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THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

Thoughts and Memories

BY

Rev. HENRY E. O'KEEFFE

of the Paulists

THE PAULIST PRESS

120 West 60th Street

New York

1920

COFYRIGHTj 1920, BY "THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF

ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE IN THE STATE

OF NEW YORK"

TO

M. F. O. WHO MADE THIS BOOK POSSIBLE

Some of these Essays were published in America, The Philadelphia Quarterly, The Amer ican Ecclesiastical Review, The Homiletic Re view and The Catholic World. Two of them were taken from another book of the author, Sermons in Miniature for Meditation, because they were deemed Religious Essays rather than Ser mons.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS 1

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS 8

THE MODERN MONK, LACORDAIRE .... 15

CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERIC ' 18

MISSIONARY TO THE BAHAMAS ...... 25

COVENTRY PATMORE 30

MISTAKES CONCERNING FRANCE 55

EMERSON AND HECKER 61

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS 71

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS 80

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 95

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 106

SUFFRAGETTES AND NUNS 117

WOMAN SUFFRAGE 123

A DISAPPOINTED NATION 129

CARDINAL NEWMAN ONCE MORE 142

HILLIS AND NEWMAN 148

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTIVITY 152

AUGUSTINE HEWIT . . • 162

THE NEW FRANCISCAN CULT 179

THE GREGORIAN CHANT 183

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 188

ix

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS

A LTHOUGH not always a perfidious person, the A\ proselyter institutes perfidy. There is no crassness about his ignorance, yet he is profoundly ignorant. Since he sometimes draws his suste nance by proselyting, he is not always in good faith when he steals away the good faith of others. However, there may be moments when he acts prompted by what the moralists would term a mixed motive. Hardly ever is he provoked by what the ascetic theologians would call the prin ciple of detachment. He is part of the refined sys tem which is encompassed with the economic and religious insincerities which sometimes fester around what are called social settlement houses.

My memory serves me so pleasantly when I think of Edwin Booth's splendid rendition of lago's contempt for one who would steal the trash in his purse, and his fear of one who would steal away the precious boon of his good name.

Proselytism steals a jewel more costly than a good name. It roots out the faith from that spiri tual Kingdom within the hearts of even little chil dren. Preeminently is this so in respect to the proselytism of the children of that inexpressibly brilliant country, Italy. Huddled in the infectious

2 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

tenements of our American cities the struggle for material betterment is normal in such a quick witted race, indeed, highly commendable. Gold is a strenuous temptation for every people on the face of the earth. Why are we shocked that it should be so for the children of a poverty-stricken nation like Italy?

How execrable is that wretch, who, knowing all the facts, would feed the body, but only on the con dition of stealing away the bread and wine of the soul! What a horrible fallacy to presume that a soup-school or a swimming-pool can supply moral strength or sweetness even to that ingenuous faith in the hearts of little children! Yet this is what these bloodless and broken sects of Christendom, with their insincere sociologists, are vainly at tempting to do. Thousands of dollars go out and gratify the venality of an army of officials con sumed with the mixed passion of proselyting Italians and at the same time foraging for them selves. The horror of it is more patent when we remember what the rich glow of an authentic faith means to an Italian.

Of all countries in the world, Italy the most for bids any expression of vulgarity. In a land where all language is music and the rustle of a leaf a song, even one strident voice is out of place. Italian air is redolent with the aroma of faith. Because of this, even the smallest places are en veloped with religious mystery and charm. He who cannot feel the faith of Italy has lost the spiri-

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS

tual sense. A superficial tourist is a grave scan dal in any country, but infinitely more so on Italian soil. To know Italy and Italians one must be not only courteous and gifted with the gift of distinc tion, but also possessed with the fine grace of reli gious perception. To speak of Italy one must first forget its failings, and love it. To the full spirit it is a most lovable land, and its people the most affectionate in the world. Every honorable word concerning that picturesque country is a literary contribution when the author is an intimate and sincere observer.

Within the church which harbors the Holy House, in the town of Loretto, I saw an Italian peasant woman with a sickly child in her arms. She was for all the world, a mater dolorosa her self. There was a gentle melancholy in her dark eyes, a softness in her hair and a grace about her head which the pre-Raphaelite limners give to the Madonna. She held the tiny lips of her bambino to the stones of the Holy House, that they for heal ing, might be kissed. In her broken, halting dia lect and dramatic manner, even a stupid foreign observer could detect the vivid glory of her faith. She spoke to the Madonna as mother to mother, as if Christ's Mother were a thing of fine flesh and blood before her. For this Italian mother, faith had become sight. It was of little import whether the Angels over night had translated the Holy House from Illyria, or the Crusaders had brought it from Palestine, the print of her baby's lips upon

4 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

its sacred stones would be an instrument of heal ing to his body. He had kissed not only the blue border of the Virgin's garment, but the blue tassel on the Levite robe of her Son.

Such is the type of Italian mother that has sent her sons and daughters to this American Republic. They are like exiles from Milan and Genoa in the north, but most of all from Sicily, Calabria and Naples in the south. The ways of our ancient and gracious Faith are in the corpuscles of their red blood. It is the vilest of occupations to eke out a livelihood by destroying this profound, historical gift which has bestowed for centuries comfort and solace to millions of Italian hearts. The proselyter is a most malign and virulent sociological influ ence. His malignance has such a play of sin cerity that wealthy constituencies open out their coffers for his support. So there are gymnasiums and moving pictures and Christmas presents all in profuse command to quench that faith, that light which is seen neither on land nor sea. If the per ceptions of the proselyter were ultimately affec tionate, they would be worthy of reverence, but they are venal to a high and oft-times a low de gree. But how can he love Italians who is out side the Fold of the Faith? Even Ruskin and Symonds with all their wealth of elegant Italian detail, possess only the love of appreciation, but not of benevolence. Of course, they are honorable and gracious, because they have safeguarded the point of honor. Not so is this with the proselyter

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS 5

who skulks around the social settlement houses of our seething American cities. His purpose even though mixed is out of harmony with all that is Divine.

But if we have nothing but malediction for him, what shall we say of those indifferent citizens in the commonwealth of our Holy Faith? What shall we say of the unappreciative pastor who is naturally so appreciative? Is he careless of this acute Italian problem because he is unjustly cen sorious and educated beyond his intelligence? When the Italian is wary of him and will support neither church nor school, why will he forget that the Italian for centuries has known but a beneficed clergy and that even the richest basilicas have been reared by the munificent bounty of noble hands. However even to judge of it incorrectly is but beside the point. The Italian problem is here and must be religiously met.

A facile mind may be alive to every phase of moral beauty in Italy, but it is the religious heart which perceives the beauty in its gentle decay. There are stretches of Italy which the unwhole some breath of doubt and of the newer civilization, has never touched. The artlessness of Italian faith has created an atmosphere of art which hangs over these odd places in the midst of their dignified dissolution. The Faith of the Holy Uni versal Church alone has been the fruitful mother and tender patroness of all these inutterable his toric and artistic charms.

6 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

All these and more would the proselyter wrest to his own disreputable service by robbing the Italian of that perennial source of his all — his wit and art, his sentiment and delight.

The obtuse observer of our Italians in these United States is dense because he has not caught the spirit of place, much less does he measure the spirit of man. Because the Italians take their re ligion genially it must not always be concluded that they are not seriously spiritual. One must be quick to see what is of the core of religion and what is the manifestation of national and racial temperament.

It is a rare delight to come upon even an Ameri can priest, who is analytic enough to wholly under stand the Italian people. It is quite as interesting to receive the impressions of one who has a zest for their moral security and who is susceptible to the real and inner operations of their complex tra ditions. We are never confused at the ill repute of the touts and gamblers who hound the racing haunts like Saratoga. But a shallow American wayfarer is shocked at light-hearted Siena, with its Palio, where a horse-race is indeed an innocent merriment. He is shocked again when the jockey's banner is taken to the Cathedral to be blessed, or when the successful horse stands at the head of the banquet table before a manger filled with the finest delicacies a horse can eat. There is an act of faith even in Italian sports.

Think of the faith of Loretto! It is but a tiny

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS 7

spot, yet call it by its name and troops of angels hover around the poet's mind. Think of the way side shrines in Lucca in the month of June! See the olive trees and vineyards and church towers standing like naked spears against a sky soft enough to touch!

Who that saw can ever forget the divine design in the waters below or in the heavens above the Adriatic? Assisi is in the heart of the Umbrian hills, yet even in this, our time of spiritual doubt, many a pilgrim would travel barefooted on the sacred soil of the good St. Francis, for was it not in Assisi that he held sweet converse with the birds and swooned away for very love at the comeliness of the wild flowers? There is a sacredness even in Rimini, for the gossips now are silent and the stones alone tell all the tragic horror of Fran- cesca's guilty passion.

Lights and flowers and color and florid music must feed the Latin faith. Italy's faith is not suf fering from the irreverence of the modern spirit. Italy's faith is eternally great and beautiful to all except the blind and the foolish. Its test of faith — morality — is of the highest order — that is why all the lovers are romantic and the women easily beautiful and naturally chaste. This is the rea son, too, why the proselyter is like the kings of Shakespeare— superfluous, if not base.

Fie! fie, upon this proselyter, may he die the death!

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS

WHEN I was a youth I heard Ingersoll lecture one Sunday night at the old Harrigan and Hart Theatre on Broadway, New York. I cannot remember his subject, but my memory serves me in such wise that I can even to this day hear him pouring out in affluent verbiage his shattering ridi cule on the believer in spirits, ghosts or goblins. Afterward I learned that he had caught a tiny something of the spirit of Voltaire's cynicism, without Voltaire's brilliant literary fluency or genius. Later it was obvious to me that Huxley, who was then in fashion, had largely influenced him. Huxley, too, was attempting to bring to de struction all revealed truth. He did but scorn the philosopher who would people our planet with in visible spirits and affirmed that he would not be lieve that the circumpolar seas were full of sea- serpents unless he had seen them with his own eyes.

But behold there has come to our shores an emi nent British physicist whom but five years ago we revered as we once revered Kelvin. He comes with what he calls a new revelation. He assures us, although at times his terminology is vague, that the unseen is real, and declares that the fact that

8

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS 9

you cannot see a thing does not prove that the thing does not exist. But this is what the humor ous person in the comic opera, The Mikado, would term "a pretty state of things." Think, too, it has all come within a few years — this confusing twist in the world of thought. Huxley is at one pole of scientific induction while Lodge is at the other.

It is a far cry, too, from Gibbon, who referred the genesis of even religion to an illusion, an idea that thrived even in the times of the Roman Em pire. Gibbon recognized, however, as did some of the utilitarian pagan philosophers, that it was a useful illusion. But nevertheless the Roman philosopher thought it a false illusion, while the Roman magistrate saw it necessary for discipline, as the esthete believed it a thing to be admired.

Now Gibbon had so popularized the idea that thinkers full of accurate information, historical sense and moderate judgment took it up and made it more vivid. Lecky, indeed, clothes this illusion with such potentiality that it seems to create all institutional, social and philanthropic civilization. Moreover, at times he would indicate that even political forms of civilization can be referred to this useful illusion of religion. Yet to him it remained an illusion, but necessary with its jurisprudence and canon law for the discipline of the masses, for the refinement of social intercourse, for the devout instinct of the believer, the heart of the lover and the rhapsody of the poet. But it remained a beau-

10 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

tiful illusion. It had its foundation not on verity but falsity, not in objective reality but in individual subjectivism. He views with delight the bloom and beauty of the flower, but the tap-root of it all is not only invisible, it does not exist. Hence Lecky's wonderment at the overpowering charity of the Catholic Sisterhoods, the preternatural influ ence of the celibacy of the clergy, the plausible system of moral jurisdiction and other sociological phenomena which are mere commonplace realities to us.

But a wider thinker, perhaps, than Lecky was John Stuart Mill. He cherishes not merely as a philosopher but as an economist the far-reaching social value of this illusion named religion. Her bert Spencer opined in the same manner, but his rigid methods of ratiocination and lack of charm of literary style do not provoke the same obvious evidence for the scholar.

There then appeared in the sky that unique im- moralist with all his translucent brilliancy, Fried- erick Nietsche. He concentrates his cruel, flaming light upon the logical absurdities of these British sophists. He waxes more merciless than ever, and with artless sarcasm depicts the foolishness of morality, if it is founded on a sublime fancy. He goes still further and asserts that if religion and morality are illusions, then they are not useful but inimical to humanity. He arrives at the conclu sion that immorality, disillusion and the destruc tion of the weak and the survival of the fittest are

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS 11

the real necessities for strengthening the civiliza tion of mankind. So the World War was to him not only a national but a universal necessity that the race might slough off its weaker elements and create that new type of superman for its future security. It was, thought he, not might over right, but might had the only right even against the weak. It was a kink in the process of thought. He stretched the principles of the British philoso phers until they snapped.

The result of the War knocked this opinion into a cocked hat, as it did the illogical beliefs of the British dialecticians. Men could not, or rather would not, spill their blood in verdant valleys, or leave the hearths of home for an illusion, however useful it might be in times of peace. Men, how ever valiant, must die for an ideal, but it had to be objectively real, not false, else sham and pre tence would triumph over candor and truth. But by another curious twist the malign influence of bad logic did not stay merely in the domain of thought. Karl Marx, that exiled Jew living in a London garret, took it into the world of action. His genius applied it on the high scale of inter nationalism, to every laborer with his horny hands of toil, to every factory girl with her pinched and pallid face. His cry, which is even now ringing throughout the economic world, was to the masses, suffering what he considered to be genuine griev ances; his rallying cry to them was: "Act, act, for you have nothing to lose but your chains, reli-

12 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

gion is a useless illusion and morality is a matter of enlightened expediency." The great Socialist drew the aberrations of the British and German thinkers to their consistent and practical conclu sion. The downward course of high thinking and ethical doctrine became easy: Facilis descensus averni.

But now another astounding cataclysm of rea soning has come to pass. The War which smashed into a thousand pieces all these unsound and in genious forms of dialectics, has, because of the multitudinous loneliness of death, goaded man on to the other extreme of Spiritistic belief. With him, now, all seeming unreal illusions are not only useful but they are real. Was there ever such an abruptly violent change in the whole history of thought? I do not know.

Sir Oliver Lodge, who only a few years ago ex plained psychical phenomena in terms of the material, has now turned his thought upside down, and is explaining material phenomena in the terms of the psychical. But if this distinguished scien tist turned a somersault, enterprising and baneful journalists with turgid and venal fictionists have also stood on their heads and are beholding a par tial, fragmentary, distorted vision of the ever- ancient and ever-new doctrine of the Communion of Saints. With that kind of knowledge which Paul of Tarsus believed puffeth a man up, they are telling us that the supernatural is a reality. This is a truth which is so a parcel of the integral

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS 13

system of Catholicism that it has been taken as a matter of course for centuries.

The reality of the supernatural is as vital to the little children in our household of the Faith as is the existence of stewed prunes.

Moreover, the definite hope for personal immor tality is as old as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, So crates, Plato and other noble pagans, and older by many a long century.

These marvelous discoveries of modern Spiritists were formulated in those splendid productions of the early Fathers of the Church, ages and ages ago. The searching judgment of Thomas Aquinas, with the discriminations and practical principles of ascetic theology, for the divination of angelic from diabolic spirits, are as old as the hills. The regu lation of private from public relevation was as rigidly measured by a fixed standard of the Church, far away in the past, as it would be now, at the seance of a fashionable Spiritistic medium. It is the horrible lack of this norm of moral authority that will bring psychical havoc and disaster. In this, Sir Oliver is our colossal enemy. Sincere and susceptible himself, he will breed a generation of Spiritistic vipers who \vill poison and eat down to the root and stock of all moral effort. It was that great Pope Leo I. who emphasized the terrible warning that the Oriental superstitions, debauched ancient Rome and Greece. Already criminal per sonal conceit and absurd individual fancy are cre ating a psychical literature so confusing that if

14 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

you peruse it earnestly you cannot tell whether you are on your head or your heels. This is the mighty difference between the sane, ascetic litera ture of the Church concerning heavenly and devil ish spirits and the pestiferous aberrations of these religiously insane mediums. There is no species of mental disorder which will more profoundly and in a facile and plausible fashion produce such de bilitating effect on morals, and such neurological disturbances for the highly organized body. The tragic pathos of Sir Oliver Lodge's life is pitiable, but his terribly wicked influence is worthy only of rebuke.

THE MODERN MONK, LACORDAIRE

BORN in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Lacordaire's early moments were most simple and ordinary; many of us have had youthful lives far more romantic. No childish anecdotes, no boy ish adventures, no unusual deeds. The son of an humble country doctor, loved by a kind mother- tutored in a prominent college, his young hours passed happily until the age of twenty, when he lost the faith of his childhood. It was the craze of his time to be progressive; he passionately read the modern philosophers of France; not, as he said, to retain their ideas, but merely to catch the gist of their thoughts. But little by little, unknow ingly, to himself, the faith his mother had given him was slipping away. The firm rock that once he stood upon while troubled billows lashed about him was now but shifting sand. He looked — he was frightened — he saw the eternal star of hope had hid itself behind a dreary cloud.

For the two following years, as a lawyer in the crowded courts of Paris, he heard the name of the prisoner, the cry of ragged children, the complaint of the exile; he saw the perjurer's quivering lip, the gibbet's deathly shadow.

There was no God for Lacordaire. His God was an airy phantom bred in the shallow brain of man.

15

16 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

On the boulevard of Paris he saw the scornful eye of wanton luxury; he heard the mother's tale of piteous woe. In the Rue Mont-Thabor he saw the beggar's bony hand, the miser's heartless stare. All seemed chaos!

But a soul wrestles with God — a noble soul is in the conflict — it is the hour of vocation — it catches sweet fragments of echoes far away — are they from heaven? But then there was no heaven for Lacordaire.

At last the day had come. Worn out with his journey he cries for his God. The cloud is broken, the storm has ceased, the waves are stilled, the sky is bright in everlasting sunshine. Truth had re vealed itself, and Lacordaire felt its hidden sweet ness.

Then followed Lacordaire's life as a seminarian; his rigorous asceticism; and then perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of his life, that of his ex emplary submission to Gregory XVI., who ordered the suppression of the Avenir newspaper; and lastly his wonderful preaching, his pious death.

Although the matter contained in Lacodaire's sermons and conferences cannot be disregarded, still he must have depended on magic utterance, finished manners, commanding aspect, wondrous virtue to produce such marvelous effects.

But Lacordaire was above all, a man of feeling — his soul burned with love for virtue and for the young men who looked upon the wanderings of shallow philosophers as rays of light from eternal

THE MODERN MONK, LACORDAIRE 17

wisdom. To bring these noble souls to God was the object of his life — to win them back to truth the aim of all his sermons. And for many years his voice resounded through the highways of Paris calling men to Truth and Goodness.

He soothed the youth who were troubled with temptation — he strengthened the skeptic — con verted the infidel — consoled the aged. He yearned to see a land filled with warm homes and happy firesides; a people without sin, Christian love eternal and loyalty to God's Church shrouding every nation of the world.

CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA

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

He visited America in 1863 and again in 1870. He himself brought to Baltimore the first four missionaries for the American Negroes. These young priests were the first fruits of his founda tion of St. Joseph's College, Mill Hill. They vowed themselves forever to the service of the

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CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 19

Negro race. We are told in the biography that they met with a very friendly reception in Mary land, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore at once placed at their disposal a house and some sixty acres of land. The departure from England of these first American missionaries to the Negroes, was marked by a special ceremony of farewell and by a sermon by Archbishop Manning.

Mr. Wilfrid Ward says, that although the epithet "great," often used of Newman, of Manning, of Wiseman, was denied Cardinal Vaughan, it cannot be now, after we have read his biography. In New York City he collected but four thousand dollars, yet he had many promises and doubtless some of them were duly fulfilled. All the money realized went to the founding of the Missionary College, Mill Hill, which was to educate missionaries to the Negroes, not only in America, but in the Philip pines, in Uganda, in Madras, in New Zealand, in Borneo, in Labuan, in the basin of the Congo, in Kashmir, and in Kafiristan. No records exist to tell the amount of money he gathered on his tour in the United States. At best it seems to have been a comparatively paltry sum, when the proportions of the undertaking are considered. His biographer thinks it to be about £11,000 in cash. Money may have had a larger value in those days, and it may have gone further, as we would say, in his own country, but we cannot help believing that, in this day, we would have been more generous.

Yet, he must have been profoundly grateful,

20 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

In chapter six of Mr. Snead-Cox's work we are told that Father Vaughan sailed from Southampton for California on December 17, 1863. Passage was difficult across the American Continent, so he went by way of Panama. In Panama he had to wait a week for a steamer, which was to take him along the Pacific coast to San Francisco — accord ingly he "left for California January 14th, on the

CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 21

steamer St. Louis." The voyage took several weeks. He immediately became the priest and friend of the steerage passengers, many of whom were Irish Catholics from the Eastern States, who were on their way to the gold fields, while others were avoiding the drafts then required for the Northern Army in the Civil War. On the first Sunday morning he said Mass in the steerage, and in the afternoon he held service in the saloon under the protection of the Stars and Stripes. With the captain of the vessel seated by his side, he "preached his first sermon under the shadow of the American flag to an almost exclusively non- Catholic audience."

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

"The Catholics are very numerous in California. They are the largest and most important community.

22 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

In the public conveyances nuns go free of charge and priests sometimes at half-price. ... I thought, of course, the Archbishop of San Francisco would en courage my begging, bearing with me such a letter as I do from Rome, but, no — he called a Council and it was decided that I should not be allowed to collect in San Francisco, nor indeed in the diocese at all from house to house. . . .

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

"The convents — excellent fervent communities — at San Francisco and here at Marysville, are busy pray ing for the work. . . .

"I have come up here to Marysville, Bishop O'Con- nelPs diocese. I have got about £100 only, but this was more than it was thought possible to collect here."

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

"I went into Mr. Donohoe's bank to sit down. I told him my case; he had no sympathy for the work, and had given $250 to please his wife. Said he would lend me $400. 'But I can't lend them to the Blessed Virgin,' said I, smiling. I told him I had not come

CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 23

with the intention of begging from him — he had given generously enough. Finally, I said: 'What interest do you require?' 'Never mind that/ he answered. 'When do you want the principal back?' 'Never mind that, either,' said he.

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

"The only passage in all his writings, published or unpublished, in which, as far as I know, he ever speaks of natural scenery with anything like enthusi asm, occurs in the Journal kept at this time. It de scribes the Sacramento River as it rolls into the Bay of San Francisco, and declares that for sheer beauty there is nothing in Italy or anywhere in the Old World to touch it. All the rest of his days he was partial to everything American. And, to say the truth, there was something in his own nature which answered to the restless energy, the spirit of high adventure, and the willingness to risk everything for a good cause, which he noted then, and in later visits, in the people of the United States. I find this passage in the diary at the time when the depredations of the Alabama were mak ing bad blood between England and the United States: 'The American is prodigal of money, health, home, lands, and all. So he will sacrifice all this for the suc cess of an undertaking. If that be war with England, he will go to every imaginable length of exertion.' "

With this, for want of space, we must conclude, and perhaps it were well to do so with a happy, though somewhat flattering, entry in the Cardinal's diary. We cannot refrain, likewise, from quoting from what his biographer calls "one of the last

24 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

entries in his diary before sailing" for England; it runs as follows:

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

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

MISSIONARY TO THE BAHAMAS

IN May, 1918, there was buried, in the officers' plot of the cemetery at the West Point Military Acad emy in the United States, a priest who was, in a manner, the founder of the Catholic Mission at Nassau, New Providence, in the Bahama Islands. At his funeral much was gracefully said of the unusual episodes of his life, but not a word (since most of us had forgotten) of the things he began to do in 1883 for a colored population of more than 10,000 in Nassau, the capital of those tropical is lands. They had been a British possession for nearly two hundred years.

It is a far cry from the blue sea and coral reefs of Nassau Harbor and from the palm trees which line the islands, to the soldiers' graveyard on the banks of the Hudson River, in New York. But the contrast in the picture is interesting.

On that May morning, 1918, the body of the Right Rev. Mgr. Cornelius G. O'Keeffe was borne by soldiers' horses, on a caisson or gun- carriage — a favor for one who was not a soldier — across the plains where the cadets drill, past the Catholic chapel (which he had actually fought the United States Government to build), to his own military grave. What a change in the course of

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26 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

this priest's fruitful years of residence at West Point!

By a special ruling of the War Department he was given burial among the distinguished Amer ican officers who are now peacefully sleeping there after the battle of life. In May it is a beautiful spot, with rich, green grass and many bright flowers. The Faculty of the Academy stood by the priest's grave. The honorary pall-bearers were generals of distinction, who had known him and had come to do him honor. Simple soldiers were there for whom he had done favors. His brother priests in surplice and black cassocks and mon- signori in purple chanted the Psalm, Benedictus, and the final prayers. The Military Band con cluded the service with Cardinal Newman's hymn. It was this priest who by the sheer force of his character and after three years of struggle with the Senate and the House of Representatives at Washington had finally won the permission to build a Catholic chapel on this military reserva tion.

In 1892 by this same characteristic strength he impressed on the Holy See the imperious necessity of settling at once the ecclesiastical case of Doctor Edward McGlynn, the pastor of St. Stephen's Church, New York. He could do this without the violation of any ecclesiastical etiquette. Everyone knew him to be honest — abruptly so he was at times. He knew Rome. He had been educated — one of few Americans — in the Roman Seminary of

MISSIONARY TO THE BAHAMAS 27

San Appolinare. He had as classmates and friends some of the most eminent prelates and diplomats of the Roman Curia, such as Cardinal Gasparri, the present Papal Secretary of State. The McGlynn difficulty, a misunderstanding (principally on economic problems) between good men, was a source of inquiry and distress for nine years among many devout and serious persons within and without the Catholic Church. It was this priest, buried with military honors at West Point in May, 1918, who almost single-handed con strained Cardinal Satolli, his friend and the first American Papal Delegate, to bring to trial and eventually restore Dr. Edward McGlynn to his position in the Church. The rector of St. Stephen's had been O'Keeffe's patron in youth. His disciple in after years did him a service which he and the whole country never forgot.

But Mgr. O'Keeffe was destined to bring to the consideration of the ecclesiastical authorities an other matter of concern, which involved the secur ity of sixty thousand souls in the Bahamas. This mission, with its simple Negro inhabitants, should ever be of affectionate interest to American Cath olics. For the islands were beheld by Columbus while opening to his view the glorious vision of a new world. On one of them there was said, for the first time on this continent, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. They are replete with many a golden landscape — soft twilights and cloudless skies, sweet odors and luscious bursting fruit.

28 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

For four hundred years the blessing of our ancient Faith hardly ever touched the genial soil of the Bahamas. They were no man's land and nominally under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina. But there were no means of communication; no line of sea- steamers; no manner of transference to the his toric isles. There was a steamship line from New York to Nassau. In the winter of 1883 Mgr. C. G. O'Keeffe took a pleasure trip on one of these steam ships, the Santiago, bound for Nassau. But a few days after his arrival he wrote home that Catholi cism had no part in the islands, once baptized by the Catholic discoverer, Christopher Columbus. He was a secular priest of the Archdiocese of New York, and had no pretences to be a missionary, and least of all to a foreign country. But this la mentable situation distressed him. He deter mined, on his arrival in New York, to appeal to some of his powerful friends, ecclesiastics in the Congregation of Propaganda, Rome. This he did, in cooperation with His Grace the Most Rev. Michael A. Corrigan, D.D., Archbishop of New York. On August 25, 1885, the islands were within the spiritual domain of the great metro politan archdiocese — and this largely consum mated by the zeal and tact of a New York priest.

From the beginning he felt that the sacrifices of these missions would be many and profound and that only the heroism of a Religious Order could make of them a spiritual success. Anglicanism

MISSIONARY TO THE BAHAMAS 29

was dominant. It had wealth and all the influen tial white population within its fold. Catholicism had nothing but the intense love for Christ with which to begin. Hence, its progress and glory of these twenty-five years!

In 1885 Mgr. O'KeefTe built the first Catholic Church on the Islands and with his own hands blessed the corner-stone on December 3d, the Feast of St. Francis Xavier. It was dedicated by Arch bishop Corrfgan February 1, 1887. He had no desire even to begin the work, and felt himself un equal for the task. But he said that with prayer a measure of divine courage was vouchsafed him, and he spent almost three lonely, though happy, years of service for the Bahamas, until he returned to New York, in the spring of 1889.

Others continued the sacred enterprise insti tuted by Mgr. O'Keeffe, until October 28, 1889, when the Benedictine Fathers from St. John's Abbey, Northern Minnesota, and the Sisters of Charity from Mount Saint Vincent, New York, took unto themselves the poor missions of the Bahama Islands.

COVENTRY PATMORE

POSSIBLY the triumvirate Pusey, Keble and Newman gave the impetus to the present sense of reaction against the Reformation — a feeling which has taken captive the artistic mind of mod ern England. Nevertheless there exists today in that country a constituency which can have been influenced only very indirectly by these three great spirits of the Catholic revival. If the pre-Raphael- ite movement was born in* Oxford, it was not bred there. Its representatives are artists like Watts, Millais, Burne-Jones, Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There are others both in art and letters who differ more or less from these. Others, like Algernon Swinburne or Water Pater, who, if they be neo-pagans, are at times mediaeval and Catholic. To say this of Swinburne is perhaps unreasonable, for there are critics who contend that his ethics is drawn not from the wholesome but the poisoned fountain of Greek sensualism. Others — although differing from each other — are Hedonists, loving the beautiful for its own sake and making it the sum and end of life. If Swinburne's theory of passion be that sung as by Anacreon, what shall we say of the loves of these lesser lights? Yet to say that Mr. Patmore is part of the pre-Raphaelite

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COVENTRY PATMORE 31

movement needs some intelligible explanation. That movement aimed to bring back the romantic days of Cimabue, and Giotto, and Fra Angelico, and that array who painted bodies with souls and flesh all spiritual. The new disciples in their en thusiasm copied even the crooked anatomy and blind perspective of their Catholic masters. Ros- setti, in his unique poems, drew his inspiration from Dante, but in imitating that mighty genius he lingered perhaps too much in the realm of sense, and so is Dantesque only up to a certain degree. Patmore has charged him almost with sinning against the light, and prostituting the gift of a holy mission. Nevertheless he remains, as much or more than Tennyson or Ruskin, a living expression of that medievalism which is golden even in the eyes of the modern world.

Patmore in quite another fashion has unearthed from the tomb our ancient glories and taught us that the blood of saints flows in our veins; that that spiritual power is not to be disregarded which cre ated the poetry, architecture, painting, and sculp ture of mediaeval Europe. We have no details of Patmore's conversion to Catholicism, but it is easy to see how the sestheticism of that religion could provoke from him not only love, but obedience. Yet he was philosopher enough to know that cul ture is but a faint manifestation of the high spirit that dwells within — that beauty is but the splendor of the true. In this limited sense is Patmore a pre-Raphaelite, since he longs for that immortal

32 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

time, loves its saints and dreamers, and reverences the hearts who would bring it back again. In a more limited sense still is he a classicist — not, of course, as William Morris or Alma Tadema would be — but a classicist who, if he exchanged the Sis- tine Madonna for the Venus of Milo, would never theless be careful to explain that the worst charge you can hurl against Christianity is to call it a new religion and to deny that it is but a quality added to the religion of the past. Doubtless there are some who would not accept the theory that there is a principle of continuity running through all the religions. Patmore, it would seem, be lieved that there was. He has said in his essay on "The Language of Religion:" "How 'natural,' for example, it would be that King Humbert, if ever he thinks fit to assume possession of St. Peter's and the Vatican, should regard the erection of an Egyp tian Obelisk in the forecourt of a Renaissance church as a monstrous solecism in art, and so abolish one of the boldest and most impressive symbols ever devised to teach man that the 'Lion of the Tribe of Juda' (with this title the obelisk is inscribed) came out of Egypt, that the 'great Ser pent Pharao, King of Egypt' (or nature), 'is be come Christ by His assumption of the body which without Him is Egypt.' "

Coventry Kearsey Dighton Patmore died Decem ber 1, 1896, and was buried from the little Cath olic church at Lymington, Hants, England. He was born at Woodford, in Essex, on July 3, 1823*

COVENTRY PATMORE 33

His father, Peter Patmore, was a friend of Hazlitt and Lamb, and there are letters addressed to him in Hazlitt's Liber Amoris. Mr. Edmund Gosse is responsible for saying that Peter Patmore was painfully mixed up in the Scott duel of 1821 and the Plumer Ward controversy, and that it was for this reason that Thackeray refused to meet the then young man, Coventry Patmore, even though he bore letters of introduction from the distin guished Robert Browning. His early youth was spent in comfortable circumstances. His father had a house in Southampton Street, Fitzroy Square, and a country house at Mill Hill, not far from London. From the beginning the lad was a great reader, and he had many books at com mand. When about fourteen or more he was sent to Paris. He lived with a family in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and went to lectures at the College de France. He remained there for one year, and in a very unhappy mood. Such, indeed, is the re corded impression he left with Mr. Gosse, to whom we are indebted.

It must be fifteen years or more since Mr. Aubrey de Vere wrote a letter to Father Isaac Hecker, accompanying a copy of the Unknown Eros, and recommending its author as a man who struck deeper and flew higher than many a mortal around him. From that time forward the founder of the Paulist Community never ceased to read and mark passages in the volume. This is to be noted, for he was a priest who read in later life

34 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

but little poetry, and that only of the supremely best.

While in Paris, Patmore fell in love with a beau tiful English girl. Although she rejected him and married another, he considered her as the very first Angel in the House. At the age of sixteen he published The Woodman's Daughter and The River. In 1884 he again gave to the world a vol ume of Poems. It was attacked on all sides, Blackwood's Magazine being most violent in the charge. To add to his misfortunes, just at this time his father lost everything speculating in rail road stocks. To get away from his creditors he fled to the Continent, leaving his son, Coventry, be hind him in a penniless condition. He went through fifteen months of severe poverty. Brown ing was kind to him, so were Barry Cornwall and his wife. This couple, now known as Bryan Waller Procter and Mrs. Procter, at a dinner in troduced Patmore to Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, who made some flippant remarks on Patmore's shabby appearance. Mrs. Procter made it the occasion of placing Patmore's poems in the hands of Milnes, and the next morning she re ceived a note from that gentleman offering to Pat- more a post in the library of the British Museum. This, with the kindly friendship of Leigh Hunt, buoyed up the spirits of the poet. In 1846 he met Tennyson, and for more than three years they were fast friends; but both being positive characters, there came an estrangement. About 1847 he met

COVENTRY PATMORE 35

Rossetti and probably Millais. At the invitation of Rossetti he contributed the lyric called "The Seasons" to the pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ. Mr. Gosse tells us that Patmore was instru mental in bringing Tennyson and Rossetti together. In the same year he became intimate with Mr. Ruskin. Then suddenly he withdrew from the world and married Miss Emily Augusta Andrews, the daughter of a prominent Independent minister. This was in the fall of 1847. This spiritually- minded lady was painted by Millais. She must have been beautiful. Mrs. Carlyle accused her of looking like a medallion, so immobile was her beauty. She suffered with great calmness the poverty of her husband. She bore him six chil dren. She loved him, she protected him. In 1862 she died, being only thirty-eight years old. He has recorded her Departure in lines tremu lous with pathos :

"It was not like your great and gracious ways I

Do you, that have naught other to lament,

Never, my Love, repent

Of how that July afternoon

You went. "But all at once to leave me at the last,

More at the wonder than the loss aghast,

With sudden unintelligible phrase

And frightened eye,

And go your journey of all days

With not a kiss or good-bye,

And the only loveless look the look with which you passed:

'Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways."

36 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

Three years after the death of his first wife Pat- more married again a woman of high virtue and large fortune. Stricken with heart-hunger, he sought and captured responsive companionship in the delightful personality of Miss Mary Byles. Chilled with the fear that he may have violated the sanctity of his first love, he explains to her his brooding loneliness in a poem of exquisitely shaded feeling, entitled Tired Memory.

Patmore's second wife relieved him of all finan cial difficulties, and some have said it was she who made him a Catholic. This cannot be true, for his mystical aspirations had already and uncon sciously made him a Catholic. He was of too in dependent and candid a mind to be influenced either by Puritanism because his first wife was a Puritan, or by Catholicism because his second wife was a Catholic. Yet it would be wrong to deny that these women must have indirectly mellowed his heart and soul — how could so susceptible a character as his resist them? Father Cardella, the Italian Jesuit, who is known as being something of a philosopher and theologian, is rumored to have said, after meeting with Patmore in Rome, that he was Catholicism itself before he was received for mally into the Church. The mental processes by which Patmore worked himself into becoming a Catholic would be a most interesting psychological study. There is no one to tell us about it but Mrs. Alice Meynell, the poet and consummate essayist, who was his sympathetic friend and admirer. She

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may not be versed in mystical theology, but she has subtlety and strength and feminine intuition, and a rare capacity for analysis.

It was somewhere near the year 1877 that Mary Patmore died, leaving the poet for the second time a widower. In 1883 his youngest son, Henry, died a youth of twenty-two, and, like Emerson's dead son, he was a hyacinthine boy of rare promise.

There remains one sad story which Mr. Edmund Gosse has repeated in an article on Patmore for the Contemporary Review. With a pure heart and wonderful daring Patmore undertook to give to this suspicious modern age the candid Christian interpretation of human and divine love, as we find it in the forgotten volumes of mediaeval saints and Catholic mystics. The very title he gave his essay — "Sponsa Dei"— "The Spouse of God"— would startle the pietist who is narrow and the vulgarian who is unclean. Alas! perhaps it was better that he should have suffered melancholy by burning on Christmas Day, 1887, this extraordinary manu script, which has been classed as a masterpiece by the distinguished critic who read it. They who know The Unknown Eros, and The Rod, the Root, the Flower, must know the truth he strove to teach. If it is not formulated distinctly in the writings of St. Bernard, it certainly is in The Ascent to Mount Carmel, whose author is St. John of the Cross. Indeed the two Spanish mystics, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa, gave him much matter for his daily practice of meditation and spiritual read-

38 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

ing. His second wife was shown the culture of her spiritual sense by her translation of St. Bernard's work on The Love of God. Once, when Patmore was writing of his verses Scire Teipsum, he said: "They may be taken ... as expressing the re wards of virginity attainable even in this life in the supernatural order."

It was Patmore's heavenly gift to have met early and in this life his "predestinated mate." This carried him without blemish through that perilous adolescent period of the heart's history. With single eye and calm, vision he looks upon truths and tells them to us with the ingenuousness of the saint — the truths which, if we could see, \vould nevertheless be unlawful for us to utter. Fortu nate, doubtless, it is at times that he talks for the many in a Dead Language, though in the poem thus entitled he regrets that it should be so. All his studies, his introspection, his reading of the Fathers of the early Church like St. Augustine, his dabbling in physical science, his explorations into what he calls "that inexhaustible poetic mine of psychology" — all these are used but to sound his three mysteries, the three motifs of all his music: God, Woman, Love. Throughout the procedure his intentions are as limpid as crystal. He is

"proud

To take his passion into church." He writes of women as if the horrible fact never came to him that the world can corrupt all things, even so fair a thing as a woman.

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In his essay on Woman, entitled "The Weaker Vessel," he ridicules the French writer who classi fies woman into twenty-five species. Patmore seems to perceive that not only is every woman a species in herself, but many species. In his Angel in the House he has sublimated domestic love to a high and holy pitch. With wondrous delicacy he attaches a sacred symbolism to a tress of hair and the flutter of a ribbon.

What does that young genius, Mr. Francis Thompson, mean when he accuses Patmore of hav ing stalked through hell like Dante, and of having drunk

"The moonless mere of sighs, And paced the places infamous to tell Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes."

These verses may possibly refer to Patmore's later days when, in depression of spirit, he could no longer sing aloud that

"Sadness is beauty's savor, and pain is The exceedingly keen edge of bliss."

If melancholy encompassed Patmore towards the end when his life was consumed, it never touched his poetry. Nor can it be said that this "black humor," as Mrs. Meynell calls it, ever found en trance into his essays. Religio Poetae, an extra ordinary volume published in 1893, manifests, if you will, a petulance and aggressiveness betoken ing the advance of senility. Yet in how masterly a fashion it suggests, in a few brief essays, thoughts

40 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

that are too tender and too glorious to be amplified ! He sees so clearly himself that he has nothing left but divine contempt for those who doubt. With grave impoliteness he assaults Protestantism as a! moral system radically defective, and loses his tem per because it is narrow, extreme, and vulgar. He proves himself conversant with occult regions not only of dogmatic but also of ascetic theology. He is in no sense whatever (for he lacked the learn ing) a theologian, but he is devoted to St. Augus tine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and in a felicitous English style he reveals beauties long since hidden in the writings of Sts. Catharine of Genoa and Siena, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Ber nard, and St. Francis de Sales.

Curious it is that for the most part the modern propagators of the Catholic Renaissance in art and letters and spiritual science are English Protestants or converts to Catholicism. We know nothing of our treasures until they are opened by eager hands like Pugin or Patmore. They were both sick at heart because we lacked devoutness for our fathers in the faith. In the pressure of our untoward his tory we have become only half-educated. We have lost the great soul and broad culture which created the music, the literature, the architecture which for largeness of conception has not yet been equalled. For our chaste, majestic, plaintive chant — God's own music, once sung by saints and kings — we have substituted tones out of keeping with the sacrifice and the incense of prayer. Our

COVENTRY PATMORE 41

aesthetic sense has become un-Catholic. In 1889 Patmore published a little book entitled Principle in Art. He displayed a keen observation of lights and shadows — he has an eye not so much for the styles in architecture as for the philosophy in it, its cause, ideal greatness, substance, purpose, and "symbolization of sentiment," an expression used by Mr. Ruskin. His sighs for the forgotten past are frequent; yet they come not from acute despair, that disease which furrows the brow of sensitive genius. He has no belief that the future is rich in golden promise, yet he has said: "I have re spected posterity; and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me." He has dubbed the nineteenth century

"0 season strange for song!"

If in verse execution and technique Patmore be defective, his vitality is so imperious that we yield out to sheer weakness to his mannerisms. As with his compatriot, the histrionic artist, Sir Henry Irving, we are pressed to give way to his magnet ism even when he misuses his marvelous voice to grunt and snort, and distorts his divine face to mis shapen attitudes. Art loses its perfection when it reveals the least vein of eccentricity. Yet some weaknesses sit well upon and actually seem emi nently proper to some individuals. The wondrous simplicity of dramatism, as personified by the Italian actress, Duse, can never touch the point of classicism, yet it is the most finished representa-

42 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

tion of passion. Patmore roughly exposes the statuesque composure of Emerson; he flashes all his cruel light upon the veins of clay and forgets the comeliness of the statue. The American's stoicism irritates him; he brands him for ringing the changes upon a few themes, a fault common to himself, for he repeats ideas both in his prose and his verse. Yet if truths be new and startling, why not resurrect them into a thousand different forms? We accept almost totally the judgments of Matthew Arnold and Patmore concerning Emer son. That they studied him proves that he has made an impression. No man is closer to Pat- more in manner and method than Emerson, and, strange to say, even many of the prophecies that they uttered would seem to issue from the same lips. We cannot afford to be always smelling out the grave sins of our only two original geniuses, Emerson and Poe. Emerson has the mystical ten dency, and were he a contemplative of the ages of faith he might have given us a book just this side of inspiration — a work like the Imitation of a Kem- pis or of Tauler, the German mystic. Yet this may be on a plane with saying that if Kant were an integral Christian he might have left us a Summa like that of St. Thomas Aquinas. Except ing Isaac Hecker, Emerson is the only American who manifests any higher interior experience. These two men differed vastly, and told each other so with honest openness when they knew each other in youth.

COVENTRY PATMORE 43

Take him all in all, Patmore has but a Pessi mist's Outlook for the fresh phases of civilization which are blossoming in this Republic of the West. If the United States has a providential purpose to complete in the reconstruction of the nations, then Patmore can find no shadow of such a mission in our present history.

Concerning the theory of the Anglo-Saxon pre dominance over the history of the future, he has written nothing. He greets with keen delight the artistic and searching sarcasm of Mrs. Meynell on the New-Worldling, who, if he be not a barbarian or a savage in her eyes, is certainly a de-civilized type of society.

Indeed, it may be said of Patmore that to him all lovers of the people were beside themselves, and the advent of rich hopes was but the symptom of an overwrought and decadent civilization. He despised the rabble, and made it the visible organi zation of the "amorous and vehement drift of man's herd to hell." It had nailed Christ to the Cross and it was not worthy even of sociological analysis. In his essay on "Christianity and Prog ress" — meaning material progress — he contends for an opinion which, so far as I can learn, is theo logically correct, that there is only a distant rela tionship between the one and the other. To his thinking, if Christianity has not sensibly affected progress — a thesis which, by the way, he does not uphold but suspends judgment — if it has not, then by no means can it be called a failure, for the

44 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

reason that it never professed to promote material amelioration. In the same pages he parries ruth lessly with the distressing question of the number of the elect, and although he would reason logi cally, he is too impetuous to detect that sentiment apart from logic has its own argument — an opinion illustrated in Newman's very original Grammar of Assent. An example like this goes to show Pat- more's extremism, his inability to view the field from all points. He lacks mental poise, and even while he advocates repose of manner he does so in words that tremble like leaves in an unseemly blast. It is because of such violent Christian teachers that we wax frightened at those words of music and of magic, "Progress," "Liberty," words which the enemies of Christianity have stolen from us while we slept.

Yet it must come at times to the most unreason ing optimist, as it came with vehemence to Pat- more, that all this forward social movement may be but another bitter jest, illustrating the mere impossibility for anything in this or any other planet to be at rest. In that strong poetic utter ance, Crest and Gulf, he leaves us with the im pression made by Tennyson in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After — that that prophet is wisest and taught by heaven who confesses that he can but see nothing; that this fresh stream of advance is only another fitful heaving in the sea of history. It shall mount to the crest and slump down in- gloriously into the trough of the billow:

COVENTRY PATMORE 45

"Crest altering still to gulf And gulf to crest, In endless chase That leaves the tossing water anchored in its placet"

This sober thought tinged his patriotic poems; even while they breathe a fierce love of country, they are never joyous. So, too, with his political poems (if I may call them such), they are unhappy to a degree. He is peevish and ill-tempered with those who prate about equality and social rights:

"Yonder the people cast their caps o'erhead, And swear the threatened doom is ne'er to dread That's come, though not yet past. All front the horror and are none aghast; Brag of their full-blown rights and liberties, Nor once surmise

When each man gets his due the Nation dies; Nay, still shout 'Progress!' as if seven plagues Should take the laggard who would stretch his legs. Forward! glad rush of the Gergesenian swine; You've gain'd the hill-top, but there's yet the brine. Forward! bad corpses turn into good dung To feed strange futures beautiful and young. Forward! to meet the welcome of the waves That mount to whelm the freedom which enslaves. Forward! Good speed ye down the damn'd decline, And grant ye the Fool's true good in abject ruin's gulf, As the Wise see him so to see himself!"

If he is intolerant and aristocratic in his politics, so, too, can he become of very narrow gauge in matters of religion. His Cathoicity is very often unmannerly and aggressive. He tries to introduce a species of ultra-Toryism into it which is out of

46 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

harmony with its very name. If a series of hypotheses were constructed purporting to give the percentage of the elect, it would probably have suited his cast of mind to choose the one that sent most souls to damnation. One has but to read the essay on "Distinction" to learn his opinion of Modern Democracy: "I confess, therefore, to a joyful satisfaction in my conviction that a real Democracy, such as ours, in which the voice of every untaught ninny or petty knave is as poten tial as that of the wisest and most cultivated, is so contrary to nature and order that it is necessarily self-destructive. In America there are already signs of the rise of an aristocracy which promises to be more exclusive and may, in the end, make itself more predominant than any of the aristoc racies of Europe; and our own Democracy, being entirely without bridle, can scarcely fail to come to an early and probably a violent end. . . In the meantime, 'genius' and 'distinction' will become more and more identified with loudness; floods of vehement verbiage, without any sincere convic tion, or indications of the character capable of ar riving at one; inhuman humanitarianism; profan ity, the poisoner of the roots of life; tolerance and even open profession and adoption of ideas which Rochester and Little would have been ashamed even remotely to suggest; praise of any view of morals provided it be an unprecedented one; faith in any foolish doctrine that sufficiently disclaims authority. That such a writer as Walt Whitman

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should have attained to be thought a distinguished poet by many persons generally believed to have themselves claims to distinction, surely more than justifies my forcast of what is coming. That amazing consummation is already come."

Mr. Patmore is best in the serener ether of con templation. It is here that he proves himself a man of deep religious instinct. He revels in the most abstruse problems concerning the Being of God. He approaches the mystery of the triple Personality in one Being as the only condition by which he can apprehend the Deity. What, after all, is the Trinity but the relation between Subject and Object — that which in theological terminology is called Divine Immanence? He has grasped this truth with unusual facility. In The Three Wit nesses the poetry is defective but the thought is clear. How wonderful to think that Greek phil osophers earlier than Plato, and that wise men from Egypt and India more or less obscurely, ap prehended God under what Patmore calls "the analogue of difference of sex in one entity!" To Orpheus is attributed: "God is a beautiful Youth and a Divine Nymph." Plato divined that there are three sexes in every entity. With Christian theology the Holy Spirit is the "amplexus" of the First Person and the Second of the Ever-Blessed Trinity. So, too, is this living triplicity somewhat shadowed forth in the animal, vegetative, and min eral kingdoms. The grossest atom in this universe is the "amplexus" of the two opposed forces, ex-

48 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

pansion and contraction. All being is the har mony of two opposites. That which exists is the result of a process of conflicts — thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. All entity has a unity in trinity. That which is natural and human takes the form of sex.

To be sure, it were useless to imagine that such propositions can arouse conviction at the first presentation. The mere reading of Patmore's es say "The Bow Set in the Cloud" is valueless unless it be studied and prayed over. He who would rend the veil must have clean hands. His eyes must be of the spirit to discern Wisdom when she is un veiled. As St. George Mivart once remarked, the sensuous images which are used in one age to express God, Who is unimaginable, may be quite repellant to the eyes of another age. There is no irreverence or lack of faith in passing by the non- essential Hebraicisms which appeal to peoples of the Orient. That tender intimacy tempered with fear — the agony of desire between the soul and God — bears in "the unitive way" an analogy be tween the affection of bride and lover. In the days of King Edward III. of England an anchoress of Norwich named Mother Juliana, wrote charming revelations of Divine Love. There are several pas sages relative to what she expresses in old English as: "Three manners of beholdings of Mother- head in God." Take private revelations for what they are worth, but if the term "Motherhood of God" seems strange to us it is because we do not

COVENTRY PATMORE 49

know how to express the element of femininity which exists in God, and in Woman as she is the reflection of some of the attributes of God. Christ as a man, and also as the literal manifestation of God in history, combines in their proper propor tion the tenderness of the woman with the strength of the man. . . . "The anthropomorphic character which so universally marks the religion of the simple and is so great a scandal to the 'wise,' may be regarded as a remote confession of the Incar nation, a saving instinct of the fact that a God, Who is not a Man, is, for man, no God." The Church represents Christ as the glory of the Father who is His Head. Man is the glory of his head, Christ, as woman is the glory of man, who is her head — a fact which Milton gained through his in tuition and without the aid of Catholic theology :

"He for God only, she for God in him."

With wondrous skill Patmore traces these thoughts in the essay "Dieu et Ma Dame;" in the verses also, De Nalura Deorum, Legem Tuam Dilcxi, Delicise Sapientise De Amore, and sev eral others. No one but Patmore could take our gross English speech and weave of it a white rai ment to shroud the bliss of the soul, the secret be tween the Divine Psyche and the Diviner Eros. But if we be of "The People of a Stammering Tongue" who have not been told of such a vision, let us remember that divine teaching is almost al ways gradual.

50 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

The new visions looming up in the vast fields of modern knowledge present our God in new shadows of Transfiguration. Science, physical, critical, and historical, will doubtless create a new and more profitable symbolism to represent con ceptions of a God Who is inconceivable. Patmore, true to his poet nature, selected his symbolism from the domain of emotion, and not from nature. He has, however, deprecated all art and life which is subject only to emotionalism. The music of Handel, the poetry of ^Eschylus, and the archi tecture of the Parthenon are to him sublime ap peals because they take little or no account of the emotions. Yet it would be unfair to say that Pat- more does not concern himself with the material world. He does indeed, but as genius always does : he pierces through it and attaches a divine signifi cation to its changing aspects; as, for instance, when he represents the fulfillment of the positive and negative powers in the electric fire as being a faint reflection of the "embrace" existing in the Essence of the Deity. He gives science its proper place — it is but a means to an end. Scientific men are of all men the most illiberal — they are at best but specialists. The theologian who is wor ried about them does not know his books. His worst indignity is to sniff around chemicals and animalculae. Let him take his nose out of the dust and hold his head erect in his own sphere. The economy of the material universe has no rela tion to the fold of the spirit.

COVENTRY PATMORE 51

"Not greatly moved with awe am I To learn that we may spy Five thousand firmaments beyond our own. The best that's known

Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small. Viewed close, the Moon's fair ball Is of ill objects worst, A corpse in Night's highway, naked, fire-scarr'd,

accurst.

And now they tell

That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst Too horribly for hell. So judging from these two, As we must do,

The universe outside our living Earth Was all conceived in the Creator's mirth, Forecasting at the time Man's spirit deep, To make dirt cheap. Put by the Telescope! Better without it man may see, Stretched awful in the hushed midnight, The Ghost of his eternity. Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye The things that near us lie."

In an essay of three or four pages, entitled "Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity," Patmore shows how the jaundiced eye of heresy has weak ened our visual power, and, because it is the most mortal of sins, has colored with sickly hue things that are fair and good in themselves. In times past moralists were wiser; their methods for the cultivation of virtue were not so prohibitive and negative; they taught chastity not so much by the suppression of desire as by the presentation to the

52 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

will of a pure object and the proper direction of the tide of passion. Consequently modern life knows nothing of the ardor that is virginal. Yet ancient and mediaeval Catholicism gave us saints thrice- widowed, who their

"birth-time's consecrating dew .... For death's sweet chrism retained, Quick, tender, virginal, and unprofanedl"

From the ancient day when Cecelia so charged the air with the ozone of her moral presence that Valerian could no longer look upon her, to the mediaeval time when Henry, king as well as saint, knelt a slave to the virtue of his queen, it was a familiar doctrine which Patmore has tried to re vive in the ode To the Body. It was a

"Little, sequester'd pleasure-house For God and for His Spouse; Elaborately, yea, past conceiving, fair, Since, from the graced decorum of the hair, Ev'n to the tingling, sweet Soles of the simple, earth-confiding feet, And from the inmost heart Outwards unto the thin Silk curtains of the skin, Every least part Astonished hears

And sweet replies to some like region of the spheres; Formed for a dignity prophets but darkly name, Lest shameless men cry 'Shame I"'

Ideas such as these were faintly suggested by the best of Romans before the period of decline, and

COVENTRY PATMORE 53

with the nobler conceptions of the Greek. You will bear with me if my memory does not serve me correctly in repeating a scene, possibly from the "Hecuba" of Euripides, where the tragedian paints Polyxena with her throat cut, falling upon the altar, and how, conscious even in death of her modesty, she carefully folds the snow-white rai ment over her limbs. It was not until the advent of Christ's Mother that the high dreams of the pagans were fulfilled. With vestal grace she com bined in her virginal maternity the dignities of the matron with the honors of the virgin, and, as Pat- more puts it when writing of how she missed cor ruption,

"Therefore, holding a little thy soft breath, Thou underwent'st the ceremony of death."

An admirable quality in Patmore is his inde pendence of spirit. He does not argue. He as sures you that "Christianity is an Experimental Science," and says, by way of passing: "Try it and see." The saints when they talk understand each other. To Mr. Huxley and Mr. Morley their parlance would be like the hooting of owls. If I may not be abused for saying it, I would intimate that Patmore is an impressionist in his apprehen sion of the mysteries behind religion. To the many who see not he will ever be an impossible colorist. If you cannot see, then so much the worse for you, he would seem to say. The tones that linger on purple hill and upon skies of gold

54 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

have impressed themselves upon the painter's eye. Almost all modern impressionists are dishonorable and pictorial liars. They paint, but they do not see. Not so with Patmore. He has safeguarded "The Point of Honor," and sees more than he can write about. He is too honest to be influenced by the hypocrisy so rife in modern religion, art, and letters. Patmore is a true impressionist. He be holds and points out views visible only to the fin ished artistic eye.

I have tender scruples that in the beginning I put my finger on what he defines as "The Limita tions of Genius" — those moods of impatience that are congenital with rare intellectual power. If so, I send a message to wherever his bright spirit reigns that he may deem me fit for absolution. Sargent has painted him long and lean, thin- fingered and weak-chested, with a face eager and crowned with the broad brow of the vissionary. It may be noted that nothing has been said of the things that constitute his form of art : the involved clause, colloquialism, symmetry, metre, and rhythm; but such discussions are at best but tedious. Infinitely more interesting is the man, his work and his life. With resolution he bore his last agony. Having received the Holy Viati cum, he was anointed with the sacrament of Ex treme Unction. Then having left us, he went to face death.

MISTAKES CONCERNING FRANCE

THE noble basilica of Montmartre is now fin ished and consecrated as a peace offering by the French people to the Prince of Peace.

It was Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson, who in his treatise on Lourdes after he sojourned there, was provoked to distress by the cursory English opinion that the French were an irreligious people. One might aver, however, that Lourdes is not Paris any more than the sanctified crags of Notre Dame de la Garde can be compared to the illicit nooks in the side streets of Bordeaux. Paris is a city of sharp contrasts. Balzac's house is but a stone's throw from the place where the seraphic Pere Eymard once lived.

Superficial English observation is perhaps more worthy of rebuke than the snap- judgment of our ill-educated American officer and soldier concern ing the French Republic. They have returned from France with distorted aspects of things fundamental. They are not altogether to be blamed, no, not even the educated, for the per spective faculty is a rare gift and in some manner apart from education. You may call it an illative sense or even an instinct. But whatever it is, it is not the outcome of information or learning. Yet

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it is not less wonderful than the estimative faculty in the animal which will discard the poison to consume the thing which is wholesome.

Bnt there are animals that wax fat on that which is unwholesome. The hyena skulks around churchyards and with its putrid snout uproots the carcasses of the dead. The coyote on the prairies scents the dead cattle from afar.

Our tongue would cleave to the roof of our mouth, so to speak, if we should tell of men who are not even hedonists, but have a morbid instinct for discovering the unwholesome. So opportunely and in a mannerly fashion we withdraw an un timely assertion.

Cardinal Newman writes of thinkers who in their judgments bend principles until they snap. Equally offensive is the logician who in his ratioci nation puts his conclusion wider than his prem ises. American humor is almost always elliptical, as American statement is almost always general and in the superlative degree. Cardinal Mercier would tell us, I fancy, that mediaeval scholastic precision of thought was never more necessary. Was there ever less clear thinking and writing than there is today? Was there ever such immature judgment from such mature minds? Every un taught ninny can in these times with facility pro nounce on the most complex difficulties.

That supreme master of thought, Thomas Aquinas, attributes two essential qualities to a good mind: first, to know and secondly to know

MISTAKES CONCERNING FRANCE 57

when it does not know. There are some types of mind that know much but never know when they do not know. This intellectual limitation is the explanation of our excellent officers and men who have returned to tell us of the wickedness of France. They forget, or rather never knew, that they landed in that country in a grim hour when it was not only demoralized but flattened out with the iron pressure of misfortune. In the bloody mess of the War our soldiers were oblivious to the fact that France was making expiation in blood for 10,000 national follies.

But moral deordination, it is said, existed in France even before the cursed War. Yes; but the opinion pronounced at that time was from the lips of the superficial and sometimes dissipated tourist of England and America. Now it solemnly issues from the mouth of the English and American sol dier who says what he says with more gravity and less thought since he is flattered by an audience he never held before. Soldiers are heroes before even small boys not to mention their sweethearts, sisters and mothers. It takes the acute observer to dis criminate. The Greek word to "criticize" pre-sup- poses the faculty to judge properly.

Below the ancient and holy hill of Montmartre there fester those infectious sores of modern social life called by the French the cafe chantant. They are supported not by the youth of Paris but by the prodigality of rich and reckless Americans and English who upon pleasure bent judge the brilliant

58 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

city by these malodorous haunts. That flaming dome of the Church of the Heart of Christ which hangs above and crowns Montmartre is lost in the sickly vision of the pleasure seekers below. They are morally impervious to the tears and the blood and the incense of prayer ascending above the skies. Furthermore, Paris, great as it is, in its gayety and art and life, is not the heart or head of the French nation. Behind its lurid glamour there lurk the tragic despair and reaction which come from the abnormal and inordinate. Its ex cesses are local and much provoked by foreign in terest and curiosity. Nor indeed is the French Government the heart or head of the French na tion.

One day I went to Chartres to see the thirteenth- century windows. The color and fire in the glass were as nothing compared to the light that lin gered in the eyes of a faithful and heroic people at prayer. Not even he who has seen it can tell of the 30,000 flambeaux that shine at night with the flame of faith before the piazza of the Basilica at Lourdes. There I saw a cripple from Antwerp hold his crutch up to the sky and walk with the winged step of youth. I saw the pilgrims who tramped barefooted over the stones of the Pyrenees, with their children and their goats, praying as if they belonged to another world.

Missionary enterprise from Madagascar to the South Sea Islands has been paralyzed since the French priesthood has been so broken. Although

MISTAKES CONCERNING FRANCE 59

our soldiers may have learned the names and know of the unseemly places in Marseilles, Bordeaux and Paris, they know nothing of the sweetness and moral beauty of the French home. The ulcerous manifestations of unhallowed social and domestic life are obviously apparent in France as perhaps in no other country. Because of this the superficial foreigner arrives at invalid conclusions. His lack is pathetic and brutal. How can he know any thing of the foyer, since French family life is ex clusively sacred? How can he know anything of the honnete femme of France? How can he know anything of that faithful, cheerful housewife and mother who passionately loves her children, who is the daughter to her aged parents, the gracious sister to her brother, the chaste spouse to her hus band? "She is," as Barrett Wendell puts it, "the central fact of the national life of her country."

As I write I think of the more than million noble dead that have just bled on the fair fields of France. I see in vision once again Amiens, Reims, Rouen, Chartres and Notre Dame. Joan of Arc, Bernadette Soubirous, and Margaret Mary Ala- coque are too fresh in our memory to speak of them at length, but what of those sublime begin nings of the French race? What of those early times when St. Nicaise, the disciple of St. Denis, who coming from Rome, the centre of Christen dom, with Quirinus and Subiculus, began with his bloody martyrdom the long list of saints, mission aries and heroes all down the picturesque cen-

60 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

turies of French history? How can we speak of their universities except to behold with wonder the gigantic proportions of French literature and art? It is excessively bad reasoning to measure French classicism by one department of erotic French fiction. How can any one except the poet, scholar and saint speak of the perennial and golden glory of France? "Gesta Dei per Francos" is a verity and not mere fatuous rhetoric. Well, offi cers and soldiers may be brave soldiers and offi cers, and yet have nothing of what we term the historical sense. Indeed they may be clever and know nothing of literature or art. Alas! they may be honest and yet know nothing of philosophy and therefore be utterly unable to give a dispas sionate judicial verdict of a mighty and complex race and nation, like the French people and Re public.

Yet they are our officers and soldiers. What should we have done without them?

EMERSON AND HECKER

WHEN giving a mission in West Roxbury sev eral years ago the subject of this brief and simple article came to my mind. It was pro voked, doubtless, by the circumstances that I was living, for the time, in the house once occupied by none other than that distinguished son of New England, Theodore Parker. What a curious twist in local history, that it should now be the rectory of the Catholic parish of West Roxbury.

It cannot be more than two or three miles from this same house, that there stands the historic bit of country called Rrook Farm. Naturally, I had a desire to see it. The landscape is still beautiful. It could not be otherwise. Rut not one of the original buildings is left, so I am informed by a gracious friend who lives in the neighboring town of Dedham. The only relic is the stone fireplace which is a kind of antique ornament for the parlor of the wooden building which now serves as a Lu theran orphan asylum. Another strange reversal of local history, for Martin Luther played no part in that social movement of Rrook Farm which we now call transcendentalism, unless my reader would insist that any system of religious or intel lectual thought which lacks the principle of defi-

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nite authority, can be reduced to that evil genius of the sixteenth century.

This may be an exaggeration and I am not pre pared to discuss it. I merely want to say that the genial glory of Brook Farm is not departed, al though the buildings are destroyed and the fine spirits that moved in its pine woods and along the fresh brook are gone forever. But its glory springs from a source that you would the least suspect. I mean that it has contributed something to the prog ress of American Catholicism. In this for me lies its glory, and of this I would like to speak.

I have very good authority for saying that the brightest gem among all the lovely women (not forgetting Margaret Fuller) that shone at Brook Farm, was George Ripley's wife. Father Walter Elliott, C.S.P., the biographer of Isaac Hecker, writes me that "she died in the odor of sanctity." She represented the best that was in the feminine kind of New England. It was in the order of Providence that in becoming a devout Catholic, she should bring to their highest expression all her natural gifts of mind and heart.

Now in speaking of her I cannot forget her hus band, who is considered the founder and the strongest man of the whole movement. After the disruption of Brook Farm, Ripley came to New York and worked with Horace Greeley on The Tribune. Indeed Greeley was always his friend. Ripley lived for more than ten years after his wife's death. Although he was never received

EMERSON AND HECKER 63

formally as a Catholic, I would like to think (be cause of the following facts) that he died within the pale of our ancient Faith. When Hecker was a young transcendentalist, Ripley began to see the profound sincerity of the man. Long years after ward when he was a priest, Ripley turned to him, and said: "Can you do everything that a Cath olic priest can do?" "Yes," said Hecker. "Then, when my end is drawing near," said he, "I shall send for you." When the end was drawing near, he did send for him but the message was never delivered. Hecker, however, heard of his illness and went to see him, but Ripley was unconscious and nothing could be done. Yet, it is our holy tra dition that the remotest indication of a desire to be one with us, is quite enough for a secure salvation.

Now we know what a vigorous thinker Orestes A. Brownson came to be. His entrance into the Church both developed and disciplined his mind. If Brook Farm did much for him Catholicism did more. I used to hear the old Paulists — Hewit and Deshon — tell about his power and aggressiveness. Cardinal Newman acknowledged it.

I come now to Isaac Hecker whom I believe to have had what was the best among the fine souls of Brook Farm, and all of this purified and crowned by a humble faith in our Universal Church. To be sure, the first evidence of the mystical sense is manifest in that remarkable Diary written at Frook Farm before he was a Catholic and when he

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was less than twenty years old. But these exalted aspirations, which I confess seem, at times, to read like the prophets, would have sorely tumbled him into those excesses of thought and action (charac teristic of Brook Farm) had he not become a Cath olic. He himself has said so. He had a humility equal to his gift of inspiration. This it was that saved him from himself and providentially gave him the divine vocation to found that organiza tion whose hope is to bring the American Republic to the heritage of authentic religion. How inter esting to note that the only tangible or practical relic of the Brook Farm experiment is a religious community — commonly called the Paulist Fathers.

There were others who became Catholics, but they were not influential in a public manner. Types of character, like Nathaniel Hawthorne or George William Curtis or Charles Dana, could never at least be bigots after their studies of his tory and philosophy at Brook Farm. Young men though they were, they saw honestly the intellec tual and moral worth of Catholicism. Indeed, some of the books of Nathaniel Hawthorne occa sionally have touches of the mellowness of Catholi cism. If he never became a Catholic his faithful and pious daughter did. She is not only a Domi nican nun, but she has undertaken a work among cancerous sufferers of which some of us shudder to think.

When I said that humility should be equal to in spiration I had in mind the great men of Brook

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Farm who disappoint us because we cannot apply this principle to their lives, distinguished though they be. Reverently, I would say this of Lane, Alcott, Thoreau and Emerson. There are others, but I select these because they are the preeminent ones who have failed, when measured by our standard of success. Some notes from a conver sation with Father Hecker will make clearer what I am trying to say :

"March 5, 1888 — Bronson Alcott dead: I saw him coming from Rochester on the cars. I had been a Catholic missionary for I don't know how many years. We sat together.

" 'Father Hecker/ said he, 'why can't you make a Catholic of me?'

" 'Too much rust here/ said I, clapping him on the knee. He got very angry because I said that was the obstacle. I never saw him angry at any other time. He was too proud."

From these words of Hecker it is very evident that a fundamental truth of Christianity had not been perceived by Alcott. The statement of the Founder of Christianity "unless a man loseth his life, he shall not find it'* never, at least, practically, enters into the lives of these men.

The same fact is patent when considering that strange character Charles Lane. He is at fault, however, in a less degree than Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Some memoranda of Hecker, found in his biography, will strengthen the irreverent position I have taken with regard

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to these great characters. Father Hecker said : "I knew him well. When I resolved to become a Catholic I was boarding at the house of Henry Thoreau's mother, a stone's throw from Emerson's at Concord."

"What did Thoreau say about it?" Hecker was asked.

" 'What's the use of your joining the Catholic Church? Can't you get along without hanging to her skirts?' I suppose Emerson found it out from Thoreau, so he tried his best to get me out of the notion. He invited me to tea with him, and he kept leading up to the subject and I leading away from it. The next day he asked me to drive over with him to the Shakers, some fifteen miles. We stayed overnight, and all the way there and back he was fishing for my reasons, with the plain pur pose of dissuading me. Then Alcott and he ar ranged matters so that they cornered me in a sort of interview, and Alcott frankly developed the sub ject. I finally said: 'Mr. Alcott, I deny your in quisitorial right in this matter,' and so they let it drop. One day, however, I was walking along the road and Emerson joined me. Presently he said: 'Mr. Hecker, I suppose it was the art, the architecture, and so on in the Catholic Church which led you to her?' 'No,' said I, 'but it was what caused all that.' I was the first to break the Transcendental camp. Brownson came some time after me.

"Years later, during the War, I went to Concord

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to lecture, and wanted Emerson to help me get a hall. He refused.

"Alcott promised that he would, but he did not, and I think Emerson dissuaded him. After a time, however, a priest, a church, and a congregation of some six or seven hundred Catholics grew up in Concord, and I was invited to lecture, and I went. The pastor attended another station that Sunday, and I said the Mass and meant to give a homily by way of sermon. But as I was going to the altar, all vested for the Mass, two men came into my soul; one, the man who lived in that village in former years, a blind man, groping about for light, a soul with every problem unsolved; the other, a man full of life, with every problem solved — the uni verse and the reason of his existence known, as they actually are. Well, there were those two men in my soul. I had to get rid of them, so I preached them off to the people. Some wept, some laughed, all were deeply moved. That night came the lec ture. It rained pitchforks and pineapples, but the hall, a large one, was completely filled. Multi tudes of Yankees were there. Emerson was ab sent, but Alcott was present. I had my lecture all cut and dried. 'Why I became a Catholic' was the subject. But as I was about to begin, up came those two men again, and for the life of me I couldn't help firing them off at the audience, and with remarkable effect. Next day I met Emerson in the street and we had a little talk together. None of those men are comfortable in conversa-

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tion with an intelligent Catholic. He avoided my square look, and actually kept turning to avoid my eyes until he had quite turned around."

Now, out of all this, is the sad reflection, that if these choice souls had knelt humbly at the foot of the Cross of Christ (with their gifts of natural in spiration) the religious history of America would read in another way. They knew not how to fol low the Light of Him Who walketh not in dark ness. So there is that specious mode of egotism woven in the very structure of their spirituality. Hence, with all its romance, sentiment, virtue and natural glory, as a system, Brook Farm has failed except perhaps as a literary endeavor and as a very remote religious influence. By egotism, I do not mean that unmannerly offensiveness which oozes out so often from the writings of successful liter ary men, but I mean that more subtle selfism, which St. Thomas Aquinas thought to be the arch enemy of truth. And dare I say it (even when I think of Harvard University) that in this imper fection I find Emerson the chief offender. Con trast the moral results of the men and women of Brook Farm who have followed what we call the Light, with those who have not. We see what Brook Farm has done for us, but much more what we have done for it. Thoreau might, under the stress of divine grace, have been transfigured into a great hermit of the fourth century or a St. Francis of Assisi of the thirteenth. But no: he flounders into the obscurity of Brahminism and

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therefore can make no distinction (with all his acute observation of nature) between nature and nature's God.

The same defect is in Emerson, but it is Bud dhism and Pantheism rather than Brahminism and not Christianity. As a religious teacher I find more Christianity in Billy Sunday than I do in Emerson — though I take my Christianity from neither. If Emerson had been brought low, with the discipline, authority and simplicity of the Catholic mystics he might have given us an incom parable work like The Imitation of Christ.

The following is Emerson in this contemplative mood:

"Good-bye, proud world: I'm going home: Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine. Long through thy weary crowds I roam; A river-ark on the ocean brine, Long I've been tossed like the driven foam; But now, proud world, I'm going home.

"Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face; To Grandeur with his wise grimace; To upstart Wealth's averted eye; To supple Office, low and high; To crowded halls, to court and street; To frozen hearts and hasting feet; To those who go, and those who come; Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home.

"I am going to my own hearth-stone, Bosomed in yon green hills alone, A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;

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Where arches green, the livelong day,

Echo the blackbird's roundelay,

And vulgar feet have never trod

A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

"O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools and the learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?"

The self-assertiveness — if egotism is too harsh a word — of Emerson is nevertheless put in such majestic language that it almost escapes the analysis of the critic. Self-reliance and self-per fection — Emerson's doctrine, if he has any — is ever congenial and stimulating to human nature. It was so at Brook Farm. Because of this Emer son will always inspire some and please many. But, if you are looking for an integral and authori tative system of thought, you will not discover it in Emerson, or at Brook Farm. It can, however, be found in Catholic mysticism and ascetic theology, for the Catholic mystics and ascetics are disci plined in humility and safeguarded from the crim inal conceits of egotism, by the external norm of authority.

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS

THE recent Negro race riots are but exploita tions of a disorganized or perhaps organized discontent. They are the pathetic and abortive struggle of an inferior race to give birth to itself, in the face of an intolerant expression of American civilization. When Alice Meynell was in our country, on a trip to California, she passed, on her way, some Indian reservations. The tragedy of a dying race was shadowed in high cheek bones and the placid melancholy of the Indian women and children. That this gentle English lady so taci turn in her method should have spoken to me con cerning it was but an evidence that she had already intimately divined the historic horror of a decadent and majestic race. The Negro less romantic and picturesque in historic aspect than the Indian is nevertheless more stirring in his pitifulness. He too must die, if there be any veracity in ethnological assertion. Not that he is not prolific, but confine him in civilized habitations and alleys of our Southern cities and he becomes keenly susceptible to decline. If he is not like the red man, a dweller in tents, he is, at least, out of joint with the strictures of a Caucasian civilization. Herein lurks the difficult core of the Negro problem. Be-

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cause of this it is not understood in England, and only partially in the South, and still less in our northern States.

Yet, withal, is this an apology for our apathy economic and religious? Is it radically true that we must first civilize and then Christianize? Is it possible that one quality should be the salutary complement of the other?

Doubtless the Roman slaves brought from Africa and the outer confines of the Empire, seemed to be higher types than even the Negro of the West Indies. Therefore they were more alive to the delicate sense of Christianity. But the Josephites of Mill Hill, England, are now struggling to gain ground, in the Uganda, Madras, Borneo, Labuan, Kashmir, and the basin of the Congo, that they may convert types of Negroes much more ob tuse than ours.

Herbert Cardinal Vaughan visited these United States in 1863 and again in 1872. The Negro prob lem was so acute to this English prelate that he sent to Baltimore the first four missionaries for the American Negroes. These young priests were Americans and the first fruits of his foundation at Mill Hill. Their departure from England was marked by a special ceremony of farewell and a sermon by Archbishop, afterwards, Cardinal Man ning.

It was in 1896 when I met Cardinal Vaughan and he referred to this event with a sense of humble trust that the Divine Will would complete the

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS 73

simple beginnings of his work in the American Republic. His work or his dream, which, let us pray, was not all a dream, may be put in these hopeful words. He would have his missionaries to the Negro overrun the South. He seemed to be lieve that under the spell of American zeal this would be but a natural development. But his golden hopes loomed still brighter. Might not, thought he, the American Republic prove to be the half-way house to Africa? Might not the Ameri can Negro priests eventually prove to be the most effective missionaries for the conversion of the Dark Continent itself.

The magnificance of the Cardinal's hopes are obvious, but what is more to be noted, is, that he, at least, believed the Negro to be capable of the finest Christianity, as manifested in its heroic missionary form. Whether it be the optimism of the prophet which beholds things as they are to be or the enhanced imagination of a profoundly reli gious man, it does not, for the moment, matter. The faintest expression of his high hope should fill us Americans with confusion and shame when we measure with what indifference we are dealing with the Negro.

Southerners are not to be blamed for the prob lem which was abruptly thrust upon them by the North. Still less are the struggling Southern bishops and priests culpable, since they are few and poor and possessing only the interior resources of good men. The affluence and power are in the

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Northern States. The missionaries and the money should come from the North, at least, from wher ever there is an excess in numbers of shepherds of souls.

Is it not startling and to our dishonor that the American bishops conscious of their inability to cope with a problem at their doors, made a special appeal to Europe to come to the rescue and send us priests ready to devote themselves entirely to the colored population? This was at the Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1866. Mr. J. G. Snead- Cox, the biographer of the English Cardinal, says that it was "in answer to that prayer that Herbert Vaughan had come." He studied the Negro prob lem on the spot. He made a tour of the Southern States and he saw sights which filled him with sor row and compassion. For ignorance and spiritual desolation he was prepared, but it came as a shock to find how little was being done for the Negro and how far he seemed outside the area of religious and philanthropic effort. He had heard all this, had been warned of it before he left England and by none more emphatically than by the represen tatives of the Catholic Church in the United States.

This unhappy, sociological and religious condi tion of the American Negro has been bettered only in a slight degree. It is no longer a Southern problem, for such cities in the West as Chicago are seething with Negroes, and our own metropolitan city harbors thousands of them who know not even the name of Christ.

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However, if conditions have been softened in the South, and it is likewise a problem for the North, it may be of service in stimulating our zeal to re cord some of the circumstances entered in the diary of Cardinal Vaughan in 1872. Have they a counterpart in this year of 1919, to provoke inter est for the Negro both in the North and South? At least, no harm can be done now, and no sensi bilities violated, if we quote a few entries, taken from the little commonplace book he kept at that time:

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

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

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

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

"A fancy fair: colored people allowed to work for it, but not admitted to it.

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

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"St. Louis, January 25, 1872— The Archbishop thought all my plans would fail; could suggest nothing for the Negroes, and refused permission to collect, and de clined to give a letter of approval."

A few lines further down in the diary he adds :

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

In Memphis he notes:

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

It is to be noted that Father Vaughan, as he pro longs his stay, grows more and more satisfied of the practical wisdom of separating the two races even in Church. In Charleston he writes:

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

"Father Mandini, of St. Stephen's Church, has got up a little chapel for colored people, which they highly appreciate. He says they like to have a place of their own without its being determined that no white shall

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS 77

enter. This is the common opinion of intelligent people and I think true."

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

"Called on Jefferson Davis. He said the Negro, like a vine, could not stand alone. No gratitude, but love of persons — no patriotism, but love of place instead.

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

Certainly this opinion of Jefferson Davis in ref erence to the emotional appeals of the Methodists to the Negroes is very interesting, but Father Vaughan's comment concerning it is more inter esting and touched with practical suggestion. In one place in the diary he exclaims: "Why can not we have catechists or brothers like the Metho dist preachers?"

Then in several places we find him suggesting the necessity of what we call "popular devotions," which he regards as essential for success among the Negroes.

Finally we are constrained to say that this man, a stranger in our country, studied the nature of the Negro problem with intelligence and by personal investigation. Although of a buoyant temper, lie was not highly emotional, btft a bluff, hard-headed, practical Englishman, therefore his roseate hopes are, at least, worthy of attention. They are summed up in the following eloquent passage, de scribing his prophetic vision of the American

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Negroes proving to be the willing means of evan gelizing Africa itself:

"We have come to gather an army on our way, to conquer it for the Cross. God has His designs upon that vast land. It may be one thousand years behind our civilization of today, but what were our fore fathers a little more than one thousand years back compared to our present condition? They were sunk in an apparently hopeless barbarism. But God sent missioners to them from a Christian nation, and they brought them into the light. Nation is dependent on nation, and we have to carry on the light. In less than one thousand years Africa may be as civilized as Eu rope or America. The mission of the English-speaking races is to the unconverted, especially to the uncivil ized, nations of the world. God calls upon you for cooperation : His plans are prepared from afar. The branch torn away from the parent stem in Africa by our ancestors was carried to America, carried away by Divine permission, in order that it might be en grafted upon the Tree of the Cross. It will return, in part, to its own soil, not by violence or deportation, but willingly and borne upon the wings of faith and charity."

May it be that the vision was really prophetic and that the Negro will yet come to the Cross in holy faith and simplicity?

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS

(( A RE not five sparrows sold for two farthings

IV and not one of them is forgotten before God? Yea, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows."

It was in the winter-time, in a Southern city of our own country; a city with streets of cobble stones and houses with jagged roofs and white marble doorsteps. As we were wont to say in school, it is situated on a river. This handsome river gives it some pretence to history and pic- turesqueness.

It was in December — a month of miracles in the air — some being wrought in our own hearts — mir acles everywhere.

The aged missionary who was with me had a way all his own. He was painting the farewell touch to a scene of his career, replete with color, incident and holy toil. Nearly forty years before there blossomed in his soul the opening of his missionary vocation. He began in this same hal lowed region, and over it there rustled the hover ing wings of the same spirit of place. He had moral strength and experience. The vain imagin ings of the perilous adolescent period had already

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vanished. He had spent his "dearest action in the tented field," was a Union soldier in Civil War, and if we may be allowed, again, a trifling snatch of poesy he had bidden

"Farewell to the neighing steed,

The shrill trump, the spirit-stirring drum, the ear- piercing fifel"

The second spring is a significant time in per sonal and historic destiny. Such a thought did Dante intimate in his Convito — singing of human life as an arch or bow, the highest point of which is (in those well-tuned by nature) at about the thirty-fifth year. He thinks the same in his out burst in the initial canto of the Divina Commedia.

Such a beginning, happy omen, closed with the sight of the Blessed Vision — Finis coronal opus!

Old St. Peter's was the church, or rather the Cathedral. The walls, the steeple, the ancient bell and all the artless simplicity of the venerable structure were more sanctified with the process of these nearly forty years. It was, indeed, more than ever a holy place. We marveled at the old people with their rusty joints and their canes, stumbling up to the altar-rail each morning, and with them, by way of extremes, tiny children in all their beauty and innocence :

"How lovely are Thy tabernacles, oh Lord of hosts ! My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God. For the sparrow hath found

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herself a house and the turtle a nest for herself when she may lay her young ones: Thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.'*

To discourse of the indescribable charm of child hood is now a commonplace and quite irrelevant. Even they who possess nothing of the spiritual sense feel it. We speak now of two children who were "not forgotten before God," and who were evidently "of more value that many sparrows."

The rectory in which we were living was for merly the home of a holy bishop who had died but a few years before. He was a native American of English stock. He had been an Anglican pastor of a fashionable church in a city contiguous to his own before he entered the Catholic fold. The worldlings said he could be impetuous in temper, while the elect counted it as impatience with sham, pretence or vice. It was even whispered with bated breath that (like St. Charles Borromeo and his snuff) he had a weakness for tobacco.

But for all these lingering imperfections, he was a saint to the children of light, and the saints know one another even in this dark and confusing world. For hours he could fast, keep vigil and pray. Alone he would prostrate himself in con templation before the Eucharist in the silent omi nous moment of the night, while the city, and his whole diocese, for that matter, profoundly slept.

"I have watched, and am become as a sparrow all alone on the housetop."

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Yet with his spirituality and aloofness from the great world, he was never ill-at-ease with the rus tic, the lumber- jacks or the fisher folk along the coast. To them he preached, and at night slept in sacristies or in those ignoble shacks called churches. Often there would be no visible result to his endeavor. Failure is a mere incident in the action of a saint — he has the merit of the spiritual purpose. In untoward crises he is as light-hearted as a child. He has the fine sense of proportion — all things are adjusted to a gentle Providence. "Yea, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows."

He had the splendid faculty of humor. Once he returned to a village which was demoralized and had been particularly discouraging to him. "At last," said he, "I have made an impression there; somebody has smashed all the windows of the chapel."

So that with his temperamental austerity he was intimately human and gracious. He loved flowers, birds and little children. The dogs in the street knew him and crept to his door for victuals. There was no cur so degenerate but he would be fed and receive a benediction. Animals perceive by instinct when we regard them. This is some thing which any lion-tamer at Hagenbeck's or Bos- tock's will tell you free of charge.

Newman, with his rare quality of distinction, suggests in one of his discourses the mysterious

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nearness of the animal to man. The desperate at tempt of animals to make themselves know to us is pathetic. At times they are fearfully near, and again so far away.

There are moments when we would incline to concede to Balmes, the Spanish philosopher, that they have some kind of soul and a future fitting destiny. Else we might be provoked to believe with Des Cartes, at the other extreme, and say that they are lacking in sensation, and cannot suffer, here or hereafter.

We should have said our bishop loved animals, excepting (which was only accidental) when he met a stupid hen on a country road while riding his bicycle.

The preternatural influence of the saints over the animal kingdom is a perennial source of inter est and romance to the physio-psychologist and the sacred poet. By no great play of fancy we can see the hermits of the Thebaid quelling by the very bearing of innate sanctity the beasts that prowled and skulked about the caverns of the desert. How shall we ever forget St. Francis as pictured in the Fioretti, with his fishes and his converted brother, the wolf which frightened all the children in the town of Gubbio? Or again, at the market-place, where he took from the boy the basket of wild turtle-doves and tamed them and made them nests, so that they lingered around the convent, and the boy in due time became a brother: "For the sparrow hath found herself a house and the turtle

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a nest for herself, where she may lay her young ones: Thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God."

Indeed, it was not at the last, but the first mis sion which St. Francis preached that there oc curred the miracle of the birds. Pere de Gherance calls it "a prodigy touching and extraordinary which marked the first day of this apostolic journey."

After the saint had regulated the spiritual exer cises at the convent of St. Damien, there came to him the anxious desire to know the divine will — whether he should lead an active or contemplative life. He had grave doubts about his apostolic vo cation. The chroniclers, Bernard of Besse and Thomas of Celano, tell about it, and Pere de Cher- ance puts it in his own interesting fashion:

"Not knowing what resolution to come to, he as sembled his brethren and said: 'Brothers, I have come to ask your opinion on this question : Which of the two is better for me — to devote myself to prayer or to go about preaching? It seems that prayer suits me better, for I am a simple man and unskilled in oratory, and have received the gift of prayer more than of speech. Prayer purifies our affections, unites us to The Sovereign Good, strengthens our will in virtue; by it we converse with God and the angels as if we were leading a heavenly life. Preaching, on the contrary, makes spiritual men gadders abroad; it distracts, dissi pates and leads to laxity in discipline. Thus one

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is the source of graces; the other the canal that conveys them to peoples. Nevertheless, there is a consideration of a higher order, and which inclines me to the apostolic life; it is the example of the Saviour of men, Who joined prayer to preaching. Since He is the model we propose to imitate, it would appear more comformable to God's will that I should sacrifice my tastes and purpose to go and labor abroad/

"To obtain ampler lights, he sent two of his re ligious to St. Clare, and Brother Sylvester, the lat ter having retired to the heights of Monte Subazio, to beg them to consult the Lord on this subject. When the two religious, Philip and Masseo, re turned, Francis received them as ambassadors from God; he washed their feet, embraced them, and gave them to eat. Then, leading them to an adjoining wood, he knelt before them, bareheaded, and with arms crossed upon his breast, said: 'Brothers, tell me what my Lord Jesus Christ com mands me to do.' 'Dearest Father,' said Masseo, 'here is the reply Sylvester and Clare have re ceived from Our Lord Jesus Christ; it is exactly the same. It is His will that you should preach, be cause it is not only for your own salvation He has called you, but also for the salvation of your breth ren; and for their sake He will put His words in your mouth.' At these words Francis, filled with the spirit of God, arises, exclaiming, 'Let us go in the name of the Lord,' and, full of holy enthusiasm, he immediately sallies forth with two of his dis-

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ciples, Masseo of Marignano and Angelo of Rieti, to preach God to every creature."

St. Bonaventure, when writing of St. Francis — and this is of value, as Cardinal Manning and others think, for it is a saint writing of a saint — says:

"When he drew near to Bevagna, he came to a place where a great multitude of birds of different kinds were assembled together, which, when they saw the holy man, came swiftly to the place, and saluted him as if they had use of reason. They all turned toward him and welcomed him; those which were on the trees bowed their heads earn estly at him, until he went to them and seriously admonished them to listen to the word of the Lord, saying: 'Oh, my brother birds, you are bound greatly to praise your Creator, Who has clothed you with feathers and given you wings wherewith to fly; Who has given you the pure air for your dwelling-place, and governs and cares for you without any care of your own/ While he spoke these and other such words to them, the birds re joiced in a marvelous manner, swelling their throats, spreading their wings, opening their beaks, and looking at him with great attention. And he, with marvelous fervor of spirit, passing through the midst of them, covered them with his tunic; neither did any one of them move from his place until the man of God had made the sign of the cross and dismissed them with his blessing, when they all at once flew away. And all these things

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were seen by his companions, who were waiting for him on the road. When this pure and simple man returned to them, he began to accuse himself of negligence, because he had never before preached to the birds.

"Afterwards, as he was preaching in the neigh boring places, he came to a city called Alviano, where the people were gathered together, and there he silenced the swallows who made their nests in that place, because for the great noise they made he could hardly be heard. Then the man of God said to them in the hearing of all : 'My sisters, the swallows, it is now time that I also should speak, for you have spoken more than enough. Listen to the word of God, and keep silence until the preach ing is ended/ Then, as if they were capable of understanding, the swallows kept silence, and ut tered not a word until the sermon was ended. All who beheld this, being filled with wonder, glorified God. The fame of this miracle being spread far and wide greatly increased the reverence and faith borne to the man of God.

"In the city of Paris there was a certain scholar of very good dispositions, who, with some of his companions, was diligently pursuing his studies. Being one day greatly troubled by the vexatious garrulity of a swallow, he said to his companions : 'This must be one of the swallows which molested the holy man Francis while he was preaching, and would not desist until he had imposed silence upon them/ Then turning to the swallow, he said con-

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fidently: 'I command thee in the name of Francis, the servant of God, come to me, and I will quickly quiet thee/ When the bird heard the name of Francis, as if it had been taught by the man of God, it was quiet at once, and came and placed itself in the scholar's hands, who, in great amazement, set it at liberty, and was troubled no more by its clamor."

It is to be noted that the people, even before his death, made St. Francis a saint, and they believed that because of his sanctity the birds were obedient to him. Through the invocation of his dear name the young student of Paris had such power over the unmannerly swallow that it placed itself in his hand.

Now the people in their vivid sense of faith were trying to canonize our good bishop. At times in history from the "clamor populi," and even out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, there have is sued reasons for the canonization of saints and the election of bishops. Is not a divine truth often found midway between the dispassionate intellec tual mind of theology and the hot, vital religion of the plain people which the schoolmen express as the "sensus fidelium?" We must not aver, however, that each is a partial truth, but rather that one is the complement of the other.

Within a stone's throw of the dead bishop's house there stood an orphanage. Among the waifs there were two little girls who incessantly pressed upon the Sisters of Charity their consuming desire

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to be cloistered nearby the Visitation Monastery. They were so very young and ingenuous that it seemed like a capricious whim, a childish game of fancy to play at being a holy nun. There are saints in the memory of our reading who played long since at being nuns and priests — instance St. Aloysius Gonzaga, that blameless flower of adolescence.

Once again the children urged their charge with full many a tear on their ruddy cheeks, until they who were wise and good prayed and said: "No harm can be done; it is a time-honored principle (from the early century of St. Benedict down to our own of Dom Bosco), once you have captured the body, you can create the soul." It is not such a long step from Assisi and the birds in the hills of Umbria to Annecy, the country of St. Jane de Chantal and the other St. Francis.

"He the sweet Sales of whom we hardly ken, How more he could love God, he so loved men."

It would at least be an experiment. No harm could be done by putting two little ones in the genial keeping of Providence. "Are not two spar rows sold for a farthing? And not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; better are you than many sparrows."

Instinctively readily these diminutive nuns took to conventual surroundings. They played as any

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normal children would among the flowers of the cloister garden. They vainly attempted the plain tive chant of the holy office. They uttered their little prayers together each evening at the bishop's grave, for he was buried there to fulfill the desire of his holy heart. There he sleeps as the Latin words on the headstone indicate — "in somno pads." A grave in a cloister is nothing gruesome. Perhaps the religious aesthetic glamour over it — the flowers, the birds, the incense, the chant, the Eter nal Sacrifice, the Real Presence — take away the bit terness and tragedy of the scene.

One day our two religious had their toys taken away by the Reverend Mother. It was done as a gentle rebuke, for they had outgrown these instru ments of diabolic frivolity. But in this company of the Visitandines there was a sister more sus ceptible than most, who, when she found the two looking like daughters of Niobe, all in a fountain of tears, whispered: "Quick, run to the bishop's grave and ask him to send you the birds to play with." With the winged step of youth and the glisten of love in their eyes they fled to the grave.

Hardly had they knelt when there swooped down upon them a flight of birds. Yes; living, fluttering, happy birds — oriole, jay, lark, linnet, thrush, blue bird. Though they riddled the air with a babel of contradicting chatter, their plumage made a symphony of color — red, yellow, brown and blue. "Si non mysterium est mendacium" and "si non miraculum est mirandum" were principles, it is

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said, used by St. Augustine and others since him who study the suspension of nature's laws. An other phenomenon was manifest — the sight of the sparrows in this pied and motley crew. Sparrows are shunned, be is said reverently, among the civil ized birds. In birdland they are like those bar barians that swept down from the north — Huns, Vandals, Goths and Visigoths — all tumbled to gether.

Even the perfervid Anglo-maniac must be dis tressed at this English importation. They are a menacing problem, which some day perhaps may be more acute than trusts, tariff or woman suf frage. But for all that, they are not an unmixed evil. Sacred Scripture lends a hallowing touch to their very name, and even the higher critics have not attacked the authenticity of the passages: "And not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father." Are there not times when their mixed brown wings are the color of the coarse habit which St. Francis wore, and the pearl gray on the breast like the cassock of a Franciscan bishop?

They must have been the little brothers and sis ters of the poor man of Assisi as much as the gar rulous swallows and all that other constituency of feathered songsters. That they were with the other birds at the bishop's grave is indeed a mir acle, were it not that the greater miracle over shadows it — namely, that they were all there at the bidding of two children, who played with their

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young, while the mother bird looked on, and they held them in their hands like the student of Paris with his twittering swallow. The chirping of the birds and the gayety and shouting of the children attracted the nuns. But at their arrival the birds flew away, for some esoteric reason, doubtless, it was not stipulated in the contract. It was always so for the many days during which the miracle occurred.

We had heard of this marvel at the bishop's home from disciples who knew the depth of his interior spirit — they spoke as having authority. But we of a censorious and positivist turn, like the "advocatus diaboli," were willing to doubt, or at least to learn for ourselves. Like barristers of the Queen's Council, we soberly cross-examined the witnesses. They were simple, honest, sensible — nothing overwrought, hysterical, subjective. The more we listened, the more credible seemed the case, until we believed as we did in our own existence.

The bishop of the diocese was making a tour, but he had heard the rumors of this curious event. When he returned, strange to say, he was not skep tical, but rather judicial and on the alert. He was aware of the sanctity of his episcopal predecessor, and of his love, too, of birds and little children. Arriving at the monastery walls, he entered and broke cloister. Then asking for the nuns and then the children, he bade them reveal the story. In their naive manner they told it, and he marked

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how truly it was in keeping with the sworn state ment of the sisters who were witnesses. To make assurance doubly sure, he confided to them how pleased he would be if they prayed once more at the bishop's grave, so that he could see these birds for himself.

Eager they were to please him, saying, however, as they romped away to get them: "It is winter time now — December — and there are only spar rows." They knew not the text: "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father."

Now we know how fearful and difficult of seiz ure are these English sparrows — the bullies and the cowards of the bird world — the bully when frightened is always timid. Yet our two blessed children returned to the bishop with a living, full- fledged sparrow in every hand.

He who was with me was older and wiser with the inner wisdom of nearly forty sacerdotal years. He said as we all said: "It is the miracle of the sparrows."

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL

FEW of those who visit the little Gothic Chapel at the Military Post, West Point, New York, know fully of the bitterness of the struggle which made it a picturesque reality. It is nestled in the side of a hill that looks north to the most graceful bend of the river Hudson. The building has an air of distinction about it which makes us forget the somewhat humiliating position of Catholic offi cers, cadets, and soldiers who lived at West Point some twenty-five years ago.

Since the brave personages who fought for it and those who were most concerned are now dead, the writer, knowing as he does its secret and strange history, is loath to let it go unrecorded.

In the summer of 1896, the Catholic officers, cadets, soldiers, and others of the same faith resid ing at the United States Military Academy, mani fested a desire to have a suitable place in which to worship God according to their conscience. At that time the entire Catholic population of West Point numbered about five hundred, a good third of the whole population of the post. It was made up of officers with their wives and children, cadets, married soldiers and their families, unmarried sol diers and the employees of the post. They made

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a congregation respectable in numbers and charac ter. Their spiritual welfare was looked after by the Right Rev. Mgr. Cornelius G. O'Keeffe, the rector of the neighboring parish of Highland Falls, where an assistant priest was maintained for the services of the Catholics at West Point. During the forty years that the wants of the Cath olic members of the United States Army stationed at West Point had been attended to by Catholic priests, the Government had never given any re muneration — nor had the priests sought it — for looking after the Catholic soldiers.

Nearly a half million dollars has been spent to build a post chapel at West Point in which are held only Protestant services. It is a fine struc ture seated on a high hill, modeled after the once Catholic Cathedral of Durham, England; and as early as 1896 there was a handsome and substan tial stone chapel situated at the south end of the rich and grassy plain.

In this chapel, erected and maintained by the Government, officiated the post chaplain, who had a commodious residence and received a handsome salary. The post chaplain is and always has been a Protestant, and Protestants have always had the exclusive use of the post chapel. Meanwhile Cath olics had modestly contented themselves with de manding permission to erect at their own cost and without any expense to the Government a suitable place of worship for the Catholic officers, cadets, and soldiers of the United States Army. The per-

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mission was granted, with a building in a hollow, to the north side of the West Point parade ground, where the soldiers had their barracks, gas-houses, coal-sheds, stables, and other less sightly utilities of the military garrison. It was a wooden struc ture of one story, looking like a country school- house of the poorer sort or a cheap meeting-house in some rough suburb or frontier town. It was rickety and mean in appearance, with the main entrance in the rear, and altogether too small to accommodate the large Catholic congregation of the post. The want of space made it necessary to have two morning services every Sunday, which fact added to the expense of maintaining two priests at the mission attached to Highland Falls. Had the Catholics at West Point a chapel large enough to hold all of them at one service, one priest would have sufficed for both places. Another seri ous objection to the building was that it was out side cadet limits. Hence it was necessary that the military authorities of the post should give special permission to the cadets to attend Mass in this building.

They were marched to service and back again without having the opportunity to cultivate the ac quaintance of their own clergymen. For several generations the numerous Catholics of West Point, the distinguished officers, the capable cadets, and the soldiers engaged in their country's service, had worshipped under these disadvantages with out prospect of amelioration. Finally they deter-

98 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

mined to ask leave to erect at their own expense a chapel of convenient size and suitable character, so located that it would be within easy reach of all classes of Catholics residing on the post. On August 8, 1896, the Right Rev. Mgr. C. G. O'Keeffe, rector of Highland Falls, made application in the required form to Colonel Ernst, the Superintendent of West Point, for permission to build a church on a site to the north of the parade ground. Mgr. O'Keeffe declared his willingness to have the build ing conform in style and material to the other buildings of the post. Colonel Ernst received most favorably the application, and it was sent to the Secretary of War, the Hon. Mr. Lamont, with this endorsement from the Superintendent:

"HEADQUARTERS UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY,

WEST POINT, N. Y., AUGUST STU, 1896.

Respectfully forwarded to the Adjutant-General, United

States Army.

"The writer is the Roman Catholic priest who resides in the village adjoining West Point. He is a gentleman of the highest character and accomplishment, and has for many years been rendering valuable service to the Government in holding religious services here, without compensation, for the benefit of the Roman Catholics who reside here. The building in which these serv ices have been held is unattractive in appearance and surroundings, and for officers and cadets it is incon veniently located. It is also used as a chapel for en listed men and their families who are Protestants. The number of these is not great, but that use of the building makes it necessary to provide a temporary screen for the Roman Catholic altar. It will be a de-

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 99

cided encouragement to the religious development of an important and worthy part of the command if a separate building be provided for the Roman Catholics.

"I recommend the acceptance of Father O'Keeffe's offer to build the chapel upon a design to be approved by me, the building after its completion to be the sole property of the United States.

0. H. ERNST, Colonel of Engineers, Superintendent."

In a further communication to the War Depart ment the Superintendent of the Military Academy wrote :

"The Government has for many years provided a place of worship for Roman Catholics at this place, and the services of that Church have been held regu larly, the members who reside here numbering about five hundred, including officers, cadets, enlisted men and their families, and domestics. It is the policy of the authorities here to encourage the religious develop ment of all parts of the command. The erection of a separate chapel for the Roman Catholics will be a dis tinct advance in this direction."

The Secretary of War, Mr. Lamont, submitted Mgr. O'Keeffe's application to General Lieber, the Judge Advocate-General of the United States Army, the highest legal authority of the War De partment, for his decision. The Judge Advocate- General found that no law existed by which the chapel could be handed over to the United States Government for the use in perpetuity of Catholics residing at West Point. In place of this, General Lieber recommended the granting of a revocable

100 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

license to build the chapel. Colonel Ernst in formed Mgr. O'Keeffe officially of this decision in the following letter:

"Sir: I have the honor to transmit herewith a copy of the indorsements showing the action of the War Department upon your application of the 8th ultimo, for authority to erect here a chapel for the use of members of your Church residing at West Point. The Department consents to grant you a revocable license to erect the building. This leaves in the hands of the Government the complete control of the building and of the persons who use it, which of course is essential. At the same time it gives you the exclusive use of the building while the license lasts. Such a license would not be revoked without cause. It must be assumed that the cause will not occur. Upon the whole, I think that the terms offered by the War Department are more favorable to you than those which you offer, and which I recommended, which were that the title of the build ing should rest wholly in the United States. But as they are different I shall be glad if you will inform me if they are accepted by you.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

O. H. ERNST, Colonel of Engineers, Superintendent."

As Mgr. O'Keeffe had been prepared in the first instance to surrender to the Government all title to the chapel which he proposed to erect, so now he was also willing to build upon a revocable license. The War Department was informed of his readiness to build under the new conditions.

Meantime bigots all over the country were busy in composing protests for the War Department against so simple an act of religion and justice as

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 101

the permission to build the chapel. Be it remem bered that these protests were not hurled against the introduction of Catholic services at West Point — for Catholic services had been regularly held at West Point for generations; nor were the protests directed against the granting of money or land to the Catholic Church, because no money was asked for, and the land on which the proposed chapel for the use of members of the United States Army was to be built still remained the property of the United States. And in its license to build, the Government reserved to itself the right to have the building removed whenever such removal became necessary or desirable. The protestors had not such pretext. Their action was the outcome of blind bigotry, which would deny to the Catholic officers and soldiers in the service of the United States a respectable and suitable place of worship at the Military Academy, which would have the Catholic soldiers, cadets, and officers still continue to worship in the wretched building among the stables and outhouses, that they might be made to feel how meanly regarded is the religion which they profess by the Government which they serve. In reference to these protests Secretary of War Lamont wrote on February 3, 1897, to the Hon. John A. T. Hull, Chairman of Committee on Mili tary Affairs, House of Representatives :

"Sir: Replying to your favor of the 14th ultimo re specting a pending application for a permit to erect a Catholic chapel at West Point, N. Y., I have the honor

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to invite your attention to the several memoranda and statements herewith, wherein will be found answers to your several inquiries. A number of communications have been received protesting against the grant of the permit requested. Inasmuch, however, as no percept ible harm has resulted from similar permission hereto fore given, and convinced that those of Catholic faith at this post — one-third of its population — are entitled to the convenience of worship which they cannot otherwise obtain, it has been my judgment that the protests are unreasonable and untenable. Under the advice of the law officers of the Department, that the right to issue such a revocable and prudently guarded license is authorized, I am disposed to approve the ap plication, with certain restrictions, unless Congress shall order to the contrary."

From the memoranda submitted by Mr. Lament to Mr. Hull, it was made evident that revocable li censes to erect every conceivable kind of building, including churches, on military posts, can be and had been granted by the War Department. Hav ing passed his judgment on the protests made against the application of the Catholics of West Point to build their chapel, protests regarded by him as "unreasonable and untenable," Secretary Lament granted on March 3, 1897, a revocable license to the Most Rev. M. A. Corrigan, Arch bishop of New York, to build a chapel on the site asked for by Mgr. O'Keeffe and agreed to by the West Point authorities.

The entire process of securing permission had been gone through so carefully and prudently that seven months elapsed from the filing of the appli-

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 103

cation to the affirmative reply of the Secretary of War. The highest legal authorities of the War Department agreed that the granting of a revocable licence to build the church was perfectly within the jurisdiction of the Department. The conditions attached were of a kind to secure the West Point authorities from annoyance, and to guarantee the building of a suitable chapel for the Catholics of the post. The designs were to be of the Superin tendent's selection, and the whole sum required for the building was to be in the treasury before the work was begun. Secretary of War Alger, who succeeded Mr. Lamont in the War Department, when President McKinley came into office, found no difficulty in reaffirming and renewing the ac tion of his predecessor, and cheerfully approved the granting of the revocable license, and assured Mgr. O'Keeffe that he might proceed with the work at once. On April 27th, General Alger gave the following statement to the newspapers: "Much has been said about the building of a Cath olic chapel on the grounds of the United States Military Academy at West Point. This was a privilege accorded to my predecessor, who said that similar privileges would be accorded to others. You can state, that any other denominations wish ing to build a chapel on the grounds upon the same conditions will be given an equally advantageous site for the building. No favoritism will be shown to any denomination, and others will be accorded a site equally as good."

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Fortified by so many official assurances, by the good will of the West Point authorities, by the de cisions of the law officers of the Government, and by the official action of two Secretaries of War, and presumably by two Presidents, the sum required for the building of the chapel was collected by Mgr. O'Keeffe. Architects were engaged and money was expended in the usual preliminaries. Then, without a word of warning or a chance to be heard in the matter, the Catholics of West Point were overwhelmed by a bolt from a clear sky. In less than two weeks after Secretary of War Alger's offi cial statement to the press, Attorney-General Mc- Kenna ruled that the Government could not grant a revocable license for the building of a Catholic chapel on its own ground at West Point, for the religious welfare of its own soldiers, and the li cense issued by Mr. Lament and renewed by Mr. Alger was revoked. The distressing feature of the decision was its suddenness and unexpectedness. It struck like a shell from an enemy. Had there been the faintest hint that such a decision was con templated, no money would have been collected or expended, and no preparation been made. Then, had it come, the decision would have been only a disappointment, whereas under the circumstances it left behind it a feeling of punishment and humiliation.

This undignified struggle waxed more intense when the question was submitted to Congress. Mgr. O'Keeffe fought incessantly for three

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 105

years. Members in the House of Representatives were consumed with an ignorance and bigotry which were appalling. He tactfully arranged in terviews and made speeches without number to disabuse them of overwrought notions which lodged in their heads. Finally he triumphed. His work was done. He sleeps in the West Point military cemetery with the officers, a concession granted, because of his worth, by the Secretary of War. There is no monument, not even a stone or a flower, on his grave. His monument crowns the brow of the hill that looks on the river to the north.

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN

FOR the student it is worth noting that a complete and at the same time the only authorized edition of Newman's writings has been published. This edition is of value because of the author's corrections, modifications, notes, comments, and amplifications. Apart from his in teresting personality, Newman's style will remain a perennial source of inquiry and imitation. New man would have found many things in America to distress him, yet it would have pleased him to learn that a few thoughtful among us have studied him almost as eagerly as the flight of rare spirits who watched him by day and night in his own holy city of Oxford. If his influence there has waned, it can never wholly die. He has at tached himself to the everlasting world of litera ture by his gift of imagination and speech. Noth ing in English can be compared to his simplicity and self-restraint. An acute critic has placed him for music of language alongside of Cicero; yet this gift is a mere incident, for of more worth is the sincerity of the mind behind the faculty — the truth consistent with and almost one with the ex pression. The personal element in all he has written is very akin to Dante's characteristic; yet

106

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 107

the personalities of each are vastly dissimilar. What was said by both was first felt in the marrow of their bones. When they faintly intimate the difficulty of a mystery we know that the pressure on their minds must have been enormous. Yet withal there is ever a due reserve and sense of com posure, which can be attributed to Newman more easily than to Dante. Immeasurably narrower, however, is Newman's mind when compared with Dante's. Is there any human being, not even for getting Shakespeare and Goethe, who can be asso ciated with this mighty Italian for breadth of im agination? For him the gutters of Florence ran streams of flame, and the stones of Giotto's tower were singing paeans to the stars. His mental ac tion is of white heat intensity almost to the point of insanity, and one wonders, with Plato, if such be not divine. Within his wrinkled pate he gath ered the worlds; he knew what is best in the sci ences, astronomy, mathematics, computed and foretold systems in the heavens, then turned his mind to the constitution of matter and concocted theories of chemical operation. He knew history, sacred and profane, pagan and Christian. He sounded the deepest depths of emotion and ex pressed in his life the most incessant action. He controlled with ease the principles of philosophy, ancient and mediaeval, and traversed with the swiftness of Mercury the three great departments of divine theology, and perhaps saw their causes more clearly than most of the Christian bishops.

108 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

So it is not judicious to compare Newman with Dante because of his living perception of the in visible, so subtly expressed in his one Dantesque poem. The similarity is rather in the fact that what was said or sung was part and parcel of themselves, and came like electric flashes from the tips of their fingers.

Yet who so self-possessed as Newman? There are passages of his which act like a sedative on the mind and the heart. We must thank England for giving us this spiritual genius. Amid the strife of many voices his note of solemn unction sounds clear and brings silence, as the music of a bird when all the woods are hushed. Every true man must perforce and in time become a genius. The continuity and unvarying quality of purpose in his life will ever be the device with which Newman will capture honest and free minds. The reader is impressed with the overwhelming conviction that what is said by the author is indeed true. He does not write of what he has not seen clearly and felt deeply. Indeed, his fault is to so fascinate the mind that we begin tc fear for the validity of an argument which does not appeal to him because of his own structure of mind. To most minds an act of faith would be a rational process, for the beginning and end of the act are built upon the foundations of reason. To Newman's mind it would be a leap into the dark; the reasons for the leap might be clear and so he would take it, but his mind was so large and demanded so much that

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 109

even the ultimate region of truth must be for him clear as a sky of blue. It is the temptation of great minds. Dante cried for peace of mind and Goethe died asking for more light. It is a question whether the mere language which became the raw material out of which serious agnostics could con struct the charge of skepticism be not warranted. It is denied by many, and of course Newman has given many external arguments to prove that Catholicism is the only historically and logically tenable form of Christianity, yet the atheist might be anxious to reduce Newman to the more radical question: Do you find the difficulties fewer or as many in Catholicism as you do in Atheism? In other words, is the matter entirely tweedle-dum, tweedle-dee? or, to speak in a commonplace man ner, is humanity an ass with its head between two bales of hay — both acceptable objects — and at tracted from some unknown instinct toward one rather than toward the other. Is there as much in Atheism to quell the restless inquiries of the mind as there is in Catholicism? And if there is, is he — Newman — drawn to the latter through the head or the heart? Certainly, as he himself has said, "to a perfectly consistent mind there is no medium in true philosophy between Atheism and Catholic ity;" but what if there be one reason for accepting Atheism and two for Catholicism? In explanation he would seem to intimate that one bale of hay might be excellent food for one donkey, but poison for another. He remarks, by way of amplification,

110 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

in the Note II. of the Grammar of Assent: "I am a Catholic, for the reason that I am not an Atheist." Then one is tempted to forget reverence and fear for his genius, and beg him to say, rather, I am a Catholic because the arguments for Catholicism have an objective value: they are adequately pro portionate to my intellect; they have satisfied the logical demands of my mind; they do not totally explain the difficulties; but they give me something by which to adjust my visual power; if I cannot see, then the defect is with me — in my organism for seeing — but there is a reality of existence in the arguments, and they are external to myself and the same for all minds. Then, on the other, I would with becoming and profound humility and deliberation ask him to put on record that he be lieves the arguments for Atheism prove and ex plain nothing, not because the arguments for Catholicism do explain and prove, but because they have no existence, and therefore cannot create a medium of adequate proportion between intellect and object. Of course nowhere in his writings is the philosophic value of Atheism expressed; in deed, the thirty-eight volumes which he has left and the example of his blameless life are a testi mony of the thoroughness of the argument for Catholicism. Yet if he leaves me, the reader, wdth the impression that there is another intellectual region where my mind might be satisfied either more or less, I feel constrained to leave him and seek my fortune in that new country; for the laws

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 111

of my own land rationally demand my entire obedi ence, and they only explain, and that partially, the difficulties which beset my mind. In writing thus there is excluded, to be sure, the Christian idea of probation in life and the relative value and super natural merit of an act of faith.

It would be dishonest to say that Newman was a skeptic; yet that his mind was of skeptical con struction must be the conclusion arrived at by the disciple who has studied his revelations analyti cally, especially the more intimate ones, like the Apologia or the Grammar of Assent.

Skepticism is always a serious charge, but a skeptical or incredulous quality of mind may be a good thing if the individual behind it be honest and possess that rare gift of analysis. Possibly in his tenderness Newman may have been seeking a model of justification for those minds which be cause of their peculiar complexions, excluding the influences of education, prejudice, temperament, or domestic and social affiliations, seem to honestly reject the irresistible force of evidence in argumen tation. Yet he does not say so, and the question is whether the fear of distracting ill-educated minds may have kept him silent. In the note at the end of the Grammar of Assent he compares his manner of thought concerning the quotation above to the famous argument in Butler's Analogy. He contends that no one would dare to forget But ler's sermons on Christian subjects, or his consist ent Christian life, because forsooth the bishop de-

112 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

fended the proposition in defence of his own creed, that it is the only possible alternative of the denial of the moral law. Then, immediately after this, Newman reveals his own mind in the words: "If on account of difficulties we give up the gospel, then on account of parallel difficulties we must give up nature; for there is no standing-ground be tween putting up with the one trial of faith and putting up with the other." Again one is tempted to ask him : are not the reasons for putting up with a trial of faith so irresistible that there are no rea sons left for putting up in the least with any other mode of thought? The question is: are the things which make a trial of faith of any objective value whatever, or are they not rather disturbances or ill adjustments of essentially good things which have produced the confusion of history, the tumult in the physical universe, and disorder in the mind? I gather from Newman's writings an impression which has never been relieved, that although he did not formally deny the logical and external proof of the existence of God, he does not care to study it, because he is so sure of himself and of his own personal arguments. He rushes away from the world with its marks of design; he puts aside the books with their stock proofs of positive value, and there within the sanctuary of his own mind the existence of God is; he says, "borne in upon me irresistibly, . . . the great truth of which my whole being is full."

Again, it may be questioned whether this argu-

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 113

ment, so personal to Newman, be of any value to others. We have the traditional argument from the law of conscience, but its foundation is not only from within but from without ; from a study of the polity and policy of nations, the principle of cause and effect written upon stones, the law of justice detected in even the warfare of rude savages and traced in the tribal relationships of early historic periods, and lastly the keen moral sense of ad vancing civilization.

But of what objective value would Newman's personal spiritual experience, and the revelation of it, be to a mind less candid and pure than his? One might ask the same of Rosmini's or of Des Cartes' personal argument. In affirming this one would be very narrow to disregard the validity of the personal within its own sphere, as we on our part demand a reverent inquiry into the external objective argument in its sphere. Indeed, the Grammar of Assent and the Apologia may both be said to be personal, yet who can deny the intellec tual merit and the help which these books have been to some? There is so much that is over whelmingly good that only an unusual reader does detect, and in spite of himself, the peculiar quality that lurks in them.

A sentence such as this found in the Oxford University Sermons forces us to believe that either we have misinterpreted philosophy and logic or else we are ignorant. But it is a fact, and all the more curious because it is against the

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vanity of nature, that when a mind is shadowed by so earnest a mind as Newman's it does not rely on its own power but abandons itself to the superior's transcending charms. Herein lies the danger. He tells us: "And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, com monly reason — not by rule, but by an inward faculty." In the Grammar of Assent he would leave us free to believe that the motives of credi bility for the truth of a proposition are not in the expression of premises or conclusion. "As to Logic," he remarks, "its chain of conclusions hangs loose at both hands; both the point from which the proof should start and the points at which it should arrive are beyond its reach; it comes short both of first principles and of concrete issues." If this mean that logic has no right to confine an idea — supposing even the deepest and most transcen dental — then the system, as constructed by Aris totle and perfected by St. Thomas Aquinas, is of less value that we were taught. The soul is wider in its breadth of being, yet it is one with the body. Can sentiment, taste, impulse, memories, moods, inclinations construct an argument? If they can, then let us ask merely concerning sentiment : what is the comparative worth of its argument in ap pealing to all minds or even to one mind?

Briefly stated, the scheme intended to be con veyed in the Grammar of Assent is this: It begins with the refutation of the fallacies of those who say we cannot believe what we cannot understand;

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 115

then indirectly reasons are given for believing in a Mind which established those laws which interlace the structure of the universe and which show a method of transition from cause to effect. There then appears the curious question as to whether the cumulation of probabilities can give certainty. According to the more strict method of philosophy, which Newman does not use, certitude would ex clude all possibility of doubt; probabilities might be regarded as the lower strata of the material out of which certainty is moulded. Then the author proceeds to give a direct proof of Theism; then the proof of Christianity from the striking fulfillment of the prophecies, and the principle of continuity running from Judaism through to Christianity, and its living expression in Catholicism.

Newman would seem to explain the modes of procedure in ratiocination to two methods — to what he calls "the ascending or descending scale of thought." He preferred the descending — a sen tence from The Discourses to Mixed Congregations will elucidate; it is in the Sermon on Mysteries: "If I must submit my reason to mysteries, it is not much matter whether it is a mystery more or a mystery less; the main difficulty is to believe at all; the main difficulty for an inquirer is firmly to hold that there is a living God, in spite of the darkness which surrounds Him, the Creator, Witness, and Judge of men. When once the mind is broken in, as it must be, to the belief of a Power above it, ;when once it understands that it is not itself the

116 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

measure of all things in heaven and earth, it will have little difficulty in going forward. I do not say it will or can go on to other truths without con viction; I do not say it ought to believe the Catholic Faith without grounds and motives; but I say that, when once it believes in God, the great obstacle to faith has been taken away, a proud, self-sufficient spirit," etc., etc.

The truth is that Newman, like any other man or school in the Church, must be studied, and he is of value only in so far as he provokes us to think and make judgments for ourselves. The full blown maturity of his power is in the Grammar of Assent, and it truly seems to bear the seal of what we term genius; yet it is only a testimony, un rivaled, if you will, for condensation and serious ness, but personal unto himself. To the religious philosopher it will ever be an enigma, and to re duce it to value some sympathetic disciple shall have to harness it in scholastic terminology, else it will ever remain a tangle of mental moods. In the face of his numberless ardent admirers we may venture to say that he was not a philosopher, no more than he was a scientist. Perhaps the fault we find may be one of the golden charms with which he shall attract the future modern mind. Yet one may be permitted to say this and still kneel in reverence to the light of his spiritual sense, to the glories of his literary art, to the un varying purpose of his honest life and his unflinch ing faith unto death.

SUFFRAGETTES AND NUNS

HE was a strategist, this Ignatius Loyola, who, when he beheld authority being impugned, marshaled his forces toward the weak spot. His cohorts were to bleed for authority. At a com mand they must do. This Ignatian method could be reverently termed the exaggeration of the virtue of obedience to counteract the excesses of an his toric vice, the denial of authority.

That light-headed spiritual genius of Assisi, ex ploited a similar spirit, with his organized protest, against the glittering luxuries of the thirteenth cen tury. The sordid indignities of poverty would off set the illicit opulence of the king, the courtier and sometimes the prelate. When the coarse habit of this sanctified reformer was frayed and tattered, his disciples constrained him to slough it off, if for no other than for hygienic motives. After a perfervid disputation he consented, but in his sublime infatuation for the Lady Poverty, he took the patches from the old garment and sewed them on the new. It was the exaggeration of the virtue of holy poverty as a counter-irritant to the prodi gality of that picturesque time.

Now, breathes there a man with manner so un- gallant as to accentuate the contrast between the

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118 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

suffragette and the cloistered nun? Yet it were no rash deed to aver that if one is not a counter- irritant to the exaggeration of the other, one could be a saving complement of the other. The other could impair the defects of the one. The one could requite the insufficiencies of the other. The clois tered nun might become a sociological necessity to adjust the suffragette to a novel situation, with which, at present, she seems out of joint. If per chance, a philosopher should be so absurd as to fancy that the suffragette symbolizes a deordina- tion, then the nun being her complement could co ordinate all that is wholesome in each estate to a common end.

This would not be so much the curing of a vice by the exaggeration of a virtue as it might be the healing of an imperfection by the assertion of a quality. To be sure this is a prodigious dissimi larity between the exoteric publicity of a suffragette and the vestal privacy of a cloistered nun. The contrast is acute, but the rights of the one do not overshadow the prerogatives of the other.

Shall we ever forget the romantic Victorian woman, sometimes found in fiction like Trollope's, who so gracefully swooned away at the sight of her ecstatic lover? Love was her life and so pro foundly reacted on her frail body that smelling- salts were as imperative as victuals. We have ridiculed the delicacy of that Victorian w7oman be cause our women are rapidly returning to what Chesterton calls the coarse and candid women of

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the Elizabethan period. This vulgarity has ma tured, in some measure, from a merciless mode of civilization which has thrust the tenderest shoots of feminine flowering into avocations which nor mally belong to man. The promiscuous dealing of woman, who is naturally refined, with man, who is naturally a vulgarian, has demoralized the wom an. Herein lurks the grim and black humor of woman suffrage. The romantic and aesthetic in feriority of the modern man has dragged woman so to the deeps that she is screaming for emotional and economic self-assertion. Is the vote an unc tion for so wide a wound?

However, there are sedatives for ruffled neurolog ical conditions. Could the equable composure of a cloistered nun be an anodyne to the tense tumultous life of a suffragette? It must be more than a contrast. The Divine placidity of the one must tender a balm to the feverish spirit of the other. Perhaps there never was a riper era for the reassertion of the feminine contemplative ideal to counteract the ruthless and cruel waste of feminine activities, political and otherwise.

St. Teresa, no mean mistress of the science of life, it was, who declared that more good is done by one minute of reciprocal contemplative com munion of love with God, than by the founding of fifty hospitals or even fifty churches. Is the suf fragette, who in fine frenzy, discourses in the pub lic square of more sociological value to the com munity than the cloistered nun, who under the

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wing of the Sacramental Presence chants her pro pitiatory and plaintive song, at midnight, Matins, by way of atonement for the excesses of our im perfect life? It is but flippant to presume that her heart is narrow because it is cloistered. Indeed it is wider than all the political systems of the world. For as she detached herself from the thraldom of the things of sense, her heart dilated and there was opened a larger horizon. It is not for the suffra gette to judge her. She is the judge of her life as is the suffragette.

The tremulous cry of a conductorette in the sub way or even the elegant chatter of a feminine gath ering at a fashionable hotel betokens an over wrought but doubtless necessary condition. But the mellow and cadenced artlessness of a nun's voice when intoning the Divine Office in the cloister chapel, seems as natural as a bird singing in the tree or the cooing of a dove in the clefts of the rocks.

It is a rigid verity that we cannot touch political pitch without being defiled. So the suffragette has lost not only poise, intuition, manner and distinc tion but another grace, the voice soft and low, that most excellent thing in woman. Can the sacred silences of the cloister be the agency of atonement to stem the floods of vehement verbiage which threaten to inundate the region of sincere thought concerning the dignity of woman?

The loose speech and lax method of ratiocination have not only a reference to feminism but also to

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Prohibition and Socialism. That such modes of crooked belief have come into vogue is because we are still immature experimentalists. We have not as yet the perspective sense to look to the sharp realities. As for dispassionate, judicious think ing, we are standing on our heads and not on our heels. Oh! for the "Homo simplex" of the Ro mans, since now the female of the species is more complex and incompetent amongst the ruins in the realm of modern thought.

Yet we are saved by the orisons of the righteous. They avail much. Cloistered nuns are women. Women are still parcel of the redemptive and sacri ficial scheme which balances the world. By their stripes we are healed. They die for the many. If the suffragette shall close her eyes to this vision, the cloistered nun cannot, since it is the law of her life. She is therefore not a luxury but a pro found social necessity for the feminine ideals of civilization. She is now, more than ever, a rod and a staff for the moral support of the suffragette. This is why the perfection of one finely heroic spirit is of infinitely more worth than the propa gation of innumerable ordinary types of the race.

The fashionable, though charitable, society leader at the Waldorf and the militant suffragette storming the White House at Washington, are of infinitely less worth as economic factors for amelioration than the cloistered nun kneeling erect in prayer before the Tabernacle. One is all fuss and feathers. She symbolizes the tempest in

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the tea-pot. But the cloistered nun represents the Divine energy which wraps itself around our help less world.

Even the Romans, in their period of moral de cline, never lost this womanly ideal. The stand ard of feminine morality ran low, but the discern ing spirits insisted that the ideal at least must be held on high. Thus, the vestal virgin plighted her vow of inviolate chastity for one year. Her life was of reparation and possessed all the esoteric exclusiveness of a cloistered nun. She kept aloft the snowy banner of a noble ideal. If she violated her vow she was buried alive. So now, our goodly array of consecrated virgins, be they Teresian con- templatives, Poor Clares or Nuns of the Precious Blood, are by atonement, propitiation, sacrifice, lending an ethical and economic value to the mod ern devices of the suffragette.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE

THERE is sweet solace in the thought that, though the laws anent women may be as mutable as the sea, woman will remain ever and forever the same. The fluctuations of custom and fashion may excite her for the moment, but the novelty dies down and she reacts to her lovable and fundamental self. This is the only exhilarat ing truth in the general confusion of thought which overshadows us, now that woman has thrust her self into the public conflicts of men. With the measured pace of time, will there come the inevi table slump in the actual voting? The game has been perhaps too rough, and she will awaken to discover that she is helpless in the domain of pub lic performance both by nature and grace, in mind and in body.

Yet, for the present, her self-assertiveness will blaze up, inflamed by the ardent insincerity of the politician. She being credulous and trusting, as is her nature, will confuse patriots with politicians and in this exalted mood all her geese will be as swans.

Already > political manipulation is feeling for the fibres of her heart, since it cannot reach the gray tissue of her brain. The subtle cunning of politi-

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cal method has divined that woman approaches the problems of life with her heart and not with her head. St. Thomas Aquinas said something of the same thing, but he was a Dominican friar and lived in the Middle Ages. Did it take the searching splendor of his genius to discover a truth known to every youth who has loved a maid? Coventry Patmore in an ugly mood clumsily translates the philosopher's words with the statement that wom an is "scarcely a reasonable creature." Now we know the Saint completes the distinction between irrationalis and vix rationalis. He does not mean that the devout sex is irrational or scarcely ra tional, but that deep down in the very roots of its nature the emotional strain is dominant and the rational ever subservient.

This weakness or dependence seems to be parcel of the Divine scheme, and hence the perennial source of not only the interior influence but the inspiration of romance, poetry and art.

Moreover, woman's delicate reserve is the breath of moral life, the origin of her incomparable per sonal charm. Because of her inappropriateness for the things of strength, intellectual and physical, she will lose out in this unruly public scrimmage of politics. Can she be taught to do something which will subvert the fixed and unalterable econ omy of the Divine design? Can she upset the past and make anew her nature? If the suffrage move ment is builded on a fallacy, wherewith shall we defend woman from herself or adjust the defects

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of her qualities? Will she because of the glorifi cation of a vote wax stronger physiologically and be adorned with an intellectualism never possessed before? Will her latent genius, as she calls it, ex ploit itself under this novel adjustment of circum stances, or will she retain her natural, primal in stinct for motherhood rather than for a Divina Commedia or a Venus de Milo? Does the force- fulness of genius ride roughshod over untoward conditions? If so, woman's opportunity has come and gone, long since, and she still is the creature of infinite variety, but within a circumscribed sphere.

The rude demagogue shall find no favor with woman, but what of the refined, wary, if not comely type of professional politician? Will he, like Richard, the wicked monarch, creep into favor with himself for the prowess of his vicious under taking with the impressionable queen?

This if it be a truth will die hard, but woman's blatant self-sufficiency is evanescent and the more provoked by her tremendous efficiency in the crit ical suffering of the cursed War. In that she was her supreme and sweet self, for it sat well on her nature. Will she draw conclusions wider than the premises and mistakes her deeds in a crisis for normal action in a permanent environment? If perhaps she does not, then some chivalrous poli tician will do it for her. Already we shudder to think that such a type of politician is extant. Will she because of her susceptibility and sacrificial

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capacity be made a burnt offering on his new altar? So now, instead of one we have two problems em bracing the complex structure of womankind. Its prodigious complexity is a byword even for those who have never studied a word of feminine analy- sists, like Balzac or Bourget or, the less psycho logical but diverse Englishmen, Meredith, Hardy and Patmore. They are of one mind that, though there may be several species of woman in woman hood, every woman is several species of woman hood in herself. The gigantic proportions of the difficulty become at once obvious, its manifold aspects are unspeakable.

To compare the craft and erudition of the mod ern woman with opulent intelligence and secret power of the woman of bygone times, is to draw comparisons between the glowworm and the star. These iridescences of feminine splendor had every thing of accomplishment and grace, in keeping with the eternal womanly. But they had it, nat urally, for it was part of the Providential plan. Hence they never lost distinction or composure, nor were they ever consumed with hysteria for the possession of a public boon which ran counter to the impregnable walls of the womanly nature.

Furthermore, not only the criminologist but the moralist will venture to think that never was a more vital principle of psychological experience applicable to this urgent situation than corruptio optimi pessima. Can the female become more deadly than the male even in politics? If the In-

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dian squaw in Utah can barter her Divine privi lege of a vote for seventy-five cents, what is to con strain the negro wench from offering hers for the enormous sum of one dollar? But this is a mere incidental and can, perhaps, be regulated by a law, if not by a vote.

But can a vote alter something deeper than the foundation of the everlasting hills? The demoral ization of the red woman will react on her papoose as the moral frailty of the black matrix will be vouchsafed to her pickaninnies. If the salt be there, but lacking in savor, wherewith shall things be salted? St. Francis de Sales, who, like St. Vin cent de Paul and Fenelon, understood the Divine side of womanhood, believed that there was noth ing so malodorous as the foul stench of decaying lilies. This is, at least, a pungent fact, if the lily be the white symbol of inviolate feminine excel lence. Lacordaire was a friar but of a modern type, and of a mind which reasoned that the world can corrupt all things, even so fair a creature as a woman. Though shielded by angelic influence, the Blessed Joan of Arc slept in her steel armor. She was dealing with men. This new species of womanhood must be thrice armed to meet the de vices of political action. It does not matter if her quarrel be just or otherwise. To discourse upon so fine a subject in so gross a fashion: it is the female dealing with the male as never before in history, the ways of a man with a maid.

The Spanish women are slender in form and

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rather vain of their tiny feet. Of old the feet of the Spanish Madonna were hid in fleecy clouds and folds of cloth of gold. It was the artists' pas sion to paint the ideal woman. If his jealousy was provoked by the protrusion of a foot, what would he have said to the exploitation of a modern wom an? Would his idealism interpret aright, if he should conclude that the standards had relaxed? Will the feminine ideal eventually die and the people perish? Will our youth no longer see vis ions or dream dreams? If woman is now the busi ness victim of merchant, broker, banker and law yer, because these professions have no ideal sense, is there a budding evil already asserting itself in her novel relationship with the politician? That he has already dared to batten on the weakness of her strength is the first indication that he, too, is beginning to lose the ideal sense in reference to woman. How is she to make the best of this bad job? There is but one method — to be her honest self and seek the ministrations of the priest, the poet and the lover.

A DISAPPOINTED NATION

HOW can I ever forget the feeling that came over my spirit when, after a journey of many days at sea, I saw in the distance and for the first time the green Irish coast looming up like some sad spectre upon the horizon. Who can explain the subtle sentiment which will creep over the heart and stir the blood at the mere sight of some certain object? It was there in that mysterious country that our fathers slept. There they had sorrowed and died. From there came our own flesh and blood — our own kith and kin. The fresh imaginings of boyhood were heightened by tradi tions of valor in war and fidelity in love in that romantic isle. Small wonder, then, that such a keen mood of emotion should fall upon us like a pall and move our eyes to tears — our hearts to pity. All this would be personal did I not wish to provoke in you the belief that, although I did not spring from the loins of Irish soil, but was born in this new Republic of the West, I had nevertheless an Irish woman for a mother; and I may, therefore, by a certain right of heredity, speak of Ireland with some sympathy and even with some affection.

The races in modern Europe as well as in Amer ica have been and are being so intermingled that

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only certain general characteristics can be attrib uted to each of the greater ones — such as the Latins, the Saxons, or the Celts. But in speaking of the Irish race I wish to combine all the conflict ing racial elements of Irish nationality under one head. I would direct my words to the one type which represents all the nations of Ireland — the Celtic, the Gaelic, the Norman, and even the Saxon. Moreover, concerning the nation itself, I would think of it not so much as a land which drew, as rivers to the sea, different streams of European races, but as a country which had or has its own peculiar complexion of civilization. If it be true that the elect among men are chosen by God to bear the sins of the people, and to effect His work through heroism and self-sacrifice, may we not say the same of nations and especially of the beloved country of Erin? Around the great martyred hero of a seeming lost cause, there kneel the goodly company of the just nations — the weepers, they who wane sad, they who sit by the city gates, by the deep sea and look out toward the West. "Be hold how the just one dieth and there is none that taketh it to heart: just men are taken away and no one considereth it: the just one is taken away be cause of iniquity and his memory shall be in peace."

He does not read history aright who sees in the Irish martyrdom of seven hundred years nothing but the outcome of human events. These circum stances forced by men are divinely permitted to

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complete some Providential historic development. The day must come when this long cycle of suffer ing will close. When Erin shall bind up the dis heveled tresses of her hair and put on the habili ments of life and of love. There she sits, easily graceful, on the bleak rocks, lashed by the waves of the cruel sea. Weeping, she hath wept in the night and her tears are on her cheeks. The drops of glistening dew on her wanton tresses are the only helmet she wears. Her soft raiment is woven from the gold and the green of the moss in her val leys and the purple of the heather on her hills. She is lovable even in her melancholy, but she would be lovelier still if the light of hope came to her eyes and the winged step of freedom to her feet. In forecasting her destiny we are confronted with a problem — we stand between the hopes and the fears of the Irish nation.

The fear is that the small island cannot with stand the tide of modern material and commercial splendor which is sweeping over all the world. The fear is that with the loss of her ancient tradi tions, and language, and music, and population she may lose her individual life as a nation and become a prosperous neighboring shire of Eng land — merely an English colony. On the other hand, there are clever men of an optimistic temper who see in the recent transference to Ireland of minor departments of government, a faint fore shadowing of the fuller national liberty which is to come. There are patriots and acute thinkers

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who find in the recent federation of the conflicting political elements, a portent of national reconstruc tion. May the God of Nations grant that this will come !

If, however, the former state should eventually assert itself, the race of itself would not necessarily lose its enduring characteristics. As I have said before, a race does not need its own country to complete its missions. Of old the Jews went out from the homes of their fathers into a strange country, and by their very migrations they taught to the world the lessons they were divinely ap pointed to teach. So, too, think you, would such thorough and far-reaching phases of Christianity have been transplanted to America, India, Aus tralia, or even England, if the Irish had remained in their own desolate, blighted country, wandering about broken spirited, hungry and poor. It is sad reading the exodus of any people from the hills of home and from hearths made festive by min strelsy, love and wit; but to a people teeming with sentiment and highly-strung the melancholy is all the profounder.

It is peculiar sometimes to great spiritual events that they are wrought by the materially weak and by the simple. If we are to believe history, Ire land's greatness is not to be found in the external facts of history, but rather in that more subtle region of the spirit.

Her better life has not been public. She has moved rather under the clefts of the rocks, within

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the region of emotion and thought and interior grace. Hence she has never once strewn fleets of ships across the seas or planted armies in foreign fields. Her glory is of the soul. The beauty of the king's daughter is from within. Who knows that if Ireland had historically and materially pros pered she might have fallen from the state of grace — and then we could no longer speak of the purity of her Christianity or the chastity of her life. Amid her hopes and her fears, and in the face of diverging opinions as to her future, there is one practical hope towards which her ardent lovers (no matter what their political creed) may bend all their energies. It is the golden means which will procure a mode of civilization conserv ing all the supernatural aspirations and ancient ideals, and yet, at the same time, licitly adjusting itself to the benefits of modern progress. The quick intuition, the mystical tendencies, and even the very passions of the people are religious. There is little executive or mechanical genius in them if we balance these with their spiritual sense. They are rather the feminine element in the races. They work best in perpetuating the life of a nation when in relationship with a more dominant race. They are emotional, susceptible, assimilative, and tender as women. They produce best under the influence of a more masterful external environ ment. Their wit, imagination, melancholy, and fluency of speech are tokens of the artistic nature rather than those of men of action. As women by

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her subtlety and charm influences the world for good or evil, so Erin by her tears and her smiles and endurance of sorrow and spirituality has played her delicate career on the stage of the world's drama. Beautiful and holy Ireland, comely as the daughter of Lir, but rich only in the treasure of a pure conscience, has ever been the fruitful mother of saints and heroes, dreamers and poets. When the vision dies the people perish. It is in the providence of God that some nations should suffer by way of atonement for the sins of others; that some nations should be refused mate rial contentment, that the sacred lore of country and national ideals may not perish from the hearts of the people. It were better for a nation to suffer undignified dissolution and die from off the face of the earth than that in spite of God's inspiration, it should sin against the light and prostitute the gift of a holy mission. It were better that fever and plague, coercion and famine, pillage and slaughter should drain away the life blood of some and bring about the exile of others, if by such crises God should multiply His people out of Egypt. Alas! Clonard, Lismore, and Armagh are no longer nooks of sacred love, but the virginal ardor for spiritual science and morality glows as brightly as it did in the burning hearts of St. Malachi or in Dublin's Bishop, St. Laurence OToole. How can I marshal to my lips the serried troops of Irish saints who joined knowledge and learning to pur ity and love? How dare I tell it to you who know

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it so well, the golden period of Ireland's history? How can I be gracious enough to speak of the beauty and innocence of the women and the little children? How bring to your minds the gleam and the scent of the wild flowers, the sunshine and cloud, the tears and the smiles of the skies, the notes of the lark, the linnet and the thrush, the wonder of the dark woods, the music in the leaping of the rivers and the streams? And least of all should I say a word lest I provoke bitterness of those rude and ruthless ages of sword and flame, of hunger and thirst. Least of all should I revivify corpses long since buried, faded pictures at the mere sight of which the heart grows sick. Rather do I linger looking towards the West, there where the course of empire takes its way to the high hopes and to the skies more golden than a stretch of harvest in the yellow veil of Tipperary.

"A terrible and splendid trust

Heartens the host of Innisfail : Their dream is of the swift sword-thrust, A lightning glory of the Gael.

"Croagh Patrick is the place of prayer,

And Tara the assembling place: But each sweet wind of Ireland bears The trump of battle on its race.

"From Dursey Isle to Donegal,

From Howth to Achill, the glad noise Rings; and the heirs of glory fall Or victory crowns their fighting joys.

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"A dream, a dream, an ancient dream,

Yet ere peace comes to Innisfail, Some weapons on some field must gleam, Some burning glory fire the Gael.

"That field may lie beneath the sun Fair for the treading of an host: That field in realms of thought be won, And armed minds do their uttermost.

"Some way to faithful Innisfail

Shall come the majesty and awe

Of martial truth, that must prevail

To lay on all the eternal law."

The last hope of the modern Irish poet is rather the better one, that in this eternal struggle with the Grown some policy of arbitration will yet be reached by which the truth will prevail and the individual character of Ireland saved to the world of history. With the revival of industry and agri culture and labor, such as flax and linen, in the large cities, with the rehabilitation of trade so long paralyzed by manifold influences, with a hopeful commercial spirit compassing the hearts of the people, there would come a national regeneration. They who love Ireland tell us to beware, however, of lowering the mind of the entire nation to the ordinary standard of merely natural ambition — merely materialistic and commercial success. The effort to bring Ireland into the arena of the modern utilitarian idea, will destroy the specific genius of the Irish people unless efforts are made

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to have them retain at the same time their own spiritual ideas. To save the Irish race from ex tinction in its own country material prosperity is not the only means needed. The language, with all its mystery and weird enchantment, must be kept within the heart and on the lips. Those stacks of ancient manuscripts in monastery and museum must be unearthed and submitted to translation and modern scientific research. The wild music, with its plaintive minor chants, must resound in the valleys of song, until fire, mist, dew and water will be touched again with preternatural awe. The holy wells must dispense sweet water as of old. The torches of learning must be re kindled upon the mountains. The green ivy must fall from the crumbling walls, and the stones of the ancient abbeys spring to life again. All this is compatible with the admission of what is best in those words of music and of magic — "liberty," "progress." Material prosperity, however, is not the end but the condition of Ireland's future life. She was made for a higher purpose. The fear is that she will lose her ancient identity in the march of the modern spirit. The hope is, that in select ing what is best in the new she will still harbor all the glory of the old. The wise householder bring- eth forth treasures new and old.

Never so much as now do we need a nation of renunciation and vicarious suffering. Nations as well as men carry their crosses to the gloom of Calvary and atone for the crimes of other nations.

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It is meet that one man should die for the people. By his stripes we are healed. For twice three hundred years have the hands of the Irish people been lifted up in the attitude of prayer. Where, if not in Ireland, is there the historic perpetuation of the bloody atonement? Where, if not in Ire land, is there the passion for martyrdom and retri bution for the sins of history? Is not Christ's sublime philosophy of self-sacrifice best reflected in the shadow and gloom of her mournful career? The very contradictions and follies of her people have become conditions out of which God has wrought His own spiritual purpose. "Every val ley shall be filled and the rough places shall be made smooth, and that which is crooked shall be made straight, for all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

Is it unreasoning optimism even to dream of that blessed country gathering to her wings her exile sons and daughters? "The Lord thy God shall bring back again thy captivity, and will have mercy on thee, and gather thee again out of all the nations into which He scattered thee before." From the days of the Babylonian Captivity to this hour the Jews have hoped and dreamed of taking up their national history at the point where they left it in the holy city of Jerusalem.

The inspired visions of the Hebrew prophets, the wail of the harpists in their exile, the sincerest music in the sublimest Psalms are tinged with this secret thought. I am told by the learned that

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the ancient bardic music of the Irish is full of sim ilar melancholy and vague yearning. There is some parallelism between the people which God chose in the older dispensation and in the new. All down through history have these two races kept through blood and sweat, fire and water, their high hopes. In spite of centuries of persecution there is still alive in both races the small flame that may relight the altars that have been dug down, and the hand not shortened may pile up the stones — those stones which have been left not one upon the other. Ah! were it foolish to hail these national impulses of hope as an unconscious awakening of grace to the realization of the mission of God's chosen people? Surely great mercies may be in store for races which have suffered so much. "If thou be driven as far as the poles of heaven the Lord thy God will fetch thee back from thence. And will take thee to Himself, and bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it, and blessing thee He will make thee more numerous than were thy fathers."

With all their genius for worry such hopeful ideas are the heritage of the Irish people. Ireland bound with the fillet of divine misfortune on her brow looks from Calvary to the glimmer of the dawning of the Resurrection. In the face of such high hopes, however, the principle must not be for gotten that nations under God complete their own destinies through human means and along human lines, just as grace presupposes nature in the for-

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mation of character. Recognizing, of course, the principle of Providence, Ireland will be what Irishmen will make her. Again I repeat what seems to me the momentous problem for her, that of creating a civilization which will conserve the Irish race with its ancient ideals and at the same time will accept the licit possibilities of modern in ventive genius and material prosperity into that financially depressed country. This is a vision and a theme for the Neo-Celtic poet to behold and eternally sing of. This is the practical reason for the existence of the Neo-Celtic movement of today. This is a cause for which beauty, youth, love and patriotism might die once again upon verdant fields and in the echoing valleys. What a tre mendous mission for a holy country — what a mis sion for Ireland to hold fast to all the vivifying strength of her ancient spirituality and yet seize every opportunity for modern material advance ment. This ought not to be difficult, for even from the days when the fire of the Druids burned on the altars there was in this strange districted race a passion for the mystical and supernatural. Then with the message of the new era of prosperity of modern progress will come the inspiration of new life — thrift, temperance, and practical acumen.

This, then, is the great hope among the hopes of the Irish nation. They are hopes so lively that they overshadow the fears — the fears we dare not think of, but dismiss as we should an unseemly thought.

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"Shall mine eyes behold thy glory, O my country? Shall mine eyes behold thy glory,

0 shall the darkness close around them ere the sun-

blaze Break at last upon thy story?

"When the nations ope for thee their queenly circle, As a sweet new sister hail thee,

Shall those lips be sealed in callous death and silence That have known but to bewail thee.

"Shall the ear be deaf that only loved thy praises, When all men their tribute bring thee? Shall the mouth be clay that sang thee in thy squalor When all poets' mouths shall sing thee?

"Ah, the harpings and the salvoes and the shoutings Of thy exiled sons returning

1 should hear tho' dead and mouldered, and the grave

damps Should not chill my bosom's burnings.

"Ah! the tramp of feet victorious, I shall hear them 'Mid the shamrocks and the mosses, And my heart should toss within the shroud and quiver As a captive dreamer tosses.

"I should turn and rend the cerecloths round me, Giant sinews I should borrow, Crying, O my brethren, I have also loved her In her lowliness and sorrow.

"Let me join with you the jubilant procession, Let me chant with you her story, Then contented I shall go back to the shamrocks Now mine eyes have seen her glory."

CARDINAL NEWMAN ONCE MORE

IT is interesting to notice the change that has come over the minds of even Catholic apologists toward Cardinal Newman's philosophy.

Newman is dead over twenty-five years, yet his influence as a thinker, and of course as a stylist, is consistently increasing.

When he wrote his memorable book — The Grammar of Assent — he felt that it would at first be misunderstood. He knew but little of the scholastic philosophic terminology. He reverenced it as a system for holding the mind to correct log ical thinking. But he realized that he could not use its manner of speech to bring the modern mind to see certain theories of knowledge that he would have it accept.

It is pathetic reading in his biography by Wil frid Ward, to find the great Cardinal begging Dr. Meynell of Oscott, to censor mercilessly the matter he was preparing for The Grammar of Assent.

Be it said to the honor of Dr. Meynell that he seems to have discovered the constructive power of this book from the beginning. He, too, knew it would be a philosophic enigma to most readers. Events proved it. Father Harper, S.J., the dis tinguished philosopher, attacked it at once. New-

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man never answered him, but wrote a letter, re plete with humility, to Father Coleridge of the same Society, saying that he was not correctly in terpreted. He said the same of our own Amer ican, Brownson, who was violent in his criticism, believing the book to be skeptical. An American Bishop spoke of the book at Rome in conjunction with Newman's other great book, The Essay on Development. The Romans were naturally con fused. Newman was quite unlike others in man ner of thought and speech when measured by past traditions.

In truth he was, but he had hoped to sympa thetically conquer skepticism on its own grounds and with its own weapons of language and knowl edge. So the superficial reader and hasty scho lastic traditionalist put him down as a skeptic.

Now, much that is distressing could be said of the active opposition of good men (within the household of the faith) to Newman's Grammar of Assent and Essay on Development, when these books were published. It would be useless to speak of such matters, except to show how a tre mendous change has come, and that which was re garded as a skeptical theory of knowledge is now the only theory to cope with at least three of the most prominent systems of modern philosophy.

Among theories of knowledge there is one much in vogue called pragmatism. It is a system which reduces all knowledge and truth to their practical significance. According to this theory, truth is

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real only in so far as it practically affects life and moral conduct.

Prof. William James of Harvard University, if he did not originate, has, at least, made this phil osophy popular. One may find something of this teaching in his book, Varieties of Religious Expe rience. His desire is to exclude all useless mental speculation. Indeed, he ridicules the theologian whom he thinks fruitlessly discusses the attributes of God. With the pragmatist there are no attri butes in the Divine Being except those which affect the life and being of man. Thus, such divine attri butes as transcendence, infinity, aseity and the like, are not real attributes because they cannot be fully comprehended by man's intellect, and there fore cannot vitally affect his character or mode of life.

However, the pragmatist would admit such, qualities of the Divine Being as justice, love, mercy, omniscience — because these are intelligible to man's mind. They, too, react on the being of man, for he can practically see that a good and just God and the knowledge of Him can somewhat be mastered. God must in some manner reward virtue and punish evil. Somewhere and somehow all things went awry and are out of joint morally and must be adjusted and coordinated up to the Divine purpose.

Now, Newman's philosophic genius foresaw the coming of philosophic pragmatism. His forecast was correct. An age so practical as ours would

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attempt to convert all thought to action. How did Newman so subtly meet this difficulty?

He began with the principle expressed in The Grammar of Assent — that, "the human mind em braces more than it can master." When this state ment was first uttered there came a cry of protest, even from Newman's friends and disciples. It was thought to be skepticism. It is clearly expressed in Vol. II., p. 311, of his Letters and Correspond ence, edited by Anne Mozley.

Yet, it was this very principle which could an swer the limitations and imperfections of pragma tism. He answered that the human mind, al though it could not fully comprehend, yet it could embrace even the transcendental attributes of God — that it was indeed possible for man, to be per sonally affected, with a sense of profound awe and reverence, at the thought of this illimitable, all- powerful Being, Who lives far beyond the flux of His creation. Hence Newman's argument for the personal conscience. This idea is given, in his regal style, in The Grammar of Assent, and in some of the University and Parochial Sermons.

Now, a second evidence of Newman's philosophic genius is apparent in his dealing with and recog nition of what is commonly now known as "sub conscious reasoning."

He accepts the fact and reverts to his first prin ciple that: "the human mind, in its present state, is unequal to its own powers of apprehension." The Grammar of Assent more than once demon-

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strates the power of intuitive genius and what Newman calls "the illative sense." The mysteri ous question of faith and reason and the still greater mystery that faith can and does exist, apart from intellect, was before his mind, even in his Oxford days, when he preached the University Ser mons at St. Mary's. He realized that the human mind is controlled by myriads of influences and many of these are hidden. The modern psychol ogist gives the name of "subconscious reasoning" to these latent influences. Newman gives him a possible explanation.

There is yet another demonstration of Newman's philosophic instinct, in his sympathetic treatment of the difficulty which modern philosophers have, concerning the tumult and confusion of the moral and physical .world. Newman does not deny the traditional argument of design in the universe, but he is so overwhelmed with what he calls "the piti- fulness of life" that he rushes away from the world, back into the sanctuary of his own con science, to find "two self-luminous beings," God and himself. He appreciates the problem, but he has a norm by which to measure it. This was at first considered to be of no objective value, as an argument, by the scholastic. It might be a per sonal testimony, but no more. By some it was at once even regarded as German subjectivism. But such an opinion has now changed.

Finally, we have come to Newman's mental atti tude toward the modern theory of evolution. With

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keen foresight, he sees that biological evolution is a theory, and must remain so, as facts have now shown. He is interested only in the evolution of thought in the community. In an informal man ner, he takes the weapons of the evolutionists and applies their principles to the development of an idea. It was this that provoked that book which is not only philosophical, but historical: The De velopment of Christian Doctrine. With learning and splendid eloquence it has answered for all time the tremendously serious objection that Catholicism is not an authentic and integral ex pression of primeval Christianity.

So, after twenty-five years, Newman, who in life failed in so many projects dear to his heart, and who was not trusted philosophically even by his own, has in our day, come to be regarded as one of the greatest lights of the Church since the Reformation.

HILLIS AND NEWMAN

IN the Literary Digest for October, 1912, the Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D., rector of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, wrote what I thought to be a very unsatisfactory review of Wilfrid Ward's Life of Cardinal Newman. I quote the closing sentence to indicate what I mean:

"He (Newman) believed that no matter how culti vated the mind, that the intellect was of the devil, and that the moral faculty was of God. Therefore he tried to make the intellect bow its neck and receive the yoke of dogma and authority. The sure infallible guide was not in the conscience, not in the immediate witness of God to the human soul, not in the creed, not in the Bible — the infallible guide was the Church. He carried with him over to the Roman Church a few dis tinguished scholars, and less than two hundred lay men. And from that hour his influence upon the Church of England and non-conformist bodies practi cally came to an end. When the great Cardinal was in extreme old age, George Frederick Watts painted his portrait and presented it to the people of England. Standing before that wonderful canvas, the onlooker exclaims: 'How beautiful the face! What breadth of forehead! What all-seeing eyes! What multitudinous thoughts have furrowed this face!' But there is an il lusive something also in the portrait, and, turning away, the beholder finds himself whispering: 'Did the great Cardinal find peace?' For there is something

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mysterious in every great man, akin to the throne of God, that is surrounded with clouds and mystery."

I, then, sent to the Literary Digest for publica tion the following sentences from Newman's Medi tations and Devotions, with a reference also to one of Newman's letters (and giving volume and page) which expressly denied what Dr. Hillis had so thoughtlessly asserted. I could have given other proofs, notably the Cardinal's letter to Mr. Hope, in which he tells of his peace in the Catholic Church, and that he never had even "the tempta tion of doubt."

Listen to these words of Cardinal Newman, writ ten towards the end of his life, when he had had many years of experience in the faith of his adoption :

"O my God! my whole life has been a course of mercies and blessings shown to one who has been most unworthy of them. I require no faith as to Thy providence towards me, for I have long experienced it. Year after year Thou hast carried me on, removed dangers from my path, recovered me, recruited me, re freshed me, borne with me, directed me, sustained me. Oh, forsake me not when my strength faileth me! And Thou wilt not forsake me. I may securely repose upon Thee."

And when the illustrious convert was coming near to death, he deliberately penned these words in testimony that his heart and his soul were at rest in the Catholic Church, and that his only de sire was to die in her fold, happy to the end :

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"I write in the direct view of death as in prospect. None in the house, I suppose, suspects anything of the kind. Nor any one anywhere, unless it be the medical men. I write at once because, in my own feelings of mind and body, it is as if nothing at all were the mat ter with me just now; but because I do not know how long this perfect possession of my sensible and avail able health and strength may last.

"I die in the faith of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apos tolic Church. I trust I shall die prepared and pro tected by her sacraments, which Our Lord Jesus Christ has committed to her, and in that Communion of Saints which He inaugurated when He ascended on high, and which will have no end. I hope to die in that Church which Our Lord founded on Peter, and which shall continue till His second coming. . . . And I pray to God, to bring us all together again in heaven under the feet of His saints. And, after the pattern of Him, Who seeks so diligently for those who are astray, I would ask Him especially to have mercy on those who are external to the True Fold, and to bring them into it be fore they die."

I repeat, I forwarded this to the Literary Digest and received a polite note (from this presumably impartial magazine) saying not a word about the publication of what I sent, but assuring me that the matter had been referred to Dr. Hillis.

From Dr. Hillis I received the still more polite (and therefore the more exasperating) note with which I conclude :

"Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.,

"Oct. 19, 1912."

"MY DEAR DR. O'KEEFFE: — Your letter and enclosure were received. I have read the statement with very

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deep interest. In some way these words of Cardinal Newman have escaped my attention, and I am very grateful to you for your thoughtfulness in my interest in calling my attention to them. I am particularly moved by Newman's final confession of faith and his prayer that God may bring us all together in heaven under the feet of His saints. I hasten to send you my gratitude for your kindness.

"With best wishes for your work, I am, my dear Dr. O'Keeffe, very faithfully yours,

(Signed) "NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS."

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTIVITY

"There are those who believe that our century and, above all, our country, is antagonistic to this kind of [contemplative] life; as to the forms of its expression, this may to some extent be true. But my most inti mate conviction is, that not only the gift of contem plation is necessary to these, but God will not fail to bestow this grace on certain elect souls in our day, and precisely among us. It is the only counterweight that can keep this headlong activity of our generation from ending in irreligion and its own entire destruc tion." — From a letter of Father Hecker to a contem plative nun.

"Of the dawning apostolate of the conversion of America, St. Teresa became a special patron. Father Hecker, an exceedingly active missionary, yet essen tially a contemplative, was her lifelong, devoted dis ciple. He prayed to her constantly, and always re ferred to her as one of the greatest authorities on mys tical prayer ever given by God to Holy Church. St. John of the Cross, her novice and pupil, was his daily reading and, through his influence, was officially asso ciated with St. Teresa as patron of his community whose primary vocation is the conversion of America. St. Teresa's was an age of great missionaries of whom she was second to none in zeal. Well, then, may we rely on her convert-making prayers, who by them in her own day, brought scores of thousands of heretics and infidels to the light of truth."— From Father Walter Elliott's introduction to the Works of St. Teresa.

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WHOSOEVER brings us in relationship with other and greater worlds than this; whoso ever reminds us that we are children of a spiritual and not a material kingdom; and that there is an infinite something far beyond the things about us, that person is indeed worthy of our reverence and of our love.

We are the citizens of a commonwealth larger than this, and there is little else but religion to teach us this portentous fact.

Within the economy of our holy faith, grace is strong enough to elevate nature, and even to tri umph over its weakness and perversity, so that the golden promise is once again fulfilled : "Every valley shall be filled and the rough places shall be made smooth, and that which is crooked shall be made straight, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

While humanity remains human, the heroic ex pression of religion will take captive the choicest spirits. While the divine spark lurks in the heart of the race, a few of the rarest amongst us will be constrained by some strange superhuman instinct to lay down their lives for the many. By some mystical quality of divine intuition they perceive even in youth that it is not wealth or power or fame or human love which provoke deep and abid ing happiness. They are so spiritually con structed that they must move in wider worlds than this. For them the streams of delight run not in the channels of the senses, but in the deeper waters

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of eternal life. "If any man drink of the water that I shall give him, he shall not thirst forever: for the water that I shall give him shall become in him a fountain of water springing up into life ever lasting."

The moral effectiveness of a spiritual system is measured by its authority to uphold the highest religious ideals. When the vision dies, the people perish. It is meet that one man shall die for the people. The strength of a religious economy must be tested by the degree of success with, which it conserves not only the commandments, but like wise the counsels of Christ. That Church alone which is the living mouthpiece of Christ's mind in history has the sole right to say to that select aris tocracy of souls: "Go out from thy Father's house into a strange land."

Where is there one who can explain the mystery of this inhuman or superhuman fervor which pro vokes the gentlest, purest, bravest hearts of the race to abandon with joy all that this great and brilliant world holds dear? We cannot, if we would, restrain them. With preternatural com posure they leave home and father and mother, sister and brother, and pass into a country known only to themselves. They feel that they have tasted the deeper waters of life, and it is not for us of the world to judge them. They are the judges of their lives. They have made the experiment, and with them it is indeed true that "It is better to live even for one day in the courts of the Lord

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than for a thousand years in the habitations of sinners."

Who will tell us the secret of this mysterious religious life? Whatever philosophy or thought may think of God, whatever theories or ideas man may have constructed with regard to the nature of this Mighty Transcendental Being above and be yond us, to woman's heart God is an everlasting ex pression of love — and Christ is that Divine Love made manifest in living history.

And what is it that prompts this love if it be not beauty? The lower forms of love are provoked by physical beauty, and the higher, subtler forms by moral beauty. Now, Jesus Christ is the comeliest moral beauty in history, provoking the finest love. We find in Him all the strength of the man with the tenderness of the woman. Not only is He the satisfaction of the intellect, but He is the delight of the heart. The finer spirits among womanhood look upon Him as fairer than the children of men. They plight their vows to Him Who becomes even more than friend, more than spouse, more than lover.

How superficial is the view which considers that the life of the spirit is a narrow, useless, and barren life. Whatever there may be high and honorable and noble in the marital estate, this much is certain, that in it creatures are the mere instruments by which the race is preserved. But the perfection of the individual is of much more import than the perpetuity of the race.

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The perfection of one finely heroic spirit is of infinitely more worth than the propagation of in numerable ordinary types of the race. "Salt is good. But if the salt shall lose its savor, where with shall it be seasoned."

Our gracious Mother the Roman Church conse crates and safeguards the sanctities of the domes tic life; but she teaches that, from an idealistic aspect at least, the state of virginity, of perfect chastity, is infinitely higher and of more merit.

Moreover, with perfect poverty there comes a divine freedom which is of more value than all the possessions of the world — the liberty with which Christ has made us free. His religion has not for its purpose the hoarding of riches or the increas ing of the implements of luxury. It was meant to lift our spirits into serener spheres, where wealth and power would be forgotten. She who is poor for the sake of Christ — she who freely loves Him with entire mind, heart, and will, is rich with pos sessions that the worldling cannot even dream of. She realizes that the things without and about us do not satisfy. "Do likewise; every one of you that doth not renounce all that he possesseth can not be My disciple." They who have drunk deep of the things of the world are not at peace with themselves or others. It is the doctrine of Christ, that the Kingdom of God is within us. Once we have learnt all this truth, the tumult and con fusion of life, all the misery and waste around us cannot disturb our faith, hope, and love.

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Within the realm of the spirit there are but two realities, or, as Newman puts it, there are two self- luminous beings, God and myself. In the spiri tual life the outer world shrivels up like the prophet's scroll. The solution of the problem of my destiny is within the sanctuary of my being, where dwells God and myself.

Oh! who but the angels can count that goodly array of consecrated virgins who through the cen turies have lifted their snowy banners aloft be fore a vicious and unthinking world. They have marched under the command of Christ — and their watchwords are poverty, chastity, obedience. For some of us it is of little comfort to learn that our country has vastly grown in numbers, that we have increased our army and navy, that we have exported so many bushels of wheat or so many ships have entered the harbor, or that we have spent so much wealth in constructing massive buildings. These things, though fair and excel lent, do not directly make for the perfection of the individual. It is the culture of the spiritual sense which lends value and dignity to human life. It is the interior life which will give heroes, saints, and poets to our young Republic. We need the contemplative life as a protest to our intense and thoughtless activity. We need it as a counter- irritant to the vulgarity and frivolity which is consequent upon our marvelous material prosper ity. While the world remains sinful the choice spirits will come together in religious communities,

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and by that law of atonement, propitiation, and sacrifice they will joyously lay down their lives in suffering, not for themselves alone, but for others. While they exist and multiply in our country, our country is morally secure. They are the weepers; they are those who are crucified for the follies of the nation. It is the scandal of the Cross once again in history. Around that great Hero of a seeming lost cause are gathered this goodly company of the just, they who fast and pray and keep vigil — they by whose stripes we are healed.

I know not by what mysterious law it is, but there are some elect amongst us who are chosen to suffer for others. They look below the sur face of things. They see the gross vanity and con ceit of it all — the nothingness of existence. They are those by whom salvation shall come to Israel.

Of course it is impossible for the world to under stand such a life as this. I once heard a distin guished American agnostic say that the bridal robes of perpetual chastity were to him the habili ments of night and of death, and that the saints who bore the Cross of Christ were sluggards, men of inaction and the parasites of humanity.

While men believe that love and hope and strength and joy consist in building, breeding, and possessing the things that are about us, they shall never taste the ecstasy of sacrifice — the subtler bliss of the spirit. The frivolous and the vulgar, and they who feel contentment in being clad in

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beautiful raiment, or find favor in the elegant chat ter of the drawing-room, how can they ever know the meaning of the spiritual life?

It is doubtless true that the faith of the Church has constructed glorious cathedrals. She has drawn to the spiritual service of men light and music, dogma, poetry, ritual, and all things beauti ful. She has conquered wayward nations, up lifted the slave, and solved problems which the world of itself could not do; but these perform ances are largely in the external order. Her larger life is in the recesses of the spirit. The pro- founder evidences of true religion are seen in the sacred silence of the cloister. Not distressed by the tumultuous problems of life, these pure and lowly-minded virgins of Christ move in a land where the vision is clearer and the reasons for the exercise of duty more plain. "Behold I will lead her into the wilderness, and there will I speak to her heart."

It is a portent of moral decadence when the meditative spirit dies out from the heart of a na tion. I am happy to know that our American sis terhoods are daily growing in numbers, and that the cloistral and contemplative life is being the better understood. We have the barefooted Car melites, the poor Clares, the cloistered Dominicans, Visitandines, and Ursulines. They feel that the world is to be saved only by Israelites in whom there is no guile.

Even when the ancient Romans fell into a period

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of moral decline they did not lose the ideal of per fect chastity. The vestal virgin was paid to live in the Temple and keep vigil. If she violated her vow (which she kept only for one year) she was buried alive. The Greeks likewise, the most re fined of people, yet who at one time were given over to the pleasures of sense, realized throughout that there is an everlasting beauty and sacredness in inviolate chastity. The vision of the Apocalypse is the great ideal of which the poets have ever sung.

"And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars."

With the Hebrews, although every maiden de sired to be the mother of the Messias, a few rare souls were constrained by some indefinable in stinct to go away from the mazes of men. They felt as if the Holy One would not suffer them to see corruption. "Behold I will lead her into the wilderness, and there will I speak to her heart." There is no higher privilege upon earth than to sacrifice the fruit of one's life upon the altar of Jesus Christ for ever. What greater gift to God is there than to present a soul as white on the day of its religious Reception as at the moment when the saving baptismal dew fell upon the tender fore head?

In proportion as we detach ourselves from the thraldom of the things of sense the heart dilates

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and the horizon widens. It is a flippant judgment to suppose that the contemplative life is narrow because it is cloistered. The hearts of these holy women are wider than the kingdoms of the world.

AUGUSTINE HEWIT

ripHE five original Paulists were priests dissimilar 1 in cast of mind and temperament. A holy and common purpose was the basis of the unity of their lives. In the days when they were born some of the choicest spiritual traditions of the American Republic came from New England. For the most part this select constituency sprang from the loins of New England stock. Such could be said pre eminently of the subject of our study. He had therefore by birth those natural susceptibilities which are conducive to exalted spiritual aspira tions. His father, Rev. Nathaniel Hewit, D.D., was religiously-minded and of a strong and masterful type of character. Such manifestations of indi viduality expressed themselves in the vehemence with which he took hold of public questions. He was a temperance reformer whose utterances were known even in England, and who defied public sentiment in those ancient times when rum was both in Connecticut and Massachusetts as palatable a beverage as is milk to the mouths of babes and sucklings. The American origin of the Hewit fam ily reflected back to a minister of the Church of England who was dispossessed because of Puritan tendencies by Archbishop Laud. This was thought

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to be the cause of his coming to these now United States.

Father Hewit was born November 27, 1820, in Fairfield, a picturesque town near Bridgeport, Conn. He had for his mother, Rebecca Hillhouse Hewit, a woman said to be, by those who knew her, lovable, refined, and very beautiful in appearance. Remotely her family was of mixed English and Irish blood. There was a religious strain running through her lineage. The Hewit and Hillhouse fam ilies originated from the same American colony, and the first settler of the latter household was an Irish Presbyterian parson. From this, one would gather that Father Hewit's beginnings had much of the charm and romance of adventure which hover around the brave lives of the American col onists. It is certain that his father, Dr. Hewit, commanded the reverence of the Congregational denomination. His biography makes him out to be a preeminent figure, majestic in form, of seri ous aspect, whose bearing denoted moral and spiritual composure. He was a graduate of Yale. He finished his theological course at Andover; was made pastor of the Congregational Church of Plattsburg, N. Y.; was transferred to Fairfield, Conn., then to Bridgeport, Conn., where he served as a minister for nearly fifty years. He died in 1869.

The influence of heredity, be it remote or proxi mate, in the formation of character is always an interesting consideration.

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Some time near the year 1828 Dr, Hewit visited England as a representative of the American Tem perance Society. He lectured in all the large cities, and a record is given of a meeting in Exeter Hall, London. Much is said of his "producing upon all a deep impression of his great power" and his "splendid and fiery eloquence — the outcome of his deep sincerity." These things are told here of the father in order the better to bring to light the characteristics of the son. He inherited something of his father's appreciation of the grave difficulties of the temperance problem, and this was more not able since by nature he was never drawn to a sym pathetic analysis of popular questions.

Father Hewit had some share of his father's ora torical ability, if that gift is to be measured by the effect of lasting impressions. Likewise in his mother's family were there conditions to predis pose the son to study the public spirit. Her father, the Hon. James Hillhouse, became a mem ber of Congress about the year 1791. He was for sixteen years United States Senator from Con necticut. A curious incident is related of him, that as President of the Senate he was called upon to be acting President of the United States for one day. The outgoing President retired a day too early and his successor had not been sworn in.

When six years old Father Hewit went to the Fairfield Public School; at eight he was sent to the Phillips Academy at Andover; at fifteen his name was entered at Amherst College, and he was

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graduated from that institution in the year 1839. Among his classmates there were some of distinc tion, such as Bishop Huntingdon, Henry Ward Beecher and the Rev. Richard Storrs, D.D.

After graduation the mind of the youth naturally turned to the religious system which he had re ceived by inheritance. In the Congregational Seminary at East Windsor he fitted himself for the ministry of that denomination. He had ac quired the authority to preach, and there seems to have been opening out to his intellect, at that early period, the unreasonableness of the doc trinal economy which by right he was professed to teach. The genius and argument of Calvin blighted the fresh imaginings of his youth. Cal vinism has destroyed the religious instinct in more souls than one. The mockery and hatred of all things spiritual so vehement in the career of the American agnostic, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, are often referred to the Calvinistic gloom which hung about the perilous adolescent period of his life. The reaction which follows from such a mental condition is always dangerous and some times fatal.

Young Hewit escaped without any radical in jury, but he never forgot, as is evidenced by some passages in his writings, the depressing experience of those unhappy times. The memory of them probably provoked in later days the making of that lucid and closely-argued book, Problems of the Age, which contains as a sequel some Studies in

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St. Augustine. Among other motives for the pub lication of this essay on the illustrious Doctor, he says: "We wish to show that neither the saint himself nor the Church of his period held the Cal- vinistic or Evangelical system, and thus remove the misconceptions of both Calvinistic and Pelagians."

In Father Hewit's Memoir of Rev. Francis A. Baker, C.S.P., there is an account of his meeting with Mr. Dwight Lyman, the intimate friend of Mr. Baker. He writes accordingly that he "felt the charm of his glowing and enthusiastic advocacy of principles which were just beginning to ger minate in my own mind." Soon after he met Mr. Baker. In a letter dated Baltimore, April 22, 1843, and written by that gentleman, reference is made to "a Mr. H., a convert to the Episcopal Church, and one, I believe, of great promise. He was a Congregationalist minister, and Rev. Mr. B. read me a letter from him, dated about a month ago, before his coming into the Church, the tone of which was far more Catholic than that of many (alas!) of those who had been partakers of the holy treasures to be found only in her bosom." It may be remarked in passing that Mr. Dwight Ly man afterwards became a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He lived a long life as a devoted pastor whose blessings and good works were manifold. His truly Christian death was the natural and graceful ending of a consistent priestly career.

In the early summer of the year 1843 Father

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Hewit arrived in Baltimore as a candidate for or ders in the Episcopal Church. He came to live at Courtlandt Street in the house of Dr. Whittingham, the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Maryland. The reasons which led to this step have been given more or less in Father Hewit's own writings. The more interior growth of his mind and spirit has never been fully revealed to the world. Its most interesting exposition has been found in a long series of correspondence carried on between his father and himself. The relentless attitude of the father and the struggle of the son to harmonize filial respect with the overpowering pressure of his conscience are depicted in these letters in a pathetic manner. He was loyal to the Church of his birth for six years. His defection from it caused his youthful heart many a sorrow. His father did but look upon it as a sin against the light. Prompted by love for his child he could not suppress his wounded feelings. Young Hewit could do nothing but leave his father's house, and like an exile go into a strange land. It likewise blighted a beautiful and exalted affection which had all the grace and loveliness of romance. But the sacrifices contained in it became, under Provi dence, the basis of a wider life and larger love. The correspondence between father and son will, let us trust, be published. Its chief merit is the display of the personal element which enters very largely in the process of conversion, a factor which is often overlooked in the study of religious contro-

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versy. It is impossible within the limited space of this Essay to give a thorough representation of Father Hewit's religious development from Evan- gelicanism to Anglicanism. It became apparent to him that the former, as a system, could not his torically justify its position — that its likenesses to the Apostolic Christian Church are but seeming and not real, and that the original reasons for hierarchical organization and sacramentalism can be distinctly proved. In the year 1842 his mind had proceeded another degree toward Catholicism, as is evident from notes, correspondence and writ ing done at the time. He began to grasp the idea of tradition and the utter lack of value in Scripture as a basis of faith unless there be a norm of exter nal authority by which to interpret both Scripture and tradition. About this time the Tractarian movement had arisen in England, and its influence was beginning to be felt in the Episcopal Church of the United States. The Rev. Clarence E. Wai- worth has told the story in a genial and interesting book entitled The Oxford Movement in America. William Rollinson Whittingham, who was Father Hewit's spiritual director, was a disciple of New man. The Bishop was graduated from the Chelsea Seminary, New York, in 1825. In that institution he was professor of ecclesiastical history for two years. He assumed charge of the Baltimore dio cese in 1840. Young Hewit lived with him and was naturally impressed, for beside his devoutness and learning he was one of the most prominent

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figures in the Episcopal Church in those days. So when the name of Nathaniel Augustus Hewit was presented for ordination to the diaconate he was careful to give his assent to the Thirty-nine Articles only in the sense of "Tract No. 90." How ever, not long afterwards the Popery charge was hurled against Whittingham. He yielded some what by relieving himself of certain ritualistic practices and gave subtle and unreal explanations which distressed the youthful Newmanites that had gathered around him. Although it was a shock to Hewit, it was a wholesome one. It taught him to think for himself. He already appreciated the historic force of the patristic argument so log ically and eloquently expressed by Newman. But the shock was severer still when news came from England that the great Oxford leader had himself actually entered the Catholic Church. This oc curred October 9, 1845, at Littlemore. In Charles ton, South Carolina, on Holy Saturday of the year 1846, Father Hewit proceeded to do likewise. He was now a Catholic. It was then that he changed his name from Nathaniel Augustus to Augustine Francis — in honor of St. Augustine and St. Francis de Sales.

It may not be amiss to quote here an unpub lished letter written to his father just before this time:

"Edenton, February 19, 1846.

"Mv DEAR FATHER : — I take my pen this morning to communicate to you a purpose of mine which I fear

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must unavoidably give you pain, but upon which I trust you will look calmly and quietly. Although it has given me great and most soothing comfort to per ceive in your late letters how much your feelings have changed respecting my theological and religious posi tion, yet I have in one sense regretted it, as fearing that you were indulging a hope that in the present divisions in the Episcopal Church, when one set of High-Church men have advanced toward the Catholic Church, and another is retreating upon Protestant ground, I might be among the latter class; which hope future events would take from you, and thus occasion a renewal of past sorrow, more painful than if it had been healed.

"It is now plain enough that the members of our communion, who have followed the teaching of Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman, must either retrace their steps or go on into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. And as study and meditation during the last three years have confirmed me in Catholic principles, and caused me to advance continually towards Roman doctrine, I find that I must embrace the latter alternative. In justice to Bishop Whittingham I must say and beg you to believe that his influence has retarded my progress towards the Church of Rome more than any which I have felt.

"And now, my dear Father, I cannot enter into any minute history of my change, or of my present views. You will yourself see that in respect to the doctrines of Church Authority, Priesthood, the Holy Eucharist, Justification, the Sacraments, I have not essentially changed my views; and also that there is no difference in principle between these and the other doctrines of the Church of Rome. The only new doctrines I have admitted are the authority of the Holy See, Purgatory, the Invocation of Saints and the veneration of images. And these you will perceive I am sure are involved in the doctrine of Unity, of Justification, of human inter-

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vention for the forgiveness of sins, and the use of the altar, the cross and other symbols. I have but a few words to say on any of these points at present. Only with regard to images, I will simply say that it is clear to my mind that the sin of idolatry consists in adoring idols instead of the true God: that the prohibition of images and pictures to the Jews was a temporary com mandment: that the reason of it was that Christ, the image of God, had not yet been manifested: and that if it is right to make a picture of Our Blessed Saviour, it is also right to express the inward sentiment of adora tion towards Him which that picture awakens in the mind by an outward act of veneration towards it which we make in token of our worship of Him; just as we kiss the picture of a friend in token of our love to him. "With regard to the invocation and intercession of the Blessed Mother of God, the Holy Angels and the Saints, it seems to me that it is a necessary consequence of the doctrine that believers are one with Christ and participate in His Righteousness, His Sonship, His Glory, His Kingdom; and are made 'to sit together with Him in Heavenly places.' As to the alleged tendency of the Catholic belief to draw away the soul from the supreme love and worship of the Father and the Son to an idolatrous worship of creatures, I will only say this, that it is clear from Scripture that all idolaters have their part in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone, and are wholly unable to love or trust in Christ; whereas it is certain that the devotional writ ings of those who have been the most strenuous advo cates of the Catholic doctrine breathe the purest and the profoundest love and faith towards God and the Blessed Saviour. I know from my own experience that this doctrine has no tendency to draw away the heart from Christ, or to obscure His Mediation, His Passion, His Incommunicable Deity; but on the con trary illustrates and confirms and perfects all.

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"I cannot, of course, expect you to agree with me. My only object is to convince you that as you believe there are pious and good Catholics, you may believe that whatever is true of the Catholic doctrines in them selves, yet as they actually lie in my mind they are consistent with a true and saving faith. And I would for the same purpose request you to read Moehler's Symbolism, a work thought to be equal to Bellarmine, if not superior. It is my intention to join the Cath olic Church in Charleston, where I shall probably re main for some time. I trust I need not assure you that my sentiments of love and veneration towards you re main unchanged, and that I hope for the continuance of confidence and kindness on your part which has made our recent correspondence so grateful to us both. I trust you will see in the frank and open manner in which I have written to you a proof of my confidence in the strength of our mutual esteem and affection. I am happy to be able to say that I am quite as well as I have been. You will know how anxious I shall be to hear from you after your receiving this letter, and I will write directly from Charleston. And now, with best love to all, I am your affectionate son,

"AUGUSTUS."

The successive stages in the history of that spiri tual change are more fully shown in articles in the American Catholic Quarterly Review and the Catholic World. The latter has a popular exposi tion of his conversion in the October number of the year 1887 — it is written by himself. In the former he has a very important contribution printed July, 1895. It bears the graphic title: "Pure vs. Diluted Catholicism." Indeed, from April, 1891, to October, 1896, only one year before

AUGUSTINE HE WIT 173

his death, he was almost a constant contributor to this review. It would be interesting to count the number of total pages of articles written for the American Catholic Quarterly Review, if only to manifest his literary activity and intellectual strength even to the time of his death. The sudden change of scene from Baltimore to Charleston is accounted for from the fact that our subject was constrained to go South, having had several haemorrhages of the lungs. He was obliged to spend the winter in Edenton; he then went to Charleston.

The seriousness of this physical misfortune may have had some part in sealing the act of his con version. On one occasion only was he known to speak of that critical time, and then he told in a most naive manner of how he arrived in Charleston at Bishop Reynolds' house, thin and pale as death, and having but a few cents in his pocket — all the money he possessed in the world. He had, how ever, that inexplicable freedom and peace of con science which is concomitant with entire resigna tion to the Divine Will. The Catholic Bishop of the Charleston Diocese was taken with the young man and introduced him to the Vicar-General, Dr. Lynch, who became afterwards the third Bishop of Charleston. He, with Right Rev. Mgr. Corcoran, the famous scholar of Overbrook Seminary, Phila delphia, and for many years the faithful editor of the American Catholic Quarterly Review, lived at the Bishop's house. Both of these became Hewit's

174 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

friends. He aided them by teaching in a collegiate academy which owed its existence to the distin guished Bishop England. At the same time he was pursuing his theological course. On the feast of the Annunciation of Our Lady, March 25, 1847, he was ordained priest by Bishop Reynolds. Shortly afterward he was commissioned to compile and edit the works of Bishop England. This took him to Philadelphia, where he met Bishop Kenrick, afterward Archbishop of Baltimore. While in Philadelphia he determined to lead a stricter reli gious life. He began to look toward the Society of Jesus and vaguely thought of entering it, but for a reason which could never be learned he re versed his desire. Moreover, his special rea son for joining the Redemptorists was never made known. Several times he expressed the salutary impression made on him by his first visit to a Redemptorist convent. He was edified by the missionary zeal of the Fathers and by the severity and simplicity of their lives. They accepted him after he had passed his probation. He wras pro fessed, took the vows, and was sent to Baltimore to the Redemptorist Church of St. Alphonsus. Afterwards his Superior sent him on missions throughout the country in company with Fathers Walworth, Hecker, Deshon, and later, Baker. Baker was received into the Catholic Church by Father Hewit in presence of Father Hecker, April 9, 1853, in the city of Baltimore. He was ordained to the priesthood September 21, 1856. The life of

AUGUSTINE HEWIT 175

a Redemptorist and likewise of a Paulist mission ary, is depicted in Father Hewit's Memoir of Father Baker. It is now a familiar story of how the five American Redemptorists, Hewit, Walworth, Baker, and Deshon, under the leadership of Hecker, sought a plan for founding an English-speaking Redemptorist house; and how there arose differ ences with their Superiors. A summary of their separation from the Redemptorists is given in an admirable chapter of the biography of Father Hecker, written by Father Elliott. It is needless to go into detail. This much is merely intimated to aver that Hewit played an honorable and effi cient part in the founding of the new community. Hecker arrived in Rome August 26, 1857, on his errand to the General of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. On August 29th he was ex pelled from his community, and in December of the same year he had his first audience with Pius IX. In the following year, March 6th, by a decree of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, Hecker and his brethren were dispensed from their vows. In 1859, June 19th, the corner-stone of the Paulist house was laid. During all this crisis Father Hecker had the undeniable moral support of Father Hewit, and in every detail of the pro cedure they were of one mind, as were Walworth, Deshon and Baker. From that day to this, amic able relations have ever existed between the Con gregation of the Most Holy Redeemer and the Con gregation of St. Paul.

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Father Hewit's Paulist life begins with the ap proval of the Paulist Rule by Archbishop John Hughes, July 7, 1858. The Rev. Walter Elliott, C.S.P., has put in print this statement that Father Hewit "was destined to be more to Father Hecker than any other man." This, to the Paulists, was the most providential aspect in Father Hecker's life. Hecker never printed anything without consulta tion and especially with Father Hewit. Almost every thought that Hecker placed on paper was not merely the long and careful result of consultation, but the effect likewise of interior contemplation, of incessant prayer. It was the natural outcome of the intuitive science of the mystic. There was at times no need to consult the books except to find the consecrated forms from which to clothe his thought and thus save it from misinterpretation. Then it was that Hewit's wide reading and famil iarity with the ancient fountains of knowledge and with definitions of the schools and the time- honored scholastic terminology became of im mense service to him.

The trust and sense of security manifested by the American Episcopate in relationship with Father Hewit were providential helps in the foun dation of the Paulist Congregation. If in his early life his conservatism was unjustifiable, it was al ways fortunate. Latterly he mellowed out, and in his search for the true and the right he saw that to accept the new was in many cases but to safeguard the old. He believed and he said publicly and pri-

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vately that, measured by the mind of the Catholic Church, Hecker was undoubtedly endowed with spiritual gifts far beyond the ordinary. He be lieved absolutely that the consecration of the vol untary principle was the reason of the religious existence of the Paulist community. From the be ginning to the day of his death, July 3, 1897, he worked faithfully for it. He was a missionary, lecturer, professor, spiritual director, and Superior- General. He wrote valuable books, magazine articles, and reviews. He held converse with the learned and holy, like Orestes Brownson and Bayma the Jesuit. He knew philosophy well, and he was wise enough to show that he was ignorant of that modern revelation of philosophy — experi mental psychology. He confessed likewise that modern sociology in the department of ethics, al though utterly congenial to his mind and tempera ment, was nevertheless of immense worth to science. He knew history, dogma, and ascetic theology. He seems to have had no extraordinary interior experience, but he was holy and he knew how to guide others and to interpret the masters of spiritual literature, as is evident from his book, Light in Darkness. He never pretended to any thing original in what he wrote or lectured; his ambition was but to popularize truths long since hidden from the world. His reading was exten sive. Being conversant with at least seven lan guages, he could at will and with facility betake himself to the original sources of many subjects of

178 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

knowledge. In a word, his was a dignified, con sistent and more than ordinary career both as priest and scholar. May the fair memory of him never go out of the hearts, not only of his own, but of others, for he was a benignant and wise father among many sons.

THE NEW FRANCISCAN CULT

JUST at present it is a fashion in literature to perceive and write about the beauty and poetry of monasticism. This desire will pass when some other chord will be struck to move the reading public. For the most part, all these books are ex cellently written, and by men who finely appreciate what has come to be regarded as the aestheticism of the religion of the Catholic Church.

It is a question whether or not the interior, meritorious or truly spiritual principle behind monasticism is at all comprehended in this litera ture which is now being published concerning it.

It is very largely an expression of admiration for the artistic and external aspect of the religious ideal — the sacrificial purpose of the life is hardly if ever appreciated.

There is now, moreover, much admiration for the Franciscan ideal. St. Francis is said to be everybody's saint, and many are reading The Little Flowers and The Canticle of the Sun.

The personality of "the poor man of Assisi" will ever take captive the imagination of great poets and critics like Tennyson and Ruskin. Then there are others who study St. Francis more seriously. Observers there are like Sabatier who regarded

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him as a reformer of the thirteenth century, whose socialistic idea might with some modification be applied even to conditions in the twentieth century.

Sabatier makes one of the purposes of the Saint's life to be a living revolt against sacerdotalism, whereas in truth it was a revolt against the ex aggerated ecclesiasticism and un-Christian luxury of the time. It has yet to be proved against St. Francis of Assisi that he denied the traditional idea of an official priesthood.

There are three kinds of disciples of the Saint. First there is the artist who remembers and looks upon him as the poet who out of very love swooned away at the sight of the wild flowers and held sweet converse with the birds and the fishes.

Secondly, the sociologist who regards him as a true Christian reformer. Finally, there is the prayerful student who sees the meritorious and spiritual principle behind the idea. He alone is the faithful disciple of St. Francis.

It is an imperfection in the hagiographer to make his work so charming and artistic that it can not be the life even of a Saint and much less of a Franciscan of the Third Order. Poesy and ro mance do not always hold good in the light of the rough realities. Doubtless the hagiography of the Saints manifest an exquisite and picturesque as pect, and the foundation of their attractiveness may be in fact, but the biographer must not dis hearten us, with the erroneous belief, that any soul, in any place, can live a religious life, composedly

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and sweetly, without having tasted many times of the rigors and death of the cross.

The world's objection to religion is that it is a weariness to the natural man.

The beginner's fear of the spiritual yoke is, that, it is burdensome and never lightsome or sweet. It is its very severity and harshness which gives it its meritorious and atoning power unto salva tion. To throw the glamour or romance over this fundamental principle of ascetic theology is wrong, when it unduly excites the emotions and imagina tion. In such conditions the mind and will of the spiritual aspirant are impeded in their normal operations.

The Franciscan Cult has produced a literature admirable in qualities of style and structure and erudition. For the most part the writers and dis ciples are finely strung, and perceive (as artists can) the finer aspect of the economy of the spirit. But sometimes they fail in not grasping the fierce and tremendous seriousness behind it. Yet they may know the names of the mystics and their works and where to find them, which, indeed, is an accomplishment in these days, when high school girls are reading Huxley and Spencer. I cannot but revere the devout Franciscan dreamer who sleeps in the golden time of the mediaeval past.

Of course, the Franciscan principle can never be the predominant, but only the exceptional norm, of religious perfection for the new era. It will never die, for rare spirits will seek it — as a frightened

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bird the nest. The gross indignities of modern life are distressing the delicately organized types. There is nothing in the broken sects of Christen dom, but narrow-mindedness and vulgar sentiment to feed the hungering heart and soul. The in tegral compactness of Catholicism can do it — the system that can take my heart and my imagina tion to that lovable land of Italy, to the town of Assisi, far away in the Umbrian Hills. In the pos session of some of the graces of the good St. Fran cis, may I sleep and take my rest and be singularly blessed with hope.

THE GREGORIAN CHANT

1AM old enough to remember when Alfred Young, the Paulist, stood sadly alone, to the discredit of his opponents, in trying to introduce Gregorian chant into the churches of the United States. He had as successor Sir Edmund Hurley, who suffered for many years from the same clerical incomprehension of musical expression.

But lo! there is now a startling reaction toward the severest of Gregorian plain chant. How it has come about I do not know. The encyclical of Pius X. was never taken seriously in this country. Per haps the late Pope's sweet tone and the gentle memory of his words have at last reached our impervious senses.

It is nearly twenty-five years since Madame Melba did me the gracious favor of singing an of fertory piece, Gounod's Ave Maria, in one of the churches of San Francisco. Several years after she listened to some Gregorian sung in New York. Her musical instinct at once divined the acute contrast between Gounod and the depth, rhythm, sincerity and artlessness of the chant. She felt that it was indeed the Church's own music mani fested in keeping with the mystery of the Eternal Sacrifice and the incense of prayer,

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I was reminded of Huysman's Durtal who, when he heard Gounod's "pert mysticism" at a requiem in the Madelaine, concluded that there ought to be astonishing penalties for choir masters who allow such musical effeminacy in church.

Whatever private musical opinion may be, Gregorian chant is a perennial source of interest and inquiry in spite of its outrageous rendition in many choirs of our land. As in any profound and insistent phase of art it can easily be spoiled in the execution. The faith which created it must be be hind its chanting. Hence it is sung with light- heartedness and intelligence in convents such as the Cenacle, where they have the authentic Solesmes tradition or in the Dominican Monastery at Hunt's Point, in the city of New York.

To some the chant means nothing but elemental music of severe and rigid phrasing with no color or melody or variation. Yet the glory and spacious ness of some Gregorian Introits have been the mar vel of saints, poets, artists and kings. The mighty streams of mellow sound that, with tragical pauses, pour out from the Psalms, are a consistent occa sion of delectation to the devout. Let us hope that the liturgical sense so distressingly lacking with us will be born again. Gregorian chant is not understood in this country for the reason, among others, that we have not as yet learned how to understand its immaterial, esoteric nature.

The secret of Plain Chant is in the knowledge of it. The voice is null and void when the spiritual

THE GREGORIAN CHANT 185

sense is lacking. There are Plain Chant antiphons so unearthly, so penitentially austere, so celestial in their fight and mobile in range that they pro voke wonderment even in the hearts of the listless and the simple.

It was a bold stroke of genius for Cardinal Vaughan to construct the greatest church in Eu rope since the Reformation, but as we learn from his Life, he felt that it would be soulless without a splendid revival of the mediaeval Chant and ritual. It had to show the sincerity of past ages and shoot forward in glory to the time to come.

Wagner made the human voice but one part of his operatic structure. With the voice there was to be the marvelous orchestration, the scenic art, and the poem of the Nieblungen Lied.

In the scheme of the Gregorian the human voice is but a part of the vast economy of prayer, com munion, sacrifice, atonement and aspiration which mount on high through the soul of the Church. Its emotionalism is regulated by consecration. It is passionless yet fervent and propitiatory. Its purpose is so exalted that in its performance noth ing should distract. Therefore women should not not be allowed to sing it in our churches. They are generally self conscious and personal and therefore destroy its supreme artistry. However, if one may say it of music, it retains its sexless superterrestrial character in convents and monas teries where the fervid sestheticism and the senti ment of religion are under restraint. All the con-

186 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

fusion of earthly sentimentality has vanished. Its passion is seraphic.

It is an erroneous opinion to presume that be cause it is now so badly done that it cannot be well done except within the walls of religious Chapels. I heard that sublime musical orison, the "Missa de Angelis," chanted by thousands of the congregation in the Cathedral at Cologne. I was stirred when listening to the Gregorian "Credo," that great hymn of human faith as it rose out of the hearts of thirty thousand Lourdes pilgrims after they beheld a miracle performed on a Belgian cripple. It was not only, and at the same time a shout of joy, but a solemn cry of trust in Him Who could make the lame man leap as a hart. No other church music can produce this preternatural effect. It reaches even deeper than this in its extra human quality. It springs from the loins of the Church, and was nurtured by the Church in those wondrous "Schohe Cantorum" of the Middle Ages.

The modern sacred music of Dubois or Massanet, for example, or of a more serious composer like Bach, cannot even remotely attain the solid grandeur of the old ingenuous Chant. In sincere art the consciousness of the artist is overwhelm ingly submerged. This is the divinity and ethereal quality in Gregorian Chant. However, it must be well done. If done without soul or spiritual sense it is a harsh, crude and unbending emission of sound.

Perhaps some musical genius will fix a practi-

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cal, definite mode of procedure to teach the faith ful of the American Church the inner mystical significance of Gregorian so that they may verily feel: "Quod ore canto corde credo."

It is a curious fact that the Church which has been so potent in safeguarding so many of its treasures, has not been able to guide the composers and choir masters who have suppressed that mode of worship which began with the very birth of the ancient Church.

Oh! let us have once again the music which, as an unusual critic avers, has penetrated to the mar row of the Church, has clung to each of its phrases and become with it, one body and one soul.

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE

IT is to the honor and breadth of the Catholic system that it occludes all that is wholesome in spiritual science. This as a verity was never so borne in on me than when I listened recently to a physicist who has become a psychologist, and even a professed spiritualist. All that he said was Catholic truth, until in the excess of faith, he en tered in a new domain where he had no external norm of authority to regulate his confident asser tions which, in fact, had no verification. But this was apparent only at the very end of the lecture. However, I have been told that the venom of the bee is in its tail. Yet it is this same lecturer who in October, 1905, commends Hon. Arthur Balfour's address to the British Association at Cambridge, in which he appears to hint that scientific men are apt to lose all sense of reasonable constraint unless they restrict their investigations to their own do main. It is, moreover, this same lecturer who finds Haeckel, the eloquent author of the Riddle of the Universe, a most striking instance of a scien tific man, who on entering philosophic territory, has exhibited signs of exhilaration and emancipa tion.

These indeed are the very words of my lecturer 188

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 189

who, in 1905, published from the University of Birmingham a book called Life and Matter. It is in this same book that the author regrets the harm which Haeckel has done to the uneducated. But what is still more interesting is that my lecturer has not so completely left the region of science, but that he could go into the land of spirit. Be cause of this he has lost something and acquired much. Much of what he has acquired he thinks he has discovered, and gives not evidence, but re sults, which have been parcel of the Catholic spiri tual economy for centuries. So that most of the things he has said are true, but he has not dis covered them. They have been ours since the day when Christ worked miracles and exorcised those who were diabolically possessed. Thus paradox ical and naive as it may seem my first impression of the lecturer was : "This man could easily become a Catholic." His plausibility of thought has root in real authentic Catholicism. I will describe what I mean.

When he announced that miracles were per formed at Lourdes he took care to assure his audi ence that these wonders were wrought not by the violation but by the suspension of a fixed law of nature, and that the cures were attained by the inspiration, aspiration and prayer of the religious spirit. It was the dominance of the religious mind over inert matter. Other scientists have affirmed that miracles are the results of some law of nature which as yet we do not understand. My lecturer

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believed that they were the results of a law which we do understand. This is precisely the Catholic position.

Again when he said he believed in the Catholic doctrine of the Communion of Saints I was re minded of an incident which Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson made known to me when I met her in San Francisco in the year 1900. She told me her husband, the poet and novelist, had many times spoken to her of the reasonableness of the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory and the Communion of Saints. These were to him the spiritual explana tion of the nearness and reality of the dead, and of the truth that the spirit must pass through proc esses of purification before it can attain beatitude or the completion of its state.

So, too, my lecturer divined without the aid of Catholic theology and in the terms of not only the physical but the psychical that nothing defiled can enter into the Kingdom of Perfection. He called this process a kind of spiritual evolution or spiri tual survival of the fittest. He made sure, too, of the fact that the individual spirit did not in the process lose its own persistent identity. With this thought he laid the foundation of a magnificent destiny for the future of the human race. Its con scientious struggle for the right in this world, was but an indication of that larger struggle and com munion, which finally bound all creatures to gether to the ultimate and perfect type of the Creator, in the world to come. Indeed the Vision

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 191

of Him Who reigns on high, as Tennyson puts it, is seen by him as in the poem :

"The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and

the plains — Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him Who reigns?

"Is not the Vision He? though He be not that which He

seems?

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

"Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?

"Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why; For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel 'I am I?'

"Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy

doom,

Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendor and gloom.

"Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with

Spirit can meet —

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

"God is law, say the wise; 0 Soul, and let us rejoice, For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice.

"Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fool; For all we have power to see is ° "traight staff bent in a pool;

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"And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man

cannot see;

But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were it not He?"

This higher pantheism taught by St. Paul in even finer expression than the poet, is what my lecturer taught his listeners the morning I heard him. He reiterated the distinction between the Divine Cre ative Mind dominant in the universe and the Divine creation. To him it was as foolish to deny soul as it was to deny matter.

My lecturer's astonishing ideas concerning the structure of an atom brought me to the days when the mediaeval scholastics discussed with zest the ultimate constitution of matter. They had theo ries not only atomic and dynamic, but they seemed to be satisfied that they had touched the heart of the subject when they taught the theory of prime matter and substantial form.

But now my lecturer finds the atom of matter more beautiful and complex than ever. To him atoms are like minute particles revolving in their orbits as planets revolve in the solar system. Permeating beneath them all there is a funda mental substance called the ether of space which constitutes the whole material universe. Is this the scholastic doctrine expressed in terms of the physical? It is not the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas nor was it the opinion taught by our an cestors in the universities of Paris, Oxford, Sala manca or other seats of learning in the Middle

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 193

Ages. At least this is a statement which I get from Dalgairns, the Oratorian.

But my physicist and at times spiritualist is a modern, and he has discovered in a mere atom of matter the marvelous structure of the whole phys ical universe. Therefore the Catholic doctrine of Transsubstantiation should not be so difficult with him since we know so little of the ultimate nature of matter, and what we do know is so over powering and intimates that the veil of sense which screens the Divine Presence is very thin. He quotes our own Catholic poet, Francis Thomp son, who sings:

"0 World invisible, we view thee,

O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

"Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air — That we ask of the stars in motion If they have humor of thee there?

"Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars I The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats on our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;

Turn but a stone, and start a wing! 'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,

That miss the many splendored thing.

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"But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

Cry; and upon thy so sore loss Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Gross.

"Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,

Cry — clinging Heaven by the hems; And lo, Christ walking on the water Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!"

Once again, the lecturer pleased me, by flatly op posing those who deny the reality of matter and the reality of pain, although he admitted that the senses are not the only sources of knowledge, as the sensism of Locke would have us believe. The denial of the objective existence of matter and of pain should destroy outright that partial and therefore imperfect religious system called Chris tian Science. A perfect moral structure cannot be built on a fundamental philosophic fallacy. Doubtless, sensation is measured by the acuteness and degree of consciousness. With heightened in telligence there is an increased capacity for pain. For this reason we cannot conclusively prove that animals suffer or that they arrive at a conclusion. So we have Descartes at one end of thought believ ing them to be mere automata without sensation, and Balmes the Spanish philosopher at the other attributing to them a kind of soul. All my lec turer could affirm was what Cardinal Newman has written in his own regal style, that these speech less mysterious creatures are terribly near us and at the same time inexpressibly far away. Who can

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 195

tell whether it be a conscious or unconscious sense of organization which will provoke the bee to build the honey comb and the bird its nest? Who can tell what is the species of instinct or pride which will provoke the peacock to display the irridescent beauty of its feathers? The splendid disposition of harmonious color is produced by natural causes, but behind these causes there is one Cause which has acted with design. This sound common judgment was expressed by my lecturer more than once.

The lecturer impresses me also with his mighty fund of knowledge, so that I find it hard to deny even the few statements which I know are not true. He assures me that to deny involves a large knowledge of the subject. Then I grow timid. He avers that to deny that there is a certain word in Shakespeare means that I have read all of the great poet who requires severe study. But I may easily affirm that there is such a word in Shake speare when the word is so common I may have seen it myself. But are there not affirmations made by lecturers in some departments of knowl edge which I readily detect to be false? Of course I have my mental limitations and I cannot get at all times the whole truth. This is, however, ob vious to the lecturer, for he reads for me the poem :

"Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies; Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower — but if I could understand,

196 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.

Finally, I began to fear the charm of my lec turer when he entered into the terrible land of the spirit. But I was agreeably surprised when I found him telling what is known to every student of Catholic spiritual science. It is no new doctrine to be told that the essense of humanity is not seen in its ordinary labor any more than is life meas ured by the tangible. It is a well-worn truth that I spiritually perceive with my spirit — in this sense I am a spiritualist. When I look at a painting of Raphael my senses see only the pigment and the canvas, but my mind sees the picture. This morn ing hundreds of millions of stars are spinning in the vast spaces above me, yet I do not behold them except in my mind's eye. My bodily eye does not even see the light, it sees the object which emits the light. I follow the track of the sunbeam through the hole in the shutter or the chink in the wall, but I do not see the light, but the dust which reflects the light. But these facts I could gather in an elementary book. But my lecturer is anx ious to teach me that it is my spirit, soul or mind which are the realities in me. He tells me that with my spirit I behold the visions of prophets, poets and seers — with it, I am in touch with the other world and near to those that I love in the countless army of the dead and near not only to angelic but devilish spirits — all of which is true.

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 197

I have learned it in the spiritual economy of Catholicism. But alas ! my lecturer had no stand ard of authority to teach me when I see or hear aright and when I hear and see in a false and dis torted manner. At that moment I lost trust in him and was sad that he had not, as I had, an ex ternal spiritual power to safeguard me from illu sions concerning myself. I was sorry, too, that he did not know some of our mystics, like St. Teresa or St. John of the Cross, or perhaps best of all, St. Thomas' organic doctrine of the spiritual life and its relation to mysticism. If he did, per haps he would be a Catholic spiritualist — if I may be allowed to put it that way.

BX 890 .04 1920 SMC O'Keeffe, Henry E. , Thoughts and memories 47230341

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