The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 To
September 1878, by Various
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Title: The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 To September 1878
A Monthly Eclectic Magazine
Author: Various
Release Date: May 4, 2019 [EBook #59433]
Language: English
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PALM SUNDAY.
MONDAY.
TUESDAY.
WEDNESDAY.
HOLY THURSDAY.
GOOD FRIDAY.
HOLY SATURDAY.
EASTER SUNDAY.
The period of six centuries before Christ may be taken as the immediate period of preparation for Christianity—not in a precise numerical sense of exactly six hundred years, but as a general term denoting an epoch whose beginning is somewhat vague and indeterminate. Some of the great events are prior to B.C. 600, and the larger number of those which are important are much later. What we would do is to describe an historical cycle including the great prophetic cycle of Daniel, which embraces seventy weeks in the mystical numeration of Holy Scripture—i.e., a period of four hundred and ninety years; beginning at the rebuilding of the city and temple of Jerusalem, and ending with the promulgation of the New Law to the nations of the earth by St. Peter. We consider this last event as the culmination and ultimate term of the preceding historical period of preparation, from which history takes a new point of departure, thenceforward moving directly towards its final consummation through its last period, the one in which we live. These six centuries comprise what is specially the pre-Christian historical period. The greatest part of ancient profane history is taken up with the record of its events. The history of the ages going before is vague and scanty, and even the chronology is uncertain. A few dates will show how great a portion of what is known to us from childhood as historical antiquity is comprised within this relatively recent and modern period.
Herodotus, the father of history, is said to have recited parts of his history at the Olympic games, B.C. 456, and Thucydides, who was then a boy, to have heard him; and this is also the date of the death of Æschylus. The date of the battle of Thermopylæ is 480, of the death of Socrates 399, of the birth of Alexander 356. The period of Confucius, Lao-Tseu, and Pythagoras is in the vicinity of the year 550. The beginning of the Persian Empire under Cyrus was in 559. The common date of the building of Rome is 753 B.C. Carthage was destroyed in 146. Julius Cæsar began his career in the year 80. Within this period occurred also the restoration of the Jews to their own country, the founding of the Jewish temple and community at Alexandria, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, the rise and triumph of the Asmonæan dynasty of the Machabees, the usurpation of Herod, and the beginning of Roman supremacy in Palestine.
We now proceed to show the relation between this period and its 5great events, as making the most important chapter in ancient universal history, with the origin and extension of Christianity. The modern rationalist theory of a purely natural origin of the Christian religion by development from previous stages of purely natural phases of the human intellect, should be refuted by a true exposition of the connection between the natural and the supernatural causes which concurred in producing the great historical phenomenon of Christianity. The history of the one true and revealed religion, and specifically of its latest form in Christianity, is not isolated and separate from the general history of mankind.
It is a topic in universal history. The Christian era succeeds by a close historical connection to the period which preceded it, and that period was the outcome of the ages going before. These preceding ages appear to us historically under a merely natural aspect. That is to say, the nations of the earth have no divine revelation or religion. Their religions are different and national, mere human creations, and their polity, morals, philosophy, and literature are products of natural intelligence. Their early history loses itself in obscurity or fable. Hence the manifest connection of the Christian period with the ages foregoing gives some plausible ground for the hypothesis that the origin of Christianity is natural, that it is only an outcome of mere natural progress and development. When we proceed to show a preparation for Christianity in the ages immediately preceding, we may be asked if we do not thereby tacitly admit and argue from this hypothesis. If God created all mankind for a supernatural destiny, under a supernatural providence; needing a divine revelation, in which a divine religion, one, unchangeable, demanding absolute, universal faith and obedience, is made known and imposed on the intellect and will of man as obligatory; how is it that we seek for the causes and events which prepared the way for its promulgation in a previous state of things so unlike that which we declare God intended to produce by Christianity?
The answer to this is easy. God began by giving a revelation and a divine religion to all mankind. The general falling away from this primitive religion was not so far advanced as to make it necessary for God to select a special race as the recipient and preserver of a renewed form of the divine religion until two thousand years before Christ. The period of the old and universal form of religion, therefore, embraces all the time from the calling of Abraham to the creation of man, at least two thousand years, and, according to the opinion of many, from two thousand five hundred to four thousand years. During the entire period of human history, therefore, from the creation of man to the present moment, embracing from sixty to eighty centuries, the divine religion derived from revelation has been more or less universally promulgated, with the exception of its mediæval portion—that is, during a time including from two-thirds to three-fourths of the whole time in which the human race has existed. The period in which the mass of mankind was left to itself apparently, without the law of God manifested by revelation—the period called by St. Paul “the time of ignorance which God winked at”—embraces only the remaining third or fourth part of time, that is, twenty centuries. This state of ignorance was not original, and not natural in the sense of being conformed to the exigencies of human nature and human 6destiny, or intended and directly produced by the Author of nature. It was the result of an apostasy, a degeneration, a wilful departure, a rebellion, a schism, a voluntary fall from the primitive state. Moreover, in this very state of apostasy, the principles of all the good which remained, the principles of civilization, science, virtue; political, social, and personal well-being and improvement; were all remnants from the first period in which the divine religion was universal. Therefore, when we point out in heathendom the preparation for a new promulgation of the universal religion, we are not tracing Christianity back to its natural causes and to its origin, but are tracing the movement of humanity along its re-entering curve, from the ultimate term of its departure, to its point of contact with a new motive power, the true and divine cause of the re-conversion and restoration of mankind through Christ, qui restauret omnia.
In addition to this, we must remember that it is only wilful ignorance and sophistical perversion of historical truth which assigns the origin of the human race and its institutions to an unknown, pre-historic chaos. Far back of the period of written, profane history, of hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions, of the scattered, uncertain records of every kind which we can gather up from the remote past, the authentic, written documents of the people of Judea throw a clear light on the beginning of things. Divine revelation is in possession from the beginning. Profane history is modern history. We alone are ancient; and we may say to the infidel, as the Egyptian said to Solon: “You have neither knowledge of antiquity, nor antiquity of knowledge.”
Even during the period of the universal excommunication of mankind from the church of God that church existed, the divine revelation was preserved and increased, and the line of continuity between the past and the future was kept unbroken, in the nation of the children of Abraham. It was from Juda that the Lawgiver and the law came forth to the subjugation of the nations. The historical and rational basis of the supernatural origin and power of Christianity reaches down, therefore, to the first foundations of the world and the human race. So, then, we can have no fear of searching after and pointing out any natural and concurrent causes in the progress of human events which have prepared the way for Christianity and facilitated its universal conquests. The state of heathendom is not to be considered as a normal, natural, and necessary stage in the evolution and progress of mankind, from which Christianity was educed. The plan of divine Providence proposed to conduct mankind from one degree of development to another, until the perfection of religion and civilization was attained in the Catholic Church and carried forward to its last results in the universal resurrection and the everlasting kingdom of heaven, for which all the progeny of Adam, without exception, were destined. According to this plan, the church would always have been one and universal, and whatever might have been the special mission and privileges of the people of Israel, the covenant of God with them, and the possession of divinely-revealed doctrine, discipline, and worship would not have been exclusive. The national and exclusive constitution of the church in the posterity of Abraham and Jacob through the Law of Moses was a dispensation established on account of the general apostasy 7of mankind, a measure of protection against an absolute and final defection of the human race. And the preparation which went on in heathendom for the new promulgation of the divine law to all the world by Jesus Christ was also a measure of remedy and rescue, a “second plank after shipwreck,” thrown to the nations who were drowning in a sea of errors and miseries.
The object of that preparation was to furnish a sufficient ground and territory for the kingdom of Christ, the Catholic Church; to make ready the people who were fit to receive his law and doctrine; to produce the conditions and circumstances requisite for the universal conquest and permanent dominion of Christianity in the world. The discipline of divine Providence over the nations during the long centuries of their wandering through the waste and howling wilderness of ignorance, error, sin, warfare, and misery of all kinds, is like that over the children of Israel during their wandering of forty years in the desert which lay between Egypt and Palestine. They were condemned to this wandering as a punishment for their unbelief and disobedience. This punishment was nevertheless made the means of their training and education as a nation, and a better generation, born in the wilderness, was formed, which was fit to go into, conquer, and possess the Promised Land. We can also draw an illustration front individual examples, of which history furnishes a great number. A youth, highly gifted, brought up in faith and virtue, well educated, and with every kind of means and opportunity for pursuing a noble career to the glory of God, the welfare of men, and his own highest advantage both in time and eternity, comes to the morning of his manhood, with the straight path of duty stretching out its narrow and ascending course before him. Instead of pursuing this path steadily from the beginning, he is seduced to turn aside and wander over the more pleasant lands which are on the border of his right road, following the illusions of ambition, of pride, and of pleasure. For a while God leaves him to his wanderings, but his mercy does not abandon him. Through circuitous paths, through the lessons of experience, through trials, disappointments, and sufferings, he is led back to the right road. He becomes a hero, a saint, an apostle. The science, the fame, the influence, the wealth, the experience he acquired during those years, and which he labored to acquire for a low and unworthy end, are all now made the means and instruments of fulfilling a noble and holy purpose. Even his errors and sins serve as a warning lesson to others, and cause in himself a more vivid appreciation of the goodness of God, the value of divine faith and grace, and the happiness of a holy life.
In like manner the human race, in its youth, went forth from the cradle-land of Armenia to take possession of the wide inheritance of the earth. Carried away by the illusions of the senses and the imagination, in the pride of its youthful strength, the human race sought to find its destiny and create its paradise on the earth, forgetful of God, of his law, of his doctrine, and of his promises. The colonization of new countries, the foundation of empires and cities, the cultivation of science, literature, art, and every sort of commerce, handicraft, and industry, all that is included in the term civilization, employed the energies of that portion of mankind whose doings find a place in universal history, until everything was accomplished which was possible to 8man and God saw fit to permit him to achieve. As for his relations with the world above this earth, with the duration which is beyond time, and with superhuman and divine powers, since he could not ignore them or confine his intellect of divine origin and immortal destiny to merely temporal and earthly things, he invented religions, or sought by the light of reason to discover the truth about the supersensible world. The result of all was that a state of things was produced in which mankind, unable to proceed further, dissatisfied and sighing after something better, cried out for God to come and accomplish the work which was too much for man. A young man or a young woman, feeling deeply the emptiness of all the enjoyments to be obtained by wealth, gives up his or her fortune for charitable purposes. A prince, tired of war and politics, devotes his castle and domain to the foundation of a monastery and assumes the religious habit. An artist, a poet, an orator, a great scholar, convinced of the futility of chasing the shadow of earthly glory, consecrates his gifts and acquisitions to religion. In like manner all that the human race had gained in civilization, in empire, in wealth, in philosophy and literature and art, was so much material accumulated for the spirit and genius of Christianity to appropriate and employ in the work of the regeneration of mankind.
This statement is, of course, restricted to that part of the human race which forms the principal subject of universal history and is included within the sphere of the Greco-Roman intellectual and political dominion. The Chinese, and the nations of similar origin and character, are a nullity in universal history. The Hindoos have remained to this day outside of the current of the catholic movement of Christianity. The barbarian and savage races have only been capable of receiving Christianity together with civilization from nations previously civilized. What conquests Christianity may yet make among the great mass of the heathen who constitute the numerical majority of mankind, only the future can disclose. Probably the dominion of European intelligence and political power will be a necessary condition for the extension of the spiritual dominion of the Catholic Church in those regions of the world, if it is ever accomplished. Leo says of the Mongolian races:
“It seems to us that it is only their conversion to Christianity which can entitle them to admission into the domain of universal history as we have conceived its plan, and this conversion can hardly become general except through some kind of political subjugation and dependence. Certainly, the place of these nations in history is one foreseen by God; but the period of their intellectual importance for us has not yet arrived, and will perhaps never come until they are conquered by the Caucasian race and mingled with it. It is therefore only upon the Caucasians, in their great division of Semites, Japhetians, and Chamites, that we can direct our view, as being hitherto the workmen whose labors are recorded by universal history.”
It is only with the past history of that select portion of the human race which has advanced steadily on the road of progress toward the completion attained in Christianity that our theme is concerned. Even some portions of the Aryan race, as the Hindoos, have but little connection with it. And in that later period upon which our attention is at present specially directed, the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans make the principal factors in producing the result which we wish to estimate—viz., the preparation for the actual 9conquest and extension of Christianity as a universal religion, which has been thus far achieved, and has become an historical fact. Jewish faith, Hellenic intellectual culture, Roman polity, were the chief agents in preparing the way for Christianity as the world-religion and the world-subduing power. The Hellenic philosophy and literature we leave aside for the present. The Roman imperial and universal monarchy is the topic to be specially considered in this article. This great world-subduing power is historically and logically connected with the great monarchies of a similar character which preceded it, and which are all presented under one figure, that of a colossal statue, whose members are cast from different metals, in the celebrated vision of Nabuchodonosor, interpreted and recorded by the prophet Daniel. It is remarkable that this vision, which presents emblematically a summary of the universal political history of the world in prophecy, was given to the monarch of the great Assyrian Empire, yet in such a way that it passed before his mind like an evanescent flash. He could not understand or even remember it until the great prophet of Juda repeated and explained it. The date of this vision is a little later than B.C. 600, just at the beginning of the period we are considering. “Thou, O king! didst begin to think, in thy bed, what should come to pass hereafter: and He that revealeth mysteries showed thee what shall come to pass. Thou, O King! sawest, and behold there was, as it were, a great statue: this statue, which was great and tall of stature, stood before thee, and the look thereof was terrible. The head of this statue was of fine gold, but the breast and the arms of silver, and the belly and the thighs of brass: and the legs of iron, the feet part of iron and part of clay. Thus thou sawest, till a stone was cut out of a mountain without hands: and it struck the statue upon the feet thereof, that were of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces: but the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.”
Daniel then interpreted the vision as a prophecy of the destinies of the world under four universal monarchies, the Assyrian being the first, represented by the head of gold. The other three are manifestly the Medo-Persian, Macedonian, and Roman. The weak feet and toes of the statue are the extension of the empire among the barbarians of the West. The prophet finishes by declaring that after the decadence of the last empire God will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed or transferred to another power, but which shall destroy entirely the whole fabric of world-monarchy which was represented by the statue of gold, silver, brass, and iron, terminating in clay—i.e., the Babylo-Roman Empire. Thus, at the very beginning of the course of events which took place during the six centuries of the period preceding the Messianic epoch, the great prophet who is inspired to foretell with minute distinctness the times of the Messianic kingdom is made the counsellor and prime minister of the last monarchs of the Assyrian Empire, and of the first of the succeeding Medo-Persian kings, and Nabuchodonosor and Cyrus are instructed by divine revelation in the designs and purposes for which God has raised them up to prepare the way for the coming and reign of his Son upon the earth. The great world-empire, whose seat is first established in Babylon, and afterwards transferred to Rome, has a mission to accomplish, and, when 10that has been fulfilled, it is finally abolished to make way for the Catholic Church and the Christendom of which it is the nucleus, the Christian political, social, and moral order, the unification and restoration to one universal fraternity of the regenerated human race.
The Roman Empire, the inheritor of all the power, the civilization, the intellectual and material wealth and grandeur of its predecessors, with its own new and specific force in addition, made of the whole world one dominion, brought the East into subjection to the West, and established in Rome, the Eternal City, the permanent capital of the earth. Thus the way was prepared, by the general diffusion of the Greek and Latin languages, by universal commerce and communication between all nations, by the organizing and educating force of political and military discipline, and by many other efficient agencies, for a rapid and irresistible transmission of the spirit, the doctrine, the moral law, the entire supernatural and regenerating grace of Christianity throughout the civilized world. At the same time the civilizing power was brought into contact with that great mass of European barbarians who were destined to form the most vigorous portion of Catholic Christendom. Julius Cæsar is considered as the great author of modern European civilization. The empire reached its acme in the reign of Augustus. Near the close of his reign, and somewhere in the vicinity of A. U. C. 747, the Temple of Janus was closed, and the epoch of universal pacification, the effect of irresistible, triumphant Roman power, came to a world which was expecting the advent of the Prince of Peace, and made a moment’s stillness, a brief pause of silent wonder through the universe, while the mystery of the incarnation and human birth of the great King was accomplished.
Let us turn now to Judea, whose mission was much higher in the order of moral grandeur, though not so dazzling to the imagination as that of Rome. Daniel foretold the end of the captivity of the Jews when a period of seventy years should be completed, and the birth and death of the Messias after another period of seven times seventy years from the rebuilding of the city and Temple. The schism and captivity of the ten tribes had freed the kingdom of David from putrescent parts and given a more pure and healthy life to Juda. The corruption of Juda found a severe and efficacious remedy in the captivity which befell that tribe also at a later period. A purified remnant, the élite of the nation, were restored to their own land under Cyrus. The city and temple were rebuilt. Alexander the Great extended the same favor to the Jewish nation which had been granted by the Persian monarchs. Under his successors, the kings of Syria and Egypt, Judea flourished both in a political and a religious sense for three centuries, although not exempt from vicissitudes, a second temple was established in Egypt, and in Alexandria, the new capital founded by Alexander, the Jews became numerous and attained to great consideration and importance. The Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek and the important books of the second canon were written. Under Antiochus Epiphanes a new crisis arrived, which threatened the total extinction of Judaism. A large portion of the priests and people were infected with the corrupted Greek civilization of that period, the practice of the Mosaic law was forbidden 11and suppressed by the most oppressive edicts sanctioned by the most cruel penalties, and Jerusalem was changed into an apparently heathen city. The sacred ark containing all the hopes of the world in the ages to come seemed about to be wrecked. But God raised up the heroic family of the Machabees to rescue once more Jerusalem and Judea from the ruin which seemed to be imminent.
There is no greater and more wonderful hero in all history than Judas Machabeus, a new and more sublime Leonidas, standing with his small but invincible host in the world’s Thermopylæ, as the defender, even unto death, not of Greece but of all mankind; the saviour, not of mere national and temporal interests, but of the precious inheritance of faith, the supernatural treasure by which all men were to be enriched with those blessings which are eternal. The history of the Asmonæan dynasty, its period of glory and of decay, and, next, of the Idumæan usurpation in the person of the cruel tyrant, Herod the Great, a mere creature and dependent viceroy of the Roman emperor, brings us to the end of the dispensation of Abraham and Moses, to the epoch of the new Prophet, Priest, and King, who teaches, sanctifies, and rules mankind by his own personal and inherent might and right, as the Emmanuel, who is both the Creator and the Redeemer of the world.
St. Paul declares that the mystery of divine Providence respecting both the Jews and the Gentiles, made known in the full Christian revelation, was to “establish all things in Christ, in the dispensation of the fulness of times” (Eph. i. 10). We infer from this statement, that all the ages preceding the birth of Christ were a preparation for the foundation of the Catholic Church, which was completed at the epoch of his coming. The work of Judaism was done and its mission completed. Henceforth it was only an obstacle in the way of the universal religion which it had been created to serve. The oracles of God which it preserved and transmitted, the faith which it inherited from Abraham, its genuine spirit, the essence of religion which had been embodied in its outward organization, were transmitted to Christianity. The lifeless mass which was left behind was only fit to be buried as a putrescent carcass. The mission of the Roman Empire was also completed, its destruction decreed, and dimly foretold by the apostles. The entire Greco-Roman civilization, with its philosophy, its literature, its religious superstitions, had run its course, and its ultimate result was an intellectual and moral abyss of vacancy and unfulfilled longing for the truth and the good which alone can fill the frightful void in the human soul and in universal humanity caused by the absence of God. St. Paul says that Christ, having first descended to the lowest depth, ascended to the highest celestial summit, “ut impleret omnia”—that he might fill all things. The Emmanuel, the God in humanity, the very sovereign truth and sovereign good impersonated in a twofold nature, divine and human, is the only fulfilment of universal history, of human destiny, as the term and expression of the thoughts and purposes of God. His kingdom on the earth, the Catholic Church, is the instrument and medium by which he extends his action through time and upon universal humanity during the period of universal history which is now in the process of fulfilment. The material part of the substantial essence of this new Messianic empire was furnished by the commingling 12of the elements of Judaism and Greco-Roman civilization. The vital and informing principle was supernatural and divine, inspired into the now organic structure by a new out-breathing of the creative and life-giving Spirit.
This supernatural character of Christianity is capable of a rigorous historical and rational demonstration. Rationalists, as they call themselves, having first made themselves their own dupes, have duped the great mass of the unlearned and the unthinking in this age, and even imposed to a greater or a lesser degree on numbers of Catholics whose instruction in sound Christian knowledge is defective and superficial, by a shallow and pretentious system vaunted under the name of scientific criticism. Like the pseudo-Smerdis, its pretence to be the true, legitimate possessor of dominion, and heir to the acquisitions of reason and experience historically transmitted from the past, is founded on an illusory semblance of likeness to genuine science. As the impostor who passed himself off on a credulous people for the son of Cyrus was detected and exposed by stripping off the royal head-dress which he had stolen, and showing that his head had long since been deprived of the ears as an ignominious punishment for crime, so this base-born rationalism, when the logic of facts and sound reasoning seizes hold of it, meets the fate which befell the Persian usurper under the iron grasp and death-dealing sword of Darius, the son of Hystaspes. It is an old culprit, long since marked by the sword of truth, and doomed to perish under the blows of the genuine offspring of the noble, ancestral chiefs in the intellectual kingdom. Christianity is historical and rational, resting on the principles of contradiction and of the sufficient reason. That which has occurred and which exists cannot be denied or doubted, and must be referred to a sufficient reason and an adequate cause. The facts and events of the religion of Christ, as well those which preceded as those which have followed his human birth, are historically certain. The flimsy hypotheses of sceptical criticism have been destroyed by critical science. The penetrating acid of critical investigation, a solvent which is destructive of all counterfeits and semblances, has only made more manifest and clear of all accidental adhesions the real substance and imperishable solidity of the great historical structure of the primeval and universal religion. The books of Moses and his successors, the four Gospels and the other apostolic documents, together with all else that is accessory and corroborative of sacred history in the genuine records and works of antiquity, have come unscathed, and with brighter and clearer evidence than before, out of the restless and audacious researches of that modern school of rationalists who have sought to destroy all ancient science and belief, to make way for a new fabric of hypothesis which they call modern science and philosophy. Their visionary systems stand confronted with unassailable facts and convicted of falsehood. These great facts, from the creation of man to the resurrection of Christ, and from his resurrection to the present, actual existence of the Catholic Church, irresistibly, and with all the force of invincible logic, demand the recognition of their sole, assignable sufficient reason, a supernatural cause. It is because of this necessary connection of the great facts upon which Christianity is founded with a supernatural cause that rationalists 13deny, in so far as that is possible, these facts. But, as they cannot deny altogether the reality of all, they deny the principle of causality itself, like Hume and the whole sceptical sect of pseudo-philosophers, or, at least, by their hypotheses, ignore and subvert the principle of causality, through the contradiction of necessary deductions from the principle which is contained in these hypotheses.
The fact of Christianity cannot be denied, because it is too immediately present and evident before the minds of all men. Unless one avowedly abjures reason, it must be accounted for. The hypothesis of the rationalists supposes that a young man of Galilee, without education, evolved out of his own mind and the Scriptures of the Old Testament a doctrine which he taught for about one year to the people of Judea and Galilee, and was then crucified as a teacher of false doctrine and a disturber of the religion of his country. The effect of his moral excellence and heroism in dying for his convictions, together with that of his teaching of a few simple and sublime doctrines of theology and ethics, was the astounding revolution which has resulted in historical Christianity. This is a theory of lunatics. The birth of Jesus precisely at the period which was the fulness of the times, the promulgation of a universal religion which appropriated and subjected to its dominion and utility all the results of previous preparation, combined opposite elements into a new form, conquered and regenerated the human race; and all the phenomena of the origin and progress of Christianity; prove the intervention of the same power which created the world and has governed it since the beginning. The divine mission of Jesus is proved by the work which he accomplished. The precise nature and comprehension of that mission and work, as God intended it, and as Jesus Christ revealed it to his apostles, is proved by the effect actually produced, by the argument a posteriori, from the effect to the cause. The religion which actually became universal is the religion which is founded on the confession of the Trinity, the true and proper divinity of the Son of God, his assumption of human nature by a miraculous birth from the Virgin, his redemption of the human race, fallen through the sin of the first Adam, by the cross, his absolute sovereignty over the earth and the whole universe, and his delegation of authority to the apostles under their prince and head, St. Peter. The conversion of the Roman Empire to this religion demands a sufficient cause, and the only cause to which it can possibly be traced is the divine power of its founder, Jesus Christ. The law did not go forth from Sion and Jerusalem to the whole world by virtue of any power which Judaism put forth. The Roman imperial power did not undergo a transmutation into the kingdom of Christ. Catholic theology was not the fruit of Greek philosophy, and the regeneration of mankind was not the natural result of Greco-Roman civilization. All these forms were overmastered and supplanted by a superior force which overcame a most violent and stubborn resistance on their part. They had only prepared the way, and were destroyed when their work was done. Jesus Christ proved himself to be the possessor of that divine power which had employed them to prepare his way before him, by establishing his new kingdom upon their territory, and making their work subservient to his own conquest and dominion. 14Rome was made the seat of his own Vicar, the monarch of his spiritual kingdom. The thirteen great dioceses of the Roman Empire were parcelled out to the great princes of the church, the patriarchs, exarchs, and primates, who received a delegated share of the supremacy of the Sovereign Pontiff of the city of Rome. The great provincial cities were made the seats of the metropolitans, and the thousands of minor cities the sees of the bishops of the Catholic Church. This great work was substantially accomplished within three centuries from the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. One must be demented not to recognize a supernatural cause for this effect, and, as directed by and concurring with this first, supreme, efficient cause, a chain-work of second causes extending through all previous history backward to the origin of the human race and of the great nations of the earth.
Mgr. Delille, Bishop of Rodez, thus contrasts the theory of universal history which presents the incarnation of the divine Word as the central fact of the whole circle of human events with that of modern rationalism:
“In presence of all the remains of the past actions of the human race which are buried in the catacombs of history, only two theories can be found by which to account for them—the theory of chance or fatalism, and the theory of a divine plan.
“The first explains nothing, because it professedly ignores the final destination of humanity. Sitting amid the ruins, with its back turned to the future, it contents itself with making an inventory of the bones of the defunct generations, and weighing their dust. As the conclusion of this fruitless and melancholy work, it says: Things were thus and so, because they had to be so; they are either games of chance or evolutions of the universal substance. It is quite otherwise with that theory derived from the revelation of the divine plan by the way of faith, in which all the events of the world are viewed as an execution of a pre-conceived design of Providence, being nothing else than the restoration of fallen humanity by the Mediator. This is the true philosophy of history, illuminating the past of which it furnishes the explanation, and the future of which it gives foresight. In accordance with its results, the ancient era of the world can be defined, the preparation for the reign of the Messias, and the modern era, the reign of the Messias.”
In this present article it is especially some parts of the preparation which immediately preceded the epoch of the Messias that are presented to the reader’s consideration. It is one of the most interesting and useful fields of exploration upon which any one who has taste and time for solid reading can enter. There are not wanting in our modern literature some excellent works in which the desirable information can be obtained. In the German language the Universal History of Leo, in the first part, on ancient history, presents a condensed but most complete, learned, and philosophical sketch of the great historical events of the pre-Christian period, conceived entirely in accordance with the idea we have here endeavored to present. In French, the History of the Universal Church, by Rohrbacher, has remarkable merit in this respect and is very full in its details. This subject is treated most explicitly and comprehensively in a work by M. l’Abbé Louis Leroy, entitled Philosophie Catholique de l’Histoire. In English the learned works of Father Thébaud, and a recent one entitled De Ecclesiâ et Cathedrâ, by Colin Lindsay, are especially valuable. As a French bishop, Mgr. Angebault, of Angers, has said: “For the last hundred years an effort has been kept up to make history lie by perverting it; it is requisite that men of learning and sound faith 15should bring it back into the right path from which it has been drawn away.”
History, like all the treasures of the past, belongs to Christianity and the Catholic Church. A few years ago some marbles belonging to Nero, which had been laid aside and become buried under the accumulated deposit of ages, were unearthed, and became the property of Pius IX. as sovereign of Rome; who made use of them for decorating a church. In like manner it is our right to claim all the costly materials we can find and dig out of the dust of all foregoing centuries, and our duty to use them in adorning the walls of the temple of God on earth, his universal and eternal church.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN,” “THE ROMANCE OF A PORTMANTEAU,” ETC., ETC.
On the return to Kilkenley I placed my guest beside Father O’Dowd in the car, as I saw that the former was bursting with impatience to get at the Home-Rule question. During the luncheon he had made several ineffectual attempts at drawing out the priest, which were deftly shunted off in favor of lighter subjects; but having extracted a promise from Father O’Dowd that during the drive he would discuss the “idea” with him, no sooner had the horse commenced to tear up the gravel in the little lawn than the member for Doodleshire opened fire by asking if there was any real issue at stake in the question.
“What is Home Rule? Is it Fenianism veiled or unveiled? Is it Repeal? Is it less than Repeal or more than Repeal? Is it a surrender or—ahem!—a compromise of the national demand, or is it a demand founded upon the—ahem!—supposed necessities of the country at this present time?”
“I must go back a little in order to reply to your queries; as the French say, Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter—one must draw back a little, in order to make a better spring. You have heard, Mr. Hawthorne, that the law of defeats separates the vanquished into two or three well-defined parties or sections: one party more bitter in opposition than ever, one party quietly put out of the way, who retire upon their shields, and a little party who recognize no defeat. This is just the outcome in Ireland of forty-eight and forty-nine. The Young Ireland movement in forty-eight was never national in dimensions or acceptance—”
“Thrue for ye, father darlint,” exclaimed Peter O’Brien from his coigne of vantage, and whose heart and soul were in the discussion. “The boys wasn’t riz properly.”
Without noticing the interruption Father O’Dowd continued:
“O’Connell’s movement was from forty-two to forty-four; but from that date, although Smith O’Brien and John Mitchel came to the front, the country was not at their back.”
“Did not the Young Irelanders break with O’Connell on a war policy?”
“That is a fallacy. They had no war policy, nor had he. It was the blaze of revolution lighted in Paris in forty-eight that set men on fire here. They seceded from O’Connell on the point of the celebrated test resolutions, which declared it would not be lawful to take up arms for the recovery of national rights. The non-acceptance of this declaration led to the Irish Confederation. The confederates were decidedly unpopular, 17especially after the death of O’Connell, whose demise was laid at their door, and they themselves became the victims of secession. John Mitchel and his following were for preparing the people for war against England. Thus we had three parties and no real national movement. When Paris hurled Louis Philippe from the throne, the pulse of Ireland became intensely agitated, and two schools of insurrectionists were to be found in the new insurrectionary party: one that declared that Smith O’Brien wanted a rose-water revolution, the other that Mitchel was a Red and wanted a Jacquerie. The refusal to rise for the release of Mitchel led to bad blood, and the subsequent rising resulted in a fiasco. The men who ordered it had no command from the nation, and were but a fraction of a fraction.”
“Were you opposed to them, father—I mean your order?”
“Assuredly not in a combative sense, but in the sense of a decided disapproval of the insurrection. They had also against them the bulk of the Repeal millions.”
“But the cities—”
“Yes, the cities became imbued with the spirit of the revolution and a desire to see it out, but, beyond their national antipathy to English rule, the rural population had little or no participation in the forty-eight movement.”
“They wor aisy enough beyant in Kilpeddher, where they bet Mickey Rooney wud his own pike-handle an’ called him a bladdher-um-skite, no less,” cried my coachman.
“Peter, be good enough to keep your observations to yourself,” I said, struggling with a laugh.
“Faix I will, thin, Masther Freddy, for sorra a word the darlint father is spakin’ I’d like for to lose. But as for th’ other omadhaun,” lowering his voice to a confidential whisper, “I’d as lave be spakin’ to—”
“Silence!”
“After the forty-eight movement had exhausted itself in transportations and expatriations,” continued Father O’Dowd, “and the flower of Ireland’s intellect and patriotism was literally pining away in England’s penal settlements, the gaze of the country turned instinctively toward one man, Charles Gavan Duffy, and behind him crouched the terrible problem: ‘What next?’”
“Is this—ahem!—the Mr. Duffy who holds a somewhat prominent position in Victoria?”
“Only that of prime minister,” laughed the priest.
“And what was his—ahem!—policy in the crisis you mention?”
“A retreat all along the line. He tried the original Irish Confederation policy, but received no support. He at last got together a party under the banner of ‘tenant right.’ This was a move that brought the Presbyterians of Ulster to take counsel with the Catholics of Munster; it brought Repealers, and Anti-Repealers, and men of every shade of politics and religion upon one common platform, and an organization was formed to compel Parliament to pass a measure which would prevent the eviction of the tenant farmer, except for the non-payment of rent, and to prevent also the arbitrary raising of the rent.”
“That’s me jewel!” cried Peter, in an ecstasy of approbation. “Faix ye’d think it was on th’ althar he was.” This latter observation being addressed to me.
“You flooded us in the House, if I remember—ahem!—rightly, with a very strange set of representatives as the outcome of this movement,” observed Mr. Hawthorne.
18“Yes, we sent you about thirty-five or forty members, returned at the instance of the Tenant League and to work out its programme. They used the new shibboleth to suit their own ends, and many of them being both corrupt and dishonest, the pass was sold and the party bought up through its leaders, Sadlier and Keogh. Some of us thought it was a goodly step in the right direction to see Catholics on the bench, and lulled our consciences with this soporific; but the cause of the poor tenant was lost, and we grasped the shadow while the substance floated beyond our reach.”
“The curse o’ Crummle on Sadlier and Billy Keogh! Amin,” muttered Peter.
“A cohort of the exasperated section of the forty-eight party now came to the front, who, seeing the utter and shameful defeat of the Gavan-Duffy following, instantly raised their voices for war to the knife, war to the bitter end, and out of this cry arose the Fenian movement.”
“I should like to hear your ideas upon this insane movement,” observed the M.P., endeavoring to face Father O’Dowd, and succeeding only in jerking himself partly off the car, to the hand-rail of which he clung with the tenacity of an octopus. “What support did it receive?”
“It did not represent anything like the full force of Irish patriotism, or even, indeed, a considerable portion of it. The bulk of the millions who believed in O’Connell and Smith O’Brien stood with folded arms outside this movement. Its policy was disbelieved in, although the Fenians worked with an energy worthy of the highest admiration, while an honest, manly, self-sacrificing spirit of patriotism marked the men who were its martyrs. Never did braver men stand in the dock; and to the Fenians Ireland owes that stirring up of public opinion upon Irish subjects which hitherto had slumbered in a masterly inactivity. You see, Mr. Hawthorne, as we say at whist, I am leading up to your strong suit, and if I have been a little prolix—”
“My dear sir, I am receiving more information than the Bodleian Library or all the blue-books could possibly give me.”
“Sorra a lie in that! Ah! wud ye?” The latter addressed to the horse, in order to parry my inevitable censure.
“Well, sir,” continued the priest after he had duly acknowledged the compliment bestowed upon him by my guest, “we had arrived at that stage when, as Phædrus says:
We had been checkmated, and Britannia smiled contemptuously at us from behind the glistening bayonets of the regiments with which she flooded the country. It was again the horrors of the lash and triangle, loathsome details of the treachery of informers and prosecutors, the chain-gangs at Portland and Chatham, and the terrible outrages inflicted upon men whose only fault lay in loving Ireland not wisely but too well. I shall pass over that, because there is a wicked beat underneath my waistcoat, and curæ leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent. I shall come at once to the question of Home Rule and dismiss it briefly; for there is the stable dome of Kilkenley right over beyond that group of firs.”
“Yev more nor a quarther av an hour, yer riverince, for the baste’s purty well bet up.”
“Five minutes will do me, Peter,” 19laughed Father O’Dowd. “The Irish passion for national existence still glowed in our bosoms, and we cried for light. A field for Irish devotion and heroism was what was wanted. We were sick of the hecatombs of victims offered up by the last sad effort. As you are well aware, Mr. Hawthorne, the Tory party came into power during the Fenian scare, and they went to their work in a spirit which would have shamed Oliver Cromwell himself. They fined, fettered, imprisoned, and hanged, until a glut of vengeance seemed an impossibility. ‘This is my chance,’ says Mr. Gladstone. ‘I’ll make capital out of this Fenian scare, and, dashing at the Church Establishment, I’ll gather in the straying bands which once formed the rank and file of the liberal party. England wants a salve, and when she finds herself doing a virtuous thing she will purge her conscience of all her recent evil-doing.’”
“I never heard of Mr. Gladstone’s having used those words,” exclaimed the member for Doodleshire pompously. “If he had used them in the House, they would have been ordered to be taken down by the Speaker.”
“They are my words, not Mr. Gladstone’s.”
“Blur an’ ages!” began Peter O’Brien, but, upon my administering no light touch of the whip to his shoulders, he suddenly pulled himself in. “Now, I ax ye, Masther Freddy, isn’t that the hoighth, now—the hoighth av an ignoraymus? Why, a turf creel—”
“Silence, sir!” I exclaimed, in a frenzy of terror lest my guest should by any possibility overhear him.
“With the war-whoop of ‘Down with the Irish Church!’ Mr. Gladstone bounded into office at the head of a majority only equalled by that of Sir Robert Peel in forty-one, and, with the faculty of persuading himself into a fervid conscientiousness upon any subject he likes, he flung himself body and soul into the disestablishment of the church established in Ireland. At this uprose the Irish Protestants, who declared that, as faith had been broken with them by the English government, they would repeal the Union by way of retaliation, and kick another crown into the Boyne. ‘Break with us,’ said they, ‘and we’ll break with you. We’ll become Irishmen first and anything else afterwards.’ Well, Mr. Hawthorne, the Irish Church was disestablished—”
“I am happy to say that my humble vote was recorded in favor of that measure,” interrupted the M.P.
“More power to ye for that, anyhow,” muttered Peter.
“And a good vote it was, Mr. Hawthorne. Well, sir, the Irish Protestants were in a craze of indignation, and eagerly sought a vent for their feelings of revenge. They wouldn’t touch Fenianism, and their minds insensibly reverted to eighty-two, and to such Protestants as Grattan, Flood, Curran, and Charlemont. Some of our most influential Protestant countrymen were now prepared to take up the cudgels—peers, dignitaries of the Protestant Church, large landed proprietors, bankers, merchants, deputy lieutenants, and even fellows of Trinity College. This was no Falstaffian army, no mere food for powder, but a band of men who had a vast property at stake in the country, who saw a thousand reasons why Irishmen alone should regulate Irish affairs. And now Mr. Butt comes upon the stage.”
20“The sorra a shupayriorer man in the counthry,” observed Peter, despite my previous admonition. “An’, be the mortial, me own first cousin wud have got six months for delayin’ Jim Fogarty’s ould ram from goin’ home wan night, an’ he as innocint as a cluckin’ hin, av it wasn’t for the shupayrior spakin’ av Counsellor Butt. ‘There isn’t a bigger rogue in the barony, me lord,’ sez he, addhressin’ the binch, ‘but this wanst, me lord, he wasn’t in it at all, at all.’ That’s what I call spakin’ up.”
“Mr. Butt, in addition to defending Peter O’Brien’s kinsman,” said Father O’Dowd, “was called to the front from an obscurity into which a wild recklessness had hurled him, to defend the Fenian prisoners in sixty-five. Mr. Butt became then a centre figure, and through the meetings of the Amnesty Association, larger than any since Tara and Mullaghmast, a centre figure he remained. The Protestants, who now chafed under the disestablishment, were many of them Butt’s old comrades, college chums, and political associates, and to them he turned, urging them no longer to act the secondary rôle of an English garrison. ‘Act boldly and promptly now,’ he said in one of his powerful addresses, ‘and you will save Ireland from revolutionary violence on the one side and from alien misgovernment on the other. You, like myself, have been early trained to mistrust the Catholic multitude, but when you come to know them you will admire them. They are not anarchists, nor would they be revolutionists if men like you would but do your duty and lead them—that is, honestly and faithfully and capably lead them—in the struggle for constitutional liberty.’ Mr. Butt made a great impression, but of course was met with the old cry of ‘wolf,’ ‘Catholic ascendency,’ ‘the tools of the priests,’ ‘yoke of Rome,’ and all that sort of low Orange claptrap. The incidents of the defeat of ‘honest John Martin’ for Longford are too recent to bore you with now, but in that election you saw a Catholic people fighting their own clergy, who had foolishly pledged themselves to support the Fulke-Greville-Nugent candidate, as vehemently as they and their own clergy had ever fought the Tory landlords. It was an exceptional and painful incident, but it vindicated both priests and people from the unworthy sneers to which I have just alluded. You are familiar with the meeting in Dublin held under the presidency of a Protestant lord mayor, and the resolution enthusiastically adopted that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland was an Irish Parliament. And now, Mr. Hawthorne, having given you an owre true but also an owre lang tale, I am happy to find ourselves within hail of the hospitable roof of Kilkenley, and—yes, to be sure, there are the ladies awaiting our arrival upon the steps.”
“Av that discoorse isn’t aiqual to the House o’ Lords, I’m an omadhaun,” was Peter’s muttered observation as we rattled gaily up to the house.
“Papa is enchanted with the priest,” said Miss Hawthorne.
It was just before dinner, and we were standing upon a small balcony overlooking the lawn.
The moon was rising in all the consciousness of her harvest beauty.
“I am so glad.”
“He says that his reverence has the Irish question at his fingers’ ends, and gave him more information 21than a dozen Commons debates or ten dozen editions of Hansard. We are going over to visit Father O’Dowd, are we not?”
What induced me to say: “I shall send you with great pleasure”?
“Send us! Are you not coming?”
“I fear not. Welstone will go. He is much better company.”
What a boy I was!
She looked at me in a puzzled, inquiring sort of way.
“What a glorious moon!” I said, bitterness in my heart.
“Don’t you find it a little chilly?” was her reply, as she turned into the drawing-room.
My own, shall I call it temper, or insanity, or what? lost me this chance, for which I had been longing with such fervent yearning. I felt terribly irritated with myself and angered against her. She should have expressed sorrow at my being prevented from going over to Father O’Dowd’s. Had she cared one brass farthing she would have declined the expedition; but instead of this she silently accepted Welstone’s ciceroneship, and exclaiming, “Don’t you find it a little chilly?” left me standing all alone, like the idiot that I was. And yet had I not acted strangely, rudely, in intimating my intention of remaining at Kilkenley? Was I not her host, and should I not make every effort within the scope of my power to render her visit as agreeable as possible?
I followed her into the drawing-room. The light of two moderateur lamps muffled in pink shades threw a delightfully tender glow all over the apartment. Our furniture was very old-fashioned. It bad all been purchased when my great-grandmother had been brought home, and was esteemed a wonder of its kind then. The rosewood settees and spider-legged chairs were upholstered in the richest flowered brocade, very faded now, but highly respectable in their antiquity. The mirrors were oval in gilt frames, an eagle holding a chain, to which was appended a golden ball, surmounting each. A sofa large enough to seat a dozen people in a row graced one wall, while a thin old-fashioned card-table, over which many hundreds of guineas had changed hands, adorned the other. In the alcove, in a stiff, formal, uncompromising arm-chair, so utterly different from the inviting lounges of to-day, sat Mabel, turning over the leaves of a scrap-book that had been made up by my grandmother.
Dressed in simple white, with a sprig of forget-me-not in her golden hair, she looked so lovely that my heart flew to her.
“I hope you haven’t caught cold. Shall I close the window, Miss Hawthorne?”
“Oh! dear, no; it was just a passing sensation, a shiver.”
“Somebody was treading upon your grave,” I said, alluding to the popular superstition.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
When I had told her, “I should like to know where I shall be interred.”
“I know where I shall be, if I am not hanged or lost at sea.”
“Where?”
“In the little churchyard close by; it’s in the domain.”
“Are all your family interred there?”
“We have head-stones since 1650. Cromwell’s troopers destroyed everything, digging up the graves in the hope of finding armlets and golden ornaments of our race.”
22“I should like to visit the churchyard.”
“By moonlight?” I said laughingly.
“Oh! yes.
sings Scott.”
“Your wish shall be gratified.”
“When?”
At this moment Mr. Hawthorne entered the room, carrying in his hand two telegrams.
“Startling news!” he exclaimed.
“What is it, papa?” asked his daughter somewhat affrightedly.
“Nothing alarming, my dear.” Turning to me, “Your county member is dead.”
“Dead?” I cried.
“Dropped dead on the steps of the Carlton Club.”
“Is it Mr. Bromly de Ruthven?”
“Yes.”
“That’s awfully sudden. I had a visit from him not ten days ago. He was quite a young man, and, for his party, a rising one.”
“I cannot agree with you there, Mr. Fitzgerald,” said my guest in his usual pompous style. “His speech—if speech it might be called—on the malt question was a tissue of illogical absurdity. But now, Mabel, I have a big surprise for you. The great conservative party—I call them great, sir, although in opposition—have not been idle, and already has a candidate been selected.”
“That’s rather quick work, Mr. Hawthorne.”
“Military machinery, sir—one man down, the next man forward. And whom do you think they have selected, Mabel?”
“How should I know, papa?”
“Guess.”
“I cannot. Some of the rejected at the last dissolution.”
“No; guess again. A friend of yours.”
“A friend of mine?” somewhat surprised.
“A particular friend, who telegraphs me to say that he will arrive here to-morrow,” with a knowing smile.
I guessed the name. My heart told it me with a pang of envy.
“Not Wynwood Melton?” she said.
“The very man!”
I knew it.
“I’m so glad!” she cried, clapping her dainty hands together. “It will be great fun to have him in the house! What capital imitations he will give us of Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright, and Whalley! And what stories! Mr. Fitzgerald,” she added with considerable earnestness, “you must vote for him.”
I think I was about to pledge myself to do so, forgetful of the dire consequences of such a proceeding on my part, when her father interrupted:
“He cannot, my dear. Mr. Fitzgerald is one of us—a liberal.”
“I am a liberal,” she laughed.
“I presume he will have a walk-over,” said Mr. Hawthorne.
“Who will have a walk-over?” asked Father O’Dowd, who had entered unperceived.
“My friend, Mr. Wynwood Melton.”
“For a seat in Parliament?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a vacancy?”
“Yes.”
“In an Irish constituency?”
“You have not heard the news, then?”
“Not a word; and I may exclaim with Horace, Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia.”
23“Well, reverend sir, your county member, Mr. Bromly de Ruthven, is dead.”
“Dead!”
“Dead, sir. And Mr. Wynwood Melton is to have a walk-over.”
“Is he?” asked Father Dowd with a quiet smile. “Who says so?”
“Well, I suppose so. He is young, clever, rich, and, better than all, the nominee of the Carlton Club, which means, of course, the De Ruthven interest.”
The priest gave a short laugh.
“Mr. Wynwood Melton will not have a walk-over; I promise you that. Neither will he win the election; I promise you that, too.”
“Is there another candidate in the field?”
“There will be, please God.”
“Are you at liberty to name him?”
“I shall name him now, as I mean to carry the county for him; and,” taking me by the shoulder, “a very good figure he will cut in St. Stephen’s.”
My heart gave one beat backward. Of name and fame I thought nothing. To defeat Wynwood Melton I would give half my life. Here was a chance—one of those marvellous chances which the whirl of the wheel turns out occasionally to fit into the exact moment. It was a high stake, but I would play for it. It was my solitary hope for an advantage over the man whom Mabel Hawthorne loved. Yes, I would stand the hazard of the die.
“Mr. Fitzgerald dislikes politics,” observed Mabel.
“You may bring a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink,” added her father.
“Besides, he will not be ungallant enough to oppose my nominee,” she laughed.
“I shall be greatly disappointed if my young friend will not stand in the gap for the old county and the old faith,” said Father O’Dowd.
“How can you expect to carry him in the teeth of the overwhelming majority which the conservatives possess in this county?” asked the M.P.
“Thank Heaven! we have the ballot, and now or never is the time to try its efficacy.”
“Well, Mr. Fitzgerald, may I hope to meet you in St. Stephen’s?” asked my guest.
“You may.”
“To oppose my nominee?”
“Yes.”
I braved even her displeasure in my agony of anxiety to cross swords with my rival.
“Bravissimo!” cried Father O’Dowd. “The day is ours. I knew you had the Fitzgerald pluck, dashed with the hot blood of the Ormondes. I look upon victory as certain. All the tenants on the De Ruthven estate are good Catholics and will vote with us—I know it. All the Derryslaghnagaun people will come up to a man. Father Brady and Father Tim Duffy will work the northern side of the county; Father Quaid and Father Ted Walsh will carry the southern side; I’ll take the Ballytore district, and—but no details now; dinner, and then I’m off. We’ll send the ‘hard word’ round like wild-fire, and, Miss Mabel, you’ll see real Irish bonfires on the hills to-morrow night. Tell your friend to stay where he is, Mr. Hawthorne; for with Virgil I may say, Animum pictura pascit inani. Why, I feel like a war-horse:
“What’s all this about?” asked my mother.
24“Allow me to present to you the Hon. Frederick Fitzgerald Ormonde, M.P.,” gaily exclaimed Father O’Dowd, informing her in a few words of what had happened and what was expected to happen.
“God bless my boy!” she faltered, and, bursting into tears, kissed me as if I had been in my cradle.
It was a moment of fierce inner glow. I almost tasted the sweets of victory—of victory over Mabel, for whom, had I consulted my own self, I would have sacrificed anything—everything.
“We haven’t a minute to lose,” exclaimed my Mentor, all ablaze with excitement. “We shall have to rush out and fight helter-skelter. A surprise has been sprung upon us. Oh! for one week. My brave people will be taken at a disadvantage if we be not up and stirring. Every dexterity will be used to outwit us, every dodge resorted to, bribery especially. We must arrange committees in every town and village to sit en permanence until you are elected. We must have special messengers by the hundred. Ormonde, you will place all your horses at my disposal. North, south, east, and west we must nail the Home-Rule flag to the mast. North, south, east, and west the cry Pro aris et focis must go forth. This is our first genuine election under the ballot. We allowed ourselves to be cozened by false promises when Mr. Gladstone sprung his mine last year, but now the ballot, and free and fearless voting. No more coercion, no more intimidation by landlords, no more bullying or bribing. At last we have a chance of freeing the country from the yoke which has been put upon its neck for centuries, and now we have a chance of letting its voice be heard and to pass a verdict on the Act of Union.”
“I do wish Mr. Melton was not in the field against you,” almost whispered Mabel as I led her into dinner.
There was a something in her tone, like a faint note in melody, that vibrated through me. What was it?
Father O’Dowd would only swallow a few mouthfuls of food. “Up, guards, and at them! Eh, Mr. Hawthorne?”
“The duke never uttered those words. I can give you exactly what occurred. When Napoleon was advancing at the head of the remnant of his shattered army the duke—”
“Excuse me, my dear sir, but I have to marshal an army for my Waterloo. Animum curis nunc huc, nunc dividit illuc—this way and that way my anxious mind is turning. Ormonde, you’ll come over to me to-morrow, and be prepared to address a meeting of your constituents. Don’t be later than one o’clock. And now sans adieux all!” And the worthy priest, buttoning up his ulster, sprang upon the car.
In vain we implored of him to stay. In vain I asked to be permitted to accompany him. No. “I am all aflame,” he cried. “I go to light a fire that will not be extinguished until the high-sheriff is compelled to declare a Catholic and a Home-Ruler the member for this Orangest of all Orange counties. I feel like one inspired. Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit.” And with this quotation ringing in our ears Father O’Dowd sped upon his mission out into the night.
“An’ so yer goin’ for to be the mimber? Good luck to ye, Masther Fred darlint!” exclaimed Peter 25O’Brien, who was wild with delight at the intelligence, regarding the election as a foregone conclusion.
“I hope so, Peter.”
“For to repale the Union, Masther Fred?”
“Not quite so fast, Peter.”
“Och, murther!” he groaned, with disappointment delineated in every feature. “I thought ye wor for tee-total separation like Dan.”
“I’ll go as near to it as I can.”
“Do, avic; an’ begorr, av ye don’t take the consait out av some av thim on th’ other side, I’m a boneen, no less. Mind the dalin’ thrick, and keep your thumb on the ace av hearts—the card that always is thrumps.”
On the following morning, as I was preparing for my drive over to Father O’Dowd’s, and endeavoring to pull my ideas together on the burning topic of the hour, my mind being a prey to love, jealousy, politics, and despair-a crushing mélange—an outside car whirled up the avenue, and gracefully lounging upon the back cushion, attired in the fulness of fashionable travelling costume, a cigar in his mouth, and dainty lavender-colored kid gloves upon his hands, sat, or lay, Mr. Wynwood Melton. I recognized him even before he came within clear eye-shot, and, despite my bitter feeling against him, could not help paying him an involuntary tribute of admiration.
I knew what brought him to Kilkenley. It was not to seek my vote, it was not to visit Mr. Hawthorne—it was to see Mabel; and now, with a dull, dead ache at my heart, I should play host to my rival in love and my opponent in the hustings. I hastened downstairs and met him in the hall. I resolved that no one should come between me and my devoir as a gentleman.
Melton was a pale, finely-featured, almost effeminate-looking young fellow, whose Henri Quatre beard and thin, dark moustache set off a round, carefully-groomed head—one of those heads that reveal the execution done by double brushes and hand-mirrors, as a woman’s bespeaks the delicate manipulations of the fille de chambre. He was quite pictorial in his get-up, from a Vandyke collar to black velveteen coat, knee-breeches, purple stockings, and shoes with great strings almost resembling those coquettish rosettes so much in vogue with ladies whom nature has blessed with Lilliputian feet. He might, but for his soft plaid woollen ulster, have represented one of the old portraits of my ancestors that hung in the dining-room; and as he stood thus I could not avoid contrasting my own homely appearance with his, and bitterly flinging the heavy odds into the scale against myself.
“Mr. Melton?” I said.
“Yaas,” with a drawl and a bow.
“You are welcome to Kilkenley,” extending my hand.
“Mr. Ormonde! Ah! glad to meet you. What a drive I’ve had, over such roads and such a vehicle! Caun’t say I like your cars. Per Bacco! one’s spine gets divided into sections during the drive. You’ve got old Hawthorne here. I suppose he has bored you to death. I expected to find this place like the enchanted wood—everybody asleep, even the princess.”
“Whom you would like to awaken as in the fairy tale,” I added bitterly.
“Don’t care for kissing. How 26does Miss Hawthorne like this precious country?”
“I assume she will like it all the better for your arrival.”
I was going to resent the impertinence, but withheld the burning retort that rose to my lips.
A self-sufficient smile appeared as he almost yawned:
“I should hope so.”
At this moment Mabel appeared upon the steps.
“Ah! Mr. Melton,” she exclaimed, a bright, happy flush upon her lovely face; “this is a surprise,” shaking hands with him.
“Agreeable?”
“Of course. You have introduced yourself, I see, to Mr. Ormonde.”
“How’s the governor?” not noticing her observation.
“Papa is wonderfully well; his trip has agreed with him à merveille. He will be able to encounter the late hours of the coming session without flinching.”
“They shau’n’t catch me sitting up, except at the club. You know what brought me over?”
“Oh! dear, yes.”
“I saw the De Ruthven lot, and, as I could have been elected without leaving London, I’m doosid sorry I came away, except,” he added, “for the pleasure of seeing you.”
“Are you quite sure of being returned?” she asked.
“Rather,” with a quiet, self-satisfied smile.
Miss Hawthorne glanced at me.
“You are to be opposed,” I said.
“Haw! haw!” he laughed. “That for opposition,” flinging away his cigar-butt.
“But I tell you it will be a fierce fight, Mr. Melton,” exclaimed Mabel. “You’ve got a foeman worthy of your steel.”
“Some cad of a farmer’s son or a briefless Irish barrister. Ireland wants Englishmen to sit for her and upon her.”
“I am going to oppose you, Mr. Melton,” my heart beating very fast as I uttered the words.
“Aw!” And extracting an eye-glass from the folds of his coat, he deliberately stuck it in his eye and coolly surveyed me from head to foot.
I would have knocked him heels over head, if Miss Hawthorne had not been present.
“Fire away,” he said; “but, if you take my advice, you will not run your head against a stone wall.”
“And if you take my advice,” I hotly retorted, “you’ll take the next train en route for London, for you have come upon a bootless errand.”
“Nous allons voir,” with a shrug.
“Yes, we shall see the outcome.”
“You don’t mean to go on?”
“To the bitter end.”
“The sinews of war are at my command.”
“The sinews of the county are at mine; but come,” I added, suddenly recollecting my position of host, “let us talk the coming campaign over a cutlet and a bottle of champagne.”
We entered the house together. Mr. Hawthorne met us in the hall.
“Glad to see you, Wynwood, although,” with a ponderous laugh, “I find you in the camp of the enemy.”
As I proceeded cellarwards to look up the wine I heard Mr. Melton say: “That cad; I’ll lick him into a cocked hat.”
“You’ll eat those words, my fine fellow,” I muttered, “or my name isn’t Ormonde; and for every sneer against Ireland you’ll have my riding-whip across your shoulders.”
27I couldn’t play the hypocrite, I couldn’t act the Arab, and, while sharing bread and salt with mine enemy, plot his downfall as soon as he quitted my tent; so, making a very plausible excuse, I betook myself to my gay little dog-cart, and was about to give the mare her head when Peter O’Brien whispered to me:
“Isn’t that the spalpeen that’s cum over for to thry a fall wud ye, Masther Fred?”
“That is Mr. Melton,” I replied.
“That’s enough. The boys is waitin’ for to ketch him below at the crass-roads; and faix it’s little he’ll be thinkin’ av Parlimint if Teddy Delaney wanst gets a rowl out av him.”
“Peter,” I said, “if there is any insult offered to Mr. Melton while on my land, I’ll take it as to myself, and I will not contest the county. I pledge my honor to this.”
“Shure a little bit av a fight wudn’t be amiss.”
“I won’t have it.”
“The pond below is convaynient.”
“Silence, sir!”
“Tim Moriarty, the boy that dhruv him from the station, only wants the word for to land him in Brierly’s Pool”—a great slimy ditch about half a mile from the gate lodge.
I’m afraid I swore at my retainer.
“Wirra, wirra! is there to be no divarshin at all, at all?” he muttered to himself as I ordered him to let go the mare’s head.
Miss Hawthorne suddenly appeared upon the steps.
“Bon voyage,” she gaily cried. “Go where glory waits you.”
“I am going to lick that cad into a cocked hat!” I fiercely shouted, dashing from her presence like a lightning-bolt.
TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.
Matters do not run smoothly in United Italy. There is a screw of considerable magnitude loose in the national machine. It jerks in its motion, pitches, staggers, and men who affect a knowledge of the mechanism of nations predict for Italy—unless the screw adverted to receive proper attention—a dead, disastrous standstill. There are fashions in politics nowadays, as there are in the styles of dress, just as capricious, just as irrational, equally expensive in their own sphere, but unconscionably malicious. It is the fashion, then, in the politics of Italy, to attribute to the Papacy the only obstacle to the full enjoyment of political unity and its consequent blessings. The deep-rooted antipathy of the Vatican to a nationality in Italy, its traditional hatred of new institutions, and its equally prolonged and powerful influence over the people—who, after all, are the mainspring of action—all this is adduced by the liberal party in explanation of the palpable want of unity in Italy.
The explanation may be satisfactory to conceited sciolists, especially 28if a hatred of the Papacy be one of the component parts of their moral constitution. Latterly, however, a veritable enemy to the political unity of Italy has begun to assert itself, in a manner so striking as to alarm even the most sanguine liberals. Not a spectre but a startling reality assists at the deliberations of the Italian legislature, and, insinuating itself with deadly effect into every department of governmental administration, produces jealousies, feuds, and schisms which threaten ultimately to dismember the nation. This danger is what is called Regionalism.
Solomon’s apothegm on the newness of nothing under the sun is applicable to Regionalism. It is of ancient birth in Italy, albeit of recent manifestation, at least in its present form. It may be defined as the interested affection which an Italian has for the geographical part of the Peninsula in which he was born—for the abode of his domestic gods, so to say, with its surroundings. The affection must be interested, and of its very nature aim at effecting the prevalence of the interests, moral or material, of his own region over those of the others. A Platonic affection for one’s own natal region does not, according to the liberals, constitute Regionalism; for, say they, such an affection merely contemplates historical rights, and the love of one’s rights is purely Platonic. Moreover, this affection should be directed to the region and not to the city or town of one’s birth. An interested affection for the latter has its own appellation already, being known as amore di campanile, and bears the same relation to Regionalism as a part to a whole. But the Regionalism of today, which threatens to produce fatal consequences in Italy, is referable to those portions of Italy which in times past formed separate states, or at least notable portions of an independent state, which, in its history, its traditions, its genius, its style of speech, and its interests, differed from the other states of Italy—as, for instance, Tuscany from Piedmont, the two Sicilies from Lombardy and Venice, or even the island of Sicily itself from continental Sicily, Venice from Lombardy.
Having explained our terms, we would remind the reader of the fact that, when the question of uniting Italy into one body with Piedmont at the head was first mooted, a formidable obstacle at once presented itself in the shape of the difficulties arising at once from the different and almost contradictory elements to be united. It was argued—and with reason, too—that to build up a new state upon the foundation of new institutions, and annul disparities which had existed for centuries, was easier to plan than to carry through. The conflict of interests, of local affections and jealousies, notoriously characteristic of the Italian states, was pronounced by the distinguished statesmen of Italy and Europe a fatal obstacle, if not to the formation, at least to the preservation, of unity. Count Cavour himself was of the number of those who proposed such a consideration, and, for his own part, expressed himself perfectly satisfied if Lombardy and Venice were but annexed to Sardinia. But the liberals and sectarians were urged on to the unification of Italy by the irresistible force of Mazzini’s mind, and to do so quickly, even without Venice and Rome, because the arms of 29Napoleon III. were at their disposal. A happy opportunity had presented itself, and they seized it. They obviated the difficulties alleged above by a heroic compact. Arrogating to themselves the right of representing the sentiments of the Italian people at large, and assuming the moral personality of the various regions to which they belonged, they proclaimed to the whole world that the all-absorbing desire of the people was to be united in one nation, and that they sacrificed for ever upon the altar of their country the interests, traditions, jealousies, and local affections which had hitherto divided them, and swore to seek no other glory for the future but the one only glory of Italy united.
Cavour resigned himself with so much tact to the situation that he seemed to have created it. And thus, by assiduous application of his maxim, that, in order to make Italy, morality must be put aside, and of that other, promulgated by Salvagnoli, one cannot govern and tell the truth, the great undertaking was accomplished. Two Italies soon began to exist, the legal and the real, which, as Iacini, a minister of the Italian Cabinet, wrote, are directly contradictory to each other. Legal Italy, the supplanter, conquered, and real Italy had to bow the head and submit to a series of civil and fiscal persecutions without example in modern history. But Regionalism was immolated to unity, and the world lauded the sacrifice.
Italy is a land of promise, or rather a promissory land. Promises are given with amazing facility—only to be equalled, however, by the reluctance with which they are fulfilled. While it was a question of sacrificing the interests of some one else—the majority of the liberals who labored in the construction of the national fabric had very little of their own to sacrifice, but everything to gain—all went well, especially while the novelty of the situation lasted. But when the excitement consequent on the formation of the nation had subsided, people began to perceive that the much-vaunted political unity of the country was not real. The promissory notes of the liberals touching the eternal sepulture of provincial differences remained unhonored. The practical sacrifice was impossible. It is now more than eighteen years since the promise was given, and during that time Venice and Rome have been added to the kingdom of Italy, with a view of consolidating for ever the nationality. But the great obstacle remains unmoved, ay, and avows itself, by the eloquence of facts, immovable.
We assert this much on the authority of a member of the Italian Parliament. In an address to his constituents, delivered on the 9th of September last, Federico Gabelli said: “Do differences and divisions exist in the country? Yes, great ones; and no wonder. We have had in Italy different histories, different glories, different sufferings, and different styles of education. We have ideas, habits, tendencies, and characters, different in different regions. For many years we were unknown to one another. The sole fact of our accomplished unity—the living together, so to speak—has revealed to us the existence of these great diversities. But the most profound diversity has been constituted by the material wants of the different parts of Italy. I do not take into account the petty desires of municipalities. I look at the 30matter very broadly. A real difference exists between the wants of the northerners and southerners, greater still between the demands of the two parties. There, the great word is said, the fearful phrase pronounced—a real and profound disparity between meridionali and settentrionali (southerners and northerners). But why hide it? Is it possible to hide it? This division is felt by all, but all are afraid to declare its existence. They are afraid (and their fear is honorable, because inspired by the holy love of country) to compromise, by the declaration, the grand fact of the unity of Italy.”
Great was the scandal produced among the liberals by this declaration of Gabelli, and greater still when he subsequently made a careful diagnosis of the evil, and prescribed a remedy—nothing less, by the bye, than a confederation similar to that proposed by Pope Pius IX. thirty-one years ago.
When the first Italian legislature assembled in Turin it was observed that nearly all the deputies formed themselves into groups, separate and divided, not politically in parties, but geographically in regions. There was the Tuscan group, the Sicilian group, the Neapolitan group, and later on the Lombard and the Venetian groups, which were the occasion of constant lamentations on the part of the Piedmontese. Then began the general struggle for power, to the almost incurable laceration of poor, real Italy. All the martyrs and confessors of the country clamored for offices in compensation for their heroic sufferings. As their number bordered on the infinite for such a puny state as Italy, so infinite was the number of positions created, and, consequently, infinite was (and continues to be) the number of peculations. But with masterly tact the Piedmontese element maintained the preponderance in power, and so great was the fury of the other patriots that they finally, with one accord, devoted all their energies to the extermination of Piedmonteseism. The molestations and bitternesses which fell to the lot of Count Cavour in the struggle that ensued were, in the opinion of many Piedmontese, among the causes which hastened his death. Whenever a new ministry was to be formed, to the personal rivalries which are inseparable from such an occasion were superadded the jealousies, the intrigues, and the pretensions of the different regions. Every region clamored for the exaltation to the ministerial bench of its own representative, not as the exponent of a political principle, but as the defender of some provincial interest. The Unità Cattolica, apropos of this, observes (September 21, 1877): “When it is a question of forming a cabinet in England, in France, in Spain, do they take care to have representatives of the various English, French, and Spanish regions? Certainly not. Personages are chosen according to their opinions, not according to the regions from which they come. But here in Italy a ministry cannot spring into existence but there enters at least one Piedmontese, one Neapolitan, one Lombard, one Sicilian, one Tuscan. Examine all our ministries, from 1861 down, and you will find that they were formed more on a regional than a political basis.” This is quite true as regards the past few years. Formerly, however, as we have already intimated, the Piedmontese held the majority in the cabinets, to the unquenchable 31ire of the other provincials.
Another cause of jealousy to the provinces, and the occasion, at least, of the pre-eminence of the Piedmontese, was the existence of the capital at Turin. The Peruzzi-Minghetti ministry, however, according to the convention with Napoleon III. of September 14, 1864, succeeded in having the capital transferred to Florence. This roused the hatred of the Piedmontese against the Tuscans, and was the cause of some bloody scenes in Turin. But Lanza and Sella, both Piedmontese, vindicated their countrymen by bearing the national lares away from the banks of the Arno, and enshrining them for ever, as they thought, on the banks of the Tiber. Nor did the evil disappear with the annexation of the Venetian province and the Pontifical territory. The Venetians constituted another group in Parliament, and, if the Romans did not do likewise, it was simply in default of the necessary elements, considering the aversion of the Eternal City and the neighboring provinces for the invaders. Rome became what the Baron d’Ondes Reggio predicted—a very Tower of Babel. The war of interests broke out afresh and was carried on with redoubled fury. The combatants ranged themselves into two grand divisions of northerners and southerners. The Tuscan group alone enacted the part of moderator. The Piedmontese element asserted its pre-eminence anew in Rome, and invaded not only every department of state, but extended its ruling influence even over municipal matters. The patriots of meridional Italy prepared themselves, during the intervals when a common attack against the church did not withdraw their attention from provincial feuds, to give battle to the Piedmontese, whose ascendency was stoutly maintained by Ponza di San Martino, Lanza, Sella, and General Cadorna. The language of the southern papers was in something like the following tenor: “Here we are at last in Rome! It is high time now that the patronage of the Piedmontese should be suspended, and a check put upon that political monopoly which they arrogate to themselves as a right of conquest. They gave us a dynasty—good. They also gave us a constitution, but we mean to perfect it and adapt it to the demands of progressing civilization. But in Rome Italy belongs to the Italians, not to the Piedmontese. Piedmonteseism oppresses us. Everything in the kingdom has a subalpine odor—the organic laws, bureaucratic systems, fiscal arrangements. The administrative machine is run entirely by Piedmontese. The ministers, their secretaries (with rare exceptions), the supernumeraries who lackey these—all Piedmontese. The secret offices are given to Piedmontese, and the Piedmontese enjoy the sinecures of the secret funds. The national bank itself is but a transformation of the old subalpine bank. The army is in the hands of the Piedmontese, with a Piedmontese as the Minister of War. In short, the nerve and fibre of government is Piedmontese. There must be an end of this!”
It took seven years of laborious intrigues, amalgamations, and combinations of parties to effect the downfall of the Piedmontese. Their obituary notice is dated March 18, 1876. On the same day began the reign of the Neapolitans, and within the short space of nineteen months they have 32so thoroughly disposed of Piedmonteseism in every branch of civil and military administration that even the word Buzzurri (chestnut-roasters), applied seven years ago by the Romans to their new masters, has become obsolete. The Venetian Gabelli has given us a description of the condition of affairs at present. In the discourse alluded to he proposes a league of the septentrionals. He says: “There is nothing, gentlemen, that drives people to an abuse of power more than the certainty of having so much of it that there is no danger of being made responsible for the abuse. The meridionals are in this position to-day, because they are supported therein by the division of the septentrionals. A part, and a great part, of our votes and forces is subordinate to the votes and forces of the meridionals. But is it true that in Parliament they vote for regional interests?” He answers in the affirmative, and adduces a series of amusing yet startling facts to prove his assertion. He then continues: “I might go on indefinitely with the enumeration of facts proving the existence of the struggle of interests between the northerners and the southerners. This struggle is real and active. Many preach that, even admitting the unfortunate existence of these divisions in the country, they should be kept secret, should not be proclaimed or discussed; above all, they should not be considered as a test in government. What would you say, gentlemen, of the logic of a physician who would reason in this wise: ‘I have a patient prostrate with typhoid fever. But, as this disease is very serious, I will hide it from myself, deny its existence; and because this disease can terminate fatally for my patient I will treat it as a simple inflammation of the bowels.’ That physician would be a fool. But would those rulers be more logical who, recognizing the existence of a condition so serious for the country, would persist in governing without taking it into account? The struggle of interests is an evil. Let us cure it. But to cure it let us begin with an exact diagnosis, and with a recognition that the evil exists. Without an exact diagnosis an efficacious cure would be a miracle. I am for unity. But the unity, and even the existence, of Italy might be threatened by mistrust in our systems of government, by the ever-increasing discontent. The country will always be governed badly, unless consideration be had for its actual condition. I am for unity. But I hold it to be fatal for Italy to pass through a crisis determined by the war of northern and southern interests. What the vicissitudes of this war will be, or who will prevail, no one can foresee. If we northerners remain united and form a compact party, our more advanced civilization, and, let us speak frankly, our honesty, more extensive and serious, will ensure for us a just predominance. If we continue to be divided, while the southerners form one phalanx, we will have to submit to the law of their interests, to the influence of a social condition entirely different from our own.”
We have said nothing in reference to Regionalism—of that faction in the liberal camp which is always conspiring against the monarchical unity of Italy, with a view of substituting a regional confederation of independent republics; nothing of the multitude of liberals who 33are clamoring for administrative decentralization, as a restoration, in part, of the independence in administration which was taken from the individual regions by political unity; nothing of the absolute impossibility of having a territorial army in Italy, for the reason that Regionalism might assert itself in a more material style, to the imminent peril of the government. We have simply narrated facts furnished by the liberals themselves—by legal Italy, which assumes to be the nation. Narration has the force of demonstration in this instance, and clearly establishes the fact that Regionalism exists in the very core of Italy, nay, rules supreme, regulating politics, constituting parties, biassing every discussion, and threatening, in the long run, not only the unity of the nation but the monarchy personified in the unity.
This much established, a very reasonable doubt may be put forth as to whether the unity of Italy be accomplished, even among the liberals, who arrogated to themselves the right and the faculty to unite it, spite of the nature, the history, the traditions, the genius, and the diverse and contrary interests of the Peninsula. That there is a species of unity we do not question. But it is neither moral nor organic unity, such as forms one whole, ordained to a living purpose, founded on the same principle, agreeing in its operations, harmonious in its members. It is a mechanical and artificial unity, without bonds of life, without order in purpose, without concord in action, without harmony in its parts; in short, it is merely fiscal, not national, unity. This is a logical conclusion, derived entirely from a consideration of legal Italy.
Our conclusion does not assume a more favorable aspect for the unity of Italy if we consider its passive subject—that is to say, the immense number of Italians who were united against their own wish; who never entered into the calculations of the demagogues; who, in deference to the Unity described above, have been outraged in the tenderest affections of the heart and in the most sacred rights of nature; who have gathered no other fruits from unity than regional, municipal, and domestic impoverishment; who perceive that, in the name of this unity, their nation is perverted and their religion vilified, and who consequently recognize in the government naught but an enemy of their purse, their conscience, their family, and their liberty.
From what has been said already the absurdity and, we will add, the malice of the accusation that the Papacy is the only obstacle to the perfection and enjoyment of political unity in Italy become quite apparent. The most powerful obstacle to such unity is not in the Papacy, but in the very nature of things; it is in the history of ages, in the varied character of the people, in the contrariety of the material and moral interests of the different portions of the country. Let liberalism eradicate from its bosom the gnawing worm of Regionalism; let it reconcile opposing interests, quiet regional passions, which are the seeds of civil war; and, having done this much, let it effect a unity with the real country. Until this much be accomplished, to charge the Papacy with the ill success of the national unity is absurd. It is malicious, also, inasmuch as it manifestly tends to separate the people from the Catholic 34Church, making them regard the spiritual head of the church and their father in the faith as an enemy of their country. Nay, were the liberals successful in effecting their daring purpose, which is the separation of the people from the see of Peter, then indeed would the political unity of Italy receive its death-blow; then indeed would the bond which unites the Italian people be severed, the bond of one faith, the bond of the only unity they really can boast of—religious unity. It were well if the demagogues of Italy bestowed the necessary consideration upon the incomparable uniting force of religion to a people, instead of promoting and hailing with delight every measure devised to destroy it. Since they deem it advisable to affect Prussian and Russian ways and means, why do they not perceive the manifest wisdom of Bismarck’s measures against the Catholic Church?—measures the fundamental purpose of which is not the extinction of the church, as much as the establishment of a firm and lasting basis to the unity of the empire in a uniformity of worship—Protestant, of course. And with this intent were the Falk laws promulgated. Russia, too, fully alive to the importance of a religious uniformity as the indestructible basis of political unity, has peopled Siberia and the squalid prisons of the empire with non-conformists to the so-called Orthodox creed of the land. Never yet was there a dynasty which did not find its main support and perpetuation in the religious unity of its subjects. True or false though the religion may have been, the principle of support was there. And Italy’s patriots, with the connivance, not to say the active concurrence, of a petty provincial dynasty, would perpetuate unity by sowing religious discord among the people; by making of a people, one in faith, in baptism, and actual religious profession, a discordant, divided multitude of Evangelicals, Calvinists, Waldensians, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Methodists. The discord produced in Italy to-day by Regionalism is a great and, in all probability, a fatal evil to the unity of the country. Add the religious disunion of the people to that caused by Regionalism, and the result will be simply chaotic.
The reader may add to these conclusions: If the Pope came to terms with Italy, as she now exists, would not the political unity of the country improve, not to say receive its formal perfection, in consequence? We answer, the hypothesis is inadmissible. Waiving the fact that, as governments are conceived nowadays, the Pope cannot be the subject of any one of them, and that he cannot in conscience accept terms from the Italian government without compromising rights which he is bound to maintain—though in fact they be trampled under foot and no human probability predict their restoration—it is sufficient for us that he declares a Non possumus. But admitting the supposition of a reconciliation, of a cession of imprescriptible rights, would the confusion which now predominates in Italy give place to order? Would the only beatitude to which Italy now aspires be realized? Would the political unity of the nation be established for ever? Would the war of interests cease? Would the interests themselves change their nature? Would the “more civilized” northerners of Italy leave off increasing their prosperity at the 35expense of the southerners, and these be content with contributing as taxpayers of the land, not as rulers? Would Sicilians and Calabrians live en famille with Venetians and Ligurians? Would Turin, and Venice, and Modena, and Parma, and Florence, and Naples forget that they were once the flourishing capitals of separate, independent states, and be beatified in their present condition, simply the residence of a prefect, and he a favorite of an ill-favored ministry? The glory of being made the capital of Italy presumably satisfies Rome. Think you, however, that the old city is never retrospective? If the puny provincial cities and regions, in struggling for their own regional interests and asserting their importance, cause people to yield to dark forebodings, and to re-peruse and reflect upon the history of the Italian states, what confusion could not the mistress of the world produce, were she to fall back upon her eighteen centuries of glory as the centre of Christendom?
The great obstacle to the enjoyment of political unity in Italy is not in the Vatican, but in the character, genius, history, traditions, and conflicting interests of the Italians themselves, and it is called Regionalism.
In passages of quiet beauty such as the first six books are full of—the Odyssey, we may call them, of the Æneid, as the last six are its Iliad—Conington is almost always happy. Take, for instance, the picture of the happy valley in Elysium (book vi. 703):
In such lines, too, Mr. Morris, judging from his own poetry, should be at his best; and here again it is hard to choose between him and his predecessor:
Hypercriticism might here point out as a blemish the use of the same word “murmuring” to express the different sounds indicated in the Latin by the words sonantia and murmure; these are just the delicacies to be looked for in Virgil and not to be overlooked by his translator. Moreover, the line,
asks considerable good-will and 36knowledge of the Latin to make it sound quite reasonable, and “diverse flowery things” we have some private doubts about. But “hovered” is certainly a better equivalent for “volabant” than “crowded,” which gives no hint of the shadowy, unsubstantial nature of these dwellers in the realms of Dis—animæ, quibus altera fato corpora debentur:
as Delille puts it by an anticipative paraphrase. Here Mr. Cranch may meet his antagonists on somewhat better terms, though still we seem to miss in his lines the poetical flavor, which he rarely catches throughout:
The pathos, too, of his author—that exquisite pathos of Virgil which pervades the Æneid like a perfume, which one feels not more in the eloquent compression of the En Priamus wherewith Æneas recognizes his country’s painted woes on the walls of the Carthaginian temple, or the passionate heartbreak of the
or the subtle, touching beauty of the epitaph on Æolus, scarcely to be read even now without a quiver of the eyelids:
than in the
of the farewell to Helenus, or the manly fortitude of the hero’s admonition to his son:
—the pathos of the Æneid Prof. Conington has not been unsuccessful in preserving, as we might show in more quotations than we have room for. But for the expression of sublimity or intense emotion the octosyllabic verse is scarcely so apt; and in striving to do justice to the tragic grandeur of the second book, the passionate despair of the fourth, and the elevated majesty of the sixth, or even the splendid rhetoric of Juno and Turnus in the tenth and eleventh, Prof. Conington must often “have been made sensible,” as he says in his preface, “of the profound difference between the poetry of Scott and the poetry of Virgil.” In the battle-scenes, however, he takes his full revenge, and in his nimble-footed verse Turnus falls on with a fire and fury, or swift Camilla scours the plain with a grace and lightness, which most of his competitors toil after in vain. And in rendering those epigrammatic turns of phrase of which the Æneid is full, and which are so characteristic a feature of Virgil’s style, we know of no version which surpasses his. Take such examples as these:
(how well in the heavy movement of the last line the sound echoes the sense!—a beauty which the translator certainly misses):
the description of Turnus’ horses in book xii.:
or Corœbus’ appeal to his comrades in book ii.:
Have we not here all needful fidelity united to the air of genuine poetry? Compare Mr. Cranch’s versions of the first and last of these examples:
and
If Æneas and Corœbus had harangued their fellow-Trojans in this wise, we doubt if they would have helped them so gallantly to make some of the finest poetry in the Æneid. There is no trumpet in such lines as these.
Nevertheless, in spite of many suspicious flavors of prose in his version, Mr. Cranch, we suppose, is to be called a poet. The Boston muses are liberal to their votaries, and do not ask that a man shall be Shakspere or Milton before crowning him with all their laurels. At least, we may fairly say that he is a gentleman of accomplishments and—we should be tempted to add culture, the proper term, we believe, for a person “in society” who knows all the things that are proper for “persons in society” to know, were it not that glib dilettanteism and newspaper sciolists have well-nigh sent that much-abused word into the Coventry of cant. Mr. Cranch is, moreover, a writer of much poetic taste and no little poetic faculty, as he has shown in many pleasant essays in many varieties of metre. Among the kinds of metre which he can write, however, his version of the Æneid has not convinced us that blank-verse is included; or, to put it more agreeably, if not more justly, we are not persuaded that the kind of blank-verse he writes is best fitted to do justice to Virgil.
So much we are led to say, because in his preface Mr. Cranch hints that only a poet can or should attempt to translate the Æneid, and asserts that only in blank-verse can it be fitly translated at all. Into that interminable controversy as to whether any but a poet can translate a poet, or whether rhyme is a curb or a spur, a help or a hindrance, to the judicious translator who knows how to follow its inspiration, we do not propose to enter. But Mr. Cranch, in declaring against the rhymed couplet of Dryden and his followers, delivers himself in a way which to us seems to imply a curious misconception of Virgil’s manner, and leads us to anticipate on the threshold one of the points in which Mr. Cranch’s version most strikingly fails. “The incessantly-recurrent rhyme,” he says, “gives an appearance of antithesis which disturbs the very simplicity and directness of the original.” Adjectives are apt to be used somewhat vaguely—or, as our Western friends would say in their delightful, breezy idiom, “to be slung about with a looseness”—in speaking of the style of ancient writers, of which so few of us nowadays know enough to be justified in speaking at all. We have no desire to meddle more than is needful with these dangerous epithets, double-edged weapons as they are. 38But unless we have read Virgil quite amiss, he is especially fond of antithesis, which Mr. Cranch seems to think he is not; and he is not especially simple or direct, which Mr. Cranch seems to think he is. Not that he cannot be, as in truth he often is, both simple and direct; but that simplicity and directness are not the features of his style which we should select to characterize it, as we should select them, for example, to characterize the style of Homer. Whatever simplicity Virgil has belongs, we think, to the general conception and conduct of his story, by no means to the manner of his telling it, to the general quality of his thought or style. What directness he has belongs to the general movement of his verse and the necessities of epic composition, and is in spite of a tendency to dwell curiously on incidents not in the track of his narrative, to turn, as it were, from his epic path and linger over wayside flowers of rhetoric or sentiment—a tendency illustrated by that subtlety of allusion which all his critics have remarked, and the habit of hinting at two or three modes of expression while employing one. These characteristics of his poetry would naturally have resulted from the quality of his genius—the genius of taste the Abbé Delille calls it; he was the first of the racinien poets, says Sainte-Beuve[2]—and the character of his time. The age he wrote for was one of extreme literary and social refinement, of keen philosophical speculation; the Latin he wrote in was already a literary language—as much so as the French of Racine or the English of Pope. The age of Augustus, in many points, was strikingly like that of Louis XIV. in France and of Charles II. or, still closer, of Queen Anne in England, as has been more than once pointed out. Sainte-Beuve, with his usual insight, has seized upon this resemblance to explain why Virgil, in the account of the shipwreck in the first book (vv. 81 seq.), which is an ingenious cento from the Iliad and Odyssey, should have dropped two of Homer’s most striking similes: that the pilot, struck by the falling mast, went overboard “like a diver,” and that the scattered swimmers—rari nantes in gurgite vasto—were borne like sea-birds on the wave. Virgil omits these images, says the French critic, just because they are so salient, so life-like, so frank and real. “Comparisons of that sort the age of Augustus, like the age of Louis XIV., rather eschewed. They were by no means to the taste of Frenchmen in the days of Saint-Evremond and Segrais (I use extreme terms purposely)—men of society, of the drawing-room, nice scholars who had been often in the Hôtel Rambouillet but little at sea, and to whom divers and sea-birds were unfamiliar sights. The Frenchman of that time preferred general descriptions to images too minutely particularized, and so, too, in a measure, did the Roman of the time of Augustus and the circle of Mæcenas. Mæcenas is not so far, either in taste or philosophy, from Saint-Evremond.”
With some reservations, much the same thing applies to the ages of Dryden and of Pope—to Pope’s age and to Pope himself more strictly, perhaps, than to Dryden or his time; so that one is half inclined to think it a caprice of literary destiny that Pope should have been 39set to translate Homer, and Dryden Virgil, rather than the reverse. Not that the result would have been a better Homer, if we may judge from Dryden’s sample work in the first book of the Iliad; a better Homer than Pope’s was perhaps not to be looked for in an age which in its poetry thought it fine to call a spade—about which it was apt to be only too plain-spoken in free fireside prose—an agricultural implement, and the bucolic person who wielded it a swain. Pope’s famous ironical essay in the Guardian on his own and Ambrose Phillips’ pastorals is a curious illustration of the then passion for putting Nature into hoops and periwig. Phillips, in a dim, blundering way, is nearer right with his Cecilias and Rogers, who talk at least like ploughmen and milkmaids, than Pope with his gentle Delias and sprightly Sylvias, who converse like masquerading duchesses; but as all the world happened to be masquerading, the laugh was with Pope.
Yet, as between the Greek and Roman poet, it should seem that the former ought to have been more congenial to Dryden, and the latter to Pope. In many of the points where Pope was farthest from Homer he was nearest to Virgil—not least in his love of antithesis, his epigram and point, his brilliant rhetoric, the studied elegance, nay, the artifice, of his style. Even in his most didactic vein he would scarcely have been so far from Virgil as in his most epic strain he was from Homer. Virgil is not averse to a bit of sermonizing sub rosa; he writes with a moral; his Æneas is a sort of fighting parson born before his time. One cannot help feeling, too, in his most impassioned moments, that he is writing with his eye on his style, as Pope always is, as we can never fancy Homer doing. Is the rhetorical artifice any less plain in
than in
Is the antithesis less pointed in
than in
There are hardly more lines of the kind in Pope than in the Æneid.
When, therefore, Mr. Cranch tells us that he has taken blank-verse rather than the rhymed couplet in order to avoid the appearance of antithesis, and to secure the clear simplicity and directness of his original, he shows us where to look for some of his failures. His simplicity is too often baldness, his directness not seldom prose, and to the pointedness of the Latin he does much less than ample justice. His blank-verse seems to us monotonous in its modulation and is not always correct. Lines like the following occur too often:
Indeed, we must confess that we are at a loss to know what Mr. Cranch means by saying: “I am far from pretending that my versification may not frequently fail to convey the movement of the Latin lines to the ear of those to whom they are familiar.” If he means that his versification often, or even sometimes, or at all, conveys the movement of the Latin lines to his own ear, then his ear must be as curiously constructed as the “arrected ears” he bestows 40on Æneas in the famous shepherd simile in the second book.[3]
But it is ungracious to linger on faults which we have only dwelt on because they seemed to flow from what we must take to be a misconception on the part of Mr. Cranch of the true spirit of his author. His version has certainly the merit of fidelity to the sense of the original, though this, it seems to us, is sometimes bought by a sacrifice of the spirit. His verse is, for the most part, what he claims it to be, smooth, flowing, and compact, though it does not recall to us, as to him, the best models of blank-verse, and he does not sin, as one other of our translators does, against that “supreme elegance” which is Virgil’s chief fascination. We find him best in the least essentially poetic passages, which is, perhaps, not so bad a sign as it appears. The speech of Juno in the tenth book is no unfavorable specimen of his best style:
In rendering the phrase fovive cupidine bello (“or battles flame with passion fanned,” says Conington) Delille has a characteristic touch almost worthy of Segrais:
In the speech of Turnus in the eleventh book the Trojans become “brigands” and “barbarous assassins,” quite as if the Rutuli chief were a deputy of the Left Centre addressing his friends on the Right. If the good abbé had written a few years later he would no doubt have made them Communists. But his speech of Juno, though rather free, has many fine touches; and, indeed, the French seems to hit off the women’s part of the Æneid better than our English. Thus, the dumb rage with which Juno must have listened to Venus is well hinted in the line,
though it is by no means so literal as Cranch’s.
Of the three translators of Virgil we are now considering, Mr. Morris certainly brought to his task the greatest natural and acquired 41gifts. Nay, had we been asked from the ranks of living English writers to pick out the one who could give us Virgil most fitly, with least loss of majesty or beauty, in an English dress, we think we should have named the author of Jason and the Earthly Paradise. For Mr. Morris is not only a poet—a poet of very nearly the first order; whereas Mr. Cranch, we are constrained to say in the teeth of the Boston muses, is hardly more than a poet by brevet—he is also a classical scholar who, in point of general acquirements at least, is a rival whom even Prof. Conington would respect. Since the time of Dryden, and not excepting him, we know of no English poet—unless, perhaps, Pope and the present laureate—whose natural genius should seem to have fitted him so well as Mr. Morris to interpret the Æneid. His own poetry shows many of the most distinctive qualities of Virgil’s verse: its elegance, its pathos, its pregnant allusiveness, above all the pensive grace, the under-note of tender sadness, that runs through all the strain of the Æneid, the underlying motif of its theme. And though the form of narrative verse, in which Mr. Morris has chiefly exercised his powers, is sufficiently remote in tone and spirit from the tone and spirit of epic narrative, yet here and there, as in passages of Jason and of the Lovers of Gudrun, he has come as near to striking the true epic note as any modern poet we recall, unless it be Mr. Matthew Arnold in his admirable and touching fragment of Sohrab and Rustum. Add to this his minute and well-digested knowledge of classic mythology and legend, and his rare mastery of the Saxon and Romance elements of the language, in which so much of its tear-compelling power resides—what Joubert might have called les entrailles des mots—his possession of the secret, so hard to learn, of the sweetness of short and simple words,[4] and we had every reason to expect from Mr. Morris a version of the Æneid which should be in the highest degree original, elegant, and fresh, which should even take rank as the best English translation of Virgil’s poem that had yet appeared. That pre-eminence, indeed, has by many English critics been assigned to it; but to their verdict we cannot assent.
Fresh and original this version certainly is; for it is altogether unlike any that has preceded it, in conception, in method, in treatment, we might almost say in metre, since Mr. Morris’ long Alexandrines are, in metrical effect, no more the Alexandrines of Phaer than those of Chapman. Elegant it is, too, so far as regards artistic workmanship and finish; that everything that Mr. Morris sets his hand to is sure to have. But it is not the elegance of Virgil; it is not even the elegance of the Earthly Paradise. The final grace of proportion and fitness it has not, and in spite of many and singular beauties—of beauties which scarcely any living English writer that we know of, except Mr. Morris, could give us—it is not to us, upon the whole, a satisfactory version. Nay, it is most unsatisfactory, and it is so because of the two qualities which should otherwise have made its chief charm—its freshness and its originality; because to the attainment of these Mr. Morris seems to us to have sacrificed the most important 42quality of all in a translation—fidelity to the spirit of his author.
We need go no farther than the title-page to read the story of his design and, as we incline to hold, his failure. “The Æneids of Virgil done into English verse” is what he offers us, and the affectation of the title runs through the performance and mars it. If from the result we may derive the intent, Mr. Morris set out to produce such a version of the Æneid as might have been written anywhere between the time of Chaucer and Phaer, had any poet then lived who joined to the simplicity and freshness of his own age the culture and self-consciousness of ours. At least, this is the only way we can account for Mr. Morris’ choice of the peculiar style in which he has seen fit to couch, we might almost say to smother, his version—a style which is not, indeed, the style of Chaucer, or of Phaer, or of Chapman (to whom it has been rashly referred by an English critic in the Saturday Review), or, for the matter of that, of any other English author we are acquainted with, living or dead; but which is nevertheless plainly inspired by the same effort in the direction of mediævalism and the earlier manner that has borne such pleasant fruit in the author’s former productions. But the effort is here carried, it seems to us, to “a wasteful and ridiculous excess,” and is, besides, quite out of place in a translation where the writer is not free to form his own manner, but is bound to the manner of his original; unless, indeed, Mr. Morris finds in the style of Virgil the same effect of quaintness and antiquity which he has striven but too successfully to give his translation, and that he is too good a scholar to permit us to believe. Virgil’s style was that of his age, and his unfrequent archaisms, such as faxo for fecero, aulai for aulæ, and the like, can scarcely have produced on the reader of the Augustan era any stronger impression of quaintness than such poetical forms as “spake” and “drave” and “brake” produce on us when we meet them in English poetry today. We must, therefore, assume that Mr. Morris aimed at some such reproduction of the literary manner of a past age as Thackeray gives us in Esmond, or Balzac, with still greater ingenuity but much worse art, in the Contes Drolatiques. This, and a resolve to use only Saxon words as far as possible—a right idea in the main, perhaps, for translation from the Latin, certainly a most interesting and instructive one—and (a less useful idea) to say nothing in the common way which could at all be said out of the common, seem to have been his controlling influences. To these he has subordinated all else but verbal fidelity, and the result is a queer composite production of a strong mediæval flavor—a romanticized Æneid which one of the seekers after the Earthly Paradise might have told his comrades
but which, except for fidelity to its meaning, seems to us hardly nearer being Virgil’s Æneid than Pope’s Iliad was to being Homer’s. Close it certainly is; we may say marvellously close. Indeed, so far as we have been able to collate, it surpasses in this respect all previous rhymed versions, even Conington’s, and falls but little below any of those in blank-verse. Not only does it render the Latin line 43for line—no trifling task, even for the Alexandrine, with its unvarying fourteen syllables against the average fifteen of the hexameter—but not seldom word for word. Moreover, notwithstanding its exactness, it reads as smoothly and as spiritedly as an original poem; it is everywhere set off with those verbal graces of which Mr. Morris is a master, and the metre, which has many merits for the purpose, is throughout handled with admirable skill. Wherein and how, then, does it fail of giving us Virgil?
Because, we answer, not only is Virgil’s tone—his coloring, his local atmosphere-conspicuously absent from Mr. Morris’ translation, not only is the tone of the latter as unlike the tone of the Æneid as can well be, but it is even carefully, studiously, nay, laboriously, removed from it. It may be taken as a rule in translation that any word is out of place which violently disturbs the associations that belong to the original, the train of ideas raised by the original in the reader’s mind. For instance, when Mr. Theodore Martin makes use of the word “madrigal” in his translation of the Carmen Amœbæum of Horace, we somehow feel that he has struck a false note; we are sensible of a discord. The word to the English reader brings up associations wholly foreign to Horace and his time, turns the thoughts of the English reader into a widely different track, and dispels the Horatian effect. Mr. Morris not only does this in single words, but his very design is based on doing it as often as he can; his entire vocabulary is carefully selected with a view to doing it uniformly throughout his work. From the stately towers of Ilium, city of the gods, the arces Pergameæ and incluta bello mœnia Dardanidum; from the splendid temples of Carthage; from the fertile plains of Hesperia, the royal city of Laurentum, and the mighty hundred-pillared palace of Picus; from the Ausonian battle-fields, ringing with the clatter of chariots, the clang of sword on helm and spear on buckler, the shouts and shocks of the contending heroes—from all the scenes and characters so familiar to us in the Virgilian story, Mr. Morris ushers us into a strange, remote, wild Westland, where all the famous doings we thought we knew so well are transformed in the most grotesque fashion. It is a land of “steads” and “firths,” of “meres” and “leas” and “fells,” he takes us into, inhabited not by a people but by “a folk,” who are not named but “hight”; who dwell in “garths” and “burgs” and worship “very godheads” in “fanes”; who never by any chance go anywhere, but either “wend” or “fare” when they are not engaged in “flitting”—a mysterious kind of locomotion which they sometimes achieve by means of “wains”—and who hold converse among themselves not in words but in “speech-lore,” which they at times condescend to speak, but very much prefer, when the rhyme will give them the ghost of a chance, “to waft” through “tooth-hedge” (ore locutus). In this mysterious region are neither times nor numbers, but only “tales” and “tides”; what would be mere tillers of the soil (agricolæ) in Virgil are here become “acre-biders” or “field-folk,” who for cattle have “merry, wholesome herds of neat” (læta boum armenta), and for horses “war-threatening herd-beasts.” Here things are rarely carried, but, like the “speech-lore” above spoken of, are “wafted” whenever humanly possible, 44and are never done or made when they can by any means be “dight.” Here we are puzzled to recognize our old friends, the Muses, under the disguise of “Song-maids”; we fairly cut those amiable sisters, the Furies, when they are introduced to us as the “Well-willers”; and of the heroes who roar and ruffle so gallantly through the battlefields of the Æneid we have scarcely a glimpse, but instead a “tale” of “lads of war,” “begirded” with “war-gear” and led by “Dukes of man,” who are for ever falling on and smiting or being smitten by a “sort of fellows” dight in “war-weeds,” who fare around in “war-wains” and “deal out iron-bane” (dant funera ferro) with “shot-spears” or “weapon-smiths” and “wound-smiths” instead of simple javelins and swords. Following Mr. Morris’ lead, in short, we find ourselves in a land where Virgil would be as much at home as he would in Asgard or Valhalla, or as the hero Beowulf might be in Elysium. It is a pleasant land enough in its way, and the folk are entertaining folk, but we feel that we have left the Æneid behind us.
It is far from our wish or aim to set Mr. Morris’ work in an unworthy or ridiculous light. Our respect for him is too great, our admiration too sincere, to treat any performance of his lightly. But some such impression as that we have given above is the chief one left on our mind by reading his Æneids. We are no longer in Italy but in Norseland, or, if in Italy, an Italy after the Gothic irruption; Æneas and Turnus, Pallas and Lausus, fortisque Gygas fortisque Cloanthus, are no longer Trojans or Rutules, but Norse jarls and vikings. They bear their Latin names, but that is all that is Latin about them: the hand is the hand of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob. What associations connect themselves in the mind of the English reader with such words as “garth” and “burg” and “firth”? Are they not as unlike as possible to any that belong to Virgil? Do they not disturb and trouble, even totally obscure, the effect the English reader habitually derives from Virgil—these incongruous words dropped into the clear current of the poet’s manner—as a stone flung into a limpid pool may trouble and obscure it? What is there in common between Morris’ “lads of war in vain beleaguered” and Virgil’s nequidquam obsessa juventus?—between Morris’ “very Duke of man” and Virgil’s ipsis ductoribus? (v. 249). What impression is the English reader apt to get from phrases like “flitting by in wain”? It is certainly not that of a hero rushing to battle, but, if any—and we are not sure that upon our own mind any very tangible impression is left at all—rather of a bucolic ghost disappearing somewhere in a spectral hay-cart. To say Carthage is to be “Lady of all lands” is surely to produce an utterly different effect from that of dea gentibus esse (i. 17); and they must have shrewder eyes than ours who can find in such lines as
or
anything more than the shell of Virgil’s
or,
where the pretence of verbal fidelity only makes the verbal affectation 45more annoyingly weak. These ever-recurring eccentricities of phrase tease the reader and spoil half his enjoyment. In a translator whose daily speech was of “trowing” instead of “trusting,” of “tale” for number or “sort” for company, of “wending” and “wafting,” and “folk” in the singular, and who used “very” rather profusely, and on slight provocation, as an adjective, and “feared” and “learned” as transitive verbs, and agreed with some modern great men in thinking grammar generally a bore, such lines as
—such lines in a translator to whom this dialect was still a living language would not seem unnatural. They would be simply the expression of the effect made by Virgil on the mind of that age, and so far, since every age has its own idiom, they would not necessarily be un-Virgilian at all. Even such extraordinary phrases as
for
or
for
or
for
or,
for
—such phrases as these, if to any translator at any time they could have seemed a natural way of saying things, would not then, in such a translator’s version, have struck us with more than the passing and not unpleasant sense of quaintness which is part of the charm we find in the diction of a past age when used by its lawful owners. But when a poet of the nineteenth century sacrilegiously invades the tomb and seizes upon this castoff and moth-eaten verbal bravery of buried ages to bedeck himself withal, it is much as if he should come to make his bow in a modern 46drawing-room arrayed in the conventional dress-coat, Elizabethan ruff and trunks, Wellington boots, and a Vandyke hat. The novelty might please for a moment, but the incongruity must offend in the end. In the very time which Mr. Morris so much admires they knew this to be false art. “That same framing of his stile to an old rusticke language,” says Sir Philip Sidney in his Apologie for Poesie, speaking of The Shepherd’s Calendar, “I dare not alowe, since neither Theocritus in Greeke, Virgile in Latin, nor Sannazar in Italian did affect it.”
Still worse is it when our amateur of second-hand finery, the bric-à-brac of language, selects such a poet as Virgil—Virgil, whose name is a synonym for supreme, for perfect elegance, whose “taste was his genius”—as a lay figure to drape with these shreds and tatters of an obsolete, fantastic verbiage, “mouldy-dull as Eld herself”—to quote and illustrate at once from Mr. Morris[5]—and smelling of the grave. This persistence in going out of the way to hunt for archaisms at once—to repeat a word which best hits our own feeling—teases the reader and distracts him. We seem to feel Mr. Morris amiably tugging our coat-sleeve at every turn to point out this or that fresh eccentricity of language. We fancy we see him chuckling and rubbing his hands gleefully here and there over the discovery of some more than usually exasperating way of violating the usages of modern speech. So vexed and harassed, it is impossible to get much taste of the Æneid; through this word-jugglery we catch such glimpses of it as of the painted scene a conjurer has set behind him to throw his tricks into relief Of a piece with this laborious renaissance of a forgotten tongue are the studied mispronunciations, such as Ænĕas for Ænēas and Erāto for Erăto:
the false rhymes, such as “wrath” and “forth,” “poured” and “abroad,” “abroad” and “reward,” which might be forgiven to the stress of so long and difficult a task had we not such reason for suspecting them to be intentional; the occasional use of phrases familiar, even low, and totally at variance with Virgil’s lofty and cultivated style, such as “gobbets of the men” for frusta, iii. 632; “Phrygian fellows” (Phrygii comites); “those Teucrian fellows”; “the other lads” for juventus; “but as they gave and took in talk” (hac vice sermonum); “he spake and footed it afore” (dixit et ante tulit gressum); “unlearned Æneas fell aquake” (Horruit ... inscius Æneas)—surely a most undignified proceeding for a hero; “so east and west he called to him, and spake such words to tell” (dehinc talia fatur)—the list is long, scarce a page but would swell it; or the compound epithets which Mr. Morris—herein, no doubt, taking his cue from Chapman, but not so happily or with such good reason—has coined profusely. “In the Augustan poets,” says Prof. Conington, “compound epithets are chiefly conspicuous by their absence, and a translator of an Augustan poet ought not to suffer them to be too prominent 47a feature of his style.” This assertion must be qualified with regard to Virgil, who, in imitation of his model, Homer, and in obedience, perhaps, to a supposed law of epic composition, has too many compounds to permit it to pass unchallenged—such, for instance, as armisonus (Palladis armisonæ—“Pallas of the weapon-din”), velivolus (“sail-skimmed”), legifer (legiferæ Cereri—“Ceres wise of law”), letifer (“deadly”), cælicolus (“heaven-abider”), laniger (“woolly”), noctivagus (“nightly-straying”), and the like. Yet, not content to render these by English compounds even where it is not always expedient—since the compound form in our own language will often, from its strangeness in a familiar tongue, seem strained and awkward, where in the less familiar Latin it seems only natural and elegant[6]—Mr. Morris has introduced many other compounds of his own invention for which there is no authority in Virgil at all, which in many instances are discordant with his style and not seldom downright grotesque—such combinations as “hot-heart” for ardens, or “cold-hand in the war” (frigidus bello) or even “fate-wise,” “weapon-won,” “war-lord,” “battle-lord,” “air-high,” “star-smiting,” “outland-wrought,” “heaven-abider” (cœlicolus), “like-aged,” “goddess-led,” etc., which meet us at every turn. And what are we to say of such inventions as “murder-wolf,” “death-stealth” (“on death-stealth onward the Trojan went”—hic furio fervidus instat), “dreaming-tide” for somnus, “war-Turnus,” “weapon-great,” “helpless-fain” for nequidquam avidus, “hero-gathered stone” (lapis ipsi viri), “anger-seas,” “wounding-craft,” “bit-befoaming,” “speech-masters,” or those others, if possible still more extraordinary, already mentioned, “weapon-smith,” “wound-smith,” “tooth-hedge”? These, and scores of other such we have marked for notice, are surely as little like Virgil as they are like any English that is spoken to-day; and they are scarcely less potent than Mr. Morris’ archaisms in disturbing and altering the Virgilian tone. Of a like effect are the quaint and unconsequential translations now and then of Latin names—as of Musæ into “Song-maids,” Eumenides into “Well-willers,” Avernus into “Fowlless,” and soon—whereby for a perfectly familiar and intelligible term of the Latin is substituted in the English a grotesque and puzzling word, and which again stops the current of the story until the reader can readjust his mind to the novel ideas it awakes. The most unclassical of readers has his notions formed of the Muses and the Furies, at least, if not of the Eumenides; but of these Song-maids—who might as well be milk-maids—and of these Well-willers—who rather suggest well-diggers—he must form a new notion as he reads. And one might add, at the risk of seeming to split hairs, that in thus translating the word Eumenides we lose much of the effect of that euphemism with which the Greeks, like all strongly imaginative peoples, sought to keep disagreeable subjects at arm’s length—the form τι παθεῖν, as a synonym for dying, is 48exactly paralleled by the Irish phrase “suffered,” applied to an executed rebel—or perhaps to ward off the wrath of these ticklish neighbors, as Celtic races, again, are in the habit of calling fairies “the good people.” A more substantial objection is that Mr. Morris seems capricious in the matter, for we see no particular reason for his translating one such name and others not at all—-why he should not give us Quail-land for Ortygia, or Chalk Island for Crete, as well as Westland for Hesperia, or Fowlless for Avernus.
It is a result of these affectations, or—for we are loath to press the charge of affectation against a poet whose own writing is so genuine and sincere—of these peculiarities of style, which have on the reader all the seeming and effect of affectation, that the pathos of Virgil, the one quality to which Mr. Morris should have been best fitted to do justice, he has greatly impaired. Affectation is fatal to pathos; one cannot have much feeling for the woes which are carefully set forth in verbal mosaic. Take but a single example—a passage in Virgil already referred to—which sets forth admirably that faculty the Latin poet has to so curious a degree of infusing sadness into mere words, but in which Mr. Morris is little behind him. It is the death of Æolus, which Mr. Morris renders thus:
It only needs to compare this with the original to see how far it misses the pathos of the Latin; it needs only to compare it with Mr. Morris himself, where he has forgotten or failed to be sufficiently archaic, to see the reason of the miss. Take, again, the passage from the shipwreck in the second book already referred to:
The word “wand” for telo has an odd look, but that may be forgiven to the rhyme; and the rest is simple, emotional, and true. In like happy moments of oblivion we catch an echo of Jason, as in the opening of book vii.:
The rising of the Rutules in vii. 623 is an animated picture unmarred by too many of the mannerisms we have spoken of:
Passages like this—and, indeed, there are many of them—only deepen our regret that Mr. Morris should let a whim of doubtful taste deprive us of what might have been otherwise the best rendering of the Æneid yet. One other passage we will give, and then cease to tax longer the patience of the reader. It shall be the gallant picture of Turnus sallying forth to battle (xi. 486), which, as it is taken from the like description of Paris, near the end of the sixth Iliad, will permit us to compare Morris’ manner with Chapman’s:
Compare Chapman, Iliad vi. 503 (Οὐδέ Πάρις δήθυνεν ἐν ὑψηλοῖοι δόμοιοιν):
Is not the modern older in style than the ancient?
We lay aside Mr. Morris’ book with a mingling of admiration and regret. The critical and poetical ability shown in it is of the first order—no man could have spoiled Virgil so thoroughly as we think Mr. Morris has in places who did not know him au bout des ongles, just as a clever parody shows true appreciation of an author—and its ingenuity is amazing. But one feels it to be a wasted ingenuity, and the predominant sentiment with which we leave the book is one of annoyance that a man should so wilfully do ill what his very errors prove him capable of doing so well. Yet for all that the book wins upon us as most of Mr. Morris’ work has a way of doing; and if one could but get reconciled to a Norseland Æneis, we should no doubt find it pleasant enough.
50Perhaps we cannot better dismiss our subject than by saying, in the old-time fashion of comparison, that of these three translations Conington’s will probably be read for the story by those who know Virgil not at all; Mr. Cranch’s for its literalness by those who half know Virgil and are willing to know him better; and Mr. Morris’ for its very ingenuity of perversion by those who know Virgil so well that to see him in any new light, even a false light, only adds a fillip to their love for him.
Caligula was reigning, C. Marcius was prætor at Vienne, in Dauphiny, when a litter, escorted by a number of cavaliers, one evening entered the triumphal gate of this metropolis of Gaul. Many gathered together at the unusual display. On the door of the modest little house before which they stopped, and which stood close by the Temple of Mars, was the name of F. Albinus in bright red letters. An old man, tall in stature, but now bent with age and fatigue, alighted from the litter, and, preceded by two of his attendant Hebrew slaves, entered the reception-room, where he was greeted by his friend, the master of the house.
After having bathed and received the usual attentions at the hands of the slaves, he proceeded with his host to the supper-room to enjoy the evening meal. The lamps were lighted, and Albinus was alone with the new guest, with whom he entered into conversation as soon as the dish of fresh eggs was placed before them.
“Many years have passed since we separated,” said Albinus; “let us empty a cup of Rhone wine to your return.”
“Yes, many years!” sighed the old man; “and cursed be the day whereon I succeeded Valerius Gratus in the government of Judea! My name is unlucky; a fatality is attached to all who bear it. One of my ancestors left the stamp of infamy on the name of Roman when he passed under the yoke in the Caudine Forks, after fighting against the Samnites; another perished in Parthia, fighting against Phraates; and I—I—”
The wine remained untasted, while his unbidden tears fell into the cup.
“Well! you—what have you done? Some injustice of Caligula exiles you to Vienne; and for what crime? I read your affair in the tabularium. You were denounced to the emperor by your enemy, Vitellius, the prefect of Syria; you punished a few Hebrew rebels who, after assassinating some noble Samaritans, entrenched themselves on Mount Garizim. You were accused of doing this out of hatred to the Jews.”
“No, no, Albinus; by all the gods! it is not the injustice of Cæsar which afflicts me.”
“What exactions did you impose?”
“None.”
“Did you carry off any Jewish women?”
“Never!”
“Did you gibbet any Roman citizens, as Verres did in Sicily?”
Pilate did not reply.
“I always took you to be good and sensible,” continued Albinus; “hence I did not hesitate to proclaim aloud in the city that your spoliation and exile were an outrage. It was never referred to the senate. The whole affair was evidently owing to some caprice of Vitellius.”
“Albinus, let us talk of other things. I am tired, having just arrived from Rome. Serious things for to-morrow, says the sage. This Rhone wine is exquisite.”
52“Beware of it, Pontius; it disturbs the brain.”
“So much the better. But I am not afraid of it. I am accustomed to the wine of Engaddi; that is a potent Bacchus.”
“As you please. But tell me, you who come from Rome, what stirs men’s minds there? Have you aught to interest my ear?”
“The auguries are bad. I did not recognize Rome; she no longer goes forward, but steadily sinks!”
“What say you?”
“I say what is. From here you cannot detect the mysterious subterranean noise which rumbles as with the approach of that invisible, superior power now irresistibly pushing the empire to its ruin. Our gods are vanquished; they abandon us. Listen, Albinus; let me this evening throw a smile to your Penates, and no more words of what is sorrowful. Night is the mother of sadness, but the triclinium counsels gayety. Tell the child to turn me a cup of wine of Cyprus, and ask the slave to bring my sandals and prepare my bed. I love not the gloom of night; let us haste to sleep, that the day may sooner come.”
Albinus bowed, and the desires of Pilate were complied with. As the slave approached him with a silver hand-basin for washing his hands, Pilate’s face turned pale as with fright, while the light of his eyes was terrible to behold.
The next day was the eve of the kalends of August. Pilate took a walk with Albinus in the Roman city of Vienne, and listened abstractedly to the conversation of his friend, who pointed out the various localities as they passed along, and the many splendid monuments rising on every side.
“There is left no trace of the domination of the Allobroges here,” said Albinus. “Since the death of Julius Cæsar they have ceased to disturb the city. Life is quiet and peaceable at Vienne, and you can spend here the years which the gods still grant you in secure contentment.
“Here before us is the palace of the emperors; it is not so grand, so sumptuous as that on Mount Palatine, but it is good enough for those who never visit it. Look to the left, and see the temple of Augustus and Livia; unless your eyes are weakened by the sun of Judea, you can read, from here, the inscription: Divo Augusto et Liviæ. Beyond is that dedicated to the Hundred Gods. If we go down to the river we can get a little fresh air on the bridge. Vienne, as you may have already remarked, is a very pleasant place of residence; the climate is quite mild, being so thoroughly sheltered by the surrounding mountains from the violence of the winds. We are only fifteen leagues from Lyons; and by the Rhone our away to both Marseilles and Arles is shortened. These three important cities are under the government of Vienne, as Tiberius has decreed; so thank fate, which has sent you to so pleasant a place of exile.”
Albinus remarked a look of trouble in the face of the old man, whose eyes were fixed on a point of dust in the direction of the river-bank, and from which were seen gradually to emerge horsemen with armor glistening in the sun.
“It is the prætor,” said Albinus; “he has been visiting the works at the amphitheatre. That is his daily ride.”
“Let us avoid the prætor,” said Pilate; “may he never know my face!”
53As they reached the “Quirinal” street on the way back, they were met and separated by a crowd of idlers who, attracted by the trumpets, had gathered from every side to witness the passage of the prætorian escort. Pilate found himself isolated, and soon became an object of interest, as is the case with one who seeks alone to stem a popular current. His dress was enough to attract insulting remarks. For from his long sojourn in Judea Pilate had insensibly adopted Hebrew fashions in dress, gesture, and deportment. His very figure, black hair, and dark complexion (he was of Iberian origin) betrayed more the Hebrew than the Roman.
“Let the Jew pass; he is going to the synagogue,” said one at his side.
“Mothers! watch your little ones,” said another; “the wolf is out of the Quirinal.”
“We had better take him and crucify him,” muttered a third.
But nothing further was done to molest him, and Pilate passed safely through the crowd, with head sunk upon his breast and suppliant bearing, as far as the head of the street, where a different scene awaited him.
Seeing a house which closely resembled that of Albinus (for a number of them were similar in construction), and finding the door standing open, he hastily entered, glad to find its shelter at last, and closed the door behind him.
A fearful cry chilled the blood in his very veins; he heard his own name uttered, and thrust his fingers in his ears at the ominous sound.
The master and his family were at their daily labor, as basket-makers, beneath the interior peristyle called the impluvium. When he entered the master recognized Pilate, for he knew the more than famous name of the stranger whose exile to Vienne had been made public. “Pilate! Pilate!” he cried; and the women and children dropped their wicker-work as they, too, repeated this formidable name, stained with the blood of God himself. The family were Christians.
Pilate asked an asylum, but they did not understand him, as he spoke a sort of Hebrew-Latin and they were Gallic Allobroges. Still, as they caught the name of Albinus twice or thrice repeated, the father made signs to the rest of the family to be seated, and, as if recalling some divine precept of charity learned in the secret assembly of the faithful, he approached Pilate and quietly showed him the house of his neighbor Albinus. Pilate crossed the street and entered his friend’s house.
Albinus was not over-displeased when the rude crowd separated him from a companion whose appearance bade fair to compromise him before the public. Like a good courtier he prudently stayed to see the prætor, shouted Vivat imperator! and praised the rare magnificence of the escort and the beauty of the horses; after which he quietly returned to his house, where he found his friend in an agony of despair.
“I am recognized,” cried Pilate as Albinus entered; “the little children pointed their fingers at me on the street. O Albinus! remember that our lips as very children uttered words of friendship; remember that we played together on the banks of the Tiber; that we have sat at the same banquets and raised our cups in the same libations. Remember the past and protect me beneath the inviolable shelter of thy roof. I seek a refuge beneath 54the sacred wings of thy hospitality.”
Albinus was too moved for utterance, and silently pressed the hands of Pilate.
“There are Christians, then, at Vienne also?” asked Pilate, as he passed his hand over his aching brow.
“Oh! yes, as there are everywhere,” replied Albinus, “except in our temples. You are afraid of those people, then?”
“Ah! yes, yes. I fear them. I fear everybody. Jews, Romans, Pagans—all are odious, terrible to me! The Romans see in me a criminal fallen into disgrace before Cæsar; the Jews, a severe proconsul who persecuted them; and the Christians, the executioner of their God!”
“Their God! their God! The impious wretches!”
“Albinus, have a care what you say!”
“They adore as a God that Jesus of Nazareth who was born in a stable and put to death on a cross?”
“They would not adore him if he had dressed in garments of velvet and lived in princely halls.... Albinus, I am about to submit my life to your judgment; you will see whether I am worthy of the hospitality which you offer me.”
Changing his seat for one more comfortable, Pilate continued:
“Albinus, order your doors to be closed, and let a slave watch at the porch, as when a young virgin first enters the doors of her spouse. The ear of Cæsar is everywhere on the alert. And now listen. All my misfortunes spring from the death of this man, this Nazarene. Tiberius cursed me because of him; Caligula now exiles me because of him; for this boldness of the Christian sect, which to-day threatens the empire, began at the foot of Calvary. If Jesus had not been put to death, his followers would never have crossed the Jordan nor the sea of Cæsarea. It is the death of that man which has made so many martyrs. But could I prevent that death?
“When I was about to set out as successor to Valerius Gratus, Sejanus summoned me to the Palatine and gave me his instructions. ‘You are intimate,’ he said, ‘with the Roman policy; hence a few words will do. Judea is a beautiful country; after completing its conquest we must strengthen its possession by a paternal government. Let all your care be to draw blessings down upon the Roman name. We have left the Jews a king of their own race, their temple, their laws, their religion. They are a brave and haughty race, with heroic deeds inscribed in their history, and which they well remember. Govern them wisely, that they may regard you more as a stranger visiting than as a master holding the reins.’
“I set out with my wife and my servants. When near the quarter of the Tres tabernæ I met Tiberius, then returning from Pannonia. Recognizing the imperial escort, I immediately alighted to salute Cæsar. He had received at Brundisium my nomination, and confirmed it, and now, offering me his hand most graciously, he said:
“‘Pontius, you have a fine government; let your hand be firm and your speech conciliatory. Act in public matters according to your own good sense, and never forget the eternal maxim of the Romans:
Go and be happy.’
55“The auguries were favorable, you see.
“I reached Jerusalem, took solemn possession of the government, and gave orders for a splendid feast, to which I invited the tetrarch of Judea, the high-priest, and the other Hebrew dignitaries and princes of the people. At the appointed time not a guest appeared! This was a mortal affront. Some days later the tetrarch deigned to honor me with a visit, but he was cold and full of dissimulation. He pretended that their religion did not permit them to sit at our table nor offer libations with Gentiles. I thought best to accept this excuse graciously; but from that day the conquered were in declared hostility with the conquerors.
“Jerusalem was, at that time, the most difficult subject-city in the world to govern; the people were so turbulent that from day to day I was always expecting a sedition. To suppress this I had only a centurion and a handful of soldiers, so I wrote to the prefect of Syria to send me a reinforcement of troops, but he answered that he had hardly enough for himself. Ah! what a misfortune that the empire is so large; we have more conquests than soldiers.
“Among the thousand rumors which circulated about me there was one that attracted my special notice. Public rumor and my secret agents alike reported that a young man had appeared in Galilee with a remarkable sweetness of speech and a noble austerity of manner, and that he went about the city and the borders of the sea, preaching a new law in the name of the God who had sent him. I at first thought that this man intended to arouse the people against us, and that his words were preparatory to a revolt. But my fears were soon dissipated; Jesus the Nazarene spoke as a friend rather of the Romans than of the Jews. Passing one day, in my litter, near the pool of Siloe, I saw a large gathering of people, and remarked in the midst a young man standing with his back to a tree and quietly addressing the crowd. I was told that it was Jesus, but I could have guessed it at once, so different was he in appearance from those who listened. He seemed about thirty years of age, and the wonderful reddish-blond tint of his hair and beard gave a luminous appearance to his noble countenance. Never have I seen so mild a glance, so calm a face; he was a striking contrast to the dark skins and black beards of his auditors. From fear of disturbing the liberty of his speech by my presence I passed on, leaving my secretary to mingle with the crowd and hear his words. This man’s name was Manlius; he was grandson of that chief among the conspirators who awaited Catiline in Etruria, and, having dwelt many years in Judea, understood perfectly the Hebrew tongue. He was, moreover, sincerely devoted to my interests, and I could always trust him. On my return home I found Manlius awaiting me with a detailed account of the speech which Jesus had pronounced. Never in the Forum, never in the books of sages, have I met anything comparable to the maxims which had that day reached the ears of Manlius. One of those rebellious Jews such as abound at Jerusalem having asked if tribute were to be paid to Cæsar, Jesus answered him: ‘Render under Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, and unto God what is God’s.’
“Thence the great liberty which I gave to the Nazarene; it was doubtless 56in my power to arrest him at any time, put him on a galley, and send him to Pontus, but I should have felt myself acting against justice and good Roman sense. The man was neither seditious nor rebellious. I gave him, perhaps without his knowledge, the benefit of my protection; he was free to act, to speak to the people, to fill a whole square with his audience, to create a legion of disciples to follow him from city to desert, or lake to mountain, and never did an order from me interpose to trouble either orator or auditory. If some day—may the gods forefend!—if some day the religion of our fathers fall before the religion of Jesus, Rome will pay a noble tribute to her own generous toleration, and I, unhappy I! will be called the instrument of what the Christians call Providence—what we call fate.
“But this great liberty which Jesus enjoyed from my protection displeased the Jews—not the common people, but the rich and powerful. True, they were the very ones whom Jesus did not spare in his discourse, and that was for me an additional political reason for allowing him free speech. He told them—that is, the Scribes and Pharisees—that they were a race of vipers and no better than whited sepulchres. And another time he sharply criticised the ostentatious charity of the rich man, saying that the mite of a poor widow woman was far more precious to God. New complaints against the insolence of his speech came to me nearly every day. Deputations came with their griefs before my tribunal. I was told that he would be assaulted; that it would not be the first time that Jerusalem had stoned those who called themselves prophets; and that if the prætor refused them justice they would appeal to the emperor.
“So I was beforehand with them. I at once wrote letters to Cæsar, and the galley Ptolemais carried them to Rome. My conduct was approved by the senate, but I was refused the reinforcement of troops which I asked, or at least I was given to hope that the garrison of Jerusalem should be strengthened after the war with Parthia was terminated. That was an interminable delay, for our wars with Parthia never end.
“Being too weak to repress a sedition, I determined to make a move which would pacify the city, without obliging me to make any humiliating concessions; so I at once sent for Jesus of Nazareth.
“He received my messenger with due respect, and came straightway to the prætorium.
“O Albinus! now that age has weakened every part of my bodily frame, and that my muscles in vain ask a little vigor from my thin and cold blood, I am not astonished if Pilate occasionally trembles; but I was younger then, and my Spanish blood, mingled with the Roman which coursed through my veins, was proof against any ordinary emotion of fear. When I saw the Nazarene enter my basilica, where I was walking, it seemed as if a hand of iron held me to the marble of the pavement. I thought I heard the very bucklers of gilt-bronze, dedicated to Cæsar, sigh as they hung against the columns. The Nazarene was as calm as innocence itself; he stood before me, with a single gesture, as if to say: Behold me. For some time I remained contemplating, with mingled terror and admiration, this extraordinary man, type of a physical perfection unknown to any of the innumerable 57sculptors who have given face and form to so many gods and heroes. ‘Jesus,’ said I at last, when my emotion had subsided—‘Jesus of Nazareth, for nearly three years I have allowed you freely to speak in public and everywhere, nor do I now regret it. Your words have ever been those of a true sage. I know not whether you have ever read Socrates or Plato, but there is in your language a majestic simplicity which raises you far above even those great philosophers. The emperor has been informed of it, and I, his humble representative at Jerusalem, count myself happy to have allowed you the toleration of which you are worthy. I must not, however, disguise from you that your words have provoked against you powerful and terrible enemies; be not astonished that you have thus become an object of hatred, for so was Socrates to those who encompassed his death. Your enemies are doubly irritated, against you and against me: against you, because of your sharp criticisms; against me, because of the liberty which I have allowed you. I am even accused of complicity with you to destroy what little civil power has been left to the Hebrews by Rome. I give you no commands, but I charge you seriously to spare the pride of your enemies, that they may not stir up against you a stupid populace, and that I may not be obliged to detach from these trophies the axe and the fasces, which should serve here only as an ornament and never as an occasion of fear.’
“The Nazarene answered me:
“‘Prince of the earth, thy words spring from a false wisdom. Tell the torrent to stop midway on the mountain-side, lest it uproot the trees of the valley. The torrent will tell thee it obeys the voice of God. He alone knows whither goeth the water of the impetuous stream. Amen, amen I say unto thee, before the roses of Sharon bud the blood of the just shall be shed.’
“‘I do not wish your blood to be shed,’ I exclaimed hastily. ‘You are more precious in my eyes, because of your wisdom, than all those turbulent and haughty Pharisees, who abuse our Roman patience, conspire against Cæsar, and mistake our forbearance for fear. The dolts!—not to know that the wolf of the Tiber sometimes conceals himself under an innocent fleece! But I will defend you against them; my prætorium is open to you as a place of refuge. You will find it an inviolable asylum.’
“He shook his head quietly with an air of godlike grace, and replied:
“‘When the day comes, there will be no shelter on earth, nor in the depths, for the Son of Man. The only asylum of the just is above. What is written in the books of the prophets must be accomplished.’
“‘Young man,’ said I, ‘I have just made you a request. I now give you a command. The preservation of order in the province confided to my charge requires it. I demand that the tone of your speech become more moderate. Beware of opposing my will! You know my intentions; go and be happy.’
“With these words my voice lost its severity and became mild again, for it seemed that a harsh word could not be uttered before this extraordinary being, who calmed the storms of the lake with a motion of his head, as his own disciples testified.
“‘Prince of the earth,’ said he, ‘I do not bring war to the nations, but charity and love. I was born the 58very day when Cæsar Augustus proclaimed peace to the Roman world. Persecution cannot come from me; I expect it from others, and do not flee before it. I go before it, in obedience to the will of my Father, who has appointed my way. Keep thy foolish prudence. It is not in thy power to stop the victim at the foot of the altar of expiation.’
“Saying these words, he disappeared like a luminous shadow behind the curtain.
“What could I do further? Fate could not be averted. The tetrarch who then reigned in Judea, and who has since died, devoured by worms, was a foolish and a wicked man. The chiefs of the law had chosen this man to be the tool of their hate and vengeance. To him the whole cohort addressed themselves in their thirst for vengeance against the Nazarene.
“Had Herod consulted only his passion, he would have put Jesus to death at once; but although he regarded his impotent royalty as a matter of importance, still he shrank from an act which might injure him with Cæsar.
“Some days later I saw him coming to the prætorium. He began a conversation with me on indifferent subjects, in order to conceal the true object of his visit; but, as he rose from his seat to go, he asked, with an air of indifference, what I thought of the Nazarene.
“I replied that Jesus seemed to me one of those grave philosophers such as arise among the nations from time to time; that his language was by no means dangerous; and that it was the intention of Rome to leave to this sage perfect liberty of speech and action.
“Herod smiled at me with malignity, and with an ironical gesture departed.
“The great feast of the Jews was near at hand, and their leaders determined to take advantage of the popular exaltation which is always manifested at the Paschal season. The city was crowded with a turbulent rabble, who shouted for the death of the Nazarene. My emissaries reported that the treasure of the Temple had been used to stir the popular feeling. The danger was imminent, and my very power was insulted in the person of my centurion, whom they hustled about and spat upon.
“I wrote to the prefect of Syria, then at Ptolemais, and asked for one hundred horse and as many foot-soldiers, but he reiterated his former refusal. I was alone, in a mutinous city, with a few veterans, too weak to suppress the disorder, and with no choice but to tolerate it.
“They had already seized Jesus, and the triumphant people, knowing that they had nothing to fear from me, and hoping, on the word of their leaders, that I would tacitly acquiesce in their designs, rushed after him through the streets, shouting: ‘Crucify him! crucify him!’
“Three powerful sects had coalesced in this plot against Jesus: first the Herodians and the Sadducees, who had a double motive—hatred against him and impatience at the Roman yoke. They had never forgiven me for entering the holy city with the banners of the empire; and although I made them an unwise concession in this matter, the sacrilege still remained in their eyes. Yet another grief stood against me, because I had wished a contribution from the treasures of the Temple towards certain buildings of public importance, and which had been coarsely refused. Then the Pharisees, who were the 59direct enemies of Jesus: they did not trouble themselves about the governor, but for three years they had angrily heard and endured the severe language of Jesus against their weaknesses. Too weak and pusillanimous to act alone, they eagerly embraced the quarrel of the Herodians and Sadducees. Besides these three parties, I had also to struggle against a crowd of those idle, worthless beings who are always ready to rush into a sedition out of love for disorder and a taste for blood.
“Jesus was dragged before the council of priests and condemned to death; after which Caiphas, the high-priest, made a hypocritical act of submission by sending the condemned man for me to pronounce the sentence and have it executed. My answer was that as Jesus was a Galilean it did not concern me; so I sent him to Herod. The wily tetrarch pretended great humility, protesting his remarkable deference for the lieutenant of Cæsar, and left the fate of the man to be determined on by me. My palace resembled a citadel besieged by an army; for at every moment the seditious crowd was reinforced by fresh arrivals from the mountains of Nazareth, the cities of Galilee, the plains of Esdrelon. It seemed as if all Judea had invaded Jerusalem.
“My wife was from Gaul, and had, like most women of her nation, the gift of reading the future. She now came, and, throwing herself in tears at my feet, exclaimed: ‘Beware of laying a violent hand on this man. His person is sacred. I saw him in a dream this night; he walked upon the waters, he rode upon the wings of the wind, he spoke to the tempest, to the palm-trees of the desert, to the fish in the waters, and they all responded to his voice. The torrent of the brook Kedron was as blood before me; the imperial eagles were in the dust, and the columns of this very prætorium were crumbled, while the sun was in darkness, as a vestal at the tomb. There is misfortune about us, Pilate; and if you do not believe in the words of the Gaul, listen hereafter to the maledictions of the senate and of Cæsar against the cowardly proconsul!’
“Just then my marble staircase trembled, as I may say, beneath the steps of the angry multitude. They had returned with the Nazarene. Entering the hall of justice, followed by my guards, I demanded in a stern voice of the crowd: ‘What will ye?’
“‘The death of the Nazarene!’ shouted the mob.
“‘What is his crime?’
“‘He has blasphemed; he has predicted the ruin of the Temple; he calls himself the Messias, the Son of God, and says that he is the King of the Jews!’
“‘The justice of Rome does not punish these crimes by death!’
“‘Seize him! Crucify him! crucify him!’
“Their ferocious cries seemed to shake the very foundations of the palace, and but one man amid all this tumult was calm: it was the Nazarene! One might have taken him for the statue of innocence in the temple of the Eumenides.
“After many useless efforts to withdraw him from the hands of the self-willed multitude, I had the fatal weakness to command what, at the time, occurred to me as the only thing that might perchance save his life. I ordered him to be beaten with rods, and, calling for a basin, washed my hands before the 60crowd, which, if not hearing my voice, might at least catch the allegorical meaning of my act.
“But they would have his life. Often in our civil troubles I have seen what an angry crowd can be capable of, but all my memories and experience of the past were effaced by what I saw then. I might almost say that Jerusalem was peopled by all the infernal spirits of Hades, and as they crowded about me there seemed an odor as of sulphur exuding from their bloodshot eyes and inhuman countenances. Their very movements were not as of men, but, like the waves of an angry sea, they rolled and dashed, in ceaseless undulations, from the prætorium to Mount Sion; yelling, shouting in a most unearthly manner, such as never in the troubles of the Forum or the seditions of the Pantheon assaulted a Roman ear.
“The day had slowly darkened, as in a winter evening, such as we saw it when the great Julius died—’twas also near the ides of March—and I, the mortified governor of a province in full and unrestrained rebellion, stood leaning against a column, gazing through the gray, unnatural light at the infuriated spirits who bore the innocent Jesus to his death.
“It became gradually quiet about me, for the whole population had followed to the place of execution, leaving the city as silent and as mournful as the tomb, even my very guards having disappeared, save the centurion alone. I, too, felt alone; isolated from the rest of mankind, and in my strangely-excited heart, I understood that what was passing around me pertained rather to the history of the gods than to that of men. The sounds brought by the wind from Golgotha announced to my horrified ear a death-agony such as never human nature underwent before. Dense leaden clouds shrouded the pinnacle of the great Temple, and thence seemed to envelop the vast city as with a veil of impenetrable darkness. Terrible signs of perturbation were manifest on earth and in the air, prodigious enough to make Dionysius the Areopagite exclaim: ‘Either the Author of nature suffers or the whole universe is being dissolved.’
“At the first hour of the night I wrapped myself in a cloak and walked down into the city towards the gate leading to Golgotha. The sacrifice was consummated! The attitude of the people was no longer the same, for the crowd re-entered Jerusalem, disorderly, of course, but silent and moody, as if filled with shame and despair. Fear and remorse were in every heart. My little cohort passed by, as silent as the populace; the very eagle had been draped as in mourning, and in the last ranks I heard some soldiers talking in a curious manner of things which I could not comprehend. Others were relating prodigies somewhat like those that have often terrified Rome by the will of the gods. Now and then I came across groups of men and women in grievous sadness as they moved over that sorrowful way, or as, in some cases, they turned back towards the mount of expiation, expecting, perhaps, some new prodigy.
“Returning to the prætorium, my own breast seemed to embrace all the desolation of this painful scene, and as I climbed the stairs I saw, by the lightning flash, the marble still covered with His blood. There stood, awaiting me in most humble attitude, an old man, accompanied 61by several women, sobbing in the darkness.
“Throwing himself at my feet, the old man wept.
“‘What do you ask, my father?’ I said in a mild voice. He answered:
“‘I am Joseph of Arimathea, and I come to beg, on my knees, the favor of burying Jesus of Nazareth.’
“Raising him up gently, I promised that his wishes should be complied with. At the same time I called Manlius, who went with some soldiers to superintend the burial, and to place a few sentinels over the grave, that it might not be profaned. A few days afterwards the grave was empty, and the disciples of Jesus published everywhere that their Master had risen again, as he had foretold.
“There now remained for me a last duty to perform: to send a full account of this extraordinary event to Cæsar, which I did that very night; and the minute relation which I gave was not yet completed when daylight appeared.
“The sound of trumpets drew me from my task, and, glancing towards the gate of Cæsarea, I saw an unusual stir among the soldiers and sentinels, and heard in the distance other trumpets playing Cæsar’s march; it was my reinforcement of troops, two thousand in number, who had, in order to arrive more promptly, made a night-march. ‘Oh! the great iniquity had to be completed,’ I cried, wringing my hands in despair. ‘They arrive the next morning to save a man who was sacrificed the day before. O cruel irony of fate! Alas! as the Victim said on the cross: ”All is consummated.“’
“From that moment, invested with abundant power, I set no limits to my hatred against the people who had forced me into both crime and cowardice. I struck terror into Jerusalem. And, as if further to excite my vengeance, I shortly afterwards received a letter from the emperor, wherein he blamed my conduct very severely. My official account of the death of Jesus had been read before a full senate, and had excited a profound sensation. The image of the Nazarene, honored as a god, had been placed in the sacred place of the imperial palace. The courtiers, who were opposed to me, seized the pretext to begin that long series of accusations which now, years after the death of Tiberius, have at last brought me to this city of exile, where my life is to go out in anguish and remorse.
“I have told you all, Albinus, and my words have opened to you my innermost soul; you will surely do me the justice to say that Pilate was more unfortunate than wicked.”
The old man ceased; tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks, while his fixed and hollow eyes seemed to gaze with fright upon some scene, invisible to other eyes, the lugubrious phantasm of an ever-present past. Albinus was wrapt in sombre thought, seeking in what manner of speech to simulate pity for his guest.
“Pontius,” said he, “your misfortunes are not ordinary ones, yet there may be a balm for the ulcers of your memory and heart. You must invoke the Fates, whose good-will may disarm the anger of the gods.”
Pilate gave such a smile, amid his tears, as distressed the prudent Albinus.
62“The city is a bad place for you,” pursued Albinus; “hatred is at home in public assemblies, and Janus, who watches at the threshold, cannot protect the domestic hearth against violence from without. Why not ask of our mountains the quiet and peace which seem refused to you here? The air of the fields invites repose and counsels forgetfulness of canker care.”
“I fear to understand you,” said Pilate, turning suddenly pale and with quivering lips. “Yes, I am afraid I comprehend your meaning too well; like a serpent, you take a long turn to attain your end. You wish to close the door of your house against the old man!”
“The gods, whom I invoke, and who hear me,” said Albinus, “know that I have never violated the sacred laws of hospitality, but—”
“Yes,” interrupted the old man—“yes, towards others, but towards me you will find an excuse for violating them. I understand—do not finish! I must spare a friend the embarrassment of words which his lips refuse to utter. Albinus, I feel the spirit of a Stoic revive in me; the waxen torch flashes up yet once before going out. Listen; I am about to salute your Penates. I will depart.”
Albinus lowered his eyes and was silent.
“Well! well! your silence speaks, as Marcus Tullius says. I will call my servants.”
“Your servants?” said Albinus, as Pilate rose from his seat. “Your servants? You have none; they have fled from you!”
“It is well!” answered Pilate.
“One alone has remained faithful—an old soldier.”
“Ah! that is Longinus; I know him. Tell the servant to call Longinus, and permit me to blow out your lamp; the oil is exhausted, and here is the dawn.”
“Oh! blame me not, Pontius. Let not your farewell insult my household gods!”
“I blame you? No, I pity you. The blood of Rome weakens in every vein; there are no Romans now. Let altars be everywhere erected to Fear; the house of Albinus is built on the very threshold of the Temple of Mars!”
And Pilate uttered a loud, hard laugh, which ceased at the entrance of the soldier.
“May your fidelity be rewarded, Longinus! You did not follow the deserters. Albinus, do you know what this soldier did? He was in the spearmen; he was at Golgotha, at the foot of the gibbet, when the Nazarene died; he pierced his heart with his lance. Longinus will die a Christian. Have you girded on your sword, old soldier, my last friend?”
The soldier made a sign of assent.
“All is, then, ready.” And Pilate saluted Albinus.
An hour after these two men had reached midway the side of a mountain overlooking the city of Vienne. The sun was rising in all the calm beauty of a summer morn; its first rays glistened upon the gilt-bronze dome of the Temple of Victory and the marble roof of the Temple of the Hundred Gods. Mysterious night still reigned in the sacred woods which crowned the dwelling of the Immortals. The city, inclined towards the Rhone, seemed listening in unbroken silence to the harmonious murmurings of the stream; the hill-tops floated in an atmosphere of molten gold, while the noise of 63cascades, the song of birds, and the countless melodies of a fresh, delicious morning, rising from valley to mountain-top, filled all whose hearts were light with joy and gratitude to the Powers above.
Pilate halted, his eyes fixed on a dark chasm which, yawning, stood before him. In the depths below could be heard the mournful plash of waters, to the eye unseen; dense brush, interwoven with dwarf oaks and the wild fig, hung over and, half-concealing, yet increased the horrid abyss, and a piece of the rock, detached and hurled over, struggled and tossed awhile among the resisting vines before dropping into the gloomy waters to send up a series of ill-boding, mournful echoes.
Pilate smiled at the gulf of horror, then turned to contemplate the immense sublimity which surrounded his agony of despair; he thought of the death of the Nazarene—that death so calm amid the universal distress of nature—and wept bitterly.
“Longinus,” said he, “put up your sword; I do not need it. I can die without you; I do not wish you to soil your hands with my blood, for you are yet covered with another blood which will never be effaced. Yes, Longinus, the Sage of Golgotha was one of the superior intelligences; retain that belief. All who stained their hands with his blood have perished miserably; think of Herod and Caiphas. Tiberius likewise was suffocated in his bed at Capreæ, and I yet survive—I! See how I imitate them!”
And he threw himself into the abyss. Longinus heard the interlacing branches crack, but saw only the torn remnants of a toga here and there adhering to the thorny plants which grew upon the sides. He heard the dull bound of the body from rock to rock, and a last unearthly cry of agony, enhanced by echo, and fading to the splash of water as its disturbed surface leaped and glistened in the rays of the now penetrating sun.
So died the man under whom Christ suffered.
SUGGESTED BY A PAINTING BY J. L. GÉRÔME.
The diocese of Paderborn is one of the largest in Germany. Its bishop, Dr. Conrad Martin, has just published a little work[10] which may vie with Silvio Pellico’s Le mie Prigioni, being an account of a three years’ banishment from his see. It is not “poetry and truth,” remarks the writer of this pamphlet in his preface, “but only the truth which is written down in these pages.”[11] And true to his statement, the bishop tells us in dispassionate language of his captivity, of its joys and sorrows, of the friends who were so true to him in his adversity, of the whole Catholic Church, who shared his banishment in a measure, and of that most august prisoner whose sympathy is so freely given to his suffering brethren, and whose captivity is in itself, perhaps, a pledge that they too must taste of his own chalice.
With the presentiment of future events, or rather of the storm which was about to break over their pastor 67on account of the Kulturkampf, the people of Paderborn came in large numbers in the spring of 1874 to assure him of their love and devotion. The demonstration began on the 25th of March, when the train deposited five thousand pilgrims in the ancient city of Paderborn. They repaired to the bishop’s house, and terminated the meeting by simultaneously falling on their knees to recite aloud the Apostles’ Creed. These deputations lasted for two months, and on one occasion the number of deputies amounted to fifteen thousand. It is not an insignificant fact to see how well and bravely the flock stood by the pastor in his hour of need. But at last the cloud burst. Repeated infringements of the May Laws were laid to the bishop’s charge; and the fine in proportion rose to a sum altogether beyond his means, and a corresponding term of imprisonment was the only alternative. Here an unknown, and therefore doubly generous, benefactor interposed, and paid the money required without the bishop’s knowledge. But, to use his own simple language, Dr. Martin, “from higher considerations, thought he could not accept the benefit,” and protested against it,[12] whereas the local authority said that he could. At last an answer came from Berlin deciding that he should submit himself to imprisonment. As the bishop would not consent to that, force was used, and on the 4th of August, 1874, he was taken from his house through a dense crowd of sympathizers to his prison, where he was witness of a scene “not to be described by words.” Bouquets of flowers fell at his feet from all sides, and the steps leading up to the abode of his sorrow were thick with them. Two works had been near his heart as a pastor—the establishment of ecclesiastical institutions for the fitting education of the clergy, and the labor of love which is expressed by the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This touching devotion was therefore one of the first-fruits of his own workings, and it has become widely known through the world. But never before had the bishop of Paderborn shared the prison common to malefactors of every degree. The prisoner was then conducted to his two cells. One he describes as “certainly not roomy, but still not wholly unpleasant”;[13] the second was to serve merely as a bed-room. Loneliness is the prisoner’s trial, and when first the bishop heard the lock and key tell him of his utter solitude, sad thoughts pressed themselves upon him. Many years before he had paid a pastoral visit to this same prison, and his own encouraging words spoken then came home to him now. “Could you only have imagined then,” he said to himself, “that you yourself should be confined in the same dungeon, and come to need the recommendation to resignation and patience which you gave to those prisoners? Oh! what a change, what a comparison then and now—then, when there was no Kulturkampf, but an undisturbed and joyous peace. O tempora, o mores!”[14] But the angel of consolation was at hand. The thought of that divine Providence whose care of us is so beautifully specified in Holy Scripture brought peace. “Every hair of our head is numbered.” The bishop determined upon active endurance, and during those first few hours of his imprisonment planned for himself an order 68of duties for the coming solitary days. That night the breaking of a pane of glass in his bed-room window, caused by the hurling of a stone from an unknown hand outside, was a little alarming, and, in spite of inquiries on the subject, it could not be discovered whether the missile was directed by a friend in a serenading spirit, or by a foe who might have taken umbrage at the demonstrations of intense affection on the part of the people of Paderborn.
For the rest the bishop, according to his own account, had small cause for complaint during his confinement at Paderborn.[15] His food was provided and sent from his house. He was allowed to read and write when and what he liked. Strict supervision was, however, exercised on his correspondence and on the visits which he received. These were permitted in the presence of a third person only, and letters might be read and sent under the same condition. The Holy Sacrifice, which was his daily refreshment, supplied many deficiencies in that lonely heart. But the “body of death” had still to suffer much from privation of air and exercise. It is true that once a day the prison bolt was withdrawn for an exercise of two hours in the court-yard. This had to be taken in common with the other prisoners, in a very limited space, so that the bishop often preferred to sit by an open window in his room, there to enjoy what air he could get.
On the 17th of August, the eighteenth anniversary of his episcopal consecration, the widowed cathedral of Paderborn was filled with an assembly of the bishop’s faithful children, who celebrated the occasion by heartfelt prayers for him to God. Flags adorned the houses of the Catholic inhabitants. But the pastor’s heart was further gladdened by the intelligence that from the very first day of his captivity a certain number of the faithful gathered every evening in the Gaukirche to offer up the rosary for their oppressed church. And now, after the lapse of three years, the same practice is kept up, and who would be so presumptuous as to say that the divine Head of the whole body will not allow pleading so constant finally to bring about the desired end? It reminds us of that supplication of the infant church to remove Peter’s chains, or of a case which was brought before our personal observation in Germany.[16] Our Lord’s presence in the Holy Eucharist had been banished from his sanctuary through the working of the May Laws, but the villagers succeeded each other during the day in unremitting prayer before the altar where he once dwelt.
Upon the bishop’s six weeks of confinement followed eighteen of custody. The only distinguishable difference between the two consisted in the non-bolting of the prison-door from the exterior. On the outset he was saddened by the command to surrender his office as bishop. The summons came to him through the Oberpräsident von Kühlwetter, whose attitude to Dr. Martin from the beginning of the Kulturkampf had been most hostile. One act in particular of the bishop’s seems to have roused the enmity of the non-Catholic party, but the principle of authority must fall to the ground where demands wholly contrary to his conscience are urged upon a spiritual ruler. The act in question had 69been a certain pastoral letter in the affair of the Old Catholics. The bishop replied immediately that “devotion to the Catholic Church had been his first love, and that it would be his last.” Ten days of respite were allowed for the reconsideration of the question, under the threat of ultimate expulsion from his dignity. But, thanks to an energetic nature and the quiet peace which is the fruit of a brave determination, it had small influence over the bishop. He labored to finish his work on the Christian Life, and time, which is so often the greatest trial of the prisoner, passed rapidly away. His feast-day was the next small event to break the monotony of his life. From his window he could see the festive appearance of some neighboring houses, and from far and wide came wishes of sympathy and affection. The telegraphic messages and letters of congratulation numbered over eight hundred on this day, and proved a provision of encouragement for several succeeding days. They were the flowers of persecution, and as such most dear to the bishop’s Catholic spirit.
Oppression does indeed often bring the work of the Lord to a timely and palpable development, and we may echo the prisoner’s words: “Would years of hard work have given evidence of so close a union as well as this short and fleeting sorrow?”[17] At the same time two other addresses reached him which were a source of particular joy: the one from a good number of Belgian noblemen, who thereby drew forth a remonstrance on the part of Prince Bismarck, the other from two imprisoned bishops of the far west who were themselves confessors of the faith, and protesting by their personal suffering against the evil spirit of Freemasonry. They were the bishops of Para and Pernambuco, who, profiting by the journey of a priest to Europe, took occasion to express their love and sympathy to the fellow-sufferer in Germany who was bearing the self-same testimony to Catholic truth as they themselves. Comfort, too, came from the Holy Father, who sent first a gold medal, and then, on the feast of St. Conrad, a telegraphic message of greeting and good wishes. But the price of these favors was suffering and greater suffering. The threat on the part of the secular power to depose the bishop was now carried out. Many and grievous had been his shortcomings, according to the standard established by the May Laws, and amongst the accusations brought against him was the erroneous charge that he alone amongst the German bishops had worked in favor of the Papal Infallibility at the Vatican Council. Extensive quotations from his pastoral letters were given in the indictment, whilst the words he had addressed on various occasions to his faithful children, their constant devotion to him, the legal measures recently carried out, and the cause now pending were alleged as the ground why he could not continue to exercise his office. He was invited to appear on the 5th of January, 1875, to answer these charges, after which day, and having simply refused to accept the act of deposition, it was nailed to his door inside. There it remained quietly hanging, says the bishop with dry German humor, “without my casting one single glance upon its contents.”[18] The feast of 70Christmas, which occurred in the midst of these cares, found him not altogether joyless. The prison chapel bore for him a resemblance to the lonely grotto of Bethlehem.
The bishop fancied that after enduring his twenty-four weeks of imprisonment he might hope for fresh air and liberty. That hopefulness was rather surprising. Instead of the accomplishment of this expectation, his house was stripped of its furniture (which was afterwards sold), and he himself was conveyed on very short notice to the fortress of Wesel, it being explicitly stated that this penalty was the consequence of the before-mentioned pastoral regarding the Old Catholics. The same sympathizing crowd met him on his way to the station, and his private secretary accompanied him by choice to the scene of his new imprisonment. It was on the 20th of January, 1875, that the bishop entered on the two months’ penalty at Wesel, and there he seems on the whole to have been better off than at Paderborn. He could walk freely on the ramparts, and enjoy to a certain extent social intercourse with the other prisoners, who were in most cases priests of his own diocese. Three cells were assigned to him for his use; the third was an act of thoughtfulness on the part of the commandant, who had reserved it for the bishop’s daily Mass. If, indeed, it had not been for the Holy Sacrifice—for every day, Dr. Martin remarks, “holy” Masses were said up till ten o’clock by the imprisoned priests[19]—the fortress would have borne a resemblance to the middle state where souls are detained for a time on account of their sins. The supervision exercised was slight, beyond the visitation of all the cells twice every day. Once when the bishop was taking exercise on the ramparts which overlooked the Rhine—in itself like the face of an old friend to Dr. Martin—some of the faithful who descried him in the distance knelt for his blessing. The act, the bishop knew not how, was communicated to the commandant, who forbade him in writing to repeat it. At Wesel correspondence was free, and even newspapers of all kinds were permitted. Feelers were sent out by the government to test the bishop’s sentiments with regard to his civil deposition, but his consent could never be obtained. And he was cheered and supported by an address which was brought to him towards the middle of March by a nobleman on the part of his diocese. It contained these words: “It is true that your lordship as bishop has been deposed by the Royal Court of Justice in Berlin, but you are, and will remain, our bishop, and we will be faithful to you until death.”[20] Two thick volumes bore the signatures to this statement, and they numbered ninety-six thousand.
After his life in the fortress the bishop was refreshed by a little breathing-time in a friendly house in Wesel itself. His host had just married and taken his bride to Rome. On their return they brought to the exiled pastor a new token of sympathy from the Holy Father in the shape of another gold medal. The days passed pleasantly for the bishop, as far as that was possible out of his diocese, until he made the discovery that he had not yet paid the entire penalty of the famous pastoral. He was sentenced to another month’s 71imprisonment in the fortress. “I had always thought,” he writes, “that for one offence it sufficed to be punished once. But the powers of the state said no.”[21] Summer had come, and a return to the fortress in that season was no small penance. The sun’s penetrating rays made the prisoner’s little cells almost intolerable, and the bishop’s health began visibly to decline. He lost his appetite and his sleep, and the only remedy, according to the doctor, to produce return of vital power would have been change of air and a course of sea-baths. But for this desired end he learned from the mayor of Wesel that it would be necessary to undergo an examination from the district doctor, and to procure a written statement that such treatment was necessary. Moreover, it was enjoined that the place chosen for the cure should be at least twenty miles distant from the diocese of Paderborn. A Protestant district doctor was accordingly consulted, and his opinion exactly corresponded with the bishop’s own account of his state, whereupon Dr. Martin gave himself up to the pleasant hope of soon being able to leave Wesel. “I wished for haste the more,” he says, “as my state became worse from day to day. The continual agitation in which I was kept helped to aggravate things. For day after day I received tidings of new ruins which the unhappy Kulturkampf worked in my poor diocese.”[22] In the autumn of 1873—that is, after the promulgation of the May Laws—the bishop had given faculties to four newly-ordained priests. This is the most natural and harmless action of a bishop, for what spiritual act can take place without that exercise of his jurisdiction? Pronouncing a priest competent for the care of souls is analogous to the action in law of giving a brief to a barrister. What if the church should require a barrister to present himself to the bishop for approbation before he received such a brief? But the May Laws completely confuse spiritual and temporal things. The bishop was accused of breaking article fifteen of those regulations, which runs that “spiritual rulers are bound to present such candidates as are about to receive a spiritual office to the Oberpräsident, whilst at the same time the office is specified.” If the barrister obtain briefs after he has been called, the bishop does not meddle with him; but because the priests in question had exercised their faculties Berlin thought well to condemn the bishop to a further imprisonment of six months.
But now a new phase began in the life of Dr. Martin. Having “waited and waited” for the permission to follow out the cure which a disimpassioned authority had pronounced absolutely necessary, he resolved to act in spite of the law, and to fly from Wesel. He considered this course not only allowable, but even obligatory, seeing two principal reasons. His health was seriously endangered, if he could not have the required treatment, and that health belonged not to himself but to his diocese. Furthermore, in Wesel his movements were so closely watched that one single act of the pastoral office might give the government a plea for still more rigorous measures. Therefore on the 3d of August he wrote an official letter stating his intended departure from Wesel on the morrow; and so, as the clock struck the hour of midnight, he was quietly crossing the bridge 72over the Rhine, and on the following day, the 5th of August, he was received at the Castle of Neuburg by the family of Ausemburg. How full his heart was of his appointed work we may gather from the attempt to return to Paderborn. At Aix-la-Chapelle two railway authorities recognized him, and he was counselled by a valued friend to go back to Holland in “God’s name!” The document which reached him a few days later proved the soundness of the advice. It was from the Minister of the Interior at Berlin, announcing to him the fact that he was from henceforth an outlaw in the eyes of his country. The May Laws further exhausted their bitterness against him by the warrant which was issued from the district court in Paderborn for another imprisonment of six months. But it seems that these punishments did not affect the bishop’s peace of mind. Amidst tokens of universal love and devotion he was spending his time chiefly with the Ausemburg family, occupying his leisure with writing on religious subjects, amongst which one was Devotion to the Sacred Heart. After his fruitless attempt to join his bereaved flock he had directed his efforts in the first place towards his own physical restoration. After a three weeks’ cure in Kattwyk, which worked a wonderful change for the better in his state, he visited the bishops of Haarlem and Roermond, and rejoiced his spirit by witnessing some of the fruits of the new and vigorous Catholic life which has been promoted in Holland by the re-establishment of the hierarchy. Whilst Dr. Martin was with the bishop of Haarlem he received intelligence of the dreadful fire which the “dear Paderstadt” had sustained.
These peaceful days, however, were not of long duration. They were shortened by one of the bitterest experiences which a pastor can be called upon to endure—that is, an unfaithful friend. A priest of his diocese (the only one besides Mönnikes, he remarks) had gone over to the enemies of the church, and vainly had the bishop tried the power of loving exhortation. He was obliged at last to use that spiritual weapon which has ever been obnoxious to a world impatient of restraint, and to pronounce excommunication, fully conscious of the possible consequences of the step, and therefore prepared to accept them. The government of Holland was too weak to protect an exile. It gave way under more powerful pressure, and the bishop was ordered to leave.
“I prayed to God for light,” he says. “I asked St. Joseph (it was in March, 1876) to lead me where I should go.”[23] His steps were directed to Catholic Belgium; but whatever the character of the population may be, that of the policy of its government is rightly defined by the bishop as the effort to keep out of the way of Prince Bismarck’s complications, which effort is the ne plus ultra of political wisdom. He was not, therefore, much astonished when he received orders to leave the Belgian frontier.
A homeless, houseless exile, the bishop once more wandered forth in strict incognito, we are not told where, but the place must have been wisely chosen, for there he remained in great retirement from April, 1876, till the following April. Then it was that Rome, the home of all Catholic hearts, once more awoke his desires; but, owing to the well-known 73sentiments of the Italian government, he was aware that the journey had its dangers for a bishop under the ban of the Kulturkampf. He set out, nevertheless, and on his journey through France experienced numberless consolations and the warmest reception from the French bishops. Persecution imprints on the heart the device, Cor unum et anima una.
On the 24th of May, 1877, the feast of St. Monica, he arrived in Rome for the fifth time. Men are trying to make even the Eternal City new, and as the bishop walked through the familiar streets he felt that the voice might indeed be the voice of Jacob, whilst the hands were the hands of Esau. The Colosseum, consecrated by remembrances so heart-stirring, now appeared to him as a dearly-loved face whence the spirit had fled. It is the nature of Rome to be the most conservative of cities, and never are natural laws overturned with comfort. These were the German bishop’s thoughts as again he compared what had been to what was, the more so as he found the improvement wholly exterior and material, and, along with finer streets in course of erection, was obliged to notice a lowering of moral tone in their inhabitants. Even the faces of the men he met seemed to have altered; for, he says, they are mostly not Romans, but a kind of heterogeneous mob gathered from all quarters of the globe.
When Pius VII. returned to Rome after the persecution which had threatened to annihilate his power, he invited his enemy’s family to partake of hospitality in that city, as the land of great misfortunes; but now the Holy Father, his successor, could offer nothing but an affectionate greeting to a bishop who had borne so noble a witness to the truth. The shadow of Pius IX.’s captivity must fall upon all his children. An exiled bishop sought refuge in Rome as the home of his father, and Rome could not give him what he sought. By the advice of several cardinals Dr. Martin changed his residence and went out only in secular dress, but not before he had been denounced by unfriendly papers as one who was under arrest. On the 24th of May, in consequence of continued persecution from the press, and in honest fear of more serious ill-treatment, strengthened by the loving farewell and the apostolical blessing of the Holy Father for himself and his diocese, the bishop of Paderborn set out for an unknown place of exile, happy at least in his resemblance to One who, coming unto his own, was not received by them.
The early church wrote the acts of her martyrs, in order that the remembrance of their deeds should never perish, and the church of the nineteenth century may be allowed to record the struggle of her confessors not only for a perpetual memorial of them, but also that others who are not in the fight may realize at once the presence of the battle-field and the nature of the warfare. We have seen that it exists; its nature cannot be better defined than by the words of him whose confessorship we are recording:
“The Papacy is in fact the one and only point round which the Kulturkampf is raging, and I am convinced that if the ‘deposed’ and banished bishops were to break off their connection with the Papacy to-day, to-morrow they would be re-established in all their honors and privileges.... On the 3d of August last it was three years since 74I parted from my beloved flock. After God that flock is daily my first and last thought. My prayers, my anxieties, my studies, and my occupations of whatever nature belong to it. I will be true to it till death, and I hope by God’s grace that it will be true to me. Hours of temptation come upon me sometimes, it is true—hours when the painful doubt suggests itself whether I shall ever return to it. But I take courage to myself again through a trusting look up to God. He has counted every hair of our heads, and, if my return is in accordance with his providence, no Kulturkampf will have power to prevent it. But should it be his good pleasure that I close my eyes to this world separated from my flock, I say with most humble resignation: May His will be done!
“But even supposing that all we ‘deposed’ and exiled bishops should die in banishment, the church, and the church in our German Fatherland, will finally conquer. He to whom all power in heaven and on earth is given is her protector; and, let her enemies be as numerous and powerful as it is possible to be, an hour will come when of them also it will be said: ‘They who sought after her life are dead.’”[24]
No one visits Barcelona, or ought to visit it, without going to Montserrat, the sacred mountain of Spain, and one of the most extraordinary mountains in the world: the naturalist, to study its singular formation and the thousand varieties of its flora; the mere tourist, to visit its historic abbey and explore the wonderful grottoes with which the mountain is undermined; and the pilgrim, as to another Sinai, torn and rent asunder as by the throes of some new revelation, where amid awful rifts and chasms is enthroned its Syrian Madonna, like the impersonation of mercy amid the terrors of divine wrath. It is one of those wonderful places in Catholic Christendom around which centres the piety of the multitude. Hermits for ages have peopled its caves. The monks of St. Benedict for a thousand years have served its altars. Saints have kept watch around its venerable shrine. The kings and knights of chivalric Spain have come here with rich tributes to offer their vows. And the poor, with bare and bleeding feet, have, century after century, climbed its rough sides out of mere love for their favorite sanctuary.
Poets, too, have come here to seek inspiration. Several Spanish poets of note have celebrated its natural beauties and its legendary 75glory. Goethe could find no more suitable place than this wild, mysterious mountain for the scenery of one of the most wonderful parts of Faust—the scene where he makes the Pater Ecstaticus float in the golden air, the hermits chant from their mystic caves, and the bird-like voices of the spirits come between like the breathings of a wind-swept harp.[25]
We took the Zaragoza railway, and in an hour after leaving Barcelona were in sight of the towering gray pinnacles that make Montserrat like no other mountain in the world. It rises suddenly out of the valley of the Llobregat more than three thousand five hundred feet into the air, and looks as if numberless liquid jets, sent up from the bowels of the earth, had suddenly been congealed into colossal needles or cones. These cones unite in a rocky base, about fifteen miles in circumference, which is cleft asunder by an awful chasm, at the bottom of which flows the torrent of Santa Maria. The base of the mountain is fringed with pines, but the cones are ash-colored and bare, being utterly devoid of vegetation, except what grows in the numerous clefts and ravines. This serrated mountain, standing isolated in a broad plain, strange and solitary, seems set apart by nature for some exceptional purpose. It looks like a vast temple consecrated to the Divinity. Even the Romans thought so when they set up their altars on its cliffs. It is the very place for the gods to sit apart, each on his own pinnacle, and talk from peak to peak, and reason high, and arbitrate the fate of man.
The sharp needles which give so peculiar an appearance to the mountain are mostly of a conglomerate stone composed of fragments of marble, porphyry, granite, etc., and not unlike the Oriental breccia. Some say that these enormous clefts have been produced by the agency of water or volcanic force; others, that the mountain, like Mt. Alvernia in Italy, where St. Francis received the sacred stigmata, was rent asunder at the great sacrifice of Mount Calvary, of which these profound abysses and splintered rocks are so many testimonials. Padre Francesco Crespo, in a memorial to Philip IV. on the Purísima Concepcion, says of it: “Astonishing monument of our faith, divided into so many parts in sorrowful proof of the death of the Creator!” And Fray Antonio, a Carmelite monk: “And in Montserrat is verified that which was spoken in St. Matt. xxvii.: And the earth did quake and the rocks were rent.”
We stopped at the station of Monistrol, two miles from the town of that name which stands at the very foot of the mountain, and walked along the banks of the Llobregat by an excellent road, often bordered with olives at the right, while the other side was overhung by cliffs fragrant with rosemary and wild thyme. We passed several cotton manufactories, for this is the region of contrasts: Industry is running to and fro in the fertile valley, while Contemplation kneels with folded palms on the rocky heights above. But what divine law is there that makes physical activity superior to moral, or productive of greater results, as so many would have us believe in these cui bono days? Who knows what rich returns the cloud-wrapped altar above has rendered to these heavens? or how 76much the proud world owes to the solitary Levite who in the temple keeps alive
Monistrol derives its name from monasteriolum—a little monastery, which was built here by the early Benedictines. It is said that Quirico, a disciple of St. Benedict, came to Spain in the sixth century, and, hearing of an extraordinary mountain in the heart of Catalonia, called Estorcil by the Romans, he came to see it and said to his disciples: “On this mount let us build a temple to the Mater pulchræ dilectionis.” His project was not realized till three centuries after, but he is believed to have built a small convent at the foot of the mountain.
It was late in the afternoon when we drew near the spot where St. Quirico and his disciples set up their altar, and the little white town of Monistrol lay closely hugged in at the foot of the mountain, behind which the sun sets by two o’clock, so that it was already in the shadow. On the outskirts we were surrounded by a swarm of swarthy gipsies ready to tell our future destiny for a real, as if we did not already know it! We crossed one of those bombastic bridges so common in Spain, as if there were a flood for the immense arches to span, and just beyond met the cura—a tall, thin man, with an abstract, speculative look, but who proved himself able to give good practical advice, which we followed by going to the little posada hard by for the night, and awaiting the morning to ascend the holy mountain. It was a clean little inn, but as primitive as if it had come down from the time of St. Quirico. Not a soul could we find on presenting ourselves at the door, and it was only by dint of repeatedly shouting Ave Maria Purísima! that a brisk little woman at length issued from some cavernous depth, as if called forth by our magical words. She gave us a dusky little room, with a crucifix and colored print of St. Veronica over the bed, and, after exploring the town, we took possession of it for the night while the tops of the mountain, that rose up thousands of feet directly behind the house, were still flushed with light.
The following morning was warm and cloudless, though in the middle of February. The tartana came at ten o’clock—a wagon with a hood, drawn by three stout mules—and we set off with two men and three women, all Spanish, and all as gay as the crickets on the wayside. If their forefathers ascended the mountain with streaming eyes and unshod feet, they, at least, went up on stout wheels, and with many a song and quirk, though perfectly innocent withal. They were light-hearted laborers, released from toil, going with their lunch to spend a holiday at Our Lady of Montserrat’s. Just after starting we passed the little chapel of the Santísima Trinidad, built, as the tablet on it says, to commemorate the happy ending of the African war in 1860. We soon left Monistrol below us. The view at every moment became more extended as we wound up the steep sides of the mountain. At the right was always the towering wall of solid rock, while the left side of the road was often built up, or at least supported, by masonry. Vines and olives clung to the crags as long as they could find foothold, and here and there was an aloe on the edge of the precipice. The bells of 77Monistrol could be heard far below. The plain began to assume a billowy appearance, swelling more and more to the north till lost in the mountains. The air grew more exhilarating. In two hours’ time we came to a chapel with a tall cross before it, and nearly opposite suddenly appeared the abbey of Our Lady of Montserrat, seven or eight stories high, with a cliff rising hundreds of feet perpendicularly behind, divided by deep fissures, and terminating in needles that looked inaccessible, but where we could see a hermitage perched on the top like the nest of an eagle. There is no beauty about the convent, or pretension to architecture, but there is a certain austere simplicity about it that harmonizes with the mountain. The narrowness of the terrace has prevented its extending laterally, so it has been forced to tower up like the peaks around it. The mountain, as M. Von Humboldt says, seems to have opened to receive man into its bosom. But nearly everything is modern, and everywhere are ruins and traces of violence left by the French in their ravages of 1811. Passing through an arched gateway, we found ourselves in a close, around which stood several large buildings for the accommodation of pilgrims. These are of three classes, according to the condition of the visitor, and named after the saints, such as Placido, Ignacio, Pedro Nolasco, Francisco de Borja, etc. The poor have two houses for the different sexes, where they are lodged and fed gratuitously. Bread is distributed to them at seven in the morning; at noon, more bread with olla and wine; and at night the same. Pilgrims of condition sometimes go to receive the bread of charity, which they preserve as a relic. No one, rich or poor, is allowed to remain over three days without special permission. Even the better class of rooms are of extreme simplicity, containing the bare necessaries for comfort. They are paved with brick, and the walls are plastered, but not whitewashed. A man brought us towels, sheets, and a jug of water, and left us to our own devices. The visitor offers what he pleases on leaving. Nothing is required. Meals are obtained at a restaurant at fixed prices. After taking possession of our rooms we went to pay homage to Our Lady of Montserrat.
The first thing that struck us on entering the large atrium, or court, that precedes the church, was a marble tablet recording one of the greatest memories of Montserrat:
For here it was that in 1522 came the chivalrous hero of Pampeluna, who had passed his youth in the court of Ferdinand V., trained in the practice of every knightly accomplishment, but now smitten down, like St. Paul, by divine grace, and come here in accordance with the principles of Christian chivalry in which he had been nurtured, to devote himself to Jesus and Mary as their knight. He laid aside his worldly insignia, and put on the poverty of Christ as the truest armor of virtue, and, on the eve of the Annunciation, kept his vigil of arms before the altar of Our Lady, whom he now chose as the Señora 78de sus pensamientos—“no countess,” as he said, “no duchess, but one of far higher degree”—and he hung up his sword on a pillar of her sanctuary as a token that his earthly warfare was over.
So, in the Book of Heroes, Wolf-dietrich, “the prince without a peer,” stopped short in his career of glory, and, going to the abbey of St. George, laid his arms and golden crown on the altar and consecrated himself to God.
On the other side of the entrance is a similar tablet relating to St. Peter Nolasco, a knight of Languedoc, who, after serving in the religious wars of the times, ascended Montserrat on foot, and, when he arrived at the threshold of the house of Mary, fell on his knees, and in this position approached her altar, where he spent nine days in watching and prayer. It was during one of his prolonged vigils that he conceived the project of founding the celebrated Order of Mercy, which required of its members to give themselves, if need were, for the liberty of their brethren in bondage, and which in the course of about four hundred years (1218-1632) ransomed, at the price of millions, four hundred and ninety thousand seven hundred and thirty-six Christians (among whom was the great Cervantes) from the prisons of the Moors, where they had endured sufferings no pen could describe.
Dwelling on these saintly memories, we passed through the arcades of the court, green and damp with mould, and came to the church. The exterior, of the Renaissance style, is by no means striking. There are columns of Spanish jasper on each side of the door, with niches between for the twelve apostles, of whom only four remain. And over the entrance stands our Saviour giving his blessing to the pilgrim. There is a single nave of fine proportions, divided transversely by one of those iron rejas, or parcloses, peculiar to Spain, with a succession of chapels at the sides, by no means richly decorated. It was noon, and there was not a person in the large church. Divested of its ancient riches, and simply ornamented, it needed the crowds of pilgrims for whom it was intended to give it animation and effect. But the antique Virgin was there, in the centre of the retablo over the high altar, surrounded by lights, and we were glad of the silence and solitude that surrounded her.
The sacred image of Our Lady of Montserrat is believed to be one made by St. Luke the Evangelist at Jerusalem, and brought to Spain by St. Peter, and long preserved in a church erected by St. Paciano at Barcelona under the title of the Blessed Maria Jerosolimitana,[26] where it was still venerated in the time of San Severo, a bishop under the rule of the Goths. According to an old chronicle, it was to preserve it from the profanation of the Moors that, on the tenth of the kalends of May, 718, Pedro the bishop, and Eurigonio, a captain of the Goths, took the holy image of the Blessed Mary, and carried it to the mountain called Asserado, and hid it in a cave.
79Amid all the wars and commotions of that age, it is not surprising that the remembrance of the holy statue became a dim tradition, and the precise spot of its concealment utterly forgotten. It was not till two centuries after that some young shepherds, guarding their flocks at the foot of the mountain, observed that every Saturday night, as soon as the darkness came on, a light descended from the heavens and gathered in a blaze around one of the lofty peaks. Their story was at first made light of at Monistrol, but, coming to the ear of the curate, a great servant of God and Our Lady, he resolved to ascertain its truth for himself. Accordingly, the next Saturday night, he set forth at an early hour with a number of people for the most favorable point of observation. As soon as it grew dark the supernatural light was seen, and a soft, delicious music heard issuing as from the depths of a cave. The curate did not venture to approach, but returned to consult the bishop of Vich, then residing at Manresa, the former place being in the hands of the Moors. This bishop, whose name was Gondemaro, took the curate and other members of the clergy, and, accompanied by several knights, ascended the mountain at the usual hour of the wonderful occurrence. They found the cliff enveloped in a cloud of fragrance. A shower of stars settled around the summit like a crown, and dulcet symphonies came forth from its bosom. This phenomenon lasted till midnight, when the music died away, the stars returned to their spheres, and silence and darkness resumed their empire.
The bishop passed the remainder of the night in dwelling on what he had witnessed, and at the first ray of dawn summoned the curate and requested him to take the necessary means for examining the place by daylight. He was not obliged to repeat the command. The curate took his parishioners, and, accompanied by the bishop, went in procession along the banks of the Llobregat, and up the sides of the mountain as far as practicable. Then he despatched several young shepherds, who could climb the rocks like goats, to explore the cliff. After no little fatigue and danger they discovered a cave on the edge of a precipice, and within it the sacred image of the Mother of God, surrounded by an odor like that of a garden of flowers. The joyful cries of the shepherds, repeated by all the echoes of the mountain caves, made known their discovery. The bishop took the statue in his arms, and, desirous of carrying it to Manresa, they went circling the wild peaks with songs of joy in the direction of Monistrol; but when he attempted to go past a certain place on the mountain his feet became fastened to the ground like iron to a loadstone. The Virgin had chosen the mountain for her abode, and would not abandon it. After the first moment of astonishment the bishop comprehended the meaning of the Soberana Señora, and a chapel was soon built to receive the statue, which he entrusted to the care of the curate of Monistrol.
But this was not the first chapel on the mountain. The oldest was that of San Miguel, on the other side of the ravine of Santa Maria, said to have been built out of the ruins of a temple of Venus. We went to see it that afternoon. It stands on a lofty ridge of the mountain to the north, commanding a magnificent prospect. Beneath is 80the whole valley of the Llobregat, but what below seemed like a vast plain here looked like the sea in a storm, in which wave after wave succeeded each other till lost in the Pyrenees. And these, capped with snow, looked like the foaming sea, run mountains high, all along the northern horizon. The whole country was dotted with villages. The river looked like a thread of silver winding through the surging valley. The sounds came up from below in a subdued murmur. At the right lay the Mediterranean, calm as a sea of crystal. Behind the chapel rose the tall cones, like the watch-towers of a vast fortress.[27] The solitude, the wildness, the awful depths over which we hung made a profound impression on us all. “How easy for the soul to rise to God in such a place!” we said. “Let us remain here the rest of our lives. With books to read, the chapel in which to pray, the mountain-side on which to meditate, and such a glorious view of God’s world around us, what more in this world could we ask for?” Every now and then came the peal of the convent bells. The air was fragrant with the balsamic odor of the shrubs. The glowing sun lit up mount and sea. And a certain melancholy about these gray peaks and unfathomable abysses, the ruined hermitages and violated chapels, and even the wintry aspect of yonder plain, gave them an additional charm. While sitting on the rocks a Spaniard came along with his daughter, and, entering into conversation, we learned that they were visiting the holy mountain for the last time together, she being on the point of entering a sisterhood. They both showed the most lively faith, and talked with enthusiasm of Montserrat, telling us how it had been rent asunder at the Crucifixion. After they had gone on in the direction of Collbato we sat a long time in silence, and then went slowly down the winding path, bordered with laurel, holly, heather, and shrubs of various kinds. On the way we met a long file of pupils from the abbey, ranging from ten to twenty years of age, all in gowns and leather belts like young monks. Two of the Benedictine fathers came behind them.
It was nearly night when we got back to the monastery, and as soon as we had dined we went to the church. It was wrapped in utter darkness, all but the sanctuary, which was blazing with lamps around the Madonna and the tabernacle. We knelt down in the obscurity close to the reja. In a short time thirty or forty students entered in their white tunics, and, encircling the altar, began the Rosario in a measured, recitative way that was almost a chant. Then they gathered around the organ and sang the Salve and Tota pulchra es with admirable expression. The lateness of the hour, the vast nave shrouded in darkness, the blazing altar, with the black Madonna above in her golden robes after the Spanish fashion, the groups of worshippers motionless as statues, the venerable monks of St. Benedict in the choir, and the white-robed singers around the organ, gave great effect to the scene. We wished we might keep our vigil before the altar, like St. Ignatius; but one of the lay brothers, with a queer old lantern that must have been handed down from the Goths, began to hustle us out of the church as soon as the devotions were over, and we went stumbling through 81the dark court into the open air; and giving one look at the violet heavens, across which flashed a shooting-star, and to the tall black cliffs that overshadowed us, we went to our rooms, our hearts still under the influence of the music. The bells of the monastery kept ringing from time to time as long as we were awake, and they roused us again at an early hour the following morning, as if the laus perennis were still kept up as in the olden time.
It was not yet day, but we hurried to the early Mass, which is sung with the aid of the students, followed by another chanted by the monks, and the sun was just rising out of the sea when we came from the church. As soon as breakfast was over we went to visit the cave of Fray Juan Garin, which is in the side of an enormous cliff it seemed fearful to live under. He was lying there in effigy, with his book and rosary, a water-jar at his feet, and a basket at his head, as if he had just gone to sleep. His legend, though not pleasing, is too closely connected with the early history of the mountain to be wholly omitted. It has been sung, too, by poets, and one scene, at least, in his life has been perpetuated in sculpture.
Fray Juan Garin is said to have been born in the ninth century of a noble family of Goths at Valencia, and in the time of Wifredo, Count of Barcelona, became a hermit on the lone heights of Montserrat. He is represented as a man of wasted aspect, with a long beard, who lived in the cave of an inaccessible cliff, and, when he went forth, carried a long staff in his hands, which were embrowned by the sun. Here he attained to such consummate sanctity that the very bells which hung between the two pillars before the ancient chapel of SS. Acisclo and Victoria rang out of their own accord whenever he approached. Every year he made a pilgrimage to the capital of the Christian world, and tradition says the bells of the Holy City spontaneously rang out at his arrival, like those of Montserrat. It would seem as if this holy hermit, regardless of the world, and by the world forgot, could have nothing to disturb his peace. But the great adversary had his evil eye on him, and resolved on his fall. For this purpose he turned hermit himself, as in the old rhyme, and put on a penitential robe and long white beard, which made such an impression on the count of Barcelona, when he presented himself before him, that he took his advice and brought his beautiful daughter Riquilda, who was thought to be possessed, to try the efficacy of Fray Juan’s prayers.
Meanwhile, the devil established himself in the very cave on the top of the cone above the monastery still known as the Ermita del Diablo, and soon after the two hermits met as if by accident.
They looked at each other, but without at first breaking the holy silence that set its seal on their contemplative life. At length the Diablo addressed Fray Juan, saying he was a great sinner who had come to the mountain three years previously to seek pardon of God for his innumerable offences in solitude and mortification, and expressing surprise that they had never met before. Garin at first repulsed his advances, as if by instinct, but the Diablo continued to speak with so much unction on the redoubled fervor that would result from a holy union of prayer and 82penitential exercises that Garin at length yielded, and finally let no day pass without meeting him and unveiling the innermost recesses of his heart.
We will not enter into the details of the tragedy which ended in the murder of the beautiful Riquilda. But when Fray Juan awoke to a sense of his crime, he was seized with so terrible a remorse that he once more set off for Rome to throw himself at the feet of him to whom are given the keys of earth and heaven, and confess his heinous sin. But the bells no longer rang out as he drew near. He was now
Even the pope, with the power to him given to wash men’s sins away, had no ghostly word of peace for him. But he sent him not away in utter despair. He imposed on him by way of expiation to go forth from his presence like a beast of the earth, to live on the herbs of the field, and keep an unbroken silence till a sinless child a few months old—O power of innocence!—should assure him God had remitted his sin.
And Fray Juan submissively went forth from the Holy City on his hands and feet, and directed his weary course once more to Montserrat. Meanwhile, the Virgin, as Mr. Ticknor says, “appearing on that wild mountain where the unhappy man had committed his crime, consecrates its deep solitudes by founding there the magnificent sanctuary which has ever since made Montserrat holy ground to all devout Catholics.”[28]
In the course of time Fray Juan’s garments were worn out; exposed to the blazing sun of Spain, he grew swarthy of hue, and his body became covered with hair that made him look like a wild beast, for which, in fact, he was taken by the royal foresters, who fastened a rope around his neck and led him to Barcelona, where he was put in the stables of the count’s palace of Valdauris, and became at once the wonder and terror of the people.
Not long after the lord of Catalonia made a great feast to celebrate the birth of his son, now four or five months old, and one of the guests expressing a wish to see the curious beast from Montserrat, Fray Juan was led into the hall. As soon as he appeared the infant prince, speaking for the first time in his life, said: “Rise up, Fray Juan Garin; thou hast fulfilled thy penance. God hath pardoned thee.” And the penitent rose up and resumed his original form as a man.[29] He then threw himself at the count’s feet and confessed his crime. Wifredo could not refuse a pardon God had granted through his child. He ordered Fray Juan to conduct him to his daughter’s grave, and, followed by all the lords and knights of his court, he went to the mountain, and there, beside the newly-erected chapel of the Virgin, he found the tomb of the princess. When it was unsealed, to their amazement Riquilda opened her eyes and came forth from the grave. Around her neck was a slight mark, like a thread of crimson silk. As Faust says of Margaret:
83The overjoyed count took his daughter back to Barcelona, where an immense crowd came to see her whom the great Madre de Dios had awakened from the sleep of death. One of the knights of the court, struck with her beauty, requested her hand in marriage, but Riquilda felt that after so strange a restoration to life, she ought to consecrate herself to God on the mount where the wonder had been accomplished.
Wifredo, who was a great builder of churches, determined to erect a magnificent convent on the mountain. Fray Juan worked on it with his own hands, and after its completion retired to a cave, where he penitently ended his days. The convent was peopled with nuns of noble birth, and Riquilda placed at their head. Eighty years after Count Borrell, who was now lord of Catalonia, fearful of a Saracen invasion, substituted monks and transferred the nuns to the royal foundation of Santa Maria de Ripoll.
This legend of a rude age, gross in some of its details, has been celebrated in several poems, one of which, still read and admired, takes a high place in Spanish literature. This is El Monserrate, by Cristóbal de Virues, a dramatic poet, who was a great favorite of Lope de Vega’s. Virues had served as a captain in the Spanish wars, and taken part in the battle of Lepanto. He belonged to an age when, as Mr. Ticknor says, many a soldier, after a life of excess, ended his days in a hermitage as rude and solitary as that of Garin.
The old counts of Barcelona made great donations to the convent of Montserrat, as well as the kings of Aragon after them. The monks were exempted from imposts and taxes, and made honorary citizens of Barcelona. They not only had possession of the mountain, but held feudal sway over several towns and lordships. The rule of St. Benedict is known to have been observed here in 987, when Prior Raymundo was at the head of the house. It was a dependence of the abbey of Ripoll until the fourteenth century, but on account of its miraculous Virgin, and the extraordinary history of its foundation, it at once acquired great celebrity, and not a day passed without numerous pilgrims. In the twelfth century there were so many that Don Jaime el Conquistador ordered all who went to the mountain to take with them the provisions necessary for their subsistence. These pilgrims, who were often from distant provinces, used to come with bare feet, sometimes with torches in their hands, or bearing heavy crosses, or scourging their bodies, or with a halter around their necks and manacles on their hands, as if they were criminals. And when the monks saw them coming in this manner, they went out to meet them, and released them from their vow by special authority from the pope, and brought them in before the holy image of the Mother of God, where their sighs and tears broke forth into piteous prayers.
These pilgrims had a kind of sacred character which prevented them from being cited before tribunals till they returned, except for crimes committed on the way, under a penalty of five hundred crowns. Leonora, the wife of Don Pedro el Catolico, was the first queen of Aragon to visit the sanctuary, and Don Pedro the Great the first king. The latter passed the night before the altar of Our Lady, imploring her aid against the French, who 84were invading Catalonia. Don Jaime and his wife Blanca came together and endowed the monastery, of which their son was then prior. Don Pedro el Ceremonioso came twice: on his way to the conquest of Majorca, and again at his return, when he presented a silver galley in thanksgiving for his success. Queen Violante, wife of Juan I., came here with bare feet, out of pure love for the Virgin, bringing with her rich gifts.
When Ferdinand the Catholic was nine years old his mother brought him to Montserrat and consecrated him to the Virgin. After the conquest of Granada he and Queen Isabella came here together, with Prince Juan, their son, Isabella, widow of Don Alonso of Portugal, Doña Juana, afterwards called la Loca, and others of the royal family. They brought with them the two young sons of the last king of Granada, who were baptized under the names of Juan and Fernando. In the retinue were the great Cardinal Mendoza and a number of prelates. On this or some other occasion their Catholic majesties presented two magnificent silver lamps to burn before Our Lady of Montserrat, and Queen Isabella gave twelve yards of green velvet, and two of brocade, to the sacristy.
It was about this time that thirteen monks from Montserrat were chosen to accompany Christopher Columbus in order to establish the faith in the new regions he might discover. At their head was Dom Bernardo Boil, a noble Catalonian, who was raised to the dignity of patriarch and papal legate. Columbus gave the name of Montserrat to an island he discovered in 1493, on account of the resemblance it bore to the holy mountain of Spain, and the first Christian church erected in America was called Nuestra Señora de Montserrat.
Charles V. came to Montserrat when nineteen years of age, accompanied by his tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, afterwards pope. They found the court full of soldiers, with lighted torches in their hands, and the Count Palatine at the head of an embassy to offer him the crown of Carlo Magno in the name of the electors of Germany. Charles went to prostrate himself at the feet of the Virgin, and the following day left for Barcelona, after giving the father abbot the title and privileges of Sacristan Mayor of the crown of Aragon. He subsequently bestowed many gifts on the abbey, and gave it rule over the town of Olessa and other places. He visited it repeatedly, and not only remained several days at a time, but is even said to have tried the monastic life he afterwards embraced in the convent of Yuste. The third time he came here was in 1533, and on Corpus Christi day he walked in the procession with the monks, carrying a lighted candle in his hand. He liked to pass such great solemnities in a monastery, contributing by his presence and generosity to the brilliancy of the festival. He always invoked Our Lady of Montserrat before engaging in battle, and attributed to her his victories. He was at Montserrat when he received notice of the discovery of Mexico by Hernando Cortes, and when he heard of one of his important victories over the Moors. And on St. Margaret’s day, 1535, the parish of Santa Maria del Mar at Barcelona sent a deputation of twelve persons to the mountain, habited as penitents, to pray for the success of the royal arms. They united with the monks and hermits in a devout procession around 85the cloister, and made such prevailing prayer at the altar of Our Lady that Charles V. that very day took possession of Tunis. When the emperor, in 1558, found he was dying, he called for the taper blessed on the altar of Montserrat, and holding it in one hand, with the crucifix that had been taken from the dead hand of his mother Juana in the other, this great monarch, who, as he acknowledged to his kinsman, St. Francis Borgia, had never, from the twenty-first year of his age, suffered a day to pass without devoting some part of it to mental prayer, now slept for ever in the Lord.
Isabella of Portugal, wife of Charles V., likewise came here, and in her train the Marques de Lombay, afterwards Duke of Gandia, and Viceroy of Catalonia, now venerated on our altars under the name of San Francisco de Borja. With him was his wife, the beautiful Leonora de Castro, lady of honor to the empress. As a memorial of her visit, Isabella presented the church with a silver pax of artistic workmanship worth two thousand ducats, and a little ship garnished with diamonds valued at 10,800 pesos.
Some years after Doña Maria, daughter of Charles V., came here with her husband, Maximilian II., Emperor of Austria, to obtain a blessing on their marriage, and she spent several days here on her return to Spain. Her page, at that time, was the young Louis de Gonzaga, son of the Marquis of Castiglione, who afterwards entered the Society of Jesus, and is now canonized.
With this empress came also her daughter, the Princess Margarita, who prostrated herself at the feet of the Virgin and implored the grace of becoming the spouse of her divine Son. Tradition says the Virgin gently inclined her head in token of consent. At all events, the princess, after her prayer, took a dagger from one of the cavaliers, and with blood from her own veins thus wrote:
“I solemnly pledge myself to become the spouse of Christ, to whom I here offer myself, begging his Virgin Mother to be my mediator. In faith of which I subscribe myself,
“Margarita.”
She placed this vow in the Virgin’s hand, and afterwards fulfilled it by becoming a nun in the royal foundation of the Carmelites at Madrid under the name of Sr. Margarita de la Cruz. This interesting document was long preserved in the abbey, but disappeared when the house was ravaged under Napoleon.
Philip II., the monarch who boasted that the sun never set on his dominions, visited Montserrat four times, one of which was on Candlemas day, when he took part in the procession, devoutly carrying his taper. He presented Our Lady with a silver lamp weighing over a hundred pounds, and an elaborate retablo for her altar which cost ten thousand ducados.
Don John of Austria came here after the battle of Lepanto, and brought several flags taken from the enemy, as trophies to the Virgin of Montserrat, and hung up in the centre of the church the signal-lantern taken from the vessel of the Turkish admiral.
The abbey at this time was one of the richest in Spain. It was surrounded by ramparts and towers for defence. It had its courts and cloisters full of sculptures, and carvings, and tombs of precious marble, whereon knights lay in 86their armor, and abbots with mitre and crosier. But the church was too small for the number of pilgrims, and dim in spite of its seventy silver lamps. Abbot Garriga, one of the ablest men who ever ruled over the monastery, resolved to build a new one. This distinguished abbot rose from the humblest condition in life. When he was only seven years old his father, a poor man, ascended the mountain on an ass, with a kid in one pannier and his son in the other, and offered them both at the convent gate. The porter accepted the kid, but refused the boy. The father, however, persisted in leaving him, and the abbot, struck with his intelligence, gave him a place in the school. He received the monastic habit at the age of nine. While a novice he used to lament the inadequate size of the church, and predicted he should rebuild it. He subsequently became abbot, and fulfilled his prophecy, but he ended his days in the lofty hermitage of St. Dimas, where he had retired to prepare for eternity.
When the new church was completed, as the Virgin could not be removed under penalty of excommunication, the sanction of the pope had to be obtained. Philip III. came to take part in the ceremony, and with him a crowd of courtiers and Spanish grandees. On Sunday, July 11, 1593, the king and all the court went to confession and holy Communion in the morning. In the afternoon the sacred image was taken down from the place it had occupied for centuries, and clothed in magnificent robes, given by the Infanta Isabella and the Duchess of Brunswick. Then the procession was formed, preceded by a cross-bearer carrying a cross of pure silver, in which was set a piece of the Lignum Crucis surrounded by five emeralds, five diamonds, a topaz as large as a walnut, and a great number of pearls. Then came forty-three lay brothers, fifteen hermits, and sixty-two monks, chanting the Ave Maris Stella, each one carrying a wax candle weighing a pound. After them were twenty-four scholastics, and then the statue of Our Lady, borne by four monks in orders, wearing rich dalmaticas. Over it was a gorgeous canopy supported by noble lords. Behind followed Abbot Garriga and his attendants, and, after the peasant’s son, King Philip III., bearing a torch on which was painted the royal arms, and a long train of lords and ladies, the highest in the realm. With all this pomp the Madonna was borne up the nave of the new church, and, amid the ringing of bells and the chant of the Te Deum, was placed on her silver throne, given by the Duke of Cardona.
All the kings of Spain, down to the end of the eighteenth century, came here with their votive offerings. The church had a font of jasper, a reja of beautiful workmanship that cost fourteen thousand ducats, and around the altar of the Virgin burned over two hundred costly lamps, the gifts of kings, princes, and nobles. She had four gold crowns studded with gems; one estimated at fifty thousand ducats, sent by the natives of Mexico converted to the faith. The monstrance for the exposition of the Host gleamed like the sun with its rays of sparkling jewels. Chalices were covered with rubies. There were golden candlesticks for the altar, and ornaments of amber and crystal, and vestments of cloth 87of gold embroidered with precious stones, and a profusion of other valuable things that may to Judas eyes seem uselessly poured out in this favored sanctuary.
To this wonderful church, for the gilding of which he had contributed four thousand crowns, came Don John of Austria in the seventeenth century, and, penetrating into the sanctuary, he placed his hands on the sacred altar, and in a distinct voice pronounced the following: “I swear and promise to maintain with my sword that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin from the first instant of her being,” which vow was repeated by all the knights in his train. There was formerly a painting in one of the chapels to commemorate this scene.
Many children of the first families of Spain used to be brought to Montserrat and consecrated to the Virgin. Sometimes they were even left here to pass their boyhood. Don John of Cardona, a Spanish admiral, who distinguished himself in the wars with the Turks, and at one time was viceroy of Navarre, was educated here, and said he valued the honor of being a page of Our Lady of Montserrat more than having been the defender of Malta against the infidel. He took for his standard her glorious image, and, when he died, was buried, at his own request, at her feet. So were many others, famous as soldiers or statesmen, reared on this secluded mountain. The pupils, as now, wore a semi-monastic dress. They daily recited the Office of the Blessed Virgin, sang at the early Mass, and ate in the monks’ refectory. Nor were they all nobles. There were peasants’ children, too, among them, but they were all reared together in that simplicity of life that seems traditional among the Benedictines. The divine words that for ever ennobled the innocence of childhood have done more to efface artificial distinctions in monastic houses than the second sentence in the Declaration of Independence has ever done in our beloved republic. But in Spain there has always been a certain courtesy towards the lower classes that has tended to elevate them, or, at least, to maintain their self-respect. It is said that the dignity of man in that country seems to rise in proportion as his rank descends.
Among the more recent memories of the school, it is told how, September 30, 1860, Queen Isabella II. came here with her son, now King Alfonso XII., then only three years old, and had him made a page of Our Lady of Montserrat, and he was clothed in the dress of the pupils in the presence of the court.
But to return to the history of the abbey. The day came when all its riches were suddenly swept away. Catalonia was the first to rise against the government of Napoleon. Montserrat, being considered almost impregnable, was made a depot of provisions and munitions of war. It was fortified, and bristled with cannon like a citadel. Suchet attacked the mountain. It was vigorously defended by three hundred Spaniards entrenched in the defiles, but the French succeeded in gaining possession of it. The monastery was blown up. The hermitages were ruined. The hermits were “hunted like chamois from rock to rock,” and the treasures of the church were carried off as spoils of war. All the testimonials of the faith of 88Spain that had been accumulating here for centuries were swept away: the gold and the jewels, the paintings and carvings, the Gothic cloister and the tombs of alabaster—all, all disappeared. Only one priceless jewel remained, around which all the others had been gathered—the ancient Madonna brought from the East, which was once more concealed in a cave, as in the time of the Moors.
Towards the close of our second day on Montserrat we passed through an avenue of cypresses behind the monastery, and came to a small terrace on the very edge of the precipitous mountain-side, around which was a wall adorned with great stone saints that were gray and mossy, and worn by the elements. Against the wall were seats, and, in the centre of the plot, a tank for gold fish, with a few plants and shrubs around it. Here is an admirable view to the northwest, and we stood leaning a long time against the wall, looking at the broad Vega beneath, and the long range of Pyrenees that stood out with wonderful distinctness against the pure evening sky. Directly beneath us was Monistrol, and, beyond, Manresa, only three leagues off, but seemingly much nearer; and along yonder road winding through the Valley of Paradise, as it used to be called, must have gone St. Ignatius from Montserrat in his newly-put-on garments of holy poverty, which could not, we fancy, hide his courtly bearing or eagle glance.
Nothing could surpass the exquisite gradations of light and color that passed over the landscape while the sun was going down. The pleasant valley grew dim. Manresa receded, and her white walls soon looked like a ship at sea. A purple mist began to creep up the mountain-sides. The snowy summits were suffused with a blush of rosy light. The last gleam of the sun, now below the western horizon, flashed from peak to peak like signal-fires, and then died away. The purple hills grew leaden. The rosy peaks became paler and paler till they were actually livid, and finally faded away into mere fleecy clouds.
Then we walked reluctantly back through the tall, dark cypresses to the convent, and through the shadowy cloister to the church, which we found dark but for the usual cluster of lamps around the altar, suspended there—beautiful emblem of prayer—to consume themselves before God, in place of the hearts forced to live amid the cares of the world.
There is an old legend, embodied in a Catalan ballad, that tells how an angel one night ordered Fray José de las Llantias, a lay brother of Montserrat, now declared Venerable, to quickly trim the dying lamps lest the world be overwhelmed in darkness because of iniquity.
The next morning, after the usual offices, we went to receive the father abbot’s blessing and visit the treasury of the Virgin—no longer filled with countless jewels, but containing many touching offerings that tell of perils past, such as soldiers’ knapsacks and swords, sailors’ hats, innumerable plaits of hair, etc. Then we went up a winding stair, on which, at different turnings, three white angels pointed the way, to kiss Our Lady’s hand, according to the custom of pilgrims. Afterwards we took a guide, and went to visit several of the hermitages, most of which are still in ruins. That of the Virgin has been restored, and from below 89looks like a small château rising straight up from the edge of the precipice overhanging the ravine of Santa Maria. The ancient Cueva, or cave, where the Madonna was found, is now converted into a pretty chapel lighted by small stained windows. The adjoining cell has a balcony that hangs over the abyss, commanding a lovely view.
The hermitage of San Dimas, or Dismas, is on one of the most inaccessible peaks.
says the old Latin rhyme. This cell is now in ruins, but it was once fortified and had a drawbridge. Col. Green entrenched himself here in 1812 with a detachment of soldiers, and cannon had to be put on a neighboring height to dislodge him. It was in one of its chapels the great Loyola made his general confession, and to a Frenchman. In ancient times there was a den of robbers here, for which reason it was placed under the protection of the Good Thief when it was converted into a hermitage.
The hermitage of Santa Cruz is approached by a flight of one hundred and fifty steps cut in the solid rock. It is said to be so called because Charlemagne, when fighting against the Moors in the north of Spain, ordered a white banner, on which was a blood-red cross, to be set up on this peak. Here lived the Blessed Benito de Aragon for sixty-three years. The hermits generally lived to an advanced age, to which the pure air, as well as their simple life and regular habits, conduced. There are about thirteen of these hermitages scattered over the mountain. That of Santa Magdalena, one of the most picturesque, is two miles from the monastery. They are all built on a uniform plan. There is a chapel, and connected with it is a small house containing an antechamber, a cell with an alcove for a bed, and a kitchen. On one side there is a little garden with a cistern. The hermits made a vow never to leave the mountain. On the festival of St. Benedict they received the Holy Eucharist together and had dinner in common. On certain days in the year they descended to the abbey, and always took part in the great solemnities. Their director, appointed by the abbot, lived in the hermitage of San Benito. Their rule was very austere. They observed an almost continual fast, and their abstinence was perpetual. Fish, bread, and the common wine of the region constituted their food. Most of their time was passed in exercises of piety, varied by the culture of their little gardens. They were allowed no pets of any kind, but the birds of the air became so familiarized with their presence as to approach at a signal and eat from their hands. This was no small pleasure, for there are nightingales, goldfinches, robin red-breasts, larks, thrushes, etc., in abundance on the mountain. When ill they were removed to the infirmary at the abbey.
The most elevated hermitage is that of San Geronimo. The way to it lies along the edge of deep ravines, over steep cliffs, through narrow fissures—a rough, fatiguing, enchanting excursion. There is a fresh surprise at every instant, from the continual variety of nature. We gathered fragrant violets, daisies, the purple heather, delicate ferns, branches of holly and box, that grew in crevices along the mountain-paths. We were so fatigued when we arrived that we 90were glad to sit down against the crumbling walls of the hermitage, and eat our lunch, and take a draught from the cool cistern. The cell is on the brink of a gulf worn by torrents, into which it makes one giddy to look. Close by rises a tall cone which is the highest point of Montserrat. Here is a magnificent prospect of mountain, and sea, and four provinces of Spain. On the north is Catalonia and the glorious Pyrenees; at the east the blue Mediterranean, with the Balearic Isles in the distance; to the south the coasts of Castillon and Valencia; and to the west Lerida and the mountains of Aragon.
The hermit of San Geronimo was always the youngest, and as the others died he descended to a cell less exposed to the inclemency of the seasons, leaving his place to a new-comer. It is a solitary peak, indeed, to live on, and yet in sight of so vast a world. We were there at noon, when the sun was in all its splendor, lighting up the snows of the mountain and the waves of the sea. The wind began to rise with a solemn swell, giving out that hollow, ominous sound which De Quincey says is “the one sole audible symbol of eternity.” The holy mountain, shivered into numberless peaks; the abysses and chasms that separate them, only inhabited by birds of prey; the variety of aromatic plants that grow in the rich soil collected wherever it can find room; the exhilarating air; the marvels of creation on every side, seemingly “boundless as we wish our souls to be,” constitute an abode in which one would wish for ever to live. The lines of Fray Luis de Leon in his Noche Serena might have been inspired by this very spot:
Tall, gaunt, with clear-cut and unmistakably New England features, and feet that would not admit of Cinderella slippers, is the tout ensemble which Emerson photographed upon our retina when we heard him lecture recently. We liked his calm and self-poised manner. There was no heated concern when the Sibylline leaves on which his lecture was written became inextricably mixed. Paradoxically enough, his theme was “Orators and Oratory.” His high, shrill voice, his ungainly manners, and his utter absence of gesture make him the most unattractive of speakers. But there was a certain “fury in his words” which fastened the attention. The next thing to being an orator is to love oratory; and his reverence and admiration for the eloquent in speech pass his own eloquent expression.
Emerson’s sentences are so pointed that frequently the point is so fine as to be lost. His eloquence is anything but Asiatic, and, indeed, its terseness very much resembles affectation. He is called 91the American Carlyle, but his proper title is the American Montaigne. There is not an idea in Emerson that cannot be traced to the garrulous old Frenchman. The first reading of Emerson is an era in a young man’s life. The short, apothegmic sentences strike him with the force of proverbs. The happy quotation and illustration seem inspirations of genius. The misty transcendentalism has a roseate hue, in delightful contrast with the bald practicality of Watts’ hymns and orthodox sermons. The stimulating style, resultant from exquisite taste and the manly resolve to carry out Pope’s advice about the “art to blot,” is high perfection when compared with the weak and weary prosing of moral essayists. Yet there is nothing original in Emerson. He has contributed little or nothing to the body of ideas. Not even his poetry, which is supposed to be productive of ideas, presents anything new or striking. The passion for nature-worship, which Wordsworth carried to its highest expression, becomes tiresome and unnatural in Emerson’s short metre and careless versification.
What is the source of his power? Why do New England critics rave over him? Even J. Russell Lowell, who, with all the limitations of a narrowed culture, ranks respectably as a literary critic, cannot find words in which to laud the New England philosopher. He finds the secret of his influence to consist in his “wide-reaching sympathy” and his being able to understand the use of a linchpin equally with the stellar influences. Lowell himself is under the witchery of mere words. His cultivated mind is drawn to the beautiful by acquired æsthetic taste. His estimate of Dante, as published in the New American Cyclopædia and afterward in Among my Books, fills the thoughtful Italian student with amazement. He is a critic of words, and is childishly led by a bright figure or exquisite metaphor. Emerson, whilst seeming to disregard words, pays profound attention to their collocation and effectiveness. This school is not a school of thoughts but of words; and it is under this aspect that we intend examining it. It is the thorough embodiment of poor Hamlet’s objection to the book which he is reading: “Words, words, words.” We read and read, and are charmed with Thucydidean terseness and Solomonic wisdom; but when we begin to reflect “all the riches have escaped out of our hands.” It is about time to expose this wily old philosopher, who has been throwing rhetorical dust into the eyes of several generations. He may have a noble manhood; he may be sincere; but there can be no question that it is the ignotum pro magnifico which has been the cheap cause of his popularity.
Thomas à Kempis tells us that “words fly through the air and hurt not a stone.” There is certainly no objection to a writer’s careful elaboration of his style. The study of words is a part of rhetoric. But there is a subtle and elusive application of words, outside of their obvious and generally-used meaning, which is at once a rhetorical and a logical vice. And as ideas fail, so words are sedulously cultivated. The style is the man, as Buffon did not say; but what of an affected style? If there is any truth in the saying, it convicts Emerson of being stilted, unnatural, and affected. No man thinks by jerks and starts, and no man writes so. The fanciful and abrupt indicate either affectation or an unbalanced intellect. All the 92great philosophers write calmly and equably. The sustained strength of Plato, on whom Emerson professes to model himself, is in direct contrast with the abruptness of Seneca, who was a mass of conceit and hypocrisy. We have no quarrel with Mr. Emerson on account of his studied style; only, with Sydney Smith, we object to a discourse in which are hung out preconcerted signals for tears or excitement. It is quite easy to form a quaint style. The success of Charles Lamb’s imitation of Sir Thomas Browne, or of Bret Harte’s or Thackeray’s burlesques of popular novels, shows how quickly a ready writer can fall into a philosophical diction. Emerson attempts the epigrammatic. Like Pythagoras, he disdains reasons. The ipse dixit, he supposes, will suffice for his disciples. He contradicts himself on his very self-satisfactory theory of “not being in any mood long.” He admires opposite characters; but, to the credit of American good sense be it said—good sense even in a philosophe—he does not “boil over,” like Carlyle, in all sorts of oddities of hero-worship. The Yankee hard head which he has cannot be softened by all the philosophy and poetry in the world; and, notwithstanding his ethereal views, he drives a hard bargain.
Can we review this philosopher to the satisfaction of our readers, or must they peruse him themselves in order to form a vague idea of his system?
It may be Emerson’s boast that he has no system. This restlessness under any, even nominal, régime is a characteristic of contemporaneous philosophy outside the church. There is liberty enough in the church; and, in fact, beyond it we see nothing but imprisonment, for nothing so practically chains the intellect of man as irresponsible freedom. It is like the liberty of the ocean enjoyed (?) by a mariner without sails or compass. A Catholic philosopher can speculate as much as he pleases. The security of the faith gives him a delightful sense of safe freedom. Like O’Connell’s driving a coach and four through an act of Parliament, he may go to the outermost verge of speculation. St. Thomas moves the most outrageous fallacies, speculations, and objections, and discusses them, too, with all the boldness of intellectual freedom. It is Dr. Marshall, we think, who shows that all intellectual activity and freedom are enjoyed within the spacious bounds of Catholic truth. Even in theology there are wide differences. The Catholic intellect is supposed to be completely bridled. We once read a powerful arraignment of our Scriptural proofs for purgatory, written by an eminent Protestant theologian. He must have been surprised to learn that Catholic theologians do not attach all importance to the Scriptural argument for purgatory. The different schools of Catholic theology argue pro and con. as keenly as old Dr. Johnson himself would have desired, but without the slightest detriment to the unity of the faith. Nothing can be falser than the received Protestant notion that we are helplessly bound by a network of petty definitions and regulations. There are, however, great and immovable principles which are understood to guide and vivify the Catholic intellect. And such systemization is necessary to all knowledge. Without it a man’s mind, like Emerson’s, wanders comet-like, attracting attention by its vagaries, but is of no intelligible use to the universe, and gives no light, except of a nebulous and perplexing nature.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, of all 93American writers, had the true transcendental mind, ridicules it unsparingly. His doleful experience upon Brook Farm, when he attempted to milk a cow, may have had a practical awakening effect upon his dreams. In a little sketch entitled The Celestial Railroad, in which he whimsically carries out Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, he introduces Giant Transcendentalism, who has taken the place of Giant Pope, and Giant Despair, that interrupted Christian’s progress to the Delectable Mountains. Giant Transcendentalism is a huge, amorphous monster, utterly indescribable, and speaking an unintelligible language. This language, which Emerson strives to make articulate, we read with mingled amusement and astonishment in the German writers. Emerson is not a member of the Kulturkampf, like Carlyle. His mind does not take in their wild rhapsodies. His essay on Goethe (in Representative Men) is cold and unappreciative when compared with the Scotchman’s eulogies. We firmly believe that no healthy intellect can feed upon Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or even Kant, who was the most luminous intellect of the group. Emerson has not the stolid pertinacity of Herr Teufelsdröckh. His genius is French. He delights in paradox and verbal gymnastics. Carlyle works with a sort of furious patience at such a prosaic career as Frederick the Great’s. He gets up a factitious enthusiasm about German Herzhogs and Erstfursts. Emerson would look with dainty disdain upon his Cyclopean work among big, dusty, musty folios and the hammering out of shining sentences from such pig-iron.
Whence his transcendentalism? We believe that it has two elements, nature-worship and Swedenborgianism. Of nature-worship we have very little. Like Thomson, the author of the Seasons, who wrote the finest descriptions of scenery in bed at ten o’clock in the morning, we are frightfully indifferent to the glories of earth, sea, and sky, whilst theoretically capable of intense rapture. This tendency to adore nature, and this intense modern cultivation of the natural sciences, we take as indicative of the husks of religion given by Protestantism. Man’s intellect seeks the certain, and where he cannot find it in the supernatural he will have recourse to the natural. The profound attention paid to all the mechanical and natural sciences, to the exclusion, if not denial, of supernatural religion, is the logical result of the absurdity of Protestantism. Perhaps Emerson’s poetic feeling has much to do with his profound veneration for fate, nature, and necessity, which are his true god, with a very little Swedenborgianism to modify them.
And here we meet him on his philosophy of words. A word, according to St. Thomas, should be the adæquatio rei et intellectus, for a word is really the symbol and articulation of truth. Where words convey no clear or precise idea to the mind they are virtually false. The terminology of Emerson falls even below Carlyle’s in obscurity. What does he mean by the one-soul? What by compensation? What by fate and necessity? Explica terminos is the command of logic and reason; yet he maunders on in vague and extravagant speech, using terms which it is very probable he himself only partly or arbitrarily understands. He is not master of his own style. His own words hurry him along. This fatal bondage to style spoils his best thoughts. He seems to aim at striking phrases and ends in paradox. 94His very attempt to strengthen and compress his sentences weakens and obscures his meaning. The oracular style does not carry well. He is happiest where he does not don the prophetic or poetical mantle. When we get a glimpse of his shrewd character, he is as gay as a lark and sharp as a fox. He muffles himself in transcendentalism, but fails to hide his clear sense, which he cannot entirely bury or obfuscate. It seems strange to us that such a mind could be permanently influenced by the fantasies of Swedenborg, whom he calls a mystic, but who, very probably, was a madman. The pure mysticism of the Catholic Church is not devoid of what to those who have not the light to read it may seem to wear a certain air of extravagance, which, apparently, would be no objection to Emerson; but it is kept within strict rational bounds by the doctrinal authority of the church. We do not suppose that Emerson ever thought it worth his while to study the mystic or ascetic theology of the church, though here and there in his writings he refers to the example of saints, and quotes their sayings and doings. But it must be a strange mental state that passively admits the wild speculations of Swedenborgianism with its gross ideas of heaven and its fanciful interpretations of Scripture. Besides, Emerson clearly rejects the divinity of Jesus Christ, which is extravagantly (if we may use the expression) set forth in Swedenborgianism, to the exclusion of the Father and the Holy Ghost. He is, or was, a Unitarian, and his allusions to our Blessed Lord have not even the reverence of Carlyle.
Naturalism, as used in the sense of the Vatican decrees, is the proper word to apply to the Emersonian teaching. He has the Yankee boastfulness, materialistic spirit, and general laudation of the natural powers. His transcendentalism has few of the spiritual elements of German thought. He does not believe in contemplation, but stimulates to activity. In his earlier essays he seemed pantheistic, but his last book (Society and Solitude) affirmed his doubt and implicit denial of immortality. He appears to be a powerful personality, for he has certainly influenced many of the finer minds of New England, and, no doubt, he leads a noble and intellectual life. His exquisite æstheticism takes away the grossness of the results to which his naturalistic philosophy leads, and it is with regret that we note in him that intellectual pride which effectually shuts his mind even to the gentlest admonitions and enlightenments of divine grace.
It is a compliment to our rather sparse American authorship and scholarship that England regards him as the typical American thinker and writer. We do not so regard him ourselves, for his genius lacks the sturdy American originality and reverent spirit. But Emerson made a very favorable impression upon Englishmen when he visited their island, and he wrote the best book on England (English Traits) that, perhaps, any American ever produced. The quiet dignity and native independence of the book charmed John Bull, who was tired of our snobbish eulogiums of himself and institutions. Emerson met many literary men, who afterward read his books and praised his style. He has the air of boldness and the courage of his opinions. Now and then he invents a striking phrase which sets one a-thinking. He has also in perfection the art of quoting, and his whole composition betokens the artist and scholar.
There is a high, supersensual region, 95imagination, fantasy, or soul-life, in which he loves to disport, and to which he gives the strangest names. One grows a little ashamed of what he deems his own unimaginativeness when he encounters our philosopher “bestriding these lazy-pacing clouds.” He wonders at the “immensities, eternities, and fates” that seem to exert such wondrous powers. When Emerson gets into this strain he quickly disappears either in the clouds or in a burrow, according to the taste and judgment of different readers. There is often a fine feeling in these passages which we can understand yet not express. Sublime they are not, though obscurity may be considered one of the elements of sublimity. They are emotional. Emerson belongs rather to the sensualistic school; at least, he ascribes abounding power to the feelings, and, in fact, he is too heated and enthusiastic for the coldness and calmness exacted by philosophical speculation. Many of his essays read like violent sermons; and his worst ones are those in which he attempts to carry out a ratiocination. He is dictatorial. He announces but does not prove. He appears at times to be in a Pythonic fury, and proclaims his oracles with much excitement and contortion. It is impossible to analyze an essay, or hold on to the filmy threads by which his thoughts hang together. It is absurd to call him a philosopher who has neither system, clearness of statement, nor accuracy of thought.
It is a subject of gratulation that Emerson, who has been before New England for the past half-century, has wielded a generally beneficial influence. With his powers and opportunities he might have done incalculable harm; but the weight of his authority has been thrown upon the side of general morality and natural development of strength of character. We know, of course, how little merely natural motives and powers avail toward the building up of character; but it is not against faith to hold that a good disposition and virtuous frame of mind may result from purely natural causes. He has preached the purest gospel of naturalism, shrinking at once from the bold and impious counsellings of Goethe and from the muscularity of Carlyle. He has given us, in himself, glimpses of a noble character, and his ideals have been lofty and pure. New England could not have had a better apostle, humanly and naturally speaking. Its cultivated and rational minds turned in horror and disgust from its rigid Calvinism, its outré religious frenzies, and its sordid and prosaic life. They found a voice and interpreter in Emerson. He marks the recoil from unscriptural, irrational, and unnatural religion.
Puritanism, always unlovely, despotic, and gloomy, began to lose its hold even upon the second generation of the Puritans. Its life will never be thoroughly revealed to the sunshiny Catholic mind. Perhaps its ablest exponent was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in the Scarlet Letter, revealed its possibilities and, in fact, actualities of hideousness. We have no fault to find with any elements of stern self-control or ascetic character that it might develop, but its effect on the intellect was darkening and crippling. The whole Puritan exodus from England was a suppressed and blinding excitement. The rebound from their harsh and unbending discipline was terrific. The frowning-down of all amusement, the irritating espionage over private life, the high-strung religious enthusiasm which it was necessary to simulate 96if not feel, the abnormal development of ministerial power and influence, and the baleful gloom of Calvinistic doctrine, were elements that had necessarily to be destroyed, or they would madden a nation. They could no more endure, if it were possible to extirpate them, than could a colony of rabid dogs. Human nature, as created by God, tends to preserve the primal type. It asserts its functions, its rights, its powers, and its aptitudes. After a century, in which religious intolerance ruled New England with a rod of iron, the long-pent-up storm burst with indescribable fury and scattered orthodoxy to the four winds. The people breathed more freely; the atmosphere cleared; there was a healthy interchange of sentiment. The predominance of public-school education, combining with the multiplication of books, developed that crude and half-formed culture which has characterized New England to the present day. The best-educated portion of the Union, filled with all the insolence of a little learning, aspired to rule the nation, and succeeded. Its ideas were zealously propagated. Wherever a Yankee settled he planted all New England around him. The peddler did not need religion, but the philosopher did. The culture of æsthetics engaged some; others went off into Socinianism. The doctrines of Fourierism had charms for many, among whom was Emerson. He longed for an ideal life. The country was not leavened then, as now, by the solid thought and practice of Catholicity. The mystic radiance and grace of the Adorable Sacrament did not sweetly pervade the whole atmosphere of the land. Satan was busy and jubilant. The strangest and most eccentric forms of religion sprang up like rank mushroom growths, with neither beauty nor wholesome nutriment. It was then that Emerson’s call to a high manhood seemed to have the right ring in it. At least, it attracted and fixed the wandering attention of New England. For many a winter he lectured, speaking great words, the heroic wisdom of old Plutarch and the practical sense and insight of Montaigne. His fine scholarship won the scholars and his homely maxims charmed the farmers. It was well that in that dreary, chaotic period there was a brave and bold speaker who did not entirely despair of humanity, even when he and his companions had broken adrift from their anchorage in the rotten and worn-out systems of Protestant theology.
The grace of the faith has thus far escaped the Concord philosopher, but who shall speak of the ways of God? The theologian will solve you quickly all questions in his noble science, except questions upon the tract of grace. There he hesitates, for the most intimate and personal communications of God with the soul take place in the mystery of grace. Every man has his own tractatus de gratia written upon his own heart in the all-beautiful handwriting of God, sealing us, as St. Paul says, and writing upon us the mark that distinguishes us as his beloved. It is the miserable consequence of the New England system of early education, which inheres in a man’s very spirit, that it perversely misrepresents the Catholic Church. It is simply astounding how little Americans know about our divine faith. They have never deemed it worth their while to examine it, taking it for granted that all that is said against it is true. We remember, as a boy, reading Peter Parley’s histories, which were very popular in New England, and not a page was free from some misrepresentation of 97the church. Emerson classes “Romanism” with a half-dozen absurd theories; which goes to show that he has not even reached that point of culture which, according to its advocates, understands and embraces all the great creeds of humanity, in their best and most universal truth.
Mr. Emerson is now in the sere and yellow leaf, and it is to be feared that his intellectual pride, and that nauseating flattery which weak-minded people assiduously pay to men of great intellectual attainments, have left in him a habit of vanity which is fatal to truth. We have known very able men who were prevented from seeing the truth of Catholicity by the dense clouds of incense that their admirers continually wafted before their shrines. The fulness of divine faith which he lacks, and for which he seems mournfully to cry out, is in the happy possession of the humblest child of the Catholic religion; not, as he would think, merely instinctive or the result of education, but living and logical, the gift and grace of the Holy Ghost. Emerson is no theologian, though once a Protestant minister, which fact, however, would not argue much for his theology. But he has a heroic and poetic mind whose native strength manifests itself even in the very eccentric orbit through which it passes.
In view of the sad affliction which has so recently befallen the church in the demise of Pope Pius IX.—now of happy memory—we shall preface this article on papal elections with a brief account of the ceremonies that follow upon the death of a Sovereign Pontiff.
As soon as the pope has breathed his last amidst the consolations of religion, and after making his profession of faith in presence of the cardinal grand-penitentiary—who usually administers the last sacraments—and of the more intimate members of his court, the cardinal-chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, accompanied and assisted by the right reverend clerks of the apostolic chamber, takes possession of the palace and causes a careful inventory to be made of everything that is found in the papal apartments.[30] He then proceeds to the chamber of death, in which the pope still lies, and, viewing the body, assures himself, and instructs a notary to certify to the fact, that he is really dead. He also receives from the grand chamberlain 98of the court—Monsignor Maestro di Camera—a purse containing the Fisherman’s ring which His Holiness had used in life. The cardinal, who, by virtue of his office of chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, has become the executive of the government, sends an order to the senator of Rome, who is always a layman and member of one of the great patrician families, to have the large bell of the Capitol tower tolled, at which lugubrious signal the bells of all the churches throughout the city are sounded. Twenty-four hours after death the body of the pope is embalmed, and lies in state, dressed in the ordinary or domestic costume, upon a bed covered with cloth of crimson and gold, the pious offices of washing and dressing the body being performed by the penitentiaries or confessors of the Vatican basilica, who are always Minor Conventuals of the Franciscan Order. It is next removed to the Sistine Chapel, where it is laid out, clothed in the pontifical vestments, on a couch surrounded with burning tapers and watched by a detachment of the Swiss Guard. On the following day the cardinals and chapter of St. Peter assemble in the Sistine and accompany the transport of the body to the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the Vatican basilica, where it remains exposed for three days, the feet protruding a little through an opening in the iron railing which closes the chapel, that the faithful may approach and kiss the embroidered slipper. The nine days of funeral services—Novendialia—which the Roman ceremonial prescribes for the pope now begin. These are his public obsequies. For the first six days the cardinals and prelates of the court and Holy See assemble daily in the choir chapel of the canons of St. Peter, where, the Office for the Dead being chanted, a cardinal says Mass; but during the remaining three days the services are performed around an elevated and magnificent catafalque which in the meanwhile has been silently erected in the great nave of the basilica. This structure is a perfect work of art in its way, every part of it being carefully designed with relation to its solemn purpose, and in harmony of form and proportions with the vast edifice in which it is reared. It is illustrated by Latin inscriptions and by paintings of the most remarkable scenes of the late pontificate, and adorned with allegorical statues. A detachment of the Noble Guard stands there motionless as though carved in stone. Over the whole is suspended a life-size portrait of the pope. A thousand candles of yellow wax and twenty enormous torches in golden candelabra burn day and night around it. On each of these three days five cardinals in turn give the grand absolutions, and on the ninth day a funeral oration is pronounced by some one—often a bishop, or always at least a prelate of distinction whom the Sacred College has chosen for the occasion. In former days the cardinal nephew or relative of the deceased had the privilege, often of great importance for the future reputation of the pontiff and the present splendor of his family, raised to princely rank, of selecting the envied orator. Ere this, however, the final dispositions of the pope’s body have been made. On the evening of the third day, the public having been excluded from the basilica, the cardinal-chamberlain, cardinals created by the late pope, clerks of the chamber and chapter of St. Peter, headed by monsignor the vicar—who is always an archbishop in partibus—vested in pontificals, assemble in the 99chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, in which the pope still lies in state. The body is then reverently enfolded in the gold and crimson cover of the couch, and taken up to be laid in a cypress-wood coffin, into which are also put three red purses containing medals of gold, silver, and bronze, as many of each sort as there were years of the pontificate, bearing the pope’s effigy on one side, and a design commemorative of some act of his temporal or spiritual government on the other. If there should be a relative of the late pope among the cardinals, he covers the face with a white linen veil, otherwise this last office of respect is performed by the major-domo. When the coffin has been closed it is placed inside of a leaden case, which is immediately soldered and sealed, while the metal is hot, with the arms of the cardinal-chamberlain and major-domo. A brief inscription is cut at once on the face of this metal case, giving simply the name, years of his reign, and date of death. The coffin and case are now enclosed in a plain wooden box, which is covered with a red pall ornamented with golden fringes and an embroidered cross, and carried in sad procession to the uniform temporary resting-place which every pope occupies in turn in St. Peter’s, in a simple sarcophagus of marbled stucco which is set into the wall at some distance above and slightly overhanging the floor of the church, on the left-hand side of the entrance to the choir chapel. A painter is at hand to trace the name of the pope and the Latin initials of the words High Pontiff—Pius IX., P.M. Before the pope’s body is taken up from the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, some workmen, under the direction of the prelates and officers of the congregation for the supervision of St. Peter’s—Reverenda Fabrica di San Pietro—have broken in the sarcophagus at the top and removed its contents (which in this case were those of Gregory XVI., who had been there since 1846) to the crypt under the basilica until consigned to the tomb prepared, but not always in St. Peter’s, either by the pope himself before his death[31] or by his family or by the cardinals of his creation, and the new claimant for repose takes his place there.
During the nine days that the obsequies of the pope continue the cardinals assemble every morning in the sacristy of St. Peter’s to arrange all matters of government for the States of the Church and the details of the approaching conclave. These meetings are called general congregations. At them the bulls and ordinances relating to papal elections are read, and the cardinals swear to observe them; the Fisherman’s ring and the large metal seal used for bulls are broken by the first master of ceremonies; two orators are chosen, one for the funeral oration and the other for the conclave; all briefs and memorials not finally acted upon are consigned to a clerk of the chamber, etc., etc. On the tenth day the cardinals assemble in the forenoon in the choir chapel of St. Peter’s, where the dean of the Sacred College pontificates at a votive Mass of the Holy Ghost, after which the orator of the conclave—who, if a bishop, wears amice, cope, and mitre—is introduced into the chapel, and, after making the proper reverences, ascends a decorated pulpit and holds forth on the subject of electing an excellent pontiff: the pope is dead; long live the pope; the Papacy never dies![32]
100After the sermon and the singing by the papal choir of the first strophe of the hymn Veni Creator, the cardinals ascend in procession to the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican palace, where the dean recites aloud before the altar the prayer Deus qui corda fidelium, and afterwards addresses his brethren on the great business which they are about to engage in, exhorting them to lay aside all human motives and perform their duty without fear or favor of any man. All the persons who are to remain in conclave, as the prelates, custodians, conclavists or attendants on the cardinals, physicians, barbers, servants, are passed in review, and take an oath not to speak even among themselves of matters concerning the election. Every avenue leading into the conclave, except the eight loop-holes or windows, as mentioned in a former article, are carefully closed by masons; one door, however, is left standing to admit any late-coming cardinal, or let out any one expelled from, or for whatever cause obliged to leave, the conclave. It is locked on the outside by the prince-marshal, and on the inside by the cardinal-chamberlain, both of whom retain the key of their own side. The lock is so combined that it requires both keys to open the door. On the following day the cardinal-dean says a votive Mass de Spiritu Sancto, at which all the cardinals in stoles receive Holy Communion from his hands.... Fervet opus....
As soon as the cardinal upon whom the requisite two-thirds of all the votes cast have centred consents to his election, he becomes pope. This consent is absolutely necessary, and, although the Sacred College threatened Innocent II. (Papareschi, 1130-1143) with excommunication if he did not accept,[33] it is now admitted that no one can be constrained to take upon himself such a burden as the Sovereign Pontificate.
Thirty-eight popes, from St. Cornelius, in 254, to Benedict XIII., in 1724, are recorded in history as having positively refused to accept the election, although they were afterwards induced by various motives, however much against their own inclinations, to ratify it. As soon as he has answered in the affirmative to the question of the cardinal-dean, proposed in the following very ancient formula: Acceptasne electionem de te canonicè factam in Summum Pontificem? the first master of ceremonies, turning to certain persons around him, calls upon them in an audible voice to bear witness to the fact.[34] The new pope then retires and is dressed in the ordinary or domestic costume of the Holy 101Father, three suits of which, of different sizes, are ready made, and disposed in the dressing-room for the elect to choose from. It consists of white stockings, cassock and sash with gold tassels, white collar and skull-cap, red mozzetta, stole, and shoes. He then takes his seat on a throne and receives the first homage—adoratio prima—of the cardinals, who, kneeling before him, kiss his foot and afterwards his hand, and, standing, receive from him the kiss of peace on the cheek. We see, from the ceremonial composed in the thirteenth century by Cardinal Savelli, that the present custom is not very different from the mediæval one; for, speaking of the pope’s election, he says: Quo facto ab episcopis cardinalibus ad sedem ducitur post altare, et in ea, ut dignum est, collocatur; in qua dum sedet electus recipit omnes episcopos cardinales, et quos sibi placuerit ad pedes, postmodum ad osculum pacis. The custom of kissing the pope’s foot is so ancient that no certain date can be assigned for its introduction. It very probably began in the time of St. Peter himself, to whom the faithful gave this mark of profound reverence, which they have continued towards all his successors—always, however, having been instructed to do so with an eye to God, of whom the pope is vicar. In which connection most beautiful was the answer of Leo X. to Francis I. of France, who, as Rinaldi relates (Annal. Eccles., an. 1487, num. 30), having gone to Bologna, humbly knelt before him and kissed his foot, se lætissimum dicens, quod videret facie ad faciem Pontificem Vicarium Christi Jesu. “Thanks,” said Leo, “but refer all this to God himself”—Omnia hæc in Deum transferens, et omnia Deo tribuens. To make this relative worship more apparent a cross has always been embroidered on the shoes since the pontificate of that most humble pope, St. Gregory the Great, in the year 590. It is curious to read of the objection made to this custom by Basil, Tzar of Muscovy, to Father Anthony Possevinus, S.J., who was sent to Russia on a religious and diplomatic mission by Gregory XIII. in the sixteenth century. His eloquent defence of the custom, appealing, too, to prophecy,[35] is found in the printed account of his embassy (Moscovia, Cologne, 1587, in fol.)
When the pope is dressed in the pontifical costume he receives on his finger a new Fisherman’s ring, which he immediately removes and hands to one of the masters of ceremonies to have engraved upon it the name which he has assumed. The popes have three special rings for their use. The first is generally a rather plain gold one with an intaglio or a cameo ornament; this is called the papal ring. The second one, called the pontifical ring, because used only when the pope pontificates or officiates at grand ceremonies, is an exceedingly precious one. The one worn on these occasions by Pius IX., and which his successor will doubtless also use, was made during the reign of Pius VII., whose name is cut on the inside. It is of the purest gold, of remarkably fine workmanship, set with a very large oblong diamond. It cost thirty thousand francs (about $6,000), and has 102a contrivance on the inside by which it can be made larger or smaller to fit the wearer’s finger. (Barraud, Des Bagues à toutes les Époques. Paris, 1864.) The Fisherman’s ring, which is so called because it has a figure of St. Peter in a bark throwing his net into the sea (Matthew iv. 18, 19), is a plain gold ring with an oval face, bearing the name of the reigning pope engraved around and above the figure of the apostle, thus: Leo XIII., Pont. Max. On the inside are cut the names of the engraver and of the major-domo. The ring weighs an ounce and a half. It is the official seal of the popes, but, although the first among the rings, it is only the second in the class of seals, since it serves as the privy seal or papal signet for apostolic briefs and matters of lesser consequence, whereas the great seal of the Holy See is used to stamp the heads of SS. Peter and Paul in lead, and sometimes, but rarely, in gold, on papal bulls. This ring was at first a private and not an official one, as we learn from a letter written at Perugia on March 7, 1265, by Clement IV. to his nephew Peter Le Gros, in which 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 this it would appear that such a ring was already in well-known use, but it cannot be determined at what period it was introduced, or precisely when it became official, although it is certain that it was given this character in the fifteenth century; but another hundred years passed before it became customary to mention its use in every document on which the seal was impressed by the now familiar expression, “Given under the Fisherman’s ring,” which is first met with in the manner of a curial formula in a brief given by Nicholas V. on the 15th of April, 1448: Datum Romæ, apud Sanctum Petrum, sub annulo Piscatoris, die xv. Aprilis, MCCCCXLVIII., pontificatus nostri II.[36]
Briefs are no more sealed with the original ring, which is always in the keeping of the pope’s grand chamberlain, who, as we have said, delivers it to the cardinal-camerlengo on the pope’s decease, to be broken in the first general congregation preliminary to the conclave, according to a custom dating from the death of Leo X. A fac-simile is preserved in the Secretaria de’ Brevi which serves in its stead; but since June, 1842, red sealing-wax, because too brittle and effaceable, is no longer used, but in its place a thick red ink or pigment is employed. Briefs are pontifical writs or diplomas written on thin, soft parchment and more abbreviated than bulls, and treating of matters of less importance, requiring, therefore, briefer consideration[37]—whence, perhaps, they derive their distinctive name, although it has been suggested that the word comes from the German Brief, a letter, and was introduced into Rome from the imperial court during the middle ages. They are signed by the cardinal secretary of briefs, and differ from bulls in their manner of dating and their forms of beginning and ending. Their heading always contains the name of the reigning pope and the venerable formula, Salutem et apostolicam benedictionem, which was first used by Pope John V. in the year 685. When the pope sends a brief to a person who is not baptized he substitutes 103for this form the other one, Lumen divinæ gratiæ. Both briefs and bulls are always dated from the basilica nearest to which the pope resides at the time; thus, we understand why the brief erecting the diocese of Baltimore was dated (6th of November, 1789) from St. Mary Major’s, although Pius VI. was then living at the Quirinal palace. Another of the very ancient and venerable forms used by the popes is Servus servorum Dei—Servant of the servants of God. It is a title first assumed by St. Gregory the Great in the sixth century as a hint to the arrogant patriarch of Constantinople, John the Faster, who had taken the designation of universal bishop, which belongs only to the Roman Pontiff: “Whoever will be first among you shall be servant of all” (Mark x. 44).
As soon as the cardinal who has been elected gives his assent to the election, the cardinal-dean asks him what name he would wish to take. This custom of assuming a new name is very old, and has been much disputed about by writers on papal matters. The great Baronius has expressed the opinion in his Ecclesiastical Annals that John XII., who was previously called Octavian, was the first to make the change, which he did probably out of regard for his uncle, who was Pope John XI. Cardinal Borgia has observed in this connection, as showing that the change of name was yet a singularity, that the pope used to sign himself Octavian in matters relating to his temporal, and John in those relating to his spiritual, government. Martinus Polonus started a fable that Sergius II., elected in 844, was the one who first changed his name, because known by the inelegant appellation of Pigsnout—Bocca di Porco; but the truth is, as Muratori says in one of his dissertations on Italian antiquities (Antiquitatum Italic., tom. iii. dissert. xli. p. 764), that Sergius IV. (1009-1012), and not Sergius II., had this only for a surname or sobriquet, as was commonly given in that age at Rome, but was baptized Peter. He changed his name, indeed, according to the custom then becoming established as a rule, but, as Baronius observes, not ob turpitudinem nominis (Os porci), sed reverentiæ causa: cum enim ille Petrus vocaretur, indignum putavit eodem se vocari nomine, quo Christus primum ejus sedis Pontificem, Principem Apostolorum, ex Simone Petrum nominaverat. It has long been usual for the new pope to take the name of the pope who made him cardinal. There have been, however, several exceptions even in these later times. In some special cases, as in the signature to the originals of bulls, the pope retains his original Christian name, but, like all sovereigns, he omits his family name in every case. There have also been exceptions to this change, and both Adrian VI. and Marcellus II. kept their own names—the only two, however, who have done so in over eight hundred years.
The word pope—in Latin Papa, and by initials PP.—was once common to all bishops, and even to simple priests and clerics; but when certain schismatics of the eleventh century began to use it in a sense opposed to the supreme fatherhood of the Roman Pontiffs over all the faithful, clergy as well as people, it was reserved as a title of honor to the bishops of Rome exclusively. Cardinal Baronius says, in a note to the Roman Martyrology, that St. Gregory VII. held a synod in Rome against the schismatics in the year 1073, in which it was decreed “inter alia plura, ut PAPÆ Nomen unicum 104esset in universo orbe Christiano, nec liceret alicui seipsum, vel alium eo nomine appellare.”[38] Another singularity about one of the pope’s titles deserves to be noted. The word Dominus in Latin—lord—was originally used only of Almighty God, and a contracted form—Domnus—was employed in speaking of saints, bishops, and persons of consideration; but in course of time, although a vestige of the once universal custom still lingers in the Jube Domne benedicere of the Office recited in choir, the term Domnus came to be specially reserved to the Roman Pontiff, for whom we pray in the litany as Domnum Apostolicum. Cancellieri, who, as usual, has sought out an abstruse subject, gives everything that can be said upon the matter in his Lettera sopra l’Origine Delle Parole Dominus e Domnus e Del Titolo Don che Suol Darsi ai Sacerdoti ai Monaci ed a Molti Regolari. In Roma, MDCCCVIII.
Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, Mass.
On the 14th of December, 1877, died, at the age of sixty-two years and a half, Mr. T. W. M. Marshall. He had borne a long and trying illness of many months with invariable patience and resignation, and gave up his soul to his Maker and Redeemer after a most Christian preparation. He has well deserved that some more explicit notice of his life and what he did in it should be made public than what has hitherto, so far as we know, been given in any native or American source of information. The following slight account is drawn up by one who has known him well for nearly a quarter of a century.
Mr. Marshall was born the 19th of June, 1815; was educated under Dr. Burnup at Greenwich and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was ordained in the Anglican Church by the bishop of Salisbury in 1842. In 1844 he published his Notes on the Episcopal Polity of the Church of England, for which he received the thanks of the then archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Howley. This was the prelate, it may be remarked, to whom the writers of the famous Tracts for the Times dedicated their translation of what they called “this library of ancient bishops, Fathers, doctors, martyrs, confessors of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church,” with, as they added, “his grace’s permission, in token of reverence for his person and sacred office, and of gratitude for his episcopal kindness.” We mention this, because thanks from such a man in such an office for a work on the episcopal polity of the Church of England in 1844, when that polity was not a little canvassed, was an omen of good things to come for the writer, who was then nestled in a very small and poor cure among the Wiltshire downs, once a house of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. These prospects were blighted for ever by Mr. Marshall’s conversion in the following year, 1845. Indeed, he seems in that year to have committed two acts, one blameless and the other highly to be commended, which yet in their conjunction foreboded a life of no small anxiety in temporal matters; we mean to say that his marriage was followed in a few months by his reception into the church at Oscott by Dr. Wiseman. Thus the nest in the southern hills was lost just as he wanted its shelter most, and instead of the future protection of him whom the Tractarian dedication called “The most reverend Father in God, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England”—a patron, it may be added, of one hundred and seventy livings, besides canonries and options—Mr. Marshall, at the age of thirty, with a young wife, commenced a new life without a profession and without prospect, and with 107fifty pounds in his pocket. It may be said Mr. Marshall was true all his life long to the spirit which he thus showed at the first crisis of it.
It may be conjectured that the studies made by Mr. Marshall in composing his work on the episcopal polity of the Church of England predisposed his mind in the following year to seek admission into that world-wide community over which presides the head and source of the episcopate.
It was hardly possible that a clear and conservative and eminently logical mind such as that with which he was naturally endowed could have its attention fixed for so long a time as is requisite to compose a well-thought-out work upon the relations of the bishops to each other throughout the world, without coming to the conclusion that the Anglican episcopate rests on no definite basis whatever; without noticing that no one of its defenders has ever yet been able to state on what positive basis it claimed to stand. It exists, in fact, by reviling the Church of Rome, being itself nothing else but a fragment of Western Christendom severed by Tudor lust and despotism from the compages of Christian unity to which it once belonged, and dragging on an existence in subjection to the state which eminently represents in ecclesiastical matters the insular pride and independence of the English mind. Its root is national, not Catholic; its soil human, not celestial; and for a thinking mind, such as Mr. Marshall’s, to examine its position could lead but to one result when it was accompanied by such honesty of purpose as, by the grace of God, Mr. Marshall possessed and manifested.
For let none misconstrue what Mr. Marshall was doing. To give up at thirty years of age, just married, with no private fortune, the profession of clergyman in the Church of England to become a Catholic layman, was an act not only of remarkable honesty but of superhuman courage. At thirty human life presents a long avenue of years. The prospect of traversing these in poverty and obscurity, with a young wife by your side, when the reasonable hope of honor and affluence has just been presented, is one which perhaps it requires greater trust in God, greater fortitude to meet, nay, to choose, than those, for instance, exhibited who heard themselves ordered to summary execution by the “abagi jussit” of the refined and philosophic Roman gentleman, Pliny the Younger, for having addressed their hymns in the early morning to Christ their God.
Anything, humanly speaking, more absolutely hopeless than Mr. Marshall’s position, after taking that step in 1845, as a married ex-clergyman convert, cannot be conceived. At that time private education offered no emolument, for pupils were entirely in the hands of institutions taught by priests or of individual priests; and as even now the services of a priest, well educated and intellectually gifted, are thought among Catholics in England to be adequately remunerated by the salary of one hundred pounds a year, what chance had a married convert to pick a living out of that mode of employing his brains? Much more was writing—that is to say, for Catholic objects—unremunerative. Brains are still at a fearful discount among Catholics in England. They are not paid as much as the lowest unskilled labor; and if this is true in 1081878, judge how it was true in 1845. The writer believes that it was the very last time he saw Mr. Marshall when he complained bitterly of the inadequate remuneration that he received for writing. Then, further, for any occupation in the outside world, to be an ex-clergyman Catholic convert was the worst possible recommendation. The writer remembers a most distinguished author in Anglican history quitting the railway carriage in which he was sitting, in order not to converse with one who had lately deserted what was called “the church of his baptism”—as if Christian baptism was insular in its nature, and was a peculiar possession belonging to the “penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos.” Such is the lot which, for a whole generation since Mr. Marshall’s conversion in 1845, he and a host of others have voluntarily encountered. Mr. Marshall may be taken as a typical instance of the class. He may be spoken of freely now. He has run his course; he has kept the faith; he knows now fully, as none of us yet know, the wisdom of such a course; as he knew once, as none of us can more fully feel, the folly of such a course in the estimation of the world.
Most unexpectedly, however, and in a way that he could not the least have foreseen, this common lot of indigence and inaction, in which the work of life and the head which supports it are together taken away in the case of a married clergyman-convert, was terminated about three years after by his appointment as an inspector of schools in the government system of primary education. The Catholics were entering into that system in 1847, and, as a consequence of the rules and conditions obtained by the Catholic poor-school committee with reference to such entry, the appointment of a Catholic to the office of inspector by the government, whose nomination, however, was to be approved by the committee as representing the Catholic body, became necessary. The first so appointed was Mr. Marshall, and he held the office from 1848 to 1860. There cannot be a doubt that the functions which he there had to discharge were in certain respects functions which required great delicacy of touch. It was not without many suspicions that Catholic clergy admitted an officer of the government into their schools. That those who had been in old times forbidden every act of their ministry, pursued by ferocious spies of the state into their most secret lurking-holes, unearthed in order to be tortured by the race of Cecils and Walsinghams, and then hanged, drawn, and quartered—this in the first stage of the state’s enmity; then, in the second, who had been contemptuously ignored, and left to struggle with every trial of poverty, and to collect their scattered sheep in holes and corners—that the descendants and inheritors of such men, in whom the royal blood of Peter was flowing, should suspect at first the servants of a government which had done such things in hatred of Peter’s royal blood, this was most natural. We are convinced that during the five years in which Mr. Marshall was the only Catholic inspector of primary schools, he did much by courtesy, and yet more by his character as an uncompromising Catholic, to do away with this suspicion, and to lead an ever-increasing number of Catholic primary schools to accept inspection. 109By this conduct he indirectly raised greatly their standard of efficiency in secular instruction; and he commenced that union of the spiritual and the secular authority in the work of education which is now bearing great fruit, and which is incomparably fairer to the dearest interests of Catholics than the system existing in the primary schools of the United States. We think, indeed, that Mr. Marshall, in his anxiety to conciliate, may sometimes have pushed the limits of indulgence somewhat too far. It is honorable to him that he never spared in his reports to government the open commendation of religious teachers. Some of those reports contain the most enthusiastic praise of Catholic teaching which we remember to have read. And they were reports of a government official.
His occupation of inspector ceased in 1860; and being fully conversant with the circumstances which led to his quitting a post of honor and trust, which was then producing to him an income of eight hundred pounds a year, we must express our strong feeling that it was a great error of judgment on his part which led him so to act that it was possible to deprive him of this office. He was thus thrown back into all those difficulties of maintenance which he had so bravely encountered fifteen years before. It is true that Mr. Marshall was in fibre an author; the elementary character of the education he had to control, and the constant iteration of its petty details, besides the exclusion from his range of inspection of all those religious instructions in which he would naturally have taken a great interest—these things galled him. He fled for refuge to the more interesting subject of “Christian Missions,” on which he composed the well-known work published by him at Brussels in 1862, but which, in spite of the vast number of volumes which it required him to look over for his facts, he managed to compose before he quitted the inspectorship. If he could have had the place of a professor in some great Catholic institution, which would have afforded him a moderate income and a fitting subject on which he could have thrown the powers of his most active and apprehensive mind, that would have been to him an earthly elysium. But elysiums are not of the earth, at least not of nineteenth-century earth to Catholics in England. He gave up eight hundred pounds a year to be for the rest of his life a vigorous, witty, sarcastic, and trenchant Catholic champion and a wanderer on the face of the earth. From henceforth he was of those who have “no abiding city.” If he began this second stadium of his life with an act of imprudence which religion did not call for, which, in our individual judgment, we think it did not even justify, he traversed those seventeen years of bitter trial with the spirit of a confessor, and he ended them with the death of an humble, contrite, earnest Christian. He on whose words, defending Catholic doctrines, illustrating Catholic truths, excited multitudes in great cities have hung, who could make them thrill through with the emotions which he felt himself, died in a small room over a shop in an obscure outskirt of London, tended by an unwearied, uncomplaining affection which had been proof against every sorrow and every trial, and was the only earthly consolation left to him. In the eyes 110of the world it was a sad end of an agitated life. But we make bold to say that he is not sorry now for his choice; and that what he accepted rashly he transformed by endurance into matter for lasting reward, for the praise which does not pass away.
For in this last stadium of his life he showed most conspicuously that which we consider to have been the special honor of it. Let us state succinctly the remaining facts in that life, and then pass to a brief consideration of them. Mr. Marshall went in 1869 to the United States with his family, intending to settle there, which intention, however, he abandoned on a further acquaintance with the country. He lectured there during the winters of 1870-1 and 1871-2 on “The Liberty of the Catholic Church,” “St. Paul and Protestantism,” “Ireland’s Providential Mission,” in most of the large cities. In 1872 he brought out My Clerical Friends, and later on Protestant Journalism, reprinted from the London Tablet, for which he wrote a series of articles on Russia and on ritualism. It was the latter series which was brought to an abrupt termination by his illness in June, 1877. In 1866 he was decorated with the Cross of St. Gregory the Great by the Holy Father as a recognition of his services in the cause of the church; and in 1871 he received the honorary degree of LL.D. in the Jesuit College at Georgetown, near Washington. He broke down at the age of sixty-two. A life which, under less trying circumstances, might have been considerably prolonged, in the possession and exercise of those mental gifts with which he was richly endowed, was thus terminated before its natural time.
What is the lesson which it presents to us? We say without hesitation that the Cross of St. Gregory which the Holy Father presented to him hung on the breast of a true Christian knight. Not for gold nor earthly honor would he sacrifice one jot of Christian liberty. He preferred to be paid poorly for his work as a Catholic than to be paid richly, as he might have been, had he chosen to lay out the gifts of eloquence and clear reasoning and the power of satire which he possessed, in some of many non-Catholic causes. Had he even chosen to write, as many Catholics think themselves constrained to do, on secular subjects, merely taking care not to offend the spirit of the time—intensely anti-Catholic as that spirit is—had he written with all his energy and wit, not against his religion, but keeping it in his pocket, he would, we think, not have died at sixty-two nor in penury. But, so doing, he would not have been worthy of the Cross of St. Gregory; he would have been the world’s journeyman, not the Cross’s knight. Rather than so live, he has died sans peur et sans reproche, with his career shortened, as is the wont of knights; with his shield battered but stainless; with his lance unlowered. God grant many knights of such temper to his church in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, for the times are coming when they will be wanted!
Following the advice once given by an old Anglican preacher to a newly-fledged brother, “When you have nothing else to say, pitch into the pope,” Rev. Mytton Maury contributes to the January number of the American Church Review an article having for title “The Political Rapacity of the Romish Church.” Intrinsically the article hardly deserves a reply, owing to the recklessness with which it puts forth mere assertions and inferences as though they were facts; while yet it should, perhaps, under present circumstances, not be silently passed by without at least a statement of historical truth in regard to some of the events and their causes, which are therein so perverted as to seem to present a sort of partial foundation for deductions that are utterly false. The explicit aim of the article is to show that “in recent as in past times, the unalterable aim of the Church of Rome has been the establishment of its unconditional supremacy, as in things spiritual, so in things political.”
It is the old, often-exploded tale that took very well with the gobemouches in the days when everything said against the church, true or false, was grist to the Protestant mill, but which cannot stand for a moment against a clear, full, and impartial examination of history. The gist of Mr. Maury’s argument is that, as the demeanor of the Papacy was intolerably overreaching and overbearing during the pontificate of Gregory VII., as the Church of Rome is always the same, as not even the gratitude which Pope Pius VII. owed (teste Maury) to the Allied Powers who overthrew Napoleon was sufficient to make that pontiff bate a jot or tittle of the rights of the church, and as not even outrage, injustice, and spoliation were sufficient to induce Pius IX. to forget or barter any of the doctrines or claims of the church, so there is nothing to be expected of any future occupant of the Holy See but that he shall be politically a ravening wolf. Q. E. D. There pervades the article a curious after-taste of a once straight-forwardly-asserted but throughout-insinuated straining on the part of the church in these United States after political aggrandizement—a charge well suited in itself, could it only be made plausible, and we think intended, to catch the ears of the groundlings. Reference is made to a late pamphlet of Von Sybel, from which the writer would seem to have culled his one-sided statements; and we have in the meantime tried to procure that pamphlet, deeming it far better to examine the original than to refute mere excerpta. The brochure in question has not yet been received, and we must content ourselves with a refutation of the ill-founded charges and an exposition of the baseless statements contained in Mr. Maury’s article.
There is an exquisite appropriateness in the fact that the charge of political rapacity comes from a minister of that sect of which Henry VIII., half-Catholic, half-Protestant, and wholly beast, 112was the acknowledged supreme head, the so-called bishops of which sit in the British House of Lords, and owe their appointment to anybody, Jew or Gentile, who may happen to be prime minister. Lord Melbourne—by no means a model Christian, unless as entitled to the name by being an adept in profanity—leaves us ample testimony of the cliquing and caballing by which the appointments to vacant sees were secured, and puts on record a jocose saying that they (bishops and deans) just died to plague him. It is true that their presence in the Lords means nothing, and that they have no power but that of being a little obstructive. That, however, is not their fault. They would fain have more power, if they could. Even in their dioceses they have no sort of effective power belonging to a bishop. Neither clergy nor laity obey them even in spiritual matters, whether in England or in the United States; nor can we for our life see why, on Protestant grounds, in view of the utter nullity of their office, so far as its influence for good is concerned, they have not long ago been abolished, as much more valuable articles have been done away with. In political life other sinecures have in this century been got rid of. Irish disestablishment, which these bishops opposed to their utmost, will infallibly prove the precursor of a similar fait accompli in England. If, after that, the members of their sect choose to maintain them, and even to add to their number, we can have no sort of objection, because then those who utterly repudiate their ministry will not, as now, be obliged to contribute to their support. They may, if they please, match the American army in the proportion of highly-paid, showy, and useless officials to the number of rank and file; in fact, they come in the United States pretty near doing so already. But that is not our business, since we do not pay for them; still, we cannot help having an opinion in the matter.
Again, an impartial observer might reasonably think that a preacher of a sect whose ministers, and, we suppose, their congregations, are of every persuasion or utter want of creed touching the essentials of faith, from the narrowest Calvinism to the most pronounced Puseyism—some of whose highest dignitaries deny the inspiration of Scripture, while others are Universalists, and others, again, denounce the doctrine of baptismal regeneration—a sect which has, in short, less claim to consistency either of faith or practice than any other of all Protestantism—would have enough to attend to in trying to find out what his church did believe and what he should preach, without travelling away to Rome and back to the days of “Hildebrand” for the purpose of raking up falsehoods or misapprehensions with which to bespatter or cast suspicion upon the Church of Rome. This is, perhaps, but a matter of taste; and Mr. Maury’s idea both of taste and duty differs from what ours would be in the same premises. In any case let us see what he has to say, giving his statements such credit as they may prove to deserve.
It is strange, by the way, how the ignorant and insane prejudice which exists among many Protestants against the church warps otherwise fair minds and kindly hearts in the consideration of any question in which she is a party or her rights are in question. We 113venture to say that if any government attempted the same sort of tyrannical interference at this day with the Jews, not to speak of any Christian sect, that Prussia is now striving to exercise over the Catholics of her dominion, a cry of righteous indignation against the wanton and palpable injustice would go up from all the rest of Christendom. We should, perhaps, except the Anglicans, who are less a sect of Christendom than a clique or set of recipients of government pap, with no fixed doctrinal or moral principles save an overweening idea of their own eminent respectability, a thorough knowledge of the buttered side of their own bread, and a keen appreciation of number one. They have become hereditarily accustomed to consider Anglicanism less as a scheme of doctrine and morals than as an institution for distributing government patronage among their ministers, and for securing in these a somewhat superior police in aid of the state. Yet some of the best minds even among these have been very outspoken in condemnation of the aggressions of Prussia upon the principles of religious freedom. Let us imagine even a George Washington appointing the rabbins who should minister to the adults, and the teachers who should instruct in Judaism the rising generation of Hebrews in this country. Is there anybody who does not see at a glance the wrong thereby done these people? Does any one need argument on the subject? Suppose, in addition, he were to claim the right to appoint the instructors in the rabbinical seminaries, to select schismatic or suspended rabbins for the purpose, and to insist on prescribing the curriculum of the establishment in which young men are instructed for their ministry. Would we not all consider them very unjustly treated, and do our utmost to rectify the wrong? Yet this is exactly what the Prussian government has for some years been attempting to do with the Catholics within their territorial limits; and the vast majority of Protestants either look on with indifference or actually encourage the efforts made for rendering the church but a subordinate bureau of government under Bismarck and Falk, of whom it would be exceedingly difficult to say whether they are Protestants, simply infidels, or downright atheists. What is certain is that they are not Catholics and that they hate the church. Not long since the body of a drowned man was being towed ashore in the East River, and a considerable crowd had gathered to see it, when some one on the edge of the dock remarked, “Oh! it’s only a negro.” Nobody took any further interest in the corpse, and the crowd dispersed at once, every one going his way. So, in this case, the idea seems to be that it is only the Catholics that suffer. But these gentlemen will find out, in the long run, that it is a blow at liberty of conscience (for which theoretically they express great regard), struck, it is true, at Catholics only as yet; they will find out, if any sect of Protestantism but holds together long enough, or ever believes anything with sufficient seriousness to imagine it vital, that the same Prussian government has just as strong an objection to any other decided conscience as to the Catholic. In the references that Mr. Maury makes to this struggle we will assume him to be honest; and, in so doing, we must also take for granted that he 114does not understand the nature of the contest between Prussia and her Catholic population, else he would not attempt to represent it as a flaming instance of “unsparing political rapacity” on the part of the church. The fable of the wolf and the lamb has rarely had a more apt illustration.
It will simplify matters very much if we state once for all at the outset that Mr. Maury entirely mistakes the ground held by the church or by Catholic writers on her behalf when he represents them as apologizing for what he calls mediæval pretensions, and deprecating any apprehensions as to their renewal. No Catholic writer takes any such ground; and as the salient instances adduced of such mediæval pretensions is the controversy about investitures, and the action of Pope Gregory VII. towards Henry IV. of Germany, which produced their meeting at Canossa, we, as Catholics, have no apology to make for either. As head of the church, Pope Leo XIII. must to-day protest just as strongly against the right of lay investiture in spirituals; and had he lived at that day, he could, as minister of the sacrament of penance, in view of the shameless debaucheries, atrocious cruelties, monstrous acts of injustice, and heinous sacrileges of Henry, not have done otherwise than impose on the emperor a penance that should be known of all men. The church has yet to learn that one of her members, though he may wear a crown, is any more exempt from her spiritual jurisdiction than if he were clad in corduroy and wielded the pick. St. James would seem quite to have agreed with her; and as before God in heaven, so there can be within the church of God no exception of persons. We accept, then, as crucial instances by which this alleged political rapacity of the church is to be tested, both the question of investitures and the excommunication and deposition of the Emperor Henry by St. Gregory. They really contain all that can or need be said on the subject at issue. If it be shown that only malevolence and ignorance of the times and circumstances could have twisted them to an apparent support of the accusation founded upon them, and not now for the first time brought against the church, we shall have accomplished our task. Apart from what he says on these matters, which are essentially but one transaction, the rest of Mr. Maury’s article is but des paroles en l’air.
In the middle ages and under the feudal system all the lands of each separate country were looked upon as belonging to the sovereign, and were held of him in feudum (hence the name of that system)—on condition, namely, of certain services to be rendered. In no country had the feudatory process got such vogue and attained such magnitude as in that portion of the Holy Roman Empire now going by the name of Germany, about the beginning of the eleventh century. There is no Holy Roman Empire now. Each separate parcel of it has had perhaps twenty different forms of government since, and may within a hundred years have as many more. That emperor was at that time essentially the master of Christendom; and between him and the few smaller monarchs then existing there was no breakwater, no umpire, but the pope. Now, it came to pass in course of time that many bishops 115and abbots in Germany became possessed, by legacy, gift, purchase, or otherwise, in their own personal right or as appanages of their sees or abbeys, of farms, estates, demesnes and castles, to the possession of each of which was attached the condition of rendering at stated times some certain services to the sovereign as their liege lord. Many archbishops, bishops, and abbots there also were who were not simply ecclesiastical rulers but at the same time temporal lords. The people, who unfortunately had then and for ages afterward very little to say, or at least could say but little effectively, in regard to how they should be governed, have left on record an enduring monument of the view they entertained as to the difference between the rule of the secular knights and the ecclesiastical regimen in that most trustworthy of all forms, that evidence which cannot be forged—i.e., the proverb. To this day there is not a dialect of Germany that has not, in one form or other, the saying: “Unterm Krummstab ist gut leben”—Happy the tenant whose landlord bears the crosier. They were well cared for, kindly treated, and their complaints attended to by their clerical landlords, which, we all know, was far from being the case with the serfs and villeins under the marauding knights. There was no reason for objection to the service or homage by which ecclesiastical persons, dioceses, or abbeys held those lands; and with the usual care of the church, which has always laid stress first on the physical well-being of the people and then on their moral improvement—deeming the former at least highly conducive to the latter, and esteeming it of no use to leave a moral tract in a house where there is no bread—the church, we repeat, for the benefit of the people, encouraged at that time the holding of these lands by ecclesiastics, and neither pope, prelate, nor people complained for over two hundred years of the acts of homage—observe that the homage of the middle ages is not our homage of to-day—by which those estates were held. And this, too, though the rulers of the church, having nearly all the prudence, wisdom, and learning then existing in Christendom, must have known, just as well as we do to-day, that every acre of land beyond what is indispensably necessary held by the church, and every building that can be utilized for any other than an ecclesiastical purpose, is simply an inducement to the extent of its value, a temptation to plunder, sure to be acted upon sooner or later by the civil government, until that one shall arise which the world has never yet seen, in which right shall ever be stronger than might.
But under Conrad II. and Henry III. the possession of these lands began to give rise to an abuse which had not been foreseen. Both these emperors were chronically in want of money. They were afflicted with a standing incapacity to pay what they borrowed; and there resulted, as a natural consequence, an exceeding hesitancy on the part of lenders to take the royal word in lieu of funds. The name was no doubt regal, imperial, and all that, but the paper to which was attached the signature or thumb-mark of his imperial majesty was not what would now be denominated on ’Change gilt-edged; and money must be procured. In the words of another and later august emperor: Kaiser bin i, und Knödel muss 116i hale. So these emperors commanded on sundry occasions, when a bishop or abbot died, that the ring and pastoral staff, emblems and insignia of spiritual dignity and jurisdiction, should be brought to them. They appropriated the revenues during the vacancy of the diocese or abbey, prevented the canonical elections from being held, or refused to allow the prelates elect to exercise their functions. But to men of this stamp a lump sum of money in hand was of far more importance than a regularly-recurring income, and they began to give over the ring and crosier to that cleric (of course noble, and of course unfit) who could pay the highest price for them. This knave was then supposed to become bishop or abbot, so far, at least, as to have a right to the temporalities of the see or abbacy—generally all that such a man would care about. In this way dioceses were kept vacant for a series of years and flourishing monasteries went to ruin, since the pope would not (save where a deception was resorted to) permit the consecration of flagitious persons. We need not argue to show that this was simony of the basest sort. The thing had become so general in Germany, and the effect such, at the time of the accession of Henry IV., that, instead of the election of a bishop by the clergy of the diocese, or of an abbot by the monks of the monastery (which is the only canonical mode), the power of appointing and installing both had been seized by the emperor; and it may more readily be imagined than described in words what sort of men the purchasers were. Bishoprics and other prelacies were shamelessly put up at auction; and not merely the right to the temporalities (in itself sufficiently unjust) but the sacred authority itself was currently believed to be conferred by the investiture per annulum et baculum. It was only when things had come to this pass—one plainly not to be borne, unless with the loss of all ecclesiastical liberty and the grievous detriment of religion—that the Roman pontiffs, who had previously intervened but in special instances of complaint, deemed that the foul system must be plucked up by the roots. A more flagrant abuse, or one more imperatively demanding redress, it would be hard to find in all history.
Henry IV. made no scruple whatever of selling all ecclesiastical benefices to the highest bidder, and had already twice disposed in that way of the archiepiscopal see of Milan. He seems to have been a sort of prototype of Henry VIII. of England, but to have ruled over a people of a much less elastic conscience and possessing a stronger sense of religion. In the early part of his reign he sought by all means in his power to procure from the pope a divorce from his wife, Bertha, using the basest means for the purpose of tempting her into seeming criminality. He saw at the time a Gospel light beaming from the eyes of another Anne Boleyn of that day. The refusal of the pope, coupled with the threats of his subjects (we mean the nobility, for there were at that time no subjects in the modern sense), who were more willing to put up with his tyranny than to see the innocent empress treated as poor Katharine of Aragon subsequently was, caused him to desist; but he was a monster of lust, injustice, mendacity, and cruelty. 117Hildebrand, while yet cardinal, wrote to him that, should he ever become pope, he would surely call him to account for his tyranny, licentiousness, and for his making merchandise of benefices. Having been elected in 1073, Hildebrand assumed the tiara under the name of Gregory VII.; wrote at once to the Countess Mathilda not to recognize or countenance in any way the simoniacal bishops of Tuscany; to the archbishop of Mainz to the same effect concerning the intruding prelates of that country; and to Henry himself he addressed at intervals three several letters, warning him of the injury he was doing to religion by his uncanonical and simoniacal course toward the church of God, and exhorting him to desist from his detestable presumption. These several letters and all of them having proved of no effect, he issued his decree, the important words of which begin: Siquis deinceps.
This decree, repeated and confirmed in several Roman synods under St. Gregory, iterated and amplified by Victor III. in 1087, and reiterated by Urban II. in two councils, ended in an agreement between Paschal II. and the Emperor Henry V. that the emperors should cease henceforward to claim the right of investiture, while the bishops and abbots should give up the estates for which they owed service to the crown. It was found impossible to carry this agreement into effect, principally on account of the unwillingness of the people to accept the proposed change of masters; and the last-mentioned pope granted to the emperor that he might go through the form of investiture per annulum et baculum, “providing the elections of bishops and abbots were freely and legitimately held by the clergy and monks, all stain of simony being removed.” However, this agreement, notwithstanding that the liberty of the church was fairly guarded by its provisions, was regarded by the Catholic world as but a temporary repressal of the arrogant claims of the state, which would infallibly be but held in abeyance, to burst forth again under the pretext of the form by ring and crosier; and the agreement was recalled in 1112. The matter was at length finally settled, to the entire satisfaction of the church, by a convention at Worms between Callistus II. and Henry V., which mutual agreement was definitely sanctioned by the First Council of Lateran.
It would be hard to imagine anything more absurd in the face of history than the charge of rapacity, and that, too, political rapacity, alleged against St. Gregory because he would not allow ecclesiastical benefices, abbacies, and bishoprics to be sold like meat in the shambles, and the miscreants who could gather together the largest sums of money to minister at the altar and bear rule over God’s people. That controversy was not excited on account of, or in opposition to, the homage exacted or the investiture conferred on the transfer of secular estates. Those ceremonies were both legal and right. Nobody objected to them then, nor would anybody object to them at this day if lands were held on feudal tenure. If Mr. Hayes chose to grant an estate to the archbishop of Cincinnati in trust for the church (the archbishop has no other use for it), on condition that the archbishop should appear on a certain day of every year and bow three times reverentially toward him, we suppose there is not a Catholic in the 118State of Ohio that would enter the smallest objection to the annual ceremony. But let Mr. Hayes, or any President of the United States, on the death of, say, the bishop of Columbus, send for or take his crosier and ring; still more, let him appoint some one (cleric or not), who is willing to pay for the billet, to the vacant see, and we promise that there would be unpleasant times and doings. There never has been but one legitimate way to preferment, high and low, in the church—that is, the canonical; and now, as in the days of the apostle, he that comes not in by the door, the same is a thief and a robber. As to the statement that the action of the pope, in abolishing investiture by ring and crosier, was in any sense a blow aimed at the independence of civil government, it is simply false; while it is manifest that neither the dignity, the liberty, nor even the very existence of the church was consistent with simony and the advancement of the most unworthy men to her dignities. The pope, whoever he might be, could not have acted otherwise than did St. Gregory; and had the latter not done as he was inspired by the Almighty to do, he could, when dying at Salerno, not have used those words which thrill one as do no other dying words, save those uttered from the cross: “Dilexi,” said the dying saint—“dilexi justitiam et odi iniquitatem: propterea morior in exilio.”
So far is the whole, or any portion, of the history of the church from lending even a semblance of color to the alleged political rapacity of the popes, or any of them, that the plain inference of the man who reads true history in order to find out truth will be that they invariably spurned every consideration of the kind. To keep what influence they held, or to gain any in future, their plan would have been to divorce those bestial monarchs whenever they desired it—to play (like Parker and the Elizabethan bishops) a perpetual minor accompaniment to the monarch’s fiddle. Had they done these things, leaving duty undone and right disregarded, there would have been fewer execrable, political anti-popes in history, fewer popes would have died in exile, and there would have been no trouble whatever about investitures. The complaisance displayed by Luther and Melanchthon toward the landgrave of Hesse, if shown by the pope toward the original head of Anglicanism, would have obviated the necessity for any outward change of religion in England herself. It must be admitted that conscience and not interest seems to have carried the day at Rome.
Under the head of this controversy about investitures, of which we have given the true, as Mr. Maury has given a false and garbled, history (principally from Mosheim, who seems to have manipulated every event simply with a view to favoring Protestantism), he has made incidentally several random and several false assertions. Observe that we do not attribute to him wilful falsehood; but his zeal outruns his judgment, and, if a statement seems to make in his favor, he is not sufficiently careful in verifying it; e.g., “In view of the fact that this church (the Catholic) is making rapid advances in the acquisition of political influence in the United States,” etc.
Here is a statement very glibly uttered and flatly untrue. The church, as such, neither has nor desires to have any political influence 119in this or in any other country; and we challenge the assertor to the proof of his slander. Her members have votes like other people; and there are probably in the United States within her communion (taking the ordinary statistics and ratio of voters to population) about a million voters. But they vote on both sides, like their neighbors; and whenever there are three parties the third always presents a sprinkling of Catholic voters. The proportion of Catholic office-holders in our country never has been in any sort of proportion to the Catholic population; nor do we mention the fact to complain of it. Our prayer is that they may be long kept out of the foul wallow. The only prominent official that we can for the moment recollect was Judge Taney. We believe there is one Catholic in the present Senate, but we doubt very much whether the present House of Representatives contains ten Catholic members. Men like James T. Brady and Charles O’Conor are not apt to be chronic office-holders. These alleged advances toward political aggrandizement, if made at all, have not been made in the dark or in a corner. They must be capable of being pointed out. Put your finger on them; show them to us. What are they? Where are they? Where were they made? We had occasion lately in these pages to insist that the statement was false by which Catholics were represented as all voting one way, or as voting under the direction of their priests and bishops; and we reproduce the words then used, viz.:
“But we appeal to the Catholic voters of this country, of American or foreign birth, to answer: Has your bishop or parish priest ever undertaken to dictate to you how you should vote? Has your vote, on whatever side given, interfered in the slightest degree with your status in the church? Do you know of a single instance in which one or the other of these things has taken place? We cannot lay down a fairer gage. If such things happen, they cannot occur without the knowledge of those among and with whom they are done. Had the proof been forthcoming, the country would have rung with it long ere this. We demand and defy the proof.”
We stand now by what is therein said, adding that people who are unwilling to be brought to law should not assert, at least in print, what they do not know to be true, or might, with very little pains, ascertain to be false. It will not do to make hap-hazard assertions, merely on the ground that they will be well received by a portion of the community, whether small or large. There are people who do not think that it is honest, and who characterize such conduct by a very harsh name. If a writer in the Church Review chooses to address Episcopalians, and those alone, on matters connected with their own special organization, we shall care but very little what he says, and shall certainly not interfere. With them be it. But he shall not make sweeping, false statements about the Catholic Church, without being informed that, however it may have happened, these utterances lack the essential element of truth.
Again, he says: “They (the bishops and abbots) assumed the leadership of the soldiers of the district over which they had jurisdiction,” etc.
We did not imagine that there was any man at this day, pretending to an inkling of education, who did not know that it has at no time been lawful for a clergyman of the Church of Rome to bear arms. Clergymen bearing arms are 120excommunicated by the law of the church. Mr. Maury, in another part of his article, undertakes to give a definition of canon law which is misleading, and bears every appearance of having been culled from some writer who knew as little of the canon law as does Mr. Maury. The drill-master needs only to see a recruit take up a musket in order to state positively: “My lad, you never had a lesson on musket-drill in your life.” To us Mr. Maury’s uncouth and largely false definition of canon law is proof positive that he never opened a book on the subject in his life. And yet he undertakes deliberately to enlighten people upon its nature in print. Fie, Mr. Maury! Let us give you your first lesson on canon law, and it is this: Those clerics who enlist are irregular, and it is prescribed by canon law that “they shall be punished by loss of their grade, as contemners of the holy canons and profaners of the sanctity of the church.” Of course we, like others, have frequently read that little story, well befitting a Protestant ecclesiastical history, in which it is stated that a certain bishop of Beauvais was taken prisoner in arms, and that, on the pope’s interceding for him, the coat of mail in which the prisoner is said to have been clad was sent to His Holiness with the message: “Discerne an hæc sit vestis filii tui.” It is more than probable that the story was made for the sake of the supposed jest. Certain it is that the attempt to trace it deprives it of any authority, while even as a fiction it shows on the part of its author what Mr. Maury has not—viz., a knowledge of the canon law on the subject. Did not a late bishop of Louisiana act as a major-general in the army? Now, canon law is not binding on members of that sect, nor are its ministers at all bound to know the canons, unless, indeed, they undertake to instruct others upon them, and then we humbly submit that things are different.
Once more: “It (the state) expressly limited its right to the temporal advantages belonging to the endowments, and made no claim to conferring the spiritual functions,” etc.
What the state actually did was this. It said: “We have sold to the highest bidder this see or that abbacy. We know full well that to be simony, and that the person on whom we have conferred the crosier and ring is ipso facto excommunicated by reason of that simony. We also know him to be an unfit, and even a grossly immoral, person. But there he is; and you must either consecrate him or that prelature shall not be filled. At all events he shall have the revenues. He has bought and paid for them.” How any man of ordinary honesty, how any one not previously determined by his prejudices to make out a case, should talk of its “not suiting the views of the ambitious pontiff that the church should be subjected to the state even to this limited (sic!) extent,” is one of those things that must remain a mystery till the day when we shall be able to look back on the affairs and actions of this world with a clearer mental vision than any we have borne while in it. Mr. Maury’s sect, founded by a king, the doctrines of which (if it have any) are in England defined by a parliament and its practice decided by the courts, the convocation of which has for two hundred years not ventured to cheep, and then hardly above its breath, can of 121course endure, in view of the loaves and fishes, to be subject to the state in all matters. But the church of God can only, like her Master, render to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and she does not deem conscience to be one of his perquisites. Instructive, if not edifying, reading in regard to the results brought about by the secular power’s appointment of bishops, deans, etc., may be found in the lives, autobiographic and otherwise, of the prime ministers of England. The doctrines of Anglicanism are now, notwithstanding parliaments and courts, just what they have been from the beginning—a series of incomprehensible shifts and evasions, a set of enigmas with no fixed response to any of them. The columns of the London Times will show how “livings” are disposed of, canted at public sale, puffed into fictitious value by representations of the age of the present incumbent and the short-livedness of his family. If we must take instructions from anybody, surely ministers of such a sect as this are not the persons to be listened to either in matter of religion or of taste.
Further on, and in relation to the decree of Pope St. Gregory, we find: “It is impossible to conceive of (sic) presumption surpassing that which inspired this, or to imagine a more absolute disregard of the rights of sovereigns. It was a declaration of war by the church upon the state. Disobedience to it was absolutely unavoidable under the existing system of feudal tenure,” etc.
After what has been given of the history of this controversy it is but a work of supererogation to show that each one of the statements in these three sentences is a separate and distinct falsehood. St. Gregory excommunicated and debarred from entrance into the church the simoniacal holders of bishoprics or abbacies, as also every emperor, duke, marquis, count, knight, or other person who should presume to confer the investiture of a bishopric or other ecclesiastical dignity; he finds no fault with the temporal homage or service due on account of secular estates, whether pertaining to the incumbent or to the prelature. Being head (not of a sect nor of a church, but) of the church, he was not, like a titular archbishop of Canterbury, a mere figure-head, whose presence served to give a false show of authority to ecclesiastical decrees made by a collection of laymen, perhaps not even Christians; and his excommunication must consistently strike all the accomplices in a most nefarious work. It is impossible for a Catholic to conceive how the pope could have acted otherwise than he did, since the church knows to this day, and will till the end of time know, no different rules to apply to those of her members who are highest in temporal dignity from those which affect the poorest inmate of the almshouse. The state had now for nearly a century been making war upon the church; and as to the impossibility under feudal tenure of anything but disobedience to the decree of His Holiness, we see in point of actual fact that the matter was quietly and satisfactorily settled by the withdrawal on the part of the state of the offensive and impious claim to confer investiture in spiritualibus. No one found any fault with the purely temporal homage, and it was only when, by seizure and sale of cross and crosier (with which, according to the rude ideas of many 122people in that age, was involved the spiritual authority), the king put forth a claim to the power of appointing bishops, that the church withstood him to the face. He strove to usurp a spiritual power which never belonged to him or to any other temporal authority. We can all see in history what has been the fate of those sects of Protestantism which, for the sake of mere existence or of temporary courtly favor, have given up the rights and powers that would have been inherent in them, were they a church. Their doctrines are a mass of doubt and contradiction. Their ministry, having neither authority nor message to the world, consists of dumb dogs that bark not. Perhaps Anglicanism has been the most successful of them. Is there any thoughtful man, even among its own members, that can in reason look hopefully forward to its future?
But it will be objected: “All this, however satisfactory so far as it goes, only proves that Henry IV. attempted a very gross outrage against the church; and we freely admit that the pope could then, as he can, in case of necessity, now, excommunicate from the church. The church would be a sham if he could not. But how about the claim to the right of deposing kings, set up by the popes and carried out by St. Gregory against the emperor of Germany?” We entirely acknowledge the reasonableness of the question, not merely from the Protestant point of view, but from the general standpoint of our own days; and we propose to answer concisely (allotted space allowing nothing else) the question put, though a complete response thereto would require a separate book. Meantime, we refer such as wish a full and expansive treatise on the subject to M. Gosselin’s “Pouvoir du Pape au Moyen-Age.”
This power was not, nor was it ever claimed to be, inherent in the Papacy, but was simply the result of a necessity, alike felt and acknowledged by all in those turbulent and unruly times, for some tribunal of final arbitrament. It had its source in the common consent of all Christendom—in the fact that the popes were, in the language of Count de Maistre, “universally recognized as the delegates of that power from which all authority emanates. The greatest princes looked upon the sacred unction as the sanction and, so to speak, as the complement of their right.” Even the highest of all the monarchs of the middle ages, the German emperor, derived his august character and was regarded as emperor in virtue of the unction and coronation by the pope. It was “the public law of the middle ages,” as Fénelon has well explained; and it is the universal acquiescence in that law which explains the conduct of popes and councils in deposing incompetent or vicious rulers. “In exercising this power,” says M. Gosselin, “the popes but followed and applied the principles received, not merely by the mass of the people but by the most virtuous and enlightened men of the age.” We sometimes nowadays have sense enough to avoid a war by leaving the decision of a question to a convention of arbitrators, as in the case of the Geneva conference; sometimes to a single umpire, as the difficulty about the occupancy of the island of San Juan was submitted to the decision of the late king of Belgium. Several international disputes, which might doubtless otherwise have eventuated 123in war, have been left to the emperor of Brazil as arbiter. We know very well that the right to bind by such decisions is in no way inherent in the sovereignty of Brazil or of Belgium, but in the fact that mankind agrees to abide by their decision in the matters submitted to them. Now, in those days, while unfortunately, as history shows us but too many proofs, knaves and scoundrels existed as now, yet while feudalism lasted the theory was that civil society was completely swayed by the spirit of Christianity. All the new governments which had sprung up from the débris of the Roman Empire were indebted both for foundation and nurture, during what may be termed their infancy and childhood, to the fostering care of the popes and bishops. Had it not been for the church, mankind would without doubt have relapsed into a state of barbarism. It is not, then, matter of surprise that common consent should, under those circumstances, have vested in the pope the right of deposing a sovereign in cases where no other remedy existed. Our sole remedy nowadays for such evils rests in the power of insurrection, which may or may not be successful, but must, in either case, be the cause of at least as much misery and far more actual bloodshed than the evils it was meant to remedy. There is room extra ecclesiam for difference of opinion on the subject, and minds do, no doubt, honestly differ as to which of the two is the better plan. For our own part, while we utterly disclaim the remotest sympathy with the feudal system, yet we are not prepared to say that it was not the best possible in that age, and should most unhesitatingly give the preference, first, to papal intervention, as being least likely to be biassed, and, second, to any fixed and recognized, fairly impartial tribunal, rather than risk the doubts and undergo the horrors of rebellion, successful or otherwise. Far be it from us to wish to recall the middle ages with their utter disregard for the rights of the people, who, but for the popes, would have had none to put in a word in their behalf; and it was only under the feudal system that the public law of Europe could call for the interference of him whom all then believed the vicegerent of the Almighty. Laws, nationalities, customs, languages, and religion have all changed. What then was legal and desirable, nay, absolutely necessary, is no longer law; and the lapse of whole nations and of large parts of others from the faith of Christ has abrogated a custom which, like all other civil regulations, could but derive its authority from international consent. It may, however, “be doubted whether in a historical light,” to use the words of Darras, “the system of the middle ages was not quite equal to our modern practice.” But this troublesome and invidious duty thus thrown upon the popes was, however, never claimed to be an integral or essential part of their authority, but simply to attach temporarily to the office by law, consent, and necessity. Of course there were then, as there are now, men who imagined that the political system of their day would never change, and that the Holy Roman Empire and the feudal system would last for ever. It is well to remember that there is but one institution that is sure and steadfast among men—the church to which He has promised who can perform.
The right and duty of excommunicating 124professing Catholic kings and princes is, on the other hand, and always has been, inherent in the Papacy, to be exercised by the pope when all other means have failed, in case of stern necessity and for the good of the church. Such right is inseparable from his office, and can be exercised just as fully from the Catacombs or from a dungeon as from the high altar of St. Peter’s at Rome.
It astonishes us somewhat to find that the mind sufficiently clear to indite the following sentiments should have failed so completely to understand the nature of the struggle over the investitures, and should have seen but through a glass darkly the condition of governments, men, and things requiring the application of his doctrines to practice. Mr. Maury says, and says well:
“It is to be admitted that the intervention of the popes in foreign political affairs in early and mediæval European history was not unfrequently matter of moral necessity. The papal authority constituted for those periods the High Court of International Arbitration. Not seldom the pontiffs stood forth as the solitary champions of right and justice.... We cannot but make ample allowance for their interference; nay, in many cases we must admire it.... In the case of the popes themselves moral necessity must often be allowed to have more than justified their interference in the domestic policy of foreign governments,” etc.
We must hasten through the remainder of Mr. Maury’s article. A great portion of it strikes wide of the mark, having no application to the point at issue, which we understand to be the political rapacity of the “Romish” Church. The sketch of the career of Napoleon, his imprisonment of the pope, the theological opinions of the canaille of generals that the Little Corporal gathered about him, and the action (not of the French people, but) of the rude rabble of the large cities at the time of the Revolution, would seem even to evince that the rapacity existed elsewhere. Again, it would be mere waste of ammunition to argue with an opponent who seriously maintains that gratitude for what he terms “the restoration of the Papacy” ought to have induced Pius VII., or any other pope, to govern the church thenceforward on such principles as would meet the approval of the so-called Holy Alliance. The man who can entertain such a notion has not the first rudimentary idea making toward a conception of what the church of God is, however well he may understand that of Queen Victoria.
Only two further points shall we briefly notice. One is the restoration of the Jesuits by Pius VII.—a fact upon which Mr. Maury lays great stress, as indicating the political rapacity of the church. The order had been suppressed by Pope Clement in 1773, not as having been proved guilty of any wrong whatever, but simply because their existence as an order, under the then circumstances and state of feeling in Europe, seemed to that pope and his council to give not cause but pretext for scandal to a certain portion of nominal Christendom. It is admitted that the prime movers in exciting this enmity against the Jesuits were the infidels in France, the Pombal faction in Portugal, the persons bearing in Spain the same relations to the monarch which were in France held by Madame de Pompadour, and those weak people who believe all that is diligently sounded in their ears from the rostrum or presented to their eyes by the press. Pope Clement deemed it the most 125prudent course to suppress the order, and he did so. It was their duty to obey, and they obeyed to the letter. Had he been a Protestant archbishop or bishop, would he have been so thoroughly obeyed? Would there even have been a pretence of obedience? Had the Jesuits been the wily knaves they are frequently represented as being, would they have disbanded on the instant? Has any association in history, we will not say so powerful, but even one-tenth part so numerous, so able, and so well disciplined, ever been extinguished by the myrmidons of the most powerful civil government? Had they been Protestants, we should at once have had a new and powerful sect. Had they been merely a conscienceless, oath-bound society, they could have gone on, despite all the civil governments on earth. Being Jesuits, they obeyed the mandate of the Vicar of God. Pius VII. deemed the time opportune for their revival. It may be that his experience of the favor shown to the usurping Napoleon during the period of his own imprisonment, and the manifest tergiversations of nearly all the higher French clergy at that unhappy time, caused him to long for the faithful Jesuits. Of this we know nothing. His right to restore them was just as clear as had been that of Pope Clement to suppress them. We propose neither to go into a eulogy of the Jesuits nor to defend them from the slurs and slanders cast upon them, mostly by those who know little more of them than the name. They need no eulogy from us, and are quite competent to defend themselves by word and pen. Mr. Maury (who seems to be an ardent Jesuit-hater; we know nothing of him but his article) is evidently one of those who fancy that the church is a political party, and that, on gaining an advantage over her opponents, she may bargain to shift principles and suit discipline to those who have been instrumental in bringing about the result. We quite agree with him, however, that, judging by all history, the church does not seem to regard herself in that light. Very many popes have died in exile. For seventy continuous years the head of the church was in captivity at Avignon. Pope Pius VII. was long a prisoner at Savona. For all that we know, the present pontiff may yet have to hide in the Catacombs. But neither in the past has there been, nor will there be found in the future, a pope who for personal duress or temporal domain (however clear his right thereto) will barter away one iota of the sacred deposit of faith and practice. The church leaves it to the politicians to seek foul ends by base means—to bargain that “in case you commit this forgery or that perjury for me, I shall, on attaining power, see that you are not only held guiltless but rewarded.” Were this her way of acting, she would be very unlike her Founder, and certainly would not be the institution with which our Saviour has promised to be till the consummation of the world. Mr. Maury would seem to think that he is making a point in charging the church with being true to her principles, with being changeless, with not giving way to feelings of gratitude (?) so far as, upon occasion, to give up her position as the conservatrix of faith and morals. He repeats the charge, under different forms, sundry times in the course of his article. Does he perchance not know that this is 126exactly the characteristic of the church in which Catholics glory? Did he never hear of the church before? Does she now come before his mental vision for the first time? One is really tempted to think so from the fact that he speaks of the pope’s styling himself “God’s vicar upon earth,” as though it were a new title never assumed until Pope Pius used it in his encyclical of March, 1814. If it will do Mr. Maury any good or save him future labor in writing, we can inform him that we Catholics would have neither faith nor confidence in a church that could sway and swerve, that allowed herself to be ruled by politicians or by heretics; and that we all believe Pope Leo XIII. to be, like his predecessor St. Peter, “God’s vicar here on earth.” Let him stop the first Catholic boy he meets who attends catechism class, ask him what is the pope, and he will get that answer in so many words.
The other point is this: Mr. Maury takes it very ill that the church should find fault with the Falk laws and the supervision that the German government claims and attempts to exercise over her in that country; while he asserts that no fault is found with the Bavarian government, which (he says) exercises the self-same jurisdiction over the church that Germany is now striving to carry out. The latter part of his statement is untrue. But, admitting that it were true, cannot even Mr. Maury see that there would be all the difference in the world between permitting to a Catholic ruler certain rights of supervision touching ecclesiastical matters, and giving the same rights to infidels, rationalists, transcendentalists, atheists—in any case to non-Catholics? Perhaps we should hardly expect this, since, unless our information be very incorrect, wardens or vestrymen, or both, may be, and often are, in his own sect, not mere non-communicants but of no profession of religion whatever. That such is the case in England we know; and Mr. Thackeray painted from life both the Rev. Charles Honeyman and Lady Whittlesea’s chapel, which is there depicted as a speculation of Sherrick, the Jewish wine-merchant. True, the Bavarian government has adopted a new constitution subsequent to the establishment of its concordat with the Holy See; and we are far from denying that things would be on a very unsatisfactory footing in Bavaria were the reigning house to become Protestant, or the government, by an accidental (and we admit possible) influx of free-thinkers, to determine to give trouble. This, however, has not yet taken place, and the proverb holds that it is unnecessary to greet his satanic majesty till one actually meets him. We doubt not but that any overt act against the freedom of the church will, in that country, be as promptly resented and rendered as thoroughly ineffective as has hitherto been the case in Prussia. All the power and influence of the German government has, so far, been unable to push the so-called Old Catholics into even a decent show of repute; and no Catholic in communion with the pope will ever lend himself to any such thing as the Bismarckian scheme of a German national church, or national church of any other empire, kingdom, or republic. An independent provincial church is to the mind of the Catholic an utter absurdity; and no proposition looking to any such end 127would for a moment be entertained at Rome. Catholics do not and cannot exist without being in communion with the pope, whosoever or wheresoever he or they may be. It seems grievously to vex Mr. Maury that in no single instance has the church allowed herself to be made, as has the legal sect in England, a mere tool in the hands of the state; and he takes pains to stigmatize what he ironically describes as the “gentle suavity” of Pope Pius and the Cardinal Consalvi, intimating that it was mere stratagem; but he forgets that there is no sort of hypocrisy in doing the best that can be done under given circumstances, providing always that no principle be given up. Even on his own showing the church has under no circumstances abandoned for a moment the principle that she should and must be entirely free from any control of the state in matters spiritual. Were it any one of the little sects that set up such claim for religious freedom as against governmental interference, a cry in its favor would go up along the line from Dan to Beersheba; but in the case of mother church it only furnishes a reason for an article on her political rapacity. Some original genius once remarked that consistency is a jewel. It certainly is very rare; and here is a radiant instance of it on the part of our opponents. The moment that the state presumes to trench upon the domain of conscience we must all obey God rather than man. Usque huc et ne plus ultra. Up to that point we stand ready to act and obey loyally as citizens. Beyond that line we neither can nor will be bound; and they who demand that we should put our consciences in the keeping of Reichstag, Parliament, or Congress know but little of human rights and less of the rightful domain of civil law.
A little reflection might have shown Mr. Maury the absurdity of his statement that Consalvi demanded of the Bavarian government the expulsion of the Protestant population of that country, then amounting to nearly a million. Surely Mr. Maury is joking! In the many centuries during which the popes have had full sway in the Eternal City, not one of them has ever proposed the expulsion of the Jews, a large number of whom have at all times resided in Rome. Mr. Maury represents Cardinal Consalvi as an eminently shrewd man, whereas he must have been little better than an idiot to entertain such an idea, much more to express it in writing, even to the dullest court in Europe. He never did do so. Surely this must be, like several other statements of the writer which we have not time at present to take up, a lapsus pennæ into which haste in writing and zeal for “the good cause” betrayed him. Authority for it we have been utterly unable to find, though the account of the negotiations of that cardinal are in the main given with tolerable fulness in the books at our hand.
That system of religion is surely in a very bad way the hold of which on the minds and consciences of its adherents cannot be maintained without the aid of government; nor does it deserve the name of religion at all when its ministers are such as those must be who owe their appointment to the back-stair intrigues by which men attain political offices. The Roman Curia has shown both wisdom and a high sense of honor in persistently refusing, on principle, to recognize 128any other than the canonical election of her prelates. But it does seem somewhat hard that her unwillingness to curry favor with the various reigning houses and their ministries should be attributed to political rapacity. So far as the pope is concerned, he was just as much the head of the church under the persecution of Diocletian as in the days of Leo X., and is just as really and effectually the father of all the faithful to-day as on the day when the Papal States were restored to him by Pepin in 768. The minds of men have, however, become so accustomed to acts of injustice that they regard them with comparative indifference. The justice of the pope’s claim to the patrimony of St. Peter is infinitely clearer and of far more ancient standing than that of any sovereign in Christendom to the throne he occupies. Necessary to the existence of the Papacy those states certainly are not, save in the sense that he who is not a temporal sovereign must to a certain extent be a subject, and that an ill-disposed government, under or within control of which the pope may be, will always be in a condition to hamper him, and to put trammels on his intercourse with his people over the entire world. As it may well be doubted whether there ever was a period when the Holy Father was more firmly entrenched in the affections and confidence of his faithful children than now, when despoiled of territory, courtly pomp and splendor—all of which he might have retained had he been willing to stretch principle to compliance with iniquity—so a more unsuitable season could hardly, in the view of any impartial on-looker, have been selected for charging the church with political rapacity. Had she possessed that, or desired its results, her position, however high in a worldly point of view, would hardly have been so honorably glorious in the eyes of her faithful members.
(FROM A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD IN ROME.)
Rome, February 21, 1878.
He is no more! As a Christian, he loved justice with the charity of his divine Master; as a priest, his vows; as a bishop, his flock; as a Sovereign Pontiff, he kept the deposit of faith with a great, intelligent love. And we loved him dearly in life, as pontiff never was loved before, and shall ever think of him as the one colossal figure of justice, unmoved and immovable, of the nineteenth century. In memoria æterna erit justus ille; ab auditione mala non timebit.
We thought, as we gazed upon his loving face on the Feast of the Purification, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of his First Communion, that he never looked better. He looked younger, ’twas said by those present. His face had a glow that suggested his early manhood. His voice, too, was vigorous and robust as he addressed the parish priests, the heads of the religious orders, and the rectors of the colleges, who had presented him with the Candlemas taper, according to custom. And when he had thanked all present, and requested them to bear his thanks to the faithful for having offered up prayers to God and the Virgin Immaculate for his recent recovery from illness, he pronounced the sweetest little homily, so characteristic of Pius IX., on the necessity of giving religious instruction to the little ones. Alas! it was the sweetest song of the swan, because the last.
Towards evening, on the 6th inst., it was observed by his physicians that the Holy Father was somewhat feverish. This excited no alarm, for such attacks seemed but the lingering traces of his recent illness. The Pope retired to bed at his usual hour, about ten o’clock. His rest, however, was not tranquil. He seemed to be oppressed in his breathing. About four o’clock on the morning of the 7th he was seized with a shivering chill, his breathing became quick and hard, his pulse excited. About half-past six o’clock the fever came on with greater force, producing an utter prostration of the august patient. His mental faculties remained clear and undisturbed, and at half-past eight he received the Viaticum with great devotion from the hands of his sacristan, Mgr. Marinelli. The malady became more intense, the catastrophe inevitable; so at nine o’clock he was anointed. Meanwhile, the news of the Pope’s sudden and dangerous illness had spread through the city, and the cardinals hastened to the Vatican. By order of the cardinal-vicar the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in all the churches of the city. That fact contained the dread significance that the Pope was dying. The Romans flocked to the churches and prayed fervently against the crisis, yet trembled at the thought that, when the Blessed Sacrament would be restored to the tabernacle, all would be over, well or ill. The cardinals and prelates assembled around the bed of the sufferer knew too well what the issue would be. He knew it himself, for, taking the crucifix from under his pillow, he blessed them. His suffering increased. At one o’clock p.m. Cardinal Bilio, the grand-penitentiary, began to repeat the last prayers of the church for the dying. The Holy Father pronounced distinctly, though with the greatest difficulty, the act of contrition. Then he subjoined in a voice that betokened great trust, “In domum Domini ibimus”—We will go into the house of the Lord. When the cardinal came to pronounce the last address to the departing soul, he hesitated at the word proficiscere (depart); but the Pope added quickly, “Si! proficiscere”—Yes! proficiscere. When he had repeated the exhortation the cardinal knelt down and asked the dying Pope to bless the cardinals. There were present Cardinals Borromeo, Sacconi, De Falloux, Manning, Howard, and Franchi. He raised his right hand and made the triple sign of the cross. It was the last 130Apostolic Benediction imparted by Pius IX. At half-past two in the afternoon the rumor spread through the city that the Pope was dead. Telegrams to the same effect were sent to all parts of the world by the correspondents of the press. The secretary of the Minister of the Interior had caused a bulletin of the same tenor to be posted up in the vestibule of Parliament. But the agony of death had not even set in upon the venerable patient, though all hope of a change for the better was abandoned. At half-past three the struggle began in very earnest. It was a sight that brought copious tears to the eyes of the beholders—Pius IX. in his agony. Never more strongly than during those supreme moments did the youthful vitality of the Pontiff manifest itself. Two hours and a half of a death-agony is something we associate only with robust constitutions in the flower of manhood. At five o’clock the physician requested Cardinal Bilio to pronounce a second time the recommendation of the departing soul. He did so, and then, kneeling down, he began the rosary, giving out for contemplation the Five Sorrowful Mysteries. At the fourth—the carrying of the cross—he stopped, looked anxiously at the face of the Pontiff, stood up, and gazed still more eagerly upon those loving features. The eyes had closed sweetly, a pearly tear, just born, glistened on the lids, the lines of agonizing pain seemed to disappear perceptibly—it was all over, and the Angelus bell rang out over a fatherless city, ay, a fatherless world.
The news created no excitement. There was no crowd to speak of in the Square of St. Peter. Only a few loiterers stood for a moment gazing up at the bronze doors which open into the Vatican; but they “moved on” at the quiet request of a policeman. There were no soldiers visible—nothing war-like, if exception be made to the bristling bayonets of the Swiss Guards. Soon after the Ave Maria the bronze doors were closed, and the loiterers betook themselves across the Bridge of St. Angelo into the city. There all was quiet, too, save and except the theatres; they went on performing, though the authorities had a superabundance of time to order them to be closed. The two lesser theatres, in which Pulcinella gives nightly amusement to the unlaved of Rome, closed of their own accord on hearing of the Pope’s death. The other theatres received official notice to suspend performances until further notice, on the following day. During the day of Pius IX.’s suffering King Humbert and Queen Margherita sent repeatedly to the Vatican to inquire after his health. During the night the following notification from the cardinal-vicar of Rome was affixed to the churches:
“TO THE CLERGY AND PEOPLE OF ROME.
“Raffaele, of the title of St. Croce in Gerusalemme, cardinal-priest of the Holy Roman Church, Monaco La Valletta, Vicar-General and Judge-Ordinary of Rome and its district, Commendatory Abbot of Subiaco.
“The Majesty of God Omnipotent has called to himself the Sovereign Pontiff, Pius IX., of holy memory, as we have just been advised by the most eminent cardinal-chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, to whom it belongs to give public testimony of the death of the Roman Pontiffs. At this announcement the Catholic people in every corner of the world, devoted to the great and apostolic virtues of the immortal Pontiff and to his sovereign magnanimity, will mourn. But above all let us weep profoundly, O Romans! for to-day has unfortunately ended the most extraordinarily glorious and prolonged pontificate which God has ever granted to his vicars on earth. The life of Pius IX., as Pontiff and as sovereign, was a series of most abundant benefits, both in the spiritual and temporal order, diffused throughout all the churches and nations, and especially upon his own Rome, where at every step monuments of the munificence of the lamented Pontiff and father are met with.
“According to the sacred canons, in all the cities and distinguished places solemn obsequies and suffrages shall be celebrated for the soul of the deceased hierarch, and every day, until the Holy Apostolic See be provided with a new chief, solemn prayers shall be offered up to implore from his divine Majesty a most speedy election of the successor of the never-to-be-sufficiently-lamented deceased.
“To this effect, 1. Notice is given 131that public and solemn funeral services will be celebrated in the patriarchal Vatican basilica by the chapter thereof, whither, as soon as possible, the body of the immortal Pontiff will be carried, and placed, according to custom, in the chapel of the Most Holy Sacrament. 2. It is ordained that in all the churches of this illustrious city, as well of the secular as the regular clergy, and privileged in any way, all the bells be rung in funeral notes for the space of an hour, from three to four, to-morrow. 3. As soon as the precious mortal remains of the Sovereign Pontiff be carried into the Vatican basilica, solemn obsequies shall be celebrated in the aforesaid churches. 4. The reverend clergy, secular and regular, are exhorted to offer up the unbloody Sacrifice in suffrage for the soul of the august deceased, as has always been done, and the communities of both sexes, as also all the faithful, are invited to recommend his blessed soul in their prayers. 5. Finally, it is prescribed that in each of the aforesaid churches, in the Mass and other functions, the collect Pro Pontifice be added as long as the vacancy of the Apostolic See shall last.
“Given from our residence, February 7, 1878.
“R. Card. Monaco, Vicar.
”Placido Can. Petacci, Secretary.”
Soon after the soul of Pius IX. had departed his physicians returned to the chamber of the dead, now guarded by two of the Noble Guards—who never lose sight of the body until it is consigned to the tomb—and made a formal autopsy, which they couched in these terms: “We, the undersigned, attest that His Holiness Pope Pius IX., already affected for a long time by slow bronchitis, ceased to live, through pulmonary paralysis, to-day, February 7, at 5.40 p.m.—Dr. Antonini, physician; Dr. Ceccarelli, surgeon; Dr. Petacci, assistant; Dr. Topai, assistant.”
Dr. Ceccarelli then composed the body reverently on the bed, and covered it with a white cloth; whereupon it was carried into a neighboring chamber, looking north, towards the Belvedere wing of the palace. Detachments of the chapter of St. Peter’s kept a vigil, reciting psalms the night long. On the following morning, the 8th inst., Mgr. Macchi, Master of the Chamber, attended by Mgri. Casali del Drago and Della Volpe, Participating Secret Chamberlains of His Holiness, repaired to the apartment taken possession of the previous evening by Cardinal Pecci, Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, and gave him a formal announcement of the death of the Pope. The cardinal, having put on robes of violet, which is the mourning of the church, repaired in procession with the rest to the room in which the venerable remains lay, to effect a solemn mortuary recognition. All knelt down and prayed for a while in silence. His eminence then recited the De profundis, and, standing up, he reverently raised the cloth from the face of the dead. Taking a little silver hammer from the hand of a master of ceremonies, he struck the forehead of the Pontiff with it thrice, pronouncing at each stroke, in a loud voice, the name of the Pope. After a momentary silence he turned to those present and said: Papa vere mortuus est—The Pope is indeed dead. The cardinal then tendered a request to Mgr. Macchi, Master of the Chamber, for the Fisherman’s ring, which was still on the finger of the Pope. The monsignore removed it and gave it to the cardinal, who wrote a receipt for it. Thereupon Mgr. Pericoli, Dean of the Apostolic Prothonotaries, knelt down and read the following attestation: “This morning, February 8, at eight o’clock A.M., the Most Eminent and Reverend Cardinal Pecci, Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, accompanied by the College of Clerics of the Chamber, by Mgr. the Vice-Chamberlain, by Mgr. the Auditor of the Reverend Chamber, by the advocate-general of the Apostolic Chamber, by the procurator-general, and by the two secretaries and chancellors of the Chamber, repaired to the private rooms of His Holiness, in one of which he found on the death bed the corpse of his same Holiness.
“Having ascertained the death of the Holy Father, and recited opportune prayers in suffrage of the blessed soul, his aforesaid most reverend eminence made a request to the Most Illustrious and Reverend Mgr. Macchi, Master of the Chamber of His Holiness, for the Fisherman’s ring, which was immediately consigned by the same Mgr., the Master of the Chamber, to the most eminent chamberlain, who received it, with 132a view of presenting it in the first cardinalitial congregation (to be broken); for which ring his most reverend eminence gave an act of receipt to the aforesaid Mgr. the Master of the Chamber.
“Whereof, at the request of the most eminent and reverend chamberlain, a solemn act was drawn up, rogated by the Most Illustrious and Reverend Mgr. Pericoli, cleric of the Chamber, and Dean of the College of Apostolic Prothonotaries, the act being signed by the most eminent and reverend chamberlain, by the others above named, and by the two secret chamberlains of His Holiness, the Most Illustrious and Reverend Mgri. Casali del Drago and Della Volpe, in the quality of witnesses.
“According to the injunctions made by the eminent and reverend chamberlain to the clerics of the Reverend Apostolic Chamber, these assembled in the presence of his most reverend eminence, in an apposite congregation, and in the regular manner, divided among themselves the different offices.”
The supreme government of the church during the vacancy of the Apostolic See belongs to the cardinal-chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, and to the deans of the three orders of cardinals—bishops, priests, and deacons. These are respectively Cardinal Pecci, Cardinal Amat, dean of the cardinal-bishops, Cardinal Schwarzenberg, dean of the cardinal-priests, and Cardinal Caterini, dean of the cardinal-deacons. Cardinal Simeoni’s office as Secretary of State ceased with the death of Pius IX., and will be discharged ad interim by Mgr. Lasagni, secretary of the Council and of the Consistory. He retains the office of prefect of the apostolic palaces. Every day during the Novendiales (that is, the nine days on which solemn obsequies are celebrated for the deceased pontiff) there is a congregation of the cardinals, whereat their eminences appear with the rochet uncovered, as a sign of jurisdiction. They are all popes in fieri. In consideration of this a cardinal always rides alone in his carriage during the vacancy. Moreover, during the conclave, in the general reunions of the cardinals, each one has a canopy erected over his seat. When the election takes place all the canopies are removed, save that which is over the seat of the pontiff-elect.
Immediately after the ceremony described, an extraordinary congregation of the cardinals was held in the palace of the Vatican. Object, the manner of celebrating the funeral services; and the question, Where is the conclave to be held? The first question was disposed of quickly, it being unanimously resolved to observe the constitutions as regards the funeral. The question of where the conclave should be held presented many difficulties, considering the political circumstances of the Holy See at present. The foreign cardinals, and Cardinal Manning in particular, supported the proposal of not holding the conclave in Rome, not only because little faith was to be placed in the Law of the Guarantees, but for the reason that it would be a new and powerful protest against the usurpations consummated by the Italian government. The Italians overruled these considerations, and constituted a majority in favor of holding the conclave in Rome. Cardinal Manning’s project of holding the conclave at Malta received thirteen votes.[40] Some city on the Adriatic coast of Austria was also proposed, but with little favor.
Pending this discussion the canons of St. Peter’s washed the body of the Holy Father in scented water, and then gave it to the physicians to be embalmed. This was on the evening of the 8th inst. They performed the operation in the traditional way, taking out the præcordia and embalming them separately; afterwards the body. The præcordia, according to an old tradition, are interred in the parish church near which the pontiff dies; consequently those of Pius IX. will be buried in St. Peter’s. Had he died at the Quirinal, the church of SS. Vincenzo and Anastasio would receive them. The operation of embalming was brought to a successful termination on the morning of the 9th.
The city on the 8th presented a sad appearance. All the shops were closed, traffic for the most part was suspended, the Bourse was closed, and the soldiers marched to and from their regular stations without music. There were no amusements in the evening, and very few people 133to be seen in the streets. A shadow rested on the city. There was a great blank. Something was wanting—is wanting. The world seems strange, purposeless, and unutterably dreary without Pius IX.
After the embalming process his body was vested in the white cassock, the red cope bordered with ermine, and the camauro, or red cap, likewise bordered with ermine, placed on the head. He was then laid out on a modest catafalque, under a canopy, in one of the halls of the Vatican. The Roman nobles and persons of distinction were permitted to see him. Never have we seen death so beautiful as in Pius IX. His face, always aglow with a sweet smile, was now doubly sweet and restful. There was not a trace of pain left on it, and its beautiful whiteness seemed a supernatural glow which God had breathed there for his well-meriting servant. The hands, too, clasping his beloved crucifix, seemed to have a warmth about them which is not associable with death. Indeed, he seemed to sleep, did our Holy Father. Towards nightfall the body was habited in full pontificals, golden mitre, red chasuble, red satin gloves, gold-embroidered, and red satin slippers, also richly wrought in gold; and when darkness descended upon the Eternal City they carried Pius IX. down into St. Peter’s. The Swiss Guards formed themselves into a double line in the halls of the Vatican and along the Loggie of Raphael, whose classic beauty, recently restored and enhanced, will bear testimony ages hence to the munificence of Pius IX. as a Mæcenas. Masters of the horse in their fantastic and quaint liveries, the canons of St. Peter’s bearing torches and chanting the psalms, mace-bearers robed in sable velvet, and a detachment of the Swiss, bearing their pikes reversed, preceded the bier. This was borne on the shoulders of the throne-bearers, and a square was formed around it by the Noble Guards in full uniform and the penitentiaries of St. Peter’s. They were followed by the domestic prelates of the papal household, and the secular and military officials, likewise in dress uniform. The cardinals succeeded, marching two abreast, bearing torches, and responding to the psalms as intoned by the clergy in advance. They were followed by a detachment of the Palatine Guard. The Roman nobles, and other personages of distinction, brought up the rear of the procession. The flaming torches lighting up the halls, the corridors, the regal stairway, down which the cortège moved, the liveries of the servants, the uniforms of the soldiers, the robes of the priests, the purple of the cardinals, and, above all, that already heaven-lit face looking upwards, as if in placid and joyous contemplation of the Truth Eternal, the assertion and vindication of which was his dearest object in life, produced a sensation in the beholder which baffles description, there being no term of comparison to which we can liken it. And the muffled psalmody in those silent halls, inexhaustibly silent because of the circumstance and the hour, seemed to be, what it indeed was, the music of another and a tranquil sphere, where there is no “hostile domination,” no death.
The procession entered St. Peter’s, by an inner door communicating with the palace, at seven o’clock. It was met by the chapter of St. Peter’s, who led the way to the chapel of the canons in the right aisle. The bier was placed precisely within the iron railing of the chapel, so that the feet of the venerable Pontiff extended outside sufficiently far to allow the people to kiss the papal slipper. It gently inclined towards the railing, thus giving a perfect view of its precious burden even at a distance. It was covered with a red silk pall, delicately embroidered with gold thread. At either side hung a red cardinalitial hat of the primitive form, which used to be carried before His Holiness in grand processions.
At an early hour on Sunday morning, long before dawn, the steps of the great temple were crowded with people, waiting for the moment when the bronze doors would swing open and admit them to view the remains of their father. Detachments of the Italian soldiery had taken up positions within the vestibule and outside. Others marched around the basilica and entered by the sacristy door. They formed a double line from the door of entrance on the left, up along the corresponding aisle, across the nave, and down to the door of egress. Those stationed at the iron gates of the vestibule had a difficult task in trying to stem the onflowing and irresistible tide of 134thousands of people when the gate at last swung open. They acquitted themselves well, poor fellows, and as reverently too, both within and without the temple, as could be expected under the circumstances. As the people entered the temple at half-past six A.M. a solemn Mass of requiem had already commenced in the chapel of the canons. It was the first of the Novendiales. Throughout that day and the three following a continuous stream of people of all classes flowed into and out of St. Peter’s, and every individual paused, at least, to contemplate that figure lying in peaceful repose, a heavenly contrast, to the intelligent, against the pleasure-surfeited and revolting mass which defied the embalmer’s art, yet was enshrined at the Quirinal not a month since. And thou, Mark Minghetti, who didst abandon this sainted figure to serve that other in the name of liberty, forsooth, what has brought thee into St. Peter’s, and face to face with the holy dead? Speak, thou whose deeds for the past quarter of a century have been at cross-purposes with good faith; unbosom thy sentiments as thou didst linger at the catafalque of thy old and too-trusting master! Thou, too, Visconti Venosta, author of the notorious Memorandum of 1870, wouldst gaze once more on the face of him thou conspiredst to betray? Many a traitor besides these two went there, and the exponents of their iniquity, the liberal papers, said that Pius IX. seemed to sleep, and commended the martial bearing of the four Noble Guards who stood erect and vigilant around the catafalque.
On Wednesday, the 13th, in the churches of St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran, solemn obsequies were also celebrated, and every parochial church in the city was on that day the scene of pious suffrages for the soul of Pius IX. In the basilicas lofty catafalques were erected, surmounted by a tiara, and surrounded with blazing torches. That in the church of St. Mary Major bore, inscribed on its four sides, a pithy yet adequate panegyric of the Pontiff—Religio, Fides, Spes, Caritas.
It is Wednesday evening; the great aisles of St. Peter’s at seven o’clock are empty. The bronze doors are shut. Torches, blazing in the nave of the basilica, reveal to our gaze a procession of cardinals emerging from the door of the sacristy, and moving with measured and reverential steps to the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament; the domestic prelates of the papal household, already there; the canons in surplice—one of them, Mgr. Folicaldi, in black pontificals and a snowy mitre, attended by deacons and subdeacons of honor, also in black; the officials, civil and military, of the palace in full dress; the Noble Guards; the Swiss in burnished helmets and cuirasses; the little garrison of the Vatican; the gentlemen of the pontifical court, and the Roman nobles. All form themselves into a procession. The choir sings the Miserere. Eight canons take up the catafalque. The procession moves up past the bronze statue of St. Peter, around the tomb of the apostles, and down the further aisle, to the chapel of the canons. It is the funeral of Pius IX. The catafalque is placed in the middle of the chapel. Arranged in order on the floor are three coffins—one of cypress-wood, one of zinc, and a third of chestnut. The officiating prelate blesses the first, sprinkling it with holy water, and then incensing it. Meanwhile, the cardinals press around the bier, and reverently kiss that sacred right hand which had so often blessed them, and the feet of the Pontiff. All who can come near enough do likewise. Mgr. Ricci, major-domo, spreads a white cloth over the face of the Pontiff, thus hiding it for ever from the view of man. The canons take up the pall, with its precious burden, and place it in the coffin. When the body had been properly composed, Mgr. Macchi, Master of the Chamber, placed beside it three purses of red velvet, containing respectively as many medals, gold, silver, and bronze, as there were years of the pontificate of Pius IX. A violet ribbon was sealed crosswise over the body to the edge of the coffin, with four separate seals: that of the cardinal chamberlain, that of the major-domo of the palace, a third of the archpriest of St. Peter’s, and a fourth of the chapter. Two masters of ceremonies spread a red silk cloth over the body, and a third dropped at the feet a tin tube containing a roll of parchment, on which was written in Latin the eulogy of the Pontiff. The carpenters do the rest. On the lid of the zinc coffin there is the following inscription:
When the workmen had closed the last coffin they carried it out of the chapel to a place on the left, where there was an opening in the wall high up. It was the temporary resting-place of Gregory XVI., and is of every deceased pope until he obtain permanent sepulture. It is surmounted by a marble sarcophagus adorned with a tiara. By means of ropes and pulleys they hoisted the coffin into the niche, and, after having walled up the aperture with bricks and cement, they laid on the outside a small slab of marble, with this inscription:
PIUS IX. P.M.
A cardinal was heard to say in a voice of emotion, as all quietly moved away: Tanto nomini nullum par elogium!
Two days after, the will of Pius IX. was opened by the cardinal-chamberlain in the presence of the relatives. It was written with his own hand, and dated in the year 1875. A few codicils were added since that date. He bequeathed 100,000 francs to the poor of Rome. He always loved them, and it was to perpetuate the memory of that love that a subscription was immediately opened after his death by the Italian Catholic journals, under the title of “Pius IX. Eternal in charity.” To this end, by the advice of the cardinal-vicar of Rome, a sumptuous church will be erected on the Esquiline, and dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Conception. Side by side with the church will rise up two extensive asylums for the poor, old and young, of both sexes.
The funeral services performed by the Sacred College of Cardinals began in the Sistine Chapel on Friday morning, the 15th. They were attended by the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, by the Roman nobility, and persons of distinction who received invitations. A wish was expressed indirectly by the King of Italy to be present. The cardinal chamberlain took no notice of this indirect wish. The obsequies lasted for three days. After each service the Sacred College gave a reception to the diplomatic personages in the Hall of the Consistory. Pending these events, the preparations for the conclave were completed. The story of the Vatican above the apartments of the Holy Father was divided off into little cells for the cardinals and their attendants. The windows outside were covered with gratings, and the court of St. Damasus entirely walled up to prevent any communication with the outer world. Physicians, an apothecary, barbers, cooks, and bakers, were appointed. On Monday morning, the 18th, the Mass of the Holy Ghost was celebrated in the Pauline Chapel by Cardinal Schwarzenberg. All the cardinals and officers of the conclave were in attendance. The diplomatic corps assisted in stalls allotted to them. A Latin oration De eligendo Summo Pontifice was read after the Mass by the Secretary of Briefs. This might be termed the formal inauguration of the conclave. At half-past four of the same evening the cardinals all, of the Holy Roman Church, with but three exceptions—their Eminences Cullen, McCloskey, and Paya y Rico—assembled in the Pauline Chapel, whence, having recited the usual prayers, they proceeded in procession to the Sistine Chapel, singing the Veni Creator Spiritus. There the sub-dean of the Sacred College, Cardinal di Pietro, read the Papal Constitutions on Conclaves, after all but the cardinals had been invited to withdraw. The reading of the constitutions was followed by a solemn oath, pronounced by the cardinals in a body, to observe them faithfully. This oath had previously been sworn in the presence of the cardinal-chamberlain, Pecci, by the patriarchs, archbishops, and auditors of the Rota, who were to mount guard at the cells of the cardinals to prevent their communicating each with the other. The marshal of the conclave, Prince Chigi, had also been sworn. The doors of the chapel were then opened, a cleric took up the processional cross, reversing the figure toward the cardinals, who followed, each one accompanied by a Noble Guard, and all entered the precincts of the conclave. Each cardinal entered the cell which had fallen to him by lot. That night, in company with the cardinal-chamberlain, and the deans of 136the three cardinalitial orders, and the apostolic prothonotaries, the marshal made a formal visitation of the cells and precincts of the conclave, after which the chamberlain consigned to him a purse containing the keys, and, with the other cardinals, retired to his cell. The doors of the cells and the general entrance of the conclave were locked, and a formal document attesting the operation was read and subscribed to. The reign of silence and communion with the Paraclete began. Pending the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, let us glance at the world outside.
In deference to the conclave the government postponed the opening of Parliament until the 7th of March. Whether this was done from a sense of genuine reverence for so sacred and imposing an assembly, or with a view of showing their loyalty to the Law of the Guarantees, is not definitely known. But the fact aroused the indignation of the radicals. They at once proposed to organize a mass meeting of disapproval of the Guarantees, and, accordingly, demanded the required permission from the Minister of the Interior. He refused it. Inde ira. As may be supposed, speculations were rife in all circles as to the future Pontiff. It was hoped, and asserted pretty generally, that Cardinal Pecci would be elected. It was feared by all Italians, liberals, conciliators, and non-compromittals, that Cardinal Manning, who is exceedingly unpopular in radical Italy, would, through some unexpected combination of circumstances, come out of the conclave a pontiff. It was reported that the Sacred College itself was divided into three parties—the conciliating, of which Cardinal di Canossa was supposed to be the exponent and hope; the extreme rigorists, of whom the favorite was the young Cardinal Parocchi, of Bologna; and the statu-quoists, represented by Cardinals Bilio and Simeoni.
On Tuesday, the 19th of February, an immense concourse of people, assembled in the Square of St. Peter’s, witnessed the traditional sfumata, or smoke, rising from a particular chimney of the Vatican, which signalized the burning of the votes at the first scrutiny in the Sistine Chapel. This meant no election. It has been ascertained since that Cardinal Franchi’s name was called out twenty times at that verification. On the following day, the memorable 20th, at half-past twelve p.m., the smoke again arose over the Vatican, and the multitude began to move away towards the Bridge of St. Angelo. Comparatively few people remained. But about an hour after they observed the window of the great balcony of St. Peter’s to open. An acolyte appeared bearing a cross, and then Cardinal Caterini, who, from old age, infirmities, and the emotion of the moment, could scarcely make himself heard to the following effect: “Annuncio vobis gaudium magnum: habemus Papam Eminentissimum et Reverendissimum Dominum Pecci, qui sibi nomen imposuit
“LEONIS DECIMI TERTII!”
This announcement was received with cheers in the square below. The great bell of the basilica began to ring joyously, and every bell in the Eternal City re-echoed the glad news to the people, and hurried them in haste to St. Peter’s. Let us go back an hour in our narrative. The votes were counted at noon, and the name of Cardinal Pecci was read aloud forty-four times, thus giving him the two-thirds majority required for election. The sub-dean of the Sacred College then opened the door of the chapel and ushered in the master of ceremonies. With the assistance of others, he lowered all the canopies which covered the seats of the cardinals, with the exception of number nine on the gospel side of the altar. The sub-dean of the Sacred College, accompanied by Cardinals Schwarzenberg and Caterini, approached his Eminence Cardinal Pecci, and asked him if he accepted the election: “Acceptasne electionem in Summum Pontificem?” He replied that, albeit unworthy of the great charge, he would submit to the will of God. The sub-dean continued: “Quomodo vis vocari?” “Leo Decimus Tertius” was the reply. He was then conducted into the sacristy by two cardinal-deacons, Mertel and Consolini, and attired in the white cassock, red slippers bearing the cross, the rochet, red cope, stole, and white cap of the Sovereign Pontiff. Returning to the chapel, he received the homage of the Sacred College, after which Cardinal Schwarzenberg, just nominated pro-chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, placed upon his finger the Fisherman’s 137ring. The Pope immediately retired to his cell. The cardinals followed his example.
Meanwhile, the people had assembled in great numbers in the square and in the basilica, awaiting the appearance of His Holiness. It was not known whether he would give his blessing from the outer or the inner balcony of the temple. The traditional place was outside. Consequently, on the appearance of any one at the window of either balcony, there was a precipitous rush of the people in that direction. The noise in the basilica was like the roar of a storm-tossed sea. At last—it was half-past four o’clock—two prelates opened the window of the balcony which looks into the church, and hung over the railing some red bunting. Soon after the anthem Ecce sacerdos magnus was heard, and then a powerful, robust voice, Sit nomen Domini benedictum. It reminded people of another voice which erst rang out benedictions with the clearness of a trumpet from the outer balcony. But the figure which now appeared was tall, spare, yet imposing, and the features, worn and wan with rigid austerities, were lit up by large, brilliant orbs, that beamed gladly on the excited people below. When he had pronounced the trinal blessing in a firm voice, a great, deafening cheer arose, startling the dormant echoes of the vast edifice, and sending them quivering from nave to transept, and thence aloft into the gigantic dome itself. Again and again did the evvivas burst forth from every lip, and high, unmistakably pronounced above them all rang out the Saxon hurrah! Every difference, political and religious, was forgotten in that moment of joy. Jew from Ghetto, deputy from hostile Parliament, officer and private of invading army, dissenting Anglican from Albion, and downright, practical American joined in the shout of Viva il Papa! Viva Leone! His Holiness stood for a moment gazing on the enthusiastic multitude, then motioned with his hands, as if to deprecate any demonstration, and moved away. He did not appear at the outer balcony. We forbear putting any construction on this circumstance. The conclave was opened formally in the evening by the marshal, and the cardinals retired at nightfall to their homes. The new Pontiff moved to his apartments, and the attendants read in the severe lines of thought which had settled on his brow that he wished to remain alone for the night.
Glad words of congratulation are exchanged in all circles throughout the city, and a universal, spontaneous confidence has sprung into existence; for the man who has just blessed the Catholic world as its father is pious, learned, and very severity itself in firmness.
The Church is no longer a widow.
New Ireland. By A. M. Sullivan, Member of Parliament for Louth. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1878.
Mr. Sullivan has invented for his country a new name that is pregnant with meaning and significance. At least, the name is new to us, and it represents a great fact. The old Ireland, the land of confiscation and bitter penury, of enforced ignorance and compulsory poverty, of chronic revolution and periodical famine, the exercise-ground of political proscription and religious persecution, is passing away under our eyes. A new Ireland is indeed springing up in its place—by no means a land as yet flowing with milk and honey, and stripped of all that cumbered it and darkened its life before, but a land full of hopeful possibilities for all good in itself and for good to its neighbors and the world at large.
It was less to describe this hopeful and bright land, whose day has not yet come, but whose morning we see dawning in the east, than to set forth in a clear light the stages that led up to it, that, we take it, induced Mr. Sullivan to write his brilliant, most interesting, and valuable book, which, perhaps, no pen but his could have written, or at least written so well, with its series of graphic pictures, its passionate reasoning, flecked 138with the gayest humor and most mournful pathos. It is in itself an epitome of the Irish character, with a notable improvement. The despairing courage of a “forlorn hope” that marked such writings in the past has yielded here to a resolute and practical purpose, which of all things is the most striking and hopeful sign of a really new Ireland.
Ireland as it stands to-day presents a problem of the deepest interest not only to a thinking Christian man, but also to the student of political history. It, of all nations and peoples, has resolutely refused to follow after the ignis fatuus of the revolutionary spirit of the age. This it has done in the face of the most pressing incentives to join hands with the agents of social and political disorder. From the first day of English rule in Ireland that country has been, perhaps, the worst-governed country in the world; and this ill-government is only beginning at last to cease. No better soil could have been offered as a battle-ground for the agents of evil. Yet, owing chiefly to the essentially conservative and Christian character of the Irish race, informed and strengthened by a true conception and grasp of the religion of Jesus Christ, the Irish people, as a people, has steadfastly refused to achieve right by doing wrong. For this the English government has to thank that religion which it was its avowed and persistent purpose to root out of the Irish heart, in which most wicked and revolting purpose it would certainly have succeeded long ago, were not God more powerful than all the force and machinations of man, inspired and guided by the spirit of evil. Ireland has at last shaken off some of the strongest chains that bound her, a bleeding nation, to her own earth; and she has succeeded in doing this by a persistent adherence to the right. She would not die, because Heaven made her immortal, and because the principle of immortality was grafted deep in her soul by an Almighty hand. She would not live at a gift; she would not accept a false life at a sacrifice of principle. She waited and suffered on. Her patience and her constancy, her virtue and her faith, have overcome all things. A new era opens before her. The question of questions is: What will she do with it?
Mr. Sullivan goes back in his narrative fifty years, and gives us the salient measures and movements that have affected the Irish people during that period. The state of education in Ireland fifty years ago, “O’Connell and Repeal,” “The Ribbon Confederacy,” Father Mathew and the temperance movement, the famine in “the black forty-seven,” the “Young Ireland” movement, agrarian crime and its causes, the land question, the “Tenant League” party, the “Phœnix” conspiracy, the Fenian movement, the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and the “Home-Rule” movement—these form the chief headings of Mr. Sullivan’s chapters. They are all worthy of study, and must be studied in order to get a right view of the actual state of Ireland—not under the Tudors or the Stuarts or Cromwell, but here and now, within the knowledge of most of us. Much of what Mr. Sullivan has written was already sufficiently well known. It was well, however, to link all of these together, to weave them into a continuous narrative, and show how singularly one played into the other, how necessarily one was a sequel of the other, until the story is laid down at our own doors. We are thus enabled to see how this series of catastrophes, acting, apparently, independently of each other, wrought up secretly to the whole that is before us. The awful shocks that moved the nation, now this way and now that; that tossed it up as by a volcanic eruption; that shattered it and cast it to the ground as though by the convulsion of an earthquake, senseless and bleeding, and bereft of life; the storms that devastated it; the famine that decimated it—all were instruments of Heaven rudely, to all seeming, but surely working to a great end. Or, if the political philosophers prefer it, they were mighty and gigantic social and political forces working through the dark up and into freedom and light. They made Ireland a spectacle to the nations; they scattered her children over the world, bearing their crying wrongs to all lands; they welded together those who were left at home into a hard and compact mass; they shocked and shamed the power that was chiefly answerable for them into a sense of dawning justice. It was in such throes as these that the new Ireland had its birth.
It seems to us that never before was 139Ireland so well fitted to play a large part in history as it is to-day. It is now, to a great extent, certainly it is in the right way of being, its own master, its own law-giver, its own educator, its own priest. It has grasped the realities of political life and political power. These it has in its hands, and we do not well see how they can be taken from it. This fact ought to smother any smouldering fires of revolution that may be left, and it will smother them effectually, if the English legislature, as seems to us likely, can only rise to the fact that the best cure for discontent is to remove the discontent by removing its cause. We do not say that Ireland will leap at once into full national life, prosperity, and social happiness. That, even in a far from complete state, must be a work of time, and care, and struggle, not alone to the Irish but to all peoples. The Irish, however, have now in their own hands the adequate means of national representation; and this, it seems to us, is the great first step towards a true national life. Whether in after-years that life will have its centre in London or in Dublin seems to us a question hardly worth discussing just now. We like to take hold of actual facts and shape the future out of them. At present Ireland is represented in the English Parliament by a strong, resolute, and able body of Irishmen. These men may not be collectively or individually the ideals of political wisdom and sagacity. They may not have any great leader among them. They may be a little new in their harness yet. But their power, as a united body, is very great and undeniable, and it can be constantly exercised and increased. To expect that in a session or two they are going to wring from the English government repeal of the Union, or total separation, or even one-tenth part of the measures that Ireland needs in order to secure such prosperity as she has, or to advance it, or to do away with crying and cruel evils now existing, is to expect altogether too much. It is like expecting a city to be built in a day because some of the chief artisans and implements and material for the building are already on the ground.
Great and grave and manifold grievances still exist in Ireland. Steadfastness and patience and right political representation must succeed in removing these in time. Great dangers also threaten the country, not the least of which is the very freedom to which it is at last rising. The hardest problem in regard to freedom is to use it wisely and well. It would be a sad thing for the Irish people if on the altar of a new-found freedom they sacrificed their grand old conservative spirit, their deep sense of the supernatural, their reverence for the church and the things of God. For them to drift into the liberalism of the age would be to destroy them. They have gained what they now possess by having been steadfast Catholics and steadfast Irishmen. Let them so continue. We rejoice at the growing sympathy in political and social life between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. There is no harm in that; on the contrary, it is a great good. But to pass beyond that in matters vital to the faith would be wrong. To renounce, for instance, the right principles of education would be wrong. Let the Protestants go their way in all freedom, security, and peace, but let the Catholics also hold to their way, and insist on it.
Mr. Sullivan is least satisfactory in a point on which we are most deeply interested—the actual position of Ireland to-day, in its industries, its mode of life, its social condition, its educational status, its income, its outlay, how money circulates in the country, how the people are housed, fed, and clothed, compared with former years. These are matters on which, of all things, we desire as full and accurate information as could be obtained, for they are the outward and most visible signs of a people’s progress. Indeed, they are practically the only gauge by which to measure the actuality of that progress. But on this subject Mr. Sullivan gives us only a few rather hesitating words in his last chapter, with the consoling assurance that, “despite all disaster and difficulty, Ireland is marching on.” This is a very serious defect in a work dealing with “New Ireland,” and to remedy it we have applied to another quarter, as seen in the preliminary article on “Ireland in 1878” (The Catholic World, March, 1878). This will be followed by others on the same subject, taking up just the matters which Mr. Sullivan has allowed to escape him.
With this exception, we heartily congratulate the author on his latest volume. He is himself one of the political chieftains who has nobly helped to make a 140new Ireland. He is a very able and ready man, whose value was at once recognized in the English Parliament, and whose services to his country and to the party which he materially helped to form have been of the most marked and important character. His life has been an honorable one, and he has well earned the fame that now attends him. No man who looks hopefully to the new Ireland can help following with sympathy and interest the future career of A. M. Sullivan.
De Ecclesia et Cathedra; or, The Empire-Church of Jesus Christ. An epistle by the Hon. Colin Lindsay. Vols. i. and ii. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
Mr. Lindsay, who is a Scottish convert of some ten years’ standing, and was formerly one of the principal lay-leaders in the ritualistic party, has already won a high reputation by a valuable work on St. Peter’s Primacy. The present one is original in its conception and different from any other on the same subject in its method of treating the topics indicated by the title. The grand principles and laws of the church and the Papacy are considered in their universal character as forming the ground-plan of the government of divine Providence over the human race from the beginning. It has a wide historical sweep, and embodies a great mass of solid learning and sound reasoning. The author is sometimes fanciful in his theories and occasionally deficient in theological accuracy of expression, as well as in his style and construction of sentences. These are but faults of minor importance, however, not seriously detracting from the great merits of his most interesting and instructive work. It is quite in the same line of argument with the articles on Historical Christianity we have lately published, and those who are interested in that important and very attractive aspect of religion will find the greatest profit and pleasure in perusing it. One most valuable and quite novel portion of the author’s exposition of the apostolic and divine institution of the Papal Supremacy, is his application of the principle of reserve contained in the discipline of the secret to the particular doctrine in question, as explaining the guarded and reticent manner in which the sacred writers and the early Fathers speak of those high prerogatives of the Christian hierarchy and its chief, which would give umbrage to the Jewish priesthood and the Roman emperors. Full justice could not be done to Mr. Lindsay’s comprehensive and elaborate production without making a long and careful analysis and review of his positions and his manner of supporting them. We trust many of our readers will gain a much better knowledge of its contents than we could possibly give them in this way, by making a careful study of the work itself. It contains a complete historical demonstration of that which we think will soon be as universally admitted as any other great fact of undisputed history—that Catholicity and Christianity are identical and convertible terms, and that ancient and modern Catholicity are one and the same identity in respect to all which pertains to their essence and integrity as the one, universal religion, whose continuity has remained unbroken since the creation, and is destined to be coeval with the world.
The Nabob. From the French of Alphonse Daudet, author of Sidonie, Jack, etc. By Lucy H. Hooper. Author’s edition. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1878.
Sidonie and Jack have been briefly noticed in these columns. The Nabob is a large advance upon either. Possessing all the characteristics that individualized those stories, it is larger in scope, firmer in touch, fuller in character, more vigorous and finished in execution. As far as writing, plot, and development go, it is a very remarkable book. We must say of it, however, as we said of its predecessors, it is not a pleasant story. There is a kind of hot-house effect about it, a forced process, so to say, that, while fascinating for the moment, is not natural and healthy. We breathe in an overcharged atmosphere. There is any quantity of intoxicating odors, of lights and flowers, and soft music and rich costumes and beautiful faces. But the light is not the blessed sunlight; the odors and flowers oppress us with their heaviness like those around a bier; the beautiful faces are painted, and we sigh for something fresh and free, even if it be not half 141so elegant or well “made up.” There is from the beginning a brooding sense of a storm coming, and the storm comes with awful and repulsive vehemence.
Doubtless the author meant to produce just such an effect and to achieve just such a result. If this were his chief intention he is to be congratulated on his success. He has given a highly dramatic story—melodramatic, in fact. There is wit enough and humor enough throughout; but even the wit is biting and the humor sour. The laughter has the sardonic tone of Mephistopheles, and an honest man shivers a little even while he joins in it. Every scene fits with niceness; the curtain always falls on a strong situation; there is not a dull incident throughout; and if nearly everybody in whom you have been interested gets murdered, or destroyed, or run away with, or debauched at the end, what will you have? A melodrama is a melodrama, and Paris is its paradise.
The Nabob is a story of Parisian life, as Parisian life is popularly supposed to have been when Napoleon III. was the arbiter of Europe and Paris Europe’s capital—a capital, if the novelists are to be believed, of political, social, literary, scientific, and moral charlatanism. Doubtless this is true to a great extent; for the leader of it all had, unfortunately for France and himself, much of the charlatan in his disposition. There is everything there but honesty and purity; or if honesty and purity there be, they are kept severely in the background. Their garb is too homely, their faces are too fresh, for this garish light and exotic atmosphere. They are out of place in this fashionable dance of death, as we say here the scholar and the gentleman are out of politics. There is a wonderful duke and statesman—De Mora—whose habit is to give a bored half-glance to the affairs of France, and the rest of his time to dilettanteism and amours, looking all the while to a quack doctor’s globules to keep his eyes bright, his step elastic, and his nerves steady enough for an evening party. There is a sculptor—Felicia Ruys—full of the noblest aspirations, but whose bringing up has been bad. She has been among Bohemians from her infancy, and she is left alone among them, under the care of an old aunt, a famous dancer in her day, whose wonderful toes had turned the crowned heads of Europe. Felicia’s noble nature finds itself bound in by an iron barrier of wickedness. She is surrounded always by a vicious circle from which she sees no outlet or escape. Is it so wonderful that she mistakes her narrow circle for the universe, and sees nothing but wickedness in all the world? How many do this in real life!
There is the wonderful Nabob himself, risen from nowhere, to whom one of the strange turns of Fortune’s wheel sent a fabulous fortune gathered by his own hard and not too scrupulous hands in Algeria. He is ignorant, vulgar, low, without any very strong moral sense, but with a really kind and good heart: he goes to Paris with his millions, and his millions conquer Paris—as long as they last. All the charlatans circle around him. He is a rich man; he wants now to be a great and a distinguished man; and it is truly wonderful to see how many kind friends spring up to make this rich man great and distinguished in a day. Even the Duke de Mora condescends to sell him his cast-off pictures at ducal prices; the illustrious and philanthropic Dr. Jenkins—Jenkins the great—feeds him on his globules at fees that are fortunes; Felicia Ruys makes a bust of him, and would have married him only that he is stupid enough to have been burdened with a wife; Moessard, one of the vampires of the press, writes the Nabob up, and, when the Nabob at last closes his pocket, writes the Nabob down. And so they go on all of them, in a whirl of gold-dust and pearl-powder and moral filth that is their world until they are swept out, each in his or her way, on the strong eddy that is for ever noiselessly, silently, relentlessly sweeping off human lives into the vast and eternal hereafter.
Alphonse Daudet has all the gifts that a powerful novelist needs, and has cultivated them to the highest degree. He writes with that passionless tone of an intense but calm observer who sees things as they are, and sees deeper and farther than other men, and paints his picture with pitiless truth. He misses nothing that can add even incidental effect to the firm yet delicate stroke of his pencil. He writes with that apparent effortless ease which is really the result of the strongest effort in a man who is perfectly master of his work. He has even, we believe, that highest quality—a moral 142purpose in what he writes. But though he sees virtue and the possibilities of virtue even in his Paris, vice seems too strong for it and always to get the best of the bargain, even if in the end it goes out in darkness, disaster, and despair. This undertone of despair of the good is principally what imparts so unhealthy and morbid an air to his stories. Thackeray pictured bad enough people, and with an awful accuracy. But the devil never had it all his own way in Thackeray’s stories, as he has not in real life. He invariably came out of the fight with his tail between his legs, very limp and woe-begone, and in a disgraceful condition generally. There was rude health and pure blood in all Thackeray’s stories strongly set off against the other side. If M. Daudet could only muster moral pluck enough to make his virtuous people a little more robust and aggressive—and there are plenty of such virtuous people in Paris—his stories would gain rather than lose in tone and make much more pleasant reading than they do at present. After all, we tire of a crowd of “awfully wicked” people, going through all their wickedness for our special edification and instruction.
Miss Hooper’s translation is excellent.
The Church and the Gentile World at the First Promulgation of the Gospel. Considerations on the Catholicity of the Church soon after her Birth. By the Rev. Aug. J. Thébaud, S.J. Vol. I. New York: Peter F. Collier. 1878.
We can do no more now than acknowledge the receipt of advance sheets of this first volume of a work that promises to be one of great value and importance. Father Thébaud needs no introduction to our readers. He is known to them as a man of wide and accurate knowledge, keen observation, and deep thought. These qualities are not conceded to him idly and for the sake of saying something graceful. They are too rare in these days, and are still more rarely found united in one person. Nothing, then, that comes from the pen of this learned Jesuit can be thought unworthy of careful attention by an intelligent Catholic reader. The title of the present volume gives some indication of the scope and aim of the work. These are still further set forth in the following words, which we quote from the preface:
“Her (the church’s) expansion took place instantaneously, as soon as the apostles began to preach. Thenceforth her universal sway on earth began, never to end until the last day, when she will be transferred to heaven. The whole world at the time was comprised in the three old continents. It is doubtful if there were already on this western hemisphere any of the nations which were found in it when it was discovered by Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century.... The church, therefore, became at once universal if she filled the greatest part of the old world, and subdued the chief nations that inhabited it. It can be proved at this time that her conquests in Asia went much further than was for a long time believed, and that she was rapidly spreading toward the Eastern ocean when Moslem fanaticism arrested her in her career. A like result follows an attentive study of her early progress in the interior of Africa. Of Europe all concede that she rapidly attained the leadership, and that she was afterwards mainly instrumental in giving birth to European civilization.
“But what renders more attractive the detail of all these considerations is the enumeration of the obstacles she had to surmount in so arduous a task as this. The main one was not only the natural opposition between the leanings of corrupt human nature and the doctrines of the Gospel, but in particular the extreme dissimilarities existing between the various races of man—dissimilarities in aptitudes, in thoughts and ideas, in language and manners, but especially in religion and worship. For the Gospel of Christ was preached not only at a time of a high civilization, but also of great corruption and religious disintegration. The primitive traditions of mankind were then nearly all forgotten; the pure religion and morality which existed at first had given place to the most degrading polytheism; and, worse yet, this polytheism had lost all the homogeneity it may have possessed formerly in many countries, and had become a mere jumble of absurd superstitions.
“This is, in a few words, the portraiture of humanity which met the apostles at every step, and which must be examined in detail to understand the difficulty of their task.”
We defer to a later number the criticism which a work of this kind demands.
143The Vatican Library. New York: Hickey & Co. 1878.
The “Vatican Library” has been started by Mr. P. V. Hickey, the active and enterprising editor of the Catholic Review, with the aim of supplying the general Catholic public with the best Catholic works in the cheapest possible form. Such an object is on the face of it its own best recommendation. Two volumes from the “Library” have already reached us: a twenty-five-cent edition of Cardinal Wiseman’s beautiful story of Fabiola, one of those stories that is destined never to grow old, and an original story (price ten cents) entitled The Australian Duke. The latter we have not yet had an opportunity of examining. Both volumes are handsomely produced—very much more so, indeed, than many far more costly books. Quite a series is promised of “cheap, amusing, entertaining, and instructive Catholic literature.”
An attempt of this kind, seriously undertaken, and not in a haphazard fashion, cannot be too highly commended. Whatever tends to cheapen Catholic books—books, that is, that are really Catholic—and spread them abroad among the people is a good and noble work. More harm is probably done by cheap literature in these days than by any other means. The readiest and most effectual antidote to this universal literary poison is undoubtedly a literature such as the projectors of the “Vatican Library” aim at supplying. But they cannot work alone. Generous and earnest Catholics must help them generously and earnestly. It goes without saying that the attempt must prove a failure unless it is seconded on all sides. The purchase of a single copy of a ten cent book will not help the publishers very materially. The books are chiefly intended for those who have the will to read but not the means to purchase. In such a case it is for those who have the means to come forward and help their poorer brethren all they can by placing in their hands books that cost next to nothing, yet are in themselves a long delight and unceasing source of sound instruction.
Leo XIII. and His Probable Policy. By Rev. Bernard O’Reilly, D. D. New York: Peter F. Collier. 1878.
This little biographical sketch of ninety-six pages has for title on the cover, “Who is the new Pope? and What is He Likely to Do?” As to who the new Pope is, Dr. O’Reilly gives a pleasing and picturesque sketch of him whom it has pleased Providence to call to the highest dignity in the church and on earth. The personal familiarity of the author with the scenes where the present Pontiff passed his early youth and strong and vigorous manhood add value to the charm of a brisk and stirring narrative. Those who wish to know the character of Leo XIII., what manner of man he is, and how he passed his life previous to being summoned to sit in the chair of Peter, will find Dr. O’Reilly’s sketch by far the best of any that we have thus far seen. Speculations as to the future policy of the Pontiff can hardly prove very satisfactory just yet. It may be as well for impatient men to wait a little, and not attempt to forestall the Holy Father. What his future policy may be can only be made plain by his own words and acts. He has thus far spoken very little and done very little. Indeed, he has scarcely had time to do either one or the other. His position is one where the most extreme caution and circumspection are needed, and it augurs well for his future “policy” that he is so very slow to declare any policy at all. The present state of Europe hardly admits of a hard-and-fast line of “policy” to be drawn by any one. It is enough for us to know that the church is safe in whatever hands it falls, so far as regards the deposit of faith. For the rest, the march of circumstance must greatly influence the actions of the supreme head of the church. Prayer is rather needed at this crisis than advice. These observations are not at all intended disparagingly of Dr. O’Reilly’s interesting brochure, but of a well-meant tendency manifesting itself, among our non-Catholic friends chiefly, to map out beforehand a convenient little policy for Leo XIII. which shall make everybody happy here and hereafter.
A Few of the Sayings and Prayers of the Foundress of the Sisters of Mercy. Edited by a member of the order, authoress of Catherine McAuley, Venerable Hofoauer, etc. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.
A beautiful little book made up of beautiful maxims and prayers. Such a gem will, we are sure, meet with a welcome 144reception by religious of all orders. Its reading will also benefit those who are not religious.
“Ghosts.” Father Walworth’s Reply to Robert G. Ingersoll. A Lecture delivered at St. Mary’s Church, Albany, Jan. 20, 1878. Albany: Times Company Print.
The History of John Toby’s Conversion. With his Views on Temperance, the Liquor Trade, and the Excise Law. A Lecture by the Rev. C. A. Walworth. Albany News Company. 1878.
These are two excellent lectures, deserving of a wide circulation. The first is a plain, common-sense yet effectual and eloquent reply to a lecture by Mr. Ingersoll, who has recently gained some notoriety as a preacher of a very “cheap” and very “nasty” form of infidelity. Father Walworth’s is just the kind of argument to apply to men of average intelligence who are as open to the teachings of truth, when plainly presented to them, as they are apt to be carried away by a bold assault of scoffing infidelity. The lecture is a straightforward, manly, matter-of-fact defence of religion as against no-religion, none the less effective and thorough because the lecturer has contrived to conceal under the guise of a popular form of address the wide knowledge and learning which give its inherent force to what he says. Mr. Ingersoll ought to feel peculiarly flattered at being answered by a gentleman and a man of real power and culture.
The second lecture is the story, very tenderly and charmingly told, of a drunkard’s conversion. It brims over with real humor and flashes with “palpable hits”; while there is a touch here and there of pathos that brings tears to the eyes, and that could only be the outcome of a tender heart that loves its fellows and sorrows over the woes for which their vice and folly are chiefly answerable.
St. Joseph’s Manual: Containing a selection of Prayers for Public and Private Devotion. With Epistles and Gospels for Sundays and Holydays. Compiled from approved sources. By Rev. James Fitton. Boston: Thomas B. Noonan & Co. 1877.
This is an old friend with a new and very pleasing face. The St. Joseph’s Manual, compiled by the skilful hand of Father Fitton, has long been, and is likely to continue long to be, a favorite prayer-book with Catholics. It is formed on an intelligent plan. It is a book of wise instruction as well as devotion. The first seventy pages are devoted to a clear and sound exposition of Catholic doctrine and practice. With regard to this valuable portion of the book we would offer two suggestions for future editions: 1. The English here and there would be better for a little trimming; 2. A special chapter on the dogma of Papal Infallibility, which might be made brief and concise as the rest, would do no harm. For the rest, the volume is everything that could be desired. It contains over eight hundred pages, printed in a large, clear type very grateful to the eye. The illustrations are, without exception, excellent. Indeed, the whole work reflects real credit on the publishers.
Cantus Ecclesiasticus Passionis D. N. Jesu Christi, secundum Matthæum, Marcum, Lucam et Joannem, editus sub auspiciis Sanctissimi Domini nostri Pii Papæ IX., curante Sacrorum Rituum Congregatione. Fasciculi III. Chronista, Christus, Synagoga. MDCCCLXXVII. Ratisbonæ, Neo Eboraci et Cincinnatii sumptibus, chartis et typis Frederici Pustet, S. Sedis Apost. et Sacr. Rit. Cong. Typographi.
These three superb volumes exhibit the same elegance and taste in composition that mark all the ritual and choral works edited by Mr. Pustet, and for which his house has earned a so deservedly high reputation. Besides the chant of the Passion as appointed for Palm Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Good Friday of the Holy Week, the second volume contains a form of chant for the Lamentations, and the third volume the chant of the Exultet.
The Way of the Cross. Drawn by N. H. J. Westlake, F.S.A. With a letter of approbation by His Eminence Cardinal Manning. Devotions by St. Alphonsus Liguori. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1878.
A very beautiful little volume, whose title explains itself. It is brought out in a tasteful and convenient form, and is admirably adapted for the Lenten season. The name of Mr. Westlake is sufficient guarantee for the superiority of the drawings.
Doctrine and speculation concerning the destiny of man in that future which follows the termination of his earthly life, have always held a most important place in all religions and systems of philosophy. Nothing interests the human mind so much, when it escapes in any degree from the spell of present, sensible preoccupations, and is awakened to the sentiment of its own perennial nature and duration. The recent agitation of the public mind in England and the United States concerning retribution in a future life has shown how universal and deeply seated is the anxiety to know what lies beyond the veil which separates the period of existence on this side, from the endless duration on the other side, of the common grave into which all human generations descend. The question of eternal punishment has occupied the pulpits and the press, as the one most deeply disturbing the general mind of that great mass of men whose traditions and beliefs are derived from Christianity, although they are themselves actually separated from the great Christian body, the Catholic Church. That which strikes the mind of an instructed Catholic most forcibly in all this discussion is the want of clear and settled principles in philosophy and theology, the lack of the requisite premises and data, the absence of any sure criterion for deducing certain conclusions, testing and determining doctrines and opinions. The controversy seems to be interminable, for all those who have no lawful and unerring external criterion in authority. And it really is so. For this reason, we regard it as the only practicable way for a Catholic to take in treating of this subject, that he should present the doctrine of revelation as defined and declared by the church; and resort to reason and the Holy Scripture, only to refute objections to the Catholic doctrine from these sources, and to present corroborative proofs and explanations, in so far as these can be found and their validity as certain or probable established.
We do not propose to discuss directly the subject of the reality and the nature of eternal punishment. There is a previous question respecting the destiny for 146which man was originally created, upon which depends the whole solution of the subsequent one concerning the necessity or contingency of its attainment. We must know what this destiny is, and what are the means ordained by the Creator for securing its fulfilment, before we can know whether there is a danger of final and irretrievable failure on the part of those who are placed in the way of attaining their end, involved in the very nature of these means.
In plain words, is there a heaven for man hereafter, and what is the way to obtain it? The doctrine of hell is the shadow of the doctrine of heaven, and follows it necessarily, when it is rightly presented.
The idea of heaven is that of a state of endless and perfect beatitude, in the possession of the sovereign good, and of every kind of inferior good suited to the nature of man. This idea is absolutely incompatible with every form of atheism, which does not acknowledge the existence of the sovereign good. It is entirely above the scope of philosophy and natural theology. For, although God, the sovereign and infinite good, is manifested by the light of reason, as the first and final cause of all things, the light of reason does not disclose the possibility of a light intrinsically superior to the natural light, by which the created spirit can see God in his essence, and thus obtain the sovereign good as its own proper possession. Much less can it discover any reason why man should be regarded as destined to such an elevation above his own natural mode of knowledge. The utmost that can be proved by pure philosophy is the possibility of a perfect and permanent state, in which the ideal of humanity only partially realized in this life is brought into complete and actual existence. It is certainly most consonant with the dictates of sound reason to expect that God will bring all reasonable creatures to a state of permanent felicity, unless they voluntarily thwart his benevolent purposes. But it does not seem possible to determine with certainty whether this benevolent will of God determines him to put an end to all moral and physical evil in the universe or not, from arguments of pure reason. The whole subject of the existence of evil must remain covered with obscurity, so long as it is considered in the light of mere rational philosophy. It is only by the light of divine revelation that the dealings of God with the human race become intelligible, and we are able even to reason about the future destiny of man in a satisfactory manner. Even those who profess to be guided by this light, if they follow the rule of private judgment, fail to obtain clear and consistent ideas. The proper idea of the heaven for which men were created, if not lost, is obscured in the minds of the greater part of those who profess to be Christian believers and yet reject the authority of the Catholic Church. All other doctrines connected with this fundamental one are similarly obscured and perverted, rendering the theology which rests on them absurd or inadequate.
It is supernatural beatitude which the revelation of God proposed by the Catholic Church discloses to faith as the end for which man was created. By its very essence and definition it is infinitely beyond and above the end which human nature spontaneously aspires 147to attain, in which it finds the perfection and scope corresponding to its essence and its capabilities. To attain this end it needs grace, or a supernatural mode of being and acting, elevation above every nature excepting only the divine, transformation, and, in a sense, deification. Such a destiny for a mere creature, especially one which is lowest in the intellectual order, would be inconceivable, and incredible, unless explicitly revealed by God. Even when it is made known by revelation, its intrinsic possibility cannot be apprehended or proved by reason. It is one of the mysteries which is above reason, and the utmost we can do by a rational argument is to prove that it has been revealed by God, and therefore rationally demands our assent to its truth because of the divine veracity. We can, however, by a rational argument, prove that such an elevation of a created nature must necessarily be supernatural and cannot be effected by any evolution of a natural capacity, or expansion of the intrinsic being even of a pure spirit, although it were to increase in intelligence by an indefinite progress for ever.
Cognition is a vital act, immanent in the intelligent spirit, determined in perfection by the essence of the spirit itself, and incapable of transcending its limits as a created and finite being. By this act other beings are received into and united with the intelligent being, according to the mode of the recipient; that is, ideally, by a representation through which they are perceived and known as objects in their own proper reality outside of the subject. This representation cannot exceed the capacity of the intelligence which is its active recipient. The idea by which a created spirit receives God into itself and unites itself to him, cannot represent his essence and produce immediate cognition, because the essence of God absolutely and infinitely transcends all genera and species of created beings. The highest angel can perceive no essence which intrinsically transcends his own, and must therefore represent God to himself by and through himself, that is, analogically and by abstractive not intuitive cognition. His intellectual vision is as utterly incompetent to perceive the essence of God, as the sensible vision of man is to see a pure spirit, or his finger to touch the points of an argument. The indefinite increase of the power of sensible vision will never bring it any nearer to spiritual vision, and, in like manner, the indefinite increase of intelligence will never bring it any nearer to divine intuition. The essence of a created spirit is finite and its intellectual light is finite. Its immediate intelligible object is within the limits of its created nature. As the mind of man cannot rise to any natural knowledge of God except by discursive reasoning from first principles on the works of God, that is, by the argument from effects to the first cause, so the purely spiritual being cannot rise above his own intellectual cognition of God as the cause and first principle of his own intelligent nature. It is vain, therefore, to think that it is the grossness of the body, or the body itself, which hinders the human spirit from seeing God. Separated from the body, and elevated to an equality with the highest angel, it could never possess itself of an intelligible object outside of its own supreme genus as a created spirit, 148outside the limit of created and finite being.
It is evident that all the perfection and felicity of an intelligent being is measured and determined by its intelligence. It possesses the object in which it voluntarily rests as its chief good by cognition, and according to the mode of its cognition. No creature, therefore, by its nature, can rise to that state of immediate communion with God which is properly called friendship, which demands as its basis a similitude and equality resulting from a real filiation, such as the creative act cannot impart to a being brought into existence out of nothingness. The possession of the sovereign good belongs exclusively to the nature of God. To the created nature is due only a participation and imitation of that sovereign good within its own specific and finite limits of being. The heaven in which God eternally dwells in his own infinite beatitude is not therefore the natural term and end of man’s future destiny, nor of the natural destiny of any higher order of creatures. The distance dividing the most perfect beatitude of created nature from that of the uncreated and creative nature is equally infinite with the distance between the essence of God and created essences. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit alone have natural society, each person of the Blessed Trinity with the other persons, in unity of intelligence and volition, in the possession of the divine essence, the sovereign good, the absolute beatitude.
A created spirit cannot be raised to this divine level, unless God so unites his divine essence with the essence of his creature, in an interior and vital union penetrating to its very centre and the seat of its intelligent and vital action, that in the essence of God present to it as immediately as it is present to itself, it sees as through a divine medium that same divine essence as its immediate object, without losing its own proper act and distinct individuality.
That God can and does thus elevate created nature we know by divine revelation. Jesus Christ is true God and true man in two distinct natures and one person for ever. All the blessed in heaven are affiliated to God after his likeness, in an inferior degree which leaves them in their distinct personalities. This state of glory is properly speaking what is called the kingdom of heaven. Annexed to it, as the proper inheritance of those who share in the royalty of the Son of God, is every kind of the most perfect natural beatitude, in the possession and enjoyment of everything which the universe contains, according to the different natures of men and angels.
It is evident, without any reasoning on the subject, that in proposing this supernatural and purely gratuitous beatitude to created beings, God might select whom he pleased as the recipients of so great a grace, and prescribe any conditions which are possible and reasonable for securing its permanent possession. It is perfectly consonant with justice and goodness, that it should be made a prize and reward of merit, and that a state of trial and probation should be appointed for those who were permitted to aspire to this reward. Divine revelation, whose teachings are confirmed by universal experience, makes known to us, that in fact God did place the angels, and afterwards mankind, in a state of probation for this supernatural 149destiny. A probation must be real and not illusory. It involves the possibility and danger of failure. It must have a prescribed period for each individual and for the whole number. When this period is finished, those who have failed are by the very terms of the probation finally excluded from the hope of retrieving their loss. Divine revelation informs us that the probation of the angels was terminated long ago, and resulted in the winning of eternal beatitude by a certain number and the loss of it by the others. One among the chiefs of the angelic hierarchy rebelled against God and drew after him many other spirits, and with these fallen angels for his ministers and associates, he has continued and will continue on the earth the revolt he began in another sphere, until the day appointed for the final judgment. He has continued it on this earth, by seducing men to join in his rebellion, and making war against Jesus Christ and his kingdom, the universal church. The conditions of human probation are of a very special and peculiar nature, in accordance with the specific nature of mankind, which is extremely different from that of the angels. The angels, as pure spirits and having a simple, intellectual essence, were created singly, and in the actual possession from the first instant of existence of their complete being. Man was made a rational animal, by the law of his nature increasing numerically by generation, and progressing from an inchoate state to his perfection through gradual and successive stages of growth. The first progenitors of the race alone, were immediately created, in full maturity of perfection, and endowed with all the natural and supernatural gifts suitable for their high destination, to be transmitted to their offspring. Their disobedience and fall entailed on themselves and their descendants the loss of the supernatural destiny and of all the gifts and privileges connected with it. Nevertheless, the human race was restored again by another dispensation, which is that of the Redeemer Jesus Christ. All those who receive from him the grace which he merited by his atonement, and do not wilfully and finally reject this grace, obtain in the end a complete resurrection to the glory and beatitude of heaven. The rest of mankind are for ever excluded from the kingdom of heaven. This is a summary of first principles and fundamental truths pertaining to the very essence of Christianity. In so far as the destiny of mankind is concerned, the first constitution of human nature in the person of the common progenitor of the race in the state of grace and integrity, with a right to the kingdom of heaven; the ruin of the whole human race by the sin of Adam; the redemption of the race through Jesus Christ; are the sum of the teaching of the Old and New Testaments, of the traditional doctrine concurrent with it, and of the common belief of all generations of men who have professed to make this doctrine their rule of faith, especially those who have lived in the full light of Christianity. It is idle to pretend to call any doctrine different from this by the name of Christianity, for the whole world knows that this is of the very essence of the genuine, historical religion which acknowledges Jesus Christ as its founder. Those who reject it, and yet call themselves Christians, are only philosophers, professing a 150merely natural religion, partly constructed from materials borrowed from Christianity and altered to suit their own private notions, but really in its fundamental principles and distinctive character nothing more than a system of rationalism. The traditional and orthodox Christianity has invariably taught that all men naturally descending from Adam and Eve need salvation, and can receive it only through an act of gratuitous mercy on account of the merits of the divine Redeemer. No man is entitled by the rights of his natural birth to heaven, or capable of obtaining a right to it by any exertion of his natural powers. All are under a doom of exclusion from the kingdom of heaven. That future state, with all its circumstances of locality and other adjuncts and environments, to which all are destined by virtue of this doom, is called in the authorized language of the Catholic Church Infernum, in the English language, Hell. The doctrine of hell as an eternal state is therefore necessarily the shadow which must accompany the doctrine of heaven. It is impossible for any one to believe in salvation by grace through Jesus Christ, without implicitly at least acknowledging that all men might have been left under the doom of destination to the infernal state, without any prejudice to the justice or the goodness of God. The case is not one whit altered, if one supposes that all men are actually saved because Christ died for all. If the mercy of God were universal, it would still remain evident that mercy is not identical with justice. It could not be argued that any man has a natural right to salvation, because salvation is bestowed as a boon upon all men. It is vain, therefore, to argue on à priori grounds, that all men must eventually be saved. In truth, it has never been a doctrine of traditional and orthodox Christianity, that the simple fact of redemption placed every one of the human race in the possession of an inalienable right to final salvation. That many never recover the lost right to heaven, and that many who have obtained it lose it again irretrievably and for ever, is the common and universal doctrine of Christians. The efforts made to twist the language of Christ and the apostles into a contrary sense are so futile, that only a fixed determination to force the Holy Scripture into agreement with one’s own private opinions and feelings can account for them. The doctrine of the Catholic Church is unalterably determined. The fallen angels were not redeemed by Jesus Christ, and for them there is no restoration to the place which they have forfeited. Of men, all, be their number greater or smaller, who have been regenerated by the grace of Christ, and have passed out of this life in the state of grace, will obtain the kingdom of heaven, and the remainder will be forever excluded. The notion of an ἀποκατάστασις or future restitution of all angels and men, proposed as a mere theory by Origen, and alluded to by one or two other Catholic Fathers of the early ages as a possible conjecture, was universally reprobated and condemned by the church as soon as it attracted general attention. There is no doubt as to the Catholic faith on this matter.
The recent discussion has turned chiefly on the question of moral probation, the cause and reason of the mutability and liability to error in the intellect and perversion 151in the will of rational beings, and the manner and extent of their passing through the state of mutability to a state of permanent stability in good or evil. The errors of Origen were derived from the Platonic philosophy. So far as the Periarchon really presents his fanciful conjectures, we must consider them as vagaries of a man who, although richly endowed with intellectual gifts and moral virtues, was destitute of a truly rational and Christian philosophy, and therefore unable to think consistently, when he ventured beyond those primary doctrines of the faith which were clearly known to him. We perceive the same cause of aberration and incoherence in most of the current statements and expositions of theological opinion which appear in our modern publications. It would seem that Origen considered it to be a necessary law of creation, that God must create all souls alike, and in an elementary state, with a most capricious and uncontrollable liberty to choose good or evil, so that they were for ever liable to indefinite mutations of character and condition, and could never become stable in one fixed position. His state of restitution was no more permanent and eternal than the previous one of degradation. There is no eternal heaven possible, according to his hypothesis, or rather that of the Periarchon, any more than an eternal hell. Our modern Protestant religious writings are affected by a similar tendency to a chaotic confusion of ideas. It would be an endless task to attempt to follow them through the maze of conflicting and incoherent reasonings with which they contend mutually, and strive to construct some sort of rational and credible eschatology. It is only in Catholic theology based on dogmas of faith, and a philosophy in harmony with this theology derived from the ancient masters of intellectual science, that a remedy for this chaotic state of things can be found. We cannot do more at present than merely state a few sound and certain principles, without attempting to reproduce the arguments by which they have been often and fully demonstrated.
The first principle we lay down is, that God can impart his own immutability of intelligence and will to intelligent beings. It is because his intelligence is infinite that God is immutable, that is, can never change his mind. His will necessarily conforms to his intelligence, and he therefore is, and is in full possession of, the sovereign good, by his self-existing essence.
The intelligent creature participates in this intelligence, in that degree of being which God gives him. The object of the spontaneous and natural act of intelligence is the real verity of being, and by his intelligent nature he can never be deceived. The object perceived by the intelligence contains in it the good, toward which the will moves by a spontaneous and natural act. It is only necessary that the object be so placed before the intellect that it compels assent, to make all error, voluntary or involuntary, impossible. The good which is thus perfectly presented necessarily draws the will to itself, and thus immutability in good is produced. Error in the intellect is an accident and a defect in nature, and all perversion of will or evil choice is a consequence of error. The liability of sinning is therefore no necessary adjunct of the spontaneity or liberty of will which is an 152attribute of intelligent beings. It is removed by making the intelligence perfect. It is easy, therefore, for God to make any intelligent being immutably good, even from the beginning of his existence, since it is easy for him to give to nature any degree of perfection, within the purely natural order.
In the supernatural order, the gift of the intuitive vision of the divine essence imparts to the recipient the knowledge and possession of the sovereign good, with which it is immovably united by a spontaneous and necessary act. It can no more lose its beatitude than it can lose its essence. It is as impossible for one of the blessed to be changed into a sinner, as for an angel to become an ape.
Liability to error and sin belongs, therefore, not to any necessary order of things, resulting from natural and necessary laws which God is obliged to follow in creation and providence, but it is a condition of defectibility pertaining to a law of probation which God has established by his sovereign will.
This defectibility supposes an equilibrium or indetermination of the will in respect to contraries which is overcome by a self-determining power. Such an equilibrium can only exist, when opposite objects, in which some good corresponding to the spontaneous tendency of the will is contained, are presented to the intellect as desirable and worthy of choice; in such a way that the motives for choice balance each other. The will must follow the intellect, and therefore an error in the choice must be preceded by an erroneous judgment, which is possible only when the object presented to it does not compel assent. Moral probation requires that there should be an obligation, arising from the eternal law of God or a positive command, to choose one of the opposite objects and reject the other. It is this which makes these objects contrary to each other in a moral respect, and is the reason why liberty of choice between them is called the liberty of contrariety, and the determination to the one is a virtuous, while that to the other is a vicious act. It is easy to understand this liberty of contrariety and the moral discipline which is requisite for its due control and direction, in respect to human nature. From its complex constitution, the sensible good is often opposed to the rational good, and reason, which ought to govern, is easily deceived by the imagination. In the case of pure spirits, it is more difficult to see how they can be subject to any illusion, or capable of undergoing any moral probation. In the natural order, they are perfect, and cannot err in the apprehension of that which is truly desirable as their chief good. They are not, therefore, capable of probation in the moral order of pure nature. But in the supernatural order, the object proposed to them being presented in an obscure, supernatural light, which does not compel assent, there is room for a suspension of the act of consent, and a power of rejecting the sovereign good by a voluntary self-determination, in adhering to the inferior object which they naturally comprehend and love. In fact, it was in this way that the fallen angels sinned and rebelled against God. In like manner, Adam, who was elevated to a perfect state like that of the angels, and enjoyed absolute dominion over all sensible concupiscence, underwent a supernatural probation, in which he fell 153through the seduction of Eve, who was the instrument of the demon, who had previously made her the victim of his diabolical sophistry.
The only moral order which is known to exist as an order of probation, in reference to an ultimate destination and end of intelligent creatures, is the one which is supernatural. If we conjecture that the universe is filled with intelligent beings who are neither angels nor human beings, we have no need and no reason to imagine that they are subject to a moral probation with the trials and pains connected with the order under which angels and men were constituted. The great problem of the reason of probation is one which is restricted within the sphere of those beings who have been constituted by the Creator in the order of a supernatural destiny. The difficulty of the problem arises exclusively from the moral and physical evil which is an incident of probation. In itself, the sufficient reason for probation is obvious and evident. The origin and nature of evil really present no insoluble difficulty, when the principles of sound theology and philosophy are understood. The difficulty consists in accounting for the permission of sin and misery in view of the known attributes of infinite goodness and almighty power in God. If the final conclusion of the vicissitudes and temporary evils of the state of probation were a universal ἀποκατάστασις, including the eternal abolition of evil in the universe and the attainment in general and in each individual of a permanent good of the highest order, to which the temporary conflict of good and evil was a necessary means, the human reason might be completely satisfied. But, although in general, and in a multitude of individuals, this is really the predestined and certain result, it is not the case with another multitude, the whole number, namely, of those who finally forfeit the sublime destiny to which they had an original right, but which they have lost irrecoverably. There is a repugnance in the human mind to the contemplation of permanent and eternal evil in the universe, and this is much increased by the human sensibilities, and natural sympathy with those of our own kind who suffer even the consequences of their own violation of the eternal law. This repugnance causes the effort to find a way of escape, or at least of mitigating the severe integrity of the truth by resorting to some kind of fatalism. These efforts are all futile and foolish. It is absurd to question the infinite goodness or the infinite power of God. The fact that moral and physical evil exists, is only too well known by experience. There is but one way to account for it, which is that God permits it as incident to the law of moral probation. We can have no knowledge of the finality of evil except from the divine revelation. And, that revelation having made known to us that the decision of destiny for each individual at the term of his probation is irreversible, it is reasonable, as well as imperative in respect to faith, to assent to the judgment of God because of his own knowledge and veracity, whether we can or cannot understand how and why that judgment is consistent with his goodness.
There is no prohibition placed on the exercise of intellect and reason in seeking to understand these revealed doctrines, provided we respect the authority which God has established as our extrinsic 154rule and criterion of truth. Under this regulation, reason can go very far toward solving the problem of the origin, nature, and reason of evil.
The origin of evil is in the abuse of free-will by intelligent beings who are placed by the Creator in a state of probation. Its nature is merely privative, consisting in deficiency and disorder. The sufficient reason for permitting it is either that it is a necessary incident to any order of moral probation, or to such an order as the one actually established, in view of the greater glory of God and the greater general good of the universe. The evil condition, or state of deficiency and privation, into which intelligent beings are degraded in consequence of their abuse of the power of free choice, is the natural consequence of their voluntary sin, and is, in itself, permanent and irremediable. Since the order of probation is supernatural, and the power of efficaciously electing the sovereign good is a grace freely given by God, sin, which is a supernatural death, is eternal in its duration and consequences, unless God restores the lost state of grace by his divine power. He can easily do it, and it is therefore vain to attempt, as it were, an apology for the Almighty, by pretending that he actually does all that is possible, to restore the fallen, and to bring every intelligent being to the perfection for which he was originally destined. It is by the will of the Almighty, that each one who has been placed in a state of probation, if he passes out of that state with the guilt of sin upon him, is for ever deprived of the grace which is absolutely necessary for expiation and restoration. The probation of angels ended long ago, and those who sinned were left without any offer of pardon and reconciliation. The pardon which is offered to men, is offered to them as a gratuitous act of mercy on the part of God, which is available so long as they live and have the use of reason and free-will. Probation ceases with death, and all merit and demerit become eternal. The doom awarded to merit is eternal reward, to demerit eternal punishment. The final privation of that good which is the reward of merit, and of that grace which is necessary for making the least movement toward it, is a penalty which God has annexed to sin. This is the Christian and Catholic doctrine, and to deny it is equivalent to a complete renunciation of the genuine Christian religion. The recent developments of the extent to which this fundamental tenet of orthodox Protestantism is disbelieved or doubted among the various sects, are an evidence that their dogmatic and historical basis is crumbling and passing away with unexpected rapidity. The genuine dogmatic system of Protestantism is Calvinism. And although the Calvinistic system retains a number of the fundamental articles of Catholic faith, its omissions and additions and perversions make it as a whole self-contradictory and absurd. The principle of private judgment logically results in rationalism, and no such system as Calvinism can long stand a rational test. All other theological systems which have sprung up as modifications of the Luthero-Calvinistic system are too incoherent and incomplete to be permanent. An irresistible current is sweeping away all these fabrics hastily built upon the sand, leaving only a confused débris of truths and errors to the amazement of mankind. While this breaking up of old and 155general beliefs and convictions is in many respects lamentable and dangerous, we recognize, nevertheless, that there is a divarication in the irresistible logical current which is sweeping them into the sea of oblivion. The tendency of the general mind is not exclusively destructive. There is a yearning and an effort toward universal truth, and a deeply-seated conviction that this truth is really contained in Christianity rightly understood, which makes a strong and wide counter-current, bearing away from the tide that sets so strongly toward materialism and atheism. We recognize in the views and arguments more or less rationalistic which have been recently put forth in respect to the future destiny of the human soul, a revival of ethical and theological ideas in respect to the relation of the soul toward God, which are more in harmony with the Catholic faith than those of the old Protestant belief. The intrinsic, inherent good qualities and state of the soul itself, its voluntary determination to the good, its actual perfection in spiritual excellence and virtue, are acknowledged to be the ground and measure of the relation of friendship with God, and the want of this subjective fitness and worthiness is confessed to be a necessary cause of a corresponding alienation. The state of interior rectitude, integrity, and likeness to God, is acknowledged to be the necessary qualification of congruity and condignity in the soul, which gives it an aptitude to receive from the Creator that permanent and perfect enjoyment of its highest good which constitutes its everlasting beatitude. Sin is acknowledged to be the supreme evil of the soul which deprives it of its true good and degrades it below the order in which its proper excellence and felicity are placed. Therefore, the whole question of the final restoration of all intelligent beings who have lapsed from good, is resolved into a question respecting the cessation or the perpetual continuance of a moral order, under which renovation is possible, and the possibility sure to become actual, by a necessary and eternal law, in every individual instance. What is the criterion by which those who maintain this ἀποκατάστασις intend to determine its truth or falsity? It must be either divine revelation distinctly and certainly made known, or pure human reason. Every one who thinks logically must select between the two. As we have before said, we judge it by the criterion of revelation. What is the Christian, that is, what is the Catholic doctrine, founded on the veracity of God, clearly declared, and unalterable? We have already stated it, and it is known to all men. Those who still profess that they have in the Scriptures interpreted by their own private judgment an infallible rule of faith, are bound to demonstrate that their doctrine is clearly taught in the Scriptures, or is at least compatible with what is taught in them. It is open to any Catholic writer to discuss the matter with them on that ground if he thinks fit to do so, and it may be of some utility. It is equally suitable to discuss the question on purely philosophical grounds with those who do not admit revelation. But, as this is not our present purpose, we confine ourselves to the statement of what is the Catholic doctrine, and merely affirm that it is impossible to bring any conclusive argument against it, either 156from Scripture or from reason. It is really only the objections from reason which have any weight in the minds of men. Now, it is impossible to prove from reason that God may not propose to intelligent creatures a supernatural end to be attained by their voluntary operation under a moral law, and fix definite limits to their probation; or that it is not just to leave those who have misused their liberty by turning away from their prefixed end, in the permanent state of privation of their sovereign good. Nor is it possible to prove that penalties are not justly inflicted as a retribution for violations of law, in the state which succeeds the term of probation. It is God alone who is the judge of the nature and quantity of retribution which is due according to justice to individual demerits. Reason is not qualified to criticise the divine judgment which has decreed an eternal penalty for sin. The only rational mode of inquiring into the penalty for sin in the future life, is by seeking to ascertain what the divine revelation actually discloses and teaches on this momentous subject. This is determined with certainty by the Catholic rule, and taking all that is contained in this certain doctrine as a point of departure and a regulating principle, a theological and philosophical exposition of its relations with the other known principles and doctrines of revelation and reason manifests its harmony with all these truths, in a sufficiently clear light to command a firm rational assent. If all difficulties and obscurities are not completely removed, many misconceptions and apparent objections are dissipated, while the obscurity which finally remains is shown to be a necessary accompaniment of the dim light, by which the human mind, in its present condition, perceives these remote objects of eternity; and to make part of that limitation of knowledge which is an element of our moral discipline.
It is a demonstrable truth, contained in the first principles both of natural and revealed theology, that God has made all things for good, and that he will not permit the abuse of free-will by his creatures to thwart the final attainment of the end he has proposed, by causing permanent disorder in the universe. St. Thomas teaches that the punishment of the future life is decreed for this very reason. “It pertains to the perfect goodness of God, that he should not leave anything inordinate in existing things. Now, those things which exceed their due quantity are comprehended in the order of justice which reduces all things to equality; but man exceeds his due measure of quantity when he prefers his own will to the divine will by satisfying its desires inordinately; and this inequality is removed, when man is compelled to suffer something contrary to his own will according to God’s established order” (Con. Gent., iii. 146). F. Liberatore, commenting on this text, says: “Punishment is therefore a certain reaction of reason and justice for the restoration of the disturbed order. The argument which demonstrates the necessity of a sanction for the natural law, shows also that when God punishes those who commit mischievous acts he is not impelled by a movement of vengeful ire, but only by the love of goodness and order. For retribution, which proceeds from the order of justice according to the quality of the works done, imports in its very notion the concept of rectitude 157and goodness” (Eth., c. iii. art. 2).
In respect to the essential nature of the punishment, the same author lays down the proposition: “That the punishment of retribution for the impious consists principally in the loss of their ultimate end. By those good works which are commanded by the law, man puts himself on the road which leads straight to his end. For virtuous actions are a kind of steps by which a man walks toward this end; while on the other hand by vicious actions he deflects from his end and goes in an altogether opposite direction. Therefore, when the time destined for the journey has expired, it will necessarily follow that the one who has travelled by the road leading to his end should attain his end. Again, it is necessary for a similar reason that the one who through disregard of his end has followed a road leading in an entirely opposite direction should be deprived of the attainment of his end. It is a contradiction to assert that a way leading to a certain term does not lead to it; and equally absurd to say that this same term is reached by a way which leads directly away from it. Therefore, it necessarily follows that at least the loss of the ultimate end should follow the violation of the natural law and be, as it were, a certain internal and natural sanction for it. But the loss of the end inflicted in view of the acts which one has committed has the nature of a punishment.
“Nevertheless, that by no means suffices for a complete retribution corresponding to the works done; but a positive infliction of punishments according to the diversity existing between individuals is requisite. Therefore they are not all to be made to receive an exactly equal punishment (which would happen if they were only deprived of the attainment of their end), but to be chastised by a greater or lesser positive punishment according to the quality of their transgressions. This is required for still another reason, viz., that by their vicious acts they have not only despised their end but also positively disturbed the right order.” (Ibid.)
The reproach of dualism, and of a failure to establish a final subjugation of evil by good and of disorder by the triumph and domination of order, made against the orthodox doctrine, is shown by these arguments, in connection with other well-known principles of Catholic theology and philosophy, to be groundless. There is no dualism in God, for his creative act, and all that he does for bringing it to its ultimate term, proceeds from love diffusive of the good of being in a wise and benevolent order. There is no dualism in the essence and being of intelligent creatures, in respect to God or each other. Their essence is good, and all nature whatsoever is essentially good. No evil substance does or can exist. Evil is privation and disorder. The temporary disorder, which is permitted as an incident to the liberty of a state of probation and movement toward a stable order, is rectified in the final ordination of all things under the supremacy of sovereign law. The loss of some good, which might have been added to the actual sum of good if all had attained their end, is compensated by the greater good which God has brought out of evil. Reason and order and law are vindicated and satisfied, by the compulsory subjection and homage of those who have refused 158to give their concurrence and pay their just tribute of obedience and labor freely. Privation does not disfigure the spiritual universe in which all that is requisite to consummate order and beauty exists, any more than empty space disfigures a stellar system. The good has therefore a complete and universal triumph, which leaves no deordination in the universe.
Disorder is only in the moral order of liberty in the election of contraries, by which the permanent order of those who exercise this power is determined. Those who rise above the moral order go to a higher order which is permanent; those who fall below it go to an order beneath which is permanent. The moral order passes away, and with it all conflict between opposing moral forces. Those who have fallen below their proper destiny receive precisely what is due to them and results naturally from their voluntary choice. Whatever is superadded to the misery naturally involved in the state of alienation from God and the frustration of their proper end, is directed to remove and prevent but not to perpetuate and increase deordination; and thus eternal punishment, whatever its nature, qualities, and instrumentalities may be, really restricts the limits of evil. It is the bonum honestum and not the bonum delectabile which is the just and reasonable object of the primary and direct complacency of intelligent beings. The bonum delectabile is secondary. That which is most contrary to this highest good is the revolt of free-will against the will of God. When the term allowed by the Almighty for the rebellion of Lucifer to run its course has been reached, it will be suppressed by that act of sovereign power, which places each one of those who have merited exclusion from heaven in a fixed and unchangeable state, precisely suited to his character. No further disturbance of the moral order is possible, no further privation can be incurred, no new injuries can be attempted against any of God’s creatures. Those who suffer, actually endure nothing beyond the retribution justly due to the demerits of their state of probation, and their suffering compensates in the order of the bonum honestum for their offences against that order, restoring the disturbed equilibrium of justice. It is an effect of the divine goodness frustrated (in respect to them) of its intention, and deprived of its due quality as bonum delectabile by their own voluntary opposition to the benevolent will of God. Socrates and Plato taught that it is better even for the one who deserves punishment to undergo it than to remain in impunity. Assuredly it is better for the common order which he has violated. Impunity for great political frauds is the greatest of disorders in a community, and the punishment of the criminals is a reparation to the public honor and the sanctity of right, which adds decorum to a state. This is in virtue of an eternal and universal law, and holds good in the supreme order, with which the ethical constitution of human society is in an analogical resemblance. Justice reduces all things to equality, by subjugating the inordinate wills of created beings under the coercive force of the reaction of reason and order against their rebellion. The inequality removed by this violent reaction is measured by the voluntary and free excesses of the rebels and transgressors against the sovereign will 159of God. Beyond this measure, there is no violence done to the spontaneous desires and natural tendency to good intrinsic to the essence of every intelligent being. Unless there is an inequality caused by voluntary contrariety to the divine will, there is no opposition, and therefore there must be a perfect harmony and equality of proportion between the eternal order and the wills of those who are subject to it. Therefore, there is no such thing possible as pain, discontent, deficiency from the bonum honestum and bonum delectabile of nature, in the eternal world, except that which is the retribution for voluntary transgressions.
The thousands of millions of human beings who never attain the use of reason, never run the risks of probation, and pass into the eternal state without merit or demerit, enjoy the good of being which is consonant to their nature in whatever actual condition it exists. Those whose nature is regenerate, and spontaneously seeks the sovereign good of the supernatural order, go immediately into the kingdom of heaven. Those whose nature is not regenerate possess an immortality in which they enjoy the natural good of being. There is no such thing as fatality, calamity of chance, misfortune, or deordination of any kind in the true ἀποκατάστασις and restitution of all things, which succeeds the present inchoate, temporary order. It is the absolute and universal and eternal reign of God by his eternal law, which is identified with the physical and spontaneous laws of being, and gives liberty of action within the ordained circumference, without any possibility of escape from the orbit assigned to each individual existence.
We return now to that which we proposed at the beginning as a primary question, not for those who are already certain by Catholic faith, but for inquirers into the mystery of human destiny beyond the veil. Is there a heaven, and what is the way by which it can be attained? Modern rationalism presents at best nothing higher that the eternal state into which human nature fell by the transgression of Adam, and from which we are redeemed by Christ. This species of philosophical and semi-Christian Theism, which is respectable in pagans and those who are in a similar condition of dim enlightenment, has no intellectual foundation which can stand or give support, in opposition to the clear Christian revelation. The firm assent to its really sound and rational principles and their logical conclusions, inexorably demands a further assent, to the physical, moral, and metaphysical demonstration by which the certain truth of Christianity is made evident to reason. A consistent and thorough rejection of Christianity reacts with irresistible logical violence against the first premises of natural theology. The prevailing rationalism is materialistic and atheistic. The contrary of Catholic faith, the real error of the age, the logical alternative of genuine undiluted Christianity, is anti-spiritual, anti-theistic Nihilism. To those who have a repugnance for the hell which is the shadow of heaven in Catholic doctrine, the night-side of the supernatural, this system cannot be very attractive; unless they are in despair, and already so unhappy and hopeless that existence seems to them an intolerable evil. In this system there is nothing besides hell. Hell is the necessary, eternal 160reality, the only being. The negation of all eternal good, of all beatitude whether natural or supernatural, is the one, fundamental dogma of Pessimism.
The aspiration and longing for beatitude which cannot be wholly extinguished in any human soul, and which manifests its vehemence even in the most gloomy and despairing utterances of scepticism, is strong and vivid among the multitude of half-believers, whose Christian descent has left in their minds, as an heirloom, some indistinct idea of the heaven of Christian theology. Even though they practically seek to satisfy their thirst for the true good by the pleasures of the present life, they wish to cherish the hope of a higher future happiness in the next world. Therefore, they eagerly welcome any plausible teaching or speculation which seems to make a happy immortality their sure ultimate destiny, and are glad to think they run no risk of losing it, and need not give themselves trouble to find the way to gain it. Conscience, and the moral sense which has had a semi-Christian education, will not permit those who still cling to their traditional religion to believe that the majority of adults are actually fit for perfect happiness, or capable of passing out of this life at once into heaven, without undergoing some thorough transformation of character. The view presented by the most reasonable and high-toned of the writers and preachers who have recently advocated universal salvation, or a doctrine tending in that direction, places a prospect of indefinite trial and suffering before those who have sinned during their mortal career, as awaiting them hereafter. Its happy termination in the heaven promised to the good is something which is inferred by their own reasonings and conjectures, but which cannot be proved with certainty by reason, much less shown to be a promise of the divine word. Over against this there is the general belief of mankind; the general consent of those who have read the Holy Scriptures in the interpretation of their plain and obvious sense; and the teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning, which she will certainly never change. It is much more reasonable to take the authority of the church as the criterion of truth in regard to this momentous matter than to decide it by private reasonings or private interpretations of Christian doctrine. The Catholic doctrine proposes a heaven of supernatural beatitude and glory to every one, and points out a sure way by which any one may secure it, no matter how much he may have sinned in the past. It is the most rational course to begin at once to follow the road which leads to the right end, and leave with God the responsibility of administering his own just and sovereign laws by giving to each one that retribution which he has deserved.
Note.—The reader is referred for a more full exposition of the relation of the supernatural to the natural order, and the other principal topics belonging to the subject of the future destiny of man, to the following works: Aspirations of Nature, by the Rev. I. T. Hecker; Problems of the Age and The King’s Highway, by the Rev. A. F. Hewit; Catholicity and Pantheism, by the Rev. J. de Concilio; The Knowledge of Mary, by the same author; and Catholic Eschatology, by H. N. Oxenham.
Among the many beautiful paintings by world-known artists which adorn the old Pinakothek in Munich is one symbolizing Innocence, by Carlo Dolce. It represents a lovely, rosy-cheeked girl gazing frankly at you; down her shoulders floats a stream of golden hair, and clasped to her bosom is a lamb.
Before this picture, one spring day in the year 1855, stood a gentleman admiring it with all the rapture of one who knows how difficult it is to achieve such a miracle of art—to place upon canvas a face so instinct with life, so full of that divine something which only genius can impart.
“It is indeed beautiful, most beautiful,” thought Conrad Seinsheim. “And yet,” after an inward pause, during which his eyes rested on a young lady who was copying it—“and yet real flesh and blood, when cast in the mould of beauty, infinitely surpass aught that was ever accomplished by brush or chisel.”
It was only a profile view he had of her face—for the painting hung in a corner, and she was in the corner too, with her left side next to the wall—but this view sufficed to send a thrill through every fibre of his body.
Conrad was no longer a very young man; his age was five-and-thirty, and he had already seen a good deal of the world. His father, a wealthy merchant of Cologne, had died, leaving him a handsome fortune, and with his last breath almost had urged him to marry. And Conrad had travelled and visited well-nigh every capital in Europe, enjoying to the utmost the pleasures which choice society affords, but had not yet found the woman whom he could really love. The fair women whom he had met had been mere butterflies of fashion, idlers basking in the smiles of men as vain and idle as themselves. But here, at last, was one who came up to his high ideal of female loveliness, and who withal was not a drone. But it was Walburga’s expression, rather than the exquisite classic outline of her countenance, that made his heart throb as it did; it imaged a soul nourished upon the visions of genius. The girl was evidently enjoying, with delight too deep for words, this Carlo Dolce; and, guided by the light of sympathy, its ethereal life, which other copyists might have missed, she was catching and retaining, and you might almost have fancied, from her mien of rapture, that she knew the spirit of the old master was hovering over her and guiding her delicate white hand.
“The sunshine of her soul is inspiring, and fills me with gladness too,” exclaimed Conrad inwardly. “She does not turn to look at me; she goes right on, filled with the joy of her work. Oh! have I not found here the being whom I have been so vainly seeking?”
After admiring the young artist a few minutes he continued his way along the gallery. But his mind was too occupied with the 164living picture which he had just seen to care a jot for anything else, and all the rest of the day this vision of beauty haunted him.
At three o’clock the Pinakothek is closed; and at this hour Walburga betook herself to her humble but cosey home in Fingergasse,[43] where, summoning her friend, Moida Hofer, who lodged with her, and who kept an old curiosity shop in the same street, the two sallied forth for a stroll in the English Garden.[44] They were fast friends, these girls, having been many years together, and never were they so happy as in each other’s company. And now, while they wandered through this delightful park, they talked about their school-days, and rejoiced that not yet a day of parting had come.
“Well, as for me, I shall never marry, you know,” spoke Walburga.
“Oh! yes, you will,” the other smilingly answered. Yet in her heart Moida believed that what Walburga said might be true. Her dearest friend was born with an affliction, a weighty cross—one which likely enough would prove a barrier to marriage. Moida, however, had no such cross, and already she had a devoted lover, whose name was Ulrich, and who, moreover, was the brother of Walburga.
Ulrich was uncommonly handsome and the last representative of the ancient and noble family of Von Loewenstein. But he was poor, and far off seemed the day when he should make Moida his bride. The latter, however, was patient. She built for herself no castles in the air; she was one of those practical souls, full of common sense, which is the genius of everyday life, and nobody had ever heard her utter a sigh. “Sometime or other our honeymoon will come,” she would tell her betrothed; “therefore, much as I love you, my Ulrich, I’ll not die of impatience.”
It would have been hard to find two young women more unlike in temperament as well as looks than Moida and Walburga; and perhaps ’tis why they dwelt in such harmony together. Miss Hofer, instead of being tall like her friend, was short and plump, with a little sprightly nose turning upward toward the sky, and she had a somewhat broad mouth. But there was a pretty dimple in her chin—a very pretty dimple; just the place for a kiss to hide itself—and she had lovely blue eyes, and such a fund of mirth and humor that it was impossible ever to be sad in her company. Of painting Moida knew absolutely nothing. But she was glad that she was not an artist; “for if I were,” she would say, “how could I find time to attend to my curiosity-shop and keep our little household in order? Ulrich is an artist, and so are you, Walburga; and we must not all three be making mountains and heads.”
“No, indeed. And I don’t know what I should do without you,” spoke Walburga, as they sauntered along the gravelled path by the lake. “You can’t tell how much I lean upon you. I really believe I am better since I took your advice about the skull.”
Walburga, who was of a nature inclined to melancholy, had for more than a year kept a skull in her bed-room, and before it she was wont to meditate sometimes for 165hours, until the ugly thing stole away the bloom from her cheek and drew a black mark under each of her eyes. Her appetite, too, began to fail; and ’twere not easy to say what might have happened if she had been living alone. But one morning, while she was plunged in one of her reveries before this death’s head, Moida approached, and, after kneeling beside her and saying a prayer—for Moida was a good girl, and quite as pious as Walburga, only in a different way—she reverently took the skull in her hands and said: “Now, dear friend, I think ’tis time to put this aside. ’Tis making a ghost of you. It has honeycombed you with scruples, and I am sure that your father-confessor would approve of the reformation which I am going to inaugurate. Therefore take one more good look at this eyeless, grinning object ere it disappears from your sight for ever.”
These bold words so astonished Walburga that for about a minute she could not reply, and she turned to Moida with an expression which might have deterred anybody with less spirit and determination from proceeding further. But Moida—who, let us here remark, was a descendant of Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese patriot—was not in the least frightened by the other’s flashing eyes.
“I will use this skull with reverence,” she continued. “I promise you it shall be laid in consecrated ground; if necessary, with my own hands I’ll bury it in God’s-acre. But here in this room it shall be no more.”
“Well, I declare!” exclaimed Walburga, presently bursting into a laugh, “you are the dearest, sauciest girl I ever met.”
“Then say I may do it,” went on Moida. “For, although I am very determined, yet I prefer not to be too great a despot and carry the skull off absolutely against your will.”
“Well, let me bury it myself,” answered Walburga.
“Agreed! But I’ll accompany you to God’s-acre; for I know one of the grave-diggers, and before another hour this poor old head shall be resting in peace underground.”
So the skull was buried, after which Walburga’s cheeks recovered a good deal of their bloom. And now, while she and her friend are enjoying themselves in the open air this mild spring day, she looks more sprightly than we have ever seen her before.
“Pray tell me, Moida,” said Walburga, after they had gone round the lake and were on their way home, “what is Ulrich doing at present? You had a letter from him this morning, had you not?”
“Oh! yes,” answered the other, her ever-bright countenance growing brighter. “The dear fellow is in the Innthal,[45] where he means to make a sketch of the home of his ancestors.”
“Dear, sweet spot!” murmured Walburga.
“Ay, and dear Tyrol!” added Moida. “And he tells me Loewenstein Castle has been sold by the state to a rich gentleman from Cologne, who has engaged Ulrich to restore its faded frescos, and he is beside himself with delight. The least thing raises his spirits ever so high, and now he imagines that this undertaking will be the beginning of his fortune. I must caution the dear boy, in my answer, not to indulge in dreams.”
166“Ah! true; he is given to dreaming, like myself,” said Walburga, shaking her head. “But this is a hard world, as you have often told me, and dreams will not feed us. I must sell my paintings—sell them—and not work for pure love of the beautiful.”
“Yes, indeed. Murillo, Raphael, and all of them had to eat, and bread costs money,” said Moida.
“Well, I hope this new-comer is a good man, and may he know how to keep his castle. Alas! if our family had known how to manage things, instead of letting everything go at loose ends. If there had been heads among us like yours, Moida, I should not have been living to-day in narrow, dingy Fingergasse, trying hard to make the two ends meet, and not always succeeding.”
“But then I should never have known you; a grand lady dwelling in a castle would not stoop to look at me.”
“Oh! true; and ’twas worth coming down in the world—down to a humble abode—in order to know you.” Then, after a pause: “But what else does my brother say about this gentleman?”
“Well, he says he is not a bit handsome, and that he looks stern. Ulrich says, too, he is passionately fond of art, is a believer in the aristocracy of nature, and declares he doesn’t know who his great-grandfather was. The only thing that is really not good about him is that he has no faith.”
“No faith!” sighed Walburga. “Well, at any rate, Moida, he’ll not suffer for want of company; for it cannot be denied that very few of those learned men are ever seen inside a church. Oh! how comes this?”
Moida shrugged her shoulders, but made no response. The truth is, although a very good girl, she did not think deeply on religious subjects. Walburga, on the contrary, was often much distressed by the infidelity which she saw spreading around her, and trembled for her dear brother, who had once declared that out of every hundred students who frequented the university with him seventy lost their belief in a God after being there six months; and nothing is so dead as a dead faith. And now she was not certain that Ulrich himself went to church; for of late he had been away from her a good deal. Walburga called to mind, too, a grave conversation which she once had with him about religion, when he told her something that had left a deep impression upon her.
“Believe me, sister,” said Ulrich, “a boy may be very good at home and have the best religious instruction from his parents, yet their advice and teaching will prove but a slender safeguard against the perils of the university. This is the age of science; ’tis impossible to prevent young men from studying chemistry and geology. They will flock to our halls of learning and crowd round our great professors, who are atheists, like moths about a lamp, heedless of the risk they run. Now, sister, I verily believe one true Christian university would be worth a thousand Sunday-schools. The great need of the day is to Christianize science—ay, Christianize it; make it a beacon-light and not a consuming fire.”
“Moida,” spoke Walburga, after dwelling a moment on these words of her brother—“Moida, do you think Ulrich says his prayers and goes to church as he used?”
167“Oh! yes, I am quite sure he does,” replied her friend. “He declares that for love of me he will always be good.”
“Well, although ’tis not the best reason he might have for keeping his faith, yet some fish are held by a very slender line,” added the other, smiling. “So, thank God! he loves you.”
Thus conversing about Ulrich and Tyrol, and listening to the merry songs of the birds, the girls continued their walk. It was dusk when they got home. And what a snug little home it is!
But before we enter let us call the reader’s attention to three letters, “C M B,” chalked upon the door. They stand for Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar, the names which tradition gives to the wise men who came with gifts for the infant Saviour; and beneath the letters, and likewise marked in chalk, are three crosses and the year of our Lord.[46]
But now open the door and see how clean and neat everything is within. Yonder quaint-looking closet, standing between the two bed-rooms, albeit a century old and more, shows no sign of age; not a particle of dust rests upon it, not a spider’s web. The floor, too, is well scrubbed and polished, and looks all the better for having no carpet. In one of the windows are a couple of flower-pots, wherein are blooming two magnificent roses; while in the other window is a cage containing a nightingale. The bird at this moment begins to warble a sweet melody to greet Walburga, who is its mistress; while Moida, who also has a pet, finds it no easy matter to prevent Caro—a black, shaggy poodle—from tearing her in pieces for joy.
“Poor, dear Caro!” she said, holding him at arm’s length, “the horrid police would kill you, if they knew you were alive, and so I must keep you shut up within doors. Poor, dear Caro!” And this was true. In Munich aged dogs are not allowed to live; and Caro is toothless and nearly blind. But his heart is as young as ever; and his tail—oh! how much expression there is in a dog’s tail. How it wags to and fro! How it whisks up and down! How it thumps on the floor! Moida sometimes, for fun, would try to hold fast Caro’s tail while she spoke endearing words to him. But in vain. No sooner would she open her lips than away it went, ten times quicker than the pendulum of a clock, and as impossible to clench as if ’twere a bit of machinery driven back and forth by steam-power.
Nothing could better show the difference between Walburga and her friend than a glance at the different books which each of them reads. In Walburga’s sleeping-chamber, on a table close by her bed, lie two well-fingered volumes: one is Master Eckhart, the Father of German Mystics; the other is Blessed Henry Suso’s Little Book of Eternal Wisdom. For a number of years these have been well-nigh her constant companions, and she knows them almost by heart. More than once have they inspired her to renewed effort when she felt disheartened, as well as lightened the cross which afflicted her. “The swiftest steed to carry us to perfection is suffering,” says Eckhart; and these words Walburga often repeats to herself.
But in Moida’s apartment, instead of the mystics we find a song-book, an arithmetic, and the Regensburg book of cookery.
168While Caro was frisking about and yelping, the nightingale, as we have already observed, was warbling a song for its mistress, who stood listening with a pensive air.
“You shall never die in a cage,” she murmured presently. “’Tis a shame to keep you even one day a prisoner.”
“How so?” exclaimed Moida, who had quick ears, and was a mortal foe to anything like mere sentimentality. “Are not birds created for our pleasure? And you take such care of yours! Why, I’m sure he is quite as happy as if he were flying about in the groves, hunting here and there for food, chased by other birds, and journeying hundreds of miles to find a warm climate in winter; whereas you give your pet plenty to eat—I sometimes think too much (Moida was economical)—and whenever it is cold your room is turned into a hot-house to please him.”
“Ah! but, Moida dear,” answered Walburga, “he has no playmate, no other little bird to love; and what is life without love?”
“Well, he loves you, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, and very much. But that is not the kind of love I mean. He has no mate to sing to. I am sure, in the song he is giving us now, he is sighing and pining for some other pretty bird whom he might kiss and caress and woo.”
“Well, I do declare!” exclaimed Moida, bursting into a laugh. Then, suddenly becoming grave: “But, no, no, I mustn’t laugh. I agree with you: love is everything, and Ulrich is my nightingale. Why, every letter he writes to me is a sweet song of love.”
For several minutes after Moida uttered these words Walburga remained silent. They had awakened in her breast longings which had better have slept for ever. But we cannot escape from ourselves; and she was born with a nature full of tenderness and sympathy. It made her yearn for something which she might call all her own, something to serve and cherish and suffer for. Home! home!—this was the secret craving of Walburga’s soul. But, alas! she had barely the glimmer of a hope that this happiness would ever be hers; and even good Eckhart’s words, which she now repeated to herself, did not bring her the usual comfort.
The poor girl, too, was an orphan; her brother was away from her, and a day would come when Moida would fly off into Ulrich’s arms. “And, oh! then I’ll be lonely indeed,” she sighed.
While Walburga was thus musing on her fate Moida took up her zither,[47] and, seating herself by the open window, sang in a rich contralto voice one of the old Volkslied, beginning:
which may be rendered:
When the song was finished Walburga, in whose eyes tears were glistening, said: “Nobody can beat my nightingale singing except you. Oh! who will sing for me when you are gone?”
“Gone! Why, I never mean to leave you, dear Walburga; no, never!” cried Moida.
“Ah! Ulrich will carry you away; and then—”
“Yes, yes, so he will, the dear boy! and then I’ll take you in my 169arms, and carry you away too, and thus we’ll all three fly off together,” interrupted the sunny-hearted girl.
Then Moida sang another song, and another, and another, until one by one all the stars came out of their hiding-places in the sky; and never did they shine down upon two warmer friends than these.
In the fairest valley of Tyrol, and perched on a spur of the mountain, a thousand feet above the swift-flowing river which gives the Innthal its name, stands Loewenstein Castle. How admirably placed it is! From afar the enemy might be espied approaching; and when he came near it needed stout lungs as well as a bold heart to climb the steep ascent which led to its walls, for ’tis like an eagle’s eyrie to get at. When the castle was built many an eagle used to soar above its battlements, and the dense pine forest which covered the land was the haunt of wolves and bears.
Tyrol is wild enough to-day. What must it have been in the ninth century? The Roman legions had once marched through the valley on their way to conquer Germany. But Rome had fallen, and only here and there an earthwork, or a paved road, or a sentinel-tower was left to tell how far her soldiers had penetrated into the wilderness. Afterwards barbarians and wild beasts had it all to themselves as before—had it all to themselves, until by and by, in the course of time, afoot, or perchance mounted on an ass which had carried him across the snowy Brenner—poor ass! how it must have longed for sunny Italy again—came a monk. St. Benedict bade him go forth and preach the Gospel; and lo! here he was, quite at home amid these shaggy-looking men, very Esaus for hairiness, and in manners a shade removed from cannibals. And this monk’s track had been followed ere long by other monks, until finally what Roman power could not do they did.
Round about the monastery the trees were felled and the land made to bloom; no farmers better than those old monks. And they cultivated the barbarians, too, as well as the soil.
Then, when times were ripe for him to appear, when there was something to plunder, on the mountain-side the robber-knight built his fastness; and Loewenstein did its share of plundering in those good old times.
But there was a chapel attached to the castle, and the baron’s lady was devout, if he was not. Gently, little by little, she persuaded her consort to take part in her devotions, and in the end made a pretty fair Christian of him. But the Von Loewensteins loved dearly to fight; the dust of the battle-field was sweeter than incense to their nostrils; and so to the Holy Land they went, nor missed a single Crusade. The knight’s bride with her own hands would buckle on his armor, then go take her post on the topmost turret, waving adieu as long as her swimming eyes could see the gleaming helmet that sometimes never gleamed again for her.
Many a century has rolled by since those brave days of battle-axes and healthy men; and now Loewenstein is only a ruin. But the monastery still stands, the grayness of its old age hidden by the greenness of its ivy, and St. Benedict would not find things much changed if he were to make his brethren a visit.
170It is sunset, and the new owner of Loewenstein has just returned from Munich, whither he went to enjoy himself awhile in the Pinakothek.
“What a pleasure ’twill be,” Conrad Seinsheim is saying to himself, “to restore this ancient castle! Happily, one tower is left, and in it I can make shift to dwell until the rest of the edifice is completed.” Then, speaking aloud: “And I will embellish my home with beautiful paintings and statuary; and the first statue shall be a woman.” Here he turned his deep-set, heavy-browed eyes upon a young man who was seated beside him sketching the ruin. The latter looked up and smiled.
“And a living woman it is to be,” added Conrad.
“Have you found your dream, then, sir?” inquired Ulrich, tossing back the long, unkempt hair which he persisted in wearing, albeit it troubled him not a little, for ’twas constantly falling in his eyes.
“I believe I have,” replied Conrad. Whereupon he went on to tell of the young lady whom he had seen copying Carlo Dolce’s picture of Innocence. While he was speaking a faint tinge of red spread over Ulrich’s cheek; for Moida had written that his sister was making a copy of this very painting. Suddenly he laid his pencil aside and rose to his feet. Conrad observed him in silence, but without any air of contempt; if he did not pray himself, he respected none the less those who did, and the monastery bell was ringing the Angelus. As Ulrich murmured the prayer he could not help thinking that likely at this very moment Moida was saying it also.
When the sound of the bell died away Conrad passed with him into the tower, where they began examining its faded frescos.
“These must have a strange effect on you,” remarked the former. “Doubtless yonder barely perceptible figure of a lady stretching forth her hand and clasping another hand—her lover or husband, perhaps—was one of your ancestresses!”
“Well, it is indeed sad for me to view such ruin and decay in the place where myself and so many of my name were born,” answered Ulrich. “I feel all the while as if I were moving about among ghosts. But then ’tis many, many years since Loewenstein was anything better than what it is to-day. The wind, I have heard my dear mother say, used to blow in through the chinks in the wall and rock my cradle.” Here the poor fellow gave a rueful smile. “You see,” he continued, “old families die hard. It often takes them more than one generation to get down to the bottom of the hill. Why, my parents were little better off than the owls when they inhabited this ruin; and ’twas high time to quit it when they did. But we are out at last on the broad world, and I can truly say I thank God that a man like yourself has bought my ancestral home. Again let me thank you, sir, thank you from the bottom of my heart, for your kindness in giving me employment.”
These words, uttered in a frank, manly tone, pleased Conrad, who, when he first met the young artist, had taken him for a silly fellow that was clinging to the shadow of a great name while too proud to do any work. Ulrich certainly had rather a haughty mien; but, thanks to the girl to whom he was betrothed, he had acquired a good deal of common sense, and, moreover, 171he had a warm heart. So that Conrad, who pitied his threadbare appearance, soon grew to like him, and during the past week had made the youth take up his quarters with him in the tower.
“Well, I deem it a great piece of good-fortune to have fallen in with you,” said Conrad. “For, although I don’t believe in spirits coming back to molest those who occupy their former abodes, yet, really, to have passed a night here alone might have made my flesh creep. How old is Loewenstein, do you know?”
Ulrich, who knew pretty well the whole history of his house, now proceeded to relate it, briefly of course; yet he told enough to make the other long to hear more. And when he had finished Conrad said:
“Although I am an ardent believer in the aristocracy of nature, nevertheless I feel all the more drawn to you for being a Von Loewenstein.” After a pause he added: “I wonder who my Dream will turn out to be? Will she appreciate dwelling in a castle? Oh! yes, I am sure she will.”
And Conrad went on to tell again of Walburga’s look of rapture as she stood at her easel, and of her tall, graceful figure:
“I am sure, too, her hair is all her own; in fact, every part of her is as classic as her face.”
While he thus gave utterance to his admiration for Ulrich’s sister Ulrich’s heart was in a flutter, and he could not help thinking what happiness ’twould be if Walburga were one day to become mistress of Loewenstein. Yet at the same time he thought it not a little strange that Conrad should express such unbounded admiration for one who did not expect, any more than he did himself, that ever a man would wish her for his bride.
“But tell me,” pursued Conrad, twitching his sleeve, “is there no dear girl whom you have fallen in love with? Artists, of all men, you know, are the most prone to the tender passion.”
“Oh! indeed there is,” answered Ulrich—“as sweet a girl as ever breathed. Once a week she writes to me and I to her.”
“Well, who is she? Where does she live?”
“In Munich, sir. Her name is Moida Hofer; and, although of peasant descent, I call her noble, for many of our mountaineers have owned their rough acres for generations, and, moreover, Moida’s grandfather was Hofer the Patriot.”
“Really! Oh! then, don’t let her slip; marry her by all means, for she belongs to my nobility,” exclaimed Conrad with enthusiasm. “And of course she is beautiful?”
“Every girl, sir, is beautiful when a man loves her; and I detest Greek noses and Roman noses since I have known Moida, for she hasn’t one.”
Here the other burst into a loud laugh, which frightened away a couple of bats that had been circling about their heads; for bats and swallows, as well as owls and hawks, found their way into this ancient chamber, which had not been occupied till now since Ulrich and his sister left it as children.
“And you should hear Moida sing,” continued Ulrich; “and hear her talk, too. Oh! she is so wise. She knows how to preach to me and tell me of my faults without ever making me angry. I was living in Cloudland before I met her. She said: ‘Ulrich, come down out of the clouds and earn 172your bread’; and ’tis owing to her that I persevered in my art-studies and am able to paint a little.”
“You certainly have talent,” said Conrad, “judging by the sketches in your portfolio. But let me ask why you do not marry?”
At this question Ulrich heaved a sigh.
“Is it want of money?”
“Well, our honeymoon will come some day or other,” said the youth, evading a response. “She is patient—more patient than I. She cheers me up; knits stockings for me; makes me shirts; in fact, she does as much for me almost as if she were my wife. Dear, dear, dear Moida!”
“May I inquire how Miss Hofer earns a livelihood?”
“She keeps a small store, an old-curiosity shop, where one may buy for a mere trifle chairs and mirrors, and clocks and engravings, together with many other articles that at some time or another adorned noble houses. You may find there a number of things that used to belong to Loewenstein.”
“Indeed! Then I’ll buy out her whole stock—upon my word I will—and back to this spot shall come every chair and mirror and clock. O Ulrich, Ulrich! why didn’t you tell me this before?”
After thus conversing awhile within the tower, and it being settled that the young man was to begin on the morrow his labor of restoring the frescos, they passed out by what must once have been a stately passage-way, but was now so encumbered with fragments of stone and mortar that Conrad and Ulrich were obliged to stoop very low, at one place almost to creep, in order to emerge into the open air. As we have already observed, the tower was the only portion of the castle not entirely in ruin; the rest of the building was so shattered by time that it was difficult even for imagination to picture it as it had been in the days of its glory.
“Here,” said Ulrich, “used to be the chapel. On this spot the first Mass was offered up in Loewenstein.”
“Well, I will rebuild this, too, unbeliever though I am,” said Conrad. “And oh! would that my dead faith might be quickened as easily as these crumbled stones can be put into shape again. But, happily, women are still prayerful, and the young lady whom I hope to win shall have her chapel to pray in. But, alas! what desolation has come to this hallowed spot—what desolation! Everything gone except one tomb. I must not tread upon it, for doubtless one of your race lies buried underneath.”
“Only a few words on the monument are legible,” said Ulrich, stooping and brushing off the dust with his hands:
The rest I cannot make out; but I remember hearing my father say that this Walburga was a Hungarian princess, who married Hugo von Loewenstein toward the close of the fourteenth century.”
“How sad is the fall of old families!” observed Conrad after a moment’s silence, during which his eyes remained fixed on the blurred slab at his feet. “But I sometimes believe there is a law which governs the strange and solemn procession of generations: as the wheel of time goes round and round, the king takes his turn at beggary, and 173the beggar shuffles off his rags and mounts up to the throne.”
“Therefore at some future day, if your notion be correct, I, or one of my descendants, will get this castle back again,” said Ulrich, smiling.
“Nowadays,” pursued Conrad, as if in soliloquy, “people affect to be democratic; we win our spurs by speculating in cotton, or grain, or some other stuff, instead of by brave deeds on the battle-field. Well, well, I for one prefer the helmet and the battle-axe to the chinking of the money-changers.” Then, turning to Ulrich: “It surprises you to hear me say this, eh?”
To tell the truth, it did surprise him; but Ulrich did not show it.
“Well, a fortnight ago I would not have spoken thus,” he continued. “But the truth is, the veriest democrat loves in his secret heart a pedigree; and if he hasn’t one, he’ll pay somebody to make him a family-tree; and then he’ll buy a ruin, as I have done, and get to feel as I feel, perhaps. Why, Ulrich, I do believe somebody has thrown a spell over me; ay, this fair lady sleeping under the old stone here has touched me with her spirit wand. Why, I feel as if I were a Loewenstein—I do! I do!” Here Conrad brandished his cane and repeated aloud the Loewenstein motto: Intaminatis fulget honoribus.
“How it would please Walburga to hear him talking thus!” said Ulrich inwardly. “Proud as she is, I think her heart might incline towards him.”
It should perhaps be observed that hardship had wrought little effect upon Walburga. It had scarcely bent her spirit at all; and not once since she quitted the home of her forefathers had she returned to visit the dearly-loved spot. “It would be too bitter a sight to see vulgar people wandering amid its ruins,” she would tell her brother. “I’d rather have Loewenstein disappear entirely, be covered up by the mountain, than that some rich upstart should buy it, then pull down the mite that is left of its glorious walls, and erect a modern villa in their stead.”
Nor had she for several years entered Moida Hofer’s store, where so many curious objects were exposed for sale; and once, when her friend had disposed of a Loewenstein clock, one of the primitive kind, with pendulum swinging in front—ay, and disposed of it, too, for a pretty good price—Moida did not dare mention the fact. Indeed, the old-curiosity shop was now a banished theme of conversation between them.
By and by, after telling Ulrich for the twentieth time how finely the castle was to be renovated, Conrad said: “Now let us go in and take some repose; for to-morrow, you know, we are to be up early—you to do a good day’s work, while I must be off by the first train to Munich, where I am determined to have another look at my Dream.”
With this they went back into the tower, and after trying, but without success, to drive the bats out of their dormitory, Conrad and Ulrich lay down to rest. The former was soon fast asleep; but the youth, who had a more vivid imagination, stayed awake a whole hour thinking of the many who had occupied this chamber in days gone by. The moon shimmering in through the iron-barred window over his head flung a weird halo round about the lady painted on the wall; and he could not but think what a very, very ghostly chamber it was.
174A month had gone by since Ulrich had laid eyes on Moida Hofer—only a month, yet it seemed as long as six months. So next morning, when Conrad was making ready to descend the hill on his way to Munich, the youth thrust his hand into his pocket, and, drawing forth some small pieces of silver, counted them over carefully. With anxious heart he counted them, and to his great delight found that there was just enough money to carry him to his betrothed and back. The other, who had a quick eye, was not slow to read what was passing in Ulrich’s mind, and said: “Is there any message you wish delivered to Miss Hofer? Or perhaps you will accompany me? Do; and we may visit her curiosity-shop together. To-morrow will be time enough to begin work on the frescos.”
“Well, I own, sir,” replied Ulrich, “’twould give me great happiness to see my lady-love; and I’ll labor all the harder for making her a visit.”
Accordingly they both set out for Munich, which was reached in four hours—eight it seemed to the impatient travellers, who as soon as they arrived went straight to Fingergasse.
Never was street better named, for it is little broader than a finger, and consequently only at high noon does the sun cheer it with its rays.
But this morning Fingergasse looked anything but dismal to the young artist, who knew that a pair of bright eyes were about to greet him, and already were shooting floods of light into his heart.
“Why, Ulrich! Ulrich!” These were Moida’s first words as she flew towards him. Perhaps in presence of a stranger she may have expected only a warm shake of the hand in response or a pat on the cheek. But in an instant the arms of her lover were twined about her neck. Then, when the greeting was over, Conrad Seinsheim was introduced, and we need not say that the girl surveyed him carefully. Moida found him not handsome like her Ulrich; rather the opposite. But she admired his broad forehead and the energy which flashed through his eyes; even his air of sternness did not displease her, for she recognized in him a man with opinions of his own, a man of power and decision.
And now, reader, blame her not for telling Conrad frankly and in her most winning way that her store was the best place in town to find old curiosities. “Why, sir,” said Moida, “I have even some fourteenth-century chairs from Loewenstein Castle, of which doubtless you have heard. ’Tis the oldest castle in Tyrol, and——”
“Moida,” interrupted Ulrich, “did I not write to you that——”
“Oh, hush! hush!” said Moida, blushing and putting her plump hand over his mouth.
“Well, I am here,” observed Conrad, trying hard not to smile—“I am here purposely to buy everything your store contains; for I am now owner of Loewenstein, and mean to fit it up as far as possible in true mediæval style.”
“Really!” exclaimed Moida. “Really!”
Whereupon Conrad did smile outright at her look of surprise and joy. Then presently she turned towards Ulrich, and her lips moved as if she were trying to speak. But he could only guess what she wanted to say. Yes, Moida, if Conrad purchases all that your little store holds, then indeed you may name your wedding-day. And if a radiant 175expression can make a homely face beautiful, it would have been difficult to find a more beautiful girl than Moida at this moment.
After speaking volumes to Ulrich through her blue eyes, she turned again to Conrad and said in an earnest tone: “O, sir! how kind you are. I cannot find words to express my thanks.”
The latter waved his hand, as if to say, “Pray do not thank me,” then set about examining the curiosities. These consisted of nine chairs ranged side by side along the wall, half a dozen breast-plates and helmets, a stack of arquebuses and pikes, three crossbows, some silver plates and goblets, a ewer, a couple of clocks which had not ticked in a century, an earthenware stove quaintly embossed with scenes from Holy Writ, and apparently a countless number of smaller objects, such as seals, rings, miniatures, and coins.
Picking up one of the miniatures, Conrad exclaimed: “Why, I declare, this is very like a young lady whom I saw lately in the Pinakothek, only here is a full view of her face, whereas I saw but the profile of my Dream.”
At this remark Moida stepped up and whispered: “’Tis the portrait of Walburga, the spouse of Hugo von Loewenstein; and ’tis the only thing I am not willing to part with.” The other turned towards her a moment with an air of disappointment; then, perceiving that she was in earnest, he let the subject drop.
A few minutes later Conrad was on his way to the picture-gallery, while Ulrich remained to enjoy the company of his betrothed. The first thing Moida did was to run out and fetch him a mug of beer. This may seem too trivial a fact to relate; nevertheless, truth may as well be told. She knew that in Tyrol he had had only water or wine to drink; and what can equal Munich beer? As Ulrich quietly sipped the delicious beverage, her quick eye ran over his buttons. She took them all in at a glance, and in another moment Moida’s needle was busy mending a rent in his sleeve. But while the girl sewed, she ever and anon peeped up at his face, and thought to herself: “In the whole kingdom of Bavaria there is nobody can compare with my Ulrich.” And, moreover, full of common sense as Moida was, there was nothing she admired more than the two sword-cuts on her dear boy’s cheek, in shape like a cross; and well did she remember the day when he received them, now five years ago. For, like most German students, Ulrich had belonged to a corps (his was the Teutonia), and occasionally engaged in a duel. It was on that memorable day that he addressed her the first tender word, after having had his wounds sewed up; while Moida, as she listened with fluttering heart and drooping eyes, thought to herself: “I am the third one to whom he has said this. Oh! I wonder which of us will win?”
Then she pretended that she did not care a straw for him; whereupon Ulrich presented her with a beautiful nosegay—four florins it cost him—and the rest we need not narrate.
“By the way, how is Caro?” inquired Ulrich, after holding the glass to her lips and making Moida take a sip of the beer.
“As frisky as if he were a puppy,” answered the latter, highly pleased at the question. Ulrich knew it would please her.
“Well, wouldn’t it be nice to 176have the old dog settled at Loewenstein, where he might get plenty of fresh air and be outdoors as much as he chose?” added the youth.
“Ay; but what chance is there of that?—unless you were to take him; and he’d be rather troublesome.”
“No pet of yours would ever trouble me,” rejoined Ulrich. “And let me tell you, Moida, strange things happen in the world.”
With this he proceeded to reveal how much Conrad Seinsheim admired a certain young lady whom he had seen in the Pinakothek.
“’Tis the very one you heard him say that miniature is so like; and I know he is gone there now purposely to see her again. And it must be Walburga, for isn’t she copying Carlo Dolce’s picture of Innocence?”
Leaving Ulrich and his betrothed to discuss the possibility of a union between a Von Loewenstein and a Seinsheim, let us follow the footsteps of Conrad.
He found the one of whom he was in quest seated at her easel, perhaps a trifle nearer the wall than before, and with the same expression on her face which had so ravished his heart the first time he lighted upon her. She seemed not to notice his approach, and when at length Conrad ventured to ask if the copy she was making were for sale, Walburga replied, apparently with indifference, and without taking her eyes off the canvas: “Yes, sir, it is.” Yet how his question set her heart a-throbbing! For the sale of the picture would enable the girl to pay several bills that were due, as well as take a trip to Nuremberg, which for years she had been longing to visit; for Nuremberg was the birthplace of Albert Dürer.
“How differently Miss Hofer would have answered me!” thought Conrad, observing Walburga with close attention. “She would have looked me full in the face and completed a bargain forthwith; ay, and persuaded me, too, to offer a high price for the picture.” Then aloud, and addressing Walburga in courtly German style: “Well, if the gracious lady will allow me to possess her beautiful copy, I shall be delighted. For I have just bought an old castle in the Tyrol, which I mean to restore, as far as money may, to its former state of grandeur, and I promise you your painting shall adorn the fairest chamber in it.”
“An old castle, indeed!” murmured Walburga, still without glancing at him. She wondered whether it might be Loewenstein. Then presently, unable to contain her eager desire to know if it was or not, she said: “May I ask, sir, in what part of the Tyrol your castle is?”
“In the Innthal, not far from Innspruck; and it once belonged to the noble house of Von Loewenstein.”
At these words a flush crimsoned the girl’s cheek for a moment, then disappeared, leaving her paler than before; while her brush, always so steady, now tremblingly touched the canvas. At length, after vainly endeavoring to master her feelings, she let the brush drop and buried her face in her hands.
Conrad’s curiosity was here raised to a high pitch; for although Ulrich had not told him that he had a sister an artist, yet he was quick-witted, and since he had seen the miniature in the old curiosity-shop—and Moida, we remember, had informed him that it came from Loewenstein—Conrad had been 177hoping that the young lady whom he called his Dream might prove to be one of the Loewenstein family, a near relative of Ulrich’s—his sister, perhaps.
“And why not?” he asked himself. “A likeness may be handed down through many generations; it may vanish for a space, like a lost stream, then reappear in the person of a far-off descendant. And verily, this charming girl is the living image of Walburga, the bride of Hugo von Loewenstein. And, oh! if I am right, what a treasure she will be. True, I am not highborn, and she may not view me at first with favor. But I’ll go through fire to win her!”
Presently Walburga uncovered her face, and for the first time stole a furtive glance at the one who stood beside her. Then quick her eyes were fastened on the canvas again; and while Conrad was wondering at her shyness a tear rolled down her cheek. His curiosity to know who she was now increased tenfold, and he said, in a voice the tenderness of which he did not care to conceal:
“Gracious lady, pray be not offended if I ask whether you have ever been to Loewenstein?”
“I was there once; I never wish to lay eyes on it again,” answered Walburga, trying to conceal her emotion.
“Would it offend you if I were to inquire the reason why?” pursued Conrad, now scarcely doubting who she was.
For more than a minute Walburga did not trust herself to speak. Finally she said:
“What spot, sir, can be so sad as an abandoned home? Parting with our birthplace to strangers does not tear up the deep roots whereby our heart clings to it. We feel towards it as towards a dear friend whom we have deserted. O sir! for many, many years—for centuries”—here Walburga drew herself proudly up—“my race held the castle which now is yours; and I love it so much that I cannot speak of it with calmness. A friend dies and we hide him in the earth; a dead home remains, mournfully gazing on us whenever we pass by. ’Tis why I will not go near dear, dear Loewenstein: nothing so ghostlike as an abandoned home!”
By this time tears were glistening in the dark, cavernous eyes of her listener; and when Walburga finished speaking Conrad said:
“Gracious lady, you cannot imagine how precious to me the old ruin has become. I love it, too.”
Here for the second time Walburga looked at him, but, as before, only by a swift side-glance. Then she said: “I must return you thanks, sir, for your kindness to my brother. He wrote to a young lady, his betrothed, all about it, and she told me; and I sincerely rejoice that Loewenstein has fallen into the hands of a gentleman like yourself.”
“Then you are Ulrich’s sister?” exclaimed Conrad.
“His only sister, and he my only brother. You cannot tell how I miss him.”
“Well, he accompanied me today, and is now with Miss Hofer.”
“Indeed! How delighted I am!”
“And I am much pleased with his lady-love,” added Conrad.
“Well you may be, sir. She is the salt of the earth. Ulrich needs a shrewd, practical woman for his wife; for the dear fellow is somewhat of a dreamer like myself. We both of us live in the past. But now do let me know how you came to meet Moida Hofer.”
178“It happened in this wise: Your brother told me there were in her curiosity-shop many relics from Loewenstein, which I determined to possess. And really, I was charmed with the few words she addressed to me; her ways are so sprightly and winning. And I, for my part, am curious to know how you fell in with the granddaughter of Hofer the Patriot.”
“Well, I’ll tell you all about it,” answered Walburga, as she went on finishing the golden hair of her picture. “You must know, sir, that Ulrich and I were left orphans at an early age, and immediately after the death of our parents the castle fell into the hands of the state; for there were many taxes unpaid, as well as heavy debts owing here and there. So away went Loewenstein. But, although quite penniless, God sent us in our uttermost need a generous lady, who had no children of her own, and who adopted us and gave us a home in Munich. This lady had a small fortune, enough to live comfortably on and to educate us. Ah! what should we have done without her? Well, ’twas during this happy period that Ulrich made Moida’s acquaintance. She was then an orphan, too, and clad in the picturesque costume of Tyrol; a real mountain daisy she was, and brother fell in love with her. Shortly thereafter our adopted mother died, bequeathing to us her fortune, and we little thought we should ever suffer want. But, alas! the bank where our money was placed failed, and all, or nearly all, was lost. Then poor Ulrich, who had already become engaged to Moida, feared that he could not be married—at least not so soon as he had hoped. ’Twas a bitter disappointment to them both. But Moida said: ‘Let us be patient and hope. I will never give you up.’ Brother and I were now fortunately well advanced in our art studies—Ulrich, moreover, had passed through the university—and we resolved to try and earn our bread by painting.
“But ’tis easier to paint a picture than to sell one”—here Walburga’s cheek reddened—“and so for Ulrich and I ’twas Lent all the year round; and we grew very thin, for we did not even eat fish. Until one day dear Moida discovered our miserable plight: we had done our best to conceal it. Then she insisted on doing her utmost to help us. She made me share her lodging; she even clothed me. And this was most noble in her, for Moida knew that our high-born acquaintances had told Ulrich he would be marrying infinitely beneath him if he married her. Yet not one of those proud families extended to us a helping hand. About this time Moida had set up a little store—the one she keeps to-day. But she would not let me help her to dispose of anything; she treated me as if she knew I was not born for such drudgery—sometimes archly saying I could not make a good bargain, which perhaps was true.
“But when the furniture of dear Loewenstein was sold at auction, and when Moida bought it all, oh! from that day I have not set foot in her curiosity-shop; for I know every clock and cup and pike and helmet, and ’twould break my heart to see this man and that coming in and cheapening those precious heirlooms. But Moida is not displeased with me for holding aloof; she respects my feelings, although not at all a sentimental girl herself. Unhappily during the past year business has been very dull, and she sells but few things, 179while the rent of the store keeps high; and only that my friend has great spirit she might almost fall into despair. Yet even now, in what I may call her darkest hour, she tells Ulrich to be cheerful, that their wedding-day will come sooner or later.”
“Yes, yes; very soon,” murmured Conrad, who felt tempted to lay bare at once his whole heart to Walburga. But a moment’s reflection deterred him: it might appear too abrupt, for the young lady had never seen or spoken to him before. So, while admiring her more and more, he resolved to wait a little.
But Walburga’s voice sounded so sweetly to his ears that Conrad urged her to go on and tell him something more about herself and Moida.
Whereupon Walburga smiled and hesitated; for although she had scarcely paused an instant with her brush, yet his presence was felt to be a distraction. If she interested him, it was no less certain that he interested her. She could not feel towards Conrad as towards a stranger; she knew that he had befriended Ulrich; that he was now the owner of the place where she was born; and that the many precious things which debt and the auction-sale had scattered to the winds he was bent on recovering and taking back to Loewenstein. What wrought most potently upon Walburga was the evident interest which he showed in herself. Instead of buying her picture and then retiring, Conrad had dallied half an hour by her side, and prevailed on her to talk about her affairs with an openness at which she inwardly blushed.
Nor was he at all like the other sight-seers who were wont to visit the gallery. The two shy glances she had given him had convinced her that Conrad was no ordinary man; that whatever his origin—even if he did not know who his great-grandfather was, as Ulrich had written to Moida—yet his was not a grovelling, low-born soul.
Accordingly, after remaining silent well-nigh a minute, Walburga yielded to his request and proceeded to tell him more about herself. “Moida and I and two others, sir,” she resumed, “have a home together—which makes four of us in one small lodging.”
“Four!” repeated Conrad, just a little disturbed and wondering who the other two might be.
“Yes, four. There is myself, Moida, Caro, and a nightingale.”
“Oh! indeed—Caro and a nightingale,” ejaculated her admirer, with a sense of relief he was hardly able to conceal.
“And never was a more peaceful home. Up under the roof it is; but that gives us fresh air, and into our dormer windows the sunshine comes sooner than into any other windows on the street.”
“And you have the sweetest of all birds to sing for you,” observed Conrad.
“Yes, indeed. But I sometimes think of giving my pet his freedom. Moida laughs at me for it. Moida is——”
“Not in the least sentimental,” interrupted the other, with a smile.
“Well, true, she is not. But my bird is now a prisoner, and I am sure he must feel lonesome where he is.”
“Oh! believe me, he is far happier as your prisoner than if he were enjoying the freedom of all the woods in Bavaria,” said Conrad, with a faint tremor in his voice.
“Indeed!” exclaimed Walburga, answering his emotion by a crimson spot on her cheek.
180“Well, you may be right,” he added presently. “Your kind heart may tell you that your nightingale sighs for some other little bird to love.”
At these words the sweet, pink blush spread itself with the quickness of light over Walburga’s whole cheek, and she answered:
“I declare, ’tis just what I told Moida.”
“And what did she say?”
“Moida said—and no harm in repeating it—she said Ulrich was her nightingale.”
“Her nightingale! Well, really, your friend is sentimental; and I envy your brother. It must be the greatest of earthly joys to be happily wedded, as they soon will be.”
Here Walburga’s countenance grew suddenly pensive, and she murmured to herself: “Ay, the greatest of earthly joys.”
Conrad noticed the change in her expression and wondered at it. Then he thought to himself: “’Tis time for me to withdraw; I may be wearying her.”
But ere he retired he said: “May I come again, gracious lady, tomorrow or the day after? I sometimes have melancholy moods, but these lovely pictures bring the sunshine back to my heart; and the loveliest picture of all is in this part of the gallery.”
“You may, sir, if it pleases you,” was the answer he received. Then, making an obeisance, Conrad went away, leaving Walburga hardly in a fit state to continue her work; and she inwardly repeated the words which he had uttered about her nightingale: “Far happier as your prisoner than enjoying the freedom of all the woods in Bavaria.”
“What did he mean?” she asked herself. “What did he mean?”
A few minutes later the girl rose and went away too, still murmuring the question: “What did he mean?”
TO BE CONTINUED.
I.
Luke xxii. 44.
181II.
John xix. 1.
III.
John xix. 5.
IV.
Matt. xi. 30.
V.
John i. 29.
It has been well said that “the best government is that which governs least”; and it might with infinite propriety be added that the legislative body stultifies itself when it passes laws that cannot possibly be carried into effect. One such law on our statute-books, yet constantly and notoriously violated, does more to destroy that political morality with which our people are, to say the least, not overburdened—of which certainly there is no surplus—than would ten wrong practices against which no law exists. We learned, during the late war, of how little avail legislation is when it undertakes to regulate and declare the value of gold; and it is designed briefly to set forth in this article that the proposed much-vaunted prohibitory legislation touching alcoholic liquors is false in theory, must be unsuccessful in practice; that remedial (not repressive) measures are what is required; and to suggest means by which the end aimed at by such enactments can be attained without invading the domain of the church, the free-will of humanity, or placing the state in the odious light of executor of a grinding tyranny exercised by a temporary majority over a recalcitrant minority.
And here, in the outset, let it be understood that there is no difference between ourselves and the most ardent favorers of the Maine Law, or any similar enactment on this matter, concerning the detestable nature of drunkenness, which we both admit to be a damning sin in the sight of God and a crying scandal before man. That it is a loathsome vice is a proposition requiring only to be stated, not argued. Even the wretched being who is enthralled by it will admit this and lament his deplorable condition. The days are past when Fox, Pitt, and Sheridan went openly drunk to the House of Commons; when the usages of the highest society were such that we still retain therefrom the saying, “Drunk as a lord”; when the literature of the age informs us everywhere that gentlemen were not expected to be sober after dinner; when Burns could write in Presbyterian Scotland, “I hae been fou wi’ godly priests”; and when, in our own country, the first thing on entering and the last on leaving a house was a visit to the sideboard. Drunkenness is now deservedly 183considered by the entire community not only a vice but an inherently vulgar one. Fashionable society will not tolerate it, and there is no pretence of usage any longer set up that will even partially condone it. In short, it is the one unpardonable sin against modern society, and we are well pleased to see it ranked in this category. But while detesting drunkenness, and deprecating, in the strongest manner, the habitual use of intoxicating liquors, we dislike very much to perceive a tendency on the part of the public to ignore the fact that there are other sins besides the abuse of liquor, and that it is not by legal provision that people are to be kept sober. As Almighty God has been pleased to leave us our free-will, the reason is not evident why frail man should seek to take it away; and we object utterly to that queer manipulation by which the word “temperance” itself, the proper meaning of which is “moderation in any use or practice,” should be restricted to the moderate use of alcoholic drinks, much more that it should falsely be twisted and perverted into implying a total abstinence from them. Why should we be wise above what is written? Has Almighty God failed his church? Are we prepared to admit that Christianity is a miscarriage? This we tacitly do when we invoke to her aid the arm of the civil law. It is not to be doubted but there are persons so unfortunately constituted that they cannot use stimulants of any kind without abusing them. “Madam,” said Dr. Johnson to a lady who asked him to take a little wine—“madam, I cannot take a little, and therefore I take none at all!” Such persons must plainly abstain entirely; whether they shall do so of their own accord, by taking a simple pledge or by joining a “temperance society,” is for themselves to answer. In any case there is no safety for them save in total abstinence; but said abstinence, to have any merit whatever, must be voluntary, not one of legal enforcement.
While attention had, from time to time within the last century, been called to the intemperate use of alcoholic liquors, it is only within comparatively recent times that any organized efforts have been made to grapple with this monstrous evil. The first association for the purpose was made in Massachusetts in 1813. By its means facts and statistics were gathered and published for the purpose of calling the attention of the public to the magnitude of the evil, and suggestions made for its abatement or suppression. Similar associations were soon formed in adjoining States, and these again organized branches, until associations of the kind existed in nearly all the Eastern and Middle States. About 1820 there was formed in Boston “The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance,” which in 1829 had over one thousand auxiliary societies, no State in the Union being without one or more. The influences relied upon by this institution were the dissemination of tracts in which were portrayed the evil effects of the use of alcohol, and the employment of travelling lecturers to deliver addresses in favor of temperance. The first society professing the principle of total abstinence from intoxicating liquors was formed at Andover in 1826. These several societies, under 184one form or other, soon spread largely not only in our own country but in Canada, England, and Scotland, until they existed by hundreds in each; and about this time the word temperance began to lose its normal signification, and to be used as a synonym for total abstinence from the use of liquors. Teetotalism became the popular cry. The country was taken by storm; lecturers loomed up all over the States, administered the “pledge” publicly to hundreds of thousands; various minor denominations refitted their terms of communion in accordance with the new war-cry. In Ireland the cause of total abstinence was so successfully advocated by Very Rev. Father Mathew that he is stated to have administered the pledge to more than a million persons within three years from 1838; and since that time there has been, in the popular mind, no such thing as temperance, except in the sense of total abstinence from all that can intoxicate. All the former associations which proposed to themselves any such secondary and inefficient object as moderation in the use of liquors, or which administered either a partial pledge or one merely for a specified time, were disbanded or fell out of sight. Societies of Washingtonians, Sons of Temperance, Good Templars, and Rechabites sprang up, most of them secret and with signs, passwords, grips, tokens, etc., the members of which were pledged neither to touch, taste, handle, buy, sell, manufacture, nor use as a beverage the accursed thing. In 1851 the Legislature of Maine passed the well-known “Maine Law,” by which it was made penal to manufacture, have in possession, or sell intoxicating drinks. The law was repealed in 1856, and it has since been lawful to distil, keep, or sell spirits under certain restrictions, but drinking-houses are prohibited. A similar law was enacted in Massachusetts in 1867. In many of the States there is a law prohibiting the sale of liquors on Sunday, and in a majority the local-option law (which leaves the question whether license to sell spirits shall be granted or not to the decision, at the polls, of the people of each city, town, township, or county) is now in full blast, with results that we shall glance at hereafter. A political party has been formed in many States, under the name of “prohibitionists,” which, though as yet but rarely sufficiently numerous or powerful to elect a governor on that single issue, yet numbers adherents enough frequently to hold the balance of power between the two prominent parties, and thus extort from candidates very important concessions in their own interests. They are active, energetic, conscientious in the main, and they besiege the various legislatures with petition upon petition against the liquor-traffic, which, to their minds, is the sum of all iniquities. The various religious sects come to their aid, loudly decrying all traffic in, and use of, spirituous drink. Matters have been brought to such a pass that a man’s reputation is imperilled by taking a glass of liquor; and there is yet wanting but the one further step of making its use illegal and its procurement impossible—a course strongly and unhesitatingly urged by almost all the various supporters of what is nowadays called temperance, and which seems quite likely to succeed, should the upholders of 185these views increase in numbers for a few more years as they have done within the last two decades.
It is a law of all fanatical movements, and one of their most peculiarly dangerous features, that they readily enmesh large numbers of people, and that their workings, tendencies, and developments fall of necessity, in the long run, into the hands of the extremists, the intransigentes, among themselves. Nor has this movement proved an exception, as is seen in the attempt made by legal enactment to coerce people into the practice of an enforced abstinence from stimulants—an abstinence not shown to be physiologically desirable, not commanded by the church, and most assuredly not inculcated in Scripture. But in secret societies always, in sectarian combinations generally, and oftentimes in political parties, the experience of all ages shows that people first set up for themselves a master, and then obey him like so many slaves. They do this, too, under the delusion, for the most part, that they are carrying out their own convictions of right. It is much easier to join one of these secret organizations in a flush of curiosity, enthusiasm, or other temporary excitement than it afterwards proves to leave them in calm blood. Ties of acquaintance and quasi friendship have been formed which most men strongly dislike to break. Good care is usually exercised that “the rhetorician, from whom,” as Aristotle says, “it is an error to expect demonstration,” shall be on hand to stimulate, exhort, inspirit, and incite to still further and more vigorous exertion; the boundaries between right and wrong fade away from the mental view; and few start in on this false track who fail to accompany their misled companions as far as the archbigot or archfanatic may choose to take them.
Within the Catholic Church a large number of total-abstinence societies have been formed, of course with her sanction. Most of these are at the same time beneficial institutions, which in case of sickness give the member, and in case of death to his nearest kin, a certain allotted sum. But probably most priests on the mission will say that the great mass of Catholics who feel the necessity for them of such abstinence take the pledge as individuals at the hands of the priest, either for a certain term or for life, without joining any special society. An immense amount of good has thus been accomplished, particularly among the poorer and laboring population, a very large proportion of whom are Catholics, and, from their circumstances and inevitable surroundings, most in danger of falling into temptation in the matter of drink, as well as most certain to suffer very severely from its effects. But it has at no time been, nor is it now, any part of the teaching of the church that her children shall not manufacture, buy, sell, and use (should they be so disposed) vinous, malt, or spirituous drink. Condemning the abuse of them, and reprobating drunkenness as a mortal sin, she yet allows to her children the moderate use and enjoyment of that wine which our Blessed Lord himself made for the use of the guests at the wedding at Cana, as well as of the other forms of it, which no physician or chemist ever found to be injurious per se until it chimed in with a cry emanating from a large, an influential, possibly a well-meaning, but in our view certainly, if so, a false-thinking, or 186it may be a deceived, portion of the community.
And here it may be well to note the unpardonable arrogance of assumption with which the intemperately temperate of all sorts take it for granted that all intelligence and morality belong peculiarly to those who inculcate or practise this one principle of abstinence from liquors. We see it displayed most offensively, indeed, among the variously bedizened and becollared gentry of the divers oath-bound secret societies, and among such sectaries as practically make total abstinence a term of communion; but truth compels us to go further, and to admit the tendency, even among Catholics, on the part of those who have ardently attached themselves to the societies got up with this view, to treat all outsiders as though living on a lower plane of piety and morality than themselves. “Stand thou off, for I am holier than thou” is too frequently their language in effect, if not in words; and, indeed, that is an almost inevitable effect of what the Scotch call “unco guidness.” However, the teaching and tenets of the church remain what they have always been, and the Catholic manufacturer or vender of wines and spirits, the total abstainer and the moderate drinker, go to confession, receive absolution and holy communion, together; nor do intelligent or well-instructed Catholics imagine for a moment that the formal pledge of abstinence from intoxicants, or membership in a total-abstinence society, are anything more than adminicula to the individual whom his own weakness, the circumstances under which he earns a livelihood, or other reasons place in peculiar danger with reference to this vice.
But there must be some strong reason why an all-pervading necessity has been felt, in this century, for doing something in regard to drunkenness, the need of which (if ever previously perceived) has certainly never been acted upon by the most enlightened nations, whether of antiquity or of modern times. Lot was made drunk; Noe was drunk; Nabal and the Ephraimites were “drunken withal”; and all the evils and phenomena of intoxication are fully described in various passages of the Old Testament, always with reprobation, but there is not to be found in the entire book the slightest disapproval of the use of the fruit of the vine. On the contrary, oblations of wine to the Deity are enjoined upon the children of Israel; and the most horrible judgments denounced by the prophets of God upon the Jews consist in their being deprived of wine. In New Testament times our Saviour was called by the Pharisees (the prototypes of our ultra-abstainers) a wine-bibber; yet the same Jesus does not deem it at all necessary to proclaim himself on the teetotal side, or to leave us any precept against the use of wine. On the contrary, he institutes in wine the sacrament of his love, thus rendering the manufacture of wine necessary till the end of time. He himself changes water into wine. His apostles nowhere discourage its use, while they frequently speak of and upbraid professing Christians with its abuse, and one of them actually advises another to drop water and use a little wine for sanitary reasons. It would be sheer waste of time to undertake to refute those very ignorant or very dishonest persons who try to make it appear that wine, when mentioned in Scripture with 187commendation, is merely the unfermented juice of the grape, and that the shechar, tirosh, and yayin were only intoxicating when excess in their use was reprobated. Either these people know better, and are wittingly making use of a dishonest argument, or their ignorance is too dense to be penetrated by any proof, however cogent. The reader who may wish to see this branch of the subject succinctly yet exhaustively treated should refer to an article in the Westminster Review for January, 1875, entitled “The Bible and Strong Drink.”
The Greeks and Romans cultivated the vine very largely, made and used wine habitually; but their whole literature, while teeming with reference to the use, in no single instance commends the abuse, of wine. That the Spartans were accustomed to make their slaves intoxicated, in order by their example to deter young men from becoming addicted to the vice, is as well attested as any fact in history; while even in the worst periods of Roman story drunkenness is invariably referred to as disgraceful in itself, never to be predicated of people entitled to respect, and relegated, even at the Saturnalia, to the rabble and to slaves.
In the Stromata of St. Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the latter part of the second century, we find allusion made to a few who at that day attempted to disturb the harmony of the church by imitating the example which they professed to consider set them in the narration by the Prophet Jeremias of the story of the sons of Jonadab-ben-Rechab, and we find those persons classed by him with those of whom the apostle speaks, as “commanding to abstain from that which God hath ordained to be received with thanksgiving.” Two centuries later St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine both pointedly condemn, as acting “plainly and palpably contrary to Scripture and to the doctrine of the Church,” some who, fancying they had attained spiritual information not generally accessible, tried to introduce among Christians the vow of the Nazarites. From that time till the former half of the present century we read, indeed, of drunkenness as existing; for that matter, we know of its existence in the earliest ages, and in all times and countries since, just as we do of incontinence, of theft, and of suicide by poison. It was reserved for the nineteenth century to attempt to do away with the possibility of the vice of drunkenness by rendering penal the production of the means; which is as though the law should step in to render men chaste by emasculation, theft impracticable by the abolition of property; and not in the least more feasible than would be the carrying out of an edict against the production of animal, mineral, or vegetable poisons.
Now, we should not in the least object to any well-devised and practical legislation that would do away with drunkenness entirely, if that were possible, which it unfortunately is not; nor will it ever be the case so long as the human race exists upon earth. The question, then, arises, What would be practical legislation in the matter? This, in turn, involves an inquiry into the latent causes of the great commotion raised within this generation on the subject. It will be fresh in the memory of reading people in the United States that some two years ago one of our ablest metropolitan journals employed an agent to purchase samples 188of every possibly adulterable commodity from the most reputable venders in that city, drugs of the same description from the most respectable apothecaries—in short, specimens of everything on sale that was capable of deterioration by admixture of foreign substances; and that, on handing them over to a competent chemist for analysis, there was not a single instance of an article so purchased and tested that was not found adulterated to the last extent. All, without exception, whether articles of food, drink, medicine, or products of the arts and manufactures, were debased and corrupted—always, of course, with an inferior and cheaper, frequently with an absolutely injurious, and in some instances with a poisonous, admixture. The exposure occupied the columns of the paper referred to for some two weeks, and was then discontinued; not, however, without leaving food for reflection in the minds of the thoughtful. Now, when we consider the still greater temptation, the patent feasibility, and the larger gains resulting from adulteration of the various liquors, owing to the many hands through which they must and do pass before reaching their consumers, and the almost total impossibility, as things are, of detection, we shall have strong reason à priori to believe that such adulteration takes place. But we have before us at this moment a book of some two hundred pages, entitled the Bar-keeper’s Manual, in which the facts are laid down, the method explained, the ingredients unblushingly named, the manipulations described, and a clear reason thus afforded why the use of liquors nowadays is so ruinous to health, so productive of hitherto comparatively unknown forms of disease, and has become in this century especially such a crying abomination. In this book (which forcibly recalls to our mind an advertisement for “a man in a liquor store” that we once saw, and which wound up by stating that no one need apply who did not understand “doctoring” liquors) recipes are given for making from common whiskey any kind of gin, brandy, rum, arrack, kirschwasser, absinthe, etc., as well as any other desired brand of whiskey; together with full directions for mixing, diluting, coloring, adding strength, bead, and fruitiness, as well as for flavoring them each up to the required mark. When we find among the ingredients recommended (and evidently used, as the result of experience in this diabolical laboratory) nux vomica, cocculus indicus, strychnia, henbane, poppy-seed, creosote, and logwood, to impart strength to the false liquor, we need not inquire after the thousand other less pernicious articles used to supply color, odor, or bead to the noxious compounds. Now, from conversations held with persons who have been engaged in the liquor business in its various forms, as well as from reliable information long since spread before the public, but to quote which in extenso would occupy too much space, we may generalize these facts, which we take to be not only undisputed but indisputable; viz., that wines never, and brandies, gins, etc., rarely, reach our shores in their pure state; that the same assertion is true of every imported liquor; that the subsequent adulteration is something fearful to contemplate; and that the advocates of prohibitory laws are talking within bounds when they call such preparations 189poisons. We may further learn that rarely indeed do our home-manufactured liquors pass in a pure state into the hands of the first purchaser; and that, after they have passed through two or three subsequent hands, whatever they may have become, they are anything in the world but pure liquors. By the time, then, that they reach the small groceries, drinking-shops, doggeries, and the lowest classes of saloons, all liquors will, on an average, have passed through at least seven or eight hands, each man quite as eager as the last to make all the gain he possibly can upon the article; and adulteration (he has the Manual before him) presenting the safest and easiest plan, it follows that the laborer or artisan, those whose poverty forces them to frequent the lowest and meanest places, will be supplied with the most villanous article possible to be conceived under the name of liquor. Mr. Greenwood, in his work, The Seven Plagues of London, says:
“Where there is no pure liquor—and there is little such in London, even for the wealthy—perhaps nothing used by man as a stimulant is liable to greater and more injurious adulterations than gin; and I assert that it is not to-day to be procured pure (I speak not of merely injurious but) of absolutely poisonous drugs at a single shop in London to which a poor man would go or where he would be served.”
Mr. Nathaniel Curtis, the founder and first Worthy Chief of the Order of Good Templars, has (though his deductions from the facts are entirely different from ours) made it abundantly evident that the adulteration of all liquors, fermented, vinous, and ardent, is carried on in a most reckless manner and without regard to consequences in our own country. His words are:
“From the tramp’s glass of beer, through the sot’s glass of rum, jorum of whiskey, or pull of gin, up to the merchant’s madeira or sherry and the millionaire’s goblet of champagne, we have shown them all to be, not what the drinker supposes—and that were bad enough in all conscience—but universally drugged, most frequently poisoned, and not in one case of ten thousand containing more than a small percentage of the article the purchaser paid for.”
We might multiply authorities, chemical, medical, and purely statistic, on this subject to an indefinite extent, but it would occupy too much space; besides which, reading men are already sufficiently convinced of the facts. Within the last few years such a mass of damning evidence has been put before the public on this subject that the man must be wilfully blind who does not admit adulteration of the most injurious sort to be the rule in all the various branches and phases of the liquor-traffic. One quotation, however, we must make from the pages of the Dublin Review, July, 1870, article “Protestant London,” in which the writer suggests something very like our own view, though he seems to have an idea that the wholesale adulteration was, in England, confined to fermented liquors, which is indeed a grave mistake, whether as regards England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, or in fact any of the countries peculiarly afflicted by this demon of drink. The writer says:
“Yet the effects of beer in England are confessedly far worse than those of wine in France. We believe the real explanation of this to be its adulteration. It is by drinking, at first in moderation, adulterated beer that the habit of intoxication becomes a slavery, by which men are afterwards led on to the abuse of gin. 190There are at this moment thousands of habitual drunkards among us who would never have been drunkards at all, had they not been betrayed into the snare by drinking in moderation adulterated beer—that is, if the beer sold in public-houses were not universally adulterated. This evil, at least, law well administered might meet and uproot. Government should not allow men both to cheat and poison their neighbors with impunity.”
It is, then, not at all surprising that mania a potu, delirium tremens, and other disorders arising from the abuse of good or the use of drugged liquor should have become so common in this country as to furnish a good or, at any rate, a plausible reason why many conscientious persons have attributed to the use of liquor effects due, either solely or in great measure, to the stupefying and poisonous decoctions vended under that name. But while this would have been, at all times as it is now, an excellent and an all-sufficient reason for trying to induce people to refrain, whether by pledge or otherwise, from such infernal compounds, and for having analysts appointed by law to examine and test the liquors sold in every tavern, we insist that it is no argument at all for doing away by law with the use of liquor in toto. We believe sincerely that no single measure (that can be carried out) would do more to lessen the national curse of drunkenness than the appointment of competent chemists to see to the purity of the liquors vended. And, considering the advanced state of chemical science among us, is it absurd to suppose, that if the government were determined that so it should be, the selling of adulterated liquor might not easily be made so dangerous a trade as to be very soon given over? It is lamentable that people are so eager for gain that they will and do adulterate everything capable of the process. Physicians tell us that it is nearly impossible to get at the ordinary drug-stores any of the higher-priced medicines in their pure state; that opium, quinine, etc., are nearly always impure, mixed with foreign ingredients; and that, for this reason, their prescriptions often fail of the intended effect. This, certainly, is no good reason for enacting a law to abolish entirely the use of adulterable drugs; nor because tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, mace, mustard, and pepper are rarely found pure should we therefore abandon their use altogether.
Here, of course, it will be contended that the cases are not parallel; that whereas the abuse of liquor, or the use of the drugged article going by that name, renders man like the brute, degrades and obliterates the image of God in us, yet such is not the case with the adulterated commodities of food or with the drugs referred to. True, the analogy does not hold equally good throughout in each case, but the principle is exactly the same in all. We will go further, admitting that liquor is in very few cases an absolute necessity; but what a large number of mankind regard it as of prime importance to their well-being, to their comfort, or, finally, to their enjoyment! How few of the great mass of humanity, on the other hand, are of that unfortunate constitution of mind, of body, or of both that they cannot restrain themselves within the bounds of moderation in the use of liquor vinous or fermented! Suppose even that the passage of a prohibitory law by the majority were consonant with church and Scriptural 191teachings, would it be fair or reasonable that for the lamentable weakness of the very few the comfort and enjoyment of the vast mass of humanity should be lightly set aside as an unconsidered trifle? That Anglican bishop who said he “would rather see England free than England sober” expressed a noble sentiment, and we think, with him, that enforced sobriety (as would be that produced by such a law) would be dearly purchased at the expense of virtual slavery. Some one pithily condemns that false system of morality that begins by pledges of total abstinence, but the falsity of such a scheme is trifling compared with that which would invite us to come and admire a nation sober, enforcedly sober, de par la loi! As well ask us to applaud the sobriety of the convicts in the penitentiary. We are not placed in the world to be free from temptation, but to resist it. All theologians assure us that this is a state of probation, nor is it the business of the civil code either to abolish property lest many may steal, or to suppress the manufacture of liquor lest some shame themselves and sin against God by getting drunk. Again, if you begin this business, where is it to end? Human beings are very full of kinks and crotchets. Each half-century is sure to have its peculiar vagary. What may not be that of the next one? King James considered tobacco as a direct emanation from the devil; and John Wesley was no whit behind him either in the belief or its expression. It is certainly quite as unnecessary, quite as much an article de pur luxe, as beer, wine, or spirits. Who is bail to me that, the principle once established of suppressing human nature by act of Congress, future Good Templars, prospective Rechabites, Sons of Temperance yet to come, nay, the whole Methodistic fraternity, may not revivify the views of Wesley and thunder anathemas against Yaras, Fine-cut, and Cavendish? Or there may arise an expounder of Scripture who shall deduce thence a system of vegetarianism (quite as unlikely doctrines and practices have been deduced from Holy Writ) to his own satisfaction and that of crowds greater than wait on the ministrations of our latest evangelists. Of course then, marshalled to victory by the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” they will soon have a law enacted forbidding to us all beefsteak or mutton-chop! There is, in short, no end to the antics and absurdities that may, nay, that must, arise under the ægis of such a precedent as this law would furnish. We, for our part, fully believe in rendering to Cæsar what belongs to him; but it is the province of the church, representing God upon earth—of religion, in other words—so to dispose man as to enable him to withstand temptation to sin and crime; and the business of the civil power to punish him for offences committed, not to remove all temptation to wrongdoing. In short, the law is not held to an impossibility, which this would plainly be, unless the world were made a tabula rasa. The assumption, therefore, by the civil law, of the divinely-conferred duty and prerogative of the church would, in any case, be a usurpation, were it even practicable. We shall see that in the case before us, at least, it would be purely impossible to carry out the legal mandate by all the power of the government, were it multiplied a hundred-fold.
192The heavy tariff on foreign, and the large internal revenue tax on domestic, liquors, necessitated by our civil war, have also been a great inducement to the adulteration of spirits, as well as to the advance of that already too wide-spread practice of cheating the government in matter of revenue, now so common as hardly to be regarded in the light of a moral wrong. Howsoever it may have come about, the fact is that the tone of political morality with us is about as low as it has ever been in any country that the sun shines on. From the Stocking & Leet trial, through the troubles of Tammany’s magnates and the charges of complicity with smugglers pending against some of our most prominent mercantile firms, down to the “crooked whiskey” cases of to-day, as well as the constantly-bandied and the sometimes thoroughly proven charges of bribery against our most highly-placed public men, we see everywhere either a desperate resolution to evade all law, or a serene belief that deception and the withholding of tax and tariff legally due cease to be cheating and swindling when the government is the party of the second part. It is now clearly made out that, since the laying on of high duties and revenue tax, it has cost our government an average of three dollars to collect every two dollars received from that source in the public treasury; while as to the amount of which the government is annually defrauded, no calculation other than an approximate one can, of course, be made, but those whose position gives them the best chance to form an accurate judgment place the yearly sum at the minimum of $80,000,000. Before our late war we had a federal treasury ever full. Indeed, but a very short time before that dismal experience the general government distributed a large surplus among the States; our treasury notes were always above par, and our simple government bonds at high premium. With the advent of war came the necessity for raising a large and an immediate revenue. Taxation, direct and indirect, was resorted to, the like of which has rarely (if ever) been known in civilized countries. Paper money, redeemable at the pleasure of the government, was issued. Gold and silver entirely disappeared. An army of internal revenue officers had to be created, and a supplementary host of detectives to ferret out infractions of the new-made laws. The tax on common whiskey was placed at two dollars and fifty cents per gallon, and corresponding sums on foreign liquors; Cognac, for example, being rated at seven dollars per gallon. Our people were not accustomed to, and did not like, taxation; and the government neither knew how to suggest, nor its officials how to carry out honestly and skilfully, any well-devised plans for the collection of revenue on such a gigantic scale. Here there was a strong inducement at once both to the illicit manufacture and to the increased adulteration of liquors, the latter of which (though existing too largely before) took, from that time, large strides in advance, and both have uninterruptedly continued their progress till the present day, threatening (unless most stringent measures be taken for their repression) to ruin our country, morally, and a large number of her citizens temporally and eternally. It is true that the tax on home-manufactured spirits was 193largely cut down in 1870, and that on foreign wines and liquors heavily curtailed; but those at all acquainted with the subject know how little this step, taken after eight years of the reverse practice, was likely to interfere with clandestine manufacture, and how immensely it tended to give a superadded impetus to the practice of adulteration. Our internal revenue officers are now legion, yet they do not collect one-half of the revenue that should be collected; and of that one-half not more than two-fifths inures to the benefit of the treasury. Our detectives swarm everywhere, yet illicit distillation and poisonous adulteration of liquors are on a very rapid increase. Now, a very large number of people, learned and lay, rich and poor, of practical experience in the use of liquor, and deriving their information from the experience of others, or from reading, are strongly of the opinion that the best and most practicable mode of decreasing actual drunkenness, and of mitigating or diminishing the acknowledged evils of drink, would be the furnishing of pure liquors instead of the noxious compounds now on sale. Certainly, to put the matter in the mildest terms, there prevails a very extensive belief, founded, we think, upon good reason, that if pure liquors alone were sold drunkenness would not prevail as it now does. It is not contended that intoxication would thereby be done away with, any more than that the most skilful devices can ever entirely prevent theft, forgery, murder, or other crime; but we insist that the tendency to drunkenness, now so inseparable (as experience shows) from the use of the drugged article, would not exist in a tithe of the instances nor to a hundredth part of the extent that we daily see. Certain it is that in the last century, and until adulteration began to prevail extensively in the present, the terrific effects of liquor-drinking now known to us, under so many different names and forms of disease, did not present themselves with any frequency; and it is equally certain that just in proportion to the universality of adulteration has been the commonness and virulence of mania and delirium resulting from drink. We have said that stringent measures should be taken to guard the interests of the comparatively helpless consumers, so that they may have some reasonable ground for believing that in taking a glass of ale or beer they have not imbibed a dose of cocculus indicus, that a drink of whiskey does not of necessity imply an undefined amount of nux vomica, or that the symptoms resultant from a mixture of brandy and water at dinner are not due to strychnia or creosote. We found it much easier during the war to raise prices on account of the enhanced value of gold than it has since proved to diminish them in accordance with the approximation of greenbacks to coin. So, too, in this matter of suppressing adulteration of drink (which is the remedy we propose, and which will be just so far valuable as it is thorough and uncompromising, while comparatively useless unless rigidly and strenuously carried out), we have called into play a practice, we have evoked a demon, which is not to be abolished or banished by feeble instrumentality. We shall illustrate what may be done here in our own country by what has been successfully accomplished in Sweden (a country in which 194drunkenness and its attendant evils had attained a magnitude beyond, perhaps, any other of Europe); nor can we do it better than by the following account taken from Dr. Carnegie’s late book, entitled The License Laws of Sweden:
“In the town of Gothenburg, however, these measures (prohibitory laws), partly from local reasons, were not found sufficiently restrictive; and a committee, appointed in 1865, readily traced a concurrent progress between the increasing pauperism and the increasing drink. The laws were evaded, the police set at naught, and nothing remained but to inaugurate a radically new system. This consisted of various measures, all subordinate to one great principle—viz., that no individual, either as proprietor or manager, under a public-house license, should derive any gain from the sale of liquor. To carry out this principle in its integrity the whole liquor-traffic of the town was gradually transferred to a company, limited, consisting of the most highly respected gentlemen of the town, who undertook, by their charter, to carry on the business in the interests of temperance and morality, and neither to derive any profit from it themselves nor to allow any person acting under them to do so. The company now rent all the houses and licenses from the town, paying a moderate interest on the capital invested, and making over the entire profits of the trade to the town treasury. The places for drink—the number of which was immediately curtailed—are of two classes, public-houses and retail shops, both bound to purchase their wine and spirits (analyzed and authoritatively pronounced pure) from the company, to sell them without any profit, to supply good food and hot meals on the premises, and not to sell Swedish brandy except at meals. The public-houses are managed by carefully-chosen men, who derive their profits from the sale of malt liquors (also analyzed before being put on sale), coffee, tea, soda and seltzer water, cigars, etc., and from the food and lodgings. The retail shops are managed entirely by women, who have a fixed salary but no share in the profits. This system began to work in October, 1865. Its effects have been at once perceptible. In 1864 the number of fines paid in Gothenburg for drunkenness was 2,164; in 1870, with a largely increased population, 1,416. Cases of delirium tremens in 1864 were 118; in 1868 but 54. Nor are the financial effects less encouraging. In 1872 the company realized in net profits no less than £15,846, which, being paid over to the town, far more than covers the entire poor-rate. Another pleasant fact is that this large amount of trade is virtually carried on without any paid-up capital, the whole outlay of the company having only amounted to £454.”
It is interesting to learn from the same authority whence the above extract is taken that whilst the consumption of liquor in Sweden is still enormous, it has been reduced (mainly owing to the care exercised in testing its purity, and partially, also, to well-regulated restriction) from ten gallons per head throughout the kingdom in 1860 to about two gallons in 1870, which is about the same proportion as in Scotland at present; and that the universal testimony of the Swedish philanthropists, far from favoring absolute prohibition, looks rather to purity of liquor, conjoined with moderate restriction, and finds the results eminently satisfactory. But while we point to their experience, as well as to common sense, right reason, the practice both of the ancient and modern world till the beginning of this agitation of a factitious temperance; while we invoke the teachings of Scripture for those who profess to be guided in matters of morals and doctrine by that, and by that alone, and appeal to the constant practice and to the authority of the church, which should, with Catholics, be paramount to all other considerations, yet we are painfully aware that to produce conviction in the minds of extremists is a task that no logic can accomplish. It is, like the cure 195of the vice itself which gives occasion for this article, only to be accomplished by the grace of God. The English-speaking world—the most enterprising and energetic portion of the human race—occupying, for the most part, regions which suggest toiling and striving physically and mentally so as, in the opinion of many of them, to necessitate an occasional resort to alcoholic stimulants, have used these liquors largely, we will say too largely, if you please. Other shrewd and unscrupulous Anglo-Saxons have stepped in and poisoned, for gain, the cup which they thought one of refreshment. Death and disease, drunkenness and dipsomania, have been so long and so frequently the result that the attention of the public is imperatively called to it. “Take the pledge,” says one; “that will settle the matter”—forgetting that without the help of God no pledge is of any account, and that with his grace no pledge is needed. “Join the order,” bawls another; “here you find the sovereign panacea for drink”—oblivious of the fact that these secret institutions are never permanent, rarely at peace within themselves, constantly shifting in views and practice, and that in joining them the neophyte simply takes as many masters as there are members, exchanging the slavery to drink for one still more galling and quite as sinful. “No license to sell less than a quart,” says yet another. The quart is soon disposed of, and many another quart and gallon go the same road. “Sell no liquor, open no drinking-house on Sunday,” screams a full-throated chorus of religionists. This, too, is tried, and the poor man, obliged to choose between entire dulness and intoxication, prepares himself on Saturday night for a Sunday’s drinking bout. “No license less than three hundred dollars,” suggest the cannie property-holders; and, presto! higher adulteration; more poison in the drink; a higher rate per glass, it may be, but not a tippling-shop less in country or city. “No license at all,” is the next cry. It is tried; adulteration becomes still more barefaced, but the same amount of drinking is done, it can hardly be said clandestinely, for it is done in the face of day, and everybody knows or may know of it. Macrae’s America tells us that when an investigation was instituted into the workings of the prohibitory or no-license system in Boston, there were found to be in that city over two thousand places where liquor was vended by the glass, and that the average annual amount spent per head (men, women, and children included) for liquor in the entire State was a little over ten dollars. “We’re all for the Maine Law here,” said a man to Mr. Macrae, “but we’re agin its enforcement.” It may here be stated once for all, without possibility of successful contradiction, that not one of these laws, whether for Sunday-closing, higher license, no license, partial license, or entire prohibition, ever was carried out, or ever had any other effect than possibly to add to the cost, and certainly to enlarge illicit distillation and set an enhanced premium on the adulteration of liquors.
Maine was obliged, after a few years’ trial, to abrogate her prohibitory law; and the most ardent favorers of local option, which has now had a full and fair trial in many States, confess it a failure. 196Our own experience of it is that drunkenness is nowhere so rife as in the midst of those very regions where no license is granted and entirely prohibitory laws are supposed to prevail; and there is surplusage of testimony to the facts.
Strange, certainly, it seems to us, that among the various modes, some plausible and some supremely silly, that have been proposed and acted upon with a view of checking the ravages of intemperance, so few should have suggested, and none should have acted upon the idea of trying, what might be the possible effect of pure liquor. Common sense should have at once suggested it, and a portion of the redundant and exuberant philanthropy of the age might have been well, at least harmlessly, employed in making an experiment which could in no case have worked disastrously, as all those plans have done which familiarize the people with systematized violation of law, to gratify the morbid craving for those poisons the use of which, growing with every indulgence, soon leaves the victim incapable of resisting the craving that never abandons him but with life. Most people, however, once fairly inoculated with the views of the temperance societies (we refer to the secret institutions under that name), see everything but from one point of view; the vision becomes jaundiced, prejudice carries the day, argument is of no avail, moderate measures are futile, liquor in any shape, alcohol in any quantity, are the accursed thing, and those who deal in them, nay, those who see no objection to their use, are Amalekites. What to them are the vested interests of the eight hundred thousand persons engaged in the manufacture and sale of liquor in the United States alone? What the employment of hundreds of thousands engaged in its transportation? What care they about the wives and families of either? It is of no sort of consequence to them that over sixty million dollars accrue to the federal treasury, even under the present extremely defective system of collection, from the tax on domestic liquors; half as much more from the tariff on foreign wines and spirits; and that the amounts paid for municipal, county, State, and federal purposes, by license on liquor-selling and drinking-houses, are simply incalculable. As well plant and try to cultivate the sands from high-water mark to ebb-tide as attempt to reason with such people! They are the communists of our country, the impracticables, the men of one idea, and that idea a wrong one. We would much like to be able to reach them, to be able to make them hear the words of genuine truth and soberness; but they are “joined to their idols,” as Ephraim of old; the doctrines of the “lodge,” the rulings of the W. Patriarch, W. Chief Templar (or whatever else may be the name of the presiding Grand Mogul), are of more avail to them than all the philosophy and all the logic of ancient and modern times. What are the Fathers of the church to the Rev. Boanerges Blunderbuss, at Brimstone Corner, who explains to the satisfaction of his hearers that wine, “which cheers the heart of God and of man,” is but the unfermented juice of the grape, and that our Saviour, at his last supper, squeezed out some three or four clusters of grapes into the goblet whence he and his disciples drank? Talk to one of these people about the desirableness of some regard for the habits and customs of the multitudes 197in this wide world who use wine and spirits without abusing them; he regards you with a withering contempt for your ignorance, and informs you that they are all drunkards and must be reformed; that if five glasses of wine make a man drunk, one-half of a glass must make him one-tenth part drunk; that liquor is never necessary, even in disease as a remedy; that the Good Samaritan was really poisoning the poor fellow to whom he gave the wine; and he leaves on your mind the general impression that Solomon had yet a great deal to learn from Sons of Temperance and prohibitory-law men when he over-hastily recommended in his Proverbs to “give drink to the sorrowful.” Just as impracticable, though in a different way and for a different reason, is the man who has no sympathy for habits and needs which he never knew; who never had a generous impulse in his life; whose every act is based on cold reason and personal interest; who seldom or never took, and who never longed for, a glass of wine since his wedding-day; who has no sympathy for those differently situated in life or of different physiological diathesis. He has neither genuine sympathy for the unfortunate drunkard nor fellow-feeling for those who use liquor. Mistaking oftentimes his own plentiful surroundings for honesty, the want of temptation for temperance, and his own success in life for virtue, we need expect from him no other cry than “do away with the whole thing.”
Those poor degraded wretches at the other extreme of society who, from congenital inclination, bad surroundings, evil training, folly, disease, or the gnawing remorse engendered by failure in life, have fallen a prey to the accursed poisons sold as drink, their intellect shattered and their physical constitution prostrate, do not, we confess, deserve a very ardent sympathy from a community for which they have done little but harm. Still, that community was to blame that received money for licensing the houses that sold them narcotics instead of beer, henbane instead of wine, and liquid damnation for strong drink. It is, at least, a duty which we owe in future to all who can control themselves that, when they ask for bread, they shall not be furnished with a stone.
We are very anxious not to be misunderstood. This article is not intended to be either a recommendation of, or an excuse for, tippling habits, still less as an argument in favor of the drinking usages of the last century or of any other period distinguished for copious drinking. The personal habits and practice of the writer are opposed entirely to the use of wine, beer, or spirits. His profession does not render them necessary nor his taste crave them, and he would that in this one respect the world “were altogether such as” he is; but he cannot ignore the fact that all men are not so constituted physically, so situated in a worldly point of view, or mentally disposed in the same way. What all can clearly see is that a cry is being raised, an attempt being made, to add in a clandestine and illegitimate way something that shall in effect be tantamount to a precept, and that this something so foisted upon us is opposed to the practice of the church, consequently to the Scriptures. We see that this cry has become fashionable, a fear of being reckoned with the “vulgar 198herd” (for drunkenness is a vice of the vulgar) or a fear of giving offence causing many to be silent who should “cry aloud and not spare,” lest haply the harm may be done and it be too late for the remedy. Now, the whole clamor, save in so far as it inveighs against drunkenness, “the disgrace of man and the mother of misery,” proceeds on the false hypotheses, 1, that the Holy Scripture discountenances the moderate use of liquor; 2, that the church opposes it; 3, that the ancient philosophers condemned it; 4, that it is injurious in health; 5, that it is valueless as a remedy in sickness; and, 6, that prohibitory laws should be passed forthwith forbidding under penalty the manufacture, purchase, sale, or importation of wine, beer, or spirits. Not a single one of these assertions is true, or has about it the semblance of verisimilitude to any but the average brain of the secret-society affilié, or the fungus that stands in the place of a heart for the bigoted sectary. Were they every one true, we should still be opposed to the manner in which it is attempted to carry them into effect; fully believing, as we do, that the whole matter of personal reform lies within the domain of the church, upon which region the civil power has no right to trench. Of course the state has a perfect and undisputed right to tax wines, liquors, etc., like all other articles of luxury, to any extent she may deem advisable, either for revenue or repression of habits of expense among her citizens. But, inseparably bound up with this right, and as a corollary from it, it is the duty of the state to see that the article or articles for allowing the sale of which she receives revenue shall not injure, much less ruin, her citizens; and it is in the performance of this duty that we affirm government to have been totally remiss and delinquent. Had it been otherwise, and had the state been half as anxious to perform her duty as she has been always eager to claim her right, there never would have been the faintest plausibility in the cry raised; no agitation could have resulted; with her performance of the duty the clamor must, of necessity, cease, and with it those secret societies, so powerless for good, so potential for evil, that have been evoked by it.
There is, however, no limit in our age to the power of clap-trap, of a cry well started and persistently kept up. Back such a cry by the unremitting efforts of a few secret organizations, which demagogues well know how to use as a means of climbing into power, and superadd the influence of some of the sects, it deepens to a howl, and a careless or lethargic community is easily induced to believe that there must be some reason for the clamor; that what so many people say must be true; that where so much smoke exists there must have been a fire at some time; and, finally, that the object on which so many persons seem to have set their minds, to carry which so many are combined, must be a good one. From this point to supporting it with vote and influence the step is an easy one. Hence it is that, absurd as is the proposal of those who favor Congressional prohibitory laws touching liquor, we feel no certainty that its unreasonableness will prove a barrier to its being at some time put into effect. We have indicated previously that there exists, even among Catholics, who should know better, a lurking notion that in joining the T. B. A. 199or any of its congeners, they take a step forward in holiness, approach nearer to the imitation of the Saviour, and outstrip in piety those who remain outside the institution using (and able to enjoy without abusing) “the liberty wherewith Christ has made them free.” Now, this is false, and consequently is not Catholic doctrine or feeling. It is according to the doctrine of the church, with which the practice of Catholics must agree, that should the experience of any individual prove to him that total abstinence from drink is in his special case easier than moderation in its use, and that he ought, consequently, not to use liquor at all; and if, in addition, he is clearly of opinion that this, his proper course, is much facilitated by joining a Catholic temperance association, he has a clear right, nay, it is his duty, to attach himself to it. Further, should a Catholic have a friend, whom he can largely influence, who is becoming over-fond of drink, and whom he judges in conscience he can reclaim by taking with him the pledge of total abstinence, or by accompanying him into any of the Catholic associations got up and recommended for such purposes, the Catholic so doing acts nobly and performs a meritorious work, greater and more laudable just in proportion as he himself was further removed from temptation or danger of fall in the matter of drink. But it is not a bounden duty enjoined on every Catholic Christian to abstain entirely from liquor, much less to join a temperance society; and, except where it is done to save another, as in the case just presented, the Catholic so joining it is no more laudable, certainly, than he who stands aloof, using his God-given liberty in the matter.
While the church, like her divine Lord and Founder, has never forcibly interfered with man’s free-will, yet her entire history proves that her salutary influence has been exerted, and that, too, with the highest success, against every shape in which the sin of luxury has appeared. The Catholic countries of the world are not now, and they never have been, the drunken countries. Drunkards are not found to-day among those who frequent the tribunal of penance; and, with that consistency of action and oneness of doctrine which is found in no other existent institution, the church maintains that against the sin of drunkenness, as against all other forms of sin, there is no thoroughly effectual remedy but the frequentation of her sacraments. Pledges and associations, while sanctioned by her, are regarded as mere adminicula, tending to bring the sinner to the use of confession, the performance of enjoined penance, and the worthy reception of the Blessed Sacrament. Abstinence, whether for a time or for life, she looks upon as a work of perfection, of remedy, or of penance for the individual. The pledge, as administered by her, is neither oath nor vow, but either a resolution taken by one’s self in the presence of another, or at the utmost a solemn promise made to man. While more than fifteen hundred years ago the church anathematized the heresy of the Manicheans, who taught that spirituous liquors are not creatures of God, and that, as they are intrinsically evil, he who uses them is thereby guilty of sin, yet both before and after the rise of that detestable sect all the writings of her fathers and doctors, all the decrees of her synods and councils, all the decisions of her Supreme Pontiffs, and all the labor 200of her priests have been persistently directed towards teaching her members to “subdue the flesh with its affections and lusts.” How well she succeeded let her conquest to Christianity of the conquering northern barbarian hordes testify. Of these, whose temperament rendered them peculiarly inclined to debauch, whose habits by no means belied their inclinations, and whose besetting sin was drunkenness even after their conversion to the faith, she made sober nations. Acts of Parliament, municipal and other local measures, show us the huge strides toward unbounded intemperance in drink taken by the English people from the time when, in giving up the true church, they abandoned the sacrament of penance; while the same acts, and what we have had of so-called repressive law-tinkering on the same subject in our own country, show us the utter futility of any and every attempt by the civil law to render men moral by statute—to do God’s work without the help of the Omnipotent. Were it even possible for the state to succeed in carrying out the most stringent prohibitory or repressive laws that it ever entered the brain of the wildest or most narrow-minded fanatic to conceive, what would be the result? Simply that people would, like inmates of the work-house or penitentiary, endure privation without practising abstinence. The church of God takes no such ground; and the state can no more succeed in carrying out such measures than did Domitian with his sumptuary decree. Legislators forget what the church always bears carefully in mind and has always inculcated—viz., that drunkenness is the sin not of the drink but of the drunkard. The assertion that alcohol in any form is an emanation of the evil spirit, or the denial of the lawfulness of the use of liquor, is in itself just as much a heresy today as it was in the days of the Egkratites. But, that we may not overrun our limits in pursuing this branch of the subject, we refer such readers as may be anxious to see it fully and ably treated to the valuable little work entitled The Discipline of Drink, by Rev. T. E. Bridgett, C.SS.R.
It is not, however, from Catholic sources that the proposal emanates to cut off by legal enactment the supply of beer, wine, and spirits, which many people—indeed, the vast majority of the civilized inhabitants of the earth—deem necessary for their health, conducive to their comfort, or desirable for their enjoyment. Such schemes come from the Radicaux enragés; from those who addle their intellects by striving to decipher the mystic number of the Apocalyptic beast; from the men of the George Fox stripe, to whom a steeple-house is the unclean thing; always from men on whom the name of the Church of Rome operates as does the flaunting of a red rag by the picador on the bull in the amphitheatre of Seville; and, finally, from those who believe neither in this nor in anything else that man should hold sacred, but who see and seek in the secret societies, and in the agitation of this and similar questions, a stepping-stone to power and a means of gaining influence.
Were one to judge by the pamphlets and tracts written on the side of the prohibitionists, he would readily suppose that it is admitted on all hands by physicians and chemists that alcohol is of no use as a remedial or curative agent; that it is not food, is not life-sustaining; 201that no possible good can come out of Nazareth; that the unclean thing is altogether accursed, and should be relegated to the bottomless pit whence it sprang. And, that we may not overburden this article, we shall simply give the conclusion arrived at by a writer in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1875, entitled “The Physiological Influence of Alcohol,” in which the writer (himself a physician, whose yearning to find against us is evident throughout), after an able comparison and summing up of the cases, experiments, and arguments of Doctors Richardson, Thudichum, Dupré, Anstie, and other celebrated authorities, thus perorates:
“The inference is plain. The nutritious capability of alcohol, when used in appropriate circumstances and in reasonable quantity, is yet a matter of controversy, and a question which has yet to be further investigated and weighed by competent scientific authorities before any absolute judgment regarding it can be pronounced that shall be worthy of general acceptance.”
Those who feel any interest in this part of the subject would do well to read the entire article referred to, and we feel convinced that nine out of ten who do so will come to the conclusion, from the data given, that the able writer’s patent bias is what caused the very non-committal wording of his final dictum; while the same number will decide the large preponderance of proof to be in favor of the nutritive qualities of alcohol. We have failed to see in any of the “temperance” documents the remotest hint that there was anything at all to be said in favor of alcohol as an article of nutriment. Is this honest? These people must calculate largely on the gullibility of the public; but they should recollect, too, that the same public, when it once discovers their prevarication, is very ready to apply the proverb, Falsus in uno, etc.
The great Swedish chancellor, Oxenstierna, said to his son: “You do not yet know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” We are in this respect neither better nor worse off than other countries, with perhaps this exception: that our best citizens, those of largest experience and soundest judgment, are too self-respecting, too proud, to descend into the dirty arena of politics, a vast majority of such never having attended a primary meeting in their lives, and many, very many, rarely casting a vote. True, when corruption has run its course, when ring-rule becomes unendurable, this class will sometimes, as lately in New York, arouse itself. Now, the men of one idea, the canters (honest and dishonest), and the knaves are not so. They never miss an opportunity of propagating their views, and it would seem almost as though there were an intimate and necessary connection between the falsity or illiberality of the view and the pertinacity of its upholders in spreading it. Besides, they are not indifferent to, but they hate, broad and liberal views on any subject; they must gauge all humanity by their own instrument, which, while it suits the pint-pot, is but ill adapted to the hogshead. “Les idées générales sont toujours haïes par les idées partielles,” says a French writer to whom (while we by no means agree with him in everything) ability must be conceded. Should people ever have the power to do it—a contingency by no means unlikely in this century, in which the secret societies seem to hold “high carnival” (May a subsequent Lenten time 202purge the world of such foul humors!)—they will infallibly enact a penal prohibitory law. This will be accomplished by means of the already-organized associations, the oath-bound classes, the pledged abstainers, some of the sects, largely aided by the lethargy and carelessness of people who hold clearer and more correct views. It will be worse than useless to pass such laws, unless provision be made for stringently carrying into effect their details. Suppose that the prohibitory law proposed has been enacted and is vigorously enforced, and let us cursorily examine what is this Golden Age, this antedated millennium promised us so confidently by our over-temperate friends.
A blockade of coast will be necessary, to which the blockade of the Confederate territory during the late war will be as nothing, either for extent of coast to be guarded or for the numbers, ingenuity, and means at the command of the blockade-runners. The Canadian and Mexican borders will require cordons of sentries day and night, to furnish which one hundred armies such as we possess would be ridiculously inadequate. A government detective force of at least one-fourth our adult male population will have to be employed, organized, and paid; and not less than one-half of the remainder will soon be in prison for infraction or evasion of the law. Meanwhile, the revenues will have diminished by fully one-third, while the governmental expenses will have been tenfold increased. The hundreds of thousands who now make a livelihood for themselves and families by the manufacture, transport, and sale of beer, wines, or spirits must find other employment or join the already too numerous army of tramps; and in this case what becomes of the unfortunate families? If the laboring man finds it difficult to procure work now, what will it be then? Taxation must, of necessity, be decoupled; and meantime a large proportion of the population will have come to the conclusion that they are suffering under the most odious of all tyrannies, and will be ripe for revolution. The pretext will not be wanting in the details of carrying out the provisions of the law. This state of things might last, at the utmost, a year, during which insurrections would be of constant occurrence in every part of the country; outbreaks in the cities would take place day after day; and, finally, the minority, in revolution against what they considered an unjust and tyrannical edict, would carry the day either peacefully at the polls (by aggregating to themselves such of the majority as had become convinced of the absurdity of the law) or, sword in hand and at the mouth of the cannon, would revindicate to themselves the rights so wantonly trampled upon. The results of such a victory may be better imagined than described. History, fortunately, has but few examples of such revolutions against the extravagance of over-zealous reform, but those few are terrifically replete with warning.
We wish, then, to insist that no law at all is better by far than a law which, in its nature, cannot be carried into effect. That this is such a law we think manifest on the above showing; and did we wish further proof, it is readily found in the fact that all those communities, great or small, towns, counties, or states, that have tested this, or even much milder doses of similarly-intended 203laws, have been obliged either to abandon them after a longer or shorter trial, or to acknowledge their impotence to execute them, and to own that under such régime the evils deprecated become more virulent and drunkenness more rampant. Contempt, too, for the law, in one instance, has the inevitable tendency to sap the foundations of respect for all law, not merely in the mind of the drunkard but in that of the moderate drinker, as well as of those who abet them both in their violation of legal enactment. Meanwhile, the sensible man, the practical but unpledged total abstainer, cannot be expected to feel strongly interested in the success of a law which his judgment tells him to be merely an arbitrary enforcement, by a majority, of their views of morality on a minority entitled to their own ideas and practices in this matter alike by natural reason, Scriptural teaching, and church commands. “A nation is near destruction when regard for law has disappeared.”
Fully aware, as we are, that the arguments and deductions, the statements and quotations, contained in this paper are far from being in accord with the oral and printed teachings most in vogue and most palatable to the reading public, and much as we might desire to be on the popular side, still we are not prepared, for the attainment of this end, to sacrifice our convictions of right, to ignore the experience of the past, to turn a deaf ear to the teachings of the church, or to superadd to her commands practices in morals that she knows not. We cannot undertake to find in Scripture injunctions that do not exist; still less are we willing to lie supine when erroneous views are stealthily creeping in (even amongst ourselves), are sedulously promulgated over the length and breadth of the non-Catholic world, and when the attempt is making to enforce even desirable practices in morals and personal discipline by false arguments and means that will not stand the test of right reason. Let us review the ground and gather together the results.
The use of intoxicating liquor or strong drink has been known in all countries and from the earliest times; drunkenness must have been and was equally well known. In no system, even of heathenism, has intoxication been recommended; and in none, save that of Mohammed, has abstinence from liquor been enjoined. The Old and New Testaments, while teeming with allusions to the use of wine and strong drink, nowhere lay down any precept forbidding their use, but frequently by the clearest implication, and in a few instances by express injunction, command the use of both; and the manufacture of wine must, by the institution of our Blessed Saviour, be kept up so long as the world shall exist. There is no proof for the assertion, that alcohol is not food, and less for the averment that it has no efficacy as a remedial agent. The taste for liquor is a natural one and inherent to all men, but probably stronger and more necessary of gratification among hard-working men, and in damp or cold climates, than in the case of sedentary persons or in mild and hot countries. It is not the province of civil government to remove temptation to the infraction of the moral law; its province is to keep order and to punish infractions of law. To pass a series of totally prohibitory laws would be to attempt the legal suppression of 204human nature; which being impossible, such legislation must be absurd. There are great evils in the present management of the liquor-traffic, chiefly arising from the wholesale adulterations with poisonous drugs everywhere largely practised, but most ruinously in the northern countries of Europe, in Canada, and in the United States. Were the traffic so taken in charge by governments or carefully-appointed companies that pure liquors only should be furnished for consumption, all profits from the sale accruing to government, the great mass of the evils (now justly complained of) in connection with the liquor trade would disappear, while at the same time an immense revenue would accrue to the federal or State treasury, as the case might be. If these prohibitory laws were passed, and carried out in their spirit, dreadful evils would be the result; and, finally, such laws never can be carried out at all, and, by consequence, it is not competent for government to enact them. The whole matter of intemperance comes purely within the domain of morals; religion alone can deal with it radically; and while the civil law should and must punish drunkenness, with the crimes resulting therefrom, it is to Christianity alone that we must look for the effectual reformation of the drunkard and prevention of his sin.
These are the arguments that present themselves to us against the enactment of what are called “prohibitory laws”; and we believe the suggestions above given, regarding the evils of the present liquor trade and the mode of ridding the world of those evils, to be in full consonance both with the facts and with common sense.
There is, in the French language, one peculiarity amongst others which only becomes perceptible to foreigners after a somewhat lengthened residence in France—namely, the frequent use of proverbial expressions of which the original meaning, as far as the speaker is concerned, is utterly lost.
For instance, a person grandly dressed out is said to be sur son trente et un; an old piece of furniture or of attire is vieux comme Hérode; again, il ne se foule pas la ratte means “he takes things easily”; prendre les jambes au cou is to go as fast as possible; and a person who speaks French badly is said to parler Français comme une vache Espagnole.
When the English-speaking races use expressions of this kind, there is in them almost always some recognized allusion, quotation, or, it may be, a quaint adaptation of the words of some well-known author, ancient or modern, or they point to some fact or tradition or popular notion. In French familiar conversation, however, there are numberless proverbial and popular sayings still in common use the sense 205of which has been lost for centuries. Comparatively few amongst those who use them know that they are expressions borrowed, it may be, from certain customs or from history or from literature; but usually the trace is lost, the connection broken, and the reason of their existence forgotten.
These proverbial expressions have, for the most part, been recently collected, and as far as possible accounted for, and their source and history, where not discovered, at least suggested, in an ingenious volume by M. Charles Rozan, in which he gives also certain popular words usually qualified as vulgar, but “whose fundamental meaning it is all the more acceptable to learn, from the fact of their not being yet admitted into the official dictionaries; since,” he adds, “it is intruders more especially whom we would question as to who they are, whence they come, and what they have done.”
In the present notice we have chiefly selected examples having a local, historical, or in some way characteristic interest, and, with one or two exceptions, we have left aside those taken from the drama, besides the numerous sayings, not by any means peculiar to France alone, which relate to classical antiquity, and which any one possessing a very moderate knowledge of ancient history and literature would at once understand.
Je m’en moque comme de l’an quarante is a saying which dates from the beginning of the eleventh century. There was at that period an extensive belief that the end of the world was at hand, and that the thousand years and more supposed to have been assigned by our Lord as the duration of his church on earth, and of society in general, were to expire in the year 40 of that century. Sinners were converted in crowds; many talked of turning hermit; but, once this redoubtable epoch was over, men changed their tone, and from that time to this the expression used in speaking of a thing which need inspire no alarm is: “I care no more for it than for the year forty!”
La beauté du Diable we should naturally suppose meant an appalling ugliness. It means nothing of the kind, but, on the contrary, that exceeding prettiness frequently noticeable in young girls between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, or thereabouts, which then passes away. This, the freshness of youthful beauty, seems to derive its name from the old proverb, The devil was handsome when he was young—namely, while he was yet an unfallen angel.
Ladies somewhat advanced in the debatable ground of life’s pilgrimage, when youth has made way for the nameless years of “a certain age,” are said to coiffer Sainte Catherine.
It was formerly the custom in France, as it still is in Spain and some parts of Italy, on particular festivals, to array in festal garments and headgear the statues of the saints. St. Catherine being the patroness of virgins, the care of her adornment was always entrusted to young girls. This charge, however agreeable and honorable at sixteen, might, nevertheless, not be desirable in perpetuity, and thus it came to be said of any middle-aged maiden: “She stays to coiffer St. Catherine.”
To speak French very badly, or with a bad accent, is called parler Français comme une vache Espagnole. The people inhabiting the Basque provinces obtain their name from the indigenous word vaso—mountain—which, 206when taken adjectively, is augmented by the final co, and thus becomes vasoco, and, by contraction, vasco—mountaineer. The French, knowing little enough of Spanish, said at first vacco, and then vacce. Thus, parler comme un vacce Espagnol meant at first to allude to the inhabitants of the Basque provinces of Spain, whose language still bears all the characteristics of a primitive tongue, and who have great difficulty in expressing themselves in French; but vacce, at a time when the Latin had left its traces everywhere, was said for vache, the peasants in many of the French provinces retaining it still. Thence arose the confusion which produced the senseless comparison, “to speak French like a Spanish cow.”
Attendez-moi sous l’orme (wait for me under the elm) implies that “the rendezvous you ask is disagreeable to me, and I will not keep it.” The type of an unpleasant rendezvous is that which compels an appearance before the judge, and it is to this that the expression here quoted originally referred. Formerly the judges administered justice under a tree planted in the open space before the church or the entrance of a seignorial mansion; hence the phrase of juges de dessous l’orme, and also that of danser sous l’orme. Attendez-moi sous l’orme means, Find me there if you can (ironically), and to name a rendezvous which one has no intention of keeping.[49]
Faire Charlemagne is to retire from the game after winning it, without giving the adversary a chance of revenge. This expression evidently alludes to the death of the great Charles, who, when he had become the monarch of the West, quitted this life without having lost any of his conquests.
To make unlawful profits by deceiving as to the price of any articles a person has been charged to buy is called “shoeing the mule” (Ferrer la mule). The expression dates from the time when the counsellors of the Parliament repaired to the Palais de Justice mounted on mules, and the lackeys who remained outside during the sittings of the Assembly spent their time in gambling, extorting from their masters the money they wanted for their amusement by pretending that they had had to pay for shoeing the mules. Others carry the origin of the saying back to the time of Vespasian; the muleteer of that emperor, when on a journey, having been bribed to do so, suddenly stopped the mules under pretext of having them shod, so as to give time to a person whom they had met on the way to speak to the emperor of his affairs.
Faire danser l’anse du panier is said of a cook who fraudulently obtains from her mistress more money for her purchases at market than they have really cost. The idea is that of shaking the basket so as to make its contents take up as much room as possible, and thus look worth their alleged price.
Connaître les êtres de la maison is to know the doors, staircases, passages, rooms, outlets, etc.—in a word, the internal arrangements—of the house. Êtres, which for a long time was written aîtres, has for its origin the Latin atria, in the sense of dwelling.
Je l’ai connu poirier is said of a 207parvenu whose sudden rise from a mean condition has not earned him much consideration. There was in a village near Brussels an image of St. John, black and worm-eaten with age, and held in great veneration by the people. M. le Curé, thinking it time to replace it by a new one, sacrificed his best pear-tree for that purpose. One of his parishioners, who had shown great veneration for the ancient statue, took no notice whatever of the new one. “Have you lost your devotion to St. John?” the curé one day asked him. “No, M. le Curé; but the new St. John is not the real one—I knew him when he was a pear-tree.”
The expression of Cordon Bleu is a singular example of the degradation of an aristocratic word, and we discover its ancestry with the same feeling that we once received the answer of a poor mason’s apprentice, who, on being asked his name, gave as his Christian and surname those of two of the oldest and noblest families in the county of Devon.
To the Order of the Holy Ghost, instituted in 1578 by Henri III., not every one could aspire. It consisted of only one hundred members, at the head of whom, as grand master, was the king.[50] The Dauphin, the sons and grandsons of the monarch, knights by right, were, as well as the princes of the blood, received at the time of their First Communion. Foreign princes were not admitted before the age of twenty-five; dukes and other nobles of high rank not until thirty-five; and in all cases none was allowed to enter who could not trace back at least three generations of nobility on the father’s side. The cord to which the symbol of the order was attached was blue, and the knights themselves were commonly designated Cordons Bleus.
The distinction being reserved to only a small number of persons of the highest rank, it gradually became customary to give the name of cordon bleu to persons of superior merit. The Order of the Holy Ghost was abolished at the Revolution. All the dignities as well as all the ideas which had grouped themselves around this noble order have disappeared with it. Its name is no longer used in the figurative language of France to recall great merit or a distinguished name; the last memory of the order lingers in the kitchen, and the only cordon bleu of the nineteenth century is a good cook!
Those who have hard work and scant pay are wont to observe that they might just as well travailler pour le roi de Prusse. The kingdom of Prussia not having been a century and a half in existence, this expression cannot have an earlier origin. M. Rozan asks, therefore, which is it of the five Fredericks who thus puts in doubt the royal generosity? Some persons say that it is Frederick William I., constantly anxious to show himself economical of the property of his subjects, unlike his father, who was, according to the expression of Frederick the Great, “great in little things and little in great.” Either from what the one did not spend at all, or from what the other spent amiss, a conclusion might be drawn in the sense of the proverb. We incline, however, rather to charge upon the Great Frederick himself all the responsibility of the French reproach.
Frederick II. was fond of employing 208French workmen, but not quite so fond of paying them; and as no people know better than the French that noblesse oblige, it is no matter of surprise that he should have furnished them with a proverb. We also find an example of his sparing management in the conflict which arose between him and Voltaire (who was very economical also) about lumps of sugar and candle-ends. In the agreement he had made with the poet Frederick had promised him, besides the key of chamberlain and the Cross of Merit, the ordinary appointments of a minister of state—i.e., an apartment at the château, board, firing, two candles a day, and so many pounds of tea, sugar, coffee, and chocolate every month. These articles, though duly provided, were of such bad quality that Voltaire complained to the king. Frederick professed to be infinitely pained, and promised to give fresh orders. Were the orders given? In any case the provisions were as bad as ever, and Voltaire again remonstrated. The king got out of the affair with equal economy and cunning. “It is frightful,” he exclaimed, “to think how badly I am obeyed! I cannot hang those rascals for a lump of sugar or an ounce of tea; they know it, and laugh at my orders. But what most pains me is to see M. de Voltaire disturbed in his sublime ideas by small miseries like these. Ah! let us not waste upon mere trifles the moments that we can devote to friendship and the muses. Come, my dear friend, you can do without these little provisions. They occasion you cares unworthy of you; we will speak of them no more. I will command that for the future they shall be stopped.”
On another occasion Frederick was having a new front put to a Lutheran place of worship in Berlin. The ministers complained to the king that they had not light enough to carry on the service. The building, however, being too far advanced for his majesty to wish to incur the cost of alteration, he sent back their address, after writing upon it: “Blessed are they who see not, and yet believe.”
As a last proof of the just implication of the proverb, an English traveller, who does full justice to the eminent qualities of the monarch, says: “Never was there a fat soldier in any country; but the King of Prussia has not even a fat sergeant. A profound knowledge of financial economy is a point on which this sovereign excels. It is also a reason why his troops should never be otherwise than lean.”
This observer might have added that Frederick made it a rule never to allow his soldiers any pay on the 31st day of the month. There were thus seven days in the year on which the whole Prussian army travaillait pour le roi de Prusse.
Manger de la vache enragée is to suffer great privations, to procure with difficulty the merest necessaries of life, and so to be reduced, as it were, to “eat the flesh of a mad cow.” The expression has also come to mean the trials of every kind which, in the course of life, ought to strengthen the body to endure hardness and the mind to a habit of fortitude.
On entering upon a house or appartement in Paris it is customary to make a present of a few francs to the concierge, which present is called le dernier adieu. The newcomer, if a foreigner, wonders why the first dealings he has with the concierge of his new abode should be so singularly misnamed as “the 209last farewell.” The words are a corruption of the Denier à Dieu—God’s penny—the piece of money given to the person with whom a bargain was concluded, with the intention of taking God to witness that the engagement had been made, and of offering him a pledge that it should be faithfully kept. The sums thus given were bestowed by the receiver in alms to the poor, and were not appropriated, like the arrhes, a part payment of what was due to the person with whom an agreement had been made.
The lugubrious associations connected with the name of the melancholy building at the back of Notre Dame de Paris encourage the idea that the word morgue must relate to corpses, or in any case to death. M. Rozan disabuses us of the mistake.
There was formerly at the entrance of prisons a room where new arrivals were detained for a few days after committal, in order that the keepers might learn to know their faces and appearance sufficiently well to preclude any chance of their escape. Later on the corpses found in the Seine or elsewhere were exposed in this same room, the public being admitted to see them through a small aperture made in the door.
Until 1804 the corpses were exposed in the lower jail dependent on the prison of the Grand Châtelet, when they were transferred to the quay of the Marché Neuf in a small building which received the name of morgue, an old French word for face or visage, and used also to express a fixed or scrutinizing look. It is doubtless in the latter sense that we find the true meaning of the term.
Now that we have given a greatly abridged version of portions of M. Rozan’s work, we refer the reader for the remaining curious fragments of information scattered throughout its pages to the book itself. At the same time we venture a suggestion that in future editions it might be well if the author were, as far as practicable, to classify its contents under certain heads—such, for instance, as are dramatic, historic, local, or classic, etc., in their origin or allusion—so as to allow some continuity of ideas in its perusal, and to gather its at present scattered stones into a collection of mosaics.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN,” “THE ROMANCE OF A PORTMANTEAU,” ETC., ETC.
I was received at Clonacooney with an enthusiasm that sent the hot blood surging through my veins in prideful throbs. At the entrance to the village I was presented with an address by a splendid specimen of the Irish race in the person of Myles Moriarty, a man who had been “out” in forty-eight, who, on the part of the tenant-farmers of Clonacooney, tendered me welcome and assurances of both moral and physical support.
“The dark hour is passin’ from the ould country, sir, and yours be the hand to wipe the tear from the cheek of Erin,” were his concluding words.
I must have spoken to the point, for I was cheered to the echo, and my right hand almost wrung from the arm by repeated shakings.
In Father O’Dowd’s garden a small platform had been raised, composed of the kitchen table, the safety of which Biddy Finnegan watched over with tender regard.
Around the little grass-plat some hundred of the “boys” were gathered, who bared their heads in respectful reverence when the good priest ascended the dais.
It is chiefly in Ireland that one sees the visible link that binds priests and people. The Irish peasant never forgets that he is in the presence of the Lord’s anointed, and the respect for the clergyman upon the hillside or wayside is the same as though he were clad in his vestments and upon the altar.
Father O’Dowd introduced me in a speech that burned into the minds of his auditory. It was full of fiery eloquence, full of patriotism, full of Catholicity. In dealing with the question of Home Rule he said: “Over a country agitated by dissension and weakened by mistrust we have raised the banner of Home Rule. We raised it hesitatingly, unfurling it tremblingly to the breeze; but the hearts of the people have been moved by the two small words, and the soul of the nation has felt their power and their spell. These words have passed from man to man along the valley and along the hillside. Everywhere our despairing sons have turned to that banner with confidence and hope. Thus far we have borne it. Upon these young and stalwart shoulders,” placing his arm affectionately around me, “we shall now place it, to be borne unto victory. It is meet that the representative of a stainless race, of a race that upheld their creed when its avowal led to the scaffold and gibbet, should go forth from among us young in years, high in hope, ardent in the cause of creed and country. We shall hand our banner into his youthful hands, and with him this trust shall be considered 211sacred. He will defend it, if necessary, with his life. The cause of the church will be his; the cause of the country will be his.”
When it came to my turn to speak a mist seemed to gather before my eyes and my head began to swim.
“Courage!” whispered Father O’Dowd. “Nos hæc novimus esse nihil.”
I plunged in medias res, floundering on, stumbling, staggering, repeating myself, till I felt all aflame, and as if my head were red-hot. Suddenly the idea smote me that I had Wynwood Melton to beat, and I became cool as ice. Yes, the transition was simply instantaneous, and with it came a flow of words such as have never welled from me since, save, perhaps, upon the day of the election.
I spoke for nearly an hour, and I subsequently recollected that I had discussed the entire political situation of Ireland, as I had done some years before in a debate at the Catholic University. Memory came gallantly to the rescue, and when I concluded Father O’Dowd cried enthusiastically:
“A born orator—nascitur, non fit. Now, boys,” addressing the tumultuous assemblage, “haven’t we got the right man, and won’t we put him in the right place?”
When I returned to Kilkenley I found that Mr. Melton had taken his departure.
“He is alive to the importance of an active canvass,” said Mr. Hawthorne, “and has repaired to the tents of his people. I am very sorry that the warning should come from me—a warning that may be of singular disservice to you.”
“I feel that I shall win.”
“My dear young friend, I felt that I would win, and discredited the returns that threw me overboard when I contested Fromsey. Do not let your feelings mislead you. Work as if expecting defeat, and as if endeavoring to reduce the majority against you. I’m an old campaigner and know the ropes.”
My mother was all eagerness to know how I had progressed. When I told her that I had made two speeches, one of them of an hour’s duration, her delight was boundless.
“You were lost, dear child,” she cried. “Your talents are of a high order, and you have at last found a field for them.”
Harry Welstone had attended a meeting at Ballynashaughragawn, and had held forth in my behalf, like a regular brick that he was. All my jealousy disappeared upon the mention of Melton, and Harry was again my confidant in everything.
“I don’t think she cares much for that fellow, Fred.”
“I tell you that they understand each other.” And I writhed in the agony of the thought.
“I think her governor is nibbling for Melton as a son-in-law, but there is no ring of the true metal about the girl’s feelings—nothing that I can detect; and I’m not utterly unobservant.”
I never felt that the gash in my heart was so deep until Miss Hawthorne referred to their leaving.
“Our time is up. We have overstayed our limit.”
“Surely you will not desert us until after the election,” said my mother. “You must celebrate his success, if success it is to be.”
“Oh! Miss Hawthorne is not interested in my success, mother,” I interposed.
She turned her violet eyes full upon me.
212“Much more so than you give me credit for.”
“My non-success, you mean.”
“I do not mean it.”
“It is quite right that you should,” I said bitterly. “I have no claim upon your interest.”
“A very strong one, I assure you.”
“Melton’s the man,” assuming a savage gayety. “How jolly he will feel if he wins! how delighted to bear the news to his lady-love!”
“Does it not strike you, Mr. Ormonde, that your last observation is upon the borderland of—what shall I call it?”
“Truth,” I suggested.
She did not deign to reply to me, but, turning to my mother, expressed a fear that she should leave Kilkenley upon the following day.
“I will not hear of it,” said my mother stoutly.
There was one chance left, and that lay in inducing Mr. Hawthorne to stump the county with me. This scheme I confided to Harry, who highly approved of it. After dinner, when the ladies had returned to the drawing-room, Harry opened fire.
“Mr. Hawthorne, the people about here are exceedingly anxious to hear you speak. They have heard a good deal of your eloquence in Parliament, and have read some of your speeches.”
“I am not reported, sir. Those scoundrels in the press gallery ignore me because I defy them. Would you believe it, gentlemen, my speech upon the removal of a custom-house officer upon a charge of disloyalty to the throne and constitution, and which occupied two hours and a half in its delivery—I went into the question of customs generally, into those of foreign countries, into the national debt, into our relations with Japan, into the contracts for constructing ironclads—in fact, I grasped a series of subjects of the highest importance to the country; and would you believe it, Mr. Speaker—I mean gentlemen—the Times, although I saw that the reporter—yes, gentlemen, I watched him with an eagle eye—was present and apparently engaged in reporting me—the Times, I say, had the audacity to publish that the honorable member for Doodleshire uttered some irrelevant observations which were inaudible in the reporters’ gallery; and yet this unprincipled scoundrel pockets his pay, and reports the flimsy orations of other honorable members not one tithe of so much national importance as mine.” And trembling with anger, Mr. Hawthorne gulped down three glasses of claret in rapid succession.
“The Irish people,” continued Harry, “are the most rhetorical and oratorical in the world, and prefer a good speech to any known amusement except a wake. News of your presence here has gone far and wide, and I may tell you fairly that it is incumbent upon you to let them hear you.”
“I—ahem!—would be very pleased to do so, did a suitable opportunity present itself,” said the M.P. with a pleased smile.
“The opportunity luckily does present itself. On Thursday next our host here must attend a meeting of his constituents at Bohernacallan, and, if you were to accompany him and address the people, I assure you it will be regarded as a very considerable favor by the hundreds who will be assembled.”
“On Thursday next I shall be on my way to London.”
“Not a bit of it,” I chimed in.
213“There is nothing to be done in London now, Mr. Hawthorne,” said Harry.
“My arrangements are all made, and nothing, sir, nothing could induce me to break them. I am a man of iron, adamant in such matters.”
I looked blankly at Harry, but Master Harry was still hopeful, as indicated by a dexterous half-wink while the M.P. was tossing off another glass of claret.
“I may tell you as a matter of fact, Mr. Hawthorne, that you are expected at this meeting.”
“It is very flattering, Mr. Welstone, but the meeting must stand disappointed in so far as I am concerned. No, gentlemen; in the House or outside of it, once I lay down a plan of operations, I never diverge from it by the distance of a single hair.”
Again I looked blankly at Harry, and again I met with a half-wink.
“That’s very unfortunate, Mr. Hawthorne, but I suppose it cannot be helped.”
“It cannot indeed, sir.”
“And reporters coming down from Dublin, too,” said Harry, addressing me.
“What is that you say, Mr. Welstone?” demanded the member of Doodleshire with considerable earnestness.
“Oh! it’s not worth repeating.”
“I think I heard you mention something about reporters?”
“Oh! yes; the Dublin newspapers are sending down special reporters, and the London Times’ correspondent is a reporter on the Daily Express.”
“Ahem!” And Mr. Hawthorne gravely produced a memorandum-book, which he proceeded to scan with apparent interest.
Harry gave me the full wink now.
“Oh dear me—ahem!” exclaimed the M.P. “I find that I need not be in London quite so soon, and if it obliges you, my dear Ormonde, I shall be glad to strike a blow in your aid. Did you say the Times’ correspondent will be there? Not that it makes the slightest difference to me; yet, belonging as I do to the great liberal party, and belonging as this election does to the great liberal party, I deem it a sacred duty to aid the great liberal party in so far as it lies in my power. Mr. Ormonde, rely upon me, sir.”
When later on I spoke with Harry on the question of deceiving my guest, especially as no reporters would be within fifty miles of us, “Don’t bother your head about it, Fred. Leave it all to me. I’ll get Tom Rafferty and the two O’Briens to come with big pencils and lots of paper, and tell them to write for their lives the whole time old Hawthorne is speaking. Everything is fair in love, war, and an election.”
The excitement in the county was intense as soon as the fact of my being in the field became known across its length and breadth. The De Ruthvens were furious, the head of the family, Mr. Beresford de Ruthven, honoring me with a personal visit, in order to ascertain whether I was in my senses or out of them.
“Am I to understand, Mr. Ormonde, that you are a candidate for the representation of this county?” he asked, after the usual ceremonial questions had been pushed aside.
“You are, Mr. De Ruthven.”
“That you have consented to be nominated by a rabble—to be—”
“I have been nominated by no rabble, Mr. De Ruthven.”
214“You are the nominee of the priests.”
“I am, sir; but have a care how you speak of a Catholic clergyman in this house. You are not now at Ruthventown.” I was hot with anger.
“Do you want to break up the harmony that has existed for centuries in the county, Mr. Ormonde?”
“I want to see a liberal represent the county, and I am willing to give way to a better man.”
“Liberal! What liberality do you require? Do not the liberals have their share in everything?”
I had him now.
“How many liberals are there on the grand panel, Mr. De Ruthven?”
“Oh! I grant you that there has been mismanagement,” he hastily replied, “but we’ll see to that.”
“What liberality is it that leaves the roads approaching every Catholic church in a condition that would shame a backwoods clearing, while those near the meanest Protestant place of worship are cared for like the avenues in your own domain?”
“That shall be looked to.”
“Where is the liberality at the union boards, in the magistracy, in the county offices? Is there a single Catholic in any office whatever?”
“O Mr. Ormonde! I see you are primed and loaded, and must go off like a fifth-of-November cracker. Now, all I can say to you is this: that if you persist in this audacious attempt in breaking up the harmony of this great county, on your own head be the penalty; and let me add, sir, that when next you attend the assizes, do not be surprised if you are openly insulted.”
“And do not be surprised, Mr. De Ruthven, if the man who dares insult me is openly horse-whipped.”
Mr. De Ruthven, very much disgusted at my papistical audacity, took his leave, warning me, even when in his carriage, that I was certain of defeat, and equally certain of being put in Coventry.
My attempt to wrest the seat from the conservative party was regarded with the same interest as Mr. A. M. Sullivan’s daring effort to snatch Louth from the Right Honorable Chichester Fortescue—an effort that was crowned with such signal success. The cabinet minister and ex-Irish secretary, who was regarded as Mr. Gladstone’s official representative in Ireland, was deemed invulnerable in Louth, having sat for it for twenty-seven years. The government laughed to scorn the idea of disturbing him, but Mr. Sullivan polled two to one, and was carried in by such a weighty majority as virtually to close the county for ever and a day, as the children’s story-books say.
In my county the conservatives laughed my attempt to scorn, pooh-poohing my pretensions and ridiculing my supporters. My opponent made Ruthventown his headquarters, and from Ruthventown came forth his address. From Ruthventown also was issued a manifesto, or imperial ukase rather, commanding the tenants to vote for the De Ruthven candidate, while from every conservative landlord appeared a notice couched in similar dictatorial terms. To these counter-proclamations were scattered broadcast by my various committees throughout the country, calling upon Catholics to support a Catholic, upon Irishmen to support Home Rule.
Father O’Dowd was indefatigable, leaving Sir Boyle Roche’s bird simply nowhere, as he would appear to be in half a dozen different places at 215one and the same time. He lived upon his little outside-car, and the dead hours of the night saw him dashing through lonely glens, winding up steep mountain-sides, speeding through sleeping villages, all for the purpose of bringing the old faith to the front, and of rescuing representation from the clutches of the Orange clique, who had held it so long, to the prejudice of Catholicity and the shame of Catholics.
“We’ll shake off the yoke now or never!” was his constant cry. “Down with the De Ruthven ascendency! We’ll take their heels off our necks. We have suffered and endured too long and too patiently. We have allowed a little clique to govern a nation at their own sweet will. It is time for the people to assert themselves, to come to the front, to share in their own government. The hour is at hand, and the men.”
The county was ablaze. Meetings were held in every village, and my name was handed from townland to townland as a talisman. The most despicable coercive measures were adopted by the conservative landlords toward their tenants with reference to their votes, threats of eviction, of rent-raising, of persecution being openly resorted to.
“Make no promises, boys. Keep yourselves unpledged,” was the constant cry of Father O’Dowd. “Recollect that you have consciences and a country.”
At one meeting, whilst I was engaged in speaking—even now I feel astonished at my eloquence of that time—I was interrupted by some of the De Ruthven faction, who endeavored to hiss and hoot me down.
“Boys,” yelled a voice in the crowd, “there’s iligant bathing in Missis Moriarty’s pond below; they say it’s Boyne wather.” And ere I could interpose or take any step towards cooling the feverish excitement of my supporters, the luckless Ruthvenites were ruthlessly swept towards the dam in question, where in all human probability they would have been half-drowned had not Father O’Dowd rushed to the rescue.
“Are you mad, boys? Don’t touch a hair of their heads.”
“We want for to larn them manners, yer riverince; shure there’s no great harm in that.”
“If one of these vagabonds is ill-treated by you, they’ll unseat Mr. Ormonde on petition. You will not suffer, but Mr. Ormonde will. For Heaven’s sake, boys, don’t lay a finger on them.”
The announcement caused a general gloom.
“Never mind, boys,” shouted one of the crowd. “Shure if we can’t bate thim afore the election, we can knock sawdust out av thim whin it’s all over, an’ that’s a comfort anyhow.”
From every side promises of support came pouring in. The priests and people were working as one man, silently, swiftly, surely. The “hard word” had gone forth, and every parish was preparing its contingent. The hints and cajoleries of the other side were received in dignified silence—a silence which the ascendency party construed into assent. It was deemed utterly impossible that the tenantry could vote against the nominee of their landlords; and although these “slave-owners” received very significant warnings from their bailiffs, they could not and would not give heed to them.
My address was drawn up in a solemn committee composed of Father O’Dowd, Mr. Hawthorne, 216Mabel, my mother, and myself. I need not reproduce it here. It was Catholic and national, and when it went forth to the county it was received with universal enthusiasm. The opposite party stigmatized it as an “audacious document,” a “firebrand.” “Yes,” said the parish priest of Derrymaleena, “it is a firebrand, and one that lights the funeral pyre of the Orange party.”
I found Miss Hawthorne rewriting a copy of my address.
“I will save you the trouble, Miss Hawthorne,” I said bitterly, and Heaven knows my heart was at a dead ache, “and I will send a copy to Mr. Melton.”
She flushed, the hot blood mounting over her little ears. “You do me a cruel injustice, Mr. Ormonde,” she replied. “Read that!” contemptuously flinging me an open letter across the table.
“I do not wish to pry into Mr. Melton’s secrets.”
“That letter is not from Mr. Melton. I never received one from him in my life, nor do I care to receive one; but since you will not read this letter, you shall hear its contents.”
She read as follows in a pained voice:
My Dear Mrs. Ormonde:
As the coming man is so busy, and is probably at the other side of the county, I write to you to ask you to send me a copy of his address as soon as ever you can. We are all alive here, and Victory is within our grasp. Always yours,
Peter Heffernan.
“Now, Mr. Ormonde, may I ask you if it was generous of you to—”
“Forgive me, Miss Hawthorne,” I exclaimed. “I—I do not know what I am doing, what I am saying. I am distracted—wretched.” I was silent. I dared go no further. The vision of Wynwood Melton cried check to the bounding thoughts that came surging from my heart.
“The evening of the 20th will find you in better form.”
I shook my head. The future was utterly dreary—one blank, sunless waste.
“You will win this election, Mr. Ormonde.”
I sighed deeply.
“A barren victory.”
“A barren victory!” she exclaimed with considerable animation. “Do you consider it a barren victory to beat the Carlton Club, the great conservative stronghold of England, whose every ukase is law—to beat the De Ruthven faction, who have held your beautiful county in subjection since the Pale?”
“A Dead-Sea apple. In winning this election I win your hatred.”
“My hatred?” opening her lovely violet eyes in delicious wonder.
“Yes, Miss Hawthorne; if I am elected I shall have beaten the man you love.”
She flushed again—a shower of rose-petals.
“There is not a more miserable being on the face of this earth than I am this moment, Miss Hawthorne. Were I not pledged in honor to this election, I would stand aside and let Mr. Melton win this stake, as he has won the higher stake—your heart.”
She was about to interrupt me, her lips tremulous, her hands in strong action.
“Hear me for one moment,” I cried, carried away in a rush of tumultuous feeling, every sense in a mad whirl. “I love you, Mabel—love you with a love that is more than love. I tried to hate you. In that vain attempt I resolved to bring sorrow to your heart, to glut my own desire for vengeance. It was jealous despair that led me 217into this conflict. It is possible I may not see you until the fight is over, perhaps never again; but, Mabel Hawthorne, my first, my last love, it may be sweet to you to know why this victory will be a barren one, why the hand that grasps the laurel will seize but dead ashes.” And without trusting myself even to glance at her, I rushed from the room, from the house, and was many miles on the road to Derrymaclury ere thoroughly aware of the fact.
I did not return to Kilkenley. I dreaded the fearful fascination of Mabel’s presence, and, now that I had declared my hopeless love, I did not care to meet her. It would be mean and shabby to hang about her, knowing she was never to be mine. It would be despicable, under the peculiar circumstances of the case, were I again to refer to Melton or the election. There was nothing for it but to remain at a distance. I recall the agonies of those few days with a shiver. The powerful excitement of the approaching contest was over-weighted by the dull gnawing at my heart. I was as one walking in a painful dream. In vain I plunged into the whirl of speech-making, canvassing, and all the absorbing surroundings of the election—truly in vain, for the one idea ever grimly tortured me, and the one hopeless thought ever perched raven-like in my gloom-laden mind.
“Take heart of grace, man,” Father O’Dowd would say. “We’ll beat them three to one.”
Could he minister to the disease that was eating away my very heart?
Harry Welstone came over.
“Why, there has been a sort of panic at Kilkenley on account of your abrupt departure, Fred. The last person who saw you in the flesh was Miss Hawthorne, and she is very reticent in the matter. I tried to pump her, and got quietly sat upon for my pains. She has disappeared, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“She has been playing the invisible princess. Your opponent called twice, and she refused to see him.”
“Is it Melton?” I cried, a wild joy surging around my heart.
“Yes; the great M.P. in embryo.”
“Wouldn’t see him?”
“Said she had a headache.”
“You jest, Harry.”
“Not a bit of it. Old Blunderbuss was as mad as a hatter, but missy stuck fast to her colors.”
“I wish to heaven you hadn’t told me this, Harry.”
“Why?”
“I do not know.”
And I did not know, but so it was. There lay a disturbing element in this news that completely set me astray. Hope, that springs eternal in the human breast; hope, that seemed shut out from mine for ever, was timidly knocking at the portals demanding admittance; but I resolutely barred the portals, raising the drawbridge, and dropping the portcullis. And yet—
No. I would not admit the impossible.
The nomination took place in the court-house at Ballyraken, the county town, which was literally packed with the country people, who had come in from the great harvest districts to hear the “speechifyin’.” The De Ruthven faction mustered very strongly, all the Protestant gentry arriving in their equipages, making “a brave and goodly show.” Mr. Wynwood 218Melton—who appeared in a faultlessly-fitting black frock-coat, with the last rose of summer in his button-hole, a hat that literally shone like jet, and pale lavender gloves—was proposed by Sir Robert Slugby de Ruthven, D.L., and seconded by Mr. Beresford de Ruthven, D.L.
Sir Robert, an aged, aristocratic-looking man, with a lordly voice and royal mien, after dilating, amidst fearful interruption, upon the misfortune that had fallen on the county in the ill-considered enterprise of this rash young man—meaning me—in his hopeless endeavor to disturb the harmony which had so long existed in the county, proceeded to say:
“I have a gentleman to propose to your consideration—a gentleman of birth, a gentleman of education, a gentleman of position, a gentleman of means, a gentleman—”
Here a voice, which I immediately recognized as that of Peter O’Brien, cried out in the crowd:
“Arrah, blur an’ ages, we’re tired av gintlemin; can’t ye stand yerself?”
This sally, which was greeted with a roar of laughter, completely upset the little speech which Sir Robert had prepared, and in a few mumbled words he proposed Mr. Wynwood Melton as a fit and proper person to represent the county in the Imperial Parliament.
Mr. Beresford de Ruthven was an able and popular speaker. He knew how, when, and where to touch the heart of the Irish peasant. His tact was admirable, while he possessed the rare qualification of being enabled to keep his audience in his hands as a juggler his golden balls.
We feared his speech. It was a rock ahead, and every word that fell from his lips was to be caught up and treasured, in order that our best men should reply to him. We knew it was nearly impossible to catch him tripping, and that he was one of those agile performers who spring smilingly to their feet even after an ugly fall.
“I wish this was over,” whispered Father O’Dowd. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. He’ll butter the boys like parsnips, and promise them the moon.”
Mr. De Ruthven commenced his speech in a breathless silence. Oratory is always respected in Ireland, even in an opponent, although that opponent be a Protestant and an Orangeman. The speaker labored under the disadvantage of possessing but one hand, the other having been accidentally shot off by the bursting of a fowling-piece while Mr. De Ruthven was grouse-shooting in Scotland.
His speech was, unhappily for us, most felicitous. He seemed to suit himself to the occasion, and to make the occasion suit him. A faint murmur followed one or two of his well-directed points, which gradually swelled into open applause, until, to our dismay, we found he was carrying the audience with him.
Our party gazed significantly one at the other. We all perceived that the danger we had already anticipated was upon us in real earnest. At this moment I perceived Peter O’Brien elbowing himself to the front. A dead silence had fallen, one of those unaccountable stillnesses that occasionally come upon all assemblages, however large. Mr. De Ruthven was about to recommence, when Peter, putting his hands to his mouth, and in a voice that could be heard in the adjacent barony, shouted at the top of his lungs:
219“Where’s the hand that sthruck the priest?”
To describe the effect of this query would be impossible. It was simply electrical. In one second the current, which had been flowing smoothly, became dammed, and instantly turned into another channel. In vain did Mr. De Ruthven endeavor to gain a hearing; in vain to disclaim the odious charge that had been indirectly preferred against him. It was useless. Every effort was met by a thousand cries of “Where’s the hand that sthruck the priest?” And in these few words the sun of his eloquence had set for ever. The high-sheriff almost burst a blood-vessel in his endeavor to obtain silence, until, finding the task a hopeless one, he advised Mr. De Ruthven to formally second the nomination and retire, which was accordingly done, and in dumb show.
When Melton presented himself he was received with laughter and jeers. The people had just warmed into that facetious good-humor that is so dangerous to a candidate for their suffrages. Opposition makes a martyr. Laughter causes a man to appear ridiculous.
“What’ll ye take for the posy?”
“Off wud yer gloves.”
“Will ye give us a pup out o’ that hat?”
“Is that coat ped for?”
“The raison it’s so new is that he wants to be able for to turn it, boys.”
“Spake up.”
“Give us a little Irish.”
“Sing the ‘Wearin’ av the Green.’”
“We’ll return ye—to England.”
“Go home to yer mother.”
“Cud ye say boo to a goose?”
“Och! we’ll vote for ye all together like Brown’s cows, an’ he had only wan.”
“Yer a fine man to send—out o’ the counthry.”
“Arrah, what brought ye here at all?”
“Ax for the price o’ the thrain for to take ye home, an’ mebbe ould Beresford wud give it to ye.”
Such were the greetings that interrupted Mr. Wynwood Melton during the delivery of a very brief speech, not one word of which even reached the reporters’ table. He seemed, however, perfectly unruffled, and continued bowing for a considerable time in response to the derisive cheering that followed upon his silence.
Father O’Dowd was received with a whirlwind of cheers, yells, and other manifestations of enthusiastic delight.
In proposing me he was very brief, alluding to the degrading position held by Catholics in a county where the large majority of the people were Catholics, and where everything that could be denied a Catholic was denied him. He was good enough to refer to the intrepidity with which my poor father had upheld the ancient faith, to his true-hearted patriotism, and wound up by declaring that this was the hour for the county to assert itself, both for conscience and country.
I read my speech in the Weekly Courier on the following Saturday, and I suppose I must have uttered it, but I have not the remotest conception of what I said. It read wonderfully well; and as Father O’Dowd told me I surpassed myself, I felt more or less elated at my success.
“If she had been there to hear it!” was my sad, sickening thought.
Læta dies aderat. The eventful day arrived big with my fate and that of the county. I felt that 220I was but the mere instrument, and, if victory were to crown the effort, it would be due to the principle and not the man. We knew that in some districts we would be badly beaten, while in others the issue was somewhat doubtful; but as to the ultimate outcome we entertained not a shadow of a doubt. The people were panting for a chance, and they had got it now.
When I showed the voting-papers to Peter, telling him that a cross marked in pencil should go opposite the name of the candidate for whom the voter wished to vote, he anxiously demanded:
“An’ must the min that votes for the Englishman put in a crass, too?”
“Every man of them.”
“Och, thin, glory be to God! shure it’s a judgmint on thim Protestants for to have to make the sign av the blessed an’ holy crass at all, at all—curse of Crummle on thim!”
Fearing a disturbance, as party spirit ran so high and as my supporters were so excited, a strong detachment of the Sixtieth Rifles was marched into Ballyraken on the eve of the polling. The Protestant landlords had secured free quarters in the town for such of their tenantry as chose to inhabit them, while they themselves occupied the Club House and De Ruthven Arms in a most imposing and demonstrative manner.
I was walking down the main street, all alone, thinking not of the forthcoming ballot, but of Mabel, when I perceived my opponent lounging on the steps of the Club House. I should be compelled to pass the Club House or cross the street, and as I was a member of the club, although I never frequented it, I now resolved upon boldly entering the enemy’s camp.
I was passing Melton with a nod when he stepped forward and in a singularly insolent tone demanded a word with me. He was very white.
“I was at Kilkenley yesterday.”
“Indeed!” I said. His tone was too uncertain to admit of my making any comment upon his visit.
“I suppose Miss Hawthorne is acting under your orders?” he hissed.
“I am at a loss to understand your meaning, sir,” I hotly replied.
“Not at home save to those whom you may be pleased to admit to your palatial residence,” he sneered.
“My residence is a very humble one, Mr. Melton, and when you honored it with your person I hope you found it a hospitable one. Miss Hawthorne is mistress of her own movements, but let me tell you, sir, that she is my mother’s guest, and the guest of an Ormonde is sacred.”
“Very dramatic, but scarcely to the point.”
“I’ll come to any point you please.”
“When this election business is over I may have something to say to you,” his tone fairly exasperating.
I could stand it no longer.
“You white-livered cub, whatever you have to say, say it now!” I shouted, the blood rushing like molten lava through my veins.
“I don’t row in public.”
“Do you wish me to tell you what I think of you, in public, Mr. Melton?”
He smiled.
“Pah! you are not worth this stick, or I’d break it across your shoulders.” And I marched into the 221club, my heart bumping against my ribs from sheer excitement.
What could he mean? Miss Hawthorne refuse to see him at my request? It was too absurd. Some lover’s quarrel. Was this cad her lover? Had her heart gone forth to such a man as this?
It was torture to think it.
Contrary to all expectations, the conduct of the people was orderly and peaceable. The dread of a petition had been seared into their very souls by Father O’Dowd and by the admirable organization that had charge of my interests. They came up to the booths silent, almost sullen. The landlords and bailiffs were all at their posts, uttering a last warning word as the tenants filed into the booths, addressing them cheerily as they emerged therefrom, in the hope of gleaning the much-coveted information as to the direction of the vote; but the responsibility of that day’s work appeared upon every face, and they entered the voting-places as though stepping into a church. Telegrams came pouring in all day from the outlying districts.
“Ballymaclish is all right—a majority of sixty; Derrymaclooney accounts for every man,” cried Father O’Dowd. “Bravo, my dear old parish! I knew I could trust my good, brave, pious children.”
Later on: “The De Ruthvens have carried Tubbercurry.”
“That’s because Father Nolan is on the broad of his back.”
“Ay, and because the Beresfords have stopped at nothing,” observed one of my committee. “If we want a petition we can pick it up in Tubbercurry. A telegram this morning says that there were money and whiskey going all the week.”
“How about Dharnadhulagh?”
“No returns yet.”
“Or Derrycunnihy?”
“Derrycunnihy is doubtful.”
“Not a bit of it.”
“I say it is.”
“I say it isn’t. Sure, Father James O’Neil has it in hands.”
“Oh! that will do. Put us down at forty at the very least.”
This sort of thing went on all day; but as the day wore on and the returns came in, we found at four o’clock that I had a majority, and at five that I had beaten Melton like a hack.
A wild flash of joy quivered through me. Frederic Fitzgerald Ormonde, M.P.! Visions of St. Stephen’s, of fierce debates over the crushing wrongs of expectant Erin, of glorious oratory, of splendid, supreme efforts, of magnificent rewards, honors—Cui bono?
She would hate me for having beaten her lover in the race. But was he her lover? Had not her tell-tale blushes told me all? And yet I had given her no chance of reply. Perhaps—
As this idea smote me a nameless ecstasy vibrated through every fibre of my being, and I longed to get to Kilkenley, I knew not why.
It was excruciating to be compelled to wait and receive the congratulations of my friends and supporters. It was simply fearful to have to sit out a dinner which had been prepared in my honor, and to listen to the leaden speeches all harping upon the one theme.
Somehow or other the night passed onwards, and at about eleven o’clock I found myself free. I rode over to Kilkenley; it was a mad race, and how I contrived to avoid riding down some of my constituents is still a matter of mystery to me. It relieved my feverish spirits to give the reins to my horse, and we flew homewards, past villages, past 222homesteads, past inebriated revellers on low-backed cars, past bonfires which were lighted for miles along the route, past hedges, ditches—everything; nor did I draw rein until I drew up at the lodge, shouting the word “Gate!”
“Lord be merciful to us! but it’s the masther,” cried Mrs. O’Rourke, the lodge-keeper, as she tremblingly threw open the gate. “May I make so bould as to ax ye if ye bet the Englishman, sir?”
“Beat him to smithereens.”
“Glory be to God! I knew Father O’Dowd would settle it.”
There were lights all through the house. The great event had kept the household out of their beds. My mother fell upon my neck in a paroxysm of joy when I told her the news.
“Where is Mabel—I mean Miss Hawthorne, mother?” I stammered.
“She was here a moment ago. Is Mr. Hawthorne at Ballyraken?”
“Yes; I left him making a third speech.”
“You must be worn out, my child. I’ll make you some mulled port.”
Something told me that I should find Mabel in the adjoining room; and my instincts had not deceived me. She stood in the centre of the apartment, one hand resting upon a small table. When I found myself standing opposite to her I felt utterly, totally dumbfounded. I could only stare at her.
“I heard the news,” she said, casting down her violet eyes. Ah! that was all she had to say.
“Will you forgive me?” I cried.
“Mr. Ormonde,” her hands working nervously, her glorious eyes still bent upon the table, her exquisitely-shaped head half averted, “I—I—that is—you have been under a most extraordinary misconception with reference to Mr. Melton. That gentleman is only a friend. As a matter of fact, I—I was so—so distressed at your ideas about him in connection with myself”—here she blushed red as a rose—“that I refused to see him when he came to visit here yesterday.”
“Then you are not in love with him?”
She raised her violet eyes, and her glance met mine as she uttered the, to me, ecstatic word, “No.”
“And not engaged to him?”
“No.”
I do not know what I said or what I did; but this I do know: that when my mother entered the room with a tumbler of mulled port, she dropped the tumbler, uttering an exclamation of delight, and fell to kissing Mabel, exclaiming: “This is the one thing wanted to make me perfectly happy. My poor boy was breaking his heart about you.”
I was declared duly elected to serve the county in the United Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland.
Mr. Hawthorne duly presented me to Mr. Speaker upon the occasion of my taking the oaths and my seat. My first nap in the House was during a speech from the member for Doodleshire, which was not treating the ethereal thunder of his mind with becoming respect, especially as he had just been good enough to give me his daughter in marriage. We were married at the pro-cathedral at Kensington, by Father O’Dowd.
Melton I never met.
Harry Welstone and I are closer friends than ever, as he is in the House, representing the borough 223of Bohernabury, and we are always “agin the government.”
We reside at Kilkenley, and Peter O’Brien is teaching my eldest boy to handle the ribbons.
“Musha, thin, whin I rowled out forninst ye in the dirt beyant at the railway station, it’s little I ever thought I’d see ye misthress av the ould anshint property, ma’am,” is his constant remark to the lady of the manor, while he is perpetually urging upon me the crying necessity for “takin’ a heat out av Drizzlyeye.”
“Bloody wars, Masther Fred, but you an’ ould Butt is too aisy wud him. Give him plinty av impudince, an’ as shure’s me name’s Pether O’Brien ye’ll have Home Rule while ye’d be axin’ the lind av a sack.”
THE END.
Our federal government, as a government, is absolutely forbidden by the Constitution to have anything whatever to do with religion; but the State Department has been for years and is now conducted as if it were an agency for a religious sectarian propaganda. The gentlemen whom it has sent to represent us at foreign courts have acted, in numberless instances and with few exceptions, as if they were the emissaries of Protestant or infidel missionary societies rather than as the ambassadors, ministers, and chargés d’affaires of a government which professes no religion, but which nevertheless has among its citizens eight millions of Roman Catholics, more or less, whose rights and opinions it is bound at least to respect. Many of these gentlemen have seemed to believe that one of their principal duties, especially if accredited to a Catholic country, was to form intimate associations with conspirators and agitators; to espouse their cause; and to fill their despatches to Mr. Seward, Mr. Fish, and Mr. Evarts with absurd but pernicious misrepresentations concerning the relations of the church towards education, civil freedom, and material progress. It may be admitted that many of these agents have erred rather through ignorance than malice; not a few of them have received but a limited education; it is only lately that a knowledge of the French language has been deemed requisite for even an ambassador. Scores of our ministers and chargés d’affaires have been sent abroad, remained for a few years, and returned, without acquiring more than a mere smattering of the language of the country to which they were accredited. Too frequently these misrepresentatives of ours fall into the hands of the agents of the secret sects which are plotting all over the world for the destruction of the church and the overthrow of Christian society, and receive from these sources the erroneous and pernicious views of affairs which they transmit to Washington. One of our diplomatists, returning from a long residence in 224the capital of a Catholic country, had for a fellow-traveller on the steamship an American Catholic.
“I envy you your residence in ——,” said this gentleman; “the intellectual society there is agreeable. Were you not well acquainted with Father —— and Mgr. ——?” naming two individuals of wide-spread celebrity.
“Oh! no,” replied the astute statesman, “not at all; I never met them. They are Papists, you know, and I never cared to waste my time with men who pray to idols, and pretend to believe that a piece of bread is God. Besides,” he added, with ingenuous simplicity, “my interpreter, a very shrewd fellow, told me all the priests in —— were bitter foes of our free republican institutions, and I thought it my duty to keep aloof from them.”
A perusal of the Red Books for the last two years inclines one to believe that many of our ministers to foreign countries derive their opinions and their information chiefly from their “interpreters.” The Hon. Mr. Scadder, rewarded for his eminent services to his party by being torn from his sorrowing constituents at Watertoast, and sent to represent us at the proud court of a papistical sovereign, may be at the mercy of any wag who chooses to humbug him with fantastical lies, or of any emissary from a Masonic sect who is instructed to fill his mind with misrepresentations; but Mr. Fish and Mr. Evarts are men of culture, and are supposed, at least, to be able to distinguish a hawk from a handsaw. It is of them that we chiefly complain. If the exigencies of party have made it impossible for them to select the best men for our diplomatic service, and if they have been obliged to put up with Mr. Scadder and his kind, it has at least been always in their power to cause our foreign agents to understand that it is no part of their duty to write despatches calumniating the Catholic Church, or to employ themselves in promoting the missionary enterprises of Protestant sects in Catholic countries. Had Mr. Fish and Mr. Evarts possessed a true idea of their own official duties, they never could have permitted one of their agents to write a second time such despatches as some of those contained in the Red Books before us. They would have administered to their Scadders, and Marshes, and Beales, and Partridges, and Bassetts a rebuke that would have opened the eyes of these public servants and taught them a useful lesson. Mr. Fish, we know, is a prominent and zealous member of the Protestant Episcopal Church; Mr. Evarts, we believe, is an adherent of the same sect. In their private capacity they have at least a legal right to do what they can to advance the interests of their own communion, and to expose and check the diabolical designs of the Man of Sin. But as Secretary of State at Washington Mr. Fish had not, and Mr. Evarts has not, any right to instruct, encourage, or even permit our agents abroad to calumniate the Catholic Church, to encourage conspiracies against her, or to spend their time, which belongs to the country, and the money with which the country supplies them, in promoting Anti-Catholic propagandism. Such a course is as bad a policy as it is un-American. We trust that the present Secretary of State will give this matter his immediate and careful attention; and the Senate and the House of Representatives 225would do well to look into it. Let him, as becomes his duty, inform the diplomatic agents of this republic that they are sent and paid to attend to the material and political interests of our country, and are expected to keep to themselves their religious opinions, whatever those opinions may be, in their correspondence with the Department of State. A proper sense of dignity on the part of the American who holds the office of the Secretary of State, and a decent respect for others, would not suffer that a diplomatic agent under his control should use his political position to insult the religious convictions of so large, important, and patriotic a portion of his fellow-citizens. Catholic citizens ask no favors as Catholics, and the time has gone by for them to accept silently from the hired agents of our common country insults to their religious faith. No one deprecates more than we do to see the tendency of the Catholic vote in this country given almost exclusively to one of its political parties. The only way in which to prevent this is by the opposite party putting an end to the display of bigotry and fanaticism against the Catholic Church.
The Department of the Interior, in its Indian Bureau, has repeatedly been guilty of gross violations of good faith and fair dealing towards the Catholic Church; but this has been due, probably, to the direct pressure put upon it by the various sects, whose cupidity was excited by the hope of reaping where Catholic priests had sown. But the foreign agents of the State Department often appear to have gone out of their way, in mere wantonness, to insult, irritate, and injure Catholic interests and feeling. Imagine the collector of the port of New York writing official despatches to the Secretary of the Treasury, informing him that, in the absence of anything better to do, he had been giving his mind to an investigation of Catholicism in this metropolis, and that he had arrived at the conclusion that much of the pauperism of the city was due to the facts that the entire Catholic population were in the habit of refusing to work on eight days of the year—days known in the superstitious jargon of the Papists as “days of obligation”—and that vast sums of money were exacted by the priests from their ignorant and degraded dupes, and sent over to Rome to support in idle luxury the pampered pope! It is probable that Secretary Sherman would administer to the collector a severe reprimand, and that this particular letter would not form part of the annual treasury report. But this is precisely the sort of news with which our minister to Hayti—Mr. Ebenezer Bassett—regales Mr. Evarts, so much to the apparent satisfaction of the latter that Mr. Bassett again and again returns to the subject and dwells upon it with unction. Or fancy Postmaster James sending a despatch to Mr. Key to cheer him with the happy intelligence that an unfrocked and disgraced Catholic priest had started a brand-new sect of his own in New York, and predicting that in a short time a majority of the Papists would desert their pastors and joyfully embrace the new gospel. But this is in substance the intelligence that such a man as Mr. Bancroft most delighted to send from Berlin. The collector of the port and the postmaster would be as much out of the line of their duty in the cases we have mentioned as Mr. Bassett and Mr. Bancroft have 226been. The duty of our foreign representatives is to promote the commercial, financial, and political interests of this republic at the courts to which they are accredited, and not to make themselves channels for the conveyance of idle, false, and scandalous gossip, much less to interfere in the domestic affairs of the countries to which they are sent, or allow themselves to be used as the tools of secret societies or of Methodist or any other missionary boards.
We have at present thirteen envoys extraordinary and ministers plenipotentiary—in Austria, Brazil, Chili, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Russia, and Spain; eight ministers resident—in the Argentine Republic, Belgium, Central American States, Hawaiian Islands, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway, Turkey, and Venezuela; and two ministers resident and consuls-general, in Hayti and Liberia. There are also five chargés d’affaires—in Denmark, Greece, Portugal, Switzerland, and Uruguay and Paraguay. We have no representative in Bolivia, Ecuador, or the United States of Colombia. The great majority of the inhabitants of nineteen of the above-named thirty-one countries are Roman Catholics; yet not one of our foreign representatives is a Catholic. We ask not is this fair, but is it good policy? The population of these nineteen Roman Catholic nations is in round numbers, and according to the latest enumerations, about 170,000,000 souls; but we now are, and so far as we know almost always have been, represented at their capitals by Protestants. Of this, in itself, we do not complain. Wisdom—nay, even common sense—would indeed seem to dictate that the best results would be attained, other things being equal, by sending Catholics as envoys to Catholic countries. An American Catholic in a Catholic country finds himself in sympathy with, and not in antagonism to, the religious habits and modes of thought of the people; and his path towards the accomplishment of any good and worthy object is greatly smoothed by this fact. We believe that intelligent, clever, patriotic, Catholic envoys at Vienna, Rio Janeiro, Santiago, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Lima, Madrid, Buenos Ayres, Brussels, Guatemala, Caracas, Port au Prince, Lisbon, Montevideo, Asuncion, Quito, Bogota, and La Paz would have been more successful in accomplishing the best and highest duties of diplomatic representatives of this republic than Messrs. Beale, Partridge, Logan, Washburne, Marsh, Foster, Gibbs, Cushing, Osborne, Merrill, Williamson, Russell, Bassett, Moran, and Caldwell have been. We are certain that they would not have committed the sins against good taste and propriety which must be laid at the door of nearly all these gentlemen; they surely would not have committed the still graver offences of which we shall have to give some instances. We wish to except from this remark, however, Mr. Moran, long our faithful and exemplary secretary of legation at London, and for the last two or three years our chief representative at Lisbon. Although not a Catholic, Mr. Moran is a gentleman of excellent culture, of correct opinions concerning his official duties, and a very skilful diplomatist. One may look in vain through his despatches for anything that should not be there. We wish 227we could say half as much for some of his confrères.
Let us take, as an instance, our misrepresentative at Rome, Mr. George P. Marsh, of Vermont. Mr. Marsh leaves us in no doubt whether or not he is in full sympathy with the worst political elements in Italy, and inspired by a lively hatred of the church. He deems it one of his most pressing duties to assail and calumniate the Pope; he seems never so happy as when he can give a false and malicious interpretation to the acts of the Papal See; he appears never so miserable as when he finds himself disappointed in his fond anticipation of seeing the Italian government invade the Vatican, drive out the Pope, and finish up what is left of the church in Italy. In what Mr. Marsh is pleased to call his mind, the church in Italy is a ravening wolf, wounded, sick, and in a trap, but still with life enough in her to make her dangerous, and to render it necessary that she should be knocked on the head as soon as possible. Whenever Mr. Marsh observes indications of a willingness on the part of the government to let the wolf live a little longer, or even to make terms with her, he scolds and laments at a fearful rate. He writes as if he were a member of the Extreme Left, and evidently draws his inspiration from the most advanced radical sources. “I see no reason to expect,” says he, “any more vigorous resistance to the encroachments of the church from this administration”—the administration that was in power in November, 1876. What is it that Mr. Marsh would wish? What can be “the encroachments of the church” in Italy—the “encroachments” of men disarmed, despoiled, captive, and helpless as far as human agency is concerned? The elections for members of the Chamber of Deputies in November, 1876, were regarded by Mr. Marsh as evidence that the electors were greatly dissatisfied with the government as it had been administered. Doubtless they were. Mr. Marsh speaks of “the heavy burdens of taxation imposed by it upon the people”; of its “financial difficulties that prevent the execution of important works of public improvement”; of its failure even to attempt “the abolition of the macinto tax, or of any of the financial abuses which weigh so heavily on the poor.” But his remedy for this is simply “a more vigorous resistance to the encroachments of the church”—a little more plundering, a little more confiscation; the seizure of the Vatican, for instance, and the sale of its treasures at public auction, would no doubt put a few million lire in the public treasury. That would suit the amiable Mr. Marsh exactly. But the Italians hesitate, and Mr. Marsh is disgusted with them. At times he informs Mr. Evarts of terrible secrets—confidential information which could only have been communicated to him under the pledge of solemn secrecy by one of those practical jokers who lounge about the cafés in Rome and exercise their ingenuity in beguiling simple foreigners with incredible canards. In a despatch dated April 23, 1877, Mr. Marsh gives an account of a seditious outbreak that had occurred in Central and Southern Italy, instigated by people who were well dressed and who had plenty of money, but whose purpose, as explained by themselves, was “not only the overthrow of the existing government, but the destruction of 228all established civil, social, and religious institutions, and the triumph of universal anarchy.” These, in fact, were members of Mr. Marsh’s own party; but his secret informant in Rome made him believe that they were in the pay of the Pope, and probably Jesuits in disguise! “Long live Pius IX.! was shouted by the Internationalists at Benevento in the same breath with their cries of sedition,” writes Mr. Marsh; and he goes on to warn Mr. Evarts that “the number of persons prepared to lend a ready ear to the promptings of International emissaries”—videlicet the Jesuits in disguise aforesaid—“already large, is increasing; and that Italy may be the theatre of convulsions, to resist which will demand the most strenuous efforts of wise rulers and the most self-sacrificing patriotism on the part of the governing classes,” but always in the direction of resisting “the further encroachments of the church.” Mr. Marsh indulged in glowing hopes when the so-called Clerical Abuses Bill passed the Chamber of Deputies. He described the measure as “a bill for repressing the license of the clergy in public attacks upon the ecclesiastical policy of the government,” and looked for the happiest results to follow its enforcement. Mr. Marsh is an American citizen; he is the representative of a government which plumes itself upon the almost unchecked freedom of its citizens; he is paid by a people whose political shibboleth is “free speech.” If Mr. Marsh were running for Congress in Vermont instead of exercising his powerful intellect as minister at Rome, what would he say concerning an attempt by Congress to enact that the penalty of fine and imprisonment should be inflicted upon every clergyman or minister who should “attack the policy,” for instance, of the government seizing all the Methodist and Baptist meeting-houses throughout the country, and converting them into barracks? The Italian bill was worse than this, for it inflicted these penalties upon every priest who, even in the discharge of his duties as a director, might “disturb the peace of families” by advising a mother to teach her children that it was a sin to steal. But the Italian senate was less brave than Mr. Marsh, and his heart was almost broken by its final rejection of the bill. “This rejection,” he moans, in his despatch of April 23, “will encourage the clergy to measures of more active hostility against the state.” He feels so cut up about it that he returns to the subject in his despatch of May 10, and is so far carried away by his feelings as to write that
“The violence of the clergy and of their lay supporters in Italy and France is almost beyond description, and any one living among them has abundant opportunities of being convinced that they are prepared to resort to arms in support of the pretensions of the Papacy and of the principles of the Syllabus of 1864!”
A viler calumny, a more wicked falsehood against the French and Italian clergy has seldom been written. We are amazed, not that Mr. Marsh should have written it, but that Mr. Evarts should have allowed such balderdash to be printed. But Mr. Marsh grows worse as he goes on. In his despatch of May 26 he almost excels himself. He takes it as a personal grievance that the Pope has compared Prince Bismarck to Attila; he is impatient for the abrogation of the Law of Guarantees; he is 229certain that sooner or later “a violent conflict between the government and the church is inevitable,” and he wishes it to come rather sooner than later. Apparently he is anxious to assist at the final sacrifice, and he is tormented with the fear that the crafty Papists may cheat him out of that gratification.
“The Roman Curia,” he writes, “is at all times shrouded in such mystery that the purposes of those who administer it (sic) are very rarely foreshadowed, and no positive predictions can ever be hazarded concerning it beyond the general presumption that its future will be like its past.” In all soberness and earnestness we ask Mr. Evarts whether Mr. Marsh is kept in Rome for the purpose of writing nonsense about the “mystery” of the “Roman Curia”? What has he to do with the affairs of the Holy See? He is not accredited to the Vatican; he has no more to do with the Pope than our minister at London has to do with the Archbishop of Canterbury. True, the Pope is a far more important personage than is Mr. Tait; but Mr. Marsh, as we understand it, was not sent to Rome to occupy himself about the Pope. Instead of attending to his own business he goes out of his way to insult the Holy Father, and through him the entire Catholic population of the United States. If everything were as it should be, we should have as our representative at Rome, the capital of Christendom and the seat of the head of the universal church, a Catholic statesman. We do not insist upon this; but we do insist that our representative at Rome should be at least a fair-minded, candid, well-educated, and discreet gentleman, and not an ignorant, rude, prejudiced, and foolish dupe like Mr. Marsh. That we may not be accused of doing him injustice, let us give here the exact text of the essential portions of his despatch of May 26 last, to which we have already referred:
“The excesses of the clericals,” he writes, “are producing their natural and legitimate effect in a feeling of dissatisfaction with the position in which Italy has placed herself toward the Papacy by the Law of Guarantees. A recent allocution by the Pope, in which, for acts of the German government, Count Bismarck is likened to Attila, is much commented upon, and it is seriously asked whether Italy can protect herself against all responsibility for tolerating the use of such language in public discourses by the Pope, and its circulation through the press, under the plea that, by the seventh article of the law referred to, she has enacted that the Pope ‘is free to perform all the functions of his spiritual ministry, and to affix to the doors of the basilicas and churches of Rome all acts of that ministry.’ Such questions are bringing more clearly into view the incongruities and inconveniences of the anomalous position in which the general sovereignty of the state and the still higher virtual sovereignty of the Papacy, admitted by the terms of the Law of Guarantees, are placed toward each other. The Syllabus of 1864, having been promulgated before the enactment of that law, was notice to all the world of the extent of the inalienable rights claimed by the Papacy, and it is not a violent stretch of Vatican logic to maintain that, in spite of its protests, the law in question is legally a recognition of those claims. In fact, there are many occasions of collision between the two jurisdictions, such, for example, as the right of asylum implied in the extraterritoriality of the Vatican, which can never be avoided or reconciled without such an abandonment of the claims of one of the parties as will be yielded only to superior force; and hence a violent conflict between them is at any time probable, and at no distant day certainly inevitable. Such occasions were expected by many to arise from the pilgrimages to Rome on the fiftieth episcopal anniversary of the present Pope. But the number of pilgrims thus far has not reached the 230tithe of that predicted, probably not amounting in all to ten thousand, while the garrison and municipal police have been quietly strengthened to a force abundantly able to repress any disturbance. The death of Pius IX. and the election of his successor, events almost hourly expected, are looked to as probably fraught with important changes in the attitude of the Papacy toward Italy, and in the general policy of the church. For this expectation I see no ground, though the Roman Curia is at all times shrouded in such mystery that the purposes of those who administer it are very rarely foreshadowed, and no positive predictions can ever be hazarded concerning it beyond the general presumption that its future will be like its past.”
Mr. Edward F. Beale, of Pennsylvania, was our representative at Vienna, having been sent there to succeed that ardent anti-Catholic, Mr. John Jay, and being now in his turn superseded by Mr. Kasson, of Iowa. Mr. Beale’s career at the Austrian capital was brief but not brilliant. In August, 1876, he undertook to instruct Mr. Fish concerning the drift of public opinion, not only in Austria but in France and England, upon the Eastern question. He had ascertained that the prevailing sentiment in these countries was “religious fervor”; the people were so much in love with Christianity and so full of hatred of Moslemism in that they desired nothing more than to see Russia enter Constantinople, and to drive the Turks out of Europe “bag and baggage.” “It is a question of faith which will govern Europe,” writes the astute Mr. Beale, “and a crusade is quite as possible now as when Peter the Hermit preached.” The European congress which is about to assemble as we are writing will not disturb itself about any “question of faith”; its members will concern themselves only with questions of boundaries, fleets, and money. But not content with forecasting the future, Mr. Beale reverts to the past, and kindly undertakes to furnish the State Department with easy lessons in European history. Thus, in a despatch dated September 27, 1876, and apropos des bottes, he bids Mr. Fish to remember that
“It is interesting to recall that in Bosnia originated the first Protestant movement of Western Europe, and that even before the heresies (as the Catholic Church calls them) of John Huss in Bohemia she had sent out her missionaries to preach the Gospel as she read it, and to disseminate her religious views over the rest of the world. When the persecutions of the Church of Rome were at their worst she offered a generous asylum to her co-religionists, many of whom found here what had been denied them at home—the right to worship God after their own forms and belief.”
In point of fact, the heretics of Bosnia, at the time referred to by our erudite minister at Vienna, were advocating principles utterly subversive of order and tending directly to anarchy. They taught that a subject was released from all allegiance to a ruler if that ruler were in a state of mortal sin, and each subject was to judge for himself as to the spiritual condition of his ruler. The Church of Rome had no hesitation in setting the seal of her condemnation upon this vagary of Protestantism, and even Mr. Beale would probably admit that she was right in so doing. But he evidently was ignorant of the facts, and was anxious only to air his newly-acquired learning and to have a fling at the church. Is there among the secret instructions of our State Department to its agents a rule to this effect: “When you have nothing else to write about, pitch into the Pope”?
It is a far cry from Vienna to 231Port au Prince; but our misrepresentative in Hayti next demands our attention. He, of all his brethren, is perhaps the most vulgar, insolent, and ignorant; but he is one of the most outspoken. The United States pay him $7,500 a year, and have done so since 1869. How much the Protestant Episcopal Church pays him, if anything, we do not know; but he seems to have given much of his time and influence to the advancement of the interests of that body, and to the abuse of the Roman Catholic clergy of the island. Several of Mr. Bassett’s despatches contain eulogiums upon a “Rev. Dr. Holly,” who, he says, was “at Grace Church, New York, in 1874, ordained bishop of Hayti,” and whom Mr. Bassett appears to have taken under his special protection and care. Now, there is no “bishop of Hayti”; there is an archbishop of Port au Prince, the Most Rev. Alexius Guilloux; and he has four suffragans, the bishops of Cap-Haitien, Les Cayes, Gonayves, and Port Paix. “The Rev. Dr. Holly” has no more right to call himself bishop of Hayti than he has to call himself the Pope of Rome; but Mr. Bassett deems it very hard indeed that the archbishop, the bishops, and the clergy of Hayti have taken the liberty of warning their people that “the Rev. Dr. Holly” is not bishop, and that his teachings that marriage is not a sacrament, and that the first duty of a Christian is to revolt against the church, are not to be accepted. In May Mr. Bassett writes to Mr. Evarts that “the Roman Catholic archbishop and his clergy have assumed a pretension to supremacy over the civil code, notably in the matter of marriage”; and in July he writes again a long letter upon “the introduction and growth of Protestantism in Hayti and its influence upon the government.” He admits that in 1804 “Romanism,” which was “then, as now, the faith professed by a great majority of the Haytian people,” “was declared to be the religion of the state and placed under the state’s special protection and support,” and that “it still continues to enjoy that protection and support.” But he complains that “the Roman priesthood have made many strongly-directed and persistent but truly uncommendable efforts to cause to be suppressed, or effectively placed under ban, every other form of worship and belief than their own.” Mr. Bassett is not the only Protestant who cannot or will not understand the difference between the duty of Catholic prelates in a country where heresy does not exist and where it is sought to be introduced from outside, and their duty in countries like our own, where theoretically all religions are placed on the same footing, and the government is absolutely forbidden by its organic law to interfere in any way for the propagation of religious truth or the suppression of religious error. The first ruler of Hayti who endeavored to introduce Protestantism into the island was, according to Mr. Bassett, “Henri Christophe, the autocratic king of the north of Hayti,” who in 1815, although “himself a Roman Catholic,” engaged a clergyman of the Church of England to propagate heresy in his dominions. But King Henri, five years afterwards, “died by his own hand,” and Protestantism made no further progress “until, in 1861, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States was pleased to establish a mission with the Rev. J. T. Holly as its pastor.”
232He hit upon the idea “of raising up a national clergy in Hayti—a policy which seems never to have been thought of by any other religious denomination in this country, and which opened a new road and gave a new impetus to Protestantism here. The mission continued to grow. It was encouraged and visited in 1863 by Bishop Lee, of Delaware; in 1866 by Bishop Burgess, of Maine; and in 1872 by Bishop Coxe, of Western New York; and finally the Rev. Dr. Holly was, at Grace Church, New York City, in 1874, ordained bishop of Hayti. So that since 1874 there has been established in Hayti an independent Protestant Church, with the distinguishing feature that all its clergy are citizens of the country, several of them educated in the United States under the vigilance of Bishop Holly.”
There are ninety-three Catholic priests in Hayti, and of these nearly all are educated and cultured French gentlemen, who are undoubtedly far better able to discharge the duties of the priestly office than the native apostates who have been “educated in the United States under the vigilance of Bishop Holly.” But Mr. Bassett has the ignorant malice to vilify them and to display his own foolishness in this happy style:
“The French Roman Catholic priest, in coming to Hayti, leaves behind him all his social ties, in the hope of returning to them within eight or ten years, the average period of his labors here. All that he receives while in the country, over and above his scanty personal wants, goes abroad to enrich France at the expense of the Haytian people, and he even bends his energies to accumulate. In addition to his salary from the government, which ranges from 20,000 francs to the archbishop to 1,200 francs to the country curate, he is allowed a tariff of prices for all public religious services performed by him. Baptisms, marriages, funerals, dispensations, indulgences, Masses for the dead—services for each of these yield him by law a revenue ranging from 50 cents up to $50. Not only this, but he can collect offerings from the faithful, and it is even affirmed that many such offerings are made to him under the dread secrecy inspired by the confessional.
“It is true that France lost open political control over this island in 1804, but by means of the Roman Catholic clergy she has maintained almost exclusive control over the religious affairs of these people. Indeed, the domination which she once held over their bodies was hardly more complete than that which she still holds over their consciences and spiritual susceptibilities. The priests, in their present controversy with the government, which is outlined in my No. 501 already referred to, do not fail to rely upon the spiritual subjugation of the Haytian to the papal system of Rome, in connection with their own supposed power over him as citizens of a country which once held him in physical bondage, and to whose interests they themselves are devoted.
“In the light of these facts it is no cause for astonishment that the Haytian government, aroused and inspired by the policy and success of the Protestant Bishop Holly in raising up and establishing a national clergy for the Protestant Episcopal denomination, should seek to conserve its own integrity and the resources of its people, as well as to avoid continual misunderstandings with a class of foreigners resident here and shielded by the dignity of sacerdotal robes, by stimulating and encouraging the young men of the country to enter the ecclesiastical vocation.
“Meanwhile, it ought not to be unknown to those who feel bound by the holy injunction to have the Gospel preached to all the world that in Hayti the door stands wide open for every kind of Christian missionary work.”
And it is for writing such stuff as this that we pay Mr. Ebenezer Bassett $7,500 a year—that is to say, as much as is received by thirty of the “country curates” whom he reviles.
Our space is limited, and we have but skimmed through our two Red Books. We should have been glad to have followed the erratic flight of Mr. Partridge, our late minister to Brazil, who fills quires of paper with ridiculous nonsense 233about “the exactions of Rome,” the wickedness of “the ultramontane party,” and the awful danger that the Brazilian ministry “will yield to the demands of the Roman Curia.” Nothing escapes the birds-eye view of this Partridge; he unconsciously explains much that would otherwise be mysterious by stating that the prime minister of the cabinet is “a member of the Masonic fraternity”; but the scope of his intellect is best shown by his remark that “the throwing of stones at the bishop of Rio, as he ascended the pulpit to preach,” was “a trick of the Jesuits.” It would have been pleasant to congratulate Mr. Orth, who was our representative at Vienna in 1876, upon his sagacity in advocating, with hysterical warmth, the law for the virtual confiscation and destruction of the houses of the religious orders in Austria—a measure denounced by Cardinal Schwarzenberg and thirty-one archbishops and bishops as “a law which equally violates the equality and personal freedom of the citizen, the dignity of religion, the honor of the Catholic Church, and the members of religious orders,” but which, in Mr. Orth’s opinion, was “sound and salutary, and demanded by the progressive spirit of the age.” A page or two is deserved by Mr. Williamson, who gives us a history of a presidential campaign in Chili, in which all the virtues are attributed to the Masonic candidate, and all that is devilish is ascribed to “the church party,” “the ultramontanes,” and “the church.” Delightful would it be to tarry with Mr. Scruggs, our talented and courteous minister at Bogota, who commences one of his despatches thus: “In April last one Bermudez, a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church, proclaimed against the public-school system of this republic,” and who gives an account of the events which followed, closing his glowing periods with the cheerful assurance that “the church property will probably be appropriated to pay the war debt.” The letters of our Mr. Rublee, at Berne, apropos of the Old-Catholic schism in Switzerland; of our Mr. Nicholas Fish, who during a brief interregnum represented us at Berlin; and of several of our other agents, furnish equally tempting matter for comment. But we must pass by them with the remark that none of them are quite so outrageous as those of Mr. Bassett, Mr. Beale, and Mr. Marsh.
The present administration has made changes in six of our most important embassies. Mr. Kasson has been appointed to Vienna, Mr. Stoughton to St. Petersburg, Mr. Hilliard to Brazil, Mr. Lowell to Madrid, Mr. Welsh to London, and Mr. Bayard Taylor to Berlin. It goes without saying that none of these gentlemen have received any diplomatic training. Mr. Kasson is a respectable provincial lawyer, who has sat in Congress, and who rendered important services to his party by going to Florida and taking care that the electoral vote of that State was properly counted. What he knows about Austria, and how he may deport himself there, remains to be seen. Without being extravagant, one may indulge the hope that he may prove to be an improvement upon Mr. Beale. Mr. Welsh is an old and worthy merchant of Philadelphia, a prominent member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and an extensive dealer in sugars: but we have yet to learn what are his qualifications for the weighty duties of minister to the 234court of St. James. Mr. Lowell is a poet, a man of letters, and a scholar who has done honor to his country; but we should be inclined to doubt his fitness for managing our commercial and political affairs at the court of King Alfonso. Mr. Taylor is a good journalist, in a certain way; he has been a traveller of some experience, and he is an ardent admirer and a close student of Schiller and of Goethe; but he has himself been swift to disclaim the idea that these things made him fit for the post to which he has been appointed, and he rather ridiculed the notion that he had been appointed minister to Berlin in order that he might there finish his great work—a new biography of Goethe. There is much to be said on both sides of the question, “Is it worth while to keep up our diplomatic service at all?” We should be inclined to take the affirmative; but we are not disposed to enter into the discussion at present. One thing, however, is certain, and that is the necessity of freeing the service from the weight of men like Marsh, Beale, Partridge, Orth, Williamson, and Scruggs. There are others as bad, but these will serve as types of the worst. In no sense can they be said to rightly represent this great, free, and noble people; in every sense they may be said to misrepresent the Catholic population of the republic, whose interests, rights, and feelings can no longer be, as they never ought to have been, safely trampled upon by any administration or by any party. Whatever party does this betrays an un-American spirit; its policy is a bad one both for the country and itself, and unless it changes for the better its reign will be short.
Beneventum is a small town of about fifteen thousand inhabitants, situated geographically in the kingdom of Naples. It formerly depended, spiritually and temporally, on the Holy See, which also held jurisdiction over part of the territory of the ancient duchy; the other part being subject to the king of Naples as to temporal affairs, and to the archbishop of Beneventum as to those of a spiritual nature.
The archiepiscopal palace, or the episcopio, to use the old term, stands in its proper place, next the cathedral, flanking the apsis. One of the wings faces the market square, where public gratitude has erected a marble statue to Pope Benedict XIII., the immortal benefactor of the city, of which he had been archbishop under the title of Cardinal Orsini. The entrance is to the south. At the west, from the garden terrace, or the windows of the conventino, is a superb view over a fertile valley, the verdure of which extends up the very sides of the mountains that fade away in bluish tints on the horizon. It is at once in the city from the proximity of the inhabitants, and in the 235country as to its pure air, calm solitude, and the enchanting aspect of a landscape that always commands attention and admiration.
The building is not, strictly speaking, a palace.[52] It is large and spacious, but not lofty or elegant. Nothing in its exterior bespeaks its occupant. It might be taken for a theological seminary or a convent, wrapped as it is in gloomy silence, and surrounded by thick walls. Its general appearance is dismal and unattractive. Only an archæologist would take any pleasure in examining the huge stones of which the walls are built. These stones were hewn out in the time of the Romans, and more than one have the characteristic trou de louve by which they were raised and put in place. They were probably taken from the amphitheatre, for the misfortune that made the Coliseum at Rome an inexhaustible quarry for the construction of so many palaces, like the Farnese, Barberini, etc., also befell the theatre of Beneventum, of which but a bare outline remains, though great blocks from it are to be found at every step in the private dwellings and the walls that surround the city. After the earthquakes of June 5, 1688, and March 4, 1702, the exterior of the palace was greatly modified by Cardinal Orsini, but the building, as a whole, is ancient, and many features of the walls, like the belfry of the cathedral, carry us back to the middle ages. Let us study it in detail, for in more than one respect it presents a model worthy of imitation.[53]
The portal of the palace is monumental. It has a semi-circular arch, which is more graceful than a square entrance, and more conformable to ecclesiastical traditions. And the tympanum which fits into the arch or ogive offers ample space to the sculptor or painter for decoration. Against the lintel rest the folding doors. These are open all day, however, for the house of a bishop is like that of a father who cannot shut out his children. Above are the arms of Cardinal Orsini, carven in stone. Two other scutcheons once hung beside them: one of Pius IX., destroyed when his temporal power was suppressed in the duchy of Beneventum—that is, in 1860, when the kingdom of Naples was overrun by the Garibaldian hordes; the other that of Cardinal Carafa, the actual archbishop, who was driven into exile, and whose palace was devastated.
Two enormous lions, taken from the front of the Duomo, stand at the sides of the entrance. They have come down from Roman times. They are not of remarkable workmanship, but the outlines are good. There is life in their partly stretched-out forms, and pride in the pose of their heads. The paws are pressed resolutely together. One of them grasps a head covered with a helmet, and the other the remains, 236probably, of one of those nude children to be seen in the mouths of the crouching lions watching at the doors of the churches at Rome, symbolic of helplessness and innocence that need aid and protection from the strong. When the lion is represented crushing a beast or holding a warrior’s head, it signifies the vice to be overcome, the enemy to be annihilated.
Some look upon the lion as the emblem of justice. This queen of the cardinal virtues is generally represented as a woman with various attributes, such as the book of the law, the balance wherein actions are weighed, the sword to smite the guilty, the eagle to show her imperial nature, and the globe indicating the extent of her empire. On the public square at Bari is to be seen a lion of the twelfth century, with the brief but significant inscription, Cvstos Ivsticie, on its collar. The lion, then, does not represent justice itself. That virtue is only exercised in the temple, either by God or by his representative. But the lion stands, like the guardian of Justice, watching at the door of the Holy Place in which she has taken up her abode. Nothing, then, could be more suitable for the door of a bishop, the unflinching enemy of vice as well as the sure protector of virtue, than these two lions, type of the power conferred by the church on her ministers. And they are specially emblematic of the firmness and energy of Cardinal Orsini, who had them placed here.
The wall through which the gateway is cut is bordered by a line of merlons, the peculiar form of which reminds one of Cordova and the Alhambra. They produce a picturesque effect, but are not of the slightest utility. They are the relics of feudal authority and power, the last vestige of which is the annual payment of the cathédratique, identical with the nominal tribute some lords required of their vassals, of no importance in itself, but typical of the honor due from the inferior to the pre-eminence of his lawful chief—in signum præeminentiæ et honoris, to quote the holy canons revived by Cardinal Orsini, and maintained to our day, particularly in this point, by the collateral descendant of Pope Paul IV., who for more than thirty years has occupied the see of Beneventum.
From the top of the wall rises one of those small open belfries called bell-gables. It is of the most primitive construction, being a mere extension of a part of the wall through which an opening for a bell has been made. It terminates in a gable like a mitre, on which are an iron cross fleurdelisée and a small vane to mark the direction of the wind. The cross is always appropriate for a belfry, large or small, if not obligatory, as Anastasius the Bibliothecarius insists in his works. The vane is no less traditional at Rome, where it is generally in the shape of a little banner (the origin of which is quite feudal), wherein the armorial ensigns are so cut as to be emblazoned against the azure sky. Here the vane is shaped like a flame. It once bore the arms of the resident archbishop, but the rain has washed off the color, and the surface is now corroded by rust.
The small bell is of the kind called nola. In ancient times it was rung whenever the archbishop left his palace or re-entered it, as the bells of St. Peter’s at Rome announce the visit and departure of 237the pope. Later it only rang when he set out on a journey and at his coming back. Now it is mute, and no longer announces his appearance in public or his return to the palace.
Passing through the gateway, we come to the court. On the left are the carriage and store houses, and, beyond, the saddle-room, which was quite brilliant in former times when the cardinals went forth in gala array. At the right is an arched passage leading to the interior of the palace, and further on is the porter’s lodge, formerly the guard-house of the curia armata.
Around the court are many ancient monuments and inscriptions, which constitute a small museum, begun long since by the archbishops. There is an Egyptian obelisk of red granite, broken in two, which once stood in the cathedral court. It is covered from top to bottom with hieroglyphics relating to the deeds of some old king. Domitian consecrated it to Isis. On another side are three fragments of fine marble columns: one of cipollino, so called on account of its greenish veins, which resemble those of an onion, in Italian cipolla; the second, of what is called porta santa, because the casing of the door in the Vatican basilica, opened only at the Jubilee, is of this marble, which is of a pale violet color, or a purple that has lost its freshness; and the third is of breccia corallina, the white ground of which is relieved by reddish veins.
The ancient inscriptions collected here, whether sepulchral, votive, or commemorative, are not rare. But they are noteworthy for their clearness and brevity. How expressive, for instance, are these four lines consecrated to the manes of Vibbius Optatus, who died in the flower of youth:
The unfortunate parents had no illustrious name to bequeath to posterity. The discreet marble only echoes a profound grief.
Here is a landmark, rounded at the top, and hewn to a point at the bottom, the better to insert it in the ground, that once stood on the Appian Way, which passes triumphantly through the arch raised to the glory of Trajan at one end of Beneventum.
Beneventum, which copied Rome, even in the device of its senate: S. P. Q. B.—Senatus populusque Beneventanus—had a magistrature of ediles at its head, who made generous provision for the embellishment of the city. Here is a pedestal on which this municipal corps pompously proclaimed itself:
One cannot help exclaiming, in view of the present order of things:
“Comment en un plomb vil l’or pur s’est-il changé!”
How into vile dross hath the pure gold changed!
The Romans loved statuary, and were lavish of it in all their public as well as private dwellings. Above all, their sculptors produced divinities and illustrious men, but sometimes the principal members of a household, if not the whole family, to adorn the atrium. Who does not remember the Balbus family in the Museum at Naples, the father and son on horseback, and the rest gathered around them? Here we find several statues, both nude and draped. Nudity was 238chiefly confined to heroes and the gods. It signified apotheosis—the ascension to a higher world. The terrestrial garb was laid aside; only a glorified body remained. Pagan art showed itself incapable of fully expressing a state indicated in the middle ages by a radiance surrounding the transfigured body. We have an admirable example of the immediate change to the glorified state in Perugino’s immortal production in the Sala del Cambio at Perugia. There the bankers and money-changers have constantly before their eyes a symbol of the change wrought by divine power on a body in the state of celestial beatitude. Paganism divested the body of its garments, but did not render it luminous. It only invented a symbol which the church has retained to designate the saints—the nimbus around the head, as the most noble part of man because the seat of the intelligence. But it could go no further. From Apollo, who alone had the nimbus in the beginning to express in a measure the luminous atmosphere of the sun, personified in him, it passed to other divinities, and finally even to those to whom the senate accorded the title of divine, thus becoming the equivalent of divus. It is really amusing to see, on the Arch of Constantine at Rome, the Emperor Trajan so divinized that his bare head is surrounded by a nimbus, though he is engaged in the chase. The nude among the Romans was, therefore, a conventional way of expressing what was right in substance, the immutation wrought by glory, and was not intended to excite ignoble passion. In other cases their statues were modestly draped, though sometimes a little too much of the form was revealed by the clinging folds of the garments.
There are several sarcophagi in the court, with nothing extraordinary about them, but even in the most unpretending affording proof of artistic taste. They are adorned with scenic masques, vases of fruit, the genii of the seasons, etc., which have their significance and are not without poetry. Here is one with a medallion of its former occupant in the centre—a portrait full of life and animation, as if he still were under illusion as to his nothingness. It is supported by two genii, winged and nude, as if bearing him to the celestial regions—winged, because they are fulfilling a mission; nude, to indicate their celestial origin. This emblem was common in ancient times. The middle ages did nothing but Christianize it by substituting angels for genii, and placing in their hands, not the body, but the soul, of the deceased, about to receive the reward of his sanctity and good works. We see them on the tomb of King Dagobert, in the abbatial church of St. Denis, snatching the soul of the king from the demon who was endeavoring to bear it away.
But we have lingered too long in the precincts. Let us enter the palace, and first visit the prisons—for prisons there are, the archbishop of Beneventum, as we have said, having formerly a twofold jurisdiction, temporal as well as spiritual. His tribunal of justice imposed the canonical penalties. Fines seem to have been specially employed, for among the officials of the Curia there was one to receive and apply them to some religious object. At the same time there was a register in which they were faithfully recorded. There were, too, different 239degrees of imprisonment. In the carcere alla larga there was comparative liberty. The purgatorio indicates a temporary expiation. The inferno was perhaps the prison from which death alone could be looked forward to as a release. The two latter correspond to the carcere duro of the Venetians. There are similar ones, but not so spacious, in the governor’s castle overlooking Beneventum, which also bore the terrible names of purgatorio and inferno.[54] Cardinal Orsini, who, though severe, was of a humane disposition, visited these prisons in 1704, at which time there were only three prisoners, it appears, from the report of his visit. After assuring himself that the vaults were in a good condition, capable of resisting all efforts at escape, confornicatæ et proinde tutæ, he saw the necessity of obviating the dampness of the ground by a brick pavement, ut humiditas arceatur, and ordered the inferno to be closed for ever, because, as he said, it was a very damp and atrocious place. A thoughtfulness so full of humanity is something to dwell on. The very text should be cited: “Eminentissimus archiepiscopus utpote humidissimam et immanissimam claudi demandavit et quod sub pœna excommunicationis nemo ibi detendatur.” The prisoners must have been delighted at a threat so much to their advantage.
The cardinal, preoccupied also with their spiritual condition, found means of providing them with a chapel where they could attend Mass and on festivals hear a sermon. Their cells were sprinkled with holy water to drive away the malign spirit, and ornamented with 240pictures of devotion. They were forbidden to play cards or read bad books, and were to go to confession six times a year—at Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, St. Peter’s day, Assumption, and All Saints. Every month the vicar-general visited them to listen to their grievances, remove all grounds of complaint, and assure himself that all orders had been executed. And the cardinal, who always kept an eye on everything himself, went to see them twice a year.
One item in the register of accounts is particularly touching. Cardinal Orsini increased the ration of bread from time to time at his own expense, and had a fire made in the winter, that the prisoners might not suffer from the cold.
The three soldiers employed to make the necessary arrests were under the command of a baricello, or corporal, all of whom, with the jailer, were lodged in the guardiola beside the arched passage which connects the two interior courts.
The second court is bounded on one side by the sacristy of the cathedral, and on the other by the stables and the jubilee hospice. The stables, built by Mgr. Pacca (of the same family from which the cardinal of that name descended), are large enough for about twenty horses—none too many for the archbishop and his suite, for his visits could not always be made in a carriage. Even in our day a cross-bearer precedes his eminence on horseback, clothed in a violet cassock and mantellone, and in former times the cortége must have been much more imposing.
The hospice affords a proof of Cardinal Orsini’s inexhaustible charity. He had before built a special asylum for pilgrims, not far from the palace, under the title of 241St. Bartholomew, patron of the city. There is nothing left now to remind one of it, except a narrow street still called the Via dei pellegrini. But on extraordinary occasions, as at the time of a jubilee, this asylum was insufficient, and the cardinal accordingly set apart a whole wing of his palace to lodge those who came to Beneventum or were on their way to Rome to gain the indulgence of the Holy Year. This hospice had two entrances to admit the sexes separately: one opening into the first court, the other into the second. The latter has on its lintel this inscription, which gives the precise date and object of the foundation:
Nor was the cardinal content to give them benches and tables in such numbers as still to be spoken of. He had the bare walls relieved by paintings of some religious subject. In the room where public prayers were offered and the rosary sung, as it still is daily in the cathedral to a peculiar air handed down by tradition, was painted Our Lady of the Rosary, with St. Dominic and St. Catharine of Siena at her feet. In the refectory was depicted a scene from the life of the Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni, a Dominican friar. He was in the habit of serving five pilgrims in honor of the five wounds of our Lord. One day, while waiting on his guests, his eyes being opened by the Holy Spirit, denoted by the white dove on his shoulder, he saw with astonishment that they were five angels sent by God to reward his charity. In the room where the pilgrims’ feet were washed is to be seen the Blessed Andrea de Franchi, also a Dominican, humbly prostrate before a pilgrim who afterwards reveals himself to be the Saviour.
In the arched passage we find a staircase, leading on the one hand to the hall of state, and on the other to the curia. Taking the latter direction, we pass beneath a statue of St. Philip Neri, larger than life, for which reason it is called St. Filippone. Before it burns a votive lamp, a tribute of gratitude from Cardinal Orsini. Higher up are two medallions of the fifteenth century: one of the Blessed Virgin modestly veiled, her hands folded, borne to heaven by two angels; the other represents St. Mark with his usual attribute, the winged lion. The walls of the court-room are enlivened by a series of landscapes, alternating with the Orsini arms, but the most appropriate decoration is the sentence from the writings of St. Jerome:
To judge no one without first hearing him is one of those axioms it seems useless to repeat, and yet how many precipitate judgments, how many sentences that would not be rendered, were so obvious a duty heeded!
The metropolitan archives are between the chancery and the office of the vicar-general, which pour into it every week a mass of official documents for preservation. On the ceiling are emblazoned the arms of Cardinal Banditi, who fitted up the room with conveniences for the registers and papers, distributing them, according to their contents, among the large pigeon-holes which extend from 242the floor to the very ceiling, and are literally crammed with documents. To find one’s way through such an accumulation requires the sagacity and good memory of an archivist like the present one, whose patience is only equalled by his wish to oblige. Beneventum is full of such excellent priests, who are ready to spend their leisure moments in aiding you in your researches.
It is here Cardinal Orsini may best be studied, and that we can learn to what an extent he sacrificed himself for his flock, thereby meriting to become, by the unanimous suffrage of the Sacred College, the successor of Pope Innocent XIII. His incessant activity is shown by the Diario of six volumes in folio in which, till his elevation to the Papacy, his secretary, day by day, noted down the most minute details of his official life. It begins December 1, 1685, the date of his preconization as archbishop of Beneventum by Pope Innocent XI.
The contents refer chiefly to his pastoral visits, ordinations, both regular and extraordinary; assisting at the offices of the cathedral, preaching in pontificals with seven deacons around him; confirmation, with examination of the children on the eve; general communions, baptisms, visits to the dying, visits of devotion to churches; consecration of bishops, churches, altars, and chalices; blessings of all kinds, including vestments; religious professions; processions wearing the red hat; attending lectures on the Holy Scriptures by a theologian; exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, absolution of the excommunicated, synods, provincial councils, consultations in cases of conscience, instructions to the people after the Gospel, saying the rosary with the faithful, teaching children the catechism, journeys, etc., etc.
At the end of the year a summary was made of his principal labors. We give that of the year 1694: Cardinal Orsini baptized 67 children and confirmed 13,851; conferred orders on 841 clerks, 503 porters, 450 lectors, 449 exorcists, 435 acolytes, 436 subdeacons, 434 deacons, and 457 priests; consecrated 12 bishops, 100 churches, 100 stationary altars, 500 portable altars, 176 patens, and 188 chalices; blessed 5 abbots and 4 abbesses; received the profession of 88 nuns; performed 6 marriages; administered extreme unction 8 times; placed 13 corner-stones, and blessed 14 cemeteries and 234 bells.
What a proof of his activity, combined with a very complicated administration! But let us cite a few items from this unpretending diary:
“In the evening I kept vigil before the relics exposed in the church to be consecrated on the morrow.
“In the morning I solemnly consecrated the church of the Most Holy Annunciation at Jelsi, preached to the congregation, and then said Low Mass. This church is the CXXXV.
“I solemnly administered the sacrament of confirmation in the church to 34 boys and 24 girls, in all 58.
“Assisted in cappa at a sermon on the Blessed Sacrament by one of the students of my seminary.
“Assisted in cappa at the Mass of the feria, chanted (it was in Lent), and at the sermon.
“At Fragnitello I was received with the usual ceremonies, but, what was unusual (and this greatly affected me), all the men, women, and children came out to meet me a mile distant, with olive branches in their hands, showing by this manifestation the joy in their hearts. God be for ever blessed!”
At the end of the year the cardinal signed the register to guarantee 243the authenticity of the contents. He adopted this formula:
“Annus 1695, Deo propitio, hic terminatur.
“Ita est. Ego fr. Vin. Mar. card. archiepiscopus m(anu) p(ropria).”
The old palaces had a hall of state for exceptional occasions, when the bishop had to appear in all his dignity. There is such an apartment here, and it is of grand proportions. It is adorned with the portraits and arms of the prelates who have occupied the see, with a concise notice of each. Among them are fourteen saints and two beati: viz., SS. Photinus, Januarius, Dorus, Apollonius, Cassian, Januarius II., Emilius, John, Tamarus, Sophus, Marcian, Zeno, Barbato, and Milon. The latter belongs to the eleventh century, St. Photinus to the first, and the remainder range between the fourth and seventh. The Blessed Giacomo Capocci and Blessed Monaldi lived in the fourteenth century. Let us hope, as the cause has been introduced, we may soon add the Venerable Orsini.
From St. Photinus to his Eminence Cardinal Carafa di Traeto there are fifty-one bishops and seventy-one archbishops. The see was not made archiepiscopal till the year 969, during the pontificate of Pope John XIII. Of the twenty-three cardinal archbishops two became popes: Alexander Farnese, under the name of Paul III.; and Cardinal Orsini, under that of Benedict XIII. Three other popes were likewise from Beneventum—St. Felix (526), Victor III. (1086), and Gregory VIII. (1187).
As an example of the concise and elegant manner in which these prelates’ lives are noticed, we give that of St. Milon, a native of Auvergne:
Above these records of the bishops is a long array of armorial ensigns, in which, unfortunately, the arms and seal are often confounded, though essentially different. The archbishops of Beneventum have used for ages a seal of lead on their diplomas and licenses, similar to the bulla of the popes. On one side, separated by a cross, are the heads of the Blessed Virgin, titular of the cathedral, and of St. Bartholomew, the patron of the city and diocese. On the other side are the name and title of the actual archbishop. This seal, in spite of the principles of archæology and heraldry, is given as a coat of arms to the bishops who had none, beginning with St. Photinus, and continuing to the seventh century. From the time of St. Barbato, who died in 682, another seal is added in parti to the bulla, representing a bishop on horseback crossing a bridge and precipitating a dragon into the water. This is doubtless St. Barbato himself, and perhaps refers to the golden viper which he abolished the worship of at Beneventum, transforming it into a chalice, on which, says tradition, was graven the Lord’s Supper.[55] This counter-seal is maintained from the seventh to the eleventh century, when the bulla is resumed under Amelius (1072).
The first arms really heraldic make their appearance under Cardinal 244Roger, the sixteenth archbishop, who died in 1221. The red hat is found on the escutcheons of the twelfth century, though not conceded to cardinals till about a hundred years later (at the Council of Lyons), and not to be seen on their arms before the fourteenth century. But this may be on the same principle that St. Jerome is usually represented with a cardinal’s hat at his side.
The bulla, seal, and arms, from the first, bear the tiara and crosier. The latter adds nothing to the significance, and does not imply any special privilege, being common to bishops and abbots. As to the tiara, even with a single crown at the base, it is a manifest usurpation. The archbishops of Beneventum, it is true, wore it in the middle ages, as is shown by a document of the fourteenth century and the reliefs on the bronze doors of the cathedral. But Paul II., and later St. Pius V., by a motu proprio, the original of which is to be seen in the archives of the chapter, condemned the practice in formal terms. If the tiara is no longer admissible on ceremonial occasions, why retain it on the arms? And this tiara is boldly surrounded by a nimbus when placed over the arms of the canonized bishops, though none of them ever wore it, with the exception, perhaps, of St. Milon. The nimbus is suitable for the head, which represents the whole body, whereas the covering of the head, however sonorous its name or rich its make, should not have an emblem which denotes elevation on our altars and a claim to public veneration. This would be a grave error, infringing on the liturgy as well as iconography.
The archbishops of Beneventum had a mania for imitating the pope. Thus, they wore the tiara, had the Blessed Sacrament borne before them in their visits, styled themselves Servus servorum Dei, issued diplomas in solemn form after the style of the Cancellaria, sealed them sub plumbo, and imposed on the bishops of the province the annual visit ad limina B. Bartholomæi apostoli. Of all these usurpations, only the tiara remains on the arms, and the bulla on the licenses; but even these are too much, for the tiara and bulla are essentially papal, and rightfully belong to the Sovereign Pontiff alone.
On the walls of the apartment are painted en camaïeu all the sainted bishops of Beneventum in simulated niches, clothed pontifically, with the tiara on their heads. One alone has a distinguishing attribute—St. Barbato, who has in his hand the viper of gold. St. Photinus, according to the Diptychon of Beneventum, was ordained and sent here by St. Peter in the year 40. He is believed to be of Greek origin. From him to St. Januarius, who was martyred in 305, is a long interval with no names, though tradition tells us the see had eleven occupants in the time. This loss of names is said to be owing to Diocletian, who ordered the writings of Christians to be destroyed. There is a similar vacancy in all the sees in France, but this is no argument against their apostolic origin. The first founders might receive their mission from St. Peter or his immediate successors, and the difficulties of the times might prevent their being at once replaced. The churches had to exist as best they could for a long period, and were perhaps governed by bishops with no fixed residence or distinct territory.
To complete the parallel with 245Rome, Beneventum is said to have had a woman for one of its bishops, as the papal see, according to its enemies, was fraudulently occupied by Pope Joan. Cardinal Orsini spiritedly replies to this calumny in the noble words inscribed next the name of Bishop Enrico, who died in 1170: “Ex errore in necrologio monialium S. Petri orta fuit fabula de Sebastiana moniali pro archiepiscopo habita ne fabula sua vacaret Beneventana Sedes in hac Sebastiana ut Romana de sua Johanna.” This calumny sprang from a false interpretation of the record in the necrology of the abbey of San Pietro for November 29: “Obiit archiepiscopus et Sebastian. mon.” The archbishop and the nun might certainly die on the same day, without being, on that account, one and the same person.
On the east wall of the hall is painted the city of Beneventum, surrounded by the principal towns of the diocese and the sees of the suffragans. As their number is considerable, the frescos are continued in the passage leading to the sacristy. They are not without interest, though perhaps maps would be preferable, after the manner of those, so striking and complete, which adorn the gallery of Gregory XIII. at the Vatican.
As conferences and ecclesiastical assemblies, as well as the Mandatum on Holy Thursday, were held in this hall, there is a permanent throne of carved wood, but it stands between the windows on one side, instead of being at the end in capite aulæ, the proper place, where the entrance now is from the private apartments.
One of the doors in the hall opens into the Monte di Pietà, founded by Cardinal Orsini to relieve the poor of his diocese, where money was lent on articles pledged and without the least interest, conformably to the bulls of Leo X. and Paul V., which definitely regulated such institutions. He established, moreover, a Mons Frumentarius, or wheat fund, to furnish grain to the poor in want of bread, or to sow, at the mere recommendation of their curate, and inscribed over the door appropriate texts from Holy Writ, showing him to be the comforter of the poor:
Mons frumentarius Beneventanus erectus anno Domini 1694.
Factus es fortitudo pauperi, fortitudo egeno[56] (Isaias xxv.)
Eripiet de angustia[57] pauperem (Job xxxvi.)
Revolutions have naturally put an end to these charitable institutions, without substituting anything more to the advantage of the people, but they cannot efface the memory of the incomparable prelate who founded them. Canonico Feuli has reason to say in his Bulletino Ecclesiastico that “others may equal Orsini, but can never surpass him.”
At the top of the staircase is a kind of marquise, supported by elegant columns, before the door leading to the private apartments. Above are the Orsini arms of inlaid marbles, the colors conformed to the rules of heraldry, and the inscription:
Fr. Vinc. Maria. Ord. Præd. Card. Ursino. Archiep. An. MDCCVIII.
which reminds us that Cardinal Orsini belonged to the Dominican Order. Even when pope he continued to be a frate. From him emanated the celebrated constitution which admonished bishops chosen from the regular orders to remember, by the color of their 246costume, the solemn profession they had once made.
The most striking thing in the antechamber is a double band of emblematic medallions on the walls, with explanatory mottoes, such as were popular in the sixteenth century. They all refer to the obligations of a bishop, and evidently allude to Cardinal Orsini as the model of one. They begin with the holy name of God in Greek, with the Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, the angels’ eternal song of praise. We will rapidly review the other emblems here employed to raise the mind from the visible to the invisible, the material to the spiritual.
The telescope, which enables the human eye to penetrate the profound mysteries of the heavens. So the spiritual world is opened by prayer and meditation. Alta a longe cognoscit (Ps. cxxxvii. 6).
A dog, guarding the fold: emblem of pastoral vigilance. Vt vitam habeant (St. John x. 10).
The mitre, supported by a column: episcopal firmness. Firmalitvr et non flectetvr (Ecclus. xv. 3).
The wine-press overflowing with the juice of the grape: emblem of the spiritual harvest. Vt fructvm plvs afferat (St. John xv. 2).
A clock, which tells the hours and minutes: the value of time. Particvla non te prætereat (Ecclus. xiv. 14).
The crane, emblem of vigilance, because it was formerly believed to sleep on one foot; the other holding a stone, which, when it fell, awoke it. Excvbat in custodiis (Num. xviii. 4).
The horse, held in check by a vigorous hand: self-government. Ne declines in ira (Ps. xxvi. 9).
The elephant, believed every morning to adore the sun at its rising: humility before God. Hvmiliat semetipsvm (Philipp. ii. 8).
The lamp which burns and gives light: figure of the bishop consuming himself for others. Vt ardeat et lvceat (St. John v. 35).[58]
The pelican, nourishing its young with the blood from its own breast: a lively expression of extreme devotedness. Reficiam vos (St. Matt. xi. 28).
The crosier is the shepherd’s crook. It terminates with a graceful hook for the purpose of drawing the lambs more gently. It was once a saying: “It is good to live under the crosier!” Svm pastor bonvs (St. John x. 2).
The sun, shedding its rays on a balance: equity under the inflexible eye of God. Æqvitatem vidit vvltvs eivs (Ps. x. 8).
The honeycomb, in which the bee deposits its honey gathered from the flowers: activity and sweetness. Mansvetvm exaltant (Ps. cxlix. 4).
The stag, which, according to an old notion, attracted serpents by its breath in order to exterminate them: the might of the Holy Spirit, of which a bishop is the organ. Flavit Spiritvs eivs (Ps. cxlvii. 18).
The trumpet, which, though sonorous, can give forth sweet notes. In spiritv lenitatis (Gal. vi. 1).
The mill, turned by the water, grinds wheat to feed the hungry. A bishop, above all, should be the father of the poor and needy. Frangit esvrienti (Isai. lviii. 7).
A painting representing the sun: the divine attributes should be reproduced in a bishop. In eandem imaginem (2 Cor. iii. 18).
The fox, emblem of the transgressor, flies before the dog, symbol of episcopal vigilance. A facie tva fvgiam (Ps. cxxxviii. 7).
The dolphin, by the odor it exhales, draws to it the fish of the 247sea: the influence of virtue. In odorem cvrrimvs (Cant. i. 3).
An anvil, struck by two hammers at once, without being moved: strength to resist exterior assaults. Fortitvdinem meam cvstodiam (Ps. lviii. 10).
The phœnix, which springs to new life on the pile where it is consumed: the power of multiplying time. Mvltiplicabo dies (Prov. ix. 2).
The bear, taking its young in its paws, to teach them to stand and walk: paternal direction of souls. Donec formetvr (Gal. iv. 19).
The compass, turning its needle to the polar star. A bishop should not be guided by human influences. Hanc reqviram (Ps. xxvi. 4).
The rain, watering the garden: going about doing good. Pertransiit benefaciendo (Acts x. 38).
The pomegranate contains a great number of seeds: a bishop shelters the multitude. Coperit mvltitvdinem (St. James v. 20).
The mitre, surrounded by an aureola: the splendor sanctity adds to the episcopal dignity. Contvlit et splendorem (Judith x. 4).
The eagle, trying its eaglets by making them look at the sun: God alone should be looked to in trial. Cvm probatvs fverit (St. James i. 12).
A tree, the vigor of which is only increased by age: experience increases one’s efficiency. Fortior cvm senverit (Prov. xxii. 6).
At one end of the antechamber is the library, formerly containing a fine collection of books, mostly belonging to Cardinal Orsini, but now unfortunately scattered. He also established a printing-press in the palace for the purpose of publishing his own edicts, licenses, and pamphlets for the direction of his clergy. A small oratory opens into the library with its marble altar turned towards the East and its walls covered with paintings. One of these is a votive picture from Cardinal Orsini after his miraculous preservation in the earthquake of 1688 by the special intervention of St. Philip Neri, representing him buried among the ruins of his palace, his head alone visible, resting on a picture of the saint, who, in consequence of this memorable circumstance, has ever since been regarded as one of the patrons of Beneventum.
It is said that when Cardinal Orsini was leaving Beneventum for Rome, he turned towards the weeping inhabitants, and, after praying silently for an instant, promised them his protection henceforth against earthquakes, and, in fact, not only has the city been spared when serious disasters have occurred in the country around, but no citizen of Beneventum has received any injury, even when exposed elsewhere to terrible danger. Many families keep with veneration a bust of the holy cardinal in their houses, or some object once belonging to him, and attribute to this devotion a special protection.
There is nothing of interest in the private rooms once occupied by Cardinal Orsini. One would like to see his unpretending furniture, his pictures of devotion, the kneeling-stool where he so often prayed for his flock, and the books he daily used, but they are all gone. There is not even an authentic likeness of him,[59] though he resided here thirty-eight years, and expended in the restoration and embellishment 248of the palace 64,589 ducats of his personal fortune.
We have already alluded to the quarter of the palace called il conventino, because it has the aspect of a monastery. It is divided by a corridor, with cells on both sides that communicate with each other, or can be made private at pleasure. Here, without any luxury or display, Cardinal Orsini lodged the bishops convoked for the provincial councils, and generously provided for every expense these assemblies involved. The priests who accompanied them were lodged in the convent of San Modesto, where nothing was wanting to their comfort. The register of accounts gives some curious details as to the supplies. Macaroni necessarily played an important rôle. Snow was furnished for refreshing drinks. And as the wine called Lachryma would doubtless have been too heavy, it was previously tempered by a strong addition of the ordinary red wine!
But the patience of the reader is already exhausted with these details. As we have implied, the archiepiscopal palace of Beneventum is not precisely artistic, and yet it is interesting and curious. If the account has been unreasonably prolonged, the memory of Cardinal Orsini is a sufficient justification. We cannot make too prominent the name and labors of those who lived only for the church, and sacrificed themselves for its development and glory. Quam multa, quam opportuna, quam grandia accepta referunt beneficia, let us say, in conclusion, with the inscription on the hospital at Beneventum, graven on marble to the praise of Fra Vincenzo Maria, priest of the title of St. Sixtus, Cardinal Orsini.
La Bruyère sees in all extravagance of phrase some symptom of weakness. “To say modestly of anything it is good or it is bad, and to give reasons why it is so, needs good sense and expression. It is much shorter to pronounce in a decisive tone either that it is execrable or admirable.” He himself is a model of clearness and exactness of expression. His English counterpart is Swift, of whom Thackeray said: “He writes as if for the police.” Nothing in literature surpasses the vraisemblance of Gulliver’s Travels, which reads like a book of authentic adventure. Its artlessness is the perfection of art concealing art. La Bruyère also says: “What art is needed to be natural (rentrer dans la nature)! What time, what rules, what attention, what labor to dance with the ease and grace with which we walk, to sing as easily as we talk, to speak and express one’s self as one’s self thinks!” To speak or to write as one thinks seems, in these days of tumid and extravagant expression, to be one of the lost arts. We generally say either more or less than we think, usually more. For this reason we should turn to the older classical writers, because of the importance they attribute to diction, and the sense of duty they attach to it.
The new rhetorical doctrine is, “Let the style take care of itself. Give us thought.” Robert Browning, whose poetry nobody understands, probably not even himself, declares in favor of “burrs of expression that will stick in the attention.” Any one who has scrambled through the labyrinths of some of his poems has had “burrs” enough to suffice him for a lifetime. It is clear that this plea for thought to the neglect of style is an excuse for slovenly composition. There is no reason why thought should not have clear, precise, and beautiful expression. Unless style be made a subject of deep attention, and be brought to the severest test of rhetorical criticism, there is an end of literature. If the barbaric “yawp” of Walt Whitman is to pass for poetry; if the pictorial daubs of J. A. Froude are to be considered historical portraitures; and if extravagant and exaggerated forms of speech are to be ranked as striking beauties, the literary critics and the lovers of literature in general must gird themselves for a tougher battle for letters than they ever did for any attack that threatened them from Philistia. What we call the Extravagant School of Literature numbers eminent names, and is by no means confined to the more obvious and pronounced sensationalism of the daily press. Contemporaneous 250history, criticism, poetry, sectarian theology, and, wonderful to say, philosophy and science deal largely in exaggerated expression and extravagant theory.
It may be some consolation to the newspapers and to the gentler sex, both charged by the critics with the use of exaggeration and hyperbole, that they but follow the example set them by grave modern historians and scientists. The reckless writing in the journals, like the fluent gossip at Mrs. Grundy’s tea-parties, is ephemeral. But extravagance aspires to immortality in the pages of the historian. The description of Mary Stuart’s beheading in Froude lacks even the historical accuracy of a New York Herald reporter’s account of an “execution.” Macaulay’s fantastic analysis of motives exceeds in boldness of conjecture a journalist’s article on the future policy of the Vatican. In both sets of examples there is the same fault—unlimited speculation and unjustifiable comment. Darwin observes some particular facts in natural history, and, in defiance of a familiar rule in syllogisms, leaps at once to a universal conclusion. Matthew Arnold, fired by his name as a critic, indulges in extravagant speculation upon the relations of literature and dogma. Science loses its cool head, and philosophy its cautious pace, on the presentation of hitherto unexplained phenomena. Protestant theology hears aghast that the Greek of the Epistle to the Hebrews is more classic than that in the other Pauline epistles, and telegraphs the discovery to the Board on the Revision of the Scriptures. The dainty trick of Tennyson’s metre is the despair and admiration of inglorious Miltons, whose hands cannot strike the resounding lyre with like skilfulness, and thereupon jangle it in woful measures. Bret Harte makes a “hit” in the delineation of wild Western life, and he is hailed as a new-born genius. John Hay and Joaquin Miller assume the bays. A crowd of nonentities rush before the public on the lecture platform, and their extravagant nonsense brings them fame and fortune. The two classes react upon each other for the worse. The extravagant never corrects his faults, and the public never perceive them, so used have they become to this baneful influence of sensationalism. It permeates popular religion. A Protestant Life of Christ by a prominent preacher reads like a dime novel.
We readily pardon the extravagance of fiction; and catechresis in poetry does not call forth the severest censure of the critic. Any one familiar with the hard conditions of modern newspaper writing will not be disposed to judge harshly if both editor and reporter combine to make their journal “spicy.” It may be that the high-pressure system on which newspapers are conducted has exercised a marked influence upon all classes of readers and writers. The New York dailies have a rather questionable élan, which provincial journals follow from afar off. The stupendous enterprise of sending expeditions to South Africa and to the North Pole, the insatiable quest for news, the undisguised love of the sensational characteristic of foremost journalism, have, in our opinion, a debilitating and disastrous effect upon the scholarship and the intellectual life of America. The showy story, the painfully epigrammatic drama, and the pyrotechnical poetry of the land are newspapery to the last degree. 251Journalists do not even seem to know or realize the influence which they exert. What is a pointed and brilliant editorial compared to the honest endeavor of a journalist to inculcate sound ethical and social views in the minds of his readers? Who cares about Jones’ slashing attack upon Smith? Why, in the name of common decency, are columns opened to the discussion of Robinson’s domestic infelicities? We do not wish to make up our minds every morning upon the state and prospects of the universe. We are firmly convinced that the world will go on, without being daily buttonholed by talented editors to acquaint us with the fact. The sensational newspaper has spoiled some of the best traits in the American, and it has given abnormal development to his worst tendency—his curiosity. A newspaper would have scattered all the happiness of Rasselas’ valley. It is happy for Americans that they have a weakness for print, and seem rather to enjoy a figure therein. If the Bungtown Bugle did not notice the arrival in town of Mr. Porkpacker, let the editor tremble.
But the extravagance of journalism is mainly confined to words. It is not altogether true that the guiding spirit of the newspaper is sensation. This charge, which can readily be sustained against the contemporary historian, does not hold of the journalist. He makes the most of news, but he rarely invents. He is sensitive on this point. Accuracy is a prime requisite in a reporter. His is the hyperbole of words. This comes generally from a limited education and inexact habits of thought. When we reflect that the first and last lesson of rhetoric is simplicity, we should not expect too much from men who are trained to think and believe that no idea is acceptable unless arrayed in gorgeous imagery and blazing with tawdry rhetoric. A fire with loss of life is a terribly startling thing, and the reporter imagines that he is really describing its horror when, with apt alliteration’s artful aid, he heads his account with “The Fire-fiend Furious—Flaunting Flames Frantically Flashing—Fainting Firemen Fused by the Fierce Fire,” etc. Richard Grant White has wearied his readers for a decade and more on the theme of newspaper English and cognate subjects. The fact is, no man can be an etymologist without a fair knowledge of the languages from which the English is derived, and it is simply wasted labor to counsel the attainment of a classic style from a mere acquaintance with one language, and that the vernacular. The wonder is that so much really good writing is done under such limitations.
It takes some self-denial in a newspaper man to say a thing simply. We understand that Western newspapers have made a new departure in announcing deaths, and that a rather coarse, if not ribald, humor is tolerated. This is an evidence of a lower sensationalism. The West has exercised a rough and energetic influence upon the laughable dilettanteism of the Eastern press, but we must confess our inability to relish its humor. Its humor is extravaganza, and thus would work out the very reform and improvement which it is the design of this article to advocate. The pompous descriptions ending in anti-climax, the open burlesquing of the style of newspaper novelists, the riotous characterization of oddities, and the hearty dislike of sham and cant that one meets in 252Western journalism must have a good effect upon the general literature of the country. But one tires of Mark Twain, mayhap for the reason that one grows speedily weary of professedly funny papers. The poor court-jesters of the middle ages got more frowns than smiles. Mark Twain has little of that heartiness and bonhomie that are the characteristic of true humor. Real wit he has none, nor does he pretend to it. His humor is extravagance, which, even in this humble but oh! how genial faculty and expression of the human heart, is seen to be out of place and power.
The more we read and write, the clearer becomes to us the wisdom of the Horatian maxim to keep our lucubrations by us for years. Hasty writing is not only hard reading but often dangerous utterance. An editor told the writer that when the news of the late Pope’s death reached us he had his biography already in type, but without editorial comment. It was necessary to compose some sort of editorial upon an event which for a time suspended the breath of Christendom, and our editor, with the nonchalance and conceit which unfortunately characterize so many of the journalistic guild, sat down to dash off as fast as pen could travel his estimate of that great, long-suffering, and heroic man on whose brow, where gathered the glory of Thabor and the gloom of Calvary, rested the mystic diadem of the Supreme Pontificate. “Of course,” said our editor, “I hadn’t time to get up anything very fine, but my Protestant friends were delighted. I gave the good old man some pretty severe raps—that thing, you know, about his being a Mason, and opposed to progress—and—and—Antonelli, and that little love-affair, you know. Ha! ha! ha!” No wonder Dickens impaled the editor of the New York Rowdy. Now, if this man could have waited, and read and reflected, it would have been morally impossible for him to have composed an obituary which, if it had been written of any other man than the dead Vicar of Jesus Christ, would have exposed its author to the pistol-shot of outraged relatives or to the chastisement of public justice.
So long as ignorant and irresponsible men are suffered to guide and control the expression of a journal, so long will the American newspaper fail of any high mission. It is a good sign of the sturdy independence of the American character that it has shaken off the journalistic yoke and thinks for itself. Formerly the editorial pages were the first to be scrutinized and the mysterious oracle consulted. But
The garish light of day has been poured in upon the sanctum, and the divinity has fled. The newspaper is not likely soon again to attain to that high dignity and power which it held prior to the last Presidential election, for reasons too obvious to the reader to need mention here. Year by year the strongly-marked individuality of the chief editor, so familiar of old, fades out of sight, either because the race of great editors is run or the conditions of newspaper life have changed. We speak of the newspaper only as it falls within the scope of this article, which regards its literary and not its moral aspect. We do not advert to it at all as a teaching or ethical power, for we look upon the average 253journal with feelings akin to contempt at its blind or wilful neglect of the highest possibilities of good. No men are better acquainted than are newspaper men with the absurdity of Protestantism, its failure both as a public institution and a private religious life, its petty tyrannies, its squeamishness, its rhodomontade, and its helplessness before any attack of sound and manly logic. They know, too, or ought to know, the real good of the Catholic Church. Yet how rarely one sees in a journal even a feeble recognition of the benefits of Catholicity! Why, in many quarters we do not even get the show and hearing graciously accorded to the Mormons. Who has not felt the covert sneer, the poorly-concealed bigotry, and the ignorant prejudice so thinly disguised? When Doyle, England’s best caricaturist, not even excepting Cruikshank, was required by the proprietors of Punch to draw a caricature of the Pope, he threw his pencil in their faces and told them “be ——,” a word which the recording angel certainly blotted out. What are we to think of a journal that seizes the celebration of the feast of a great national saint as a happy occasion for publishing a series of “jocular” and blasphemous articles on the saint’s memory, twice piercing the sensibilities of Irishmen, once through their faith and next through their nationality? Is that honest, worthy, or dignified journalism?
Enough has been said to place the general newspaper press upon a low form in the school of extravagant expression. Not until editors feel a profound moral responsibility, and enlarge their minds with at least a cursory study of Catholic theology—two things which are least likely to come to pass—will the American journal attain any lasting prestige or power. As it is, its tone becomes less dignified and effective year by year, and we should not be surprised to discover in the newspaper, in time, the most stubborn and powerful opponent of Christianity, and even of general morality. Heaven knows what incalculable harm it now does to immortal souls by its constant vomiting forth of social impurities and criminal details. There are certain papers of large circulation and “respectability” which cannot be read by all without proximate danger of mortal sin. But if a Catholic critic ventures to proclaim these manifest truths, he is answered with a howl about the church’s opposition to progress and enlightenment. The newspapers cannot bear criticism whilst savagely attacking any person or institution to which they take a dislike. This sensitiveness is a symptom of weakness.
We turn to the great masters of extravagant expression. At their head we place Lord Macaulay, who has demonstrated the art of making history romantic, and romance historical. Query: whether Sir Walter Scott was not the founder of the contemporaneous historical school? At any rate the cry is, “Let us have no more dryly accurate histories like Lingard’s or Arnold’s. Relegate to an appendix state papers and statistics. Give us delightful conversations between historical personages, somewhat in the style of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, only not so heavy.” It is so delightful to enter into the secret motives of men, to interpret their hidden spirit, and clearly understand their whole mental and moral being. This is the new school of historical writing, carried 254to extravagant lengths by Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle. The old-fashioned idea of history was the simple and exact statement of events, the ascertained motives of historical personages, and the actual results of their deeds and decrees. This idea the trio before mentioned scout with derisive laughter. Macaulay writes down “the dignity of history”; Froude penetrates into the arcana of royal bosoms; and Carlyle shrilly hoots at the Dryasdusts for their historical investigations, and makes a bonfire of archives and state papers. Of this precious triad Macaulay is the least vehement, but none the less must we dub him an extravagant. He never can say a thing naturally. He cannot rise above an epigram or an antithesis. Nor was there ever any intellectual growth in him. In Trevelyan’s Life and Letters of Macaulay there is a characteristic anecdote of his boyhood. His mother refused him a piece of cake for some misdemeanor—for missing a lesson, we think. “Very well,” antithetically answered the future reviewer (ætat. 9), “hereafter industry shall be my bread and application my butter.” This might have been written in the Edinburgh forty years after. When the famous essay on Milton appeared, sensationalism had not as yet invaded the prosy precincts of the reviews. Jeffrey’s classic but dull reviews were models; nor did the humor of the “joking parson of St. Paul’s” receive much countenance from the Scotch, on whom the parson revenged himself when he said that a surgical operation was necessary to get a joke into a Scotchman’s head. Macaulay’s brilliancy took the town by storm. But what is there in the review of Milton? of Johnson? of Bacon? He began the carnival of the sensational. George Cornewall Lewis said of Macaulay: “The idea of a man of forty writing such flowery and sentimental stuff! Macaulay will never be anything but a rhetorician.” But the reading people had their appetites whetted by Scott and Byron, and there has been little sobriety in literature since. The extravagance of the praise with which Macaulay bedaubed Milton struck the critics at the time; but when they answered, he was famous. The Americans raved over him. It was perhaps as well that his History was never finished, for it is morally certain that his infatuation for saying brilliant things would have led him to hurl Washington and the American patriots of the Revolution from their pedestals. He could not resist the temptation to bid men abate their admiration of any esteemed character. To wind up with a brilliant period was the height of his poor literary ambition. Of course he received his reward; but no man now who values his reputation for scholarship would think of citing him as an historical or, what may seem stranger, a literary authority. That glowing tribute to the Catholic Church in the review on Ranke has always seemed to us one of his rhetorical bursts. There were in the subject light and color, imposing figures, an atmosphere of art and beauty, and innumerable chances for introducing epigrams and startling paradoxes. He wrote an article which flames like one of Rubens’ pictures. The whole argument is false from beginning to end, and its logic would shame the New Zealander himself. The conclusion which any thoughtful man would draw from the powers and 255attributes therein ascribed to the Catholic Church is that such an institution must be divine—a conclusion furthest from the reviewer’s thought. He has made the dull pages of English political history as interesting as a fairy-tale, under which designation it no doubt will be tabulated by future scholars; for there is not a point d’appui in the entire history, from his glorification of King William to his defamation of Penn, that has not been shattered by some one. But who should seriously attack romance?
James II. was a poltroon, and William III. was a brave man and a great statesman. Macaulay did not attempt all the possibilities of sensationalism. This was left for J. A. Froude, who now reigns in his stead. Casting about for a striking character, Froude lights on Henry VIII. And it is here that that delightful historico-romantic style soars to hitherto unexplored heights of extravagance. The injured monarch is introduced to the sound of mournful music. His tortured mind is apparent in his anguish-riven face. Contemplate at leisure that Achillean form, that massive brow, the melancholy grace of those royal legs. A pensive smile irradiates a countenance on which all the graces play. He is thinking of Katharine. His conscience is smitten. Enter to him Anne Boleyn. What thoughts are hidden beneath that alabaster brow?—and so on for volumes. The forte of the historian of this school is his thorough knowledge of the thoughts and designs of his personages. Nothing escapes his eagle eye. This wondrous faculty, which has hitherto been considered preternatural, enables him to detect deep meanings in the slightest act. The king smiled significantly. Ah-hah! Sergeant Buzfuz’s interpretation of Pickwick’s note about the warming-pan sinks into obscurity alongside of the calm and connected analysis of motive that Mr. Froude can weave out of King Henry’s stockings. It will amuse our readers to take up a few pages of any of Froude’s historical works, and study out illustrations of this criticism. They will soon discover that it is he who does all the thinking, planning, and suffering for his historical automata, that are moved by the chords of his sympathetic heart. No one would call Froude a historian except in burlesque. He is a romancist.
But what shall we say of the Scotch Diogenes, Carlyle, who hurls books instead of tubs, though the latter missile would do less mischief? He is an extravagant. We have hesitated some time about classing him in the school, but we think that we are justified, at least by the wildness, unconnectedness, and rhapsodical fury of his speech. Besides, he frantically hates and denounces America, which fact would set him down at once as a man of unbalanced intellect and malignant humor. He used to know how to write English, as his Life of Schiller and Life of John Sterling abundantly prove. But in an evil hour he learned German, and the next view of him we have discovers him tossing in a maelstrom of German metaphysics. He certainly deserved a better fate. We very much doubt if any sane man can long keep his wits and study German philosophy, especially in the mad outcomes of Fichte’s Absolute Identity and Schelling’s theories of the το εγο. The best minds of Germany, both Catholic 256and Protestant, Möhler and Neander, have pronounced the judgment of all sensible men upon these absurdities in one word—rubbish. Carlyle patiently worked in this rubbish for years, and his result is not half so good as his brave old words, spoken out of his honest heart: “Do what you are able to do in this world and leave the rest to God.” In the name of common sense, do rational men care anything about the critic of Pure Reason, or the beer and tobacco speculations of conceited egoists? It were well if men, like the parish priest in Don Quixote, burnt all those foolish books of knight-errantry carried on in a world as dreamy and fantastic as that fabled by the old writers on chivalry. Carlyle’s command of language is marvellous, but his style is hybrid, wearisome, and frequently unintelligible. He is sensational, in a bad sense, too. There is not a hero that he has chosen who was not chosen with an eye to effect: Mohammed, a prophet! Luther, the hero-priest! Cromwell, the hero-king! The selection of these worthies enabled him to say something startling. Then the idea of taking Frederick II. of Prussia as a type of the heroic, kingly, religious, literary, and general excellence of the eighteenth century was carrying the extravagant a little too far. The old man now sits like a bear with a sore head. We pardon him much, for we look upon him as an embittered and disappointed man. He seems not to care what he says nor how rudely he says it. His criticism on Swinburne, the erotic poet, whose success is an indication of something rotten in English letters, is so harsh that we hesitate to quote it, though it is richly deserved: “He is a man up to his neck in a cess-pool, and adding to the filth.” We need Diogenes to snub Alexander and to trample on the pride of Plato. Had Carlyle escaped fantastic Germanism and its wretched philosophizing, he would rank with the greatest masters of language in any tongue. The glow and beauty of many of his descriptions are beyond praise, and no more skilful hand has ever drawn the vast and gloomy tableaux of the French Revolution. His historical method has the same vice as Macaulay’s and Froude’s. He is pictorial, imaginative, and given to unwarranted speculation. His style has the worst faults of the sensational school, though it may be alleged in his defence that his vast knowledge of German has unconsciously and radically modified it. Affectation he has none, which cannot be said of his imitators in word-coining.
Literary criticism, which certainly should have advanced somewhat since the days of Dennis, is at present as “slashing” as that old cynic himself could have desired. The great reviews, spoiled by Macaulay’s example, have adopted a supercilious tone that but ill comports with the dignity and functions of true criticism. We recall only one great exception, John Wilson (Christopher North), in recent English literary criticism, that is not open to the charge of querulous fault-finding. The narrowness of the English reviews, and their fatal obtuseness to see beyond the limits they have drawn for themselves, have deprived them of the proper power of literary judgment or suggestive writing such as we associate with a review. The latest of their number, the Nineteenth Century, is not long 257enough before us to enable us to form a satisfactory judgment. It lacks unity, but, perchance, this is a merit. The reader knows beforehand the judgment of the Edinburgh, the London and British Quarterlies, and the Westminster on any subject. They are a bench of Lord Jeffreys passing sentence before any evidence is presented to them.
There is no writer on whom sensationalism works such quick and fatal destruction as the critic. We look to him to be above the passions of the hour, the rage of the fashion, and the influence of literary and political cliques. Even his admiration must be tempered. He must betray no weaknesses. When we come across a critique which runs over with passion, weak sentiment, petty jealousies, unworthy bickerings, and a subdued but potent sensationalism, we are shocked and disappointed. Most contemporary reviews are pompous exhibitions of the writer’s own learning, which may be in one sense encyclopædic, and which generally throws the author under review quite in the shade. The older reviewers gave some hearing to an author. They quoted him largely, and enabled the reader to judge for himself. They proffered their opinions modestly, and supported their objections with proof drawn from the book itself. But nowadays, if a reviewer condescends to advert to the book which he is supposed to be reviewing, it is in a high and mighty tone of censure or of autocratic approval. This obtrusion of self and opinions smacks much of the sensational. The reviewer wishes to be seen upon the tripod, and he is convinced in his own heart, or at least allows his reader plainly to understand, that he could write a much better book than that which he has deigned to review. Slashing criticisms are in great favor. Oh! for another Macaulay to blast another Montgomery. We say, Oh! for another Pope to place these gentlemen in another Dunciad. There is no merit in cutting a book to pieces. An eye sharpened by malice and on the lookout for faults will detect blunders in a title. Where merited chastisement must be inflicted it should not be spared; but that is a poor idea of literary criticism that views it as a medium of communicating only stinging comment and bitter diatribe. Criticism is essentially calm and judicial. It should sift a book as law does evidence. No stormy passions should be suffered to disturb its equanimity. There is no other department of letters that invites and exacts such rare scholarship and genial wisdom.
The man who can quickly recognize and honestly praise a work of genius, and, through wise commendation, introduce it to a wide circle of readers, merits a crown more precious than the poet’s. In these days of much bad writing and wide reading there is deep need of such exact criticism, such careful watchfulness over literature, and such sure guidance of the public taste. Keep sensationalism at least out of our reviews and our book notices, for if the critic loses the reckoning we are indeed at sea.
We hinted that sectarian theology has its sensational side. If we can dignify with the name of theology that congeries of books, sermons, pamphlets, and tracts that is the literary outcome of Protestantism, then theology, the queen of the sciences, is in the plight of Hecuba as described in Hamlet:
258No attempt is made to conceal the sensationalism of the Protestant pulpit. A dull preacher had best betake himself to another occupation; say anything that will be listened to, sooner than behold the agonizing sight of a sleeping congregation. Modern congregations do not enjoy the traditional nap. They are kept awake by the attitudinizer in the pulpit. They are not sure of what he is going to say next. Sir Roger de Coverley made his chaplain preach one of Barrow’s sermons, and, thus being assured of orthodoxy, he slept with a quiet conscience. The quality of the majority of Protestant sermons is as spiced and sensational as the average popular lecture. What motive but that of making a sensation can induce Farrar and Stanley to preach against hell in Westminster Abbey? Their sermons are as high colored as a story in the New York Ledger. The new tack which the Protestant hulk is now painfully taking is the harmonization of science and religion. We verily believe that Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall take a malicious pleasure in seeing the squirms of Protestant theologians. Those men know themselves the inconclusiveness of their arguments against revelation, but the fatal spell is on science, too—it must be sensational or nothing. The old scientists worked calmly away for years, and set forth the results of their investigations with the modesty of true merit. But Huxley cannot anatomize the leg of a spider without publishing the process in the newspapers, with some reflections upon its bearing and probably fatal effect upon the Mosaic records.
In summing up the conclusions suggested by our reflections upon the extravagant, we must not forget that the ways and habits of modern social life have almost necessitated this species of literature. It is remarkable that the Latin writers under the later emperors have neither the purity of thought nor of style of the old masters. Literature is the reflex of passing life. Our century is the century of startling discovery, of kaleidoscopic changes, of rapid social life and intense intellectual energy. Its expression must be loud and boisterous. But it is the duty of writers to keep the gross sensational elements of life out of letters. Literature should soothe and compose the mind; should be its refuge from turbulence and care; should be a ministry of peace and refreshment to the wearied spirit. The enduring products of human genius are marked by the calmness and serenity of the great souls that conceived them, and they produce in us the like frame of mind. The public should look coldly upon the class of productions we have been examining, and bid
A diligent and impartial German bibliographer, Dr. John Geffcken, Protestant pastor of St. Michael’s, Hamburg, in his learned work on catechetical treatises of the fifteenth century, has pointed out the almost complete forgetfulness of present scholars of a branch of literature important in the theological and controversial history of Germany before the Reformation. He says of his own researches in this field:
“There was a lost, or at any rate a forgotten, literature to be discovered step by step, and its spirit grasped in all the branches thus brought together and compared. The following information will show how little light the fragmentary notices of Langemack in his Historia Catechetica (vol. i.), or of Köcher, in his Catechetical History of the Papal Church, threw upon the times to which I have devoted my attention. The worst, however, was that even these scanty notices were often false or misleading, and that, instead of pointing out the right track, they not seldom led into error. They consist mostly of lists of titles of books, without a hint of the contents of such books, and not seldom an uncertain or fanciful title is interpreted as denoting contents utterly different from the reality. The spirit of controversial prejudice in which these works were written impelled the authors, whenever they had to deal with ante-Reformation times, to paint the historical background in the darkest possible colors, in order to bring out in corresponding relief the brightness of the new dawn of the sixteenth century.”
If this is true of such works as those to which Geffcken refers, it is equally so of the German Plenarii, or glossaries, commentaries, homilies, and various devotional manuals in the vulgar tongue published in the last half of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth. The inquiry into the publication, contents, and diffusion of these books is as interesting from an antiquarian as from a theological point of view. They are little known even to cataloguists of acknowledged merit. Brunet, in his Manuel du Libraire,[61] etc., under the heading Plenarium, vol. iv., mentions only one, as the Plenarium, or Book of the Gospels, printed at Basle by Peter von Langendorff in 1514; while under the heading of Gospels (vol. ii.) he mentions in general terms several “Evangelia.” Hain, in his Repertorium 261Bibliographicum (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1826-1828), in which he claims to have collected the names of all the books printed from the time of the discovery of printing to the year 1500, is a little more explicit as to the gospels and epistles under the heading of that name, but has nothing to say of any Plenarium; although the name stands as a separate heading, it is followed by no details or examples. Graesse, in his Trésor de livres rares et précieux, ou nouveau dictionnaire bibliographique (Dresden, 1859-1869), mentions only five of these works, giving the dates and presses but no hint of the contents of the books. Earlier scholars, however, had not so wholly lost the tradition of the existence of these manuals; for instance, Nicholas Weislinger, in his Armamentarium Catholicum Argent., 1749 fol. sub anno 1488 (pp. 412-415), and Panzer, in his Annals of Ancient German Literature; or, notices and descriptions of those books which, since the invention of printing till the year 1520, were printed in the German tongue (Nuremberg, 1788), mentions a fact which Dr. Alzog says he has not yet found proved by other documents—the existence of similar manuals in other countries than Germany. The French have Les Postilles et Expositions des Epistres et Evangiles Dominicales, etc. (Troyes, 1480 and 1492, and Paris, 1497), and the Italians the same in 1483, press and date not mentioned, and Epistole e Evangeli per tutto l’anno, per Annibale da Parma (Venice, 1487). No doubt research among the libraries of ancient Italian cities, colleges, and monasteries would discover many copies of such manuals, and the same may be said of French glossaries. The fact that they have but recently come to light in Germany argues equally in favor of their being at some future time discovered in other countries, certainly not less enlightened at the time whence date the German manuals.
It seems that hitherto no satisfactory etymology of the name of this class of books has been found; the explanation of Du Cange[62] being rather bald, that the books “wholly contain the four gospels and the canonical epistles.” Whatever the origin of the title, the books themselves multiplied rapidly from 1470 to 1522. They were invariably in the vulgar tongue, often in dialect. They were meant as emphatically popular hand-books, guides to the liturgy, and interpreters of the Latin offices of the church, while they also supplied the place of sermons, homilies, and meditations by their glossaries and explanations of the gospels, lessons, and epistles. Some of these are much in the style of the commentaries of the early Fathers on Scriptural subjects. The translations from the Vulgate are generally original, and do not follow strictly any of the authorized versions of the day. In some of the later Plenarii the Collects and Prefaces are given, in others the Graduals and Communions; in a few the whole liturgy is translated and the ceremonies explained. None of these books was ever published in Latin, and, unlike our modern missals, they very seldom, and then sparingly, included the Latin text with that in the vulgar tongue. Hymns and sequences were also often printed. Dr. Alzog was drawn to the study of this branch of church literature by his researches for a hand-book of universal 262church history, and by his opportunities in the University Library of Freiburg in Breisgau, which alone contains six editions of Plenarii of 1473, press unknown, five respectively of 1480 (Augsburg), of 1481 (Urach), of 1483 (Strassburg), of 1514 and 1522 (Basle), and several others without authors’ or publishers’ names, as well as the kindred works of a famous preacher of that time, Geiler von Keisersperg, printed at Strassburg. The reproach sometimes made to the fifteenth century, of being destitute of sufficient religious and moral instruction in printed form, is much neutralized by the opposite reproach of a contemporary whose name is famous in literature as that of the author of the Ship of Fools, Sebastian Brant. This powerful satire, the work of a priest, begins with these words in German rhyme:
Alzog names thirty-eight manuals, including five by Keisersperg, with his sermons and expositions of doctrine, and seven in Low Saxon dialect, interesting as showing the peculiarities of spelling in certain districts at that time. The form of the title is almost unvaried in all: “In the name of the Lord. Amen. Here follows a Plenarium according to the order of the holy Christian Church, in which are to be found written all epistles and gospels as they are sung and read in the ceremony of the holy Mass, throughout the whole year, in order as they are written in the following.” The two earliest mentioned by Alzog are of 1470-1473. They are adorned with title-pages or frontispieces, Scriptural or allegorical subjects. In the University Library of Freiburg is a small folio with a wood-cut of our Lord, his right hand uplifted in the act of blessing, and his left carrying an imperial globe, the ball surmounted by a cross, such as may be seen in pictures of the old German emperors. Round the four sides of the print runs the following curious inscription, unfortunately clipped short in part by the binder: “This portrait is made from the human Jesus Christ when he walked upon the earth. And therefore he had hair and a beard, and a pleasant countenance. Also a ... He was also a head taller than any other man on the earth.” The first edition mentioned by Panzer and Hain as containing a glossary on the Sunday gospels is of the year 1481, printed at Augsburg, but the four editions between 1473 and 1483 all had uniform glossaries.
The mention is worded thus: “A glossary will be found of each Sunday gospel—that is, a good and useful teaching, and an exposition of each gospel, very useful for every Christian believer (or believer in Christ) to read.” In 1488 Weislinger and Panzer point to a book printed at Baden by Thomas Ansselm, called Gospels with Glossaries and Epistles in German, for the whole year; also the beginning; the Psalm (the “Judica” and Introit) and the Collect of each Mass according to the order of the Christian Church. Another book of 1516, printed at Dutenstein, has the same title with this addition: “for the whole year, with nothing left out.” A very elaborate manual, of which a copy (1514) is in the University Library of Freiburg and is mentioned in Panzer’s catalogue, is called
263“The Plenarium, or gospel book. Summer and Winter parts, through the whole year, for every Sunday, Feria, and Saints’ days. The order of the Mass, with its beginning or Introit. Gloria Patri, Kyrie Eleyson, Gloria in Excelsis, Collect or prayer, Epistle, Gradual or penitential song, Alleluia or Tract, Sequence or Prose. Gospel with a glossary never yet heard by us, and ended by fruitful and beautiful examples.[63] The Patrem or Creed, Offertorium, Secreta, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Communion, Compleno and Ite Missa est or Benedicamus Domino, etc. And for every separate Sunday gospel a beautiful glossary or Postill, with its example, diligently and orderly preached by a priest of a religious order, to be seriously noticed and fruitfully applied for the greater use of the believer, who in this quickly-passing life can read nothing more useful....” At the end are these words: “To the praise and worth of Almighty God, his highly-praised Mother Mary and all saints, and to the use, bettering, and salvation of men.... Printed by the wise Adam Peter von Langendorff, burgher of Basle. 1514. In folio.”
The book contains four large wood-cuts of some artistic merit, Christ crucified, with a landscape in the background, and two groups, one of four women on one side, the other of four men on the other, and the following legend beneath, taken from Notker’s famous hymn Mediâ Vitæ, which “wonderful anthem or sequence,” says an Anglican writer, is “so often mistaken for a psalm or text”[64]: “In the midst of life we are in death: whom shall we seek to help us, and to show us mercy, but thou alone, O Lord, who by our sins art righteously enwrathed? Holy Lord God, holy strong God, holy, merciful, and eternal God, suffer us not to taste the bitterness of death.” The other wood-cuts, respectively indicating Christmas day, Easter eve, and Whitsunday, represent the Adoration of the Infant Jesus by Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds, with a landscape in the background; the Resurrection; and the Descent of the Holy Ghost in the form of fiery tongues. The book contains many smaller wood-cuts.
Another Plenarium (Strassburg, 1522) boasts of being “translated from the Latin into better German,” and another, of the same year (Basle), announces “several other Masses, never hitherto translated into German,” as well as a register with blank leaves. Keisersperg’s sermons “in the last four years of his life, taken down word for word from his own mouth,” are printed at Strassburg in 1515, and are qualified in the title-page as “useful and good, not only for the laity, and never hitherto printed.” His Postill, or “Commentaries on the Four Gospels,” is printed in four parts in Strassburg in 1522, also his Lenten sermons, and some additional ones on a few saints’ days, “written down from his own mouth by Henry Wessmer”; but the most curious work mentioned is a folio volume of his sermons, without title, and containing other treatises with fanciful titles and bearing on mysterious subjects. “The Book of Ants, which also gives information concerning witches, ghostly appearances, and devilish possession, very wonderful and useful to know, and, further, what it is lawful to hold and believe touching them”; also, “the little book, ‘Lord, whom I would gladly serve,’ in fifteen parts of fine and useful doctrine; finally, the book of ‘Pomegranate,’ in Latin Malogranatus, containing 264much wholesome and sweet doctrine and advice.” This dates from 1517 (Strassburg, John Greinninger). For the sake of the language the manuals printed in Low Saxon, chiefly in Lübeck, are among the most interesting specimens. The titles are much the same as the German, but generally more concise. Panzer remarks of one of them, printed by Stephen Arndes at Lübeck in 1496, and adorned with several fine wood-cuts, that he has seen three other editions, printed in 1488, 1493, and 1497. A few of the peculiarities of spelling, and of the indifferent use of various forms of one word, will be seen in the following examples: book, in the contemporary High-German, spelt buch or buoch, is here spelt boek, boeck, bok, and boke, this last a form often found in Old English writers; holy, heylig, heilig, or hailig, is here spelt in five different ways: hilgen, hylgen, hylligen, hilligen, and hyllyghen; and birth, geburt, is bort and borth. Das (the) becomes dat; endigt (ends) is turned to ondighet; and the o’s and n’s are in general used the reverse way to that common in High-German.
The contents of the Plenarii show the peculiarities of the liturgy as used at that time. The same epistle and gospel sung or read on Sunday was repeated on Monday, Tuesday (which the oldest manuals call After-Monday), and Thursday. Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year had separate epistles and gospels, and Saturday is not mentioned, unless it is indicated by the “third day,” which the later editions speak of as “having a separate epistle and gospel throughout the year.” Each day of Lent had a separate one. Some of the books of 1473 contained special Masses—that of the Wisdom of God for Mondays, the Holy Ghost for Tuesdays, the Holy Angels for Wednesdays, the Love of God for Thursdays, the Holy Cross for Fridays, and the Blessed Virgin for Saturdays. There followed Masses for rain, for health, for sinners, for fair weather, and for “all believing souls.” The glosses on the gospels in the earlier editions are interesting from their simplicity and directness. Even the preface of the Basle Plenarium of 1514, though less simple, is a good specimen. It is noteworthy that the Immaculate Conception is implied in the text. The heading is from Luke xi. 28: “Blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.” The preface runs thus:
“Jesus Christ is the Word of the Eternal Father; the Word is made flesh (understand by that, man) in the womb of the immaculate, holy, and pure Virgin Mary, that we too may be saved. From this Word, as from Christ the Son of God, flows Holy Scripture, which is the life-giving flow of the blessed paradise of the highest heaven, penetrating and making fruitful on this earth the paradise of the holy church to the use of all believers. And in order that man may better know and acknowledge his Lord, he has at hand the help of Holy Scripture, which is the source of all knowledge and wisdom, of whom all knowledge is the servant and follower, and which teaches and admonishes us, through the wonderful works of God, to worship the Maker of all; for Christ the Son of God is the wisdom of the Eternal Father, and in him and through him are all creatures made, and, indeed, so wonderfully made and hidden that no human wisdom can fully penetrate into these secret recesses. Such is the teaching of Holy Writ.
“To confess God, to avoid sin, to do good, and to show ourselves diligent in the love of God and our neighbor—this is a spiritual pharmacy of all sweet-smelling and precious medicine. Although many prophets and other saints have written Holy Scripture and divine 265truth, each one according as it was given to him by the Holy Ghost, yet are the strength and truth of the holy gospels above every other Scripture, as says St. Augustine in his Concordance of the Gospels. And Holy Scripture is so fruitful, wise, and unfathomable that we can never fathom it till the end of this passing life on earth, and till we come to the place whence Scripture itself floweth ... and ourselves read in the great Bible—that is, the Book of Life.
“And because many men do not understand Latin, and yet can read German, therefore this book of the gospels, with its belongings, has been translated into German, to the glory of God and the use of such as shall feed their souls on it. For man liveth not on material bread alone, but on the spiritual bread which is the Word of God, as Christ says by the mouth of the evangelist Matthew, in the fourth chapter.”
Much more follows; for instance, an enumeration of the nine graces that a diligent reader of Scripture receives, in which much good but rather trite advice is given, and of the five kinds of men who read Holy Writ, only two of whom do it to advantage. These conceits belonged to the age, and, indeed, survived the age, as we find in the Presbyterian sermons of two centuries later in Scotland and the Puritan sermons of New England. Keisersperg was profuse of them, and some of the quaint and rather strained combinations and coincidences which he imagined are a curious illustration of the sort of pulpit eloquence popular in the fifteenth century. The prominence given among saints to the four evangelists grew naturally out of the reverence paid to the four gospels as the noblest part of Scripture. The Plenarii often contained allegorical representations of them under the conventional figures known to art, and undertook to explain the reason of these figures being applied to them, connecting them with the four living creatures of Ezechiel’s vision and those of the Apocalypse. But, beyond the constantly-received explanations, they sometimes contained details calculated to astonish readers of a later day. Such is the idea of the fitness between St. Mark and the symbolic lion, derived from the belief that lion whelps were awakened the third day, by the roaring of their mother, from the sleep or trance in which they had been born, which was interpreted to refer to the fact that St. Mark chiefly dwells on the resurrection of the Lord on the third day after his death. The Basle manual from which the foregoing preface is quoted has special prayers in honor of the evangelists, chiefly to the end that they would help the faithful to a better understanding of, and acting up to, the principles of the Gospel. The wood-cuts which distinguish these as well as the Latin missals took the place of the illuminations of the older books in manuscript, and, though wanting in the finish and delicacy of the latter, were designed on the same models and in the same spirit. The Latin missals now in the University Library of Freiburg, of 1485 and 1520, are rich in this kind of ornamentation, the latter having as title-page the Crucifixion, with a group of many figures, and around the illustration representations of the seven sacraments, whose grace flows from the atonement of Christ. The same idea is conveyed in the often-repeated allegorical representation in mediæval pictures of two angels collecting in golden cups the blood that flows from the outstretched hands of the Saviour on the cross.
Freiburg has many treasures in the department of illuminated 266manuscripts, the chief one being a Codex of the tenth century, with the Sacramentarium Gregorianum. It contains two hundred and ten pages of parchment, and begins with a calendar of twelve pages on purple ground with arabesque borders. The Ordinary of the Mass is written on a similarly colored ground, and has three illuminated pictures—a portrait of Pope Gregory the Great, an angel uplifting the Host, and an elaborate Byzantine crucifix. Five thousand francs were offered for it by a French archæological society, and refused by the university. Among the peculiarities set forth by the German manuals is the order of Sundays throughout the year, which, before the Council of Trent, were reckoned from Trinity instead of Whitsunday, and, in the case of Easter falling early, were supplemented by a “twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity,” as the editions of 1473 to 1483 have it, “if another Sunday is needed.” The later editions and the Latin missals simply call it, without comment, “the twenty-fifth Sunday.” As time went on, the German Plenarii contained more and more, sometimes additional votive Masses, and the Passions and Prophecies of Holy Week, sometimes the whole of the liturgy, including the minor parts, sometimes even more than the Latin books themselves—as, for instance, the thirteenth to the fifteenth chapters of St. John, inclusive, for the edification of their readers on Maundy Thursday. The glossaries or homilies also grew longer and more serious after 1514, and among explanations of undoubted moral worth and pious intent—due, Alzog thinks, greatly to the influence of the Swiss “Friends of God,” a brotherhood devoted to popular teaching and the propagation of practical piety among the masses—we often come upon those naïvely-propounded conceits which were common to earnest and ingenious men of that day. For instance, the word alleluia, whose etymology was probably wholly unknown to the author, is thus dissected and explained in one of the Basle editions of the sixteenth century:
“The word has four syllables—that is, four meanings: the first, al—that is, altissimus, or Most High and Almighty; the second, le, levatus in cruce, or uplifted on the cross; the third, lu, lugentibus apostolis, or the apostles have mourned and all creation bemoaned him; the fourth, ja, or jam surrexit—that is, he is now risen from the dead, wherefore we should rejoice with all our strength and sing alleluja.”
On the other hand, some of the prayers and meditations of these now obscure books of devotion were beautiful, dignified, and worthy of imitation. The language often reminds one of the Following of Christ:
“Consider, O my soul! with thorough devotion, the gifts and benefits of God wherewith he has so abundantly blessed thee. He has created thee out of nothing and in his image. He has given thee wisdom and understanding, that thou mayest distinguish good from evil. He has also given thee reason beyond that of all other creatures, and made them subject unto thee. He has put the sun and the moon in heaven to give light to the world. He causes all green things to grow and ripen on the earth to thy use, that thou mayest be fed and clothed therewith. Consider also, O my soul! with great devotion, how inestimable are the gifts of the holy sacraments, so sweetly prepared for thee. How clean should be thy hands from all evil works, how chaste thy lips, how holy thy body, how spotless thy heart, to which the Lord Almighty, the God of purity, humbles himself so lovingly! How great should be thy thankfulness to God thy Creator, 267who gives himself to thee so freely, not for any good he derives therefrom, but only that he may cleanse thee, in thy misery and sickness, from sin, and give thee eternal life. Amen.”
The manuals also made typographical progress corresponding to that of their contents, and, after 1483, began to have their pages both numbered and headed, while the spelling became a little more uniform, but the odd comparisons and arbitrary combinations in the text developed themselves as freely as ever. Indeed, they had one merit—that of fixing a thing in the minds of hearers less likely to be impressed by generalities; and, unlike the sensational devices of the present day, they were not resorted to as mechanical means by men to whom they were themselves indifferent, but came from the “abundance of the heart” of authors fully penetrated by their meaning and proud of having originated this particular form of it. For instance, a panegyric on St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, is résumed in the seven letters of the German word Bischof, each standing for the initial of a word describing some quality of the saint; and the same happens with the seven letters of the name of Matthew, Matheus (seven was, from obvious causes, a favorite number in the mystical mind of those ages), which are thus interpreted: Magnificentia in relinquendo (magnanimity in relinquishing), Auscultatio in obediendo (hearing in obeying), Tractabilitas in non resistendo (tractability in not resisting), Humilitas in sequendo (humility in following), Evangelisatio in prædicando (evangelization in preaching), Virtuositas in operando (efficiency in working), Strenuitas in patiendo (fortitude in enduring).
The glossaries on the epistles and gospels contain many passages remarkable as setting forth the reverence for Holy Writ of which those times have been too hastily pronounced deficient. The four oldest editions (from 1473 to 1483) have the same commentary for the first Sunday in Advent, on which the gospel of Palm Sunday, pointing to preparation for the coming of the Lord, was then read. The whole is filled with texts and allusions to the prophets; the preparation is asserted to consist in being “washed clean of evil thoughts,” in laying aside the torn garments of sin, that bind us to the darkness where we have hidden ourselves that we may not be seen, ... in hating the garments of impurity and those of pride.... It is not seemly to stand in the hall of the King clothed in mean garments, as we find in the Book of Esther, cap. iii., and therefore no one should enter the holy time of Advent while yet burdened with sin and so on through a host of Scriptural quotations in which moral virtues only are inculcated, and of ceremonial observances there is no mention. The edition of 1514 (Basle) on the same occasion says that this gospel is read twice in the year, on the anniversary of the day when our Lord entered Jerusalem, and on the first Sunday in Advent, which commemorates his spiritual coming and his assuming human nature. The various kinds of advents or comings are represented by the gospels of the four Sundays, the last being the entry into the heart of every sinner when he repents of his sin and is converted. “As the Jews asked John the Baptist, ‘Who art thou?’ so should every man ask himself, Who am I? If we examine honestly we must needs acknowledge that we are but 268poor sinners. Of this advent St. John speaks in the Apocalypse: ‘Behold I stand at the door of thy heart and knock with my gifts; and whoever opens unto me, to him will I go in, and give him bread from heaven, and a new stone in his hand, that is the new joy of everlasting life.’“[65] Of this advent St. Augustine speaks:
“Lord, who shall give it to me that thou shouldst come into my heart, sweet Jesus, and fill it, and that my soul should forget all evil and all sin?... ‘This is everlasting life (John xvii. 3), that men know thee, Father in heaven, and confess thee alone the living and true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’ This raises a question—namely, Why did the Lord Jesus not come earlier? why delay his coming so long? For this reason: that Adam transgressed God’s command on the sixth day, and the coming of Christ was therefore deferred till the sixth age of the world.... If you turn to the Lord in truth, he will answer you through the prophet Ezechiel: ‘In whatsoever hour the sinner repents of his sins and forsakes them, and is turned from his unrighteousness, I will remember his sins no more, saith the Lord.”
The commentary on the gospel of the first Mass on Christmas night in the Basle edition of 1514 contains glimpses of legends which long kept their hold on the popular and even the scholarly mind of that age. The story of the Sibyllic prophecies is outlined:
“The Emperor Augustus, when he had conquered the whole world for the Roman Empire, was about to be adored by the Romans as a god. But he resisted and asked for a delay of three days, during which he sent for the wise woman, the Sibyl of Tibur, and asked her advice. When she shut herself up with the emperor and prayed to God to tell her how to advise the emperor, she saw close by the sun a shining ring of light, and within the ring a beautiful Virgin with a fair Child upon her knees. Then the Sibyl showed the Virgin and Child to the emperor, and said: “This Child upon the knees of a Virgin must thou adore, for he is God and Lord of the whole world, and the Child that is to be born of a Virgin shall be for the consolation and salvation of mankind.’ So when the emperor saw this he refused to let himself be adored....
“We read also that once the Romans built a fine temple, large and grand, which they meant to call the Temple of Peace. While they were building it they asked the Sibyl how long the temple should stand. She answered and said: ‘Until a Virgin shall bear a Child.’ ‘Then,’ said the Romans, ‘as that can never happen, the temple will stand for ever, and shall be called the Temple of Eternity.’ Then came the night when our Lord Jesus Christ was born, and a great part of the temple fell suddenly in ruins, and many who have been in Rome say that every Christmas night a portion of this temple still crumbles into ruin, as a sign that on this earth nothing is eternal.”
The three Maries at the sepulchre give the author occasion in the homily on Easter Sunday to link the virtues we ought to practise with the names of the three holy women. From Mary Magdalen, whom, according to the tradition of the time, he identified with Mary the Sinner, he bids us learn “the great diligence and great love with which she sought God the Lord; ... so should we also anoint the feet of Christ with the ointment of contrition and repentance. From Mary Jacobi (Mary the mother of James, or Jacob) we should learn to overcome sin, because Jacob means a fighter and striver.... From the third Mary we should learn to have a true hope of obtaining grace, for Salome means a woman of grace (probably he considered wisdom and grace identical), ... especially the grace to battle against despair.” And this suggests a comparison of the three Maries with the three virtues, faith, 269hope, and charity. Galilee, again, which he interprets to mean in German Passover, is set as a sign that we must part with sin and cross over to God, die to the world and be detached from its allurements. The commentary on the gospel of Whitsunday, in the older editions (1473-83), contains these words: “If you love God, you will willingly hear his word and diligently say to yourself, What I hear is a token from the great King.” Then follow several Scriptural quotations strengthening and illustrating this truth. The epistle of the day gives rise to an explanation of the appearance “as it were of fiery tongues”: “The fire of the Holy Ghost consumed all fear in their hearts, and so enkindled them that they feared neither king nor emperor. So was fulfilled the saying of the Redeemer, ‘I am come to bring a fire upon the earth,’ and what do I wish but that it should be enkindled?” Then the tongues signify that the word is spread by the tongue; God sent the Holy Ghost in fiery tongues, that they (the apostles) might burn with love and overflow in words. What is the Holy Ghost? He is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, who confirms and establishes all things, and who comes at all times to the heart of every man who makes himself ready to receive him, as says St. Augustine: “It is of no use for a teacher to preach to our outer ears, if the Holy Ghost be not in our hearts and do not give us true understanding.” The likeness of the Holy Spirit to a dove is then ingeniously drawn out in comparisons such as St. Francis of Sales, two centuries later, might have adopted in his Introduction to a Devout Life, and the prayer or aspiration at the end is thus worded: “May the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost help us to hear the word of God and keep it, that our hearts may be enlightened and enkindled by the fire of the Holy Ghost, that we may live with simplicity and joy among the doves, and that the true Dove, the Holy Ghost, may come to us and abide with us for ever.”
The later editions of the sixteenth century have a longer and more complicated homily on the same subjects; they dwell, among other things, on the peace and comfort brought by the Holy Ghost, and distinguish three kinds of peace, that of the heart, that of time, and that of eternity, the second of which alone was not given to the apostles, because their Master also had it not, as is inferred from several texts quoted at length. The suddenness, the force of the wind, and the quickness of the appearance in the upper chamber in Jerusalem are all turned to practical account by the commentator, who also reminds his readers that the grace of God comes soonest to those who lead a life of inner recollection and prayer. The love of God is shown under a sort of parable, that of the scholars of an Athenian philosopher, who begged their master to write them a treatise upon love, and received from him in answer the picture of a lion with a legend round his neck: “Love brings forth nothing which afterwards causes remorse to man.” Thus Christ, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, is spiritually this lion of love, whose works were all for the salvation of man. For Trinity Sunday the glossaries of both the older and the later editions are very short, the mystery being confessedly unfathomable, and the ancient Fathers themselves having but feebly 270succeeded in throwing any other light than that of faith upon the subject. Both editions contain a warning not to search curiously into the mystery, but believe with simplicity, and the later ones cite the legend of St. Augustine and the child whom he met by the sea-shore trying to bail the sea into a small trench in the sand. On the thirteenth Sunday after Trinity the vision of God by purity of heart, “and by the reading of Holy Scripture and practising its precepts,” is descanted upon in the 1514 Basle edition, and the fate of Lot’s wife is used as a simile for the turning back from God into sin, while the love of our neighbor, as flowing from a true love of God, is strenuously inculcated by Scripture texts and warnings.
The description of the contents of these manuals, however, would not be complete, nor wholly convey the spirit of the age in which they were published and read, without some mention of the miraculous stories printed in them under the head of “useful examples.” Of these Frederick Hurter, in his work on Pope Innocent III., vol. iv. pp. 547-8, says:
“All writers of this time (the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and what applies to those applies to later centuries almost as far as the seventeenth) are full of wonder-stories—a proof of how universal and deeply ingrained in man was the belief in wonders. Many of these are simply mythical, others had passed by tradition and literary embellishments from the region of facts into that of myths, while others again must be left uninterpreted by criticism, unless it is disposed to dismiss them with a mere denial. Whatever decision one may come to on this point, one truth certainly underlies this mass of tales: that they cannot have been without influence on the mind of thousands. Many may be looked upon as childish and crude, but from beneath this coating still shines the true gold of a belief in one almighty, ever-present Being, a father and protector of the good, a leader and raiser-up of the fallen or the wavering, an avenger against the evil and oppressing.”
Such stories have to later research appeared as interesting landmarks of the progress of a nation’s mind, and links with all its former beliefs and traditions. Again, they were striking illustrations, fitter to remain in the popular mind as emblems of great truths than the learned doctrinal disquisitions, which were always above the understanding of the masses. They are rather emblems than facts; the condensation of a truth than its actual outcome. We have only room for a single specimen. Whether it was intended to be related as a vision in a dream, or partly as a waking dream, does not appear clearly from the text:
“There was,” says the Basle Plenarium of 1514, on the occasion of Good Friday, “a prior in a monastery, who sat in his cell after his meal and fell asleep. While he slept, one of his brethren died and came to the sleeping prior, and spoke to him: ‘Father prior, with your permission, I am going.’ When the other asked him where, he answered: ‘I am going to God in eternal blessedness, for in this very moment I have died.’ Then said the prior: ‘Since many a perfect man must after death pass through purgatory, and one seldom comes back to earth from it, I ask you how can you go at once to God, and how do you know you have deserved it?’ Then answered the monk: ‘I always had the habit of praying thus at the feet of the crucifix: “Lord Jesus Christ, for the sake of thy bitter sufferings which thou hast endured on the holy cross for my salvation, and especially at the moment when thy blessed soul left thy body, have mercy on my soul when it leaves my body.“ And God mercifully heard my prayer.’ Then the prior asked again: ‘How was it with you when you died?’ and the other answered: ‘I thought at 271that moment that the whole world was a stone, and that it lay upon my breast, so terrible did death seem to me.’”
The Plenarii were not the only manuals scattered among the rapidly-increasing number of people who, in Germany, could read in their native tongue. Besides the Scriptures, of which nine translations, some partial, some entire, were printed before Luther’s, from 1466 to 1518, and three entire ones after his in the sixteenth century alone,[66] there were previous to that period fourteen complete Bibles in High-German and five in Low-German (the University of Freiburg possesses copies of eight of the former), and many psalters and gospels, as well as separate books of Scripture published singly. The psalter was undoubtedly the best-known and most commonly used part of Holy Writ. Panzer mentions the three oldest editions printed in Latin and German, without date or press, in folio; another octavo at Leipsic; others in German, Augsburg, 1492 and 1494; Basle, 1502 and 1503; Spires, 1504; Strassburg, 1506 and 1507; Metz, 1513; and the Book of Job, Strassburg, 1498. Again in the same years, and from the same presses as well as Mayence and Nuremberg, came the epistles and gospels, and the four Passions, divided according to their use on Sundays, while the first popular illustrated “Bibles of the Poor,” condensations and selections, chiefly of the most stirring stories told in the Old and New Testaments, followed each other rapidly after 1470. The wood-cuts were generally very good, and the Latin and German texts printed side by side. “German explanations of the office of the Mass” were also printed, and the devotional writings, meditations, etc., of Tauler, Suso, Thomas à Kempis, Geiler von Keisersperg, and Sebastian Brant. Lives of the saints and martyrologies were also printed, arranged according to the calendar in two parts, winter and summer; but though in the main edifying, these were chiefly reflections of traditions rather than authentic biographies taken from contemporary sources. That style of writing was not known then, and the general example of a holy life was more the object of the writers than the historic details of real life. But even in these traditions some nucleus of undisputed fact might always be found beneath the ivy tracery of legend. Panzer remarks that these editions differed greatly from Jacob of Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, and often contradicted it. Catechisms and manuals for confession and communion were also familiar, and some of the litanies now reprinted in modern prayer-books are of this date, while even the contents of the Breviary were translated into German by a Capuchin, James Wyg, and printed in Venice in 1518. “Little prayer-books” are mentioned by Panzer as printed at Nuremberg, Lübeck 272(these in Low German), Basle, and Mayence from 1487 to 1518. Two were called the Salus Animæ and the Hortulus Animæ. The latter is as well known now in English as it was then in German; one edition of 1508 has a little versified introduction, interesting as showing how Sebastian Brant’s talents were often practically employed:
The prayer Anima Christi is found in some editions. A book called The Mirror of the Sinner went through five editions from 1480 to 1510, which Pastor John Geffcken has most impartially and fully criticised in his history of catechetical instruction in the fifteenth century. The Ten Commandments was the title of two books printed at Venice by an Augsburg printer in 1483, and Strassburg in 1516, and a Manual for Preparation for Holy Communion, several times reprinted at Basle, has suggested this praise from Herzog, the biographer of John Œcolampadius: “It breathes the purest and noblest devotion (mystik); we shall seldom find a communion-book penetrated with such a glow of devotion”; if we had any room left for quotation, this judgment would be found fully deserved. Manuals for the sick and dying were also widely used; three of 1483, 1498, and 1518, and one without date, are given in Panzer’s catalogue. The Garden of the Soul also contains a long passage on the fit preparation for death; and other books have special prayers for the same circumstances. That we are apt to see but one side of any question, and that false impressions unluckily in the popular mind chiefly avail themselves of the axiom that “possession is nine points of the law,” Jacob Grimm very appositely complains in the preface to his Antiquities of German Jurisprudence. “What is the use,” he says, “of the poetry being now discovered which presents the joyous vitality of life in that time (the middle ages) in a hundred touching and serious representations? The outcry about feudalism and the right of the strongest is still uppermost, as if, forsooth, the present had no injustice and no wretchedness to bear.”
Under the title of “Indigence in a Black Coat” an observant French writer[69] draws a painful picture of the sufferings of a class of his countrymen usually much less compassionated than the so-called working-classes. That term, indeed, is a misnomer when applied to any one especial class, as, with rare exceptions, every one in France is hard at work, manually or intellectually. The class, however, with which these few pages are concerned is one still more deserving of respectful sympathy than even those who follow the honest, nay, noble, career of skilled or unskilled labor.
Besides the mechanic and artisan, whose payment follows in a certain measure the progressive price of provisions, there are other categories of men, assuredly not less interesting, whose pecuniary level has never risen or fallen even by a five-franc piece, and who at the present time are compelled to live on the appointed salary which has been attached to their place for an unlimited number of years.
Everywhere in the towns rents have doubled, and even trebled. The system of railways has disseminated local production, which formerly had a local and limited sale, over all parts of France, and even abroad, without any proportionate incomings to compensate for the increase of prices attendant on so great an increase of sale. The latter, it need hardly be said, involves a like increase of production.
In a country like France, where the agricultural riches are immense and the landed property infinitesimally parcelled out, the means of transport, which have increased tenfold within the last thirty years, have carried riches, or at least competency, into the villages and other country parts. To such a degree is this true that there is not now a peasant in France who cannot maintain himself by his strip of land. Formerly he would have carried into the town, on market days, the produce of his land and live stock. Now he rarely takes the trouble to do this, and almost always strikes a bargain with buyers who purchase en masse and pay him a high price. Thus, with hardly any expenditure,[70] he can live on his little property, his aim being to save all he can and to sell as dearly as possible.
But in the cities and small towns how to live is a more difficult problem. The clerks, secretaries, and small functionaries of every kind, who could formerly support and educate their families in a respectable way, have no longer the possibility of doing so on the meagre and rigidly-fixed salaries dispensed to them by the state. The sea itself is no longer a resource. The railway carries off the produce of the tides to Paris and the other 278large towns, which purchase the whole and throw away thousands of kilos of spoilt fish every week.
Again, these small official situations generally involve the necessity of being respectably, or even well, dressed. A professor, for example, or a magistrate, an employé of the registration or other government offices, belongs, by education or by the functions he discharges, to a class of persons who must make a good appearance, under pain of being neglected, unnoticed, or even altogether tabooed.
At Paris, where there is an abundance of everything, and into which the provinces pour the overflow of their riches, life, for certain persons, is materially impossible. The octroi absorbs all, and, under pretext of making the capital a rich and beautiful city, peoples it with poor by rendering their means wholly inadequate to meet the increasing exigencies of expenditure.
Thus, while living is difficult to them in the provinces, because the country sends all its produce to the great towns, in the towns they cannot live at all. The imposts there are enormous; while the fact that the necessaries of life are abundant is accompanied by no diminution of price, but the contrary.
Still, nothing is done; and these meritorious persons, obliged to conceal a very real poverty beneath an outward show that eats into their slender resources, and who, unlike so many around them, are disenchanted of the dream that the world is all their own, suffer uncomplainingly. Perhaps they are weary of complaining; in any case they do not noisily insist and threaten, but, at the utmost, plead, and certainly wait until hope and energy wither in the blight of continued disappointment. Hundreds of thousands of persons thus exist, and those who may be called the intellectual essence of the nation: professors, magistrates, men occupied in the various departments of art, and who prepare the intellectual prosperity of a generation to come. These men, especially such of them as have a family dependent upon them, drag on life year after year so miserably remunerated that how they contrive to live, and to strain the two ends to meet by any honorable means, is simply a mystery. In vain may each capable member of the family put a shoulder to the wheel and effect prodigies of economy. With every noble effort they find their life growing harder, and the cost of life increasing in proportions of which it is impossible to see the limit.
In the times through which France is passing even the wealthy, and those who are regarded as the favored ones of fortune, reduce their expenses under the influence of a certain feeling of apprehension which is not easy to define, unless a reason for it may be found in the frequent government changes and general instability of political affairs in this country. They instinctively restrain their expenditure to what they regard as the necessaries of life, and indulge in few of the luxuries of patronage involving outlay. And thus the hardness of the times makes itself so severely felt in all the liberal professions that in the study of the professor or literary author, as in the atelier of the artist, the pressing cares of life not unfrequently absorb the mind so as to eclipse and benumb the powers of imagination and invention. The father and bread-winner anxiously asks himself how, even with marvels of economy and self-denying privation, he is to provide 279for the present needs and future career of his children.
The question we are considering is for the moment drowned amid the tumult of political strife. It must, however, assert itself with increasing urgency in proportion as misery, in the full acceptation of the word, shows itself as the inevitable consequence of the progressive increase of prices in things of absolute necessity, without such compensation as corresponds with it or even approximates to it.
And yet France is far from being poor. Sober, industrious, and economical, her treasury is rich in spite of the enormous war-tribute by which it was partly diminished of late. That diminution was, by comparison, insignificant. Surely, with all the sources of wealth which France has at command, there must be amply sufficient to pay, at a rate commensurate with their services and due requirements, men who have never bargained for their trouble, but who now, under the continuance of the actual condition of things, will find it impossible to live.
This is a question demanding prompt attention, unless the anomaly is to be maintained that France is a country of great actual and possible wealth, in which the élite of the nation are more and more exposed to the danger of dying of hunger.
The writer on whose words, verified by our own observations, we have based our remarks says that from all quarters he receives letters of which the following extract is a sample: “What you have stated is far short of the truth. Could you lift the veil that conceals our misery, you would see into what a gulf of distress we have been plunged by years of indifference to our needs. From time to time we make earnest representations of our case, but these, as well as the proofs we give of the hard reality of our necessities and expenses, are year after year treated with the same passive disregard; and there are very many amongst us who, in spite of the most rigid economy, will never be able to recover themselves.”
In case our remarks should seem to have too general a character, or to be in any way exaggerated, we will give an example—namely, the parochial clergy, the men who are unweariedly denounced by the radical-republicans as “pillagers of the budget” and “robbers of the state.”
The ordinary income of one of the more opulent among the rural parish priests (by far the larger proportion receive less—some much less) is as follows:
| Indemnity of the government for each quarter, paid three weeks or more after time = 225 francs, equalling per annum the sum of | 900 frs. |
| Indemnity of the commune | 100 frs. |
| Casual receipts | 60 frs |
| (Say, 40) Low Masses | 60 frs |
| ——- | |
| Forming a total of | 1,120 frs |
Then, as the sum of obligatory expenses, we have the following:
| Wages of servant | 240 frs. |
| Door and window tax | 53 frs. |
| Prestation, or taking of oaths | 5 frs. |
| Tax for dog | 8 frs. |
| For the Fund for Infirm Priests, as the only means of securing a morsel of bread if disabled | 10 frs. |
| ___ | |
| Total | 316 frs. |
There remains, therefore, for this parish priest to live upon an average income of 804 francs—i.e., about $160. He is not even “passing rich” on the traditionary “forty pounds a year.”
With these eight hundred and four francs he must meet all expenses, keep open the hospitable 280door of the presbytery—the house so readily found, so close by the church, and so accessible; the house which receives the first visit of the poor, the outcast, and the wanderer, and whose occupant, thus poor himself, has neither the wish nor the right to close against any one the way to his fireside. Two francs and four sous a day, however, are the magnificent sum allowed for the inmates of this presbytery and for all the needy, who, regarding it as their natural home, go straight to the kitchen, not knowing what it is to be sent away empty.
We are personally acquainted with several country curés whose governmental stipend is from four to six hundred francs a year, and it is only the more important parishes of the curés doyens or curés de canton to which is attached the ampler revenue of nine hundred francs, or thirty-six pounds sterling. A large proportion of the curés de commune do not receive more from the state than four hundred francs per annum. And this stipend is termed, as if in mockery, an “indemnity.” It only deserves that title if we read the word by the light of a wholesale spoliation of church property and revenues, parochial, monastic, collegiate, and eleemosynary, effected by the revolution, and later on ratified, or at least condoned, by the state. If, indeed, as all history proves, the Catholic Church has been the saviour and preserver of the state, the state has often shown itself the Judas of the church, and this “indemnity” is its kiss of peace.
There are now in France more than twenty thousand priests who are the recipients of this exorbitant civil list. They neither complain nor recriminate, but patiently and bravely act for the best in the interest of all. With a calmness derived from faith, they allow to sweep by them, as if heeding it not, the flood of stupid and malignant calumnies with which they and their sacred office are daily assailed. They go on receiving the poor, visiting the sick, consoling the sorrowful, sympathizing with all, assisting, even beyond their power, the distressed out of their own pittance, and thus further lessening the scanty means doled out to them for the sublime service of every hour—services basely misrepresented as to their motive, their spirit, and even their result.
It is not our present intention to dwell on the high social part filled by the second order of the clergy in France, and almost invariably with the most praiseworthy self-abnegation. But, at a time when honor, justice, and moral sense are by so many in France completely forgotten, or treated as an effervescence of obsolete and Quixotic sentimentalism; when it is the order of the day for each to get as much as possible for himself, and thrust himself into any office at hand, irrespective of worth, fitness, or merit; and when legions of “enlightened” and “advanced” “republicans” (especially those who elect to be married like heathens and buried like dogs) are gnashing their teeth at the clergy of France, so excellent, so devoted, and in the truest sense so liberal, it would be well if these men who insult them without stint and against reason were made aware that the more opulent among the men they revile are receiving, for all personal and household requirements, and the satisfaction of the hospitable instincts of their sacerdotal hearts, the munificent revenue of forty-four sous a day.
Rome, March 20, 1878.
There is a passage in the circular of the cardinals addressed to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See on the eve of the conclave which deserves to be noted in connection with the issue of the conclave and the secular policy of the new Pontiff. The circular, after renewing all the protests and reservations of the deceased Pontiff, and declaring the intention of the cardinals to hold the conclave in Rome, because the first duty of the Sacred College is to provide the widowed church with a pastor as quickly as possible, says: “And this resolution was taken with the greater tranquillity, inasmuch as, pledging the future in no wise, it left the future Pontiff at liberty to adopt those measures which the good of souls and the general interests of the church will suggest to him in the difficult and painful condition of the Holy See at present.” The future for the new Pontiff is a free and open field which he can traverse in the manner he shall judge best for the weal of the church. The protests and reservations of the deceased Pontiff touching the temporalities of the Holy See constitute a realm of principle. Surrounding this is a free border-land for the new Pope.
People here in Rome and elsewhere who speculate much on the present condition of the Holy See, and especially on the so-called antagonism existing between itself and the Italian government, hoped that Leo XIII. would assume a less inflexible attitude before the people. Of the liberals, the conservatives, who are the acknowledged exponents of the sentiments of the crown, hoped for a formal conciliation. The Catholics expected that the new Pope would at least appear occasionally in public to bless them; while the curious tourists of all countries had visions of the solemn and imposing ceremonies in St. Peter’s which were the characteristic feature of Rome in other days. The expectations of all have been falsified so far. Since the 3d of March, the day of Leo XIII.’s coronation, the most sanguine liberals have desisted from their conciliatory speculations, and the rest have settled down into quiet resignation, yet hoping that a propitious occasion may again bring the Pontiff in public before his people.
A more fitting occasion than the day of his coronation could not be desired. Nay, the Pontiff himself had resolved to make his appearance, and be crowned before the people, in the upper vestibule of St. Peter’s. The Mass and other functions, prefatory of the coronation, were to have been performed in the Sistine Chapel. In fact, on the 1st of March the members of the Sacred College each received an intimation from the acting Secretary of State that the ceremonies preceding the coronation would be performed in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican Palace. In the vicinity of the inner balcony of St. Peter’s temporary balconies were erected for the diplomatic corps, the Roman nobles, and persons of distinction, native and foreign. The confession of St. Peter and the papal altar under the dome were surrounded with a strong railing to prevent accidents, while the central balcony itself was enlarged by extending it farther out into the basilica and back into the vestibule. It had been the intention of His Holiness to be crowned here, and afterwards to bestow the apostolic benediction upon the people below. But on Friday afternoon, March 1, the workmen received orders not only to discontinue but to undo the preparations. It is unnecessary to speculate on the cause of this order in the presence of explanatory facts. A demonstration of enthusiastic devotion on the part of the multitude of Catholics who would be assembled there was naturally expected, and in this there was nothing deterrent whatever. But the information had eked abroad, and was duly reported to His Holiness, that a party of Conciliators had resolved to seize the occasion of the solemn benediction, and create a demonstration in favor of a conciliation with 282the existing order of things. Flags, Papal and Italian, were to have been produced just at the moment of benediction, and an interesting tableau of alliance to have succeeded. But this was not all. A counter-demonstration of the radicals was also mooted. This is no trivial hearsay, as the events of the same evening sufficiently attest. I pass over the allusions to the explosion of Orsini shells in the church. In the face of such expectations ordinary prudence would have suggested to the Sovereign Pontiff the inexpediency of a public ceremony. Yet if he were disposed to hesitate before giving credence to what was related to him by reliable authority, the attitude suddenly assumed by the government left no doubt in his mind as to what was expedient in the matter. Crispi, the garrulous Minister of the Interior, had given out that the government would not consider itself responsible for the maintenance of order in St. Peter’s on the 3d of March. He had previously addressed a circular to the prefects and syndics of the realm, interdicting any participation of theirs in the public rejoicings for the election of Pope Leo XIII., because, forsooth, he had not been officially informed of the election! He seems to have overlooked the inconsistency of this act with the efficient service rendered by the troops in St. Peter’s during the funeral ceremonies of Pius IX., albeit the government had not been officially informed of his demise. The church, however, has long since learned that it is vain to look for consistency in men who are strangers to truth and fair dealing. Moreover, she has, within the past few years, had bitter experiences in the doctrine of provocation, as inculcated by the Italian government. Leo XIII. was crowned in his own chapel, in the presence only of the cardinals, the prelates, and dignitaries, ecclesiastical, civil, and military, of the Vatican, the diplomatic corps, the Roman nobility, and a few guests.
At half-past nine o’clock on Sunday morning, the 3d of March, Pope Leo XIII., preceded by the papal cross, and surrounded by the attendants of his court, by the Swiss and Noble Guards, descended from his apartments to the vestry hall. The two seniors of the cardinal deacons, the penitentiaries of St. Peter’s, and the archbishops and bishops awaited him there. When he had been vested in full pontificals, with golden mitre, a procession was formed, moving towards the ducal hall. A Greek deacon and subdeacon, in gorgeous robes, attended upon the deacon and subdeacon of honor. The cardinals were assembled in the ducal hall, where an altar was erected. His Holiness knelt for a moment in prayer, and then mounted a throne which stood on the gospel side of the altar. There he received what is termed the first obeisance of the cardinals, who approached, one by one, and kissed his hand. The archbishops and bishops kissed his foot. Having imparted the apostolic benediction, the Pope intoned Tierce of the Little Hours. Another procession was formed, preceded by the first cardinal, who bore the sacred ferule in his hand and chanted the Procedamus in pace. The Pope was carried in the gestatorial chair under a white canopy borne by eight clerics. The Blessed Sacrament had previously been exposed in the Pauline Chapel. Thither the procession moved. At the door of the chapel the Pope descended from his chair, entered the chapel bare-headed, and knelt for a time in silent prayer. It is to be supposed that in those moments he prayed for humility of self, as well as peace and benediction upon his reign. It is the fitting prelude to the significant ceremony which followed. Just as the procession was about to move from the chapel-door towards the Sistine Chapel a master of ceremonies, bearing in his hand a gilded reed, to the end of which a lock of dry flax was attached, approached the throne, and, going down upon one knee, gave fire to the flax. As it burned quickly to nothing he said: Pater Sancte, sic transit gloria mundi—“Holy Father, thus passeth away the glory of the world.” He repeated the same ceremony at the entrance to the Sistine Chapel, and again just as the Pope was approaching the altar—a sage reminder, for the Sistine Chapel at that moment presented a spectacle of glory and magnificence which has no parallel.
Sixty-two cardinals, in flowing robes of the richest scarlet, the magnificence of which was enhanced beneath tunics of the finest lace, and as many attendant train-bearers in purple cassocks and capes of ermine; archbishops and bishops vested in white pontificals; clerics of the apostolic palace in robes 283of violet; Roman princes, gentlemen of the pontifical throne, in their gorgeous costumes; officers and guards in splendid uniforms; diplomatic personages ablaze with decorations; Knights of the Order of Jerusalem in their historic vesture; ladies in black habits and veils, gracefully arranged, and gentlemen in the full dress of the present day. Despite all this splendor, the most trivial worldling could not but be impressed with the sacred solemnity, the awful genius of the occasion. A Pope was to be crowned—“the Great Priest, Supreme Pontiff; Prince of Bishops, heir of the apostles; in primacy, Abel; in government, Noe; in patriarchate, Abraham; in order, Melchisedech; in dignity, Aaron; in authority, Moses; in judicature, Samuel; in power, Peter; in unction, Christ.”[71]
The Mass has begun. The choir has sung the Kyrie Eleison in the inimitable style of the Sistine Chapel. The Pope has said the Confiteor. He returns to the gestatorial chair. The three senior cardinals of the order of bishops, mitred, come forward, and each in turn extends his hands over the Pontiff and recites the prayer of the ritual, Super electum Pontificem. Cardinal Mertel, first of the officiating deacons, places the pallium upon his shoulders, saying at the same time: Accipe pallium, scilicet plenitudinis Pontificalis officii, ad honorem Omnipotentis Dei, et gloriosissimæ Virginis Mariæ, Matris ejus, et Beatorum Apostolorum Petri et Pauli et Sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ. Leaving the gestatorial chair, and ascending the throne on the gospel side of the altar, the Pope again receives the obeisance of the cardinals, of the archbishops and bishops. The Mass proper for the occasion is then celebrated by the Pontiff, and the Litany of the Saints recited.
The solemn moment has arrived. The Pope again ascends the throne, while the choir sings the antiphon, Corona aurea super caput ejus. The subdean of the Sacred College, Cardinal di Pietro, intones the Pater noster, and afterwards reads the prayer, Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, dignitas Sacerdotii, etc. The second deacon removes the mitre from the head of the Pontiff, and Cardinal Mertel approaches, bearing the tiara. Placing it on the head of the Pope, he says: Accipe thiaram tribus coronis ornatam, et scias te esse Patrem Principum et Regum, Rectorem Orbis, in terra Vicarium Salvatoris Nostri Jesu Christi, cui est honor et gloria in sæcula sæculorum.
The Pope then arose and imparted the trinal benediction. This was followed by the publication of the indulgences proper to the occasion. From the Sistine Chapel the Pope, with the tiara still glittering on his brow, was borne in procession back to the vestry hall, whither the cardinals had preceded him. When he had been unrobed and seated anew in the middle of the hall, Cardinal di Pietro approached and read the following discourse: “After our votes, inspired by God, fixed upon the person of your Holiness the choice for the supreme dignity of Sovereign Pontiff of the Catholic Church, we passed from deep affliction to lively hope. To the tears which we shed over the tomb of Pius IX.—a Pontiff so venerated throughout the world, so beloved by us—succeeded the consoling thought, like a new aurora, of well-founded hopes for the church of Jesus Christ.
“Yes, Most Holy Father, you gave us sufficient proofs, while ruling the diocese entrusted to you by divine Providence, or taking part in the important affairs of the Holy See, of your piety, your apostolic zeal, your many virtues, of your great intelligence, of your prudence, and of the lively interest which you also took in the glory and honor of our cardinalitial college; so that we could easily persuade ourselves that, being elected Supreme Pastor, you would act as the apostle wrote of himself to the Thessalonians: ‘Not in word only, but in power also, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much fulness.’ Nor was the divine will slow in manifesting itself, for by our means it repeated to you the words already addressed to David when it designated him King of Israel: ‘Thou shalt feed my people, and thou shalt be prince over Israel.’
“With which divine disposition we are happy to see the general sentiment immediately corresponding; and as all hasten to venerate your sacred person in the same manner as all the tribes of Israel prostrated themselves in Hebron before the new pastor given them by God, so we too hasten, on this solemn day of your coronation, like the seniors of the 284chosen people, to repeat to you as a pledge of affection and obedience the words recorded in the sacred pages: ‘Behold, we shall be thy bone and thy flesh.’
“May heaven grant that, as the holy Book of Kings adds that David reigned forty years, so ecclesiastical history may narrate for posterity the length of the pontificate of Leo XIII. These are the sentiments and the sincere wishes which, in the name of the Sacred College, I now lay at your sacred feet. Deign to accept them benignantly, imparting to us your apostolic benediction.”
His Holiness replied: “The noble and affectionate words which you, most reverend eminence, in the name of the whole Sacred College, have just addressed to us touch to the quick our heart, already greatly moved by the unlooked-for event of our exaltation to the supreme pontificate, which came to pass contrary to any merit of ours.
“The burden of the sovereign keys, formidable in itself, which has been placed upon our shoulders, becomes still more difficult, considering our insufficiency, which is quite overcome by it. The very rite which has just been performed with so much solemnity has made us comprehend still more the majesty and dignity of the see to which we have been raised, and has increased in our soul the idea of the grandeur of this sublime throne of the earth. And since you, lord cardinal, have named David, spontaneously the words of the same holy king occur to us: ‘Who am I, Lord God, that thou hast brought me hither?’
“Still, in the midst of so many just reasons for confusion and discomfort, it is consoling to us to see the Catholics all, unanimous and in harmony, pressing around this Holy See, and giving to it public attestations of obedience and of love. The concord and affection of all the members of the Sacred College, most dear to us, console us, and the assurance of their efficient co-operation in the discharge of the difficult ministry to which they have called us by their suffrage.
“Above all, we are comforted by confidence in the most loving God, who has willed to raise us to such an eminence, whose assistance we shall never cease to implore with all the fervor of our heart, desiring that it be implored by all, mindful of what the apostle says: ‘All our sufficiency is from God.’ Persuaded, moreover, that it is he who ‘chooses the weak things of the earth to confound the strong,’ we live in the certainty that he will sustain our weakness, and will raise up our humility to show his own power and cause his strength to shine forth.
“We heartily thank your eminence for the courteous sentiments and the sincere wishes which you have now addressed to us in the name of the Sacred College, and we accept them with all our heart. We conclude, imparting with all the effusion of our soul the apostolic benediction. Benedictio Dei, etc.”
His Holiness then retired to his apartments, and the solemn assembly dispersed.
Meanwhile, the vast basilica of St. Peter had been crowded with people since ten o’clock in the morning, who hoped on, despite the contrary appearances, that His Holiness would come out at the last moment to bless them. Deeming such an event not unlikely, the Duke of Aosta, now military commander in Rome, had ordered several battalions of soldiers into the square, with orders to render sovereign honors to the Pontiff if he appeared on the outer balcony. This measure inculpated still more the Minister of the Interior, inasmuch as the unofficial information which was acted upon by the Minister of War should have been sufficient for the Interior Department. Save and except the salaried organs of the ministry, the journals of every color in Rome concurred in censuring the action of Signor Crispi, adding, at the same time, that it was the duty of the government to show every consideration for a Pontiff whose election has given such universal satisfaction. The breach between the church and state, they concluded, was only widened and the antagonism intensified.
Though the ceremonies of the coronation terminated at half-past ten o’clock, and the equipages of the cardinals and dignitaries had disappeared from the neighborhood of the Vatican, still the expectant and anxious people lingered in the basilica until the afternoon was far advanced. Then only did they turn homewards, supremely dissatisfied, not with the Pope but with the civil authorities. The demonstration of the canaille in the evening against the Pope and the 285clerical party only confirmed the report of an intended tumult in St. Peter’s, to be provoked by the radicals. The palaces of the nobles had been illuminated about an hour on the Corso, when the mob assembled at the usual rendezvous, Piazza Colonna. With a movement which betokened a previous arrangement they rushed down the Corso to cries of “Death to the Pope!” “Down with the clericals!” “Down with the Law of the Papal Guarantees!” etc. They halted before the palace of the Marquis Theodoli, and assailed the windows with a prolonged volley of stones, which they had gathered elsewhere, as no missives could be had on the Corso, unless the pavement were torn up. A full hour elapsed before the troops appeared on the scene and the bugles sounded the order to disperse. Only a few were arrested.
That same afternoon the Mausoleum of Augustus was the witness of a more systematic and dangerous demonstration against the Law of the Guarantees. The speakers, several of whom are members of the Parliament, indulged in the most villanous tirades against the Papacy, coupled with no measured votes of censure upon the government. A strong memorial was drawn up and addressed to Parliament, demanding the abrogation of the Law of Papal Guarantees.
Two days after his coronation Pope Leo XIII. appointed to the office of Secretary of State his Eminence Cardinal Alessandro Franchi, formerly prefect of the Propaganda. Whether it be that the moderate liberals still harbor visions of a formal conciliation, or that their esteem for Leo XIII. is superior to every party question, or both the one and the other motive actuate them, is not yet established; but the fact is, every act of the new Pontiff has been more warmly commended, as an additional instance of his unquestionable capabilities and profound sagacity, by the liberal than by the Catholic press. I am far from wishing to intimate that the latter displays no enthusiastic admiration for the inaugurative acts of Pope Leo’s pontificate. But the liberal press is particularly demonstrative in its admiration. The nomination of Cardinal Franchi to the Secretaryship of State has been hailed with jubilation by organs which hitherto have devoted every energy to bringing the late incumbents of that office, living and dead, into disrepute. “Cardinal Franchi,” say they, “is the man for this epoch. Accomplished, polished, bland of manner, skilled in diplomacy, and of accommodating disposition, he will be a worthy companion and counsellor to Leo XIII. in the new era for the church just inaugurated.” It is to be regretted, however, that their admiration for the Sovereign Pontiff and his secretary has not been able to keep their usual powers of invention from running riot in their regard. Cardinal Franchi is already credited with addressing a circular to the nuncios abroad, asking how a change of the Vatican policy in a less aggressive sense would be regarded by the powers of Europe. He is also said to have made the first step towards an understanding with Prussia, while the Pope himself is asserted as having addressed an autograph letter to the Czar of Russia, in which he expresses the hope that the difficulty between the Holy See and the imperial government, touching the condition of the church in Poland, will soon be removed.
It is needless to observe that the nomination of Cardinal Franchi as Secretary of State is pleasing to the Catholics. His career has been throughout one of eminent service to the Church. He was born of distinguished parents in Rome, on the 25th of June, 1819. At the age of eight years he entered the Roman Seminary, where he graduated with distinction, and was ordained priest. Soon after he was appointed to the chair of history in both his Alma Mater and the University of the Sapienza. Later on he became professor of sacred and civil diplomacy in the Accademia Ecclesiastica. Some of his pupils are now members of the Sacred College. In 1853 he was sent as chargé d’affaires to Spain, where he remained, with honor to the Holy See and to himself, until 1856. Recalled from Spain, Pope Pius IX. himself consecrated him Archbishop of Thessalonica in partibus, and appointed him nuncio to the then existing courts of Florence and Modena. He remained in that capacity until the annexation to Piedmont of both duchies in 1859. Returning to Rome, he was nominated in 1860 secretary of the Congregation of Ecclesiastical Affairs. In 1868 he was sent back to Spain as apostolic nuncio. The Spanish Revolution of 1869 brought his useful labors in that country to a close, and he again sought his native city, but only to be sent to Constantinople in 1871, on the delicate mission of arranging the serious difficulty then existing between the Holy See and the sultan touching the Armenian Catholics in the Turkish capital. His sound judgment, coupled with his proverbial urbanity, enabled him to bring his mission to a successful conclusion in a short time, and he returned to Rome laden with presents from the sultan to the Holy Father. He was created cardinal in the consistory of December 22, 1873, and in the March of the following year was appointed prefect of the Propaganda. His qualifications for the present office need not be enlarged upon after a consideration of his antecedents. With the office of Secretary of State is joined that of prefect of the Apostolic Palace, and administrator of the revenues and possessions of the Holy See. In the latter capacity he will be assisted by their Eminences Cardinals Borromeo and Nina, recently nominated at his request by the Sovereign Pontiff.
Pope Leo XIII. has inaugurated an era of reform in the administrative department of the Vatican. He is fast retrenching unnecessary expenses. He has brought into the Vatican his old frugal habits which distinguished him as the bishop of Perugia. He still uses the midnight lamp of study, and is at the moment of the present writing busily engaged in drawing up the allocution which he will pronounce in the coming consistory.
In that document Leo XIII. will stand revealed in his attitude before the Powers, friendly and hostile, of the world.
A Life of Pope Pius IX. By John R. G. Hassard. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.
“It is ... with the story of the private virtues of Pius IX., the outlines of his public life, and the most important works of his pontificate that the present biography will be chiefly concerned,” says the author of this really excellent life of the late Pope. Mr. Hassard has closely kept to the programme which he thus clearly set down for himself in the beginning, and the result is one of the most comprehensive biographies of Pius IX. that we have yet seen. The book is by no means a bulky one, yet the story of the wonderful pontificate is all there; the events that mark it grouped with the skill of a thoroughly practised and efficient pen: the secret forces that impelled those events brought to light; and the lights and shadows of the ever-shifting scene pictured with a rapid yet bold and true hand. Mr. Hassard has the happy gift of collecting his facts, setting them together in the briefest and most intelligible form, and leaving the reader to make his own comment on them. The comment is sure to be such as the author himself would make, so clear and logical is his arrangement of the premises. Another happy feature marks this biography: there is an absence of gush. The author writes tenderly and with an open admiration of his subject; but the tenderness never sinks into sentimentality, and the admiration is always manly and reasonable. The anecdotes are well chosen and happy, and most, if not all, of them will be new to the general reader. The author’s study of the workings of the secret societies, which play so prominent a part in the history of the last pontificate, has been close and searching. His acquaintance with European politics generally, so necessary in a biographer of Pius IX., is equally thorough. These necessary qualifications give a special value to the present Life, while the whole story is told with a genial glow of personal regard and admiration for its subject, none the less charming that its tone is rationally subdued. Mr. Hassard is to be congratulated on having produced a biography that will be cherished by Catholic readers as we cherish and keep by us, and look at again and again, a faithful miniature of one very dear to our hearts.
286Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne. From the original manuscripts, with introduction and notes by Harry Buxton Forman. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1878.
Were these the letters of John Brown instead of John Keats the world would wonder, with reason, what possible motive could have induced their publication. Well might poor Keats, were he alive, say on seeing them in print and exposed to the public gaze, “Save me from my friends!” Their publication is, perhaps, the greatest injury that the unfortunate poet, or his memory, ever had to sustain. As letters, even as love-letters, they are remarkably dull and insipid. How Miss Fanny Brawne received them of course we do not know. Love is reputed to be blind. It is certainly color-blind. Othello could never have looked black—at least not very black—to Desdemona. Had he worn his native sable that poor lady would undoubtedly have been reserved for a better fate. So it is presumably with love-letters. They may contain wells of wit and wisdom and eloquence and fire to the party to whom they are addressed, and who is bewitched by love’s potion, though to all the rest of the world they are the very embodiment of absurdity and nonsense. Titania, over whom the spell has been wrought, sees an Adonis where everybody else only sees honest Nick Bottom, the weaver, fittingly capped by an ass’s head. It is an evil day for Bottom when the love potion has lost its virtue and the scales drop from the eyes of Titania. Such an event does happen at times to all the Bottoms and Titanias, and probably it happened to Miss Fanny Brawne, who never became Mrs. Keats, but Mrs. Somebody Else. If ever she had cause for a grudge against Keats she has more than revenged it by allowing some prying busybody access to these very silly letters which are now given to the public for the first time.
They show nothing but weakness, mental and moral, in their author. It should be remembered, however, that they are the letters of a man marked for death. They exhibit not a trace of the wit and humor which Keats really had, and to which he sometimes gave expression. They are utterly without his classic grace and profound, if pagan, sympathy with nature. They are the expressions of morbid feeling, and of nothing else. They can serve no purpose but to lower Keats in the estimation of all who read them. He was never a robust character; but these exhibit him as a weakling of weaklings, and it was simply cruel to publish them. The whole thing is a piece of the worst kind of bookmaking we have seen. The introduction, which is worth nothing save to perplex, occupies sixty-seven pages; the letters, which are of about equal value, occupy one hundred and seven pages; an appendix of nine pages sets forth “the locality of Wentworth Place”; to all of which there are no less than six pages of an index with such headings as these: “Arrears of Versifying to be Cleared”; “Books lent to Miss Brawne not to be sent home”; “Brawne, Fanny”; “Brawne, Margaret”; “Brawne, Mrs.”; “Brawne, Samuel, Jr.”; “Brawne, Samuel, Sr.” (why not “The Brawne Family” at once?); “Café, Keats will not sing in a”; “Flirting with Brawne”; “Front parlor, Watching in”; “Getting Stouter”; “Laughter of Friends”; “Sore throat, Confinement to the house with”; and so on. We do not know who Mr. “Harry” Buxton Forman may be, but if ever it came to pass that we were threatened with fame at the cost of a future Harry Buxton Forman to hunt up our love-letters or butchers’ and bakers’ bills, or every scrap that we might write in an incautious moment, we should certainly prefer to all time our present happy obscurity.
Life of Henri Planchat, Priest of the Congregation of the Brothers of St. Vincent de Paul. By Maurice Maignen. Translated from the French, with an introductory preface. By Rev. W. H. Anderdon, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
This Life is a beautiful one. In reading it we are constantly reminded of the just and faithful man—the privileged servant of God—who, amidst the turmoil of the world, possesses his soul in peace. Henri Planchat was born of good parents at Bourbon-Vendée on November 22, 1823. After a holy youth he was called to the sanctuary and studied under the venerable Sulpitians at Paris. Being ordained priest on December 22, 1850, he offered his first Mass the next 287day, and the day after that “attained,” says his biographer, “the climax of his wishes by becoming a member of the little community of Brothers of St. Vincent of Paul, in order to live and die in the service of the working classes and of the poor in general.” Interior recollection, humility, and the perfect performance of the duties of his ministry raised him to a martyr’s throne. A dreadful storm, the fury of the Commune, suddenly burst upon this life of singular simplicity and charity, devoted to the needy and the ignorant for upwards of twenty years, and he was basely massacred, out of hatred to religion, in the Rue Haxo, on the 27th of May, 1871, among that very class of people for whom he had labored so earnestly and so long. “We are the good odor of Christ,” says the apostle, and in the untimely yet happy death of Henri Planchat we perceive the aptness of Bacon’s saying about adversity, that “virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed.”
The Rev. Father Anderdon, S.J., has written an introductory preface to this English translation which is short and to the point; but a scholar like Father Anderdon should not have mistaken (preface) Poitou for Picardy, which was an altogether different province of the territorial divisions of France before the Revolution.
One of God’s Heroines: A Biographical Sketch of Mother Mary Teresa Kelly, Foundress of the Convent of Mercy, Wexford. By Kathleen O’Meara. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.
Nothing that the very gifted author of the Life of Frederic Ozanam writes can fail to attract attention or excite admiration. Miss O’Meara seems equally happy in biography as in fiction. Her stories, such as Are You My Wife? Alba’s Dream, etc., etc., need no recommendation to readers of The Catholic World. In the touching little biography which calls for the present notice Miss O’Meara has evidently performed a labor of love. The title exactly describes the subject of the sketch. Mother Kelly was indeed “one of God’s heroines,” called up at a time when such heroines are peculiarly needed—in our own days. She was born in 1813; she died on Christmas day, 1866. Her religious life was a sustained series of heroic actions—actions none the less heroic that they were done in a practical, unostentatious, matter-of-fact manner. Her good works live after her, and it was a kindly and just thought to commemorate them as they have been commemorated in the bright pages of this tender and graceful little memoir by so skilful a hand and appreciative a heart. No one can read One of God’s Heroines without feeling that after all the world is a brighter place than so many writers are wont to picture it. It will always be bright and worth living in while it can boast of such pious and charitable souls as Mother Mary Kelly. The only fault to be found with the present sketch of that life is its brevity.
To the Sun? From the French of Jules Verne. By Edward Roth. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger. 1878.
That very clever Frenchman, Jules Verne, has again given us a most interesting and wonderful tale, which has been very successfully translated by Mr. Roth. It is to be wished that all translations were equally well done. Captain Hector Servadac and his servant, Ben Zoof, a typical Frenchman, are hurled into space upon a piece of the earth’s surface, and proceed with alarming velocity toward the sun. Of course they are not the only ones removed from this sphere. There are some Englishmen and Spaniards, and a Dutch Jew. We must not forget a Russian count and his companions, who all play an important part in this wondrous story. Verne’s object is to interest boys in the exact sciences, as Mayne Reid’s was to awaken a corresponding interest in natural history. At the present day, when stories for boys are becoming so intensely vulgar, and contain so much slang which passes for wit and playful badinage, it is a relief to find a story that is told in good English, and that contains, moreover, in a marked degree the highest sentiments of manly honor. There is in it an undercurrent of the strongest feeling against the Germans, which is vented upon a Holland Jew. The book would have been better without this. Some English officers come in for a few hits at their national characteristics, but, on the other 288hand, our young captain himself is frequently reproved by his Mentor, the Russian count, who, of course, is nearly faultless.
The chief beauty of the book is the large amount of interesting scientific knowledge which can be gleaned from it, if carefully perused, and although not as amusing as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea or A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, it can be cheerfully recommended to our boyish friends as full of absorbing interest and healthy in its moral tone. It is to be followed by a sequel.
Thirty-Nine Sermons Preached in the Albany County Penitentiary, from May, 1874, to March, 1877. By the Rev. Theodore Noethen, Catholic Chaplain. Albany: Van Benthuysen Printing House. 1877.
These discourses are published in aid of a fund for increasing the Catholic library of the prison. The author’s preface tells us that the library contains about one hundred bound volumes and a number of pamphlets. “An incalculable amount of good has already been effected” by it; but the number of Catholic prisoners—nearly four hundred—makes many more books necessary. “If,” he says, “there could be some concerted action among the Catholic publishers of the United States, each contributing a few books, an excellent library would soon be formed; and it is but right that this suggestion should be acted on, for the reason that prisoners are sent to the Albany penitentiary from all parts of the Union.” He praises the example of a few of our leading Catholic publishing houses, “whose generous contributions of English and German books, together with rosaries and medals, have earned for them the gratitude” of their unfortunate fellow-Catholics.
These sermons are short and simple, and will be found very useful to pastors whose time is crowded with work, and particularly to those in the country who have more than one “mission” to attend. They will also prove excellent reading for the Catholic inmates of other penitentiary institutions.
The Four Seasons. By Rev. J. W. Vahey. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.
This is a useful book of instruction, written in a pleasing and popular style. The “four seasons” represent the various stages of human life from early youth to ripe old age. The lesson inculcated is the old one, that as a man sows so shall he reap. The author has happily contrived to weave much practical observation and really sound knowledge into his allegory—for such the little work may be styled. The chief object aimed at is to arouse Catholic parents to the necessity of religiously guarding the education of their children, and thus keeping them all their lives within the church into which they are baptized. Father Vahey’s volume has the warm approval of his archbishop, the Most Rev. John M. Henni.
The Young Girl’s Month of May. By the Author of Golden Sands. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.
Golden Sands, which was noticed in this magazine, has become, as it deserved to become, a very popular book of devotion. In the present small volume the same author has given us a work admirably adapted for May devotions. There is a special motive, aspiration, and brief meditation set apart for each day of the month of Mary, breathing a happy piety and tender grace throughout. The devotions need not at all be restricted to “young girls.” The same skilful hand that rendered Golden Sands into English has with equal happiness set this Month of May before English readers.
There is a story told of an illiterate cobbler who was wont to attend the theological discussions in an Italian university, and who, despite his ignorance of Latin and the points discussed, always discovered the disputant that was worsted. To a friend who expressed surprise at his acuteness he explained that he had noticed that the arguer who first lost his temper was the one who also lost the victory.
The cobbler’s test admits of wide application. The consciousness of truth begets serenity. What chronic ill-temper was there amongst the first Protestant Reformers! And even to-day a Protestant controversial author writes as though he were aflame with rage. The doughty Luther, warmed, possibly, as much with the wine whose praises he so lustily sang as with polemical zeal, hurls such names as sot, devil, and ass at his opponents. He has declined and conjugated the word “devil” in all cases, moods, tenses, numbers, and persons. We can imagine his broad face purple with rage, and his bovine neck throbbing apoplectically, as he pours out the vials of his wrath upon that “besatanized, insatanized, and supersatanized royal ass,” Henry VIII., whose accredited book won for the monarchs of England that most glorious, though now, alas! inappropriate, title, “defender of the Faith.” The meek Melanchthon had the tongue of a termagant; and Bucer must have suggested to Shakspere some of the characteristics of Sir John Falstaff, so far as a command of billingsgate goes; for the wordy combats of that Reformer (Bucer, we mean) recall the conversational victories of the knight of sack.
Morbid irritability and unwholesome sensitiveness were the characteristics of the movement known, rather vaguely, as “New England Transcendentalism,” which, forty years ago, promised America a new life in religion, literature, and art. This ill-temper was a forecast of defeat. 290It brought the movement under the suspicion of weakness and error. It was a voice crying in the wilderness; it had not, however, the trumpet-tones of strength and conviction, but was rather the puny wail of complaint and despair. We were just ceasing to be provincial and were opening to world-wide influences. Our national boastfulness was hugely developed, and we flattered ourselves that no pent-up Utica contracted our powers. De Tocqueville says of us that we are a nation without neighbors; and this, of course, means that we are without standards or comparisons of excellence, and so, like the Buddhist devotee, we aim after perfection by self-contemplation. New England was filled with schoolmasters who had read Carlyle and translations of the Encyclopædists, and who in consequence began to have doubts about what not even Pyrrho would have considered a doubt, so far as it had any existence in their minds—religion. The stern-eyed old Calvinism which watched them like a detective became inexpressibly odious to them, and they hated “Romanism,” too, with all that contradictoriness that baffles explanation. It was soon discovered that Scotch Puritanism was unfitted for the latitude of New England, though it must be said that the mechanical virtues and the staid habits of the people owed much to that strange fanaticism which, whether happily or unhappily for them, has passed away for ever.
How to throttle Puritanism, and yet preserve its corpse from putrefaction as a convenient effigy to appeal to, became a problem for which no solution presented itself. The American masses even to this day venerate the Pilgrim Fathers, and no amount of historical evidence will shake their veneration for those fierce and ignorant fanatics, whose memory should long ago have been buried in charitable oblivion. It is only the Catholic historian and philosopher that can to-day respect the inkling of truth which they held, and which St. Augustine says is to be found in every heresy and doctrinal vagary. They attempted to make the Bible a practical working code of laws—an idea which to-day would be greeted with laughter by their children, who have long since unlearned veneration for the Scriptures. There is something quite noble, though irresistibly ridiculous, in the old Puritan notions about the Bible. One wonders that they did not revive the rite of circumcision. Protestants are beginning to acknowledge the wisdom of the church in not making the Scriptures as common as the almanac or the newspaper. The whole atmosphere of New England became Judaic. Biblical names of towns abounded. Scriptural names were given to children, with a disregard for length and pronunciation that in after-years provoked the ire of the bearers. The Mosaic law was ludicrously incorporated with the legal enactments of the civil law. The old Levitical ordinances were carried out as far as practicable, and the minister of the town just barely refrained from donning the garments of the high-priest and decorating himself with the Urim and Thummim. This anomalous society survived even the great social changes which were wrought by the Revolution.
Puritanism repressed all individual eccentricities of religious opinion. The boasted independence of Protestantism scarcely ever 291did exist, except in name. Let a man to-day dissent from the opinions of the sect in which he has been brought up, and he may as well become a Catholic, though that is the crowning evidence of being given over to a reprobate sense. What liberty did Luther give the Sacramentarians? What divergence of opinion did Calvin allow in Geneva? He punished heresy with death. What toleration was there in the Church of England for Dissenters? And there is a quiet but effective persecution kept up in the English church to-day against all “Romanistic tendencies.” There is not a greater delusion prevalent than the lauded Protestant freedom of investigation and liberty of conscience. The Catholic Church, even as judged by her enemies, was never so intolerant as that obscurest of Protestant sects, the Puritans of New England. The harshest charges that have been falsely made against a merely local tribunal, the Spanish Inquisition, are historically proved against the full ecclesiastico-civil tribunals of Massachusetts in the punishment, not of turbulent and contumacious heretics, but of wretched and harmless old women accused of witchcraft. Every Protestant church is a complexus of social and business influences, all of which are cruelly and unfairly brought to bear against any member who uses the Protestant right of private judgment. If he will disjoin himself from church communion, though his interpretation of the Scriptures may assure him that the Father is worshipped in spirit, he is looked upon as an infidel and blasphemer. The petty persecution of the Protestant church is a subject admissive of infinite illustration.
Cramped and crippled by a fierce Scotch Covenantism, what were the aspiring minds of New England to do? A natural idea struck them. Some of the fathers of the Revolution were infidels. That great and glorious light of American history, Benjamin Franklin, who was held up as a model to every New England boy, was a sort of deist. The influence of that man’s example and writings has been one of the most baleful in our country’s history. The fathomless depths of his pride, the cool assurance of his “virtue,” the intensely worldly spirit of his maxims, and his Pharisaical reward of wealth and honors in this world have been imitated by thousands of American youth. That nauseating schedule of “virtues” which he drew up; such hideous maxims as “Rarely use venery” and “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” which seem to us infinitely more shocking in their cold calculation than a wild debauch or a hot-headed oath; his constant prating about integrity as the high-road to health and wealth; and, in short, the whole wretched man, body and soul, furnished the worst yet widest-copied example of American virtue and success. Add to such influences the schoolboy beliefs in liberty and independence, the solemn Fourth-of-July glorification of individual freedom, the vision of the Presidency open to the humblest youth in the district school, and the gradual weakening of faith in the Bible, brought about by the rapid multiplication of the poor, deistical histories and scientific miscellanies of fifty years ago, and the end of Puritanism was soon predicted. The heavy hand of the clergy was shaken off. The curiosity deeply planted in the Yankee nature looked around for a new religion. At once all the vagaries of undisciplined thought, so long held 292in silence by Protestantism, burst out in Babel speech. Chaos was come again. If Puritanism had dared, it would have sent the “Apostles of the Newness,” as they were called, to the scaffold or the pillory, or, at the very least, it would have pierced their tongues and branded them with symbolic letters.
And what a revelation! We laugh at the wild rhapsodies of George Fox, and Mr. Lecky, in his late book, England in the Eighteenth Century, has rather cruelly, we think, dragged up Wesley’s and Whitefield’s eccentricities for the laughter of a world which should rather be in tears over the vanishing of such earnestness as both those deluded men had; but the laughter which New England Transcendentalism evokes is hearty and sincere, from whatever side we view it.
In the first place, there is no meaning in the name. The logician knows what transcendental ideas are—the ens, verum, bonum, etc.; and what philosophy calls the transcendental is really the most familiar, as connected with universal ideas. But Transcendentalism in New England was understood to mean a high, dreamy, supersensuous, and altogether unintelligible and unexplainable state, condition, life, or religion that escaped in the very attempt to define it. Dr. Brownson complains that he had much difficulty in convincing a philosopher that nothing is nothing; and we feel much in the same mental condition as that philosopher, for we cannot see how Transcendentalism (a polysyllable with a capital T) is nothing. It is infinitely suggestive. It is any number of things, all beginning with capitals. It is Soul, Universe, the Force, the Eternities, the Infinities, the βία καὶ κράτος. It is Any Number of Greek and Latin Nouns. It is, in fact, a Great Humbug (in the largest kind of caps). Mr. Barnum’s “What-is-it?” is nothing to the Protean forms of Transcendentalism. A fair definition might be, Puritanism run mad. There was a certain method in it, and it would be false to say that the absurdity ever went so far in America as Fichtism or even Hegelism in Germany. The old Puritan leaven was too strong for that; and the Yankee common sense, which not even the wildest flights of Transcendentalism could wholly carry from earth, instinctively rejected the German theories. Not even Comte’s Positivism, which has quite a following in England and an influential organ in the Westminster Review, ever gained ground amongst us. We do not believe in Cosmic Emotion or Aggregate Immortality, ponderous and unmeaning words, to which, listening, a Yankee asks, Heow?
The surprising fact is how, in the name of all the philosophers and the muse that presides over them, did New England fall a victim to the “Apostles of the Newness”? It was worse than the Protestant Reformation, which is said to have developed more crazy and eccentric enthusiasts than any other physical or social convulsion recorded in history. The shrewd Yankee genius was supposed to be insured against spiritual lightnings. The cold and common-sense temperament of the people seemed farthest removed from the action of “celestial ardors.” But the fierce old Puritanism was taking only a new form. The spirit that sent Charles I. to the scaffold was nurtured amid the gloomy woods. Only that the sweet providence of 293God, mysteriously permitting and clearly punishing evil, is gradually withdrawing even the physical presence of that spiritually and intellectually unbalanced race, what chance would there be for the action of his all-holy will as wrought out by the church? New England is largely Catholic to-day, yet New Hampshire will have no popery in her councils. “This spirit is not cast out without prayer and fasting.” Milton, who lacks spiritual insight, fails to identify the spirit of pride with the spirit of impurity. New England, alas! has been filled with the spirit of pride, and of hatred against the City of God, and lo! now she is slain by the spirit of impurity, and the stranger within her gates has taken her place and will wear her crown. And that stranger is the despised and hated “Romanist,” who now enjoys the blessing foretold in that mystic Psalm whose counsels New England despised—the blessing of progeny. It is a prophecy and a history (Ps. cxxvi.): “Unless the Lord buildeth the house, they labor in vain that build it. Unless the Lord keepeth the city, he watches in vain that keepeth it. It is in vain for you to rise before the Light. Rise after ye have sat down, and eaten the bread of sorrow. Behold, children are an inheritance from the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows in the hand of the mighty, so are the children of them that were rejected.”
This is the divine “survival of the fittest.” Would to Heaven that the solemn significance of this great Psalm could sink into the heart of New England and cast out the foul demons that have so long lurked within it; that, having partaken of “the bread of sorrow,” she might rise to the contemplation of the true Light!
No sooner was the restraining power of Puritanism cast off than Transcendentalism, like the genie in the Arabian Nights, rose like an exhalation, and afterward defied the command of the invokers to return to its former limited quarters. The men who assisted at this liberation of a powerful and anarchic spirit soon discovered, to their fear and disgust, that they could not control it. It was worse than Frankenstein, for it appeared to have symmetry, and the land was quickly enamored with its beauty. Every theorist felt that the millennium had dawned. A truce to common sense was called. The leaders of the movement were put in the painful but logical predicament of inability to object to the consequences of their teachings. The over-soul was reduced to such limitations as the necessity and obligation of using bran-bread in preference to all other forms of food. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus happening to appear at a time when the inspiration was fullest, Sartorial heresies became the rage. Bloomer costumes asserted their rights. The old sect of Adamites revived, and nothing but tar and feathers, which hard-headed Calvinists bestowed with unsparing vigor and abundance, prevented many from rushing into a state of nudity. There arose prophets of vegetarianism, and, says Lowell, every form of dyspepsia had its apostle. Money, the root of all evil, was condemned by impecunious disciples, who drew largely upon treasures which they imagined they had laid up in heaven. Furious assaults were made upon the Bible, which was stigmatized as a worn-out and effete system. A 294crew of anti-tobacconists, who regretted that they could not find a condemnation of the weed in Scripture, were joined by a set of teetotalers, who did not hesitate to condemn our Blessed Lord’s use of wine, and, as they were unable to see the high, mystic significance of the Eucharist, they vented their foolish wrath upon such of the Protestant sects as retained wine in the Lord’s Supper, and this with such effect that it became quite common in New England to administer bread and milk instead of wine in the communion, thus destroying even the semblance to the blood which we are commanded to drink in remembrance of That which was shed for our redemption, and which, in the divine Sacrifice celebrated by Christ on Holy Thursday, was then really and truly poured forth, in the chalice, unto the remission of sin.
The revulsion from the unspeakable harshness of the Puritanic interpretation of the Scriptures was so complete that men cast about for an entirely new theological terminology. The transcendental pedants were ready for the want. What was grander than the old Scandinavian mythology? What is Jehovah to Thor? What is the Trinity to the sublimity of the Buddhistic teachings? The cardinal doctrine of the New Testament is the golden rule, which was familiar to the Greeks, and expressed in our own terms by Confucius. Satan’s master-stroke was thus levelled at the Bible, which was the word of life to the New-Englander. Take the written word away from the Protestant, and the gates of hell have prevailed against him. The inscriptions upon the Temple of Delphi preserved Greek mythology for centuries. Infantine belief in the poor, adulterated word of the Scriptures, which, after all, were never subjected to the full action of the Protestant theory, kept alive some remnants of Christian faith and hope. But to cast away the Bible for the Vedas, the Krishnas, the Mahabarattas, the skalds, and the devil knows what other vague and windy compilations of Scandinavian and Brahminical superstitions was to inaugurate a chaotic era, the like of which history does not record. There is no sympathy between the American mind and the Buddhism of the East, much less between the minds of the Yankee Transcendentalists and the wild beliefs of Danish sea-kings, who would have knocked their brains out, as puling and scholarly creatures unfit to wield a club or harpoon a seal, and consequently objects of the just wrath and derision of Odin and Thor. Yet these strange mythologies, intermixed with fatalism, Schellingism, and nature-worship, formed the olla-podrida to which New England for at least ten years sat down, after the unsavory dish of Puritanism had been thrown out of doors.
The spiritual squalor and intellectual poverty of most Transcendentalists were studiously kept out of sight, and the school—for it would be blasphemy to call it a religion—pushed forward into notice its exponents, who, under the stricter requirements of writing, considerably toned down their sentiments, and sought to give intelligible and literary form to their extravagances. A magazine, called the Dial, was published in Boston, in 1840 and a few following years, and notwithstanding the petulant genius of Emerson, its editor, who only now and then yielded to the spirit of newness, the strangest gibberish 295began to mumble in its columns. The following, from the “Orphic Sayings” of Bronson Alcott, who was considered to be one “overflowed with spiritual intimations,” is an illustration of the jargon. It might be proposed by a weekly paper as a puzzle to the readers:
“The popular genesis is historical. It is written to sense, not to soul. Two principles, diverse and alien, intercharge the Godhead and sway the world by turns. God is dual. Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in diversity. Unity is actual merely. The poles of things are not integrated. Creation is globed and orbed.”
The leaders of the movement cared nothing about letting their infidelity be known; but the mass following were loath to break completely with their religious traditions. They did not know what Kultur meant, and had neither knowledge of, nor sympathy with, Wilhelm Meister or Werther. The Atlantic Monthly, which may be regarded as having taken the place of the Dial, became the repository of Transcendental thought, though, with Yankee shrewdness and savoir faire, the editors managed to give it an unsectarian and, in time, even a national character.
The Atlantic never committed itself to Christianity, or, if it did so, it was to that spurious horror which in rhyme, idea, and general relativeness joins Jesus with Crœsus. A peculiar school of literature, marked with the patient study of German idealism, grew up around the Atlantic, which, with characteristic New England assertion, claimed to be the critic and model of American letters. The orphic style was sternly kept down in the Atlantic, but it would assert itself. Any one who cares about illustrating this idea has but to turn over the older Atlantics to see the painful efforts made to paraphrase the name of God, which, whenever boldly printed, has some title of limitation. We have any quantity of Valhallas and mythologies, and poems about the Christ that’s born in lilies, etc.; but it is tacitly understood that Kultur is the presiding genius. It must be admitted that New England Transcendentalism developed, or at least engaged, considerable literary and poetic talent. Not to speak of its High-Priest, Avatar, Inspirationalist, Seer, or Writer (with a big W), or Whatsoever you call him—Emerson, who has retreated from its altar and seems to be swinging his Thor-hammer wildly in every direction, there appeared a number of writers, all under the mystic spell. They aimed at a certain vague and beautiful language, and were given to pluralizing nouns which are one and singular in meaning. A certain kind of poetry, after the manner of Shelley, but not after his genius, sprang up and monthly bedecked the Atlantic with flowers. The literary men of New England were made to feel that inspiration sprang from Transcendentalism alone.
Nathaniel Hawthorne became its novelist, and Thoreau, whom we have been keeping at the door so long, suggested to him the idea of Donatello in The Marble Faun—a finely-organized animal, acted upon by human and otherwise spiritual influences. Hawthorne’s morbid genius, for which we confess we have little admiration, was unnaturally stimulated by the Transcendental seers. He is for ever diving into the depths of inner consciousness, and always appearing with a devil-fish instead of a pearl. His Note-Books show him to have 296been a spiritually diseased man, for whom the stench and ugliness of moral fungus growths had more charms than had the flowers. He has the besetting weakness of false reformers, chronic irritation, quite as vehement against the pettiest crosses and vexations of life as against its awful tragedies and crimes. This is the evolution of Transcendentalism. It began with enthusiasm and ended in worse than Reformation anger at everything and everybody, not excepting itself; but it was not an anger that sins not.
Theodore Parker was its theologian by excellence, and as the one god he believed in was himself, we suppose he may be allowed the title. Margaret Fuller Ossoli was co-editor with Emerson of the Dial, and was a strong-minded woman, whom her admirers insisted upon calling Anne Hutchinson come again—so strong, after all, were their New England traditions. Dwight wrote their music, if music can be limited in expression. William Ellery Channing was the poet of Transcendentalism, and Henry D. Thoreau was its hermit.
Thoreau was born at Concord in 1817, and he died in 1862. He was the only man among the Transcendentalists that allowed their theories the fullest play in him, and the incompleteness and failure of his life cannot be concealed by all the verbiage and praise of his biographers. Emerson’s high-flown monologues ruined him. A trick of naturalizing and botanizing which he had, and which never reached the dignity or usefulness of science, was exaggerated by a false praise that acted more powerfully than any other influence in sending him into the woods as a hermit, and among mountains as a poet-naturalist. He appears to have cherished some crude notions about the glory and bountifulness of Nature and her soothing and uplifting ministry, but these notions are, in the ultimate analysis, admissive of much limitation and qualification, if they be not altogether ægræ somnia mentis. The Transcendentalists worshipped Nature and built airy altars to the Beautiful, but they did not venture into the woods on a rainy day without thick shoes and good umbrellas. Thoreau gave up his life to this delusory study and adoration of Nature, and got for his worship a bronchial affection which struck him down in the full vigor of manhood. We have no patience with an ideal that takes us away from the comforting and companionship of our fellow-men. What divine lessons has Nature to teach us comparable with her manifestations in human nature? Why should we run off into solitude, and busy ourselves with the habits of raccoons and chipmunks that are sublimely indifferent to us? How much better is old Dr. Johnson’s theory: “This is a world in which we have good to do, and not much time in which to do it,” and who, on being asked by Boswell to take a walk in the fields, answered: “Sir, one green field is like another green field. I like to look at men.”
Life in the woods is very good for a mood or a vacation, but man escapes from them into the city. The old proverb about solitude runs, Aut deus, aut lupus—no one but a divinity or a wolf can stand solitude. One of the weaknesses of Transcendentalism was an affectation of seclusion. It was too good for human nature’s daily food. Man is such a bore! “O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!” 297Now, all this is sinful and unreasonable. Why should we shrink from the bad and evil and objectionable in mankind to herd with the wild beasts of the forest? The only thing that sanctifies solitude is the Catholic faith; and, even when the monastic idea sought to realize complete isolation from the world, the superiors were loath to grant permission. They felt that it is not good for man to be alone, and St. Benedict, in his Rule, has a reflection that there were monks lost in solitude who would have been saved in community. The true idea is that we can be solitary in spirit in the midst of crowds. There is no necessity of betaking ourselves to the woods.
Very likely the high praise of isolation, as nutritive of genius, acting upon a naturally retiring disposition, first led Thoreau to his sylvan life. The common idea that he was a hermit or a misanthropist is fully disproved by his biographers. In our opinion he is just the reverse, and if we were disposed to bring in evidence we could show that he was wild for notoriety. His private letters are more affected than Pope’s, who wrote with an eye to publication. All Thoreau’s books are full of his private experiences, thoughts, and emotions. He never suffers you to escape from his overpowering personality. He never sinks the ego. He reminds one of the diary of the private gentleman in Addison’s Spectator: “To-day the beef was underdone. Took a walk. Dreamt about the Grand Turk.” Thoreau is for ever telling us about his personal feelings, his method of baking bread, and his dreams about tortoises, etc. There is something funny in his writing six volumes for men on whom he fancied he looked with Transcendental contempt. The fact is, he was a fine, naturally talented, and poetic man, who was bewitched by the theories which we have sketched; and the contest within his spirit has led his biographers and critics into pardonable misapprehensions of his life and aims. Left to himself and his aspirations, he would have developed into a fair poet or a good naturalist—perchance an Agassiz or an Audubon. He had no theological or philosophical ability, but a deep sense of truthfulness, which made him experimentalize upon the theories which he heard. He found it much easier than would most men to live in the woods, to take long walks, to navigate rivers, and to collect specimens of natural history. His studies in nature have no value to the scientist. He was a good surveyor and liked animals. He wrote some indifferent poetry. He described some gorgeous sunsets. He delivered an oration on John Brown, and he managed to let the world know that he built and lived in a hut at Walden. Voilà tout. He flippantly criticised our Lord Jesus Christ, ridiculed all Christian beliefs, preferred the company of a mouse to that of a man, of an Indian to a white man, and died without a single throb of supernatural faith, hope, or charity. This was a man, too, who had Catholic blood in his veins, but who could not bear to hear the chime of church-bells without some contemptuous remarks, and who professed himself a Buddhist without the Indic veneration, and a worshipper of Pan without knowing or believing that the great Pan had died for his salvation.
Two biographies are before us, one by William Ellery Channing, who was Thoreau’s friend and companion, 298the other by H. A. Page, who appears to be a biographer-in-general or by profession. Channing’s, as might be expected, is a sort of prose In Memoriam; and Page’s is made ridiculous by an attempted comparison between Thoreau and St. Francis of Assisi, based on the saint’s love of, and miraculous power over, animals, and the Concord man’s ability to bring a mouse out of its hole or tickle a trout. Strange as it sounds, this comparison is carried on through one-third of the volume. Page must be a member of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for Thoreau’s kindness to brutes he evidently regards as his finest trait. Such stuff as “the animals are brethren of ours and undeveloped men,” and the slops of evolution in general, are poured out in vast quantity, and the impression forced upon the reader is that Mr. Page, who speaks of himself as an Englishman, has no conception of Thoreau’s character, nor, indeed, of any adventurous or sport-loving nature such as freely develops on our wide plains and high mountains.
Thoreau graduated at Harvard, but without distinction. He and his brother taught school for a while at Concord, where the sage lives who gave such cheering voice to Carlyle. There was a wildness in him which nothing could subdue, yet it took no cruel or brutal form. He appears to have had that passionate love of external nature which is so sublime as a reality, so detestable as an affectation. He was made of the stuff of pioneers and Indian scouts, but with rarer feeling and poetic temperament. A water-lily was more than a water-lily to him. He had no social theory to advocate—a delusion about him into which Page falls—but he took to the woods as an Indian to a trail. There is nothing Transcendental about his life, and yet he is the chief and crown of Transcendentalists. He had a brave, high life in him, which is perfectly intelligible and realizable, quite as much in the parlor as in the swamp. Heroism need not leave New York for the steppes of Russia. A naturally timid priest who anoints a small-poxed patient is as brave in his way as Alexander or Charles XII. of Sweden. A thousand hermits have lived before Thoreau, and made no palaver over their social discomforts, which are, indeed, inseparable from their way of life. There is an unpleasant soupçon of Yankeeism when, in Walden, Thoreau lectures us on economy. The Transcendental aurora vanishes before the prosaic hearth-fire.
We remember having read A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and The Maine Woods during a summer vacation which we spent between Mount Desert and Nantucket, and the sweet naturalness of those two beautiful books sank into our heart, touched, perhaps, by the glorious yet sombre scenery in which we moved. The jar and discord of Thoreau’s theological opinions melted away in the harmony of the great music which he made us hear among the hills and scenes which he loved so well, and of which he seemed a part. Hawthorne’s keen eye, sharpened, we will not say purified, by high æsthetic cultivation, detected in Thoreau the latent qualities of the Faun whose existence, by an anomaly, he has thrown into modern Italy, and even intimates as wrought on by the church. We love to think of Thoreau, not as idealized 299by Emerson, Channing, or Page, nor shallowly criticised as by Lowell, but as bright and winsome, afar from the sensuous creation of Hawthorne, and full of that boyish love of flood and field which has made us all at one time Robinson Crusoes. This is a most undignified descent from that ideal type of character which Thoreau is supposed to represent; but we submit to any reader of his books, if he did not skip his foolish theories about religion, friendship, society, ethics, and other such themes on which Emerson expatiates, and about which dear old Thoreau never knew anything at all practical, and leap with him into the stream, follow the trails he knew so well, learn the mysteries of angling and hunting, and tramp with him through the forests, read with him his dearly-loved Homer, and, in spite of our half-concealed laughter, listen to his wonderful explanations of the Beghavat-Gheeva.
It is encouraging to notice how bravely he shakes off half the nonsense of Transcendentalism, though bound by the wiles of Merlin, who lived only two miles from Walden. Transcendentalism gave no religion. It was even hollower than Rousseau’s Contrat Social and Émile, in which writings the wicked old Voltaire said that Jean Jacques was so earnest in converting us back to nature that he almost persuaded us to go upon all fours. Even Emerson confesses to the failure of Thoreau’s life. “Pounding beans,” says that wise old man, with the air of a Persian sage—a character which he frequently adopts, especially when he recommends some thousand-dollar Persian book to us as infinitely superior to the New Testament,—“Pounding beans,” says he, referring to poor Thoreau’s attempt to carry out his Transcendentalism, “may lead to pounding thrones; but what if a man spends all his life pounding beans?”
And so, in the style of the tellers of fairy stories, we say that poor Thoreau continued all his life pounding beans, but without caring very much for the bearing of beans upon the eternities, splendors, and thrones, and that he lived a cheerful and wholesome, natural life, though rather an uncomfortable one, in his woods and among his beasts and flowers; that he was kind and gentle to beasts, but not to God or to man, of whom he seemed to be afraid, which was a mistake; and after he was dead he was made out to be a great philosopher, a golden poet, a great social theorist, and a Transcendental saint, which is another mistake.
With Thoreau died the Transcendental hermit, and, so far as human nature and a happy combination of character and circumstance could permit, the only truly ideal man that Transcendentalism has produced. Yet how far he falls below the most commonplace monk in spiritual range and power and aim! No great spiritual fire burns in his bosom; nor will any Montalembert be attracted to his memory. There was not the light of Christian faith or love upon his life, which is distinguished from the savage’s only by its superior mental civilization and its relation to that civilization which he so humorously yet contradictorily despised. With Emerson, who has now convinced himself of the absurdity of immortality, its greatest writer will die. The Kulturkampf of Germany, which New England introduced into America, cannot survive the literary changes which take place every half-century. Emerson 300will fade into oblivion, and even now he is no longer listened to. But there is that in Thoreau’s books which gives vitality to old Walton’s Angler, and the traveller on the Concord and through Maine will recall the memory of Thoreau, no longer, we hope, to be associated with the eclipse of his false philosophy, but seen bright and vivid in that sunshine and beauty he loved so well.
“Let man return to God the same way in which he turned from him; and as the love of created beauty made him lose sight of the Creator, so let the beauty of the creature lead him back to the beauty of the Creator.”—St. Isidore of Seville.
Let others who visit the magnificent range of the Pyrenees tell of the grandeur of the scenery and the beneficence of the mineral waters; let them recount the days of border warfare, when Christian and Saracen fought in the narrow passes, and Charlemagne, and Roland, and all the mighty peers awoke the echoes of the mountains; we will seek out the traces of those unlaurelled and, for the most part, nameless heroes who overcame the world and ended their days in the lonely caves and cells that are to be found all along the chain from the Mediterranean Sea to the Bay of Biscay. Many towns and villages of southwestern France owe their origin to some such cell. The hermit at first only built one large enough for himself, in which he set up a cross and rude statue of the Virgin. Other souls, longing for solitude, came to knock at his door. The cell was enlarged. An oratory was erected. People came to pray therein and bring their offerings. The oratory grew into a chapel. The hermitage became a monastery, around which families gradually took shelter, and the hamlet thus formed sometimes grew into a town. Lombez, St. Papoul, St. Sever, and many other places owe their origin to some poor hermit. 303The names of a few of these holy anchorites are still glorious in these mountains, like those of St. Orens, St. Savin, and St. Aventin, but most of them are hidden as their lives were, and as they desired them to be. Many of the chapels connected with their cells have acquired a local celebrity and are frequented by the people of the neighboring villages. This is a natural tribute to the memory of the saintly men to whom their fathers used to come when in need of prayer or spiritual counsel. The influence of such men on the rural population around was incalculable, with their lessons of the lowly virtues enforced by constant example. Sometimes not only the peasant but the neighboring lord would come with his Dic mihi verbum, and go away with new views of life and its great aims. King Perceforest, in his lessons to his knights, said: “I have graven on my memory what a hermit a long time ago said to me by way of admonition—that should I possess as much of the earth as Alexander, as much wisdom as Solomon, and as much valor as the brave Hector of Troy, pride alone, if it reigned in my bosom, would outweigh all these advantages.”
Many of these hermitages and oratories are
that have been consecrated to religious purposes from the first introduction of Christianity. In the valley of the Neste is one of these grottoes, to which you ascend by steps hewn in the cliff. The opening is to the west, and the altar, cut out of the live rock, is turned duly to the east, where the perpetual Oblation was first offered. The sacred stone of sacrifice has been carefully preserved. There is a similar cave near Argelés also with its altar to the east.
Whether cave or cell, these hermitages are nearly all remarkable not only for their solitude but for the beauty of their situation. Sometimes they are in a fertile valley amid whispering leaves and wild flowers that give out sweet thoughts with their odors; sometimes ’mid the deep umbrage of the green hillside, vocal with birds, perchance the nightingale that
or on the border of a mountain stream with no noise there
or some secluded tarn whose tideless waters, like the soul stilled to all human passions, give back an undisturbed image of the sky; but oftener on some lofty crag, gray and melancholy, with scarce a spray for bird to light on, where amid heat of summer and winter frosts the hermit grew “content in heavenward musings,” like him, sung by Dante, on that stony ridge of Catria
Every one in his hours of deepest feeling, whether of love, or grief, or devotion, has longed for some such retreat where he might nurse it in solitude. To every soul of any sensibility that has lived and suffered—and is it not all one?—it appeals with a force proportioned to the deep solitude he has already passed through, and his sense of that solitude he knows must one day be encountered. There is something healing and sustaining in this contact with nature, but it is only experienced by him who has that “inward eye 304which,” says Cowley, “is the bliss of solitude.”
“But solitude, when created by God,” says Lacordaire, “has a companion from whom it is never separated: it is Poverty. To be solitary and poor is the secret of the heroic in soul. To live on a little, and with few associates; to maintain the integrity of the conscience by limiting the wants of the body, and giving unlimited satisfaction to the soul, is the means of developing every manly virtue, and that which in pagan antiquity was a rare and noble exception has become under the law of Christ an example given by multitudes.”
The cells of these mountain hermits are therefore invariably of extreme simplicity. “Prayer all their business, all their pleasure praise,” the mere necessities of the body only were yielded to.
There were once more than a thousand hermitages on both sides of the Pyrenees, most of which have been swept away in the different revolutions. Several of them, however, have been restored, and a great number of the chapels connected with them have become popular places of devotion. This is especially the case in the Pyrénées Orientales. M. Just, who was our guide to so many of them, and on whom we draw freely in our narration, gives nearly forty of ancient origin that still exist in Roussillon, the chapels of which are open to the public and greatly frequented, at least on certain festivals of the year. The people love the altars where erst their fathers prayed, and have restored most of those which fell into ruin at the Revolution. One feels, in going from one of these holy places to another, as if in the true garden of the Lord filled with flowers of aromatic sweetness. The “balm-breathing Orient” has nothing to surpass them. Let us pass several of them in review, and catch, if possible, the secrets of their spicy nests.
There is the hermitage of Notre Dame de Peña—Our Lady of the Peak—on a barren mountain, bristling with needles, not far from the source of the Aude. Nothing grows on these rocky cliffs, except here and there, in the crevices and hollows, tufts of fragrant lavender, thyme, and rosemary, and the box, the odor of which, as Holmes says, suggests eternity. A rough ascent, cut in the rock, leads up to the hermitage, with a little oratory here and there by the wayside, and a saint in the niche, reminding the visitor to prepare his heart to draw near the altar of the Mother of God. There is a narrow terrace before the chapel, from which you look down on the wild Agly rushing along at the foot of the mountain over its rough bed of schist. On the farther shore is the little village of Cases-de-Peña, surrounded by hills that in spite of the aridness of the soil are covered with vines, almond-trees, and the olive. In the distance is Cape Leucate, where the low range of the Corbières shoots forward into the very sea. The hermitage is in a most picturesque spot, and there is a stern severity about the bare gray cliffs not without its charm. An unbroken silence reigns here, except on certain festivals of the Virgin. Directly behind, a sharp needle springs up, called the Salt de la Donzella, with ruins on the summit, 305of which no history remains.[73] These cliffs can be seen far out at sea, and the mariner, when he comes into the basin of St. Laurent, looks up to invoke Our Lady of the Peak:
“Beloved is the Virgin of us. Every day we pray to her at the sound of the Angelus bell. Her image is the sail that impels our bark toward the flowery shore. O the Virgin! the Virgin! We need her now; we need her everywhere, and at all times!”[74]
Notre Dame de Peña is one of those Madonnas, so numerous in the Pyrenees, that were hidden in the time of the Moors or Huguenots, and, being forgotten, were brought to light in some marvellous manner. In this pastoral region it was almost always by means of the flocks or herds, whereas in Spain such images were generally found surrounded by light, music, and odors. In this case the lowing of cattle around a cliff of perilous height led to the discovery of the statue in a cave. When this took place, or when the chapel was built to receive the holy image, is not known. But the date on the cistern hollowed in the rock shows that it was already here at the beginning of the fifteenth century: “In the year 1414 this cistern was made by Bn. Angles, a mason of Perpignan, by the alms of charitable people.” The chapel formerly had no doors; consequently, any one could enter, day or night. The peasants used to say of the Madonna: “No quiere estar cerrada esta imagen”—This image is not willing to be shut up. But later, in order to keep animals out, a wall was built around it, with a gate that any one could unfasten. In old times there were many ex-votos in the chapel, and silver reliquaries, one of which contained a fragment of the tomb at which Christ wept, and another of the pillar to which he was bound. And the Virgin had thirteen veils broidered with silk and garnished with silver, and a still greater number of robes, it being the custom here, as in Spain, to clothe the sacred statues out of respect. The chapel and hermit’s cell fell to decay at the Revolution, and the Madonna was carried to a neighboring parish church. But the people continued to come here to pray amid the ruins. When better days arrived it was restored through the zeal of M. Ferrer-Maurell, of the neighboring village of Espira-de-l’Agly. The statues of St. Vincent and St. Catharine in the chapel are said to be the likenesses of his children of these names, who both entered the order of La Trappe and died in the odor of sanctity. They are generally known, their lives having been published, as Père Marie Ephrem and his sister.
The Madonna now in the chapel is commonly called the Mara de Deü Espagnola. The place was once owned by the Knights Templars, but now belongs to the chapter of Notre Dame de la Réal at Perpignan, and on certain festivals the youngest canon comes here with other priests to hear confessions and say votive Masses. At such times a great crowd ascends the mountain. The pavement of the chapel—of the solid rock—is worn smooth by the pilgrims of so many ages. At the foot of the 306mountain is a road leading to the Valley of the Aude.
The hermitage of Notre Dame de Força Réal is on a mountain of that name, so called from the royal hold that once stood on the summit, fifteen hundred feet above the level of the sea. When the clouds gather around it the people in the plain below pray to the Madonna veiled in the mist to be protected from hail, so often disastrous to the crops in this region. As the chapel is on the culminating point of the mountain, it is visible for miles around, and seems to the sailor afar off on the treacherous waves like a true pharos of hope. M. Méchain, the noted astronomer, established himself here when measuring the arc of the meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona. All the villages around have stated days in the year to come here in procession. The people of Corneille come on Trinity Sunday; Millas, on Whitmonday, and so on. It is very picturesque to see them winding up the mountain-side with their crosses and gay banners, singing as they go. On the way they stop to pray at the little oratory of Notre Dame de Naudi, or Snow. Mass is sung in the chapel of Força Réal, and they all receive the Holy Eucharist. The chapel is dedicated to Notre Dame de Pitié, and over the altar is that group, always so affecting, of Marie éplorée at the foot of the cross receiving the body of her crucified Son. Two doors behind facilitate the approach of pilgrims to kiss the holy image. To see these pious mountaineers gathered around the dead Christ and his mourning Mother, singing the wild Goigs, so expressive of grief, in the native idiom, is very pathetic. Before the chapel is a large portico that also leads to the hermitage, and beyond is a small patch of land for cultivation. From the terrace before the chapel is a fine view over the sun-bathed plains of Riversal, and in the distance is the blue sea which washes the shores of that Eastern land where the angelic greeting was first uttered, but is now echoed for ever among these mountains consecrated to Mary. Not far off is an isolated peak, on which are the ruins of an old military post that had its origin in the time of the Romans. Roussillon, it must be remembered, has been successively occupied by the Romans, Visigoths, Saracens, Spaniards, and French. Separated from France by the Corbières, and from Spain by the Pyrenees, it was a border-land of perpetual warfare for centuries, and this post was noted in the contests, particularly in the war between Don Pedro of Aragon and King Jaime of Majorca, and was the last place to hold out against Don Pedro. Louis IX. had resigned all claim on Roussillon to Don Jaime el Conquistador, who, on his part, withdrew his pretensions to a portion of Languedoc. After the death of Don Jaime the province fell under the rule of the kings of Majorca, till the bloody wars of the fourteenth century gave Don Pedro possession of it. He made it the apanage of the crown prince of Aragon. Louis XIII. took Perpignan, and the treaty of the Pyrenees confirmed France in the possession of the whole province.
The hermitage of Notre Dame de Juegas is pleasantly situated in the plain of Salanca beside the river Agly, whence it derives its name—a corruption of Juxta aquas, near the water. Here once stood a temple to the false gods. It is a quiet peaceful spot, a little from the 307highway to St. Laurent, the centre of the maritime business on this coast, and the traveller often turns aside to say a prayer in the ever-open chapel. The sailors themselves come here, and there is a constant succession of votive Masses all the year for safe voyages and happy ventures. It is especially frequented in the summer. The neighboring parish of Torreilles comes here in procession four times a year, one of which is on the festival of St. Eloi to perpetuate a thanksgiving service at his altar for the cessation of a pestilence that raged ages ago in this vicinity. How few of us, who perhaps consider ourselves certain degrees higher in the intellectual scale than these good peasants, ever return to give thanks for our own mercies, much less for those of our forefathers! On Good Friday a great number come here from the surrounding parishes to make the Way of the Cross and pray at the altar of the Christ. There is a large garden walled in around the hermitage, and adjoining is a field belonging to it. Before the cell is a wide porch and a court shaded by trees, where the birds keep up their sweet responses from one leafy cell to another. Here the pilgrims assemble to eat the lunch they bring with them. The chapel is known to have existed in the thirteenth century by a document of 1245, by which Delmau de Castelnou transferred all his possessions in the territory of Sancta Maria de Juseguis to Don Jaime, the Infante of Majorca. It contains a statue of Our Lady between St. Ferréol and St. Lucy. Not far from the chapel is the mound where tradition says the Madonna was found. Out of respect it has never been cultivated.
About a mile from the little village of Corneilla-del-Vercol is the hermitage of Notre Dame du Paradis—in Latin, Regina Cœli. A fifteen minutes’ walk across the sunny plain brings you to it. It is in a retired spot well calculated to diffuse peace in the soul, and you pass out of the air tremulous with heat into the cool, solitary chapel with a delightful feeling of repose. The hermit, varying his duties by cultivating the land adjoining, may well find a calm happiness at the feet of Our Lady of Paradise. The very name brings joy to the gloomiest soul. The word Paradise, as the Père Bouhours says, “implies the cessation of every ill, and the fruition of all good.” Fra Egidio, one of the early Franciscans, used to fall into ecstasy at the very name of Paradise; for such holy souls kindle into a glow at the least spark, above all at the thought of the eternal bliss that awaits the end of their penitential life.
This chapel has recently been restored by the villagers and very prettily ornamented. One of the side chapels is dedicated to St. Acisclo, whom, with Santa Victoria, we found honored on Montserrat in Spain. Prudentius has consecrated a hymn to these two martyrs, who suffered at Cordova in the reign of Diocletian. The chapel is very ancient. In an old will of 1215 Dame Ermessende Raffarda bequeathed it half an aymine of barley, and not long after one Pons Martin, of Perpignan, wishing to be buried here, left it a whole load. High Mass is celebrated here on the Assumption, and there are frequent votive Masses throughout the year.
On the way from Caudies to Fénouillet is the hermitage of Notre Dame de la Vall, on a peak surrounded by a great number of old 308graves that are shaded by sad cypresses and olives. Mention is made of it in a privilege accorded by Pope Sergius IV. in 1011 to the monastery of St. Pierre de Fénouillet. Near the mount is the Ruisseau des Morts—the Stream of the Dead—to which the priest in his sable stole used to come down to receive those brought here for burial. About a mile from Caudies you come to the oratory of St. Ann, recently restored, with an inscription in the Catalan tongue stating that it was erected in 1483—that is, when the country was under the rule of Aragon. It then belonged to the domains of the counts of Fénouillet. Just beyond this oratory is a large cross at the foot of a long ramp leading up to the hermitage. The Madonna in the chapel is held in great veneration, as shown by the number of ex-votos on every side. She stands in a curious retablo of terra-cotta. In one of the compartments the demon is represented beneath the bier of the Virgin, seemingly half crushed by the weight, perhaps significant of her power over the Prince of Darkness. There is a kind of belvedere, to which you ascend by a flight of seventy-three steps, where you have a fine view over the valley of Caudies and the stern, barren mountains that surround it. On one of these rocky heights are to be seen the ruins of Castel Sizel, and on another those of the old château of Fénouillet, which take quite a poetic tinge up in that sunlit air. A great festival is held at Notre Dame de la Vall at the Assumption, when the mountain is clothed with joy and its summit crowned with light. At other times it wears a solemn aspect. To see it at night, especially, with its chapel on the top among lone graves and funereal cypresses, with the Stream of the Dead winding along at the foot, is something gloomy to behold. The monotonous flow of the sullen stream, the black shadows, the sighing of the night winds, as of suffering souls, strike a kind of terror into the heart.
The hermitage of St. Catharine nestles in the bottom of a charming valley about a mile and a half from Baixas, among almond-trees and luxuriant vines, the more pleasant from the contrast with the barren cliffs that enclose it. Here the titular saint has been venerated from time immemorial, as well as SS. Abdon and Sennen, who are in special honor in this country. They all have statues in the sanctuary, and above them stands supreme Notre Dame de la Salud, which is the Catalan for health—Salus Infirmorum. On St. Catharine’s day, as well as the feast of Our Lady of Snow, the whole valley is swarming with pilgrims and resonant with their Goigs, as the hymns in the native tongue are called.
The valley of the Agly leads to the hermitage of St. Antoine de Galamus by a pleasant road along the left bank of the river, shaded by trees and shrubs that never lose their verdure. On the other side rise bold cliffs with astonishing abruptness. At length you come to an iron gate that opens into the Bois de St. Antoine, where, along the path bordered with odorous plants, are the stations of the Via Crucis, and beyond is a cave dedicated to St. Magdalen, with her statue over a rude altar. Soon after you come to the hermitage at the end of the valley, surrounded by a wall, with a small belfry rising above it. Here you are welcomed 309with cordial simplicity by a hermit of saintly mien. A grotto, seventy feet deep and twenty wide, serves as a chapel. Eight steps lead to the marble altar, on which is a statue of the patron saint with the mysterious Tau on his mantle, and beside him the animal symbolic of all uncleanness. Every one who has seen the picture of the Temptation of St. Anthony by Teniers—and who has not?—remembers under how many aspects the great adversary was allowed to tempt the saint, and how, according to the significant legend, the victorious St. Anthony forced the malign spirit to remain beside him under the most suitable of forms.
This chapel has always enjoyed great celebrity since the cessation of an epidemic in 1782, in consequence of a solemn procession here by the neighboring people. Several rooms are built into the side of the cliff to accommodate those who wish to spend some days in meditating on the contemptu mundi. In one room is a shelf in the rock that used to serve as a bed for the hermit—certainly one that would not tempt him to remain too long inert. Near by is a small cave where the statue of St. Anthony was found. Here is a little fountain fed by water that comes trickling down the side of the cave with a pleasant murmur.
The place reminds one of Sir Lancelot, who, “after riding all night, became ware of a hermitage and a chappel that stood between two cliffs, and then he herd a lytel bell rynge to Masse, and thyder he rode, and alyghted and tyed hys hors to the gate.” But he that said Mass in our case was not “the byshop of Caunterburye,” but a poor friar of the Order of St. Francis. In 1482 this hermitage was taken possession of by the Observantine fathers, who occupied it for more than a century. They were succeeded by lay hermits. For several years past members of different religious orders have succeeded each other here, and by their austere lives recalled the ancient solitaries of the desert. You seem to see St. Pachomius in the wilderness among the clefts of the rocks. In 1843 Père Marie, of saintly memory, was the hermit here, and might have been daily seen hollowing out his tomb in the rock. Beside the yawning mouth lay a death’s head with the scroll: “Soon you will be what I am, all of you who behold me. Pray for the dead, and work out your own salvation.” Sometimes the hermit would stop in his lugubrious employment to prolong the moral as with the voice of one risen from the dead. He was succeeded by others who were desirous of pausing in the midst of their apostolic career and refreshing their weary souls by spending a season in retirement and prayer among the caves of this lonely mountain. One of these caves is in the side of a steep cliff difficult of access. On the wall is rudely graven: “The voice of him who crieth in the wilderness.” The very stones here, indeed, seem to cry out. The cave recalls the Earl of Warwick who became a hermit and scooped out his own cell in a cliff, as he is made to say:
The hermitage of St. Antoine is certainly a charming solitude. The cliffs are bare and stern, but the eye looks down on the verdure of trees and a meadow enamelled with 310flowers. The songs of the birds come up from their leafy nests, as if in response to the hermit’s psalm, and the sunny air is full of insects chirping in the bliss of their peaceful existence, only rivalled by his own.
Near the village of Pézilla de la Rivière is the ancient hermitage of St. Saturnin in a graveyard full of trees, and flowers, and crosses, showing the piety of the people towards their dead. Before burial their remains are taken into the chapel, where the Miserere is sung and absolution pronounced. Here are the statues of St. Saturnin, St. Blaise, St. Roch, and St. Sebastian, all popular saints in this region. On the wall is a tablet to the memory of a noble Béarnaise who became a canoness, and always used to attend High Mass here on St. Saturnin’s day. A legend tells how on one occasion, being overtaken by a hard rain, she was not wet in the least, while the servant who reluctantly accompanied her was drenched to the skin.
On the left bank of the Agly, about a mile and a half west of Claira, is the modest hermitage of St. Pierre del Vilar, surrounded by pale, trembling poplars, and tall reeds that rustle drearily in the wind, and orchards of olives—saddest, if most sacred, of trees. It wears an aspect of utter solitude. The chapel is so old that its origin is unknown. But there is a tombstone from a neighboring priory (now gone) to which the chapel gave its name, to the memory of Prior Berengarius, who died in 1193. There is an old statue of St. Peter here, carved out of wood, dressed in an alb, stole, and cope. This chapel was in such veneration that after the Revolution the people restored it, added a belfry, and on St. Peter’s day, as well as several other festivals, they come here in procession, and Mass is solemnly sung. At their departure they used to gather around the graves of the old hermits to chant the Requiem, but these graves are now covered by the cells built here in 1851 by some pious cenobites of the Order of St. Francis—refugees from Spain, who sought in prayer and solitude consolation for their exile.
The hermitage of St. Martin stands on one of the highest peaks around Camelas. It dates from a remote epoch, as appears by a bequest dated the twelfth of the Kalends of May, 1259. The seigneurie of Camelas belonged to the barony of Castelnou, and when Lady Anne de Fénouillet, the widow of one of the barons, took the veil “of her own free will,” as the account says, “de sa propria y mera voluntad, and not by force, or persuasion, or reward,” she gave all her rights over the domain of Camelas, including the hermitage of St. Martin, to the hospital of Ille, to which she had retired in order to serve the poor of Christ.
In the seventeenth century this venerable sanctuary, having fallen to partial ruin, was restored by the exertions of M. Curio, a priest of Camelas, who has left many details of its history in a manuscript of touching interest. He tells us how, when a mere escolanet dels rectors—a pupil of the curé—he used to walk in the processions of Rogation week, carrying the cross or the holy water; and when they came to St. Martin’s, and he saw its ruined condition, his young heart was deeply moved. The altar was poor. The old statues of St. George and St. Martin were defaced. The walls were crumbling to pieces, and there were holes in the vaulted roof; and the open 311doors allowed the goats and other animals to take shelter there. “Estas cosas,” says he, “eran pera mi de gran afflictio”—These things were to me a great affliction—and he longed to be able to repair the chapel. He finally became a priest and held a small benefice at Thuir, but he never lost sight of the chapel of St. Martin—a saint to whom he had special devotion—and he would have become a hermit here had it not been for the opposition of his superiors. On the 12th of January, 1637, during a visit at his brother’s in Camelas, while saying the rosary in the evening, he felt suddenly inspired to take immediate measures for the restoration of the chapel. But there were many obstacles. He was himself very poor, as he tells us, and the people around were equally so. He knew he should incur the reproaches of his brother as well as of the neighbors. And it would be expensive to transport brick, sand, and water to the mountain for the repairs. By a few sous from one, and a few francs from another, he was enabled to begin the work, but had to continue it at his own expense. Six years after the work was not completed. He now removed to Camelas to devote himself to it, bringing with him a pious old laborer to aid in the task, and a hermit to whom the bishop had given a license to collect alms within the circuit of two miles—a limitation made at the special request of the prudent M. Curio himself, lest, as he said, the hermit might have an excuse for “vagabondizing.” The zealous priest gave all his own income. He even made himself the organist of a church to add to his means. At length he had the happiness of seeing it completed, and, going to Perpignan, a painting of St. Martin was given him for the altar of his patron, and a retablo of sculptured wood for that of Notre Dame des Anges. The chapel was reopened September 25, 1644, and M. Curio figured as chief musician at the High Mass. His own inclination for the solitary life made him long to retire here himself, but he was again refused permission. At length, in the time of some pestilence, he made a vow to retire here for the space of a year, should he and his parish escape. He entered upon the fulfilment of his vow April 2, 1653.
The church consists of two aisles, each with its altar: one of St. Martin, with the old painting above it presented to M. Curio; and the other of Our Lady of the Angels with its ancient statue of coarse workmanship found in a neighboring cave still known as the Cova de la Mare de Deü.
In former times, after High Mass on St. Martin’s day, a small loaf, a cup of wine, and a morsel of cheese were given to all the people present; and the custom is still kept up, at least as to the bread.
On the way home Walburga stepped into the cathedral, the grand old Frauen Kirche, and remained a short while on her knees before the high altar. There Conrad and all that he had spoken passed out of her mind; she felt as if she were in another world, so changed was everything round about her, so solemn and still. Before her hung the ever-burning lamp, symbol of the Eternal Presence; and as Walburga’s eyes rested upon the sacred flame, she wondered at herself for bearing with so little resignation the troubles of this life.
“What I seek, what I yearn for,” she sighed, “is not to be found here below. Everything sooner or later passes away; the happiest home we may found on earth must in the end know tears and desolation. O eternity, eternity!”
Yet, strange to relate—and yet, no, not strange, but quite naturally enough—the moment Walburga emerged from this peaceful sanctuary and found herself once more in the noisy, airy, life-throbbing street, with the azure sky overhead and gladsome faces flitting to and fro, she felt very human again, ay, very human; and her craving for something human to love and be loved by grew none the less intense when presently she saw happy Ulrich and happy Moida advancing towards her arm-in-arm. It was not necessary for them to speak to tell that their hearts were throbbing in sweet harmony together, and that for them at least this world was all a paradise.
When Conrad and Ulrich found themselves back at Loewenstein again they talked of little else than their pleasant trip to Munich.
“The only harm ’twill do me,” said the artist, smiling, “is that I’ll lie awake a good while to-night thinking of Moida. The more I see of my betrothed, the more virtues do I discover in her. She is so full of common sense; she keeps store and keeps house too; nobody can make a better bargain when she goes to market, and it is a fortunate thing that Walburga has such a friend.”
“Miss Hofer is indeed a rare girl,” said Conrad, who was seated beside him watching the moon rise over the mountain; “and you have proved your own good sense in choosing her for your future spouse.” Then, assuming a graver tone: “But now let me tell you something which is of great concern to me. You remember that I spoke to you about a young lady whom I met with in the Pinakothek, and that it was in order to see her again that I went to-day to Munich. Well, she turns out to be your sister.”
“My sister! Walburga! Really!” exclaimed Ulrich, feigning surprise at this piece of news.
“And, Ulrich”—here Conrad took his hand in his—“I mean to try my best to win her heart.”
“And most sincerely do I hope you may succeed,” rejoined the youth.
“Well, is she quite free? Is any gentleman courting her?”
313“Nobody, sir, is courting her.”
“It must be because she is poor,” said Conrad inwardly, “and perhaps, too, a little proud. Well, a Loewenstein has a right to be proud.”
They remained thus conversing together until a late hour, until all the lights in the valley were out, until the moon was sailing high in the heavens, and every sound was hushed except the voice of the waterfall in the ravine back of the castle.
And when at length they withdrew to rest, Ulrich, instead of lying awake, as he had feared he might, soon fell asleep, and till cockcrow next morning did nothing but dream of his beloved Moida. He dreamt—O naughty dreamer!—that he was tearing off his buttons purposely, that he might see her plump, ready hand sew them on again; and when he opened his eyes and heard the monastery bell ringing the Angelus, Ulrich fell at once on his knees and prayed with fervor, because he knew that at that same hour in Fingergasse Moida was saying the Angelus too.
The day which now opened was to be a busy one at Loewenstein. Ulrich betimes set himself to work renovating the half-destroyed frescos; and, to his great delight, several beautiful and interesting pictures came to view as he carefully scraped the whitewash off the walls. They appeared in patches: here an eye would peep out upon him; there a hand, a foot, a tress of hair; until by and by a lovely damsel or a knight in armor would stand full-length before his admiring gaze. This whitewash had been daubed over nearly the whole interior of the tower by a simple-minded cobbler, who had intended to make the place his home after Ulrich and Walburga went away, but who only passed one night in it; then was scared off by ghosts.
And when Conrad, who was superintending a band of laborers outside, came in and saw the art treasures which had been brought to light, he clapped his hands for joy. But more even than with the fair lady and mailed warrior was he charmed with a wild, shaggy figure, underneath which in quaint Gothic letters was written the word “Attila.”
“And now, as I behold anew this fresco,” remarked Ulrich, “my childhood comes vividly back to me, and I remember once hearing my father tell my mother that the great-grandsires of those who laid the foundations of Loewenstein might have known the king of the Huns.”
In short, these unlooked-for discoveries so excited Conrad that he could hardly go back to the open air, where the stones and earth which covered the site of three other towers were being cleared away; and ever and anon he would run in again to show Ulrich an old coin or other curious object which the workmen had found amid the rubbish. Whereupon the youth would point to still another long-concealed wall-picture gradually coming to view, till finally Conrad exclaimed: “God bless the stupid cobbler! I’ll not rail at him any more. But for his vile whitewash I should not have enjoyed all these surprises.”
Yes, it was a busy, happy day for them both. When the sun dipped behind the mountain in the west Conrad called to Ulrich to cease his labors and come out and watch the path leading down into the valley. “For I am expecting,” said he, “all the things I purchased of your betrothed to arrive this evening, and 314Miss Hofer is coming with them. I kept it secret, lest you might be too distracted if you knew it.”
“Really! is Moida coming?” cried Ulrich.
Scarcely had the words escaped his lips when they heard the bark of a dog—not a sharp, quick yelp, but the thick, husky bark of a dog that is aged—and in another moment who should be seen emerging from a clump of hazel bushes through which the pathway led but Caro and his mistress.
Down at a break-neck pace flew Ulrich, and, ere the girl had ascended a dozen steps further, she found herself clasped in his arms.
“My knight always takes me by storm,” said Moida, laughing merrily as soon as she recovered her breath.
“Nay, ’tis you who were taking us by storm at the pace you were mounting,” answered Ulrich; then, catching her hand, he assisted her up the rest of the way.
“Everything is coming, sir, everything,” were Moida’s first words to Conrad, who greeted her warmly when she reached the spot where he stood. “But the donkeys have a heavy load—a very heavy load—and so I determined to run ahead and tell you they were coming.”
“Bravo!” cried Conrad. Then, patting Caro’s woolly head: “And is this the good old poodle that I have heard so much of?”
“Yes, sir. And as my pet would be killed by the horrid police if they knew he was alive, I concluded to carry him away from Munich. I hope you are not displeased at my bringing him here?”
“Displeased? Why, nobody likes dogs more than I; and this one shall find a snug home in my castle. But why didn’t you bring the other pet, too?”
“What! the nightingale?” exclaimed Moida, with an air of surprise. “Oh! Walburga would not part with him for anything.”
“Well, the young lady only yesterday spoke of giving him his freedom.”
“Did she? Well, I trust, sir, you persuaded her not to do so,” answered Moida, smiling inwardly; for Walburga had related to her the whole conversation which had passed betwixt herself and Conrad at the Pinakothek, and ever since she had been full of hope that great good would result from her friend’s acquaintance with the new owner of Loewenstein. “And not only will Walburga not let her bird out,” she thought to herself, “but it may end by its joining Caro in this peaceful retreat.”
“But now, Moida, do come and see what I have been about since morning,” spoke Ulrich, drawing her gently along. With this all three passed into the tower, where verily a great change had been wrought in a few hours.
Not only were many frescos long invisible brought again to view, but it was now manifest that each figure and group of figures, from the barbarian Attila down to the most modern one of all, which was scarce a century old, were linked together and presented a tolerably good pictorial history of the house of Loewenstein; and Conrad observed to Moida with a roguish smile: “Your betrothed, miss, has for his remote ancestor a Hun.”
They were still examining these wall-paintings when the donkeys made their appearance, and, although the hour was rather late, Moida clapped her hands and said: “Let us put everything to rights at once. Do!” Accordingly, inspirited 315by her blithe voice, Conrad and Ulrich, without summoning others to help them, unpacked the loads, and so zealously did they work that in a very short while everything was in its proper place except the huge earthenware stove.
Then Conrad donned a suit of armor (rusty and dented, but all the better for being so), and, clutching firmly a heavy two-handed sword, laid about him right and left like mad for above a minute, to Moida’s great delight, and until he was fain to pause for breath.
“I have a friend in Cologne,” said he, “a republican like myself in his opinions; but I mean to write and warn him never to buy a castle—never; otherwise he’ll become a changed man. Oh! there’s nothing like buying a castle to make one an aristocrat.”
After joining in the hearty laugh with which he ended this speech, Moida said to him in a whisper, and as though she felt there was something touching in what she was about to communicate: “My friend Walburga entered the curiosity-shop to-day, sir, for the first time since I have had anything in it belonging to Loewenstein; and ere I packed up the various objects, she placed her hand on each one and stroked it, and even kissed yonder clock, for she said: ‘It stood in my mother’s chamber, it called many a happy hour, and now ’tis going back to the old home again.’”
“Well, now let me tell you a secret,” said Conrad, likewise in an undertone, but with a bright gleam in his eye: “I hope one of these days to see the young lady here herself.”
“Oh! wouldn’t that be charming! Wouldn’t that be glorious!” replied Moida, who understood what he meant. “Why, in the whole of Bavaria there is not her equal, and I am sure you will make her an excellent husband.”
“I hope so, Miss Hofer, even though I am no longer a believer in Christianity.”
“’Twill give Walburga the great happiness of making you a Christian again,” she added, with an arch smile. But Conrad’s expression did not respond to hers, and for a minute or two he was silent. When again he opened his lips the tone of his voice was changed, and, in order to shake off the gloom which he felt creeping upon him, he asked her to sing him a song.
“Yes, yes, do!” exclaimed Ulrich, turning away from the grated window through which he had been gazing while the others were whispering to each other. “Sing that wild ballad called the ‘Scream of the Eagle.’” Moida sang. Never before had Conrad Seinsheim heard anything half so thrilling, and the words were accompanied by such graceful motions as proved the girl to be no mean actress.
“Yes, it is a grand song,” she said when it was finished; “and I like to be in the country, where I may give it with my whole heart. In Munich our lodging is too small and the air out-doors too heavy with beer for such rousing, inspiring words.”
“Your grandfather composed it, did he not?” said Ulrich.
“Oh! no. But he and his riflemen used to chant it when they went into battle. ’Tis as old as the hills; perhaps it rang in the ears of the Roman legions.”
“Well, truly, you are a rare bird,” thought Conrad Seinsheim as he looked at Moida’s bright-blue eyes and cheeks glowing with health; “and if I had not already found my ideal I’d wish to marry you.”
316Then, praying her to sit down in one of the old family chairs: “Now please,” he said, “tell me a little of your history; for”—here Conrad dropped his voice—“I hope ere long that you and Ulrich, and Walburga and myself, as well as Caro and the nightingale, will all form one happy family together. Therefore I am curious to know more about you.”
This was spoken in such a kindly way that Moida could not refuse. Accordingly, she began and told him how she was descended from a race of mountaineers who had never been serfs, like the peasants in other parts of Europe.
“We did not dwell in castles,” said Moida, darting a sportive glance at Ulrich, who was patting her hand. “Still, for all that we were nobles.”
“Yes, yes, you were indeed,” cried the youth.
“But after grandfather was put to death our family quitted their native place in South Tyrol—’twas too full of painful memories—and came north to Innspruck; and finally we drifted to Munich, where I now live. My parents are dead, but Walburga is like a sister to me; and as for this boy—”
“He is a poor, dreamy fellow, but, thanks to you, is turning over a new leaf at last,” interrupted Ulrich. “And I mean soon to have a studio in Munich, where I’ll paint fine pictures, and my darling sha’n’t keep shop any longer.”
“Ay, you must be weary of that sort of life,” observed Conrad.
“Well, if people would only buy something when they pause to look at my curiosities, ’twould not be so trying to my feelings, sir. But you can’t imagine how it excites me when I see a gentleman eyeing the things in the window, even pressing his nose against the glass to obtain a better view. Sometimes he actually enters and scrutinizes every article in the store; asks the price of this and that; smiles approvingly; in fact, looks as if he were about to draw forth his purse; then he coolly turns and walks out. O sir! I have more than once cried for disappointment.”
“Well, except that I might never have met you,” said Ulrich, “I’d rather you had stayed hidden among your native hills than lead such a life.”
“Ay, nothing is so mean and slavish as trade,” remarked Conrad, “and I am very glad that I have given it up.”
“Ha! but if you or your father, sir, had not turned over a good many banknotes and thalers, you might never have become owner of Loewenstein,” said the wise Moida. “And then dear Caro wouldn’t have had a home here, and all these pikes and helmets and other venerable relics would have been for ever scattered to the winds. Whereas now, thanks to your wealth, there will soon be no castle in all Tyrol like this one.”
“Well, tell me, Miss Hofer, what would you have me do now that I am out of business?” asked Conrad. “A man ought not to be idle.”
“Do? Why, I’d hunt chamois, and fish in the Inn, and climb the glaciers, and I’d find happiness in making others happy, for there are many poor people in the Innthal.”
“But would that suffice? Oh! you do not know what a restless mortal I am. I have always been sighing for something, but no sooner do I attain my heart’s desire—and thus far I have been very fortunate—than straightway I begin to 317yearn for something else. Suppose now I devote myself to science, say to astronomy, and build a telescope, a gigantic one, bigger than the biggest, and sweep the heavens millions of miles beyond the farthest star now seen?”
“Well, I’d rather busy myself with the things near me,” returned Moida. “However, if you like to look through a telescope, why I’d build one. But, telescope or no telescope, I’d do nothing but laugh from sunrise till sundown if this castle belonged to me.”
And this was true enough. Hers was a happy nature; nothing ever disturbed her serenity. Although poor, she did not envy the rich. Although a very good girl, she was never troubled by religious scruples; the most fiery sermon on eternal punishment could not keep Moida’s head from nodding after the preacher had been preaching more than twenty minutes, and Walburga used to envy her from the bottom of her heart. And now Ulrich’s betrothed felt inclined to smile at Conrad, who was so rich and free from care, but whose visage had assumed a grave look, and she thought to herself: “’Tis a pity he has moody spells, for dear Walburga is prone to them, too; she should have a laughing, jovial husband.”
Then, to cheer her host, Moida sang another song, which presently drove away the cloud from his face. But the girl paused not with one; the music continued to flow in an unbroken stream from her lips, until the oil in the lamp burned low and warned them that it was time to seek repose.
“And now good-night,” said Conrad, after showing his fair guest to a little room near the top of the tower. “I hope the moonbeams shining in through the chinks in the wall will not keep you awake. Good-night.”
“Nothing ever keeps me awake; I’ll soon shut out the moon. Good-night, sir,” she answered. And in a very short while Moida was fast asleep, with her rosary in her hand—for she always closed her eyes before she had half finished, and let her guardian angel say the rest of the prayer.
“Why, what an early bird you are!” exclaimed Walburga the following morning, as she was preparing to set off for the Pinakothek. “Back already?”
“Yes,” answered Moida. “I took the first train. Not that I didn’t wish to stay longer, but—”
“Ah! true, you have to look after the dinner—my breakfast was miserable without you—and keep store, and one night was quite as long as you could be spared,” added the other, smiling; and good-natured Moida smiled too; then with an arch glance said: “By the way, he came with me.”
“He! Whom do you mean?” asked Walburga, pretending not to understand.
“Why, Conrad Seinsheim. And really, I advise you to accept him if he proposes. The short time I passed in his company has convinced me that he is a good man, and I doubt not but you will bring him back to the faith. Yes, love and prayer will make a Christian of him again sooner than anything else.”
“But what makes you think he has any notion of courting me?”
“Oh! I can tell by the way he talks, and by what you yourself told me about him the other day. So you’ll surely see him this forenoon; he may be already at the gallery awaiting you.”
318“Well, true, Mr. Seinsheim did ask my leave to come and renew our conversation. Therefore I presume he will be there.”
“Yet a moment since you feigned not to know that he cared for you,” continued Moida, twitching her sleeve.
“Oh! he merely wishes to converse on art. Besides, some men enjoy being near a woman, without having any thought of matrimony. There are full as many flirts in one sex as in the other; however, if Mr. Seinsheim imagines he can throw dust in my eyes, he’ll be mistaken. It shall be all art between us—nothing but art; not a single silly syllable.”
“Well, he doesn’t look like one to pay foolish compliments; you have owned as much yourself,” said Moida. “Now, remember his words when you spoke of uncaging your nightingale; and if I can read character, Mr. Seinsheim is just the man to ask a girl to be his wife at the second or third interview. So, dear friend, you may return at noon engaged.”
“How can you dream of such a thing!” said Walburga, half reproachfully.
“Oh! now don’t be vexed. But let me calmly inquire why I should not dream of it; for where could he find a better helpmate?”
“Because all men are alike. Even the holy patriarchs were guided by outward appearances in choosing their wives. Scripture tells us that Laban had two daughters, Leah and Rachel: ‘Leah was tender-eyed; but Rachel was beautiful, and Jacob loved Rachel.’”
This was more than Moida could gainsay; therefore she let the subject drop and asked about the bird.
“I have given him his liberty,” said Walburga.
“Have you truly? Well, I declare!”
This was all that Moida could utter. Then, putting on her hat and shawl, Walburga quitted the room, leaving her friend repeating to herself:
“What a sentimental girl she is! What a sentimental girl she is!”
We may be sure that while on her way to the picture gallery Walburga thought only of the one whom she expected to meet there, and she quite agreed with Moida that Conrad did not seem like a man to play at courtship. Yet, admitting that he was in earnest, would he not prove to be in the end like the great majority of his sex—a blind follower only of what his eyes revealed to him? Would he dive below the surface and judge her by her inner self?
“I will try not to indulge any hope,” thought Walburga. Yet, at this very moment, down in her heart’s depths the flower of hope was already beginning to bud, and no doubt that was why her step this morning was lighter than usual. As for Conrad having lost his faith, however much she regretted it, and pious girl though she was, this did not lead her to believe that he was a bad man. Walburga had sense enough to discern the difficulties which lie in the way of belief in the revelation to those who have wandered from, or never known, the truth; she knew, too, that the universities were full of learned professors who spoke of God as a myth. “And even some saints,” she said, “have been racked by doubt, and overcame this, the greatest of all the temptations of the arch-fiend, only by severe self-tortures. Therefore I will continue to pray for Conrad Seinsheim.” (Walburga had remembered him in 319her prayers ever since she had heard that he was an unbeliever). “And I will pray also for dear Ulrich, who is young and confiding, and is much in Conrad’s power.”
A quarter of an hour later and the girl was busy at her easel, and working swiftly too. “For I must accomplish all I can before he arrives,” she murmured to herself.
But Conrad did not allow her time to do much. Presently his voice was heard bidding her good-morning. Whereupon she returned his greeting in a cheery tone, but without looking round.
“Gracious lady,” he began, “doubtless Miss Hofer has already told you of her pleasant visit to Loewenstein. The weather was delightful, the old place looked charming, and I should not have let her return so soon, nor come myself either, only that I longed to see you again.”
“Dear Moida enjoyed it very much, but she knows that ’tis impossible for me to get along without her,” answered Walburga, revealing only by a faint flush the emotion excited by Conrad’s words. Her hand, however, was steadier than it had been the first time he paid her a compliment. Then the other, after observing her a moment in silence, went on:
“How rapidly you paint, Miss Von Loewenstein! And what life you throw into your picture!”
“Well, yes, sir, I am a quick worker. I hope my brother is not disappointing you and dawdling over his task.”
“No, indeed! And I consider myself very fortunate in having found such an artist. There he was, seated amid the ruins of the old castle, when I arrived, apparently waiting for me to appear; and if you saw the tower now you would hardly recognize it. Why, some of the frescos, since Ulrich has restored them, are as fine as anything in this gallery.”
“Really!” exclaimed Walburga.
“Yes, really. And he declares his skill and energy are all due to Moida. Ulrich says she spurs him on, and I believe it. Oh! nothing like a woman to put fire into a man.”
“Well, some gentlemen, sir, manage to live and prosper without any such spurring,” rejoined Walburga, with a smile lurking on her lips.
“I am exceedingly hard to please; that is why I am still a bachelor,” said her admirer, wincing a little at this remark.
“Well, believe me, sir, ’tis foolish to be so fastidious. Why, in any town of ten, nay, of even five thousand inhabitants a good man may find a good woman to be his wife.”
“Do you think so?”
“’Tis my conviction. This hunting up and down the world for an ideal woman is nonsense.” Then, with a slight gesture of impatience: “O these lips!” exclaimed Walburga—“these lips! when shall I get them right?”
“Well, you see, Miss Von Loewenstein, what a severe critic you are of your exquisite copy of Carlo Dolce; whereas to me it seems already perfect.”
“Oh! but this is a picture, not a living being. Here the eye is our only guide. In the other case—”
“Then a blind man might do as well as one who had sight in choosing a wife?” interrupted Conrad, laughing.
Walburga laughed, too, then answered:
“Verily, sir, there is more truth in that than you imagine. He knows little of a woman who knows 320only what his eyes tell him of her.”
“Well, you may be right,” he added musingly; “you may be right. Yet I trust a good deal to mine.”
“If women did the same, might there not be fewer weddings?” said Walburga. “Besides, I know I am right. Why, the happiest lady in Munich—I know her intimately—is wedded to a little squab of a man, who squints so badly that his two eyes seem blended into one.”
Here a pause ensued, during which Conrad made up his mind that Ulrich’s sister was no ordinary character. She had ideas of her own, and was not afraid to express them. Then, unable to resist the temptation to speak something else that was flattering, he said:
“I wonder how a person so gifted as yourself should be content to remain a mere copyist.”
“’Tis all one can be in our age,” replied Walburga. “The days of originality are gone by. We need another deluge to blot out whatever mankind has wrought in literature and art; then, after the flood should have subsided, artists and writers might begin anew.”
“Oh! but surely there are original things painted and written nowadays?” said Conrad.
“It may appear so, sir. But ’tis only because the ignorant public does not know where lies hidden the musty parchment or worm-eaten canvas whence the so-called genius has stolen his prize. No, no; originality, in this age of the world, is the art of knowing how to pilfer. True originality is stark dead.” And the girl ended these words with a sigh, which proved that she, at least, believed what she said to be true.
“Well, if all copyists did their duty as faithfully as yourself,” pursued Conrad, “we might readily forego any more originals.” Then, while the bright color which this speech brought to her cheek was still glowing upon it, he added: “And now, gracious lady, let me remind you that I once asked if your picture was for sale, and you told me ‘yes.’ But we came to no bargain.”
“Well, what will you give me for it?” said Walburga, little dreaming what a weighty response her question would draw forth.
“A castle and my own poor self with it,” answered Conrad.
For full a minute the girl stayed silent; her brush fell to her lap, and, without giving him a glance, she bowed her head. Then presently, resuming her work: “Come back, sir,” she said, “in three days and you shall have my decision.”
“Oh! but why not to-day? now? at this moment? Nobody is near to hear what you say,” pleaded Conrad, and so fervent was his tone that Walburga’s resolution was half shaken. Then, while her right hand hung quivering upon the canvas, he seized it and pressed it to his lips.
The effect of this kiss was magical; it thrilled like lightning through every vein in her body, and from that instant Walburga’s heart was won.
But presently, to Conrad’s amazement, the glow faded from her cheek and she heaved a sigh; then came a tear.
“What can it mean?” he asked himself, strongly tempted to sweep the bright jewel away with another kiss. “What can it mean?” And again he implored her to end his suspense, to let him know his fate at once.
“Please do not urge me; I would rather not,” said Walburga, 321in a voice little above a whisper. “I believe, sir, you love me; therefore wait and be patient.”
These last words lent fire to Conrad’s hopes, and scarcely doubting that her response, when it came, would be favorable, he allowed her hand to go free.
But any more work was out of the question for the fair artist; while the other, albeit longing to linger in her company, judged it would be best to withdraw. And so Conrad went away, full of gladness, leaving Walburga cherishing, too, the fond belief that here was a man who was not like other men—a man who would take her for her inner worth, who would give her that home, that celestial harmony of loving hearts, which had been for years the craving of her soul.
TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.
The editor of Popular Science Monthly gave us in one of his late issues an article concerning the belief in hell. The article begins by referring to the lively discussion which has recently been carried on in the pulpit and the press as to whether there is a state of eternal torments. According to Prof. Youmans, this discussion shows that “there has been, thanks to the influence of science, a pretty rapid liberalizing of theological opinion during the past generation, and is an instructive indication of the advance that has been made.” After this expression of satisfaction he very naturally remarks that the question of the existence of a veritable hell is a theological one, which he cheerfully leaves “to those interested,” as if men of science, especially those of a certain school, were not interested in the question of knowing what is kept in store for those who sin against truth and against God. But “the topic,” he adds, “has also a scientific side. The rise and course of the idea, or what may be called the natural history of the belief in hell, is a subject quite within the sphere of scientific inquiry. It is legitimate to ask as to how the notion originated, as to its antiquity, the extent to which it has been entertained, the forms it has assumed, and the changes it has undergone; and from this point of view it of course involves the principle of evolution.” Whence he concludes that a few suggestions concerning this view of the subject may not be inappropriate.
This preamble, though the least objectionable portion of Prof. Youmans’ article, is full of questionable assertions. First, the discussion about the existence of eternal punishment does not show any “rapid liberalizing” of theological opinion. For, on the one hand, the doctrine of hell is not a theological opinion but a revealed dogma; and, on the other, the foolish attempt of discrediting it among the ignorant did not proceed from theologians, but from such men as have been, 322and are, the worst enemies of theology. Theology is essentially based on authority; hence theology has no existence in the Protestant sects, whose very reason of being is a contemptuous disregard of authority and the assumed right of private interpretation. Now, all those who ventured to argue against the existence of eternal punishment belonged to Protestant sects. And, therefore, their “liberal” view of the subject does not constitute “theological opinion.” Protestants may, indeed, assume the title of “divines”; but the title is not the thing. There is no real theology outside of the Catholic Church. When Catholic divines shall discuss the existence of hell as a free theological opinion—which, of course, will never happen—then only Prof. Youmans will be welcome to say that there has been “a liberalizing of theological opinion.”
But, secondly, the very idea of “liberalizing” Protestant thought is supremely ludicrous. For who has been the forerunner, the inventor, the father, and the fosterer of liberalism but Protestant thought? Whence did religious scepticism spring but from Protestant inconsistency? Liberalism is nothing but Protestantism applied to philosophical, political, and social questions. It is Protestant thought, therefore, that has liberalized a portion of modern society, not modern thought that has liberalized Protestant opinion. To liberalize Protestant thought is like carrying coal to Newcastle.
Thirdly, it is not true that the recent discussion of the doctrine of hell shows “the influence of science.” It simply shows the ignorance of some Protestant divines and the wickedness of perverted human hearts. Science, as now understood, is exclusively concerned with things that fall under observation and experiment, or that can be logically inferred or mathematically deduced from experiment and observation. Now, surely, the torments of hell are not a matter of observation and experiment during the present life, as even Prof. Youmans will concede. And therefore it is evident that the doctrine of hell cannot be made the subject of scientific reasoning. On the other hand, how can science influence the opinion of men as to believing or not believing in a future state of eternal punishment? Our advanced thinkers assume that science knows everything, and that what is unknown to science has no existence. It is on this ground that they ignore revelation, creation, immortality, and a number of other important truths. But the absurdity of such an assumption is so evident that there can be no mistake about it. Science knows, or pretends to know, matter and force; but it knows nothing about right and wrong, nothing about virtue and vice, nothing about religion and moral law, nothing about the origin and the finality of things, and it is so ignorant (we speak of advanced science) that it even fails to see the absolute necessity of a Creator. Is it not ridiculous, then, to assume that there may be no hell because modern science professes to know nothing about its existence?
But “the topic,” continues Prof. Youmans, “has also a scientific side. The rise and course of the idea, or what may be called the natural history of the belief in hell, is a subject quite within the sphere of scientific inquiry. It is legitimate to ask as to how the notion originated, as to its antiquity, the 323extent to which it has been entertained, the forms it has assumed, and the changes it has undergone, and from this point of view it of course involves the principle of evolution.” This reasoning, on which the professor endeavors to ground a scientific claim to meddle with a revealed doctrine, is altogether preposterous. For, although it be legitimate to ask how the notion of hell originated, and how ancient it is, and how ignorance and vulgar prejudices may have distorted it, nevertheless it is not from natural science that an answer to such questions can be expected. The theologian, the historian, and the moral philosopher are the only competent authorities on the subject. The scientist, as such, is not qualified to speak of the origin of revealed doctrines; for science, especially advanced science, has no knowledge of revelation. Hence, when our scientists venture to pass a judgment upon matters connected with revelation, they deserve to be reminded of the good old precept: Let the cobbler stick to his last.
The reader will have remarked that Prof. Youmans proposes to deal with the “forms” which the doctrine of eternal punishment has assumed, and with the “changes” it has undergone. This, of course, has no bearing on the question of the existence of hell; for the existence of things does not depend on the changeable views entertained as to their mode of existing. But the professor, who is wise in his generation, perceived that by insisting on the changes undergone by the doctrine two advantages could be gained. On the one hand, a precious opportunity would be offered of confounding our revealed doctrine with the fabulous conceptions of the pagan world; on the other hand, the professor would be enabled to treat our revealed doctrine as a mere development of old fables, according to certain principles of evolution which modern science has invented though never established. But we would remark that, since the professor meant to show, as we see from the conclusion of his article, that our Christian doctrine of hell “should be eliminated from the popular creed,” the argument drawn from the discordant views of heathen and barbarous nations should have been considered preposterous. For what does it matter if the pagan fables took different forms and underwent any number of changes? It is quite enough for us that our own doctrine has been invariably the same. It is a blunder, therefore, to condemn the latter for the variations of the former.
Prof. Youmans begins to develop his subject in the following manner: “In the first place, it is necessary to rise above that narrowness of view which regards the doctrine of hell as especially a Christian doctrine or as the monopoly of any particular religion. On the contrary, it is as ancient and universal as the systems of religious faith that have overspread the world.” In our opinion, this pretended necessity of rising “above the narrowness of view” which regards the doctrine of hell as especially Christian doctrine is only a futile pretext for putting on the same level the Christian dogma and the pagan inventions. In the recent discussion of the doctrine by the Protestant sects there had been no question about the existence of the imaginary hell of the pagans; the whole question 324regarded the Scriptural hell. Hence a reference to pagan ideas could not be necessary. Nor is it true that the view which regards the doctrine of hell as a specially Christian doctrine is “narrow.” We see that different sects have kept or borrowed some points of doctrine from the Catholic Church, and that they have perverted them more or less, as was the case with the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, of the Eucharist, of justification, and of other supernatural truths; and yet no one will say that it is a “narrow view” to regard these doctrines as essentially and exclusively Catholic. For to whom were they originally revealed but to the Catholic Church? and where are they to be found in their primitive entirety but in the Catholic Church? The vagaries of sectarian thought are surely not to be considered as a development of doctrine; they are only a travesty and an adulteration of truth, just in the same manner as the evolution of species is no part of natural science, being only a mass of absurdities, as we have abundantly shown in some of our past numbers. To mix together doctrinal truth and doctrinal error is not to avoid narrowness but to produce confusion. Were we to collect all the errors of modern scientists about force or about the constitution of matter, we could easily prove, by Prof. Youmans’ method, that science is a mere imposition and a disgrace to the age. But our logic differs from that of the professor; hence we do not consider it “narrowness” to distinguish science from the errors of scientists, that truth and error may not be involved indiscriminately in the same condemnation. But let us proceed:
“The oldest religions of which we have any knowledge—Hindoo, Egyptian, and the various Oriental systems of worship—all affirm the doctrine of a future life with accompanying hells for the torture of condemned souls. We certainly cannot assume that all these systems are true and of divine origin; but, if not, then the question forces itself upon us how they came to this belief. The old historic religious systems involved advanced and complicated creeds and rituals, and if they were not real divine revelations in this elaborate shape, we are compelled to regard them as having had a natural development out of lower and cruder forms of superstition. To explain these religions we must go behind them. There is a prehistoric, rudimentary theology of the primitive man, the quality of which has to be deduced from his low, infantine condition of mind, interpreted by what we observe among the inferior types of mankind in the present time.”
This passage contains the main argument of Prof. Youmans’ article, by which he intends to show that the doctrine of hell has no ground in divine revelation, but simply originated in human ignorance. Unfortunately, Professor Youmans’ interpretation of history cannot be depended upon. The fact that Hindoos, Egyptians, and all other nations admitted in some shape the doctrine of hell is a very good evidence that the doctrine of the existence of hell was co-extensive with humanity, and therefore had its origin in a primitive tradition of the race, and not in the imagination of isolated individuals or families. This primitive tradition, as well as the primitive religion, must be traced to Noe and his family. It is Noe’s religion, not the Hindoo or the Egyptian or any other Oriental religion, that has been “the oldest religion of which we have any knowledge”; and this oldest religion had its secure foundation in 325the knowledge of the true God and of his supreme, omnipotent, provident will. Hence, when Prof. Youmans, forsaking all mention of this primitive religion derived from direct divine revelation, resorts to other systems of worship more or less corrupt, and declares that “we cannot assume that all these systems are true and of divine origin,” he shows either a perverse desire of deceiving his readers, or at least a strange ignorance of ancient history.
The consequence he draws from the preceding assertions is even more unreasonable. If the religious systems of the ancient heathens were not divine revelations, “we are compelled,” he says, “to regard them as having a natural development out of lower and cruder forms of superstition.” This conclusion is so contrary to all we know of mankind that it required the inventive genius of an advanced scientist to formulate it. The known truth is that the objectionable systems of worship invented among different nations were not a progress of humanity from a lower form of superstition, but a departure from the form of worship originally practised according to God’s prescription, a fall from the region of light into the darkness of error. Noe’s religion was no superstition; and it is from Noe’s religion that the pagan nations apostatized by a gradual corruption of revealed truth.
Our advanced scientist invents also “a prehistoric rudimentary theology of the primitive man.” The invention is quite new and deserves to be patented. And the primitive man was still “in a low, infantine condition of mind”; which is another great discovery. The pity is that it has no ground. The Darwinian theory of evolution cannot be appealed to; for it is philosophically, historically, and even scientifically exploded, so that only “the inferior types of mankind”—that is, “the low and infantine minds”—can hear of it without shaking their heads. The primitive man knew his noble origin, conversed with his Creator, received his orders, and learned from him his own destiny. Adam was a great deal sharper, wittier, and more instructed in all important things than his modern scientific descendants; and Noe, the second father of our race, the second propagator and witness of divine revelation, was as eminent a man at least as any of our contemporaries; for he it was who transmitted to his descendants that knowledge of astronomy, architecture, philosophy, history, agriculture, and other arts and sciences by which the post-diluvian world, as soon as sufficiently repeopled, displayed in the wonderful magnificence of Babylonian and Egyptian civilization the intellectual treasures inherited from the antediluvian culture. Such was the man who handed down to us the fundamental truths of primitive religion. If such a man is said to have been “in a low and infantine condition of mind,” could we not say as much of the average scientist of the time?
The professor remarks that the early men, in profound ignorance of the surrounding world and of their own nature, must have grossly misinterpreted outward appearances and their internal experiences, and this, he says, “is certain.” Indeed? How did the professor ascertain this? Men whose lives were measured by centuries could not have sufficient experience of things to save them from gross mistakes! They made no sufficient observations 326to enable them to interpret exterior and interior phenomena! They did not even know their own natures! Their ignorance was profound! Adam had the advantage of nine hundred and thirty years of experience, and yet “it is certain” that he remained in profound ignorance of the surrounding world! His descendants soon invented different useful arts, as metallurgy, architecture, and music both vocal and instrumental; they built cities, and reached that high degree of civilization and refinement without which the subsequent universal corruption would have been impossible; and yet, if we believe our professor, they did not know their natures nor what they were doing!
Then we are told that the analysis of the conditions of early men “has abundantly shown how these primitive misunderstandings led inevitably to manifold superstitions.” It is plain, however, that the conditions of early men have never been analyzed by those who reject the Mosaic history, for the first requisite for proceeding to such an analysis is a knowledge of the conditions themselves which are to be analyzed; and these conditions are found nowhere but in the book of Genesis. And as to “primitive misunderstandings” and the “inevitable superstitions” to which they have led, can Prof. Youmans give us more detailed information? Did Adam, in his “profound ignorance of the surrounding world,” imagine that the sun was a god? or the moon a goddess? Or was it possible for him to fall into “inevitable superstition,” seeing that he had been in frequent direct communication with his true Creator and God?
It is altogether ridiculous to pretend that Herbert Spencer “has carefully traced out this working of the primitive mind, and explained how the early men, by their crude misconceptions of natural things, were gradually led to the belief in a ghost-realm of beings appended to the existing order.” Herbert Spencer did nothing of the kind. He analyzed fictions, not facts, and his conclusions are worthless.
But, says Mr. Youmans, “the idea of a life after death, so universally entertained among races of the lowest grades of intelligence, is accounted for, and is only to be accounted for, in this way. Through experiences of sleep, dreams, and loss and return of consciousness at irregular times, ... there grew up the idea of a double nature—of a part that goes away leaving the body lifeless, and returns again to revivify it; and thus originated the theory of immaterial ghosts or spirits.” This is just what we could expect from an admirer of Herbert Spencer’s philosophical method. Prof. Youmans does not know, apparently, that the idea of a life after death is a simple corollary of a manifest truth—viz., that the reasoning principle which is in man is neither matter, nor an affection or modification of matter, but a distinct substance, and one which possesses powers and properties of a much higher order than the powers and properties of matter. This truth, against which materialists can allege nothing which has not been refuted a hundred times, combined with another obvious truth which even advanced science admits—viz., that no substance is or can be naturally annihilated—leads directly to the consequence that our reasoning principle, our soul, will naturally survive the death of our body. This mere hint concerning the substantiality, spirituality, 327and natural immortality of the human soul may here suffice. It shows that men had no need of resorting to the experiences of dreams, swoons, catalepsy, trance, and other forms of insensibility to be enabled to infer that the human soul is a spiritual substance. Every act of our intellectual faculties proclaims that our soul is a self-moving and self-possessing being. Dreams and swoons and catalepsy, being common to the lower animals, have never been considered a proof of the spirituality and immortality of the human soul. It is childish, therefore, to derive the idea of spirituality and immortality from the experience of such phenomena.
Mr. Youmans tells us also that when the conception of a separate and future life arose in men’s minds, such a life could not have been supposed to differ much from that of the present order of things. This he takes for granted, owing to the profound ignorance which, according to advanced science, characterized the primitive men; and he illustrates this view by some examples of savages, who bury food, weapons, implements, etc., with the bodies of their dead friends. But, “as knowledge accumulated, the conception grew incongruous, and underwent important modifications, so that similarity gradually passed into contrast. The intimacy of the intercourse supposed to be carried on between the two worlds decreased; the future world was conceived of as more remote, and as having other occupations and gratifications more consonant with developing ideas of the present life.” Such is the professor’s theory. We need hardly say that, as a scientific theory, it has no value. Science is based on facts; but here we have nothing but dreams exploded by history as well as by philosophy. The origin of the belief in hell is not to be traced to the profound ignorance of the primitive man. This profound ignorance is not a fact but a fiction. The assumption that man’s intellect was originally in an undeveloped condition, and that it has gone on improving all along till it became able to discover the incongruousness of its previous notions and to give them up, is another fiction. That the “accumulation of knowledge,” such as obtained among infidel nations, could enlighten them on a question as to which nothing can be definitely known on merely natural grounds, is a third fiction; whilst the truth is that the pretended knowledge of the heathens, like the pretended science of our modern sceptics, has been rather a source of innumerable absurdities, by which the primitive holy and healthy traditions of the race have been obscured, corrupted, and disfigured.
But the professor has more to say in support of his “scientific” view. “Rude conceptions regarding good and evil could not fail to be early involved with considerations of man’s futurity. Good and evil are inextricably mixed up in this world, which seems always to have been regarded as a faulty arrangement, and, as there was little hope of rectifying it here, the future life came to be regarded as compensatory to the present.... This idea of using the next world to redress the imperfections and wrongs of this grew up early and survives still, and it has exerted a prodigious influence in human affairs.” It is evident that the consideration of man’s futurity, to be rational, must involve the consideration 328of man’s moral nature; for the futurity of a moral being is necessarily connected with the moral order. It would be folly to deny that virtue deserves reward, or that vice deserves punishment; and even the most stupid understand that the future of a scoundrel must differ from the future of a saint. This universal belief “survives still,” as Mr. Youmans himself testifies, and is not “growing obsolete,” as he pretends, but is still universal in our civilized society. Of course a dozen or two of advanced thinkers may be found who reject this universal belief; for, as they suppress God and worship Nature, they would be embarrassed to explain how the good can be rewarded and the wicked punished by their blind goddess that has no knowledge of the moral law. But this shows only the “profound ignorance” of such advanced thinkers regarding things supersensible, and proves to demonstration that, in spite of all their pretensions, they do not belong to the civilized world. The early men, whose conceptions our professor denounces as “rude,” were better and deeper philosophers than he is. They recognized a personal God, the eternal source of morality, the judge of his creatures, the rewarder of justice, and the punisher of crime. They knew, therefore, that the problem of good and evil was to be solved “not by the absorption and disappearance of evil,” but by separating the good from the bad, “the good being all collected in a good place, and the bad ones all turned into a bad place.” Mr. Youmans does not like this solution. He seems to insinuate that the true solution implies the absorption and disappearance of evil. He seems to say: Let virtue be rewarded, but let not wickedness be punished. He may have his reasons for preferring this solution, but we have none for accepting it. Reason as well as revelation declare it to be unacceptable.
What follows is a vulgar tirade against priesthood. All priests indiscriminately are denounced by our liberal professor for having taught the existence of heaven and hell. He says:
“As the grosser superstitions were gradually developed into systematic religions, a priestly class arose, and religious beliefs were embodied in definite creeds. Fundamental among these was the belief in heaven as a place of happiness, and of hell as a place of torment for the wicked. To one or other of these places, it was held, all men are bound to go after death; but to which depended—and here the office of the priesthood assumed a terrible importance, for they knew all about it and had the keys. It is impossible to conceive any other idea of such tremendous power for dominating mankind as this! It raised the priesthood and the ecclesiastical institutions into despotic ascendency, brought it into unholy alliance with civil despotism, and became the mighty means of plundering the people, crushing out their liberties, darkening their hopes, and cursing their lives.”
This bit of declamation might safely be left without answer. But to clear up the confusion made by the scientific writer, we will ask him to explain what he understands by the word “priesthood.” Does he mean the ministers of all religions without exception, or the ministers of false religions only? Does he involve in the same sentence the priest of God and of Christ with the priest of Baal and of Moloch? or does he admit that a distinction should be made? Perhaps he will smile at our simplicity in asking a question about which his habitual readers can entertain no doubt, it being evident that 329a man who worships nothing but matter and force is a natural enemy of Christ and of his ministers. Nevertheless, as no one must be allowed to snarl and bite without motive, we insist on an explanation. If the Christian priesthood is not involved in his denunciations, then Mr. Youmans’ eloquence is all thrown away; for it is by the Christian priesthood that the doctrine of hell has been most efficiently taught and inculcated all the world over. If, on the contrary, as it is logical to assume, the Christian priesthood is involved in his denunciations, then Mr. Youmans’ brain is surely not in a sound condition. A man in full possession of his reasoning power would never have thought of connecting the Christian priesthood with despotism, or of charging them with plundering the people, crushing their liberties, darkening their hopes, or cursing their lives. No; the professor is not in full possession of his faculties in this matter. Were it otherwise, he would be guilty of the most odious slander. In some of his articles, which we have analyzed not long ago, we had already found what might be taken as unmistakable signs of scientific aberration. The reader may still remember how the professor countenanced the conception of the unthinkable, how he advocated continuous evolution without any actual link of continuity, and how he made life spring from dead, inert matter. But now it is the Christian priesthood that makes an unholy alliance with civil despotism and crushes the liberties of the people! This assertion cannot be excused by the plea of bad logic; for it regards a matter of fact, not of speculation, and logic, whether good or bad, has nothing to do with it. Only a natural or preternatural derangement in a man’s brain can account for the oddity of such a charge. We say natural or preternatural, because it sometimes happens, even in this age of advanced civilization, that a man who makes profession of militant infidelity is taken possession of, either consciously or unconsciously, by “the father of lies,” who makes a fool of him in this world the better to secure his everlasting ruin in the other. We repeat that a man of sound mind, and free from satanic influence, would never make such a silly and unhistorical denunciation of the priesthood as Prof. Youmans has ventured to make. He would rather say that the Christian priesthood has been the most earnest champion of popular liberties in all times and in all countries, as all ecclesiastical and secular history testifies. He would say that their ascendency, far from being despotic, was kind and paternal, and calculated to win, as it did, the love of the people without ceasing to command their respect. He would say that this ascendency was not derived from their threats of the torments of hell, but was the reward of their virtuous life, ardent charity, singular prudence, and superior education; and was used, not to plunder the people, but to protect them against baronial, royal, and imperial plunderers.
Plundering is a masonic virtue; witness the great French Revolution in the last century, and the policy of Italy, Germany, and Switzerland in the present. And who are the men that plunder the American people but the infidel politicians who do not believe in hell? Mr. Youmans may depend upon it, no judicial, legislative, or 330executive power will ever put a stop to such a wholesale plundering until they humbly kneel before the priest, and conjure him to take in hand the education of our citizens and to revive in them a salutary fear of hell. It is not the fear of hell that “curses the lives” or “darkens the hopes” of men. All the world knows, on the contrary, that there has never been on the face of the earth a thriftier and happier people than the Christian has been. Of course criminals are troubled by the remembrance of hell, their lives are galled, and their hopes are darkened; but we presume that Mr. Youmans does not mean to patronize them. After all it is not the priests that have created hell; they merely warn the sinner of its existence, that he may mend his ways and be saved. Indeed, it is sin, not hell, that darkens the hopes and curses the life of man.
From the bitter tone of the passage we have been refuting it would appear that Mr. Youmans is extremely jealous of the authority and ascendency of the priesthood. The jealousy is very natural. The priest, who teaches the Gospel backed by the authority of the universal church, is a very serious obstacle to the propagation of false scientific or unscientific belief. Therefore it is that Mr. Youmans cannot bear to see the Christian priesthood revered and esteemed by the people, and does his best to destroy their reputation and authority. At this we are not astonished; for modern unbelief is so destitute of intrinsic grounds and so incapable of defending itself that it is constrained to go out of its lines and try a diversion. Accordingly, it takes the offensive. But when the offensive is carried on with no other weapons than those recommended by Voltaire, “Mentez, mentez toujours; il faut mentir comme des diables,” then tranquillus judicat orbis terrarum, the world, though wicked, will be heard to pronounce its sentence against the offender.
The professor adds:
“So productive an agency of unscrupulous ambition could not fail to be assiduously cultivated, and the conception of hell, the most potent element in the case by its appeal to fear, was elaborated with the utmost ingenuity. Language was exhausted in depicting the terrors of the infernal regions and the agonies of the damned. We by no means say that these ideas were mere priestly inventions, but only that they grew up under the powerful guidance of a class consecrated to their exposition and incited by the most powerful worldly motives to strengthen their influence. In order to enforce belief, to compel obedience to ecclesiastical requirements, to coerce civil submission, and to extort money, people were threatened with the horrors of hell, which were pictured with all the vividness of rhetorical and poetic fanaticism. As the hierarchical spirit grew in strength and became a tyrannical rule, obedience to its minutest rites was enforced by the most appalling intimidations.”
We did not know, before we read this passage, that preaching the Christian doctrine of hell was productive of “unscrupulous ambition”; we rather thought that it was productive of deep and sincere humility. The preacher of the Gospel believes in the Gospel, and knows that hell is awaiting the bad and “unscrupulous” priest no less than the bad and unscrupulous layman. Hence, if the priest assiduously cultivated the thought and elaborated the doctrine of hell, it would appear that the priest could not be “unscrupulous”—at least, not so unscrupulous as those professors who get rid of hell by the 331final “absorption of evil.” Nor do we understand why a wise man should complain that the priests assiduously cultivated and elaborated the doctrine of hell, and that “language was exhausted in depicting the terrors of the infernal regions.” This fact should be a matter of congratulation, not of blame; for the terrors of hell “exert a prodigious influence,” as the professor acknowledges, in human affairs; they discourage crime, fortify virtue, and contribute to the maintenance of those conditions without which human society would be transformed into a lair of ferocious beasts. A professor who pretends to a high place among the friends of civilization should have seen this.
As to the motives which induced the priesthood to dilate so assiduously on the torments of hell, we admit that they were “powerful”; but that they were “worldly” we do not admit, for had they been worldly they would have lost all their power. In like manner we admit that the hierarchical spirit may have grown in strength; but that it became a “tyrannical rule,” enforcing the minutest rites “by appalling intimidations,” we most confidently deny. These malicious assertions cannot be substantiated. And again, we understand how the fear of the eternal torments may have helped to secure obedience to the lawful authorities, whether civil or ecclesiastical; but we do not see how this fear could be used “to extort money” from the people. The thing is absurd, as it involves the assumption that the most virtuous, venerable, and self-sacrificing friends of the people, the Christian priesthood, were a set of knaves.
The professor’s remark that “the terrors of hell were not mere priestly inventions, but grew up under their powerful guidance,” will receive more light from the passage which follows:
“We must not forget that the future life, being beyond experience and inaccessible to reason, offers an attractive playground for the unbridled imagination. It opens an infinite realm for sensuous imagery and creative invention, stirs the deepest feelings, and concerns itself with the mystery of human destiny. It accordingly offers a favorite topic for poetic treatment, and this is more especially true of the darker aspect of the future world, poets having taken with avidity to delineations of hell.... Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, working through poems of immortal genius that have fascinated mankind, some of them through thousands of years and others through centuries, have thus combined to familiarize countless millions of people with the conception, and to stamp it deep in the literature of all countries.”
There is some truth in this; for it is true that all our pictures of hell are drawn more or less from our imagination. However, we do not mistake our pictures for the reality. No effort to depict what we have never seen can be a success. But what of that? The belief in the existence of hell is not derived from, or subordinated to, our mode of representing its torments, just as the belief in the existence of heaven is not derived from our wild theories of celestial spaces or from our poor notions of happiness. The future life is indeed “beyond experience,” as Mr. Youmans says, but its existence is not “inaccessible to reason,” as he sophistically assumes; for it is by reasoning that both the ancient and the modern philosophers established the truth of the conception. On the other hand, our pictures of hell are not drawn exclusively from our imagination. The lake of fire and brimstone, 332the undying worm, the weeping and gnashing of teeth, the sempiternal horror, the company of devils, etc., are mentioned in the Bible. Hence, when we use such words as these for describing the state of eternal damnation, we use images authorized by Him who knows what he has prepared for the unrepentant transgressor of his commandments.
From these remarks it clearly follows that if the poet can find in the notion of hell “an attractive playground for the unbridled imagination,” such is not the case with the priest. The imagination of the priest is not “unbridled”; it is ruled by the Scriptural language. The preacher who would countenance Dante’s Inferno from the pulpit would be accounted a traitor or a fool. The hell of the poets may be highly amusing in spite of its terrors, but it makes no conversions, whilst the hell of the Bible has converted millions upon millions of sinful souls. Prof. Youmans strives to confound the hell of the Christians with the hell of the poets. It is lost labor. Fecundity and sterility demand different subjects. It is truth that fructifies. Fiction is barren.
And again, to say that the poetic inventions of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton “combined to familiarize countless millions of people” with the conception of hell, is to utter a paradox which has no foundation. Prof. Youmans mistakes the effect for the cause. There has been no need of poesy to familiarize the countless millions with the conception. The millions were familiar with it before they ever read the poets; nay, more, it is from the popular conception that the poets collected the first materials for their descriptions of hell. The multitude, the millions, do not read poets. On the other hand, before the invention of typography—that is, for long centuries—books were extremely rare, and the “countless millions” did not even know how to read. Hence Mr. Youmans’ attempt to trace the general belief in hell to poetical inventions is a manifest fallacy.
The professor now comes to our time, and with an air of great satisfaction makes the following assertions:
“Yet the doctrine of hell is now growing obsolete. Originating in ages of savagery and low barbarism, and developed in periods of fierce intolerance, sanguinary persecutions, cruel civil codes, and vindictive punishments, it harmonized with the severities and violence of society, and undoubtedly had use as a means of the harsh discipline of men, when they were moved only by the lowest motives. But with the advance of knowledge, and the cultivation of humaner sentiments, the doctrine has become anomalous and out of harmony with the advance of human nature. Hence, though still a cardinal tenet of orthodoxy, it is now generally entertained in a vague and loose way, and with reservations and protests that virtually destroy it. Only revival preachers of the Moody stamp still affirm the literal lake of fire and brimstone, and it is certain that the doctrine in any shape recurs much less prominently in current preaching than it did a generation or two ago. Sober-minded clergymen have got in the way of neglecting it, except now and then when rehearsing the creed, or, as at present, under the spur of controversy, or when rallied about the decay of the old theology.”
Here Mr. Youmans surpasses himself; for, though he has given us already other proofs of his recklessness, yet here he displays his power of misrepresentation with an effrontery that beggars description. “The doctrine of hell is now growing obsolete”! Is this a fact? No. It is only a desire and a delusion 333of the anti-Christian sects. Were it a fact, the church, too, would be growing obsolete; for the doctrine of hell is one of the “cardinal” tenets of the church, as Mr. Youmans himself testifies. But we see, on the contrary, that the church is everywhere gaining new ground and extending her conquests. We are not ignorant that a spirit of apostasy has pervaded a portion of the ruling classes, and that Freemasonry makes daily some converts to Satan; but, while we are sorry to see this ruin of souls, we are far from regarding it as a loss to the militant church. The church cannot but thrive better when cowardice and hypocrisy cease to conceal themselves under her glorious banner. Can the apostasy of her unworthy sons cause her faith to grow obsolete? No. The third part of the angels, according to a received view, refused obedience to God and became his enemies; yet obedience to God did not grow obsolete. At the time of the Lutheran Reformation the authority of the popes was fiercely denounced, vilified, and rejected throughout all Germany, Switzerland, and other countries; yet the pope’s authority did not grow obsolete. What does it matter, then, if a set of fools who have no God but the “unthinkable” agree to reject the doctrine of hell? So long as two hundred millions of Catholics believe the doctrine as a “cardinal tenet” of the church, and so long as the rest of the world, Protestants, Jews, and pagans, believe either the same or an analogous doctrine, it is absurd to call it obsolete. Opinions may grow obsolete, dogmatic truths never; for the church and her doctrine, whether respected or disregarded by our modern wiseacres, will last to the end of time.
The doctrine of hell “originated in ages of savagery and barbarism”! The sapient writer who makes this assertion should be asked to point out a definite age in which the doctrine originated, and to give some proof of the savagery and barbarism of such an age. Will Mr. Youmans give us any evidence on these two points? No; he cannot. He will merely appeal to prehistoric time—that is, to the unknown and unknowable. This is now the style of many scientific jugglers; they draw their conclusions from unknown premises! We have already shown, by reference to the Bible, how the doctrine of hell originated. Let Mr. Youmans examine our statement of facts, and we do not doubt but that, in a lucid interval, he will see the absurdity of his assertion, and the futility of his struggle against historical truth.
The doctrine of hell “was developed in periods of fierce intolerance, sanguinary persecutions, cruel codes, and vindictive punishments”! Much might be said about this bold untruth. Perhaps we might reverse the whole phrase, and say that it is the hostility to the doctrine of hell that was developed in a period of fierce intolerance, sanguinary persecution, cruel codes, and vindictive punishments. Unbelief had a period of triumph in the great French Revolution. Its intolerance was so fierce that it brought about “the Reign of Terror”; its persecution was decidedly sanguinary; its code the will of a drunken mob or the caprice of a profligate dictator. That period is past, but another, and not a better one, is approaching. Freemasonry is maturing new diabolic plans, and, if allowed to conquer, when the time comes 334will not stop midway in their execution. Meanwhile these enemies of “fierce intolerance” are satisfied with a Bismarckian humanity, and these denouncers of “sanguinary persecutions” wash their innocent hands in the blood of Colombian and Ecuadorian citizens, priests, and bishops who have had manhood enough to oppose the tyranny of the sect. We might add much more, of course, to unmask these virtuous Pharisees, who are so scandalized at the intolerance of Christianity; but we must return to our subject.
The assertion that the doctrine of hell “was developed in periods of fierce intolerance,” etc., is really nonsensical. For the truth is that this doctrine was never developed. The doctrine, as now held in the universal church, does not contain anything besides what it contained at the time of the apostles. Hence the development of the doctrine of hell is a “scientific” invention of Mr. Youmans’ brain. Nor can he exculpate himself by pretending that his phrase refers to the barbarous inhabitants of the primitive world. For civil codes had then no existence, and nothing allows the assumption that the early men passed through periods of fierce intolerance and sanguinary persecution. These words are meant to stigmatize Christianity and the middle ages as contrasted with the scepticism of the present age. If our professor had a correct idea of what the middle ages really were, we fancy that, though a man of progress, he would admire their culture, wisdom, and humanity.
The doctrine of hell was used as “a means of harsh discipline when men were moved only by the lowest motives”! Be humble, Mr. Youmans; you are not a competent judge in matters of this sort. First, you know not the facts. Secondly, you know not the nature and value of supernatural motives. Thirdly, you know not that a “harsh discipline” is as much needed to-day to curb the unruly passions as it was a thousand years ago. Fourthly, you do not know that the lowest motives do not exclude the highest. Fifthly, you do not know that no motive is low which is suggested and inculcated by God. Sixthly, you do not know that your words are a crushing condemnation of modern liberalism, whose god is the almighty Dollar, and whose best motives are infinitely lower than those which animated the chivalric and high-spirited Christians of the mediæval time.
“With the advance of knowledge and the cultivation of humaner sentiments the doctrine of hell has become anomalous”! What does this mean? Did the advance of geography, physics, mechanics, cosmogony, chemistry, or other branches of science alter the conception or diminish the certainty of the doctrine of hell? Common sense says no. And yet these are the only branches of knowledge that claim to have advanced. But we must notice that “knowledge,” according to Prof. Youmans’ phraseology, comprises all the wild hypotheses of our modern speculators, and that among these there is a theory which has charmed our professor, and to which he certainly alludes when he reminds us of the advance of knowledge. This is Darwin’s theory of the descent of man. If man is a modified ape, it is quite plain that the doctrine of hell becomes “anomalous”; for apes do not go to hell. But, if such be the case, 335then “the advance of human nature” is retrogressive, and we cannot boast of “humaner sentiments” without inconsistency. The truth is that we have advanced a little in the knowledge of matter; but our moral advance has been, and still is, badly cramped by false ideas of civilization. The very effort of advanced thinkers to suppress hell reveals the hollowness of their humane sentiments, and proves that their philanthropy is a sham.
The doctrine of hell “is now generally entertained with reservations and protests that virtually destroy it.” By whom?—perhaps by the professor’s friends. And the doctrine is entertained “in a vague and loose manner.” Again by whom?—by sceptics, we suppose. But scepticism is ignorance; it deserves pity, not approval. Yet “only revival preachers of the Moody stamp still affirm the literal lake of fire and brimstone”! Perhaps Prof. Youmans will be glad to be informed that the literal lake of fire and brimstone is preached even now all over the earth, and in the very centres of civilization, by men of a far higher stamp of intellect than Moody and Sankey. The “sober-mindedness” of the Protestant clergymen who “have got in the way of neglecting” the Scriptural hell is nothing but scepticism, or, worse still, cowardice. But the silence of these men proves nothing. They have no mission to teach. They are not “the salt of the earth”; and their defection does no harm to the dogmas of Christianity.
Mr. Youmans concludes thus:
“In the recent pulpit utterance there is a perfect chaos of discordant speculation, open repudiation, tacit disavowal, and ingenious refining away, but no stern and sturdy defence of it, in the old form and spirit, from any source that commands respect. The doctrine of hell is still conserved in popular creeds, but, if not eliminated, it will be pretty certain to carry the creeds with it into the limbo of abandoned superstitions.”
This conclusion would be unanswerable, if the Protestant pulpit were the standard of religious doctrine. But why did not Mr. Youmans reflect that his clergymen are only leaders of sects whose Christianity is nearly extinct, and whose words have no authority? Is it not plain that, if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a ditch?
But we must conclude without entering into further developments. The Christian doctrine of hell is incontrovertible. It is universal, it is reasonable, and it is revealed in unequivocal terms. Advanced scientists may not like it; yet, instead of sowing malicious doubts about it, they should bear in mind that they themselves are of all men the most likely to fall into the lake of fire in which they disbelieve. To Prof. Youmans we offer a text from St. John’s Apocalypse, chapter fourteen:
“And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice: If any man shall adore the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead or in his hand, he also shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mingled with pure wine in the cup of his wrath, and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the sight of the holy angels, and in the sight of the Lamb; and the smoke of their torments shall ascend up for ever and ever.”
Professor Youmans need not be informed that this great beast with its adorers and followers is a symbolic representation of anti-Christianism. Its soul is the spirit of apostasy; its heads and horns are governments and kings; its body is an organic confederation of all 336secret societies, comprising diplomatists, statesmen, politicians, godless newspaper editors, authors of infamous books, writers of “scientific” articles against revelation, and the whole army of the enemies of Christ. The beast will have great power, God so permitting; but its reign will be short. Jesus Christ will defeat it, and its followers will find no mercy. Their portion shall be “in the lake of fire and brimstone,” and their punishment shall last “for ever and ever.” We think that no sensible man can deceive himself so as to undervalue this solemn prophecy. The great beast, which is now walking upon the earth, has been minutely described by the evangelist and by Daniel; and it would be odd to pretend that they could, without a revelation from God, foresee, thousands of years ago, what was to happen in this time of ours. But if their words have come from God, then the lake of fire and brimstone and the eternity of the torments deserve the most serious consideration, especially on the part of our professors of anti-Christianity. Materialism will not help them in the day of wrath. Friends will not save them. Faith, repentance, and a timely satisfaction for past delinquencies are the sole chance of salvation.
We earnestly entreat Prof. Youmans to ponder over this momentous truth. It may be unattractive, but it has the merit of being absolutely certain.
“You have overdone it, Bertram.”
“Not a bit of it, father.”
“You must get away.”
“Can’t afford expensive luxuries.”
“Do you consider health a luxury?”
“A necessity.”
“And yet, for the sake of piling up a few hundred dollars, you fling, yes, actually fling, it from you as though you were tired of it.”
“I love my profession too much not to make some little concession to it.”
“Come, now, Bertram, this won’t do. You have overworked yourself, and off you must go. This is the right time to start.”
“Whither?”
“To Paris.”
“Paris! Why not say Timbuctoo?”
“I say Paris.”
“You are surely jesting.”
“I do not jest on so serious a subject as your health, my boy.”
“It can’t be done, father.”
“It must be done, Bertram. Your Uncle Kirwan starts on Wednesday, and with him you shall go. He hopes to be in time for the opening of the Exhibition.”
“My Uncle Kirwan goes on business.”
“His nephew shall go on pleasure. Why, what’s the matter with you? Half the young fellows in New York would be half-mad with delight to be in your place.” Doctor Bertram Martin laughs. The idea is ridiculous, absurd. He cannot, he dare not leave his patients. That delightful case of tetanus, that splendid fracture of the hip, that exquisite tumor yielding to a new treatment, that interesting consumption, that curious cardiac dropsy, that superb typhus!
Bertram Martin, although but twenty-four years of age, is regarded by the profession as the coming man. His work on aneurism is considered the ablest essay yet written upon the subject, and his reputation with the “knife” is second to none. He is highly cultured, earnest, a calm intelligence, with the fires of enthusiasm well banked up; but he is full of latent purpose, an energy that is ever on the spring, and of lava that eventually cools into solid success. He has a great future before him, and he feels it.
His father, in whose Turkey-rugged, book-lined office he reclines in a low chair—one of those delightful chairs that fondle and caress the weary occupant—is also a physician, and who, having amassed a considerable fortune, now that he has safely launched the good ship that bears his name, is about to enjoy a well-earned otium cum dignitate.
Bertram’s mother has noted the increasing pallor in the young physician’s face, the drag under the eye, the hard, dark lines, and the weariness of tone, that denote an active brain heated to a white heat, and has determined, coûte que coûte, that her eldest-born shall “drop both spade and plough for a revel amongst the daisies.”
“Exhibitions are played out, 338father,” exclaims Bertram. “The last and best was at Philadelphia, and no show on the earth could beat that.”
He is intensely American, regarding Europe as effete, old-world, used up.
“Paris is not played out.”
“I should much prefer seeing Paris at any other time.”
“That’s what everybody will say who can’t go. I may as well tell you, Bertram, that there’s a little conspiracy got up against you, and at the head of it is your mother.”
“Yes, Bertie,” exclaims Mrs. Martin, who enters, “we have undermined you. Your Uncle Kirwan starts on Wednesday by the Scythia, and here’s the ticket for your state-rooms,” handing him the article in question.
“Why, mother—”
“My darling child, you look dreadfully ill, and it is fretting my heart out. I spoke to Doctor Lynch, and he orders change of air and total cessation from work. You never opposed me in your young life; you are not going to commence now.”
“But—”
“But me no buts, Bertie.”
“This trip would take two months.”
“Three.”
“I should be out of the race in three months.”
“You’ll return fresh and vigorous, and to win.”
“This is sheer folly. I never felt better in my life.”
“Next Wednesday, Bertie.”
“I could not, even if I listened to this absurd proposal, be ready before two weeks.”
“Next Wednesday, Bertie.”
In vain does the young doctor expostulate, contesting the ground inch by inch. In vain does he plead for time. His pickets are driven in, the enemy is upon him in force, and, ere he can well realize the exact posture of affairs, his mother has obtained his solemn promise that he will leave for Europe by the Scythia upon the following Wednesday in company with his uncle, Walter Kirwan.
A bright and joyous group was assembled at the Cunard wharf to see him off, and to bid him Godspeed across the waste of waters. Mr. Kirwan, a fine, handsome man of five-and-thirty, over six feet high, with a winning eye and a wooing voice, stood “one bumper at parting” in his state-room, which was decorated with a profusion of glorious flowers, the offerings of very near and very dear friends. One bouquet, composed exclusively of forget-me-nots and mignonette, caused any number of “Oh! my’s,” “How beautiful!” “Isn’t it lovely!” from pouting female lips.
“Who sent it to you, Bertram?” asked Mrs. Martin.
“It may not be for me, mother.”
“Oh! yes, it is; here is the card with your name upon it.”
“I have no idea.”
“No idea?”
“None in the world.”
A tall, lithe, graceful girl stands a little aside, trifling with the fringe of her parasol, as these questions are being put, her embarrassed looks and blushing cheeks denoting fierce and scarce controlled agitation.
“Did you send me this bouquet, Miss Reed?” asks Bertram in a low tone.
“I—I—that is—I hope you will—that they will—look pretty,” is the murmured response.
“Did Carrie Reed send those flowers to Bertram?” asks Mrs. Martin of her sister, Mrs. Kirwan, in freezing tones.
339“Yes; I heard her admit it just now.”
“What a forward minx! I’ve a great mind to tell her so.”
How severe these mothers are when “my son” is approached by youth and beauty! The idea of marriage is a horror.
“And this is Liverpool!” exclaims Bertie, as the good ship steams up the Mersey. “I’m awfully sorry to have been asleep when we were at Queenstown; why didn’t you shake me up, uncle?”
“Because you want all the sleep you can get. You were nearly in for a dose of insomnia, and that would have pretty soon squared your account, my boy.”
“Pshaw! you all made me out worse than I really was.”
“Not a bit of it. You allowed a nice lot of sand to run out of your glass. But isn’t that a sight, Bertie? There are masts—a forest. There are docks—the docks of the world.”
“What docks we’ll have in twenty years at New York!”
“You don’t believe in anything outside of the stars and stripes.”
“Not much,” with a laugh; adding, “Shall we make any stay in Liverpool?”
Mr. Kirwan consults his watch.
“We shall only just catch that train due in London at 6.40. The Dover express starts at 7.35. This will decant us in Paris to-morrow morning at six. We shall have nice time for a big wash, a big breakfast, and then for the opening of the Exhibition.”
“This is close shaving.”
“That’s my principle. Narrow margins. They pay best all round.”
Mr. Kirwan’s calculations, based Upon professional experience, proved correct. A vague soup and an ill-dressed cutlet at Charing Cross, a thick omelette and a thin wine at Amiens, did duty for refreshment. In the sheen of dazzling early sunlight Bertram Martin first saw Paris, the bright, the joyous, the glittering, the beautiful. A dream of his life was about to be realized.
Mr. Kirwan having telegraphed for apartments, he with our hero was “skied” at the Hôtel du Louvre, and after a breakfast which would have done honor to a navvy had been disposed of by Bertie, who in New York would flirt with a slice of toast and coquette with a fresh egg, cigars were lighted and the two gentlemen set forth in the direction of the Champ de Mars.
“This is the best sight I have ever seen,” cried the young physician, as they strolled along the Rue de Rivoli. “Why, it’s nearly as bright as Broadway.”
“What a thorough Yank you are, Bertie! Come here, now; just take a look around you, and confess that you are fairly dumbfounded.”
They stood at the Place de la Concorde. The fountains were throwing feathery sprays high in air; the flowers were blooming in a myriad hues. Thousands of vehicles were flashing past, tens of thousands of pedestrians. The great tide of human life had set in towards the Trocadero. Regiments in gorgeous uniforms, headed by bands playing superbly, marched onwards, quaint costumes of every nationality under the sun flitted by—bizarre groups chatting and laughing and gesticulating!
Behind them the blackened walls of the Tuileries, in front the Champs Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe, on the left the Chamber of Deputies, on the right the glorious Madeleine.
340“It is magnificent,” exclaimed Bertie at length, in a subdued tone of emotion.
“Nearly as bright as Broadway,” laughed Kirwan.
“Wait! Twenty years, and our up-town will be as gorgeous as this. We have the taste, we have the money, all we want is the time; that we have not.”
“And never will have. We rush too much. But come along; we must be at the Exhibition building early or our chances of getting in will be a little thin. We shall have, as we say in New York, to take a back seat, doctor.”
“I should prefer to stop here. What a sight this is! What contrasts; how vivid! Look at that grim sergent-de-ville, and beside him that piquante girl in the Normandy cap as high as his cocked hat, and earrings as long as his sword. See that ouvrier in the blouse; how cheerfully he smokes his cigar, carrying his two children! I do believe he would carry his wife into the bargain. How coquettishly she is attired, and how cheaply! See the artistic manner that two-dollar shawl is draped over her shoulder, and how that five-cent ribbon hangs. I’ll wager that these fellows coming along as if walking on air are of the Quartier Latin, the students’ quarter. They, poor fellows! have come to see the crowd. I suppose their united wealth at this moment will scarcely do more than omelette and beer them. What flashing equipages! How beautifully finished! We do want these liveries in Central Park. Imagine those yellows, and purples, and blues, and saffrons, and whites glancing amongst our green trees or up Fifth Avenue. What cavalry! How superbly those dragoons sit their horses—Centaurs every man of them. It must have been by sheer force of numbers that they bit the dust in the late war. What fountains! what flowers! what trees—four rows of them up to that magnificent arch—and what residences!” gushed Bertram Martin.
“These gilded pagodas, and Swiss chalets, and marble palaces, and fairy bowers are for open-air concerts. Wait till you see them lighted up, and I tell you what it is, Bertie, you’ll go into raptures. Why, no tale in the Arabian Nights equals them for glitter. And the music, my boy, sparkles like champagne,” cried Kirwan enthusiastically.
Arrived at the Champ de Mars, the crowd gradually filtered into the Exhibition building. At the turnstile Bertie was separated from his uncle, who made a rush for another entrance. Immediately in front of him was a young girl, lissome and lithe of figure, attired in a raiment of soft, filmy, cloudy, floating white. He could detect a delicate little ear, and a white neck from which the hair was scrupulously lifted and arranged—she had removed her hat—dark and lustrous, tight and trim, in a fashion exceedingly becoming to the beautiful, but trying to the more ordinary of womankind.
Have we not all at some time or another felt that something strange was going to happen to us? that steps were coming nearer and nearer? that a voice was calling to us at a great way off that would presently become more distinct?
A something urged Bertram Martin to see this girl’s face. Was it mere curiosity? No. The impulse was indefinable as a subtle perfume, indefinable as a sweet sound in music. A shapely head, 341and lustrous hair, and a lissome form—this was a very ordinary scaffolding whereon to build a romance, and, although the young doctor would have laughed anybody to scorn who would have taxed him with being romantic, there was no boy of half his age and quarter his experience more likely to make a fool of himself about a woman than Bertie Martin.
He had led his life amongst his books, his profession his mistress. Too much absorbed in the engrossing duties attendant upon the alleviation of the ills the flesh is heir to, he was in the world and yet not of it, beholding it as through a polished sheet of plate-glass. His mother, a woman of the highest culture, refinement, taste, and ability, had vainly urged upon him the necessity of taking part in the gayeties of a very extended and highly fashionable circle—vainly, indeed; for having on a few occasions attended “swell” receptions and upper-crust entertainments, he squarely pilloried himself in a cui bono? and from that hour the butterfly world knew him no more.
He is tall, lightly built, graceful. His eyes are dark gray, full of earnestness, and blazing with intelligence. His mouth is absolutely faultless, having at command a smile, a veritable ray of sunshine. His light-brown moustache and beard have never known the razor. He dresses well, and is a dandy in gloves and boots.
He must see that girl’s face, and he plunged forward despite the sacr-r-ré of an infuriated Frenchman and the full-flavored exclamation of a London cockney, into whose ribs he had plunged his right elbow. At this moment she turned her head a little to address a portly gentleman behind, who, with a flushed face and a general appearance of acute physical and mental suffering, through heat, crush, and excitement, had been urging her to push onwards.
Her profile was simply lovely: one inch of forehead; a nose a trifle out of the regular line of beauty; eyelashes that swept her cheeks; a short upper lip with a tremulous curl in it, a rich red under one, and a chin worthy the chisel of Phidias. And yet, despite its classical contour, her face was Irish—yea, that delicious ensemble which Erin bestows upon her daughters, placing them above all in beauty, in archness, and in purity of expression.
“She is lovely,” murmured Bertie, gazing at her with all his eyes.
A rush came, a great pressure from behind, and the wave flung him beyond the turnstile.
“Well done, old fellow!” cried Kirwan, clapping him on the back.
“Where is she?” demanded the young physician, gazing round him on every side, as though his head were rotary.
“Just gone up this way with her son.”
“Who? What son?”
“Why, the Duchess of Lachaunay. That’s what caused the rush; her toilet is by Worth, and cost twenty thousand francs.”
“Hang the duchess!” groaned Bertie. “I have lost sight of the loveliest girl I ever laid eyes on.”
“Where was she?”
“There, right in front of me.”
“Never mind. Take heart of grace. We’ll pick her up by and by. Let’s get our seats or we’ll forfeit them.”
“You go, uncle. I’ll do as I am, I think I’ll walk about.”
342Kirwan looked at his nephew with a merry glance.
“So badly hit as that, Bertie?”
“Pshaw!” cried the doctor, turning on his heel.
And they did not find her. Not a bit of it. Bertram walked, and stalked, and darted hither and thither, until Kirwan fairly let him have his own way, giving him a rendezvous at the hotel for seven o’clock.
What cared Bertram Martin for the gorgeous array of foreign princes, ambassadors, commissioners, presidents, ministers, deputations, senators, or deputies? What cared he for the address to Marshal MacMahon, or the one-hundred-and-one gun salute, or the military music, or the hoisting of flags, or the playing of fountains? What cared he for the procession, with all its glittering magnificence, or for all the treasures of the earth dug up by man and nurtured by art? He sought the four-leaved shamrock in the bright young girl whose beauty had flashed upon him as a revelation, and although he posted himself at the chief exit until he came to be regarded with suspicion by a grim sergent-de-ville, in the hope of obtaining another glimpse of her, he was doomed to disappointment, and he returned to the hotel, and to a petit dîner ordered for the occasion by his uncle, in the worst possible spirits.
“Did you find her, Bertie?”
“No.”
“If she’s French she won’t go to the Exhibition again for some time. She has done the opening, and will take it now, as the Crushed Tragedian says, ‘in sections.’ But come, Bertie, love or no love, try this Soupe à la Bonne Femme; it will ring up the curtain to a menu that even Delmonico never dreamt of in his wildest imaginings.”
For the two weeks that Bertie remained in Paris he sought the fair unknown—sought her in the Exposition, in the galleries of the Louvre, at Versailles, amongst the ruins of the palace of St. Cloud, in churches, on the boulevards, in cafés—everywhere. Once he thought he caught a glimpse of her passing along the Rue de Rome, and, plunging from the top of the omnibus at the imminent risk of breaking his neck, came up with a very pretty young girl who turned into the residence of the ex-Queen of Spain.
“It is a perfect infatuation,” wrote home Kirwan. “Bertie is crazed about some girl he saw on the opening day of the Exhibition. I can get no good of him. I scarcely ever see him, and when he is with me he is continually darting from me in pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp, or craning his neck in search of her. And only to think of grave Doctor Bertram Martin being in this horrid state!”
It had been announced that the tour was to include London, the English lakes, Scotland, and Ireland. Bertie voted London a bore, the lakes a nuisance, the land of cakes nowhere, and declared in favor of a few days in Ireland. With a sigh, as though tearing up his heart by the roots, he took his departure from Paris.
“I shall never, never see her again,” he groaned, and was silent the whole way to Calais.
Kirwan fondly imagined that London would shake off this glamour, and did his uttermost to bring all the attractions of the modern Babylon into bold relief; but four days seemed so thoroughly to weary his nephew that 343it was resolved to start for Ireland without any further delay.
A glorious evening found them pacing the deck of the mail steamer Connaught, en route from Holyhead to Kingstown. Before them lay the Dublin mountains, bathed in glorious greens, yellows, and purples. Away to the left stretched the Wicklow hills, guarded by the twin sugar-loaves and backed by lordly Djouce. To the right the Hill of Howth, the famous battlefield of Clontarf, and in the smoky distance the city of Dublin. Kingstown, its white terraces sloping to the sea; Dalkey, its villas peeping timidly forth from the fairest verdure-clad groves; Killiney, lying in the lap of a heather-caressed mountain; Bray, like a string of pearls on the ocean’s edge; the dark-blue waters of the bay, dotted here and there with snowy yachts, or with the russet brown of the Skerries fishing-smacks—what a coup-d’œil!
“It is glorious,” murmured Bertie, as, leaning on the railing of the bridge, he drained this cup of loveliness to the very dregs.
Arrived at Dublin, they put up at the Shelborne Hotel, in Stephen’s Green, whither they were borne from the dingy station at Westland Row on an outside car that jingled, rattled, creaked, and groaned at every revolution of its rickety wheels.
“What’s this fur?” demanded the tatterdemalion driver, got up in a cast-off suit of Con the Shaughraun, as he glanced from half a crown lying upon the palm of his horny hand to Kirwan and Bertie.
“What’s this fur at all, at all?”
“It’s your fare, my man,” said Kirwan.
“Me fare? An yez come from Amerikey?”
“Yes.”
“The cunthry that me sisther, and me aunt, an’ me cousin Tim, an’ me cousin Phil is always braggin about? Wisha, wisha, but it’s lies they’re tellin’ me, sorra a haporth else. The people over there must be regular naygurs afther all,” reluctantly preparing to pocket the coin.
“It will never do to let the American flag go by the board,” whispered Bertie. “Here, my man, here is half a crown for the stars, and here’s half a crown for the stripes.”
“An’ won’t yer honor stand somethin’ for the flagstaff?” with a grin of such unspeakable drollery that both the Americans burst into a fit of laughter.
Mr. Kirwan had been provided with a letter of introduction to a family residing in Merrion Square.
“Shall we look up the Darcys, Bertie?” he asked one morning shortly after their arrival.
“Cui bono?”
“The Joyces were so anxious about it. It would never do to go back to New York without calling, at all events.”
“At it, then. Let’s get it over, and on to Killarney.”
The Darcy mansion in Merrion Square was muffled in its summer wraps. The shutters were closed, the windows barricaded with newspapers, the knocker removed, while a profound air of dust and melancholy hung over it like a pall—this though the scarlet and white hawthorn, the lilac and laburnum, were shedding their delicious odors from the enclosure of the square opposite.
“The famly is out av town,” responded a very dilapidated-looking old woman to Kirwan’s query.
“Indeed! I shall leave a card.”
“Av ye plaze; but shure where’s 344the use? They’ll not get it this three months.”
“Where are they travelling?”
“In furrin parts.”
“I shall write a line.”
“Step in, sir, and welkim.”
This elderly damsel ushered them into an apartment from which the carpet had been removed, the curtains taken down, the gasalier and pictures muffled, and the furniture piled up and partly concealed by matting. Kirwan took out his letter of introduction, and, opening it, proceeded to write a line of regret upon missing Mr. Darcy. The young doctor moved about the room, amusing himself by listlessly gazing out through the half-opened shutter. Presently he approached a massive book-case, and endeavored to peer through the interstices afforded by the gaping of the brown paper that concealed the books.
Little did he imagine what an influence this simple action was destined to bear upon his near future! His wandering gaze suddenly merged into earnestness, then it became fascinated, then fixed.
“Come here!” he said to the attendant, his voice hoarse from suppressed emotion.
The woman came to his side.
“Do you see that carte de visite?”
“Cart o’ what?”
“That photograph there, lying on its side,” the words coming in hot gasps.
“Yes, sir.”
“Whose is it?”
“Misther Darcy’s, I suppose.”
“Whose likeness is it?” clutching her by the wrist.
“I dunno, sir.”
“You don’t know! Is it one of the family?”
“I dunno, sir.”
“Is—is there a Miss Darcy? Has Mr. Darcy a daughter?” his impatience wrestling with a desire to throttle the caretaker.
“I heerd that he has wan.”
“Heard! Don’t you know it?”
“I do not, sir. I’m a sthranger. I come from Stoneybatther, beyant the wather, but I heerd that Misther Darcy has a daughter, and that she is married—”
“Married!” reeling as if he had been struck a heavy blow.
“What’s all this, Bertie?” asked Kirwan uneasily.
“That photo there.”
“Yes, I see it.”
“It’s the photo of the girl I saw at the opening of the Paris Exhibition.”
“And a pretty girl she is!” exclaimed Kirwan, indulging in a prolonged whistle as he gazed at it sideways like a bird.
“I must have it,” said Bertram, a dogged resolution in his tone.
“How is that to be done? You can’t steal it, Bertie.”
“It shall be done fairly and squarely if possible; if not, I shall smash the glass.”
“Tut! tut! man, you’re not thinking.”
The wound had been nearly healed, the memory of that girlish face was fast becoming a sweet treasure of a by-gone time, to be lingered over at fitful intervals, and always with rapture, when this unlooked-for freak of destiny caused the wound to bleed afresh, and memory to burst into rich and fragrant blossom.
During each of the three days that he remained in Dublin Bertram Martin visited the deserted mansion in Merrion Square, to gaze at that photograph, all so near and yet so far. Could he have but obtained a solitary clue 345to the whereabouts of the Darcys no earthly power would have prevented his following them; but clue there was none.
The train clanked into the station at Killarney in a mist as thick as a ladies’ tulle-illusion veil.
“If this sort of thing is going to last we sha’n’t see much of Kate Kearney,” laughed Kirwan.
“I wish I had never left New York,” said Bertie. “I did my very uttermost not to come, but you set your trap, all of you, and I go back—what?”
“You can run over again.”
“Never! Once back, my profession shall have all my energy, all my hope—my life.”
They put up at the Railway Hotel, and after dinner strolled out as far as Ross Castle. The mist had cleared away, and the view of Innisfallen sleeping in the moonlight, of the cluster of dreamy islands, the soft outlines of the Mangerton, the purple mountain and the Toomies bathed in liquid pearl, the twinkling lights along the shore, the mirrored waters of the lake shimmering in silver glory, sent a wave of delicious reverie over the hearts of the two men, as, seated in silence on a ruined wall of the ivy-covered keep, they gazed in solemn rapture upon a scene exquisite, soothing, sublime.
“I wish to heaven your aunt was here to see this,” said Kirwan, lighting a fresh cigar.
“I wish—” but Bertie did not utter another word.
The following morning was one in ten thousand—fresh, sunny, breezy, inspiriting, laden with the languor of summer, rippling with the coquetry of spring; a primrose light, a violet shade. Our two friends joined a party bound for the Gap of Dunloe. The ponies were sent on, and a boat ordered to meet them at the upper lake with luncheon. Bertie was unusually depressed, and, despite the vigorous efforts of his uncle to pull him together, he clung, as it were, to himself, avoiding all intercourse with his fellow-man, and especially his fellow-woman, a buxom, blithe, hearty English lady, who laughed with anybody and at everything, and whose whole trouble lay in a morbid terror lest any accident should happen to the bitter beer. After a two hours’ drive through lovely and matchless scenery the carriage arrived at the entrance to the Gap, and here the party dismounted.
“Where do we meet the ponies?” asked Kirwan.
“A little bit up the Gap, sir.”
“Any bitter beer up there?” laughed the English lady.
“Troth, thin, there’s not, but Kate Kearney’ll give ye a dhrop o’ the mountain dew, me lady,” replied the driver.
Bertie strode on before. There was a something exhilarating in speeding up the craggy pass, in bounding from rock to rock like a mountain deer, in plunging through the purple heather, and in leaping saucy brooklets flashing their glittering waters in the glorious sunlight. In vain did Kate Kearney assail him with blarney, blandishments, and bog oak, with “a dhrop o’ the craythur” under the thin disguise of goat’s milk. In vain did arbutus-wood venders, and mendicants, and wild-flower girls trudge by his side and cling to his heels. He distanced them all, leaving them standing at different places in the middle of the road, baffled and worsted in the encounter. Up against the sky line stood the ponies. Up 346against a sheer wall of dull gray rock covered with ferns, and mosses, and lichens leant a wooden shanty, and for this shanty Bertram Martin made.
A party had ascended before him; they were from the Victoria Hotel—two gentlemen and two ladies. One gentleman was seated on a granite boulder as Bertie reached this coigne of vantage.
“Glorious day, sir,” exclaimed the tweed-covered excursionist.
“Superb,” replied Bertie, flinging himself on the purple heather to await the arrival of Kirwan.
“You’re from the other side of the pond. Have a cigar,” flinging over his case in a right royal manner.
Bertie selected a weed.
“Have a light,” shying a silver fusee-box which the doctor dexterously caught.
“From New York?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know any people of the name of Joyce?”
“Daniel Blake Joyce, of Gramercy Park?” asked Bertie.
“Yes.”
“I know him and his family intimately.”
The tweed-arrayed stranger jumped to his feet.
“I call this jolly. My name is O’Hara.”
“Not Tim O’Hara?”
“Yes, Tim.”
“Why, my dear sir,” cried Bertie, “I’ve heard the Joyces speak of you fifty times.”
“This is first-class. Have a card. You’ll come and stop with me a week, a month—six. I live in the County Wicklow.”
“I most seriously wish I could,” said the physician, exchanging cards, “but I leave by the Asia on Friday.”
“Not a bit of it. Hi, Dick! Dick! I say,” calling to a fat, jovial-faced, red-nosed elderly gentleman who had just emerged from the shanty. “Here’s a friend of Dan Joyce’s, of New York, who says he’s going to leave by the Asia on Friday. Will that fit?”
“I should say not,” said the other, approaching.
Where had Bertram Martin seen that face?
“Any friend of Dan Joyce’s is our friend, and shame be upon us if we let you leave Ireland without at least giving us the opportunity of having a gossip and a bottle over Dan.”
Where had Bertram Martin seen that face?
In a few words, even while this perplexing thought was whirling through his brain, Bertie informed the new-comer—for O’Hara had disappeared into the shanty in search of the ladies with his news—of his doings since he landed at Liverpool.
“At what time were you in Paris?” asked the stranger.
“On the opening day of the Exhibition,” replied the doctor with a deep sigh, as his thoughts flew back to the lovely girl he was destined never, oh! never, to behold again.
“I was in Paris on that day,” said the stranger.
Bertie seized him by the wrist.
“You were? I have it all now. Now I know where I saw you,” speaking with fearful rapidity. “It was at the entrance C——. There was a fearful crush. You were not alone. You were with a young lady. Who is that girl? Where is she?” And he stopped, a world of excited earnestness in his eyes.
“That young lady is my daughter.”
“Where is she?”
347“She is here.”
“Here?” a mad throb at his heart.
At this moment O’Hara emerged from the shanty, accompanied by two ladies, one of them, young and fresh and lovely, hanging fondly on his arm.
Bertie saw it all now. One wild glance told him that she was as far from him as the fleecy cloud sailing above his head—that she was the wife of Tim O’Hara.
“I don’t think, Dick, that I introduced you to my young friend, Dr. Martin. Doctor, this is Dick Darcy, one of the gayest fellows in all Ireland. Get your legs under his mahogany in Merrion Square and——”
“I have been in your house in Merrion Square. I have a letter of introduction to you from Mr. Joyce,” burst in Bertie.
“And you shall be again, my young friend,” wringing his hand warmly. “Mary,” to the elder lady, “this is Dr. Martin, a friend of Dan Joyce’s. Doctor, this is my wife. And this,” turning to the girl, “is my daughter.”
Bertie took her courteously-proffered hand, and held it for one instant in his. He looked down, down into those Irish gray eyes, where truth and innocence and purity lay like gems beneath crystal waters; he gazed with a wild rapture upon the beauteous face that had haunted him day and night in its rosy radiance, and then with a muttered exclamation was about to turn away when O’Hara exclaimed:
“Miss Darcy looks as if she had seen you before.”
“Miss Darcy?” cried Bertie.
“Yes; you wouldn’t have her Mrs. Darcy, would you?”
Oh! the weight lifted off his heart. Oh! how gloriously shone out the sun, how blue was the sky, how radiant the flowers, how sweet the song of the mountain thrush, how delightful everything. The great black shadow which had hung over him like a pall had passed away before the dayshine of her presence, and, borne on that sunlight, came the message to his heart that Kitty Darcy was to be wooed, and—possibly to be won.
Kirwan’s pleasure knew no bounds as he clasped the hand of Dick Darcy.
“What a sorry opinion you would have had of the old country if you had only known its hospitality through the medium of a hotel, Mr. Kirwan!” laughed Darcy as the party mounted their shaggy mountain ponies.
Of course Bertie rode beside Miss Darcy, and descanted not as eloquently as he could have wished upon the glorious bits of scenery that revealed themselves at every turn in the Gap. He spoke glowingly of home, of the lordly Hudson, the dreamy Catskills, the White Mountains, and the Yosemite.
“Oh! isn’t that gloriously gloomy,” cried Miss Darcy, as they emerged from the granite-walled Gap to the ridge overlooking the Black Valley to the right, stretching away in gray sadness, locked in the embraces of mountains standing in ebon relief against the blue yet lustreless sky.
“Not unlike my own reflections for the last six weeks,” laughed the doctor; “they were gloriously gloomy.”
“See the sunshine over the upper lake.”
“I accept the omen.”
“And the Eagle’s Nest, how superbly it towers over the water! What greens!—from white to russet. 348How charmingly the foliage of the arbutus seems to suit this lovely scenery!”
And what a scene in its brilliance, its repose, its poetry! Verdure-clad mountains dreaming in the haze of summer, lifting themselves to the blue vault of heaven, the tender green mixing with the cerulean, as a spring leaf with the forget-me-not; mirror-like lakes reflecting every crag, every tree, every bud with that fidelity only known to nature’s mirrors; the path winding tortuously down to the lake, now disappearing in a patch of wood, now meandering through a waving meadow as yet uninvaded by the ruthless scythe. Away stretched the lakes, away the old Weir Bridge—away in shimmering loveliness all too lovely to describe, all too lovely save to gaze and gaze upon, until heart and soul absorbed it in a thirsty greed.
Three days spent in Kitty Darcy’s society—three days in wandering through the ruins of Muckross Abbey, that home of silent prayer, that “congealed Pater Noster,” by the low, dulcet murmur of O’Sullivan’s Cascade, amid the leafy dells of “Sweet Innisfallen,” up the steep ascent of Mangerton, on the fern-caressed road to the police barracks, stopping at the exquisite little chapel perched like an eerie up in its wooded nest and uttering an Ave, always by Kitty’s side, always inhaling the subtle perfume of her presence—three centuries compressed into three days.
The Darcys were en route to a fishing-lodge at Valentia, out where the cable flashes into the wide Atlantic, and the day arrived when farewell—a word that must be, and hath been, a sound that makes us linger—must be said.
“Are you going by the Asia on Friday, uncle?” asked Bertie.
“Why, of course.”
“I am not.”
“No!”
“I go on to Carrick-na-cushla with the Darcys.”
“I thought as much, Bertie. What shall I tell them in New York?”
“That I shall bring home a young, lovely, pure, and charming wife, if I can. I have two letters for you, one for my mother and one for my father. If things turn out—all right, I’ll return; if—” here he paused with a writhe—“all wrong, you won’t hear of me for some time.”
Dr. Bertram Martin’s three months’ vacation is not yet over. It threatens to lengthen into six, possibly into nine months; and when he returns he will not return alone. His uncle Kirwan has had a sad time of it ever since; and Dr. Martin’s fair patients are inconsolable.
Mulier amicta sole, et luna sub pedibus ejus, et in capite ejus corona stellarum duodecim.—Apoc. xii. 1.
I.
Luke i. 38.
II.
Luke i. 43.
III.
Luke ii. 16.
IV.
Hebr. x. 7.
V.
Luke ii. 48.
The Catholic Church, founded by Christ to be the depositary, the guardian, and the interpreter of his word, was from all eternity in the mind of God, not in the same manner as the other things that were made by him, and which constitute the visible universe, but as a creation apart, far superior to the world that we see, the completion of the designs of love which he entertained for men, and the reason of the existence of everything else inferior to it. It is the sublime theology of St. Paul: “All things are yours,” he writes to the Corinthians—“the world, life, death, things present and things to come. And you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” From this it is easy to see the rank which the church holds in the divine plan. Christ stands first in the scale; he is the link, the Supreme Pontiff by whom all creatures are united with God; the church, his spouse, is for him and forms one with him, and has been ordained for the good of the elect and the sanctification of souls; she is the mother of the living. As Christ is first in the intention of God, the church, which is so intimately connected with him, is conceived along with him in the Divine mind, and has in it the precedence over all other things. Thus she can apply to herself the words of the inspired writer: “The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his ways. I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters; when he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits, I was with him forming all things.”
Such being the case, it is not astonishing to see the whole drama of human history turned towards a central figure, Christ and his church, which are the grand objects contemplated by God in the universe. Nations rise and fall, empires are founded which are succeeded by other empires, each having a special mission, that of preparing the way for the kingdom of God; and when that mission is accomplished they disappear from the scene. The barriers set up to divide nationalities are forcibly broken down; conquest, commerce, the sciences and arts form a link between them; languages are modified, ideas are interchanged, intellectual systems are brought in contact; efforts are made sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong, direction; men grope in the dark, but some ray of light, however faint it may have been, is still there to urge them in their researches after truth; views are conflicting, but their very conflict paves the way to a broader spirit and more universal conceptions. When we glance at the state of the human mind before the coming of Christ, it seems that all is confusion and a perfect chaos from which there is no possible issue; but an attentive observer will easily discern, even when obscurity is most intense, the Spirit of God, as of old, brooding over the vast 352abyss and ordering all things so as to make light finally shine out of darkness.
The providential action of God manifested in the gradual preparation of the world for the acceptance of Christianity has always been considered one of the most striking proofs of its supernatural character, and modern rationalism has completely failed in its attempt to destroy it. To confine ourselves to the theories invented for that purpose, and bearing on the subject which we have undertaken to treat in the present article, the relation of Judaism to Christianity, they may be briefly summed up as follows: they peremptorily deny all supernatural agency in the march of events recorded in the sacred writings; they equally deny the divine mission of Jesus Christ; the apostles were, it is affirmed, men of their age, and did not escape the influence of popular opinions, which they knew how to use for their own ends; as to Christian dogmas, they followed in their formation the law of progressive development and growth; Christianity is nothing else but an evolution of Judaism or its various sects by a natural process and under the pressure of circumstances and prevailing ideas. Now, every page of the Jewish history contains a refutation of these doctrines. There we see a people especially chosen by God, among all others, to be the authentic and accredited witness of the truth among the nations; to keep alive in the world the belief in one true God and the hope of a future Redeemer already promised to our first parents after the fall; to be the depositary of that promise and the organ of its promulgation. Judaism, therefore, is related to Christianity, not as the seed to the plant, but as the well-prepared soil to the harvest; as the figure to the reality, as the prophecy to its accomplishment; as the harbinger to the King whose coming he announces to the populations that are to receive him. It is, as Isaias expresses it, “the voice of one crying in the desert: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the wilderness the paths of our God” (Isaias xl. 3).
From the early dawn of their history the destiny of the Hebrews is clearly defined. They are a nation set apart to be a living protest against the prevailing idolatry of the times. From the vocation of Abraham to the promulgation of the law on Mount Sinai, and throughout the succeeding periods of their existence, the fundamental dogma of their religion is monotheism: “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods in my sight. Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them.” Another article of their creed equally pre-eminent as their belief in one God is their expectation of One who was to be sent for the restoration of mankind. To Abraham, the progenitor of that race, it was revealed that “his posterity should be as the stars for multitude, and that from them a blessing should go forth to all other nations.” Later God had said to Isaac: “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and I will give to thy posterity all these countries (that is, the land of Chanaan), and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” Jacob had 353heard a voice from heaven, saying: “I am the most mighty God of thy father: fear not, go down into Egypt, for I will make a great nation of thee there. I will go down with thee thither, and will bring thee back again from thence”; and when the aged patriarch is on the point of death, God bids him fix his eyes upon the lion of Juda, and shows him all the nations blessed in a prince who is to come out from his lineage. Moses, raised by the Almighty to deliver the numerous posterity of Jacob from the bondage of Egypt, had led to the threshold of the promised land that nation which God had chosen to give birth to the Redeemer, and to maintain upon earth faithful worshippers of his name. He also was divinely apprised that a prophet would rise from his nation and from among his brethren whose voice all should hear. Hence it is that the Old Testament religion was prophetic in its whole nature. “The guides of the Hebrew people,” says Dr. Fisher,[75] “were ever pointing to the future. There, and not in the past, lay the golden age. The Jew might revert with pride to the victories of David and the splendor of Solomon, but these vanished glories only served to remind him of the lofty destiny in store for his nation, and to inspire his imagination to picture the day when the ideal of the kingdom should be realized and the whole earth be submissive to the monarch of Sion. The hopes of all patriotic Jews centred upon a personage who was to appear upon the earth and take in his hands universal dominion.” It is a most interesting study to follow the Hebrew prophets in delineating so many centuries in advance the history of the Messias, and the principal features of that kingdom which is to embrace the earth under its sway. The time and place of his birth, the circumstances by which it is accompanied, his character, life, sufferings, and humiliations, his death and final triumph—all is described with astonishing precision. They openly speak of the object of the kingdom he is to establish, which is the regeneration of man, of his mind as well as of his heart, the destruction of idol worship, the adoration of the true God, and the reign of holiness; and this at a time when all was God except God himself, when Greece deified nature and Egypt changed gods into beasts, whilst Babylon, more corrupt, fabricated impure monsters which they adored, and Gaul, more ignorant, saw the Deity on the summits of mountains and in the depths of forests. It was in this age of darkness that Isaias sang the glory of the new Jerusalem, the church like to a mountain on which will be broken the chain of iniquity that bound all nations and the web that had been woven around them. The universal diffusion of the Messianic kingdom is also foretold by the prophets. There is nothing more clearly expressed in the prophecies and so much insisted upon as this: that the new alliance is not to be local and limited to one nation, but that it will be extended to all nations. We have already alluded to the prophecy of Abraham and to that of Jacob. Later David proclaims all nations of the earth to be the inheritance of Christ. Isaias contemplates from afar a new sign, the standard of the cross raised before the eyes of all nations; he sees them bringing their children in their arms—that 354is, those barbarian tribes that come to prostrate themselves at the foot of the cross and present their sons to the baptism of the church; he announces the conversion of the kings of the earth and their submission to the spouse of Christ; he follows the apostles carrying the good tidings to the farthest ends of the world. “Who are those,” he exclaims, “who fly like clouds? The far distant islands are in expectation, and ships are waiting to carry them. I shall choose from among my people men whom I shall send to the Gentiles that are beyond the seas, in Africa, in Lydia, in Italy, in Greece, to the islands afar off, to them that have not heard of me and have not seen my glory.” Again, the reign of the Messias is everywhere represented as having no end; it is to endure for ever. We shall only mention the prediction of the Messianic kingdom contained in the book of Daniel, which was familiar to the Jews, and one in which they trusted. After a description of the four kingdoms, the last of which the Roman, as iron, breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things, the writer says that in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed.
These doctrines were not to remain the exclusive appanage of the Hebrews. Divine Providence willed that they should be diffused among the nations, and moulded the destinies of the chosen people for the furtherance of this design. It is a remark of Ritter that the Supreme Wisdom has allotted to nations their place on the globe in view of their destination. It was by such a providential disposition that Palestine was singled out as the habitation of God’s chosen people. Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia on the east and north; Egypt and Ethiopia on the south; Greece and Rome on the west—all the great empires of antiquity will successively come in contact with it. It is there, at the confluence of human affairs, in the centre of ancient civilization, that the sacerdotal race is placed, called to spread everywhere the true religion, the knowledge of God and of Christ the Redeemer. From that central point it will be easy to send messengers of the eternal truth to the most flourishing cities, establish prosperous colonies in the important states by which it is surrounded, and thus accomplish its mission to be “a light for the Gentiles.”
The prodigies which, under Josue, Heaven had wrought in favor of the children of Jacob, had already fixed the attention of the other nations upon Israel, and had predisposed them to adore the God whom that people worshipped. Bossuet, speaking of those miracles, which were occasionally renewed, and of the effect they produced among the heathens, says that they undoubtedly brought about numerous conversions; so that the number of individuals who worshipped the true God among the Gentiles is perhaps much greater than is generally supposed. In the times of the Judges the frequent incursions of the neighboring tribes, their partial occupation of Judea, their repeated strifes with the Hebrews on the one hand, and on the other intervals of peace, commercial relations, the advantages offered to those who were willing to embrace the Jewish religion, contributed to propagate with that religion the expectation 355of a Messias. Under the Kings, the wars of Saul, the conquests of David reaching as far as the Euphrates, his domination over the country of the Moabites, of the Ammonites, the Philistines, spread among those nations the knowledge and fear of the true God. From the prosperous reign of Solomon to the glorious days of the Machabees, the alliances contracted with Egypt, Phœnicia, and the neighboring kingdoms, the great number of workmen whom those states placed at the disposal of Israel for the cultivation of the soil, the construction of its cities and fortresses—all contributes to the propagation of the sacred truth. The Israelites who repair to other countries for the sake of commerce speak of their traditions and leave after them the notion of their worship. Whilst the ships of Israel go and deposit on far distant shores its consoling hopes, travellers, attracted by the beauty of the country, the richness of its vegetation, the mildness of its climate come to visit the hospitable people by whom it is inhabited, and return initiated in the true faith. They recount to other nations the magnificence of the monarchs of Juda, the justice of their laws, the splendor of the solemnities of Jerusalem. Kings, legislators, philosophers come to the holy city from all parts; and Solomon, in the census he took of foreign proselytes, found that their number amounted to more than a hundred and fifty thousand.
But it is not enough that the name of the Lord should be known by the nations in the vicinity of Judea; the most distant tribes must be brought to adore him. To this effect Assyria, whose domination extends to the remotest regions of Asia, successively subjugates the kingdoms of Israel and of Juda, and disperses their inhabitants over the whole of its vast provinces. It is expressly forbidden to the captives of Israel to concentrate themselves on one point; for Providence intends that they should spread all over the East the light of truth and the earnest of salvation. Hala, Habor, Rages in Media, Ara on the river Gozan, are made the residence of the Jews of the ten tribes. They advance beyond the Tigris and the Euphrates, through Armenia as far as Colchis and Georgia, where they continue to dwell after the captivity, unwilling to abandon their new home. Numerous families fix their abode in Khaboul, in the most important cities of Chorasan and in Herat. Others established at first at the sources of the Indus, descending that river, reach India, and give rise to the tribe of the Afghans. Some even will cross the mountains of Central Asia, and will found establishments in Tartary, and chiefly in China, where later their descendants, raised to the first dignities of the empire, will teach the Chinese the Jewish religion. Some fragments of the books of Genesis and of Kings, passages of the prophets, written in the characters of that remote epoch, sufficiently indicate that those exiles transmitted to their children and propagated the revealed truth in that country. Confucius, the legislator of China, in his travels towards the west, derived from one of those colonies his ideas on the Supreme Being, whom he designates by the Hebrew name of Jehovah, scarcely altered, as Abel Rémusat tells us. At a later period the Persian reformer Zoroaster derived from the same source those flashes of truth which shine in the Zend-Avesta by 356the side of glimpses of primitive revelation. The Jews of the kingdom of Juda, grouped, on the contrary, in the centre of Chaldea, establish colonies at Sova, at Nahar, and in other places as far as the confines of the desert; and likewise at Teredon, at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates; at Machusa, Annebar, Nisibis, and on the spot where later Bagdad shall rise. All these colonies, and many others, which after the restoration will still remain in those countries, will open schools to become centres of light to the heathens. That permanent contact with the Chaldeans shall allow the latter to recover a portion of the treasure of primitive truths which they had lost. Also do all agree in considering the Chaldeans as the men of antiquity the most conversant with theological science. Whilst the Jews of Israel are carrying their faith to the extremities of the vast empire, those of Juda, assisted by the translation of their sacred books into Chaldaic, diffuse it abundantly in the thickly-populated provinces of the centre. Assyria had fallen before the superior valor and military skill of the Persians. It was the time of the deliverance of the Jews. The most zealous among them availed themselves of the edict of Cyrus to return to Palestine and to rebuild the sacred places. But their destiny was not altered; they still went on fulfilling their sacred mission among the Gentiles. Under the Persian domination Hebrew princes tell the monarchs of Persia of the future divine Liberator, and these have sacrifices and prayers offered in the Temple at Jerusalem for the prosperity of their reign. Providence makes use of the high functions they exercise at the imperial court to lead those princes of Juda to Ecbatana, to Persepolis and Suza, that they might initiate the nobility of those important cities in the knowledge of the true God, to speak to them of the Messias whom the Magi shall from that time expect. Distinguished Jews are entrusted with the archives of Ecbatana. A great number of priests continue after the restoration to live among the Persians, and are disseminated all over the empire. They spread their traditions and their dogmas among the heathen populations. That sojourn of Jewish priests in the land of exile, after liberty had been restored to them, and when honors awaited them in their own country, evidently shows that it is the effect of a merciful design on the part of God, who devises means for those populations to receive the light of truth. Ochus, one of the last Persian monarchs, irritated against the children of Israel, sends a certain number of them in exile into Hyrcania and on to the shores of the Caspian Sea, and by this he unwittingly helps in spreading among those abandoned tribes the consoling promises of salvation; for those violent measures, as Hecatæus remarks in Josephus Against Apion, far from discouraging the Jews, serve to revive their patriotism, their attachment to the faith of their fathers, and their religious zeal.
If Asia, the land of great empires, was favored in a special manner, Africa was not forgotten. The Hebrews had long before initiated Egypt in the knowledge of the one true God and of a Redeemer whose birth in future ages had been revealed to it by Jacob in his last moments. This first initiation had produced its fruits; we know by the testimony of Holy Writ that when the Hebrews went out of 357Egypt a considerable number of Egyptians followed them in the desert. In the reign of Solomon a small Jewish colony followed the Queen of Saba to Abyssinia. According to Bruce, in his travels, not only do the kings of that country claim to descend from Solomon, but, furthermore, the annals of Abyssinia are full of details about the voyage which the Queen of Saba made to Judea. Ethiopia thus received the sacred books and the religion of the Israelites—a religion which they kept afterwards, as the Jewish Ethiopian treasurer of the Queen of Candace, whom St. Philip found reading Isaias and whom he converted to Christianity, seems to prove. At the time of the Assyrian wars and of the great captivity a number of Jews took refuge in Egypt. Some went to Abyssinia and other parts of Ethiopia, where they established powerful colonies by the side of those which already existed. At a later period Ptolemæus I. brought two hundred thousand Jews into Egypt, where they established in all directions colonies which soon became prosperous under the protection of his successors. Numerous schools for the propagation of sound doctrine; houses of prayer in cities; a Sanhedrim at Alexandria, the residence of learned Greeks; a temple near Bubaste, in which the ordinary sacrifices prescribed by the Mosaic law were offered—all contributed to make of Egypt a second native land for the Jews. The name of the Lord was publicly revered and the worship of the true God practised everywhere. The infidels had consequently full opportunity afforded them of knowing him and serving him; and Isaias affirms that, in fact, a great number embraced the true religion.
As the times approach for the coming of the Messias, the nation chosen to announce him to the world and to prepare his way multiplies its colonies and its schools. During the whole period of the Greek domination the Hebrews avail themselves of the protection accorded them by Alexander and his successors to extend in the east and west their beneficial influence, and spread their salutary doctrines, which shall predispose the Grecian mind to receive the light of the Gospel. We find them in Seleucia, at Ctesiphon, and at Chalcis, where St. Jerome subsequently repaired to take lessons in the Hebrew language; at Berea, where he met with Jews converted to Christianity. We find them at Antioch, where they shall soon suffer martyrdom for their faith; at Damascus, a city in which they are in continual intercourse with the Greeks who flock around the celebrated teachers of its schools; at Emesus, Nisibis, and Edessa. In the principal cities of Asia Minor: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamus, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea possess Jewish colonies. Delos, Miletus, Halicarnassus, Iconium have their synagogues. At Philippi, in Macedonia, there are houses of prayer for the Israelites. Athens, Corinth, Salamis, Paphos count such a considerable number of Jews mixed with their populations that, as it is stated in the Acts of the Apostles, synagogues are to be found in those places. Now, synagogues were not only used for prayer but also for the interpretation of the sacred books, and consequently as public chairs from which the revelation and hope of a divine Redeemer were announced to the inhabitants. The prophet Abdias tells us that after the destruction of Jerusalem 358by the Chaldeans Jews had sought refuge in Sparta; and Arius, King of the Spartans, writes to the pontiff Onias that “it was found in writing concerning the Spartans and the Jews that they are brethren, and that they are of the stock of Abraham.”
During the period of the Roman domination Judea had colonies in all countries—in Parthia, among the Medes and Elamites, in Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Arabia, in the island of Crete, and at Rome. It is an opinion which found credit with several learned men that some Hebrews, at the time of the Assyrian invasions, came to Rome in the reign of Numa and suggested to him what is best in his laws; and, in fact, several of them seem to be modelled upon the Hebrew legislation. But it is certain that one hundred and forty years before Christ the Jews had erected public altars in Rome, and that a decree banished them from Italy; which is an indication that they must have been there in great numbers for a long time previous. In the days of the Machabees, when the Jewish nation, to use the expression of the Scriptures and of Cicero, was the friend of the Romans, the senate, at the solicitation of Jewish ambassadors, wrote letters in favor of the Jews of Lampsacus, Sparta, Delos, Myndos, Sicyonia; of those who inhabited Gortyna, Cnidis, Caria, Pamphylia, Lycia, Samos, Cos, Sidon, Rhodes, Avadon, the island of Cyprus, and Cyrene. No nation escaped the action of their zeal; and the Acts of the Apostles, enumerating the Hebrews assembled at Jerusalem on the occasion of the solemnity of Pentecost, tell us that “there were Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.”
Such, then, was the mission of the Jews; they constitute the true church before Christ for the preaching of God’s future kingdom that shall have no end. We see them dispersed throughout the world; we meet them on all the highroads of humanity, confessing the only Lord of heaven and earth, and holding in their hands their sacred writings, showing to all that a peaceful Ruler would rise from the land of Juda and would restore all things. And when the times were accomplished, and the earth was to behold its Saviour, all nations were held in expectation of the mighty event.
We have here endeavored to give a brief sketch of the Jewish history. No one can deny that the very raison d’être of the Hebrew nation was the hope of a Messias who was to restore all things and establish upon earth the kingdom of God. The prophets speak of him and of his glorious reign; they predict his universal dominion; it will have no end in time, and its boundaries will be those of the universe. The destiny of the Jews is unique. After a comparatively short period of splendor which the conquests of David and Solomon shed upon Palestine, they lose their political independence, and henceforth they shall be forced to mingle with the Gentiles, whose social habits they will adopt, but at the same time unflinchingly adhering to their own religious tenets. The result is also an historical fact: a Liberator of the human race is expected by all nations, et erit expectatio gentium. Is it possible for an unprejudiced mind, for one who does not read history in the light of preconceived systems, not to see in that well-connected 359whole a design of Providence which ordains means to the obtaining of a clearly-defined end? Historical atheism refuses to recognize any such design, as atheism, in the conception of nature, refuses to recognize an intelligent Creator. It gives us, instead of life, dry bones and ashes, barren and unmeaning facts in history, and in nature phenomena with no intelligible cause for their production, and tending to no assignable end. In every sphere of knowledge atheism does nothing else but spread darkness and desolation all around. But as one who is not wilfully blinded will always discern by a kind of rational instinct the action of an infinitely wise and omnipotent Being in the order displayed in the world, so will he admit the action of God in the direction of human events in which a divine intelligence is no less clearly manifested. The ever popular argument of St. Paul with its consequence, against those men that detain the truth of God in injustice, holds good in both cases: “That which is known of God is manifest in them; for God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made: his eternal power also and divinity: so that they are inexcusable” (Rom. i. 18-20).
England’s first printer was a Catholic. He lived and died in communion with the Holy See. He established his press in England beneath the shadow and on the grounds of the Abbey of Westminster, protected and encouraged by its monks. He translated and printed books of Catholic piety, and seems especially given to devotions for a happy death. He made bequests to the church, and the Requiem was said at his death.
Among all incunabula Caxton’s issues rank among the scarcest. Why? The Reformation made war upon them, so that many have perished utterly; six are known only by some scanty fragment preserved by being used to form part of a book-cover; of thirty-two more only a single copy has been preserved to our day. How many have perished and left no trace whatever, no man can tell.
“Be it therefore enacted by the king, our sovereign lord, the lords spiritual and temporal, and the commons in this present parliament assembled, that all books called antiphoners, missals, grailes (graduals), processionals, manuals, legends, piès, portuasses (breviaries), 360primers in Latin and English,[77] couchers, journals (diurnals), ordinals, or other books or writings whatsoever, heretofore used for service of the church, written or printed, in the English or Latin tongue, other than such as shall be set forth by the king’s majesty, shall be by authority of his present act clearly and utterly abolished, extinguished and forbidden for ever to be used or kept in this realm, or elsewhere within any of the king’s dominions.
“And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid that if any person or persons, of what estate, degree, or condition soever he, she, or they be, bodies politic or corporate, that now have, or hereafter shall have, in his, her, or their custody any the books or writings of the sorts aforesaid, or any images of stone, timber, alabaster, or earth, graven, carved, or painted, which heretofore have been taken out of any church or chapel, or yet stand in any church or chapel, and do not, before the last day of June next ensuing, deface and destroy or cause to be defaced and destroyed, the same images and every of them, and deliver or cause to be delivered all and every the same books to the mayor, bailiff, constable, or church wardens of the town where such books then shall be, to be by them delivered over openly, within three months next following after the said delivery, to the archbishop, bishop, chancellor, or commissary of the same diocese (to the intent the said archbishop, bishop, chancellor, or commissary, and every of them, cause them, immediately after, either to be openly burnt or otherwise defaced and destroyed), shall for every such book or books willingly retained ... forfeit for the first offence ten shillings, and for the second offence shall forfeit and lose four pounds, and for the third offence shall suffer imprisonment at the king’s will” (Statute 3 and 4 Edward VI. c. x.)
Neglect on the part of the archbishops and the others named to burn the books involved a penalty of forty pounds.
Thus Protestantism destroyed Caxtons. “A glance at the titles of the uniques will show that the books most liable to destruction, probably owing in part to their being much used, and in part to the destructiveness of religious sectarianism,”[78] says Blades, “are those directly or indirectly of an ecclesiastical character—such as ‘Horæ,’ ‘Psalters,’ ‘Meditacions,’ etc.”
Last year, 1877, being, it was believed, the fourth centenary of the first book printed by Caxton at Westminster, a Caxton celebration, proposed by Mr. Hodson, was carried out in London with no little pomp and display. Caxton imprints were brought together from many choice collections, with incunabula of all countries, and especially editions of the Bible, from Gutenberg’s to one printed for the occasion at Oxford.
The celebration was curious in the utter exclusion of any Catholic element, and in the machinery brought to bear to make the whole affair a glorification of the Reformation and of the stale prejudices against Catholicity. In the face of the books brought together and the lessons they told, this use of the first English printer, a Catholic, whose Catholic books the gentlemen of the Reformation had under severe penalties consigned to the flames, required in the managers no little assurance, or perhaps a well-founded knowledge of the voluntary blindness of the masses. They seem to have felt some sense of difficulty, or English exclusiveness never would have called in the Yankee adroitness of one of our countrymen rather inclined to play the buffoon in bibliography.
361The English Catholic body seems to have felt some compassion for their Protestant fellow-countrymen in the strange attempt on which the latter were engaged. They did not seek to force themselves into the affair, nor greet them with merited ridicule. We do not know whether they acted under a sense of pity or were merely apathetic. Yet we wish they had celebrated the anniversary of Caxton’s death or deposition, or some day selected, by a solemn Mass of Requiem in the ancient church of St. Etheldreda, now happily restored to Catholic worship. The Holy See would perhaps have sanctioned pro hac vice the use on that occasion of the Mass for the Dead in the ancient Sarum Missal, such as was used at the obsequies of the good printer, whose translation of the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert was completed on the day of his death.[79] We do not know but that we should have applied to Parliament for permission to celebrate a Mass of Requiem for Caxton in Westminster Abbey church, such as was said at his death. The proposition would probably have struck some dumb from sheer amazement; but Parliament would either have granted it, and permitted the funeral service of 1491 to be repeated just as it was said after his death, or they would have refused the request of the Catholic body, and made their bigotry one of the memorabilia of the Caxton celebration.
No such step was taken; and the managers of the Caxton anniversary were left at full liberty to give all the false color they could, to combine, suppress, distort as they chose, in order to give the public an impression that printing was one of the boons conferred on mankind by the Reformation. This was actually done directly and indirectly; and as Kaulbach, the painter, in his great canvas of the heroes of the Reformation, introduces Gutenberg and Christopher Columbus, so these gentlemen in England used the good, pious Catholic Caxton as the central figure in their tableau of the apotheosis of Protestantism.
Caxton left no dubious evidence of his practical faith as a Catholic. His Four Last Things, in French, ends with an exhortation to good works, “by which we attain to eternal life.”[80] The English Cordyale, or The Four Last Things, ends: “Which Werke present I began the morn after the saide Purificacion of our blissid Lady, Whiche was the daye of Seint Blase, Bisshop and Martir. And fiinisshed on the even of thannunciacion of our said bilissid Lady fallyng on the wednesday the xxiiij daye of Marche. In the xix yeer of Kyng Edwarde the fourthe.” The Festial 362opens: “The helpe and grace of almyghty god thrugh the beseechynge of his blessed moder saynt mary.” It ends thus: “By the helpe of his blessid moder mary and his holy spowsesse saynt brygytte and all sayntes. Amen. Caxton me fieri fecit.” Then there is “the lyf of the holy and blessed vyrgyn saynt Wenefryde ... reduced in to Englysshe by me, William Caxton.” “A short treatyce of the hyhest and most worthy sacramente of crystes blessid body and the merueylles therof” certainly sounds orthodox. And the picture of the Crucifixion, inscribed: “To them that before this ymage of pyte deuoutly saye v Pr nr v Aues & a Credo pyteuously beholdyng these ar of Xps passio ar granted xxxij M. vii. C. & lv yeres of pardon,” shows a belief in the power of the church to grant indulgences.
We know that the attempt has been made to persuade those eager to be deceived that Caxton must have had Lollard sympathies. Thus, the editor of the reprint of the Fifteen Os says: “This collection is noticed by Dr. Thomas Fuller as being the first book of prayers tending to promote the Reformation.” And again: “It is more than probable that this is the first book of prayers in English issued by the followers of Wickliffe, and cannot but be interesting as having prepared the way for the great moral and spiritual changes that ended in the Reformation.” Now, the volume closes thus: “Thiese prayers tofore wreton ben enprited bi the comaūdementes of the moste hye & vertuous pryncesse our liege ladi Elizabeth, by the grace of god Quene of Englonde and of Fraūce & also of the right hye & most noble pryncesse Margarete, moder unto our soverayn lorde the kyng, &c. By their most humble subget and seruaūt, William Caxton.”
There is certainly no suspicion of Lollardism attaching to these ladies. Now let us examine the prayers. The title Fifteen Os will not suggest to Catholics now any familiar devotion; but when we state that they are nothing more nor less than St. Bridget’s Prayers or Meditations on the Passion of our Lord, which have retained their place in our Catholic prayer-books to this day, they will utter at least fifteen “ohs” and be certainly hyely amused at the idea of their savoring of Wickliffe.
Caxton.
“O Jhesu, endless swetnes of louyng soules. O Jhesu, gostly ioye passing & excedyng all gladnes and desires. O Jhesu, helth and tendre louer of al repentaūt sinners that likest to dwelle, as thou saydest thy selfe, with the children of men. For that was the cause why thou were incarnate and made man in the ende of the worlde. Haue mynde, blessed Jhesu, of all the sorrowes that thou sufferedest in thy māhode, drawing nyhe to thy blessed passion.”
Garden of the Soul.
“O most sweet Lord Jesus Christ, eternal sweetness of those who love thee, joy above all desire, firm hope of the hopeless, solace of the sorrowful, and most merciful lover of all penitent sinners, who hast said thy delight is to be with the children of men, for the love of whom thou didst assume human nature in the fulness of time. Remember, most sweet Jesus, all those sharp sorrows which then pierced thy sacred soul from the first instant of thy incarnation until the time of thy solitary passion,” etc.
Among the prayers following those of St. Bridget is this:
“O blessid lady, moder of Jhesu and virgyne immaculate, that art wel of comforte and moder of mercy, singuler helpe to all that trust to the, be now, gracyous lady, medyatryce and meane unto thy blessid sone our sauyour Jhesu for me, that by thy intercessions I may opteyne my desires, ever to be your seruaunt in all humylite. And by the helpe and socour of al holy sayntes herafter in perpetuell ioye euer to liue with the. Amen.”
Evidently Caxton would have 363had no difficulty in submitting to Pope Pius IX.’s definition of the Immaculate Conception.
The next prayer is one “To the propre angell”—guardian angel, as we now say. Further on we find a prayer to which indulgences for the souls in purgatory are attached. These prayers certainly show no trace of Wickliffe’s doctrines. The little book is one that any Catholic would use now, and which no Protestant would or could use.
Protestantism can lay no claim to the worthy, upright, laborious, and learned Catholic merchant who introduced printing into England, and chose the precincts of her finest abbey for his labors. His surviving friends shared his faith, as witness this note in a very old hand on a copy of the Fructus Temporum:
“Of your charitee pray for the soul of Mayster Wyllyam Caxton, that in hys time was a man of moche ornate and moche renommed wysdome and connyng, and decessed ful crystenly the yere of our Lord MCCCCLXXXXJ.
On the 17th of February, 1877, a meeting was held in the Jerusalem Chamber of the old Catholic abbey, not far from the presumed printing-office occupied by Caxton in the Almonry. Dean Stanley presided, and preparations were made for the exhibition. The Stationers’ Company offered their hall, but it was deemed too small, and a request was made for the Western Galleries at South Kensington. These were granted, and every facility given to arrange and display properly the works collected. One great object was to bring together and exhibit to the public as many copies as possible of works from Caxton’s press as could be obtained for the brief period from the public and private libraries, with such other books, especially of early date, as would tend to show the progress of printing from its discovery. The appeal was generously answered. No less than one hundred and ninety copies of books printed by the good Catholic William Caxton were contributed to the exhibition—a greater number, probably, than have ever been seen together since the Reformers made war on them, and greater than are at all likely to be again collected. They represented one hundred and four distinct works.
Lord Spencer sent fifty-seven Caxtons, early Block Books, a Gutenberg Bible, a Mentz Psalter; the Duke of Devonshire eighteen Caxtons; the Earl of Jersey and the Bodleian Library each seven; Sion College six, and the University of Göttingen six; Queen Victoria sent four and a Mentz Psalter.
The books were arranged in classes: (a) William Caxton and the Development of the Art of Printing in England and Scotland. (b) The Development of the Art of Printing in other Countries. (c) The Comparative Development of the Art in England and Foreign Countries, illustrated by specimens of the Holy Scripture and Liturgies. (d) Specimens noticeable for Rarity or for Beauty and Excellence of Typography. (e) Specimens of Printing. (f) Printed Music. (g) Book Illustrations. (h) Portraits and Autographs of Distinguished Authors, 364etc. (i) Books relating to Printing. (k) Curiosities and Miscellanies. (l) Type and Printing Materials. (m) Stereotyping and Electrotyping. (n) Copper-plate Printing, Lithography, etc. (o) Paper and Paper-making.
The great effort of the exhibition seems to have been directed to Class C. Noble collectors and commoners, universities and libraries, the British and Foreign Bible Society, archbishops and bishops, all contributed, and it was this department above the others that was to invest Protestantism with a peculiar halo. Yet the case presented difficulties of no ordinary character. Men like Stevens rant about “priestly dross and gloss” and similar claptrap expressions to keep alive old myths, but it required enormous assurance to advance these myths in the face of the collection gathered at London in 1877. They may talk of monkish legends and fables, but Protestantism rests on legends and fables which men who know better still continue to circulate in defiance of bibliography and common sense.
In the present case they desired to present to the public a glowing picture. There is a foreground in every picture, and there is a background also; there are clear lights which bring out the chief figures into bold relief, and there are shadows where figures lie almost unnoticed. The artists here knew well what to throw into the background and the shade.
Fable the first was that the Catholic Church had ever been the enemy of the Bible, opposed to its circulation. How is it, then, that when printing was invented the first book printed was the Bible? The church must have made the Bible known, or the early printers, who were not priests or monks, would have known nothing of such a book, would not have known where to get copies to print from, would not have known that anybody would know enough about the work to buy it if they printed it. But the fact is that people knew about the Bible, manuscripts were easily obtained, and many wanted them who could not afford to buy them. The fact that the Bible was selected to print shows that there was no impediment to its circulation, that there existed a well-known demand for it, and a call for cheaper copies.
Stevens reluctantly gives us aid to demolish this fable of Catholic darkness as to the Bible: “The Bible was the first book printed.” “Biblical bibliography proves that during the first forty years, at least, the Bible exceeded in amount of printing all other books put together; nor were its quality, style, and variety a whit behind its quantity.” And be it remembered that these forty years do not cover the whole period from the invention of printing to the commencement of the Reformation.
Bibles preceded all the Latin and Greek classic authors and all vernacular works, not in one place but in almost every place where a printing-press was set up.
“In a word,” says Stevens, “up to the discovery of America in 1492 Columbus might have counted upon his fingers all the old classic authors (including Ptolemy and Strabo in their unbecoming Latin dress) who could throw any geographical light on the questions which the great discoverer was discussing with the theologians of Spain; while, covering the same period, the editions of the Bible alone, and the parts thereof, in many languages and countries, will sum up not far less than one thousand, and the most of these of the largest and costliest kind.”
365This, it must be remembered, is no rash assertion, but the truth wrung from this writer by the fact that the collection exhibited before his eyes at least three hundred out of the thousand to which he refers; and this thousand—not thousand copies of the Bible, but thousand editions of the Bible, or parts such as New Testament, Psalms, etc.—includes only to 1492, thirty years before Luther issued his Bible. Yet the monstrous figment is kept up to this day that in those dark and benighted ages the people were kept in ignorance of the Bible, that the Catholic Church suppressed it and kept it hid away, and that it was only the “glorious Reformation” which brought it from its obscurity. Stevens, with all his assurance, must have blushed as he wrote the words: “The church managed to have small call for the Scriptures in the vulgar tongues which the people could read and comprehend.” He does not cite, and knew that he could not cite, any authority to show that the church did anything that could be construed into any such management. The Bible had come down in her keeping; she preserved it, diffused it, and handed it down from generation to generation, jealous of its purity and its traditional interpretation.
Next to the fable of the hostility of the church to the Bible, and connected with it, is the myth of Luther’s discovering an old copy of the Bible when he was a priest and a monk, that he thereupon set to work to translate it, and that he first gave the Scriptures to the people in the vernacular. It was a very pretty story, told down to our day by authors like D’Aubigné. The Caxton celebration, though it did not contain specimens of all the editions of the Scriptures printed before the Reformation, had enough to show how shamefully the Protestant public had been deceived and imposed upon by this fable.
Mr. Stevens’ list begins with the Gutenberg Bible, printed at Mentz between 1450 and 1455—for a copy of that magnificent work was there, lent by Earl Spencer, perfect, entire, with its six hundred and forty-one leaves, double column, “the earliest book known printed with movable metal type.” Then follows the Psalms, printed by Fust and Schöffer at Mentz in 1457, Queen Victoria lending a copy. Next comes the 1459 Psalter, the second, third, and fourth Latin Bibles, another Psalter, and then a complete Bible in German, printed, Mr. Stevens assumes, at Strassburg, by Mendelin, in 1466. Queen Victoria’s magnificent copy, richly illuminated in gold and colors, was there for all to admire, and beside it Earl Spencer’s, nearly as beautiful. Either by accident or design Caxton’s Psalter was not obtained, and this first known separate book of Holy Scripture issued in England between 1480 and 1483 was represented only by a fac-simile of a page of the copy in the British Museum. The various Books of Hours printed by Caxton were similarly unrepresented.[82] Then with other Latin editions came the second German Bible, also in 1466; the third, Augsburg, 1470; and so on through the list, fourth, fifth, sixth, to the twelfth German,[83] printed at Augspurg in 1490 by Henry Schonsperger; and two editions in 366Low German, Cologne, 1480, Lubec, 1491. There was also a German Psalter printed in 1492, described by Stevens as “a fine specimen of an early pocket edition of the Psalms in the language of the people.”
Thus the Caxton collection presented no less than sixteen Catholic Bibles and Psalters in German printed before Luther’s time; and as translations were not made on the spur of the moment, there must have been in existence many translations in manuscript, some of which never found their way into print at all. These sixteen volumes, publicly exhibited at once and together in London, are as many refutations of the Protestant fables and legends.
“Prior to the discovery of America,” says Stevens, “no less than twelve grand patriarchal editions of the entire Bible, being of several different translations, appeared from time to time in the German language; to which add the two editions by the Otmars of Augsburg, of 1507 and 1518, and we have the total number of no less than fourteen distinct large folio pre-Reformation or ante-Lutheran Bibles. No other language except the Latin can boast of anything like this number.”
The collection shows, too, that Bibles in the vernacular were not confined to Germany. It could show some in other languages:
The language of Sir Thomas More leads us to believe that some one of the Catholic versions of the New Testament at least was printed; but if so, the copies were suppressed so completely that none has reached our times. The mere fact that no copy is now known does not prove that none ever existed, when we consider the wholesale destruction by law of all Catholic books of devotion.
These are not all the vernacular Bibles issued in that period, but, as they stood there in the South Kensington Loan Collection, they furnished an irrefragable proof that printing originated in Catholic times; that the church was the first to use and encourage it; that she multiplied editions of the Bible in Latin, the habitual language of the church, then the language of learning and science, as well as in German, Italian, Dutch, French, and Bohemian; she printed, too, as a copy here showed, the Bible, Pentateuch, and Psalms in Hebrew, the Bible and Psalter in Greek and Chaldee, and an Arabic Psalter. (See 682, 691, 706, 711, 718, 720, 721.) Catholic writers have frequently referred to these early-printed Bibles and portions of Scripture in the vernacular; but to cite Panzer or some other bibliographer is far different from referring to a copy of the book. Here in the Caxton collection the very volumes stood to speak for themselves, and the catalogue attests the fact that they were there, tells us who owns each copy, its condition and state. What as a Catholic argument seemed vague and hazy thus took solid form, and became too substantial to doubt.
Now, how does Mr. Stevens endeavor to elude the force of this array of solid proofs? It is absolutely comical to see to what straits 367he is put. The following platitude, false statement, and false deduction is about as curious as the Caxton celebration itself:
“As the discovery of America was the greatest of all discoveries, so the invention of the art of printing may be called the greatest of all inventions. But no sooner had Columbus reported his grand discovery through the press than the pope assumed the whole property in the unknown parts of the earth, and divided it (sic) all at once between the two little powers in the Peninsula, wholly disregarding the rights and titles of the other nations of Europe. The same little game of assumption has been tried, from time to time, with regard to this great invention, but the press has a protective power within itself which the church can smother only with ignorance and mental darkness.”
The figures are somewhat confused, and we cannot exactly picture to our minds the church, with the two pillows of ignorance and mental darkness which Mr. Stevens can doubtless supply from his well-furnished store, trying to smother a protective power. The smothering of the children in the Tower was nothing compared to it. As for the “little game of assumption,” we think the gentlemen of the Reformation have played it long and successfully. But we admit that we do not see what right and title the nations of Europe had in the unknown parts of the earth, or whence they derived any right and title. So far as we have read, no right or title was claimed except when based on discovery, and then it was in the known and not in the unknown. Spain and Portugal carried their rival claims to the Holy See as a recognized tribunal, and the line of demarkation in their attempts at exploration was a wise and peace-establishing provision. It did not operate, and was not intended, to exclude the subjects of the pope, France, Germany, Denmark, or England from exploring.
The whole question is foreign to the subject of printing—so foreign that none of the Columbus letters, or the bull of Alexander VI., was thought worth obtaining for the Caxton exhibition. We have looked carefully through the catalogue, and, if they are there, they have certainly escaped us.
The array of books presented here shows that Luther could not have received the education he really did in his monastery, making him conversant with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, without being aware of the existence in print of many of the more than a thousand editions in all languages that had already issued from the press. It is not pretended that Luther obtained his knowledge of languages by a miraculous gift; he acquired them in the monastic schools, and his attainments are a proof of the extent of their curriculum.
One of the great objects of the exhibition was to show the earliest English Protestant editions. Tyndale’s New Testament, supposed to have been printed at Worms by Peter Schöffer in 1526, was represented by the very imperfect copy owned by the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and by the Antwerp edition of 1534; by the London edition of 1536, which had also at the end the “Epystles taken out of the Olde Testament what are red in the church after the use of Salsburye upon certen dayes of the year.”
But the great pride of the exhibition was a series of Coverdale’s Bibles and Testaments, over which Mr. Stevens indulges in most rhapsodical eulogy. “Let no Englishman or American,” he exclaims, “view this (765) and the six following 368Bibles without first lifting his hat, for they are seven extraordinary copies of the Coverdale Bible, containing, with one important exception (the Marquis of Northampton’s copy), all the variations known of the most precious volume in our language.” We cannot altogether share his raptures over this Bible, “faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and Latyn into English.” Stevens sneers at the Rhemish Testament as “a secondary translation from the Vulgate,” but Coverdale’s, translated out of “Douche and Latyn” into English, elicits no such sneer. According to his theory, set forth at great length, this edition is due to “Jacob van Meteren, of Antwerp, printer and proprietor, and probably the translator, by whom Coverdale was employed to edit and see the work through the press,” and he gives Antwerp as the place of publication. The edition was bought by James Nicolson, of Southwark. Though Mr. Stevens elsewhere represents the English people at this time as hungering and famished for an English Bible, he admits “that the English printer and publisher seems to have had as much trouble in working off his books as Simmons had in selling Milton’s Paradise Lost, if we may judge by the number of new titles and preliminary leaves found in different copies.” It contains a long and fulsome dedication to Henry VIII. and his dearest just-wife, in some copies “Anne” (Boleyn), in others “Jane” (Seymour). The Bible bearing the name of Thomas Mathew as translator (London: Grafton & Whitchurch, 1537) he ascribes to the famous John Rogers, and maintains that it too was printed by Van Meteren at Antwerp.
The Latin-English Testament bearing Coverdale’s name (London 1538), which he repudiated on account of its errors, or perhaps the correction of some of his errors, and that really issued by him at Paris in the same year, were both in the exhibition, as well as that issued also in 1538 at London bearing the name of Johan Hollybushe as translator. These are very curious as being, we think, the only Latin-English Testaments ever issued, giving the Vulgate and a translation based upon it. No other has, to our knowledge, ever appeared in the lapse of more than three centuries since that year, 1538. As Caxton’s Psalter was perhaps the first book of the Vulgate printed in England, these Testaments of Nicolson were the last portion of the Vulgate printed there for more than two hundred and fifty years, when the edition printed for the exiled clergy of France made its appearance. Unfortunately we do not find a copy of that edition in the list of those included in the exhibition.[84]
The first Testament professing to be translated directly from the Greek is that numbered in the catalogue 864, issued by Gaultier, 1550; and the first Bible from the Hebrew and Greek is that printed at Geneva by Rowland Hall in 1560. This shows how the people in England clung to the Vulgate. On the Continent Luther had abandoned it for such Hebrew and Greek texts as he could find, and so led the way to the host of errors that prevail to this day; but in England the versions were all based on the Vulgate, occasionally represented as compared with the Greek. It 369was not, indeed, till 1611 that the Church of England, by the translation then issued, formally abandoned the Vulgate, as the Calvinists had previously done. Mr. Stevens’ sneer at the Rhemish Testament of 1583, as being a secondary translation, applies with equal force to nearly all the English Protestant editions then in the hands of the people. Now that the Greek and Hebrew texts have by the aid of the best manuscripts been restored to some degree of purity and accuracy, Protestant scholars are revising the translation of 1611, and the one remarkable fact appears constantly that every change made to bring them to correspond to correct texts brings them back to the early translations from the Vulgate.[85]
This fact of English adherence to the Vulgate shown in the collection of Bibles at the Caxton celebration goes far towards exploding another Protestant myth and legend; and that is that England welcomed the Reformation with open arms, that the whole nation went over to the new ideas, and that Catholicity was generally abandoned. This is inculcated in a thousand ways in all the histories and popular literature of the day, if not squarely asserted. The Caxton collection shows that for nearly a century the people of England clung to the old Latin Vulgate as a standard, and that translations from it alone were read officially in the churches. And to this day the Book of Common Prayer is based on the Vulgate. Although Henry VIII. broke off from Rome, he knew the temper of the people. The English nation was in a manner bereft of its wonted leaders. The civil wars of the Roses had swept away most of the old nobility, and had brought to the surface the worst, most unscrupulous and grasping adventurers. What this class was who clustered around the spendthrift Henry VIII. we can easily see by a study of our times, after our experience of civil war. They were men to whom nothing was sacred; men determined to grasp and hold rank and wealth at any cost to the state or conscience. The people, bereft of their old leaders, of the time-honored noble families, could not effectively resist the set of new men. To these the church offered a splendid field for plunder. The ill-concerted insurrections against them were put down with merciless severity. Yet the attachment of the people to the old faith remained. Every step of Henry VIII. was gradual. In his reign the Mass and other offices of the church were maintained. Even in the reign of his boy son the unscrupulous men who coined a new faith and worship did not venture to go too far from the old forms. Like the Chinese emperor, they sought to destroy all trace of Catholic worship by committing to the flame every book in England that could keep it alive. What havoc they made we can learn and imagine from a view of the Caxton collection. Mary’s reign was too short to undo the mischief, and Elizabeth threw her whole influence into the scale against the church, 370and, against her own convictions, upheld the Anglican establishment as organized in her brother’s name, and finally gave it form and power; but even she did not dare to bring it to the standard of the French, Swiss, Dutch, and Scotch Protestants. The Church of England, in obedience to the old Catholic instincts of even those who submitted to force, retained much of the old form, and non-jurors, Puseyites, Tractarians, Ritualists are simply natural products of this old element.
Yet, with all the power of Henry, Somerset, Elizabeth, the mass of the English people had not become Protestant or ceased to be Catholic. One of Harper’s Half-Hour Series is not likely to over-state the Catholic side; yet Dr. Guernsey, in his Spanish Armada, says:
“At the middle of the reign of Elizabeth the population of England numbered something less than five millions. Of these, according to the estimate of Rushton, one-third were Protestants and two-thirds Catholics. Lingard, with less probability, thinks that about one-half were Catholic. The Italian Cardinal Bentivoglio reckoned the zealous Catholics at only one-thirtieth part of the nation, while those who would without the least scruple have become Catholics, if the Catholic religion should be established by law, were at least four-fifths of the whole; and Macaulay thinks this statement very near the truth. We think a more accurate apportionment would be that one-fourth of the population were decided Protestants, another fourth decided Catholics, while the remaining half—the majority of them with a leaning to the old faith—were quite content with whatever form of religion should be ordained by the civil authorities for the time being.”
If this was the state of England in the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, after all connection with Rome had been broken off for two generations, all Catholic books committed to the flames, the Mass and the priesthood outlawed, how impossible to believe that the English people went as a body into the Reformation! If only one-fourth were then decided Protestants, how many were Protestants when Coverdale’s Bible was issued?
If England became Protestant, it was simply because the English people were dragooned into it by penal laws steadily and persistently applied. The decided Protestants from choice were few and their descendants are comparatively few. The mass of English Protestants are the descendants of cowards who yielded up their faith and their convictions to save property, liberty, or life. The poorest Irish Catholic has a noble ancestry of men who suffered confiscation, imprisonment, hunting like wild beasts, death itself, rather than abandon the faith they sincerely believed, and it is certainly not for the sons of poltroons to despise them.
The Caxton collection thus, by showing the adherence to the Vulgate till a Presbyterian king came to the throne, shows how reluctantly England accepted Protestantism, and dispels many of the fine theories with which Mr. Stevens mystifies the subject.
The collection had some editions of special interest to us Catholics, yet it lacked many which we would expect to find in so pretentious a series of books. The Gutenberg Bible, that glory of the church, we have already noted. Few of our readers were or could well be present at the London exhibition, but when the Lenox Library opens in New York they will be able to see a fine copy of this first of printed books—proof that in Catholic times, when the church was undisputed mistress of Europe, the first 371work deemed entitled to the honor of being reproduced by the new invention was the Bible. A Catholic can point to it, and say: “That is the first book ever printed; it is our Catholic Bible, printed by the Catholic men who invented the art of printing.”
The Caxton collection contained also the first edition issued in the city of Rome in 1471, as well as the wonderful Polyglot of the great Cardinal Ximenes, and the Polyglot Psalter of Bishop Giustiniani with the first sketch of the life of Columbus. The Bible issued as a standard by Pope Sixtus V. in 1590 is represented by Mr. Stevens, most strangely, as “the first complete Latin edition published by papal authority.” He does not tell us in what respect the previous Latin Bibles were incomplete, or explain how none of them had any papal authority. This Sistine edition was contributed by Earl Spencer, as well as a copy of the edition issued under Pope Clement VIII., 1592, and the edition of the Septuagint from the Codex Vaticanus, issued at Rome in 1586. The Rhemish New Testament, 1582, and the Old Testament printed at Douay in 1609-10, were also there, but Mr. Stevens is clearly in error in saying: “It is a remarkable circumstance that, though these volumes bear the dates of 1609 and 1610 they had not reached the hands of the translators of the 1611 version when their long preface was written. There is distinct allusion to this work, as if to disclaim any knowledge of it.” Yet there is intrinsic evidence that they availed themselves of it before they put their own to press. Readings both in the Old and New Testament which had been preserved through the series of Protestant translations were abandoned in the King James Bible, and Douay renderings substantially, if not literally, adopted.
The King James Bible, of course, figures in the collection. But the question as to which is the editio princeps, the standard for those who bow down to that version, is a knotty one. There is a “Great He Bible” and a “Great She Bible”—two issues of the same year 1611 distinct through every leaf. Catholics will wonder at this distinction of sex in Bibles, and it may be well to state that in the endeavor to determine which of the two was the one originally issued by the translators, scholars found a discrepancy in Ruth iii. 15, one reading: “He measured six measures of barley, and laid it on her, and He went into the city,” while the other reads, “She went into the city”; and as each of these, although varying from each other in many places, was taken as a standard for subsequent editions, these Protestant Bibles are all He and She Bibles to those who wish to know from which of the two 1611 editions they sprang. Mr. Stevens decides that the He Bible, evidently incorrect in its rendering, was the original one.
He sets at rest another point in regard to this King James Bible, and that is the myth or fable of calling it “The Authorized Version.” He says: “We do not find any authority for calling it the Authorized Version, the words ‘appointed to be read in churches’ meaning not authorized, but, as explained in the preliminary matter, simply how the Scriptures were pointed out or ‘appointed’ for public reading.” In other words, to make the Bible go down with the people of England, who still clung to many old Catholic ideas, the epistles and gospels for the Sundays and many 372of the holidays of the year, as read from time immemorial in the Mass, were indicated or appointed in this Bible. This makes the King James Bible, whether a “Great He Bible” or a “Great She Bible,” a document to prove how slow the English people were to go over to the Reformers, and how they clung to what little they could grasp of their old Catholic faith and devotion. Mr. Stevens does not like it for this very reason, and wants the title purified by leaving out “appointed to be read in churches”; but leaving it out now will not destroy the force of the phrase as it stands on both the He and She Bible of 1611. He claims the King James as the Bible of all English Protestant churches. It has become so; but it was not so originally. He is historically wrong when he says: “It never was any more the Bible of the Church (i.e., of England) than of the Puritans.” It certainly was. Unfortunately there was no copy in this Caxton celebration of “The Souldier’s Pocket Bible: Printed at London by G. B. and R. W. for G. C., 1643,” or we could refer him to that constant companion of Cromwell’s soldiers to show that the Puritans stuck to the Geneva Bible as late as the time of the Commonwealth, and left the King James and the Bishop’s Bibles to the malignants. He knows the early writings of his own New England divines too well not to be aware that their sermons and tracts quote the Geneva and not the King James. The incorrect editions of the Geneva, and the appointment of king’s printers in the reign of Charles II. with the exclusive right of printing Bibles, stopped the issue of any but the King James, and it thus superseded the Geneva, and people took it as a matter of necessity, not of choice or preference. It is simply absurd to make it appear that the King James version was at once accepted and adopted generally.
The collection did very little in showing the various modifications of the Douay Bible. After the edition of 1635 there was scarcely anything in the Caxton exhibition—no copy of Nary’s New Testament, which is certainly remarkable enough. The first edition of the Protestant Bible printed in Ireland dates only from 1714, and certainly a Catholic Testament printed, in spite of penal laws and persecution, in 1719, only five years later, ought to have found a place there. There was no copy of Witham’s New Testament or of Challoner’s first Testament, or of the first edition of his Bible. Nor does Geddes appear. America is not at all represented. Not a copy of Eliot’s Indian Bible, or of Sauer’s German Bible, or the Congress Bible, or the first Catholic Bible of 1790; the Bay Psalm Book stands almost alone.
The Bibles sought for on account of curious renderings or strange blunders were pretty well represented, such as Matthews’ Bug Bible: “Thou shalt not nede to be afraid for any bugges by nyghte,” Ps. xci. 5. The second Genevan, 1562: “Blessed are the place-makers,” Matt. v. 9. Bishop’s Bible, 1568: “Is there no tryacle in Gilead?” Jerem. viii. 22. The Wicked Bible, London, 1631: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Cambridge Bible, 1638: “Whom ye may appoint,” Acts vi. 3, for we. The Vinegar Bible, 1717: “The Parable of the Vinegar.” Oxford Bible, 1807: “Purge your conscience from good works,” instead of “dead,” Heb. ix. 14. Oxford Bible, 1810: 373“Hate not ... his own wife,” for life, Luke xiv. 26. Still these are of no value except as cautions against typographical blunders. But among the curious Bibles and Testaments we were surprised to see no copy of the now rare negro English Testament, published in London in 1829, Da Njoe Testament va wi Masra en Helpiman Jesus Christus. The Rev. Sydney Smith immortalized it, and Notes and Queries in 1864 devoted some space to it. Renderings like these from a copy before us: St. Matthew, vi. 7, “En effi oeni beggi, oene no meki soso takkitakki, leki dem Heiden, bikasi dem membre, effi dem meki foeloe takkitakki, Gado so harki dem,” or vi. 11, “Gi wi tideh da jamjam va wi,”[86] are certainly as curious as anything exhibited.
An ingenious gentleman like Mr. Stevens might perhaps have deduced from it a proof that Caxton was a follower of Wickliffe, or that the Catholic Church showed no respect for the Word of God.
A catalogue of books such as we have taken up seems to afford little scope for any but dry bibliographical notes, but the Caxton celebration has its lessons that can be gleaned even from a catalogue, and if our readers have followed us we think that they will admit that the attempt to make Caxton other than a pious Catholic was a delusion; and the exclusion of the Catholic element, and the attempt to make Caxton a fulcrum for the exaltation of Protestantism, a failure.[87] As Catholics we may be grateful for the unintentional evidence the collection afforded of the fact that the Catholic Church protected and preserved the Bible, made men esteem and desire it, gave it to the newly-invented art of printing as the first work to issue, fostered the publication of the original texts, the authentic Vulgate, and of translations in the vernacular; as well as incidentally of proof that the Luther romance was a figment, and proof that the Reformation was forced on the English people, that they clung to the Bible, liturgy, and dogmas of the Catholic Church with the utmost tenacity, and that they lacked only the courage of Ireland and Poland to have maintained their country Catholic.
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II.
III.
Scarcely fifty years have elapsed since Sydney Smith contemptuously asked: “Who reads an American book?” John Bull was delighted at this sneering query of the witty Dean of St. Paul’s. It was so agreeable an exposé of the literary poverty of a formidable rival. It was so very consoling to find a weak point in the young giant who had twice beaten him in war. Could Sydney Smith rise to-day from his grave in Kensal Green he would witness a marvellous change. The time has passed when he might triumphantly ask: “Who reads an American book?” The time has passed when John Bull might gloat over the poverty of American literature. We have a literature—a noble literature—of which any nation might be proud. We may confidently reverse the celebrated query of the wittiest of English divines, and ask: “Who does not read an American book?” Who does not read the histories of Prescott? Who does not read the charming writings of Irving? Who does not read the wonderful tales of Hawthorne, the poems of Longfellow, of Bryant, of Poe?
Our literary temple, like Aladdin’s palace, is glorious; but, like Aladdin’s palace, it is also incomplete. While our literature is full and splendid in poetry, in history, and in science, it has been strangely wanting in what Prescott calls “ornamental literature”: the romance. The deficiency is more particularly remarkable when we consider the magnificent field which this country offers to the novelist. Our government, our institutions, our society, our national manners, the vice and extravagance of our great cities, our political corruption, the enterprising spirit of our people, the rapid change of fortune in our commercial cities, where the born beggar often dies a millionaire, life at our watering-places—all present interesting and inexhaustible subjects for the romance-writer. No country in the world affords such strong and striking contrasts of character as the United States. Here we have the gay and mercurial Frenchman, the practical and plodding German, the generous and improvident Irishman, the reserved Englishman, the proud Spaniard, and last, but by no means least, the eager, calculating American, with his brain of fire and his heart of ice.
376Certainly there is no lack of materials; the workers alone are wanting; the harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few. We want a Thackeray to expose the heartless extravagance of our best society; a Dickens to turn our hearts in generous sympathy towards the poor and suffering; a Bulwer to polish the manners of our people, and illustrate the noble truth that knowledge is power, money only its handmaiden. Within a dozen years this trio of novelists has passed away, and they have left no successors. Except a few chapters in Thackeray’s Virginians, and some absurdly nonsensical scenes in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, the works of the great English novelists are entirely foreign: the characters, manners, scenes—all foreign to us. But they are read here with as much pleasure as in England. The Americans are a nation of readers—men, women, and children, all read. The majority of our men read newspapers almost exclusively. Seven-eighths of the novel-reading of this country is done by women. The statistics of any popular library will show that three novels a week form the average of these fair readers.
With so great and constant a demand for novels, why have we no novelist among us?—a great novelist, a national novelist, an essentially American novelist, as Bulwer and Thackeray are essentially English. As there can be no effect without a cause, there must be a cause for this deficiency in our literature. There are two: American publishers and American readers. While an English magazine scarcely ever publishes an article by an American writer, there is not a great English novelist of the last quarter of a century who has not written for one or other of the American magazines. Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, George Eliot, Trollope, Miss Muloch, etc., etc., have written more or less for our periodicals. Literature, like love, must be encouraged or it languishes and dies. In addition to the want of encouragement given to American novelists by our publishers is the fact that American novel-readers affect to despise American novelists. The novel-reading ladies who frequent circulating libraries, demanding with one voice “something new,” who prefer Miss Braddon to George Eliot, and Mrs. Henry Wood to Thackeray, say they “cannot read American novels.” And yet three of the most popular novels of the last three years have been American, viz.: Infelice, One Summer, and A Question of Honor. We have seen an American lady take up The American, by Mr. Henry James, Jr., and throw it down, saying, “The name is enough.” We have seen ladies decline one of the charming stories of Mr. Aldrich or Mr. Howells, and carry off in triumph the last production of Mary Cecil Hay or the voluptuous “Ouida”! If Americans refuse to read American novels, who will read them?
The indiscriminate and almost universal novel-reading now practised is a striking and alarming feature of American life, when we consider the tone and character of so many of the modern novels. Judged by them, divorces, elopements, intrigues, and other crimes against society are the normal attendants of modern civilization. They play a conspicuous part in most of the “popular novels” of the day. Yet such books are eagerly devoured by young girls, 377whose minds are keenly susceptible to their dangerous influence. An insidious poison is thus infused which often fatally corrupts the youthful imagination. Bad books are the devil’s own instruments for the ruin of souls. As it is impossible to deny the fact that novels form the staple reading of a majority of the world, it is important that they should be not only pure but above suspicion.
The Catholic press cannot too strongly condemn the scope and influence of the novel of to-day. While Scott and Miss Edgeworth are neglected, the vile trash of Rhoda Broughton and Mrs. Forrester is eagerly sought. The good old habit of reading history, travels, biography, essays, etc., is almost entirely abandoned. “We want something new and exciting,” is the general cry; “history and biography are too deep.” And so they go on from week to week, from month to month, and from year to year, reading nothing but novels, and filling their minds with nonsense, if nothing worse. While we condemn indiscriminate novel-reading, we do not condemn novels indiscriminately. There are a few that can be read without detriment either to morals or religion, and these, we are sorry to say, are the novels that modern readers pronounce “flat.”
During the century of our national existence we have had three genuine American novelists: Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Gilmore Simms. The first of this trio possessed great natural gifts and enjoyed a liberal education. The singular advantages which nature so lavishly bestowed upon Brockden Brown prevented him from being a popular novelist. He was a pure idealist. He lived in a world of his own. His beautiful and fertile imagination created beings which never could exist in this world, and these he made the heroes and heroines of his strange stories. They may please the intellectual few, but they possess no interest for the uncultivated many. If Brown’s talents had been properly directed, if he could have kept his soaring imagination fixed on the earth, and been satisfied with describing men and things as they really exist, his would have been a lasting fame. But, as it is, he is not now read by one in ten thousand, nay, in ten times ten thousand. Cooper is second to Brown in point of time and superior to him in point of popularity. He threw a charm, a grace, and an interest around the life and character of the American Indians which appear inconsistent in the light of recent experience. In his sea-stories he succeeds where the greatest novelist signally failed. Cooper enjoyed a high reputation during life, but his novels now rank with the writings of Mayne Reid, and are almost exclusively read by boys. Simms’ stories of the Revolution and the border life in the South that succeeded the struggle for independence are excellent in their way. His Revolutionary romances afford glimpses of generous devotion to patriotism and an ardent zeal in the cause of liberty which Americans might read with profit at the present day.
But those novelists belong to the past—the dead and buried past. We want the present time described—the living, breathing, busy present. There never was an age, there never was a country, that afforded such scope for the novelist as this age and country. Our cities are swarming with an eager, 378reckless, enterprising population, presenting an infinite variety of characters, each occupied with his own particular pursuits of ambition, pleasure, or wealth. Take New York as the representative city of America. There are to be found the best and the worst features of our civilization; the most unbounded wealth and the most squalid poverty; the most exquisite culture and refinement and the most degraded and abandoned of the human race. Is not our society as vain, frivolous, false as that English society which Thackeray satirized so unmercifully? Have we no Vanity Fair, no heartless Becky Sharps, no selfish George Osbornes, no wicked old Steynes, no disreputable Rawdon Crawleys?
Our country is the last of nations in point of time, but the first in all material prosperity. Like Minerva, it sprang into existence fully equipped for a career unparalleled in the annals of the world. Other nations have taken a thousand years to reach the position which the United States took at one bound. We have more than realized the dream of Plato. But let us not imitate the philosopher of Greece, and banish poetry and pure fiction from our republic. Let us not hang the sword of Damocles over the imagination, but let it be purified. Let us not employ the scissors of Atropos to cut the threads of fictitious narrative, but let it be purged of its present loose and dangerous tendency. Sir Walter Scott declared novels to be “a luxury contrived for the amusement of polished life, and the gratification of that half-love of literature which pervades all ranks in an advanced stage of society, and are read much more for amusement than with the least hope of deriving instruction from them”; yet Ivanhoe throws more light upon the personal character of Richard Cœur de Lion, Kenilworth informs us more particularly about the court of Elizabeth, the Fortunes of Nigel gives us a better insight into the private life of King James, than we derive from Hume. By his poems and novels Scott threw a perpetual charm over the bleak hills of Scotland; he made its ruined abbeys as interesting as the ruined castles of Germany; he made its lakes the favorite resort of thousands of summer tourists. Author of the most celebrated novels that were ever written, Scott was unjust to the children of his mind when he spoke slightingly of novels. It should be remembered that he also spoke unfavorably of the literary profession—a profession by which he made a million dollars and an immortal name.
When the author of Waverley spoke disparagingly of novels that kind of literary composition was almost in its infancy, certainly in its childhood. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith were the only great names in that department of English literature. It was almost an uncultivated field, but the reaper was at hand, whose harvest should be abundant, whose reward great. The lordly halls of Abbotsford still stand, the magnificent result of novel-writing. For every novel written during the time of Scott there are at least one hundred written now. The novels published during the last fifty years are far more numerous than all the novels that had previously existed in the world. A hundred years since pamphlets were written to promote the success of a political measure, to show that “taxation” was “no tyranny,” to overthrow a 379minister, etc. Now, when Disraeli wants to convince the country of his political sagacity, he writes a novel; when Dickens wanted to show up a crying injustice to the poor he wrote a novel; when Thackeray wanted to expose the shams of English society he wrote a novel. The age of pamphlets is gone, the age of novels has succeeded. Statesmen write novels, soldiers write novels, clergymen, lawyers, doctors—all professions, all classes and both sexes, write novels, and still the novel-reading Olivers “ask for more.” Any person who visits a fashionable circulating library upon a Saturday afternoon will see how great is the demand for new novels.
Books which were, in the last century, read in mixed assemblages of young ladies and gentlemen could not now be read by old ladies in the privacy of their closets. Apropos of which is a story out of Lockhart’s Scott: “A grand-aunt of mine,” said Sir Walter, “was very fond of reading, and enjoyed it to the last of her long life. One day she asked me, when we happened to be alone together, whether I had ever seen Mrs. Behn’s novels. I confessed the charge. Whether I could get her a sight of them? I said, with some hesitation, I believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the manners or the language, which approached too near that of Charles II.’s time to be quite proper reading. ‘Nevertheless,’ said the good old lady, ‘I remember them being so much admired, and being so much interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again.’ To hear was to obey. So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with ‘private and confidential’ on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words: ‘Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn; and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,’ said she, ‘a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society of London?’”
Although a vast improvement has taken place in the tone of novels generally, yet there are many still written which should not be read, and many are read which should not be written. It is a striking and lamentable fact that the worst novels of the day are written and read by women. The miss scarcely in her teens reads books which her grandmother would be ashamed to read. As the pampered palate of the epicure can only enjoy food highly seasoned, so the vitiated minds of modern readers can only enjoy highly seasoned novels; mysterious murders, mad marriages, runaway matches, terrible secrets, awful mysteries, hidden perils, etc., are required to stimulate their jaded taste. As a person who feeds only on dainties will soon have the dyspepsia, so a person who reads only highly-seasoned novels will have a sort of mental dyspepsia. Scenes are described, circumstances are mentioned, conversations retailed, vices introduced into modern novels which would cause any man to be banished from decent society who should so far forget himself as to allude to them. Yet such things are read without 380blushing by young ladies, such books are discussed by ladies and gentlemen without shame. If our young ladies are to read nothing but novels, in the name of modesty let not their literary food be corrupt and corrupting; let not their virgin minds be filled with foul images; let not their Christian souls be soiled with even a thought of vice.
Queen Anne could not enjoy her breakfast unless the Spectator was by her plate. Were Addison alive now and writing the Spectator, we doubt whether Queen Victoria would have it with her morning meal. Times change, and kings as well as commons must keep pace with their age. Gibbon’s vanity was gratified that his history was in every lady’s boudoir and discussed in every fashionable drawing-room in London. Were Gibbon writing in this present year of grace, we do not think the Decline and Fall would deprive the last novel of its “pride of place” in my lady’s boudoir. About twenty-two years ago Macaulay received that famous £20,000 check from the Messrs. Longman for a volume of his History of England, of which more than twenty-six thousand five hundred copies were sold in ten weeks. Macaulay’s History was even more popular than Gibbon’s. He said: “I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.” “For a few days” Macaulay’s history did “supersede the last fashionable novel,” but we think we are safe in saying that it will have fewer readers this year than a new novel by “Christian Reid” or Mrs. Alexander. Take the average girl of the period, question her about her reading, and what is the result? She averages six novels a week—three hundred a year. Certainly much in point of quantity, but how about the quality? Has she read the Spectator, the Vicar of Wakefield, Macaulay’s Essays? No. They would be as tiresome to her as the compliments of an old beau—as old-fashioned as last year’s bonnet.
Mme. Roland when a girl slept with a volume of Plutarch’s Lives under her pillow. Our girls, who are more interested in contemporary society than in the lives of illustrious Greeks and Romans, put the last novel under their pillow, that they may continue the first thing in the morning the entrancing story of Theo, which “tired nature” compelled them to relinquish at midnight. We trust they may never be called upon to display the lofty heroism of Mme. Roland—that their only tears may be those shed over the woes of imaginary heroines, their only sorrows as fictitious as those in the novels they love so well.
Being an unquestionable fact that the reading millions of this last quarter of the nineteenth century devote themselves to novels more than to any other class of literature, novels may be made the means of great and universal good. We all know how rapturously the third tier applauds lofty moral sentiments; how enthusiastically the “gods” of the gallery sympathize with virtue in distress; how the protector of innocence is cheered and the villain hooted. Let this natural feeling of the human heart be turned to account in novels. We have all laughed over that inimitable scene in The Rivals between Lydia Languish and Lucy, her maid, who has been sent to the circulating library for some late 381novels. Do not some of Lydia’s favorites suggest the names of popular novels that are in daily request at our fashionable circulating libraries?—the Reward of Constancy, the Fatal Connection, the Mysteries of a Heart, the Delicate Distress, the Tears of Sensibility. Have we not the Fatal Marriage, the Empty Heart, a Woman’s Heart, the Curse of Gold, the Mysterious Engagement, a Clandestine Marriage, etc.? Judging from the books they read, our girls must believe with Mrs. Malaprop that “thought does not become a young woman.”
A popular modern novel, one which nine out of every ten readers pronounce “so nice,” “so interesting,” “perfectly lovely,” is “made up” something after this manner: A young girl, one half of whose character entirely contradicts the other half, engages herself to some worthy but commonplace young man, who is more familiar with figures in his ledger than with figures of rhetoric, who is more apt at writing business letters than love letters, who is better acquainted with market quotations than poetical quotations, who knows more about the Corn Exchange than about Lucille—in short, a man who takes a practical, common-sense view of life. The love of this romantic girl and this practical young man is not very ardent. In the meantime there appears upon the scene a dark, mysterious, gloomy, blasé man of the world, believing in nothing, hoping for nothing, and who looks upon existence as a curse. He is as handsome as an angel, cynical as a fiend, sceptical as a modern philosopher. His “noble” brow is often disfigured by a scowl, his “chiselled” mouth is often marred by a sneer. In a word, he is a sort of fashionable Lara. This scowling, sneering, cynical gentleman has had an interesting history: he was the hero of an unfortunate love-affair. His heart is a burnt-out volcano. In his early youth he had loved—madly, wildly loved—a woman who was married to a brute. He tells this woman his love. She listens to his story, laments that she is not free, and bursts into tears. He takes her in his arms, swearing that she is the one idolized love of his heart. At length she says they must part, but bids him await her summons. He leaves her, goes abroad, and tries to forget his sorrows in the sparkling Lethe of dissipation. In vain. The sad form of his loved one is the skeleton at every feast, and changes every ball into a funeral. At last his long-expected summons comes: the being he loves more than ten thousand lives writes him to come to her at once; that her husband has struck her, she is sick, perhaps dying. He flies to revenge her wrongs. He finds her dead. Thus was his love lost, his hopes crushed, his life wrecked. Lara tells his story to our romantic girl one lovely June evening. They are seated on a moonlit piazza. The perfume of many flowers fills the air. The sound of a distant river is heard. It is a night and a scene meet for love. In tones, tender, sad, but sweet, he tells her his heart has long been ashes; that he never thought the fires of love could again be kindled there, but she has taught him that there is peace, happiness, love for even him. Will she raise this dead heart to life? She murmurs, softly but passionately, “I love you, Arthur.” This is a rather mild and innocent specimen of the food that modern 382novel-readers feed on. The object of fiction should be to represent life as it is—to “hold the mirror up to nature.”
Just one hundred years since all London went wild over a new novel by a nameless writer. The new novel was Evelina, the nameless writer was Miss Burney. The characters in the book were commonplace, the scenes uninteresting, the story unexciting, but it showed, what no other novel of the time showed, that a book could be lively without being licentious, readable without being immoral. Nothing more clearly proves the poverty of the fictitious literature of the last quarter of the eighteenth century than that such a statesman as Burke should sit up all night to read such a book as Evelina. Nothing better proves how prejudice can sway a strong mind than that Dr. Johnson should pronounce Miss Burney superior to Fielding. But it was extraordinary for a young lady to write a book one hundred years ago. It was still more extraordinary for a young lady to write a novel that could be read with pleasure. Hence the furore that it created and the interest that its author excited. Miss Burney did not (as too many of our lady writers do), upon the strength of one successful book, rush a half-dozen inferior novels upon the world. She waited more than four years before she published her next work, Cecilia. For Evelina she received £20, for Cecilia £2,000. We have mentioned Miss Burney, because we consider her as an excellent example for the imitation of modern novelists. She was willing to wait four years after publishing an unprecedentedly successful book before giving another to the world. But, when that other work did appear, it was placed by general consent among the few classical novels in the English language. Nowadays it is the fashion for a popular writer to deluge circulating libraries with rubbish which, in a few weeks, finds its way to the junk-shop. Those who write for posterity write slowly, correct carefully, and publish seldom.
When we remember that this is peculiarly the age of the novel, that more novels are now published in New York in one year than existed in the whole world one hundred years ago, that the demand is still greater than the supply, that we have long since broken the apron-strings that bound us to our literary mother, England, in every other department of letters, we feel convinced that, at no distant day, our novelist will come. But he must be true to his mission, and give a faithful representation of American life and manners, not a “counterfeit presentment.” He must not sacrifice virtue and honor to present popularity, he must not pander to the vicious tastes of a demoralized society, but, like Addison, he must purify the public taste by elevating it to his own high ideal. Such a writer would not violate the sanctities of domestic love or forget the obligations of social duty. He might be witty, but he would never be wanton; he might be lively, but he would never be licentious. Such a writer would be a benefactor to his country and to the world.
Development implies a germ. It is the growth of such qualities or characteristics as were inherent in the original principle. If the principle was bad the development will be bad—if, indeed, there be development at all. Perhaps it will be truer to say that bad principles do not develop; they rather generate fresh stages of decay. Corruption is the law of bad principles, as development is the law of good principles. The “survival of the fittest” is certainly true in the moral law, even if it be not certainly true in the material. Six thousand years of human history have proved that divine principles “survive”; and their survival has been their development, in respect to the sphere of their empire. The principles themselves do not grow, but the world grows, and with it divine government. Dr. Newman, in his work on developments, has drawn this distinction very luminously. The church grows, and its influence extends, and its machinery is in constant operation; yet its developments are not developments of its principles so much as of its qualities and capacities. They are also developments of its power. What the church was on the day of Pentecost she is to-day; it is her body which is grown, not her spirit. Divine principles are immutable; but because the world always changes the church must change too—not in her principles but in her action.
The converse of the development of Catholicism is seen in the development of Anglicanism. Whereas the church is more powerful in the proportion of antagonism, Anglicanism grows weaker and weaker. Whereas the church opposes dogma to heresy, Anglicanism suggests wider religious liberty. Whereas the church cuts off every withered branch, Anglicanism grafts the sticks on to its trunk. Thus the development of Anglicanism is in the direction of corruption; of the gravitation of new errors towards the parent one; of the union in one society of every element of dissolution, with a view to spasmodic vitality. The older Anglicanism grows the more decay it engrafts, trying hard to look vigorous with life by the process of galvanizing death. This is its general principle. But, particularly, the modes of its experiment are as instructive and as lamentable as is its principle. Let us take a late example. Nearly five thousand Anglicans have just petitioned their queen against the permitting confession in the Church of England. Their motives may be left to their own consciences, though they do allege, by way of seeming to be in earnest, that “confession is subversive of the principles of morality, social order, and of civil and religious liberty.” Among the petitioners are more than three thousand clergymen; but there are also a vast number of signatories who are set down as “Anglicans not classified.” Now, in what way are we to regard this grave petition as a development of the principles of Anglicanism? Be 384it remembered that confession, as practised by the Ritualists, was in itself a development of Tractarianism; that Tractarianism was a development of the reaction which followed on the decay of Evangelicalism; that Evangelicalism was a development of the reaction which followed on the decay of Dry-Churchism; and that Dry-Churchism was the development of that Erastianism which the house of Hanover firmly rooted in the state church. So that the huge gulf between confession and Georgeism has to be bridged over by successive revolutions, each perfectly natural in its reaction, yet each naturally leading to fresh change. Here we see the distinction between the development of church vitality and the development of heretical restlessness. As we have said, church principles cannot change; it is the action only of the church which becomes enlarged, Catholic principles not admitting of development save in the sense of extension of empire. But Anglican principles can be turned upside down, or can be turned inside out, a score of times. There is no more affinity between ritualism and Dry-Churchism than there was between Evangelicalism and Erastianism. There is no more concord between Dr. Pusey and Canon Ryle than there was between Bishop Butler and John Wesley. Not more opposite was Mr. Simeon to Canon Liddon than was Archbishop Whately to Lady Huntingdon. These Anglicans represent different churches. And yet they all belong to the same church. What, then, is the development of Anglican principles?
Obviously there is not development at all. The word cannot be used in a Christian sense. There is reaction, revolution, novel apostolate; there is not true Christian development. We may say of the great French Revolution that it was a development of (some of) the principles of Voltaire; or that D’Alembert and Diderot, with the Encyclopædists generally, planted seeds which sprang up into the guillotine. Yet the very point of such development was that it sprang not from principle but from the assertion that principle was not divine. And so in Anglicanism: though the assertion was quite distinct, there was no little affinity in the results. The theory of Anglicanism was that the Catholic Church was not divine, but that Church-of-Englandism had pretensions to be so; or rather, that the divine principles of the Catholic Church were purified to perfection in Church-of-Englandism. But a corollary of this theory was that the (divine) Catholic Church had no more authority than had “Reformers”—an assumption which was fatal, in argument and in fact, to the immutability of principles. Accordingly we find that mutability has been the law of the whole system of Anglican developments; in other words, that those developments have been as utterly contradictory as they have been numerous beyond computation. Is this a Christian or a Catholic development, or a development of even a philosophic kind? It is, on the contrary, proof positive that Anglican principles are not divine, for if they were divine they could not change. It is not discipline which has changed, nor external observance, nor the relations of the church to the state; such changes would be comparatively unimportant; it is Christian doctrine, Christian sacraments, 385priestly powers, and all that constitutes the idea of a church. It is not that new doctrines have been added to old doctrines; it is that old doctrines have been excised. A perfectly brand-new theology has supplanted a defunct system; and this not only once but fifty times. So that we have to deny most positively that there has been “Catholic” development in that institution which Queen Elizabeth founded; and we have to affirm that reaction and revolution have proved that institution to be human. It has been argued—and it is still argued in ritualistic organs—that ritualism must be a Catholic development; for its spirit is in the direction of Catholic truth, and its labor is to restore Catholic practice. The answer is that such reaction is not Catholic; it is the aspiration of heresy towards the church. We do not touch the delicate question—which belongs rather to spiritual science—the operation of divine grace outside the church; this question does not enter into our argument; we are speaking only of the distinctions between the development of true theories, and reaction and revolution from false. Development in the Catholic Church has meant expansion of empire, of inherent capacities of adaptation, of definition in proportion of need, and of anathema in proportion of desert; it has never meant the least change of principle. Development in Anglicanism—if we must still use the word—has meant new religions shooting up out of old, with a chaos of old and new together, and with no means of arguing from precedent to sequence what Anglicanism may become this day twenty years. This is certainly not Christian development. It may imply human energy, with restlessness of will and a constant eagerness to keep moving for life’s sake; but as to calling it supernatural development, the very suggestion appears profane. Those three thousand clergymen, with “Anglicans not classified,” who have just petitioned their queen against confession, have asserted three things, each of which is absolutely fatal to the assumption of Christian development. They have said that their sole head is the state; and this is pure paganism and impiety. They have said that they abhor a divine sacrament; and this is anti-Catholic, anti-Christian. But they have said, too, that, in the Church of England, there is to be both liberty of opinion and the forbidding of a Christian practice to the laity; and in saying this they have both cut short development and cut short its root and its principle. Development can only mean one of two things: either the extension of the empire of one principle, or the extension of the rights of religious liberty. That it does not mean the first in the Church of England we think that we have sufficiently shown; and that it does not mean the second these memorialists against liberty have taken their best pains to demonstrate. What development, then, is left to the Church of England? Obviously there can be none, save the increase of wrangling and the natural effort to crush one another’s liberty.
Yet there is one new development—to use the word conventionally, and not in its scientific meaning—which has proved perhaps more shocking and more thoroughly unchristian than any which has ever gone before. That development is modern Broad-Churchism. It is distinct from its antecedent 386in the Georgian era, being necessitated by totally different issues. It is a compound of three things, all kindred in kind and all mutually assisting one another: repugnance to sacerdotal pretension; indifference about dogmatic truth; and a fondness for scientific infidelity. This last is the worst of the three, but it is in most men the parent of the other two. It is an element of Broad-Churchism which had positively no existence until after the full development of Tractarianism. Curiously enough, the return to the supernatural, and the rejection of whatever is not natural, have been almost twin movements in the Church of England. Ritualism having failed to hold the intellects of shrewd men, there were only two courses left open: the one was to, logically, become Catholics, the other to deny the supernatural. The birth of a new school of so-called scientists, which school has sought to question revelation, took place at the very crisis when Anglicans were hesitating whether they ought to become Catholics or not. It furnished the exact pretext desired. If there was doubt about the evidence for revelation, it was useless to adopt all its consequences. Yet it was felt that it would not do to throw overboard Christianity, as at least the most admirable of ethic systems; so the moral part of Christianity was retained, while the dogmatic part was put on one side. Hence a Broad-Churchism which, while being really quite sceptical, covered itself with the mantle of Christian morals. “I deeply regret,” said an ecclesiastic of this school, when he came to the last hours of his life, “that I ever preached anything but morals.” This was paganism, virtuous paganism, but it passed current for respectable Broad-Churchism. What it meant, and what Broad-Churchism now means in almost every one of its adherents, was scepticism in regard to the Incarnation, but a natural admiration for natural virtues. Dean Stanley is one of the doctors of this school, and preaches rationalism in Westminster Abbey. “Christian rationalism” is that last new abortion which has been born of the failure of previous systems. It had no existence in England until twenty years ago; that is, it was not formulated into a system. In these days it is openly taught. In the magazines there constantly appear brilliant articles which are directed against the Christian revelation, while yet advocating the beauty of Christian sentiments, of Christian ethics and philosophy. It is pure rationalism, under the cloak of respectability. “We would not shock your pious prejudices,” these novel theorists seem to say, “by telling you that Christianity is false; on the contrary, we believe that there was a Christ, but he was not the Son of God, he did not rise from the dead, he was only a most admirable doctor. Therefore hold fast to his philosophy, which was amiable in the extreme, and exquisitely adapted to social wants; and, if you like, remain an Anglican or a Dissenter, or even please your fancies with ritualism. You cannot do better than remain a Christian. The Christian system is full of beauty. It is not divine; it was not revealed; it has not one shred of the supernatural; but so useful a system has never before been developed; indeed, it includes the best philosophies. Therefore we advise you to stick to your Christianity, as you would stick to your domestic 387canons of harmony.” This kind of counsel has been given in the Fortnightly and in answer to recent Catholic publications. Its authors are obviously proud of their discovery. “Christian rationalism” will just suit a leisure age, which is too intellectual yet too indifferent to be Christian.
A recent writer has called modern Broad-Churchism “a fortuitous concourse of indifferentisms.” So it is in its acceptance by the majority. But there is a very large section which goes far beyond indifference, and which aggressively attacks Christianity. Whately has the credit of having started the principle that intellectual inquiry is above faith. The first duty of man is to be intellectual; and he must never stand still in his inquiries. When convinced that he has found out the truth, he must proceed to inquire still more earnestly; always despising the very issues of those inquiries which he places below inquiries themselves. Euclid, when it says Q. E. D., ought to have made Q. E. D. an hypothesis. Reasoning is not intended to conduct to truth, but should be pursued as in itself the chief good. Argument is above demonstration, and search is far superior to discovery. This is the theory of many modernists. But it has only lately raised its votaries into a school. Mr. Kingsley, when he said, “I am nothing if not a priest,” had no notion of eliminating Christianity. Even the Oxford essayists and reviewers shrank from this. Dr. Arnold, who wished to remove the Athanasian Creed, did not wish to remove Christianity. Bishop Butler, whom some call the founder of Broad-Churchism, certainly never dreamed of rank scepticism. The theory of Frederic Dennison Maurice, that revelation may be given differently to different centuries, did not exclude revelation. There was always, until quite lately, a clinging fast to the fond truth that Christianity was a divine dispensation. The last generation were quite sure of this. But their grandchildren, if they happen to live in England, may be brought up to adopt the new religion. They may proclaim frankly that Christianity is a myth, or that pagan virtue is the best Christianity. To such a depth has Anglican “development” now sunk. Fathers fear not to talk cold-blooded scepticism before their little ones gathered round their knees, and to poison their young natures with that most dreadful of inclinations—the doubting the pure instincts of their own souls. Sons of clergymen teach their sons that Christianity may be true, just as a particular political theory may be so; but that to ally Christian faith with the honor of God is a sign of feeble intellect or enthusiasm. Many thousands of English children, sons of educated “Anglicans,” now prattle their scepticism over their toys.
One hideous consequence of this growth of English rationalism—and Broad-Churchism is practically rationalism—is that it has lowered the standard of personal aspiration by removing the certainties of objects. Protestantism had much of the sentiment of Catholicity, though it had little of its dogma or discipline; but Broad-Churchism is absolutely without sentiment, save such as is common to pagans. What the children of Cicero may have been the children of Broad-Churchmen may be. The divine instinct of faith is reasoned down. Indeed, Cicero or Terence, Plato or 388Sophocles, had a much higher object than the Broad-Churchman; for they professed that to know would be the chief good, whereas Broad-Churchmen pronounce knowing the chief evil. It matters not by what name we call these men, whether free-thinkers, rationalists, sceptics, their aspiration is to be content with not knowing, instead of regarding knowing as the chief good. “I think,” said an English gentleman a few weeks ago, who had graduated at Oxford, and who has six children, and whose father was a distinguished ecclesiastic, “that the best way is to try to live honorably, and not occupy one’s mind with inquiry.” Thus he and his six children have gone back two thousand years in intellectual—that is, eternal—aspiration, minus this advantage which the ancients had over them: that the ancients wished to know what was true. Now, it is manifest that the death of aspiration is the death of the finest qualities of the human mind; and this is specially seen in the rising generation of English young men and young women. Where doubt takes the place of conviction, and cold content of an animating faith; where natural longings are the sole governing principles, and all that is beyond the grave is dark cloud; where the illumination of the intellect by the full knowledge of God—which is alone possible within the Catholic Church—is deferred to the petty quibblings of speculation, it must follow that a lower type of men and women must succeed to our profound Catholic ancestors. There is no need to refer here to Christian morals; they are the exercise of obedience to particular laws. Nor is there any need to speak of mere worldliness, which is often incidental, circumstantial. Nor, again, need we allude to the immense varieties of natural temperament which bias people’s lives, people’s loves. Let all questions of perfection or imperfection be set aside; they are not the immediate points we are considering. Human nature is human nature in every one, be he a Catholic or a free-thinker; and the extent to which human nature may be brought under control is a distinct question from “Anglican development.” The sole point which we are now arguing is the intellectual consequences of the theory and practice of pure Anglicanism, and the conclusion we arrive at is that, intellectually speaking, Anglicanism degrades the human mind. The development of Anglicanism is deterioration. This is its intellectual development. But when we speak of the intellect we are not speaking of talent, of any natural gift, or of industry. We are speaking of intellectual aspiration; for the true dignity of intellect is its object. To separate the intellect from its object, the dignity of the end from the means, is impossible for any really earnest mind, as, indeed, it is rationally impossible. If, then, the object of an intellect be to not believe, to eliminate the supernatural out of the world, or to narrow the compass of aspirations, it follows that the greater is the ignorance, the greater is the dignity, of the human mind. This theory has been advocated by Mr. Spencer. “Our highest wisdom and our highest duty,” says this scientist, “is to regard that through which all things exist as the unknowable.” So that not only to know nothing, but to wish to know nothing, of the will of our Creator in regard to us is the highest aspiration of the trained intellect, whether 389professedly Christian or pagan. Now, (popular) Broad-Churchism does not go so far as this, for it would not be “Christian” to do so. Broad-Churchism affects to be Christian, though it includes within its pale many sceptics. Yet practically the assertion that opposite truths are the same truths, or that no truth is a truth save to its votary, is the assertion that there has not been a revelation, or that if there has been it cannot be understood. Regard it as we will, there is no escaping from the conclusion that Broad-Churchism is inimical to Christianity. It is inimical to divine faith, to divine love; to the interior exercise of Christian virtues; to the perfecting those graces of character which are formed on the pattern of a divine Lord. In short, it is fatal to sanctity. Instability of Christian faith and stability of Christian life are mutually opposed to one another. The Broad-Churchman may be an excellent man, but he cannot be supernaturally a Christian. Christianity is the divine life of man, and it presupposes many postulates and axioms. And since divine faith in the whole range of divine truth is the first requisite of the intellectual Christian, it follows that a Christian who is intellectually not Christian cannot spiritually advance to perfection. Thus intellectually and spiritually the Broad-Churchman is at fault in regard to the Christian life. And this deterioration is the prevalent “development” of the later stages of Anglican change. Broad-Churchism is the profession of most Anglicans. And in one degree or another it is the ruin of aspiration, and therefore of the intellectual Anglican. But young people, whose intellects are undeveloped, are of necessity chiefly nourished by their affections; and unhappily the enfeebling of their faith is the enfeebling the objects of those affections. Thus parents ruin children by enfeebling the objects, and with them the affections which need objects. Intellectually and spiritually, sensitively and instinctively, Broad-Churchism is the ruin of children. And that huge waste of object, of affection, of sentiment, which the disease of Broad-Churchism necessitates, stints the growth, both religious and natural, of the majority of the rising generation. This is the last Anglican development. And it threatens to breed a race of pagans. There is the profession, of course, of some sort of Christian life—for ethically every Englishman must be Christian—but the Christianity is a natural sentiment, it is not a supernatural life. And must we not call this the intellectual degradation of the heirs of two thousand years of truth? The spasmodic attempts of the Ritualist sect to revive certain fragments of Catholic truth, or the earnest aspirations of warm-hearted puritans to love all that they know how to believe, are both admirable efforts, though not true successes; and they are the efforts of a comparatively small number. Nationally England is Broad-Church, and the majority of Broad-Churchmen are sceptical. What stage of development can come next? If in Westminster Abbey “Christian rationalism” is triumphant, what will become triumphant in country parishes? And if the feeble reasonings of Dean Stanley, his serene platitudes or pretty sentiments, are pabulum sufficient for the well educated, what descent into weakness, into indifference or impiety, may we not look for among the 390poorer classes? Scepticism among the poor means simple grossness, unrelieved by the scholarliness of the rich, and uncomforted by even the ease of this life. Yet there is an immense spread of scepticism among the poor. There is even blatant hostility to all religion. Broad-Churchism is the parent of this evil. The final harvest has not yet been reaped. Yet it seems certain that in the next quarter of a century we must either see the English multitude become Catholics, or we shall see them go down into a state of irreligion which will be simply paganism minus its gods.
A moderate degree of attention bestowed on the signs of the times apparent in society, and a consideration of the social convulsions which among ourselves seem only to end that they may begin again, will make it impossible not to perceive, within the bosom of this society, some permanent, chronic evil, seated at its very core, and ready to bring to the surface the seething elements from below by a series of eruptions recurring at shorter and shorter intervals. This social evil, which for nearly a century has subjected us to periodical revolutions, as certain diseases subject a patient to periodical fits or crises; this evil, whose many roots reach back to causes more or less remote and more or less appreciable; this evil, which marches through the world of to-day like the hurricane that sweeps over cities and plains, and which we see uprooting principles 392in its passage, corrupting morals, and undermining society—for society is directly and particularly threatened by its stormy progress; this social evil—I give it the name it gives itself—is socialism: socialism—that is, a body of doctrines, passions, and plots that attack and would fain uproot the actual social system, or, if you prefer this definition, armed, passionate, and doctrinal aggression against society; socialism, which forty years ago the mass of earnest thinkers scarcely thought it worth while to take into account, so hidden was it then in the depths of mere theorizing, and so dimly perceived by a few thoughtful men, who saw it half covered by the veil of utopianism; socialism, which practical men of that time, in their Olympic repose, deemed too self-condemned by its obvious extravagance to be capable of doing harm; socialism, which even now still finds a few self-styled conservatives so blinded as to join hands and conspire politically with it for the furtherance of their own plans; socialism, which, emancipated from the region of dreams and speculations, and realized for a moment on the burning stage of contemporary history, has shown us its hideous form by the light of incendiary fires, and still points out to us, by the light of a threatening present, the possibility of a frightful future.
Let us begin at the beginning, and ask ourselves the question, What is Socialism? I hasten, at the outset of a subject which touches on such delicate ground, to state that I intend taking my stand above politics or party spirit. I fight only under two flags, that of society and that of Christianity. Even in the harshest strictures I may make I shall attack things, not men—things which we are bound to oppose, not men, whom we are bound to love.
To come to a full understanding of contemporary socialism it is necessary to look at it under a triple aspect—as an idea, as a passion, and as an action; as an idea which gains ground, a passion which kindles itself, an action which organizes itself more and more under our eyes; as an idea which gains ground by every channel controlled by the contemporary press; as a passion which is enkindled by every phase of contemporary realities; as an action which organizes itself and conspires by every lever known to contemporary revolutionism—that is, in three words, the socialist idea, the socialist passion, the socialist action. It is these that we must fathom and examine, if we would understand what socialism is and means. I shall be satisfied if I succeed in developing this time what is socialism as an idea, and what is the scope of this idea; in what does the socialist idea consist, and what are its immediate consequences.
It is necessary to grasp the nature of the parent idea which nursed socialism in its bosom, and has brought it forth as it appears to-day. Such a movement in the world of reality would be inexplicable without a corresponding, anterior movement in the world of thought. Ideas, in the social system, are as germs in the animal and vegetable systems, and germs in a very practical sense, for they are the seed of things that come to light later on, and grow according to the kind of soil and the degree of heat with which they come in contact. Socialism, as a whole, though intelligible as the result of causes not 393belonging to the world of ideas, is, however, the product of an idea which has grown and thriven long before it came to the surface. I do not mean by this the body of ideas which has helped to create it, but its own parent idea, that which, if I may say so, constitutes the socialist credo. It is true that, if we consider socialism in what appears its only living and real aspect, we are brought face to face with something quite alien to the world of ideas. What we see is not unlike a lion or a tiger obeying its instincts and roaring in the desert for its prey. We have no longer to face a doctrinal socialism with pretensions to a plausible theory, but a brutal socialism claiming no right save that of might; not a dreamy socialism such as forty years ago still carried away generous enthusiasts, but an aggressive socialism hurrying by force to the fulfilment of its programme; not a contemplative socialism parading through the world of ideas a Platonic love for humankind, but a destructive socialism eager to carry through the ruins of the world of realities the bloody banner of its brotherhood. What we see before us might be more fitly called the socialism of torch and dagger than the socialism of ideas and doctrines.
Still, it cannot be denied that socialism heralded itself above all as an idea which was to make the mightiest revolution in the midst of humanity that the world had ever seen. What was this idea, and what, in this era of social revolution, were its starting-point, its path, and its goal? I have long attentively followed the course of this new planet, and marked in the changing sky of our social world its chief appearances. I saw it rise as in the dawn of a bright morning, then grow amid the clouds of a thousand systems more or less important or obscure, then at last reach its zenith, and throw over our modern society the baneful light in which we see it arrayed at present.
At first the socialist idea gave itself out as the idea of social reform; later on in its progressive movement it became the idea of social transformation; and now that it has fully developed itself, it stands forth as the idea of social destruction. If we follow up the stream of theories which distinguished the beginning of this century and the end of the last, we shall find that the parent idea of socialism first embodied the longing for social reform, and tended to restore universal harmony to the new world. To listen to our pretended prophets and Messiahs, one would be led to believe that the great law of universal harmony in the social world had been lost amid conflicting human interests, and needed to be restored or re-enacted; while the systems of philosophy of that period insisted that within the near future a regeneration of human nature and a social reform would take place such as the world had never seen or history chronicled—a greater reform, indeed, than that accomplished by the divine Reformer in behalf of poor humanity. These philosophical systems, full of a dreamy poetry, were nothing but humanitarian idyls, delightful pastorals, pointing in the future, through a tinted medium, to a rose-colored humanity smiling under blue skies and an unclouded sun—a humanity free from all the contradictions and antagonisms of the past, and, like the planets, or better even than 394they, revolving round its centre in the undisturbed and beatific equilibrium of universal harmony. Harmony was everywhere in these fair dreams and easy utopias: there was the harmony of all minds in truth, the harmony of all hearts in love, the harmony of will in liberty, the harmony of passions in pleasure, the harmony of interests in community, the harmony of labor in organization, the harmony of men in brotherhood, the harmony of families in the state, and, finally, the harmony of all peoples and nations in the unity of a government that should rule all alike. The omniarch, or universal monarch, of this universal society appeared in the distance, in the centre of the human world, as the moderator and ruler of this gigantic harmony of brotherly nations. In a word, there was nothing but harmony, everywhere and in all things, harmony easy and spontaneous, springing up from, and flourishing naturally in, the regular play of all human forces, replaced as they would be, so said this new language, in their normal motion around their harmonious centre. This alluring theory, sung by all the bards of the social philosophy, or rather poetry, of that time, marched triumphantly along its flower-strewn path, escorted by all the errors and negations of which it was the result and the essence, and proclaiming to the gaping world: “I am the revelation of the new world. I am Social Reform.”
It is worth noticing that while the working of so many unhealthy doctrines gave birth, as to its natural product, to this growing socialist idea, so the new world of men seemed to grow towards it by every breath it emitted, to call for it and drink it in by the diseased organs of its own unhealthy body. The idea of reform is always and will always be captivating to humanity, because there is in humanity always something to be reformed; but at that time the state of the popular mind, by enhancing its prestige, was preparing for this notion a greater influence over the rising and future generations than it had ever won in foregoing ages.
Humanity was then bleeding from the pitiless wounds made by the doctrines of the eighteenth century. Men’s souls, especially in the lower strata of society, cruelly felt the void created by the Voltairian creed of individualism. These generations, cut adrift from Christianity, felt themselves smothered by the monster of human selfishness. Humanity, literally disinherited of the love of God, was dying of the selfishness of Voltaire. From the heart of this diseased society came a despairing cry for love, brotherhood, association. Then started up innovators on all sides to turn this great need of the human soul to their own account. They proclaimed universal association through universal love; and as Newton had reconciled by the discovery of gravitation the forces of earth and air, so they pretended to build on the attraction of love a permanent harmony between human nature and society. Such was the first appearance on our stage of this comparatively new element, socialism—i.e., the general and yet undetermined formula of social reform. Its claims, thus put forward in public, with a popularity they had never reached before, startled many men, even those thinkers who had scarcely suspected the existence of such ideas. It was, however, no new notion, and had lain undeveloped in society 395certainly as far back as the beginning of this century. It glimmered forth among the fogs of socialist metaphysics wherein Fourier and Saint-Simon groped after their ideal of universal reform; it grew under the pens of writers in reviews and newspapers celebrated in their day—rash innovators who carelessly questioned every basis of human society, and propounded theories whose fulfilment involved nothing less than a radical change of the organic conditions of society, in the magical name and under the shield of social reform.
The world of ideas had never witnessed such a confusion of mind, such an upsetting of fixed landmarks, such a perversion of language. An intellectual orgy gravely took its seat in the social world under the name and disguise of science; absurdities dubbed themselves philosophies, folly called itself reform; indeed, the passage of these eccentric theories and these grotesque utopias was one of the great surprises that attended my curious and truth-seeking youth. They were a source of pure stupefaction to me. The socialist idea hitherto had been almost confined to the exclusive domain of philosophical abstractions and social ideology. After long wandering through the twilight of various conflicting systems, it emerged from these doubtful regions, where only a few innovators perceived its presence, and came down to the level of the people, stirred as the latter were by new aspirations and hopes. From henceforward the socialist idea, the idea of social reform, was not only a theory broached by philanthropists, discussed by scientists and philosophers, and taught by intellectual apostles from tribune and printing-office, but it became a living, acting reality, a watchword of the laboring classes, a personal question among workmen. Once there, ripening as ideas do quickly in the fervid soul of the people, and pushing on towards its development, it strode forward apace, its evolution only waiting an opportunity to perfect itself abundantly. The people, little used to the hair-splitting of socialist metaphysicians, soon saw either that all this talk meant nothing or that it meant a fundamental transformation of actual social life, and consequently the road to, or, as it was grandiloquently called, the new birth of, a state of comfort and power hitherto unknown. Each one made the dazzling formula, “Society must be reformed,” cover his own special grievances or aspirations, his pet theories, his individual hopes and dreams. It soon became patent to all that even the apostles of the new idea meant not only that the new world should be a reformed one, in the common acceptation of the word, but a radically reformed—that is, a transformed—world. The fathers of the socialist idea had already become aware that the present organization of society presented insurmountable obstacles to the realization of their favorite law of harmony as applied to their theory of a future society; they felt that the organic conditions of society as it is were invincibly opposed to their idea, which, in order to triumph in the end, must become not only a reform, nay, not only a transformation, but such a transformation as should change from the very roots all existing vital conditions of society. To reform was not enough; they determined to transform. One idea had thus quickly displaced or succeeded 396the other. Stripped of the wordy disguises in which it still affected to wrap itself, it was simply a theoretical denial of society, such as society has been since men have lived together; a radical change of the social mechanism adopted in principle and in practice by all nations and acknowledged in all ages; a triumphal progress of revolution—indeed, social revolution itself.
Up to that period men who worked on the passions of the masses to compass their own ambitious ends had contented themselves with handling political problems, stirring up political revolutions. The game played by leaders of riots or leaders of parties consisted in changing a monarchy for a republic, a republic for an empire, an empire for a monarchy, and one species of monarchy for another; but this was child’s play to the growing power and genius of socialism. Social revolution, as set forth by the socialist idea, had far other ends in view; it did not care to stir the surface only of things, but to undermine, or, as we say now, revolutionize, their foundations. This is the difference between socialism, or social revolution, and political revolutionism, properly so-called; the former seeks to disembowel society itself. Common—that is, purely political—revolutionism only affects the surface of society; it strides over the ruins of governments shattered by the popular arm; it overturns a throne, then another; drives out one dynasty, then a second; creates a republic, then another; improvises a constitution; plays, if I may use the expression, among the dust of institutions, whether demolished thrones, torn constitutions, broken governments or legislatures; it grows excited and drunk with enthusiasm and ambition in the midst of these shifting scenes of the political world, on whose stage actors, now hissed, now applauded, by no rule but the arbitrary passion of the multitude, play ever-varying parts—parts barren and ephemeral, and the common result of which is to wear out those who play them, to sicken them of men and things, to make them drop from the stage stripped of their prestige, and too often covered with popular derision, as despairing actors are wont to fly from the theatre where they have hopelessly “broken down.” It was thus that between the tides of opinion and action political revolution pursued its course, leaving ruin and bloodshed in its track.
But after the flood of these monarchies and republics, these constitutions and governments, these kings and emperors, these presidents and dictators, these ministers and lawgivers; after all these sledgehammer blows of force, these coups d’état, or these sensational changes on a stage where revolution had long since decreed that no government, no constitution, no statesman should ever remain permanently; behind what we may call the political phenomenon, one thing remained firm—namely, society. It was always fundamentally the same, and stood on a substantial, unalterable basis, above which, but not reaching it nor attempting to injure it, flowed the tide of political revolution; it had mechanisms more or less different in appearance in each century, but the same vital permanent conditions; it kept its necessary balance between authority and liberty, between progress and stability; it guarded its three treasures, which to destroy is to kill society—i.e., the family, religion, and property.
This is the secret that explains 397why, after so many ruins heaped up and so many battles won, the genius of revolution could not rest content. It soon perceived that in spite of its gigantic efforts, and even after the immensity of its triumphs, it had only achieved a surface work. Its dreams of governments more or less constitutional and representative, more or less monarchical or republican, had collapsed with the ruins of these governments, thrown down by its own hand; it felt the emptiness and disappointment of these political revolutions, whose commonest result was an increase of wretchedness and a decrease of peace. Then it said to itself: I will go further; I will dig below the very foundations of this society, which I find everlastingly the same, with its old vices, its incurable abuses, and its obstinately recurring tyrannies. I will reach its heart, the very source of its life, the very core of its being. There I shall discover the true vital principle of human society, and, whether it will or no, I will force it to take part in outer actions, and take its place among the realities of history. I will not only reform but transform this rotten and disorganized society.
Thus the idea of transformation quickly superseded that of reform; but even a transformation of the conditions of social life, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, would not have contented the thoroughgoingness of the socialist idea. No doubt it was better than reform, for it was a fuller development of the socialist principle, but it did not constitute a perfect development, it was not the ultimatum of the idea. Transformation was not enough in the eyes of radical socialism, or, if you like the term better, socialist radicalism; destruction was better, and, to speak plainly, its conception of the former was equivalent to the latter. Socialism had dissected the body of society, examined and analyzed it in all directions, and then pronounced its verdict in these words, brimful of supreme contempt: “Rottenness! Let the corpse perish, and the true social body, moulded by our hands, spring from its remains.” Socialism had examined and probed the still standing building of our past and present social polity, and had said: “It is evident to all that the building is bad; better rebuild it, from cellar to attic. The human abode is not stable; to buttress it is useless; let us destroy it. This is no longer the time to reform, or even transform; nothing short of destruction is of any avail. Let the old social Babylon crumble and decay, and from her fruitful ruins, if needful even watered with blood, let the new Jerusalem of society come forth. Social reform was the dream of our fathers; social transformation is but another dream, a generous fallacy, but still a fallacy, attempting impossibilities and ending in nothingness. A ruin cannot be reformed nor a crumbling shed transformed; we see only a building to pull down and a building to put up. What I will do is this: I will use the popular arm to destroy, and on the ruins of the past I will erect the edifice of the future.”
The socialist idea, in its logical march irresistible as fate, had reached its inevitable goal. It began by deciding to reform, then it said, “I will transform,” and finally it announced boldly, “I will destroy, shatter, and demolish.” The beginning was reform with its alluring utopias of social unity and harmony; the middle stage was 398transformation, with specious promises of improvement and hopes of a renewed social youth; the ending is destruction, with open threats of anarchy and social annihilation. It is impossible to cherish illusions any longer on this subject: the reformers glided into transformers and the transformers coolly turned destroyers, not in haste and passion, but in cold blood, theoretically, we might almost say dogmatically; for radical destruction, or the uprooting of the existing social order, is the foremost doctrine of the syllabus of the socialist idea, which is itself the most perfect outcome of the revolutionary idea.
Living socialism—that is, socialism personified in its real representatives—no longer makes any mystery as to this, and cannot pretend to feel itself injured or calumniated if we reproduce and lay bare its own formulas. It is its own voice that cries aloud over the world: “Society as it is must perish, and from its ruins a new social system shall and must spring forth.” The first prophets and teachers of the socialist idea had hoped that the idea in itself, and for its own sake, would be accepted at once, and that humanity would spontaneously open its heart to it, as it does its eyes to the rays of the sun. The disciples have far outrun the programme of their masters; they no longer mention the ideal revolution, and if the ideal alone, preached by word of mouth, should not be strong enough to fulfil the programme at any given time, they mean to back it with the strong hand, and force it by violence to become a fact and hasten towards its definitive triumph. Social destruction is at present the latest phase of the socialist idea, which boldly comes forward, programme in hand, and bids us accept it and help to build up its rule as an inevitable necessity. It summons living society publicly and contemptuously to its bar, and bids it be ready to be demolished and afterwards re-established according to the fancy of this evil spirit, powerful indeed to destroy, but helpless to create.
Thus it is that this doctrine—if it can be called a doctrine—so philanthropic at the outset, so peaceful, so brotherly; this doctrine, which announced itself as a new gospel of peace, freedom, and brotherhood, has come to speak sternly of war, of massacre, of destruction; has sworn that no matter what opposition it raises and what blood it costs, the socialist idea shall triumph, and has decided that if it be necessary to reach the throne at which it aims over ruins and over corpses, it will stride over ruins and over corpses! Let the human sacrifices seal, if need be, the bloody covenant of the new social order.
It will scarcely be believed that this work of social destruction has been compared to the work of Christ, the reformer and transformer of society. It is so, however; and this new era which is before us has actually been likened to the social transformation, or rather restoration, achieved by Christianity—as if anything could be more flagrantly antagonistic to the great transformation worked by the Christian idea than this pretended transformation dreamed of and sung by the prophets of the socialist idea; as if a revolution brought about by force and violence could ever be compared to a restoration accomplished through love and self-sacrifice!
You reformers and innovators, do you forget that Jesus Christ attacked 399nothing by force and destroyed nothing by violence; that in his divine wisdom he was content to sow truth in men’s souls and love in their hearts as the husbandman casts seed into the furrow; and that truth and love have done their work among humankind as germs in the earth, as the blood in our veins, as electricity throughout nature—that is, in mysterious silence, with a strength full of gentleness and patience, yet with unerring certainty? You forget that if Christ cursed the unjust rich man—that is, wealth abusing its privileges, wealth without love, compassion, or sympathy for others—yet he never dreamt of leading the poor against the rich, but simply placed between the two the powerful but sweet link of charity. You forget that if he delivered captives from their bonds and slaves from their chains, he never incited master or slave to wage fratricidal war on each other, and that it was only as his teaching sank into the heart of the master that the fetters of the slave set free through love dropped of themselves, as ripe fruit drops from the tree in its good time and season. You forget that if the divine Reformer came to found a new society, it was by a new creation, and not through destruction; that he came to rehabilitate even bodily society while he created the true kingdom of souls; and that, far from breathing into it the spirit of social hatred and jealousy, he came to restore, or rather found within it, the rule of love and social self-denial. The very goal which the socialist idea has reached by identifying itself with the idea of social destruction is itself the best proof of the irreconcilable antagonism between socialism and Christianity.
I do not say that each individual in the ranks of contemporary socialism defines and adopts this programme of destruction so clearly and so resolutely as I have stated. Under all standards there are many men who neither see nor understand where the chiefs whose orders they obey are leading them—honest, upright men, duped by villains; passionate lovers of good, while strayed and lost in the great army of evil. I fully admit these exceptions, possible, nay, probable, everywhere; and, indeed, why deny their existence? Nevertheless, the mainspring of socialist action in our day lies in the idea of destruction, and the problem which contemporary socialism no longer seeks to veil is simply this: “What are the speediest means for completely demolishing the old structure of society, which is already bursting asunder in all its parts; and when down, what is to be done to rebuild from its ruins the edifice of the new social order?” Yes, such is the problem whose solution socialism boasts of finding, even though it be through rivers of blood and mountains of corpses; and yet this social body, rotten as it is said to be, still rests on strong foundations as old as humanity itself.
Property is its material foundation, the family its human foundation, and religion its divine foundation; and therefore the logical march of the socialist idea drives it, like fate, to clamor not only for the reform and transformation but for the ruin and destruction of these three things on which rests the whole of society, religion, family, and property. I do not hesitate to declare it, in spite of the vehement denials of men still unaccountably blinded to facts: the real scope of the socialist idea when pursued to 400its logical conclusion is the radical transformation or the utter uprooting of these stable and ancient institutions, as old as human society itself—property, family, and religion—and thereby the fall of our whole social system, as of a building on its shattered foundations and its broken supports. There are many theoretical socialists who do not dare to exhibit their theory in terms whose brutality seems to exceed even the grotesqueness of the idea they embody, and many who still cling to a few illusions and have a regard for decency. Such as these protest against what they call our calumnies and exaggerations. Destroy? they exclaim; we do not wish to destroy, we only long to transform. There was a time when, with mistaken faith in the honesty of purpose I loved to find or imagine everywhere, I, and you perchance, were deceived by this specious excuse, these alluring formulas; but to-day it is impossible to mistake the sense of this former mystery; it has too disastrously been revealed to us.
The socialist idea directly attacks the principle of property—that is, individual possession of one’s fields, house, capital, or patrimony, so happily called the domain; property—that is, in the common order of things, the fruit of individual labor or of the labor and self-denial of one’s forefathers; property—that is, the pledge of man’s independence, and the sign of his kingship in his own home, small as it may be; property, which in all nations and ages has been sheltered under the triple shield of nature, justice, and religion; property, the material basis of society—indeed, its necessary condition and the link by which the family is bound to its native soil as the tree by its roots; property, always and everywhere looked upon as sacred and inviolable among nations who have claimed the honors of civilization; property, which all societies have acknowledged even while appearing to deny its rights, violating them by force; property, in a word, which is a thing so familiar to us that the least infraction of its laws would cause us a remorse only to be allayed by reparation. Such is the nature of property; and shall we believe the teaching of this new jurisprudence, the propagators of these new laws, who maintain that there is no question of destroying but only of reforming, or at most transforming, the nature of property?
In what does this miraculous, proposed transformation consist? The expedient is very simple—namely, to strip the mass of owners in order to constitute one sole and supreme owner; for it is obvious, after all, that some one must still possess the earth. This legal spoliation, no doubt, will be a work of time, but it will be sure. And who is the new owner to be, in whom the right of universal property shall be vested, and on whose shoulders will be flung the burden of universal wealth? The state, forsooth; the god-state, the “state” which may be an honest man to-day, but to-morrow may be a rogue; the god-state, whom infatuated philosophers are constantly working to aggrandize, to make all-powerful, and for which they strive night and day to win more worshippers. This is to be the one owner and possessor of all; the state shall have all, organize and work all, distribute and apportion all, be the centre, the fountain head, and the goal of all; while in this universal domain where the state controls all, this huge arsenal 401where the state produces, executes, or orders all, society shall become a human hive, vast as the earth itself, but in which every individual shall be reduced, as a terse writer has put it, to the size and functions of a bee. This is the masterpiece elaborated by the socialist idea—the dream of universal property, which is likewise a dream of universal levelling, universal stuntedness. Individual responsibility or initiative is swept away; human kingship and free-will disappear; domestic society is left without a material basis, and even public society without a foundation; the right of all is practically the right of none, and the result is universal slavery to universal despotism. Such is the miracle of this transformation of property, so glibly promised by the socialist theory to future generations; and though all who fight under the banner of legal spoliation do not carry thus far their social ideal, and do not look forward to such absolute communism, all are on the road to it by the very fact of vesting in their god-state the right of increasing and decreasing, making or unmaking, individual property under the name of taxes on the rich and rates for the poor. What astonishes me above all in this respect is to see in certain men, the most interested personally in the upholding of the conservative principle of property, a certain pandering to, or half-support of, this eminently anti-social idea.
The same socialism which attacks the immemorial constitution of property attacks likewise the immemorial constitution of the family. The socialist idea attacks specially in the family, together with the principle of property, the three things which are its pride, its strength, and its stability—namely, unity, indissolubility, and inheritance, which, it is needless to say, uphold its permanence and perpetuity. First of all, it attacks unity, and unity in trinity: one man, one woman, and one whole family springing from both; one life produced by two sources fused into one—a unity which, in the family as everywhere else, is the essential condition of harmony, order, beauty, and happiness. This unity does not please the socialist. An advocate of free morals and free love, he prefers polygamy, as allowed by the Koran and practised by Moslems, to the conjugal unity enjoined by the Gospel and sanctioned by the teaching and practice of Christendom. Socialism attacks the indissolubility—that is, the permanence—of the marriage tie. Such an indissolubility before God and before the state is in its eyes only the civil and religious endorsement of slavery, the legal and theological confiscation of liberty. The apostles of free love are unable to understand the principle which binds two human beings to each other for ever and under no matter what circumstances. What revolution allows to society socialism would fain make accessible to the family—that is, perpetual change and unlimited option concerning divorce and separation. Socialism claims unblushingly, in the name of nature and progress, the revolutionary right of a husband to send away his wife, and a wife to leave her husband, as easily as a nation disposes of its sovereigns and its governments—a right equivalent to a permanent revolution in the family and the state, and bearing as its fruit the abolition of inheritance. Inheritance means the tradition of a patrimony; it is the pledge of the stability and perpetuity of domestic 402or home society; bereft of it, the family, without moorings in the past or hopes in the future, becomes, like the individual, an ephemeral phenomenon, gone in a breath and holding to nothing but the present hour. This right of inheritance has its place in God’s plan and man’s laws; it represents to coming generations the labors, the benefits, the sacrifices of their forefathers; it extends the influence of the latter over their descendants. But socialism does not shrink from questioning it in theory and attacking it in practice. How, it asks, should the will of a dying man be able to transmit beyond his grave a domain to his posterity? Down with a privilege which gives man, when he is a corpse, a posthumous omnipotence in contradiction with the very condition of the dead, and injurious to the freedom of action of the living! Socialism thus saps every conservative family principle, and the spirit it instils into the human mind is destructive to the foundations of home society, in order that it may prepare a clearer path to the eventual destruction of public society.
It is scarcely necessary to follow the socialist idea throughout its destructive march in order to realize the havoc it makes of domestic society; a glance at its practice is enough. Look at the homes and hearths where this idea has seated itself and taken practical possession. What homes, great God! and what morals; they might astonish even a heathen. The acknowledged reign of license and disorder, sanctioned by a so-called doctrine, and careless of any outward badge of respectability, whether civil or religious; a boasting display of a foulness for which the very faculty of blushing is lost, for the socialist idea, breathing its poison over these hearths, has extinguished the lamp of domestic virtue, and tossed into the mire not only the ideal of Christian perfection but that of moral blamelessness. No wonder that men preaching such doctrine and practising such morals should be eager to transform the family; they do it, indeed, in a strange and appalling manner by turning the sanctuary of honor and virtue into a sink of corruption and vice.
Furthermore, I maintain that they would turn the home, the school of faith and religion, into a school of unbelief and impiety; for socialism, which detests the family and property, hates religion still worse, because it is the chief bulwark of property and the family. It hates religion as such—not only this or that religion, but the very principle of communication between God and man, and the main object of the socialist idea is to transform—that is, destroy—this element in mankind. The fiat has gone forth, the watchword is given, “No more religion in humanity”; and the ideal of progress, as pointed out to the world by the socialist, is simply the suppression of all religion, which he dubs with the unpopular names of fanaticism, superstition, clericalism. The cry is not only no more property, no more family, no more homestead, no more hearth; but the frantic cry takes up other matters and echoes to the ends of the world a more sweeping denunciation: No more religion, no more altars, no more priests, no more churches, no more ritual, no more oblation, no more ceremonies, no more religious festivals. The like has never before been seen in history; it could not have been even conceived. This public attempt to drive out all religion 403from humanity in the name of progress is an absolutely unparalleled phenomenon, not only within but beyond Christianity. It is a monster in human history, the deformity of the nineteenth century. Our age will appear before history with this shameful inscription on its forehead, which will sufficiently brand it in the opinion of after ages: “I, the nineteenth century, have proclaimed by the voice of a million of atheists, as the law and condition of all progress, the abolition of all religion.”
And yet you will find religion attending the birth of every new society; you will meet it at the source of every growing society, and will perceive it shining and triumphing when that society has reached its utmost greatness and perfection, for a great heathen writer has truly called it the motive force of all things: Omnia religione moventur. Religion is to the world of men what sap is to the plant, blood to the animal, electricity to the system of nature—an indispensable condition of life, of motion, of fruitfulness. Who would dare undertake to drive from the earth and uproot from the soul of man this divine link between God and human nature, this boundary of human life, this vivifying force which permeates all, fertilizes all, directs and controls all?
Why, I ask these frantic demolishers, why not pluck electricity from nature, sap from the plant, and blood from our veins? For it is true that it were easier for the tree to live without sap, the plant without root, the body without blood, than it is for the human soul to exist without religion—religion, that need of something divine, that longing after something durable, that step towards the infinite; religion, that natural breath of the soul, as the air is of the body, that attraction heavenwards which corresponds to the physical attraction earthwards of our body! A mysterious but very sensible force draws us towards our physical centre of gravity, but a force still more mysterious, more sensible, and, above all, more powerful draws us towards our heavenly, our spiritual centre; and while we are physically bound by a chain as strong as life to the stage of our earthly existence, yet spiritually we soar by as irresistible an impulse towards the place of spirits, the eternal and the infinite.
The flagrant antagonism between the socialist idea and the religious idea is easily explained. Socialism knows by instinct that in religion, and especially in Christianity, the religion above all others, exists the divine foundation of the world; that as long as this foundation is not shaken the social polity can never be thoroughly destroyed; that religion, even stripped of direct and, as it were, official influence in the political and social order, is still the last bulwark that interposes between socialism and its avowed object; in a word, that there rests the supreme force, the insurmountable obstacle to the new ideas, there the truth that repudiates the new errors, there the holiness that repudiates the new corruption, there the authority that repudiates the new anarchy, there the divine Might which says to the idea of devastation what God the Creator says to the ocean: “So far shalt thou go, and no further”—“huc usque venies.”
To sum up, there is a disastrous idea prowling through the modern world—the socialist idea. This idea, which at first was only that of social reform, and later became that 404of social transformation, has developed at present into that of social destruction.
And whereas every social structure rests on three foundations, property, the family, and religion, so the socialist idea more or less directly attacks these three foundations. The socialist idea, or socialism looked upon as a theory, pushes its anti-social aggression up to this climax; it stands there in radical and fearful opposition, threatening all that is most vital and most fundamental in society.
Therefore we are bound to resist it face to face, everywhere and always, and do battle against the socialist idea—that is, the idea of destruction, disaster, and ruin. I impress upon you the necessity of, and claim your help in, a doctrinal resistance to this idea, a defence of all it attacks, an assertion of all it denies; a sturdy repetition of the credo of universal affirmation, and not only a repetition, but a publication, a triumphant challenge, to the socialist idea which embodies in itself a universal negation.
“I maintain it is a glory for the Catholics of Maryland that, in this age of religious strife, our colony has been made a home for the persecuted, and that we are the first to proclaim the equal rights of all who profess to be Christians.”
These words were spoken by a young man named William Berkeley, who formed one of a group of five persons seated under the shade of an oak-tree one summer afternoon in the year 1636. His companions were Sir Charles Evelyn, who was of about his own age; an old gentleman, Sir Henry Lee; his daughter, a maiden of three-and-twenty; and, lastly, a way-worn traveller, whose sad, wan face and unkempt locks told that he had suffered much and been long in reaching a place of safety and repose.
“Yea, Mr. Berkeley, this colony hath set a glorious example,” answered the last-mentioned individual. “And I wish my worthy friend Roger Williams had accompanied me hither, instead of halting where he did on Narraganset Bay; for he hath a rigorous climate to contend with. Oh! how cold it was last winter, how bitter cold, as we journeyed through the wilderness. And, moreover, the Puritans of Massachusetts, not content with having exiled him once for his religious opinions, may claim jurisdiction over the haven where he is now resting, and drive him still further away.”
“Well, ours is indeed a charming country,” spoke Helen Lee. “It is now two years since we landed from the Ark and the Dove, and we have all enjoyed uninterrupted good health, while our numbers, which at first were only two hundred, are now much increased. Oh! St. Mary’s is a blessed spot.”
“And we shall very soon have our church finished,” observed the young baronet, who sat between Helen and her father. “The big wigwam which the Indians kindly gave us wherein to celebrate holy Mass is become a great deal too small and many are obliged to kneel outside.”
After a little further conversation, and after again praising the climate and people of Maryland, Roger Williams’ friend arose; then, having thanked Sir Henry for his hospitality—the latter had entertained him at dinner—he silently waved his hand to the others and bent his steps towards the town.
“I am glad that stranger has found his way here,” said Berkeley almost as soon as his back was turned; “and to-morrow I will try to get him employment.”
“I entertained the fellow at my table; I could not have done less,” growled Sir Henry, knitting his brow. “But I hope I have seen the last of him.”
At this remark Helen turned towards Berkeley, making him a sign with her finger, which unfortunately he did not perceive. She knew her parent’s hasty temper, his bitter feelings against Dissenters, and feared 406lest they might engage in a dispute over the question of religious toleration.
“The true glory of our charter,” went on Berkeley, “consists in—”
“’Tis precisely its weak point,” interrupted Sir Henry, who knew well what he was about to say. “Ay, this religious freedom which you so much admire will one day prove our ruin. Only let enough Puritans and fellows like him who has just quitted us settle here, and then you and I and Lord Baltimore, in fact every Catholic and Anglican, will be hurried out of the colony.”
“I do not believe it,” said Berkeley.
“But I do; and it shows what little sense you have,” continued Sir Henry, now quite red in the face.
We need not give the rest of the discussion between them, which waxed louder and hotter, until finally, at something the old gentleman said, Berkeley got up, made a silent bow to Helen, and walked away. In a moment Evelyn followed him.
“What! go back and make peace with Sir Henry?” exclaimed Berkeley, as the other took his arm—“after calling me low-born, and saying that was the reason I sympathized with common folk and Puritans? No, no, I cannot.”
To any one of a less generous nature than Evelyn this might have been a welcome announcement, for both he and Berkeley were suitors for Helen’s hand. But Evelyn did not let this fact for a moment lessen his desire to restore harmony between his rival and Helen’s father. “Look,” he said, “how pained his daughter is! She is weeping. Do return and be friends for her sake.”
“You are a noble fellow to speak thus,” answered Berkeley. “But I cannot; for, besides calling me what he did, he bade me henceforth hold aloof from him, and I will obey. As for Helen, she is too good, too meek, too patient; she is a martyr.”
After they had walked together a short distance, Evelyn, finding that his efforts to persuade Berkeley to retrace his steps were vain, let him go his way, and during the rest of the afternoon he had Helen all to himself.
These two had been friends from childhood, and their natures were much alike. Both were dreamers. Well-nigh as far back as their memories went they had built castles in the air; and after they had been strolling hand-in-hand, as they oftentimes used to do, amid the pleasant groves of Evelinton Park, Yorkshire, the boy would always bid his gentle comrade good-by with a kiss; then little Helen would betake herself to her father’s mansion, which was next to that of Sir Charles Evelyn’s, and pass the time until she was put to bed thinking about the pretty boy, who had made so many vows to be with her all through her life; and she closed her eyes with his words ringing in her ears: “If a giant comes to attack you, Helen, or a dragon, I will defend you; I will kill the horrid beast or wicked man.” And often in sleep she witnessed a desperate fight, wherein her knight, after many wounds received in her defence, always came off victorious.
Happy indeed were those days of childhood. And when in the course of time Helen grew to be a woman and Charles a man, it was wonderful how little they had changed, how like children still they were. Indeed, the only new thing which 407Helen observed in him was that he did not kiss her any more as he used; while the youth occasionally saw a flush steal over her cheek as she listened to some innocent speech of his—innocent yet full of rapture—wherein he said there might be maidens in heaven who were like herself, but only in heaven. And so they continued to be much in each other’s company; and when at length Helen’s father fell into debt—for old blood is spendthrift blood—and determined to cross the sea with the hope of retrieving his credit and decayed fortune in the New World, Evelyn would not stay behind.
Sir Henry Lee, let us here remark, was a cavalier of the truest stamp; chivalrous, devoted heart and soul to his king, utterly careless of money. “And never was there a queen like Queen Henrietta Maria,”[90] he would say. Her being a Catholic mattered not a jot; for, although he himself belonged to the Church of England, he had married a Catholic wife and allowed his daughter to be brought up a Catholic. The only people he hated were Presbyterians, and his beau ideal of the devil was John Knox.
As soon as Sir Henry had resolved to join the company of Lord Baltimore he sent for a surveyor to make a map of his encumbered estate, which he could no longer afford to hold; and the surveyor’s name was William Berkeley. While the latter was engaged on this work Lady Lee would often go and talk with him; and among the last words which this excellent woman spoke to her daughter before she died were these: “Helen, you are now of an age to marry. Yonder is a man who would be of great help in mending our shattered fortune. William Berkeley is a Catholic, and he tells me that he too intends to go with Lord Baltimore. As for his having no title, think none the less of him for that; he hath a pedigree—’tis even said he comes down from Robin Hood. Child, you might do worse than wed that honest, able yeoman.” And the girl treasured up these words; and now this summer evening, while Evelyn is alone with her in Sir Henry Lee’s new home in Maryland, trying to console her for the harsh language which the old gentleman had used towards Berkeley, her mother’s advice came back upon Helen’s memory with very great force, and she asked herself: “What should we do if Mr. Berkeley were henceforth to hold aloof from us?” For he was a worker, not a dreamer. He gave Sir Henry good counsel which might in time be listened to; and if a day of urgent need ever came, he would be a useful friend. Whereas since they had been at St. Mary’s what had the gentle Evelyn done to better his condition? And his father, like her own, was overwhelmed with debt: old blood is spendthrift blood. True, his morals were correct; he was the very soul of honor, well educated, and of distinguished mien and manners. But as time wore on Helen felt more and more convinced that there was something wanting in Evelyn’s character, and, were she to give him her hand, was it not only too probable that they would grow poorer and poorer? “For, alas!” she would sigh, “I am too much of a dreamer myself, and we cannot live on dreams.”
Moreover, Helen believed that Evelyn’s love for her partook too 408much of a religious devotion; what he had told her years before he kept telling her still—she was his angel; and Helen shrank from taking a step which might undeceive him: “For I fear if I became his wife I should cease to be his angel.”
The room, where they now sat conversing together was the one known as the queen’s room; for, besides the portraits of the family, it contained a picture of Queen Henrietta Maria by Van Dyck. Nothing in the world did Sir Henry treasure more than this work of art by the great master, unless, perhaps, his own daughter. Yet even this priceless gem he might ere long be obliged to part with, as he had already parted with his old wine, in order to pay off fresh debts.
“In a day or two,” spoke Evelyn, “I will make another effort to reconcile your father to Berkeley. I do hope I shall succeed.”
“I pray that you may,” answered Helen.
Then, as he toyed with one of her rich chestnut curls, “Helen,” he added, “I am going to paint a grand picture—St. George delivering St. Margaret from the Dragon—and I want you to sit for my model of St. Margaret. Will you?”
“I fear I am not worthy of such an honor,” replied Helen. “Poor me! What am I?”
“You are the inspiration of my life,” pursued Evelyn. “Yes, the little I have accomplished is all owing to you. But for you I should never have touched a brush.”
“Well, well, I’ll be St. Margaret; but who is to be St. George?”
“Myself. And now, when may I begin?”
“To-morrow, if you like.”
“To-morrow? Good!”
With this Evelyn withdrew, leaving Helen meditating on his words: “You are the inspiration of my life”; and she said to herself: “Alas! would that I had known how to inspire you better, good, kind Evelyn, my earliest friend. But all I have taught you to do is to play artist; and you would starve on the proceeds of your brush.”
Then presently her thoughts turned to her other lover, the strong, active, practical Berkeley, who never fell into rhapsodies over her eyes—her eyes, deep as the sea, blue as the sky, bright as the stars—as Evelyn did, nor said that his prayers were little worth unless she were kneeling near him.
Berkeley showed his feelings in a plain, healthy way by a hearty squeeze of the hand, and by now and again begging her to mend his buckskin gloves. “Because no girl in St. Mary’s can sew like you, Helen.” And, as might be expected, the young surveyor was bettering his condition every year, and had always something to give away to those who were not so well off as himself. Helen knew, too, how he had bestirred himself to find a purchaser for her father’s wine, and it was through him she had disposed of several jewels—precious heirlooms from her mother. In fact, Berkeley seemed able to do everything; and few people in St. Mary’s began anything important without first consulting him. Then Helen recalled one of the old fairy tales which Evelyn had told her when they were children, and wished that she were a fairy. “For then,” she said, “I would quickly wave my magic wand over Evelyn’s head and change him into Berkeley, and so make everything 409smooth, and my poor heart would be at peace.”
She was beginning, moreover, to agree with Berkeley that it was not wise to undertake to build a castle; a simple log-house would be much better. Already her father was involved in fresh trouble on account of this folly. Yet, even after selling his wine, and she her jewels, there was still money owing; and only one tower was finished.
Evelyn, on the contrary, had praised the undertaking, and told Sir Henry that as soon as the edifice was completed he would make a fine painting of it. Thus from musing over days gone by—the happy days in England, when her dear, prudent mother was living, who always had urged economy—and the sad present, tears came to Helen’s eyes, while the chamber grew darker and darker, until she could no longer distinguish Queen Henrietta Maria’s face looking down upon her from the wall. By and by she groped her way to her harpsichord, and began to play a mournful tune which was in harmony with the shadows and her own thoughts.
“Well, really, child!” exclaimed Sir Henry, entering presently with a light, “as if this abode were not cheerless enough with only you and me to inhabit it, you must needs give me melancholy music.”
Quick Helen changed the air and struck up something full of life and gladness, “A Carol to the Sun” ’twas called; and when he asked where she had got this delightful music—for it was new to him—and she answered, “From Evelyn,” her father seemed much pleased. “But, child,” he said, “why do you hesitate so long about accepting Sir Charles? Is it because Berkeley is courting you too? Why, one has a title and is of gentle blood; the other is a plebeian, and I hope will make his visits less frequent in future. I spoke sharply to Berkeley to-day—did I not?—and if he comes again I’ll speak more sharply still.”
Seeing that Helen made no response, Sir Henry continued: “Why, the fellow actually had the impudence to advise me not to go on with this castle, which I intend to make the finest structure in the colony. But Evelyn has better taste; blood tells in everything, and he agrees with me that Lord Baltimore will be highly gratified when it is finished, and will write to the king about it.”
“Well, there is indeed a magnificent view from the top of the tower,” observed Helen timidly. Then, plucking up a little courage, “But, father,” she added, “think of the money it will cost; think of the future.”
“A view! A magnificent view!” cried Sir Henry. “God-a-Mercy! is that all you have to say in praise of this tower? A magnificent view! Would you have the portrait of our gracious queen hanging in a log-cabin? And that suit of armor which your ancestor wore at Agincourt, which bears upon it the dents of a battle-axe—would you wish to see it in a log-cabin? Child, you are not worthy of your name.” Then, after a pause, during which he strode excitedly back and forth, Sir Henry continued: “As for money, I never trouble my head about money. But when you bid me think of the future—well, I have indeed bitter thoughts when I allow my mind to dwell on the future.”
This was true enough. Helen’s father was no longer young. Helen had not yet chosen a husband; would he live to see a male descendant 410of his house? “Oh! it wrings my heart,” he murmured half aloud—and his daughter heard the lament—“it wrings my heart to think of the old stock dying out.” After giving vent to his sorrow even by tears, the old gentleman bade Helen commence the usual evening reading. And let us here observe that the only book he cared for was Don Quixote, which Helen read to him in the original; for he had been in Spain and had taught her Spanish. Accordingly, she opened the volume—’twas the third time she had gone through it—and began to read in a loud, clear voice, while Sir Henry sat with his back towards her and his eyes resting on the ancient suit of armor, whence they never strayed, except for a moment to glance at the portrait of the queen.
Helen had found Don Quixote quite entertaining the first time she had perused it; but now the interest was all gone, and only the dread of offending her father kept her from often pausing and nodding her head. But this she durst not do; and so on and on she read through five chapters, without so much as lifting her eyes off the page, after which Sir Henry told her to put the volume aside, then withdrew in what for him was a very genial humor.
The night which closed this summer day was a restless one for Helen Lee. She lay awake several hours listening to a whip-poor-will perched on a tree by her window. She got thinking about her father, whom, despite his acerbity of temper, she dearly loved; she thought of the rash way he was squandering his means, and said to herself: “Dear mother was right: in order to save ourselves from utter ruin we should live as economically as possible. But, alas! he will not do it, and we may be forced ere long to sell our new home here, as we did our old home in England.” And when at length she fell asleep, these mournful thoughts followed her in a dream.
The next morning Helen repaired to Evelyn’s abode, which stood on the outskirts of the town, and found him all ready to begin the painting of which he had spoken the day before.
“You look a little pale, Helen,” he said as she entered his studio. “You are always as blooming as a rose. Are you not well?”
The girl did not answer, and presently her countenance brightened, for by nature she was of a cheery disposition, ever hoping for the best, even when the sky looked darkest; and, besides, it was never difficult for the companion of her earliest years to interest her.
“Look,” continued Evelyn, “look at that oriole singing on the elm-tree yonder; his mate is hidden in the deep pear-shaped nest, with a tiny door on the side, which you see dangling from the end of the limb. Well, I have given that beautiful bird a new name; I have christened it the Baltimore bird, because we find in its golden plumage, mixed with deep black, the colors of Lord Baltimore’s arms. And his lordship was highly pleased yesterday when he heard the new name.”
“What a fanciful boy you are!” answered Helen, smiling.
“And, Helen,” he went on, “I am composing a new song for your harpsichord. You see you have inspired me to become a poet as well as an artist.”
“I sometimes fear that I have caused you to dwell too much in Cloud-land,” said Helen. Then, a 411little abruptly, “Evelyn,” she added, “did you ever cut down a tree?”
Ere the young baronet could make reply Berkeley, with an axe strapped across his shoulders, galloped up to the open window of the studio.
“Good morning! good-morning!” cried the surveyor. “Why, Helen, I am lucky to catch you here; I was going as nigh the tower as I durst venture, in order to bid you good-by.”
“Good-by! What mean you?” exclaimed Helen, betraying in her voice and looks the anxiety she felt.
“I am going forty miles up the Potomac, in order to lay out a new settlement,” answered Berkeley; “for our colony is growing, you know, and I am kept pretty busy.” Then, bending down from the saddle and taking her hand, “Helen,” he added, “please tell Sir Henry how sorry I am that I showed so much temper yesterday. I ought to have held my tongue, or not spoken out so openly, for I might have known that we should not agree. Tell him I ask his pardon.”
Helen gazed up in Berkeley’s face a moment, then her eyes dropped and she murmured: “Yes, I will tell him.”
“But of course,” pursued her lover, “I do not change my opinion. I still firmly believe that the example of religious toleration which Maryland has set will in time be followed by the other colonies; and who knows what a century may bring forth? Why, I believe the day is coming when all North America will be occupied by English-speaking commonwealths, where there will be no religious wars as in Europe; Catholics and Protestants will dwell in harmony together, and then it will be said: ‘Maryland began it. God bless Maryland!’”
“You have quite won me over to your way of thinking,” interposed Evelyn. “A man may be tolerant of the views of others without being himself indifferent.”
“Why, Roger Williams’ friend, whom we saw yesterday,” spoke Helen, “was drawn hither by our very toleration. Yes, we have outstripped the Puritans in common sense, and who knows but this poor exile may end by embracing the true faith?”
“But now, to change the subject,” went on Berkeley, who saw a fresh canvas spread out and a crayon in his friendly rival’s hand, “are you about to begin a new picture?”
“Yes,” said Evelyn; “a picture of St. George rescuing St. Margaret from the Dragon, and Helen is to sit for St. Margaret.”
“Indeed!” Here Berkeley meditated a moment in silence. The fact is, he feared lest he might be absent from St. Mary’s three or four months—perhaps longer: would it not, therefore, be wise, if he wished to secure Helen for his bride, to ask her forthwith to plight him her troth? Had he not already deferred it long enough? He could now afford to marry; and if he still put off the weighty question, might not Evelyn during his absence become the chosen one? “Why wait,” he asked himself, “until I have made friends with Sir Henry? He never would look with a favoring eye on our union, for I have no title; I am plain William Berkeley. Yet Helen is of age, she is not a slave, I love her dearly; and if she loves me enough to accept me, why, in God’s name, let us be married.”
412Then aloud he said: “Evelyn, before I go I must pass a few minutes in your studio, just to see you commence the picture.”
“Yes, do; and let me call a servant to take your horse to the stable,” said Evelyn.
“Thanks. I’ll take him there myself,” answered Berkeley, who was now determined not to set out for the wilderness without knowing his fate.
“How well he rides!” observed the artist. “What a soldierly bearing he has!”
Then, gazing earnestly in Helen’s face, he added:
“Berkeley would make a capital St. George. Would he not? Shall I put him in the painting instead of myself?”
At this question Helen’s cheek crimsoned, and without making any response she awaited Berkeley’s return; while Evelyn murmured to himself: “Alas! alas! I see I should do well enough for a picture; but he would be her real St. George.”
In a few minutes Berkeley reappeared, and as he entered the room he seemed to read Helen’s thoughts at a glance; for the first words he uttered were:
“Evelyn, may I enquire who is to sit for St. George?”
Here Evelyn turned to Helen, upon whom Berkeley’s eyes were fastened, saying: “Dear Helen, please answer for me.”
This was a cruel moment for the girl—most cruel! What a throng of memories rushed upon her!—memories of far-off, sunny days, when she and the pretty boy used to saunter and dream hand-in-hand together along the shady paths that lay between her native home and his. And now all these memories became so many voices pleading powerfully in Evelyn’s behalf; he had loved her from the beginning, and she had only met Berkeley when she was grown up to womanhood.
But when she thought of the latter, she remembered her dead mother and what she had said of him—of his inner worth, his talents, his energy. Then, too, since Helen had been in Maryland, Berkeley had shown in many ways that he was attached to her; and, moreover, he was a man in the truest sense of the word—a man on whom she and her heedless father might lean and find support. His every waking hour was devoted to some useful employment. Far and wide he was known as an able, active, daring man; and at this very moment he stood before her all equipped to plunge into the trackless forest to pioneer the way for another settlement. His views, too, of the future had won Helen’s heart; she believed, as he did, that in America the church was destined to spread and to glean a more golden harvest than in old, worn-out Europe. And so, after a painful inward struggle, which revealed itself not faintly in her countenance, Helen’s response came, and, turning with tearful eyes to Berkeley, she said:
“William, do you be my St. George.”
“For life, Helen?”
“Yes, for life.”
At these words of doom poor Evelyn, who had felt what was coming, averted his face and stared on the vacant wall. Then, presently, bidding them remain a short while in his studio, that he would not be gone long, the heart-broken man hurriedly quitted the house.
The church whither he went was 413close by; and there at the foot of the altar he flung himself, bowed down his head, and tried hard to breathe a prayer. But he had never suffered before as he was suffering now, and it was not easy for him to be resigned, to have a Christian spirit, to say, “God’s will be done.” For a moment even a rebellious, devil-sent word quivered on his lips; and thus did he kneel dumbstricken before the altar, until by and by—brought to him, perhaps, by his guardian angel—came a sweet, holy calm; the storm passed away, and, spreading forth his arms, he gazed upon the ever-burning lamp which told of the Blessed Presence of his Saviour truly near him. And as he gazed upon it Evelyn took a high resolve; the words of the Psalmist came to him: “When my heart was in anguish, thou hast exalted me on a rock. Thou hast conducted me; for thou hast been my hope.... In thy tabernacle I shall dwell for ever.”[91]
Then straightway followed a flood of joy; like a bright, sunshiny wave it flowed over his soul. In his rapture he sang aloud the Gloria, the Magnificat, the Te Deum Laudamus. After which, rising up off his knees, he went back to his friends, who were wonder-stricken at the change that had come over him in the brief space since he had left them. Evelyn’s whole countenance beamed with a fire that was in striking contrast with his former listless self; and in a voice wherein was no tone of sadness he addressed Berkeley, saying: “Now to work! Let me quick begin St. George; I will draw rapidly, and in a couple of hours you shall be free to depart.”
Accordingly the picture was commenced, nor had the artist’s crayon ever touched the canvas so deftly before; indeed, so swiftly did he work that by the time the Angelus bell told them it was noon the rough sketch was finished.
Nor did the parting betwixt Berkeley and Evelyn bear the least trace of coldness; they seemed like two brothers, and Helen like an affectionate sister between them.
“And now,” spoke Evelyn, when the other was gone, and as he and Helen turned towards the tower—“now I’ll go see your father, and try my best to appease his anger against your betrothed.”
“Oh! how kind, how good you are,” answered Helen, who would fain have said more; but how could she? What language could express her gratitude to Evelyn for being so forgiving? And she inwardly owned that, whatever his weak points were, he was a rare, high-minded man—a man the like of whom this world had few indeed.
“Sister,” pursued Evelyn, in the tender accents she knew so well, “I am only too happy to serve you; and you know it is now more important than ever to soften Sir Henry’s heart towards Berkeley.”
“Yes,” said Helen, “otherwise I foresee great trouble in store for me.”
“But if I do not succeed, why, then you must speak to him yourself,” added Evelyn.
A half-hour later the young baronet and Helen’s father were closeted in the queen’s room, engaged in earnest talk.
“Well, I have known many good Papists in the course of my life,” spoke the old gentleman, “but upon my word you are the best one of all. Why, you ought rather to rejoice to have Berkeley hold aloof; 414yet here you are pleading his cause.”
“Berkeley is a most honorable, excellent fellow,” rejoined Evelyn, “and—”
“Oh! there you go again,” interrupted Sir Henry. “Your charity gets the better of your common sense. Why, what is he if you strip him of all disguises—what is he but the son of a forester, who, having turned surveyor, is no doubt earning money? But does that make him a gentleman—a fit one to be your rival for my daughter’s hand?” Then, after pausing and wiping his brow, Helen’s father continued: “No, indeed! And I would be really thankful, Sir Charles, if you would prevent him from ever coming again within a mile of my castle.”
“How might I accomplish that?” inquired Evelyn, inwardly smiling.
“How? Why, by asking Helen’s hand. From her cradle she has known you, and you her; she cannot help but love you if she has any heart at all—and she has a heart; oh! yes, a warm, loving heart.”
“Sir Henry,” replied Evelyn, with a faint tremor in his voice, “Helen can never be more than a dear friend, a sister, to me; I intend to become a priest.”
“What! a priest?” cried Sir Henry, utterly amazed. “A priest! O Evelyn! Evelyn!” Then, dropping his forehead in his hands, he began to sigh and wail. “I counted upon you,” he said in accents of unfeigned grief. “I counted upon you. But now, alas! all my bright hopes are vanished—all! all!” Then presently, clenching the hilt of his rapier—the old cavalier always carried a rapier—“But Berkeley shall not have her,” he thundered, working himself up to a violent passion. “No! by heaven, he sha’n’t! Never! never! I swear by—”
Leaving Sir Henry storming and invoking anything but blessings on poor Berkeley’s head, Evelyn withdrew to seek Helen, whom he found waiting outside the door. The girl trembled when she learnt the result of his interview with her father, and scarcely had courage to enter the latter’s presence. Urged, however, by Evelyn, she overcame her timidity and passed into the room; then, in as firm a voice as she could command, she told Sir Henry that Berkeley had requested her to beg his pardon for having angered him. Helen told him, too, that the surveyor was gone off forty or fifty miles from St. Mary’s; and concluded by reminding her father of the high opinion which her mother had entertained of the young man, of his industry, honor, manly courage.
“And dear mother was not given to praising people unless they were really good and worthy of praise. So, father, I implore you, do not harbor any ill-feeling against William Berkeley. Indeed, I am quite sure my mother would have agreed with him.”
Here Helen paused to hear her father’s answer; if he relented—and she hoped that he might, for, despite the rage he was in, he had listened without interrupting—if he relented, she intended immediately to reveal her engagement. But if he did not relent—what then? With heart violently beating she watched him; his hand was still upon his sword, and after waiting a good minute, as if to see whether she had aught else to say, Sir Henry replied:
“You tell me Berkeley has quitted St. Mary’s for a while; well, I 415hope he will remain away. As for what Lady Lee may have thought of him—alas! your mother held certain very unseemly opinions, which more befitted Wat Tyler’s wench than a nobleman’s spouse. Why, she once even denied to my face the divine right of kings; and she was obstinate—most obstinate. But, nevertheless, I little doubt that the Almighty hath already granted her forgiveness. O child! although I am not a Papist, I own there is much consolation in your doctrine of purgatory; it is a most consoling doctrine.”
Knowing that to stay and argue with her father in his present mood would only make the matter worse, Helen was about to withdraw when she was startled by a loud groan which escaped him:
“Evelyn a priest! a priest! a priest!” ejaculated the old knight.
“What! is he going to become a priest?” exclaimed Helen, turning back from the door. “Oh! then he has chosen wisely. Father, do not deplore it. Let us say rather, ‘God be praised!’”
“Then you did not know this? It is news to you?” inquired Sir Henry, eyeing her closely.
“Upon my honor I knew it not,” replied Helen, trembling, for she feared lest he might follow up his question by another, which she would dread to answer.
“Well, now leave me,” continued her father, waving her off. “Leave me alone a space. Go! I am heart-sick.”
For well-nigh a week Sir Henry remained inconsolable; even Don Quixote’s adventures failed to entertain him, nor his daughter’s cheeriest music and blithest songs move him to mirth. The workmen, too, whom he was fond of superintending and thus whiling away some hours each day, did not come any more to labor at the castle walls; for Sir Henry’s funds were running low and he had not wherewithal to pay their wages.
His favorite haunt was a small island christened the Island of Tranquil Delight. It was named after a pretty isle in a lovely stream which flowed hard by Sir Henry’s old home in England. But in several respects the two islands differed greatly: one was shaded by the wide-spreading branches of an oak—an oak planted in the days of William the Conqueror—and at the foot of this venerable tree lay the ruins of what once had been a hermit’s cell. The other island had a persimmon-tree growing in the middle of it, and every time Sir Henry approached this retired corner of his domain he espied an opossum waddling off; and the name of both tree and animal sounded exceedingly vulgar to his ears. But, as we have remarked, this was his favorite spot. Here he loved to come and listen to the murmuring brook, to see the trout jump up, and watch some beautiful lilies, the bulbs of which he had brought over from his native land.
One day Helen determined to go down to the Island of Tranquil Delight and make another attempt to soften her father’s heart towards her future husband. “And then,” she said to herself, “I’ll tell him that I am William’s betrothed; and oh! what a weight will be lifted off my heart.”
Accordingly, she repaired thither. But Sir Henry quickly checked her, saying: “Why, child, one might think from the interest you take in Berkeley that you were fast in love with him. Good God! child, I hope not. I—”
What else he might have spoken 416we cannot tell, for just at this critical moment who should be seen advancing towards them but one of Sir Henry’s oldest and best friends, a boon companion of his youth, who had just arrived from England; and in the hearty greeting and long talk that followed all thought of Berkeley was happily driven out of the old gentleman’s mind.
We may imagine what a Godsend this proved to be for Helen. And, moreover, her father’s friend was invited to make the castle his home as long as he remained at St. Mary’s, so that his visit afforded the girl not a little spare time; for Sir Henry did not oblige her to read to him a couple of hours daily nor sing and play for him on the harpsichord. Indeed, he took his watchful eye off her movements entirely; neither asked whither she was going when she went out, nor where she had been when she returned home; and language can but faintly express the blessings which Helen breathed on her father’s guest for thus unwittingly procuring her so much liberty.
Every day she spent some time in Evelyn’s company, whose newborn energy gave her as much wonder as delight. Nothing he had ever painted before was so instinct with life, showed such marks of genius, as the painting he was now engaged upon. And seeing her there so often, and hearing them converse together so familiarly, caused more than one gossip to say: “There will be a wedding ere long at the Tower.”
But Sir Charles did something else besides ply his crayon and brush: he was up every morning as early as the oriole whose nest hung close by his window, studying and otherwise preparing himself for his new life; and the stars were long twinkling in the heavens when he retired to rest at night. And if sometimes in the still hours a vision of what might have been passed before him—a vision of home, of a hearthstone of his own, of wife and children gathered around him—the sweet vision vanished, nor left a pang behind, as soon as he opened his eyes and murmured a prayer.
Thus passed away August, September, October, and Sir Henry began to hope that Evelyn had got over his folly—for such he called the notion of becoming a priest; and this hope, together with the companionship of his friend (who Helen prayed might never go away, and who had brought over from London a pipe of Canary, which he insisted on sharing with his host), caused Sir Henry’s spirits to revive greatly; and one morning he kissed Helen, and said in what for him was a very mild voice: “Child, when will you bring me the glad tidings I am yearning to hear?”
Whereupon she smiled, rubbed her cheek against his grizzly beard, and without answering thought to herself: “The fantastic plan which came last night in a dream will succeed; I feel sure it will. And though I shall have to brave your wrath once more, in the end, father, you will forgive me.”
And now was ushered in the loveliest season of the year—Indian Summer. Of an early morning on one of these lovely days Helen mounted a pillion behind Evelyn, and, accompanied by her waiting-woman, set out for St. Joseph’s, which was the name Berkeley had given to the new settlement, and where report said he was become the chief man. Her father made no objection to her taking this trip, for he knew there was a widow lady, 417with whom Helen had been once exceedingly intimate, who was now living at St. Joseph’s, and it was quite natural that the girl should wish to visit her.
Moreover, good Father McElroy—formerly Helen’s confessor—was living there too; so that the old gentleman, as guileless as he was proud, did not suspect the real object of this journey, for he had not heard Helen breathe Berkeley’s name in several months.
As for Helen daring to wed him, nay, even to plight Berkeley her troth—this Sir Henry could have sworn that his meek, obedient child never would do.
Accordingly, as we have said, Helen departed for St. Joseph’s, her father wishing her “God speed! and come back soon,” and she waving her hand to him until the forest hid him from view. Then Sir Henry turned to his old comrade, saying: “’Tis well I have you with me, Dick, otherwise this castle would be horribly dull now”; on which the other answered: “Depend upon it, Harry, there’s a match brewing ’tween Miss Helen and Sir Charles. Ay, I can tell by the sparkle of a lassie’s eye when she’s in love; nor is there any thought of priesthood in Evelyn. And at the wedding feast we’ll drain dry my cask of Canary and set the whole town in a roar.”
“May the Lord hasten that day!” returned Sir Henry. “Oh! I long with a longing words cannot express to see a grandchild ere I die.”
TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.
“Looking, then, at the Church of Rome from a strictly logical stand-point, it is hard to see how, if we believe in free will and morality in the face of these modern discoveries, which, as far as they go, show us all life as nothing but a vast machine—it is hard to see how we can consider the Church of Rome as logically in any way wounded, or crippled, or in a condition, should occasion offer, to be less active than she was in the days of her most undisputed ascendency. I conceive of her as a ship that seems now unable to go upon any voyage, or to carry men anywhere, but that this is not because, as was said not long since, that her ‘hull was riddled by logic,’ or that she is dismasted or has lost her sails, but merely because she has no wind to fill them. In other words, with regard to supernatural religion, and Catholicism as its one form that still survives unshattered, I conceive that the imagination of the world has been to a great measure paralyzed; but that it may be seen eventually that it never was in any way convinced; and that nothing is wanting to revive the Roman Church into stronger life than ever but a craving amongst men for the certainty, the guidance, and the consolation that she alone offers them.
“The only question is whether such an outburst of feeling is in any way probable. It is possible that the world may be outgrowing such a craving as that I speak of; or that it may find some new way of appeasing it.”
Such is the conclusion of an article on “The Future of Faith,” by W. H. Mallock, in the London Contemporary 418Review, March, 1878. It goes without saying that the writer is not a Catholic; his very phraseology sufficiently shows this. His testimony, therefore, to the truth, the strength, and the stability of the Catholic Church is the more important as being that of an outsider. He is a man, judging by such of his writings as we have seen, who in a time of intellectual doubt and questioning, almost of despair, is searching honestly and earnestly for some truth on which to rest, if truth there be. He examines all things, shirks nothing, shrinks from nothing. He is not terrified by phrases; he is not to be put off with jargon, scientific or otherwise. If a man descants to him on “the great Unknown and Unknowable,” he listens with calm politeness, and then asks quietly, What is the great Unknown or the great Unknowable? And so with any other term and real or alleged fact. He sifts and sifts until he gets at the bottom. If the bottom is emptiness he says so; if he finds something there he says so. He acknowledges established facts, whether or not those facts go against his natural inclinations, or his preconceived theories, or the prejudices that in the course of a lifetime grow up around even the broadest and most honest minds; for pure intelligence is a rare quality indeed in man. The testimony, then, of a man like Mr. Mallock, a man who in every line he writes shows a keen intelligence, a mind formed by careful study and stored with knowledge, a rare culture, and a thorough honesty of purpose—the testimony, we say, of such a man is of real value on any subject of which he treats, and worthy of all respect.
The article which we purpose examining, and presenting in great part to our readers, seems to us to be almost the closing link in a long chain of reasoning. It is closely connected with other writings by the same author, and, though complete and independent in itself, thanks to the writer’s skill and logical strength, it ought really to be read with them in order to grasp its full force and significance as intended by the author himself. It should be read in connection with The New Republic; or, Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House (Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1878); “Is Life Worth Living?” (the Nineteenth Century, September, 1877, and January, 1878); to which may be added “Positivism on an Island” (the Contemporary Review, April, 1878). All of these bear one upon another. In them the most brilliant and refined satire alternates with, may be said rather to lighten, illustrate, and render fascinating, the most eager and earnest and searching inquiry into the very foundations of all that constitutes human society, especially in its modern and unchristian form. Mr. Mallock does not laugh simply for the laugh’s sake. Indeed, there is a deep mournfulness in his satire, notwithstanding its brilliancy—an undertone of sadness that causes one to doubt sometimes whether it is a laugh or a wail that we hear. It seems to us that the highest satire should always leave this doubt on the mind—the satire that is only bitter with the healthy bitterness of truth cleverly presented. However, we will not discuss that matter now; and with the mere mention of Mr. Mallock’s other writings, and the recommendation of them as affording reading that is at once very pleasant while it is healthy and strong, we turn to the more immediate subject of our article.
The future of faith is of course a question that deeply concerns all the 419world, more especially in these days, perhaps, when faith in its honest old meaning is dying according to some, dead according to others, an effete and pitiable superstition according to very many more. Delightful and quaint and chivalrous old Kenelm Digby would seem half inclined to restrict the Ages of Faith to days when Christian knights went forth to battle for the Holy Sepulchre, when there was in all Christendom but one Christian faith held by all, and when Europe was forming and emerging out of paganism and barbarism under the beneficent hand of the Catholic Church. Those old days have passed away, and with them, according to many modern and enlightened thinkers, has passed the old faith. Christendom itself has passed away, too. Those were the days of the infancy of Christian nations, and an infantine belief akin to, where it was not wholly, superstition befitted them, according to what claims to be modern enlightenment. One religion was very natural then, and did much good, perhaps, in softening and checking barbarism and saving the very life of Europe. But as the infants grew into youth, and the youth developed into manhood, it was only natural that they should cut aloose from their leading-strings, tire of the mother who had watched so tenderly over their birth and growth and development, and discover that she was a shrewish old termagant, who wanted to keep them in leading-strings all their lives. So they cut their leading-strings and emancipated themselves, and believed as they liked and did as they liked, and left their mother to live or die as she might. Mother-like she refused to die; she lived for them. Though grown to man’s estate, they were still her children. Though they would disown her, she was still their mother. And her eyes went out wistfully after them; her heart yearned always for their return; her prayers went up unceasingly to heaven for them. Will the “Ages of Faith” ever come back, the old unity, the old simplicity? Is such a thing as the old faith ever dreamed of in this faithless age? Is there a desire anywhere among men for Christian unity, or is the tendency not rather the other way, towards still greater disintegration, until the very name of faith be banished from the world, and all mankind shall have attained to the supreme scientific beatitude of placid disbelief in a God whom they cannot see with their earthly eyes, touch with their earthly hands, set under their microscopes, examine and analyze and measure and weigh? This is really the question to which Mr. Mallock applies himself.
To those who note the signs of the times there is observable a strong centripetal as well as an equally strong, and perhaps more pronounced, centrifugal moral force working among men to-day. The centre from which the one party seeks to fly, and to which the other party seeks to turn, is Rome, the centre of Catholic unity. Take the Anglican Church as an instance. More than once in its history of three centuries has there been an attempt among some of its members to turn backwards to Rome. Never was that attempt more open and avowed than it is to-day, and, on the other hand, never was that attempt more bitterly resented by an opposing and more numerous party in the same church than it is to-day. There were at one time, under Alexander I., strong hopes of Russia becoming reconciled to the mother church. The sudden death of the emperor effectually quenched those hopes for 420the time being. The very large and ever-increasing number of conversions to the Catholic faith within the last half-century, of men of every form of belief or of no belief, very many of whom have been conspicuous for their learning and ability, some of them for their genius, is another indication of the real existence and strength of what we have termed this centripetal moral force. We only note these facts now, without stopping to inquire into their cause. But whether we be right or wrong in our belief that there is a strong and growing tendency towards reunion in Christendom, there is no denying that outside of the Catholic Church there never did exist so open and pronounced a feeling of religious unrest and disquietude as exists to-day among all bodies of professed Christians. What they have of religion, and what their fathers professed, no longer satisfies them. What were once held to be indisputable articles of faith are so no longer. Deep mistrust of the old ways, disbelief in the old tenets, have set in, and men who wish to be Christians find themselves without any fixed ground of faith. Thus infidelity is reaping a rich harvest, for the reason that Christianity in the minds of non-Catholics was identified with Protestantism in its various forms. But Protestantism now is found insufficient and wanting. It has fallen to pieces under the attacks of its own children, who to-day find themselves without a faith, and without any positive moral guide save such fragments of the truth as are still left to them, and to which the best of them adhere as a matter of necessity without exactly knowing why. They feel that Christianity is right, is the best; but they have not quite made up their minds as to what Christianity is or where it is. In fact, they shrink from the painful inquiry, and naturally enough; for the very fact of such an inquiry is an admission that there is something very wrong in their system, and that the wrong is an old growth.
This general feeling of unrest and disquietude shows itself in a thousand ways, and in no way more conspicuously than in the literature of the day, even in its lighter forms. What newspaper is without its “theologian”? We keep a theologian, say the newspapers, as the lady of the nouveaux riches said: “We keep a poet.” In days when religion is by many advanced minds supposed to be altogether out of date we find no subject of more general and entrancing interest than religion. The first question asked when a respectable rascal is exposed is, To what church did he belong? And so seemingly advantageous is religion, at least in a social point of view, that it generally turns out, especially, we are sorry to confess, in our own country, that the rascal was “a leading member of the church” and “in good standing.” We know to our cost what the school of “Christian statesmen” means. Even these degrading and disgraceful spectacles show that Christianity cannot be so very dead when its profession is found to be so very profitable a moral investment and so strong a guarantee of good character and sound morals. The evidence is that, whatever may be said, people still cling to it as something sacred and above suspicion, and their sense is undoubtedly right, however often and however sadly they may find themselves mistaken. It is not yet a reproach to a man that he is a professed Christian. On the contrary, it is the greatest stigma, as it ought to be, on his character when he falls. If he avowedly believed in nothing, 421in no moral law, men could easily understand why he should refuse to be bound by any moral law. But when he professes to be a follower of Christ and betrays his trust, even the infidel is shocked and turns with special loathing from the hypocrite.
Emerson, who is avowedly no Christian, in these his late days—and, let us hope, his best—can find no subjects so interesting as morals, religion, ethics; and his tendency, allowing for his early training, his acquired habit of mind and expression, is unquestionably in the right direction. Some of Carlyle’s latest and noblest utterances are Christian in spite of himself. At least he can find nothing in the world, which he long ago consigned, to the devil, of such real worth as Christian faith. Bulwer Lytton’s last and, to our thinking, his best story presents a noble Catholic youth as the very beau ideal of excellence, and excellent because of his Catholicity. Thackeray sighed long ago for what to him seemed a hopeless reunion with Rome. George Eliot’s stories are a perpetual wail of despair for lack of fixed belief and a moral right which she cannot see. Others, the scientific minds more especially, are fiercer and bitterly attack anything that recognizes the supernatural. James Anthony Froude, while confessing that Protestantism as a whole has gone to the devil and allowed Protestants to go wholesale the same way, is startled at a “revival of Romanism.” We are only taking these few and varied instances as characteristic of the multitude of non-Catholics to-day who would fain believe in something and take refuge from the awful blank of infidelity. The magazines are full of them and of many like them. Mr. Disraeli moves England with a religious novel; and his political rival, Mr. Gladstone, has only lately deserted Rome to take up the Turk. Indeed, he seems to take even a more passionate interest in his theological than in his political discussions; and, facilis descensus, our own Secretary of the Navy shows his supreme fitness for his position by writing a remarkably bad and stupid book—remarkably bad and stupid even for him—against Rome.
We have not lost sight of our subject nor parted company with Mr. Mallock. All that has been said has only been intended to show how general is the interest to-day among all classes of minds in religious discussion. This of itself is an assurance that there is something to discuss; that there are disputed questions abroad which interest all men alike; and that these questions are not settled. And that is the point to which we wish to call special attention. Outside of the Catholic Church there is no body to-day claiming to be Christian which is fixed and steadfast in its belief; and this is only another way of saying that there is no belief which wholly commends itself to its professed followers, save the Catholic. Mr. Mallock does not write for Catholics. They are, as he acknowledges, and as all acknowledge, at least firm and steadfast. There is no shaking them. They may be wrong, utterly wrong, but at least men can see exactly what they believe and why they believe. Are they right in their belief, or are others right? Is there any such thing as faith in this world to-day, and is there any reasonable hope of its holding its ground and approving itself to the intelligence of mankind? These are the questions which Mr. Mallock puts in the calmest of tempers and with the thorough honesty of purpose we have already noticed.
422In discussing “the future of faith” Mr. Mallock naturally turns his attention to those who profess to have and to hold Christian faith. The prospects of faith in the present order of the world he does not find very encouraging. What is called modern thought is against it; modern tone is against it—“a tone of confident and supercilious animosity that is gradually dying into triumph.” “It is true,” says Mr. Mallock, “that this leaven in its full bitterness is to be found only in a narrow circle; but flavors of it, more or less diluted, meet us far and wide. Indeed, it is difficult to find any place where they are not traceable.” This is undoubtedly true; it is equally true that “there is doubtless much definite religion left around us, and many firm believers. But the modern tone has its influence even on these. Religion must be changed in some ways by the neighborhood of irreligion.” This he explains by showing the amicable social relations that exist between religious and irreligious people in these days.
“They are united by habits, by blood, and by friendship; and they are each accustomed to ignore or to excuse what they hold to be the errors of the other. In a state of things like this it is plain that the convictions of believers can neither have the fierce intensity found in a minority under persecution, nor the placid confidence that belongs to an overwhelming majority. They can neither hate the unbelievers, for they daily live in amity with them; nor despise altogether their judgment, for the most eminent thinkers of the day belong to them. The believers are forced into a sort of compromise, which is a new feature in their history. They see that the age is against them; and they are obliged to make excuses for their enemy.”
Mr. Mallock, it will be seen, does not here characterize his “believers.” We are not prepared to agree altogether with what he says in this. At the very least the influence resulting from a social truce between believers and unbelievers need not tell entirely on the side of unbelief. There is no reason why believers should not be as steadfast in a drawing-room as in a church or on a battle-field, and politeness to an opponent does not of necessity imply a concession of weakness. Religious fervor is by no means incompatible with civility; but doubtless Mr. Mallock has in view more particularly Protestant believers, though he would not seem to restrict himself to them, judging from the following passage:
“If the modern tone has thus affected even those who ye most opposed to it, what must not its effect be upon those who have, in part of their own free will, adopted it? And these form to-day a great mass of our educated public. A large number of these still call themselves Protestants; and were the matter to be treated lightly, they might afford countless studies for the humorist. The state to which they have reduced their religion is indeed a curious one. With a facile eclecticism that is based on no principle, and that changes from year to year, or more probably from mood to mood, they pick and choose their doctrines, saying: ‘I keep this and I reject this,’ in some such manner as the following: ‘Of course the Apostles’ Creed is true, and of course the Athanasian Creed is false. And then, after all, suppose neither is true, the meaning of the thing is the real heart of the matter.’ Such is the Protestant language of to-day. Nor is it the language of foolish or of ignorant people; it is the language of countless clever men who have much to do, and of countless clever women who have nothing to do.”
The author proceeds to test the actual value on a person’s life of such a faith as this—a faith that has nothing really fixed in it, and that varies with the mood of the holder. There come the great trials of life, when those who sorrow or those who suffer 423or are sorely tempted require all their fortitude, must trample on themselves and on their own feelings and natural instincts, or yield to despair and give way to wrong.
“A great sorrow comes, or a great temptation comes. At once the tone of to-day grows more pronounced, and a new set of arguments suggest themselves with singular readiness: ‘God is not good, or he would never have robbed me of so good a husband’; or, ‘God is not good, or he would never have let me marry such a bad one’; and then follows, as a corollary to these propositions, ‘God is nothing if not good, and therefore there is no God at all.’ Or the syllogism, especially in the feminine mind, takes not uncommonly some such form as this: ‘If there was a God he would put me into hell for being in love with so-and-so; but I am certain in my own mind that I do not deserve hell; therefore I am certain in my own mind that there can be no God to put me there.’”
The aptness and force with which Mr. Mallock brings the application of these vague speculations about religion and these loose principles of belief home to daily life is characteristic of the man. He is not content with wandering in the clouds. He brings everything down to solid earth, and tests and weighs it there. He does not ask, How will this appear to the philosopher? but How will this affect the lives of men and women? Religion is not for the philosophers only, but for every man born into this world. A recent trial in Brooklyn gives peculiar point to his remarks on this head. “In former times,” says Mr. Mallock, “when such thoughts occurred to men, the whole weight of the world’s opinion always was ready to condemn them as vain and wicked. But now the case is just reversed. However foolish may be the actual conduct of such reasoning, the opinion of the enlightened world is ready to corroborate the conclusion.”
He goes on to take another circle, “a probably far larger one.” This is made up of men who are in suspense altogether. “They see much to revere and to regret in Christianity, but they make no pretence of believing in its details. They do not even think them worth arguing against.” And, lastly, “there are the extreme destroyers, who would break altogether with the past; and who, though probably wishing to retain some of the emotions that were once directed to God and to heaven, would give them an entirely different object in the shape of humanity, and would never suffer them to wander from the earth’s surface.”
“Such are the various parties that the world of thought now shows to us,” says Mr. Mallock—a small body who cling heart and soul to the past; a small body that would utterly break with the past; and between them “a vast and varied crowd, tinged in various proportions with the colors of each extreme. And amongst them all there is a continual arguing, and anxiety, and perplexity.”
There is no denying the truth of this picture. Such is Christendom to-day, and what is to be the outcome of it all? The keen and truthful observer whom we are quoting thinks “it cannot be doubted that the modern tone is spreading,” and the tendency is therefore against faith. “To all except a small minority faith, in the old sense of the word, is growing a cold and shadowy thing.”
“The dogmas, the services, the ministers of the church are coming all of them to have a belated look for us. They seem out of place in the busy world around us. Ever and again we hear of a new Catholic miracle and the fame of some new pilgrimage. And the strange effect that these things have on us shows us how far our minds have travelled.
424Do such things still exist? we ask in surprise and irritation, and we set them down as ‘the grimacings of a dead superstition’ galvanized into a ghastly imitation of life. And then from the modern miracles the mind goes back to the older ones, once held so sacred and so certain. And they, too, have undergone a change for us. Not only are Lourdes and Paray-le-Monial contemptible, but Calvary is disenchanted. There may have been a death there, but there was never a Sacrifice. Scales have fallen from our eyes. We see it all clearly. The creed we were brought up in is an earthly myth, not a heavenly revelation. We know exactly whence it came, and we see pretty certainly whither it is going. The signs of it still survive; but they signify nothing. They will soon be swept away, and will make place, we hope earnestly, for something better.”
Such is the modern tone, wonderfully well presented. Is it so universal as Mr. Mallock seems to think, or so deeply rooted in the minds and hearts of men? He himself is in doubt on this point, and proceeds to inquire with characteristic honesty and persistence. He takes up and classifies the various objections against Christianity that are popular to-day: the objections à priori, which are opposed to all religion, natural as well as revealed; and the objections à posteriori, which are opposed to revealed religion only. We must refer the reader to Mr. Mallock’s article for these objections, as space does not allow us to present them, nor is their presentation necessary to our immediate purpose. The conclusion at which he arrives is briefly this: “If Christianity relies for support on the external evidence of its truth, it can never again hope to convince men. These supports are seen to be utterly inadequate to the weight that is put upon them. They might possibly serve as props, but they crash and crumble instantly if they are used as pillars.”
We are not so much arguing with Mr. Mallock as allowing him free utterance, therefore we make no formal exception to what he here says. But, he goes on, “it is as pillars that the whole Protestant community uses them,” the “props” above mentioned, and he takes up Protestantism as the religion of the Bible.
“There,” it says, “is the word of God; there is my infallible guide. I listen to none but that. It is my first axiom that the Bible is infallible; and granting that, history teaches me that all other churches are fallible. On the Bible, and the Bible only, I rest myself. Out of its mouth shall you judge me. And for a long time this language had much force in it, for the Protestant axiom was received by all parties. It is true that it might be hard to decide what God’s word meant; but still every one admitted that God’s word was there, and it at any rate meant something. But now all this is changed. The great axiom is received no longer. Many, indeed, consider it not an axiom but an absurdity; at best it appears but as a very doubtful fact; and if external proof is to be what guides us, we shall need more proofs to convince us that the Bible is the word of God than that Protestantism is the religion of the Bible.”
We agree with Mr. Mallock that if this be Christianity, Christianity has lost its use and its place in this world. Reasonable men cannot be brought to understand how so stupendous and vast an edifice as Christianity can by any possibility rest on so very narrow and shaky a foundation as that presented by Protestantism. The whole thing is either a gigantic sham, which has enslaved and overshadowed men’s minds too long already and wrought infinite mischief in the world, or else we must seek some deeper and broader foundation for it than this. “In this country” (England), says Mr. Mallock, “nearly all the ablest attacks upon supernatural religion have been directed against it as embodied 425in the Protestant form; and they have widely, and not unnaturally, been regarded as quite victorious.” There is left then only one of two alternatives: either Christianity is false, or Protestantism is not Christianity.
Protestantism has fallen, as we said, under the hands of its own children. They have demolished it, and left only scattered fragments of what was a body with something like life in it. In destroying it have they destroyed what they identified with it—supernatural religion, or Christianity?
“It seems to escape the assailants,” observes Mr. Mallock, “that though they may have burnt the outworks, there is still a citadel inside, which, though it seems to them almost too contemptible to take account of, may yet not prove combustible, and, when the conflagration outside has subsided, may still remain to annoy them. They forget altogether, I mean, the Church of Rome; nor do they seem to consider that, though for other causes she may perhaps be dying, yet many of their logical darts can do nothing to hasten her end.”
Having found Protestantism so complete a failure, Mr. Mallock turns to the Catholic Church and examines it. He finds that “Catholics have one characteristic which fundamentally separates them from the Protestants” with respect to the chief points at which modern thought and science have assailed revealed religion. Protestantism, he says, offers itself to the world as a strange servant might—bringing with its number of written testimonials to character. It expressly begs us not to trust to its own word. The world examines the testimonials carefully; “it at last sees that they look suspicious, that they may very possibly be forgeries; it asks the Protestant Church to prove them genuine, and the Protestant Church cannot.”
Catholicism comes in an exactly opposite way. It brings the very same testimonials, but sets itself above them. It speaks with its own authority. It speaks as Christ spoke, Who said openly and boldly: “Believe in me; I am the way, the truth, and the life; the Father and I are one.” He used the Scriptures also, but only as adjuncts to his own teaching. His credentials were exclusively his own. The Scriptures were his; he was not the Scriptures’. And so the church which he founded surely ought to speak—the church which is his living body, higher and greater than any Scriptures. “It” (the Catholic Church), says Mr. Mallock, “asks us to make some acquaintance with it; to look into its living eyes, to hear the words of its mouth, to watch its ways and works, and to feel its inner spirit; and then it says to the world, ‘Can you trust me? If so, you must trust me all in all, for the first thing I declare to you is that I have never lied. Can you trust me thus far? Then listen, and I will tell you my story. You have heard it told one way, I know; and that way often goes against me. I admit myself that it has many suspicious circumstances. But none of them positively condemn me. All are capable of a guiltless interpretation; and now you know me as I am, you will give me the benefit of every doubt.’ It is in this spirit that Catholicism offers us the Bible. ‘Believe the Bible for my sake,’ it says, ‘not me for the Bible’s.’ And the book, as thus offered us, changes its whole character.”
We have no fault to find with this presentation of the Catholic claims so far. Mr. Mallock has here fully grasped an essential difference between Catholics and Protestants which few non-Catholics are able to 426grasp. How clearly and well he elucidates this important point will be seen by those who care to read his article, of which we can only present the substance. His conclusion with regard to Catholicity and the Bible is: “As Catholicism stands at the present moment, it seems hard to say that, were we for any other reasons inclined to trust it, it makes any claim for the Bible that would absolutely prevent our doing so.” That being the case, it follows as a matter of course that all the “logical darts” aimed at the Bible fall harmless from the invincible armor of the Catholic Church.
He then goes on to consider the various doctrines of the Catholic Church, and herein he shows the same capability of appreciating the Catholic stand-point, an appreciation of which stand-point is, of course, necessary to any one who would honestly inquire into what Catholicity really is, and what Catholics actually do believe. These doctrines, he says, “though it is claimed that they are all implied in the Bible, are confessedly not expressed in it, and were confessedly not consciously assented to by the church till long after the sacred canon was closed.” We would here remark that this is true only of some Catholic doctrines. Well, says Mr. Mallock, “let us here grant the extreme position of the church’s most hostile critics. Let us grant that all the doctrines in question can be traced to external and often to non-Christian sources. And what is the result on Romanism? Does this go any way whatever towards logically discrediting its claims?” We will let him answer his own question in his own way:
“If we do but consider the matter fairly, we shall see that it does not even tend to do so. Here, as in the case of the Bible, the Roman doctrine of infallibility meets all objections. For the real question here is not in what store-house of opinions the church found its doctrines; but why it selected those it did, and why it rejected and condemned the rest. History cannot answer this. History can show us only who made the separate bricks; it cannot show us who made and designed the building.... And the doctrines of the church are but as the stones in a building, the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a language. Many are offered and few chosen. The supernatural action is to be detected in the choice. The whole history of the church, in fact, as she herself tells it, is a history of supernatural selection. It is quite possible that she may claim it to be more than that; but could she vindicate for herself but this one faculty of an infallible choice, she would vindicate to the full her claim to be under a superhuman guidance. The church may be conceived of as a living organism, for ever and on all sides putting forth feelers and tentacles, that seize, try, and seem to dally with all kinds of nutriment. A part of this she at length takes into herself. A large part she at length puts down again. Much that is thus rejected she seems for a long time on the point of choosing. But however slow may be the final decision in coming, however reluctant or hesitating it may seem to be, when it is once made it is claimed for it that it is infallible. And this claim, when we once understand its nature, will be seen, I think, to be one that neither our knowledge of ecclesiastical history nor of comparative mythology can invalidate now or even promise ever to do so.”
It will be seen that we are a long way from Protestantism already, and that we have here a very different kind of church, which, be it right or wrong, rests on a very deep and firm foundation. At least this must be said of it by all: Granting its truth, there is no stronger foundation conceivable. Granting it to be false even, it is hard to conceive a stronger foundation, or one that could commend itself with more force and assurance of safety to reasonable men. If there be a God living and 427moving in this world, this looks very like God’s handiwork.
Mr. Mallock concedes that “the Catholic Church can still claim, in the face of all the new lights thrown on her history, to be sprung from a supernatural root.” But it may be that she “will be found to be betrayed by her fruits” when these are inspected in detail. Her primary dogmas and her general sacred character may be conceded; but “numberless deductions from them and indirect consequences” may “revolt our common sense and our moral sense, though we have no exact means of disproving them.” Such difficulties, he finds, do exist; “but if we examine them carefully, many, at least, will be found to rest upon misconceptions.”
The difficulties in question are that Catholicity “makes salvation depend on our assenting to a number of obscure propositions”; that to many Catholic ritual seems to be an integral part of the church’s mystical body, and that thus salvation is made to hang “not only on an assent to occult propositions of philosophy, but upon altar-candles and the colored clothes of priests”; again, “the temper and intellectual tone which she seems to develop in her members” makes the church “a rock of offence to many”; there are “a number of miraculous legends and quaint beliefs which are or have been prevalent amongst Catholics.” Of all these difficulties Mr. Mallock himself very lucidly and effectively disposes, and shows that they “will be seen to be not really formidable.” There are other difficulties, however, which he finds “worse than these.” They consist of “certain moral objections to the Catholic Church’s scheme altogether, and objections of science and common sense to other necessary parts of it.”
“The moral objections consist principally of these: the exclusiveness of the church, which leaves the rest of mankind uncared for; the church’s doctrine of rewards and punishments, which are barbarous or ridiculous in their details, and which, besides that, make all virtue venal; and the doctrine of a vicarious satisfaction for sin, which to many minds carries its own condemnation on the face of it. Lastly, besides these, there is the entire question of miracles.”
Into all these matters Mr. Mallock goes with the same patient purpose and honest mind that distinguish him everywhere. His conclusion, as a whole, is given at the head of this article. Space forbids us to follow him any farther, but we cannot resist the temptation to quote for the benefit of our non-Catholic readers what he says on infallibility and on the “exclusiveness” of the Catholic Church:
“The doctrine of the church’s infallibility,” he says, “has a side that is just the opposite of that which is commonly thought to be its only one. It is supposed to have simply gendered bondage, not to have gendered liberty. But as a matter of fact it has done both; and if we view the matter fairly we shall see that it has done the latter at least as completely as the former. The doctrine of infallibility is undoubtedly a rope that tethers those that hold it to certain real or supposed facts of the past; but it is a rope that is capable of indefinite lengthening. It is not a fetter only; it is a support also, and those who cling to it can venture fearlessly, as explorers, into currents of speculation that would sweep away altogether men who did but trust to their own powers of swimming. Nor does, as is often supposed, the centralizing of this infallibility in the person of one man present any difficulty from the Catholic point of view. It is said that the pope might any day make a dogma of any absurdity that might happen to occur to him; and that the Catholic would be bound to accept these, however strongly his reason might repudiate them. And it is quite true that the pope might do this any day, in the sense that there is no external power to prevent 428him. But he who has assented to the central doctrine of Catholicism knows that he never will. And it is precisely the obvious absence of any restraint from without that brings home to the Catholic his faith in the guiding power from within.”
Of the “exclusiveness” of the Catholic Church, or, as it is more commonly put, of the doctrine that “out of the Catholic Church there is no salvation,” Mr. Mallock thus writes:
“As to the exclusiveness of the Catholic Church, it must be of course confessed that much perplexity is caused by any view of the world which obliges us to think of the most saving truths, and the most precious helps to a right life, being confined to a minority of the human race. But, supposing we attach to a knowledge of the truth any real importance, let us hold the supreme truths of life to be what we may, until the whole human race are unanimous about them we shall have to regard a part, probably through no fault of their own, as condemned to disastrous error. But of all creeds Catholicism is the one that does most to alleviate this perplexity. Of all religious bodies the Roman Church has the largest hope and charity for those outside her own pale. She condemns men, not for not accepting her teaching, but only for rejecting it; and they cannot reject it until they know it, what it is—know its inner spirit as well as its outward forms and formulas. Such a knowledge, in the opinion of many Catholics, it may be a very hard thing to convey to some men. Prejudices for which they themselves are not responsible may have blinded their eyes; and if they have been blind they will not have had sin. They will be able to plead invincible ignorance; and the judgments the church pronounces are not against those who have not known, but against those only who have known and hated. Nor is it too much to say that a zealous Catholic can afford to harbor more hope for an infidel than a zealous Protestant can afford to harbor for a Catholic.”
And now comes the final question, What is to be the future of faith? As we regard the matter, the answer to that, humanly speaking, rests mainly with those who have the faith. Faith is a sacred deposit, to be used, spread, and propagated over the world; to lead men to a right manner of living, to the true knowledge of God, and up to God. Thus the future of faith is in the hands of the faithful. Faith has two antagonists: the devil and, in a sense, man’s free-will. Of course modern thought scornfully dismisses the first antagonist as a myth. We cannot follow modern thought in this; we have a very profound belief in the existence of an ever-active and intelligent spirit of evil, who can and does tempt man into revolt against God, and who finds his readiest instrument, where he ought to find his chief resistance, in that highest prerogative of freedom which God confers on man. We take, then, first the devil, and, in a secondary sense, man’s free-will as the two great antagonists to faith. That is to say, if man will rebel, if he will not accept the faith, there is no power to hinder his rebellion.
And here we leave the devil aside and turn only to man. The future of faith is for him to say. What will he do with it? Why does he not accept it? Why should his free-will reject it, if it is good and approves itself so strongly to human intelligence, and if, moreover, God and all heaven are for ever standing on its side? There was at one time a united faith in Christendom; why was it ever broken?
Of course we can lay a great deal on the back of the devil and on the perversity of the human will. But it may be as well to remember also that those who have the faith may prove false to their trust. St. James tells us that even the devils believe and tremble. And so a man may possess the letter of the faith in full with very little of its spirit. A man 429may know St. Thomas from cover to cover, and assent to all his propositions, yet lead a bad life. Faith without works is dead. Christians must show forth in their lives whose disciples they are. If their lives are good; if the lives of a large body of believers are good; if they are chaste, charitable, honest in word and deed, and if such be the normal condition of their lives, men will not have far to go to look for faith. Virtue is the great preacher and converter. Even natural virtue—courage, sobriety, manliness, self-restraint—wins universal admiration. Supernatural virtue proclaims its godhead.
If the world is to be converted to faith, it will only be converted by the good lives and works of the faithful. The human intellect may carp at intellectual difficulties, but the human heart is overcome by goodness, by charity, by chastity. Faith is now what it always was; men are as they always were. But from a faithless and corrupt generation the inheritance is taken away. Thus the Jews lost it, thus Christian nations lose it. Had there been no corruption among the faithful there would have been no Protestant Reformation. Had there been no corruption in France, had the leaders of the people been true to the faith that was in them, infidelity would never have made such fearful havoc in a land of saints. And so with Germany, England, Scotland, Austria, Italy, and the other nations; when we examine closely we shall find that the revolt had its origin less in pride of intellect than in the concupiscence of the flesh and the pride of life. Intellectual assent to God’s teaching is not enough to lead a man to heaven. There must be a corresponding moral assent in his life. Why did Ireland, the weakest of the nations, not lose the faith? She was decimated, starved, made ignorant, brutalized as far as inhuman legislation can go to brutalize man, but she never lost the faith. Why? Because her sons and her daughters, whatever they may have known or not known of theology, of science, of philosophy, of literature, lived the faith, kept it stored up in their hearts, died for it, bequeathed it as a sacred legacy—their only legacy—to their children. Ah! it is on this that the future of faith hangs more than on intellectual discussion, articles in magazines, or theological writings. Shall we to-day doubt or hesitate about the future of faith—we the members of a church that numbers its millions by the hundred thousand? Are not we the children of Peter, of Paul, of Christ himself? Have not we the deposit that he confided to the twelve? Did they hesitate to face a world from which faith was almost blotted out, a world steeped in iniquity? They went out—twelve men; they preached Jesus, and him crucified; they lived what they preached, they suffered for what they preached, and, when nothing more was left for them to do, they died for it. We are not called upon to die for it to-day. The church is established. Its temples cover the world. Its children are in every land. From the rising of the sun to the going down thereof the living Sacrifice of Christ’s redeeming body and blood is daily offered up to God from the world and for the world. Can we tremble for the future of faith?
Of course sin and schism and infidelity will exist in the world till the end; but great multitudes may be saved and brought back if only the faithful are true. One great opposing element to the advance of faith is dissolving before our eyes—Protestantism. 430Shall all the children of Protestants perish and be given over to infidelity? Are there no earnest and well-inclined minds among them, no good people? There are multitudes of such, who are wavering and in doubt and sore perplexity because such support even as they had is slipping from under them, and beneath they see nothing but a blank and awful abyss. We do not anticipate that they will come back to us in multitudes. We scarcely look for that general “craving amongst men for the certainty, the guidance, and the consolation that the Catholic Church alone offers them,” as Mr. Mallock puts it. We do not rely upon “such an outburst of feeling”; and yet even that might come. Sensim sine sensu will the wanderers come back. What we Catholics have to consider is our duty in the matter. We can indeed hasten that coming. If we would do so effectually we must be brothers to them in charity, examples to them in our lives, above them in intelligence as in that faith which is the highest intelligence.
Elements of Ecclesiastical Law. By Rev. S. B. Smith, D.D. Second edition, revised and enlarged. Benziger Bros., New York.
We are glad to see that the Rev. Dr. Smith has been obliged to issue a second edition of his Elements of Ecclesiastical Law so soon after his first edition. This is an evidence that his book was a desideratum in our country. Though considered as a missionary country and under the direction of the Propaganda, yet, owing to the progress which the church has made here during the last twenty-five years, we have almost all the qualifications for being put on the same regular footing as the oldest churches of Europe. At all events it cannot be denied that we are steadily and swiftly approaching that stage. Very soon the church in this country will assume the regular canonical status of the churches on the Continent of Europe. The necessity, therefore, is apparent of studying the common legislation of the church universal, in order to assimilate ourselves to the spirit and, as far as possible, to the letter of that legislation, and to apply its general principles to the particular conditions, wants, and requirements of our country. This has been Dr. Smith’s aim in the Elements he has published. He gives, in the first place, an idea of law and jus in general, and in particular of canon law with its divisions. Next he inquires into the sources of canon law—which are the Scriptures, tradition, apostolic enactments, decrees of the Roman pontiffs and of the councils, œcumenical, national, provincial, and diocesan, the Roman congregations and customs—along with a history of canon law in the Latin church, and especially a history of canon law in our country. This occupies the whole of the first part. In the second part our author treats of jurisdiction in general as vested in ecclesiastical persons, of the different kinds of jurisdiction, of the manner of acquiring it in general and in particular, of the manner of resigning and losing jurisdiction, and of the right and duties of such as are vested with ecclesiastical jurisdiction; hence in the third part he speaks in particular of the Sovereign Pontiff, his election, primacy, and other prerogatives, of cardinals and of the Roman congregations, of legates, nuncios, of patriarchs, primates, metropolitan bishops, auxiliary bishops, coadjutor-bishops, vicars-general, deans and pastors, etc., of the rights, privileges, and duties of all these respective dignitaries.
It might be said against this book that all these things are treated in every elementary treatise on canon law. Of course 431the author of the book before us does not claim to discuss any matter which has not found its place already in the canonical legislation of the church. But that does not make Dr. Smith’s book less valuable nor its author less worthy of praise for having rendered a great service to the church in this country. In the first place, he has put together in a comparatively small volume and at great labor what would only be found scattered in many books. In the second place, he has given us his Elements in the English language, so that every one, even those who are not familiar with the Latin tongue, can acquire a fair knowledge of the church’s legislation.
Thirdly, and above all, he has taken great pains to give us the particular legislation of our country as derived from the first and second Plenary Councils of Baltimore, of both of which he has fairly interpreted the spirit and the aim. At the first glance, and upon a superficial perusal of their enactments, it would seem that the whole tendency of these two councils was a centralization of power as vested in the hierarchy—as, for instance, the power of governing without consulting the chapter or the advisers of the bishop; the power of having seminaries regulated altogether by the bishop without the three canonical committees of the clergy, one to look after the spiritual welfare, the other two after the temporal interests, of seminaries; the power of appointing priests to parishes without the concursus, or competitive examination; the power of moving priests from parishes, and many other instances, would seem to indicate a tendency of centralizing all power in the hierarchy. Yet the spirit of the two Plenary Councils of Baltimore was far from intending any such thing, as is evident by other enactments, and by the desire which the fathers of the council frequently express of conforming themselves as far as possible to the general legislation of the church, and by the regret which they manifest that, owing to the particular circumstances of our country, they are unable to adopt the general canon law of the church in many things. Dr. Smith’s book clearly puts forward this spirit of our two plenary councils, and the enactments which the fathers made in order to put a just and fair limit to their power, as in the question of removing pastors; in which case the last Plenary Council of Baltimore enacted that no bishop should remove a pastor without a proper cause.
In questions which these two councils left undecided our author, with all proper respect, gives a decision more consonant with the general canon law of the church and with the dictates of natural jus, thus conforming himself to the spirit of the two councils.
How far it would be desirable to adopt the common canonical law in this country, or whether the time has fully arrived for doing so, the author very properly leaves for the decision of the hierarchy and the Holy See. We do not deem it inconsistent with the respect we owe to our American prelates in coinciding with the desire expressed by the Council of Baltimore that some few things pertaining to the common canonical law of the church might be carried out; for instance, the exacting of a concursus for parishes. Our bishops could require a concursus at least for the larger parishes, and abstain from appointing any one to such parishes except one of those who have received a sufficient number of points required for approbation. This would secure always for the larger parishes at least an occupant sufficiently instructed in moral as well as parenetic theology. It would also be a great inducement for the younger clergy to cultivate these sciences, and not to abandon them as soon as they are out of the seminary. Our bishops would attain these great beneficial results without losing their perfect right and freedom of appointment, as they would not be bound to give the parish to the best in learning, but to the best all things considered, learning as well as probity, prudence, and ability in looking after the temporal welfare of the church; as, indeed, they would not be bound to give it to the best at all, but only to one of the approved.
With reference to other things our opinion would be to let things remain as they are; because the common canonical law as it stands only obtains in a very few parts of Europe, and we may say that the church legislation, owing to the circumstances of the times, is in a transition state. When the Vatican Council opens again—and we hope our Holy Father Pope Leo XIII. may soon see fit to reopen it—many changes may take place in the legislation of the church. It will be time enough then for 432the American Church to adopt such legislation as will be conformable with the common law of the church.
Dr. Smith deserves high praise for his work, and our seminarians and clergy would do well to study his book as eminently useful and important, giving us quite an accurate idea of the common canonical law and of the particular legislation of the American Church.
The Book of Psalms. Translated from the Latin Vulgate, etc. London: Burns & Oates. 1878. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
This small and neat edition of the Psalms is most welcome. With all respect we apply to it the words of an old English Catholic poet, Crashaw:
Cardinal Manning has written the preface, and the Psalms are enriched throughout with explanatory notes as the church requires for the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue.
The Psalter of David was among all classes of Christians, from the beginning, the favorite expression both of private and public devotions. The apostles themselves (Ephes. v. 19, Coloss. iii. 16) instructed the faithful in the use of these inspired canticles, and we learn from various passages in the writings of Tertullian, Augustine, Jerome, and Ven. Bede particularly, how familiar the early Christians must have been with them until the eighth century, when public or liturgical psalmody was left to the clergy exclusively. We hope that a taste for the reading of the Sacred Scriptures, and the devotional use of the Psalms especially, will increase—we had almost said will revive—among the laity.
Books for Summer Reading.
The Catholic Publication Society Company has just published quite a batch of very seasonable and interesting books. For those looking for summer reading nothing better could possibly be recommended than the graphic sketches of Italian life and manners, of scenery and monuments of faith and history, embodied in the charming Six Sunny Months, which ran as a serial in this magazine. Its gifted author, the writer of the House of Yorke, Grapes and Thorns, etc., needs no introduction to our readers. A companion volume to this is the Letters of a Young Irishwoman to her Sister, which excited so much interest and no little controversy while appearing in these pages. The pictures of French home-life and scenery, of French and Irish character, of thrilling contemporary events, given in these letters are to our thinking unsurpassed in unaffected grace and naïve simplicity, while the growing sadness of the end lifts what was intended to be the unpublished narrative of unassuming everyday existence to the heights of tragic pathos. Sir Thomas More carries us back into other days and weaves history into a powerful romance. The Trowel and the Cross, from the strong pen of Conrad von Bolanden, gives us the German social and political life of the day with a force and a truth and a deep philosophical insight that very few pens can command. Bolanden has Disraeli’s art of throwing the living problems of the day in social and political matters into interesting stories, with the saving gift, that Disraeli has not, of truth and right. Of lighter calibre, yet thoroughly charming and well adapted to while away the lazy summer hours, are Assunta Howard and Other Stories, Alba’s Dream (by the author of Are You My Wife?) and Other Stories, Stray Leaves from a Passing Life and Other Stories. Nothing better, in the way of light literature, than any or all of these books issues from the press, and nothing better can be done by Catholics who read at all than to read their own literature and support the efforts of those who devote their gifts exclusively to the Catholic cause.
Pious books especially adapted for this season are the Hand-book of Instructions and Devotions for the Children of Mary (translated from the French by Rev. J. P. O’Connell, D.D.), The Love of Jesus to Penitents (by Cardinal Manning), and The Young Girl’s Month of June (a companion to the Month of May, noticed last month, and translated by Miss MacMahon).
During the last two months our daily journals have contained reports of the doings and the threatenings of numerous mysterious associations in our Western cities. From these reports it is clear that attempts were being made to organize and arm the disaffected against the present constitution of society, and that the purpose of these proposed assaults was utterly destructive, and not at all constructive; everything as it exists was to be swept away, but there was no agreement as to what should take the place of the destroyed system. To the tail of the serpent there seemed to be no head. Each of the leaders in the agitation, when personally questioned by the agents of the daily press, spoke for himself, with more or less obscurity of meaning, but with no recognition or mention of a general organization or a directing head. In St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and a score of other cities companies of men are meeting secretly night after night, and are drilling to accustom themselves to the use of arms; when they are not drilling they are listening to speeches in which most inflammatory language is used: in this place a certain list of “demands” is formulated; in another these so-called reforms are scouted as merely palliative in their nature and as unworthy of consideration. But amid this confusion it was seen clearly that the inspiration of the agitation came from German sources, and that the men engaged in fanning the flame of the inchoate conflagration were chiefly of German birth. Here we resist a temptation to diverge into an examination of the causes of the origin and growth of this revolutionary agitation in the United States—a most fecund and interesting theme. But just at this time the life of the Emperor of Germany is attempted by one of his own subjects; and it is made to appear that the would-be assassin made the criminal attempt in the interest of the socialistic agitation in Germany. Each branch of the German socialists, of course, condemns and disowns him; he appears to have been initiated into the secrets of the councils of 434many of these associations; he certainly was thoroughly impregnated with the theories of the German socialistic philosophers of the most advanced schools. These theories are destructive and not constructive; the man Hoedel had probably convinced himself that it was time to begin this work of destruction, and that it would be well to commence at the root of the tree. So he struck at the emperor—happily with a bad aim.
Here, then, we have a striking illustration of the fruition of German socialism at the very time when we see its initial workings in our own country. This flower of the tree—the man Hoedel—may, however, be said to be a premature and unnatural product of the plant. The educated classes in Germany, we believe, will not think so. If they are blind to the natural tendency of the socialistic theories of their own philosophers, it is not for lack of plain warnings and demonstrations from authorities whom they are accustomed to respect. The anxiety of the government regarding the spread of revolutionary and subversive opinions has long been well known. It is only a short time ago that a thorough review of German socialism was published in the Deutsche Rundschau—the “German Contemporary Review”—a monthly magazine of high standing, printed at Berlin. This review extended through two numbers of the magazine, and at once attracted attention by the thoroughness and acumen with which the subject was treated. Its author is Dr. Ludwig Bamberger, a gentleman whose own history is curious. Born in Mayence, in 1822, he studied for the law at Giesen, Heidelberg, and Göttingen, and in 1848-49 he edited the Mainzer Zeitung. Carried away by the revolutionary excitement of that period, he took part in the insurrection in the Rheinphalz, and was elected to the Frankfort Parliament. Instead of taking his seat, he wisely went into Switzerland and thence to London, where he devoted himself to the study and practice of banking. In 1851 he founded a banking-house in Rotterdam, and two years afterwards found himself at the head of a large financial institution in Paris, which he conducted with great success for thirteen years. He has written several works of importance; his last production, a volume published in German and in French at Paris, in 1869, on Count Bismarck, was not the least notable of his books. This is the author whose dissertation upon German socialism has appeared so opportunely. It is worthy of the most serious attention, and we give the substance of it in the following pages. Dr. Bamberger is not a Catholic. He is decidedly anti-Catholic, as will be seen, and as we allow him to appear; he discusses his subject without the slightest aid from the light which true reason, aided by religion, would throw upon it. But we shall take him on his own ground, and, without attempting to translate him fully, follow with fidelity his line of thought.
The people of Germany, he says, are to-day waging as wordy a war as did the nobility of France a century ago. The men who best know this are those who for a generation have devoted themselves to fomenting the war of those who have nothing against those who possess everything, and who are 435to-day the leaders of the proletariat. The contrast between the theories and the practice of these men is ludicrous. A small number of gifted, learned, diligent men, they dwell in peace and luxury; they enjoy life like connoisseurs; from these secure and pleasant ports they sail forth to attack the economy by which the machinery of society is kept in motion. In this amusement there seems to be a species of demoniacal pleasure. If they were sincere, the contrast between their habits and their professed aims would be ludicrous. The equalization they call for can only be realized by placing an equal proportion of the means necessary for gaining a livelihood within the reach of all. Every ownership exceeding this minimum would be divided to increase the necessary quota.
Is it objected that this is looking at the question from the darkest side? It is true that great movements should not be measured by those nearest to them. But events can never be separated from those who bring them about. Moreover, we are not now concerned with history but with to-day. In the demonstration of philosophical principles it may be asked whether the teacher is a philosopher in his own life; this curiosity is still less indiscreet when the issue is one of life and death.
The originators of German socialism—Lassalle and his eulogist, Herwegh—were luxurious men of the world, for whose desires the voluptuous apparatus of modern cities alone sufficed. Their successors are like unto them. To meet them is to scoff at the idea that these men should have described, as participants, the grim battle for existence fought by the common people. An ingenious psychological explanation is offered for them. The conjunction of bodily comfort with intellectual distinction which they enjoy causes them to shudder at the thought of a life hard, painful, and colorless. Their sympathy to this extent may be genuine; but so much the greater is the hypocrisy of their battle-cry for a universal economy whose cardinal principle shall be the equal abnegation of all.
These men are not Catilinical but Herostratic. We can have some sympathy with the man who, thrown out of his path, angry with the whole world on account of his evil fortune, seeks for a new order of things. But these leaders, from Marx to Bakumin, from the caustic diatribe of the poisoned pen to the torch steeped in petroleum, exclaim: “For the world as it is we care not! If we can proclaim our contempt for it by destroying it, let it perish!” This is the cry that has been growing louder for thirty years—from the date of the appearance of the first socialistic articles in the Cologne Zeitung to the present moment.
The public of to-day know the high-priests of socialism only from the thick books in which their solemn declarations are spread out, and from the interpretations of these given at working-men’s congresses. The personal motives from which the whole movement sprang are forgotten. Carl Marx, when he gazes over from his London cottage upon the new German Empire, can exclaim with pride that after thirty years his seed has brought forth abundantly. Whoever wishes to see this sower more closely and in his true character need only read Carl Vogt’s pamphlet, Life of Fugitives in London. 436Here are the revelations not of an opponent but an adherent of the cause and an admirer of Marx, but a disillusionized admirer. He sees that the meanest of tricks were practised by Marx and his entourage in the meanest manner; and that the desire for power is as strong among these levellers as it is in the court of a king. Here, for instance, are extracts from Carl Vogt’s pamphlet:
“In the end it is all the same whether this contemptible Europe falls—an event that must presently occur without the revolution. They (Carl Marx and his Janissaries) care nothing for the German common people. They desire only to remain eternally in the opposition, without which the revolution would go to sleep.... We drank first porter, then claret, then red Bordeaux, then champagne. After the red wine Marx was quite drunk. This was very desirable, for he became more open-hearted. I heard much that otherwise would have been concealed. But he kept up the conversation to the end; he impressed me as a man of singular mental superiority and of remarkable personality. Had he as much heart as mind, as much love as hatred, I would go through the fire for him. I am sorry for our cause that he does not possess a noble heart. His ambition has eaten up all the good qualities in him. He laughs over the fools who repeat his proletariat catechism, as well as over communists à la Willich or the bourgeoisie. He cares only for the aristocrats, purely and consciously so. To drive them from power he employs a force that he finds only in the proletariat, and for that reason has adapted his system to it.”
So much for Marx. The true portraiture of Lassalle would be as amusing. But the contrast between the living and the preaching, between the private mode of thought and the public utterances of the German upper and middle classes generally, is equally observable. And in this respect they remind one of the marquises and viscounts of the eighteenth century. They do not dance on the volcano, but gather the fuel for the pile on which they themselves are to be consumed; and the cry Sancta simplicitas! resounds, not sympathetically from the mouth of the victim, but mockingly from the throat of the executioner. The fact that the internationalists, far away from German shores, send mandates from beneath the shelter of their English homes for the destruction of our civil comity, would give us little cause for alarm, if men unwillingly united, and doubly important by their positions and their number, were not seeking to accomplish this work within our own walls. The fruits of their activity are observable everywhere.
Many will answer: In these symptoms appears the development of a healthy process, similar to the unconscious self-dissolution of the French aristocracy which brought about the revolution and thus conferred the greatest benefit upon posterity. So it is now the duty of the people—“the third class”—to make room for its legitimate successor, “the fourth class.” Whether it was fortunate for the world that the French Revolution was accomplished we shall not say. There is, however, not a single analogous characteristic between the epoch of that revolution and the present time.
One of the most absurd weaknesses of our time is that it hurries on with formulas of a dialectic development, and transforms them into the business of life before they are properly digested. What is more ludicrous than the introduction of parliamentary systems into countries semi-barbarous? The attempt to cure Russia, Turkey, Roumania, and Egypt with 437parliamentary constitutions reminds us of the peasant who, when the doctor has prescribed a medicine for him, employs the same for his wife and child in every disease. He falls into the same error who fancies that the German people have arrived at that stage of their development when, like the French nobility of the eighteenth century, they should betake themselves with a good grace out of the world. The very contrary is the case. Never have extremes met more closely than in the common attack of reaction and socialism against the German people. While the temperate socialistic ideal has for its end the revival of the state of society during the middle ages, the internationalists aim at the dissolution of all that has been gained since our ancestors were barbarians. There is a lower depth yet, for a school exists which, going only a step farther, calls itself “anarchist.”[92]
The support given the socialists by the agrarians and the ultramontanes is more than an ordinary political coalition. Their sympathy reposes on inward concurrence; and for Germany it is especially dangerous, because their attacks are directed against a people neither matured nor secured. Germany is almost wholly wanting in everything needful for the formation of a united, intelligent, and independent body politic. The strong material groundwork is yet wanting. The complaints made against our industrial products are not groundless. Nor can they be ascribed to the passing influence of commercial folly which characterized the period immediately following the war. We have to do with evils as old as the century. Improvement of workmanship, increase of general prosperity, and elevation of political prestige bear the closest relationship to each other. The intoxication of victory led to a foolish application of the booty extorted from France. Those who undertook the solution of this stupendous financial problem approached it with too small a measure of its importance. But everywhere we meet with the same technical inadequacy in Germany. Earnest work alone in domestic as well as public economy can lead us to the firm establishment of a healthy, civilized state. Only fools can propose to dispense with the forms requisite for the collection of strength which has made possible the stage of culture we now are in, and only sophists can attempt to establish this power without capital, and capital without property. But instead of allowing the German people to attain its development, the inimical elements are now all pouncing upon it, and telling it that it has outlived itself and is ready for dissolution.
In England, France, and Italy there is an aristocracy with strong self-respect and conservative principles—an erudite community, filled with the quiet consciousness of its intellectual superiority. But these classes do not separate the task of their self-preservation from that of the preservation of the people. There he who seeks to bring forward particular ideas endeavors to carry them into the great community of the people.
There are eccentric persons everywhere; but only in Germany exist entire groups of aristocratic, learned, and religious men who 438make war upon the people their business. Aristocrats who take the field against capital, professors who teach that the road to wealth leads to prison, bishops who conspire with demagogues, are to be found only in Germany. First one and then another of these groups wish to make experimentum in anima vili with the people. Its pains give them no care—nay, in some cases secret joy; all are deluded by the idea that they can abuse it without imperilling their own safety.... The nation, as a whole, does not feel responsible for its own support. It still believes that the supreme power, reposing upon itself, would take care to preserve order. For this reason it does not permit any interference with attacks against itself,[93] and sometimes takes pleasure in joining in the sport.
The ruling class is scarcely wiser. Its nerves are somewhat more susceptible; but as for a true insight into the state of affairs it is as much in the dark as the governed. It suspects, in small degree, the extreme danger that threatens, but it is at sea concerning the origin and nature of the danger. If alarmed by a fresh incident, it thinks that more stringent laws are all that is needed,[94] or the revival of a buried belief.
It is an error to measure Germany by English or French ideas. Here immature conditions have penetrated over-ripe ideals. The lesson of the war of classes has, with us, fallen on a soil which for pernicious growth is better adapted than that of any country in the world, Russia excepted. The conjunction of our strongly-developed intellectual life with our crude and immature political and social systems has generated an atmosphere in which the poisoned germs of these seeds yielded fruit with unparalleled rapidity and plenty.
Germany has become the special field of this war of classes, because she is a country divided into many classes. Here every individual holds to his own claims or promulgates new ones; and no one feels himself united with the whole. No group hesitates to assail the foundations of society, if anything dissatisfies them. Our class strifes are kindled and fomented from all sides—from above as well as from below. No class knows for whom it is really working. Only the professional agitators know it; these are careful not to divulge the secret, and strive to make it appear that they do not suspect the connection between their conscious conspiracy and the unconscious conspiracies of all the other parties. They know that their principal strength lies in this quiet coalition.
In this unconscious raving against ourselves lies our chief danger. This assertion applies not only to the bourgeoisie but to all classes up to the highest. All seem to be living in blessed ignorance of the real drift of affairs. Their efforts are always futile; they always take hold of their subject at the wrong end. Let us relate a parliamentary incident. The question of the best method of opposing the socialistic movement was recently debated in the Reichstag.[95] A decree forbidding attacks in the press upon the family, property, 439and religion was introduced. The government attached the greatest importance to the passage of this decree. It was to be the bulwark of existing institutions. The Prussian Minister of the Interior, Count von Eulenburg, made his first appearance in the Reichstag to advocate this measure. The minister betrayed his fear that the Parliament would not consent to increase the restrictions upon the press by reason of the ignorance of members concerning the intrigues and dogmas of the social democrats. His lively and exhaustive delineation of these dangers bore the stamp of a work ordered for the purpose by the department to which he belonged, which had supplied him with the necessary data for the instruction of the blind or unsuspecting parliamentarians. So far all was well. But when members arose, and, without contesting the reality of the danger, reminded the minister that the enemy in his own camp was the most dangerous; that the pet decree would find no favor with these arch-conspirators; that it would merely divert the danger from its least perilous direction; in short, that socialism had penetrated and found a home in conservative and governmental circles—then it became evident that “the world was nailed up before the eyes of the government.” They had no suspicion of what was really going on around them; the minister had no real knowledge of what he wished to explain. He felt harshly assailed, and disappeared; on the Right of the chamber there was confusion; as a closing scene Monfang and Bebel swore with touching unanimity that they did not know each other. Is anyone surprised to find the most select audience in Germany so unprepared, so ignorant of the real state of affairs? It is always a mistake to presuppose too much wisdom. A little keener scent of the secret forces that serve the socialistic propaganda has been gained by Prince Bismarck; but this is due to the fact that the intrigues directed against his person did not hesitate to employ socialistic partisans and catch-words. In this way the existence of this unnatural combination was forced upon his notice. Under other circumstances it was not to be expected of him that he should trouble himself about socialism. His method is to employ every element of power to his advantage according to circumstances, and to spare every one that does not thrust itself with hostile intent across his path.
“It is fortunate for us that a few social democrats have taken service in the camp of the ultramontanes and junkers, and thereby called attention to the consanguinity of their beautiful souls.”[96]
Germany is the only great country in which exists a social-democratic party—using the word party in the sense of a compact political union which promulgates as its official platform the determination to secure by whatever means domination over the state and society. Even in the much-agitated kingdom of Denmark socialism has not yet attained parliamentary recognition. In England the mass of laborers organized for common purposes is disproportionately larger than in Germany, and all politicians there discuss the problems 440proposed by the workmen. The programme of a state reposing on a communistic groundwork, built upon the ruins of the present system, there is advocated but by few. With us this is the only solution sought by the entire social democracy; of late it has become the official profession of faith of the whole body.
In England the dissension is confined to the employer and the employed. The one tries to secure the best terms from the other. Political objects confine themselves within limits which, compared with the professed aims of the German social democrats, are very narrow. Extension of the suffrage, limitation of the labor of women and children, free education—these are demands which do not imperil the foundations of society.
In France the reaction from the Commune has swept away all tangible remains of the social-democratic party. France has fought against communism in the streets. No peaceful overtures have been made to socialism, as in Germany. With us it is recognized as a political organization representing a particular line of thought. This constitutes its great strength, and all that strengthens it weakens us. In Germany almost all the reactionary parties strive to obtain the support of the social democrats. The Protestant hypocrite, the Catholic clergy, the combination of protectionists and agrarians, offer their hands to the social democrats in solemn pledges of brotherhood.[97] Thiers, in his political will, bequeathed the Commune to us. France, he said, has overcome this misery; in her place Germany must carry the cross. The old man knew what he was talking about. When with Bismarck at Versailles he said his greatest fear was of the coquins of Paris. After him came Jules Favre, who opposed the disarming of the national guard, and sublimely exclaimed: “There is no mob in Paris!” We have our Favres, who pretend to be in love with all the world. Woe unto us if we should be placed on trial! The elevation of the social democracy to a recognized power dates from the creation of the German Empire. The causes were many; the decisive one was universal suffrage. This is made the scape-goat of many sins—most unjustly. The harm it carries in its train does not lie in the fact that it permits the expression of the opinions of all classes. On the contrary, this is a gain. It has only worked badly because it appeared as a new, powerful incentive to greater activity to those into whose heads confused notions are sought to be instilled. While the new elective law brought to its support a part of the population which had until then not possessed the right of suffrage, it compelled those desirous of gain to devote themselves mainly to this fresh ground.
To beget dissatisfaction, vague desires, and unlimited hopes was very easy here. Those who expected to gain the advantage of 441leadership from it determined quickly to take possession of this inviting land.
The regular organization of the socialistic party dates only from 1867. A careful dissemination of ideas had first been accomplished. The new constituencies had been imbued with the notions of the propaganda, and the way to obtain their votes was to advocate these notions. “If you wish to be elected to the Reichstag, apply yourself with all energy to the new voters,” was the mot d’ordre. The sentiment of hatred against property-owners, and hunger for the distribution of estates, now became merchantable commodities. Thus the election of a new German Reichstag offered a premium for the propagation of socialistic ideas. The leaders of the combination took immediate advantage of this. The necessary freedom accompanying the election cleared the road of a mass of police and legal obstacles. The rostrum of the Reichstag is of immense use. Those elected attain greater respect both in and outside their party. We should never have heard of the most renowned socialists—of Bebel or Liebknecht, of Most or Hasselmann—if a nomination to the Reichstag had not put them in a position of importance. Besides, the leaders learn much in Parliament, and take advantage of the opportunities given them. There is, for instance, no doubt that the introduction of free passage by railroads for the benefit of members of the Reichstag will be successfully employed for the dissemination of socialistic teachings, and perhaps gain new members of like tendencies. Per diems (Tagegelder) would of course prove even more valuable. The socialistic organization at present pays each of its representatives nine marks per day during his stay in Berlin. If they were paid by the state the saving to the socialistic treasury would be thirty thousand marks; and this increase of the sinews of war would result, at the next election, in new accessions of strength.
There are only a dozen socialists in the Reichstag, but they rely upon the support given by the divisions of the other parties; and this is a peculiarity which runs through our whole national character. Every person pursues his own private and local ends, and there is no united feeling. It is for this reason that the socialists and ultramontanes make such rapid headway. Through the narrow-minded system of electing men to the Reichstag as a reward for local services, men of great talent are often neglected. The Reichstag has three hundred and ninety-seven members, among them twelve socialists. Deducting the latter, there are altogether only seven districts which are represented by deputies who are not natives of the places from which they were returned.
But how is this picture changed as soon as we look upon the social democrats! Here national unity is the rule. Of the twelve elected, eight are without any local relation to their districts. Even with the other four birth, representation, and residence do not go hand-in-hand. Bebel, though residing in Saxony, is a native of Rhenish Prussia; Fritzsche is a native of Saxony, but lives in Berlin; Motteler lives in Saxony, but is a native of the Palatinate. (These three were elected in Saxony.) The only one who falls within the general rule is Rittinghausen, who represents Solingen.
442The kingdom of Saxony, the hot-bed of particularism, is the rendezvous of the whole German social democracy. Auer, Kapell, Bracke, Liebknecht, Most, and Demmler were returned from that kingdom. The same is true of Schleswig-Holstein; and if it were an independent duchy instead of a Prussian province, it would probably have sent three social democrats into the Reichstag.
The German people have not attained a degree of development sufficient to permit of their coping successfully with the political and social problems spread before them. Meanwhile socialism is widening its sway. Whither it tends we shall proceed to show.
In ten years the German social-democratic party has sprung into importance. In the American Congress no representative of the social democracy is yet seated. In the French Assembly no member would subscribe to the confession of faith of the German socialists. In the English House of Commons there are two working-class members—Burt and Macdonald—but neither have ever thought of the abolition of private industry, the organization of the proletariat with state capital, or the destruction of private property. In Denmark no socialist has yet gained an entrance into Parliament. The German nation alone is represented by men who have declared war against our whole political and social economy. There are twelve of them. Ever since a German Reichstag has existed they have increased. In 1867 two of them entered the constituent Reichstag; in 1868 five entered the North German Reichstag; in 1871 two entered the first German Reichstag; in 1874 nine entered the second German Reichstag; in 1877 twelve entered the present Parliament. To understand these figures it must be noticed that South Germany was without influence in this regular increase, for the districts beyond the line of the Main have not as yet returned one social democrat; the increase occurred wholly on the old ground. The figures speak still more convincingly when we go from the elected to the electors. In the year 1874 only 350,000 votes were cast in favor of the social democracy; in the year 1877 they received 485,000—an increase of well-nigh forty per cent. The whole number of electors who cast valid votes in 1877 was 5,535,000. Of this total 3,600,000 votes were cast for the successful candidates. The last number divided by 397 (the number of members) gives us the average of the number of voters which go to a representative, 9,000. The same process applied to the twelve social-democratic representatives, and the 111,000 votes which are united upon them, makes the proportion remain the same: each one elected represents 9,200 votes.
A different picture is presented if we regard the votes lost by scattering. The 3,600,000 successful voters are in the ratio of 67 per cent. of the total number of voters. This repeats itself if we apply the investigation to the several parties. The total of votes for the national-liberal party was 1,594,000. The number of votes represented in the Reichstag of this persuasion is 1,082,000—that is, a little more than 67 per cent. of those 1,594,000. By comparing with this the corresponding proportion between the 443number of social-democratic votes and the number which obtained representation, we find that this party has not attained to an equal degree of concentration in its elective elements. Against 485,000 votes cast we find here only 111,000 at the back of successful deputies—i.e., only 23 per cent. of the voters have effected representation. If the general proportion had gained expression here, the number of social-democratic deputies would be thirty-two, or almost as many as the members of the German liberal party. Only for this reason, that 77 per cent. of these votes were scattered, whereas by the general rule only 33 per cent. are scattered, have we escaped the fate of giving the world, in tangible figures, an idea of the intensity of the disease which is threatening our nation. But if for the present we remain safe from such a humiliation, it is none the less true that our political thinking and feeling are already as strongly affected as these figures attest. There may not as yet be any immediate danger from the action of the Reichstag. But in the very fact which is as yet paralyzing the effectiveness of the socialistic elective power lies the greatest danger. For this scattering of votes is an omen of a distribution of advance posts throughout the whole empire, which, if particular circumstances favor it, will suddenly gain in strength, and, joining hands, can obtain control of the country. Had we introduced a method of minority representation into the elective law, the socialistic faction would already be on an equal footing with the other parties. If we had the French method, by which several deputies in large districts are elected on one list, we would, perhaps, already number two dozen social-democratic members in the Reichstag.
The socialistic party may justly boast that it is stronger than it appears to be by its representation in the Reichstag, and that it may reasonably hope for a speedy development of its parliamentary power. But even to-day it is strong. The twelve socialistic members may possibly hold the balance of power. A closer inspection of the election returns shows that nearly one-half of the voters in 1877 were hostile to the development of the German Empire on its present basis. Poles, Welfs, Swabian democrats, protesters from Alsace, social democrats, added to the ultramontanes who serve them as a firm nucleus, bring the sum of the combination up to 2,395,000 voters out of 5,535,000. An increase of but three or four hundred thousand votes would deliver the empire into the hands of its foes. Besides, circumstances favor the socialists. In large cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Breslau, Eberfeld, Bremen, and Lübeck a strong working-class element is easily concentrated. Seven of the twelve socialist members of the Reichstag were elected in Saxony. But wherever the local mind has had a definite and fixed idea socialism has made no progress. It is thus in the Catholic portions of Bavaria and in Alsace-Lorraine. In other quarters, where opinions are more divided, the Catholics form coalitions with the socialists. In France a large class of property-owners incline to Catholicism, because they believe that through it they can save the state and society. In Germany Catholicism throws itself into the arms of inimical elements, in order to strengthen itself.
The official reports of the annual congress of the socialists are 444highly instructive. The Protocols of the Socialistic Congresses are issued at Hamburg, “printed and published by the brotherhood’s book-printing establishment.” For twenty-five cents as much instruction may be gleaned from them as in the whole mass of socialistic literature. Until recently the socialists were divided into two factions, each represented by a journal which attacked the other violently. But in 1875 they settled their differences, and united in issuing a paper called Forwaerts, or “Progress.” This is the official organ; but besides it there are forty-one socialistic journals in Germany, one of them an illustrated paper, The New World; and fourteen industrial journals, more or less imbued with the spirit of socialism. Of these forty-one organs of the social democracy thirteen appear daily, thirteen tri-weekly, three bi-weekly, and eleven weekly. Twenty-five of them are printed in offices belonging to the brotherhood. Eighteen of these journals have had their birth within the last year. “The rapid augmentation of our press,” says the report of the last congress, “is enormous, not only in the number of journals but in the number of subscribers.”
Germany is the breeding-house for the representation and distribution of socialistic teachings in the rest of the world; it is the apostolic seat of the new faith, whence missionaries are sent to all lands, preaching in all tongues. Wherever in Europe or America a communistic congress or insurrection is to be noted, Germans are at its head, or exercise control. At the congresses of the International, held since 1866 in Geneva, the Hague, and Brussels, Germans have always taken the front seats. The English communists were represented in Geneva in 1873 by the tailor Eccarius, a German Swiss, with whom, in truth, the congress of English workmen which met at Sheffield in 1874 wished to have nothing to do.[98] Next to Eccarius, the Germans Johann, Philip, Becker, and Amandus were especially prominent at Geneva. At the Congress of the International at the Hague in 1872 Carl Marx presided in person. This German ascendency is seen also in America.
Here Dr. Bamberger enters into a long description of our railway strike last summer, tracing its origin to German influences. The beginning of all socialistic combinations in America, he says, can be traced to German origin. The “International Working Confederation” of 1867 was founded by German emissaries from Marx’s mother-lodge, and Chicago was its headquarters. The point is made that at the meeting in New York on the 25th of July last Germans were prominent; at a similar meeting in St. Louis, suppressed by the police, among the arrested leaders were Germans, one of whom on the 26th of July, when the mob for a moment seemed victorious, had sent this despatch to Leipzig: “St. Louis, a city of three hundred thousand souls, is in our power.”
In Switzerland, Dr. Bamberger goes on to say, the international element is strongest where the German influence is greatest—in Zurich. The intellectual head of the whole international propaganda is 445the German Carl Marx, whose first lieutenant is the German Friedrich Engels. Marx framed the foundation of the International. The congress of the sect at the Hague in 1872 was his work. Among the sixty-five members of that body twenty-five were Germans; New York and Zurich were there represented by Germans.
The French socialism which ruled the field from 1830 to 1850 has been laid aside and forgotten. But the German socialism of to-day has the French system for its foundation. To St. Simon and Fourier, to Cabet and Considérant, however, reference is no longer made.
Louis Blanc’s “organization of labor” has been scientifically, and even piously, absorbed into “systematic production.” Proudhon has long been branded as a “miserable bourgeois” while the most devout of German Protestants, Pastor Todt, does not hesitate to exclaim in his latest organ: “The war of competition (Concurrenzkampf) today is nothing but a system of expropriations, shrouded in illusions with regard to property” (Eigenthumsillusionen). “La propriété c’est le vol.” The pastor says the same thing, only in other words.
The sum total of the theories in all their gradations, from the formulating of the brutal war of classes to the most honey-toned appeal to the duties of men and Christians, to-day bears the predominating stamp of German invention. No country in the world can point to so extensive an existence of learned and unlearned literature in this province. Especially in the province of learned socialistic theories France and England stand far behind us. Socialism in Italy is confined to a small number of younger savants, who understand German, and acknowledge themselves pupils of our masters. The most prominent trait of the national character of German socialism is the trace of scientific coloring which is retained in the rudest revolutionary circles. Scientific epicures like Marx and Lassalle have written the gospels of the new brotherhood of working-men; professors and philosophically learned men like Schaeffle and Adolph Wagner, Rodbertus, Duehring, and Lange, have assorted them canonically; and even with the smell of powder and petroleum emitted by the congresses of socialists, composed mainly of working-men, is mingled something of the delicate perfume of quintessent abstraction. Herr Liebknecht, a man of learning, is the real spiritus rector of the whole brotherhood, and it was his energy which finally triumphed over the different sects of the party and consummated the difficult work of consolidation.
Perhaps there is no man in or out of Germany better versed in the literature and history of socialism than this vaunter of the praises of the Commune. Has not this something attractive besides so much that is repulsive? Is it not touching to hear that the same Herr Liebknecht who in the tribune of the Reichstag agitates the nerves of his colleagues to excess by his strongly-spiced speeches, honors their library continually by collections of interesting works from the province of his “science”? and that, according to competent evidence, the social-democratic deputies are not only the most industrious readers of this library, but distinguish themselves by a prompt return and respectful treatment of the books? We could even find a touching symptom in the comical appearance of the deputy 446and former book-binder, Most, who is vieing with Prof. Mommsen for the palm in the investigation of Roman history. As if there was nothing more important to do than to allow one’s self to be touched! In fact, this hobnobbing with science is resorted to for the purpose of misleading the noblest tendencies of the German character. Something further is to be noted here: nothing less than the organic connection between the best and the worst which is in us. Not for nothing has Marx furnished with a highly-learned scaffolding his international platform which appeals to “the proletarians of all lands.” Lassalle is prouder of nothing than that, after the appearance of his books on Herakleitos and The System of Acquired Rights, Humboldt and Boeckh should have counted him as their equal.
The militant social democracy well understand how to keep up this delusion. At their last congress it was proposed to issue in Berlin, bi-monthly, “a scientific review in an appropriate form.” The scientific contributors to the Forwaerts, the central organ of the sect, had overburdened it; if these had a journal to themselves the Forwaerts could devote more space to its work of agitation. One of the delegates, Herr Geib, said that by this step an alienation between science and the workmen would not be caused, as some feared; and to anticipate the review he recommended a half-monthly scientific supplement to the Forwaerts gratis. Another delegate said that “the more political life stepped into the foreground, the farther did the scientific side of life recede, unless official efforts were made to promote it. It was necessary that this should be cared for, in order to prevent the levelling of the party.” The proposition was adopted, and the scientific review, The Future, has appeared regularly since October last in the “appropriate form” of a red-covered magazine.
The commanders of the socialistic army are wise in thus enlisting scientific officers on their general staff. They gain by this, in literary circles, the position of “the best-favored nation.” In the vast number of publications lately issued on “the social question” we seldom meet one which, even if inspired with the utmost disfavor for the new dogma, does not approach it with respectful and ludicrous timidity. The social democracy has for its first article of faith open hostility to all other parties; their extinction is its aim. But almost all confutations, on the other hand, strike the key-note of a defender who is only pleading for milder conditions. By aid of the “scientific” coloring the social democracy has moved into a position to which every assailant makes an obeisance before firing. Through the anti-socialistic literature runs a tone of humble apology that seems to say: “Excuse us that we belong to the contemptible class of the bourgeoisie, and believe our promise of future reform.” As with the cause, so do we approach the individuals with uncovered head. All presentations of the life and teaching of Lassalle accept the Titan’s diploma which he has given himself. If unbelievers and half-believers do this, how natural that the social democracy has decreed him Godlike honors after his demise! If we, however, look with impartial eye into the biographic material which is available to us, we are struck by the characteristic 447trait of grotesque mockery overshadowing all. Were it not sinful to recount the names of Germany’s great men—those who still live as well as those who have left us—in one breath with the name of this talented agitator, we might be tempted to draw a parallel between the letters which we possess of the former and those which the Lassalle literature has brought to light. An instructive antithesis, forsooth: the simple, human self-sacrifice, thought, and feeling of truly great souls, and the hollow pretensions of a proletariat rescuer, who lifts his martyrdoms into the skies, in order to step down from them into perfumed boudoirs! This man writes to young women that he was born to wage a contest with the world, and in the same text explains to them that never had a woman resisted him, but he had never yet done homage; for him it was only to accept, not to give. How modest, in comparison with this, does the address sound with which Saint-Simon had himself awakened every morning: “Levez-vous, Monsieur le Comte, vous avez de grandes choses à faire.”
Fallacious as it might be to judge of the effective socialistic strength in time of war from the number of votes it controls in time of peace, it remains true that the growth of these numbers points to a change in the sentiments of the voters. There is something more at the disposal of the leaders than a mass accidentally thrown into their hands. We must guard against too trivial an appraisement of human appearances, especially in Germany, where thought enlarges its sway more than in any other land. Ideals, real or false, cannot become powerful with us without going through the earnest-thinking process of the nation. The socialistic leaders have fully recognized and acted on the principle that he who wishes to have an interest in. the future must first do his share for science. The German mind being thus constituted, we must, to explain the spread of socialism, find the fountains of its source. This is easy. The professors of political economy in our high-schools at the beginning of this century turned their attention to the socialistic problem. The university professors, even, have lately declared that they accept the socialistic stand-point sans phrase. The word expressing the nature of the whole movement would not have gained an introduction into the language had not the characteristic symptoms demanded an expression. The phrase “platform socialism” is not permitted to be left out of any German dictionary. The German Socialistes de la chaire are as familiar to French writers as the Socialisti della Cattedra are to the Italians. All manner of shades of opinion have been developed from this academic socialism. But a series of stereotyped formulas have come into existence with which every one, in the press and on the platform, plays; as, for instance, that the inequality of property is greater now than formerly; that the masses are more unhappy; that wealth remains confined to the few and flows only to them; that capital rules supreme over labor and prescribes its laws. From these premises, which are all false, the conclusion is drawn that the present social system must be rejected and replaced by another; that it was the government’s business 448to do this; and that “science” should furnish a plan for a righteous economy, and a guardian to regulate the same for all time to come. “Science” did not wait for a second invitation. Young souls devoted themselves to the projection of plans for the salvation of society; systems were invented for the organization of working-men into historical and organic groups, in order to enable them to withstand capital; others discovered methods of taxation by which the inequalities of ownership could be neutralized. He who had too much, in the opinion of “science,” was to be deprived of it, and it was to be given to him who had too little; persons were to be prevented from getting rich by ingenious plans for equalizing prices. “Permissible luxury” was divided from prohibited enjoyments; “science” undertook to prescribe the limits of individual action.
Former times offered stronger contrasts, perhaps, of luxury and misery. But the complaint now is that some persons have by certain manipulations become rapidly rich, and have made a “loud” use of their wealth. But are the hereditary ownerships of nobles or of extensive mercantile houses more sacred than the newly-won riches of stock speculators? Does the ancient castle with its solemn walls fit better into the new system than the luxurious villa of the parvenu? Is one’s desire for equality less offended by the velvet train which a page bears behind a duchess than by the satin skirt which the wife of a contractor draws behind her in the dust of the promenade? The bourgeoise spirit has nothing in common with the principles of socialism, nor with the sentiments of the proletariat. But the fountain of civil dissatisfaction has fed the torrent of socialistic agitation. Many a man, ruined by gambling, becomes a convert to the idea of a more just division of property; many, from grief over unlucky stock speculations, have written essays on the immorality of the acquisition of capital.
Why has German science, justly renowned for its exactness, and often accused because of its heaviness, hurled itself into this whirlpool, in order to rise again, dripping with foul water, and with its hands full of prospectuses for the eternal freeing of the world from evil? Well, one can have too much of a good thing. The scientific spirit can be driven to excess. Science has done so much for us that it was easy to believe that it could accomplish everything. Science and its disciples suddenly proposed to solve all the problems of life; and every one with a project was compelled to give out his method for science to decide upon. Your German, as, a rule, has more adaptability for theoretical learning than for practical action. Into his head everything penetrates, and in his head he accomplishes everything. Other people do much with their five senses and ten fingers without their minds giving much attention to it. We have more learning than action; more criticism than taste; we do better when we work with circumspection than when we attempt to improvise. When, therefore, in the space of a few years, we had conquered two powerful states in war and in diplomacy, and the world asked whence we had taken the means, we reflected upon the secret of our success, and believed that we had found the correct answer in this: “The school-teacher has won the battle 449of Sadowa!” In all probability it was a school teacher who invented this saying, for fecit cui prodest. Already has Lasker warned us of the folly of this dictum. Nothing can be less acquired in school than genius, and the decisive turn toward greatness which Germany has accomplished was given by the genius of the great men who in the right moment took its destiny into their hands. Statesmanship and war are two arts, not two sciences. To trace the secret of the power of the commander is not vouchsafed us; but as regards the political side of the question, it is certain that no German was ever less of a pedagogue than the imperial chancellor.
We might almost ask how a man who is so exactly the opposite of a school-teacher could be born in Germany. Germany has at length broken through the chain which so long held it prostrate, just because it found a statesman who was so entirely differently constituted from all the rest. For those who desire to make nature and destiny democratic by teaching that no one is irreplaceable this fact is unwelcome; but nothing is more aristocratic than nature and destiny.
But as the schoolmaster carried off and appropriated the laurels of 1866, these of 1870 were awarded to him without question; and when, in the German Empire which he was supposed to have founded, a breach showed itself here and there, who should be called upon to fill it but he? The question was seriously proposed whether society should not be reconstructed from the core. And the schoolmaster undertook to reply.
The turn which public life has thereby taken is of a very dangerous character. If we do not soon turn away from this overrating of the school we shall destroy the whole of German life. By imposing upon science tasks that do not belong to her we would destroy life through science, and science through life, and that which was Germany’s pride and safeguard, her learning and knowledge, would become a burden and a curse.
Science and life have constantly to learn from each other. In an exchange of their riches is to be found their salvation, not in the domination of the one over the other. The much-praised student-life itself does its part in imbuing the student with the inclination for an isolated existence. Many remain students all their lives, and a love for the practical tasks of life is not thereby fostered. The consciousness of high scientific attainments gives a degree of self-confidence which is easily carried too far when applied to worldly affairs. To this temptation more than one succumbed when he was told that it was his task to reconstruct the social structure. The cry was that the whole existing order of things had become “bankrupt.” By what rules, then, was the new order to be established? These were sought and ranged, as the expression went, in a scientific way. The first of these rules is: “The weak person must be protected against the strong.” How much can be brought under this formula! We can pledge ourselves with its aid to work out every communistic programme to the smallest details. If we only once lose the sense of discrimination between theoretical knowledge and practice, no limit can be placed upon self-confidence. Science applied to dogs and frogs is one thing, but it would not do to apply 450the same rules to men. For the communists to assume for their method of regulating society by scientific means the title of a historical school is indeed a piece of communism!
How was it possible that a number of scholars, to whom no one can deny ability and purity of intentions, could permit themselves to be led on to such extravagances? The overrated conception of the avocation of the teacher is not sufficient to explain this. Another exaggeration had to combine with this: the exaggerated conception of the avocation of the state. Teaching was to prescribe all, the state to execute all.
In regard to the state we have fallen from one extreme to the other. After it had sunk to the level of a caricature during our political degeneracy, the recognition of its high vocation overcame us, and we made an omniscient and omnipotent deity of it. When we say “state” philosophy takes a hand in the matter, and immediately the conception of absoluteness and divinity is apparent—the “state” becomes a god in whom we can place unlimited confidence and from whom we can expect everything. The truth that after all the “state” is only a term for a body of individual ministers or legislators has been forgotten. We make a secret idol of the state. To look behind the curtain is forbidden. But the less the state benefits one, just so much the more does he expect and demand from it. He beats his idol in order to compel it to work miracles. As Herbert Spencer says, it is the fashion to scold the government in one breath for its awkwardness in the most trifling matters, and in the next to demand from it the solution of the most difficult problems. Statecraft, at its best, is only the work of individuals; it must lose in fineness in proportion to the number of those who participate in it. There is a thousand times more wisdom in hero-worship than in the adoration of the intangible collective being to which, under the name of the state, we do divine honors only because we cannot see it. A parliament can be observed at its work; even ministers appear in flesh and blood as parliaments do. But of a sudden parliaments and ministers end their work; the curtain falls; second act: the state! It is divine!
Curiously enough this adhesion to the collective system coincides with the time of the disappointment over this system. For the financial grief of the last few years is nothing but sorrow for the losses to which stock-companies have led. If the anonymous corporation could puzzle so many heads, it is due to the fatal charm which the apparatus of the collective system exercises. Whenever a man withdraws from the eyes of men; where in place of the individual a corporation acts, under whose name the individual is lost to view, there a curtain is drawn which excites the fancy of those without. Even those who partake of the labor inside the curtain are enshrouded by the clouds of anonymousness, and believe more in themselves as a part of the abstract whole than they would believe in themselves as individuals.
Nothing is more calculated to make intelligible the mixture of deceiving elements which lie latent in abstract authorities than the famous sixth great power, the press. How much better were it for that other abstraction, “public opinion,” 451if it kept in mind that it is only a man (and often what a man!) that stands behind the thought! It has been attempted to remove this cloud, and to force men to see, by compelling every one to sign his articles with his own name. But this was of no avail. The law never was enforced in its true sense. Public opinion as an abstraction feels the need of intercourse with something of a kindred nature far too deeply to be willing to miss an abstraction representing that opinion in the form of an anonymous press. It is the same with anonymous business corporations as with the press. All efforts have failed to effect a reform in the laws relative to stock-gambling by means of which the personal responsibility of the board of control of an anonymous corporation could be brought home to individuals. A piece of fiction will and must always remain here. If the lawmaker were to take upon himself the task of changing this fiction into reality the result would be the same as with the press. Those associations are the best which are most tyrannically administered, and in which the director has the least respect for his executive committee. Tant vaut l’homme tant vaut la chose! There will be no relief until the stockholder knows that in entering a company he sacrifices a part of his motive for self-sustentation.[99]
Science is not all in all. To the department of the “highest powers” reason also belongs. Reason must decide where the domain of science begins and ends. When science, because it has studied history, feels called upon to make history; when, because it observes developments, it believes itself bound to work out plans of development for the future; when it sends out its champions into political assemblies—why, then it is out of its own sphere.
In a country which, more than all others, lives on “the milk of the mind,” the pest of socialistic nonsense could not have spread so widely if the unwholesome ingredients of this lacteal fluid had not impregnated the country. For him who studies men and things in proximity it is curious to observe that when ministers come into Parliament to thunder against socialism, the offices under their control are filled with younger officials who have imbibed socialism with the mother’s milk of the high-schools, and who esteem it their duty, as far as their position admits, to aid in the inauguration of small socialistic experiments. At times the jargon of social democracy even finds its way into their official reports. Still more noticeable is this in journalism. The official organs which the congress at Gotha mentioned as being in its service are really only a weak auxiliary corps to the great power which works in the civilian press for the social democracy. The same reader who would grow pale were he to discover on the last page of his newspaper the news of a sudden fall in stocks, is delighted to peruse, on its first page, a leading article presaging the speedy coming of the day of vengeance for the proletariat. Such readers count upon the protection of the 452army in the event of this theoretical revolution becoming practical. But this does not hinder them from assailing “militaryism.” That the strong and strictly-disciplined armed power would still remain indispensable for internal war, even were the danger of outward war removed, is a natural thought. But this consolation, if it be one, is not of so trustworthy a character as is commonly supposed. So long as the quiet course of history follows its accustomed path Germany need not fear the dissolution of her army organization by socialistic agitation. But who can say what a systematically-conducted dissemination of ideas may not in the end accomplish?
In Würtemberg, Saxony, Hesse, and Holstein the social democrats have entered the municipal governments. The number of socialistic students is large; in Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony the rural population has allowed itself to be drawn into the net of the propaganda. Of course all this can go much farther without changing the outward aspect of life, and the suggestion that life is threatened with a radical alteration will only arouse incredulous laughter, as being an outgrowth of terror or the “red ghost.” But we should take into consideration the possibility of a great catastrophe, and remember how, in the breaking-out of a storm, all the elements of evil augment themselves, unite, and fall upon everything with destructive force. Thus would Christian socialists, social-political-socialists, tax-reformers, and local-economic-reformers unite; and among the leaders themselves one would be dragged on by ambition, the other by a sense of his responsibility. The motto of Carl Marx, “The liberation of labor must be the work of the working-class, to which all other classes are only a reactionary mass,” has now become the mot d’ordre of all the socialistic organizations in Germany. The “Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers,” which last year formed the nucleus of the terrible railway insurrection in America, began in 1863 in an association for mutual aid in cases of sickness, and for temperance in the taking of spirituous liquors. This insurrection is in its way better adapted than the Paris Commune for the study of those who are anxious to ascertain how much longer the fire can smoulder, and how suddenly and with what irresistible force it may break forth. Faithful to their tender predilections in favor of socialism, many German papers have found in the destruction and incendiarism at Chicago, Cincinnati, Reading, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Baltimore, and Martinsburg only material for throwing light upon the American speculative mania; and the terrible devastations which shadowed with gloom a third of the Union were mostly presented as though they were only to be ascribed to transgressions in the financial economy. The truth that for years the propaganda had won the mass of the working-class, and had reared a conspiracy extending over the whole country, remained in the background. The season in which the West sends its many products to Eastern ports, and receives in return the means for carrying on its business, was selected as the moment for interrupting traffic. At a certain hour all trains were to stop, and not again move until all the workmen had achieved their object, whose principle was that industry was bound, even in times when it 453does not produce much, to pay just as high wages to working-men as in seasons of the utmost prosperity—a principle which is announced in the writings of the Christian socialists of both confessions. After the population had recovered it asked how it had been possible for it to be beset by such a monster, whose existence it had not before dreamt of? And yet three years before, on Christmas day of 1874, a similar attempt, though on a smaller scale, had been made. On that day at the stroke of twelve the engineers of all locomotives which transported trains between the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri stepped down, left the cars and passengers where they were, and refused to serve any farther until their demands had been complied with. But in that widely-agitated country this note of warning was soon forgotten.
Must nations experience everything for themselves? Does man learn nothing from the misfortunes of others? Forsooth, he seems to learn nothing from his own. Not insensibility to the wants of the weak dictates the principle that no legislation on the part of the state can prevent poverty, inequality, and suffering. Insight into the nature of man shows us this truth. This insight teaches us that growths in freedom, in acquirement, in diligence, and in possessions bear inseparable relations to each other and lead to the good of all. It is not true that the proportion of the poor and unhappy is larger than formerly; not true that the contrast between rich and poor is harsher; not true that the weak is more at the mercy of the strong. It is only true that the greater approximation between all classes compels us to become more sensitive to diversities of conditions and to regard them as intolerable. The idea of a mechanical levelling of the fortunes of all is the non plus ultra of folly, which in the course of realization will result in nothing but the destruction of all liberty, for which reason all reactionary instincts feel themselves attracted to socialism. Socialism, it is true, has not been productive wholly of evil, because there are no absolute truths (sic), and every anomaly, in its way, performs a service. It has led, and will in the future lead, the community and individuals to understand the connection between true interest and true humanity. More important than to set in motion the motive of self-interest is it to direct attention to real abuses. For, say what we may, never has a time possessed more sensitiveness for every ill and more craving after justice than ours.
It were difficult to describe how intensely Helen enjoyed her ride through the wilderness. A good part of the way they followed an Indian trail which skirted the bank of the Potomac; but occasionally they were guided in the right direction by blazed trees. “The work of my dear William’s axe,” thought Helen. In the most beautiful parks in England she had never beheld any scenery like this; an ancient Greek might have told her that the wood-nymphs and fauns had come forth from their sylvan retreats to deck her progress through their dominion. It looked, indeed, like a festive march; the gentian flowers were a-bloom in every open spot; the American ivy flung out her gorgeous banners of orange and yellow; the cedars were draped in scarlet woodbine; the maple, the gum, the pepperidge-tree, and the sassafras, each one wearing a color of its own, added glory to the landscape; while from amid clusters of berries and chestnuts the yellow-hammer and blue-jay called out to Helen in shrill, gladsome notes.
“I agree with you at last,” said Evelyn—“I agree with you: the Old World has no season which can compare in loveliness with the American Indian Summer.”
“And whatever father may say,” observed Helen, reaching out her hand as they jogged past a persimmon-tree, “I do love ripe persimmons. Nor have I any objection to a fat ’possum. Look! look! there goes one.” And sure enough Evelyn caught a glimpse of one of those “low, plebeian brutes,” as Sir Henry Lee called them, making off through the bushes.
It was late in the evening when they reached St. Joseph’s. The Angelus bell had long rung; but there was a full moon shining, the air was balmy, and Helen, tired though she was, was not willing to forego the pleasure of a stroll with the surprised and enraptured Berkeley at this witching hour. And as they sauntered along she gave him an account of her life since they had parted; after which he gave her an account of his, then ended by making a fervent appeal to her not to return to St. Mary’s except as his wife.
“Does this startle you?” he asked, as Helen stopped short and half withdrew her arm from his, murmuring:
“My father! my father!”
“Oh! I entreat you, do not let Sir Henry stand in the way of your plighted troth. Think—think of me! Loving you with my whole heart, yet condemned to live separated from you—Helen, it is cruel. No, no! Let the holy sacrament of matrimony make us one; then, if circumstances still force us asunder, it will be most consoling to know that the separation is only for a brief space. I am sure God will soften your father’s heart towards me, and that ere long he will call me son. O Helen! answer. Do not refuse my petition.”
While her lover was speaking Helen remembered the dream she 455had had, and the ingenious method which had occurred to her in that dream for overcoming her parent’s aversion to the young man. At the same time her heart whispered a thousand tender things, such as only a heart deeply in love can ever whisper; and now when Berkeley ended his supplication all fear of her father had vanished from her mind, and, looking up at him, she said:
“Dear William, I consent; let it be as you wish.”
“My own dear girl!” cried Berkeley. “And now, my darling, you have only to name the happy day. When shall it be?”
“Well, let us be wedded to-morrow. I will tell Father McElroy our whole story; when he hears it I am certain he will marry us.”
And Helen was right. The wise, kind-hearted priest, after lending an attentive ear to what she narrated to him early the next day, agreed to perform the ceremony forthwith. Indeed, there was nothing Father McElroy liked better than to see young folks united in wedlock, and whenever a young couple announced to him that they were betrothed he always clapped his hands and cried: “Good! good! My children, you could not bring me better news.”
The wedding was as private as possible. Then Helen abode a fortnight at St. Joseph’s—a blissful fortnight—after which she went back to her father, who, when he saw her coming towards him, exclaimed:
“The jaunt has done the child a world of good! She needed a change of air.”
Whereupon Sir Henry’s friend answered:
“Ay, Harry, her cheeks are rosier, and she is every way prettier, than when she left us.”
The winter that followed this glorious Indian Summer was a very happy winter indeed. Almost every evening Evelyn visited the tower and passed an hour in the queen’s room, where Helen played merry airs and sang joyous songs; and so pleased was Sir Henry at the way she behaved towards the baronet that he laid aside his gruff manner entirely, and addressed her always in the kindest voice; for which, we may be sure, Helen felt extremely grateful to generous Evelyn, who was playing his part to perfection. And once when the old gentleman kissed her and asked when the happy day was to be—“For, child, I am growing old; don’t put it off much longer”—Helen answered: “I promise, father, that I will yet make you the happiest man in the colony.”
At which he gave her another kiss, then, walking up to the ancient suit of armor, he began talking to it in an undertone, to the no small amusement of his friend Dick, who had heard him say that this armor was haunted by the ghost of one of his forefathers.
But nothing contributed so much to Helen’s peace of mind as a certain resolution which her father came to towards Christmastide. Sir Henry had resolved to make a visit to his native land in the company of his friend Dick, who would be obliged to return in spring. The Ark, the same vessel that had brought him to Maryland, would sail for England early in March, and the temptation to see his birth-place once more ere he died was too strong to be resisted. Sir Henry announced his intention to Helen with a tear in his 456eye. “But I’ll not be long gone, child. I’ll be back again before autumn.” Which when Helen heard, instead of looking pensive, as her father thought she would, she sat down to her harpsichord and played the most gleeful air he had ever heard in his life—an air which Helen herself had composed during her honeymoon at St. Joseph’s. Many times that winter did she repeat this happy air, and more than once, too, when she finished playing it, she burst into a merry laugh; and whenever Sir Henry begged to be told what pleasant thought was amusing her, she only laughed on, then ended by twining her arms about his neck and saying:
“Dear, dear father! don’t be longer away than the last day of summer.”
As for Evelyn, during those months he was happy too. Yes, he truly was, and often said to himself: “Thank God! I am awakened from the listless and supine life I was leading.” And he inwardly confessed that Helen’s refusal of him had kindled him into a man. Father McElroy, to whom he made known his resolve to enter the priesthood, was delighted, and lent him several books which it was needful that he should read; and having already taken his degree at Oxford, Sir Charles was not ill prepared for his glorious vocation.
Yes, those days were days of peace and sunshine for the young wife, and when by and by March arrived and her father bade her adieu, she did not feel lonesome for being left all alone in the tower. The Ark, she knew, was a stanch craft, and would carry Sir Henry safe across the ocean, helped by her prayers; then back in a few months he would come, to meet a joyful surprise.
Of Helen’s life during this spring and summer naught need be said. Time flew swiftly by; every opportunity brought a letter from her dear William; and now we find ourselves verging towards September, and Helen is gazing anxiously from the highest window of her home to catch sight of The Ark, which may any hour be expected. At length, on the very last day of August, The Ark appeared; and was ever ship so beautiful in Helen’s eyes?
Happy indeed was the meeting between father and daughter.
“But you look a little pale, child—a little pale,” spoke Sir Henry, as he clasped her in his arms. “Worrying, no doubt, about me. Well, we had a tempestuous voyage last spring, and coming back the sea was not much smoother; I once thought we might never reach land. But, nevertheless, here I am safe and sound, and now your cheeks must bloom again.”
Then, after the fond greeting was over, Sir Henry set out, accompanied by Evelyn, to inspect his domain.
“Let us first go see how your lilies are thriving,” suggested the latter—“the lilies which you planted by the Island of Tranquil Delight.”
“Yes, yes, we will visit them first of all,” answered Sir Henry.
Accordingly, off they went, briskly too, for the old gentleman was delighted to find himself on solid earth again, and from a distance he caught sight of the lilies, and of something else besides which was not a lily, but lovely, wonderful, bewitching, half hidden in a small birch canoe that 457floated in the midst of the beautiful flowers.
“Well, I do declare, here is a baby—a winsome blue-eyed baby!” cried Sir Henry, beside himself with astonishment, as he bent his rheumatic back over the little mortal, who seemed to know him, for the prettiest of blue peepers began straightway to wink and make love to him; and as soon as he lifted it out of the canoe, deep into his grizzly beard its tiny fingers dove and wove themselves.
“Well! well! This is truly amazing!” he continued. “Some villanous Indian must have stolen it from its mother. But I will rescue it.”
“So it would seem,” remarked Evelyn, with difficulty repressing a smile, “for here are a bow and arrows and deerskin blanket.”
“The wretch! the vile kidnapper!” went on Sir Henry. Then, wrapping the infant in his coat, “Come, come,” he added; “although ’tis a warm day, yet this poor wee creature might take its death of cold. Come, I must hurry home; and do you make all speed to the town and fetch a nurse.”
“Helen! Helen! Where are you?” cried Sir Henry the moment he reached the tower. “Quick, Helen! and look what I have found. Helen! Helen!”
But his daughter did not appear for half an hour, by which time a nurse had been procured and was already bestowing all needful attention on the little stranger.
“Why, father!” exclaimed Helen, with radiant countenance, as the old gentleman led her into the baby’s presence, “why, what a treasure this is! It will no doubt bring you good luck.”
“I verily believe it will; perhaps money enough to finish my castle,” said Sir Henry. “Although”—here he looked yearningly at his daughter—“although this is not the babe I am longing to greet.”
“Well, well, we will do our best to make the pretty waif at home among us,” pursued Helen. “I am sure we shall get to like it. Why, see! see! ’tis reaching out its hands towards you, father.”
“Just what it did when I first discovered it among the lilies,” said Sir Henry. “But now let us retire and leave it awhile with the nurse; for the little darling must need sleep.”
Accordingly they withdrew; and through all the rest of that memorable day Sir Henry could do nothing except talk about his wonderful discovery by the Island of Tranquil Delight.
During the week which followed Sir Henry paid frequent visits to the nursery, and his fondness for the infant grew with the hours. Like many a stern, imperious nature, he completely unbent; he became woman-like in his devotion to it. Closely and with fluttering heart did Helen watch him as he fondled the babe, who never whimpered when he approached, but, on the contrary, always smiled and made funny signs with its fingers, which Sir Henry declared that he understood. Then her father would take it in his arms and speak to it; and once he carried it into the queen’s room, where he showed it the rusty armor and portrait of the queen.
It was during one of these pleasant promenades that he turned to Helen and said, “My daughter, ought we not to have the little one baptized?”
Helen breathed a short prayer ere she answered, then spoke: “Father, the baby is already baptized; his name is Harry Lee.”
458“Harry Lee! What mean you?” exclaimed Sir Henry, giving a start; and he might have let his precious charge drop, had not its mother sprung forward and caught it. Then, while she pressed it to her bosom, the truth like lightning flashed upon him.
“And I am now Helen Berkeley,” went on Helen. “But we have christened our darling Harry Lee.”
“Good heavens!” cried Sir Henry, utterly aghast. “Good heavens! How you have deceived me!” As he spoke his brow grew dark as a thunder-cloud and the mother trembled.
Presently, clasping her infant still closer to her bosom, “O father! father!” she sobbed, “forgive me! forgive me!” And while Helen sobbed and implored, and while the old knight was trying to calm himself sufficiently to go on and vent his indignation in measured terms, the baby, for the first time since he had found it among the lilies, turned away from him and began to cry. This was more than Sir Henry could stand. Its wailing accents pierced deep into his heart. There was a moment’s struggle within him; then, going up to it, he let fall a tear on its bare head, saying: “Harry, Harry, don’t cry. For love of you I will forgive all.”
Berkeley, who had been for the past three days at St. Mary’s, was not long in answering his wife’s summons to speed to the tower, and with him came Father McElroy, who offered to take the whole blame on himself. But all was blue sky now; the baby had triumphed, and as Sir Henry grasped the hand of his son-in-law he said:
“I thank you, ay, from the bottom of my heart I thank you, for christening the child Harry Lee. I hope it is his whole name, no addition?”
“Harry Lee and nothing else,” replied the happy Berkeley; whereupon Sir Henry, in the fulness of his joy, took the child away from Helen, and, kneeling down at Father McElroy’s feet, said, Anglican though he was: “Reverend father, may I ask your blessing on me and my grandson?” Then, when the blessing had been pronounced, he rose up off his knees, and exclaimed with a voice and mien which those who were present never forgot: “O God be thanked! I shall not be the last of the Lees.”
One autumn day in the year 1660 a young pale-face might have been seen entering an Indian village which stood on the western slope of one of the Alleghany mountains and not far from the source of the Monongahela.
He was a tall, handsome youth, with long, chestnut hair resting on his shoulders; yet withal he had a somewhat girlish countenance which sorted ill with the deep scar across his left cheek, that looked very like a sabre-cut. Presently he reined in his steed in front of a big cabin forming the centre of the village, and on top of which was a cross, and said to himself, “This must be the church”; then inquired for Father Evelyn.
A few minutes later the young man entered a wigwam close by, and found himself face to face with his god-father; but neither recognized the other. “Are you truly Harry Lee?” exclaimed the priest, with visible emotion. “Why, Harry, I have not laid eyes on you since you were a child. Is this indeed you?”
We may be sure that Harry was 459warmly welcomed to the missionary’s humble abode, where for a score of years he had dwelt with his savage flock around him; but no, not savages any longer. Virtue reigned in the midst of this happy tribe, and no prisoner had been put to the torture by them for well-nigh a hundred moons.
“You tell me Sir Henry is dead,” said Father Evelyn, after the first words of greeting were over. “Well, well, God rest his soul!”
“Dear grandfather!” said Harry. “Not many like him left in this world. He was so loyal; he was steel itself. Why, he took to his bed the very day the news reached him of the battle of Naseby, and never left it again—no, never—and died within twenty-four hours after hearing of the king’s execution. ‘Damn the Roundheads!’ he cried, as he rose up on his pillow—‘damn the Roundheads! No, no; God—God forgive them—God save the king!’ Oh! I shall never forget his expression as he uttered these his very last words.” Here Harry brushed away a tear and was silent a moment.
“Before dying,” went on the youth presently, “he gave me this book”—as he spoke he drew from his pocket a well-fingered copy of Don Quixote—“and mother has taught me Spanish, and I carry this book about with me wherever I go.”
“Your mother,” said Father Evelyn, “your mother—tell me how she is.”
“Thank God! mother is in excellent health,” answered Harry. “But it was long before she recovered from the shock of my father’s death. We have a comfortable home at Jamestown, Virginia; we want for nothing.” (Berkeley would have died a much richer man, except for his father-in-law’s debts, which he paid.) “But mother cannot get over her love for Maryland, and last year we made a visit to St. Mary’s. But we did not stay long; ’twas too sad. There the tower stands, half hidden by wild vines and creepers, and surrounded by persimmon-trees. Once a rude churl dared to call it ‘Lee’s folly’; but I made him rue the day—rue the day.”
As Harry spoke he sprang to his feet; his face, a moment before as mild and tranquil as a woman’s—his very mother’s face, which Father Evelyn remembered so well—changed in an instant; and while the lightning darted out of his eyes, the priest beheld the face of old Sir Henry. Ay, and farther back, too, it went through the generations—back, back: it was the self-same look which Harry’s ancestor wore who fell at Agincourt.
“Well, is the old home deserted?” asked Father Evelyn, after calming him and persuading him to resume his seat.
“No; it is used for a look-out tower, and from its summit you can see ships a long distance down the river.”
Presently Harry noticed a painting hanging on the wall above a rude book-case, and, after eyeing it a moment, said the two faces in the picture reminded him of his father and mother. To this the priest made no response, except to observe that he intended to bequeath him this painting when he died. “My good Indians will keep it safe for you, Harry. Do not forget to come for it.”
Then after a pause, during which he ruthlessly crushed many a golden memory, Father Evelyn added: “The scene represented is not 460strictly historical, for St. George lived some time later than St. Margaret. But in one of the old miracle plays of the middle ages the knight is made to rescue St. Margaret from the dragon.”
Harry Lee tarried a week under his god-father’s roof, and a pleasant week it was; after which he returned to his far-off home in Virginia. But before departing Father Evelyn took his hand in his, and, pressing it, said: “Harry, who knows when we may meet again? So listen well to what I am about to say. Your dear father I knew most intimately. In the colony of Maryland there was no better man than William Berkeley; none more active; none to whom, after Lord Baltimore himself, the people have been more indebted for their prosperity and happiness. Therefore tread in his footsteps. You tell me that you are a surveyor. Well, labor hard and honestly at your profession. Learn betimes to measure life; stay true to the faith; and above all things don’t dream—don’t dream.”
“Let man return to God the same way in which he turned from him; and as the love of created beauty made him lose sight of the Creator, so let the beauty of the creature lead him back to the beauty of the Creator.”—St. Isidore of Seville.
Three miles from the village of Passa is the hermitage of St. Luc on an elevated plateau, surrounded by thorny furze and the cistus, and a few old mulberry-trees. It overlooks a vast plain dotted with villages, and in the distance is the Mediterranean—no melancholy main, but a golden sea of light beneath a burning sun. This is a place of strategical importance, and in time of war has been alternately occupied by French and Spanish troops. The chapel has been restored, and a hermit lives in the adjoining cell. Near by is a fountain shaded by plane-trees to slake his thirst. On great festivals the peasants come to sing the Goigs relating to the chapel, and votive Masses are frequently offered up for the cure of various maladies.
About two miles from the little walled town of Ille in the valley of the Tet, on the side of the mountains that separate it from the valley of the Tet, is the hermitage of St. Maurice shaded by walnut-trees (what we call the English walnut). It is a lonely spot, but there is an agreeable view over the broad valley. The chapel is dear to the people, and they come here with holy songs on the feast of St. Maurice, who is invoked for fevers, common in this region. Over the altar is his statue as a Roman soldier, and near him are two sainted virgins who overcame the fiery dragon—St. Martha and St. Marguerite. In the pavement is inserted—a rare thing to find in these chapels—the tombstone of an old hermit who died here in 1758, with its
461Further up, on the right bank of the Tet, you came to Prades, a village north of the Canigou, in a valley teeming with wheat, vines, delicious peaches noted in the market of Toulouse, and fruit of all kinds. The very hills are terraced for cultivation. A few miles distant is the hermitage of St. Etienne on a spur of the Canigou inaccessible to carriages—a wild, desolate place where rocks are piled on rocks, out of which gush clear, sparkling rills that keep alive the few plants and shrubs that grow wherever soil can collect. It once belonged to the counts of the Cerdagne. The chapel often serves as a refuge to the shepherds of the mountain in storms. Here is a picture of St. Stephen with a stone on his head, as he is painted by Carpaccio. Just beyond the chapel rises the Roc del Moro, a high peak crowned by the ruins of an old watch-tower—perhaps a Moorish Atalaya.
Near Prades, on an elevation overlooking the fertile valley, is the ancient hermitage of St. Jean Baptiste, now private property, though the chapel is open to the public. The Canigou presents an imposing aspect from the terrace, and not far off are the interesting ruins of an old monastery.
The hermitage of St. Christophe is on a mountain shelf shaded by a venerable hermit oak, looking off over a beautiful valley sprinkled with villages such as Ria, Sirach, etc. Beyond tower the calm, grand heights of the Canigou, that, like the contemplative soul, stands above the world, its gray sides relieved by no soft green pasture-land, and yielding no corn or oil to man, but holding in its stern recesses the cold glacier springs whose waters pour down through summer heat from its storehouses of ice and snow to refresh the thirsty plain, fit emblem of the holy influences that rain down from the sanctuaries it overshadows. The huge St. Christopher may well be set up among these giant peaks, ’mid flood and fell. His beautiful legend is told in a series of bas-reliefs around the walls of the old chapel of rubble-work. On the 10th of July, when he is specially honored here, as in Catalonia, the surrounding villages come here in procession, stopping on the way to pray at the oratory of St. Sebastian. After their devotions at St. Christopher’s they eat their lunch among the rocks and drink from the stone basins in the caves. Not far off is Ria with its castle—the cradle of an historic race from which descended the old counts of Barcelona, as well as many a king and queen of Aragon, Navarre, France, etc. Several of the present sovereigns of Europe, in fact, might trace their descent from the old lords of the obscure hamlet of Ria.
The valley of the Tet contracts to a mere gorge at Villefranche, where there is barely room for the river and the two streets that constitute the town. This is one of the first places fortified by Vauban. Further on there is only a mule-path along the ravine shut in by wild, rocky mountains whose sides are lashed by fierce torrents. On one of these is the hermitage of St. Pierre de la Roca, reached by climbing a steep path cut in the sides of the cliff. The chapel fell to ruin at the Revolution, and the Madonna, which had been found ages before in a cave, was carried to the parish church. It is now owned by private individuals, who have had it 462restored. Adjoining is the hermitage, that looks down on the beautiful villages of Fulla and Sahorre. Directly behind rise tall cliffs, and beyond is a vast amphitheatre of mountains, above which towers the majestic Canigou. A convent once stood close by, the monks of which served the church of the Tour Carrée at the foot of the mountain, now in ruins. The convent, too, is gone. You see only the remains of the old kitchen with its marble pavement and fine cistern; and, climbing up the side of the cliff by means of a ladder, you come to a terrace where the monks had their parterre of flowers for the garden. Close by is the Virgin’s Cave, where the Madonna was found. The chapel, which is only twenty-five feet long and ten wide, has few ornaments except the statues of St. Peter and St. Teresa. Before the entrance are several tombstones, on one of which is this inscription:
“Thou who regardest this tomb, why dost thou not despise that which is mortal? A similar dwelling is reserved for all mankind. What thou art, I was. What I am, thou wilt be. I was honored in the world, and now I am laid away and forgotten in the tomb. I shone in the world with my rich garments; now I am naked in the grave. I only inspire horror. I lived in delights....”
Unfortunately the inscription is incomplete. There is no name, no device, to indicate who it was that had thus tested the pleasures of life. The stone only echoes the eternal refrain: Vanitas vanitatis.
The hermitage of Notre Dame de Doma Nova is on a peak in the ancient seigneurie of Domanove. At the foot is a rivulet that feeds the stream of Riu-Fagés. The terrace is shaded by evergreens. You enter by a pretty porch and find yourself before a mediæval-looking altar with a Madonna dressed in the Spanish style. This statue was found under a juniper by means of a lamb that had strayed thither. Among the ex-votos on the walls is a painting of a hermit tied to a pillar by a band of Huguenots who are setting fire to the chapel he is in. This commemorates a pleasing instance of Protestant toleration in 1580.
The Huguenots of Béarn made several raids into Roussillon in the sixteenth century, and a company was organized to resist them, for which several communes were rewarded by the king of Spain with special privileges. Ille, for instance, was allowed to hold a fair.
The hermitage of Notre Dame de la Roca stands on a naked cliff not far from Nyer. In the depths of the ravine below flows the Mantet ’mid rocks and frightful precipices. Near by are the ruins of an old battlemented tower, and on the other side of the stream, in a still wilder, more inaccessible spot, is the cave where the Madonna was found by a girl in search of fagots. The chapel is vaulted and adorned in Spanish fashion, with a retablo over the altar, on the panels of which are painted the mysteries of religion. The Virgin and Child are in silken garments; and an iron reja protects the sanctuary. People come here to pray in time of calamity, and often hang their votive offerings on the wall.
The hermitage of St. Jacques de Calahors is but little frequented. It has a poor desolate chapel with rude images of the Virgin and St. James, and an altar to St. Antich, probably some Spanish saint. If any one wishes to live in poverty and undisturbed solitude, he could find no more suitable place than the wild, desolate region of which St. Jacques is the culminating point.
The hermitage of La Trinité is known to have existed in the ninth century. Think of that! A thousand years of prayer in this sacred desert! What fruits of immortal life from this obscure region! The present chapel is of the twelfth century. Here is a curious crucifix known as the Santa Majestad, said to have come down from the age of Charlemagne. It is in great veneration, and sung in quaint Catalan Goigs perhaps as ancient as the image itself. The Christ is clothed in a long tunic that allows only the hands and feet and head to be seen. He is fastened to the cross by four nails, and around the head project long rays. There are several of these singular crucifixes in the Pyrénées Orientales, and we remember seeing a similar one at Naples, clad in its long crimson tunic.
The chapel is surmounted by three crosses, of which the central one is the highest. Behind rises a peak, on which stands the old donjon of Belpuig that dates at least from the thirteenth century. La Trinité is very popular in this pastoral region, and on St. Peter’s day and Trinity Sunday the mountains ring with the Goigs of the shepherds and herdsmen.
One of the most picturesque hermitages in the valley of the Tet, and certainly the most popular, is Notre Dame de Font Romieu, a mountain solitude surrounded by pines, delightful in summer, but so snowy in winter that the chapel is closed to the public about the middle of November, and scarcely opened again till spring. But in the summer it is open night and day, that the shepherds may come here at any hour they are at leisure. The actual chapel is of the seventeenth century, but it is on the site of one much older, built to receive the Virgin found here in 1113. This venerated statue is kept at Odello the greater part of the year. On Trinity Sunday it is brought here in solemn procession and left for a few months, when it is carried back with equal pomp. On these days there are five or six thousand pilgrims. The Virgin and Child are crowned and clothed in rich garments, so their faces alone are visible, but they are evidently very ancient. The fountain that, according to the Goigs, sprang up where the statue was discovered is beneath the high altar, and the water is conveyed by pipes beneath the pavement of the chapel to the court, where the pilgrims go to drink. It is remarkably pure and cool. One pipe extends to a private room, where there is a large reservoir, twelve feet square, made of a single block of granite, for the purpose of bathing. This tank is inscribed: Fons salutis Maria. Those who come here to bathe first say the rosary before a statue of the Virgin at one end of the room, after which they walk several times around the reservoir, praying Our Lady de la Salud as they go. A short distance from the hermitage is another fountain, called St. Jean.
One peculiarity about the chapel is that one-half of it is higher than the rest. You traverse part of the nave, and then ascend seven steps to the remainder, into which open the side chapels and the sanctuary. The retablo of the high altar is covered with bas-reliefs of the life of the Blessed Virgin, which, as well as the other sculptures, were done by Suñer, an artist of the seventeenth century from Manresa, Spain. The walls are covered with 464an infinite number of ex-votos, such as crutches, long tresses of hair, rude pictures of the Virgin invoked in time of danger, etc. The whole edifice is rich with gilding and sculpture, and, when filled with lights and flowers on great festivals, is quite dazzling. Over one of the altars in a niche is an old painting of San Ildefonso of Toledo receiving the Santa Casulla from the hands of the Virgin. We love to find this great servant of Mary in her churches—him who seemed clothed with her virtues as with the garment she gave him, and who is never weary of dwelling on her exalted mission. “Lo, by means of this Virgin the whole earth is filled with the glory of God!” exclaims he. The Mass here on his festival is obligatory for the parish of Odello.
Near the church is a still higher eminence, to which you ascend by a path winding around the mount with the Stations of the Cross up the sad, funereal way, terminating in a Calvary with the uplifted image of Him who alone can heal the serpent’s wounds that filled our souls with death.
The buildings at Font Romieu are quite extensive. There is a hostelry with a gallery of eleven arcades in front, where meals are prepared and rooms furnished those who wish to make a retreat. During the summer not a day passes without visitors. But the great day of the year is the patronal festival on the 8th of September, when the people of all the neighboring valleys come here, displaying a variety of physiognomy and costume hardly to be found elsewhere. Sometimes they amount to ten or twelve thousand. From the earliest dawn you can see them flocking in from every quarter, in the costume of their own valley, praying aloud or singing sacred hymns. As soon as they come in sight of the Calvary they fall on their knees to salute the uplifted Image so powerful to save, and again at the sight of the holy chapel. They hear Mass, go to Holy Communion, and, after completing their devotions, they scatter over the green to eat their lunch, when the whole scene assumes the aspect of a rural festival full of innocent gayety. Venders of fruit, cakes, and all kinds of wares, secular and holy, fasten themselves upon you with amusing pertinacity, while wandering musicians, in hopes of a few sous, begin to play on various rustic instruments—the flageolet, oboes, and perchance, at a proper distance from the holy chapel, the tambourine and bag-pipe.
Meanwhile, Goigs succeed each other all day long in the chapel, sung by peasants to rude mountain airs quite in harmony with the words and place. Every valley awaits its turn to sing its hymn before the Holy Mother of God.
One would think the age here still Golden, so naïve is the piety, so simple the manners, of these mountaineers.
We come now to the valley of the Tech, abounding in harvests and rich meadows kept verdant by the mountain streams. The air is pure and exhilarating. The pastures are full of sheep and goats. On one hand are the ridges of the Canigou with watch-towers and ruins of old castles on the tops, and mines of iron ore in their bosom. The sides of the gorges are bristling with gloomy pines, and the rocky cliffs aflame with the 465rhododendrons that grow in their crevices. On the other hand is the long line of the Albères with pleasant villages in their folds, and torrents of crystal coursing down their sides. Beyond is Spain, true land of Mary. Prats-de-Mollo is the last town on the frontier. It is an old place, at the very source of the Tech, surrounded by the fortifications of a bygone age, and commanded by a fort on one of the heights above. A few miles from the town is the hermitage of Notre Dame de Coral, delightfully situated on a mountain among trees that afford an agreeable shade to the weary pilgrim, while cool springs are at hand to quench his thirst, and rooms provided should he wish to tarry. The Madonna is in great repute, not only in the province but across the border. The word coral is supposed to refer to the heart of the oak in which the Virgin was found. But that was ages ago. It is known to have existed in 1261. This ancient image is now enclosed in another, likewise very old, as if to enshrine it. It is over the high altar, behind which is a stairway that enables the votary to approach it. At one of the side altars is another of those ancient crucifixes similar to the Santa Majestad at La Trinité, supposed to be of Spanish origin. It came from an old hospice at the entrance of a Coll, or mountain pass, not far from Prats-de-Mollo, where lodged pilgrims to Compostella in the middle ages. There is still a round building remaining that formed part of this hospice, with four openings towards the different points of the compass, in which lights used to be placed to guide the traveller by night. The chapel, too, called Notre Dame du Coll d’Ares, is still standing, but is sequestrated.
But to return to our hermitage. Among the numerous ex-votos on the chapel walls is a curious painting of a young man, seized by two demons, invoking the aid of the Virgin, who appears and carries him off by the hair of his head. Beneath is the inscription: “This miracle was wrought by Maria Santissima del Coral in favor of Joan Solána in the year 1599. Thomas Solána, his descendant, had this painting done in 1704 for the honor and glory of the Verge Purissima.”
Mgr. Gerbet, Bishop of Perpignan, visited this hermitage in 1857, and commemorated his visit by a graceful poem which runs thus in more sober English prose:
“Señora del Coral, for ages the protectress of the pious people of Prats, Tech, and St. Sauveur, as soon as a turn in the mountains brought thy chapel in view, the song of the pilgrim burst from my heart. The rock of Aras, once consecrated to false gods, exorcised at thy coming, has ever since proclaimed the true Lord. Let thine ancient power be again renewed. Destroy in us all devotion to worldly idols with their lowering influences. And accept this ephemeral homage in union with the Goigs that for so many ages have resounded in these mountains. Let my verse mingle with these ancient hymns, as among thy venerable elms the flower of a day springs up and then dies.”
Between Prats-de-Mollo and Tech, not far from the source of the Comalada, a branch of the Tech, is the hermitage of St. Guillem de Combret in the midst of the ridges that shoot off from the Canigou like huge buttresses. In ancient times there was a Pausa here where pilgrims to Spain found shelter—a kind of station or hostelry, where pious people exercised their charity in allaying the fatigue of such holy wanderers. The Pausa Guillelmi is spoken of in the donation of a part of Mt. Canigou to 466the abbey of St. Martin by Count Wifredo of Barcelona. In the eleventh century it seems, however, to have belonged to the Benedictines of the neighboring village of Arles, whose church, still standing, contains the shrine of SS. Abdon and Sennen, noted for the perpetual flow of miraculous water. These saints are very popular all through these valleys, and are called by the peasants Los Cossos Santos, or the Sewed-Together Saints, perhaps because they are never mentioned apart. There is only a part of their remains here, brought from Rome at some remote period, as the guide-book sneeringly says, to free the neighborhood from the dragons and other wild animals that infested it. We know that when these saints were exposed to the fury of two lions and four bears in the Coliseum, the animals became tame and harmless before them. No wonder that, crowned in heaven, they should be equally powerful against error, or the wild beasts, whichever it might be, that infested these mountains.
The lives of the saints do not mention St. William of Combret, but the ancient Goigs and sculptures of the chapel set forth a few details of his life. According to these, he was a Frank who came to seek solitude and oblivion among these Pyrenees. The wild goats used to come and offer him their milk for nourishment. And to confound the impiety of the smiths (who are still numerous at Arles) he wrought, as by miracle, a bell in their presence that still rings the hour of prayer—an iron bell, very broad in shape and sharp of clang. The rough altar of solid stone he is said to have brought here unaided. He died at Alp in the Spanish Cerdagne, and two blind women are known to have recovered their sight at his tomb. His statue in the chapel represents him with book and crosier, as if an abbot. Beside the hermitage is a small garden and a fountain of delicious water. On St. Guillem’s day the parish of Tech comes here in procession; High Mass is offered; four gospels are sung in the open air, as if to proclaim it to the four quarters of the globe; benediction is given with a relic of the True Cross; and pains bénits are distributed in remembrance of the hospitality of the old Pausa. Prats-de-Mollo comes here on St. Magdalen’s day, for to her the place was dedicated before the time of St. Guillem. Religious traditions never seem to grow dim in the memory of these tenacious mountaineers.
Three miles from the watering-place of Amélie-les-Bains is the hermitage of St. Engracia in a green valley that once belonged to the Benedictines of Arles. The cell is in ruins, and the little chapel very poor. The walls are about four feet thick, and the dim light makes it seem like a cave. There is only one altar, with the virgin martyr of Zaragoza on it, a palm in her hand and a nail piercing her brow. Her legend is told in some old paintings on the wall. There are statues, too, of the Cossos Santos.
Coming down to Ceret, where the Albères sink into the plain, the Tech is spanned by an immense arch, by no means so pretentious in the spring, when the snow melts in the mountains and the waters come pouring down through the wild gorges, sweeping everything before them. A little way from the village is the hermitage of St. Ferréol on the plateau of a mountain. The road to it passes through vineyards, and is bordered 467by cherry, walnut, and other trees. The chapel is in such veneration that the peasants often used to ascend the mountain on their knees with a candle in their hands, in fulfilment of their vows, and perhaps do so still. Before it is a terrace shaded by elms, beneath which are two springs. Here is a fine view over the valley of the Tech extending to the very sea, while in the background are the everlasting mountains. In the chapel is a statue of St. Ferréol in the garb of a Roman soldier, with a sword in his left hand. He is said to have been an officer of some high grade, martyred for the faith at Vienne, in Dauphiné, in 303.
There is an altar here to Notre Dame dels Desemparats—the Catalan for abandoned or forsaken. There are times in every one’s life when one feels the need of invoking such a Madonna, and she may well be set up here in a solitude that harmonizes with the feelings of those who have need to appeal to her. To be friendless is solitude, says Epictetus. The women of Valencia wear combs on which is graven the image of Nuestra Señora de los Desemparados, but whether this is by way of bewailing their forsaken condition, or to announce their readiness to be consoled, or merely by way of averting the possible contingencies of life, we cannot say.
A Catalan inscription on the holy-water vase states that it was given by a hermit of St. Ferréol who had been a slave at Constantinople twenty-four years. The chapel is specially frequented in time of epidemics, and on the festivals of SS. Lawrence and Ferréol, when worship is conducted with great pomp, the Goigs never cease around the altars.
The hermitage of Notre Dame del Castel is on a mount belonging to the chain of the Albères, a few miles from the pretty village of Sorrède. The pathway up the height is bordered with violets, wild thyme, furze, and various shrubs. You pass three crosses, and a small oratory where the processions of Rogation week stop on their way to the mount to sing a hymn to the Virgin. The hermitage is in a fine position, shaded by trees, the terrace overlooking a vast extent of country with the immensity of the sea in the distance. In sight are several places of interest—the rock of Montblanc, where once stood a royal château; the Cova de las Encantadas, or the fairies’ cave; and, on the top of an isolated peak, the ruins of the old castle of Ultrera, which history says was taken by Wamba, King of the Visigoths, in the seventh century. Don Pedro of Aragon received its keys from Don Jaime of Majorca in 1344. Finally, it became the property of the lords of Sorrède. Marshal Schomberg took it from the Spanish in 1675, and the place his troops occupied is still pointed out as the Camp des Français. The castle being dismantled by order of Louis XIV., Jeanne de Béarn, who had seigneurial rights over it, took possession, among other things, of the ancient Madonna in the chapel, and built another to receive it. This statue had long before been miraculously discovered in a cave of the mountains. There is a singular expression of sweetness in the face, and both Mother and Child are considered muy hermosos. She is dressed in Spanish style, the veil that falls around her partly covering the Child. Great crowds come here on the festivals of the Virgin, where 468Mass is sometimes sung at an altar under the trees, and the people, spread around on the neighboring heights, give it the aspect of an amphitheatre.
Not a mile from the hamlet of La Roca, where Philip le Hardi in his campaign against Aragon lodged with all his court, is a pleasant valley watered by a limpid stream and shaded by trees. Out of it rises a low hill from which you can see the Albères and their forests of cork-trees, and among them the ruins of the castle of La Roca, where the king of Majorca took refuge from Don Pedro of Aragon. Here is the hermitage of Notre Dame de Tanya, with a well before it shaded by fine old plane-trees. On the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary the people of La Roca come here in procession. There are daily services during the octave, among which is the rosary at sunset. On the eighth day there is a Mass of thanksgiving, after which the people return processionally to La Roca.
Near the Coll de Prunet, through which passed Hannibal and the hosts of the Cæsars, is Notre Dame del Coll, shut in by the mountains and their forests of evergreen oaks and cork-trees—a popular chapel, where people come to pray to be delivered from the goître and all throat diseases common in the mountains. The Goigs contain the only accounts of its history, from which it appears that the chapel was built in the ninth century to receive a Virgin discovered by means of an ox. There is a painting over the altar of a herdsman and dog kneeling before the Virgin. The statue has been gilded, and the dress only allows the head to be seen. Here are manacles worn by captives in Moorish times, brought in gratitude for their deliverance and suspended before the image of Him “whose pierced hands have broken so many chains” other than those of material bondage. There is an altar, too, to St. Quitterie of Aire, to whom there are also special Goigs. She is invoked for hydrophobia.
About two miles from Argelés is the hermitage of St. Ferréol in a wild, solitary place among the cliffs of the Albères, the savage aspect of which is softened by the almond, fig, cherry, and oak trees. Before the chapel ran the ancient “Carrera de Espagna,” by which Philip le Hardi went with his army when he undertook the disastrous war against Pedro III. of Aragon, in 1285, continuing along beneath the castle of Ultrera to the Coll de la Massane. The chapel used to have two holes in the wall to receive the alms of the passer-by when the doors were closed. It has been restored from the ruin into which it had fallen, but is seldom visited.
On a bare rock not far from Argelés is the hermitage of Notre Dame de Vic, apparently very ancient, from the thick walls and low heavy arches of the chapel. Just below is a dark ravine lined with trees, and a cistern that catches the water trickling down the rocks. A family now lives in the hermitage. From it you can see over a vast plain, and beyond is the Mediterranean Sea, a perpetual beauty in itself.
The hermitage of Notre Dame des Abeilles is near the sea-coast, not far from the Spanish frontier, in a region once noted for its honey. In some seasons it is approached by the dry bed of a mountain torrent that comes down in the spring through the undulating hills covered with vines and olives. As far 469back as 1657 the chapel was known as the Capilla Antigua, and was famous for the perpetual miracle of its ever-open door which no human hand could keep closed. It contained one of those images which was “not willing to be shut up.” This was an old Madonna, black as that which Giotto loved to pray before, with a honeycomb in her hand, sweet to the taste as the knowledge of wisdom to the soul, reminding one of the spouse of the Canticles, whose lips drop as the honeycomb. People used to come from Spain to revere this Virgin, but it was removed for safety in 1793, and is now in the parish church of Banyuls-sur-Mer, where, as in ancient times, a lamb is offered at her altar on Whit Tuesday, the feast of Notre Dame des Abeilles, which is afterwards sold to the highest bidder to defray the expenses of the festival. On the top of a neighboring mountain, about two thousand feet above the level of the sea, may be seen the old historic tower of Madeloc.
Three miles from the town of Collioure is the hermitage of Notre Dame de Consolation, to which you ascend out of vines and plantations of olives, almonds, and figs by a path cut in the rocks. By the wayside is an oratory here and there with some saint in the niche, as St. James, St. Ann, and Our Lady of Many Griefs. You seldom find a more charming spot in summer. The terrace before the chapel is shaded by alleys of lindens, chestnuts, and elms, some of which are of enormous size, and beneath them are fountains that diffuse their cooling waters. Below is a vineyard noted for its products, and through an opening between two hills can be seen the fortress of Miradon, the belfry of Collioure, and the sea in the distance. The ancient image of Our Lady has disappeared, but there is a modern one in the sculptured retablo. Here on certain days, as St. Ferréol’s, is a great gathering. The popular Goigs are sung to airs of simple melody, and every one goes down the eighteen steps to drink at the miraculous fountain. He who has prayed in this mountain chapel among the pious peasantry, and wandered in the shady alleys of the delightful terrace, and drunk of the waters, finds it difficult to tear himself away.
Such are a few of the ancient hermitages of the Pyrénées Orientales. Not one is without some beauty of its own that would commend it to the heart of the poet; not one without the balmy fragrance of some holy legend so attractive to the imagination; not one without its altar where God has for ages revealed himself, and the solitude where he loves to speak to the heart. Well may we exclaim with one[100] who was himself a hermit for a time on the shores of this very sea: “How delightful this boundless solitude where nature silently keeps watch! This silence has a thousand tongues that prompt the soul to soar away to God and wrap it in ineffable delights. Here no noise is heard but the human voice rising heavenward. These sounds full of sweetness alone trouble the secret solitude. Its repose is only interrupted by murmurs sweeter than the repose itself—the holy murmur of the lowly psalm. From the depths of the fervent soul rise melodious harmonies, and the voice of man accompanies his prayer to heaven.”
I.
Psalm cxxv. 5.
II.
Psalm lxxxiii. 6-8.
III.
Acts i. 14.
471IV.
Cantic. ii. 17.
V.
John xvii. 22.
Protestantism is very unfortunate in its warfare against modern unbelief. It is daily losing battles, losing men, and losing ground; and it feels so little reluctance to give up one dogma after another as to create the impression that the time is not far off when it will deliver up its last citadel and accept the yoke of the enemy. The fact is so well known that it needs no proof; nevertheless, as we have a striking illustration of it in a phase of the struggle which is now going on between Protestant and infidel thought on the all-important dogma of the existence of God, we will make it the subject of a short discussion, that our readers may form a clearer conception of the suicidal strategy of some Protestant controversialists.
A work has recently appeared which purports to be a natural history of atheism.[103] Its author is an accomplished Protestant scholar, a learned professor, an elegant writer, and an earnest advocate of religious ideas in accordance with the Bible as interpreted by his private judgment. His object is to 472refute atheism. Of course history, reason, and revelation are all on his side, so he is well armed; whilst his antagonist, though boisterous and aggressive, is by no means formidable, having had his strength thoroughly broken by former defeats. In such a condition of things the victory should evidently belong to the champion of Divinity. And yet no. Our champion strikes, indeed, some heavy blows, but while thus struggling with the enemy he falls into a quagmire. In other words, he grapples with a senseless atheism only to plunge into an equally senseless pantheism.
With regard to the first chapters of the work we have little to say. The author proves pretty conclusively that atheism is against reason. He shows that the belief in the existence of God has been universal not only among civilized nations but also among barbarous tribes. “Atheism,” says he, “is a disease of the speculative faculty.” “It indicates a chaotic state of mind.” “It is a doctrine so averse from the general current of human sentiment that the unsophisticated mass of mankind instinctively turn away from it, as the other foxes did from that vulpine brother who, having lost his tail in a trap, tried to convince the whole world of foxes that the bushy appendage in the posterior region was a deformity of which all high-minded members of the vulpine aristocracy should get rid as soon as possible.” This argument against atheism was well known to the ancients, who laid great stress upon it, as they saw that a universal agreement of mankind on the existence of God could not but proceed from our rational nature; but our author considers it as a simple “presumption,” rather than a proof in favor of the theistic doctrine.
He then argues from the principle of causality and from the wonderful wisdom displayed in the architecture of the universe. This, too, is very good. Next, he meets the objection drawn from the existence of evil in the world.
“If there were no poverty,” says he, “where were charity? If every person were equally independent and self-reliant, where would be the gracious pleasure on both sides which arises from the support given by the strong to the weak? Where again would be the topping virtue of moral courage, unless the majority, at some particular critical moment, were cowards?... In fact, always and everywhere the development of energy implies the existence of that which energy must subdue—namely, evil in some shape or other. Therefore the existence of evil is not a proof that there is no God; but it is by the overcoming of evil constantly that God proves himself to be God, and man proves himself to be God-like, when in his subordinate sphere he does the same.”
This answer is tolerably good; but we doubt if the atheist will be silenced by it. The author should have distinguished physical from moral evil. The existence of physical evil he could have shown to be perfectly reconcilable with God’s infinite goodness and providence; whereas the existence of moral evil should have been shown to be in no manner derogatory to his infinite sanctity. This has been done very fully by a multitude of philosophers and theologians; but it could not be done consistently by our pantheistic writer, because, as we shall see, all moral evil, according to his pantheistic theory, would either emanate from God or be immanent in him, with a total ruin of his infinite sanctity. Hence the atheist, after all the reasonings of the learned professor, 473may still urge that the existence of a God is incompatible with the existence of sin; and we think that the professor will be at a loss how to answer the difficulty so long as he holds to his pantheistic views.
As to the genesis of atheism the author makes many good and thoughtful remarks. There is a sort of atheism which arises from an absolute feebleness or babyhood of intellect. This he calls “atheism of imbecility”; but, says he, “we need not detain ourselves with this type of intellectual incapability. It is not atheists of this class that we are likely to meet with in the present age; and if we did meet them we should be much more likely to remit them summarily to some hospital of incurables than to a thinking school.”
The next type of the atheistic disease has its origin in moral depravity. There are men whose career is “like a piece of music made up of a constant succession of jars, which shakes the strings so much by unkindly vibrations that the instrument, from the force of an unnatural strain, cracks itself into silence prematurely. Now, unharmonized characters of this description are naturally indisposed, and practically incapacitated from recognizing order, design, and system in the constitution of the universe, and of course cannot see God.” This root of atheism is very well illustrated by Mr. Blackie. Here is a beautiful passage:
“It occurs to me to set down here the features of one of the most notable of those disorderly characters who lived in ancient Rome at the same epoch when the hollow atheism of Epicurus was dressed up for a day in the garb of poetical beauty by a poet of no mean genius called Lucretius. The man I mean is Catiline. Hear how Sallust in a well-known passage describes him: ‘Lucius Catiline, born of a noble family, a man of great strength, both of mind and body, but of a wicked and perverse disposition. To this man, from his youth upwards, intestine broils, slaughters, rapines, and civil wars were a delight; and in these he put forth all the energy of his youth. He could boast of a bodily frame capable of enduring heat and cold, hunger and watching, beyond all belief; he had a spirit daring, cunning, and full of shifts, ready alike to simulate what he was not and to dissimulate what he was, as occasion might call. Greedy of others’ property, he was lavish of his own; in passion fiery, in words copious, in wisdom scant. His unchastened ambition was constantly desiring things immoderate, incredible, and beyond human reach.’ This is exactly the sort of character, to whose completeness if anything like a philosophy is to be attributed, atheism will be that thing.”
In our age, however, according to the author, all the varieties of speculative and practical atheism which we meet with in common life are “weeds sprung from the rank soil of irreverence.” Man being naturally a religious animal, atheism can then only spring up when, in the individual or in society, any influence arises which nips the natural bud of reverence in the soul. Thus power may foster a strong feeling of independence, which may end in a monstrous self-worship. But liberty also, as the author well remarks, when unlimited, leads to godlessness. There is an atheism of democracy no less than of despotism. From extreme democracy, as from a hot-bed, atheism in its rankest stage naturally shoots up. There is nothing in the idea of mere liberty to create the feeling of reverence. The desire of unlimited liberty is an essentially selfish feeling, and has no regard for any Power from above. The fundamental maxim of all pure democracy is simply this: “I am as good 474as you, and perhaps a little better; I acknowledge nobody as my master, whether in heaven above or on earth beneath; I will not be fettered.”
But, continues the author, unlimited power and unlimited liberty are not the only social forces that are apt to run riot in the exaggerated assertion of the individual and the negation of all superhuman authority. There is the irreverence begotten of pride of intellect. Knowledge, of course, does not directly produce irreligion or extinguish piety, on the contrary, the more a wise man knows of the universe, the more he is lost in admiration of its excellence. But the knowing faculty is not the whole of a living man, and to bring forth its healthy fruits it must go hand-in-hand with a rich moral nature; divorced from this, knowledge begets intellectual pride and opens the way to godlessness.
Here the author points out the fact that there is something in the researches of modern science, at least in certain conditions of the intellectual atmosphere, not apparently favorable to the growth of piety and the cultivation of religious reverence. In not a few modern books of physical science we find nothing but “a curious fingering of wretched dumb details utterly destitute of soul. Whatever is in the book, depend upon it, God is not there. You will hear no end of talk about laws and forces, developments and evolutions, metamorphic forms, transmuted energies, and what not; but it is all dead—at least all blind. For seeing intellect and shaping reason there is no place in such systems.” The author strongly condemns this godless science, and shows at length its fickleness and unwisdom; and we might almost mistake him for a Catholic apologist, were it not that he ventures to speak of “non-sense” in connection with the Council of Trent, at which he irreverently sneers.
In the next chapter he treats of polytheism, whose origin he traces to misdirected reverence towards the powers of nature. He shows that polytheism was not atheism, and that polytheistic society could reach a certain degree of morality not to be found among atheists. To our mind, this chapter, though learned, is nearly superfluous; for it has scarcely any bearing on the history of atheism. In like manner we think that the chapter on Buddhism, which comes immediately after, and which fills seventy pages, was uncalled for. The author says that the British atheism of Bradlaugh, John Stuart Mill, Miss Martineau, Tyndall, and others called his attention to the assertion that in the far East atheism had been publicly professed for more than two thousand years, and was at present the corner-stone of the faith of more than four hundred millions of the human race. Could such an assertion be true? He could not believe it. To talk of a religion without God was, to his mind, “as to talk of the propositions in Euclid without the postulates on which they depend.” He therefore determined to get at the root of the matter, and thus he discovered that Buddhism was not atheism. It is to show this that he gives an elaborate explanation of the Buddhistic system. We need not discuss it, though we believe that some Buddhistic errors which he points out are somewhat exaggerated. We only repeat that the natural history of atheism would have lost nothing, and perhaps gained something, if this long digression 475on Buddhism had been omitted.
And now we have reached the last chapter of the work, where the author endeavors to make theologians responsible for a kind of modern atheism which he calls “atheism of reaction,” and where he makes his strange and foolish profession of pantheism. It is with this chapter alone that we shall be concerned in the following pages; for it is the evil doctrine contained in this objectionable chapter that spoils the whole work and gives it a totally anti-Christian character. Is the author a Freemason? Is he the mouth-piece of the Scotch and English lodges, whose members are anxious not to be ranked among atheists, though they have no definite creed? We do not care to know. But we may well affirm that his book is full of the Masonic spirit, and answers so well the present needs of British Freemasonry that we cannot be much mistaken if we call it a Masonic work. It is well known that the English Freemasonry, either because less advanced or because more prudent than the Masonry of France, thought it necessary to protest against a suicidal resolution lately passed by the latter, which permits the admission of candidates to membership irrespective of their belief or disbelief in the Great Architect of the universe. This resolution was strongly condemned by the English lodges, which lost no time in sending out a public official declaration that, so far as the English fraternity was concerned, no member would be recognized who did not profess to believe in the Great Architect, according to the old Masonic constitution. The wisdom of this measure cannot be doubted; for the English Masonry enjoys still a certain degree of respectability, which must not be compromised by a low sympathy with the desperate atheism of the French communists. Nevertheless, so long as they talk of a “Great Architect of the universe” without explaining more particularly what they mean by these words, there is reason to fear that their protest against the French infidels is a deceit. The pantheist, the Buddhist, and the agnostic, and even the materialist and the fatalist, can admit an Architect of the universe, provided they are allowed to put upon these words a free construction. One will identify him with Law, another with Nature, a third with Force, a fourth with Matter, and perhaps a fifth with Satan himself; for, as the old Manichæans held that this material world was the work of a bad principle, so there are now men (not unknown to Freemasonry) who consider Satan as their friend, their master, and their god. There are lodges where the “Great Leonard,” a satanic apparition, is an object of worship. No doubt these lodges recognize him as the “Great Architect of the universe.” And Proudhon was so bold as to publish that he was in love with Satan: “Viens, Satan; viens, que je t’embrasse!”
At any rate, if the book we are criticising has been written in the interest of the British Freemasons, it fails to show that they are more orthodox than their French brothers whom they have excommunicated. The pantheism professed in the book is just as worthless as the French atheism; for pantheism, just as much as atheism, makes all religion impossible. Hence a book which refutes atheism in order to establish pantheism, however filled with Scriptural quotations to make 476it look religious, is an anti-Christian book.
The atheism of reaction, of which the author speaks in the first part of this chapter, is, according to him, “a recoil” from the exaggerations and dictatorial imperiousness of theological orthodoxy. “Even theism,” he remarks, “the only reasonable theory of the universe, in the blundering fashion in which you state it, may possibly produce atheism, the most unreasonable of all theories.” The Reformation “was unquestionably a reaction from the excess of sacerdotal assertiveness, and the abuse of ecclesiastical power in the latter centuries of the middle ages.” This excess “gave sharp offence to the delicate conscience of Martin Luther, and roused his sleeping wrath into a thunder-storm of holy indignation.” How? “By parading the public places, and marching through the highways of Christendom with a sacerdotal gospel of salvation by works—by conventional and arbitrary works, penances, and payments of various kinds imposed by authority of the all-powerful clergy, and having little or nothing in common with the morality of a pure life and a noble character.” “Against this abuse Luther protested exactly in the same way, and with similar effect, as St. Paul protested against the ritualism of the Jews.” “The just liveth by faith. This great doctrine has saved the world twice, once from the cumbrous and narrow-minded ceremonialism of the Jews, and again from the despotic and soul-stupefying sacerdotalism of the Romanists.”
All this trash is beneath discussion; it only shows that the author is little acquainted with the men and the doctrines to which he refers. He seems never to have reflected that such “delicate consciences” as that of Martin Luther had as little scruple about falsifying history as they had about marrying nuns, rebelling against authority, or shedding blood. Even Protestants would now smile at the “thunder-storm of holy indignation” roused in the good soul of Luther at the thought of a gospel of salvation by works of penance. Well might even Lucifer’s “delicate conscience” have burst into a storm of “holy indignation,” as he could not work out his salvation without controlling his pride; and he might have protested against God’s orders, just as Luther did, by alleging that “the just liveth by faith.” How the reformers succeeded in “saving the world” by this doctrine of salvation without works, can be argued from the fact, attested by our author himself, that “anarchy and confusion, with the braying of a theological ass here, the cackling of a clerical goose there, and the raving of a sectarian madman in a third quarter, began to show face to such a degree that sensible and quietly-disposed men, like Erasmus, became seriously alarmed before the spirits they had conjured up, and retreated, with a devout timidity, into the sacred ark of the old Catholic Church.” This confession speaks volumes.
The author describes a sort of rampant orthodoxy which delights in doctrinal exaggeration of mysteries, and which is never so happy as when it can plant itself behind the broad shield of unintelligible formulas and traditionary shibboleths, to pluck Reason by the beard, and bid open defiance to the grand principle of the Scottish philosophy called common sense. And this, he says, excites an atheistical 477reaction. We really do not know of any orthodoxy which delights in “plucking Reason by the beard.” The Scotch Presbyterians may have done something of the kind, but they have no claim to orthodoxy. True orthodoxy is nowhere but in the church whose centre is Rome. But the Roman Church never used unintelligible formulas, never had shibboleths, and never plucked Reason by the beard, but on the contrary made use of the plainest language and the best cultivated reason to teach the revealed truth, and to defend it against heretics and unbelievers. Had the Protestant sects as much regard for Reason, and for the great principle of the Scottish philosophy called common sense, they would soon perceive that their claim to orthodoxy is nonsensical and their Christianity a delusion. And if they were logical, they would not, when their ministers pluck Reason by the beard, feel inclined to an “atheistical reaction,” but would only conclude that their ministers do not belong to God’s church, and have neither grace nor mission to teach Christianity.
The author admits the necessity of faith; but he scouts the doctrine that whoso believes not every dogma about the divine nature shall be eternally damned.
“The spirit,” he says, “from which damnatory declarations of this kind proceed is a mingled spirit of ignorance, conceit, presumption, insolence, and pedantry, and has more to answer for in the way of creating atheism than any other fault of Christian preachers that has come under my observation. Against declarations of this kind, however solemnly made, and however traditionally hallowed, the moral and intellectual nature of the most soundly-constituted minds rises up in instinctive rebellion: the intellectual nature, because the propounding of dogmas in a scholastic form about the nature of the Supreme Being shows an utter ignorance of the proper functions and limits of the human intellect; and the moral nature even more emphatically, because to make fellowship in any religion conditional on the merely intellectual acceptance of an abstract proposition addressed to the understanding, is to remove religion altogether out of its own region, where it can bear fruit, and to transplant it into a soil where it can show only prickles that fret the skin, and thorns that go deeply into the flesh.”
This is wisdom! Therefore, according to this writer, to believe in three divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, is unnecessary for salvation, and to say the contrary is conceit, insolence, and pedantry. It is difficult to conceive how a Christian could fall into such absurdity. The mystery of the Holy Trinity is the very base of Christianity. It is in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost that we are baptized; it is by the Son of God that we are redeemed; it is by the Holy Spirit that we are sanctified. Without this faith there is no Christianity, and without Christianity there is no salvation. We need not be afraid that “the moral and intellectual nature of the most soundly-constituted minds should rise up in instinctive rebellion” against this doctrine; for the history of eighteen centuries proves very conclusively that soundly-constituted minds have never rebelled against dogma. Nor do we see why the intellectual nature should denounce the use of the scholastic form in the propounding of dogmas. Such a form is clear, precise, and full of meaning; it is therefore the best intellectual form. And as to the moral nature, we can only say that nowhere is it more cultivated than in the Catholic Church—a truth which no one disputes—whilst the 478assumption that “the merely intellectual acceptance of an abstract proposition” suffices to qualify a man for religious fellowship, is a clear proof that the author has never read our Christian catechism.
“But,” says he, “it is not only in their way of presenting faith generally, but in their rash and unreasoned statement of special points of Christian belief, that our theologians have greatly erred.” And he mentions the doctrine of predestination and reprobation, the doctrine of original sin, the doctrine of eternal punishment, the doctrine of creation out of nothing, and the doctrine of God’s providential intervention in human affairs. We do not deny that the doctrine of predestination and reprobation has been discussed rashly and in an irreverent manner so as to create scandal and discord; but it is on the Protestant, and especially on the Calvinistic, preachers and writers that lies the responsibility of such deplorable quarrels. It was their private judgment pushed to excess and their pride that roused the storm. Of course our Catholic theologians could not look silently on such a wanton perversion of truth; to defend human liberty on the one side and God’s justice on the other they had to take part in the difficult controversy. They often differed in matters of detail, but their conclusions as to the main point—that is, as to the dogma—were uniform and irreproachable. Mysteries, however, do not cease to be true because men cannot unravel them. Theologians do not claim the privilege of tearing asunder the veil through which mysteries are seen; but they claim the honor of defending the objective truth of mysteries against the attacks of heresy and unbelief. This is why theologians investigate and expound mysteries; and to contend that the result of their labors is to encourage atheism is to abandon “the great principle of the Scottish philosophy called common sense,” or, to use another phrase of the author’s, “to pluck Reason by the beard.”
The author says that he has brought forward this matter (of predestination and reprobation) specially because the Calvinistic view of it, as laid down in the catechism used in the elementary schools of Scotland, occasions “no small amount of misery and self-torture to young persons beginning seriously to look into the great truths of religion and morals.” We agree with him. The Calvinistic doctrine of reprobation makes man the helpless victim of a tyrannical and cruel God, destroys all the seeds of piety, and fosters despair. But if its adoption may lead to atheism, it is not the fault of theology; it is the fault of Calvin’s rebellion against the church.
The next good service done by theologians to the anti-Christian tendencies of some “respectable” (?) classes of the community has been, according to our author, their inculcation of the doctrine of original sin. “Original sin,” says he with Coleridge, “is not a doctrine but a fact”; by which he means, we suppose, that the first man sinned, but that from this fact we cannot conclude that his children are born in sin.
“Moral merit and demerit are in the very nature of things personal; to imagine their transference is to destroy their definition. If every baby when born, in virtue of an act of transgression committed some six or eight thousand years ago by the father of the race, must be confessed a ‘hell-deserving sinner,’ and lying on the brink of eternal damnation 479as soon as it lies on its nurse’s lap, then every man of sound moral feeling is entitled to protest against a doctrine of which such a cruel absurdity is a necessary postulate.”
Here again the author is at fault. The dogma of the inheritance of guilt from our first parent is not an invention of theologians, but an explicit doctrine of the New and even of the Old Testament. To omit other quotations, St. Paul the apostle, whose authority is so frequently appealed to by our author, declares that Adam sinned, and that in him all men have sinned. Now, if St. Paul cannot be charged with doing a good service to anti-Christianity by preaching this doctrine, why should theologians be denounced for preaching it?
The author argues that “merit and demerit are personal,” and that “to imagine their transference is to destroy their definition.” Yes; but the dogma of original sin does not imply any such transference. The original sin is personal and inherited, not transferred. “Out of good seed,” as the author tells us, “a good plant will grow, and out of bad seed a bad plant.” Is the badness of the plant transferred? No; it is inherited. And so it is with the stain of original sin. We are born of a degraded father, and we are a degraded race—degraded not only physically but morally; that is, deprived of the supernatural grace which accompanied the original justice in which man had been created. This is what St. Paul expresses by saying that we are born “children of wrath.” It is not in virtue of an act committed six thousand years ago that every baby is formally a sinner; he is a sinner owing to his own personal destitution of supernatural grace, just as the child of a redskin is formally a redskin, not by the skin of his father but by his own. This doctrine has been taught and held from the origin of Christianity by the most learned, the most acute, and the most holy men, without their sound moral sense being hurt by it; it was reserved to our vicious and ignorant generation to take scandal at the pretended cruelty involved in such divine dispensation. What a pity that God, in shaping his decrees, forgot to consult our learned professor of Greek![104]
The doctrine of eternal punishment is, according to Mr. Blackie, another “stone of stumbling” set up by the Christian doctors. The ancient Greeks, he remarks, had also taught this doctrine; but they taught it in a very modified form. Only a few flaming offenders were condemned to a state of helpless reprobation and inexhaustible torture. But the Christian churches “committed themselves to a theology drawn up by scholastic persons in a series of formal propositions which challenge contradiction and refuse compromise. Therefore the doctrine of infinite torture for finite sins is still stoutly maintained as a point of Christian faith, and as stoutly disowned by a large class of benevolent and thoughtful persons, who look upon such a doctrine as utterly inconsistent with the conception of a wise and benevolent Being.” He then adds that if there were not a great deal of dogmatic obstinacy, a fair amount of hermeneutical ignorance, and a considerable vein of cowardice also in the ecclesiastical minds, 480this stumbling-block might easily be removed. For “it does not require any very profound scholarship to know that the word αἰώνιος, which we translate everlasting, does not signify eternity absolutely and metaphysically, but only popularly, as when we say that a man is an eternal fool, meaning only that he is a very great fool.”
This last argument is easily answered. In fact, it does not require any very profound scholarship to know that the word αἰώνιος here means everlasting in the sense of perpetual duration. This is evident from collateral passages of Scripture, from which we know that the fire of hell “shall not be extinguished,” that, the smoke of the torments of the wicked “shall ascend for ever and ever,” that their worm “shall never die,” etc., all which expressions, according to our “hermeneutical ignorance,” more than suffice to annihilate the professor’s pretension. Besides, the ancient translators of the Bible were as good professors of Greek, to say the least, as Mr. Stuart Blackie; but they never suspected that there would come a time when such slang as “an eternal fool” would mean “a very great fool.” It is too late now for any professor to pretend that the ancient Greek had no correct interpretation till English slang made its appearance.
The other argument consists in saying that a finite sin cannot deserve an infinite punishment. This, too, is easily answered. The act of sin is finite, but it violates the infinite majesty and sanctity of God, and on this account it partakes of infinity. However, let us drop this consideration, which is too scholastic to be understood by certain modern professors of Protestant institutions. We have another answer. A man can dig out his eyes in less than a minute; the act is finite, but its result is perpetual blindness. In like manner a man loses, by sinning, his fitness to see God in his glory; the act is finite, but the consequent unfitness is, of its nature, everlasting. God alone can restore the sinner to his previous condition; but this he is not obliged to do. The rehabilitation of a sinner is a real miracle, just as the resuscitation of Lazarus, and miracles are not the rule but the exception. God warns us that “the hope of the sinner shall perish,” that “now is the acceptable time,” and that after death “there is no redemption.” And yet we are accused of “dogmatic obstinacy” because we do not renounce this doctrine of faith!
We are told that there is a large class of “benevolent and thoughtful persons” who look upon such a doctrine “as utterly inconsistent with the conception of a wise and benevolent Being.” But our “dogmatic obstinacy” compels us to remark that this wise and benevolent Being knows much better than those “benevolent and thoughtful persons” what his wisdom and benevolence require; and therefore it is from his word, not from those “thoughtful persons,” that we must accept the solution of the problem. It may be that in doing so, we exhibit “a considerable vein of cowardice”; but it is wise to fear God. We are weak and he is almighty.
“Another stumbling-block which theologians have laid in the way of the devotee of physical sciences is the creation out of nothing. This dogma, which, as every scholar knows, is not necessarily contained in any place, whether of the Old or New Testament, arose in the Jewish Church, and has been stamped with orthodox authority in Christendom, partly 481from a pious desire to magnify the divine Omnipotence; partly from the timid stupidity of clinging to the letter instead of breaching the spirit of Scripture; and partly also from the evil trick which we have just mentioned of importing metaphysics and scholastic definitions into the Bible, from which all the Scriptures are the furthest possible removed. Now, the objection to this doctrine on the part of modern thinkers I conceive to be this: that, though not perhaps absolutely impossible, it is contrary to all known experience, and highly improbable if we are to judge of the constitution of things from what we see, not from what we choose to imagine. It is the vulgar imagination which delights to represent the Supreme Being as a sort of omnipotent harlequin, launching the fiat of his volition, as the nimble gentleman in the pantomime strikes the table with his wand, and out comes a man, or a monkey, or something else, out of nothing. This is man’s crude conception; but God’s ways are not as man’s ways, and his way is evolution. Nothing is created out of nothing; and mere volition, even of an omnipotent Being, cannot be conceived as bringing into existence a thing of an absolutely opposite nature, called matter.”
To answer these reckless assertions in detail would take a volume. Fortunately, however, we may be dispensed from such a task, as there are hundreds of excellent books, both philosophical and theological, where the dogma of creation is fully established and victoriously vindicated. On the other hand, our professor does not give any proof of his infidel view; he merely asserts what has no possibility of proof. “Nothing is created out of nothing,” says he; but philosophy demonstrates that nothing is, or can be, created but out of nothing. “God’s way is evolution.” No; God’s way is creation. Evolution is man’s way, as Mr. Darwin and all his admirers know; and, since (as the author reminds us) God’s ways are not as man’s ways, it follows on his own showing that God’s way is not evolution. Evolution is impossible without antecedent creation. The subject of evolution is matter, and matter is a created being. To deny the creation of matter is to assume that matter is eternal and self-existent, or, in other terms, to make it an independent being or an appurtenance of Divinity; and this colossal absurdity even the author must reject, as he confesses that the nature of matter is “absolutely opposite” to the nature of Divinity.
The author imagines that the absolute opposition between God and matter makes it impossible for God to create matter, because “mere volition, even of an omnipotent Being, cannot be conceived as bringing into existence a thing of an absolutely opposite nature.” These words show the author’s philosophical ignorance of the law of causation. The law is that efficient causes must always be of a nature entirely different from that of their effects. The efficient cause of gravitation at the earth’s surface is the substance or matter of the earth itself; but gravitation is neither matter nor substance, but something entirely different. The soul is the efficient cause of the voluntary movements produced in our organism; and yet those movements have nothing common with the substance of the soul. And the same is to be said of all other effects as compared with their efficient causes.[105] Hence it is idle to argue that an omnipotent Being, owing to his spirituality, cannot create matter. The author will say that every effect must be contained 482in its cause, and that matter is not contained in God. To which it must be answered that effects are eminently and virtually, not formally, contained in their efficient causes. If the effect existed formally in its cause its production by the cause would become a contradiction; for the effect would exist before its effection. Effects are said to be pre-contained in their causes only in this sense: that causes possess a power competent to produce their effects. Causation is action, and action is the production of an act. Every act produced is the formal principle of a new existence, or of a new mode of existence. To say that God cannot create matter is to say that God cannot produce an act giving formal existence to matter; which amounts to the denial of omnipotence. Still, the existence of matter must be accounted for. Matter undergoes modifications and is subject to natural agents; it is therefore essentially potential and contingent. How, then, did it come into existence? And how is it potential, if it is not created out of nothing, since nothingness is the only source of potentiality?
But we are told that creation out of nothing “is contrary to all known experience.” This shows what new kind of philosophers nowadays we have to deal with. They want to see God making a few acts of creation before they consent to believe, just as they want a lecturer to prove his theories by a series of visible experiments. God, of course, will not satisfy their curiosity; he has given them the light of reason and the light of revelation, which are quite enough. But were God to condescend to their yearning, would they believe even then? Would not these men, who have the impudence to speak of an “omnipotent Harlequin,” declare with equal profanity any visible fact of creation to be jugglery?
The author tells us also that “if we are to judge of the constitution of things from what we see, not from what we choose to imagine,” we shall find out that creation is improbable. At this we need not wonder; for the author is a great enemy of scholastic definitions and of metaphysics—that is, of intellectual light. He sees with the eyes of his body, but he shuts the eyes of his reason. Had he less horror of metaphysics, he might learn that “the constitution of things” proclaims in the loudest and most unmistakable language the fact of creation; and that every change or movement in the universe furnishes a peremptory demonstration of it. But what can a man see who discards definitions and disregards the principles of real philosophy?
And now let us see to what conclusions the author is led by his style of reasoning. He says:
“To us dependent ephemeral creatures all existence is a divine miracle; and the continuity of that divine miracle in the shape of what we call growth is, so far as we can see, the eternal form of divine creativeness. The absolute dualism of mind and matter which is implied in the received orthodoxy of the church is not warranted by any fact that exact science can recognize; nowhere do we find mind acting without a material instrument, nowhere matter absolutely divorced from the action of inherent forces, inasmuch as even the most motionless statical condition of things most solid is always produced by a balance of forces in some way or other—forces which, if they are not blind, but acting according to a calculated law, as they manifestly do, are only another name for Mind. This view of the constitution of the universe ... is generally disowned with a certain pious horror as pantheism, a 483word to which a great chorus of thoughtless and ill-informed people are straightway ready to echo back atheism, with the feeling that the two terms, though etymologically as opposed as white and black, are practically the same.... Pantheism, scientifically understood, has nothing to do either with materialism or with atheism. It ... simply denies the existence of two opposite entities in the world of divine reality, while it asserts the existence of only one. The world is essentially one; and the All, though externally many, is, when traced to its deepest roots, not different from the One; as the human body, for instance, is both one and many.... The term pantheism, therefore, is not opposed to unity, or to the principle of unity in the world, which is God; and a pantheist, as Hegel well said of Spinoza, may more properly be said to deny the world than to deny God.”
This is the quagmire into which the professor, as we said at the beginning of this article, has fallen. The view he takes of “the constitution of the universe,” the assertions he makes, and the arguments he employs are a mass of confusion to which no more appropriate name can be given than nonsense. We are “dependent ephemeral creatures.” Yes. But how could he call us “creatures,” he who denies creation? or “dependent,” he who makes us one with God? or “ephemeral,” he who includes us in the eternal All? Is not this a flagrant contradiction?
To us “all existence is a divine miracle.” If so, the author cannot consistently be a pantheist. Miracles are facts transcending the power and exigencies of nature. Pantheism divinizes nature, and admits of nothing transcending the power and exigencies of nature; and therefore pantheism can admit of no miracle.
“Growth is, so far as we can see, the eternal form of divine creativeness.” Growth implies change, whereas the eternal form of divine creativeness is altogether unchangeable. Hence, so far as we can see (and we see it most evidently), growth is not what the professor imagines.
“The absolute dualism of mind and matter is not warranted by any fact that exact science can recognize.” If so, then exact science should find a way of reconciling the well-known inertia of matter with the equally well-known immanent and reflex self-activity of mind. For, as the latter excludes the former, their existence is the most incontrovertible evidence of the absolute dualism of matter and mind; and this evidence is quite scientific, too, for it is the result of universal and unexceptionable experience. But our men of science, who profess to deal with nothing but matter, are not the best judges about the attributes of mind. They are gross and material; they must see, and touch, and smell, and subject everything to chemical analysis; and spiritual substances refuse to be thus manipulated. Hence no wonder if these latter substances are not recognized in any fact of exact science so long as “exact science” is confined to the study of matter.
“Nowhere do we find mind acting without a material instrument.” Be it so; it does not follow that matter and mind are one and the same thing. The organ is not the organist, and the instrument is not the artist.
“Nowhere do we find matter divorced from the action of inherent forces.” Quite true; but these forces of matter are absolutely blind. The author pretends that they are not blind, because “they act according to a calculated law”; but this is a new blunder. It is 484not the forces of matter that have calculated the law, it is God that subjected them to the law; and their acting according to the law is a mechanical necessity. The very fact of their inviolable subjection to the law proves their utter blindness; for were they intelligent, they would have given before now some instances of proud rebellion at least in the hands of the torturing chemist.
“This view ... is generally disowned as pantheism.” Certainly. Let the author remember “the principle of the Scottish philosophy called common sense,” and let him ask himself if a view generally disowned deserves the honor of being adopted by a professor of a Scotch university.
“Pantheism, scientifically understood, has nothing to do with atheism.” May we ask how pantheism can be “scientifically understood”? Science is concerned only with material phenomena. God, mind, and spiritual things in general are beyond its reach. How, then, can what is above science be understood “scientifically”? And, again, how can pantheism be “understood” at all, since it is as contradictory as a changeable immutability, a compounded simplicity, or a sinful holiness? That the terms “pantheism” and “atheism” are etymologically opposed is quite clear; but our question is one of things, not of mere terms. The atheist says to God: “Thou hast no existence”; the pantheist says: “Thou art a compound of matter.” Which of them is better? Which is less irrational—the one who degrades his Creator, or the one who merely shuts his eyes that he may not see him? After all, neither the one nor the other has an object of worship—the atheist because he denies its existence, the pantheist because he denies its superiority; and thus the atheist and the pantheist are twin-brothers, with this only difference: that the latter wears a mask of hypocrisy, that he may the easier seduce those who would be disgusted with the impudence of the former.
“The world is essentially one.” No greater blunder could be uttered.
“The All, though externally many, is not different from the One.” The truth is that things cannot be “externally many” unless they be also intrinsically and substantially many. Thus in the human body, which the author brings forward as a fit illustration of his view, the limbs are many because each one substantially differs from each other. It is the negation of identity that makes things be many; and no such negation can be conceived without entities intrinsically distinct. Hence, if the All is “many,” it must intrinsically differ from the One.
“Pantheism is not opposed to the principle of unity in the world, which is God.” To this we say, first, that pantheism is opposed to the fact of plurality in the world. This fact is so manifest that no professor can plead ignorance of it. We say, secondly, that the world has unity of design, of composition, and of government, but no unity of substance. This, too, is as evident as noonday.
“Spinoza may more properly be said to deny the world than to deny God.” Were this granted, it would still be supremely foolish to trust and follow a leader who denies the world. But Spinoza denies God as well, if not explicitly, at least by implication. To set up a mass of contradictions, and to 485call it “God,” is to declare that there can be no God; and this is just what Spinoza did, through ignorance, we suppose, rather than malice, though not without a sovereign arrogance and presumption.
Before we end we must take notice of an attempt, on the part of Prof. Blackie, at answering the objection that pantheism destroys religion, “because it destroys human personality, and denies individual responsibility, on the foundation of which all human society, as well as all religious obligation, is constituted.” He answers thus: “Freedom, personality, and responsibility are facts which no theological or metaphysical theories can meddle with, any more than they can with generation, or appetite, or digestion.... The answer to all such speculative objections from transcendental theories, when brought into the world of practice, is a fact and a flogging.”
Bravo! Freedom, personality, and responsibility are facts. The pantheistic theory contradicts them, but cannot interfere with them any more than with generation, appetite, and digestion. Hence when any one argues from the pantheistic theory against freedom, personality, and responsibility, he must be answered with “a fact and a flogging.” And, vice versa, if any one from freedom, personality, and responsibility argues against the pantheistic theory which makes these things inexplicable and impossible, he, too, must be answered with “a fact and a flogging.” Does the reader understand the excellence of this liberalistic logic? Yes, with a fact and a flogging; for the eloquence of the scourge sometimes replaces with advantage the doubtful efforts of a hesitating tongue: Si non prosunt verba, prederunt verbera. What a candid confession of pantheistic impotence! But then, if flogging is to be resorted to, who shall be found more worthy of it than the pantheist himself, who wantonly contradicts by his theory what his common sense recognizes to be a fact?
The book we have thus far examined contains many other errors on important points of religion; but our readers need not be detained any longer in their refutation. The author admits a general providence, but a providence which imparts particular favors in reward of prayer he does not admit. Answers to prayers he considers to be “as ridiculous as interpretations of judgments are presumptuous.” For him “the idea of a God, constantly interfering in answer to prayer, or otherwise, is one of the most anthropomorphic of theological conceptions.” “Asceticism and monkery form a very sad and lamentable chapter in the history of the church.” Abstinence and mortification are “a pedantic and ridiculous sort of virtue,” and they are “abnormal, monstrous, inhuman, and absurd.” Then “there is, and can be, no such thing as a priesthood in Christianity.” It would take too long to enumerate all his theological, philosophical, and historical blunders, for his book is full of them; so we must give up the task.
In the last pages of the work we find a fairly good refutation of atheism, as maintained by Miss Martineau, Mr. Atkinson, and Prof. Tyndall. But what is the use of such a refutation, if it is intended merely as a first step towards pantheism? A pantheist has no right to refute atheism. Whatever he may say against it can always, in one manner 486or another, be retorted against himself; and when the retorsion is pushed on to its last consequences, his defeat takes the aspect of an atheistic victory. Thus nothing is gained, and discussions become interminable, to the great satisfaction of the sceptics. It is for this reason that most of the Protestant controversies on religious topics cannot be settled. Truth, if mixed with error, has little, if any, chance of victory; and books in which truth is compelled to minister to error are all the more pernicious because their poison is less recognizable. If this Natural History of Atheism is what we assume it to be—a Masonic work—then we must confess that the Scottish Masons could not be served better than by such a baneful mixture of Calvinistic dogmatism and pantheistic dreams.
“Moida! Moida! you were right; you knew him better than I did: Conrad Seinsheim has already proposed,” were Walburga’s first words as she entered her home in Fingergasse, where her friend was awaiting her to go out for a walk.
“Oh! good, good. How delighted I am! You’ll soon be back in your old castle,” cried the joyous Moida, springing up from her seat by the window and dancing round the room.
“Alas! I scarcely dare yet to give full rein to hope,” added Walburga, shaking her head.
“What is that? I didn’t understand you!” said the other, abruptly pausing in her merry skips. “Of course you said yes to him? Of course you did?”
“I said neither yes nor no; he is to return in three days for an answer.”
“O you naughty, puzzling creature! Why didn’t you tell the poor fellow yes on the spot, as I did to my darling Ulrich?”
“Why?” said Walburga, looking pensively at her; then, after hesitating a moment: “Well, Moida, it was because I have thus far adroitly, but perhaps foolishly, concealed something from him; you know what I mean. And, like a coward, when the crisis arrived, when he asked for my hand, I still put off the revelation for a brief space.”
“Well, Mr. Seinsheim will be a fool, a big fool, if he doesn’t marry you; that’s all I can say,” replied Moida, tenderly twining her arms about her friend’s neck. “And, what’s more, if I didn’t think we were all of us going to live near one another at Loewenstein, I’d hate him for trying to take you away from me.”
“Well, you and I have certainly been very happy together, have we not, Moida?”
“Oh! very, very, very; and you should have kept your pretty nightingale, so as to have brought him with us to Tyrol.”
“Perhaps I ought,” answered Walburga, her countenance now clearing up; for hope, sweet hope, was just at this moment flashing its rays into her bosom and inspiring her to believe that Conrad would surely accept her, accept her exactly as she was, and, like a brave, good husband, bear upon his own shoulders as much of her cross as he was able.
A few minutes later the two friends were passing through the park on their way to Foering. This place is simply a beer-garden—one of the many within an hour’s walk of Munich. Here on the warmest summer day the air is cool, for the spot is high and commanding, and, moreover, well shaded by elm-trees. But better than breeze or shade is the beer—beer such as one can taste only in Southern Bavaria. In the middle of the garden is a platform elevated a few inches above the ground, where those who are fond of dancing may trip it merrily to the music of a fiddle, harp, and flute, dropping now and again a copper into the 488tin plate which one of the minstrels passes through the crowd.
When Moida and Walburga arrived Foering was well-nigh deserted, and they had no difficulty in being helped at once to whatever they wanted, for the good-natured waiter-girl had only them to wait on. But ere long other people began to come. First appeared a husband and wife, the former carrying the baby—the best of all babies, of course—and so bound up in swaddling-clothes that the little thing could do naught except wink. Then followed a soldier hand-in-hand with a buxom lass, with nature’s own rouge glowing on her cheeks; and hand-in-hand these two sat down, and hand-in-hand they quenched their thirst out of the same mug, the beverage tasting all the more like nectar for this sweet communion of lips.
Presently a pursy gentleman waddled into the garden, his respiration so laborious that you could hear him from afar, and dropped heavily down upon the same bench where Moida and Walburga were seated. To judge by his appearance you would have declared there was not a spark of sentiment in his whole composition; he looked to be a sheer mass of beer-drenched humanity. Yet this was wide, wide of the truth. Herr Wurst was organist of the cathedral, was passionately fond of poetry, and knew by heart every song of the Minnesingers. In short, he was a Bavarian every inch of him, and never was so much soul hidden in a sausage.
And thus on, on the people came, all jovial, all orderly, and to look at them you might have fancied they had not a care or trouble in the world. Then by and by the music commenced. ’Twas a waltz from Strauss, and the corpulent organist, who knew our young friends—for they both sang in his choir—danced thrice round the platform with each; and the baby in swaddling-clothes lay upon the bench like a little Stoic while its daddy and mammy whirled round too; and the buxom lass and the soldier likewise danced—danced so hard, threw such life into their motions, that when at length they paused to give their hearts a rest you might have thought they had been out in a shower of rain.
“How often dear Ulrich and I have enjoyed ourselves here!” spoke Moida, when she and Walburga were once more seated over their beer-mugs. “I do believe we once danced a whole hour without stopping. And oh! how sweet it was to coo and whisper our love to each other while we flew round. Why, I don’t think I knew what life was till I became his betrothed.”
“Well, I hope you each had a glass of your own to sip the beer from,” remarked Walburga, smiling.
“No indeed; we went halves in everything. And now—just think—we are soon going to be married! And you too. O Walburga! Walburga!”
The latter, who was still under the radiant influence of hope, and who seemed to feel anew the warm touch of Conrad’s lips, cried: “Yes, yes, my future is bright, and I will prove by my devotion to him how grateful I am; and there’ll be no happier husband than Conrad Seinsheim!”
Presently, however, her countenance fell, and in a low, grave tone she added: “But suppose all this were not to happen? Everything 489must remain in doubt and uncertainty till I meet him again, you know.”
“Oh! but he is so full of good sense, so unlike the rest of the world, that you may dispel all doubt. Conrad is sure to take you—sure,” answered Moida.
Cheered by these words, Walburga, who was not blest with the same even temperament as her friend, and who too easily flew from one extreme to the other, became once more blithe and cheerful, and she proceeded to speak of Conrad in a strain which their brief acquaintance hardly justified. But love engenders love; and excited by the thought that she was loved by him (Walburga had never had a lover before), a tender, responsive passion now inspired her tongue, and during the rest of the afternoon even Moida’s high spirits did not soar higher than her own.
“And now,” said Walburga, when the sun was verging near the horizon—“now let us seek the grove into which my dear nightingale flew; I long to hear him singing his song in liberty.”
“And making love to some other pretty bird,” returned Moida, as she rose from the table.
Accordingly, they wended their way back to the park; and in about half an hour Walburga came to a halt and said: “Here is the spot; just among these bushes he disappeared.” Then, after listening a moment, she added: “And that is his voice. Hark!”
“May it not be another nightingale?” observed Moida.
“Well, let us approach softly and try to get a peep at the one that is now singing; if ’tis mine I’ll know him by a bit of blue ribbon I tied about his neck.”
Presently they caught a glimpse of the little songster amid the green leaves, and, by the ribbon he wore, ’twas undoubtedly Walburga’s pet.
“Oh! how glad I am I set him free,” spoke the latter in an undertone, as if she feared to disturb his roundelay. Then, pointing towards a neighboring bush: “And look! look! Yonder is his mate.”
Walburga had scarcely breathed these words when the other bird took wing and perched itself close beside hers. And now the song waxed softer and more melodious, and a tear glistened in her eye as she gazed upon this happy scene of love-making.
Presently a rushing, swooping sound was heard; ’twas like a blast of wild wind, and the girl gave a start. Moida was startled, too, and wondered what it was. But before either of them could utter a cry or hasten one step to the rescue, a hawk had pounced upon Walburga’s sweet warbler and carried him away.
The next three days were anxious ones for Conrad and Walburga. The former endeavored to beguile his thoughts by watching the work which was going on at the castle, and spent as much time as possible beside Ulrich, under whose skilful hand the pristine beauty of the interior of the tower was fast returning.
Whenever the youth spoke of Moida, Conrad’s face would light up, and he would exclaim: “Yes, yes, a happy day is coming for her and you and all of us.” Yet down deep in his heart he felt a strange misgiving. He remembered the pensive look which more than once had shadowed Walburga’s countenance whilst they were conversing together; nor did Conrad forget 490the tear—the tear he had been so tempted to kiss away. “And there was a shyness, too, about her which I cannot understand,” he said to himself. “She seemed afraid to look at me. And when finally I proposed, instead of answering yes or no she put me off for three long days.”
Conrad’s own temperament, as Moida Hofer had discerned, was not unlike Walburga’s; and now the thought of waiting this space of time was very trying to him. At one moment he was full of hope; at another he was certain that he would be rejected, and then he was plunged in despair.
Yet, singular to relate, when at length the dawn of the third day did arrive, Conrad was seized with a mysterious impulse not to leave Loewenstein; and Ulrich, to whom he had opened his heart and confided all his thoughts, was unable to comfort him and give him courage to shake off the gloom which had come over his spirits.
“I had a dream last night,” spoke Conrad—“a dream that has wrought on me a most vivid, painful impression. I believe I shall never get over it—never!”
“Pray, what was the dream?” inquired Ulrich.
“I thought I was standing on the brink of a river, whose dark waters as they rolled by me gave forth a moaning, melancholy sound; and ever and anon along the surface of the flood there passed a human head; and every face of the many, of the thousands, I saw float by wore traces of pain and woe, while some were stamped with a sorrow perfectly indescribable. And, oh! one of these faces”—here Conrad shuddered—“was the face of Walburga. And she watched me and watched me until she disappeared in the distance with a mournfulness no human tongue can express. Then when she was gone I heard a voice cry out: ‘This stream hath its fountain in the heart of poor humanity; and these waters are all the tears which have been shed since Paradise was lost.’”
“What a curious dream!” said Ulrich. “But I beg you to forget it. ’Tis only a dream.”
Walburga, too, was impatient and anxious for the time to fly by. And now while she sat at her easel waiting for Conrad to appear—’twas the morning of the day she had named—her heart fluttered at every footstep that approached. Her countenance was paler than usual, and on it were marks of grief. Nor ought we to smile at the girl for feeling so acutely the death of her nightingale; it was such a cruel death, and she had loved the bird so much. Indeed, it was her very love for it that had prompted her to set it free. Only for this her pet would still have been warbling in its cage; now nothing remained of it save a few scattered feathers.
“Alas! will my heart, perhaps, be torn like his?” she sighed, as she waited and listened.
But hour after hour went by, and still Conrad did not come; nor did he show himself at all this day, nor the following day either.
And then Walburga murmured to herself: “Ah! I might have known it would be so. He has been told by somebody else what I should have let his own eyes discover. Now I shall see him no more.”
The evening of the sixth day, after having waited for him at the Pinakothek, but, as before, in vain, the poor girl went her way home, where she might bow her head on 491Moida’s breast and silently lament. But lo! on reaching her humble abode her friend was not to be found—Moida was gone! On the pin-cushion was found a slip of paper, whereon was written: “Stay calm, dear Walburga, and trust in me; I’ll be back to-morrow.” Moida did not reveal that she was gone to Loewenstein to learn what had become of Conrad Seinsheim.
As changeable in spirits as the one whom he so passionately loved, Conrad arrived in Munich, his heart ravished with joy at the prospect before him; for Moida had assured him beyond the shadow of a doubt that ere the clock struck noon Walburga would be his affianced bride.
“She has been expecting you day after day,” said Moida; “and I can hardly forgive you for putting her patience to such a trial.”
The day was anything but pleasant; the rain poured down like a deluge, and the streets were gloomy and deserted. But when there is blue sky in our heart all the clouds in the heavens cannot shut it out; and so Conrad did not heed the tempest in the least. At length he reached the Pinakothek; and when Walburga found him once more by her side, she had to call forth all her resolution, in order to preserve a mien of calm and dignity.
Only by a great effort she succeeded; at least her eyes did not stray from the canvas, and, except for a flush of color which came over the paleness of her cheek, one might have fancied she was not even aware of his presence.
“Gracious lady,” began Conrad in faltering accents, “I am come late—very late, I know. But I hope not too late?”
“Oh! no, sir. I forgive you,” answered Walburga, with a smile which at once doubly assured him that the happy moment was indeed close at hand. “But pray be patient yet a little while,” she added, “and watch well what I am about to do; ’tis the finishing touch to my picture.”
“Your beautiful picture!” ejaculated Conrad. “How I long to see it hanging in Loewenstein Castle.”
And now, while Walburga went on with her brush, he fell into attentive silence. But he said within himself: “Only for what Miss Hofer has told me of you, of your kind heart, I should set you down as the cruelest of mortals for keeping me in a fever of suspense during such an age as a single minute.”
Presently Conrad’s expression became one of amazement, and, quite unable to contain himself, he exclaimed, “Why, what are you doing?”
But without making any response the girl continued her work; and her hand was wonderfully steady, considering that Conrad’s trial, great as it was, was not greater than her own. Nay, the agony of waiting was tenfold more poignant for her than for him.
In a few minutes she had finished, and then again he cried out, this time loud enough to be heard in the main gallery: “Why, why do you disfigure your chef d’œuvre by a hideous birthmark?”
With a tremor and cheek white as death Walburga here let her brush fall, then abruptly cut short Conrad’s exclamations of regret at what she had done by saying:
“Pray listen, sir; I am about to answer the solemn question you put to me a week ago.” But before going further she paused a 492moment, perhaps to smother a wail of anguish that was ready to burst from her lips; and while she paused Conrad leaned towards her to catch the coming words, and you might have heard the beating of his heart. Then Walburga spoke: “My response, sir, is—No!”
There are times in life when we scarce can put faith in what our ears plainly tell us; to Conrad Seinsheim this was such a time. His expression when these words reached him, it were impossible to describe; he stood like one petrified.
In another moment, with astonishment, and wrath, and grief struggling madly in his breast, he turned and hastened out of the Pinakothek; and as he went, oh! bitterly did he curse the hour, the fatal hour, when he first laid eyes on this beautiful but utterly heartless and deceiving woman.
O Conrad, Conrad, Conrad! why didst thou not stay thy rash flight an instant—only an instant—and give Walburga one other glance? Hadst thou done this, we verily believe, nay, we are certain, thy flashing eyes would have softened to tenderness and pity.
For at the sound of thy departing steps she turned round towards thee, and her face was as the face thou sawest in thy dream. But destiny shaped it otherwise: thou didst not pause, and Walburga floated down the dark stream, away from thee for ever and for ever.
Ulrich retired to rest, the night which closed the stormy day when Conrad went to Munich, in a very happy mood. Not only did he believe himself on the high-road to success, for Conrad had promised to find him steady employment, but the absence of his benefactor made the youth confident that Walburga had put an end to his suspense by giving him a favorable answer. “Yes, Conrad told me that if she accepted him I need not expect him back till to-morrow, or the day after at the very soonest.”
Nor even when five days elapsed, and the owner of the castle still remained absent, did Ulrich think it strange. “I am sure,” he said to himself, “I didn’t leave my Moida’s side for five days after we were betrothed—no indeed.”
But why none of them dropped him a line to impart the glad tidings did surprise him a little; Moida, at least, might have written two words. Finally, a letter did come from Moida, but it brought anything save good news; and when the poor fellow had read it through he sank down on the grass near the ancient tombstone and wept bitterly.
When this day closed Loewenstein was quite deserted, except by Caro, the aged poodle, who wandered all about the dusky ruin, whining and wondering what had become of his master. Yet, cheerless as Loewenstein was this evening and many an evening afterwards, ’twas less cheerless than the erewhile happy home in Fingergasse.
But Conrad Seinsheim knew naught of this; he believed all the grief, all the lamentations, to be his own. And, indeed, he suffered much. From hateful Munich he sped away he did not care whither: to Nuremberg, to Dresden, to Prague—on, on he travelled, half distracted; until by and by, after three weeks of aimless, feverish wandering—his heart spoke to him and said: “Thou hast been hasty; return to the Pinakothek and ask Walburga once more to be thy spouse.” And Conrad listened 493to the voice of his heart and went back.
Three weeks have passed away since Walburga pronounced that doomful No—only three weeks. Yet what changes may be wrought in this brief space of time! Is yonder haggard visage moving through the Pinakothek the visage of Conrad Seinsheim?
Yes, it is he; and how his deep-sunken eyes glow as he draws nigh to the spot where hangs Carlo Dolce’s picture of Innocence! Like sparks out of a tomb they seem.
But she whom Conrad is looking for is gone. “Pray tell me,” he said, addressing one of the custodes—“tell me where is the young lady who was copying this painting a few weeks since. Is she anywhere in the gallery?”
“She is dead, sir,” answered the other, quietly tapping a little black box with his knuckles and taking out a pinch of snuff; “and she is to be buried to-day.”
“Dead!” repeated Conrad, starting back. “Dead!”
In another moment he was hastening with winged feet to the God’s-acre. And as he sped along the streets, every merry laugh that reached his ears sounded like a dismal croak; and the sky overhead, albeit never so cloudless and bright, seemed to shadow every object like a vast funeral pall.
How bitterly did Conrad now reproach himself for the rash words he had uttered when he saw Walburga tracing the birthmark on her picture!
“Fool, fool, fool that I was! I should have divined in an instant what she thus meant to convey to me, and I should have answered: ‘Even so, dear girl, I will take thee and cherish thee!’”
When Conrad reached the Leichen-Haus[107] the funeral bell was already tolling—the Leichen-Haus, whose ghastliness cannot be dissipated by all the bright-burning tapers and garlands of sweet-scented flowers which surround the dead. Breathless he turned to the sheet of paper posted by the doorway, whereon are written the names and station in life of those who are to be buried; and breathless he read the names.
Walburga’s stood third on the list, and, as coffin number two was just passing out of the building, Conrad saw that he was not more than in time. He pushed his way through the crowd, and in another moment found himself beside Walburga. She was the only one of the departed who retained any look of life about her; you might almost have fancied she was blushing at the curious eyes which were staring upon her, as she lay still and motionless in the narrow box, and that she heard them whispering, “How handsome she would have been, except for that ugly birthmark!”
We need not tell what Conrad felt at this moment; those who noticed him nudged one another, and said in undertones:
“Her lover, perhaps. Poor fellow!”
Not many followed Walburga to her last resting-place; for she had been of a retiring nature, and had kept much to herself and her one devoted friend. There might have been five or six persons in all who saw her lowered into the grave; and among the few who sprinkled holy water upon her there was Conrad Seinsheim. As he did so an inner 494voice whispered to him and said: “Walburga is near thee; she sees thee; she is immortal and happy for ever.”
Then, when the last clod of earth had been well packed down by the grave-digger’s spade, Conrad turned away to seek Moida Hofer. Ulrich accompanied him, and when they gained the high-up chamber where Walburga had lived so many peaceful years, they found Moida standing beside a table on which lay Master Eckart and Blessed Henry Suso’s Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, an empty bird-cage, and a tress of golden hair.
“She loved you truly,” spoke the girl, looking at Conrad through her tears. “She told me so; they were almost her last words to me.”
“Oh! I know it now, but, alas! too late. She is gone!” replied Conrad; and the word gone sounded through the room with long-drawn pathos. ’Twas as if his voice had passed the word on to other voices, who kept repeating: “Gone! gone! gone!”
Here Moida and Ulrich fell to weeping; and when by and by they uncovered their faces, they were surprised to find that Conrad had disappeared. He must indeed have glided away like a spirit, for neither of them had heard his footstep; and, to their further wonder, the sunshiny curl had vanished too.
“How strangely things turn out!” spoke Moida to her betrothed one evening, as they were seated side by side at the foot of Loewenstein tower, watching the sun go down.
“Strangely, strangely!” answered Ulrich.
“Poor Conrad!” went on Moida. “Had he come back only a few days sooner—and he came with the full intention of proposing again—if he had arrived even one day before the saddest of all the days I have known, Walburga might have lived.”
To this the youth made no response; he could not speak, and his tears set Moida weeping again; while old Caro, who perceived that his mistress was in sorrow, let droop his head, and his tail ceased to wag. Presently the sun disappeared. But still in the twilight the lovers remained thinking of the past.
By and by a voice was heard singing within the tower, and after listening a moment and sighing, “Poor, poor Conrad!” Moida rose up and peeped through the lowest of the grated windows. Ulrich did the same, and what did they behold? Wrapped in a long, flowing gown, and pacing round and round the room, was Conrad Seinsheim. Yet not everybody would have recognized him; for his hair, which now reached down to his shoulders, was turned quite gray, and so was his beard, and you might have taken him for an aged man.
The song he was singing was one full of tenderness and love; and ever and anon Conrad would pause and listen, and press to his lips a lock of sunny hair.
Then suddenly, like a person who hears an answering voice, his ghostlike visage would glow with rapture, and you might have fancied he had caught a vision of heaven.
“Really, I sometimes think Conrad is not mad at all,” observed Moida solemnly. “At this moment I do believe he sees dear Walburga. Look! look! He is beckoning!”
“It may be so,” returned Ulrich. “At any rate, he is infinitely happier, judging by his expression and 495his songs, than many a man who is not mad.”
“Well, I’ll not say ‘Poor Conrad!’ any more,” added Moida. “For I verily believe he knows Walburga is ever hovering near him; nay, that at times he actually sees her. There, look again! look! How he smiles! And his outstretched hands may indeed be clasping hers now, albeit they are invisible to you and me.”
Here there was a brief silence, after which Ulrich remarked, “I am very pleased, my love, that you keep the little lamp so nicely trimmed before the image of our Blessed Mother: for the image belonged to Walburga. See, now Conrad is praying before it.”
“Oh! ’tis not I who trims the light,” replied Moida. “Conrad takes entire charge of the shrine; I merely bring him oil and tapers.”
“But, darling,” continued Ulrich somewhat abruptly, and with a look of seriousness, “if Conrad’s mysterious condition last much longer ’twill plunge us into still greater difficulties; will it not? Why, already all your slender means have been swallowed up, as well as the few florins I had, in paying off the swarm of laborers who were employed upon this ruin. Now all work is stopped, and ’twill be a bitter cold place to spend the coming winter in. Yet what can we do? We must surely stay by Conrad, for he was extremely generous to you and me; and if we abandoned him in this dark hour ’twould be very cruel.”
“Ay, let us prove his stanch friends, now that he is unable to help himself,” answered the girl, brushing away a tear.
“Well, if he could only sleep he might grow better,” pursued Ulrich.
“Our kind friend hasn’t closed his eyes in ever so many nights,” said Moida. “Nor does he take enough nourishment to keep another person from starvation. In fact, his condition is exceedingly mysterious. An inward fire seems to be consuming him; you can see it shooting out of his eyes; but still on he lives—on and on; apparently happy, too, withered to a skeleton though he is.”
“Ay, what can keep good Conrad alive?” said Ulrich.
“Might it be that Walburga’s spirit feeds him?” spake Moida, in an awe-stricken whisper.
Here the subject of their remarks rose up from his knees and began again to sing:
When the song, of which we have given but a stanza, was ended, Caro uttered a melancholy howl that awakened the echoes far up the mountain and set the owls in the ruin hooting; then following his mistress, who passed into the tower to make sure that Conrad’s door was properly fastened for the night, the old dog curled himself up on a rug and was soon asleep.
Moida, however, went out again to spend a half-hour more with her betrothed, watching the stars and wondering what fate was in store for herself and him.
“If these stones could only speak, what tales they’d tell!” observed Ulrich, after she had nestled down beside him and flung half her shawl about his shoulders, for the air was rather chilly.
“Yes, very interesting stories no 496doubt,” returned Moida. “They’d tell us of many a brave knight and fair lady, of many a pageant and tournament. But remember, dear boy, what I have often said to you: beware of dwelling on those dead and buried days. And I, too, must beware; for, do you know, since I am here I occasionally feel myself drifting into a dreamy state, and I might almost fancy this ruin is enchanted and that it has thrown a spell over me. But believe me, Ulrich, believe me, the past is past and can never, never come back. Whatever your forefathers were, however wealthy and noble and powerful—some of them even placed kings on the throne—you, at least, must toil to win your daily bread; and I mean to help you. Therefore be of stout heart and look only to the future. And even if we have to live like these owls we will marry some time or other; and happy days are in store for us yet.”
Moida had scarcely spoken these words when she and her betrothed were startled by a loud, wailful cry which seemed to proceed from Conrad’s chamber. Nor can we wonder that it made them both spring to their feet; for not once since poor Seinsheim had been confined had he wept a tear or uttered a single lamentation. Yet ’twas undoubtedly his voice they had just heard. But what could have wrought this sudden change in him?
In another moment they were within the tower. Then Moida with trembling hand turned the key of his door and entered, followed closely by Ulrich.
“O Moida! Moida!” cried Conrad, as she advanced toward him, “why did you wake me? Why did you not let me sleep on? ’Twas a celestial vision I had—oh! celestial. But, alas! now I am awake—stark awake; and now it all comes back to me—all, all. She is dead! dead! dead!”
Here he burst into a paroxysm of grief, and uttered anew the shriek of woe which had been heard a minute before.
“I do believe his reason is restored,” whispered the girl, turning to her betrothed.
“Oh! let us thank God,” answered Ulrich.
“Conrad, dear, good Conrad,” spoke Moida, now gently taking his hand in hers, “you have been living indeed in a vision for many days past; but now you appear to be yourself again. So do not mourn; rather kneel and pray, and I will pray with you, and so will Ulrich. Let us offer thanks to God for your happy recovery.”
“Well, yes, I will pray—pray to be taken where Walburga is,” answered Conrad, in a somewhat calmer tone, yet still weeping bitterly. “O Moida! if you only knew how happy I have been. Why, blessed Walburga was near me all the while; and every time I sang she responded in a strain such as only angel lips can breathe. But now—now her face has disappeared, her voice is silent—she is gone! O Moida! if my blissful vision was madness, then would to God I had stayed mad!”
“Well, dear friend, Walburga is no doubt in heaven, and I believe she does often hover round you; for she loves you, and knows that you love her; and I am confident nothing would so rejoice her soul as to have you pray—to see you back once more in the faith of your youth. On her dying bed this was her ardent hope. Oh! do, do.”
“I am what I used to be in my 497early years,” replied Conrad, a glad smile lighting up his wan face. “I am, indeed. Blessed Walburga led me back—and— But hark! She is calling me! Hark! Hark!”
Here Conrad sank slowly to his knees, while an expression came over him which filled the other two with alarm. Then Ulrich, without losing a moment, hastened with all speed to the monastery for a priest. The path down the mountain was a difficult one, especially at this hour. On the way back the good father and Ulrich might have gone astray and arrived too late, but for their meeting a man with a lantern, who offered to light them up the rugged ascent.
Nigh unto death as he was, Conrad’s soul lingered yet an hour in its mortal tenement—a long enough time for him to be shriven and to receive the last sacrament of the church; after which the man with the lantern—and who, by a happy providence, turned out to be the village notary—drew up in brief words Conrad’s will and testament, whereby Loewenstein Castle, and all his other property besides, was bequeathed to Ulrich.
“And now, ere I depart hence,” spoke Conrad in a voice barely loud enough to be heard, and placing Moida’s hand in the hand of her betrothed, “let me see you joined in matrimony. Ay, let the holy bond be made right here by my couch, and do thou, reverend father, pronounce them man and wife.”
Such a ceremony at such a time and place the latter had never yet performed. But so urgent was Conrad’s appeal to have it done on the spot, without an instant’s delay, that he overcame a little scruple.
Then, just as Conrad’s immortal part was winging its flight, Moida, the patient, faithful Moida, who had waited so long for this golden moment to arrive, found herself the bride of her own dear Ulrich; and like a bright rainbow illumining a rain-beaten landscape, a gleam of joy, great joy, shone through her tears, and never before was happiness so strangely blended with sorrow as here in this chamber of death.
Then, kneeling down side by side, Moida and Ulrich breathed a prayer for the repose of the soul of him who had been so very good to them. And may we not hope that near them at that solemn moment was the soul of Walburga, greeting the spirit of the one whom she loved, and ready to be his guide in the dark, dismal region which Conrad had still to pass through ere he came to the home of the blest?
END.
A generation has passed away since the beginning of that which is commonly known as the Tractarian movement in the Church of England; the early leaders of the little band whose influence has been and still is felt throughout the length and breadth of the land have, with two exceptions, gone from among us; the names of Father Newman and Doctor Pusey are known to all our readers, the one as that of a devoted son of Holy Church, the other as that of an Anglican still firmly attached to the cause which he espoused in early life.
Which of these eminent men is to be taken as a fair example of the results of the movement? What is the tendency of the High-Church party? Do its doctrines and practices lead people to the Catholic Church or keep them out of it? Questions like these can hardly fail to occur to the mind of any intelligent observer of the state of religion in England in the present day, and on them must chiefly centre the interest of Catholics in the subject.
The different parties contained in the Church of England give contrary answers to the questions we have proposed. Low-Church or Evangelical Anglicans are unanimous in their denunciations of “Puseyism” and “Ritualism” as the high-road to Rome; some of them even go so far as to say that the Jesuits are the hidden but real promoters of what they look upon as a return to the errors and evils swept away by the Reformation. The High-Church portion of the Church of England is equally earnest and positive in the assertion that what it calls the revival of Catholic teaching and Catholic practice does not lead men to Rome, but keeps them, to use its own language, true to the faith of their baptism.
In face of these conflicting statements we turn to the testimony of Catholic priests engaged in the work of conversion, and to the personal experience of converts. We believe that every priest who has experience in conversions will unhesitatingly endorse the statement that most of the converts received into the Catholic Church come from the ranks of the High-Church or Tractarian section of the Anglican communion. Many of these converts, especially of those who were formerly Anglican clergymen, have felt it right to lay before the public the motives which determined them to take a step so serious in its nature and consequences. We have therefore a considerable number of published documents to refer to, and the testimony that they bear is in perfect accordance with that of our priests. The question, however, is not so easily settled. If you lay these facts before a Ritualist he will at once assure you that those who have left the Church of England were weak, or unstable, or impatient, or that they were driven from their position by the imprudence or fault of others, most probably by the errors of their bishops. They will, in fact, deny that conversions are the natural and legitimate 503result of High-Church teaching, and will treat them as exceptional cases, to be blamed, indeed, and deplored, but not to be viewed as indicating a general tendency.
It will therefore be interesting to examine a little into the work of the High-Church movement, and to judge for ourselves how it bears on the interests of the church.
We begin at once by admitting that the High-Church party is opposed to the Catholic Church—deliberately and actively opposed. The language in which it condemns converts is at least as strong as that in use among Evangelicals. The principle of private judgment, which furnishes the convert with an argument unanswerable in the case of his Low-Church opponent, is not recognized by the High-Churchman, although we do him no injustice in saying that it underlies his whole course of action. The High-Churchman’s belief in Anglican orders, coupled with his ignorance as to the meaning of jurisdiction, enables him to suppose that the Catholic Church in England is schismatical, and to denounce those who submit to her authority as guilty of grave, if not of unpardonable, sin.
If, then, the High-Church or Tractarian party does in any sense or to any degree promote the cause of conversion, or prepare the way for souls to return to God’s church, we must say that such work is done unconsciously and involuntarily.
The original principle of the High-Church movement was reverence for antiquity; it was, in the intention of its leaders, a return to the old paths. The past has ever had a charm for minds of a certain order; to those who have not realized the supernatural character of the church, who have not grasped the great fact that, in virtue of the promise of her divine Lord and of the power of his Spirit, she is ever the same, ever preserved from error, ever guided unto all truth, antiquity is a matter of primary importance. Ignorant of the existing Divine authority, the Protestant who believes that our Lord founded a church upon earth goes back to the earliest days of its history; he traces the stream to its source; he thinks that there it must needs be purest. It may be that the labor is great, that the study required is beyond the reach of many, and that, after all, the materials at his command are too often insufficient, and that he is ultimately compelled to fall back on the exercise of his private judgment; but in the absence of a living authority there is nothing that he deems more likely to guide him aright. The view, we must admit, is from his position perfectly reasonable, and we may bless God that the reverent and conscientious study of the past has brought many of the best and most gifted of the Anglican body to bow their heads in allegiance to the Vicar of Christ; they have found that the truth they sought is, to use the words of Moses, not above them nor far off from them, but very nigh unto them.
But the influence of this awakening of reverence for the past has told upon many who have not joined the Catholic Church; it has even left its mark on material things. The old churches which our Catholic forefathers built, wherein they worshipped and beneath whose shadow they rest, have been restored; through the length and breadth of the country they stand in their venerable beauty, and seem at once to bear testimony to the piety of former ages and to await England’s return to the faith.
504We believe the High-Church section of the Anglican communion to be promoting the cause of conversion in several ways.
First, by the valid administration of baptism. High-Church clergymen know what is essential to the validity of baptism; they believe baptism to be a sacrament and necessary to salvation, and consequently they are very careful in instructing their people as to its importance and in giving it properly. In former days, and in the case of ministers who did not believe that baptism really affected the eternal salvation of an infant, there is reason to fear that there was an immense amount of neglect. By baptism, as we know, the habit of faith is implanted in the soul, and accordingly in converts from Anglicanism we often find a wonderful power of grasping the truths of the Catholic religion; as soon as a doctrine is presented to them the mind seems at once to respond to it; faith is there, as it is in the soul of the baptized child.
Most of the doctrines of the Catholic Church are preached and taught by the High-Church clergy with more or less distinctness; and here we must observe that in speaking of the High-Church or ritualistic body we are compelled to use terms whose signification is somewhat vague. The Church of England may be said to contain three different schools of opinion, High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church; but no one of these has any definite standard. Among those who are called, and who would call themselves, High-Churchmen there are many varieties and shades of opinion; the writings or sermons of one High-Church clergyman may, of course, be disavowed by another. Up to the present time Dr. Pusey, who more than any other man might seem to have been a leader, does not feel it necessary to adopt the ritual for which some of his disciples are so earnestly contending. All that we can, therefore, hope to do is to give a general idea of High-Church and ritualistic teaching, premising that on most points there is more or less divergence amongst the teachers.
It is not surprising that many of those who look back to the past for guidance and instruction should have come to view the so-called Reformation with regret. The ordinary Protestant boldly declares it to have been a necessity, but many High-Churchmen openly deplore it; they repudiate the name of Protestant, and, in defiance at once of history and of etymology, call themselves Catholics. There is something, however, in a name, and we may fairly believe that the disavowal of the epithet Protestant tends to educate people out of the idea of protesting; it is certainly true that if the Church of England ceases to be Protestant, she cuts the very ground from under her feet, and abolishes her only plausible raison d’être; but the English mind, with all its good qualities, is not, generally speaking, logical, and words are too often used without a very accurate idea of their derivation or import.
Those Catholic doctrines which have been most fiercely opposed and most grossly misrepresented in England are now openly and earnestly inculcated. We may almost say that the conflict is gradually being narrowed to the one subject of the authority of the Holy See and the questions immediately depending on it. For the High-Church Anglican believes that our Lord founded a church; he professes 505to take that church as his guide, though he strangely persuades himself that its authority is at present in abeyance. He would obey the voice of a general council, but in order to have a general council it is absolutely necessary that his bishops should take part in the deliberations; in the expectation of an impossible conjuncture of circumstances he practically disobeys every one who in the meantime claims his allegiance.
But a vast amount of Catholic teaching is, as we have said, finding its way into the minds and hearts of Englishmen; Catholic practices and devotions are being revived, the way is being prepared for the church. There is a wonderful connection between the different doctrines of our holy faith; the soul that earnestly and devoutly believes one truth is, if we may so speak, predisposed to believe the next that may be presented to it, and this not only from a reasonable perception of the beauty, the fitness, and the mutual relations of the different truths, but from the habit of mind which is produced and cultivated by acts of faith. Each act of faith contains or implies an act of homage to the truth of God; the soul that worships is on the way to receive fuller light.
We have in a former paper[118] dwelt at some length on the subject of confession in the Church of England; we have shown that it is habitually practised by a considerable number of earnest Anglicans, and that it is publicly urged upon people by some of the clergy as the ordinary remedy for post-baptismal sin. It is quite certain that confession is believed in very much more widely than it is practised. The most extreme of Anglicans cannot possibly maintain that the Church of England requires it of every one; to the majority of people, especially if early habit has not facilitated the practice, there can be no doubt that it is painful and difficult. We therefore often find persons who thoroughly believe that the English clergy possess the power of the keys, and yet never themselves seek for the benefit of absolution. The matter is left quite optional, or rather the penitent is to be judge in his own case, and to decide whether he does or does not require this special means of grace. The scanty utterances of the Book of Common Prayer seem to imply that peace of mind is the principal object to be attained by confession. If, therefore, an Anglican can “quiet his own conscience,” he is quite justified in doing so without any extraneous aid; and, indeed, in so doing he would seem to be carrying out the intention of the framers of the Prayer-Book.
The doctrine of the Real Presence is perhaps the one which has taken the deepest root in the mind of advanced Anglicans. We might multiply extracts from their books of devotion and instruction conveying the Catholic faith on this point in its completeness. Our prayer-books, especially the Golden Manual and the Garden of the Soul, are largely used. Many Catholic books of devotion have been translated for Anglicans, and, although most of the translations are more or less spoiled by a process of adaptation, in many of them the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist is unimpaired. The Lauda Sion, the Pange Lingua, and the Rythma of St. Thomas are preserved and 506faithfully translated. Nor is the teaching confined to words; the meaning of the ritual, of which we hear so much in the present day, is to be found in the belief in the Presence of our Lord which it expresses and inculcates. The so-called altars of many Anglican churches are decked with flowers; the crucifix stands upon them; lights are burned; the clergy wear vestments like those used in the church; celebrations of the communion are multiplied—it is made the central act of worship; fasting communion is insisted on; confession is recommended as the fitting preparation for communion. A confraternity has been founded with the name of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, and with the object of promoting the devotion which naturally flows from a belief in the Real Presence of our Lord. Attendance of non-communicants at the communion service is in many churches recommended and encouraged, and devotions for such worshippers have been published. Incense and music are employed in the service; chancels are richly adorned. In some chapels communion is reserved, and a rite, evidently imitated from the Catholic Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, is practised.
Ritualists have also learned to invoke Our Lady and the saints. Fifty years ago Keble wrote:
and now the Angelus and the Memorare, the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin and the Rosary, are in use in the English Church. The saints are honored and their intercession is sought. Extreme Unction is considered to be a lesser sacrament, and sick persons are anointed. The dead are prayed for in the touching and beautiful words which holy church puts into the mouths of her children.
It is needless to say that the doctrine of apostolic succession is most firmly maintained by High-Churchmen. Not only are the Catholic doctrines which have furnished the chief mark for Protestant hostility and the principal subjects of misrepresentation now maintained and inculcated, but others which, without being formally contradicted, have been obscured and neglected are now brought forward with a clearness which leaves little to be desired. The Catholic devotions to the Sacred Heart, to the Holy Child, to the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of our Lord, cannot fail to make those who use them enter more and more into the great mystery which lies at the very foundation of the Christian faith.
Moreover, the idea of duty, of conscience, of a work to be done in the sanctification of one’s own soul, is constantly kept before the mind. Daily self-examination is part of the rule of life. The fasts of the church are observed often, indeed, with a severity greater than that required by the church, but natural among those who have no guide save their own conscience for the details of their practice. Her sacred feasts are also kept, and thus our separated brethren have some share in the holy teaching which each season of the ecclesiastical year impresses on the heart. During the Holy Week which has just passed the Tenebræ were sung in many ritualistic churches. On Good Friday the Three Hours’ Agony was preached in several places, the Reproaches were sung, and a devotion somewhat resembling 507that of the Stations of the Cross was practised. On Easter day the communion was celebrated as early as five o’clock and repeated several times. The histories of the saints are being made familiar to people’s minds. The literature of Ritualism might of itself furnish the subject of an interesting study. The Imitation of Christ is one of the most familiar books of piety, and among the books adapted from Catholic sources are the Spiritual Combat, many of the works of Fénelon and Bossuet, Rodriguez, Courbon, Pinart, Avrillon, and other spiritual and ascetic writers. Faber’s hymns are constantly sung in churches. The Catechism of Christian Doctrine, with some variations, is in the hands of the children of Ritualists. The Catholic Breviary has furnished the material for the day and night Hours used in many of the religious houses, and the very prayers of the Mass have been interwoven in the Anglican Office for Communion. An ample supply of juvenile literature places the doctrines of which we have spoken in an attractive form before the minds of children. Catholic pictures are to be seen everywhere. Several newspapers and magazines are devoted to the publication and discussion of matters relating to the interests of the High-Church party.
A very important feature in the revival of the last thirty years is the foundation of religious houses in the Church of England. There are now upwards of thirty Anglican convents, in which women lead a life of seclusion and devote themselves to the practice of works of charity and piety; they are in many cases bound by vows and live in obedience to authority. A few communities of men also exist. These Anglican religious call themselves monks and nuns, and wear a dress unlike that of secular persons. They keep the canonical hours of prayer, they give up all earthly ties, and their rule is in some cases taken from one of those originally framed by a saint and sanctioned by the church.
Retreats and missions more or less resembling our own are given by some of the Anglican clergy. We have recently heard that in a place where the conversion of some of the clergy seemed likely to be followed by that of a considerable body of their congregation, a retreat has been given with the special object of settling the minds of the waverers in their allegiance to the Church of England.
After all that we have said it will not surprise our readers to hear that people are often received into the church who thoroughly believe every Catholic doctrine, and, on making their submission, have no difficulty to surmount and nothing new to learn.
Prejudices are being dispelled; an interest in that body which has ever held the doctrines now recovered by Anglicans has been awakened. On their own principles High-Church people who go abroad feel bound to attend Catholic churches; the Catholic religion is better understood than it used to be, our ceremonies are imitated, our works of charity and devotion appreciated.
A work, then, is being done by that party in the Church of England commonly known as the Tractarian or High-Church party. Its influence has reached many whom we could not have hoped to reach. It has put many in a position where they are accessible to conversion. It has taught many souls the need 508and the value of sacraments. It has awakened a hunger and thirst whose ultimate satisfaction is only to be found in the church. It has trained souls to habits of self-examination, of self-denial, of earnestness, of meditation, and of generosity. It has, we may trust, kept many from ever falling into grievous sin; and while we are of course unable to admit the validity of Anglican orders, and consequently of sacraments dependent on such orders, we rejoice to think that what the devout soul believes to be a sacramental communion may prove a spiritual communion and be a means of grace and blessing.
Can we, then, as Catholics hold out the right hand of fellowship to those Anglicans who believe so much of Catholic doctrine, and who would fain persuade us that they have a right to the name we bear? Can we bid them God-speed and wish them success? Alas! we cannot. Whilst we appreciate their self-denying labors, whilst we admire their devotion and believe that the grace of God is leading them on to better things, we are constantly and sadly reminded that as yet they are in schism, that they are defying or ignoring the authority which in the name of Christ claims their obedience.
The opposition to the church is a feature of the very advanced party which we cannot overlook; it is impossible to say how many souls its influence has kept out of God’s church. The means used to hinder the work of conversion are various and too often successful. We began by the statement that most of our converts come from the ranks of Ritualism, but we must in some degree qualify it by saying that to many it has only been the final stage; that they have passed through it on their way from dissent or Low-Church Protestantism into the church. Whether they would have come to their true home more speedily if they had not on the way been attracted by that which has so great a semblance of truth we cannot say. Conversion is of course a work of God’s grace; but we cannot help feeling that while High-Churchmen have got rid of many of the prejudices and misconceptions which keep other Protestants out of the church, they are themselves surrounded by influences hard to overcome. There is more to satisfy both taste and devotional feeling in Ritualism than in ordinary Protestantism; there is more to keep the mind back from honest inquiry. The ordinary Protestant is bound to “prove all things and hold fast that which is good.” If he has a doubt, on his own principles he ought to follow it up, to question, to examine, and reason till he arrives at conviction. The Ritualist is too often taught to put away a doubt or question as a sin. He is hedged in on every side. He is forbidden to inquire. If he be in perplexity he is recommended to devote himself to good works; he is told to avoid controversy.
The branch theory and the dream of corporate reunion are constantly brought forward to combat the convictions of those who are drawing near to the church, and to defend a position which is felt to be exceptional. The branch theory maintains that the church of Christ is divided into three distinct branches, the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican; each one of these, according to its adherents, has preserved all the essentials of a church, and each one claims with equal authority the obedience of 509the faithful over whom it reigns. The Catholic Church, accordingly, is the teacher appointed by God for Christians who live in Italy or Spain; the Greek Church is in the same manner the guide of the inhabitants of Russia, and the Anglican Church of those in England and her dependencies. The divergence or contradiction that may be observed in the teaching of these three bodies is ignored, or it is asserted that they are one on all essential points. The church, according to this view, is more or less a national institution. St. Paul, indeed, declared that there was neither barbarian nor Scythian; but this theory boldly asserts the distinction between Englishmen and Romans, and again between Englishmen and Russians. Perhaps national vanity may find some satisfaction in the idea of a branch church specially for British subjects. Some curious consequences follow from the view we have explained. In the first place, a man is bound to change his religion as often as he crosses the Channel. The Anglican would, he is told, be guilty of an act of schism by worshipping in a Catholic church in England; as soon as he arrives at Calais, however, it becomes his bounden duty to attend Mass on all Sundays and days of obligation, and if he were to be present at any Protestant worship, even though conducted by one of his own ministers, he would commit an act of schism. Church and schism, in fact, change places.
No Protestant is stronger in his condemnation of those who become Catholics than are many of the clergy who hold the branch theory. It might, indeed, appear that if each of the three branches has an equal claim to be called a church there could be little objection to the change; and yet these teachers declare it to be in England a sin even to enter a church belonging to the “Roman branch,” and to become a Catholic is said to be risking one’s salvation.
Closely connected with this theory is what we must call the dream of corporate reunion. It is of course evident to all who have read our Lord’s words in his Gospel that all Christians ought to be one, and though people may persuade themselves of an invisible unity in essentials, few can feel that the present state of things is altogether as it should be.
The wish for union, coupled with an absolute confidence in the reality of Anglicanism, has led to the hope that terms may at some time be made with the Catholic Church. The duty of submission is thus evaded; people are told that they are bound to wait till common action can be taken. It is hoped that in some mysterious manner “Rome” will yet be induced to see her errors in regard to England. People who have a strong leading idea look at everything through a medium of their own. They grasp at straws; the kindly courtesy of some good priest, or the ignorant credulity of some poor peasant, is taken as a token of the coming amalgamation. The fact that the Catholic Church has in the strongest manner condemned the scheme of reunion is ignored, the insuperable obstacles which at once present themselves are unheeded, and for the sake of an unreal and unfounded dream those who would fain submit to God’s church are held back.
Besides the expression of these general principles there is a vast amount of special and personal action 510hostile to the church. It is not enough to assure the poor famishing soul that the Church of England supplies its every want, that it has never turned the graces already bestowed to sufficient account; it is also warned that it is a sin even to think of leaving its present position. The obedience claimed by and rendered to Anglican directors is such as would astonish Catholics. The Anglican director, generally speaking, has not learned to obey, and this may be the reason why his manner of ruling is so absolute. It is no uncommon thing to find people forbidden to enter a Catholic church, although the director himself believes our Lord to be present on its altar; conversation or correspondence with Catholic friends about the church is in some cases prohibited, as well as the reading of Catholic books. The director will sometimes promise to answer for the soul that blindly obeys him. Means such as these are used to bind the conscience, and it is probable that they keep back many who would bravely face persecution.
It is to be feared that the temper of mind prevalent among the ritualistic clergy is one little likely to lead to submission to the church; for we must receive the kingdom of God as little children, and nothing can seem less indicative of the childlike spirit than the tone of insubordination constantly to be met with. The authority of the crown is set at naught; that of their own bishops is defied; obedience is little known amongst them; nevertheless by God’s grace many a soul from among the clergy as well as from among the laity bursts the trammels that have bound it, and finds its true home and rest. It is said that the present year is bringing into the church a harvest greater than that of any year since the time of Father Newman’s conversion; and if it be so, we may well appeal to all Catholic hearts for the aid of their prayers.
We look towards these separated brethren with a longing sympathy. We feel that the grace of God is appealing to their hearts in a very special manner. We acknowledge that the difficulties which keep them back are of no common order. We admire their earnestness, their devotion and charity; we appreciate the courage and constancy with which they suffer for what they believe to be the truth; and if we are compelled at times to use language which has a tone of harshness or sternness, it is because we are solemnly bound to be faithful to God’s church, and because we know that we can do them no greater kindness than to convince them that they are spending their labor for that which cannot satisfy them, and to lead them on to the enjoyment of all the blessings which the Precious Blood has purchased for them.
We believe that the influence of the Tractarian movement has been felt even in America, and we hope that the sketch here given of its bearing on the great work of conversion may not be devoid of interest to those who would deem it a joy and a privilege to help a soul into God’s church—a work for which the power of sympathy and the intelligent comprehension of its position and difficulties are most important qualifications.
One of the most remarkable features of this most remarkable century is the unparalleled growth of that branch of ephemeral literature known par excellence as the press. This increase has not been confined to any particular nation or locality, but is as observable in conservative Europe as in expansive America. Still, in this country, and particularly in New York, newspapers have multiplied during the last fifty years with a rapidity that has astonished not only the public but even their projectors and proprietors. It is within the memory of many now living when our city knew not the luxury of a daily journal, and its most inquisitive and anxious inhabitants were obliged to wait a whole week for current news and editorial comments thereon. Now we are so imbued with a craving for early information that few persons in active life are satisfied with a morning paper, but must have likewise two or three evening editions. The last generation were content to wait for an indefinite period for intelligence of what was going on in the Old World; to-day we are sadly disappointed if we cannot read over our toast and coffee of what has happened a few hours previously at the principal points of interest throughout Christendom. Business enterprise, competition, steam power, and the telegraph have been mainly instrumental in changing the character of journalism and creating wants hitherto unfelt; increase of population and a love of superficial reading, which, like jealousy, makes the food it feeds on, have done the rest.
Before proceeding to point out some of what seem to us to be the grave defects of the secular press, we freely and thankfully admit that its tone as regards the Catholic Church has greatly improved within the last few years. Those who remember the scoffs and sneers, the outrageous calumnies and downright falsehoods, which were usually associated with everything Catholic in so many New York journals a quarter of a century ago, now look with more than complacency on the comparative fairness which at present characterizes their reports, correspondence, and editorials. The manner in which the life and death of the late Pope, the venerable Pius IX., was treated and commented upon is a notable example of this growing spirit of liberality and good sense alike gratifying to their Catholic readers and honorable to themselves. Now and then, of course, we found expressions and sentiments opposed to our sense of historical truth and moral rectitude; but as a whole the non-Catholic press have expressed very just and impartial views of the multifarious labors and shining virtues which distinguished the career of the wonderful man who was lately called to his reward. The same may be said of their allusions to his successor, Leo XIII. Abandoning the senseless and mischievous course of their European contemporaries previous to the meeting of the conclave, they gave us a truthful and succinct account of the meeting of that august body, the result of its solemn deliberations, 512and excellent sketches of the life and services of the illustrious prelate selected to bear the burden laid down by Pius IX. For all this, considering how Catholic questions were formerly treated, we ought to be, and are, thankful. Again, looking nearer home, the services and ceremonies of the church are described with much more regard to their sanctity and less to the gratification of idle curiosity and insensate popular prejudice than formerly. Some of the press accounts of the nature and reason of fasts and feasts, abstinence, prayer, and good works, which are especially enjoined at particular periods, have been so precise and discriminating that the conviction is forced upon us of their having been written, or at least dictated, by persons fully in accord with Catholic teachings.
Yet while we cannot but admit this salutary change and admire the variety, system, and attention to details exhibited in the mechanical arrangement of news, and the extraordinary industry displayed in the general manufacture of our modern newspapers, it must be confessed with regret that in elevation of tone and honesty of purpose there has been little or no improvement on the slower and less attractive productions of our ancestors. We may take as an example the metropolitan press of New York, which in point of ability, influence, and circulation far surpasses that of any other city on the continent. Let any impartial person, after the careful perusal of any one of our five or six prominent daily newspapers which are supposed to control and lead public opinion, ask himself what there is in its pages to command the attention of the moralist, or to move the sceptical or thoughtless to a sense of his duty to God and his neighbor: what stern rebuke has been administered to the growing spirit of peculation and heathenism which is constantly gnawing at the vitals of society. How seldom do we find in the labored essays, the disjointed platitudes, the pretentious diatribes, the ornate editorials, or the epigrams which distinguish our prominent journals a sentiment or an argument based on sound views of morality and religion! With a constituency at least professedly Christian, they bandy with words and phrases, opinions and speculations, essentially anti-Christian. One sneers at the Catholic Church and everything we hold sacred; another patronizes us in a manner more insulting than complimentary; while the others, when not openly misrepresenting and maligning us, allude to our faith in a manner even more objectionable. All without exception, possibly without knowing it, are the advocates of the secret societies abroad, which are endeavoring to undermine the fabric of social order and Christian civilization, and the apologists for those home fanatics who seek to excite public prejudice against us, and oppose class to class and creed to creed for their own selfish and diabolical ends.
Of course we do not expect secular newspapers to become active exponents of the great truths of religion, nor should it even be required of them to give undue prominence to the publication of matters of a religious character. That is not their province. But appearing as they do in a Christian community, and being supposed to reflect in a great measure the feelings, views, and moral status of the people who support them, we have a right to 513demand that they adhere to the teachings of that moral law which ought to govern us all, and that when they treat of sacred things, and deal with questions affecting faith and religion, it shall be done with that serious reverence which persons are bound to observe in social life. Neither do we ask that they advocate the superior claims of Catholics, nor even enter upon our defence against the many unscrupulous enemies who are constantly rising up against us; but we do insist that we shall not be insulted, that our opinions be respected, and that the code of morals which all who profess to be Christians acknowledge be not constantly and persistently outraged.
The secret of this apparently unanimous anti-Catholic feeling which we lament in the New York daily press is to be found in the mental, not to say moral, inferiority of the editorial fraternity as a class. Since the death of Greeley and Raymond and the practical retirement of Bryant we have had no really able journalist among us; while, unlike Paris, Berlin, London, and other European cities, where the foremost statesmen and most profound thinkers scorn not to take up the editorial pen occasionally, we have no voluntary contributors above the level of mediocrity. A New York editor is usually a man paid to write something or anything on certain subjects, whether he be familiar with them or not. He writes not to express his own well-considered convictions, or to give the public the benefit of his study and experience of a particular topic, but simply to meet a special emergency, and to embody, more or less lamely, the half-formed notions of his employer, who is as likely as not an uncultured man himself. Hence the greater number of what are called leading articles which appear in our daily papers, instead of presenting clear views, sound reasoning, and reliable information artistically epitomized, are seldom other than a mass of hasty, crude, and shallow speculations on topics of the greatest importance. With the mass of casual readers, who are too busy to look beneath the surface, such productions pass for gospel truths, and therefore are likely to do more harm than more elaborate articles; but to the intelligent reader it soon becomes obvious either that the heads of the writers are astray or that their hearts are not in their work. The latter surmise, we are inclined to believe, is more generally correct. How can a Hebrew, for instance, write a eulogium on the glories of the Catholic Church; a Catholic, no matter how lukewarm, praise the Communists and applaud the Carbonari; or a follower of the stern precepts of Calvin glorify free love and exalt the doctrines of universalism? Yet such anomalies are frequently found in New York journalism, where every man seems to be in the wrong place. The well-known fact that the editorial staff of all our large dailies is principally made up of persons of diverse nationalities, creeds, and opinions accounts for the discordance noticeable in every one of their pages. They have no fixed principles. No matter what political party journals may support, and how emphatic they may be in their advocacy of this or that public measure, when they come to treat a great social question, or one of vital importance to the honor and reputation of the republic, one column of the same paper is usually found to contradict the other, and the principles 514advanced to-day are in imminent danger of being condemned to-morrow.
To this rule, however, there is an exception. It seems to be a canon of the press of this city, and we might add of the entire country, that Catholics can be abused, scoffed at, and misrepresented with impunity. Their religion is unfashionable; their social, commercial, and political influence small in comparison with their numbers; the world is not their friend, nor the world’s law, and therefore the generous and large-minded editors of our newspapers, when at a loss for something else to say, have always an arrow in their quiver for the “tyranny of Rome,” and the dangers to which their beloved country is exposed from the “machinations and encroachments of Romanism.” Vulgar nicknames and insulting epithets applied to the church and the religious orders, which have long since been banished from the vocabularies of other countries, are freely used with a coolness and a facility which show that the writers are either too ignorant to know when they are vulgar, or so barren of ideas and expressions that they are compelled to borrow those which have done service in the days of a bigoted and fanatical generation.
But turning from the editorial page to what constitutes the bulk of our journals, we find their dangerous character revealed. What mainly fills their capacious pages and constitutes their principal attraction for the generality of purchasers? Extended reports of divorce cases, criminal trials, matrimonial escapades, and the minutiæ of executions; “spicy” paragraphs and indecent anecdotes to which the ordinary and instructive news of the day is only an adjunct. The sensational style of reporting, the dressing-up of disgusting topics in romantic phraseology, though unknown a few years ago, or confined to a few disreputable weekly papers, is fast becoming a distinctive feature in New York journalism. It is a growing evil, as well as a most insidious one, and the keen competition which exists between proprietors of daily journals for popular patronage has a direct tendency to develop it still further. So much, indeed, do our papers, big and little, vie with each other in catering to the depraved taste of a certain portion of the people that it has become a matter of serious consideration with many persons whether they can safely introduce into their families the papers they are obliged to take for business purposes.
It is very safe to assert that too many of those who collect the city and suburban news for the daily press are as devoid of conscience in their method of communicating as they are often shameless in their manner of procuring their information. They seem to think that a reporter, in his official capacity, has no moral responsibility, and act consistently with the supposition. They fairly revel in scandal; consider vice only something to be elaborately depicted in their respective newspapers, and crime, no matter how heinous, a fitting theme for their nimble and facile pens. Their excuse for all this prostitution of ability which might be turned to some good account is that the public demand this highly-seasoned style of reporting, forgetting that they themselves have excited this prurient taste, and that if, repenting of their past misdeeds, they were to return to the old-fashioned 515method their present admirers would soon follow them.
It is certain that the degeneracy of the newspaper press in this respect is fast sapping the morals of the community, particularly the younger portion of it. Once familiarized with crime of every sort and degree through the florid descriptions of the reporters, our young men and women must necessarily become mentally debased. Their thoughts, unbidden, will stray to matters of which they have lately read, a dangerous curiosity will be excited, and from constant reflection they will begin to lose that horror of sin which is one of the safeguards of virtue, which every pure-minded youth should keep constantly before his eyes. The mind once disturbed, the imagination led astray, every defaulter and swindler, if he be a criminal on a large scale, is apt to appear to them as “a smart fellow”; the betrayer of female innocence, the faithless husband or disloyal wife, as one more sinned against than sinning; and even the murderer, whose sayings and doings are faithfully chronicled, and whose solemn exit from the world is made the occasion of a grand dramatic scene, becomes in some degree a hero and a victim of revengeful law.
Of course it is easier to point out the evils which disgrace the editorial profession, and so materially impair the usefulness of the press, than to suggest an adequate remedy for them. It is useless to appeal to the conductors of newspapers; for as long as Catholics can be abused with impunity, and the moral sense of the community be shocked by vile and obscene descriptions of crime and criminals with profit to themselves, they will heed neither advice nor remonstrance. The cure rests with the public who purchase and support such journals. As far as Catholics are concerned, the true course would be to establish a daily paper of their own, which would reflect their sentiments and opinions, and furnish them with reliable foreign and domestic news collated in unobjectionable style; but this, it seems, is impossible at present. The embarrassed financial condition of the country is opposed to the initiation of such an enterprise. Our only present resource, as long as so many of us must read daily papers, is to concentrate our patronage on that journal which presents the least objectionable features, and, by encouraging it to do better things, prove to its contemporaries by the strongest of all arguments to them—their decreased circulation—that the Catholics of this city and vicinity will no longer pay to be abused and calumniated. But there are many among us who from habit take daily papers with which we can well dispense. We advise them to discontinue their misdirected patronage and bestow it on our struggling weekly Catholic journals. They will thus administer a wholesome lesson to bigotry and immorality, and at the same time give encouragement and life to Catholic serial literature.
There are, however, other and more cogent reasons why the reading of daily papers, now so prevalent, should be discouraged, or at least confined within reasonable limits. There can be little doubt that their constant and persistent perusal is apt to create a distaste for more profound and healthful reading. Drawing our opinions mainly from the hastily composed contributions of overworked correspondents and editors, we are pretty 516sure to fall into the habit of reaching conclusions and entertaining views of life neither logical nor well considered. Like those who feast overmuch on sweets, we conceive a dislike for solids and as the body suffers in the one case, the mind naturally is impaired by indulgence in the light and meretricious literature of which newspapers are, if not the worst, certainly the most widespread and exemplary, types.
Americans, to paraphrase a well-known expression, are a newspaper-ridden people. We must have some sort of paper at breakfast, dinner, and supper. We are not even satisfied with one each day, but require two or three more every twenty-four hours. The time that should be devoted to the study of good books, wherein can be found solid instruction and food for reflection, is thus too often wasted on the lucubrations and speculations of half-informed men who are as incapable of emitting sound ideas as they are of appreciating the immoral drift of much that daily falls from their own pens. Hence inordinate readers of newspapers necessarily become shallow-minded, superficial thinkers; their intellectual tastes are vitiated, and their judgment is weakened and perverted. Like a shattered mirror, their minds are incapable of reflecting one entire well-defined image, but present only fragments of thought in forms indefinite and distorted. The higher aspirations of our nature, those sublime conceptions which lift us above the grosser things of earth, and, even in this life, bring us nearer and nearer to our Creator, can never be generated by ephemeral newspaper literature. While we may feel compelled by business considerations or a natural political curiosity to glance over the columns of our daily journals, we should not forget that the intellect receives neither health nor strength from prolonged indulgence in such enervating pursuits. Newspapers undoubtedly have their use and mission; they have become an important factor in our present system of civilization, and are capable of accomplishing much good in their own sphere; but their effect and scope are limited, and should be circumscribed so that they be not permitted to interfere with the reading of solid history, the works of our best writers, and the essential duties of life, among which must be considered the pursuit of Christian knowledge and the elevation and purification of the immortal part of our being.
The summer was upon me, and with it the yearning for the dulcet plash of the salt sea wave.
“Whither?” became the vexed question of the hour, and Newport made reply to it.
To Newport I accordingly transported myself. I shall not say whether it was last season, or the season before, or even the season before that again. The readers of this narrative must determine the exact date. I refuse point-blank to do so.
Newport was in the height of the season when I entered my humble name, John V. Crosse, Lexington Avenue, New York, on the leaf of the register at the Ocean House.
It was a lovely evening in August, and the piazza of the hotel was crowded with high, mighty, and fashionable humanity. Dinner was a thing of the past, and the drive was looming in the near future. Ladies were chatting in parti-colored groups, men smoking in acrobatic postures. A delicious stillness prevailed—a warm, life-caressing glow. A wooing message from the sea, laden, as it sped upon its errand inland, with the perfume of a myriad glowing flowers, fanned the cheek. The sun shot bars of molten gold between the trellised branches of the slumbering trees, and the indolence of waking repose descended upon everything like a rosy cloud.
I went on the piazza, and, selecting an able-bodied wooden chair, flung myself into it, placing my feet on the iron railing in front of me, ere proceeding to light a cigar. When I had succeeded in emitting half a dozen puffs of my most excellent weed I looked right and left of me.
On my right sat a man of about thirty, or perhaps more, apparently tall, and slender to leanness. He was dark as a gipsy, with coal-black hair waving naturally but sparse upon the temples—he had removed his hat—which had a craggy look. His large eyes were deep-set, while his mouth wore an expression of superb self-complacency. He was clean-shaved, except for a fringe of long, silky black whisker far back upon the cheek, but both moustache and beard were clearly marked by the blue-black shade on his lip and jaw. The man was not ugly—just escaping ugliness by a very narrow margin. He was well dressed in a suit of light Scotch tweed that fitted him like “the paper on the wall,” whilst a certain je ne sais quoi bespoke the Englishman.
On my left lounged a handsome young fellow with clear blue eyes, a fair moustache, and one of the brightest smiles I have ever seen upon a human countenance. He twirled an unlighted cigar between his red lips, and as vehicle after vehicle dashed up to the “ladies’ entrance” fair dames and damosels gave him cheery and gracious salutation, cheerily and graciously responded to, accompanied by the flourish of a rakish little straw hat perched on the side of his superbly-set head.
518With these two personages the narrative has much to do.
I sat smoking the one post-prandial cigar allowed me by my doctor, contemplating with indolent satisfaction the fragrant greenery in front of me, when my meditations apropos of nothing were brought up with a sudden jerk by the young fellow on my left asking to be permitted to light his cigar from mine.
Now, as a matter of fact, I have a very decided and deep-rooted objection to surrendering my cigar to anybody, rich or poor, gentle or simple; I like no one to handle it but myself; and therefore, instead of transferring the glowing weed to his expectant fingers, I dived into the breast-pocket of my coat, and producing a tin box containing wax matches, placed it, together with its contents, at his disposal.
“You are an Englishman,” he gaily exclaimed, extracting a vesta as he spoke.
“No, but very English on the subject of the handling of my baccy,” I laughed.
“You are not far astray. You should have seen the tramp that deprived me of a genuine Lopez this morning. I couldn’t refuse him, so I left him the weed.”
“I consider that the——”
“Per Bacco! there she goes,” he suddenly interposed, and, flinging my match-box into my lap, he vaulted over the railing into the carriage-drive beneath.
Two ladies seated in a pony-phaeton flashed past.
“I’m English,” exclaimed my right-hand man, tapping the ash from his cigar with a finger white and delicate as wax, “and I’m glad to find that one American sees the abomination of handing every cad his cigar who chooses to ask for it.”
Being very Starry and Stripey, I was about to defend the practice in vogue amongst my countrymen, although thoroughly against my convictions, when he asked:
“Do you know who that fellow is?”
“What fellow?”
“That long-eared, long-legged jackass who took that railing as if he was at school.”
“I never saw him before.”
“You’ll see him again. I lay seven to two. And I’ll take the odds that he tells you that he’s Grey Seymour, whatever that may be; that he’s over his long ears in love with a Miss Hattie Finche, whom he followed here from Martha’s Vineyard; and that she has five hundred thousand dollars.”
“I suppose that one of the ladies in the pony-carriage was Miss Hattie Finche?”
“The whip—yaas.”
“I wonder can she be a daughter of Wilson Finche, of New York?”
“The tallow-man, Beaver Street and Fifth Avenue?”
“Ay, and Chicago and ’Frisco,” I added.
“That’s the identical geranium.”
“And is Wilson Finche in Newport?”
“He has taken a cottage on the Ocean Drive for the season.”
“I must look him up.”
“Are you acquainted with him?” the languor of manner disappearing, and a vivid interest rushing to the front.
“Very well indeed.”
“And with his daughter?”
“Why, certainly.”
“Stop a minute!” fumbling in his breast coat-pocket. “You’ll introduce me.”
The coolness of this proposition 519actually staggered me. Introduce a man of whose name even I was in total ignorance!
“I could not venture to do such a thing,” I responded somewhat gruffly. I did not relish the idea of being treated in this off-hand way—of being openly and deliberately made a cat’s-paw.
“Oh! yes, you will. Here’s my card. Let’s have one of yours,” thrusting his pasteboard almost into my reluctant hand.
With very considerable deliberation I searched for my double eye-glass hidden away somewhere in the depths of my capacious waistcoat—I was fat, and fair, and fifty-five at that date—and, carefully wiping it with a scarlet silk handkerchief, adjusted it to my eyes and read:
“Let’s have your card,” said Mr. Price, as though I were a tradesman with whom it pleased his high mightiness to have dealings.
“I am not in the habit of”—
“There, now, you’re going to put me aside. Where’s the use? Why wouldn’t you help a poor hungry, briefless English barrister to this piece of gilded gingerbread? You’re not going for her yourself?”
Oho! I inwardly chuckled.
“Not much. I have seen too many of my peers wrecked upon the rock-bound coast of matrimony to permit my argosy within those shallow and treacherous waters.”
“I guessed you were a bachelor,” observed Price facetiously.
“And might I ask, sir, how you were led to imagine this?” I felt curious to hear what the fellow would say.
“I’ll tell you, Mr. Smith.”
“I am not Mr. Smith.”
“Well, Mr. Jones.”
“I am not Jones.”
“Robinson.”
“Your pertinacity, sir, ought to make your fortune at the Old Bailey.”
“Well said, Thompson. Now, you wish me to tell you how I guessed you were a bachelor. Firstly,” putting up his finger and tapping it with his cigar, “your general complacency; secondly, your linen—no married man ever commands the linen of a bachelor; thirdly, your gaiters—such fit, such polish!—fourthly, your isolation; and, fifthly, the methodical way in which you do everything, from lighting a cigar to playing a fantasia on your handkerchief with your nasal organ.”
“I am not aware that I am more methodical than other men of my age and habits.”
“Are’n’t you? Then just watch yourself.”
“You are a very peculiar specimen of your country, Mr. Price.”
“I can return you the compliment; and as one good turn deserves another, you’ll introduce me to Miss Finche.”
“You must excuse me, Mr. Price.”
“But I won’t.”
“I beg to differ from you.”
“We shall see.”
“We shall.”
Mr. Price rose and quitted the piazza, returning after a brief absence.
“Now, Mr. John V. Crosse, of Lexington Avenue, New York, as you say in this queer country, I have posted myself. You are confoundedly rich, living on your dollars, and are not a half-bad sort of elderly gentleman.”
“May I ask to whom I am indebted for this portrait, sir?”
Somehow or other I couldn’t 520get up a feeling of anger. I tried, but it wouldn’t come.
“The clerk inside. I know you now, and you know me. I am the son of Sir Harvey Price, of Holten Moat, Sevenoaks, in Kent. The Moat is about one of the last of the Tudor residences in England. We have been in that one corner since the battle of Hastings, and the Moat has never run dry since Queen Bess visited us, when the waters were turned off and red wine turned on. I am the sixth son, and poor as a sixth son ought to be. I was sent to the bar because I had an uncle on the bench. My uncle died while I was keeping my terms. I am an honor-man of Oxford, and last year my brief-book showed one hundred and fifty pounds. About ten weeks ago my godmother died; she left me five hundred pounds. I paid my tailor just enough to maintain a doubtful confidence in me, my boot-maker ditto. Like an able general, who always prepares beforehand for a retreat—although Wellington, our best man, failed to do this at Waterloo, having the forest of Soignies at his back—I have paid for the rent of my chambers in advance. I have come here just to ascertain for myself if red Indians are to be met with on Broadway, and buffalos to be potted on Fifth Avenue. This is the story, and here is the man. Will you introduce me to Miss Finche now?”
I must confess that the story, brief though it was, and told in a short, sharp, jerky way, somewhat interested me. I had no reason to doubt it, and yet I was too old in the devious paths of the world to accept either the narrative or the man at sight. Surely, if he were so well connected, he should be able to obtain letters of introduction to some persons in society, and then it would be plain sailing enough for him.
“You won’t take me on trust?” he exclaimed after I had said as much to him.
“I have arrived at that time of life, Mr. Price, when I take nothing on trust. I must know my butcher, my baker, my wine merchant, my boot-maker, et hoc genus omne.”
“Never mind,” he gaily cried. “You’ll be sorry by and by, when you see me engaged to Miss Finche.”
“You seem to have a tolerably strong belief in your powers of—”
“Audacity. You are right. Toujours de l’audace. I am a man of a single idea; the idea at present on my groove of thought is the gold Finche. The lion in my path is Grey Seymour. If he were poor I wouldn’t have a chance; but he has millions, and money doesn’t fall in love with money. Your heiress always spoons on a pauper, while your aurati juvenes go in for penniless governesses. Ne c’est pas, mon vieux? Give us a match. I’ll go and take a swim; and you go and call on Wilson Finche. His direction is—stay; I’ll write it down for you. There!” he exclaimed, handing me a card: “‘Wilson Finche, Esquire, Sea View Cottage, The Cliff.’ You’ll find him at home now, Crosse, and in that beatific condition which is the outcome of a Château Lafitte of the ’54 vintage. Adios!”
Obeying the mandate of this very peculiar young man, I strolled down to The Cliff.
The wide sea heaved and plashed beneath me with a dull, dulcet murmur. Away out on its unruffled bosom lay great patches of 521purple, denoting the passage of some fleecy cloud onwards, ever onwards. White sails dotted the deep green sea like daisies on a dappled field. The shingle caressed by the wooing wavelets was red and brown, while the wave-kissed pebbles flashed in the sunlight. Boats like specks were drawn up on the beach, and sailors were busy with sails and cordage and the impedimenta of their craft.
Finche’s marine residence stood boldly prominent, all corners and gables like an old cocked hat. It was new and pert-looking, and wore the air of a coquette in a brand-new toilette from Worth’s. A ribbon border of glowing scarlet geraniums led from the lich-gate to the Queen Anne porch, whereon sat, or lay, or reclined—it was all three—my old friend, his body in one of those chairs which invalid passengers on ocean steamers much affect, to the envy of all who do not possess the luxury, his feet on a camp-stool, beside him a small marble-topped table, whereon stood a bottle of claret, a crystal glass of wafer-like thinness, and a box of cigars. Price had spoken wisely.
After the usual exclamations of greeting had dried up I complimented Finche on the beauty of the location.
“Yes, sir; it costs money, but what’s money if you don’t get value for it? Thompson—you know Thompson, of Brand & Thompson—that man, sir, has four millions, sir, and what value does he take out of it, sir? A back-room in Thirteenth Street; a breakfast at a foul-smelling restaurant, sir; a five-minute dinner at Cable’s; an unhealthy supper at another restaurant, and half a dozen of newspapers. That’s what he has for his four millions.”
“You are wiser in your generation, Finche.”
“I am wise in this way, sir”—Finche is very sententious, and his shirt-collar is always troubling him—“I must have value for my money. One hundred cents for my dollar is good enough for me. If, sir, I can get one hundred and fifty, so much the better; but, sir, I never take ninety, or ninety-five, sir, or ninety-and-nine, sir. Help yourself to that claret—it’s a Nat Johnson, sir; I paid twenty-five dollars a case for it in the year ’70. It’s value for the money, sir, I tell you.”
“You are here with your Lares and Penates,” I observed, after some further remarks upon the value of the surroundings.
“What do you mean, sir?” Finche is as ignorant as a chimpanzee.
“Your household gods.”
“Yes, sir. I am here with my daughter and my wife. My daughter gets value, sir, in the hops at the Ocean House, and the nice society she meets with—real bang-up swells, sir. My wife gets value out of the salt water, sir—health, sir, which improves her body and her temper, sir. She is a quick-tempered woman is Mrs. Finche, and when she’s ill, sir, she’s ugly.”
At this moment the pony phaeton which I had observed from the piazza of the hotel dashed up to the lich-gate.
“My daughter and her friend, Miss Neville, an English girl, sir, of a very high family, poor as cheap claret, sir, but proud as a coupon, sir. She’s on a visit to us, but we get value out of her. She sings lovely, sir; you shall hear her. It entertains our swell friends, and thus we strike a balance. The tall one is my daughter, sir.”
522I saw a slim but well-proportioned figure, clad in a rich black silk dress, the cut of which, even to my masculine eyes, betrayed the hand of an artist; a face, though not beautiful by any means, earnest and interesting, surmounted by a profusion of little fair curls, arranged, as was the fashion, so as to conceal the forehead; a picturesque hat, a pair of diamond solitaire earrings, and upon the whole a person decidedly “fetching.” Her companion was petite, and constructed, as they say of saucy steamers, upon the most perfect lines. She was a clear brunette, and as she swept somewhat haughtily past the glowing ribbon borders I bethought me of Cleopatra, and the passage down the Cydnus of that boat which wrecked the fortunes of the luckless Antony.
Of course I gazed at the possessor of five hundred thousand dollars, as the “penniless lass wi’ a lang pedigree” counted for nothing.
“Hattie, this is my old friend, Mr. Crosse, of Noo York, who has come to Newport to take some value out of the summer-time.”
Miss Finche was very gracious, presenting me with a hand encased in a glove of many buttons, and flashing a row of magnificent teeth between each smile.
“Are you a ‘cottager,’ Mr. Crosse?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Are you at the Ocean or the Acquednuk?”
“The Ocean.”
“The other is quieter.”
“There is better value at the Ocean, Hattie,” observed her father.
“One sees everybody worth seeing there. Isn’t the piazza charming, Mr. Crosse?”
“Of its kind, yes; but I would prefer a little of this,” sweeping the horizon with my hand.
“It is very beautiful,” said a sweet, low voice by my side, a voice that “chimed” into my ear—I can use no other word. It was Miss Neville who spoke.
“There is great value to be got out of that view at sunset, sir—yellows and reds, sir, that would set up a painter, if he could only fetch up to the right color and give good value to the buyer.”
Miss Neville imperceptibly shrugged her shoulders, while I winced at this commercial view of marine painting. I wondered what Mr. Hook, R.A., or my rising young friend Mr. Quartly would have said to the man of tallow.
“Hattie, another bottle of this wine, although it’s a pity to drink it on a hot day; one doesn’t get the value out of it. Get into the house, girls; I want to have a talk with my friend Crosse here. What is Bullandust going to do in Lake Shores?” addressing me.
I protested.
“Finche,” I said, “I’ve come down here for sea, and sky, and trees, and dolce far niente.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Well, loafing,” I laughed.
“There an’t no value to be got out of that.”
“Isn’t there, though? And I mean to drop Wall Street, and scrip, and shares, and every sort of business. I won’t even look at a newspaper till I choose to go back.”
“You an’t in earnest?” said my host, gazing at me in solemn astonishment.
“A fact, upon my honor.”
“Well, that—say, there’s some one saluting. It’s not me—I don’t know the man. It must be a friend of yours, sir.”
523I adjusted my double glass and gazed towards the lich-gate.
A slight sense of shock vibrated through my system. Leaning upon the gate, and nodding at me like a Chinese mandarin, was Mr. Herbert Price, Temple, London, E. C.
“You seem to be having a good time there, my friend,” he gaily cried.
What could I say? What could I do?
“It’s awfully hot for walking.”
“Won’t you step in, sir?” said Finche.
I could not say, Don’t ask this man. Of course a gossip and a glass of wine, and a mere formal introduction to Finche, meant nothing.
“His name’s Price,” I hurriedly whispered—“stopping at Ocean House—London barrister—don’t know him.” Whether these last three words were lost upon Finche or not it is impossible to determine, inasmuch as he took no notice of them whatever.
“Glad to see you, Mr. Price. Any friend of my friend Mr. Crosse is welcome here, sir. Get a chair. Take that other one, sir, with the back to it; you’ll get more value out of it. That’s my principle—take value out of everything. A glass of wine, sir? It’s a Château Lafitte that cost me twenty-five dollars a case in ’70, sir. Touch that gong, sir!”
A servant appeared in obedience to the tocsin.
“Ask Miss Finche to send me another bottle of this wine, then take the empty bottle. Put it carefully by, Mary, as all the bottles have to go back after I have taken the value out of them, which I guess I do,” with a chuckle.
“Did you walk down, Mr. Crosse?” asked Price.
“Yes.” I was on the borderland of indignation. I felt foolish—checkmated.
“You had no difficulty in finding the place.”
“I can always find my friend’s house, Mr. Price.”
“You were dull enough about it on the piazza when we were speaking about Mr. Finche. What a glorious spot you have here! It reminds me of Devonshire. Ah! you American millionaires know how to live.”
“We try to get value out of the world.”
“And you succeed. Your good health, Mr. Finche. Ah!” smacking his lips, “that is wine. What a superb thing to sit beneath one’s vine or fig-tree, drink such nectar as this, and to be able to—pay for it!” with a light laugh.
“You are from London, sir, my friend Crosse tells me.”
I could have flung the contents of my glass into Finche’s face. Price would perhaps think I had been singing his praises.
“Yes, I hail from that little village on the Thames.”
“A lawyer?”
“One of the briefless. I did not choose the profession, I assure you. Like my first frock, it was chosen for me, and I was thrust into it bon gré mal gré. I’ll tell you who I am and what I am. I have told my friend Crosse already.” And he summed up the case, much in the same words as he had addressed to me.
Finche was impressed by the mention of the title, and deeply interested in a detailed description of the Moat.
“I am happy to meet you, sir, and should be glad to visit Sir Harvey Price at Holten Moat when I go to England next year, sir. Do you purpose taking much value out of this country, sir?”
524Price actually winked at me, and that wink spoke the following words:
“I mean to take five hundred thousand dollars if I can.”
A bell sounded.
“Supper, gentlemen!” said Finche. “Let us get in. No ceremony here, Mr. Price. We have no Moats for three hundred years in our family, although we see them every day in our neighbor’s eye—ha! ha!”
It would never do to have this pickpocket, for aught I knew to the contrary, enter beneath my friend’s roof under the very peculiar circumstances of the case. Had he been an ordinary travelling acquaintance it would not have much mattered, but a penniless adventurer bent upon matrimonial designs—never!
“Mr. Price and I are going back to the Ocean House,” I said in my sternest tone, and in a manner so marked as to bear but the one interpretation.
“What do I hear, Mr. Crosse?” exclaimed Miss Finche, emerging from the interior, arrayed in a bewitching toilette of fleecy white and delicate lilac.
“My dear, this is—”
“I beg your pardon, Finche, but could I—” I burst in.
“This is Mr. Price, of London, a friend of—”
“Finche, I may as well”— But the pompous old ass would have his bray, and Price was conversing with Hattie Finche ere I could utter the words of explanation that were ready to spring from my lips.
“Gentlemen, you would like to wash your hands. Just step up to my sanctum. Tompkins” (to a servant), “show these gentlemen to my sanctum.”
When the door had closed upon us, “Mr. Price,” I said, “do you call this fair?”
“Everything is fair in love.”
“Bosh, sir! You find in me a man unwilling to wound the feelings of another. I have gained nothing by acting the part of a gentleman.”
“I deny that!” his coat off, his head deep in the marble basin. “You’ve made me your friend for life.”
“And who might you be?”
“I’ve told you. See, now,” his hands dripping, “here,” plunging one of them into the breast-pocket of his coat, which was lying on a bed—“here’s a ten-pound note; spend every shilling of it in cablegrams. You have my own, you have my father’s address. Wire him, wire anybody you like, you’ll have your reply to-morrow. My story will be corroborated in every particular. That ought to satisfy you.”
I shook my head.
“Time with me is money. This fellow, Grey Seymour, is to meet her to-morrow at a garden-party at Mrs. Dyke Howell’s. His millions will come into play, and such heavy artillery will sweep my rusty flint-locks into ash-barrels. A duel with artillery is all very well, but when the batteries are all on one side one side wins. My chances depend on what running I can make to-night. I can talk to women as few men can. It is my faculty. I know where to reach them, and how. It is nascitur non fit with me. I don’t go on Doctor Johnson’s idea of making an idiot of a girl’s understanding by flattery. That is false in theory, false in practice. Now, you are not half bad. Stand by me,” placing his hand on my shoulder, “and, by George! I’ll do something for you yet.”
525He was thoroughly in earnest, and hang me if I could refuse him. I suppose it was my bounden duty to have done so. Common sense and common prudence nudged me ere I took his proffered hand, but, heedless of the whisperings of still, small voices, I permitted myself to go with the tide. It was treating my friend Finche badly; it was placing myself in a false, if not a worse, position; and yet—I could not utter that absurdly small word “no.”
The morrow would tell its own tale, for I had resolved upon telegraphing without the assistance of Mr. Price’s ten-pound note, and a few hours could do no possible harm. If Miss Finche were to lose her heart in the space of an evening, she would prove a very noteworthy exception to the great sisterhood to which she belonged.
The addition to her dinner table did not seem to please Mrs. Finche, an emaciated, waspish, red-nosed lady, whose thin lips had an unpleasant twitch in them, and whose bright, beady black eyes darted angrily hither and thither like a pair of beetles in search of prey.
I sat next to her; opposite to me Miss Neville; Finche was at the foot of the table; on his right my friend Price, on his left the heiress.
“What brings you to this fashionable place, Mr. Crosse?” asked mine hostess, the inference being “plain to the naked eye.”
“Well, I thought I’d like to take a peep at the gay goings-on.”
“Ah!” an icy chill in the monosyllable.
Mrs. Finche being very silent, and, if not silent, snappish, I directed my conversation to Miss Neville, whom I found to be absolutely charming. I had travelled a good deal, and, from the loneliness of my life, read about as much as ordinary men, and I discovered, to my most intense pleasure, that there was at least one young girl in the nineteenth century the possessor of ideas above the level of sweet things in sheathe-like costumes, or the latest methods for beautifying the human face divine.
Miss Neville was thoroughbred, and all unconsciously showed her lustrous lineage in every movement, every gesture, every word. Blood will tell, and it spoke its own emblazoned story in the winsome elegance of this “rare bit o’ womankind.”
Mr. Price laughed and talked, and narrated piquant anecdotes, and kept Miss Finche well in hand, causing the host “all the time” to indulge in a vast, expansive smile. Finche was getting the value of his mutton and his claret out of his friend’s friend. He was satisfied. After dinner the young ladies returned to the Queen Anne porch, while the waspish hostess proceeded to take forty wide-awake winks. We mankind talked generally, and, although pressed to remain at our wine, Price and I were glad to get from beyond the range of our host’s perpetual “values.”
As we were seated upon the wooden steps at the feet of the fair ones, gazing out across the wide, wide ocean, gilded with the expiring rays of the setting sun, and canopied by a sky of pale blue merging into delicate green, and again into white, the lich-gate swung back and Grey Seymour swung in.
“What a glorious evening! Are you for a walk on the cliff?” asked the new-comer, eyeing Price and myself as he spoke. “How do?” he added, addressing me.
526“Mr. Seymour, Mr. Price,” said Miss Finche, while the two men nodded stiffly.
“A walk on the cliff, by all means; don’t you think so, Maude?” asked Miss Finche, addressing Miss Neville.
“Comme vous voulez.”
“Let’s go as we are.”
We sallied forth.
“What a nuisance, this fellow’s turning up!” whispered Price angrily. “I shall have to fall back.”
Seymour and Miss Finche led the way. I did the elderly and protecting party.
“I place them in your charge,” were the parting words of mine host. “The youngsters will take value out of one another; you take value out of the whole lot.”
I dropped behind, and proceeded to enjoy the glories of the night in my own way. Soon came that entrancing blue light which steals in between day and dark, and the stars began to throb in the great canopy, and that “hush” which Night sends as her envoy to earth was passing over hill and hollow, and land and sea.
I sat down in a little nook on the cliff—a corner that seemed almost clean out of the world, and as if the earth had suddenly ended there. I thought over many things, and in the bizarre reflections consequent upon the adventures of the day came a dreamy sensation of admiration for the fair young girl whom destiny had thrown beneath the roof-tree of my friend Wilson Finche. I felt strangely interested in her already. Why, I did not ask myself. She was a blaze of intelligence, a mine of intellectual wealth. I do not mean for one second to say that she was a genius, but there was a tone of high culture about her that shed itself like a fragrant perfume.
Miss Finche appeared to me to be a very nice, ladylike, ordinary class of girl—one of those patent-mannered, warranted-to-go-well sort of young ladies who rove at their sweet wild will in the garden of society; but beside Miss Neville she was absolutely colorless.
I sat thinking over the strange freaks of fortune, that give thousands of dollars to some girls, leaving others without a dime, when the sound of approaching voices scattered my reverie to the night breeze that gently fanned my pepper and salt—too much salt—whiskers. I was in a hollow beneath the cliff. The speakers were Grey Seymour and Hattie Finche.
Miss Finche’s tone was cold and resolute.
“I do not love you, Mr. Seymour. I never could. I will not hold out a particle of hope.”
“Don’t say that, Hattie—anything but that. Hope is all I have to live for,” he cried in a quivering, agonized way that made me sad to hear.
“I tell you fairly I can give you no hope.”
“Try and love me. I can make life a dream to you. Your every wish shall be gratified. My whole time shall be spent in anticipating your lightest fancy. O Hattie! do not drive me to despair, desperation.”
She was silent. They had stopped right opposite to where I sat concealed. I frankly confess I was too much interested to think of making my proximity known. It was a mean thing to remain where I was. I reproach myself while I write.
“I do not care for your money,” he raved on. “I have millions, ay, 527millions at my command, and those millions shall be spent to make your life an idyl.”
“Did I not tell you that I could not care for you last season? Did I not repeat it at Martha’s Vineyard two weeks ago? Now I repeat it again and for the last time. Let us be friends.”
“Friends!” he bitterly cried.
“Yes, friends, and good friends. Why not? In a short time you will wonder you ever were in love with me, and—”
“Never!” he burst in.
“Oh! yes, you will. And, what is more, you will fall in love with somebody else.”
“Do you wish to drive me mad?”
“On the contrary, I wish to bring you to your senses. Listen to me calmly.”
“I cannot.”
“But you must. This passion of yours is a boyish love.”
“It is my life.”
“Nothing of the kind. I don’t want your love. I could not return it.”
“But you won’t try.”
“I will not indeed. I am selfish enough to care for my own happiness, and my happiness—that is, the matrimonial part of it—does not lie with you. You are very fond of me?”
“I—”
“Now, don’t rhapsodize. You would do a good deal to make me happy?”
“Anything.”
“Would you be willing to make a sacrifice for me, if I earnestly asked you?”
“Try me, Hattie!”
“Well, then, I’ll put you to the test.”
“Do,” firmly, resolutely.
“You know Maude Neville. She is young, beautiful, penniless. She hasn’t a friend in the world. Be her friend.”
“What am I to do?”
“Marry her.”
There was a sound as though he had sprung backwards.
“This is insolence, Hattie,” he exclaimed hotly.
“Don’t be silly,” coolly observed Miss Finche, and I heard no more, for they had moved onwards.
This was a strange experience—a woman refusing a man, and then asking him to make love to another. I had read much of the doings of the sex, but this situation beat anything I had ever seen on the stage. Miss Finche’s evident self-possession, not a ripple in her voice, told how truly she spoke when she told the luckless love-sick youth she did not care for him, while the coolness, not to say the audacity, of the proposition almost staggered me. And Miss Neville—was not she to be consulted in the business? I was very much mistaken in my estimate of that young lady if she would haul down her colors at the bidding of any captain afloat, if she had not a mind so to do herself.
When I arrived, all alone, at the cottage, it was to find Miss Finche flirting heavily with Mr. Herbert Price, Miss Neville playing a brilliant fantasia of Chopin’s upon the piano, and, mirabile dictu, Mr. Grey Seymour, his face, his neck, his ears in a rosy glow, leaning over her and turning the leaves of the music. Could he have—pshaw! impossible.
“You know Mrs. Dyke Howell?” was Mr. Price’s observation, as we turned out of Sea View Cottage on our way to the Ocean House.
“Very slightly.”
“But you do know her?”
528“Well—yes.”
“You’ll get me a card for her garden party to-morrow?”
“Well, considering that I haven’t got one for myself, I—”
“That’s nothing to the point. A man can ask a favor for a friend he wouldn’t ask for himself, you know.”
“But you are not my friend.”
“I mean to be, though. Friendship must begin somewhere, and ours flourishes like Jack’s bean-stalk.”
“’Pon my word, I—”
“There, now, you’ll write for the card to-night: ‘Mr. John V. Crosse presents his compliments to Mrs. Dyke Howell, and would feel much obliged for an invitation for an English friend’—it looks well to have an English friend—‘for her garden party to-morrow,’ or words to that effect. We’ll send it off to-night, and you see, old man, it will get you an invitation as well.”
“You are the coolest hand I ever even read of.”
“Must be. My godmother’s legacy, like Bob Acre’s courage, is oozing out at my fingers’ ends, and I’ve nothing but my return ticket and my audacity to look to. Come, now, Crosse, don’t do things by halves. You’ve introduced me to a very nice family. Can’t say I admire my mother-in-law. What son-in-law does, though? The old boy is no end of a bore, but Hattie is all there.”
“I did not introduce you, Mr. Price; you introduced yourself.”
“Never could have done it but for you; ergo, logically, you introduced me.”
To my shame be it said, I wrote a note from the Ocean House to Mrs. Dyke Howell, a haughty lady of cadaverous aspect, and a nose resembling that of the late Duke of Wellington, who believed in that small monarchy called Knickerbockerdom, and in everything high, and mighty, and fashionable.
The cards came without note or comment, and my friend Price and I started for Hawthorndale. He wore a frock-coat that, even irritated as I was, evoked admiring comment, and a tall hat so shiny that I felt I could have shaved by it.
Before starting I telegraphed to Sir Harvey Price, Bart., Holten Moat, Sevenoaks, Kent, England, in the following words:
“Is your son Herbert in America? Is he a barrister? Describe him. Of the utmost importance. Telegraph instantly to
“J. V. Crosse, Ocean House,
Newport, R. I., U. S. A.”
I chuckled as I handed over my greenbacks.
“He doesn’t think I’ve taken him at his word. A few hours will unriddle him,” were my thoughts as we emerged from the hotel. I had seen Grey Seymour that morning en route to bathe. There were black shadows beneath his eyes, and the great brightness which I had so much admired the day before had faded out of his face. What was the issue of that most remarkable conversation?
He was the first person I encountered after passing through the icy fingers of Mrs. Dyke Howell, and much of the old look had returned.
“Have you seen the Finches?” he asked.
“No.”
“By the way, who is your friend Mr. Price?”
“He’s no particular friend of mine—merely a travelling acquaintance. He’s a member of the English bar, and very clever.” This latter assertion I believed in my heart.
529“Is he rich?”
“Oh! dear, no.”
“Unmarried?”
“Yes. That is, I believe so.”
“I see him here to-day. I suppose Mrs. Howell knows him.”
I was considerably relieved when young Roadwell, of the Coaching Club, cut in with a query as to a pair of roans which Seymour was about to put under the hammer, and left the pair diving “full fathom five” into the mysteries of horse-flesh.
The Finches arrived later on in full force—Mrs. Finche in yellow and green and red like a mayonnaise of lobster; Hattie in floating white; Maude Neville in black and orange. My friend Price clung to Miss Finche’s side like her breloquet, while Grey Seymour seemed to devote himself to the brunette.
“Ma foi,” thought I, “can the convocation of last night have so soon borne fruit? It would not be difficult to fall in love with Miss Neville, but the falling out of it first is the trouble.”
I did not see Price until eleven o’clock that night. He had gone home with the Finches—I was left out in the cold—and returned to the hotel in splendid spirits.
“Anybody there?” I asked with assumed carelessness.
“Nobody but Seymour.”
“Ah! Spooning over Miss Finche?”
“Not a bit of it; it’s over the other one. He was with her all day to-day, and by Jove! sir, to-night they were on the balcony doing moonlight like anything.”
“Where is he? Did you leave him behind you?”
“No; we left together, but he didn’t seem to want me, and—”
“And did you see that?” I sneered.
“Why, of course I did. I wasn’t going to do The Cliffs at this hour. I prefer my cigar on the piazza here.”
I did not see either of my gentlemen the following day, save in a casual way. Seymour appeared to be picking up his good looks, and as the table to which I was relegated was within range of his quartier, I could perceive, from the flotilla of plates and dishes around him at breakfast, that his rejection by Hattie Finche had in nowise impaired his appetite.
I was in love once, twenty-five years ago, and I lived on it. A sweet cake and a glass of champagne twice a day kept me in the flesh. I wouldn’t undertake to try that “little game” again. Judging from my own symptoms at that critical period of my existence, I fairly argued that Grey Seymour had either over-lived his passion for the heiress, that he was off with the old love and on to the new, or that his mistress and he had come to an understanding after they had passed beyond my coigne of vantage. I must own I was “sairly and fairly” puzzled. The reply to my cablegram was anxiously awaited. Properly speaking, it was due upon the evening of the day on which I set the wires in motion. Allowing for the difference in time between Newport and London, say six hours and a half, and having despatched it at 9 A.M., I might fairly have reckoned on a reply that night. The Moat, however, was some little distance from Sevenoaks, so I shouldn’t be utterly disappointed were forty-eight hours to elapse ere tidings would reach me. As it was, however, the appearance of every despatch boy sent a thrill of expectation through me, and a pang of corresponding 530disappointment when I sought the message on the rack under the letter C.
It was upon the second morning that Price came down to breakfast arrayed in nautical costume, deep, dark, desperate blue flannel, with a superb Maréchal Niel rosebud in his button-hole, and a genuine air of festivity in his whole appearance.
“What mischief are you up to to-day?” I asked.
“A sail with my friends the Finches.”
“My friends, if you please, Mr. Price.”
“To be sure; I quite forgot. Doosid nice people. I say, I am making the running, and I mean to win, as we say in the race-course, ‘hands down.’”
“Ahem! It doesn’t follow that if you win the daughter you’ll get over the father,” I observed with a knowing air.
“Oh! I’m not going to trouble myself about him. You’ll square him for me.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Price?” almost aghast at this cool impudence.
“I mean that old fogies understand one another. You’ll rub it into him that I am a man of considerable genius; of keen perception, calm deliberation; in the habit of hand-balancing conflicting propositions, a brilliant orator, and that I have tact, which is better than talent, and audacity, which is better than either or both.”
“If I were to speak about you at all to my friend Mr. Finche, I should certainly pay a glowing tribute to this last quality,” sneeringly.
“That’s a good fellow. You’re a brick of the most adhesive quality. You go for Finche when I give you the word. I mean to pop for Hattie the first good chance.”
“Well, really, I—”
“I know what you’re going to say: ‘Man is man and master of his fate.’ Shakspere says ‘sometimes.’ I mean to play the waiting race. The man who can afford it gets three to one in his favor. I can only be beaten by a dash-horse now. Here comes the man whom I imagined was the favorite, and he is not entered for the race at all.”
Grey Seymour joined us, also arrayed in dark blue, a red rose in his button-hole.
“These are our favors,” laughed Price: “Miss Finche yellow, Miss Neville red.
And gaily humming that song which Sims Reeves has made all his own, he lounged out of the immense salle à manger, casting criticising glances en passant.
I am fond of the sea. I never was sick in my life, and once upon a time thought of running a saucy schooner. Would I, like Paul Pry, drop into this party with an “I hope I don’t intrude”?
The hour was rapidly approaching when I must take action with reference to my friend Mr. Price. He had entered Finche’s house under my ægis, and I was bound in honor to protect Finche and Finche’s child. Yes, I would join the yachting excursion bon gré mal gré, and in a few straight words tell Wilson Finche exactly how the land lay.
I donned a blue flannel suit—no man goes to Newport without one—and taking an old-fashioned telescope under my arm, went upon the piazza to await the appearance of Grey Seymour, who was still occupied in going through the entire menu for his matitudinal meal.
“A telegram for you, sir,” said the clerk, as I passed the desk.
531“At last,” I muttered, as I tore it open.
It was from Lady Price, and dated Holten Moat:
“My son is in America. Barrister. Tall, thin, dark. Black mole under left ear. Scar on right wrist. Telegraph if in trouble.”
At that particular moment Mr. Price appeared on the corridor, engaged in chewing a tooth-pick.
I went to him, and, without a single word, seized his right hand, baring his wrist. The scar was there. I then wheeled him round, and took a rapid and searching look behind his left ear.
“Ah!” he laughed, “looking for the macula materna? So you’ve been telegraphing home, you incredulous old codger,” scanning the open telegram.
“Read it,” I said. I should mention that the black mole was in its place.
“Why, you’ll frighten the old lady into fits. Write her at once, Crosse, and tell her I’m as safe as the milk in a cocoanut. Don’t spare your dollars, old man!”
When I left Newport the Finches were still at Sea View Cottage, and my friend Mr. Price on a visit in the house. About six months later I received cards to attend at the nuptials of Miss Hattie Julia Maria Anne Finche to Herbert Price. An attack of the gout prevented my putting in an appearance, but I sent both bride and groom a little present. To the daughter of my old friend I gave a pearl necklace; to his son-in-law a diamond ring, with the words inscribed in raised letters, “De l’audace. Toujours de l’audace.”
I may mention that Grey Seymour and his charming bride honored me with a visit some time, later on, en route to Europe.
St. Thomas defines beatitude, in respect to man, to be “the perfect good in which the natural tendency of the human will to universal good attains complete rest.”[119] This is beatitude objectively considered. Subjectively, it is the actual fruition consequent upon attainment, and rest in the quiet possession, of the perfect good which is the object of volition. This fruition is an immanent act within the nature of the human subject, and must therefore proceed from a principle within the human nature. Nature denotes the same thing with essence, expressing only as a distinctive term its being a principle of activity. By reason of his essence, the human being has within him a principle by virtue of which he desires, seeks, and is impelled by the movement given him by his First and Final Cause toward the attainment of beatitude. As intelligent, universal truth is his object, to which his intellect is connatural; as volitive, universal good is his object, to which his will naturally corresponds.
The idea of universal good is obviously the one which lies at the foundation of this conception of beatitude. It is well known that the notion of good as a universal is one of the transcendental predicates; that is, of those which are outside of everything which does or can mark out any generic ratio, or diversity of kind between any existing or possible beings. Good is not a genus or kind, in opposition to some diverse genera or kinds which are not good; and, à fortiori, it is not a species, under which individuals are to be classed as specifically different, by the note of goodness, from other individuals who by their specific difference are something else than good. It is the species which completely determines the essence of every existing thing, and the specific difference which marks its essential unlikeness to other things whose essence is other than its own. Therefore no being can be essentially unlike any other by reason of one being good and the other somehow dissimilar to good. The predicate of good belongs to all genera, and, of course, to all species and individuals, as a universal notion transcending all their respective determining notes, and identifying itself, in the analogical sense proper to each of them, with all and singular of these notes.
Good is whatever is consonant to nature, whatever is a perfection, or subserves to the conservation and increase of a perfection. It is coextensive with being, and identical with it, as are all the transcendental notions, which merely present the same object of thought under various phases. Whatever is thinkable, as an object is an entity; as having its own entity undivided in itself and divided from every entity other than itself, is a unity; as an intelligible entity is a verity; as containing in itself reason for the volition that it should be what it is, it is a good. All these notions are 533contained in the notion of being, and are as universal as being, which has in opposition to it only nothing, that is, no-being, no-one-thing, no-true-thing, no-good, mere negation and nullity.
We are at present concerned only with actually existing rational nature, in its relation to universal being as the object of its volition, or movement towards the universal good in which it seeks for beatitude. Whatever is consonant to rational nature, gives it perfection or subserves to its perfection, is its good. Good is being regarded in its aspect as something desirable, in which the will can rest with complacency. Every actual, concrete essence is good, as such, because it has being, and in so far as it has being; and it presents, therefore, an object to the will which is desirable and in which it can have complacency. The rational nature is in itself a good as an actual being, and it is a good to itself, or, in other words, it is a good for it that it exists. The universe in which it exists is all good in essence and nature. Universal nature is in consonance with itself, and its laws tend to the perfection, conservation, and augmentation of being, throughout its whole extent. The movement of will in rational nature toward the universal good is only a higher kind and mode of an operation which is common to all nature. Things destitute of sense are put into operation toward the general end of the universe by blind and fatal laws, which receive their impulse and direction solely from the will and motive power of their creator. Those which have sense but not reason are incited to movement by a vital impulse and the excitement of their sensitive faculties by external objects. Rational nature moves itself by intelligence and will toward the good which is its object. Intellect has for its connatural object universal being as verity, and tends toward an adequation between itself and its object. So, likewise, the will in respect to the good of being. This adequation constitutes the beatitude of rational nature, and an approximation to it is an approach toward beatitude which constitutes a greater or lesser degree of imperfect felicity. The principle of beatitude has therefore been pointed out and proved to exist in human nature. The intense longing for it is matter of self-consciousness to every human being. The natural tendency and longing for beatitude cannot have been implanted by the Creator in order to be frustrated. There is no place in the nature of things for any other intention and end of creation, except to produce the good of being in all its grades and orders, according to the determinate measure prescribed by the divine intellect and the divine will. The good of inanimate nature necessarily falls short of any final and complete term in itself, because it does not contain any faculty of apprehension and complacency. Mere sensitive apprehension and complacency in living, irrational beings do not adequately supply this deficiency, because they attain only to the lowest and most imperfect good, in a partial and deficient mode. All nature below the rational, therefore, furnishes only an element, an inchoate and incomplete material substratum for the formal and complete good of created being, which can only possess a final actuality and become an end in itself in rational nature. Material beings have only their own essence and 534existence, which are exclusive and isolated, determined by necessary laws to merely extrinsic states and movements, in which they are totally inert. They have no return upon themselves and no capacity of receiving any other being into their own. Therefore they can have no self-consciousness or self-activity, no cognition or sentiment. Sensitive beings have a partial return upon themselves by sensation and sensitive cognition, and a limited self-activity. A spirit returns upon itself with a complete retroaction, and can receive other beings into itself according to the mode of the recipient, that is, ideally. It has therefore complete self-consciousness and self-activity, intelligence and volition, and in the human essence, by virtue of the union of the rational part with the animal, it has also a more perfect kind of sensitive life. It apprehends and possesses its own being, and universal being outside of itself, as a verity by intelligence, as a good by volition. When it is perfect and permanent in its natural good, the possession of this good is in itself beatitude. There is no other term or effect which can possibly have the ratio of an end to the intention of the Creator in the creative act, for it is the only complete and final good of being. Created being is nothing but a participation of the uncreated and necessary being, and an imitation of it in the finite order. Finite beatitude is, therefore, a participation of the infinite beatitude of the divine nature, and an imitation of it. God alone is THE BEING, who exists by his essence, and possesses being absolutely and in plenitude. In the same sense in which He alone is, whose Name is Ego sum qui sum, He alone is good and He alone is blessed. That is, He alone is good by his essence actually and in plenitude, and is alone by his essence possessed of the plenitude of blessedness.
Boethius defines the eternity of God as “the perfect possession, all at once, of boundless life.” This may answer as a definition of the beatitude of God. His being is living being, in all respects boundless, and so absolutely in act that it is incapable of any increase or diminution. The being of God is essentially good, and an object of complacency. The life of God consists in the act of intelligence and volition in which he knows and wills his own being, as infinitely intelligible and infinitely desirable. For God, to be and to live is to be blessed. The vision of his own essence presents to him an object of infinite complacency in which his will rests with a perfect and eternal quietude. What his essence is, and what that good is which constitutes the infinite beatitude of God, we cannot know except in an analogical manner. The universe of created being is an image and imitation of the divine essence. Whatever being and good we can perceive in the works of God we know must have its archetype in the essence of God, existing in a supereminent mode and an infinite plenitude. Created beauty is something which being seen pleases, in which the will reposes with complacency when it is apprehended by the intellect. Infinite, absolute, uncreated beauty must please infinitely the infinite intelligence which beholds it by a comprehensive vision. This is the nearest approach we can make to a conception of the beatitude of God.
The being of God is the archetype and source of all created being, and his infinite beatitude the archetype 535and source of all finite beatitude in created, intelligent beings. Creation proceeds not from want but from fulness of good in the infinite Being; not from necessity but from free volition. It is an overflow of power, intelligence, and love, diffusive of the good of being from the boundless sea of the divine essence into the streams which it fills. Its ideal possibility is in the divine essence as imitable, presenting to the divine intelligence innumerable terms of the divine omnipotence, and to the divine will innumerable objects of volition and complacency. The act which brings it out of nonexistence into existence proceeds from the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity equally and indivisibly. The origin of the creative act is in the Father, the medium in the Son, the consummation in the Holy Spirit. The almighty word of intelligence and volition calling the nonexistent universe into existence, proceeding from the Father as the origin of infinite and finite essence, in the Word is the creative ideal and measure of all the intelligible and intelligent creation, in the Spirit is the cause and principle of all created good. The formal principiation of the divine essence, proceeding from the Father and the Son as its active principle, whose term is the person of the Holy Spirit, is pure Love. Love is the consummation of the infinite being of God, and its eternal efflorescence is beatitude, the perfect possession of boundless life which is a boundless good, totally, existing in a present whose duration is without any before or after, without beginning or end or successive parts, and unchangeable by any increase or diminution. It is a maxim of philosophy that operation is in accordance with the nature of the operator. An artist produces a work corresponding to the nature of his art. The work of the Holy Spirit is like himself. The divine essence in his person being love, the consummation of the divine work in creation effected by him must be good; and that good in its last result is beatitude. He is “The Lord and Giver of life.” The life of the intelligent creature is like the life of God. He is finite, and therefore his duration is not eternity. It has a beginning, and a before and after, and its totality is not possessed all at once in one present, but its parts succeed each other without end. Although he cannot possess his past and future at one time, he possesses always his present, which glides with him through all time, and is an imitation of the eternal, ever-enduring present of eternity. The perfect possession of all that constitutes his life, without any fear of losing it, constitutes his beatitude. Divine love, diffusive of the good of being out of its own plenitude, can have no other end in creation, in so far as this end is contained within the creation itself, except the beatitude of intellectual creatures.
The idea from which creation receives its form is in the Word, and intellectual creatures are specially made in his image. In the Incarnation, the Word united to his divine nature a rational nature, consubstantial with that which is common to the whole human race, and allied generically to the highest as well as to the lowest orders of created beings, that is, both to the spiritual and the corporeal extremes of nature. The created nature thus assumed into personal unity with the divine nature in Immanuel, who is the only-begotten Son of 536God the Father from eternity, has become the nature of God, and as such entitled to receive from the divine nature the communication of its plenitude of being and of good, in so far as this is communicable in a finite mode and measure. The Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Son, both in the eternal order of the Trinity and in the temporal order of creation, is communicated to the human nature of Immanuel as the principle of life and beatitude. The hypostatic union of created and uncreated nature in the person of Jesus Christ is the masterpiece of the Lord and Giver of life, the ultimate term of his creative act. The beatitude which he imparts to the human nature of Jesus Christ is the supreme participation of its rational intelligence and will in the divine act of comprehensive vision of the divine essence and infinite complacency in its absolute beauty, which constitutes divine beatitude. The angels were destined to the same beatitude, and, those excepted who forfeited their right by sinning, they have attained it. The human race was created for the same destination, and the elect will receive their perfect consummation in the same sempiternal glory and blessedness which belongs of right to the humanity of the Eternal Son, on the day of the universal resurrection.
It is evident that this supernatural beatitude in God completely fulfils the definition of beatitude given by St. Thomas as bonum perfectum quod totaliter quietat appetitum. The object of the rational human appetite, that is, of the will, is universal good, which is in God in the most absolute and perfect plenitude. But universal good is also in creatures by participation, and presents a proper object of complacency to the will in perfect harmony with its primary object of beatific love. Our Lord Jesus Christ in his human mind and human heart not only has the immediate intuition of God and of all things in God, together with the love which accompanies this highest mode of knowledge, but also the mode of knowledge and love which is strictly natural. He delights in the contemplation of the beauty of his own human nature, in the works which he performed through it, in its dignity and exaltation, in the splendor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the angels and the saints, in his entire and universal kingdom both of mind and matter. He delights in loving his companions in celestial glory, and in receiving their love, in radiating light and beauty and happiness all around himself through countless realms of space and numberless multitudes of beings. His human nature was not essentially changed at the resurrection, but only glorified. He has therefore that sublimated corporeal and sensitive life which is proper to the nature which he assumed, with the sensitive cognition and enjoyment resulting naturally from its attributes and faculties.
The kingdom of heaven has therefore its visible and natural as well as its divine aspect. Natural beatitude in the possession of universal created good, in the enjoyment of the works of God, in science, in the sentiment of the beautiful in created objects, in activity, in society and friendship, co-exists with the uninterrupted contemplation of the divine essence, and the perfect quietude of everlasting repose on the bosom of God. The quiet and repose of the spirit in 537beatitude by no means signifies inaction and the slumber of the faculties. God, who is immutable, is most perfect act, and the first mover of all things. The rest of beatitude is in opposition to the restless inquietude of a spirit which has not found its equilibrium, and is impelled by unsatisfied longings to seek for its perfect good. Its rest consists in its having found its equilibrium in the stable possession of the perfect good. But the presence of the due object to the intellect and the will calls forth their most perfect and intense activity, and the very qualities of the glorified bodies of the blessed saints in heaven prove that they also will be active, and not for ever standing still in one posture or reclining indolently on grassy meads, as some seem to imagine is the Christian belief. It is indeed most difficult to form any imaginary pictures of the future life which are in any way satisfactory to reason. But whatever we can represent to ourselves by such efforts which can give some idea of a glory and a beatitude worthy of rational beings in a perfect state, assuredly will be realized in a way far beyond our conceptions.
The aim of the foregoing exposition has been to prepare the way for presenting, in the natural element which exists in supernatural beatitude, that which is the purely natural good due to the intellectual nature left to itself in its own native sphere, the underworld below heaven. We call this sphere of pure nature native to the intellectual nature in general, because it belongs there by virtue of its essential being, prescinding from any higher destination given to it gratuitously, whether simultaneously with its original creation or subsequently to it. It is an underworld relatively to the supernatural order whose last complement is in the hypostatic union realized in the Incarnation. The state of pure nature in respect to the only species of simply intellectual or rational creatures known to us, is treated by Catholic theologians in a merely hypothetical manner; as a possible state, in which angels and men might have been constituted by the Creator, or in which he could, if he pleased, place other beings generically similar to angels or men, in other spheres of the universe which are distinct from our earth and the celestial abode of the angels. Whether there are now or ever will be such beings, inhabiting the numerous worlds with which the vast extent of real space is filled, can only be matter of conjecture. But the human species, and the hierarchy of pure spirits with which it is in present relation, were destined for the supernatural order immediately depending from the royal seat of Immanuel, the sovereign head of the host of deified intelligences, as its centre. In respect to the human race, therefore, the state of pure nature is presented under another aspect as a state of lapsed nature, and the sphere of the underworld is its native sphere actually and by virtue of natural generation, by reason of a fall and a sentence of deprivation. On this account, the permanent future state of all human beings who are finally excluded from heaven, in Christian eschatology is primarily considered as a state of loss. Whatever felicity is possible in this state appears as something remaining from the original destination of mankind, and not as the complete good of human beatitude. For this reason, 538we have presented first the total ratio of beatitude in respect to human destiny, before considering what remains after the sum of supernatural good has been deducted.
Substantially, the state of lapsed nature as denuded is the same with pure or nude nature. The question of the object and nature of pure natural beatitude is the one to be decided, in order to determine what amount of good in the endless life of human beings who lack the beatific vision of God is conceivable and possible. There is only one serious difficulty in this question. It arises from the consideration of the very essence of intelligence as related to the universal truth, and will as related to the universal good. The intellect, as such, by its very nature, seeks for the deepest cause, and for an adequation with the intelligible being of its universal object, and the appetite of the will follows it. How, then, can the intellect rest in any object except the absolute, necessary, infinite essence of God, apprehended by a clear and immediate intuition, or any other object but this perfectly quiet the appetite of the will? It is evident that if the intellectual nature, as such, has in it an exigency and a longing which cannot be satisfied with any good to which its faculties are commensurate, beatitude is something essentially supernatural. In this case, the natural order must be merely inchoate, potential, needing to be completed by the supernatural. Intellectual beings could not, then, be created for a purely natural end and destiny; the only end suitable and fit for them would be that which reaches its consummation in the beatific vision. Defrauded of this in any way, even without any voluntary fault of their own, they must be miserable during eternity through the suffering of the pain of loss, or at least continue for ever in a state of arrested and imperfect development, in which absence of suffering would be due only to insensibility, with an imperfect kind of felicity similar to that which men possess in this earthly condition, from the common enjoyments of human life.
We deny, however, that there is any exigency in created nature for the supernatural good. The difficulty above stated, that God is necessarily the supreme object of the created intellect and the created will, we answer as follows. Intellect, by nature, seeks God, according to its own mode and measure. The operation of the will is determined by the intellect. Nil volitum nisi prius cognitum. The divine intellect, which is the divine essence considered as intelligent subject, is in adequation with the divine essence considered as intelligible object. God has immediate, comprehensive cognition of himself by his essence. Every created essence is infinitely different from the divine, and therefore has an operation intrinsically unequal to the act in which the divine life consists. Operatio sequitur esse. The being of an intelligent creature is within the order of the finite, of the imitated, participated existence, activity, enjoyment, which is a diminished image of the archetypal reality in the Creator. All this is within the circle of nature, and when this circle is perfect, including whatever belongs to it, there is no exigency of anything beyond. The knowledge of God, not as he is in his essence, within his circle of immanent being, but as he is in the terms of 539his creative act, in the universe, in the intellectual light and intelligible essence of the created spirit itself, is within the circle of nature. As the Author of nature he is knowable and lovable, by perfect and well-ordered faculties of pure nature without grace and without defect. Natural beatitude does not require the immediate and intuitive, but only the mediate and abstractive cognition and contemplation of God, and does not exact any kind of union of the will to God as the sovereign good, except that which terminates by natural sequence its own rightly directed and completed spontaneous movement. Even now we can find God by reason, and take complacency in his perfections. Much more can beings of a higher perfection attain to the knowledge of God in a manner proportionate to their kind or degree of perfection, and with a complacency corresponding to their knowledge, if their intelligence and will are rightly co-ordinated, and directed toward their proper object. As respects the universal verity and good of being in the created universe, there is no difficulty whatever in supposing that it can be attained within any finite limits, in a state of pure nature.
This inferior sphere of natural beatitude being thus theoretically possible, it is most reasonable to suppose that all human beings who at the general resurrection are dispossessed of any right to the kingdom of heaven, and at the same time free from all actual sin, receive their ultimate destination in such a sphere. There is no reason in the order of justice why they should be deprived of any perfection or good of which they are naturally capable. In the “restitution of all things,” the ἀποκατάστασις, there will be no deordination left in the universe, and no imperfection of order belonging to an inchoate condition of nature. Venit dies, dies tua, in quâ reflorent omnia. Inanimate creation will become resplendent with the beauty which the last touches of the divine Artist have given to his consummate work. The influence of the life-giving Spirit will be poured in a full torrent through all parts of the universal realm of living being. In this general restitution we may be certain that the thousands of millions of human infants who have never attained to the use of reason in this world, and have never received the grace of regeneration, will be raised up, by the bounty of their Creator, in the full perfection of their human nature, both corporeal and intellectual, to live for ever in the enjoyment of all the good which is due to pure nature, participating in their own inferior degree in that excellence and felicity which in its highest perfection belongs to the blessed in heaven as an adjunct of their supernatural glory and beatitude. Moreover, it is altogether congruous to the order of redemption in Jesus Christ, and probable, that they will receive, in common with the whole creation, their own special benefit and increase of natural good, through the Incarnation. There is no obstacle in their nature to the reception of any good except that of the beatific vision. They may, therefore, enjoy the vision of the glorified humanity of the Lord, worship him and love him as their creator and benefactor, see and converse with the angels and saints, and in every respect enjoy a better and more desirable immortality than that which 540would be possible in another system of divine providence which did not contain a supernatural order.
Besides those who die in infancy, there are many adults who may be considered as on the same level with infants in respect to moral responsibility. Balmes proposes the opinion that a large proportion of the most ignorant and spiritually undeveloped part of mankind, especially those who are born and brought up in a low state of barbarism, never attain the rational level of a well-instructed Christian child of five or six years old, who, nevertheless, is regarded in Catholic theology as incapable of mortal sin.[120] Among the whole multitude of those who are destitute of the ordinary means of salvation, each and every individual either has the use of reason sufficiently for full moral responsibility, or he has not. If he has not, he is, in the moral relation, an infant, at most capable of venial sin; but if he has, either he has divine faith sufficient for obtaining salvation, or the sufficient grace and means for attaining the faith, or neither of these requisites for working out his salvation by his own voluntary efforts. In this last case his lack of faith is no sin, and he is only accountable for the observance of the natural law according to his own conscience. If he keeps this natural law, he is subject to no eternal penalty besides the privation of supernatural beatitude. All men, therefore, who really incur the responsibilities and the risks of a moral probation, have an opportunity of meriting heaven, or at least of attaining that natural felicity hereafter which is the lot of infants who die without baptism.
From all these premises we deduce one general conclusion, that the notion of a doom to everlasting infelicity and misery, which is a dire and inevitable calamity involving the great mass of mankind, by reason of the state in which they are born into this life, is a chimera of the imagination, and not any part of the Catholic faith or a just inference from any revealed doctrine. The sufferings of those who have not deserved punishment by their own voluntary transgressions of the divine law are temporary, disciplinary, intended for a final good, and in the end abundantly compensated. Many of the sufferings which have the nature of punishment are condoned altogether, and many others are temporary and in their last result beneficial to those who are subjected to their infliction. No rational and immortal being is permanently deprived of the proper perfection and good of his nature by fate or destiny, or by the arbitrary will of the Creator and sovereign Lord of the universe. The order of reason and justice of itself produces only universal good, and this universal good embraces the private and personal good of each individual being, except in so far as he has freely and wilfully made himself unfit and unworthy to participate in it. Eternal retribution is awarded solely to personal merit or demerit in proportion to its quantity. Outside of the order of just retribution, there is no action of God upon his creatures except that of pure goodness and love, bestowing gratuitously, unmitigated good without any mixture of evil. The desire for permanent beatitude in endless life, and the natural principle of 541beatitude implanted in every rational nature, are not frustrated and thwarted through any deficiency in nature, or failure of divine Providence to carry out his original design and intention to its complete and ultimate term. The only failure is in the free and concreative cause to which God has given dominion over itself and its acts and the effects of those acts, with power to produce in prescribed limits as much or as little good as it chooses. This free cause is free-will, which is the only cause, in every rational creature finally deprived of his original right to beatitude, of the state of irreparable privation in which he is placed by the “restitution of all things.” The restitution brings all nature into order and to perfection, in so far as each thing in nature is receptive of its proportionate good. Rational nature is receptive according to its rational appetite or the attitude of the will. Those rational beings who have determined themselves to a state of volition contrary to the order of reason and justice are, in so far as they are affected by this state, receptive only of a violent reaction of order against their will, repressing and confining their inclination to a perverse activity. The privation of beatitude is co-extensive with the contrariety between the will and the permanent, irreversible order of reason; and this contrariety is proportional to the misuse of freewill by sinning during the term of probation. Their evil is nothing but spoiled good, and they are themselves the spoilers. It is through no defect of goodness in God, or deficiency of good in the order of nature, that they are what they are. Every thing and every person in this order is in the right place and the due relation, according to the highest reason and the most perfect justice. God has made all things well, they are what they ought to be, and there is no flaw or defect in the bonum honestum of the universe. God must take complacency in the fulfilment of his own wise and just will, and every rational being must concur with intellect and will in that which God wills. This is precisely what St. Thomas affirms when he says that the beatitude of the just will be increased by their knowledge of the eternal punishment of sinners, and there is no sense or reason in the diatribes of rationalists against him or any other theologian who does not overpass the limits of Catholic and rational doctrine on this head.
Another conclusion which may be reasonably deduced from sound theological principles and probable opinions is, that the majority of mankind, and of rational beings in general, are in a state of perpetual felicity in the world to come. There is no reason whatever for supposing that more than a third part of the angels fell with Lucifer. It is probable that the greater number of adults who live and die in the faith and communion of the church are finally admitted into heaven. We cannot deny that numbers of those who have lived under the natural law, without any explicit faith in Jesus Christ, have been also saved by extraordinary grace. Nor is it possible for us to determine what proportion of the great mass remaining may eventually attain some degree of inferior natural felicity similar to that which is the lot of infants dying in original sin. The number of infants who have received baptism and have died before the use of reason at least 542equals the number of the baptized who have attained adult age, and to these must be added all those who died in infancy before the sacrament of baptism was instituted, and had received remission of original sin under the ancient covenant of grace. The entire multitude of infants who have died since the beginning of the world at least equals the number of adults, and it is therefore certain that the majority of all human beings will possess in the future life either supernatural or natural beatitude. There is no reason, therefore, for the supposition that the Christian and Catholic doctrine represents the vast majority of human beings as destined to a state of everlasting misery. If any one is disposed to entertain the hypothesis that the universe is filled with a multitude of rational beings who are neither angels nor men, whose number bears a quantitative proportion to the physical magnitude of the vast cosmical system of the starry heavens, there is as much reason for supposing that they are all eternally good and happy as for supposing that they have existence. In respect to mere extensive and numerical quantity, the amount of good resulting from the creative act of God far surpasses the sum of that possible additional good which has been frustrated by the failure of free, concreative causes to co-operate with the first cause toward the great, final end of creation. In reality, the absolute, eternal decrees of God are not in any way frustrated by the failure of a certain number of creatures to attain the good for which they were destined. They leave no gap in the universal order which the foresight of God has not filled up. Their loss is exclusively their own, and their sins have only furnished an occasion for bringing out of the evil which they have attempted a far greater good than they could have effected by a faithful co-operation with the will of God, greater glory to the Creator and to the universe, more splendid merits in the just, a more magnificent exhibition of wisdom and love in the cross, through which the divine Redeemer of men triumphed over sin and death. “He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God hath also exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above every name: that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and in hell; and that every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father.”[121] The perfection of the whole creation, in subordination to the sphere of supernatural glory inhabited by the sons of God, is also clearly declared by St. Paul to be a consequence of the exaltation of Jesus Christ through the cross. “For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him that made it subject, in hope: because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that every creature groaneth, and is in labor even until now. And not only it, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body.”[122]
543Satan himself, with all those whom he has seduced into sin in the mad hope of thwarting the divine work of the Incarnation, has only contributed by his efforts to destroy the universal order, under the overmastering intelligence of God, to increase its splendor. In the end he will be found to have wound himself up by going around in his circuit. A few years ago there was a bear in the Central Park, who was permitted to live on a grass-plat, fastened by a long chain to a stake in the middle. By going continually round and round his post, he used to wind himself up so tightly that he could not stir. Satan is like this bear. His great achievement, and masterstroke of policy, was the crucifixion of the Son of God, by which he was exalted and obtained a name above every name, before which every knee in hell shall bow and every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. This is the one great example of the universal action of divine Providence in bringing out of all evil a greater good than that which the evil destroys or prevents.
St. Paul anticipates an objection, which is likely to occur to some minds, in respect to the justice of God in the unequal distribution of grace, and the withholding of mercy from those whom he permits to work out their own final perdition. “Thou wilt therefore say to me: Why doth he then find fault? For who resisteth his will?” The answer is a rebuke of the presumption of those who pretend to dispute the sovereign right and dominion of God over his creatures, and thus in reality make the divine Majesty subservient and responsible to his own subjects. “O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it: Why hast thou made me thus? Or hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor and another to dishonor?”[123] The whole mass of mankind being destitute of any right to supernatural grace and beatitude, there can be no complaint against the sovereign will of God for conferring the grace of regeneration upon some and withholding it from others. None of those who have made themselves positively unworthy of everlasting glory by their sins are entitled to mercy. That God withheld all hope of pardon from the fallen angels and gave that hope to men, that to some sinful men he gives more grace than to others, and that he compels those who rebel against him to glorify him against their will in their own defeat and the overthrow of all their plans, is no ground of complaint against the divine justice. “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated”; that is, loved less, and excluded from certain special, gratuitous blessings bestowed on Jacob. “What shall we say then? Is there injustice with God? God forbid!” No creature is made to suffer without sufficient reason or deprived of any natural or acquired right. But in respect to gratuitous gifts, and especially graces conferred upon the unworthy, God is absolute master. “For he saith to Moses: I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.” It enters into the very notion of grace and mercy that they should be purely gratuitous. The whole order of grace in respect both to angels and men is purely gratuitous. It is therefore 544absurd to argue from the justice and goodness of God, and from the superabundant mercy which he shows toward sinners in this world, especially when they are within his special circle of grace, the Catholic Church, that he will give grace or show mercy after the day of judgment, in derogation of the order of justice. It was a purely gratuitous act of goodness in God to elevate human nature by the hypostatic union, and to give angels and men a share in the privileges of the sacred humanity. The rewards conferred on merit in this order are indeed rewards of justice, but the whole basis of the justice by which glory is proportioned to merit is laid in a gratuitous grant of the very conditions of merit, the grace which made it possible, and the promise of reward on which the title to the kingdom of heaven rests. Absolute, indefeasible, personal right to the glory of heaven does not exist except in Jesus Christ the Lord, who is a divine person, and whose merits are infinite and equal to all the benefits conferred by the Father upon creation. The rights of all those who share with him, the Blessed Virgin Mary included, have been conferred by him upon them. The beatific vision is a pure boon of goodness to every creature who attains its possession. All might have been left in their natural state without any possibility of attaining it, without any derogation of the order of eternal law in respect to intellectual nature. There is no reason, therefore, why the number of the elect, once completed, should ever be increased, or the gates of heaven reopened to admit new citizens and princes of the celestial Jerusalem. Those who have never forfeited a right to admission through their own fault have no reason to bewail their exclusion.
Those who have lost their right cannot possibly hope to recover it, because they are left in their despoiled nature, utterly impotent to turn back toward the supernatural good, deprived of all grace and beyond the reach of the economy of mercy, which has passed away for ever. In respect to supernatural life they are dead, and as incapable of resuscitation by any effort of their own as a corpse is incapable of repossessing itself of the soul which has departed from it. The ἀποκατάστασις is not a resurrection to spiritual life in grace, for this belongs to the preceding, initial order of regeneration which has terminated with the end of the present world. The bodily resurrection and restitution of nature gives only to human beings the complement of the life which they already possess, whether supernatural or merely natural, and to the physical universe its complement of perfection in the eternal order. The angels remain intrinsically unchanged in their spiritual, incorruptible nature, as God made them in the beginning. The holy angels continue in the possession of the supernatural mode of being which they acquired by their free and active co-operation with grace, before the probation of man commenced, without any increase of essential glory and beatitude. The fallen angels remain in the state into which they voluntarily precipitated themselves at the same time. The change which takes place at the end of human probation is, for the angels, only extrinsic. The holy angels cease to combat with the demons, and to minister in the economy of redemption. The demons are compelled to desist 545from their war against Immanuel and his kingdom, and are relegated to their destined abode. All human beings are placed in the state and condition in which they are to remain for ever, those who have followed the demons in their rebellion in a state similar to theirs, as those who have obeyed God are in a state similar to that of the holy angels. It is this part of the Christian doctrine which Origen wholly misunderstood. He may be excused from wilful and contumacious heresy, on account of the paucity of means at his command for learning the complete doctrine of the apostles, and the modest, hypothetical manner in which he proposed his erratic theories. We may also give him the benefit of the doubt respecting the entire purport of what he really and persistently did teach out of all that mass of wholly uncatholic and in a great measure absurd opinions, so justly condemned by the patriarchal synod at Constantinople in its fifteen anathematisms, and in a general way by several subsequent œcumenical councils. It is impossible to doubt, however, that one fundamentally erroneous conception was fixed in his mind, and gave occasion to the fanciful hypotheses of aeons and ages, and transitions of spirits up and down through the scale of being. This conception was an exaggeration of the freedom of will inherent in rational nature. Because no creature is either holy or wicked by his essence, but every one is capable of good or evil, he argued the perpetual flexibility and vertibility of free-will between good and evil. Permanence in good must therefore be attributed only to a habit of right determination, and permanence in sin to an opposite habit or obstinacy of purpose to do wrong. Perhaps his various and apparently conflicting statements can be reconciled, if we suppose that he admitted the actual perseverance of some in holiness through a kind of moral impeccability acquired by long and persistent efforts, with a consequent eternity of unchangeable beatitude; and an opposite state of irreclaimable perverseness in others with everlasting misery as its necessary penalty. Those who are in the middle between these two extremes are then variable, vacillating between the opposite poles of moral good and evil, happiness and infelicity, at least during indefinite periods of duration. Our modern rationalistic Christians to a certain extent are involved in the same imperfect philosophical notions which Origen, in the lack, of a Christian philosophy, borrowed from Neo-Platonism. They do not understand the nature of grace, which gives immutable holiness and impeccability as a perfection to a created essence which in itself is capable of defect. Hence, they cannot get a clear idea of a permanent state of indefectibility in good except as a moral habit resulting from a series of acts. Nor can they understand the opposite state of deficiency and privation as something permanent in itself, apart from the habit of sinning which has been contracted by acts of sin and may be removed by contrary acts under the influence of moral discipline. They choose to consider the state of those who become perfectly good, here or hereafter, and attain the felicity of heaven, as something fixed, because it is agreeable to the feelings to think so. They also strive to make the prospects of those who are not very good, and 546even of those who are very bad, as hopeful as possible, in view of a certain, or probable, or at least possible, future conversion at a more or less remote æonian period, because it is likewise agreeable to the feelings to anticipate this happy change. Moreover, they are very willing to accept the teaching of the Bible and the Christian tradition concerning the eternity of heaven, without seeking too anxiously for metaphysical or moral demonstration of its intrinsic credibility, because it satisfies the natural desire of the heart for perfect good. We do not deny that there is some truth in their reasonings concerning acquired habits of virtue and vice, but they are defective as an argument for the determination of the future destiny of souls. The certainty of a fixed and immutable state of sanctity and beatitude for the just in heaven does not depend either on these reasonings, or on an exegetical and critical interpretation of certain words in Holy Scripture. It has a deeper foundation. The human soul of Jesus Christ is impeccable because of its indissoluble union with the divine nature in his person. The angels and saints are impeccable because they also are united to God by an indissoluble union. The Holy Spirit is in them as the principle of their spiritual life. They love God above all things by a happy necessity, and their intuitive vision of his essence, the infinite good, with the perfect quietude of the will in the enjoyment of this good, raises them above all possibility of attraction toward any object which could allure them from their willing worship and allegiance to their sovereign Lord. Moreover, they actually possess the inferior good in the most perfect manner, with an unbounded liberty to follow all their inclinations, which are all innocent, in conformity to reason, and identical with the will of God. The indestructibility and immortality which belong to their essence as spirits, by nature, pervades their entire actual being with all its accidents, so that they are incapable of suffering any deterioration or injury.
In the natural order of beatitude, the perfect intellectual cognition of God accompanied by perfect natural love to him as the most perfect being, together with the complete possession of all connatural good, removes all tendency to evil. Nature seeks good by a necessary law, rational nature by its spontaneous, voluntary movement. No rational being seeks evil gratuitously or for the sake of evil, but only under the aspect of good, not sub ratione mali but sub ratione boni. Where no illusion is possible, no sin is possible. Liberty of choice between the contraries of good and evil is not intrinsic to liberty of will, or a perfection of liberty, but a defect. It belongs to a defective order and to a defective subject, an order of probation and a subject placed under a trial of his obedience. The order and the subject are arranged to suit each other. The subject is required to move toward his end by using his reason and will rightly, and concurring with the Creator in bringing the inchoate order of creation to its due perfection. The order is such that it is not yet perfect, but capable of being made so by the operation of free, intelligent beings upon it. When the time of the end is reached, in the ἀποκατάστασις, this moral order is superseded; there is nothing which can be injured or abused or misdirected. Intelligent creatures which 547are made perfect have no more scope for election between contraries; their spontaneous and voluntary action is necessarily toward the true, universal good, and their liberty of choice has no possible terms which are not within the circle of order. They cannot think or will otherwise than right, because they are perfect and all things which come in contact with them are perfect. In this way they are brought into a similitude with God. He is what he is by necessity of nature, though he is most pure and simple act, wholly free from any extrinsic limitation or intrinsic contradiction to his will. He does what he will beyond his own being, but only that which is good. It is a perfection of his will that he cannot sin, as it is of his intellect that he cannot err or be ignorant. Falsehood and evil are nothing, and cannot terminate a divine act. Bonum ex integrâ causâ, malum a quovis defectu—Good is from complete cause, evil from any defect. God is absolute, infinite, first cause, and no defect in his causality is possible. Second causes, when they possess and exert their integral causality, are deficient in nothing which belongs to them. All those beings which are constituted in their ultimate perfection are in this integral state, and therefore are above all liability to evil throughout eternity.
This flexibility and vertibility in respect to good and evil, imagined by Origen as perpetually inherent in rational creatures, is a mere figment of his imperfect philosophy. He had scarcely any books to read which could help him to satisfy his unbounded curiosity to penetrate into the rational sense of the doctrines of revelation. Besides the Scriptures themselves, there was only pagan philosophy for him to study. Our modern philosophers have cast away the Catholic theology and philosophy, and strive to reconstruct the higher science for themselves, though with very poor success. The old Protestant theology was a doctrine of cruel, inexorable fate, which suppressed all freedom and justice in the moral order. The new theology which has subverted it restores the freedom of the will, and protests against the gloomy exaggerations and perversions of Christian dogmas which make them incredible and insupportable. But, in the effort to substitute more rational ideas, it overthrows or weakens the stability of the whole order of creation in its relation of dependence on the sovereign power and will of God. The wisest and most sober of those who are seeking for some stable and certain doctrine regarding the destiny of man and the final cause of creation, confess that they are in doubt and cannot solve the most momentous of the problems which force themselves on their attention. They never will find the light of truth until they return to the true church of Jesus Christ, and by her lamp recover the lost clew which guides the steps of the wayfarer through the labyrinth. The one dark mystery which like a cloud overshadows the bright disc of light “which enlighteneth every man coming into this world,” the mystery of moral evil and its punishment, cannot be ignored or reasoned away. Catholic theology does not create this mystery but finds it existing. It cannot remove it, but it, so to speak, absorbs it in another, the mystery of moral probation. And this mystery, awful as are the responsibilities and risks which it presents to view as environing 548those beings who are called to run and to contend for the supernal prize upon the arena, has in it more of light than of darkness. It throws new splendor upon the ἀποκατάστασις in which the order of reason and justice finally and universally triumphs. Its dark spot is reduced by the exposition of the Catholic doctrine as authoritatively taught by the church, in connection with certain or probable and permissible reasoning from revealed or rational premises, to its smallest limits. The gloom of doom and fate in the destiny of rational beings is scattered like an unwholesome mist from the swamps of error, in the light of this doctrine. The universality and perpetuity of the struggle and danger of probation are reduced to the limits of a relatively small number and brief period of duration. The numerical proportion of the losers to the winners in the strife is reduced to the lowest terms which are consistent with a fair and judicious estimate of the probabilities of the question. Moreover, the multitude of beings, whether greater or lesser, who suffer eternal loss as the penalty of their irreparable failure, are not losers through mischance or inferiority to competitors, as in a strife where one person wins at the expense of a less capable or less fortunate rival. Neglect or contempt of their own supreme good, deliberate and wilful wasting of their day of grace, are the sole causes of their failure. Their loss of beatitude is the penalty of their demerit. It is equally proportioned to their ill-desert, and this is limited to the sins committed during the time of probation which have never been remitted. The demerit of the angel which determines his eternal destiny is the demerit of one act only, the sin by which he fell from grace. The demerit of the man is confined to the sins of his mortal life unforgiven at the moment when this life ceases. The notion of an eternal increase of demerit, and a corresponding augmentation of torment without end, is a mere human invention without any foundation in Catholic doctrine. God has set bounds to the dangerous liberty of choice between good and evil, and to the evil as well as the good resulting from its exercise. Hell can become no worse than it is when the last sentence of the Judge has been pronounced, and the active hostility of the powers of hell against the kingdom of God is suppressed for ever when they are made to bend the knee before the name of Jesus, and to confess his glory. “Qui crucem sanctam subiit, infernum confregit.” The unending warfare between good and evil, the perpetual strife, the infinite series of changes, the eternal fluctuations and revolutions of Neo-Platonic philosophy, are a wild dream. The inventions and exaggerations and distortions produced by the working of the human intellect and imagination upon a mystery of God, have no value and are not to be confounded with the revealed truth made known through the teaching of the church. Clear and adequate knowledge of the future life is reserved for the future life. In the obscurity of this present state we not only have the veracity of God as the motive and ground of faith, but also the perfect, unerring intelligence of the human soul of Jesus Christ as the medium of transmitting to us the revelation of those things which are not seen but believed, and its pure love for humanity as the warrant of confidence 549in the divine goodness. Human reason and justice, impersonated in their ideal and integral perfection in union with the divine wisdom in Immanuel, will be the standard and measure of the final judgment by which the destiny of all men and all creatures will be determined for eternity. We need not have any misgivings, lest the ways of God should not be vindicated before the whole rational universe.
The recent resignation of Earl Derby was an act entirely characteristic of the man. He is not at all like Mr. Gradgrind, but he reminds one very forcibly of that unamiable stickler for, and worshipper of, facts. Let one come to Earl Derby with a new fact, or, better still, with a new application of old facts, and he is sure of a patient, candid, and intelligent hearing; but if he approaches him with a theory, or a sentiment, or a hypothetical conclusion based upon “ifs,” Earl Derby will be as unresponsive and immovable as a statue. His ruling passion is to be, or at least to appear, positively practical; the phrase most often on his lips is “common sense.” His illustrious father was a writer of established fame; a gay man of the world; fond of society and proud of his popularity with “the sex”; a captivating orator and an extremely skilful Parliamentary debater; moreover, he did not disdain to stoop to tricky devices when sober argument and sound reason would not ensure success. The present Earl Derby is prosaic to an almost painful degree; he cares little for society, and has not even “a redeeming vice”; his political and personal honesty is unimpeachable; he is as incapable of wilfully deceiving or misleading a foreign diplomatist as he would be of cheating his butcher; his speeches, in and out of Parliament, are models of wise dulness and calm force; they may in vain be searched through and through for a flight of fancy or an extravagant expression; and as for a joke—his lordship, as seen and heard in public, is apparently incapable of either making or understanding one. Sometimes those listening to him are tempted to laugh at him; but he never invites them to laugh with him. To hear him discourse for forty minutes at a time upon the comparative advantages of closed and open sewers, or demonstrating, with mathematical exactness, the superiority of natural manure over artificial compounds, is instructive, but it is not exhilarating. Lord Derby, however, is not without ideas. It was he who furnished Mr. Disraeli with a popular cry in 1874, when, hard pressed for a policy, and finding that appeals concerning the Straits of Malacca failed to fire the popular heart, that versatile and humorous statesman startled the country by declaring that the most pressing, inspiriting, and noble duty of the government at that moment 550was to improve the drainage of the kingdom. This was Earl Derby’s happy thought, and Mr. Disraeli was enraptured when, on asking his lordship to put it in shape, the latter proposed the formula, “Sanitas sanitatum; omnia sanitas.” There is a belief entertained by some of Earl Derby’s more intimate friends that at heart he is a sentimental, romantic, susceptible person, and that he is so morbidly timid of being suspected of such amiable weaknesses that he has fabricated for himself an artificial disguise for public wear, in which he may appear as the hard, dry, prosy, unsentimental, matter-of-fact business man. It does not stand to reason, it is claimed, that any man, and above all an English nobleman with practically boundless wealth, in the enjoyment of vigorous health, and in the prime of his life (he is now only fifty-two years old), could possibly be so preternaturally dry and skilfully prosaic as is Lord Derby. “It must be put on,” they say, “to hide the natural romance and tenderness of his disposition”; and as one of the proofs of the correctness of this theory they relate the story of his first and only love; of its frustration by accidents not wholly beyond his control; of his long and patient, but not hopeless, waiting for the death of the rival who had carried off the prize; and of his calm confidence, fully justified by the result, that he in his turn would win the lady. The story is true; but it may bear a different moral than the one assigned to it by those who fancy that Earl Derby, reversing the plan adopted by Hamlet, has chosen to put a solemn disposition on to hide the antic joyousness of his real nature. A sufficient acquaintance with Earl Derby will establish the fact that, if he wears a disguise, it fits him so well that no one can detect the imposition. He always seems to be exactly the same; never hot, never cold, never excited, never listless, attentive to everything that is said to him, replying without hesitation but without haste, most often in words that might have been cut and dried six months before.
His resignation, as previously remarked, was entirely characteristic of the man. He will not be led along a tortuous path; and the policy of Lord Beaconsfield on the Eastern question has been very crooked. Its very success depended on its crookedness. The two earls are great friends; in fact, Lord Beaconsfield would be guilty of ingratitude if he should ever cease to regard Lord Derby with affection. Nor is it to be supposed that Lord Beaconsfield is a whit more patriotic than Derby, or that he has a keener sense of what is necessary for the safety of the empire. The difference between them is the difference between the daring yet keen speculator and the staid and methodical merchant. Lord Beaconsfield is sometimes willing to try the hazard of the die. Something may always turn up; there is the possibility of an alliance with Austria; there is the chance that Italy may be willing to repeat the part that Sardinia played in 1854; it is on the cards that the death of Bismarck or of the Emperor William may effect a radical change in Germany’s foreign policy; it is possible that France may be magnanimous enough to forget how England left her naked to her enemy in 1870, and that the allied French and English armies may again fight together in the Crimea. 551Lord Beaconsfield is popularly supposed to argue thus; but Lord Derby is subject to no such illusions. At least, he will take no chances. He has no sentimental horror of war, as John Bright has. He would fight soon enough if he saw his way clearly to a successful issue of the conflict; but he does not see his way. For England to enter single-handed into an armed struggle with Russia would in his opinion be madness; and he is convinced that she cannot count upon a single ally. It is true that some of the German people are not much in love with Russia; but the German government, Lord Derby affirms—and he ought to know—is altogether on the side of Russia, and an unkind neutrality is all that England can expect from that source. As for France, not a single French politician would advocate an English alliance for war; the Crimean War was never popular in France, and the 100,000 French lives lost in that struggle are still lamented. Sardinia joined England and France in the war of 1854 because she was in a position in which an adventurous policy was desirable; but now Sardinia is swallowed up in Italy, and Italy has all she can do to make both ends meet at home. The great hope lies in Austria; but Earl Derby knows that Francis Joseph, Alexander, and William are three sworn friends, and he sees, moreover, that one of these would not be likely to break with another of the triumvirate unless he were assured that the third would either aid him or remain neutral. Still more plain is it to Earl Derby’s cool perception that the internal divisions of Austria are so grave that she would be mad to engage in a war which, if unsuccessful, would split the empire in twain. The Magyars sympathize with Turkey, the Slavs with Russia, the Austro-Germans with neither; the army could not be trusted; and the finances of the empire are in such a condition that it was with the greatest difficulty that the government the other day raised a loan of twenty-five millions of dollars. It is clear enough to Lord Derby that England, without an ally, would be worsted; and it is equally clear that she cannot safely count upon an ally. Of course all things are possible. She may secure an ally; but it is only a chance, and Lord Derby will take no chances.
There is another fact that weighs upon him: the consideration that the war, if entered upon, has no definite, practical object. The cant is that it is necessary in order to regain for England influence in Europe; but this is a consideration that has no weight in Lord Derby’s mind. He sneers at it in his dry, prosaic manner as something that is ridiculous. In a certain sense he is a democrat. He recognizes fully the fact that England is practically a democracy, and on a memorable occasion he shocked the Lords by telling them that the people were their “employers.” But he is keenly alive to the fact that a government which shapes its course in accordance with the ever-shifting breeze of popular caprice cannot have an intelligible or consistent record; and the other day he took occasion to point out that the “employers” of the government, in regard to the Eastern question, had not been of the same mind for six months together. Two years ago it was as much as one’s life was worth to say a word in favor of the Turks or against the Russians; now it is all the other way. Turkey 552might have been saved, and not a voice was raised; now she is irretrievably lost, and every one is crying out that she must be saved. So Earl Derby refuses to help his “employers” to embark in a war without an object well defined, without reasonable hope of success, and without an ally. He does it without the passion that Mr. Gladstone displays; without the rhetoric John Bright uses, without a flourish, or a poetical quotation, or a sarcasm—simply as a dry, shrewd, cold-blooded, and clear-headed merchant would do when asked to imperil his fortune by wild investments on the Stock Exchange.
One of the writer’s most memorable conversations with Lord Derby was on a summer morning in 1872, when he was resting in the cool shade of the Opposition, and had plenty of time on his hands to devote to those subjects of social science and political economy in which one might imagine he takes more real personal interest than in adjusting the balance of power in Europe or in maintaining the prestige of England on the continent. The Stanleys for four centuries, and I know not how long before, have been large landholders. The first Earl Derby was created by King Henry VII. in 1485—seven years before Christopher Columbus discovered America—but the family had been a rich and powerful one long ere that. The Lord Stanley whose designed failure to bring up his contingent to the support of Richard III. at the battle of Bosworth Field had so much to do with the defeat of that resolute monarch was the father-in-law of his conqueror and successor, Henry VII.; and the young George Stanley whose head was so opportunely saved by the suggestion of the Duke of Norfolk, that there would be time enough to decapitate him “after the battle,” was the fifteenth predecessor of the present earl. I was accompanied in this visit by an English commoner, who was greatly interested at that time in certain projects for the systematic improvement of the dwellings of the working-classes—projects which Earl Derby also regarded as worthy of his attention. The large estates of the family in England and Ireland have always, or at least for a very long time, been well administered. Neither the former nor the present earl has been accused of being a bad landlord; they were not given to rack-renting, and their tenants did not fear to ask them for favors. The former earl was perhaps more quick to grant a request from a tenant than the present one; but if the plea be a good one the applicant will not go away denied. But it must be a good one; of all men in England Lord Derby is perhaps the least easily deceived. There is nothing imposing in his town-house. It is not a palace, like the magnificent mansion of the Marquis of Westminster; nor does it stand apart in dull and ugly grandeur, as does Devonshire House; nor bewilder and delight the visitor by the splendor of its saloons and the beauty of its grounds, as does Stafford House, the glories of which so dazzled the Shah of Persia that he asked the Prince of Wales, who had just entertained him in shabby Marlborough House, why he permitted the Duke of Sutherland, a subject, to dwell in a state so superior to that which royalty itself maintained. Earl Derby’s town residence is a plain building in Piccadilly, not far from the almost equally unostentatious house where the richest lady in England 553resides. There are houses on Park Avenue, New York, which are finer than the London residences of either Lord Derby or the Baroness Burdett-Coutts; and there is little in his lordship’s dwelling that is either rare or strange. The great historical and romantic heirlooms of the family are elsewhere—at Knowlsey Park, for instance. We held our conversation on the occasion referred to in a room looking out upon St. James’ Park and the Green Park. The windows were open; the sweet, fresh air of the morning came freely in. From the leather-cushioned chair in which I sat I could see a portion of the façade of Buckingham Palace, the west front of Westminster Abbey, and the towers of the Parliament House. The earl questioned me for some time concerning the actual condition of affairs as they then were in America; and his questions were sometimes hard to answer. One thing impressed me as rather remarkable: he made no mistakes in his questions; that is, he did not ask how far Chicago was from Illinois, or whether New York and Washington were under the same municipal government—interrogatories which another very studious and painstaking English nobleman once put to me. Had we yet made any satisfactory progress in solving the problem of the true relations between capital and labor? We had certain facilities at our command for working out that solution; would we work it out, and if so, how? Was there any common interest and common feeling between American workmen and American masters? The abolition of slavery was doubtless a fine thing; but had it not been accompanied with, or followed by, a long series of financial, industrial, and political mistakes? It was with a feeling of relief that I found my examination ended, and became a listener instead of a talker.
On the subject of improved dwellings for the working-classes he held very firm convictions. Unquestionably these were needed, but he did not wish to be a party to any scheme which proposed to build little palaces for working-men, and to rent them at one-tenth of their value, making up the deficiency by contributions from the rich. That was all nonsense. Nor was he very much enraptured with the Peabody buildings; they were well enough in their way, but they were not available for those who most needed them. The thing to be done was to make the workmen help themselves. How? Well, possibly by co-operation. The earl thought that much might be accomplished by an aggregation of sixpences. As for co-operation in distribution, that had already demonstrated its own usefulness; would it not be well to attempt the experiment of co-operation, strictly confined to the workmen themselves, in buying lands, erecting houses, and selling them, on long time, to themselves? He had in a drawer of his table an elaborate calculation of what might be accomplished in this way; but after producing it he suggested so many objections to its practicability that I soon regarded it with contempt. The agitation concerning the demands of the agricultural laborers was at this time just beginning to make itself felt; and the conversation drifted into a rather desultory discussion of that subject. The earl made two points very clear: in his opinion the extension of the suffrage to the agricultural laborers would greatly increase the strength 554of his own party, and if he cared only for that he would advocate it; but it would not advance the interests of the peasants nor promote the general welfare of the country. He made some very hard and dry statements on this point. I was rather taken aback by them, but did not attempt to controvert them. Subsequent events in the United States have shown that the earl had a prophetic ken. He disclaimed, with something like animation, the idea of comparing the liberated and enfranchised slaves of our Southern States with the English peasants; but he said that the party that had enfranchised the slaves would not retain their political allegiance, and would probably owe its ultimate overthrow to them. Men are not grateful beings, he said; it is a great mistake to count on their gratitude. Besides, the negroes will believe that they were enfranchised not so much for their own sakes as for the reason that they might aid in keeping their liberators in power. Unless negro human nature was unlike Anglo-Saxon human nature, the enfranchised negroes would say to themselves: “What has been given to us belonged to us; the men who gave it wished to buy us to serve them; but they have only given us what was rightfully our own, and they have nothing more to give us. A vote is nothing to us, save for the use we can make of it. We do not care whether this man or that man is President; but we do care whether our rent is lowered or raised, or whether we are on good or bad terms with our landlords.”
It was in this way that Earl Derby demonstrated to me that the negro vote in the South, so long as the rights of property were held sacred and order was preserved, would always be at the disposal of the land-owners of that region; and he drew the same conclusion as to the results of the enfranchisement of the English peasants. Affairs were bad enough as they were; despite all the new devices for securing the purity of elections, they were not pure, and he did not see how they were ever to be made pure. It was in 1849, if I remember correctly, that Earl Derby visited the United States and the West Indies. He was then a very young man. Mr. Fillmore was President. A very different political atmosphere prevailed at Washington and elsewhere from the present one. The young Lord Stanley observed affairs for himself and drew his own conclusions. At heart I think he was more pleased with the South than with the North or West; and, without saying so in words, he left upon me the impression that he did not entertain a very high opinion of our Republican statesmen.
It is more pleasant to hear him talk in private than to listen to him in public. But he is not a bad speaker, as English speakers go. He was better in the Commons when Lord Stanley than in the Lords as Earl Derby. But whenever he speaks he impresses you as being an earnest and sincere man—not earnest in the sense of enthusiastic, but sober, steady, and fully believing in the truth of what he is saying and of the necessity of his saying it. He is not what is called a popular man, but he is esteemed and respected by every one. His father died in the autumn of 1869; the nine years that have since passed have been eventful ones for the present earl, and his responsibilities have been heavy. But they have not dismayed 555or disheartened him, and when I last met him he was looking younger and rather less grave—more happy, I thought—than usually.
In certain respects Mr. John Bright resembles Earl Derby; in others he is the very contradiction of the earl. Physically the two men are not very unlike. Either of them would do very well for a model of the traditional John Bull; indeed, Punch has often used both of them for this purpose. Mr. Bright is fifteen years the senior of Earl Derby, and two years younger than Mr. Gladstone. Earl Derby has been in active political life for twenty-six years; Mr. Bright for thirty-five years; and Mr. Gladstone for forty-six years, for he was returned as the Tory member for Newark in 1832, when Earl Derby was a child of six years; and he had sat in Parliament eleven years before Mr. Bright entered the House in 1843 as member for Durham. It is a curious fact, to which I have heard Mr. Bright refer with some mirthfulness, that he sat in the House for four years without opening his mouth. It was not until 1847 that he made his maiden speech in the House; it was a plea for extending the principles of free trade, and it gave him a national reputation. As between Derby, Bright, and Gladstone, the latter must be admitted to be the greatest man—greatest in his acquired knowledge, greatest in his natural genius, greatest even in his oratorical power. But there is at times a charm in the speeches of John Bright that the finest utterances of Mr. Gladstone never carry with them. Mr. Gladstone captivates the fancy, pleases the taste, convinces the judgment, for the time being at least; Mr. Bright touches the heart and subdues it. I am not certain but that his skill in this depends upon a trick. Mr. Bright in his life has been the doer of some heartless and cruel things; he has wrought more mischief than most men of his age; his idea of progress has been that of the bourgeoisie, not that of the workman; his beau ideal of a country is a republic where there is no titled aristocracy, but where the working-classes, having fair wages, are quite content with their station and have no inconvenient aspirations beyond it. The manufacturers and the traders are Mr. Bright’s “people”; he would like to see nothing above them; he thinks those below them should be content with the station wherein God has placed them. Mr. Bright has often fanned popular discontent, but it has been too often for the purpose simply of using the power thus evoked to pull down something that stood above him. The mercantile spirit is strong in him. Anything that was for the good of trade was good in his eyes; the trader was always his idol. But he had “a way with him” that enabled him to carry along the hearts of the workmen. His personal appearance and deportment had something to do with this: his round, florid, solid, “English” face, his almost magical voice, the ease and power of his delivery, his wonderful mastery of plain and forcible but really elegant English, the aptness with which he could introduce a quotation from Holy Writ or from some familiar English poet or rhymster. I find myself unconsciously writing of Mr. Bright in the past tense. It is only while revising these lines for publication that the sudden death of his wife occurs. That bereavement will be 556very hard for him to sustain; it is probable that his public career has ended. When the utter breaking down of his health compelled him to retire from Mr. Gladstone’s cabinet in December, 1870, he was in a deplorable condition. After many months of entire abstinence from mental excitement of any kind his mind began to resume its strength. But from that time there has always been danger of another collapse. An intimate friend of his family told me that Mr. Bright was in the condition of one whose arm had been broken and who had the bones reset. “So long as he does not use the arm, and allows it to rest in its sling, all will go well; but if he strikes a blow with it, it will fall shattered at his side.” It was during this period of convalescence and rest that I saw Mr. Bright most frequently. The attachment between his wife and himself was very evident. He petted her as if she had been a bride in her honeymoon. On one occasion, when breakfasting with them, the conversation turned chiefly on the then recent declarations of President Grant in his Des Moines speech concerning secular education and the rights of the Catholic Church in the United States. This must have been some time in December, 1875. I was grieved, although not surprised, to hear Mr. Bright express sentiments of very bitter hostility to the church, and a desire to see education wholly taken from her control. He confessed that he did not know anything about the merits of the question as it stood in the United States, but he applauded the President for his boldness in bringing the subject forward. Mrs. Bright, seeing that the topic was an agitating one to both of us, adroitly turned the conversation into another channel, and Mr. Bright was presently telling me stories of Mr. Cobden and of the early struggles for free trade. He said that one of the things he most prized was a copy of a resolution passed in 1862 by the New York Chamber of Commerce, expressing its sense of the devotion which he had manifested to the principles of international justice and peace.
Mr. Bright is a fascinating conversationalist, and it is a great pleasure to listen to him. Like most men who have not been born to high positions, but who have attained them by the force of their own genius, there is sometimes observable a little stiffness, or mauvaise honte, in his manner. There is some difficulty here in expressing one’s self clearly without seeming to be offensive. Mr. Bright has often expressed great contempt for the English hereditary nobility; and he is, or was, in the habit of regarding them as a pack of fools. The aristocracy of England have not failed to afford abundant instances of what Mr. Bright was fond of calling their “unwisdom.” More than this, the personal littleness, meanness, duplicity, and cruelty of some of these hereditary noblemen cannot be denied. But it would be impossible for one of them, if you were lunching with him, to tell you that the sherry you were drinking cost ninety shillings a dozen, and therefore must be good.
Mr. Bright has very frequently expressed an ardent admiration for American institutions, and he has often been accused of wishing to Americanize the British Constitution. Had Mr. Bright been born to an earldom, he would have been the greatest stickler for the rights of his class who has lived since the 557days of Louis XIV. A dozen English noblemen could be named who are more ardent republicans than is John Bright. He does not like to see men above him; but he is quite content to see any number below him, so long as they help him to lower those above him to his own level. Men speak of him as a radical; but he is nothing of the kind. Mr. Gladstone is tenfold more of a radical. If John Bright lived in the United States he would belong to the conservative party, whatever its name might be. Between him and such men as Auberon Herbert, Charles Bradlaugh, and the other republicans in England there is a great gulf fixed; and this not at all by reason of the irreligious opinions of these men. He would like a republic well enough, if he were always to be President, and if the rights of property were secure from all infringement. It is an utter misconception of Mr. Bright’s character to rank him among enthusiastic, unselfish, and theoretical reformers and philanthropists. His passions are strong, but his hate is far fiercer than his love is powerful; and he cares infinitely more for the “freedom of trade” than for the freedom of man. His opposition to the bill for preventing and punishing the adulteration of articles of food illustrates this curious trait in his character. He said, almost in so many words, that it were better that the people were half poisoned and wholly cheated than that the government should interfere between buyer and seller, to protect the former and lessen the gains of the latter. This is the true Manchester spirit—the spirit that has led the cotton-makers of Lancashire to load their fabrics for the Eastern markets with so much glue and chalk that a fabric which appeared of the best quality became a worthless rag as soon as it was wet—a deception, by the way, that has now cost England the loss of a very large share of her Chinese and Indian trade.
Mr. Bright is also violently inconsistent at times. We conversed once for a long time on the question of the extension of the suffrage to the agricultural laborers and to women. Some of his remarks reminded me of that shrewd American politician who was in favor of the Maine Liquor Law, but was opposed to its enforcement. Mr. Bright and his party had recently suffered some mortifying disillusions. The new voters, enfranchised by the Reform Bill, which Mr. Disraeli had taken up and passed after the Liberals had dallied with the question for years, began to manifest evidences of insubordination—not at all, however, in the right direction, from Mr. Bright’s point of view. It must be understood that a superstition had sprung up to the effect that all the new voters must necessarily be on the side of the Liberals; just as it was supposed that the enfranchised negroes in the United States must all vote the Republican ticket for ever and a day. There was this difference between the two cases: the Republicans had actually freed the negroes; the English Liberals, led by Bright and Gladstone, had talked about enfranchising the lower classes in England, but, while talking about it and disputing where the line should be drawn, the Tories, led by Disraeli, stepped in and accomplished the work by establishing what is virtually household suffrage. The former Earl Derby, led an unwilling captive by Disraeli, had reluctantly given his 558assent to this measure, which he called “a leap in the dark”; but at the time of which I speak it was becoming plain that this leap had landed the Conservative party upon very good ground. The new voters, instead of swelling the ranks of the Liberals, were to a great extent found in the train of the Tories, and Mr. Bright was disgusted with them. I have good reason to know that he disliked the idea of universal suffrage, and that he had quite as sincere a horror of the residuum as that which Mr. Lowe expressed. The “conservative working-man” was beginning to show that he really existed and was not a myth. The voters of the kingdom had been vastly increased in numbers; but the new voters, when they came to the polls, were found to be quite as conservative, and in many cases more so than the old constituencies. This was a source of keen mortification and disappointment to Mr. Bright, and the first results of the Ballot Bill caused him no less chagrin. He had indulged in two illusions: let us have a general suffrage (not universal but general) and secret voting, and we shall carry every election district and be masters of the situation for ever more. Household suffrage and the ballot were provided, and from that day to this the Liberal party has grown weaker. Mr. Bright took no care to conceal from me the annoyance that these results gave him; and it was plain that his faith in the good sense and integrity of the masses was weakened. The impression he left on my mind in this conversation was that he would have preferred a much more limited suffrage; no one should vote, for instance, who did not pay a rental of perhaps six pounds a year. As for the future, there were two classes yet to be enfranchised—the agricultural laborers and the women. With regard to the latter Mr. Bright referred me to his brother Jacob. “He is the great man for the women,” said he. “He has that matter in charge; he can tell you more about the merits of their demands than I can. I am a little afraid of women as voters. Women are naturally easily led away by romance and glitter; and I suspect a showy ministry would always be more apt to secure their support than a sober and dull administration.” With regard to the claims of the agricultural laborers for the suffrage he was cold and guarded in his expressions. Theoretically they should have what they asked; but as a practical measure, and one of immediate action, it was plain that he preferred to allow affairs to rest as they were. He feared that the peasants with votes in their hands would be seduced by the Tories, as the new voters in the boroughs had been. “A little more education would be desirable before thus increasing the constituencies,” said he. “What kind of education, Mr. Bright?” “Well, certainly not that of the parish school, with the parson as the real teacher; and that, as affairs now are, is almost all they can have.”
The study of Mr. Bright’s course upon the great question of the present day in England—war with Russia or surrender to her—is full of interest to those who wish to closely analyze his character. Eighteen months ago Mr. Bright—Quaker as he is, apostle of peace as he is, trader and manufacturer as he is—was altogether in favor of war; that is, of a certain war—the war of the Russians against the Turks. In the Christmas-tide of 1876 559Mr. Bright could say nothing too harsh in condemnation of those who were attempting to prevent Russia from entering into the war with Turkey. He spoke, he said, in the name of Christianity, but only to remind his hearers that the Russians were Christians and that the Turks were Mohammedans. Very curious language at that time came from the lips of this great peace advocate. In substance it was an appeal to Englishmen to encourage Russia in her attempt to drive the Turks from Europe, “bag and baggage,” as Mr. Gladstone has it. English Christians were bade remember by this Quaker peace-apostle that seven hundred years ago their ancestors fought to regain possession of Bethlehem and Calvary and the Mount of Olives; and that those sacred places now, as then, were in the possession of the infidels whom Russia, if not interfered with by England—would soon drive forth. England should stand by. If she interfered she would prevent the war; she must not lift a finger nor say a word save in approval of the Russians; and they must be left to wage war as they wished or as they could. Eighteen months have passed; the Russians have waged their war; it has been marked at every step with revolting horrors; half a million of Mohammedans and hundreds of thousands of Christians have perished in it; and Mr. Bright ought to feel satisfied. But now that England proposes to interfere and to fight a little on her own account, Mr. Bright boils over with rage, and calls all England to observe the unparalleled wickedness of the government in proposing to employ its Indian troops to sustain the empire. It is infamous to employ them, especially against “Christian Russia.” War conducted by Russia is not at all shocking; war waged against her is the unpardonable national sin. Russia might shed oceans of Christian blood in her wars, and Mr. Bright be content; but when England proposes to use Mohammedan soldiers in efforts to save English interests in the East from utter ruin, Mr. Bright raises his hands in horror and declaims against the wickedness of war. Radical inconsistencies like these are natural to Mr. Bright. They are observable in many of his acts; they crop out in his conversation. He has spoken eloquently against persecution for opinion’s sake; but, to judge him by his tone, he would burn Earl Beaconsfield at the stake to-morrow.
In all my conversations with Mr. Bright there were two things that impressed me: his indifference to, and want of sympathy with, the question of university education in any of its aspects, and his perfectly ignorant hostility to the Catholic religion. This hostility was not active, or it was rarely so; but it was implanted deep in his mind, and it colored to a great extent some of his most important actions. Without knowing anything at all about the church, and without, as I believe, having even so much as read a Catholic book, he had put it down among his self-evident truths that the church was the foe of what he most held dear, and he hated her accordingly. Mr. Bright’s instincts are clear, and they did not deceive him here. The church is the foe of what he most holds dear; for in the ideal society which John Bright would create, if he had his way, the temple would be a cotton-mill, the priests would be the manufacturers, and the people 560would have “free trade” for their god.[124]
Mr. Gladstone has within him the power of being as plodding and patient in his search for dry facts as Lord Derby is; he is as passionate in his hatreds and as inconsistent in his affections as is Mr. Bright; but he has what neither Derby nor Bright possesses—genius. He is a far more attractive man than either. It was my dear friend, the late John Francis Maguire, who first brought me into personal contact with Mr. Gladstone. We were talking together in the lobby of the House of Commons one summer evening in 1870, the year after the passage of the Irish Church Disestablishment Bill, when Mr. Gladstone came by and stopped to speak to Maguire, to whom he was very much attached—as who was not that knew him? After a few moments Mr. Gladstone complained of the heat in the lobby. “Let us go out on the terrace,” said he. “But I must not leave my American friend; come along, ——. Mr. Gladstone, permit me to present my friend.” We moved along the long corridor to the terrace that overhangs the Thames; and here, while they continued their conversation, which was of no interest save to themselves, I had ample opportunity to regard at close range the then ruler of England. He was sixty-one years old; he is now sixty-nine. The disappointments, defeats, and ardent but unsuccessful conflicts he has fought during the last four years have aged him; but he is still hale and vigorous, and, for all that one can see, may count upon many years of active life, which indeed no man will begrudge him. He is not by any means an Adonis, and never has been; but as we sat together that evening on the stone bench of the terrace he seemed to me a fascinating man. His voice in conversation is melodious and pleasant, with an occasional touch of a strange, melancholy minor key. If he be interested in his subject and on good terms with the person to whom he is speaking, he is a most charming conversationalist. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford; he entered Parliament as the member for Newark in the Tory interest in 1832. He has had forty-six years of almost uninterrupted public life. He was under-secretary for the colonies in 1835 under Sir Robert Peel, and vice-president of the Board of Trade in 1841; he revised the tariff in 1842, and was president of the Board of Trade in 1843; he was returned for Oxford in 1847, and became a Liberal in 1851 on the questions of university reform and Jewish disabilities; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Coalition Ministry of 1852, and was sent on a mission to the Ionian Islands by the then Lord Derby in 1858; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer again under Palmerston in 1859, and repealed the paper duty, making possible the establishment of the penny newspaper; he aided Cobden to accomplish his commercial treaty with France, and amused himself by interfering officiously with the domestic government of the kingdom of Naples; he was defeated for Oxford in 1865, but immediately returned for Lancashire, and after the death of 561Palmerston became leader of the House as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Russell. He brought in his Reform Bill in 1866, was defeated on it, and went into opposition; he brought in and succeeded in effecting the passage of his Irish Church resolutions in 1868; he was defeated for Lancashire at the general election of 1868, but returned for Greenwich, and took charge of the government as Prime Minister in that year. He disestablished the Irish Church in 1869; passed the Irish Land Bill in 1870; abolished purchase in the army in 1871 by the arbitrary exercise of the prerogative of the crown, and negotiated the Treaty of Washington. In 1874, anxious to finish his Irish work, he evolved from out of the depths of his own inner consciousness an Irish University Education Bill, and had the extreme mortification of seeing it not only rejected by the Catholics but violently opposed by the English and Scotch Liberals. He appealed to the country, not on that question but on a new project invented by himself for the abolition of the income tax; his majority of sixty members was turned into a minority of as many, and his old foe, Disraeli, came marching into power with drums beating and colors flying.
Since then Mr. Gladstone has conducted a species of independent opposition of his own; he has sought to punish the Catholics for their refusal to accept his University Bill by writing several venomous pamphlets to show that Catholics could not be loyal subjects; he has endeavored to upset the Disraeli administration on various occasions; he conducted the Bulgarian outrage excitement with great skill; and for the last few months he has been almost incessantly engaged in the most strenuous and violent efforts to prevent England from interfering in any way with Russia in the execution of her designs against Turkey. This was the extraordinary man with whom I was sitting on that summer evening. After a while he turned to me to ask me about some of his American friends, and thus I was drawn into the conversation. Mr. Maguire, for my benefit, I think, diverted it into the channel of the then remaining causes of Irish discontent; and the conversation became animated and ran on until the unlucky ringing of a division bell compelled both the premier and the Irish member to run off and leave me alone—not, however, before Mr. Gladstone had given me an invitation which I was not slow, in future days, to accept.
Thus it came about that many conversations were held between us, and the memory of them is for the most part extremely pleasant. We spoke generally on the immediate questions of the day, occasionally diverging into wider and more fragrant fields. He had at this time a very wide circle of Roman Catholic friends; and he was so fond of their society that Mr. Newdegate and Mr. Johnson, of Edinburgh (the secretary of the Anti-Papal League), got up the story that he was about to be received into the church. This rumor grew into the fact that he had been actually received; but to this there was the variation that he had become a communicant of the Greek Church! There never was any foundation for these stories; but it is probable that there was a period in Mr. Gladstone’s life when, had he not been Prime Minister of England, he would have become a Catholic. This reminds me of a story 562that Cardinal Manning once told me. He and Mr. Gladstone were very old and very dear friends; and this friendship continued unbroken until Mr. Gladstone’s assault upon the church in his “Vatican” pamphlets. I do not think the friendship thus sundered has ever been restored. But the story was this: One day the premier was talking with the archbishop, and after a little pause he said: “What a pity you ever left us, Manning! Had you remained with us you would have been Archbishop of Canterbury to-day, with £15,000 a year!” “I clasped my hands,” said his grace, “looked up to heaven, and exclaimed with all my heart, ‘Thank God for having saved my poor soul!’”
Mr. Gladstone’s town residence in Carlton House Terrace was pleasant to visit. He had enjoyed being a victim to the old-china and Wedgwood mania, and some of the rooms were crammed with his successes in the collection of “uniques” in this line. He—or some one in his confidence—had had good taste in pictures, and some excellent works of old and new masters hung upon his walls. It was wonderful to hear him talk about blue china, but I think his strong point in this line is Wedgwood. It was pleasanter, however, to draw him away from his china and lead him on to talk about men or books. He discussed both, on occasion, with a freedom and incisiveness that were somewhat startling. It was amusing to see the care with which he sometimes avoided speaking about Mr. Disraeli, and the latitude which he allowed himself on other occasions in denouncing and ridiculing him. He once complained bitterly that Disraeli was not an Englishman and had no English blood in him; and when I ventured to suggest that the wretched malefactor could scarcely be blamed for circumstances so wholly beyond his control, he looked very glum for some moments, and then turned the conversation aside, as if disinclined to accept even that apology for his foe.
It is that curious trait in Mr. Gladstone’s character which makes it so difficult for him in his public speeches to make a statement without qualifying it, or amplifying it, or stating several hypothetical cases with reference to it, that renders his conversation so charming. Beginning to tell you something about Pius IX., for instance, he will branch off into a story about Father Newman, an anecdote of Mazzini, a reminiscence of Orsini, Palmerston, or Louis Napoleon, an adventure that happened to himself in Naples, his feelings when he recognized an old college chum of his as a bare-footed friar in a monastery on the Alps, and so on. It is like the Arabian Nights, for one story grows out of the other, and all the time he does not forget the original subject, the Pope, but comes back to him, and winds up with the story about him, told with all due emphasis and action. There was a time when for Pius IX. Mr. Gladstone entertained what seemed to be a truly sincere admiration and respect; occasionally the feeling appeared to be even that of affection. As for the insensate hatred and dread of the church which fills the breasts of Messrs. Newdegate and Whalley, Mr. Gladstone never shared it. This, however, did not prevent him from making his outrageous attacks upon the church, in order to revenge himself upon the Irish and 563English bishops for refusing to support him in his University Bill. His passions are very strong. The difference between him and Mr. Disraeli is that the latter seems never wholly in earnest, while the former always is. Some of the language in which he has allowed himself to indulge in his recent speeches on the war question have been marked with a degree of passionate violence that would seem to indicate a mind overwrought. There used to be a cruel saying in the London clubs that “Mr. Gladstone would die either in a mad-house or a monastery.” I believe the credit of the mal mot was given to Mr. Disraeli. There seems small hope left of the monastery, and there was probably never any danger of the mad-house. But Mr. Gladstone has now been out of power for four years; he reflects that his own imprudence thrust him out; he can see no prospect of a return to power; and he feels that under the guidance of Earl Beaconsfield England is being led into grave dangers. He chafes and frets, and the apparently unreasonable violence of his language is only the candid expression of his sincere wrath and fear.
Of these three statesmen, Earl Derby, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Bright, Mr. Bright is the dandy. The earl is negligent in his dress, and thrifty therein; but his valet, or some one else, manages to turn him out neatly every morning. Mr. Gladstone is positively careless as regards his attire, and one imagines that nobody but himself has anything to do with it. It has been whispered about that Mr. Gladstone’s tailor pays a large sum every year to have his identity concealed, for Mr. Gladstone’s clothes fit him so badly, or seem to do so, that the tailor’s business would be ruined if his name were known. The shocking bad hat of Mr. Gladstone, and his baggy “Sairey Gamp” of an umbrella, so often pictured in Punch, are no exaggerations; the last time I saw him he was sailing down Pall Mall under full steam for the Reform Club, with this identical hat and umbrella. There is a deep mystery connected with his legs, or with his trowsers, for they bag to an incredible extent at the knees, and are always too long at the lower extremities. I have said that he was not an Adonis, but when he is pleased and happy there is something winning in the expression of his mouth, and his eyes are wonderfully eloquent. Mr. Bright’s rich but plain costume is always faultlessly neat and clean; his linen spotless; his shoes have an almost unearthly lustre; his hat shines in rivalry with them. When, on the occasion of his taking office as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancashire, he went to Windsor “to kiss hands,” the queen, it is said, was enchanted with him, and the Princess Beatrice, who is much given to speaking out her mind, is reported to have exclaimed: “Ever since Louise married young Mr. Argyll, I have supposed that nothing was left for me but one of Marshal and Snelgrove’s young men. But if any one of those tradesmen were as handsome and good as this old tradesman, I’d take him in a moment.”
Mr. Bright’s handwriting is small, elegant, and beautifully distinct. Mr. Gladstone writes a rapid, bold, and running hand, at times rather illegible. He is somewhat too fond of his pen; of late he has written too much on unimportant subjects. Earl Derby has 564a happy dread of committing himself on paper, and writes but few letters. “Do not write to me,” he said one day; “come and talk with me; it will be better for each of us.” Mr. Gladstone once made a very happy retort to a question put to him in the House of Commons concerning one of his letters. Mr. Bouverie, with all due solemnity, and after having given a day’s notice of his question, asked the premier if his attention had been called to a letter published in the Times, purporting to have been addressed by him to the correspondent of a New York journal, and whether he had really written the letter. “It is quite true,” Mr. Gladstone replied. “Mr. —— addressed me a very proper and courteous letter, upon certain matters connected with the Treaty of Washington and the negotiations at Geneva, and I replied to it. He subsequently obtained my permission to make the letter public. And I have to add that I often have to write letters to much less important persons than the representative of an influential American journal.” As he had recently written a letter to Mr. Bouverie, the hit was thought to be a good one, and the House laughed.
Strabo, after having mentioned the great number of Jews residing in Cyrene, a city celebrated for its schools of Greek literature, adds that “it would be difficult to show a spot upon earth where they were not found and where their influence was not felt.” The influence of which he speaks must not be restricted to that which they acquired everywhere by their remarkable industry, commercial capacity, and wealth; it was felt in the higher field of thought, and was brought to bear on heathen philosophy, in which it produced considerable modifications. We are chiefly concerned with the Greeks, whom all admit to be the representatives of philosophical speculations in the ages we are reviewing.
It is the opinion of Aristobulus, of Aristeas, and of Philo that the Greek philosophers were acquainted with the sacred books of the Hebrews, and that they derived from them those great truths relating to God, the soul, a future life which we find in their writings. We can easily understand this to have been the case when we reflect that the Hebrews were already in Egypt in great numbers, when the learned men of Greece repaired thither in search of knowledge; and in order to account for the opinion just mentioned it is by no means necessary to have recourse to the national pride with which its supporters are supposed by our rationalists to have been animated. Because Aristobulus, Aristeas, 565and Philo were Jews it does not follow that they should have been so blinded by the desire of glorifying their nation as to make them lose their well-known critical acuteness. Besides, they were not the only ones who perceived that the Greeks had borrowed from the Hebrews. Antiquity is at one in recognizing the fact. The Fathers of the primitive church who had occasion to touch upon the subject do not hesitate to affirm it from observations of their own. “Our sacred books,” says Tertullian, “are the treasure from which philosophers have drawn all their riches. Who is the poet, who is the sophist, that has not borrowed from the prophets? It is at those sacred sources that the philosophers have striven to quench their thirst. These men, impelled by their passion for glory, endeavored to reach the sublimity of our Holy Scriptures, and when they found in them anything that suited their views they made it their own. But as they did not consider them as divine, they made no scruple to alter them. And, moreover, they could not understand many a passage the sense of which was obscure even for the Hebrews, to whom the books belonged.” St. Justin equally affirms that “Plato took from Moses his doctrine of creation, as well as his notions on the Word, or Logos, and the Energy or Spirit of God, though all these truths appear strangely disfigured in the Athenian philosopher.” Again, Clement of Alexandria tells the Neo-Platonics that their master, Plato, had borrowed from the books of Moses his most sublime doctrines and purest moral precepts, and adds: “We state the fact that the Greeks, not satisfied with transferring to their writings the wonderful events related in our sacred books, have stolen from us our principal dogmas in altering them. They are caught in the very act of theft as to what regards faith, wisdom, knowledge and science, hope and charity, penance, chastity, and the fear of God, which virtues are the offspring of truth alone.” Eusebius tells us that Pythagoras had held communications with the prophets at the time when the Jews were exiles in Egypt and Babylonia. Hennippus, according to the testimony of Josephus, confirms that fact by saying that Pythagoras had embraced and professed a part of the doctrines of the Jews, and had transmitted their philosophy to the Gentiles. Clearchus affirms that Aristotle had spoken to him of his conversations with a Jew “from whom much was to be learnt.” Theodoret is not less positive. “Anaxagoras and Pythagoras,” he says, “in their travels in Egypt, had made the acquaintance of learned men of that country and of Judea. It is to the same source that Plato came later in search of knowledge, as we are informed by Plutarch and by Xenophon.” “What is Plato?” said the Pythagorean Numerius. “He is a certain Moses who speaks Attic.” The negations without proofs which men of rationalistic tendencies oppose to this view cannot stand before the overwhelming testimony of the Fathers, doctors, and historians of the primitive church, corroborated as it is by more than one pagan author. Our modern Catholic writers, without any exception that we know of, have recognized that influence of revelation on the heathen mind. “The laws which Solon gave to the Athenians,” remarks 566Fleury, “had a great analogy with those of Moses. The principles of Socrates are founded on those of the Hebrew legislator; his notions of the unity of God, the immortality of the soul, the distinction between good and evil, the merits and rewards of virtue, the chastisements of vice, are all derived from the sacred books. The political system exposed by Plato in his Republic, in which he enjoins that every one should live by his own labor, without luxury or ambition, without innovation or change, under the sway of justice the greatest of all goods, and the government of a wise ruler devoted to the happiness of his subjects, is nothing else but the theory of the constitution which governed Judea.” “Aristotle,” says M. de Maistre, alluding to a passage already quoted, “conversed with a Jew in comparison with whom the most distinguished philosophers of Greece seemed to him but barbarians. The translation of the sacred books into a language which had become that of the universe, the dispersion of the Jews over the whole world, and man’s natural curiosity for everything new and extraordinary had caused the Mosaic law to be known everywhere, which thus became an introduction to Christianity.” “The doctrine of the Hebrews,” writes M. de Bonald, “was spread with their writings in those parts of Asia and of Europe bordering on Palestine. It was not unknown to the Greeks, and undoubtedly gave to the philosophy of Plato that stamp of elevation and of truth by which it is characterized.”
But it is to Alexandria that we must turn in order to follow the developments and modifications of Greek thought in the three centuries which immediately preceded, and in the four centuries which followed, the coming of Christ. Ptolemy I., during his glorious reign, that lasted from 306-285 B.C., among other monuments with which he adorned the city of Alexander, established the famous Museum or University of Alexandria, with its vast library, which is said to have contained seven hundred thousand volumes. It soon became the centre of intellectual life. There the most renowned teachers in philosophy, poetry, mathematics, astronomy, and the arts lived and taught. Thither would resort the learned of many countries and religions. From the time of its foundation to that of Proclus, the most important of the Neo-Platonics, who died four hundred and eighty-five years after Christ, that school continued to flourish, but then began to decline until every trace of it disappeared before the invasions of the barbarian Mussulman. For a long time the philosophy of the Museum consisted in commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. But the Jews of the Greco-Egyptian city, which had become after Jerusalem the most important seat of their religion, were destined to give a new direction to these speculations; and from it arose that peculiar school of thought denominated Neo-Platonism. It was an effort made to reconcile together popular belief with philosophic thought, and was common both to the Jewish and to the Grecian schools. The first endeavored to blend Judaism with Hellenism, as the latter did to give a logical and doctrinal foundation to heathenism.
It is not easy to fix the date when the movement began. Some trace it back to Aristobulus. He 567lived under Ptolemy Euergetes, whose reign extended from 247-221 B.C., and had been the teacher of that illustrious prince, who, disdaining the coarse divinities of Egypt, addressed his homage to Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews, and sacrificed in the Temple of Jerusalem, where he left marks of his munificence and of his piety. It is true that Aristobulus appealed to Orphic poems in which Jewish doctrines are found in support of the assertion that the Greek poets and philosophers had borrowed their wisdom from the Jews. But this opinion, which is shared by Aristeas and others in those ages, is not peculiar to Neo-Platonism, and is by no means one of its characteristics. Others pretend that the earliest traces of Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy are to be found in the Septuagint. According to them, the authors of this version of the Biblical writings into Greek, made by order of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.), knew and approved the principal doctrines of this philosophy, and contrived to suggest them by apparently insignificant deviations from the original text. But the passages on which they rest their argument do not necessarily force us to admit this conclusion. We find that they avoid representing God under sensible forms; such ideas as God’s repenting, being angry, etc., are toned down in their expression; in the same way euphemisms are used when there is question of sensible manifestations of the Divinity; there are omissions and explanations in the translation which are not authorized by the original text. It is evident that the translators were influenced in their work by the dread they had lest Jehovah should be assimilated to the false divinities of pagan mythologies. All this competent critics concede, but fail to see in the Septuagint a union of Greek philosophemes with Jewish ideas. Be this as it may, it was at the dawn of Christianity, when the Ptolemies had gone and the Romans came in, that the Neo-Platonic movement was really inaugurated; and if it did not originate with Philo, it was in him, at any rate, that it first attained to importance. Philo belonged to a rich family of Alexandria, and was born about twenty-five years before our era. He lived long enough to be placed at the head of the legation to Caligula in favor of his people, and to write an account of it in the reign of Claudius. What gives a special interest to his writings is that they were composed at the very last period of the Jewish nation, before the appearance of Christianity. In religion a zealous Jew penetrated with the truth and goodness of the Hebrew revelation, and a Greek by education—a man, besides, of high intellectual gifts—it is no wonder that he should wish to blend in a harmonious whole the two elements of his own being, and to fuse the form of Greek thought with the substance of Jewish belief. In his endeavors to realize this object Philo falls into grievous errors, and on several points deflects from the Jewish faith into Greek views. “His love of Greek philosophy,” says Allies, “had led him, as it seems unconsciously, to desert the divine tradition of Moses and the orthodox Jewish belief.” Here, then, we are concerned with two questions: first, What did Philo contribute to Greek thought? and, secondly, How far his orthodoxy suffered by its contact with it.
568Philo introduced into philosophy two principles the result of which can be traced throughout the whole subsequent periods of Neo-Platonism: the principle of faith, or the need of a revelation in order to acquire the knowledge of God and of the great problems relating to human life; and the principle of grace, or of a special assistance from heaven in order to make this knowledge practically available. Now, these principles had been either entirely ignored by the Greek philosophers or had remained without any significance to them down to Philo’s time. Reason was the only light by which they were guided, and scientific thought their only source of knowledge. We find in them no assumption of supernatural revelation, no requirement of contact with the divine other than what might be produced by the effect of thought itself. Greek philosophy in its whole tenor was rationalistic. “On the contrary,” observes Allies in his Formation of Christendom, “the religious and philosophical system of Philo is based upon the idea of a revelation made to man by God, and of holiness, the result of divine assistance. His conception of God is derived to him from the theology of the Old Testament; it comes to him as a gift from above, not as an elaboration of his own mind.” Hence it is that his notion of the Supreme Being is so much above that given us by Plato and Aristotle. The God of Plato is an ideal and metaphysical God, not absolutely personal, not free; the God of Aristotle, or his Primum movens, the first Motor, is mechanical, and holds in the universe the office of the spring in a watch, by which all its parts are moved; but the God of Philo is life, and, as he constantly calls him, “the living God.” “He is one, simple, eternal, unoriginated, and absolutely distinct from the world which is his work. His own being is incomprehensible. We can only predicate of him that he is ‘He who is.’ He is most pure and absolute mind, better than virtue and better than knowledge, better than the idea of goodness and the idea of beauty. He is his own place, and full of himself, and sufficient for himself, filling up and embracing all that is deficient or empty, but himself embraced by nothing, as being one person and yet everything” (Legis Allegor., l. xiv., quoted in Allies). His providence is fully recognized. “Those who would make the world to be unoriginated, cut away, without being aware of it, the most useful and necessary constituents of piety—that is, the belief in Providence. For reason proves that what has an origin is cared for by its father and maker. For a father is anxious for the life of his children, and a workman aims at the duration of his works, and employs every device imaginable to ward off everything that is pernicious or injurious, and is desirous by every means in his power to provide everything which is useful and profitable for them. But with regard to what has had no origin there is no feeling of interest, as if it were his own, in the breast of him who has not made it. It is a worthless and pernicious doctrine to establish in the world what would be anarchy in a city, to have no superintendent, regulator, or judge by whom everything must be distributed and governed” (De Mundi Opificio, apud Allies). In his work entitled Quod Deus est Immutabilis Philo ascribed to God absolute knowledge. “To God,” he says, “as dwelling in pure light, 569all things are visible, for he, penetrating into the very recesses of the soul, is able to see transparently what is invisible to others, and by means of prescience and providence, his own peculiar excellences, allows nothing to abuse its liberty or exceed the range of his comprehension. For, indeed, there is with him no uncertainty even in the future; for there is nothing uncertain and nothing future to God. It is plain, then, that the producer must have knowledge of all that he has produced, the artificer of all that he had constructed, the governor of all that he governs. Now, Father, Artificer, and Governor he is in truth of all things in heaven and the world. And whereas future things are overshadowed by the succession of time, longer or shorter, God is the Maker of time also.... For the world by its motion has made time, but he made the world, and so with God there is nothing future, who has the very foundations of time subject to him. For their life is not time, but the archetype and model of time, eternity; and in eternity nothing is past and nothing is future, but there is the present only.” In his conceptions of the Godhead and of his attributes it is evident that Philo, as long as he follows the light of revelation and keeps clear of the false notions which he had drawn from Greek sources, rises far above the speculations of the Greek philosophers on the same subjects. Plato himself in his happiest moments never reached such heights. For Philo, God is goodness and sanctity itself. By this he does not mean only that he is the boundless ocean of all perfections, the archetype of all holiness and of everything that is good, but that he is the origin of all human virtue, which flows from him into his rational creatures as from its only source. “It is God,” he writes in his Allegories of the Law, “who sows and plants all virtue upon earth in the mortal race, being an imitation and image of the heavenly.” According to him, man, in order to reproduce in himself the divine resemblance in which holiness consists, must be freed from the influence of his sensuous nature, the source of his weakness and sinfulness. But in that nature no power is to be found to transform itself, as no nature has the power of changing itself into anything other than what it is. The consequence is that “he must betake himself to a higher power, and receive from it as a loan that strength which fails in himself.” The difference between this doctrine and that of the older philosophers is palpable. When Plato and Pythagoras recommend to their disciples the subduing of the senses as a condition to reaching truth, they suppose that man can do it by his own efforts and without any help from above; and this is precisely what Philo denies. Furthermore, the knowledge of God, in which man finds his perfection and supreme happiness, is not a mere ray of cold light, but it leads to an intimate union with him, which is the ultimate point of Philo’s system; and this union, as everything perfect in human nature, is an immediate gift of God. Thus Philo would reach knowledge and virtue by the gift of God, bestowed through his grace, whilst down to his time Greek philosophy, adhering to its own principle, scientific thought, would reach them by the exercise of reason alone.
It is impossible to overrate the influence which Philo, with his powerful genius and vast erudition, 570must have exercised not only among his co-religionists but among the Greek-speaking populations of Alexandria and other countries. The most authorized writers have at all times rendered justice to his great merits. Josephus says that he was “a man illustrious in all things”; Eusebius extols “the abundance, the richness, the sublimity of his style and the depth of his thoughts”; St. Jerome, speaking of his works, says that “they are most remarkable and innumerable”; St. Augustine praises him as “a philosopher of universal erudition, whose language the Greeks do not hesitate to compare to that of Plato.” Photius also testifies that “his writings gave him an immense reputation among the Greeks.” This truly admirable man went, as did all the great philosophers of antiquity, over the whole range of human knowledge: history, ethics, jurisprudence, politics, metaphysics, cosmogony, physics, mathematics—no department of learning did he leave unexplored. In morals he rises far above Stoicism, and approaches to the sublimity of the Gospel—a fact which probably was the origin of the opinion entertained by some that Philo had embraced Christianity. But the glaring errors which are found in his works on several important points show that he was rather the disciple of Plato than a follower of Christ.
No Christian would have held, as he did, the independent existence of matter, which is the subversion of the dogma of creation ex nihilo taught us by revelation. For Philo God is not, strictly speaking, the Creator, but the Demiurgos, the Artificer and Arranger of the world. He admitted the Stoic doctrine of the human soul being a fragment or derivation of the divine Mind. He places the origin of evil in the conflict of matter and spirit. Accordingly, the body is an absolute contradiction to the mind, and, as such, the source of all evils. He thinks that the earthly shell is a prison out of which the soul longs to be set free. Thus it is not the abuse of free-will, but rather the conflict between the flesh and the spirit, which is made the source of evil. On these four points Philo’s ideas are identical with those of Plato and the Greek school. Philo is further notorious for his extravagant use of allegory in the interpretation of Scripture on the one side, and in giving a moral sense to the Greek myths on the other; besides, it is asserted that his doctrine on the Logos, or divine Word, is erroneous, and has thrown considerable obscurity over his otherwise elevated and exact conceptions of God.
According to the Alexandrian philosopher, the Logos, or the Word, would be “an intermediary being between God and the world,” “the first-born of God,” “the highest of all the divine forces or potencies,” “a creature whose instrumentality he used to give existence to all other creatures,” “a second God.” The Logos is also the directing power of the world, the divine Providence that governs all things. “The divine Word,” he says, “flows down as from a fountain, like unto a stream of wisdom, to inundate souls enamored with heavenly things. It is by his Word that God gives to the children of the earth the knowledge of that which is.” Finally, the Word holds the office of mediator between man and God; in this regard it is “the Supreme Pontiff,” and may be called “the Paraclete, or Consoler.” If we take some of these expressions 571in their literal meaning—if the Logos is, properly speaking, a creature, and yet a second God endowed, as it appears from the passages which we have just quoted, with the attributes of the Divinity—there is no doubt that Philo is at variance with the orthodox teaching of the Jews, who were always averse to anything that would in the least go against their belief in the unity of God. Creation in the first book of Genesis is simply attributed to God: “At the beginning God created heaven and earth,” and in the Book of Wisdom and other passages of Biblical writings there is nothing to indicate that the Word, the Energy or the Virtue of God, by which he created all things, is not identical with God. In Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 14, Wisdom is said to have been created before the world. But there is no question here of any creative act, properly so-called. The meaning is that the Word, who is the Wisdom of the Father, was produced from eternity by an ineffable generation; for Wisdom is spoken of as existing before all time, and therefore is eternal and God himself. The notion of the Logos which is attributed to Philo would likewise be at variance with that of his master, Plato. The doctrine of Plato on the subject is contained in his theory of ideas, the types, exemplars, or immutable reasons of things, present to the mind of the Creator, which determine in him the essence of each class of beings, and direct him in the production of his works. Did Plato make of those types or ideas separate existences and substantial beings distinct from God? Aristotle interpreted in this sense certain expressions of his teacher. But in antiquity as well as in our own days Plato found strenuous defenders who refused to admit that he ever intended such an absurdity. For our own part, we believe that the whole of his doctrine is faithfully exposed in the following passage of Atticus, apud Eusebius, one of his most illustrious disciples: “Plato,” he says, “had recognized God as the Father and Author, the Master and Administrator, of all things. Understanding, by the very nature of a work, that he who produces it must first of all conceive its plan in his mind to give it existence afterwards according to that type, he saw that the ideas of God were anterior to his works; that they were the immaterial, purely intelligible, eternal, immutable exemplars of everything that exists; that in them was the first being, the being par excellence from which all things derive their being, since they are only in the measure in which they reproduce their types. Being fully aware that those truths are not easily understood, and that language is inadequate to formulate them in a clear manner, Plato discoursed of them as best he could, opening the way to those who would come after him; and absorbed in that consideration, making his whole philosophy converge towards that object, he declared that wisdom consisted in the knowledge of the divine exemplars, and that such was the science which would lead man to his end or beatitude.” Again, if it be true that Philo conceived the Logos as a being distinct from God, his doctrine has nothing in common with the Christian dogma of the Word as exposed in the Gospel of St. John. The Word that was at the beginning, and by whom all things have been made, was with God, and the Word was God. But it would not be fair to condemn a 572man before having made honest endeavors to give to his words the most favorable interpretation of which they are susceptible. When Philo calls the Word “the first-born of God,” “the first creature,” nothing forces us to attach to these expressions any other meaning than that we give to similar locutions which we find in Scripture, and in some of the early Fathers; as, for instance, St. Paul, Coloss. i. 15, who, speaking of the Word, says that “he is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature”; and Clement of Alexandria, who declares that the Word is “the first created wisdom.” Besides, it is probable that Philo had some idea of the personality of the Word. We must not forget that he based all his philosophical speculations upon revelation as found in the Old Testament, and that he could not have been wholly ignorant of the teachings of Christianity. When, therefore, he uses the expression “second God,” or “the other God”—alter Deus—it is possible that he intends to designate by it the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
Be this as it may, certain it is that Philo’s ideas are found permeating Neo-Platonism in that phase of it into which it entered in his time, and which is also denominated Neo-Pythagoreanism, because in that school an attempt was made to revive the doctrines and method of Pythagoras, as well as his mode of life. It will be sufficient here to direct our attention to Apollonius of Tyana, the chief representative of the Neo-Pythagoreans of that period. He was a contemporary of Christ. His life, written by Philostratus in the third century, is a philosophico-religious romance in which the Neo-Pythagorean ideal is portrayed in the person of Apollonius. He had visited many countries and sojourned with the sages of India, whom he admired, and whose pantheistic notions he adopted. His doctrine is no more that of the old Greek philosophers, who considered reason as the only means of knowledge. He pretends to be in direct communication with the Deity, from which he derives light and strength; and in this immediate contact with Heaven his whole being is purified and elevated to a degree of power which gives him, as he pretends, the dominion over the forces of nature. And as the soul is, according to him, a portion of the divine intelligence, and the source of all good to man, so the body, which is regarded as the prison of his higher nature, must be the source of the disordered affections which gain mastery over his soul. All the ascetic life of Apollonius is therefore directed to subdue this tyranny of the body. This he must do first in himself and then in those around him.
There is no doubt that this tone of mind, which began to prevail at the very time Christianity made its appearance in the world, was favorable to it. Henceforth the several schools of philosophy shall be brought in contact with Christian dogma and the contest carried on in the same field. On the one hand, the Greek philosophers were in search of a light which they did not possess; they were forced to acknowledge in spite of themselves that the speculations and systems had failed to give a solution to the most important problems with which humanity is concerned; they had been made aware of the insufficiency of reason to effect this purpose; they felt the need of a 573special assistance from above as a check to the corruption of nature. And, on the other hand, the champions of a new religion saw the necessity of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the ideas of their opponents, in order to meet them on their own ground and gain admittance into the very heart of pagan learning. “In the truest sense of the word,” says a writer in the Dublin Review, “Christianity is a philosophy, and, what is more to the purpose, in the sense of the philosophers of Alexandria it was a philosophy. The narrowed meaning that in our days is assigned to philosophy, as distinguished from religion, had no existence in those times. Wisdom was the wisdom by excellence, the highest, the ultimate wisdom. It meant the fruit of the highest speculation, and at the same time the necessary ground of all important practice. A system of philosophy was, therefore, at that period, tantamount to a religion. When the Christian teachers then told the philosophers of Alexandria that they could teach them true philosophy, they were saying not only what was perfectly true but what was perfectly understood by their hearers. The catechetical school was, and appeared to them, as truly a philosophical lecture-room as the halls of the museum.” It was in this light that the Neo-Platonics must have looked upon such men as Clement, Origen, and other writers of the Christian school. They listened with deep interest to the words of those teachers, who, with a clearness and authority which they had not known before, propounded doctrines that had already found an echo in their hearts. “Your masters in philosophy,” they were told, “are great and noble; but they did not go far enough, as you all acknowledge. Come to us, then, and we will show you what is wanting in them. Listen to these old Hebrews whose writings you have in your hands. They treated of all your problems, and had solved the deepest of them whilst your forefathers were groping in darkness. All their light, and much more, is our inheritance. The truth which you seek we possess. ‘What you worship without knowing it, that we preach to you.’ God’s Word has been made flesh, has lived on earth, the Perfect Man, the Absolute Man. Come to us, and we will show you how you may know God through him, and how through him God communicates himself to you. Asceticism and the subduing of the flesh by mortification are good and commendable, but the end of it all is God and the love of God, and this end can only be attained by a Christian.” Thus those very matters of intellect and high ethics in which they especially prided themselves were brought back to them with an intensity of light that made visible the darkness which surrounded the teachings of their old masters.
It does not matter that Christianity found its most bitter enemies in the ranks of Neo-Platonism. It was a great advantage for it to be brought hand-to-hand with all forms of error. The battle raged for three hundred years; but from the very first Christianity proved itself superior to its antagonist by the influence which it exerted even then on heathen philosophy, whose tone and temper were completely changed as early as the time of Plutarch—that is, about fifty years after Philo. That influence is unmistakable, as Champagny clearly 574shows in his Antonines. Philosophy has become more pious, more worshipful. The idea of one supreme God is more definite; God is spiritual, not material; he is the pattern of every virtue, and his providence extends over the world and man. The principles of morality are purer and in many cases recall the spirit of the Gospel. “In the time of Severus,” says Allies, “all the thinking minds have become ashamed of Olympus and its gods. The cross has wounded them to death.” It is in vain that the later Neo-Platonics and court philosophers strive to shelter retreating heathenism in a last fortress. They only prepare the way for the Christian faith, which they strenuously combat. When the Emperor Severus, regarding with the eye of a statesman and a soldier that faith, contemplates its grasp upon society, and decrees from the height of the throne a general assault upon it; when his wife encourages Philostratus to draw an ideal heathen portrait, that of Apollonius of Tyana, as a counterpart to the character of Christ, tacitly subtracting from the Gospels an imitation which is to supply the place of the reality, they confess by the very fact the weakness of heathenism and the ascendency which the religion of Christ had already obtained. Soon after Origen could discern and prophesy the complete triumph of that religion. To Celsus, who had objected that, were all to do as the Christians did, the emperor would be deserted and his power fall into the hands of the most savage and lawless barbarians, he replied: “If all did as I do, men would honor the emperor as a divine command, and the barbarians, drawing to the Word of God, would become most law-loving and most civilized; their worship would be dissolved, and that of the Christians alone prevail, as one day it will alone prevail, by means of that Word gathering to itself more and more souls” (Orig. contra Celsus, apud Allies).
Philo, therefore, in inaugurating the Neo-Platonic movement in philosophy, was only fulfilling the mandate delivered to his people, that of preparing the way of the Lord and disposing the nations for the acceptance of the Gospel. The church succeeds the synagogue as the divinely-accredited teacher of mankind; the long-cherished hope of the Hebrews is realized, and the true kingdom of David, is established upon earth to hold universal sway. The Gentile world, through the instrumentality of the chosen people, had been made to share in the great hope of a Redeemer, and within it aspirations had been developed and longings were felt which philosophy was unable to satisfy; and at the very time when its inanity appeared more manifest Christ reveals himself to that world as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” and presented to it in his own person that form of virtue which Plato thirsted to see embodied. Under his influence the face of the earth is renewed; what human genius, with all its efforts, had failed to accomplish, what such men as Plato, Pythagoras, and others could not accomplish, even among a small number of adepts—this and infinitely more was realized, not merely within the narrow circle of a few privileged disciples, but among the masses, among the learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled, the powerful and the weak; not in one corner of the globe, but all over the world, 575from north to south and from east to west; not only in countries favored by great intellectual aptitudes, where the arts and sciences flourished, where civilization with all its refinements had reached the highest degree of perfection, but in countries most abandoned, among savage tribes and barbarous nations plunged in utter darkness. Surely a new principle of life has taken possession of the earth—a divine principle which gives rise to those heroic virtues which we see displayed in every rank of society and in all climes, and by which the human race is transfigured. This result was foretold centuries before; it is the new creation spoken of by the Psalmist: “Thou shalt send forth thy spirit, and they shall be created; and thou shalt renew the face of the earth” (Ps. ciii. 30). It was preceded by a series of events so combined that it is impossible not to see in them the supernatural action of divine Providence and the profound wisdom of God, who makes use of apt means for the furtherance of his end. Besides, there is a wonderful unity of truth discernible from the very beginning, and which appears in an unbroken chain throughout the course of ages. It is the same Word, the same light, which was communicated to our first parents that we see increasing in intensity until it reaches in Christ the splendor of the full day. The first revelation of the Word to man is to be found in his natural reason, which is pervaded with primary truths that are axioms in the intelligence of mankind. “But on these,” says Cardinal Manning (Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost), “descended other truths from the Father of light, as he saw fit to reveal them in measure and in season, according to the successions of time ordained in the divine purpose. The revelations of the patriarchs elevated and enlarged the sphere of light in the intelligence of men by their deeper, purer, and clearer insight into the divine mind, character, and conduct in the world. The revelations to Moses and to the prophets raised still higher the fabric of light, which was always ascending towards the fuller revelation of God yet to come. But in all these accessions and unfoldings of the light of God truth remained still one, harmonious, indivisible; a structure in perfect symmetry, the finite but true reflex of truth as it reposes in the divine intelligence.” None of the much-boasted theories of our modern rationalists gives us that unity which is the test of truth. The restoration of our fallen race by the manifestation of the Word is the leading principle of Schlegel’s Philosophy of History; and the greatest minds, as St. Augustine and Bossuet, admitted no other in their immortal works. How puerile, in comparison with their grand and luminous conceptions, are all those systems which would fain explain the destinies of man without God! To the dreamers who have invented them can be applied the words of St. Paul: “They detain the truth of God in injustice. They have become vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart has been darkened” (Rom. i. 18-21).
The Divine Sanctuary. A series of Meditations upon the Litany of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. By the Very Rev. Thomas S. Preston, V.G., Pastor of St. Ann’s Church, N. Y. New York: Robert Coddington. 1878.
We welcome most gratefully this new book for the month of June. We hope it will go a long way towards placing the observance of this month on a level with that of the month of May; for the more the devotion to the Sacred Heart increases among us the more abundant will be the graces it always brings.
The book, however, is not intended for the month of June alone, but can be used at any time, and particularly on the first Friday or Sunday of every month. The author’s idea, in choosing the Litany of the Sacred Heart and forming a meditation on each of the invocations to this “divine sanctuary,” is a very happy one. He has divided the whole into three parts, viz.: “The Glories of the Sacred Heart,” as shown in the first thirteen invocations; “The Sorrows of the Sacred Heart,” as contemplated in the next eight; and “The Offices of the Sacred Heart,” as appealed to in the remaining nine. At the head of each meditation is an appropriate passage of Holy Scripture.
As to the excellence of the meditations themselves, there is no need of our dwelling on it. It is enough to know, from his past efforts, what Father Preston is capable of in dealing with devotional subjects. This kind of book is his peculiar forte. We are sure the little volume will be highly prized by all lovers of the Sacred Heart, who will also find the Litany itself, together with a beautiful Act of Consecration, immediately following the list of contents.
Good Things for Catholic Readers: A Miscellany of Catholic Biography, History, Travels, etc. Containing Pictures and Sketches of Eminent Persons, representing the Church and Cloister, State and Home, etc., etc. With over two hundred Illustrations. Second edition, with Additions. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Company. 1878.
This large and very handsome volume is in every way a gem. It contains more varied and interesting information—much of it of positive and immediate value—than any work we know. It is called “second edition,” but really it is a new volume, containing twice as much matter as the original. Its sketches of Catholic biography, with excellent portraits, are brought down to the present year. The last face that looks at us from the pages is the beautiful one of the Rt. Rev. M. M. de St. Palais, the lamented Bishop of Vincennes, who died in June, 1877. Near him is the noble countenance of Bishop Von Ketteler. Dear old Father McElroy looks out at us with his bright eyes, his head leaning against his hand. Archbishops Bayley and Connolly and Bishop Verot are there. There is also the leonine head of Dr. Brownson, and an excellent sketch of his life. But it is dangerous to begin the list of these Catholic heroes and holy men whose portraits and biographies are here given us. One lingers by each one, for each one is full of attraction. A good sketch and an excellent portrait of our late Holy Father, Pope Pius IX., catch the eye as we open the volume of 638 pages. Interspersed with these biographical sketches and portraits is every kind of interesting matter with pleasing illustrations. No book could make a more acceptable present; for it is indeed an exhaustless mine of “good things”—things, too, which young and old will find equally good.
We are in receipt of a number of volumes and pamphlets, many of which have been noticed and the notices are already in type, but owing to a variety of necessities have been regretfully held over from month to month. We trust to satisfy everybody in our next number. A word to publishers: They are very apt to send in what are called “seasonable” books on the eve of The Catholic World’s going to press, and appear to be surprised at not seeing a notice duly appear “in season.” For instance, devotional works intended for the month of May come to us by the dozen when the May number of The Catholic World is already passing through the press. If all publishers bore in mind, as some do, that the magazine is to all intents and purposes prepared a month ahead of date, there would be no surprise at the long delay which “seasonable” books that arrive out of season have to endure.
Ten years ago Dr. Ewer produced an argument proving the failure of Protestantism by some solid reasons, which he avers have been met “not by argument, but by a gale of holy malediction and impotent scorn,” on the part of those who were included in his indictment. Dr. Ewer being an accredited minister of a society whose official designation in its own ecclesiastical law and before the civil law of the land is “the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States,” it was a very natural inquiry whether he had not indicted his own church and himself as participants in this general failure or religious bankruptcy, and was not morally bound to abandon an institution denounced by himself as not only insolvent but fraudulent. The late illustrious Dr. Brownson did the reverend gentleman the great honor of reviewing the argument which he had put forth, in the pages of this magazine. Not with malediction and scorn, but with sober logic, he pointed out his inconsistent and self-contradictory position, as a Protestant minister denouncing Protestantism, and proved that the only possible logical alternative of Protestantism, for one who admits the divine origin of the Christian religion, is the genuine and pure Catholicism of the holy, Catholic, apostolic Roman Church. To the many failures of Protestantism, not only to construct any real form of Christian religion, but also to destroy the actual and historical Christianity which it has renounced, Dr. Ewer added another in his own person by failing to answer the arguments of Dr. Brownson. Although strongly urged to undertake the task, he absolutely declined to do so; and in presenting himself anew, after a lapse of ten years, with the proffer of something which he is pleased to call “Catholic Truth” as a substitute for Protestant error, he does so under the great disadvantage of having failed to vindicate himself from the charge of teaching what is only one of the Protean forms of the very error which he so solemnly denounces as subversive of all faith or even natural religion.
578The present lecture, besides containing a renewal of the indictment of Protestantism, and a restatement of the assertion that the truth opposite to its errors is embodied in the infallible teaching of a Catholic Church existing in his own imagination, has also what purports to be a palmary refutation of the dogma of Catholic faith defined by the Council of the Vatican respecting the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff. Perhaps the lecturer considers that this is a sufficient though late rejoinder to the arguments of Dr. Brownson in The Catholic World. Not so. Dr. Ewer’s Catholic Church has been proved to be an ens rationis, an abstraction, and its imaginary infallibility to be mere moonshine of the fancy. The logical idea of organic unity, of corporate, Catholic, unerring teaching and legislating and grace-giving hierarchical authority, representing Christ on earth from his ascension to his second coming, has been demonstrated to have no counterpart and expression in the order of real and actual existence, except in the one church over which Peter presides in his successors. If it is proved that the successor of Peter, with the concurrence of the bishops, clergy, and faithful who obey his supreme authority, has committed an act of self-stultification, this lamentable catastrophe affords no more ground to Dr. Ewer and his little party to claim a gain of cause for their petite église than it does to the Rev. John Jasper to maintain the triumph of his ancient and primitive doctrine that “the sun do move.” Let us suppose that the utter failure of Protestantism is demonstrated. Let us suppose, also, that the Church of Rome has erred. Does it follow by any logical reduction that the party of Dr. Ewer, however respectable in regard to learning and intellectual ability, morality and religious zeal, is not also in error? By no means. The only conclusion which does logically follow is that two-thirds of those who are called Christians are very seriously in error regarding the true and real nature of the Christian religion which they profess. It is possible that the remainder may also have erred. The Greek Church may have erred, the Church of England may have erred, the Oriental sects may have erred. Some of them must have erred, for they disagree among themselves in regard to two important matters, one as to what pertains to the essence and integrity of Catholic faith, the other as to what pertains to the essence and integrity of Catholic order. There is a general disagreement and disunion, without any external criterion or legitimate tribunal of judgment by which their differences can be adjudicated and terminated. The appeal which some of our Anglican friends are wont to make to an œcumenical council of Christendom is about as practical a method of constituting such a tribunal as an appeal would be to Moses, to the twelve apostles, to the Council of Nice, or to a special commission of archangels. Failing all possible recourse to an actually existing and infallible tribunal, we are thrown back upon the necessity of judging for ourselves between the various systems and forms of doctrine professedly Christian, on their intrinsic merits, and the rational evidence which each of them can adduce in its own behalf. Whoever thinks that we are really in this predicament will, if he holds firmly to Christianity and 579at the same time follows the dictates of reason, conclude that the various forms of Christianity are only differentiations of the same generic ratio, and will seek for some rationalistic or broad-church basis of reconciliation and union among Christians. If he does not hold by some kind of strong, and dominant conviction to the Christian religion, he will adopt the opinion of Mr. Froude and many other men of the nineteenth century, that it is a religion destined to become obsolete and be replaced by a new religion or by nihilism. So far from liberating those who are “breast-deep in torrents of scepticism,” Dr. Ewer plunges them with a stone to their feet to the bottom of the sea of scepticism. He loudly proclaims that there is no remedy for doubt, misery, and spiritual ruin except in the coming and the remaining upon earth, in visible, audible form and presence, of God made man, by his natural and mystical body, through whose organs of human speech the truths of salvation are infallibly declared to those men who are willing to hear. Yet he denies all the evidence there is that any such mystical body of Christ, possessing and exercising the requisite power of infallible speech, has continuously existed, and does now exist, on the earth, giving to men an unerring external criterion of judgment whereby they may discern Catholic truth from Protestant errors. Having first swept away rational theology and all certitude concerning revealed truth which can be gained from the private study of the Scriptures, he annihilates the living, teaching authority of the perennial church, and leaves nothing whatever which can furnish a refuge from the universal sea of doubt, not even a Noe’s ark. The land which he points out is a mirage, the ark of safety is a phantom-ship. Man is justified, according to the gospel of Dr. Ewer, not by faith alone, but by theory alone; not by the works of the law, but by the plays of the imagination. With very great pomp of language he exclaims: “In this God embodied in the one church, in this God continuously visible and audible, therefore, behold, gentlemen, the fountain of infallibility which you seek; for God himself cannot err nor falsify.” This is an encouraging and promising invitation. Surely, if we can find this divine oracle, this sacred tabernacle over which a pillar of fire reposes all through the hours of this present darkness as a token of the abiding of the Spirit of Truth within its sacred enclosure, we may be satisfied, and if this bright cloud precedes we may march with confidence through the desert toward the promised land.
Let us be sure that the Son of God has come into the world, that he has founded a church with sovereign and unerring authority to teach his truth and his law, that we know with certainty which is this church, and it is obvious that all reasonable cause for doubting in regard to things necessary to our interior peace of mind and our eternal salvation is removed. Dr. Ewer’s theory is right and consistent so far. But he fails to verify his own conditions, and does not designate any real and concrete body which fulfils the exigencies of his theory. He asserts that whoever holds his theory is a Catholic, and that there are three, and only three, churches which are parts of the one body that, according to the theory which he calls Catholic, must necessarily be identified and recognized as the mystical body of 580Christ. He exhorts his hearers to listen, “as the one Holy Catholic Church in all its parts, His own body, raises its voice,” which he says is “the voice of God on earth, chanting aloud that all the people in all time may hear, and be without excuse, the unaltering, irreformable truth.” What is the sum and substance of this truth? It is, he informs us, “the solemn, Catholic Creed of Nice, Constantinople, and Athanasius.” This creed, moreover, he asserts, has been chanted “in unison round and round the world in unbroken strain, following the tireless sun, through the centuries and the millenniums,” by his imaginary catholic church, a body existing in separate parts, without any head or unity of organization. Dr. Brownson has demonstrated that such a body cannot exist either in the realm of nature or in that of grace, and we need not repeat his arguments. We simply affirm, at present, that this unison of voices without discord or interruption, chanting continuously from the apostolic age the three creeds above mentioned, is a myth, and no historical fact. Dr. Ewer appears to rely on it as the external criterion of Catholic truth, and if it vanishes, as it must under the historical test, he is left to the mercy of the torrents of scepticism, along with the other Protestants. The creeds, in their external form, are a growth and a development from the germ which first existed under a simpler form. The slightest acquaintance with early church history suffices to show how long and violent a warfare was necessary in order to establish the Nicene Creed with its test-word of orthodoxy, “consubstantial with the Father,” as the permanent, universal, and unchangeable formula of faith, even among those who truly held and confessed the Catholic faith itself in regard to the true and proper divinity of the Son. The additions made by the First Council of Constantinople were not universally adopted, or the council itself completely ratified and recognized as œcumenical, until at least seventy years after its celebration.
If the doctrine contained in the creeds is regarded in itself, prescinding from its verbal expression, the case is much worse for Dr. Ewer’s theory. The Arian heretics were numerous and powerful, and they were able to persecute the Catholics and lay waste the church in a fearful manner. They were nevertheless Catholics, according to Dr. Ewer’s definition. They professed to have the genuine, apostolical, and primitive faith, and accused the Catholics of having altered and corrupted it. They recognized the visible church, the apostolic succession, the hierarchical order, the sacrifice and sacraments instituted by Christ, and continued the outward show and appearance of conformity to established Catholic usage, and even to the language of the Fathers respecting the mysteries of faith. They were intruded into the possession of the titles, churches, and other temporalities of many of the most important episcopal sees, and sustained in their usurpation by the civil power.
After the extermination of the Arian heresy came the Nestorians. They also professed to be orthodox and Catholic, anathematized the Arians and all the previous heretics, confessed the Nicene Creed, and, when they were condemned and cut off from the church, so far from ceasing to exist, they increased 581and flourished in a remarkable way for centuries, and still remain as a separate organization with their bishops, who have succeeded in an unbroken line from those of the fifth century.
The Eutychians or Monophysites received the decrees of the councils of Nice and Ephesus, anathematized the Nestorians, and denounced the Catholics as Nestorian heretics. After the Council of Chalcedon, which condemned them, they persisted in maintaining their position as being the genuine Catholics, and formed a new sect, which still subsists in Egypt and the East. A century after the Council of Chalcedon, out of six millions of Christians in the patriarchate of Alexandria, there were only three hundred thousand Catholics, and in Asia Minor the divisions and dissensions caused by the Monophysite and Nestorian heresies were so great that the peace and stability of the Eastern empire were seriously compromised. This was the occasion of an effort at reconciliation made by the Emperor Heraclius, in concert with Sergius of Constantinople and Cyrus of Alexandria, which brought in a new heresy, the Monothelite, with new disorders, new persecutions, and another violent struggle for life on the part of the Catholic faith, that resulted after fifty years in a sixth œcumenical council, where the Monothelite heresy was condemned. What reason has Dr. Ewer for excluding these heretical Eastern sects from his comprehensive Catholic Church? They have always received the creeds of Nice and Constantinople. They hold fewer heresies than those which are admitted by the Church of England, and, apart from their special heretical tenets, are in close conformity of doctrine and order with the Greek Church. They always protested that they held the primitive, Catholic faith, and that they were unjustly condemned because they resisted the effort to impose new dogmas and additions to the creed as terms of Catholic communion. The history of the whole period of the first six councils completely falsifies and nullifies Dr. Ewer’s theory, and shows his fanciful chant in unison to be as mythical a song as was ever sung in the brain of a woman with a bee in her bonnet. It has a very nice sound to appeal to the first six councils. Even the Presbyterian General Assembly could vindicate their orthodoxy before Pius IX. by loudly proclaiming their assent to all the dogmatic definitions of the first six councils. But what do the majority of men know about these councils? The same objections which Anglicans make against the seventh, and Greeks and Anglicans alike make against the councils of Lyons, Florence, Trent, and the Vatican, are of equal force against those of Nice, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. The number of bishops present in each of them varied from one hundred and fifty to six hundred and thirty, out of a whole number of prelates certainly much larger even in the beginning of the fourth century, and estimated by the emperors themselves, who must have had better means of information than any others at the time, as having increased in the fifth century to a total of five or six thousand. The church went on very well for three centuries without any œcumenical councils. When the necessity arose, each council was sufficient for the present emergency, but not sufficient for the new ones which arose 582and demanded new councils and new decisions, of equal authority with the preceding. Each one has met the violent opposition of the rebellious, the schismatical, and the heretical appellants from the present, actual authority of the church to some ideal tribunal of their own imagination, in the past or in the future, which they can call what they choose, the Catholic Church or the Word of God. Their word of God is their own private interpretation of Scripture, or of Scripture and tradition together; their Catholic Church is themselves and their particular party, pretending to speak in the name of the church and to be her interpreters. The whole is worth as much as the œcumenical council forged by Photius, acts, decrees, signatures, and all, and promulgated at large among the Eastern bishops, in support of his usurpation of the see of Constantinople. The council of Photius was Photius himself, and the Catholic Church of Dr. Ewer is Dr. Ewer and the other members of his party. There is no really existing and speaking society which says: “I am the church, composed of three parts, Roman, Greek, and Anglican.” This is the language of certain individuals put into the mouth of an imaginary society. The principle of individualism, which is the first principle of schism and heresy, is just as really at the bottom of Dr. Ewer’s theory as it is at the bottom of Chillingworth’s. It breeds the same discord and disunion, and leaves men exposed to the same inroad of scepticism. Controversies concerning what the church is, what her authority and infallibility are, which are the true councils, which is the true Catholic communion, who are the lawful pastors to whom obedience is due, confuse and disturb the mind and conscience as much as controversies concerning the true sense of Scripture, the true doctrine of the Person of Christ, or the conditions of salvation in general. There must have been an external criterion, a rule of determination, by which the orthodox faith and Catholic communion could be discerned from Arian, Nestorian, Monophysite, and Donatist counterfeits. That same rule must exist now; it must be an infallible test of every kind of spurious Christianity and spurious Catholicity. It is necessary that this rule, if it be really sufficient, should determine not only between Caiphas or Mohammed and Christ, between apocryphal and genuine Scriptures, between Arius and Athanasius, Macedonius and Basil, Nestorius and Cyril, Dioscorus and Leo, Pyrrhus and Maximus, but also between Calvin and Bellarmine, Elizabeth and Pius V., Nicholas and Pius IX., Döllinger and Cardinal Manning, Dr. Ewer and Dr. Brownson. It must determine not only between church and no-church, Bible alone and Bible with apostolic tradition, priest and preacher, but between bishop and bishop, the usurpation and the just right of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the pretence and the reality of infallible authority, the minimum and the maximum of doctrine which must be accepted as pertaining to Catholic faith. These are not non-essential matters or questions of debate between theological schools. They relate to obligations of conscience in which the salvation of the soul is involved, and are eminently practical. The Spanish prince Hermenegild had such a practical rule, and obeyed it by sacrificing his life rather than to receive communion 583from an Arian bishop. Marie Antoinette had the same, and died without the Viaticum rather than to receive it from a constitutional priest. An Anglican living in St. Petersburg, and in doubt whether he was bound to remain in his own sect, to join the Russian national church, or to become a Catholic, or was at liberty to choose between the three, would need the same rule. Who could decide the doubt for him? His own clergy? The Russian clergy? Catholic priests? The judgment of any of these, as private individuals, is not infallible. They can only help him to find some rule under which they are personally acting, and which proceeds from an authority superior to themselves. According to Dr. Ewer, neither of these authorities is supreme or infallible in itself; it is only in so far as they agree in transmitting the judgments of an authority in abeyance, that they can furnish an infallible rule. This is no rule which meets his case. They agree only in telling him that he must obey the rule recognized by the first six councils. Where is that voice of God which is audible to all men who will hear? Where is the embodied Christ who will take him by the hand? What has become of the chant in unison of the one, Catholic Church, musically uttering unalterable truth? Suppose that the Christians of the first seven centuries had been left without any better rule than this, what perplexity and unutterable confusion would have been the result—quite as bad if not worse than that which exists among our modern Protestant sects.
An extrinsic and infallible rule of faith must be one that in a self-evident manner manifests itself as really extrinsic to those who present it, and superior to their individual judgment, and it must be universal. The teacher and the judge must speak in the name of a really existing society which is actually one and universal, and in a manifest identity with itself in the past, by unbroken continuity of life and self-consciousness from the time of its origin in the divine institution of Christ. The instructor of the one who seeks the truth must teach him what the church thinks and commands, and give him a criterion of certainty that she does think and command what he ascribes to her, so that if he falsifies her teaching he will disclose and betray his own deception in the very act of deceiving, like one who hands over a package of money which had been entrusted to him with a letter containing a description of its contents. Such a rule of faith, with its criterion of certainty and of self-verification, without any doubt the Catholics of the first seven centuries possessed. Their living and immediate rule was a church really one and obviously one with itself in its present and in its past. It declared itself to have always held and meant just what it was now saying. The faithful believed and obeyed it, because its continuity and identity from St. Peter and the apostles were obvious by manifest signs and tokens which could not deceive them. Heretics and schismatics could not successfully mimic the voice of the true church. Their lack of continuity, i.e., apostolicity, of unity, of Catholicity, and of sanctity as well, was obvious. Their counterfeits were always put forth as the genuine coin of ancient stamp, but as coin which had been hidden or defaced until they had discovered it, 584or burnished it anew. The lawful issues of new coin from the old mint they denounced as counterfeit or adulterated. Their very pretence of returning to a kind of old Catholic doctrine more ancient and more Catholic than that of the present church, was a sure, detective test of their spuriousness. Continuity could not be in them, or universality, or unity; because their only claim to a hearing, and their only justification of their rebellion, implied that the church had not preserved these notes unimpaired. They were self-contradictory, and affirmed and denied the Catholic Church in the same breath. So likewise their successors. The so-called Greek Church is a contradiction to itself, in respect to its schismatical position, and a concrete absurdity. The Anglican sect is not on a par with the schismatical and heretical churches of the East in any way, and deserves no consideration in the treatment of the question of the actual extension of the Catholic Church. The theoretical church called Anglo-Catholic is an ens rationis. We give it only a hypothetical position in our discussion, as a possible society which might be organized in accordance with Dr. Ewer’s theory, if there were one real bishop to undertake the experiment. This hypothetical church is an hypothetical absurdity, as the Greek Church is a real one. The absurdity consists in the contradiction between the concrete and practical actuality of separate existence as a partial and incomplete church, and the confession of faith in one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church, having infallible authority in faith and morals. If the one church continues to exist as a complete, integral whole, there is no place for another partial and incomplete church, and any society which exists under that name is condemned by itself as an anomaly and a crime. If it does not exist, the church has failed. There being no whole, there can be no parts. There is no church at all of divine institution, no mystical body of Christ on earth. There are only human organizations, each of which is changeable and fallible. The profession of belief in the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church is, therefore, a profession of belief in a falsehood. Mentita est iniquitas sibi.
In that part of his theory which is Catholic Dr. Ewer affirms as a necessary consequence from the nature of God as a God of love, together with the method which he has chosen for manifesting his love through the Incarnation, that the Catholic Church must be really existing: “that God has still remained, and will to the end of time remain, in a one, undying, ever-fresh, amazing, organic, visible, audible, tangible, and recognizable body of human matter, known as the mystical body of God on earth.” Once more he says: “As Jesus Christ was the only being who dared to call himself God, so Catholicity is the only Christian body that dares to call itself infallible; that dares to begin its discourses, to give its truth, to pronounce its judgments, and to pardon sin, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’” This is given as a token of the true church, the real possessor of infallible authority.
From this it follows that the church whose supreme ruler is the Roman Pontiff is the one, Catholic Church, complete and integral in itself, and in no sense a compart with the Greek and Anglican 585churches as other parts making up with it, as a composite totality, the Catholic Church. The members of this church are on the same footing with the Catholics of the earlier ages, and have the same rule. They recognize one church, distinct and separate from all others, as perfect and infallible, with its continuous series of œcumenical councils. This church, and this church alone, dares to assume the exclusive name and prerogatives of Catholicity, to proclaim itself infallible, and to command obedience to its decrees as the necessary condition of salvation. The Sovereign Pontiff of Rome, and he alone, dares to call himself the Vicar of Christ and the Head of his entire mystical body, the church. But that most illogical and inconsistent of men, Dr. Ewer, confronted by Pius IX. and the Œcumenical Council of the Vatican, and feeling himself and his pseudo-Catholicism smitten by their anathemas, suddenly drops his Catholic disguise, and, showing himself in his true character as a Protestant and a sceptic, cries out: “Let us examine.” We have no objection to an examination. For a Catholic, to examine the dogmatic decrees of an œcumenical council or of the pope in respect to matters of faith, with an examination of doubt and hesitancy, is ipso facto a renunciation of his rule of faith and an act of apostasy. For one who is in inculpable ignorance or doubt concerning the criterion of truth and the proximate rule of faith, to examine with sincerity and honesty of purpose is a duty as well as a right. Dr. Ewer puts himself and his auditors into this position, as seekers, inquirers, who are invited to “go back and start all over again—without a Bible, without a church, without sacraments, without any religious notions—and see where we shall come out.” An interesting exploration, assuredly! Dr. Ewer, and those who follow his guidance, come out, by a tolerably short path, to a logical position, which is the next one to a final term of the process. Nothing remains to be determined, except the subject of the attribute of infallibility, in its specific and individual being as really existing, and representing the sovereign authority of Christ on earth. Even this is determined in respect to the past existence of the body which is recognized as the one, true church, and was assembled in the first six councils. The one point to be examined is whether the body assembled in the Council of the Vatican is identical with the one, true church assembled at Nice, Chalcedon, and Constantinople, in œcumenical council. If it is, the examination is terminated; the infallible church is found really existing in the present, with the same specific and individuating notes by which it is identified as existing in the past. If not, the examination is equally terminated, for there is no other body even ostensibly similar to this one which remains to be examined. Consequently, Dr. Ewer and his followers have come out into a cul de sac, or no thoroughfare.
Dr. Ewer, having examined the claim of the Vatican Council to be the Ecclesia Docens, defining the Catholic faith with infallible authority equal to that of the Council of Nice, does not merely dispute or deny it, but scouts and ridicules it with most contemptuous language, unsurpassed by any ever used by Arians or Eutychians against previous councils and definitions. Its 586great dogmatic decree defining the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff he vituperates as “this flagrant instance of the fallacy known as ‘begging the very question at issue’; an instance which is perhaps the sublimest in its presumption, and the most absurd in its simplicity, that the world ever stood amazed at.” This is a strong assertion and powerful rhetoric! But what we want is evidence and logic. Has Dr. Ewer furnished any? There is some pretence of an argument, and, such as it is, we will endeavor to sift its value. The argument is briefly this. The dogmatic decree is the product of two factors, the collective judgment of the bishops apart from that of the pope, and the judgment of the pope himself. The judgment of the bishops being confessedly not final and infallible in itself, it is the judgment of the pope which must make the decree defining his infallibility final and infallible. Therefore, he defines his own infallibility by the same infallibility. He declares himself to be infallible because he is; the reason why we are bound to believe is identical with the very object of belief, idem per idem.
We will first point out the consequences to Dr. Ewer’s own theory from the argument he has used against the infallibility of the pope, and show its thoroughly sceptical tendency, and afterwards refute it in a more direct manner. The infallibility of the church or of œcumenical councils has never been defined by any of the councils acknowledged by Dr. Ewer. It has always been taken for granted. Suppose that the Council of Nice had explicitly declared this doctrine as a dogma of Catholic faith. It would have affirmed the infallibility of a council as its own infallible judgment, and the infallibility of this judgment itself would rest on the infallibility of the church in council, the very thing defined, as much as the infallibility of the judgment of Pius IX. rested on his own declaration that he was infallible. It would be the same in the case of the imaginary future council gathered from the three parts of Dr. Ewer’s catholic church. The taking of infallibility for granted was just as much a begging of the question, on the part of the Ecclesia Docens, in her ordinary universal teaching and her solemn definitions, as if she had expressly defined it. According to the same logic, the affirmation of their infallibility and inspiration by the twelve apostles would have been a begging of the question. It would have been a demand for belief in their inspiration, because they declared that they were inspired. Even so with our Blessed Lord. He declared that he was the Son of God, and required absolute faith in his words because he was the Son of God, and the very reason for believing his declaration rested on his actually being the Son of God. It is exactly the same with the intellect and reason of man. The demonstrations of reason rest on first principles which are taken for granted. Why do you take them for granted, we may ask of the intellect. Because they are evident to me. What is the proof that what is evident to you is truth? I am intellect, and am made to see truth? By what authority do you affirm that? By my own, because I am intellect and reason. But I want an authority, extrinsic to you, as a warrant that you do not err when you say you are intellect and reason, and that what you call self-evident is really 587so, and not a mere hallucination. There is none.
Let us go back to God himself. We believe God on his veracity, i.e., because he is truth in his essence, his knowledge, and his manifestation of the same to us. This veracity of God, which is the reason for believing whatever he makes known to us by revelation, is made known to us by God himself, and we depend on his truth for the certainty that it is truth, that he exists, and that he has manifested to us the truth. If, therefore, the declaration of the infallibility of the pope by the pope himself is a logical fallacy because the infallibility of the person and the act declaring it is implied and presupposed, there is a logical fallacy at the bottom of all faith and all science, of the first acts of reason and intellect, of the very idea of being and reality. This is Kantian and transcendental scepticism and nihilism pure and simple. Being and nothing are identical. We are swallowed by the abyss of the unknowable, and the only fate possible or desirable for us, phantoms of a nightmare, is to be swallowed by the lower abyss of dreamless unconsciousness.
There is a real affinity between the pseudo-Catholicism of Oxford and scepticism. The former breeds the latter, and has actually been succeeded by it in the English universities and in many individual minds. Its sophistical methods pervert the reasoning faculties and undermine the basis of certitude. There is, moreover, a reaction caused by the refusal to draw from premises which can only find their just conclusions, their logical consequences, in genuine and complete Catholicity, which drives men back upon a rejection of all Christianity and all rational theology. As for the great mass of the present doubting generation, they are disgusted and repelled, if they are not rather moved to laughter and contempt, by the exhibition of such an illusory and fantastic claim of authority, before which they are exhorted to bow down. If Protestantism is a failure, and the authority of the Roman Pontiff and the great councils which have been celebrated under his presidency is futile, and the doctrine of the Greek Church is only Catholic in so far as the Church of England agrees with it, and this final measure of truth is only ascertained by taking the opinion of one small party of individuals, most men will conclude that Catholic authority is the most baseless of pretensions, and that Christianity itself is a failure. It is very unwise for any man to attempt to play the prophet, and assume to speak to men with a solemn air in the name of God, in these days, unless he has very authentic credentials. The pope can speak to the world as the Vicar of Christ, and receive some respectful attention. Any Catholic priest preaching Catholic doctrine has the pope, and the whole hierarchy, and many past centuries behind him, to overshadow him with their majesty. But the world cares nothing for what is said officially by the Patriarch of Constantinople or the Archbishop of Canterbury, much less for Dr. Ewer, and others like him who attempt to play the priest and imitate the Doctors of the church. In the great controversies of the age they count as a cipher. Whatever else the men of the coming age may do, they will not become Greco-Russian or Ritualistic. The issue is between Rome and anti-Christianity. Our 588only reason for noticing such a theory as that of Dr. Ewer is that numbers of individual members of his communion who are personally worthy of all respect are hindered by its speciousness from perceiving clearly the truth over which it casts a haze, and that others are likely to be prejudiced against the truth which it misrepresents and denies. It is a pseudo-Catholicism. Those who imbibe its Catholic ingredient are hindered from embracing the genuine Catholicity, toward which they have a tendency. Those who assimilate its uncatholic and sceptical element are hardened in their unbelief. We have said enough to show that it is no substitute for pure Catholicity and no antidote against scepticism. We drop this theory now out of sight, and during the remainder of this article we shall present to the candid inquirer for truth whose mind may have become confused by following the exposition of sophistry, a brief counter exposition of the integral Catholic truth in respect to that extrinsic, infallible criterion and rule by which it is ascertained with certitude, and all Protestant errors, or errors in faith or morals of any kind, are rejected.
In the first place, we repudiate utterly that extravagant fideism, if we may call it so, which makes an extrinsic rule, an authority exterior to the individual intellect and reason, and a faith or belief on testimony or authority, whether human or divine, the ultimate and only source and basis and rule of certitude in knowledge of the higher truths. We can never begin with any such source and criterion, and of course never progress and finish. Discursion of the reason, and faith as well, must have an intrinsic starting-point, which for man is in both the senses and the reason. We want no other light, and can have none, by which to see light itself, or rather to see illuminated objects in and by light. The intellect is a spiritual light. All men who have the use of their senses in a normal and healthy condition, and likewise their reason, see and feel and hear and understand and reason and know, without doubting; and when they reflect, they are certain that they do perceive sensible and intelligible objects. Each one knows this for himself, independently of the rest of mankind, as well as by the agreement and common sense of all. The intellect and reason of each one, and the intellect of mankind in general, is that to which we appeal, as containing the first principles and the intrinsic criterion of truth. Whoever pretends to doubt these first principles, or asks for somewhat above them and exterior to them, throws himself out of the rational sphere, and with him it is useless to argue. By intuition and discursion, by self-evident principles and demonstration, a great amount of certain science, even in natural theology, is attainable. Belief on testimony is rationally based on the evidence of the veracity of the witnesses, and furnishes another great amount of knowledge. Besides what is thus made metaphysically, or physically, or morally certain, there is a much larger quantity of that which is probable, in philosophy, physics, history, and all kinds of higher science. In respect to those things which are made known by divine testimony, that is, by divine revelation, the fact of the testimony is accredited, and made rationally credible, by the motives of credibility attesting and authenticating the revelation. The veracity of God is known by 589the light of reason. That which is really contained in the revelation, however it is transmitted, whether by books or by tradition, can be known in a great variety of ways, like other facts and ideas of the purely natural and human order. It is by no means absolutely necessary to prove the infallible authority of the church before we can refute scepticism, false philosophy, infidelity, or heresy. Christianity and Catholic theology rest on a sound rational basis and can be proved to the reason of one who is competent to understand the arguments. Revelation itself is absolutely necessary only for the disclosure of truths which are above reason. And these very truths can be demonstrated, not indeed by their intrinsic connection with truths of natural theology, but by their extrinsic connection with the veracity of God, through a logical syllogism. Whatever God testifies is true; but God has testified the mysteries contained in the Holy Scripture; therefore these mysteries are true. It is only necessary to prove the minor, and the demonstration is complete. The greatest part of the distinctively Catholic doctrines can be proved historically, critically, and logically, without resorting to the divine authority of the church. In great measure its human authority suffices, together with extrinsic sources of proof. In this way many Protestants have conclusively proved a great quantity of the truth contained in the Christian revelation. Even infidels are able to perceive and to prove that the religion established by Christ is the Catholic religion, and that whoever believes in the divine mission of Christ, or even in the existence of God, is logically bound to believe in the supremacy of the pope and in all the doctrines defined by the Roman Church.
What, then, is the necessity of revelation? It is absolutely necessary for the disclosure of truths above reason, and morally necessary for the instruction of the great mass of men in all religious and moral truth, in a perfect, certain, and easy way, adapted to their spiritual needs. What is the necessity of an infallible authority in the church? It is necessary as the ordinary means of applying this instruction efficaciously and unerringly, in respect to all the dogmatic and moral truths and precepts, with absolute and universal certainty, to the minds of all men, in a simple, easy, and unmistakable manner, and of determining finally controversies and condemning heresies.
A specious and fallacious objection is made on the very threshold of the argument on infallibility to show that there is necessarily a begging of the question from the start, and that some prior infallibility must be assumed as a reason for affirming any infallible extrinsic authority whatsoever. This is the very sophism we have previously brought to view, and which is the very essence of universal scepticism. It is objected that we cannot really identify and appropriate an infallible rule without a previous infallible criterion, and that we cannot apply it without the same criterion. The mind of man is fallible in determining that there is an infallible authority, what is that authority, what it teaches. But if I am fallible in the very judgment upon which rests the infallibility of the criterion which I assume as a safeguard against my own liability to error, I can never get 590beyond a fallible conclusion. This is the very argument of sceptics and probabilists against physical and metaphysical certitude. The senses are fallible, reason is fallible. Men are sometimes deceived by trusting to their senses, to their reason, to the testimony of others. Therefore we ought to doubt everything, or at least to rest satisfied with probability and a kind of blind, instinctive assent. We must substitute practical reason for pure reason. This is all sophistry and false philosophy. Fallibility is not essential but accidental in sensitive and intellectual cognition. It is a deficiency of nature, not a natural incapacity for certitude. Some would say that the intellect and reason are infallible within a certain sphere, so that by reason the mind infallibly joins itself to the higher infallibility of the church, and infallibly receives the truth from its teaching. We think it more accurate to restrict infallibility to that criterion which is absolutely and universally exempt from all liability to the accidental defect of error. In respect to the senses and to reason, we say they are fallible per accidens and by a deficiency in their operation. Nevertheless, we can be certain, in many cases, that they do not and cannot fail to give us certitude through any such accidental failure and deficiency. We can test their accuracy, as in observing sensible phenomena, and in mathematical calculations. This is enough to overthrow scepticism and probabilism. There is such a thing as rational certitude, and this suffices for our purpose. By rational certitude human reason can obtain, without any fear of error, its infallible criterion. By the same it can receive and apply its infallible judgments without fear of error. We are not analyzing supernatural and divine faith, but the rational process which underlies, accompanies, and follows faith with more or less explicitness and completeness, and which is the preamble of faith for those who are not yet in possession of Catholic faith, but are sincere inquirers. No one is asked to grant any begging of the question of infallibility, or to accept any proof of idem per idem, or to give unqualified assent to a mere probability. The truth of Christianity, and the identity of Catholicity with it, are proved with conclusive certainty by the motives of credibility. The same proof which establishes the divinity of Jesus Christ establishes the divine authority of the Catholic Church. This authority is infallible because divine and supreme, and having the right to command the firm, undoubting assent of the intellect to its teaching, and the unconditional submission of the will to its precepts. The authority of the church once established, its testimony to its own character and prerogatives must be received as true. The divine mission of Jesus Christ was proved by his miracles, and his own affirmation of his divinity was thus made credible. The mission and authority of the apostles are authenticated by his commission, and the church founded by them is identified by the manifest notes of unity, sanctity, apostolicity, and catholicity. The hierarchical organization of the church, its principles of unity and government, the constitution of its tribunals, and the respective attributions of the ruling, teaching, and judging magistrates who preside over the whole or particular parts, must be determined by its own traditions, laws, usages, and declarations. In any 591matter of controversy respecting any of these things, the supreme authority must decide without appeal. Find the sovereign authority to which the whole church is subject by its organic law, and there can be no further question. In every perfect and unequal society there is a sovereignty which is considered as practically infallible, that is, as a tribunal of last resort, from which no appeal can be taken. In a society having divine authority to teach and judge in matters of faith and morals in the name of God, this practical infallibility must be a real infallibility in the strict sense of the term. From this principle springs the reason and obligation of the recognition of infallibility in œcumenical councils. They are supreme, because they contain all the authority which exists in the church. Although the entire episcopate numerically is not present in such a council, the authority which it possesses is equivalent to that of the whole episcopate. The accession of the suffrages of the bishops who are absent from the council supplies what is wanting in respect to numerical quantity in the representation of the whole body at the deliberations and decisions of the council. Their tacit assent, which in due time becomes the explicit and formal profession of complete concurrence, adds moral weight and invincible force to the authority of the conciliar decisions. This is augmented by the assent of the whole body of the clergy and laity. It is no matter how numerous dissidents and recusants may be among bishops, clergy, and people, or how long their protest and rebellion may continue. They separate themselves from the true body, and are legitimately excluded from it, and therefore their suffrages do not count. That unanimity which is a criterion of truth is not a unanimity of Catholics, heretics, and schismatics together, but of Catholics alone. There is requisite, therefore, some certain mark by which Catholics can be discerned. The Catholic episcopate, the Catholic priesthood, the Catholic people, Catholic councils, Catholic creeds and confessions, the Catholic communion, must be discriminated in some plain and obvious manner from all their counterfeits, however great the semblance of reality which these counterfeits bear on their surface. The test of separation from the true faith and the true church, and the authority which judges of the fact of separation, must be clear and indubitable. The œcumenical council must have its complete and legitimate authority, in which the authority of the whole church and the whole episcopate is concentrated and applied, independently of the assent or dissent of any number of individuals, even bishops or patriarchs, who are not actually concurring in its judgment. It must have power to command assent and to punish dissent, or its authority is nugatory. It is a plain, historical fact that the supremacy of the Apostolic See of St. Peter gave to the episcopate its unity, and to the episcopate assembled in general council its final authority, from the first age of the church, and from the beginning of its action through œcumenical councils. The councils were not complete without the pope, and it was his ratification which confirmed and made irreformable their judgments.
The Council of Nice and the Council of the Vatican are precisely alike in this respect. The 592bishops possess now, as they have always possessed, conjudicial authority in deciding matters of faith with the pope, whether in or out of council, as they are, in all other respects, jure divino co-regents with him of the universal church. But they do not share in his supremacy and sovereignty, even though they may be bishops of apostolic sees and have patriarchal jurisdiction. He is the supreme judge, as he is the supreme ruler. As such, his right to judge in matters of faith, without the aid of a general council, as well as to make laws and exercise all the plenitude of jurisdiction, has been acknowledged by all the œcumenical councils and by the whole church in every age. It is false to say that the dogmatic decree of the Council of the Vatican made any change in doctrine or law respecting the authority of the pope over the episcopate, whether assembled or dispersed, and over the universal church. The Council of Florence, to go no higher, defined the plenitude of his power. The Creed of Pius IV., to which every bishop, and every particular council since Trent, has been obliged to swear assent, proclaims the Roman Church “The Mother and Mistress of Churches,” denoting by the words “Magistra Ecclesiarum” not supremacy in government but in defining and teaching doctrine. The undoubted authority of the pope to teach and define doctrine by his apostolic authority, to condemn heresies and errors, and to command not only exterior but interior obedience and assent even from bishops, was universally recognized before the Council of the Vatican assembled. Appeals from his judgments to an œcumenical council have been forbidden for centuries past, under pain of excommunication. The infallibility of the pope in his decisions ex cathedra is a necessary logical deduction from his supreme authority in teaching and judging. It is false to say that it was doubtful before the Council of the Vatican defined it. It has been implied and acted on, as a fundamental principle of the Catholic Church, from the beginning. Some Catholics doubted or denied it, and the church wisely tolerated their error for a time, as she tolerated the Semi-Arians, awaiting the opportune occasion of destroying the error without damaging the cause of truth and the salvation of her children. That some few bishops at the Council of the Vatican still held to the Gallican error, that it was taught by a few professors and learned writers, that it was held by a small minority of the clergy and educated laity, and that a still greater number were not clearly aware of the true and Catholic doctrine, does not prejudice the case in the slightest degree. All these were bound as Catholics to recognize the infallibility of the definition solemnly promulgated by the pope with the assent of a majority of the bishops. Those who refused were excommunicated as heretics. The pope, together with all the bishops, clergy, and faithful of the Catholic Church, are united in the profession of the faith as defined in the Vatican Council, precisely as they were united in the profession of the dogmas defined at Nice, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople, at Florence and at Trent. It is absurd to deny to a tribunal competent to define with metaphysical accuracy the most abstruse truths concerning the trinity of persons in the Godhead, and the divinity and humanity of the Incarnate 593Word, an equal ability to determine the attributions of the distinct parts of the Catholic hierarchy, and to define clearly how the infallible church is constituted in respect to the relations between her head and members. It is absurd to recognize the Council of Nice as infallible, and to deny the infallibility of the Council of the Vatican. They rest upon the same basis, the divine constitution of the Catholic Church in the episcopate as the Eccelesia Docens, with authority to teach and to command assent, under the supremacy of the successor of St. Peter in the Roman See. This is not an arbitrary authority to impose any opinion which may happen to command a majority of suffrages and receive the sanction of the pope. Neither is it an original authority, founded on inspiration, to propose truth immediately revealed. It is authority, in the first place, to deliver authentic testimony of the faith handed down by tradition from the beginning and continually preserved in the church, but especially in the Roman Church. It is authority, in the second place, to interpret and declare the true sense of all past decrees and decisions, of the general teaching of the church in past ages, of the doctrine of the Fathers and Doctors of the church, and of all records in which evidence is found of the traditional doctrine derived originally from the apostles. In the third place, to interpret and judge of the true sense of the Holy Scriptures, the principal source from which knowledge of revealed truth is derived. Finally, to declare the revealed dogmas contained in the Written and Unwritten Word, in Scripture and Apostolic Tradition, in clear and precise terms which are fit and proper to express them intelligibly, that is, to define dogmas of faith, and to require universal assent to these definitions under pain of anathema. The inerrancy, or infallibility, is a security from the accident of error in these dogmatic definitions, which results from a supernatural and divine assistance, overruling the conclusions of the human judgment which have been reached by a human and rational process, so far as needful, in order that they may not be faulty either by excess or defect as an exact expression of the revealed truth. This divine assistance is not given exclusively to the pope as an individual, to regulate the acts of his own mind, in thought or investigation regarding the revealed truths. It extends itself over the church universally, and over all the processes and methods by which the doctrines of revelation are preserved and developed in her living consciousness, and proclaimed through her organs to the world in their integrity. In the councils of the church it is by the assistance of the Holy Spirit to the deliberations of the bishops and theologians, as well as by his overruling direction of the exercise of his office of supreme judge by the pope, that the result is reached in the solemn and final decisions. This result is not a blind determination, a passive reception of an impulse superseding reason. It is a rational certitude, an enlightened judgment based on motives which are convincing and conclusive. It has the highest human authority, apart from the divine sanction which confirms it. When the prelates of the Vatican Council presented the dogmatic decree defining the infallibility of the pope, to Pius IX. for his sanction, history, theology, the consent 594of Fathers, Doctors, councils, and Catholic Christendom, and the Holy Scriptures as interpreted by a series of the most learned and holy men who have adorned the annals of the church, demanded through them the solemn confirmation of this decree. Pius IX. was called upon to declare the tradition of the Roman Church, the doctrine of his predecessors, the principle upon which the Holy See had always acted in defining faith and condemning heresy. He was asked to complete and confirm by his supreme authority the explicit or implicit judgment of nine-tenths of the Catholic episcopate. The absolute finality and divine authority of his judgment was not dependent upon his personal assertion of his own belief in his infallibility, as its support. His right and power to determine that the decree of the council should be final and irrevocable were beyond question or controversy. The fact that, by virtue of his right as Vicar of Christ, he defined something respecting the nature and extent of that right is irrelevant as an objection, and to make use of it as one is a sophistical artifice. If Almighty God is credible when he declares his own veracity, if Jesus Christ is credible when he declares his own divinity, the Vicar of Christ is credible when he declares his own infallibility. If God is God, he must be veracious; if Christ is Christ, he must be God; if the Vicar of Christ is his Vicar, he must be infallible. God does not command our belief without giving us evidence that he is God; Jesus Christ does not require our submission to his divine authority without giving us evidence that he is the Son of God; the pope does not exact our obedience to his infallible judgments without giving us evidence that he is the Vicar of Christ and the Vicegerent of God on earth. The Catholic religion makes no demand for irrational assent to anything. It is not mere logic and philosophy, but it contains both in their ultimate perfection, and will bear the most rigorous rational examination. It is logically consistent and consequent throughout, from its first principles to its last conclusions. There is no other religion or philosophy which is so, and the most illogical of all is pseudo-Catholicism.
Paris, May 22, 1878.
Scenes and sensations there are in life which seem to cut themselves into the soul as diamond cuts into glass, and on May 22, 1871, occurred one of this kind. On the afternoon of that day I was sitting on the balcony of a house in London with a large and merry party watching the “return from the Derby” up Grosvenor Place, every house and balcony in which was similarly draped in red and filled with bright faces and brighter dresses, with youth, beauty, and fashion, when a friend appeared amongst us, sad and solemn, come from his club in breathless haste, evidently burdened with some important news. In a few seconds a thrill of horror ran through the lively circle, for he had announced that the “Tuileries was burning! Paris was in flames!” Never shall I forget the sensation. All at once the countless carriages below, full of ladies and children, ranged in a line along the street; the four-in-hands coming back from Epsom, driven by, and filled with, the reigning “hopefuls” of the “Upper Ten,” whose faces as they passed betrayed the varied effect of the race on purse and betting-book; the dust-stained inmates and blue-veiled coachmen of the open landaus and hansoms, with their emptied picnic-baskets slung behind; the serious countenances of some, the smiling features of others; the thousand-and-one comic-tragic incidents of the motley multitude which make the return from this annual British Olympic game so celebrated—all suddenly faded from our view, for the eyes of the soul became transfixed on the appalling scenes then occurring in Paris, and their possible consequences caused all hearts to feel sick with anxiety and dismay. L’imagination travaille, it is true, at such moments, and is prone to exaggerate; but had not the Versailles troops succeeded in entering the city, our fancy would in no way have outstepped the reality. Until that day all had believed themselves prepared for the worst. The murder of the archbishop and his martyred companions had sorely grieved mankind, and a repetition of the guillotine scenes of the Reign of Terror we felt might any day occur; the idea was not unfamiliar, but so wholesale an instrument of destruction as petroleum, such demons has les Pétroleuses, had never entered into our wildest calculations. “The terrible year,” as the French have since so aptly named it, 1871 most truly was, not only for them but for the thinking world at large, who, from the universal confusion, the ungoverned passions, the fast-increasing atheism, had need of a confidence in Providence, supernatural in the highest degree, not to lie down and die of sheer despair.
Eighteen months later I passed through Paris on my way home from Switzerland, but so dolorous was the impression that I had fain leave it in a couple of days. Ruin, desolation stared one in the face at every step, and the smell of petroleum 598seemed to haunt one at every turn. The blackened shells of the historic Tuileries, of the beautiful Hôtel de Ville, the Conseil d’Etat, the Ministry of Finance, the Gobelin tapestry manufactory with its art treasures accumulated there during the last three hundred years, the blank in the Place Vendôme caused by the destruction of its splendid column, the felled trees in the Bois de Boulogne, and the complete annihilation of St. Cloud, town and palace, were sights which deprived us of all happiness during the day and of peaceful rest at night. Not less melancholy was the effect of the sad countenances of the inhabitants. The elasticity and cheerfulness which had formerly seemed to be a component part of Paris air was gone, and in its place one only heard tales of their sufferings in those days of anarchy, of the Pétroleuses seen gliding stealthily through the streets, of the petroleum strewn round St. Roch and the chairs piled up in the nave of Notre Dame, so that both churches might be set on fire, when the troops providentially entered just in time to prevent this and many other wicked designs being carried out. Instead of the brightness one remembered of yore, people seemed to have a suspicious dread of their neighbors, and veiled communism undoubtedly still lurked even in the best quartiers. One notable instance of the kind will never be effaced from my memory, and even now, though mayhap unjustly, makes me view Parisian cabmen with anything but affection.
My friend and I, feeling dejected and oppressed by sad thoughts, one morning determined to indulge our feelings by a kind of pilgrimage to the scene of the massacres, especially as we had known and revered the sainted archbishop at the time of the Vatican Council in Rome. Calling a cab, therefore, on the Boulevard des Capucines, we quietly desired the grinning coachman to drive us to the Rue Haxo. In an instant his expression changed to one of sturdy anger. He knew no such street; had never heard of it before; could not possibly take us there. Perceiving at once the spirit we had to deal with, and that he had divined our object, no other cab, moreover, being within view, we insisted no further on the point, but tranquilly told him to drive instead to La Roquette—the prison where the unfortunate victims had been confined. Knowledge of so large a place we knew he could not deny, and, trusting to our own general idea of its position, we felt satisfied when he apparently started in that direction. However, on and on we went, in and out of lane and street, without seeming to approach the object of our search, but as we proceeded soon found ourselves amongst a most forbidding population, men and women looking stern and sulky as we passed, and exchanging glances with our driver, who appeared known to many, while on more than one window were the ominous words, “Ici on vend le pétrole!” An involuntary shudder seized us, not diminished on reaching an open height whence we beheld La Roquette in a distant part of the town, and our horse’s head turned exactly the opposite way. The truth suddenly flashed upon us. Our Communist driver, possibly one of the undetected incendiaries or murderers himself, calculating on our ignorance, while unable to plead such on his own part, had cunningly outwitted us by driving in and out toward a different point, whither 599doubtless he would have gone on indefinitely but for our unexpected discovery. It was too dangerous a neighborhood in which to quarrel with him, even though but mid-day; therefore, merely telling him that we had altered our intentions, we tranquilly desired him to return to our original starting-point on the Boulevard des Capucines. Most curious was it then to note the same instantaneous change of countenance as before, but this time to an exultant expression as undisguised as the sulky mood of the previous hour. And how could we wonder at it? For had he not succeeded in defeating the object we had in view, and, moreover, inspired us with so much fear that we sighed to get away from such a population and never breathed freely again until safely back in the more civilized quarters? Our courage, however, then revived, and, determined not to be altogether conquered, we bade him turn aside and stop at the ci-devant Hôtel de Ville. Incredible as it now sounds, again he feigned ignorance, then pretended to have lost his way, and at length, when we forced him to “land” us there, the scowl and growl he honored us with made us realize, more than any description ever could, what such a being might be if uncontrolled, above all if multiplied indefinitely.
To-day, the 22d of May, 1878, as I stand in the new building on the Trocadéro and behold the scene before me, thinking of this recent past, I am tempted to doubt my own identity. Paris—the same Paris that was in flames on this day seven short years since—now lies, like a vision of beauty, outstretched around; the pretty Seine winds beneath its beautiful bridges, the countless boulevards are thick in shade and perfumed blossoms, the then unfinished streets finished, the scars and wounds well-nigh (though not completely) removed, all faces bright and people civil, and the whole city still hung with the thousand flags spontaneously hoisted on the opening day of the Exhibition, when England and America were everywhere given the posts of honor beside the tricolor. Opposite, the huge main building of this same Exhibition, standing on the Champ de Mars, is crowded with its fifty and sixty thousand daily visitors;[126] the gardens between it and this Trocadéro, connected by the bridge of Jéna, are covered with a moving mass of all nationalities, while the Spanish restaurant, Turkish kiosk, Chinese “summer palace,” English buffet, Hungarian cafe, dotted with others around the grounds, tell of peace, and of a national revival unparalleled for its rapidity in the history of the world.
And what subjects for deep thought, what food for philosophic meditation, as one gazes at this glorious landscape, and from the hidden recesses of one’s memory spring forth recollections of the past few years!
My own acquaintance with this Champ de Mars dates from 1865, when in the August of that year I here witnessed a review of fifty thousand men in honor of Don François d’Assise, King Consort of Spain. On this last 1st of May, 1878, the same royal personage, long since classed amongst the ex’s residing in this capital, walked beside the Marshal-President, MacMahon, and the Prince of Wales in the 600procession which opened the Exhibition, and it were but natural to presume that thoughts of his previous visit must now and then have flitted across his royal brain. On that former occasion military of all arms lined the sides of the then arid square, while the imperial party advanced from the Porte de Jéna up its centre to a tribune in the Ecole Militaire. First came the empress, beautiful and popular, loudly cheered as, in her open carriage, she passed along the lines; next appeared the little Prince Imperial, not more than nine years old, riding far in front quite alone on his tiny pony, followed by his father, the emperor, and his royal guest, Don François d’Assise, escorted by an apparently brilliant gathering of distinguished military men. No prophetic eye was there to point out those who in brief time were to court the national defeat, or whose names would soon become bywords for corruption and incapacity.
Nor in the large mass of soldiery who required two hours and a half to march past, albeit in quick time, could any one discern the possibility of coming gigantic disasters. Alas! alas! what reputations have since then been blown into thin air, what calculations dashed to the ground, what history “acted out,” fearful suffering endured, theories exploded! Such thoughts are overpowering—sufficient to make the giddiest spirits ponder. And such, in truth, has been their effect of recent years in France; for, side by side with the marvellous material resurrection of this energetic nation, its religious revival has grown to astounding proportions. Not that we ever can admit with many passing observers that the French people were so completely devoid of religion as it has been somewhat the fashion to affirm—and on this point we thoroughly agree with the article by an eloquent Protestant writer in the Blackwood of last December—but the terrible events of 1871 have made the most frivolous more sober-minded, forced many an indolent mind to reflect, and from thoughts have made them now proceed to acts, to good works and alms-deeds. Above all they seem to have learnt the necessity of expiation and of prayer, and the whole Catholic portion of the French community since then have fallen upon their knees and endeavored to pray. Their pride, it is true, has been humbled, but they have taken the lesson properly to heart, and appear to have realized the truth that in all things, human as well as divine, “in order to live we first must die,” and that without supernatural aid even humility itself cannot be acquired.
And here it must be noted that mortifying as the defeat by the Prussians has been to French pride, it never could have produced the permanent effect on their characters which has been achieved by the frantic outbreak of the Commune. This it is which has so thoroughly sobered the entire nation and made them feel that every one must combine as against a common enemy. The republic, too, whether destined to last or not, has been productive of one incalculable service in depriving all its citizens of the possibility of shirking individual responsibility by throwing the blame, as heretofore, of every failure on some supposed or real despot; so that, while they have arisen from this death-struggle wiser and better men, Frenchmen 601now see the necessity, almost for the first time in their history, of taking an active part in public affairs and putting their own shoulders to the wheel.
But leaving these reflections, let us turn to the Champs Elysées and take a seat beneath its trees. What a contrast between the May of ’71 and this one of ’78! That all terror and woe, this one all joy and contentment. French mothers with their bonnes and babies are in groups around far and near, mingled with foreigners of all sorts and nationalities. Faultless carriages pass by, drawn by magnificent, high-stepping horses, of a size and breed formerly unknown in France, and which make many an Englishman exclaim with wrath: “This is the way in which all our horses are taken out of our country!” Doubtless he is right, though only to a certain degree; for the perfection to which horses now attain in France is said to be mainly due to the climate, which has been found to suit equine nature in a way undreamt of some few years since. Thus the breed, when once imported, is improved on French soil, and easily accounts for the multitude of fine horses at present met with all over Paris. This fact, however—together with the taste for horses, driving, and every other thing connected with the existing Anglomania, so foreign to the Parisian natures of forty years ago—owes its discovery to the late emperor, little as any Frenchman now likes to admit its possibility. Before his day no one ever thought of holding the reins, and almost as little of riding, not only in France but on the Continent, leaving such matters to grooms, as Easterns leave dancing to hired performers. But if these tastes were fostered by him before the war, the extraordinary development they have since acquired is one of the remarkable changes in modern Paris, and denotes both greater wealth—despite the Prussian indemnity—and more manly habits than in the “good old days long, long ago.” Louis Napoleon no doubt laid the foundation, but during the republic the edifice has been raised. He it was who inspired the tastes, prepared the ways and means, laid out the roads and drives—the marshal-president and his “subjects” who now profit by them. Perhaps one of the prettiest and most interesting sights nowadays in this beautiful city is the daily Parisian overflow of riders to the Bois de Boulogne between the hours of eight and ten, not only of men but of ladies, whose wildest dreams in former times never aspired to such an expensive pleasure. On a fine May morning “Rotten Row” has here a formidable rival both in numbers and in the steeds, with the difference, too, that instead of riding up and down a monotonous, straight road, the happy-looking parties of equestrians in Paris, almost invariably numbering many ladies, turn off into the fifteen small and large roads that surround the lake in the Bois, and there for a couple of hours enjoy a genuine country canter or a walk beneath pleasant shade. And mingled with these are pony-phaetons well driven by ladies, returning later laden with ferns, wild flowers, and greenery of various kinds. There is true enjoyment in sitting on a bench in the Avenue de Boulogne (once de l’Impératrice) and watching the well-shaped horses, their healthy looks and glossy coats, which would awake the envy of many a London groom, and are not more striking than 602the good seats of the fair riders and the vast improvement in those of the younger men. Of the number in the early morn the soldier-like President may here be seen, accompanied more than once during this month of May by the Prince of Wales or some other royal visitor.
But this is the afternoon, and, though our thoughts have flown back to the morning, we are sitting in the Champs Elysées and the hour for driving has arrived. Here comes a four-in-hand, driven, though somewhat badly, by the young Marquis de Château Grand—strictly à l’Anglaise, as he fondly hopes—closely pursued by the Duc de Grignon in his pretty dog-cart, attended by his English groom. “Victorias” with duchesses and countesses—the bluest blood of the blue faubourgs—follow in countless numbers. But whose is this open landau with its four black horses and gay postilions, containing two ladies in close converse as they pass along? The stout one is Isabella, ex-Queen of Spain—what memories her name evokes!—the younger “La Reine Marguerite,” as her intimates love to call her; in other words, the wife of Don Carlos, now the inseparable companion of Isabella, with that remarkable disregard to conventionality, considering the remonstrances of her son’s government, which has always been as strong an element in her character as the bonhomie that has led her into this intimacy, and also makes her love her present Parisian life almost as much as she ever did her throne. A few seconds later a handsome man rides slowly by, attended only by his groom, his sad, pensive countenance amidst this gay throng telling a tale of care and inward sorrow. It is Amadeus, son of Victor Emmanuel, but unlike him in most respects, now Duke of Aosta, once too “King of Spain,” and still grieving for his lost wife. Then, turning round to look again at the mass of children, voué to the Blessed Virgin, driving up and down in their blue and white perambulators, and which thus silently bear witness to wide-spread French devotion amid all the seeming worldliness, the eye falls on General de Charette as he walks by with some old friend, and whom we last saw commanding the Papal Zouaves in Rome during that eventful winter of 1870. Since then he has seen fire and fought valiantly for his own native land, he and his corps, as in the ages of faith, first making a public act of consecration to the Sacred Heart, the scapular being emblazoned on their regimental colors. Trial and suffering, however, have rather improved than injured him, for he has grown in size and freshness, mayhap owing somewhat to present happiness and the fair American who has lately brought him both wealth and beauty. Looking towards the road again, the Crown Prince and Princess of Denmark are seen driving past, but only to make us miss the sweet, smiling face of the Princess of Wales and the pleasant manners of the Prince, seen here on their road to the Exhibition every afternoon until last week, but now returned to England, not, however, until they had become such universal favorites and so completely won French hearts that if this were 1880 and not 1878, universal suffrage, it is said, if Paris were a criterion, would be very likely to offer Queen Victoria’s heir the doubtful honor of MacMahon’s place.
Nor does this in any way complete the list of royal representatives 603during this month of May in Paris. Archdukes of Austria, princes of Belgium and Holland, with Orleans princes and princesses, old and young, and, neither last nor least, the blind King of Hanover, Bismarck’s victim, and now permanently settled in the gay capital, may be here discerned by those who care to penetrate their incognito.
And not only during the day but at night is the city gay and full of life, for balls and fêtes are going forward, where twelve and fourteen royalties may often be seen at a time; nay more, unlike as in imperial days, the faubourg has come forth from its retreat, and legitimacy has opened its doors with hospitality, oftentimes with regal splendor.
Where, then, are the signs of poverty and depression which the enormous indemnity paid to Prussia and the sad events of recent years might lead a foreigner to expect? Naught but wealth and comfort is apparent; money and money’s worth; the rich showing every outward mark of luxury, the people well clad and housed; that squalor which makes itself so painfully visible by the side of London riches here entirely absent, life bright and cheerful as far as casual observers can perceive.
But beneath all this enjoyment, the flutter of flags on the “opening day,” the gathering of foreign princes as in the palmiest period of imperialism, and the evident revival of trade, in no other country is there so great a dread of impending evil, such a vague, undefined fear, baseless it may possibly be, but which it were folly to ignore. 1880 and the termination of the Septennate are ever before French minds, and the dreaded lack of durability, of a firm basis to their edifice, and the possible renewal of the Commune horrors seem nowadays always uppermost in their thoughts. Despite the outward symptoms of brightness, perhaps even frivolity, no change is more impressive to any one formerly acquainted with France than the grave and sobered character of the nation; the reflection which misfortune seems to have evoked, and the subdued tone their crushing defeat has stamped upon the entire people. The old crowing of the Gallic cock, so Napoleonic and offensive to strangers of yore, has, at least for the present, entirely disappeared and been exchanged for a tranquil manner, a greater civility in answering questions, and a total absence of the “swagger” so universal in the ante-war period. Hence, too, springs a sudden awakening to the possibility of other nations having special merits unnoticed formerly, with a studying of their minds and habits as compared with their own both in the press and private circles, which unconsciously betrays how terrible an ordeal the French have been passing through and how little they count upon its being as yet fully past.
Nothing, therefore, is so interesting and at the same time touching to any one who has not been in Paris since 1867 as to note the signs of change in these respects which meet us at every turn. One time it is the eloquent tribute of the Figaro to the reign and subjects of Queen Victoria on the birthday of that constitutional monarch; at another, the strict neutrality, so foreign to their natures, which this excitable people are maintaining in the present turmoil of the Eastern question; yesterday I noticed it at a dinner, when a heedless remark about the ruined Conseil d’Etat caused all 604the party to shudder and to exclaim, one after the other, that hard as it had been to eat horses—nay, dogs, and even cats, as many of them had had to do during the siege—the suffering was as naught compared to the terror of those fearful Commune days. One who had lived near the Palais Royal had seen the Tuileries burning from the end of her own street, another had been roused from her work by a shell throwing the opposite chimney down into her court-yard—and now that it is rebuilt an inscription records the fact—while a third had slept for the two worst nights, if sleep it could be called, in the cellar of her house, amongst the odds and ends of a band-box maker’s stock, who occupied the place. But the most singular experience of all, perhaps, was that of a family who then lived at their villa twelve miles outside of Paris, and became aware of the Conseil d’Etat being in flames from a shower of burnt paper falling on their lawn on that May evening of the 22d, 1871, of which some scraps showed the government stamp and belonged to documents of the state. And, perhaps, of all the Commune misdeeds the burning of this building and the Hôtel de Ville was the most malicious, for in both places marriage contracts and family deeds were kept or registered, and the loss and confusion which have hence ensued in families can never properly be estimated.
But it is especially in the churches, just where passing travellers have neither the time nor opportunity for observation, that the strides in religious fervor become most apparent. Above all in the Faubourg St. Germain is one at once conscious of breathing a different atmosphere. There the bells, as in old Catholic Swiss and German towns, wake one at five or half-past five o’clock of a summer morning, and keep up a constant call to Mass thenceforward until a late hour. There, too, should one turn in to a church on coming home from the Exhibition, he is certain to find devout women, and men also, lost in meditation before the Blessed Sacrament. “Kneeling-work” (as a late writer names this œuvre) and “reparation” are the practice of the day in the orthodox quarter. But especially before the Grotto of Lourdes in the Jesuits’ Church, Rue de Sèvres, is the crowd of ardent petitioners never ceasing and intensely fervent. I have watched them with admiration the many times I have been there myself, and the thousand ex-votos, many from military men, prove that their prayers have not been made in vain. The faubourg is also like a network of “Mother Honors,” second only to Rome itself in their number and variety. Sisters of Charity especially flit about it in every direction, and are even to be met with in the omnibuses or shopping with the utmost simplicity amidst the vast crowds of the Bon Marché. The devotions of the “Mois de Marie,” moreover, lend the district at this moment an additional source of ardor.
May, too, has ever been the month of First Communions, and those who know French life understand what this implies. The whole winter, nay, for many previous years, the catechism has been leading up to this point, and now since Easter Sunday the examinations have been constant and severe. Each parish has a day set apart in May for this great event, preceded by a short retreat, attended many 605times a day by all the children. Then on the happy morning the whole church is given up to the ceremony. All is arranged most systematically: the nave set apart for the two hundred or three hundred young communicants—rich and poor mixed together—the boys in front with white rosettes in their new jackets, the girls in rows behind enveloped in long white veils. Beautiful hymns are sung by the whole congregation, led by one of the priests; a touching sermon is preached by the curé; the parents are in the aisles, and many follow their children to the holy table. In the afternoon the little ones again meet to renew their baptismal vows in presence of the Blessed Sacrament, and the day closes by Vespers and Benediction. On that day week, before they lose their first fervor, in the same church the same children receive confirmation. These have been fête days for the whole family, nay, parish; and as parishes and churches are numberless in Paris, tiny brides and white-rosetted boys are met in all quarters during the whole of this beautiful month. If any of these children have the misfortune in after-years to lose their faith, their parents and the clergy at least have faithfully and zealously fulfilled their share of duty, while, on the other hand, it is a certain fact that in most cases this care lays the foundation of the solid virtues and tender piety, of that religious element in French life so well described by Mme. Craven and others, and which, side by side with the frivolity, is now making such sure and steady progress in every part of France.
The month of May, too, is here, as in England, the period of charitable bazaars, annual meetings, and rendering of accounts. Amongst others, two societies, the immediate offspring of the Commune, are now attracting much attention. One is that of St. Michael, to whom devotion as ancient patron of France has revived with marvellous ardor, and under whose protection has been placed the society for the distribution of good books; the other, “Les Cercles Catholiques,”[127] or Working-men’s clubs, more deeply interesting than any other of the present day.
At this present moment Paris counts its eighty different “Cercles,” while the provinces possess not less than two thousand. The third Sunday after Easter, the Patronage of St. Joseph, is their annual feast, and on that day, while gay Paris was attending the races in the Bois de Boulogne, we were present at the afternoon service in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. A more imposing sight, with greater promise for the future, it were impossible to conceive; for six thousand members, but only that portion which consists of the schools and apprentices—many from the Belleville quarters—had marched thither, each headed by their own chaplain and carrying handsome banners, unfolded as they entered the church. For them the nave was set apart, all others being in the aisles, while the meek, venerable Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris sat opposite the pulpit during the sermon, the blind Monseigneur de Ségur at his side, the Comte de Mun and other gentlemen of the society directing the general arrangements.
The now celebrated hymn of the Sacred Heart composed by the blind old bishop was first sung; and 606if the sensation of the Derby Day in May, 1871, had cut deeply into my soul, it was now all but effaced by the sublime, thrilling emotion caused by this vast multitude answering each verse chanted by the choir by the famous, heart-stirring chorus of
The effect at any time would have been marvellous, but with the knowledge that these six thousand youths had almost all been to Holy Communion that very morning, with such a past in one’s memory, and a congregation composed of such elements before one, it became simply overpowering. Moreover, we all knew that at the same hour, nay, at the same moment, the same prayer was being offered up in two thousand other churches in France; for, the provincial branches had made arrangements that their ceremonies should thus coincide with those of Paris. A procession, rendered picturesque as well as impressive by the six thousand lighted tapers winding in and out of the nave and aisles of this grand, historic cathedral and headed by the cardinal-archbishop, followed the short sermon, when a public act of consecration, with Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, brought this most heart-stirring and encouraging celebration to a close.
And now, on the 30th May, since writing the above lines, another impressive ceremony has taken place in the same cathedral, but strikingly illustrative, too, of the increasing influence the religious element is obtaining in France—namely, a public act of reparation for the intended celebration of Voltaire’s centenary and in memory of Joan of Arc. Good principles have certainly made more progress than was supposed, for public opinion and the protests of the religious portion of the nation have forced the government to forbid the demonstration in honor of the enemy of Christianity. But, to show even-handed justice, they equally forbade all homage to Joan of Arc, even that of depositing wreaths around her statue in the Rue de Rivoli—erected, by the way, on the spot where she was wounded when attacking Paris for the king.[128] No authorities, however, could or would interfere inside a church. Hence at three o’clock precisely the act of reparation commenced, every spot in the vast cathedral being occupied by a crowd, composed in greater part, too, of men, though the ladies, especially the “Enfants de Marie,” distinguished by their lighted tapers, mustered strong under their president, the Duchesse de Chevreuse. Amongst the number, in her Spanish mantilla, I recognized “La Reine Marguerite,” with many another high-born dame of far-sounding title. It was purely a work of devotion—vespers and benediction, the Miserere chanted by this enormous congregation, constituting the “reparation,” followed by a “Regina Cœli” which in beauty nothing could surpass. But the countenances of all present were a perfect study in themselves, showing the depth of their emotion and how different such ceremonies are in a country like this, where every one attends them for a solemn and public purpose, far more than for private, individual motives. It lends a sublimity to such acts that raises the spirit high above ordinary 607moments. Who, for instance, could behold the vast multitude beneath the roof of this lofty nave, which goes back to the ancient days of France, without remembering that Providence had saved it seven short years since from destruction by its own sons, and that the chairs whereon they were kneeling had been piled up in that same spot, in the hope of putting an end to all ceremonies or worship of this kind? As one listened to the “Regina Cœli,” and gazed on the beautiful statue of the Virgin Mother presenting to us the Divine Infant, and which stands amidst the lights and flowers over the altar outside the choir, courage and hope revived, and all left the sacred edifice with renewed grace to encounter their struggles in the cause of right. Most surely prayer and expiation are the strength and the duty of modern France, and with such reward as has been already vouchsafed to them her sons and daughters need no longer despair.
A decree of the late Holy Pontiff permitted the introduction of the cause of the canonization of Mary Guyard Martin, known in religion as Mother Mary of the Incarnation, foundress of the Ursuline Convent at Quebec. There is in this much to console and encourage us. Up to this step no servant of God who lived or labored even transiently in any part of our continent lying north of the Rio Grande had ever been proposed for that exceptional public honor which the church permits by a decree of canonization.
To any servant of God whose life, stamped with the impress of sanctity, seems to justify a belief on our part that he is now reigning with Christ in glory, we may address our prayers to obtain those more abundant temporal and spiritual graces which we crave as a means to our ultimate end, salvation; but this devotion is for our own closet. The church permits no public honors till she has examined with the closest scrutiny the life, writings, virtues, and miraculous gifts of the one whom thousands are honoring in private.
Exalted sanctity was developed in the mission life in our northern wilds, in the first rude cloisters, in laborious ministry, in patient suffering; but there were no monarchs or wealthy communities to undertake the long and often expensive investigations and evidence demanded at Rome, where, as the saying is, it almost requires a miracle to prove a miracle.
Spanish America under the Catholic kings was differently situated, and that part of the western world numbers not a few canonized or beatified, as well as many whose process of canonization, begun long since, has been laid aside amid the changes in the political world, which in this century show us the government in almost all Spanish-speaking countries the enemy of religion.
Mexico and Peru were the two great centres of Spanish power, originally rich, prosperous, semi-civilized states. In and between these two states flourished nearly all those whose canonization was undertaken or completed. It would be an error, however, to suppose that the Spanish colonies were all that the church desired, or that they were models for a Christian state. The popular picture of them is dark enough, and the untempered zeal and vivid imagination of Las Casas gave to the enemies of Catholicity and Spain an authority for the most fearful charges. Calm Spanish accounts, however, reveal facts which show that, in the mad rush for wealth aroused by the opening of these golden realms, an immigration poured into our shores which made light of the salutary teachings of Catholicity, and even of humanity or the natural law. The sudden wealth did not tend to chasten or spiritualize these natures in which pride, avarice, and lust held such sway. Yet it was with adventurers of this kind that the church began her mission to bring the Indian to the Gospel, the 609Spaniard back to the spirit of the Gospel. There was opposition alike from Indian and Spaniard. If missionaries fell, slain by the Indians whom they sought to enrich with blessings beyond all price, a bishop died like St. Thomas of Canterbury, slain by his own Christian countrymen. Shining sanctity, however, exerted its influence and ultimately prevailed.
In Mexico the humble Franciscan brother Sebastian de la Aparicion filled Puebla with the odor of his virtues, and the process of his canonization attested his sanctity so clearly that he was beatified by Pope Pius VI. The causes of the Venerable Gregory Lopez and of the Venerable John Palafox, Bishop of Puebla and Viceroy of New Spain, were also introduced, while missionaries either born in Mexico, like St. Philip of Jesus, or laborers for a time in that field, won in Japan the crown of martyrdom, recognized by the beatification of the church.
St. Louis Bertrand for several years illumined by his holy life and gospel eloquence the coast of South America from Panama to Santa Marta and Carthagena, laboring among the Spaniards and the conquered Indians, and endeavoring, as did all his order, to save the latter from misery here and hereafter, as well as to bring his own countrymen to the practice of the religion which they professed. As though one saint prepared the way for another, Blessed Peter Claver came in the next century to devote his life on that same coast to a still more degraded race, the enslaved African. New Granada thus has her saints, but Peru is the favored spot in our whole continent—Peru, where religion seems at so low an ebb, where governments of a day, put up for sale by prætorian guards, agree only in one point: hostility to the church of God and to the well-being of the people. Peru was above all other parts blessed by the example of exalted sanctity. St. Toribius Mogrobejo, called from among the laity to the archiepiscopal see of Lima, illustrated his stewardship by untiring zeal—reviving religion in the clergy and people, extending the missions, erecting institutions of learning and charity—and by the wise decrees of synods and councils confirming his holy work. Among those who labored in his diocese was the holy Franciscan St. Francis Solano, whose zeal has made his memory hallowed from Tucuman, in the Argentine Republic, to Panama, but who is honored especially at Lima, long the scene of his apostolic ministry. His heroic virtues, the miraculous gifts with which God endowed him, gave a force to his words that no human eloquence could equal and the most hardened sinners could not resist.
While Lima, the City of the Kings, had these two brilliant examples before her, a child of benediction was born of a father Spanish in origin and an Indian mother. Little Isabel Flores y Oliva was, however, known from her cradle as Rose, and the church, in canonizing her, adopted this name, which St. Toribius, too, gave her when he conferred the sacrament of confirmation. Her wonderful life of austerity and zeal, of intense love of God and her neighbor, has made the name of the Lima virgin known throughout the world; and even before her canonization she was declared protectress and principal patron of all the churches of the New World.
She is one of the glories of the 610Order of St. Dominic, and in her day two humble lay brothers, in convents of the same order in Lima, were conspicuous for sanctity. Blessed Martin Porras, a mulatto, holy, zealous, full of love for the sick, the poor, and the afflicted, was looked upon by all as a saint and an angel of mercy. His labors and his fame were shared by the Spanish lay brother Blessed John Massias. What a privilege it must have been to have lived at that time in Lima!
Coeval with the last of these flourished in Quito the secular virgin Mariana de Paredes y Flores, whose life so resembles that of St. Rose that she has been called the Lily of Quito. Her beatification by the late Pope Pius IX. gave us another patroness for the western world.
The canonized and beatified in Spanish America thus represent all states and ages: the episcopate, the priesthood, the religious state, and secular life.
Spanish America, in the wild rush of the restless and adventurous to its rich and luxuriant soil, resembled California and Australia as we have seen them in our days, could we imagine the tide of emigration Catholic, with some of the knightly graces of chivalry still powerful, and devoted clergy and religious striving manfully to recall the wild horde from their temporary forgetfulness of religion, morality, and civilization.
When we turn from this picture to that of Canada, we find a contrast as striking as the difference of the climes. In Canada labor, hardship, the deepest religious feeling prevailed from the outset and left their impress on the colony. The world has rarely witnessed a community so completely guided by religion and morality as the first Canadian settlers, and so deeply imbued with them as to elevate to its own standard the repeated emigrations of more than half a century. The austere virtue of Canada was gay and cheerful; it had none of the ferocious Puritanism of New England, which enforced religious tyranny, and pursued with unrelenting hate alike dissenting whites and unbelieving natives. While New England, narrow and restrictive in character and territory, hugged the bleak coast of the Atlantic, Canada, under the broader, higher impulse of Catholicity, won the friendship of countless native tribes and pushed her conquest thousands of miles into the heart of the continent. “Peaceful, benign, beneficent were the weapons of this conquest. France aimed to subdue not by the sword but by the cross; not to overwhelm and crush the nations she invaded, but to convert, to civilize, and to embrace them among her children,” is the testimony of one to whom Catholic piety seems only a wild dream.
Time has shown on what a solid foundation they built who laid the corner-stones of the Canadian colony. At a critical moment, when the court of France, yielding to the spirit of licentiousness and infidelity which had leperized the higher classes, was forging a rod of iron wherewith in the hands of the neglected and demoralized masses to chastise the monarchy and the aristocracy, God in his providence saved Canada by what seemed a death-blow, by allowing it to pass under the sway of England, the bitter enemy of Catholicity and France. But though the French spirit in the colony died out, her teeming population is intensely Catholic, well 611trained, well guided, holding their own against Protestant and infidel influence.
With such results we may look to the founders of the Canadian commonwealth for examples of high and exemplary virtue. The history of the Canadian Church has not been written even in French, and does not exist in English; it has seemed scarcely necessary to write separately the history of a church when the history of the colony is so imbued with the religious element that, deprived of it, her annals would be almost a blank.
In every history of Canada we trace the life of the church; we see governors whose lives were models of Christian piety, of strict administration, of skill and courage; priests and missionaries whose austerity, zeal, and piety shrank from no hardship, no peril, no torture; religious devoting their lives to education and works of mercy; colonists, the whole tenor of whose career recalls us to the days of the primitive church, influenced by the highest motives of faith.
Among all the founders of Canada the eye rests especially on her martyred missionaries; on Mother Mary of the Incarnation, foundress of the Ursuline Convent, Quebec; on Margaret Bourgeoys; on Bishop Laval; on Catharine Tehgahkwita, the Mohawk maiden, who rose to such sanctity. To them devotion has been constant though private, fervent, and not unrewarded.
The time has come when the Head of the church has been solicited to sanction and confirm the devotion so long entertained for one of these heroic souls—Mary Guyard Martin, known in religion as Mother Mary of the Incarnation.
She was born at Tours, in one of the loveliest provinces of France—one that gave that kingdom some of its master-minds and American colonization some of its most energetic and manly pioneers. Her father, Florence Guyard, was a wealthy silk manufacturer, and her mother belonged to the noble house of Babou de la Bourdaisiere, one of her ancestors having been deputed by Louis XI. to escort St. Francis of Paula to his states. The hereditary piety of the family was marked by a special devotion to this servant of God.
Mary was born on the 18th day of October, in the year 1599, and showed from her cradle marks of God’s predilection. Her childish soul had no greater passion than a lively charity and most tender compassion for the poor and the sick, viewing in them the beloved of Jesus and Mary, whose names were the first she learned from a pious mother’s lips. On one of her little errands of mercy she was caught by the shaft of a cart and thrown so violently to the ground that bystanders rushed to raise the child, whom they supposed terribly injured, only to find that she had escaped unharmed, protected, as she always believed, by the influence of the prayers of the poor and afflicted.
When only seven she had a vision, in which our Saviour called her in an especial manner to be his alone. Her docile heart responded to the divine vocation, and from the age of nine or ten she sought the most retired places and least-frequented churches, in order to spend a considerable part of the day in communion with our Lord. She watched the devout persons at prayer, and imitated their humble and pious attitude, and, ignorant of meditation or mental prayer, made her spontaneous acts of virtue, repeated 612the prayers she knew or ejaculations prompted by her own innocent heart.
As she grew and began to study, the influence of her girlish companions could not wean her from her love of spiritual things. In pious books she found her greatest and most unwearied delight, and her piety only grew more solid as her mind was enabled to understand the mysteries of faith and the immensity of God’s love and mercy. Her whole soul tended to the consecration of herself to our Lord in some religious retreat, and she expressed to her mother her desire to enter the Benedictine convent at Tours, then the only one in the city; but as her pious mother, after advising her that she was yet too young to take such a step, heard no further allusion, she supposed it a mere passing thought and not a solid vocation. The child had not the advantage of a wise and prudent director at this moment, and her future was apparently to lie in secular life; yet Providence was but guiding her surely to her real vocation.
At the age of seventeen her parents proposed that she should accept the hand of a young man of good character who solicited her as his wife. She evinced the greatest repugnance to enter a state so incompatible with the recollection and prayer which were her great desire. But as her parents had accepted the offer she durst not resist. “Mother,” she exclaimed, “as the whole thing is determined and my father insists on it, I feel obliged to obey his will and yours; but if God does me the grace to give me a son, I here promise to consecrate my son to his service; and if he restores me the liberty I am now about to lose, I promise to consecrate myself to him.”
The young wife accepted her new life courageously. Her husband, Mr. Martin, was a silk manufacturer, employing many operatives, and she had a certain supervision over a number of them who lived on the place. But these new duties did not cause any relaxation in her pious practices; she heard Mass every day, and gave a considerable time to meditation and pious reading. Affection founded on the purest motives united her and her husband, who soon learned to revere the holy wife whom God had granted him. Yet her life was not free from bitter trials. Even greater were in store. She had passed but two years in the marriage state, and had been but six months a mother, when her husband was almost suddenly taken from her. The widow of nineteen, with her helpless child, saw her property swept away, law-suits encircle her in their deadly meshes, and a lot of almost absolute destitution await her. She soon returned to her father’s house, and in a garret room led the life of a recluse.
God now began to favor her by interior lights, and placed her under the guidance of experienced directors. She consecrated herself to his divine service, but the future was not made clear to her, and a further period of trial was to purify her virtue. A sister, also married, urged her to come and aid her in the business that devolved upon her. Mme. Martin reluctantly yielded, but was ungratefully made the drudge of the house, and then burdened with the superintendence of her brother-in-law’s extensive forwarding business. Amid all this distracting toil, apparently so incompatible 613with high spirituality, the servant of God maintained an almost uninterrupted union with God. Amid all the din and bustle of business life she was raised to the highest contemplation. In all this she subsequently beheld God’s providence. Writing at a later date from Quebec, she said: “I see now that all the states, all the trials and labors through which I passed, were a preparation to form me for the work of Canada. This was my novitiate, from which I issued far from being perfect, but yet, by the grace of God, in a state to bear the difficulties and hardships of New France.”
Heaven was fitting her alike for the external work in founding a religious community in a scarcely-organized colony, and for conducting its members with the experience of the highest mystical knowledge.
As the ties which bound her to the world fell away her longing for the religious life increased. Her director, however, deemed it her duty to remain in the world in order to superintend the education of her son; but he ultimately allowed her to make vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the last referring to her director, and in temporal affairs to her sister and brother-in-law.
Her austerities at this time were constant and severe. She slept on a bare board, wore hair-cloth, mingled wormwood in her scanty food, and by frequent disciplines—even with nettles—and fastings mortified a body already over-burdened with daily toil. For this privileged soul, raised to the highest contemplation, and prepared by the heavenly Bridegroom for the most sublime union, mortifying the body with austerities that rivalled the anchorets of Thebais, was not even in a religious cloister, but immersed from morning to night in those business cares and details which seem so incompatible with a spirit of prayer and of recollectedness. She not only gave so much of her time to God and made all her labor one prayer, but in her great heart was always solicitous for her neighbor. Over the working-people under her direction she exercised the greatest influence, giving them from time to time clear and persuasive instructions suited to their understanding, and by counsel and mild reproof guarding them from offending God or recalling them from danger. But it was especially in the hour of sickness that they found her a true mother, rendering them all the service and care that the best of mothers could lavish on them.
It was not to be wondered at that she came to be regarded as a saint; but God, to purify her and preserve her from any self-esteem, permitted her suddenly to fall into the greatest aridity. Her fidelity when all sensible consolation was withdrawn was rewarded by extraordinary favors—visions in which the most profound mysteries of faith seemed laid open to her gaze.
The period at last arrived when she could place her son in a suitable institution and follow the inclination which had so long been to her as a vocation. Yet she was far from beholding to what order she was called. Her first inclination had been towards the Ursulines, while the contemplative order of Mount Carmel seemed most in unison with her whole spiritual life. Her director was a father of the order of Feuillants, and the general, desirous of securing for a convent of nuns of his rule a soul so privileged and so highly advanced 614in the ways of perfection, offered to assume the education of her son. While she remained thus undecided the Ursulines founded their first house at Tours. She felt at once that Providence wished her among them. A knowledge of their rule and of their profession of serving their neighbor confirmed this impression, and she felt convinced that she was not called to a purely contemplative life. A pious bishop, about to found a Visitation monastery at his see, heard on his way through Tours of the pious widow, and called upon her. He pressed her earnestly to join the community he projected, but all confirmed her in believing that the Ursuline was the order into which she must enter.
She did not, however, propose the step either to her director or to the superior of the convent, with whom she soon formed a holy friendship; but one day, visiting the convent to felicitate Mother Mary of St. Bernard on her re-election as superior, it came into her mind that her friend would offer her admission into the community, and she had no sooner congratulated her than the superior exclaimed: “I know well of what you are thinking: you believe that I am going to offer you a place in our community. I do indeed, and it depends on yourself to become one of our number.” Her director, however, showed no favor to the project until the divine call became so distinct and irresistible that he could not oppose it.
The Archbishop of Tours authorized the convent to receive her without a dowry; her sister assumed the education and future care of her son, and, giving him her last instructions, she parted with him and her aged father. Then, with the blessing of the archbishop, she entered the convent, expecting to commence her novitiate as a lay sister, but to her confusion was placed among the choir nuns.
She had reached the haven for which she had so long prepared herself by prayer and mortification; but a storm soon arose. Her son, excited by some who disapproved of her course, made his way into the convent, and by cries and complaints and boyish threats so interfered with the order of the community that it seemed impossible to retain the novice. A Jesuit Father, however, becoming acquainted with her great virtues and the difficulty of her position, took charge of young Martin’s education and placed him in a college of his order.
Thus freed from the last care, Mme. Martin took the white veil of a novice, and assumed in religion the name of Mother Mary of the Incarnation. In the sacred abode of piety new lights seemed to be given her. A knowledge of Latin was imparted to her without study, and an infused understanding of the Scriptures. Her fellow-novices listened to her eloquent and solid expositions with breathless wonder. But in a moment darkness overspread her soul, and she was assailed by the most horrible temptations. All her spiritual life seemed an error and an illusion; a self-deceit and a deceit in her director. Unfortunately her wise and experienced spiritual guide was removed about this critical time, and was replaced by one who regarded her as an ill-directed visionary. Her devotions in behalf of the obsessed sisters of Laudun made her the object of terrible visitations. Her son, after a brilliant opening at college, was led astray, and tidings 615came that he was threatened with expulsion. Everything seemed to thwart the vocation of the servant of God; but for two years amid all these trials she persevered in her novitiate, and when her superior directed her to prepare for her profession she obeyed, and pronounced her vows on the 25th of January, 1633, rewarded for a brief period with the highest spiritual consolation, only to be followed by a fresh season of trial.
At last a new and experienced director enlightened and relieved her soul; and this strong woman, taught in the bitter school of experience, became mistress of novices. Soon after in a prophetic vision she saw the Blessed Virgin and our Lord overlooking some vast land sunk in the depths of heathen darkness. Without knowing yet to what part of the world this vision seemed to call her, she became filled with a desire to aid by her prayers and other good works the missionaries laboring in pagan lands. But this did not divert her from her duties as mistress of novices. Her instructions to the young candidates were full of unction, and based especially on the words of Holy Writ. She explained fully and clearly to them the Psalms of David, which form so large a part of their office, and the Canticle of Canticles, in which the great masters of spiritual life have seen such mysteries of the union between the elect souls of predilection and our Lord. She also composed for their use a catechism, which the judicious Father Charlevoix, the historian of New France, regarded as perhaps the best then extant in French. “We may at least aver,” he adds, “that there is none in which the truths are explained with greater order, precision, and conciseness. The selection and application of the passages of Scripture show that Mother Mary of the Incarnation was one of those who in her age knew the Holy Scriptures most thoroughly. All breathes a wonderful simplicity which avoids that dangerous curiosity, the ordinary cause of pride, levity of mind, and insensibility of heart.”[130] The novices formed by her showed how solidly she had grounded them in spiritual life, and how fully her great experiences and trials had enabled her to guide them through all the dangers of that period where unwise and rash directors make shipwreck of so many vocations or hurry the unstable and doubtful into professions for which they have no grace of state. The novices of Mother Mary of the Incarnation can be traced among the superiors and important officers of many of the greatest Ursuline convents of France.
The interior sense of a vocation to the foreign missions grew steadily within her till her very body wasted under the longing and yearning to know the will of God. Her prayer was incessant. At last a divine light suffused her soul, and at the same time these words were spoken to her: “Ask me through the Heart of Jesus, my most amiable Son; it is through it that I shall grant thy desire.” From that moment, she declares, she felt so intimately united to the Heart of Jesus that she spoke and breathed only through it.
Among the points she often inculcated on the novices was a constant devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, of which she was one of the early propagators, although God did not make her the instrument of 616its general diffusion. She would say to her novices: “The Eternal Father has made known to a person that he is ever disposed to grant what is asked of him through the Heart of his Son.”
One day she explained to her director, the Jesuit Father Dinet, her interest in the foreign missions and her mysterious dream. He remarked that it seemed very possible, and that Canada was probably the country designated in the vision. She had never heard of the colony begun there by France some twenty-five years before, and knew absolutely nothing about it; but some days afterwards, while in choir, she had an ecstasy and the vision was repeated, but she heard distinctly: “It is Canada that I show thee; and thou must go thither to found a house in honor of Jesus and Mary.” God’s designs were becoming clearer; and when a few days later she received from the Jesuit Father Poncet—now known for his labors and sufferings in Canada and New York, but then a perfect stranger to her—one of those Jesuit Relations which our bibliophiles so eagerly seek, and a pilgrim’s staff from Loretto, she felt that the land for her future labors and prayers was beyond the Atlantic. Father Poncet sent with the pilgrim’s staff these words: “I send you this staff to invite you to go and serve God in New France.”
In her heart she responded fully; but how was she, a cloistered nun, to begin a convent in a distant colony of a few log huts, a colony with no female population, where everything was poor, scanty, struggling, and laborious? How was she to become the pioneer nun among the backwoodsmen who had begun to clear the Canadian forest? Nothing could seem to most minds more preposterous in a nun in a quiet convent in a quiet provincial town in France. Yet Providence was guiding her surely to her work. A holy young widow, Mme. de la Peltrie, who had reluctantly entered the marriage state when her heart was in the cloister, had responded to a call in a Jesuit Relation of Canada, where Father Le Jeune exclaimed: “Alas! cannot some good and virtuous lady be found willing to come to this land to gather up the blood of Jesus Christ by instructing the little Indian girls?” She resolved to devote herself, and, when stricken down by illness and given up by physicians, she made a vow to St. Joseph, promising to consecrate under his patronage her fortune and her life to the service of the Indian girls. A recovery from the very brink of the grave, that seemed a miracle, confirmed her. Baffling all the objections of her family, she sought some community of religious to begin the work in which she desired to take an active part. The Jesuit missionaries from the shores of Lake Huron were writing to Mother Mary of the Incarnation; the Jesuits in France had resolved to attempt an Ursuline convent in New France. Mme. de la Peltrie and Father Poncet wrote to Mother Mary of the Incarnation to undertake the great work. The divine call so mysteriously given was at last accomplished. Her letter to the holy widow shows the fulness of her heart.
“Ah! my dear lady,” she writes, “beloved spouse of my divine Master, in finding you I have found her whom I love in truth, since there is no greater or truer love than to give one’s self and all one has for the person beloved. And since it has pleased His mercy to give me the same sentiments, it seems that 617my heart is in yours, and that both together are but one in that of Jesus, amid those vast and infinite spaces where we embrace the little Indian girls, teaching them how to love Him who is infinitely amiable. Do you really mean, madame, to do me and those of my companions whom God well chose this favor, to take us with you and connect us with your noble design? For five years now have I been awaiting the opportunity to obey the urgent summons which the Holy Ghost has made me; and, not to speak untruly, I believe that you are the one whom his divine Majesty wishes to employ to enable me to enjoy this blessing.”
This was in November, 1638. So rapidly did all progress that early in spring two pious companies gathered at Dieppe to found amid the unbroken wilderness of Canada the first convents of religious women—the first, indeed, between the Mexican frontier towns and the icy ocean.
On a vessel devoted to St. Joseph, already designated to Mother Mary as the patron of Northern America, embarked May 4, 1639, Mme. de la Peltrie and her attendant, Mother Mary of the Incarnation, and Mother St. Joseph, the only Ursuline of Tours who was permitted to join her, though all desired to do so; with Mother Cecilia of the Holy Cross from the Ursuline convent at Dieppe, three Hospital Nuns of the order of St. Augustine, Father Vimont, Superior-General of the Jesuit Missions in Canada, with two missionaries for that field, Father Chaumonot and Father Poncet.
The voyage was menaced at first by pirates and cruisers; was long and stormy, and the vessel escaped as by a miracle being crushed by a mountain-like iceberg. Yet, amid storm and blast, the vessel was a monastery and chapel; Mass was said, and the nuns, in two choirs, chanted the office of the day. On the 15th of July they reached Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, and the passengers in a smaller vessel then ran up the river to Quebec.
At daybreak on the 1st of August the whole population of the little settlement was gathered on the height, their eyes fixed on Ile Orleans. At last boats were seen putting out. The Chevalier de Montmagny, Knight of Malta, Governor of Canada, marched to the water-side with his garrison, followed by all the settlers, and the cannons of the fort saluted the sisters as their barks touched the strand.
Mother Mary of the Incarnation had reached the field of her labors, designated so long by heaven. It was a land endeared to her by the will of God. When she stepped ashore she and her companions prostrated themselves and kissed with respect the land so long desired. They were then escorted to the Church of Our Lady of Recouvrance, where a Te Deum was chanted and Mass offered up. All communicated, and Mother Mary remained long before the altar in a holy ecstasy.
The work of building up her convent began. After visiting the Indian mission at Sillery the Ursulines took up their temporary residence in a little house in the lower town. One of the two rooms was choir, dormitory, and refectory; the other a school, where their first pupils were six Indian and some French girls born in the colony. A little chapel was erected beside this rude convent, and here this little community spent three years amid trials, hardships, and suffering, awaiting the completion of the new structure. Quebec was 618but a hamlet of two hundred and fifty souls, and, though Mme. de la Peltrie generously devoted her fortune, the work made but slow progress. In the selection of the site Mother Mary showed not only a superior judgment and prudence but a holy submission of her will. When the question of the site was raised their director, Mme. de la Peltrie, and the sisters fixed upon a spot. Mother Mary alone recommended a different one, and gave her reasons. Her opinion was rejected almost without examination, and the building was begun at the proposed place; but the difficulties and disadvantages were soon seen. The work was stopped, and the site suggested by the servant of God was adopted as really the only practicable one.
When the Ursulines were installed in this temporary convent Mother Mary of the Incarnation was at once elected their superior. The instruction of the Indian girls being one of the principal objects of the foundation, Mother Mary commenced the study of the Algonquin language, spoken by all the tribes on the St. Lawrence. It was no easy task, but she acquired it with an ease that astonished all.
The discomforts of these pioneer nuns were not yet completed. Their little convent was crowded to its fullest extent with Indian girls, whom they washed and clothed, and were endeavoring to form to European life, when the good nuns were dismayed to find the smallpox make its appearance in the Indian villages. Their school became an hospital, and the Ursulines stripped themselves of all their linen for the use of the sick.
The arrival of two sisters from the Ursuline convent at Paris gave the holy superior great joy, but the members of the little community were now from three different houses, each with special rules of its own, and great diversity of opinion prevailed as to the rule to be adopted. The patience, piety, and caution displayed by Mother Mary were those of a saint; and her really great mind and thorough knowledge of nature and grace enabled her to blend all into one happy community actuated by the same spiritual instinct.
But the very existence of the house was menaced. The expenses, especially in the great multitude of articles that it was necessary to import constantly from France, and the aid given to the Indians in health and sickness, exceeded all their income, and Mme. de la Peltrie withdrew for a time to Montreal, depriving them of her usual and stipulated contribution. Their agent in France assured them that the establishment must be abandoned, that there was no way left except to return to France. But Mother Mary was undisturbed. Her holy soul never lost its calm, its union with God. She wrote incessantly, and her appeals to hundreds of charitable souls in France brought alms that saved the convent.
Mme. de la Peltrie returned to the community she had helped to found, and on the 21st of November, 1642, the Ursulines took possession of their new monastery. It was not the only consolation of the venerable superior. Letters from France announced that her son, after securing a favorable position at court, had abandoned the world and entered the novitiate of the learned order of St. Benedict, where in time he became an illustrious member.
The new building was spacious, but in their poverty they still had 619much to suffer, especially in the long Canadian winters. Then came the overthrow of the Hurons in Upper Canada, the massacre of many holy missionaries personally known to Mother Mary, who beheld at her doors a crowd of fugitive Hurons. Their language she learned, to be able to labor for their good, if God spared the colony; for the Iroquois, intoxicated with success, now ravaged the valley of the St. Lawrence, and no one was safe even at Quebec.
While all were paralyzed by fear, and the colony in its sorest distress, fire broke out in the convent one December night toward the close of the year 1650, and before dawn naught remained but the walls. Mother Mary was the last to leave the burning structure. The whole community and their pupils were left in the snow, in their night-dresses, nothing having been saved of their clothing or stores. The Hospital Nuns received them with open arms and the whole town endeavored to meet their wants.
All was gone. There seemed no course but to return to France. Such was not, however, the decision of Mother Mary and her heroic companions. “The resolution was that, without further delay, we should rebuild on the same foundation, inasmuch as our courage had not been crushed by the weight of this disaster, and as our vocations were as strong or stronger than before, and the girls of French and of Indian origin needed our services.”
The work was begun at once, Mother Mary and the other sisters helping to clear away the ruins. A little house which Mme. de la Peltrie had erected became their temporary convent, while by loans they paid the workmen to continue the work on the new building. The work cost thirty thousand livres, and the furnishing and supplies required still more. Yet all came so wonderfully that Mother Mary of the Incarnation declared it to be a miracle and ascribed it to the special protection of the Blessed Virgin.
Soon after an Iroquois army spread terror through Canada, till a heroic band sacrificed themselves in an attack on the ferocious enemy, and by a glorious death so crippled them that the savages retired. During the panic caused by these cruel invaders the Ursulines were forced to leave their convent, which became a fortified house. Then came an earthquake which convulsed the whole country, attended by meteors that filled all with terror and alarm. Amid all these dangers Mother Mary of the Incarnation preserved unruffled her calm and serenity of soul.
One of the founders of the colony, she lived to see it develop and strengthen; children born on the soil had grown up under her guidance and become mothers of families, handing down to coming generations the solid Christian instruction imparted to them by Mother Mary of the Incarnation and her sisters in religion. Canada had grown, too, from a mere mission to an organized church with a holy bishop at its head, a seminary for the training of candidates for the priesthood, a Jesuit college, and inferior schools. Her work was well-nigh accomplished. In 1664 she felt the first symptoms of the disease which was to terminate the long death of her earthly existence and unite her for ever to her heavenly Spouse. Extenuated by austerities, labor, and vigils, she was 620attacked by a continued fever, accompanied by effusion of bile and violent pains which gave her no rest by night or day. Her constitution, naturally so strong and enduring, could no longer resist the inroads of the malady. She was soon at the point of death, and received the last sacraments amid the sighs and tears of her spiritual children. All Quebec was in tears, for there was scarcely a family in which she was not looked up to as a guide and mother. The continual prayers seemed to move Heaven to spare her to them for a time. But she survived only to remain on the cross in a state of continual suffering. Masses, novenas, prayers were offered for her complete recovery; but she herself offered none. Several persons, among others Bishop Laval, who visited her regularly, implored her to solicit her cure from God; but she replied that she felt utterly unable to frame such a prayer. “Of what use can an infirm old woman of sixty be? Oh! do not prolong my exile; let me go to my God.”
She did not even beg for a cessation of her pain or her state of suffering. The office of superior had been for the third time conferred upon her; from this she now asked to be relieved, as she was unable to discharge the duties incumbent on it. But when her director declined to permit this she submitted without a murmur and continued to bear the burden.
“My present condition,” she wrote to her son, “is most dear to me, because the cross is the pleasure and the delight of Jesus. I can never recover from my long malady, which has very painful and torturing consequences. But nature grows tame to suffering and becomes familiar with pain. I even feel attached to it; and I fear that my tepidity will oblige the divine goodness to deprive me of it, or at least to moderate it. Everything I take is like wormwood, and constantly brings to my mind the gall in the Passion of our Lord. This makes me love this state.”
Yet in a state which would have kept most persons prostrate on a bed she labored as unremittingly as ever. She rose the first and retired the last, attended all the duties of the community, conducted an extensive correspondence, and, when too weak to do other work, employed her time in painting or embroidery. Her existence during the eight years she spent in this state was as great a mystery as her whole mystical life had been.
Her missionary zeal never flagged, and the great consolation of these years was to instruct in the Algonquin and Huron languages the younger members of the community, to enable them to continue after her death the instructions which she had been in the habit of giving. It would seem as if her wish had been gratified, for two centuries after her death Huron girls were among the pupils in the convent she founded, playing beneath the very tree where she and Mme. de la Peltrie had washed, dressed, and instructed the Indian children.
Her works compiled for the use of the sisters, had they escaped the conflagrations of the monastery, would give her a high rank among the authors in Indian languages, for they comprised two extended Algonquin dictionaries, an Iroquois catechism, and a huge volume of Bible stories in Algonquin.
She could now walk only when supported. Mother Mary of St. Joseph went to receive her reward. Mme. de la Peltrie was also taken from her.
On the night of the 15th of January, 1672, an oppression of the chest 621seized Mother Mary of the Incarnation, attended with incessant vomiting and fever. The end had come, but amid the most exquisite suffering not a sigh, not a complaint, scarcely the quivering of a muscle, betrayed what she was undergoing. She seemed absorbed in an ecstasy. She received the last sacraments with unspeakable joy, and asked pardon of her director, her superior, and the community for all the trouble she had given them. She spoke to the younger sisters in the most touching and eloquent terms to excite them to esteem their vocation and to encourage them to care for the Indian children.
But the community could not part with its founder. They offered up earnest prayers in her behalf, and her director, Father Lalemant, commanded her to join her prayers with them. Though anxious to be united to God, she obeyed. An immediate improvement ensued. She rallied so as to join the community in the devotions of Holy Week.
On the evening of Good Friday the pain of two tumors that had formed became intense. An operation was performed, but she sank gradually, and on the 30th of April entered into her agony. It was long; but the strength of purpose evinced in life enabled her even then to raise the crucifix repeatedly to her lips when speech and hearing were gone. At six o’clock in the afternoon, after looking around on her sisters, as if to take a last farewell, she gave two sighs and expired.
The news of her death spread rapidly. She had been regarded as a saint, and all flocked to the convent. Every pious person in Quebec desired some relic; so that everything belonging to her was carried away, and the Ursulines had great difficulty in retaining her large rosary, which has been preserved to this day as their chief relic. Her funeral service was attended by all the dignitaries in church and state, and a sermon by Father Jerome Lalemant, her chief director during her long mission in Canada, depicted her labors and her sublime virtues.
Her body was interred in the chapel vault, and amid all the vicissitudes of war, conflagration, and change of nationality the Ursulines have continued guardians of the precious remains of their foundress.
She had in life impressed all as one elevated above the common order, one who received extraordinary graces from God, and who corresponded with them. The missionaries, men versed in the direction of souls and the paths by which divine grace leads them, all entertained the highest esteem for her virtues. Her fellow-Ursulines living with her, watching her minutely from day to day and from year to year, could aver that they had never seen her commit a fault against meekness, patience, humility, charity, modesty, poverty, or obedience, and that she never let an occasion pass unheeded of practising those virtues.
When, therefore, all could piously believe that she was reigning with Christ, the confidence of the afflicted led them to seek her intercession, and the consolation derived has kept alive devotion to her to this time; while her letters, published by her son, revealed to the masters of spiritual life the wonderful interior and mystic life led by this nun in a rude convent amid the handful of log-houses 622which constituted the capital of New France.
Father Charlevoix alludes to the opinion of “two learned prelates who have not always been of the same opinion [evidently Bossuet and Fénelon], but who, nevertheless, agree in regarding her as one of the brightest lights of her age.” Bossuet in one of his arguments says:
“Mother Mary of the Incarnation, Ursuline, who is called the Teresa of our days and of the New World, in a lively impression of the inexorable justice of God, condemned herself to an eternity of pain and offered herself for it, in order that God’s justice might be satisfied, provided only, she said, ‘that I be not deprived of the love of God and of God himself.’”
Mr. Emery, superior of St. Sulpice at Paris, wrote:
“The Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation is a saint whom I revere most sincerely, and whom I place in my esteem beside St. Teresa. In my last retreat her life, her letters, and her meditations alone constituted my reading and the subject of my mental prayer.”
Father Charlevoix wrote her life in gratitude for favors obtained by her intercession.
“Indebted,” says he, “as I have reason to believe, to the merits of the foundress of the Ursulines in Canada that I did not end my days in a foreign land in the flower of my life, it seemed to me that I could not do less than extend her knowledge among men. Not that she was hitherto unknown. The eulogium pronounced upon her by the greatest men, and her own works, in which we admire an exquisite taste, sound reason, a sublime genius, and that divine unction which so well distinguishes the writings of the saints, have already placed her in the rank of the most illustrious women.”
Father Galifet, in one of his spiritual works, says:
“Her life was full of marvels by the heroic virtues she practised, by the supernatural gifts with which she was endowed, by the choicest favors of her divine Spouse, by unspeakable communications of the Divinity, by the wisdom she derived from the Scriptures and from the mysteries of faith, and finally by the experience she had of all conditions of interior life, which rendered her a thorough mistress in this Divine knowledge.... This wonderful servant of God had an extraordinary devotion for the Sacred Heart of Jesus at a time when this devotion was yet unknown. She could have learned nothing about it from men. It was from God himself that she learned this in a heavenly revelation.”
Even Protestant writers, to whom all Catholic spiritual life is something unreal and deserving only of scorn and contempt, blasphemantes quæ ignorant, recognize in Mother Mary of the Incarnation a woman of a rare and singular combination of qualities, and never ascribe to her a fault. “She had uncommon talents and strong religious sensibilities,” says Parkman. “Strange as it may seem, this woman, whose habitual state was one of mystical abstraction, was gifted to a rare degree with the faculties most useful in the practical affairs of life.” “Her talent for business was not the less displayed.” “Now and henceforward one figure stands nobly conspicuous in this devoted sisterhood. Marie de l’Incarnation, ... engaged in the duties of Christian charity and the responsibilities of an arduous post, displays an ability, a fortitude, and an earnestness which command respect and admiration.” “Marie de l’Incarnation in her saddest moments neither failed in judgment nor slackened in effort. She carried on a vast correspondence, embracing every one in France who could aid her infant community with money or influence; she harmonized and regulated it with excellent skill; and in 623the midst of relentless austerities, she was loved as a mother by her pupils and dependants. Catholic writers extol her as a saint. Protestants may see in her a Christian heroine, admirable with all her follies and faults.”
The follies and faults consisted in her being a Catholic, a nun, and in rising to the higher states of mystical life.
And how are we to regard this inner life of this remarkable woman? Was this clear and gifted mind, this pure soul, this person devoting a long life to incessant occupation and free from all selfish taint, one to be readily self-deceived? Was anything that passed in her soul, as described by her, without its parallel in the history of the church? By no means. It is, indeed, the state to which few comparatively are called by God, and to which all who are called do not rise. But it is one recognized by the church, which is the pillar and ground of truth, and from the case of St. Paul there have been ever in the church remarkable examples of great souls combining the exterior activity with the highest contemplation. Wise and spiritual directors are seldom wanting as guides, and the highest authority in the church is frequently called upon to decide questions that arise.
“Moreover,” says Father Charlevoix, in reference to this very case, “we have general rules which, being founded on good sense, are within the reach of all; and they are given to us by the Doctors of the church and by all the masters of interior life, as sure means to guarantee us against seduction. I will not mention all, as the detail would lead me too far, and the rules can readily be found. I shall speak of only one of the most important, which includes the principles of all the others. According to this rule, we may believe that what passes in the soul is a favor of heaven, if in the conduct of the person who receives it, in the matter in question, in the manner in which it occurs, and in the effects which it produces, there is nothing that does not lead to God, nothing savoring ever so little of one’s own mind, or which can come from a suggestion of the devil. For if in a vision, revelation, or any similar impression nothing can be discovered that is not conformable to pure doctrine and sanctity of life, if there is no ground for prudently fearing surprise or deceit, on what basis can we pronounce the whole to be frivolous? It may be that after all it is only an effect of the imagination, but, at least, nothing is risked if the soul in which it occurs remains in distrust of self and in humility.
“But if it is only an operation of the enemy of salvation to seduce and lead into sin, a little application and experience will soon reveal the venom hidden under the appearance of piety....
“When, then, we are told of a person to whom it is said that God communicates himself in an extraordinary manner, if this person is recognized by all acquainted with him to have a sound and upright reason, a firm mind, imagination under control, solid virtue based on Christian simplicity, humility, and distrust of self; if his conduct never belies itself; if he perseveres to the end in the exact discharge of his duties; if on all occasions he does works worthy of that sublime state in which he is represented to be—there is, I admit, no indispensable obligation of giving credit to what is said in regard to him; but there is, it seems to me, a reasonable prejudice in favor of this person, and we can scarcely avoid a want of the respect due to God’s gifts in a soul which has all the appearances of being so singularly adorned. I may even go further, and if Lactantius has proved the truth of the Christian religion by showing that it is in all points conformable to reason and nothing contradicts it, would I not have some right to maintain that we can recognize God’s operation in a soul when what passes there is in perfect accord with good sense, faith, reason, and itself?”
When two centuries had elapsed after the holy death of Mother Mary of the Incarnation, and her memory was still fresh in the minds of the Canadian people and of the 624few remaining bands of Indians, and temporal and spiritual graces were constantly ascribed to her intercession, a process in due form was drawn up by the authority of the Archbishop of Quebec in regard to the miracles attributed to the servant of God. This was duly authenticated, and sealed and despatched to Rome in 1868 by a clergyman selected for this duty. These documents were presented to the secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, and, according to a wise regulation, must lie there untouched for ten years, during which time nothing is to be done in regard to the desired beatification.
The Ursulines solicited the beatification of the illustrious member of their order; the remnant of the once powerful Huron nation attested the traditional reverence for her who had welcomed them when wretched fugitives from Iroquois cruelty, and had lavished her kindness on the hapless women and children, teaching them to suffer as Christians and training them to die worthy of the name.
The hierarchy of Canada, assembled in Provincial Council in that year, gave to the Holy See their testimony in regard to the fame of the servant of God.
“Nearly two centuries have elapsed,” say these venerable prelates, “since the death in the Lord of Mary Guyart, called in religion ‘Mary of the Incarnation,’ first superior and foundress of the Ursuline convent erected in this city of Quebec. How illustrious she was both in the theological virtues and in the observance of the religious life is attested by history and by constant tradition. The tree is still shown under which she sat and taught the Indian girls the rudiments of the faith; the wandering tribes still retain a tradition of the benign mother who first introduced into this land, then seated in darkness and in the shadow of death, such an illustrious example of monastic life in her sex.
“As years have gone by, the fame of her sanctity and her miracles has not decreased, but is rather increased from day to day, especially as many aver openly every day that they have obtained great temporal and spiritual benefits through her invocation....
“Assembled in provincial council, turning to your paternity with the utmost confidence, we cannot refrain from expressing our most ardent desire, as well as that of our diocesans, and of all the Ursulines scattered throughout the whole Catholic world, of soon publicly and solemnly invoking her whose assistance we now often implore privately but efficaciously.”
Such was the testimony of the Archbishop of Quebec and the bishops of Montreal, Ottawa, Hamilton, St. Boniface, Kingston, Toronto, St. Hyacinth, Three Rivers, St. Germain, and Sandwich, given in the most solemn form.
The ten years of patient waiting had almost ended in 1877, and further steps could be taken. The documents were by a special permission opened, the life of the servant of God and her writings were proposed. It was then for the Holy See to decide whether they presented such a case that the cause of her beatification could be introduced, and the long law-suit, so to say, be commenced in which her life, writings, and miracles should be subjected to the severest scrutiny. The Sacred Congregation of Rites reported favorably, and one of the latest acts of the great Sovereign Pontiff, Pius IX., was:
“Our most Holy Father, Pope Pius IX., having deigned to permit on the 9th of September of last year that the question of the signature of the commission charged with introducing the cause of the servant of God, Sister Mary of the Incarnation, be brought up in the Sacred 625Congregation of Rites, in ordinary session, and without the participation and the vote of the consultors, although it is not ten years since the day of the presentation of the process of the ordinary in the Acts of the Congregation of Rites, and that the writings of the said servant of God have not been inquired into or examined;
“The Most Eminent and Most Reverend Cardinal Aloysius Bilio, Prefect of the said congregation, in the name and in the absence of the Most Eminent Cardinal Bartolini, reporter of the cause, at the instance of the Rev. Benjamin Paquet, Private Camerlengo to his Holiness, and Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the Catholic University of Quebec, designated as postulator in this cause, in view of the postulatory letters of a great number of cardinals of the holy Roman Church, of venerable prelates and persons illustrious by their ecclesiastical and civil dignity, to-day proposed at the session of the Sacred Rites, held at the Vatican, the discussion of the following question: ‘Should the commission of introduction of the cause, in the case and for the object in question, be signed?’
“The same Sacred Congregation, having maturely examined all things, having heard the address and report of Father Lorenzo Salvati, promoter of the faith, has decided to answer affirmatively, that is, that the commission should be signed, if such was the will of the Holy Father.—September 15, 1877.
“The undersigned secretary having then made a true report of all the foregoing to our Holy Father, Pope Pius IX., His Holiness ratified and confirmed the decision of the Sacred Congregation, and signed with his own hand the commission of introduction of the cause of the venerable servant of God, the said Mary of the Incarnation.—September 20, 1877.
“A., Bishop of Sabina,
Cardinal Bilio, Prefect.
”Placidus Ralli, Secretary.”
Years will be spent in the investigation; and meanwhile the hearts of the devout, not only in Canada but throughout this country, will turn with confidence to this wonderful and holy woman, this early propagator in the western world of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, soaring to the highest mystical contemplation, yet immersed in constant, active labor—a fitting patroness indeed for so many of us who find the best and holiest impulses of our lives choked and stifled by the thorns and brambles of earthly cares and duties. Her intercession will be as powerful as it has been, and it may be in God’s providence that confidence will be rewarded by some striking mark of favor to attest the sanctity of his servant.
The body of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation, at the time of the removal of the remains of the deceased members of the community to the new choir in 1724, was placed in a leaden coffin with those of Mme. de la Peltrie and Mother St. Joseph. They were again taken up in 1799 and placed under the communion screen. On the 30th of April, 1833, the ever-constant devotion to Mother Mary of the Incarnation led to another verification of her relics. The leaden coffin was found full of clear, limpid water, which was devoutly preserved as a relic of the holy foundress, and has been, under God, the instrument of many cures which are regarded as miraculous.
The first of these occurred, we may say, on the spot. One of the scholars, Miss Margaret Mary Gowan, had for a year been deprived of the use of an arm. Full of confidence in the Venerable Mother Mary, she began a novena, applying the water that had touched her venerated relics. A total cure followed. This remarkable restoration was soon made known, and far and wide the afflicted turned as of old to this holy servant of 626God for temporal and spiritual aid.
Cures like that of Father Charlevoix had taken place from time to time, but the authentications had been neglected or perished in the repeated destructions of the convent by fire. The miracles of recent date are well attested. Miss Gowan became a Sister of Charity, and is, we believe, still alive to give her testimony of the cure wrought in 1833.
The devotion of the Venerable Mother Mary is generally a novena, using especially her prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus[131] and the application of the water.
Among the prodigies ascribed to this servant of God are the cure of Mary Coté, a girl of twelve living at Black River. She had been blind for five years after an attack of small-pox. No pupil, iris, or cornea could be distinguished in either eye, and the pain, especially in winter, was intense. Dr. Morin examined her and declared it an incurable case of leucoma. By the advice of Miss Bilodeau, the teacher at the place, to whom the child was brought to prepare for her First Communion, she began a novena to Mother Mary of the Incarnation, applying a drop of the water. On the fourth day, during Mass, the child felt all pain leave her eyes, and, raising them for the first time, saw the altar and a large statue of the Blessed Virgin upon it. On examining the eyes they were found clear and limpid. A few reddish stains remained for some days in the left eye, but gradually disappeared. The cure was complete and durable, and was attested by the physician, the teacher, and others who were eye-witnesses. This remarkable cure occurred June 8, 1867.
The cure of James McCormac, a boy five years old, in 1868, is also attested in a most satisfactory manner. He suffered from terrible internal pain, especially in the bowels, and from a contraction of the leg, and hip disease. No sooner had a novena been begun and the water applied than the pain ceased and the child was able to get upon his feet and walk, though uncertainly, like a young infant not yet accustomed to step. At the end of the novena he walked perfectly, and from that time enjoyed complete health. Damian Gavard was similarly cured at St. Alban in 1876.
The devotion to the Venerable member of their order extended to the Ursuline convents in Europe, and cases are reported from Aubresles, Quimperlé, Carhaix, Blois, Mons, in France and Belgium, as though Providence was preparing near the Eternal City testimony of the sanctity of the Canadian nun.
Early one June morning, not many years ago, a young couple might have been seen strolling along by the side of a babbling brook a short distance from the village of North Conway, New Hampshire.
Harry Fletcher, although a late riser when at home, had determined to be up betimes this morning and catch a mess of trout for breakfast. Not for his own breakfast, however, but for that of Miss Kitty Gibbon, who, like himself, had come to pass a few weeks at the Kearsarge House.
“’Twill please her,” thought Harry, “to hear how I left my comfortable couch for her sake, at an hour when only farmers are stirring.”
But Miss Gibbon, who had seen him the evening before making ready his fishing-tackle, had said to herself: “I’ll be up early, too, and go with him.” And she kept her word; nay, she was down before her admirer. And when the latter discovered Kitty seated on the piazza reading Middlemarch, he of course invited her to accompany him; which invitation Kitty accepted, but not until he had asked her a second time; and then she closed the book slowly, lingering a moment over the last line and exclaiming: “What an interesting tale this is!” So that Harry was half tempted to apologize for thus interrupting her reading.
“The truth is, Miss Gibbon,” he said, as they wended their way toward the stream—“the truth is, I know that you like fresh trout. For no other human being would I have risen at such an unearthly hour.”
“Indeed!” returned Kitty with an air of perfect indifference. Yet, accustomed as she was to receiving attention and to hear flattering words, she could not prevent a tiny rose from blooming on her pallid cheek when Harry went on to assure her upon his honor that this was the truth.
In our opinion Miss Gibbon is an attractive young lady. But most people might not agree with us; and not a few of her rivals declare it is only her money that makes her so pleasing to the gentlemen. There is, indeed, a slight cast in one of her eyes, and her forehead is somewhat too broad for a woman’s. But then she is gifted with a melodious voice (a rare gift among American women) and has exquisite teeth, which she knows how to display to the best advantage by a merry laugh practised before the mirror. Her hair, too, wonderful to relate, is all her own, and, despite the care which she bestows on her toilet, one glossy ringlet always manages to escape from its thraldom and fly hither and thither. But the best feature Kitty possesses—at least so think we—is her nose. It is a bold Roman nose, which proclaims her to be a girl of character; and we are convinced that, however spoilt she may be by fortune, there is a solid groundwork of worth in Kitty which would reveal itself if the occasion demanded it.
Her mother, who is a rich widow, has been living five or six years abroad, most of the time in Paris, 628and Mrs. Gibbon only came home this summer because she thought that a trip across the ocean would be good for her daughter’s health.
Harry Fletcher, Kitty’s companion this June morning, is the son of a prominent New York banker; and as it seems to be one of the laws of nature that wealth should attract wealth, we cannot wonder if he and Miss Gibbon have very soon become known to each other.
“He will be as good a catch for you, child, as you will be for him,” spoke the watchful mother. “And if you play your cards right we may be back in Paris before October, bringing Mr. Fletcher along with us; and, considering his prospects, he will do almost as well as a count.”
It would be untrue, however, to say that there was no real love between this youthful pair. Money may, indeed, have first drawn them together; but now, after only a fortnight’s acquaintance, we doubt, if one of them were suddenly to be stricken with poverty, whether poverty would separate them.
“How charming this walk is!” exclaimed Harry, as he took Kitty’s hand to help her over a fallen tree.
“In Paris such a delightful walk would not be possible,” answered Kitty.
“Do you really enjoy it?” said Harry. “It must seem so different from the Champs Elysées and the Bois de Boulogne.”
His companion was silent a moment, and ’twas not until he repeated that the pine woods and stony fields of New Hampshire must appear very rugged and unpleasant to her that she said:
“Well, but here, sir, I do for once in my life feel that I am free. Why, at the fashionable pensionnat where mother put me I was not allowed to walk out alone even with my cousin Arthur.”
“Oh! you can’t imagine how I long to see Paris,” continued Harry.
“Well, despite what I have just said,” answered Kitty, “it is a most fascinating city—the queen of cities; and there is a large colony of Americans there, who have made up their minds to die in Paris, and who look upon their countrymen here as semi-barbarians.”
In a few minutes they reached the brook and Harry cast in his fly. But no fish rose; and presently he gave another throw. This time it was not skilfully done, or rather it was most skilfully done, for the fly, as it went circling round his head, got caught in Kitty’s truant curl, who laughed and said: “You have hooked a big trout now, Mr. Fletcher.”
“Well, I came purposely to catch a mess for you,” returned Harry. “But may I crave leave to keep this one dear fish all for myself?”
“What do you mean?” laughed Kitty, as he tried to disentangle the fly.
“I mean—” here his fingers stopped working and his voice trembled. “I mean—” Kitty, who understood him well enough, in another moment gave the happy response, and Harry was so overjoyed that he wound up his line and did not fish any more.
But they did not return immediately to the village; they felt drawn nearer to each other in the lonely woods, with only the trees and the brook to watch them; and so on and on they wandered, until by and by they emerged from the forest and saw before them an old farmhouse with moss-covered roof, on which the morning sun was 629shining, and round about the homestead the stream made well-nigh a circle—a bright, silvery circle, murmuring sweet music to those who dwelt there. The lovers paused a moment and gazed upon the scene without speaking. Then presently Kitty said: “I could live in such a spot all my life.”
“So could I,” said Harry, turning his sparkling eyes upon her. “With you I could live anywhere.”
“Let us draw nearer,” continued Kitty, “and speak to the young woman who is feeding the turkeys by the door; and quite a pretty girl she is,” Kitty added in an undertone, as Mabel Willey turned towards them.
“Yes, if one admires a dark complexion,” said Harry.
“And buried among these hills!” continued Kitty compassionately. “But I forgot what I said a moment ago; if I could be happy here with you, dear Harry, why, she may have a lover too, and not pine one bit for city life.”
The genial way in which Mabel returned their greeting quite won Kitty’s heart, while Harry inwardly confessed that, although he did not like brunettes, she was the handsomest one he had ever seen. And when presently he glanced down at her bare feet she did not blush, but quietly remarked:
“I have been gathering lilies, sir, at the pond, and I had to wade in after them.”
But Harry thought no excuse was needed; for Mabel’s foot was as perfectly shaped as her hand—a sculptor might have chosen it for a model.
“What a sweet home you have!” observed Kitty. “And the swallows love it, too; how many there are skimming over the grass!”
“’Tis not my home,” returned Mabel. “I am here only on a visit to my grandfather.”
“Indeed! Well, may I ask where your home is?” continued Kitty.
“In Illinois. My parents settled there twenty-three years ago, when they were first married, and I was born there, and I like it much better than New Hampshire.”
“Do you? And what part of Illinois are you from?”
“Lee County; and we live on the bank of a beautiful river called Rock River, which is full of black bass and pickerel, and in autumn ’tis covered with mallard and teal. Oh! I love Rock River.”
“Well, if your home is a more delightful spot than this it must be exquisite indeed.”
“I never saw a finer beech-tree than that one yonder,” put in Harry. Then turning to his betrothed and dropping his voice, “Let us go cut our names upon it, Kitty, to preserve the memory of this happy day.”
“Oh! do,” answered Kitty aloud. Then, taking Mabel’s hand, she added: “You must know, my dear, that he and I are just engaged. I spoke the sweet yes to him as we were strolling up the brook—this never-to-be-forgotten brook.”
“Engaged—going to be married,” said Mabel in a musing tone and fixing her dark eyes upon Harry, who wondered what she was thinking of while she watched him so wistfully. Then presently Mabel went on:
“Yes, do cut your names on the tree, for you must never forget this day—never; and your names will be visible upon it many years to come.”
All three now bent their steps to the beech, where Harry deftly 630carved his name and the name of his betrothed upon the bark.
“Why, how strange!” cried Mabel when he had finished. Then, taking Kitty by the sleeve, she drew her to the other side of the tree, where, lo! in letters almost obliterated by Time, was written Harry Fletcher—Mabel Willey!
“Then you have a lover, too, of the same name as mine,” observed Kitty.
“I a lover! I have none,” returned Mabel. “Besides, do you not perceive that these names have been here a long time, for the bark has nearly grown over them?”
“Well, who were these lovers, then?—for such no doubt they were,” said Kitty.
“I do not know; I only discovered the names yesterday. I’ll ask grandpa as soon as he comes back from the mill.”
“Do,” said Harry, “for I am curious to know.”
“And before you return to Illinois,” continued Kitty, “please come to the Kearsarge House, in order that I may see you again; for where your home is, is far, far from where ours is going to be.”
“We intend to live in Paris,” said Harry.
“In Paris?” observed Mabel. “You mean, of course, the Paris that is in France?”
“Is there any other?” said Kitty, inwardly smiling at her simplicity.
“Oh! yes. There is a Paris in Oregon and another in Texas.”
Here the talk ended by Mabel promising to visit Kitty ere many days were over.
“I should not have expected to meet such a fine-looking, well-mannered girl in a place like this,” spoke Miss Gibbon, when she and Harry were out of Mabel’s hearing.
“In America pretty girls are as plenty as blackberries,” answered Harry.
“Well, we certainly carry off the palm in Europe,” added Kitty. “But this young woman is a peasant.”
“A farmer’s daughter,” said Harry.
“Oh! we should call her a peasant in France, Harry dear. And I have some misgivings as to what mother will say when she hears that I have invited Mabel to visit me at the hotel.”
“Well, she is dark-complexioned, and I’ll swear she is an Italian baroness,” returned Harry, laughing.
“Oh! yes, do. A capital joke! Why, we know ever so many baronesses abroad. Ma has a large circle of noble acquaintances.”
“Really!”
“Yes. And I know three American girls married to counts. But there was no love between them during the courtship—not a spark—’twas all pure business from beginning to end, and I am told the young ladies are now very unhappy.”
“Well, our way of courting is the best,” said Harry.
“Judging from my own experience it undoubtedly is,” continued Kitty, looking tenderly at him. “The walks we have enjoyed together have taught me what you are, and taught you what I am; and, oh! how fortunate it is that I came back to America this year.”
“Most fortunate for me,” said Harry.
“And for me, too, dear boy. But now, to speak seriously about Mabel; I am in a quandary. What shall I do? Ma will see at a glance that she is a peasant.”
Mrs. Gibbon was highly pleased 631when her daughter told her of her engagement to Henry Fletcher, Jr.
“Console toi, ma fille,” she said. “S’il n’a pas de titre, l’argent au moins ne lui manque pas.”
But, as Kitty had feared, she was not at all pleased when she heard about Mabel Willey.
“Mais, mon Dieu! C’est une paysanne!” groaned the widow, who was wont to speak French to Kitty, and spoke it well, too—“une paysanne!” Then, sinking down in a rocking-chair, “Mon Dieu!” she sighed, “mon Dieu! quel scandale.”
Here the matter was let drop, for Mrs. Gibbon was too delighted with Kitty’s engagement to remain long out of humor.
Three days later, while the widow was seated on the piazza, fanning away the mosquitoes and wishing with all her heart that she was at Biarritz or Trouville, up rattled a farm-wagon. An old man was driving, his back pretty well bent with years, and beside him sat Mabel.
“Grandpa, I’ll not be long,” said the girl, alighting from the vehicle, and speaking loud enough to be overheard by a number of guests.
“Mon Dieu!” groaned Mrs. Gibbon, who guessed who it was.
Now, Mabel did not know Kitty’s mother, but it so happened that it was she whom the girl first addressed.
“I am come to call on Miss Gibbon. Can you tell me, madam, whether she is in?” inquired Mabel.
“Go ask one of the servants,” replied the widow, her eyes darting flashes of anger as she spoke. Then suddenly a bright thought struck her; quick a change came over her features, and, dropping her voice, she added just as Mabel was turning away, “Stop! I remember now Miss Gibbon has gone on a picnic and won’t be back till quite late.”
“Oh! too bad,” ejaculated Mabel. “I may never see her again.”
In another moment the wagon drove off and the girl was on her way to the West.
When Harry returned the following week to New York and told his father of his betrothal to Miss Gibbon, the heiress, Mr. Fletcher senior was as pleased as Kitty’s mother had been.
“But now, my son,” he said, “you must not be idle any longer; you must come down town and learn business.”
“Business!” exclaimed Harry with an air of surprise.
“Why, yes. Have I not been steadily at work in Wall Street more than twenty years? During all that time no holiday have I taken—not one, except a fortnight after your mother’s death. Then I own I did pass a short while in the country, for grief rendered brain labor out of the question. And now I am worth a million at the very least; and with such an example as I have set you would you lead a drone’s life?”
“Well, but, father, I am quite satisfied with our fortune; ’tis large enough, and I—I have promised Miss Gibbon that we should make our home abroad.”
Mr. Fletcher was so taken aback by these words that he could only knit his brow; he could not speak.
Then Harry proceeded: “And, father, I think you ought to take a holiday this season. What is the use of racking your brains for more money, since you have a million? Oh! I wish you had been with 632me at North Conway. I had such pleasant rambles among the hills, such fine trout-fishing! And in one of my walks—’twas the morning I proposed to Kitty—I found our name carved on a tree.” The youth now described the big beech and the brook and the old farm-house; for it was a never-to-be-forgotten morning, and he loved to tell all he remembered of those happy hours.
While he was speaking the look of displeasure which had clouded his father’s face when he began gradually passed away; the stern, matter-of-fact business man grew pensive; and when at length Harry came to describe Mabel—dark-eyed, barefooted, graceful Mabel Willey—the attentive listener shaded his eyes with his hand, and Harry could not imagine why his parent sighed. But the young man adroitly took advantage of his emotion to again ask if he might not go live in Paris. “I promised Miss Gibbon, father, that we would make our home there. You surely would not have me break my word?”
Mr. Fletcher merely answered: “Hush! speak no more about it. Go! go!”
Whereupon Harry, now in the blithest of moods, hurried off to get his trotting-wagon; for he had invited Kitty to take a drive in the Central Park.
At this same hour, while Harry and his betrothed were enjoying themselves together, conversing chiefly about Europe—their own country seemed to hold very little place in their thoughts—Mabel Willey was engaged in household duties with her mother.
Mabel was right when she praised her Western home: a log-house standing on a knoll which overlooked a swift-flowing river; beyond the river a broad expanse of rolling prairie, where the grouse were wont to gather in springtime, and for hours long their voices, saying, “Coo-ooo, coo-ooo, coo-ooo,” would reach Mabel’s ear; while ever and anon a black bass would spring up out of the flood, marking the spot where he fell back into the water by a ring of widening, quivering ripples. And, oh! how the girl loved these sights and sounds. But most of all did she love the deer, who would steal out of the forest of a moonlight night in autumn and make incursions into the corn-field hard by. Nothing had ever disturbed the harmony of this sweet spot. Husband and wife loved each other with true love, and God had blessed them with six children, of whom Mabel was the eldest; and when you saw Robert Willey felling a tree or following the plough you knew where his offspring had derived their health and strength from, while in the mother’s face still lingered traces of the beauty which young Mabel had inherited. But Robert did not perceive that his Mabel was changed: no, as fair in his eyes was she now as when he wooed her in the far-off days of his youth.
Above the broad fireplace in the room where the family assembled of an evening, to chat and make merry after the labors of the day were over, were these words, painted in large letters and taken from the Book of Proverbs:
“Give me neither beggary nor riches: lest perhaps being filled, I should be tempted to deny, and say: Who is the Lord? or being compelled by poverty, I should steal, and forswear the name of my God.”
What a happy hour this evening 633hour was! Sometimes Mr. Willey would tell the young ones a story; and when he began, what a scramble there was for his knees! Sometimes he would look over the columns of the Prairie Farmer, gleaning therefrom useful hints for his vocation. While he was thus occupied his wife would read aloud to the children. But she did not select anything from a silly dime novel or illustrated paper, but generally something in Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book, or one of Cooper’s tales; and let us say that the tale they all liked best was The Pioneers.
“I am glad you enjoyed your visit to grandpa,” spoke Mrs. Willey one morning, as she rested awhile at the churn.
“Oh! ever so much,” answered Mabel, who, with sleeves rolled up, was busy skimming cream. “But I forgot to tell you, mother, that a few days before I left him there came to the house, at a rather early hour, a young gentleman and lady from one of the hotels in North Conway. They had strolled up Wild-cat Run, which, you know, winds almost round grandpa’s home, and had become engaged to each other on the way. I told them it was quite romantic. The girl was stylish-looking, but didn’t appear to be strong; her face was like wax-work, and her dress was made in such a fashion that I think she must have found it hard work to breathe. But she was exceedingly polite, and I was quite taken with her before we parted. The young gentleman likewise was a very pleasant fellow, and much better-looking, too, than she was. I judged by his hands that he has never done any work in his life, and his moustache was twisted and curled in the most coquettish way imaginable—just like this.” Here Mabel put her fingers to her upper lip, then twirled them round and round to Mrs. Willey’s great amusement.
“But what I want most to speak of,” she continued, “is the big beech-tree.” Mabel now proceeded to tell how Harry had carved his name and Kitty’s upon it, and how she had discovered the names of Harry Fletcher and Mabel Willey upon the same tree in letters barely legible.
“O child!” exclaimed her mother, when she was done speaking, “you cannot imagine how vividly my girlish days come back upon my memory when you speak of that old beech. Yes, I can see Harry Fletcher cutting his name and mine upon it just as plainly as if it were yesterday. A handsome fellow was Harry. He wanted me to be his wife. I did not dislike him—no, indeed. We were good friends; we sat side by side at school; we picked huckleberries together. Many folks thought I should marry him. But there was another young man courting me, one who bore the same name as myself, though no relation; and one day we all three met, and my lovers agreed that I should then and there decide which of them I’d choose. And ’twas your father, Mabel, who won me; nor have I ever for a single moment regretted my choice. Yet Harry Fletcher was a brave, generous fellow, very smart, too, and I have often wondered what became of him. All I know is that soon after I refused him he quitted our part of the country to seek his fortune elsewhere.”
“Right, wife, right! A splendid fellow!” cried Mr. Willey, entering the dairy to get a cup of milk. “Why, I was thinking about him myself only a few minutes ago while I was looking at our corn—and a 634fine crop it’s going to be, a mighty fine crop. And I wondered whether Harry, if he is still in the land of the living, has a farm like ours and a snug log-house to shelter him. Many things may happen in the length of time since he and I parted; this world has many ups and downs—it’s a regular seesaw.”
After talking awhile about Harry Fletcher Farmer Willey said: “Come, wife, let’s take a row; and I’ll bring my rod along and catch a mess of black bass for supper.” Mrs. Willey, who liked to see her husband play as well as work, gladly assented. They did not fish much, however, for the skiff was long and broad and leaked never a drop; and the six happy children went a-rowing too. It did your eyes good to look at them, and your ears good, too, to hear them—so healthy and strong and rollicksome they were; dipping their hands in the water, sprinkling each other’s faces, singing, laughing; and finally barefooted Dick, who was ten years old, wittingly tumbled overboard and played fish around the boat—the boy could swim like a fish—to the great amusement of his brothers and sisters.
Three months after this pleasant excursion on the river Mabel found herself again in New Hampshire. The truth is her grandfather, whose feelings had been much wrought upon by the visit she had paid him in summer, could not bear to be separated any longer from those whom he loved, and, moreover, he was of an age when farm-labor was getting rather irksome. Accordingly, he had written to Mrs. Willey, telling her that he wished to spend the rest of his days in Illinois, and begged that he might have the company of young Mabel in the long, tiresome journey to the West. “For she is a bright girl,” he said, “and can take charge of me and my trunk, and of herself too.”
So Mabel, who, fond as she was of home, was not averse to seeing a little of the world, went to fetch her grandfather; and now in October we find her passing with him through the city of New York.
“It’s just like a beehive, this town,” spoke Mabel, as she paused a moment in Broadway near the Astor House to try and discover the ticket-office of the Michigan Southern Railway.
“Such a crowd makes my head swim,” said the old man, who was leaning on her arm.
“Well, I’ll ask somebody where the ticket-office is,” added Mabel.
And she did ask somebody, and that somebody happened to be no other than Harry Fletcher, Jr., who was on his way down town with his father. Right cordial was the meeting between them.
“I have often thought of you,” said Harry.
“Indeed! Well, the morning we first met was a blissful morning for you—was it not?” returned Mabel, with a laughing gleam in her eye. “Pray, sir, how is Miss Gibbon?”
“Oh! extremely well. She is now in Philadelphia, bidding good-by to some friends, for we sail shortly for Europe.”
“But you will not really settle abroad, as you once told me?” said Mabel. Then, with a little hesitation, she added: “Men like you, sir, ought to live in their own country.”
“You are more eloquent than you imagine,” answered the youth. “But I have promised Miss Gibbon that we should make our home in Paris.”
Here Mr. Fletcher senior shook 635his head, while Mabel’s grandparent observed: “Why, young man, isn’t this country big enough for you?”
Harry made no response, but, taking a pretty rosebud from his buttonhole, he presented it to Mabel, saying: “We may never meet again, but Miss Gibbon and I will often speak of you when we are far away.”
Closely during this brief conversation had Harry’s father watched Mabel, and now he took her hand and pressed it, and the girl wondered why he gazed upon her with moistened eyes. Then, after showing her the ticket-office, Mr. Fletcher went to a flower-stand near by and bought her a beautiful bouquet which quite threw into the shade Harry’s rosebud. “Oh! thanks, sir,” said Mabel, as she accepted the flowers. “How delicious they are!”
When presently they parted Harry said to his father: “Miss Willey is a very fine girl, isn’t she? And I’ll not let Kitty call her a peasant any more.”
Mr. Fletcher did not seem to hear this remark; he appeared like one absorbed in a reverie. But of a sudden he burst out: “A peasant! a peasant! By heaven! there is not a princess in Europe better than Mabel Willey.”
“Well, Kitty would not call her a peasant except for her mother,” continued Harry. “But Mrs. Gibbon has filled her head with foolish notions.”
“Such as living in Europe,” answered Mr. Fletcher. Then, with a sigh, he added, “O Harry! how you have disappointed me. Why, I would rather see you wed a girl like Mabel, even if she were poor, than have you pass your days in a foreign land.”
“Would you really?” exclaimed Harry.
“But, alas!” went on Mr. Fletcher, now speaking to himself—“alas! ’twas I who urged him to make a rich match. Yet I have been rolling up money for years and years; and now, when I am worth a million, my only child is going to spend my fortune among foreigners.”
As they pursued their way to Wall Street, Harry noticed the unhappy look on his father’s face and again advised him to take a holiday. But Mr. Fletcher answered: “I wish I could. But I have been so long in the treadmill of business that now I should not know how to play if I went away.”
And so the millionaire went down to his office, while the heir to all his wealth, with a fresh rosebud sticking in his buttonhole, repaired to Delmonico’s to kill time, as he expressed it—to kill time sipping sherry and thinking about Paris and Kitty Gibbon.
But the banker’s thoughts were of Mabel Willey. “She brings me right back to the dear old days,” he sighed—“the dear old days. She is the living image of her mother.”
For once in his life Mr. Fletcher was absent-minded, and the president of a trust company, who came to talk with him upon important business, fancied that he did not evince his usual shrewdness and penetration. They were still engaged in earnest conversation when a piece of news reached them, a startling piece of news, that made them both stare and wonder if their ears told the truth: the Confidence Trust Company had closed its doors!
But Harry, who heard of it at Delmonico’s, was not startled in the least; nay, he rather enjoyed 636the excitement which quickly followed. He was rich; how could this failure harm him? Ere long other failures were announced, and Wall Street became filled with an excited crowd—so filled that it was well-nigh impossible to move about; crash followed crash, and, judging by men’s faces, you might have thought the end of the world was at hand.
Yet Harry calmly edged his way through the throng, always careful of the pretty rosebud, over which he frequently placed his hand for protection.
But ere this memorable day came to an end Harry grew serious.
“This is going to prove the greatest financial crash our country has known since the Revolution,” said Mr. Fletcher to him in the evening; “and, my son, I may be utterly ruined.”
“And I’ll not be able to go to Paris,” said Harry inwardly. “Oh! what will Kitty say?”
But it was not so much Miss Gibbon as Miss Gibbon’s mother, who took to heart the sudden, unexpected, astonishing change in Mr. Fletcher’s fortune; for the banker, who had been entangled in many speculations, did indeed lose nearly all he possessed—so little had he left that the widow made up her mind that her daughter should not marry his son if she could prevent it.
A few days after the panic Harry called on his betrothed, who was now back from Philadelphia. He meant to tell her the whole sad truth, and afford her an opportunity to break off the engagement, if she wished to do so. In the parlor he found Mrs. Gibbon, who seemed to be expecting him (he had written Kitty a note to say he was coming), and the widow’s countenance chilled his heart as he entered. Harry began by making a commonplace remark about the weather—the equinoctial was raging—then went on to speak of the unhappy change in his father’s fortune, wondering all the while why Kitty did not appear.
“We have heard of it,” answered the other, “and needless to tell what a shock the news gave us. However, such misfortunes will happen—c’est la vie. And now that you have been so frank with me, Mr. Fletcher, let me be equally frank with you, and say that my daughter and I have had a long, serious talk on the subject. Miss Gibbon, you know, has set her heart upon living abroad—indeed, we wish to be back again by the end of the month, and—”
“And now that I am penniless,” interrupted Harry, “perhaps you deem it best that the engagement be broken off.”
“I regret to say it is the conclusion we have come to.”
Harry, who had feared this would be the step which Mrs. Gibbon would urge Kitty to take, nevertheless wished to see the young lady in person, and so he said: “But may I not speak with Miss Gibbon a moment? I—I—”
“She has a bad headache and is confined to her room,” interrupted the widow. “Besides, sir, I am fully authorized to speak for my daughter, who, you are aware, is not yet of age.”
“Oh! but do tell her I am here; let me speak only a word to her,” said Harry in a pleading tone.
“I am sorry that I cannot grant your request,” answered Mrs. Gibbon firmly.
With this the interview closed, and Harry departed in a sorrowful mood indeed.
637For a while the blow quite stunned him. The tears did not flow; he could only sigh and groan. He wished he had been born poor, and that Kitty had not been an heiress. “For then poverty would not have separated us; we should have toiled for our daily bread, and been as happy as if we had lived on Fifth Avenue.”
The following week he read in a newspaper the names of Mrs. Gibbon and her daughter among the passengers by the steamship Russia for Liverpool.
“Well, Harry, let us not despair,” said Mr. Fletcher a month after the panic. “Happy days may yet be in store for us.”
And as he spoke his thoughts turned westward to Rock River—to Mabel Willey.
“And why not?” he asked himself, after musing a moment. “Why not? Many a man as old as I am has married a girl as young as Mabel.”
“Well, yes, father, I do believe happy days are in store for us,” returned the youth, his countenance brightening; for he was beginning to recover from the blow which his heart had received (young people easily recover from such blows). Besides, he had come to the conclusion that all had happened for the best. Miss Gibbon was not worthy of him, otherwise, despite her mother, she would certainly have managed to communicate with him ere she sailed. It was only his money she cared about. “And, father,” he added, “I could be perfectly content on a farm; yes, I know I could, and you have enough left from the wreck of your fortune to buy a farm, and we might live together on it very happily. Suppose, therefore, we go West—say to Illinois, where Mabel Willey’s father lives.”
“Just what I was thinking of,” said Mr. Fletcher, with a tender throbbing of the heart, which might have changed to a bitter pang had he known what was passing through Harry’s mind; for Harry, too, had asked himself:
“Why not? I abominate rich girls now. Mabel is quite good enough for me.”
Accordingly, to Illinois they went, and arrived in the most glorious time of the year—Indian summer.
“Why, I do declare! Can it be possible? Is this really my old friend Harry Fletcher?” cried Mr. Willey, as he grasped the other’s hand, while Mrs. Willey and Mabel and all the little ones stood in a gaping circle round them.
“Yes, I am he and nobody else,” was the response, given in a voice quivering with emotion.
“Well, you are welcome—a thousand times welcome!” put in the wife, a tear glistening in her eye. “Ay, Harry, it makes us young again to look at you.”
“And here is the image of yourself in the dear old days,” spoke Mr. Fletcher, turning towards Mabel, who blushed and looked very pretty, while Harry Fletcher, Jr.—who did not dream of his parent falling in love—whispered to Mabel:
“How romantic this is!”
“Very,” answered Mabel. “But pray, sir, why didn’t you bring Miss Gibbon? Or perhaps you are married, and I should say Mrs. Fletcher?”
“I’ll tell all about it by and by,” said Harry in a low tone. “It is an exceedingly painful subject. I am trying to forget it.”
Then, after a pause, and drawing the girl aside, he added:
“I may as well tell you now: 638our engagement is at an end—Miss Gibbon is in Europe.”
When Mabel heard this her kind heart was deeply moved for Harry as well as for Kitty. Mabel had no lover, but she had often thought that if she had one how dearly she would love him. “And if our engagement were to be broken off, I hardly think I should ever smile again.”
“Well, Harry,” continued Mr. Willey, addressing his old friend, and at the same time sweeping his hand over the landscape, “is not this a charming country? Look, yonder is the prairie; and there is Rock River—isn’t it a fine stream? And there you see my timber—I have fifty acres of it; and that is my corn-field—a good fifty acres of corn; and there are my cattle; and I have no end of chickens and turkeys; and I have a good orchard. In fact, I want for nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“Well, you ought to be happy,” answered Mr. Fletcher.
“Happy isn’t the word,” put in Mrs. Willey.
“Right, wife,” said the farmer. “I’d not change places with the richest man in New York. People talk about the panic. Why, it hasn’t harmed me a bit. My corn is ripening just as well now as before the crash; my land is all paid for; I owe not a dollar to anybody; and I really don’t know what worry means.”
“No worry!” murmured Mr. Fletcher, pressing his hand to his brow. “Alas! when have I been free from it?”
“Well, it is worry and not work that kills people,” went on Mr. Willey. “So stay out here and buy a quarter section; ’twill make you ten years younger. No life so happy as a farmer’s life.”
“The very thing I intend to do,” said Mr. Fletcher. Here Mabel clapped her hands, and all the little ones laughed and clapped their hands too; while Mrs. Willey said to herself: “How very pleasant it would be if the son of my old lover were to marry Mabel!”
It was long since Mr. Fletcher had passed a happier day than this first day in Illinois; the balmy air, the entire change of scene, the gladsome faces around him, but above all the company of sweet Mabel, who insisted on showing him all over the homestead, obliterated from his mind the troubles and worries he had gone through and really made him feel many years younger.
The following week Mrs. Willey was delighted when she heard Harry ask her daughter to take a row on the river. “I have only a short letter to write,” said the youth, “then I’ll be ready. Will you come?”
“Suppose we take a row,” said Harry’s father to Mabel a few minutes later—he had not heard Harry’s invitation.
“To be sure,” replied Mabel. “But shall we go immediately, sir, or wait for your son? He asked me to go with him as soon as he had done a little writing.”
“Oh! indeed,” said Mr. Fletcher; and now for the first time it occurred to him that perhaps Harry might fall under the influence of this simple yet bewitching maiden. “Well, if he does,” he added inwardly, “dearly as I feel that I could love her—for her mother’s sake, dearly, dearly—I’ll not stand in my boy’s way.”
However, Mr. Fletcher and Mabel did go down to the river without waiting for Harry, who made his appearance on the bank in less 639than twenty minutes, waving his hand and shouting lustily.
But Mr. Fletcher seemed not to hear his voice; at least he did not hear it for a long time—so long that Mabel fancied the old gentleman, as she inwardly called him, must be a little deaf. At length she made bold to inform him that his son was calling; whereupon Mr. Fletcher looked round and exclaimed: “Oh! ay, to be sure, so he is.” And now the bow of the skiff was turned slowly shoreward. But the oars did not move very briskly; nay, so sluggishly were they plied that the boat drifted a good half-mile below the landing-place—poor Harry following it along the shore, while Mabel was tempted more than once to ask her companion to let her have the oars.
“Well, well, I have had my day,” sighed Mr. Fletcher, about a quarter of an hour later, as he sat on a stump watching with tearful eyes his son, whose vigorous young arms were now sending the boat upstream as rapidly as he himself had sent it down with the current. “No, I must not lament; Mabel is worth a dozen city flirts, and I hope that Harry will fall in love with her.”
“Is it not a beautiful view from this knoll?” spoke a voice, presently, close behind him; and, turning, Mr. Fletcher beheld Mabel’s mother, who had approached him unheard over a bed of moss.
“It is indeed!” he replied. “And the most beautiful object in the whole landscape is your daughter.”
“Well, Mabel is a jewel, and no mistake,” continued Mrs. Willey. “And right glad am I that she and your son are enjoying themselves together on the river.” But even as she spoke a strange thought flashed upon the mother, for she perceived that the eyes of her old suitor were moistened with tears.
“Can it be possible,” she said to herself, “that he, too, is falling in love with Mabel? Well, I hope not; for there will be a poor chance for him while young Harry is about.”
We need scarcely say that for Harry Fletcher, Jr., this was only the first of many pleasant excursions on the river with Mabel; and day by day the recollections of his former life—the dinner-parties, the operas, the balls he had gone to, the pretty girls he had danced with—grew dimmer and dimmer in his mind’s eye. More than once, too, did Mrs. Willey discover Harry’s father watching the happy couple from the stump on the knoll.
“How strangely things turn out!” spoke Mr. Fletcher, a fortnight later, when Mabel’s mother once more approached him over the bed of moss.
“Perhaps you are thinking of just what I am thinking,” returned Mrs. Willey. “If so, it is indeed strange, and, I may add, a most romantic way of taking revenge on me; eh, Harry?”
“Ah! little did I dream of this the day when I proposed to you and you refused me,” continued Mr. Fletcher, shaking his head. “It seems only yesterday. Yet here is a son of mine, with beard on his chin, as much in love with your daughter as ever I was with you.”
“And I guess there’ll not be any nay spoken this time,” answered Mrs. Willey.
At these words Mr. Fletcher buried his face in his hands and sighed, while the other, who remembered the tears which had once 640moistened his eyes as he sat looking at Harry and Mabel from this same spot, felt more than ever convinced that her child had two lovers, and wished that she had two Mabels, in order to be able to give one to each.
Yes, Harry and Mabel were already deeply in love, and Mabel, for whom it was quite a new experience, trembled every time the youth met her—and he met her very often between sunrise and sunset: at the churn, feeding the poultry, gathering chestnuts—“For now I am sure he is going to propose,” she would say to herself.
At length a morning came when Harry resolved to put the all-important question. Why dally any longer? He had made up his mind to become a farmer; Mabel would be just the wife for him; she was not only handsome but healthy—no headaches, no dyspepsia. If her hands were not so soft as Miss Gibbon’s, what of it? They were industrious, willing hands, and able to do almost everything except thrum on a piano.
Accordingly, Harry went in quest of Mabel, who, one of the children told him, had gone to pay a visit to their neighbor. Whereupon he took the lane which led to the adjoining farm, and had proceeded about half way when he saw the girl coming towards him. She did not walk with her usual elastic step; her eyes were cast upon the ground, nor did she raise them until he was quite close, and then Harry perceived that she was very pale, and seemed to be startled, as if she had not heard him approaching.
“Dear Mabel, what is the matter?” said Harry, taking her hand as he spoke. “I never saw you look troubled before. Are you ill?”
In a voice wonderfully firm, considering the poignant anguish she was suffering, and forcing to her lips the ghost of a smile, Mabel answered:
“Ill? No, indeed, sir! And I should not have been moving at such a snail’s pace; I should have been running, flying, for I bring you great news—news that will ravish your heart with delight.”
“Really! Well, pray, what is it?” said Harry, who felt the hand which he clasped growing colder.
“Miss Gibbon has arrived,” continued Mabel. “She is at our neighbor’s; she mistook the road, and went there instead of coming to our house; and I told her to wait where she was until I found you and broke the glad tidings So, Mr. Fletcher, make haste, do, for Miss Gibbon is longing to meet you.”
Here Mabel, who could not trust herself to utter another syllable, tore away from him, leaving Harry perfectly dazed and bewildered.
But Mabel did not go home. No, into the woods she plunged, where no eye might witness the tears which now rolled down her cheeks. And it happened that somebody else was strolling among the trees at the same time, pensive and musing over days gone by. Suddenly the girl found herself face to face with Mr. Fletcher. In vain she strove to hide her grief—too late; not ten paces separated them.
“Why, Mabel, dear, darling Mabel,” cried the other, who fancied that a lover’s quarrel had broken out between herself and Harry, “what has happened? ’Tis the first time I have seen anything but gladness on your sweet face.”
As Mr. Fletcher spoke he drew her affectionately towards him. But it was several minutes ere she could 641check her sobs sufficiently to answer.
Finally, yielding to his solicitations, Mabel opened out her heart; she told him the whole truth, and we may faintly imagine what Mr. Fletcher’s feelings were as she went on to confess her love for his son, and the cruel shock which her heart had received a half-hour since when she met Miss Gibbon.
“And Miss Gibbon told me, sir, that she loved Harry as much as ever; that she had sold all her diamonds, run away from her mother, come alone the whole way from Paris to find him, and that her mother should never part them again.”
A spell of silence followed Mabel’s confession, and during the silence Mr. Fletcher’s heart throbbed violently.
“Well, Mabel,” he began presently, and looking her full in the face, “you have unbosomed yourself to me, let me now reveal my inmost feelings to you. I, too, have a cause for sorrow—one which I find it impossible to overcome. Nobody can remove it except you; but you can remove it—you may make me the happiest man in Illinois, if you choose.”
“I!” exclaimed Mabel in surprise. “O sir! I will do anything, anything to make you happy.”
“Ay, child, the happiest man in Illinois,” exclaimed Mrs. Willey, who had caught these last words as she pushed her way through the trees, and was determined to back him up in his suit with all the authority she could command.
“O mother, mother!” cried Mabel, leaving Mr. Fletcher and flinging herself in her parent’s arms.
“Come, come, child! Don’t take on so about it,” continued Mrs. Willey. “I know what the trouble is. But it can’t be helped. Harry loved Miss Gibbon before he ever laid eyes on you, and she loved him, and they were once engaged to be married; and now they are engaged anew—not the least doubt about it, for I have just left them walking arm-in-arm, cooing together like a pair of doves. So, Mabel, dry your tears, and let me declare you would make me the happiest woman in the State, if you would accept the hand of my dear, good friend Henry Fletcher.”
“What! marry the old gentleman?” whispered Mabel, looking up in her mother’s face; then turning she gazed furtively on Mr. Fletcher, who had retired a few steps, while a smile, a very faint smile, played on her lips.
“Hush, child!” returned Mr. Willey in an undertone. “He is not old; his heart is just like a boy’s.” Here Mabel again hid her face in her mother’s bosom, and the latter began to feel a little vexed, for she fancied that she heard Mabel laughing.
“Be my wife, Mabel!” exclaimed Mr. Fletcher, drawing near, “and then I’ll settle here, and Harry will too, and we will all be happy neighbors. Oh! speak, dear Mabel, speak.”
“Give me until to-morrow,” answered Mabel, with her face still concealed.
“Surely I will,” said Mr. Fletcher.
“O child! be business-like and arrange the matter at once,” urged Mrs. Willey.
“Not now; to-morrow,” said Mabel—“to-morrow.” And she ended her words with a sigh.
With this Mr. Fletcher withdrew, and mother and daughter went their way home—the mother eloquently 642pleading the cause of her old lover, Mabel patiently, reverently listening; and when they reached the log-house, whom should they meet standing by the porch but Harry. He was alone, and appeared much confused as Mabel fastened her eyes on him—poor Mabel! Then in broken accents he said: “Mabel, Mabel, can you forgive me? I—”
“Forgive you! Pray, for what?” she exclaimed, interrupting him. “Did I not tell you I brought glad news? And I hope that you and Miss Gibbon will live long and happily together.”
“Oh! how good, how generous, how noble you are,” said Harry, who knew full well that Mabel loved him; in more ways than one she had let the dear secret escape her. “And fortunate will be the man who wins you!”
Here the girl stood silent a moment; a violent struggle was going on within her. Then, a sunny look beaming over her face, “Who has won me,” she replied.
“Well spoken, child!” exclaimed Mrs. Willey, clapping her on the shoulder—“well spoken!”
“Why, Harry,” added Mabel, “I am going to be your step-mother.”
“Really, truly!” cried a voice from an upper window. “My Harry’s step-mother!” In another moment Kitty Gibbon came rushing down the staircase at a break-neck pace, and half choked Mabel with her embraces. Her arms were still clasping Mabel’s neck when the elder Harry appeared on the scene; and we may imagine, if we can, what his feelings were as Mabel stretched out one of her hands towards him.
Presently Mr. Willey arrived; then the grandfather and all the little ones; and while they were rejoicing together a man on horseback galloped up.
“Is there a lady here named Miss Gibbon?” inquired the stranger.
“Yes, I am she,” answered Kitty, looking somewhat agitated, for she could not imagine what the fellow wanted; all sorts of things passed through her head.
“Well, I have a telegram for you,” continued the man, handing her an envelope.
“A telegram! Why, so it is, and from Europe, too!” cried Kitty. Then, tearing it open, she read as follows:
“Kitty, I forgive you. Will allow you $5,000 per year. Count de Montjoli heart-broken. Write at once. God bless you!”
“Oh! it is from mamma,” she said, after reading it to herself. “And now I’ll read it aloud. And, Harry, listen well, for it’s jolly. But let me say before I begin—and I wish mother could hear me—you are worth, dear boy, all the counts in the world.”
Here Kitty read over the telegram, after which followed a general round of embraces. All were indeed happy beyond measure, Mabel as well as the rest; and the girl said to her mother, “You have chosen a husband for me, and no doubt chosen for the best.” Then, with a smile, she added: “And I promise to grow older every day and catch up to him by and by.”
“And you will teach me how to be a farmer’s wife,” said Kitty to Mabel.
“And I’ll play boss over you all,” spoke Farmer Willey, spreading forth his brawny arms so as to covey the whole group.
“Yes, yes,” said young Harry, “and I will write to New York and tell others who are crying over 643hard times to follow our example and come West.”
“Do, do!” exclaimed Harry’s father. “Here is health and no worry, sound sleep by night, and—”
“Wives to be had without much wooing,” interrupted Mabel, glancing archly at her future husband.
“Darling girl!” replied Mr. Fletcher, with tender pathos in his voice. “This is the blessed end of an old, old courtship. Ay, Mabel, the shadow of my days, like Hezekiah’s, runs backward when I gaze upon you.”
“Well spoken!” exclaimed Mrs. Willey, with tears of joy glistening in her eyes—“well spoken! And, oh! most sincerely do I thank God that my old lover has won his Mabel at last.”
I.
II.
Seven years ago the government of the new German Empire, pursuing the Protestant traditions of Prussia, and spurred on to action by the occult power of Freemasonry, began its gigantic attack on the Catholic Church. It opened hostilities without the customary declaration of war, and, in order to hide the real motives and aims of the campaign, its crafty rulers professed well-meant intentions and a sincere solicitude for the welfare of the church, declaring over and over again that the religious policy they were inaugurating was exclusively directed against the Jesuit or ultramontane influence in the church. Soon, however, and as the government gradually unfurled the banner of persecution, the dark designs of Freemasonry appeared in their real light and character. Whilst the ministers moved heaven and earth to produce some plausible pretexts in justification of the announced legislation, such as the pope’s infallibility, the pretended encroachments of the Roman Church on the domains of the state, the creation of the Centre party, etc., the national liberals in the Landtag dogmatized on the religion of the future, the first mission of which was to bring Christianity into harmony with the spirit of the age, or, as one of their leading organs put it, “to reconcile the faith of our forefathers with the reason of their children.” At last, when the legislators had gained the conviction that the reasons alleged for the May Laws found neither credence with Catholics nor favor with honest Protestants, they threw off the mask, and Infidelity, fully armed and with colors flying, boldly entered the lists of the Kulturkampf. The final aim of the struggle, so long and persistently denied, now openly acknowledged, was nothing less than the annihilation of the Roman Catholic Church, and thereby of Christianity itself. Whatever exception Prince Bismarck may have taken to this sweeping programme in favor of his own idea of a German state church, with the emperor for its head, appears irrelevant before the extraordinary fact that he placed himself at the head of the enemies of Christ, and with their help worked for the destruction of his religion. For this end, and for this end only, did the German infidels devise and pass the May Laws. Have they succeeded? Will they ever achieve their object? To these questions we unhesitatingly oppose a decided never. As Catholics we have the promise of Christ that his church here on earth will last to the end of the world; as witnesses of the persecution and its results we proclaim with unspeakable satisfaction that the attempt to destroy the church in Germany has completely failed. Although the body of the church has been roughly handled, although it bleeds from a thousand wounds, and stands mutilated, disfigured, a most piteous sight, still the church itself, the Catholic faith, has remained untouched and shineth forth with increased splendor, strength, and beauty. Men have suffered, not their religion.
645Taking a bird’s-eye view of the present condition of the Catholic Church in Prussia, we discover an immense field of desolation on which a seven years’ relentless war has spread intense misery and suffering, heaped ruins upon ruins, and well-nigh destroyed every monument of Christian faith and piety. The guides and pastors of the church are dispersed, the whole hierarchy is broken up, hundreds of priests eat the bitter bread of exile, many more waste their lives in prison, and greater still is the number of those for whom the exercise of priestly functions is accounted a treasonable crime. More than one million of loyal Prussian subjects are doomed to live and die without the blessings of the church. In more than seven hundred parishes no sacraments can be received, no Mass be heard, no Christian burial obtained. New-born children must be baptized by lay hands or carried with personal danger to distant parishes. The sick and dying are denied the last sacraments, unless they, too, can be conveyed to neighboring churches. All Catholic seminaries, schools, and educational establishments are either closed altogether or taken possession of by the Protestant government. Convents and monasteries are empty or inhabited by criminals, their former saintly inmates driven out of their homes and country. Catholic orphanages, hospitals, reformatories, all charitable institutions are suppressed, and the church property of dioceses deprived of their bishops is sequestrated by the civil power. Catholic religious instruction in popular and higher schools, no longer under the control of the church, is now exclusively taught in the name and by authority of the Prussian government.
This sad work of destruction and persecution appears sadder still when viewed in the ghastliness of its details. By clause 1 of the law of May 11, 1873, all papal jurisdiction in matters of church discipline was transferred from the pope to the German ecclesiastical authorities, or, in other words, German Catholics were, declared cut off from the visible head of their church. This law, on the very face of it, could have no practical meaning in the nineteenth century, and therefore remained a dead letter. Beyond a certain number of penalties inflicted on priests and editors for publishing papal documents addressed to German bishops and priests, or forwarding letters of excommunication to apostates, no harm was done to any one by this law, and diocesan communications are uninterruptedly carried on by the pope, not publicly, it is true, but almost as completely and safely as if the Holy Father enjoyed the Prussian government’s sanction for it.
Far more mischievous, downright disastrous to the German hierarchy, became the various laws concerning the education and appointment of priests to the ecclesiastical office. With regard to the clause prescribing a state examination in science for ecclesiastics over and above the usual examination in philosophy and theology, its severity could not hitherto be tested; for, although the official list of thirty-four examiners is every year published in the leading newspapers, not one Catholic candidate has presented himself for examination. This clause, too, may therefore be termed a failure. On the other hand, the appointing and not appointing of priests to vacant parishes became fatal to all Prussian 646bishops. Whenever they proceeded to such appointments without giving the required notice to their respective ober-presidents, or if they failed to comply with the latter’s orders to fill up vacant parishes, the bishops were in all cases prosecuted, fined, or imprisoned. For a time fines were paid by some good diocesans, or the bishops’ sold furniture was bought back and restored to their owners; but when, from the continued and increased severity of such prosecutions, it became evident that the well-meant aid of good Catholics contributed only to enrich the persecuting government without removing their chief pastors’ difficulties, perhaps also on the express wish of the exalted victims themselves, the generous practice was discontinued, and the bishops, some reduced to utter poverty and unable to pay the ever-increasing penalties, were ignominiously dragged into prison. The Archbishop of Cologne alone was condemned to pay at very short intervals 120, 150, 3000, 21,000, 88,500, in all 112,770 marks. His brother bishops, even those not deposed, had to suffer similarly high and numerous penalties. What made a great many of these condemnations appear excessively hard and unjust was the bishops’ inability to fill up the vacancies; for they had no longer priests at their disposal, since the closing of the seminaries made new ordinations impossible. Thus the government asked an impossibility and punished the bishops for not achieving it. With the exception of the Prince Bishop of Breslau and the Bishop of Limburg, who escaped imprisonment by going abroad, all the Prussian bishops had to go to jail, some for months, others for years. As soon as their imprisonment was over proceedings for their “deposition” were instituted at the royal Tribunal of Ecclesiastical Affairs in Berlin. To the official summons to lay down their offices the bishops answered in substance that, the state not being a spiritual power capable of investing them with or depriving them of their ecclesiastical offices, they did not consider themselves empowered to accede to the government’s request; and that as the church alone—i.e., her head, the pope—had endowed them with the said offices, she alone possessed the spiritual power to dismiss them. The answers which priests gave to the government, when summoned to lay down their offices as parish priests, were couched in equally decided language. Thus Dean Leineweber, of Heiligenstadt, wrote to the ober-president that, according to the principle and teaching of the Catholic Church, Bishop Martin, although “deposed” by the state, was still their bishop, and that consequently no priest was released by this “deposition” from the vow of obedience by which he is bound to his bishop; moreover, that a faithful priest is a better and more loyal state officer than an unfaithful priest, and therefore could not in any way admit that his removal from office was required by the interest of the state. The government, however, paying no heed to the bishops’ refusals to resign, summoned them one after the other before the Supreme Tribunal of Ecclesiastical Affairs. After a short trial, at which the accused bishops neither appeared in person nor were represented by counsel, the court pronounced sentence of dismissal from their offices as Prussian bishops on the ground that “the accused had so grossly violated their duties as servants of the church 647that their remaining in office involved a serious danger incompatible with public order.” In this way the Prussian government managed to get rid of seven bishops—viz., Archbishop Melchers, of Cologne, who is supposed to reside in Holland; Cardinal Ledochowski, Archbishop of Gnesen-Posen, now in Rome; the Prince Bishop of Breslau, living in the Austrian part of his diocese; Bishop Martin, of Paderborn, now in Belgium; Bishop Brinckmann, of Münster, present residence unknown; Bishop Blum, of Limburg, somewhere with the Benedictines; Dr. Janiszewski, suffragan Bishop of Posen, in Cracow. The three episcopal sees of Treves, Fulda, and Mayence being vacant through the death of their former occupants, there are now nine dioceses without visible spiritual administration in Prussia. The only remaining bishops are those of Hildesheim, Osnabrück, Ermeland, and Kulm. For what reason these church dignitaries are allowed to remain in office, although they committed the same transgressions of the May Laws and are in every respect in the same position as their brethren, is indeed difficult to say; the only reasonable explanation we can venture to offer for this forbearance is either the government’s determination to discontinue the useless persecution, or the emperor’s unwillingness to consent to the expulsion of all the Catholic bishops from the country over which he rules. Even an emperor may dread the verdict of history.
As was to be expected, the “deposed” bishops, although far away from their flocks, found the necessary means and ways to carry on the spiritual administration of their dioceses, either by appointing secret delegates or with the help of certain priests with whom they keep up regular communications. Of course their conduct involved, in the eyes of the government, fresh and very grave offences, which were resented by endless prosecutions not only against the bishops themselves but all persons, laymen as well as priests, whom the public prosecutor suspected of helping the bishops in the exercise of their “illegal” episcopal functions. Summonses to appear again before the royal tribunal in Berlin were nailed on the doors of the bishops’ former residences, and in the trials which ensued the accused were sentenced in contumaciam to fines and years of imprisonment. And as the government could neither exact the inflicted penalties nor lay hold of the convicted dignitaries, it issued disgraceful writs of arrest in which the Prussian gendarmes were ordered to watch for the said criminals, and, when apprehended, to deliver them to the next police station for the execution of the sentences passed upon them. The bishops, in their safe retirement, could afford to smile at these futile attempts on their liberty, but those persons who remained within the grasp of the government had to suffer many hardships for the support they had lent to their bishops. Hundreds of priests are constantly harassed with summonses to make depositions concerning the secret delegate, but, to their glory be it said, all proved faithful, all persistently refused to give the demanded evidence, declaring their inability to recognize the authority of civil courts of justice in purely ecclesiastical affairs. The only case in which the prosecution was successful is that of Dean Kurowski, of Posen, who, on secondary evidence, was pronounced to be 648the secret delegate of Cardinal Ledochowski, and sentenced to two years and four months’ imprisonment. Released in October, 1877, he received his dismissal from office in the beginning of the present year. Connected with the illegal exercise of episcopal functions was the persecution of the Rev. Dr. Kantecki, editor of a Polish newspaper, who sat six months in prison without trial simply because he refused to turn king’s evidence; and that of Fathers Herold and Pudenz, of Heiligenstadt, who were kept in jail for more than one year for not revealing the name of the secret delegate.
Another deplorable consequence of the law concerning the education and appointment to ecclesiastical offices is the closing of all priests’ seminaries, which took place almost immediately after the promulgation of that law in 1873, in consequence of the refusal of the authorities to admit the delegates of the government as inspectors of these purely ecclesiastical institutions. Since then not one priest has received ordination in Prussia. That is not, however, a great hardship, as no new priests can, under the present circumstances, be appointed in Prussia, and a great many Prussian young men are constantly ordained abroad who will one day return to their country. On the other hand, the number of vacant parishes increases rapidly every day. At the present moment there are in Prussia about 700 parishes deprived of priests—viz., in the archdiocese of Cologne, 121; in the diocese of Treves, 153; Paderborn, 68; Münster, 70; Limburg, 33; Fulda, 30; Hildesheim, 22; Osnabrück, 23; Kulm, 14; Ermeland, 13; Breslau, about 100; Posen, about 100; in the principality of Hohenzollern, 19, to which must be added more than 100 curacies.
Of the exiled secular priests of Prussia about three hundred found a field for their labors in Bavaria; the others went chiefly to Belgium, Austria, Italy, England, and America. As the religious orders were expelled from the whole German Empire, their members had to settle outside of Germany; they emigrated either to America, or went as missionaries among the heathens, or transferred their establishments to Belgium, England, etc.
The number of Prussian Catholics deprived of church ministrations now amounts to one million and a half. If these wish to hear Mass on Sundays or receive the sacraments, they must attend the services in churches of their neighborhood, and sometimes walk as far as ten and fifteen miles. In a great many places, and now in nearly every widowed parish, so-called lay services have been arranged by the parishioners, at which one of them reads the prayers of Mass, and, if not forbidden by the local police, a sermon as well. In the afternoon they sing Vespers and hymns in the same manner. At first it was feared that even this poor comfort would be taken away from the desolate parishes, for in many places the conductors of lay worship were prosecuted and heavily fined for exercising illegal functions in church; but later on both the officials and the judges took a more lenient view of these cases and abstained from interfering with them. Now and then, however, the forsaken parishes have the unexpected joy of hearing Mass in their own churches. In every diocese, especially in that of Posen, banished or newly-ordained priests travel in disguise through the 649country, baptizing, hearing confessions, giving the last sacraments to the dying, and saying Mass in every deserted church they can reach. Notwithstanding the greatest vigilance by day and by night, the police seldom succeed in arresting one of these faithful shepherds, for the parishioners exercise a strict watch over the police and give their pastors timely warning of the enemy’s approach. When found out the itinerant priests invariably undergo a severe punishment of two or three years’ imprisonment, followed by banishment from their country. How loyal to these priests not only the Catholic but even the Protestant and Jewish population is may be seen from the following case, taken out of many. From Schwerin-on-the-Wartha, diocese of Posen, Father Logan, whom the government had exiled several years ago, managed for a whole year to administer a parish in the neighborhood, and to carry the consolations of his ministry wherever they were required. During that time he kept a well-attended shop in the little town, and travelled about in the neighborhood apparently as a cattle-driver, in reality as a good shepherd of souls. At last discovered and tried, he was committed to prison for thirteen months. Forty-six such priests, mostly newly ordained, are said to administer the vacant parishes of this much-troubled diocese, in which meritorious work they are successfully assisted by the great landowners, who provide them with food and shelter, and, when wanted, with safe hiding-places. Several of them have lately been discovered and thrown into prison. Greatly and unnecessarily increased was the number of vacant parishes by the arbitrary decision of some ober-presidents, that junior priests, after the death of their elders, should abstain, under pain of expulsion, from all parochial work, even from saying Mass. In vacant parishes the dead themselves fell under the application of the law, for Dr. Falk decreed that founded Masses cannot be said in such parishes, but must stand over until the vacancies are filled up with legally-appointed priests.
According to one of the May Laws, a parish which has stood vacant for one year possesses the right of electing a new priest. This law was evidently passed with a view of destroying the authority of priests as well as bishops; in fact, it was a bait thrown out to Catholics to join the state church. But Catholics at once understood the malign intention, and spurned it, to the amazement and discomfiture of the persecuting party, which had built its brightest hopes on the working of that law. Not one vacant parish in the whole kingdom of Prussia has as yet been found willing to elect a new pastor. Whenever the Landrath convened an election meeting for that purpose, the invitation was either not responded to at all, or, if for prudence’s sake the electors appeared at the meeting, it was decidedly refused with the declaration that the parishioners had no power to elect their own priests, and that they would never acknowledge a pastor who was not sent to them by their bishop. Such being the firm attitude of all Prussian parishes towards that particular law, how could the government flatter itself with the hope that its own nominees would be received and acknowledged by the faithful? And yet Dr. Falk, disregarding all previous experience, went on imposing state 650priests on protesting parishes wherever he found an opportunity for it, to the great injury of the faithless priests themselves, who were excommunicated, to the parishes that rejected them, and to government, which made itself only the more odious. By this time, however, the ministry must see their mistake, for, in spite of the many enticements and premiums offered to priests of doubtful character and doctrine, the government during the interval of three years has not been able to gather more than twenty-one apostates round its state-church banner. Twenty-one out of ten thousand! With the exception of one, all these misguided men belong to the provinces of Silesia and Posen. Here is a complete list of them: Mr. Mücke in Gross Strelitz; Kolany in Murzyno; Nowacki in Obornik; Lizack in Schrotz; Kubezak in Xionz; Brenk in Kosten; Kick in Kähme; Gutzmer in Grätz; Würtz in Grabia; Moercke in Podwitz Golembiowsky in Plusnitz; Sterba in Leschnitz; Pischel in Girlachsdorf; Kenty in Boronow; Grünastle in Cösel; Sabotta in Kettch; Czerwinski in Zirke; Büchs in Gross Rudno; Rymarowicz (Posen); and Glattfelder in Balg (Baden).
Besides these state priests who profess to remain faithful to Rome, the Prussian government introduced two apostates in vacant parishes, one of whom is the Old Catholic pastor, Struckberg, presented by the Protestant Baron von Dyherrn to the fat living of Oberherzogswaldau in Silesia, and the other the notorious Suszynski, the married state-priest of Mogilno, who enjoys the emoluments of his sinecure comfortably at Königsberg. In all these state parishes the faithful refuse to entertain any communication, social or religious, with the intruders, and fulfil their religious duties in other churches. As to the congregations of these state priests, they principally consist of a few bad Catholics or government officials, such as burgomasters, policemen, etc.; in some even Protestants and Jews attend, and several count no other members than the clergyman’s housekeepers.
As the sect of Old Catholics must be looked upon as forming part of Prince Bismarck’s intended state church, it may fittingly be mentioned in connection with the state parishes. None of the 26 Kulturkampf laws issued in Prussia and the German Empire since 1871 has been more abused, more arbitrarily and unjustly applied by the government, than the so-called Old Catholic law, which grants to Old Catholic communities the joint use of Catholic parish churches and cemeteries, and the joint possession of the Catholic Church property, wherever a considerable number of these sectarians exist. How ober-presidents apply that law and determine the meaning of the word “considerable” may be seen by the two cases of Braunsberg and Königsberg, where in the one case about 20 and in the other about 40 Old Catholics formed, in the governor’s estimation, a sufficient number to allow the application of the law, and to rob as many as 10,000 Catholics in one instance of their churches and property. The ober-president’s partiality and self-contradicting conduct received a further illustration by the treatment of the Catholics of Hohenstein, who, although numbering 1,500, were refused permission to build a church in the town because the number 1,500 was not considered 651“considerable” in the meaning of the law. The thousand Catholics of Willenberg who petitioned the government for the same purpose received a similar answer. Thanks to this unjust application of the law, the Old Catholics obtained hitherto possession of 13 beautiful Catholic churches—viz., in Witten (10,000 Catholics to 76 Old Catholics); in Breslau the Corpus Christi Church (20,000 Catholics to a few hundred Old Catholics); in Neisse the Church of the Cross; in Hirschberg St. Ann’s Church (3,000 Catholics to 250 Old Catholics); in Königsberg; in Wiesbaden (15,000 Catholics to 250 Old Catholics); in Bochum (10,000 Catholics to about 200 Old Catholics); in Cologne St. Gereon’s Church (10,000 Catholics to 87 Old Catholics); in Crefeld St. Stephen’s; in Boppard the Carmelite Church (5,000 Catholics to 45 Old Catholics); in Coblentz the Jesuit Church; in Bonn the Gymnasium Church; and quite recently the parish church of Gottesberg in Silesia. In nearly all these churches the Old Catholics made their first entrance with the help of the police, the doors being forced open with hammer and crow-bar. Since they fell into Old Catholic hands most of them stand empty. On Easter Sunday about 20 to 30 worshippers attended in the robbed church in Wiesbaden; in several places grass is growing on the pavement surrounding the churches, and in others mushrooms are springing up freely at the very foot of the altars. There can be no doubt that the sect is already declining. Were it not for the aid in money and other advantages which its members receive from the Prussian government, it would probably by this time have shared the fate of Rongeanism. According to the report read at the fourth Old Catholic synod at Bonn, in May, 1877, there were at that time 35 Old Catholic communities in Prussia, counting in all 6,510 people with civil independence; in Baden there were 44 communities, in Bavaria 31, in Hesse 5, in Oldenburg 2, in Würtemberg 1. The total number of adherents, women and children included, amounted in Prussia to 20,524, in Baden to 17,203, in Bavaria to 10,100, in Hesse to 1,042, in Oldenburg to 240, in Würtemberg to 223—in all 49,342 out of a population of 14 millions. The number of Old Catholic priests in the whole German Empire is now 56. In the course of last year four of them and a good many laymen from Wiesbaden and Dortmund retracted their error and returned to the mother church; others became Protestants.
Although passed in May, 1875, the law ordering the dissolution of Catholic religious congregations has not yet been fully carried into execution, not out of regard for the establishments themselves, but because the state interest required a departure from the rule. The last term granted to Catholic sisters engaged in education expires on the 1st of October next. Their expulsion is causing the deepest grief among all classes of German Catholics, for the good sisters have, by their noble and self-sacrificing exertions, so endeared themselves to the hearts of the people that they are looked upon as—what they really are—the greatest benefactors of the people, without whose help the moral and religious training of the young will remain defective. More than all do the poor and unhappy feel their departure, for it was chiefly on orphanages 652and other charitable institutions that the expelled nuns exercised their salutary influence. Now that these establishments no longer stand under the direction of those ministering angels, who work only for the love of God and man, the respective parishes have to grant salaries to their successors, for which the poor as well as the rich are compelled to contribute. In a great many towns, however, they cannot be replaced at all, not only for want of means but also for want of the competent persons, and about 10,000 orphans of the poor are left destitute by the expulsion of the nuns. No wonder, then, if under such circumstances the parting scenes were everywhere heart-rending; not only sobbing children thronged round their foster-mothers in uncontrollable grief, but the inhabitants, burgomasters, and magistrates came to express their thanks for the eminent services they had rendered to their parishes, and their deep regret at seeing them driven out of home and country—their own beloved benefactresses. No exact statistics regarding the number of expelled nuns have as yet been published, nor is it possible to say what has become of them all. It is, however, computed that about 500 houses have been broken up, which must have included at least between two and three thousand inmates. The Ursulines of Dorsten transferred their establishment to Holland, where forty pupils followed them on the very day of their expulsion. The house of Posen went to Cracow; those of Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, Duderstadt, Kitzlar, etc., emigrated partly to North America, partly to neighboring countries. The Sisters of Our Lady, whose convents had been established more than 200 years in Essen and Coesfeld, went 250 strong across the Atlantic, and the School Sisters either returned to their families or left off their religious habits and continued their calling as lay teachers. The names of the other congregations that had to leave this year are chiefly the following: The English Ladies (Fulda and Mayence), the Franciscans (Frankfort, Erfurt, Treves, Fulda, Aix-la-Chapelle, Bonn, Oberwesel, Emmerich), the Sisters of Mercy conducting orphanages (Posen, Breslau, Lauban, Myslowitz, Steinfeld, Bromberg, Peplin, Düsseldorf, Crefeld, Bonn, Dortmund, Berncastle, Malmedy, Lannerz, Berge-Borbeck, Mayen, Rheinberg, Paderborn, Schroda, Düren, Bitburg, Neuss, Neustadt, Osnabrück, Salzkotten), the Sisters of St. Charles (Boppard, Oberglogau, etc.), St. Vincent de Paul (Deutz, Nippes, Ehrenfeld), the Daughters of the Holy Cross, and the Poor Sisters of Christ. Those Sisters of Mercy who exclusively devote themselves to hospital work have been allowed to remain; their exact number was a short time ago 5,763.
Of all the laws enacted since 1871 against the Catholic Church in Prussia, none will be attended with more injurious effects than the law regulating school supervision and religious instruction in popular schools. Not content with having removed nearly all ecclesiastical district and local school inspectors, and appointed Protestants and “liberal” Catholics in their place, the government has also forbidden the priests to teach the Catholic religion anywhere except in church out of school hours. In a decree issued by Dr. Falk in March, 1876, the right of parents to bring up their children in accordance 653with their religious principles is virtually denied, at all events practically destroyed, for it places the whole teaching and supervision of Catholic religious instruction under the supreme control of the Protestant government, and thus arbitrarily cancels clause 24 of the Prussian constitution, which guarantees to recognized religious societies the right of conducting religious instruction either through their priests or laymen invested with the missio canonica. By virtue of this ministerial ordinance the government, feeling its hands strengthened and unshackled, proceeds to all kinds of arbitrary and unjustifiable changes in matters of religious teaching. It sets aside Catholic catechisms and reading-books hitherto used in schools with ecclesiastical approbation, and replaces them by works more in harmony with the spirit of the age; it commissions schoolmasters (now already about 1,000) to teach the Catholic religion only in the name and by order of the civil power, threatening them with prosecution if they ask for or accept the missio canonica from church authorities; it either dissolves Catholic schools or amalgamates them with Protestant institutions under the name of simultan-schools, all of which stand under exclusively Protestant direction; it appoints Protestant and Jewish teachers to purely Catholic schools; it compels, as was recently done in Crefeld, Catholic children to attend Protestant school prayers; it limits the hearing of Mass to two days in the week, and strictly forbids Catholic teachers to exhort their pupils to a greater frequency of the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion; in one word, it uses all possible means to Protestantize Catholic children in popular schools. Priests and parents, school boards and parishes, have sought redress of this bitter grievance in innumerable petitions and protests addressed from all parts of the country to the emperor, the ministers, to both houses of Parliament, demanding in the name of liberty, of justice, of the constitution, of natural and human rights, that the teaching of their religion should again be declared free and placed under the only rightful authority, that of the church; but neither the prayers of distressed parents nor the powerful agitation got up by the leading Catholic representatives proved of any avail, Dr. Falk invariably rejecting all petitions on the ground that the grievances complained of did not exist—an assertion which the minister, if he had ventured to do so, could not have reconciled with the truth of facts. As ministers and national liberals alike expect the realization of their plans from the destructive school policy rather than from any of the other May laws, the Prussian government feels the less disposed to make concessions on this question, as it enables them to administer the poison of infidelity to the rising generation in a quiet and imperceptible but systematic and effective manner. Catholics have therefore nothing to hope from the present rulers of Prussia towards an equitable settlement of the religious question, as party interest, and not justice, is the moving principle of the May legislators. If the faith of the next generation is to be saved, it must be done by the parents themselves; if they take the religious instruction in their own hands, if by vigilance and self-devotion they detect, counteract, and destroy the evil influence of heterodox school-teaching, 654no power on earth will be able to interfere with their children’s faith; but if they neglect this solemn duty, which now devolves upon them with a fearful responsibility, they will have to bear the guilt of their children’s apostasy. Happily there is little or no ground for such apprehensions, now that bishops, priests, and laity have all so manfully withstood the storm and so far passed unscathed through the crucible of the persecution. Persevering in their course of loyal attachment to the church, Catholic parents of all classes of society look after their children’s faith and teach them catechism at home, in which excellent work they are effectually assisted by the advice and practical help of numerous societies instituted for that purpose all over Prussia.
Whilst Catholics heartily rejoice at the failure of their enemies’ endeavors to destroy their church in Germany, they deeply feel the enormous losses and sufferings which the application of the May Laws has so wantonly inflicted on so many thousands of their innocent co-religionists. Apart from the innumerable convictions of bishops, priests, and laymen for so-called May-law transgressions, Prince Bismarck alone instituted more than 7,000 prosecutions for alleged offences against his person. In his eagerness to silence opposition he spared neither sex nor age, neither office nor rank, proceeding with equal animosity against statesmen and artisans, distinguished writers and poor peasants, washerwomen and children. The sums paid in fines and the time spent in prison for Kulturkampf offences are said to be enormous; our readers may form an idea of the magnitude of the penal results of the persecution by the perusal of the following statistics: Within the first four months of 1877 Prussian courts of justice pronounced sentences of imprisonment amounting to 55 years, 11 months, and 6 days, and fines to the amount of 27,843 marks. The victims were 241 priests, 210 laymen, and 136 editors of newspapers. Imprisonment of 12 years, 8 months, and 14 days was decreed for offences against the emperor, and 8 years, 4 months, 7 days for 68 Bismarck offences. Besides these penalties, the police made 55 arrests, 74 domiciliary visits, and 56 dissolutions of unions and assemblies. A compositor of a Mayence paper, father of eight children, was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for having used a disrespectful expression towards his majesty whilst in a state of intoxication; a doctor had to spend a whole year in a fortress for a similar offence; a rag and bone gatherer got five and a half months, and a poor servant-girl of nineteen years of age one month’s imprisonment.
A few more instances, taken at random from the masses of Kulturkampf convictions, will further exemplify the nature of the offences and the penalties with which they were visited. Bishop Brinckmann received one year’s imprisonment, Vicar-General Giese two years, Father Fievez three months, Father Haversath four weeks, for alleged embezzlement of diocesan money; in reality for preventing certain church funds from falling into the hands of the government, which had no claim whatever to them. In Münster 2,500 heads of families were fined for not sending their children to school on Corpus Christi day. The successive editors of the Kuryer Poznanski, the Germania, and the Frankfort Zeitung 655have for several years past gone to prison, some for publishing papal and episcopal documents, others for offending the emperor, Prince Bismarck, and other members of the administration. Father Isbert, of Namborn, Treves, spent 903 days in the prison of Saarbrücken for “illegally” saying Mass, hearing confessions, etc. In April, 1876, the priests of the diocese of Posen had to pay 163,463 marks for similar offences. Father Simon was sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment because he removed the sacred Host from the church of the Girlachsdorf the day before state priest Pischel’s installation. Fathers Bruns of Geldern and Kroll of Adekerke were prosecuted and punished for refusing absolution to two penitents. A French priest accidentally staying in Hanover was condemned to a fine of 4,800 marks for saying Mass in a private chapel. Dean Leineweber, of Heiligenstadt, went to prison for 18 months for granting dispensations; Father Nawrocki two years for secretly administrating the parish of Goszieszy. Besides endless prosecutions, hundreds of the inhabitants of Marpingen had to pay fines for granting hospitality to pilgrims.
But the Catholic clergy had to suffer for not acknowledging the May Laws as well as for transgressing them. By the so-called Bread-basket Law, intended to starve the priests into submission, many thousands lost their income and had to bear great misery, especially in poor parishes, where church offerings usually consist of farthings. In the diocese of Fulda, for instance, the average income of a great number of parish priests fluctuated between twelve and twenty pounds a year. In other districts they fared in so far better as their parishioners indemnified them for the loss of their state emoluments and homes by voluntary contributions or gifts in kind, such as meat, bread, firewood, etc. This help, if lastingly established, might have considerably alleviated the existing distress; but unfortunately the Prussian government forbade public offerings and collections for the relief of priests in distress, on the ground that such illegal remunerations encouraged resistance to the state laws. This harsh, not to say inhuman, proceeding, however, only harmed its victims for a time; for very soon the inventive spirit of the faithful found out other means of relief, over which the most watchful officials could obtain no control. In addition to secret parish subventions the priests now receive regular assistance from the Paulinus Verein, which charitable association collects contributions not only in Germany but also from foreign countries, among which England especially has distinguished itself.
Destructive as the Kulturkampf has been to the outward organization of the church and the happiness and worldly interest of the people, its consequences have in many other respects proved an immense blessing to the Catholic Church in Germany. Instead of having been destroyed or weakened, as her enemies hoped, she has, on the contrary, become stronger and more powerful in her influence over the masses, more respected by her adversaries, better understood by Protestant Christians, better loved and obeyed by her own children. Lukewarm Catholics, formerly almost ashamed of professing their religion in public, now no longer shrink from manifesting their loyal attachment to the church; nay, more, they stand up in her defence, 656and edify others by the regular fulfilment of their religious duties. The devout crowds that fill the churches on Sundays and all festive occasions; the enormous increase of regular communicants; the frequent processions from widowed dioceses to cathedrals of other dioceses for the reception of the Sacrament of Confirmation; the deep and universal grief shown by the people at the death of Pope Pius IX. and their cordial rejoicing at the election of his successor; the numerous addresses of loyalty sent on every possible occasion to the banished bishops by millions of the faithful; the touching attachment of the masses to their pastors—all these and a great many more significant manifestations afford ample proof that the Catholic Church has gained, and not lost, by the Kulturkampf. And it may not be exaggeration to say that never at any time did the religious sentiment among German Catholics shine forth so brightly, their piety so fervently, their spirit of self-sacrifice so strongly, their love for their church so unboundedly, as now after seven years of relentless persecution. Giving to the state what belongs to the state, but fearlessly obeying the church in all matters that regard their eternal salvation, the German Catholics, bishops, priests, and people, stand firm and unshaken in their resolution to remain true to God and his church, and to lose wealth, freedom, life itself, rather than give up one particle of their faith.
Nor are the beneficial consequences of the persecution limited to a revival in religion; they are also felt, with almost equal power, in the political and literary life of the Catholic portion of the German nation. Purified, ennobled, raised from a state of political servility to a sense of self-dignity, the persecuted German Catholics feel their love of freedom rekindled, their sunken courage revived, and a hitherto unknown power—the power of outraged honesty and truth—growing and spreading among them, and defending their inalienable rights with energy and success, in society, in parliament, in the press, and in general literature, wherever religious and political liberty and independence are wont to assert themselves. The Catholics of Prussia now constitute a political body second only in importance to the national liberals, whose influence in the country is rapidly declining. If the wishes for a return to a religious policy, as expressed by the emperor shortly after the late attempt on his life, should be carried out by his ministers, we may live to see Prince Bismarck courting the help of the Catholic Church to save that same state which resolved upon and worked for her destruction. How valuable the support of the Catholic party would be to the perplexed German government in these critical times is sufficiently shown by the number of its representatives in the various parliaments: in the Reichstag the Catholic Centre party counts 98 members; in the Bavarian Chamber of Deputies it commands the majority; in Baden, where only one Catholic sat in parliament before the year 1870, there are now 13 Catholic deputies. The best illustration of the growth of the Catholic party in Germany was furnished at the last elections, when, in spite of the arbitrary dissection of Catholic voting districts, Catholic members were returned with overwhelming majorities wherever a sufficient number of constituents 657made such elections possible. The same success attended the elections of municipal officers, but unfortunately to no purpose, as the Prussian government, contrary to right and justice, annulled all elections of Catholic burgomasters and appointed its own creatures to the vacant posts.
Another creation of the Kulturkampf for which we cannot be too thankful is the German Catholic press, which for its tone, skill, influence, and general success stands unrivalled by any press in the world. Beyond a few more or less obscure provincial papers, Germany possessed no Catholic press organization before the year 1870; now nearly 200 of these spirited children of the persecution flourish in the German Empire. Foremost among all appears the Germania, of world-wide reputation, which expounds and defends the political programme of the Catholic party with such statesmanlike ability that Prince Bismarck himself, in one of his parliamentary speeches, was fain to acknowledge the superior character and excellence of the paper. Worthy associates of the Berlin central organ of Catholic publicity are the great provincial daily papers, such as the Deutsche Reichszeitung in Bonn, the Kölnische Volkszeitung in Cologne, the Westphalian Merkur, and last, not least, the smaller provincial and local papers, all of which, in the involuntary absence of the chief pastors of the church, teach and guide the people in the paths of religion as well as in those of public life. The influence of the Catholic press over the people was felt in two ways: in the first place, it succeeded in preserving and consolidating among them that spirit of union, order, and loyalty of which the bishops and priests had given such admirable examples; and in the second place it prevented, by its wise admonitions, the exasperated people from abandoning the policy of passive resistance as recommended by the bishops, so that, in the midst of incessant, almost unbearable provocations, the Catholic population of Prussia has not been found guilty of one single act of rebellion or open resistance to the state power.
The difference of the effects which the May-law legislation has had on the Catholic and the Protestant inhabitants of Prussia must strike every one. Whilst to the former the Kulturkampf has been a school of improvement, of moral and religious regeneration, the latter have derived none but deplorable results from it; witness the general lawlessness, the frightful increase of crime, the sunken state of morality, and the all but complete extinction of Christianity which now prevails among the Protestant people. According to the Nord Allgemeine Zeitung, Prince Bismarck’s non-official organ, not a day passes in Prussia without murder and manslaughter, and the demoralization of the lower classes has reached such a depth that there is no longer any security for life and property, that the son murders his father, that the intoxicated father stabs his son, and that the servant kills his master on the slightest provocation. School-boys have become regular frequenters of public-houses; they fight duels in love affairs, commit suicide for the most trifling causes, and help to fill the overcrowded prisons. Since 1874 the number of prisoners has increased by nearly two hundred per cent. To mention a few instances only, in 1872 the town of Frankfort-on-the-Main 658had 1,072 convicts; in the present year it has 5,323. In the province of East Prussia more crimes were committed in 1875 than in the 20 preceding years together. Sacrileges, theft, murder, suicide, immoralities are the crimes of most frequent occurrence in Protestant Prussia. In the one small province of Schleswig-Holstein not less than 212 suicides were recorded in the year 1874; and in the city of Berlin in 1875 there were 284 (213 men and 71 women) cases, besides 38 corpses found in the Spree. In one month of the year 1876 the army counted 26 suicides—i.e., one-fifth of the whole mortality. Another offence, formerly little known in Prussia, but now spreading in an extraordinary manner, is the wholesale evasion of the obligatory military service. According to official returns the number of young men who evaded that duty by going abroad increased within the period of 1862 to 1872 from 1,648 to 10,069. Last year it was about twice the latter number. We may here add that Catholic priests are now also obliged to serve in the army as private soldiers. It is a remarkable fact, perhaps only a coincidence, but at all events one of the fruits of Bismarck’s anti-church policy, that socialism has grown in Prussia in proportion as crimes have multiplied. In the year 1871 the socialists had only two members in Parliament; now they have 13, representing two millions of adherents, who support 45 socialist newspapers. The party has not reached its maturity yet; but if the Prussian government, disregarding the disapproving vote of the Reichstag, should proceed against it with violent repressive police measures, it is sure to grow rapidly into a dangerous power that may one day shake the new German Empire to its very foundation.
Prince Bismarck did not intend to injure the Protestant Church by his May legislation, but, whether intended or not, it is now an undeniable fact that the two great results of that legislation are the growth of socialism and the accelerated extinction of Christianity in the German Protestant Church. When preachers of the Gospel are allowed to declare from the pulpit that to them the Bible is nothing but Jewish literature, that our Lord Jesus Christ was a mere man, that the idea of a Trinity, sacraments, miracles, etc., are human inventions, can it surprise any one if socialists go further still, and in numerously-attended meetings openly deny the existence of God and eternal life? Enabled by the May Laws to utter any blasphemies they like, the German infidels carry on their anti-Christian propaganda on a very extensive scale, and succeed in drawing hundreds of thousands of Protestants out of the established church. They alone make use of the so-called Alt-Catholic law, which gives freedom to leave a church without joining another, and which was passed for the purpose of inducing Catholics to follow the lead of the Alt-Catholic Bishop Reinkens. This ostentatious secession from the Protestant Church, however, is not its greatest loss; far more disastrous to its existence is that wholesale defection which takes place quietly, without people thinking it worth while to go out of the church. They simply abstain from frequenting places of worship, and refuse all ministrations from their clergymen for themselves and their children. During the last three months of 1874—that 659is to say, in the year following the promulgation of the May Laws—16,631 Protestant children remained unbaptized, and 8,346 Protestant couples refused to be married in church. In the year 1875 Berlin alone had 9,964 civil marriages without church blessing, and 15,000 children who received no baptism. In Königsberg the number of civil marriages not accompanied by any church ceremony was 36 per cent., in Dantzic 47 per cent., in Breslau 53 per cent., in Stettin 68 per cent. In Berlin 70,000 Protestants reject their church altogether. There only 18 per cent. of the whole Protestant population go to church; in Worms 6 per cent., in Mayence 5 per cent., in Giessen 5 per cent., in Darmstadt 3 per cent., in Chemnitz 3 per cent., and in some other places of Saxony only 1 per cent. In short, the Protestant Church in Germany is irretrievably lost. Thus it has come to pass, under God’s providence, that the blow which Prince Bismarck aimed at the Catholic Church glided off from the Rock of Peter, and fell with deadly effect on the Protestant Church, of which he counts himself a stanch adherent.
The strangest and saddest commentary upon that dreary religious sentimentality known as positivism, or the Religion of Humanity, was the infatuation of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill with regard to two very commonplace women whom these men, one the founder and the other the ablest exponent of the religion, foolishly loved and worshipped in life, and actually deified after death. Guizot says that Comte was crazy, but Mill was confessedly a man of rare logical acumen, thoroughly-trained intellectual powers, and with no trace of mental alienation. One does not know whether to laugh at or to pity the maudlin sentimentalism of his love for his wife, the idolatrous honors he paid to her portrait and bust, and the painful conflict of his soul, halting between a frantic wish to believe in the presence and intimations of her disembodied spirit, and the necessity of rejecting, according to his theory, all hope or belief in the hereafter. There is something at once ludicrous and shocking in this, the only religious sentiment that such a mind as Mill’s would admit—the worship of a woman’s memory as the full satisfaction and highest reach of religion. The worship of woman irresistibly suggests the crowning of the Goddess of Reason by the French Revolutionists; and we trust our reflection will not be misconstrued when we say that woman holds her true and rightful position only in the Catholic Church. The tolerance of divorce in Protestantism is an injury to the sex, and when we glance at woman’s relations to most of the philosophico-moral systems that have been the outgrowth of the religious rebellion of the sixteenth century, we see how wise and tender the church has ever been in her treatment of the weaker vessel. St. Paul has laid down for all time the true idea of woman in her religious relations, and every attempt to change those conditions has resulted in failure and shame.
The Religion of Humanity is one of those vague terms which logic rejects with scorn. The phrase has a certain hazy beauty for hazy minds; but its gross spirit means the deification of man, the boundless extent of his natural powers, a worse than Pelagian confidence in his own moral strength, and the natural, social, and civil equality of woman. In our own country the system has not revealed all its deformity, nor are its principles apparently very familiar even to its advocates; but all its hideousness is laid bare in the writings of the German Feuerbach, and it is sad to think that Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot) devotes her uncommon powers to the exposition of its distinctive doctrinal phase—namely, that all religion is a diseased state of our consciousness, and its exercise through any form or in any sphere gives us neither present comfort nor future hope.
A primal instinct and yearning of the human heart tends toward an object of infinite blessedness 661and beauty. Descartes inferred from our knowledge and love of Infinite and Absolute Being, in which all glory, perfection, mercy, and power co-exist, that such a Being really does exist; and this famous proof of the existence of God has never been shown to be false or unwarranted, though some philosophers have held that it is not strictly a demonstration. Our readers know how cogently and eloquently Dr. Brownson expatiates upon that beautiful formula, Ens creat existentias. God IS. Every affirmation and reality announces that glorious and all-sufficient Being. Nothing less than himself can satisfy our immortal longings and aspirations. The very difficulties that enshroud our ideas of the Supreme Being seem to be only “dark with excess of light.” Nor has this truth, on which man’s feet have been stayed since the creation, ever been shaken. Dr. Newman, using Lamennais’ argument from universal authority, but without falling into Lamennais’ mistake of its being the only argument, challenges the world to explain away the universal consent of mankind to the divine existence. Cicero only echoes Plato when he says that there never was a nation, no matter how barbarous, that had not some idea of the existence of God. Talleyrand used to say: “There is somebody that has more intellect than Napoleon and more wit than Voltaire, and that somebody is—mankind.” The great heart of the world leaps to its Creator, and the testimony of individual experience in all ages but repeats the saying of St. Augustine: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord! and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”
If we compare this noble and sublime creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” with the hollow metaphysical and humanitarian beliefs of our unhappy age, we at once recognize the profound truth and beauty of many of the utterances of the ancient Fathers upon the subject of religion. Their simple and antique majesty of thought and phrase is like a statue of Michael Angelo’s alongside of a bizarre specimen of fashionable ceramics. St. Clement of Alexandria holds that there is only one religion, and the great argument of St. Augustine’s City of God is the essential unity of the divine cultus, coming from Adam, through the patriarchs, the prophets, fully revealed in Christ the Son of God, and destined to endure for ever. All theology germinates from the invocation of the three divine Persons. When we bless ourselves we worship God, with the worship of unending ages, from everlasting to everlasting. The church condemned the proposition that all the virtues of the pagan philosophers were vices. Christ, the God-Man, is the object of religion, and, as thus presented, he fulfils all the yearnings and hopes spoken of by the humanitarians, who, in making the human race at once the subject and object of worship, fail to see that Catholicity gratifies man beyond his wildest dreams of exalted manhood and infinite progress; for humanity cannot be raised higher than it has been raised by the Eternal Son of God, who, clothed with our glorified humanity, which he will never lay aside, “sitteth at the right hand of the Majesty on high.”
It seems an unworthy concession to a very weak school of scepticism for Max Müller, in the May number of the Contemporary Review, to propound the queries, What is religion? 662Have we any religion? and, after giving a long and flattering notice of every fool that says in his heart there is no God, to inform us graciously that there is a term for God in every language with which he is acquainted. The logical vice of nearly all non-Catholic scientific men here and in Europe at the present day is an ignorant and unwarranted obtrusion of their crude theories upon the subjects of religion. They have no perception of the exquisite sense and appositeness of the old saying, Ne sutor ultra crepidam. A satirical friend, after listening to Proudhon’s theories about the creation, remarked to him: “What a pity God had not the benefit of your suggestions when he made the world!” and such was the hebetude of the infidel that he rejoined: “In that event creation would have been infinitely better.” Huxley, who is pronounced a scientific charlatan even in those studies upon the invertebrata to which he has devoted twenty-five years, has the blasphemous audacity to call his Creator “a pedantic drill-sergeant”; and Tyndall refers to his God as an “atom-manufacturer.” Max Müller has far greater reverence, but his latest utterances convict him hopelessly of pantheism, which is about the absurdest form of “religion” that any unfortunate man can adopt.
It is a curious exemplification of the state of religious thought in England when such a man as Müller is selected to deliver a course of lectures upon theology. His only qualification is his philological learning, of which Scaliger, the greatest of modern philologists, said its value in theology has been very much over-rated. To such an extent does Müller carry his linguistic fanaticism that he derives all reason and all truth from language. He settles a controversy by appealing to the root of a word. The most cursory study of etymology suffices to show that it is in the main a vague guess-work; and the words we employ to express the subtlest operations of the intellect are so many metaphors or images drawn from sensible objects. The word religion may be derived from three distinct roots, relegere, to read back, to retrace; or religere, to collect; or religare, to bind together; and an enthusiastic etymologist, warming with the subject, would run us back to Babel. Who would suppose that the word goose, for example, which, on the “bow-wow” theory of language, must have originated with an old farmer driving his poultry to market, is traceable directly to the Sanscrit, through the Teutonic, Gothic, Latin, and Greek, and enjoys a proud pedigree of Aryan etymology? Like all modern specialists, Müller drives his philological hobby through all theological science. He has done a very great injury to religious thought by his constant prating about the essential oneness of all creeds, and his studied purpose to represent Christianity as only a modification of the great “world-creeds,” with a very decidedly expressed preference for the Vedas over the Gospels and for Zoroaster over St. John the Evangelist.
If Protestantism continues to disintegrate as rapidly in the next decade as it has in the last two, our theological professors may skip all the tracts at present devoted to the refutation of the principles and consequences of the Reformation. The older controversial works are already antiquated, and the theological lore of thirty years ago is no longer available. Yet it is very 663doubtful if any solid advantage can be gained by the study of modern philosophy. The Holy Ghost, ever ruling the mind of the church, brought about the definition of Papal Infallibility at the most opportune period of the world’s history. The only salvation for the human intellect is the dogmatic authority of the church, and the clearer this is shown and enforced the better for the world. The day of tedious Christian controversy is gone for ever. Amicable discussions upon controverted points of doctrine are no longer possible. The field has been narrowed down. The contest now is conducted upon the primal bases of the primitive truths—God or Satan, heaven or hell. “Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!” When the admired and acknowledged “leaders of modern thought” are come to such a pass as to ask if life is worth living? is there a hell? is not man the beginning and end of himself? was not Christ sublimely self-deceived? does not matter contain the promise and potency of all life, and is not immortality a splendid dream? it is manifestly useless labor for a Catholic theologian to pore for years over the question of Anglican Orders or the Donation of Constantine.
Our objection to the prolonged study of philosophy must be understood not of Catholic philosophy, which is the handmaid of revealed truth, but of those degrading systems that the materialistic mind of the age is constantly spawning. The facilities of the printing-press, and the habit of writing philosophical articles and systems in the common languages, have familiarized the world with a vast amount of error. One advantage of the learned tongues lay in their preventing many people from obtaining the little learning which is proverbially a dangerous thing. In our day we not only have technical treatises on science, philosophy, and theology, but popular hand-books which aim at the greatest simplicity and directness. Materialists give illustrated lectures to unscientific people, and labor strenuously to accommodate their ideas even to the unformed mind of childhood. The newspapers teem with all sorts of crude theories, and no effort is spared to disseminate the most outrageous fallacies. When Diderot and D’Alembert started the Encyclopédie there were protests and remonstrances from the church and from scientific bodies; but few persons could afford to purchase the huge tomes, as compared with the multitudes that now can buy for a few cents a dangerous publication at any news-stand. The New York Daily Graphic, not content with printing a likeness of Müller, gave also long extracts from the article to which we have adverted; and nothing is commoner than a so-called philosophical essay even in our lightest magazines. With the help of a learned and often unintelligible phraseology the impression is left that a mighty mind, after many mental throes, has given birth to a wonderful truth or profound reflection destined to influence modern thought and lead eventually to the widest-reaching social results. The only remedy for such a delusion is to impress readers with a modest consciousness of their own ability to penetrate the sibyllic meaning, which, if they fail to do, is very likely without any meaning at all. By this manly and rational process it is surprising how quickly one sees through absurdities, and catches a glimpse of 664the ass’ ears under the lion’s skin. Our present study of the Religion of Humanity will illustrate this idea (not in our own case, of course). Let us take up a few of the most famous dicta of humanitarianism. Note the obscurity of the language, which in many cases is intentional. In Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, who may be regarded as the first arch-priest of positivism, the sage of Weimar expressly remarks that philosophical writers contemporary with him had told him that when they were most perplexed and confused, that was the very time when they courageously wrote on! This is enough to make a man give up metaphysics for the rest of his days.
“My theory,” says Feuerbach, “may be condensed into two words—nature and man. The cause of existence is not God—a vague, mysterious, and indefinite term—but nature. The being in which nature becomes conscious of itself is man. It follows that there is no God—that is to say, no abstract being, distinct from nature and man, which disposes of the destinies of the universe and mankind at its discretion; but this negation is but the consequence of the cognition of God’s identity with the essence of nature and man.”
What does Feuerbach mean by nature? Something distinct from man, evidently, for he continually separates them. Ah! man is the being in which nature becomes conscious—of what? Then nature, God, and man are said to be identical in essence. But if God is only an abstract term, how can an abstraction enter into a conscious essence, and how does it follow that after all there is no God? Oh! you mistake. This negation (of what?) is a consequence of a cognition, etc. Now, all this stuff amounts to nothing but low, base materialism. There is not a particle of reasoning, fancy, or poetic beauty in the entire book from which this extract, which is clear by contrast with others, is taken. Yet George Eliot, who is trumpeted through the world as a glorious prophetess of humanity, deemed it worth her patient toil to translate this bathos into English. In the foregoing extract are used at random words of deep and pregnant import, the meaning of which has been fixed by the sharp and subtle but eminently truthful and honest minds of Catholic philosophy and theology. These words are vilely misused by reputed philosophers, until there is no clearness or exactitude of statement in half the philosophical treatises that one takes up to read. The church herself, in her dogmatic infallibility, has defined for all time the meanings of certain expressions which she has made touchstones of the faith—tesseræ fidei. The devil was the first to equivocate, and his children have always followed his example. The term “nature” has an exact philosophical meaning which Feuerbach knew, and his school know. Essence, existence, cognition, and cause are words that have to be weighed with the nicest care when used in a philosophical disquisition. If these writers are sincere they should speak their meaning plainly, and not darken counsel with vain words. The plain English of the extract is this: “There is no God in the sense of creator or judge of man. Man is his own God. We cannot know that anything exists outside of our own consciousness.” Even this is obscure, because there is darkness 665upon the face of these abysmal depths of unbelief, over which the Spirit of God never moved.
The Religion of Humanity, in contradiction to the very consciousness and irresistible instincts and traditions of the human race, thus assumes that there is no God but man, out-Mohammeding Mohammed, who admitted that there is one God, and contented himself with the humbler title of prophet. It stands alone in its horrible deformity. It is a leper from which all other creeds shrink. It has attempted to prove its identity with many of the old pagan beliefs, but, notwithstanding a cumbrous and learned exposition of mythology, no such identification could be proved. There are some gibing comments upon the gods in Lucian, and Juvenal at times hints slyly at the amours of Olympic Jove; but there is no student of mythology but knows the depth of the religious sentiment in the vast masses of the Greek and Roman states. The worship of the earth, sea, and skies was idealized. It may be boldly asserted that ancient history does not present any traces of the gross materialism of modern times. Æschylus repeatedly declares that there was a power superior to Jove himself, and the researches of Niebuhr have established the virtual monotheism of Greece and Rome. Despite the multitude of gods, there was the Deus Optimus Maximus, clearly spoken of by Tully, and not obscurely intimated in nearly every relic of ancient literature and art. The attempt to trace the Religion of Humanity back to the beginnings of the human race proved a complete failure. Man never worshipped himself as the Supreme God. There was a broad distinction made between the heroes or the emperors to whom divine honors were decreed and the gods themselves. These are but the commonplaces of the history of religion; but the attempt showed a consciousness of weakness on the part of this wretched school of unbelief. Euripides himself would have upbraided them:
Every effort that has been made to find a purely natural and human cause for religion has failed. The wide study of religion which modern scepticism has unweariedly pursued always results in perplexing it the more. Volney went to Palestine to disprove the ancient prophecies, and his book shows their literal and startling fulfilment. Fichte used to open his lectures upon God with the blasphemous remark, “Gentlemen, to-day let us construct the Supreme Being,” but all attempts at such construction have only brought out more clearly the immemorial belief of his creatures in his existence. The permanency of the original traditions of the human family is so remarkable a phenomenon, in view of the perishableness of merely human records, that the most sceptical minds have been struck with fear and amazement. It is like the living proof of the Psalmist’s words: “If I go up into heaven, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and flee to the outermost ends of the earth, thou art there!” Even the pantheism of Brahminism is something entirely distinct from the confusion and chaos of the Religion of Humanity.
Strauss, in his last book, The Old 666and the New Faith, asks if the modern world is as religious as the ancient world was, and he appears to derive satisfaction from his conclusion that there is a vast falling off in religion. But as he does not deign to define what he means by religion, we are left in the dark. One loses patience with the perverse stupidity of the British and American public, that have always their ears erect for what Strauss will say, and sceptics will complacently assure you that there are arguments in Strauss that have left Christianity in a deplorable plight; whereas the fact is, Strauss’ Life of Christ is familiarly cited in the schools of Germany as an illustration of the futility of an argument against well-authenticated human testimony. Whately wrote a book to prove that such a person as Napoleon Bonaparte never existed, and Strauss wrote a book to prove that Christ never existed, both with equal success.
The true animus of Comte, Strauss, Renan, and the other heads of this school is demoniac hatred of Christ. Why are they for ever attacking him, if, as they claim, all religions are preparative of the advent of this Religion of Humanity? Why can they go into hysterics of admiration over Socrates, Voltaire, and Shakspere, yet foam with fury at the name of Jesus? They will not even credit our Saviour with effecting the slightest moral good in the world, but refer to his blessed religion as a darkness and blight on the human intellect. Surely no true measure for the elevation of humanity would throw aside Christianity. But it is clear that these men have no true love for man. It is only their insufferable pride that will not bend the knee before Christ, or bend it in mockery like Renan and the author of Ecce Homo. They cry out, “Son of David, what have we to do with you?” and their cry is that of lost souls. All the infidel literature about Christ that has appeared so abundantly in the past score of years bears traces of this humanitarian spirit. They fain would make out Christ to be a mere man, but they are in this quandary: that he had no “humanitarian” notions. He came to do the will of his Father. He said nothing about the Sublime Humanity, the greatness and glory of this world, the god-like intellect of man, the progress of vast ideas, the universal diffusion of knowledge, the infinite progressiveness of the species, the force of cosmic influences, and the gorgeous future that will dawn for woman. Therefore, worse than paganism, the Religion of Humanity will not erect a statue to him.
Comte, desirous of giving hierarchical form to positivism, invented a worship and a calendar in which were commemorated three hundred and sixty-five “eminent servitors of humanity” in place of the saints of the Catholic Church. He began with Moses and ended with himself. Among the saints were Bichat, Condillac, Gutenberg, and Frederick II. of Prussia. He also invented a public service, a hymnal, and a certain form of worshipping the Sublime Humanity, by which he probably meant himself. He himself adored the Sublime Humanity as embodied and idealized in a very commonplace lady. Guizot says of him that he made repeated attempts to commit suicide, and in his review of positivism seems to think the insanity of its founder a sufficient refutation of his strange opinions. He admits, however, that long before Comte’s 667death his religion had made considerable progress in France and in England, where it was enthusiastically embraced by two men who, one would suppose, would be the last to adopt a fantastic creed—J. S. Mill and Wm. Hartpole Lecky, the historian of rationalism.
Toning down the sublimities of the irrepressible Comte, and not deigning to admit his hierarchy or his saints—which, to say the truth, smacked too much of Catholicity—the positivists of England and America contented themselves with a denial of all supernatural religion, and announced with a flourish of trumpets the infinite perfectibility of the human race, the glory of humanity, the cosmic emotion which is the deepest religious feeling of humanity, and the superiority of aggregate immortality to a private or personal existence after death. Man, very much in the abstract, was exalted to the throne of the Deity. All this blatant puffing of modern progress, development, and evolution is kept up by these man-worshippers. The spirit is the spirit of pride. But it must in justice be said of Mr. Frothingham that he is not so enthusiastic in the cause of humanity as he might be. His book on the subject is quite tame when contrasted, say, with Comte’s Woman and Priest. He does not gush enough, and he has not the irreverent boldness of his master, Theodore Parker. Mr. Frothingham is not by any means an emotional man, and this is fatal to his humanitarian progress. Nor is he a deeply-read man even in his own theology, though, to be sure, no sane man would blame him for that defect.
The doctrine of the infinite progressiveness of man is another of those high-sounding phrases that no logic will tolerate. There can be no internal progress in religion. All the scientific discoveries that may be made to the end of time will not have the slightest influence upon one jot or one tittle of revealed truth. Nor will they have any essential or related power over the truths of natural theology, or what is generally known as such. The relations of man to God, the coming of Christ, the establishment and conservation of his church, are truths and facts that can never be changed. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but the word of God shall not pass. This is why the church is so calm when all Protestantism is in a ferment about science. The two spheres of truth, divine and human, supernatural and natural, can never collide. Man may progress in many things, but religion, the Everlasting Yea, as Carlyle calls it, cannot from its very nature change, transform, advance, increase, or diminish. The humanitarians long for the day when there will be no sects and no religious differences. Then the best plan is for all the sects to enter the Catholic Church. They want a religion for man, and surely that religion is the best which God himself made for man.
There is a great deal of speciousness in this cry of progress, culture, and modern enlightenment, and even Catholics are deceived by the spirit of pride, for man from the beginning loved to consider himself a god knowing good from evil. Humanitarianism gains adherents in Catholic countries who would roar with laughter at the idea of turning Protestants. France never forgets those delusive words, liberty, fraternity, and equality, and this religion of humanity has blazoned them over the world. The restlessness 668under church government, the rational submission which the faith exacts, the lessons of mortification, and the stern portrayal of man which Christianity presents are all influences that tend to the progress of humanitarianism. No man likes to hear the dread truth regarding his slavery to the devil, the necessity of grace, the duty of confessing, and his unutterable weakness. It is these that are the unpalatable truths which spoil the teaching of the Ideal Man, as they call our Saviour. Comte would not suffer him to be enrolled among his saints, perhaps for the reason that St. Frederick the Great of Prussia used to refer to our Lord as L’Infame. If there is one truth most saliently brought out in the Gospel, it is that without Christ we can do nothing, and this would never suit the apostles of the infinite progressiveness of the human race.
This latter absurdity, most ridiculous when applied to religion, is not a whit more reasonable as applied to science. There must be a limit. The human mind is not infinite. No doubt we shall continue our improvements in machinery. There can be no vast progress made in literature or art. It seems from the history of the race that our powers are limited, and, though we boast of our great mechanical improvements, Washington Irving said that he would not be surprised if they yet unearthed a locomotive engine from the ruins of Persepolis. Infinite progress would seem to be only a figment of the brain of a poetic humanitarian. It is well known that Don Quixote, who certainly gave himself up to redressing the wrongs of humanity, was peculiarly eloquent upon the charms and perfections of Dulcinea; though the honest old knight, crackbrained though he was, would have crossed himself devoutly at the idea of Dulcinea being a divinity in any other sense than that familiar to true lovers.
The motives for moral action presented by the humanitarian theory are very noble but, alas! very impracticable. While we entirely dissent from the opinion of Bentham and Paley, that selfishness is the guiding principle of our actions—an opinion which is at once an insult and a falsehood—still the vast majority of mankind cannot be influenced by the very airy and sublime notions of our philosophers. Even natural goodness appears to be prompted by heavenly intimations and aids. Gratia supponit naturam. Of course a good work, to merit salvation, must be attended with grace from its origin to its consummation. But our humanitarians will not even promise us happiness hereafter, and we know how slim are the chances for happiness in this world. This great humanity for which we must labor is only an abstraction. No doubt a man may have a real and pure love for his fellow-man on merely speculative grounds or through natural kindness of heart; for have we not a Bergh for the brutes? All of us, however, feel how vague and impotent such a feeling must be or is likely to become. Christ unites love of our neighbor with love of God, its reason and cause, and there is a world of sweet philosophy in this precept on which depend the law and the prophets. It is the only motive that has been found fruitful in any age. Charity is a Christian growth. There was not one hospital in pagan Athens or Rome, though there were numerous coteries of eminent philosophers.
669From whatever side we view this strange “religion,” its hollowness and absurdity become apparent. Its genesis in a morbid mind clouded at times with insanity, and its elaboration in other morally unbalanced intellects, awaken at the outset doubts of its coherency. The vagueness of its formulas wearies and confounds the critic. It has no philosophical structure, and, we are afraid, no theological results. Its literature is marked with weak sentiment and an effusive love and praise of mere naturalism—we were going to say mere animalism—which cannot hold any mind that has a perception of the true dignity and exaltation of human nature as created by God and redeemed by his only Son. So far as we are aware, it has exerted no appreciable influence upon the morality of the world, and its failure to commend itself generally to the humanity it so loudly praises would indicate that men perceive its intrinsic weakness and ineptitudes.
We know that many Protestants condemn and detest this creed as heartily as does the church, which in simple and noble language condemned it in the very first session of the Vatican Council. But we cannot help thinking that Protestantism has had much to do in bringing the monster to birth. It is the logical evolution of Protestant right of private judgment, of personal independence of the doctrinal authority of the church, and of unwise tolerance of all sorts of mischievous religious vagaries. Stripped, of all disguises and forced to speak in true tones, this deified man of the Religion of Humanity is the Antichrist, setting himself up as God and claiming to be God. It is the apotheosis of man, who renews the folly of building a tower of pride in which he may secure himself against the wrath of the Eternal. But before the face of His wrath who can abide? It will not do to speak of the Omniscient as the Unknowable or the Unknowing.
The worst feature of this placitum is that it is militant and aggressive. Comte, as we have said, established a regular system of worship, and what passes under the more respectable name of Unitarianism is really formulated positivism. We should care little for it, did it openly profess its origin and purpose, but it works under a false name and has no scruples about deceiving the confiding and unwary. The Boston Index would be highly indignant if asked to defend Comte’s calendar of saints and to explain the culte of the Sublime Humanity; and George Eliot places in the mouth of Daniel Deronda the most exquisite praise and appreciation of the Hebrew creed. Comte says that the day advances when we shall worship no being inferior to man; and as no man is very much disposed to think another greater than himself, especially under the religious teachings which we have analyzed, each of us will act practically upon Satan’s declaration to Eve, “You shall be as God.”
There is no doubt that as the doctrinal authority of Protestantism fades away year by year, this pronounced individualism will more boldly assert itself. The gospel of vulgar and intense selfishness will triumph, and the worst phases of paganism will return. St. Paul complains of the heathens that they were without affection, and this was because of their creed. The spirit of modern infidelity hates and despises the poor, the ignorant, and, like the Spartans of old, would soon 670dispose of the sick, the lame, and the blind. Herbert Spencer luckily is no philosopher, though he labors hard to synthetize humanitarianism. Should this monstrous parody on religion ever take clear and scientific form, all traces of faith and charity in Protestantism will disappear. Fetichism itself would be better than this horrible worship and deification of selfishness. If a man believes in anything outside of himself as something diviner and better than he, there is hope for him; but woe to him and to his neighbor when he enthrones himself upon an altar and worships his humanity. It is to be hoped that much of the excessive laudation of ourselves in these days springs from no deeper source than an overweening opinion of our abilities. It may be only vanity. It may not be spiritual and intellectual pride. This question we leave to the reflection of our readers, with a concluding remark that all exaltation of the merely natural powers of the human intellect is attended with extreme danger to moral sanity. The man who has cast off the yoke of the church, the traditions of his race, and the honest suggestions of his conscience has already joined the ranks of the arch-deceiver who first flattered us with hopes of divinity, and now tempts us with unbounded visions of the enlightenment of the world, social progress, the political amelioration of the human race, the downfall of all tyranny in church and state, and the splendid advent of the coming man; but he only lures us to that awful destruction which hurled him from heaven because of the usurping thought, “I will become like unto the Most High.”
BY KATHLEEN O’MEARA, AUTHOR OF “IZA’S STORY,” “A SALON IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE EMPIRE,” “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” ETC.
The Redacres were at home on Saturday evening—at home in the pleasant, simple way that used to be the fashion in Paris some twenty, or even ten, years ago. They lived in an entresol in the Faubourg St. Honoré and their friends flocked to them in troops regularly every Saturday, crowding the spacious, old-fashioned salon, where there was always a cordial welcome to be had, cheerful conversation, excellent tea, and a blazing hearth when the weather was cold. It was bitterly cold on this January evening when I beg to introduce you to the Redacre family. The head of the house, Colonel Redacre, was a retired cavalry officer, who had lost his left leg at Balaklava; Mrs. Redacre had been a beautiful, and was still a lovely, woman; there were two sons who were at Eton, and two daughters, both at home, Pearl and Polly.
The colonel had spent ten years in India, and his wife had become so acclimatized to those burning skies that she could not bear the climate of England on leaving them. She was, indeed, a chronic invalid, and this was why they lived abroad. At least, Colonel Redacre always gave his wife’s health as a reason for not living in England, and took no small share of credit to himself for making this sacrifice of personal choice to his duty as a husband. When old friends, who knew how strong were his English predilections, pitied him for having to reside in France, he would heave a sigh, and, looking towards his wife reclining on her cushions, say: “Yes, yes; but she’s worth it, bless her!” And nothing was prettier than the smile with which Mrs. Redacre would thank him for this remark when it was made in her hearing, as it generally was.
It was past nine, and there were a good many people in the salon. Some of the ladies were in full evening dress, having turned in for an hour before going to some larger assembly; but the greater number were in plain morning dresses. There was a whist-table in a far corner of the large, square room, and the players were deep in their game, the partners being Mrs. Monteagle and the Comte de Kerbec, the Comtesse de Kerbec and Mr. Kingspring.
Polly Redacre was singing, accompanied by her sister Pearl. Polly was a beauty. The most fastidious critic could not have found a fault in her face; the lines and the coloring were alike perfect. And yet, when you had paid this inevitable tribute of admiration to the chiselled features and brilliant complexion, to the harmonious grace of her movements, your eyes turned to Pearl’s face and lingered there, riveted by some more potent spell than mere beauty. You never dreamed of analyzing Pearl’s face; you enjoyed it, and you said involuntarily, “What a sweet girl! I should like to talk to her. What a spirit there is in her eyes! what fun in those dimples!” And your own face 672broke into sympathetic smiles. There was a close family likeness between the sisters; both were rather above the medium height, and both were very fair. Polly’s eyes were deep blue, almond-shaped, and black-fringed. Pearl’s were brown, bright and limpid as a Scotch pebble; as to their shape, you never gave that a thought; you only saw that, whether the light in them was soft, mischievous, or merry, they were good to look at.
The song was over.
“Mme. la Baronne Léopold, Mme. Blanche, et M. le Capitaine Léopold!” called out the servant. Pearl and Polly flew to greet Blanche, who was Polly’s bosom-friend, and the three girls betook themselves to a private corner of their own, and were soon deep in confidential talk. Mme. Léopold got out her tapestry, and began stitching away by the shaded lamp near Mrs. Redacre’s sofa; and Léon, after doubling himself in two before the ladies of the house three separate times, fell in with a group of gentlemen on the hearth-rug. Presently Mme. Léopold looked up from her floss silks and called out to the young girls:
“Have we interrupted the music, mesdemoiselles? I implore of you to go on with it! My son will be in despair if you don’t; he perfectly adores music. I hope you will induce him to sing a duet with you—that one from Fra Diavolo that goes so well with your voice, Pearl. Do make him sing it, dear child, I pray you!”
Thus adjured, Pearl drifted away to capture the reluctant and, so far, unconscious songster, who again doubled himself in two, and vowed that he was a miserable singer, but at the orders of ces demoiselles.
“Are we not to see Léopold this evening?” inquired Col. Redacre in his loud military tones.
“Can I say? He is so busy. He keeps me hard at work, too; I write twenty letters a day for him, and still he can’t get through all his correspondence. One must have real patriotism to serve one’s country in France, my dear colonel.”
“Humph! It is easy enough to serve it when one can stay at home and keep one’s legs,” grunted the colonel. “I should not mind writing five hundred letters a day if I could get my leg back.”
“Ah! but you are a hero,” smiled Mme. Léopold.
Presently, throwing aside her tapestry, she sallied over to the card-table, and, laying her hand on Mrs. Monteagle’s shoulder, “Will your game soon be done, chère madame?” she said. “I want to have a little chat with you, and it is so difficult for me to get to you in the day! M. Léopold, since he is in the Chamber, works me to death. Not that I complain of it. I am proud to be of use to him; but it is a life of sacrifice.” And the patriot’s wife sighed.
“My dear baronne, if there be a thing I resent it is having my game of whist interfered with,” burst out Mme. de Kerbec before Mrs. Monteagle could answer. “How is Mrs. Monteagle to give her full attention to the game, if you stand there watching the minutes till it is over?” And the irate whist-player turned down her hand and looked indignantly at the intruder.
Mme. Léopold fled with a pretty pretence of terror; and Mrs. Monteagle, whose attention had been disturbed by the interruption, after nervously surveying a wretched set of cards, threw a low trump—on her partner’s ace.
673M. de Kerbec uttered a meek “Oh!” of expostulation.
“I feel for you, Jack—I do indeed,” said Mme. de Kerbec. “The idea of having a partner that trumps one’s ace the second round!”
“Dear me! I thought it was the third round,” said Mrs. Monteagle; “that was why I risked my little trump.”
“Then you deserved to lose your little trump!” said Mme. de Kerbec. “You should have trumped high if you trumped at all; third in hand always plays high!”
“Ma chère amie,” put in meekly M. de Kerbec, “one plays as one can; my partner may not have any high trumps.”
“Good heavens! count,” screamed his wife, “the idea of your exposing your partner’s hand in this way!”
“Ma chère amie, I am not exposing it; I merely suggest that—”
“Hold your tongue, count! What business have you to suggest? What sort of whist is this? I thought whist meant hush; and you have done nothing but chatter ever since we sat down.”
When Mme. de Kerbec addressed her husband as “count,” those who knew M. de Kerbec felt for him; when she called him “Jack” they congratulated him. His real name was Jacques; but though she had been married to him for thirty years, and lived nearly all that time in France, his wife had never modified her hard English ring of the soft French name, hammering it out with three k’s at the end.
“It sounds so uncommonly like whack” Col. Redacre used to say, “that I feel for poor Kerbec, as if I saw the stick coming down on him.”
He jocosely called Mme. de Kerbec “Captain Jack” one day, and the name stuck to her, as appropriate nicknames sometimes will. And yet Captain Jack was very kind to her husband, letting no one bully him but herself.
Her partner this evening, Mr. Kingspring, was an excellent player, but he had his temper so well in hand that no one suffered from this superiority. If his partner had trumped his ace on the first round, he would have received the stab with a lovely smile; but when he succeeded in trumping his adversary’s ace, or some such indelicate feat, he had a way of quietly chuckling that was very offensive to Capt. Jack. To-night, however, they being partners, she beamed on him.
“Ha! ha! This time we looked out,” said M. de Kerbec. “When monsieur leads trumps we know that means mischief.”
“What do you mean by making such remarks?” demanded Mme, de Kerbec. “Will you hold your tongue and attend to the game? Go on, partner; very well played. Oh! it is my turn.”
The game went on in silence for a couple of rounds.
“Humph!” muttered Mme. de Kerbec, putting the ten of clubs on Mrs. Monteagle’s deuce; M. de Kerbec threw the knave, and Mr. Kingspring took it with his queen. Mrs. Monteagle looked aghast.
“Why, count,” she said, “I made sure you had either ace or king. I led from nothing.”
“Really, Mrs. Monteagle, you are past praying for!” exclaimed Mme. de Kerbec indignantly.
“I was certain my partner had the ace,” pleaded the culprit.
“How could he have it when I took the very first trick with it?”
“So you did, ma chère amie,” said the count, “and I quite forgot 674it, or I should have played my king; but I thought monsieur had the ace, and would have come down on me with it.”
“You thought, forsooth! What business had you to think at all? You know the rule—third in hand; you should have stuck to the rule and taken the consequences.”
“Ma chère amie, you sometimes remind me that it is part of genius to know when to break rules.”
“Don’t throw my words in my face, count. And don’t argue with me about whist. I have been playing whist with you these thirty years, and everybody knows I am a better player than you!”
“Shall I bring you some tea now?” said Pearl, advancing to the whist-table and cutting short the little discussion between the count and Capt. Jack.
“I shall be most thankful for a cup, my dear,” said that lady in an aggrieved tone; “but not strong. I can’t have my night’s rest spoiled for anybody. Jack, you know how I like my tea; just go and get me a cup, if it’s not too much trouble.”
The obedient Jack flew to obey.
The large room was now very full; there were a few groups of splendid ladies in diamonds and shining silks and a great many gentlemen in uniform that gave quite a brilliant air to the unceremonious gathering. Polly Redacre was a picture to look at as she moved about in her white muslin, her bright gold hair shining more effectively than any coronet of jewels, and her cheeks flushed with pleasurable excitement to the brightest rose tint. She knew she was by far the loveliest object in the room, and she took great pleasure in the thought. And who shall blame her? Pearl certainly did not. Indeed, Pearl had a great deal to answer for in the way she ministered to her sister’s vanity; for she was ten times as vain of Polly’s beauty as Polly herself was. Col. Redacre was talking very loudly, while his right hand expostulated with Balaklava, his wooden leg, so called in memory of the field where he lost the original. Every change in the weather affected Balaklava painfully; for the colonel declared that his wooden limb had more sensibility in it than all the rest of his body combined. To-night the sudden frost that had set in was shooting fifty razors a minute in and out of it. He was confiding this detail to M. de Kerbec’s sympathizing ear in his very loudest tones when a voice called out:
“Jack, is this tea sweetened?”
“Certainly, ma chère amie; that is—I really don’t know, now I remember. Mlle. Pearl prepared it, and I have no doubt it is well sweetened.”
“You have no doubt! I dare say not. You care very little about what interests me, count. Pray don’t trouble yourself about it now.” And Jack retreated, meek and snubbed.
“The selfishness of men!” said Mme. de Kerbec, as she helped herself from the bowl Pearl held out—“the selfishness of men! He knows if there is a thing I detest it is tasting my tea without the sugar.”
While the tea-serving was going on Léon Léopold stood with his back to the wall and watched the pretty tea-table with its glistening silver and porcelain, and graceful cup-bearers hurrying to and fro; he never dreamed of lending more than a moral assistance to the latter, as an Englishman in his place 675would have done. Blanche was intimate as a sister with Pearl and Polly Redacre; but Léon seldom showed himself on a Saturday evening. He was on the most distant terms of acquaintanceship with the ladies of the family, with whom he was always as silent as a sphinx. No wonder Polly voted him a muff. But Pearl declared her belief that Léon had plenty of fun in him, if one only could get at it. He was very good-looking, rather striking, indeed, in appearance; not tall but finely proportioned, with a blue shaven chin and a short black moustache, and solemn, coal-black eyes that had a way of looking at you, Pearl said, as if to see whether you or he should look longest without laughing. Colonel Redacre thought highly of him, and said he had the making of a first-rate soldier in him; but Pearl declared this was because Léon listened so attentively to the description of the Balaklava charge every time her father related it, which was pretty nearly every time he met Léon.
“And that song we were to have had from your son?” said Mrs. Monteagle, taking her tea-cup to a seat near Mme. Léopold. “I have a poor opinion of a young man who can sing and won’t sing; either he is shy, which means that he is a goose, or he wants to make a fuss over it, which means that he is a coxcomb.”
“My dear boy, you must execute yourself after that!” exclaimed his mother, laughing.
“I but await the orders of ces demoiselles,” protested Léon, starting from his position against the wall and doubling himself in two before Pearl. He went straight to the piano, and soon the room was echoing to the lament of the disconsolate lover to his Eléonore. Léon had a fine voice, fairly cultivated, and, if he had not sung exactly as if he had been a wooden man, it would have been very pleasant to listen to him; but Pearl said it was just like accompanying an automaton.
“How well they suit!” observed Mme. Léopold in a sotto voce, as she glanced towards the piano, where Léon’s black head showed above Pearl’s fair face and dancing brown eyes. Mrs. Monteagle knew at once why she had been convened to a little chat by Léon’s mother.
“Yes; they make a good effect as contrasts.”
“And both are so musical! My son has a passion for music.”
“If he has all his passions under as good control as he seems to have this one, he is a model young man—indeed, a model man for any age,” said Mrs. Monteagle with a little grunt that was peculiar to her. To judge of Mrs. Monteagle’s character from seeing her at whist would have been a grievous mistake; you would have supposed she had not the spirit of a mouse, whereas she had, on the contrary, a very high spirit, and held her own everywhere and against all comers except at cards, and above all when Mme. de Kerbec was playing. She laughed at Mme. de Kerbec everywhere except at the whist-table, and there she was completely cowed by her.
“I suppose I am not a witness to be trusted,” remarked Mme. Léopold; “but I can testify that he is a model man. He is certainly a model son, and a good son is generally good in every other relation.”
“That depends. He loves you, so it costs him nothing to be good to you. We are all of us good to those we love.”
“And why should he not love his 676wife? Is there any reason why he should not love her?”
“Not that I know of; but I did not know he had a wife.”
“Ah! but I have got one for him. Chère madame, that is why I wanted to have a little chat with you. I have found a perfect wife for my son, and I want you to arrange it. Do you not guess?”
Yes, Mrs. Monteagle did; and involuntarily her eyes wandered to the piano, where Pearl was striving earnestly, but in vain, to draw out by her passionate accompaniment some responsive spark from the dark face that was solemnly appealing to his Eléonore, her own face meanwhile flushed with the effort and the music; perhaps also by her endeavors to keep those dimples under control, for they seemed actually bursting with suppressed laughter.
“How lovely she is!” said Mrs. Monteagle, instead of answering the eager mother.
“She is a most sweet girl, and would, I feel sure, make a perfect wife for my Léon.”
“And you are equally sure that he would make her a perfect husband?”
“Chère madame! can you look at him and doubt it?”
“Is he so very much in love with her?”
Mme. Léopold gave an imperceptible start, and put her handkerchief to her mouth with a little cough; but the pantomime was lost on her companion, who was watching Pearl and observing mentally, “She is not in love with him, at any rate.” The brown eyes were sending forth sparks of merriment, and looked as if they were on the point of exploding outright with fun.
“My son is the very soul of honor,” Mme. Léopold went on to explain. “Before doing anything that could in the faintest degree compromise Mlle. Pearl, it was necessary for me to arrange all the essentials; and, as an old and valued friend of the family, I thought you would be, of all others, the person to help me in this. Let us, therefore, come to the point at once in all simplicity. What is her dot?”
“Her dot! Good gracious! how should I know?”
“Not, perhaps, the exact sum, but you surely must know à-peu-près, intimate as you are.”
“I have not the remotest idea on the subject. I never heard that she had a dot at all. Now you mention it, I should think it highly probable she had not. But if your son be really attached to her, that—”
“Bonté divine! No dot! A man of Col. Redacre’s position not give his daughter a dot! You are surely not serious?”
“Indeed I am. He has two sons to provide for, and in England the sons come first; the daughters are provided for by their husbands. Your son being an only son and so well off, it does not—”
“But his sons will have a carrière; and besides there is an estate that is to come to the eldest, I understand. Then there is the mother’s fortune to be divided amongst the younger children. Surely the girls’ dot will come out of that?”
“You seem to be much better informed about the family affairs than I am,” said Mrs. Monteagle. “I know nothing about Mrs. Redacre’s fortune; but, now you mention it, I dare say it will be divided amongst the younger ones. In 677any case I should think your son ran no risk in trusting all that in Col. Redacre’s hands.”
“There can be no question of risk. I know my duty to my son better than to let him run any risk on such a point as that. It must be all clearly and distinctly understood before he is committed in any way.”
“It seems to me he is committed very extensively, if he has fallen in love,” said Mrs. Monteagle. “You should not have thrown him in Pearl’s way, if you were not prepared for his running risks.”
“Qu’elle est donc romanesque!” exclaimed Mme. Léopold, putting her handkerchief to her mouth, as if she were exploding with laughter; but Mrs. Monteagle could see that she was not laughing at all.
“What is it that you wish me to do in the affair?” she inquired. “Do you want me to sound Pearl and find out whether she returns your son’s affection?”
“Grand Dieu! that would be madness. I would not breathe a word that could disturb the dear child’s peace of mind until we find out what the exact figure of her dot is. Surely you can help me to do this.”
“What odd people you French are! Ha! ha! ha!” And Mrs. Monteagle fell back in her chair and had her laugh out, in spite of Mme. Léopold’s agonizing pressure of the hand and imploring eyes at her to be quiet.
“Col. Redacre would think I had taken leave of my senses if I were to go and catechise him about his money affairs,” said the incorrigible confidante when she had sufficiently recovered herself.
“But through the family lawyer you might do it. Chère amie,” pleaded the mother, “could you not ask him?”
“He would tell me to mind my own business. Besides, I don’t know the man’s name, or where he lives, or anything about him.”
“But you could easily find out. How do families do in England in such cases? How do the parents find out about the young people’s fortune before they ask for them in marriage?”
“They don’t find out, and they don’t ask; the young people manage their own affairs first, and leave the parents to fight over settlements afterwards.”
“And if it turns out there is nothing to settle on either side? Suppose the young folk have become engaged without any money between them?”
“That is their affair; they must get out of it as well as they can.”
“And the young lady’s name is compromised, and if she loves the man she breaks her heart and dies! Very sensible and very pretty indeed!”
“Tut! tut! They don’t die off so easily as all that, pretty dears! Every girl I know has had her little romance before she marries; and all the better for it. It takes the nonsense out of a girl to be crossed in love.”
“How shocking!” cried Mme. Léopold, lifting up her hands. “With us a young girl goes to the altar with the virgin bloom of her heart untouched.”
“Pish! Don’t talk such stuff to me, my dear lady,” said Mrs. Monteagle with a contemptuous grunt. “Virgin bloom, forsooth! You marry your daughters before they are out of the nursery, while they are ignorant babies that have had no time to develop either mind or heart or character. And what 678comes of it half the time? When one sees the way you French people arrange your marriages, the wonder is that you are not ten times worse than you are—ten times worse!”
There was plenty of noise in the room, and, what between Polly’s performance on the piano and the general buzz of voices all round, there was little danger of the private conference being overheard; still, Mme. Léopold cast nervous glances on either side while Mrs. Monteagle thus denounced the evil courses of the French people.
“Then you decline to be my intermediary in this matter?” said the disappointed mother, lowering her voice to the most confidential tone.
“I decline to commit an impertinence that would lead to my being shown to the door—and very properly; but I shall be most happy to convey the offer of your son’s hand to my young friend Pearl, if you and he honor me with the mission.”
“Thank you, dear madame; you are very kind. I must consult first—”
“M. le Baron Léopold!” called out the servant. Mme. Léopold started, and with a discreet pressure of the hand moved away and joined the group gathered round Mrs. Redacre’s sofa.
“Who expected to see you appear this evening, legislator? I thought you were at headquarters governing the country,” said Col. Redacre, propelling reluctant Balaklava to meet the deputy.
“I have just come from the Intérieur, where we have been holding a little private council,” said M. Léopold, a fine, solid sort of man, whom you might fire jokes at for an hour with impunity, so well encased was he in good-natured self-approval.
Everybody was glad when he appeared, for the deputy was delighted to see everybody, was always in good temper, and always had some bit of pleasant news—news, that is, that he considered pleasant. In person he was the very opposite of his son Léon; very stout, and tall in proportion, florid in complexion, a shining bald head, and bland, fussy manners. This evening he looked big with some mighty intelligence.
“What news? Are we to have war or not?” asked Mr. Kingspring, who with several others crowded round the deputy.
“I myself think we are,” he replied; “but I have been talking with Canrobert, and he thinks it will blow off.”
“Quel malheur!” said a voice from behind him. It was Léon’s.
“Ah! you soldiers call it a misfortune when you miss the chance of having your heads blown off.”
“Or our legs, which is much worse,” growled Col. Redacre; “when a man is shot at all he ought to be shot outright.”
“My dear Hugh!” protested Mrs. Redacre from her sofa.
“And so Canrobert thinks it will blow over?” said Léon, who was another man now that he felt himself safe amongst his fellow-men. “That is hard on us, after calling us back from Marseilles just as we were going to embark. We made certain there was war in the wind when the order came to return. The colonel will be horribly disappointed; he was sure to get his command if war had been declared.”
“Well, my opinion is that it will be declared,” said the baron; “so cheer up and hope for the best.”
679“If you go to war I don’t see how we are to keep out of it,” said Col. Redacre.
“That would be most unfortunate,” said M. de Kerbec. “I should have to leave France.”
“Why so? You are not a naturalized Englishman, are you?” said M. Léopold.
“Not exactly; but our property is in England; and besides, my wife hates living there. But of course I could not consider that; a man must overrule his wife and take her interests in hand, even against her will, when his judgment dictates. I invariably do so.”
“You poor creature!” thought Col. Redacre. “But I don’t contemplate our going to war with France,” he added aloud; “we should take sides with her against Austria—that is to say, if Prussia joined her—”
“Which she won’t,” said M. Léopold emphatically. “I have just been saying so to one of the ministers—I won’t name him, because what he said to me was confidential—”
“And what did he say?” inquired M. de Kerbec.
“He said—I don’t mind repeating it, as I have not mentioned names—he said that it was impossible at this stage of affairs to say what England or Prussia would or would not do.”
“I could have said as much myself,” said Col. Redacre; “one need not be a minister of state to say that.”
“He said a great deal more than that, though,” said the deputy. “He told me several facts connected with the state of the army and the condition of the troops that threw a great light on future probabilities. He seems to think our arsenal, and artillery, and all that are in a much more flourishing condition than either Austria’s or Prussia’s, and he has not the smallest doubt as to the issue if we go to war. His facts and figures were, indeed, perfectly conclusive to my mind.”
“It was the Minister of War, then,” said Col. Redacre. “Come, now, baron, don’t be playing the diplomat with us already. You are not at the Foreign Office yet.”
“My dear friend, I beg of you don’t let this go beyond ourselves!” said M. Léopold, his bland features assuming an expression of fussy concern. “You know I speak out here as amongst friends whose discretion I can trust.”
“Who the deuce, now, should we go and denounce you to?” said his host. “What else did la guerre say?”
“You must not ask me; I really must not say any more,” said M. Léopold. “The emperor is very anxious, it appears; he has not slept for three nights.”
“No more have I,” said the colonel; “but that was Balaklava’s fault,” and he tapped angrily on the offending limb. “If these arm-chair soldiers had a touch of the frost in a wooden leg, they would not be in such a hurry to go to war.”
“It would be much worse if you were in England; the damp would kill you,” said M. de Kerbec, meaning to be consolatory.
“You are greatly mistaken; it would do nothing of the sort,” snarled the colonel. “The climate of England agreed with me perfectly; I never enjoyed a day’s perfect health since I left it. You don’t suppose it is for my pleasure that I live out of my own country? It is on account of my wife’s health; she could not bear the damp.”
“No more could Balaklava, 680papa,” said Pearl, slipping her hand into his arm and looking archly into her father’s face.
“You minx! How dare you contradict me?” said the colonel, scowling down on the saucy brown eyes. “You know very well if it was not for your mother’s sake I would not stay an hour in this country.”
“Mon cher colonel!” protested three Frenchmen in chorus.
“Oh! you are very good fellows, you French, and your climate is not so bad, and Paris is a pleasant enough place; but there is no place like one’s own country.” And the exile heaved a sigh that would have melted a stone.
“England is the most delightful place in the world to live in when one has an estate and a good rent-roll,” said Mr. Kingspring; “but under other circumstances it is not so pleasant.”
“When one is hard up, you mean. I don’t know the place that is pleasant under those circumstances.” And the colonel almost groaned this time.
“Your property is in Devonshire, is it not?” inquired M. de Kerbec, who liked to show off his knowledge of English country geography.
“It is in the moon, sir,” replied Colonel Redacre. “I have a worthy cousin who has a property in Devonshire which it is generally supposed he means to leave to me, which in fact he must leave to me; but unless he leaves something more than the estate as it stands it will be of precious little use, I suspect. A fancy place, sir, a fine, picturesque old place, but brings in nothing and takes a deal of keeping up.”
“He is a very old man, the dean, is he not?” said M. de Kerbec.
“He is nothing of the sort. Am I an old man? He is five years older than I am—a most worthy, excellent man. I wish him a long life; I have no murderous thoughts concerning him. His fortune would be a boon to a family man like myself; but one gets used to dragging the devil by the tail.”
“I hope the devil gets used to it, too,” said M. Léopold. “If he doesn’t, the poor wretch must find it very uncomfortable.”
“The wonder is that he has any tail left, considering how half the world is engaged in pulling at it.”
The colonel laughed, and so did everybody else. The deputy’s little joke proved rather a relief. Colonel Redacre had a way of airing his pecuniary grievances in public that was sometimes embarrassing to people; it was difficult to know what to say. French people especially were at a non-plus on these occasions; but they mostly set down the colonel’s grumbling to the evil behavior of Balaklava. If Balaklava was making him miserable, then there was no pleasure to be got out of life. When a man had only one leg he should at least have had ten thousand a year as a set-off to the accident; this would enable him to travel about in the wake of the sun with his household gods around him. He could not do this with three thousand a year—not as an English gentleman understands travelling.
You have already discovered that Pearl’s father was the last man to mislead any one intentionally as to her fortune. If Mme. Léopold or anybody else assumed that she was to have a large fortune because the colonel lived like a gentleman, that was no fault of his; it was absurd and unreasonable to imagine that he could do otherwise. Nobody expected a man to pinch and screw for the sake of saving dots for his daughters out of an income that 681was barely sufficient for his wants. Least of all did the daughters expect it. They preferred infinitely that their father should give them a carriage and a couple of riding horses than economize for the sake of leaving or giving them a fortune on their marriage. Besides, there was Broom Hollow and the dean’s money, which they were safe to inherit some day.
“Heaven knows I wish Darrell a long life and a happy one,” said Colonel Redacre, heaving a sigh from the bottom of his heart; “but when one sees how he suffers from this terrible rheumatism, one can’t help feeling that death would be a blessed release to him, poor fellow!”
“It is dreadful! I wonder if he has ever tried homœopathy?” said Mrs. Redacre.
“Not he! He is too out-and-out a conservative to go in for any of those new-fangled systems,” replied the colonel.
“That is so foolish! I really think I will write and urge him to call in a homœopathist.”
“It would not be of the slightest use,” said her husband.
“My dear Hugh! How can you say that when you know that my father’s life was prolonged ten years by homœopathy? You know Dr. New rescued him, one may say, out of his coffin that time.”
“I mean there would be no use in your writing to Darrell about it. He would laugh at you.”
“I don’t mind his laughing, if I could persuade him to try it. He has always been civil to me, and I have not written to him for an age. I will write to him this very day.”
“You will do nothing of the sort,” snapped the colonel; “he is quite old enough to manage his own affairs and look after his own health.”
“My dear Hugh, a man never knows how to manage himself,” protested Mrs. Redacre gently. “You all want a woman to do that for you; and it seems to me the dean is a particularly helpless creature. He does absolutely nothing for his rheumatism, and if it goes on as he describes it it may go to his heart one of these days and carry him off in an instant.”
“Do as you like; you always get your own way,” said the colonel. “My opinion is you had better not meddle with Darrell’s concerns; if he gives in to you, and if the rheumatism goes to the heart, people will say it was homœopathy that killed him.”
“Let them say what they like. The rheumatism is much more likely to kill him if it is left to itself. If he goes on in this agony without something being done to relieve him, he can’t hold out many months, I feel certain.”
“Do as you like, do as you like,” said the colonel.
“Now, don’t say that, my dear Hugh. You know how I hate you to give in to me in that way. I won’t write, if it annoys you.”
“Why the deuce should it annoy me? You don’t suppose I wish him dead? Heaven knows I want the money. It is becoming impossible to make ends meet on our present income, and things grow worse and worse in this infernal country, where the rent is perpetually being 682raised, and where a tradesman can’t send in a bill without announcing that tout est augmenté, monsieur, as an excuse for swelling his items. I don’t know where it is to end—I don’t, indeed.”
“We have no debts, at any rate, thank Heaven!” said Mrs. Redacre.
“No,” assented her husband; “I would rather live on beefsteaks and beer than swindle a tradesman. All the same it is hard work, this screwing one’s wants within one’s income; and poor Darrell, if the Almighty called him away, could not leave his money to anybody harder up for it than myself.”
Mrs. Redacre made no comment, but went on sorting her wools, while her husband turned over the pages of the newspaper with an ill-humored jerk and an occasional grunt. She was puzzled and pained. Could it be possible that his reluctance to let her write to the dean sprang from any unworthy motive?—he who was so emphatic in declaring in season and out of season that he devoutly wished his cousin to outlive him, that it was only on account of his children he cared for the inheritance, his present income sufficing for his own wants; and as to ambitions, he had none.
Every now and then within the last few years Col. Redacre had thrown out hints of some remote but possible catastrophe overtaking them all; he never said anything definite, but in a vague, moody way would remark that there was no saying what straits they might not be one day reduced to, and that it was well to look the danger in the face, so as not to be taken altogether by surprise if a catastrophe occurred. When he first took to saying this sort of thing Mrs. Redacre was very miserable, and conjured up all kinds of dreadful spectres to explain the mysterious words. She first thought he gambled; but after watching him for a time as a cat watches a bird, she gave that up and took to suspecting him of betting on the turf; but this, too, proved itself a chimera. Then she began to suspect him of having made some bad investments and being in terror of a sudden collapse; but this was in its turn dispelled by a conversation with their man of business, who assured her that Col. Redacre’s money—or rather his wife’s, for he had, so to speak, none of his own—was safe beyond the reach of speculating schemers. When everything was tried and found non-proven Pearl set down the gloomy forebodings to Balaklava.
“You may be sure, mamma, it is all the east wind or some turn in the weather—nothing else. I have noticed that we never hear of the ‘catastrophe’ except when Balaklava is worrying papa.” And Mrs. Redacre was thankful to believe that this was really the word of the riddle.
Mrs. Monteagle lived on the floor above the Redacres. She received on no particular evening, but she was at home every evening in general, seldom going out anywhere except to her old friends’ on the entresol. Pearl and Polly were up and down all day long with her, and she declared they hardly ever came near her.
“Why should you, my dears? A tiresome old woman—what should you young things have to say to her? But I am very glad whenever you have time to pop in for five minutes. Not that I care much about seeing anybody. One gets selfish as one grows old; one cares for nobody. And really, living amongst these 683French people, it is no wonder. What a set they are, to be sure! And what a government! Good gracious! when I remember how it used to be when I came to Paris first. We had a court then, and real nobles attended it. They were not much to look at, I must say; you never saw such toilettes in your life as they used to wear coming to make their court to Mme. d’Angoulême, and the Duchesse de Berri, and all of them. But it was much pleasanter. People got themselves up like guys, but nobody minded that, and they had not to ruin themselves in fine clothes. I remember one evening the Duchesse de R—— presented herself in a dyed pea-green gown with dirty feathers and lace that was the color of strong tea. I felt ashamed for her, poor thing!—I did indeed; but, goodness me! nobody saw it, I believe, but myself; the Duchesse d’Angoulême received her as if she had been dressed like the Queen of Saba. They knew how to receive, those princesses—not like this little woman you have at the Tuileries now. But it won’t last, my dear. Things are going from bad to worse, I hear. People fancy that because I don’t go dans le monde, as they call it, I know nothing about what is going on. Ha! ha!” And the old lady shook her finger at some invisible contradictor. “I can tell you I know a great deal more than any of you. I hear many things that I keep to myself; but I can tell you things are looking very badly indeed. I suppose you are going to the ball at the Tuileries to-morrow night, all of you?”
“Polly and I have our dresses ready,” said Pearl; “but I am afraid papa won’t be well enough to come with us.”
“What’s amiss with him? Balaklava troublesome?”
“Yes, dreadfully. I wonder if Mme. Léopold is going? I dare say she would take us, if papa asked her.”
“He mustn’t, though; he mustn’t do that, my dear,” said Mrs. Monteagle very emphatically; and then, seeing Pearl’s brown eyes widening in wonder, she added. “It would never do to have you sallying in after Blanche, my dear; three young girls in a group are sure to interfere with each other. It wouldn’t do at all.”
“What a funny idea!” And Pearl laughed merrily.
“And besides, the Léopolds are such out-and-out Bonapartists your father would not care to have you appear under their flag,” continued the old lady; “not that he thinks as much of that as he ought to do, I’m sorry to say. We English get into very loose ways when we live abroad; going to the theatre on Sunday, and going to these pinchbeck people at the Tuileries, and doing all sorts of improper things. It is very naughty of us—it is indeed; for we ought to know better. As to those French people, one never expects anything from them; there is no truth in them; they all tell lies, every one of them—they do indeed, my dear.”
“If we can’t go with Mme. Léopold I don’t see whom we can go with,” said Pearl musingly. “Polly will be awfully disappointed. There was to be a cotillon; it is in honor of the little archduchess. She can’t wait for the petit Lundi, and the empress said she should have the cotillon to-night. Polly would have looked so lovely in her new dress!”
“Where do you expect to go in the next world, you vain minx!” 684said Mrs. Monteagle. “You are a great deal too conceited about Polly.”
Pearl laughed.
“Is there to be anybody at this ball to-morrow that she is particularly anxious not to disappoint?” inquired the old lady, looking hard at Pearl.
“No; she doesn’t care a straw for one of them. I wonder if she ever will? I can’t imagine Polly in love.” And Pearl laughed gently to herself.
“More’s the pity. I don’t like a girl who goes flirting on her way, making every man she meets fall in love with her, and not caring a straw for one of them. I suppose she means to marry for money, or rank, or something of that sort.”
“O dear Mrs. Monteagle! how could you say such a thing of Polly?” said Pearl. “She is incapable of marrying for anything but love!”
“Then, you silly puss, what did you mean by saying that she could not fall in love?”
“I meant—well, I don’t know exactly. Only there is nobody going to-morrow that she is the least in love with.”
“And you? Is there to be any one you are not cruel to? Come, tell me all about them like a good child.”
Pearl tossed back her sunny head and laughed.
“As if anybody would look at me when Polly is there!”
“Nonsense! that is a matter of taste. If I were a young man I know what would be my taste,” said Mrs. Monteagle; “and I shrewdly suspect there is a certain young gentleman who is of the same opinion.” She looked steadily at Pearl as she said this, and, raising a finger, shook it at the laughing, astonished face. Pearl looked as unconscious as a baby at first, but as the finger continued its slow, significant shake she grew a little confused, then she blushed, first slightly, but the pink tint rapidly deepened to scarlet and spread all over her face and neck.
“Ha! you naughty puss. I knew I should find you out,” said Mrs. Monteagle with a mischievous laugh. “I know all about it, and, since you care for him, it is all right. I think he is a good fellow, although I confess I should have preferred your marrying an Englishman; however, since you are in love with one another, one must make the best of it.”
“Dear Mrs. Monteagle, what do you mean?” said Pearl, who had now recovered her self-possession, and was looking mystified and curious, but not the least guilty.
“I know all about it, my dear. I tell you I know more about most things than people imagine. I have been watching this little game quietly in my corner while you and M. Léon were singing and playing at your piano.”
“M. Léon? Capt. Léopold?”
“Capt. Léopold, of the Third Hussars, officier de la Légion d’Honneur, and heir to the title of baron. I don’t begrudge him any of his glories, my dear; I only wish there were ten times more. I suppose he will be very well off; not that you care about that.”
“No, indeed, I don’t!” cried Pearl. “Why should I?”
“Nonsense, child, nonsense! All the same I like to hear you say it. Nowadays you young girls are so worldly-minded you only think of what a husband can give you. It is dreadful—it is indeed; as to these French, it is positively frightful to think of the way they go about it—just as if they were buying 685a horse or hiring a house. But your Frenchman will, I am sure, prove an exception. Of course he is supposed not to have said a word to you himself; but you don’t expect me to believe that—”
“Indeed, dear Mrs. Monteagle, I give you my solemn word of honor—” broke in Pearl.
“Ah! yes, my dear. Words of honor in a case like this are made to be broken; but has his mother spoken to you—that is to say, to your father yet?”
“Dear Mrs. Monteagle, I don’t know what you are talking about—I don’t indeed! M. Léon has never opened his lips to me on such a subject, and I feel sure he hasn’t to papa either.”
“Well, perhaps not; you young people have a way of understanding each other without much talking. I know all about it; I was young once myself, though you may not believe it. I know that in my time a young man could tell a girl he adored her without putting it in so many words.”
“I dare say they can do so nowadays, too,” said Pearl; “but I know that M. Léon never told me, in words or in any other way, that he adored me.”
“Tut! tut! Then he made his sister say it for him; these French people have peculiar ways I know. I dare say the little French girl did it.”
“Blanche? She declares that Léon adores only two things, fighting and jam. ‘Set him before the enemy or before a pot de confiture and he is the happiest of men!’ That is what Blanche says of him.”
“Good gracious! what a character for any girl to give her brother. She had a motive in it, my dear—depend upon it she had a motive. She wanted to stand in your way, to prevent the marriage. I always thought she was a sly minx; they all are, those French girls, though they look as if butter would not melt in their mouths.”
Pearl was going to enter an indignant protest against this attack on her friend, but she was prevented by the arrival of visitors. Mme. de Kerbec and Mme. Léopold entered together.
Pearl started up from her seat of honor on the sofa beside Mrs. Monteagle, and as Mme. Léopold came forward, profusely affectionate, to embrace her, she blushed scarlet.
“Chère petite!” said the fond mother, playfully stroking the warm red cheek, of which Pearl for very rage with herself could have scratched the skin off. It was tantamount to confessing herself in love with Léon to blush up and look so confused the moment his mother appeared. Mme. Léopold and Mrs. Monteagle evidently thought so, too, for they laughed significantly at one another as they shook hands and glanced at Pearl.
Mme. de Kerbec wondered what the little joke was about. She was not in the intimacy of Mme. Léopold, because, as she put it, the deputy and his wife were not de notre monde. They were of the court set, and Mme. de Kerbec was of the faubourg; so, at least, she said, and as nobody of the other set had the entrée of the faubourg, nobody contradicted her.
“How is every one chez vous, mon enfant—your dear mother and your excellent father? I suppose we shall meet him with you both to-morrow evening?” said Mme. Léopold.
“I hope so, madame; but papa is not very well....” Pearl began to explain.
686“No; and very likely he will ask you to—” interrupted Mrs. Monteagle; but Pearl made such imploring eyes at her and gave her hand such a terrible squeeze that the old lady did not finish the sentence, but turned off the subject by exclaiming on the splendor of Mme. de Kerbec’s dress.
“You talk of the extravagance of the Tuileries set; but if we are to judge your old faubourg by you, countess, you are a great deal worse. Good gracious! what a superb costume, to be sure. In my young days one never saw such things, except it might be at court; and even there, poor old Queen Charlotte and Queen Adelaide never were much to speak of in the way of elegance; and as to the people here at the Tuileries in those days—”
When Mrs. Monteagle was thus fairly embarked Pearl seized the opportunity to slip away.
“What a sweet girl she is!” said Mme. Léopold as the door closed on the slight young figure.
“She is charming,” assented Mme. de Kerbec; “but Polly’s beauty throws her quite into the shade.”
Both the French lady and Mrs. Monteagle exclaimed at this. “I think her face more sympathetic and her manner infinitely more so!” said Mme. Léopold.
“No comparison!” chimed in Mrs. Monteagle; “and she has three times the brains of Polly.”
“One does not want much brains with such an amount of beauty,” said Mme. de Kerbec. “Polly is sure to marry much better. Men don’t care for clever wives; they are jealous of them.”
“That may be the case with Englishmen, but I protest in the name of my own countrymen,” said Mme. Léopold. “I never knew a Frenchman yet who objected to his wife having brains.”
“Very likely not,” said Mrs. Monteagle; “provided she has money, I don’t suppose a Frenchman would object to anything, even to her being a lunatic.”
“You are severe, chère madame,” said Mme. Léopold, looking hurt.
“Mrs. Monteagle suspects every Frenchman of marrying for money,” said Mme. de Kerbec. This was a tender point with her, for everybody, of course, knew that M. de Kerbec had married her for her money, and that she had married him for his title.
“I can only judge by what I see,” said Mrs. Monteagle; “and I see that the first and last and only thing that they ask, or rather that their family asks, about a young lady is, ‘How much money has she?’”
“You do us an injustice there; that may be the first question, because it is after all the essential one, but it is not the last,” said Mme. Léopold. “And I can assure you our young men of the present day follow very much the English fashion in marrying; they like to marry themselves, and they often feel a great, a very decided sympathy for their fiancée before the family interferes at all. My son always said he would marry himself à l’anglaise.”
“I am glad to hear it, madame, and I hope you will let him have his way,” said Mme. de Kerbec.
“Certainly; my dearest wish is to see him happy,” replied Mme. Léopold, and she looked at Mrs. Monteagle. It was immediately borne in on Mme. de Kerbec that there was a marriage in the air between Léon and Pearl, and that Mme. Léopold was here to discuss 687the matter with Mrs. Monteagle, and, being a kind woman, she naturally felt at once a deep interest in the match.
“I suppose Col. Redacre will give very handsome fortunes to both his daughters,” she remarked; “but I think that arrangement very unjust. Pearl should have it all; Polly has beauty enough to make a queen’s dower.”
“For my part, I would rather have Pearl without a penny than Polly with the two dots together,” said Mrs. Monteagle with a little angry grunt.
“Their mother was an heiress, so there will be plenty for all the children,” Mme. de Kerbec went on; “and then Dean Darrell is enormously wealthy, and his money all comes to the Redacres. To be sure he may live twenty years yet.”
“I did not know they had such great expectations,” said Mme. Léopold, her interest kindling as she listened to these details. “Who is this M. Darrell?”
“He is a cousin of Col. Redacre’s, and holds the property which comes to the Redacres at his death. It is not much to speak of, I believe; but the Dean is very rich, and will leave them all his money. He is Pearl’s godfather, too, and they say he will leave a very large sum to her.”
“She deserves it; she is a most angelic girl. I never saw any girl I admired so much,” said Mme. Léopold, waxing enthusiastic as Pearl’s merits were thus unfolded to her. “You know what I feel about her, chère madame,” she added, addressing Mrs. Monteagle.
Other visitors came in, but Mme. Léopold contrived when saying au revoir to whisper to Mrs. Monteagle a request that she would, at her earliest convenience, speak to Col. Redacre upon the subject “near our hearts.”
“And M. Léon’s heart?” said Mrs. Monteagle once more before committing herself.
“Chère madame! why will you doubt my dear boy?” said the mother with a smile.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Voltaire has to this day, among a certain class of people, the unenviable privilege of sharing with his great friend and patron the devil a popularity which he richly deserves. He belongs to that race of scoffers and liars that has never been wanting in the world since the arch-deceiver was allowed entrance into it, and will never be wanting as long as he sees in it anything bearing the image of God which he may hope to destroy, any truth which he may contradict, any beauty which he may defile, any goodness which he may turn into evil. Celsus, Porphyry, Jamblichus, Julian the Apostate, Luther, were of that race; and if Voltaire be inferior to most of these in genius, he has nevertheless done the work of their common master as zealously, and certainly as successfully, as any of his predecessors. Give, then, the devil his due, and let the philosopher of Ferney have the admiration of his votaries. Let him inhale in long draughts the incense which they offer him. It is not the rich perfumes of Arabia that they burn upon his altars. The god of the Revolution would have very little relish for anything sweet and pure. He delights in filth, and filth they serve him in abundance. From every cess-pool and garbage-plot, from every loathsome swamp and poisonous marsh, from every infected spot, a thick cloud laden with nauseous odors and death rises up to his nostrils. Surely the god must be satisfied. What else has he sought during his long career from his boyhood to his old age? To what did he devote his wonderful activity but to create those very sinks of moral degradation which send back to him from their unclean depths the impure homage which they are fit to give? Voltaire deserves a statue; let him have it. Why should the French government hesitate to comply with the desires of the Commune in this regard? What more worthy hands can they find for the purpose than those stained by the blood of so many innocent victims? Why should not one who thirsted during his whole life for the destruction of what is most sacred suffer the well-merited punishment of having a monument raised in his behalf by cut-throats to perpetuate his ignominy? A statue to Voltaire? Yes; and in Paris, too. Only choose the right place, and let it be emblematical of the lewdness with which the works of that infamous man reek. The fitting spot is that where all the sewers of the great city empty themselves into the Seine.
The idol of the French Commune is not without his admirers on this side of the Atlantic. One of our leading journals, speaking of the demonstration that took place on the 30th of May in the French capital in honor of Voltaire, gave us the following eulogistic and edifying editorial, which we quote as a fair specimen of the cant that is now and then reproduced in this country from the French radical papers of the most advanced school:
“France, it is said, celebrated in a characteristic way the memory of one of her great men, one of the makers of the 689great Revolution. Voltaire did France more service than any twenty generals, but did it by strictly intellectual methods; by operation on the national mind; by exposure of the shams, pretences, villanies, and oppressions of the system of organized wrong that those exposures did so much to undermine and destroy. He created in great part that public opinion, that common judgment of the nation, in the presence of which it was impossible that the ancient régime should continue to exist beyond the day when the power to end it fell into the hands of the representatives of the people. As his influence was felt by its intellectual results, it is characteristic and just that his memory should be celebrated, not by monuments or other preservations of a great man’s name, but by the dissemination of a printed volume of his own best thoughts, so distributed that a copy may be given to every Frenchman. By this method honor is done to Voltaire and good is done to the people; for the world is very much as yet in the condition in which he criticised it, and his keen, sound judgments on liberty, on the rights of the people and persons, on the church, on law, on government, on freedom of the press, may yet continue his influence with great advantage to society” (New York Herald, May 31).
It would be difficult to condense into a short page a greater number of false assertions, of wrong appreciations and misleading suggestions. “Mentons; il en restera toujours quelque chose,” the favorite motto of Voltaire, continues to inspire his disciples all over the world. It is the idiosyncrasy by which the members of the family are recognized. The result of these often-repeated falsehoods is, in France, to keep the people in a chronic state of dissatisfaction periodically finding vent in those violent up-heavings of society which have more than once during the last hundred years brought that beautiful country to the verge of ruin; and though, in other places where they are rehearsed, they may not produce the same fatal effects, they serve, nevertheless, to make dupes of the ignorant who are unable to judge for themselves of the truth or falsity of assertions stated with such unhesitating boldness and assurance that the most glaring errors are accepted by them as articles of faith; they are an insult to the conscience not only of Catholics but of all those who still profess to retain the least vestige of Christianity; they are a gross calumny thrown in the face of France herself, who, by the voice of her most illustrious children and by a vast majority, protests against the idea that Voltaire is one of her great or representative men. “Lately,” says a French writer (the Correspondant, May 25), “the radicals conceived the purpose of showing to Europe the genius of France, personified in the image of Voltaire. A lying symbol, assuredly. For if it be the glory of France that they intended to represent, there are in our history twenty reputations nobler, wider, purer which would contend with our rivals for the admiration of the world. Voltaire possessed only one feeble spark of the French genius; but, thank God, the flame has been more powerful and shone with a deeper and brighter lustre, it ascended to greater heights, with St. Bernard, Pascal, Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Mirabeau, Châteaubriand, Lamartine; and as to the other qualities that are characteristic of the French people, France would disavow them had they their type and model in Voltaire; and, in fact, how could she recognize in him that generosity which is foremost amongst the gifts of her race, her warm heart, her heroic soul, her chivalrous valor, her Christian beneficence, her love 690for the weak and the oppressed, her loyalty, her passion for great ideas and great actions? How could she sacrifice to the genius of Voltaire all that she had of French genius in those times of Charlemagne, of Godfrey de Bouillon, of St. Louis, of Joan of Arc, of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., when those who were her chief ornaments by their brilliant virtues so little resembled Voltaire? To pretend that a nation which has deserved to be called by Shakspere ‘the soldier of God’; a nation that has given to religion so many saints and heroes, so many doctors and martyrs; a nation that has raised by its thought and art so many monuments to Catholicity; a nation that can cite so many names dear to the church from St. Jerome, Pope Sylvester, Peter the Hermit and Suger, to St. Francis of Sales, De Bérulle, Fénelon, Massillon, and Lacordaire—to pretend that such a nation ought and desires to have its personification in Voltaire is a mockery.”
Bold indeed is the man who dares associate the idea of greatness with the name of Voltaire in presence of the evidence we have to the contrary, and which cannot be ignored by any one who has the slightest acquaintance with the literature of the last century. He uses words at random and cares very little about their true signification, or he unduly presumes on the ignorance of others. We find in Voltaire no element that constitutes the great man. He lacks those qualities of the heart which ennoble their possessor and surround him with a halo of serene splendor even in the lowliest station; his private life from beginning to end is there to show us all the meanness of his character. He had no civic virtue; he denied his country and despised the people. As a philosopher he has discovered no truth, elucidated none, contributed nothing to the advancement of knowledge. What he did was to direct all his efforts to obscure by sophistry and revile by sarcasms those truths of which mankind was in time-honored possession. He has no claim to the reputation of a great poet; all critics worthy of the name, even those of the age in which he lived, are at one in assigning to him an inferior rank in this regard. Voltaire tried his hand in every department, in literature, in the natural sciences, in philosophy, in politics, in history, in theology, and has only succeeded in giving proofs of his ignorance of the subjects he attempted to treat or of his mediocrity. “Voltaire,” says W. Schlegel (Dramatic Literature, lect. xix.), “wished to shine in every department; a restless vanity permitted him not to be satisfied with the pursuit of perfection in any single walk of literature; and, from the variety of subjects in which his mind was employed, it was impossible for him to avoid shallowness and immaturity of ideas.... He made use of poetry as a means to accomplish ends foreign and extrinsical to it; and this has often polluted the artistic purity of his compositions.”
We often read in the lives of holy personages that, in their very infancy, they gave signs of their future greatness and sanctity. As to Voltaire, he manifested in his early youth a degree of perverseness which foreshadowed but too well what he subsequently proved to be. The precocity of his mind showed itself by his precocious unbelief. Every one knows the prediction 691which his impious sneers at religion elicited from Father Le Jay when at the college of Louis-le-Grand—a prediction which was so truly realized afterwards: “Wretch,” said the father to him, “you will one day be the standard-bearer of infidelity in France.” Expelled several times from his father’s house for improper conduct, he pursues his career in the world, which he fills with the scandals of his life. His disgraceful intrigues in politics and in love, his dishonesty in business matters, his greed of money, his writings breathing lust and revolt, fixed upon him the attention of the police, and more than once brought him to the Bastille and sent him into exile. He had no heart; he proved it by the contempt he entertained for his nearest relations. He felt no shame in destroying the reputation of his mother; from allusions he makes in a letter addressed to Richelieu, and in other passages of his works, he throws suspicions upon the legitimacy of his birth. Voltaire at first signed his name “Arouet”; but soon this family name disgusted him, as he himself avows, and he rejected it for that of Voltaire. To discard the name of one’s own family is certainly no sign of a good son. He was no better citizen. The French having been beaten at Rossbach by the King of Prussia, Frederick II., Voltaire, who kept a correspondence with that prince, ridiculed his countrymen, and heaped upon them the most injurious epithets. He wishes a Prussian officer to come and take a certain city of France. He writes to the King of Prussia: “Look upon me as the most devoted subject that you have, for I have no other, and wish to have no other, master but yourself. It is to my own sovereign that I write.” The vile and crouching sycophant goes so far as to call Frederick “a god” and “the son of God.” Is it not incredible and the height of impudence that men who call themselves Frenchmen should urge their country to decree national honors to be paid to this idolatrous worshipper of Prussia, and that after the disasters of 1871? These men deserve the scorn of the whole world. Not satisfied with having turned Prussian, the ambition of Voltaire was to become Russian, and for this purpose he disowned France. In a letter of the 18th of October, 1771, to the Empress of Russia, Catherine II., after having called the French who had gone to the assistance of Poland fools and boors, he adds: “It is the Tartars who are civilized, and the French have become Scythians. Please to observe, madame, that I am not Welsh (that is, French); I am a Swiss, and, if I were younger, I would become Russian.” And Russian he soon became in spite of his old age, and Catherine could send him her felicitations on his being already “so good a Russian.” We shall not transcribe the words of sacrilegious adulation which he addressed to his idol, to a woman stained with the blood of her husband and living in adultery. “To make of the flatterer of Frederick II., the adulator of Catherine II., the adorer of Mme. de Pompadour, a republican citizen, would be a difficult task. But to make a patriot of the man who applauded the victory of Rossbach, who saw without pity the blood of France flow, who defiled the reputation of Joan of Arc with the loathsome profanation that we know, and who aspired to the happiness ‘to die a Prussian,’ would 692be a want of respect for France and of pride for the republic. In presence of the victors of Metz and of Sedan, in presence of Alsace-Lorraine, France would betray herself and the republic would disown France, were the one with the help of the other to erect the image of Voltaire as that of our wounded country, which stands waiting and hoping” (Correspondant).
We must never be astonished at anything from such a courtier of Fortune as Voltaire was. The most irascible of poets is the most flexible servant of the reigning powers. If, to use an expression of Diderot, he bore a grudge to every pedestal placed in the path of his literary glory, no one more grovellingly than he kissed the dust before every statue of success raised to command men or to impose upon them. He deserts to the King of Prussia after the defeat of De Rohan, he kisses the blood-stained hand of that other Lady Macbeth seated on the throne of Russia; he will do more: he will lower the purple of Richelieu before that of the ignoble Dubois, to whom the Revolution alone could give notoriety. Young, he had not the dignity which talent imparts; old, he had not that of his gray hairs. His pretty prose and his small, prurient madrigals will be scattered freely in the antechamber of every courtesan who has usurped for the time being the rightful place of the queens of France. It is to a Marquise de Prie, mistress of the heart and of the politics of the Duke of Bourbon, or to a Mme. de Pompadour, that he offers his mean and impure adulations. Mme. de Pompadour, metamorphosed into an Agnes Sorel, is still but a mortal; Mme. du Barry will be a divinity in this distich of the octogenarian of Ferney:
So much for the irreproachable citizen who reviled his country, rejoiced at her misfortunes, and sold himself to her enemies; so much for the model republican who fawned on despots and courted the good graces of the most abandoned characters, provided they stood around a throne. But what of Voltaire, the great democrat, the devoted friend of the people? Those who wish to enlighten the working classes by the dissemination among them of a printed volume of Voltaire’s own best thoughts have taken care, of course, to exclude from the precious popular volume, destined to perpetuate the great man’s influence in France, such passages as these, which clearly show his sentiments on the subject. He writes to a friend:
“I believe that we do not understand each other on the question of the people, who, according to you, deserve to be instructed. I understand by people the populace, or those who are forced to gain their livelihood by the labor of their hands. I doubt whether that class of citizens will ever have the leisure or the capacity required for instruction. It appears to me essential that there should be ‘ignorant boors.’ When the vulgar begin to reason, all is lost. The absurd insolence of those who tell you that you must think like your tailor and your washerwoman should not be tolerated. As to the canaille, it will never be anything else but the canaille. I have nothing to do with it.”
And again: “The canaille whom every yoke fits is not worth enlightening.” That hatred for the poor, the laboring classes, the people, is a satanic trait characteristic of Voltaire. Were the principles which he sought to establish to obtain in 693the world, we would soon see the worst times of paganism return, when the vast majority of men were slaves under unfeeling masters. From this abject condition Christianity rescued the human race. It is Christianity that can still make the people free; it is Christianity that saves it now, in spite of the efforts made to exclude Christ’s influence from the face of the earth and substitute for it that of Freemasonry, socialism, and radicalism, which would willingly replace the worship of the Redeemer by that of a Voltaire or a Mazzini. Were it possible to abolish the Christian religion in the world, the earth would at once become a den of wild beasts tearing one another to pieces. Witness the French Revolution. It is Christ who said: “Come to me, all you that labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you”; it is Christ who ennobled labor by embracing a life of toil; it is Christ who taught the poor that poverty is no disgrace, but rather an honor, ever since the King of Kings sanctified it and glorified it in his own person; it is Christ who gave us the true signification of sufferings, and revealed to us their chastening and purifying influence when they are borne with resignation. But it is Christ also who taught the rich to be charitable to those not possessed of the goods of this world, and to consider themselves but as God’s stewards in favor of the needy. In the acceptance of those principles is to be found the solution of the social problems which become more and more entangled in proportion as society withdraws itself from the light of the Gospel. “Jesus has wept and Voltaire has smiled,” said Victor Hugo at the celebration of the 20th of May, “and from those divine tears and that human smile the sweetness of our civilization was the result,” and the crowd applauded. Foolish and blasphemous words! To associate Christ and his reviler in the same mission for the regeneration of the human race! Voltaire never smiled—he grinned, and in his infernal sneer he embraced those for whom Jesus especially came and wept, suffered and died. But the tactics of the evil one are always the same and are followed by his disciples, to draw men into his snares by creating illusions around them.
The age of Voltaire had no philosophy. Its great voice was silent, and was heard no more until it resounded again in the first part of this century in De Maistre and De Bonald. The generation of Malebranche, Descartes, and Bossuet had passed away, and was succeeded by a sect of sophists headed by Voltaire, whom they nicknamed the “Philosopher of Ferney.” The eighteenth century was the reign, not of philosophy, but of philosophism, which consisted in an abuse of reason directed to the demolition, by means of sarcasm and ridicule, by the corruption of morals and by falsehood, of the religion of Christ and of all the principles upon which human society is based. The pretended Reformation had given the signal; in weakening the foundations of faith and the respect for spiritual authority it opened the door to every error, to revolt, and to all corruptions. Germany began, England followed, and from England came out that spirit of incredulity and atheism which would have plunged Europe into all the agonies of dissolution, and made it a prey to renewed barbarism, had 694not the terrific thunder-peals of the French Revolution awakened it on the brink of the abyss and warned men to turn their eyes towards God and his church. Rousseau gives us in his Emile a faithful picture of those mad dreamers, possessed by the genius of evil, who in his time proudly called themselves philosophers:
“Turn away from those who, under pretext of explaining nature, sow in the hearts of men subversive doctrines, and whose apparent scepticism is a hundred times more affirmative and dogmatic than the decided tone of their adversaries. Under the haughty pretence that they alone are enlightened, true, and sincere, they impose upon us their peremptory decisions, and pretend to give us for the true principles of things the unintelligible systems which their imagination has built. Besides overthrowing, destroying, and trampling upon everything that men revere, they take away from the afflicted the last consolation in their miseries, from the powerful and the rich the only check of their passions; they snatch from the depth of the human heart remorse for crime, the hope which supports virtue, and still boast of being the benefactors of mankind. Never, do they say, is truth injurious to men. I believe as they do, and it is, in my opinion, a strong proof that what they teach is not the truth.”
Of all those who, at that period, took part in the infernal struggle against Christianity, Voltaire was the recognized chief and leader. He and Rousseau are the two men who did most to undermine the foundations of religion, to extend the reign of unbelief, and destroy the bulwarks that protect order and the family; the former by his inexhaustible fund of impious raillery that scoffed at everything, and the latter by an affectation of sickly sentimentality that paved the way but too well for the atrocities by which the last years of that disgraceful century were polluted. The eighteenth century is appropriately called the Siècle de Voltaire; it will be its eternal shame. For Voltaire, notwithstanding his sparkling wit and a few happy productions in literature, will remain eternally the type of a mean character, of a corrupt intellect and perverted reason. It is the conclusion to which men will necessarily arrive who wish to draw their knowledge of Voltaire from another source than that of an ignorant fanaticism, and who, not satisfied with vague sounds floating in the air, will take the trouble to study his life and his works. Not long ago the illustrious Bishop of Orleans, from his senator’s seat, instructed the radicals of his country on this subject, and his method is sure. It would be more in the interest of truth to re-echo his voice on our shores than to spread amongst us those groundless and erroneous appreciations issuing from disordered brains maddened by passion. He cited to them the judgments of men whom their party chiefly consults, to whom they defer, whom they admire and revere most, as Rousseau, Marat, Béranger, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc, Sainte-Beuve, and Renan. He placed before their eyes the very writings of Voltaire; and thus, by testimony that commanded their confidence, he taught them what Voltaire was worth as a democrat, a citizen, a patriot, and even as a philosopher. We have no space to give quotations from those writers; but we cannot resist the temptation to place before our readers a few lines written by Victor Hugo himself, when he had not as yet lent his unquestionable genius to the vagaries of modern radicalism. They tell us what the distinguished poet then thought of the man whom he now extols to 695the skies and dares to put on a level with Christ. He speaks of that filthy production of Voltaire’s pen, The Maid of Orleans, and warns purity and innocence to beware of the poison contained in that infamous book: “An old book is there, a romance of the last century! A work of ignominy! Voltaire then reigned, that monkey of genius, sent on a mission to man by the devil himself. O eighteenth century, impious and chastised, society without God, struck by God’s hand! world-blind for Christ, which Satan illumines! Shame on thy writers in the face of nations! The reflection of thy crimes is in their renown! Beware, O child! in whose tender heart no tainted breath has as yet been felt. O daughter of Eve! Poor young mind! Voltaire the serpent, Doubt, and Irony is in a corner of thy blessed sanctuary; with his eye of fire he spies thee and laughs. Tremble! This false sage has caused the ruin of many an angel. That demon, that black kite, pounces upon pious hearts and crushes them. Oftentimes have I seen under his cruel claws the feathers fall one by one from white wings made to rise and take flight towards heaven” (Rayons et Ombres).
Voltaire was not a great thinker, not a great poet, not a great historian, not a great novelist, and not a great manager or man of action. Of his twenty-eight or thirty dramatic pieces scarcely one rises to the highest line of dramatic art; his comedies, like his epics, are no longer read; his histories are sprightly and entertaining, but not authentic; and his essays, both in prose and verse, with perhaps the single exception of his historical disquisitions, have ceased to instruct. This is the judgment about the man which we find recorded in the American Cyclopædia, and we have no doubt of its correctness. If we seek, then, for the secret of his success, we must turn not to his lighter compositions, as has been advised, but to the corruption of the age in which he lived. Voltaire found around him a society in a state of disorganization produced by the orgies of the Regency, and the spirit of incredulity which had invaded the whole of Europe. He seized upon those materials which he used against Christianity. He wished to destroy it. His intention was not doubtful; it had been clearly revealed by his Mahomet, a tragedy given to the public in 1741. The piece had no success at first, or rather people were frightened by it. Christianity was too openly attacked in it not to revolt public opinion, which was as yet profoundly Christian. It was withdrawn after three representations; but, resumed ten years later, it was received with enthusiasm. It is at that date and with that the eighteenth century properly begins. In 1751 all was changed. Religion, morals, taste, national honor, military glory were soon to disappear from the soil of France. Fleury had ceased to live, and voluptuousness had seated a Pompadour upon the throne; flattery erected altars in her honor, whilst a philosophy, the enemy of God and of the laws, placed itself under the protection of that worthy patroness. It was not difficult to see already looming on the horizon the horrors of 1793. Voltaire, undoubtedly, was one of the makers of the great Revolution—“that grand conflict which,” as Schlegel says, “must be looked upon in no other light than as a religious war; for a formal separation, not only from the church, but from 696all Christianity, a total abolition of the Christian religion, was an object of this Revolution.” It is no wonder, then, that all revolutionists have made an idol of Voltaire, who played so prominent a part in bringing it about. It is still Voltaire the enemy of Christianity whom they celebrate. This they openly avow. One of the organs of the party, the Bien Public, declared that it was not the centenary of Voltaire the man of letters that they intended to celebrate, but that of him who had said “Écrasons l’infâme” (Let us crush the wretch). The Droits de l’Homme also wrote: “Voltaire had no respect for things established; he dared look Christ in the face; he insulted him. This is the reason why we have chosen Voltaire to pay him our respects.” It is his hatred for the religion of Christ which they wish to propagate. The volume containing Voltaire’s best thoughts, ordered to be printed and distributed among the people, tells us that “everything which is related of Jesus is worthy of a pack of fools”; that “miracles are ridiculous and the work of charlatans”; that “Christ himself was a vile mechanic from the scum of the people, a seducer who had lost all scruple”; that “our sacred books are the work of insanity, and that Christians are dupes, fools, and cowards.” And they desire such a book to replace among the masses the catechism and the Gospel! Do so, and you have wolves instead of men.
The steadfastness of Breton Catholicity is proverbial. From the far-away time when the disciples of the good St. Patrick, among whom, says the Breton legend, “he was like a nightingale among wrens, or a beech-tree among ferns,” first planted the cross in Armorica, up to that last crusade in defence of it wherein only yesterday, as it were, Lamoricière and Pimodan and their gallant comrades sacrificed themselves as chivalrously as any knight of old on the fatal field of Castelfidardo, the Breton has never wavered in his faith. Evil example has not availed to weaken it; persecution has only made it stronger; the poisoned arrow of the scoffer, deadlier than the Moor’s, has fallen blunted on the armor of its tranquil simplicity. When all France beside, with few exceptions, had sunk into indifferentism or infidelity, Breton peasant and Breton gentleman still held fast to their fathers’ creed, still doffed their hats as reverently as of yore to wayside cross or Madonna, still knelt as devoutly side by side in the little rustic chapels which so cover the land “that,” says a sympathetic writer, “it seems fertilized by so many holy shrines.” Some idea may be had of the number of the religious monuments of Brittany from the fact that when, at the Restoration, the proposition was mooted to replace the wayside crosses which the iconoclastic 697frenzy of the Revolution had overturned, it was found that 1,500,000 francs would be needed to restore those in the department of Finisterre alone.
Indeed, it may be said that the Revolution in Brittany took the form not so much of a political struggle as of a religious proscription. It was not the royalist so much as the Catholic who was there the object of partisan fury. To the butchers of the Temple, the mad idolaters of Reason, religion was a crime even greater than loyalty. “It was,” says the author already quoted,[134] “a conflict between the guillotine and a people’s faith—a merciless conflict, in which the guillotine blunted its knife and was baffled.” Catholic Brittany offered but a passive resistance to her persecutors, but it was a resistance none the less stubborn, unflinching, unconquerable. On her knees with clasped hands she defied the noyades of Carrier and the bayonets of Hoche. “Nothing,” says M. Souvestre, “could alter the freshness of her faith. She gave way neither to anger nor to fear. The red cap might be put upon her head, but not upon her thoughts.
“‘I will throw down your belfries,’ said Jean Bon-Saint-André to the mayor of a village, ‘so that you will have no longer any reminder of your effete superstitions.’
“‘You will still have to leave us the stars,’ returned the peasant, ‘and we can see them farther than our belfries.’”
Nevertheless, the threat was carried out, at least so far that the churches were closed, the celebration of Mass was made a crime, the priests were hunted like wild beasts, and the faithful were reduced to much the same straits as their English co-religionists under Elizabeth, or as Irish Catholics under the Penal Laws. Among the many shifts they were put to to evade their savage pursuers, the coast population were often driven to take to their boats and put to sea, where, under favor of the midnight, the faithful pastor offered Mass upon a raft. Surely the people who could resort to such measures rather than forego the exercise of their faith must have been devoted to it.
It may seem strange that so brave and hardy, nay, so fiery, a race as the Bretons should submit so tamely to provocation so bitter. Unlike La Vendée, Brittany never, as a province, made any effectual head against the Revolution, which made so ruthless an onslaught upon all that Breton and Vendean held most sacred. The uprising in Upper or Western Brittany which broke out just as the Vendean insurrection was about being crushed, and which is known to history as the Chouannerie, or war of the Chouans, was but a desultory guerilla warfare, confined for the most part to that division of Brittany which has preserved fewest of the Breton characteristics. The only important engagement which took place in Lower Brittany during the Revolution was the surprise of Fort Penthièvre by Hoche, when “the sickle sweep of Quiberon Bay” reaped its harvest of slaughter; and there the royalists were in the main composed of emigrés, nobles, and Chouans from Western Brittany. Even the brothers Cottereau, nicknamed Chouan,[135] who gave 698its name to this insurrection, were not Bretons, but from Maine. Doubtless had not De la Rouarie’s plot miscarried through treachery and the premature death of that far-seeing and audacious schemer, the result might have been otherwise. As it was, the counter revolution took in Brittany and La Vendée very different directions. In the former it was the hostility of the “patriots” to the church that was most deeply felt and most bitterly resented; while the Vendeans fought for their faith, indeed, and their army bore the name of “Catholic and loyal,” but they fought at least as directly for their king. We have not space to philosophize upon this curious distinction, further than to point out that Brittany, so far as the bulk of its population is concerned, has always been rather Catholic than royalist. It is not so very long ago that a Frenchman was nearly as much of an alien as the hated Saozon or Saxon[136] himself to the man of Tréguier or the Léonnais; even two centuries of submission to an enforced and distasteful union scarcely sufficed to make the Breton look upon the French king as other than a usurper. In this, as in devotion to the faith, which the same apostle brought to both, and in readiness to give up all for it, the parallel between Brittany and that other great Celtic colony, Ireland, is of the closest kind. True, the union of Brittany and France, like that of England and Scotland, was effected through marriage,[137] and not, as in the Irish union, by force and fraud. But it was none the more popular for that; and though all overt opposition was effectually crushed with the overthrow of the League, headed by the ambitious and self-seeking though gallant Duc de Mercœur, in the early part of the seventeenth century, there still remained a smouldering fire of resentment and dislike which only lately, if ever at all, has been extinguished. And from that time, too, to quote M. Souvestre again, of the two sovereign powers on which the feudal edifice was based, the nobility and the church, the latter alone preserved its authority in Brittany. Deceived and disappointed in his worldly leaders, it seemed as though the Breton peasant turned more implicitly to his spiritual guides. Certain it is that in no Catholic land, not even in Ireland, has the priesthood retained more ascendency, nor, if we may trust writers who cannot be accused of partiality, deserved it more.
The spirit of devotion breathes all through the Breton’s daily life. No important act is begun without its appropriate religious ceremonies. Is it a house or a barn that he has built?—he will use neither till they have been blest, as in Aubrey de Vere’s “Building of the Cottage”:
He thinks, with the poet,
699In little acts as in great ones it is the same. The knife does not cut the loaf until it has made over it the sign of the cross; the children tell their ages by the number of Easters they have made; the sowing of the grain is preceded by a solemn procession. “The barren field,” says the Breton proverb, “grows fertile under the stole of the priest.” In all his thoughts the religious idea is uppermost. “I was walking in the fields,” says M. de la Villemarquée, “reading a book, when a peasant accosted me. ‘Is it,’ said he, ‘the Lives of the Saints you are reading?’” And the strongest idea a Breton can give you of the truth of any book is that it was written and printed by a priest.
It is not surprising, therefore, that among a people of such simple and fervid faith devotion to the Blessed Virgin should especially have flourished. The popular impulse towards the expression of piety which displayed itself in France in the sixteenth century, and which soon covered the land with Calvaries and Chapels of Notre Dame, was nowhere more outspoken or lasting than in Brittany. Mme. Marie de Bon Secours, mère des pêcheurs—Mme. Mary of Good Help, mother of fishermen—is invoked as heartily on the coast of Tréguier as Notre Dame de tous les remèdes—Our Lady of All-Healing—on the mountains of Cornouailles. And, as might be looked for in an impressionable and imaginative race, this devotion has entwined itself with many quaint and curious legends. It is a general belief in Brittany—as, indeed, it is among the peasantry elsewhere in France, and we believe in some parts of Spain—that our Lord and his Blessed Mother visited their country in propria persona after the Resurrection. Ask a peasant of Vannes, for example, the origin of the galgals, or heaps of pebbles which diversify the monotony of his vast Landes, and he will tell you that the Blessed Virgin carried them there in her apron. The folk-lore of the country turns largely upon her intervention for the protection of those who call upon her. Two of the most curious of these legends we propose to give our readers from M. Souvestre’s very interesting collection entitled Le Foyer Breton. So far as we know they have not been rendered into English except in a mutilated and imperfect version styled Popular Legends and Tales of Brittany, which is simply the translation of a German adaptation of Souvestre’s book, and in which the essentially Catholic features of the original are for the most part studiously eliminated. This process of “evangelizing” Catholic literature is familiar enough from Dies Iræ down; it is to be regretted that Catholic publishers are sometimes found willing to father and to circulate such counterfeits.
The first of our legends is one current in the country of Tréguier—the Lower Breton still divides his beloved province, not into the departments fixed by the Revolution, but as of old into the four bishoprics of Léon, Tréguier, Vannes, and Cornouailles—and is known as Les Trois Rencontres, or, as we shall call it,
Once upon a time, in the days when Jesus Christ and his Mother came often to visit Lower Brittany, when along the roads there were as many cells of holy hermits as there are now new houses with a manger 700and a branch of mistletoe by the door, there lived in the bishopric of Léon two young lords as rich as heart could wish, and so handsome that even their mother could not have wished them better-looking. They were called Tonyk and Mylio.
Mylio, who was the elder, was going on sixteen, while Tonyk was but fourteen. Both had taken lessons from masters so able that there was nothing to hinder them from becoming priests at once, if they had been old enough and had had a vocation.
Now, Tonyk was pious, ever ready to help the poor and forgive injuries. Money stayed no longer in his hand than anger in his heart; while Mylio would give to no one more than his due, and even haggled over that, and if anybody offended him he never rested until he had avenged himself to the utmost of his power.
As God had taken their father from them while they were still in long clothes, the widow, who was a woman of great virtue, had brought them up herself; but now that they were well grown, she deemed it time to send them to an uncle of theirs at a distance, from whom they might look for good counsel as well as a great inheritance. So one day, making each of them a present of a new hat, shoes with silver buckles, a purple cloak, a well-lined purse, and a horse, she bade them be off to the house of their father’s brother.
The two lads set out, glad enough of the chance to see strange lands. Their horses went so fast that at the end of some days they found themselves in another kingdom, where the trees and grain were unlike any they had seen at home. But one morning, as they were passing a cross-roads, they spied a poor woman sitting by the cross, her face buried in her apron. Tonyk pulled up his horse to ask her what was the matter. The beggar-woman told him with sobs that she had just lost her only son, who was her all, and that she was thrown upon the charity of Christians.
The lad was greatly touched; but Mylio, who had stopped some paces off, cried out with a jeering air:
“You are not going to swallow everything the first whimpering old woman tells you? That creature is there only to trick travellers out of their money.”
“Hush, my brother,” replied Tonyk, “hush, in God’s name! Your words make her cry still harder. Do you not see that she has the years and mien of our own mother, God bless her!”
Then, bending forward and handing his purse to the beggar-woman, “Take it, poor woman,” he said; “I can only help you, but I will pray to God to console you.”
The beggar-woman took the purse, and, kissing it, said to Tonyk:
“Since your lordship has wished to enrich a poor woman, you will not refuse to take from her this nut, which holds a wasp with a diamond sting.”
Tonyk took the nut, thanked the beggar-woman, and went his way with Mylio.
The two soon came to the edge of a wood, where they saw a little child, nearly naked, who was prying about in the hollows of the trees, and singing the while an air sadder than the chants of the Mass for the Dead. Often he stopped to slap his little frozen hands together, saying in a kind of sing-song, “I’m so cold! I’m so cold!” And then they could hear his teeth chatter.
701At this sight Tonyk felt like crying, and he said to his brother:
“For pity’s sake, Mylio, do you see how this poor little innocent suffers from the cold?”
“He is a great baby, then,” said Mylio. “I, for my part, do not find the wind so cold.”
“Because you have on a velvet vest, and over that a cloth coat, and over that again your purple cloak, while he is clad only in the air of heaven.”
“Well, what of it?” said Mylio. “He is only a little peasant.”
“Alas!” replied Tonyk, “when I think that you might have been born in his place, my brother, my heart bleeds and I cannot see him suffer so.”
With these words he drew rein, called the little boy, and asked him what he was doing there.
“I am looking for the winged needles[138] that sleep in the crannies of the trees,” answered the child.
“And what wouldst thou do with these winged needles?” said Mylio.
“When I have enough of them I will sell them in the city and buy a coat which will keep me warm as if it was always sunshine.”
“Hast thou found any yet?” went on the young noble.
“But one,” replied the child, showing a little cage of rushes within which he had shut the blue fly.
“Very good, I will take it,” broke in Tonyk, throwing him his cloak. “Wrap thyself up in that precious cloth, little one, and add every evening in thy prayers a Hail Mary for Mylio and another for her who bore us both.”
The two brothers went on their way, and Tonyk at first suffered much from the wind for want of the cloak he had given away; but when they had got through the wood the wind fell, the air grew milder, the fog lifted, and a vein of the sun[139] shone along the clouds.
Just then they came to a meadow where there was a spring, and by the side of it an old man in rags carrying upon his shoulder the sack of the seekers for bread.[140] When he saw the two cavaliers he called to them in a supplicating voice. Tonyk went up to him.
“What would you, father?” he asked, lifting his hand to his hat out of respect for the beggar’s age.
“Alas! dear sir,” replied he, “you see how white my hair is and how wrinkled my cheeks. I am grown so weak from age that my legs can no longer carry me; so I must needs die in this spot, unless one of you will sell me his horse.”
“Sell thee one of our horses, bread-seeker!” cried Mylio with a scornful air. “And wherewith wilt thou pay us?”
“You see this hollow acorn?” said the beggar. “It holds a spider which can spin webs stronger than steel. Let me have one of your horses, and I will give you the spider and the acorn for it.”
The elder of the two lads burst out laughing.
“Do you hear, Tonyk?” he cried, turning to his brother. “By my baptism! there must be two calves’ feet in this man’s sabots.”[141]
But the younger replied gently: “The poor man can offer only what he has.” Then, getting off his horse and going up to the old man, “I give you my horse, my good man,” said he, “not because of the 702price you put on it, but in remembrance of Him who has said that the seekers for bread were his elect. Take it as your own, and thank God, who has made use of me to offer it you.”
The old man murmured a thousand blessings, got upon the horse with the lad’s help, and was soon out of sight across the meadow.
But Mylio could not forgive his brother this last almsgiving, and it led to an outbreak.
“Big mouth!”[142] he cried to Tonyk, “you ought to be ashamed of the plight your folly has brought you to. You thought, no doubt, that, once stripped of everything, you would be let share my money, my horse, and my cloak; but do not hope it! I want the lesson to do you good, that by feeling the hardships of prodigality you may be more thrifty hereafter.”
“It is indeed a good lesson, my brother,” Tonyk answered mildly, “and I am perfectly willing to take it. I never thought to have any part in your money, your horse, or your cloak; so go your way without troubling yourself about me, and may the Queen of the angels guide you!”
Mylio deigned no answer and set off on a trot, while his young brother kept on afoot, watching him from afar and bearing him no grudge in his heart.
They came thus to the opening of a narrow pass between two mountains which lost themselves in the clouds. It was called the Cursed Pass, because a Rounfl, or ogre, dwelt upon the cliffs, and there lay in wait for travellers as a hunter lies in wait for the game. He was a giant, blind and without feet, but of so quick an ear that he could hear the worm working underneath the ground. His servants were two eagles he had tamed, one white and the other red (for he was a great magician), and he sent them out to seize his prey when he heard it coming. So the people of that country, whenever they had to go through the pass, carried their shoes in their hands, like the girls of Roscoff when they go to the market of Morlaix, scarce daring to breathe for fear the ogre should hear them. Mylio, who had no warning of this, rode in on his horse, and the giant was aroused by the noise of the hoof-strokes on the flint.
“Ho, there! my eagles,” cried he, “where are you?”
The white eagle and the red eagle ran to him.
“Go get me for my supper what is going by,” cried the ogre.
Like two balls from a gun they plunged to the bottom of the pass, seized Mylio by his purple cloak, and bore him away to the ogre’s dwelling.
At this moment Tonyk reached the mouth of the pass. He saw his brother carried off by the two birds, and with a cry ran towards him; but the eagles and Mylio were out of sight in the clouds which covered the highest mountain.
The lad stood for a moment rooted to the spot and beside himself with grief, staring at the sky and the cliff as steep as a wall; then he sank upon his knees with clasped hands and cried:
“Almighty Lord, Creator of the world, save my brother Mylio!”
“Trouble not God the Father for such a trifle,” replied three small voices which he heard all at once near by.
Tonyk turned round wonder-stricken.
703“Who spoke then, and where are you?” he asked.
“In your waistcoat pocket,” replied the three voices.
The lad felt in his pocket, and pulled out the nut, the acorn, and the little cage of rushes, wherein were the three insects.
“Is it you, then, who wish to save Mylio?” said he.
“Yes, yes, yes!” replied they in their three different voices.
“And how will you go about it, my poor nobodies?” said Tonyk.
“Open our cages and you will see.”
The lad did as they asked; then the spider made up to a tree, against which she began a web shining and strong as steel; then she got upon the winged needle, who wafted her gently into the air, while she went on with her web, whose threads were far enough apart to make a kind of ladder, reaching higher and higher as they went up. Tonyk followed them up this wonderful ladder until he had reached the top of the mountain. The wasp flew in front of him, and together they came to the giant’s house.
It was a cave hollowed in the rock and as high as a church. In the middle of it sat the ogre, without eyes or legs. He kept rocking himself to and fro like a poplar, while he sang these words to an air of his own:
All the while he sang this song he got ready slices of pork to roast Mylio, who lay at his feet, his legs and arms tied upon his back like a chicken trussed for the spit. The two eagles held a little aloof, near the chimney, and one set the turn-spit while the other stirred up the fire.
The noise the giant made in singing, and also the care he gave to getting ready his slices of pork, had kept him from hearing the approach of Tonyk and his three little servants. But the red eagle spied the lad; he darted upon him, and was about to make off with him in his claws when the wasp pierced his eyes with her diamond dart. The white eagle ran to help his brother, and his eyes were put out too. Then the wasp flew to the ogre, who had sprung up on hearing the cries of his two domestics, and fell to piercing him with her sting without let or truce. The giant roared like a bull in August. But it was in vain for him to dash his arms about like the sails of a windmill; he could not catch the wasp for want of eyes, and no more, for want of feet, could he get away.
At last he dropped face down upon the ground to escape the sting of fire; but the spider at once came up and wove about him a net which held him fast. In vain he called his two eagles to his aid. Mad with pain, knowing the ogre was helpless, they wished to avenge their long slavery; with flapping wings they rushed upon their former master and sought to tear him to pieces under his net of steel. At each stroke of their beaks they tore away a shred of flesh, and never stopped till they had picked his four bones clean. Then they lay down upon the carcass of the ogre, and, as the magician’s flesh was indigestible, they never got up again, but burst there on the spot.
As to Tonyk, he had untied his brother’s bonds, and, after embracing him with tears of joy, led him 704out of the ogre’s house to the edge of the cliff. The winged needle and the wasp were soon at hand, harnessed to the little cage of rushes, now changed to a coach. Praying the two brothers to take seats, while the spider posted herself behind like the lackey of some great house, the equipage went off with the speed of the wind.
Tonyk and Mylio in this way crossed with the utmost ease meadows, mountains, and villages (for in the air the roads are always in good order) until they were come to their uncle’s castle.
There the carriage alighted and rolled towards the drawbridge, where the brothers saw their two horses waiting for them; but at Tonyk’s saddlebow hung his purse and cloak; only the purse was bigger and much better lined, and the cloak was all embroidered with diamonds.
The wondering lad would have turned to the carriage to ask the meaning of this; but the carriage was gone, and in place of the wasp, the winged needle, and the spider there stood only three angels dazzling with light.
The two brothers, confounded, fell upon their knees. Then one of the angels drew near Tonyk and said to him:
“Be not afraid, dear youth; for the woman, the child, and the old man thou didst succor were no other than the Virgin Mary, Jesus her Son, and St. Joseph. They have given us to thee that thou mightest make the journey without danger, and, now that it is ended, we go back to Paradise. Bethink thee only of what has happened to thyself, and let this be a warning.”
With these words the three angels spread their wings and flew off like three swallows, chanting the hosannah which is sung in the churches.
The motive of this tale, it will be observed, is the beauty of charity, and it is perhaps another form of the ancient legend of St. Julian which is found, in one shape or another, in the traditions of many peoples. But charity and hospitality are pre-eminently Breton as they are Irish virtues. With a “God save all here!” the beggar walks unbidden and unrepulsed into the first cabin he comes to, and takes his seat, as one expected, by the fireside or at the table. No one dreams of turning him away, for he is the guest of God. The following legend also turns on the same virtues; but it is peculiar in introducing a personage almost unique in Breton tradition—viz., a wicked priest. “In our pious Armorica,” says M. Souvestre, “the respect accorded to the priesthood partakes of worship. The tonsure is a crown which gives a right to royal homage.” But in proportion to the veneration paid to the good priest is the contempt and detestation visited upon the derelict, as the few “constitutional” curés whom the Revolution found among the Breton and Vendean clergy were made fully aware. The reader of Carleton’s Tales and Legends of the Irish Peasantry may discover here another element of likeness in the kindred race.
Christians who wish a powerful protectress in heaven cannot do better than address themselves to Notre Dame de tous remèdes (Our Lady of All-Healing), near the City of the Beech.[143] She has in that place the richest chapel that the hand of 705man ever built. All inside it is filled with golden statues; the belfry, which is brother to that of Kreisker, has more windows in it than there are holes in a Quimper waffle, and there is near the church a fountain of masonry whose waters wash away all evil of soul and body.[144] Our Lady of All-Healing is one of the four great Pardons of the Virgin Mary in Lower Brittany. The others are at Auray, at Bois du fou (Fol-goat, or Madman’s Wood), and Callot.
It was to Our Lady of All-Healing that Mao stopped to pray. Mao was on his way from Loperek, a pretty parish between Kimerc’h and Logoma. He had neither kith nor kin, and his guardian had put in his hand a frappe-tête[145] with three silver crowns, telling him to seek his fortune where he would.
After saying at the foot of the great altar all the prayers his nurse and the rector had taught him, Mao left the church to go his way. But as he was about passing through the hedge he saw a crowd of folks gathered about a dead body lying on the grass at the door of the priest’s house; and he was told it was a poor bread-seeker who had given up his soul the night before, and whom the priest refused to bury.
“Was he, then, a pagan or a wretch who had denied his baptism?” asked Mao.
“He was a true sheep of God’s fold,” made answer all who were there; “and even when hunger pressed him sore he would have taken neither the three ears of corn nor the three apples which custom permits the wayfarer to pluck.”
“Why, then, does the rector deny him the holy water and the consecrated earth?” asked the youth.
“Because poor Stevan left nothing to pay for the prayers of the church,” replied the spectators.
“What!” cried Mao, “is there a priest in this country, so hard-hearted that he shuts the door on the poor while living and will not open to them when dead? If it is money is wanted, here are three crowns. ’Tis all I have in the world; but I give it with all my heart to open to a Christian the consecrated earth.”
The unworthy priest was called; he took the three crowns, rattled off the prayers for the dead in as little time as it takes a carrier’s horse to eat his truss of hay, dumped poor Stevan into a hole in the ground, and went off to see that the sucking pig which was a-cooking for his dinner was properly done on both sides.
As for Mao, he made a cross with two branches of yew, planted it on the grave of the poor seeker of bread, and after saying a De Profundis went on his way to Camfront.
But after a time Mao grew hungry and thirsty, and bethought him that he had nothing left of what his guardian had given him to buy food and drink. So he set about finding some mulberries or wild sorrel or wild plums, and all the while he hunted for them he kept looking at the birds who were picking away in the thickets, and saying to himself:
“Those birds there are better off than baptized creatures; they want neither for inns nor butchers, nor 706bakers nor gardeners; God’s heaven is all their own, and the earth spreads itself before them like a table always served; the little insects are their game, the seeds are their fields of standing corn, hips and haws their dessert; they have the right to take everywhere without paying or as much as saying by your leave. So the little birds are gay, and they sing all day long.”
Turning these thoughts in his mind, Mao slackened his pace, and at last sat down under a great oak and fell fast asleep.
But, lo and behold, all of a sudden while he slept there came to him a saint, all dressed in shining stuffs and crowned with a halo, and the saint said to him:
“I am the poor seeker of bread, Stevan, to whom thou hast opened the gates of Paradise by buying for his body a consecrated grave. The Virgin Mary, whose faithful servant I was on earth, has just had me made a saint, and she has let me come back to thee as the bearer of good tidings. Believe no longer that the birds of the air are happier than baptized souls, since for these the blood of the Son of God has been shed and they are the favorites of the Trinity. Hear, then, what the Three Persons have done to reward thy piety:
“Near by, beyond the meadows, is a manor which thou wilt know by its red and green weathercock. There lives a lord named Tréhouar, who is the father of a daughter as lovely as the day and as gentle as a babe in the cradle. Go and knock this evening at his door, and say that thou comest for what he well knows; he will receive thee, and the rest thou wilt learn thyself. Remember only, if thou hast need of help, thou must say,
With these words the saint vanished and Mao awoke.
His first care was to thank God for the safeguard he had sent him; then he took his way towards the meadows in order to seek the manor-house. As night was falling, he had at first some trouble to find it; but he saw at length a flight of pigeons and followed them, sure they could lead him only to a noble house.
Sure enough, he spied at last the red and green weathercock peeping above some trees loaded with black cherries—for that is the country where they grow. It is the mountain parishes which send all the wild cherries you see laid out on straw at the Pardons of the Léonnais, and which lovers bring to the pennérèz[146] in their great felt hats. Mao crossed the lawn set out with walnuts, knocked at the smallest door he could find in the manor-house, and said, as the saint bade him, that he came for what they knew.
The gentleman was told at once. He came shaking his head, for he was old and feeble, but leaning upon his granddaughter, who was young and fresh; so that to look at them you would have said it was a ruined wall held up by a blooming honeysuckle.
Both, with the utmost politeness, bade the young man come in; he was given a carpet-covered stool by the old man’s arm-chair, and served with sweet cider while supper was getting ready.
Mao wondered greatly at this greeting, and could not keep his eyes off the young girl as she ran about getting everything ready and 707singing like a lark. The more he looked the prettier he found her, and his heart beat like a clock.
“Alas!” he thought, “he alone may call himself happy who will be able to talk with the pennérèz of the manor behind the gable.”[147]
At last, when supper was over, the grandfather had Liçzenn (that was the young girl’s name) clear away the things, and said to Mao:
“We have given you of our best and according to our means, young man, but not according to our wish, for the house of Tréhouar has long suffered from a grievous wound. Once upon a time we reckoned here as many as twenty horses and forty cows; but the fiend has made himself master of cattle-sheds and stables; cows and horses have vanished one after another and as often as they have been replaced, until I have sunk all my savings. All our prayers to conjure away the destroying spirit have been in vain; we have had to resign ourselves, and for lack of live-stock my lands are now lying fallow. I had some hopes of my nephew Matelinn, who has gone to the French wars; but as he never came back I have caused it to be given out through the country, at sermons and elsewhere, that the man who freed the manor should have Liçzenn to wife, and my whole estate after me. But all who have come here to this end and watched in the stable have disappeared like the cows and horses. I pray God you may have better hap.”
Mao, whom the remembrance of his vision emboldened to take the risk, answered that, with the grace of the Virgin Mary, he hoped to overthrow the hidden demon. With that he asked for some fire to keep his limbs from getting stiff, took his frappe-tête, and besought Liçzenn to think of him in her prayers.
The place to which they brought him was a great shed divided into two parts for the cows and the horses; but it was wholly empty, and spiders had spun their webs upon the feed-racks. Mao lit a fire of furze upon the great stones which served for pavement, and betook himself to his prayers.
For the first quarter of an hour he heard only the crackling of the flame; for the second quarter of an hour he heard only the wind whistling sadly through the cracks of the door; for the third quarter of an hour he heard only the little death’s hammer[148] which sounded in the wood-work; but at the fourth quarter a muffled sound was heard under the pavement, and at the end of the building in the darkest corner he saw the largest stone rise slowly and a dragon’s head come out of the ground; it was as big as a cheese-trough, flat like a viper’s, and all about its forehead flashed a row of parti-colored eyes.
The animal set two paws with red claws upon the edge of the pavement, looked at Mao, and left his hole with a hiss.
As he drew near Mao could see his scaly body unroll itself, coming out from under the stone like a great cable from the hold of a ship.
Although the lad was bold enough, yet his blood ran cold, and as he felt the fumes of the dragon’s breath he cried:
708That very instant the shining shape he had summoned stood by his side.
“Fear nothing,” said he; “the wards of the Mother of God will always prevail against the monsters of the earth.”
So saying, Stevan stretched forth his hand, spoke some words of the language they talk in heaven, and instantly the dragon rolled over on his side, struck dead.
At sun-up next morning Mao went and woke all the people of the manor and took them to the stables; but at sight of the dead beast the boldest fell back ten paces.
“Have no fear,” the young man said to them; “the Virgin Mary has helped me. The monster that devoured the cattle and their keepers is now but lifeless clay. Go fetch cords and drag him hence to some deserted quarry.”
They did as he bade them, and when the dragon had been dragged from his lair the entire body went twice round the buckwheat-thrashing yard.
Overjoyed to be freed from so dangerous a foe, the grandfather kept his promise to Mao and gave him Liçzenn to wife. The young pennérèz was led to the church at Camfront, her right arm encircled, as usual, with a band of silver lace for each thousand francs in her dowry, and the story goes that she had eighteen.
Once married, Mao bought live-stock, hired servants, and the lands of the manor were soon worth more than ever. Then it was that the grandfather went to receive his reward from God, leaving all he owned to the young couple.
These last were happier than any other baptized creatures—so happy that every evening they could find nothing to ask of God, and could only thank him. But one day, just as they were sitting down to supper with their servants, who should come in with one of the maids but a soldier, so tall that his head touched the beams of the ceiling, and whom Liçzenn knew at once for her cousin Matelinn. He had come back from the French wars to marry the pennérèz, and, learning what had passed while he was away, great indeed was his wrath; but he took good care not to show it to the young couple, for he was a dissembler by nature.
Mao, nothing doubting, welcomed him with open arms; he gave him of the best in the manor, had the best room made ready for him, and rode with him everywhere about his fields, now covered with harvests.
But the taller Matelinn found the flax, and the heavier the wheat, the angrier he grew that all these things were not his, without speaking of his cousin Liçzenn, who seemed to him prettier than ever. So one day he got Mao to hunt with him on the downs of Logoma, and brought him to a far thicket where there was an abandoned windmill, against which bundles of furze had been piled for the baker of Daonlas; arrived there, he turned his eyes towards Camfront and said all of a sudden to the young man:
“Look! I can see from here the manor with its great court.”
“Which way?” asked Mao.
“Behind that little beechwood: don’t you see the windows of the great hall?”
“I am too short,” said Mao.
“You are right,” cried Matelinn, “and it is a great pity, for I see my cousin Liçzenn in the little paddock by the garden.”
“Is she alone?”
709“No; she is talking to some gentlemen, who are whispering in her ear.”
“And what is Liçzenn doing?”
“Liçzenn is listening to them and twisting the strings of her apron.”
Mao stood on tip-toe.
“Oh! how I wish I could see,” he said.
“Nothing is easier,” replied Matelinn; “you have but to go up to the top of the mill, and you will be taller than I.”
Mao thought well of the advice and climbed the old ladder. When he was come to the top his cousin asked him what he saw.
“I see only trees which seem as near the earth as two-months corn,” answered he, “and houses which seem as little as shells left dry stranded on the shore.”
“Look nearer,” said Matelinn.
“Nearer I see only the sea with barks that skim the water like gulls.”
“Nearer yet,” continued the soldier.
“Nearer yet is the heather in bloom and the golden gorse.”
“But below you?”
“Below me!” cried Mao in a fright, “instead of the ladder to get down I see flames coming to devour me.”
And he saw truly, for Matelinn had taken away the ladder and set fire to the heaped-up piles of furze, so that the old mill was in the midst of a furnace.
In vain Mao begged the giant not to leave him to perish, in so cruel a manner; he turned his back and went off along the downs, whistling.
Then the young man, feeling himself near to stifle, repeated the invocation:
Instantly the saint appeared, holding in his right hand a rainbow one end of which sank in the sea while the other shed a heavy dew, and in the left hand Jacob’s ladder which joined heaven and earth. The rainbow put out the fire, while Mao climbed down on the ladder and made his way back to the manor without the slightest hurt.
At sight of him Matelinn was thunderstruck; sure that his cousin would denounce him to justice, he ran to get his arms and his war-horse, but as he was going out of the great court Mao went up to him and said:
“Have no fear, cousin; for no man on earth will know what has passed on the heath of Daonlas. Your heart was sickened that God had given me more prosperity than you; I wish to cure your heart. From to-day on, while I live, you will have the right to half of all that is mine, save my dearest Liçzenn. Go, then, cousin, and have no more bad thoughts against me.”
This agreement was drawn up by the notary in due form, and Matelinn had every month half of all the produce of the fields, the poultry-yard, and the cattle.
But this generosity of Mao only embittered the venom of his heart. For undeserved benefits are like wine drunk without thirst; they give neither joy nor profit. He no longer sought Mao’s death, for, Mao dead, he would lose the allotted share of his wealth; but he hated him as a caged wolf hates the master who feeds him.
What heightened his wrath was that all turned to gold for his cousin. Up to that time only a child was wanting to his happiness, and Liçzenn now brought him a handsome, hearty boy who was born without a tear. Mao sent word 710to all the gentlefolks for more than five leagues round, praying them to the christening feast; they came from Braspars, from Kimerc’h, from Loperek, from Logoma, from Faou, from Irvilhac, and from Saint Eloi—all mounted on well-caparisoned horses, with their wives or daughters on pillions behind them. The baptism of a prince of Cornouailles would not have drawn together more people of rank.
All were gathered in front of the manor, and Mao was come to get the new-born infant in Liçzenn’s chamber with those who were to hold it at the font and his nearest friends, when in comes Matelinn, wearing on his face a treacherous smile. At his entrance the sick mother gave a cry, but he drew near, twisting his shoulders, and with many compliments thanked her for the present she had made him.
“What present?” asked the poor woman in bewilderment.
“Have you not just added an heir to my cousin’s wealth?” said the soldier.
“And if I have?” said Liçzenn.
“A deed on parchment entitles me to half of all that shall belong to Mao, save your dearly-beloved self,” added Matelinn, “and I come, therefore, to claim my half of the new-born heir.”
All present cried out, but Matelinn repeated coldly that he must have his share of the infant, adding that if denied he would take it himself; and he showed a great knife for cutting up pork which he had brought with him for the purpose.
Vainly did Mao and Liçzenn beseech him with clasped hands and on bended knees to give up his right; the giant’s only answer was to whet his knife on the steel which hung from his girdle. At last he was in the act of tearing the child from the young woman’s arms when Mao bethought him all at once of the appeal to the dead beggar, and repeated it aloud. He had no sooner ended than the room was flooded with a heavenly light, and the saint was descried upon a cloud with the Virgin Mary by his side.
“I am here, good people,” said the Mother of God; “my faithful servant has had me come from the starry realms to judge between you.”
“If you are the Mother of God, save the child,” cried Liçzenn.
“If you are the Queen of Heaven, make them give me my due,” said Matelinn with effrontery.
“Listen to me,” said Mary. “You first, Mao, and you, Liçzenn, draw near with the babe. Until now I had given you only the joys of life; I wish to do more, and so I give you the joys of death. You will follow me into the Paradise of my Son, where neither sorrow nor treason nor sickness comes. As for you, Goliath, it is your right to share the new good which is given them, and you will die like them, but to descend twelve hundred and fifty leagues[149] into the kingdom of the evil one.”
With these words she held out her hand, and the giant was swallowed up in a gulf of fire, while the young husband and wife with their child bent towards each other like a family asleep, and disappeared, borne upon a cloud.
In the incomplete version referred to the beggar-man is changed into a spirit of the air like the genii of the Arabian Nights, the Blessed 711Virgin, it is needless to say, makes no appearance at all, and the beautiful touch at the end, possible only in a Catholic legend, by which Mao and Liçzenn receive the crowning reward of their virtue on being translated to Paradise, is altogether omitted; so that all that is truly significant and characteristic in the story is lost.
Philochristus. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1878.
The peculiar merits of this book cannot be too highly valued by any sincere lover of Christ. Its sweet, earnest, intensely religious tone leads the reader through its learned pages over a most delightful walk of spiritual and intellectual recreation. Dry and unsatisfactory discussion is wholly avoided, and the all-absorbing subject, the human life of the divine Redeemer, is pictured in a light glowing with fascinating love and luminous with precise intelligence. Assuming the character of a disciple who actually lived with and followed Christ until the Ascension, the author represents himself as writing in Alexandria ten years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and when, he says, “almost all those disciples who with me saw the Lord Jesus in the flesh are now fallen asleep.” He admits the impossibility of portraying Christ “as he was in himself,” but he “determined rather to set forth an history of mine own life, wherein, as in a mirror, might perchance be discerned some lineaments of the countenance of Christ, seen, as by reflection, in the life of one who loved him.”
The book opens with a brief but strikingly graphic statement of the condition of Judea, both religiously and politically, at the time of our Lord’s public appearance. Its subjection to Roman domination had eliminated its existence as an independent state, whilst the excessive love of ceremonial into which the law had degenerated betokened the need of a new law and a new law-maker. For to be pious in those days meant “to be obedient to the light precepts of the law, such as the laws concerning the exact observance of the Sabbath, and concerning purifications, and concerning the consumption of nail-parings and the like” (p. 27). The nicety to which these casuistic pietists carried their human observances is shown from the example of one of them, Abuyah, who extolled the Law of the Tassels as most perfect; and so, he says, “once, because I had chanced to tread upon a portion of the fringe of my garment, going up a ladder, I steadfastly refused to move from the spot where I stood till such time as the rent had been repaired.” It was this same pious man that chid his mother “because she wore on her dress a ribbon that was not sewn but only fastened to her vesture, for thus she transgressed the law by bearing burdens on the Sabbath.”
Bringing in Philo and some Alexandrine Jews, with an exposition of their philosophical opinions, adds much interest to the narrative. The patriotic spirit of the enthusiastic Galileans who hastened to gather around Jesus, whom they thought to have come for the restoration of the ancient glory of Israel, is well depicted, and shown to have been the chief motive leading so many from that province to follow him. How slowly even the disciples learned the true mission of our Redeemer appears from the fact that Philochristus himself had no definite conception of it in the beginning. Conversing with Gorgias, a travelled Jew, he sees advancing the tetrarch’s Thracian guard, whose description, as well as that of the Roman soldiers, is admirable: “I looked and saw 712a band of about three hundred men, of a wild and savage aspect, bearing targets and girt with scimitars. But Gorgias, noting, as I suppose, the anger in my countenance, answered: ‘These dogs (may the Lord destroy them root and branch!) are swift indeed to shed the blood of women and children, but they are as naught compared with the Romans. Couldst thou see a Roman legion how they march, these would seem unto thee but as jackals at the lion’s tail. Mark but how the dogs straggle. But when the Romans march the spears in their hands all point one way, and the swords by their sides hang all after one fashion, and even their stakes and tools (which they carry behind their backs) do all swing to one time, and their feet, arms, and heads, yea, even to the winking of their eyes, go all together after the manner of a five-banked corn-ship of Alexandria, with her five hundred oars all keeping time; and when they charge, they charge like ten thousand elephants clad in iron.... Verily these Roman swine are all as children of Satan; but a Roman legion is as Satan himself’” (p. 126). As he had been listening to Christ teaching that whosoever would enter the kingdom should become as little children, it seemed not easy to him to reconcile this with the temporal restoration of Israel, and “methought,” he says, “it would be very hard to overthrow these Thracians, and much more the Romans, by becoming as little children” (ibid.)
Although the work does not come out as a Catholic production, it is very encouraging to those who desire the spirit of Christ to be more universally diffused to find such books receiving extensive circulation. Dogmatic or formally doctrinal propositions are not to be found in it, yet the substantial doctrine of the Gospel is clearly discernible in the body of the work. Excepting the brief exposition of the doctrine of divorce at p. 213, there appears nothing in the whole book inconsistent with a candid, Catholic exegesis of Scripture. The beautiful exposition of Peter’s faith and the founding of the church thereupon, at p. 249, could not be easily surpassed. It is a good sign when Protestants have such works placed in their hands, and the publishers deserve well of the public for the creditable manner in which they have brought out this admirable volume. No professing Christian can read it without very much profit, and, indeed, he will be filled with the author’s declaration concerning Christ: “For in his presence I find life; but to be absent from him is death” (p. 242).
Holy Church the Centre of Unity; or, Ritualism compared with Catholicism. Reasons for returning to the True Fold. By T. H. Shaw. London: R. Washbourne. 1877.
This pamphlet is not a little remarkable among those which issue from the pens of converts. It is very different from what its title leads us to expect. But perhaps it will take the Protestant mind all the better for its peculiarities. We confess, for our own part, to being disappointed at the same time that we are pleased. There is occasionally an exhibition of something like bad taste. There is extravagant use of italics—the effect of which is always weakening. There are outbursts of pious sentiment—a thing never suitable to polemical pages. Then, too, there is no continuity of argument. Each chapter stands by itself and needlessly repeats what other chapters have dealt with. Still, in spite of these defects, there is an earnestness from beginning to end which cannot fail to impress the mind of a real inquirer. And together with this earnestness there is a force in the way some of the arguments are put which is greater, by contrast, than it would appear in pages of the usual style of controversy.
The writer begins by telling us that he has been “for nearly fifty years a member of the Church of England.” He is therefore no hot-brained undergraduate. He adds that his “misgivings were first aroused as early as the year 1851”; and that his “convictions have become matured by means of earnest prayer for Divine guidance.” Here is a mental process that ought to strike a Protestant, and make him ask his conscience: “Am I seeking that I may find? Am I praying for light as this man did? Can I believe that such persistent prayer has ended in delusion?”
The author’s next paragraph is a specimen of his way of putting things:
“Regarding the Church of England—to say nothing of the overwhelming testimony against her through lack of ‘apostolic commission’ and her want 713of unity in doctrine—the endowments, the system of patronage, the untrained priesthood, are in themselves facts glaringly inconsistent with the idea of the guidance of the Spirit of that God who is the author and source of all unity. There is no trade or profession for which it is required that a youth should go through less training than that which suffices for the English clergy. Almost any scholar would pass for holy orders whose father had a lucrative benefice at his disposal. Is it so in Rome? I rather think that learning, self-sacrifice, and poverty are the main worldly requirements. Which most corresponds to our Blessed Lord’s life upon earth, whose ‘kingdom is not of this world’?”
On pages 22-25 he quotes from Father Harper’s reply to Dr. Fraser, Bishop of Manchester, on infallibility. The learned Jesuit is appealing to the testimony of the Third, Fourth, and Sixth Œcumenical Councils. All Anglicans profess to receive the Third and Fourth, some even the Sixth. If their divines should honestly state, as arguments on the Catholic side, the passages cited by Father Harper, their cause would be a lost one indeed, as many of them know but too well. It is therefore a great service to lay these passages before the candid inquirer, who, in all probability, has never heard of Father Harper’s “reply,” or would fear to read it if he had. Further quotations follow, from page 25 to page 27, showing how the dogma of Papal Infallibility, like all other definitions, is “at once old and new,” and thus refuting the stale charge of innovation.
We conclude our notice with another piece of excellent advice to professed inquirers:
“We should call a man insane who endeavored to roof in his house before he had laid the foundation or measured its dimensions; just so it is in fact when people seeking the true church begin by attacking and trying to understand every dogma. These can never be fully understood. It is only as the house becomes built up that the roofing begins; so it is in the spiritual house of the soul. Faith leads us to the church. Faith is, then, the foundation. As the soul grows in grace and humility, so the mysteries of godliness expand before the eye of the soul, revealing that which at one time appeared most obscure.... The great thing needed is divine faith; and this is never found by mere arguing and reading. It is the free gift of God, to be obtained only by earnest prayer.... Get this, and then search whether Jesus Christ did establish a visible church.”
The “faith” here spoken of is not fides formata, for that “comes by hearing”; but the grace of a right disposition for accepting the “word of Christ.” And this disposition is not merely an attitude of earnest attention, but, essentially, a spirit of humility—the “becoming as a little child.” It is precisely the lack of this child-like spirit that makes our arguments barren of result even where they are listened to with respect.
Life of St. Winfrid, or Bonifacius, Martyr, Archbishop of Mentz and Apostle of Germany. By the author of St. Willibrord. London: Burns & Oates. 1878. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
This latest life of the great apostle of Germany is a truly interesting contribution to the early missionary history of the church, and as such seems to commend itself in an especial manner to those of his wandering Anglo-Saxon children who would fain be of the church without being within it; since in this short narrative these may learn how, in the eighth century, their great English saint laid his spiritual allegiance at the feet of Peter before he went forth successfully to undertake the conversion of the heathen and the reform of abuses among half-hearted and unruly Christians. And might not these also ponder on the counsel of Pope St. Zacharias, addressed to the Saxon monk, when commenting on certain of the Gallic clergy who held nationality above unity, the fringes of the episcopal robe of greater value than the seamless raiment of the Bride of Christ? “Preach, dearest brother,” writes the holy pope, “the rule of Catholic tradition we have received from the Holy Roman Church which we serve, and of which God is the founder.”
The present English biographer of St. Boniface has enriched the historical account of the saint’s labors with letters that give a vivid picture of the faith and simplicity of those troubled times that seem so confusing a maze as we look back on them with the clouded memories 714of early school-days, when English history was a tangled web of Ethelwulfs and Ethelberts.
To American ears the name of St. Boniface grows familiar through the churches that rise in his honor among his German children in the United States, yet, while we seem to know him better under the title given him at Rome, we heartily enter into the feeling of loving pride that makes his English biographer dwell on the sweetness of the Saxon name, and with its peaceful syllables waken patriotic echoes among the forests of Thuringia and the waves of the Zuyder Zee—Boniface or Winfrid, he is alike peacemaker and worker of good for all the nations.
Voyage of the Paper Canoe: A Geographical Journey of two thousand five hundred miles, from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, during the years 1874-5. By Nathaniel H. Bishop, Author of “One Thousand Miles’ Walk across South America,” and corresponding Member of the Boston Society of Natural History, and of the New York Academy of Sciences. Boston: Lee & Shepard; New York: Charles T. Dillingham. 1878.
Mr. Bishop has given us a most interesting and instructive book. It cannot fail to be interesting to every one who has any love for nature, or any appreciation of out-of-door life and adventure; and it is instructive in two ways: first, by showing what can be done by a paper boat (a thing which most people know little or nothing about) under skilful management, and, secondly, by the information it gives regarding that remarkable inland line of navigation which runs along almost our whole Atlantic coast, the very existence of which is perhaps known to comparatively few persons.
Mr. Bishop started from Quebec on July 4, 1874, in a large wooden canoe, with which he had at first proposed to make his journey, under the impression, in which well-informed seamen shared, that two hundred miles of his route would be on the open ocean. With this boat he ascended the St. Lawrence and Richelieu rivers to Lake Champlain, thence proceeding by the Champlain and Erie canals to Albany. At this point he concluded to adopt a lighter craft, which was made for him at Troy by Mr. Waters. This was the paper canoe with which the rest of the voyage was made; it was only one-eighth of an inch in thickness, and weighed only fifty-eight pounds. In this seemingly frail but really very strong boat he rowed along down the Hudson, through the Kill von Kull, up the Raritan, through the canal to the Delaware, down the Delaware to the bay and Cape Henlopen, thence along the coast nearly to Cape Charles. Here he had to take the steamer across Chesapeake Bay; but thence, with the exception of short land-portages, the voyage was pursued through the sounds and inlets skirting the coast, and the Waccamaw River, to the Florida line at St. Mary’s, and across Florida by the St. Mary’s and Suwanee Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico.
We have given a short sketch of what Mr. Bishop did; but how he did it, and the various incidents and adventures of his trip, must be learned from the book itself, which we commend heartily to the perusal of all who like to read a most interesting story, which has the advantage of being true from beginning to end.
Seven Years and Mair. By Anna T. Sadlier. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1878.
This is a pleasing and graceful little tale quite out of the common track. It opens amid the wild scenery and the wild people of the Shetlands, passes thence to France, and goes back to a happy ending in its Shetland home. The out-of-the-way scenery and characters afford unusual scope for a picturesque imagination, which Miss Sadlier seems to possess in a very high degree, but which she holds under, a wise restraint and never allows to run away with her. She delights in the long, low sunsets, the gloom of night, the roar of the tempest, the swell of the sea, the grey and the rosy dawn of morning, the solemn beauty of the starry night. All these have a meaning, a poetry, almost a life for her; and she is very happy in her descriptions of them. These are enhanced by a sweet, clear English, which she has doubtless caught from a mother whose name is and will long remain a household word among Catholic readers. The narrative is fresh and pure and simply quaint. Miss Sadlier does not affect to depict the psychological monstrosities 715which are the ambition of most of the story-writers of the day. She avoids microscopic inspections of the interiors, so to say, of impossible personages, and gives us instead a pleasing story of the romantic style, with a few characters strongly marked and well contrasted, the whole forming a refreshing change from the average fiction of the day.
The Christian Reformed in Mind and Manners. By Benedict Rogacci, S.J. The translation edited by Henry James Coleridge, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
This volume is the twenty-third of the quarterly series brought out by the Jesuits in London. The original is a work of the seventeenth century. “It may be considered,” says the editor, “as the fruit of the great experience of Father Rogacci in giving retreats,” and “is one of those series of meditations in which the whole substance and system of the Exercises of St. Ignatius are worked up, although not precisely in the form in which they lie in the Exercises themselves.” Moreover, “the meditations are meant for persons of all classes, not only for religious persons; and those who are familiar from practice with the text of the book itself of St. Ignatius will not fail to see how perfect an acquaintance with and mastery of it must have been possessed by Father Rogacci.”
The meditations are arranged for an eight days’ retreat, at the rate of four a day. But since this may be considered excessive, a “selection” is given on page xii. “for persons who desire to make only three a day.” Indeed, Father Rogacci’s own practice was “not to give more than three meditations a day, with a repetition, or some practical considerations helping to the reformation of life, in the afternoon.” “The place of these considerations,” continues the editor, “is supplied in the present work by a number of practical reflections which he calls réforme, one of which he would have the exercitant read each day at the time of the consideration. There are sixteen of these considerations, in order that the exercitant may choose for himself, or as directed by his spiritual guide, whose assistance is supposed in works like this, according to his special needs.”
Our own judgment of the work is that it is most excellent as a whole, and we recommend it specially to those who are called upon from time to time to give retreats, whether to religious or to sodalities. We regret, however, that the meditations on hell, which are assigned to the fifth day, have been left without annotations for those who may use the book in private. “Pious” exaggerations and figures of speech which may be necessary, by way of economy, to impress gross and sensual natures are very much out of place, we think, in a work of the kind before us.
Our Sunday Fireside: or, Meditations for Children. By Rory of the Hill. London: Burns & Oates. 1878. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
The author of this series of stories, as we find stated in the preface, aims “to supply, for the use of children, some meditations on the choice of life,” while he endeavors so to clothe, in a garb attractive to childish minds, great truths of salvation and of every-day morality—as well as the more complex relations of “church and state”—that, the picturesque raiment winning the eyes, the soul may be led to weigh the half-hidden substance. How far he has attained his aim remains for the children to prove to whom his words shall be read. To us the garb seems, in many cases, too deep-freighted with cabalistic embroidery for little hands to lift, and the substance too heavy with the world’s fate for little minds to weigh. “Many carps are to be expected when curious eyes come a-fishing,” says gentle Robert Southwell, and so our curious eyes open wide with wonder at the wise little maiden of thirteen years who discourses of “amphibologics” and “the hypodichotomy of petty schisms”; who quotes from Renan and Voltaire, Walpole and De Tocqueville, citing almost volume and chapter, and who sets before her younger brothers and sisters the question of the great social conflict of the age, the ceaseless war between Christ and the world in its modern phase of “Liberalism” versus the divine voice of the church of God. In his ardent interest in the subjects whereof he treats we fear the scholar has often forgotten himself, and so has failed to stoop low 716enough, or rise high enough, to reach the hearts of the little people for whom he writes, picturesque as are his descriptions and full of meaning as are his tales, among which we like best “The Way of Life,” for the greater simplicity of its action; “Forgiveness,” for the Christian pathos of its close; and “The Last Mass,” for the solemn beauty and true poetry of its cathedral vision.
A Manual of Nursing. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1878.
In reading this little volume it will be seen that nursing is an art only to be acquired by a large experience and under competent instruction. Although this Manual has been published expressly for the Training School for Nurses at Bellevue Hospital, nevertheless it would repay perusal by any person who is liable to be called upon to act as nurse. As is truly remarked in the preface, the infirm and superannuated are not suitable as nurses. The young and vigorous are the proper subjects to act in such capacity. Judging from its past record, the Training School is a success, and its pupils are far in advance of the old-time nurses who vegetated about Bellevue and charity hospitals. Many physicians state that numbers of patients are lost through injudicious acts on the part of the nurse. A careful perusal of this Manual, and a careful attention given to the physician’s advice, will certainly be important, and would repay the trouble a hundred-fold.
Frederic Ozanam, Professor at the Sorbonne: His Life and Works. By Kathleen O’Meara. (First American Edition.) New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co., 9 Barclay Street. 1878.
We greet with pleasure the appearance of an American edition of this delightful biography, an article on which appeared in The Catholic World, February, 1877, on the event of its publication in England. This edition has, we understand, been published at the request of the Supreme Council of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul of this city, and we trust there is not a member of the society in the country who will not read this life of one of the founders, in fact we may say the founder, of the great and useful Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
Vacation Days: A Book of Instruction for Girls. By the author of Golden Sands. Translated from the French. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1878.
This is another of the admirable little series of devotional and instructive works which Miss McMahon has been the happy means of setting before the English-reading public. Vacation Days follows Golden Sands in its method of appealing simply and tenderly and with apt illustration to the young heart. We recommend it strongly to young people who have the opportunity of idling during these idle days. A passing glance once a day at a page or two of it will form an excellent antidote to the literary trash which nowadays constitutes the staple commodity of summer reading.
Select Works of the Venerable Father Nicholas Lancicius, S.J. Vol. I. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
This is the first volume of a selected edition of the works of one who was a very holy Jesuit and great master of spiritual life during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is a spiritual treatise developing the eight days’ retreat which is founded on the Exercises of St. Ignatius, and contains many pious considerations supported and illustrated by opinions of the saints. We do not question the doctrine of the book; it is solid, orthodox, and inviting; but we believe the book is one which, on the whole, is not adapted to people living in the world, and had better be confined to that class of persons, religious and people retired from the world, for whom it was originally written. Some of the examples taken from the lives of saints are “hard to be understood,” and several of the illustrations given in the chapter on “Helps to escape Purgatory” are not specially edifying to us. We do not care to believe in the vision of a certain monk, or even to think about numerous souls impaled upon spits and roasted like geese before a large fire, with a lot of devils around them acting the part of cooks. The work is well translated from the 717Latin, and contains a short preface by Father Gallwey, S.J., whose name stands deservedly high in England.
The Mysterious Castle: A Tale of the Middle Ages. Translated from the French by Mrs. Kate E. Hughes. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co.
This quaint autobiography of the Baron de Rabasteins is charmingly written. It is full of pleasant, lively incidents of travel, with descriptions of the life and manners of the French people during the middle and latter half of the last century, a period which can hardly be classed as mediæval, as the title given to the translation imports. The adventures of the young baron in the so-called “mysterious” castle of Monségur surpass any story of the kind we have ever read in fiction. If they knew what a treat was in store for them by its perusal, there is not one of our young folks who would not like to get it as a school premium or as a Christmas present. However, we feel it our duty to say that there are numerous faults in translation which in future editions should be corrected. As, for example, on the first page we are confronted with the expression “decision of the holy siege,” by which we presume is meant “the judgment of the Holy See.”
The Art of Knowing Ourselves, etc. By Father John Peter Pinamonti, S.J. With Twelve Considerations on Death, by Father Luigi La Nuza, S.J., and Four on Eternity, by Father John Baptist Manni, S.J. Translated by the author of St. Willibrord. London: Burns & Oates. 1877.
Daily Meditations on the Mysteries of Our Holy Faith, and on the lives of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Saints. First Part, containing Meditations for the five weeks of Advent, for the six weeks after Christmas, as also on the Mysteries of the Life of Christ. Translated from the Spanish of Rev. Father Alonso de Andrade, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. 1878. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
Here are two more volumes of meditations written for other times and rescued from oblivion. Of the three brief treatises contained in the first volume, the “Art of Knowing Ourselves” is a veritable gem. It may well be called “the looking-glass which does not deceive.” Regarding the other two treatises—the “Twelve Considerations on Death” and the “Four on Eternity”—we have to remark again that there is much in them unsuited to the present age. We greatly prefer the second volume from the Spanish of Father Andrade; for though here, too, in the meditations for the first week of Advent, will be found things rather calculated to irritate than to edify, yet the rest of the book is the more delicious for its quaintness, and has a way we have never seen surpassed of making us familiar with Jesus and Mary as our models, and of showing us what wealth is treasured up in the gospels which the church has chosen for her Mass.
St. Teresa’s Own Words; or, Instructions on the Prayer of Recollection, etc. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
This is a good English translation, by Bishop Chadwick, of St. Teresa’s admirable method of interior prayer. It contains the sense and substance of the whole third book of the Imitation of Christ, showing us in brief how Truth speaks within, without the noise of words; and that interior conversation of Christ with the faithful soul is the surest means of possessing our Sovereign Good in this world and the next. It is, as Edmund Waller says, “infinite riches in a little space.”
The Notary’s Daughter. From the French of Mme. Donnet, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co.
As the translator, Lady Fullerton, announces that this very pretty tale is an adaptation, and not in a strict sense a translation, we are assured that the gifted authoress of Lady Bird has not only avoided servility in translating the parts of Un Mariage en Province which she has decided to employ, but has added to a very charming French story some of her own excellent ideas, both in relation to plot and dialogue. The story brings us to the south of France, 718about Toulon, and is strikingly illustrative of the French theories in regard to matrimony. A notary, M. Lescalle, who possesses great political influence, has a very pretty daughter, Rose, whom he successively offers to all the great men in the neighborhood, desirous of his support, as a suitable wife for their sons. His offer is accepted by a rich roturier, but is abruptly broken off by M. Lescalle himself, in consequence of another offer of marriage by M. le Comte de Védelles, in behalf of his younger son, George. Now George, being considered a fada—namely, a half-witted person—is an object of aversion to Mlle. Rose; but, in spite of her repugnance, the ceremony takes place. It is needless to say that George is not a fada, but is a poet, unappreciated by his relations, and so everything is brought to a happy conclusion. The dialogue is above the average of novels, but even so, it is not very sprightly. The moral tone is exceptionally good. The plot affords an opportunity of condemning the system by which marriages are arranged in France, and invites reflections which cannot be discussed in a brief criticism.
The Precious Pearl of Hope in the Mercy of God. London: Burns & Oates (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
We welcome this beautiful little book as a great addition to our ascetical literature. It is translated into English from the Italian, and, to judge by its grace and elegance, by a master of both languages. The aim of the pious author was to awaken and increase in us a sense of confidence in God, which is so necessary to our spiritual life; and he admirably answers objections drawn from certain passages of the Sacred Scriptures which heretics and others have abused, and from some opinions of the Fathers insisting on the severity of the divine judgments. We are reminded by this little work of the great and constant account which the early Christians made of the virtue of hope, whose symbol was an anchor—suggested by St. Paul to the Hebrews vi. 18-19—and which, either alone or in connection with the fish (symbol of our Lord and Saviour), or combined with a cross, substituted for the ring by which the anchor is attached, was a very common device cut or impressed on lamps, rings, and other objects of daily use. Among early Christian inscriptions, also, few are more frequent than those which express hope in the mercy of God, such as Spes in Deo, Spes in Christo, Spes in Deo Christo.
Thalia. From the French of Abbé A. Bayle, by a Sister of St. Joseph. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham & Son.
The vast majority of the lovers of light literature look upon classical stories with a certain mistrust. They fear them either to be too pedantic or wanting in “esprit.” Thalia opens in Arles, thence we voyage to Alexandria, then to Rome, from Rome to Nicomedia, and so on. There are a few good scenes and descriptive passages; but, although a somewhat agreeable way of learning the history of the time, it does not necessarily make a pleasing romance. A Sister of St. Joseph has translated Thalia into very correct English. The book is likely to be discarded as a light production by one who can appreciate its learned allusions, and to one who cannot, to read it will seem a task rather than a pleasure.
Ireland, as She Is, as She Has Been, and as She Ought to Be. By James J. Clancy. New York: Thomas Kelly. 1877.
The comprehensive title of this work indicates the author’s intentions in giving it to the public, and, if he has not succeeded in doing justice to a theme so important, he has at least produced a very readable book, in which will be found many historical facts clearly and succinctly stated, and several suggestions that will command the attention of the thoughtful reader. With some of Mr. Clancy’s views on the past and present of his native country we cannot agree. They are those entertained by a certain class of radical and impracticable politicians whose sole claim to attention consists in the fact that they are continually inveighing against the inevitable, and criticising the acts of the able men who, like Edmund Burke and Daniel O’Connell, have conferred dignity on their native land and earned for themselves the world’s applause. Still, 719the author of the book before us advances his opinions with so much comparative moderation that, while they do not compel conviction, they certainly command our respectful consideration. Those who have read Mr. Sullivan’s New Ireland will probably like to read this Irish-American version of the oft-told tale of Ireland’s wrongs and rights.
Wrecked and Saved. By Mrs. Parsons. London: Burns & Oates. 1878. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
The author of this very pretty and instructive tale is already well known to the public as the writer of several moral stories which, while thoroughly Catholic in tone and interesting in plot, are sufficiently attractive in an artistic point of view to command the attention of all intelligent readers. Wrecked and Saved is a story of everyday life very simply and gently told. The hero, who has been a shipwrecked babe, passed through all the phases of the life of a foundling, winning to himself friends by his good conduct, cheerful disposition, and intrinsic merits. Wrongfully accused of a heinous crime, he suffers imprisonment and mental torture, but, having finally been proven innocent, all ends happily. The plan of the book can scarcely be called original, but the lessons of patience, industry, and dependence on the will of Providence inculcated are excellent.
Forbidden Fruit. From the German of F. W. Hackländer. By Rosalie Kaufman. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1878.
This is a novel with the threadbare plot of a young heir being obliged to marry before a certain age or lose a considerable fortune. There is no grace or lightness about the dialogue, and scarcely a particle of humor in the entire book. There are one or two characters well drawn, of whom an old gentleman named Renner, and a young and vivacious beauty, Fräulein Clothilde, are possibly the best. As a rule, this kind of novel does not prove a success when translated for an American public. How it may succeed in Germany it is impossible to say, but certainly the book is even uncommonly stupid. When it is remarked that all the young ladies and gentlemen are distinguished for their elegance and beauty, the character of the story will be appreciated.
Total Abstinence in its Social and Theological Aspects. An address by the Rev. James J. Moriarty, Catholic pastor of Chatham Village, N. Y. Published by special request. Chatham Village, N. Y.: Courier Printing-House. 1878.
This is a very earnest and eloquent address, which was delivered to a mixed audience of Catholics and Protestants. Studiously popular in its style, it is for that reason especially adapted to go home to the hearts of the people. Father Moriarty has happily hit on the peculiar danger and fascination of the vice of intemperance in the following passage: “It is a vice that lies in wait for the most prominent members of society, the highest in station, the most influential over their fellow-men. It is not the vice of the naturally mean, the selfish, or the miserly. It is more apt, of its nature, to attack those of the finest mind, the most brilliant talent, the brave, the frank, the generous-hearted, those open to the influence of the highest, the purest, the noblest sentiments.”
Erleston Glen: A Lancashire Story of the Sixteenth Century. By Alice O’Hanlon. London: Burns & Oates. 1878. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
The scene of this tale, as the title indicates, is laid in England, and the time is that of Queen Elizabeth, before the Catholic gentry of the country became almost extinct, and the persecuting spirit of the “Reformers” had died out for want of material upon which to exercise its fanaticism. The plot of the book is simple, and the story is, taken all together, sad. Two happy, unobtrusive families, allied by long acquaintance and sincere friendship, but still more by the bond of a common faith, are suddenly and cruelly interrupted in their retired happiness by the agents of that government which it is the boast of some modern historians to characterize as one of the most glorious England has ever had. Then follow espionage, arrests, mental 720suffering and physical torture, that, though less than historical facts and by no means distorted from the truth, sicken the heart and move us to thank God we live in the nineteenth and not in the sixteenth century. As a work of art Erleston Glen is by no means perfect. Its stiffness of style argues an unpractised hand, and the incomprehensible Lancashire dialect is too often introduced to suit the general reader; but as a picture of English life as it was during the sudden paroxysm of Protestant reformatory zeal which characterized the reign of Elizabeth, it is both truthful and vivid. Many who do not care to read the more serious works lately printed in England on the same topic—the sufferings of Catholics in that country—will be both edified and instructed by a perusal of Miss O’Hanlon’s clever book.
The Catholic Publication Society Company has in press, and will shortly issue, one of the most important of its excellent series of educational works. This is the History of the United States (for the use of schools), advance sheets of which lie before us. It is written by one of the most experienced and cultured of our writers, Mr. J. R. G. Hassard, author of the Life of Archbishop Hughes, Life of Pius IX., etc. Its letter-press, illustrations, and maps are beyond criticism. Its method is singularly well adapted to assist both scholar and teacher. At the foot of every page are questions on what has gone above. The History begins with the discovery of America and brings us down to our own times. It has this special distinction to recommend it: it gives Catholics their due prominence in a history of which they occupy so large a place, but a place that has hitherto been resolutely denied them. It is well, it is necessary, that Catholic children should feel and know that they have as grand a share in the history, the development, the life, the struggles, the triumphs of their country as has any other class. Placing this History in their hands at school is the very best means of instilling into their minds facts which it has been the custom to ignore in the histories thus far published.
The work is intended for the more advanced students in our schools and colleges. For younger scholars an Introductory History, arranged on the catechetical plan, has been prepared as an abridgment of the larger work, and will be issued simultaneously with the latter.
We would again call the attention of our readers to the new and excellent works published by the Catholic Publication Society Co., and especially intended for light summer reading. Such are Six Sunny Months, Sir Thomas More, Letters of a Young Irishwoman, Alba’s Dream, and the various volumes of stories collected from The Catholic World. We only call attention to these because they are the most recent of their kind. The field of Catholic fiction is now happily a large and rich one, and Catholics who are given to this kind of reading might well turn aside from the foolish romances that are made to suit a vicious popular taste to works which are fully as interesting as the others without their nauseous flavor and immoral tone and tendency.
The primary light of reflection which awakens the human mind to a distinct consciousness of itself at the same time reveals a world of unknown forms, the universe of space and succession, teeming with evolutions of order, beauty, and power. With the dawn of reason comes also the principle of causality, and man asks himself, What mean these mighty changes on earth and in the sky? What urges the wonderful motions of wind and wave, of sunshine and of shadow, and yonder golden fires that sparkle and burn in the high vault of heaven? Whence are they all, and whence am I? And the very first attempt to answer these spontaneous questions produces the first theory of natural theology, inaugurating the reign of the earliest natural religion.
But the curiosity of the intellect never slumbers, and the problem repeats itself from age to age: What is the magnificent and mysterious power above man and before nature, the primordial Cause of all phenomena? And in response to this constant and ever-recurring interrogatory the annals of speculation have presented several contradictory solutions, as the atheistic, the sceptical, and the pantheistic, none of which I shall now pause to criticise. I shall simply undertake to prove, in accordance with the rigorous rules of inductive logic, that the great 722cause, the fundamental efficient of all facts whatsoever, must possess the attributes of intelligence, and especially mathematical reason.
It will be remembered, however, that on the subject of causation, as to the reality of the abstract idea itself, the schools of both ancient and modern philosophy stand divided. The disciples of one sect assume the existence of secret forces in the bosom of nature, whose development results in those varied manifestations of mingled matter and motion which become perceptible to our senses; while their opponents, now including the élite of the most enlightened thinkers, as strenuously contend that the knowledge of efficient causes lies altogether beyond the reach of the human faculties; that our science must therefore be limited to the strict generalization of phenomena according to their invariable conjunctions of simultaneity and succession, without the possibility of discovering any hidden nexus or closer tie between them. This is the doctrine taught alike by the great names of Reid, Locke, Hume, Brown, Kant, and Comte.
But it is fortunate that the path of the present argument will not carry us into the mist of that interminable controversy. I shall not pretend to determine the specific qualities of causation in general. On the contrary, the whole extent of my purpose is to show that the fundamental efficient of all material facts, whatever else it may or may not be, must be endowed with the attribute of rationality.
I will begin by laying down the universal proposition: Every natural phenomenon having the characteristics of mathematical order and harmony, to the exclusion of chance, must be the effect of a rational cause.[151]
Now, it is evident that the foregoing assertion, the major premise of my intended syllogism, predicates a uniformity of relation between a certain class of facts and the power which produces them. In other words, it affirms an invariable correspondence betwixt a given quality in the consequent, or effect, and a like definite attribute in the antecedent, or cause, whichever terminology different schools may prefer. The existence of this relation would by some be deduced from à priori principles founded on a mental analysis of the abstract notion of causation, while a large majority of mankind actually take it for granted as an intuitive axiom of self-evident truth; and thus, wherever they behold the appearances of design or the beautiful evidence of mathematical order, their inference of previous or contemporaneous causal intelligence is immediate and irresistible.
But neither of those procedures can be regarded as either certain or scientific. No sequence of events can attain to the dignity of a general and philosophic law until the antecedent and consequent are brought face to face and tested by the rigid rules of an infallible induction. The complicated web of circumstances must be unravelled to eliminate the extraneous facts, and discover what precise quality alone in the cause produces mathematical harmony in the effect.
723For example, it is known that the air supports animal life as well as combustion. But that same atmosphere consists of two elements, oxygen and azote; how, then, shall it be ascertained which ingredient is the supporter of life and flame? To determine this question the natural philosopher performs an experimentum crucis by plunging a bird or a lighted candle in a jar of pure azote from which the oxygen has been removed, when the bird instantly dies and the candle is extinguished. The problem is solved according to the inductive canon of difference. Nevertheless, to make sure he reverses the experiment, and treats the animal or the flame with oxygen instead of azote, when the functions of vitality and combustion proceed without disturbance—indeed, with additional vigor. Here there can be no longer any room for doubt. It is manifest as any demonstrated theorem in geometry that of the two elements in atmospheric air, the oxygen, and not the azote, sustains both life and combustion. And as I said before, this is the procedure of induction by what Mill so happily terms the method of difference—the most potent and unerring of all the five canons for the investigation of causes.
Now, what we need for our induction as to the real and absolute efficient of mathematical order and harmony in the motions of the universe is a similar analyzed instance, where the naked antecedent and consequent shall be detected in the very act of conjugation. And, by a propitious arrangement of nature in the great fact of our complex organization, we have it in our power to perform this decisive experiment in the same manner and with as much certainty as in the previous example. We can act as individual causes, either with or without the presence of a rational purpose. Then, let the student seat himself, pen or pencil in hand, to make marks on the paper, without any intelligent design, as we sometimes do in a state of reverie when the reason is exclusively occupied with some other subject. The result is a medley of irregular and disconnected figures, of letters and words written mechanically, without beauty, order, or consecutive meaning.
Again, let the experimentalist apply the test of his intelligence. The effect is a series of united diagrams solving some profound problem in geometry, or a divine page of impassioned and classical eloquence, or the elegant delineation of any particular object of nature or art, according to the specific intention of the person. Here the analysis is perfect, and realizes the exact conditions imposed by the inductive canon of difference. The circumstances are all precisely identical in both cases, save the presence of rationality and its consequent mathematical harmony in the one instance, and their absence in the other. Hence there can be no question that in human causation the attribute of reason is the actual efficient of every species of order.
Besides, even nature herself presents the same experiment in every case of total insanity. The madman is deprived of reason, but not of simple volition or bare causal power; and the consequence is utter disorder and want of method in his actions. He cannot produce mathematical effects, because he is deficient in mathematical intelligence.
The same general law is demonstrated also by the canon of agreement. 724Universal experience shows in every department of science, industry, literature, and art that intelligence is the invariable antecedent of order, and that the absence of that mental quality involves the corresponding absence of all regular and harmonious sequence.
It remains, however, to prove our major premise by the method of concomitant variations, the canon of which has been expressed with such clear and scientific accuracy in Mill’s Logic: “Whatever phenomenon varies in any manner whenever another phenomenon varies in some particular manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, or is connected with it through some fact of causation.”
For instance, in the case of heat, by increasing the temperature of a body we enlarge its bulk, but by enlarging its bulk we do not increase its temperature; therefore heat must be the cause, and not the effect, of expansion. In a similar manner philosophers demonstrate the first law of motion, or uniform velocity in a straight line, by showing that retardation, or divergence, is always in the definite ratio of the obstacles encountered by the moving body.
The application of this rule to our argument, although its force cannot be augmented, gives the evidence the greatest variety and splendor. For the annals of all ages and nations, without one single exception, bear witness that, in exact proportion to the increase of rationality, the human mind has always displayed corresponding effects of beauty and order in every sphere of art and civilization. What investigators have extended the limits of natural knowledge by perfecting the science of geometry, or discovering the differential calculus, or fixing the true principia of the material universe? Not a low class of intellects with feeble faculties of reason and no broad sweep of mathematical perception, but men of the loftiest genius, such as the immortal names of Euclid, Archimedes, Leibnitz, or Newton.
But I have already spent sufficient, and perhaps the reader will think too much, time on this primary induction, which indeed, from the universality of the law, has every appearance of being self-evident. Nevertheless, this fulness of discussion was indispensable to my purpose, that being to place all the premises of the argument on a scientific rather than a popular basis. And, if I am not mistaken, we are now entitled to consider the first proposition as completely proven: “That all natural phenomena having the attributes of mathematical order and harmony to the exclusion of chance must be the effects of a cause, or of causes, possessing rationality.”
I am aware, however, of the specious objection that the general induction is too wide for the warrant of its particular instances. It may be urged that although the demonstration is perfect as to the logical relation of intelligence as a cause and harmony as the consequent, yet still we are not justified in affirming that no other cause is capable of producing the same result. For example, a hundred separate antecedents may lead to death; and many ordinary facts follow very different material or mental efficients. Upon what principles, then, it will be asked, are we enabled to pronounce the universal negative that there cannot exist any unintelligent forces in the bosom of nature entirely adequate 725to the production of the mathematical order which we behold in the world of time and space? I state the adverse criticism in all its strength, because it is the only answer that can be interposed by the sceptical philosopher; and, besides, it constitutes the main difficulty in the minds of the multitude. Nevertheless, it cannot claim the slightest pretension to the dignity of a scientific argument.
In the first place, I remark that the objection, if it has any semblance of validity, proves too much, as it goes to overthrow every general proposition which can possibly be framed on the subject of causation, so far as assertion can proceed from the antecedent to the consequent. It cuts off from the realms of logic, at one reckless blow, the whole category of universal as to the predication of any causal sequence even among perceptible phenomena. Nay, it also denies the legitimacy of particular affirmations in all cases of causation; for if the sceptic has the logical liberty to assume the hypothesis of unknown and invisible efficients in one instance, he may with equal plausibility do so in all; and therefore these secret and unseen causes may be the real producing antecedents of every phenomenon whatever, and thus all knowledge must be reduced to naked conjecture.
By what rule, let me inquire, are we justified in extending the sublime law of gravitation to the various planets of the solar system, and even as high as the fixed stars? Obviously for the only reason that we perceive in the magnificent evolutions of the celestial bodies the same class of effects which appertain to terrestrial attraction. And upon that identical principle we are entitled to infer the existence of a rational cause wherever we behold mathematical harmonies or the manifest evidences of intelligence and design. The most stringent canons of induction give us this right, and I can see no motive for refraining from its exercise, if the process should perchance conduct us to the recognition of a Supreme Being. But as to this last point, we have not yet advanced far enough in the discussion to venture a positive declaration.
It must be admitted, however, that the axiom by which we are enabled to deduce a cause with specific attributes from any definite facts, such as we know by previous experience to be the natural consequents of that particular efficient, must be restricted to the special case where we have no acquaintance with any other cause competent for the production of the given phenomena. And this is precisely the condition of the case in our present argument. We have the most abundant and perfect experience that intelligence is adequate to produce the harmonious regularity and beautiful order of nature; but we are altogether destitute of scientific, or even superficial, knowledge as to the reality of any different cause which might yield those results.
As I have already observed, the most advanced schools of modern sensist philosophy entirely ignore the investigation of efficient or producing causes, as removed beyond the sphere of the human senses. On this point the Scotch metaphysicians speak as decidedly as the disciples of Locke and Hume, or the more profound and intensely critical Kant. Indeed, Dr. Thomas Brown has clearly demonstrated 726that in the physical world we can never hope to discover by sensation anything save phenomena, either antecedents or consequents, with their invariable laws of simultaneity and succession; while the deepest as the most laborious thinker of all, M. Auguste Comte, refuses even so much as to use the term cause in his Course of Positive Philosophy.
On the other hand, those who aver the existence of imperceptible powers and occult qualities as the actual efficients of phenomena do not attempt to define their character, nor pretend that they fall within the limits of sensible or intellectual cognition. A member of that sect, like the pedant in the old play, may explain “that opium produces sleep because it has a soporific property”; but if you ask him how he knows it to possess such a property, he can only answer, from the fog of his vicious circle, “because it produces sleep.” And such must ever be the virtual avowal of utter ignorance as to the nature of causation by the adherents of this obsolete school. And could they thus solve, even to their own satisfaction, the question of secondary causes, they leave the question of the First Cause untouched.
It therefore follows, in accordance with all the rules of the most rigid and thorough induction, that the mathematical harmonies of the universe furnish conclusive proofs of an intelligent cause; and if we reject this inference there is not, and cannot be, the faintest shadow of a possible hypothesis for the explanation of natural phenomena.
I will next proceed to state my second proposition: All natural phenomena have the characteristics of mathematical order and harmony to the exclusion of chance.
Now, it is evident that a generalization so sweeping and universal as the above could only be made good by an immense, an almost infinite series of inductions. Nevertheless, we are not bound to assume an onus of such overpowering magnitude. For as the syllogism of our argument belongs to the first figure, and we have to deal at present with the minor premise, that may well be particular; and the conclusion will be valid as to everything embraced within its terms, and that will be found sufficient to warrant our conclusion.
As a preliminary, however, it becomes necessary to explain the logical process for the exclusion or mathematical elimination of chance. Suppose there be two dice in a box, what are the chances of our turning an ace at a single throw? Obviously one-sixth, leaving six chances minus one against the probability; while the chances against our throwing two aces, or any other equation, may be set down, with sufficient accuracy for the purpose of this argument, as the square of the last number, or thirty-six. The chances against an equation of four dice are 1,296; while against eight they amount to the enormous sum of 1,679,616—an impossible throw, unless the cubes have been loaded. And it is manifest from this example how very soon the multiplication of coincidences indicative of order must demonstrate causation to the utter elimination of chance. I will now commence with the particular cases of the general law announced in my second premise.
I survey my right hand: it has five fingers; I look at my left: it has five also—the other member of 727an algebraic equation. I then turn to my feet, and behold a similar equation of five toes on each. I next turn to my bodily senses, and again find the mystic five. The wonder is increasing. And now all the incalculable millions of my fellow-men rise up and sweep before the eye of the mind, in all the rich and radiant, or coarse and unseemly, varieties of humanity; and all these, too, present the identical God-announcing miracle, the quintuple equation of fives.
Let us, however, apply the rigorous rules for the calculation of chances, not forgetting the judicious remark of Whately: “That the probability of any given supposition must be estimated by means of a comparison with each of its alternatives.”
Now, there can be but two suppositions possible as to this uniform combination by which the number five is five times repeated in the human organism. The cause, whatever that may be, which produces these invariable equations must be endowed with intelligence or not. There is no other conceivable alternative; for the abscissio infiniti effected by the word not, in logical division, always exhausts the whole category of things, both real and imaginary. Every object must be rational or not—rational in thought and in fact.
Therefore all these millionary equations of fives must have been produced by a cause, or causes, possessed of reason, or by a power destitute of that attribute. If we assume the first alternative there will be no chances for calculation, the efficient itself being amply adequate to develop the mathematical harmony.
But take up the other and only remaining supposition, that the causal agent producing the human organism is mere blind force of some unknown and unimaginable nature; what are the chances against such a hypothesis? We might say, in all logical strictness, that as we have no scientific knowledge of any such unintelligent cause capable of effecting the given phenomena of order, while we are acquainted with an efficient fully competent for the purpose, the chances against the naked assumption of blind force must be stated as infinity to zero. The chances against the equation of five fingers on each hand would be twenty-five. Add the five toes on each foot, and the chances will be six hundred and twenty-five. Then incorporate into the calculation the five senses, and the chances are three thousand one hundred and twenty-five. Let me procure a larger sheet, as the measureless sea of infinite and nameless numbers is flowing fast upon me. Next reckon the chances in the case of two persons, and they swell to the vast sum of nine millions, seven hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred and twenty-five; while the chances for four men will be the square of that number, and so on for ever. But the enormous sums soon overpower all the magnificent processes of our algebra, and no logarithmic abbreviations can aid us to grasp what stretches away into the unexplored fields of immensity. The attempt to apply the calculation even to the inhabitants now living on the globe would be as idle as the endeavor to enumerate the sunbeams shed during a solar year. The arithmetic of the archangel would perhaps be insufficient for the mighty computation.
In reference also to a single individual the subject might be 728pushed indefinitely farther—to the bones of the arms, head, feet, and the convolutions of the brain; for everywhere, and all through the physical framework, there runs a wonderful duality, where the series of constant equations counterbalance each other.
It must be borne in mind that I have shown in my major premise the necessity of rationality in the cause which effects mathematical order in the sequences of any natural phenomena. Hence such a cause is demonstrated for the whole of humanity. But, apart from the rigid logic of the argument, the question presents itself to popular apprehension: Could a cause without the intellect to perceive, the faculty to calculate and arrange, numerical relations, produce this infinity of mathematical harmonies?
If it be answered that the efficient is some unknown power or secret quality involved in the facts themselves or concealed beneath them, the problem still remains unsolved and rebounds upon us with accumulated force: Is that supposed secret power or occult quality self-conscious? Hath it the attribute of mathematical reason competent to the calculation and production of all these beautiful and boundless equations?
Let us take our next comparisons from chemistry, that youngest sister of all the sciences, the splendid child of the galvanic battery, whose birth was brilliant as that of lightning.
Go analyze a cup of water. You find it composed of two parts of hydrogen to one of oxygen by volume, and eight parts of oxygen to one of hydrogen by weight. Nor do these numerical ratios ever vary. Freeze it into ice hard as the crystal of the jewelled mountains; dissipate it into vapor of such exquisite tenuity that a million acres of floating mist would scarcely form a single dewdrop; bring it from the salt solitudes of the ocean, or from the central curve of a rainbow, and submit it to the test of analysis; and still the pale chemist, as he watches the evolutions of the perpetual wonder from the depths of his laboratory, calls out: “Two to one, and one to eight, now and for ever!”
Let no one hope to estimate the chances against the hypothesis of the production of these mathematical relations by an unintelligent agent, unless he can first reckon the drops of a thunder-storm or measure the capacity of the sea.
A similar numerical harmony prevails in the atmosphere, which contains twenty parts of oxygen to eighty of nitrogen in every one hundred by volume, very nearly; the definite proportions never varying. Can it be imagined that the cause of this constant order, which rolled the aerial ocean of the breath of life forty-five miles deep around the globe, is itself destitute of the reason to perceive the ratios of its own wonderful works?
But select as another example a bit of limestone. You discover its elements to bear a quadruple proportion. There are twenty-two parts by weight of carbonic acid, and twenty-eight of lime. Lime yields on analysis twenty parts of the white metal calcium and eight of oxygen gas; while carbonic acid is composed of sixteen parts of oxygen to six of pure carbon. And these fixed relations of numbers are the same in every particle of limestone on the earth: in the 729snowy stalactite torn from the roof of coral caverns, in the ponderous fragment hurled up from the heart of the globe by the fiery hand of world-rocking volcanoes, and in the gleaming pebble which the child picks up from the waters of the brook. What a field is here for the calculation of chances! What a theme for devout and transcendent wonder! What a magnificent Bible with leaves of crystal is this among the old silent rocks! Must not such marvels of mathematical order have been produced by an efficient endowed with rationality—a cause that, to borrow the sublime language of Hebrew poetry, had the skill “to weigh the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance”?
But not only do we find numerical ratios here; symbolical angles are also detected. All the hundred forms of carbonate of lime split into six-sided figures, or regular rhombohedrons, whose alternate angles measure 105 deg. 55 min. and 75 deg. 5 min. Let the mathematician come with his trigonometry fresh from the schools to study this lofty lesson; although no science can avail for the computation of the chances against the hypothesis of an unintelligent cause for this celestial geometry of the crystal mountains.
We will make our next inductions in that study so charming to all genuine lovers of nature. Not over smoky furnaces or in darkened chambers will we read this division of our theme, but out in the sunny fields, and in the green-robed valleys, among the silken sisterhood of vegetable beauties, and beneath the radiant smile of the blue-eyed heavens.
The first ten classes of Linnæus are arranged simply according to the number of stamens presented in each blossom. For example, let us analyze a flower of the tobacco plant. It is of the fifth class, and of course has five stamens. But the equation does not end here; its corol has five parts, and the emerald cup of its calyx as many points.
Now, suppose that every bloom is produced by some efficient which cannot count; what are the chances against this combination of fives three times in a single specimen? Obviously one hundred and twenty-five; while for two flowers they amount to the sum of fifteen thousand, six hundred and twenty-five. For four blossoms the chances would be the square of the last number, and so on ad infinitum. What, then, must be the chances against the supposition of atheism in the flowers of a solitary field, in all the fields of a solar summer, in all the summers of sixty centuries?
But similar equations hold with all the vegetables to be found on the globe, and in their fruit as well as flower. Some blossoms are perfect time-pieces, marking the eternal march of the celestial lights in the firmament. Many open to the morning sun; some only to the fiery kisses of noonday; others at purple twilight when the gentle dews begin to fall; and a few in the depth of darkness, as it were to gaze on the glory of the midnight stars.
I shall not hazard a remark as to the nature of that wonderful agent whose coming at the dawn of every day is like the sweet smile of some viewless yet omnipresent divinity, 730bringing with it the revelation of a new world. At present we have only to deal with mathematical evolutions, and not with the substantial essence of any fact or phenomenon.
The first law of light is an algebraic formula: The intensity of the fluid decreases as the square of the distance increases, and vice versâ.
The second law is equally mathematical: The angles of incidence and reflection are equivalent for every ray. Thus a sunbeam, falling on the table before me at an angle of forty-five degrees, will be reflected at the same angle.
Here, then, in the development of these two general laws, we behold the miracle of innumerable squares, circles, angles, such as sweep over countless millions of leagues in the stellar spaces, with a regularity that no Euclid or Legendre might ever hope to trace. And can it be possible that after all the great cause which thus geometrizes may be devoid of all geometrical knowledge—nay, of even the faculty of rationality? If so, then might a blind mole, or the abstraction of a nonentity, compose a system of beauty and order superior in both accuracy and splendor to the Principia of Newton or the sublime theories of La Place!
You can scarcely commence the estimation of chances in reference to these luminous angles being continually formed all over the material universe. Even imagination reels before the immensity of the conception. Think of all the fire-beams that emanate from the sun during one long summer day—of all the rays which flash out from the high stars for only a single night! Then let the mind travel back over the march of dim and distant centuries, gathering age upon age, rolling cycle after cycle, in those vast segments of eternity where the Alps and Andes seem evanescent as the snow-flakes that ride on the gyrations of the whirlwind around their hoary summits; where Platonic years are fleeting as the pulsations of the pendulum, and even the starry galaxies come and go “like rainbows.” Then bid your soaring fancy lift her lightning-wings away from world to world, and behold the horizon of the space which hath no limits, still opening for ever onwards and upwards, and thickening all around with serial columns of suns and stars, and undulating like some shoreless sea with its waves of nebulous light. Then tell me the number of rays that have shot athwart this teeming expanse of immensity since the sons of heaven shouted their choral hymns in the morning of creation. And answer me, who shall calculate the chances against the sceptical hypothesis here? Only a God of infinite intelligence may solve this infinite problem.
The first law of the celestial motions discovered by Kepler, like all the rest, expresses a mathematical formula: All the planetary orbits are regular ellipses, in the lower focus of which stands the sun.
Now, as the ellipse contains an infinite number of geometrical points, it follows that the chances against the repetition of this figure by the progress of the same body along the same path in space must be infinity multiplied into infinity, compared with zero.
The second law is equally decisive. It may be stated thus: The times occupied by a planet in describing 731any given arc of its orbit are always as the areas of the sectors, formed by straight lines from the beginning and end of the arcs to the sun as a common centre. And here it cannot fail to be remarked that every term of the enunciation is purely mathematical.
But the third law of Kepler is still more astonishing. The squares of the periods of the planetary revolutions vary as the cubes of their distances from the sun.
What amazing evolutions are these to be the work of unthinking masses of matter! What angel’s music is this among the stars to be chimed by the choir of tongueless atoms! And well might the inspired old man exclaim when the heavenly harmony first broke upon his ear: “I have stolen the golden secret of the Egyptians. I triumph. I will indulge my sacred fury. I care not whether my book be read now or by posterity. I can afford to wait a century for readers, when God himself has waited six thousand years for an observer.”
We will not speak of chances in the production of such a mathematical marvel. We dare not approach the stupendous calculation, unless we might borrow the geometry of the morning star.
But every region of astronomy overflows with similar wonders; yet I have only time to adduce one more. The sun and all his suite of luminous attendants rotate from west to east, on axes that remain nearly parallel to themselves. La Place has computed the probability to be as four millions to one that all the motions of the planets, whether of rotation or revolution, originated in a common cause. Is it, then, even so much as conceivable that the efficient of such an endless order should be itself destitute of all reason and foresight? For it is universally conceded that the discovery and quick perception of mathematical relations evince intellect of the most lofty character; how incomparably superior, therefore, must have been the rationality required for the primary composition and arrangement of these relations! If to think geometrically demands intelligence, can any cause work geometrically without possessing the attributes of thought? We admire the genius of a Kepler and of a Newton as almost superhuman, because they were enabled to understand the harmonious laws of the heavenly bodies; what madness, then, must it be to deny the existence of mind as the necessary efficient for the production of these very harmonies!
I might go on to career all over the fields of science, and show the prevalence of mathematical ratios and equations in every department of approachable nature. But on the strength of the instances already adduced I think we are entitled to assume our minor premise as thoroughly proven: that all natural phenomena have the characteristic of mathematical order and harmony to the exclusion of chance. And this induction, although it only rests for support on the canon of agreement—per enumerationem simplicem, ubi non reperitur instantia contradictoria—nevertheless has as broad and firm a basis as the philosophic axiom that every fact has a cause. For as we have never found a phenomenon without an efficient, so neither can we ever find one without its relations of mathematical order.
732And now calling to mind our major premise—that every natural phenomenon having the characteristics of mathematical order and harmony must be the effect of a rational cause—it follows irresistibly by the rules of logic, from the conjugation of the two propositions, that all natural phenomena are the effects of a rational cause.
But we are not yet justified in dignifying the efficient of all these natural phenomena with the name of God. For the cause, though demonstrated to be intelligent, may be one or many, permanent or transient, good or evil. We have only inquired as to its existence, without considering any other attribute. However, we have not far to go in the sequel of the investigation, as the laws of logical inference founded on our previous inductions will enable us to give a speedy solution of the remaining problems, at least so fully as they may be susceptible of scientific explanation.
On the subject of causal unity it may be laid down as a general principle: That in the same sphere of time and space the identity of an efficient is to be concluded from the identity of the phenomena which experience has shown it to be capable of producing. Thus we refer all the electrical facts in the universe to a single imponderable agent; and we always predicate the power of heat whenever we witness its usual and well-known effects. Nevertheless, these instances are only analogous. But the following are precisely in point. The affirmation of a single human being, the truth of his separate existence as a real and rational unit, is inferred alone from his manifestations as a cause in time and space. He stands demonstrated, present or absent, by the power that he develops, or has developed, in his individual sphere. His physical features may change, yet he will still be revealed in his intelligent actions. The divine pictures of a Raphael or a Rubens may be identified for long ages after the hand that sketched the now immortal lineaments of some mortal face has been mouldering, like the lovely original, in darkness and dust. No two persons—that is to say, human causes—present exactly the same effects. Every fact evolved will differ more or less. And, lastly, every cause is manifested as a unit by its occupation or pervasion of a given space.
Applying, then, this axiom of identity to the efficient of natural phenomena, the unity of the great Cause becomes at once apparent. Everywhere we behold the same laws of mathematical harmony. The identical principle of gravitation, which we have proved to be the effect of a sublime rationality, carries us away to the utmost limits of the solar system, and shows us one sovereign efficient, one pervading force, that we may henceforth call God, all over those immeasurable fields of infinite azure. And when this path grows so dim and distant amidst that far-off wilderness of flaming worlds that we can no longer trace the footsteps of attraction, there still remains heaven’s own highway of radiant light to conduct us on and on towards the centre, or perchance it may be the circumference, of the universe, revealing the same God enthroned on every sun; because every ray that flashes from the great blue deep of the firmament preserves the same identical laws of reflection and refraction.
Who can elevate his mind to the 733contemplation of these amazing and magnificent depths of distance, those profound caverns of space, teeming and sparkling with worlds like crystals? That light which travels almost two hundred thousand miles in a second does not reach us from the star 61 Cygni until after a journey of nine years and three months; and yet that is one of the nocturnal luminaries which may be termed the nearest neighbors of our system. The number of registered stars amount to two hundred thousand; while the entire host accessible to the sweep of the telescope have been reckoned as a hundred millions, from some of which it takes the luminous rays thousands of years to fly down to the earth. What mathematician, then, shall measure this celestial expanse, brimming over with suns and stars, and swarming with galaxies of living flame? Imagination stoops beneath such a giddy summit, nor dares attempt to scale those cliffs of golden fire. Reason, faltering on the brink of that boundless ocean of immensity, recoils as from the verge of annihilation. None but God can walk the heights of those starry pinnacles, and the light that burns and flashes around his feet falls down to man as the proof of the divine presence. In fine, if we had never before known a Deity, the telescope would have revealed him.
The unity of God being established, can we predicate his eternity? In the first place, all history bears witness to the permanence of the same grand principles of causation, since the primary annals of the species; and then geology takes up the subject, and carries it back for countless ages through those records inscribed on the ancient rocks by the pencil of central fire, or the fierce pen of earthquakes and blazing volcanoes; and still everywhere we see the evidence of the same mathematical laws, the same attraction and gravitation. Everything alike shows the existence of the same all-creating Deity as anterior to itself; and further than this the canons of mere induction cannot go.
Nor can the goodness of God be demonstrated in the precise and conclusive manner which has marked our previous propositions. The beauties of nature and the blessings of Providence are sufficient proofs to the majority of mankind; and for all the rest one must depend on à priori reasoning, or look to the clearer light of a divine revelation.
It must be observed that the foregoing argument differs essentially from that of the celebrated Paley. His is founded on the mechanical phenomena of the universe, but this on the mathematical relations of order and harmony—on the present as well as the past physical evolutions in time and space, thus proving the continued agency of the supreme Cause, the Deity, both in immanence and in act.
But it is not my purpose to criticise other theories, nor to answer objections, which must be impotent unless they can overthrow the legitimacy of my inductions. Accordingly, I submit the whole.
BY KATHLEEN O’MEARA, AUTHOR OF “IZA’S STORY,” “A SALON IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE EMPIRE,” “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” ETC.
Early next day Mrs. Monteagle sent down to the entresol to know if Col. Redacre was well enough to come up and see her, or, if not, could she go down and see him; she wanted to speak to him on a matter of importance. The answer came on a card of Mrs. Redacre’s, written in pencil:
“I am so sorry! Hugh is really not able to see any one this morning. I hope you will come down to-morrow.—Yours affectionately,
“A. R.”
Mrs. Monteagle was surprised. There was nothing in the fact that the colonel was not able to come up-stairs—Balaklava sometimes made a great difficulty about stairs; but why could she not go down to him? The hope that she “would come down to-morrow” was clearly an intimation that she was not to go to-day. Why should she not go and see Mrs. Redacre, even if her husband was not in a humor to see people? The forenoon passed, and neither of the girls came near her. She inquired if the doctor had been sent for, but the servants said not. M. le Colonel had nothing the matter with him; he complained of Balaklava just as usual; there was no question of such an extreme measure as sending for the doctor. This made it all the more curious why an old friend like herself should be kept out for the day. Mrs. Monteagle, however, was not a gossip, and, after turning it in her mind for a reasonable time, she concluded that it was no business of hers, and that it would be a nuisance, having friends living in the same house with one, if one could not be left alone for a day without their seeing a mystery in it.
Late in the afternoon she went out to pay some visits. It was Mme. de Kerbec’s day. Mrs. Monteagle had rather a horror of “days,” but she was pretty regular in attending this one. Mme. de Kerbec was very particular about people calling on her day, and apt to take offence if they neglected it. To her it was the grand recurring opportunity of her life. She loved dress with a passionate love, tenderly, humanly; and her day was an opportunity for doing it honor, making a kind of feast to it. This was a trial to some of her friends; they felt obliged to respond to the challenge and come always finely dressed, and many were not inclined to don their first-best costumes on so ordinary an occasion. People, however, like Mrs. Monteagle, who had passed the age when society exacted this kind of homage from them, found great amusement in looking at the fine fashions, laughing at them very often, and at the mistress of the house, who, fat, fifty, and not fair, sat on her crimson satin sofa, with the latest and most magnificent costume spread out over it.
To-day she was gorgeous in a Bismarck-en-colère moire antique, so trimmed that the original material 735nearly disappeared under elaborate passementerie, lace, and fringe. Nothing pleased her like being complimented on her dress; and Mrs. Monteagle, though she was fond of snubbing people when they deserved it, was fond, too, of pleasing them, and occasionally gratified this weakness of Captain Jack.
“How beautiful Mme. de Kerbec’s dress looks!” said some one, breaking a pause in the languishing conversation.
“That’s because it is beautiful,” said Mrs. Monteagle in her literal way. “Where do you get those splendid costumes, countess? One does not know which to wonder at most, their magnificence or their variety. I suspect you have a Titania who works some time of the night weaving those lovely silks and making them up into costumes.”
“Oh! no,” said Mme. de Kerbec gravely. “I never would keep my maid up of a night working, and I always tell the dressmaker that I would rather wait any time than have her keep those poor girls up all night at my dresses; but I dare say she does it all the same—they are so selfish, that class of people.”
“Will you tell me the class that is not selfish?” said Mrs. Monteagle; but she happened to catch Mr. Kingspring’s eye, and there was a dangerous twinkle in it which made her look quickly away and observe that there would be a fine display of dresses at the ball to-night, no doubt.
“Yes, I should think there would be,” said Mme. de Kerbec, composing her countenance, as she always did when dress was spoken of, assuming that peculiar gravity of manner which many people put on when anything connected with the life to come is mentioned.
“It is a pity you don’t go to the Tuileries, countess,” said Mr. Kingspring; “you would cut them all out with your dress.”
“It is a pity in one way,” she replied; “but one has a principle or one has not. It would make no end of a scandal if we were to be seen at this court. The count would never be forgiven by the faubourg; and I have to consider his position before my own pleasure.”
“Of course, certainly,” said Mr. Kingspring.
“It is to be an unusually brilliant affair to-night; the Redacres are going, I believe,” some one remarked.
“I fancy not; the colonel is not well,” said Mrs. Monteagle.
“The young ladies are going with Mme. Léopold,” said Mr. Kingspring. “I met her just now, and she told me Mrs. Redacre had written to ask her to chaperone them, as their father would not go.”
Mrs. Monteagle looked at Mr. Kingspring as he announced this, and she fancied there was a glance of answering intelligence in his eyes.
“The colonel is not seriously ill?” inquired Mme. de Kerbec, who was rather proud of her intimacy with the Redacres.
“He’s not ill at all,” said Mr. Kingspring.
“Then why is he sending his daughters to the ball with Mme. Léopold?”
“I really can’t say, unless it be that he is not in a humor to go; a man does not always feel inclined to go to a ball, especially a man like Redacre.”
“Ah! to be sure. Balaklava is a 736constant trial to him, poor, dear man!” sighed Mme. de Kerbec.
“Have you seen him lately?” inquired Mrs. Monteagle.
“Yes,” said Mr. Kingspring. “I turned in there this morning for a moment. What does M. de Kerbec say of the ‘situation,’ as they call it? Does he think we shall have war?” This was to Mme. de Kerbec.
“He never tells me what he thinks,” said the lady in an aggrieved tone. “I have, in fact, given up asking him. He only cares to talk politics with men; that is the way with most of you.”
Mrs. Monteagle began to be seriously mystified. This sudden interest in M. de Kerbec’s view of the situation did not deceive her. Mr. Kingspring evidently had turned off the conversation from Col. Redacre on purpose. And why? She was not a meddling person or touchy, but really it was enough to set her wondering, this odd behavior of the Redacres. They were distinctly keeping her out of the way while Mr. Kingspring was allowed to come in! And then Mrs. Redacre writing to Mme. Léopold to chaperone the girls to-night! What did it all mean?
Suddenly it flashed on her that they were anxious to bring about a marriage between Pearl and Léon, and had seized on the ball to-night as an opportunity for suggesting the same idea to the Léopolds. On the other hand, this was such a thoroughly un-English way of proceeding that it was hardly fair to suspect the Redacres of adopting it. Pearl, too, was the last girl she knew who would be likely to fall in with such French manœuvring. Altogether it was puzzling. Mrs. Monteagle was angry with Mr. Kingspring, turned her back on him, and began to converse with a French lady near her. People were dropping in in ones and twos, and Mme. de Kerbec was in high delight, sweeping her glittering train behind her as she rose to greet each new-comer. Mrs. Monteagle took advantage of one of these triumphant moments to say good-by, and, without casting a glance on the offending Kingspring, made her exit.
Just as she reached her own porte cochère Mr. Kingspring overtook her.
“Are you going in to see the Redacres?” he said.
“No; Mrs. Redacre sent me word that she hoped I would go to-morrow, which meant evidently that I was not to go to-day.”
“If I were you I would not mind that; I would go at once. You are their oldest friend here; they will be the better for seeing you.”
“There is something amiss, then?” And Mrs. Monteagle forgot her grievance in real concern.
“There is. I can’t tell you any more. They will tell you themselves; you had better go in and see them.”
He shook hands and hurried away, fearing to say more if he loitered with her. Mrs. Monteagle went slowly up to the entresol, and, after an interval of hesitation, she pulled the bell. “The idea of my being nervous at pulling Alice Redacre’s bell!” she said to herself.
It was answered quickly.
“Madame ne reçoit pas aujourd’hui,” said the servant.
“She is not well?”
“Madame is a little indisposed; M. le Colonel also.”
Mrs. Monteagle left her compliments 737and regrets, and went on her way up-stairs.
“It is quite clear they do not wish to see me,” was her comment. “What can it mean? It looks odd—it is odd,” she added, correcting herself, as she was in the habit of doing to other people for the same inaccurate mode of speech.
Great was her surprise an hour later to see the two girls going out on horseback, accompanied by an old general officer who sometimes replaced their father in this way. Would they also go to the ball, in spite of the something that was amiss? They always ran up to show themselves to Mrs. Monteagle in their ball-dress whenever they went out; but she did not expect they would do so this evening. At nine o’clock, however, there was a ring, and in they came. Pearl looked sad, though there was no sign of tears in her face; but Polly looked, as she always did on occasions like this, a vision of triumphant beauty. Her blue-black eyes were all aglow with soft, tender lightnings, her curved red lips parted, her delicate skin bright as tinted alabaster. If the combined misfortunes of life had fallen on her as she stood there in her exulting loveliness, Polly might have defied them. She looked a creature born to happiness, buoyant, supple, invulnerable; you might as well have tried to hurt the mounting flame by sticking pins in it as to quench the glory of her youth in that royally beautiful maiden.
“Does she not look pretty?” said Pearl, surveying the young queen proudly.
“She is pretty, you vain puss!” said Mrs. Monteagle. “But why do you always wear white, my dear? Pink would suit your brown eyes better, eh?”
“White is Polly’s color, and any color does for me,” said Pearl.
“Papa likes us to dress alike,” said Polly; “and pink does not go very well with my hair.”
“Tut, nonsense, child! Duckady mud would go well with your hair,” said the old lady. “But Pearl spoils you—that’s what it is.”
“She does indeed!” said Polly heartily, and she twined her lovely arms around Pearl and kissed her.
A voice came from the stairs announcing that Mme. Léopold’s carriage was at the door. The two girls kissed Mrs. Monteagle and hurried away, looking very like a couple of swans as they floated off with their waves of white tulle round them.
“Come up early to-morrow morning and tell me all about it,” said Mrs. Monteagle in a sotto voce to Pearl; “of course it will be settled to-night.”
Pearl blushed up, and there was a sudden look of distress on her face as with an exclamation of protest she hastened after Polly.
Blanche Léopold was in great delight at having Pearl and Polly with her.
“We are just like three sisters, are not we, petite maman?” she said, as they lightly tossed their skirts over each other so as not to crush them.
“Exactly, chères enfants!” said Mme. Léopold, with a smile at both her protégées; but it was Pearl’s hand she pressed, it was Pearl’s forehead that she stooped to kiss, in answer to Blanche’s appeal.
“Is M. Léon to be at the ball?” inquired Polly.
“Of course he is! What a question, you wicked child!” said Léon’s mother; and then she turned to Pearl and laughed, and pressed her hand again.
Pearl’s cheeks were burning like two live coals, but nobody saw this in the dim light of the carriage.
“I thought he was on duty at the Etat Major this evening?” persisted terrible Polly.
“So he was, but he contrived to get off,” said Blanche.
“A higher duty called him to the Tuileries to-night,” said his mother.
“Oh! the emperor has named him on his staff? How glad I am!” said Polly, and Pearl longed to choke her. “Yes, it will be very nice for you to have him in the emperor’s service,” went on the incorrigible Polly, as innocent as a babe of any mischievous intentions. “You are sure to be asked to the Petits Lundis now; and we shall enjoy them more for having you all there. Are you very deep in engagements to-night, Blanche?”
They compared notes and discussed partners till they drew up before the palace; that is to say, Blanche and Polly did. Pearl lay back very silent all the way, and when they alighted Mme. Léopold noticed that she was very pale and seemed provokingly out of tune with the gay scene.
Who that has ever beheld it can forget how gay it was, that brilliant gathering in the old palace?—the blaze of light, the flashing uniforms, the splendidly-attired women, all 739the stars of fashion and wealth forming a dazzling galaxy round the beautiful Spaniard’s throne, she herself the centre of the firmament, outshining all in grace and beauty and magnificence of attire.
“There is Léon!” cried Blanche the moment they entered the Salle des Maréchaux. And Léon, obeying the magnetic attraction that we all know of, suddenly turned round, and, across the crowd of “fair women and brave men,” espied his mother and her maidens, and at once made towards them. He was very striking in his picturesque hussar uniform with its hanging dolman.
“Il n’est pas trop mal, mon fils?” said Mme. Léopold, glancing from him to Pearl and smiling at the latter. But Pearl made no answer, only crimsoned and looked away.
“How late you are!” exclaimed Léon. “I have been on the watch for you this last hour. Are you all engaged, mesdemoiselles?” bowing in one sweep to the three young ladies.
They all were, but their partners were not to the fore yet, and they might not meet for a long time.
“Les absents ont toujours tort,” said Léon; “so I claim the privilege of replacing one of them.”
It was to Polly he spoke; she responded by holding out her hand, and in a moment they were wheeling along in a waltz.
“That is a bit of masculine coquetry; he fancies he will make somebody jealous,” said Mme. Léopold, trying to look as if the joke amused her very much; but she was really annoyed with Léon.
Pearl set her face like a flint this time, and, without blushing happily, looked about her with an unconcerned air. She and Blanche were not left long waiting. Partners quickly found them out, and came up in a body, quarrelling over their claim to priority. Before Pearl had come to a decision Mr. Kingspring was at her elbow, and proclaimed his right to the first quadrille over all comers. She caught at this with avidity and hurried away with him.
“How I hate being here to-night!” she said when they were out of Mme. Léopold’s hearing. “I can’t imagine why mamma insisted on our coming. You could tell me if you liked?”
Mr. Kingspring was taken aback by this direct appeal. He was very fond of Pearl, and she treated him with a sisterly sans façon that he was proud of. They were friends, in fact. He might easily put her off with some platitude or prevarication now, but he felt this would not be acting as a loyal friend.
“Is it fair of you to ask me? If your father has not let you into his confidence yet, it would not be honorable in me to do so. It would not be acting as one gentleman should towards another. You would not have me do this? You would not have one whom you call your friend act otherwise than as a gentleman?”
“I can’t imagine why there should be a mystery about it,” sighed Pearl. “If anybody was dead, we should not have been sent to a ball, I suppose?”
Mr. Kingspring coughed and muttered a vague assent.
“Is Cousin Darrell dead?” asked Pearl abruptly.
“No, no; it is nothing about Darrell.”
“Is it anything about money?”
“Well, perhaps it may be; but I hope not. I mean I hope it will turn out a mistake.”
“Mamma was crying this morning,” 740said Pearl; “she does not cry for nothing.”
“I hope there may be no real cause for her tears. I believe myself there is not.”
“Papa was in a dreadful state,” continued Pearl. “I heard him storming in his study for more than an hour. Was it about a letter he got from England?”
“There was a letter. But don’t cross-examine me; don’t, Pearl. It is not fair, and I really must not speak.”
Pearl never remembered him calling her by her name before, though he declared he used to do so when she was a baby.
“To think of their insisting on our coming here to-night when there is this horrible anxiety at home!” she said, and her eyes began to fill in spite of her.
“There is no certain cause for it so far,” protested Mr. Kingspring. “Don’t worry till you know there is real cause for it; there is no use in saying good-morrow to the devil till you meet him. Let us take a turn with the waltzers; you have done me out of my quadrille.”
They took a few turns down the long gallery, now densely crowded, and then he stopped to let her rest.
“Who is that Polly is dancing with?” said Pearl, as she spied her sister in the distance with a tall, distinguished-looking man in the uniform of the hussars.
“I don’t know; probably some fellow Léopold has introduced.”
While they were still standing in the embrasure of a window Léon came up.
“May I claim the honor of a dance, mademoiselle?” he said, doubling himself in two before Pearl.
“I don’t feel a bit in the mood for dancing,” said Pearl, “the rooms are so hot and so dreadfully crowded. Do you know who that is that my sister is waltzing with?”
“Captain Darvallon, one of the most distinguished officers in the service, and quite the best fellow I know; he is a great friend of mine.”
“Then it was you who introduced him to her?”
“I was proud to procure him that honor.”
“Poor devil!” said Mr. Kingspring. “I suspect you have done for him; if he has such a thing as a heart he will go home a miserable man to-night. I never saw Mlle. Polly looking so unmercifully pretty. D’Arres-Vallon you say his name is? Does he spell it in one word or two? I used to know two families of that name; one spelt it D’Arvalhon, the other D’Arres-Vallon. Which is his?”
“Neither; he writes it in one word with a big D; he does not boast the noble particule.”
“Then he is a man of no family?”
“None whatever. He is what we call the son of his works; he has risen in his profession by sheer force of intelligence and moral worth. There is not an officer in the army more respected than Darvallon.”
Pearl looked again at Polly’s partner, and he struck her as still more prepossessing than at the first glance.
“Amongst military men I can imagine its making no difference; but socially his low birth must subject him to disagreeables now and then,” observed Mr. Kingspring, following the direction of Pearl’s eyes, and surveying the hussar with the sort of interest one bestows on a curious variety of animal new to one’s experience.
741“The man who would subject Darvallon to anything of the sort would be either a fool or a snob,” replied Léon coldly. “I suppose there are plenty of both going about the world; but men like Darvallon have a sort of charm that keeps them at a distance.”
Mr. Kingspring felt that this remark addressed to him was not that of a perfect gentleman; it sounded too like a snub. But the Léopolds, as Mme. de Kerbec said, were after all only Empire people, Léon’s grandfather having been made a baron by the first Napoleon.
Pearl admired Léon for standing up so bravely for his friend; there was that in her which responded instinctively to everything noble, even when it was violently against her own opinions or sympathies.
“He must be a nice man, as well as clever,” she said. “Introduce him to me when he has finished his waltz with my sister.”
“Reward me beforehand for that act of generosity by finishing the waltz with me,” said Léon.
And Pearl did, Mr. Kingspring being left alone to meditate on the low ideas of modern Frenchmen and the strange inconsistencies of well-born English maidens.
“Mademoiselle, may I have the honor of presenting to you my friend and brother officer, Captain Darvallon?”
M. Darvallon bowed low, and when he looked up Pearl’s soft brown eyes met his with a glance of interest so full and frank that, if he had been a coxcomb, he might have flattered himself he had slain her on the spot.
Polly was a little tired and said she wanted an ice, so Léon offered her his arm to the buffet, and Pearl followed with her new acquaintance. He was a tall, powerfully-built man, with a Gothic head set on broad shoulders, and long, well-bred hands and feet. Judging from his hands and feet, Captain Darvallon might have had the blood of the Montmorencis in him; not that he needed this cachet of distinction to redeem his appearance otherwise or stamp him outwardly as a gentleman. Pearl, even in the distance, had singled him out as somebody above the common. His head, massive as it was, had nothing coarse about it; his features, without being handsome, were marked by an expression of energy, intelligence, and refinement that impressed you more than mere good looks; and though the prominent characteristic of his whole appearance was power, it was too tempered by gentleness to be alarming or repulsive. An array of stars and crosses on his breast bore witness to his prowess on the field, but his manner had borrowed no tinge of soldierly roughness from the camp; it was, on the contrary, marked by a courtesy towards the fair sex rare enough in these days, when the independence of women who have rights is too often pleaded as an excuse for forgetting that they still have privileges.
“What a crowd there is to-night!” said Pearl.
It was a silly remark, but she wanted to say something that would put her companion at his ease. It was the first time that she had been in the company of a man who had risen from the ranks, and she fancied the experience on his side must be novel enough, too, to be embarrassing.
“Just at this point the crush is rather great; but I don’t think the rooms are more crowded than usual. Is it your first ball, mademoiselle?”
742“Oh! no; I came out last season in London. You have never been to England, monsieur?”
“Pardon me; I spent five months there three years ago.”
“Indeed! And did you think it a horrible place? Was it raining all the time?”
“No; it behaved very well in that respect, and I liked the country very much, and London especially; perhaps it was owing in a measure to all the kindness I received there.”
Pearl wondered who the people were who had shown him so much kindness; good-natured middle-class people, no doubt, who thought it rather fine to have a French officer to entertain.
“The English understand the virtue of hospitality in a charming way,” continued M. Darvallon; “the mere fact of your being a stranger opens every door to you.”
“Whereas in France it shuts them?” said Pearl.
“I am sorry if that is your experience of us, mademoiselle.”
“I don’t say that; I only thought you meant to say so. But it is true; we are fond of foreigners in England.”
“Nothing is more delightful, certainly, than the way in which you make them welcome. I was staying at our embassy—I went over with the Comte X—— as military attaché—but it was merely a kind of nominal headquarters; I spent most of the time in the houses of English people. The Duke of S—— was particularly kind to me. I had known his brother in the Crimea, and he made this a pretext for receiving me as an old friend; so did Lord B——. I spent two days at his place on the Thames. What a little paradise it is! The grounds and the house and the view combine to make it a perfect Eden. Some of the country places of your old aristocracy are the most magnificent residences in the world, I suppose; but they are so home-like, there is such a genial atmosphere in them, that one is not oppressed by the magnificence.”
“I am glad to hear you say so; one so often hears foreigners complain of our morgue and stiffness.”
“I saw none of it.”
“Did you visit any of our palaces?”
“Yes; St. James and Buckingham I saw at once, of course. But Windsor is glorious. We have nothing like Windsor in France. I have seen the finest palaces in Europe, and to my mind Windsor is the most beautiful of all. There is such a prestige of historic interest about it, added to its artistic beauty; then the grounds and the surrounding country are so beautiful. Nature and art have put forth their best to make it a worthy abode of royalty.”
“And our royalties—did you approve of them, too?”
“Most highly,” said M. Darvallon, smiling; “they are excellent hosts, since we are on the subject of hospitality. No one is overlooked. La Reine Victoria has in a high degree that royal faculty of making all her guests, from the highest to the humblest, feel that they are duly noticed in her salon.”
So these were the middle-class people who had been ostentatiously civil to the French officer. Pearl was laughing to herself at the false hit she had made, and also at her foolish idea that he needed to be encouraged to be put at his ease. It was impossible to be more entirely simple and free from all shyness and affectation than he was. They had reached the buffet now, 743and Léon and Polly were pushing their way to get next to them. This was not so difficult, for the crowd fell back, as it instinctively does for all royalties, and made way for Polly as she advanced. Pearl looked up at her companion, and saw his eyes fixed on her sister with an expression of admiration so unfeigned, and so full of respect at the same time, that she felt quite tenderly toward the stalwart hussar.
“Monsieur le Capitaine,” said Polly, as soon as they all came together round the ices, “he insists that it was you who took Sebastopol all by yourself!”
“Voyons, Léopold, don’t push modesty too far,” protested M. Darvallon. “You lent me a hand; he did, I assure you, mademoiselle.”
“Don’t believe him; he is a flatterer. It is a trick he learned at courts,” said Léon, and his solemn black eyes stared Darvallon full in the face without a smile; but Pearl detected an expression of almost feminine fondness in them as they met the gray eyes looking down on him.
“I don’t believe either of you took it,” she said, with saucy defiance; “it was my papa who took it. Did M. Léopold tell you our father is a soldier too, and that he lost a leg at Balaklava?”
“Col. Redacre’s name and valor were known to us all in the Crimea, mademoiselle,” said M. Darvallon, bowing deferentially.
Both the girls blushed with pleasure, and turned a smile of fullest approbation on the speaker.
“I told you he was a flatterer,” said Léon.
Before M. Darvallon could enter a protest some one spoke from behind him.
“I say, Léopold, you are going to catch it for staying away from your mother so long with these young ladies. She’s very angry with you.”
“It’s no fault of M. Léon’s,” said Polly. “We stayed ourselves, dancing; that’s what we came for.”
“We had better go back to my mother and make an acte de présence,” said Léon. “Where is she, Kingspring?”
“Where you left her, in the Salle du Trône. I have just conducted Mlle. Blanche there after waltzing with her.”
Mr. Kingspring moved towards Pearl, as if he expected to conduct her back; but M. Darvallon proffered his arm, and she took it.
On their way through the long ball-room they met Blanche waltzing down on them with a slim, sallow-faced partner, of the type that Polly called “scrubby.” The partners pulled up, and then she saw that Blanche was radiant with smiles, and listening with delighted attention to whatever the scrubby man was saying.
“Qui est ce monsieur?” Polly inquired of Léon.
“That monsieur is the Marquis de Cholcourt, the greatest parti in France just now.”
“Is he amusing?”
“I really don’t know. I shouldn’t say he was, to look at him.”
“Blanche is listening to him as if she thought him so.”
Léon made no remark, and they went on till they reached the Salle du Trône. There they saw Mme. Léopold, just where they had left her; but she had risen from her velvet seat, and was expostulating in an excited manner with M. Léopold, who had just joined her, and who seemed vainly endeavoring to pacify her. Madame shook her head, and opened and shut her fan, 744talking all the time volubly, and with a countenance disturbed by no pleasant emotion. When she caught sight of Léon and his companion she became suddenly silent, and awaited their approach with an air of grave displeasure.
“Mesdemoiselles, you forget you are not in England; you must know that it is not the custom here,” she began; but the good-natured deputy cut short the scolding, and broke out into compliments to the two delinquents: they were the stars of the Imperial firmament to-night; every French girl in the room was dying with jealousy, etc.
Mme. Léopold was not sorry to have their attention drawn away from herself for the moment, and while this bantering went on with Pearl and Polly she said in a sotto voce to Léon:
“My son, you have behaved with criminal imprudence. Have you said anything to compromise you? Tell me the truth.”
“Compromise! What on earth do you mean, mother?” said Léon in amazement. “I have spoken to no one but these two young ladies.”
“That is just it! You have been parading yourself with Pearl for the last hour. Have you said anything to lead her to hope—”
Léon began to understand, and the look of indignant surprise that answered his mother completely reassured her.
“Thank Heaven!” she muttered under her breath. “I knew you were incapable of it, my son, but—”
Léon did not wait to hear more; he abruptly turned away, fearful lest Pearl should have overheard his mother’s offensive insinuations; but a glance at her face showed him she had heard nothing.
“Are you engaged for the cotillon, mademoiselle?” he said.
“No.”
“Then may I claim your hand for it?”
“Good gracious, my son! you are not so selfish as to want to keep me here till four in the morning? I am worn out already—I am indeed,” protested the terrified mother, whom her son and everybody else knew to be simply indefatigable when the duty to society was in question.
“Pray don’t let us detain you here, madame,” said Polly with a certain asperity; “we shall be glad to go the moment you feel inclined.” She saw that a change had come over their chaperon, and she was annoyed at the way she snapped at Léon about the cotillon.
“Is it indeed true? You would not mind coming away now? I am so exhausted by the heat! I never knew the palace so overheated. But Marguerite wishes to remain for the cotillon?”
“I have not the least wish to remain for it, madame,” said Pearl; the sudden change from affectionate familiarity to being called “Marguerite” showed that she had in some way incurred Mme. Léopold’s displeasure.
“Then let us come,” said that lady, signing to her husband to give his arm.
“And Blanche?” said Léon.
“Good gracious! It shows how ill I am that I could have forgotten her. Where is she? It appears that English manners are à la mode everywhere to-night. Why is your sister so long away from me? Who is she with?”
“I saw her dancing with M. de Cholcourt; but it is some time ago,” said M. Darvallon.
745“She was dancing with him again then, five minutes ago,” said Polly.
“M. de Cholcourt!” repeated Mme. Léopold in a tone of unmistakable satisfaction. “Are you sure?”
“M. Léon told me that was his name,” said Polly. “I asked him because Blanche seemed particularly to enjoy his conversation.”
“Dear child! I am glad she is amused. I wonder if she has made an engagement for the cotillon?” This was said interrogatively to the two girls and the two gentlemen with them.
Nobody knew. Meantime, Léon had gone in pursuit of Blanche, and it was not long before he returned with her. She looked angry.
“What is the matter with you, mamma?”
“Chérie, I am rather tired to-night, and these good children are anxious to get home.”
“It was hardly worth coming to go away so soon,” said Blanche, “and I have made an engagement for the cotillon.”
“With whom?”
“The Marquis de Cholcourt.”
“Ha! My dear child, I am always ready to sacrifice myself to your pleasure.... If your young friends don’t mind waiting, I will stay for the cotillon.”
“Pardon, ma mère,” said Léon, “Blanche prefers your comfort to her amusement; she will go home now.”
“My son, you should consider your sister. If she has made an engagement....”
“I will make her excuses to Cholcourt.”
Mme. Léopold looked exceeding displeased, and tried to convey the full motives of her displeasure to Léon through her eyes. But Léon would not see it. Blanche saw there was a conflict between the two, and she sided with her brother.
“Yes, you will tell M. de Cholcourt,” she said. “We had better go at once, mamma, as you are not well.”
“What an angel she is!” said the enraged mother, swallowing her vexation under the fondest smile.
The drive home was performed almost in silence. Mme. Léopold lay back with a pretence of utter exhaustion, and never said a word. Blanche and Polly sat opposite, and had a little confidential talk to themselves.
“Is he nice, that marquis who was dancing with you?” inquired Polly.
“Nice! He is the greatest parti in all France. He is heir to the dukedom, and he has a fortune now of two hundred and fifty thousand francs a year; besides that he is heir to his aunt, who has enormous property in the south; and I believe, only I am not sure, that the Comtesse de V—— has left all the family diamonds to him—just think!”
Blanche summed up all this in a voluble whisper to her friend.
“What a catch he will be!” said Polly. “I hope he may fall in love with you, Blanche.”
“Pas tant de chance, ma chère; my dot will be a drop compared to M. de Cholcourt’s. I have not the ghost of a chance of making a marriage like that.” And the young French girl sighed.
“He might fall in love with you,” suggested Polly.
“His family would never allow him.”
They drew up at Colonel Redacre’s door, and the two girls, thanking 746Mme. Léopold for her kindness, wished her and Blanche good-night.
At a preternaturally early hour next morning Mme. Léopold presented herself at Mrs. Monteagle’s.
“I make no apologies,” she said on being admitted into that lady’s dressing-room. “The case is so urgent that I could not delay an hour. Did you speak yesterday to the Redacres about that absurd idea of mine?”
“You mean did I offer your son’s hand to Pearl?”
“Oh! you have done it. We are compromised!” exclaimed Mme. Léopold in despair.
“Console yourself, madame; I had not an opportunity of doing your commission—”
“You have said nothing! I thank Heaven! Then indeed we have had a narrow escape. My son is so chivalrous there is no saying what folly he might have committed had he known it.”
“Known what?”
“That I had asked Pearl in marriage for him. Happily, he has not the faintest suspicion of anything. But I am heartily sorry for the poor child,” continued Mme. Léopold, finding room in her heart to pity Pearl the moment her terrors for Léon were allayed. “I feel deeply for her. The disappointment will be a terrible blow, she is so much in love with my son. That is the dreadful part of your English way of doing things; but it is no fault of mine.”
“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Mrs. Monteagle. “A terrible blow to Pearl, you say? My good lady, take comfort; Pearl is perfectly heart-whole. Your son is the only person to be pitied in the affair. Ha! ha! ha! Capital! So you thought Pearl was in love with him? What an excellent joke!”
Mme. Léopold did not see the joke, and was deeply offended by this manner of treating the matter.
“I see nothing surprising in the fact of my son’s inspiring a sentiment,” she replied. “You yourself seemed of that opinion yesterday. As to Léon, he could not deny it when I put it to him; he had to admit that it was true.”
“True that Miss Redacre had a passion malheureuse for him? He says so, does he? Then I heartily congratulate Pearl on escaping him,” said Mrs. Monteagle, bridling with the spirit of a gentlewoman and a loyal friend. “I thought your son was a gentleman; it seems he is a cowardly coxcomb.”
“Madame!” Mme. Léopold stood up in wrath.
“I sincerely congratulate my young friend on escaping such a husband!”
“You mean to insult me?”
“I mean to speak my mind. I am sorry if it insults you; but you may tell your son from me, madame, he is stating what is false when he says that Miss Redacre is in love with him: it is a delusion of his own vanity.”
“He never said it,” said Mme. Léopold. “When I said so he did not deny it; he feigned not to believe it; but when I persisted in affirming it he spoke in the kindest terms of Miss Redacre, and declared he was ready to make any sacrifice of his own inclination and happiness if it was necessary to—”
“Pray tell him nothing of the sort is necessary. I am sure it is most kind of him,” said Mrs. Monteagle with a contemptuous chuckle. “He never will have the luck to get such a wife; he is not worthy of her.”
747“Madame!”
“But since we are on the subject, may I ask why you have so suddenly changed your views about this marriage?”
“Have you not heard? They are ruined.”
“Who? The Redacres?”
“Yes. Is it possible you have not heard of it?”
Mrs. Monteagle stared at Mme. Léopold with a troubled countenance for a moment.
“Sit down, I beg of you, and tell me what all this means,” she said, her tone changed in a second from anger to one of intense and painful interest.
Mme. Léopold was not sorry for the change as regarded her share in it; she did not want to quarrel with Mrs. Monteagle, and she felt that the wrong had been on her own side. She sat down and told all she knew. It seemed that a letter had arrived on the previous day, by the early post, with news of the death of some person, who by dying in this sudden way let Colonel Redacre in for an enormous sum of money—in fact, utterly ruined him. This was all that Mme. Léopold knew. Who the man was, or how the money was gone, she had not heard; but the main fact was positively true. M. Léopold heard it from M. de Kerbec, who knew more than he liked to tell; Mme. Léopold had heard it from her husband at the ball last night. Mr. Kingspring knew it too; he had been to see the Redacres in the morning. Apparently they wanted to keep the affair quiet for some little time, and this was why the door was closed yesterday on the plea of the colonel’s not being well.
“And this was why they sent the girls to the ball, no doubt,” said Mrs. Monteagle. “It is a most extraordinary affair. Do you know, I am inclined to think there is some mistake. I don’t believe Colonel Redacre ever speculated to the extent of half a crown in his life; in fact, he had nothing to speculate with, as he tells you himself; the money is his wife’s, and that, I know, is bound up so that he could not touch it.”
“I know nothing except that in some way they are ruined,” said Mme. Léopold. “The letter fell on them like a bombshell. I am very sorry for them—very.”
“To me it is like a personal misfortune,” said Mrs. Monteagle. “And to think of their not sending for me at once! How did M. de Kerbec hear it, do you know? But I tell you there is some mistake; I feel certain there is. Those poor, dear girls! It is heartbreaking to think of them if this be true. And the boys—what is to become of them?”
“Boys always pull through somehow,” said Mme. Léopold. “It is the girls that my heart bleeds for. I suppose they will have to go out as governesses—Pearl at least. Polly’s beauty would make it impossible for her to do anything; no family would run the risk of letting that face in amongst them.”
“They shall never be asked to run the risk so long as I can prevent it,” said Mrs. Monteagle with a touch of her old asperity. “While I have a home those children have one.”
“That is real friendship; it consoles me wonderfully to hear you say so, chère madame.”
Mrs. Monteagle made no answer. She was speculating on the possible truth of this story of sudden ruin, and it occurred to her how mysterious Mr. Kingspring had been on the subject of Mrs. 748Redacre’s not receiving the day before.
“I will go down the moment I am dressed,” she said. “I can’t lose an hour till I know the truth.”
Mme. Léopold rose to go.
“Have you breakfasted, or will you stay and have a cup of tea with me?” said Mrs. Monteagle.
“Thank you; I had my coffee before I came out. You will not mention that I have been here? They think at home that I am gone to see my poor people; I always go early, because then they do not interfere with my day.”
Mrs. Monteagle hurried through her breakfast and went down to the entresol. She was admitted at once.
“What is this? What does it all mean?” she said, as Mrs. Redacre, who was not lying on the sofa, but actively sorting letters at a table, stood up with an exclamation of welcome and hastened to meet her.
The colonel was standing with his back to the fire.
“It means this: that we are beggared,” he said.
“Only for a few years, Hugh. Don’t speak in that despairing way about things!” said his wife, and she cast a look of tender entreaty at him.
“Tell me, for goodness’ sake, what has happened,” said Mrs. Monteagle. “I hear that somebody has died and that you are ruined by their death.”
“That is about it,” said the colonel. “I put my name to a bill for £30,000 some five years ago, and the man for whom I did it is dead, and died a bankrupt, leaving me to pay the money.”
“Thirty thousand pounds!” repeated Mrs. Monteagle.
“We can pay it, Hugh, and Providence will come to our aid,” said his wife.
“By sending us another income when every penny has gone to meet this bill?”
“I don’t know how; but trust me, dearest, help will come. If only you won’t break down under it! What does poverty or anything matter so long as we are left to bear it together?”
He made no answer, but stooped down and gave the fire a savage poke.
“What madness possessed you, Redacre? I always thought you had a horror of speculation,” said Mrs. Monteagle, her resentment against him rising at the sight of Alice’s gentle face of anguish.
“It was no speculation,” said the wife quickly; “he did it to oblige a friend. Any one would have done it in his place.”
“Any fool would,” thought her friend, but she said nothing.
“Fortunately we can meet it,” Mrs. Redacre went on. “I thought at first that it might have been paid off at once with my fortune; but it shows what a goose I am in practical things,” she said, trying to laugh. “My money is so tied up that neither Hugh nor I can alienate the capital; all we can do is to surrender the income for a few years till the debt is paid off.”
“She means that we must raise the money to pay it off, and pay back the loan by mortgaging our income for about ten years.”
“It may not be for half that time, dearest. Providence may shorten the trial for us unexpectedly.”
“You mean that Darrell may die. He is more likely to bury us all. Those kind of men live for ever. I am sure I don’t want to hurry him away; I have made a 749point of wishing him a long life. You have always heard me say I hoped he might have a long life? Of course, if the Almighty saw fit to call him home, I could not but feel that the loss would be also a gain to me—to you and the children, that is; for myself, I count no man’s money.”
“Has he a very large property to leave?” inquired Mrs. Monteagle. Col. Redacre talked very openly about his money affairs, but in such a vague, exaggerated way that one never knew what to believe about his prospects or his difficulties.
“Broom Hollow is a glorious old place,” he said, “but it brings in nothing; that must come to me. Darrell himself is a rich man, but he may leave his money to whom he pleases. As likely as not he will leave it to pay off the national debt. He is just the man to do a thing of that sort.”
“My dear Hugh! he told you himself that you were to be his heir; that he had made his will and left you sole legatee!” said Alice.
“That’s just it. When a man tells you he has made his will in your favor, be you sure you will never see a penny of his money. I make a point of never believing what men say about their wills.”
“The dean is not the least likely to tell a falsehood, dear, even about his will,” said Alice.
“I don’t say he is. I never said he was not a truth-telling man; but people have crotchety notions about wills. However, we are a long way off from the settling of that question, I fear—that is to say, I hope; I devoutly hope the poor fellow may live for twenty years. At the same time, if the Almighty sees good to call him to his reward sooner, and that he leaves me his money, he will do as good an action as he ever performed in his life.”
“Have you written to him about this unfortunate business?” inquired Mrs. Monteagle.
“No. I will worry nobody about it. What is the use? We are beggared, and there is an end of it.”
“There is no use making things out worse than they are,” said his friend. “They are bad enough as it is; but, as Alice says, Providence will pull you through somehow. I may turn out of some use myself; but we will come to those matters by and by. The thing is, What are you going to do now? Is it out of the question—your getting something to do? You have friends who have influence; so have I.”
“What could they do for me? Could they get me back my leg? If it were not for Balaklava I should not let this catastrophe cast me down a bit; but it makes all the difference when a man has to face the world with one leg.”
“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Monteagle. “You have not half the sense I gave you credit for, Redacre. What difference can it make, your having one leg or two? I don’t expect you to enter an infantry regiment and go on the march. There are appointments to be had where legs are not wanted at all. My nephew, Percy Danvers, has an appointment of fifteen hundred pounds a year at the Horse Guards.”
“But Danvers has both his legs?”
“But he doesn’t write with his legs, and the work he does is all writing.”
“How did he get the appointment?”
750“His father got it for him. And, by the way, he had no legs at all, poor fellow; he lost one in the Crimea and the other in China. And he used to joke about it, and say that the loss of his legs was the best investment he ever made, and the only one that paid regularly.”
“That’s just it: if a man loses both he is a hero; if he loses only one he is a cripple. Balaklava never did anything for me but worry my life out.”
“That is a most excellent idea!” said Mrs. Redacre, turning with a look of sunny hopefulness to Mrs. Monteagle. “I don’t see why Hugh should not get something at the Horse Guards. We know so many old generals, and some of them are influential, and I am sure all our friends will be kind and anxious to help us. Hugh, dear, we must lose no time in seeing about this.”
“First of all, we have got to pay this £30,000. When that is done, it will be time to think of the other. But with the government we have now I don’t expect we would succeed. They are a beggarly lot, who toady all the self-made men, as they call them—fellows who have risen Heaven knows from what, and to whom it is as well to throw a bone to stop their mouths. I would see them farther before I asked a favor of them if I had my two legs to stand on.”
“Where are the girls?” said Mrs. Monteagle; she was losing patience with these lamentations over the missing leg.
“I sent them out for a ride before breakfast; they may as well enjoy it while they can, poor darlings!” And the mother’s voice faltered a little.
“Have you told them?”
“Not the whole terrible truth. I prepared them for it yesterday a little, and again this morning. But they guess that worse is coming, and they are very brave.”
The noise of hoofs pattering under the porte cochère announced that the girls had come back. In a few minutes they both entered the room. The fair young things, in their beautifully-fitting habits, their complexions freshened by exercise in the morning air, their features lighted up with the buoyancy of youth hitherto untouched by sorrow, made a pathetic and striking contrast with the group they broke in upon—the father stern and irritable, his fine face ploughed into sudden furrows of care, the mother courageous and tender, with undried tears on her cheeks. Pearl spied the tears at once, and, taking a bunch of violets out of her riding-habit, she went and kissed the wet face lovingly and fastened the flowers in her mother’s breast.
“My darling! Have you had a nice ride?”
“Yes; but we had no heart to care about it. I wish you would let us stay at home with you, and not send us off to amuse ourselves while you are worried. It is not kind of her, is it, Mrs. Monteagle?”
Polly was standing at the table, holding up her habit, and looking from one to the other of them all, with an expression of awakening terror in her large, lustrous eyes.
“I don’t know what it all means,” she said. “Is it very bad? Is it going to last long? Papa, we are not babies; you ought to tell us the truth.”
“I ought, my dear; but I have not the courage to do it. Ask your mother.”
751“Redacre, you are a selfish brute!” burst out Mrs. Monteagle, glaring at him.
“Oh! don’t,” cried Alice, with a look at once imploring and angry. “Of course it is my duty, but I am such a coward!” She let her head fall on Pearl’s shoulder, and sobbed aloud.
“For God’s sake, Alice, don’t give way!” cried her husband. “I can bear anything but that; I can indeed, my love. It is quite true I am a selfish brute. I ought not to have asked you to tell them. Come, now, don’t! It will all come right, if you will only cheer up and help me to bear it.” And he went over and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Help you to bear it!” repeated Mrs. Monteagle; but she checked herself as she met Alice’s eyes uplifted in supplication through her tears.
“Come with me both of you, children,” said the old lady; “I know all about it now, and I will tell you everything. Come, and leave the colonel and your mother to themselves a little; they were very busy when I came and interrupted them.”
The two girls kissed Alice with many a tender endearment, and followed Mrs. Monteagle up to her own apartment. She told them the truth as gently as possible, but without disguising anything.
“Then we have nothing at all to live on except papa’s half-pay?” said Polly, her eyes wide open in dismay, her lily-white hands lying motionless on her knees.
“I fear not, my dear child; but I hope we will soon be able to get an appointment for him. Meantime you must not worry too much. I have some money lying by that he can have and welcome; he won’t refuse me an old friend’s privilege at a moment like this. You must both do your very best to help him and your mother to bear it. You will not let them see you cast down.”
“And the boys,” said Pearl—“they must come home and grow up dunces; that is the worst of all. What is to become of the boys?”
“What is to become of any of us?” said Polly. “What could have possessed papa to promise to pay such an enormous sum of money for any one? It was very wicked of him.” And the big tears welled up and came streaming down the lovely face.
“Has he written to Cousin Darrell?” said Pearl.
“No,” said Mrs. Monteagle. “I asked him, and he said he would not write; that it would worry the dean.”
“But he might give us the money to pay this, or some of it, at any rate,” argued Pearl. “I am certain he would; since we are to have all his money by and by, he would not refuse a portion of it now to do us such a service.”
“I would not be too sure of that, dear Pearl,” said her friend, with a dubious shake of the head. “Giving and bequeathing are very different things. Still, I agree with you, Colonel Redacre ought to write and tell your cousin the truth; he owes that to the dean and to you all.”
“I will make him do it!” said Polly, brushing away the tear-drops and shaking back her head with a resolute air; “and if he won’t write, I will.”
“You mustn’t do it against papa’s will, Polly,” said Pearl, a little frightened by this unexpected display of will. Polly had always had her own way hitherto without making any effort to get it.
752“I think we had better go down now,” she said, not answering Pearl’s remark. There was an energy in her manner and look that amazed Mrs. Monteagle.
“Perhaps you had, dears,” said their friend; she was anxious to have a little private talk with Pearl on other things, but she did not venture to ask her pointedly to stay.
“I will go to papa at once, and tell him he must write to Cousin Darrell,” said Polly; and gathering up the folds of her long habit, she walked away, too absorbed in her own thoughts to say good-by or notice if Pearl was following her. Mrs. Monteagle signed to Pearl to stay.
The idea that this misfortune was weighted to Pearl with a super-added individual sorrow had been in her friend’s mind ever since Mme. Léopold had announced the bad news to her. When that lady declared so emphatically that Pearl was attached to her son, Mrs. Monteagle had denied it and laughed to scorn the pretended compassion of the manœuvring mother. This was clearly her duty as a stanch friend, whether she believed or not that Pearl loved Léon; but, indeed, she so earnestly desired at the moment not to believe it that she concluded she did not, that it was a delusion of Léon’s vanity or his mother’s; but now there recurred to her Pearl’s vivid blush at the mention of Léon’s name, and her confusion when Mme. Léopold was announced. It was dreadful if the young heart was to set out on the rude battle of life with its bloom rubbed off and all its brightness quenched. But though she had a true woman’s heart, Mrs. Monteagle indulged little in sentiment. If the mischief was done, it must be undone as quickly as possible, and Pearl was a girl of rare sense.
“My dear, did Léon Léopold propose to you last night?” said the old lady when they were left alone.
“No,” said Pearl, looking her straight in the face. “What put that into your head?”
“But he ought to do so, ought he not? He has been paying you a great deal of attention.”
“Léon!” The old innocent laugh rang out in spite of all her trouble, as Pearl repeated in amazement, “Léon?”
“And you really don’t care for him?”
“Not I, and I should be very sorry to think that he cared for me; but I am perfectly certain he does not. If I were a pot de confiture he might.”
“You relieve me immensely, my dear,” said Mrs. Monteagle, quite at rest now on the score of Pearl’s heart. “It would have been dreadful had you been in love with that young man.”
“It would indeed,” assented Pearl. “I had better be going now; I don’t like leaving mamma alone—without me, that is. Poor darling mamma, if I could take some of the worry off her! What are we to do? I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Keep a cheerful spirit and a brave heart; that is all you have to do for the present. I promise you things will come right in good time.”
Mr. Kingspring called very early, and was closeted a long time with Col. Redacre. Pearl met him in the hall as she was coming out of her father’s study, and whispered to him:
753“Make papa write to Cousin Darrell.”
Mr. Kingspring nodded yes and went in.
It had got wind that the Redacres were ruined, and everybody was very sorry for them. It was all conjecture yet how the ruin came about. The general belief was that a banker with whom he had lodged his money had “gone smash.” Mr. Kingspring and M. de Kerbec were the only two who had known the truth from the first, and they were not communicative as to details; Mr. Kingspring from innate discretion, M. de Kerbec from friendly desire to shield Col. Redacre from the ridicule which awaited a man imbecile enough to fool away his money by signing a bill.
“No, I can’t write to Darrell,” said Col. Redacre in answer to Mr. Kingspring’s urgent advice that he should at once apply to his rich cousin. “Darrell is a man who never did a foolish thing in his life, and he despises people who do. If he knew I had been idiot enough to put my name to a bill, he would disinherit me for a fool; he is a most eccentric fellow.”
“But he is sure to hear of it,” said Mr. Kingspring, “and he will be more likely to resent it if you seem trying to hide it from him.”
“I don’t see that he need ever hear of it. He never sees any one, never writes to any one, I believe, except his medical man, and his lawyer perhaps; he leads the life of a hermit down there with his books. If he does not hear of this miserable business from ourselves, he is likely never to hear of it.”
Mr. Kingspring could not press the point after this. Pearl, meantime, was on the watch to catch him when he left the study, and in answer to her eager “Has he promised to write?” Mr. Kingspring only replied, “No; he says it would do no good; and I think he is right.” Pearl was disappointed, and took the news to her sister, who was awaiting it in her own room.
“It is nothing but pride that prevents him,” said Polly, angry and impatient; “it is cruel and selfish of papa to sacrifice us all to spare his own pride.”
“He is sacrificing himself as well as us,” said Pearl; “and I don’t believe it is pride. I am sure papa has some good reason for it; he knows Cousin Darrell better than we do.”
“Do you write to him,” said Polly; “he is your godfather, and he pretends to be greatly interested in you. Tell him you will have to go out as a governess if he won’t come to papa’s help.”
“I could not write against papa’s will,” said Pearl.
“Stuff! Then I will.” And Polly tossed back her head, and her almond-shaped eyes had a light of dangerous wilfulness in them as she rose and went towards her writing-table.
754“O Polly! you must not do that; papa would be so angry,” pleaded Pearl.
“He will forgive me when Cousin Darrell sends the money.” And Polly sat down and opened her dainty blotting-book and prepared for action.
“Polly, you sha’n’t. I will go and tell mamma of it. I won’t be a party to your defying papa in this way,” said Pearl resolutely, moving towards the door.
Polly started up.
“Come back; you need not play tell-tale. I won’t write.” And she shut the blotting-book and flung the pen angrily aside.
“I am sure it is better not, darling,” said Pearl. “We can’t know as well as papa in a matter of this kind.” She went over to Polly and would have kissed her; but Polly repulsed the caress with an impatient movement of her head. Pearl did not force the kiss on her, but she felt the tears rising as she turned away and left the room. If misfortune was going to change Polly like this, it was a worse sorrow than anything she had anticipated.
TO BE CONTINUED.
(Scene: Before the Temple.)
ST. JOSEPH.
SINGS:
MARY (SINGS).
757CHORUS.
May, 1878.
For many reasons the Bollandist series of saints’ lives is one of the most remarkable works that ever issued from the pen of man. As a serial publication, what other work of the kind extends over a period of nearly two centuries and a half, comprises upwards of sixty volumes in large folio, and is still advancing, with upwards of one-sixth part of the whole remaining to full completion? Or as a monument of devotion to the saints of God, as a vast storehouse of example and instruction in the way of eternal life, there is nothing that can be put in competition with it. Even this view of it is narrow, as compared with other claims to regard which it possesses, and which are fully recognized by literary men, even among those who have little or no sympathy with the religious side of this great work. The whole range of history, from the foundation of Christianity, forms an essential portion of it. The lives of the apostles demand the investigation of all that is known of that remote period; a large proportion of the Roman pontiffs are among the canonized, and their records belong to the history of the Christian world, including that of the middle ages. The sainted founders of religious orders, from Benedict to Ignatius, from Anthony to Paul of the Cross, cannot be described without entering at length into the origin and progress of their holy institutes, many of which were asylums and homes of refuge for letters and learning during the darkest and most troubled periods of European history, and others served as training-places, whence the confessors and martyrs of the Christian faith went forth to the ends of the earth to propagate divine truth and love at the sacrifice of everything that humanity holds dear, even of liberty and life itself. Or, if it is question of kings and emperors whom the church venerates as saints, the secular history of their dominions naturally falls within the scope of their biographies: as of Hungary under St. Stephen; of Germany under Henry II.; of England under Edward the Confessor; of Denmark under Canute 758IV.; of Spain under Ferdinand III.; and of France under Louis IX. Not unfrequently the biography of a saint comprises the history of his age: as of the fourth century in the life of St. Athanasius; of the eleventh in that of St. Gregory VII.; of the twelfth in that of St. Bernard; and of the thirteenth in those of St. Dominic and St. Francis of Assisi. The limits of the Acta are not confined to Europe; they are as wide as our globe itself. Wherever the seed of the Gospel has been sown or watered by the blood of martyrs, among every race of mankind, from China to Paraguay, from Lima to Japan, nothing is foreign to the Bollandists’ pen; their work embraces, incidentally or formally, all the history of all nations.
Intimately connected with the historical researches of their work are several auxiliary branches of knowledge which largely enter into it and cannot be overlooked in estimating its scope and value. The aid of geography, for example, had to be called in to settle the boundaries of episcopal sees, of provinces, of kingdoms; to reconcile history with topography by determining the obsolete or corrupted names of certain places, about which different authors may have held different opinions. Several treatises on chronology entered into the general scheme. Archæology furnished the means of a minute and complete examination into ancient manners, rites, laws, arts, and the rudiments of languages, and of a comparison among the sacred and secular monuments of various nations. Then, again, the art of employing the materials, characters, and other portions of ancient MSS. for the determination of dates engaged the attention of the Bollandists, and of Père Papebroch in particular; and this father, with the frankness inseparable from true genius, did not hesitate to acknowledge his debt to the illustrious master Rei Diplomaticæ, the Benedictine Mabillon. As might have been expected, theology, canon law, and ecclesiastical history are largely represented in those sixty volumes. The teaching of the holy fathers, the decrees of councils, the laws of the church constantly demanded scientific statement and vindication, as also did the perpetual glory of miracles, of prophecy, of celestial revelations, and the undying gift of the loftiest contemplation, as against a class of critics who, while affecting to patronize letters, assume that the lives of saints must be nothing more than a tissue of idle tales and old women’s fables, or at least speak of them as if they thought them so. In the judgment, however, of several eminent critics of the modern school even the legends of saints, regarded as popular beliefs in a remote and half-instructed age, have their value as evidence of the ideas, manners, and customs of the people in the middle ages. M. Guizot was at pains to count twenty-five thousand legends in the Bollandists’ work; and these, he remarks, were the real literature of the first half of that period, and served for aliment to the intellectual, moral, and æsthetic life of those ages, and, from a historian’s point of view, were on that account beyond all price. Another French critic, M. Renan, also regarding the Acta from an external point of view, expresses himself in language of eulogy little to have been anticipated: “Quelle incomparable galerie, en effet, que celle de ces 25,000 héros de la vie désintéressée! 759Quel air de haute distinction! quelle noblesse! quelle poésie! Il y en a d’humbles et de grands, de doctes et de simples; mais je n’en connais pas un seul qui ait l’air vulgaire. Tous m’apparaissent tels que les pose Giotto, grandioses, hardis, détachés des liens terrestres, et déjà transfigurés. Ils plaisent peu au sens positif, je l’avoue; mais qu’ils ont, après tout, mieux compris la vie, que ceux qui l’embrassent comme un étroit calcul d’intérêt, comme une lutte insignifiante d’ambition et de vanité.”
Such being the character of the Acta, who conceived the comprehensive scheme and gave it actual form and being? The names of its originator and early continuators are preserved in the following lines:
Herbert Rosweyd, a native of Utrecht in Holland, entered the Society of Jesus in 1589, at the age of twenty, and taught philosophy and theology successively at Douay and Antwerp. He was a man in whom great learning was united to great piety. He composed and edited many works in Latin and Flemish, and among the rest published an edition of the Oriental ascetic Moschus’ Spiritual Meadow, and an original treatise on the Imitation of Christ to prove its author to have been Thomas à Kempis. Eleven years before his death, in 1629, Père Rosweyd published the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, in a folio volume, at Antwerp. It may be regarded as a first instalment of the Acta Sanctorum. While he was engaged on one of his books the idea occurred to him to collect in some twelve volumes the lives and acts of the beatified and canonized saints of the Catholic Church. At the time when he first conceived his great plan he was too deeply committed to other literary works to take it up at once; but the idea never was abandoned, and death alone prevented him from at least commencing it. When the project was mentioned to Cardinal Bellarmine, he inquired if Père Rosweyd expected to live two hundred years; such was the cardinal’s estimate of the magnitude of the undertaking—an estimate fully borne out by the result. Yet, as we shall presently see, in the first century and a half of the work not a dozen only but four times that number of volumes were published; and if twelve volumes could have comprised it the end would have been reached in little more than forty years from its commencement. What Papebroch said of Bolland may be said of Rosweyd: It was providential that he who first started such a work could not foresee its vast extent. Who but a rash man, or one assured by divine revelation of his success, would otherwise ever have dared to extend his plans and hopes to an age beyond his own, or counted upon the co-operation of future authors yet unborn in an association of labor up to that time without a parallel in the history of letters? It was probably only in the bosom of a religious order like the Society of Jesus, in which years count for days and centuries for years, that such a scheme could ever have been carried out.
Rosweyd, then, was dead, but his conception survived him. The duty of giving effect to it devolved on John Bolland (Latinized, in the style of the period, into Bollandus), after whom the whole body of succeeding editors has since been 760named Bollandists.[154] Bolland was by his birth, August 13, 1596, a native of Tillemont, in Flanders. At the age of sixteen he entered the society, and professed the four solemn vows January 27, 1630. His studies had been distinguished, and as a professor he stood high in many various attainments, in letters and in Oriental and other languages. But, better still, his piety and religious fervor kept equal pace with his other acquirements. Even after his appointment to carry on the work suggested by Père Rosweyd, Père Bolland would never intermit the duties of the confessional in the church of St. Ignatius attached to the house of the professed fathers of the society at Antwerp—now the church of St. Charles Borromeo, at the corner of Wyngard Street and the Katelina Rampart. It was only the spare time unoccupied by hearing confessions that he gave to sacred literature.
A glance at what had been previously done in the way of saints’ lives will enable us the better to understand the plan now adopted by Père Bolland. Of the acts of the martyrs and the other saints the very earliest form is the record of St. Stephen’s origin, arrest, trial, condemnation, and martyrdom, contained in the Acts of the Apostles. Similar records began to be kept first of all in the Roman Church by order of Pope Clement. Notaries were appointed for the purpose of collecting and authenticating the acts of martyrs. The testimony of eye-witnesses was taken down, and, when duly attested, the records were submitted to the judgment of the pope. Similarly the martyrologies took their origin from the burying-places of the martyrs in the catacombs. When a martyr was carried to his rest from the Amphitheatre an inscription was placed beside him, a name, a date, a title, a palm-branch or a dove, perhaps a monogram. Such were the rudiments of the earliest martyrologies. The Roman martyrology, in a few lines, each day records the names of the martyrs of the day under the favorite term of Depositio. The earliest calendar of the Roman Church is composed of a list of depositions copied as it were from the galleries of the cemeteries. These honored names thence passed into the diptychs, and were read aloud to the Christian assemblies on public occasions. Separate churches had their own diptychs, and frequently exchanged them with one another. At first martyrs only were admitted among the select number; but in the fourth century in the Western Church the first exception was made in favor of St. Martin. In the East the lists were opened to confessors somewhat earlier in favor of SS. Ephrem, Athanasius, Hilarion, and Antony. As regarded confessors, the acts were in fact an authenticated narration of their lives. In this way the martyrologies and acts of the martyrs and other saints assumed the form we now know, subject to the scrutiny of the bishops of particular sees, till a later date, when the admission 761of a new name into the calendar was reserved for the Supreme Pontiff. During the middle ages the literature of saints’ lives was in great part the work of the monasteries. Eusebius, the ecclesiastical historian, at an earlier period laid the foundation of this class of composition. Prudentius, in the third century, celebrated in verse the martyr’s crown of victory. There was the Spiritual Meadow of Moschus, and the Mirror of Vincent of Beauvais; and, most celebrated of all, the Legends of the Saints, composed by Da Varaggio, or De Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa—a work better known by its title of the Golden Legend, given it by its admirers. This collection was by far the most popular of all the works of the kind, and was translated into nearly every European language. It was one of the earliest books printed in England by Caxton, in 1483, in folio. To a somewhat later period belonged Surius the Carthusian, from whose Lives, in seven folio volumes, we find Charles Kingsley admitting that he had picked up his knowledge of ecclesiastical history. After Surius came Père Ribadeneira, the Spanish Jesuit, author of the Flower of Saints’ Lives. The work contemplated by Rosweyd and put in hand by Bolland was different from everything of the kind that had gone before it. The new scheme aimed at the collection and publication of the original acts and lives of all the saints in the order in which they stand in the Roman calendar and martyrology. Difficult and obscure passages were to be elucidated. It was adopted as a general rule that no testimony could be admitted which the editors had not thoroughly examined; that, in adducing an important witness, the age he lived in, his trustworthiness and judgment as an author, should be rigorously estimated. Nothing which tended to fuller acquaintance with any saint was to be slurred over without discussion; no place to be deemed too obscure, no people too ignoble, no country too remote, to which a saint had at any time belonged; and, in a word, no language too rude to occupy their careful attention, as far as either the intervention of published and unpublished authors, or correspondence, or the agency of ubiquitous friends could utilize human labor. Their plan was not simply to write a history of the church in numerous countries, strenuously as they meant to labor for that; its scope included the particular foundations of bishoprics, of cities, of monasteries, and of religious orders, the successive stages of whose histories they professed, to the full extent of their powers, to investigate.
Père Bolland’s first care was to collect materials for so extensive a work. He opened a correspondence with churches and monasteries all over Europe and beyond its limits, inquiring in all directions for offices peculiar to different places, and for copies of the rarest archives of the religious houses. These he gradually accumulated, until the foundation of a valuable library and museum was established, which long occupied the upper floor of a detached building in the professed house at Antwerp. Out of these materials Père Bolland then commenced to form his Acta for the month of January. Six years he toiled single-handed; but in 1635 a coadjutor was given him in Père Godfrey Henschen, S.J., a native of Gueldres, in Holland, then in the thirty-sixth 762year of his age and the sixteenth of his religious profession. The fathers prosecuted the work in company for eight years, and in 1643 the first two volumes were published, comprising the saints belonging to the month of January, to the number of upwards of twelve hundred. Père Bolland struck the keynote of his great work at a sublime height in these few words of dedication:
It was no exaggeration of the fact when Père Paul Oliva, afterwards elected father-general of the Jesuits, thus addressed Père Henschen: “Your reverence and your coadjutor are dwelling, in your every thought and with your pen, in the church in heaven.” The success of the January volumes was from the first assured, and went on increasing after the publication of the February saints, in three volumes, followed in 1658. Pope Alexander VII., the reigning pontiff, recorded his opinion that “a work more useful to the church of God or more glorious for her had never been accomplished, or even begun, by any one.” About the same time a second coadjutor was taken into the work in Père Daniel Papebroch, S.J., a native of Antwerp. His family was originally from Hamburg, but at the Reformation his father removed to Antwerp, where Daniel was born in 1628. At the end of the usual studies he entered the Society of Jesus in 1646, three of his brothers eventually following his example. Père Papebroch was ordained in 1658, and called from the chair of philosophy at Antwerp to assist PP. Bolland and Henschen in the Acta. After the February volumes appeared the pope invited the Bollandist Fathers to Rome. Père Bolland himself was too infirm to accept the invitation, but his younger coadjutors went instead of him. They left Antwerp July 22, 1660, old Père Bolland accompanying them as far as Cologne. Their literary tour, which lasted about two years and a half, was eminently successful. They visited monasteries and libraries without number all over Germany, Italy, and France; every door, every drawer was thrown open to them. Hundreds of precious documents were copied by them and for them; their library and museum were enriched, beyond the expectation of the most sanguine, with manuscripts and books; with missals, breviaries, martyrologies, sacramentaries, rituals, graduals, antiphonaries, and other similar works of many various rites or “uses,” such as the Mozarabic in Spain, the Ambrosian at Milan, the Sarum in England, and its Aberdeen daughter in Scotland. When at its best this library possessed some twelve thousand volumes, and in value and rarity is believed to have surpassed either the Barberini in Rome or the Mazarine in Paris—collections especially noted for their pre-eminence in similar works.
Père Bolland, who was now approaching his seventieth year, survived the return of his coadjutors from their tour only a few months. To the last he took part in the work of the museum, while the fervor of his regular and holy life seemed to increase. The 29th of August, 1665, was the last day he visited the working-room, but on a 763proof-sheet being put into his hand he was forced to lay it aside and retire to bed. He lingered about a fortnight, and then expired, after receiving all the sacraments of the dying. In his life and in his death, as well as with his indefatigable pen, he proved how well he had studied the saintly models he had been for upwards of thirty years daily contemplating.[155]
The next issue of the Acta, in three volumes, comprising the saints for March, appeared in 1668, the joint work of PP. Henschen and Papebroch. It was memorable for more reasons than one. With it began one of the customs of the Bollandists, to open a new volume with a biographical notice of any of their number who had died since the issue of the last. The first volume for March opened with an Eloge of Père Bolland, accompanied by an excellent engraving of his fine head, taken from a portrait of him executed by Fruytiers, a pupil of Rubens. The first difficulty that beset the undertaking arose from passages in the same volumes, in which a favorite opinion of the Carmelite Order, that their founder and first general was the prophet Elias, was quietly ignored. Not only had Baronius and Bellarmine anticipated the Bollandist view of the question, but it had already been taken for granted by two preceding authors belonging to the Carmelite Order itself. The Flemish Carmelites, however, took umbrage at Père Papebroch’s opinion, and a quarto volume soon afterwards appeared in opposition, the first in a tolerably long series of publications resulting from this curious controversy.[156] The Bollandists took no notice of their opponents until the publication of the saints’ lives for April, in three volumes, in 1675, afforded an opportunity of repeating and confirming their view of the actual origin of the order in question in the twelfth century of the Christian era. The Flemish Carmelites again asserted the more ancient origin; and when it was known in 1680 that three volumes of the May saints’ lives were about to appear, containing the life of another Carmelite saint, the order addressed an unusual request to Père Papebroch that a copy of the life might be shown them before publication. After some difficulty the Bollandist forwarded a copy to his father-general in Rome to be shown to the general of the Carmelites there. For a long time no answer was returned; three of the May volumes were ready; the bookseller was impatient; and Père Papebroch was on the point of leaving home for Westphalia. He therefore permitted the volumes to be issued for sale. He had hardly gone when Père Henschen received an order from Rome to suppress the life of St. Angel, and despatched it to Père Papebroch. But by this time many copies of the Bollandist May lives had got into circulation; it was too late to attempt the suppression of the life in question, and his father-general accepted Père Papebroch’s apologies. The result was another large volume from a Carmelite pen. Up to this time the dispute had been restricted to the Flemish province of the Carmelites, but in 1682 its area was extended 764to France by the casual discovery of an opinion favorable to the Bollandist view, expressed by Ducange, the illustrious archæologist, in a private letter to a friend. The provincial of the Flemish Carmelites next called on Pope Innocent XI. to interpose his authority in the matter; and Père Janning, a younger member of the Bollandist body, was sent to Rome to watch the proceedings. In 1690, two-and-twenty years after the dispute began, Père Papebroch was summoned to the tribunal of Pope Innocent XII., who referred the matter to the Congregation of the Index. Rome, however, did not move fast enough for Carmelite zeal. The Acta were denounced, 1691, before the Spanish Inquisition as a work originating within the dominions of the Catholic king. Four years later a decree of the Inquisition condemned the March, April, and May volumes of the Acta as “containing erroneous propositions, scenting of heresy, dangerous to faith, scandalous, impious, offensive to pious ears, schismatical, seditious, presumptuous, offensive,” etc., etc.
That this was a bitter trial to Père Papebroch and his coadjutors cannot be doubted. All the learned men of Europe were on their side, and the Jesuits succeeded in obtaining a subsequent decree of the Inquisition, 1696, permitting the Bollandists to appear and answer the charges; for the former decree had been pronounced in their absence. Upon this Père Papebroch produced a categorical defence of everything laid to his charge, in three volumes (1696-1699). The Carmelites also were quite as busy. Meanwhile, also in 1696, Innocent XII. forbade the disputants to attack each other. The Carmelite general, little satisfied with a neutral decision, petitioned His Holiness to end the dispute by a positive decree. After consulting the Congregation of the Council the pope decided to impose silence on the whole question regarding the origin of the Carmelites, and issued a brief to that effect, dated November 20, 1698. The judgment of the Spanish Inquisition, June 11, 1697, prohibited all the books relating to the dispute, but presumably excluding the Acta themselves; for in 1707 an index of forbidden books, published at Madrid under the authority of the Inquisition, made no mention of the Bollandist lives.
For thirty years, then, Père Papebroch had to bear this unwelcome interruption; and forty years after his death circumstances made it desirable to restate his defence. In 1755 a Supplementum Apologeticum took its place in the Bollandist series, containing all the apologetic volumes published in defence of Père Papebroch’s view in his Carmelite controversy. The successors of the early Bollandists had a noble opportunity, and used it nobly, to bury all former rancors, in the first volume of their revived work, in 1845, and the fifty-fifth of the series. The Life of St. Teresa, the great Carmelitess, occupies nearly the whole of its seven hundred folio pages—the largest scale on which any one life had hitherto been executed by the Bollandists. It was the solitary work of its author, Père Vandermoere, and was illustrated by drawings of places in Spain connected with the saint, and engraved in the highest style of art.
Père Henschen lived to see the first three May volumes issue from the press in 1680, and the following year closed his useful life, of which forty-six years had been devoted to work as a Bollandist. Père 765Papebroch was now at the head of the work, and had for his assistants PP. Janning and Baert. It went steadily on, and before his death, in 1714, Père Papebroch saw five volumes of the month of June, and of the series twenty-four, completed. For five years preceding his death he was nearly blind, and when it occurred he had reached the age of eighty-seven. This second founder of the great series was the author of several other important works, such as the Annals of the City of Antwerp and the Acta Vitæ Scti. Ferdinandi Regis Castillæ.
It would protract our sketch beyond all reasonable limits if we were to follow the progress of the great work, during the sixty years following Père Papebroch’s death, with as much detail as we have hitherto given. Let it suffice to say that it was prosecuted by fifteen Jesuit fathers in succession in addition to those already named; and when the work was suspended in 1773, the year in which the Society of Jesus was for the time suppressed, fifty volumes of the Acta had appeared, and the fiftieth was the third of the month of October. The plan of the work had indeed grown and expanded since Rosweyd estimated its contents at twelve volumes, since Bolland found two sufficient for the month of January, February, March, and April had each of them occupied three, August six, June and July seven, May and September eight. The chief sources relied upon for the heavy expenses of such a work were at first the gifts of private persons, bishops, abbots, and others, the patrimony of Père Papebroch and his sister forming no inconsiderable item in the account. Afterwards the sale of the volumes ensured a limited annual profit; and in 1688 the court of Vienna granted the fathers a pension, but burdened with the condition that subsequent volumes should each of them be dedicated to some member of the imperial house. Hence, after that date, every volume bears at the head of it an engraved portrait of an emperor or empress, of an archduke or archduchess. The Bollandists also enjoyed a certain revenue from their monopoly of the sale of classical books in the Jesuit colleges of Belgium.
A word as to the place where they lived and worked. Travellers who have visited Antwerp must remember the handsome Renaissance tower of St. Charles Borromeo’s Church, on the corner of the Katelina Rampart and Wyngard Street. That church was originally dedicated to St. Ignatius, the great first Jesuit, and was once a museum of Rubens’ art. At the suppression of the society its best ornaments were removed to Vienna, where many of them may be seen in the public gallery. The church itself perished by fire in 1718, but soon rose again as before. The small square it stands in is formed on two sides by massive buildings, formerly the Antwerp house of the professed fathers of the society. In the upper floor of the building opposite the church Père Bolland established his museum and printing-press, and there the work was carried on for nearly one hundred and fifty years. Few places in the history of Christian literature have a better title to be remembered with honor. In another article we shall trace the progress of the Bollandist Acta after the suppression of the Jesuit fathers until the long suspension of the work itself consequent on 766the French Revolution. We shall then give our readers an account of its revival some forty years ago, together with a description of the new museum and library in the Collége St. Michel, Brussels, which the writer had the honor of visiting a short time ago.
One of the most secluded and picturesque valleys of Savoy is to be found about twenty miles north of Chambéry, shut in, as by cyclopean walls, among gray jagged rocks, height piled on height—Mont du Chat on the one hand, and the mountains of Beauges on the other, while away to the north, through the gorges that give passage to the arrowy Rhone, is the dark Jura range, and to the south-east, rising into the very clouds, shine the everlasting glaciers of the Alps. At the base of Mont du Chat, which here rises abruptly fifteen hundred feet from the shore, is the beautiful lake of Bourget, clear, calm, and pure as the bright summer sky which is reflected in its bosom. It is the lac enchanté of Lamartine, who opens his impassioned romance of Raphael upon its shores, and under the inspiration of the glorious scenery wrote his poem of “Le Lac,” in which he calls upon the hours on these enchanted waters to suspend their course, and thus prolong a bliss which, to use his expression, neither time nor eternity could ever restore. In the fulness of delight and feeling he cries:
The lake of Bourget winds for several leagues in and out among the capes and headlands, forming a beautiful series of bays and inlets which wash picturesque cliffs and verdant slopes covered with vines and fig-trees and fields of waving corn. Towards one end is the little islet of Châtillon, with an old manor-house that seems to grow out of the rock, the seat of an ancient race, flanked with towers, and surrounded by gardens with steps cut in the rock leading from terrace to terrace where grow fruitful espaliers and the fragrant jasmine. Further south is the promontory of Saint-Innocent, with its granite cliffs and ancient château jutting into the lake, of which it commands the entire view. Not far from the eastern shore is Aix-les-Bains, whose hot sulphur springs were frequented in ancient times by the Roman emperors, and are still resorted to for health or pleasure. Between Aix and the lake is the verdant hill of Tresserves, that rises almost perpendicularly from the water, covered with enormous old chestnut-trees. To the south you can see the mountains gradually descending towards the Arcadian valley of Chambéry, with many a village spire peering forth amid the dark 767walnut groves, or the tower of some ancient castle with battlements still frowning, though they now only serve to point a moral and adorn the landscape, if not, perchance, a tale. On the other side, at the foot of Tresserves, is the château of Bon Port, overshadowed by trees, near a sheltered bay where boats are to be found for crossing the lake. Every one goes over to the western shore, where in the gloomy shade of Mont du Chat, which veils it from the glare of the sun the greater part of the day, is the royal abbey of Hautecombe, the ancient burial-place of the house of Savoy. The profound solitude, the grandeur of the scenery, varying from stern mountain height to fair, sunny slopes and luxuriant valleys, and the pure, limpid waters of the tranquil lake giving expression to the landscape, render it one of the most lovely as well as peaceful spots in which to rest after life’s fitful fever. The luminous sky, the purple, light on the mountains, the stately colonnade of the pines with their solemn shades, the lulling sound of the torrents and cascades, the wind murmuring through the defiles, the sunny terraces where the eye passes from gloom to light, as the soul from darkness to joy, all dispose the heart to peace.
Hautecombe may be reached in less than an hour, but there is a delicious charm in floating idly around this gem of a lake, all blue and gold, giving one’s self up to dreamy thought, breathing the mountain air, listening to the gentle waves as they break against the shore and to the melancholy songs of the boatmen, and looking at the chalets on the hillsides, the meadows and pastures, the herds with their tinkling bells, the insects floating in the sun, the quivering leaves and shimmering lights, and the dark pile of the abbey with its shadowy cloisters on the further shore.
At length we land on the terrace at the foot of a tall, octagon tower that looks like a pharos, and, indeed, serves as one. The vast buildings that constitute the abbey, the Gothic church with its painted walls, its storied windows, the tombs and cenotaphs on every side, and the three hundred statues that people its chapels and aisles, are well worth a visit. More than one tomb tells of the brave exploits of a valiant race, the glorious part its chiefs took in the Crusades, their attachment to the Holy See, for which they often shed their blood in the continual wars of Italy, and their prowess on every battle-field of Europe. All these monuments of white stone, and these pale statues standing in niches or lying on tombs, have a somewhat ghastly, ghostly look that is the more striking from the groundwork of black schist. The house of Savoy, which gradually rose by the bravery, policy, and fortunate alliances of its counts, first ruled over a sterile domain in the Cottian Alps of which Chambéry was the principal town. These princes were remarkable for their political sagacity and gallantry on the battle-field. This was in part owing to their peculiar position. Savoy was in the middle ages a border-land which forced its knights to live in the saddle and hold themselves in readiness to meet the enemy, whether on the side of France or the vast domain of the German Empire. And when not needed at home they were always at the service of their allies, so that they 768took part in all the wars of the times, and led a life of knight-errantry that often bordered on romance. Humbert aux Blanches Mains, the first count, was a descendant of Duke Witikind, a contemporary of Charlemagne. His benefactions to the churches of that day are still on record. The line of counts ended with Amédée VIII., who was created duke in the fifteenth century. The ducal line extended through three centuries, when the peace of Utrecht in 1713 recognized Victor Amédée as King of Sardinia.
The abbey of St. Mary of Hautecombe was founded in the year 1125 by Count Amédée III. through the influence of St. Bernard and St. Guérin, with whom he had intimate relations. Combe is an old French word signifying a valley between two mountains. The Cistercians generally built their convents in a valley. The first abbot was St. Amédée d’Hauterive, of a distinguished family in Dauphiné, who passed his youth at the court of the Emperor Henry of Germany, but afterwards became a monk at Clairvaux, and was appointed abbot of Hautecombe by St. Bernard himself. The Emperor Conrad II. held him in such esteem that he made him a member of his council, and Frederic I., his chancellor. And when, in the time of the Second Crusade, preached by St. Bernard, Count Amédée took the cross at Metz in presence of an immense multitude, and set forth with his nephew, Louis VII. of France (in 1147), he left both his son and estates to the guardianship of the holy abbot of Hautecombe, who proved himself fully equal to the trust. He was an able writer also, and left eight homilies in honor of the Blessed Virgin, which still form part of the collection of the fathers. They used to be read on certain days of the year in the churches of Lausanne, of which he died archbishop in 1158. His tomb is still to be seen in the cloister at Hautecombe.
The second abbot was St. Vivian, likewise a disciple of St. Bernard’s. By his exalted sanctity he gave additional renown to the abbey, which so prospered that when St. Bernard visited it a few years after its foundation it already numbered two hundred monks. Many eminent prelates have sprung from this house, two of whom were elevated to the pontifical chair—Geoffroy de Châtillon in 1241, under the name of Celestin II., and Nicholas III. in 1277, who belonged to the Orsini family. It was the latter who gave the highest sanction to the devotion of the scapular of Mount Carmel by the beatification of Simon Stock, who died at Bordeaux in 1265, in the hundredth year of his age.
Hautecombe does not seem to have been at first intended as a place of sepulture. Count Amédée III. died two years after his departure, on the isle of Cyprus, of some epidemic in the camp. His son, Humbert III., succeeded him. This prince was an able ruler, as brave as he was pious, and valiantly defended his domains against Guy IV. of Dauphiné. He also distinguished himself at the siege of Milan, and was always the ally and ardent defender of the rights of the Holy See. The religious education he had received from St. Amédée gave him a proper estimate of earthly things, and he would have gladly renounced the world and become a monk at Hautecombe, had it not been for the remonstrances of his people. He 769often retired here for a season, as well as at Notre Dame des Alpes, and when he felt his life was drawing to a close he took the holy habit and died a few days after with a reputation for sanctity which time has not dimmed. Pope Gregory XVI. authorized public honors to be paid him, and Savoy celebrates his festival on the 4th of March, believed to be the day of his death. It was he who conceived the idea of making Hautecombe the burial-place of his family, and he was the first to find a grave here. The statue on his tomb represents him in the Cistercian habit with sabots on his feet.
Two brothers of Humbert the Saint, as he is called, Peter and John, and a sister named Margaret, embraced the monastic life and died in the odor of sanctity. Several other members of the house of Savoy have also been raised to our altars. A grandson of Humbert’s, buried behind the high altar at Hautecombe, was beatified by Pope Gregory XVI. in 1838 under the name of the Blessed Boniface. His festival is on the 13th of March. He was styled, when young, the Absalom of the age, on account of his personal beauty, but he early sought refuge from the seductions of the world in the Grande Chartreuse, where he took the habit of St. Bruno. He was subsequently called forth from his cell and appointed archbishop of Canterbury and primate of England. Pope Innocent IV. consecrated him at Lyons. He was noted for his charity, and was at once an able theologian and jurisconsult. He defended the rights of the church against Henry III. with energy, and showed equal zeal in supporting the royal authority amid the disaffections of the times, thereby inspiring so much confidence in the king that he appointed him regent when he went to France in 1259. Having gone to Savoy in 1270 to visit his brother, Count Philip, Archbishop Boniface fell ill and died, after an episcopate of twenty-five years, at the castle of St. Hélène, in the valley of the Isère, and was buried at Hautecombe. The statue on his tomb represents him with a serpent at his feet, emblem of prudence, and a bas-relief depicts him defending the rights of the church before Henry III.
Count Amédée IX. and two princesses of the house of Savoy are also invoked as saints. There is a statue of St. Margaret of Savoy in the chapel of St. Felix at Hautecombe, representing her in a monastic dress, her hands meekly crossed on her breast. She was a daughter of Amédée, prince of Achaia, and after the death of her husband, the Marquis of Montferrat, having been wholly converted to God by the preaching of St. Vincent Ferrer, she entered a monastery and devoted herself to the care of the sick in a hospital. She was canonized by Pope Clement X.
The Blessed Louise of Savoy was an angel of piety from her childhood, and after the death of her husband, Hugues de Châlons, prince of Orange, she being then twenty-seven years of age and free from all obligations to her family, was solemnly veiled a nun in the convent of the Clairists at Orbe, which had been founded by a princess of her husband’s family early in the fifteenth century, and still observed the rule in all its primitive rigor. Here she died in 1503 at the age of forty-two. Fifty years after her death the Calvinists of Switzerland overthrew the altars of the conventual church, 770and gave the nuns the choice of going into exile or renouncing the monastic life. They chose the former, but before quitting the cloister they sent a crier through the streets to proclaim at the sound of a trumpet that if they had offended any one whomsoever they humbly begged his forgiveness, and declaring that for the love of God they forgave the offence committed against themselves in being banished from their monastery. They were nineteen in number. They took with them some chalices, ornaments, and rich vestments they owed to the liberality of the Princess Louise, and a Madonna of carved wood, called Notre Dame de la Grâce, which she had given the convent at her entrance into religion. At Ouchy they embarked in three small boats for Evian, on the southern shore of the Lake of Geneva, then faithful to the device on one of its gates: Deo regique fidelis perpetuo—gates opened more than once, at that disastrous period, to exiles of the faith. The sky was clear when the nuns set forth, but a sudden tempest sprang up which threatened destruction to their frail barks. The boatmen themselves were alarmed, much more these timid doves just driven from their nest, and to lighten the boats they threw all their effects into the water. They succeeded, however, in getting ashore, and the magistrates and people of Evian came forth in procession to meet them, the bells meanwhile ringing out a peal of welcome. A few nights after some fishermen found Notre Dame de la Grâce gleaming among the cliffs of Meillerie, and the people of Evian went forth again with white banners to receive and convey it to the church. Some years later Count Emanuel Philibert built these exiles a convent at Evian, where this Madonna was preserved for more than two centuries; but in 1792 the nuns were again dispersed and the Virgin concealed. The convent is now used as a Petit Séminaire, but people from all the country around still go to the chapel to pray before the Madonna of the Blessed Louise of Savoy.
Another princess, but not of the house of Savoy, is specially honored at Hautecombe—St. Erine, daughter of the Emperor Licinius, and niece of Constantine the Great. She was taken captive in the East by the army of Sapor II. of Persia, and martyred because she would not renounce the faith. Her body was afterwards taken to Patras, and Anselmo, a bishop of the Morea in the thirteenth century, who had great devotion to her, gave a portion of her remains to the abbey of Hautecombe, which, in spite of many vicissitudes, is still preserved here in a reliquary of silver given by Charles Felix, King of Sardinia. The boatmen on the Lac du Bourget invoke St. Erine in perilous storms, and many miracles are attributed to her intervention throughout the valley. On Whitmonday her relics are solemnly exposed to veneration in the church.
In one of the aisles at Hautecombe is the tomb of Beatrice, daughter of Count Thomas I., and granddaughter of Humbert the Saint—one of the most beautiful and accomplished princesses of that age. She married Raymond Bérenger, the last count of Provence, and was not only one of the most brilliant queens of the Court of Love, but rivalled the troubadours themselves in the Gai Science. One of her songs, addressed to her husband, has been preserved:
What is unique in history, this Beatrice of Savoy had four daughters and three granddaughters who were all queens or empresses. As Dante says:
It was this Romeo de Villeneuve, the able minister of Count Raymond, whom Dante finds worthy of a place in his Paradise, who is said to have first foreseen the grandeur of united France, and who negotiated the grand alliances of his master’s daughters. One married St. Louis of France; another, Henry III. of England; a third, Richard of Cornwall, afterwards Emperor of Germany; and the fourth, Charles of Anjou, King of Naples and Sicily. As for the granddaughters, Beatrice of Sicily became Empress of Constantinople; Margaret of England, Queen of Scotland; and Isabella of France, Queen of Navarre.
Beatrice of Savoy was first buried at Echelles, where a magnificent tomb was erected, on which she lay, surrounded by the statues of her children and grandchildren with their consorts—twenty-six in number, all of white marble; but the tomb was destroyed at the Revolution, and her remains afterwards transported to Hautecombe, or at least what was saved of them, and placed in a new tomb.
It was her daughter, the fair Eleanor of Provence, a princess of remarkable beauty and talent, who married Henry III. of England. Through her influence her uncle Boniface, of whom we have spoken, was appointed successor of St. Edmund of Canterbury. The English historians do not speak so favorably of Archbishop Boniface, but the number of foreigners who followed Eleanor to England gave great offence to the people. Many of them married rich heiresses, and several families, like the Fletchers, Butlers, and Grandisons, can trace their descent from a Grandson, Boutillier, and La Fléchière of that period.
That part of London called the Savoy was so named from another uncle of Queen Eleanor’s—Peter, brother of Archbishop Boniface, who was created earl of Richmond, and had this tract of land given him by the king in the Strand, where he built a palace. This was afterwards rebuilt on a grander scale by the first duke of Lancaster, and became a place of historic interest. It was appropriated to the use of King John of France while a captive in England (1356-1364), and “thyder came to see hym the kyng and quene often tymes, and made hym gret feest and cheere.” And here, by the way, King John brought his Bible in the vernacular, and thumbed it well too, it appears, for in the account of his expenses is recorded the sum of thirty-two pence paid “Margaret the bindress” for a new cover with four clasps. In the Savoy, too, lived John of Gaunt, “time-honored Lancaster,” to whom the place descended, and here the poet Chaucer was his frequent 772guest. One of the scenes in Shakspere’s “Richard II.” is supposed to be laid here, though at that date the palace had been sacked and destroyed by Wat Tyler’s followers.
This Peter, Earl of Richmond, who gave the name to the Savoy, was called the Petit Charlemagne on account of his valor and other eminent qualities. He acquired great influence over Henry III., but returned to his native land at the death of his brother, to whom he succeeded in the government, being then sixty years of age. The abbot of St. Maurice, in gratitude for his services in behalf of the Valaisans against their suzerain, who oppressed them with his tyranny, gave him the celebrated ring of St. Maurice, that was henceforth used as the symbol of investiture by the counts of the house of Savoy. Count Peter died at the castle of Chillon in 1268. His tomb, the richest at Hautecombe, has ten pale mourning figures around it, called pleureuses, and a bas-relief represents him as ambassador at the court of Louis IX., arranging a treaty of peace between France and England. Over his tomb is painted on the wall the burial of Christ, and near by is the raising of Lazarus, with their lessons of hope beyond the grave.
Archbishop Boniface, Beatrice, Countess of Provence, etc., were the children of Count Thomas I., whose first wife, Beatrice of Geneva, is buried here. She was called the Mater Comitum, or the Mother of Counts, because three of her sons, Amédée IV., Peter, and Philip, all succeeded to the government of Savoy. It was she who, being at Susa when St. Francis of Assisi passed through, promised to build a convent of his order if he would give her a piece of his habit. He tore off one of the sleeves and gave it to her. It was long preserved in the chapel of the princes of Savoy, whose descendants have driven the Franciscans of these days from their homes. This relic is still preserved in the church of the Capuchins at Chambéry. At Hautecombe, too, is buried Beatrice Fiescha, wife of Count Thomas II., and niece of Pope Innocent IV. She belonged to the great Genoese family from which afterwards sprang the mystic St. Catherine of Genoa. It was her son, Amédée V., surnamed the Great, whose large tomb, inscribed Belli Fulmen, stands on one side as you enter the nave. His is the most glorious name of the house of Savoy. He was famed for his deeds of valor, which read like a chapter from the old romances of chivalry. He is said to have taken part in twenty-two pitched battles and thirty-two sieges. His most famous exploit was his expedition to Rhodes to aid the Knights of St. John in defending the island against the Turks. At the request of the grand master he took the white cross on a red shield[158] instead of the eagle, the original cognizance of the house of Savoy. He likewise assumed the famous device, F. E. R. T., which is generally interpreted, Fortitudo ejus Rhodum tenuit—His valor saved Rhodes. He was on intimate terms with his royal kinsman of England, was present at the marriage of Edward II. with Isabella of Valois and at Edward’s coronation, and was employed in negotiations between England and France. Here, too, lies his daughter Agnes, with her recumbent statue on the 773tomb, clasping a crucifix to her breast, remarkable for pose and expression.
Count Aimon comes next. He and his wife Yolande lie on a tomb in the Chapelle des Princes, his feet on a lion, hers on a dog, beneath a baldachin, surrounded by saints and quaint pyramids. He was the second son of Amédée V., and destined at first to the ecclesiastical state, but, his elder brother having died, he succeeded to the title and displayed great military ability on the side of the French in their wars with England and the Netherlands. He protected the poor, loved justice, established courts of assizes, and founded hospitals and churches. Pope Benedict XII. had a special esteem for him, and gave him and his successors the first place after crowned heads at the coronation of the Sovereign Pontiffs. He married Yolande de Montferrat, of the imperial family of Palæologus.
Amédée VI., son of Aimon, called the Comte Vert, or Green Count, was one of the most chivalric knights of the fourteenth century. His whole life was spent on the battle-field, and he rendered his name immortal by his courage and gallant deeds. He gained the battle of Abrets against France, aided Pope Gregory IX. and the Emperor Charles IV. in crushing the Visconti, and rescued the Greek Emperor John Palæologus from the hands of the Bulgarians, who held him prisoner at Gallipolis, and replaced him on the throne of Constantinople. The tournament he gave at Chambéry in 1348, on the Place de Verney, was celebrated by the poets and romancers of the day. The colors he wore on this occasion, as well as his followers, and even his steed, procured for him the name of the Comte Vert. He founded the supreme order of the Annonciade, one of the most ancient known, in honor of Our Lady, consisting of fifteen knights; and built a Carthusian convent at Pierre-Châtel for fifteen monks, whose duty it was to say a daily Mass in honor of the fifteen mysteries of Our Lady’s life, for the fifteen knights of the order. Charles III. of Savoy afterwards added fifteen golden roses, part enamelled red and part white, to the collar, and the medal of the Annunciation.
The king of Sardinia is still grand master of the order, and its collar is the most glorious decoration he can confer. Two of the original collars, presented by the Comte Vert, were long preserved at Hautecombe. Amédée VI. also created a charitable office called the Advocate of the Poor, still kept up—a magistrate supported by the government for gratuitous services to the poor, whom he is bound to defend at court when their cause is just. Like all the old knights, Amédée was devout to Our Lady, and has left a monument of his piety
—the church of Notre Dame, which stands in a beautiful spot overlooking Lake Leman. He died of the plague at Naples in 1383, but his body was brought to Hautecombe for burial. Twenty-four prelates and a host of lords from Savoy and the surrounding countries attended the obsequies. His wife was Bonne de Bourbon.
Amédée VII., styled the Comte Rouge, or the Red Count, from the color of his hair, was the son of the Comte Vert. He married Bonne 774de Berry, daughter of John of France, Duke de Berry. He added Nice and Ventimiglia, and the valley of Barcelonette, to the domains of his ancestors, thus extending them to the sea. The gradual acquisitions of the house of Savoy gave rise to the witty saying that the kingdom thus formed was like an artichoke that had been plucked leaf by leaf. The Conte Rosso was remarkable for personal address and valor, which he loved to display at jousts and tournaments. He made his first essay at arms against the sire of Beaujeu, and at a tournament at Bruckberg defeated the earl of Huntingdon with the lance, and the earls of Arundel and Pembroke with sword and battle-axe. His judgment and prudence caused him to be repeatedly chosen mediator by the sovereigns of Europe. He was a patron of letters and founder of the University of Turin. He died in his thirtieth year at Ripaille, some say of a fall from his horse; others, that he fell a victim to poison or the medicaments of a Bohemian quack, who promised him a luxuriant head of hair and an improved complexion. The statue on his tomb represents him in armor, resting on his sword after victory. In a bas-relief he is fighting for Charles VI. of France, at the head of seven hundred Savoyards, against the English and Flemish at the siege of Bourbourg.
The Conte Rosso’s widow, Bonne de Berry, left Savoy in 1395 and married her cousin-german, Bernard VII., Count of Armagnac, who became head of the Orléans faction when his daughter Bonne married the young Duke Charles, and was murdered in a frightful manner by the Burgundians at Paris in 1418. Her first husband poisoned, her second murdered, Bonne de Berry amply expiated her strong ambition and ended her days at Rhodez in the practice of the most heroic piety. She left in Savoy, besides her son Amédée VIII., two daughters, one of whom married Louis, the last prince of Achaia, at whose death in 1418 Piedmont was united to Savoy. This princess, named Bonne, like her mother and grandmother, left one of the most curious legacies on record—a bequest for a daily Mass of Requiem in the chapel of the princes of Achaia, in the church of the Franciscans at Pignerol, for twelve thousand years! She evidently thought the end of the world very remote, and had great confidence in the stability of human affairs and the scrupulous fidelity of her heirs.
One of the chapels at Hautecombe was founded by the Count de Romont, a natural son of the Conte Rosso. He went to the Holy Wars, and was a captive seven years among the Saracens. The shield on his statue is sown with crescents, and here and there on the border of his garments is the Arabic word Alahac—God is just—recalling his exploits in the East. Twenty-eight princes and princesses of the house of Savoy have been buried at Hautecombe, but the place lost its prestige when Turin became the capital. In 1793 the monks were driven out, and the lands sold as part of the national domains. The republican commissioners went down into the vaults, opened the tombs, and carried off all the precious objects they could find; among others the ducal crown from the tomb of Duke Philibert in the caveau of the Chapelle des Princes. The ancient resting-place of sovereigns was 775turned into a fabrique de faience, and the buildings had partly fallen to ruin when they were redeemed by Charles Felix, King of Sardinia, in 1824, from his own private means. He began the restoration of the church, and peopled the abbey again with Cistercians. And here he was buried, at his own request, in May, 1831. His wife, Marie Christine, completed the work and found a grave here in her turn.
Amédée VIII., the son of Bonne de Berry and the Red Count, was not buried at Hautecombe, but at Ripaille, on the southern shore of Lake Leman. Few travellers visit this place, though it is one of the most interesting excursions to be made from Geneva. It stands on a point of land projecting into the lake just beyond Thonon, but seems so low and hidden from the water that it might be taken for a mere grange and its dependencies in the midst of orchards and woods. A pleasant walk from Thonon brings you to a grove of linden-trees that shade a monastic-looking establishment with pepper-box turrets and long corridors leading to monk-like cells. Connected with it is a church of the Renaissance, with pillars of gray marble in front, and above is the cross of Savoy serving as a support to the tiara and keys of the Papacy! Here was buried the first duke of Savoy, the last of the anti-popes, the “bizarre Amédée,” as Voltaire calls him; “the Solomon of his age,” as he is styled by others.
Ripaille seems to have been a place of great antiquity, for Roman inscriptions and remains have been found here, as well as ornaments of the time of the Merovingians, but it was only a maison de plaisance in the time of Amédée VI., who left it to Bonne de Bourbon. Amédée VII. made it a hunting-lodge and here died. It was Amédée VIII. who gave it a world-wide celebrity, and by his life here unwittingly added a new expression to the French language. He married Mary of Burgundy and had nine children. He united Savoy and Piedmont, over which he ruled forty years. He entertained the Emperor Sigismund with such splendid hospitality on his way to Italy that he elevated him to the rank of duke. This was in 1416. After the death of his wife, but still while in the height of his influence and prosperity, he suddenly retired from the world to Ripaille, taking with him six noblemen who had participated in the most important transactions of his reign. He rebuilt the old manor-house, surrounded it with moats, and flanked it with seven seigneurial towers, with a suite of apartments connected with each, communicating with each other by a long corridor. The tower next the lake was loftier than the others, and connected with a square edifice of villa-like pretensions reserved for his own use. The others were for the six lords who accompanied him. To the east was a park planted with oaks in the form of a star, still to be seen, venerable and broad-spreading. This park was surrounded by a wall and laid out with alleys and winding paths. Amédée and his companions did not retire here to become monks, nor did he at first give up the reins of government, as some have declared. But he laid here the foundation of the order of chivalry known as the Knights of St. Maurice—a semi religious establishment in his day, under the direction of the canons of St. 776Augustine. Its members assumed a particular costume, consisting of a gray habit and cowl, and a gold cross suspended from the neck. They divided their time between religious exercises and affairs of the state. They constituted, in fact, a permanent senate to manage the government, for which they fitted themselves by meditation and prayer. And Amédée wished his successors to have recourse to the Knights of St. Maurice on all important occasions. They were always to be seven in number, and recruited from the highest class. Here the duke married his son, gave judgment in certain cases, and showed by numerous acts that, though he had appointed his son lieutenant-general, he had by no means abdicated.
Of course the world took it up. There were two reports. Some said the duke had given himself up to mortification and penance with a view to the Papacy. Others declared he and his followers led a life of debauchery. The expression faire ripaille[159] is said to be derived from the unfavorable reports spread abroad respecting their manner of life. But it was not used in his time, nor, indeed, till the seventeenth century. These imputations are not derived from any writer of the day, unless we except Monstrelet, who in his Chronicles thus speaks of the duke’s life at Ripaille: “He and his followers are served, not with roots and water from the fountain, but with the best wine and best meats that can be found.” This is by no means a proof of sensuality, and, as the knights were under no vow to live on roots and pure water like the hermits of Thebaïd, there was no reason why they should not select the best meats and use the purest wine at their repasts. What would have been a simple, abstemious life for a prince and his courtiers might seem luxurious to the peasantry around, who perhaps gave rise to such reports. But Monstrelet, who had been made governor of Cambrai by the duke of Burgundy—a prince exceedingly hostile to Amédée—would be likely to take an unfavorable view of the life at Ripaille. This is why Guichenon considers his chronicle untrustworthy in everything relating to the history of Savoy. And he was too far distant to have a personal knowledge of what was occurring there. Oliver de la Marche, who also belonged to the court of Burgundy, is not so unfavorable to Amédée. He says “he governed so wisely in the time of French divisions that Savoy was the richest, safest, and most productive of any country around.” Two other writers are more explicit as to the duke’s manner of life. Raphael Volaterra, speaking of the election of Amédée as pope under the title of Felix V. by the Council of Bâle, says he was “chosen on account of the fame of his mortifications.” Jean Gobelin, the duke’s secretary, declares he led a very austere life. Onofrio Panvini, an Augustinian monk, says his life was “angelic.” The Père Daniel, a conscientious historian, after examining the case, says it is certain he led an innocent life here, without any scandal. And Æneas Sylvius, secretary of the Council of Bâle, eminent as a writer, and who became pope under the name of Pius II., visited Amédée at Ripaille and bears this testimony: “The one who had 777more votes than the rest was the most excellent Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, dean of the Knights of St. Maurice in the diocese of Geneva. The electors, considering that he was leading the life of a celibate, and that his conduct was that of a religious, thought him worthy of governing the church,” and, after eulogizing the duke at some length, adds that “he only wore what garments were necessary to protect him from the cold, and only ate enough to keep him from dying of hunger.” When the members of the Council of Bâle wished to set up a pope of the Gallican race in opposition to Eugenius IV., it is evident that they would only choose, after serious consideration, a person of irreproachable life. In fact, they did make the most minute inquiries, which led to the explicit statement that the duke, though not in orders, had “always been regular in his habits, assiduous at the offices of the church, and exact in saying his breviary.”[160] It was Voltaire who made the calumny popular. The calumnies concerning Amédée have been caught up and perpetuated by a school always glad to find an ecclesiastical dignitary, even if an anti-pope, suspected of excesses, and have led some grave historians like Duclos to state that the duke and his followers led a voluptuous life at Ripaille.
Amédée certainly should not be excused for yielding to the solicitations of the Council of Bâle and usurping the tiara. Père Monod says he resisted for a while and shed torrents of tears, dwelling on the difficulty of the oaths to be taken, and even pleading the cause of his competitor, Eugenius; but the members made him believe it would be for the welfare of the church, and he yielded. A deputation from the council came to Ripaille to offer him the tiara, and he was enthroned with great pomp in his church December 17, 1439, on which occasion he abdicated the government in favor of his son Louis, drew up his will, and gave the Knights of St. Maurice a new dean, or prior, chosen from their number. But he atoned for his weakness a few years after by the voluntary resignation of his usurped office, and retired a second time to Ripaille, as cardinal of the title of St. Sabina, legate of the Holy See, and administrator of the dioceses of Lausanne and Geneva, thus restoring peace and unity to the Catholic Church. After spending two years in retirement he died, and was buried in his church at Ripaille. The eventful life of a prince who by turns had been count, duke, anti-pope, cardinal, and bishop, who was married, a widower, and a cenobite, is not without a certain dramatic interest that needs not the shading of calumny.
A grandson of Amédée VIII., Louis II., the dethroned king of Cyprus, came also to Ripaille to die. He married Charlotte de Lusignan, heiress of the king of Cyprus, and she and Louis were crowned as king and queen of Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Armenia—high-sounding titles that soon became a mere name, for they were forced to fly before James, a natural son of the late king, who had married Catherine Cornaro of Venice, and was aided by the soldan of Egypt. Queen Charlotte made a solemn donation of Cyprus to her nephew Charles, and died a guest of Pope Sixtus IV. at Rome in 1487, the last of the illustrious house of Lusignan, which had ruled over Cyprus for three hundred years.
778In 1536 Ripaille was devastated by the Bernese—that is, the abbey. They respected the château. The tomb of Amédée VIII. was broken to pieces, and his remains at a later day were taken to Turin. In 1575 Ripaille was restored to the order of St. Maurice, which Gregory XIII. united to that of St. Lazare three years later. When St. Francis de Sales was Bishop of Geneva he placed Carthusians at Ripaille. Now it belongs to a private gentleman.
There is, perhaps, no other episode in the adventurous journeyings and heroic life of the Apostle Paul so full of interest as his visit to Athens. To all those whose acquaintance with Grecian history enables them to take in the peculiar surroundings and associations of that visit it certainly affords the most fascinating incident in connection with the progress of the Christian faith; and it has always been regarded as the most interesting event in the heroic age of Christianity. For what other event presents such striking antithesis?—the newly-established religion of Jesus of Nazareth face to face with the intellect and cultivation of Greece, the disciple of a crucified Galilean come to dethrone the disciples of Plato, a semi-barbarian Jew come to teach the mighty Athenians, who had taught the world.
The historical outline of the subject is thus given in the seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles:
“And they that conducted Paul, brought him as far as Athens, and receiving a commandment from him to Silas and Timothy, that they should come to him with all speed, they departed. Now whilst Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred within him, seeing the city wholly given to idolatry. He disputed therefore in the synagogue with the Jews, and with them that served God, and in the market-place, every day with them that were there. And certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics disputed with him, and some said: What is it that this word-sower would say? But others: He seemeth to be a setter-forth of new gods: because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection. And taking him they brought him to Areopagus, saying: May we know what this new doctrine is which thou speakest of? For thou bringest in certain new things to our ears. We would know therefore what these things mean. (Now all the Athenians, and strangers that were there, employed themselves in nothing else 781but either in telling or in hearing some new thing.) But Paul standing in the midst of Areopagus, said: Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious. For passing by and seeing your idols, I found an altar also on which was written: ‘To the unknown God.’ What therefore you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you. God, who made the world and all things therein, seeing he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands. Neither is he served with men’s hands as though he needed anything, seeing it is he who giveth to all life, and breath, and all things: and hath made of one, all mankind, to dwell upon the whole face of the earth, determining appointed times, and the limits of their habitation. That they should seek God, if haply they may feel after him or find him, although he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live and move and are: as some also of your own poets said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’ Being therefore the offspring of God we must not suppose the divinity to be like unto gold or silver, or stone, the graving of art and device of man. And God indeed having winked at the times of this ignorance, now declareth unto men, that all should everywhere do penance. Because he hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world in equity, by the man whom he hath appointed, giving faith to all, by raising him up from the dead. And when they had heard of the resurrection of the dead some indeed mocked, but others said: We will hear thee again concerning this matter. So Paul went out from among them. But certain men adhering to him, did believe: among whom was also Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.”
St. Paul went to Athens direct from Berœa in Macedonia; he had had a most successful apostolate among the Berœans, and had no intention of quitting the place so soon, were it not that his old enemies, the Jews of Thessalonica, came down upon him and compelled him to flee for his life. It was only seventeen miles to the coast, and some of his Berœan converts conducted the persecuted apostle as speedily as possible to the sea. From where they embarked it was a sail of three or four days in a small boat to the Piræus. If the great apostle of the Gentiles had an eye for the beautiful in nature, if scenes consecrated by historic association had any charm for him, he must have revelled in this quiet sail on the Interior Sea. As soon as he cleared the headlands of the Macedonian shore he saw Mount Olympus towering close above him; and as he drew near the Thessalian Archipelago Mount Athos and the picturesque coast-line of Attica began to be visible. For a distance of ninety miles on his voyage the long island of Eubœa forms the outer boundary of the narrow sea, and every spot on either shore is classic ground, hallowed by some association of the past. On the northern shore of Eubœa itself is the pass of Thermopylæ; opposite the southern extremity, on the coast of Attica, are the plains of Marathon; and when the little vessel rounded the cape of Sunium, Ægina, Salamis, and the beautiful isles of Greece were in full view. But although one can scarcely imagine St. Paul to have been wholly insensible to the surpassing beauty of such scenes, the historic associations which they recalled gave him but little concern, for he was going to Athens to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified, and this was his all-absorbing thought.
How little did the fishermen who tended their nets on the Ægean Sea think what destiny the white sail that passed them bore to Attica; and how little did the people who came down to the beach to see the strange vessel come in imagine what a conqueror they had 782received on their shores! After landing at the Piræus St. Paul at once sent back to Berœa for Silas and Timothy. And it might appear from the account given in the Acts as if he were afraid to begin work in Athens alone; but if he had any such hesitation his natural courage and burning zeal soon overcame it, and he lost no time in entering upon his labors.
Over the ruins of the long walls which in the days of Pericles were the bulwark of Greece, Paul of Tarsus passed on to Athens. As he entered the gates of the city a sight met his eye which “stirred up his spirit within him,” and inflamed the passionate ardor of his zeal for the knowledge of the one true God. Evidences of the grossest idolatry everywhere met his view. Turn which way he would, statues of Minerva, Jupiter, Apollo, Bacchus, and the Muses were before him; on every street-corner, in every portico, he saw altars raised to the false gods of Greece.
It was the custom of St. Paul, as, indeed, it was of all the apostles whenever they entered a strange city, to seek out the Jews—who were even then scattered all over the civilized world—and to begin his public teaching in the synagogue. And it may have been with this object in view that he went to the Agora, or market-place, for he well knew where the trading proclivities of his countrymen would make them apt to congregate. But the Agora of Athens was a place of pleasure rather than of business; ideas were the chief commodities exchanged there, and it was far more the resort of philosophers and sophists than of merchants and money-changers. It was, in fact, a sort of City Hall park filled with statues and fountains and plane-trees, and, as a matter of course, with loungers; and in those degenerate days nearly all the men of Athens were loungers, and did little else than loll around the Agora, inquiring after news and discussing the events of the time.
Such was the market-place of Athens, where St. Paul disputed every day for we know not how many days.
Let us picture to ourselves the great apostle of the nations, clad in the toga of a philosopher visiting the Agora from day to day to break the Gospel tidings to all who would listen to him. At one moment we can fancy him seated under a plane-tree in earnest conversation with a venerable Israelite, who nervously strokes his beard as the apostle insists that Christ was the true Messias, and in him was the fulfilment of the prophecies and the only hope of Israel. At another moment he is in the midst of a group of scoffing sophists, hotly disputing with them the unity of the Godhead and the immortality of the soul. And again we can picture him walking alone through the market-place, absorbed in his thoughts, and with an expression of sadness on his countenance as he contemplates the gross errors that surround him in the “city wholly given to idolatry.”
The monuments of Athenian glory, the masterpieces of Athenian art, the works of Phidias, of Praxiteles, in the midst of which he moved, had no charm for Paul of Tarsus; they but “stirred up his spirit within him.” He longed to sweep them all away and plant in their stead the rude cross of Jesus Crucified. Renan, in his life of St. Paul, works himself up into a rhetorical frenzy over the feelings awakened in the apostle by the beautiful statues of Greece. He makes an apostrophe to them and warns them of their danger. “Ah! beautiful and chaste images,” he writes, “true gods and true goddesses, tremble. Here is one who will raise the hammer against you. The fatal word has been pronounced—ye are idols. The error of this ugly little Jew will prove your death-warrant.”[161]
The popular religion of Greece was a religion of the senses; it had little or no hold on the soul and none at all on the intellect. In its first developments it was the religion of patriotism—patriotism elevated into a divine sentiment. Its gods and goddesses were the supposed founders and promoters of the state. In its later developments it was the religion of beauty and art—an adoration of the ideal in form and feature—and its gods and goddesses became the gods and goddesses of beauty; hence the production of those masterpieces in architecture and art which are still so despairingly inimitable. If art alone could ensure the perpetuity of a religion, the religion of Greece would still remain. Neither the eloquence of St. Paul nor the sublime maxims of the Gospel which he preached would have been able to supplant it. But God has implanted in the mind of man the desire for the true as well as for the beautiful; and the possession of truth alone can satisfy the soul.
The Athenians were always in great unrest on religious matters; they were ever inquiring, ever disputing, ever seeking out new gods and new forms of worship, and of course were never satisfied. How, indeed, could they be satisfied, seeing that their religion had no foundation in reason, and hence no foundation in truth? It is one of those strange, unaccountable phenomena in the history of the development of the human mind that a people so intellectual as the Athenians, and having such a grand philosophy, should have held to such an absurd, unreasoning system of religion. Reason and religion in their minds appeared to have been wholly separate. Philosophy had its sphere, religion had its sphere, and there was little or no contact or relation between them. In this connection M. Renan makes a remark which is unusually profound and is well worth quoting. Speaking of the philosophers of Athens, he writes: “The aristocracy of thinkers cared very little for the social wants which made their way through the covering of so many gross religions. Such a divorce is always punished. When philosophy declares that she will not occupy herself with religion, religion replies to her by strangling her. And this is just; for philosophy is nothing, unless it points out a path for humanity—unless it takes a serious view of the infinite problem which is the same for all.”[162]
But although Greek philosophy did not seek to reconcile the popular religion of Greece with reason, which in truth it would have been vain to attempt, it did effect a reconciliation of supreme importance to mankind—it reconciled the mind of Greece and of the civilized world to some of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, and so prepared the way for the coming of Christ and the preaching of St. Paul.
It will hardly be a digression here to look a little into the origin of Greek philosophy and the glimpses of truth to which it attained.
Socrates was the father of Greek 783philosophy. There were philosophers before him and there were far greater philosophers after him; but those who preceded him, such as Thales and Pythagoras, were physicists, and their speculations were almost wholly confined to the material universe; and those who succeeded him were his pupils, and simply followed up the new field of investigation he had thrown open to them. Socrates was the sage par excellence, the first to turn his looks within and explore the regions of the soul. He was the true founder of moral philosophy, the first to lay down the great maxim that “the proper study of mankind is man.” The human mind, its powers and moral perfectibility, was the one great subject of all his speculations.
Socrates was born in Athens 469 B.C., and he died there 399 B.C. He died a martyr—the first great martyr in the cause of moral truth and liberty of conscience. His father was an indigent sculptor, and for a time he himself followed the same profession, but he early abandoned it for the pursuit of wisdom. He was a self-taught man, and the means that he took to discipline his will and obtain the mastery over his passions and senses were almost the same the saints have used. He practised self-denial and mortification in a remarkable degree; and the forbearance and long-suffering he exercised towards his violent-tempered wife, Xanthippe, betoken the sublimest patience.
The apostle of wisdom, Socrates went about the streets and squares of Athens day after day for many years, questioning, catechising, reasoning with all who would listen to him, insisting ever on the wisdom of his great maxim, Γνώθι σεαυτόν—know thyself. He felt himself commissioned by the gods to teach the higher laws of conscience to the Athenians. Nor was he so very far astray in this, for we cannot fail to recognize the providence of God in the mission of Socrates. He undertook the direction of individual consciences, and his relations towards some of his friends more nearly resembled those of a father confessor than anything else. The tie that bound the brilliant Alcibiades to the uncouth philosopher was peculiarly tender. Socrates saved his life at the battle of Potidæa, and he in turn saved the life of Socrates at the battle of Delium. The friendship that grew up between the profligate youth and the austere sage was a strange one. It was the wonder of all Athens; and whenever they appeared together in public Alcibiades was jeered at by the youth of the city. Socrates for a time exercised the greatest influence over his young friend, and restrained those passions in him which seemed ungovernable. Such was the power of Socrates over minds the least disposed to receive his moral teachings and submit to their restraints. But what were the moral doctrines of Socrates? And in what way were the teachings of this sage a preparation for Christianity, so that he should merit to be called the precursor of St. Paul at Athens? In the first place, Socrates laid down those principles of moral ethics which are also in part the basis of Christian ethics. He taught that the supreme good of man lay in the path of wisdom and virtue, and he declared fidelity to conscience to be the highest law of life. With him began that new departure in philosophy which 784directed the attention of mankind to mind rather than matter. The pleasures and possessions of the world are contemptible when compared with wisdom and virtue and the perfection of the soul, in the teachings of Socrates as well as in the teachings of St. Paul. In his system, too, every other consideration must yield to the law of conscience and of God. “The word of God,” he says, “ought to be first considered”; and in the exhortation which he is represented in the Phædo as making to his friends to care for their souls he appears to strike the key-note of the Gospel. “O my friends,” he said, “if the soul is truly immortal, should we not take the greatest care of her, not for the short period of life but for eternity? And the danger of neglecting her eternal destiny does appear dreadful” (Phæd. 107). Were not these words the remote echo of the great question of the Gospel, “What doth it profit a man....”? The language of reproof which Socrates addressed to the gross-minded and sensual, whose only aspiration in life is self-indulgence and sensuality, reminds one of the energetic rebukes of St. Paul to those who make a god of their bellies and their passions. And the declaration of liberty of conscience which Socrates made before his judges when his life was trembling in the balance was worthy of a Christian martyr. “A man who is good for anything,” he said, “ought not to calculate the chances of living or dying. He only should consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong, acting the part of a good man or a bad one” (Mem. ii. 1. 28).
Besides these moral teachings, Socrates maintained the existence of a Supreme Being, who exercised a care over all things and preserved harmony in the universe. He did not, however, break through the pagan influences that surrounded him sufficiently to hold to the belief in one only God, but, while he accepted the doctrines of polytheism, he maintained that there was one Supreme Lord, who exercised a universal providence over all things; and he further taught that in the eyes of this Supreme Being all men were equal and there was nothing meritorious but virtue. This was a bold innovation when we remember the Athenian notions of race and caste. He was also of opinion that the gods exercised a watchful care over men and frequently inspired their actions; and the demon of Socrates, about which we hear so much, appears to have been a sort of guardian spirit, whose promptings, though always negative, he constantly looked for and never disregarded. These certainly were somewhat Christian conceptions of morality and of God, and although they are rather offset by other teachings and views of the Greek sage, yet in the main his doctrines foreshadow the light of the Gospel. Were it not, however, for the great disciple who immediately followed up his teaching and threw the light of his genius around it, the system of Socrates, if it can be called a system, would have accomplished little in the way of preparation for Christianity.
For the last eight or nine years of his life Socrates had had Plato for his disciple, and it was through Plato that his teachings were transmitted and developed into that sublime system of philosophic truth which St. Augustine so greatly admired and approved.
785Plato, the prince of human intellects, by his unaided reason attained to the knowledge of many of the truths of revelation. The notion of a Supreme Being which he received from Socrates he developed into an almost Christian conception of God and his attributes. In his system the Supreme Deity is not merely the source of the harmony of the universe, but he is also the Father who created out of goodness; and he is in himself so good and perfect that no unrighteousness, no imperfection can be conceived as existing in him. Plato even appears to have had some notion of the trinity of Persons in the Godhead, though of course vague and indistinct. His speculations on the destiny of man and the immortality of the soul are wonderfully luminous. He recognized after a fashion the fallen nature of man and the need of some divine mediation or redemption to raise him up; but in his theory of Fall and Redemption moral and physical defilement and regeneration are strangely and somewhat incongruously blended. Plato’s conception of virtue was exalted and his definition of it singularly Christian. “Virtue,” he said, “is the resemblance to God according to the measure of our ability.” “Be ye imitators of Christ,” “Be ye God-like,” says St. Paul; and to become God-like is to become “holy, just, and wise,” according to Plato.
He also held the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, and he gave it as his opinion that the rewards and punishments of this life are as nothing compared to those “that await both the just and the unjust after death.” He encouraged the just to be patient in all their trials and afflictions in life, assuring them that everything would work together unto their good, for the gods would have a care over them and see to it that no enduring misfortune should happen to them, and the only great and irreparable evil, after all, was “to go to the world below having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice and impiety.”
The lofty speculations of Plato in the domain of religious truth have led many to suppose that he was acquainted with the Jewish Scriptures and drew some of his inspiration from them. And this is by no means improbable. The Jews were wanderers and exiles as early as Plato’s time; and if he did not himself read their law, he certainly, in his extensive travels, must have met and conversed with those who were acquainted with the teachings of the Hebrew Bible. At all events he must have known something of the primitive traditions of mankind; and we are not forbidden to think that, though a pagan, such a pure and lofty soul may have had some light from on high to enlighten him.
It is well known what a harmony Philo Judæus and the Alexandrian school established between the teachings of Plato and the principal doctrines of the Jewish dispensation; and what a near approach Neo-Platonism made to Christian philosophy in the first centuries of the Christian era.
Next to Socrates and Plato the man who did most to create Greek philosophy, and change the current of thought of the ancient world in the direction of Christianity, was undoubtedly Aristotle. Though a disciple of Plato, he did not follow in the wake of his great master, but struck out a new course for himself. The genius of Aristotle was 786neither so lofty nor so speculative as that of Plato, but his intellect was, if possible, more acute and his mind far more systematic. He made a complete analysis of the human understanding, and laid down those rules of logic and principles of certainty which are to guide men in the search after truth. He reduced all knowledge to a system, and made the grasp of the principles of all science possible to the human mind. His grand argument for the existence of a Supreme Being from the necessity of a prime mover—Primus motor—has never been surpassed, and has done good service in every age for the cause of theism.
The moral doctrines of Aristotle, though not so much in harmony with Christianity as those of Plato, were on the whole not adverse to it, and they exerted at least a negative influence, in preparing the minds of men to receive the morality of the Gospel.
Greek philosophy reached its acme in the schools of Plato and Aristotle; after them there were no more great creative minds. The philosophers who succeeded them did but borrow from them; they were the sources whence all future philosophic wisdom was drawn; they were the recognized masters of human thought, not alone to the Greeks but to the Romans, to the civilized and intellectual world; and the influence they exerted in giving direction to the current of thought of the ancient world can scarcely be over-estimated.
Here, then, four hundred and fifty years before St. Paul set foot in Athens, were three great pioneers of truth who prepared the way for him. They were raised up by the providence of God, in the midst of the darkness and superstition and sensuality of the pagan world, to remind man of his destiny, to teach him that he was made for wisdom and truth. They were set up as the partial teachers of truth to the gentile world until the divine Teacher should come who would teach them all truth.
During four centuries their doctrines of the existence of a Supreme Being, of the providence of God over men, of the immortality of the soul, of moral responsibility and fidelity to the law of conscience, filtered through the generations, until in the fulness of time Paul of Tarsus came to engraft their wisdom on the divine philosophy of Jesus Christ. That we should not hesitate to recognize the special providence of God in the development of Greek philosophy, that we should not refuse to Socrates, to Plato, to Aristotle a providential mission in the ancient world, are opinions for which some of the greatest doctors of the church have contended. Their philosophy certainly tended to do away with polytheism and to establish the unity of the Godhead. It led the human intellect in the pursuit of wisdom and the search after truth. It created a lofty ideal of intellectual wisdom and morality, and by elevating the moral above the material, the future above the present, it prepared the way for the spiritual reign of Christianity.
“Plato and Aristotle,” says a Protestant author, “have had a great work appointed them, not only as the heathen pioneers of truth but as the educators of the Christian mind in every age. The former enriched human thought with appropriate ideas for the reception of the highest truth in the 787highest form. The latter mapped out all the provinces of human knowledge, that Christianity might visit them and bless them” (Conybeare, Life of St. Paul).
And here we skip over four hundred years of the reign of Greek philosophy, and come at once to the actual meeting of Christianity and Greek philosophy in Athens.
The schools of philosophy that were dominant in Athens at the time of St. Paul’s visit were the Stoics and Epicureans. The Stoics were pantheists, and the Epicureans were not far removed from atheists—poor representatives both of the noble systems of Plato and Aristotle. In their hands Greek philosophy was rapidly declining. Athens, which in the century before had been the school of Cæsar and Brutus and Pompey, whither Cicero and Atticus and Horace had gone to receive instruction, had now no higher wisdom to impart than the philosophy of pleasure and pride. Nothing could be more opposed to the spirit of Christianity than the system of Epicurus, which made the highest good of man to consist in the pursuit of pleasure alone, denying the immortality of the soul and rejecting all notion of a hereafter, and having for its first principle, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” Nor had the system of Zeno and the Stoics very much in it that was in harmony with Christianity, although there were some points of affinity. The Stoics taught that God was merely the soul or mind of the universe; that the soul of man was corporeal, and after death would be consumed by fire or absorbed in the infinite. The highest aspiration of man in the Stoic system should be to attain to the state of complete apathy, perfect indifference to all things. There should be in the human breast neither passion nor pity, no sense of pleasure or pain. Their moral doctrines, however, were based on those of Socrates, and hence they inculcated a practical rule of life and morality, and they laid great stress on fidelity to the dictates of reason. This, and the heroic spirit of fortitude which the Stoic discipline strove to impart, were its only points of affinity with Christian teaching. To be sure some of the later or Roman Stoics, such as Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, made a very near approach to Christianity in many things, but then they lived more in the light of Christian truth. The worst feature in the Stoic philosophy was the view it took of suicide. Self-destruction was not only permitted but was positively approved by the Stoics, and nearly all the great leaders of the sect set the example of it.
Such were the philosophers with whom St. Paul disputed every day in the market-place of Athens. The doctrines of the Stoics at least were not new to him; for Tarsus in Cilicia, where Saul was born and educated, was a great centre of Stoic philosophy, and from his youth up he must have been more or less familiar with the salient points of the Stoic system. The “Painted Porch,” the headquarters of the Stoics in Athens, was situated in the Agora, and the Garden of the Epicureans was close at hand, so that in the market-place St. Paul was in the midst of the rival sects of philosophers—in fact, on the battle-ground. We can have little doubt of the kind of reception the Epicureans would give him. It was a part of their system to make light of everything, 788and to treat nothing seriously except their dinners. He spoke to them about “Jesus and the resurrection.” Of course they called him a “word-sower” or a “babbler,” though Renan will have it that they called St. Paul a “babbler” because he spoke bad Greek. The Stoics were grave men, however, and they gave him a respectful hearing. He knew the current of their thoughts and how to address himself to them; and his doctrines must have excited their curiosity, if not their interest. They it was, doubtless, who invited him to the Areopagus, the supreme tribunal, where every important question in religion, law, and philosophy was heard and pronounced upon. It was an exceedingly great mark of respect for St. Paul and his opinions that he should be invited from the vulgar discussions of the Agora to speak before the most ancient and most august assembly of Greece; it shows the impression he must have made by his learning and eloquence on the cultivated men of Athens, and it is a proof that after all St. Paul must have spoken pretty good Greek. The Areopagus, or “Council of Twelve,” was a tribunal set up in the earliest days of Grecian autonomy to try capital offences. Solon, 600 B.C., made it a sort of high council of state and bestowed upon it the power of veto. Only men of unblemished reputation, who had rendered signal services to their country, were eligible to become members of it. The Athenians regarded it as the most sacred institution of their state, and it was, in truth, the most venerable tribunal of the ancient world. Though it had been stripped of many of its prerogatives, it still retained its prestige and took cognizance of all matters relating to religion and education in Greece. Had St. Paul been invited to address the Roman Senate in the days of its greatest glory, he would have spoken before a more powerful but not a more august assembly than was the Areopagus the day that he stood before it on the summit of Mars’ Hill.
It was one of the great events that mark an epoch in the world’s history when Christianity, in the person of St. Paul, was summoned to appear for judgment before that high tribunal wherein all the cultivation and wisdom and intelligence of the gentile nations were concentrated. It was a solemn moment for the Christian cause, and what must have been the feelings of the great apostle as he ascended the long flight of stone steps that led him up to Mars’ Hill and into the midst of the sacred circle of the Areopagus? The curious multitude pressed after him; the twelve venerable judges, seated in benches hewn out of the rock, awaited him, impatient to dispose of this “setter-forth of new divinities.” It was a scene around which was gathered the glory of the ancient world and the expectation of the new. From the summit of that hill which overlooked Athens St. Paul could, as it were, survey all the wisdom and philosophy and religion of the past. His eye could rest on the spot of the Academy where Plato taught, and on the Lyceum where was the school of Aristotle. Right before him stood the Temple of Mars and the Pantheon of Minerva, and rising close above him was the Colossus of Athens, cast out of the brazen spoils of Marathon. The Acropolis, Athens, Greece were before him, and they summed up nearly all that was great in the past.
789It was not the first time that St. Paul had preached Christ before a great assembly, and we may be assured that he entered upon his subject with his accustomed boldness. Standing up in the midst of the Areopagus, with outstretched hand, he began his abrupt exordium. Even the pagan poet Longinus, in his list of the orators of Greece, includes the name of “Paul of Tarsus, the patron,” as he says, “of an opinion not yet fully proved.” And St. Paul’s speech on this occasion must have called forth the full powers of his oratory. By all accounts the personal appearance of the great apostle was not striking, and we can hardly conceive of him as possessed of the graces of oratory; but these count for little in addressing popular assemblies. His power lay in the divine earnestness of his faith and his burning zeal for its propagation. He always spoke with the light that struck him blind on the road to Damascus shining in upon his soul, and the Voice that he heard ringing in his ear. Jesus Christ and his Gospel were an actuality to him, and he made them an actuality to all who heard him. There was no doubting the sincerity of his conviction—every tone of his voice, every expression of his countenance, every motion of his body was a declaration of the supreme power of the faith that possessed him. It was a novel experience to the free and easy Athenians, who were never thoroughly in earnest about anything, to have a man so consumed with earnestness make an appeal before them, and it must have impressed them not a little. They must have been a good deal taken by surprise also by the manner in which St. Paul introduced his subject. Instead of feeling his way timidly in the presence of so august an assemblage, he made a bold dash, carried the war at once into the enemy’s country, fought them on their own ground and with the weapons they themselves had furnished him. The people of Athens were so religious or so superstitious, or both, that they wanted to make sure that no god should be left unhonored in their city; and after raising an altar to every god of whom they had heard, they bethought themselves that there might still be some god of whom they had not heard, and so they raised an altar and dedicated it “To the unknown god.” Pausanias states that there were several such altars in Athens, and Petronius declares that so bountiful were the Athenians in providing altars and statues for the gods “that it was far easier to find a god in Athens than a man.” St. Paul might take it for granted that every false god was honored in Athens by name, and the only god who was “unknown” was the one true God whom he came to preach to them. This gave him at once an opening and a way to escape the accusation that he was a “setter-forth of strange divinities,” which would have been prejudicial to his cause before the Areopagus. It was a master-stroke, and in it we discover a good illustration of that cunning of the serpent which the apostles were told to imitate. It is supposed that we have only the outline of St. Paul’s speech on Mars’ Hill preserved to us in the Acts of the Apostles; and yet the outline is in itself complete and perfect in its adaptation to the audience. The Athenians were above all things proud of their city, and St. Paul told them that he 790was struck by its aspect; he noticed the religious feeling manifested in the setting up of so many objects of worship; and after having thus engaged the attention of the people he proceeded to lay before them the Christian conception of the Supreme Being, which must have recalled to the philosophers present the highest flights of Plato and commanded their attention. He struck directly at the atomic theory of the Epicureans by asserting the creative act of God and the divine Providence that rules the universe and orders all things. He spoke of the “God in whom we live, move, and be.” And the Stoics were full of interest; he appeared to side with their pantheistic notions of the Deity; he even quoted one of their poets—Aratus of Cilicia—and we can almost fancy some of the grave philosophers of this sect rising to applaud him. But in the next breath he crushed them, for he declared that God is a personal being, that he is equally the Father of all men, and that there is only one way to approach him—the same for all—the philosopher must come down from his high conceits and do penance just the same as the poor and illiterate. He broke down the barrier of race and national pride by declaring “that God made of one blood all the nations of mankind,” and the past times, however glorious they might appear, were in reality times of ignorance when the truth was not known. And to their utter astonishment he makes the “foolishness” of Christ and his resurrection the basis and proof of all religious truth and righteousness. This was the least philosophical part of St. Paul’s discourse and created the most opposition; but it was the most irresistible, for it was a fact.
Athens had heard great orators before, but this was the most immortal speech ever uttered in her hearing; even apart from its sacred character it would hold its own for eloquence and skill among the greatest productions of the past. It is the true model of Christian eloquence, and illustrates that economy in the way of presenting divine truth which is the most striking feature in the teaching of St. Paul. “Instead of uttering any invective,” says Dr. Newman, “against their polytheism, he began a discourse upon the unity of the divine nature, and then proceeded to claim the altar consecrated in the neighborhood to the unknown god as the property of Him whom he preached to them, and to enforce his doctrine of the divine immateriality, not by miracles but by argument, and that founded on the words of a heathen poet.”
But the speech was not well received, nay, it was interrupted, cut short, and, powerful as it was, only a very few persons in that large assembly were converted by it, and of these two only are mentioned—Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, and the woman Damaris, of whom nothing is known. It created a profound impression, nevertheless. It took the philosophers of Athens completely by surprise; they were wholly unprepared to meet it, and the only part to which they could make an immediate objection was the Resurrection, and they took advantage of this to postpone the discussion and so escape the relentless logic of St. Paul.
Nor did they give him another hearing, as they had promised. 791They were insincere; like the modern triflers with truth, they were afraid they might hear too much, and so took refuge in evasion. Such are still the tactics of flippant philosophers and men of bad faith all the world over. They simply do not want to know the truth, and hence they mock at it and evade it. But even the conversion of one member of the high council of Greece was a great gain for Christianity. Dionysius was a conquest worthy of St. Paul, and to have given to France her glorious St. Denis was a result that well repaid the highest effort of Christian eloquence.
Thus it was that Christian philosophy encountered Greek philosophy on the summit of Mars’ Hill, and silenced and dethroned it; and during twenty centuries thus has it silenced and dethroned every system that has come in conflict with it; and although its supremacy has been constantly disputed, it still remains supreme in the domain of reason and of truth. In cultivated Athens we behold the highest point to which unaided human reason can attain, and it is in cultivated Athens that we first find Christianity asserting its claim to be the gospel of reason as well as of faith.
Christianity is the only system of religion that has made philosophy its handmaiden and used it to elucidate its doctrines. It is, in fact, the only religious system that can confidently appeal to the higher powers of reason, and hence it is the only creed that has ever made really intellectual conquests, that has ever compelled rationalism and scepticism to pause before it and believe, or at least doubt. Christianity alone, among all the religions of the world, has been able to exact the complete homage of the minds as well as the hearts of cultivated men.
But although philosophy to a certain extent prepared the way for Christianity, and Christianity constantly uses philosophy and appeals to it, it is a great mistake to suppose that philosophy played a very important part in the formation and propagation of the Christian faith. The religion that bears the name of Christ is not a theory gradually developed, but from the very first a definite system of religious teaching resting on facts. The logic of facts, not of philosophy, has propagated Christianity. St. Paul appealed to philosophy in Athens, and he converted two persons. St. Peter appealed to facts in Jerusalem, and he converted eight thousand. This is about the proportion of the relative influence of philosophy and fact in the propagation of the Christian religion. Jesus and the Resurrection, the facts at the bare mention of which the Athenians mocked, were the facts that a century later converted Greece when the tide of human testimony spread on from Judea and confirmed them. Philosophical theories have never founded a religion, they have never wrought any great revolution in the belief of mankind; facts alone can produce wide-spread conviction and change.
The rationalism of our day affects to treat Christianity as a theory of religion, a mere phase in the development of the religious thought of mankind, and as such to judge it and dispose of it; it feigns to ignore altogether the Christian religion as a system resting on facts. This is certainly a crafty move; for it is easy to get rid of a theory, but facts cannot well be 792explained away. Once they are well established, facts are invincible. And the evidences of Christianity are facts—well-established, invincible facts—that can neither be ignored nor explained away. The Christian religion is a philosophical religion, inasmuch as it is in complete harmony with whatever is sound in the philosophy of any age; but it is also an historical religion, and in its origin and progress rests on the certain basis of human testimony.
The divine Founder of Christianity did not appear in a remote age of darkness and obscurity, but in an age of intellectual culture and enlightenment—in an age when history had already attained to its full purpose and perfection. So that the life and doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the progress of the religion he founded, at once dropped into the stream of history and became a part of it. This is shown by the fact that so many contemporary pagan historians have in their writings referred to Christ, his miracles, his doctrines, and his sufferings.
The Great Teacher who came to give true light to the world was not afraid of the light; and it was without doubt a part of the eternal design that he should appear in an era of intellectual activity and culture and criticism, so that human reason might have no excuse for rejecting him, and the future enemies of Christianity could not upbraid it with being a system hatched out in darkness and obscurity. Here is a point we should particularly insist upon: Jesus Christ has his place in history as much as Cæsar or Napoleon or Washington or any other great man of the past. His miracles are as much matters of history as the victories of Cæsar; his law is as much a matter of history as the Code of Napoleon; and the kingdom of Christianity which he founded is as palpable a fact to-day as the republic of George Washington.
Christianity is only a theory, say the rationalists. What a barefaced falsehood in the face of all history! Christianity an effect without an adequate cause, say they. What an outrage on reason! Verily, the theories by which the rationalistic school would account for Christianity are on a par with the Hindoo theory of the world, for they also rest on nothing at all.
Christianity is not a natural outgrowth or development of Judaism; it is not a skilful adaptation of Oriental liturgy and Greek philosophy; but it is a religion of reason and truth, resting on the eternal facts of the Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of the God of all truth.
“The one soul to the one God.”—Rev. Henry Giesen, C.SS.R.
Mr. Eugene Percival was seated in the dining-room of the Garrick Club, London, engaged in discussing a quiet little dinner consisting of a plate of real turtle, a red mullet, and a pin-tailed duck, preparatory to turning into Covent Garden to hear Titiens in Semiramide, when a servant approached him, bearing two letters upon a silver salver.
“Irish mail, sir.”
“For me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Percival quietly finished his glass of pale sherry and ordered a clean plate ere he troubled himself about his Hibernian correspondence.
“Irish letters!” he murmured. “Who could write to me from that out-of-the-world country? Jack Hotham, possibly. His regiment is quartered on some solid bit of bog called the Curragh.” He leisurely took up the nearest epistle. “A woman’s hand, by Jove! And such a hand. How she does scatter the ink! Place aux dames. Now, madam, I am prepared for the worst.” And throwing himself back in his chair, he proceeded to open the envelope. The letter ran as follows:
“Ballybo, Co. Mayo, June 1, 187-.
“Dear Cousin: A very nice young man, who says he is intimate with you, has been stopping here for a few days for the salmon-fishing. By the merest accident your name came on the tapis, and I immediately claimed you as a kinsman, my mother and your father having been second cousins. As kinsfolk should at least become acquainted with one another, I take this opportunity of letting you know that my eldest boy, Charley, and his sister Geraldine, are going to visit London next week, when any attention you can show them will be most gratefully received by your affectionate cousin,
“Martha Mary Grace Devereux.
“P. S. They will stop at the Charing Cross Hotel. Charley is twenty-three and Geraldine four years younger.”
“Of all the cool epistles I ever read this is the coolest,” muttered Percival, holding the letter at arm’s length, as though it were combustible. “I never heard of Martha Mary Grace Devereux before. I have no relations in Ireland. The idea of having a hulking savage with a brogue that would peel a potato, and dressed like a navvy, and an awkward, dowdy, gawky girl, thrust upon me is rather too good. No, no, my Irish friends. I respect you at Bally—Bally-what-you-may-call-it, but in Piccadilly not quite.” Here he commenced his ripe Stilton. “The idea of my being seen in Mayfair with—Pshaw! it’s too good.” He turned the second letter over with his knife.
“A school-boy’s hand. I suppose this is from Charley, with a modest demand for a box at the opera for himself and his sister for every night during their stay, seats on one of the Four-in-hand Club coaches, tickets for the Zoo for Sunday, invitations to swell balls. I know what Irish cousins mean, and, per Bacco! I’ll keep the Channel rolling between us. Let’s see what Charley says. A monogram, C. D. Gorgeous! Who’d have thought of so much civilization in Mayo—wherever that may be?”
“Ballybo.
“Mr. Charley Devereux’ compliments to Mr. Percival”—that’s civil at any rate—“and begs to 795say that in order to oblige his mother”—whose mother? My poor mother died when I was toothless—“he writes this note. Mr. C. D. doesn’t believe in bothering people who don’t care about him”—come, now, this is a sensible lad—“and he doesn’t care for people whom he doesn’t know”—sensible again. “If Mr. Percival wants to see Mr. C. D., he will find him at the Charing Cross Hotel on and after Monday next.”
“I say, Minniver, just come over and take your Lafitte here. I have such a bon bouche for you!” said Percival, addressing a gentleman seated at a neighboring table.
“What’s the row?” demanded Mr. Minniver, a tall, aristocratic man, whose hair was parted in the centre and whose eye-glass was the sole occupation of his life.
“Two letters from Ireland.”
“No!”
“Fact.”
“Take my glawss and decanter over to Mr. Percival’s table,” said Mr. Minniver, addressing a waiter.
“Shall I read ’em to you, Minniver?”
“Are they in Irish?”
“Oh! dear, no.”
“Then let me have the two barrels.”
“Congratulate me, old fellow.”
“On what?”
“I have been claimed by Irish cousins.”
“What a nuisance!” observed Mr. Minniver in a tone of intense disgust, and letting his eye-glass fall on the table with a click, whilst he took a sip of the rich, tawny wine.
“That’s not enough. To claim me does not fill their cup of happiness. They are coming over to see me.”
“By Jove!” wiping the glass carefully and screwing it hard into the corner of his eye.
“Yes. Just read this letter. This is the one that claims me, that takes me into the fold, and here’s another that repudiates me.”
“That’s a very extraordinary document, Percival,” observed Mr. Minniver with an owl-like glance, solemn, important, but vacant withal.
“Read this now; it’s from Charley.”
“Why, this ought to be framed and glazed. How old Thackeray would have chuckled over this in the smoking-room! You must let us have it in the smoking-room; the fellows are infernally dull just now.”
“Take both, my dear boy.”
“Thanks. What are you going to do?”
“Preserve a masterly inactivity.”
“You’ll reply?”
“I think not.”
“Drop a pasteboard at the Cross?”
“Cards are expensive luxuries just now. You forget it’s the height of the season, Minniver!”
“Then you’ll let it sink?”
“Most unquestionably.”
“I s’pose you’re right.”
“Well, rather. I can stand a good deal but Irish cousins. As the Princess Huncomun says in ‘Tom Thumb,’ ‘I shudder at the gross idea.’”
“It would never do, Percival—never, never.” And wagging his empty head sagaciously, Mr. Minniver again dipped his beak in the juice of the grape.
Mr. Eugene Percival is a swell of the first water; a bureaucrat in the most exalted sense of the term; a clerk in the Foreign Office, with expectations of a third secretaryship at no distant date. His mother, 796an heiress, died in giving him birth; his father, a captain in the Seventeenth Lancers, fell in the bloody ride of death at Balaklava. A guardian took possession of the boy, and, having placed him at Eton, later on transplanted him to Cambridge, where he took a degree, making a fair fight for honors. The failure of the banking firm of Overend & Gurney, of Lombard Street, deprived Percival of over half his property, and then he resolved upon work.
“I cannot live upon fifteen hundred a year and idleness,” he said.
“I could live, and live well, on a hundred a year with work.”
Through the influence of no less a personage than Benjamin Disraeli he was installed at the Foreign Office at a nominal salary, and the evening upon which this story opens he was twenty-five years of age, five feet eight inches in height, with yellow hair closely cropped, as is the fashion amongst the golden youth of the present hour, his eyes dark blue, his nose a delicate aquiline, his mouth and teeth unexceptionable, and the whole man bearing the unmistakable stamp of gentleman.
A few days subsequent to the receipt of his Irish letters Mr. Eugene Percival strolled from the Garrick into Covent Garden Market, but little altered in its appearance since the days when Sam Johnson and Topham Beauclerk went on a rouse amongst the vegetable wagons, and at unhallowed hours, as the worthy lexicographer subsequently—and sorrowfully—admitted.
Taking the central arcade, the bureaucrat stopped to admire bouquets that would have brought tears of envy into the pretty eyes of Mlle. Louise of the Marché aux Fleurs, so fearfully and wonderfully were they made up, so delicious in their harmonies, such veritable tone-poems in their lustrous yet satisfying effects. Stepping into a flower-shop, he invested in a two-shilling moss rosebud reclining upon the petals of a sprig of stefanotis, attached to his coat by a young lady who addressed him by name.
“Mr. Pommery ‘as just been ’ere, Mr. Percival.”
“What! another bunch of violets?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied with a saucy laugh.
“Why, he must be spending a small fortune.”
“These wiolets come from Algiers.”
“And he sends a bunch every day?”
“Every day, sir.”
“And you are sworn to secrecy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you won’t tell to whom those violets go?”
“Not for anything.”
“Where do they go?”
The young lady shook her head.
“It is refreshing,” laughed Percival as he quitted the shop, “to find one woman who can keep a secret.”
He strolled down the arcade, gazing at the flowers and fruits, and the bizarre crowd that gently surged hither and thither, from the costermonger who came for his salad and radishes, to the “Dook” who sought his five-guinea bouquet; from the weedy-looking woman, smelling horribly of gin, who shelled peas, to the countess in search of an orchid to make up her priceless collection.
He was standing opposite a window wherein lay exposed a basket 797of Belle Angevine pears labelled “£30 a dozen,” when a hand was laid on his shoulder and a cheery voice exclaimed:
“Not thinking of that lot, Percival?”
“Not quite, Pommery. They’re a cut above me. My buying price is sixpence, and I falter at anything above that lordly sum.”
“They’re not much, these Angevines. I had a cut into one last night at a little dinner Baby Bowles gave six of us at the Star and Garter—a pre-marital affair.”
“Pre-marital! Has the Baby surrendered at discretion?”
“He has surrendered, which says little for his discretion.”
“Pauvre garçon! By the way, you’ve been away, Pommery?”
“Yaas.”
“Whither?”
“Guess.”
“Norway, after the salmon?”
“No.”
“Monaco, after Rouge et Noir?”
“No.”
“Paris, after a good dinner?”
“You’d never guess. Hold on to your umbrella now, Percival, for I’m about to startle you. I’ve been in Ireland.”
“Never!”
“A fact, I assure you.”
“And you’re alive to tell the tale?”
“Ireland is not bad quarters, I can tell you. I was capitally fed. I had a game of Polo in the Phœnix Park—and that is a park. I had as good a rubber at the Kildare Street Club as ever I played at the Raleigh. I saw some very fit soldiering at the Curragh of Kildare. I landed my thirty-seven-pound salmon from a river with an impossible name in Connemara. I took to Connemara con amore—excuse the pun, it’s rather early. And I’ll let you into a secret, Percival: I mean to return for the grouse on the 20th of August.”
“Apropos of Ireland, get Minniver to show you two letters I received last week from some people calling themselves my cousins; they are the richest things in town. They have had nothing in the smoking-room of the Garrick so good since the night old Fladgate told Thackeray that, in order to render his lectures on the Four Georges a success, he should hire a piano.”
Jack Pommery is a clever, hard-working young barrister—a coming man. He was senior wrangler of his year at Cambridge, and carried off one or two “big things.” He rowed in the ‘varsity eight and boxed like a prize-fighter. Pommery, while he believes in work, stoutly maintains that the brain can only do a certain amount of it, and under cover of this theory casts aside wig and gown for a run with the Pytchley, a pull on the Thames, a breezer in the Channel under double reefs, a month on the moors—in a word, he goes in for what Micky Free termed “hapes o’ divarshin.”
“I’ve just seen your fleuriste, Jack. She still keeps the key of the blue chamber.”
“She’ll not sell me.”
“And you won’t let me into the secret—you won’t divulge the name of the violet lady?”
“Some day.”
“Some day is no day.”
“It’s a caprice, Percival. Every clever man has a caprice.”
“Bravo! Let me hear you blow that trumpet again. Why, the guard of the Windsor Coach doesn’t use his yard of tin with greater effect,” laughed Percival.
“Bah! chaff! The story is very simple. It is idyllic. I meet a 798girl, no matter where. She has violet eyes. She is as modest as a violet. Qui me cherche me trouve is her motto—a true woman’s motto, my man. I went spooney on her. I am spoons still. I told her that until I met her again I would send her a bunch of violets every day. I send the bunch of violets every day, et voilà tout!”
“Very pretty and sentimental, ’pon honor—worthy of being written by Wilkie Collins and set to music by Arthur Sullivan. I won’t press you on the subject, Jack, but I’ll tell you what I will press you to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Come back to the Garrick and have a steak—one of our famous fat slugs of beef that Thackeray revelled over after his favorite dish of tripe.”
“Try a chop at the Albion with me. It’s a real English chop-house, a tavern in the best sense of the good old English word. We’ll be sure to meet some queer people there. The theatrical stars most do congregate within its precincts. Toole, Irving, Barry Sullivan haunt it when not ‘on circuit.’ Confound their impudence in appropriating the pet terms of my honorable profession!”
“Have at thy chops, slave!” cried Percival melodramatically as they passed along through groves of cabbages, batteries of turnips, golden vistas of carrots, groups of women engaged in shelling peas.
The two entered the tavern, and, having seated themselves in a sort of loose box constructed of black oak, with a table set in the middle, Pommery gave the order to a waiter whose pronounced accent bespoke an intimate acquaintance with the road that leads from the Upper Lake at Killarney to Gougawn Barra. He was an honest-looking, open-faced, elderly man, civil without being servile, and the possessor of a twinkle in the corner of his eye that proclaimed the land of his nativity equally with his unctuous and oily brogue.
A loud rapping on the table in the next compartment made itself heard, while an authoritative voice called:
“Has that sheep been caught yet?”
“It’s on the fire, sir,” responded the waiter.
“I suppose you intend that as a sample of Irish wit.” This said with a sneer.
“Troth, mebbe it’s good enough for—” and the man checked himself.
“Let me have none of your impertinence, fellow. You Irish require to be kept under heel, every one of you.”
“Do we?”
“You do, and it takes an Englishman to do it.”
“See that, now,” said the waiter, angrily brushing the table, and by a vigorous effort keeping back the fierce retort that was on the leap in his heart.
“Get me my chop.”
“I’ll get it, never fear,” hurrying away.
Percival and his companion overheard this dialogue.
“If I were that waiter,” exclaimed Pommery, “I’d chuck the chop at that insolent fellow’s head.”
“What can the poor wretch do? He’s paid for this sort of thing.”
“He’s not paid to be insulted by a man who, the chances are, considers himself a gentleman.”
“It’s very bad form.”
The waiter returned with the autocrat’s luncheon.
“How dare you bring me a chop 799cooked in this way? Do you imagine I am in an Irish pig-sty? Send me an English waiter.”
At this moment a tall, awkward-looking youth, attired in a home-spun suit of gray frieze, ill-fitting if not shabby, slowly arose from a table right opposite, and, lounging over, quietly asked:
“Will I do?”
“Do what, sir?” demanded the irate Saxon.
“Wait on you.”
“Wait on me? You are not a waiter.”
“I am an Irishman; perhaps I might be able to please you better than my countryman.”
Pommery leaned over to Percival:
“There’s some fun here.”
“There’s danger,” was the reply.
The bully stared very hard at the young Irishman, surveying him from head to foot.
“I don’t want you,” he growled.
“Oh! you don’t,” still in the same calm tone.
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
“You’ve had your answer, my gentleman. Go back to your luncheon.”
“Not for one moment. I’ve not quite done with you yet. I have heard your observations to this helpless old man”—his voice quivering, his eye flashing—“your brutal insolence.”
“Sir!” starting as if he had been stung.
“Your ruffianly comments,” continued the other. “You knew that your eighteen pence was your armor, and that you could insult both him and his country with impunity. Now, my good fellow, I am an Irishman, and, only that I happen to be in a very particular hurry, I’d compel you to eat that chop.”
“What do you mean, sir?” he gasped.
“Precisely what I say,” replied the other.
“How dare—”
“See here, now, my good fellow, keep your hectoring for helpless waiters and feeble women. I come from a country where the word dare reaps a crop of broken bones. I know you and your mongrel class. And before I leave let me give you a bit of advice. Don’t speak disrespectfully of Ireland until you are sure of your company. The moment you find yourself surrounded by your own set fire away.” And nodding jauntily, he walked to the cashier’s desk, paid his bill, gave the now hilarious waiter a shilling, and sprang into a hansom that awaited him at the door, leaving the bully turning red and white by turns and looking the very impersonation of baffled hate and rage.
“That’s no end of a brick,” cried Pommery glowingly.
“A gentleman to the back-bone.”
“I’ll swear it.”
“Blood will tell.”
“I wonder who he can be? Depend on’t he’s of the right lot.”
“What a nice touch of the brogue!”
“Just a soupçon. I’m awfully sorry he didn’t whip the fellow.”
After some fierce yet gloomy consultation with the manager and a couple of obsequious waiters the autocrat approached the table at which the two swells were seated.
“You have been witness to a ruffianly act,” clearing his throat, “on the part of a scoundrel who has just left. It amounts to an assault in the eyes of the law. I do not intend to let the matter drop here. I’m an Englishman, and I’d take it out of that sneak in double-quick. 800You saw a gentleman assaulted—”
“I saw him assault no gentleman,” said Percival.
“You saw him assault me, sir,” retorted the other loftily.
“I did; but I saw him assault no gentleman,” coolly surveying the bully from head to foot. “You, sir, are what we call a cad. Come, Pommery.”
The autocrat muttered something with reference to “swells,” eyes, blood, and other full-flavored language as the two young men sauntered forth in the direction of “the Garden.”
“There’s nothing to be done at the office to-day; suppose we go to the Park—the Ladies’ Mile. Alice Lindsay has been presented by her uncle, Sir Winifred, with a superb mount; let’s see how she takes to it.”
It is right genial pleasure to lean upon the rails in Hyde Park and watch equestrians and equestriennes flash past on satin-coated, arch-necked, dainty-limbed horses; to meet one’s friends beneath the shade of the elms, and to enjoy a good round gossip, than which there is nothing pleasanter under the sun.
Percival and Pommery knew everybody worth knowing. Nods, becks, and wreathed smiles greeted them right, left, and centre. Fair dames showered graciousness upon them, handsome cavaliers nodded familiarly.
“Well, you Pylades and Orestes, Castor and Pollux, Siamese twins, how am you?” exclaimed a dapper little gentleman mounted upon a rattling cob, reining in and addressing our two friends.
“Ah! Lindsay, you here? I thought you were in Constantinople,” greeted Percival.
“So I were,” perverting his English; “but I left my fez behind me to show my ’fiz’ here. Twiggey voo?”
“How is your sister?”
“Pretty bobbish.”
“I hear she has a superb mount.”
“Too superb, mon camarade. She’s a lucky girl if her collar-bone isn’t fractured before twenty-four hours. The brute is a good brute, but just as fit for a woman to ride as a wild zebra. Here she comes. By Jove! she can’t hold him.”
A young girl cantered up, very red in the face from hard pulling.
“Well, Alice, you’ve had enough of that brass elephant, hasn’t you?”
“Not a bit of it,” cried Miss Lindsay, a bright, aristocratic-looking, blue-eyed, tow-haired young lady, with lines of decision around a saucy mouth, and with a form that bespoke the use of dumb-bells and all those minor appanages relating to the development of muscular Christianity.
“Shall I ride with you?”
“No, Fred; I can do the mile with Bertie,” a younger brother astride a shaggy Shetland.
“Don’t you see two fellows whom you know, Alice?”
“Why, of course I do. I’ve nearly nodded my head off at both of them, and they have jerked the rims of their beavers out of shape,” laughed the girl. “Allons, Bertie.” And lightly touching the magnificent but vicious-looking animal, which she sat à ravir, she started off like an arrow from a bow, followed by the shaggy Shetland.
“Have a lift behind, queer fellows? No? Then I’ll leave you to your meditations.” And Fred Lindsay trotted off in the direction taken by his sister.
“That’s the happiest dog I know, 801Percival,” observed Pommery. “Ten thousand a year, a house in May-Fair, a villa on the Thames, a shooting-box in Scotland, a loving tailor, a careful cook, and the constitution of a horse and cart.”
“He has, as the Americans say, a good time of it. By the way, who’s to woo and win his sister?”
“Dymoke, of the Guards.”
“Why, he hasn’t—but, I say, what’s this? A runaway, by George!—a woman. She’ll get thrown; she reels in the saddle,” jumping excitedly on a seat. “She’s a brick. She’s pulling the brute. Yes—no—it’s Miss Lindsay. She can do nothing. She’ll be killed if she loses her seat. The pace is awful. She’s lost her head. She’s done for.”
Such were the exclamations rapidly uttered by Eugene Percival as the fainting form of Miss Lindsay was borne past him like a flash.
“Magnificently done!” shouted Pommery. “That fellow is a man, whoever he is.”
Just as the young girl was swaying heavily from side to side in her saddle, and about to sink fainting to the earth, one of the onlookers plunged forward, and, seizing the reins of the maddened horse in a grasp of steel, brought the animal almost to his haunches. The swooning girl was thrown violently forward, to be received in his arms as though she were a down pillow cast at him in play.
Percival and Pommery forced their way through the crowd.
“Make way, please; we are friends of this lady,” cried Percival. “Let her have air. Carry her into the shade.”
Miss Lindsay was borne to the pathway and placed upon one of the benches, while some cold water was dashed in her face.
“How splendidly she behaved!” cried one of the bystanders.
“Such nerve!”
“Such English pluck!”
“Pshaw!” exclaimed the gentleman who had been the means of rescuing her, “I know twenty Irish girls who would have brought that brute to his senses without any of this sort of fuss.”
At this juncture Fred Lindsay galloped up.
“Is she much hurt?” he anxiously demanded.
“She’s not hurt at all; she’s frightened.” And half a dozen persons volunteered a statement of the occurrence, all speaking together.
“How can I thank you?” said Lindsay, turning to the stranger. “Let me have your name and address. By Jove! I must do something to express our gratitude.”
“I stop twenty horses a day in the fields at home, and wickeder brutes than that, so don’t say one word.” And ere Lindsay could interpose the other had mingled with the crowd.
“Did you see him?” asked Percival of Pommery.
“Who?”
“The young fellow who rescued Miss Lindsay.”
“Not particularly.”
“Why, it’s our Irishman.”
“So it is. I’m awfully sorry not to have spoken to him. What a fellow he is, to be sure!”
Eugene Percival, amongst other invitations, received a card for a dinner-party at the Lindsays’ for the following Tuesday.
“We’ve been sadly put about,” said Miss Lindsay as he arrived, “groomed to a hair.” “Our party was made up, fitting oh! so nicely. I had my old man and my old lady, and the man who can talk 802opera, and the girl who can talk Tennyson, and my M. P. who can talk politics. I had the agricultural element and the lawn-tennis element, and a man who can talk across the table, and the man who knows everything—yourself—and lo! a wicked fairy bon gré mal gré adds two unexpected guests to my party by a wave of her wand, and spoils it. Isn’t it awful?” cries the hostess piteously, elevating a superb bouquet to her dainty nose.
“What did she give you?”
“Only fancy—two Irish people!”
“This is ironical of destiny,” laughed Percival.
“I won’t know what to say to them, what to do with them. I want you to stand in the gap, Mr. Percival, to see me through this miserable contretemps.”
“Put me down for anything, from the Annals of the Four Masters to dancing an Irish jig. I haven’t the faintest idea who the Four Masters are, and I’ve never seen the jig danced, but ’shure I’ll troy,’” endeavoring to imitate the Irish brogue, and failing dismally, as does every cockney rash enough to venture upon the experiment.
“I’ve never seen these people. I called at their hotel yesterday, but they were out doing St. Paul’s, or the Tower, or the Houses of Parliament, or the Thames Tunnel, as is the habit of tourists proper.”
“How did you drop into this trap, Miss Lindsay?”
“This wise: My uncle, Sir Winifred, spent some weeks last autumn with them in Ireland. He is a man who is ever anxious to repay a courtesy twofold.”
“I wonder, if I lent him ten sovereigns, would he return me twenty?” laughed Percival.
“If it was en règle, he would most decidedly. He, it appears, met them—wherever do you think?”
“I’m sure I cannot say.”
“At Madame Tussaud’s.”
“Sir Winifred at such a place! What an old wax-work it is!”
“He loves that Chamber of Horrors, and every time a murderer’s head is added to it my uncle potters off directly to have a look at it. He encountered his Irish friends in this Chamber last Saturday, and instantly takes them to the Star and Garter at Richmond to dine. He had them at the Zoo on Sunday, last night at the opera, and to-night he has foisted them on me; so you won’t mind roughing it a little, will you?”
“Certainly not. Is there anything Irish in the house? One must talk Ireland, you know.”
“Nothing except a genuine Ulster that never crossed the Channel in its life. We bought it last year at the Robber of the North’s, McDougal, at Inverness.”
“Were you in Scotland lawst year?” drawled a pink-faced young man, lounging up.
“Oh! yes; we did the Kyles of Bute, and the Crenan Canal, and Oban, and on by Ballachullish to the Pass of Glencoe, and we slept at Bannavic, and went up the Caledonian Canal.” And Miss Lindsay went off into a gush of rapture over the glorious scenery of the land o’cakes.
A powdered-headed flunky announced Mr. and Miss Devereux, but in such a manner that the name might as well have been Smith. Miss Lindsay courteously advanced to receive her guests with “So pleased to see you! Called at your hotel yesterday. How long have you been in London? How do you like Babylon? Your first visit?”
803Charley Devereux—for ’tis he—gazes very hard at his hostess. Could he be mistaken, or is not this the young lady whom he “chucked off” the runaway horse?
“Are you fond of riding?” he abruptly asked.
“Oh! passionately. I ride every day.”
“Did you ride in the park on Friday?”
“Yes, and was nearly killed. My horse, a thoroughbred, bolted. I fought him as long as I could. I got giddy, and I can recollect nothing till I found myself stretched on a bench beneath one of the trees on the side path.”
“Were you thrown?” asked Miss Devereux, of whom more anon.
“Well, yes and no. A man in the crowd—a young mechanic, my brother says—stopped the horse and caught me as I was flying through the air.”
“Charley, don’t you know something—”
A look from her brother silenced Miss Devereux.
“Were you present?” asked Miss Lindsay.
“I should rather say he was,” interposed Lindsay, who had just entered, giving a finishing touch to his toilette as he bounded down the stairs. “Why, hang it, Alice, don’t you know that it is to this gentleman you probably owe your life?”
Miss Lindsay opened her blue eyes very wide.
“Is this possible?” she cried.
“Why, of course it is. My dear fellow,” exclaimed Lindsay, seizing Charley Devereux by both hands, “need I say what intense pleasure it is to find my sister’s rescuer in the person of a friend of my uncle?”
“Mr. Devereux,” added Alice, presenting two dainty hands in gloves of many buttons, and impulsively flinging away her brother’s hands, “this is a joyous surprise. Why, Fred told me you were a mechanic—that is,” she added with a blush—“you see he is awfully near-sighted.”
“Don’t apologize, Miss Lindsay. My old home-spun suit is becoming very dingy, but I like it so well that I wouldn’t part with it for one of Smallpage’s marvellous frocks.”
The pompous flunky announced dinner.
“You will take me down, Mr. Devereux. I shall jilt Lord Jocelyn for the preux chevalier who has so charmingly proved that the age of chivalry is not yet dead. By the way, I must do my devoirs.” And summoning Percival from a distant corner of the room, she presented him to Miss Devereux.
He did not catch the name, but, offering that young lady his arm, he moved towards the door.
“Now for pigs and potatoes,” he thought.
He took a good look at the young girl on his arm, and he beheld a very charming form, soft brown wavy hair in a glorious luxuriance, tastefully and neatly bound up in plaits, a fair skin slightly freckled, a nose a little tip-tilted like the petal of a flower, a rich red mouth, and earnest gray eyes shaded by long, sweeping lashes.
“Your first visit to London?”
“My first.”
She turned her face to him, and then he perceived its delicate oval, its low, straight forehead, its pencilled brows, its charming innocence and purity of expression. This was not the brogue he expected to hear. This was not the face or form he had so dreaded to meet. Why, he could get on with this charming bit of Emerald without 804any reference to the Isle, save what it might please her Serene Greenship to indulge in.
“And how do you like London?” he asked, after the gentle fuss of seat-taking had subsided, and every person had opened his or her napkin after his or her own particular fashion.
“It oppresses me.”
“In what way?”
“It is too vast, too grand, too colossal. It wearies. I have had more headache since I came here than ever I earned over my Latin grammar.”
“Latin grammar! Are you so deep as Latin?”
“I have taught Latin,” and, seeing his puzzled expression, “to my very young brothers.”
“By Jove!” It’s all Percival has to say, and he says it.
Miss Devereux indulged in a low, musical laugh at her cavalier’s expense.
“You’re laughing at me?” said the bureaucrat, giving a tremendous tug to his moustache.
“I am,” was her reply.
“Why?”
“It’s singularly amusing to hear an Englishman focus all his energies upon his favorite exclamation.”
“And what do you say in Ireland?” he retorted, somewhat nettled.
“You must ask my brother.”
“If he waits till I ask him,” thought Percival, “he’ll be as gray as a badger.”
Mr. Percival indulged in another gaze at his fair companion, who was engaged in the unromantic task of enjoying her dinner, while he found himself hors de combat after a spoonful of soup and a devilled whitebait. He discovered a certain magnetism about her that irresistibly attracted him. The charm of her beauty was not in her golden hair, whose wavelets threw up the brilliancy of her rich color; not in the pure cream-tinted skin, not in the exquisitely delicate curve of the chin and cheek, nor in the sauciness of her retroussé nose; it was the unconscious pleasure in her face, a joy that positively breathed happiness from every feature.
“How does it come that you have no brogue?” he abruptly asked.
“Oh! dear, yes I have. I would shame the bogs of Ballynashaughnagaun if I did not fairly represent them in the land of the Saxon.”
“Do pronounce that jaw-breaker again.”
“Ballynashaughnagaun.”
“How dreadful!”
“We have longer names than that.” And Miss Devereux, to Percival’s intense amusement, proceeded to run over the townlands surrounding her wild Connemara home.
“Only fancy if a man got lost in Knocka-what-you-may-call-um; why, he’d perish by the wayside ere he could ask his way to the place from whence he came.”
“I am quite prepared to think that you would,” she laughed.
“I’m rather a dab at languages,” he said, with a certain tinge of self-satisfaction in his tone.
“I beg your pardon—a what?”
“A dab.”
“May I ask which of your languages is that word borrowed from, Mr. Percival?”
“It’s supposed to be English,” he laughed.
“Oh! I am so relieved. I was afraid you were going to attach it to Ireland, and then—”
“And then?”
805“Guerra al cuchillo—war to the knife.”
“Are you a dab?—I beg pardon; do you speak Spanish?”
“I do; we are quite an Irish-Spanish colony.”
“An Irish-Spanish colony! In the name of wonder what is that?”
“I’ll tell you. The Infanta, one of the largest of the vessels attached to the Spanish Armada, was wrecked on the coast of Mayo. The survivors settled along the coast as far as Galway. My great, great, great, ever so great-grand-mamma was a daughter of one of the officers.”
“How is it that you come to have such glorious gray eyes?” This was said enthusiastically.
“Do not let that iced soufflet pass, Mr. Percival; it is too good to snub so unmercifully.”
“What a facer!” thought the Foreign Office clerk as he called back the servant with the entrée in question.
Miss Devereux did not understand any gentleman’s gushing in this manner upon an acquaintance of twenty minutes. If young ladies would only ice menkind occasionally, instead of permitting them to say what they will, their sway would be absolutely without limit; but, alas! the girls of to-day are too—but I will not be cynical.
“What part of Ireland do you come from, Miss ——?” He has not heard her name, and mumbles something unintelligible to fill up the gap.
“Connemara.”
“I know some people living out there.”
“Indeed! As I know everybody living out there, I am quite sure we shall discover mutual friends.”
Now, Mr. Eugene Percival, not having the remotest idea of who Miss Devereux might be, imagines that this is a very good opportunity for being very amusing, and he accordingly plunges in medias res without more ado.
“The name is Devereux,” he said.
“Devereux?” she repeated. “There is but one family of that name in Mayo.”
“Of Bally—something.”
“Ballybo?”
“That’s it. Ballybo. Do you know them?”
She gave one short, sharp glance at him. Was this Englishman about to amuse himself at her expense? Was he going to exercise his English stupidity in a practical joke? No; she instinctively felt that Percival was a gentleman and would not dare take a liberty; and she perceived him so full of suppressed mirth that she resolved upon letting him have it all his own way.
“Yes, I know them,” she replied.
“What sort of people are they?”
“Oh! very commonplace, and somewhat old-fashioned in their ways,” hardly able to keep back a burst of laughter.
“I thought as much. I’ll tell you a capital thing that has occurred within the last week.” Here he indulged in a series of gentlemanly chuckles. “I had a letter from Ballyporeen.”
“Ballybo? You, Mr. Percival?” she exclaimed in a surprised way.
“Yes, from an excellent lady, who addresses me as her cousin, and signs herself Martha Mary Grace Devereux, and who informed me that her son and daughter were coming to town, and begged of me to take care of them.”
Miss Devereux, dropping her knife and fork, gazed steadily at Percival. She became very white, 806while a sudden anger flamed in her expressive eyes.
“You, then, are Mr. Eugene Percival?” she said, a harshness in her voice.
“Yaas.”
“Of the Foreign Office?”
“I have the honor to be attached to that blundering institution.”
“If I do not mistake, Mr. Percival, you received more than one letter from Ballybo.”
“Yaas, I got one from a sulky young Irishman who—”
“Have you met him?” she interrupted.
“No, thank Heaven! and I hope I never shall.”
This was uttered so fervently that Miss Devereux, yielding to an ungovernable impulse, rang out a peal of musical laughter so bright, so joyous, so contagious that the remainder of the company ceased their colorless prattle in order firstly to listen and then to join in it.
“You are having all the fun to yourself,” cried Lindsay, addressing Geraldine Devereux. “What is the mot? Do send it round; we want something more piquante than an entrée at this stage of the proceedings.”
Geraldine, all blushes at this unlooked-for notoriety and isolation, declared that her laughter arose from a story that was being narrated to her by Mr. Percival.
“It’s the first time Percival ever succeeded in making anybody laugh with him,” exclaimed a sour-looking old gentleman who wore the red ribbon of a C. B. round his neck.
“Let us have it, Percival, pro bono publico.”
“Is it any secret of the office, Mr. Percival?” demanded Miss Lindsay. “Because if it is there’s ’a chiel amang ye takin’ notes.’ Eh, Lord Jocelyn?”
“Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison-house,” was Percival’s retort.
“Is it worth hearing?—that is the question.”
“Very well worth hearing,” said Geraldine.
“It’s merely an Irish adventure,” observed Percival.
“Merely? Why, where is adventure to be achieved, if not in Ireland? Come, Percival, let us have it,” urged his host.
This was too good a chance for the member of Parliament. “I was in the House the night the Home-Rulers—” And he commenced an anecdote under cover of which the Foreign Office clerk was enabled to beat a retreat.
“It’s an awfully funny story, but some of the people here wouldn’t see it, you know.”
“I can’t see it yet, Mr. Percival; you have only just commenced. Pray proceed.”
“Well, you see, I got this letter raking me up, you know, and the other letter from the young Irish wolf-dog, who wouldn’t have me at any price. How awfully emerald these people must be to imagine that I could—may I use an Irish word?”
“No,” hotly.
“Bother myself about them, especially in the height of the season.” And Mr. Percival emptied a glass of champagne to his own sentiment.
“Poor things! And you don’t intend taking any notice of them?”
“No more than if they never existed.”
“And are you their kinsman?”
“I believe so, now that I have looked into the matter.”
807“Don’t you think you are acting rather shabbily?”
“So Jack Pommery says.”
“And Jack Pommery is right,” exclaimed Geraldine, clinching her little left hand and bringing it down into the rosy palm of her right.
“Do you know Jack Pommery?” asked Percival.
“I—I have met him.”
“Here?”
“No.”
“It must have been in Ireland, then,” earnestly.
“It was.”
“By Jove!”
This exclamation caused Geraldine to observe Percival. There was a mysterious knowingness on his face that sent the mercury of her curiosity up into the nineties.
“Is Mr. Pommery an acquaintance of yours, Mr. Percival?”
“He is my alter ego, my better man; and I think I have got at his secret.”
“Surely such strong friends have no secrets from one another.”
“Jack kept one bottled up ever so tight, wired down like the bitter beer they send to India. May I ask you a question?” turning abruptly to Geraldine.
“You have asked so many that usage has almost become a right, Mr. Percival.”
“Are you fond of violets?”
A red, red rose-blush spread itself over the young Irish girl’s face and neck and shell-like ears—a blush that came and glowed and refused to be put down—a blush that wooed and caressed and fondled.
“Why do you ask me?” she palpitated.
At this moment Miss Lindsay telegraphed for the ladies to retire, and the usual uprising, and rustle and removal of chairs, and grim punctilio of menkind, and saucy insouciance of womenkind took place. When the gentlemen had reseated themselves the host cried:
“Close quarters, mes braves. Approach to the attack of this fortress of Château Lafitte. Get up here, Percival; you were lost to me for the last two hours.”
In obedience to the mandate of his host the bureaucrat moved more above the salt, and, casting his eyes across the table, he was astonished and delighted to discover the young Irishman who had so pluckily distinguished himself upon the two occasions already detailed in this truthful narrative.
“I am awfully glad to meet you,” he said, taking up his glass and moving to a vacant chair beside Charley Devereux.
Charley bowed stiffly and awkwardly.
“I was at the Albion with a friend last Thursday when you dropped upon that disgusting cad.”
Devereux blushed like a schoolgirl.
“He was a low, swaggering blackguard, and, only I had an appointment with my sister, I’d have kicked him into Covent Garden among the cabbages,” he warmly exclaimed.
“He wanted my friend and I to witness what he called the assault, but we gave him scant encouragement. I also saw you the very same day do a very plucky thing in Hyde Park.”
“Oh! I know what you mean. Pshaw! it’s not worth mentioning.”
“Isn’t it? The eyes of our fair hostess tell another story.”
Charley Devereux drained a glass of claret and remained silent.
“As you announced your nationality at the Albion, I know that you are Irish.”
“To the backbone, I hope.”
808“Do you reside here?”
“No; I’ve only run over for a few days.”
“I shall be glad to make you an honorary member of my club.”
“What club is it?” asked Charley.
“I belong to two, the Garrick and the Reform. I can make you an honorary member of the Reform; at the Garrick we are powerless.”
“Thanks. I won’t trouble you, my stay is so short. I know, at least I do not know, a member of the Garrick.”
“What’s his name?”
“Well, he’s not worth naming. He’s what you call in this country a cad.”
“We don’t patronize cads in Garrick Street, Covent Garden,” said Percival, somewhat coldly.
“Well, you’ve got one full-blossomed cad amongst you at all events—what we would call in my country a shoneen.”
“Of course, as there’s a black sheep in every flock, there’s a shady man in every club. May I ask who this shoneen is?”
Charley Devereux was on the point of uttering the two words “Eugene Percival” when Lindsay burst in.
“I say, you two fellows, you’re snubbing my cellar most awfully. You remind me of two pashas whom I met at a dinner-party at Constantinople, who—”
“Speaking of Constantinople,” interrupted the member of Parliament, “Sir Stafford Northcote on Tuesday night—” commencing a sing-song, Dryasdust House of Commons story which lasted until coffee was announced.
As the gentlemen were ascending the stairs Percival observed to Devereux:
“I took a countrywoman of yours down to dinner.”
“You took my sister.”
“Indeed! You do not resemble one another.”
“There is just a family likeness, that’s all.”
“Do you reside in Dublin?”
“Not exactly; we live in the wildest portion of Connemara.”
“Will you permit me to exchange cards with you?”
“I haven’t got a card, but my name is Devereux.”
“Devereux!” exclaimed Percival, staggering against the wall.
“Yes, Charley Devereux.”
“Of Ballybo, County Mayo?” turning red and white by turns.
“Quite right.”
“And—and—the girl I took down to dinner is your sister?”
“You took Miss Devereux into dinner,” said Charley proudly.
Percival said nothing. The situation revealed itself in a lurid flash. It was too ghastly. Miss Devereux had listened to his miserable story, and, while he imagined he had been amusing her, he had been engaged in digging a pitfall in which it were well he had broken his neck. He had been constructing a pillory wherein he had sat to be pelted with contumely and ridicule. And Devereux, this lion-hearted young Irishman, whose pluck was of the age of chivalry—this splendid specimen of an Irish gentleman whom he had disowned—had written him down a cad. What should he do? What could he do? What could he say? All the water in the Irish Channel were not sufficient to wash him clean of the stains imprinted by his own bovine ignorance. What idiotic folly tempted him to rush into the details of that wretched episode? Why had he not 809acted as a gentleman? Why had he not replied to the letter of Mrs. Devereux and left his card on his kinsfolk? The affair would have died out then and there, and he would have done his devoir. He felt sick and giddy. The worst impeachment is that which comes from one’s self. No sentence so stern, no torture so severe. He felt that, blinded by prejudice, he had acted a mean, unmanly part, and was now hoist on his own petard. Nemesis had followed him, and the sword of Damocles descended how unexpectedly! Of course Miss Devereux despised him. She was civil because conventionality demanded it and because true blood always tells. To her brother he should reveal himself, cost what it would. All that a gentleman can do is to apologize, and the amende honorable was already an overdue draft.
To do Eugene Percival justice, he was not a bad sort of fellow. He was only thoroughly English; and, whilst the English love the Irish individually, collectively they despise them. This farcical ignorance of Ireland and the Irish leads to a deal of misconception, and there are thousands of Saxons who would travel across Central Africa sooner than undertake the four hours between Holyhead and Kingstown, the sixty-three miles separating North Wales from the county of Dublin.
They had reached the drawing-room landing. At the open door Miss Devereux was chatting with considerable animation to Miss Lindsay.
“Mr. Devereux,” said Percival, “will you oblige me by stepping this way?” advancing to where the ladies stood.
“Well, Mr. Percival,” exclaimed Alice Lindsay, “when are we to have your Irish story?”
“Now.”
There was something in the tone that compelled attention. Miss Devereux, with a woman’s quick perception, felt the approaching dénouement, and, like a true woman, endeavored to spare this man his utter humiliation.
“Irish stories should be told in Ireland,” she cried.
“There is one Irish story that must be told here, Miss Lindsay,” said Percival gravely, “and I would beg your attention for a very brief moment.”
“Why, it must be a very tragic one,” cried the hostess. “You are as grave as the entire senate when Othello addressed them,” to Percival. “You, my dear little Irish girl, from being as joyous as Nora Creina, are as sad as poor suffering Erin herself; and you, caballero mio,” to Devereux, “have summoned a winter cloud of frown to your brow, behind it thunder. If Mr. Percival insists let us hear his horrible tale in comfort. Messieurs et mesdames, asseyez vous.”
No one took a seat but the hostess, and she sought a coigne of vantage upon the stairs.
“I hardly know how to begin,” said Percival very slowly. “I can make no amende beyond the utter humiliation the narration of the story will inflict, and no ordeal that I could be put to could possibly prove more bitter. Until five minutes ago I was in utter ignorance that to Miss Devereux and her brother I could claim relationship.”
“Relationship! How awfully jolly!” exclaimed Miss Lindsay, fanning herself violently.
“You, then, are Eugene Percival?” cried Charley Devereux, surveying him with a glance in which 810scorn and anger struggled for mastery.
“I am Eugene Percival, your kinsman. Stay,” he added as Charley was about to interrupt him. “I ask to be heard—that is all. To err is human, to forgive divine. I have made a ghastly mistake; I now eat the humblest of pie. I can urge nothing in extenuation for my silly small-talk. It was weak, it was shabby. I pillory myself. I beg to assure you, my cousins, that within the last five minutes I have passed through a bitter agony. I did not catch your name, Miss Devereux, when the honor was conferred upon me of taking you down to dinner. I had not the faintest conception who you were whilst my stupid tongue babbled. I was not aware that this gentleman was your brother. I did not know who he was until within five minutes. Fate has been playing at cross purposes with me. I offer no apology for my bad form in not replying to the letters I received. There is none that could be accepted. A chain of circumstances has woven itself which ties me to the earth. I can only say that I earnestly hope some chance may be granted me of showing how anxious I am to redeem myself with my Irish cousins.” And making a deep bow, Eugene Percival hurried down the stairs and from the house.
Upon the day following this dénouement Percival called upon Jack Pommery at the lodgings of the latter in New Bond Street.
“Have you been appointed secretary of legation at Ujiji?” laughed Jack. “You look about as cheerful as if you were in for the yellow fever.”
“Drop chaff, Jack; I want to have a long talk with you.”
“Take that chair, old fellow, and out with it, whatever it is,” cried Pommery, rolling a luxurious arm-chair to his companion and flinging himself upon a sofa.
“Jack, go and call at the Charing Cross Hotel to-day.”
“What to do?”
“Miss Geraldine Devereux is stopping there.”
“Miss who?” demanded the other, springing like an acrobat to his feet.
“Miss Geraldine Devereux, of Ballybo, County Mayo.”
“You don’t mean it, Percival!” a great wave of joy passing over his handsome face.
“I do indeed.”
“How did you come by this?”
“I met her at dinner yesterday at the Lindsays’.”
“What!”
Percival repeated his reply.
“And I was asked there, and refused for a vile whitebait dinner at Greenwich,” said Pommery with a dismal groan.
“She is absolutely charming, Jack—so naïve, so frank, so coquettish, and so pure.”
“Are you hit?”
“I would be if my proof-armor had not been buckled on by my friend Pommery. No, Jack, I want to ask you all about these people, and I’ll tell you why: they are my Irish cousins.”
“Not the—”
“Yes, the writer of one of those fatal letters was Mrs. Devereux; of the other, Charley.”
“This is a bad business, Percival,” observed Pommery after a silence.
“It is a bad business. I am written down a cad, and, by George! I deserve the appellation,” cried Percival, smiting the arm of the chair a severe blow.
“Giving those letters to that ass 811Minniver was bad form, and I said so.”
“I have got them here. Luckily, Minniver has been down with Bertie Baging for the Ascot week, and, except to old Fladgate, he has never shown them to mortal. Do you know who Devereux turns out to be?”
“Who?”
“The young fellow who so pluckily sat upon the rowdy at the Albion.”
“By Jove!”
“And only fancy, he did not know who Alice Lindsay was until he came to dinner at Curzen Street.”
“By Jove!” repeated Jack Pommery.
Impart a piece of startling intelligence to an Englishman, and he will always exclaim, “By Jove!”
“Now, Jack, tell me all about the Devereux—all that you know. She has younger brothers. Has she a sister?”
“She has.”
“Younger?”
“Yes.”
“Anything like your girl?”
“She is not MY girl, Percival. I only wish that she was,” he added with fierce energy.
“You should have seen how she blushed when I asked her if she liked violets.”
“Percival!” exclaimed Pommery, “that was hardly fair.”
“Don’t agitate yourself, old fellow; the subject was handled, as we say at the office, ‘delicately.’ How old are the younger brothers?”
“One is about eighteen.”
“Bright?”
“Very. He showed me one of Browning’s poems done into Latin, French, and some other language—I think German.”
“You are certain of this, Jack?” cried Percival earnestly.
“I am certain the lad showed them to me, and that he said they were his own translations. He’s in Trinity College at Dublin.”
“What are they going to do with him?”
“They were speaking of the civil service or the Irish bar. Entre nous, they haven’t much money, and it’s a wonder they have a stiver, they are so recklessly hospitable. Why, my dear fellow, there were fifteen guests stopping at Ballybo while I was there, and we met a whole caravan traversing the beautiful road that runs from Westport along the Atlantic when en route for the train.”
“This is admirable,” muttered Percival, half thinking aloud.
“What is admirable?”
“Never mind. Is Ballybo a handsome place?”
“It’s a fine old mansion of that order of architecture so much in vogue when Queen Anne was busying herself in distributing largess to Marlborough. It is surrounded by superb trees, in which ten thousand rooks keep up a cawing that is almost deafening. An inlet of the Atlantic almost brings the seaweed to the hall door-steps. The stables are fit for the Duke of Beaufort, and I can tell you there are horses in the stalls that would bring their five hundred guineas at Tattersall’s.”
The “Wild Irishman,” as the express from London to Holyhead has been termed, on account of the almost reckless speed at which it travels, was about to start from Euston Square when Mr. Eugene Percival made his appearance upon the platform, and, walking along the line of carriages, suddenly stopped 812opposite a first-class coupé. The compartment was occupied by a young lady and gentleman. The lady was Miss Geraldine Devereux, the gentleman her brother.
Percival had called at the Charing Cross Hotel, merely leaving cards. His visit was not returned. He sent Miss Devereux a box for the opera, with a superb bouquet from Covent Garden. The box voucher was sent back with the compliments of Mr. Devereux; the flowers Miss Devereux retained. For the few days that his Irish cousins remained in London Eugene Percival made no sign.
Removing his hat, he respectfully bowed to the occupants of the coupé. Miss Devereux sat nearest the window at which he stood.
“I have come to beg forgiveness,” he said. “Do not go back to Ireland without uttering my pardon.”
Now, it so happened that Charley Devereux, who had been dining with an old college chum, was in very good humor, all his war-paint having been removed under the pleasurable influences of a renewed friendship. So, thrusting forth his hand, he exclaimed:
“Don’t say anything more about it, Percival. I’m sure you’re sorry. You’ll do better next time, and won’t let your English prejudice bolt across country with you.”
“And you, Miss Devereux?”
“I may forgive you, and perhaps call you cousin, when you shall have made a lengthened tour in my own sweet land.”
“Am I to avoid Ballybo?”
“And commit another mistake?” she archly exclaimed.
“I have done with mistakes for ever.” And as he uttered the words the train moved silently but swiftly away.
About three weeks after Miss Devereux had regained her wild mountain home she was considerably astonished one morning upon receiving from out the post-bag a large, important-looking document with the words, “On Her Majesty’s Service,” in front, and an enormous seal on the back, with the royal arms of England stamped upon the red sealing-wax and “Foreign Office” underneath them.
“Can this be from Eugene Percival?” she thought, as she tore it open and read:
“Foreign Office, July 26, 187—.
“Dear Cousin Geraldine Devereux: I enclose a nomination for the Foreign Office for my cousin, Patrick Sarsfield Devereux, your brother. From the correspondence which has taken place between my dear friend Jack Pommery and my kinsman on the subject of his future, I trust that this opening is one that will prove suitable to his tastes and his talents. It is not impossible that I may visit your ‘impossible country’ when Mr. Pommery runs over for the grouse-shooting. With kindest regards to all my kinsfolk, I remain, dear Cousin Geraldine Devereux, your friend and cousin,
“Eugene Percival.”
“He’s a good fellow after all,” cried Geraldine with streaming eyes, “and has made more than the amende honorable to his Irish cousins.”
The English statesman whose personal acquaintance I first made was the present Lord Carlingford, who was at that time the Hon. Chichester Fortescue, Secretary of State for Ireland in the cabinet of Mr. Gladstone. I had in my possession a letter of introduction to him, but I was unwilling to use it as a means of “interviewing” Mr. Fortescue. I desired to obtain certain information from him which he might not be willing to give; and I did not wish that my possible indiscretion in asking for the information should reflect at all upon the friend who had given me the letter. I wrote to Mr. Fortescue, telling him simply who I was and what I wanted, and asking whether he would permit me to call upon him. I received a note from his secretary, informing me that at a certain hour Mr. Fortescue would receive me at his office in Great George Street, Westminster. This was before the new government offices in Whitehall were completed, and when the various governmental bureaus were scattered about, hither and thither, in houses that were not altogether magnificent or imposing. By an error of my own in estimating the time necessary for a drive from Bayswater to Great George Street, I was some minutes behind the appointed hour; and when I gave my card to the servant in waiting he regarded me with a reproachful air. “You have been asked for, sir,” he said, as he conducted me up-stairs and ushered me into an ante-room very plainly, almost poorly, furnished. In a few moments he reappeared, and, leading me through a narrow hall, opened the door of a larger room, and I found myself in the presence of the Irish secretary: a tall, slim, thin-faced, handsome man, dressed with scrupulous neatness, rather starched and stiff, not unlike Fernando Wood in his prim correctness. Motioning me to a chair in front of his table, he resumed his seat behind it, and the conversation began. Cold and calm at first, he soon warmed with the subject, and spoke with earnestness and freedom, at times with enthusiasm. Her majesty’s government, he assured me, were earnestly anxious to do justice to Ireland; he thought they had proved this by their past acts. If they remained in power they would convince all the world of their sincere desire to remove every legitimate grievance of which Ireland could complain. He appreciated the force of my suggestion that the reflex action of public opinion in America upon public opinion in Ireland was not to be despised. He questioned me closely upon the extent to which the American press was influenced by Irish thought; were there many Irish writers in the New York newspaper offices? who were they? what were their opinions? were the adverse criticisms upon the Irish policy of the imperial government inspired by them, or were these the spontaneous thoughts of American observers?
814I began to think I was the interviewed and not the interviewer; but Mr. Fortescue was ready enough to answer questions in his turn. It was quite true, he said, that the land question and the question of higher education in Ireland bristled all over with difficulties. If the demands of the tenant-farmers in Ireland were granted, a precedent would be set up that might be attended with most inconvenient consequences in England; if Mr. Gladstone were to propose a measure for university education in Ireland that would be satisfactory to Cardinal Cullen, he would encounter a storm of opposition from the Irish and English Protestants, and from the even then rapidly-growing secularist party in England, that might overwhelm him. I remember the earnestness with which Mr. Fortescue refuted a chance suggestion of mine that Mr. Gladstone was at heart a foe to the Catholic Church. The very contrary was the case; he leaned, if anything, too much the other way. Archbishop Manning was his near and dear friend. He incurred the suspicion and the latent enmity of the ultra-Protestants, and especially of the Nonconformists, by his unconcealed anxiety to compensate the Irish Catholics for the wrongs they had suffered in the past, and to make the future equable and pleasant for them. In Mr. Fortescue’s belief, an American having it in his power to influence and enlighten American opinion, and especially Irish-American opinion, respecting the real wishes of the leaders of the Liberal party regarding Ireland, could not do a better work than to impress upon the minds of his countrymen the fact that England—at least the England of that day—was heartily and sincerely anxious to do justice to Ireland. The success of the then contemplated measures of the government would depend very much upon the spirit in which the Irish people received them.
Mr. Fortescue was evidently not thoroughly satisfied with the state of feeling in Ireland, and he made some remarks concerning the Irish press that it is not necessary to repeat. He returned again, however, to the subject of the influence that Americans, and Irish-Americans in particular, had upon Irish opinion; and his observations upon this point convinced me that the secret-service department of his bureau was not badly conducted. Towards the end of our conversation I mentioned that I had a letter of introduction to him from ——, and presented it, explaining why I had not done so in the first instance. We had a laugh over what he called my “un-American scrupulousness,” and we parted very good friends. Mr. Fortescue is the possessor of very enviable qualities. I was quite convinced of his sincerity; but I reflected that the fascination of his manner when he was aroused and anxious to make a point might easily blind the judgment. We met occasionally after this from time to time; and I last saw him at his residence at Strawberry Hill, where his wife, the Countess Frances Waldegrave (whose own history is a romance), is the centre of a circle of no small political and social importance. The future of which we had talked in our first interview had become the past: Mr. Gladstone had played his trump cards and had lost his game, Mr. Disraeli reigned in his stead, while Mr. Fortescue had become Lord Carlingford and was 815not unhappy. But Ireland was not happy yet; and I ventured to say so to his lordship. “What would you have?” he asked—“Catholic university education on Cardinal Cullen’s plan; a tenant-right law that would make the landlord the slave of the occupier; and Home Rule, under which the tragedy of the Kilkenny cats would be enacted all over Ireland until none were left to tell the tale, or tails. Ce n’est pas possible, mon ami.”
The words “Home Rule” recall the memory of a very dear friend whose acquaintance I made in London, and who has now gone to rest. With sad but pleasant reminiscences I rummage through my letter-cases, filled with cherished epistles, until I come upon a packet tied with black tape and labelled “John Francis Maguire.” He was a splendid man, impulsive and quick, but with a sound judgment that held his emotions under sufficient control; full of lofty and poetic aspirations for his country’s future, but guided in his actions by the most sober and practical common sense. In the midst of arduous political and professional labors, all the more severe from the pressure of a constant struggle with inadequate pecuniary resources, from the demands of an exacting constituency, and from the burning passion of his soul for the happiness of Ireland, he found time for literary work that was at once a source of profit and of pleasure to him. Every one will remember his Irish in America and his Pontificate of Pius IX.; but it is with a pang that I remember the pages of manuscript that he read to me on my last visit to him. They were portions of a novel he was writing—and it was to be a Jesuitical novel. What Eugene Sue had done to vilify and traduce the Society of Jesus he would do to vindicate and exalt it. He described to me the plot; disputed with me over the proposed dénouement; laughed over the skill with which he had introduced well-known personages into the story; and asked me if, under the disguise of Sir Guichet de Nouvelle, I recognized that Don Quixote of Protestantism, Mr. Newdegate.
Mr. Maguire died before his novel was completed—at least, I never heard of its completion. When I first knew him he lived in pleasant apartments in Bessborough Gardens, and there it was I last parted from him. The presentation of my letter of introduction resulted in an invitation to dine with him the next day; and this was the first of a long series of little banquets that we had together, alternately at his apartments and in a cosey room on the third floor of the London Tavern, Fleet Street, where I played the host. Charming were these symposiums, generally held on Saturday nights, because the House was not then in session, and sometimes lasting far beyond midnight. I remember one of these occasions, on a lovely night in June, when, having sat together until two o’clock in the morning, I proposed that we should walk to Pimlico together, where I would leave him at his door. Our route took us through Temple Bar, up the Strand, down Parliament Street, past the Parliament houses and Westminster Abbey, and through St. James Park. The morning air was delicious. At this season of the year the night in London is very short; one can see to read without gaslight as late as nine o’clock, and the stars begin to pale as early as two o’clock in the 816morning. They were beginning to pale as we left the tavern and began our walk. The moon, hastening to hide itself before the sun arose, threw a soft light over the scene; all that was ugly and commonplace in the glare of day was hidden or disguised; all that was beautiful was arrayed in new and seductive splendor. The Strand was almost deserted; here and there a policeman paced his beat; here and there the form of some poor wretch glided out of the shade of an archway, lingered a moment, and disappeared. Trafalgar Square was glorious; the fountains made music for Marochetti’s lions at the base of Nelson’s pillar, and the little lion on the top of Northumberland House seemed to wag his tail as if beating time to the melody. Presently the grand vista of the Abbey and the Parliament houses opened before us; but scarcely had I glanced at it ere Mr. Maguire hurried me through a narrow passage to the left. “Come,” said he, “let us see where a king’s head fell.” I had seen it before—the little square in Whitehall where Charles I. was beheaded, and where the statue of James II. stands, the king pointing with his sceptre to the spot where the head of his father fell. In the daytime the place has a mean and squalid appearance, although the Crescent and gardens around it are handsome and trim enough. At this moment the surroundings of the place were bathed in a light that hid their deformities and enhanced their beauties, and the memories of the tragic scene enacted there had nothing to disturb them. The ghastly drama re-enacted itself before our mental vision. There was the window of Whitehall Palace in front of which the scaffold had been erected. From this window the king emerged; he stood on the scaffold, with his head erect, wishing to address the people; but the troops filled the place, and the populace were kept at a distance. “I can be heard only by you,” said the king to the soldiers; “I will therefore address to you a few words.” And he repeated to them a little speech which he had prepared. A curious discourse it was—grave and calm, “even to coldness,” as Guizot has it. He had been in the right, he said; every one else was in the wrong; the deprivation of the rights of the sovereign was the true cause of the unhappiness of the people; the people should have no voice in government; it was only on this condition that the kingdom could regain peace and liberty! While he was speaking some one touched the axe. “Do not dull the axe,” he exclaimed; “if it is dull it will hurt me.” The executioner directed him to gather up his long hair under a silk cap which he wore, and the Protestant Bishop Juxon assisted him to arrange it.
“I have,” said the king, “a good cause and a clement God.”
“Yes, sire,” replied Juxon. “There is only one more step before you; it is full of agony, but it is short, although it will transport you from earth to heaven.”
The king replied: “I pass from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; there I shall fear no sorrow.” Then, after asking the executioner if the block was firmly fixed, and saying to Juxon the mysterious word “Remember!” he knelt down and extended his head upon the block. “I shall say a short prayer,” said he, “and when I extend my hands, then—” In a 817few moments the king stretched out his hands; the executioner struck, and the head fell directly over the spot where we were then standing.
“It was a wretched piece of work,” said Mr. Maguire as we walked away; “but the men who did it had the courage of their opinions. Who has the courage of his opinions now?”
“Mr. Gladstone, perhaps,” I suggested.
“Yes, no doubt; but what are his opinions? Those of to-day will be discarded to-morrow. He is all on our side now; there is nothing he would not do for us to-day; but to-morrow, if affairs go wrong, he will throw us over, and Ireland and the church may find in him their worst foe. The man wants a balance-wheel,” continued Maguire, warming with his theme as we walked on, “and only the grace of God can give it him. I think sometimes that he will have it yet. I admire him, I esteem him. If he were only a Catholic he would have a guide that would keep him from mischief. There,” said he, as we came to the end of Whitehall—“there is Westminster Hall, where Charles I. received his sentence; and there is Westminster Abbey, where his body was carried in the face of a blinding snow-storm and buried with maimed rites. There, too, is the door through which they carried the body of his murderer, Cromwell, to bury it among the kings. But the ashes of the kings are yet there, while Cromwell’s grave was broken open, his body dragged out and hung upon a gallows in Tyburn. He deserved it, the brute! Do you know the story of how, after his post-mortem execution, his head was cut off and stuck upon a spike on the top of Westminster Hall, just there in front of us, and how it remained there, blackening and withering in the air, until one stormy night it was blown down and picked up by the sentry on guard, who was an old Cromwellian himself? He hid the precious relic under his jacket, and afterwards sold it to a gentleman in Kent, in whose family the skull still remains.”
Had Mr. Maguire lived a few years longer it is probable that the Home-Rule movement would have taken a somewhat different shape, and possibly might have been brought to a successful realization. When I first met him he was engrossed in developing and shaping his ideas on the subject; and I spent a whole night with him in explaining, in all its minutiæ, our own system of duplex government, State and federal, and showing how State rights and federal sovereignty were both preserved. He was the real father of the Home-Rule movement, and to his untimely death must be ascribed, in a great measure, the present apparent collapse of the party. No member of the House of Commons was more generally respected and esteemed than he; Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli alike regarded him with admiration. Uncompromising in principle, he knew how to be firm without being offensive; and he did not commit the too common error of insisting upon impossibilities. Even Mr. Newdegate cherished a sneaking liking for the man; and Mr. Maguire once happened to let me into the secret of that strange affection. “I can turn the laugh on him any day,” said he, “and if it comes to serious work he gets the worst of it; but often it is best to let him have his fling. Occasionally I give him a lift over a stile, knowing quite well that if he goes on a 818little farther he will tumble into the ditch and scramble out all covered with mud.”
Respecting Home Rule, Mr. Maguire’s favorite idea was a confederation of the three kingdoms, England, Ireland, and Scotland, upon such a basis as that of our Union, with a written constitution defining with exactness the limits of provincial autonomy and of imperial sovereignty. It was to perfect this plan that he made me expound to him, in the most minute detail, the workings of our own duplex system of government; and among his papers should have been found an elaborate scheme for the British Confederation, the joint result of our deliberations. I was summoned to these momentous conferences by such notes as these—and I select with a sad heart the last I received from him, a few months before his death:
“I shall be at home this evening altogether, and would be glad to see you, and we could spend an hour or two over wine or whiskey-punch. Or I shall be at home to-morrow after seven o’clock. Send me a line quick to say when you will come.”
“Wine” and “whiskey-punch” had an esoteric meaning as well as their ordinary significance; for “wine” meant mere gossip, while “whiskey-punch” was understood to be the accompaniment of very serious political discussions.
A prolific playwright, a popular poet, a voluminous romance writer, an author whose fecundity is equalled only by the elder Dumas, the contemporary of Shakspere, the friend of Cervantes, the intimate and guide of Calderon, the founder of the Spanish national drama—Lope de Vega was all these, and yet today he is carefully forgotten. His biography even remains unwritten. The attempt, it is true, has been made, with more or less success, in England by Lord Holland, in America by Mr. Ticknor, and in France by M. Damas-Hinard. None is fully satisfactory; all three are too prejudiced, the first two against him, the last in his favor. Mr. Ticknor’s is the fairest and the ablest. But the space in a history of literature which can be assigned to any one author is necessarily too limited to permit the introduction of a full-length portrait; with a slight sketch, or a kit-cat at best, we must content ourselves. The articles in the various encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries are either scant or in great part taken from Lord Holland’s book. Much biographical material exists, scattered here and there, and needing only judicious gleaning. But a few months after his death La Fama Postuma, a eulogy containing many curious details of his manner of life, was published by his friend and follower, Montalvan, whom Valdivielso calls the “first-born of Lope de Vega’s genius.” The allusions to him in the works of his contemporaries are copious; but his bare biography can be condensed into a few lines.
Lope Felix de Vega Carpio was born at Madrid, November 25, 1562. He was a precocious child, reading Latin as well as Spanish at the age of five, and at eleven he wrote his first plays. Left alone in the world at the age of fourteen by the death of his father, also a poet, he travelled as far as Segovia with a school-fellow. Their money gave out, and when they attempted to sell a gold chain to pay their way back they were arrested. The corregidor before whom they were brought, seeing that they were but school-boys, kindly sent them back to Madrid in care of an alguacil. At fifteen Lope was a soldier warring in Portugal and Africa. At sixteen he was the page and secretary of Geronimo Manrique, Bishop of Avila, and also studied and took the degree of Bachelor at the University of Alcala. While in the bishop’s house he wrote a few eclogues and a pastoral comedy. Then he became the secretary of Antonio, the grandson of the great Duke of Alva; his Arcadia, written then, is more or less an account of the gallant adventures of his patron. Returning to the bishop, he was about to become a priest when he fell in love, and in 1584 he married Doña Isabella d’Urbina. Quarrelling with a hidalgo of little reputation, he was arrested, by the aid of Claudio Conde released from prison, and exiled; he lived two years in Valencia, and there he first regularly wrote for the stage. Shortly after 820his return to Madrid his wife died, and in conjugal despair he embarked on the famous Armada, finding time to write a poem, “The Beauty of Angelica,” a continuation of the Orlando Furioso, before the dispersion and destruction of the great fleet by Drake. After travelling in Italy he returned to Spain and became the secretary of the Marquis of Sarria. In 1597 he married Doña Juana de Guardio. For nearly ten years Lope de Vega seems to have been quietly happy, devoting himself to the care of his son Carlos, but in 1607 or 1608 both his wife and his son died, leaving him an infant daughter. During these years he had been writing steadily for the stage; in 1609 he delivered his Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias, and in the same year he became a priest. He was also a Familiar of the Inquisition—an honorary distinction, attesting the purity of his Catholic blood, and conferring the privilege of being called into the service of the institution. In 1625, according to Mr. Ticknor, “he entered the congregation of the native priesthood of Madrid, and was so faithful and exact in the performance of his duties that in 1628 he was elected to be its chief chaplain.” After working for the theatre for forty years, in 1630 he definitely renounced dramatic authorship. In 1628 the pope, Urban VIII., wrote him an autograph letter, conferring upon him the degree of Doctor of Divinity and naming him a Knight of the Order of Malta. For more than twenty-five years he daily devoted some portion of his time to the service of the church; on the title-page of his plays he calls himself Frey Lope de Vega, Familiar of the Inquisition, and the last important work he published was Dorotea, a long prose romance in dialogue, probably slightly autobiographical. Finally, on August 27, 1635, at the age of seventy-three, Lope Felix de Vega Carpio died. The funeral ceremonies, lasting nine days, were magnificent; the eulogistic poems published in Spain and Italy would fill several volumes; and “most solemn of all,” says Mr. Ticknor, generally disposed to underrate Lope de Vega’s popularity and ability, “was the mourning of the multitude, from whose dense mass audible sobs burst forth as his remains slowly descended from their sight into the house appointed for all living.”
For forty years the works of Lope de Vega had filled the theatres not only of Spain but of all Europe. There were but two dramatic companies in Madrid when he began to write; there were forty when he ceased. He composed over fifteen hundred dramas and an unknown number of lighter pieces, in addition to his non-theatrical works. He was as popular as he was prolific. Not only in Europe but in America were his plays performed. One of his comedies, the Fuerza Lastimosa, was even exhibited within the seraglio at Constantinople. His merit was so universally recognized that to call anything a Lope was to stamp it as being sterling; it was sufficient to say es de Lope. When the king and queen of Spain met him in the street they caused their carriage to stop, that they might better see the illustrious man. The Spanish dramatists of his own and the succeeding age did not hesitate to call him their master. Tirso de Molina, Alarcon, Calderon, and Guillen de Castro hail him as their chief. And he was as popular a man as he was an author; he was 821personally beloved by nearly all his contemporaries; he had few enemies and many friends. A gentleman by birth, breeding, and education, he had a kind word for all. He was handsome and agile. He wittily declared that he disliked only those who ask a person’s age without matrimonial intentions, those who take snuff in the presence of their superiors, those old men who dye their locks, those churchmen who consult gypsies, and those men who, though born of woman, yet speak ill of the sex.
Although it is as a playwright that he is best known, yet he was the author of many other works. He wrote two heroic, four mythological, four historical poems (among which was La Dragontea, devoted to the abuse of Sir Francis Drake), one burlesque (La Gatomachia, describing the loves and rivalries of two cats), many descriptive and didactic verses, and a multitude of sonnets and epistles. He was also the author of eight almost interminable prose novels. His plays, however, are the noblest monument of his genius, although he himself thought otherwise. He declared that his autos (a sort of revival of the mysteries and moralities of the middle ages) were his best works, and regretted that he had not devoted his whole life to religious poetry.
His dramas (the Spanish word comedias meaning merely plays) may be roughly divided into three classes:
1. Comedies of common life, or domestic dramas;
2. Heroic dramas, which perhaps might sometimes be called tragedies; and
3. Comedies of intrigue, or comedias de capa y espada (comedies of Cloak and Sword, as the Spanish call them, from those frequently-used “properties”).
He also wrote religious plays, some, like the autos, resembling the mysteries and moralities, others more infused with a modern and secular spirit. He often chose Scriptural subjects for his plays, and in some of his heroic dramas the heroes are holy men and saints. But it is especially in the comedias de capa y espada that he excelled. They were interesting stories thrown into dramatic shape and written with the view of exciting surprise and curiosity. Only those ignorant of the Spanish habits and the Spanish customs of that day will reproach him for his frequent use of duels and disguises. He faithfully transcribed the romantic existence of the time. A rigid examiner may declare that his most successful pieces were comedies of intrigue rather than comedies of manners. They please by their plot, always ingenious and almost always original; by their interest, always sustained and exciting. Lope de Vega was a thorough master of stage effect. He weaves and reweaves the web and woof of his story, gaining and retaining the attention of the spectator by the growing interest. We are carried rapidly along by the skill of the dramatist, sometimes in spite of ourselves. Even in the best of his plays the incidents are often improbable, but in our enjoyment we can readily pardon this. When Shakspere has called Bohemia a desert country by the sea, and Beaumont and Fletcher speak of Naples as though it were an island, it would indeed be strange if Lope were exempt from such errors. In one play we find Adam and Eve “dressed very gallantly after the French fashion”; in another Nero 822sings a serenade in the streets of Rome. The American Indians discourse of Diana and Phœbus; Cyrus the Great, after his ascension to the throne, marries a shepherdess; Job, David, Jeremias, and St. John the Baptist are introduced in one play; and in “The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus,” among the dramatis personæ are Providence, Imagination, The Christian Religion, Idolatry, and a Demon. Haste is hardly an excuse for this, and De Vega worked in haste. The elder Dumas wrote a novel in seventy-six consecutive hours. For fifteen days De Vega wrote an act a day, and more than one hundred of his plays were written within twenty-four hours each. At least this seems to be the meaning of
Mr. Ticknor, however, reads these lines to mean that more than a hundred were performed within twenty-four hours after their completion. Perhaps this interpretation is accurate, but to any one acquainted with the difficulties attending the mounting and rehearsing of a modern comedy it seems, to say the least, improbable; and, at any rate, De Vega’s facility of composition was so great that many writers rashly assert that he could compose a play in three or four hours! Montalvan tells a pleasant anecdote illustrating the rapidity of his work. To oblige a manager Lope and Montalvan agreed to write a piece together. The first two acts of the Tercera Orden de San Francisco were divided between them, each writing an act a day. The third act was to be halved into eight leaves each. Montalvan continues, to quote Lord Holland’s version: “As it was bad weather, I remained in his house that night, and, knowing that I could not equal him in the execution, I had a fancy to beat him in the despatch of the business. For this purpose I got up at two o’clock, and at eleven had completed my share of the work. I immediately went out to look for him, and found him very deeply occupied with an orange-tree that had been frost-bitten in the night. Upon my asking him how he had gone on with his task he answered: ‘I set about it at five, but I finished the act an hour ago, took a bit of ham for breakfast, wrote an epistle of fifty triplets, and have watered the whole of the garden—which has not a little fatigued me.’ Then, taking out the papers, he read me the eight leaves and the triplets—a circumstance that would have astonished me had I not known the fertility of his genius and the dominion he had over the rhymes of our language.” At this period Lope was nearly seventy years old, or such a trifle would scarcely have tired him.
Schlegel draws a brilliant comparison between Lope de Vega and Shakspere, or rather between the Spanish and the English stage. Any such method of measurement injures the Spaniard; it is only in the management of his plots that he is able to rival the Englishman. It is curious, however, to note that each great writer was surrounded by minor lights—set, as it were, with glittering but inferior gems. Shakspere shone in the midst of a glorious company containing Jonson, Ford, Fletcher, Beaumont, Greene, Nash, Marlowe, Massinger, and Webster. Lope de Vega, following Lope de Rueda, was surrounded by a brilliant throng of 823friendly rivals—Cervantes, Calderon, Montalvan, Moreto, Alarcon, Matos-Fragoso, and Guillen de Castro. It is also remarkable to find that England and Spain, then the possessors of a great drama, are now barren fields; while France, once but the empty echo of the classic muse, is to-day the chief country in possession of a living dramatic literature. For this literature France owes largely to England and Spain; French tragedy and French comedy are directly indebted to Lope’s influence. From a play of Guillen de Castro, one of Lope’s followers, Corneille derived his Cid, the greatest French tragedy; and from a play of Alarcon, another of Lope’s followers (and the first of American dramatic authors, for by birth and education he was a Mexican), Corneille took his Menteur, the earliest of French comedies. In a letter to Boileau Molière said: “I owe much to the Menteur. At the time it appeared I desired to write, but I was uncertain as to what I should write. My ideas were confused; this work came and defined them. Without the Menteur, no doubt, I should have written some such comedies of intrigue as the Etourdi and the Dépit Amoureux, but perhaps I should never have written the Misanthrope.”
The dramatis personæ of Lope’s plays are not character studies, finely and fully polished, like those of Molière; they are rather off-hand sketches, fresh and original. Although they often disclose haste, they always show the firm though rapid touch of a master; and however wanting in completeness of detail, they never lack boldness of outline. The people who walk and talk in Lope de Vega’s comedies are living men and women, speaking and acting like human beings, and true to human nature as it was in Spain in those adventurous times; they were not lay figures, mere puppets, pulled hither and thither by visible wires. He rarely created an eccentric character, never an impossible one.
He did not allow himself Molière’s privilege of taking his material wherever he found it. Only once is it known that he used the work of another: his Esclavos in Argel is based on Cervantes’ Trato de Argel. He was an originator—copied, not copying; and if at times his characters seem to lack novelty, it is perhaps in part because we live in the nineteenth century and he wrote in the sixteenth. For two centuries and a half the playwrights of the world have been pillaging him until his people and his plots have become public property. Calderon copied him; Molière and Corneille carried Calderon to France; the English stole from all three; so it is small wonder that what Lope de Vega transcribed from nature is now typical and traditional. He was first in the field; others have stolen his pressed flowers.
A full exposition of De Vega’s ideas of dramatic art can best be found in his own essay on the subject, the Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias. It would seem from this essay that in Lope’s time Spain was slowly freeing herself from the fetters of the unities, first riveted by Aristotle. England had set the example; Spain was fast following. In these two countries the fierce fight was then fought that two centuries and a half later was to agitate France. Spain then had her battle between the Romantics and the Classics, and Lope de Vega, while ironically deferential to the 824ancient laws, fought foremost on the side of freedom. As in France Victor Hugo in 1830, so in Spain Lope de Vega in 1600. Both were leaders; both have written essays on dramatic art. It is curious to compare the Spanish writer’s Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias with the French author’s elaborate and scientific discussion of dramatic effect contained in the celebrated preface to his never-acted Cromwell.
The Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias was written in 1609 at the request of one of those numerous academies then existing in Spain, and founded in imitation of the Italian Della Cruscans. It contains internal evidence of haste in its construction; although he knew better, Lope carelessly mistakes Terence for Plautus. Capable of composing a comedy in a day, he may easily have dashed off this little essay in a very few hours. It is written in blank verse, only the last two lines of each stanza rhyming. The stanzas, also, are of unequal length. Although the essay seems almost an improvisation, it is extremely interesting not only to the student of his plays but also to the casual reader, as it gives a view of the state of the Spanish stage at the time not elsewhere to be found. The following unabridged English rendering of the essay has been made from the excellent French version of M. Damas-Hinard:
“Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias.
(The New Art of Writing Plays.)
“Noble minds, flower of Spain, who, in this illustrious academy, will soon have surpassed not only those academies of Italy which Cicero, emulating Greece, established in the land where sleep the waters of Avernus, but even that school of Plato in which Athens saw so rare an assembly of philosophers come together, you order me to write you an essay on dramatic art in accordance with the public taste to-day. This task seems easy, and, indeed, it would be to him among you who has worked the least for the stage, and who therefore better knows the rules; but it must be done by me, who have never composed except contrary to the rules of the art. It is not, thank Heaven! that I do not know them: these theories were familiar to me when I was yet a school-boy, and when the sun had not ten times passed from Taurus to Pisces; but at the time when I chose this career I found the stage filled with works very different from those which the first inventors of the art left as models, and such, indeed, as were composed by the barbarians, who had accustomed the vulgar to their crudities. And they have so thoroughly established themselves in this fashion that he who would now write for the theatre according to the precepts of the art dies without glory and without reward; for among those who lack the enlightenment of a superior mind custom always carries the day.
“Several times, it is true, I have written following these principles, which but few people know; but as soon as I see these monstrous compositions appear, full of magical apparitions, to which rush the crowds and the women, always worshipping such absurdities, then I return to my barbarian habits. And when I have a comedy to write I lock up the rules behind triple bolts; I cast Plautus and Terence out of my study for fear of hearing their cries, for truth calls aloud in these dumb books; and I then write according to the art invented by those who wished to gain the applause of the crowd. After all, as it is the public who pays for these absurdities, ’tis but just that it be served to its taste.
“True comedy has one aim, as has every kind of poem, and this aim is to imitate the action of men and to paint the manners of the age in which they lived. Now, every poetical imitation is composed of three things: dialogue, versification, harmony or melody. Comedy and tragedy agree in this; but they differ, inasmuch as the former represents the action of the lower orders, and the latter only concerns itself with kings and high personages. Judge from that how much may be said against our comedies.
“At first our pieces were called autos, because they confined themselves to the imitation of common actions and interests. Among us Lope de Rueda was 825the model of this style; his comedies, which have been printed, are in prose, and of an order so low that he has introduced artisans and traces the loves of a blacksmith’s daughter. To-day we call them interludes, these antique works in which the rules of art are carefully observed, in which the action is simple and takes place among the middle classes—for an interlude was never seen in which kings figured. And this explains how plays little by little fell into deep discredit because of the lowness of style, and how they put kings and princes into comedy, to the great satisfaction of the ignorant.
“In the beginning of his Ars Poetica Aristotle relates, in a manner quite obscure, it is true, the debate which took place between Athens and Megara touching the originator of the theatre—the Megarians attributing this glory to Epicharmus, while the Athenians claimed it for Magnes. Donat traces back the first attempts to the ancient sacrifices, and, in this respect following Horace, he attributes the origin of tragedy to Thespis, and that of comedy to Aristophanes. The Odyssey of Homer is the result of a comic inspiration, but the Iliad was the noble model of tragedy. It is in imitation of this poem that is composed my Jerusalem, which I have called a tragic epic. They commonly call by the name of comedy the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso of the celebrated poet Dante Alighieri, and Manetti gives the reasons for this in the preface to that poem.
“All the world knows that comedy, falling into disrepute, was condemned to silence for a time; that after that came the satyres, which, being still more cruel, passed away more promptly; and that then the new comedy was born.
“In the beginning dramatic works consisted but of choruses. Soon there was added a certain number of characters. But Menander, followed in this by Terence, rejected the choruses as tedious. This latter was a most scrupulous observer of the precepts; never did he raise the style of comedy to a tragic loftiness, wiser in that respect than Plautus, whom they have so much reproached for this fault.
“Tragedy is founded on fact, comedy on fiction, and the latter was called ‘flat-footed’ because it was played without cothurnus or scenery, and because it took its plots from the humblest classes. Yet then, as now, there were several kinds of comedy: there were pallium comedies and toga comedies, and pantomimes, and fabulæ atellanæ and tabernariæ.
“The Athenians, who gave prizes to their dramatic poets and to their actors, in their comedies rebuked wickedness and vice with antique elegance. This is why Cicero called comedy the mirror of manners, the image of truth—sublime attribute which raises Thalia to the rank of history, and which shows us how much she merits esteem and honor.
“But already it seems to me that you draw back, saying: ‘What use is this translating of books and this fatiguing show of erudition?’ Believe me, it is not without motive that I recalled to your memory all these things; I wished to let you see that you have asked me for an essay on dramatic art in Spain, where all plays are written contrary to art, and I wished to declare that our pieces are not according to right or the ancient rules. But let us leave this; you have recourse to my experience, and not to what I may have been able to learn of an art which tells us the truth, but to which the vulgar prefer the false.
“If, then, you asked me for the rules of the art, I should refer you to the wise and learned Rebortelo, and you would see explained in his book on Aristotle or on comedy what otherwise is scattered in a crowd of works without order and without light. But since you ask the opinion of those now in possession of the stage, acknowledging that the public has the right to establish the incongruous laws of our dramatic prodigy, I will tell you my idea, and your command must excuse my temerity. I should like, since the public is in error, to deck this error with agreeable colors; I should like, since it is no longer possible to follow the ancient rules, to find a mean between the two extremes.
“First choose the subject of your comedy, and, in spite of the old precepts, do not disquiet yourself whether there be or be not kings among your characters. I ought not to conceal, however, that our king and lord, Philip the Prudent, was angry every time he beheld a king on the stage, either because he saw in that a violation of the rules of the art, or because he thought that even in fiction the royal authority should not be presented too near the gaze of the people.
826“Besides, in this we draw near to the ancient comedy, in which Plautus did not fear to place even gods, as the part he gives Jupiter in the Amphitryon proves. Heaven knows it is difficult for me to approve of this. Even Plutarch, in speaking of Menander, formally blames ancient comedy; but since we in Spain have renounced the rules of the art and treat it cavalierly, this time the classicists are silenced.
“In mingling the tragic and the comic, and Terence with Seneca (from which results a species of monster like the Minotaur), you will have one part of the piece serious and the other farcical. But this variety pleases very much. Nature herself gives us the example of it, and it is from such contrasts that she gains her beauty.
“Take care only that your subject presents but one action; take care that your story is not overcharged with episodes (that is to say, with things which lead away from the main idea), and that no part can be detached without overthrowing the whole edifice. Do not trouble yourself about confining all the action within the space of one day, although it is the rule of Aristotle; we have already rejected his authority in mingling tragedy and comedy. Let us content ourselves with reducing the time as much as may be possible, unless the poet composes a story the action of which extends over several years, and in this case he could place the intervals of time in the ‘waits’—as, for instance, if one of his characters has a journey to take. These liberties, I know, disgust the critics. Well, the critics may stay away from our pieces.
“How many of these fellows cross themselves in horror, seeing several years given to an action which ought to be accomplished in the space of an artificial day—for they would not even accord us the twenty-four hours! For my part, considering that the eager curiosity of a Spaniard seated at the play cannot be satisfied even by showing him all the events from Genesis to the day of the Last Judgment in two hours, I think that, if our duty is to please the spectators, it is right that we should do all that is necessary to gain this end.
“The subject once chosen, write your piece in prose, and divide it into three acts, doing your best that each act, if it is possible, embrace but the space of one day. Captain Viruès, an illustrious writer, first put comedy in three acts, which before had gone on all fours like a child; and truly it was then in its infancy. I myself, at the age of from eleven to twelve years, wrote in four acts and four sheets, for each act was contained in a sheet of paper. In those days they played three little interludes in the intervals of the acts, and now it is much if they play even one, which is immediately followed by a dance. Dancing, however, fits so well into comedy that Aristotle approves of it, and Atheneus, Plato, and Xenophon do not blame it, except when it is not decent,[164] like that of Callipedes. The dance seems to me to replace amongst us the chorus of the ancients.
“The subject being treated in two ways, let them from the start be joined and well connected together until the end of the piece, so that one can divine the dénouement but at the last scene; for when the spectators know it they turn their faces to the door and their backs to the actors, to whom they have listened for three hours with interest, and of whom they think no more when they no longer need them to know what will be the result.
“Let the stage rarely remain empty. These delays make the spectator impatient and uselessly prolong the play; and besides being a great fault, to avoid it is to add art and grace to the work.
“Then begin to versify, and in your language, always choice, use neither brilliant thoughts nor witty remarks when you treat of domestic affairs; it suffices in such a case to imitate the conversation of two or three persons. But when you bring upon the stage a character who exhorts, counsels, or dissuades, you can allow yourself the use of fine language and striking ideas, and in this you will imitate nature; for when we give advice, when we wish to encourage or deter, we speak in a manner totally different from familiar chat. In this regard we follow the opinion of the rhetorician Aristides, who desires that the language of comedy should be clear, pure, and easy, like that of ordinary conversation, adding also that it should differ essentially from the tragic style, 827where we may use expressions pompous, sonorous, and glittering.
“Never quote Scripture, and take care never to offend taste by an affected erudition; to imitate the language of conversation you need name neither hippogriffs nor centaurs, nor the other mythological entities.
“If you make a king discourse, let it be with the dignity proper to the royal majesty; let the old man express himself with sententious gravity; let the conversation of lovers be replete with such lively sentiments as to move those who hear. In monologues let the character be totally changed; by this transformation let him force the spectators to identify themselves with him; let him speak and reply to himself in a natural manner; and if he bemoans a lover’s lot, let him not forget the respect due to the fair sex. Under all circumstances let the ladies preserve the modesty they ought to have; and if they don male attire (which is always very agreeable to the public), let this change of costume have a reasonable motive. In short, never paint impossible things, for the first maxim is that art can only imitate the possible.
“Let not a servant treat too lofty subjects, and take care not to put into his mouth those witty sayings which we have seen in some foreign comedies.
“Let your characters never forget their nature; let them remember at the end what they have said at first, lest we make the same reproach to them as was made to the Œdipus of Sophocles—that he had forgotten his fight with Laïus.
“Adorn the end of your scenes with some swelling phrase, with some joke, with lines more carefully polished, so that the actor at his exit does not leave the audience in ill-humor.
“In the first act lay the foundation; in the second let the complications commence, and contrive in such a way that until half through the third act no one can foresee the end. Always deceive the curiosity of the spectator by showing him, as though possible, a result entirely different from that to which the incidents seem to point.
“Let the versification be tastefully appropriate to the subject you treat. Decasyllabic lines suit lamentations; the sonnet is well placed in a monologue; descriptions demand the romantic stanza, although they are as brilliant as possible in octosyllabic metre. Triple-rhymed lines are reserved for grave affairs, and the redondillas[165] for lovers’ conversations.”
The sound sense of this little essay shows how thoroughly De Vega understood his subject. Writing to please the populace, not the learned and possibly hyper-critical, he had studied the playgoer and knew all his peculiarities—how to please him and how to take liberties with impunity. His comedies of Cloak and Sword are the least careless and the most admirable of his plays, and they were the most successful. The involved and complicated plots, the duels and disguises, the hurry and the vigor of this class of plays are seen to best advantage in Lope de Vega’s works. He had founded the school, and the bent of his genius fitted him to be its master. His works and those of his scholars went at once to all parts of Europe. In England Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Centlivre, Farquhar, Congreve, Wycherly, Holcroft, were his followers, copyists, plagiarists. Not only did others pillage him, but, like almost all prolific authors, he plagiarized from himself. Over thirty or forty times has he treated one subject: a lady and a knight forced to leave the court in disguise because of the persecutions of the king, and taking refuge in a village, where, after many mishaps and adventures, they are finally married. Of course in each of these twoscore plays the situations vary, but the central idea is the same in all. To an author of such facility the great difficulty was in the 828discovery of a subject. That was all he needed; its dramatic dressing was an easy task. Hardly one of the picturesque points of Spanish history did he neglect. His lighter plays were often historical. Generally they were not. His Perro del Hortelano (“Dog in the Manger”) is, for instance, an original invention. It contains a delightful sketch of a woman absorbed by jealousy, and yet unable to make up her mind to marry the loved one because of his inferior birth. Both lovers are drawn with delicious vigor—a vigor suggesting, perhaps remotely, Thackeray. This charming comedy shows of what things Lope was capable in this line had he so willed. It is somewhat in the style of Scribe at his best. Indeed, in many respects he was the precursor of Scribe, who greatly resembled him in fecundity, facility, and felicity of execution. More than one of his plays, if modernized, might pass for the work of the brilliant French dramatist.
But the best of Lope’s work is many degrees above the best of Scribe’s. In ingenuity and in originality, and in the conduct of the business of the stage, the Spaniard is at least the equal of the Frenchman, while in the depicting of passion he is by far the superior. Scribe was incapable of anything at all approaching the sombre and inevitable conclusion of the Star of Seville, appalling with the inexorable logic of fate. Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble has produced a spirited English play suggested by it, of which Lord Holland has given a long analysis with translated extracts. As he justly remarks, no mere relation of the plots of Lope’s plays would give a sufficient idea of the attractions they possess, “nor can they be collected from a mere perusal of detached passages. The chief merit of his plays is a certain spirit and animation which pervades the whole, but which is not to be preserved in disjointed limbs of the composition.”
It is easy to find the reason for Lope de Vega’s theatrical activity. He was poor, and play-writing was profitable. He says somewhere that poverty and himself formed a copartnership to work for the stage. At the close of the sixteenth century Spain was divided into several almost independent provinces, and there was no interprovincial copyright; the bookseller of Castile could reprint and sell for his own profit the successful work first published in Leon. An author in those days could not even get pay for advance-sheets. Under these circumstances publishers naturally paid authors little or nothing. Literature was a labor of love. The dramatic taste, however, of the Spanish people was increasing. The two companies of actors gradually grew to forty, and the forty audiences asked for novelty. The managers endeavoring to satisfy this demand, the consumption of comedies was something enormous. There was a uniform price fixed in advance: a comedy was worth five hundred reals, equivalent to about forty or fifty dollars of our money. The reward was not great, but the labor was light—at least to Lope. Dramatic work paid; other literature did not. Lope would have been certainly justified in devoting himself exclusively to the drama. He might labor in other fields; on the stage he ruled. What is done quickly may die quickly, and few of Lope’s plays hold the stage to-day even in Spain. But if his plays are not seen, his influence is visible 829in the drama of France, of England, of Germany, and of Spain, his own country, of the literature of which he and Calderon and Cervantes are the greatest glories. Calderon was his follower and Cervantes was his friend. Although it has been said they were at enmity, it is known that Lope de Vega praised Cervantes, and the author of Don Quixote generously eulogized his more successful rival thus: “At last appeared that prodigy of nature, the great Lope de Vega, and established his monarchy on the stage. He conquered and reduced under his jurisdiction every actor and author in the kingdom.... And though there have been many who have attempted the same career, all their works together would not equal in quantity what this single man has composed.”
And Cervantes wrote these lines almost twenty years before Lope de Vega’s death, almost twenty years before he had ceased composing. It is with the following brilliant paragraph that Mr. Ticknor, always strongly prejudiced in favor of Cervantes, begins his historical criticism of Lope’s life and labor, and with it we end: “It is impossible to speak of Cervantes as the great genius of the Spanish nation without recalling Lope de Vega, the rival who far surpassed him in contemporary popularity, and rose, during the lifetime of both, to a degree of fame which no Spaniard had yet attained, and which has since been reached by few of any country.”
The motives which impel men to their best actions are not always, perhaps they are not generally, the best possible motives. It is not improbable that more men are driven to the tribunal of penance by attrition than are led thither by contrition. If this be true of men in their individual and private affairs, it is still more strikingly true of politicians and statesmen in their public acts. He would indeed be fanciful and credulous who should imagine that Mr. Gladstone, in framing, advocating, and insisting upon the passage of his bill for the disestablishment and disendowment of the Protestant Church in Ireland, was inspired by a pure love of abstract justice and right, and a disinterested desire to relieve the Irish people from a flagrantly unjust burden and a crying wrong. He saw as clearly as any one that this wrong existed, but he perceived also that by removing it he would win popular support for himself and his party. It is tolerably safe to say that had Mr. Gladstone imagined that the passage of the bill for the disestablishment of the church would have resulted in the expulsion of himself and his party from power, he would not have urged the measure. In this case there were two motives: one positively 830and abstractly good, the other good in the estimation of those who believed that the continuance of power in the hands of the Liberal party was desirable. The latter incentive was the ruling one. Mr. Gladstone, we believe, would not have advocated a measure which he knew to be bad, although this advocacy might have secured him an extension of power. Nor would he have insisted upon the adoption of a measure which he knew to be good had he known that this insistence would deprive him of power. But he saw that while the disestablishment and disendowment of the alien church in Ireland would be an act of justice in itself, it would also be a good political stroke, tending to strengthen his own position and to give a longer lease of power to his party.
One need not trouble himself to assign higher motives than these to the Tory government, which, to the surprise and delight of the Catholics in Ireland, has brought forward a really fair scheme for intermediate education in Ireland, and seems honestly disposed to carry it at the present session of Parliament. Just as we write the bill has passed the House of Lords, and is about to be brought up for final passage in the Commons. The queen’s speech at the opening of Parliament contained a promise that a bill for the promotion of intermediate education in Ireland should be introduced; but it was not until events made probable the speedy dissolution of Parliament and a general election that this promise was redeemed. It is not uncharitable to suppose that the government felt it necessary to have something to offer to Ireland in the event of an appeal to the constituencies under circumstances that would make every vote important. The bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords on the 28th of June—a moment when it was still possible that England might soon find herself embroiled in a foreign war, and when it was given out in governmental circles that Parliament was to be dissolved and a general election ordered. The third reading and final passage of the bill in the Lords took place some two weeks afterwards. Meanwhile the position of affairs had somewhat altered: the conclusion of the labors of the Congress of Berlin and the disclosure of the Treaty of Constantinople had greatly strengthened the hands of the government; the Opposition gave evidence of demoralization and discord in its own ranks, and toward the close of July the inspired journals announced that Parliament would not be dissolved this year, inasmuch as the general approval of the course of the government was too plain to be misunderstood or denied. The Irish Education Bill came up for its second reading in the House of Commons under these circumstances, and its friends fancied that they discovered a little less earnestness on the part of the government in pushing it forward than was displayed under the more critical circumstances in the House of Lords. Still, the probabilities are that the bill will pass and receive the royal assent before the close of the present session; and if this be so, the Tory government of Earl Beaconsfield will go down to posterity as the first administration which has had the courage, the wisdom, and the good-will to award to Ireland anything like justice in the matter of education.
The bill provides for a system 831of payments by results, and practically is identical with the system which Mr. Isaac Butt laid before the writer during a conversation in London four years ago. We are unaware whether the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cairns—who is, like Mr. Butt, a Protestant, an Irishman, and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin—has availed himself of Mr. Butt’s ideas in the preparation of the measure; but this is not at all improbable. Mr. Butt has expressed his cordial approval of the measure. To what extent the Tory government may have been able to inspire such organs of public opinion as the Saturday Review, and such writers as Matthew Arnold in the Fortnightly, we cannot say; but the fact is that for the first time in its existence the Saturday Review has recognized and defended the right of Irish Catholics to be educated in the way that they considered proper, and that Mr. Arnold seems suddenly to have arrived at the conclusion that the denial of a Catholic university in Ireland is a wicked, absurd, and mischievous freak of English Puritanism. The development of opinion in the Saturday Review is startlingly rapid. In a remarkable article written before the introduction of Lord Cairns’ bill the Review said that “the injustice of refusing either to give the Irish Roman Catholics a university or to allow them to set up one for themselves is so patent that if the demand for a charter were once more put forward it could scarcely be very long resisted.” But in the same pages it warned the Irish Catholics that they must not expect to receive anything like an endowment from the state for denominational education:
“The demand for a state endowment of a Roman Catholic university, or of a Roman Catholic college in a mixed university,” we were told, “may be perfectly just, but it is at the same time perfectly impracticable. For this purpose the surplus revenues of the Irish Disestablished Church will undoubtedly be treated as money belonging to the nation, and unless a radical and almost miraculous change should come over the whole mind and temper of the English people, not a shilling of it will be devoted to a denominational object. This determination on their part may be quite illogical, but it is very firmly rooted. The endowment of a Catholic university or a Catholic college may continue to furnish the text for an annual motion and for any number of annual speeches, but it will do nothing more. The late government attempted to meet the difficulty by establishing a university in which the subjects upon which Romanists and non-Romanists most differ should be temporarily excluded from the university course. Denominational colleges might be incorporated into this university and teach what they liked, but the teaching of the university was to leave burning questions on one side until the university should have become strong enough to run alone, and to decide for itself in what subjects it should give instruction to its students. The scheme fell through.”
Within a few days after this candid expression of opinion the same journal was applauding Lord Cairns’ bill for intermediate education in Ireland, which provides for the application of a certain portion of the surplus revenues of the Disestablished Church for the support of schools that certainly will be “denominational.” True, the money is not to be given directly in payment for religious instruction, but it is to be given in payment to teachers who will impart religious instruction to their pupils. “Not a shilling will be devoted to a denominational object,” said the Review one week; but a fortnight afterwards it was delighted with a 832measure that proposed to devote a million sterling for the support of a system which is nothing if it be not “denominational.” We rejoice at this sudden and remarkable conversion without inquiring too closely how it came. Catholics everywhere, and Irish Catholics especially, should rejoice when organs of opinion like the Saturday Review speak of a measure that is satisfactory to the hierarchy, the clergy, and the Catholic laity of Ireland as “an honest endeavor to supply Ireland with an article which she really wants, and which nothing but the absurd prejudices of Englishmen has prevented her from attaining before now.” It is certainly encouraging to hear Englishmen told by their most un-Catholic and worldly-minded instructor that in their rejection of Ireland’s claims for Catholic education they have been “singularly unamiable and singularly foolish”; that they have been bent upon educating Irish Catholics in a way in which Irish Catholics have been equally determined not to be educated.
The provisions of Lord Cairns’ bill are briefly these:
“A Board of Intermediate Education of seven commissioners—three to form a quorum—is to be appointed by the lord lieutenant—the members to be removable by him—with two assistant commissioners, who will also act as secretaries and inspectors, at salaries of one thousand pounds each, to be appointed by the same authority. Other officers may, from time to time, be appointed by the board, with the consent of the lord lieutenant and the approval of the treasurer. This board will be a mere examining body, conducting by its officers annual examinations in June and July at convenient local centres over Ireland. The programme of subjects includes six different classes of attainments: (1) languages, literatures, and history of Greece and Rome; (2) the same of England; (3) the same of France, Germany, and Italy; (4) mathematics, including arithmetic and book-keeping; (5) the natural sciences; and (6) another group of subjects to be named by the board. Candidates for examination must show that they have been under instruction in Ireland for the year previous to the date of the examination; and the maximum ages fixed are sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years respectively for the three years’ course. Certificates, or testamurs, will be given, setting forth the results of successful examinations; graded prizes, and also annual exhibitions, of from twenty to fifty pounds, will be awarded, the condition of attendance for at least one hundred days a year in an intermediate school being required in the latter. Holders of any other exhibitions are to be ineligible. The school in which the boy has attended the required number of days receives a bonus of three pounds should he pass in two subjects, four pounds for three, and five pounds for four of the six subjects of the first year’s course; another grant is increased in like ratio for the second and third years. No subject of religion is to enter into the examination or be paid for. A conscience clause (7), while not requiring any such school to be open to all or any classes, is thus framed to protect religious minorities who may attend: ‘The board shall not make any payment to the managers of any school unless it be shown to the satisfaction of the board that no pupil attending such school is permitted to remain in attendance during the time of any religious instruction which the parents or guardians of such pupil shall not have sanctioned, and that the time for giving such religious instruction is so fixed that no pupil not remaining in attendance is excluded directly or indirectly from the advantages of the secular education given in the school.’ One million from the surplus funds of the Disestablished Church is to form the endowment for this scheme, being, in round numbers, £35,000 a year. The Church Temporalities Commissioners are empowered to borrow this sum, pending the close of the liquidation of the assets. The board may alter and amend the whole scheme, save so as to change its leading principles, and may frame codes and rules and lay them before Parliament, when, if not objected 833to by either House within three weeks, they acquire the force of law.”
The debate in the House of Lords on the second reading of the bill was characterized by a remarkable exhibition of good sense and good feeling among the Protestant members who spoke, while the remarks of the two Catholics who expressed their approval of the measure, Lord O’Hagan and Lord Emly (formerly Mr. Monsell), were discreet and well considered. Lord O’Hagan gave what he properly described as some “startling statistics” concerning the aptitude of Irishmen for fitting themselves for the discharge of public trusts, even under the limited and discouraging conditions of education which had thus far prevailed in Ireland. He showed that England has 72-1/2 per cent. of the population of the United Kingdom, Ireland 17 per cent., and Scotland 10-1/2 per cent. Since 1871 there had been 1,918 places in the excise and customs bestowed in public competition. For these places there had been 11,371 candidates, of whom 11 per cent. were Scotch, 46 per cent. English, and 43 per cent. Irish. Of the places Scotland gained 6 per cent., England 38 per cent., and Ireland 56. Of every 100 Scotch candidates 9 passed, of every 100 English 14, and of every 100 Irish 22.
These figures showed what the youth of Ireland could do when they were educated. But what were their opportunities? As children, up to fifteen they might avail themselves of an excellent primary education, but after that they have few if any opportunities of advancing further. The fact was undeniable that for three hundred years legislation has been directed against education in Ireland, except in a form in which the people would not receive it. The bill now proposed was the first step in the contrary direction, and in Lord O’Hagan’s opinion, if it were administered in the same impartial and fair spirit which had dictated its framing, its results would be most wholesome.
The bill, on the whole, although not perfect, is so great a contrast to all the former educational measures which England has devised for Ireland, and is conceived in so different a spirit, that the Irish Catholics are right in accepting it gladly. It is only to be hoped that the House of Commons will prove to be as reasonable and just as the Lords have been, and allow the bill to pass without mutilating it by mischievous amendments. For half a century England has been tinkering at Irish education, always with the idea that she could compel the Irish to accept Protestant education if Catholic education were made impossible for them. Thus was devised the national system of 1831, the queen’s colleges of 1845, the supplementary charter of 1866, Lord Mayo’s charter scheme of 1867, the unfortunate University Bill introduced by Mr. Gladstone in 1873, the National Teachers’ Act, and Mr. Butt’s University Bill. The English government in their present measure do not storm the Plevna of the religious difficulty; they simply turn it. They do not propose to establish any new institutions, nor to aid the erection of any, nor to subject to inspection and control any of the existing intermediary schools that have been founded by the zeal of the clergy and the charity of the faithful. They leave these alone; but they offer to reward them, and all 834other similar schools that may be founded, by giving prizes to their pupils, and a bonus to the schools themselves of from fifteen to twenty-five dollars for each pupil who meets certain conditions. The Irish Catholic schoolmasters and schoolboys will not be afraid to enter into this competition; on the contrary, they will “leap at it,” and the best results may be expected to follow. More important still, this step, once taken, will lead ere long, by logical consequence, to the settlement of the Irish university question in the same way. Lord Beaconsfield’s administration of the government of England promises to live in history as an epoch of many brilliant and important events; but if under his rule the Catholic education of Ireland is adequately and satisfactorily provided for, that will be really a more lasting and glorious monument to his memory than his diplomatic victories at Berlin, his second conquest of India, or his virtual annexation of Asia Minor to the British crown.
It was at precisely half-past ten, as he satisfied himself by looking at his watch, on the morning of the 17th of June, in the year 1743, that a young gentleman got up from a chair in front of the Café Procope (just then opening with that air of stretching itself, rubbing its eyes, and yawning which marks a café in the ante-meridian hours). He stood for a moment twirling his cane and his moustache alternately, and then, as if suddenly reminded by the look of the café of a great moral duty omitted, stretched himself slightly and yawned prodigiously. It was, to be sure, rather early in the day to begin yawning, except for cafés; but then this young chronologer had his own way of dividing time, and, believing with the poet that the best of all ways to lengthen our days is to snatch a few hours from the night, what was early in the morning for most men was only somewhat late at night for him. It is to be noted, too, since the most trifling incidents in the life of a hero are worthy of record, that he yawned with such admirable self-possession, with such a mingling of good-will and graceful languor; he had so much the air of giving his whole mind to it, and at the same time of being so used to yawning that he really didn’t care so much for it after all, that you saw at once he was a man of distinction, to whom a yawn was not, as to most of us, a rare luxury, but a daily, nay, an hourly, a half-hourly, necessary of life.
Much might here be said, if space permitted, of a highly instructive nature, on the philosophy of yawning and its many varieties: the go-to-bed yawn; the get-up yawn; the tired yawn, the yawn of simple lassitude; the good-humored yawn, which takes itself as an excellent joke; the peevish yawn, which denies itself acridly as if it were a crime; the writer’s yawn and the reader’s yawn (quod Jupiter omen avertat!); the chronic yawn and the fixed yawn which merges into the drawl; the imitative yawn, into which unwary grandmothers are seduced by wicked little boys with slowly-flapping palm; the bored yawn, which is a protest against the world in general; the well-bred yawn, which is a protest against the immediate company, and is practised only in solitude. (It is, of course, the last-named sort in which our hero indulges.) There is a great deal of character, too, in a yawn, from your timid little lady’s yawn, shrinking away and hiding behind fan or handkerchief, or with hypocritical feminine art so moulding itself that, like Lucy Fountain’s, “it glides into society a smile,” to your open, hearty, man’s yawn, showing all its grinders shamelessly, as if it were a fine natural prospect one ought to be grateful for. Napoleon judged men, as he led them, by their noses;[166] a true philosopher would classify them by their yawns.
Meantime, however, we are leaving 838our hero yawning at the risk of dislocating his jaw and of setting the reader to keep him company. Let us, therefore, resume. Having indulged himself sufficiently in this refreshment, and recomposed his features again with some care, the young gentleman stood for a moment irresolute, tapping his boot with his cane, and then, as if his mind were made up, set off at a brisk pace in the direction of Notre Dame. As he stepped out it did not need his showy uniform, which was that of the famous corps of Mousquetaires, his jingling spurs, or his long rapier, of a heavier make than the dress-sword then worn by every gentleman, to show him for a soldier. You saw it in his measured stride, in every movement of a lithe and graceful yet strong and well-knit figure, in the gay recklessness of his manner, and especially in the ardent and somewhat imperious glance of his dark gray eye. A trace of superciliousness and vanity on his bold, handsome face you would have pardoned to his years and comeliness. Women smiled kindly on the gay young mousquetaire as he passed them, and were not ill-pleased at the kisses he flung them in promiscuous homage from the tips of his gloved fingers. Male glances not so kind, instinct, indeed, with smouldering scorn and hatred, were shot at him covertly too—glances such as a half-century later gloated openly with savage ferocity over the death-struggles of other hapless young mousquetaires dying hopelessly and gallantly, sword in hand, for a king who knew how to make locks but not laws, and a queen who could win all hearts but those of her people.
But right little recked our young mousquetaire of glances, hostile or kindly, from those he looked upon but as a rabble of the gutter, to be kicked or beaten like other animals out of his lordly path. The young summer in his blood all unconscious of that slumbering storm, he strode along, dispensing musk and kisses, and gaily humming a madrigal of Benserade, to the Rue des Poulies, and along that street, picking his way daintily over the wretched pavement till he came in front of a certain bric-à-brac shop. There he paused, hesitated a moment, and, pulling off his plumed hat and putting on his most fascinating smile, bowed low to two persons standing in the doorway.
This simple act of courtesy had a singular effect on the two persons in question, a young man and a young woman. This effect was apparently the same on both: they first colored violently, then frowned, then turned pale. But to an observer in the attic window over the way it seemed that the internal emotions indicated by these facial changes were very unlike in each. The young man seemed—to this observer—to be moved by displeasure rising even to intense rage; the girl’s uppermost feeling seemed to be embarrassment, and displeasure, if any, only at being caused embarrassment. But the observer could not quite decide that she was displeased at all by this act of politeness, and he inclined rather to think that her blush was caused by pleasure at seeing the young mousquetaire, while her frown was directed at her companion for his inopportune presence.
“Yes, that is it,” said this acute analyst to himself: “the blush was for the mousquetaire, whom she is glad to see, the frown for M. De Trop, who is in the way, and the pallor for herself, whom she heartily 839wishes out of the way in the row she foresees coming.”
While this thoughtful philosopher of the attic was thus moralizing a curious incident took place. The girl, who held some roses in her hand, dropped one of them, no doubt from agitation. The mousquetaire sprang forward to seize it. As he stooped over the flower the young man of the doorway, with an angry exclamation, thrust him back with such good-will that he reeled into the roadway and came near falling. Recovering himself in an instant, he whipped out his sword and rushed upon the other, crying:
“Baseborn scullion! darest thou raise thy hand to a gentleman? Thy life shall pay it.”
This was not, perhaps, his exact language, but it is so much nicer than what he really did say that we will let it stand in despite of history. At all events the young man understood him very clearly to express an intention of skewering him upon the spot; so, with a natural reluctance to being skewered, he armed himself with an iron bar used for fastening the door of the bric-à-brac shop, and resolutely awaited the onset.
At sight of these warlike overtures the girl screamed and the neighbors came flocking to doors and windows in pleasurable anticipation. The philosopher in the attic appeared to await the issue with composure.
Suddenly she who was the lovely cause of strife between the heroes stepped forward.
“Forbear, gentlemen,” she cried. “For shame! Would you shed blood for a paltry flower? If ’tis but a rose you want, here is one for each of you.”
And with a charming mixture of shyness and coquetry-the coquetry of a pretty woman who feels herself to be the object of contention between brave men—she proffered to each of the champions a rose.
The mousquetaire sheathed his sword at once, seized his flower with rapture, pressed it to his lips and to his heart, and looked altogether so languishing and sheepish that the young girl had to bite her lips to control a smile. She could not so easily hide the laugh that sparkled in her dancing eyes and made them still more dazzling.
The young man of the doorway received his rose with reluctance, seemed half disposed to reject it, and more than half disposed to throw it away after taking it, and fell back with so sullen and sulky an air that the Helen of this Iliad could forbear no longer, but laughed outright and merrily.
At that electric stroke of happy ridicule the clouds passed and the air cleared; the storm was over. The neighbors withdrew discontentedly to their shops, while the mousquetaire, with another bow and smile, departed. But he did not kiss his finger-tips to this young girl, as he had to the others.
The philosopher of the attic surveyed these events with conflicting emotions.
“Humph!” said he, rather ruefully, “the roses I spent my last sou for, the price of my breakfast, in fact, to lay upon her window-sill this morning. The one in the gutter, I suppose, is for me; was it by accident or design she dropped it? I wonder which of them she likes best?”
Gentle reader—for in these days it is only a gentle reader will deign to cast an eye over a simple love-tale like this—go with us but a little 840way, and we will try to unravel the philosopher’s problem.
Had you chanced, then, miss or madam, to be your great-great-grandmother—as, Heaven be praised! you did not—and had you happened to be in the neighborhood of the Rue des Poulies in the year of grace 1743, and had it occurred to you to ask for the richest man in the quarter, public opinion would have answered unhesitatingly, “Papa Lamouracq, who keeps the bric-à-brac shop.” And had you further inquired who was the finest fellow and the best match in the neighborhood, the vote would still have been nearly unanimous for Raoul Berthier, the well-to-do ironmonger of the Quai de la Ferraille. And had you once more sought to know who was the prettiest girl—well, here there might have been some dissent, for the other prettiest girls and their mammas would no doubt have cast a scattering vote or so; but, counting the blind beggars for whom her hand was ever open, and the babies she was always ready to romp with, not to speak of the shrewd old fathers of families, who saw her beauty, as shrewd old fathers will, in the light of her imagined expectations, a decided majority would still have been given for Pauline Lamouracq, the old brocanteur’s young and only daughter.
Now, however public opinion may have erred with regard to two of the persons named—and, indeed, Papa Lamouracq, whenever the matter was broached, would protest, with many oaths and shrugs and groans, that, so far from being the richest man in the parish, he was in reality the very poorest (but what bric-à-brac dealer was ever otherwise, especially if he be an Auvergnat, as in Paris he generally is when he is not a Jew?)—certainly it made no mistake with regard to Pauline. Pretty beyond a doubt she was, with her trim young figure and her dark brown hair and eyes, lit both with a flash of golden light, and her—but, no; let us not attempt the impossible task of describing the charm and freshness of girlish beauty at eighteen. Do you, miss, look in the glass, or do you, sir—if so be it that stray masculine eyes shall linger over these artless pages—think of her you love best, and let that be our Pauline. Only herself seemed to be unconscious of her great beauty; for, though her mirror must have whispered to her now and again the charming secret, as it will to other young maidens, she fled from that perfidious counsellor, lest she should have a grievous addition to the load of peccadilloes she was wont to carry weekly to the confessional of her good friend and adviser, the old curé of the Church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois.
Indeed, she had fewer incentives to vanity than many girls not half so pretty, inasmuch as she had fewer admirers. Not that there were not many who sighed for her in secret; but Raoul’s temper was known to be as quick as his hand was heavy, and they discreetly held aloof. Raoul and Pauline had been betrothed from a very early age, and the former was not one to brook any rivalry. From the cradle almost he had been wayward and headstrong. Years before, when little more than a child, he had run away to sea, and strange tales were whispered of his doings with Jean Bart, that famous privateer and scourge of perfidious Albion. 841Now that he had come back a fine, bronzed, athletic fellow of six or seven and thirty to take his place in his dead father’s business, and handle, the gossips said, a very pretty pot of money, he was more violent and self-willed and exacting than ever; and there were not wanting those who, seeing the look that came too often into his dark, handsome face, shook their heads and prophesied that all would not be sunshine in the married life of the pretty Pauline.
If she herself shared any of these misgivings she never showed it, but was as affectionate, and even obedient, to her intended husband as the most jealous swain could ask. On one point only did she go counter to his wishes, and that was in seeing a distant cousin, André Thiriot, who alone of all the young fellows in the neighborhood made her the object of an absorbing devotion that every one but herself laughed at. In truth, poor André was not fitted out by nature for the ideal lover. Lame from a fall in his childhood, small and insignificant in appearance (but for a high white forehead and a pair of large and brilliant eyes), and a beggarly huissier’s clerk to boot, he was a pretty fellow, forsooth, to aspire to the hand of the richest heiress in the quarter. So Papa Lamouracq thought, and, when his poor kinsman first hinted timidly at the idea nearest his heart, bade him begone with bitter rebuke and reviling. “He marry Pauline, indeed! Puny weakling! No man should have his girl who could not protect her with an arm as stout as his own. In these days,” said Papa Lamouracq, very truly, “who knows at what moment his women-kind may need protection from these vile marquises and mousquetaires that go about troubling the peace of honest folks?” And Papa Lamouracq, who had served in the wars, drew himself up to his full five feet nine—which in France, you know, is a colossal stature—squared his broad shoulders, and looked very fierce and resolute. It was, indeed, a time when beauty and innocence of the bourgeois class, where, indeed, very much that there was at Paris of beauty allied to innocence resided, needed stout hearts and strong arms to fence it. The gay courtiers of Louis XV. respected few laws, human or divine, and no woman not of the privileged classes was safe from their insults.
So poor André was sent to the right-about with a very large sized flea in his ear, and could only see his fair cousin thereafter by stealth. Raoul swore that if he ever caught him prowling about her he would break every bone in his body. For that threat, indeed, André cared little, for he had a brave spirit in his little body; but he loved his cousin too well to cause her needless annoyance, and he had perforce to content himself with the stolen interviews she could give him at such odd times as her father was away with Raoul at the cabaret, which, indeed, was only too often. Nor was Pauline loath to profit by these chances to see her cousin. That everybody repulsed and derided him was to her woman’s nature of course only an additional reason for liking him. Then, too, he had been her mother’s favorite, almost as a child to her on the death of his own parents, and, lastly, he talked very differently from the others about her. Pauline, thanks to the watchful care of her good friend and godfather, the curé of St. Germain, 842had had a better education than most girls of her class, and André was a genius and a poet—at least, they both thought so; which, for them, came to much the same thing. He rhymed about as well as the rest of the rhyming crew, in an age when in France and England there were many rhymers and few poets, and those few not always greatly cared for; when Voltaire passed sentence on Homer Shakspere; when Dorat’s perfumed nothings fluttered in every boudoir, while Gilbert starved in a garret. To the taste of one simple maiden André’s madrigals and sonnets and what-not were as good as the best, and she never tired of hearing them. Even when she could not see him she could still hear them; for our poet had a very pretty turn for music as well, and from his window opposite hers would sing her his chansons, set to his own music, with such ardor and perseverance as quite enchanted his pretty cousin, and won for the performer a singular degree of unpopularity among his neighbors.
So the lame bard remained Pauline’s only open admirer until one eventful day when there came spurring through the dull and sombre street, lighting it up like a flash of sunshine, a splendid vision of a mousquetaire. Pauline chanced to be standing in the doorway of her father’s shop, and, as he caught sight of that lovely picture set in the dark frame of the portal, the bold cavalier, riding to her side, straightway proceeded to woo her in the off-hand fashion of the court. But in the soft, half-wondering reproach of the brown eyes lifted for but a moment to his own there was a depth of purity and innocence that baffled this intrepid courtier more than any words; he stammered over his first sentence, hesitated, broke down, and—blushed. Yes, incredible as it may seem, in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in the very focus of civilization, a mousquetaire blushed. To be sure he was young. Perhaps it was a reflection from his glowing cheek that brought to Pauline’s pale one a rosier tint; perhaps it was simply wonder at this unprecedented phenomenon; Pauline, too, was young, and the culprit, it must be owned, was very handsome. At all events he could only gasp out a hasty apology before she withdrew and left him to ride away, over head and tingling ears in love.
Raoul heard of this encounter and roared—burst out into a furious passion of rage and jealousy that left Pauline in tears.
André saw the meeting from his eyrie in the attic and—sighed. With one handsome rival he might hope, he might even, with some aid from the muses, hold his own; but with two—? The poor bard took to reading Tibullus; he had no heart for madrigals when life itself was an elegy, and for a night or two the neighbors slept in peace.
One morning a young man presented himself to Papa Lamouracq and asked to be taken as an apprentice to learn the bric-à-brac trade. Papa Lamouracq was a little shy of apprentices; but as he really needed help and the premium offered was large, he could not resist the temptation to his bargaining instinct, and the postulant was accepted.
The new-comer was active, intelligent, and above all good-looking; and these virtues soon won 843for him a fair place in Pauline’s esteem until she caught him making sheep’s eyes at her with extreme persistency and uncompromising sheepishness. Thereat she reproved him sharply, and, to punish him, set him to washing the dishes—a task he undertook with entire good-humor, but so much more zeal than skill that he broke more than he cleaned and speedily had to be relieved. Then he took to sighing like a bellows, and when his mistress laughed at him this audacious intruder made love to her outright, and of course got properly snubbed for his pains. But fancy Miss Pauline’s amazement when this astonishing apprentice, so far from being abashed by her chilling rebuke, went down upon his marrow-bones, and, revealing himself as the Chevalier d’Aubuisson, plumped her an offer of his heart and hand and a fine old château in Normandy.
The sight of this dashing mousquetaire in a shop-boy’s apron seemed so absurd that the young lady thus tenderly adjured felt more inclined to laugh than ever—indeed, she was a merry little maiden, more given to smiles than tears—but the evident sincerity of the young man’s emotion touched her.
“He has cut off that lovely moustache to be near me,” was her pensive reflection, as she gazed upon his eloquent, upturned face, from which that military embellishment was indeed missing. No doubt, too, she was secretly flattered and pleased; for it was not every day, I promise you, in the Paris of a century ago, that a shopman’s daughter had the chance of refusing to be the wife of a handsome young noble. And then what young girl’s heart could help going out a little to the romantic side of this madcap adventure?
But there was another aspect to the affair which made her grave at once.
“Pray rise, sir,” she said coldly; “this position is unbecoming to you and uncomfortable to me. ’Twas not well done, M. le Chevalier, to steal into my father’s household under false colors; and though I feel the honor you do me, I cannot listen to you further. I am already affianced. If you have any of the regard you profess for me, you will instantly quit this travesty and this house.”
This was reasonable advice, so our impetuous young mousquetaire rejected it at once. He would never leave her, he vowed with vehemence, till she had promised to be his.
This wild proposal plunged poor Pauline into great perplexity. To tell her father or her intended would, she foresaw, precipitate a terrible row and scandal with probable bloodshed; and perhaps it was not wholly tenderness for her relatives which checked her as she glanced furtively at her embarrassingly handsome wooer, revolving the problem of how most easily to get rid of him in an anxious mind. Nor could she go to her cousin; she blushed, she scarce knew why, as she thought of it. So, as usual in all the little difficulties of her life, she betook herself to her friend the curé, who soon found a key to the riddle.
The next day there rode up to the door of Papa Lamouracq’s bric-à-brac shop an orderly with a letter for M. le Chevalier d’Aubuisson, and by noon his majesty’s corps of mousquetaires had received a reluctant and rather mutinous reinforcement of one. And—O bitter 844and humiliating thought!—the moustache had been sacrificed in vain.
So matters stood in the Rue des Poulies at the time of that remarkable meeting which opens this eventful history, and apropos of which an observer in the attic asked himself, as you may remember, “Which does she like best?” Raoul’s rage upon this knew no bounds; and Papa Lamouracq, when he came to hear of it, was little better. They both insisted that the wedding-day should be fixed at once, and for no distant date, and poor Pauline was fain to consent. Yet, as the fatal day drew near, she shrank from it more and more. School herself as she would into obedience to her father’s will and love for her future husband, the coming marriage filled her with an invincible repugnance. Was it because she had given her heart to another, or only because Raoul’s brutality had alienated her esteem? I do not know; she did not know herself: it was a question she never dared ask her heart.
In the midst of this moral conflict by which she was so cruelly torn her mind went back often and longingly to the serenity and calm of the convent where she had passed so many of her early years, and to the peaceful, happy faces of the nuns. She yearned with an inexpressible yearning to be among them once more; she had even wild, half-formed thoughts of flying from her wretchedness and trouble and taking refuge in that quiet haven.
Naturally, therefore, when André, to whom she had dropped an intimation of her thought, urged her strongly to act upon it, she turned and rent him.
“How dare you say such things to me!” she cried with more passion than he had ever seen her show. “How dare you advise me to disobey my father! You know very well my first duty is to him. He wishes me to marry Raoul, and—and I wish it. I am not miserable. I love Raoul dearly, and we shall be very hap—hap—happy.”
And to prove the joyful nature of her anticipations she burst forthwith into tears.
The poor poet stood aghast; he was not prepared for this display of feminine consistency. Genius as he was, he had yet to learn that to set a woman against a doubtful project she is coquetting with in her mind, the surest way is to urge her to it. Dearly as he loved his cousin and wished to make her his wife, he loved her happiness more, and would joyfully have seen her take the veil, marry the mousquetaire even, whom he suspected her of favoring, anything to escape this marriage, in what he foresaw for her only wretchedness, if not death. Raoul in his drunken furies, he knew, would stop at nothing, and even as a lover he had threatened her life.
“But,” he stammered, conscience-stricken, “I thought you said you wished to be in the convent.”
“You know I never said anything of the kind,” sobbed the indignant fair. “I forbid you ever to say such things to me again. You are very unkind to tease me so, and it is only your mis—miserable jealousy.”
The poet winced under this poisoned shaft, but was too generous to retaliate. His cousin had the right of suffering to be unjust.
Nevertheless, he could not forego 845another effort to rescue her, as he called it. It wanted but a day or two of the wedding when he next got a chance to see her, for she was now watched and guarded almost like a prisoner. Drawing a little packet from his pocket, he said with a sad smile:
“Pauline, here is my wedding gift. It is the most precious, indeed, the only precious, thing I have.”
Pauline opened the packet. It held only a withered rose. She looked in perplexity from the gift to the giver.
“Do you know what rose it is, Pauline? ’Tis the one that was trampled in the mire the day the mousquetaire and Raoul fought.”
“Dear André!” said Pauline, pressing his hand. She was greatly touched by his unobtrusive devotion.
“I have often wondered,” she went on musingly, “where those roses came from.” (You see, miss, a posy was more of an event in this simple life than in yours, bouqueted and basketed as it is.) “I have sometimes thought, do you know, it was—” Pauline stopped suddenly and blushed.
“Raoul, of course,” said André quietly.
“No,” said Pauline briefly, and blushed again.
“Not the mousquetaire?” said André in affected amazement.
“Yes, yes,” said Pauline, still very rosy—“that horrid mousquetaire. I’m sure,” she added with a toss of her pretty head, “he had impudence enough for anything.”
This is the way, messieurs, that the ungrateful fair for whom we run all risks characterize our devotion.
“No,” said André gently, “it was not the mousquetaire.”
The girl looked up quickly, a sudden light in her eyes.
“Dear André!” she said again, “you are very good to me.”
They were silent awhile, and then the poet, taking the girl’s hand, said earnestly:
“Listen to me, Pauline. There is a condition to my gift. It is that if at the last moment you should change your mind in regard to—to—” he hesitated—“to what we once spoke of, you will send me back this rose,[167] and I will find a way to save you.”
Pauline made no answer; but she no longer scolded, and André was satisfied that she had agreed. We shall see if he was right.
On the night before Pauline’s wedding-day a merry and noisy company of mousquetaires were gathered in the Café Aux Fers Croisés. Some were playing billiards, others baccarat; all were drinking, and nearly all were singing and shouting at the top of their lungs. Only our old friend, the Chevalier d’Aubuisson, sat apart by himself, very woebegone and silent.
A comrade, drawing near, slapped him on the shoulder and said boisterously:
“Come, come, my friend, cheer up. Don’t mope your life away because your light o’ love is false.”
This delicate counsel the mousquetaires greeted with vociferous applause.
846D’Aubuisson sprang to his feet with flashing eyes.
“Vicomte de Brissac,” he cried, “hold! The first who breathes a word against that angel dies. I swear it, by this sword!”
The mousquetaires were silent; not that they respected his evident emotion—they respected little enough, not even themselves—but they did respect his sword.
“Why, man!” said De Brissac at length, “you don’t mean to say you are in earnest—that you would marry the girl?”
“To-morrow, if she would have me. God knows how willingly; and to-morrow I lose her for ever.”
With a groan the chevalier sank back into his seat and buried his face in his hands.
“Tut, tut, man!” said De Brissac, who was naturally kind-hearted. “If you love her so, why give her up tamely? She must like you better than this shop-keeper.” Our mousquetaires had a brave contempt for all men who earned their living honestly. “Why not make a bold push for it and carry her off from under his nose? We’ll all stand by you”—“That will we,” in chorus from the rest—“and, take my word for it, the bird will thank you for her rescue from the fowler.”
D’Aubuisson looked up quickly, a gleam of hope in his face. But his brow soon grew dark; he knew Pauline too well to believe that she would sanction or forgive such an act of violence, however much she loved him. And he was more than half persuaded she did love him, in spite of her rejection, conceited young mousquetaire that he was; he was fully persuaded she did not love Raoul, both from his own observation and the statements of Papa Lamouracq’s old housekeeper, Angélique, whom he had won to his interests. If he could but bring her to consent! It was a forlorn hope, but he would make a last appeal.
He wrote a fervent letter to Pauline, proposing, if she agreed, to place her in charge of his aunt, the abbess of the Convent of Pont-aux-Dames, where she would be in safety until he could marry her. Both these lovers, you see, had the same thought, but with very different motives. This letter he despatched to his friend the housekeeper, promising her a royal reward if she got him an answer.
In an hour’s time the answer came: it was only a withered rose.
D’Aubuisson eyed it in blank amazement. Was it a cruel sneer, a mistake, or what?
“Bah!” cried De Brissac after a few moments’ study of the problem. “Love has made you dull, comrade, as it does most men. Don’t you see? Where is that weed I have seen you kissing a hundred times so insanely? This is the mate to it, and the message can have but one meaning: she is yours.”
Angélique confirmed this view, which our mousquetaire was only too willing to accept; so with much clinking of glasses and vowing of vows the rescuing party was made up.
All night long the poet kept lonely vigil in his attic, waiting and longing, and hoping against hope, for the rose which never came. Had it come he would have been puzzled to know what steps to take for Pauline’s deliverance; but somehow he felt he would compass it, if he had to ask the aid of his rival the mousquetaire, and though the price were his cousin’s hand. But the long hours dragged wearily on and 847no word came. The dawn found him still keeping his weary watch, no longer hoping, but haggard indeed and the picture of despair—a most dismal philosopher, who in all his philosophy could find no comfort.
It was a very gay wedding party that gathered next day at the Mill of Javelle, then a famous resort for the Parisian merrymakers, to do honor to the nuptials of Raoul Berthier and the lovely Pauline, less lovely now, alas! for care and sorrow had worn her almost to a shadow of her former self. With the wedding guests mingled freely an unusual number of masks; but their presence excited little remark and no objection, for it was one of the familiar privileges of the time. And the strangers, whoever they were, made themselves so agreeable to the feminine part of the company that by these, at least, they were voted a welcome addition to the pleasures of the day.[168]
It had been arranged that the wedding ceremony should be performed by the curé of St. Germain l’Auxerrois in a little chapel hard by at ten o’clock, and that the wedding breakfast should follow. But ten o’clock passed, and eleven, and still there was no sign of the good priest. Noon was drawing near when Papa Lamouracq swore roundly that they would wait no longer, but sit down to the feast at once, let the marriage take place when it might—a decision hailed with acclamation by his guests. Perhaps, too, a glance at Raoul’s condition—he had been drinking deeply all the morning and through the previous night—may have suggested the wisdom of postponing the ceremony.
At this moment one of the masks drew near Pauline, who stood a little apart, pale and sorrowful, and whispered hurriedly in her ear:
“Dearest, come; it is the time. A post-chaise waits for us in yonder clump. In an hour’s time we shall have you safe behind the convent walls.”
Pauline shrank from him in mingled astonishment and terror. Then he showed her a withered rose; she knew it at once for the same she had sent the night before to André upon receiving D’Aubuisson’s letter. This she had torn to pieces in a transport of indignation and bade Angélique carry the pieces back to the writer. But the very suggestion so terrified her in her nervous state with the idea of an attempted abduction such as was only too common in that lawless time, that her scruples yielded at last, and she resolved to take André’s advice and seek refuge in a convent. With this view she commissioned the housekeeper to carry to her cousin the signal rose. That crafty old person, however, shrewdly surmising that the return of his own torn letter would win her scant esteem or guerdon from her employer, took it upon herself to give him the rose instead—a message on which at need she could put her own construction.
At sight of the flower Pauline hesitated. Surely this could not be her cousin; the figure seemed much too tall, yet, if not, how came he by the signal? In her confusion and incertitude she suffered herself to be half-passively drawn by the unknown in the direction of the thicket he spoke of. As she did so the 848other masks drew together about them—a movement unnoticed by the rest of the company, whose thoughts and eyes were all intent upon the loaded and steaming tables, to which they were on the point of sitting down under the trees.
Suddenly a wild scream startled them. It was from Pauline, who had just caught sight of André’s pale, reproachful face gazing at her fixedly from the outskirts of the crowd. At her scream the wedding guests, headed by Papa Lamouracq, came hurrying towards the bride with various cries of anger, astonishment, and menace. The situation bade fair to be embarrassing.
But the chevalier was a man of promptness and decision, by no means one to draw back from an undertaking once begun. Besides, to him Pauline was only hysterical; she must be saved in spite of herself. Further disguise was useless; force only would now prevail. So catching the fainting girl in his arms as if she were an infant, and shouting, A moi, mousquetaires! he pressed on to the carriage.
But he was not to reach it unopposed, however. The word mousquetaires made plain the whole design to the dullest-witted in the assembly: the fame of those audacious scamps for similar exploits was wide-spread. Among the wedding company was more than one old privateering comrade of Raoul’s who had swung cutlass and boarding-hatchet by his side; and it so chanced that two other wedding parties had brought to the mill that same day some scores of sturdy blacksmiths and fishermen and stout butchers from the Halles. Armed with stools and benches, with sticks and stones, they flung themselves furiously upon the mousquetaires, some fifty or sixty in number. The latter, casting off mask and domino, and forming a circle about D’Aubuisson and the unconscious Pauline, defended themselves with vigor.
The fight was long and uncertain, and many were hurt on both sides. But disciplined valor won the day as usual over brute strength, and in spite of every effort of their antagonists the mousquetaires slowly but surely made their way towards the fatal thicket. Papa Lamouracq, himself wounded more than once, and disabled, could only gnash his teeth and howl impotent curses at the foe; the bridegroom, at his first step towards the scene of conflict, had staggered and fallen, and was lying on the grass in a drunken stupor; the little poet, bleeding already from a ghastly wound in the forehead, had to be forcibly held back from flinging himself like another Winkelried upon the bristling blades of the mousquetaires. All seemed lost.
But despair, too, has its inspirations. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, seeking everywhere for a weapon to annihilate his enemies, fell upon one of the steaming tureens of soup just served for the wedding feast. Instantly he caught it up and hurled it, contents and all, full at the heads of the victorious mousquetaires. Two went down at once before the shock; half a score were scalded by the boiling liquor; double that number—O much more direful and appalling tragedy!—had their splendid uniforms stained by good Mère Leroux’s most savory potage.
Shrewdly did Cæsar bid his veterans strike only at the faces of Pompey’s dandy cavaliers. Thus does history repeat itself. Death and torture our mousquetaires 849would have faced unflinchingly, and charged a battery as gaily as they would have danced a minuet; but their clothes were dear to them. For most of them they were their only clothes, and what wonder if at the onslaught of this novel and terrific weapon they wavered? So might the bravest knight who first faced the terrors of gunpowder have hesitated without shame to his courage. André’s example was infectious. From all sides was rained upon the hapless mousquetaires a shower of soups, ragouts and entremets, sauces, sausages and salads, omelettes aux fines herbes and omelettes sucrées, until they fairly broke and fled, dripping, not blood, but gravy at every pore, and dragging with them by main force their frantic leader, who wished not to survive the loss of his Pauline.
Need the sequel be told? Of course the valiant poet was rewarded with the hand of her he had loved so faithfully and rescued so oddly. Papa Lamouracq was loyal to his vow that only to the man who could protect his daughter should she be given, and it was Raoul’s turn to be sent off in disgrace. He sold out his business, disappeared from the Quai de la Ferraille, and betook himself to his old trade of privateering, or, many folks said, something worse. As for André, he became a famous poet, was presented at court, and duly enrolled among the glorious fellowship of wits—the great M. Voltaire deigned to call him confrère, much to Pauline’s indignation, for that great man’s notions were by no means to her taste—and his poems may no doubt still be found by those who look for them in the Bibliothèque Impériale.
What were they, do you ask? Truly I have never heard, but he was a most famous poet.
What was better, he was a most happy husband, and Pauline never regretted the chance which made her his wife instead of Raoul’s. She owned she had always liked him the best, which I dare say was true, though I suspect that in her secret heart she would have liked a more romantic fashion of being won, and was not over and above pleased when André’s friends, in allusion to his valor, called him Marshal Terrine or M. De Bouillon. But she was very happy, especially when, after her father’s death, they found themselves rich enough to fulfil that dream of every good Parisian, a neat little country house with a lovely garden in the suburbs.
And the poor mousquetaire? Ah! miss, you are right. Could we but have had him for our hero, which was indeed the author’s intention at the start, as you may see by looking back to the earlier pages of this veracious history! But fate, alas! is not to be gainsaid, and on the whole, perhaps, Pauline was better off with her poet. The chevalier could not face the ridicule poured upon him for his share in the Battle of the Soup-Kettle, as the wits called it. He got himself exchanged into a regiment at the front, and fell fighting gallantly in the decisive charge which broke the English column at Fontenoy.
I forgot to mention that Pauline’s favorite pastime in her country life was cultivating roses, with which her garden in the season fairly glowed; and on each anniversary of her wedding-day it was her custom to put by her husband’s 850plate at breakfast a little posy containing exactly three of the flowers in question, which he never failed to receive with an air of the utmost surprise as to where they could possibly come from.
On the 2d of July a certain, or rather uncertain, number of English, Irish, Scotch, Canadian, and American gentlemen met together in the long-desecrated chapel of Lambeth Palace; and on the 27th of the same month the same gentlemen, after listening to a discourse in St. Paul’s Cathedral from one of their number, the “Bishop of Pennsylvania,” bade each other farewell. During the twenty-five days that had intervened between these two dates the gentlemen in question had talked a great deal to and at each other, sometimes in public and sometimes with closed doors. A general sense of confusion concerning this assemblage seemed to pervade that portion of the public mind of London which paid any attention to it. The London newspapers, which must notice everything, from the arrest of a pickpocket to the reconstruction of an empire, could not agree upon the title to be given it. In the Morning Post it was spoken of as “The Lambeth Conference”; the Spectator called it “The Gathering of the Bishops”; the Times on one day entitled it “The Pan-Anglican Synod,” on another it spoke of it as “Episcopal Visitors”; the Pall Mall Gazette and the Saturday Review agreed upon “The Bishops at Lambeth” as a sufficiently safe and non-committal title; but the former, on one day, went so far as to venture to speak of the assemblage as “The Pan-Anglican Conference.” Nor did the reporters of the journals arrive at a consensus of opinion concerning the number of these gentlemen; one authority reporting them as numbering “something like eighty-five prelates,” while another placed the assemblage at “about one hundred,” and a third, with greater precision, spoke of “about one hundred bishops and four archbishops.” A still more notable diversity of opinion prevailed as to the purpose for which these gentlemen had come together—some of the writers in the journals insisting that the affair was a mere social gathering; others that it was a species of debating society composed exclusively of Anglican bishops; others that it was a conclave to devise combined action “to put down the Ritualists”; others that its purpose was to “sell out” to the pope, if peradventure he would buy; others that it covered a scheme for the “corporate unity” of the Protestant Episcopal Churches in Great Britain, Ireland, the colonies, and America, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as patriarch. The journals which care most for the respectability and perpetuation of the Anglican body besought the gentlemen to content themselves with talking, taking tea, and smoking in Mrs. Tait’s back garden, and not to attempt to do anything else. “We recommend the bishops,” said 851the Spectator, “not to attempt a pastoral, as they did last time; not to try their hands on points of creed; not to suppose that for any purpose of defining religious belief they will be strengthened by this concourse, if not rather weakened.” They might, perhaps, discuss “what concession could be made to pagan and heathen converts brought up under a very different morality from the Christian”—as, for instance, we suppose, whether a Turkish convert might not be permitted to indulge in his peculiar ideas regarding marriage, and whether a converted Thug should not be allowed to strangle a victim occasionally. Or they might even venture to discuss “the practicability or impracticability of church discipline”—that is, whether it be “practicable” or “impracticable” for a clergyman to refuse to marry a divorced person or to exclude an unrepentant murderer from the communion-table; or for a bishop to prevent one of his clergy from turning the communion service into a Methodist love-feast, or another from making it a close imitation of the holy sacrifice of the Mass. They might “discuss” these things, but they must not act upon them, and they must above all refrain from “discussing creeds.” “We strongly recommend the Pan-Anglican Synod,” exclaimed the Spectator, “to renounce entirely the superstition which attaches to such assemblages of bishops a sort of divine skill in discriminating truth from falsehood. Indeed, we believe them to be under very special incapacities for any such discrimination.” Honest and true advice, but hard for the so-called bishops to bear, as coming from a journal warmly attached to Anglicanism and edited by two prominent and zealous members of that church. No discussion of creeds! no discrimination of truth from falsehood! Why, here is the Anglican body throughout the English-speaking peoples, with a clergy no two of whom can agree upon the most vital dogmas of the Christian faith; who are disputing with each other and befogging the minds of their people with their discordant “views” upon the subject of baptismal regeneration; upon the sanctity and indissolubility of the marriage relation; upon the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. If these were true bishops, if their church were really a church and anything but a state-born and worldly association, these bishops would not have separated without not only “discussing” but defining the faith and providing for its preservation and enforcement.
They took the Spectator’s advice. They took it all the more readily, perhaps, because the Times pointed out to them that “these highly respectable gentlemen from the antipodes and the tropics, from the Transvaal and the Falls of Niagara,” must make up their minds that to eat “a dinner at the Mansion House” was the most important work they would have to perform, and that in “the social assemblages” that would follow they would “find more benefit than from their public conferences.” The Times frowned upon the suggestion that the Primate of All England countenances, even tacitly, the suggestion that he should be recognized as the metropolitan of the Anglican Church; the Saturday Review ridiculed the opinion that “the reliance of the independent communities upon England might be regulated 852and strengthened by declaring that the Archbishop of Canterbury was a patriarch, and Lord Penzance, we suppose, family lawyer all round,” and went to the extent of comparing the church to an “Odd-fellows’ society.” In the face of chaff like this the gentlemen from the antipodes and Niagara Falls, as well as those from Lincolnshire and Edinburgh, turned a deaf ear to the appeals alike of Ritualistic working-men and Low-Church green-grocers, and wisely contented themselves with eating the lord mayor’s dinner, going to sober evening parties, preaching sermons in London churches, and devoting a few hours each week to the discussion, in church-congress fashion, of such thrilling and vitally important themes as “Voluntary Boards of Arbitration,” or “the position of Anglican chaplains on the Continent of Europe and elsewhere.” To cap the climax, during the session of the conference the first anniversary of “the Reformed Episcopal Church of England” was held in Newman Hall’s church in London. The Reformed Episcopal Church of England, it may not be generally known, was imported into England from the United States, and had its birth by the secession of Bishop Cummings, Mr. Cheney of Chicago, and some others from the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Reformed Episcopal Church of England has a bishop—one Mr. Gregg—and at this anniversary meeting Bishop Gregg said:
“The Church of England might be likened to a ship. When he joined it he thought he was going straight to a Protestant port, but he afterwards found that the ship had turned its head, had altered its course, and was now bound straight for Rome. For this reason, as he did not want to go to Rome, he thought it best to come out of it. Some people had asked, ‘Why not remain in it and endeavor to alter its course? Why not try to reform it?’ His answer was that others had tried to do it and had failed, and therefore he had come to his present conclusion. After denouncing the evils of sacerdotalism Dr. Gregg said that he considered the present Prayer-book was the cause of many of the existing evils. The Reformed Episcopal Church had therefore entirely revised it, freed it from all sacerdotalism, had thoroughly uprooted all its dangerous dogmas, and the revised edition now in press would shortly be issued.”
The bishops at Lambeth were so fearful of disobeying the injunctions of the Spectator not to “discuss creeds,” or to attempt to “discriminate between truth and error,” that they did not even venture to rebuke Bishop Gregg or to take any steps against this schism. Indeed, how can they be sure that he is not right and that they are not wrong?
The first Pan-Anglican Synod, convoked eleven years ago, the London Times says, “excited some curiosity, mingled with more ridicule and remonstrances.” But it discharged its “apparent functions” to the satisfaction of all concerned. That is—
“It afforded to a great many hard-working gentlemen the opportunity of taking a holiday under the guise of an episcopal progress. A certain number among them it enabled to render an account in person to their constituents in England of the value they had received for the funds entrusted to their hands, and to beg for more. Over and above these material objects, the synod professed its aim to preserve Anglican churchmen throughout the world in theological harmony. This, too, it accomplished, at least negatively. English churchmen were able to testify that Protestant bishops from the east and from the west resembled each other very closely in demeanor and in their forms of thought. They even had, surmounting the obstacles of their local accent, 853the very tone of voice which no other body of clergy throughout the civilized world can boast, and which gives Church-of-England ministers a virtual monopoly of the clerical sore throat. Our visitors, whose episcopal residences and cathedrals are scattered over the globe, carried home, we believe, an equally good report of church conservatism in the mother-country.”
But the subtle mind of the late Bishop of Winchester, who was the reputed author of this episcopal picnic, had deeper views at bottom. He intended the first Pan-Anglican Synod as an answer to the sneer that the Church of England is a local accident, without any principle of spiritual authority, growth, or development. The synod was held, but the Bishop of Winchester was disappointed: the bishops would do nothing; they would not even order Bishop Colenso to the stake; and, “as clergymen, what they manifested above all else was that the Anglican Church in England and the Anglican Church out of England resemble each other almost to identity. The special peculiarities of the Church of England come into even more prominence abroad than at home. We are more impressed with the spirit of the state church carved out by King Henry VIII. when we meet with its foreign professors than we are in the country of its birth.” How biting is this sarcasm, and how deeply it must cut into the heart of the Anglican or the American Episcopalian who stills fancies that the mind of England is true to Anglicanism!
The Lambeth Conference which has lately ended was as barren of results as was its predecessor. On the day before its first meeting a number of the American and colonial bishops went down to Canterbury, where Dr. Tait, perhaps as an undress rehearsal of his anticipated elevation to the post of Protestant Pope, had “the chair of St. Augustine” brought forth, enthroned himself in it, and delivered a discourse. The audacity of this performance was extreme; perhaps the thoughts which it must have suggested to the spectators will yield their proper fruit. In face of the disjecta membra of a creed before him Dr. Tait had the extreme rashness, not to use a harsher term, to say in this discourse that he and his hearers “had advantages which the great St. Augustine had not,” for “they stood nearer to the pure, primitive Christianity of the apostles than St. Augustine stood, ...” and that St. Augustine’s faith, which is that of the whole Catholic Church to-day, was “a sort of semi-pagan Christianity.” St. Augustine preached in England in the sixth century, Dr. Tait talks in the nineteenth; which is “nearer,” chronologically, “pure, primitive Christianity,” and which is nearer, doctrinally, the faith that St. Augustine received from Rome or that which Dr. Tait has received from Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth?
On the next day, July 2, the conference opened at Lambeth Palace. There were “something like eighty-five prelates present,” of whom forty-three were from the colonies and the United States. It seems that there are ten bishops unattached, living in and around London, who had expected to be invited and who were disgusted at being left out; but it is explained that “the primate felt that the line must be drawn somewhere, and these prelates had no jurisdiction, even of a delegated character,” so he drew it at them. Before entering the chapel to receive holy communion 854the bishops adopted the following declaration:
“We, bishops of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church, in visible communion with the churches of England and Ireland, professing the faith delivered to us in Holy Scripture, maintained by the primitive church and by the fathers of the blessed Reformation, now assembled by the good providence of God at the archiepiscopal palace of Lambeth, under the presidency of the Primate of All England, desire, first, to give hearty thanks to Almighty God for having thus brought us together for common counsel and united worship; secondly, we desire to express the deep sorrow with which we view the divided condition of the flock of Christ throughout the world, ardently longing for the fulfilment of the prayer of our Lord, ‘That all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they may also be one in us, that the world might believe that thou hast sent me’; and, lastly, we do here solemnly record our conviction that unity will be more effectually promoted by maintaining the faith in its purity and integrity—as taught in the Holy Scriptures, held by the primitive church, summed up in the creeds, and affirmed by the undisputed general councils—and by drawing each of us closer to our common Lord by giving ourselves to much prayer and intercession, by the cultivation of a spirit of charity and a love of the Lord’s appearing.”
Is it not extraordinary that men of intelligence will persist in befogging themselves with phrases about “the deep sorrow” with which they view the divided condition of the flock of Christ throughout the world, and their longing for the fulfilment of the prayer of our Lord for the unity of his people? The flock of Christ is not divided; it has never been divided, and can never be divided for the reason that he not only prayed for its unity but willed its unity, and provided infallible means for the preservation of its unity.
The communion service over, Dr. Thomson, the Archbishop of York, pronounced a somewhat remarkable discourse, in which Catholic truth, Protestant error, and fanciful theory were strangely mixed, from the words of St. Paul, “But when Peter was come to Antioch I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.” He exposed the fallacy of the theory that the great apostle of the gentiles and the first Supreme Pontiff were in antagonism to each other, and he did this ably; but he ended his sermon with the following absurd passage:
“More than one writer has been pleased to point out that in the first century there were three periods, in which three apostles—Peter, Paul, and John—predominated in succession; and they think they can trace the same succession in the larger field of church history, so that the Petrine period ends at the Reformation, and the Pauline succeeds it, whilst the time of St. John is supposed to be the beginning. There is something fanciful in this arrangement. Yet pardon the fancy for the truth that underlies it. And when Peter falters, impulsive, and is inconsistent with himself, and Paul withstands him to the face, let the third apostle enter on the scene and remind us that we can afford to use the largest charity whilst we hold still the firmest trust. His contribution to the eternal diapason of the church’s faith and love shall be this: ‘Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God.... And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also’ (1 John iv. 15, 21).”
It will not do to set up St. Paul as the John the Baptist of Luther and Henry VIII.’s Reformation; nor will it do to assume that Peter, whose province it is to confirm the faith of his brethren, “falters and is inconsistent with himself,” or that the church has waited until now to understand the words of St. John.
But here the curtain falls upon 855the public proceedings of the conference. They retired from the profane sight of men, and, shut up in company with “four reporters pledged to secrecy,” and who duly gave to the journals every day accounts of all that happened, they spent a few hours of each day in discussing “not creeds,” but “modern forms of infidelity”; “the best mode of maintaining unity among the various churches of the Anglican communion”; “Voluntary Boards of Arbitration for churches to which such an arrangement may be applicable”; “the relation to each other of missionary bishops and of missionaries in various branches of the Anglican community acting in the same country”; and “the position of Anglican chaplains and chaplaincies on the Continent of Europe and elsewhere.” Nothing could be less interesting than much of this; and the prelates were no doubt glad when all was over, and when they closed their meetings by a sermon from the Bishop of Pennsylvania in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
As is plain from the comments already given by the leading organs of English opinion, the second Pan-Anglican Synod attracted even less attention and more general contempt than the first. When men come to ask themselves what has been accomplished by the twenty-five days’ session besides tea and talk, what is the only answer? It is this: the synod ended, as it began, in nothing.
Ethics, or Moral Philosophy. By Walter H. Hill, S.J., Professor of Philosophy in the St. Louis University, author of Logic and Ontology, or General Metaphysics. Baltimore: Murphy & Co.; London: Washbourne. 1878.
We rejoice to learn that Father Hill’s first volume of the course of philosophy has met with great success. We have been long desiring to see the second part in regular order, namely, the Special Metaphysics. This is, undoubtedly, the most difficult part to treat in a satisfactory manner, as well as the one most controverted among Catholic writers, particularly as regards cosmology. Precisely on this account we were especially curious to hear Father Hill’s exposition of the debated questions, and perhaps this is also the reason why he has postponed this part of his work, and published first his Ethics. Ethics is equally important, and even more generally necessary and useful. We are, therefore, glad to welcome the Ethics of Father Hill, hoping that he may hasten, as much as his heavy labors in the work of teaching and in that of the sacred ministry will permit, the completion of his Metaphysics.
This volume is, like the first one, an English text-book of the same grade and quality with our standard Latin text-books in philosophy. It is suited for the educated reader and for the higher classes in college. Both volumes are above the capacity of pupils of a lesser degree of intellectual development and instruction. If it is possible to bring the study of philosophy down to the level of this class of pupils without reducing the science to a merely nominal and superficial condition, the text-book fitted for this purpose still remains a desideratum. For the general reader and the pupil who is able to understand it this manual of ethics will prove of great service. It has always been the rule and practice of the illustrious Society of Jesus to follow in instruction the doctrine of St. Thomas, as understood by the great body of Catholic 856theologians and philosophers, in all those particulars in which such a common understanding exists. In ethics, happily, there does exist such a common and generally accepted doctrine in regard to all chief and important topics, and there is consequently a great degree of unity and harmony in the teaching imparted by Catholic professors to their pupils. Without doubt it is the safest and most practical method to make the text-books of theology and philosophy, and the lectures of the class-room, conform to this common doctrine. Deeper and more original and free discussions of difficult and undecided or imperfectly-elucidated questions belong to another class of works.
Father Hill’s text-book may be taken as a safe and sound exponent of the system of ethics contained in our approved Latin manuals and taught in our seminaries and colleges. In substance its doctrine is scholastic, the doctrine of Aristotle, St. Thomas, Suarez, Bellarmine, Liberatore, and the generality of similar authors of approved reputation. The great number of original texts, with translations, which are interwoven with the author’s own exposition, gives the ordinary reader a notable advantage, by making him acquainted with the great writers on ethics, and furnishing a guarantee of the fidelity with which their ideas are presented by the author.
A minute criticism of the work before us in its minor details would occupy too much space for a mere notice. We are obliged, therefore, to content ourselves with a general expression of our favorable opinion of the manual as a whole, and of the treatment given to the principal topics in its several parts, and the briefest possible notation of particular points of remark. The first chapter, on the Ultimate End of Man, presents sufficiently for a treatise of such limited compass the twofold relation of humanity by nature and by grace to God as the Final Cause. One statement (p. 21), that “it is not simply impossible for God to make a creature so perfect that intuitive vision of the divine essence would be connatural to it,” we cannot concur in, and it is contrary to the common opinion that grace elevates its subject “super omnem naturam creatam atque creabilem,” so admirably defended by Father Mazzella in his De Deo Creante. We think, also, that the author confuses the abstractive with the discursive process in the same context, and refer to Liberatore’s exposition of the nature of angelic knowledge and the similar knowledge proper to the state of separated spirits, in his work Deli Uomo, for our reasons of dissent from the exposition of Father Hill. The qualification of “unnatural,” used in respect to a desire of the soul to see God intuitively, on page 23, seems to us objectionable, on account of the use of a term at least ambiguous, and liable to be taken as signifying a positive opposition between nature and a final term which transcends its specific active force. The remainder of the whole division of General Ethics, comprising the following chapters: ii., Action of Man as a Rational Being; iii., Principles of Moral Goodness; iv., The Passions; v., The Virtues; vi., Law; vii., Civil Law; viii., Conscience, is in our opinion admirable, and we find nothing to criticise. We are particularly pleased to see that the author refutes a common fallacy that sin is an infinite evil, meriting an infinite punishment. It is most important at this time, when the doctrine of endless punishment is so generally and violently assailed, that the exaggerations and fallacious arguments which cling around it should be cleared away, and only that which is the real doctrine of revelation be presented, sustained by rational arguments which are solid, which has been done by Liberatore, and also by Father Hill in his section of this subject.
In the second part, on Special Ethics, four chapters are included: i., Rights and Duties; ii., Special Duties; iii., Man as a Social Being; iv., Civil Society. We are glad to see that Father Hill distinctly asserts the rights of rational creatures before God, a most important point against Calvinistic, Jansenistic, and rigoristic exaggerations of the doctrine of God—absolute dominion and divine sovereignty, which make theology odious and drive many minds toward atheism in their intellectual despair. The question of veracity, lying, and mental reservation, which Grotius said made him sweat, is too briefly treated for a satisfactory enucleation of its difficulties, especially as the author departs from the common opinion of Catholic moralists. We are rather disposed to favor his view, which has strong reasons in its support, though not prepared to express 857an opinion that it is altogether complete and sufficient.
In treating the great question of civil society, with the subordinate question of the origin and legitimacy of government, etc., the author has shown great judgment and discrimination. He adheres to the theory of Suarez, Bellarmine, and the great body of the ablest Catholic authors, respecting political society. Ultra-monarchical and ultra-democratic theories are equally indefensible, and both are mischievous. We trust that loyal citizens of our republic who are reasonably conservative will find evidence, in Father Hill’s calm and moderate statements, that the Catholic religion is admirably suited to give stability to our own national institutions, notwithstanding its total opposition to the European liberalism and radicalism that would fain overthrow the constitutions and governments of the Old World.
In respect to style, the main point in a work of this kind is to make its ideas clearly and distinctly intelligible. The author, in general, has succeeded in his effort to accomplish this result as well as the necessity of adhering to the phraseology of Latin authors would permit. Sometimes, however, succinctness and condensation produce ambiguity and obscurity—a defect which we suspect in some instances is partly or entirely owing to errors in printing. Again, there are some words used in a way which is not conformed to the English idiom—as, for instance, the word “avert,” used intransitively, and the phrase to “put an action.” There are many minor faults of this sort which can be easily corrected in a second edition. Let us, by all means, have the other volume as soon as possible. The whole, when complete, will serve a most important end, by extending among intelligent readers of English books a knowledge and taste for scholastic philosophy. This taste, when awakened, will demand much larger and more thorough works on the same subjects. We think, moreover, that those who write these works must break away from the trammels of an artificial Latinized style and write in idiomatic English, like Dr. Newman and the best writers in the Dublin Review and Month. We desire to see works on Catholic philosophy which are as fine specimens of pure English idiom as those written by Liberatore in his native language are of a charming and literary Italian style.
I. A History of the United States for the use of Schools, Academies, and Colleges. By John R. G. Hassard, author of Life of Archbishop Hughes, Life of Pius IX., etc. 1 vol. 12mo, illustrated.
II. An Introductory History of the United States for the use of Schools. Arranged on the Catechetical Plan. 1 vol. 16mo, illustrated. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.
In this history Mr. Hassard has performed a very rare feat. He has made a school-book which, while being in every respect a thorough school-book, is full of interest from cover to cover. There is not a dull page in it.
Of course the first thing that commends this book to Catholic teachers and students is that it is written by a Catholic, and Mr. Hassard’s eminent qualifications for the preparation of such a work are too well known to need any mention here. The part that Catholics played, not only in the discovery of this continent but in its exploration and colonization; the part borne by them in the War of Independence and in the later history of these United States, has been carefully forgotten, or slurred over, or misrepresented, or omitted altogether in the average history set in a boy’s hand at school. This is not history; and to remedy this capital defect, we take it, has been the chief object of Mr. Hassard’s book.
He has done his work thoroughly and in an excellent manner. He is nowhere aggressive; he is simply historical from first to last. Where Catholicity comes in he gives it its place; where it does not enter he never drags it in. He is concerned with facts, and he attends chiefly to them. How he has succeeded in grouping them together, in collecting the tangled threads of events that are scattered over a vast continent, where so many nations and tribes of men and forms of religion and government contended for the mastery; the patient skill with which he has woven these into a bright, clear, and picturesque whole, can only be judged by those who read the book, which, for our own part, we 858could not set down until we had read it through. The history begins with the discovery of the continent, and brings us down by easy yet rapid stages to our own times. The story of the Spanish colonies, the French, the English, the Dutch, are all given due prominence. The work of Catholic missionaries in exploring the continent and attempting to convert the native tribes is briefly yet fully set forth.
The long struggle for national independence is given with great skill, force, and clearness, and indeed these qualities characterize the whole work. It is very plain that the author had everything clear in his own mind before he sat down to inform others. The result is a clean-cut and complete whole, with no important omissions, no waste, and no redundancy. The narrative is invariably spirited and flowing, and to students is in itself a model of clear, strong, simple English. It is wonderful, too, to see how, with the brief space at his command, the author has contrived to throw in at the right time those little personal allusions, pictures, or reminiscences of famous men and events that lend its charm to history and so aptly illustrate the times. Indeed, the gifts here displayed by Mr. Hassard are obviously those that would lend grace, strength, and dignity to a much more ambitious, though not more useful, work than that before us. The sense of historical truth and accuracy plainly predominates in the author’s mind.
His efforts to produce a history that was much needed, yet had hitherto remained unwritten, have been ably seconded by the publishers. The text is a delight to the eye; the illustrations, though many, are unexceptionally excellent; the little maps thrown in here and there are of great use in illustrating the text; and the questions at the foot of the page are all that either student or teacher could desire. It is impossible to commend such a work too heartily. It simply stands alone.
We have often heard the just complaint that Catholics had no history of the United States which they could safely use in their schools—none, at least, which was satisfactory. That complaint can exist no longer.
The Catechism of United States History is made from the larger work, and is in every way suitable for parish schools and junior classes in academies. The narrative is continuous, so that it can be read without the questions as a regular history.
Le Progres du Catholicisme Parmi les Peuples D’Origine Anglo-Saxonne depuis l’annee 1857. Par Mgr. De Haerne, Membre de la Chambre des Representants (de la Belgique). Extrait de la Revue Catholique de Louvain. Louvain: Peeters. 1878.
This pamphlet is an evidence of the awakening of a great interest in Catholic Europe in the Catholic Church existing and increasing within the dominion of the British Empire and the republic of the United States. Ample justice is done by the author to the great Celtic element which pervades the church in English countries, although the term Anglo-Saxon appears so distinctively in his designation of the territory which he has made the object of his investigations. It is almost impossible to give an account of a pamphlet so full of statistics without translating the whole bodily. The author has made it as full and correct as he could, considering the means within his reach. The defects are those of his sources of information, and his few mistakes are those which a foreigner would easily make—as, for instance, in making Seton Hall College an institute of the Jesuits, and attempting to enumerate the generals of the army of the United States who have become converts. A translation of this interesting pamphlet made by a competent hand, with the corrections and additions in respect particularly to our own country and British America which a fully-informed writer living among ourselves could make, would furnish some very valuable information both to the friends and the enemies of the Catholic religion. We owe grateful acknowledgments to the eminent Belgian prelate and statesman for his excellent and elaborate essay, and for his kindness in favoring us with a copy.
I. Ancient History. II. History of Rome. III. History of the Middle Ages. Adapted from the French of Rev. P. F. Gazeau, S. J. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.
Whoever knows the above works in 859their original French will be glad to see them in their present convenient, cheap, and attractive English form. The series makes delightful reading, even in a desultory sort of way. They are full of sound learning and philosophical inference; indeed, it would be hard to find books containing more wealth of research in so small a space. As might be expected, the style is concise and yet smooth, flowing, and agreeable.
Such books as these are needed. Without denying the zeal and learning of most of our teachers, it is still safe to say that few of our higher students ever finish a course of history. The difficulty lies with the text-books generally in use. They are for the most part so large and full of detail that the pupil leaves school without a fair knowledge of the events connected with the Roman Empire, the formation of the modern states of Europe, the conversion of the barbarians, the Crusades, the events that led up to the Protestant Reformation, and the important changes and revolutions that have occurred since that period, because all or most of the time available for history has been consumed in the epochs preceding the time of our Saviour.
The Ancient History is a complete compendium of the history of Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia, Media and Persia, Phœnicia and Carthage, Greece, Macedonia, Alexander’s Empire and the states founded on its ruins. The History of Rome treats of the Eternal City and its dominion from the time of Romulus to that of Romulus Augustulus.
The History of the Middle Ages, of which we have before us advance sheets, is now in press. Scholars will be surprised by its wonderful combination of learning, sagacious reflections, and convenient grouping of events. Its narrative stops with the taking of Constantinople (1453). A Modern History of the same series is in preparation, and will follow as soon as possible. It will bring the series down to our own times.
The orthography of the proper names is made to conform to the practice of the best modern English and American writers. The judgment and learning of the American editor are apparent in the many wise alterations and additions which he has made. Review questions are given at the end of each chapter, except in the Middle Ages, where the questions will be printed at the end of the book, so as not to break the continuous appearance of its pages for the general reader. The three books may be gone through in one term of ten months without any resort to “cramming,” and we can recommend them to our high-schools, academies, and colleges as the most compact, complete, and continuous set of histories yet given to the Catholic public.
Dosia. From the French of Henry Greville. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1878.
It has been hinted that Henry Greville is the nom de plume of a French lady who lived for some time in Russia. The sex of the writer may be readily judged from the book itself, which is decidedly feminine both in plot and in dialogue. Its sketches of Russian society are in a measure very neutral in color; and as to the two facts that peculation is very active in Russian official circles, and that extravagance is very common among the “crack” regiments at St. Petersburg, these are so very well known that the story, if written to exhibit such phases of society, is superfluous, as that information could better be obtained by reading some standard work of travels in Russia. As a novel it is trifling and flimsy, and the authoress cannot compare with Daudet either in dramatic force or beauty of diction. The plot is feeble, but the dialogue is often amusing and the situations on certain occasions not wanting in interest.
A Saint in Algeria. By Lady Herbert. (Reprinted from the Month.) London: Burns & Oates. 1878.
A Saint in Algeria is the record of one of those lives ever living in the bosom of the church of God—a link in the vast unbroken chain of saints binding through all the centuries the church suffering on earth with the church triumphant in heaven.
We recommend this little memoir of Margaret Bergésio (better known as Agarithe Berger) to those who look on the past ages only as the days of faith and of a charity that faileth not. In the life of this pure mountain blossom of Piedmont, transplanted to the thick 860atmosphere of Lyons and finally finding its perfection among the hills of Algeria, these mournful souls may, in the midst of the seeming decay they weep, find consolation in a new name added to a saintly list that in future years may make some Kenelm Digby sigh for the earnest and active faith of the church in the nineteenth century.
And the devoted Agarithe has found in Lady Herbert a loving biographer, who writes with a fervor and simplicity worthy of the high humility of the holy heroine.
Legends of Holy Mary. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1878.
As we read the preface to this little book we feel our weapons of criticism trembling in their sheath, since, should we use them, we find ourselves well-nigh denied any seat in that kingdom whereof Holy Mary is queen; while our critic’s spoils lie out of our reach safe in her hands amid whose lilies, as once wrote St. Bernard, our earthly offerings lose their stain and wear only the whiteness of the heavenly bloom.
The writer of the present volume has gathered from ancient gardens, in the devotional spirit of old-time minnesinger, a nosegay of legends breathing the pervading presence of her who is the “mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope,” the ever-merciful mother of the poor children of Eve.
Few can fail to gather some sweetness from such a nosegay—one that among its blossoms counts that fair one of Provence whose perfect perfume fills one of Adelaide Procter’s most perfect poems teaching the completeness of the mercy of God:
The Young Catholic, published by the Catholic Publication Society Co., enters this month on its ninth year. It may be that some persons who are interested in this kind of literature have not yet seen the Young Catholic. For their benefit we would say that it is a monthly paper of eight pages for children and young people. It is finely illustrated and filled with original matter that is at the same time entertaining, instructive, and edifying.
As a literary work, our young people may well be proud of the Young Catholic. It can take its place beside the best literature of that kind in our country.
It is most suitable for Sunday-schools, convent schools, etc., and the low price at which it is published brings it within the reach of all. The following is the table of contents for September:
Thinking over the Actions of the Day; illustrated. Hero Priests. The Sparrow and her Children. Twilight Talks. Beautiful Things. The Mocking-Bird; illustrated. Heroism of a Little Girl. The Holy Rupert of Bingen. What is He? illustrated. Talk by the Fireside; illustrated. Insects of August. A Lake Asleep. The Little Cricket. Perils of Missionary Life; illustrated. Stockings. The Farmboys, Chap. III. Hymn to St. Aloysius, with music, composed by a pupil of Loretto Convent, Enniscorthy, Ireland. A Letter from “Martha from the Country.” Letters from “Uncle Ned’s Sunbeams.” Enigmas, Riddles, etc.
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We need scarcely call the attention of our readers to the new serial from the pen of Miss Kathleen O’Meara, which has just begun, and which will run through our next volume. We have no doubt that Pearl will prove to our readers, as it has proved to us, to be by far the finest story that this accomplished writer has yet given us.
1. Del Regionalismo in Italia—Civiltà Cattolica, Quad. 656.
2. Cf. what Joubert says of Racine: that “his genius, too, lay in his taste,” and that he is “the Virgil of the ignorant.”
3. “And stand and listen with arrected ears”—atque arrectis auribus adsto. We may add that to our mind Simmons’ version of this simile, which we regret not to have space to quote, is one of the very best.
4. Dr. Johnson never learned it. “His heroic lines,” he said of Cowley, “are often formed of monosyllables; but yet they are often sweet and sonorous.”
5. “Eld the mouldy-dull, and empty of all sooth,” is Mr. Morris’ equivalent for “verique effeta senectus,” Æn. vii. 439.
6. Mr. Matthew Arnold’s remark to a like effect in his admirable essay on translating Homer was curiously anticipated by Tickell in the preface to his (or Addison’s) version of the first book of the Iliad, where he says the double epithets of the Iliad, “though elegant and sonorous in the Greek, become either unintelligible, unmusical, or burlesque in English.” He adds: “I cannot but observe that Virgil, that sunge in a language much more capable of composition than ours, hath often conformed to this rule.”
7. Mr. Morris here unaccountably sacrifices an opportunity. Decurrens aureus arce the Latin is, and yet he gives us “castle” instead of “burg,” which, in his own translating dialect, is the true meaning of arx. To such shifts will rhyme reduce the ablest translators!
8. Spare the submissive and crush the haughty.
9. Three Years of my Life. By Dr. Conrad Martin, Bishop of Paderborn. Mainz, 1877.
10. Drei Jahre aus meinem Leben.
11. Ibid. p. 3.
12. Ibid. p. 8.
13. Ibid. p. 14.
14. Ibid. p. 15.
15. Ibid. p. 16.
16. At Künigstein, in Nassau.
17. Drei Jahre aus meinem Leben, p. 23.
18. Ibid. p. 30.
19. Ibid. p. 37.
20. Ibid. p. 41.
21. Ibid. p. 45.
22. Ibid. p. 51.
23. Ibid. p. 83.
24. Ibid. pp. 160, 169.
25. Mr. Bayard Taylor.
26. This church is now that of San Justo y San Pastor which perpetuates the memory of the holy image by a chapel and confraternity of Our Lady of Montserrat, as well as by frequent pilgrimages to the mountain itself.
27. The Moors called Montserrat Gis Taus—the watch-peaks or towers.
28. History of Spanish Literature.
29. There was formerly an old sculpture in this palace of the counts of Barcelona, representing the prince in the arms of his nurse, and the hermit of Montserrat at their feet. This is now in the museum of antiquities in the old convent of San Juan at Barcelona.
30. The apostolic chamber, called in Rome the Reverenda Camera Apostolica, dates from the pontificate of Leo the Great, who constructed in the year 440 a small but elegant suite of chambers which served as a sanctuary for the bodies of the apostles SS. Peter and Paul until proper crypts, called Confessions, had been prepared for them beneath the high altars of their respective basilicas at the Vatican and on the Ostian Way. When these relics had been deposited in their present resting-places, the Leonine sanctuary was used, as a strong and venerable place, to contain the public treasury of the Holy See, which was given into the safe-keeping of certain officials called camerarii. Their successors are the present chierici di camera, who are eight in number and form one of the great prelatic colleges of Rome. The present institution was reorganized by Pope Urban V. in the fourteenth century. The cardinal-chamberlain is ex officio its head, and it acts as a board of control over the finances.
31. It is known to all visitors to Rome that Pius IX. prepared a beautiful tomb for himself before the high altar of St. Mary Major’s.
32. Roman bibliophilists anxious to possess—what is rare indeed—a complete set (una biblioteca, as the Italians say) of the funeral orations pronounced over the popes, and of the hortatory discourses addressed to the Sacred College about to enter conclave, eagerly contend at book-sales for these pamphlets, which are always in the choicest Latin of the age, and sometimes have a sentimental value on account of the subsequent fortunes, or misfortunes, of their authors. They are much more than mere literary curiosities for book-worms to feed upon. The form of the title-page, excepting of course in proper names and dates, is about the same in all; for instance, Oratio habita ad Collegium Cardinalium in funere Innocentii IX., Pont. Max., vi. Id. Januarii, 1592: Romæ, 1592, in 4to: by Father Giustiniani, a famous Jesuit; and Oratio habita in Basilica SS. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli pridie Kalend. Aprilis, 1721, ad Emos. et Rmos. cardinales conclave ingressuros pro Summo Pontifice eligendo: Romæ, ex Typographia Vaticana, 1721, in 4to: by Camillo de Mari, Bishop of Aria.
33. Arnulfus of Seez apud Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, tom. iii. p. 429, says that on this occasion the cardinals told the elect of their choice: Si acquiescis, exhibemus obsequium; si recusas, exigimus de inobedientia pœnam; and on his still hesitating parabant excommunicationis præferre sententiam.
34. This notarial function which the first master of ceremonies here performs is the reason why he is always an apostolic prothonotary; but his title to this prelatic rank rests entirely on custom, since he is not appointed by papal brief, as others are. It is by a similar analogy, although in matters theological, that the master of the Sacred Palace, who is always a Dominican, ranks with the auditors of the Rota.
35. “Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and queens thy nurses: they shall worship thee with their face toward the earth, and they shall lick up the dust of thy feet.”—Isaias xlix. 23, which St. Jerome interprets of the apostles; but in Peter’s successors all honors and prerogatives continue. A very learned writer of the last century, Gaetano Cenni, has gone profoundly into the historical and antiquarian part of this singular and most venerable custom, in his dissertation Sul Bacio De’ Piedi Del Romano Pontefice, which is the thirty-fourth of the third volume of Zaccaria’s great collection of dissertations on subjects of ecclesiastical history—Raccolta Di Dissertazioni Di Storia Ecclesiastica.... Per cura Di Francesco Antonio Zaccaria, etc. Seconda edizione. Four vols. Rome, 1841.
36. The celebrated antiquarian Cancellieri has written with his usual diffuseness and erudition on this matter in a little work, Notizie sopra l’Origine e l’uso dell’ Anello Pescatorio, etc., etc., published at Rome in 1823.
37. Briefs, says the learned Benedictine Mabillon, De Re Diplomaticâ (lib. ii. cap. xiv.), brevi via, seu manu, remotis omnibus ambagibus, absolvuntur; quippe quæ a Pontifice, ut plurimum sponte et absque rei longa discussione conficiuntur.
38. We had the good fortune once to pick up at a book-sale in Rome for a few cents a rare and curious little book on this topic, which gives the very marrow of the subject in a very agreeable form: Lettera di A. L. Nuzzi, Prelato Domestico Del Sommo Pontefice Sull’ Origine ed Uso Del Nome PAPA. Padova, 1 Settembre, MDCCXCVIII.
39. In our last number we published an article on the works of this illustrious Catholic layman by one closely connected with him. Immediately on receiving the sad news of Dr. Marshall’s death we wrote to his friend, Mr. T. W. Allies, who will be known to our readers as the author of The Formation of Christendom, asking him to prepare for The Catholic World a more adequate notice than we had seen of one who had done so much for the Catholic cause. The result is the present article, which, though it comes after the other, will be none the less pleasing to our readers, coming from such a pen as that of Mr. Allies, and dealing as it does rather with the personal life and character than with the public work of its subject.—Ed. C. W.
40. The Roman Correspondent of the London Tablet, February 23, denies the truth of this “project” so far as Cardinal Manning is concerned.—Ed. C. W.
41. If I knew there was one fibre in my heart which was not all God’s I would instantly pluck it out.—St. Francis de Sales.
42. St. Francis draws many beautiful illustrations from this mythical bird. The ancients asserted that when age had exhausted the strength of the phœnix it built a funeral-pile of aromatic gums and wood on the top of some high mountain, and, ascending it when the sun was in his meridian splendor, lit the pile by the fanning of its wings, and was consumed to ashes. From these ashes sprang another phœnix.
43. The narrowest street in Munich; hence the name.
44. The name of the park in Munich.
45. Valley of the Inn.
46. These are made afresh every year on the feast of the Epiphany.
47. An instrument not unlike a guitar.
48. Petites Ignorances de la Conversation. Par. Charles Rozan. Paris: Hetzler. 1877.
49. We may here mention that the finest elm in France is probably that in the court of the Deaf and Dumb Institution in the Rue St. Jacques in Paris. It is 50 metres in height and 5 in circumference, the last remaining of the 6,000 feet of trees planted under Henri IV. We mention this merely for the sake of our European readers, not for those accustomed to the sylvan giants of the Western world.
50. Henri III. instituted this order in memory of the three great events of his life which had happened on the Feast of Pentecost—namely, his birth, his election to the crown of Poland, and his accession to the throne of France.
51. Le Palais Archiépiscopal de Bénévent. Par Mgr. X. Barbier de Montault, prélat de la maison de Sa Sainteté. Arras: A. Planque et Cie. 1875.
52. The word palace is, by us, reserved for exceptional edifices that are vaster, loftier, and more highly ornamented than the dwelling of a merely private individual. But the Italian, who loves sonorous epithets, is more indiscriminate in its application. His word palazzo is susceptible of two meanings, one referring to the edifice, and the other to the person who inhabits it. In the latter sense it is applied to the residence of any high dignitary or person of office, however little in accordance it may be with his station. It is his rank which gives importance to his dwelling, and a name that sets it apart and prevents it from being confounded with the houses of people merely in easy circumstances.
53. In order to correspond fully to the wish expressed so gracieusement by the Rev. Father Hecker, founder of the Paulists, to have the plan of a building, with its ornamentation, in conformity with Roman traditions, we have taken the principal features of the palace at Beneventum as the model of that which the Catholics of America propose offering the cardinal of New York. The development of this architectonic and iconographic project will be the subject of a special essay.—Note of Mgr. Barbier de Montault.
54. In an official paper at Dijon, dated Sept. 26, 1511, mention is made of an obscure dungeon under the name of cachot d’enfer.
55. St. Barbato’s triumphal entrance into Beneventum was by a gateway that has preserved the name of Porta Gloriosa.
56. In tribulatione sua (Isa. xxv. 4).
57. De angustia sua (Job xxxvi. 15).
58. These quotations are often modified—the idea, rather than the exact words, being aimed at.
59. There are three portraits of Cardinal Orsini in the cathedral, taken at different periods of his life. The forehead is high and well developed. The eye is pleasant and sympathetic, but keen and penetrating. The nose has a bold outline, indicative of his energetic will. The mouth is contracted at the corners, giving it an expression of bitterness and dissatisfaction. The face is full, and tells of life and vigor.
60. Die deutschen Plenarien (Handpostillen) 1470-1522. Dr. J. Alzog. Herder. Freiburg in Breisgau. To this most interesting and valuable brochure of the distinguished German ecclesiastical historian the writer is chiefly indebted for the substance of the present article.
61. Dans lequel sont décrits les livres rares, précieux, singuliers, et aussi les ouvrages les plus, estimés. Ve édit. Paris, 1860-1865, en vi. tomes.
62. Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis.
63. These “examples” constituted a literature apart, to which reference will be made later, characteristic of the middle ages, of which scholars like Grimm speak with more respect, because more knowledge, than many more modern and less discriminating writers.
64. Bampton Lectures, 1876. Witness of the Psalms to Christ and Christianity. Dr. William Alexander.
65. A paraphrase of Apocalypse ii. 17 and iii. 20.
66. The German translations of the Bible, in part or complete, of which the library of the University of Freiburg possesses copies, are as follows: 1. 1466, Strassburg, folio, in 2 vols., printed by Eggestein. 2. 1472-1474, Strassburg or Nuremberg, large folio, 1 vol., printer not named, the chief source from which the following editions were compiled. 3. 1474. Augsburg, Günther Zainer. 4. 1474, Augsburg, 1 vol., large folio, Antony Sorg. 5. 1483, Nuremberg, large folio, 2 vols., Antony Koburger. 6. 1485, Strassburg, small folio, 2 vols. 7. 1490, Augsburg, small folio, 2 vols., Hans Schösperger. 8. 1507, Augsburg, folio, 1 vol., but very defective. 9. 1518, Augsburg, small folio, 2 vols., the first missing, Sylvanus Otmar. 10. 1534, the Old and New Testaments, Mayence, folio, 1 vol., Dietenberger (of which six other editions were printed at Cologne between 154- and 1572). 11. 1534, The Old and New Testaments translated directly from the Hebrew and the Greek texts, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Christian Egenolff. 12. The Old and New Testaments, according to the text authorized by Holy Church, 1558, Ingoldstadt, small folio, 1 vol., Dr. John Ecken.
67. By heaven, throughout this discourse, Dante means, simply, planetary influence. The lesson taught by Marco Lombardi is the same as that which Shakspere puts into the mouth of Cassius:
68. It is well to note in connection with this passage that Dante was, up to the time of his banishment by a political faction, a Guelph, the Guelphs being then the patriotic party in Italy, and supporters of the pope in his resolute opposition to the foreign invasion under Frederic Barbarossa. During his exile Dante changed his politics and joined the Ghibellines. Had he lived in our own days it is certain that he, whose faith was so high and clear, would have shared the openly expressed convictions of all responsible men and competent judges in this matter, that the temporal authority of the Holy See is necessary, as things now are, to the full liberty and full exercise of its spiritual authority. Dante’s opinion, as above expressed, is that of a political partisan in bygone times. Were he living to-day, instructed by the lessons of the centuries which have passed since he wrote, there can be no doubt that he would adhere to his earlier, truer, and more patriotic political convictions and see no impossibility of the union of “The twofold splendors of a double sun in Rome” in the person of Rome’s lawful and historic pontiff and king.—Ed. C. W.
69. Under the nom de plume of “Jean de Nivelle.” See Le Soleil for Jan. 4, 1878.
70. The diet of a French peasant is frugal in the extreme. His two meals usually consist of cabbage-soup—in which on Sundays and other special occasions a morsel of bacon is boiled—accompanied with rye bread. We have known a very well-to-do couple make half a rabbit last them four days in the way of meat. Many kinds of fungi are common articles of diet with the French peasantry. They cook them with vinegar “to kill the poison.”
71. St. Bernard.
72. Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. By W. E. Channing. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1873.
Thoreau: his Life and Aims. A Study. By H. A. Page. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1877.
73. Perhaps this peak, encircled by other peaks, is so styled from the curious dance of this region, called Lo Salt, performed by four men and four women. At a certain part the former pass their hands under the arms of the women, and raise them in the air in the form of a pyramid, of which their white caps form the summit.
74. Jasmin.
75. Beginnings of Christianity.
76. Caxton Celebration, 1877. Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Antiquities, Curiosities, and Appliances connected with the art of Printing, South Kensington. Edited by George Bullen, Esq., F.S.A., Keeper of the Printed Books, British Museum. London, Trübner; xix.-472 pp.
The Bibles in the Caxton Exhibition. MDCCCLXXVII.; or, A Bibliographical Description of nearly one thousand representative Bibles in various languages chronologically from the first Bible printed by Gutenberg in 1450-1456 to the last Bible printed at the Oxford University Press the 30th June, 1877.... By Henry Stevens G.M.B., F.S.A., M.A., etc. London: H. Stevens. 1877. 8vo, pp. 151.
77. Office of the Blessed Virgin, with other prayers.
78. The clown appears early in “What you Will.” It has become the fashion to call our Catholic institutions, schools, etc., sectarian, because apparently the sects are bitterly opposed to them; and institutions in which the Protestant sects have complete control and enforce their views are called non-sectarian. No one would imagine that “religious sectarianism” here is a euphemism for “Protestant intolerance.”
79. We have always indulged the hope that the use of the Sarum Missal on some patronal feast will be permitted in the primatial church of England, as the Ambrosian and Mozarabic are in Italy and Spain, to show conclusively that we are the identical body who used that liturgy before the Reformation.
80. While writing we read the following from Blades’ Life of Caxton to a Catholic girl in her teens: “No. 57. Death-Bed Prayers. A Folio Broadside:
“From the language of these prayers it is evident that they were intended for use by the death-bed. They were probably printed in this portable form for priests and others to carry about with them. Although short, their interest is great, and the reader may not be displeased to read them in the following more modern dress than that of the original:
“‘O glorious Jesu! O meekest Jesu! O most sweetest Jesu! I pray thee that I may have true confession, contrition, and satisfaction ere I die; and that I may see and receive thy holy body, God and man, Saviour of all mankind. Christ Jesu without sin; and that thou wilt, my Lord God, forgive me all my sins, for thy glorious wounds and Passion; and that I may end my life in the true faith of all holy church.’”
“What a stupid man!” exclaimed my young hearer. “That is not any prayer for a priest to say by a dying person; it’s a prayer for a happy death, and is it not a beautiful one?’” She was certainly right, and a Catholic child could teach many of these people.
81. To the same purport is this colophon on Bartholomæus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum, issued by Wynken de Worde about 1495:
82. Stevens admits that there was no necessity for actually doing the printing of Bibles in England. “The educated of England, however, were not ignorant of the Scriptures, for Coburger, of Nuremberg, and probably other Continental printers, had established warehouses in London for the sale of Latin Bibles as early as 1480, and perhaps earlier.”
83. The Paulist Library in New York might have sent a fine copy of the ninth edition, printed in 1482, the very year Luther was born.
84. We have never seen the Latin Bible printed by Norton at London, in 1680, but think that the text of the Vulgate was not followed.
85. The natural history and topography of the 1611 Bible are ludicrously incorrect, because they abandoned the Vulgate and translated at random. Yet the Vulgate was translated from the Septuagint, and revised in the Holy Land by St. Jerome with the aid of Jewish scholars who knew the geography and natural history of the country. The Septuagint was made in Egypt, while Hebrew was still the language of the nation, by men thoroughly acquainted with their native country. Was it not sheer madness for gentlemen in England in the seventeenth century, with a mere smattering of Hebrew, to think that they could render geographical and zoölogical terms more accurately? Is not their presumption the real matter to be sneered at?
86. Written according to Dutch rather than English. This is very odd. Beggi is pray; takkitakki is much talkee (say); jamjam is yam (bread). “Give we to-day the yams for we!”
87. Like Caxton, a Catholic, the writer has, like Caxton, written, translated, edited, printed, and published, and has had for years behind his chair in his dining-room an engraving of Caxton examining his first proof-sheet. His interest in Caxton is, therefore, almost personal.
88. Dante does not overestimate the importance of this little town of middle Italy to a religious mind. Every Christian must be piously impressed by the subjoined inscription over the gate of Assisi which greets a traveller coming from Rome.
These words are believed to have been the dying benediction of St. Francis as he looked out from his pallet over the roofs of the mountain city which has become through him a place of pilgrimage:
89. From the French of Père Félix, published as an article in the Revue Catholique des Institutions et du Droit (April number, 1878). The article is a reproduction of one lecture out of a series, on the subject of socialism, given at Grenoble, and shortly to be published entire by Jouby-Roger, Rue des Grands Augustins, Paris.
90. Queen of Charles I., and in whose honor the colony was called Maryland.
91. Ps. lx. 3-5.
92. The man Hoedel, who sought to kill the emperor, stated that he belonged to this school; he had swung around the circle, and had ended as an “anarchist.”
93. But this interference is now to be insisted upon, for Prince Bismarck has instructed the Parliament to pass laws for the suppression of the publication and spread of socialistic and revolutionary doctrines.
94. Just as the emperor and the chancellor are now urging upon Parliament the passage of laws to restrict the right of public meeting and of free speech on the platform and in the press.
95. It is now being debated there under the direct orders of the emperor and the chancellor.
96. We give this passage literally, in order to furnish an indisputable evidence of the animus of Dr. Bamberger when he writes of the church or of Catholics. We shall see, as we go along, how this spirit colors his reasoning.
97. Dr. Bamberger utterly misrepresents the attitude of the Roman Catholics in Germany towards the socialists. In the debate of May 23-24 in the Reichstag, on the proposed restrictive measures against the socialists, the Catholic members aided in defeating the government’s bill: on the very rational ground that the laws already in existence were sufficiently strong to accomplish all that the government required, if only they were properly applied. In any case it is to be hoped that a man may defend freedom of speech and public assembly without necessarily being ranked among the socialists. Men may defend right principles without at all defending a wrong application of them. The Protestants and National Liberals who, in this instance, joined with the Catholics in condemning what was essentially a tyrannous measure, were not “hypocrites.” All condemned alike the wicked attempt on the life of the German emperor. But even that attempt did not justify what practically amounted to a wholesale gagging of the German people.—Ed. C. W.
98. As a matter of fact, Mr. Eccarius could not have gone to this congress at all had not the London correspondent of one of our New York journals furnished him with the necessary funds for his journey, taking his letters as payment. Mr. Eccarius, who is an able writer and personally an estimable man, made excellent use of his visit, as the London Times took his letters from the congress and paid him at the rate of £2 a column for them.
99. Here Dr. Bamberger portrays at great length and in a bantering manner the demands of those who believe that the state can remedy all evils, and describes with humor the various programmes for state administration of domestic life, public amusements, education, and what not. He quotes the Italian proverb that “a fool in his own house is smarter than a wise man in another’s mansion,” and says that the state falls into folly when it penetrates the houses of its subjects and regulates for them their domestic economy.
100. St. Eucher.
101. Le Oranti of the archæologists.
102. John xvi. 26.
103. The Natural History of Atheism. By John Stuart Blackie, Professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1878.
104. Children dying in original sin, though children of wrath, are not necessarily “hell-deserving sinners,” as the author objects. Most Catholic theologians maintain with good reasons that they will be in a state of natural happiness, though debarred from the vision of God.
105. See The Catholic World for February, 1874, where we have proved that all efficient cause is infinitely more perfect and of an infinitely better nature than any of its effects (“The Principles of Real Being,” p. 584).
106. Proverbs, cap. viii.
107. A building in the Munich cemetery to which all are taken immediately after death—no exception, save for the royal family.
108. Words by Jean Paul.
109. “Who took the shape of that sweet bird.” Reference is here made to the story of Procne, wife of Tereus, King of Thrace, and sister of Philomela. To revenge herself on her husband, Procne murdered their child, Itys, cut him into pieces, and served up the flesh to the father. Tereus, discovering the truth, pursued and was on the point of overtaking her when, at her prayer, she was changed by the gods into a nightingale, and her sister Philomela into a swallow, according to Probus, Libanius, and Strabo.—Purg. ix. 15.
110. This is Haman, who was hanged upon the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai, as we read in the Book of Esther; but Dante’s word is crocifisse.
111. “A damsel,” etc. This was Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus and Amata. Lavinia had been secretly promised in marriage by her mother to Turnus, King of the Rutuli. The marriage was displeasing to the gods, and the oracles declared that Lavinia should marry a foreign prince. The foreign prince was Æneas, who, on his arrival in Italy, became the friend and ally of Latinus, and won his favor as suitor to Lavinia. Turnus thereupon declared war against both, and was killed in battle by Æneas. Amata, having been informed prematurely of the death of Turnus, and enraged at being unable to prevent the marriage of Lavinia with Æneas, hanged herself in despair.
112. “Never Creator ...” In this passage Virgil explains to Dante the nature of love according to the mediæval philosophy, viz., God is love. “Deus caritas est,” and so are all created things, as derived from him. Love in man is natural or rational—that is, of the mind. Natural love, or the love towards all things necessary to one’s preservation, cannot err. Rational love can err in three ways: first, when directed to a bad aim—that is, to evil; secondly, when directed excessively to earthly pleasures; thirdly, when directed feebly to those things truly worthy of love, the celestial. As long as love turns to the Primal Good, the celestial, or seeks with due check the inferior, or terrestrial, it cannot be the source of wrong, or sin. “But when it swerves to ill,” ... etc.
113. “Whence may’st thou ...” Love is the source of good works, as of bad ones; thus, according to St. Augustine, “Boni aut mali mores sunt boni aut mali amores.”
114. “Hatred of Him ...” Love cannot turn against its subjects (viz., men cannot hate themselves); and as these subjects cannot exist separate from their First Being, they cannot therefore hate God. (Men may deny or blaspheme, but not hate, God.) It follows, therefore, that, as no bad love can be directed against one’s self or against God, that it can only be against one’s neighbor, and this can be in three forms: viz., by Pride, or the love of good to ourselves and of evil to others; by Envy, or the love of evil to others, without cause of good or evil to us; by Anger, or the love of evil to others on account of real or imaginary evil to us.
115. “... Languid love ...” Sloth; indolence to seek the true good, which is God.
116. “There is another good ...”—the love of this world and earthly pleasures.
117. “Tripartite ...”—three other bad loves: Avarice, Gluttony, Lust.
118. See The Catholic World for February, 1878, “Confession in the Church of England,” by the Right Rev. Mgr. Capel, D.D.
119. These are not the exact words, but they express the exact sense of St. Thomas in the following passage: Beatitudo est bonum perfectum quod totaliter quietat appetitum.... Objectum autem voluntatis, quæ est appetitus humanus, est universale bonum. Summa Th., 4, ii. q. 2. a. 5.
120. Mélanges, French translation, vol. i. Essay on the Maxim, No Salvation out of the Catholic Church.
121. Philipp, ii. 8-11.
122. Rom. viii. 19-23.
123. Rom. ix. 19-21.
124. The writer, for whose opinion we have all respect, has the advantage over us of a personal knowledge of Mr. Bright, and an acquaintance with his public career to which we cannot pretend. So far, however, as our knowledge goes, our estimate of Mr. Bright is far from agreeing altogether with that of the writer. We always believed Mr. Bright to be a man of large heart, of generous impulse, and of large mind, circumscribed by certain defects of education and inherited prejudice; but always a man wishing to see right done and to do right.—Ed. C. W.
125. A lecture by the Rev. Dr. F. C. Ewer, “Catholic Truth and Protestant Error,” reported in the New York Tribune of May 11, 1878.
126. The largest number at the Exhibition was on a Sunday, when upwards of 111,000 entered the building.
127. For a full description of these excellent associations see The Catholic World, January, 1878, “Catholic Circles for Working-men in France.”
128. The Place des Pyramides in the Rue de Rivoli is on the site of the ancient ditch of the fortification in the Faubourg St. Honoré, and is known to be the spot where Joan of Arc was wounded.
129. Ecclesiasticus xxiv.
130. It was published in France in 1684 under the title of L’Ecole Chrétienne.
131. Prayer of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation:
“It is through the Heart of Jesus, my way, my truth, and my life, that I approach thee, O Eternal Father. Through this divine Heart I worship thee for all who worship thee not; I love thee for all who love thee not; I acknowledge thee for all the wilfully blind who through contempt acknowledge thee not. I wish by this divine Heart to fulfil the duty of all men. In spirit I traverse the whole world to seek all the souls ransomed by the most precious Blood of my divine Spouse, in order to satisfy thee for them all by this divine Heart. I embrace them in order to present them to thee through it, and by it I ask of thee their conversion. Wilt thou, O Eternal Father, suffer them to be ignorant of my Jesus, or live not for him who died for all? Thou beholdest, O divine Father, that they live not yet. Oh! make them live through the divine Heart.
132. 1. Gottheit, Freiheit und Unsterblichkeit. Von L. A. Feuerbach. Leipzig.
2. The Essence of Christianity. Idem. Translated by George Eliot. London.
3. The Religion of Humanity. By O. B. Frothingham. New York.
133. Hecuba.
134. M. Emile Souvestre has done more than almost any of his countrymen, except M. de la Villemarquée, to illustrate and set forth the Breton character.
135. A corruption of chat-huant (screech-owl), the cry of which bird the brothers, who were salt-smugglers, used as a signal to inform one another of their whereabouts at night.
136. The Breton has preserved a thoroughly Celtic hatred of his ancient conqueror. “Yes,” said a little peasant girl, describing a shipwreck; “I saw them buried here in the sand; they were Saxons, you know, not Christians; and many an evening I have come with the village children to dance on the graves of the Englishmen who were turning to dust below there.”
137. Namely, of Anne, daughter of Francis II., the last duke, to Charles VIII., and after his death to Louis XII. of France. Brittany was her dowry.
138. The insect popularly known as dragon-fly the Bretons call nadoz-aër, or “needle of the air.”
139. Goazenn-Hêault—Breton expression for a ray of sunlight piercing the clouds.
140. Chercheur de pain, Klasker—the Breton name for beggar.
141. Treid lué zo éné voutou—i.e., he must be an idiot.
142. Genowek—a Breton insult equivalent to “imbecile.”
143. Faou, in the department of Finisterre (the ancient Pays de Cornouailles), was so called.
144. We are not to take literally, says M. Souvestre in a note, these Breton exaggerations. The church of Rumengol (corruption of remed-ol = tous les remèdes) is remarkable without being a wonder; the golden statues are gilded figures of rude workmanship, and the spire is far from being comparable to that of Kreisker at St. Pol de Léon.
145. Pen-god or pen-scod—literally, a maul-pate, the Breton shillelagh.
146. Pennérèz—Breton for heiresses, marriageable girls.
147. Lovers met behind the gable end, because there there were no windows from which they could be overlooked; hence the expression for courtship, to talk behind the gable.
148. Morzolik an ankou the Bretons call the wood-louse, in allusion to its faint, regular rapping. Cf. our Death-watch.
149. The precise distance at which the Bretons locate hell.
150. The following article was recently found in Chicago among the posthumous papers of Judge Arrington, who died in that city nine years ago, a convert to the Catholic Church. It was written twenty years previous, when he was struggling to escape from the meshes of pantheism, and seems to be a vigorous effort to prove to his own satisfaction the reality of a personal, rational Deity.
Some of the illustrations are recognized as having been used in a similar article published in the Democratic Review about thirty years ago, which was extensively copied, and even translated into the French and German languages. The present is a much more elaborate statement than that, as if the author still dwelt upon the subject, and as the years rolled on wished with increasing knowledge to more strongly substantiate to his intellect what his higher nature so instinctively craved.
At the bar Judge Arrington stood almost without a peer in the great Northwest for legal learning and oratorical power. Whenever he indulged in the luxury of literary and poetical composition he showed an ability that promised a like pre-eminence in those pursuits, had he devoted himself to them.
This struggle of a great mind to fling off the incubus of modern error, whose every maze he had thoroughly explored, coupled with his subsequent conversion to Catholicity and his saint-like death in its communion, is an admirable practical illustration of the truth that nothing short of the light and grace to be found only in the true church of Christ can ever thoroughly satisfy a great soul.
151. Judge Arrington had devoted much time and attention to studying the nature and results of sagacity in animals; but he so distinctly saw that they are not responsible agents, and that the harmonious and orderly results produced by them—as, for example, the mathematical regularity of the cells of bees—are to be attributed not to them but to the Author of their wonderful instinct, that he does not even pause to treat this as an objection to his proposition or to draw a distinction between mediate and immediate causes.
152. Written for a children’s “May Cantata.”
153. Numbers xvii.
154. Nothing could give a truer idea of the fog of misconception and ignorance that envelops every subject connected with Catholicity in England than an incident which occurred to the writer in the course of last summer. He had applied to the editor of an influential monthly of high standing, published in London, for permission to contribute a paper on the Bollandist Acta. The editor in reply said that he should be happy to receive an article on such a subject, adding, “They were old friends and benefactors of mine.” The phrase was somewhat puzzling; but it was fully explained to the writer by a literary friend of great experience as referring to the respectable family of the late Baron Bolland, a judge of the English Exchequer Court. The Catholic Bollandists were strangers even in name to the popular editor.
155. Among the numerous errors in the few lines devoted to the Bollandists in the new Encyclopædia Britannica, not the worst is the statement that Père Bolland was only a short time engaged on the Acta. More than one-half of a life of sixty-nine years was spent in the production of five folio volumes for his own share, besides superintending the preparation of others.
156. Particulars may be found in the Bibliothèque des Ecrivains de la Comp. de Jésus, of the Pères de Backer, S.J. Liége, 1854. Also in Nicéron, Histoire des Hommes Illustres, II.
157. Costello’s translation.
158. The white cross of Savoy, won by a chivalric knight of the ages of faith, but which one now learns to loathe in Italy—the cross of torture: crux de cruce—for Pius IX. of blessed memory.
159. The more ancient writers use this expression in the sense of enjoying the pleasures of the country or making good cheer, without any invidious meaning. Voltaire is one of the first to imply by its use a life of luxurious and sensual indulgence.
160. Æneas Sylvius.
161. Renan. Vie de Saint Paul, chap. vii. p. 126.
162. Renan, Vie de Saint Paul, c. vii. p. 135.
163. Ecclesiasticus xxiv.
164. It was recently said that there were three kinds of dancing: the graceful, the ungraceful, and the disgraceful.
165. Redondillas are stanzas of four short lines. This paragraph on versification reads curiously to ears accustomed to the pentameter blank verse of the English drama, stately at times and sprightly when need be, and, indeed, capable of infinite variety. The Spanish plays of to-day are written in very short metre, and French tragedies still rhyme.
166. Napoleon thought a big nose to be a sign of intellect, says history, mother of lies. Fiddlesticks! He chose men with big noses because they were easier to lead. An army of snub-noses would never have gone to Moscow.
167. It will occur to the ingenious reader, as indeed it has to the ingenious writer, that it would have been much simpler and more natural to ask Pauline to write her wishes. So it would. But then André was a poet and a genius, and—this is a romance. Besides, who knows but Pauline might have been locked up at the critical moment and denied writing materials?
168. It was the very incident here related, and which in its main outlines is historically true, that led to a police regulation forbidding the intrusion of masked outsiders into wedding parties and other festivals.
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