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THE

AMERICAN

Catholic Quarterly
REVIEW

Under the Direction of
MOST REV. PATRICK JOHN RYAN, D. D.

ASSOCIATE EDITORS, RT. REV. MGR. J. F. LOUGHLIN D. D., REV. JAMES P.
TURNER AND MR. JOHN J. O'SHEA.

Bonum est homini ut eum Veritas vincat volentem, quia malum est homini ut eum Veritas

vincat invitum. Nam ipsa vincat necesse est, sive negantem sive confitentem.

S. AUG. EPIST. CCXXXViii. AD PASCENT.

VOLUME XXVL
From January to October, 1901.

PHILADELPHIA:
211 SOUTH SIXTH STREET.

Entered according to Act of Congress,

in the year igeo,

By Benjamin H. Whittaker,

In the OflBce of the I,ibrarian of Congress, at

Washington, D. C.

SEP 1 2 196f

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAGE

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods— Bryan J. Clinch 243

Apennines, An Old-Irish Monastery in the— Rev. Thomas J.

Shahan, D. D . ^^

As Others See Us— W. F. P. Stockley. !!!!!!!!.'.*!!.'.*!!.*.*.*.*! .278

Burns, C. S. C, Rev. James A. Catholic Secondary Schools. . .485

Campbell, D. D., Right Rev. Mgr. J. A. Legal Tenure of the

Roman Catacombs 1^7

Cardinal Mermillod — T. L. L. Teeling 757

Catholic Features in the Official Report on Education — ^J. J.

O'Shea 125

Catholic Secondary Schools — Rev. James A. Burns, C. S. C 485

Catholicity in Detroit, Two Centuries of — Richard R. Elliott. . .499

China,, The Western Powers and — Bryan J. Clinch 4

CHnch, Bryan J. Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods 243

Clinch, Bryan J. The Western Powers and China 4

Clinch, Bryan J. The Work of the Philippine Commission 625

Collectivism, The Principle of — Rev. William Poland, S. J 53

Common Prayer, The First and Second Books of — Very Rev.

W. Fleming 338

Commonwealth, The Irish Policy of Cromwell and the — Rev. G.

McDermot, C. S. P 20

Coupe, S. J., Rev. Charles. The Temporal Power Tjd

Crispi, From Silvio Pellico to Francesco — ^John J. O'Shea 798

Cromwell and the Commonwealth, The Irish Policy of— Rev. G.

McDermot, C. S, P 20

Detroit, Two Centuries of Catholicity— Richard R. Elliott 499

Divine Element in Scripture-Revelation— Rev. Charies P.

Grannan, D. D 353

Doctrinal Subterfuges, Royal Oaths and— John J. O'Shea 417

Dowling, B. A., A. E. P. R. The Greek Temples in Sicily 694

Education, Catholic Features in the Official Report on— John J.

O'Shea ' ^^5

Eleusis, The Mystic Rites of— Daniel Quinn ^ 742

Elliott, Richard R. Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. . . -499
Encyclical "De Jesu Christo Redemptore" ^^3

iv Table of Contents.

PAGK

Encyclical ''Graves de Communi" 374

Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy, Saint — Very Rev. E.

Maguire, D. D 3^7^ S^S

Evolution by Natural Selection, The Rise and Fall of— Rev. S.

Fitzsimons ^7

First and Second Books of Common Prayer, The — Very Rev.

W. Fleming 338

Fitzsimons, Rev. S. The Rise and Fall of Evolution by Natural

Selection 87

Fitzsimons, Rev. S. The True Critical Test of Natural Selection.559
Fleming, Very Rev. William. The First and Second Books of

Common Prayer 338

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi — ^John J. O'Shea 798

Galileo Galilei Linceo, II Dialogo di— F. R. Wegg-Prosser. . 266, 453

Ganss, Rev. H. G. Luther and His Protestant Biographers 582^

Glancing Backward on the Road — Most Rev. P. J. Ryan, D. D. . i
Grannan, D. D., Rev. Charles P. Divine Element in Scripture-
Revelation 353

Greek Temples in Sicily, The— A. E. P. R. Dowling, B. A 694

Harnack and His Critics on the "De Aleatoribus" — Rev. G. H.
Joyce, S. J 675

II Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo — F. R. Wegg-Prosser. . 266, 453
Irish Monastery in the Apennines, An Old — Rev. Thomas J.

Shahan, D. D 436

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonwealth, The — Rev. G.

McDermot, C. S. P 20

Joyce, S. J., Rev. G. H. Harnack and His Critics on the "De

Aleatoribus" 675

Joyce, S. J., Rev. G. H. The Source of Moral Obligations 41

Justinian the Great (A. D. 527-565)— Rev. Thomas J. Shahan,
D. D 209

Kerby, Ph. D., Rev. W. J. The Laborer and His Point of View . 108
Kerby, Ph. D., Rev. William J. The Socialism of the Socialists . 468

Laborer and His Point of View, The— Rev. W. J. Kerby, Ph. D . 108
Legal Tenure of the Roman Catacombs — Right Rev. Mgr. J. A.

Campbell, D. D 147

Luther and His Protestant Biographers — Rev. H. G. Ganss 582

Table of Contents.

Maguire, D. D., Very Rev. E. Saint Ennodius and the Papal

Supremacy ^j^^ ^23

Maynooth, The Second Plenary Synod of— Rev. M. O'Riordan

D.D.,D.C. L '^36

McDermot, C. S. P., Rev. George. The Irish Policy of Crom-
well and the Commonwealth 20

McDermot, C. S. P., Rev. George. Spencer's Philosophy 643

Medicine, Microbes and — ^James J. Walsh, M. D., Ph. D 287

Mega Spelaeon, or the Monastery of the Great Cave— Daniel

Quinn 70

Mermillod, Cardinal — ^T. L. L. Teeling 757

Merrick, S. J., Rev. D. A. The Supernatural 733

Michael Servetus and Some Sixteenth Century Educational

Notes— James J. Walsh, M. D., Ph. D 714

Microbes and Medicine — James J. Walsh, M. D., Ph. D 287

Missionary Methods, Anglo-Saxon — Bryan J. Clinch 243

Moral Obligations, The Source of — Rev. G. H. Joyce, S. J 41

Mystic Rites of Eleusis, The — Daniel Quinn 742

Natural Selection, The Rise and Fall of Evolution by — Rev. S.

Fitzsimons 87

Natural Selection, The True Critical Test of — Rev. S. Fitzsimons.559

Old-Irish Monastery in the Apennines, An — Rev. Thomas J.

Shahan, D. D 43^

O'Riordan, D. D., D. C. L., Rev. M. The Second Plenary

Synod of Maynooth 136

O'Shea, John J. Catholic Features in the Official Report on

Education ^^5

O'Shea, John J. From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi 79^

O'Shea, John J. Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges 417

O'Sullivan, S. J., Rev. D. T. Scientific Chronicle . 185, 396, 613, 819

Papal Supremacy, Saint Ennodius and the— Very Rev. E.

Maguire, D. D 3i7» 523

Pellico to Francesco Crispi, From Silvio— John J. O'Shea 79^

Philippine Commission, The Work of the— Bryan J. Clinch. . . .625

Philosophy, Spencer's— Rev. George McDermot, C. S. P 643

Poland, S. J., Rev. William. The Principle of Collectivism 53

Principle of Collectivism, The— Rev. William Poland, S. J. . . . • • 53
Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities— James E.

Wright ^^

vi Table of Contents.

PAGE

Quinn, Daniel. Mega Spelaeon or the Monastery of the Great

Cave 70

Quinn, Daniel. The Mystic Rites of Eleusis 742

Revelation, Divine Element in Scripture — Rev. Charles P.

Grannan, D. D 355

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Natural Selection, The — Rev. S.

Fitzsimons 87

Roman Catacombs, Legal Tenure of the — Right Rev. Mgr. J. A.

Campbell, D. D 147

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges — ^John J. O'Shea 417

Ryan, D. D., Most Rev. P. J. Glancing Backward on the Road, i

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy — Very Rev. E.

Maguire, D. D 317, 523

Schools, Catholic Secondary — Rev. James A. Burns, C. S. C. . . .485
Scientific Chronicle — Rev. D. T. O'Sullivan, S. J. . 185, 396, 613, 819
Scripture-Revelation, Divine Element in — Rev. Charles P.

Grannan, D. D 353

Second Plenary Synod of Maynooth, The — Rev. M. O'Riordan,

D. D., D. C. L 136

Servetus and Some Sixteenth Century Educational Notes,

Michael— James J. Walsh, M. D., Ph. D 714

Shahan, D. D., Rev. Thomas J. An Old-Irish Monastery in the

Apennines 436

Shahan, D. D., Rev. Thomas J. Justinian the Great (A. D.

527-565) 209

Sicily, The Greek Temples in — A. E. P. R. Dowling, B. A 694

Socialism of the Socialists, The— Rev. William J. Kerby, Ph. D..468

Source of Moral Obligations, The — Rev. G. H. Joyce, S. J 41

Spencer's Philosophy — Rev. George McDermot, C. S. P 643

Stockley, W. F. P. As Others See Us 278

Supernatural, The — Rev. D. A. Merrick, S. J 733

Teeling, T. L. L. Cardinal Mermillod 757

Temples in Sicily, The Greek— A. E. P. R. Dowling, B. A 694

Temporal Power, The — Rev. Charles Coupe, S.J 776

True Critical Test of Natural Selection, The — Rev. S. Fitzsimons.559
Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit — R. R. Elliott 499

Walsh, M. D., Ph. D., James J. Michael Servetus and Some

Sixteenth Century Educational Notes 714

Walsh, M. D., Ph. D., James J. Microbes and Medicine 287

Wegg-Prosser, F. R. II Dialog© di Galileo Galilei Linceo . 266, 453

Table of Contents.

Western Powers and China, The—Bryan J. Clinch.

Work of the PhiUppine Commission, The— Bryan J. Clinch 62^

Wright, James E. Protestant Domination Over Weak Com-

munities

538

BOOKS REVIEWED.

PAGE

Apologetik als Spekulative Grundlegung der Theologie,—

Schmid \ 624

Beati Petri Canisii, Epistulae et Acta— Braunsberger 414

Bible and RationaHsm, The— Thein 616

Biblische Studien — Bardenhewer 416

Breviarium Romanum 832

Day in the Cloister, A — Von Oer 617

Dictionary of the Bible — Hastings 202

Dionysii Cartusiani Opera Omnia 205

Divinity of Christ, The — Bougand 201

Exposition of Christian Doctrine 409

Faith and Folly — Vatighan 621

General History of the Christian Era, A — Guggenberger 618

General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scriptures — Gigot . . . 202

Geschichte der Christlichen Kunst — Kraus 622

Geschichte der Weltliteratur — Baumgartner 623

Great Supper of God, The — Coube 620

Historical Memoirs of the City of Armagh — Stuart 206

History of America Before Columbus — De Roo 200

History of the Diocese of Hartford — O'Donnell 623

History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages—

Janssen 19^

History of the Jesuits in England, The — Taunton 614

Holy Year of Jubilee, The— Thurston . 204

In the Beginning — Guibert 613

Institutiones Metaphysical Specialis, Psychologia— De Backer. .829

Institutiones Philosophiae Moralis — Castelein 829

Institutiones Theologicae Dogmaticae — Einig 4H

Jesuit Relations, The 198, 41 1

Last Years of St. Paul, The— Fouard 206

viii Table of Contents.

PAGE

Law and Policy of Annexation, The — Randolph 415

Meditations on Psalms Penitential 831

Meditations on the Life of Jesus Christ — Ilg 412

New Raccolta, The 415

Orestes A. Brownson's Latter Life — Brownson 205

Philosophia Lacensis — Meyer 407

Political Economy— Devas 619

Psychology — Maher 203

Scale of Ladder of Perfection, The — Hilton 622

Short Lives of the Dominican Saints 413

Sister Mary Gonzaga Grace, Life of — Donnelly 199

Some Notes on the Bibliography of the Philippines — Middleton. 195
Synodorum Archidioeceseos Neo-Eboracensis 832

THE AMERICAN CATHOLIG

QUARTERLY REVIEW

« Contributors to the Quarterly will be allowed all proper freedom in the ex-
pression of their thoughts outside the domain of defined doctrines, the Review not
holding itself responsible for the individual opinions of its contributors."

(Extract from Saluutory, July, 1890.)

VOL. XXVI.— JANUARY, 1901— No. 101.

GLANCING BACKWARD ON THE ROAD.

THE first quarter century of our existence closed with the last
October issue. Therefore it is fitting that we should offer
a few words as to the sentiments with which the occasion
inspires us, as we look back, not without a certain sense of solemnity,
on the wreck of years and the work accomplished, as well as the
monumental urns which stand by the dim wayside. The hands that
first presented the work to the world — saintly and capable hands,
both cleric and lay, they were — are mouldering in dust; but their
spirit survives in the intellectual organism which they called into
being, animating it with undiminished zeal and desire in the prosecu-
tion of those high aims and ideals which formed the original inspira-
tion.

When making its first bow before the world of learning this "Re-
view" modestly but clearly defined its mission and its message. Its
mission it declared to be to provide a vehicle for the highest thought
which should be distinctively American as distinctively Catholic.
To that definition it has rigidly adhered all these twenty-five years.
More than once it has been suggested that the word "American"
was injurious because suggestive of limitation. But this idea is
illusory. In practice, the pages of the "Review" are open, and have
been always open, to the whole world of Catholic thought. Nor
has it excluded non-Catholic thought when this was presented by

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1900, by Benjamin H Whittaker, in the
Office of the Ubrarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

2 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

minds made generous by that search for truth which distinguishes
the conscientious student from the wavering and irresolute votaries
of the midnight oil. Because it is proud of the country of its birth
and its institutions, and proud of the progress which under these our
indestructible Church has made, the editors stood firm in the resolve
that this pride should find recognition in official title of their publi-
cation.

Rightfully, the exposition and defense of Catholic truth held the
first place in the opening announcement of objects contemplated.
To Philosophy and Science, as handmaids of religion, when not
taken out of their proper atmosphere, due place was also assigned.
To the muse of History, in its relation, especially to the Catholic
Church on the American Continent, it was proposed to pay due
honor. These were some of the intentions outlined in the first note
of salutation. Since then the widening of the programme was seen
to be necessary, for the development of the social propaganda and
the birth of new ideas in many fields of thought and action have
directed literary energies into channels hitherto undreamed of. All
these topics have been discussed by the ablest hands in the "Re-
view," concurrently with the unfolding of doctrinal truth and the
patient investigation of its truth by the keen eyes of the ecclesiastical
archaeologist.

"We are not without misgivings, either as to the arduous nature
or the probable success of our undertaking." So said the dis-
tinguished scholar who wrote the introductory lines ; but he solaced
himself for this incertitude of mind by remembering the line of the
Umbrian lyrist :

"In magnis et voluisse sat est."

This almost Divine encouragement was indeed the great vivifying
inspiration of the original founders, and it was rewarded by the addi-
tion of success beyond the utmost hope. The "Review" has had its
fluctuations. It has had its prosperous periods — prosperous beyond
all early anticipation — and its times of stagnancy, when it reflected
in some measure the vicissitudes of fortune in the affairs of the nation
at large.

Politics in the ordinary sense were excluded from the purview of
the "Quarterly." But the ethics of politics, as the signatory ob-
served on assuming control of the magazine, ten years ago, de-
mand attention, because "when great moral questions are involved
in political issues the illumination of sound principles must fall on
the dark places and show men that the right alone is the truly ex-
pedient."

Great liberty of expression of opinion has been permitted, as an-
nounced in the Salutatory written ten years ago and published on the

Glancing Backward on the Road. 3

first page of the "Review" in these words: "Contributors to the
^Quarterly' will be allowed all proper freedom in the expression of
their thoughts outside the domain of defined doctrines, the 'Review'
not holding itself responsible for the individual opinions of its con-
tributors."

The idea of the "Review" may be attributed to the late Monsignor
Corcoran. His great intellect led him to aspire to more for the
literature of Catholicism than had been as yet attempted by any
publication in the United States. He found a ready and responsive
cooperation at the hands of the publishers of its predecessor, the
Catholic Record, Messrs Charles A. Hardy and Daniel H. Mahoney.
Down to the time of his lamented death Mr. Hardy continued to
be the publisher of the magazine; and it is only just to say that his
personal enthusiasm in the work all through had no small share in
the determination of its success. Since his demise the responsibility
for the magazine's production has devolved upon our own shoul-
ders. The most trenchant and erudite pens that the Catholic world
could boast of have constantly been impressed into the service of the
Church, on this high plane of ambition, ever since the "Review"
was ushered into the world. Monsignor Corcoran, its first editor,
was a host in himself. He wrote much for its pages. Orestes
Brownson, John Gilmary Shea, George Dering Wolff, Rev. Augus-
tus Thebaud, S. J., Right Rev. James O'Connor, D. D., Rev. Edward
McGlynn, D. D., Right Rev. T. A. Becker, D. D,, Right Rev. P. N.
Lynch, D. D., T. W. Marshall, LL. D.— these are a few of the
names to be encountered in the pages of the very first number.
Among the succeeding contributors are such names as those of
Cardinal Gibbons, Cardinal Manning, Archbishop Keane, Arch-
bishop Seghers, Bishop Spalding, Bishop Chatard, Bishop Walsh,
Very Rev. Augustine Hewit, Monsignor Seton, Very Rev. John
Hogan, S. S., D. D., Rev. Dr. Bouquillon, Very Rev. Canon O'Han-
lon. Rev, Edward Pace, D. D., Rev. Dr. Zahm, Brother Azarias.
These are only a few, picked up at random ; but they will serve to
show the class of aspirants which the founders of the magazine at-
tracted to the cause on the announcement of their design to produce
on the American Continent a Review of the highest order in a
literary point of view— for which Seneca might possibly be too heavy
and Plautus certainly too light— a work intended not to pass an idle
hour in the boudoir, but to help the scholar by his lamp and the

theologian in his study.

P. J. Ryan.

American Catholic Quarterly Review,

THE WESTERN POWERS AND CHINA.

THE outbreak in China has come on the close of the nine-
teenth century as suddenly as the French Revolution came
on the eighteenth. There is a strange likeness between the
early stages of the European convulsion and the events now passing
in Asia. In each case the oldest Government of a continent has
been suddenly assailed by revolution within and invasion from
abroad. In each attempted reforms of society on theoretical prin-
ciples have resulted in outbursts of savage ferocity among popula-
tions regarding themselves as civilized for many centuries. A year
ago political economists were planning the transformation of China
by railroads and modern machinery as, in 1789, philanthropists and
savans urged the reconstruction of Europe on the theories of human-
itarian science. In neither century did the would-be reformers
reckon with the wishes or sentiments of the populations affected by
their projects, and in both the populations have shown that old
habits and thoughts are not to be changed with impunity by self-
sufficient rulers.

The plans of social reorganization in China have not been con-
fined to outsiders. Men like Li Hung Chang and the reigning
Emperor have been for some years trying to introduce the science
and political ideas of the West into the Middle Empire under the
patronage of despotic power and for its benefit. In a similar way
Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia undertook to mould
their governments on the philosophy of the encyclopedia. Despotic
monarchs were as eager for social and religious changes as the
French advocates of the rights of man, and, when power was thrown
into their hands, the latter showed themselves as despotic in forcing
their own ideas on others as either King or Emperor. The Taiping
rebellion in China showed a similar spirit in the nineteenth century
in Asia.

European and American theorists seem to have taken it for
granted that the Imperial Government is all powerful over the
Chinese population. It has only to concede privileges to foreigners,
and the Empire may be moulded at will to the interests of trade and
capital. In point of fact, the Chinese, during the nineteenth cen-
tury, have been more turbulent than the populations of Europe dur-
ing the first eighty years of the last century. In Paris popular dis-
turbance had been unknown since the days of Mazarin and De Retz.
In England no popular insurrection had occurred during the eigh-

The Western Powers and China. e

teenth century. In Spain and Germany the case was almost the
same. The duty, or necessity, of submission to the existing govern-
ments was recognized by the population at large in every European
country down to the French Revolution. If it seems to be equally
so in China to-day there is no more assurance that the sentiment will
continue if the public feelings are thoroughly excited than there was
in France before the storming of the Bastille.

Indications are not wanting of a change in the impulses of the
Chinese people similar to that which occurred in the France of
Louis and La Fayette. They are found both in the Government
and in popular outbreaks. Prince Tuan, the leader of the Boxers,
has a striking resemblance to the regicide Duke of Orleans of the
Revolution. The wavering action of the Chinese Court, now ap-
plauding, now denouncing the "anti-foreign" rioters, recalls the later
Ministers of the unfortunate French monarch while his authority
was still recognized in name as head of the government. The fra-
ternization between the regiments of the royal army and the Paris
rioters seems to have been repeated between the Imperialist soldiers
and the Boxers in Pekin.

Atrocious as may have been the outrages committed by the Asiatic
revolutionists, it should not be forgotten that even worse cruelties
attended the progress of revolution in France. The butchery of the
Ice Tower at Avignon, the wholesale drownings of Charries at
Nantes, where men and women were tied together, in so-called
Republican marriages, and sunk by hundreds in the Loire, the mas-
sacres at Lyons, at Toulon and a hundred other places, were as
savage and far more extensive than any outrages lately reported
from China. The slaughter of priests in the Abbey Prison of Paris
was greater than that of all the missionaries slain in China in our
own days. In Paris, the capital of European civilization, mobs tore
men and women to pieces in blind fury and paraded the streets with
the bleeding heads of their victims carried on pikes to the strains
of music. The daughter of the Marquis de Cazotte, called to drink
a bowl of human blood as the price of her old father's life, is as hor-
rible as anything told of Chinese brutality. When human passions
are let loose from moral restraint, no difference in savagery can be
found between European, Asiatic or American man, between civil-
ized society or barbarism. The Chinese mobs hack their Christian
countrymen in pieces as "foreign devils," the civilized pagans of old
Rome burned their Christians as "enemies of the human race," the
Jacobin disciples of reason piked or shot Catholic priests as "foes of
liberty," the Gordon rioters of London murdered Catholics as idola-
tors. In deeds of cruelty the Chinese are not sinners above other
men, and barbarity is confined to no race or time.

6 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

The intervention of the foreign powers as a consequence of the
Boxer outbreak is another parallel between the France of the eigh-
teenth century and China of the nineteenth. Even before the depo-
sition of the King, the Emperor of Germany and the King of Prussia
combined at Pilnitz to suppress by arms the revolution in France.
Prussian and Austrian armies invaded its territory under claim of
defending the common rights of society and royalty. A Prussian
army attacked Verdun as the European fleets attacked the Taku
forts, in the alleged interests of order. From Coblentz the Duke of
Brunswick, as commander-in-chief of the allied invaders, issued his
famous proclamation threatening Paris and all other French towns
with military execution unless they at once restored their King to
his former absolute power. The manifesto has a remarkable re-
semblance to the speech of the present German Emperor to his
troops when sailing for China. The injunction to avenge the death
of the murdered Embassador by a wholesale slaughter of Chinese
is, indeed, more truculent than the "military execution" threatened
by Brunswick. In politics the nineteenth century cannot boast of
any ethical development between Brunswick and Kaiser Wilhelm.

The attack on revolutionary France was as unanimous as the late
campaign against China. Austrian, Prussian and Sardinian armies
invaded France in 1792, while Louis was still in name its constitu-
tional King. On his execution England and Spain, as well as
Russia, Sweden and Holland, joined in the attack. The motive
alleged for this remarkable unanimity of usually hostile States was
the suppression of anarchy in France, in the interests of European
society. The excesses that had been committed by the revolution-
ary party when Brunswick's army entered Champagne were wholly
confined to Frenchmen on French soil. The invading powers
claimed an international right to enforce the continuance of mon-
archy in any country, as modern Imperialists claim the right to take
over the government of dark-skinned peoples. The "white man's
burthen" is but the "sacred rights of monarchy" under a new name.

The result of the German invasion on France was only to increase
the violence of the revolution a hundredfold. The deposition of
the King, the massacres of the Paris prisons, the establishment of
the National Convention of Robespierre as the supreme authority
and the execution of Louis followed in quick succession. Marat
demanded two hundred and sixty thousand heads of aristocrats as a
public necessity, and urged the organization of bands of murderers
to accomplish it quickly. The churches were closed and the "God-
dess of Reason" worshiped on the altar of Notre Dame. Three
hundred thousand "suspects" filled the jails of France, and their
numbers were daily thinned by the action of the guillotine. The

The Western Powers and China. «

Reign of Terror was called into existence by the foreign invasion
more than any other cause.

To the politicians of outside Europe it looked as if this condition
of affairs left France at their mercy. Civil war was raging. La
Vendee, Lyons, Toulon, Caen and a number of other cities took up
arms against the Paris Convention. The national army had been
demoralized by the recent events, and especially by the banishment
or execution of nearly all its officers as suspected aristocrats. The
Treasury was bankrupt, the administration in the hands of mob
leaders without experience or training, the magazines empty of sup-
plies and the population divided between the traditions of order and
loyalty and the new republican ideas. The occupation of Paris and
the conquest of France seemed as easy a task to the wise men of
Berlin and London in 1793 as the conquest of China appears to-day
to modern Imperialist eyes. Plans for the partition of its territory,
of course in the interests of humanity, were put forward as freely as
they now are in China's case. Austria wanted Alsace and French
Flanders ; Sardinia, Provence and Dauphiny ; England, Corsica and
the French colonies. A restored Bourbon might be left to rule the
rest of the country under the armed protection of the other European
powers.

The first progress of the invasion seemed to promise realization
of these projects. Fifty Austrian hussars chased an army of French
levies at Wisemberg; the Prussians captured the strong fortress of
Verdun, so famous in the late Franco- Prussian war, almost without
loss; the Sardinians and Spaniards marched unopposed into the
French territory. There was wild panic in Paris. The Convention
decreed a levy of three hundred thousand men and afterwards called
every man between eighteen and twenty-five to immediate service.
But there were neither arms nor ammunition to supply the means of
defense; even clothing and shoes could not be found for the re-
cruits. The sea was in the power of the hostile nations. The steel
of Sweden and the nitre needed for powder making were both cut
off by the war. Famine, too, was raging in France. The crops
had been ruined between political disturbance and bad weather, and
English and Dutch cruisers blockaded the ports and seized all ves-
sels bringing the provisions of America to the starving nation. All
the resources of civilization seemed combined in the hands of the
allies against the distracted French people. The military discipline
of the Prussian army under Frederick was as efficient as it was in
our time under Von Moltke. Rosbach, thirty years before the Revo-
lution, was as decisive a victory of Prussians over French soldiers as
was Sedan since. With such a force at his disposal against the raw
levies of Republican France, it is not strange that the march to Paris

8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

was regarded as little more dangerous than a military promenade.
The whole population of France was only twenty-five millions.
The nations combined against her disposed of a hundred and twenty
milHons. They controlled the sea and commerce as well as the
capital of the world. Numbers, military organization, wealth and
trained political intelligence were overwhelmingly against the
French Republic.

They all failed to win success. Whatever the different views of
Frenchmen on republicanism or monarchy, towards Jacobins or
Girondists, the great majority felt that defense of their native land
against invasion was their first duty. A flame of enthusiasm blazed
through France and made the whole nation an army. The smiths
were all impressed to make muskets, the tailors uniforms. All
materials needed were seized wherever they could be found. Nitre
was extracted from the mortar of cellars and the recruits were
armed. Royalist oflicers, though liable to lose their heads as aris-
tocrats at any moment, drilled the new levies and led them to vic-
tory. Dumouriez repulsed Brunswick at Valmy and saved Paris.
The check was little more serious in effect than that which the aUies
met in their first advance towards Pekin, and was as little regarded
at first by the invaders; but other lessons of war's uncertainties
came thick and fast. Men from the ranks like Hoche and Pichegru
took command of armies and defeated the veteran generals of Ger-
many. The retired royalist officer, Dugommier, raised a force in
the south which drove back the disciplined Spanish troops and in-
vaded Spain. At Jemappe and Hondscoote, at Fleurus and at a
score of other battles the new levies scattered the best armies of
Germany and England. Within a few months after Valmy the
Austrians had been driven out of their own territory of Belgium,
and Holland was overrun and its navy captured by French cavalry
while embedded in the ice of the Texel. The fortune of war was
not, indeed, all on one side, and defeats like those of Neerwinden and
Mayence came to vary the victories of the French armies ; but within
two years the heads of the European governments recognized that
the conquest of France was beyond their power. Spain made peace
in 1795 and Prussia the same year. Holland had been conquered,
the King of Sardinia driven from his own capital. The English had
seized Toulon, the chief naval station of France on the Mediter-
ranean. They had also invaded Corsica, under protection of their
fleets. They were driven from both. Napoleon won his first dis-
tinction at the recapture of Toulon as a captain of artillery. Within
four years he had conquered Italy and dictated peace to the German
Emperor at Leoben. The European coalition had collapsed. Its
members had made war to prevent the establishment of republican

The Western Powers and China. g

institutions in France. Their efforts had resulted in surrounding
a republican France with a border of dependent republics formed
from the territories of its assailants. The Batavian, the Ligurian,
the Cisalpine and the Parthenopean Republics had replaced the
Stadtholder of Holland, the Kings of Sardinia and Naples and the
German rule in Lombardy.

While defending their soil against invasion the French people had
also put down the anarchy of the Jacobin faction in Paris. Robe-
spierre had been overthrown and guillotined, after eighteen months
of executions, and a Directory set up in his place. Napoleon had
crushed a last rising of the anarchists before setting out to conquer
Italy. Within four years more he had become absolute master in
the new republican France. As First Consul and Emperor he be-
came master of that Europe which had projected the partition of
France ten years earlier. Austria, Russia, Prussia and Spain saw
him in their capitals as a victorious invader. Kings of his family
reigned in Spain and Holland, in Naples and Westphalia. A
French general became Crown Prince of Sweden. Such was the
result of the combination of Europe to regulate the government of
the French people a hundred years ago. The lesson seems worth
study at present.

The course of action of the different allied powers with regard to
one another is also worthy of consideration. Setting out with proc-
lamations of disinterested zeal for the maintenance of public order
and international law, each power, in the course of the Revolution-
ary struggle, showed itself as unscrupulous in its acts as the French
Jacobins. Prussia and Russia enslaved Poland the very year that
Louis XVI. died on the scaffold. When the French made Holland
a republican government England seized the African colonies of its
late ally. Prussia, a little later, tried to make its own of Hanover
from England. Austria accepted the Venetian territories from
Napoleon as a compensation for the loss of Lombardy. Russia an-
nexed Finland from Sweden because its boundary was too near St.
Petersburg. England kept Malta from its legitimate rulers because
it had been occupied by Napoleon on his voyage to Egypt. Nelson
bombarded Copenhagen and seized the fleet of Denmark with no
excuse except that Napoleon might do likewise. The twenty-two
years, from Valmy to Waterloo, which followed the Convention of
Pilnitz for intervention in France, were marked with more blood
and international lawlessness than any century of European history.
More than any other cause the policy of intervention of Leopold and
Frederick William was responsible for this. Does the new principle
of the "White Man's Burthen" offer better prospects in prac-
tice?

10 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

It hardly seems so. There is little in modern political history to
indicate that any higher moral principle rules the governments of
our day than those of the last century. England is annexing the
Transvaal with as little pretext of right as Catherine of Russia and
the Prussian King had for the dismemberment of Poland. Her
power is checked for intervention in China precisely in the same
way as Russia was at first hindered from active part in the invasion
of France in 1793. The seizure of Kiao Tchou by the German Em-
peror was as flagrant an outrage on international right as Russia's
occupation of Finland. The parallel between the King of Sweden,
murdered by one of his own subjects when setting out to put down
anarchy in France, and Humbert of Italy, similarly slain, while his
soldiers were slaying Chinese to restore order in that Empire, is a
very striking one. If lack of moral principles worked disastrous
results among governments a hundred years ago, there seems reason
to anticipate similar results from like causes now.

The recent history of most of the powers now engaged in restor-
ing order in China gives little guarantee that the undertaking will
be carried out with any more honesty among the partners than was
the old coalition against France. The Italian Kingdom owes its
origin to conquests of a character simply piratical. The invasions
of Tuscany, of Parma, the Papal States and Naples were made
without even pretext of right. The seizure of the African territory
which forms the Italian colony of Erythraea was of a similar nature.
The invasion of Schleswig, of Hanover and Hesse by Prussia showed
equal disregard of national rights. The cynical hypocrisy of a gov-
ernment which refuses its own subjects the right to reside in Ger-
many, if they belong to Catholic religious orders, and demands that
China shall be invaded if she refuses protection to Catholic mis-
sionaries on her soil may be remarked.

It is scarcely diflferent with France. Her late seizures of Tunis
and Madagascar showed equal disregard of right with Prussia's oc-
cupation of Schleswig. England's occupation of Egypt, because a
part of its people attempted to substitute European methods of
government for Turkish despotism, is a copy of the policy which
attempted to restore absolute monarchy in France last century.
The conquests of Burma, Uganda and the South African republics
are equally lawless. Russia's advance in Asia is of the same kind as
the invasions of Timur or Mahomet II. There is small likelihood
that regard for moral right or public opinion will sway the decisions
of any of these powers in the disposal of China. The "ethical devel-
opment" of the nineteenth century of Spencer and Huxley promises
even less fruit than the doctrines of Rousseau and D'Alembert in the
eighteenth. Indeed, the list of public violations of national rights

The Western Powers and China.

by the armed hand of power is far longer in the later century than
in its predecessor.

. How slight the chances are that half a dozen allies will unite
harmoniously in a scheme of plunder, history teaches us from the
last century. It was from experience of the European coalition that
Washington left to his countrymen his solemn warning against "en-
tangling alliances" with any foreign power. Its observance saved
America from being drawn into the Revolutionary struggle which
devastated Europe for twenty-two years, which began with a Reign
of Terror of anarchists and ended with a Holy Alliance of absolute
monarchs.

The part which China itself may take in the struggle is still harder
to anticipate. At the present her people seem helpless against
modern war, with its scientific weapons and careful discipline; but
France seemed scarcely more Hkely to successfully resist the armies
of Europe when Brunswick issued his famous proclamation. The
last twenty-five years have given ample illustration that in war the
unexpected is always liable to happen. Modern discipline and arms
did not save the Italian army from crushing defeat by the warriors
of Abyssinia nor the British-led Egyptians under Hicks Pasha from
annihilation by the Dervishes. The Boer war, where two hundred
thousand British soldiers have been needed to conquer a population
of three hundred thousand all told, is a still more striking instance
of the uncertainties of war, even under modern conditions. The
possibilities latent in the four hundred millions of Chinese are enor-
mously greater than were those in the twenty-five millions of Revo-
lutionary France. That the people have little of the military spirit of
Western nations at present is true, but it is no guarantee that it may
not be awakened in them as in other men by aggression carried too
far. The Taiping rebellion and the Black Flags of Southern China
are hints that the fighting spirit is not wholly absent from Chinese
nature. The Russians to the time of Peter the Great were as little
regarded as soldiers by their European neighbors as the Chinese to-
day. A King of Sweden, in the eighteenth century, scattered fifty
thousand of Peter's best troops with eight thousand Swedes at
Narva. The same monarch traversed the whole of Russia as a con-
queror with forty thousand men. The Russian peasantry to-day
are as peaceable and scarcely more advanced in civilization than in
the days of Peter, but the best soldiers of the world, from Frederick
of Prussia to Napoleon, have found conquerors in the once despised
Russian armies. The Mongol tribes, now a part of the Chinese
Empire, have entered Europe as conquerors at least three times in
modern history. The dominion of Kublai Khan and his successors
for two centuries reached from the Yellow Sea to the Dnieper, and

12 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the Princes of Russia had to seek their investiture with power in a
Tartar camp. It seems not impossible that the descendants of the
old conquerors may learn the use of arms again as readily, at least,
as the Russians have done already.

The permanent supremacy of the white race in the world, or of
civilized over uncivilized man, are facts commonly assumed, but not
borne out by the experience of the past. Nations of European race
are strongest in the world to-day, as they were in the days of
Augustus or Theodosius ; but in the intervening centuries there were
many in which the sceptre was held by others. The tribes of Arabia
in sixty years built an Empire greater than the Roman and including
half of its former dominion. The Turkish Sultan and the Great
Mogul in the sixteenth century were superior in power to any
European State. Francis I. of France and Elizabeth of England
begged the alliance of Solyman the Magnificent in terms that seem
incredible to French or English pride to-day. Higher civilization
made Greece the conqueror of Persia under Alexander and made
Rome supreme for three centuries over the wild tribes of Germany
and Africa ; but in the Roman Empire, as in Asia, the turn of the
barbarians to conquer civilization came in due course. A skin-clad
savage from the Baltic, scarcely different from one of our own Iro-
quois of the last century, took place in Rome of the last Caesar. A
band of Turkoman shepherds from the steppes of Tartary have for
four centuries occupied the imperial city of Constantine. One can-
not see grounds for the assurance that similar changes are now im-
possible.

The material power of the European race was concentrated in the
Roman Empire as it has never been concentrated since. It repre-
sented the highest civilization and culture as well as the greatest
military power of the world for nearly six hundred years. If inde-
pendent nations or tribes continued to exist around its frontiers, it
was only because the domestic policy of the Roman Government
desired no further territory. From Marius to Theodosius no rival
State rose to dispute the supremacy of the Roman. One govern-
ment ruled France, Spain, Great Britain, West Germany, Hol-
land, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Turkey, South Russia
and the whole north of Africa. In all these lands there were no
more national rivalries than exist among the different States of the
American Union to-day. Roman law and Roman language, Roman
schools and Roman military discipline were the common possession
of York and Alexandria, of Morocco and Cologne. The tribes out-
side her borders were scarcely more important than the Creeks or
Shawnees to the Republic of Washington. The Parthians of the
East were not more formidable than Afghanistan to-day is to the

The Western Powers and China. ix

Indian Empire, and the known world showed no other power even
the equal of Parthia in military strength. A Roman of the days of
Constantine might, not unreasonably, hold the supremacy of his
race and civilization was a natural law of human nature. He could
look back four hundred years to Sylla and Marius and find Rome,
even then, dominant over all rivals and already old in a career of
victory over Greek and Carthaginian, over Gauls and Asiatic mon-
archs. Compared with such a duration, what have any of the civil-
ized powers of our time to 'show? Russia as a European power
only begins with the eighteenth century. The whole foreign Empire
of England is no older. The French Republic, by the widest reckon-
ing, cannot date beyond the Revolution. Austria began with the
nineteenth century in her present form. The German Empire and
the Italian Kingdom have each but thirty years' existence. Our
own United States has a hundred and eleven years of its present
Constitution. Judged by the test of time, the present predominance
of the European race in the world is almost as brief in comparison
with the Empire of the Caesars as the dominion of Napoleon in
France beside the old Bourbon monarchy. Yet Rome crumbled
and her Empire passed away within a half a century of the death of
Theodosius. A savage chief ruled in the Imperial City as its King
before the end of the fifth century, and other hordes divided the
provinces of the civilized world at will. Neither higher civilization
nor military science could preserve the European race from foreign
conquest fourteen hundred years ago. They hardly promise better
guarantees to it to-day from the successes of three centuries.

The collapse of the Western Empire was mainly a triumph of
barbarian over civilized man among European races. Goths and
Vandals, Burgundians and Lombards were of the same Caucasian
race as Romans, Greeks or Celts. But the revolution then begun
did not end with the substitution of Frank or Gothic Kingdoms for
Roman Caesars and prefects. From the deserts of Arabia a power
was developed by Mahometanism which, within sixty years, con-
quered the largest half of the territory of European civilization and
held it for fully a thousand years under various forms. The Arab
Caliphs made the whole of Roman Africa and Western Asia as well
as Spain and Sicily part of their empire, which for two centuries was
the greatest in the world. When the Saracen power crumbled its
place was taken by other Asiatic conquerors, Turk or Mongol, with
undiminished power. From the eighth to the fifteenth century the
domain of the European races was steadily diminished by the tide of
Asiatic conquest. Christian Russia became a province of the Mon-^
gol Khans in the twelfth century. The Balkan Peninsula fell un-
der the rule of the Osmanli in the fifteenth. In the sixteenth cen-

14 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

tury Sultan Solyman was the foremost ruler in Europe, and up to
1683 no Christian land, once conquered, had ever been recovered
from Turkish rule. The Russian Czars paid regular tribute to the
Khan of the Crimea, himself but a vassal of the Sultan. Indeed, it
is barely a hundred years since our own United States paid a tribute
of sixty thousand dollars annually to the Dey of Algiers to escape
the seizure of American vessels by the Algerine Corsairs. European
ascendancy seems rather too recent a growth to warrant assured con-
fidence in its permanence even now. Mahometanism had nine hun-
dred years of victory and ever growing territory before her decline
came.

Civilization is an elastic term and very differently understood by
different races. The Chinese are as fully convinced of the superior-
ity of their own institutions and culture as the most enthusiastic
Anglo-Saxon or German Imperialists of their own call to take up the
"white man's burthen." It must be admitted they are not wholly
without justification in their ideas. The population maintained by
the soil of China is denser than that of Europe and equals the
wealthiest individual European countries in that respect. The po-
litical convulsions of the last fifteen hundred years have been far
more destructive of human life and material progress in Europe
than in China. Wars of conquest have been, as a general rule,
avoided by successive Chinese Governments during all that time in
spite of the preponderating power placed in their hands. The action
of the Emperors of China towards their weaker neighbors of kin-
dred races, towards Annam, Corea, Burmah and Japan has been
more equitable on the whole than that of any great European power
during the last three centuries. The government, however corrupt,
is one of law rather than brute force, and the length of its duration
is a fair argument that the good in the system outweighs the evil.
In spite of the denser population in China, the material comfort of
the people is greater than in India under Anglo-Saxon rule. Fam-
ine, though not unknown, does not recur with the terrible regularity
of its appearance in British India, and has never, we believe, attained
the intensity of the Irish famine of 1848 under the present Queen's
reign. Neither is the public action of the Chinese authorities
marked with the cynical disregard of human suffering that has been
too often expressed by European rulers, and in theory, at least, the
obligations of the rulers towards the people are fairly recognized in
China.

In some points we cannot but notice that the Western nations
have been adopting as social improvements institutions in vogue for
over a thousand years in the Chinese Government. During the
nineteenth century the growth of democracy has been one of the

The Western Powers and China. ib

most marked movements in European civilization. In China there
is no privileged class of nobles. The offices of government are filled
by examinations almost on the principles known in this country as
Civil Service Reform. With all its materialism, the Chinese race
has a high regard for intellectual culture, and the tests applied for
its recognition are not widely different from those of European
schools and colleges. This must, in fairness, be considered in decid-
ing on the real human value of the Chinese system of civilization.
That it is imperfect, that the laws are not formed on European
models or always honestly administered may be conceded without
therefore concluding the whole system unfit for existence. We are
not confident that the general administration of the laws in our or
any other land is above reproach, or that any of our systems of
government does not need improvement, yet we claim the title of
civilized men. We may grant as much to the Chinese.

With all its jealousy of foreigners it is but fair to admit that dur-
ing the last three centuries the Chinese Government has treated the
Catholic missionaries and their converts with less intolerance than
most non-Catholic European States. The year in which the first
Jesuit missioner entered China was marked in England by the exe-
cution of Father Cuthbert Mayne with worse than Asiatic tortures
on the sole charge of being a Catholic priest. In 1599 the Italian
Jesuit, Ricci, was allowed to settle in peace at the Chinese capital
and teach his religion to any who chose to hear him. During those
seventeen years nearly two hundred persons, priests and laymen,
had perished on English scaffolds for profession of the CathoHc
Faith. A Chinese Christian was first Minister of the Emperor.

At this time, in Sweden, profession of Catholicity was a capital
offense, as in England was the reception of Catholic orders. The
penal codes of both countries lasted for more than a hundred and
fifty years later.

There has been a congregation of Catholic Chinese with Bishops
and priests and churches and schools in Pekin since the beginning of
the seventeenth century, as well as many others through the Em-
pire. The Chinese Christians and their teachers have undoubtedly
been often persecuted and many of them executed for their religion
by the tribunals, but neither in duration nor violence has Chinese
intolerance of Christians equaled English intolerance of Catholics.
There have been Catholics in England during the whole existence
of the Penal Laws. The year 1583, in which the first Jesuit mis-
sioner entered China, was marked in England by the execution of
Father Cuthbert Mayne, with atrocious tortures, for the crime of be-
ing found in the dominions of Elizabeth as a Catholic priest. At
the close of Elizabeth's reign, twenty years later, over two hundred

l6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

persons, priests and laymen, had been executed for profession of the
CathoHc faith alone. At the same time a European Jesuit was
President of the Board of Mathematics in the capital of China, and
congregations of Christians had been formed there and in half a
dozen other Chinese cities. Thirty years later a Chinese Catholic,
the celebrated Paul Siu, was Grand Colao, or Prime Minister, of
the Empire, and two other Catholics were Presidents of Supreme
Courts and another Viceroy of Lao Tong. The Jesuit Father Schall
was employed during twenty years in revising the Chinese calendar,
and on his death an elaborate monument was raised to his memory
in the name of the Emperor himself. The Mantchu conquest made
no change in the policy of the Chinese Government in this respect.
Catholic priests continued to direct the Imperial Academy of As-
tronomy in the time of Napoleon. In 1811 there were four large
Catholic churches in Pekin and over three hundred thousand Cath-
olics scattered through the Empire. The Chinese Christians and
their missioners had indeed persecutions to endure from time to
time. The Emperor Kea Kin in the present century deported four
Bishops and thirty priests to Canton and threatened death to the
teachers of Catholicity and exile to its professors. There were nu-
merous local persecutions at different times by Viceroys and Gov-
ernors as well as outrages by fanatical mobs, but Chinese history
shows no such persecutions as marked the annals of Japan in the
seventeenth century, or Corea or Annam in our own. The intolerance
which makes the abandonment of Mahometanism a capital crime in
every Mahometan State finds no parallel in China with all its dislike
of foreign ways. Under many of the Emperors Catholic converts
attained the highest offices, while in Russia to-day renunciation of
the national creed entails perpetual banishment, and in England to
the close of the eighteenth century it involved loss of property as
well as political rights.

With these facts before us we are not warranted in describing
the Chinese as more intolerant in religious matters than Western
races have shown themselves to be. The Government is not Chris-
tian, but scarcely a Western nation professes to be guided by Chris-
tian principles in its policy to-day. The attitude of most of them
towards the Catholic Church is scarcely more favorable than that
of the Chinese Court, and often far less so. Within the last twenty-
five years the Catholics of Germany and Russia were deprived for
an indefinite time of all their Bishops, and the exercise of Catholic
worship was penal to any priest not licensed by the agents of the
Government. If the lives of missionaries and Christian converts
have been sacrificed at times by mob violence in China, similar events
are not unknown in our own land. The burning of the Ursuline-

The Western Powers and China. 17

Convent at Charlestown and the persistent refusal of the authorities
of Massachusetts either to compensate for the injury or punish the
rioters is as flagrant an instance of lawless brutality as any that can
be set against the Chinese Government or people.

The necessity of protecting the different missionaries who are
spreading through China in the name of religion is a plea that is
sometimes used to justify the aggression of foreign powers. The
gross hypocrisy of this motive on the part of infidel governments is
too patent. Germany and Russia to-day will not allow a Catholic
Jesuit or members of various other Catholic orders even to enter
their dominions. With what face can the representatives of these
powers demand of China a toleration for foreigners which they refuse
not only to foreigners, but to their own subjects ? As far as the win-
ning of the Chinese people to Christian belief is concerned, which,,
after all, is the only motive for true missionary work, this interfer-
ence of national governments in a work outside their sphere is far
more likely to hinder than to further it. From the time of Father
Ricci down to a few years ago the Catholic priests, who were the
only missioners in the Empire, accepted the chances of toleration
or persecution from the Chinese Government. They tried to con-
ciliate the authorities, as the Irish and English Catholics of the last
century strove to win toleration from the English Government, but
they made no call on their own governments, even when Catholic
ones, for protection. Father Perboyre and Father Clet were exe-
cuted seventy years ago by the Chinese tribunals, but the French
Missionary Society made no appeal for reprisal or even protection.
It would seem that a continuance of the same course offers the best
hope for the conversion of China. If its people refuse Christianity,
the loss is their's, but their refusal gives no warrant to Christians to
force the Gospel on them at the bayonet's point. Conversion must
be free or it is valueless.

Neither morality nor the interests of Christianity call for the vio-
lent destruction of the existing Chinese Empire. The material in-
terests of the world at large are scarcely less opposed to such a
course. That an enormous disturbance of men's minds and eco-
nomic conditions must follow is certain. What the result may be,
if Asia should be stirred to fighting fury, as France was in the last
century by the coalition of monarchs, passes calculation. We can
no more foretell it than the Duke of Brunswick could foresee Na-
poleon and Jena when issuing his Coblentz proclamation to the
French people.

That the European troops can put down any armed resistance that
the Chinese Government can now offer seems morally certain.
Since the first English invasion in 1840 the Chinese soldiery has
Vol. XXVI.— Sig. 2.

1 8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

been almost ludicrously unequal to meeting Europeans in battle, and
the late war with Japan showed little comparative advance yet made
by them. But that fact does not show that the Chinese are incapa-
ble of learning the trade of the modern soldier any more than the
others of Western civilization. The long despised Russian peas-
antry learned to become the foremost troops of Europe in ten years
of defeat at the hands of the Swedish Charles. The Chinese may
learn similarly, if the system of nagging and aimless warfare is con-
tinued indefinitely, or if a skilled head assume efficient control of
their government. Asiatic nature is as capable of change and even
of sudden revolution as European.

For centuries japan had been more hostile to European ideas than
China itself, while she regarded China as the model nation for gov-
ernment and culture. It is hardly thirty years since the Mikado's
government undertook to introduce the science of the West to its
people. Yet to-day, in China, the Japanese troops have been recog-
nized as at least the equals of the best soldiers of Europe and Amer-
ica in every military essential. That immobility is not a character-
istic of Asiatics is proved by the experience of Japan. There seems
no grounds to believe it distinctively Chinese more than Japanese.
The population of China is about ten times greater than Japan's.
The position Japan, with ten times her actual population, would hold
in the world is a suggestive consideration. The population of China
equals the whole European race combined. The Asiatic races out-
side the Empire — Hindoos, Annamites, Siamese, Burmans, Turks,
Persians, Arabs and Tartars — make up as large a population as
China has. The last forty years have seen projects of German unity
and Italian unity realized. Panslavism is being put forward as a
more formidable combination for realization in the near future. A
union of Asiatic races is not a remote possibility even now. It has
been formulated already by Russian public men. Prince Uch-
tomski, in a recent work pubHshed in St. Petersburg, asserts there
is scarcely any difference between Siberian and Chinese life, and he
adds : "Few Western Europeans have any idea of what the steady
advance of Russia across Asia means. We have blended with the
Asiatics on the ground of common feelings and common ideas.
This accord, on the most vital questions, makes it easy for us to deal
with them. We prize absolute monarchy as our greatest treasure,
and the peoples of all Asia have the same reverence for its idea.
W'e are true Asiatics to-day."

Russia, in fact, has always been as much Asiatic as European in
her national character and policy. "Scratch a Russian and you will
find a Tartar" was the old expression of the fact formulated by Na-
poleon. The original Duchy of Moscow was for two hundred years

The Western Powers and China. iq

a tributary of the Khans of the Golden Horde. The Grand Dukes
had to journey to Mongolia during that time to receive authority
only over their Slavonian subjects. When the Russians shook off
their dependence as the Mongolian power broke down, three-fourths
of what is now European Russia was occupied by Tartar races. The
Finns, who stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, were the
first race amalgamated. The Tartar Kingdoms of Kasan and Astra-
khan were conquered in the sixteenth century by John the Terrible,
but for a hundred and fifty years later the south of Russia was sub-
ject to the Tartars of the Crimea, themselves vassals of Turkey.
All these have been long absorbed in the Empire of the Czar, and
are officially described as Muscovites, but the Asiatic blood and dis-
position still remains even among the natives of European Russia.

The Russian advance in Asia has no parallel in the English con-
quest of India or in the stream of colonization across this continent.
It is a combination of both systems. The Tartars of Khiva or
Turkestan, the Circassians of the Caucasus, the Kalmucks of Siberia
have been conquered, as the Mahrattas were by Wellington or the
Sikhs by Gough; but when conquered, they have been enrolled
in the ranks of their Russian conquerors on an equal footing.
When Skobeleff was marching towards Merv, in Central Asia,
twenty years ago, his advance was formed of Mahometan Circas-
sians, who, themselves, had only submitted to Russia twenty years
earlier. A few months later Russian troops came into collision
with the Afghans at Pendjeh. The general commanding was a
Turkoman chief, who, with a commission, had received the Russian
name of Alikhanoff. The present Governor of Poland is the Circas-
sian Prince Imeritinski, whose father was an Asiatic chief. A late
Chancellor of the Empire and one of the most famous Russian gen-
erals veiled their native Armenian names of Melikan and Lazaran
under the European forms Melikoff and Lazareff. Men of Asiatic
and European origin are mingled in every part of the administration
of Russia, and members of the proudest Russian nobility boast of
their Tartar blood. Prince Uchtomski's assertion is strictly true.
Russia is as much, if not more, Asiatic than European.

What effect the Asiatic feeling of brotherhood will have on the
policy of Russia and Japan at the present crisis in China is not to be
easily settled. That any prolonged combination of the invading
powers will exist seems more than unlikely. Like the confederated
monarchs of the coalition against republicanism in France, each is
guided solely by private selfish interests, and the result is likely to
be the same. Neither France, Italy nor Austria, and still less Amer-
ica, has any prospect of gain from the dismemberment of the empire
even could it be effected. The German Emperor's ambition for an

20 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

empire beyond the sea may lead him to urge war, and even to seize
more territory on his own responsibility; but the good- will of his
Russian neighbor is too important a factor in his policy to be over-
looked. England's military power has been tried to an unexpected
length by the resistance of the South African Republics to conquest,^
and she can afford no army to cope with the problem of an invasion
of China. Her power is crippled for the time, as that of Prussia was
occupied in the last partition of Poland while Napoleon was form-
ing the armies that a few years later were to lay her prostrate at
Jena. In the meantime the continuance of hostilities without defi-
nite object or principle of justice threatens serious danger to the
world at large. The plunder of Tientsin and Pekin, the atrocities
already committed on thousands of unarmed peasants in the pre-
tended interests of civilization have carried modern warfare to the
methods of barbarism. At least they give us an idea of the cynical
brutaHty of the work so unctuously styled taking up the "white
man's burthen" by the cant of the day.

B. J. Clinch.

San Francisco, Cal.

THE IRISH POLICY OF CROMWELL AND THE COM-
MONWEALTH.

FOR practical purposes we might hold that the Republic was
mierged in Cromwell, but we shall endeavor to take his pre-
tence and the views expressed by all who had taken part in
the war against the King and the overturning of the monarchy that
the Republic was a real constitution of which Cromwell was at first
the most influential military officer and subsequently the supreme
Magistrate. The Intelligencer, the official or quasi-official organ of
the Commonwealth, in its issue announcing that Cromwell was
about to lead an army to Ireland, gives a curious challenge to the
Marquis of Ormond :^ "Have at you, my Lord of Ormond ; if you
cry Caesar we cry a Republic ; at the same time promising that he
will have foes to encounter, to defeat whom will be a feather in his
cap, and if defeated by them he will sustain no loss of reputation."
This is a valuable sidelight in view of the efifect aimed at in Carlyle's
edition of the "Letters and Speeches of Cromwell." Carlyle wishes
it to be understood that the state of things in Ireland defies the

1 James Butler, twelfth Earl of Ormond, had been raised to a marqnisate. Later
on he was made a duke.

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonwealth.

human intellect to grasp. Mr. Morley, evidently referring to the
passage, observes : "It has been said that no human intellect could
make a clear story of the years of triple and fourfold distraction in
Ireland from the rebellion of 1641 down to the death of Charles I.
Happily it is not necessary for us to attempt the task. Three re-
markable figures stand out conspicuously in the chaotic scene."
These are Ormond, Owen Roe O'Neil and the nuncio Rinuccini.
We think this very disappointing on the part of Mr. Morley, who
sees somewhat clearly that the events of that time, the war and the
social relations established at that time, constitute the Irish question
in its various aspects during two centuries and a half. We are glad
to recognize that he looks upon the condition of political and social
relations then set up as containing within themselves the elements
of disintegration. We go the length of saying that the condition of
aflfairs then brought about in Ireland was an anarchy. We miss
from it every element of order and of right. There was not even
the "order" that one might expect in a country newly planted with
soldiers among the remnant of a people spared to be their servants.
Martial law was the criminal jurisprudence, and the civil law — or
rather the control of private interests and claims — was in the juris-
•diction of commissioners whose statutes and precedents were their
own discretion. Such discretion is what a great judge called the
law of tyrants.

Beginning the chapter entitled "Cromwell in Ireland," Mr. Mor-
ley, we think, very fairly says that it is not enough to describe one
-who has the work of a statesman to do as "a veritable heaven's mes-
senger clad in thunder." Such descriptions since the publication
of Carlyle's biography have been doing their work of steeping intel-
lect and conscience in a kind of lethargy. It is hard to understand
how a man so balanced in mind and consistent in principle, to whom
difficult problems of government have come for solution and whose
maxims of policy approach to the Catholic ethic more nearly than
those of any man except his illustrious chief, Mr. Gladstone, would
allow himself to sink into the sort of lotos-eater's trance begotten of
the strange harmonies and discords of Carlyle. We shall examine
the evidence for the events, declining to take the latter's estimate of
authorities for the very sufficient reason that he is utterly unable to
deal with evidence. Mr. Morley is too gentle in suggesting that
this passage or that savors of rhetoric. We say rhetoric, like "the
creature wine," is good when not abused, but with Carlyle it does
duty for fact, for argument, as well as for morality. In this
paper we direct ourselves against Carlyle; for the philosophy of
hero-worship in which he finds the rules of conduct for Cromwell
and which is the standard by which this atrocity or that is to be vin-

22 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

dicated or explained away is the "misbirth" of his own morbid in-
tellect.

Mr. Morley, with an air of criticism, quotes a passage for which we
shall find a significant parallel, but the criticism is almost apologetic.
He is like an advocate who has the court against him and which he
tries to bring round by hesitating insinuation. The court in this
instance is the Anglo-Saxon race, or, if you like it better, the Eng-
lish-speaking world. Mr. Morley is an able and honest gentleman,
and quotes the following from Carlyle as if there were something in
it : "I could long for an Oliver without rhetoric at all ; I could long
for a Mahomet whose persuasive eloquence with wild flashing heart
and scimitar is : 'Wretched mortal, give up that ; or by the Eternal,
thy Maker and mine, I will kill thee ! Thou blasphemous, scandal-
ous Misbirth of Nature, is not even that the kindest thing I can do
for thee, if thou repent not and alter in the name of Allah ?' " Mr.
Morley's censuring this dithyrambic of ferocity is a soft hint that
such sonorous oracles do not escape the guilt of rhetoric.

Let it be read in connection with the insane outburst with which
Carlyle meets the possible denial of a statement for which he has no
authority except Ludlow, whom he himself denounces as a valueless
one. The statement in Ludlow's Memoirs that the garrison in
Drogheda was mostly English is accepted by Carlyle as "absolutely
certain" because it suits him. So he goes on in his superior manner,
threatening vague penalties if Irishmen dare to question this abso-
lute certainty : "To our Irish friends we ought to say likewise that
this garrison of Tredah consisted in good part of Englishmen. Per-
fectly certain this ; and therefore let 'the bloody hoof of the Saxon*
forbear to continue itself on that matter. At its peril !" Then fol-
lows something like a promise of a Cromwell visitation. Well, the
Irish peasant has a phrase, "The Curse of Cromwell !" in which he
concentrates his sense of a calamity beyond the power of language
to express. At the thought of it his mind is a blank with regard to
all other horrors. The wars of Elizabeth, living in the cold and piti-
less pages of Spenser and Carew to chill the heart and appal the
mind, have no place in the national memory in the presence of the
later horror. Whatever has happened since, the famines of two
centuries, by which time can be dated as by Olympiads are shadows,
the penal laws are a mere party cry at an election, the land war and
the incalculable misery of evictions phases of a social crisis, the
dragooning of 'gy and '98, in comparison with which the raids of
Claverhouse were the sports of children, is only a holiday inspiration ;
but the Curse of Cromwell is an inheritance of woe to which every
child is born in Ireland.

We shall try to give the true aspect of Cromwell and the time ;

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonwealth.

we shall give it as a protest against the notion that strength, success
and wealth are superior to morality; and, above all, we wish to at-
tempt it because the political interests and the reputation of Irish-
men are involved in the matter. Were it not for such considerations
we should not think of marring the intellectual jubilee of the Eng-
lish-speaking world, synchronizing though it does with a manifesta-
tion of imperialism over the grave of Gladstone. It would be im^
possible to deny to Cromwell some of the qualities which belong to
greatness. His rise in life, to which we shall allude by and by,
could not have happened without certain moral and mental gifts
superior to the common. As surely as Napoleon laid hold of and
controlled in his own interests the passions let loose by the French
Revolution, so surely has Cromwell seized on and guides those the
Great Rebellion unchained in England. But we cannot see in him
a commanding intellect entrusted with an eternal mission any more
than in Attilla, any more than in those destroying meteors from the
East which filled the world for the brief span of a life, leaving noth-
ing behind but blood and ashes. In some sort of way Mr. Carlyle
looks upon him as a northern god with the hammer of Thor in his
hand. It is true it fell with crushing force on Ireland; it fell on
Scotland also. We are very much of opinion that in neither country
would he have ground opposition to powder were it not that there
were circumstances of fatuity, overwrought zeal, unwisdom and
jealousy, which fought as the stars fought against Sisera. In Ire-
land there was the additional misfortune that at the moment Or-
mond seemed disposed to honestly avail himself of the military
talents of O'Neil, that officer was on his deathbed.

While not agreeing quite with Mr. Morley's opinion of Ormond,
we are far from accepting Carlyle's implied judgment that he was
not a man whose statements could be relied on. Any statement of
bare fact coming from him is trustworthy. He was an honorable
man in his way ; he was the most splendid gentleman of his time ;
he had civil talents of a high order, but we think he was totally
devoid of military talent. His coming back to Ireland in 1648-9
was unfortunate. His double-dealing had ruined the country ; but
taking the supreme command as the King's viceroy over men who
had so many grounds for distrusting him, and not possessing the
training and experience necessary for successful operations against
the greatest general produced by the Civil War in England, could
have no effect but that of ineffectual resistance to the splendidly
appointed army of Cromwell.

We put aside the hazy notions about this struggle which recent
writers adopt from the pronouncement of Carlyle already cited m
this article. It is so easy to shelter oneself under a plea of the im-

€4 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

possibility of unraveling the evil, and by this acquiring the privilege
of ventilating theories and inventing facts, that writers of a certain
kind are tempted to pursue that course. Your mind is the mill and
your inner consciousness the tender of the raw material. The fact is
the vast information to be had from Carte's "Life of James Duke of
Ormond" would of itself enable one to follow the whole war in Ire-
land from 1641 — Mr. Morley's figure — until its termination in 1653.
Carte, who is by no means friendly to the old Irish, who for that
matter looks at everything with the eyes of Ormond, is described by
Carlyle as "Jacobite Carte," Why? Simply because he puts the
deeds of Cromwell in their genuine colors. It must be recollected
that we are Christian men, now judging men brought up in a Chris-
tian land, who executed the dictates of a policy of extermination
two centuries and a half ago on a people professing the Christian
religion and who were not one whit less civilized than their fellow-
subjects in England. We mentioned Ormond. Take him as a
representative of the nobility of the Pale. All the praise Mr. Mor-
ley can give his statesmanship and character we can give to his ex-
ternals— to whatever comes under the head of manner and equipage
and to his character in those passages where his idolatrous king-cult
did not interfere to warp his judgment. In his progresses from his
seats to Dublin Castle six carriages and six accompanied him,
and with these an escort of gentlemen of his own name, a dozen
servants out of livery belonging to good families, a little army of
servants in livery. His valet had orders to lay out a fresh suit of
silk or velvet each day. This was when he was a young man in
Ireland. Very little after he was the greatest figure at Whitehall.
When we have him in 1649 he was a pauper, but with the thirty
pistoles he brought from the Continent as his military chest he did
not despair of his master's cause.

Take a representative of the old Milesian nobility. The Earl of
Thomond's state was hardly in any respect inferior to Ormond's.
We have the authority of a foreigner for the statement that his parks,
gardens, castles and so on were not surpassed in Europe. He
speaks of one deer park as containing three thousand head, we
think in 1646, when the pinch of the long war must have been
sharply felt by men in all conditions of life. Thomond was a color-
less sort of magnifico, unable to take sides either with the Confed-
erate Catholics or with the King, but that he was a great prince
there can be no doubt, if for no other reason, because his terrible
Protestant kinsman, Murrough of the Burnings, who looked up to
no one else, looked up to him. If one reads the accounts of the pro-
ceedings at Kilkenny he can only arrive at one conclusion, that the
Catholic lords and commons and the Catholic bishops assembled

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonwealth. 25

there were able and educated gentlemen with a high sense of public
duty and a conception of political morality rare not merely then
but which is now to be found only in a few instances in Britain— in
Mr. Morley himself and, much as we differ from him, in Mr. Arthur
Balfour and one or two more. Now we submit that the slaughter-
ing of men of this kind^ and the transplanting of them with adjuncts
of incredible suffering, the shipping them off to the Barbadoes, the
extremes of military violence offered to their wives or sisters or
daughters, sons, children of all ages, even to the infants, ''lest nits
should become lice," we submit deeds of this kind must be judged
not as though Cromwell were a Mahomet ranting at "scandalous
Misbirths of Nature," but as an Englishman of the seventeenth cen-
tury exercising unlimited power over the lives and fortunes of his
countrymen.

There is too much of this factitious use of measures, this history-
book handicapping of men, principles and events. Why should
James of Ormond be declared "incapable of pardon," though he was
a Protestant? Why the Lord Primate Bramhall? Why should
every Protestant bishop, dean, archdeacon and dignitary? Mr.
Morley does not seem to have reflected on these points, though we
admit his principles of toleration compel him to condemn Crom-
well's murdering of Irish priests and friars, and he does so on the
same ground as he would the killing of Protestants by Catholic au-
thorities. But the omission of this feature in the tyranny of the
Commonwealth or its agent or master, Cromwell, is unfair. The
ferocity of Cromwell was an ingrained or inborn instinct to which
the gloomy fanaticism of his sect, fed on the bloody commands and
examples of the Old Testament, gave a half-believed-in,half-doubted-
of sanction. The inexorable and. scheming policy wrought out in
the death of Charles I. is in its own chamber of psychological study
a crime portentous like the massacre in Drogheda. The point we
have in view is that there is an abnormal cruelty like Cromwell's, or
like that of the more desperate Cameronians, which, while seemingly
tinged with insanity, is the instinct of a savage egotism. There
was something of it in Napoleon's shooting of the Due d'Enghien
in the fosse of Vincennes, a great deal of it in the murders of the
best and noblest in Rome by those emperors who are the fables of
history. The persons in whose blood others would shrink from im-
bruing their hands would be the selection of those egotists. Now
like to that eclecticism in morbid ferocity we hold is Cromwell's
universal, indiscriminate massacre of soldiers in cold blood and non-
combatants without regard to age or sex. It is a ferocious vanity.
Accordingly, we are disposed to regard the "veritable Heaven's

"" 2 Knocking on the head is CromweH's own phrase.

26 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

messenger clad in thunder" as the vulgar and brutal ruffian he was
looked upon by his contemporaries, who were certainly as good
judges as Carlyle. Is contemporary judgment of no value? If so,
the man who struck the most fatal blow at the prestige of royalty
was John Hampden — we mean at that sort of glamor which, not-
withstanding the conflicts between Charles and his parliaments,
made his person sacred almost to the last. Not till the madmen of
the Old Testament covenants and sacraments against backsliding
Kings and their idolatrous wives became ascendant in the army was
there a thought that threatened the life of Charles. The Cavaliers
looked upon Hampden's action for years after his death as the line
of conduct most disastrous to the monarchy, and yet not one of them
during the entire time spoke of him otherwise than in terms of the
highest respect. From the day Cromwell first outraged common
decency in the House of Commons in a violent rambling invective
until the day he slew the King, then all through the usurpation and
until his seat went to that son of his whom Macaulay calls a foolish
Ishboseth, he was the subject of contemptuous lampoons, the object
of nicknames and the scorn and contempt of honorable men. They
thought, rightly or wrongly, at the Restoration that the only way some
atonement could be made to justice outraged, loyalty made a crime,
antiquity dishonored and King, Church and State trampled under
the feet of lawlessness and irreligion was by gibbeting the remains of
the principal delinquent. It was an indescribably weak and con-
temptible act, but it helps our judgment that this Carlylean demi-
god was after all only a badly moulded image of brass with feet of
clay.

We shall proceed now, as far as our limits will permit, to correct
the historical distortion by which Carlyle makes State papers, con-
temporary documents of all kinds, the consensus of opinion to his
own time an elaborate lie and his imagination the source of truth.
Certain French publicists in what they regarded as the reactionary
day of Charles X. began to discover in the great English Rebellion,
of which the presiding genius was Cromwell, that movement of
constitutional aspirations and needs in which their own Revolu-
tion was conceived. But not until Carlyle said the word did the his-
torical or political philosophy of Britain regard him as one of the
lights of progress. To examine his claim to the title of a benefactor
of his kind a slight glance at his early history may be of advantage.
He was when a young man reckless, violent and dissipated. It is
unnecessary to repeat the things told of him on the Cavalier side.
He became a bankrupt in business, and then turned to religion, as-
suming the severest pharasaism of the Puritans. He entered Parlia-
ment, and in one or two speeches justified the hopes of his constitu-

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commmwealth,

ents that no law, no respect for usage, no regard for the religion of
the State would restrain him in the expression of their sentiments.
Certainly some very strange persons were sent to the Long Parlia-
ment in that swing of the political pendulum which carried hot-
headed and unreasoning men to the extreme from the monarchical
principle. Events came to a crisis; the prospect of civil war was
close at hand.

Charles directed that the Irish would recall some regiments that
had been disbanded, enroll new regiments, reform their own Par-
liament and provide for the redress of the grievances concerning
which they had been for a long time in treaty with him and for
which they had paid him an enormous sum of money. This is the
true statement of the origin of what Mr. Morley describes as "the
savage aboriginal frenzy of the Irish." The movement was to be
kept a secret, but one whose name has had hard measure in the unfair
histories of the time became acquainted with it. This is Sir Phelim
O'Neil. He was a member of the bar and of Parliament, a man
of large estate and had been educated, if we mistake not, a Protestant
by the Court of Wards. Some of his followers heard of the King's
designs, communicated them, and all who received the inteUigence
felt that they were likely to serve their own, their master's interests
and the King's. They rose up to recover possession of their lands,
and it is plain as anything can be that the settlers fled for the most
part, and none were slain unless those who offered resistance.' The
government of the Lord Justices was in a panic in proportion to the
terrible cruelties it had been exercising all over the country and even
in the districts around Dublin. Though these officials had been
appointed on the King's behalf as representing his viceroy, they
were employing his troops in the service of the Parliament, tortur-
ing loyal gentlemen in the chamber of the Castle and murdering or
otherwise harassing their tenants. In point of fact, it was at this
time from the Council Chamber the secret leaked out that the Cath-
olic religion was to be suppressed and the Catholic proprietors trans-
ported to the North American settlements ; and this was to be done
irrespective of descent. The knowledge of the design more than
anything else forced the Catholics of the Pale into an alliance with
their co-religionists. If they had no such fear we are very clearly
of opinion they would be as ready to hunt down the old Irish and
their clansmen as were their fathers or grandfathers under Carew
and Mountjoy in the reign of Elizabeth. Recovering from the panic
the Lord Justices directed measures of appalling vengeance against
the insurgents. For these, as was only natural, there were deeds of

3 The case of Lord Caulfield is the strong one agamst ^'^eil. Caidfield was
shot without his knowledge. If O'Neil were guilty, why was he offered pardon
by the Parliament in 1649?

28 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

a like character committed in retaliation. The outbreak was put
down. Not for three years after was there an attempt to make a
charge of general massacre. There was nothing of the kind hinted
in the reports of the Irish government to the Parliament, but about
the year 1644 Temple compiled for purposes of State the invention
that three hundred thousand Protestants were massacred in cold
blood "or otherwise" during the insurrection in Ulster.

We fully recognize the sharp line of distinction between the action
of the Confederate Catholics and the abortive outbreak in Ulster.
That the insurgents engaged in that enterprise were disavowed by
the virtual Parliament of the Kingdom of Ireland, we mean the
Confederation, proves nothing more than the severe and jealous
judgment of men of high rank on the proceedings of peasants under
dispossessed and factious leaders acting without authority. The use
made of the outbreak in England, the declared purpose of the King
that he would go to Ireland to put it down,* clearly proved to the
Confederates that their policy should be one guided by prudence,
resting on sound principles, in accordance with public usages and
in support of the institutions of the kingdom. That Sir Phelim
O'Neil was not believed to be the sanguinary ruffian the Parlia-
ment authorities depict him is clear from the fact that he was one
of the Commons in the Confederation, and a little after he was mar-
ried to a daughter of General Preston, who possessed his own share
of the Norman's pride.

The war which the Confederation began early in 1642 was carried
on with varying fortune and under unfortunately divided counsels
until the death of the King forced Ormond to see what he ought to
have seen at first, that these men had other interests in the struggle
as well as the reestablishment of the royal authority. Owing to
Ormond's intrigues and his influence with the section of the Con-
federates belonging to the Pale, Preston spent his time moving about
Leinster, Castlehaven levying contributions and fox hunting here
and there through two provinces, Clanrickarde for the King practi-
cally helping the Parliamentary generals in Connaught, Murrough
of the Burnings sometimes striking effectual blows for the Par-
liament all through Munster and in the adjoining parts of the other
provinces, while Monroe with a large army of veteran Scotch was
living on the people of Ulster until his power was broken at Benburb
by Owen Roe O'Neil. For this playing at cross purposes Ormond
is responsible ; and Mr. Morley, as well as Irish Catholics of literary
mark and historical acumen, are clearly and distinctly wrong in

* It was proved by the Marauis of Antrim that he and others were commis-
sioned by the King to effect the diversion we mentioned, but it was foiled by
the leaking out of the secret.

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonwealth.

29,

attributing to him statesmanship much higher than the routine ex-
perience of Dublin Castle.

However, the period is clear enough to our view and the men who
adorned and darkened it. Certainly Cromwell does not come out of
a mystery, out of the twilight of history, however skilfully Carlyle
weaves his cloud and casts his shadows. In the turmoil of civil war
the crazy member of Parliament,^ the bankrupt brewer or butcher of
Huntingdon or both might find himself at the top. In the turning
of the world upside down he would be like the lawless raiders of the
Border, who were best served, to use their expression, when the
underside was uppermost. It is in vain Carlyle tells us, or in vain
Mr. Morley seems to agree with him, that no one can understand
the political and social circumstances and interests from 1642 to the
landing of Cromwell. They are unhappily plain enough and have
their counterparts in the story of the unhappy land. Ever and ever,,
even at this writing, in a small way, we find the jealous, the ambi-
tious, the covetous endeavoring to defeat the work of reconciliation.
There have been men so saddened from age to age that they bowed
their heads in despair, smitten by a sense that a hand was against
them so strong and pitiless that genius became powerless, devotion
an idle sacrifice.

In estimating the year 1649 we do not need the "liquid lightning""
in which Carlyle clothes Cromwell to comprehend it. His talk is
declamation through a tragic mask, helping the reverberating hol-
low monotone to the "vague heads" he addresses. There is no
sense in the rotund rhapsodical period by means of which he stuns
us with "words," "blot," cloud "without a feature" as descriptive
terms of the condition of the country when Cromwell for a brief
terrible moment rends the veil and shows the heaving billows.
The whole is a map easily examined in the authorities of the time ;
and for the hallucination that has fallen like a spell on so much of
the intellect of the United Kingdom and America, Carlyle is the arch-
image accountable.

There is something attractive in a theory, even though untenable,
under which we are invited to look at an historic personage in a new
aspect. We do not think a more financially successful book could
appear than one aiming with ability and art at the reversal of the
verdict of history. Indubitably circumstances favored the solemn,
tragic and quasi-mythical treatment employed by Carlyle. Crom-
well, without undue exaggeration, could be puffed up into a Hebrew
judge commissioned like Josue to conquer the land flowing with
milk and honey promised for an inheritance. There would be a

8 He was regarded by the Court party and the bulk of the opposition aa a
vulgar, irresponsible fanatic, without the power of speaking coherently.

30 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

rough force about such a parallelism to which the Biblical turn of
your common Englishman and your middle class Englishman would
go forth. This investiture, familiar as the Sunday clothes in the
meeting house, would make him a tutelary power in the Noncon-
formist household, by which political and religious problems would
find a more apt solution, a more worldly or wide-awake one than the
remote dreaminess which carries the Scotchman past the remnant on
the hillside, past the first Reformers, past Apostles, past all to the
Theocracy. Incidentally we have but the radical difference between
the English and Scotch sectary, and we only hope that the Liberals
of Scotland will never entertain the idea that the man whose hand
was so heavy on their country could have been a friend of liberty
any more than the first Edward, who brought them "chains and
slavery."

But a Biblical hero was too closely human, too much within the
measure of mankind, despite his inspirations and enthusiasms ; so we
must take a flight to the desert with Carlyle, a hegira, for a new
creed ; and then to the thunderous mountain walkers of the North,
gods of the ice floe and the regions of the mist. To such a concep-
tion Cromwell bears as much resemblance as the King in a play
does to a real potentate prescinding from the sentiments which in
the player King are often very genuine. Or, better still, he is as
like the compound of prophet-sheik, Hebrew Judge and heathen
world-crusher as any strong-willed, huge-nosed Anglo-Saxon of to-
day might be to Osiris blended with Apollo. We must come down
from the fantastic world in which Carlyle has placed Cromwell to
say that nearly two centuries of political and social degradation
loaded the English laborer with a weight unmatched in France from
the time La Bruyere gave his picture of the peasant until the latter
echoed the cry of barricades bursting from ensanguined towns;
and this burden the English laborer owed to Cromwell and the Com-
monwealth.

The reaction from their tyranny is to be measured by the frenzy of
delight with which the people hailed the Restoration. They went
into the opposite extreme of surrendering every right of freemen to
the Crown, the landed interest and the Church. The enslavement
of the laborer, the extinction of the small proprietor and the yeoman
followed. Englishmen, with a curious inconsistency and injustice,
were determined to efface all the marks of Cromwell's despotism in
England and to maintain in their integrity all its marks in Ireland.

The ghastly, immoral and bewildering theories of Carlyle are pre-
sented in the language of a morbid conceit qualified by art. They
antedate the facts which are to verify them and are in harmony with
the facts when these are submitted to refinement in the alchemy of

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonwealth. 31

his mind. That Cromwell, like Frederick, should be the man of his
time, he is fashioned, as we have seen, into one clothed with a divine
mission. Ambition, hypocrisy and cruelty are transformed into
public spirit, prudence and sagacity.

A hundred Irish women are butchered after the battle of Naseby.
Mr. Carlyle tells us : "There were taken here a good few 'ladies of
quality in carriages' and above a hundred Irish ladies not of quality,
tattery camp followers with long skean knives about a foot in length,
upon whom I fear the ordinance against Papists pressed hard this
day." It will scarcely be believed that there is no authority for the
statement that these poor creatures had knives. The whole passage
with regard to the Irish women is unfair and the excuse suggested
for the butchery is untrue. In the first place there were Irish
ladies of quality, wives of officers, among those slain; the others
were the wives of the private soldiers. Schomberg, forty years later,
speaking of the custom of the Irish soldiers in taking their wives and
infants with them, remarked it had in it more of love than policy,
a different conception from Carlyle's.

The ordinance referred to was a decree of the Parliament com-
manding the murder of Irish Papists taken in arms anywhere in
England. A similar enactment was made by the Scotch and faith-
fully executed ; in fact, there was an agreement to that effect between
the Scotch and their English allies, but the effect of the ordinance
was sadly blunted when Prince Rupert began to shoot Parlia-
mentary prisoners for every Irishman killed in cold blood. So much
for the divine character of the ordinance against Irish Papists. Now,
at the end of two centuries and a half, we must confess that among
the many errors of the Confederate Catholics not the least impolitic
was their allowing the rules of civilized war to foes who spared
neither the prisoner taken in battle nor the peaceful inhabitants of
the country. The terrible game of reprisal could alone appeal to
men who set no measure to their ferocity except the sense of their
own safety.

The Confederates had overwhelming proofs that the extirpation
of their religion was the aim of the English Parliament and its
officers in Ireland. It is idle for Carlyle to deny that a policy of ex-
termination had been determined on, or suggest it as an invention of
Clarendon's, the man least likely of any in England to trouble him-
self with the making of a fiction which might be injurious to the
Cromwellian Settlement in Ireland, which he regarded with the full-
est approval and to maintain which he employed his influence and
counsel as the first Minister of Charles II. It is impossible to under-
stand Carlyle's language with regard to Clarendon in this instance.
He handles the point of extermination in this way: "There goes

32 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

a wild story which owes its first place in history to Clarendon, I

think, who is the author of many such : How the Parliament at one

time had decided to 'exterminate' all the Irish population ; and then

finding this would not answer had contented itself with packing-

them all into the province of Connaught, there to live upon the

moor lands ; and so had pacified the sister island." One without

very much difficulty can trace the operation of Carlyle's mind

through this passage, the appearance of caution in "I think," and so

forth, the sneer at Clarendon as a person easily imposed on or ready

to invent or give currency to all manner of tales damaging to the

Commonwealth. But he warms to the work and so the authorship,

the creation is fastened on Clarendon by a method which if it be

generally imitated will put an end to history. He says : ''My Lord

had the story all his own way for about a hundred and fifty years,

and during that time has set afloat through vague heads (sic) a

great many things."

We have no exceptional admiration for Edward Hyde, Earl of
Clarendon, but we shall cite one or two passages from Macaulay's.
"History of England," in which the apologist for the great Rebellion
as well as the Revolution of 1688, presents his estimate of Hyde :
"He had during the first year of the Long Parliament been honor-
ably distinguished among the Senators who had labored to redress
the grievances of the nation. . . . When the great schism took
place, when the reforming party and the conservative party appeared
marshaled against each other, he with many wise and good men took
the conservative side. ... It must be added that he had a
strong sense of moral and religious obligation. . . . But his
temper was sour, arrogant and impatient of opposition." We sub-
mit this judgment of Hyde's character and disposition would be suf-
ficient to dispose of Carlyle's "I think" mounting up the steps of
possibility to certainty ; but the policy of extermination was so much
and so absolutely one of the commonplaces of the time and the
failure of it so conspicuously due to circumstances too strong for
the actors that one wonders how it could be questioned. The cour-
age of Carlyle is undeniable.

The fact is that the money obtained for the prosecution of the
war in Ireland from the beginning of the troubles with the King
was advanced by a number of persons called adventurers, who re-
ceived in return debentures on the estates to be confiscated. There
were several loans of the kind and distinctly recognized classes of
adventurers according to priority. To these were added the officers
and soldiers, to whom had been given debentures on Irish land for
their arrears of pay. Lord Clare, in his most remarkable speech in
1800 in support of the Union, stated that almost the entire soil of the

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonivealth. 33

country then changed hands and was parceled out among the repre-
sentatives of the ''two hundred or more sects" which "then infested
England." But we cUnch the argument by saying Cromwell was
himself one of the deputation from Parliament in 1649 to the Guild-
hall to ask for an additional loan. In answer to the question in what
manner the war was to be carried out, the Chief Baron Wild replied
to the city authorities : "It will be by rooting out the Papists from
the land and planting it with Protestants." Either Carlyle was
culpably ignorant of this or he more culpably suppressed the knowl-
edge of it and rode oflf on his imaginary combat in the lists with
Clarendon. He himself supplies evidence enough that Cromwel!
went out with a mission of punishment, of revenge which should be
ample and monumental. In fact, in his speech to the soldiers at
Dublin a few days after landing he said that they were to war upon
the Canaanites, and as the people of God warred for the promised
land and against idolatry, they were to carry on the war in the coun-
try to which they had come.

Cromwell entered on his work in a way that deserved success if
there were no God, no moral government of the world. Within
two days after he sailed he cast anchor in Dublin Bay. Dublin had
been surrendered to the Parliament by Ormond rather than that it
should fall into the hands of the Confederates, whom he was now
leading against Cromwell. It served as a base for the latter, who set
out for Drogheda with a splendidly appointed army of twelve thou-
sand men over and above the forces under the other Parliamentary
generals in Ireland, and who might be trusted to watch the Irish
armies scattered through the provinces. The fleet of ninety-two
vessels sailed along the coast in sight of the army. Its business was
to maintain supplies and help in the battering of the seaport towns.

On the 3d of September he was before Drogheda. On the loth
a furious cannonade made two breaches in the south wall, wide and
practicable as the King's highways. The steeple of St. Mary's on
that side of the town had fallen on the 9th. Eight hundred picked
troops mounted one of the breaches as a forlorn hope. After a
desperate struggle the forlorn hope was flung back on their lines,
leaving its colonel dead in the breach. At the third assault Crom-
well, at the head of the entire reserve, hurled himself into the breach
and forced his way after hard fighting. As the night fell the whole
army, horse and foot, were in the streets, the defenders falling back
step by step to the Mill mount, where soon a ring of fire and steel
girdled them — fully ten thousand men to one-fifth of the number.

It is hardly desirable to proceed further, the particulars are too
horrible, and the substance of the defense and subsequent carnage
is presented fairly enough by Mr. Morley. One or two incidents

34 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

we shall note, as they illustrate Carlyle's contempt for evidence
which does not suit him ; but the considerations that are important
in view of the line of defense or palliation taken by the worshipers
of Cromwell we must not lose sight of. We have already intimated
the value we set upon the plea that his mission and the dis-
tance of that primitive age from this can oust the standard of
modern ethics from jurisdiction. We say in passing, Mr. Morley
is hardly fair in introducing what he calls the ''contention,"'
that the slaughter in Drogheda was no worse than some of the worst
acts of those commanders in the Thirty Years' War whose names
stand out as by-words of savagery. He admits that such extenua-
tion is dubious. Why, there is no earthly comparison ; there is not
a common factor between the atrocities in Drogheda and the cruelties
inflicted now and then, on one side and the other, during the Thirty
Years' War. The acts that stand out as written in crimson letters
in that war have been always looked on with horror, and viewed as
a warning to Christian men how careful they should be in permit-
ting religion to enter the domain of international policy. But in
all these instances the savageries were unpremeditated in a manner —
that is to say, they were the result of the brutal passions and utter
unrestraint from moral principle which arise during a long con-
tinued war. The English army in Spain as late as the nineteenth
century went through a carnival fairly diabolical in the sack of
Badajos, yet no one would dream of trying the soldiers of the
Peninsula in the same court with the God-fearing troops of the
Parliament,'^ carrying out the fixed policy of that body and the ex-
press commands of their general. It was in no sense of the word
military license ; it was an indiscriminate fury against the Irish, sur-
passing that of the Israelites when they entered the Promised Land.
It is a problem difficult enough to understand, but there is so much
in the history of English warfare resembling it that we must leave
the defenders of English aggression to explain the facts. When a
people are to be hunted down preparatory to the acquisition of their
territory and the confiscation of their property, libels are flung out
broadcast. Humanity and the progress of civilization are the ex-
cuse for the violation of human and divine laws. The wars of Eliza-
beth in Ireland, the piracies of the merchant-adventurers in her
reign, the conquest of India, the subjugation of Africans are chap-
ters of the policy which asserted itself in the massacre of Drogheda.
Such things are done in obedience to a law higher than the rights of
weak peoples. This is the explanation, however it may hurt British
Pharisaism.

« The exact words are "as is contended." 7 There is one wickedness of which
the Parliamentary troops must be acquitted.

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonwealth. 35

The commander at Drogheda, an English Cavalier who had served
with distinction in the Thirty Years' War, placed himself at the head
of three hundred men on a steep mound after the breach was won.
This position is described by Cromwell as "very strong and of diffi-
cult access." It could have been taken only at the cost of several
hundreds of lives. This was the consideration on which Sir John
Aston and his band were induced to surrender on promise of quarter.
They were immediately put to death— Aston's body most frightfully
hacked — "chopped in pieces," as if the one-legged old Cavalier of
Edgehill was the special object of their detestation and vengeance.*
The subsequent order for the slaughter of the men driven to the
northern quarter of the town Cromwell himself palliates as given "in
the heat of action." The plea does not hold water. If the Canaan-
ites were to be exterminated, the heat of action was not necessary
to justify the divine command. If no Irish were to be spared on ac-
count of the Ulster massacre, the heat of action is beside the issue.
The truth is that Cromwell did not believe either in the Ulster mas-
sacre or the inspiration from on high, but the savage nature of his
youth was strong in age. How could he believe in the massacre or
the inspiration ? He had been in treaty for an alliance with O'Neil,
which was broken off on the reappearance of Ormond in Ireland
to make that "peace" with the Confederates by which a politic name
is given to the union of the purely Royalist and the Catholic interest
— a "peace" which his master had desired from the beginning. The
steps of the alliance between Cromwell and O'Neil are clear. It is
another question how far Cromwell was sincere, but the negotia-
tions had unquestionably reached a definite stage when we find
Munroe ordered by the Parliament to supply O'Neil with powder.®
Now when we remember that O'Neil represented the extreme Cath-
olic interest — what Mr. Morley calls the ultramontane in a connec-
tion which shows he has not realized the truly national character of
that interest — we can measure pretty accurately the depth of Crom-
well's conviction that he was clothed in thunder to destroy the Irish
Amorrhite or Misbirth of Nature, or however else his policy may be
described in the shifting language of his admirers commenting on
his own rather crimson text.

The reality of the belief of a massacre in 1641 and the justice of
punishment for it is equally hollow considered side by side with the
negotiations mentioned. There are other grounds to establish the
fact that however industriously the tale of such a massacre was cir-
culated, there was no one in authority who believed it. The report

8 Strafford had a high opinion of Aston's qualities as a leader; and as the reader
will remember, Strafford himself was one of the first vi-tims of the great IJebel-
lion in England, if not the first. » Murrough of the Burnings intercepted the
convoy on the way to O'Neil's camp, Murrough was a Royalist at this time.

36 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

had served its purpose by throwing the counsels of the King's sup-
porters, Catholic and Royalist, in Ireland into confusion, and by forc-
ing the King into the appearance at least of hostility to his Irish sup-
porters. If an alliance with O'Neil were to be finally effected, the
men who invented the report could disavow it and punish their sub-
ordinates for libels dangerous to the public interest.

We can do no better than refer the reader to Mr. Morley's chapter
in the June number of the Century for some particulars of the sack of
Drogheda. Of more importance than the blood-curdling tale is the
proof that Carlyle affords, in his account of it, of his inability or un-
willingness to abandon a preconceived theory. We have spoken of
his insistance in the teeth of evidence that we must hold that the mas-
sacred garrison of Drogheda was largely English. Would the reader
be surprised to learn that Cromwell gives the list of the regiments de-
fending Drogheda, and they are Irish to a man? The document must
have been before Carlyle ; it is absurd to suppose a man compiling
from the works of the individual whom he is to paint as a more than
ordinary hero for the worship of this and future ages could overlook
a document in itself interesting and connected with the most severely
censured episode of his subject's life. We will not labor this point.
The indignation we feel compels us to pass from it ; but we see those
regiments led by the Norman Irishman of the Pale, by the gentle-
man of Milesian descent from beyond the Pale ; we see the yeoman
of Meath or from the meadows of the Upper Liffey fall side by side
with the Munster clansman, the clansman from the Celtic parts of
Leinster, Sir James Dillon's tenants from Mayo and Roscommon.
In the sacrament of blood we witness the single hour of union since
the long and desolating war began. We hope from that commin-
gled blood of the two thousand victims on the altar of their coun-
try the instinct and the passion of a love may spring that shall yet
repair the past.

The "knocking on the head" of the officers who for five days, un-
daunted by the terrible scenes during the time, defended the two re-
maining gate towers, is told by Mr. Morley in the graphic words of
Cromwell ; but there are one or two matters which escape him, and-
these, in pursuance of our purpose to hold Carlyle up in his genuine
colors, we cannot leave aside. The townspeople had taken refuge
in St. Peter's Church. The troops enter through window and bat-
tered door, each soldier bearing as a buckler an infant on his left
arm. Up to the galleries so protected they ascend ; having flung the ■
bucklers over the wall, and then goes on the slaying, slaying, matron,
maid, old man and youth in one red holocaust.

Carlyle speaks contemptuously of a Captain a Wood, an officer in
Ingoldsby's regiment, who was about to take compassion on a.

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonwealth. 37

young girl, evidently of high rank and great beauty from the de-
scription. We do not quite mean that the philosopher of Chelsea
finds fault with Wood's weakness, but the story was not worth tell-
ing. This is the idea. We shall take the liberty of giving it, pre-
mising that Wood was a brother of the great Oxford scholar, An-
thony Wood. The latter mentions that it was frequently narrated
to the family and among friends by the captain as an experience
of the Irish war. We think it too valuable a side-light on the homo-
geneity of the Biblical religion of the two hundred sects to whom
Popery was an idolatrous abomination to be lost sight of.

In the vaults of St. Peter's the rank and fashion of the town
sought concealment. When the church was made a shambles, the
soldiers descended to the vaults — pike, sword and gun do their
work. Among those who were being slaughtered there was a girl,
who falls on her knees to Wood. "She was a most handsome virgin,
arrayed in costly and gorgeous apparel." With tears and prayers
she begged he would save her life. We resume Wood's account:
"And being stricken with a profound pity, he took her under his
arm, went with her out of the church, with intention to put her
over the works to shift for herself ; but a soldier perceiving his in-
tentions," thrust his sword through her. This is Anthony's tran-
script of Thomas a Wood's experience, of whom Carlyle speaks as
though he were on terms of domestic intimacy with him, as Tom
a Wood, "an old soldier" whose "account of the storm" is "suffi-
ciently emphatic." The account is the most exact of what happened
in Drogheda, and the one we have taken in supplementing Mr. Mor-
ky ; and for the "hacking to pieces" we should have added "chop-
ping to pieces" the body of the governor.^^ Wood winds up the
account by letting us see his brother knew, sound Puritan that he
was, how the goods of the Canaanites were as the gold and silver of
the Egyptians : "Whereupon Mr. Wood, seeing her gasping, took
away her money, jewels, etc., and flung her down over the works."
There is one circumstance, the particular manner of the slaying of
this ill-fated young lady, which cannot be told. We have read ac-
counts of "the Bulgarian atrocities;" and among the vile and
hideous methods in which the Turks evinced their contempt and
hatred of the slain we could find not an equivalent indeed for the
brutalities of the Puritan soldier — or rather for the insane beastli-
ness of his ferocity, but the approach to some resemblance of its
turpitude.

We are glad to find that Mr. Morley rejects the plea of success for

10 We think Astley fought on the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War-
not like Major Dalgetty, who changed sides as often as Murrogh O'Brien in Ire-
land.

38 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the policy of terror which Carlyle and those who follow him profess
to discover in the sack of Drogheda. No doubt it was intended by
Cromwell to have that effect. Ormond in saying he surpassed him-
self, that he surpassed all who preceded him in the annals of feroc-
ity," adds it was for the purpose of frightening into submission.
But a stout, though badly ordered, resistance was maintained., It
was not the rending of the darkness by the thunderbolt of Carlyle
or Caesar's "Thrasonical brag" "I came," etc. ; it was a war, but one
waged with resources, energy and definite purpose against half-
starved, badly equipped forces, led aimlessly by two men, one of
whom, Castlehaven, had a system unsuited to the country, and the
other, Ormond, had no idea of what a system of war meant.

So frightened was Ormond by the story of Drogheda that he
ordered Dundalk and Trim to be evacuated. We have in connec-
tion with the departure from these towns an insight into the quali-
ties of the Ulster Scotch — they like to be sure of profit. They left
the towns unburned in their hurry to get away; they left the can-
non behind them in Trim. Up or down the Scotch surrendered
Ulster. It is not our way to allow Carlyle, Froude, Macaulay or
Hume to make statements or suggest views that are not warranted.
Our meaning is that these and other writers assume that all the
forces supposed to be acting for the King in the beginning of this
year and up to the arrival of Cromwell were still in his service.
They were nothing of the kind, and we have a very significant proof
of it in a letter by Cromwell to the Speaker Lenthall. When Crom-
well landed in Ireland his force between the troops he brought with
him and the men already there fighting for the Parliament amounted
to seventeen thousand men. The secession of the Ulster Scotch in-
creased it immensely in material and moral power; and we feel
bound to say that at this dark period the character of Ormond
stands forth in a fine light, superior to fortune like the Roman who
never despaired of the Republic. His want of military knowledge
ho is not to be blamed for, but even now he .would not adopt the
strategy most likely to embarrass Cromwell, because of a possibility
that the Confederate Catholics might treat with him. He is
throughout the evil genius of the Irish cause.

As if not satisfied with the terror inspired by Drogheda, Cromwell
decided on attempting Wexford. It must be recollected that the
province of Ulster was in the hands of his troops and their allies
and the country south of the Boyne to Dublin. His fleet was out-
side ; if he proceeded through W^icklow to Wexford, the fleet could
attend him and keep up his supplies the whole way. It was well

11 We wonder had Mr. Morley Ormond's opinion before him when he compared
the massacres in Drogheda with acts of savagery on the Continent.

Irish Policy of Cromwell and the Commonwealth. 39

worth his while to go to that town ; he had friends there. The Re-
corder of the town, Hugh Rochfort, formerly "a violent partisan of
the Nuncio's/'^2 ^^s in correspondence with Cromwell through Mr.
Nicholas Loftus, a man of considerable estate in the county.

Poor little Moore, who had a warm heart of his own, despite vani-
ties and puerilities, passionately prayed

For a tongue to curse the slave
Whose treason like a deadly blight

defeats the policy and efforts of the patriot planning and fighting
for all he holds dear. We know there is no in use cursing traitors any
more than in bewailing misfortunes, but in what we write we have a
purpose. There are a few objects to be borne in mind which we
should like our readers would spell out of this article, not the least of
which is the spirituality or idealism, if you like it better, of the Irish
race. There is even in this horrible episode of Wexford an instance
of high, haughty and fearless rectitude walking the road of honor
leading to death with a punctiliousness like knight errantry. What
about Carlyle's Old Testament cum Alkoran hero and his "resarted"
thunder suit, his profound guile and suspicious watchfulness of the
interests of his ambition in England, when compared with the pure
motive, the stainless honor which preferred ruin to compromise with
suspected or discredited allies ? The coarse lineaments of the Eng-
lish middle-class Titan stare in their repulsiveness at us when into the
gallery of the mind move Butler and Iveagh^* and the staunch Cath-
olic townsmen who required a proof of orthodoxy before accepting
aid from those who had once wavered or who even now would seem
to be within the meaning of Rinuccini's interdict. We need only say
that Cromwell may point to the treason of Strafford as freeing him
from the obligations of the treaty with the governor of the town. Mr.
Morley discusses, as if it were a question of military casuistry, the
right to murder the inhabitants of Drogheda; the question here might
be how far Cromwell was bound by his own terms to the governor.
We do not think where Cromwell is concerned and his soldiers,
where the Parliament, the Commonwealth is concerned, that nice
questions can be profitably considered. The Irish in not acting
like Prince Rupert, or like the Cromwellians themselves, deserved
everything that befel them at the hands of those enemies of human
right and intercourse. The upshot of it all is that the Wexford peo-
ple of all ranks became "a prey to the soldiers ;"^* and so universal
was the slaughter of them that Cromwell informs the Speaker that

12 Carte's "Life of Ormond." i3 Maginnis Lord Iveagh, who led some com-
panies of Ulstermen all the way to Wexford throuph a country in Cromwell'g
hands. 1* Cromwell to Speaker.

Afnerkan Catholic Quarterly Review.

not one in twenty of the owners could now claim any property in the
town.

We do not purpose to notice Carlyle's scoffing at the women mur-
dered at the cross which stood in the middle of the market place.
What we shall do is to express regret that an Irish Walter Scott
like him who has so finely portrayed the courage and endurance of
the Covenanters has not arisen to paint the terrible scene when the
women from every part of the town rushed in their despair to the
foot of the great stone cross, under the shadow of which they might
die in the hope of a happy resurrection, if Christian soldiers would
not be moved to pity at sight of the imaged sufferings of the Christ.
Such a writer linking the tragedy of the market place to the fortunes
of some characters in whom his genius had interested us would de-
scribe in plain, unvarnished language — any other would degrade the
majesty of truth — ^the rows kneeling down, becoming rings con-
centred within rings as the panic-stricken, panting creatures came
and threw themselves down — mother and daughter and sister — in
agony of expectation as to what awaited, while the work of murder
was going on elsewhere. He would tell how from some place
where wretches had been forced into the Slaney and drowned, from
where boats of fugitives were sunk, from the ramparts out of which
leaped other wretches in panic, or from which others still were
forced to leap, the wild-eyed, stern enthusiasts came with military
precision, armed as strong men with pike and gun and halberd to dc
the commanding of the Lord. He would say how a sweet resigna-
tion came to the kneeling women when it was their blood only that
was required, and that like the martyrs of old a halo was encircling
them ; or, if any faltered, if human love or weakness cast its shadow
over the moment, how the thought passed as Father Raymond
Stafford, in his brown habit cinctured by a rope, bareheaded, bare-
footed, holding the Crucifix on high, stepped into the arena amid the
smoke and moans and carnage.

We think we may turn our back on this method of war. Enough
has been said to make it incumbent on all who have the slightest in-
terest in the advancement of the Irish race and an honest desire that
the claims of the Catholic Church on the English race shall be effec-
tively presented to make a stand against the abuse of the language
and the prostitution of the literature to the purpose of maintaining a
public lie and of pandering to an insatiable national vanity. Noth-
ing is gained by it. The sense of a pretentious superiority is fed to
fatness, the modesty of merit is pushed aside. As we write we hear
that the pure sentiment which lent a dignity to Irish literary effort
and a self-denial to Irish political life is fading or is being changed
into a spirit of cynical enterprise. This issnot a desirable prospect.

The Source of Moral Obligations.

The policy which imitated the captivities told of in Holy Writ, or the
terrible experiments of transplantation when Babylonian, Assyrian
and Egyptian Kings carried oflf provinces to found settlements Ik
distant regions, failed to darken the spiritual character of the Irish
people. It is in danger now from a spurious advancement, a shallow
imitation of vulgar materialism. As a protest against this tendency
we have spoken these words, told this tale. If we have done it well,
we have spoken as we would ; if not well, we have spoken as we could.

George McDermot, C. S. P.

Ne\r York.

THE SOURCE OF MORAL OBLIGATIONS.

AMONG the curious phenomena of the revival of classical
learning in the fifteenth century may be reckoned the pecu-
liar bitterness with which men of letters conducted their
disputes. If a scholar detected his rival in a false quantity he de-
duced the conclusion that he had likewise violated each of the pre-
cepts of the decalogue and was addicted to most of the seven deadly
sins. That style of controversy is a thing of the past; and yet
when it is not a question of classical learning, but important princi-
ples of philosophy that are at stake, the acerbity of the dispute,
though veiled, is scarcely less deep-seated than of old. The empiri-
cist suggests that the scholastic philosopher has not altered his point
of view since the days of Duns Scotus, and the scholastic hints that
empiricists are the enemies of God and man. There is in fact more
justification for warmth of feeling where these problems are con-
cerned. They may appear at first sight merely matter for the study
and the lecture hall ; yet the character of a whole society, a whole
nation, is profoundly and rapidly modified according to the doctrine
which prevails. What is at first but the teaching of a few pro-
fessors at the universities is ten years later the common-place of the
clubs of the capital, of the daily papers, of the sermons of preachers.
Nor do the principles thus adopted remain in the chrysalis condition
of speculation. When men have accepted a theory they proceed for
good or for evil to reduce it to "crude hard fact" with a logical con-
sistency as relentless as that of a syllogism. Amongst these ques-
tions there is perhaps none the current doctrine on which more pro-
foundly influences the national life than that of the authority of con-
science. Where men hold that conscience has a right to coerce
them their character will in the lon§r run be formed on the principle

42 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

that duty is the first and imperative rule. Where the coercive power
is explained away the claims of duty will fare but ill. That this is so
may afford us sufficient justification for an attempt to answer Shy-
lock's question and say why it is that the dictates of conscience must
be obeyed.

Our own experience is sufficient to show us that the voice of con-
science deals with us authoritatively, that when it speaks to us it
claims the prerogatives of a supreme power in our regard. Nor is
any profound examination required to assure us that it is no artifi-
cial creation, but a constitutive part of human nature wherever that
nature is not stunted and deformed ; that it cannot, as has sometimes
been asserted, be explained by the pressure exerted on us by public
opinion. The essential characteristic of the obligation which the
law of conscience imposes on us is that it is not simply a necessity
occasioned by the advisability of avoiding some disagreeable alterna-
tive. It is not a contingent, but an absolute necessity. It does not
say to us : "If you do not do this it will be the worse for you," but
simply and absolutely : "You ought to do this — by the moral law
you must do it." Nor can its dictates be reduced to the formula,
"Do right, or you will violate your human dignity." Were it so its
authority would, we fear, have but an insecure foundation. Many
a man would be disposed to say, and not without some justification,
that poor human dignity had had so many shocks already that one or
two more could make but little difference.

What is the explanation of this obligation? Whence comes this
"categoric imperative" which deprives me of my liberty, and which
if I disobey it, sets me in the position of a criminal before a judge?
There is something which takes right conduct from the sphere of the
aesthetically correct and the intellectually true, gives it a new com-
plexion and transforms it into something entirely different, namely,
bounden duty. The change is so complete that no sense of exag-
geration is aroused when the poet personifies Duty and speaks of her
as the "stern daughter of the voice of God." This question as to
how we are to account for the change from right to duty has with
justice been termed the central question of ethical philosophy.

There is a short and easy way of explaining the mysteries pre-
sented to our consideration by Nature and by man, which has found
vogue at all times and as it seems is not out of fashion yet. It con-
sists in boldly denying the existence of the fact which we are called
on to explain. Thus we have seen the mutual interaction of bodies
denied by one school of philosophers, the existence of matter by
another, the objectivity of space and time by a third, free will by a
fourth, the permanence of individual personality by another, and so
on. The explanations of moral obligation given us by philosophers

The Source of Moral Obligations.

of the Hedonistic school are open to this objection. When called
on to account for the coerciveness of the dictates of conscience they
deny that they possess any. We may illustrate this from Mr. J. S.
Mill's treatise on Utilitarianism. The internal sanction of duty Hes,
he tells us, in "a feeling in our own mind, a pain more or less intense
attendant on the violation of duty, which in properly cultivated
moral natures rises in the more serious cases into shrinking from it
as an impossibility." The origin of this feeling he explains as fol-
lows : "Society between equals can only exist on the understand-
ing that the interests of all are to be consulted equally. ... In
this way people grow up unable to conceive as possible a state of
total disregard of other people's interests. . . . Not only does
all strengthening of social ties and all healthy growth of society give
to each individual a stronger personal interest in practically consult-
ing the welfare of others; it also leads him to identify his feelings
more and more with their good, or at least with an ever-growing
practical consideration for it." Such an explanation, though not
lacking in ingenuity, is surely only one more illustration of the play
of "Hamlet" with the part of the Prince of Denmark omitted. Where,
we ask, in all this is there any room for obligation^ for the factor of
coerciveness? Pleasure and pain are one thing; bounden duty is
another. Those who confuse them are simply throwing dust in our
eyes. Yet here we are taught that the stern voice of duty may be
reduced to the prudential dictates of an enlightened self-interest
which arise in a "properly cultivated moral nature," and that the im-
perative commands of the moral law grow out of pleasurable and
painful feelings. "Why not then," says a modern critic^ with justi-
fiable impatience, "sunbeams from cucumbers, or the sense of ethical
justice from the varieties of the triangle?"

Not only is there no room for obligation in such a theory, but
whereas the law of conscience is a law of right, that of Hedonism, if
logicall}^ interpreted and consistently followed out, is a principle of
the purest selfishness; and this is true even if we concede for a
moment that the norm of right action is the greatest happiness of the
greatest number. For if the summum bonum for each individual is
his own greatest happiness no reason can be assigned why con-
science should bid him seek the greatest happiness, not of himself,
but of others. It is needless to point out that it is a mere sophism
to say that because every individual seeks his own greatest happi-
ness, therefore each severally is bound to seek the greatest happi-
ness of all. On the contrary, each on that hypothesis would remain
consulting his own interests and putting those of others outside his
calculations. So far, then, as a counsel which lacks all obligatory
iMr. W. S. Lilly: "Right and Wrong," page 88.

44 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

force can be termed a law, the law which Hedonism gives us is
merely

"The good old rule the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power.
And they should keep who can."

At the present time, however, it is Mr. Herbert Spencer who, of all
the thinkers who place the foundation of morals in utility, exerts the
widest influence among English-speaking people. It cannot be said
that his writings lie open to the charge of containing this fallacy.
He does not tell us that because we each desire our own happiness
we are therefore bound to desire something which differs from it so
entirely as the greatest happiness of all. The theory of development
which holds so large a place in every part of his system supplies him
with a convenient solution for the difficulty which is raised by the
fact that conscience often bids us act in a way which seems contrary
to the principle of expediency. The experience of past time has, he
tells us, shown what course of action usually conduces to the welfare
of the tribe, and the results of the experience thus accumulated is
stored up in our brain tissue, so that we feel disposed to act in a way
which would not naturally appear to be the most advantageous in
the particular case; to this registered experience is due our innate
dislike of lying, stealing and other breaches of the decalogue. We
are not concerned here to enquire whether the testimony of facts
lends any support to this view, or whether it be mere guesswork,
unsupported by adequate evidence. It is sufficient for our purpose
that here, too, righteousness, as understood by Mr. Spencer, is
merely that which most conduces to the happiness of the tribe, and
that, as we have already seen, this leaves the main characteristic of
conscience unaccounted for. Moral obligation will not grow out of
any number of experiences of the advantageous consequences result-
ing from an action.

To pass from those writers who base the moral law on considera-
tions of pleasure and pain, and to turn to the theory of Kant is like
emerging from the heavy vapors of a marsh into a purer air. That
great thinker recognized the authoritative character of the voice of
conscience, and made no effort to explain it away. He allowed that
it could never be accounted for on any Hedonistic theory, and turned
to find its origin in the rational nature of man. Further than this,
as it seemed to him, we need not go, for the tendency to prescribe
this law is essential to our rational nature. We find the law within
us. The categoric imperative of the practical reason which is native
to us and is not received as an imposed command from an external
source belongs to our dignity as men. In virtue of our free-will, of
our power of determining our own conduct, we are capable of obey-

The Source of Moral Obligations.

ing these commands or disobeying them, of consulting our human
dignity or of treading it underfoot. Hence he taught that morality
consists in obedience to these dictates of reason, and that only when
we act in accordance with this law, and purely because such is the
law, is our action moral.

Yet of the philosophy of Kant no less than of that of the Hedonists
we can only say that the obligation it provides us with is a figment.
He tells us that we are obliged to obey the commands of reason.
But no man can in any true sense impose commands on himself or
lie under an obligation to his own higher faculties. We can, in
fact, only employ these terms in virtue of a metaphor in which we
represent man as divided into two parts, and endow each with some
shadow of personality. All the support which the Kantian theory
can lend to the law of conscience is to say that if we do not obey it
we shall cease to be living as men, and shall become degraded and
corrupt. But the individual may answer that after all he is not
bound to live the life of an ideal man, and that he entirely declines to
be forced to do so against his will. Nor can we make any reply
demonstrating that he is under any necessity to do so. This phil-
osophy can, in fact, only give to the moral law a contingent neces-
sity which, as we have seen, differs completely from the absolute
necessity that belongs to the dictates of conscience. An absolute
necessity admits of no alternative. All material beings save man are
guided to their end by the necessity of physical law. Man is guided
not by physical law, but by the moral law as revealed in conscience ;
and since the execution of the moral law is dependent on a free
agent we often think of it as possessed of a less absolute necessity
than belongs to physical law. We should remember that the moral
law never consents to our adopting the alternative of disobedience,
whatever be the consequences of obedience to ourselves or others.
Fiat justitia, mat coelum! The necessity of the moral law is absolute,
only it rules not in the physical, but the moral order. In contrast
to this the moral law as set forth by Kant can claim no higher degree
of coerciveness than is possessed by a contingent obligation. We
must obey it if we desire to live as men, if we would avoid handing
ourselves over as slaves to the cravings of our lower nature. But
in all this there is no vestige of real authority, of that categoric im-
perative which, as he truly tells us, is manifested in the dictates of
our practical reason.

The problem, then, which we are called on to solve is to explain
how this absolute necessity can arise. And the imposition of an
absolute moral necessity as distinguished from one that is purely
contingent is not so unknown a circumstance in our ordinary experi-
ence that it should be hard for us to find examples and hence to ar-

46 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

rive at some conclusions as to the nature of conscience. Let us, for
instance, take the case of a child who has been told by his father not
to touch some china that lies within his reach. No one, we may
presume, will call this a merely contingent necessity and say that all
that the command amounts to is that the child must either obey or
take the punishment which follows disobedience. On the contrary,
all liberty of choice is taken from him. He is under an absolute moral
obligation of doing what he has been told, and if he neglects to do so
he will have grievously offended against the moral law of childhood.
For by virtue of his nature as a child he is totally dependent on his
father, the protector and guide, without whose care he would perish.
As yet he depends for his existence on the family of which he is a
member, and hence he is subject to the head of that family, and may
not act contrary to his expressed command. Being in this very real
sense one with his parent, he has no more right to disobey him than
a member of the body has to disobey the will. If per impossibile we
suppose the hand to be endowed with sufficient liberty of choice to
be able at its own discretion to obey the will or not, it would still be
bound to obey it, since it is a part of the same being, and a part
which by its very nature is subordinate and dependent. In an analo-
gous way the child is dependent on and bound to obey his father.
If he does not do so, he may suffer punishment and so have erred
against the Hedonistic code, or he may escape scot free ; but most
assuredly he is morally blameworthy.

The conclusion to be drawn will now be clear. It is that a moral
obligation is found wherever a will to which we are rightfully sub-
ject imposes a certain choice on us as a duty. When this is the case
our free-will can be bound in the moral order as truly as the pro-
cesses of growth in a plant are bound and determined in the physical
order. Moreover, this relation of dependence on the will of another
is very frequent. The members of a corporate body owe this obedi-
ence to their head wherever the body is no purely artificial creation,
but one whose members are linked together by the operation of the
natural law.

All the various forms of dependence which we find thus obtaining
between one man and another are only partial. Their sphere may
be a wide one, or may be very circumscribed ; but in each case there
are definite limits which we can assign. There is, however, one rela-
tion of dependence which is absolutely unrestricted and of which
all these are but reflections. This is the complete dependence by
which man is bound to his Creator. Not only do we owe our exist-
ence to God, but without His active conservation we should fall back
into the nothingness out of which He drew us. He has created us
to obey His law, and to that end has put the fundamental principles

The Source of Moral Obligations.

of the natural law within the knowledge of every rational being.
The authority of a father over his son, of a King over his subjects, of
a master over his servants are but faint reflections of this primal
fountain of authority, the sovereignty of God. Here, then, is the
source of moral obligation — in the will of God.

It may, however, be urged, and not without some show of justifi-
cation, that if obligation is constituted by the expressed will of God,
this should be clearly recognizable in the voice of conscience. Yet
it is evident that in the greater number of occasions when we act in
obedience to duty, we do so without express advertence to a Divine
command. But an authority which does not manifest itself in the
individual cases of obligation cannot constitute the obligation. What-
ever the constituting factor may be we should be able to recognize
it in every call of duty.

To this we would reply that though we may not explicitly advert
to the fact that the command proceeds from God, yet we cannot but
be conscious, and that, too, in each individual case, that the law of
duty commands our obedience as something superior to us which
is our rightful master and whose claim may not be denied. But a
law which is invested with such a supremacy as this, and which can
thus demand the obedience of free agents must proceed from a per-
sonal lawgiver, and that lawgiver can be no other than our Creator.
In other words, it is patent on reflection to all who have the use of
reason that to obey conscience is to obey not a mere abstraction —
an impersonal rule of conduct — but a personal God. If this conclu-
sion be rejected, it seems scarcely possible to conceive of any other
hypothesis on which the facts before us could be adequately ex-
plained.

In thus deriving duty from the command of God we do not intend
to suggest that the moral law is made known to us in some super-
natural way ; that conscience is, as it were, something extrinsic — ^a
pressure of the Divine will upon ours, not necessarily belonging to
man in his natural state. Such a view would rightly be held to
imply that human nature was created imperfect and only able to
attain its final end by a special intervention of the Creator. It will
be seen on consideration that a creature endowed like man with in-
telligence and free-will must in the natural order of things be sub-
ject to such a law, and be conscious that it is the design of the Cre-
ator that he should obey it. The light of reason suffices to show
man what actions befit a being such as he is. By its aid he knows
that if he is to attain to the highest state of which his human nature
is capable the lower appetites must be held in subjection, that they
must be checked and controlled by the will ; that his faculties must
not be allowed to become inert through idleness, but must be de-

48 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

veloped and cultivated ; that as a man amongst other he must be true
and just in his deahngs ; that as a son he stands in a certain relation
to his parents, as a citizen to his country, as a father to his children,
and that to each of these relations correspond certain actions which
befit him. He knows, in fact, the natural law. But he realizes
further that he is a creature owing implicit obedience to the will of
his Creator, and this shows him that the natural law is imposed on
him as a duty. For it would be repugnant to common sense to sup-
pose that the Creator of such a race of beings does not actively desire
that their life should be such as befits their nature ; to suppose, either,
that He is indifferent to their actions, or that He wishes them to be
in violation of the nature He has given. True, He has made man's
will free. But this cannot obscure the fact that it must be His de-
sire that man should obey those dictates of the natural law which
reason makes clear to him ; that they come to him as commands and
not merely as a course which he may adopt or not as he pleases.
There is, then, no need to suppose the existence of some extrinsic
monition in order to account for conscience. It is simply reason
recognizing the moral law as obligatory on us, and speaking to us
of our responsibility in its regard.

From what has been said it is plain in what consists the true
malice of the violation of the law of duty. It does not lie in any
diminution of the happiness of the greatest number, nor in the retri-
bution which may await the wrongdoer in a future life, nor yet in the
confusion and disorder which he introduces into the designs of Prov-
idence, but purely in his disobedience. When a child disobeys his
parent, or a subordinate defies the orders of a legitimate superior,
the two personalities are brought into direct antagonism. Where
there was harmony and concord, there is now aversion, and this
aversion continues as long as the will of the subject remains in re-»
belHon. The case is similar between God and man; by disobedi-
ence to the voice of conscience man averts himself from God, and
this alone, apart from all consideration of punishment, renders his
act essentially evil.

The distinction between obligation as we have explained it and
the sanctions of the moral law should be clearly borne in mind. This
is all the more needful since some philosophers appear to hold that
the sanctions of the law constitute its obligation. The sanctions of
a law are the reward and punishment which follow on our obedience
and disobedience to it, respectively. Obligation, as we have seen,
is a necessity in the moral order by which a free agent is bound to
obey the law; it has nothing to do with the consequences of the
action. Those, therefore, who tell us that our every act is caused by
a consideration of its results are endeavoring to persuade us that it

The Source of Moral Obligations. 4g

is invariably the sanctions and not the obUgations which form the
motives of our action. It is, of course, sufficiently evident that even
in this life sanctions are attached to the observance and non-ob-
servance of the moral law. These sanctions are, it must be owned,
imperfect ; and long ago the apparent success which sometimes at-
tends those who set that law at defiance led to the complaint that the
wicked ''come in no misfortune like other folk." Yet on the whole
and in the long run honesty is the best policy, even here. But what
we do deny most emphatically is that we must needs act from policy,
that there is no such thing as acting purely because we ought, and
that the very idea of such action is a mere chimera.

Is there not, however, a sense in which it may be said that our
doctrine of obligation only provides us with a new sanction as our
motive — a sanction of a more refined kind than pleasure or pain,
but nevertheless a mere sanction ; and that we have thus only estab-
lished more firmly the doctrine that there is no obligation which
does not spring from this source. It may be said that it is admitted
on all hands that no man can act unless with a motive. Some end-
in-view there nmst needs be in every action. Now this end-in-view
must be some good to be obtained by the agent ; it is not necessary
that it should be any mere pleasure ; it may consist in the continu-
ance of the due relation between the agent and the Author of the
moral law; but some individual good there must be. Analyze, it
will be urged, any act said to be done purely from obHgation, and
you will find that even on your own hypothesis it comes to this : "I
obey the law because if I do so I shall be at peace with God, while
if I do wrong there will be antagonism between His will and mine.
What is this after all but a sanction — an old friend with a new face ?
You are at bottom acting to obtain a personal reward, nor would
it be possible to find any act which in its final resolution is not self-
regarding."

Here we have the last word of those who would see selfishness at
the root of all human action. It is, so to speak, their last line of
defense ; but though specious it is not really tenable. For the ulti-
mate end-in-view which man in virtue of his nature tends to aim at
is not, as is here suggested, self-advantage. He may, of course,
deprave his nature and become entirely self-centred, but in so far as
he does so his character is deteriorated and distorted. For in man
there is an innate tendency to seek the interests of good for its own
sake, and apart from all reference to self. Just as a patriot may
forego his own private ends and labor solely for the good of his
country, so man tends to forget the advantages which accrue to him
from well-doing, and to do right for right's sake. There is a true
sense in which each individual is not an independent unit, but a part
Vol. XXVI— Sig. 4.

50 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of a greater whole ; for men are not made for solitary, but for social
life. And the well-established principle that the parts of an organ-
ism tend primarily to promote the good of the whole, and only sec-
ondarily to their own good, is no less true of men as members of a
body corporate than of the parts of a material body. But man is
not only a part of a whole as regards his country, but also as regards
the civitas Dei. As a created being possessed of the faculty of rea-
son he recognizes himself as a constituent part of that great polity
whose head is God and whose other members are his fellow-men,
who, like him, are children of God. Hence just as it is natural to a
citizen to put his country's interests before his own, so it is natural
for man to see in the victory of good over evil — in other words, in
the success of God's cause — the great end-in-view of life.

The theory which would make selfishness our motive is further
objectionable because it practically denies that actions can have any
inherent goodness capable of becoming a motive to our will except
such as is derived from their utility to the agent. It tells us that
when we imagine we are acting from a sense of obligation we are
not obeying the law because obedience itself is intrinsically good,
but because it is useful to us. Hence it makes the only true good a
subjective state to be attained by the individual. All else it deprives
of substantial goodness, only allowing to it such excellence as may
belong to it as a means to this. It is, of course, plain that there are
many acts which only have a value derived from the result they
effect; as, for example, study, which may be pursued for the most
worthy or for the most unworthy ends. But there are many actions
which are in themselves substantially good; we may instance the
internal acts of patience, charity, forgiveness of injuries, divine wor-
ship and the like. Anything which is substantially good, of what-
ever kind its goodness be, is capable of attracting the will and acting
on it as a motive, altogether apart from any result to which it may
contribute. Were it not so, indeed, the perception of a beautiful
scene could never move our will to acts of admiration and love un-
less it were such as to confer on us some personal advantage. Among
acts which thus possess a goodness of their own we may reckon the
act of obedience to legitimate authority. It is plain, then, that the
moral excellence of acting from a sense of obligation may be a
genuine motive, and that we may perform such an act without any
reference to our self-interest.

Yet, although it is possible for us to do our duty from no other
motive than the cause of right and the service of God, experience
tells us that in a vast number of cases it is the reward and the pun-
ishment which influence us. To children and to those who are deaf
to the voice of virtue as long as her hands are empty, it is the only

The Source of Moral Obligations. 51

method of appeal. Indeed, there is no one who does not on many
occasions require the props which sanctions afford. The saints, both
by example and precept, recommend us to meditate on heaven and
hell, and warn us that our perseverance in the way of justice will be
very brief unless we do so. Nor is there anything to cause surprise
in the fact that much of our right action flows from this source.
The task before us is to obey a law which irks and galls our lower
inclinations. We are bidden follow the dictates of reason and keep a
firm grip on the "demos" of our passions, which are always seething
in suppressed revolt. Towards this end we are provided with two
great helps. We are able to form habits of self-government which
become a second nature to us and tide us over those points where
either reason or will is not on the alert ; and we are further able to
keep our minds fixed on the certain truth that obedience will even-
tually be rewarded and disobedience sternly punished. Unprovided
with these aids our own consciences will tell us how incompetent we
should be to support the strain involved in being faithful to the voice
of duty.

A moment's consideration will show us how entirely the legitimate
self-regard of which we are here speaking — that "calm and reason-
able self-love" on which so much stress is laid by Butler in his "Anal-
ogy of Religion" — differs from selfishness. An action is positively
selfish when we seek some private good, consciously setting aside
all consideration as to whether it is right or not, when even though
conscience forbid it we determine to pursue our end. Here we ex-
plicitly yield to our lower tendencies. There is no resemblance be-
tween this and the case where we obey conscience and follow the
higher impulses of our nature, but are led to do so by the sanctions
attached to the observance of the law. We are not here speaking of
the action of a man who is honest simply through fear of the police-
constable. In that case it is the external act alone which conforms
to the law of right ; as far as desire can carry him the man is simply
dishonest. We are supposing a case where the man is genuinely
honest, not only externally, but internally, but where it is the con-
sideration of heaven and hell that has made him so. It is an absurd-
ity to call this positive selfishness. We have seen that to constitute
a positively selfish action a man must determine to pursue his end
irrespective of the law of conscience. But no man can say without
absurdity : "I am determined to escape hell, and shall continue try-
ing to do so, even if conscience and the law of God forbid me." All
that can be said of actions thus motived is that though not positively
unselfish, they are self-regarding in such a way as not to interfere
with our duty to God, but to aid it. Thus they are legitimate, and
even laudable ; for when our sense of the inherent goodness and at-

52 American Catholic Quarterly Reviezv.

tractiveness of the service of God becomes dulled it is right that we
should pursue the blessings which that service brings with it.

We have doubtless against us here the Kantian theory, which will
allow the title of moral to no action unless it is not only in accord-
ance with the moral law, but is also done purely for the sake of that
law. A right action done for the sake of obedience is, according to
this school, simply non-moral. Their point of view is tersely sum-
med up by von Hartmann when he says that it is as absurd to hope
to become moral by means of laws prescribed by the reason of an-
other and not our own, as it would be to hope to become fat on meals
taken by another person. The root of this doctrine is to be found in
their view of man as entirely independent ; they do not consider him
as a being who by his very nature is dependent on and subject to
God. Hence, as we have already explained, they have no satisfac-
tory account to give of obligation which necessarily involves a law-
giver. They are driven to find the lawgiver and the subject in the
same person, failing to see that only by a metaphor can a man be
said to owe a duty to his higher self. And, further, having lost the
clue to the true character of moral action, they have substituted a
definition which while it is insufficient on the side of obligation is
too strict in regard to the motives which it requires. Their theory,
taking no account of the author of the moral law, does not allow
them to recognize the provision by which He has assigned sanctions
to its observance in order that we may be assisted to neglect the
solicitations of our lower nature, and act from motives which though
not the highest are nevertheless legitimate. All such actions are
placed by them on the same level with those done at the instance of
the lower appetites. Such an estimate is evidently erroneous ; for if
we recognize the call as that of duty, our obedience to it cannot lose
its character as a moral act because we are moved to obey by the
knowledge that our obedience will be recompensed.

The question to which we have here attempted to provide a satis-
factory answer is no matter of merely speculative interest with which
the student alone is concerned. We have already called the atten-
tion of our readers to the momentous issues with which men's beliefs
on this matter are fraught. Who shall estimate the number of those
who consciously or unconsciously have taken the doctrines of Mill
and Spencer as the principles by which they regulate their lives?
Whither such doctrines must infallibly lead we have endeavored to
indicate; and the testimony of facts may be invoked to show that
what we have said is no more than the truth. Where these views
have become popular society is to a large extent frankly pagan, the
race for wealth or pleasure absorbs all energies and the authority of
conscience is openly denied. It is a prospect well calculated to fill
us with apprehension for the future. We all know how clear is the

The Principle of Collectivism. 53

witness of history that the decay of moral principle is the near
harbinger of social disruption and national degradation. With the
rejection of the authority of conscience is inseparably united the
neglect of private duties and a contempt for all obligations towards
the nation and its rulers. We are apt to smile at the exaggerated
deference paid in old days by subjects to the governing power ; per-
haps we blame it as servile and inconsistent with the dignity of the
individual. A more careful reflection would lead us to recognize
that the almost contemptuous disregard which has taken its place
is a symptom of far graver import than that extravagant obedience.
A firm belief in the authority of conscience, if it could be restored,
would be the true cure for these evils. That would not be one of
those nostrums on which, under the name of "Morrison's pills,"
Carlyle has heaped such merited ridicule; but a medicine which
would heal society in the only way in which it can be healed, by
altering the character of the individuals of whom it is composed.

G. H. Joyce, S. J.

St. Asaph, North Wales.

THE PRINCIPLE OF COLLECTIVISM.

"Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture, and as useful work in general
is possible only through society, so to society — that is to all its members— belongs
the entire product of labor bv an equal right, to each one according to his reason-
able wants — all being bound to work.

"In the existing society the instruments of labor are a monopoly of the capital-
ist class; the subjection of the working class thus arising is the cause of misery
and seryitude in every form.

"The emancipation of the working class demands the transformation of the in-
struments of labor into the common property of society and the cooperative con-
trol of the total labor, with application of the product of labor to the common
good, and just distribution of the same." (Opening words of the programme of the
united socialistic bodies of Germany, laid down in the congress of Gotha, May,
1875 — where the collective principle assumed political importance in the formation
of the "Socialistic workingmen's party of Germany")

"The economic development of civil society necessarily leads to the destruction
of small industries, the basis of which is private ownership of the laborer in the
means of production. It divests the laborer of all means of production and
transforms him into a penniless proletarian, while the means of production be-
come the sole property of a comparatively small number of capitalists and real
*»8tate owners.

"Private property in the means of production, which formerly was a means of
securing to the producer the ownership of his produce, has nowadays become a
means of dispossessing farmers, laborers and small merchants, and of making tlie
non-laborers— capitalists and landlords—the possessors of the produce of labor.
Only the transformation of private capitalistic property in the means of produc-
tion— t. e., land, mines and mining, raw material, tools, machinery and means ot
communication — into common property, and the change of private production
into socialistic — i. e., production for and through society — can effect that the
extensive industry and the ever-increasing productiveness of social labor shall
become for the downtrodden classes, instead of a fountain of misery and oppres-
sion, a source of the highest prosperity and of universal and harmonious perfection.

"The struggle of labor against capitalistic oppression is necessarily a political
one. The laboring class cannot carry on its industrial struggles and develop its
economic organization without political rights. It cannot effect the transfer ot
the means of production into the possession of the body social without possessing

54 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

itself of political power." (Extracts from the platform of the socialistic working-
men's party, as adopted at Erfurt in October, 1891. J

"With the founders of this republic we hold that the true theory of politics
is that the machinery of government must be owned and controlled by the whole
people; but in the light of our industrial development we hold, furthermore, that
the true theory of economics is that the machinery of production must likewise
belong to the people in common.

"Resolved, That we call upon the people to organize with a view to th« substi-
tution of the cooperative commonwealth for the present state of planless produc-
tion, industrial war and social disorder. . . . We call upon them to unite with
us in a mighty effort to gain by all practicable means the political power."
(Extracts from the Socialistic Labor Party platform, adopted at Chicago, October
12, 1889 J

"Against such a system (the present despotic system of economics) the Socialist
Labor Party once more enters its protest. Once more it reiterates its fundamental
declaration that private property in the natural sources of production and in the
instruments of labor is the obvious cause of all economic servitude and political
dependence.

"We, therefore, call upon the wage workers of the United States and upon all
other honest citizens to organize under the banner of the Socialistic Labor Party
into a class-conscious body, aware of its rights and determined to conquer them
by taking possession of the public powers." (Extracts from the platform of the
Socialist Labor Party, adopted at New York, July 9, 1896.)

"To unite all persons who are in favor of the cooperative commonwealth as a
substitute for the present competitive system." (Expression of the aim of the
Social Democracy of America, at special convention held in Chicago, June, 1891.)

THE economic question of the hour is the question of paternal
government under that form of socialism which is now
coming to be denominated Collectivism. This collectivism
is something with which every one who by his single vote has a voice
in the nation's councils should make himself acquainted. Unfortu-
nately, its fundamental principle is often enough not thoroughly
comprehended not only by antagonists, but even by promoters.
The socialism which we are asked to understand is not that which
was identified with the Reign of Terror or the Commune. It is not
the old-time communism or anarchy. It is an economic theory of
state polity which has taken its place in the recognized politics of
civilized nations, with a seat in imperial parliaments and a regular
ticket in municipal elections. It is not a political economy, but an
economic polity.

What is this new socialism, this collectivism? Its fundamental
principle, with which alone we propose to deal, and which was an-
nounced by Karl Marx more than thirty years ago as the one neces-
sary condition for the true economic social reconstruction, is the
abolition of private capital. By capital we are to understand capital
in the active sense, capital that is applied to production. Idle capi-
tal which is not applied in any way to bring a return, and which can
be used only to be diminished, is not classed as capital to-day. The
final object of all collectivism is to do away with private capital as
applied to every industry, thus to do away with competition ; and to
substitute for competition a collective ownership of all the means
and instruments of production. Whatsoever is to be employed in

The Principle of Collectivism. ^e

production is to be put under official control as a collective capital
and is to be common property. Results are to be distributed simply
according to the contribution of individual labor which each one
makes to the common welfare whilst employing the common in-
struments upon the common material.

In this collectivism there can be no private enterprise to yield a
return in interest, profit or dividend. That is to say, there can be
no competition. Hence there can be no private profit, no private
agreement upon wages. Employment can be given only by the one
absolute monopolist, the entire community. Wages can be only a
certificate of the labor that has been contributed. This certificate
is to be redeemable in the results of the common production.

Howsoever much we may have hitherto despised this theory, it is
time for us to see that it is the tenet of the most widespread political
party in the civilized world. It is a party that knows no fatherland,
as it knows no mother-tongue. It has cut itself free from all the
prejudices of language and of traditional methods in government.
It is even strong enough to-day to concentrate its forces in some
constitutional, elective community, and by a single majority-ballot
to take possession of the machinery of government.

The final, adequate end, namely, absolute common ownership, is
not stated in its fulness and simplicity in the socialist, collectivist
platforms drawn up at the time of municipal and general elections.
The collectivism advocated in these programmes is usually limited
to those industries where capital has already become sufficiently
centralized to manifest the tyranny of monopoly and where the cen-
tralization is sufficiently organized to make the transfer to public
control an affair of merely passing a law, signing a paper and paying
a price. We are not considering here the advantages or disadvan-
tages of certain municipal ownerships, as of water, lighting and pas-
senger transport ; or of certain national ownerships, as of railways,
telegraph lines, etc. We are occupied solely with the question of
ultimate complete centralization, the abolition of private capital and
the common ownership of all the means and instruments of produc-
tion. The tendency of the broad socialistic movement is to this, as
to an ideal, a goal. We are told that it is only by an ultimate re-
construction of society upon the basis of common ownership that all
men will be enabled to receive a wage commensurate with their
labor, a compensation due to them for the benefit which by their
labor they bestow upon the community. It is seriously important,
therefore, to understand at the beginning and to bear constantly in
mind that in dealing with the collectivist theory we are dealing with
a political theory of labor and not with a theory of idleness, anarchy,
nihilism, dynamite or free plunder.

56 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

In face of this latest scheme for the ameHoration of the condition
of labor, all the old systems for the reconstruction of society, the
systems of St. Simon, of Fourier, etc., have passed into the history of
theory. The new system itself is far from being clear, whether as to
the details of method or of practically distributed results. How-
ever, its fundamental principle, the consolidation and common
ownership of all the means and instruments of production, is clearly
and unmistakably announced. This principle, at least in partial ex-
pression, is found embodied as a political tenet in every socialistic
programme that is presented to the people for their suffrage. It is
the one point which is found in every socialistic programme without
exception. And what is significant of its silent power is that it is re-
cognized by governments the most antagonistic to it as a policy
which may be legitimately presented to the people for their election.

In the collectivist theory, then, the one sole cause of all the diffi-
culties with which labor has to contend is free competition in pro-
duction. This affects everything — the stocking of the market, the
wages paid, the price. The wage-earner is at the mercy of the com-
peting capitalist producers. Take away the one cause of the diffi-
culties, take away competition, and the labor question is solved.
The only way to be rid of competition is to have no competitors.
The only way to be rid of competitors is to have but one producer.
The only way to have but one producer is to make all the means and
instruments of production absolutely common property and to pro-
hibit all private production for profit or sale.

This collectivism has entered into the field to win not by violence,
but by the present conventional political means, that is to say by a
majority of votes. Though collectivists feel that just now they can-
not get this majority for the establishment of the social state, yet
they are sanguine of ultimate success. They rely upon the enemy
as their best ally in the destruction of the enemy. Under the condi-
tions of industry which have been brought about by machinery and
rapid transport they are waiting for the competitive system to run its
course. Within fifty years the old-time conditions — under which
the tradesman owned his lot, his shop, his tools and the fruit of his
labor, under which he found his own market and regulated supply
to demand — have practically disappeared. Small proprietorships of
peasant, mechanic, merchant have given way to huge agricultural,
industrial and mercantile capitalizations. The process goes on with
giant strides. To use the expression of Karl Marx, "one capitalist
kills many." The collectivist, then, is waiting for large capitals to
absorb the smaller. He will thus find created for him a few mil-
lionaires on the one hand and a race of wage-earners on the other.
The essential preparatory work will be done for him (as he could not

The Principle of Collectivism. 57

do it himself) by the trusts and monopolies, the inevitable outcome
of competition. As the capitalists by absorption grow fewer, the
workers must increase in numbers, and they must also increase in
misery, since they can have nothing to say about production, market
or price. This development must go on until the workers revolt by
using the legal means of suffrage which has been put into their
hands. But when they revolt, it will be as a united, organized, dis-
ciplined body, into which they shall have been formed by the very
methods of the capitalist system. Then, as capitalists expropriated
the many for the benefit of the few, the many will turn around and
expropriate the few for the benefit of all. This is the prospective
evolution.

The plan of allowing all industries first to reduce themselves to a
few controlling centres of capital is comparatively slow of execution.
But it is regarded by the collectivist thinker as a necessary prepara-
tion of the masses for the final step by which all the centres will be
made one. Hence we do not find collectivism attacking centraliza-
tion. This tolerance it extends even to the matter of huge armies,
feeling that when the new era dawns there will be no danger of a mil-
itary struggle, since the armies will be made up from the ranks of the
workers. Therefore, the collectivist leader and thinker is not in a
hurry. He knows that from private ownership of all the means of
production according to the old competitive method, to common,
public ownership of all the means of production, a single leap is an
impossibility. He is satisfied with promoting the preparatory work
which must necessarily be done, and which is actually being done for
him by the monopolies, trusts, huge corporations. These central-
izations are an object-lesson which accustoms minds to concede the
feasibility of a still more centralized management. In the end, all
that the collectivist will have to do will be to unite under one man-
agement the two, three or four great corporations of a given indus-
try— steel, coal, oil, paper, sugar, tobacco — and then, at one stroke,
by a combination of the industries, to eliminate the slavery condition
of private capital and reap the fruit of common ownership.

The present phase of the movement, then, may be designated as
one of party organization. The chief stimulus used to effect the
organization, one that appeals best to individual sensibilities, is the
picturing of the misery of labor. This misery is easily admitted to
come precisely from the trust, and the trust is as easily proved to be
the necessary consequence of private capital. In this is found a
solution of what to many seems a contradiction : namely, on the one
hand to expose and deplore the misery that comes from concentrated
capital, and on the other hand, negatively to promote the very
capitalism that intensifies the misery. But there is a double pur-

58 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

pose in it all : first, to show the possibility of a still greater concen-
tration; and secondly, by exhibiting the private monopoly as the
necessary consequence of competition, to increase discontent and
make the suffering people clamor for what is presented as the sole
remedy — the placing of all wagework absolutely under common
control. Hence, we see the collectivists refusing to endorse restric-
tive legislation against trusts, saying that this can only perpetuate
the private competition which has been the root of all the misery ;
and that the only admissible legislation in the matter is that which
makes for common ownership.

When we hear them using Proudhon's expression, "Property is
robbery," we must be careful to understand that they do not charge
the individual property holder of to-day with being a robber. They
are attacking a system from which, they concede, the property
holder has no escape, but under which the wage earner can never
get the value of his work. Under the capitalist system into which
competition must necessarily fall, the surplus value of a day's labor,
the profit, which once went at least to the small competitor, is now
added simply to the accumulations of capital, to minister to the
luxury of the few and to strengthen the few in their power of de-
termining the serfdom of the many. The individual capitalist is
not blamed for this. He is not accused of personally robbing the
wage earner of the surplus value of his work. He is recognized as
being the fortunate one in what is called the "anarchy" of competi-
tion, an anarchy upheld by civil statute ; and so long as he wishes to
compete he must abstract as much as he can from the fruit of labor.
It is the system, then, which has to be changed. The root has to be
dug up. Competition must be eliminated and in its place there
must be substituted, also by law, a collective ownership in which
there will be no wage earners and no capitalists as persons ade-
quately distinct. All must be producers for their own benefit in the
benefit of all.

Once more, we must be on our guard against a prevalent vague
notion that the main tenet of the actual socialism, collectivism, is the
periodical dividing up and redistribution of all properties, so as to
preserve equality of possessions amongst the citizens. Whatever
may have been the meaning of some old forms of communism, the
collectivism of to-day does not contemplate this at all. It aims sim-
ply at common ownership of all the means of production, to the end
that each one may receive a wage, a compensation due to him for the
labor which he has expended upon the common production.

Still further, we must know that the collectivist system does not
propose to dispossess the capitalist brutally, whilst depriving him of
the privilege of drawing an interest on his capital or his plant. It

The Principle of Collectivism. 59

will, of course, prohibit all private industry for profit, and thus all
instruments and machinery, as private capital, will become useless.
But the coUectivist proposes to make some compensation. Private
producers will be privileged to transfer their plants to the collective
state, and they will receive in return an annuity for a number of
years, to be fixed according to the value of what they have trans-
ferred. This annuity will be in the form of labor certificates. With
these certificates the common produce can be obtained and the com-
mon service can be utilized, so that the heretofore capitalist, and
perhaps his descendants, may live in luxury for ten or twenty or
forty years. But no one of them all may go into business; they
may not produce ; they may not make their capital grow. When
the scrip shall have been used up the descendants shall have to go to
work like the rest of the people.

We believe that the foregoing outline contains a very fair state-
ment of the fundamental tenet of collectivism. We do not think that
in the flood of socialistic journals and pamphlets there will be
found a clearer or more comprehensive statement of the first princi-
ple of the party which bids for the politico-industrial management of
civil society. We have dispensed with citations which, though they
might lend an air of erudition, would add nothing to the conviction
of a publicly recognized fact.

Now for a practical view of the operation of the fundamental
principle let us suppose the coUectivist state to be agreed upon, and
an effort set on foot to put it into running order. There are three
things which we may conceive to be necessary for the very exist-
ence and continuance of a civil community along those lines of ma-
terial civilization with which no one would be willing to dispense.
These three things are, briefly, freedom of individual demand, a
more or less determinate unit measure of value for the purposes of
exchange, and freedom of the individual to choose an occupation
and to qualify for the same. No one accustomed to the present
material civilization will be willing to change it for a new order of
things, unless under that new order he shall be able to provide him-
self with what he needs, or thinks he needs, as easily as at present ;
unless he shall have some measure of value and medium of exchange
no less convenient than the article which we now call money ; and
unless he shall have at least the same chance which he now has to
select his occupation and to vary the same. In the present advanced
stage of material civilization, these three things are necessary as
stimulus or aid to the development of individual capacity. Now it
has never been demonstrated that a state founded on the funda-
mental tenet of collectivism can supply these three needs of the
individual in the modern civilization.

6o American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Take first the case of the supply for every individual demand.
First and foremost before all things, what the new collectivist state
will have to do will be to regulate supply according to demand.
And if that state is to be a success, the supply must be regulated
even better than it is to-day. We must understand at the outset
that in the new state the entire production, the kind and amount
produced and the distribution of all things, in all places, for all
emergencies, will necessarily have to be managed by bureaus or
committees. It is hardly possible for a human intellect to conceive
the enormous governmental machinery which will be required for
this one function of the new state. There is here implied not merely
the regulation of the supply of coal oil, or shoes, or perfumery, or
books, or millinery, or tobacco, or quinine, or coal, of ink, rouge,
razors, ice cream, fans, chewing gum — but the supply of each of
these and of all of these and of everything, absolutely, that is used
and is called for, and of everything that may be called for. If that
new state cannot and does not actually do this, then instead of being
a liberation it will be an enslavement ; instead of securing freedom
it will open at once as the most galling despotism. In the system
of free small competition I can always get what I want. The thing
i desire may be useful or it may be useless ; but for the moment J
imagine that I need it, and so imagining, I can always get it. Un-
der the small competitive system it requires very little demand to
induce some one to undertake to supply the demand. I can always
lind a mechanic who will take my job and try to execute my idea.
My idea may not be the most scientific. That matters very little to
the mechanic ; but it matters much to me, in my present mood, to
have my idea carried out. This freedom of individual demand,
taken in the aggregate, is a primary essential in the material benefits
which man is to draw from civil society. I can always have my
demand supplied when there is an individual, personal profit to be
made by supplying the demand. But where governmental ma-
chinery will have to be moved in order to carrry out my odd idea —
which to me is a very bright one — and where the committee can
look for no special profit, but only for trouble, in deserting its
routine, I cannot expect to get the service which I could easily get
from the independent tradesman. Anything outside the established
routine of production will then be obtainable only under the difficul-
ties which now attend the passage of a law through a City Council.

It is necessary to keep this point in mind : that, in the new state.
the total population must inevitably be at the mercy of a ruling com-
mittee and of a system of committees, and that it is only through the
good will of the committee that an mdividual can have done for him-
self what he pleases and when ne pleases. In the suppression of

The Principle of Collectivism, 6i

free demand, therefore, by the ehmination of free production an
insuperable obstacle is put to the development of individuality and
to the practical, untrammeled exercise of that inventive spirit upon
which the purely material progress of a community depends. The
new system thus affects not merely the prospective progress, but
also the actual contentment of the community ; for there can be no
contentment in a community when the individual is prevented from
spending his earnings upon the things which he happens to fancy.

It is a patent fact that in the socialistic programmes this difficulty
or supply to demand has never been satisfactorily or honestly dis-
cussed. There is abundant promise to the proletaire of magnificent
festivals, excursions, pageants, concerts which every one will be
obliged to take in the crowd. But no regard is shown for that
domestic exclusiveness of entertainment and that quiet relaxation
which as we all know form the true enjoyment of the better part of
the community.

Under this new system, we have to recognize, there will be no
usury, no private monopoly. There will be no tenancy or leases,
no renting of houses, no real estate agents, no mortgages, no stocks
or stock exchanges. There will be no display made by competitors
in shop windows, no trading of anv kind, no coinage of money, no
silver question. Money means private capital that can be intro-
duced into private enterprise for private gain. There could be no
private enterprises. There would be only bureaus and committees
to decide upon the production and transport of goods, according to
the judgment which the committees would be pleased to pass on the
needs of the people. If the wives of the bureaus decided that stuffed
birds should not be worn on autumn hats, it is reasonable to suppose
that there would be no stuffing of birds during the summer, or that
there would be a lovely row in the homes of the bureaus. Sales-
men and saleswomen would not care what you asked for in return
for your certificate of a day's labor. They could have no interest
in pleasing you. You would have no chance to toss up the goods
on the counters two or three times a week. You would have to
know precisely what you wanted when you wandered into the dull
warehouse on a bright afternoon. The markets and shops of to-
day are merely a consequence of competitive production. In the
new state there would be no occasion for them. There would be no
page advertisements of startling bargains in the Sunday newspapers.
There could be no advertisements at all. There would be no bar-
gains, for there would be no rival establishments. The newspaper
would be no power in trade or politics. There would be no trade.
Politics would be a thing of the past, just as rival show rooms and
warehouses and those obsolete terms of wholesale and retail.

62 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Where, then, would the interest of the individual be supposed to
come in ? In this simply, as we have stated, that every man would
be supposed to obtain a wage that would be considered to represent
the full value of his labor. And this leads to speak of what we
placed as a second requisite in the modern civiHzed State, namely,
some approximately fixed and determinable unit measure of value
for the purposes of exchange.

In the new state there could be no real money, as we understand
the term. With us real money is both measure of value and medium
of exchange. In the new state the two functions of money would
have to be distributed. They could not be combined in the same
article or instrument. As each member of the community would
be supposed to be remunerated according to his contribution in
labor to the general store or service, labor itself, in some way or
other, would necessarily have to be the measure of value. The
medium of exchange, then, since the labor or the product could not
be passed around, would needs have to be a certificate of labor con-
tributed. This certificate could not be in the form of gold or silver
or anything which might have its own value, as a commodity, over
and above the labor represented. In the collective state, then, the
measure of value would be the labor contributed ; and the certificate
of labor would be the medium for the purchase of the common pro-
duce and the utilization of the common service.

The labor hour as the standard measure of value is, indeed, the
pivot of the whole collectivist scheme. But it is a pivot which will
support nothing ; and any scheme which attempts to turn upon it
must go to pieces from a thousand and one disasters. Moreover,
after going through the long and laborious and specious discussions
of Marx and the other collectivist Solons, we discover that it is pre-
cisely this solitary, fundamental, essential basis and support of the
whole super-structure that they have failed to determine, and that
they do not dare to determine.

As a basis for the standard of value and for the medium of ex-
change there is nothing which I can conceive of as being less
determinate or less determinable than the labor hour.

There are two ways only of counting the labor hour : by time em-
ployed and by value produced. Is all labor to be paid according to
time given, with absolute equality? Or is the scrip certificate to
have its purchasing power from a given amount which has been pro-
duced and which shall be regarded as the unit of value? If the
labor hour is to be paid by mere time, then, when you are working
amongst a hundred men, and you are working harder than the
ninety-nine, they will be receiving the fruit of your labor and you
will be receiving none of theirs. They will be reducing your wages

The Principle of Collectivism. 63

and you will be raising theirs. This is against the fundamental
tenet of collectivism, i. e., that every man shall receive the full wage
due to his labor. In a population of a million you will have to know
that 999»999 are working as industriously for you as you are working
for them. To be satisfied that the principle is in operation, you
must know that you are not laboring to cover over other men's
laziness and fraud of time. If you give to each labor hour of the
industrious, of the lazy, of the skilled, of the ignorant, the same re-
muneration it will not take thirty days to banish from the commun-
ity every indication of industry and skill. In sixty days the collec-
tive society will be bankrupt, because there will not be on hand the
produce which the scrip calls for. If you get a dollar for your
hour's work, no matter how much you do and no matter how you
do it, it stands to reason that you shall not expend your energy and
care to earn a dollar which you can get with equal certainty for the
same slow, heedless hour which your neighbor devotes to the public
service of production. It is simply incredible that intelligent col-
lectivists of twenty years ago should not have seen the contradiction
between the end intended, i. e., the remuneration of labor to its full
value, and the means proposed to accomplish the end, i. e., the meas-
uring of the value of all labor equally by pure duration. The system
was certainly very simple. Its simplicity brought it adherents, espe-
cially among the indolent. The simple system helped to create the
party, and we see it still practically set forth to-day in the unwise de-
mands of some local labor organizations. Still, Marx and other
leading collectivists of his day found themselves obliged to recede
from too much insistence upon the time measure for the value of the
labor hour.

If we take the thing in reason, and in its entirety — as we must
always do when discussing a scheme — we have to see that scrip cer-
tificates for hours of labor cannot possibly have a purchasing power
beyond amount and value produced. A labor hour can give pur-
chasing power to a scrip only by reason of some definite amount
produced in the hour of labor. If a thing has not been produced
it cannot be purchased. Now, there are no two men whose hour of
labor can be counted upon to give exactly the same results. Neither
is the labor hour of the same person always uniformly productive.
The value of the scrip to have any definite purchasing power must
be measured by the minimum production. It stands to reason,
then, that each one will produce his minimum, seeing that he can
receive no more for the scrip that testifies to his labor. We cannot
conceive of the long continuance of a state where every citizen is
doing as little as he possibly can to the end that he may not be im-
posed upon by the idleness of all the other citizens.

64 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The other way, as we have said, of making the hour of labor the
measure of value is to take account of what is produced. This is,
indeed, to eliminate pure time as a measure of value and to measure
value by the need, desirability or mere demand (for demand may not
be suppressed) of articles produced and services rendered. An esti-
mate of value will have to be passed on everything that may be
demanded. As a certificate scrip for production of one kind will
have to be accepted in exchange for service and commodities of
every kind, it will be necessary to establish a ratio of value between
each resultant of labor and every other resultant of labor. Each
resultant of labor through all the stages of production will have to
have its schedule of fixed ratios with everything that can be pro-
duced and with every service that can be demanded ; since the scrip
representing it will have to be exchangeable for everything to be
found in the community. Now, if as we are told, there is so much
difficulty in maintaining a ratio between two metals as unvarying as
gold and silver, the supply of which, as inert matter can, in a degree,
be regulated, how shall we make up ratios for the labor hours of
fifty million persons applying themselves in a million different in-
dustries to the production of things that are unequally necessary
and of shifting desirability? If pure time measure for the value
of the labor hour was marvelously simple, in this other only alterna-
tive of the collective state, the establishing of all the ratios, we have
something that is no less marvelously complex.

The difficulty of the ratios will become manifest in a brief illus-
tration. Let us take simply the final labor expended upon the fin-
ishing of a few articles that are now produced. Let us say, merely
by way of example, that for this finishing labor A produces in an
hour 30 pairs of suspenders ; B produces 80 gallons of molasses ; C,
the milliner, produces i spring hat ; D produces 9 kegs of nails ; E
produces 25 gross of wooden toothpicks ; F produces 19 gross of
hairpins, and G produces I violin. We are taking only a few arti-
cles, and we are considering only the last touches upon these arti-
cles. We are not considering the multifarious distinct kinds of
productive labor hours that have previously been given. For this
we should have to introduce the ploughing of fields, the planting of
cotton and cane and flax, the mining, the smelting of copper and tin
and iron, the felling of trees, the sawing of wood, the harvesting and
gathering and carding and spinning and weaving, the manufacture
of machinery, the transport, the storing, the dispensing for distribu-
tion of material, etc., etc. We leave all this out, though it would
have to be introduced in the complete scheme even for these few
articles as well as for a million more. Now, taking the labor of the
finishing touches, where is the labor of the most value ? Sit down

The Principle of Collectivism. ge

for a year with your pencil and paper and work out the answer.
Take your ten years or twenty. You cannot do it. Half the world
believes that a working equivalent cannot be found between two
pure metals, silver and gold. How shall it be found between a
million, between fifty milHon articles produced, between all the
various kinds of labor results contributing to their final produc-
tion? What is the relative value of the labor hour employed in
weeding a potato patch as compared with that devoted to sewing on
glove buttons? How many dozen glove buttons will balance an
acre of potatoes ? If you are a collectivist and do not wish to com-
mit yourself to paying for mere time, independently of what is done,
you will be obliged to establish this little ratio, together with a
million more. You will, besides, be obliged to reestablish the
ratios every day according to the fluctuating value put upon any-
thing and everything by the changing tastes of the community.

But let us suppose that you have succeeded in laying down a few
ratios between commodities or various kinds of public service, say,
between street cleaning, making ice cream, playing the bass drum
and pulling teeth. The ratios could not be established with any-
thing like the exactness of the ratio that can be established between
silver and gold. But let us suppose that you have succeeded in
working out the six ratios, showing the value of each of these
kinds of labor hour in terms of each of the others. How are you
going to decide who is to have the privilege of applying himself to
the most lucrative kind of labor ? Who shall be obliged to take the
labor that is less remunerated, even whilst he is willing and anxious
and competent to do the better rewarded labor ? In fairness there
can be but one way to determine the individuals who are to have the
preference: an examination test, established for every occupation
and free to all comers. The whole land will be turned into a school
of civil service contests. If you do not wish this endless examina-
tion, which will stop the wheels of business, you have but one alter-
native : you must allow the members of the committees to give the
best places to their friends — and within sixty days you will have the
community in a bloody revolution.

We dismiss altogether the question of hard labor, which has been
utterly unproductive for the community, a question that must arise
in regard to agricultural labor whenever there is a failure of the
crops. Time measure here could be the only measure, and time
measure, as we have seen, would mean the minimum of food.

In regard to this third point, namely, choice of occupation, let us
take a single case in the higher professions. In the collective state,
who will be the physicians ? If there are to be physicians, they will,
of course, have to be educated at the public expense. As the young

Vol. XXVI.— Sig. 5.

66 American Catholic Quarterly Revtew.

men to be educated cannot be expected to have laid by any labor
certificates to serve for their support during the time of their medical
studies, it is clear that they will have to receive for their hours of
study — say eight hours per diem — corresponding labor certificates
as for so many hours spent in the public service. And, indeed, their
services will have to be specially remunerated ; for as they will be
deprived of the active, open-air exercise which is the privilege of
those who labor in the fields, they will require a more easily digested
and hence a more costly nourishment. The daily bacon and corn-
bread which .would be the delight of the herdsman and of the log-
roller would bring chronic dyspepsia to the medical aspirant; and
it is important, as a matter of grave moment in therapeutics, that
the physicians who survive should not all be dyspeptic.

They will all have to be fittingly supported during their studies.
This being fixed, there arises the problem of the selection of candi-
dates. Let us suppose that one hundred physicians are considered
to be sufficient for a given quadrangle of the collective state. How
shall they be chosen ? All the boys and girls of ten years of age will
have a right to demand that they be educated for the medical pro-
fession. Here at the start there is an insuperable difficulty. But
let us suppose that at length four thousand young men and women
of the age of twenty years present themselves to begin the medical
studies. Out of these it may be necessary to select three hundred,
in order to make allowance for death and failure. The selection will
have to be made by a committee. Will it select at random ? That
would not be justice to the community. Will it select its friends ?
That would not be the equality of distributive justice which is the
professed aim of the collective state. Will it select according to
previous examinations in schools of arts and letters? Knowledge
of arts and letters is not a criterion of certain very important quali-
fications which should be looked for in those to whom the lives of
the community are to be entrusted. There are certain moral and
physical qualities which can exhibit themselves only in the course of
practice, and which — any physician will attest it — go far to make
up the necessary equipment of the medical practitioner who is to be
of real value to the community. These things cannot be foreseen
by any committee. Hence no committee can make a fit selection of
subjects for education in medicine.

W' e shall, nevertheless, suppose that the committee does make a
selection of the three hundred who are to pursue the medical
studies. As we have said, these students will have to receive their
salary or wages for study. What guarantee can we have that they
will really fit themselves for the best public service ? For, the prac-
tice of medicine will have to be a public service, since there can be

The Principle of Collectivism, 57

no competition. No more can be done than to establish a mini-
mum percentage which one must reach in order to be accepted as
the public servant. And in the doing of this the entire medical pro-
fession is reduced to a minimum of excellence. For, nine-tenths of
those who, under the system of private competition, would have
labored for a maximum of excellence, will, under the new system,
labor only for the minimum which is demanded for the earning of
the daily wage in the public service — the only thing they can aspire
to. In a word, the entire profession is degraded, and the entire
community is put at the mercy of half-educated charlatans. Drugs,
medicines, under the new system, will have to be as free as water.
The members of the community, on labor hour certificates, cannot
be expected to lay by enough to cover the expenses of a long ill-
ness. Everything for the infirm and the incapacitated will have to
be done by public hospital service. But where nurses and doctors
and all entrusted with the health of the citizens are qualified for
their service by a minimum examination, we may well pity the com-
munity that is subjected to the collusion of such servants whose
wages are independent of the efficiency of their service.

This is but one illustration which we have chosen to pursue out
of a hundred thousand. The collectivists do not go into these
details. They are careful to avoid such details. They keep on
crying, "The fruit of labor for the workman and down with capital."
They pose as reformers ; but their reform when investigated is seen
to consist simply in tearing down and not in building. In no one of
their programmes have they presented a practical satisfactory detail
upon any point of the new system which they offer to establish.

We may remark here that it is a necessary consequence of the
collectivist scheme that every person who is at least willing to work
must be entitled to the labor wage. Hence it must be a socially
inevitable fact that at all times there shall be many who shall receive
the labor wage whilst doing no work. For it is impossible that all
persons in the same locality shall always be producing. Yet such
persons are fully entitled to the labor wage, for the principle of
equality demands that it be not arbitrarily given to one in prefer-
ence to another. If, however, actual labor should be counted a
necessary condition for the receipt of the wage, then those for
whom there would be nothing to do in a locality would have to be
transported at public expense to another locality where labor would
be possible. Thus there would be an endless shifting of popula-
tions; there would be a continual breaking up of families — a vital
blow given to one of the fundamentals of human liberty.

To return to the second of our questions, the new socialism has
set itself the task of specifying what it means by the labor hour as

68 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the measure of value — whether that measure is to be the time of the
labor or the utility, necessity, desirability of the result : the hour or
the product. As we have seen, the product must necessarily enter
into the standard. But, as we have also seen, this will give us a
standard the most fickle, fluctuating and complex that could possi-
bly be devised. For the purpose of avoiding a more bewildering
complexity we have omitted to hint that even the use value of a
product could be justly decided upon in no other way than by the
voice of the whole community. If a few individuals want a certain
article and this article has to be produced for them, the labor ex-
pended for their idea would be so much labor taken from the pro-
duction of what is really desired and used by the whole community ;
and it is, therefore, by reason of the diminution of the supply, an
increase in the price of the commodity that is demanded by all.
Socialist leaders see their dilemma. Hence they are reticent or
over-cautious in their expressions upon the use value of labor.
They are apprehensive of the shoal of rocks upon which their phan-
tom ship must go to pieces. For the most part, therefore, we find
them still specifying by the time and glossing over the general use
value of the labor in which the time is spent. But this mere time
value, the equal wage for all time service, is the most galling civic
tyranny that can be exercised upon the intelligence, industry and
enterprise of a population.

Unfortunately, it is precisely this prospective despotism to be ex-
ercised over the attentive, the careful, the industrious and the con-
scientious that has contributed as much as anything else to swell
the ranks of the new socialism as a political party. The lazy, the
chronic grumblers, the dissatisfied, the improvident are swept into
the political maelstrom by the momentum of their own inertia. The
deeds of the socialists in Italy and Belgium during' the past two years
are evidence of the methods by which a dangerous class of men,
under the name of a recognized political party, are ready to execute
their programme the world over. Debarred from political recogni-
tion under their own name or tenets, we find promoting the social-
istic demands that entire class which, with change of time or locality,
has made up what has been known as nihilism, the internationale,
the commune, the "reds" — the class that has wrought all the destruc-
tive revolutions from the days of the "Terror." There are cer-
tainly intelligent and able men at the head of the coUectivist move-
ment. But so were there intelligent and sincere men at the head
when the reform of the last century began ; but they were swept
away by a turbulent sea. It is the time-standard for the value of
labor which has, for the present, merged into the social coUectivist
party that entire class which wants a paternal state where there will

The Principle of Collectivism. go

be a wage for every hour ; where a committee, representing the
paternity of the state, will set the task, and where no one will have
a chance to grow rich.

It is precisely the promotion of this socialistic time pay principle
which has done most, primarily, to bring dishonor and discredit
upon what ought to be, as five centuries ago it used to be, the most
potent force to keep the social equilibrium. I mean the trades guild
or labor union. The trade union has often enough alienated its
friends and set itself in antagonism to those who would have been
its best support, by insisting upon the time employed rather than
upon the excellence of the work done as the measure of the labor
wage. It would be interesting to learn how far the application of
this socialistic principle, as the working basis of certain trades
unions, has been responsible for some of the uncomfortable strikes
by which communities have been afflicted. I have seen as many
as seven hundred operatives walk out of one establishment because
the manager refused to pay the wages of the skilled laborer to one
man who was not skilled and who could not do the work that was
called for. The union insisted upon his having the full wage simply
because he was a member of the union. And because the manager
would not sanction this socialistic tyranny the whole establishment
went out upon a strike by order of the dictator.

We have said nothing of the attitude of the new socialism toward
religion. Our purpose has been solely to consider the political
possibility of the economic scheme as judged by its fundamental
principle. The religious attitude of the polity would be matter for
special consideration. This much, however, may be said, that the
general literature of the movement, together with the character of a
vast body of men from whom it is getting its support, leave no room
to conjecture that it would or could be other than strictly material-
istic, that is atheistic and purely irreligious.

Taking, then, the temporal view alone, we have to remember
that there is no temporal advantage which can compensate a man
for the loss of his individuality, his personal liberty, his native
autonomy. In this view the development of individuality implies
the right to earn and the right to learn. From what we have said
it ought to be manifest that the collectivist paternalism stands in
the way of individual development by practically forbidding the un-
trammeled exercise of the right to earn. But the scheme is equally
obstructive of individual development in the other way, and as thus
obstructive it is, perhaps, the more imminent danger to us at the
present hour. There is a slavery not alone of the body, but also of
the soul. Besides the slavery of matter there is a slavery of mind.
There can be a slavery not only of muscular energy, but even of the

70 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

energies of thought. And it is precisely in the intellectual sphere —
even in the temporal order — that collectivism is to exercise its most
disastrous effects upon the native liberties of the individuals of the
collection. Under the system the individual cannot be privileged
to get the education which he knows to be best, whether for him-
self or for his children. The entire management of the intellectual
culture will necessarily be in the hands of the bureaus. If the
bureaus decide that a certain book is not to be printed, it shall not
be printed. It will be consigned to oblivion with its author. If
the author does not choose to write so as to suit the ideas of the
committee, he cannot get into print; for the entire plant will be at
the dictate of the committee. The committee cannot print every-
thing at everybody's request. It will have to make a selection ; and
it will select according to its prejudices.

The most terrible tyranny, then, of the coUectivist state will be
the tyranny over thought. It might be a surprise to many to hear it
affirmed that where they would look last for the reaHzation of the
paternal despotism, namely, in the domain of truth and the realms of
thought, right there has the coUectivist principle found its most
comprehensive application. Men who would repudiate scornfully
the imputation of an alliance with the collective socialist movement
are doing more than any other class to promote that movement and
to prove its feasibility. It is in the advocacy of control of the
thoughts of the young through committees ' and bureaus that the
new socialism is striking its strongest blows, silently and with tell-
ing effect. If people are not now willing to be awakened to the
truth of this they shall awake upon a day to find that their sons and
daughters have been led into an intellectual captivity such as has
not been since the beginning of the world.

William Poland, S. J.

St. Louis University.

MEGA SPEL^ON, OR THE MONASTERY OF THE GREAT

CAVE.

IN the early years of its existence monastic life was identical in the
East and in the West. But this identity rapidly disappeared.
For while the Western monk, more active and sympathetic
than his Eastern prototype, could not hold himself aloof from the
temporal and spiritual welfare of his fellow-Christians, the Eastern
monk became more and more selfish, spent his religious solicitude
in caring for no one's soul or body except his own ; and while re-
maining a passionate defender of Eastern dogma, never was wor-

Mega Spelmn, or the Monastery of the Great Cave. yi

ried by the duty of laboring either with hand or with intellect for the
amelioration of the moral condition of other men.

The Western monk interested himself in the daily life of the peo-
ple and rivaled the lay-priest's care of souls. His superiority of
learning and austerity of life rendered him more efficient than his
secular confrere, and the result was that the lay-priest had to imitate
him, and practically became a monk, in order not to lose his sway
and influence. The Western lay-priest accordingly accepted the
celibacy and office and secluded life of the monk, remaining different
only by his not taking up his abode within the walls of a monastery.
This influence, however, was mutual, and not all from one side, as is
evident. Although each set of clergy, by a kind of natural fitness,
devoted itself rather to one kind of work than to another, yet no
kind was exclusive property. In reality, therefore, the religious of
the West differs from the secular only in the very unimportant acci-
dentals of dress and routine of life.

While, then, the priests of the West are practically all monks,
and the monks of the West have nearly all become secular, this
useful amalgamation has not taken place in the East. There the
secular priest has accepted almost nothing from the regular ; and
the monk although in some countries, as in Russia, encroaching on
the domain of the secular priest, has not assimilated himself unto
him. This lack of assimilation is as natural in the East as it would
have been strange in the West. For in the East the monk has really
no qualities exclusively his that would add lustre to the life of other
men ; and the secular has no special virtues distinguishing him from
any good member of his flock that the religious might be moved to
emulate. ' »

In Greece and Turkey monasticism has essentially remained what
it was centuries ago ; and in this connection it is not out of place to
remember that what does not change and grow, if a thing of life, is
probably in the stage of decline or decrepitude. Monasticism is not,
however, on the same level in all parts of the East. In some coun-
tries, as in most of Russia, it is still in vigorous activity. In Greece,
however, it has become a useless institution, and unless renewed by
being thoroughly reformed, will soon lose what little influence it still
possesses.

The following historical and descriptive sketch of one of the most
noted monasteries of the East, and the most celebrated and popular
one of the modern kingdom of Greece, will, at least indirectly, fur-
nish some idea of what monasticism has been here what it is, and
what the Greeks think of it. My judgments, if not formed on theirs,
agree therewith. They properly respect the monasteries and monks
not exclusively in proportion to their worth to-day, but also in rela-

72 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

tion to their historic past. My sketch will follow this idea, and
will describe the monastery as it appeals to the Greek, and as it
really is.

Meg-a Spelaeon is not the only famous monastery of free Greece.
For Hagia Lavra in Arkadia, the Meteora in Thessaly, the Tax-
iarchs near ^gion and others also have their peculiar historic repu-
tation. But Mega Spelaeon has been more closely connected with
the varied life and fortunes of the people, and has partaken of their
aspirations more than any of these others. It is also the largest in
respect of the number of monks and the most noted in respect of
wealth.

Mega Spelaeon is located in the northern part of the Pelopon-
nesos and in the province of ancient Arkadia, near to where the
mountains of Arkadia join the neighboring ones of Achaia. It is
situated high on the slope of a long cliff overlooking the rocky bed
of the Erasinos river, which brings down into the Korinthian Gulf
portion of the waters of the Aroanian and Erymanthian mountains.
The monastery stands about one mile above the river, to the east.

Formerly Mega Spelaeon was quite difficult of access. It could
be reached only on foot or by pony, as no wagon road either in
ancient or in modem times has been cut across these Arkadian
cliffs. The nearest centres of civilization in the late middle ages,
and up to the present time, were the village of Kerpine, where the
French chieftains of Charpigny built one of their fortresses, and
which is distant by a walk of two hours ; the town of Kalabryta, dis-
tant to the south more than two hours; Korinth, sixteen hours
away towards the rising sun, and Patrae, twelve hours towards the
west. Now, however, a pilgrimage to Mega Spelaeon involves no
unpleasant journeying whatsoever. In 1895 a military railroad
was built through the gorge of the Erasinos, and thus easy com-
munication now exists between Northern Arkadia and the Ko-
rinthian Gulf. This railroad is of the toothed kind. The ascent
is in some places dangerously steep, as can be judged from the fact
that the station in Kalabryta, although distant only twenty-one
chilometres from the station near the gulf, is two thousand one hun-
dred and seventy-five feet higher. The ride up this incline is won-
derful. The train, consisting of an engine and one open car, creeps
up along its rocky path, over waterfalls, under tunnels, over high
and short bridges, under cliffs so tall that one cannot see the top
from the cars at times, with the Erasinos surging and boiling along-
side. Just below the monastery is a small village with the strange
name of Zachlorou, where the cars stop. Zachlorou is nineteen
hundred and fifty feet high, although it is distant only eleven chilo-
metres from the gulf. From Zachlorou to the monastery, which is

Mega SpelcBon, or the Monastery of the Great Cave. 73

about ten hundred and fifty feet above the station at an angle of
about forty degrees, the ascent is made by donkey along a zig-zag
path. About half an hour is required to make the ascent.

The history of the monastery has been written by one of the most
noted of modern scholars in the Greek Church, CEkonomos ex
CEkonomon. It was published in the year 1840, under the title of
"Ktitorikon or Proskyneterion of Mega Spelaeon," in Greek. But
the early centuries of the history of the monastery are so enveloped
in obscurity and pious story that they cannot be clearly examined.
Its later history, however, and the part it took in the stirring events
that occurred in Greece at the beginning of the present century are
well known.

It seems probable that the original monastery was established on
the exact site of the present one, that is, in the cave from which the
institution takes its name. The custom of founding monasteries
and churches in caves was a frequent one during the early and mid-
dle ages of Christianity. It came in part from the habit which the
anchorites cultivated of not surrounding themselves with anything
that resembled artificial luxury. To such men these caves afforded
a natural, easy and sufficient shelter. All throughout the East may
be found monasteries that originated from a cave and a cave-dwell-
ing anchorite.

It is this spacious grotto, then, that furnished to the monastery
its name of Mega Spelseon, or the Great Cave. Ecclesiastically it
should rather be called "the monastery of the Assumption," since
it is established in honor of the Blessed Virgin, and celebrates with
special pomp the feast of the 15th of August in her honor. But the
other name is the only one in official as well as in popular use. And
a precious image of the Blessed Virgin, which is kept here, is known
everywhere throughout Greece, in its copies, as the "Panagia Megas-
pelaeotissa," or the Madonna of the Great Cave.

The cave itself is about ninety feet high and one hundred and
eighty feet long. It is on the mountain side, at the foot of a tower-
ing and perpendicular face of solid rock that rises about five hun-
dred feet straight in the air above it. It is quite deep, so that the
principal building of the monastery is entirely within it and beneath
its roof. And a stone rolled from the summit of the cliff above will
fall clear of this cavity and the monastery.

From a distance the monastery can be seen only from the moun-
tain heights west of the longitude of the cave. Mysteriously pic-
turesque does it appear from the top of the ruined citadel of the
Prankish knights of La Tremoille near Kalabryta, and from a few
points along the banks of the Erasinos, especially from a place called
"the Maiden's fount," and from the higher parts of the opposite

74 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

village of Zachlorou. But from a distance it is very difficult to find
a point from which all the buildings are visible, because from most
of the neighboring lookouts a portion of the group of curious build-
ings, and oftenest the principal one, is hidden behind some mountain
projection. Most often only the old tower on the edge of the cliff
above the monastery can be seen, the tower built as a defense against
the Egyptian army of Ibraim Pasha in 1827.

The principal building is mostly seven stories high. The lower
portion is built of stone and the upper stories of wood. Most of this
stone portion is about four stories high ; but since its various sec-
tions do not all begin from the same ground level it does not all rise
to the same horizontal line at the top. Indeed one could easily
think that irregularity in lines and lack of symmetry were inten-
tionally provided for by the successive architects of the buildings.
The fagade of this central building forms not a straight line, but an
irregular segment of a circle, following the contour of the cave. It
is the custom here in Greece to cover the roofs of houses with brick
tiles. This, however, cannot be done at Mega Spelaeon, because
in winter gigantic icicles form on the rocky side of the cliffs above
and fall with tremendous force upon the monastery. These roofs
have therefore to be made of thick planks, capable of resisting the
violence of the falling ice.

A characteristic of the Greek is that he never makes repairs.
This truth is well illustrated here at the monastery. Nothing after
being once constructed is ever restored, and injured parts are never
renewed if possible until progressing decay necessitates complete
demolishment and reconstruction. Accordingly, the various build-
ings with their crooked lines and unsymmetrical shapes are made
even more picturesque by their rickety and. dilapidated appearance.

In front of the monastery, towards the Erasinos, the higher slopes
of the mountain side are all carefully terraced and cultivated.
Various kinds of vegetables and fruits are raised here by the monks,
each one of whom, assisted by his famulus, tills a small patch, from
which he supplies his table. These terraces and hanging gardens
are separated off from each other by supporting walls of stone and
by irregular rows of trees and flowering shrubbery. The walls are
covered with masses of ivy and wild vines in most luxuriant profu-
sion. A number of these enchanting gardens can be seen from the
windows of the monastery. Nightingales and other sweet-voiced
birds fill the air with music morning and evening. The monks have
the good quality of being lovers of nature. And the slovenliest of
them will cultivate a few flowers in his garden, and perhaps have a
song bird in his cell. Having once climbed to the top of the cliffs
that overhang the monastery to the tower where Ibraim's Egyptian^

Mega SpelcBon, or the Monastery of the Great Cave, 75

were repulsed, I came suddenly upon a priest robed in cassock and
kalimavki standing statue quiet in among the bushes, and on in-
quiry learned from him that his lonely posing was due to his watch-
ing some young bullfinches which had just left their nest. He had
already caught one and had it imprisoned, chirping and fluttering,
in the pocket of his cassock. He said that he wanted them for his
cell, as the bullfinch is an excellent songster. But when I met him
again, a few days later, he hastened to tell me with sorrow that his
prisoners of melodious hopes had died.

The story which the monks narrate as to why the site was selected
is that within the cave an image of the Madonna was discovered by
a native shepherdess of Zachlorou, a pious girl named Evphrosyne,
and that in consequence of this discovery two monks from Thessa-
lonika, Saints Symeon and Theodoros, built a church and cells in
the cave, and took up their abode in it. That the monastery is ex-
tremely ancient is beyond all doubt. And the tradition which as-
serts that it was founded by these two saints in the fourth century is
perhaps not widely incorrect. The tradition is confirmed by the
office which the monks sing in memory of its reputed founders,
Symeon and Theodoros, who along with Evphrosyne are commemo-
rated as local saints on the i8th of October. Archaeological methods
of reasoning bring the researcher back towards that period. And
since the fourth century saw monasteries founded in many other
parts of the Christian world, we do not yield much to tradition by
not positively rejecting for the origin of Mega Spelaeon a date so
early.

In the year 1641 a terrible conflagration visited the monastery
and consumed everything — the buildings, the church, the library
and the archives. Nothing of importance within the buildings
escaped the flames except the image of the Madonna, which the
monks carried off to a place of safety. This annihilation of all older
monuments and destruction of the records is what renders the early
history of the monastery so obscure. Fortunately a few important
documents were saved because they happened to be kept at that
time not in the monastery, but in one of its various "metochia" or
succursals. Among these were three golden imperial bulls from
Constantinopol.

Documents have been preserved which show that the church
which was reduced to ashes by the conflagration of 1641 had been
rebuilt or renewed from still older foundations in the year 1285 with
money sent from Constantinopol by the Emperor Andronikos H.
One might suppose that since the Peloponnesos was at that time
under the rule of the Franks, it was strange for an Emperor of Con-
stantinopol to become the benefactor of a monastery within their

^6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

dominions. But there could not have been much difficulty in doing
so, for Villeharduin and his successors, who since the Fourth Cru-
sade in 1204 held most of the Peloponnesos, never cut the church of
their Greek subjects loose from Byzantine influence. Besides, the
gift of Andronikos need indicate no imperial sway over the country.
And moreover at that time the Emperor could hope for the return
of the Peloponnesos to his dominions, for it was just then very
carelessly governed from the West. It had lately been added to
the possessions of Charles of Anjou, King of Naples. The King
of Naples died in this year, and his successor, Charles IL, was a
prisoner in the hands of the King of Arragon. And his Viceroy,
Robert, provided temporarily for the Peloponnesos by placing it
under the care of the Duke of Athens, Guillaume de la Roche. But
Guillaume had nearer and more vital interests in his own dukedom,
and the Prankish possessions of the Peloponnesos were open to con-
tinual attacks from the garrisons of the Byzantine forts of Monem-
basia and Lakedaemon. It is also well known that Andronikos was
a religious man. He followed the views of those that had opposed
the ikonoklasts, being in favor of the images, and therefore was
naturally well disposed towards a monastery where was venerated a
picture of the Madonna reputed to be from the hand of the Apostle
St. Luke. He also sent to the monastery one of the three golden
bulls mentioned above.

The Megaspelgeotes, after this fire of 1641, immediately set about
rebuilding the church and monastery. Within the following year
a good portion of the work was completed. And in the year 1653
the church, which had already been entirely rebuilt, was frescoed,
as is testified to by an inscription over the great door of the
narthex.

This new church, which dates from 1641, is probably, like the one
that had been destroyed by the fire, a good specimen of the Byzan-
tine style of ecclesiastical architecture. The church is not visible
from without, as it is on the third floor of the principal building, and
has no separate fagade of its own. The main part of the church is
in the form of a square, in the middle of which four pillars support
a beautiful dome. As is usual in the East, the sanctuary is sepa-
rated from the body of the church by a wall called the Eikonostasion.
Three doorways lead through the Eikonostasion from the body of
the church into the sanctuary. This eikonostasion is extremely
rich, being of wood intricately carved and covered with gold. When
looking at it one cannot fail to recall the luxurious Rococo orna-
mentations so much favored by the Jesuits in Italy and other parts
of Europe. The eikonostasion receives its name from the fact that
it is decorated with the eikons or images of Christ as King of Kings,

Mega SpelcBon, or the Monastery of the Great Cave. 77

the Blessed Virgin, the Apostles, St. John the Baptist and the patron
saints of the church.

To the right of the worshipers, in this eikonostasion, is the great
treasure of the monastery, the image already mentioned, the Ma-
donna which was saved from the fire of 1641, and which the tradi-
tion of the monks attributes to the hand of St. Luke. It is not a,
painting on canvas or on a flat surface, but is a carved image in high
relief, made of wood and representing the Virgin holding the Child
in her lap. It is probably a very old work. That it was, however,
made by the Apostle seems to be merely a bit of pious credulity
which adds to the incomes as well as to the fame of the monastery.
The image is covered with a kind of wax, which the monks profess
to know to be mastic. It has become very black with age and with
the smoke of incense. The image may possibly be technically
classed with those called "kerochyt," and finished by a process called
"kerographia."

The decorations of the church of Mega Spelseon are rich and
heavy. The effect is added to by the fact that the overhanging cave
shuts out almost all the light of day from the little windows in the
dome, allowing the church to be illuminated only by the softened
light which streams in from the narthex through the open doorway,
and by the candles and olive oil lamps that burn in front of the
eikons. The walls are one solid mass of frescoes in heavy colors.
These frescoes represent prophets and apostles and martyrs and
saints and holy persons thousands in number, who seem in the dim-
ness to be standing behind the stalls of the monks and listening with
mysterious attention to the chants of the Holy Office. In the middle
of the floor beneath the dome is carved in marble the two-headed
eagle of the Emperors of Byzantion, which the Tsars of Russia have
appropriated. It may be seen in all Greek temples of importance
that were built while the Greek Church here was subject to Constan-
tinopol. The entrance into the main portion of the church from the
outside narthex is through a doorway which is closed by two mas-
sive doors of brass, made in Lebadeia in 1805. They are covered
with figures and groups of figures in low relief, not of good but of
pleasing art. Outside of these gates is the outer narthex, or vesti-
bule, where those who come to visit the church may sit till the doors
be opened. 'I '^

Besides this church there are several small chapels. The church
is called "katholikon," or "katholikos naos," because into it gather
the "entire" community for such services as are ifitended for "all."
The smaller chapels are five in number, one of them being sacred
to St. Luke, as the painter of the miraculous image, and another to
St. Evphrosyne, to whom the place of the hidden image was re-

78 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

vealed. Sick persons who are often brought to the monastery to be
reHeved of their sufferings are placed in the chapel of St. Evphro-
syne. It is so small that no more than three or four persons can
enter it at once. As a rule these chapels are used only when more
than one Mass is to be said; for, according to the canons of the
Eastern Church, not more than one Mass may be celebrated at the
same altar on the same day. Such a coincidence, however, is not so
very frequent. For the priests usually celebrate Mass only when
they have "intentions."

This monastery of Mega Spelaeon belongs to the class called
"stavropegiac." Stavropegiac churches and monasteries are en-
tirely independent of the authority of the bishop and other local
ecclesiastical authority in the diocese where they are established.
They depend directly on the Patriarch of Constantinopol. The
local bishop cannot interfere in the appointment of the abbot,
in the admission of novices, or in the administration of the
property of the monastery. Nor is he specially commemorated in
the office and M^ass. But these privileges are here in Greece now
merely an empty historic title, for shortly after the establishment of
the kingdom of Greece the Church was declared to be independent
of the Patriarch, and Constantinopol now has no authority whatso-
ever over this and other such monasteries, the head of the Church
in Greece being the Metropolitan Archbishop of Athens. At pres-
ent the Mega Spelseon is supposed to be subject to the bishop of
^ the diocese of Kalabryta and ^Egialeia. But the see of this diocese
has been vacant for years, and probably will long remain so. The
vicars, who reside in Kalabryta and administer the affairs of the
"widowed" diocese, as they call it, bother themselves very little about
Mega Spelseon.

In consequence of its fame and high protection, Mega Spelseon
became very wealthy. By legacies and other gifts it came into pos-
session of property in every part of the Hellenic world, in European
Turkey, in Asia Minor and in North Greece, besides its numerous
possessions in the Peloponnesos. This wealth and property were
secured to it repeatedly by imperial and patriarchal bulls. A num-
ber of the later patriarchal bulls referring to the monastery and its
property are still in existence and are kept in the library. Of the
imperial bulls only one is still in the possession of the monastery,
that of John Kantakouzen, written in 6856 anno Mundi, that is 1358
A. D. Possibly Kantakouzen's bull was occasioned by the events
of 1320. In that year the country round about Mega Spelaeon
passed again under the control of the Emperors, owing to the vic-
tories of the Byzantine general, Andronikos Asan. This change of
rulers probably brought with it disputes as to the legality of the

Mega SpelcBOUy or the Monastery of the Great Cave. 79

titles which the monastery held to some of its lands. And the ob-
ject of the bull was to prevent greedy laymen from appropriating to
themselves fields and forests belonging to the monastery. The bull
may have been obtained through influence with the son of Kanta-
kouzen, Manouel, who in this year was appointed Byzantine general
in the Peloponnesos and established the seat of government in the
Lakonian town of Misthra.

Similar circumstances later occasioned the loss of two of these
imperial bulls. In 1684 the Republic of Venice declared war anew
against the Sultan, and her armies, under the leadership of Morosini,
succeeded in liberating the entire Peloponnesos from his yoke. By
the treaty of Carlovich in 1699 the Peloponnesos was accordingly
declared to be a Venetian possession. This new change of masters
again occasioned disputes as to the legal ownership of certain lands
which the monastery claimed. And to vindicate their rights the
monks in the year 171 5 sent to the government of the doges the
three bulls in question, in order that the RepubHc might renew the
privileges therein granted. Venice, however, did not pay much at-
tention to the affair, probably foreseeing that her hold on the Pelo-
ponnesos was but temporary, and that it would not seriously benefit
either monastery or Venice to restudy the questions at issue, as the
possessions in dispute were liable at any time to again fall under
Turkish rule. And in fact in 171 3 war broke out afresh. Then
Zacchaeos, the monk who had brought the bulls to Venice, returned
to his monastery so as to be with it in the dangers of war. In his
hurry to depart from Venice he deposited the bulls with one of the
secretaries of the government. The result of this war was that in
1 71 5 the Grand Vizier AH Koumourtzi had easily reconquered all
of the Peloponnesos. After peace was restored the monks, being no
longer subjects of Venice, asked for the return of their valuable
parchments. The request was not readily complied with. And
after much delay they were glad to recover the latest of the three,
that of Kantakouzen ; but even from this one the golden medallion
or seal had been removed. Where this medallion now is, as well as
the fate of the other two bulls, is not known. But they are proba-
bly in some historical collection somewhere.

The wealth of the monastery was so great that not many years
ago the income annually was more than four hundred thousand
dollars ($400,000). This made a yearly allowance for each monk of
about fourteen hundred dollars. In those days the number of
monks approached to three hundred. Now they are not more than
one hundred and fifty. Of late years the income is not greater than
perhaps twenty thousand dollars. There is no way of discovering
the exact sum, although the abbot and counselors are supposed to

8o American Catholic Quarterly Rez^lew.

render to the government a detailed account every year. There
has, however, undoubtedly been a great decrease in the revenues of
the monastery, both because it has gradually lost much of the prop-
erty that it possessed outside of the Peloponnesos, and also because
of the increasing laziness of the monks. The government of Greece,
which is always hard pressed for funds, taxes this and all other
monasteries quite severely, making it necessary for the monks either
to become industrious or else to suffer somewhat by privation.
Most of the monks prefer the second of the two evils.

A great portion of monastic property has been confiscated. In-
deed it is quite probable that the government would mercilessly
confiscate all valuable monastic property, were it not that by doing
so it would commit the diplomatic blunder of giving the example to
the Sultan. In Turkey there is a great deal of property in the pos-
session of Greek monasteries. And these monasteries in Turkey
have not lost their usefulness to Greece and the Hellenic cause.
Accordingly it is to the interest of Greece to be solicitous that the
monasteries within Turkish territory be not interfered with by the
government of the Sultan. And therefore it cannot give the exam-
ple of high-handed confiscation of similar property at home. Still
confiscation quietly does go on. The ground on which the Ameri-
can School of Classical Studies in Athens stands once belonged to
the monastery of the Angels. And there have not been wanting
among the members of the Congress slavish men who have been
looking about through monastic property to find a suitable tract to
confiscate and donate to the third son of the King, since his older
brothers have already been provided for. Mega Spelason, however,
will not be confiscated, for the entire nation would resist such an act.

The life of the anchorite has always had a great fascination for
the Christian Greek. And monasteries have always been numerous
in Greek lands. In Turkish times they were in many respects use-
ful. The monasteries then were places where more or less of
Greek and Christian learning was diffused and where Christians
could occasionally assemble and feel that they were not under the
eye of spies. The monks continued to care for the treasures of lit-
erary antiquity, or at least to sell them to Europeans, thus prevent-
ing their complete loss. Many became monks because few other
professions then brought any kind of personal security together with
a little honor. The Turk nearly always respected the monk.

The Greek Church has almost ceased to be a teacher. She no
longer can be regarded as laboring intelligently in directing or form-
ing the morals of the people. She presents herself to the Greek as
a serious and energetic authority in no other domain than that of
religion and religious rites. Every historian knows that at times
there exists a divorce between morals and religion, and that people

Mega SpelcBon, or the Monastery of the Great Cave. 8i

become careless or unaware of the connection between the two.
This is unfortunately now approaching to be a fact in Greece. The
Greek is not a bad man by any means, but it is not evident that he
owes his virtue to his Church. In accordance with this view of re-
ligion the Greek who becomes a novice in a monastery is attracted
not so much by the morality of monastic life as by its religiousness.
And he and his friends think himself benefited by his becoming a
monk, although he brings with him only the most ordinary virtues,
and all of these he is by no means sure either of cultivating or of
increasing.

At Mega Spelaeon each monk may, if he chooses, keep under his
direction one or more young boys, who after reaching the age of
twenty-five years and spending three years in their patron's service
as novices, may receive tonsure and become monks. The mon-
astery as such rarely accepts novices. But the individual monks, as
individuals, according to their own absolutely free choice, take these
boys, who, known as "hypotaktikoi," that is "famuli," act as ser-
vants to their patron, and at the same time learn how to live a
monastic life. They also often become the inheritors of his personal
property. A not entirely unfounded opinion prevails that some-
times these famuli have reasons by paternity as well as by this
spiritual adoption to be regarded as the proper heirs of their patrons.

The monks of Mega Spelaeon belong to the class called "idor-
rythmic." As such they are to be distinguished from those others
of the "cenobiac" type. Cenobiac monks live a life in common.
All are under the direction of the abbot and the council, and must
labor for the common good of the monastery, according to the will
of their superiors. All eat at the same table. Food as well as
clothing and other necessities are supplied from the common funds
of the monastery. The idiorrythmic life, however, is very different.
Each member of the community is to a great degree independent.
He is indeed subject to certain general regulations, but can direct
and employ most of his life as he wishes. At Mega Spelaeon each
monk receives from the common income and property of the mon-
astery an amount of bread and wine and cheese sufficient for his
support and that of his famulus. A small garden is also allotted to
him in which he raises fruits and vegetables and salads for his table.
He eats in his own cell, attended by his famulus, who prepares his
food. There is no common table whatsoever.

Since wine and bread are common property, each monk is obliged
to be ready to assist, either he or his famulus, in the cultivatitig of
the fields that produce the wheat, in the irrigating of these fields
and the vineyards, in the harvesting of the wheat and the gathering
and pressing of the grapes. But as most of the lands are tilled by
Vol. XXVI— Sig. 6.

82 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

hired men or are pacted out to farmers, these labors occupy but a
small fraction of his time. If he holds any office in the monastery
or performs any duties other than those mentioned he receives a pro-
portionate salary. The religious exercises in the church go on
regularly, but he may attend or not almost as he pleases. And
surely except on Sundays and feast days he is absent much more
frequently than he is present.

The bread and wine and cheese, which is doled out free to all, is
produced from the farms and vineyards and pasture lands of the
monastery. In the wine cellar there are two famous old wine casks
called "Stamates" and "Evangelios." Stamates holds twelve thou-
sand okes, or nearly four thousand gallons. Evangelios formerly
was much larger than Stamates, but one end of the cask decayed and
had to be sawed of¥, so that Evangelios now contains only nine
thousand okes, or somewhat less than three thousand gallons.

Monastic life in the East, as in the West, has been carefully legis-
lated for in detail by the canons of various general and local coun-
cils, and these canons have been explained and amplified by the
regulations of the greater and model monasteries, especially those
on Mount Athos. The rules of these model monasteries are known
in the East as the canons of St. Basil, and all monks in Greek coun-
tries are regarded as being "Basilian." But these careful rules now
exist for the Megaspelaeote, as for other Greek monastic communi-
ties, rather in theory than in daily application. Perhaps the only
regulations which they never violate are those concerning fasting.
And this is to us the more remarkable, as the fasts in the Greek
Church are exceedingly severe. The monks, like a good portion of
other Greek Christians, observe four separate lents every year,
namely, the regular quadrigesima which they keep in common with
the Catholics, a lent of two weeks before the feast of the Twelve
Apostles, June 30, another of two weeks before the Assumption of
the Blessed Virgin in August, and one of four weeks during the
Advent of Christmas. These are all lents of severe abstinence rather
than of fast. Besides the monks never fail to abstain similarly on
all the remaining Wednesdays and Fridays of the year, avoiding all
use of meat, fish, eggs, butter, cheese and oil.

The management of the community has at its head the Hegou-
menos, or Abbot. Among all the abbots of the monasteries of
Greece he of Mega Spelaeon ranks first. He is a mitred abbot and
has the privilege of carrying a crosier and of wearing robes similar
to those of a bishop. He is elected for a period of five years, the
monks of the monastery being the electors. Their choice, how-
ever, must be confirmed by the Holy Synod at Athens. Only such
monks as have lived for six years in the monastery can have a vote

Mega SpelcBon, or the Monastery of the Great Cave. 83

in this election. The privilege of electing the abbot is conceded not
only to Mega Spelaeon, but to all monasteries where the number of
monks is more than six. Where there are not six monks the abbot
is appointed directly by the Synod at Athens.

In the management of affairs the abbot is assisted by two coun-
sellors, who with the abbot constitute a body called the "hegoumeno-
symboulion." In case this body fail to arrive at a decision in regard
to important matters, they call to their assistance such of the monks
as have been previously abbots, and others who belong to the cate-
gory of "gerontoteroi." The ex-abbots are usually two or three in
number, and are known as **prohegoumenoi." The gerontoteroi
are the aged monks that have spent a long and edifying life in the
monastery. And if this larger body cannot settle the difficulties,
then another class of monks called the "Senators" is summoned to
take part in the deliberations. The Senators are monks of good
standing who have arrived at the age of forty-five. Whatever be
the decision of this congress consisting of abbot, counsellors, ex-
abbots, gerontoteroi and senators, it is final. There is no higher
authority in the monastery.

The monastery possesses quite a valuable library. It contains
about twenty manuscripts of the Gospels. Of these the oldest one
is written on parchment and dates from the eleventh century. The
others are not so old. There are also specimens of rare editions of
the classics and old editions of the fathers. These books and manu-
scripts are chiefly gifts. How interesting so ever they be to the
bibliophile or to the palseographist or antiquarian, they have but
little value, comparatively, as books for an ordinary library and for
daily use. This fact is immediately evident to any one who visits
the library, in spite of the repeated assertion of the librarian that
the monks are very fond of reading. The monastery buys no new
books as a rule. Individual monks may in this matter, as in others,
follow their own inclination. The printed books in the library are
mostly ecclesiastical and theological. Besides serving as a library,
this room is a general cabinet of historical relics and curiosities.
There are mitres of mediaeval bishops, crosiers, jeweled crosses,
relics of saints, rich old vestments, vellum manuscripts, patriarchal
bulls, in profusion and confusion.

In general it may be said that just as real holiness is not much in
vogue amongst the monks, so also is deep learning a lost art. A
number of novices from Mega Spelaeon have been sent to the higher
schools to study ; and at present there may be counted at least a
score of Megaspelaeotes who have taken a course in theology or
philology. Nearly all of these have studied in the University of
Athens, a few of them in Germany. But after completing their

84 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

studies, if they receive no appointment calling them to labor as
priests in some foreign mission, or as teachers or professors in sortie
schools, they quickly forget their scientific habits and lose their in-
clination to study. Mega Spelaeon, however, has good men en-
gaged in professional duties outside of the monastery. There are in
the United States two Megaspelaeote priests laboring among the
Greek emigrants. Several of the bishops of Greece are from Mega
Spelaeon, including the Metropolitan of Athens, the head of the Hel-
lenic Church.

The monastery has always been a popular shrine for pilgrims.
They come so frequently and regularly that the monastery provides
a special "xenon" or hotel for them. No visitor is excluded from
the hospitality of the monastery. These pilgrims go there to light a
candle before the image of the Madonna, or to perform some other
religious act, or have a Mass said, or make a confession and receive
Holy Communion. Many come in consequence of a vow, having
promised that if certain hopes of theirs be fulfilled, they would make
a pilgrimage to the monastery. One can often see such people,
especially peasants and women, performing these pilgrimages bare-
footed, through a desire to do penance.

But also a number of persons go to Mega Spelaeon simply to en-
joy a pleasant outing. There are two "xenons," one for the poorer
and the other for the richer visitors. Those that have relations or
friends among the monks, especially if they be friends of the abbot,
are taken to private rooms and entertained elaborately. All visitors
must arrive before sunset, as at that time the outer gates are barred,
and it would be difficult to get near enough to persuade the man in
authority to open them. Likewise all weapons must be left with the
watchman at the entrance gate. This is a relic of the days of Turk-
ish sway.

In Turkish times the monastery, on account of the protection
which its sacredness aflforded to the "rajahs," was regarded as a
proper place for the Christians to meet once every year and hold a
kind of fair, each visitor bringing whatever he had to sell and pur-
chasing such objects as he had need of. Little merchants from afar
came and exposed their wares and trinkets. But after the wars of
liberation were over this practice was discontinued and the fair was
transferred to the neighboring town of Kalabryta, where it is still
held annually, at the same time of the year, the week preceding the
feast of the Assumption, in August. At Mega Spelaeon, however,
the name still remains attached to a hill in front of the monastery,
called "the hill of the fair;" and on its top is a chapel called the
"Madonna of the fair" or the "Panegyristria."

The monks of Mega Spelaeon on account of the manner in which

Mega SfelcBon, or the Monastery of the Great Cave. 85

they are recruited are from amongst the people of the neighboring
provinces of Achaia, Arkadia and Korinthia. Being children of the
people, they have always sympathized with the struggles of the peo-
ple, and this at times when it was a sacrifice to do so. When in the
year 1819 the Philike Hetseria, which had been organized in Odessa
in 1814, and whose object was the liberation of the Christians of the
East from Moslem rule, began to be more freely propagated in the
Peloponnesos, Hierotheos, the abbot of Mega Spelaeon, together
with three other monks, were among the noted Peloponnesians that
joined the society. And after the patriotic convention of the leading
Christians at ^gion, five hours distant from the monastery, this
Philotheos, being regarded as one of the most reliable and patriotic
priests of the Greeks, was commissioned to travel through the Pelo-
ponnesos and communicate with the other rajahs and prepare them
for the approaching strife by giving advice and collecting funds.

On account of its impregnable position the monastery was a fre-
quent place of refuge for many during the awful wars of annihilation
from 1 82 1 to 1828. In 1821, at the outbreak of the struggle, when
the Christians massacred the unfortunate Turks of Langadia, Ka-
nellos Delegiannes, one of the most prominent Christians of that
town, hurried his wife and children off to Mega Spelaeon, in order
that he might feel more at ease in fighting for his country. Like-
wise the family of the old hero Zaimes took refuge here more than
once.

In spite of the benefits conferred on the cause of the Christians
by the monastery and monks, it escaped all serious damage from the
Turks. Only in the last year of the war, in 1827, was it threatened
with impending destruction; but the danger was averted. The
Sultan of Turkey failing of being able either to suppress or anni-
hilate the Christians, after six years of fire and sword and assassi-
nation, called to his aid the bloody Ibraim Pasha of Egypt, offering
him the country in fief if he could subdue it. Ibraim came with an
army of Arabs and destroyed every thing in his way. In July of
1827 he came to Kalabryta, three hours away from the monastery.
He was full of triumph, for he had captured and destroyed the im-
mortal town of Mesolonghi, had ravaged and burned most of the
Peloponnesos and had made many of the rajahs kiss his hand in
submission. He brought an army of fifteen thousand men against
the monastery. But Kolokotrones had by his wonderful skill suc-
ceeded in sending a band of his paHkars there, who, uniting their
strength to that of the monks, formed a defending body of about six
hundred men. They dragged two or three old cannon to the top of
the rock above the monastery, located them in the fort there and
prepared to resist.

86 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Ibraim to save himself the trip to the monastery sent three suc-
cessive letters calling their attention to his proximity, to his large
army and his artillery, and advising them to surrender and acknowl-
edge his authority. According to a copy preserved in the monas-
tery, the answer of the monks was as follows :

"Most high ruler of the army of the Othmans, hail. We have
received your note, and we are aware of what you mention. We
know that you are as near as the fields of Kalabryta, and that you
have all the means of war. But for us to submit to you cannot be
done, because we are under oath by our Faith either to get free or
to die in war ; and according to our belief it is not right to break our
holy oath to our Country. We advise you to go and fight some-
where else. Because if you come here and conquer us the misfor-
tune will not be very great, as you will merely rout some priests.
But if you get licked, as we surely expect with the help of God, be-
cause we have a good position, it will be a shame to you, and then
the Greeks will take heart and will hunt you down from all sides.
This is our advice ; you look to your interests like a knowing man.
We have a letter from the Boule and from General Kolokotrones
that he will under all circumstances send us palikars and food, and
we will soon all be free men or will die true to our holy oath of Coun-
try.

"Damaskenos the abbot, and the priests and monks with me.
June 21, 1827."

Kolokotrones' aid-de-camp Chrysanthopoulos commanded the
monks and pilakars that defended the monastery. For two days
did Ibraim rage against it with infantry and artillery and cavalry.
But he had to withdraw, concluding that the monastery was im-
pregnable by its position and its defenders. He went back to Ar-
kadia to continue his devastations elsewhere. Two months later his
ships were sunk in the harbor of Navarino by the united fleets of Eu-
rope, and the Greeks were free.

Otho loved the monks of Mega Spelseon. Twelve of them did he
especially honor, and with his own hand pinned the medals for
bravery on their breasts. The room is still shown at Mega Spelaeon
where he slept. And the monks still love to tell of how he hugged
some of the old heroes that had fought in the war of liberation ; for
many of the older monks still remember the great-hearted Catholic
King, Otho the Bavarian.

Daniel Quinn.

Kalabryta, Greece.

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 87

THE RISE AND FALL OF EVOLUTION BY MEANS OF
NATURAL SELECTION.

IN this year of grace 1900 there has come from the press of D.
Appleton & Co. the second volume of the "Revised and En-
larged Edition" of "The Principles of Biology," by Mr. Her-
bert Spencer. The first volume of this edition was published in
1898, and both together may be regarded as the last word, or, at
least, the latest on the subject of evolution. They have the advan-
tage, too, of coming from the highest living authority on the subject.
Professor Haeckel is, indeed, still with us. His theory of evolution,
too, like that of Mr. Spencer, did not confine the famous hypothesis
to merely biological phenomena, but extended it to the inorganic
world as well. As Professor Haeckel's enthusiasm, however, could
never be made amenable to reason, and as his sanguine temperament
too often led him to mistake imagination for reason and fiction for
fact, his authority on the new doctrine never carried as much weight
as that of Mr. Spencer. It is true that neither Professor Haeckel
nor Mr. Spencer has contributed as much to the spread of the new
doctrine as did the late Charles Darwin and Professor Huxley, but
both Charles Darwin and Professor Huxley have already passed
away, and many things have come to light even in the brief space
since their exit. Mr. Spencer's volumes are the outcome of the
newer light, the fuller experience, the more sober second thought,
and while he still clings to a theory of evolution in some form or
other, he deals some deadly blows against the Darwinian hypothesis
from which it is impossible for it to recover. Unconsciously, too,
and even somewhat naively he lays bare the weakness of evolution
in any form yet advocated.

Mr. Spencer's confessions of the failure of evolution in the very
form of which he himself was at one time so ardent an advocate
naturally calls to mind the famous conflict, so called, of science and
religion in this particular field. The last half century has been
lighted up with the weird and lurid glare of the strange doctrine.
The men of science, as they loftily styled themselves, strove to
superinduce a reign of terror in the religious world under cover of
the new theory. The overwhelming destruction of revealed reli-
gion was, we were told, inevitable. The Church was patiently await-
ing her impending doom. Onlookers held their breath as they gazed
on the swelling portents. Mediators and reconcilers were busy
proffering their kind offices of intervention. Even the late Pro-
fessor Mivart once threw himself into the breach to effect a recon-
ciliation. But the case seemed hopeless. Religion was doomed—

88 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

and doomed not so much on account of its own inherent weakness
as because of the irresistible strength of the opposing science. And
now that the closing year of the century has come, it is somewhat
amusing to find that once more it is not religion but science that
confesses its weakness. In the light of Mr. Spencer's recent vol-
umes it is interesting to review the history of the late movement of
the doctrine of evolution.

The history of speculative science for the last half century has
been, as we have said, one of noisy and aggressive boasting. Not
content within its own sphere it invaded the provinces of reUgion.
The strong were surprised ; the timid were alarmed ; the weaklings
were in terror. Even in some who should be pillars of strength a
visible slackening of courage might be noticed. Fresh crops of re-
concilers sprang up from time to time, with the laudable aim of
effecting a compromise that might be honorable to religion. The
fathers of the Church were ransacked. The Scriptures were again
read over with a watchful eye to their elasticity. New meanings
were discovered for old texts, and doubtful readings were carefully
adapted to the new movement. Meanwhile on came the mighty
movement, ominous and terrible, threatening to overwhelm revealed
religion with death and destruction. Agnosticism and destructive
criticism were enlisted for the attack ; but they were mere auxiliaries.
The great central power — alike death-bearing and indomitable — was
the doctrine of Darwinism or evolution by means of natural selec-
tion. This was the wonder of the age, the marvel of the nineteenth
century, the crowning glory of science, compared with which the
practical and industrial sciences, such as steam and electricity, were
spoken of by speculative scientists in the language of measured
scorn. "They were merely utilitarian." For fully a quarter of a
century the new doctrine loomed up in gigantic proportions in the
scientific world. It was the fetish of speculative science. It will be
instructive to note briefly the suddenness of its rise and the greatness
of its fall.

Should any one be inclined to regard such a task as superfluous,
it is merely necessary to refer them to our current literature, from
which it can be speedily learned that, at least in some quarters, faith
in natural selection seems to be gaining ground in inverse ratio to
its failure. In view of the glowing eulogies on Darwinism one reads
nowadays, of the eloquent tributes to natural selection from living
and deceased litterateurs, of the brilliant attempts to reconcile the
Genesiac cosmogony — even to man's origin — with the origin of spe-
cies by means of natural selection, and in view of the further fact
that a profession of faith in natural selection is supposed to carry
with it the strongest evidence of modernity, it is a somewhat per-

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 89

ilous undertaking to go counter to the popular current in favor of
Darwinism. It is, however, just twenty years since the late Profes-
sor Huxley, celebrating what he called "The Coming of Age of the
Origin of Species," gave this wholesome admonition :

"History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to
begin as heresies and to end as superstitions (italics ours), and as
matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that in another
twenty years the new generation, educated under the influences of
the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of
the 'Origin of Species' with as little reflection, and it may be with as
little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years
ago, rejected them."

Twenty years have proved Professor Huxley to be a true prophet.
The new generation is accepting the main doctrines of the "Origin
of Species" with just "as little reflection" and just "as little justifica-
tion" as Professor Huxley foretold they would; for, assuredly, if
scepticism regarding natural selection has yielded to creduHty, it is
not owing to weight of evidence.

The notion of evolution had been floating about the world in one
form or other from ancient times. It was, however, only towards
the close of the last century, when the theory was propounded by
Treviranus and Lamarck, that it began to seriously challenge the
attention of scientists. Lamarck was a keen observer, and noticing
that in the animal world organs became more fully developed by
use and atrophied by disuse, he maintained that these characteristics
of more fully developed or atrophied organs were transmissible to
posterity. To this inheritance of organisms affected by use or dis-
use Lamarck attributed the variations from original types. In other
words, the inheritance of organs modified by use or disuse held
about the same place in Lamarck's theory of evolution that natural
selection holds in the Darwinian hypothesis. "Floods of easy ridi-
cule," as Professor Huxley tells us, "were poured" on Lamarck's
theory; and though adopted by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather
of the famous Charles, the doctrine of evolution dropped out of
sight in the early part of the present century, drowned in the floods
of ridicule poured on it by the scientists themselves. Little was
heard of evolution for the next half century, until in 1859 "The
Origin of Species" by means of natural selection strode into the
arena, like Minerva full-armed from the brain of Jupiter. Science
at once discovered in the new visitor the form and features of a god.
It knelt down and worshiped. Mr. Wallace, the joint parent with
Mr. Darwin of the prodigy, was, it is true, slightly overlooked in the
distribution of honors, but Mr. Darwin received his full meed. The
Darwinian hypothesis, as all the world now knows, was, to state the

90 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

matter roughly, simply this: All species have been developed by
variation from common stocks by means of the process of natural
selection. This process is closely allied to artificial selection or
what is commonly called selective breeding, the struggle for exist-
ence doing for natural selection what the human agency does for
selective breeding.

The new doctrine was hailed with acclamations of joy from every
quarter of the scientific world. Professor Huxley, as he himself
tells us, acted in the capacity of "under-nurse" to the infant prodigy.
Mr. Herbert Spencer hastened to offer his kind offices, and as the
cognomen of "natural selection" was somewhat "caviare to the gen-
eral," he suggested a substitute for it in "the survival of the fittest."
Evolution filled not only the world of science, but all the rest of the
world besides. Evolution was in the air. Its success was a fore-
gone conclusion. It was to take its place alongside the great dis-
coveries in physical science, greater than any of them, greater than
all of them, greater than the heliocentric discovery, greater than the
law of gravitation, while the names of Copernicus and Newton were
to rank a degree lower than that of Charles Darwin. For more than
a quarter of a century evolution with natural selection as its prime
minister reigned supreme. Now it begins to lie like an incubus on
all physical science, for, according to the very highest scientific au-
thority, the evidence for natural selection has completely broken
down.

To those who followed the divagations of natural selection for the
last quarter of a century the doctrine of Darwinism had, about the
middle of the last decade, ceased to be interesting, for the reason
that it had ceased to be tenable. Just then there was a general com-
motion in the scientific world. Dogmatism suddenly ceased. An
abandonment of position followed. Darwin himself had passed
away. Professor Huxley was still living. Suddenly the world be-
held the singular spectacle of the two foremost men of science, Mr.
Herbert Spencer and the late Professor Huxley, abandoning for the
moment the field of speculation and inquiry for the humiliating
work of reparation and retraction. And what is more, to all appear-
ances, both these renowned scientists entered upon this work after
due deliberation and by concerted action. Repentance does not
come easily to such spirits as Professor Huxley. He had too long
indulged in his favorite pastime of intimidating religion to take
easily to recantation. Indeed, Professor Huxley on the stool of re-
pentance would rob the most picturesque character in the history of
modern science of all its romance. Abject penitence was hardly to
be expected of him. Nevertheless, while the proud, baffled spirit
fought fiercely to the last, and the note of defiance would break out

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 91

occasionally, even to the end, he was too great a lover of science to
permit his name to go down to history as the supporter of a theory
which he knew to be inconclusive, without sounding a note of warn-
ing to his followers. It is true that only once or twice does he
speak in trumpet tones of unmistakable clearness on Darwinism
itself ; and that it is only when Mr. Herbert Spencer interprets for us
the very strongest of them we apprehend its full significance; but
his warnings to his disciples are plain, unmistakable and numerous.

With Mr. Herbert Spencer the case is entirely different. His re-
traction is made ex professo. As the Duke of Argyll put it at the
time: "He goes himself into the confessional." He points out
where his own theory of evolution as well as that of Mr. Darwin is
defective, and for both he tries as best he can to substitute some-
thing more satisfactory. Whether he has succeeded in this is not
the question here. The important point — which seems, however,
to be universally overlooked — indeed, the only point worth con-
sidering, is the candid avowal that evolution by means of natural
selection has been a failure. In the scramble to discover substitutes
for the Darwinian hypothesis the utter failure of that hypothesis
seems to be completely lost sight of. Natural selection is, in some
quarters, talked of as glibly and as confidently as if it had triumph-
antly accomplished all it had promised. He would be a bold man
who would say aught against it or against evolution ; and that Mr.
Herbert Spencer and the late Professor Huxley were reactionists
from the famous theory needs conclusive proof. Fortunately the
proof is easily furnished.

We have said that Professor Huxley was a reactionist from Dar-
winism, and this is true; but it is only half- the truth. It sounds
like the wildest of paradoxes to say that Professor Huxley was
never a believer in the Darwinian hypothesis at all. Nevertheless
it is but the simple truth. He was the coryphaeus of the movement.
He was its most eloquent and zealous advocate. In season and out
of season he preached the doctrine. To him more than to any one
else — more than to Mr. Spencer, more than to Professor Haeckel,
more, even, than to Mr. Darwin himself — is due the wide popularity
of the Darwinian hypothesis ; and yet he never made a profession of
faith in it to the end. Like some worshipers who are regular at-
tendants at church services in one or other of the Protestant denomi-
nations all their lives long, but who never "join the church," sub-
scribe to its doctrine, adopt its creed, or make a profession of faith
in its tenets. Professor Huxley to the end was outside the Darwinian
fold. He saw too clearly the shortcomings of natural selection from
the very outset, and was, from the start, one of its keenest and most
•dangerous critics. Here are the facts :

92 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The first edition of the "Origin of Species" appeared on November
24, 1859, and in the April of i860 Professor. Huxley contributed his
first criticism of the work to the Westminster Review, in which he
said :

"There is no fault to be found with Mr. Darwin's method, then ;
but it is another question whether he has fulfilled all the conditions
imposed by that method. Is it satisfactorily proved, in fact, that
species may be originated by selection? that there is such a thing
as selection ? that none of the phenomena exhibited by species are
inconsistent with the origin of species in this way? If these ques-
tions can be answered in the affirmative, Mr. Darwin's view steps out
of the rank of hypotheses into those of proved theories ; hut so long
as the evidence (italics ours)^ at present adduced falls short of enforcing
affirmation, so long, to our minds, must the new doctrine be content to
remain among the former — an extremely valuable, and in the highest
degree probable, doctrine, indeed the only extant hypothesis which is
worth anything in a scientific point of view; but still a hypothesis, and
not yet the theory of species."

This was Professor Huxley's first criticism on natural selection,
written a few months after the publication of Mr. Darwin's famous
work. In the same article Professor Huxley added:

"After much consideration, and with assuredly no bias against
Mr. Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction that, as the evidence
now stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having
all the characters exhibited by species in Nature, has ever been originated
by selection, whether artificial or natural."

Again, closing his objection drawn from the sterility of hybrids,
he thus concludes :

"But still, as the case stands at present, this 'little rift within the
lute' is not to be disguised or overlooked."

And before closing his article he says :

"We have ventured to point out that it (The Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection') does not, as yet, satisfy all those require- .
ments." (The requirements of "scientific logic")

Professor Huxley has, we think, left little room for doubt regard-
ing the meaning of the foregoing extracts. They establish his posi-
tion with regard to natural selection clearly. He had evidently the
hope that one day the hypothesis might prove a demonstrated
theory, but until that time, if a bull may be permitted, scepticism
was his creed. It may, possibly, be urged that Professor Huxley
changed his views as years went on, and that his scepticism was
dispelled by the proofs which the next quarter of a century brought
to light. He himself can best answer this question also. A short

1 Italics throughout this article are ours, unless indicated otherwise.

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 93

time before his death, in controversy with the Duke of Argyll, de-
fending himself against the charge of being a reactionist in evolu-
tion, he took occasion to reiterate his faith, such as it was, in Dar-
winism, in connection with which he used those remarkable
words :

"It is only a few weeks since I happened to read over again the
first articles I ever wrote (now twenty-seven years ago) on the 'Ori-
gin of Species,' and I found nothing that I wished to modify in the
opinions that are there expressed, though subsequent vast accumula-
tion of evidence in favor of Mr. Darwin's views would give me
much to add."

We have just seen what those views were in which, after twenty-
seven years, he "found nothing to modify." During all that time
an army of scientific inquirers had been industriously at work with
natural selection as their watchword and evolution as their goal.
The activity of the scientific world during these twenty-seven years
is unparalleled in the history of science. Willing workers and
anxious seekers in every department of speculative science — in
natural history, in geology, in palaeontology, in biology, in physiol-
ogy, in morphology, in comparative anatomy, in the newer sciences
of anthropologfy, embryology and synthetic chemistry — had but one
end in view, one Eureka as their object, namely, the lifting of evolu-
tion by means of natural selection out of the rank of hypotheses and
placing it securely in that of demonstrated theories; and yet at the
close of that time Professor Huxley frankly admitted to the world
that he had "nothing to rhodify" in an article in which he had de-
liberately consigned to the rank of mere "hypotheses" Darwin's
doctrine of the evolution of species, in which he had openly declared
that this doctrine had "not yet satisfied all the requirements of
scientific logic," and in which he pointed out "the little rift within
the lute" that was soon to make the music of that doctrine mute.

Strange as it may seem, then, there is no doubt that Professor
Huxley never regarded the evolution of species as propounded by
Mr. Darwin as a scientific truth at all. But, it may be asked, this
being the case, why was he so strenuous an advocate of Darwinism,
and why should there be need of reparation on his part ? The same
answer will suffice for both these questions. While he regarded it
as of little value, inasmuch as it was merely an unproved hypothesis^
he regarded it as of the utmost value as a provisional hypothesis, or,
as he himself put it, "as an instrument of investigation." It might
have no truth in it. It might never become a demonstrated theory;
but as an incentive to inquiry, as a stimulus to research, as a guide
in observation and experiment — in a word, as a good working hy-
pothesis—he regarded it as unequaled. He did not hesitate to assert

94 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

that it was far "superior to any preceding or contemporary hypothe-
sis in the extent of observational and experimental basis on which
it rests, in its rigorously scientific method and in its power of ex-
plaining biological phenomena." This was its value, or at least a
portion of its value, in his estimation. A further value he thus ex-
plains ;

"We should leave a very wrong impression on the reader's mind
if we permitted him to suppose that the value of the work depends
wholly on the ultimate justification of the theoretical views which it
contains. On the contrary, if they were disproved to-morrow, the
book would still be the best of its kind — the most compendious
statement of well-sifted facts bearing on the doctrine of species that
has ever appeared."

These were the qualities in the new doctrine which elicited his
regard and enlisted his enthusiasm. This enthusiasm, indeed, he
carried beyond all due limits. He expressed himself in such terms
that his hearers and his readers were not to blame if they looked
upon him as a firm beHever in the truth of the doctrine itself. The
disciples, taking the cue from the master, whose meaning they mis-
understood, soon began to out-Herod Herod, until at last Mr.
Spencer was forced to complain that "nowadays most naturalists are
more Darwinian than Darwin himself." Professor Huxle/s eyes
were at last opened to the real situation, and hence the work of
reparation and admonition. We shall quote two or three instances
of Professor Huxley's penitential texts. In his history of "The
Advance of Science Within the Last Half Century," referring to
some of the advanced views in anthropology, he finds room for
these pregnant words :

"Much of the speculative 'phylogeny' which abounds among my
present contemporaries reminds me forcibly of the speculative mor-
phology, unchecked by a knowledge of development, which was
rife in my youth. As hypothesis, suggesting inquiry in this or that
direction, it is often extremely useful ; but, when the product of such
speculation is placed on a level with those generalizations of mor-
phological truths which are represented by the definitions of natural
groups, it tends to confuse fancy with fact, and to create mere confu-
sion. We are in danger of drifting into a new 'Natur-Philosophie'
worse than the old. Boyle did great service to science by his 'Sceptical
Chemist/ and I am inclined to think that, at the present day, a 'Sceptical
Biologist' might exert an equally beneficent influence ''

Sceptical biologist indeed ! But who, in these days of ultra-Dar-
winism, will tolerate a sceptical biologist? Nevertheless, it is well
to remember that we have the salutary warning of the foremost biol-
ogist of his time against overmuch faith in the new anthropology.

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection.

Again, in one of his articles on "Science and Pseudo-science," Pro-
fessor Pluxley says :

"As is the case with all new doctrines, so with that of evolution :
the enthusiasm of advocates has sometimes tended to degenerate
into fanaticism, and mere speculation has at times threatened to shoot
beyond its legitimate bounds. I have occasionally thought it wise to
warn the more adventurous spirits among us against these dangers in
sufficiently plain language.^'

All of which unmistakably indicates "a change of heart" in Pro-
fessor Huxley's later years from the days when he, too, was among
the more adventurous spirits who seemed to think that speculation
could not be carried too far and that its only legitimate boundary
lines were the imagination. We shall let Mr. Herbert Spencer add
one more of Professor Huxley's admonitions, perhaps the most
significant of all of them. In his epilogue to "The Factors of Or-
ganic Evolution," Mr. Spencer thus quotes Professor Huxley :

"With these passages I may fitly join a remark made in the ad-
mirable address Professor Huxley delivered before unveiling the
statue of Mr. Darwin in the museum at South Kensington. Depre-
cating the supposition that an authoritative sanction was given by the
ceremony to the current ideas concerning evolution, he said that ^science
commits suicide when it adopts a creed.^ "

If language means anything, then Darwinism had, after a quarter
of a century of trial, fallen into utter disrepute. The feet of the idol
were found to be of clay after all. Dagon had fallen prone from the
altar on which science had, a quarter of a century previous, so
proudly placed him. Scientific men shrank from even the appear-
ance of lending the dethroned idol their sanction or approval, and
the consequence of their having been duped by the impostor was the
utterance of the conviction that scientific creeds are dangerous things
for men of science ; which, put epigrammaticallyso as never to be for-
gotten, is "science commits suicide when it adopts a creed." This was
the bitter lesson taught Professor Huxley by meddling with the
doctrine of the origin of species by natural selection. The full sig-
nificance of this revolt will be understood when we remember that
it is the same Professor Huxley who was once so enthusiastic an
advocate of the new doctrine, who acted in the capacity, as he him-
self tells us, of "under-nurse" to the theory, who was the orator
when it celebrated its coming of age, who was the chosen expounder
of the doctrine on all public occasions, and who, even now, when a
statue was being unveiled in honor of Mr. Darwin, was the orator
by natural selection on the occasion ; that it is the same Professor
Huxley who now makes use of that occasion to stab the doctrine to
the heart, and who goes even to the length of "deprecating the sup-

96 , American Catholic Quarterly Review.

position that an authoritative sanction was given by the ceremony"
to the doctrine of evolution by means of natural selection. Well
might natural selection cry out "Et tu Brute"

It would be easy to adduce other proofs of Professor Huxley's
attitude towards the doctrine; but we think enough has been said
to show that we have not overstated the case when we said that
Professor Huxley never made a profession of faith in the doctrine of
natural selection at all, and that towards the close of his life he was
engaged in the work of reparation by uttering warnings and ad-
monitions to his followers. With Professor Huxley there was, as
has been said, no occasion for retraction. He had never made an act
of faith in the doctrine.

With Mr. Herbert Spencer the case was different. Not only had
he openly avowed his faith in the efficacy of evolution as taught by
Mr. Darwin, but he had even disputed with Mr. Darwin the honor
of inventing it. Moreover, Mr. Darwin did not extend his general-
ization beyond the domain of biology, while Mr. Spencer not only
extended it to the inorganic world, but endeavored to apply it to all
psychical, social and political phenomena as well. For Mr. Dar-
win's "natural selection" he invented the Spencerian equivalent, "the
survival of the fittest," and around this as a centre as many battles
were waged as over the famous Darwinian phrase itself. Mr. Spen-
cer's advocacy of evolution was not as enthusiastic as Professor
Huxley's, but it was more positive and assertive ; hence the need of
retraction in his case. And it must be admitted that the recantation
is clear, candid and ample.

In the year 1886 Mr. Spencer contributed to the Nineteenth Cen-
tury two articles which could not fail to be epoch-making in the
history of natural selection. They were entitled "The Factors of
Organic Evolution." Whatever indirection there might have been
in the method of announcement, the announcement itself was un-
mistakable. It was the confession that the dogmatism of a quarter
of a century had been a mistake. "Natural selection" and "the
survival of the fittest" were both inadequate to account for the
origin of species. Mr. Spencer does not, like Professor Huxley,
content himself with laying down a general principle or uttering
oracular epigram. He at once plunges in medias res. He comes at
once to particulars. He puts the question plainly, even bluntly:
Has "natural selection" succeeded ? In the very first sentence of his
first article he makes a clean breast of the whole matter. The arti-
cle opens thus :

"While recognizing in full the process brought into clear view by
Mr. Darwin, and traced out by him with so much care and skill, we
may iitly ask whether those are right zvho conclude that, taken alone, it

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 97

accounts for organic evolution f Has the natural selection of favorable
variations been the sole factor, as it is now commonly supposed to have
been?"

And his answer comes promptly :

''On critically examining the evidence, we shall find reason to
think that it by no means explains all that has to be explained."

Mr. Spencer immediately adds what he believes must be regarded
as a necessary supplemental factor :

"Unless that increase of a part resulting from extra activity and
that decrease of it resulting from ^inactivity are transmissible to
descendants, we are without a key to many phenomena of organic evolu-
tion:'

To those who had pinned their faith to Darwin and Spencer and
who had long regarded, on the authority of these scientists, evolu-
tion as the solution of all biological and even of all cosmical prob-
lems, this announcement came like a thunder-clap from a serene sky.
What did it mean ? That natural selection and the survival of the
fittest had been failures? Of a surety this and nothing else. Mr.
Spencer asks the question plainly : Does "natural selection" account
for organic evolution ? And he answers without hesitation that, on
critical examination, "it by no means explains all that has to be ex-
plained;" that it leaves us "without a key to many phenomena of
organic evolution." Nay, what is more, recognizing this utter fail-
ure of "natural selection" to "explain all that has to be explained,"
he at once casts about for some other means of explanation; and,
strange to say, of all others, he selects as a worthy coadjutor of
natural selection the eflFete hypothsis of Lamarck, which, as we have
seen, was, about the beginning of the century, rejected by the scient-
ists with scorn and drowned in floods of ridicule. This obsolete
doctrine he rakes up from the rubbish of a past age, tries to galva-
nize it into new life and places it as the head of the corner. He tells,
us in cold print that while "the hypothesis of the inheritance of func-
tionally produced modifications" (the Lamarck theory) is "utterly
inadequate to explain the major part of the facts, . . . yet there-
is a minor part of the facts, very extensive though less, which must be-
ascribed to this cause" He then proceeds to describe three classes
of difficulties which cannot be explained by natural selection, but
"which disappear if the inherited effects of use and disuse are recog-
nized."

Whether Mr. Spencer makes good his contention regarding the
solution of those different classes of difficulties by the rehabilitated
factor does not come within the scope of this article. All that is
necessary here is merely to recognize the fact — too often lost sight
of — that Mr. Spencer has recorded in the strongest way his loss of
Vol. XXVI.— Sig. 7.

98 American Catlwlic Quarterly Review.

faith in natural selection and the survival of the fittest as a solution
of the problem of evolution. This is all the more remarkable, too,
coming from Mr. Spencer at a time of life when, as he himself once
said about Mr. Darwin, "the natural tendency is towards fixity of
opinion ;" and coming from Mr. Spencer, of all others, for whom the
failure of evolution is equivalent to drawing the pencil of cancelation
throughout the pages of his colossal life work. But this is not all.
Mr. Spencer, having entered on the work of demoHtion, pursues it
unrelentingly to the end. He has shown the failure of the Darwin-
ian theory of natural selection "to explain all that has to be ex-
plained," and he has supplemented it by the Lamarckian theory of
the inherited effects of use and disuse, as a necessary auxiliary. But
he does not stop here. He tells us that even both these together
are inadequate to explain all the facts; that there is still need of a
third. And he tells us this quite as bluntly as he told us there was
need of a second. Here is how he puts the question :

"But now, supposing the broad conclusion above drawn to be
granted — supposing all to agree that from the beginning, along with
inheritance of useful variations fortuitously arising (the Darwinian
theory), there has been inheritance of effects produced by use and
disuse (the Lamarckian theory), do there remain no classes of phe-
nomena unaccounted for?"

And, as before, the answer comes promptly and unhesitatingly :

"To this question I think it must be replied that there do remain
classes of organic phenomena unaccounted for. It may, I believe, be
shown that certain cardinal traits of animals and plants at large are
jtill unexplained."

Well might the devout evolutionist exclaim: "Mercy on us!
What is going to happen next? Has catastrophism not only reas-
serted itself, but overtaken the doctrine of evolution, too?" For
the world had been filled with the resounding echoes of Darwinism.
It was to account for everything. It had just begun to be regarded
as almighty and irrefragable. And just in the supreme moment of
its exaltation the foremost living evolutionist suddenly calls a halt
and declares it an ignominious failure. Nor were Mr. Spencer's
reasons for his abrupt interruption of the apotheosis of Darwinism
calculated to reassure the ardent evolutionists. Important and far-
reaching as were Mr. Spencer's articles, they were still more signifi-
cant in the spirit that prompted them. He told the world plainly
that the articles were written for the express purpose of stemming
the tide of credulity. What could be stronger than these words ?

"Along with larger motives, one motive which has joined in pro-
moting the foregoing articles has been the desire to point out that
already among biologists the beliefs concerning the origin of species

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 09

have assumed too much the character of a creed. . . . There seems
occasion for recognizing the warning uttered by Professor Huxley
as not uncalled for."

The warning here referred to as coming from Professor Huxley
was that already quoted, in which he said that "science commits
suicide when it adopts a creed." And Mr. Spencer concludes his
remarkable articles — perhaps the most memorable articles on the
subject since Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" appeared forty-one
years ago — with these pregnant words :

"Whatever may be thought of the arguments in this article and
the preceding one, they will perhaps serve to show that it is as yet
too soon to close the inquiry concerning the causes of organic evolution."

We have called these articles of Mr. Spencer's a work of repara-
tion and retraction, and we think that, as in the case of Professor
Huxley, we have here, too, made good our claim. Coming as they
did from the foremost of living evolutionists, they produced imme-
diately a profound impression in the scientific world. The tide of
opinion at once began to turn from the belief in natural selection as
the sole cause of evolution, and scientists began to cast about for
new factors to take its place, since that had proved inadequate. The
revolt of Professor Huxley with that of Mr. Spencer, and, to all ap-
pearances, according to a mutual understanding, shook the doctrine
of natural selection to its very centre, and the temples of the long-
cherished idol were soon destitute of worshipers. Of the vast multi-
tude that fifteen years ago bent the knee before Darwinism as the
true and only deity of the scientific world, perhaps not more than
two of any note — Professor Weismann and Dr. Romanes — have
maintained the faith in natural selection pure and unadulterated — if,
indeed, panmixia and special determinants can be conceived as non-
adulterating. Some have openly repudiated the doctrine altogether
and adopted the inheritance of functionally produced modifications
as their creed instead. Others, still, profess a sort of divided faith,
acknowledging a sort of dual divinity as supreme in the evolutional
world. This amphibious deity is part Darwinian and part Lamarck-
ian, for it is a combination of "natural selection" and the "inherita-
bility of functional modifications." Outside of these anarchy reigns
supreme. The tendency is towards independent views. Each
scientist shows an inclination to set up his own little Bethel for him-
self. Hence we have not only panmixia, which is, to be sure, only
an offshoot of natural selection, and determinate evolution or ortho-
genesis as it is called ; we have not only the "isolation" resulting in
"monotypic evolution" and the "isolation" resulting in "polytypic
evolution," besides the "physiological selection" recently elaborated
by Dr. Romanes; but Mr. Spencer, himself not dismayed or dis-

lOO American Catholic Quarterly Review.

heartened by the failure of the survival of the fittest, has undertaken
to find new factors for evolution. He had adopted natural selec-
tion under the cognomen of survival of the fittest ; but found, as we
have seen, that "it by no means explains all that is to be explained."
Next he supplemented natural selection by "the inheritance of func-
tionally produced modifications," and still, again, found that there
remained "many classes of organic phenomena unaccounted for."
He then introduced a third factor, which he called "the direct action
of the medium" — using the word medium — as including "all physical
forces falling upon them (living organisms) as well as matters bath-
ing them." But Mr. Spencer had already opened wide the flood-
gates of revolution. Rebellion is now in the air. The humblest
scientist refuses longer to call any man master. Regard for high
authority, so long sacred and so edifyingly carried out towards Mr.
Darwin and his scientific offspring, has fled the school of evolution.
Lawlessness reigns supreme. Mr. Spencer sowed the dragon's
teeth, and he has lived to witness and bear the dire results. And so
when he tries to raise his voice above the din and confusion no one
listens, or, if they do, it is but to question and argue as if with one
without authority. Indeed, a special creationist — supposing a
specimen of the extinct race still left upon the earth — beholding
Darwinism dethroned, natural selection a mere magni nominis umbra,
anarchy and chaos supreme in the world of evolution, might well
believe that retributive justice had at last overtaken his once proud
oppressor and that all the woes and tribulations of his brethren were
being amply avenged.

So far we have seen Professor Huxley's revolt against the doc-
trine of natural selection. We have seen how Mr. Spencer first
adopted the doctrine, found it insufficient, then how, instead of
promptly rejecting it, he undertook to strengthen it by introducing
the hypothesis of adaptive changes, as one undertakes to strengthen
a flawed timber by adventitious methods. We have seen, from Mr.
Spencer's own confession, how both these together, still showing
structural weakness, he was obliged to buttress them by a third — the
direct action of the medium. This piece of evolutionary engineer-
ing took place in 1886, fourteen years ago. It is interesting and in-
structive to inquire how the doctrine has fared during that period.
Up to that time there was unity of faith throughout the world of
evolution. The creed was one, the discipline was one, the worship
was one. No one had been rash enough to question the divinity of
the scientific deity, much less to dare lay sacrilegious hands upon it.
But in an evil hour Mr. Spencer unveiled the prophet and laid bare
its infirmities to the scientific world. Disunion and dissension
naturally ensued. Evolution, following its own law of variation,,

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection.

lOI

has branched out into many varieties — so many, indeed, that it
would not be at all surprising to find it in its own personality cutting
the gordian knot and solving the sphinx's riddle for good and all by
originating a new species. It would be a profitless task to follow
out the different varieties into which evolution has evolved itself.
The main branch is still that advocated by Mr. Spencer. Mr. Spen-
cer still stands without a rival in the school of evolution, and we shall
follow him as still by far the ablest exponent of the doctrine. Mean-
while, however, we must not forget the fact that there is no longer a
theory of natural selection ruling far and wide, arbitrarily and auto-
cratically exclusive, as in the days before the revolt. Not even in
the Neo-Darwinian school of evolution is natural selection regarded
as a competent cause of evolution without support of some kind.
Before examining the main branch of the doctrine held by Mr.
Spencer let us inquire into the fate of natural selection within the last
decade.

Since Mr. Spencer's revolt against the once famous doctrine he
has been fiercely assailed and an internecine warfare has ensued.
In the strife Mr. Spencer has done irreparable damage to the cause
of which he was once so staunch a supporter. The cause of natural
selection has received at his hands many bloody wounds — some of
them even fatal. Indeed, all that is necessary in order to see how
utterly natural selection has broken down is to read Mr. Spencer's
portion of the controversy with the Neo-Darwinians during the last
six or seven years. The enemies of natural selection need go no
further than Mr. Spencer's recent writings for the most deadly
weapons against the hypothesis that had once come to be looked
upon as impregnable. Mr. Spencer found himself in two somewhat
difficult roles. In the first place he found himself in the awkward
position of assailant and defender of natural selection at one and the
same time ; hence it was inevitable that he should give it some ugly
stabs. Then we find that without wholly discarding natural selec-
tion he took to himself a new favorite in the inheritance of function-
ally produced modifications, and in the clashing claims of the two
favorites the old one received at his hands scant courtesy. Hence
we find him referring to natural selection as "the fashionable
hypothesis." We hear his sharp retort to the Neo-Darwinians that
"they admit that there is no direct proof that any species has been estab-
lished by natural selection" He tartly tells them that in certain cases
he rejects natural selection because "When to uncertainties in the
arguments supporting the hypothesis we add its inability to explain facts
of cardinal significance" he is compelled to do so. And he enume-
rates three distinct classes of problems — the coadaptation of co-
operative parts, the possession of unlike powers of discrimination

102 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

by different parts of the human skin and the question of rudimentary
organs — where natural selection utterly fails, and sums up by saying,
"Failure to solve any one of these problems would, I think, alone
prove the Neo-Darwinian doctrines untenable ; and the fact that we
have three (italics Mr. Spencer's) unsolved problems seems to me
to be fatal." With this parting blow from Mr. Spencer, we think
Natural Selection — once written with capitals — may safely be left in
the hands of its friends as incapable of further good or evil. We
can now turn to the examination of evolution in Mr. Spencer's own
hands.

Mr. Spencer's new gospel of evolution is, as we have seen, a
species of eclecticism. It is indeed a strange conglomerate of spe-
cies grafted on species, adaptive changes grafted on natural selection
and the direct action of the medium grafted on both. It is, indeed,
possible that the weakness of the Darwinian hypothesis and the
weakness of the Lamarckian hypothesis when put together make
for strength, but it is not quite reassuring to find that this strength
Mr. Spencer finds it necessary to buttress by a third hypothesis ad-
mittedly no stronger than either. In fact, there seems to be a little
danger that the doctrine of evolution may prove to be something of a
monstrosity, inasmuch, as it seems to be developing heads as rapidly
as the Lernaean hydra. For first we had at least a symmetric doc-
trine in natural selection, whatever else it might be wanting in. But
natural selection being lopped off, two other heads instantly spring
up in its place, and every new^ excision seems to develop another and
still another. A quarter of a century ago Mr. Spencer seemed to be
a firm believer that natural selection was sufficient to account for all
biological phenomena. To-day he stoutly insists that not one, but
three are necessary, and even shows a willingness to look with some
degree of favor on still other coadjutors, such as isolation, physiologi-
cal selection, etc. The question, therefore, naturally arises : how has
Mr. Spencer's experiment succeeded ? If in a multitude of counsel-
lors there is much wisdom, in a multiplicity .of factors we might ex-
pect some solvent potency. But Mr. Spencer does not seem to be
any nearer the solution of the problem evolution started out to solve
than when he attempted the solution by means of natural selection
alone.

The inquirer cannot fail to be struck by several strange features of
Mr. Spencer's new formula of evolution. We shall briefly call at-
tention to five, the first and last being especially striking. The first
of these is its openly acknowledged failure. We ask: With all
these new factors is the problem solved ? Does evolution at last ex-
plain all that is to be explained? And Mr. Spencer still answers:
No. He candidly, as before, says : "But nozv let it be confessed there

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 103

remain many unsolved problems." And as if to impress us with the
fact still more strongly, he adds: ''Thus the process of evolution is
far from being understood.'' This then is the result after forty-one
years of trial with not only natural selection as a key, but with what-
ever else scientific ingenuity could devise by way of new hypotheses.
In this year of grace, 1900, it is again confessed that with all modern
appliances and after countless attempts "many problems remain un-
solved," and that "the process of evolution is far from being under-
stood."

We have said that the first and last features of Mr. Spencer's new
theory of evolution are especially striking ; but in some respects the
second is the most striking of all. It is nothing more or less than
the attempt to "ignore" the distinctions of species as mere "techni-
cal ideas" and merely "incidental phenomena." But one asks natu-
rally : Was not this the question precisely which evolution started
out to solve? the all-important question? And scientists can only
reply : Yes, it was the question of questions. Indeed, in the face of
the agitation of the last half century scientists cannot answer other-
wise. What, then, must be thought of this latest variation of evolu-
tion ? One reads a second and a third time to be sure that his senses
do not deceive him. Desperate indeed must be the cause which is
forced to Hy to such a refuge. To solve a problem by ignoring it
altogether as merely technical is indeed the newest feat in the scien-
tific world ; but what, when this is the problem on which the whole
question at issue hinges, indeed when it is the problem of problems
itself? As we expect to return to this question later on, we may
pass to the third feature to which we wish to call attention. It is
this:

The process of evolution was to be strictly scientific. Science
admitted nothing in the way of explanation which did not fall within
the sphere of our conceptions. Conceivability Mr. Spencer himself
set up as the test of truth. Whatever did not fall within the limits
of conceivability was to be rigorously excluded. This was why
special creation was so summarily ejected. It introduced an incon-
ceivable element into its account of phenomena, and this science
could never abide much in the same way as Mistress Quickly tells
of Falstafif that "A could never abide carnation." But now Mr.
Spencer tells us quite candidly that the theory of adaptive changes
which he has formally installed as a coadjutor to natural selection,
and without which he tells us "an extensive part of the phenomena
cannot be explained," is not conceivable in thought at all. The pro-
cess, he admits, is wholly inconceivable. In plain words he says:
"At last, then, we are obliged to admit that the actual organizing
process transcends conception. It is not enough to say that we

104 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

cannot know it; we must say that we cannot even conceive it."
Nevertheless, dispensing himself from the rigorous test he imposed
on others, he introduces the theory of adaptive changes. Yet even
with this explanation, which is inconceivable, and with the distinc-
tion of species — the main problem — thrown in, he tells us still that
"there remain many unsolved problems/' The fourth feature to
which we wish to call attention is but a corollary of the third. Mr.
Spencer, finding the theory of adaptive changes inconceivable, yet
loath to part with it, undertakes to symbolize it, and what is even
worse the symbolic conceptions of it which he undertakes to intro-
duce belong to what he himself has long since designated as "the
illegitimate order;" that is to say, they belong to that class upon
which, in religion, Mr. Spencer has over and over again pronounced
anathema. Now, however, fronting the difficulty of solving prob-
lems which are insoluble by conceivable processes, he takes refuge
in the very method which he has so severely censured. Finding that
the process of adaptive changes is inconceivable, that here "imagina-
tion, whatever license may be given, utterly fails us," he concludes :
"Thus all we can do is to find some way of symbolizing the process
so as to enable us most conveniently to generalize its phenomena."
In other words, he adopts precisely what he condemned special
creation for adopting and recalls the method which he visited with
Anathema Maranatha. And yet with all this he admits "there re-
main many unsolved problems." But this is not all.

The fifth and last feature to which we will direct attention remains
to be seen. We have seen how science started out to solve the prob-
lem offered by phenomena in general, or, if you prefer it that way, by
biological phenomena in particular, by means of natural selection
alone, and, according to the testimony of the evangelists of natural
selection, how egregiously it has failed. We saw how it then asked
to be permitted to use as an additional key to the problem the theory
of adaptive changes, and how there was still failure. We saw how a
third key was added with no better results ; residual phenomena there
remained still which yielded to no solvent. We saw how various
other factors were called in to assist in the solution, with failure still
as the result. We saw how, in its desperation, science then at-
tempted to throw out the very question at issue — the origin of
species — but that even still many kinds of phenomena remained un-
accounted for. We saw how science did not scruple even to adopt
unscientific methods and transgressed its own canons by introduc-
ing inconceivable processes where legitimate scientific methods
failed ; but yet with no better success. We saw how as a last resort
it betook itself — like Macbeth to the weird sisters — to "symbolic
conceptions of the illegitimate order," of which it had expressed so

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 105

dread an abhorrence ; and still here failure is written in glaring char-
acters over the broad face of evolution. And now with the solution
of one portion of the phenomena claimed by one hypothesis, with
the solution of another extensive portion of the phenomena claimed
by two antagonistic hypotheses, and with a large realm of the phe-
nomena yet unaccounted for by any hypothesis, we are further told
that the mysteries which science started out to solve by means of
evolution remain with us as mysteries still. We are no better off
than when we set out. We are not a single step in advance of spe-
cial creation. We have mysteries as numerous and perplexing as
before. Mr. Spencer tells us life is a mystery. Its origin is a mys-
tery. There is a mystery in its functions. There is an inconceivable
element in its workings. Mr. Spencer is in a quandary as to whether
he can hope that the mystery will one day be solved, or whether "We
must conclude that since life itself proves to be in its ultimate nature
inconceivable, there is probably an inconceivable element in its work-
ings" also. "What then are we to say — what are we to think ?" Mr.
Spencer asks. And he answers : "Simply that in this direction, as
in all other directions, our explanations finally bring us face to face
with the inexplicable. The ultimate reality behind this manifesta-
tion, as behind all other manifestations, transcends conception. It
needs but to observe how even simple forms of existence are in their
ultimate natures incomprehensible to see that this most complex
form of existence is in a sense doubly incomprehensible."

This then is the last word of evolution. The mystery which it
set out to solve remains a mystery still. The flourish of trumpets
was a false alarm. The science that condemned religion because of
symbol and mystery finds itself in turn forced to fall back on symbol
and mystery in the last resort. But why symbol and mystery should
be regarded as intolerable in religion where they are rational and
logical, while they are regarded as desirable in science, where they are
illogical and absurd, is one of the paradoxes which, like some bio-
logical phenomena, defy all explanation. But this may be passed
over here. The matter of deepest import is that, according to the
very highest authority on the question of evolution, evolution by
means of natural selection has utterly failed. And as evolution by
means of natural selection has been the only theory of evolution
which has ever been regarded by the world at large as worth con-
sidering, it follows that there is no theory of evolution before the
world that is worth a single moment's consideration. Mr. Spen-
cer's disproof of natural selection as a competent cause of evolution
threw the subject back a full century — to Lamarck's time. And the
admission that the theory of adaptive changes cannot account for
all the facts, and further, that natural selection and adaptive changes

io6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

taken together — even with the addition of all the new-fangled doc-
trines— cannot account for all the facts, leaves the doctrine of evolu-
tion in any sense utterly baseless.

Every one knows that when a man undertakes a piece of work
which he does not succeed in accompHshing he has simply failed.
When he undertakes to solve a problem by certain means, and after
repeated attempts tells us that much is left yet which cannot be satis-
factorily accounted for, we do not hesitate to pronounce his attempt-
ed solution a failure. If the method he adopted has been properly
applied the failure evidently lies in the method. We do not see why
scientists should be treated with greater indulgence than their fellow-
men, or why their methods should be entitled to larger exemptions.
The evolutionists undertook boldly to solve the problem offered by
phenomena and dismissed with contempt all previous attempts at
solution. They challenged the world to come and witness the solu-
tion of the puzzle. The world stood by breathless to see the miracle.
Science was to solve the riddle by natural means. We were to be
shown that there was no mystery, nothing supernatural at all. The
scientific magician approached the work. The necromancer was
evolution with natural selection as his magic wand. The whole
merit, however, lay in the fact that the process was not magical or
supernatural at all ; it was simply natural — scientific. All the world
looked on intently while the wizard performed the wondrous feat.
The wizard — evolution by means of natural selection — tries; fails.
It tries again ; fails again. It tries repeatedly ; fails repeatedly. It
asks to be allowed other means ; they are granted. It tries again ;.
again fails. It requests to be allowed still other means. Again
granted — again failure. Again another means is requested, and an-
other and another. They are all permitted; failure each time. It
begs to throw out the whole central problem, which is almost, the
entire problem. It does so ; still failure. It requests permission to
use means which it loudly condemned in its competitors. Granted ;
failure once more. Illegitimate symbolic conceptions? Can they
not be permitted, just for a trial? They are introduced — failure as
great as before. Realms of facts are still unaccounted for; mys-
teries as inscrutable as before remain. In real life the necromancer
would be hissed ofif the stage ; in science we call it success.

Indeed, the world owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Spencer for his
unconscious aid in unmasking the impostor. He has thus in a
measure atoned for the colossal folly of the Synthetic Philosophy.
In spite of all his faults, Mr. Spencer is still the brightest intellect in
the English-speaking world of speculative science, and it is some-
thing that he has lived to cancel some of his mistakes. Certainly no^
one has pointed out more clearly than he the utter failure of evolu-

Rise and Fall of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 107

tion by means of natural selection. The best that can be said of
evolution as it stands before the world to-day is that it is but a pieced,
patched, botched theory ; that even so it fails to account for all the
facts it undertook to explain ; that it has already abandoned all hope
of being able to explain them in the future, and that to the eternal
disgrace of science it is forced to take refuge in symbol and mystery.
For the honor of true science the more quickly it were decently
buried out of sight the better. One begins to understand why so
many eminent French scientists have steadfastly refused to lend
countenance to the doctrine. It is not altogether, as Mr. Spencer
opines, owing to the surviving influence of Cuvier. Everlasting
fame is yet awaiting the scientist who can give to the world a satis-
factory theory of evolution. Can it be done? Meanwhile in our
schools, colleges and universities pupils are wading through the
deeps and shallows of ignorance, vainly imagining they are studying
science. What is glibly called science is what Professor Huxley
twenty years ago called "superstition."

In view of the admissions of the scientists themselves, may it not
be pertinently asked : Would not so many of our learned and dis-
tinguished Catholic professors be more profitably employed — not
only from a religious, but even from a scientific standpoint — in ex-
amining the evidence for evolution than in trying to force its accept-
ance on the world? , One longs for even a brief season of the late
Dr. Brownson's vigorous and healthy thinking.

In the foregoing pages we have shown the failure of evolution by
means of natural selection from the testimony of the scientists them-
selves. This failure can be even more conclusively demonstrated by
a critcal examination of the doctrine in the light of the forty-one
years during which it has been before the world. This, however,
will require another article.

S. FiTZSIMONS.
Lima, N. Y.

io8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

THE LABORER AND HIS POINT OF VIEW.

DISORDERS among laboring men and conflicts between them
and their employers have become so frequent of late that no
one who is interested in public welfare has remained indiffer-
ent. Those who are not parties to the issues — at least not directly —
may be roughly divided into two classes : the unthinking many and
the thinking few. The former class read the newspapers, perhaps
the magazines ; they form opinions readily, express them freely. As
they think without adequate information and speak without reflec-
tion, they unintentionally mislead others and obscure the real nature
of the industrial problem. The thinking few devote themselves to
careful study; they recognize the reign of law and the working of
complex and subtle causes in the industrial situation. They have
done much to force the question to the front ; to win attention from
all classes of society. Laborers themselves, no doubt, deserve most
credit for actually forcing the world to study conditions ; but earnest
students and writers have aided to a marked degree.

The situation merits attention. A great class of our population,
numbering millions, is being slowly isolated ; gradually acquiring a
consciousness, an individuality by which they are distinguished from
other classes of society. Were the isolation of a kind which bears
merely on secondary phases of social life, there need be no alarm.
But it is an isolation regarding the fundamentals of our national and
industrial organization. Laborers now seem to constitute a real in-
dustrial class. Their interests are regarded by them as distinct from
those of professional classes and antagonistic to those of the em-
ployer and the wealthy classes. Laborers have taken a position in
the industrial world which clearly reveals that isolation. They are
rapidly acquiring — we may say they have acquired — the character-
istics of a political class. As laborers they foster a distinctive view of
our institutions and political ideals ; they have a peculiar view of the
functions of government and of its possibilities ; there is a conscious
though heretofore unsuccessful effort to reduce those views to a
platform and construct thereon a labor party. Laborers constitute
a distinct social class. Their tastes, judgments, enjoyments, their
plane of life, ambition and aspiration are peculiar to themselves.
One can scarcely come in touch with laboring men without detect-
ing evidences of this threefold isolation. Naturally, the line of de-
marcation in each case is wavering; it is vague between all social
classes. But that there is a decided tendency in the direction indi-
cated seems indisputable. As a great ship lies quietly in the har-

The Laborer and His Point of View. loo

bor, surrounded by a forest of masts and vessels of all sizes and kinds,
its appearance suggests repose as we note the easy grace of its rest-
ful swaying in the water. But once it is in motion seaward, it is
transformed. Grace, majesty, power are revealed in every move-
ment. The laboring class has cut anchor ; it is moving, and there is
power, determination, purpose in every step.

This isolation of the laboring class is a vital question for modern
society. It is in apparent contradiction with our accepted social
ideals, and even with their current interpretation. Yet it is the ex-
pected product of our philosophy and institutions, historically con-
sidered. Then, again, the solution of the problems implied, consti-
tutes a vital test of our institutions, our civilization and its possibili-
ties. The situation in the industrial world cannot be tolerated. If
we meet it successfully the triumph of popular government was never
before so complete, so glorious. If we fail, our institutions will have
failed of their fundamental purpose and the socialist will have been a
prophet with a mission. The times are indeed solemn.

Events such as those seen in recent times in Chicago, St. Louis,
Idaho and the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania show that at pres-
ent neither our philosophy nor our institutions nor recognized social
authority is equal to the situation. Contests concerning property
rights and human rights ; concerning court jurisdiction and the in-
terpretation of fundamental laws ; concerning even the power of our
chief executives to employ the militia, are of frequent occurrence;
and experience gained in one disturbance is of no use whatever, ex-
cept to those to whose complaints the disturbances are due. There
are contests every day concerning similar rights and powers. But
they are orderly, peaceful and constructive. The contests referred
to, however, are public, marked by great bitterness and suppressed
hate ; they result in no triumph of law, contribute in no way to up-
build our institutions. They are merely contests of endurance —
attempts to settle by force what law has failed to determine ration-
ally. Such disturbances, known as strikes, are only incidents in the
whole situation. A battle, rather a campaign, supposes organiza-
tion and armies. Out beyond the local limits of a particular strike
there is going on among laborers the process of class isolation and
organization. Organized they are capable of self direction, aggres-
sive action and even revolution. It is this phase of the situation
which merits most attention.

The facts in the social situation of the laboring class as the laborer
sees them are fairly well known to all who care to learn them. Low
wages, long hours, uncertainty of work, total dependence for living
upon the property owner, diversified oppression of laborers by
fines, methods of payment and company stores ; wives, mothers and

no American Catholic Quarterly Review.

children competing with fathers and brothers ; Hmited opportunity of
elevation, culture or happiness. But statements of fact never con-
tain the whole fact. Employers look upon the situation and see
little if any difficulty; the general public looks and is scarcely more
than interested ; the laborer looks, sees himself as part of the situa-
tion and he is stirred, thrilled, aroused. The most marked result of
the laborer's view is the trade union. It proclaims itself as the
prophet of a new gospel, the teacher of new ethical interpretations to
society, of a new conception of human dignity; for it teaches that
man, and not property, should be the basis of all social organization.
In this thought there is revolution, and the laborers know it.

Observing this process of class isolation and noting the history,
methods and mistakes of the labor movement, one can scarcely fail
to be struck by the phenomena there seen. Unselfishness abundant,
yet much gross selfishness to be seen ; order, pity and conservatism
by the side of cruelty and lawlessness; quick command of reserve
force, yet pathetic inability to avoid excess in action ; clear grasp of
principles and astonishing blindness to the limitations of circum-
stance and relation to which all social principles are necessarily
subject.

It seems to be worth while to study the situation from the labor-
er's point of view ; to attempt to see with his eyes, hear with his ears,
judge with his mind. It may aid us in dealing with him to find out
what are his standards, his ideals, his views. This essay is an at-
tempt to accomplish that purpose. The study may be made indepen-
dently of the truth or falsehood of the laborer's assumptions. We must
aim to know what are his feelings or convictions without testing the
premises or examining the validity of the process by which his view
has been established. The task is not easy. The sources from
which the information must be drawn are of varying value. It is
difficult to determine whether or not a labor leader actually repre-
sents the views of the laborers at large ; it is not easy to say how far
the labor press reflects opinions and views accurately or how far it
influences laboring men in the formation of their views. It is im-
possible to determine how far the sweeping preamble to the constitu-
tion of a labor union, voted unanimously, does contain the settled
sentiment of a mass of men rather than the expression of momentary
enthusiasm. Yet it is to the labor leader, the labor press, the labor
convention that we must go for much information.^ A census of
individual laboring men, with generalizations based thereon, would
not prove more reliable or free from error. As a rule a man is not
fully conscious of his real mental attitude. How much unconscious

1 Reports of legislative committees and of Bureaus of Labor are also useful
in a study like this.

The Laborer and His Point of View. m

feeling or force there may be given in a deliberate process we know
only when we are tested. This is shown by our general lack of
control in enthusiasm or dejection. When a laborer is consciously
half socialist, e. g., a crisis may provoke latent feeling or energy and
he will talk or act fully a socialist. On the other hand, a crisis
might cause him to appear as a conservative, his half socialism not
standing the test. Yet if we ask him his views they will correspond
to neither course of action. The labor movement may in a way be
compared to the half socialist who when tested acts and speaks fully
a socialist. Not that I yet call the movement socialistic. In a crisis
such as a strike, general or local, when laborers have a serious griev-
ance, when feelings are aroused for any reason whatsoever, we find
invariably that certain views come to general expression. They are
uniformly extreme views, but I believe them to be a power and a
prophecy; a power in furnishing the basis of protest, organization
and immediate action; a prophecy because the view which to-day
is extreme and rare may to-morrow be widely shared; the view
which requires a crisis to call it to expression now, may to-morrow
be the ordinary view of the mass. Such being the case, it seems best
to expose the extreme view first, then to indicate modifications which
appear. The discriminating reader will be able to understand why
the exposition is suggestive rather than exhaustive ; he will under-
stand, too, that when it is stated that a given element is found in the
laborer's view, the statement implies that the laborer or many labor-
ers actually share that view, or are rapidly gravitating toward it.
The exposition cannot be more accurate than its sources.

For three generations our laboring men have been taught that
government exists for all the governed ; that sovereignty resides in
the people ; that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these
rights Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed." Gifted only with a
natural logic, the laborer is inclined at times to take these guaran-
tees literally, positively, in a sense possibly which was not con-
sciously intended by the writers of the Declaration of Independence.
Were conditions uniformly prosperous there might be no complaint.
But there is widespread discontent; the laborer compares the
achievements of government with its professed purpose, and he con-
cludes that as regards him government is a failure. The right to
life, he feels, is not adequately protected. Courts, laws of evidence,
jury, procedure, etc., are cleverly devised to protect the citizen
against possible murder or assault, but there is neither court nor
jury nor procedure to protect a laborer against society when its in-

112 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

stitutions force him to starve. It is nowhere written in our books
df law that a man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to earn a dig-
nified livelihood in a becoming manner. Life means to the laborer
more than physical existence, but the law fails to see how much more
is meant. Even that physical existence, he thinks, is not always
adequately protected. Necessity forces him to work, to accept the
conditions in which work is offered. Unsanitary conditions often
undermine health, overwork saps life energy, over exposure brings
on disease, all of which may be as deadly as a revolver or the assas-
sin's club. Yet the guarantee against these attacks on life in the
laborer is still inadequate ; it was unknown until laborers forced gov-
ernment to act. Again, life in the laborer's children is not pro-
tected. They enter the factory prematurely and growth is stunted,
health impaired. Conditions make the home cheerless and unsan-
itary. Then children are often consecrated to vice before they know
virtue, victims of disease before they had health, doomed to despair
before they knew of hope. Life means to the laborer all that is there
implied. When, then, the mason or the mechanic realizes this ; when
he leaves his comfortless home, "looking for a job," when he walks
day after day and mile after mile in the vain search ; when his bed is^
perhaps, a newspaper spread on the floor of a depot waiting room ;
when hundreds, even thousands, of laborers have experienced more
or less of what is here outlined, they feel that there is a cynical note
in the protection which government gives to life. Quite often a
hungry laborer will actually commit a misdemeanor in order to be
arrested and placed in jail. He knows that while in jail he will be
fed. The following, taken from an "Eight-Hour Primer" issued
some years ago by the American Federation of Labor, expresses the
situation accurately from the workingman's point of view. It is in
the form of question and answer :

Q. What do you want ?

A. Work.

Q. What do you want work for ?

A. So I may live.

Q. You are living now ; what more do you want ?

A. I want to have a good deal better living. Sometimes I am
hungry and I want food; I am getting ragged and I want better
clothes. I sometimes have to sleep outdoors, and I want a regular
and comfortable place to sleep. I am treated like a dog; I want to
be treated like a man. I hate the present, and I dread the future.
I shall soon be desperate and become criminal or careless and be-
come a hardened tramp.

Q. Why don't you work ?

A. I can't get work at any price.

The Laborer and His Point of View. ii<»

Q. Why can't you get work ?

A. Because no one will employ me.

The laborer believes that the guarantee of liberty is futile. In his
philosophy of life, political, economic and social liberty merge into
one. Formal differences are not always soothing when material
conditions are painful. The laborer believes that economically he
is a slave. He is not a party to the wages contract ; his liberty in
the supreme act of his temporal life, fixing wages and conditions of
work, is, in fact, not protected by law. Even in his acts as a citizen
he feels that he is hampered. Formerly men were told directly how
they were to vote. The law now guarantees secrecy of ballot, but
intimidation is still effective. The threat to close the factory or
shops unless Smith or Jones is elected serves its purpose. A few
days before the recent election a prominent railroad official an-
nounced that he had just placed an order for 9,000 cars ; but that it
would be rescinded unless a certain candidate for the Presidency
were elected. This may have been well meant; that it tended to
intimidate the laborers concerned is certain. The law recognizes
in the laborer the right to organize, yet employers can and do at
times effectively prevent laboring men from exercising that right by
refusing to employ or threatening to discharge them if they belong
to labor unions.

The equality which our institutions are supposed to foster is like-
wise found by the laborer to be only a vain promise. He believes
that neither economically nor politically nor socially is he the equal
of his fellow-citizens. He believes that our social organization
rests on the idea of property rather than man, hence that they who
have no property are in fact not the equals of those who have.
Since opportunity depends largely on property, there is not equality
as regards opportunity. Neither is there, in taking advantage of
legal protection of common rights. There is so much time and
money required "to go to law" that laborers quite generally look to
law for no assistance. A laborer stated to the Senate committee
which investigated the relations of labor and capital in 1884: "We
expect no protection at all from the law as a general rule, because it
is so expensive that we cannot take advantage of it."^ Other ways
in which the laborer's interpretation of equality is violated will
occur to the reader. It is quite natural, then, that the pursuit of
happiness, a thought fundamental to our institutions, is regarded as
practically closed to the laborer. Happiness for him ^YOuld be found
in the margin of life wider than mere existence; in education, cul-
ture, happy home life, with children surrounded by safe, healthy pro-
tection. But the conditions actually force him into a home that is

2 Report, Vol. I., p. 15.
Vol. XXVI— Sig. 8.

114 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

cheerless, his labor exhausts him, his children are drawn into the
stream of industrial activity by forces beyond him. Thus the ele-
ments of happiness for the laborer vanish. Many laborers resented
the "Full Dinner Pail" issue in the recent campaign. Intended as
a picturesque presentation of the prosperity argument, it was re-
ceived with bitterness by those who saw in it an insult to them-
selves ; who saw in it, to quote a Chicago Alderman, "the wages of a
horse."

This is, in outline, the laborer's survey of the fundamental pur-
pose of government and of his actual situation. He is inclined to
regard government as a failure. Coming to concrete conditions,
his initial suspicion seems to meet overwhelming confirmation.
Within the field of actual governmental activity he finds himself and
his needs neglected. Wars for humanity, crusades to civilize, diplo-
macy and intrigue, commerce and conquest busy government, while
the vital problems of national industrial life are all but ignored.
Messages of Presidents and Governors are scanned in vain to find
proof of sympathy with labor and its wrongs. Legislatures seem
to be equally indifferent. Laborers approach them to seek protec-
tion, not as citizens to representative, but as suppliants. They plead
for recognition and while pleading discover, or seem to discover,
that representatives of wealth, of corporations, of employers have
preceded them and won a sympathetic hearing. When, however,
the laborer is heard and possibly a commission is created whose
purpose it is to investigate the conditions of labor, its personnel is so
made up that laborers lack confidence ; when its report is made — if it
is made — it seems to result in no great good. Even more, if a law
is actually enacted protecting the interests of labor it may easily be
rendered ineffective by the employer. The right of laborers to or-
ganize is practically nullified when employers will require that work-
ingmen state under oath that they belong to no union, and that they
will join no labor union within a given period. Again, the law, e. g.,
in Pennsylvania requires that wages be paid every two weeks if de-
sired; it also forbids companies to force employes to patronize
company stores. Wages are paid every two weeks, if desired, and
laborers may buy where they choose. But in the mines those who
ask their wages every two weeks or who fail to patronize the com-
pany store are blacklisted. Then when some one or many must be
laid off, such are chosen ; when a part of the mine yields poorly, such
are sent there. Laws made in the interests of labor are very often
declared by the courts to be unconstitutional because they are "class
legislation" or violate freedom of contract. Again, in construing
common or statute law the courts seem to favor an interpretation
which sacrifices the laborer and his rights to some vague principle

The Laborer and His Point of View.

of law. Then the laborer believes that the reckless use of injunc-
tions by the courts against workingmen and nearly always directly
to the advantage of an employer proves undeniably that the most
sacred of our institutions is captured by his enemy. "Workingmen
are as helplessly the slaves of the judicial system of the United
States as the Italian impoverished workingmen are of the mon-
archical system of Italy."^ Furthermore, the laborer finds that ex-
ecutives frequently call out militia to suppress strikes or disturb-
ances, because public order is destroyed and property menaced.
He points out that when employers are law breakers no military
forces are called into requisition to protect laborers and their rights.
Not only that, but employers themselves actually succeed in using
the law as an instrument by which to oppress laborers.

Contact with political parties, which are an organic part of our
national life, tends to confirm the laborer's pessimism. Democrat
denounces Republican and Republican denounces Democrat; epi-
thets, insinuations, open charges of everything from treason to
theft are exchanged without hesitation. Votes are purchased ; devo-
tion to the "rights of man" is professed by rival candidates unblush-
ingly. As a result the laborer very often suspects the sincerity of all
parties and looks for help from them with but little hope. Were he
not easily flattered, shortsighted and quickly captured by empty
phrases, at times the result might be more serious than it is.

Thus along the entire line of civic hope and action, from the
towering phrase, "Life, Liberty, Equality and the Pursuit of Happi-
ness," down to the bi-monthly payment of wages, the laborer be-
lieves that he finds government a failure, law inefifective, our politi-
cal institutions a means of oppression, public officials corrupt, the
courts in the hands of his industrial enemy and political parties in-
sincere. Language like the following, therefore, has serious mean-
ing: "Organized capital is arrayed against organized labor. It
has taken its stand against fair wages and honest labor. It is ar-
rayed in the unholy conspiracy of lowering the standard of living of
families of the laboring masses. It is becoming a synonym for or-
ganized injustice, heartless cruelty and soulless aggression. With
the help of a servile press, it is a menace to human brotherhood, is
an ever increasing evil. It is in complete control of our govern-
ment. It controls executives, the legislative bodies, the courts and
the army. By combination and lawless aggression it is attempting
to control industry, destroy competitors, break up .labor unions,
lower wages and enthrone itself as the monarch of industry, of gov-
ernment, of society."* Equally emphatic is the view of the Ma-

3 "Locomotive Firemen's Magazine," September, 1900. * "Spokane Labor Jour-
nal," quoted in "Locomotive Firemen's Magazine," September, 1899.

ii6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

chinists* Monthly Journal:^ "The present iniquitous system has put
parasites in pubHc office, debauched every Legislature in the land,
degraded parties, polluted the ballot and made elections a saturnalia
of corruption." The climax in the development of such sentiments
is reached when we find that the congress of Colorado railway or-
ganizations declared last summer: ''We believe that representa-
tive government is a failure."

By the side of this increasing hopelessness as regards government
the conviction becomes stronger day by day that laborers must de-
pend on law, on government or on an effective substitute for protec-
tion and elevation. They have determined on self help. Out of this
hopelessness and this determination has sprung the labor union.
It is labor's act of despair in government and hope in itself. "De-
spite all high sounding preambles and resolutions, despite all pro-
tests of a mutual desire for equity and justice, despite all the weak-
nesses that have developed in the economy or the policy of the trades
union, in it alone have we been able to discover a means of protec-
tion for the toiler against oppression and wrong."®

All despair possesses some latent bitterness which is easily pro-
voked and all determination may quickly become fierce; this two-
fold change has taken place in the attitude of laborers. Those
among them who are active, are conscious of high ethical motives ;
altruism is the spirit, justice the purpose in all that they deliberately
attempt. This is seen from the following, taken from a letter by Mr.
Gompers, which had not been intended for publication : "Liberty,
the conception of which is a matter of growth, a matter of education
and is a matter of progress, proceeds in the same ratio that the peo-
ple conceive their rights and will manfully, heroically and with self-
sacrifice stand for it, and which no power in the form of government
can stand. It is the purpose of the trade union movement to instill
this larger manhood, this greater self reliance, this intelligence, this
independence in the hearts and minds of the workers. . . ."^
Laborers find that the institutions under which they suffer know
only egoism as a principle and wealth or power as their purpose.
They find commercialism, dishonesty, trickery everywhere. The
contrast is, for the laborer, striking ; it strengthens his conviction in
the justice of his cause. Nevertheless laborers are very generally
misunderstood ; as a result of the misunderstanding, condemned ; as
a result of the condemnation, scorned.

Laborers believe that they are habitually misunderstood and mis-
represented by the press. The great newspaper is primarily an in-

5 July, 1898. « "Iron Moulders' Journal," November, 1900. 7 Letter to Mr.
Boyce, President of Western Federation of Miners, on the occasion of the mine
troubles in Idaho. The letter was published by the U. S, Senate, Document 42,
Fifty-sixth Congress, First Session.

The Laborer and His Point of View. ny

vestment. It is capitalistic, it represents the employing class. Hence
the laborer believes that by colored statements, partial truths and
falsehood, it constantly harms his cause by misleading the public.
The Chicago Federation of Labor once determined to send a com-
mittee to Springfield to force through, a law compelling newspapers
to publish only the truth. Through the press, misunderstanding is
widespread; the purposes, methods, mistakes, actions of laborers
are constantly placed in a false light. The laborer sees so clearly
and others fail to see. He wishes no strikes and people persist in
thinking that he does. He loves order, peace and safety, and the
world accuses him of loving anarchy, riot and bloodshed.® He
struggles for what he regards as justice, and he is accused of seeking
luxury. He desires a home, and he is suspected of wishing a palace.
An. employer who testified before a sub-committee of the present
Industrial Commission said : "Make it easy for the workingmen to
get a home and strikes will cease. ... I attended an anarchist
meeting on Lake street not long ago, and I found that the longing
to have a home was the inspiration of every man at that meeting."*
The home for which laborers long means nothing more than "good,
comfortable clothes, good, comfortable fare, good, comfortable shel-
ter," to quote a member of the committee which investigated condi-
tions in 1884. Whatever be thought of the aspiration, however the
world at large takes it, laborers regard such a home as a necessity,
the object of legitimate seeking, and they know that society has
made it impossible for them to have it. Another form of misunder-
standing is found when laborers in general are condemned as ap-
proving excesses which they actually repudiate and which are due
exclusively to local or accidental conditions. An illustration is
found in a statement attributed to a prominent army officer on the
occasion of the mine troubles in Idaho : "Since the trouble largely
originates in hostile organizations of men known as labor unions, I
should suggest a law making the formation of such unions or kin-
dred societies a crime. "^'^ Recalling the contrast in purpose, motive
and spirit as viewed by the laborer, between him and his enemy, we
can easily realize that this widespread misunderstanding will not be
without its effect. A spirit of resentment is engendered, a tone of
vindictiveness is heard ; the latent bitterness of the laborer's despair
becomes a force ; the latent fierceness of his determination to help
himself becomes a power. This development may aid us in explain-
ing the habit of exaggeration in statement and excess in action so

8 Emma Goldman, the anarchist, offered her services to the strikers in Chicago
last spring. Her interference was resented by the laborers, who would not recog-
nize her. She had expressed supreme contempt for the American workmen be-
fore that, as they were impervious to her ideas. "Chicago Chronicle," March 15,
1900; "New York Daily News," November 22, 1899. » "Chicago Chronicle," March
23, 1900. 10 "Locomotive Firemen's Magazine," September, 1899.

Ii8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

often witnessed among laborers: the attitude of suspicion toward
even those who wish to aid them ; the spirit of intolerance, so unlike
what one would expect in such a movement : phases of the action of
laborers regretted and repressed by none, more eagerly and per-
sistently than by the more thoughtful in their own ranks.

Coming more closely to the heart of the situation, we find laborer
and employer face to face in the determined struggle. The em-
ployer epitomizes history and actual institutions in the mind of the
laborer. Movements are judged, institutions tested, laws appre-
ciated by their bearing on the employer. The eye of the laborer is
fixed; he gazes eagerly, intently upon him and through him the
laborer reads his social philosophy. The laborer's view of the em-
ployer then is the laborer's view of society, law, government. Now,
in dealings between laborer and employer the dominant sense is that
of master and servant, dictator and subject; all obligations rest on
the laborer, all rights centre in the employer. The power of the in-
dividual employer is great. It is increased by understandings with
other employers as to wages, men, etc. The best expression of this
power — that most hated by laborers — is found in the blacklist. For
the employer, thus superior to the laborer, everything is business,
curt, matter of fact, calculating business.^^ Business is heartless.
Safety appliances on railroads were long resisted because the com-
panies seemed to think less of the lives of their men than of the ex-
pense entailed by the change. Guards and covering for dangerous
machinery in factories were reluctantly introduced when law com-
pelled it. Incompetent engineers, whose ignorance caused the loss
of many lives in iron works formerly, were cheaper than skilled en-
gineers under whom loss of life was extremely rare. Great business
men sometimes recognize no ethics in business. A prominent trust
magnate stated to the Industrial Commission recently: "I do not
care two cents for your ethics. I do not know enough of them to
apply them. "^2 The kindly consideration of vital human rights in
laborers, rights which, in their eyes, give all sacredness to institu-
tions and all sanction to authority, are ignored. Yet watchfulness,
care, attention, interest, even enthusiasm are demanded from labor-
ers and they are forced to manifest all. One workingman can
quickly ruin a brand of cigars, a cotton or wool worker can ma-
terially affect the quality of the product, an engineer or brakeman
can cause untold destruction. They all know that they have the
power, but they dare not use it. Innocent as well as guilty would
be punished and necessity or starvation would be the outcome. Em-
ployers have the advantage; laborers are in their power. By the

11 An accurate presentation of this view may be found in the "Railway i?rain-
men's Journal," July, 1899. 12 Preliminary Keport, Part I., Testimony, p. 118.

The Laborer and His Point of View. no

side of that consciousness laborers entertain the conviction that they
alone produce wealth; that accumulations of capital are filched
from labor ; that the employer is a robber who ignores natural jus-
tice. The laborer believes that he is the equal of the employer.
"We feel that the workman of the present is the equal of his em-
ployer in every way other than financially, even though we are
forced to admit that the equality is impaired by those in whom wc
have placed the law-creating and law-applying functions of our gov-
ernment."^^ The result of this phase of the whole situation seems
to be that a deep sense of injustice is engendered. The laborer's at-
titude to government, courts and legislation is of a general character.
Here we have a concrete issue, a particular relation. Laborers feel
that they are robbed ; wealth thus taken is employed to oppress them.
Hopelessness made bitter and determination become fierce, welcome
a new element — one of tremendous power — the sense of grave in-
justice.

In all social movements, even in all human conduct, doubt
may be a source of much weakness; but opportune doubt
is certainly the proof of much wisdom. Laborers never doubt.
Among those actively engaged in the movement there is
the deep abiding conviction that they are right. This convic-
tion, like many others in human history, is not so much the product
of thinking as the result of feeling. It possesses all the force, per-
sistence and consciousness that any mental state can have. It is a
conviction which makes unselfishness easy and heroism a matter of
fact, one which converts men into apostles, dull men into orators,
mild men into aggressive leaders, aggressive men into fanatics and
drives enthusiasts into the ranks of hopeless idealism or anarchy.
Like all deep convictions it is a source of light when guarded, a
source of blindness when seen alone ; a power for good when prop-
erly related or modified, a power for destruction when unrestrained.
Such is the tyranny of this conviction over the minds of the laborers
who share it fully, that they are often blindly obstinate ; they lose all
sense of adjustment ; the faculty of toleration is destroyed, the power
to see limitations to their principles or reasons for compromise is
largely lost. All great truths must be taught slowly. Teachers
must have the sense of situation and be guided by it; they must
know the "psychological moment" and use it. Laborers who are
most aggressive seem unable to do so. There are apparent contra-
dictions of a vital kind in their gospel ; they forget them ; there are
times when insisting on a fantastic application of a -principle excites
ridicule ; yet they insist. The President of the United States could
not lay the corner-stone of the Federal Building in Chicago unless

13 "Railway Trainmen's Journal," April, 1899.

I20 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

he became a member of the Stone Mason's Union. He actually did
so by accepting a membership card. Later there was a threat to
expel him because he allowed United States troops to be sent to
Idaho to quiet the labor troubles there. The incident awakened
widespread dislike and condemnation of labor unions in the West
and it contributed in no visible manner to the triumph of union prin-
ciples.

Finally laborers are convinced that they have a high and holy mis-
sion to humanity, to save civilization, to bring material redemption
to man. They feel and teach a responsibility to society on this ac-
count ; appeals to the sacred character of the mission are frequently
made. Massive pauperism is to be exterminated, wives and chil-
dren are to be saved, oppressors are to be dethroned, they who labor
and sit in darkness and mourn are to receive power. Earnestness is
increased by laborers' belief that processes now at work will quickly
bring disaster unless checked. The constantly increasing centraliza-
tion of industry augments daily the employers' opportunity to op-
press labor. Improvement in machinery, it is thought, will rapidly
displace labor and render workingmen still more helpless. The mis-
sion is, then, to reorganize society that it may be protected ; man will
be the basis of reorganization, brotherhood its law and inspiration,
equality its ideal. It is the teaching of trade unions "that the only
hope for society and civilization, that the only freedom is through
organization, and it should stimulate every worker in the movement
to work as he has never worked before to spread organization to
every craft and calling until the workers of the world are solidly
united. Then will war with all its failures and disasters disappear,
and the new civilization, which is the brotherhood of man, take
place."^* Similarly the President of the American Federation of
Labor stated before the American Social Science Congress, Septem-
ber 2, 1891 : "We are carrying the standard for which men in all
ages have suffered exile, imprisonment and death by rack and stake
and gibbet." The fight is to be kept up "till the last enemy of indus-
trial freedom is routed and economic emancipation secured to a free
and independent people."

It was stated on a preceding page that there are many sources of
uncertainty in a study such as this. The exposition of the laborer's
point of view attempted here is not, cannot be entirely correct. It is
at most an approximation. Each sentiment to which attention has
been called actually comes to expression often in labor circles. But
what does that expression mean, passing rage or settled hatred,
pompous and reckless talk or genuine declarations of deep feeling?
It seems safe to say, while waiving that question, that the view out-

1* A contributor in ''American Federationist," August,

The Laborer and His Point of View.

121

lined is one actually shared by a goodly number ; furthermore, it is
the view toward which the whole labor movement seems to be con-
sciously and rapidly tending; it is the view by which the meaning
and power of the movement can\)e best understood. In psychologi-
cal generalizations caution is necessary. All of those elements are
not found in every laborer any more than are all the elements of the
Catholic or the American spirit found in every Catholic or every
American. That phases of this view are found among nearly all
laborers is quite certain. Between that great number in whom some
of this spirit is found and the smaller number in whom the spirit en-
tire is found there is a series of stages which defies classification.
These observations should be kept in mind to hinder us from exag-
geration after reading the description here offered. We may now
seek to study the modifications of the view and the obstacles to de-
velopment which it actually meets.

Women and children constitute a large portion of our working
population. In the labor movement, however, they are sufferers or
spectators rather than actors. They do, in fact, exert a very great
influence as the object of solicitude for husbands and fathers who
protest because those whom they love suffer. The phlegmatic, the
stupid, many of the selfish and prosperous and the inert among
laboring men may also be eliminated from our study for the moment.
They may share in a way more or less of the view in question, but in
them it does not become a vital force. We have narrowed the field
to the more thorough, more intelligent, sympathetic and progressive.
In them the view is a power ; among them the labor union begins to
be. Among them, I say, for the labor movement is broader than
labor unions. The broader movement can scarcely be outlined, but
that is not necessary for the moment. The labor union is the most
concrete, most powerful, most positive phase of the movement. On
that very account it itself has become a vital issue. In the group
of laborers to which attention is now directed we find three divi-
sions. Many — maybe one and one-half million — believe that the
union is the only means by which laborers can be saved ; others do
not believe such to be the case.^^ What they think positively I do
not attempt to say. Others are carried to extremes ; they work out
the logical consequences of the view and become socialists or an-
archists. Between these two fractions of the working population
labor unions have a difficult position. Since they have been kept
in mind throughout this study as fairly if not thoroughly representa-
tive, we shall proceed to examine how these new phases affect the
situation.

15 Some enter unions through fear of them: some do not enter because of ex-
pense, though they believe in unionism.

122 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The unionist is dominated by the "class idea." The individual
is merged into the class ; he must serve the class, fight for it, because
through class action alone will safety come. He must surrender
personal liberty, act under corporate class direction, work when and
where the union permits. Great as is the sacrifice, the unionist
makes it readily and assumes the financial burdens implied. But the
non-unionist, the "rat" or the "scab," recoils from this. The class
idea does not animate him. To work when permitted and to strike
when ordered ; to go hungry and to see wife and children in misery
when work is abundant — to do this if required is too much. Yet
such are expected union demands. Unionist, with class idea, and
non-unionist, with the idea of personal independence, clash; as a
rule the strike is the occasion of battle. The union striking, hopes
to punish the employer by enforced idleness; hence work is sus-
pended. If the non-unionist ofifers to replace the striker and is ac-
cepted, the strike is robbed of efficacy. The unionist sees in his
enemy, union philosophy baffled, union methods cheated of result,
union sacrifice nullified and union progress checked. The non-
unionist sees in the other, arrogant assumption of authority, unjusti-
fiable interference with personal liberty ; the right not to organize is
as sacred to him as is the right to organize to the unionist. The two
parties have taken an attitude of unconcealed hatred ; they war with
each other even to death. Very often, then, the employer is the
tertius gaudens.

This hatred must be added as another element in the view which
we are studying. From it the movement receives much of its "bad
temper." To it may be ascribed most of the riots, bloodshed and
destruction of property which have characterized labor troubles.^*
In a strike where non-union men do not appear as antagonists we
generally find good order. During the recent strike in Pennsyl-
vania every agitator and organizer urged the strikers to remain at
home, avoid drink and even protect the company's property. The
strike was one of the most orderly yet determined which we have
witnessed in recent years.

As remarked a moment ago, the labor union has to reckon with
the socialist. He has simply gone farther in the same line as that
traveled by the union. He tries to urge the union forward, while it
attempts to restrain him. Feeling here is not at all as intense as in
the case of the non-unionist. Many socialists have been, many
actually are, members of trades unions. The opposition of the

i« Recently the non-union men in the Machine Trades in Columbus formed a
union against unions. They accept manufacturers, superintendents and others ae
honorary members. They are pledged against stiiKes and boycotts. The settle-
ment of wage questions is declared to be "of private individual privilege of ad-
justment."

The Laborer and His Point of View. 123

unions to socialism rests on expediency, not at all on principle. The
columns of the labor press are open to the socialist. When he at-
tempts to control a labor convention or to secure the adoption of a
platform pledged to socialism and political action, then there is a
struggle. But the contest is more or less good natured ; hence its
effect on the temper of the movement is secondary.

Were the point of view described uniformly taken by all the mem-
bers of trade organizations it would result in a revolution such as
we can scarcely imagine. The best friends of organized labor may
still be loyal while thankful that many circumstances prevent the
view from developing to the depth and with the rapidity which one
might expect at first glance. The view is present in all its elements,
but the concentration which would make it dangerous and the unity
which would make it irresistible are lacking.

Geographically our laborers are widely scattered ; the fatal distinc-
tion of local interests exists. Our individual States are supreme in
•nearly all questions affecting labor. The sense of solidarity is ma-
terially affected by this condition. Within the State, variety among
industries creates diversified interests. As a rule, no time finds all
trades suffering. The spirit of discontent does not wax strong
when the laborer is prosperous. The federation idea among Amer-
ican unions aims to correct this situation. We have city, state and
national unions of trades ; city and state federations of unions, and
last of all, the national federation, known as the American Federa-
tion of Labor. Some powerful unions are not affiliated with the
Federation. Yet they recognize that individualism among unions
is disastrous. Hence the attempt made in a convention in Toledo
last summer to unite the five great railroad organizations more
closely, viz. : Engineers, Firemen, Conductors, Trainmen and
Switchmen. This division among unions — lack of cooperation
rather — is a serious obstacle to the development of the power of the
unions as a whole.

Strangely enough, the organized laborers have their own "social
classes," their own aristocracy. Men who belong to some branches
of industry regard themselves as "above" those who belong to other
trades, not held in such good repute. Wives and children share the
feeling; possibly they are in a way to be blamed for it. A well-
Icnown official of a great railroad organization once said that no
four dollar a day man can afford to go on a sympathetic strike for a
one dollar a day man. Social differences exist; they are a barrier
to class solidarity. While they will not prevent individuals or unions
from sharing the laborer's point of view fully, they prevent the fusion
of views and the development of one uniform consciousness — of a
far-reaching solidarity. In that fusion rests labor's only hope.

124 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Party allegiance is another important factor. A strong Democrat
or Republican who is a member of a labor union may not take
squarely the laborer's point of view. Instead of losing confidence in
government and legislatures, he will to a certain extent blame his
political opponents for many of labor's wrongs, and he will look to
his own party for redress. Naturally the party press favors such a
tendency. So true is it that party ties produce this effect that re-
cently it was urged as an argument of great force against the estab-
lishment of a union daily paper. Union men would not support
such a daily, it was claimed, since they prefer to read a paper which
is the recognized organ of their parties. I do not believe that this
has as great influence as one might infer ; what the efifect is cannot,
of course, be very accurately stated.

Again, a great number of valuable men are lost to the labor move-
ment in various ways. The movement is a campaign; it requires
leadership ; its leaders must be trusted ; they must be men of ability,
experience and power. Many who show capacity for leadership are
promoted in business ; they are advanced until they are lost to the
labor movement. Tricksters and politicians sometimes work their
way to power as leaders and then betray the trust. Sometimes the
movement is ungrateful and it forces out, men whose genius might
be of greatest service to the cause which the unions represent.

It is difficult for us to realize what the trade union means — difficult
to measure the process by which a slight local protest has been trans-
formed into a force affecting our institutions, coloring our social
philosophy and actually pointing in the direction in which society
must proceed. There can be no question that the labor unions mean
this. It were wise then to understand them — wise to grasp the sit-
uation. Studying facts with our eyes will never discover to us the
secret power of the labor movement. We must see, hear, feel, think
as the laborer does. In this study such has been the aim. No plea
is made for or against the laborer — for or against the employer. The
plea is that we understand views as well as facts. Were that more
generally kept in mind, less writing would be necessary and more
would be done to alleviate conditions which we all regret.

William J. Kerby.

Washington, D. C.

Catholic Features in the OHHcial Report on Education. 125

CATHOLIC FEATURES IN THE OFFICIAL REPORT ON

EDUCATION.

INTENSE interest was manifested recently in regard to the tiny
planet named Eros, because of its utility in the determination
of some astronomical problems at a certain phase. In the geo-
metric appearances on the surface of Mars not a few men of emi-
nence betray a concern almost feverish at certain periods in the
planet's rotation. The apparent eccentricities of Algol, the demon
star, as it is called, continue to furnish mental exercitation for very
many estimable men of science. Other celestial facts claim the at-
tention of learned individuals and bodies in these States, by day as
well as by night, and shorten the hours that ought to be devoted to
sleep. But, from all that we have been enabled to see or hear, or
connote in any way whatsoever, not one in a thousand of those eru-
dite and philosophic persons gives the smallest consideration to
phenomena much more relative to human concerns, and infinitely
more valuable to the true philosopher. We refer to the phenomena
of the world of education, as revealed in the annual Reports of the
Commissioner for that department of the United States Govern-
ment.

More than once it has been our pleasant duty to call attention to
the manifold merits of these periodical statements, yet it is a singular
fact that their annual appearance is productive of little or no com-
ment in the public press. So far as we have been enabled to ob-
serve, no publication of note beside our own has ever taken the trou-
ble to analyze any of the very important resumes presented by the
Commissioner and his contributors, and but very scant notice of the
Reports has been taken by the daily press. The briefest statement
of the number of pupils attending the different grades of schools, and
the percentage of scholars to population, as a rule suffices to satisfy
the curiosity of the public, so far as that sentiment finds reflection in
the leading papers. Such a result is not just. It would appear to
indicate an apathy about the question of education in general on the
part of the population of the United States such as by no means ex-
ists, or else an indiflFerence to the work of the Commissioner most
ungenerous and unjust.

It is a serious evil that such apathy should prevail over so im-
portant a subject as this, and some effort ought to be made to ascer-
tain why it is so and some corrective applied. Possibly a reason
might be looked for in the bulky character of the annual Reports.
These are usually presented in two volumes, each containing about

126 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

twelve hundred pages. Most of this is in small type, taking about
seven hundred words to a page ; so that the reader who would like to
learn all he could on the subject would be face to face with the task
of wading through nearly a million seven hundred thousand words,
besides tabulated statistics in bewildering profusion. Possibly more
attention would be secured by the issuance of quarterly reports, or
separate statements as they are sent in, accompanied by some hint as
to their relative importance as factors in the determination of special
theories or experiments in the ever-engrossing problem of mind-
development and the making of the perfect entity.

It is only of recent years that Catholics could find anything save
of negative interest in these voluminous returns. The uninstructed
stranger, glancing through them, a decade or so ago, would never
have found in them any reason to suspect that there were millions of
Catholics in the country maintaining a separate system of schools,
and colleges, and universities of their own, without a cent's helj)-
from the public funds. Since the present Commissioner had his at-
tention drawn to such a remarkable hiatus in statistics, it is but just
to acknowledge he has endeavored to prove himself more useful to
the historian, in the matter of presenting a true picture of the coun-
try's progress in the field of knowledge than he had been doing and
his predecessors had done. The Report for the year 1898-99, which
is now to hand, is full of matter of the highest interest to the Catholic
reader.

One needs, however, to do much more than take the index head-
ings if he would find some of the most valuable portions of history
bearing on Catholicism and religious education in these little-read
annuals. There are by-paths and trails to be found in the most
unlikely-seeming places. For instance, as we open the volume now
before us in the way most convenient for reading purposes, which
is by making halves of its bulk, we find confronting us a good
lengthy biographical sketch of one of the country's earlier educators,
Samuel Knox, written by Dr. Steiner, of the Pratt Free Library,
Baltimore, an authority on the educational development of Maryland
and Connecticut. This Samuel Knox was a Presbyterian clergy-
man from the North of Ireland, who settled for a considerable time
in the capital of Maryland and carried on academies or colleges there
and in other places in the course of a somewhat checkered career.
This man, full of Ulster bigotry in his heart, yet with fair-seeming
principles on his lips and dropping from his pen, appears to have ex-
ercised considerable influence in the formation of public opinion on
the subject of education in the State wherein Catholics had first laid
down the broad principles of an enlightened toleration. By voice
and pen he appears to have been incessantly ventilating his theories

Catholic Features in the OHHcial Report on Education. 127

on a national system of instruction from the alpha to the omega.
Splendid liberality shines in some of his pronouncements. Thus in
one particular publication we find him appealing to men of all re-
ligions, from Catholics to Covenanters, to beware of "interference
with the religion of any man considered as a candidate for office,"
while in several others he is seen furiously attacking the Rev. Wil-
liam Du Bourg and the Sulpician Fathers who had just opened St
Mary's University at Baltimore, simply because this was carrying
out an earlier suggestion of his own to the effect that all denomina-
tions provide schools of theology and religious training generally
for its own teaching body. The catechism prepared by Abbe Fleury
for the use of Catholic schools was in especial condemned by Knox's
partisans in the violent logomachy which his attacks stirred up, as
well as the "Jesuitical spirit" of the Sulpician Fathers. Able pens
on the Catholic side refuted the calumnies of Knox and his support-
ers, and the pamphlets and letters in the public press which were elic-
ited by the attack made a literature of very respectable dimensions.
The controversy was the means of stirring up a very bitter feeling in
the State, and thus effecting what Knox, at the beginning of his
career therein, was so plausibly earnest in deprecating, viz., the in-
clusion of religious considerations amongst the qualifications for
public office.

Knox's theory of national education, as formulated, did not ex-
clude religious teaching. He would have the knowledge of God
inculcated in some vague creedless way, and have a course of pray-
ers of the non-committal order form part of the school exercise,
together with the reading of some invertebrate homilies on religion,
likewise morals and ethics. His programme, under this heading,
as we read it now, suggests the notion that his spirit sits at the edi-
tor's desk in some of the offices wherein pabulum for the non-Cath-
olic religious world is now produced by the week or by the month,
and finds relief in the incessant aspiration after a Christianity with
Christ as an abstraction and an unrestricted field for all comers as to
what it is necessary to believe for the attainment of salvation. There
can be little doubt that, apart from Knox's peculiar notions on mat-
ters of pedagogical detail, his views on the function of religion in
education were widely held in the beginning of the several State
systems, and found expression in some shape or other until they
were proved to be unworkable and, so, abandoned for the present
plan of total exclusion of religion from the school, the college and
the university as established by the State.

The personality of this early educator bears an important relation
to the genesis of the subject, as we may consider him as a type of at
least one of the groups which exercised a preponderating influence

128 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

on the early stages of the evolution. He is thus described by one of
his pupils, Mr. John P. Kennedy : "He was a large, coarse, austere
man, with an offensive despotism in his character, which not only
repelled all love, but begat universal fear and dislike among the boys.
He was not much of a scholar, either, I should say, and was far from
successful as a teacher. He had no pleasantries by the way, no ex-
planations, no appeals to one's own perceptions of an author's
merits."

Many other side-lights on this absorbing question will be discov-
ered by the reader who has the leisure and the patience to wade
through the different able papers bearing on the general subject in-
cluded in the Report. But our limits will not permit us to do more
than indicate that the search will not be fruitless. We may leave
the quest here, and pass on to note something more positive in the
way of proof that the Catholic aspect of the subject is no longer over-
looked in the survey now annually made by the liberal-minded Com-
missioner, Dr. Harris.

Chief amongst such positive proofs is the inclusion in the Report
of the full text of three addresses of Bishop Spalding's, on themes
related to education recently. The third of these discourses is dis-
tinctively a plea for religion in education. It is entitled "The Uni-
versity : a Nursery of the Higher Life ;" and it is introduced by an
observation of Montaigne's : "In my time and country learning cures
the disease of the purse fairly well ; that of the soul not at all. To
him who has not the science of virtue all other knowledge is harm-
ful." As the only true science of virtue is religion, Montaigne's
sententiousness in this regard assumes a peculiar significance, in
view of the fact that his own philosophical tendencies at times
seemed to leave him floundering in matters of belief, much as the
"higher criticism" and the extravagant claims of the scientists on
the subject of creation do a good many thinkers of our own particu-
lar era. It is not possible to overestimate the liberality which
prompted the inclusion of these remarkable addresses, having regard
to their pronounced character as pleas for Catholicism in the train-
ing of the American citizen. The most careless reader could not
fail to be struck with the force of their reasoning and the singular
grace and boldness of their style. They are pleas couched in the
spirit of modern American notions, hortative of the search for knowl-
edge in every visible field of inquiry and the development of every
latent and active faculty of the mind for the attainment of the highest
things possible to the grasp of human thought. But they are pleas
for religion, above all things — for the interweaving of the spiritual
with the intellectual process, in the delicate task of building up the
mind's fabric in youth ; and so, in a large measure out of sympathy

Catholic Features in the Official Report on Education. 129

with, if not in actual hostility to, the principles of the system whose
progress it is the Education Commissioner's official duty to register
and record and, in a negative way, to philosophize upon, or at all
events to prepare the materials whereof for the philosopher.

"Do we not extol the Church," queries the learned prelate, in a
treatise on "The University," "for what, in ages that are gone, it ac-
complished in behalf of literature, art and science ? Do we not hold
that modern civilization is largely due to the influence of the Cath-
olic religion ?"

Now, such are not the propositions upon which the structure of
public education in this country has been reared; rather the very
contrary has been sedulously instilled into the minds of the people at
large. Wherever it has not been sought to prove that the Church
is the inveterate enemy of education, it is at least inculcated that if
she did set up the university and the school, she did it with the
selfish and narrow purpose of strengthening her own influence or
reining in the intellect within a fixed pale of pedagogy. This vi-
cious tendency is well exemplified in the introduction to a history of
the secondary school system in the Kingdom of Hungary which
forms a portion of the same volume which blazons Bishop Spald-
ing's eulogy of the Church as a teacher. A few sentences culled
from the document reveal the animus of the chronicler :

"During the earliest epoch the Church ruled supreme in educa-
tional matters in Hungary as well as in other countries. Wherever
the Church stepped upon the scene the clergy, with the well under-
stood purpose of strengthening its own position, established schools
as an irresistible means for the assertion of its power. The Latin
language and ecclesiastical teachers predominated, and the object of
the schools consisted exclusively in preparing clergymen and be-
lievers. This tendency received a new impetus through the Refor-
mation. The competition arising between the different denomina-
tions called into existence a new school at every step, which school
was to act as a fortress of the faith, . . . Scholars who had re-
turned from the West brought with them an eagerness to reform and
remodel, much to the disadvantage of home traditions. Thus the
national individuahty suffered."

Here we behold cropping up the views of Voltaire and the En-
cyclopaedists. It would be utterly unreasonable to expect the Com-
missioner of Education to use his blue pencil in such cases ; if he did
so in the one case, he certainly could not be blamed for also doing it
in the other. The further he delves into the sources of education,
no matter where almost, the more he finds how closely the begin-
nings of it had been intertwined with the history of the Church.
Here is an influence that cannot be excluded; when he finds it un-
Tol. XXVI.— Sig. 9.

130 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

justly assailed, what can he do, in common fairness, but admit the
pleas in defense which he finds publicly confronting him ?

The ideas which permeate society in this great country to-day are
found reflected in the tone of the greater number of the collective
reports which make up this one official report. These ideals are
chiefly secularism in education ; education whose aim is summed up
in the one word, "practical." If religion be not hated — and we
thankfully say that such is by no means the case — it is considered,
at all events, inadmissible in the curriculum, because sects are many
and the brains to devise a system to meet the just requirements of
all are scarce. From previous reports of the Commissioner it is
permissible to infer that he himself shares the view of the secularists
that a liberal education is in itself sufficient to make a man or woman
all he or she needs to be — perfect in mind and body, morally and in-
tellectually great. This being so, we cannot but confess the mag-
namity which permits a scholar like Bishop Spalding to emphasize
the opposite view in many memorable passages like this one :

"The universities of the past, as those of our own day, have but
partially fulfilled their mission because they have failed to foster a
deeper and purer moral life. Nay, often they have been and still are
the nurseries of vice. The radical failure is moral failure, and the
education which does not promote conduct, which does not build
character, bears within itself a mortal taint. . . . When phil-
osophy is studied as an intellectual pastime and conduct is looked
upon as a matter of policy, no genuine education can be given or re-
ceived.

"Religious faith and conduct are the basis of right human life, and
the student who is not inspired by this principle may become a bril-
liant or a famous, but not a great or a noble man. . . . 'What
rendered the University of Paris powerful, nay, positively formid-
able,' says Savigny, 'was its poverty. It did not possess so much as
a building of its own, but was commonly obliged to hold its meetings
in the cloisters of friendly monastic orders. Its existence thus as-
sumed a purely spiritual character and was rendered permanently
independent of the temporal order.' "

What Scotland owes to the Church and to this idea of the function
of education is placed clearly enough before the readers of this in-
teresting and impartial Report, in the course of an exceedingly fair
and graphic sketch of "The Mediaeval Universities of Scotland," by
Professor Ritchie, of St. Andrew's. Before the foundation of any
of the Universities north of the Tweed, observes Mr. Ritchie, a
number of enlightened Scotch ecclesiastics formed a society for the
instruction of all who chose to attend their lectures. At their head
was the Abbot of Scone, Peter of Lindores, who expounded phil-

Catholic Features in the Official Report on Education. 131

osophy as taught by Peter Lombard, the great authority of the
Middle Ages; others expounded theology; others again canonical
and civil law. Then the Scottish universities grew up, as did those
of Paris and Bologna, by a sort of voluntary process on the part of
successive enthusiasts in the cause of education — Churchmen all —
and in due time came the Popes' bulls authorizing the formal estab-
lishment of St. Andrew's, Glasgow, and Aberdeen."

It is at this point that we would like to invite the reader's atten-
tion to the momentous bearing on civilization, in its broadest mean-
ing, which the process called the Reformation had on the work of
the university everywhere. We have seen how the Hungarian
chronicler deprecated the influence for evil, from his point of view,
which the foreign university had on the Hungarian student. It
affected his national sentiment. It made him broad-minded. The
mediaeval European university was cosmopolitan. Students of all
the "nations" residing at these centres fraternized in the noble
brotherhood of learning and philosophy. Every best civilizing in-
fluence was there exerted to promote the brotherhood of man and
the extinction of ancient feuds. The "Reformation" came to undo
all this beneficent work. It scattered the "nations" and hunted the
teachers with the "dogs of war" for many woful years. The influ-
ence of the Church on this great process of consolidating the dif-
ferent States is thus graphically outlined by Professor Ritchie :

"In the Papal bull for the foundation of St. Andrew's a term is
used as convertible with universitas studii, which originally had a
distinct meaning — studium generale. This term contains more of
the meaning we usually connect with a university, but it is likewise
often misunderstood. It does not mean an institution for the study
of all sorts of subjects, but an institution for students from all quar-
ters of the world, as distinct from a merely local school. It was this
cosmopolitan character of the mediaeval universities which brought
the Pope into special connection with them. It came to be recog-
nized that only the Pope, or the Holy Roman Emperor (in those
countries which acknowledged his authority) could confer the neces-
sary privileges ; and thus even studia, which had arisen and acquired
a more than local reputation independently of Papal and imperial
authority, came to apply for Papal bulls and imperial charters. It
is this, also, which explains the way in which the universities of one-
country came to influence the type of those in another, irrespective
of neighborhood or of political ties — how, e. g., the universities of
Scotland bear more resemblance to those of Italy and of Germany
and of the Low Countries than to those of England, or even of Scot-
land's ancient political ally, France."

Here it should be observed that although the universities were

132 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

potent in inducing the broad spirit of cosmopolitanism among the
students, and so cooperating with the systematic Papal policy of
peace among all the European States, it was not obnoxious to the
principle of nationality. It will be remembered that Mr. Andrew
Lang, in his recent work on "John Knox and His Times," bore
unqualified testimony to the sturdy nationalism of the Scottish bish-
ops in all the disputes with England, previous to the disastrous
"Reformation" days. When the Hungarian commentator sets
down that deterioration in the national character was a result of the
habit of sending students to the foreign university, if we accept the
statement as reliable, we are driven, by a comparison of the two
cases, to the conclusion that the national spirit in the average Hun-
garian was not a plant of as lusty a growth as its congener that grew
in "Caledonia stern and wild." Before the blighting influence of
Knox and the English conspirators who plotted the extinction of
Scotland's faith and nationality was felt over the land, the Catholic
nobles, though turbulent, were patriotic ; thenceforward they mostly
"sat on the fence" or took sides with the Saxon.

Men of thought, true scholars and educators, deplore all things
which make for the hostility of nations and individuals. It is the
men of evil mind who cry out for war and arrogance of man toward
weaker man. Professor Ritchie sees nothing but loss to civilization
in the destruction of the old character of the university. He winds
up his interesting paper with this sobering retrospect and reflection :

"The immediate effect of the ecclesiastical revolutions of the six-
teenth century was to destroy, to a great extent, the international
character of the universities and to make them merely national in-
stitutions. Scotland was, indeed, in some respects less cut ofif from
the Continent than England. Scottish students, after the Refor-
mation, resorted to Leyden and Utrecht, as in older days they went
to Paris or Bologna. In this century we are recovering a little of
the international academic sentiment between students of different
countries; and it is a most valuable sentiment, which may make
more for peace and civilization than much of the work of statesmen
and ambassadors."

It is not often that we meet with such frank testimony from a
Protestant authority to the beneficent influence of the Papacy and
the system of Catholic teaching of which it was the universal
patron. Such an admission as this compensates for whole volumes
of stupid misrepresentation of the aims and objects of Catholicism
such as those upon which the Protestant population of this country
have habitually been nurtured. Vain and impotent must prove the
efforts of writers like the Rev. James M. King to poison the wells
of history while there be magnanimous souls like Mr. Andrew Lang

Catholic Features in the Official Report on Education. 133

and this Glasgow professor to come forward as the champions of
truth.

In the annual Report preceding the one now under review there
appeared a series of papers of an exceedingly valuable character on
Education in Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines, by R. L. Pack-
ard. They were distinguished by impartial historical statement, ex-
haustive statistical analysis, and a manifest desire to lay the truth
before the world no matter to whom it might be disagreeable or dis-
appointing. In this new volume we find another set of reports on
the same subject, but by a different writer. We often meet the
name, F. F. Hilder, in the Commissioner's collations, and chiefly in
connection with countries of Spanish settlement ; and we have noted
that he is invarably out of sympathy with the subject, so far as the
religion of the people is concerned, and has little good to say for the
clergy or the efforts made by them to educate the people. In the
particular paper now under notice this tendency is particularly
marked. He begins by blaming the religious orders in the Philip-
pines for not beginning the educational process by starting primary
schools instead of colleges. In face of facts well known to every
reader, such an objection looks exceedingly puerile. It would be
exceedingly hard for any one to put his finger on any country in the
world where education did not begin from the top, which was the
only way, indeed, in which it could begin, and perfectly in accord-
ance with the natural law. It is true, says F. F. Hilder, that^schools
Were established throughout the islands, but little progress was
made in them, as the teachers did not understand Spanish, and what
little rudiments of education the children acquired were forgotten
when they left the schools." The result of the system is, he adds,
that a large proportion of the Filipinos are "woefully uneducated."
This conclusion seems to be one of those dangerous things known
as half-truths. The whole world knows now that a large propor-
tion of the Filipinos are either savages quite or semi-savages ; that
a considerable number are Mahommedans, slave-dealers, and polyg-
amists, and so, perhaps, wholly irreclaimable. Their condition is
not due to any fault of the religious orders, but is chiefly owing to
the inaccessibility of their habitat, physical obstacles and climatic
conditions. It is downright dishonesty to hold either the Spanish
Government or the religious orders in any degree responsible for
the social conditions of such people. The glaring character of the
suppression is still more evident when we recall the fact that Span-
ish missionaries went repeatedly among these wild tribes, and often
paid the penalty of their beneficent efforts for their reclamation with
their lives.

It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that while Mr. Packard,

134 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

in preparing his report, strove to do justice to the religious orders
both as educators and social uplifters, his successor was desirous of
ignoring their claims and holding them responsible for conditions
over which they had no control. Mr. Packard shows the Spanish
clergy not only as Christianizers and schoolmasters, but as stout
defenders of the people's civil rights. He traces the efforts of the
Spanish officials and commercial speculators to exploit the natives
for gain, in the same way as the same class did in the South Ameri-
can settlements among the Indians, and he shows how the clergy,
animated by the spirit of Las Casas, put their backs against the wall
and said the iniquity should not be. What the Spanish rulers
called the "Encomienda" was introduced into the Philippines in the
year 1581. It was a species of slavery — forced labor, in lieu of which
the laborer got food, some little pay and some pen to sleep in.
Practically it amounted to serfdom. To the Filipinos, who had had,
long before the Spaniards arrived, a tribal constitution, with fueros
of their own, the Encomienda system was maddening. But their
antagonism to it would have been futile, probably, were it not
backed up by the stern remonstrances of the clergy throughout the
settlements. These were not content with protesting to the Crown
officials in the archipelago, but took care that their remonstrance
should reach the ears of the King. The strong step had an imme-
diate effect. His Majesty issued a decree putting an end to the
Encomienda system and decrying all other forms of extortion prac-
tised by the officials. These wrongs had been so flagrant that the
clergy begged the King to be allowed to return to Spain if they were
not stopped, inasmuch as they could not stand by and see them per-
petrated by the heartless tribe let loose upon the people by the colo-
nial government.

Now, with regard to the "woefully uneducated" condition of the
islanders, as charged by F. F. Hilder, Mr. Packard quotes an abun-
dance of eminent authorities to the contrary. He cites M. Alfred
Marchess "Six Years of Travel in the Philipppines" (Paris, 1887),
who found five alphabets in use among the islanders and schools,
under the control of the priests, "in every village." The love of the
people for music M. Marche found to be remarkable. In every vil-
lage there is Mass, he says, and music at every Mass. The music
of the bands in Manila he judged to be as good as what he heard
in Madrid. Nearly all the Tagalos, he declares, can read and write.
Instruction among the Indians, he observes, is far from being back-
ward when compared with the position of the lower classes in Eu-
rope. The monks at St. Tomas had published a Tagalo grammar
and dictionary, and a combined grammar of the Tagale, Bicol, Vi-
saya and Isinay languages. Semper, another experienced explorer.

Catholic Features in the Official Report on Education, 135

but one evidently hostile to the Church, is also quoted by R. L.
Packard. "Every village," he says, "has its public school, in which
instruction is obligatory," but he objects that besides reading and
writing, only Christian doctrine and Church music are taught in
these primary schools. Jagor, another authority quoted, adds that
the teachers were obliged to impart a knowledge of Spanish, al-
though, paradoxically enough, he adds that they did not know it
themselves. In introducing further testimony to the same effect
by the great authority, Blumentritt, R. L. Packard shows his spirit
of justice by remarking that while other men go forth in search of
adventure inspired by purely selfish motives, the Catholic priests
went all over the world, encountering death everywhere, from the
woods of Canada to the remotest parts of China, impelled only by
the spirit of "self-sacrifice and devotion for what they believed to be
the spiritual welfare of savages and heathen."

How different this from the faint praise or scrupulous suppression
by F. F. Hilder!

It would, finally, seem as though the Commissioner himself were'
conscious of the shortcomings of the latter's statement, inasmuch as
in the Introduction he embodies a statement of Senor Agoncillo's
regarding the educational and intellectual status of the Filipinos,
which more than bears out the favorable estimate of European ob-
servers. Two schools, he states, are to be found in every large
town; and if the population exceed five thousand, the number of
schools is correspondingly increased. Their scope, he says, is much
the same as that of the American schools. They teach, besides,
something more than reading and writing; Christian doctrine, the
Catechism and church music. Geography, grammar, the Spanish
language, arithmetic and history are likewise taught the pupils;
and the teachers are mostly native priests who have passed the
course in the normal college.

As if in order to remove all possibility of misconception as to his
own attitude, the Commissioner also calls upon Blumentritt for a
conclusive judgment. "The Filipinos have a greater proportion of
educated people among them than the Kingdom of Servia or the
Principalities of Bulgaria and Montenegro. There are fewer illit-
erates among them than in the States of the Balkan Peninsula, in
Russia, in many provinces of Spain and Portugal, and the Latin Re-
publics of South America. The Filipinos pay more attention to
schools than Spain or the Balkan States."

Weighing all the facts presented in ths voluminous Report, the
Catholic philosopher must find much that is consoling and hopeful
in the phenomena which it reflects. On the one side he finds
the hand of enlightened impartiality sweeping away the cobwebs of

136 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

prejudice regarding the aim of the Papacy in the glorious work of
intellectual uplifting; on the other the steady persistence of the
clergy in the same cause, after the work had been rudely interrupted
in Europe by the revolt of heresy, in face of death and danger in
the trackless wilds of the new-found world. If the pen of prejudice
and jealousy would fain belittle the results of those splendid sac-
rifices, the spirit of fair play at the fountain-head arises to rebuke
the injustice and let the impartial world judge for itself on whose
brows should rest the palm of merit.

John J. O'Shea.

THE SECOND PLENARY SYNOD OF MAYNOOTH.

IN the Pastoral addressed to the faithful of the Church in Ireland
by the Fathers of the Plenary Synod of Thurles we find these
words: "Our enactments we shall immediately submit with
the profoundest reverence and submission to the judgment of the
Apostolic See ; and we will not publish them until we shall have ob-
tained the necessary approbation." The Fathers of the First Synod
of Maynooth say in their Pastoral : "In accordance with canonical
usage, the results of our deliberations shall not be made public until
they shall have received the approbation of the Roman Pontiff."
The acts of the Synod recently held at Maynooth have already been
sent on to the Holy See, but of course they will be a secret until
they have been confirmed in Rome and can be published in their
final legislative form. So strictly bound to secrecy are those who
are officially present at a Synod that even a Bishop who might be
present by right but is absent through necessity cannot be informed
of what passes in Synod. Such a case actually occurred at the First
Provincial Synod of Westminster.^ The Bishops of Liverpool and
Nottingham were unable to be present. At the opening session
Provost Crooke, who was Procurator for the Bishop of Liverpool,
asked if, in case he wanted to know the views of his Bishop on points
discussed in the course of the Synod, he might communicate with
him, and it was decided that he could not do so.

However, whilst officials must be silent, the officious will talk, and

various conjectures are abroad. Some say that the recent Synod of

Maynooth has made little or no changes on the decrees of the first

Synod held there in 1875. Some say that there has been legislation

1 See the Acts of the Synod, page 16.

The Second Plenary Synod of Maynooth. ixf

with regard to the Christian Brothers ; and on the strength of sim-
ilar conjectures no persons in Ireland have been more exercised over
the proceedings of the recent Synod than the Presentation Nuns
and the Sisters of Mercy. Because officious persons, who always
know more than officials, are quite certain that the Sisters of Mercy
will have a Mother General, and that the Presentation Nuns will be
taken from their present partial enclosure and will realize the orig-
inal purpose of Nano Nagle. A very wise rule in the procedure of
Synods is the decree De Secreto Servanda; for the officious who of
course should have been official if Canon Law were wise, would be
sure to sit in judgment on the deliberations of the Bishops, and
would make improved recommendations which would stand as a
norma by which to test the wisdom of the Holy See.

Whatever be the final result of the recent Synod, its acts and de-
crees will be an index of the present needs and the general position
of the Irish Church ; for, being the outcome of the corporate jurisdic-
tion of the Bishops, they must be made to meet the needs, not of a
diocese or a province, but of all Ireland. In this connection it may
be well to observe that the legislative power of a Plenary Synod is
not the combined authority of the Bishops. It is something quite
distinct, and for which a new element is necessary. If the Bishops
of a country assemble and legislate on the strength of their united
jurisdiction merely their legislation would resolve itself into so many
diocesan decisions which would not have the canonical value even of
a Diocesan Synod. Each Bishop, of course, brings his own jurisdic-
tion with him into a Plenary Synod ; else he would have no right
to be there ; but he also shares in the corporate jurisdiction which
the Synod has, and in virtue of which alone it legislates. The new
element which gives form to that jurisdiction comes from the Holy
See. Formerly when Primates and Patriarchs had jurisdiction over
Archbishops they could summon the Bishops of a nation into Plen-
ary Synod and confirm its acts. But that jurisdiction is a thing of
the past. In those times also the power of Princes was often in
requisition. They were invited, and they thought it a privilege to
lend the aid of the secular arm in sustaining the authority of Bishops
and their Synodal decrees against erastian laics or schismatical
churchmen. But the habit of intervening led them in the course of
time to forget that theirs was an auxiliary part and a position of
privilege ; and when it suited their ambition they easily mistook fact
for right, and though earthly kings, arrogated authority in a king-
dom that is not of this world.

Metropolitans have not jurisdiction over one another, and there-
fore when the Primatial and Patriarchal jurisdiction in this matter
ceased, the direct action of the Pope became necessary to convene

138 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

and confirm a National or Plenary Synod. But the Pope commis-
sions one of the metropolitans to do so, who is therefore called an
Apostolic Delegate, and holds jurisdiction as such for the purpose
of the Synod only. The aid of kings is no longer available, and their
pretended right to interfere is repudiated. Even the term "na-
tional" as applied to Plenary Synods has fallen into disfavor and
almost into disuse, because of the color it might lend to those royal
pretensions. Erastianism is but a pagan principle — cujus est regio
illius est religio — revived by Christian Princes to gratify their greed
of domination.

Thus it was as Delegate of the Holy See that Archbishop Kenrick
presided over the first Plenary Synod of the United States held at
Baltimore in 1852, that Archbishop Spalding presided over the sec-
ond at Baltimore in 1866, and that Cardinal Gibbons presided over
the third in 1884. By virtue of similar delegation Cardinal Moran
presided over the two Plenary Synods of Australia at Sydney in
1885 and 1895. It was as Apostolic Delegate that Cardinal Cullen
presided over the Plenary Synod at Thurles in 1850 and at Maynooth
in 1875, and that Cardinal Logue presided over the Plenary Synod
recently held at Maynooth. Whilst those Synods of the United
States, Australia and Ireland are Plenary Synods, the Synods of
Westminster presided over by Cardinal Wiseman in 1852, 1855 and
1859, and by Cardinal Manning in 1873, ^.re but Provincial Synods,
although all the Bishops of England were present at them. Car-
dinals Wiseman and Manning did not preside over them as Apos-
tolic Delegates; there was no need of such delegation, and there
was none. There is but one metropolitan in England, and he has
the power as metropolitan to summon his suflfragans, but the Synods
summoned and presided over by him by virtue of his own jurisdic-
tion could be and were only provincial.

The Archbishop of Dublin is Primate of Ireland ; the Archbishop
of Armagh is Primate of all Ireland. The latter takes precedence of
the former and each takes precedence of the Archbishops of Cashel
and Tuam ; but in each case it is only a precedence of honor.

In the Pastorals issued by the Irish Bishops at the close of the
Synod of Thurles they ''announce the happy termination and grati-
fying results of the most solemn and important assembly that has
been held by the Irish Church since the days of our glorious apostle,
St. Patrick," and that "it will become an epoch in the history of our
national church ; an epoch which will not only be found pregnant
with immediate benefits, but which will throw its directing light and
influence on the future." The Fathers of the first Synod of May-
nooth open their Pastoral with those words and add : "Twenty-five
years have elapsed since these words were uttered ; and although a

The Second Plenary Synod of Maynooth. 139

quarter of a century is but a brief moment in the life of the Church
of God, in whose sight a thousand years are as yesterday, yet it has
been long enough to furnish proof that these hopes have been abun-
dantly fulfilled." The Pastoral just issued by the recent Synod
opens thus : "As we contemplate the actual condition of the Church
in Ireland, and its progress since the first Synod of Maynooth
twenty-five years ago, we see on all sides manifest reasons for thank-
ing God always for the grace that is given to you. For, whether we
regard the Church's external organization or her living spirit — the
outward forms in which her manifold activities show themselves, or
the unfailing power of God's grace which as a living fountain wells
up amongst her children unto eternal life — our hearts are filled with

joy."

Those words allude to two elements in the Irish Church — the
material manifestation of the people's faith and the living spirit
within. "At other times and in other places there have been richer
and grander churches than ours ; but it has often happened that as
the material building arose in strength and beauty, the spiritual
edifice was crumbling into ruins. Thank God it has not been so in
Ireland."

They have reason to thank God and to be proud of a people of
whom they are able to say : "It is this spirit of faith that marks the
singular harmony which exists in Ireland between the Church's
growth in outward form and grandeur and her progress in the
sanctity of her children." "The cowl does not make the monk" is
applicable to a people as to a person. With many nations it would
seem as if, when they had expended money and energy unsparingly
in raising sanctuaries to God or in benevolent institutions where
His charity is enshrined, they forgot the purpose for which they
worked, gloried in their own goodness and finally slided from the
spiritual life which had put forth its activity in such beautiful forms
till little more of the Church of God remained but the shell, and of
His worship "in spirit and in truth" only the shadow. It is quite
otherwise in Ireland. The thatched chapel has disappeared and
splendid buildings have been raised to replace them out of the
poverty of the people, assisted largely by the generosity of their
kinsfolk who have sought and found fortune in America. These
temples stand out in their stateliness and architectural beauty as so
many enduring symbols of the living faith of the people, quickened
by trial into greater life and activity. "To those who observe us
from the outside," as the Pastoral says, "these works seem but ill-
proportioned to our poverty. And so they are." But the eye of
faith that has designed them takes a wider and higher view of their
purpose than that which mere political economy gives and which is

I40 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

circumscribed by the narrow limits of the present life. But even
from the economist's point of view they have been the occasion of
distributing much money over the country. They have also stimu-
lated Irish art, although not so much, I think, as might be. The
architecture is, of course, entirely Irish; and so are the carving,
painting and sculpture to a large extent. But these, too, should be
all, or as nearly all as possible, the work of Irish artists. I am now
considering it aesthetically rather than economically. I look onward
to a time when those who are to come after us might study the
genius and development of Irish art in the churches which we are
building to-day. They cannot come to venerate if we do not build
the shrines. The saints and the scenes from the Gospel are, of
course, substantially the same whether represented by home or for-
eign art. But art is not as mere photography ; it is colored accord-
ing to the genius and the ideals of a people. In this sense it is that
I should like to see transferred to canvas or wall or marble the
sanctity of the imitators of Christ as assimilated by the ideals of Irish
faith. Better work may come from abroad, and in exceptional cases
it would be insular narrowness to set it aside. But in general our
churches should be the homes and the shrines of a sacred art which
we could call our own. The art of every people had to pass
through a process of development. Every best begins at its worst ;
and if we wait till we are at our best we shall keep waiting forever.
Cimabue and Giotto came before Fra Angelico, and if these had been
disregarded for Greek models Italy to-day would present the absurd-
ity of a naturalistic Christian art as represented by Titian and
Benvenuto Cellini instead of the noble productions of the pre-
Raphaelite painters ; and the influence of those two schools of artists
have been as divergent and far reaching as have been the literature
created by Dante and Petrarch on the one hand and by Boccaccio
on the other.

I have been speaking of the material manifestation of faith in Ire-
land. But the piety of the faithful of all classes and of both sexes
has notably increased for the past fifty years. In the early part of
the century men as a rule went but once, or twice a year to the
sacraments. That was not owing, in the vast majority of cases, to
any want of faith. It was largely due to the customs in which they
had been brought up. The Irish priests of those times were for the
most part educated in France, and they brought home that spirit of
rigorism which prevailed there. Moreover, the people were just
coming out from under the cloud which had hung over them during
the penal times. For generations they had to think less of how often
they could go to the sacraments than whether they could venture to
go at all. The people still point out in secluded glens all over the

The Second Plenary Synod of Maynooth. 141

country where Mass was offered up by stealth on rude stone altars
with the heavens for a canopy. In a pamphlet published in 1884
Dr. Nulty, the late Bishop of Meath, says : "In my own boyhood
I frequently heard old men glorying in the ingenuity of the strata-
gem by which they were smuggled as merchandize in wagons cov-
ered with tarpaulins to the hiding place of the Bishop who con-
firmed them. They were conveyed back again as 'goods unsold'
without exciting the suspicion of the authorities."

The following will illustrate how it fared with Catholics in Ireland
even so late as the early years of the present century. An old priest
who died a few years ago told me of a Protestant landlord in the
County Limerick who used to send an order to the parish priest of
the neighboring town in the harvest time to have the chapel cleared
out and ready for the magnate's men to thrash his corn in it. The
command was yielded to for a long time. But a new parish priest
came, who was made of sterner stuff.^ When the usual message
was brought to him he sent back the following reply to the local
despot : "Go back and tell your insolent master that if he dares to
meddle with or desecrate my chapel I'll send him home with a sorer
and a wiser head." The despot and his men came with the corn,
but they did not thrash it. That process was in preparation for
themselves. The priest was there to meet them at the head of a
body of stalwart parishioners, and the desecrating despots prudently
desisted. It must be said to the credit of the landlord that he duly
appreciated the courage of the priest, and became his faithful friend
for many years. In those times the Irish priest had in many cases
no fixed residence, but depended on the hospitality of the people.
To that state of things is to be traced the privilege which is pecu-
liar to Ireland — that priests are still allowed to say Mass in the
houses of their parishioners. Even the old custom of holding "sta-
tions" still remains in some parts of the country. That singular
privilege of having Mass in private houses has been withdrawn in
some dioceses. The Holy See would have prohibited it altogether,
but owing to representations made by the Bishops that the faithful,
born into the custom, would think it a great privation, it is tolerated.
At present, I believe, permission has to be periodically renewed ;
and it is not improbable that the recent Synod has proposed to re-
strict the privilege still more. The custom is, of course, an unspeak-
able benefit, but it has its drawbacks also. Several other customs
peculiar to Ireland have grown out of abnormal conditions brought
about by the Penal laws. They grew out of the hecessity of the
times, and they lingered on after the necessity had passed away.
Hence when we find defective baptismal and marriage registers, the

2 That priest died as late as 1844.

142 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

absence of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament in most country
churches, and other liturgical shortcomings, it would not be fair to
put them down to want of zeal on the part of the clergy or to want
of piety on the part of the laity. The Rosary was the only form of
public devotion which the people could always perform, and they
have clung to it with a devout fidelity which is not to be found else-
where in Christendom. In some country places the people assem-
ble in the chapel before Mass on Sundays where some pious and in-
telligent man of the parish ''gives out" the Rosary, and the others
join in. There is hardly a Catholic family in Ireland in which the
Rosary is not recited every night during Lent and Advent, and in
most of them throughout the entire year. The Association of the
Holy Family, introduced a few years ago by the Holy Father, has
made a great revival of the Rosary devotion in Ireland.

Before the churches and their emoluments were confiscated a
priest was present at the churchyard to perform the burial service at
the grave. Then the churches and the churchyard passed under the
control of the parson, and Catholic burial service was prohibited.
The people solved the difficulty by taking some of the earth from
the grave, often at a great distance, to have it blessed by the priest ;
they then take and scatter it on the grave before the coffin is lowered
down into it ; so that in spite of the law and without the ministrations
of the parson the body of the deceased would be laid to rest in conse-
crated clay. That custom is kept up to the present day.

One can readily understand how priests who were brought up in
such circumstances were glad to be let live at all, and did not always
encourage sodalities and popular devotions such as we are used to
at present. We now think them indispensable elements of spiritual
life ; if we had lived in Ireland in the days and circumstances of our
fathers we might think otherwise. It must not be thought, how-
ever, that sodalities were unknown in Ireland till lately. I have in
my possession some books of devotion specially compiled for the
use of Sodalities of the Blessed Sacrament and other confraternities,,
printed in Dublin, Cork, Waterford or Limerick, in the early years
of the century. I have heard of a poor old woman who died a few
years ago at a great age, and who could sing the Latin hymns and
recite the Latin psalms of Vespers from memory. She had learnt
them in her early days in Limerick. But it is only within the present
generation that popular devotions have spread to any great extent.
There are few parishes in country or town where Sacred Heart
Sodalities are not established. Even now the outside world is not
aware of the extent to which they have grown. A great many prac-
tices of piety go on, and a good deal of spiritual activity is abroad
all over the country which outsiders or passing visitors would never

The Second Plenary Synod of Maynooth. 143

suspect. Even converts to the Church are much more numerous
than is generally known ; not so numerous as elsewhere, because
Protestantism in Ireland is a symbol of ascendancy ; it means social
privilege more than religious conviction, whilst Catholicism carries
with it in their minds the tradition of inferiority and exclusion from
the good things of this world. These spiritual activities are not so
much advertised in Ireland as elsewhere ; and let us hope that the
CathoUcs of Ireland will always think it enough that God knows
what they do in His honor without calling the attention of the
world to look and admire them. Monthly confession and com-
munion is a common practice with both sexes and amongst all
classes ; and those who neglect to do the Easter duty are very few.
Intemperance, which was once so prevalent amongst all classes — in
fact, was a tradition of extravagant respectability borrowed from the
old gentry — has greatly decreased in the country parts and is less
than it used to be in the cities. Working on holidays of obligation
has become very common in late years; at the time of the first
Synod of Maynooth it was very rare. We have been drawn into the
ways and vices of the commercial world without sharing much of
the benefits. We have let ourselves pass unconsciously through a
process of Anglicization which many of us little dream of. The
English "Reformers" thought that industry was retarded by the
number of Catholic holidays ; so Protestantism did away with them.
In recent years they have , come to think that the people had not
holidays enough. They did not, however, revive the old holidays
which they had done away with — that would be too much of an
honor to Catholic saints — but they created new ones and called them
"Bank holidays" — I suppose in honor of the God Mammon. Un-
fortunately the Catholics of Ireland have yielded, and have followed
these changes in the humor of English Protestantism in this as in
other things. It is to be hoped that the Gaelic revival will
succeed in restoring these things, together with the mines of beau-
tiful Catholic thought hidden away in the language which our Cath-
olic fathers spoke.

The work which confronted the Bishops who assembled at the
Plenary Synod of Thurles in 1850 was in some respects far more
difficult than that which lay before the Bishops who assembled at
Oscott and Baltimore m 1852. "In it for the first time," says the
Pastoral of the first Synod of Maynooth, "the Irish Church, at the
issue of her three centuries of martyrdom, was enabled calmly to
survey her own condition, to mark the wounds of which in the heat
of the struggle she had hardly been conscious, and to replace in fair
order, according to the Sacred Canons, the scattered stones of her
sanctuaries. It was one of the first fruits of the blood of her count-

144 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

kss Irish martyrs, who had sown in tears that we might reap in joy.
It was held amid the prayers of an entire nation, chastened by heroic
endurance of recent suffering. Its will was the unanimous voice of
the entire body of the Irish Bishops, speaking with authority in-
herited through long lives of venerable predecessors, from the
sainted founders of the ancient Episcopal Sees of the land. It was
convoked in face of a great danger threatening the faith of the coun-
try, and in obedience to a special mandate from the Apostolic See
in whose loving guidance all afflicted churches are sure to find 'de-
fense and security, a haven where no waves swell, and a treasure of
blessings innumerable.' The work of such a Synod was not meant
in the designs of God to be transient, nor was its influence to perish
as soon as its immediate objects were attained; but rather its spirit
was long to survive, to be to the Irish Church an abiding source of
vitality and strength in which, from time to time, her youth may be
renewed as of an eagle."

For many years missions and retreats are given periodically in all
the parishes of the country. The devotion of the Quarant'ore exists
in the cities. Religious examinations are held annually in the
schools of many of the dioceses. In all the cities and large towns
the laity have branches of the St. Vincent de Paul Society for the
relief of the poor. "Wakes," which were meant as a token of rever-
ence for the dead and had become an abuse, are ceasing to be what
they unfortunately too often were; and in some places they are
gradually disappearing, as the custom is being introduced by the
clergy of having the corpse taken to the church where that is prac-
ticable. The custom is also coming in of having marriages cele-
brated before Mass, at which the bride and bridegroom receive Holy
Communion. I may here mention a remarkable illustration of the
devotional tendency of the people which occurred within the past
few months. A regiment of the Limerick county militia have been
encamped in England during the South African war. They asked
the local priest to direct a confraternity which they wished to form in
the camp. He gladly consented, and every week several hundred of
them assembled for devotions during their stay. That is a strong
evidence, coming spontaneously from a body of men from whom
such inspiration might be little expected.

A dozen pages or more of the Synodal Pastoral is taken up with
the question of education in Ireland — primary, intermediate, uni-
versity and technical. The Synod of Thurles and the first Synod of
Maynooth were occupied with the same question, and we may, for a
certainty, expect to find definite declarations of the Bishops on it
amongst the decrees of the recent Synod. It looks like the final
battleground on which anti-Catholicism seeks to try the faith of the

The Second Plenary Synod of Maynooth. 145

Irish people. "We are no longer assailed by open persecution and
cruel edicts," wrote Cardinal Cullen in 1856,^ "but we have amongst
us wolves in sheeps' clothing, lying in wait for the tender lambs of
the fold. Confiscation of property, exile, the rack, the sword, so
often employed against our fathers, are no longer spoken of. Edu-
cation, charity, the Bible are now inscribed upon the banners of
those whose bigotry and fanaticism in past days delighted in perse-
cution and blood."

During the reign of Henry VIII. about 1,000 educational institu-
tions were destroyed in Ireland. Out of confiscated Catholic prop-
erty and public money were founded : The Parish School Act in
1537, Diocesan Free Schools in 1570, Trinity College in 1591, Royal
Free Schools in 1605, Erasmus Smith Schools in 1669, The Blue
Coat Schools in 1672 — with the purpose of making the Irish, Pro-
testant in faith and English in sympathy. By the 7th of William
and Mary all Papists were prohibited from teaching school under
heavy penalties ; and the child who went abroad for education as
well as the parent who sent him forfeited all their belongings.
Henceforth arose the "hedge-schools,"

"Where the teacher and the pupil sat
Feloniously to learn."

Yet by 1730 the Protestant Primate Boulter wrote: "I can as-
sure you the Papists are here so numerous that it highly concerns
us, in point of interest, as well as out of concern for the salvation of
these poor creatures, who are our fellow-subjects, to try all possible
means to bring them and theirs over to the knowledge of the true
religion ; and one of the most likely methods we can think of is, if
possible, instructing and converting the young generation ; for, in-
stead of converting those that are adult, we are daily losing many of
our meaner people, who go off to Popery." He suggested a new
system known as "The Charter Schools," which began their work
in 1734. In 1775 a by-law was made by which only "Popish chil-
dren" were eligible for admission into them. In 1787 Howard, the
philanthropist, caused a public inquiry to be made into their condi-
tion, which revealed lying reports on the part of those who con-
trolled them and filth, neglect, immorality and ignorance on the
part of the children who were to be enlightened out of the supersti-
tions of Popery. After ninety-three years of existence they were
finally swept away. But during that time they cost i 1,600,000 ster-
ling— all spent on not more than 12,000 children, and for such an
"education" as Howard had exposed. In 1758 Catholics were al-
lowed to open schools, and according to Mr. Wyse* the Catholic
priests by their own exertions and without any public money edu-

3 "Writings of Cardinal Cullen," Vol. I., page 418. * "History of the Catholic
Association," Vol. II., page 92.
Vol. XXVI— Sig. 10.

146 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

cated each year four times as many as were "educated" by the
Charter Schools at such enormous cost during the whole of their
existence. He mentions that one priest in County Sligo estab-
lished no less than thirteen schools, and adds that similar instances
occurred elsewhere through the country.

The same anti-Catholic purpose established the Hibernian Mili-
tary School in 1769, the Hibernian School in 1775, the Female
Orphan School in 1790, the Association Against Vice in 1792, the
London Hibernian Society in 1806, Kildare Street Schools in 181 1,
Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in 1819. Cardinal Cullen'* gives
a list of several other institutions founded with a view to the enlight-
enment of the Papists. But he points out that charity begins at
home, and that the money thus wasted might be usefully spent in
England. He quotes from a report signed by twenty Anglican
Bishops : *'The almost incredible degradation in morals as well as
religion in which the masses of our people are sunk ;" and from a
Mr. Kay, of the University of Cambridge : **I speak it with sorrow
and shame that our peasantry are more ignorant, more demoralized
than those of any in Europe."

In 1 83 1 the Government tried to mend their hand by the intro-
duction of the ''National School" system, of which Archbishop
Whately, whilst openly declaring it an innocent system, privately
expressed his confidence that it would "soon wean the Irish people
from the errors of Popery." That system has been cobbled many
times since it was established ; each stage of improvement betraying
the fact that the original purpose of the system is still inspiring and
hampering the action of those who are responsible for it. In 1847
they established "model schools," to be examples of pedagogy for
the ordinary National Schools. By the year 1867 these, about thirty
in all, had cost £50,000, and they have been costing about £30,000
ever since. Though meant mainly for the supposed benefit of Cath-
olics, hardly any Catholics go to them. I find, moreover, from In-
spectors' returns' that they are behind many of the National
Schools in efficiency. The Royal Commission of 1869 condemned
them as an utter failure ; and the late Lord Randolph Churchill said
that "they are the greatest imposture that could be kept up in Ire-
land."

The whole system on which educational opportunities have been
offered to the Catholics of Ireland has been from the beginning a
system of defiance and denial as long as that was possible, then of
hypocrisy, deceit and cobbling. The hirtory of the action of the
English Government in this matter is such that they seem to have
lost the faculty of framing an educational system for Irish Catholics

B loc. cit.

Legal Tenure of the Roman Catacombs. 147

without slipping in some crank by which to twist the work of the
machinery into proselytism. Little wonder that the Irish Bishops
suspect whatever they offer, however denominational in appear-
ance.

In the matter of higher education the Synod will probably have
little to say that has not been said already in 1850 and 1875. For,
in this, the Government has done little or nothing! They have an
intermediate system by which Catholic youth are prepared for and
encouraged to aspire to a university training, whilst they deny a
university where the Catholic youth may go for it with safety to
their faith.

The Pastoral also alludes to the establishment of a Catholic Truth
Society for the dissemination of good literature amongst the people.
It began its work last June, and in the five months which have since
elapsed about fifty pamphlets have been issued and about half a mil-
lion have been sold. It is an open secret that the Bishops have re-
solved also to establish a high-class weekly Catholic newspaper as
an organ of Irish Catholic principles and interests.

Whilst the primary care of the Bishops is, of course, the spiritual
and moral condition of their flocks, they have not forgotten in their
Pastoral the temporal concerns of the country. It is a peculiarity of
Irish ecclesiastical life that the temporal interests of the people enter
largely into the cares of the priesthood. Irish history has decreed
it so. The people were helpless in the past. They have been perse-
cuted by open enemies, betrayed by pretending friends, and even
many of their fellow-Catholics, once they had secured power and
social position for themselves, troubled themselves little about their
needs. The priest has been the only person to whom they could
turn without suspicion. His disinterestedness has been tried by
time, and therefore they expect his aid and sympathy in every trial.

M. O'RiORDAN,
Limerick, Ireland.

LEGAL TENURE OF THE ROMAN CATACOMBS.

THE mystery and system of concealment associated with the
popular idea of the Roman Catacombs make it difficult at
first to understand by what right or by what toleration
Christians, before the conversion of Constantine, could have appro-
priated to themselves extensive tracts of land in the immediate neigh-
borhood of Rome, conspicuously situated along the great highways
that radiated from the imperial city. Twenty-six greater cemeteries
are enumerated : three on the Appian Way, two on the Ardeatine,

148 American Catholic Quarterly Review. \

one on the Ostian, one on the Portuensis, three on the Aurelian, one
on the Flaminian, seven on the Old and New Salarian, one on the
Nomentan, two on the Tiburtine, two on the Labicana and three
on the Via Latina; besides nine minor cemeteries, all existing
during the centuries of persecution ; without taking into account six
others constructed in the time of peace. How could the Christians
possibly conceal their possession of this property, which they held
for purposes of daily and public use ? By no precautions could it be
concealed that the bodies of thousands received burial in these
tombs, and that relatives and friends accompanied them to their
resting place, and periodically visited their graves. But conceal-
ment was not a universal fact, nor a necessary condition of secure
tenure : to make this clear is the object of the present paper. The
Roman laws which regulated the matter of interment amply pro-
tected, unless during times of popular excitement or exceptional
legislation, the burial places of all citizens, without distinction of
race or religion.

In order to understand the bearing of those laws on the tenure of
property by Christians, it is necessary to define what legally consti-
tuted a sepulchre in the Roman code, and what conditions had to be
satisfied to secure the inviolability of property once devoted to
funeral rites. For this definition it may be useful first to describe
the usual arrangements of a Roman tomb, and the connected build-
ings distributed over the piece of land belonging to it. We cannot
do better than examine the ground plan of a noble sepulchral monu-
ment which has been preserved to us, and is now in the museum of
Urbino. It is cut on a marble slab, and pagan as it is, was found in
the catacomb of St. Helen on the Via Labicana, where it seems to
ihave been utilized by the Christians to close the front of a loculus.
Besides the exact survey made by the State of all the property of its
citizens, Roman proprietors were accustomed to have the general
outline and measurements of their land carved on stone and erected
near the entrance. This was particularly the case with sepulchral
ground ; and along the Appian Way, and elsewhere near the remains
of ancient tombs, stones are frequently found indicating the dimen-
sions of the property : so many feet in fronte, of frontage, so many in
depth, in agro. The Urbino marble is, however, much more descrip-
tive; and although the proportions are not observed in the design,
all the measurements are given in exact figures. The monument
which it represents stood on the public road, probably the Labicana.
The area surrounding the mausoleum is bounded on the right and at
the back by a private road, 524 feet long in one direction, to a point
where it turns and proceeds for 546 feet more, enclosing an area of
ten jugera, or Roman acres. This private road joins a public one

Legal Tenure of the Roman Catacombs. 149

which borders a continuation of the property for other 1,783 feet.
The marble is broken, and the rest of the dimensions can only be
guessed. At the lowest calculation the area between the extreme
point of the 1783 feet boundary and the point of the plan where the
marble is broken was at least two acres, giving twelve Roman acres
as the minimum extent of this domain, consisting of two distinct
parts.^

The first, in which the mausoleum stands, is again divided into two
parts : one, the area proper of the tomb on the public road, and the
area adjecta, contiguous to the monument, immediately behind it.
In the centre of the first was the tomb. We cannot say what was its
form. It may have been a single chamber, a cella memoriae, dedi-
cated to the memory of the deceased, containing his statue or his
bust, and arranged with every convenience for the reception of his
friends when they came to commemorate him according to custom.
It may have been constructed, like so many tombs on the Via Latina,
in two stories : the lower, the hypogeum, to contain the urn or sar-
cophagus, lighted by a lamp; and the other, above, a chamber for
the assembly of those who came to recall the memory of the depart-
ed. It may have been covered with tiles, or a roof formed with a
flat terrace and trellis, pergula, where the guests sat in the open air.
Of its decoration, its statues, its portico we can say nothing.

The enclosure round the principal building contained at its two
extremities dependences which served to lodge the custodian, the
gardeners and workmen who looked after the place, a pantry, a
cellar, a kitchen, a well and other outhouses. In these dependences
alone was it lawful for any one to live. It was sacrilege to make
one's dwelling in the tomb itself, in the triclinium, above or against
the tomb ; and this crime or piacidum, was punished by hard labor
or banishment. After the burning of Rome by Nero it is recorded
that the populace took shelter in the tombs ; and fugitives from jus-
tice sometimes made them their refuge : but this was exceptional,
for it was severely forbidden by the laws to defile by the presence of
the living the dwelling place of the Manes.

At the left side of the monument the plan shows a smaller rec-
tangle, also divided into two portions, one facing the public road, the
other immediately behind ; giving us in smaller proportion the dis-
tribution of the larger property. The area mvnumenti in front and
the area adjecfa, or agellus conclusus behind. This is an example of
those allotments of ground that were frequently made ex indulgentia,
out of the benevolence of the great proprietor, either by cession or
sale to poorer citizens for family sepulchral areas.

To return to the main plan. The first area, the court of honor or

1 For a reproduction of this plan and a detached description see De Kossi, Roma
Setter. I., Appendix at the end of the volume, pp. 55 sqq.

150 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

forum of the sepulchre, as Cicero calls it (De Leg. ii., 24), was walled
about, and on three sides enclosed by a portico. Behind this was
the area adjecta, called also hortus, hortulus, pomarium, planted with
trees and flowers, and intersected by avenues. In the rear of this a
private road separated the principal portion of the domain from the
remainder of the area adjecta, the adjoining land, which cedit monur
mento, goes with the monument. This is an instance of the jealousy
with which the right of way was guarded by the Romans, when in-
terference with it prevented free access to their places of burial.
Cicero reproaches a freedman of Sylla because after usurping land of
Roscius Amerinus he would not allow him to pass freely to visit his
father's tomb, which was on the confiscated property. In later times
a Rescript of Antoninus Pius imposed on proprietors whose land
bordered the area of a sepulchre a servitude of right of way in favor
X)f the owners of the tomb, fixing an indemnity in return.

Beyond the private road the land cedens monumento spreads to a
considerable distance, and is devoted to ordinary cultivation, while
the inner area adjecta is reserved for ornamental trees, orchard pro-
duce and flower gardens : and the immediate court of the sepulchre
was left uncultivated as the law prescribed.

In the plan, one side of the most distant area is separated from the
public road by a strip of land, portioned off into rectangular divi-
sions of unequal size, indicated by a number of cippi, or land marks.
This furnishes us with another example of allotments made to poorer
citizens for burial places, out of the land of the larger proprietors,
and is perhaps the most remarkable demonstration of the custom,
which made it easy for the Christians to profit by the dispositions
of the Roman law to acquire ground for the excavation of their
cemeteries.

Now that we have seen with the help of the Urbino marble the
material arrangement of a Roman place of burial, we are enabled to
understand something of the uses to which the various buildings
were put, and of the system of administration under which the whole
was kept, as these are described in another ancient document. This
is a copy of a Roman will in which the testator gives directions for
the construction of his tomb, and provides for its preservation and
for the ritual and family commemorations to be observed after his
death. This will was discovered on a parchment in the Library of
Basle, in 1863, and is a copy of what had been inscribed in marble on
a Roman tomb at Langres in Gaul. The transcript is not entire, but
the fragment is of the greatest importance, throwing light, as it does,
on the funeral usages of the Romans and on the facility with which
the Christians, under cover of the prevailing customs, could substi-
tute for the profane observances of the heathen their own rites, with-

Legal Tenure of the Roman Catacombs. 151

out attracting attention, and remain in undisturbed possession of
their cemeteries.^

The name of the testator is lost. However, it is apparent that he
was a Gallo-Roman, an inhabitant of Langres ; and to judge from his
equipages, his furniture and garments which were to be burned with
him, must have Hved sumptuously. His dispositions show us what
a rich Roman of the second or third century meant by a tomb. The
fragment begins with instructions to his heirs to finish the monu-
ment which he had commenced for himself. He directs the cella
memoriae to be completed according to the designs he has left. This
cella is to have an exedra, or semi-circular chamber, with two seated
statues of the deceased, one of marble, the other of bronze ; a couch
and two marble chairs and is to be provided with carpets to be spread
on the seats, with covers and cushions, and a supply of banqueting
garments for the guests on the days when the cella was to be open
for their feasts. In front of the cella and exedra an ara was to be
erected to contain his bones. A gate of marble, opening and shut-
ting, was to close the entrance. The land surrounding this edifice
is to be laid out as an orchard, pomarium. Three gardeners, topiarii,
are to be retained at a salary which he fixes at sixty measures of corn,
besides thirty measures for their clothing. He orders the names of
the magistrates who were in office when the mausoleum was begun
to be inscribed on the outside, as well as his own age at the time of
his death. Then follow penalties on his heirs if they suffer any
bodies to be burned, interred or otherwise introduced into the
ground set apart for his tomb, excepting the bodies of such persons
as he himself may have designated. The land is declared inalien-
able, and the possession of the heirs is limited to its custody, its
maintenance and repair. Finally he ordains that all freedmen and
freedwomen enfranchised by him are to make every year a contribu-
tion to defray the cost of the funeral feast on his anniversary, and to
choose each year curators to collect the stipes, and to offer the cus-
tomary sacrifices on the ara of the tomb, on the first days of April,
May, June, July, August, September and October.^

Burial places like the two described in the Urbino marble, and the
Basle will, could be quite legally held by Christians, either in their
individual names or as a corporation. This is the next step in the
consideration of the matter before us. No law prevented them from
holding property, although in common with other citizens they were
debarred from devoting to burial purposes land within the city walls.
But outside the walls, in the suburbs, and in the country, they were
at liberty to set apart a portion of land for the burial place of them-
selves, their families and their friends or others admitted to share the

2 De Rossi, "BuUettino," Aprile, 1864. 3 Id. DiceniDre, 1863, Av-ere the text of
the Will is given.

152 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

privilege. Like all subjects of the Empire, they were free to bury
their dead outside the city, in their villas, their fields or their gar-
dens. Land once allotted to this purpose came to be held under the
usual legal conditions of every place of interment.

Roman law divided property in land into locus purus, simple pro-
prietorship, and locus sacer, sanctus, religiosus, sacred, holy, religious,
three degrees or shades of dedication which separated property so
distinguished from ordinary property not set apart for any religious
or semi-religious use. Only the first division, locus purus, simple or
ordinary unfettered property could be bought and sold, and be trans-
ferred from hand to hand. The three classes of the second division
could not be commercially treated, nor diverted from the purpose to
which they had been dedicated. They were regarded as divini juris,
of divine right, and what is of divine right is the particular prop-
erty of no one.* A sacred place, locus sacer, was a place consecrated
by certain religious ceremonies to the worship of the superior divini-
I ies : a holy place, locus sanctus, a place protected against invasion
and encroachment by peculiar sanction of the law : a religious place,
locus religiosus, one given over to the Manes or inferior gods. Any
place where a dead body was deposited became a locus religiosus on
certain conditions depending some on the laws of the Pontiffs and
guarded by them, some on the ordinary civil law. By the pontifical
law a tomb became a religious place only when there was justa
sepultura — that is, when the body was formally consigned to the
earth, inhumatum. When towards the end of the republic crema-
tion became general the law was evaded. The ritual of interment
and the new practice were reconciled by mingling some earth with
the ashes placed in the urn, or burying in the earth a fragment of
bone which had escaped the fire. The condition required by the
civil law was one only : that the ground to which the body was com-
mitted was the free property of the person ordering the interment :
consequently a grave did not become a religious place, if it was dug
in a field belonging to another, or let to another, or subject to some
servitude which the legal consequences of a regular interment would
frustrate.

This condition of the law was entirely in favor of the Christians.
They abhorred cremation, interment was the only funeral rite they
practiced. It is true that they rejected the worship of the Manes, as
they rejected all idolatry. But the law did not require the formal
dedication of the grave to the Dii Manes, and was perfectly indiffer-
ent to the creed professed by the deceased or his friends : the sole
fact of the interment, with the prescribed conditions, gave the re-
ligious character to the tomb.

* De Rossi, Roma Setter. I., p. 101.

Legal Tenure of the Roman Catacombs. 153

In one particular, however, Christians were at a disadvantage,
although this was more apparent than real. The religious char-
acter attached itself simply to the tomb itself, the rest of the land,
gardens, parks, dependent buildings did not share the privilege. A
field entirely occupied by graves might be regarded as wholly re-
ligious and inalienable; but a field containing a single tomb was
liable to be sold, with the exception of the limited area of the grave
itself. The pagan had a means of extending the protection of the
privilege to the whole of the land ; he could invite the Pontiffs to con-
secrate it to one of the superior gods, Diana, Cybele, Venus, For-
tune, for example, making it a locus sacer; or to the inferior gods,
making it locus religiosus. This involved the use of idolatrous rites,
and the Faithful were debarred from it. But it does not appear that
the pagans themselves had frequent recourse to this method of secur-
ing the inviolablity of their burial domains. The reason may have
been that the ceremonies were complicated and probably expensive,
and because there was a much simpler and equally efficacious way of
arriving at the same end. And this was quite as much in the power
of the Christians as of the pagans. It was sufficient to insert in the
deed of gift, or in the will of the founder, a clause restraining from
alienating any of the land annexed to the tomb, under penalty of a
fine to be paid to the Treasury, or the Pontiffs, or the College of
Vestals.

The Roman legislation therefore protected the inviolable char-
acter of land once devoted to purposes of burial, without distinction
of religion ; did it also secure to Christians immunity from what they
would have regarded a sacrilegious profanation, the intrusion of
bodies of aliens into their burial places? We know how firm they
were on this point. A certain Martialis, who had buried his chil-
dren among pagans, was for that alone considered an apostate from
the Church. The law was here again in their favor, and furnished
them with legal means of preventing it. Two kinds of sepulchres
were recognized by the law : one which passed from the founder to
his heir, becoming the property of the heir after the death of the
founder, inalienable as a religious place, but transmissible to other
heir ; the other was the family sepulchre, which did not become the
property of the heir, nor could he dispose of it in any fashion. "Hoc
monumentum haeredem ne sequatur" is an inscription frequently met
with. In such a sepulchre the founder had a place by right, with
the members of his family, and others who, by enfranchisement, bore
the family name. The heir, too, might be buried in the family tomb,
but had no right to place in it any of his own family or pass it on to
others. The founder, or testator, had even the power to exclude
whom he pleased in the classes ordinarily admitted to share the

154 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

family tomb. In this way Christians were enabled to protect their
cemeteries from promiscuous burials, and we have evidence in sev-
eral epitaphs that they availed themselves of their legal faculty to
allow the use of their tombs to others, provided they were brethren
in the faith."

With a knowledge of the material and legal conditions which regu-
lated the burial places of the Romans, it is easy to understand how
the common law completely protected the tombs of Christians, in the
ordinary cases of a private cella mefjtorice, and its dependences, erect-
ed by a proprietor in his own grounds. In the example of a wealthy
Roman's funeral domain, exhibited in the Urbino plan, we have not
only the vast area of the principal owner, but smaller areas of various
extent, all devoted to places of burial. The extent of similar en-
closures varied to any size, from squares of twelve or sixteen feet to
vast tenements and real parks, according to the wealth and inclina-
tion of the proprietor, necessarily limited, along the fashionable high-
ways, where land was valuable and quickly bought up.

A Christian had the same right as another citizen to inter his dead
in land of his own: the land became at once religious: he could
share his tomb with whom he pleased, and exclude whom he pleased.
He could provide for its custody, for the decorous observance of an-
niversaries and for the assemblies of friends or relations in the cella
memorice or the triclinium : he could dispose of funds to defray all the
expenses of its maintenance in proper order and fix, if he thought
well, a yearly contribution from all admitted to its benefits. In
reality this is the first origin of the Christian catacombs of Rome.
The earliest denomination given to a catacomb is the name of its
founder, a rich noble, or a pious matron ; and the same names have
come down to us as the original owners of the land where the cata-
comb was excavated. Thus we have the prsedia, or farms, of Lucina,
of Flavia Domitilla, of the Csecilii, of Praetextatus, of Pudens, of
Cyriaca, the Ostrianum ; the little field, agellum, the property of St.
Agnes where she herself was laid ; the hortus, gardens of Justus and
Theon, all in Rome ; and out of Rome, the arece of Macrobius, of
Evelpius, etc., in Africa.

A classic example of this origin of a historic catacomb is offered
in the primitive portion of what is called the Catacomb of Callixtus —
the Cemetery of Lucina on the Appian Way. An area with a front-
age of a hundred- feet and a depth back from the road of two hundred
and thirty feet, encloses what still remains of a massive quadrangular
tomb now stripped of every inscription and ornament. It has been
made out with almost absolute certainty that this tomb belonged to
the family of a lady, whose Christian agnomen has alone been pre-

5 Id., p. 109.

Legal Tenure of the Roman Catacombs, 155

served, but who was a descendant of the Csecilii or of the Cornelii
yEmiHi — perhaps that celebrated Pomponia Grsecina whose conver-
sion to the Christian faith, and trial by her husband are described by
Tacitus.^ The prsedium, like the subject of the Urbino marble, was
divided into two parts, the area proper, or court of the tomb, occupy-
ing the full frontage and extending back from the public way fifty
feet, leaving a hundred and eighty feet of area adjecta reaching to
the extreme boundary of the plot. In this second portion, more
remote from the road, and behind the principal monument, Lucina,
or one of her descendants, constructed a hypogeum, or crypt, for
her Christian relatives and her brethren in the faith, with an ample
staircase and ornamental doorway leading to the subterranean. The
field over this crypt was planted, perhaps, as we see it to-day. At a
later period another Lucina, probably a descendant of the first, dur-
ing the persecution of Callus, interred the Martyr Pope Cornelius
almost at the foundations of the ancient family monument. This
cemetery of Lucina is the most remarkable type of a private burial
place in its transition from its strictly family character to its incor-
poration in the public property of the Church. Nearly all the
Roman catacombs began in the same way. Around the tomb of
the patron, "ex indulgentia patroni," as the pagan inscriptions say,
graves were opened for the less wealthy members of the community,
just as encircling the tomb of the rich heathen, his slaves, his freed-
men and his clients found a resting place.

The Christians adhered to the system of private tenure of their
property in individual names as long as they could. It was safe
and suited their purpose as long as the cemetery remained within
moderate limits, and its cost of management did not overtax the
resources of the owner. When the graves were few the proprietor
and his army of servants were sufficient for the work of the ceme-
tery ; but although the system of construction permitted level under
level to be excavated, the enormous numbers that had to be buried
soon exceeded the resources of the place, and th owner retired from
the responsibility, which was assumed by the society for whose bene-
fit the cemetery had been hitherto administered. So the growth of
the Christian population, and the force of circumstances led to the
introduction of another system, that of corporate tenure, and man-
agement under the immediate control of the ecclesiastical authori-
ties.

It may seem extravagant to speak of corporate tenure and of pos-
sessions of the Church as an established and recognized body in the
reigns of Decius, and Valerian, and Diocletian ; but there is no doubt
left on the point, and the evidence is both abundant and conclusive.

6 "Dublin Review," April.

156 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Promiscuous burial was hateful to pagan as well as Christian.
No Roman would be buried among strangers, he must be buried
among relations, friends, or persons associated to him by some com-
mon bond. Hence arose numerous burial societies or clubs, com-
posed of members of a common trade, natives of the same province^
inhabitants of the same city district. They had each a schola, or
meeting place for celebrations and repasts, they bore the expense of
a funeral and a tomb for their members. They took various titles^
as Worshipers of Jupiter, of Hercules, of Diana, of Silvanus ; some-
times a mysterious name, as ''Companions who feast together;" or
took a name from their founder, as the Syncratians, the Pelagians,
etc. Funeral clubs were lawful in Rome from the first century by a
decree of the Senate. A special permission was required in the
provinces. Towards the end of the second century this restriction
was removed, and a rescript of Alexander Severus sanctioned their
erection under certain conditions. Up till that time Augustus' sys-
tem of diffidence directed the imperial policy, but circumstances
favored a change. The old aristocracy, decayed or decimated, was
replaced by a new nobility without prestige or traditions; the ties
between patron and client were relaxed or broken. The lower
classes were beginning to rely on themselves and unite for common
interests.

There were poor guilds and wealthy ones. Indeed the law at first
was in favor of the poor, who were allowed to club freely together
to provide a decent funeral, but they were forbidden to hold general
meetings more than once a month. These less wealthy guilds pur-
chased a columbarium with money given by a benefactor, or col-
lected by subscription among the associates. Other clubs received
gifts and bequests of land or money, on condition of rendering fu-
neral honors to the donor and making the customary sacrifices on
the anniversary of his birth and of his death, and the offerings of
violets, roses and grapes, according to the season.

It was under the semblance of benevolent associations for mutual
help, and with the legal protection enjoyed by burial clubs, that the
Christians first began to hold in a collective name their cemeterial
property. It is in the third century that we have for the first time
mention of cemeteries belonging to them as a body; and it was
heard in the angry cry of the pagan mobs in Africa : "Areae Chris-
tianorum non sint," Down with the cemeteries of the Christians.
The Church in Rome could not have been behind the Church in the
province, and accordingly it is about the same time that the earliest
document registering the corporate possession of the catacombs
appears. It was just the period when the Church first stood out as
a regularly organized institution, and was brought prominently inta

Legal Tenure of the Roman Catacombs. 157

public notice by its activity and influence on society. Now it wa^
not only the conscience of individuals that revealed itself in particu-
lar facts, but the society itself manifesting its vitality in organized
and corporate action. The first communities had no need to pos-
sess land, their richer co-religionists supplied what was required;
but with growth and expansion it became necessary to secure by
other means the decent burial of their dead. It was also the period
when funeral clubs had reached their greatest development through-
out the Empire. The unknown author of the Philosophumena, a
work of the third century, tells us that Pope Zephyrinus, as soon
as he succeeded Victor in the Papal chair, gave to the Archdeacon
Callixtus charge of The cemetery. The cemetery antonomastically
named was the one now known by the name of the Archdeacon. In
that office he had already charge of the Church's treasury. Why
was this particular cemetery on the Appian Way selected to be the
special charge of the chief official in Rome under the Pope? The
cemetery up to this time held in greatest veneration was the one ex-
cavated under the Vatican Hill ; there the bodies of St. Peter and St.
Paul had attracted round them all the Popes previous to Zephyrinus.
The extension of the circus of Nero had disturbed their repose and
occasioned their translation to the third mile on the Appian Way,
where the basilica of St. Sebastian stands, a place called ad cata-
cumbas. Why was Callixtus not set over the cemetery which con-
tained this precious deposit, but over the cemetery a mile nearer
Rome? The reason was because this was the first great official
cemetery legally constituted as a possession of the Roman Church,
to be administered by its official, the Archdeacon. Doubtless the
protection and favor of the noble families who granted the land, con-
tributed to the preference. Whatever may have been the motive of
the choice, the fact is established that the cemetery of Calixtus was
in the third century the property of the Christians as a corpora-
tion.

The appointment of Callixtus to this important office was made
with great discrimination. He had been a man of the world, a busi-
ness man, we should say, accustomed to the responsibilities of ex-
tensive management, young with all his experience, active and ener-
getic. Admitted to orders, he gained the full confidence of the Pope
and was charged with the immediate direction of the clergy. The
cemetery confided to him was composed of crypts constructed by
the Caecilii in their land, and made over to the Church. In his man-
agement of it he left us evidence of extraordinary 'activity, opening
new galleries, constructing cubicula and directing their decoration
with true artistic taste combined with exquisite religious sentiment.
From that time the cemetery of Callixtus was the ordinary burial

158 ' American Catholic Quarterly Review,

place of the Popes till peace was given to the Church by Constan-
tine.

Callixtus was at the same time manager of all the temporal affairs
of the Roman Church; the support of the clergy, the maintenance
of the places of assembly, the assistance of the poor, the administra-
tion of the common fund, all centred in him as the recognized rep-
resentative of the Body Corporate in the face of the public authori-
ties and institutions of the State. We do not mean to say by this
that at the end of the second century, or in the third, the Church was
recognized as a corporate body with a religious character. What is
meant is that association among Christians was permitted ; that they,
like the rest of the citizens, were free to form civil collegia, and did
actually unite in such associations, whose legal status was acknowl-
edged, while their religious character escaped notice, or was dis-
sembled under the appearance of Benefit Societies.

We have seen how the poorer guilds were authorized to collect a
monthly contribution from the members ; and we find the counter-
part of this among the Christians. Tertullian informs us that the
Christians had an area, or coffer, "into which the faithful once a
month, or when they could and as they could, put their mite for the
support of the indigent and their burial when dead."^ We also
know that, besides the distribution of money, gifts in kind were
given away by the profane corporations in their reunions, where
after the repast in common a sum of money, or a sportula, small
basket of provisions, was given to each of the guests in proportion to
their condition and need. Precisely the same usage was observed
in the assemblies of the Christians, where, besides the poor, the
clergy and others who were deserving received money or a sportula^
according to their rank and condition. It was therefore a simple
matter for the Church to take advantage of the legislation on funeral
guilds to have itself incorporated under their form. The presence
of many wealthy members in the community was no obstacle to the
formation of the society, because in all guilds the tenuiores, more indi-
gent members, were always glad to affiliate as honorary members
or as benefactors persons of distinguished rank and position, so that
in the guilds as in the city itself there was always to be distinguished
the plebs from the patroni.

Is it possible now to say what was the legal designation of the
corporate association of Christians ? There is a certain amount of
material to lead to a conclusion, but sufficient proof to answer the
question in the affirmative is wanting. The material is derived from
a series of inscriptions. First of all there is one discovered in Africa,

T Modicum imusquisque ^ipem menstrua die, vel cum velit, et si modo possit,
apponit, • * * egenis alendis humandisque (Tertullian. Apolog. c: xxxix.)

Legal Tenure of the Roman Catacombs. 159

at Csesarea in Mauritania, which records that a certain Evelpius,
Cultor Verbi, a worshiper of the Word, gave an area for a place of
burial, and built a chapel, cella, at his own expense, leaving this
memorial to Holy Church. The slab was restored some time later,
and the following inscription added : "Ecclesia Fratrum hunc resti-
tuit titulum." The Church of the Brethren restored this monument.
The singular phrase, cultor Verbi, is parallel to what is met with in
the designations of the pagan guilds: Cultores Jovis, Herculis,
Dianae, Silvanse, etc. But "the Brethren" is repeatedly found in
inscriptions of the same period. One monument was erected to the
memory of *'all who lie in this place of rest, by me, Victor the priest,
who prepared it for all the brethren." Another was found in
Phrygia, to the memory of five persons who purchased the grave to-
gether, ending with the notice : ''Up to this stella the eastern por-
tion of the area is common to all the Brethren." In Heraclea, in Pon-
tus, an inscription imposes a fine of 300 denarii to be paid into the
cofifer of the "Brethren" by any one who introduces another body
into a certain tomb. At Salona the fine was to be paid to the
"Church of Salona." Finally in Rome, in the Kircherian museum,
an epitaph says : "I beseech y^ u, good brethren, by the One God,
not to disturb this monument after my death."

The conclusion which De Rossi draws not as certain, but as highly
probable, is that the members of the Christian guilds called them-
selves "Fratres" Brethren, and that the legal denomination of the
Christian corporate associations was "Ecclesia Fratrum," the Church
of the Brethren. This is plainly implied in the words of a Christian
apologist, writing to pagans: "You are jealous of the name of
Brothers which we call ourselves, as children of one Father, God,
and heirs of the same hope."

Whatever may have been the legal denomination of the Christian
corporations, it is beyond all doubt that in the third century the
Church, either by the toleration of the Emperors or by some legal
contrivance eluding prohibitive laws, held possession of churches
and cemeteries ; and that this possession was formally recognized by
the Emperors, sometimes intervening with their authority to protect
them, sometimes decreeing the confiscation of their corporate prop-
erty and sometimes restoring it to the management of the Church.
The confiscations did not suppose the tenure illegal or the possession
of property a violation of law, or abusive ; but rather supposed it to
be a right which for motives of policy or caprice was to be abolished
or suspended. Alexander Severus not only encouraged corpora-
tions of artisans, but not content with the passive toleration of his
predecessors with regard to Christians, issued an edict forbidding
them to be troubled: "Christianos esse non laesit." He himself

i6o American Catholic Quarterly Review.

decided a suit between the popinarii, victuallers, and the Christians
in favor of the latter, treating both societies as equally entitled to
plead in a corporate quality. The same Emperor confirmed the
Christians in possession of their meeting place on the other side of
the Tiber ; and what is more singular, the Christians of Antioch had
recourse to the Emperor Aurelian to have the heretic Paul of Samo-
sata expelled from "the house of the Church," after he had been
canonically deprived of his see.

Availing himself of the mild reigns of Severus and the two Philips,
Pope Fabius divided the superintendence of the cemeteries among
the seven deacons and ordered many constructions on the cemeterial
land, cellcB and memorice above ground, and basilicas. He was mar-
tyred in 250 under Decius. An edict of Valerian of the year 257
forbade the use of the cemeteries. All visits to them and meetings
were prohibited. The places for religious assembly, as distinct from
the cemeteries, were confiscated and sold for the benefit of the State.
This edict was revoked three years later by Gallienus, who ordered
the restitution of the places of religious meeting to the Bishops of
the various churches, directing special rescripts to the provinces.
The edicts of Aurelian against the Church, issued shortly after he
had legally recognized it, and sanctioned its possession of property
even more foi;malIy than Alexander Severus, gave the Christians
the measure of security they could depend on as soon as the new
society became considerable enough to attract attention. It was
then that the system of concealment began. The ordinary entrances
to the cemeteries were closed, the staircases interrupted, the galleries
obstructed when they led to tombs where the more cherished martyrs
reposed : circuitous passages were excavated leading to remote large
chambers, where the religious offices were held ; mysterious outlets
were contrived connected with arenaria or sandpits through which
communication with the open air was possible without causing sus-
picion ; everything was done to protect the inviolability of the graves
and provide for the safety of the living who either for devotion or for
temporary shelter betook themselves to the catacombs.

That the cemeteries were places of meeting and prayer, though by
no means the only ones, is attested by writers of the times of persecu-
tion, as Tertullian, the author of the "Philosophumena," of "The
Life of Pope Fabius," the letters of St. Cyprian and the edicts of the
Emperors, interdicting or restoring their use. The interment of a
Christian was itself a religious rite ; the body was reverently washed,
anointed and separately laid in the ground, with psalms and canti-
cles, and the oblation of the Holy Sacrifice ; the anniversary of the
death or deposition was carefully observed, and with special solem-
nity in the case of martyrs; all this from faith in the resurrection.

Legal Tenure of the Roman Catacombs. i6i

The crypts that kept these venerable deposits drew crowds when the
dies natalis returned, and became true sanctuaries, where the marble
slab that covered the precious remains served at one and the same
time for the Table of the Christ's Sacrament and the faithful custo-
dian of His martyr's bones. No wonder that, when danger drove
the faithful from the tituli in the city they found it no hardship to
worship in these subterranean basilicas, surrounded by those they
had loved on earth, revered in death, with whom they were still
joined in communion, as they hoped to be united in sharing their
crown.

Just in this second half of the third century Pope Sixtus II. is dis-
covered in the cemetery of Praetextatus presiding at an ordination of
clergy, taken and beheaded in his episcopal chair ; St. Emerentiana,
still a catechumen, praying at the tomb of her foster-sister Agnes,
martyred a few days before, received the baptism of her blood,
stoned to death ; St. Candida cast down a luminare and overwhelmed
with stones. It was during the reign of Valerian that Hippolytus
lived in hiding on the Appian Way and instructed neophytes in the
catacomb, where with many companions and the repentant traitor
who betrayed them he suffered martyrdom. Under the same Em-
peror, or under Numerian, the martyrs Chrysanthus and Daria were
slain in an arenarium, and shortly after, during the celebration of the
sacred mysteries at their tomb, the persecutors came upon a multi-
tude of the faithful assembled, and casting stones and earth from
above, buried them alive. Long after, St. Gregory of Tours visited
the spot, and through the protecting bars of a grating saw the re-
mains of the martyred congregation lying, as they fell, with the
sacred vessels scattered on the ground.

The second half of the third century passed in a succession of in-
tervals of toleration and persecution. Dionysius the successor of
Sixtus II., recovered the Tituli in Rome, as well as the cemeteries in
the suburbs, and redistributed them among the clergy, assigning to
each Titulus or parish its particular cemetery; the deacons having
the temporal administration, the priests the spiritual jurisdiction
over both. Even Diocletian, at the beginning of his reign, so en-
couraged by his toleration the confidence of the Christians, that they
went on building and extending the cemeteries. To this period
many of the staircases, light shafts and other constructions in
masonry throughout the catacombs seem to belong. In the ceme-
tery of Callixtus there is a large double chamber, well lighted and
once lavishly decorated, built, as an inscription still preserved testi-
fies, in the Pontificate of Marcellinus, by the deacon Severus.

In 303 toleration changed into fierce hostility. The churches were
burned, the records destroyed, the cellce at the cemeteries demol-
Tol. XXVI.— Siff. 11.

1 62 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

ished and the land over the cemeteries confiscated. In this time of
danger Priscilla the younger excavated the lowest and most hidden
galleries of the catacomb called by her name on the Salarian Way.

The persecution ended in 306, but it was not till 311 that restitu-
tion was made to Pope Melchiades as the recognized chief of the
Christian community, a proof that the confiscated property was ac-
knowledged to be a corporate possession, and not of individuals.
The Tituli restored were twenty-five, and to each corresponded a
cemetery, or a region of a cemetery. That this was all regarded as
corporate property is made still more clear by text of the decree of
Constantine and Licinius: "The Christians are known to have
possessed property which belonged to them as a body, that is, to
their churches, not to individuals."^

From this date the possession of the catacombs was never ques-
tioned. In them and over them additions were made, chiefly dur-
ing the century and a half in which they continued to be used as
burial places ; but the decoration of particular tombs and the opening
of more convenient approaches continued till the ninth century,
when the bodies of the great bulk of the martyrs were transferred to
the city churches.

Enough has been said to establish that during the three hundred
years of persecution Christians were free to bury their dead in land
of their own ; that at the beginning the land was the property of rich
families, who allowed graves to be opened for the poor of their
faith; that later under the form of burial associations they could
combine to hold their cemeteries in collegiate name, and that, finally,
the Church, as a corporate body (whether as the "Ecclesia Fratrum"
or under another designation), came to be recognized before the
Roman law as the responsible owner of the cemeteries and of all the
edifices erected on the land in which they were excavated.

J. A. Campbell.

Rome, Italy.

8 Et quoniam iidem Christiani non loca tantum, ad quae convenire consueverunt,
sed alia etiam habuisse noscuntur ,ad jus corporis eorum, id est, Eeclesianmi, non
hominum singulorum, pertinentia; ea omnia lege qua superius, comDrehendimus,
citra ullam prorsus ambiguitatem vel controversiam iisdem Christianis, id est,
corpori et conventiculis eorum reddi jubebis, etc. (Lactantius, De mort. perse-
cutorum, xlviii.)

mrn-r-^^.^-^- ^^m^^^^'wrn:^^^

De lesv Christo Redemptore. i^-y

DE lESV CHRISTO REDEMPTORE.

Venerabilibus Fratribus, Patriarchis, Primatibus,
Archiepiscopis, Episcopis Aliisque Locorum Or-

DINARIIS PaCEM ET CoMMUNIONEM CUM

Apostolica Sede Habentibus.

LEO pp. XIII.

Venerabiles Fratres, Salutem ET Apostolicam Benedic-

TIONEM.

TAMETSI futura prospicientibus, vacuo a soUicitudine animo
esse non licet, immo vero non paucae sunt nee leves exti-
mescendae formidines, cum tot tamque inveteratae malorum
caussae et privatim et publice insideant : tamen spei ac solatii aliquid
videntur haec extrema saeculi divino munere peperisse. Nemo
enim existimet, nihil habere ad communem salutem momenti reno-
vatam cogitationem bonorum animi, fideique et pietatis christianae
excitata studia : quas quidem virtutes revirescere apud complures aut
corroborari hoc tempore, satis expressa signa testantur. En quippe
in medio illecebrarum saeculi ac tot circumiectis pietati offensioni-
bus, tamen uno nutu Pontificis undique commeare Romam ad
limina sanctorum Apostolorum multitudo frequens : cives pariter ac
peregrini dare palam religioni operam : oblataque Ecclesiae indul-
gentia confisi, parandae aeternae salutis artes studiosius exquirere.
Quem praeterea ista non moveat, quae omnium obversatur oculis,
erga humani generis Salvatorem solito magis incensa pietas ? Opti-
mis rei christianae temporibus facile dignus iudicabitur iste ardor
animi tot hominum millium una voluntate sententiaque ab ortu ad
solis occasum consalutantium nomen laudesque praedicantium lesv
Christ!. Atque utinam istas avitae religionis velut erumpentes-
flammas magnum incendium consequatur : exemplumque excellens-
multorum reliquos permoveat universos. Quid enim tam huic aetatt
necessarium, quam redintegrari late in civitatibus indolem chris-
tianam, virtutesque veteres? Illud calamitosum, alios et quidem.
nimis multos obsurdescere, nee ea, quae ab eiusmodi pietatis renova-
tione monentur, audire. Qui tamen si "scirent donum Dei," si re-
putarent, nihil fieri posse miserius quam descivisse a liberatore orbis
terrarum, moresque et instituta Christiana deseruisse,- utique exsus-
citarent et ipsi sese, certissimumque interitum effugere converso iti-
nere properarent. — lamvero tueri in terris atque amplificare imper-
ium Filii Dei, divinorumque beneficiorum communicatione ut
homines salvi sint contendere, munus est Ecclesiae ita magnum

104 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

atque ita suum, ut hoc in opere maxime omnis eius auctoritas ac
potestas consistat. Id Nos in administratione Pontificatus maximi,
perdifficili ilia quidem ac plena curarum, videmur ad hunc diem pro
viribus studuisse : vobis autem, venerabiles Fratres, usitatum certe
est, immo quotidianum, praecipuas cogitationes vigiliasque in eodem
negotio Nobiscum consumere. Verum utrique debemus pro con-
ditione temporum etiam maiora conari, nominatimque per sacri op-
portunitatem Anni disseminare latius notitiam atque amorem lesu
Christi, docendo, suadendo, hortando, si forte exaudiri vox nostra
queat, non tarn eis, dicimus, qui effata Christiana accipere pronis
auribus consuevere, quam ceteris omnibus longe miserrimis, chris-
tianum retinentibus nomen, vitam sine fide, sine amore Christi agi-
tantibus. Horum Nos maxime miseret : hos nominatim velimus, et
quid agant et quorsum evasuri sint, ni resipuerint, attendere.

lesum Christum nullo unquam tempore nullaque ratione novisse,
summa infelicitas est, vacat tamen pervicacia atque ingrati animi
vitio : repudiare aut oblivisci iam cognitum, id vero scelus est adeo
tetrum atque insanum, ut in hominem cadere vix posse videatur.
Principium enim atque origo ille est omnium bonorum: huma-
numque genus, quemadmodum sine Christi beneficio liberari nequi-
verat, ita nee conservari sine eius virtute potest. "Non est in alio
aliquo salus. Nee enim aliud nomen est sub caelo datum hominibus,
in quo oporteat nos salvos fieri." (Act iv., 12.) Quae vita mor-
talium sit, unde exsulet lesus, "Dei virtus et Dei sapientia," qui
mores, quae extrema rerum non satis docent exemplo suo expertes
christiani luminis gentes? Quarum qui parumper meminerit vel
adumbratam apud Paulum (Ad Rom. I.) caecitatem mentis, depra-
vationem naturae, portenta superstitionum ac libidinum, is profecto
defixum misericordia simul atque horrore animum sentiat. — Com-
perta vulgo sunt, quae memoramus hoc loco, non tamen meditata,
nee cogitata vulgo. Neque enim tam multos abalienaret superbia,
aut socordia languefaceret, si divinorum beneficiorum late memoria
coleretur, saepiusque repeteret animus, unde hominem Christus
eripuit, et quo provexit. Exheres atque exsul tot iam aetates in in-
teritum gens humana quotidie rapiebatur, formidolosis illis aliisque
implicata malis, quae primorum parentum pepererat delictum, nee
ea erant uUa humana ope sanabilia, quo tempore Christus Dominus,
demissus e caelo liberator, apparuit. Eum quidem victorem domi-
toremque serpentis futurum, Deus ipse in primo mundi ortu spopon-
derat : inde in adventum eius intueri acri cum expectatione desiderii
saecula consequentia. In eo spem omnem repositam, sacrorum fata
vatum perdiu ac luculente cecinerant: quin etiam lecti cuiusdam
populi varia fortuna, res gestae, instituta, leges, ceremoniae, sacri-
ficia, distincte ac dilucide praesignificaverant, salutem hominum

De lesv Christo Redemptore. 165

generi perfectam absolutamque in eo fore, qui sacerdos tradebatur
futurus, idemque hostia piacularis, restitutor humanae libertatis,
princeps pacis, doctor universarum gentium, regni conditor in aeter-
nitate temporum permansuri. Quibus et titulis et imaginibus et
vaticiniis specie variis, re concinentibus, ille designabatur unus, qui
propter nimiam caritatem suam qua dilexit nos, pro salute nostra sese
aliquando devoveret. Sane cum divini veniss^t maturitas consilii,
unigenitus Filius Dei, factus homo, violato Patris numini cumula-
tissime pro hominibus uberrimeque satisfecit de sanguine suo, tan-
toque redemptum pretio vindicavit sibi genus humanum. "Non
corruptibilibus auro vel argento redempti estis: . . . sed pre-
tioso sanguine quasi agni immaculati Christi, et incontaminati." (I.
Pet. i., 18-19.) Ita omnes in universum homines potestati iam im-
perioque suo subiectos, quod cunctorum ipse et conditor est et con-
servator, vere proprieque redimendo, rursus fecit iuris sui. "Non
estis vestri : empti enim estis pretio magno." (I. Cor. vi., 19-20.)
Hinc a Deo instaurata in Christo omnia. "Sacramentum voluntatis
suae, secundum beneplacitum eius, quod proposuit in eo, in dispensa-
tione plenitudinis temporum instaurare omnia in Christo." (Eph. i.,
9-10.) Cum delesset lesus chirographum decreti, quod erat con-
trarium nobis, affigens illud cruci, continuo quievere caele,stes irae ;
conturbato errantique hominum generi antiquae servitutis liberata
nexa, Dei reconciliata voluntas, reddita gratia, reclusus aeternae bea-
titudinis aditus, eiusque potiundae et ius restitutum et instrumenta
praebita. Tum velut excitatus e veterno quodam diuturno ac morti-
fero dispexit homo lumen veritatis concupitum per tot saecula
quaesitumque frustra : in primisque agnovit, ad bona se multo altiora
multoque magnificentiora natum quam haec sint, quae sensibus per-
cipiuntur, fragilia et fluxa, quibus cogitationes curasque suas antea
finierat: atque banc omnino esse humanae constitutionem vitae,
banc legem supremam, hue tamquam ad finem omnia referenda, ut a
Deo profecti, ad Deum aliquando revertamur. Ex hoc initio et
fundamento recreata revixit conscientia dignitatis humanae : sensum
fraternae omnium necessitudinis excepere pectora: tum officia et
iura, id quod erat consequens, partim ad perfectionem adducta,
partim ex integro constituta, simulque tales excitatae passim virtu-
tes, quales ne suspicari quidem ulla veterum philosophia potuisset.
Quamobrem consilia, actio vitae, mores, in alium abiere cursum:
cumque Redemptoris late fluxisset cognitio, atque in intimas civita-
tum venas virtus eius, expultrix ignorantiae ac vitiorum veterum,
permanasset, tum ea est conversio rerum consecuta, quae, Christiana
gentium humanitate parta, faciem orbis terrarum funditus commu-
tavit. i

Istarum in recordatione rerum quaedam inest, venerabiles

i66 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Fratres, infinita iucunditas, pariterque magna vis admonitionis,
scilicet ut habeamus toto animo, referendamque curemus, ut potest,
divino Servatori gratim.

Remoti ob vetustatem sumus ab originibus primordiisque restitu-
tae salutis : quid tamen istuc referat, quando redemptionis perpetua
virtus est, perenniaque et immortalia manent beneficia ? Qui natu-
rani peccato perditam reparavit semel, servat idem servabitque in
perpetuum ; "Dedit redemptionem semetipsum pro omnibus . . . ."
(I. Tim. ii., 6.) "In Christo omnes vivificabuntur . . . ." (I.
Cor. XV., 22.) "Et regni eius non erit finis." (Luc. i., 33.) Itaque
ex aeterno Dei consilio, omnis est in Christo lesu cum singulorum,
tum universorum posita salus : eum qui deserunt, hoc ipso exitium
sibi privatim coeco furore consciscunt, eodemque tempore commit-
tunt, quantum est in se, ut quam malorum calamitatumque molem
pro pietate sua Redemptor depulerat, ad eam ipsam convictus hu-
manus magna iactatus tempestate relabatur.

Rapiuntur enim errore vago optata, ab meta longius, quicumque in
itinera se devia coniecerint. Similiter si lux veri pura et sincera
respuatur, offundi caliginem mentibus, miseraque opinionum pra-
vitate passim infatuari animos necesse est. Spes autem sanitatis
quota potest esse reliqua iis, qui principium et f ontem vitae deserant ?
Atqui via, Veritas et vita Christus est unice. *'Ego sum via, et
Veritas, et vita" (lo. xiv., 6) : ita ut, eo posthabito, tria ilia ad omnem
salutem necessaria principia tollantur.

Num disserere est opus, quod ipsa res monet assidue, quodque
vel in maxima mortal ium bonorum affluentia in se quisque penitus
sentit, nihil esse, praeter Deum, in quo voluntas humana absolute
possit atque omni ex parte quiescere ? Omnino finis homini, Deus :
atque omnis haec, quae in terris degitur, aetas similitudinem pere-
grinationis cuiusdam atque imaginem verissime gerit. lamvero via
nobis Christus est, quia ex hoc mortali cursu, tam laborioso prae-
sertim tamque ancipiti, ad summum et extremum bonorum, Deum,
nulla ratione pervenire, nisi Christo auctore et duce, possumus.
"Nemo venit ad Patrem, nisi per me." (lo. xiv., 6.) Quo modo
nisi per eum ? Nempe in primis et maxime, nisi per gratiam eius :
quae tamen vacua in homine foret, neglectis praeceptis eius et legi-
bus. Quod enim fieri, parta per lesum Christum salute, oportebat,
legem ipse suam reliquit custodem et procuratricem generis humani,
qua nimirum gubernante, a vitae pravitate conversi, ad Deum
homines suum securi contenderent. "Euntes docete omnes gentes :
. . . docentes eos servare omnia quaecumque mandavi vobis.
. . ." (Matt, xxviii., 19-20.) "Mandata mea servate." (lo. xiv.,
15.) Ex quo intelligi debet, illud esse in professione Christiana prae-
cipuum planeque necessarium, praebere se ad lesu Christi praecepta

De lesv Christo Redemptore. 167

docilem eique, ut domino ac regi summo, obnoxiam ac devotam
penitus gerere voluntatem. Magna res, et quae multum saepe
laborem vehementemque contentionem et constantiam desiderat.
Quamvis enim Redemptoris beneficio humana sit reparata natura,
superstes tamen in unoquoque nostrum velut quaedam aegrotatio
est, infirmitas ac vitiositas. Appetitus varii hue atque illuc hominem
r^piunt, rerumque externarum illecebrae facile impellunt animum
ut, quod lubeat, non quod a Christo imperatum sit, sequatur. Atqui
tamen contra nitendum, atque omnibus viribus repugnandum est
cupiditatibus *'in obsequium Christi :" quae, nisi parent rationi, domi-
nantur, totumque hominem Christo ereptum, sibi faciunt servientem.
"Homines corrupti mente, reprobi circa fidem, non efficiunt ut non
serviant, . . . serviunt enim cupiditati triplici, vel voluptatis,
vel excellentiae, vel spectaculi." (S. Aug. De vera rel., 37.) Atque
in eiusmodi certamine sic quisque affectus esse debet, ut molestias
etiam et incommoda sibi suscipienda, Christi caussa, putet. Dif-
ficile, quae tanto opere alliciunt atque oblectant, repellere: durum
atque asperum ea, quae putantur bona corporis et fortunae, prae
Christi domini voluntate imperioque contemnere : sed omnino chris-
tianum hominem oportet patientem et fortem esse in perferendo, si
vult hoc, quod datum est vitae, christiane traducere. Oblitine sumus
cuius corporis et cuius capitis simus membra? Proposito sibi
gaudio sustinuit crucem, qui nobis ut nosmetipsos abnegaremus
praescripsit. Ex ea vero affectione animi, quam diximus, humanae
naturae dignitas pendet ipsa. Quod enim vel sapientia antiquorum
saepe vidit, imperare sibi efficereque ut pars animi inferior obediat
superiori, nequaquam est fractae voluntatis demissio, sed potius
quaedam generosa virtus rationi mirifice congruens, in primisque
homine digna. — Ceterum, multa ferre et perpeti, humana conditio
est. Vitam sibi dolore vacuam atque omni expletam beatitate ex-
truere non plus homo potest, quam divini conditoris sui delere con-
silia, qui culpae veteris consectaria voluit manere perpetua. Con-
sentaneum est ergo, non expectare in terris finem doloris, sed
firmare animum ad ferendum dolorem, quo scilicet ad spem certam
maximorum bonorum erudimur. Neque enim opibus aut vitae
delicatiori, neque honoribus aut potentiae, sed patientiae et lacrimis,
studio iustitiae et mundo cordi sempiternam in caelo beatitudinem
Christus assignavit.

Hinc facile apparet quid sperari denique ex eorum errore super-
biaque debeat, qui, spreto Redemptoris principatu, in summo rerum
omnium fastigio hominem locant, atque imperare humanam naturam
omni ratione atque in omnes partes statuunt oportere : quamquam id
regnum non modo assequi, sed nee definire, quale sit, queunt. lesu
Christi regnum a divina caritate vim et formam sumit: diligere

i68 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

sancte atque ordine, eius est fundamentum et summa. Ex quo ilia
necessario fluunt, officia inviolate servare: nihil alteri de iure de-
trahere: humana caelestibus inferiora ducere: amorem Dei rebus
omnibus anteponere. Sed isthaec dominatio hominis, aut aperte
Christum reiicientis aut non curantis agnoscere, tota nititur in amore
sui, caritatis expers, devotionum nescia. Imperet quidem homo,
per lesum Christum licet : sed eo, quo solo potest, pacto, ut primum
omnium serviat Deo, eiusque ab lege normam religiose petat dis-
ciplinamque vivendi.

Legem vero Christi dicimus non solum praecepta morum naturalia,
aut ea quae accepere antiqui divinitus, quae utique lesus Christus
omnia perfecit et ad summum adduxit declarando, interpretando,
sanciendo : verum etiam doctrinam eius reliquam, et omnes nomina-
tim ab eo res institutas. Quarum profecto rerum caput est Ec-
clesia: immo ullaene res numerantur Christo auctore institutae,
quas non ilia cumulate complectatur et contineat ? Porro Ecclesiae
ministerio, praeclarissime ab se fundatae, perennare munus assigna-
t um sibi a Patre voluit : cumque ex una parte praesidia salutis hu-
Jianae in eam omnia contulisset, ex altera gravissime sanxit, ei ut
homines perinde subessent ac sibimetipsi, eamdemque studiose et in
omni vita sequerentur ducem : "qui vos audit, me audit : et qui vos
spernit, me spernit." (Luc. x., i6.) Quocirca omnino petenda ab
Ecclesia lex Christi est : ideoque via homini Christus, via item Ec-
clesia : ille per se et natura sua ; haec, mandato munere et communi-
catione potestatis. Ob eam rem quicumque ad salutem contendere
seorsum ab Ecclesia velint, falluntur errore viae, frustraque con-
tendunt.

Quae autem privatorum hominum, eadem fere est caussa im-
periorum : haec enim ipsa in exitus perniciosos incurrere necesse est,
si digrediantur de via. Humanae procreator idemque redemptor
naturae, Filius Dei, rex et dominus est orbis terrarum, potesta-
temque summam in homines obtinet cum singulos, tum iure sociatos.
"Dedit ei potestatem, et honorem, et regnum: et omnes populi,
tribus et linguae ipsi servient." (Daniel vii., 14.) "Ego autem con-
stitutus sum rex ab eo. . . . Dabo tibi gentes haereditatem
tuam, et possessionem tuam terminos terrae." (Ps. ii.) Debet ergo
in convictu humano et societate lex valere Christi, ita ut non pri-
vatae tantum ea sit, sed et publicae dux et magistra vitae. Quoni-
amque id ita est provisum et constitutum divinitus, nee repugnare
quisquam impune potest, idcirco male consulitur rei publicae ubi-
cumque instituta Christiana non eo, quo debent, habeantur loco,
Amoto lesu, destituitur sibi humana ratio, maximo orbata praesidio
et lumine : tum ipsa facile obscuratur notio caussae, quae caussa,
Deo auctore, genuit communem societatem, quaeque in hoc consistit

De lesv Christo Redemptore. i6a

maxime ut, civili coniunctione adiutrice, consequantur cives naturale
bonum, sed prorsus summo illi, quod supra naturam est, perfectis-
simoque et perpetuo bono convenienter. Occupatis rerum con-
fusione mentibus, ingrediuntur itinera devio tarn qui parent, quam
qui imperant : abest enim quod tuto sequantur, et in quo consistant
Quo pacto miserum et calamitosum aberrare de via, simillime de-
serere veritatem. Prima autem et absoluta et essentialis Veritas
Christus est, utpote Verbum Dei, consubstantiale et coaeternum
Patri, unum ipse et Pater. "Ego sum via, et Veritas." Itaque, si
verum quaeritur, pareat primum omnium lesu Christo, in eiusque
magisterio secura conquiescat humana ratio, propterea quod Christi
voce loquitur ipsa Veritas. — Innumerabilia genera sunt, in quibus
humani facultas ingenii, velut in uberrimo campo et quidem suo, in-
vestigando contemplandoque, libere excurrat, idque non solum con-
cedente, sed plane postulante natura. lUud nefas et contra naturam,
contineri nientem nolle finibus suis, abiectaque modestia debita,
Christi docentis aspernari auctoritatem. Doctrina ea, unde nostra
omnium pendet salus, fere de Deo est rebusque divinissimis : neque
sapientia hominis cuiusquam peperit eam, sed Filius Dei ipso ab
Patre suo totam hausit atque accepit : ''Verba quae dedisti mihi,
dedi eis." (lo. xvii., 8.) Idcirco plura necessario complectitur, non
quae rationi dissentiant, id enim fieri nullo pacto potest, sed quorum
altitudinem cogitatione assequi non magis possumus, quam com-
prehendere, qualis est in se, Deum. At enim si tam multae res ex-
istunt occultae et a natura ipsa involutae, quas nulla queat humana
explicare sollertia, de quibus tamen nemo sanus dubitare ausit, erit
quidem libertate perverse utentium non ea perferre quae supra uni-
versam naturam longe sunt posita, quod percipere qualia sint non
licet. Nolle dogmata hue plane recidit, christianam religionem
nullam esse velle. Porro flectenda mens demisse et obnoxie "in
obsequium Christi," usque adeo, ut eius numine imperioque velut
captiva teneatur : ''In captivitatem redigentes omnem intellectura
in obsequium Christi." (II. Cor. x., 5.) Tale prorsus obsequium
est, quod Christus sibi tributum vult; et iure vult, Deus est enim,
proptereaque sicut voluntatis in homine, ita et intelligentiae unus
habet summum imperium. Serviens autem intelligentia Christo do-
mino, nequaquam facit homo serviliter, sed maxime convenienter
tum rationi, tum nativae excellentiae suae. Nam voluntate in im-
perium concedit non hominis cuiuspiam, sed auctoris sui ac principis
omnium Dei, cui subiectus est lege naturae : nee astringi se humani
opinatione magistri patitur, sed aeterna atque immutabiH veritate.
Ita et mentis naturale bonum, et libertatem simul consequitur.
Veritas enim, quae a Christi magisterio proficiscitur, in conspicuo
ponit, unaquaeque res qualis in se sit et quanti : qua imbutus cog-

I/O American Cctholic Quarterly Review.

nitione, si perceptae veritati paruerit homo, non se rebus, sed sibi
res, nee rationem libidini, sed libidinem rationi subiiciet : peccatique
et errorum pessima servitute depulsa, in libertatem praestantissimam
vindicabitur : "Cognoscetis veritatem, et Veritas liberabit vos."
(lo. viii., 32.) — Apparet igitur, quorum mens imperium Christi re-
cusat, eos pervicaci voluntate contra Deum contendere. Elapsi
autem e potestate divina, non propterea solutiores futuri sunt : inci-
dent in potestatem aliquam humanam : eligent quippe, ut fit, unum
aliquem, quem audiant, cui obtemperent, quem sequantur magis-
trum. Ad haec, mentem suam, a rerum divinarum communicatione
seclusam, in angustiorera scientiae gyrum compellunt, et ad ea ipsa,
quae ratione cognoscuntur, venient minus instructi ad proficiendum.
Sunt enim in natura rerum non pauca, quibus vel percipiendis, vel
explicandis plurimum affert divina doctrina luminis. Nee raro,
poenas de superbia sumpturus, sinit illos Deus non vera cernere, ut
in quo peccant, in eo plectantur. Utraque de caussa permultos
saepe videre licet magnis ingeniis exquisitaque eruditione praeditos,
tamen in ipsa exploratione naturae tam absurda consectantes, ut
nemo deterius erraverit.

Certum igitur sit, intelligentiam in vita Christiana auctoritati
divinae totam et penitus esse tradendam. Quod si in eo quod ratio
cedit auctoritati, elatior ille animus, qui tantam habet in nobis vim,
comprimitur et dolet aliquid, inde magis emergit, magnam esse in
christiano oportere non voluntatis dumtaxat, sed etiam mentis tole-
rantiam. Atque id velimus meminisse, qui cogitatione sibi fingunt
ac plane mallent quamdam in Christiana professione et sentiendi dis-
ciplinam et agendi, cuius essent praecepta molliora, quaeque hu-
manae multo indulgentior naturae, nullam in nobis tolerantiam re-
quireret, aut mediocrem. Non satis vim intelligunt fidei institu-
torumque christianorum : non vident, undique nobis occurrere Cru-
cem, exemplum vitae vexillumque perpetuum iis omnibus futurum,
qui re ac factis, non tantum nomine, sequi Christum velint.

Vitam esse, solius est Dei. Ceterae naturae omnes participes
vitae sunt, vita non sunt. Ex omni autem aeternitate ac suapte
natura vita Christus est, quo modo est Veritas, quia Deusde Deo.
Ab ipso, ut ab ultimo augustissimoque principio, vita omnis in mun-
dum influxit perpetuoque influet : quidquid est, per ipsum est, quid-
quid vivit, per ipsum vivit, quia omnia per Verbum "facta sunt, et
sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est." — Id quidem in vita
naturae: sed multo meliorem vitam multoque potiorem satis iam
tetigimus supra, Christi ipsius beneficio partam, nempe vitam
gratiae, cuius beatissimus est exitus vita gloriae, ad quam cogita-
tiones atque actiones referendae omnes. In hoc est omnis vis doc-
trinae legumque christianarum ut "peccatis mortui, iustitiae viva-

De lesv Christo Redemptore. 171

mus" (I. Pet. ii., 24), id est virtuti et sanctitati, in quo moralis vita
animorum cum explorata spe beatitudinis sempiternae consistit.
Sed vere et proprie et ad salutem apte nulla re alia, nisi fide Chris-
tiana, alitur iustitia. "lustus ex fide vivit." (Galat. iii., 11.) "Sine
fide impossibile est placere Deo." (Hebr. xi., 6.) Itaque sator et
parens et altor fidei lesus Christus, ipse est qui vitam in nobis
moralem conservat ac sustentat: idque potissimum Ecclesiae min-
isterio: huic enim, benigno providentissimoque consilio, adminis-
tranda instrumenta tradidit, quae banc, de qua loquimur, vitam gig-
nerent, generatam tuerentur, extinctam renovarent. Vis igitur pro-
creatrix eademque conservatrix virtutum salutarium eliditur, si dis-
ciplina morum a fide divina diiungitur : ac sane despoliant hominem
dignitate maxima, vitaque deiectum supernaturali ad naturalem per-
niciossissime revolvunt, qui mores dirigi ad Hbnestatem uno rationis
magisterio volunt. Non quod praecepta naturae dispicere ac ser-
vare recta ratione homo plura non queat : sed omnia quamvis dispi-
ceret et sine ulla offensione in omni vita servaret, quod nisi opitu-
lante Redemptoris gratia non potest, tamen frustra quisquam, ex-
pers fidei, de salute sempiterna confideret. "Si quis in me non
manserit, mittetur foras sicut palmes ; et arescet, et colligent eum,
et in ignem mittent, et ardet." (lo. xv., 6.) "Qui non crediderit,
condemnabitur." (Marc, xvi., 16.) Ad extremum quanti sit in se
ipsa, et quos pariat fructus ista divinae fidei contemptrix honestas,
nimis multa habemus documenta ante oculos. Quid est quod in
tanto studio stabiliendae augendaeque prosperitatis publicae,
laborant tamen ac paene aegrotant civitates tam multis in rebus
tamque gravibus quotidie magis? Utique civilem societatem satis
aiunt fretam esse per se ipsam: posse sine praesidio institutorum
christianorum commode se habere, atque eo, quo spectat, uno labore
suo pervenire. Hinc quae administrantur publice, ea more profano
administrari malunt : ita ut in disciplina civili vitaque publica popu-
lorum vestigia religionis avitae pauciora quotidie videas. At non
cernunt satis quid agant. Nam submoto numine recta et prava
sancientis Dei, excidere auctoritate principe leges necesse est, iusti-
tiamque collabi, quae duo firmissima sunt coniunctionis civilis maxi-
nieque necessaria vincula. Similique modo, sublata semel spe atque
expectatione bonorum immortalium, pronum est mortalia sitienter
appetere: de quibus trahere ad se, quanto plus poterit, conabitur
qiiisque pro viribus. Hinc aemulari, invidere, odisse; turn consilia
teterrima: de gradu deiectam velle omnem potestatem, meditari
passim dementes ruinas. Non pacatae res foris, nofi securitas domi :
deformata sceleribus vita communis.

In tanto cupiditatum certamine, tantoque discrimine, aut extrema
ntetuenda pernicies, aut idoneum quaerendum mature remedium.

ly^ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Coercere maleficos, vocare ad mansuetudinem mores populares
atque omni ratione deterrere a delictis providentia legum, rectum
idemque necessarium : nequaquam tamen in isto omnia. Altius
sanatio petenda populorum: advocanda vis humana maior, quae
attingat animos, renovatosque ad conscientiam officii, efficiat me-
liores: ipsa ilia nimirum vis, quae multo maioribus fessum malis
vindicavit semel ab interitu orbem terrarum. Fac reviviscere et
valere, amotis impedimentis, christianos in civitate spiritus ; recreabi-
tur civitas. Conticescere proclive erit inferiorum ordinum cum
superioribus contentionem, ac sancta utrinque iura consistere vere-
cundia mutua. Si Christum audiant, manebunt in officio fortunati
aeque ac miseri : alteri iustitiam et caritatem sentient sibi esse servan-
dam, si salvi esse volunt, alteri temperantiam et modum. Optime
constiterit domestica societas, custode salutari metu iubentis, vetantis
Dei: eademque ratione plurimum ilia in populis valebunt, quae ab
ipsa natura praecipiuntur, vereri potestatem legitimam et obtemper-
are legibus ius esse: nihil seditiose facere, nee per coitiones moliri
quicquam. Ita, ubi Christiana lex omnibus praesit et eam nulla res
impediat, ibi sponte fit ut conservetur ordo divina providentia con-
stitutus, unde efflorescit cum incolumitate prosperitas. Clamat ergo
communis salus, referre se necesse esse, unde numquam digredi
oportuerat, ad eum qui via et Veritas et vita est, nee singulos dum-
taxat, sed societatem humanam universe. In banc velut in posses-
sionem suam, restitui Christum dominum oportet, efficiendumque ut
profectam ab eo vitam hauriant atque imbibant omnia membra et
partes reipublicae, iussa ac vetita legum, instituta popularia, domi-
cilia doctrinae, ius coniugiorum convictusque domestici, tecta locu-
pletium, officinae opificum. Nee fugiat quemquam, ex hoc pendere
magnopere ipsam, quae tam vehementer expetitur, gentium humani-
tatem, quippe quae alitur et augetur non tam iis rebus, quae sunt
corporis, commoditatibus et copiis, quam iis, quae sunt animi, lauda-
bilibus moribus et cultu virtutum.

Alieni a lesu Christo plerique sunt ignoratione magis, quam vol-
untate improba: qui enim hominem, qui mundum studeant dedita
opera cognoscere, quam plurimi numerantur; qui Filium Dei, per-
pauci. Primum igitur sit, ignorationem scientia depellere, ne re~
pudietur aut spernatur ignotus. Quotquot ubique sunt, christianos
obtestamur dare velint operam, quoad quisque potest, Redemptorem
suum ut noscant, qualis est : in quern ut quis intuebitur mente sincera
iudicioque integro, ita perspicue cernet nee eius lege fieri quicquam
posse salubrius, nee doctrina divinius. In quo mirum quantum
allatura adiumenti est auctoritas atque opera vestra, venerabiles
Fratres, tum Cleri totius studium et sedulitas. Insculpere popu-
lorum in animis germanam notionem ac prope imaginem lesu.

Jesus Christ Our Redeemer. 173

Christi, eiusque caritatem, beneficia, instituta illustrare litteris, ser-
mone, in scholis puerilibus, in gymnasiis, in concione, ubicumque se
(let occasio, partes officii vestri praecipuas putatote. De iis, quae
appelantur iura hominis, satis audiit multitudo : audiat aliquando de
iuribus Dei. Idoneum tempus esse, vel ipsa indicant excitata iam,
ut diximus, multorum recta studia, atque ista nominatim in Redemp-
torem tot significationibus testata pietas, quam quidem saeculo in-
sequenti, si Deo placet, in auspicium melioris aevi tradituri sumus.
Vcrum, cum res agatur quam non aliunde sperare nisi a gratia divina
licet, communi studio summisque precibus flectere ad misericordiam
insistamus omnipotentem Deum, ut interire ne patiatur, quos ipse-
met profuso sanguine liberavit: respiciat banc propitius aetatem,
quae multum quidem deliquit, sed multa vicissim ad patiendum
aspera in expiationem exanclavit: omniumque gentium gene-
rumque homines benigne complexus, meminerit suum illud : "Ego
si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad meipsum." (lo. xii., 32.)

Auspicem divinorum munerum, benevolentiaeque Nostrae pa-
ternae testem vobis, venerabiles Fratres, Clero populoque vestro
Apostolicam benedictionem peramanter in Domino impertimus.

Datum Romae apud S. Petrum die i Novembris An MDCCCC,
Pontificatus Nostri vicesimo tertio.

LEO PP. XIII.

JESUS CHRIST OUR REDEEMER.

To Our Venerable Brethren, the Patriarchs, Primates,

Archbishops, Bishops and other Local Ordinaries

HAVING Peace and Communion with

THE Holy See.

LEO XIIL, POPE.

Venerable Brethren,

Health and the Apostolic Benediction.

THE outlook on the future is by no means free from anxiety;
on the contrary, there are many serious reasons for alarm,
on account of numerous and long-standing causes of evil, of
both a public and a private nature. Nevertheless, the close of the
century really seems in God's mercy to afford us some degree of con-
solation and hope. For no one will deny that renewed interest in
spiritual matters and a revival of Christian faith and piety are influ-
ences of great moment for the common good. And there are suffi-

174 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ciently clear indications at the present day of a very general revival
or augmentation of these virtues. For example, in the very midst
of worldly allurements and in spite of so many obstacles to piety,
what great crowds have flocked to Rome to visit the "Threshold of
the Apostles" at the invitation of the Sovereign Pontiff! Both
Italians and foreigners are openly devoting themselves to religious
exercises, and, relying upon the indulgences offered by the Church,^
are most earnestly seeking the means to secure their eternal salva-
tion. Who could fail to be moved by the present evident increase
of devotion towards the person of Our Saviour ? The ardent zeal of
so many thousands, united in heart and mind, ''from the rising of the
sun to the going down thereof," in venerating the Name of Jesus
Christ and proclaiming His praises, is worthy of the best days of
Christianity. Would that the outburst of these flames of antique
faith might be followed by a mighty conflagration ! Would that the
splendid example of so many might kindle the enthusiasm of all 1
For what so necessary for our times as a widespread renovation
among the nations of Christian principles and old-fashioned virtues ?
The great misfortune is that too many turn a deaf ear and will not
listen to the teachings of this revival of piety. Yet, "did they but
know the gift of God," did they but realize that the greatest of all
misfortunes is to fall away from the World's Redeemer and to aban-
don Christian faith and practice, they would be only too eager to
turn back, and so escape certain destruction.

The most important duty of the Church, and the one most pecu-
liarly her own, is to defend and to propagate throughout the world
the Kingdom of the Son of God, and to bring all men to salvation by
communicating to them the divine benefits, so much so that her
power and authority are chiefly exercised in this one work. To-
wards this end we are conscious of having devoted our energies
throughout our difficult and anxious Pontificate even to the present
day. And you too. Venerable Brethren, are wont constantly, yea
daily, to give your chief thoughts and endeavors together with our-
selves to the self-same tesk. But at the present moment all of us
ought to make still further efforts, more especially on the occasion
of the Holy Year, to disseminate far and wide the better knowledge
and love of Jesus Christ by teaching, persuading, exhorting, if per-
chance our voice can be heard ; and this, not so much to those who
are ever ready to listen willingly to Christian teachings, but to those
most unfortunate men who, whilst professing the Christian name,
live strangers to the faith and love of Christ. For these we feel the
profoundest pity: these above all would we urge to think seriously
of their present life and what its consequences will be if they do not
repent.

Jesus Christ Our Redeemer. jye

The greatest of all misfortunes is never to have known Jesus
Christ : yet such a state is free from the sin of obstinacy and ingrati-
tude. But first to have known Him, and afterwards to deny or for-
get Him, is a crime so foul and so insane that it seems impossible
for any man to be guilty of it. For Christ is the fountain-head of all
good. Mankind can no more be saved without His power, than it
could be redeemed without His mercy. "Neither is there salvation
in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to
men whereby we must be saved" (Acts iv., 12). What kind of life
that is from which Jesus Christ, "the power of God and the wisdom
of God," is excluded; what kind of morality and what manner of
death are its consequences, can be clearly learnt from the example
of nations deprived of the light of Christianity. If we but recall St,
Paul's description (Romans i., 24-32) of the mental blindness, the
natural depravity, the monstrous superstitions and lusts of such peo-
ples, our minds will be filled with horror and pity. What we here
record is well enough known, but not sufficiently realized or thought
about. Pride would not mislead, nor indifference enervate, so many
minds, if the Divine mercies were ^lore generally called to mind and
if it were remembered from what an abyss Christ delivered mankind
and to what a height He raised it. The human race, exiled and dis-
inherited, had for ages been daily hurrying into ruin, involved in the
terrible and numberless ills brought about by the sin of our first
parents, nor was there any human hope of salvation, when Christ
Our Lord came down as the Saviour from Heaven. At the very
beginning of the world, God had promised Him as the conqueror of
"the Serpent," hence, succeeding ages had eagerly looked forward
to His coming. The prophets had long and clearly declared that all
hope was in Him. The varying fortunes, the achievements, cus-
toms, laws, ceremonies and sacrifices of the Chosen People had dis-
tinctly and lucidly foreshadowed the truth, that the salvation of man-
kind was to be accomplished in Him who should be the Priest, Vic-
tim, Liberator, Prince of Peace, Teacher of all Nations, Founder of
an Eternal Kingdom. By all these titles, images and prophecies,
differing in kind though like in meaning. He alone was designated
who "for His exceeding charity wherewith He loved us," gave Him-
self up for our salvation. And so, when the fullness of time came in
God's Divine Providence, the only-begotten Son of God became
man, and in behalf of mankind made most abundant satisfaction in
His Blood to the outraged majesty of His Father, and by this infinite
price He redeemed man for His own. "You were not redeemed
with corruptible things as gold or silver ... but with the pre-
cious Blood of Christ, as of a lamb, unspotted and undefiled" (L
Peter i., 18-19). Thus all men, though already subject to His kingly

176 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

power, inasmuch as He is the Creator and Preserver of all, were over
and above made His property by a true and real purchase. "You
are not your own : for you are bought with a great price" (H. Corin-
thians vi., 19-20). Hence in Christ all things are made new. "The
mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He hath
purposed to Him, in the dispensation of the fullness of times to re-
cstabhsh all things in Christ" (Ephesians i., 9-10). When Jesus
Christ had blotted out the handwriting of the decree that was against
us, fastening it to the cross, at once God's wrath was appeased, the
primeval fetters of slavery were struck off from unhappy and erring
man, God's favor was won back, grace restored, the gates of Heaven
opened, the right to enter them revived, and the means afforded of
doing so. Then man, as though awakening from a long-continued
and deadly lethargy, beheld at length the light of the truth, for long
ages desired, yet sought in vain. First of all, he realized that he was
born to much higher and more glorious things than the frail and in-
constant objects of sense which had hitherto formed the end of his
thoughts and cares. He learnt that the meaning of human life, the
supreme law, the end of all things was this : that we come from God
and must return to Him. From this first principle the conscious-
ness of human dignity was revived : men's hearts realized the uni-
versal brotherhood : as a consequence, human rights and duties were
cither perfected or even newly created, whilst on all sides were
evoked virtues undreamt of in pagan philosophy. Thus men's aims,
Kfe, habits and customs received a new direction. As the knowledge
of the Redeemer spread far and wide and His power, which destroy-
eth ignorance and former vices, penetrated into the very life-blood of
the nations, such a change came about that the face of the world was
entirely altered by the creation of a Christian civilization. The re-
membrance of these events. Venerable Brethren, is full of infinite
joy, but it also teaches us the lesson that we must both feel and ren-
der with our whole hearts gratitude to our Divine Saviour.

We are indeed now very far removed in time from the first begin-
nings of Redemption ; but what difference does this make when the
benefits thereof are perennial and immortal? He who once hath
restored human nature ruined by sin the same preserveth and will
preserve it forever. "He gave Himself a redemption for all" (I.
Timothy ii., 6). "In Christ all shall be made alive" (I. Corinthians
XV., 22). "And of His Kingdom there shall be no end" (Luke i.,
33). Hence by God's eternal decree the salvation of all men, both
severally and collectively, depends upon Jesus Christ. Those who
abandon Him become guilty by the very fact, in their blindness and
folly, of their own ruin ; whilst at the same time they do all that in
them lies to bring about a violent reaction of mankind in the direc-

Jesus Christ Our Redeemer. 177

tion of that mass of evils and miseries from which the Redeemer in
His mercy had freed them.

Those who go astray from the road wander far from the goal they
aim at. Similarly, if the pure and true light of truth be rejected,
men's minds must necessarily be darkened and their souls deceived
by deplorably false ideas. What hope of salvation can they have
who abandon the very principle and fountain of life ? Christ alone is
the Way, the Truth and the Life (John xiv., 6). If He be abandoned
the three necessary conditions of salvation are removed.

It is surely unnecessary to prove, what experience constantly
shows and what each individual feels in himself, even in the very
midst of all temporal prosperity — that in God alone can the human
will find absolute and perfect peace. God is the only end of man.
All our life on earth is the truthful and exact image of a pilgrimage.
Now Christ is the 'Way," for we can never reach God, the supreme
and ultimate good, by this toilsome and doubtful road of mortal life,
except with Christ as our leader and guide. How so ? Firstly and
chiefly by His grace ; but this would remain "void" in man if the pre-
cepts of His law were neglected. For, as was necessarily the case
after Jesus Christ had won our salvation. He left behind Him His
Law for the protection and welfare of the human race, under the
guidance of which men, converted from evil life, might safely tend
towards God. "Going, teach ye all nations . . . teaching them
to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matthew
xxviii., 19-20). "Keep My commandments" (John xiv., 15). Hence
it will be understood that in the Christian religion the first and most
necessary condition is docility to the precepts of Jesus Christ, abso-
lute loyalty of will towards Him as Lord and King. A serious duty,
and one which oftentimes calls for strenuous labor, earnest endeavor
and perseverance ! For although by Our Redeemer's grace human
nature hath been regenerated, still there remains in each individual
a certain debility and tendency to evil. Various natural appetites
attract man on one side and the other ; the allurements of the ma-
terial world impel his soul to follow after what is pleasant rather than
the law of Christ. Still we must strive our best and resist our na-
tural inclinations with all our strength "unto the obedience of
Christ." For unless they obey reason they become our masters, and
carrying the whole man away from Christ, make him their slave.
"Men of corrupt mind, who have made shipwreck of the faith, can-
not help being slaves. . . . They are slaves to a threefold con-
cupiscence: of will, of pride, or of outward show" (St. Augustine,
De Vera Religione, 37). In this contest every man must be prepared
to undergo hardships and troubles for Christ's sake. It is difficult
to reject what so powerfully entices and delights. It is hard and
Vol. XXVI— Sig. 12.

178 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

painful to despise the supposed goods of the senses and of fortune
for the will and precepts of Christ Our Lord. But the Christian is
absolutely obliged to be firm, and patient in suffering, if he wish to
lead a Christian life. Have we forgotten of what Body and of what
Head we are the members? "Having joy set before Him, He en-
dured the Cross," and He bade us deny ourselves. The very dignity
of human nature depends upon this disposition of mind. For, as
even the ancient pagan philosophy perceived, to be master of one-
self and to make the lower part of the soul obey the superior part, is
so far from being a weakness of will that it is really a noble power,
in consonance with right reason and most worthy of a man. More-
over, to bear and to suffer is the ordinary condition of man. Man
can no more create for himself a life free from suffering and filled
with all happiness than he can abrogate the decrees of his Divine
Maker, who has willed that the consequences of original sin should
be perpetual. It is reasonable, therefore, not to expect an end to
troubles in this world, but rather to steel one's soul to bear troubles,
by which we are taught to look forward with certainty to supreme
happiness. Christ has not promised eternal bliss in heaven to
riches, nor to a life of ease, to honors or to power, but to long-suffer-
ing and to tears, to the love of justice and to cleanness of heart.

From this it may clearly be seen what consequences are to be
expected from that false .pride which, rejecting our Saviour's King-
ship, places man at the summit of all things and declares that human
nature must rule supreme. And yet this supreme rule can neither
be attained nor even defined. The rule of Jesus Christ derives its
form and its power from Divine Love : a holy and orderly charity is
both its foundation and its crown. Its necessary consequences are
the strict fulfilment of duty, respect of mutual rights, the estimation
of the things of heaven above those of earth, the preference of the
love of God to all things. But this supremacy of man, which openly
rejects Christ, or at least ignores Him, is entirely founded upon
selfishness, knowing neither charity nor self-devotion. Man may
indeed be king, through Jesus Christ ; but only on condition that he
first of all obey God, and diHgently seek his rule of life in God's law.
By the law of Christ we mean not only the natural precepts of moral-
ity and the Ancient Law, all of which Jesus Christ has perfected
and crowned by His declaration, explanation and sanction ; but also
the rest of His doctrine and His own peculiar institutions. Of these
the chief is His Church. Indeed, whatsoever things Christ has in-
stituted are most fully contained in His Church. Moreover, He
willed to perpetuate the office assigned to Him by His Father by
means of the ministry of the Church so gloriously founded by Him-
self. On the one hand He confided to her all the means of man's

Jesus Christ Our Redeemer, 170

salvation; on the other He most solemnly commanded men to be
subject to her and to obey her diligently, and to follow her even as
Himself : *'He that heareth you, heareth Me ; and he that despiseth
you, despiseth Me" (Luke x., 16.) Wherefore the law of Christ
must be sought in the Church. Christ is man's "Way ;" the Church
also is his "Way" — Christ of Himself and by His very nature, the
Church by His commission and the communication of His power.
Hence all who would find salvation apart from the Church are led
astray and strive in vain.

As with individuals, so with nations. These, too, must neces-
sarily tend to ruin if they go astray from "The Way." The Son of
God, the Creator and Redeemer of mankind, is King and Lord of
the earth, and holds supreme dominion over men, both individually
and collectively. "And He gave Him power, and glory, and a king-
dom : and all peoples, tribes and tongues shall serve Him" (Daniel
vii., 14). "I am appointed King by Him. ... I will give Thee
the Gentiles for Thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the
earth for Thy possession" (Psalm ii., 6, 8). Therefore the law of
Christ ought to prevail in human society and be the guide and
teacher of public as well as of private life. Since this is so by divine
decree, and no man may with impunity contravene it, it is an evil
thing for the common weal wherever Christianity does not hold the
place that belongs to it. When Jesus Christ is absent, human rea-
son fails, being bereft of its chief protection and light, and the very
end is lost sight of for which, under God's providence, human so-
ciety has been built up. This end is the obtaining by the members
of society of natural good through the aid of civil unity, though
always in harmony with the perfect and eternal good which is above
nature. But when men's minds are clouded, both rulers and ruled
go astray, for they have no safe line to follow nor end to aim at.

Just as it is the height of misfortune to go astray from the "Way,"
so is it to abandon the "Truth." Christ Himself is the first, abso-
lute and essential "Truth," inasmuch as He is the Word of God,,
consubstantial and co-eternal with the Father, He and the Father
being One. "I am the Way and the Truth." Wherefore if the
Truth be sought by the human intellect, it must first of all submit it
to Jesus Christ, and securely rest upon His teaching, since therein
Truth itself speaketh. There are innumerable and extensive fields
of thought, properly belonging to the human mind, in which it may
have free scope for its investigations and speculations, and that not
only agreeably to its nature, but even by a necessity of its nature.
But what is unlawful and unnatural is that the human mind should
refuse to be restricted within its proper limits, and throwing aside
its becoming modesty, should refuse to acknowledge Christ's teach-

i8o American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ing. This teaching, upon which our salvation depends, is almost
entirely about God and the things of God. No human wisdom has
invented it, but the Son of God hath received and drunk it in entirely
from His Father : "The words which thou gavest me, I have given
to them" (John xvii., 8.) Hence this teaching necessarily embraces
many subjects which are not indeed contrary to reason — for that
would be an impossibility — but so exalted that we can no more
attain them by our own reasoning than we can comprehend God as
He is in Himself. If there be so many things hidden and veiled by
nature which no human ingenuity can explain, and yet which no
man in his senses can doubt, it would be an abuse of liberty to refuse
to accept those which are entirely above nature, because their es-
sence cannot be discovered. To reject dogma is simply to deny
Christianity. Our intellect must bow humbly and reverently "unto
the obedience of Christ," so that it be held captive by His divinity
and authority: "bringing into captivity every understanding unto
the obedience of Christ" (II. Corinthians x., 5.) Such obedience
Christ requires, and justly so. For He is God, and as such holds
supreme dominion over man's intellect as well as over his will. By
obeying Christ with his intellect man by no means acts in a servile
manner, but in complete accordance with his reason and his natural
dignity. For by his will he yields not to the authority of any man,
but to that of God, the author of his being, and the first principle to
Whom he is subject by the very law of his nature. He does not
suffer himself to be forced by the theories of any human teacher, but
by the eternal and unchangeable truth. Hence he attains at one and
the same time the natural good of the intellect and his own liberty.
For the truth which proceeds from the teaching of Christ clearly
demonstrates the real nature and value of every being; and man,
being endowed with this knowledge, if he but obey the truth as per-
ceived, will make all things subject to himself, not himself to them ;
his appetites to his reason, not his reason to his appetites. Thus
the slavery of sin and falsehood will be shaken off, and the most
perfect liberty attained: "You shall know the truth, and the truth
shall make you free" (John viii., 32). It is, then, evident that those
whose intellect rejects the yoke of Christ are obstinately striving
against God. Having shaken oflf God's authority, they are by no
means freer, for they will fall beneath some human sway. They
are sure to choose some one whom they will listen to, obey and fol-
low as their guide. Moreover, they withdraw their intellect from
the communication of divine truths, and thus limit it within a nar-
rower circle of knowledge, so that they are less fitted to succeed in
the pursuit even of natural science. For there are in nature very
many things whose apprehension or explanation is greatly aided by

Jesus Christ Our Redeemer. i8i

the light of divine truth. Not iinfrequently, too, God, in order to
chastise their pride, does not permit men to see the truth, and thus
they are punished in the things wherein they sin. This is why we
often see men of great intellectual power and erudition making the
grossest blunders even in natural science.

It must, therefore, be clearly admitted that in the life of a Chris-
tian t\iti intellect must be entirely subject to God's authority. And
if, in this submission of reason to authority our self-love, which is so
strong, is restrained and made to suffer, this only proves the neces-
sity to a Christian of long-suffering not only in will, but also in in-
tellect. We would remind those persons of this truth who desire a
kind of Christianity such as they themselves have devised, whose
precepts should be very mild, much more indulgent towards human
nature, and requiring little if any hardships to be borne. They do
not properly understand the meaning of faith and Christian precepts.
They do not see that the Cross meets us everywhere, the model of
our life, the eternal standard of all who wish to follow Christ in real-
ity and not merely in name.

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not
life. Christ from all eternity and by His very nature is "the Life,"
just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as
from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade
creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him.
For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was
made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but,
as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher
and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life
of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to
which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole
object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to
sin, should live to justice" (L Peter ii., 24) — that is, to virtue and
holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a
happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salva-
tion, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by
faith" (Galatians iii., 11). "Without faith it is impossible to please
God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and
preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This
He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To her, in His
wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which
engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should
fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that
make for salvation is therefore lost whenever morality is dissociated
from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on hu-
man reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the

1 82 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by
the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the
natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them
inviolate through life — and even this is impossible without the aid
of the grace of our Redeemer — still it in vain for any one without
faith to promise hinself eternal salvation. "If any one abide not in
Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they
shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" (John
XV., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi.,
i6). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a
morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that in spite of all
the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and
even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are
told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish
without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own
unaided eflForts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular sys-
tem of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are
daily disappearing from political life and administration. What
blindness ! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of
right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary
authority and justice must perish : and these are the two most pow-
erful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope
and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods
will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the
largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The
consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither
peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with
crime.

So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers
involved that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an
efficient remedy. It is, of course, both right and necessary to punish
malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent
crime in every possible way : but all this is by no means sufficient.
The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power
greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken
in them the sense of duty and make them better. This is the power
which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning
under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and
allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation and
that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the
masses will die away ; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ
be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former
will realize that they must observe justice and charity, the latter
self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life

Jesus Christ Our Redeemer. 183

will be firmly established by the salutary fear of God as the Law-
giver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dic-
tates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will
exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies
will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hin-
drance, there the order established by Divine Providence is pre-
served, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The
common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from
whom we should never have gone astray ; to Him who is the Way,
the Truth and the Life — and this on the part not only of individuals,
but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own
rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made
to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him — legislation, polit-
ical institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and la-
bor. Every one must see that the very growth of civilization which
is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and
grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity ,as by the spir-
itual qualities of morality and virtue.

It is rather ignorance than ill-will which keeps multitudes away
from Jesus Christ. There are many who study humanity and the
natural world ; few who study the Son of God. The first step, then,
is to substitute knowledge for ignorance, so that He may no longer
be despised or rejected because He is unknown. We conjure all
Christians throughout the world to strive all they can to know their
Redeemer as He really is. The more one contemplates Him with
sincere and unprejudiced mind, the clearer does it become that there
can be nothing more salutary than His law, more divine than His
teaching. In this work your influence, Venerable Brethren, and the
zeal and earnestness of the entire clergy can do wonders. You must
look upon it as a chief part of your duty to engrave upon the minds
of your people the true knowledge, the very likeness of Jesus Christ ;
to illustrate His charity, His mercies. His teaching, by your writings
and your words, in schools, in universities, from the pulpit ; wher-
ever opportunity is offered you. The world has heard enough of
the so-called "rights of man." , Let it hear something of the rights
of God. That the time is suitable is proved by the very general re-
vival of religious feeling already referred to, and especially that de-
votion towards Our Saviour of which there are so many indications,
and which, please God, we shall hand on to the New Century as a
pledge of happier times to come. But as this consummation cannot
be hoped for except by the aid of divine grace, let us strive in prayer,
with united heart and voice, to incline Almighty God unto mercy,
that He would not suffer those to perish whom He had redeemed
by His Blood. May He look down in mercy upon this world, which

184 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

has indeed sinned much, but which has also suffered much in expia-
tion ! And embracing in His loving-kindness all races and classes
of mankind, may He remember His own words : **I, if I be lifted up
from the earth, will draw all things to Myself" (John xii., 32).

As a pledge of the Divine favors and in token of Our fatherly
affection, We lovingly impart to you. Venerable Brethren, and to
your Clergy and People, the Apostolic Blessing.

Given at St. Peter's in Rome, the first day of November, 1900, in
the twenty-third year of Our Pontificate.

LEO XHL, Pope.

Scientific Chronicle. 185

Scientific Cbronicle*

FURNACE GASES.

The gases resulting from the combustion of fuel in blast furnaces
have been turned to little practical use or have been entirely lost for
commercial purposes. This loss has not been overlooked by prac-
tical men, and the question of the utilization of the discharge gases
from blast furnaces has been under consideration for a long time-
That they can be utilized has been settled in the affirmative, and now
the search is for the best results in their utilization. On this point
the article of Mr. F. W. Gordon in the Iron Age, showing their avail-
ability in the production of power according to the efficiency of the
process is of interest.

From careful investigations Mr. Gordon considers, as a fair esti-
mate, that 1,862 pounds of coke is burned per ton of pig iron. This
is followed by a computation of what amount of heat is used by the
furnace and what amount is available for other purposes. Judging
of the completeness of the combustion from the composition of the
discharge gases, it is fairly estimated that the total heat of the con-
sumed gases would be 7,889.93 British thermal units. From this
amount must be taken the loss in chimney gases, in radiation and
connection from stoves and boilers, and the heat actually available
would be 5,986.74 heat units, leaving an efficiency of about 75 per
cent. Out of this amount to run the furnace, heat the blast, work
the blowing engines, hoist the materials and pump water 2,220.94
units would be needed, thus leaving 3,765.8 units that could be em-
ployed in other ways.

This calculation has been made on the supposition that steam
boilers are used as generators for the work done at the furnace. It
must be remembered that steam engines have a maximum thermal
efficiency of only 15 per cent. And if under such conditions there is
such a residue from the gases for work in other ways, after the work
at the furnace is done by them, we can judge of what can be done
if these gases run combustion engines, such as gas engines, instead
of steam. In gas engines, even for lease gas, the thermal efficiency
can safely be taken at 30 per cent, against 15 per cent, in steam
engines.

Mr. Gordon puts the matter in another light so as to impress upon
the reader the value of the gases which up to the present have been
allowed to escape from blast furnaces. In the case of a 300-ton blast

i86 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

furnace the power not required by the furnace and which would be
available for other purposes amounts to 4,223.8 horse-power. The
value of that power can easily be calculated. Supposing engines
using 1.8 pounds of coal per horse-power hour, and that coal is worth
$2.00 per ton, the value of the above power per annum would then
be $61,095.

When furnace owners realize that by utilizing the gases from their
furnaces their coal bill annually will be reduced sixty thousand dol-
lars, we may expect a revolution in the operation of these mills.
We shall find that gas-driven engines will provide the blast and work
electric generators to provide power and light to all parts of the
works ; rolling mills will be worked by electricity, and after all this
has been done there will be a surplus of energy in the gases which
can be farmed out for outside purposes and which will yield a large
profit. Hence improved methods will bring a larger profit and pre-
vent the enormous waste of coal consequent upon the old ways.

The feasibility of employing electric motors will become more
evident if an improvement lately suggested by Mr. Louis Katona,
before the Iron and Steel Institute, be adopted. At present there is
an immense waste of energy in rolling mills. The object of the mill
is to reduce the cross section of the metal passing through it. It is
therefore clear that the only part of the mill doing useful work at
any given time is the particular groove through which the metal is
passing. All the power required to drive the rest of the mill is
wasted. Idle rolls, couplings, gearing and fly wheel are moved to
accomplish nothing.

According to the suggest, long rolls with several passes would be
done away with and instead there would be a separate pair of rolls
for each groove, the rolls being shortened to mere disks. Such
short rolls in pairs for forward and backward pass of the metal
could easily be driven by electricity and the present great loss of
power avoided, for one, two or more pairs could be worked at a time
according to the demand.

With such a change in construction and the burning as a source
of power of the gases from the blast furnace there would be a com-
plete revolution for the better in the iron industry and a saving of
coal. The manufacture of steel requires great purity in the fuel em-
ployed and a higher temperature than that obtained from the com-
bustion of ordinary coal. Greater purity is obtained by removing
from the coal all the impurities, leaving only almost pure carbon or
coke. This is done in coke ovens. The phenomenal increase in
the number of such ovens shows the demand for as pure carbon for
a fuel as can be obtained. The greater heat is a necessary conse-
quence of the employment of pure carbon in blast furnaces. Be-

Scientific Chronicle. 187

cause instead of converting it into carbon monoxide it is completely
burned to carbon dioxide. One kilogramme of carbon burned to
carbon monoxide generates 2,442 calories, while the same amount
burned to carbon dioxide yields 8,080 calories or heat units. Hence
the complete combustion gives a higher efficiency. In coking the
coal the liquid products are of great commercial value and the gases
can be collected and utilized in ways already referred to. In at least
one place these gases have been used for motive power. In Seraing,
in Belgium, one motor of eight horse-power has been running suc-
cessfully for some time and two others of twenty horse-power each
are in course of construction. The gas from the coke furnace has
a thermal efficiency of 4,500 calories per cubic metre or about 500
British thermal units per cubic foot. About 0.8 cubic metre is re-
quired per horse-power per hour. Here again we may point out the
efficiency of gas engines. A battery of 25 coke ovens producing
40,000 cubic metres of gas in 24 hours would develop 520 horse-
power if the gas were burned in a gas engine, while it would develop
only 316 horse-power if burned under steam boilers. The pressure
of modern competition is forcing the engineer to develop methods
for utilizing waste wherever possible.

For condensing steam engines of 200 to 500 horse-power the coal
consumption may be safely taken at 4 to 2.2 pounds per effective
horse-power hour in actual working. For gas engines under the
same conditions and using lean producer gas the fuel consumption
is from 1.3 to 1.4 pounds of coal per horse-power hour. Taking
the price of coal into account, there is a saving of 40 per cent, in the
use of the gas engine. This is the case when the gas is manufac-
tured for the purpose of working a gas engine. If the gas be fur-
nished as a by product of the blast furnace or coke oven the great
economy in the use of the gas engine is evident.

EXPORT OF AMERICAN COAL.

For a long time the possibility of American coal entering the Eng-
lish market has been discussed in the newspapers and industrial jour-
nals. It is now a fact. American coal has been furnished the Lon-
<ion market, the purchaser being the South Metropolitan Gas Com-
pany. The consignment was small, but still it is the entering wedge.
The question now discussed by those financially interested is whether
our coal trade with England will continue and increase or not.

The answer to this question depends entirely on whether we can
deliver in English markets our coal at a price to compete with Eng-

1 88 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

lish and Welsh prices in the same markets. In other words, can we
sell our coal in England at a price that makes it worth while sending
it to England ?

Of late the prices have been high in England. This has been due
to a combination of causes, but whether the rise is permanent or
temporary is not yet clear. No doubt the war in South Africa in-
fluenced the rise in price. As a result of this war the South African
mines were closed and there was a temporary increased demand at
home to supply the transports and troopships. Apart from these
causes, is there such an increase in export of coal in England as to
indicate that our foreign market is enlarging ?

The fact is that now the United States is the largest producer of
coal in the world. This may be explained by an increased demand
at home. But still it is in some measure due to an increased demand
abroad, for while the export in coal has increased in England, still
there has been a falling off in the amount used by steamers in the
English foreign trade. This last is explained by the larger quanti-
ties of cheaper American coal to be had at foreign ports.

Not only do we produce more coal than England, but we can do
so at a lower cost. This is due to two facts : First, in this country
the coal is more accessible in the mines than in England ; and, sec-
ondly, there is here a more general use of machinery. It is ad-
mitted that in this country we turn out 70 per cent, more coal per
man in a year than they do in the British collieries.

While American steam coal as good as the best British can be de-
livered at our ports of shipment for less than one-half the price per
ton, still the cost of transport brings the price of American coal
higher in England than that of British coal. This objection to an
English market for our coal may be overcome in two ways.

First, there is a claim that the American coal has a higher effi-
ciency as a gas producer. It seems that this was the plea for the
placing of the order to which we referred in the beginning. If it is
found that the American coal is so much higher in efficiency, that its
greater gas production will more than overbalance its higher price,
it will be the cheaper in the end, and it is assured of a market in Eng-
land.

Still, that this market amount to anything, the second difficulty
must be met, and its successful solution means the supremacy of
American coal in all foreign markets. A present freight of from
three to four dollars a ton must be considerably reduced to make
export coal business a success. To effect this there is at present a
demand for a special class of collier. It must be a vessel of large
carrying capacity, low cost of construction, sufficient engine power
to steam about eight knots an hour, equipped with the best ma-

Scientific Chronicle. 189

chinery for handling cargo, with minimum crew and hence minimum
operating expense. This is evidently a vessel especially designed
for the coal export trade.

Is such a vessel forthcoming ? Shipowners, shipbuilders and coal
operators in this country say it is. If so, it will undoubtedly do for
the coal trade what the tank steamer has done and is doing for the
petroleum trade. To encourage this project the railroads interested
are uniting for a reduction in cost of carriage to the seaboard and
for better terminal facilities. The Chesapeake and Ohio Coal Com-
pany, which controls the Newport News shipbuilding plant, pro-
poses to construct a fleet of colliers, and the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad Company is talking about doing the same thing. If these
projects are carried to completion we may feel certain that our ex-
port of coal will be vastly increased.

Whether or not we succeed in selling a large amount of raw coal
in England, it is certain that the placing of the American consumed
product is rapidly increasing and is sure to be a permanent export.
Every ton of pig iron exported represents the consumption of from
two to two and a half tons of coal ; and every ton of rolled iron and
steel represents from six to eight tons of coal. But by virtue of
proximity to the fuel and ore deposits, advanced methods of manu-
facture and low railroad rates to the seaboard, the United States is
in a position to compete with European manufacturers of iron, in
spite of the cost of ocean transport.

The coal question is one not only of individual comfort, but of in-
dustrial prosperity and national greatness. There is an ever-increas-
ing burden put upon coal on account of the greater demand for iron
and steel, for increased power, electric traction, electric lighting and
higher steamship and railway speeds. These demands not only tend
to raise the price of coal, but will also necessitate the development
of our coal resources to meet this demand and impose more eco-
nomic methods in the use of coal and develop new methods of utiliz-
ing the products resulting from the consumption of coal.

GASEOUS FUEL.

The use of solid fuel in certain branches of industry is attended
with many inconveniences, among which is the great amount of
waste and the consequent absence of cleanliness.. This fact has
been strongly emphasized wherever natural gas was found in suffi
cient quantities to be employed for fuel. Its almost immediate and
still continued use proves that it is more satisfactory than solid fuel.

190 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

For metallurgical operations, on even a considerable scale, gaseous
fuel has been very successfully employed, especially in connection
with reverberatory or open-hearth furnaces. The developments in
the production of water gas lead to the expectation that there will
be a wider application of gaseous fuel in the near future.

To produce gaseous fuel advantage is taken of the fact that carbon
dioxide gas is changed to or reduced to carbon monoxide gas by
passing the former over red-hot carbon. The producer in which this
change is effected consists of a deep grate, into which fuel is fed from
above, the air entering below the charge. The lower portion of the
fuel burns to carbon dioxide, which is reduced to carbon monoxide
by the hot carbon at the top of the producer. This gas, producer
gas as it is called, when collected is not, of course, pure carbon
monoxide. It contains the nitrogen of the air, some carbon dioxide
and some products resulting from the destructive distillation of the
coal. It has a calorific value of about 28,000 gram-units per cubic
foot.

A gas more than double this in calorific value can be obtained
from the original fuel by converting it into water gas. This conver-
sion depends upon the fact that when steam is passed over heated
carbon a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide is obtained.
In ordinary practice water gas is made by passing steam into a pro-
ducer which is already at work until the temperature has so far fallen
that the steam is no longer decomposed. The fuel is then again
brought up to the proper temperature and the operation is repeated.
While bringing the fuel to the required temperature by an air blast,
producer gas is formed. Water gas is almost entirely made up of
hydrogen and carbon monoxide, and hence is practically all com-
bustible. Its calorific value is 74,000 gram-units per cubic foot.
But only about 40 per cent, of the calorific value of the coke, which
is usually employed in the process, appears in the resulting gas.

Two processes have been devised which give a higher efficiency.
They are the Stache and the Dellwik-Fleischer. In the former the
fuel employed is usually coal, or a mixture of coal and coke. Dur-
ing the blow the coal is coked. The producer gas resulting is car-
ried to a regenerator and thus a portion of the heat which would
otherwise have been lost is conserved. The producer gas in this
process may be regarded as a by-product of the water gas generator.
As the two gases are delivered separately they can be applied to ap-
propriate uses.

The Dellwik-Fleischer system does not generate producer gas,
but aims at burning the fuel completely to carbon dioxide, and this
developes greater heat for the decomposition of the steam. That
such is the case is clear from the fact that to burn one kilogramme

Scientific Chronicle. loj

of carbon to carbon monoxide generates 2,442 calories or heat-
units, while burning it to carbon dioxide gives 8,080 calories. In
this process a much less depth of fuel is used in the producer and
the charge is introduced from the side so as to preserve this depth
the more easily. The air pressure is also under control so as to
secure the desired combustion. The efficiency of the water gas thus
obtained is from 75 to 80 per cent, of the calorific value of the fuel
used instead of only 40 per cent, in the case of producer gas. This
makes water gas available commercially as a fuel, where before its
cost was prohibitive. Some of its advantages may be gathered from
a comparison of solid and gaseous fuels for furnace use in manu-
facturing.

In the case of solid fuel care must be taken of the shape of the
furnace and of the manner of firing it, so that the carbon monoxide
be formed at the proper point and the desired reducing effect ob-
tained. This result depends on a number of factors, such as the
height of column of charge, shape and area of tuyeres, volume and
pressure of the blast and manner of charging the ore. Again, where
solid fuel is mixed with the charge throughout the furnace an irrcgu-
biity in the blast or in the arrangement of the materials in the fur-
nace may cause the combustion to creep upwards, burning the fuel
not only at a useless point, but at one that is absolutely prejudicial.
The presence of sulphur in the present methods with solid fuel is
also detrimental.

With the use of water gas these difficulties seem to be obviated.
The necessity of regulating the point at which the carbon monoxide
is formed is done away with, for the gas is produced outside the fur-
nace and the whole question is the simple controlling of the amount
of gas and air admitted. The gas can be burned just where it is re-
quired, and the fusion zone confined to desired limits. Hence the
possibility of the fire creeping up irregularly through the charge is
avoided. The gas is, moreover, a clean fuel and is easily purified
from sulphur and its freedom from ash is a benefit in all kinds of
smelting.

NOTES.

The Mosquito and Malaria. — The experiment made by Drs. Sam-
bon and Low and referred to in our last "Chronicle," according to
published accounts, appears to have been successful. The doctors
and their associates, who have been living in a mosquito-proof hut
in the Roman Campagna, drinking the water, exposed to the damp

192 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

night air and taking no quinine, have so far been free from malaria.
On the other hand, Mr. P. Thurburn Mason ,who allowed himself to
be bitten every second day by infected mosquitoes, fed in Rome, on
those suffering from malarial fever, has suffered an attack of fever
and what are known as tertian parasites were found in his blood.

In this connection the report of Drs. Reed, Carroll, Agramonte
and Lazear, who were appointed last summer by the Surgeon-Gen-
eral to investigate infectious diseases in Cuba, is of interest. It ap-
pears, from their report, that in eleven cases in which non-immune
individuals were inoculated through the bites of mosquitoes, two
attacks of yellow fever followed, and a third attack, which ended
in the death of Dr. Lazear, seems directly traceable to the bite of a
contaminated mosquito. They think that renewed interest must be
excited in the mosquito-theory of the propagation of yellow fever,
first proposed by Dr. Finlay, since they have found a typical case of
yellow fever, which followed the bite of an infected mosquito, within
the usual period of incubation of the disease and under circum-
stances in which other sources of infection can be excluded.

Molten Wood. — Consul-General Hananer, of Frankfort, reports
that M. DeGall, inspector of forests at Lemur, France, has suc-
ceeded in melting wood. It is done by means of dry distillation and
high pressure. The escape of resulting gases is prevented, and
thereby the wood is brought to a molten condition. When cooled
it assumes the character of coal, but the organic structure of that
mineral is absent. The resulting body is hard, but can be easily
shaped and polished. It is impervious to water and acids and is a
perfect electrical non-conductor.

Petroleum or Calcium Carbide. — Germany pays the United States
annually the sum of twenty-five millions of dollars for petroleum
used for the purposes of light and heat. Will this industry with Ger-
many continue ? According to the report of the British Consul at
Stuttgart, there are at least 200,000 jets of .acetylene gas in use in
Germany. Thirty-two small towns, with populations up to 5,0'J0,
are lighted by acetylene, as well as railway carriages on the German
Government lines. The amount of carbide consumed in Germany
during the year 1900 reaches 17,000 tons. This is equal in illumi-
nat'r-g power to about 7,000,000 gallons of petroleum. Still further
preparations are making for the introduction of acetylene as an
illummant, and German capital is invested at home and abroad in
the manufacture of the carbide. It is admitted that the p^^troleum
industry is encroached, upon most by the use of acetylene. Other
American industries, such as petroleum implements, no^-elty lamps

Scientific Chronicle.

193

and oil stoves, will be effected by this change in illumination in Ger-
many.

Wireless Telegraphy. — Much activity is siill shown in wireless
telegraphy experiments. We learn that Mr. Arthur Gray, in the
employ of Mr. Marconi, has arrived at Honolulu, with the inten-
tion of putting the wireless telegraph system into operation between
the Hawaiian Islands. He has the latest appliances of the Marconi
system and is sanguine that it will work successfully. At the same
time the news comes that the General Post Office in England is
going to purchase the Marconi system of wireless telegraphy. While
this report is not confirmed, it is known that a special commission
of the Postal Department is preparing to report on the question of
its adoption. If the Government takes over the system, it remains
to be^seen whether it does so merely as a governmental safeguard
or with a view of revolutionizing telegraphy. Another point in
favor of the wireless system is the fact that Rear Admiral Bradford,
Chief of the Bureau of Equipment, Navy Department, recommends
the installation of wireless telegraph outfits on all our ships of the
navy. A special board had been appointed to watch the working
of the system at the yacht races last year and their report was favor-
able. It is regarded as a practical system of communicating be-
tween the ships and between ships and shore stations.

The French War Department has decided to devote $80,000 to
secret experiments in wireless telegraphy, with a view to improving
its campaign applications.

A New Welding Process. — This process is the invention of Dr.
Goldschmidt, of Essen. The heat required is obtained by means of
a new compound which is called "Thermit." It consists of a mix-
ture of metallic oxides with aluminium. Its utility consists in the
fact that it permits of a quick and simple production of a fusible mass
at high temperatures. By its use rails may be welded at any de-
sired place, and all that is needed is a simple melting-pot. The pro-
cedure is thus given : The melting-pot is filled with tar oil to which
an inflammable mixture is added. A match serves to ignite it.
Small quanties of Thermit are then added, which immediately ig-
nites and a temperature as high as 3,000 C is reached. The incan-
descent contents of the pot consist of iron, on the top of which floats
melted carborundum. An aluminum oxide is then poured on the
part of the rail to be wielded, and the work is done so rapidly that
the melting-pot can be taken in the hand as soon as it is emptied.

Electricity in the Chemical Arts. — The part that electricity plays in
Vol. XXVI.— SiK. 13.

194 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the industries that depend upon the forming and dissolving of chem-
ical compounds is hardly realized by the general reader. Soap-
making and paper-making have been largely influenced by the elec-
trolytic manufacture of caustic soda. Calcium carbide, a product
of the electric furnace, has given rise to the new acetylene industry.
In Italy and Switzerland it is claimed that iron is reduced as a com-
mercial article by the agency of the electric current. A whole new
family of substances has been discovered lately, the product of the
electric furnace. The members are the cilicides of calcium, barium,
strontium and of other alkaline metals. The process of manufacture
is so cheap that it is thought that the first member of this family
will assume an important position in the industrial world. One of
its chief characteristics is that when immersed in water it brings
about the evolution of a large quantity of hydrogen. The dyeing
industry may profit by the great reducing action of these sub-
stances. Electrolytic copper is now a permanent article in the
market. We owe aluminium as a commercial article to electricity.
Add to this list many of the more expensive drugs which are pre-
pared by electrolytic processes and we can form some idea of the im-
portant part electricity plays in the chemical arts.

D. T. O'SULLIVAN, S. J.
BoBton, Mass.

Book Reviews. 195

Booft 1Rcvievo0,

Some Notes on the Bibliography of the Philippines. By Rev. Thotnat
Cooke Middleton, D. D., 0. S. A. Being Bulletin Number 4 of the Free Library
of Philadelphia. Large 8vo, pp. 58, in covers.

All eyes are now turned towards Cuba, Porto Rico and the Phil-
ippines. Students are eager to learn the truth about them. So
many conflicting statements have been made in regard to them that
it is not easy to tell truth from falsehood. This is more true in re-
gard to the Philippines because they are so far away that very few
persons make the journey to them. Even these generally return
after a short stay to contradict one another about the country and its
inhabitants. The difficulties in the way of the stranger in the Phil-
ippines are many, but they do not excuse ignorant, hasty or mis-
leading statements. The people are strange to us, with their pecu-
liarities of origin, tradition, language, dress and custom ; and all this
should make the writer and speaker from foreign countries more
cautious in his statements.

One of the commonest errors in regard to them is the belief that
they are ignorant. This is an evil that is very big in American eyes,
with its widespread system of public schools. An American will
forgive almost anything else before ignorance of book knowledge.
He sums up all virtues in secular education, which without moral
training is a questionable virtue, indeed.

As the title of Father Middleton's paper shows this accusation
against the Philippines is not true. They have a bibliography and
an Augustinian priest in America makes this truth known.

A short catalogue of Philippine literature, prepared by the bibli-
ographer, W. E. Retama, comprises as many as three thousand sepa-
rate works. This statement will probably surprise many of the
learned who have been weeping over the ignorance of the poor Phil-
ippines and preparing to carry the light of modern civilization ta>
them.

The Philoblblon Club of Philadelphia invited Rev. Thomas C
Middleton, O. S. A., to read a paper before its members on this sub-
ject. It was so instructive that its publication was called for. The
manuscript was entrusted to one of our newspapers and was lost..
In answer to earnest requests from members of the Philobiblon Club,.
Dr. Middleton rewrote it, but it was destroyed in the' Lippincott fire-
Again the learned and indefatigable author took up his pen and we
have the result of his labor before us, printed by the Free Library of
Philadelphia for the use of the students and patrons of the library.

196 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

"Our list of Philippina," says our author, "although given merely
in outline embraces in its sweep across the literary horizon of that
quarter of Malaysia, many works of recognized merit in the several
lines of intellectual energy — of history, archaeology, ethnology, phil-
ology and natural philosophy."

The purpose of the author is stated in these words : "To point out
those sources of information anent^the Philippine Islands wherein
the scholar can best find a general description or history of them, the
most trustworthy works on their very varied and multiform lan-
guages, as well as other topics cognate with these. Hence these
sub-sections into which my paper is split : (i) Works of General In-
formation; (2) Authorities on Philippine Dialects; (3) Some Lite-
rary Curios among Philippina ; (4) Philippine Presses ; (5) Introduc-
tion of Printing into the Philippines."

In the development of his subject under these heads Dr. Middle-
ton brings forward a fund of useful information in that clear-cut,
concise manner peculiar to the best historians who set fact not fancy
before their readers. He deserves a vote of thanks from the public
in general, and he will get it from all lovers of truth. He closes
with these very striking words about the introduction of printing
into the Philippines :

"With no originals at hand, we feel disinclined to pursue this topic
further as to the priority of printing in the islands, nor do we care to
press the question whether, namely, the first book of Philippine
manufacture was Bugarin's dictionary of 1630, Blancas' Arte of
1610, or the Lubao Tratadillos of 1606.

"In our own colonies (we may observe) printing was introduced,
first at Cambridge, in Massachusetts, in 1638 ; while in Pennsylvania
the first book printed — an almanac — by William Bradford, of Phila-
delphia, is dated 1685, a full half century later, that is, than the intro-
duction of this 'art preservative of arts' into Malaysia."

History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages. By
Johannes Janssen. Translated by A. M. Christie. Vols, III. and IV. Herder,
17 South Broadway, St. Louis, Mo.

We possess in these two volumes, an English translation of the
second volume of Janssen's great history, the most important of the
entire series, since it contains his masterly exposition of the rise and
spread of the Lutheran heresy. It is needless to enter upon a
eulogy of Janssen's history ; the whole Catholic world is unanimous
in pronouncing that he has spoken the last word on the subject of
German Protestantism in all its phases; and the Protestant world
has paid him the homage of bitter and unreasoning hatred. Under

Book Reviews. 197

his well-directed blows the repulsive idol of Saxony lies shattered
beyond hope of restoration. The influence of Janssen's work is vis-
ible on the pages even of non-Catholic writers; and few there are
who still retain the courage to place a halo about the head of the ex-
monk of Wittenberg.

Mr. Herder has spared no pains to bring out the books with the
beauty and elegance that are characteristic of whatever proceeds
from his press.

We cannot, however, say that he has been extremely happy in his
choice of a translator. We realize, indeed, that the rendition of a
work so erudite and scientific as Ja;issen's history is no easy task.
All the more necessary is it, therefore, that the translation should be
carefully overlooked by competent persons. There are many in the
country who are able to do this work of revision; we ourselves
would be only too glad to give our services gratuitously if called
upon. We have gone over the first of these volumes, carefully com-
paring the translation with the original, and have been obliged to use
our blue pencil all too frequently. Some of the translator's mis-
takes betray a defective acquaintance with the German idiom ; others
of them evince a sad lack of historical knowledge.

Not wishing to be hypercritical, we shall pass over numerous
minor blunders : one blunder, however, we are compelled to de-
nounce in the strongest terms. As every child knows, it has been,
during the last four centuries, contended by Protestants, and stren-
uously denied by Catholics, that the Church in Luther's time openly
sold indulgences. To our utter amazement, we find this stated,
clearly and repeatedly, not by Janssen, but by his bungling trans-
lator. On page 78 of Vol. III. we read : "J^^i^s II. had proclaimed
a sale of indulgences for laying the foundations of the new St. Peter's
Church. Leo X. renewed the sale in 15 14, in order to raise money
for the completion of the building, and employed the Minorites to
proclaim the Bulls relating to the sale.'' Need we tell the reader
that Janssen says nothing of the kind ? "Julius II.," he informs us,
"had proclaimed an indulgence (hatte einen Ablass ausgeschrieben).
Leo X. renewed the same (erneuerte deuselben) and entrusted to
the Franciscans the proclamation of the bulls concerning it (und
iibertrug den Minoriten die Verkiindigung der betreflfenden Bull-
en.") Where is there in this passage the remotest allusion to a sale
of indulgences? Is this Christie a crypto-Protestant, endeavoring
to stultify the great champion of the Catholic religion ? With pain-
ful reiteration the objectionable phrase recurs page after page.

We can only repeat what we said when we had read the first two
volumes of this "translation," that Mr. Herder has been unfortunate
in his translator and deserved a better fate. This is all the more

198 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

to be deplored since the publisher has done all that in him lay to
perform his part of the work with care and diligence.

The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Travels and Explorations
of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. The original French,
Latin and Italian texts, with English translations and notes; illustrated by por-
traits, maps and facsimiles. Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. Vol LXX.
All Missions, 1747-1764. 8vo, pp. 318. Cleveland: The Burroughs Bros. Co.

This grand historical achievement is practically completed.
The text will be finished in Vol. 71, and the analytical index will fill
volumes 72 and 73.

When the publishers made their preliminary announcement many
persons must have doubted their ability to carry the project to a
successful conclusion. The task which they set for themselves was
not an easy one. It was beset with many difficulties, and shrewd
bookmen shook their heads doubtingly. Had not these Jesuits Re-
lations been in existence for periods reaching back nearly three hun-
<ired years ? Had they not been published singly at different times ?
What interest could they have for any one except a collector, who
would pay a high price for them at auction from time to time?
Could a sufficient number of persons be found who would give the
high figure required to bring out a complete set of the Relations, in
an edition limited to 750 copies, with all the original documents
printed in French, Latin and Italian, together with the English
translation, and printed on sumptuous paper with illustrations?
These and similar questions were asked with that peculiar intonation
of voice which indicates that only one answer is possible, and it must
be spelled with two letters. But the result has justified the fore-
sight of the enterprising publishers. Now, on the eve of comple-
tion, we are informed that the work is expected to go out of print in
the I'car future. Only a few sets remain for sale, and these will be
quickly bought, because some cautious book lovers will not pur-
chase so important a work until it is nearly or quite completed. It
is not likely that it will be reprinted for many years, if ever. The
Re'itiions are accessible in their entirety only in the present form,
and since the publication of this edition was begun, some of the
originals have been destroyed.

Those who wish to possess it should take advantage of this oppor-
tunity, because copies will rarely appear in the market in the future,
and when they do, will command high prices.

In the volume before us Poitier's account book of the Huron mis-
sion at Detroit, which was begun in Vol. 69, is finished. Then fol-
lows tiie official catalogue of the Jesuit order for 1756, in which are
named the persons then employed in its North American missions.
An unnamed "missionary to the Abnakis" (but known to be Pierre

Book Reviews.

199

Roubaud) contributes to Lettres ediHantes an account of the capture
of Fort William Henry (or George.) The next chapter gives a
brief outline, by Etienne de Villeneuve, written in 1762, of the his-
tory of the Huron nation and the missions established among them.
The suppression in France of the Jesuit order (1761-62) led to sim-
ilar proceedings elsewhere; and the superior council of Louisiana,
by a decree dated July 9, 1763, expelled the Jesuits from that colony.
In this volume an account is given of that event and its consequences
by one of the exiled fathers. The work is intensely interesting, and
at times fascinating. There is a rich mine here for the true Chris-
tian novelist.

Life of Sister Mary Gonzaga Grace, of the Daughters of Charity of St, Vin-
cent de Paul, 1812-1897. By Eleanor G. Donnelly. 12mo, illustrated, pp. 334.
Philadelphia: St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum, Seventh and Spruce streets.

Sister Mary Gonzaga was born in the year 1812 ; her father died
in 1814; her mother died in 1816; she was adopted by Miss Eliza-
beth Michel, aged 17, a friend of her mother; she was received as a
Sister of Charity in 1827 ; she was sent to Harrisburg in 1828, and to
St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum for Girls in Philadelphia in 1830. At
that time the Home was on Sixth street, near Holy Trinity Church.
In 1832 she nursed the cholera-stricken patients of Philadelphia
during the terrible scourge of that year. She and her companions
offered their services to the city authorities, and discharged their
duty so faithfully as to merit public approval when the scourge had
passed.

In 1836 St. Joseph's Asylum was moved to the present site at Sev-
enth and Spruce streets, and in 1843 Sister Mary Gonzaga was made
superior. In the following year she and her companion Sisters, with
their orphan charges, passed through the reign of terror called the
Know-Nothing Riots of 1844, which have left a stain on the history
of Philadelphia that cannot be blotted out.

During the War of the Rebellion she presided over the hospital in
Camp Satterlee, on the western bank of the Schuylkill river, where
thousands of wounded soldiers from the North and South, and of all
creeds, were tenderly nursed by the daughters of St. Vincent under
her direction. Many of them live to the present day to bless her
memory.

After that stormy period had passed she retired again to the quiet
walls of St. Joseph's Asylum, to labor faithfullly and perseveringly,
until the Bridegroom called her on October 8, 1897.

Her body was followed to St. Mary's Church by a great crowd of
sorrowing friends and admirers, who wept tears of genuine grief
because she whom they loved had been taken from them. She was
laid to rest in the churchyc4.rd, but her monument was built in Ger-

200 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

mantown. It is not a tablet of shining marble nor a shaft of endur-
ing granite, but it is brighter and more lasting than brass or. stone.
It was most fitting that she who had devoted her whole life to the
orphans should continue to protect them after her death. This was
made possible by the erection of the Gonzaga Memorial House in
Germantown, where the orphan shall find a home under her name.

Miss Donnelly has told the story beautifully. No one could be
found better fitted for the work. It was a labor of love for her. Her
well-known literary ability, her strong faith, her intimate associa-
tion with Mother Gonzaga and St. Joseph's Asylum for so many
years — all gave to her an equipment which could not be found in any
one else. Hence the story of a good life well told.

History of America Before Columbus, According to Documents and Approved
Authors. By P. De Roo. Two volumes, 8vo, pp. L, 613, and xxiii., 612, with
maps. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.
The origin of this very important contribution to the history of

America is told by the reverend author in these words :

"For several years I searched the Vatican Secret Archives to ob-
tain reliable information regarding the history of one of the Roman
Pontiffs, Alexander VI., who is as much slandered as he is little
known. While garnering from the richest of historical treasuries
the most important notes of my study, I happened, once in a great
while, to meet with some original and unpublished record pertaining
to the religious history of America, either of the time of the Spanish
discovery or before it. No wonder if I, an American, considered
those documents highly valuable and copied them carefully."

This was the beginning. He soon began to search other libraries
and consult other authors to complete the history of the period. He
traced the signs of Christianity, which he found in America shortly
before the time of Columbus, back to the earliest periods, and then
retraced his steps, adding to the evidence already in hand and increas-
ing it at every stage. In this way the story grew, until it arrived at
the ample proportions of the two volumes which we see before us.

While the author did not intend to write a .history of religion in
America before Columbus, the nature of the documents which
formed the foundation of the work, gives a religious complexion to
it. We must not conclude, however, that the social, civil and po-
litical history of the period has been neglected.

The first volume deals with the American Aborigines, while the
second treats of European Immigrants. A striking feature of the
first volume is a list of all the manuscripts and printed literature
consulted, with the names of all the authors quoted. The number is
very large. A remarkable feature of the. second volume is the series
of Catholic bishops on American territory before Columbus. In

Book Reviews. 201

both volumes, at the end, copious quotations are made from original
documents.

Altogether, Father DeRoo has made a very valuable contribution
to American history, and incidentally to the history of Christianity
in America. The work entailed enormous labor, while requiring
great ability, and the learned author was in every way equal to the
task. His book will live as a monument to his learning and zeal.

The publishers have shown a keen appreciation of the value of the
work by putting it into splendid form. Indeed, it could not be
better done. They inform us that the issue is limited to fifteen hun-
dred copies printed from type. We shall not be surprised to learn
in the near future that it has gone out of print. Those who desire
to possess it should procure it at once.

The Divinity of Christ: an Argument. Translated from the French of Mgr.
Emile Bougaud by C. L. Currie. 12mo, pp. viii., 159. New York: William H.
Young & Co.

In this small volume we have a brief statement of the second vol-
ume of Mgr. Bougaud's famous Christian Apology. The original
work, written in French, embraced five volumes and appeared in
1874. The author's purpose was to explain Christianity rather than
to prove it, because he believed that the number of those who were
ignorant of it was far greater than the number of those who were
opposed to it. He wrote especially for the present age, and en-
deavored to show Christianity to the world under a form that would
first attract its attention and then win its assent. He was unusually
well equipped for such a task. He knew his age well. His learn-
ing, piety, oratory and zeal all stamped him as preeminently the man
for the work. He noticed that we live in an age when men are very
practical — an age of observation, when material things absorb most
attention. In order to draw the attention of the world to Christ,
instead of speaking to it of His Divinity first and then of His Hu-
manity, which was the method pursued formerly, he invited this prac
tical age to consider the beautiful Humanity of Christ first, and then
turn to His divinity. He was encouraged to pursue this course
because the Master Himself followed it with doubting Thomas. It
succeeded beyond the author's fondest hopes.

Some time after the publication of the original work, Mgr.Bou-
gaud brought the five volumes to Pope Leo XIII. to present them
to him. The Pope said to him : "My dear son, I have your work in
my library for a long while, and I have annotated every page with
my own hand." It is most fitting then that the work of such an
author on the Divinity of Christ should be placed before the Eng-
lish-speaking world, side by side with the Encyclical of the Holy
Father on the same subject, at the dawn of the twentieth century,

202 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

which we are invited to give to the God-Man. Read together, they
will surely draw many hearts to that great heart which burst with
love lor them.

Dictionary of the Bible, dealing with its Language, Literature and Contents,
including the Biblical Theology. Edited by James Hastings, M. A., D. D.
Large 8vo. Vol. HI. Kir-Pleiades. Pp. 896. New York: Charles Scribner'a
Sons. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

This very important work is nearing completion. The present
volume covers three-fourths of the proposed field, and the last vol-
ume is promised for next year. It is coming from the press at a very
opportune time. The interest in Biblical study was never more
general nor the advance in kindred sciences more rapid. A book
of this kind must be very well done indeed to merit confidence. The
time has passed when a brief summary of some parts of the subject
and vague allusions to other parts will satisfy the student. The
Bible is so commonly known, we had almost written "well known,"
that all its claims are scrutinized and questioned. It is so widely
discussed that the youngest student challenges its most sacred sen-
tences with as much impudence and irreverence as if they were the
utterances of the most ignorant man and not the words of the wisest
God. In such an age he must be learned indeed who will teach
anything about the Great Book.

The projectors of this Bible Dictionary seemed to have under-
stood this well, for they planned carefully. As to fulness, as to re-
liability, as to accessibility, the work leaves nothing to be desired,
with this qualification, which we have made before and which we
must repeat, that no Catholic writer is a member of the editorial
staff. This is a serious defect in a work of the kind for Catholics.
Many subjects should have been treated by Catholics only ; on other
subjects the articles should have been revised by Catholics. An
illustration of the truth of this assertion may be found in the article
on the Blessed Virgin. If the writer had confined himself to the
history of the subject, his work would have been incomplete, but not
offensive. This is one example: there are many others, for the
book embraces the theology of the Bible.

General Inteoduction to the Study of the Holy Scriptures. By Rev.
Francis E. Gigot, S. S., Professor of Sacred Scripture in St. Mary's Seminary,
Baltimore, Md. 8vo, pp. 606. New York: Benziger Brothers.

This volume is to be followed by two others ; one on "Special In-
troduction to the Study of the Old Testament," and the other on
"Special Introduction to the New Testament." The author tells us
that they are the outcome of lectures on these subjects delivered
during several years in St. John's Ecclesiastical Seminary, Boston,

Book Reviews. 203

and that they are intended chiefly for the use of similar institutions
as text-books. So far as we know this is the first time that so com-
plete a course has been prepared in English, and it will be heartily
welcomed by the advocates of text-books in the vernacular for our
seminaries. Such a book was badly needed. Latin works on the
same subject were too profuse for the average seminary course, and
English works were too brief. In the present instance the reverend
author has found the happy medium. Only a man of his experience
and ability could have hoped to succeed. The combination of the
two qualities was required. To be able to cover the whole ground
in a sufficiently brief manner, and to give to each part its necessary
amount of attention, without being obscure, was no easy task. But
our author has succeeded. At the same time he has preserved the
usefulness of a larger work, to a great extent at least, by numerous
references which will enable the more ambitious student to pursue
the subject farther.

Additional value attaches to the book because it is up to date.
This is a very important characteristic of such a work, and it is
shown especially in the appendix which treats of Inspiration. The
photographic reproductions of ancient manuscripts is a unique fea-
ture. Altogether the book is a very important addition to Catholic
Biblical literature, and one that will surely be appreciated.

Stonyhurst Philosophical Series — Psychology: Empirical and Rational. By
Michael Maher, S. J., Professor of Mental Philosophy at Stonyhurst College.
Fourth Edition, rewritten and enlarged. 12mo, pp. xxviii., 602. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co.

The first edition of Father Maher 's book appeared in 1890, and it
won the highest praise from all critics. So great was its success
that the author made only a few verbal changes in the second and
third editions. When, however, he began to prepare the present
edition, he found that such a 'arge quantity of fresh psychological
literature had appeared, especially in America, and he was com-
pelled to make so many additions and alterations that the book has
assumed the proportions of a new work. He states his purpose so
well that we prefer to let him speak for himself :

"My aim here, as in previous editions, has been not to construct
a new original system of my own, but to resuscitate and make better
known to English readers a Psychology that has already survived
four and twenty centuries, that has had more influence on human
thought and human language than all other psychplogies together,
and that still commands a far larger number of adherents than any
rival doctrine. My desire, however, has been not merely to ex-
pound, but to expand this old system ; not merely to defend its as-
sured truths, but to test its principles, to develop them, to apply

204 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

them to the solution of modern problems, and to reinterpret its gen-
eralizations in the light of the most recent researches. I have striven
to make clear to the student of modern thought that this ancient
psychology is not quite so absurd, nor these old thinkers quite so
foolish, as the current caricatures of their teaching would lead one
to imagine; and I believe I have shown that not a little of what is
supposed to be new has been anticipated, and that most of what is
true can be assimilated without much difficulty by the old system.
On the other hand, I have sought to bring the scholastic student
into closer contact with modern questions, and to acquaint him bet-
ter with some of the merits of modern psychological analysis and
explanation."

The work is purely philosophical, and not only every Chris-
tian, but every Theist should assent to all that it contains. The first
institution to adopt it as a text book, after Stonyhurst College, was
a Protestant Theological College in England.

Father Maher has so arranged his text, with different type and
different headings, as to make it easier for various classes of readers.
He gives the key to this arrangement in the beginning under the
title, "Hints on Judicious Skipping." Altogether it is really a won-
derful book. Although dealing with a subject that is beset with diffi-
culties for both teacher and student, he has succeeded in making an
interesting, clear, concise, yet comprehensive manual.

It will be useful to all English speaking students, but it should be
especially acceptable to Americans, who are devoting so much atten-
tion to the subject, and particularly in its bearing on education.
Certainly every Catholic student who is asked to study psychology
should do so with this book at hand.

The Holy Year of Jubilee. An account of the History and Ceremonial of
the Roman Jubilee. By Herbert Thurston, 8. J. Illustrated from Contemporary
Engravings and other sources. 8vo, pp. xxiv., 420. St. Louis: Herder.

Here is a very fitting memorial of the Holy Year 1900 and its
Jubilee. It is an exhaustive treatise on the siibject, tracing its his-
tory back to its beginning. The author tells us that he did not in-
tend to publish so comprehensive a history of the Roman Jubilee,
but rather a briefer treatise or compilation from well-known authori-
ties. He soon found, however, that the difficulties in the way of a
writer who would adapt the language of older jubilee manuals for
modern readers were so many and so great that he was forced to
permit his book to grow in scope until it has become, practically, an
original work. No one will regret the combination of circumstances
that brought about such a result, for now we have a work on the
subject that is comprehensive and in every way satisfactory.

Book Reviews. 205

The book is not controversial at all, and in only one instance does
the writer depart from generally accepted authorities. Historians
of every school, from Bonanni and Zaccaria to Gregorovius, have
agreed in attributing the introduction of the Holy Door ceremonial
to Alexander VI. The evidence now for the first time brought to-
gether shows that this view is untenable.

Notwithstanding his desire to avoid controversy, the author
thought it important to enter a protest against the serious misunder-
standing of the phrase a poena et culpa. Two chapters are devoted to
the subject. Although the book is historical, it seemed desirable for
the sake of completeness to give some account of the practical as-
pects of the Jubilee.

The illustrations are generally very quaint, but we must remem-
ber that they are taken in some instances from very old pictures in
the British Museum, and that they are used because of their histori-
cal accuracy.

Father Thurston, in his usual able manner, has produced one of
the books of the year. One worthy to act as a link between the last
year of the nineteenth century and the first year of the twentieth.

Obestes a. Brownson's Latter Life: from 1856 to 1876. By Henry F. Brown-
son. 8vo, pp. 629. Detroit: H. F. Brownson.

With this volume Mr. Henry F. Brownson finishes the biography
of his illustrious father. He was a man who would have stamped
his personality on any age. His great mind was not confined to
any one art or science, but seemed to include the whole field of
knowledge. Philosophy, theology, sociology, politics — all acknowl-
edged him a master. With his great power and splendid equipment
he was fearless to a fault and honest beyond question. The life of
such a man should be told fully and well. He is worthy of a biogra-
pher as great as himself. But intellectual giants are almost as rare
as physical ones.

It is fortunate that Mr. Henry F. Brownson took up this work.
W^ith the wealth of material at hand, his great sympathy for the sub-
ject, and his ability, it has been well done. It forms a very important
contribution to American history and particularly to American Cath-
olic history.

D. DiONYSii Cartusiani Opera Omnia. Tomus X. In Danielem, et XIL,
Prophetas Minores. Monstrolii, Typis Cartusias Sanctse Marias de Pratis,
MDCCCC.

The tenth volume of this admirable edition of a most valuable
work leaves nothing to be desired when compared 'with its prede-
cessors. Beautifully printed, clear and legible, and on good paper,
it is worthy of its mission. The old charge, so often refuted, that the
Church is opposed to the free study of the Holy Scriptures, is most

2o6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

effectually answered by the very existence of these fifteen large vol-
umes devoted entirely to the elucidation of the written word of God.
A work of this kind, undertaken in the thirteenth century, when, if
we may beHeve some historians, the darkest night were bright as
compared to the ignorance that prevailed — undertaken, too, by a
monk — stands as a continual reproach to the adversaries of the
Church, a monument to the industry and devotion of a class so
freely maligned as the monks. Moreover, it should be noted that
study sanctified by prayer, as in the case of Dionysius, leads not to
the Higher Criticism, so-called, but to a firmer and more reverent
acceptance of God's Word in its entirety.

Those who may intend subscribing should do so at an early date.
After March i the price will be raised from eight to fifteen francs per
volume.

Historical Memoirs of the City of Armagh. By James Stuart. New edi-
tion revised, corected ana largely rewritten by Rev. Ambrose Coleman, O. P.^
S. T. L. Large 8vo, pp. xxiv., 477. Illustrated. Dublin: Brown & Nolan— M.
H. Gill & Son.

This notable book first saw the light in 1819. It had been out of
print for many years when the present incumbent of the See of Ar-
magh, His Eminence Cardinal Logue, resolved to have it reedited
and reprinted in connection with the great bazaar which had been
organized for the benefit of his Cathedral. It was always an import-
ant historical work, but in its new form it is really invaluable. At
the time when it was first written historical research in that particu-
lar field was in its infancy. Since then such rapid progress has been
made that instead of a new edition of an old book, we have a new
book. Moreover, Mr. Stuart was not a Catholic ; he wrote for Pro-
testants principally, and his work could not be acceptable to the
Catholic public without many modifications. With this thought in
mind, the present work has been done. The author wisely leaves
that part of the book untouched which treats of Protestant Primates,
except in some minor details of arrangement. For the rest we have
practically a new book.

And a very charming book it is, taking us back to the time when
St. Patrick built the city and established his see in it, and introduc-
ing us to the long line of illustrious men that followed in hs foot-
steps.

It is beautifully made.The type, the paper, the illustrations, all are
worthy of the subject. The demand for it should be large.

The Last Years of St. Paul. By the Ahbe Constant Fouard. Translated by
George F. X. Griffith. 12mo, pp. xiii., 326. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.

When the Abbe Fouard finished his work on St. Paul and his
Missions he promised another volume which would bring the life of

Book Reviews, 207

the great Apostle of the Gentiles to a close. Here it is, gotten up
in the same form as the preceding volume, and closing the series of
manuals of early Church history on which the author has been en-
gaged for several years. He has had great difficulties to contend
with in the present work, because he had to construct a history with-
out historical facts. From the epistles of James, and Jude, and
Peter, and the later epistles of Paul himself, slight facts must be
gleaned, for they are the only sources available for the student of
this period of the Church's infancy.

Rationalistic critics attack even these few documents and try to
destroy their authenticity. It is worthy of note, however, that their
attacks are weakening. The Christian student is not moved by the
sneering objections of the rationalistic school, for he knows that
time will vindicate his confidence in the precious documents of the
Sacred Scriptures. The pleasure that one experiences when he
hears the announcement of the beginning of a good book is very
much increased when he hears that it is finished. Such pleasure is
ours with Abbe Fouard's last volume before us.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Brain in Relation to Mind. By J. Sanderson Ghristison, M. D., author of
"Crime and Criminals," etc. 12mo, pp. 143. Chicago: The Meng Publishing Co.

CiTHARA Me A. Poems by Rev. P. A. Sheehan, author of "My New Curate."
12mo, pp. 246. Boston: Marlier, Callanan & Co.

Transactions of the Canadian Institute. Vol VI. Semi-Centennial Colo-
nial volume, 1849-1899. Large 8vo, pp. 660. Toronto: Canadian Institute.

The City for the People; or, the Municipalization of the City Govern^
and of Local Franchises. By Frank Parsons. 8vo, pp. 597. ir'hiladelphia: C. ».
Taylor, 1520 Chestnut street.

An Epitome of the New Testament in Greek. By Rev. Nicholas J. Stoffel,
C. 8. C, Professor of Greek in the University of Notre Dame. 12mo, pp. 322.
Notre Dame University.

Apologetik, als Spekulative Grundlegung der Theologie. Von Dr. Al. Y.
Schmid, 6 Professor der Apologetik an der Universitat Miinchen. Freiburg
and St. Louis: Herder; 1900. Price, $1,60.

The Way of the World and Other Ways. By Katherine E. Comcay. Bos-
ton: Pilot Publishing Co., 1900.

Around the Crib. By Abbe Henry Perreyve. New YorK: W. H. Young &
Co., 1900.

A Day in the Cloister. Adapted from the German of Dom Sebastian Von Oer,
O. S. B., by Dom Bede Camm, O. S. B. 12mo, up. xv., 291. St. Louis: B. Herder.

At the Feet of Jesus. By Madame Cecilia, Religious of St. Andrew's Convent,
12mo, pp. X., 279. London: Burns & Gates.

Death Jewels. By Percy Fitzgerald. London: Bums & Gates.

The Spiritual Life and Prayer, according to Holy Scripture and Monastic

2o8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Tradition. Translated from the French by the Benedictines of Stanbrook.

12mo, pp. xxi., 434. New York: Benziger Brothers.
The Beauty of Christian DoGMk (Religious Meditations) . By the Rev. Jules

Souben, Professor at the Benedictine Priory, Famborough. 12mo, pp. vi., 247.

New York: Benziger Brothers.
The Life of Our Lord, written for Little Ones. By Mother Mary Salome, of

the Bar Convent, York. 12nio, pp. vi., 430. New York: Benziger Brothers.
Lives of the Saints, for children. By Th. Berthold. With twelve illustra-
tions. 16mo, pp. 175. New York: Benziger Brothers.
A Troubled Heart and How It Was Comforted at Last. By Charles

Warren Stoddard. 16nio, pp. 192. Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press.
Oxford Conferences. Hilary Term, 1900. The Life of Grace. By Raphael

M. Moss, 0. P., Lector in Sacred Theology. 12mo, pp. 146. London: Kegan

Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
The Cardinal's Snuff Box. By Henry Harland. 8vo, pp. 319. London and

New York: John Lane.
His First and Last Appearance. By Francis J. Finn, S. J. With illustra-
tions by Charles C. Svendsen. 8vo, pp., 213. New York: Benziger Brothers.
The House of Egremont. A novel by Molly Elliott Sewall. Illustrated by C.

Relyea. 12mo, pp. 515. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Rita. By Laura E. Richards. Illustrated by Ethelred B. Barry. 12mo, pp. 246.

Boston: Dana, Estes & Co.
Snow White; or, The House in the Wood. By Laura E. Richards. 12mo, pp. 93.

Bo^on: Dana, Estes & Co.
Visits to the Blessed Sacrament. By St. Alphonsus de Liguori. ii4mo.

New York: Benziger Brothers.
New Manual of the Sacred Heart. 24mo. New York: Benziger Brothers.
The Pilgrim's Guide to Rome. Translated from the Work of M. I'Abbe Lau-

monierby Charles J. Munich. 24 mo, pp. 242, with map. New York: Benziger

Brothers.

Chatterbox. Edited by J. Erskine Clarke, M. A. 1 vol., 8vo, pp. 412. Boston:
Dana, Estes & Co.

THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC

QUARTERLY REVIEW

" Contributors to the Quarterly will be allowed all proper freedom in the ex-
pression of their thoughts outside the domain of defined doctrines, the Review not
holding itself responsible for the individual opinions of its contributors."

(Extract from Salutatory, July, 1890.)

VOL. XXVI— APRIL, lOOl—No. 102.

JUSTINIAN THE GREAT (A. D. 527-565).

PERHAPS the most crucial period of Christian history, after the
foundation century of Christ and the Apostles, is the sixth
century of our era. Then goes on a kind of clearing-house
settlement of the long struggle between Christianity and paganism.
It was no false instinct that made Dionysius the Little begin, pre-
cisely about the middle of that century, to date his chronology from
the birth of Christ, for then disappeared from daily use the oldest
symbols of that pagan civil power which had so strenuously disputed
with the new religion every step of its progress. The annual consul-
ship was then abolished, or retained only by the Emperor as an
archaic title. That immemorial root of Roman magistracy, that
thrice-holy symbol of the City's Majestas, could rightly pass away
when the City had fulfilled its mission and function in the ancient
world. The Roman Senate, too, passed away at the same period —
more than a memory. For the two preceding centuries it had gone
on, sullenly shrinking from one strata of society to another, until its
last representatives were an individual here and there, hidden in the
mighty multitudes of the Christian people of the Empire.^ The
what calls itself the Roman Senate at a later time is a purely local and
municipal institution. The old religion of Rome was finally no

iV. Schultze: "Untergang des griechisch-roemischen Heidentums/* Jena, 1892,
vol. II.. pp. 385-389; of. also pp. 214-215. The documents for the disappearance of
paganism are best collected in Buegnot, "Histoire de la destruction du paganisme
en Occident." 2 vols. Paris, 1835. Since then it is the subject of many learned
works.

Entered accoiding to Act of Congress, in the year 1900, by Benjamin H. Whittaker, in the
Office of the Ubrarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

Vol. XXXV [—1

210 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

schools of literature, philosophy and rhetoric were no longer en-
souled with the principles of Hellenism. Their last hope was buried
when the Neoplatonists of Athens took the road of exile to beg from
the Great King, that born enemy of the Roman name — the prophet
of "Medism" — a shelter and support.^ In dress, in the system of
names, in the popular literature, in the social institutes, in the spoken
language,^ in the domestic and public architecture, in the spirit of the
law, in legal procedure, in the character of city government, in the
administration of the provinces, in the very concept of the State and
of Empire, there are so many signs that the old order passeth away
and a new one even now standeth in its place. The symptoms of
internal trouble, noted on all sides from the time of Marcus Aurelius
and graphically diagnosed by St. Cyprian, had gone on multiplying.
They did not portend that decay which is the forerunner of death, as
many had thought while the ancient society was dissolving before
their eyes,* but that decay which is the agent of great and salutary
changes. Their first phase, the long and eventful Wandering of the
Nations, had broken up, East and West, the old framework of society
as the Greek and Roman had inherited, created or modified it. On
the other hand, that most thorough of all known forces, the spirit of
Jesus Christ, had been working for fifteen generations in the vitals of
this ancient society, disturbing, cleansing, casting forth, healing,
binding, renovating a social and political organism that

"Lay sick for many centuries in great error."

In such periods of history much depends on the ideals and char-
acter of the man or men who stand at the helm of a society that is
working its way through the straits and shoals of transition. Was
it not fortunate for Europe that a man like Charlemagne arose on the
last limits of the old classical world, with heart and brain and hand
enough to plan and execute a political basis sufficiently strong to
hold for centuries to come the new states of Western Christendom ?

It is here that Justinian enters on the stage of history and claims
a place higher than that of Charlemagne, second to that of no ruler
who has affected for good the interests of his fellow-men. He is
not, I admit, a very lovable figure. He stands too well within the
limits of the Graeco-Roman time to wear the illusive halo of Teutonic
romance. But in the history of humankind those names shine long-

2G1 egorovius, "Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter," vol. I., p. 58, does
not believe that any formal edict was issued by Justinian against the continuance
of the pagan schools; tney lapsed into desuetude,

sSic quodcumque nunc nascitur mundi ipsius senectute degenerat, ut nemo
mirari deberat singula in mundo defioere ccepisse, cum ipse jam mundus totus in
defectione sit et fine. St. Cyprian, "Ad Demetrianum, c. 4 ed. Hartel.

4Bury: "The Language of the Romaioi in the Sixth Century," "History of
Later Roman Empire," II.. 167-174; Freeman: "Some Points in the Later History
of the Greek Language," '^'Journal of Hellenic Studies," vol. III. (1882); Tozer:
"The Greek-speaking Population of Southern Italy," ibid (1889), X., pp. 11-42.

Justinian the Great. 211

est and brightest which are associated with the most universal and
permanent benefits. Is he a benefactor of society who makes two
blades of grass to grow where but one grew before ? Then what
shall we say of one who established for all time the immortal prin-
ciples of order and justice and equity, without which all human en-
deavor is uncertain and usually sinks to the lowest level ?^

Justinian was born in 482 or 483, near Sardica, the modern Sophia
and capital of the present kingdom of Bulgaria. The most brilliant
of his historians says that he came of an obscure race of barbarians.®
Nevertheless, in an empire every soldier carries a marshal's baton

^1 he principal authority lor the life and works of Justinian is the contemporary
Procopius, the secretary and lieutenant of Belisarius. In his account of the
Gothic, Vandal and Persian wars he exhausts the military history of the empire.
His work on the buildings of Justinian, and the Anecdota or "Secret History"
that bears his name, are entirely devoted to the Emperor, tlie former in adulation,
the latter in virulent condemnation, Agathias, also a contemporary, has left us an
unfinished work on the reign of Justinian that deals chiefly with the wars of 552-
558. To John Lydus, one of the imperial ofhoers, we owe an account of the civil
service under Justinian. Theophanes, a writer of the end of the sixth century,
has left some details of the career of the Emperor. The "Church History" of
Evagrius and the "Breviarium" of the Carthaginian deacon Liberatus are of
firsit-class value for the ecclesiastical events. His own laws (Codex Constitutionum
and NovellaB) and his correspondence, e. g., with the Bishops of Rome, are sources
of primary worth, as are also at this point the "Liber Pontificalis" and the
correspondence of the Popes with Constantinople. In his chapters on Justinian,
Gibbon followed closely Le Beau, "Histoire du Bas Empire," Paris, 1757-1784.
Among the general historians of Greece in the past century who deal with the
events of this reign are to be named Finlay, "A History of Greece" from its
Conquest by the Komans to the present time (146 B. C. to 1864 A. D.); new and
revised edition by H. F. Tozer. Oxford, 1877. 7 vols.; Bury: "A History of the
Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene" (395-800). 2 vols. London, 1887.
The German histories of Greece by Hopf (1873), Hertzberg (1876-78), Gregorovius
(histories of mediaeval Rome and Athens, 1889) and the modern Greek histories
of Paparrigopoulos (1887-88) and Lambros (1888) cover the same ground, though
th'ey differ considerably in method and appreciations. There is an "Histoire de
Justinien" (Paris, 1856) by Isambert, very superficial and imperfect, and a life of
the Empress by Debidour, "L'Impera trice Theodora" Paris^ 1885), to which may
be added Mallet's essay on Theodora in the "English Historical Review" for
January, 1887. Several essays of Gfrorer in his "Byzantinische Geschichten"
(Graz. 3 vol., 1872-77), notably pp. 315-401, are both instructive and picturesque.
For all questions of chronology pertaining to the reign of Justinian the reader
may consult the classic work of Clinton, "Fasti Romani: The Civil and Literary
Chronology of Rome and Constantinople. ' Oxford. 2 vols., 1845-50 (to A. D. 641) ;
cf. also Muralt, "Essai de Chronographie Byzantine." St. Petersburg. 2 vols.,
1855-73, and H. G^lzer, "Sextus Julius Africanus." Leipzig, 1880-1685.

An attempt has been made to collect the Greek Christian inscriptions from the
fifth to the eighteenth century. "Inscriptions Grecques Chretiennes." St. Peters-
burg, 1876-80, pp. 11-143. Mgr. Duchesne and M. Homolle Dromise a complete
"Corpus." Cf. "Bulletin Critique," 1900, October 5, p. 556. The coins and medals
of the period are best illustrated in Schlumberger's "Sigillographie de TEmpire
Byzantin," Paris, 1884, a work that rounds out and replaces the earlier treatises
of De Saulcy, Banduri, Eckel and Cohen.

<5lt is worth noting that the Slavonic origin of Justinian has lately been called
in question by James Bryce, "English Historical Review," II., 657-686 (1887). It
is said to have no other foundation than the biography by a certain Bogomilus
or Theophilos, an imaginary teacher of Justinian. This biography is not other-
wise mentioned or vouched for than in the Latin life of Justinian by Johannes
Marnavich, Canon of Sebenico (d. 1639). Bryce holds that Marnavich gives us only
echoes of a Slavonic saga about Justinian. Jiricek (Archiv fuer Slavische
Philologie, II., 300-304) (1888), condemns the whole story as a forgery of Mar-
navich. Thereby Avould fall to the ground all that Alemannus, the first editor of
the Anecdota of Procopius (1623) writes concerning the Slavonic genealogy,
name, etc., of Justinian. Cf. Krumbacher, "Geschichte der byzantimscheu
Literatur." Munich, 1891, p. 46.

212 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

in his knapsack, and an uncle of Justinian was such a lucky soldier^
Justin I. (518-527) may have been quite such another "paysan du
Danube" as Lafontaine describes in one of his most perfect fables-
(XL 6).

"Son menton nourrissait une barbe touffue.

Toute sa personne velue

Repr6sentait un ours, mais un ours mal I6ch6.

Sous un sourcil 6pais il avait Tceil cach6,

Le regard de travers^ nez tortu, grosse iSvre:

Portait sayon de poil de chSvre,

Et ceinture de joncs marins."

He may have been not unlike the good Ursus in "Quo Vadis," or
that uncouth Dacian in "Fabiola." Certain it is that in a long ser-
vice of fifty years he rose from rank to rank and succeeded with uni-
versal consent to Anastasius when that hated "Manichaean" died,
childless. The peasants of Dacia were no longer butchered to make
a Roman holiday — the land had long been romanized, had even fur-
nished the Empire with a succession of strong and intelligent rulers,,
those Illyrian Emperors whom Mr. Freeman has so magisterially
described. Justin was an uneducated barbarian, and cut his signa-
ture painfully through a gold stencil plate, as did his contemporary,,
the great Ostrogoth Theodoric, King of Italy. Yet he had the wis-
dom of experience, the accumulated treasures of the sordid Anasta-
sius, the counsel of good civil officers, old and tried friends in many
an Isaurian, many a Persian campaign. Above all, he had the devo-
tion of his youthful nephew, Justinian. Possible pretenders to the
throne were removed without scruple — a principle that has always
been prevalent by the Golden Horn. Before Justin died his nephew
had reached the command of all the imperial forces, though never
himself a warlike man. In 527, on the death of his uncle, he found
himself, at the age of thirty-six, sole master of the Roman Empire.

It was no poor or mean inheritance even then, after the drums and
tramplings of a dozen conquests. The West, indeed, was gone — it
seemed irretrievably. At Pavia and Ravenna the royal Ostrogoth
governed an Italian State greater than history has seen since that
time. At Toulouse and Barcelona the Visigoth yet disposed of
Spain and Southern Gaul. At Paris and Orleans and Soissons the
children of Clovis meditated vaguely an Empire of the Franks. The
Rhineland and the eternal hills of Helvetia, where so much genuine
Roman blood had been spilled, were again a prey to anarchy..
Britain, that pearl of the Empire, was the scene of triumphant piracy,
the new home of a half dozen Low-Dutch sea tribes that had profited
by the great State's hour of trial to steal one of her fairest provinces,
and were obliterating in blood the faintest traces of her civilizing
presence. Even in the Orient, where the Empire stood rock-like,,
fixed amid the seething waters of the Bosphorus, the Hellespont and,

Justinian the Great. 213

the Euxine, it knew no peace. The ambition of the Sassanids of
Persia threatened the vast level plains of Mesopotamia, while a new
and inexhaustible enemy lifted its savage head along the Danube
frontier — a vague complexus of Hunnish and Slavonic tribes, terri-
ble in their numbers and their indefiniteness, thirsting for gold,
amenable to no civilization, rejoicing in rapine and murder and uni-
versal disorder. Justinian must have often felt, with Henry the
Fourth, that the wet sea-boy, "cradled in the rude imperious surge,"
was happier than the King. Withal, the Empire was yet the only
Mediterranean State. Syria and Egypt were its. Asia Minor was
faithful. The Balkan provinces, though much troubled, and poor
harassed Greece, were imperial lands.*^ The Empire alone had
navies and a regular army, drilled, equipped, officered.® Alone as
yet it had the paraphernalia of a well-appointed and ancient State —
coinage, roads, transportation, justice, law, sure sanction, with arts
and literature and all that is implied in the fair old Latin word
humanitas. It stood yet for the thousand years of endeavor and pro-
;gress that intervened from Herodotus to Justinian. And well it
was for humanity that its destinies now passed into the hands of one
who was penetrated with the keenest sense of responsibility to God
and man. Though he reached the highest prize of life before his
prime, it has been said of him that he was never young. The ashes
of rebellion and insurrection had been smoldering in the Royal City
5ince, with the death of Marcian (457), the old firm Theodosian con-
trol had come to an end. The frightful political consequences of the
great Monophysite heresy that was born with the Council of Chalce-
•don (451) were dawning on the minds of thoughtful men. The Semitic
and Coptic Orient was creating that shibboleth which would serve
it for a thousand years against Greek and Roman — ^a blind and irra-
tional protest against the real oppressions and humiliations it once
underwent. Of its own initiative the Empire had abandoned, for
good or for ill, its historical basis and seat — Old Rome. It had
quitted the yellow Tiber for the Golden Horn, to be nearer the scene
of Oriental conflict, to face the Sassanid with the sea at its back, to
create a suitable forum for the government of the world, where
Christian principles might prevail, and where a certain inappeasable
Nemesis of secular wrong and injustice would not haunt the imperial
soul as on the Palatine. But in the change of capital one thing was
left behind ; perhaps it was irremovable — the soul of Old Rome, with

7The political geography of the Empire in the sixth century .may be studied in
"Hieroclis Synecdemus," ed. of Gustav Parthey. Berlin, 1866. Here are re-
printed the "Notitiae Episcopatuum" or catalogues of ecclesiastical divisions known
usually as the "Tactica." Cf. also Banduri. "Imperium Orientale." Paris, 1711
(fol.) "Antiauitates Constantinopolitanae," ibid (fol.) 1729.

sGfrorer: "Byzantinische Studien," II., pp. 401-436, "Das byzantinische Seewe-
sen."

214 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

all its stern and sober qualities, its practical cast and temper, its
native horror of the shifty mysticism of the Orient and the unreality
of the popular forms of Greek philosophy. There is something
pathetic in that phrase of Gregory the Great, "The art of arts is the
government of souls. It is like an echo of the sixth book of Vergil,
"Tu vero, Romane, imperare memento."

Perhaps this is the germ of solid truth in the legend that Con-
stantine abandoned the civil authority at Rome to Pope Silvester.
He certainly did abandon to the oldest and most consistent power on
earth, a power long since admired by an Alexander Severus and
dreaded by a Decius, that rich inheritance of prestige and authority
which lay embedded in the walls and monuments of ancient Rome.
Within a century something of this dawned on the politicians of Con-
stantinople and lies at the bottom of the long struggle to help its
bishop to the ecclesiastical control of the Orient. In history there
are no steps backward, and we need not wonder that Dante, the last
consistent, if romantic, prophet of the Empire, was wont to shiver
with indignation at the thought of the consequences of this act.

But if they lost the genuinely Roman soul of government they
gained a Greek soul. It was an old Greek city they took up —
Byzantium. Its very atmosphere and soil were reeking with Hellen-
ism, whose far-flung outpost it had long been. History, climate,
commerce, industries, the sinuous ways of the sea, the absence of
Roman men and families, the contempt for the pure Orientals, forced
the Emperors at Constantinople from the beginning into the hands
of a genuine local Hellenism that might have shed its old and native
religion, but could not shed its soul, its immortal spirit. Hence-
forth the world was governed from a Christianized Hellenic centre.*
This meant that government for the future was to be mingled in an
ever increasing measure with metaphysics ; that theory and unreality,
the dream, the vision, the golden hope, all the fleeting elements of

o"The Greek characteristics of the Empire under Justinian are calculated to
suggest vividly the process of ebb and flow which is always going on in the course
of history. Just ten centuri."^ before Greek Athens was the bright centre of
European civilization. Then the torch was passed westward from the cities of
Hellenism, where it had burned for a while, to shine in Latin Rome. Soon the
rivers of the world, to adopt an expression of Juvenal, poured into the Tiber.
Once more the brand changed hands; it was transmitted from the temple of
Capitoline Jupiter, once more eastward, t9 a city of the Greek world — a world,
however, which now disdained the impious name 'Hellenic' and was called
'Romaic' By the shores of the Bosphorus, on the acropolis of Grseco-Roman
Constantinople, the light of civilization lived pale, but steady, for many hundred
years — longer than it had shone by the Ilissus, longer than it had gleamed by the
Nile or the Orontes, longer than it had blazed by the Tiber, and the Church of
St. Sophia was the visible symbol of as great a historical idea as those which the
Parthenon and the temple of Jupiter had represented, the idea of European Chris-
tendom. The Empire at once Greek and Roman, the ultimate results to which
ancient history, with Greek history and Roman, had been leading up was for
nine centuries to be the bulwark oi Europe against Asia, and to render possible
the growth of the nascent civilization of the Teutonic nations of the West by
preserving the heritage of the old world," Bury: "History of the Later Roman
Empire," II. 39.

Justinian the Great. 215

life, were to have a large share in the administration of things civil
and ecclesiastical. Government was henceforth

"Sicklied o'er with the pale east of thought."
Cato, it is said, chased the Greek philosophers from Rome. They
one day mounted the throne in their worst shape, the shape of the
sophist, in the person of Marcus Aurelius ; but, indeed, they had no
proper place in Rome, where government has always tended to keep
its head clear and calm, with eyes fixed on the actual interest, the
average practical and attainable. Not so in the Greek Orient.
With the triumph of the Christian religion the gods of Hellas fell
from their rotten pedestals. But they were never the governing
element, the principe generateur of the Greek life. That was the in-
dividual reflective mind, eternally busy with the reasons of things,
seeking the why and the how and the wherefore, not for any definite
purpose, but because this restless research was its life, its delight;
because at bottom it was highly idealistic and despised the outer and
visible world as an immense phenomenon, a proper and commen-
surate subject for the frightful acidity of its criticism.

It is the metaphysical trend and spirit of these opiniosissimi homines
of Greece which begat the great heresies of Arius, Macedonius, Nes-
torius and Eutyches — all Greeks. They even partially conquered
in their defeat, for they compelled, to some extent, a philosophical
refutation of their own vagaries ; they helped Plato, and later Aris-
totle, to their high seats in Christian schools. With sure instinct
the earliest Christian historians of heresies set down among them
certain phases of Greek philosophy. "Quid Academice et Ecclesicer
cries Tertullian in his book on Prescription, as though he smelled the
battle from afar.

In the intense passion of the Arian and Christological discussions
the highest Greek gift, metaphysics, and the finest Greek training,
dialectics, came to the front. In every city of the Greek world the
most abstruse and fine-drawn reasoning was indulged in habitually
by all classes. The heresy of Arius had surely its obscure origins
among those third century philosophers of Antioch who gave to that
school its grammatico-literal and rationalizing trend. He appeared
at Nicsea in the company of pagan philosophers, and when defeated
carried his cause at once before the sailors and millers and wander-
ing merchants along the sea-front at Alexandria. And for two cen-
turies the shopkeepers and shoemakers of Constantinople and Alex-
andria would rather chop logic than attend to their customers. For
the victories of the mind the burdens of the State were neglected or
forgotten, or rather a metaphysical habit of thought was carried into
the council chamber, to prevail therein very often to the detriment

2i6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of the commonwealth. The great officers of the State were too
often doubled with theologians. The Emperor himself took on
gradually the character of an apostolic power, with God-given au-
thority to impose himself upon the churches, formulate creeds, de-
cide the knottiest points of divinity, make and unmake bishops great
and small, and generally to become, in all things, a visible providence
of God on earth.^** This is what the Eastern world acquired by los-
ing its Roman Emperors and gaining a succession imbued with the
spirit of Hellenic thought and accustomed to the exercise of despotic
power in a city that had no old and stormy republican traditions,
being no more than the high golden seat of imperial authority from
its foundation. Were it not for the magnificent resistance of Old
Rome in her Leos and her Gregorys, the Oriental bishops would
have allowed the cause of Christianity to become identified with the
Caesaropapism of the Emperors.

If we add to the loss or absence of desirable Roman qualities on
the part of these great governors of imperial society, and the acquisi-
tion of undesirable Greek qualities, certain influences of the Orient,
we shall, perhaps, better understand the situation in which Justinian
found himself. It was noted very early that in contact with the
Orient the extremely supple and impressionable Greek genius suf-
fered morally. It lost its old Dorian or Argive independence, and,
stooping to conquer, took on the outward marks of servitude while
dwelling internally in its own free illimitable world of opinion and
criticism. Long wars, commerce, travel, especially prolonged so-
journs in corrupting Persia, had habituated the Eastern Greeks to
political absolutism. Since Alexander the habits of servile subjec-
tion of their own conquered populations of Syria and Egypt were in-
fluential in this direction. The Roman Emperors from Diocletian
on were themselves caught by the externals of the Great King's
court, and seem to have transferred much of its ceremonial to their
own. The presence in Constantinople of a great multitude of mis-
cellaneous Orientals and the exaggeration of style and rhetoric
peculiar to this, as to all other times of decadence, added strength to
these influences.

The great problem that faced Justinian on his accession was the
very character and limits of the Roman State for the future. Were
the encroachments of one hundred years, the extinction of the Im-
perium in the West, to be finally condoned to those victorious Ger-
mans who in the last century had absorbed the political control of

loCf. Rambaud, "L'Empereur Byzantin/' "Revue des Deux Mondes." 1891.

Justinian the Great. 217

Italy, Gaul, Africa, Spain, Sicily ? Or should an effort be made to
reestablish again an orbis terrarum, the ancient world-wide cycle of
imperial authority? Should Carthage, Milan, Ravenna, Trier,
Rome itself, be forever renounced, or must one last struggle be made
to win back the Cradle of the Empire and the scene of its first con-
quests ? Every possible argument pointed in an affirmative sense —
the raison d'Etat, the religious considerations and influences, the de-
mands of commerce and industry, the incredibly strong passion of
sentiment evoked by the memories and glory of Old Rome. In the
heart of Justinian burned the feelings of a Caesar and a Crusader, a
great trader and carrier of the Royal City and a Hellene scandal-
stricken at the overflow of barbarism and "Medism" that was foul-
ing all the fair and sweet uses of life. In the person of Belisarius he
found a great general, one of the most intelligent and resourceful
men who ever led troops into action. He found also for Belisarius
-a secretary, Procopius, who has left us a brilliant record of the great
campaigns by which the ancient lands of the Empire were won back.
For twenty-five years the world of the Mediterranean resounded
with the din of universal war. Around the whole periphery of em-
pire went on the work of preparation, a thousand phases of mortal
conflict, a thousand sieges, truces and bloody battles. Belisarius
broke the short-lived and fanatic Vandal power in 531, and Car-
thage, so dearly bought with Roman blood, was again a Roman city.
Justinian lived to see the heroic resistance of the Ostrogoths made
vain, after the death of their great King, by the total subjugation of
Italy and its re-incorporation with the Empire. In the meantime
the great corn granary of the Empire, Sicily, was won back, and the
constant fear of famine that hung over Constantinople and the army
disappeared. Scarcely had he relief in Africa or Italy when the
Emperor moved his troops to the plains of Mesopotamia or even to
the rocky fastnesses of Colchis, the modern Georgia, chastening at
•once the proud Mede and the wild, fierce shepherds of inaccessible
hills. With the exception of the Persian campaigns, these wars
ended successfully for the Roman State. One last outpouring of
Teutons — the long advancing Lombards — wrenched away Northern
Italy from the immediate successor of Justinian and interposed a
bopeless barrier against any attempts to reconquer Austria, Switzer-
land and Bavaria. But Central and Southern Italy were saved. A
praetorian perfect was set over Northern Africa ; Sardinia and Cor-
sica were once more integrant portions of the great Mediterranean
State. A praetor again governed in Sicily as in the days of Cicero.
Erom the inaccessible marshes of Ravenna an exarch or patrician
ruled the remnants of the Roman name in the original home of that
race. Even in Spain Justinian recovered a footing, and several cities

2i8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of the coast recognized again the authority that had so long civilized
the Iberian peninsula.

Doubtless it was owing to the frightful exigencies of the Persian
wars that Northern Europe swept finally out of the immediate vision
of the Emperor. The men, ships, moneys and efforts of all kinds
that it took to carry on these long and costly and unsatisfactory
campaigns against the Persian could well have availed to reunite the
lost lands of the North and to make the Rhine and the Danube
again Roman rivers. The interest in the island of Britain grew so
faint that it appears in Procopius only as the home of innumerable
spirits, a vast cemetery of ghosts ferried over nightly from Gaul by
terrified mariners who are chosen in turn and compelled by super-
natural force.^^

The Frank went on absorbing at his leisure the Rhineland, Swit-
zerland, Bavaria, Southern Gaul, and threatened to sweep Spain and
Northern Italy into his State.^^ Indeed, out of the fragments that
escaped Justinian and Belisarius the greatest of the Prankish
race, the mighty Karl, would one day resurrect the Roman Em-
pire in the West. If Justinian did not recover all the Western Em-
pire, at least he brought to an end the Germanic invasions by ex-
terminating Vandal and Ostrogoth and reestablishing in the West
some formal and visible image of the old Roman power and charm.
Henceforth Thuringians, Burgundians, Alemans, Visigoths, Suevi,
Alans, the whole Golden Horde of tribes that first broke down the
bounds of the Empire, tend to disappear, submerged in the growing
Prankish unity. The one unfortunate race that came last — the
Lombards — was destined to be utterly broken up between the three
great W^estern powers of the two succeeding centuries, the children
of Pepin Heristal, the Byzantine exarchs of Italy, and the bishops of
Rome. Could Justinian have kept the line of the Danube free and
secure, the course of mediaeval history would surely have been
changed. This was the original weak spot of the Empire, and had
always been recognized as such. Trajan tried to romanize the lands
just across it — the ancient Dacia — but his successor, Marcus Aure-
lius, had to withdraw. An inexhaustible world of miscellaneous
barbarians — an officina gentium — was at the back of every frequent
rebellion, and their warriors were like the leaves of the summer
forest. Here, too, was the fateful margin of empire along which
broke eventually the last surges of every profound social or economic
disturbance of the far Orient, flinging across the great river in wild
disorder Hun and Slav and Avar and Gepid and Bulgar. The first

iiNothing could illustrate more forcibly the thoroughness of the decadence of
the old Roman power in the West than the presence in Procopius of this curious
survival of old Druidic lore. Cf. Edouard Schur§, "Les Grandes Legendes de
France." Paris, 1892, p. 154.

i2Gasquet, "L'Empire Byzantin et la Monarchic franque." Paris, 1888. Lecoy
de la Marche, "La Fondation da la France au V. et VI. siecles." Paris, 1893.

Justinian the Great.

219

encroachments on Roman life and security culminated, after a cen-
tury of warfare, in the ever memorable campaigns and retreats of
Attila. And when the Empire of the mighty Hun fell apart at his
death the Germans, Slavs, Bulgars, and other non-Hunnic tribes
whom he had governed from his Hungarian village, took up each its
own bandit life and divided with the Hunnic tribes the wild joys of
annual incursions into those distracted provinces that are now the
peaceful kingdoms of the Balkans and Greece, but were then Illyri-
cum, Moesia, Thrace, Thessaly, Macedonia, Epirus. The Avars and
the Huns, remnants perhaps of the horde of Attila, were the most
dreaded in the time of Justinian. But they only alternated with the
Slavs, to whom they gave way within a century, so endless was the
supply of this new family of barbarism. These latter were tall, strong,
blond, with ruddy hair, living in rude hovels and on the coarsest
grain, fiercely intolerant of any rule but that of the father of the
family, jealous and avaricious, faithless like all barbarians, yet child-
like in their admiration for power and grandeur. They harassed
yearly the whole immense peninsula of the Balkans. They climbed
its peaks, threaded its valleys, swam its rivers, a visitation of human
locusts. The regular armies of Justinian were of no avail, for these
multitudes fought only in ambuscade, a style of warfare peculiarly
fitting to the Balkans, which are like the ''Bad Lands" of Dakota on
an immense scale. They shot from invisible perches poisoned
arrows at the Romans, and at close quarters were dread opponents
by reason of their short and heavy battle-axes. It was in vain that
line within line of fortifications were built, that in isolated spots the
watch-towers and forts were multiplied and perfected, that every ford
and pass and cross-road had its sentry boxes and castles. The enemy
had been filtering in from the time of Constantine,^^ and was already
no small element of the native population. So, as German had called
to German across the Rhine, Slav called to Slav across the Danube ;
the Romans were caught between the hammer and the anvil, between
the barbarian within and his brother from without. Nevertheless it
was not without a struggle that filled four centuries more that Con-
stantinople let go her mountain bulwark. Every river ran red, and
every hillside was drenched with blood, in that memorable contest,
in which she sometimes saw from the walls of the Royal City the
plains of Thrace one smoking ruin, and again all but cut off, root
and branch, her Slavonic and Bulgarian enemies.^*

130. Seeck, "Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt," vol. I. Berlin, 1897.
Part II., c. 6. "Die Barbaren im Reich," pp. 391-548.

i-tThe influence of Constantinonle in the later Slavonic world is incontestable.
Beside the "Chronicle of Nestor" (French translation by L. Leger. Paris, .1884).
cf. Gaster, "Graeco-Sclavonic," London, 1887; Rambaud, •"i^a Russie Epique,
Paris, 1876; Krek, "Einleitung in die Slavische Literatur-geschichte," Graz, 1887,
pp. 451-473, and the pro-Byzantine work of Lamansky (in Russian) "On the His-
torical Study of the Graeco-Sclavonic World," St. Petersburg, 1871.

-220 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Doubtless the heart of Justinian was sore pressed at his impotency
against the swarming Slavs and Avars. He loved his Illyrian home
and built on the site of his native village a city, Justiniana Prima
(near Sofia), which he fondly hoped would be a new Byzantium in
the Balkans. With a foreconscious eye he made it a bishopric, even
a patriarchate, and ordered for it honors second only to those of the
most ancient sees of the Christian world. This act was productive
of grave consequences in later times that fall beyond our present
ken.i^

The long wars of Justinian with Persia were otherwise important.
Here it was a death struggle between Persia striving to reach the
sea and Constantinople struggling to keep her back. These wars
lasted more or less continuously from 528 to 562, and sometimes
coincided with the greatest expeditions in the West. From time to
time a peace was concluded or a truce — the peaces were really only
truces. The usual result was the payment of a heavy tribute on the
part of the Emperor, amounting at times to as much as a million
dollars, not to speak of the smaller sums paid by the cities of Meso-
potamia or Syria, and the incalculable treasures carried ofif in each
of these campaigns. If the Persian resented new fortifications in
the vicinity of the Euphrates, war was declared. If the Saracen
Sheikhs who stood with the Romans fell into a dispute with their
brethren who served Persia over a desert sheep-walk, it was settled
by a long war between the Romans and the Persians. Endless
sieges of fortified cities, heavy ransoms from pillage and burning,
extraordinary single combats, marching and counter-marching
across Syria and Mesopotamia, fill the pages of the historians. The
local Jews and Samaritans, yet numerous and powerful, were no
small source of weakness to the Romans. So, too, were the ugly
heresies of the Monophysites and Nestorians, with all the hatreds
and heart burnings they occasioned against Constantinople, the pro-
tectress of the orthodox faith of Chalcedon, a general council almost
universally misunderstood and equally hated in Syria and Egypt.
In 532, for example, Justinian purchased peace" for eleven thousand
Roman pounds of gold (about two and a half millions of dollars).
He was then in the throes of the Vandal war in Africa and on the
point of the expeditions against the Moors and to recover Sicily.
When Belisarius was in the very heart of the Gothic War in Italy,
Chosroes again broke the peace, solicited by Witigis, the head of the
Gothic forces, and joined by many dissatisfied Armenians, who con-
sidered themselves oppressed by the Romans — perhaps, too, embit-
tered by the persecution directed against the Monophysites.

In their own way these wars are of value for the history of military

i^Duchesne, "Les Eglises S6par#es." Paris, 1897.

Justinian the Great.

22 L

engineering. Great and ancient cities fall before the engineers of
Persia. Antioch, the Queen of the East, for the second time saw a.
Persian King within her walls. Chrosroes even reached the shores
of the Mediterranean, gazed on the great Midland Sea, bathed in
its blue waters, and on its shores offered to the sun the sacrifice of a
fire-worshipper. He had strong hopes of reaching and conquering
Jerusalem and of bringing all Syria under his yoke, but desisted
therefrom. Internal disorders and the plague seem to have held,
him back. The last phase of these Persian wars was unrolled at the
extremity of the Black Sea, among the Lazi, in old Greek Colchis,,
the Land of the Golden Fleece, now Mingrelia and Georgia. The
people were Christians and under an uncertain Roman protectorate.
But they abutted on an unruly portion of the Persian Empire, and
so were a thorn in the side of Chosroes. Moreover, he had long
desired a footing on the Black Sea, whence he could create a navy
that would place Constantinople at his mercy and permit him to
come into easy contact with those Huns and Slavs and Avars who
from the mouths of the Danube and the plains of Bessarabia and
Southern Russia were harassing the Royal City. Hence the great
importance of the long and weary struggle for the wild and barren
hills of the Caucasian seashore. They were doubly important, be-
cause these narrow passes could keep back or let in the trans-Cau-
casian Scythians and create a new source of ills for a state groaning-
already under a complication of them. In the end the Persian was
shut out, chiefly because the population was Christian and unsympa-
thetic to him, but not without a war of seven years' duration, filled,
with romantic episodes and revealing at once all the weaknesses and
also the strong points of the Roman military system. The victory,.
as usual, cost a notable sum of money. Justinian agreed to pay
about one hundred thousand dollars yearly for fifty years, of which
nearly a million dollars had to be paid down at once. Nevertheless,,
he kept the Persians from becoming a naval power and from under-
taking the anti-Christian propaganda that a century later fell to the
yet despised Arabs and Saracens w^ho were serving in both armies,,
unconscious that on the great dial of time their hour was drawing-
nigh.

For the thirty-eight and odd years of his reign the Emperor was.
never free from care as to the existence and limits of the State. It
was no ordinary merit to have provided for the defense of the com-
mon weal in all that time, to have recovered a great part of what his^
predecessors had lost, to have restored the prestige of the Empire
over against Frank and Ostrogoth, to have kept Persia in her ancient
limits, and to have saved the Royal City from the fate of Old Rome,.,
which had fallen before the first onslaught of Alaric. No doubt he:

222 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

had able generals, Belisarius, Bessas, John the Armenian, Dagis-
thseus, VVilgang and others. It was an age of mechanical inventions
and engineering skill, the result of good studies among the ancient
books and also of new needs and experiences.^^ The peculiar char-
acter of the barbarian wars and the multitude of old populous cities
through the Roman Orient gave opportunity for the development
of fortifications. By this means chiefly, it would seem, the Emperor
hoped to withstand the attacks of his enemies.

III.

The armies of Justinian were recruited on pretty much the same
principle as those of his predecessors. Since Diocletian and Con-
stantine, conquered barbarians had become the mercenaries of the
Empire and received regularly as wages the gold which they had
formerly extorted by the irregular and uncertain methods of inva-
sion and plunder. Isauria in all its inaccessible strongholds became
a pcpiniere of soldiers for the Empire just as soon as it had been
demonstrated to these untameable hill-folk that Constantinople
would no longer tolerate their impudent independence. The Cath-
olic ''Little Goths" of Thrace were good for many a recruit.

The disbanded and chiefless Heruli, ousted from Italy by Theo-
doric, were at the disposition of the Emperor. Sometimes the bar-
barians came in as foederati, or as ''coloni," half-soldiers, half-farm-
ers. Sometimes they rose to the highest offices by bravery and
intelligence, like a Dagisthseus, a John, a Wilgang, a Guiscard, five
hundred years ahead of that other Guiscard who was to beard in
Constantinople itself the successor of Justinian. It was a heyday
for all the barbarian adventurers of the world. Never since the
palmy days of Crassus and Caesar and Antony and Germanicus was
there war at once so grievous and widespread, so varied in its fields
of battle and claiming so much endurance, ingenuity and industry.
Then was in demand all that the art of sieges had gained since the
Homeric pirates sat down before some lone Greek trader on his
isolated perch in the ^gean. If Shakespeare's Welsh Captain
could read of the famous sieges of Daras and Edessa, his soul would
go up in flame for joy at these wars carried on with all the science of
a dozen Caesars. Trench and counter-trench, wall and parapet,
ditch and mine, tower and rampart, battering ram and beam and
wedge — a hundred industries were kept going to lay low the huge

i6ln the "Varise" of Cassiodorus are found many curious contemporary traces
of the sur\nval of the ancient skill in engineering and architecture. Cf. the for-
mula (VII., 6) for the appointment of a Count of the Aqueducts, and (VII., 15)
for the appointment of an "Architectus operum publicorum." "Let him consult
the works of the ancients, but he will find more in this city (Rome) than in his
books." The "Letters of Cassiodoi-us" are translated by Thomas Hodgkin. London,

Justinian the Great.

223

fortifications of monolith and baked brick that dotted the land of
Eastern Syria and Mesopotamia. Indeed, it was by his enormous
system of fortifications that the great Emperor assured the restored
peace of his domains.

It is true, as Montesquieu has said, that "France was never
so weak as when every village was fortified." Yet under the
circumstances this was the only immediate, remedy against count-
less enemies from without and within ceaselessly plotting the
ruin of the venerable old State. The best national defenses are
those which we can most easily set up and most strongly defend,
not what the theorist or philosopher of war can suggest. From Bel-
grade to the Black Sea, from the Save to the Danube, citadels with
garrisons and colonies were located and provided with weapons of
defense and attack. In Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, Thessaly over
600 forts were established for observation and resistance. Many of
them, perhaps, were such watch-towers and lonely barracks as we
yet see in the Roman Campagna, whither the shepherd and his herd
could turn for a momentary refuge from marauders.

All the scum of the Northeastern world was floating loosely over

the plains of Southern Russia, faintly held back by the Greek cities

of the Crimea. The peninsula of Greece was particularly open ; the

unwarlike character of its thin population was patent since Alaric

had burned and pillaged his way across it in all directions early in

the fifth century. Since then its woes are best described by dropping

a black pall across the annals of one hundred years,
t

"The centre of earth's noblest ring"

was a howling desert, save for a few cities in which, perhaps, the old
Greek blood was propagated, and some spark of the philosophic
mind nursed against a better day.^^ The pass of Thermopylae was
again fortified and garrisoned. The Isthmus of Corinth was
strengthened as a buffer for the wild Peloponnesus, half-heathen as
it still was in its remotest valleys and hillsides.

The long wall of Thrace that protected the kitchen-garden sub-
urbs of Constantinople was strengthened, not so well, however, that
irregular bands of Huns, Avars and Slavs did not regularly break
through and insult the holy majesty of the Empire with their barbar-
ian taunts that mingled with the flames of costly churches and
municipal buildings and with the cries of the dying and the out-

i7lf we go to look in modern Greece for pure and unmixed Hellenes, untainted
by any drop of barbarian blood, that we assuredly shall iiot find. . . . The
Greek nation, in short, has, like all other nations, been -effected, and largely
affected, by the law of adoption. . . . The Sclavonic occupation of a large
part of Greece in the eighth and ninth centuries is an undoubted fact, and the
Sclavonic element in the population of Peloponneeos may be traced down to the
time of the Ottoman conquest." Freeman, ''Mediaeval and Modern Greece, ' op. cit.,
pp. 340-341.

224 American Catholic Quarterly Reviezv.

raged. As we peruse these annals it is hard to keep back a tear and'
a shudder, and we comprehend the preternatural gravity that hangs
about every coin and effigy of Justinian. To him it must have
seemed as if the original sanctity of order, the rock basis of society^
were tottering to its fall. Alas ! he could not see that those flames
which lit up the Propontis and the Isles of the Princes,^^ which fell
across the site of ancient Troy and the original homes of Dorian and
Ionian merchants, were not the awful illumination of a ''Night of the
Gods," but the dawn of our modern society.^^ In such pangs and;
throes does social man usually reach his highest place, his highest
calling on this sad footstool of earth !

Though the quasi-extermination of Isauria by Anastasius gave
peace on the mainland of Asia Minor, Justinian was obliged to pro-
tect that vast heart of the Empire, with all its superimposed and
ancient civilizations, by great walls towered and flanked at intervals-
from the Crimea to Trebizond on the Persian frontier, a stretch of
five hundred miles. The Iberian and Caspian Gates, those narrow
sea margins and mountain throats that control the entry to the-
Black Sea from the steep ranges of Caucasus, had also to be fortified^
or, rather, the strong hand of the Emperor must compel the rude
mountain chiefs to render to him as well as to themselves this neces-
sary dtity. The very sources of the Euphrates, forever a dark and
bloody line of battle, had to be secured against the feudal satraps of
the Great King. In the Mesopotamian plain Amida, Constantino,
Nisibis, holy Edessa, must rise up clad with impregnable armor and
filled with warlike men. Restless, unsympathetic, proud, discon-
tented, abused Armenia — the torture of Rome since the days of
Mark Antony and still the plague of statesmen — must be fastened

18 Schlumberger, "I^es lies des Princes." Paris, 1884.

i9The first chief who fenced in the Palatine with a wall did not dream that
his hill-fortress would become the head of the world. He did not dream that it
would become the head of Italy or even of Latium. But the prince who fenced
in the New Rome, the prince who bade Byzantium grow into Constantinople, did
design that his younger Rome should fulfil the mission that had passed away from
the elder Rome. He designed that it should fulfil it more thoroughly than Milan
or Trier or Nikomgdia could fiulfil it. And his will has been carried out. He
called into being a city which, while other cities have risen and fallen, has for
fifteen hundred years, in whatever hands, remained me seat of imperial rule; a
city which, as long as Europe and Asia, as long as sea and land keep their places,
must remain the seat of imperial rule. The other capitals of Europe seem by
her side things of yesterday, creations of accident. Some chance a few centuries
back made them seats of government till some other chance may cease to make
them seats of government. But the city of Constantine abides and must abide.
Over and over again has the possession of that city prolonged the duration of
powers which must otherwise have crumbled away. In the hands of Roman,
Frank, Greek and Turk her imperial mission has never left her. The eternity of
the elder Rome is an eternity of moral influence; the eternity of the younger
Rome is the eternity of a city and fortress fixed on a spot which nature itself had
destined to be the seat of the empire of two worlds. Freeman, "The Byzantine
Empire" in "Historical Essays," III., series, 1892, p. 255. On che city of Con-
stantinople besides the classic description of Hammer in his "GescHichte der
Osmanen" there are for modem times the books of De Amicis, Grosvenor and
Hutton; for the Middle Ages the "Esquisse topographique" of Dr. Mordtmann,
Lille. 1892; for the early Middle Ages "Constantinonolis Christiana" ffol.) 1729,.
and Riant, "Exuivise Sacrae Christi^'TiBe," 06n6ve, 1877, 2 vols.

Justinian the Great. 225

once more, however unwillingly, to the body of the Roman
State.

In the whole Orient rose up one hope of victory, one sure refuge,
the great Gibraltar of Daras. One hundred years had Rome toiled
at that barrier against Persia. Only the incessant wars in Italy and
the Mediterranean prevented Justinian from making it the capital
of Roman power in the Orient. As it was, Daras was the chief thorn
in the side of Persia, a living monumental insult pushed far into the
lands that the Great King looked on as his hereditary domain, and an
encouragement to all his own rebels as well as a promise to the
thousands of unattached Saracens, the Bedouins of those grassy
deserts, on whose surface we now look in vain for traces of the
greatest fortress that Greek genius ever constructed.

Egypt, too, the land of the wheat-bearing and gold-producing
Nile, needed the assurance of fortifications against the hordes of
Ethiopia and Nubia and inner unexplored Africa, against the tribes
of the Soudan, who from time immemorial, under many names,
waged war against civilization on its oldest, richest and narrowest
line of development.

Justinian never forgot the arts of diplomacy in the midst of all
these warlike cares. He was always wilHng to pacify by tribute the
various broken bands of Huns. This had been always one line of
imperial policy, even in the palmy days of a Theodosius the Great.
Much was always hoped from the internal discords of the bar-
barians, who often dissipated their strength in orgies and self-in-
dulgence. One tribe was played off against the other by arousing
avarice. The Goths, for instance, hated the Franks and the Ale-
mans, so they were willing to exterminate 75,000 of the latter, who
might have helped them to cast out thoroughly the Roman power.
The Emperor encouraged the King of Abyssinia against the King of
the Homerites in Southern Arabia, and made thereby a useful Chris-
tian friend, while he broke up an anti-Christian Jewish power. He
took in as a body of auxiliary troops the Heruli of Italy, so brutal
and stupid that nobody would have them as neighbors. He gave
the Crimea to three thousand shepherd Goths and cultivated the
principal men among the Tzani, the Armenians, the Lazi of Colchis.
Chosroes could say in 539 that soon the whole world would not con-
tain Justinian, so happy seemed his fortunes about that date. Yet
he could also taste the cup of despair, for in 558 he was obliged to
witness a small body of wild Huns come up to the very gates of the
Royal City, an advance guard of other hordes that were pillaging
Thrace and Greece. The aged Belisarius could find only three hun-
dred reliable soldiers in a city of one million inhabitants ; yet with
them he scattered these Huns and saved the city.
Vol. XXVI— 2

22(> American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The old historian Agathias tells us that there should then have
been in the army six hundred and fifty-five thousand fighting men^
but it had dwindled down to one hundred and fifty thousand. "And
of these some were in Italy, others in Africa, others in Spain, others,
in Colchis, others at Alexandria and in the Thebaid, a few on the
Persian frontier."

It is to this decay of the army, caused perhaps by jealousy of its.
immortal leader and by female intrigue, that the same judicious
historian, a contemporary and a man of culture, attributes the grow-
ing ills of the Roman State. His thoughtful phrase is worth listen-
ing to ; soon this current of philosophic observation will cease and
commonplace chronicling take its place in the seventh and eighth
centuries of the Byzantine Empire.

**When the Emperor conquered all Italy and Lybia and waged
successfully those mighty wars, and of the Princes who reigned at
Constantinople was the first to show himself an absolute sovereign
in fact as well as in name — after these things had been acquired by
him in his youth and vigor, and when he entered on the last stages
of life, he seemed to be weary of labors, and preferred to create
discord among his foes or to mollify them with gifts, and so keep
off their hostilities, instead of trusting his own forces and shrinking
from no danger. He consequently allowed the troops to decline,,
because he expected that he would not require their services. And
those who were second in authority to himself, on whom it was in-
cumbent to collect the taxes and supply the army with necessary
provisions, were affected with the same indifference and either
openly kept back the rations altogether or paid them long after they
were due ; and when the debt was paid at last, persons skilled in the
rascally science of arithmetic demanded back from the soldiers
what had been given them. It was their privilege to bring various
charges against the soldiers and deprive them of their food. Thus,
the army was neglected and the soldiers, pressed by hunger, left
their profession to embrace other modes of life."

IV.

The very religious mind of Justinian could not but be much con-
cerned with the social conditions and problems of his time. His
legislation bears the impress of this preoccupation — it is highly
moral throughout and constantly seeks a concord on ethical and
religious principles. Thus, to go through his code haphazard we
find him concerned about the building of churches and their good
order and tranquillity. He is said to have built twenty-five in Con-
stantinople alone and to have chosen for them the most favorable

Justinian the Great. 227

sites in public squares, by the sea, in groves, on eminences where
often great engineering skill was demanded. The rarest woods and
the costliest marbles were employed, and multitudes of laborers
given the means of life. They were usually paid every evening with
fresh-coined money as a tribute to religion. He built and endowed
many nunneries, hospitals and monasteries, notably in the Holy
Land, where he also provided wells and stations for pilgrims.
Bridges, aqueducts, baths, theatres went up constantly ; for building
he was a second Hadrian. And all this had a social side — the em-
ployment of vast numbers of men, the encouragement of the fine
arts, great and little. He is concerned about institutions of charity
of every kind, and in their interest makes his own the old and favor-
able laws of his predecessors. In his day every sorrow was relieved
in Constantinople. The aged, the crippled, the blind, the helpless,,
the orphans, the poor had each their own peculiar shelter, managed,
by thousands of good men and women who devoted themselves,
gratuitously to these tasks.^*^ The slave and the debtor had their
rights of asylum acknowledged in the churches and regulated ac-
cording to the demands of proper police order. The right of freeing;
the slaves was recognized especially in bishops and priests, and the
latter were given the power to control the "defenders of the city" —
a kind of popular tribunes, whose duty it was to supervise the proper
administration of justice. He undertook to abolish gambling,
claiming, curiously enough, that he had the same right to do that as
to carry on war and regulate religion. Blasphemy and perjury and
the greater social crimes and sins were visited with specially heavy
sanctions, though we may doubt if they often passed beyond the
written threat.

He legislated humanely for the rescue of abandoned children and
for the redemption of those numerous captives whom the barbarians
daily swept away from the soil of the Empire. No female could
longer be compelled to appear in a theatrical performance, even if
she were a slave, even if she had signed a contract to do so, being a
free woman. The bishop of each city was authorized to carry out
this law. An actress might henceforth marry any member of
society, even a Senator. He was personally interested in the thou-
sands of poor girls who came yearly to the Royal City and were
often the prey of designing persons who had traveled through the
provinces ''enticing young girls by promising them shoes and
clothes."

In the last century it was a custom to oflFset such 'creditable details

2oBulteau, "Essaide I'histoire monastique de TOrient," Paris, 1680. The late
work of the Abbe Morin, "Les Moines de Constantinople," Paris, 1897, and the
studv of Dom Besse, verv rich in details, "Les Moines d'Orient antSrieurs au
Concile de Chalcedoine," 'Paris, 1900, permit the student to obtain a complete
conspectus oi the monastic history of the Orient.

228 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

by reference to the terrible pages of the Anecdota or "Secret His-
tory" of Procopius. And Gibbon has not failed to expend on them
5ome of his most salacious rhetoric and to violate, for their sake,
his usual stern principles of doubt and cynicism.^^ Perhaps I can-
not do better than cite the very recent judgment of a special student
of Byzantine history :

"The delicacy or affectation of the present age would refuse to
•admit the authority and example of Gibbon as a sufficient reason
for rehearsing the licentious vagaries attributed to Theodora in the
indecent pages of an audacious and libelous pamphlet. If the
words and acts which the writer attributes to Theodora were drawn,
as probably is the case, from real life, from the green rooms of Anti-
och or the bagnios of Byzantium, it can only be remarked that the
morals of those cities in the sixth century did not differ very much
from the morals of Paris, Vienna, Naples or London at the present
day."^^^

Still milder and more favorable is the judgment of Krause as to
the morality of the city of Constantinople, even at a later date, when
the first fervor of Christianity had cooled and the city had suffered
from the immoral contact of Islam and had become almost the sink
of the Orient. From its foundation in 330 to its fall in 1453 Constan-
tinople was always a Christian city, sometimes fiercely and violently

2iln a few vigorous phrases Edward Freeman has laid bare a structural weak-
ness of Gibbon: "With all his (Gibbon's) wonderful power of grouping and conden-
sation, which is nowhere more strongly shown than in his Byzantine chapters,
with all his vivid description and his still more effective art of insinuation, his
is certainly not the style of writing to excite respect for the persons or period of
which he is treating or to draw many to a more minute study of them. His
matchless faculty of sarcasm and depreciation is too constantly kept at work;
he is too fond of anecdotes showing the weak or ludicrous side of any age or
person; he is incapable of enthusiastic admiration for any thing or person.
Almost any history treated in this manner would leave the contemptible side
uppermost in the reader's imagination; we cannot conceive Gibbon tracing the
course of the Koman Republic with the affection of Arnold, or defending either
democracy or oligarchy with the ardent championship of Grote or Mitford."
"Historical Essays," 3d series (2d ed.), 1892, pp. 238-239. This recalls what Mori-
son said of Gibbon — that ''his cheek rarely flushes in enthusiasm for a good
■cause." Coleridge's well-known judgment in his "Table Talk" may be worthy of
mention, viz., *'that he did not remember a single philosophical attempt made
throughout the work to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline and fall of the
Empire." In an otherwise sympathetic study Augustine Birrell has recorded an
'equally severe judgment on tne historical method and principles of Gibbon: "The
tone he thought fit to adopt towards Christianity was, quite apart from all Dar-
ticular considerations, a mistaken one. No man is big enough to speak slightingly
of the construction his fellow-men have put upon the Infinite. And conduct
which in a philosopher is ill-judged is in an historian ridiculous. . . . Gibbon's
love of the unseemly may also be deprecated. His is not the boisterous impro-
priety which may sometimes be observed staggering across the pages of Mr. Car-
lyle, but tiie more offensive variety which is heard sniggering in the notes."
"Res Judicatse." New York, 1897, pp. 79-80.

22Bury, op. cit., IL, p. 61. On Procopius in general; cf. Dahn, "Prokopios von
Caesarea," Berlin, 1865; Gutschmid, "Die byzantimschen Historiker" in the
"Grenzboten," 1863, I., 344; Ranke, "Weltgeschichte," IV., 2 (1883), 285-312;
Bury, "History of Later Roman Empire," (1889), I., 355-364. Ranke is of opinion
that the Secret History contains genuine material from the hand of Procopius, as,
for instance, the adultery of Antonina, wife of Belisarius. But such materials
have been interwoven and overlaid with other assertions not due originally to
Procopius, but to jealous and disappointed persons, especiallv those affected by
the stern conduct of Justinian in th*» Nik4 sedition (532).

Justinian the Great. 220

so, nevertheless an essentially Christian foundation. The social life,
therefore, of the city, and the Empire that it gave the tone to, could
not but be of a higher grade than the pagan life had to show, whether
we look at the condition of woman, the poor, the slave and the child,
those four usual factors that condition the moral life of all ancient
society. All the betterments of Christianity were here available for
the slave, and they were many and great. Numberless convents
opened their doors to women and proclaimed in them the dignity
and independence of human nature in the only way possible in
antiquity. The diaconal service of the numberless churches was
largely in their hands ; it was they who cared for the orphan and the
poor and the aged. In the schools they conducted the maidens of
the city were taught to read the great classics of the Greek father-
land in a way that did not force them to blush for the first principles
of decency. The letters of a Basil and a Chrysostom, the poems of a
Gregory of Nazianzum, were written in a language scarcely less
pure and elegant than the best masterpieces of Attica.^^

The frequent sermons of renowned orators in the churches and
the daily conversation of men and women in the best rank and sta-
tion, particular in language and manner as the Greeks always were,
offered a superior culture. Though they had lost their rude liber-
ties, they had not lost their fine ear for verbal music, their keen and
disputatious minds. The society of Constantinople was at all times
famed for the admirably bred women it could show. Pulcheria,
Athenais, Eudoxia, were women of the most varied gifts, and they
actually governed the governors of the world by the use of these
gifts. The letters of St. John Chrysostom to the Deaconess Olym-
pias, the story of his own mother, of the women of the great Cappa-
docian family of saints and theologians, reveal a fine and original
culture penetrated with religion, but also enthusiastic for all that is
holy and permanently fair, worthy and sweet in life. Whence,
indeed, could come the strong men who so long held the Royal City
above the waves of barbarism and disrupting war and internal dis-
order but from a truly great race of women ? When Constantinople
was founded a place was made for the consecrated virgins of the
Christian Church. And forever after they held that place of honor
so worthily that the tongue of slander has scarcely wagged against
them. For over eleven centuries the City stood in the seething

23Withal mediaeval society was deeply indebted to the Empire for the materials
and traditions with which it began its career. Cunningham, "The Economic Debt
to Ancient Rome" in ''Western Civilization in Its Economic Aspects." Cambridge
University Press, 1900, pp. 5-9; cf. also for the mediaeval influence of Constanti-
nople on the West. Bollinger. "Einfluss der griechischen Kultur auf die abend-
landesche Welt im Mittelalter/' Akad. Vortrage, vol. 1., Munich, 1890, pP. 162-186;
Burkhardt's "Renaissance," Voigt, "Die Wiederbelebung des Classischen Alter-
thums," 2d ed., 1881, and Bik6las, "Les Grecs au Moyen Age," in "La Grdce
Byzantine et Moderne." Paris, 1893, pp. 3-88.

230 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

waters of secular iniquity, human weakness, Oriental depravity,
Moslem immorality and the miscellaneous filth and sinfulness of the
corrupt East. Yet she never ceased to fill these religious houses of
men and women, especially the latter, and never ceased to behold
in them models of the highest spiritual life on earth. We know
how to praise the Theophanos, the Marias and the Anna Komnenas
of the Greek Middle Ages. But who shall say how many souls of
noble women went their way silently along the ancient cloisters by
the Bosphorus, wanting indeed in fame, but not wanting in a multi-
tudinous rich service to every need of humanity ? The Greek sinned
tragically against the duty of Christian unity, but he never lost the
original Christian respect for the way of sacrifice and perfection.

The ancient life about the Mediterranean was governed by princi-
ples and manners unknown or unappreciated by us.^* The warm
sun and the abundant waters of inexpressibly delicate hues, the rich
and varied vegetation, the cool and calming winds, render many of
these lands the most delightful of the world. Life there has always
been an out-of-door life ; all the higher forms of social amusement
have been affected by the climate and the geography. It was so in
Old Rome, it is so in all the lands of Italy, Spain and Southern
France to this day. The peasant dances on the public square ; the
strolling player with his bear or his marionette sets up his tent near
by. The harvest festival, the church fete, the relics of old pagan
superstitions baptized into harmlessness by innumerable centuries
of toleration — all these are lived out in the open air under a cloud-
less sky, amid balmy breezes laden with the scents of olive and vine,
fig and orange, and the most aromatic shrubberies. As these
ancient peoples moved up in the forms of government their political
life was all out of doors — the speaking, the voting, the mighty con-
tests of eloquence. And when the Greek cities lost to Rome their
national isonomy they could still hire some famous sophist or
rhetorician, like Dio Chrysostom, to keep up on the *'agora" some
faint echo or image of their adored old life.^^

So it was that when Constantinople was built the life of the city
soon centred in its great hippodrome. Since Homer described the

24Lenonnantj "La Grande Gr6ce." Paris, 1881-1884, 3 vols.

25The municipal and domestic life of the Constantinople of Justinian is illus-
trated somewhat freely in Marrast, "La Vie Byzantine au VI. Si^cle." Paris, 1881.
Por the following centuries cf. Krause, "Die Byzantiner des Mittelalters," Halle,
1869; Schlumberger, "La Sigillographie Byzantine," Paris, 1884. The work of
Amedee Thierry on St. John Chrysostom contains admirable sketches of early
Byzantine life that are to be supplemented now by the indispensable volume of
Aime Puech, "St. Jean Chrysogtome et les Moeurs de son SiScle." Paris, 1890.

Justinian the Great. 231

races by the much-resounding sea the peoples of the Mediterranean
have been inexpHcably fond of horse racing, chariot and hurdle rac-
ing. If George Moore had lived among them he would have pro-
duced a superior Esther Waters. General Lew Wallace has left a
classic page or two descriptive of the races at Antioch that will per-
haps live while our tongue is spoken. But no one has yet caught
the spirit of that gfeat hippodrome by the Golden Horn. It came
fresh from Old Rome, with all the prestige of imperial splendor and
fondness. In that mighty circus whose ruins yet appall us at Rome
an imperial people had ruled, had felt almost as vastly as a god, had
raged, thundered, compelled, made to die and to live, had experi-
enced an oceanic fulness of Hfe, a glory of self-adulation such as
might befit the highest and whitest Alp or the solemn depths of the
Hercynian forest. And so, when at Constantinople the Emperor sat
bediademmed in his chosen seat, the autocrator, the pantocrator,
the Basileus, the golden King of Kings, it seemed as if his were in-
deed an ''eternal countenance, sacrosanct, holy, inviolable." In
him that awful mob saw itself mirrored. Each one, according to
his own passion or aspiration, saw the reach and the limit of his own
possibilities.

Nothing affected more profoundly the society of Constantinople
than the hippodrome or circus. The great multitude of men and
women connected with this "peculiar institution" were divided from
time immemorial into factions — once red, white, blue, green, from
the color of the ribbons attached to the axles of the chariot wheels
or to the ears of the horses. These were the symbols borrowed from
Old Rome, and in the time of Justinian they had dwindled to two,
the blues and the greens. The sympathy of the million inhabitants
of the city was divided between them, but with the inconstancy of the
mob. In the time of the great Emperor the Greens had become
identified with opposition to the Council of Chalcedon, had become
the Monophysite factor of the city. They had, moreover, attracted
the hatred of the Empress Theodora. The blues were the favorites
of the imperial family. The contentions of both were endless and
very dangerous. They held open and contemptuous discourse with
the Emperor during the races and clamored wildly for justice on
their respective enemies. The stormiest scenes on the Pnyx, the
fiercest contentions in the Forum, were child's play to the rocking
passions of the great mob of blues and greens on some high day of
festival. These colors eventually became the symbols of all discon-
tent and rebellion. In 532 their violence reached its height in the
sedition of Nike, whereby 30,000 souls perished in the circus and on
the streets and a great and splendid part of the city was consumed
by flames, including the great church of the Heavenly Wisdom or

232 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Saint Sophia. Perhaps this uprising was the end of the genuine
city-life of the ancients, some remnants of whose turbulent freedom
had always lived on in Old Rome and then in Constantinople. With
the awful butchery of those days the aristocracy of the City was
broken under the iron heel of the cold-faced man who dwelt in the
Brazen Palace. Neither priest nor noble ever again wielded the
power they once held before this event, which may in some sense be
said to mark the true beginning of Byzantine imperialism, being
itself the last symbolic act of popular freedom. It is significant that
the last vestiges of the free political life of Hellas were quenched in
the City of Byzas by thousands of ugly and brutal Heruli whom a
lucky Slav had attached to himself as so many great Danes or
Molossi !

The fiscal policy of Justinian has been criticized as the weakest
point of his government. In his time the Roman Empire consisted
of sixty-four provinces and some nine hundred and thirty-five cities.
It had every advantage of soil, climate and easy transportation.
Egypt and Syria should have sufficed to support the imperial ma-
jesty with ease and dignity. The former alone contributed yearly to
the support of Constantinople 260,000 quarters of wheat. The
Emperor's predecessor, Anastasius, dying, left a treasure of some
sixty-five million dollars. It is true that terrible plagues and earth-
quakes devastated the population and reduced its spirit and courage
to a minimum. But they were still more disheartened by the excessive
and odious taxes. An income tax on the poorest and most toilsome
in the cities, known as the "gold of affliction," earned him a uni-
versal hatred. The peasants had to provide vast supplies of corn
and transport it at their own expense to the imperial granaries, an
intolerable burden that was increased by frequent requisitions of an
extraordinary kind. The precious metals decreased in quantity
partly through the enormous sums paid out annually in shameful
and onerous tributes, partly through pillage and the stoppage of pro-
duction, owing to endless war. Weapons, buildings, fortifications,
alms, the movement of great armies and great stores of provisions
consumed the enormous taxes. Heavy internal duties were laid, not
only on arms, but on many objects of industry and manufacture,
thus rendering any profitable export impossible. The manufactures
of purple and silk were State monopolies. The value of copper
money was arbitrarily raised one-seventh. The revenue was farmed
out in many cases, and the venality of the collectors was incredible.
Honors and dignities were put up for sale. The office of the magis-
trate became a trade, out of which the purchaser was justified in re-
imbursing himself for the cost. The rich were compelled to make
their wills in the imperial favor if they wished to save anything for

Justinian the Great.

233

their families; the property of Jews and heretics was mercilessly
confiscated. With one voice the people execrated a certain John
of Cappadocia, the imperial banker and Minister of Finance. For
a while the Emperor bowed to the storm of indignation, but he could
not do without the clear head and hard heart and stern principles of
this man, and so recalled him to office. His example of avarice and
cruelty was, of course, imitated all along the line of imperial officers
and agents. On the other hand, economies that were unjust or un-
popular or insufficient were introduced — the civil list of pensions
was cut down, the city was no longer lit up at night, the public car-
riage of the mails was abandoned, the salaries of physicians reduced
or extinguished, the quinquennial donative to the soldiers with-
drawn. Though the unfortunate subjects of Justinian suffered un-
told woes in Greece and Thrace and Syria from invasions and the
constant movement of large bodies of soldiery, their taxes were
never remitted, hence a multitude of abandoned farms and estates.
In a word, Justinian ''lived with the reputation of hidden treasures
and bequeathed to posterity the payment of his debts." His reign
is responsible for the economic exhaustion of the Roman Orient that
was prolonged long enough to permit of the triumph of Islam in the
next century — one of the most solemn proofs of the intimate con-
nection of social conditions with religious change and revolu-
tion.

Justinian had one passion, the imperial passion par excellence,
the passion of architecture.^® He delighted in great works of en-
gineering, in prodigies of mechanical invention. We have seen that
he built many churches, and rich ones, in the Royal City. He
eclipsed them all by his building of Saint Sophia, little thinking that
he was raising it for the wretched worship of the successors of an
Arab camel driver. For him Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of
Miletum raised in the air this new thing in architecture, bold, light,
rich, vast, solemn and open. Ten thousand men worked six years
at it. They were paid every day at sunset with new-minted pieces

26The art and architecture of ancient Constantinople have never ceased to
fascinate a multitude of writers since Ducange. Indeed, the series begins much
earlier. Procopius added to his fame as a writer, if not to xiis character for
honesty, by his "De Edificiis" (Bonn ed., 1838). His contemporary, the Guards-
man Paul (Silentiarius), described in minute detail the glories of Sancta Sophia,
and a mass of curious information that drifted down the centuries lies stored up
in the book of the antiquarian Codinus, "De Edificiis" (Migne PG., vols. 157
and 158). The monumental works of Salzenberg and Labarte have found worthy
followers and critics in Pulgher, Paspatis, tjnger, Bayet, Ferguson, Muntz,
Springer, Kondakoff and Kraus. Cf. Choisy, "L'Art de batir chez les Byzantins,"
Paris, 1884;, Bayet, "L'Art Byzantin," Paris, 1883, and Mrs. J.-B. Bury in "History
of Lower Koman Empire," II., 40-54. For the very abundant literature of this
subject cf. Kraus, "Geschichte der christlichen Kunst." Berhn, 1898-1899. 2 vols.
Its profound influence on the symbolism of the Middle Ages may be traced partly
through "The Painter's Book of Mount Athos" in Didron's "Manuel d'lconog-
raphie Grecque et Chretienne," Paris, 1845. Cf. Edward Freshfield on "Byzantine
Churches" in "Archseologia," vol. 44, pp. 451-462.

234 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of silver. And when it was done the Emperor, standing amid its
virgin and shining splendors, could cry out, ''Glory to God ! . . .
I have vanquished thee, O Solomon." It still stands, after twelve
hundred years of service, a stately monument to the grandeur of his
mind and the vastness of his ideas. He also built in the city the
great Chalke or Brazen Palace, so called from a bronze ceiled hall,
and across the strait the gardens of the Herseum on the Asiatic
shores of the Propontis. Cities rose everywhere at his command,
and no ignoble ones. We have seen what a circle of forts and walls
he built about the Empire, what expensive enterprises he carried on
in the Holy Land. He built and endowed many monasteries and
churches elsewhere in the Empire. And if he collected sternly he
knew how to spend with magnificence. The churches of Rome and
Ravenna were adorned by his generosity — one may yet read in the
Liber Pontificalis, drawn up by a Roman sacristan, the list of church
plate given by the Emperor to the Church of St. Peter. He con-
voked and celebrated a General Council, which was always a heavy
expense to the Empire, for the transportation and support of the
prelates. We do not read that he did much for schools. He is
accused of closing those at Athens. But they were pagan schools,
and modern critics like Gregorovius and others doubt whether they
were closed by any formal edict. They fell away by reason of the
general misery and the emptiness and inadequacy of their teaching,
unfitted for a world that was destined to know no more the serenity
of the old Hellenic contemplation, whose weakness it had exchanged
for the saving severity of Christian discipline. It is certain that he
opened law schools at Berytus, Constantinople and Rome. He
made wise provisions for the teaching and conduct of the young
lawyers on whom the civil service of the State was to depend. Jus-
tinian was no philosopher ; he was a theologian and a grave Chris-
tian thinker. Perhaps he felt little interest in the propagation of
Greek culture. He was a religious orthodox man, troubled about
his soul, and concerned with much prayer and inner searching of
his spirit. The sweet figments of old Greek poets, like the pure
mild rationalism of Confucius, were no food for the ruler of many
millions in a decaying and ruinous state, no concern of an Isapos-
tolos, the earthly and civil Vicegerent of the Crucified. He could
read in the writings of Cyril of Alexandria, scarcely dead a genera-
tion before him, of the follies and the criminal heart of a JuHan the
Apostate, his predecessor. He saw all around him the hopeless
congenital weakness of pagan philosophy to bear the appalling evils
of the time. Only the Son of Man could save this last stage of the
old Graeco-Roman society. To Him, therefore, and the Holy Spirit
of Celestial Wisdom be all public honor rendered.

Justinian the Great. 235

VI.

Had Justinian done nothing but restore to the Empire the mem-
bers torn from it by the convulsions of a century his name would be
forever famous among the great rulers of that ancient State. But
he did more — he recast the laws of Rome and made them serviceable
for all time — those ancient laws in which, as Sir Henry Maine and
Rudolph von Ihering have shown, are deposited the oldest experi-
ences and the most archaic institutions of the great Aryan family to
which all Western peoples belong. By this act he passed into a
higher order of men than even the autocrators of old or new Rome ;
he became a benefactor of humanity — one of its solemn pontiffs,
peer of Solon and Lycurgus, of Aristotle and Plato, of Ulpian and
Papinian — nay, a greater than they, for their laws have either per-
ished from society or survive by the act of Justinian. It is not easy
to put in a nutshell a subject of such infinite charm and importance.
Gibbon thought it worthy of the most immortal chapter in his book,
and pens innumerable have labored at describing this great work as
men describe the Pyramids or the Alps, with minds distracted by
admiration and the stupor that all true greatness inflicts upon us.

The Laws of Rome ! It was a long and varied process by which
they grew, the steady exercise of that terrible Majestas Populi Ro-
mani. Leges and plebiscita, senatus-consulta and responsa prudentum,
i. e., the laws of the forum, the Senate and the renowned opinions of
learned jurists — they had grown century by century until their num-
ber was legion and their individual original wisdom was crossed by
their successive contradictions and repetitions. For seven hundred
and fifty years before Christ had the City been growing. In that
time every human interest had come up for consideration. The
functions of war and peace, of conquest and division of spoils and
administration, of trade and industry, commerce and luxury, produc-
tion and exchange and distribution — every interest arising from the
soil, or from the family, or from human agreements, or from the at-
tempts of social authority to assure peace by justice and equity —
all these had been the object of Roman legislation. Originally local
and jealous, so local that it looked askance at the men of Veii and
Prseneste, scarce a day's walk away, it expanded mightily and took
in what was good in all the legislations of the past, all the solid
deposit of business, common sense and commercial practice as it was
floating around in what came to be known as the Law of Nations.
The common Roman might see in expansion only a chance for trade
and power ; the great thinkers of the State conceived the purpose of
this expansion of the city to be, as the Younger Pliny put it, "ut
Jiumanitatem homini daret," i. e., the spread of the light of civilization

236 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

and its benefits, by the red right hand and the dripping sword if need
be. Could we read the minutes of the meetings of the Roman
Senate on the annexation of Northern Africa after the Jugurthan
War we should be reminded, I dare say, of a certain late session of
our own august body of legislators, so true is it that history repeats
itself.

When the Republic lapsed into an Empire, so gently that the first
Emperor dared only call himself the foremost citizen, the law-mak-
ing power was the first to pass away from the people. Henceforth
there are no leges — the world is governed by the will of the Imper-
ator, and he acts through Constitutions and Rescripts, i. e., general
and particular decisions, which are registered in the imperial chan-
cery and become the actual law of the land. Besides, there was a
peculiar annual legislation of the praetor, or city magistrate, and an-
other body of law arising from the opinions of licensed lawyers —
ratiocinated decisions that originally won the force of law by their
reasonableness, and in time were collected in books and held almost
as sacred as Lex or Constitution. What all this reached to, after
five centuries of imperial government of the world, one may well
imagine.

As the will of the Emperor was the real source of law since Caesar's
death, so the first attempt at a reform or a codification of the law
must begin with the Imperial Constitutions. Two hundred years
and more before Justinian, in Old Rome, this need had been felt, and
the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes had been prepared for offi-
cial use. But they were soon antiquated and a new one, the famous
Theodosian Codex, was issued in 438 by the Emperor Theodosius II.
But it was rare, bulky, costly and therefore not always at hand.
Moreover, numerous grave Constitutions had been added since 438,
precisely a time of transition, when the law-making genius is called
on most earnestly to adapt the rule to the facts. Justinian estab-
lished, February 13, 528, a commission of ten men — decemviri — to ex-
ecute a new code. Tribonian and Theophilus were the principal
lawyers, and they were charged to see that only up-to-date consti-
tutions were incorporated, minus all that was obsolete or superfluous
or repetition or preamble. They might erase, add or alter words in
the older Constitutions they accepted, if it was necessary for their
use as future law. He wanted three things, brevity, compactness
and clearness, and in less than fourteen months he received them in
the document to which he gave the name of Codex Justinianeus,
and which was published April 7, 529.

The next step was harder — it was a question of collecting and sift-
ing the responsa prudentiim, or answers given by recognized and
licensed lawyers, and which had always enjoyed a high degree of

Justinian the Great. 237

consideration before the magistrates of Rome. They were the real
philosophers of the law, but philosophers after the Roman heart,
terse, grave, direct, condensing a paragraph of dififuseness into' one
strong luminous line that seemed to shed truth and peace along its
whole length. These answers had been given for over a thousand
years, and were then scattered about in numberless treatises — it is
said over 2,000, to speak only of those enjoying actual authority.
They had been the bane of the Roman bar for many a day. Since
they were all good law, and apparently equal, the practice of law had
degenerated into citations — whoever had the most dead men to
speak for him was the victor. This was intolerable ; it came at last
to the famous Law of Citations that fixed the five greatest names,
and among them, as senior or chief, the immortal Papinian, that
high priest, king and prophet of all lawyers, past, present and to
come.

At this huge mass of ancient law, therefore, a new commission was
directed, under the authority of Tribonian. From this Golden Dust-
heap they were to extract, to enucleate, what was good and useful as
law, or interpretation, or illustration. Out of all the materials they
should erect a fair and holy temple of justice, divided into fifty books
and these properly sub-divided and paragraphed and numbered. It
meant that the decisions of 1,300 years had to be gone over and
according to present utiHty a choice struck and the balance rejected.
Seventeen specialists did it in three years. The work was called the
Digest or Pandects. There are in it something less than ten thou-
sand sententice, or brief opinions of ancient lawyers, harmonized,
castigated, clarified — at least Justinian and his lawyers thought so.
Could Cujas or Donelli have been at their side, what reproachful
looks they would have cast ! For the Middle Ages hunted out end-
less contradictions in the huge mass of these "opinions" that only
external authority had united. Thereby the ancestors of our present
lawyers lived fair and lovely lives with rich benefices and fine gowns
of silk or brocade, and the noblest palaces in the town, and ample
esteem from Church and State. How they must have smiled when
they heard Boccaccio or Pietro Dante commenting on the poet's
famous line,

"D'entro alle leggi trassi il troppo e il vano."

It is calculated that by the edition of the Digest a law library of
106 books was reduced to sVs^ a comparison that only faintly reflects
the relief that its publication gave. Finally the Emperor caused the
preparation in four books of a manual of the principles of Roman
Law, which he called the ''Institutions." It became a part of the
codified law, being largely a reproduction and adaptation of a similar

238 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

work of the second century that was owing to the great jurist:
Gaius.^^

This work of Justinian has met with some reproaches from our
modern critics ; perhaps they are deserved. It has been accused of
too much theorizing, too much ratiocination, too much blending of
the school-master with the legislator to the detriment of the latter..
But what man of heart will blame the Emperor for permitting the
pagan Tribonian to preserve the color and tone of second and third
century Stoicism, for the occasional brief reflections on the origin
and nature of human liberty and human dignity? They are deli-
cious oases in a desert of rigid rules and sententious decisions. In
this new Roman Law it is the spirit and the content of the Law of
Nations that predominate. The old, hard, selfish Romanism is
eliminated. From the Golden Horn the Genius of Order lifts up
an illuminating torch to shine afar over the Euxine of the Barbar-
ians and the Hellespont of the Greeks — nay, across the Mediter-
ranean and ^gean, even beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and to fol-
low forevermore with its sun-like radiance every path of human en-
deavor, every channel of human contention, every relation of man to
man and of practical government to its subjects.

This Roman Law, after all, was the salt and the light of the Middle
Ages. For love of it, even before Justinian, the Ataulfs and the
Wallias, standing at the parting of the ways, had renounced becom-
ing a Gothia and were willing to be incorporated in a Romania.
They adopted it at once, begging the Catholic bishops of their new
kingdoms to accommodate it to their present needs, their racial
genius and their immemorial customs. So arose the invaluable
Leges Barbarorum of Frank and Burgundian and Visigoth and Van-
dal. Only, the Catholic Church would have no separatist barbarian
law, even of that kind. All her ecclesiastics lived by the genuine and
common Roman Law, the Law of Justinian : Ecclesia vivit lege Ro-
mana. Indeed, she was its second savior, and thereby the savior of
good government, for in the West it gradually went over very
largely into her Canon Law. It was the basis and glory of her
oldest university, Bologna, and was the usual path to honor and
fame and power. There are those who regret its excessive vitality,
since it bears along with it the stamp of its origin, the absolute will
of one ruler, which makes it at all times the favorite code of central-
ized power. The Code Napoleon is built on it, as are most of the
great modern codes of Europe. Even Mohammedan law as it arose,
in Egypt and Syria especially, accepted and appHed the existing law

27The vicissitudes of the law of Justinian in the Latin iviiddle Ages have been
described fully in the classic work of Savieny, and by a host of later writers.
Foi' its history in the Orient, cf. Mortreuil, Histoire du droit Byzantin." Paris,
1843-46. 3 vols.

Justinian the Great. 239.

of Justinian that had been working more than a century in these
unhappy lands when, for their folly and stupidity, the night of Islam
settled down on them.

It is the Christian, however, who rejoices most at this act of Jus-
tinian. Those Roman laws that Tertullian denounced were now
baptized.^® A spirit of humanity henceforth breathed from them.
The rights of the Moral Code were incorporated into the legal code ;
religion was not separate from conduct. The new law showed itself
most practical in this that it recognized Christianity as triumphant,
as the popular religion, and in many ways made a large place for it,
recognized its teachers and chiefs as the principal supporters of the
State and of public order. The political life of the Middle Ages is
all in the Law of Justinian, especially in the Code of his Constitu-
tions, and for this alone it is the most remarkable of books after the
Inspired Writings and the Ancient Councils.

It is not wonderful that Dante, at once the greatest of architec-
tonic poets and last prophet of the Empire, crying out over its grave,
should speak more than once of Justinian and his laws. In the
famous lines of the Purgatorio (VI., 89) his whole soul flames out
in irrepressible anger.

"Ah! servile Italy, grief's hostelry!
A ship without a pilot in great tempest!
No lady thou of provinces, but brothel!

What boots it that for thee Justinian
The bridle mend, if empty be the saddle?

In the superb sixth Canto of the Paradiso he personifies in Jus-
tinian the imperial authority that to him is the basis of the State,

"Caesar I was and am Justinian."

Into the mouth of this shadowy shepherd of men he puts that
glorious romantic account of the growth of the Roman name and
power :

"What it achieved from Var unto the Rhine,
Isere beheld and Saone, beheld the Seine
And every valley whence the Rh6ne is tilled;
What it achieved when it had left Ravenna,
And leaped the Rubicon, was such a flight
That neither ton<yue nor pen could follow it."

The true career of Justinian appears to the mediaeval poet of Italy
and Catholicism as that of a "Living Justice" inspired by God, as
the career of a man who upheld the "Standard Sacrosanct" of order
and equity, and thereby

"placed the world in so great peace
That unto Janus was his temple closed'."

28Postremo legum obstruitur auctoritas adversus earn (sc. veritatem) . . .
Si lex tua erravit, puto, ab homine concepta est; neque enim de cceIo ruit,
Tertullian "Apologeticum," c. iv., 20. The entire opusculum is the protest of a
great Roman lawyer against the inhuman and anomalous iniquities of the Roman.
law as applied to the Christians.

240 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Elsewhere (Canzone XVIII. , v. 37) he gives voice to the deepest
sentiment of the Middle Ages, when he hails in Italy the serene and
glorious custodian of law and order, the true heiress of the genius
and calling of the Imperium that are indelibly stamped on the Pan-
dects and the Code :

0 patria, degna di trionfal fama, ~

De' magnanimi madre,

Segui le luci di Giustiniano,

E le focose tue malgiuste leggi

Con dischezion corr«ggi,

Sicche le laudi '1 mondo e'l divin regno.

VIII.

In the preceding pages little has been said of Justinian from an
ecclesiastical point of view, partly because it is the civil or profane
side of his life that here attracts us, partly because of the vast and
absorbing interest of the questions and problems that are exhibited
when we lift the innermost veil of ecclesiastical history. It was the
fate of Justinian to enter upon the last scene of a passionate con-
flict whose unity had not been broken for a century. The motives of
the last protagonists were not always pure or praiseworthy. Local
jealousies, festering old sores of a political or economico-social na-
ture, velleities of Coptic and Syrian independence, violent contempt
and hatred for the Royal City and its Greek bureaucracy that these
paid back with interest prevented the theological questions of the
day from being viewed by all in the dispassionate light of simple
faith and old tradition. The wrongs of Nestorius were still a rally-
ing cry in Syria, and the injustice wreaked on Dioscorus still roused
the fellaheen of Egypt. Obscene spirits, as usual, abounded and
fished fortune out of the troubled waters along which moved pain-
fully the bark of Peter. Old sects, schisms and heresies, almost for-
gotten by the churchmen of the day, still lived on in remote corners
of the Orient, to strike hands on occasion with the Nestorian or
Monophysite against the common enemy by the Golden Horn.^®
Here theology and tax gathering were cultivated with equal ardor
until the broken peasant by the Nile or the Orontes knew not what
he hated most — the latest fiscal oppression or the noble Tomus of

2»For the history of the government of the Greek churches in and since the
time of Justinian the work of Cardinal Pitra is invaluable, "Juris Ecclesiastici
Grseci Historia et Monumenta," Rome, 2 vols., 1864-1868; cf. the "Oriens Chris-
tianus" of Le Quien, Paris, 1740, 3 vols, (fol), and the precious compilation of Leo
Allatius, "De Ecclesiae Occidentalis et Orientalis perpetua consensione," Cologne,
1649. Of great value to the historian are the materials collected by Miklosisch
and Mueller, "Acta et Diplomata monastcriorum Orientis," 1871-1890, 3 vols., and
by Cardinal Hergenroether, "Monumenta Graeca ad Photium ejusque historiam
pertinentia," Ratisbon, 1869. Usually fair and well-informed is Neale, "History of
the Holy Eastern Church," London, 1847-1850, 4 vols., of which the first two con-
tain a general introduction, the latter a history of the Patriarchate of Alexandria.

Justinian the Great. 241

the great Leo that the local Monophysite clergy had so distorted as
to make it pass for a blast from Antichrist.

Every Emperor from the second Theodosius had longed to close
these gaping wounds, and had even attempted the same with more or
less success. In the wild and universal conflict the independence of
the ecclesiastical power was pushed aside as secondary to the resto-
ration of outward order and concord. It was an age of great per-
sonal and corporate ambitions, on the part of the Oriental clergy in
particular. The rapid successions to episcopal sees, brought about
by heresy and schism, roused an unholy cupidity in the souls of
men otherwise inoffensive to Church or State. Only from Rome do
we hear regularly the genuine principles of the relations of the two
powers, and only there is any effective resistance preached and car-
ried out against the evil Csesaropapism that lurked in every imperial
heart since Constantine.^" Justinian was no exception. First
among the Emperors he attains the character of a theologian by his
edicts and decrees in the long conflict that arose with the condemna-
tion of Origenism and ended in the painful business of the Three
Chapters. Here he recalled the worst day of Arianism, when Con-
stantius at Milan laughed to scorn the canons of the Church and
bade the bishops remember that he was their canon law. Justinian
had been brought up religiously ; the little manual of conduct that
thte good deacon Agapeetus prepared for him is yet preserved and
has always been highly esteemed as the parent of those numerous
Instructiones Principum, Monitiones and the like that we meet with in
the Middle Ages. He was profuse, by word and act, in his devotion
to the Apostolic See of Peter ; he acknowledged the supremacy of
its authority that had stood a rude and long test in the Acacian
Schism just closed, and the Liber Pontificalis relates with compla-

3oMuch has been written in the last three centuries on the relations of Church
and State at Constantinople. Cf. Riffel, "Geschichtliche Darstellung der Ver-
handlungen zwischen Kirche und Staat," Mainz, 1836, vol. I.; Niehues, "(jreschichte
der Verhandlungen Zwischen Kaiserthum und Papsthum im Mittelalter." Miinster,
2 vols., 1877-1890. The monograph of A. Gasquet, "L'Autorite imperials en matiere
religieuse 3. Byzance," Paris, 1879, and his "Etudes Byzantines," ib., 1888, are of
superior worth. Admirable in every way is Charles Diehl's "Etude sur Tadminis-
tration byzantine en Italic," Paris, 1888. Especially ch. vi., pp. 368-417, on the
relations of the Roman Church with the Emperor of Constantinople. They may
be read most usefully in connection with the notes of the Abb6 Duchesne to his
edition of the "Liber Pontificalis." Cf . Ternovsky, "Die griechische Kirche und die
Periode der allgemeinen Kirchenversammlungen," Kiew, 1883; Gelzer, "Die poli-
tische und kirchliche Stellung von Byzang," Leipzig, 1879; Kriiger, "Monophysitis
che Streitigkeiten im Zusammenhan^ mit der Reichspolitik," Jena, 1884. These
latter works are colored by the peculiar convictions of their learned authors, as ia
also Pichler, "Geschichte der kirchlichen Trennung zwischen Orient und Occi-
dent," Munich, 1864. The Catholic point of view is magisterially expounded m
the first volume of the classic work of Cardinal Hergenroether, "Photius," Regens-
burg, 1867-69, 3 vols. It also contains the best resum6 of Byzantine Church history
before Photius. Of this work Krumbacher, the historian of Byzantine literature,
says (p. 232): "Hauptschrift iiber Photius ist und bleibt wohl noch langer Zeit
das durch Gelehrsamkeit und Objectivitat ausgezeichnete Werk des Kardinals J.
Hergenroether." In Pitzipios, "L'Eglise Orientale," Paris, 1888, there is a popular
description from a Catholic viewpoint of the politico-ecclesiastical rOle of the
city and clergy of Constantinople from its foundation.

242 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

cency his gifts to the Roman churches. He received Pope Agapetus
with all honor, but his treatment of the unhappy Vigilius has drawn
down on him the merited reprobation of all.^^ Perhaps he felt less
esteem for the person of the latter, whom he had known intimately
as a companion of Agapetus ; perhaps, too, his own final lapse into
the heresy of an extreme Monophysite sect was a just sanction for
the violence done to a sinning but repentant successor of Peter. He
confirmed the ambition of the patriarchs of Constantinople and
secured finally for them the second rank, at least in honor. Under
him the third canon of the Council of Constantinople (381), and the
twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon (451), that Rome
had energetically rejected, were tacitly accepted. In the long strug-
gle the honor and the liberties of Alexandria and Antioch had gone
down in spite of the papal efforts to save them. The consequences
of this were seen within a century in the rapid unhindered spread of
Islam over Egypt and Syria and its assimilation of Persia, whereby
the fall of Constantinople was made certain. He ruled the churches
at pleasure, and with a rod of iron, divided ecclesiastical provinces,
deposed and exiled the highest patriarchs, and not only humiliated
Saint Peter in the person of Vigilius, but compelled his successors to
ask for imperial confirmation and to send large sums of money to
secure it. It was well for the churches that no second Justinian fol-
lowed him. But his despotic temper and his precedents were not
soon forgotten. Perhaps it may be urged for him that he met
habitually only a weak and sycophantic curial clergy, and that the
ancient bonds of Empire were all but dissolved in the Orient. He
is still remembered in the Greek Church for his hymns, one of which
is still in frequent use.^^ Indeed, he is, perhaps, the oldest hymno-
grapher of the Greeks. But when all hrs been said, it remains
true that his was the timely, welcome, and long reign of an orthodox
Emperor, that he broke the impact of Monophysitism, that he was
generous beyond measure to the churches, and to the poor extremely
charitable. The Christian episcopate of the East looked on him as a
father and a providence, and in the storms of the century he was
never too far below his high calling. The Western churches loved

3iCf. "Liber Pontificalis'' (ed. Duchesne) s. v. Vigilius; Duchesne, "Revue des
Questions Historiques," April, 1895. Thomas Hodgkin, "Italy and Her Invaders,"
Oxford, 1896 (2d ed.), vol. IV^ c. xxiii. "The Sorrows of Vigilius," pp. 571-594.

32 ''Only -begotten Son and Word of God, Immortal, Who didst vouchsafe for
our salvation to take flesh of the Holy Mother of God and Ever- Virgin Mary,
and didst without mutation become man and wast crucified, Christ our God, and
by death didst overcome death, being One of the Holy Trinity and glorified
together with the Father and the Holy Ghost, save us." Julian, "Dictionary of
Hymnology," London, 1892 p. 460. Cf. Edmond Bouvy, "Les Origines de la Poesie
Chr6tienne," in "Lettres ChrStiennes," vol. IV., 1882, and for the hymn, Christ
and Paranikasi, "Anthologia Graeca Carminum Christianorum," Leipzig, 1871, p.
52. Stevenson, "Du rhythme dans I'hymnographie grecque." Correspondant, Oct.,
1876, and the epoch-making essay of Cardinal Pitra, "Hymnographie de I'Eglese
Grecque," Rome, 1867.

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods, 243

to remember him as he is depicted in mosaic in San Vitale at Ra-
venna, clad in imperial purple, surrounded by his officers of state
and offering gifts to the bishop of that see.^^

To the bishops of the West, standing amid the ruins of Roman
civilization, his person and reign appeared like those of another Con-
stantine. He was, indeed, a beacon light, set fair and firm where the
old world of Greece and Rome came to an end, and along its last
stretches the stormy ocean of mediaeval life already beat threaten-
ingly.

Thomas J. Shahan.

Catholic University, Washington, D. C.

ANGLO-SAXON MISSIONARY METHODS.

THE results and methods of Catholic and Protestant missions
to heathen races in the modern world are so essentially dif-
ferent that the use of "missionary" as a common name for
the agencies of both is open to grave misconception. The great
majority of the latter are carried on by English-speaking nations,
and there is a strong similarity between the sentiment which inspired
their origin and which is professedly more national than religious.
In the usage of to-day "Anglo-Saxon" is much used as a designation,
however defective, for the characteristics of the populations which
look on English traditions in politics, social life and religion as spe-
cially their own inheritance. Many claim the designation in this
country rather than that of American, and by such a class the
Hawaiian mission has been conducted. For this reason only we
have given the above title to our brief history.

The history of missions begins with Christianity itself. The
charge "Go and teach all nations" was the authority for the first
mission, the Apostles the first missionaries. Ever since missions
have formed an important part of the work of the Church in the
world. To convey the religion taught by Christ to those outside

330n the affection of the Christian episcopate for the empire, cf. Boissier, "La
Fin du Paganisme," Paris, 1891, vol. II., p. 491. The letters of Gregory the Great
(590-604) are a proof of this idealistic devotion that disappeared at Kome only
during the Iconoclastic follies. Even as late as Fredegarius and Isidore of Seville
the "imperii felicitas secura" was for the Catholic clergy of France and Spain the
model condition of civil affairs.

244 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the Church is as much a duty of her pastors as the instruction of the
CathoHc people within. There have been times of greater or less
extension of the Church, but there is none at which missionary work
was not carried on among some non-Christian population.

The establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire was fol-
lowed by missions for its spread among foreign nations. St. Pat-
rick in the fifth century, Columba in the sixth, St. Augustine in the
seventh and Boniface in the eighth kept up, without break, the work
of extension. The next four centuries were marked by successful
mission work in Poland, Hungary, Scandinavia and the Slavonian
nations. In the thirteenth century Dominicans and Franciscans
were teaching Christian doctrine to Mongols and Thibetans and
Catholic Bishops were established in remote China. The great in-
road of Mahometanism under the Tartar races in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries arrested for a time the progress of Christian mis-
sions, but the work was taken up again with renewed vigor when
Columbus opened America and Vasco de Gama Asia to intercourse
with Christian Europe. The chain of Catholic missioners has con-
tinued in America from Las Casas to Father De Smet, in Asia from
Francis Xavier to the martyred Bishops and priests of Tonking, in
the islands of Oceanica from Urdaneta to Bishop Battalion, in
Africa from Francis of Assisi to Cardinal Massaja.

The hundred and fifty years that preceded the Protestant Re-
formation was the period of least outward extension in the whole
history of Christianity. The Turks and Mongols and Moors girdled
Europe with Mahometan foes and cut off nearly all access to the
heathen lands beyond. With the discovery of America a new field
was opened for Catholic missionary activity which was actively cul-
tivated during the next three centuries.

Las Casas and Pedro c^e Cordova began the work of converting
the American natives before the revolt of Luther. It was continued
by a host of successors through both American continents from
Canada to Patagonia down to our own days. The Reductions of
Paraguay and California, the heroism of Peter of Ghent, Betanzos
and Zumarraga in Mexico, the dauntless charity of Jogues and
Breboeuf in Canada are only a few chapters in the mission history of
America from Las Casas to Father De Smet and Archbishop
Seghers. An Indian Catholic population of at least twenty-five mil-
lions is to-day the proof that this work was not in vain. In Asia
under the rule of pagan monarchs similar results were attained.
The converts to Christian belief in Japan numbered nearly a million
in the seventeenth century and more than half that number in China.
In India, from the capital of the Mogul to Cape Comorin, Catholic
congregations were formed everywhere. In Annam to-day, after

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 245

fifty years of persecution as unsparing as any in history, nearly a
million of Christians are a monument of the success of Catholic mis-
sions. The seven millions of Catholics in the Philippines are an-
other.

It is a historical fact that in all this diffusion of Christianity no
part was taken by the European nations which had separated from
the Church in the Protestant Reformation. Spaniards, Portuguese,
Frenchmen and Italians, Belgians and Germans all shared in the
work, but the Protestant nations, though claiming to be Christian,
took neither part nor interest in the conversion of heathen popula-
tions. England and Holland were the most prominent nations in
the work of European colonization and conquest during the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, but their governments and people
alike showed no desire to impart their religions to the native races
with whom they came in contact. While the English populace was
denouncing the "idolatries" of Catholics at home and sending Arch-
bishop Plunkett and the other victims of the Popish Plot to the
scaffold in their zeal for Protestantism, the founder of Calcutta, Job
Charnock, was offering sacrifice to Siva at the grave of his Hindoo
wife, and the Dutch merchants were trampling on the Cross in Na-
gasaki to prove to Japanese pagans that they were not Christians
like the converts of Francis Xavier. High minded men like the
Irish Berkeley and the New England Eliott attempted in vain to ex-
cite the religious feeling of the English people to the conversion of
the American Indians. At the close of the American Revolution
there was hardly a single English Protestant of any denomination
engaged in the conversion of heathen races in any part of the world.

In the ferment of social projects which marked the era of the
French Revolution that of the conversion of heathens to Christianity
attracted attention among English Protestants for the first time.
It was a time of new ideas and reforms of every kind — poor schools,
penology and reading rooms — and money was forthcoming freely
for putting such ideas into practice. After considerable discussion
a body of three hundred ministers of various denominations organ-
ized, in 1795, the London Missionary Society. Its professed object
was *'to lead heathen populations into gradual acquaintance with
the glorious Truths of Revelation." The methods of attaining this
desired end were the circulation of the Bible and founding small
colonies of clergymen and artisans as "little models of a Christian
community" in such localities as would guarantee safety of life, a
healthy climate and no inordinate difficulty of languages to the pros-
pective apostles. The expenses were to be met in the first place by
subscriptions from the charitably disposed at home and afterwards
by the returns that might be expected from developing the resources

246 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

of the lands evangelized. The South Sea Islands were selected as
the first field of the new missionary experiment on all the above
grounds and also in view of the convict settlements in Australia
which had been begun by the British Government at Botany Bay.
Benevolent individuals subscribed freely to the new and romantic
enterprise. A vessel was purchased and thirty or more ''mission-
aries" of various trades, with their families, were furnished with
passage and support to the South Seas to begin the new work of
converting the heathen there. The missionary vessel, it may be
added, secured a cargo of tea for her home trip, thus combining zeal
and profit in characteristic English fashion.

The enterprise thus begun proved a financial success. The white
men got grants of land and built up comfortable homes in the
tropics and the natives accepted them as their superiors instinctively.
Numerous other missions on the same plan followed during the next
few years. The various Protestant missions, both English and
American, now spread over the world and which have become so
conspicuous lately in China, Turkey and other lands, are nearly all
founded on the methods of the original London Missionary Society.
Though their result has been insignificant as far as the spread of
Christianity is concerned, the missionary element is an important
factor in the commercial and political world to-day. The word
''missionary" in modern English ideas conveys an idea so widely
different from the meaning attached to it by history and the Catholic
world that with the majority it has become a term of scorn. Lord
Salisbury's late address to the English missionary representation is
a strong illustration of the fact. To confound the work of St.
Francis Xavier,of the civilizers of Paraguay and the martyrs of Japan
and Corea with so-called missions of the English type is a crime
against the well being of humanity itself. It seems to us that the
difference can best be shown by the detailed history of a modern Pro-
testant mission. We shall select that of Hawaii, which has been for
many years put forward as a successful instance of the Christianiza-
tion of a heathen people by Protestant mission methods. The mis-
sionary organization which undertook has proclaimed the work
complete and ended. It has had its history officially drawn up by
one of its officers, Dr. Rufus Anderson, who claims full acquaintance
with its details. His statements have been supplemented by a his-
tory, lately published by the last native Queen of the race, converted
Liliuokalani, as well as by numerous other eye witnesses. We shall
let all these tell the methods and results of modern Protestant mis-
sion work.

The mission to Hawaii was the work of the New England Congre-
gationalist body, which at the time was the State Church of Massa-

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 247

chusetts. Conversion of the heathen had formed no part of Puritan
reHgious activity for two hundred years after the settlement at Ply-
mouth Rock. According to Dr. Anderson it was about 1816 that
the attention of New England Protestants was first awakened to the
duty of communicating revealed truth to the pagan world. The
first attempt at discharging the duty was a very modest one. About
twenty-five boys and young men from different foreign countries,
who had come to Boston in the course of trade, were gathered into
a school at Cornwall and there taught English and church attend-
ance. The wisdom of the newly established "Board of Commission-
ers for Foreign Missions" considered that after a few years of this
schooling the wanderers would return home and make Christians of
their countrymen by their shining example. These artless hopes
were rudely disappointed, as might be expected, and the school was
closed in a few years. The Board next ventured on a more daring
attempt to send out ministers of the Gospel, already trained as such,
to the foreign lands. With some distrust in purely religious
agencies, it decided to add laymen of different occupations who
might be willing to seek fortune abroad and incidentally to furnish
the heathen with good example of Christian lives. Three young
ministers, all newly married — Messrs. Bingham, Thurston and Whit-
ney— offered their services for the task. A doctor, a printer and a
farmer, with five children, made up the "missionary" colony. Pass-
age was secured in a Boston vessel bound for Hawaii and a large
stock of goods provided for the support of the mission and profitable
dealing with the natives. The party reached Hawaii without acci-
dent in 1820.

They found Hawaii perfectly safe as a residence for strangers. A
native chief, Kamehameha, had brought the whole group under a
single despotic government during the early years of the century.
His conquests had been largely effected by the use of European arms
and the help of European deserters from the ships which touched at
the islands. Some of these had been made Governors of islands, and
respect for Europeans had become a principle with the native chiefs.

Under the strong hand of Kamehameha the wars, formerly com-
mon among the different tribes, had been stopped, and deeds of vio-
lence or robbery among the population were suppressed by sum-
mary executions. The evidence of the missioners and of subsequent
visitors attest that deeds of violence were rarer among the people of
Hawaii than in most parts of America or Europe. The high chiefs,
it is true, held power of life and death over their inferiors as abso-
lutely as the Sultan of Turkey, but they carefully avoided any vio-
lence towards Europeans. The young King readily granted the
land asked for a settlement by Mr. Bingham and expressed his pleas-

248 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ure at the arrival of the newcomers. He visited the ship which had
brought them in his native dress, and even got drunk on board, as
the mission chronicler relates.

A circumstance specially favorable to the teachers of a new re-
ligion at this time had just occurred. The Hawaiian original belief
was tolerably vague. A number of supernatural beings were recog-
nized as deities, one of the most formidable being Pele, the presid-
ing spirit of the great volcano of Hawaii. An elaborate system of
superstitions or 'Tabus" regulated the life of the people under the
supposed sanction of the native gods. Men and women could not
eat together, and various articles of food were strictly forbidden to
different classes, and even to women of the highest rank. On the
death of Kamehameha two of his widows were regarded as the high-
est persons in the State, though the son of one of them was the
nominal King. The royal ladies found the Tabus inconvenient, and
advised their abolition. The young King and other chiefs feared
disaster if the attempt were made, and some agitation followed
among the people. A curious incident settled the difficulty. Two
temples had been built, and the King was required to dedicate them
according to traditionary usages. He, unfortunately, imbibed too
much rum at the ceremony, and not only confused the rites, but
broke the great Tabus by eating roast dog with the women and
smoking from their pipes. As no manifestation of supernatural
wrath followed, the whole native religious system was pronounced a
fraud by Queen Kaahumanu and the chiefs of her party. The tem-
ples were closed, numbers of idols burned and the old rites forbidden
to the people. This had occurred before the landing of the New
England missionaries, who found a land absolutely without a re-
ligion in consequence. The Queens were ready to adopt some sub-
stitute, on the European plan, if they could find one, but the King
was anxious to continue free from restraint on his habits by religion
of any kind.

The missionaries made no attempt to explain the purpose of their
coming for some time. In fact, they had no knowledge of the lan-
guage, and besides their time was occupied in providing suitable
houses for their families in which the furniture and other resources
of civilization might be properly displayed to heathen eyes. Three
pupils of the Cornwall school had been brought as interpreters, but
they proved useless, as the mission chronicler explains, because their
education had been confined to teaching them English and had
given them "very few ideas." The missionaries, then, had to learn
the native language themselves, and they evidently found it a hard
task. An easier method of reaching the confidence of the Queen,
however, was found. She became deeply interested in the dress of

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 249

the missionaries' wives and employed them to make similar articles
for her own use. The picture of the trials of modern missionaries
given in Mr. Bingham's letters to the Board is graphic and unique.

"Just look into the straw palace of a Hawaiian Queen, in the first
or second year of our sojourn among them, and see a missionary's
wife waiting an hour to get Her Majesty to turn from her cards to
try on a new dress for which she has asked. Hear her curt remarks :
Too tight; off with it; make it over again,' and see the lady
patiently obeying the orders." But the reward was to come.
"Within another year Kaahumanu, Keopaluna, Kapiolana and other
chiefs threw around themselves an air of rising consequence by the
increase not only of clothing, but of furniture, noticing and trying to
imitate what attracted their attention in the mission families. The
mission," adds the historian, "was divinely guided on the right way.
The ladies had been well educated in domestic habits. They showed
the native women how to make garments for themselves and their
children." Millinery as an agent of conversion is certainly a new
discovery in the annals of the human race. Mr. Bingham deserves
whatever credit it may bring him as a Christian missionary. Kaa-
humanu, under the influence of her new silk dresses, declared herself
willing to take up the "prayer" of her dressmakers instead of the
old rites. The offer was hailed as a triumph of grace, but some
peculiarities of conduct in the royal proselyte made the missionaries
doubtful about receiving her as a real Christian. She had just taken
as husband a chief of Kaui, who had at least one other wife. She
also was inclined to have natives who incurred her anger killed with-
out ceremony, and finally she even treated the missionaries as her
inferiors. The mission historian in another place gives the informa-
tion that Kaahumanu had a resemblance to the English Elizabeth,
and even declares that her disposition was very like that of the head
of the mission, Mr. Bingham himself. For all these causes the mis-
sionaries deemed it best to defer her reception into the fold for some
years.

The science of Christian dressmaking was confined to the female
evangelists. Mr. Bingham found another work in the art of print-
ing. It does not appear that he was able to make himself under-
stood by the natives in their own tongue when he began the work
of translating parts of the Scripture and hymns into Hawaiian. He
made out a simple alphabet of twelve English letters, after an inef-
fectual attempt to imitate the work of the Cherokee Sequoia, by re-
ducing the Hawaiian tongue to a syllabary. The printer of the mis-
sion now came to be as useful as the dressmakers in gaining atten-
tion. The new invention caught immediate attention. A chief got
a few printed sheets, and in a month and a naif had mastered them

250 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

so far that he wrote a short note himself to the missionaries. The
novelty attracted the simple natives irresistibly. The chiefs not only
learned to read, but ordered their people to do the same. As soon as
some natives mastered the art they v^ere ordered to go as teachers
among the others. Within a few years fifty thousand of all ages
were working at the printed sheets furnished them by the mission,
and nearly a third of them, it was claimed, could read fairly well.
When we are told that a woman of 80 accomplished the task it does
not seem as if the new accomplishment involved any special intel-
lectual effort. It came to an end about 1832 nearly as suddenly as
it had begun. The reason given is that the teachers had exhausted
their knowledge. Dr. Anderson admits that the native teachers
could not have a very adequate idea of the nature of religion, but he
adds sagely : "What they taught was invaluable."

The spread of reading was exclusively a native occupation. Some
missioners who visited Molokai for the first time found over a thou-
sand scholars, such as they were, in that island. The books, how-
ever, were furnished by the missionaries and proved an important
source of income. With prudent thrift "the mission deemed it best
for the natives to pay for their books in products or in labor." In
some places native cloth, in others wood, in all meat, fresh vegetables
and labor were required. Even land grants seem to have been
known. Boki, a chief whose fondness for native customs caused
much grief to the missioners, gave a valuable estate at Pauhunau to
Mr. Bingham. It is now the seat of the Oahu College.

While the printing and millinery departments of the new mission
were thus favorably progressing, both in the way of revenue and in
gaining royal favor for their practitioners, it does not appear that
anything in the way of teaching the doctrines of Christianity was
done for four or five years. Several chiefs, like Kaahumanu, were
quite willing to call themselves Christians, much in the same way
as Kamehameha had raised the British flag years before on the ad-
vice of Captain Vancouver. Hardly any, however, knew enough
even of the simplest principles to warrant their admission. The
Queen mother, Keopulani, was one of the would-be proselytes. She
was attacked by fatal illness in 1823, and two missioners went to see
her and decided she had better be baptized. A large number of the
chiefs, however, were present, and the missionaries felt that their
knowledge of the language would not warrant them in explaining
the significance of the rite to the Hawaiian intelligence. Their
embarrassment was relieved by the arrival of an English visitor from
Tahiti who could speak Hawaiian and did, actually, baptize the
Queen. This and the marriage of one of the original interpreters
to a native woman seem to have been the only public acts connected

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 251

with religion that were offered to the natives during the first three
years of the mission.

It was felt that something must be done to give a more positively
religious character to the work for the satisfaction of the subscribers
at home in America. A favorable opportunity offered in 1824. A
native chief revolted in Kaui, and Kaahumanu sent a thousand war-
riors to put down the insurrection. It was the old custom to begin
battles with some religious forms, and as the Tabus were sup-
pressed the Queen Regent adopted a kind of semi-Christian rite.
The warriors were ordered to observe a day's fast and to put off bat-
tle till after Sunday. The observance of the Sabbath appears to have
been a main article of Christian practice in the system of the New
England missionaries. The battle was fought with all the old sav-
agery and won by the royalists. Kaahumanu accepted the victory
as a proof of the superiority of the white man's "prayer" and re-
newed her request to Mr. Bingham for enrollment as a Christian.
The missionaries apparently concluded it best to accommodate her
and to make some attempt at giving the nation the name of Chris-
tian. The Regent and several other chiefs were baptized, and in
return Bingham became the Queen's Chief Counsellor. A num-
ber of the chiefs even began to hold prayer meetings among their
followers without further instruction from the missionary teachers.
Kaahumanu held a great council, in which she proclaimed her de-
termination to govern hereafter on the precepts of the Gospel. The
missionaries on their part declared they would not interfere in poli-
tics, but that as teachers "they would declare the whole Word of
God, whatever its bearings might be on former customs or existing
proceedings of government or people." With a despotic sovereign
pledged to obey the Gospel teachings, and the missionaries the
recognized exponents of the Gospel, it is not easy to see the value of
the promise.

The laws, in fact, began immediately to take on a peculiar char-
acter. Strict observance of the Sabbath was ordered for all the na-
tives and penalties decreed against the Hquor traffic, the use of to-
bacco and the observance of many of the native customs which did
not meet the approval of Mr. Bingham. In some parts of the
islands, we are told, the natives ascertained the date of the Sabbath,
and on that day put on their best clothes and went to sleep in their
houses. The native dances, and especially their custom of chanting
over the dead, were strictly prohibited, though on what principle it
is not easy to discover. Uncouth manners must be changed was the
missionary maxim strictly enforced. It is curious that in 1826, when
hardly any natives had as yet received Christian instruction, a decree
was issued that all marriages should be performed by the mission-

252 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

aries alone. The historian does not mention what offerings were
required of the contracting parties on these occasions.

Some troubles with English and American visitors to Honolulu
arose from the new regulations. The United States sloop Dolphin
visited the islands in 1825, and her commander insisted that a regu-
lation forbidding women to go on board ships should be abrogated.
It was an unsavory business and resulted in the trumping up of
claims of American citizens against the native chiefs to the amount
of half a million dollars. Another American vessel visited Hono-
lulu the next year to enforce this claim, and a tax of sandalwood
had to be levied on the population to meet the extortion. With this
display of the power of foreign nations the dependence of the Queen
on Bingham was increased enormously. She determined that the
common people, who had hitherto been left to themselves by the
missionaries, should become Christians. In company with several
missionaries, for the force of the latter had been greatly enlarged by
reinforcements from New England, she made a tour through Oahu
and preached in her own fashion to the people. The result is best
given in the words of Dr. Anderson :

''The people were accustomed to obey the chiefs without hesita-
tion. The chiefs gave orders to build churches and school houses,
to learn to read — they did so ; to listen to sermons of the mission-
aries, to forsake sin and turn to the Lord — they put on, without hesi-
tation, the form of religion at least." It is not surprising that a
couple of years later, when the young King took authority and
withdrew the law of compulsory attendance at church and schools,
both were at once deserted. The mission historian consoles him-
self by the reflection that the "mass of the population must have had
glimpses, at least, and many distinct apprehensions of the funda-
mental doctrines of the Gospel. Such was the conversion of the
Hawaiians when an American President, Quincy Adams, sent the
missionaries congratulations on the progress in the islands of letters
and true religion, the religion of the Christian Bible. The action
of Kaahumanu and her missionary guides towards the Catholics in
Hawaii is a strange comment both on the tolerance and the truth-
fulness of the latter and of the spirit which the new religion inspired
in its converts. Two priests. Fathers Bachelot and Short, landed
in Hawaii in 1827, as the New England missionaries had seven years
before, to instruct and convert the natives to Christianity. The
pagan chief who then ruled had encouraged the spread of instruction
and given lands to the preachers of religion. The recently baptized
Kaahumanu made the profession of Catholicity a crime and branded
the Catholic religion as idolatry. Nor was this a passing outburst
of savage temper. A bitter persecution of the natives who joined

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 253

the Catholic Church was kept up fcr ten years until ended by the
interference of France in behalf of religious toleration. The allu-
sions to this descreditable portion of the mission history made by
Dr. Anderson are both disingenuous and cowardly. He admits the
banishment of the priests and a persecution of their converts, but
he claims that it was the act of the native Queen alone and alleges
that her own reasoning made her regard Catholicity as identical with
the old heathen rites of Hawaii. His further statement that when
she was disabused of this idea the persecution ceased is a direct false-
hood. The persecution continued seven years after the death of
Kaahumanu, while Bingham's influence was still supreme. Dr.
Anderson admits that toleration was only granted in 1839, ^^^ while
cautiously disclaiming any endorsement of persecution he describes
the demand for toleration made by the French naval officer as an
"'outrage on the natives." He appears perfectly ready to proscribe
Catholicity, if it could be done in secret, but shrinks from acknowl-
edging the fact.

A full report of the persecution was drawn up at the time by
Father Short and the Brothers who remained in Honolulu after his
first expulsion. It is substantiated by decrees issued in the name
of the Hawaiian King and reports from Honolulu newspapers.
From these sources we give the story of the new Puritan persecution
in Hawaii.

The Catholic missionaries had entered Hawaii as other Europeans
did. The Queen, under Bingham's advice, endeavored to drive
them away by threats, but no heed was paid to them. A number
of natives began to attend the Catholic services and ask instruction.
Several were baptized and a Catholic congregation was growing up
in Hawaii when the Queen issued a decree forbidding attendance at
Catholic worship. Though the natives were accustomed to obey
their chiefs in professing any religion, as Dr. Anderson declares, the
Catholic converts proved an exception. They continued to practice
their religion in spite of the royal decree, and in consequence a num-
ber were arrested in 1830 and imprisoned for some months. They
were required to abandon the Pope's religion and join "Binames
prayer," and on their refusal were sentenced to hard labor on the
fortifications.

The young King about this time showed an inclination to assert
his own authority and the persecution ceased a while. Kaahumanu
soon recovered her ascendancy. The next year nine natives were
condemned to hard labor and confiscation of property for profession
of the Catholic Faith. One, Esther Uhete, was a high chief, but she
was treated with the same brutality as the others. They were kept
at their task till the death of Kaahumanu, in 1832. In the meantime

254 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Fathers Bachelot and Short were arrested, put forcibly on a vessel
owned by the native government and sent to CaHfornia.

Kaahumanu died in 1832, and the young King, Kamehameha III.,,
showed some inclination to throw off the control already assumed
in government by the missionaries. The Catholic prisoners were
released, on the request of the English Consul, and attendance at
Protestant service was no longer enforced. In consequence the
churches and schools were deserted by the natives and the mission
seemed in danger of a complete collapse. Kinau, the daughter of
the first Kamehameha, was, however, as devoted to Bingham's influ-
ence as her step-mother, and she had a strong party among the
chiefs. The young King soon resigned himself to her guidance,,
and the persecution of Catholics began again. In 1835 about twelve
men and women were arrested as adherents of the Pope, and by a
refinement of brutality were set to cleaning the privies of the fort at
Honolulu with their hands. The English and American Consuls
remonstrated against these brutalities, but their demand was op-
posed by Mr. Bingham in person. He declared that all the natives
should have only one thought in religion, and the chiefs accepted
this theory as part of the new Gospel.

Though sending home glowing accounts of the conversion of
Hawaii, the missionaries about this time were seriously alarmed as
to the future of their mission. The readiness with which the natives
had abandoned all practices of the new religion when Kamehameha
III. relaxed the decrees of his step-mother showed how little hold
the new doctrines had. Less than two thousand converts had been
enrolled as church members during 19 years. The fad for reading
schools had completely ended and the tangible evidences of Ha-
waiian Christianity that could be reported were mainly the Euro-
pean dresses and furniture adopted by the chiefs. Mr. Bingham,
we are told, urged the industrial development of the country on
the New England Missionary Board as the most promising field for
evangelical labor. His suggestion was not adopted for prudential
motives. A revival on the well-known New England system was
next tried. This is known in missionary annals as the great awak-
ening of 1837. The natives of all classes were hunted up by the
mission servants and gathered for prayer meetings, at which their
feelings were wrought up to hysterical outbursts of shrieking and
praying. The missionaries profited by the excitement to enlarge
their nominal following. The common people had not, as a rule,
been admitted to baptism on the ground of their want of adequate
instruction. The revival meetings were assumed to have remedied
this defect and the attendants were baptized into the Church indis-
criminately. Within three years over twenty thousand were thus

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 255,

enrolled. One missionary, Mr. Coan, baptized over seven thou-
sand on his own account. The mission historian records that a year
later he found the new converts more ignorant and less religious
than before the great awakening. Similar experiences are not con-
fined to the Hawaiians.

The revival had been the signal for greater persecution of the
Catholic natives. In 1838 six were sentenced for life to hard labor^
and three women among them were further condemned to work in
the chain gang with public prostitutes. This dirty infamy speaks,
volumes of the moral tone of the Protestant missionaries then in
Hawaii. Fresh cruelties were also tried. Catholic women were
triced up by the wrists for many hours to compel them to adopt the
"prayer of Bingham," and that worthy himself witnessed the torture
in his carriage. The persecution continued until a French frigate,,
L'Artemise, arrived in Honolulu and its captain required the re-
lease of the Catholic prisoners and full freedom for the exercise of
religion in the future. The King accepted the terms and the latest
persecution was thus ended. Dr. Anderson describes this demand
for toleration as an outrage on native rights !

With the death of Kinau, in 1839, the influence so long enjoyed
by Mr. Bingham with the government was shaken. The King
showed less regard for his religious teachings than his sister and
stepmother had done and developed an attachment for old customs,
which promised ill for his continued submission to the new ways of
life. The missionaries and their lay assistants were nearly a hun-
dred, and as the revival had failed to bring any permanent accession
of native converts, mission energy was turned to politics.

The old tribe organization, as it was throughout all the Polyne-
sian islands in the days of Cook, was practically the only govern-
ment known in Hawaii under Kaahumanu and Kinau. Every tribe
had a hereditary chief, whose power over everything in his domain
was absolute and unquestioned. In old days a kind of supernatural
character was attached to the persons of the great chiefs, and dis-
obedience to them was held as a sacrilege. In Hawaii when Kame-
hameha I. made all the islands obey his authority, he merely became
the greatest among many other great chiefs who still continued to
rule their own tribes as before. Each chief divided the land, the
fishing grounds and the woods among his people in separate plots
for their support and kept others for his own use which were
worked for his benefit by the common labor. The sale of land was
unknown, the territory of each tribe was its common property and
the chief only regulated its use. Like the old Highland chiefs, each
kept a number of personal retainers, who lived in grass huts around
the chief's dwelling and were supported from his lands. The only

256 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

change introduced by Kamehameha was the appointment of special
governors over the different islands and the building of a fort and
some vessels as a royal military force. The revenues of both King
and chiefs were drawn mainly from their lands. The King levied
small dues on foreign vessels and licenses for some occupations,
especially distilling and liquor selling. The great chiefs formed a
council for the King and practically controlled his action. Decrees
from this body or the King alone were occasionally issued as laws,
but foreigners paid little attention to them, nor was there any special
force to put them into execution except among the natives.

The missionaries had been quite content with this system of gov-
ernment so long as supreme authority remained in the hands of the
two Queens, who implicitly followed their own instructions. With
the death of Kinau in 1839 and the stop put to persecutions of Cath-
olics, a change came over the missionary minds. They decided
that mission interests called for a government of more civilized
form, as they had been held to call for the substitution of European
dress for the native bark clothes and feather mantles. The native
ideas of land tenure appeared particularly barbarous to their ideas,
and they urged the necessity of reform in this point on the chiefs
with more earnestness than religious doctrines. At the departure
of the first mission colony from New England a sermon had been
preached, the text of which, according to Dr. Anderson, was the
significant one, "There yet remained very much land to be pos-
sessed." As the Hawaiian land could not well be possessed by the
missionaries while it remained common tribal possession, Mr. Bing-
ham and his colleagues now decided it their plain duty to get the
tribal system abolished. There were, however, only about eighty
white men in the colony, so persuasion, not force, was adopted to
accomplish the desired end. The missionaries advised the King to
organize his country on European political models, holding out the
promise that he would then be looked on as an equal with Kings of
England or France, whose ships had recently threatened to take
summary possession of the country. As the native inteUigence
knew nothing of the forms of European governments, the mission-
aries kindly furnished them with instructors from their own body.
The great revival was over and had left the natives more indifferent
to religious instruction than before, so some other field of action had
to be found for missionary energy. The Rev. Mr. Richards under-
took to give lectures on law to the native chiefs, to show the im-
portance of the proposed reforms. Dr. Anderson informs us that
the worthy divine had no legal training, but was gifted with "sound
common sense" and had really graduated from a Congregational
seminary. To prevent any insinuations about interference in poli-

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 257

tics on the part of teachers of rehgion, the good man renounced the
ministry and took charge of such papers and records as existed
among the chiefs at a fair salary.

The first step towards a civiHzed government for the Hawaiians
the missionaries decided ought to be a written constitution. The
chiefs acquiesced trustfully, but as they did not know what a con-
stitution was like, they asked their religious teachers to make one
for them. The method adopted was unique in the history of legisla-
tion, as Dr. Anderson triumphantly declares. A school had been
established at Lahainula six years before, when the reading "bees"
of the first days went out of fashion. This school was intended to
provide the mission with native assistants in teaching and other
works, though natives were not considered by any means fit to be-
come ordained ministers. To the pupils of this school the task of
preparing a constitution was entrusted, and the document was pro-
duced within a couple of weeks. As given by Dr. Anderson, it is a
curious jumble of extracts from the Old Testament, the Declaration
of Independence and other generalities, coupled with shrewd provi-
sions that lands should be allotted to individuals and sold at will
and that new titles should overrule old ones. The King signed it
as an act of his sovereign power, and things went on as before among
the natives. However, Hawaii had a constitution. Three years
later an English war vessel entered Honolulu and its captain. Lord
Paulet, of his own authority declared the islands British territory.
The act was subsequently disowned by the English admiral on the
station and the British flag hauled down. Dr. Judd, the successor
of good Mr. Richards, carefully hid the precious document in the
mausoleum of Kamehameha during this crisis. His devotion to
Hawaiian nationality is warmly commended by the mission historian.

More practical measures followed the constitution. There were
over a hundred pupils in the mission seminary and small demand for
them as teachers of religion. The chiefs were urged to set up a
public school system, make the natives build school houses and com-
pel universal attendance and payment for the teachers. An advan-
tage of a constitutional system among untutored Polynesians that
had not escaped the "sound common sense" of its inventor was that
missionaries had to be called into the councils of the chiefs perma-
nently to show how it should be worked. The compulsory school
law was readily decreed under these circumstances, and Mr. Rich-
ards received control of the schools, under the title of Minister of
Education. About a hundred pupils of the seminary were thus pro-
vided with salaries as mission dependents, and at the same time the
other government offices were subjected to u large extent to the re-
commendation of the Minister of Instruction.

258 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Another development promised to give the missionaries control of
the future sovereigns of Hawaii. The old chiefs, of course, could
not do more than follow directions in managing the government on
the new plan. It was pointed out that their children ought to be
trained specially for their future duties, and another missionary,
Rev. Mr. Cooke, and his wife opened a royal boarding school, to
which all the children with any prospect of royal succession should
be sent at an early age. The last five native rulers were sent to this
establishment young — in some cases at three or four years. Ac-
cording to Queen Liliuokalani, who was there, thrift was a marked
feature of the Rev. Mr. Cooke's boarding school for royalty. She
says the teachers forgot that growing children had appetites, and
that the young Hawaiian scions of royalty had often to beg food
from the cooks or forage in the garden for roots or leaves of plants.
It is possible that this experience of New England thrift had some
effect in spoiling the results hoped for in the way of ascendancy over
the future Kings. All the pupils of the royal school showed in after
life scanty affection for misssionary influences. Their teacher, Mr.
Cooke, kept his school for ten years and then quitted it and the min-
istry to go into mercantile business, in which he acquired a large
fortune.

A Legislature, with parliamentary law and officers, was the next
step taken towards the Christianization of Hawaii. However, as
the chiefs were already accustomed to debating politics among them-
selves, its effect was not remarkable. The land regulations had a
more important effect both on the condition of the natives and their
missionary guides. The latter urged the wisdom of cutting up the
lands into separate, holdings. One-third was to be set apart in pri-
vate property to the King and his successors. Another third was
to be divided among the high chiefs, and the remainder among the
people at large. The good Mr. Richards assisted in the division, as
'land surveying was not familiar to the natives and their metes and
bounds were based on other methods. It was found when the chiefs
had been satisfied by grants of the lands actually cultivated for them
and the common people with such plots as they cared to work, that
the words addressed to the original missionaries were fulfilled and
that "very much land yet remained to be possessed." The mis-
sionaries suggested that this should be disposed of for the common
benefit, and the suggestion was accepted by the still docile chiefs.
Mr. Richards undertook to arrange the disposal. Dr. Judd took
his place as Minister of Instruction and Mr. Richards went to Eu-
rope to obtain recognition from the various governments for the new
constitutional kingdom and incidentally to make profitable disposi-
tion of the waste lands. The worthy ex-minister had alreadv in

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 259

184 1 made a contract with an American business firm — Ladd & Co.
— giving them the right to lease any unoccupied lands at a nominal
rent. He became a partner in the firm at the same time. On his
European trip he organized a larger concern — the Royal Belgian
Company — to which the concession of Ladd & Co. was transferred.
In his zeal for the welfare of the new government, he considerably
enlarged the privileges of the new company, so much so indeed that
the foreign trade of the islands appeared to have been made a monop-
oly for its benefit. Its rights had ultimately to be bought out by
the Hawaiian Government. Mr. Richards, it may be added, was
one of the directors of the Royal Belgian Company. "Very much
land yet remained to be occupied."

Coined money had become a necessity for the new government,
and it was coming in from the port dues and similar charges. The
native lack of business training of course prevented the chiefs from
knowing how to handle these revenues in civilized manner. Ac-
cordingly Dr. Judd, a medical missionary, was appointed Treasurer
in 1846. Courts to settle the land titles were also found desirable
and established in 1847. -^^ American lawyer, devoted to the mis-
sionaries, happened fortunately to land about this time, and on mis-
sionary recommendation he was made Chief Justice. Another
American became Attorney General and the form of a civilized gov-
ernment was rounded off by a Foreign Minister. A Scotchman,
Mr. Wylie, received the last office. He was regarded as a true
friend to the missionaries, but some remarks in Dr. Anderson's
pages suggest that there was over much "canniness" in his Scotch
nature. He subsequently induced Kamehameha IV. to set up an
English High Church Bishop in Honolulu and declare himself an
Episcopalian, to the deep disgust of the Congregational body.

While the missionaries were thus engaged in building up consti-
tutional monarchy in Hawaii its people were wasting away. Their
numbers dropped from 130,000 in 1830 to 108,000 in 1836, and to
84,000 in 1850. Forty years later they had dwindled to thirty-eight
thousand. This unfortunate state of affairs began to cause grave
doubts of the glowing statements regularly sent to America of the
religious progresss of the mission. Dr. Anderson mentions these
criticisms and avoids any definite answer. "Whether the people
might be represented as nationally christianized," he declares, "was
hard to say. There was no well defined opinion in the Christian
mind at home as to what constitutes a national conversion." After
this remarkable statement of the intelligent zeal which' had furnished
funds for the "conversion" of the South Sea heathens he puts in his
own description of what had actually been done in the way of im-
parting Christianity to them.

26o American Catholic Quarterly Review.

"While we see more of the foreign element than could be desired
in the government of the islands, we are permitted to regard it as an
independent and constitutional government, with a native sovereign
at its head, as confessedly cognizant of God's law and the Gospel as
any in Christian Europe, and with a community of self-governing
churches embracing as large a proportion of the population and as
really entitled to the Christian name as the churches of the most
highly favored countries."

There is a strange contrast between Dr. Anderson's modest state-
ment of the work accomplished and the enthusiastic congratulations
embodied in the address to the public of a committee of members of
Congress presided over by no less a person than ex-President John
Quincy Adams.

The apparent candor of the secretary of the American Board of
Foreign Missions was not without due motive. That body had been
collecting large sums from the liberality of the Protestant public in
return for the mission work done under its auspices. Over twelve
hundred thousand dollars, we are told, was expended on the Ha-
waiian mission between 1819 and 1863. Conversion of heathens by
modern methods is an expensive matter. There were twenty-seven
ordained ministers and sixty American mission helpers laboring on
the sunny shores of the Pacific islands in 1837. As the whole num-
ber of natives enrolled as Christians at any time scarcely reached
eighteen thousand, it would seem that the labors of the missionaries
can hardly have been excessive. Their remarkable longevity and
the rapid growth of their families amid the decay of the native popu-
lation point to the same conclusion. The latter circumstance, in-
deed, was freqently described in the Board reports as a special mark
of the blessing of heaven on the great work. Some occurrences in
1848 induced a modification of this judgment. The children of
missionaries in the islands had grown to a hundred and thirty by that
year. Their parents began to think it might be well to bring a num-
ber of them home for education as the moral surroundings in the
new Protestant Paraguay were decidedly unfavorable to their Chris-
tian training. Five missionaries, with twenty-five children, applied
to the American Board to bring themselves and their families home
and provide for them in America according to contract. Twelve
more missionary families were ready to make the same demand the
following year, and others would quickly follow. In fact, as Dr.
Anderson tells us, "the prudential committee" found it likely that
the mission would be abandoned by all its teachers within a few
years if the latter could only get provision made for them at home
as they expected. The alarms excited by this untoward prospect
were appalling. Provision for twenty-five missionary families on a.

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 261

•style suitable to their requirements was a burden beyond the re-
sources of the Board. It would also be strange to the public to
learn that the mission which had been described as the triumph of
modern evangelical methods should be left without even a pastor.
The prudential committee declined to endorse the request of the
five tired missionaries. They parleyed and inquired, and the his-
torian tells us the results.

It would seem to ordinary eyes that it should be an easy task to
find zealous teachers among American Protestants to take the place
of the men whose success had been so remarkable. Such, however,
was not the case. The old missionaries did not encourage any ex-
tension of the foreign element in the islands outside their own.
They had secured most of the important offices and land conces-
sions already, and they plainly stated that increase in the foreign ele-
ment was not desirable. A native clergy might have been expected
after twenty-five years of conversion such as had been pictured al-
ready, but on inquiry it appeared that the Christianity of the natives
had not w^arranted the admission of any of them to the Protestant
ministry. The converts went and came to church, as the govern-
ment ordered, but seemed lacking in intelligent appreciation of any
doctrines. It seems that of a total of fifty thousand converts who
had been received as church members up to 1863 there were only
eighteen thousand then left, or about a quarter of the actual popula-
tion. As many more had died, for the longevity of the American
teachers, some way, did not extend to their flocks. The others had
dropped all semblance of connection with Protestant churches. In
fact, though Dr. Anderson declines to admit it, a large number had
become members of the long persecuted Catholic Church.

The moral effect of the modern mission methods on the natives is
one of the strangest facts brought out by the discussion of the pen-
sion question for missionaries. Dr. Anderson acknowledges that
the population was steadily declining and that its decline was caused
by unrestrained licentiousness and disease introduced by the first
English visitors. That the kind of teaching the missionaries had
given had little effect in bringing in a higher morality than the old
pagan one he admits, but he finds consolation in the assurance that
if it had not been for the mission there would have been no natives
whatever left in existence. "Something" had been done, he asserts,
towards moral reformation, and he quotes a Rev. Dr. Gulick for the
assertion that "female virtue was not unknown in Hawaii" after
forty years of mission work. He turns from the unpleasant sub-
ject, however, with this brief testimony to vindicate the glories of
mission work : "The nation may, and probably will, fade away. It
will be forever true that the Sandwich Islands were Christianized by

262 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

evangelical mission from the United States, and that as a conse-
quence the people were recognised as entitled to the rank and privileges
of a civilized nation." Such is the highest claim put forward by its
chief promoters for the modern mission of Hawaii.

It was hardly to attain such results that the old Anglo-Saxon
Catholic missioners had labored in the forests of Germany or among
the Vikings of Scandinavia. Boniface and the Ewalds did not lay
their lives down that their converts might be "recognized as a civil-
ized nation" and then perish from the effects of that civilization.
Patrick did not win the Irish people to Christ that they might "fade
away" from among the nations, nor did the Celtic Columbkill, the
Polish Hyacinth, the Spanish Xavier or the French Brebceuf.
Christianity is of no land or race. Its methods of propagation were
given by the Redeemer in full perfection in Palestine nineteen hun-
dred years ago, and they have been carried out by Catholic teachers
during each succeeding century. If in pride of temporary power
any nation attempts the task of Christian mission work on its own
worldly methods the result will be the same as that of the American
mission of Hawaii.

The material results of the mission in the shape of buildings and
revenues were fully discussed by the prudential committee with the
missionaries abroad. Churches were numerous, as they had been
built with native labor imposed by the chiefs during the predomi-
nance of missionary influence. In 1870 the Protestant churches
numbered a hundred and twenty for a membership of fifteen thou-
sand. Dr. Anderson admits that they were far too numerous for
the wants of the population. The missionary teachers had not for-
gotten the thrift which levied the price of the early tracts on the
native recipients. Assessments for church uses were levied on the
native converts to the full amount of their resources. Exclusive
of labor and produce eighteen thousand dollars in gold was thus col-
lected in 1848. It had been raised to thirty-one thousand dollars,
rather more than two dollars a head, as Dr. Anderson triumphantly
declares, in 1870. In the Philippines three years ago ten cents a
head represented the cost of church and clergy to the natives, and
thirteen hundred priests were laboring under a tropical sun on an
average income of less than three hundred dollars each. Twenty
times that amount was paid by the Hawaiian Protestant converts,
but it was found insufficient to attract missionary successors to fill
the places of their first instructors. The needs of missionaries of the
modern "Anglo-Saxon" school are indeed different from those of
Catholic friars. "A clerical missioner will do more towards pro-
moting civilization by a well cultivated garden, a neat house, decent
furniture and becoming clothing than fifty artisans." Such was the

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 263

sage recommendation of an English missionary deputation from
Tahiti to the American Board in the beginnings of the Hawaiian
mission. The Board was now finding by experience that such
methods were a costly luxury, and it began to doubt the expediency
of paying for them much longer.

Under these circumstances the prudence of ordaining natives as
ministers was recognized by the white missionaries who were de-
sirous of release from their functions. The first was ordained in
1849, and within twenty years later the number reached thirty-
seven. Only eight white ministers then remained, and of the nu-
merous missionary families but two had taken to the ministry. The
others found more wealth in business pursuits and politics and were
looked on with high favor in evangelical circles at home. The
"missionary party" in Hawaii continued to hold its name long after
the official close of the mission. How its members finally overthrew,
by conspiracy with an unprincipled foreign Minister, the "civilized
native government," the establishment of which, as Dr. Anderson
states, was the one result of the Piotestant mission, is an unpleasant
historical episode of our own day. Its discussion would prolong
this article beyond the limits of this essay.

The prudential committee of the American Board of Foreign Mis-
sions, on mature consideration, declined to bring home the mission-
ary families. As a compromise it agreed to divide the property
owned by the Board in the islands among the missionary residents.
It further promised to continue salaries for some time to such as
were not already "provided with adequate incomes from glebe
lands, private property or the revenues of the native churches."
Tentative attempts were made to group the latter into bunches with
white pastors drawing salaries adequate to their dignity and native
assistants doing the greater part of the work at stipends proportioned
to native life ; but these, as Dr. Anderson tells, "met only partial
success." Thirty thousand dollars a year was no revenue to sup-
port a civilized modern clergy for fifteen thousand Hawaiians.
Civilized labor is dearer in the tropics than in temperate climates,
and the Board and the missionaries agreed that in the future the
care of Hawaiian souls had better be left to the cheaper native
pastors.

The original missionaries, however, were not left to absolute want.
Kamehameha III. was pretty effectually controlled by ex-missionary
ministers, and the public funds were drawn on freely to help out the
donations of the American Board. There was a Protestant seminary
at Lahamalula since 1844. The native government was got to take
it over in the sense of providing funds for its support, while its con-
trol was vested in a self-filling Board of Trustees appointed by the

264 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

missionaries. A similar arrangement was made for the school for
the children of the missionaries themselves. It became the Oahu
College, with a liberal grant of valuable land to its trustees. A cou-
ple of other mission schools for natives were turned into private
boarding schools, from which pure natives were excluded. These
provided for a few more missionaries comparatively well. The
royal school for natives was given up, but its missionary teacher,
Rev. Mr. Cooke, engaged in business in Honolulu with another
clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Castle. Both acquired sufficient wealth to
take away any desire they might have had of returning to New
England.

Though the risk of a wholesale return of missionaries was thus
averted, the American Board felt anxious to get clear of its connec-
tion with Hawaii. They merely wished to retire with credit before
the extinction of the nation, and they urged the establishment of a
Hawaiian Board to attend to the spiritual interests of the islands in
the meantime. They even advised that Hawaiian should be substi-
tuted for English as the official language of the mission and hinted,
not obscurely, that prudence counseled the policy of leaving the
natives to manage their own religion for the future. The mission-
aries in the islands acquiesced as they, too, found more tempting
fields of work than preaching to natives. They had a new Consti-
tution framed on stricter legal lines than the original semi-Scrip-
tural document of the seminary pupils which had done duty for
twelve years. Chief Justice Lee and two assistants prepared this
document, w^hich specially insisted on the rights of Cabinet officers
in legislation in a constitutional kingdom. It may be noted that
these gentlemen were Americans whose knowledge of monarchical
institutions was theoretical. The document, however, was signed
by the King as easily as the former. A large slice of the lands
originally reserved as his private domain was also turned over to
public use. A Rev. Mr. Armstrong entered the Cabinet as Min-
ister of Instruction, and during the rest of Kamehameha III.'s reign
the Ministry was wholly composed of foreign missionaries or their
adherents.

On the death of Kamehameha III. his successor, who had been
educated in the establishment of the Rev. Mr. Cooke, showed symp-
toms of restlessness under the missionary regime. Possibly the
scanty fare of that Hawaiian Dotheboys' Hall had some part in his
change of mind. A large defalcation was found in the Treasury,
and three missionary ministers were required to resign in con-
sequence. This incident is not mentioned in Dr. Anderson's his-
tory.

The New England Missionary Board, in view of this state of af-

Anglo-Saxon Missionary Methods. 265

fairs, had to continue its direction of Hawaiian Protestant church
affairs till 1863. It did so reluctantly. The prudential committee
endeavored to find a way to get out of the charge ten years earlier
with some show of spiritual credit. Dr. Anderson says that in 1853
they 'Ventured on a somewhat jubilant announcement that the
Sandwich Islands had been Christianized," but he adds "the fact does
not seem to have been generally credited by the Board itself." Ten
years later, during the excitement of the Civil War, the Board de-
cided to take the establishment of a civilized native monarchy as suf-
ficient proof that the mission work was completed. It felt that at
all events it could do no more in the line of conversion and that it
had exhausted the resources of the Anglo-Saxon civilization in that
direction. A Hawaiian Board took full charge of the religious inter-
ests of the native population, and the New England mission was
officially ended. Just thirty years later a faction of children of mis-
sionaries overthrew, by conspiracy with the Minister of a foreign
power and the help of a foreign war vessel, the native civilized gov-
ernment. Mr. Dole, the son of a missionary teacher, was installed
as President for life. The remnant of lands left to the native Kings
was seized by force and the last native Queen sentenced to five years*
imprisonment at hard labor for refusing obedience to the usurpers.
Such was the end of the mission's work.

The methods adopted by the Protestant missionaries in Hawaii
are identical with those of nearly every Protestant mission among
the natives of the Pacific islands. In New Zealand, in Tonga, the
Society Islands, Fiji and every other group which has been subjected
to Protestant influence similar methods have been employed, and
the result has been the same. The disappearance of the native pop-
ulation and the occupation of their lands by the missionaries and
their families as rulers has followed as the result of Protestant phil-
anthropy. It is worthy of serious reflection that in the islands where
Catholic teachers were accepted, and in those alone, the native pop-
ulation has not decayed. Wallis, Futuna and the Gambler Islands
are peopled by the same race as Hawaii. They have become Chris-
tian, and they have steadily increased in population since. The
Philippines when Legaspi visited them in 1568 were estimated to
have a population of about half a million. Hawaii when Cook
brought it first under the notice of English civilization was credited
with nearly four hundred thousand. To-day it has less than forty
thousand of the native race. The Filipino Catholics number over
seven millions. The facts are indisputable and -speak for them-
selves. Bryan J. Clinch.

San Francisco, Cal.

266 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

IL DIALOGO DI GALILEO GALILEI LINCEO.

WE feel that some apology is due to our readers for inviting
their attention to a subject that has been so much dis-
cussed and so warmly controverted as the action of the
Congregations of the Index and the Inquisition with regard to
Galileo ; but the fact is that, whether we desire it or not, it is revived
at intervals, sometimes by hostile or perhaps even friendly critics,
sometimes by biographers or scientific writers ; so that we venture
to think it a matter of importance that Catholics should be ac-
quainted at least with the principal facts of the case, as also with the
force and bearing of the decisions of the Roman Congregations on
the Copernican theory of astronomy and its supposed antagonism ta
Holy Scripture.

But a further apology may be expected from the present writer^
because in a little work published in London some years ago, and
bearing the title of "Galileo and His Judges," he endeavored to state
briefly but sufficiently the circumstances that occurred, and also ta
deal with the false inferences draw^n from them by opponents of the
Church and other misguided persons. It may therefore be consid-
ered questionable taste on his part to revert to the subject; but (as
has been just explained) it is not unfrequently revived by others,
new objections being made, or old ones re-stated ; whilst, on the other
side, fresh information has been acquired; and, last but not least,
some little modification of the argument formerly used has appeared
desirable.*

Under these circumstances it has been impossible to avoid repeat-
ing here, though in a condensed form, a great part of the narrative
as given in the work just mentioned ; and this also applies to the
abbreviated precis of the celebrated Dialogue, a fuller abstract of
which is to be found in the same work. The author of this article
must therefore throw himself on the mercy of his readers, and beg
them to pardon such unavoidable repetitions, and to excuse the ap-
parent egotism (unintentional let him assure them) of referring to his
own previous writings. He may take this opportunity of remarking

iThe apology of the writer is probably not so much required for American
readers, because he is not so presumptuous as to think that his work, published
in England, has ever had any appreciable circulation on the far side of the
Atlantic.

// Dialogo Di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 267

that his treatment of the decisions of the Roman Congregations is
different from that adopted by some Catholic apologists ; but, rely-
ing on the opinions received from very able theologians, he feels
confident that such treatment is in full accordance with Catholic
principles and with the spirit of dutiful obedience to the Holy See.

With this explanatory preface, we now proceed to the questions
which appear to us the most important to answer.

The attack on the Catholic Church by those who use the Galileo
case as a weapon may be stated thus : The Congregation of the
Index in the year 161 6 prohibited and condemned a printed letter
by a Carmelite Father Paul Anthony Foscarini, in which "the said
Father endeavours to show that the aforesaid doctrine of the immo-
bility of the Sun in the centre of the Universe and the mobility of the
Earth is consonant to the truth, and is not opposed to Holy Scrip-
ture," and also prohibited "all other books teaching the same thing."
The "aforesaid doctrine" referred to what the Sacred Congregation
termed "that false Pythagorean doctrine, altogether contrary to
Holy Scripture, concerning the movement of the Earth and the im-
mobility of the Sun taught by Nicolas Copernicus, etc., . . .
already spread about and received by many persons," and the object
of the decree was "lest any opinion of this kind insinuate itself to the
detriment of Catholic truth." This decree, though not officially
stated to have been approved by the Pope (Paul V.), undoubtedly
received his approval : in fact, before the promulgation of the decree
the Pope had desired Cardinal Bellarmine to send for Galileo and
admonish him to abandon the opinion in question and no longer to
teach it, which admonition, it seems, he promised to obey.

This action on the part of the Congregation of the Index is, of
course, not all. The indictment against Rome is also founded on the
proceedings taken by the Inquisition in 1633 against Galileo on
account of the publication of his famous Dialogue ; and this in fact
is the chief thing that has taken hold of the popular imagination (so
far as the popular imagination takes in the subject at all), and this
again partly arises from the theatrical story, not based on fact, of
the old philosopher stamping his foot on the earth and saying, "E
pur si muove," after his enforced abjuration of the Copernican
theory.

It is also alleged that a Bull of Alexander VIL, published in 1664,
and authorizing a new Index in the place of the old one, gave a
special sanction to the former decree prohibiting all works teaching
the Copernican theory, because it includes that 'decree amongst
many others, and also the monitum of 1620 ordering certain cor-
rections in the work of Copernicus, and containing in its preamble
a statement that the principles of Copernicus relating to the move-

2^ American Catholic Quarterly Reviezv.

ment of the Earth were contrary to the true and Catholic interpreta-
tion of Holy Scripture ; as also all works teaching the movement of
the Earth and the immobility of the Sun.

Before proceeding to answer these arguments, it may be well to
give a brief sketch of the life and character of Galileo, or Galileo
Galilei Linceo, to give him his name in full. He was born at Pisa
in 1564, and after studying mathematics and physical science at the
University of that place, he came to Florence, when about 21 years
of age, in order to go through a mathematical course. Though the
greater part of his life was irreproachable, it appears that while still
very young he fell into sin and formed an illicit attachment to a lady
named Maria Gamba, and lived with her a few years, having three
children by her ; but this liaison did not last very long, and a separa-
tion took place, after which he saw her no more. He then entered
the monastery of Vallombrosa, but left it before his novitiate was
completed, having no vocation for the religious state. At the age
of 25 he was appointed professor of mathematics at Pisa, and it
seems that it was at that time that he first excited hostility by at-
tacking the doctrines of Aristotle on physical sciences. He had
also heard of the invention of the telescope, then recently constructed
for the first time in Holland or Belgium ; and from what he had
heard or read he contrived to make a telescope for himself, of a
very simple kind, no longer in use for telescopes, though the prin-
ciple of it is identical with that of binocular field glasses and other
similar instruments. Simple, however, as it was, it was sufficient to
reveal to a careful observer phenomena hitherto unknown. Galileo
was able by this means to discover the satellites of Jupiter (that is
four of them, for the fifth has been only discovered quite recently) ;
also the moon-like phases of the planet Venus ; the rings of Saturn,
and the spots on the Sun ; these last having been observed about the
same time by the Jesuit Father Scheiner, and by Fabricius. He
does not, however, appear to have published the results of his labors
until the year 1610, when his work called "Nuntius Siderius" was
printed. In 161 1 he went to Rome and was well received by the
Pope and by other eminent prelates; in 1612 he published another
work entitled "Discorso sui Gallegianti ;" and so far he met with
general approval, notwithstanding a certain amount of opposition.
In the year 161 3 he brought out another work at Rome, called
"L'Istoria e Dimonstrazione intorno alle Macchie Solari," in which
he drew a conclusion in favor of the revolution of the Earth on its
axis. Even this was generally well received, and Galileo might
have escaped censure had he not allowed himself to be drawn into
another question — the reconciling the Copernican theory with the
interpretation of Holy Scripture. Prudence and reticence do not

// Dialogo Di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 269

seem to have been features in Galileo's character; the temptation,
we must allow, to embark in this part of the controversy was doubt-
less great, and the provocation considerable. It was not he, but his
opponents, who began the argument from Scripture; and when
Father Cassini, a Dominican, made an attack on the Copernican
theory from the pulpit of the Church of Sta. Maria Novella at Flor-
ence, instead of leaving the Scriptural difficulty to be argued by
theologians, he wrote a letter, an imprudent and unguarded letter
apparently, to Father Castelli, a Benedictine monk, in reply to the
Dominican preacher. The result was that his letter was denounced
to the Cardinal Prefect of the Index. No actual steps were, how-
ever, taken until two or three years after the publication of the letter,
but in the year 161 5 a process was commenced, which finally led to
the decree of the Congregation of the Index, to which we have
already alluded. Galileo unfortunately could not be persuaded even
then to keep himself quiet ; he came to Rome, mixed in society and
argued his case to the best of his power. This conduct gave ofifense
in high quarters and the Pope was evidently displeased. The result
was that in February, 1616, two propositions, supposed to deserve
censure, were referred to the "Qualificators," as they are termed,,
of the Holy Office — theologians attached to the Congregation of the
Inquisition, but of less position and dignity than the "Consultors."

The propositions were : First, That the Sun was the centre of the
world and consequently immovable locally. Second, That the
Earth was not the centre of the world, nor immovable, but moved
round itself by a diurnal rotation. The Qualificators pronounced
the first opinion to be foolish and absurd, philosophically speaking,,
and also formally heretical, as it contradicted Holy Scripture accord-
ing to the proper meaning of the words, and the ordinary interpreta-
tion, and the sense admitted by the Fathers and others. They alsa
pronounced the second opinion to be deserving of the same censure
philosophically, and, regarding theological truth, to be at least
erroneous in point of faith. It seems to us indeed strange that
learned men should even at that date, nearly 300 years ago, have
committed themselves to these opinions ; but we must bear in mind
the fact that astronomy (as we now understand it) was then in its
infancy, and can scarcely be said to have attained to its maturity
until the great discovery of the law of universal gravitation, about
half a century later. We need not, however, pause to discuss the
opinions of the Qualificators, for although they had a good deal of
influence on the subsequent proceedings, they are sirnply to be taken
for what they are worth — the judgment of certain grave and learned
theologians — and have no official weight. But they had this conse-
quence, that the Pope desired Cardinal Bellarmine to send for

270 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Galileo and admonish him to abandon the obnoxious opinion ; if
he refused to obey, he was to be solemnly warned and commanded
to abstain from teaching such doctrines, and from defending them,
or treating of them. In case of his non-acquiescence, he was to be
imprisoned. Galileo, however, promised to obey.

Shortly afterwards there appeared the printed decree of the Index
of which we have already spoken. It is noteworthy that no work
of Galileo's was mentioned by name, though all books teaching that
the doctrine of the immobility of the Sun in the centre of the Uni-
verse and the mobility of the Earth was in accordance with Holy
Scripture, were forbidden. Galileo had influential friends in Rome,
and there was probably a disposition to spare him personally, pro-
vided the much dreaded Copernican theory could be stamped out.
How different the final events were we need not point out ; but that
this feeling existed in high quarters at that time is evident, for in
March, 1616, the month following the publication of the decree of
the Index, Galileo had an audience of the Pope, in which he assured
him of the rectitude of his intentions, and complained of the perse-
cutions of his antagonists. Paul V., it is stated, answered very
kindly, saying that both he himself and the Cardinals of the Index
had formed a high personal opinion of him, and did not believe his
calumniators.

On the death of the Pope, about six years after these events. Car-
dinal Barberini was elected as his successor, taking the name of
Urban VIII. The new Pope had always been friendly to Galileo,
and on the occasion of his visit to Rome in 1624 received him and
treated him with very great consideration. It seems, in fact, that
Urban VIII. had several conversations with him and discussed the
Copernican theory, and in doing so employed some of those argu-
ments which the imprudent philosopher afterwards put into the
mouth of Simplicio, a character in the ill-fated Dialogue, thereby
causing great offense to the Pope. There was clearly a partial re-
action in Galileo's favor at that period ; he had published a work
since the decree of the Index, entitled "II Saggiatore," in which he
had favored the theory of the Earth's motion ; an attempt was made
to have the work prohibited, or corrected, but this attempt was a
failure. Some reputed conversations of Urban VIII., of a private
and non-official character, point in the same direction. For in-
stance, he is reported to have said on being told that certain Ger-
mans were ready to become Catholics, but hesitated on account of
the condemnation of Copernicus, that this was not his intention, and
if he had had the arrangement of matters the decree would never
have been made. Galileo somewhat overrated the effect of the re-
action, such as it was, and as time went on he thought he might

// Dialogo Di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 271

safely publish the Dialogue on which he had been laboring. He
came to Rome in 1630, and had a long audience of the Pope, who
treated him very kindly and even increased a pension he had already
bestowed on him. He also saw Father Riccardi, who had become
Master of the Sacred Palace — the holder of which important posi-
tion was then, and still is, the official censor of books — ^and desired
from him the authority to print his book. The following circum-
stances deserve special notice because they throw some light on the
strange fact that the Dialogue bore on the face of it the Ecclesiasti-
cal permission to publish it, and that it was nevertheless afterwards
prohibited and its author severely censured.

Father Visconti, who was a professor of mathematics, had been
engaged to read the work, and he reported that there were some
passages in it that required correction, and many points that he
would like to discuss with the author. Still, the Master of the
Sacred Palace gave leave for the printing of the work, stating at
the same time a wish to see it once again himself ; so it was arranged
that Galileo should return to Rome in the autumn in order to add
the preface and' to insert in the body of the work certain additions
calculated to show that the question of Copernicanism was treated
purely as a hypothesis. But owing to some untoward events, and
particularly an outbreak of the plague at Florence, delays and mis-
takes occurred.

It was arranged that the Dialogue should be duly revised by the
proper ecclesiastical authorities at Florence, and should then be
printed there. After some further delays on both sides the In-
quisitor of Florence received from Rome the power to approve offi-
cially the copy of Galileo's work that would be submitted to him ;
but some instructions were added by Father Riccardi that the wishes
of the Pope must be borne in mind as to certain points. The title
of the work must indicate that it dealt only with the mathematical
question connected with Copernicanism, and also that the Coperni-
can opinion must not be put forward as a positive truth, but only as
a hypothesis, and this without alluding to the interpretation of
Scripture; moreover, that it should be stated that the work was
written to show that when the decree of 161 6 was made at Rome the
authorities were not ignorant of the reasons on the other side.
The preface as it stands embodies these very ideas, and certainly
reads as if it were a piece of bitter irony ; but we do not know how
much was written by Father Riccardi and how much by Galileo ; it
was probably their joint composition. Galileo proceeds to state
that for the purpose in hand he had taken the Copernican part in
the Dialogue as a pure mathematical hypothesis, but endeavoring
to represent it as superior to the doctrine as defended by the Peri-

2/2 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

patetics, to whom he alludes with some contempt — an imprudent
thing to do, considering how strong that party — the party who put
their implicit trust in Aristotle — was in Rome at that time. We
do not propose to give here a full precis of the famous Dialogue ; if
we may be permitted without presumption to say so, it will be found
in the work to which we have already alluded, "Galileo and His
Judges." We may, however, give a brief explanation of its struc-
ture and its contents. There are three interlocutors — Salviati,
Sagredo and Simplicio ; they are supposed to meet at Venice at the
palazzo of Sagredo. The best arguments are put into the mouth of
Salviati, a mathematician and a man of science. Simplicio sustains
the anti-Copernican side; the name was an unfortunate one to
choose for him, for it was obviously not meant as a compliment, and
is supposed to have given great offense to Urban VIIL, since (as
remarked above) he had used in arguing with Galileo some of the
same reasons that are put into the mouth of Simplicio : so at least
the story goes, and it does seem probable that the Pope was per-
suaded to think that some grave disrespect to himself was implied by
this circumstance. Nevertheless, Simplicio, though he is made to
say certain unwise things, is not by any means a simpleton in our
sense of the word ; he is a follower of Aristotle, whom he constantly
quotes, and is a type of the school of the Peripatetics (as they were
called), slightly caricatured perhaps in this way by our philosopher,
who had little respect for them. It seems, however, incredible that
he should have intended to insult the Pope, whom he had every
reason to conciliate, and who had long been kindly and amicably
disposed towards him.

The Dialogue is divided into four parts, one part to each day.
The second and third days are the best, and contain the ablest
arguments which the astronomical knowledge of that time allowed
of for the Copernican system. Thus Salviati urges forcibly the im-
probability of the motion of the whole celestial sphere, including
such a number of vast bodies, revolving with an immense velocity
round the earth in 24 hours ; whilst the earth' turning round on itself
would produce the same effect. This argument, good and sound
even then, is still more 'COgent now that we know something of the
distances of the heavenly bodies ; for Galileo did not know the dis-
tance or the size of the Sun, the former of which he estimated at
1,208 semi-diameters of the Earth, which would be rather more than
4,800,000 miles, about one-nineteenth part of the true distance ; and
when we consider the stars, the nearest of which (so far as we know)
is so far from us that light, traveling as it does with a speed that has
been estimated at 186,000 miles in a second, takes nearly four years
to reach the Earth from the Star Alpha Centauri, what was at the

11 Dialogo Di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 273

date of the Dialogue violently improbable appears now simply in-
credible and almost impossible. But it took some time to disabuse
men's minds of the antiquated opinion, founded on ideas which pre-
vailed before the invention of the telescope, that the stars and
planets were set in vast movable spheres, as lamps might be set in
a revolving cupola. One of the favorite reasons which the adher-
ents of the old system employed against the revolution of the Earth
on its axis was that the Earth if it so revolved would leave the air
behind it. Galileo was doubtless aware that the Earth could carry
the air round with it in its diurnal rotation ; but as far as we can
judge from the Dialogue, he did not clearly understand tlie true rea-
son, namely, the gravity of the air. He had not freed himself from
the old but mistaken notion that some bodies were essentially heavy
and others light, the latter having no tendency to descend ; whereas,
we now know that all bodies are subject to the action of gravity, and:
that the light bodies are so only in a comparative sense ; he, in fact,,
had but an imperfect knowledge of gravity, though he recognized it;
as a mysterious force drawing heavy bodies towards the centre ot
the earth; and in one remarkable passage of the Dialogue he ap-
pears to have half suspected that this same force controlled the moon
in its revolution round the Earth ; which great truth, if he had really
and fully known, he would have anticipated the important discovery
of Newton. It is, however, probable that he became aware of the
gravity of the air later on, for he lived some ten or twelve years after
writing this work, and his mind was never in a state of stagnation,
but open to the acquirement of fresh scientific knowledge. And yet
it is curious that when he wrote the Dialogue he adhered to the mis-
taken opinion that the heavenly bodies move in circles, though Kep-
ler's work containing the theory (now so well established) of their
motion in elliptical orbits, was published some years before the
printing of the Dialogue. We may add that the common opinion
of the philosophers of the Copernican school of that age was that the
adherence of the atmosphere to the Earth as it revolved was the
effect of friction. An instance, we may observe, can be found in the
Dialogue showing that whatever the author's guesses or suspicions
were as to the force and nature of gravity, he was far from compre-
hending the true doctrine as afterwards propounded by Newton;
he puts into the mouth of Salviati the argument that bodies which
emit light, as the Sun and Stars do, are essentially different from
those which, like the Earth and the planets, have no such property ;
and that the Earth in this respect resembles the planets which are
undoubtedly moving, and is therefore probably also itself in motion,
whilst the Sun and Stars remain at rest.

Ideas such as these, plausible though they seemed at that time, are
entirely contrary to the theory of universal gravitation, according
Vol. XXVI— 5

274 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

to which the luminosity and opaqueness of any two heavenly bodies
have nothing whatever to do with their relative motion, which latter
depends entirely on their respective masses. But Galileo, though
he had not arrived at the knowledge of this great scientific truth,
could explain ably and powerfully by the medium of this same Sal-
viati the grounds for believing the Sun and not the Earth to be the
centre of revolution. He takes it as certain that the two planets
Mercury and Venus revolve round the Sun, the phases of Venus,
which he had himself observed, showing it to be the case with regard
to that planet, and the fact that neither of the two is ever seen far
apart from the Sun, strengthening the conclusion as to both of them.
Then, that being so, he shows what strong ground there is for in-
ferring that the superior planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (the only
ones then known) revolve also round the Sun ; their greater apparent
size, particularly that of Mars, when on the opposite side of the
Earth from the Sun, clearly pointing to this conclusion and proving
that the Earth is not the centre of their orbits. He also explains
how the telescope revealed phenomena such as the phases of Venus,
which were unknown to Copernicus. Simplicio, as we might well
conjecture, has had no confidence hitherto in this new instrument,
and following his friends, the Peripatetic philsophers, has supposed
the appearance to be optical illusions ; he is, however, willing to be
corrected if in error.

To the objection that the Earth could not be well imagined to
move round the Sun accompanied by the Moon, Salviati replies that
Jupiter does so, accompanied by four moons.

Simplicio, however, does bring forward one weighty objection to
the Copernican system, namely, that if the Earth really makes an
annual revolution round the Sun, the fixed Stars, viewed as they
would be at different seasons of the year from points so widely dis-
tant, would be naturally expected to change their apparent positions
in the heavens. At a time when the real distances of the heavenly
bodies were not known, that was a formidable difficulty, and if it had
been understood that the diameter of the Earth's orbit was about
185,000,000 miles in length, it would have been more formidable
-still. Galileo's reply (through Salviati) is nevertheless sound and
•correct in principle, though founded on inaccurate data, and
amounts to this, that the distance of the stars is so great, that the
change of position caused by the Earth's annual motion round the
Sun is not appreciable. This was rigidly true so far as all instru-
ments then available were concerned ; but the modern answer to the
difficulty would be somewhat different; the greatly improved instru-
ments now in use have shown that a certain number of the Stars do
Actually undergo a minute displacement every year, or in the Ian-

// Dialogo Di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 275

guage of astronomy have an annual parallax, while as to the great
bulk of the Stars the same answer as that given by Salviati still
applies.

Some pains are taken in the course of the Dialogue to explain how
the Stars in their different positions would be affected by annual
parallax, if it existed, and supposing it to be discoverable. And a
minute explanation is also given, on the assumption of the Earth's
motion, of the variation of the length of day and night in different
latitudes according to the seasons; these familiar details (as they
now appear to us) being strange to the minds even of learned men in
those days.

The last day's Dialogue is mainly devoted to the argument drawn
from the tides, and we need not dwell at any length on this, as it is
well known to be erroneous. Galileo would have been wise if he
had never touched upon a matter of which he had very little practi-
cal knowledge and of which he did not understand the theory.
There was, nevertheless, some ingenuity in his idea, and any one who
is interested in such matters will find it explained in the precis of
the Dialogue, already mentioned, if they think it worth the trouble
to refer to it. We may say briefly that his suggestion was that as
the Earth has two motions, one round its own axis in 24 hours and
the other round the Sun in one year, that part of the surface of the
globe which is turned away from the Sun moves through space
more rapidly than the part which by means of the diurnal revolution
is turned in the contrary direction ; and so the sea lying in its vast
basin gets a check or a jerk as it passes from one rate of velocity to
the other. Galileo had not learnt (as he would if he had lived for a
time at some place on our own coasts) that the tides follow the lunar
day rather than the solar one, and it is remarkable that a man who
was better acquainted with mechanics and the laws of motion than
almost any man of his age should have failed to perceive that the
ocean could undergo no such jerk or check as supposed, but must be
carried round in the daily rotation of the Earth (unless interfered
with by the attraction of other bodies) with an uniform velocity.
Simplicio is justified in putting (as he does) the difficulty that if the
sea behaved in the way suggested, the air would do so on the same
principle ; the reply to which* is that the air being thin and light is
less adherent to the Earth than the water, which is heavier and so
does not follow the Earth's movements in the same way ; also that
where it is not hemmed in, as it were, by mountains and other ob-
stacles, it really is partially left behind in the daily rotation, so that
in the neighborhood of the tropics a constant wind blows from
east to west.

Our philosopher had evidently heard of the trade winds, but

276 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

had not acquired an accurate knowledge of their course and origin..
We have, however, now said enough of this mistaken argument
connected with the tides, and we may add that it is not the only
mistake in the treatment of the subject, as we have already seen.
But notwithstanding all this, we have also seen that some very sound
and cogent reasons in favor of the Copernican theory were urged in
the Dialogue — reasons as valid now as they were then, though they
have been supplemented by others, drawn from subsequent dis-
coveries and especially that of the law of universal gravitation.

But it must be admitted that Galileo failed in one respect : if a dis-
puted theory is to be handled in this way and to be argued out under
the form of a dialogue, the case on both sides ought to be stated
fairly and fully. This, we fear, was not done in the present instance ;
for Simplicio, though by no means a fool, is yet a personage who
makes a comparatively poor figure in a scientific argument. We
pass over one or two interesting questions that are discussed between
the three friends, as they do not bear directly on the great point at
issue. And we may now explain that we have directed our readers'
attention to the Dialogue, giving what we may perhaps venture to
call an abridged precis of it, because it is not possible to form a cor-
rect judgment of Galileo's history and the treatment he underwent
without some acquaintance with the work for which he was so
severely censured. His great ability, his knowledge of mechanics
and his grasp (as one remarkable passage indicates) of the princi-
ples of pure mathematics are conspicuous throughout the Dialogue,,
notwithstanding the mistakes to which we have alluded and others
also, some of which arose out of the old Aristotelian philosophy, a
philosophy not without influence over even his enlightened mind.
We must also bear in mind that a dialogue, though a convenient
form of argument in some respects, does not always give us a clear
insight into the author's real convictions. You do not know for
certain whether he agrees with any of the interlocutors ; and in fact
Galileo in his defense before the Inquisition practically assumes that
he did not so agree. But it is obviously a good method of stating
arguments pro and con, when the writer is one whose opinions are
intended to be expressed in a tentative shape, and possibly our
philosopher's mind was then in a state congenial to such expression ;
this, we think, is not inconsistent with the fact that he shows an evi-
dently strong bias in favor of the Copernican theory. A strong bias
towards a probable opinion is one thing ; a clear conviction is an-
other. The first was from a scientific point of view the natural state
of mind for an observer of the heavens in the early part of the seven-
teenth century ; the second is the attitude of the modern astronomer.

There have been writers who in their zeal to defend the action of

// Dialogo Di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 277

the Roman Congregations have expressed themselves as if Galileo
liad no substantial ground for his leaning to the Copernican doc-
trine, but almost entirely relied on the argument which he drew
from the tides ; but these writers have not studied the Dialogue or
made themselves acquainted with its contents. It has been said that
this mistaken argument was his favorite one. That may possibly be
true, but it was not by any means his only one, as the Dialogue
^clearly proves ; and indeed the man who was the first to use the tele-
scope for astronomical purposes must have had better reasons than
that of the tides for the conclusions he drew.

Some people appear to think that it was merely the discovery of
the law of universal gravitation by Newton that overthrew the old
system of astronomy. It is quite true that that great event threw a
flood of light upon the subject and gave us a key to the motions of
the heavenly bodies. Dr. Whewell in an eloquent passage in his
""History of the Inductive Sciences" calls it "indisputably and incom-
parably the greatest scientific discovery ever made ;" and that owing
to it "astronomy passed at once from its boyhood to mature man-
hood." It is none the less true that the death warrant of the old sys-
tems of Ptolemy and Aristotle was in effect signed when the tele-
'scope was turned upon the heavens. The old system did not die at
once ; it took a long time to realize the lessons to be drawn from the
discoveries of Galileo and others, for it was only the experts who
could fully appreciate them ; but the fact remains that when the tele-
scope was invented Ptolemy was doomed.

To us, who are separated from the events of that period by an in-
terval of rather more than two centuries and a half, it may seem
strange and incomprehensible that such a work as Galileo's Dia-
logue should have given serious offense to the ecclesiastical authori-
ties at Rome; for owing to the very fact of its being a dialogue,
though the case for the Copernican theory was persuasively stated,
no certain conclusion was drawn ; and it had, moreover, received the
official approbation of the Master of the Sacred Palace. But the
disciples of the School of Aristotle were powerful at Rome, and they
could not endure anything that tended to demolish the scientific in-
fallibility of that ancient philosopher. It appears that Father
Scheiner, writing to Gassendi, observed that Galileo had written
''Contra communem Peripateticoriim sensum." Then there was also
the strong current of theological opinion which regarded the Co-
pernican doctrine as contrary to Scripture, an opinion grounded on
the rigidly literal interpretation of certain texts. And there was,
too, the unfortunate circumstance that the Pope had been persuaded
that a personal affront was offered to him by putting arguments he
liad himself used into the mouth of "Simplicio."

278 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

So the agitation against the Dialogue was successful. The print-
ing of the work was suspended by orders from the. Master of the
Sacred Palace ; and the Inquisitor of Florence, by the command of
the Pope, directed Galileo to present himself in Rome in order to
explain his conduct.

F. R. Wegg-Prosser.

London, England.

AS OTHERS SEE US.

AN Irishman writes this for English-speaking Catholics in the
United States, who are mostly of Irish descent. I was not
long since in a Canadian city, and a priest of Irish name,
face and parentage was giving some facts, which seem strangely for-
gotten by some who think America vs. England still means freedom
vs. slavery. Are we all quite sure we know what the facts are of this
present world ?

"American priests come over here," said this Canadian Catholic
High School manager, "and they begin by pitying us, who, alas ! say
they, are under England, and in the hotbed of Orange intolerance.
They do not live far away ; the border is not far off ; but they live
very ignorant of their northern neighbors. They go home wiser,
and certainly sadder. For what does a short visit teach them ? That
in Ontario their brethren tell them they have nothing to complain of.
The American priests think of their flocks paying twice for schools,
taxing themselves to support unsectarian, and therefore generally
irreligious schools, and then paying for their own schools, which at
least aim at not letting the young grow up ashamed of God and holi-
ness. What is a greater matter? What does the Church think a
greater matter ? Well, under England's monarchy, in Ontario, as in
Ireland, with modifications, as in a limited way in England itself, you
give your education and you get government pay, the money of your
own taxes as Catholics, and you pay not at all for any other schools.
So that in Ireland the clergy can say education is practically 'de-
nominational,' the parish priest is the manager of the school, and we
are satisfied with the system at least. In England the Catholics
have not given up one of their schools, having satisfied in every case
the conditions of receiving grants from Her Majesty's Government.
So our American priests return to a Republic — alas ! — to receive no

As Others See Us, 279

cent for their schools, no matter how excellent in secular instruction,
from the country that claims us all as free and equal. Then from the
Republic across the ocean, from liberty, equality and fraternity,
comes the same story, with French parents increasing in number,
who to save their children from less godly and more vicious sur-
roundings daily withdraw them in greater numbers from the non-
Christian, or anti-Christian schools, which alone get all the grants,
all the taxes.

As he takes up an Irish-American paper our priest will perhaps
see a denunciation of England for withholding the grant from the
Christian Brothers' successful schools in Ireland, because of their
books not approved by the Board of Education, and the religious
emblems of crucifix, holy picture and statue, which — thank God — the
Brothers have not found it necessary to put away from the boys*
sight all the week. But even these religious, together with Jesuits
and all others, share largely, according to their great success, in the
exhibitions and prizes given by the English Government for the
higher education of boys.

But the protest of our Irish-American against the government in
Ireland for intolerance in one case might be swelled into protests
against the government in America in the whole system of secondary
education.

Facts are facts. 'Things are as they are ; and their consequences
will be what they will be" — one obvious consequence already being
that Canadian clergy of Irish descent are becoming more and more
blended with Englishism. Who will blame them? Why should
they wish their people to be double taxed for schools ? They pro-
test, naturally, against a local injustice in Manitoba ; but why should
they wish injustice done to their people all over? That injustice
they will find if they leave the English flag and join the American.
We may storm about England's influence, against her imperial
strength; we may scoff at Irishmen and Frenchmen who submit
more and more cheerfully to her rule. Let us ask these Catholics,
descendants of the persecuted and once themselves anti-English it
may be, why it is that they thus submit.

Take French Canada. Here is an incident of last year. To Mon-
treal came a religious from France and published an article in La
Semaine Religieuse, calling upon his Canadian cousins to observe the
great anti-Catholic power, England — as if the good monk had just
awakened from a sleep of 150 years, when Protestant England
fought with Catholic France — to observe how this England was tor-
menting and torturing the Catholics of Manitoba, and how French
Catholics must watch their moment ; must long for the day of retri-
bution or vengeance, and must pray for the downfall of England as

28o American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the enemy of God's Church. And this from a French monk, a monk
from France, where laws worthy of England's old penal laws have
been passed in this generation, whence a few years ago French
monks poured once more into England to find there freedom to set
up their monasteries how and where they would and to educate Cath-
olic children without paying for the education of non-Catholics.
Hear it, O Americans, O Irish-Americans, who remember when
your fathers were paying tithes to the Protestant ministers to sup-
port services you could not go to, though in your own old churches,
abbeys or cathedrals. That was hard, that was unjust; but what
they did for the non-Catholic minister under England before she
mended her ways, are not you doing now under America, America
of to-day, for the non-CathoHc schoolmaster?

It is true England still has rascally laws on the statute book —
against the religious and their holy habit. Nor are these all a dead
letter, as when lately the Irish Chancellor declared to a Jesuit novice
of wealth that he was joining an illegal society. Still, England pays
her money — or her Irish subjects' money — to Jesuit schools that do
good work. It is true also that she keeps some of her high offices
insultingly closed to Catholics, while she preaches that she gives
equal rights to all. Worse than that, the sovereigns take a brutal
and blasphemous oath against the faith of St. Augustine and Alfred,
St. Thomas and Henry the Fifth, Queen Katherine and Queen
Mary. Our Presidents do not so. But what sort of ignorant no-
Popery do we find they sometimes listen to ? And ask the praiser of
free and equal America whether he in his millions will vote for every
seventh President a Catholic; or say every seventieth, lest he say
we would be having a man elected for his religion merely.

No-Popery ! Why, in many respects our average American that
makes a stir in the world, business man, politician, journalist, essay-
ist, professor or poet, is fifty years behind the English. With his
A. P. A., and his "famous" preachers, and philanthropists, he is, on
bis controversial side, something like the 1850 English of Papal
Aggression, or like Belfast Orangemen of to-day, or the stolid bour-
geois Puritans of England and Scotland, who have not this Ameri-
can's pretense to be emancipated from prejudice, and who keep Irish
Catholic boys out of universities with the same persistency that they
are one with Americans in keeping Catholics out of Senates and
Parliaments.

All one can say to those Irish-Americans who forget nothing and
learn nothing about England is, just try the school laws of this land
to which the Statue of Liberty guides you ; just try them in the land
of Cardinal Logue and Archbishop Walsh. Propose further that
the government shall withdraw all grants from reformatories and

As Others See Us. 281

industrial schools in Ireland managed by religious men and women.
Of course, to further assimilate ourselves to America, the nuns will
have gone already from the "public schools." Then to liken Ire-
land to the other Republic that gave the Liberty Statue — "Oh, Lib-
erty, what crimes have been done in thy name !" — the English Gov-
ernment will not see that the Catholic soldiers go in a body to the
Catholic churches, but will rather forbid that any English soldiers
shall appear in a body at Mass. French soldiers are not allowed
thus to appear. And Republics surely talk much about liberty, and
ought to know what it is.

Does the American Government distribute thousands of Catholic
prayer books to its Catholic soldiers? Does the French? The
English does.

The fact of it is, as was said by an honest fellow born in an "Irish"
settlement on this side of the Atlantic, when his grandparents any-
way were from the old country, in worse days — he said that "the
people where I am would not believe these things" — would not be-
lieve in Lord Russell, a Catholic Chief Justice in England, nor in
government schools suiting the priests in Ireland, nor in Catholic
processions through English streets. No wonder. For not long
since these last would have been stoned — their chief organizer says,
by the way, that "it was the once persecuted Salvation Army that
won the battle for our Catholic processions" — and in this century a
Lord Chamberlain insulted a young Catholic lady of rank who ap-
peared at court. And I have heard a poor old Irishwoman in Amer-
ica tell of how the mission fathers in her parish "at home," in
County Armagh, were attacked in the church and had to escape
from the town before their mission was ended, fifty odd years
ago.

But how long are we going on believing that we are living two
generations back ? English or American Colonial soldiers certainly
drove the Acadian French Catholics out of house and home — before
that again. Hence even to-day France is Catholicism for their de-
scendants. Simple folk often — they would scarce believe that Eng-
land shelters exiled French monks ; that in France a bishop was last
year fined for going a few steps in his vestments from his palace to
his church — that was an illegal procession — that their young semi-
narians have to serve in barracks. Would they believe it ? Would
the Newfoundland fishermen believe that the French Government
has forbidden French sailors to take note of Good Friday? Those
who know these things may not have the heart to tell their brethren.
And one may well respect their sad reserve.

But when the French monk came to Canada to denounce Eng-
land, that shelters him and his from his own intolerant France, the

282 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

French Canadian Archbishop promptly declared that the French-
man's article was untrue and absurd and opposed to anything he
would allow published with his episcopal sanction.

When we are considering England's relations to her colonies^
when we are watching events in Ireland and abroad, we must stand
in the world as it is to-day, and judge just judgment accordingly.
Otherwise we shall sec all amiss.

There is another great change that has come in England — the
change in the Anglican religion — and that, too, has created new con-
ditions, new affinities, new possibilities. This is still a change going
on and a cause of great confusion. But it has revolutionized Eng-
lish art and architecture, has affected poetry and turned histories in-
side out, and has suggested, if unconsciously, a return to many good
things in the ideal of Catholic society. Care for the poor, and
solidarity in social work, and the use of natural means for keeping
people, young and old, in a decency and in occupied leisure which
will at least predispose towards things higher, and at the very least
keep out of vice — all this good has been stirred up and helped in
modern Protestantism by various religious movements, and among
them by the one we speak of, which has also touched men and life
by the side of that reverence to which Catholicism has never ceased
to appeal.

Talking first of such work as that of the Y. M. C. A., a man who
much dislikes its tone, yet allowed that in his wanderings as an en-
gineer in large English towns he could see that the Y. M. C. A.
rooms were usually the only refuges for young men without homes,
after work hours were past, except the ever abounding gin palaces.
In a large city nearer us there is a magnificent Y. M. C. A. building,
near the Catholic Cathedral. The bishop, no doubt with wisdom,
has warned young Catholics to withdraw from this very un-Catholic
and often anti-Catholic roof, where they found reading rooms, baths,
gymnasiums, free classes ; which things — though that city is in large
majority Catholic — they could not find any Catholic institution to
give them. Now, do we not almost tempt God — if the words be not
a violence here — when thus we neglect to give, what youth rightly
or wrongly demands, places of recreation, and under the guidance
of the clergy — indirectly so at least?

Are we not much too indififerent to these things towards bridging
over the gap between the saloon as recreation and the Church as the
working place of the soul ? I mean, is a man who occupies himself
with fairly serious books, who has the companions that libraries and
reading rooms make known to him, or who has his bathing and his
billiards, his boxing, fencing and cards among fairly decent friends,
where drink and dirt, and brutishness and scoffing are hidden or for-

As Others See Us. 283

gotten ; is such a man not more likely to love religion, the Catholic
religion, appealing, as Cardinal Newman said, especially to the
poetry in a man, or, rather, finding the poetry, the quieter and more
tender virtues, just those which his religion loves to put before him,
and in which she would have him dwell ? Is such a man not better
able to follow history, to understand the true relations of Church and
State, to enter into the spirit of the liturgy, to form high ideals of
conduct, leading to the ideal of the greatest, towards which all things
may work together by our cooperation. Him indeed in whom we
live and move and have our being ? And can we not hope that such
a one will in general help and not hinder the work of the Church and
of its ministers, rather than the one who by ignorance, by idleness,
by folly, if not by vice, lives during the week in a world so violently
contrasted with the high and holy realm of Sunday that it is no
marvel if he enters this last stripped of the needful wedding gar-
ment ? There is some justification — is there not ? — for what a charit-
able Protestant lady said, and not unkindly, to another Protestant,
that while the Catholic young women had the religious life for those
who were most full of care for their neighbor, yet those among them
who would not think of being nuns were less given to good works,
were more worldly and frivolous than many of their Protestant sis-
ters of the world. And these last who are serious are too large a
class to be compared with the Catholics who have religious voca-
tions.

Readers of "The People of Our Parish" must have noticed how the
Catholics of English-speaking America seem so greatly tormented
with all difficulties arising out of social classes and surroundings.
Certainly more Christianity of certain old world types would lessen
worldly fuss and envy.

We speak hard words against French Catholics sometimes, be-
cause they seem to allow themselves to be tyrannized over and in-
sulted ; and no doubt Archbishop Ireland has numbers of the French
clergy who value his advice to meet this wicked world in the gate.
But, says the academician, Paul Bourget, you speak these words,
you who have your reserved pews, up to which you rustle among
the crowded poor, who are almost your footstool, you who have no
American missionaries, while the French Catholics have two-thirds
of our missionaries in the world, you who give so few sons and
daughters to Our Lord's "perfect" state, whose congregations know
— as compared with us in France — nothing of the Church's cere-
monies, nothing of her music, of her holy seasons, of her offices, and
who seem to have little opportunity given you of joining your voices
in her worship of God. Yet all this— robbed from your fathers it
may be— is all in her mind inspired of God ; and if we have it not, we

^284 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

are so far weaker Catholics, and should be learners, not carpers, not
judges.

Praise to the French Catholics, said the English Benedictine,
Father Burge, for that they have preserved the Church's music.
Praise now to the Germans for their recent driving away of the silly
or the theatrical music forbidden by God's voice in His service. But
in America, if in these things we improve, yet it is not the English-
speaking Catholics who improve most. However, I will say that the
only time I heard ''Yankee Doodle" — quick — in church was in a
French Canadian church during the offertory.

We talk much of converts, but let us not scandalize them.

The other day an American Catholic paper had a word as to the
model church choir of the world — in Glasgow — and why ? Because
the members of the choir, coming in, knelt down, the men on one
side, the women on the other ; nor did they talk all through the ser-
mon ; nor did they salute friends below in the aisle. And we think
that a model. It shows to what we have sunk. And yet we hope
to impress Protestants by the worship of God's Church, "performed"
indeed — in a bad sense — in surroundings the opposite of those. Such
a choir and ritual as is seen in the Paulists' church in New York,
that is the common form to which Anglicans are now accustomed;
as far as they can give true dignity to their remains of the Catholic
offices, the which they eke out indeed with the words and forms of
the Church thrown away by those beginners of sad Anglicanism of
whose very High-churchism Heine said that it was "Catholicism
without its poetry." But their choirs, habited in cassocks and cottas
or surplices, form in their vestries and a (Catholic) collect is sung
and responded to. They walk in procession through the church,
the people standing; they kneel in their stalls, and the people and
they pray, if they will, in silence. That is all good old Catholicism,
is it not ? Alas ! as a convert organist said lately, when I think of all
that beauty and orderliness, and "contrast it with the screaming and
scrambling in the organ loft of this Catholic Cathedral." And he
went on : "Whatever is Catholic seems to me to imply here every-
thing that is horrible." He might have said for horrible "un-Cath-
olic." For is not irreverence un-Catholic; and is it not a glory of
the Church to speak of her art, her music, her use of God's natural
gifts in her worship of Him ? And is it "Catholic" now to have friv-
olous music, hideous painted windows, repulsive-faced statues and
architecture in wretched contrast to that of some of the sects, to
whom yet we appeal to come and admire the Beauty of Holiness ?

This is taking things by the worst side ; but it is a side. After
fearful music we have heard the preacher speaking thereof as offer-
ing God our best — if only it had been anything like that — and in a

As Others See Us. 285,

church little worthy (not of the congregation, as some now say, still

less of Almighty God, as piety used to say) have we not heard that

it reflects credit on everybody connected therewith ?

It was a Protestant that wrote — about Catholic buildings— not of

to-day :

"They dreamt not of a perishable home
Who thus could build. Be mine in hours of fear
Or grovelling thought, to seek a refuge here;
Or through the aisles of Westminster to roam.
Where bubble bursts, or fo lly's dancing foam
Melts, if it cross the threshold."

Trust in self, we all know, is a basis of morals. Yet Emerson's-
"Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string" is Emer-
son's, and may therefore naturally have an un-Christian undertone.
In America we have surely needed individualism, and even perhaps
self-complacency. But if there is any country in the world that can
profit by ''the great school of reverence," as the Protestant Guizot
called the Catholic Church, surely it is this one. Were it not for the
Catholic Church in America, where would modesty be seen raised to-
humility, or courtesy to reverence? We have a great inheritance.
Do not let us cast it away when now even those without are envying
us who have it. And yet the very trust in self, in the country and
the present, must make us fear, even though there be cause for re-
joicing. There is amongst some of us a strange and monstrously
anti-Christian murmuring that what is American is right, or must
surely be so ; a tyranny it is, none the less dangerous because we call
the despot the State or the Republic, and not the Emperor. Hobbes'
crusher of real liberty, his lord over body soul, was the "Leviathan,"
with crozier as well with sword, which might be the sign of republic,,
of oligarchy or of King, if only the soul were not free under its sway..
Christianity came to smite Caesarism, to give the true freedom ; not
the freedom to think wrong or to do wrong, but to assert one's right
to be at one with the absolute, with truth, with God. Christianity
undermined the Empire ; that saying has truth in it. St. Paul was
loyal indeed to the State, but not in Caesar's sense. The Catholics,
were most of them loyal under Queen Elizabeth, but not to the giv-
ing up of the Faith, what the State claimed. Does it not require all
the wisdom of the Church, all the good sense of her rulers, all the
tact they can put forth to guide us in this our atmosphere of subserv-
ience to what indeed even Emerson called "the inconceivable levity
of local opinion ?" Perhaps he would not be ofifended were we to
apply his words to a whole country. And so we, at any rate, can
apply them — we who are the heirs of the ages, the inheritors of the
full truth, the citizens of the Church in the world, the children of a
divided duty ; which yet is indeed but one single duty, if in all things
we take care lest we judge of the greater by the less.

286 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Catholics first, Americans after ; as in England one of the house-
hold of faith said, Catholics first. Englishmen after; which a Pro-
testant ecclesiastic — the present Bishop of London — lately reversed
the order for his religion and country. How absurd to do any such
thing. As Bryce says in his Holy Roman Empire, Christianity from
the first, and so in the ninth century, and so in the nineteenth, has
rejected the notion of a national religion as an essential absurdity,
and the negation of the supernatural. Bishop Creighton's words
imply the non-existence of Christianity, would men observingly dis-
til them out.

Our own eyes of the mind, may they not be favorably opened by
public deeds here of late as well as elsewhere? Not in this world
is our place of rest. Nor is a country a lawful idol to any patriot.
That cosmopolitanism of the Church, Lecky says, what an advantage
it gives her people in their education, her priests especially. But let
us try to use our advantages better, and in those things that we now
have ventured to consider. Let us remember that "the Saxons may
live again to God," that if not in Ireland, yet in other English-speak-
ing lands we Irish Catholics have our great and never sufficiently
thought of responsibilities, with the possibly more wondrous future ;
that if France be lost to Christianity — of which there is little sign —
Germany may be saved ; that "our ancestors are our ancestors, and
we are the people of to-day" — of every day, indeed, not bound into
petty doubts and fears. What have we to do with misjudging any,
with closing hearts of suspicion against any who are seeking the
truth, or being led they know not how into that city where men still
dwell with their imperfections, but yet at whose centre shines the
fulness of that light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into
this world ?

W. F. P. Stockley.

Fredericton, N. B.

Microbes and Medicine. 287

MICROBES AND MEDICINE.

IN our age of great scientific achievements it is an extremely
curious chance that has turned up the very smallest of living
things as the most interesting subject for human investigation.
There is no scientific question that attracts more widespread atten-
tion at the beginning of the new century than the relations of
microbes to disease. All of these microbes, little living things as
they are, according to their derivation from the Greek jjLcxpdv fiiov
are far beyond the limits of vision of the unaided human eye. Some
of them that are now being studied for the first time are even beyond
the powers of our best microscopes. Yet the ways and works of
these minute creatures are at the present moment a topic of the live-
liest interest to more of the human race than any other set of beings
in creation except man himself. This is surely a case of extremes
meeting and finding their affinities in their very differences.

The history of the science of microbiology, as that of all the physi-
cal sciences, reads almost more like a romance than the presumedly
prosy narrative of hard won scientific advance. The surprises as to
the nature of the little beings who have proved to our broadening
views to do much more for our weal than our woe are a perpetual
reminder of the inexhaustible variety and teeming energy of the
nature around us. Far beyond what preceding generations have
considered the uttermost limits of celestial space new worlds and
planetary systems, we might almost say universes, have been re-
vealed to us by the improvement of the telescope and the patient
study of astronomers. Points of light on the confines of space have
proven to be suns around which doubtless revolve an attendant train
of planets hidden as yet, but some time to be revealed. Just as far
below the limits of ordinary human vision a new world has been laid
bare by the microscope. The labors of the bacteriologist have
taught us that law rules as inexorably in this universe of minutiae
as it does in the great astronomical world. The littlest of the little
influence one another as inevitably as do the mighty masses out
where abyss calls to abyss. And everywhere there are the unmis-
takable signs of order that requires intelligence for its evolution and
maintenance.

Microbiology has helped biology in its study of the relations of
living beings of all orders. The wide application of the principles
that rule the living functions of the smallest beings give an added
interest to their study far beyond the practical importance of their

288 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

casual activity in human disease. At the present moment, then,,
there is an intense scientific as well as popular interest in microbes-
and their ways.

ORIGINS IN MICROBIOLOGY.

Almost as far back as the memory of man goes there existed at
least a vague idea that contagious disease was due to minute living
beings. A contagium vivuni was assumed by all the old laws with
regard to sanitation. It was understood that where dirt was allowed
to accumulate and contaminated water to stagnate, there matter
dangerous to health took on a new virulence. That this was due
to vital reproduction and multiplication was at least implicitly un-
derstood. Every now and then down the centuries such an idea
was explicitly expressed by some more thoughtful seeker into the
causes of things. Some of the old pagan philosophers in the days
when philosophy was proud to be thought scientia causarum reruni
were sufficiently interested in physical truth to suspect at least that
the cause of disease might prove to be living germs. Some of them
hint at the existence of living beings so small that they could not be
seen by the human eye. These expressions of opinion were appar-
ently shrewd guesses at truth, anchors cast to windward in the shift-
current of human knowledge, in the vague hope that they might
find some rock of fundamental fact to cling to rather than serious
scientific opinions.

It was well understood very soon after the physical sciences began
to develop in modern times that the minute size of the living causes-
of disease kept them out of human vision, and as the microscope
was undreamt of it was, of course, thought that they would never
be a subject for exact human knowledge.

The first man to see microbes seems to have been the Jesuit
Father Athanasius Kircher, the founder of the Kircher Museum,
in Rome. Notwithstanding the most varied interests in history, the
classics and archaeology. Father Kircher found some time to devote
to the physical sciences. In 1671 he reported the finding of ''minute
living worms" in putrid milk, cheese, vinegar, etc. He did not follow
up his researches in this matter because minute investigation of any
serious nature was practically impossible. The secret of the com-
pound microscope was as yet undiscovered.

Loewenhoek, in 1675, was the first to use a combination of lenses
that gave sufficient magnification to enable him to see what we
would now call bacteria. He called them animalculae, that is, Httle
animals, principally because of their spontaneous motility. He has
left sketches of what he saw that enable us to recognize his animal-
culae as what we now call spirilla — spiral bacteria. After a time

Microbes and Medicine. 289

Loewenhoek suffered from scruples as to the religious tendencies of
his work. As these little living things had never been seen by
human eyes before, he argued that it was the evident intention of
the Creator to keep them concealed from men. To him it seemed
flying in the face of Providence to continue his investigations, and
so the initial steps in microbiology were left for another century.

Some very acute forecasts as to the nature of the living contagion
that caused infectious disease were hazarded from time to time by
thinkers whose ideas were far ahead of their times. Robert Boyle,
the father of chemistry, for instance, dared to formulate a prophecv
that is very striking because of its literal fulfilment centuries after-
wards. "He that thoroughly understands the nature of ferments
and fermentations," said Boyle, ''shall probably be much better able
than he that ignores them to give a fair account of divers phenomena
of certain diseases (as well fevers as others) which will perhaps be
never properly understood without an insight into the doctrine of
fermentations." It was the study of fermentations about the middle
of the present century that led to the development of the parasitic
theory of disease. It was the great discoverer in the realm of fer-
ments, Pasteur, himself another chemist like Boyle, who was to do
the ground-breaking work in medical bacteriology and furnish a
sure basis of fact for the science of the etiology of disease, the depart-
ment of medicine which up to that time had always been most
nebulous and unsatisfactory.

THE FIRST DISEASE GERM.

The preliminary discovery in medical microbiology was made,
however, before Pasteur entered the field. In 1850 Drs. Rayer and
Davaine, as the result of an investigation of the nature of splenic
fever, announced that : "In the blood of animals stricken with the
disease little thread-like bodies about twice the length of a red blood
corpuscle are to be seen. These little bodies exhibit no spon-
taneous motion." This is the first accurate and assured observa-
tion of what we now know as bacteria.

Rayer and Davaine attached very little importance to their ob-
servation, and it attracted practically no attention from the scientific
world at the time. Splenic fever, thanks to a great extent to the dis-
covery of its microbic cause, has ceased to be the scourge it was at
the time Rayer and Davaine were so acutely studying it. About
the middle of this century flocks were frequently decimated by it.
It raged in all the European countries with great virulence. In
Russia, known as the Siberian plague, it often caused fearful destruc-
tion among the cattle of the steppes. In Egypt something of the

Vol. XXVr— 6

290 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

estimation in which it was held can be gathered from the fact that it
was connected by tradition with one of the ten plagues of Moses..
In France there were years between 1840 and 1850 when splenic fever
caused losses of from fifteen to twenty millions of francs ($3,000,000^
to $4,000,000). In 1852 a special commission appointed for the
purpose showed that the disease existed not only among horned
cattle, but that certain fatal affections in other domestic animals
which had been masquerading under other names were really special,
types of splenic fever. Sheep, for instance, and horses were prompt-
ly infected by injections of material from cows suffering from splenic
fever. The disease ran a slightly different course to that in the cow,,
but it was quite as surely fatal. The disease occasionally attacks
man himself. It is not unknown in this country even at the present
time. It occurs especially among those who have to handle the
hides and hair of animals that have died from the disease. The
name by which it is familiarly known (wool sorter's disease) is due
to this fact. It is also called malignant pustule because the primary
symptom of the affection is a pustule that develops at the point
where the inoculation of the virus took place. This pustule is
usually very red and angry looking, and these characters have sug-
gested the name by which it is commonly known — anthrax, i. e., a.
glowing coal. The anthrax bacillus produces very virulent poisons
during its growth in the tissues. These are absorbed into the sys-
tem and cause high fever, prostration and finally exhaustion and
death.

Despite the importance of the disease no further advance was-
made in the knowledge of its cause for over twelve years. During
the last five of these years Pasteur described the various ferments
and showed that fermentation instead of being a series of chemical
reactions was a complex but easily intelligible biological process..
In 1863 Davaine realized the importance his chance observation
made in 1850 might have in explaining the cause of anthrax. Pas-
teur demonstrated that butyric fermentation, that is, the putrefactive
process that gives to certain organic fatty products the odor and
taste of rancid butter, was due to a micro-organism that possessed
the characteristics of vibrios or bacteria. This recalled to Davaine
the thread-like bodies that he had seen in the blood of sheep suf-
fering from anthrax twelve years before. If filiform bodies could'
produce in a liquid the series of changes we know as fermentation,
why might not analogous micro-organisms produce such changes
in the blood of an animal as would lead to the systemic symptoms of
anthrax ?

He procured some blood from an animal suffering from splenic
fever and inoculated it into healthy animals. They always sue-

Microbes and Medicine. 291

cumbed to the disease. The blood of the dead animals always con-
tained the filaments he had described years before ; that of the ani-
mals experimented upon never showed them before the inoculation
was made. For some time after the injection of material from in-
fected animals no filaments could be seen in the blood of the animal
experimented on, and so long as they did not make their appearance
the blood of this animal remained uninfectious when inoculated into
other animals. Apparently the cause of the disease was these little
filaments. For years a heated discussion was carried on over the
question whether these filaments were a result of degenerative,
changes in the blood of diseased animals or a true casual factor irt
the disease. After the anthrax bacteria could be obtained in pure-
cultures on artificial media and after many generations of this kind,
of growth would still produce the disease all objections fell to the-
ground.

While anthrax is not important or widespread, two very signifi-
cant advances in our knowledge of disease and its spread have come-
from the study of the anthrax bacillus. Mammals whose blood is.
about the same temperature as that of man take the disease very;
readily. The meat eating mammals, especially those whose tem-
peratures are higher than that of man, do not readily take the dis-
ease. Birds whose temperature is very much higher than man's
(about 6 to 8 degrees) and reptiles whose temperature is much
lower are very refractory to the disease. If live fowls be cooled in
a refrigerator until their blood comes down to about human tem-
perature they become susceptible to anthrax and perish if inoculated
w^th anthrax bacilli. On the other hand, cold-blooded animals like
snakes become susceptible to the disease if they are kept for a time
in a chamber warm enough to bring the temperature of their bodies
up to man's.

It is evident, then, that susceptibility to anthrax is not a matter of
animal peculiarity, but rather of bacterial virulence. Anthrax bacilli
grow with fully developed powers only at a very limited range of
temperature between about 96 and 100 degrees F. Above and be-
low this temperature they do not acquire their full disease producing
properties. This question of susceptibility is most interesting and
important. Anthrax furnished the first definite information on the
subject and gave the first hint as to the reason for the localization
of such diseases as malaria and yellow fever.

The study of anthrax led to one other important discovery. The
disease was found to develop every year in certain pastures. For a
time it proved a very difficult matter to explain this peculiarity of the
disease. It seemed to come to a complete stop for the time in a
certain flock, and then seemed to originate de novo. These observa-

292 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

tions apparently contradicted the theory that disease was always a
continuation of a preceding infection and never a new entity. Mi-
croscopic study showed that under conditions adverse to its con-
tinued growth certain appearances became noticeable in the bodies
of the bacilli. Some portions of the Httle organisms took stains
quite differently to other parts and refracted light quite differently.
It was found that microbes in which these differentiated portions
occurred were much harder to destroy than others. Besides it was
found that they resisted drying for long periods. They did not con-
tinue their multiplication, but seemed to be in a resting stage. It
w^as as if, like the larger annual plants, at the approach of unfavora-
ble weather they had cast their seeds and trusted to them to con-
tinue the species. The little rounded bodies that could be seen in
the bacilli then received the name of spores (i. e., seeds), and it was
set down as established that all microbes, that produced spores were
resistent to bactericidal methods. This discovery accounted for the
preservation of many forms of bacteria in the intervals between epi-
demics of the diseases which they occasion.

A further interesting discovery came when it was found that if
animals susceptible to anthrax were set to graze in a meadow be-
neath which the carcasses of animals dead from anthrax had been
buried they were liable to contract the disease. Pasteur showed that
if the graves of sheep dead from anthrax were surrounded by a fence
and but a portion of the flock allowed to graze above the dead ani-
mals only these sheep contracted anthrax. Those grazing in the
same meadow, but kept at some distance from the anthrax dead
bodies did not contract the disease. Pasteur then showed that the
earthworms in the earth above the infected bodies contained the
germs of anthrax and that they often carried them from considerable
distances beneath the surface of the soil. It has since been shown
that anthrax bacilli in the spore stage may occur in the earthworms
above the bodies of animals that have died from anthrax for many
months and even several years after the burial of the bodies. This
was the first great advance in our modern knowledge of the distribu-
tion of disease. Contagious diseases we know now are practically
always carried by living agents. The elements wind and water,
formerly thought so instrumental in the spread of disease, very sel-
dom convey contagion, wind practically never.

;./ THE MOST IMPORTANT BACILLUS.

For the human race undoubtedly the most important bacillus is
that which causes tuberculosis. About one in eight of those that
die are carried off by the growth of this little plant in their tissues.

Microbes and Medicine.

293

Many of them are in the prime of Hfe. Not a few of them were but
a year or two before in blooming health. All of them have had
high hopes dashed to the ground because at a given moment they
became the chosen habitat of a little specimen of the plant family
which asserts and maintains its rights to live and increase and multi-
ply despite the havoc it makes with the well laid plans of mice and
men.

It had been suspected by certain medical men for some years be-
fore Koch's discovery of the tubercle bacillus that tuberculosis in its
manifold forms might be due to a specific germ or microbe. It had
even been hinted by some that tuberculosis might be contagious.
How rare such ideas were in the great body of the medical profes-
sion can be best understood from the almost universal protest that
greeted Koch's announcement in 1882 that he had isolated the
bacillus which causes tuberculous processes. The older and more
experienced as a rule the practitioner, the more profound was his
incredulity as to the value of the trumpeted discovery.

Needless to say, Koch's investigations have been substantiated by
almost innumerable observers during these last eighteen years.
Medical writers recall now that over 100 years ago the impression
gained currency in Naples, where tuberculosis was raging with
special fury, that the disease was contagious. It was even suggested
at that time that the contagium was of such a character that it could
be contracted from living in houses in which tuberculous, especially
pulmonary consumptive, patients had lived — that it might, in a word,
cling to the walls of living rooms or exist in corridors. This theory
obtained such a hold on the Neapolitans that certain supposedly in-
fected houses in which many patients had died from tuberculosis
were burned. This was followed by an amelioration in the city's
health, but whether this improvement was due to the better sani-
tary conditions after the fire or to the actual burning of so much
contagious material, who could say ?

The medical profession as a body clung to the idea of heredity as
the great cause of consumption. When successive members of
families constantly fell victims to it, father and son, mother and
daughter, brothers and sisters, what else could be thought? Yet
the seemingly necessary inference, as many another apparently of
as absolute a character, proved utterly groundless. Members of the
same family died not because of a common heredity, but because of
contact with one another (for contact and contagion are from a com-
mon root), and because they lived in a tainted atmosphere.

Koch showed that there existed in the sputum of consumptives a
little rod shaped microbe which when inoculated into susceptible
animals produces lesions exactly like those that occur in human

294 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

beings suffering from tuberculosis. This discovery made the Ger-
man bacteriologist famous ; first, because of the important nature of
the information it conveyed on a subject so vital to the human race,
and second, because of the difficulties that had to be overcome in
making the discovery. The tubercle bacillus grows very well in
human beings and in most animals, but it was no easy matter to en-
tice it into growing on a non-living medium. The little plant has
what may be called social instincts. It is essentially parasitic in na-
ture— that is, it prefers, according to the etymology of izapanixo^^
to take its food along with some other living being or at least at the
expense of the other being. It proved no easy task to find some
food material that would tempt the tubercle bacillus to lower its dig-
nity of parasite to man and the higher animals and become merely
a saprophyte, that is, a plant that draws its nourishment from decay-
ing material. Koch after a long series of experiments found that
the cultivated taste of the bacillus could be satisfied with blood
serum. It would grow on this medium, however, only when it
was kept for weeks continuously at the temperature of the human
body. If the temperature was allowed to drop below this then the
bacilli failed to grow. If by accident the temperature went much
above body temperature then failure was also inevitable. The main
adjuvant to Koch's success was a rather unsightly looking oven-like
apparatus arranged to be heated directly by a coal fire and kept at
animal heat by complicated checks and counter checks and the care
of the master and his assistants. This oven was very different from
the perfect brood ovens we now have, in which by means of gas heat
and a self-regulating gauge the temperature can be kept absolutely
at blood heat without a moment's thought or care for months. The
original old oven, however, in which Koch was first successful in
obtaining growths of the tubercle bacillus is one of the curiosities of
the Government Sanitary Museum in Berlin. Far more than the
original steam engine it represents a great step in advance for the
human race. It will be to future generations the symbol of a move-
ment that has done more for man's happiness than any other in the
history of the race.

Since Koch's time we have learned that tuberculosis is contagious,
though not virulently so. Something more than one-seventh of the
human race constantly suffer from the disease, yet the rest remain
free. Most people are thoroughly resistant to invasion. The Ger-
mans have a saying that we are all really a little tuberculous, but
this must be taken in a certain limited sense. In about 75 per cent,
of all bodies that come to the autopsy table for causes other than
tuberculosis, some tuberculous nodules are nevertheless found in the
tissues. Loomis showed that the bronchial glands of many bodies
i

Microbes and Medicine.

295

presenting perfectly healthy lungs contained living and virulent
tubercle bacilli. For successful invasion of an organism by the
tubercle bacillus something else is necessary besides its mere pres-
ence in the tissues. Only in patients who are predisposed to the
disease will the tubercle bacillus grow and flourish. When we come
to discuss the bacillus of diphtheria we shall find that individual
predisposition is important for the development of diphtheria also.
Virulent diphtheria bacilli may live in a healthy throat without pro-
ducing diphtheria. This old idea of a predisposition to disease be-
ing a necessary element in the causation of disease is becoming more
.and more prominent the more we learn of microbes. Long ago its
value as a factor in disease was recognized, but the reason was not
known. The reason of it is coming out now from a source that
promised originally to make predisposition to disease a myth.

In what the predisposition to tuberculosis consists we do not
know. We know that it runs in certain families. We know also
that it may develop in almost any one, however resistant to disease
invasion ordinarily, who permits himself to run down in health, and
especially in weight. The life insurance companies who have ex-
amined into this matter very carefully, because it is their business,
prefer to take a risk on the life of an individual who has a tubercu-
lous history on both sides of the family, but is himself in good health
and of normal weight than to insure the life of a person without
tuberculous heredity, but who is much under the average weight
he should have for his stature. One feature of the predisposition to
tuberculosis can be realized by the case of those who suffer from
diabetes. These people have a superabundance of sugar in their
blood and are very liable to be attacked by tuberculosis. Diabetic
patients are now carefully segregated from those sufifering from
tuberculosis in our hospitals. Curiously enough, tubercle bacilli
outside the human body grow better on blood serum to which a little
sugar has been added. On the other hand, it has been noted that
diabetic patients seldom suffer from ordinary pneumonia, and bac-
teriologists point out that the addition of sugar to a culture medium
always makes it an unfavorable soil for the growth of the pneumoc-
occus, the microbe to which pneumonia is due.

This points to the fact that changes in the blood may make very
serious differences in susceptibility to all disease, and especially to
tuberculosis. Not long ago the tubercle bacillus was analyzed and
was found to be composed more than one-half of fatty material.
Naturally a single bacillus was not employed in the analysis, but
many of them grown together and the mass submitted to chemical
assay. For its luxuriant growth, then, it has been argued that the
tubercle bacillus requires the presence of free fatty material. This

296 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

is supplied to it in the ordinary culture media by the glycerine,
which is added to all media intended for the cultivation of the
tubercle bacilli because it stimulates their growth. It is at times
especially, when individuals are losing weight, when the system is
taking up the fat formerly deposited in the tissues and using it for
the ordinary processes of life, that free fat is abundant in the circu-
lation in the form most suitable for use by the tubercle bacillus. It
is at these times that tuberculosis is always contracted.

SOME BACILLI RELATIVES.

About twenty-five years a disease well known in cattle under the
name of *'big jaw," because of the enlargement of the soft and bony
tissues of the jaws which it occasioned, was found to be due to the
presence of a form of bacterium hitherto undescribed. This microbe
grew branchingly and its filaments proceeded more or less regularly
from a common centre. This radiate structure suggested the name
actinomyces, or ray fungus, from the Greek rt'«^£'^''s% ray. and
fioxo^, fungus. Ordinary bacteria are known scientifically as
schizomycetes, i. e., fission fungi (from o-zt'Cefv, to divide), because
they multiply by dividing into two, and these two continue the
division and propagation is carried on. Actinomycosis took on a
new int-erest in 1885, when it was found to affect man as well as the
animals. Its lesions had often been noted in human beings, but
owing to a certain similarity between them and the lesions caused by
tuberculosis their true significance had been missed. In man the
main focus of the disease is often in the lungs. In these organs the
similarity of actinomycosis to tubercular consumption may be very
striking. Infection may take place into a carious tooth, with spread
of the process to the jaw as in animals. The ray fungus which
causes the disease seems to find a favorite dwelling place on grains
and grasses. Portions of grain, seeds or spicules of their stems are
often found at the original site of invasion of the disease. In coun-
tries where actinomycosis exists the inhabitants are warned against
the habit so common among country people of drawing straws or
the stems of grasses through the teeth. The disease is rare and
would not deserve a mention in a review of human bacteriology but
for certain recent discoveries.

The radiate form which the actinomyces assumes in growing
was thought for many years to be peculiar to itself alone. In ex-
amining sections of tissue that had been obtained from a leper, how-
ever, it was found that the leprosy bacillus which had been discov-
ered by Hansen in Norway and described as a simple rod-shaped
microbe of about the size and form of the tubercle bacillus some-

Microbes and Medicine.

297

times grew also in radiate fashion. Further investigation only con-
firmed this observation, and showed that wherever the leprous pro-
cess was especially acute and the tissues in which the bacillus grew
were succulent, supplying abundant nutritive material, the bacillus
of leprosy grew very similarly to the ray fungus. Then careful ob-
servation of the bacillus tuberculosis showed that this microbe often
grew in branching forms instead of as a simple rod or bacillus.
Babes showed that when injected into the meninges of small animals
the tubercle bacillus often grew in a radiate form. Other investiga-
tors have confirmed these observations, and now it is generally con-
ceded that the tubercle bacillus bears some very close relationship
to the bacillus of leprosy and the ray fungus which causes "big jaw"
or "lumpy jaw" in animals.

It is a curious fact that these diseases had been grouped together
by pathologists long before the relationship between their microbic
causes was even suspected. All of them produce changes in the tis-
sues that are, when examined under the microscope, found to be
very similar. The inflammatory reaction which infection with any
of these diseases occasions causes the appearance at the site of in-
oculation of three forms of cells — round cells, epithelioid cells and
giant cells. This characteristic succession of cellular appearances
does not occur with other infections. The diseases are simliar also
in other respects. All of them are contagious, yet not intensely
invasive. Tuberculosis is not contracted by a single chance contact
with some sufferer from consumption, but by intimate intercourse
for months or at least weeks with individuals suffering from tuber-
culosis.

Tubercle bacilli occur in many places and are breathed in
without producing consumption. They have even been found in
the mouth of perfectly healthy individuals. Leprosy, though its
traditional reputation with the public would seem to class it as one
of the most contagious of diseases, is in reaHty but very slightly
contagious. There is not a case on record in medical literature of
leprosy having been contracted by contact with lepers except where
intimate association with the sufferers had been the rule of Hfe for
at least ten years. There are cases where leprosy was acquired apart
from any hereditary taint, though at Constantinople a school of clin-
icians exists experienced in the treatment of lepers, who insist even
now that heredity is the prime factor in the causation of the disease.
Finally, actinomycosis, the other disease whose specific microbe re-
sembles the germs of tuberculosis and leprosy, is only very slightly
contagious. It is hard to produce the disease by direct inoculation.
Only when the actinomyces or ray fungus is retained for long pe-
riods in contact with the tissues, as when a seed of infected grain

:298 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

finds its way into a carious tooth or when an infected piece of grass
or grain is carried by aspiration into the lungs, does the disease de-
velop.

The question that occupies many minds in bacteriology at the
present moment is : Are these germs of disease essentially distinct
one from the other, or are they accidental modifications from some
common stock ? If the latter supposition is true, is it possible that
by reversion one should reassume the disease-producing qualities of
the other ? As it is, while these little plants present certain striking
similarities of form and of disease-producing power, they are no
more nearly related to one another than are the apple and the pear
or the lemon and the orange. We never hope to gather lemons
from orange trees, and there is no more probability of finding that
a lepra bacillus has given or will give birth to a tubercle bacillus.

MICROBIC TYPES IN ANIMALS.

Affections resembling very much in their course and symptoms
the various tubercular affections in man have been noted in a num-
ber of mammals and in birds. There is a widespread belief that
wild animals are comparatively free from disease. Their lives are
known to end as tragedies, in the words of a recent sympathetic bio-
grapher, but it is not considered that they are liable to wasting dis-
ease. As a matter of fact, animals even in their wild state suffer
from a number of diseases. Many of them fall victims to tuber-
culosis. Even the lions found dead along the edge of the great
desert of Sahara, the perfectly dry air of which might be expected
to prove a safeguard for them, present in many cases evidence of
tubercular lesions. Most animals that die in captivity perish from
tuberculosis. This is especially true for monkeys, for all animals
from the tropics kept in our climate — though the polar bear is also
a frequent victim — and for birds. The question of the identity of
these diseases with human tuberculosis is important because of the
opportunities for infection provided by intercourse with these ani-
mals and by the fact that their flesh is used as food. In cattle, for
instance, the usual form of tuberculosis, "pearly disease," does not
resemble the human form of tuberculosis, but other symptoms of
the disease bear marked analogies to those observed in human be-
ings. The bacilli of bovine tuberculosis are not so virulent for cer-
tain susceptible small animals as is the bacillus of human tubercu-
losis. On the other hand, the bacilli obtained from human sputum
usually fail to produce true tuberculosis when inoculated into cattle.
An inflammatory reaction is produced around the point of inocula-
tion, but the disease does not spread.

Microbes and Medicine.

299

Tuberculosis in birds seems to bear a very close resemblance to
the form of the disease that occurs in mammals. That it is quite
•different, however, is proved by the fact that the bacilli found in
tubercular lesions in birds are quite innocuous for mammals, while
those obtained from mammals are equally harmless for birds. The
temperature of birds is some five or six degrees higher than that of
mammals, and this is known to protect birds from certain diseases
<:aused by microbes whose favorite temperature is that of the human
body. We have already mentioned how chickens fail to take an-
thrax so long as their temperature remains normal, but acquire the
disease if exposed to it after their temperature has been artificially
lowered by cold. The tubercle bacilli become modified by living at
the unusual temperature, and so lose their virulence for animals of
■sHghtly colder blood.

For many years conservative bacteriologists insisted that the ba-
cilli of avian tuberculosis were essentially distinct from those which
♦caused tuberculosis in human beings and other mammals. It is
only within this last year that the identity of these two forms of
Ijacilli has been demonstrated. The method by which it was done
-was very ingenious. Cultures of tubercle bacilli from human spu-
tum were enclosed in little sacs made of collodion. These sacs
.allow fluids to penetrate to their interior, and so permit the constant
regeneration of the nutrient material on which the bacilli grow.
They also allow the bacterial products to escape, for after awhile bac-
teria would become choked in growth by the presence of their own
•excrementitious materials. The collodion envelope, however, does
not permit the egress of the bacteria nor the ingress of certain wan-
•dering cells in the animal body, the white blood cells, which would
englobe, i. e., swallow and digest the bacteria. When these little
-collodion sacs are placed in the peritoneal cavities of fowls, the mi-
crobes contained in them continue to increase and multiply for a
long time. At the end of several months the bacilli of human tu-
l)erculosis begin to take on resemblances to the bacilli of fowl tuber-
■culosis. According to Nocard, who is working in the veterinary
•department of the Pasteur institute just outside of Paris, at the end
of nine months the human tubercle bacilli became transformed com-
pletely into the avian variety, which has been heretofore considered
absolutely distinct. Human tubercle bacilli cultivated this way will
produce the characteristic lesions of avian tuberculosis in birds.
How rapidly such transformations of one bacillary variety into
another may be effected under favorable circ'umstances is not
yet known. The fact of the essential identity of these ba-
cillary forms indicates the dangers there may be in animal con-
tact.

300 American Catholic Quarterly Reviezv.

THE BEST KNOWN BACILLUS.

The bacillus about which we know most for all medical purposes
is the one which causes diphtheria. This disease has been generally
recognized as distinct from other throat affections only for about
eighty years. Bretonneau described the clinical course of diph-
theria very accurately about 1821, and to him we owe the name
diphtheria — from the Greek «5tV"5*£/>«, a membrane, because of the
membrane that forms over the mucous surface of the throat in pa-
tients attacked. Some Spanish physicians seem to have recognized
the distinct character of the disease about the beginning of the cen-
tury, but their work received so little notoriety that it is only of late
years that the rest of the medical world has known of their prior
successful investigations. Diphtheria as a disease, however, can be
traced back for thousands of years. Aretseus' description of cer-
tain throat affections leaves little room for doubt that he had seen
typical cases of diphtheria. What Galen calls the chironian ulcer
was a throat affection with a pseudomembrane on the mucous sur-
face, sometimes of the pharynx — that is, the tonsils and upper throat,
and sometimes on the larynx. There are even historical traditions
of the existence of the disease much farther back than this. The
Greeks believed it had come to them from Egypt.

In modern times it is easy to find traces of the disease in recent
centuries. During the year 1557 there seems to have been a very
generalized epidemic of diphtheria thoughout Europe. Many
deaths occurred in Germany, France, Northern Italy, Holland and
Spain. A little more than a century later there is more than a sus-
picion of the occurrence of the disease in America. Samuel Dan-
forth, a Pilgrim descendant, lost four of his eleven children — (Pil-
grim descendants' families were larger in those days than at present)
— in the course of two weeks from a throat affection described as a
"malady of the bladders of the windpipe." The term bladder can
scarcely mean anything else than the pseudomembrane portions of
which had been coughed up during the course of the disease.
About twenty years ago Klebs found a special form of bacillus in
the throat of patients suffering from diphtheria. Shortly after
Loeffler showed that his bacillus very probably stood in a causal re-
lation to the disease. Since then we have learned much about the
so-called Klebs-Lceffler bacillus, but instead of solving all the ob-
scure problems connected with the microbe, difficulties have multi-
plied at each new discovery in the microbiology of the bacillus.

For instance, we know now that the diphtheria bacillus may as-
sume very different forms, according to the culture medium on
which it is grown. Usually it has the appearance of a rather plump

Microbes and Medicine.

301

red, which takes staining material irregularly and so gives the im-
pression of containing granules in its substance. But the bacillus
may assume very different forms to this. It may have a bulbous
enlargement at one end and so present the so-called club-shape. It
may have bulbs at both ends — the dumb-bell form. Slender types
of the bacilli may occur especially in the membranes from diphthe-
ritic throats, and these are prone to be curved. Even branching
forms of the bacilli have been noted.

The questions very naturally arise are all these forms equally
virulent ? are they all derived from an essentially identical family ?
It would seem that these questions must be answered in the affirma-
tive. We know of the existence of a group of bacilli resembling the
diphtheria bacilli in all ordinary particulars except that they do not
produce diphtheritic symptoms in animals. Whether this pseudo-
diphtheria bacillus is, as some authorities think, only a degenerate
form of the true diphtheria bacillus, which has for the moment lost
its virulence, remains to be determined by future investigation.
The picture presented by a bacillus under the microscope cannot be
a criterion of its nature. Many bacilli resemble each other very
much. They are plants, and if it is remembered how difficult it
would be to distinguish many plants from each other if we had only
a distant view of them, it will not be hard to realize that mere ex-
ternal form is not and cannot be used as a final standard for differ-
entiating bacteria. The virulence of bacilli — that is, their power to
produce a certain disease — has been considered an ultimate crite-
rion, but even this is not absolute. Disease depends on susceptibil-
ity as well as infection — that is, it is not enough merely to have the
germ of a disease present to produce that disease ; the animal experi-
mented with must be liable to the disease and must at the moment
be in a state which it is not specially resistive to the invasion of
the specific microbe.

A number of observers have shown that the true diphtheria ba-
cillus virulent for animals may occur in the throats of perfectly
healthy individuals. It may also occur in affections of the throat
that bear no resemblance to diphtheria. It is even claimed that it
is because of its liability to be carried around thus by people who are
either, to all appearances, perfectly well or who seem to be suffering
only from mild throat trouble that the diphtheria bacillus continues
to be distributed widely and to cause frequent outbreaks of the dis-
ease where no diphtheria existed before. A form of bacillus very
like that described by Loeffler occurs almost constantly on the con-
junctiva or mucous membrane of the eyes of normal individuals.
When diphtheria does attack the eyes, as happens sometimes in
nurses and doctors, because material from a diphtheritic throat is

302 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

coughed into them, the affection is always very severe. Is it possi-
ble, then, that one of the diphtheria bacillus family has a habitat on
the conjunctiva, just as the pneumococcus, the cause of pneumonia,,
is constantly present in the mouth, yet without producing symp-
toms?

Why speak of the diphtheria bacillus, then, as the best known
bacillus? Because the tracing of its microbiology has helped ta
throw light on many of the important questions that concern sus-
ceptibility and imnmnity to disease. The study of this bacillus has
especially brought out the fact that was being lost sight of in the
enthusiastic search for specific germs for every contagious disease
that the absence of individual resistance to disease constitutes at
least as important an element in the causation of disease as does the
virulence of the bacilli. Besides, it is practically for diphtheria
bacilli alone that certain other important questions as to the nature
of bacilli and their products have been answered. The toxine, that
is the poison produced by the bacillus, the absorption of which
causes the fever and prostration incident to diphtheria, has been
carefully studied. Its surprising power for evil even in extremely
minute quantities has been demonstrated. In this respect any of
the ordinary poisons we know, strychnine or atropine, or even
aconitine, do not compare with it. The amount of pure diphtheria
toxine that will produce serious symptoms in an animal is almost
inappreciably small, probably less than one billionth of the body
weight.

More than this, however, bacteriologists have learned something
of nature's method in neutralizing this very virulent poison in the
human system and have succeeded in finding a means to help her in
the process of neutralization. When diphtheria patients recover
there is manufactured in their systems a substance which combines
with the toxine of diphtheria and renders it harmless. This sub-
stance is called an antitoxine. It was found that when animals
were inoculated with very small quantities of diphtheria bacilli they
readily recovered from the symptoms produced. If inoculated
again with the same amount they recovered even more readily..
Something evidently had been left in the system which helped them
to overcome the virulence of the diphtheria bacilli. If now they
were inoculated with larger and larger doses they finally reached a
condition in which they were able to withstand many times what
would have been a fatal dose of diphtheria bacilli before the series of
inoculations was begun. It was found further that if some of the
blood of animals whose ability to resist diphtheria bacilli had been
thus deliberately developed was injected into other animals at the
time when these animals received inoculations of diphtheria bacili,,.

Microbes and Medicine. 303.

they suffered less from the effects of the inoculation and recovered
sooner. This is the principle on which diphtheria antitoxine is
manufactured.

In practice a large animal such as the horse, who is at
once naturally very resistent to diphtheria and is able to furnish
large quantities of blood serum, is taken. The animal is inoculated
with diphtheria bacilli and after the fever and prostration which
ensue have subsided another inoculation, and after a similar interval
another is given. Each time the strength of the inoculation is in-
creased. In this way the antitoxic value of the animal's blood
serum becomes very great. When one-tenth of a cubic centimetre
of horse serum is able to protect an average sized guinea pig
against ten times the ordinary fatal dose of diphtheria bacilli the
serum is said to be normally antitoxic. One cubic centimetre o£
such a serum is designated as one antitoxic unit. The serum can
be made much more strongly antitoxic than this, so that one cubic
centimetre may represent hundreds of antitoxic units. It is con-
sidered an advantage to have the antitoxine value of the serum very
high, for then it is not necessary to inject a large quantity of the
foreign serum into diphtheria patients to secure the desired results^
For ordinary cases of diphtheria from 1,000 to 3,000 antitoxic units
are employed, according to the virulence of the affection. When-
ever the disease extends into the nose the larger doses are given,.,
because in the succulent tissues of the nose the bacilli grow rapidly,
and besides absorption goes on more readily from here than from
other parts of the upper respiratory tract. Whenever the larynx
is affected, that is whenever the mucous membrane covering the
vocal chords is invaded by the disease, larger doses, even to 5,000 or
6,000 antitoxic units ,are given. The formation of the false mem-
brane that is characteristic of diphtheria in this region soon closes
up the chink of the glottis, the narrow opening between the vocal
chords for breathing purposes, and the little patient is liable to-
asphyxia for want of air.

Many complaints have been made of the harmfulness of anti-
toxine. There is not a single case on record where it ever caused,
death. Children sometimes die suddenly. If the sudden death
occurs shortly after an injection of antitoxine straightway the death
is attributed to this. All the reported deaths have been due to other
causes. Antitoxine does not affect the kidneys. On the contrary,
the renal affection which so often occurs with diphtheria subsides
after the administration of antitoxine is begun. How little danger
there is in the remedy may be seen from the fact that while 5,000^
units is usually the largest dose given, in very severe cases, recently
from 60,000 to 80,000 antitoxic units have been given in three days,.

304 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

with reported good results. Certain inconveniences have been
noted as occurring after the administration of the remedy. Skin
eruptions resembhng hives have been reported, occasionally joint
swellings occur. These conditions are never serious, however, and
the symptoms disappear after a very short time.

The successful introduction of antitoxine represents the first great
triumph in the field of bacteriological therapeutics. The death rate
from diphtheria has been lessened to a wonderful degree. Statistics
from all over the world seem to show that while the death rate from
diphtheria in various epidemics before the introduction of antitoxine
was about 30 per cent., the death rate now is under 12 per cent. The
impressions of medical men who treated many cases of diphtheria
before and after antitoxine days show that the confidence in the new
remedy is not merely a result of the conviction forced upon them
by statistics of cases, but is due to their own personal experience,
showing them that the course of diphtheria under antitoxine is quite
different to what it was under other modes of treatment. The ex-
pression of the superior of a large orphan asylum in one of our
principal cities is very striking in this regard. "Before antitoxine
came," she said, "when an epidemic of diphtheria occurred we knew
that it would spread widely and that more than one-half those at-
tacked would die. Now we know that the spread of the disease
will be limited and only a small percentage of the cases prove fatal."

THE SMALLEST MICROBE.

About three years ago Professor Loefifler, one of the original dis-
coverers of the diphtheria bacillus, described some of the negative
characters of the smallest microbe so far investigated. He was
studying foot and mouth disease, an afifection prevalent among ani-
mals in certain countries, and which may exceptionally attack man.
It was found that a very small portion of the diseased tissue of an
infected animal sufficed to produce the disease when inoculated into
another animal. The most careful search, however, failed to reveal
any traces of microbes in the tissues or in the secretions from the
lesions. When inoculations were made from the infected tissues in
bouillon, a favorite culture medium on which many kinds of bacteria
grow luxuriantly, no change took place in the appearance of the
bouillon. Usually the meat solution employed in such observations
grows turbid after inoculation and a flocculent scum forms over ir
as a result of the growth of the microbes. Despite the fact that the
bouillon remained to all appearances unchanged, it was found to
have acquired the property of conveying foot and mouth disease to
animals into which it was injected. This virulence remained in-
herent in the liquid even after filtration through a Pasteur filter.

Microbes and Medicine. 305

As the unglazed porcelain of this form of filter never fails to detain
all ordinary bacteria, this latest microbe must be much smaller than
any micro-organism hitherto studied.

The most painstaking scrutiny in the examination of the bouillon
cultures of the microbe under the highest powers of the microscope
fails to reveal the presence of anything having the appearance of a
bacterium. That some microbe is present is evident from the fact
that the bouillon after inoculation becomes progressively more viru-
lent in its effects. If injected before inoculation with material from
lesions of foot and mouth disease it fails to produce any effect ; if
injected shortly after the introduction of the infectious material it is
but slightly if at all virulent. After some days, however, it has all
the virulence of material taken directly from an animal suffering
with the disease.

Humboldt in his demonstration of the theory of the microscope
showed that the minimum visible would be of the diameter 1-125,000
of an inch. When objects are smaller than this in size diffraction
takes place around their edges and the shattering of the waves of
light precludes vision. The ideal microscope has not been made
as yet, so that the limit of microscopic vision has not reached the
theoretic minimum visible. The ordinary small microbe, such as the
staphylococcus, measures from 1-30,000 of an inch to 1-20,000 of an
inch in diameter. This new germ is probably not more than
1-100,000 of an inch in ^ny dimension. The vista of possibilities
for life in infinitesimally minute particles opened up by this dis-
covery seems almost endless. If portions of matter so small as to
be beyond the range of our microscopes cannot only support inde-
pendent life, but enable that life to exhibit such distinctive proper-
ties as characterize all other bacteria, the field of microbiology
promises to be as prolific in ever widening limits and new subjects
for study as the science of astronomy. In the almost infinitely
great and the infinitesimally little, analogous advance will open up
new worlds.

MIXED INFECTIONS.

Because one microbe has gained a foothold in the animal economy
is no reason why others should not also enter. Microbes of differ-
ent families are not at all exclusive. On the contrary, most of them
are very sociable and invite others in as soon as they find them-
selves not unwelcome. The weakening effect of one microbe serves
to make it easier for others to gain entrance. In a number of dis-
eases it is the secondary infectious agents that often prove of most
significance in what regards the course of the case. In tuberculosis,
for instance, especially of the lungs, the tissues whose vitality has

Vol. XXVI— 7

3o6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

been seriously impaired by the tubercle bacilli fall an easy victim to
other microbes. It is these secondary invaders that cause most of
the disintegration of tissue in pulmonary consumption and give rise
to the fever and night sweats, at least of the early stages of the dis-
ease. It is well known that the tubercle bacillus when alone very
seldom causes any acute symptoms. A tubercular abscess in a
joint may remain latent for a long time. It gives so few inflam-
matory symptoms as a rule that it is the custom to talk of this form
of abscess as a cold abscess. Almost invariably, however, as soon
as a cold tubercular abscess is opened up symptoms of hectic fever
are noticed. Other microbes have got in through the incision and
their toxines produce acute symptoms.

In diphtheria the secondary or mixed infections are almost more
important than the diphtheria bacilli. It is the presence of these
secondary infective agents that hinders the efficacy of diphtheria
antitoxine in certain cases. The antitoxine serves only to neutralize
the specific toxines produced by the diphtheria bacillus. The remedy
has not the slightest modifying effect on the toxines of other bacilli
that may be in the system. Simple diphtheria, unless malignant
from the beginning, is not in our day, thanks to antitoxine, difficult
to treat successfully, but diphtheria complicated by secondary infec-
tions still remains an insoluble therapeutic mystery.

VIRULENCE OF DRIED BACILLI.

One of the most interesting phases of recent bacteriological in-
vestigations has been the demonstration that bacilli retain all their
virulence for long periods in spite of the fact that they have abso-
lutely been deprived of all moisture. Typhoid bacilli have been
kept for over two years in a drying chamber whence every trace of
moisture was removed by means of chemicals, yet when inoculated
into culture media it promptly proceeded to grow once more and
had all its former virulence. Strings are dipped into liquid cultures
containing bacilli and then hung up to dry. Even after over :oo
days of this absolute drying process the bacteria are not killed, but
only rendered comatose. This faculty of retaining life under these
circumstances is very interesting from the biological standpoint.
Usually when deprivation of water is brought about living proto-
plasm dies. The continuance of life among the bacteria shows
that they can under unfavorable circumstances enter upon a seed or
spore stage, during which, in the absence of moisture, though there
is no multiplication, the vital potency remains ready to manifest
itself as soon as suitable conditions become re-established.

This property of retaining life and virulence in the dried state is

Microbes and Medicine. 307

extremely important because of the liability of microbes to be blown
around in the shape of dust. Undoubtedly many microbes are thus
widely distributed. Wind-borne epidemics of disease are, however,
very rare. Once this was thought the principal way by which dis-
ease was propagated. There are, however, too many enemies to
the microbe in nature to permit of their continued existence for
long. Of these the most destructive foe is sunlight.

SUNLIGHT AS A BACTERICIDE.

Sunlight is the great germicide. Exposure of any microbe to
full sunlight for a few hours suffices to bring on its almost inevitable
destruction. Virulent tubercle bacilli especially are sensitive to the
germicidal action of sunlight. Diphtheria bacilli rapidly lose their
virulence when exposed for but a short time to the direct rays of the
sun. In a hospital ward it has been found that the shutting out of
the sunlight by close curtains predisposed to relapses of the dis-
ease. The manner in which sunlight effects microbes has beert
studied very carefully. We know, for instance, that it is especially
the blue end of the spectrum that causes the destruction of microbes-
Exposure to red or dark orange light has practically no deleterious
effect upon microbe vitality. Red has even a favorable influence on
some microbes. On the other hand, there are certain rays of light,
for light they must be called, though they do not produce any im-
pression of color upon our eyes, which are even more strongly
germicidal in their action than are even the violet rays. These
rays have been the subject of a great deal of study long before their
special action on microbic life was recognized. They are known
as the ultra violet or actinic rays. It is due to a large extent to their
chemical activity that photography owes its success. They are
capable of breaking up the silver salts and so produce photographic
effects.

The explanation usually suggested for this mysterious action
is that the wave lengths of these ultra violet rays of light bear
some intimate relation to the wave lengths of the atoms of matter in
the silver salts. This relation is such that wave interferences result
and the constituents of the silver salts fly apart until compounds re-
sult, the excursions of whose atoms will not be interfered with by the
waves of light. This same actinic power is supposed to force the
atoms of bacteria from their combinations in the living protoplasm
of the bacterial cells with the production of new chemical com-
pounds incompatible with life. As a recent biological writer has
put it somewhat poetically : **The sunbeams invite the bacteria to a
dance in the glancing sunlight. The invitation cannot be refused.

3o8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

For the microbes it is the dance of death. They Hterally dance
themselves to pieces, and the millions of little tragedies can be seen
accomplishing themselves all unsuspectedly in any stray beam of
sunlight that wanders across our rooms."

The practical side of the question of sunlight as a bactericide is
extremely important. It is after a succession of damp, sunless days
that such diseases as influenza, pneumonia, rheumatism and that
many featured disease, the "common cold," are especially prone to
occur. Living and working in rooms to which the sun is unable
to penetrate especially predisposes to their development. If the
high building mania should continue life in large cities will become
still more unhealthy than it is. In narrow streets the ten to twenty-
story buildings, when they occur opposite one another, effectually
preclude the entrance of nature's great scavenger — the silent, perva-
sive sunlight. The comparative mortality of city and country
favors the country mainly for this reason. The difference threatens
to become even more marked than it is. While the average of
human life in large cities is scarcely more than thirty years, in the
country it is nearer thirty-seven.

Nature has provided a most effective safeguard against a prepon-
derance of microbic life, but man seems almost with malice prepense
to set about the undoing of it. Living rooms when they have am-
ple opportunity for sunlight are often kept constantly dark from
week's to week's end by curtains and hangings. The shades ot car-
pets and upholstery and the housewife's complexion must be pro-
tected from the deteriorating and revealing influence of strong sun-
light. F'ashion dictates the use of stained glass windows for stair-
case and corridor. Usually the yellow and red shades predominate.
These colors absorb all the most efficient light rays and let pass only
those that are but feebly germicidal. It is in corridor and staircase
especially that the full play of bright sunlight should be encouraged.
Here are brought direct from the street by those who enter all the
microbes that are about. Here, too, the dust with its microbic con-
tents is blown in and settles to be disturbed at every entrance and
exit from the house.

THE TOXINES OF BACTERIA.

A great deal is heard of the toxines of bacteria in our day, and
the question naturally arises, what are they ? Bacteriology has not
as yet fully answered this question, but much has been learned with
regard to it in recent years. Every plant that grows contains some
characteristic chemical substance which may be separated from other
substances in the plant by suitable analytic methods. Sometimes

Microbes and Medicine, 309

there is more than one characteristic substance. The vendor of pro-
prietary medicines often vauntingly proclaims that his remedies are
perfectly harmless because they are purely vegetable in origin. As
a matter of fact, however, our most virulent poisons in medicine do
not come from the mineral, but from the vegetable kingdom.
Strychnine, the active principle of the Ignatia bean, and atropine, the
alkaloidal principle of night-shade, are familiar examples. A still
more powerful poison, aconitine, also vegetable in origin, is gaining
wide notoriety at the hands of novelists and the daily newspaper. It
is not a matter for surprise then that microbic plants also secrete
intensely poisonous compounds.

When the investigation of bacterial toxines was first begun it was
thought that they were alkaloids, just as strychnine, morphine, etc.,
are. Further investigation, however, shows that they are probably
albumoses. This class of substance is a modification of ordinary
albumin, but may be intensely poisonous. A poison recently in-
vestigated resembles the toxines of the more virulent bacteria quite
closely. It is probably one of the last substances that would be
thought of in this connection. Snake poison would be considered
to belong to quite a different class of compounds. It is, however,
like the bacterial toxines, an albumose. Albumoses are nearly all
(there is a large series of them) distinctly poisonous. They occur
at a certain stage of normal indigestion, and if anything hinders the
digestion of food beyond this stage they may be absorbed into the
system with the production of what is known as autotoxemia, that
is, self-poisoning. It is the absorption of these incompletely di-
gested substances that gives rise to the depression so often noticed
in sufferers from indigestion. Fortunately the albumoses produced
and absorbed during the course of disturbed digestion are never
very toxic.

Many bacteria produce only mildly virulent albumoses, but
some varieties, as the bacillus of anthrax, the tetanus bacillus,
and, according to recent researches, the bacillus of tuberculosis,
manufacture toxic albumoses of extreme intensity. Other vegetable
poisons, as, for instance, morphine and strychnine, are feeble in
comparison with these microbic toxines. The dose of any of these
alkaloidal poisons required to kill, though usually not more than a
grain or two, is simply enormous when compared to the minute
quantities of microbic toxines that may prove fatal. The pure con-
centrated poisonous substances have been subjected to rigorous in-
vestigation of late years. Large quantities of microbes have been
grown on favorable culture media and the toxines produced have
been isolated from all merely adventitious material and carefully
studied. The results obtained are almost appalling. Amounts of

3IO American Catholic Quarterly Review.

material representing much less than 1-100,000,000 of the body
weight of an animal may produce serious, possibly fatal, symp-
toms. As in the case of the microbes beyond the range of the
microscope we are here dealing with problems whose main factors
are beyond valuation by any of the crude scientific methods that we
as yet possess.

Curiously enough there is a condition that develops in the human
body itself without the intervention of microbes the symptoms of
which bear many analogies with poisoning by microbic albumoses.
This is sunstroke. Under the influence of long continued elevation
of temperature, where there is no period of rest to allow for repair
of the intricate mechanism of bodily metabolism (for it is after sleep-
less nights that sunstroke always comes) the system loses control of
its chemical energies and a series of compounds are manufactured
that act as intensely virulent poisons especially on the nerve tissues.
This problem is as yet, however, too unsettled for discussion here.

PRESENT FOCUS OF BACTERIOLOGICAL ATTENTION.

A bacillus that has received great popular and scientific attention
this last year or two is the bacillus of bubonic plague. This little
plant seems to have been the special instrument of Providence on a
number of occasions in the world's history for clearing the stage of
undesirable elements and making human life simpler. As the evolu-
tionist might put it, a renewed virulence of the bacillus pestis bu-
bonicse has been an important factor in the course of evolution for
the removal of the weaker individuals in races whose degeneracy
made the prospect of further development problematical. The
plague or pest bacillus has been a substantial element in the rigid
application of the great purifying principle of the survival of the
fittest. There are traces of plague at least four centuries before
Christ. The pestilence that overwhelmed Athens in Thucydides'
time, carrying oflf nearly one-half the inhabitants, may not have been
the bubonic plague. The Greek word that is used to designate it,
YO£/xo5, may mean any epidemic disease, and Thucydides, a most
acute observer, gives no hint of the occurrence of the glandular
swellings so characteristic of the disease and from which it derives .
its name, "bubonic." There are sure traces of the disease in the
fourth century B. C. It seems probable that the disease has existed
from the very earliest times.

Within these last few years it has been found that there are
three locations where bubonic plague is endemic, that is, where
cases of the disease continue to occur in the intervals be-
tween great epidemics. These three nurseries of the undesir-

Microbes and Medicine. -jn

able plant leveler are situate, one in the neighborhood of
Mecca, in Arabia ; one at the foot of the Himalaya Mountains, in
India, and the other on the shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza, in
Africa, near the head waters of the Nile. It is from these three
persistent foci of the disease that the great epidemics have taken
their rise. The continued existence of plague in some part of India
has long been suspected. Many of the great historical epidemics
took their rise there. The fact that pilgrims from Mecca spread the
disease not infrequently has been surmised at least for a century or
more. It is only in our own times that measures have been taken
for the enforcement of such sanitary measures as would ensure
reasonable safety from the disease from this quarter. Even now,
however, absolute assurance is not attainable. A number of the
smaller epidemics in Asia Minor have been traced to this source.
Only three years ago Professor Koch while on an expedition for
the German Government in German East Africa discovered the ex-
istence of the plague focus on Lake Victoria Nyanza. From there
certain hitherto inexplicable epidemics along the Nile and on the
Barbary coast have had their origin.

The tracing of the sources of infection substantiates very well the
position assumed by all bacteriologists that infection never originates
de novo, but is always transmitted continuously through various
media. A disease that has persisted for a long while in a neighbor-
hood may become less virulent for the inhabitants of that neighbor-
hood, yet may possess great virulence for people living under other
conditions, people protected neither by heredity nor by the living
conditions which may have rendered a special microbe compara-
tively innocuous. An epidemic, then, is a transplanting of the bac-
terial plant to soil where it flourishes with unwonted vigor. Such
things are not unusual in zoology and botany. Rabbits introduced
into Australia for purposes of sport became a national pest by the
wonderful reproductivity they developed under the new conditions.
The Scotch thistle introduced by some fervidly patriotic Scotchman
became an intolerable nuisance demanding government aid for its
limitation — eradication was out of the question. In the history of
epidemics it is well known that a hitherto unattacked tribe or race
may be practically wiped out by some simple contagious disease,
certain cases of which are constantly present in civilized communi-
ties. Measles, for instance, always caused great mortality among
our American Indians whenever it secured a foothdd among them.
Small-pox, next to fire water, has been the most fatal gift of civiliza-
tion to our red brother.

Every now and then some bacillus finds a favorable soil in a new
people, and then we have an epidemic. Often this epidemic does

312 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

not break out with all its virulence at once. It seems to acquire
virulence by becoming accustomed to a people and their living con-
ditions, and after passage through a number of susceptible indi-
viduals it acquires an infective power which enables it to affect
those who were able to resist it at the beginning of its career in a
particular place. This mode of action seems to be particularly
characteristic of plague or pest bacilli. Usually a few scattered
cases of the disease occur in a country. At first it does not spread
beyond those in immediate contact with patients first affected.
Then there is a subsidence of virulence that lulls into inactivity the
startled efforts to root out the disease. Sporadic cases occur for
some time, and then there is a sudden lighting up of epidemic virul-
ence.

We have not had a serious epidemic of plague in civilized coun-
tries since the beginning of the last century. About five years ago
in India the affection began to spread epidemically. Despite all the
assurances given by Indian sanitary authorities that it could be ef-
fectively controlled, plague has continued to exist ever since on the
Indian peninsula in epidemic form. It spread thence to various
parts of China. Then it scattered itself along the commercial
routes from India. It invaded Mauritius ; it reached Manila. The
world was startled by hearing of its occurrence in Alexandria last
year. A few months later came the news that plague had succeeded
in gaining a foothold in Europe at Oporto. From here it crossed
the ocean to several South American cities. Then it was heard of
at Honolulu. The Australian cities began to suffer from its rav-
ages. Finally it turned up in the Chinese quarter of San Francisco.
In none of these localities are we sure that it has given up its hold.
All this recalls the insidious way of the disease before a great epi-
demic, and there is serious question whether we may not be on the
eve of such an event. Certainly the test of the efficacy of our
vaunted sanitary measures for the prevention of disease is now at
hand. The next year or two will decide whether our sanitary
science is sufficient to protect us against one of the oldest and cruel-
est enemies of the race.

BACILLI AND EVOLUTION.

Microbiology has attained not a little of its interest for biologists
because it exemplifies in their simplest expression a number of the
great principles which underlie the life history of all living beings.
Behring, the discoverer of diphtheria antitoxin, called attention
some years ago to the fact that certain important questions in
heredity and evolution might be best studied in bacteria. When
a generation lasts a scant half hour and the scientist has the oppor-

Microbes and Medicine. 313

tunity to study not a few, but millions of successive generations,
and when he can submit these successive generations to the most
varying influences by changes of nutrition, temperature, conditions
of moisture and all the other elements that make up plant environ-
ment, it is to be expected that he will be able to elucidate many of
the problems connected with environment and heredity. So far at
least, however, such expectations have not been realized. Bacteria
of one genus persist in that genus despite the changes of environ-
ment to which they may be subjected. At most certain unimportant
modifications in their extrinsic qualities are acquired and the mi-
crobes invariably recur to their original form and properties when
placed under favorable conditions.

The bacillus of bubonic plague, for instance, produced the charac-
teristic symptoms of plague as we know it to-day some 2,400 years
ago. Countless generations of the bacillus have come into ex-
istence since then, but each has had all the qualities of the pest
family of bacilli. The bacillus was not discovered until our own
day, but it has been faithfully propagating its species in active ob-
scurity for some thousands of years. If there is an evolution in all
living things we might surely expect to find plague quite a different
disease to-day from what it was originally and conclude that the
bacillus would have developed into quite another form.

Now the bacillus of plague has been doubling every hour or so,
even allowing for long periods of quiescence, for quite 2,000 years
at least. The number of generations reaches up into figures of
which the human mind can form no conception. If the bacillus
still remains the same as it was, it seems clear that while evolu-
tion may be possible there exist certain stages in development at
which organisms become absolutely fixed and further progress
does not take place. In the case of the bacteria it can scarcely be
argued, as it is for the higher beings, that the few generations we
know anything of are inadequate to form the basis of a judgment as
to the influence of environment on living beings.

MICROBES THAT ARE NOT BACTERIA.

How little arguments from analogy amount to in the etiology of
disease is rather strikingly shown by the history of the investigation
into causes of malaria. Malaria is a febrile disease, infectious in
nature with many resemblances to the other infectious fevers. The
periodic fevers, with intervals in which there is no fever, recall cer-
tain infections after wounds and surgical operations when intermit-
ent chills and fever occur. This periodic febrile course is also noted
in consumption, in which there may be no rise of temperature in
the morning and considerable fever in the afternoon. It might con-

314 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

fidently be expected then that malaria would be found to be due to
some form of bacterium.

As a matter of fact several form of bacteria were described by
Italian observers as occurring in malaria. Laveran's observa-
tions in Algiers, however, showed that the cause of malaria
was of quite a different nature to bacteria. While the bacteria
are vegetable or plant organisms that grow by division of in-
dividual elements, the malarial germ is of animal nature and re-
quires periodic conjugation in order to go on with the process of
multiplication. Of course the plasmodium malarise, as it was called
originally, or the hoematozoon Laverani, i. e., the blood animal of
Laveran, is very low in the animal scale. It is difficult to distin-
guish between plants and animals at this stage of development.
The name protistae has been suggested for these unicellular plants
and animals that have so many characteristics in common that it
seems needless refinement to separate them. Distinctions exist,
however, and can be found on careful search.

The interesting feature of the malarial parasite is the recent dis-
covery of the fact that a certain form of mosquito is its host as well
as man. The theory of the mosquito borne origin of malaria had
been suggested at various times for a century. We owe its enuncia-
tion in definite form, however, to the penetrating intuition of Dr.
Patrick Manson, of the British Indian service. Before a single con-
firmatory observation had been made Manson elaborated the idea
that the malarial parasite had as intermediate host in the course of
its distribution from man to man the mosquito. After the event it
seems hard to realize that some such theory was not formulated be-
fore Hanson's time. Malaria is not contagious in the sense that it
will spread from bed to bed in a hospital ward. It is essentially a
disease of locality. It can be conveyed, however, as has been
proved experimentally by the inoculation of blood from patients suf-
fering from malaria into healthy individuals. The next step in the
theory, the realization of the agency of the mosquito in the matter,
seems inevitable. The mosquito in infected countries feeds on ma-
larial patients and afterwards on those not suffering from the disease.

Manson's theory was soon substantiated by Ross' observations.
Ross showed that the malarial parasites penetrated the stomach
walls of the anopheles mosquito, multiplied, wandered into the
salivary glands of the insect and then from there were inoculated
into human beings at the time "the odious creature presents his
bill." The life habits of the mosquito have now been carefully
studied. They confirm Manson's theory and add weight to Ross'
observations. The insect does not sting during the day, but pre-
ferably just at nightfall. As is well known in malarial countries,

Microbes and Medicine.

315

this is the most dangerous time for the unacdimated to be abroad.
The mosquito will not thrive at a temperature much below 70
degrees, so that malaria does not break out anew during the winter
time and does not occur at all in cold climates. The mosquito re-
quires stagnant water for breeding purposes, and so the neighbor-
hood of swamps is very naturally a favorite haunt of malaria. Care-
ful investigation for the last three years has not enabled ambitious
and acute searchers to find a single locality where malaria exists
and the anopheles mosquito is absent. By protecting themselves
carefully against mosquitoes men have been able to live in the most
malarial districts, in the Campagna at Rome, in the dreadfully ma-
larial district around Albanella, southeast of Naples, which has had an
evil repute ever since early Roman times, and where the newcomer
practically never failed to contract the disease in a virulent form.

The mosquito theory of malarial distribution has become the
mosquito doctrine. Now that we know the cause of the disease it
will not be difficult to prevent its spread. First the mosquitoes will
be limited by the drainage of swamps and all stagnant water ; second,
all malarial patients will be protected from the approach of mos-
quitoes by netting and other precautions. If the mosquitoes do not
become infected themselves, they cannot convey the infection. Ma-
larial parasites do not originate de novo in the mosquito, but are
generated only by their kind. Then, too, all malarial patients will
be cured as soon as possible by the free use of quinine, which it is
known kills the parasites in the human circulation and so limits the
opportunities for the spread of the infection. Third, those who enter a
malarial country will protect themselves by mosquito netting from the
stings of the insects — this has been efifectually done under trying cir-
cumstances— and so will not be inoculated with the malarial parasites.

The prevention of malaria and its eradication is probably the
greatest blessing that could be conferred on the human race at the
present time. Millions of acres of fertile land in the southern part
of the temperate zone that now lie useless and barren, or are imper-
fectly cultivated because of the dangers of malaria, would be restored
to man's use. Practically the only reason why the white race is un-
able to withstand living in the tropics is not the heat of the sun, but
the danger from malaria. The eradication of the disease would
open up the tropics to colonization and give unlimited opportunities
for the spread of civilization in countries as yet in a state of barbar-
ism.

THE NEW MICROBIOLOGY.

Even the slight discussion of these few headings from present-
day microbiology that our space allows shows how broad are the

3i6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

limits of the new science that has actually been born and reached its
development in the last few years. Bacteriology is by no means the
narrow study of disease germs that it is often considered to be. It
is a most helpfully promising science for the race. Within it are to
be found the principles on which the avoidance of disease must be
effected. Already it has made the work of sanitation definite and
taken its practice out of the realm of the merely empirical. Very
few realize how much this is accomplishing in lengthening the
average of human life. There are said to be alive in London to-day
over one-half a million of people who would not be living if the
death rate that prevailed fifteen years ago obtained up to the present
time. The average length of a generation of the human race has
not increased, but there are certain factors at work that would have
made it even shorter than it is if sanitary bacteriology had not come
in to prevent it. This is the time of great cities and great cities are
wasters of life. It is where men are crowded together in large
masses that death rates are high unless every precaution is taken.
City death rates would be much higher even than they are but for
bacteriological progress.

Besides this practical aspect the new microbiology is of interest
because of its relation to other sciences. The study of toxine and
antitoxine is bringing new light into the intricate mazes of organic
chemistry. The changes produced in the various animal tissues by
the presence of microbes and their toxines is making clearer some of
the difficult problems of physiological chemistry. The cellular
changes induced in various organs are teaching new details in physi-
ology and helping us to understand mysteries in pathology. Some-
thing has been said of evolution and microbes, and there are other
important questions of general biology on which light may be
thrown by bacteriological investigations. The unicellular organ-
isms represent life in its simplest form. All living things are aggre-
gations of cells, so that the fundamental problems of life remain the
same for all beings. The changes brought about by environment
may be studied in their simplest expressions in these minute organ-
isms. In a word, the new microbiology rules a microcosm whose
laws are as interesting as those of the visible universe all around us.
Every discovery made will have a significance beyond the limited
sphere in which it is found. The despised microbe, abused of the
quack and writer of funny paragraphs, may yet prove the key that
will unlock hitherto incomprehensible mysteries in the realm of liv-
ing beings.

James J. Walsh.

New York City.

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 317

SAINT ENNODIUS AND THE PAPAL SUPREMACY.

GLOOMY and ill-boding were the auguries, poignant and deso-
lating the scenes of grief amid which the year 500 was
ushered in at the capital of the Christian world. Often be-
fore, no doubt, had the impious hands of ruthless persecutors placed
a crown of sorrows on the fair brow of Christ's Church ; but such
cruelties and insults had mostly her avowed and detested enemies
for their authors. Now she is wounded close to her very heart by
professing friends, and the gaping rupture threatens her divinely-
assured existence. A saintly and cultured Pontiff has been duly in-
stalled in the chair of St. Peter, and he is intensely loved by the
great majority of his spiritual children. But that disrupting and
paralyzing curse of Christendom, an Antipope, has fallen heavily,
with all its pestiferous accompaniments, on the clergy and the people
of the Sacred City, and has spread its abominations of intrigue, dis-
trust, hatred and even murder everywhere, from the hallowed pre-
cincts of the churches and the renowned assembly of the Senate, to
the lowest dens of infamy and the resorts of perjured slaves. Schism,
in all conditions, is an evil of measureless mischief and malice ; it
saps the foundations of charity and makes wicked or deluded minds
insensible to the ennobling influences of religion ; it is an unnatural
rebellion of selfish and stubborn children against a loving mother.
Heaven stamps its progress with the unmistakable brand of reproba-
tion, in the enormities that never fail to follow in its wake, and fre-
quently visits its authors and fomentors with summary and shocking
chastisement. But schism undisguised and foully aggressive, pacing
the very sanctuaries and mounting the altar steps of the apostolic
basilicas and threatening even to seize upon the Papal throne;
schism, the outcome of an infamous bargain between the Eutychian
Emperor Anastasius and the intriguing courtier Festus, to have the
insidious and heretical Henotikon foisted on the acceptance of the
bishops, priests and faithful by the purchased efforts of a pliable
Pope ; schism which bespattered the pavements of Rome with the
blood of holy priests and devout laymen — such a schism, lasting for
four years, was the direst culmination of all the indignities and ter-
rors that the Church had yet been subjected to. TrUe, even if the
Almighty, in His inscrutable wisdom, had permitted the designing
and unscrupulous pretender to establish himself in the chair of the
Supreme Pontiff, Christ's promise would have still safeguarded the

3i8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

See of Peter and the utterances of his successor against the con-
tamination of heresy, however unworthy that successor might be of
the exalted office and terrible responsibility thus recklessly under-
taken. A signal example of such manifestly miraculous intervention
of the divine power is presented in the somewhat analogous case of
Vigilius, who is alleged to have secured the favor of the court of Con-
stantinople by a nefarious compact with the Empress Theodora, to
have received and dealt out enormous money bribes in order to gain
support in his disreputable candidature for the Papacy, and to have
been a guilty accomplice in the imprisonment and starvation of
Pope Silverius. Yet from the first moment when he was recognized
as Bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiflf all his pronouncements
were rigidly orthodox, and his stand in defense of the true doctrine
was staunch and fearless. But when the faith and the flock are threat-
ened the pastors must recognize the stern necessity of obeying their
Divine Master's command — Vigilate. The guardians of the price-
less deposit of faith could not fold their arms and look idly on while
a dastardly and corrupt combination was being organized to tamper
with that heavenly treasure, to dislodge the divinely constituted
Vicar of Christ, and to plant the false oracle of heresy in the chair of
incorruptible truth. 'The good shepherd giveth his life for his
flock ;" the wolves have entered into the sheepfold and must be ex-
pelled at any sacrifice. Nor is it bishops alone that are bound to
defend the faith from injury and alloy. "He that will confess Me
before men, him shall I confess before My Father who is in heaven"
embraces every individual believing in Christ.

That the clouds of error and the storms of fierce conflict were soon
put to flight, and that the spotless Spouse of the Redeemer emerged
from the cruel ordeal with undiminished vigor and in all her pris-
tine lustre, was the unfailing effect of the divine promise : "Behold
I am with you all days even unto the consummation of the world."
"Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build My Church, and
the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." To meet such terrific
crises God Almighty ever raises up some indomitable defender of
truth, some intrepid champion of the rights and discipline of our holy
religion, who carries the standard of the true faith unsullied through
the stormiest struggles until a sweeping and decided victory restores
peace and gives a new impulse to the activity of the Church. In the
overwhelming troubles that darkened the dawn of the sixth century
the hero of the strife and the triumphant upholder of the Papal pre-
rogatives was Ennodius, to whose enlightened and noble champion-
ship history has accorded but a tardy and inadequate acknowledg-
ment. Thirteen centuries and a half had rolled by, from the death
of this illustrious scholar and saint, before full and well merited promi-

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 319

nence, in the view of the whole Christian world for all time, was con-
ceded to him by the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. There his
teaching and his theses on the supremacy of the Holy See received
the highest conceivable sanction of infallible approval, and his name
was bracketed with those of Leo the Great, Athanasius, Cyril,
Gregory the Great, Avitus and, in modern times, Alphonsus Liguori
as a brilliant defender of this revealed and no longer debatable
truth. The learned Baronius is enthusiastic in his just praise of the
author of the "Apologia :" "His words deserve to be engrossed in
letters of gold on that dark page in the Church's history."

Pope Anastasius, in the year 498, deputed two cultured and trust-
worthy bishops to accompany to Constantinople Festus the Patri-
cian, who was proceeding to the imperial court on aflfairs of the
State. These prelates were the bearers of an important Papal letter
addressed to the Emperor and imploring him to dissociate himself
from the partisans of the late patriarch, Acacius, who had gone to
his final account under the anathema of the Church, and to return
to that warm and pronounced allegiance to Christ's vicar which he
had so constantly displayed before his accession to the throne. So
far was the Emperor from permitting himself to be gained over to
the cause of religion that he even succeeded in securing from Festus
a solemn undertaking to use all his powerful influence, in the church
and at court, to have the Henotikon adopted and approved by the
Pope and the Western bishops. This Henotikon, it will be remem-
bered, was a most seductive document, drawn up by Zeno at the dic-
tation of Acacius, professedly in the interests of peace and union,
but implicitly heretical, since it ignored the Ecumenical Council of
Chalcedon.

Before the return of Festus, however. Pope Anastasius had died,
and already speculation was keen on the subject of a successor.
Festus saw that if his unworthy projects and schemes were to have
any chance of success it would be by the election of a Pope who would
owe his elevation to his support and who would promise him to
effectuate his engagements to the Emperor. On the 22d of Novem-
ber, 498, the Archdeacon Symmachus, a native of Sardinia, and at-
tached to the Constantine Basilica or St. John of Lateran's, as it was
afterwards called, was duly consecrated Pope in that church, having
been elected, according to custom, by the vast majority of the clergy
and people. But Festus had utilized with efifect the short interval
from his return, and in the words of Nicephorus quoted by Baronius,
"he had corrupted a certain number of the clergy who gave their
votes to Laurence, a Roman priest." Thus there were two conse-
crated, the deacon Symmachus, elected by the larger number (and
already promoted to the priesthood), and Laurence, supported by

320 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the minority. On the very same morning, while the true Vicar of
Christ was receiving the episcopal ordination and Apostolic com-
mission as Bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiff of the Universal
Church, the turbulent and corrupt schismatics were setting up a
rock of scandal by the uncanonical and criminal consecration of the
Antipope in the Basilica of St. Mary Major. Festus was in the
zenith of his power; he had just delivered to Theodoric the Em-
peror's official letter under his great seal, recognizing his status as
King of Italy. Though he had been already acknowledged as such
by his own Ostrogoths and by the conquered Italians, this formal
acknowledgment of his royal dignity by the Emperor of the East
added a fresh lustre to his power and prestige, while it removed all
fear of molestation. To Festus, as the trusted bearer of this im-
portant message, enhanced importance and increased influence
naturally accrued, and he was not slow to improve the opportunity
thus offered by representing that he was commissioned by the Em-
peror to endeavor to heal the religious differences that distracted
the churches of the East, and to bring about a clear understanding
and perfect harmony between the East and the West, Constantinople
and the Holy See. Owing to the praiseworthy and urgent nature
of the momentous task he professed his anxiety and power to
achieve, he succeeded in deluding, by false pretences, many holy
ecclesiastics ; bribery was a more potent weapon to overcome the ob-
jections of the less upright.

The ecclesiastical histories deal with this critical conjuncture in
the affairs of the Church in so confused and misleading a manner
that it is only by a careful comparison of the Letters of Ennodius on
the subject that we can arrive at a clear conception of the sequence of
events. For instance, we are informed that the schism continued
for four years, and in the next sentence or so it is stated that both
sides in the prolonged dispute agreed to submit their jarring claims
to the arbitration of Theodoric. Both these statements are un-
doubtedly accurate, but it was immediately after the election that the
joint appeal was addressed to the King, praying him to intervene
and promising cheerful submission to his judgment. The following
are the words of the Liber PontiUcalis: "After a long discussion the
rival parties agreed that the two Pontiffs should go to Ravenna to
submit their case to the judgment of the King, Theodoric. The
equitable principle enunciated by the King was this : 'The Apostolic
See belongs by right to him who was first ordained or who obtained
the larger number of votes.' His opponents could not resist mani-
fest facts, and it had to be admitted that Symmachus had received
the majority of votes. He took possession of the chair of St. Peter."
This obviously just decision did not. however, crush the revolt or

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 3^1

restore tranquillity. Open resistance was abandoned for dark con-
spiracy and squalid calumny.

All this took place during the winter of 498, and in March, 499, a
council was convoked by order of Symmachus, under whose presi-
dency as undisputed Head of the Church 72 bishops, 67 priests and
5 deacons assembled in St. Peter's Basilica. The decrees of this
council are followed by the signatures, first, of the Supreme Pon-
tiff: "I, Coelius Symmachus, Bishop of the Holy Roman Catholic
Church, have subscribed these synodal decrees, approved and con-
firmed by my authority;" in the second place, by the bishops ; and,
thirdly, at the head of the list of priests' signatures, appears that of
the Antipope : "I, Coelius Laurence, archpriest of the title of Saint
Praxedes, have subscribed, with my full consent, these synodal de-
crees, and / swear to remain faithful to them." We shall see how
lightly this solemn oath sat on the conscience of the arch-disturber ;
but the direct aim of our narrative and the order of the salient facts
demand that we should first briefly review the motives and manner
of the advocacy of the Papal rights by Ennodius, whose historic
oration was not the only testimony of his whole-hearted zeal. He
threw himself into the contest from the very outset with a devoted-
ness and perseverance that obstacles and dangers were powerless to
shake or thwart.

Magnus Felix Ennodius was a native of Aries, where he first saw
the light in 473. His family, like most of the nobility of France in
those days, was connected with many illustrious houses of Rome
and of other cities of the now fallen and dismembered Empire.
While still very young he was taken to Milan by a rich aunt who
resided there and by whose generosity his gifted mind received all
the available advantages of a splendid education. If we accept as
unexaggerated recitals of facts his somewhat startling accusations of
himself in a work framed on the model of St. Augustine's Confes-
sions, we can hardly regard his boyhood as a fit prelude to that after
life of sanctity and self-sacrifice that has gained for him an honored
place on the Calendar of Saints. He inherited his aunt's attenuated
fortune, which was so notably augmented by the dowry he received
with the lady he married while he was but a little over 16 years of
age that he describes this latter accession to his material wealth as
incomparably greater than what remained of his aunt's property and
legacies. Ex mendico in regem mutatus sum. At 20 he was attacked
by a malignant and lingering disease which was the turning point in
his life. His wife entered warmly into his new views and showed her
earnestness by embracing the religious life and entering a convent
forthwith. Ennodius devoted himself with characteristic ardor to
a thorough preparation for Holy Orders, and received deaconship at
Vol. XXVI— 8

322 American Catholic Quarterly! Review.

the age of 21. Laurentius, Archbishop of Milan, then entrusted to
him the supervision of the hospitals, the care of the poor of the city
and the management and custody of the Cathedral revenues. In
addition to these onerous and engrossing duties, he conducted a
most successful school, mainly frequented by the youth of the aris-
tocracy and including in its programme the humanities and the
rudiments of the art of eloquence. He became Bishop of Pavia in
511, was twice employed as Papal Envoy to Constantinople and died
in the prime of life in 520. His memory is honored by the Church
on the 17th of July, the anniversary of his edifying death. Popes
Nicholas the First and John the Eighth speak of him as the "great"
and "glorious confessor."

To justify the character and to appreciate the value of Ennodius*
well directed efforts in the early stages of this momentous contest
between Pope Symmachus and his unscrupulous rival, it is neces-
sary to consider the disorganized and venal condition to which civil
and judicial administration had been reduced by the recent civil
wars. Thierry assures us that the improbity of judges was so gen-
eral that the vice had to be reckoned with in all important cases ; and
Ennodius himself, though in his profession of advocate at the public
bar, which he followed for many years, he never accepted briefs in
any but transparently just cases, often found what we may bluntly
call bribery of the unfriendly judges a regrettable necessity. With
this ungainly aspect of public morality we are not brought into im-
mediate contact, fortunately, in this bitter and protracted struggle ;
but we can very easily infer from the spirit of venality that every-
where prevailed how necessary it was to have abundance of money
at ready command to purchase the good offices of the needy cour-
tiers at Ravenna in order to secure a satisfactory hearing from the
King. When the ready cash at the disposal of Ennqdius out of his
own personal resources was exhausted by the enormous expenses
of which we shall learn more as we proceed and on gratuities of the
nature just indicated, his credit as the owner of immense property
and of an honorable name was sufficient to cover as a guarantee of
repayment all the advances that were needed.

The Pope, on the other hand, stood in a position of helpless
penury, the chief sources of revenue to the Roman churches being
in possession of his reckless adversaries. It is touchingly edifying,
however, to observe from the statements of Ennodius that the Holy
Father, in the midst of all his anxieties and the most pressing de-
mands for money to meet expenses incurred on his personal account,
never permitted to be touched the small but sacred reserve which he
retained in inviolable trust for the deserving poor. Even now, after
the lapse of 1,400 years, those energetic and withal graceful letters

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy, 323

of Ennodius to the Deacon Hormisdas, who afterwards filled with
dignity and distinction the Papacy he was now defending against
faction and fraud, and to the upright and scholarly Luminosus, who
acted in the capacity of chancellor to the Pope, are replete with in-
terest and instruction. At first blush a forcibly worded appeal to
the Head of the Church to discharge money liabilities contracted on
his behalf and with his knowledge suggests a scandalous laxity in
a quarter where the whole world is to look for guidance in example
as well as in word, especially in reference to admitted claims of jus-
tice. The writer very properly defends the urgency of his repeated
applications on the ground that it is Laurence, the Bishop of Milan,
that is pressing for repayment, and he even goes so far as to say that
he is prepared to fully reimburse that prelate out of his own pocket
if all else fail. We must remember that the abnormal exigences ot
the Pope's hampered position amply warranted a delay; and, sec-
ondly, that the guarantor nowhere expresses a doubt as to the de«
mands of justice being satisfied in the end. The amount of which
there is question in the following instructive quotation from a letter
to Hormisdas was due to Ennodius himself, but is not very urgently-
demanded back :

"Some short time ago, while we were overwhelmed with anxiety
and were still uncertain of the favor of our pious King and in doubt
as to the judgment he might pronounce on the accusations with
which the Pope was charged, I handed over all my numerous camels
to you to be given to His Holiness the Pope, with this stipulation,
that if the animals themselves were not necessary (presumably for
conveying the Papal equipage from Rome to Ravenna) their value
should be realized and their price, as fairly estimated, be restored
to me. Independently of this transaction. His Holiness is fully
acquainted with the fact that, to the very best of my ability, I have
on all occasions relieved, at your request, the pressing needs of our
holy Roman Church. In return, kindly do me the favor of recalling
to the memory of the Pope, just now, the facts of the negotiation I
allude to. I would request you also respectfully to make known to
me the result of your interview. I have every confidence that
neither the Pontiff of the Apostolic See nor you who worthily dis-
charge the office of intermediary can entertain on the question any
other views or intentions than such as are in consonance with our
stipulated agreement and with justice."

This modest and diffident epistles sheds a flood of light on the
devotedness of our Saint to the Holy See ; almost single-handed and
at enormous risk he sacrificed his peace of mind, he expended all his
money, mortgaged his vast estates, devoted his brilliant talents and
staked his wide popularity and distinguished name in the disinter-

3^ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ested and weary work of defending the rights and liberty of the
Supreme Pontiff. It is with a heavy heart and a keen sense of the
cold ingratitude of the Pope's entourage for all his unsparing efforts
and lavish expenditure in the sacred cause with which their sym-
pathies and interests were so closely bound up that he pens the
scathing but just reminder : ''Cui mos est pia jugiter facere, justa
non despiciet, et qui largitur proprium aliena non subtrahet."

In a letter to Luminosus he further discloses to us, by a palpable
and concrete illustration, the endless exertions he had made, and
this statement he writes in no boastful or glory-seeking spirit, but
from sheer compulsion : "Both through my communications and
-directly from the mouth of our revered Bishop of Milan himself you
have been made aware that he claims the repayment to him of those
5ums that were expended at Ravenna in the interest of our Holy
Father. This expenditure, absolutely necessary to meet the require-
ments of the case, exceeded in the aggregate 400 gold pieces, dis-
tributed in varying sums to influential personages whose names it
would be impolitic and wrong to disclose. Now, these large
amounts were advanced by my bishop, Lawrence, on my personal
security ; and I cannot reconcile myself to appearing in his presence
with unabashed boldness until I shall have obtained, as I have every
confidence I shall obtain, through your kind offices and mediation, a
thorough fulfilment of the promises given. Should you think my
claim either extravagant in itself or disrespectfully asserted, then I
shall discharge out of my own resources every fraction that the
revered bishop has been good enough to advance, and for the re-
imbursement of which I alone am bailsman. I hold in my posses-
sion the Pope's letter, wherein he authorized all necessary expenses
to be defrayed under my note of hand." It is consoling to reflect
that, slender as were the revenues and impoverished the exchequer
of the Holy See at this trying crisis, the principal at least and prob-
ably the interest, .too, at the current rate had been duly discharged
in the interval between the date of this last quoted letter and that of
his application to be indemnified for the sale of his camels and for
expenditures of his own money. But numerous were the messages
and urgent the appeals on each of three occasions at least conveyed
by a confidential courier, who was to bring back the coin, before the
heavy debt was liquidated. In turn he invoked the aid of Lumi-
nosus, Hormisdas and the Deacon Dioscurus to give effect to his
demand. To Luminosus he addresses language of piteous entreaty :
"You promised that the repayment of these necessary expenses ad-
vanced by your request would be forthcoming without any avoidable
delay ; but, in punishment for my faults, some hidden destiny has
always interposed an obstacle. The Bishop importunes me with

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 325

such urgent pressure that he scarcely allows me time to despatch a
special messenger to the Holy City. After God, the matter is now
in your hands."

The second projected visit of Symmachus to Ravenna to counter-
act the effect and to demonstrate the groundlessness of the filthy
charges trumped up against him, as he had already appeared there
with striking success to defend the validity of his election, must have
taken place in the winter of 499, if the design was ever carried into
execution. That ample means were provided for that express pur-
pose we know, and that the ministers and courtiers at Ravenna were
kept posted on the nature and extent of the foul means adopted by
the partisans of the Antipope to compass their nefarious designs we
likewise know. But we are not in possession of such explicit state-
ments or precise data as would justify the assertion that the visit
actually took place. Two important and undeniable facts point in
the opposite direction ; the appointment of a visiting bishop to in-
vestigate the charges in the beginning of the year 500 and the visit
of the King himself in the September of the same year. The mal-
contents did journey to Ravenna to prefer their calumnious charges,
and succeeded in carrying their point for the time. They convinced
the King that they were proceeding according to the requirements
of Canon Law and were easily able to adduce instances in which the
Pope had himself appointed a visitor to take cognizance of charges
alleged against bishops. What the Supreme Pontiff had put in
force against others they argued he could not object to submit to
himself. The King, being himself an Arian and only superficially
acquainted with the constitution and ordinances of the Catholic
Church, was in good faith convinced of the seeming reasonableness
of their contention. Thus was the Roman Pontiff sought to be
placed on the same level with other bishops, which was a direct and
emphatic denial of the supremacy of the Holy See. All the un-
wearying vigilance and energetic precautions of Ennodius failed to
prevent the tricky intriguers from snatching this far-reaching con-
cession from the unsuspecting King. Had the case been presented
with that lucidity and cogency of reasoning on behalf of the Pope
that Ennodius displays in his Apologia, even a temporary triumph
could not have been scored by his opponents thus, seemingly by
chance. But chance is a pseudonym and a misleading one; it was
by a wise and happy disposition of Providence, who can ever make
passing evils the occasion of lasting good. It was to this event that
the immortal ''Apologia" owed its origin ; and it was this event and
its immediate consequences that opened the eyes of the bishops of
the world to the glaring outrage of subjecting the recognized suc-
cessor of St. Peter to such an indignity and injustice ; and it was this

326 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

event that drew from Avitus and the other Bishops of Gaul their
noble and memorable protest.

It is important to observe that there were as many as five coun-
cils summoned at Rome in connection with this calamitous strug-
gle. The dates of the councils enable us to fix, with tolerable ac-
curacy, the time and duration of most of the other incidents. We
have seen that the first of the assemblies met on the ist of March,
499. Of this council two canons are extant and incorporated in the
legislation of the Church. They are both conversant with Papal
elections, and enact the extreme penalties of deposition and excom-
munication against priests, deacons or inferior clergy who enter into
cabals or adopt corrupt means to further the cause of any aspirant,
and they seal with the Church's approval the wise principles fol-
lowed by Theodoric in favor of the majority of votes. At the close
of this council the too indulgent Pontiff canonically appointed the
hypocritical Laurence to the bishopric of Nuceria; and we gather
from Ennodius that, concealing his unsatisfied ambition and his
dark designs, he departed from Rome and took possession of his
see. It is pretty obvious that the new and execrable trick of en-
deavoring to oust the legitimate Pope by bringing against him vile,
calumnious charges must have been started and worked with ma-
lignant persistency from the very moment of the Antipope's depar-
ture from the city. For Baronius and other reliable authorities
prove to a demonstration that a second council, of which the acts
have not been preserved, was held soon after Easter of 500, and that
the visitor and Antipope were there deposed and excommunicated.
It was, therefore, in the winter of 499 that, yielding to the entreaties
of Faustus, Probinus and many other influential personages, the
King approved of the nomination of Peter, Bishop of Altinum, to
inquire into the alleged charges. The Liber Pontificalis has the fol-
lowing summary :

"Some intriguing clerics and certain Senators with Festus and
Probinus at their head formulated an indictment against Symmachus
and suborned false witnesses, whom they sent to Ravenna, there to
make their depositions. In the meantime they secretly recalled
Laurence and published throughout Rome the. various articles of
the impeachment. The schism was revived ; some of the clergy ad-
hered to the communion of Symmachus, others to that of Laurence.
The Senators Faustus and Probinus addressed an appeal to the King
and employed all their efforts to obtain from him that he would ap-
point a visitor to the Apostolic See. The King named Peter, Bishop
of Altinum, for that office — a measure opposed to the canons."

The visitor was expressly directed in the commission given him
by the King to report himself to the P-^oe directly on his arrival in

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 327

Rome, but instead of doing so he at once publicly identified him-
self with the party of revolt, forgetting his official character of im-
partial judge as well as his duty as a bishop in communion with the
Holy See. *'It was, undoubtedly," says Ennodius, "the King's ex-
plicit desire that the visitor should bring, to Rome not dissension and
discord, but harmony and peace. He clearly foresaw that if he did
not fortify this unfortunate man with the most precise instructions
for his guidance, the contagion of your envenomed artifices would
soon make of him a corrupt supporter of faction. Because it is
written: The simple man believes in every word. Consequently he
defined for him a line of conduct and imposed upon him a solemn
obligation not to deviate from it. These instructions directed the
visitor to present himself at the Basilica of St. Peter's as soon as he
would have reached the city of Rome. This was nothing more or
less than to embody in a royal order the wishes of the Holy Father
himself. Who, then, would have conceived for a moment that a
bishop, even if the secular authorities had forbidden it, would have
failed to conform to those pious rules and customs that the prince
himself did not believe himself exempted from complying with?
The visitor was bound to pay his respects to the Pope and to re-
quest him in a personal interview to deliver over his slaves ; he was
bound to give him an undertaking that the said slaves would not be
put to the torture, but would be kept in safe custody to be heard by
the council in the process of the investigation." These slaves be-
longed to the Pope's household, and were alleged by his accusers to
be in possession of incriminating information. "From the very be-
ginning of his mission this visitor was circumvented by intriguers
and, so far from being a messenger of peace, was transformed into
a brand of discord. Without so much as the formality of a visit to
St. Peter's — invisis beati Apostoli liminibus — he gives himself up to
be blindly conducted by the caprice of your fury ; and that temple —
the centre of strength and authority for all other churches— which
attracts the faithful from all corners of the earth ; that temple your
visitor passes by close to its very porticoes, but condescends not to
enter. He, a mere commissioner of investigation, is too grand to
approach the supreme court of the Church. That branch severed
from the stem left no room for hope, from that instant, that it would
produce good fruit. You have refused to permit your visitor to
avail of the privilege of approaching those hallowed precincts, filled
as they are with ennobling memories, fearing that he might per-
chance detach himself from your crawling errors if he knelt in hom-
age before that august sanctuary of St. Peter's confession. You
cannot, therefore, screen yourselves behind the royal authority which
you have flouted in its very first ordinance ; already doomed objects

328 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of the wrath of heaven, you have merited in addition the severest
chastisement from the King, whose expHcit directions you have
maHciously infringed."

The reader cannot fail to observe with what prudent deftness the
accompHshed orator contrives to extol the foresight and fairness of
Theodoric, while at the same time he proceeds to show, with char-
acteristic force of argument, that the appointment of a visitor by the
King or by any other authority, civil or religious, was directly op-
posed to the canons and to the most elementary laws of the constitu-
tion of the hierarchy. As has been already remarked, the existence
of a visitor with power to bring the accusations against Pope
Symmachus formally before a council or so-called high court sup-
posed to possess jurisdiction over him was an explicit negation of
the Papal supremacy. But while he heaps compliments upon the
King with royal profusion, though with cultivated delicacy, he is
much more eloquent in his tribute of eulogy to the tomb of the
Apostles. In contrasting the conduct of the visitor with that of the
millions of pilgrims that come from the ends of the earth to do rev-
erence to the Vicar of Christ and to reinvigorate their faith and zeal
on the spot where Saints Peter and Paul preached the true doctrine
and sealed it with their blood, he proposes the objection : "Perhaps
you will say it is doing an injury to the dignity and power of those
denizens of heaven to imagine that their influence is confined to any
one particular place on earth." And he proceeds: "Prayer, it is
true, is heard, no matter in what part of the world it is offered ; the
faith and devotion of the suppliant make the martyr present by
knowledge wherever he is invoked. But who will venture to deny
that the saints are more deeply loved in the land of their birth, or
that they are more tenderly reverenced and more confidently in-
voked on the spot where they sacrificed their lives to be received
into God's everlasting presence? Our Redeemer, I admit, makes
the entire world the theatre of His stupendous miracles, but the
countless crowds of pilgrims that throng to this glorious monument
have invested it with unrivaled honor and prestige. He who can
change carnal man into an angel can assuredly endow with special
blessings one particular corner of the earth."

We are still quoting from the sublime and immortal Apologia,
and as this is the most appropriate place to examine the answer of
Ennodius to the argument that secured from the King his approval
of the uncanonical nomination of a visitor, we shall give the orator's
own statements and reasoning, even at the risk of making the quo-
tation rather lengthy. The momentous character of the question at
issue and the unanswerable cogency of the reasons adduced are, it
is hoped, a sufficient excuse.

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 329

"Ihe Pope, they argue, assigns visitors in case of other bishops,
and common justice requires that he should be himself bound by the
law of which he is the author. Let us see if that proposition can be
defended in canon law. Now, I have no wish to accuse them of
wilfully contradicting the known truth ; I will not directly denounce
them as liars. I will content myself with affirming that the legis-
lator is not subject to his own law ; if the prince is not above the
laws that he enacts for his subjects, it is vain to invoke his authority
to have these laws executed." It is the same line of argument as
that 01 St. Thomas. No man can be subject to himself ; hence his
enactments can only possess for him a directive force; the punitive
and coactive elements are wanting. It is this directive force that
Ennodius designates the law written in the heart or conscience.
"There remains for him the law of his conscience, a law written in
the hearts of all of us and which fails not to direct the man who is
exempi from all other laws. Of his own uncoerced motion he
•--mbraces that virtue with which no fear of punishment imposes upon
him compliance. When there is question of others, God has willed that
they should be judged by their fellow-men; but in regard to the Pontiff
of the Holy See, He has reserved the judgment to Himself in the most
absolute manner. Sedis istius prcesulem suo sine qucestione reservavit
arbitrio. It is the Divine will that the successors of Saint Peter
should be amenable to heaven alone, and that they should bring
before the Supreme Judge a conscience that no earthly authority
has had jurisdiction to examine. If they are guilty, imagine not
that they are exempt from fear ; their own conscience and the ever-
present Deity, whom nothing can escape, are constant witnesses of
all their actions." They can say with David, Tibi soli peccavi.

"But, you will object, every man is in this position; he has his
conscience to accuse him when he goes wrong and God to condemn
him if he perseveres in his guilt. My answer to this is brief and
conclusive: It was only to one man and his successors that the
Divine Redeemer said : Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram cediUcabo
ecclesiam meam. Quidquid solveris super terram, erit solutum et in
ccelis. I will add that the verdict of the saints since the foundation
of the Church proclaims the dignity of the Pontiffs of the Holy
See as an object of veneration throughout Christendom, since the
universal fold of Christ is subject to it and lovingly accepts its
sweet yoke. This see is named the central and the chief see of the
whole world, and to Rome may be applied the exclamation of the
prophet Isaias : "// she is humbled, to whom will you have recourse?
Where will you leave your glory f^

These are some of the words that the learned Baronius very justly
remarks "ought to be engraved in letters of gold," and our readers

330 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

will agree that their author deserves a more prominent place and
higher praise than our historians have hitherto given him. A few
of his hymns, especially the beautiful ode on the holy virgin Eu-
phemia, are referred to with scant eulogy ; we are informed that his
Apologia was approved by the Pope and the Roman Synod and
ordered to be inserted among the acts of the Council, and some of
the unappreciative notices add that his style was labored and turgid."
Thus is relegated to undeserved obscurity one of the most devoted
sons of the Church since the days of the Apostles; an unselfish
and powerful supporter of the Roman Pontiff by purse and pen, by
material succor and by the gift of eloquence, in the hour of sore and
trying necessity ; a bright and shining light ; a beacon on the hill-
tops of the distant past as a signal of the Church's infallible security.
His conclusions have been crystallized into unchangeable dogma by
the Vatican Council. "Si quis dixerit nan esse ex ipsius Christi
Domini institutione seu jure Divino ut beatus Petrus in primatu super
universam ecclesiam haheat perpetuos successores; seu Romanum Ponti-
iicem non esse beati Petri in eodem primatu successorem: anathema sit"
"Si quis dixerit Romanum PontiUcem non habere plenum et supremam
potestatem jurisdictionis in Universam Ecclesiam, non solum in rebus
quce ad fidem et mores, sed etiam in eis quce ad disciplinam et regimen
Ecclesice per totum orbem diifusce pertinent; aut hanc potestatem non esse
ordinariam et immediatam sive in omnes et singulas ecclesias, sive
in omnes et singulos past ores et Udeles: anathema sit."

A question will have naturally suggested itself to the reader
before he has reached this stage of the proceedings : what were the
charges preferred against the Pope ? That they were worthy of the
criminal gang that invented and propagated the calumnies he will
have already suspected. In the histories, where even the most
meagre account of the schism appears, it is surmised that one, and
the one most dwelt upon, of the allegations accused the saint of lead-
ing a scandalous life. It is for this reason that his slaves are so
frequently alluded to, as his enemies pretended that they could
depose to the irregularity of his conduct. Now, a slave's oath
was not accepted as conclusive evidence, according to the canon or
the civil law of the day, unless the deponent was subjected to tor-
ture, and, naturally enough, the maligned Pontiff refused to hand
over the slaves to be tampered with by his calumniators ; but he
voluntarily undertook to present himself, to allow the examination
of every member of his household and to facilitate the acquisition
of evidence in every way in his power when the conditions he
insisted on as preliminary to his submitting himself to judgment
were first fulfilled. The principal of the conditions was that the
Papal estates that had been wrested from him by gross violence

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 331

and glaring injustice and the Church revenues and personal income
that had been similarly seized upon and misappropriated should be
restored to him, as he had been pronounced by the King and by the
Council legitimate Pontiff and hence the rightful owner or admin-
istrator. In other words, he claimed that, in accordance with the
canons, everything should be placed in statu quo ante, and that then
he would answer all charges, however foul, that his adversaries
might bring against him. We shall see that, at the King's sugges-
tion, he waived even this reasonable and legal demand, and thus
covered his calumniators with confusion and disgrace. Nor ought
we to feel staggered by the filthy accusations hurled against this
holy and pure ecclesiastic. St. Athanasius and many other saints
before and since his day, men of angeHc chastity, had to suffer
cruelly for the time from similar nasty calumnies, but their terrific
ordeals only added new gems to the glorious crowns that awaited
them. A disappointed rival without a conscience is dominated by
unbridled passions, and an Antipope most faithfully represents on
earth the leader of the first rebellion in heaven. His counsel to
his disappointed partisans is forcibly expressed by the great author
of Paradise Lost :

Our better part remains
To work in close design, by fraud or guile,
What force effected not; that He no less
At length from us may find, Who overcomes
By force, hath overcome but half his foe.

It is a singular and a striking fact that neither in the exhaustive
reply of Ennodius nor in the acts of any of the councils are the
counts of indictment particularized. But the cause of their silence
is not far to seek ; other allegations they would specify, but a charge
of incontinence, however clearly disproved, they shrank from men-
tioning in connection with the Holy See or its revered occupant.
Ennodius, in a very elevated and eloquent passage, alludes to "abom-
inable inventions which ought to be buried in eternal oblivion,"
and to "accusations so scurvy that their very recital would defile
the tongue and taint the atmosphere." And in another passage his
eloquence is as telHng in effect as it is sublime in conception; he
introduces St. Paul as addressing to the accusers those apposite
words of his Epistle to the Romans : "You accuse others of perver-
sity, you who are yourselves filled with injustice, with fornication,
with avarice, with malice and with envy ; laden with murders, always
ready to condemn, tricky and jealous. You remind us that nobody
ought to hold communication with fornicators, and you are not
ashamed to allow all the world to see yourselves in the company and
train of the adulterer, Laurence, you vile instruments, which he uses
at will to spread his poisons and to expand the area of infection.

33^ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

And whilst you move in that pestilent company, while you carry the
badge of that corrupt rebel, you impute it as a crime to the priests
of the Lord to remain attached to the old communion. You pre-
tend to judge us culpable in communicating with a Pontiff whom
you have accused no doubt, but whom not an atom of evidence is
forthcoming to convict, while you yourselves associate with a man
whom the Sacred Scriptures smite with a two-edged sword." These
passages leave no room for reasonable doubt as to the nature of the
imputations, and the inference they so clearly suggest becomes per-
fectly irresistible in face of the fact that Pope Symmachus himself,
hoping to save others equally guiltless from such foul accusations,
got a most extraordinary decree passed in solemn council immedi-
ately after peace had been restored, and insisted on its being ob-
served rigidly not by bishops alone, but by priests and deacons as
well. In its original form it was devised to safeguard the character
of bishops only — Prccceptum quo jussi sunt omnes episcopi cellulanos
habere. The Bishop of Milan, in a pastoral letter, which Ennodius
mentions and quotes from at great length elsewhere, expressly
states that this surprising legislation had been dictated by motives
of prudence, in consequence of the calumnies to which the Pontiff
of the Apostolic See had been subjected, and the incalculable scan-
dal that had been caused by their circulation. "We must take into
account," says the sage and holy bishop, "that some people will be
found to believe a thing as long as it is a possibility even ; we remove
all scandalum iniirmorum by making such conduct on the part of
clerics impossible; this is secured by having present at all times a
companion or witness. Those whose revenues do not permit of
their keeping a second priest in the house with them, sleeping in
the same apartment at night, can arrange with others in the neigh-
borhood similarly circumstanced, so that two may have their beds
in the same or in adjoining rooms. Outside the females sanctioned
by the canons, let no woman, especially one unconnected with the
house, be admitted save on strict business, and, that over, let her at
once depart, lest the reputation even of the most innocent should be
compromised."

Again in the passage of the Apologia where the auditor notices,
with biting sarcasm, the sneering reference of the opposite party to
the class of people that flocked around the venerable Pontiff on his
way to stand his trial, he conveys pretty clearly that the Pope's re-
vilers had hinted at unworthy and disreputable motives engendering
their sympathy. It is needless to say that the poor and destitute
were the special beneficiaries, as they have always been, of the Su-
preme Pontiff's generosity and the most attached and devoted to his
person. Hence when they saw their beloved Bishop and bene-

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 333

factor proceeding to the council, to be there charged by his malig-
nant and crime-stained enemies with abominations of which they
knew him to be perfectly innocent, it is no wonder that they gath-
ered around him, with frantic manifestations of their grief and in-
dignation.

But the matter is placed entirely outside the pale of doubt or con-
jecture by a document known as the Manuscript of Verona, discov-
ered about 200 years ago and published in a Roman edition of the
lives of certain Popes by a learned compiler named Mianchini. This
production is undoubtedly authentic, in the less rigid sense of that
word, its author's name being unknown. It was written about the
time of the unfortunate schism we are dealing with, and is obviously
the work of a strong partisan of the Antipope, as mendacious as it is
scurrilous. Since it does not appear to have attracted the notice of
most Catholic historians, some extracts from it may prove interest-
ing. The bolder and more enlightened policy, approved by our
present illustrious Pontiff, is never to shrink from publishing gen-
uine historical facts and documents, with due distinction of the true
and the false. Our Church has nothing to fear and everything to
gain from an impartial investigation of all traditional and docu-
mentary evidence. "All the pick of the clergy and all the more
worthy Senators supported Laurence, who was ordained according
to the canons." This statement is an unexaggerated sample of the
whole tone and tenor of the Verona Manuscript. In narrating the
details of the pleading before the King in Ravenna on behalf of
Symmachus it attributes, as we might expect, the royal decision to
bribery, though it is utterly repugnant to the estimate all historians
form and convey of that Prince's uprightness, to conceive him
guilty of corruption. Had he been open to the acceptance of a bribe,
Festus was both willing and able to offer him any amount he might
name. Another charge is that of heterodox views on the Paschal
question ; but, as Ennodius deals with this insinuation so summarily,
we assume it is only introduced to account for the alleged sojourn
of Symmachus at Ravenna to test his orthodoxy. The story hangs
so loosely together that its character of fiction is apparent in almost
every sentence.

"Numerous crimes brought about, after some years, the impeach-
ment of Symmachus before the King. There was special question
of the Paschal Feast, which he celebrated at a diflFerent time from
that observed by the great body of the faithful. The King sum-
moned him to his presence to give some explanation of this diversity
of practice, and obliged himself and the clergy in his immediate
entourage to abide at Rimini for some time, with a view to testmg
their orthodoxy on this point. One evening, as Symmachus was

334 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

taking a walk on the seashore, he noticed certain women pass along
that he was accused of being too familiar with. They were pro-
ceeding to the palace by the King's express orders. Without re-
vealing to anybody that his fears were aroused by what he had re-
marked, he kept perfectly quiet all night, and then, protected by the
darkness, he drove rapidly to Rome and concealed himself within
the walls of his palace. The clergy who had been his companions
protested to the King that they had neither cognizance nor sus-
picion of his intended flight. Then the King gave them a mandate
to be conveyed to the Senate and the clergy, ordering them to take
immediate steps to secure the Pontiff's condemnation and punish-
ment."

Now, if this silly invention rested on the smallest basis of solid
fact, is it conceivable that the King would have visited the culprit in
state on the occasion of his triumphal entry into Rome and have
maintained the most cordial relations with him for many years after ?
Is it likely that an Arian Prince would have given himself any worry
about the differences in the Catholic Church in regard to the cele-
bration of Easter ? Would historians have formed a conspiracy of
silence on the subject and have spared Symmachus alone, while
they invariably exposed such practices no matter by whom else they
were followed ? But such trashy fictions were quite capable, in the
circumstances, of misleading the crowd, who paused not to weigh
the probabilities of the case and were absolutely at the mercy of un-
verified hearsay. Newspapers and telegraph wires were undreamt
of ; hence contradictions did not follow in hot haste, as they do now,
on the heels of lying gossip.

"They accused him, in the second place, of having squandered
recklessly the revenues of the Church, in direct contravention of
canonical prohibitions, decreed by his predecessors. He had, there-
fore, incurred the censures attaching to such acts of expenditure.
But what contributed most effectively to pull the mask off his pre-
tended uprightness was the infamous Conditaria, as she was called
in the city, and his open trafficking in holy orders for a fixed price
in money. Thus it happened that up to the death of that Pontiff the
Roman Church continued in a state of schism." This last assertion
is directly contradicted by the statement occurring earlier in the
document that "after four years Laurence, of his own motion, to pre-
vent the recurrence of the horrid scenes of civil war, retired to a
country residence of the patrician Festus, and passed the rest of his
days in self-abnegation of the most exemplary order." That this re-
tirement from the belligerent and tumultuous life he had been lead-
ing in the city was not resolved upon quite "of his own motion" is
obvious from another passage of the same unreliable production :

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. q-jc

"The King enjoined on the patrician Festus strict orders to restore
all the churches to the regular government and dependence of Sym-
machus, and to tolerate only one Pontiff at Rome." This royal
mandate was issued in 503, after the fourth council presided over by
the lawful Pope, and its publication was a most crushing answer to
the lying and filthy calumnies with which his enemies sought to
sully his high reputation for sanctity and charity. Its issue and
execution were too public to allow its existence and purport to be
ignored even by the hostile writer of the precious document from
which we have been quoting.

It is singular that, having just assured his readers that it was the
hasty retreat of Pope Symmachus from Rimini on seeing his accom-
plices arrive at the palace to give evidence against him on the
charge of scandalous conduct, that determined the King's action
in having him publicly arraigned before a tribunal of his fellow-
bishops, the same inconsistent author should allege that the Paschal
irregularities were the chief count in the indictment. "In reference
to the Paschal celebration all were unanimous in pressing the King
to depute, as Visitor of the Roman Church, the venerable Peter,
Bishop of Altinum, and when that solemn festival was over, by
order of the King, who acceded to the request of the Senate and the
clergy, a council was convened at Rome to inquire into the misde-
meanors imputed to the Pope and to pronounce judgment thereon.
Some bishops and Senators intrigued against the holding of such a
council and proclaimed publicly that no tribunal could take cogniz-
ance of charges alleged against the Roman Pontiff, even though
such charges were based on actual facts. But the cream of the
episcopacy, considering the publicity the matter had attained, were
of opinion that it was impossible to avoid a judicial inquiry, as well
on the ground of religion as in obedience to the King. These dif-
ferences produced animated discussions and added fuel to the flames
of discord already raging ; but at last it was decided that the im-
peachment should be entertained and officially investigated. Some
prelates were despatched to summon Symmachus to appear, but
they were repulsed by the clergy at the palace ; a second and a third
deputation were sent, but he did not condescend to reply. His
friends made two strong appeals, at different stages, to the dissenti-
ents to return to his allegiance without further examination; but
they replied that this course was impossible. Let him prove that
he was innocent of the crimes alleged against him, and they would
then acknowledge him ; otherwise let him be deposed from the priest-
hood. These delays embittered the feelings of both parties, and the
friends of Symmachus among the bishops retired to their respective
sees. But all that was sound and uncorrupted in the Church and

336 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Senate persevered in declining to communicate with that Pontiff
and petitioned the King in favor of Laurence, whom they recalled
from Ravenna, where he was then residing. They proved from the
canons that having been elevated to the episcopacy at Rome, it is at
Rome he should rule ; and for four years he governed the Roman
See. It is foreign to our purpose to recount in detail the dreadful
havoc effected by these quarrels, which assumed the dimensions of
a civil war ; many citizens of every order were murdered during that
prolonged and desperate conflict. At last Symmachus represented
to the King, by despatching the Deacon Dioscorus of Alexandria
to the court, the limitless extent of his losses, more particularly in
regard to the leading parish churches of Rome, the revenues of
which Laurence had appropriated. This recital of grievances deeply
moved the King, and he ordered all the churches to resume their
allegiance to the Pope."

It is unnecessary to dwell on the contradictions and errors with
which this biased effusion everywhere teems. What we deduce from
it as the main charges against the persecuted Symmachus were:
First, some vague insinuations as to his being a Quartodeciman.
This accusation did not assume definite shape, and is little attended
to on either side. Most probably it was introduced merely to create
a prejudice against him, as there was a furious craze at the time
against all who were suspected of wrong views or practices on the
Paschal question. Secondly, it was alleged that he had procured
the King's decision in favor of the validity of his election by simo-
niacal means, and that, according to the laws regulating the elections
of all bishops, bribery rendered his appointment null and void. This
argument was privately addressed, with much show of virtuous in-
dignation, to bishops and priests, and the accusation was circulated
sedulously among the Senators and the people. Dread of the royal
anger caused the Laurentian party to observe more caution in pub-
lic. Besides, next to physical force, bribery was the most powerful
weapon that party wielded, since the Emperor of the East had filled,
and was prepared at any time to replenish, the coffers of the crafty
Festus. Thirdly, the waste of the public funds of the Church was
advanced as a crime entailing censure and deposition, but the allega-
tion was regarded as a sort of grim joke, since it emanated from
those who had sacrilegiously pillaged the treasures of all the leading
basilicas, of which the Pope was no doubt the rightful guardian, and
abused the plunder to compass the destruction of its first owner.
Fourthly, he was accused of the lowest and most flagitious form of
simony, practised in the open sale of holy orders and ecclesiastical
preferments to the highest bidder. The particulars adduced to sus-
tain this charge have not been transmitted; but the unsmirched

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 337

reputation accorded by most of his contemporaries and by all pos-
terity to the illustrious and saintly victim of these gross calumnies
leaves no room to doubt that this accusation was as groundless as
the others. Lastly, the abominable fiction about his leading a sinful
life and inviting a notorious courtesan, Conditaria, to his palace,
throws a lurid light on the character of his accusers and must have
intensified immensely the heartfelt sympathy of the vast majority of
bishops, priests and people for their cruelly wronged Spiritual
Father.

We cannot too urgently or too frequently direct the attention of
the reader to the unyielding persistency of the great body of the
bishops — here unconsciously attested as a public fact by this anti-
papal scribe — with which they utterly disclaimed any jurisdiction to
sit in judgment on the recognized Supreme Head of the Church.
Ennodius, in his sublime oration, was but the faithful mouthpiece of
the ecclesia docens; he voiced with eloquence and truth the senti-
ments of his contemporary successors of the Apostles, and echoed
the pure doctrine of a more remote antiquity. Nor did the bishops
themselves, individually and collectively, at home in their different
sees or assembled together at Rome, fail for a moment to profess
from the roof-tops the strong faith that was in them ; quite as firmly,
though not so eloquently as Ennodius, they all proclaimed that it
was the Roman Pontifif alone that could summon them to a synod ;
that he enjoyed jurisdiction over them all by reason of the primacy
of the Holy See. In evidence of this all-important fact, we read in
every history dealing with the period that the bishops of Liguria,
Emilia and Venitia, being obliged to pass through Ravenna on their
journey to Rome, called at the palace and sought an audience with
the King. Respectfully but vehemently they represented to him
that the supremacy of the Holy See had been at all times recognized
by the greatest councils that had ever assembled; that it was the
privilege of the Pope alone to summon the prelates of the Church to
meet in synod, and that no precedent existed for obliging the Roman
Pontiff to submit himself to the judgment of his inferiors. The
King replied with characteristic courteousness ; Symmachus himself
had expressly requested the summoning of the council ; therefore,
he was only carrying out the wishes of the Pope. Finally he per-
mitted them to see for themselves the Pope's letter, in which he had
begged the King to have the bishops convened with his authority
and acquiescence. When they arrived in Rome Symmachus con-
firmed the accuracy of the King's explanation in every detail, and
added that he was deeply grateful to that noble-minded Prince for
having so promptly given effect to his wishes. He assured them
they might proceed to attend the episcopal synod without any scru-

VoL. xxvr— 9

338 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

pies of conscience, as it was virtually by his command they were
■summoned. This incident possesses a deep and far-reaching signifi-
cance ; the all-wise Providence could not permit such an occurrence
to pass unrecorded ; it was a gleam of light revealing unbroken be-
lief in an important dogma. But before proceeding to treat of this
<:ouncil in detail the order of events demands that we first give a
brief account of the royal visit to Rome, where Theodoric made his
iirst official entry in the September of 500.

With this we shall commence our next article.

E. Maguire.
"Vienne, France.

THE FIRST AND SECOND BOOKS OF COMMON PRAYER.

RELYING principally on Heylyn's and Canon Dixon's admis-
sions, together with the significant fact that no mention is
made in Wilkins' Concilia of any convocation of the bishops
between December 26, 1547, and January 24, 1552, the learned
authors of "Edward VI. and the Book of Common Prayer" have
come to the conclusion that the Book itself never passed through
Convocation.

Heylyn states in his "History of Edward VI." (p. 67) that the
high Church or Catholic party, as they were then called, contended,
at the time of its promulgation, "that neither the undertaking was
advised nor the book itself approved in a synodical way by the
bishops and clergy, but that it was only the act of some few of the
prelates employed therein by the King or Lord Protector, without
the knowledge and approbation of the rest."

Summoning to His Royal Presence, on September i, 1549, the
bishops and divines whom he had formerly employed for drawing up
the "Form for administering Communion under both kinds in the
English tongue," the King commanded them to frame a new public
Liturgy, which should contain Morning and Evening prayer, to-
gether with a method "of administering the sacraments and sacra-
mentals, and for celebrating all other public offices which were re-
quired for good Christian people; which, as His Majesty commanded,
out of a most religious zeal for the honour of God, the edification of
his subjects, and to the peace of his dominions ; so they (who knew
no better sacrifice than obedience) did cheerfully apply themselves to
the undertaking." (Heylyn, 64.)

The First and Second Books of Common Prayer. 339

Taking the Latin Missals, Breviaries and ancient Liturgies as their
groundwork, the bishops and divines deputed to compose the new
Liturgy made what they considered judicious selections from the
materials at their disposal by omitting the parts rejected by reform-
ers as superstitious, whilst retaining other portions which, while un-
offensive to the reformers, were likely to find favor with those who
still adhered to the last remnants of the ancient faith. The great aim
of the committee, according to Burnet (Vol. IL, p. 73), "was to re-
tain such things as the Primitive Church had practised, cutting off
such abuses as the latter ages had grafted on to them, and to con-
tinue the use of other things which, though they had not been
brought in so early, yet were of good use to beget devotion and
were so recommended to the people by the practice of them that
they, laying these aside, would perhaps have alienated them from the
other changes." "The blessing of water, salt, bread, incense, can-
dles, fire, bells, churches, images, altars, crosses, vessels, vestments,
palms and flowers was in future to be omitted as superstitions."

The Committee decided that in future divine service should be
conducted in the English tongue. The strongest reason urged for
this change was the teaching of St. Paul (L Cor. xiv.) who was said
to have condemned the use of unknown tongues in the Church. It
will, however, be evident to every unprejudiced and intelligent reader
of the context that the Apostle meant only to condemn the conduct
of certain disciples, who, possessing the gift of tongues, persisted,
through vanity, in preaching in a language unknown to their congre-
gations. (See L Cor. xiv., 2, 6, 9, 23, 28.) St. Paul's condemnation,
it is needless to add, has no reference to the use of the Latin language
in the divine service. Even in public exhortations he professes him-
self willing to allow preaching in an unknown tongue if an interpre-
ter be present (v. 28). But the language of the Catholic Liturgy has
been translated into vernacular, and this translation is found in books
of devotion side by side with the ancient Latin. It is evident from
this that the argument based on the words of St. Paul is entirely
irrelevant.

Nothing was said by the Committee, when discussing the Sacra-
ments, concerning penance or the necessity of auricular confession.
The reason of this reticence was that the Council by proclamation
had lifted both questions beyond the region of disputation. It may
perhaps here be interesting to mention an historical dispute which
took place between Collier and Burnet, two Church historians repre-
senting respectively the views of the High and Low Church Schools
of thought in the Church of England, concerning the doctrine of
Sacramental Confession. Burnet advanced certain propositions un-
favorable to the Sacrament, one being "that confession to a priest

340 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

is nowhere enjoined in the Sacred Scriptures" and another "that in
the Primitive Church there was no obHgation of confesssing secret
sin, since all the Canons referred to public scandal," and thus confes-
sion had ceased with the abolition of public penance.

Collier, a high Church historian, replies (Vol. V., p. 258) that St.
James (v. 16) lays down the necessity of confessing ''one to another"
and that this exhortation refers to verse 14, where the sick person is
directed to call in the elders of the Church, that they might pray
over him, "anointing him with oil." A parallel illustration which is
given in explanation of the text is taken from I. Peter v., 5, where
the Apostle commands us to be "subject one to another." To take
these words literally would be to destroy all government and dis-
tinction in the Church, and what is worse, would end in contradic-
tion, for it makes every one both subject and superior with respect
to the same person and at the same time. But God "is not the
author of dissension" (I. Cor. xiv., 33). To be "subject," therefore,
"one to another" can only mean that persons who are placed in a
subordinate position should not affect a leveling tendency, but sub-
mit to authority. By a parity of reasoning the text in St. James of
"confessing one to another" must be understood of the sick man
confessing his sins to the elders or priests of the Church.

The power of "binding and loosing" (Matthew xviii., 18), which
Burnet mentioned as "simply declarative," Collier defends as fol-
lows: If, by declarative, Burnet means that priests have no such
power in their commission to absolve the penitent, and that the ab-
solution, if pronounced by a layman, would have the same signifi-
cation— if this be his meaning, what construction can be placed on
our Saviour's words to the Apostles :

"Receive ye the Holy Ghost.

"Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them, and who-
soever sins ye retain they are retained" (John xx., 23).

And can we imagine that words so plain in the expression and so
solemn on the occasion are so void of weight and signification?
They must amount to this at least; that those who neglect this
ordinance of God and refuse to apply for absolution to persons thus
authorized shall not have their sins forgiven them, though otherwise
not unqualified.

Public penances were often inflicted in the early Church for sins
secretly confessed, but there was nothing, when scandal would arise,
in the penances given to indicate the nature of the sin committed.
Collier proves this by quoting Saint Basil: "Adulterio pollutas mu-
lieres, et confitentes oh pietatem publicare quidem patres nostri prohi-
huerunt, eas autem stare sine communione, jusserunt, donee impleatur
tempus penitentice." These escaped the discipline of the Hentes, audi-

The First and Second Books of Common Prayer. 341

entes and suhstrati, and were immediately ranged with the Consis-
tentes to prevent the discovery of their sin. From Sozomen we
gather (Lib. 7, Cap. i6j that '*it was customary to appoint, as peni-
tentiary, some priest eminent for his prudence and regular behavior,
but especially one who was remarkable for his secrecy." Now, as
Collier asks Burnet, why should this latter qualification be thought
so necessary in a penitentiary if confessional secrecy were not con-
sidered necessary ?

The confession of a scandalous sin made publicly by a lady in the
presence of a whole congregation induced Nectarius, Patriarch of
Constantinople, to issue an order for the discontinuance of public
penance within his province, A. D. 390. This seems to have been
the signal for the general abolition of public penitential discipline
throughout the whole Church, although when it passed away auricu-
lar confession, which always existed before it and will ever exist, still
remained.

With the abolition of public penances the office of the public peni-
tentiary lapsed and the faithful were left free to select their own
Confessors. To prevent, however, any undue harshness on the part
of Confessors towards their penitents, books calculated to limit
private penances according to the number and degrees of sin were
composed for the priests' instruction and guidance.

These penance books were common amongst the Irish and Brit-
ish Catholics m the fifth century, according to Alzog (Church Hist.,
Vol. I., p. 513) and in the kingdom of the Franks at the time of
Saint Columbanus (A. D. 615).

Returning again to the bishops and divines assembled in com-
mittee at Windsor, as a result of their inquiry into the teaching of
the Primitive Church they decided, in deference to the authority of
Tertullian (A. D. 220) to retain the sign of the Cross. The words
of that great writer are certainly very convincing.

"At every step and movement, at every going in and out, when
we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at
table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all ordinary
actions of daily life we trace upon our foreheads the sign [of the
Cross]. If for these and other such rules you insist upon having
positive Scripture injunction you will find none. Tradition will be
set forth as the originator, custom as the strengthener and faith as
the observer." (De Corona, Vol. I., p. 336).* Liturgy requiring
that the priest "should make a cross upon the child's forehead and
breast at baptism, say," etc., etc.

* We have employed and when quoting the early writers shall employ through-
out our article the translation published by J. & J. Clark, Edinburgh, m the
Ante-Nicene Library, 1870.

342 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

The ancient ceremony of exorcising the devil was also to be con-
tinued, and it was countenanced by the authority of Saint Augus-
tine, after which, to quote the rubric, "The priest shall take the child
in his hands . . . and shall dip it in the water thrice, first dip-
ping the right side, second the left side and the third time dipping
the face towards the font." Afterwards the child should be anointed
with chrism.

Tertullian, St. Cyprian and the Apostolic Constitutions supplied the
warrant for the ceremony of anointing the baptized. TertuUian's
words are these : ''When we have issued from the font we are thor-
oughly anointed (a practice derived) from the old discipline, wherein
on entering the priesthood (men) were wont to be anointed with oil
from a horn. . . . Thus in our case the unction runs (down the
flesh) carnally, but profits spiritually in the same way as the act of
baptism itself too is carnal, in which we are plunged in water, the
effect spiritual in that we are freed from sins." (De Baptismo,
Cap. 7.)

St. Cyprian, martyred 258, holds the same doctrine. "It is neces-
sary," he states, "that he should be anointed who is baptized, so that
having received the Chrism, that is the anointing, he may be anointed
of God, and have in him the grace of Christ." (Epistle 69.) In the
Apostolic Constitutions the following instructions are given to
bishops : "Then, therefore, O bishop, according to that type shall
you anoint the head of those that are to be baptized, whether they
be men or women, with the holy oil of spiritual baptism. After
that either thou, O bishop, or a presbyter that is under thee, shall
in the solemn form name over them the Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost, and shall dip them in water, and let the deacon receive
the man, and the deaconess the woman, that so the conferring of
this inviolable seal may take place with becoming decency. And
after that let the bishop anoint those with ointment." (Lib. 3, p.

105.)

The anointing at Confirmation, which in the first ages of the
Church followed closely after baptism, is also a primitive custom,
and as such was sanctioned by the committee.

The form sanctioned in the New Liturgy for conferring this sacra-
ment was: "Sign them, O Lord, and mark them to be thine for-
ever by the virtue of Thy Holy Cross and Passion; confirm and
strengthen them with the inward unction of Thy Holy Ghost.
Amen."

"And since the soul, in consequence of its salvation, is chosen to the
service of God," says Tertullian, "it is the flesh that renders it actually
capable of such service. The flesh indeed is washed in order that the
soul mav be cleansed ; the flesh is anointed that the soul may be con-

The First and Second Books of Common Prayer. 343

Hm^ ■ \A

secrated ; the flesh is signed [with the sign of the Cross] that the
soul may be fortified : the flesh is shadowed with the imposition of
hands that the soul may be illuminated by the Spirit; the flesh feeds
on the Body and Blood of Christ that the soul may fatten on God/'
(De Resurrectione Carnis, Vol. IL, Cap. 8, p. 229.)

At marriage the ring and gold and silver tokens were to be given
and the priest was instructed to bless them with the sign of the Cross.

With regard to the sacrament of extreme unction, it was ordered
that if the sick person wished to be anointed the priest "should
anoint him upon the forehead and breast only, making the sign of
the Cross, saying the words, 'As with the visible oil thy body out-
wardly is anointed,* etc., etc."

Anointing the sick with oil is a Scriptural custom. St. Mark
(vi., 13) states that the Apostles "anointed with oil many that were
sick and healed them." The instructions of St. James (v., 14, 15) are
clearer still :

V. 14. "Is any sick amongst you? Let him call for the elders of
the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the
name of the Lord."

V. 15. "And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord
shall raise him up, and if he have committed sins they shall be for-
given him."

Prayers and oblations for the dead, as evidently of ancient usage,
were also included in the First Common Prayer Book. The words
of Tertullian and St. Cyprian were too clear to allow of tergiversa-
tion on this matter. "As often as the anniversary comes round, we
make offerings for the dead as birthday honors" are the words of
Tertullian (De Corona, p. 336). The same writer represents a widow
as "praying for the soul of her deceased husband, and requesting
refreshment [for him] in the first resurrection, and she offers [her
sacrifice] on the anniversary of his faUing to sleep." (De Mono-
gamia, Vol. IIL, Cap. 10, p. 41.)

St. Cyprian, more explicit still, asks his brethren to "take note of
the days on which 'the faithful' depart, that we may celebrate their
commemoration amongst the memorials of the martyrs, although
Tertullus, our faithful and devoted brother, who, in addition to the
solicitude and care which he shows to the brethren in all service of
labor, is not wanting in that respect in any care of their bodies, has^
written and does write and intimate to me the days on which our
beloved brethren in prison pass by the gate of a glorious death to-
their immortality; and these are celebrated by oblations and sacri-
fices for their commemorations ; which things, with the Lord's pro-
tection, we shall celebrate with you." (Epist. 36, Sect. 2.)

In his letter to Cornelius St. Cyprian makes this beautiful ex-

344 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

hortation: "Let us remember one another in concord and unani-
mity. Let us, on both sides, always pray for one another. Let us
relieve burdens and afflictions by mutual love, that if any one of us
by the swiftness of divine condescension shall go hence the first, our
love may continue in the presence of the Lord and our prayers for
our brethren and sisters not cease in the presence of the Father's
mercy. I bid you, dearest brother, ever heartily, farewell." (Epist,
36, Sect. 5.)

Collier takes care to observe ''that though the Church of England
dislikes the Romish doctrine of Purgatory, we cannot from this
infer her dislike of prayers for the dead" (Vol. V., p. 292).

Now what this excellent historian calls the "Romish doctrine of
Purgatory" seems marvelously to agree with the teaching of Origen.
(b. A. D. 185, d. 254.) These are his words : "For this cause, there-
fore, he that is saved is saved by fire, that if he happens to have any-
thing in the nature of lead commingled with him, that fire may burn
and melt it away that all men may become pure gold, because the
gold of the land, which the saints possess, is said to be pure ; and as
the furnace trieth gold, so doth temptation try the just. (Eccl. ii., 5.)
All therefore must come to the fire; all must come to the furnace,
for the Lord sits and He shall purify the sons of Judah. But, also,
when we shall have come to this place, if one shall have brought
many good w^orks and some little iniquity, that little is melted away
and purifies in the fire like lead, and all remains pure gold." (Hom.
6 in Exod. Compare L Cor. iii., 12 to 15.)

The same author declares that heaven is the final reward of Chris-
tians who "after their apprehension and their chastisements for their
offenses, which they have undergone by way of purgation, may, after
having fulfilled and discharged every obligation, deserve a habita-
tion in that land, whilst those who have been obedient to the Word
of God and have henceforth by their obedience shown themselves
capable of wisdom, deserve that kingdom of heaven or heavens, and
thus the prediction is more worthily fulfilled, 'Blessed are the meek,
for they shall possess the land.' (De Principiis, Vol L, p. 90.)"

In the Communion Service in the First Liturgy that part which
immediately precedes the words of consecration presupposed a sac-
rificial oblation. The rubric, however, which forbade any elevation
or adoration of the sacred elements after consecration bears witness
to the Calvinistic bias of some of the members of the committee.

Now it is easy to gather the doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice from
the writings of Justin Martyr, who died A. D. 166. In his famous
dialogue with Trypho, a learned Jew, he clearly proves the Euchar-
istic sacrifice from the Prophet Malachi i., 11: "The offering of
fine flour which was prescribed to be presented on behalf of those

The First and Second Books of Common Prayer. 34c

purified from leprosy was a type of the bread of the Eucharist, the
celebration of which our Lord Jesus Christ prescribed in remem-
brance of the suffering He endured on behalf of those who are puri-
fied from all iniquity, in order that we may at the same time thank
God for having created the world with all things therein, for the
sake of man and for delivering us from evil in which we were, and
for utterly overthrowing the principalities and powers, by Him who
suffered according to His will. Hence God speaks by the mouth
of Malachi, one of the twelve [prophets], as I said before, about the
sacrifices of that time presented by you. 'I have no pleasure in you,
saith the Lord, and I will not accept your sacrifices at your hands,
for from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same, My
name hath been glorified among the Gentiles, and in every place
incense is offered to My name and a pure offering, for My name is
^reat among the Gentiles, saith the Lord, but ye profane it.' He
then speaks of those Gentiles, namely, us, who in every place offer
sacrifices to Him, i. e., the bread of the Eucharist and also the cup
of the Eucharist, affirming both that we glorify His name and that
3^ou profane it." (Dialogue with Trypho, Chap. 41.)

Listen to St. Cyprian on the Christian Priesthood and sacrifice:
^*Who is more a priest of the most High God than our Lord Jesus
Christ, who offered Himself a sacrifice to God the Father, and
offered the very same thing that Melchisideck had offered, that is,
bread and wine, to wit. His body and blood," (Epistle 62, Sec. 4).
Again he continues : "If Jesus Christ, our Lord and God is Himself
a priest of God the Father and has offered Himself a sacrifice to the
Father and has commanded this to be done in commemoration of
Himself, certainly that priest truly discharges the office of Christ
who imitates that which Christ did, and he offers a true and full
sacrifice in the Church to God the Father when he proceeds to offer
it according to what he sees Christ to have offered." (Epistle 62,
Sec. 14.)

Describing a scene which occurred whilst he himself was saying
Mass, St. Cyprian writes : "A woman, who in advanced life and of
more mature age, secretly crept in among us when we were sacrific-
ing, received not food but a sword for herself, and as if taking some
deadly poison into her jaws and body, began presently to be tor-
tured and to become stiffened with frenzy and suffering the misery,
no longer of persecution, but of her crime, shivering and trembling
she fell down. The crime of her dissimulated conscience was not
long unpunished or concealed." (De Lapsis, Sect. 26, p. 369.)

The prayer before consecration in the First Common Prayer Book
was as follows : "O God, heavenly Father, who of Thy tender
mercy didst give Thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon

34^ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the Cross for our Redemption, who made these (by His one oblation
once offered) a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satis-
faction for the sins of the whole world, and did institute, and in His
holy Gospel, command us to celebrate a perpetual memory of His
precious death until His coming again, hear us (O merciful Father),
we beseech Thee, and with Thy Holy Spirit and word vouchsafe to
bless and sanctify these Thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine,
that they may be unto us the body and blood of Thy most dearly
beloved Son, Jesus Christ, who in the same night that He was be-
trayed took bread, and when He had blessed and given thanks. He
brake it and gave it to His disciples, saying. Take, eat, this is My
Body which is given for you ; do this in remembrance of Me/ Like-
wise after supper He took the cup and when He had given thanks.
He gave it to them, saying, 'Drink ye all of this, for this is My Blood
of the New Testament which is shed for you, and for many, for re-
mission of sins. Do this as often as you shall drink it in remem-
brance of Me/ "

The rubric added was : "These words before rehearsed are to be
said turning still to the altar without any elevation or showing the
sacrament to the people." This rubric, more than any other reason,
caused the bishops of Catholic tendencies to vote against the New
Liturgy when it was presented at the House of Lords.

The Eucharist sacrifice is called in the First Common Prayer
Book "The Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion, com-
monly called the Mass." The rubric directs that "at the time ap-
pointed for the ministration of the Holy Communion, the priest that
shall execute the holy ministry shall put upon him the vesture ap-
pointed for that ministration, that is to say, a white albe, plain, with
a vestment or cope. And where there be many priests or deacons,
so many shall be ready to help the priest in the ministration as shall
be requisite, and shall have upon them likewise the vestures ap-
pointed for their ministry, that is to say, albes and tunicles."

Presented to Parliament for the third reading on January 15, 1549,
the New Liturgy received the sanction of the House of Lords and
the approval of the King and Council. Thirteen bishops voted in
its favor and eleven against it. If some of the absentee bishops,
whose Catholic views were notorious, had been present to record
their votes on the occasion the minority would be converted into a
majority.

Received by the Lutherans as a mere instalment of the Reforma-
tion, condemned by Calvinists as strongly savoring of the "ancient
superstition," and accepted with sullen acquiescence by all who still
cherished the ancient faith, the First Book of Common Prayer was,
from its infancy, doomed to die. The Catholic party viewed it with

The First and Second Books of Common Prayer. 347

particular distrust because, as has already been remarked, the eleva-
tion and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament after consecration were
forbidden by the rubric, whilst at the same time the doctrine of the
Real Presence was neither affirmed nor denied, but skilfully avoided.

It would appear that many bishops and priests, while carrying out
the New Liturgy in public to escape the penalties attaching to its
non-observance, continued in private to celebrate Mass according to
the ancient rite. Bonner, Bishop of London, and the clergy of St.
Paul's seem to have incurred the displeasure of the Council by this
offense, as the letter of censure addressed to the bishop on June 24,
1549, clearly indicates.

Soon after the complete suppression of the insurrections provoked
by the forcible promulgation of the New Liturgy the Council suc-
ceeded in inducing Parliament to pass an act in November, 1549,
"for taking down such images as were still remaining in the
churches, also for calling in all antiphonaries, missals, breviaries,
offices, horaries, primers and processionals with other books of false
and superstitious worship."

The passing of this act was announced by Royal Proclamation,
and Cranmer, in a circular letter to all the suffragan bishops, com-
manded them to enforce it in all their dioceses. Whilst the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury's imported divines, Peter Martyr at Oxford
and Martin Bucer at Cambridge, were openly denouncing the doc-
trine of the Real Presence, Calvin, who, to use Collier's words,
"thought himself wiser than all the Fathers of the Primitive
Church," commenced a fierce onslaught on the First Common
Prayer Book. Heylyn's estimate of Calvin's vanity is just as con-
temptuous as Collier's. "Thinking nothing well done except what
was either done by him or by his direction, . . . Calvin must
needs be meddling in such matters as belonged not to him." (Hey-
lyn, p. 80.)

In his letters to the Lord Protector, the archreformer condemned
the ancient custom of anointing at Baptism, Confirmation and Ex-
treme Unction, whilst he held up his hands in horror at prayers for
the dead.

Calvin found an unexpected ally in his attempts to reform the
First Common Prayer Book in the person of Hooper, the Bishop-
elect of Gloucester, who asked to be excused from wearing episcopal
vestments during the coming consecration service. Supported by
Ridley, now Bishop of London, Cranmer humbly craved not to
obey the King, who, influenced by Warwick, wished to accede to
Hooper's request, and was so successful in his opposition that
Hooper, who continued obstinate, was committed to the Tower.
Still bent on fomenting dissension from his prison, the bishop-elect

34^ . American Catholic Quarterly Review.

addressed letters to Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr requesting their
opinions on the merits of his case. Calvin now came forward with
the suggestion that Hooper should be required to wear episcopal
vestments during his consecration service, but dispensed from wear-
ing them afterwards, and this suggestion was gratefully accepted by
both parties.

This discussion gave rise to an agitation amongst the reforming
clergy throughout England against the use of episcopal and priestly
vestments, and finally led to their abolition.

The altars were not destined to long survive the priestly robes.
Hooper, when preaching in the royal presence in the year 1550,
maintained that the only remedy for the religious anarchy then
prevalent was the substitution of tables for altars, so that the people
might be effectually dissuaded from believing in the Eucharistic
sacrifice.

This sermon was received by all the courtiers present with warm
approval, not that they cared much for the theological aspect of the
question, but for a more lucrative reason, "they promised themselves
no small hope of profit by the disfranchising of altars, hangings,
palls, plate and other rich utensils which every parish had more or
less provided for them, and that this consideration might prevail
upon them as much as any other, if perhaps not more, may be col-
lected from an inquiry made about two years after, in which it was
asked what jewels, crosses, candlesticks, censers, chalices, copes and
other vestments were then remaining in any of the Cathedral or
parochial churches or otherwise had been embezzled or taken away,
leaving only one chalice to every church, with a cloth for the com-
munion table being thought sufificient." (Heylyn, p. 95.)

The influence of the Calvinistic party in England hastened the
current of events which tended to leave the Anglican Churches in
"all the nakedness and simplicity" of their own conventicles. With-
out the sanction of either Convocation or Parliament, a letter dated
November 24, 1550, bearing the royal seal and subscribed by Somer-
set and the rest of the Council, was addressed to Ridley commanding
him to substitute tables for altars in all the churches and chapels of
his diocese. The Bishop of London rigorously carried out the
orders of Council in his own diocese, but Heylyn (p. 97) states that
"no universal change of altars into table took place until the first
New Liturgy was repealed."

In the meantime all those bishops who were opposed to further
reformation were either deprived of their sees, heavily fined, or
coerced into helpless submission. Gardiner, of Winchester; Bon-
ner, of London ; Tunstal, of Durham ; Day, of Chichester ; Heath, of
Worcester, and Voysey, of Exeter, were deprived of their sees.

The First and Second Books of Common Prayer. 349

Kitchen, of Llandaff; Salcot, of Salisbury, and Sampson, of Lich-
field, submitted with such evident reluctance that most of their dio-
cesan estates were confiscated by the Crown. Thirlby, of Westmin-
ster; Skyp, of Hereford; Aldrich, of CarHsle; King, of Oxford;
Parfue, of St. Asaphs, and Gooderich, of Ely, notwithstanding their
well-known Catholic sympathies, were helplessly carried on by the
tide of the reformation. Rugg, of Norwich, resigned his see to save
his conscience.

Any one who closely reads the discussions which took place at
Windsor before the form for administering Holy Communion under
both kinds was finally settled by the committee of divines will come
to the conclusion that only four bishops, viz., Cranmer, Ridley, Fer-
rars and Holbeach, heartily accepted the latest doctrines of the Re-
formation in the beginning of this reign. But these four bishops,
backed up as they were by the powerful influence of the "Pirates of
the Council," as Heylyn calls them, easily put their opponents to the
rout.

The ranks of the Lutheran and Calvinistic bishops in the Church
of England were materially strengthened by the prelates appointed
to the sees left vacant by the deprivation or retirement of the bishops
of Catholic tendencies who had the courage of their opinions. Rid-
ley succeeded Bonner (deprived) in the See of London ; Poynet first
succeeded Ridley as Bishop of Rochester and was afterwards ap-
pointed to the See of Winchester in place of Gardiner (deprived).
Miles Coverdale succeeded Voysey, Bishop of Exeter (deprived).
Hooper was appointed to the See of Gloucester, left vacant by the
death of Wakeham. Scory succeeded Day, of Chichester (depriv-
ed). No one was appointed to succeed Heath, of Worcester (de-
prived). Westminster was left vacant after the subservient Thirlby 's
promotion, and Tunstal, Bishop of Durham, was kept in prison until
the dissolution of his bishopric by act of Parliament.

Ferrars, of St. Davids, was the first bishop consecrated according
to the form of the New Ordinal, and his consecration took place, ac-
cording to Heylyn, before the New Ordinal had received the sanc-
tion of Parliament. Miles Coverdale, consecrated on August 13,
1 55 1, and Scory, elevated to the episcopate two days afterwards, were
the next in succession according to the same authority. (Edward
VL, p. 98.)

The revision of the First Common Prayer Book occupied the en-
tire year of 155 1.

With unwearying persistency Calvin had been employing all his
great influence since the First Liturgy had received the sanction of
Parliament in 1549, with the view to securing its revision and the
introduction in its stead of a Liturgy more in harmony with his own

350 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

doctrines. He had written numerous letters to the Protector, the
King, the Council and the Archbishop of Canterbury on the sub-
ject ; as he himself states in a letter to BuUinger written on the 29th
of August, he urged them to proceed to such a reformation as he
himself had projected. Nothing short of this, he declared, would
satisfy his followers. In his letters to the King he insisted that
many things were still amiss in the State of the Kingdom and stood
in grave need of reformation ; while in letters to Cranmer he laments
that in the service of the Church, as then it stood, there remained a
whole mass of Popery which did not only darken, but even destroy
God's holy worship. But, ''fearing that he might not prevail with
so wise a Prince, assisted by such a prudent Council and such learned
prelates, he hath his agents in the Court, the country and the uni-
versities, by whom he drives on his design at all parts at once."
(Heylyn, p. 107.)

Collier fastens the whole blame for altering the First Liturgy on
Calvin, Bucer and Peter Martyr, in other words, on three foreigners.
"Calvin, who thought himself wiser than the ancient Church and
fit to dictate religion to all countries in Christendom, has taken some
pains in this matter. In one of his letters to Cranmer he speaks dis-
gracefully of the English Reformation; that there was so much
Popery and intolerable stufif in it still remaining that the pure wor-
ship of God was not only weakened, but in a manner stifled and over-
laid with it."

"Bucer was a strong second to Calvin, and Peter Martyr agreed
with Bucer's amendments, as appears by his letter, in which there
are some remarkable passages. He gives God thanks for making
himself and Bucer instrumental in putting the bishops in mind of
the exceptionable places in the Common Prayer Book. He declares
that the Archbishop Cranmer told him that they had met for this
purpose and resolved on a great many alterations, but what their
corrections were Cranmer did not explain. He adds that Sir John
Cheek (the King's tutor) told him that if the bishops refused to con-
sent to altering what was necessary, the King was resolved to do it
himself and recommend his revision to the next session of Parlia-
ment." (Vol. v., p. 433.)

The meeting of the bishops mentioned by Cranmer took place in
1550. As all the lately elected bishops were ultra reformers and as
the old "Catholic bishops" who attended were cowed into docile
submission by the punishment already inflicted on their brethren, no
difficulty was experienced by Cranmer in persuading the bishops to
agree to a revision of the First Common Prayer Book and to depute
a committee of bishops and learned men for that purpose.

When at length Parliament, in 1552, sanctioned the revision of

The First and Second Books of Common Prayer. 351

the First Liturgy, with singular inconsistency it passed a grand
eulogium on its perfection before according it a reverential burial.
The act states firstly "that there was nothing in the book but what
was agreeable to the Word of God and the Primitive Church, and
very comfortable to all good people desiring to live in Christian
conversation and most profitable to the estate of this realm. Sec-
ondly, that such doubts which had been raised in the use and exer-
cise thereof proceeded rather from the curiosity of the Minister and
mistakers than from any worthy cause, and therefore, thirdly, that
the said book should be faithfully perused, explained and made fully
perfect in all such places in which it was necessary to be made earn-
est and fit for stirring up all Christian people to the true honoring
of Almighty God." (Act 5, Ed. VI., cap. i.)

All who still cherished the last remnants of the Ante-Nicene
Church must have been shocked at finding that the Second Common
Prayer Book did not sanction the sign of the Cross, the ceremonies
of anointing at Baptism and Confirmation nor prayers and oblations
for the dead. Many, too, were horrified on finding it explained that
although kneeling was prescribed by the rubric in receiving Holy
Communion, "no adoration was intended or ought to be done either
to the sacramental bread and wine there bodily received or unto any
corporal presence of Christ's natural flesh and blood. For the sac-
ramental bread and wine remain still in their own natural substances
and therefore may not be adored, for that were idolatry to be ab-
horred by all faithful Christians." (Collier v., 434.) Thus, for the
first time, the Church of England openly denied the Real Presence
of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and in the Sacrifice of the Mass,
which supposes that penance, prayers and oblations for the dead
found no place in the revised Liturgy.

St. Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, who with the
^'Apostolic Constitutions'' had been quoted as witnesses to the doc-
trines and practices of the Ante-Nicene Church as set forth in the
First Common Prayer Book, were now scornfully set aside; even
the authority of Saint Mark (vi., 13) and St. James (v., 14, 15) could
not preserve the Sacrament of Extreme Unction from the condemna-
tion of Calvin's disciples.

Many respected members of the Church of England at the present
day are of opinion that the Second Book of Common Prayer ought
to be interpreted by the First, which bears the "imprimatur" of Par-
liament. The reasons assigned for the revision of the First Liturgy,
viz., "the desire to meet the wishes of mistakers," who, to quote Col-
lier's words, "had more scruples than understanding," furnishes,
they affirm, no ground for the abolition of the First Common Prayer
Book. It follows, then, that when the Second Book of Common

352 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Prayer was first promulgated it still remained lawful to accept the
doctrines and practise the ceremonies authorized in the First Book.
It remained still lawful to sign oneself with the sign of the Cross,
privately at least to pray for the souls departed, and they could still
call in the priests of the Church to administer Extreme Unction, for
this sacrament, though omitted from the Second Liturgy, was, they
contend, not condemned by it. The connection which exists be-
tween the First Book of Common Prayer and the one in use at pres-
ent is practically the same as that which existed between the First
and Second Liturgy during King Edward's reign. High Church-
men, therefore, cannot fairly be called dishonest when they claim the
right to make the sign of the Cross, to use the ceremonies of anoint-
ing at Baptism, Confirmation and Extreme Unction and to pray for
the dead, as these ceremonies and rites were pronounced by Parlia-
ment in the sanction which it gave to the First Liturgy to be in ac-
cordance with Scripture and early tradition, whilst they are only
omitted but not condemned in the Second.

For a similar reason Anglicans are justified in holding the doc-
trines of the Real Presence and of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, since
these doctrines find their warrant in the First Book of Common
Prayer.

But if the truth of the contention of the High Church party were,
however, granted, the members of that party would still have to face
the difficulty of belonging to a Church the majority of whose followers
in the present day dififer from them in faith. What may be the
truth of this contention is not for us to decide, nor is it our business
to discover how High Churchmen can reconcile it with their con-
science to belong to a Church most of whose members deny every
one of those doctrines to which High Churchmen so rigidly adhere.
Bishops like Gardiner, Bonner, Day, Tunstal, Heath and Voysey
submitted cheerfully to imprisonment and deprivation rather than
accept the attenuated form of "Catholicity" which finally found ex-
pression in the Second Book of Common Prayer, with the Ordinal
and Articles attached.

Kitchen, of Llandafif ; Salcot, of Salisbury, and Sampson, of Lich-
field, suffered most of their diocesan estates to be confiscated before
reluctantly submitting to the latest reforms.

Anglican clergymen should ever remember the words of Bonner
before his condemnation by the Commission at Lambeth for preach-
ing Catholic doctrine at St. Paul's Cross : *'I have a right to three
things," said he, "a few effects, a poor carcass and my soul. The
first two you may make a prize of, but I will keep the last out of your
power." William Fleming.

London, England.

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation. 353

DIVINE ELEMENT IN SCRIPTURE— REVELATION.

IN Holy Scripture we have a Book that has solved more of the
problems of life, that has awakened more lofty sentiments, that
has aroused more genuine religious enthusiasm, that has.
prompted to more heroic deeds, that has inspired more useful lives,
and that has helped to make men more gentle and manly, more truth-
ful and honest, both as citizens and as Christians, than any other book
ever written. In fact, it has exercised such a stupendous influence
on the civilized world that we may rightly infer that there must be
some strange power lodged within its pages; and the question.
naturally suggests itself. What is the secret of this power ? How is.
this singular, this widespread, this permanent influence of the Book:
to be accounted for? What is it that gives to Holy Writ so firm a
hold on the best and the noblest of our race ? It is because Scripture
is a Divine Book.

In all ages of the Christian Church the Bible has been, in some
way, considered Divine and has been called 'The Divine Word,""
"The Divine Book," "The Divine Oracles," "Divine Writ," "The
Divine Library of Holy Scripture." But in what sense or, rather,
in how many senses is Scripture Divine ? And wherein consists its
Divinity ? To avoid confusion in the use of the term it may be well
to make a clear distinction between two senses of the word when ap-
plied to the good Book, for Scripture is Divine in two ways : (i)
By reason of its Contents, and (2) By reason of its Author.

Holy Scripture is Divine on account of its contents, on account
of the topics handled in it, on account of the subject matter treated
in it, on account of the truths taught in it — all of which are Divine,
in so far as they treat of God and "the deep things of God." Under-
stood in this sense, as indicating the character of the contents.
Divinity is not peculiar to Scripture alone, but is common to many
other books, such as the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, as well as
the works of many theological writers.

In the same sense many traditions of the Church are called "Di-
vine," to distinguish them from such as are merely ecclesiastical.
Apostolic or even human in character. In the same sense, that is,
for teaching so many of "the deep things of God," St. John has been
called the "Divine," "O Theologos." In the same sense a student
of theology is often called a student of Divinity. Therefore, if the
topics discussed in a book refer directly to God, the book, whether
it is inspired or not, may be properly called, and is. Divine.

Again, Holy Scripture is called Divine on account of its origin.
Vol. XXVI— 10

354 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

on account of the Divine Source from whence it proceeded, on ac-
count of the Divine Cause by which it was produced, on account of
the Divine Author by whom it was composed. In this, case, whatever
may be the character of the contents of the book, whether Divine or
not, the book is Divine, because it was composed by a Divine Person
and "has God for its Author." The book, considered merely as a
written document, that is qua scriptus, is the result of a supernatural
operation of God exercised on the human writer, both urging him
to write and assisting him while in the act of writing, in such a way
that God becomes the primary Author of the book so written and
man the secondary author. In this case the book is Divine, because
the act of composing it is a Divine act and was performed by God,
through the instrumentality of man.

Thus the Divinity of Scripture includes two ideas, (i) Divine
Topics, Contents or Truths, and (2) Divine Authorship or Composi-
tion. In other and fewer words, there are in Scripture two distinct
Divine elements, the one called Revelation and the other Inspiration.

There seems not to be any other way to make clear to the reader
the distinction between these two words Revelation and Inspiration
than to define each absolutely, and then to consider them relatively
to each other, comparing or contrasting the one with the other, to
see wherein they agree and wherein they differ. But to do this will
take both time and space. Therefore, reserving the question of
Inspiration for future consideration, we shall, in the present article,
speak only of

I. REVELATION.

The word Revelation is somewhat ambiguous and needs defining.
It is one of the many figurative words borrowed from the Latin for
the purpose of enriching our language. It is used in a great variety
of senses. Literally and in its broadest signification, it denotes the
removal of a veil, in order that what lies behind it may be seen. It
is the putting aside of a veil, in order that what was before concealed
may be discovered. It is the act of disclosing to view something
previously hidden. The word is sometimes extended to the disclos-
ure of a material object or of some concrete thing, event, institution
or person ; and it is sometimes limited to utterances that embody a
truth, whether theoretical or practical. It is taken in an Active
sense when it denotes the act itself of manifesting truth ; it is taken in
a Passive sense when it denotes the result of such act, the truth or
collection of truths so revealed, the knowledge thus obtained.

Revelation may be either Human or Divine. Revelation is human
when it is man who reveals. In this sense the present article may
be a revelation to such of its readers as may not be familiar with

Divine Element in Scripture— Revelation. 355

the subject matter. But of human revelation nothing more need be
said. Revelation is Divine when it is God who reveals. Divine
Revelation, taken in its broadest sense, includes every manifestation
of God to man, no matter whether made through conscience or
through the constitution of the human mind, as is sometimes as-
sumed, or through the harmony prevaiHng in the universe, or
through the process of the divine government of the world, or
through the framework of physical nature. It embraces the entire
compass of Divine disclosure, whether in word or in work, whether
in the direct contact of the spirit of God on the spirit of man, whether
of truth in general or of some special concrete fact, or disposition of
the Divine Will in an individual case.

Every Divine Revelation implies a Subject, an Object and a Re-
cipient, that is, a subject or agent revealing, an object, person, thing
or truth revealed, and a person to whom the revelation is made.
Now the Subject or Revealer is God ; for, in the last analysis, God
must be the only ultimate source of knowledge about Himself, His
existence. His attributes and His relations to His creatures. The
Object or Person revealed is also God. The Revealer reveals Him-
self before all else, and thus the Subject and the Object blend into
one. In Scripture every providential act of God manifests either
His Power, or His Wisdom, or His Justice, or His Mercy, or His
Truthfulness, or His Grace, or His Holiness ; or shows Him to be a
God to be feared, to be obeyed, to be trusted, to be loved. The one
object, then, that underlies all Divine revelation is not so much a
speculative truth as it is God Himself, the concrete being of the One,
Holy, Living God, in His infinite nature and divine attributes.

The Recipient of the Revelation is man. Every revelation neces-
sarily presupposes reason, a faculty capable of apprehending, if not
of comprehending, the terms in which the revelation is expressed.
It is evidently in the nature of things that no revelation can be made
to a stone or a stump, to a dumb beast or even to an idiot. Intelli-
gence of some kind is essential to revelation of any kind, and a
higher order of intelligence is a prerequisite to a higher order of
revelation. It would be a meagre knowledge of ''the deep things of
God" that could be imparted to and appropriated by a Choctaw
Indian on his Western reservation or a savage in his native forest.
The requisite faculty for receiving a revelation may indeed be there,
but it is found in him only remotely and radically, and needs to be
developed by methods of education adapted to the nature and laws
of mind.

Divine Revelation may be either Natural or Supernatural Divine
Revelation is Natural when God reveals Himself, His existence or
His attributes through the light of human reason acting on the.

35^ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

works of God — on the world. All nature is an open book, from the
study of which man, by the proper exercise of his intellectual facul-
ties, can rise from the knowledge of the creature to the knowledge of
the Creator, or from the existence of the effect can infer the existence
of the first great cause, which is God. The Creation of the world
is itself an instance of God's coming forth from the silent depths and
vast solitudes of His mysterious Being. We must, of course, con-
fess that not all men have as complete a knowledge of God as is mir-
rored forth in nature. But that is their own fault ; for such knowl-
edge has been placed within their reach. They have not put the
right interpretation upon the facts of revelation. All men see the
same sun, but not all see it aHke. An astronomer sees more in it
than does a savage. God's self-manifestation is made to a sinful
race and through a distorted medium ; for man's reason is darkened
and his will is warped. Hence few men see the full revelation of
God in nature. St. Paul insists in his Epistle to the Romans that
the Gentiles were inexcusable for not having known God as they
should have known Him.

Divine Revelation is Supernatural when God reveals Himself, His
existence or his attributes, not by a process of reasoning, but by
means belonging to the supernatural order.

The first difference, therefore, between Divine Natural and Divine
Supernatural Revelation depends on the difference in the character
of the means employed in making the communication. The means
through which Natural Revelation reaches us belong to the system
of nature's forces as manifested in the ordinary operations of the
material world or even of the mental world. On the other hand, the
means through which Supernatural Revelation reaches us are mira-
cles or such other exceptional means as may not, strictly speaking,
constitute miracles, but which nevertheless go beyond the limits of
ordinary Providence. Briefly, in the one case, the channel of revela-
tion is nature ; in the other it is grace. As is evident, the distinc-
tion between these two kinds of revelation will depend on what is
meant by nature and what by grace. By nature we here mean not
only the external, material, physical, sensible universe which is gov-
erned by fixed laws, but also the facts belonging to the mental and
moral constitution of man, to the course of human history and to the
proper government of human society. Understood in this broad
sense, nature is the world of matter and the world of men ; grace is
all else.

The second difference between Natural and Supernatural Revela-
tion depends on their Extent or Compass, that is, on the number,
clearness and general character of the truths taught by each Revela-
tion. They differ as the part differs from the whole, as the obscure

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation. 357

from clear, as the foundation from the entire structure. Hence they
are not inconsistent. They are not opposed. They cannot be con-
trasted, as is sometimes asserted. Belief in the existence of God,
which is a fundamental truth of natural religion, is also a funda-
mental truth in supernatural religion, and must be presupposed
before we can accept any revelation as coming from God. Thus
natural revelation lies at the basis of all religion, and supernatural
revelation gladly welcomes and appropriates to itself all the light
that comes from reason and all the truth that can be learned about
God from any data furnished by nature. However, supernatural
revelation teaches truth with greater clearness and certainty, and in-
culcates duties with greater emphasis. By its very nature, there-
fore, supernatural revelation was intended, not to destroy or even
contradict, but to complete and supplement natural revelation.
Also as the one is through grace and the other is through nature,
and as both grace and nature are from the same God, it must be clear
that all appearances of antagonism between them should entirely
vanish.

The third difference between natural revelation and supernatural
revelation depends on the different Purpose for which each is given.
If man were destined for a natural end and lived in what theologians
call the "State of Pure Nature," that is, without original sin and
without either supernatural grace or the preternatural gifts that ac-
company such grace, natural revelation might suffice ; for then man,
through natural revelation, would receive from God, the Author of
nature, all the knowledge needed for such an end.

But, in the present order of things, natural revelation is inade-
quate. Man is now destined to a supernatural end and needs super-
natural knowledge to know how to reach that end. But super-
natural knowledge can be obtained only by supernatural revelation.
As is evident, natural revelation can throw no light on many ques-
tions of the utmost importance to men who have been elevated to a
supernatural state, and who have forfeited all right to it by sin.
Natural revelation cannot teach us such truths as the Trinity, the
Incarnation, the Atonement, Grace, Sacrifices, Sacraments, con-
tinued personal existence after death, the proper form of Divine wor-
ship, or any of those Divine decrees that depend, not on the essence
of God which is unchangeable, but on the will of God which, pre-
cisely because it is free, can be this, that or the other way. It cannot
tell us so much as one word about God's readiness to pardon repented
sin nor about the conditions for obtaining pardon. It.cannot supply
the knowledge that we need about God's moral attributes, such as
His mercy. His Fatherly love, or His tender compassion for His
erring children ; but only about His metaphysical attributes, such

358 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

as His Unity, His Immensity, His Infinity, His Eternity. It does
not show us the patient, merciful and helpful side of the Divine
nature, neither does it give us so much as one glimpse into the grand
scheme of grace by which, from all eternity, God had determined to
save the human race by the death of Jesus Christ.

We have seen that such truths as the Trinity and the Incarnation
can be known only by supernatural revelation, while certain others,
such as the Existence and Unity of God, can be known by the natural
light of reason. Now, the first and immediate purpose of super-
natural revelation is to make the first class of truths known, simply
known, and to make the second class better known, known more
clearly and with greater certainty, and to give them the necessary
Divine confirmation and authority.

The more remote purpose of supernatural revelation is the self-
manifestation of God as the God of mercy, grace and love, and as
the Redeemer of a fallen race from sin and its consequences. In
another order of things, it is true, this purpose might have been dif-
ferent. For if man had never sinned redemption from sin could not
have been one of the purposes of revelation. But even in the hy-
pothesis that man had never sinned, the Incarnation, which is the
greatest and most perfect manifestation of God, could and, accord-
ing to the Scotists, would have taken place for even nobler ends than
the redemption of the race. However that may be, certain it is that
sin has increased man's ignorance and misery and made supernatural
revelation more imperatively necessary than ever. What is specially
needed, in our present fallen state, is the revelation that God is a
God of infinite love, mercy and compassion, that He is a loving
Father ever ready to pardon His repentant children, and that He is
the Restorer of the entire human family to the state of original in-
nocency and sanctity from which they had fallen by their "unutter-
ably great sin."

That "God's mercies are above all His works," natural revelation
may convey some vague hint, but can give no certain knowledge.
It might, at most, suggest that God is possessed of a certain degree
of mild benevolence ; but it is only supernatural revelation that could
ever have uttered the astonishing words, "God so loved the world
as to give His Only-Begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him
may not perish, but may have everlasting life." Also that God is
our Creator and Master, and that we are His servants, natural revela-
tion may, indeed, make clear enough ; but it is only supernatural
revelation that could teach us that there exists a closer and dearer
relationship between us and God, the relationship of children to a
father. "You have not received the spirit of bondage again in fear ;
but you have received the spirit of adoption of children, whereby

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation. 359

we cry, Abba, Father. And if children, heirs also, heirs indeed of
God and coheirs of Christ." (Romans, viii., 15.)

II. NATURAL REVELATION.

We know that God is and we know what He is, because He re-
veals Himself, His existence and His attributes through nature,
St. Paul says that He was thus known to the Gentiles, and there is
still stronger reason to believe that He was thus known to the early
Hebrews and that some of this knowledge made its way into the
Holy Scriptures.

We know that the visible world of matter and the invisible world
of mind exist ; because they reveal themselves by their activity. We
learn from the science of Physics that nothing in nature is purely
passive, but that all is also active. A stump or a stone, or any mass
of apparently inanimate matter or inorganic substance is instinct
with activity, and the molecules composing it, being forever in mo-
tion, thus make their presence known. As to the invisible spirits
of our fellow-men, we know that they also exist, because through
words and deeds and in other mysterious ways, which science fails
adequately to explain, they make their presence felt to those around
them, and so unmistakably felt that there can be no more doubt
about the existence of the human soul than about the existence of
the human body.

In a similar way God's existence is known. He exists ; that we
know, because tie reveals Himself. In reality, it is hot so much we
who discover God as it is God who discovers Himself to us. St.
Paul says : "That which is known of God is manifest to them (the
Gentiles) ; for God manifested it to them." (Romans i., 19.) To
the pagans, of whom St. Paul speaks, God manifested Himself, we
may suppose, chiefly in the order and harmony that are everywhere
evident in the world, and in the logical necessity for a First Cause of
the world and of its continued existence. In each of these ways,
and perhaps in other ways, the idea of God springs up in the mind
under the suggestive power of the universe, requiring that some one
should have created the world and continue to rule it. The idea is
aroused by the play of thought in the action and reaction of reason
on the external works of nature and of these on reason. There is
something in the world of matter and in the world of men, some-
thing in the existence, in the forces, in the structure and in the
movements of the grand universe in which we are placed that tends
to originate and develop the notion of a Supreme Being in minds,
whose faculties are matured and in a normal condition. The Psalm^
ist says : "The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament
showeth forth work of His hands." (Psalm xix., i.) And the

360 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Apostle no less categorically affirms : ''For the invisible things of
Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being per-
ceived from the things that are made, also His eternal Power and
Divinity, so that they are inexcusable." (Romans i., 20.)

The same arguments that prove that God is, prove also what He is.
For the knowledge of His existence and the knowledge of His
nature easily blend into one and become inseparable. Thus a due
consideration of the world around us compels us to admit not only
that God is, but also that He is Truth, Justice and Holiness ; that
He is self-existent, independent and superior to all limitations of
time and place ; that He is eternal in duration, ubiquitous in space
and unlimited in knowledge ; that He is infinite in power, the source
of all perfection, the ground of all truth, the Cause of all things, the
Sustainer of all things, the Ruler of all things and the Judge of
all men.

Now, all these Divine attributes, which could possibly have been
derived from natural revelation, are abundantly found in nearly every
book of Holy Writ. Just how far, as a matter of fact, such notions
about God were originally developed by the natural light of reason,
and how far they were supernaturally revealed before being com-
mitted to writing in Sacred Scripture, is now neither possible nor
necessary to determine. All that is now contended is that Scripture
contains many religious truths which, considering their very nature,
could have been revealed through reason, and whose presence in
Scripture can be amply justified by an appeal to reason. The fol-
lowing are a few among innumerable instances of Speculative truths
about God :

"Thou, 0 Lord, in the beginning, didst lay the foundations of the earth.
And the heavens are the work of Thy hands.
They shall perish, but Thou shalt continue;
And they shall all grow old as a garment,
And as a vesture Thou shalt change them,
And they shall be changed.
, But Thou art the self-same,
And Thy years shall not fail."
'. Psalm ci,, 26; Hebrews i., 10-12.

; "Whither shall I fly from Thy spirit?

Whither shall I go from Thy presence?
If I ascend into heaven. Thou art there;
If I descend into hell, Thou art there.
If I take unto me the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall Thy hand lead me;
And Thy right hand hold me ... .
Darkness shall not be dark to Thee.
And night be as light as the day.'^

Psalm cxxxviii., 7-12.

As to the Practical side of natural revelation, it is found in all
classes of books. In the Pentateuch the most important ethical
document is the Decalogue or Ten Commandments, which rise be-
fore us in majesty as the guide of morality to the Jewish Synagogue

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation. 361

and the Christian Church, and which though subsequently revealed
in a supernatural manner to Moses, is in great part based on the
ethical law of nature and cannot be abrogated, and is as binding
now as it was when God thundered it forth from the summit of
Mount Sinai. However, Biblical ethics abound especially in the
"Wisdom Literature" of the Old Testament, which was in-
tended to have a direct practical bearing on conduct. It
starts, of course, with the assumption of God's existence, and
seeks by reason and reflection to understand God's way of dealing
with the world, and to determine man's duties towards God better
than they are explained in the Law or the Prophets. These Sapien-
tial Books consist largely of shrewd observations on the ways of
the world ; of maxims, the product of the sage's own experience ;
of proverbs, the result of meditation and reflection on the ever vary-
ing phases of human life ; and of practical advice, bearing on topics
of domestic, social and civil affairs, on public policy and on the best
means of getting on in the world. It has been said that this "wis-
dom" seems at times to proceed on the assumption that such virtue
as is here recommended is of the utilitarian kind and is to be culti-
vated as a means to temporal happiness and worldly prosperity.
"Honor the Lord with thy substance and thy barns shall be filled
with abundance and thy wine presses shall run over with wine."
(Prov. iii., 9.) But there is no question here of Christian ethics.

Some of the directions for regulating life and conduct, found in
the Moral Books of the Old Testament, would seem to need even
less supernatural revelation to make them known than the pre-
ceding.

"Hear thou, my son, and be wise,

And guide thy mind in the way.

Be not at the feast of the wine-bibbers;

Among gluttonous eaters of flesh;

For the drunkard and the glutton shall be consumed;

And sleepiness shall clothe a man with rags."

Pror. xxiii., 19-21.

"Go to the ant, 0 Sluggard;
Consider her ways and be wise;
Who, having neither guide, nor master, nor captain,
; Provideth her food in the summer.

And gathereth her meat in the harvest.
How long wilt thou sleep, O Sluggard?
When wilt thou rise out of thy sleep?
Thou wilt sleep a little,
Thou wilt slumber a little.
Thou wilt fold thy hands a little to sleep:
And want shall come upon thee as a roboer.
And poverty as an armed man."

"Correct thy son and he will give thee rest;
The rod and reproof give wisdom;
But the child that is left to his own will,
Bringeth his mother to shame."

Prov. vi., 6-12.

Prov. xxix., 15.

362 Amerijcan Catholic Quarterly Review.

III. SUPERNATURAL REVELATION.

While a very superficial glance at certain books of Holy Writ will
enable us to infer that much of their contents could have been
originally derived from natural reason, by what is called universal
revelation, we should not forget that there are everywhere in Scrip-
ture indications which point as clearly to the fact that very consider-
able portions of some of the books are of such a nature that they
could not have been known except by supernatural revelation from
heaven. That we may recognize and appreciate properly this im-
portant element in the Bible, we shall consider the (i) Form in which
it is given and examine some of its (2) Contents.

As we have seen. Natural Revelation is Universal, because it is
common to all men, in so far as they are endowed with reason. Not
so Supernatural Revelation. It is Special, because it was at first
given to but a few chosen ones, such as Moses, or Isaiah, in order
that they should communicate it to others and mediately to all.
And this is the method that God usually employs, "to use the few
to bless the many." We are told that, in the past, while communi-
cating His mind to men, God used a marvellous variety of means,
"In sundry manners and in divers ways." Accordingly we find that
supernatural revelations have been made through Nations, through
Individuals, through Laws, through Miracles, through Doctrines,
through Histories, through Types, through Prophecies, through
Theophanies, the last and the greatest of which is the Incarnation. Let
us consider these various

(a) forms of supernatural revelation.

The one Nation that was chosen to be the channel of grace and the
bearer of truth to all the other nations of the world was the Hebrew
people. Both natural and supernatural methods were employed in
their training. Secular and spiritual influences were exercised in
iheir schooling, so as to bring them to the knowledge of God and
His ways. The process of preparing them to be the bearers of light
to the rest of the world was steadily and painfully carried on through
thousands of years, and when at last "the fulness of time had come,"
it was among this extraordinary people that the brave men and noble
women were found who were ready to receive the torch of truth
that haa been lighted among them and hand it on to others.

T.(;e Individuals chosen to be the channels of grace to the world
were generally men of the same nationality, men of high moral char-
acter and exceptional religious acquirements, men whom God had
specially prepared to be the instruments of His will. Sometimes,
from a moral point of view, they had their faults ; yet they were men
whom God knew how to use as instruments of good for His gra-
cious purpose.

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation. 363

But among them all One there was to whom grace was given with-
out measure, **the Chosen One," "the Beloved One," "the Holy One
of Israel," who was not so much the channel of revelation as He was
its very source. Himself the most perfect revelation of God. But of
Him, apart.

Sometimes a knowledge of God and His attributes was revealed
through Lazvs promulgated in Scripture and imposed with a sanc-
tion, so as to make God known as a God of Justice and Righteous-
ness, and as an object of obedience.

Sometimes a knowledge of God and His attributes was revealed
through the Miracles related in Scripture ; for miracles, which are
extraordinary Divine facts happening in the realm of external nature,
prove that God is so mighty that He can do as He pleases in His
own creation and that He will do as He pleases, for higher providen-
tial reasons.

Sometimes a knowledge of God and His attributes was revealed
in Scripture in the form of direct and explicit Doctrinal Statement.
It is a great yet common mistake to suppose that there can be no
supernatural revelation of Divine truths unless they are expressed in
the dry-as-chaff technical language and in the abstract formulae so
much in vogue among the schoolmen. This style of language, of
course, has its place and can be made to serve a good purpose ; but
it is seldom found in Scripture. Biblical Revelation is generally the
statement of concrete facts. It is the unveiling of God, a personal,
living Being. It is the disclosure of His transcendent moral excel-
lences displayed in deeds. It is the gradual unfolding, in time and
place, of the grand scheme of Redemption through Jesus Christ.
Hence it is given largely in the form of History and Biography.
Divine truth may, indeed, be communicated in abstract forms and
expressed in general propositions; but these are usually deduced
from the concrete facts related in Scripture. Therefore, once the
reader has ceased to look for revealed truth in Scripture, expressed
in the form usually employed in modern systematic theology, he
will find that the sacred pages are full to repletion with such ideas.

Sometimes a knowledge of God and His attributes was revealed
through the historical facts related in Scripture. Indeed, History
is one of the principal vehicles through which a knowledge of the
Divine truths has been transmitted to posterity. With the inspired
writer the case was not always as it is with us. The facts which he
has recorded may not have been revealed to him. He may have
learned them from reliable sources of information, or he may have
been an eye witness of many of them. If so, it is not that God has
revealed the facts, but that the facts have revealed God. In our
case, God has revealed the facts and the facts have revealed God.

3^4 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

To us, who did not know them otherwise, those facts have been
siipernaturally revealed by God through the pages of Holy Writ.
Many of the historical facts of the Bible, having been brought about
providentially by God Himself, are the means by which His won-
derful dealings with His people have been made known to all who in
any reliable way, natural or supernatural, have acquired a knowl-
edge of those facts. By what He has done in all ages of the past to
save His people, God has proved Himself to be a God of infinite love
and mercy. Thus the tragical death of Christ on the Cross, with all
its accompaniments, is a fact of history ; but what an astonishing
exhibition of the love of God for man !

The Old Testament History differs from all other histories, be-
cause it contains a preparatory dispensation leading up to a perma-
nent covenant, that was to succeed in the distant future and to last
to the end of time. St. Paul speaks of the Old Testament as the
pedagogue that led the children of God, the Father of men, to Jesus
Christ, the Teacher of men. *'The Law was a pedagogue to Christ."
(Gal. iii., 24.) Thus the New Testament grew out of the Old and
realized all the sublimest ideals of that older dispensation.

The Old Testament History differs from all other histories in this
also, that while they refer exclusively to the past, this contains a
considerable element pointing unmistakably to the far-ofif future,
either to the first or to the second Coming of the great Redeemer
of the world and bearing on many events not to be realized till the
close of the Book, till "the latter days."

Sometimes a knowledge of God and His attributes was revealed
through the Types of the Old Testament. In this connection the
word Type generally denotes a prophetic similitude, by means of
which something that is to come to pass in the future is symbolized
and foretold. It is essential that the resemblance between the type
and the antitype should have been purposely intended by God, the
Author of both. Now it is well known that much of the Old Testa-
ment God intended to be a type of the New, a foreshadowing of the
good things to come. Many of the privileges that God conferred on
the chosen people, much of the Legislation that He prescribed for
their religious instruction and proper government, the peculiar rela-
tionship which they, as "a holy nation," bore towards God, together
with many of the chief personages who held high office in Church or
State in the Jewish Commonwealth, all foreshadowed something
that was to be realized on a grander scale in the life and work or in
the person and character of Jesus Christ, or in the Church which He
was to establish.

Adam and Noah, Abraham and Melchisadeck, Sarah and Hagar,
Isaac and Ishmael, Joseph and Joshua, David and Solomon, the

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation. 365

Ark of the Covenant and the Paschal Lamb, the Scape-Goat and the
Brazen Serpent, the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by
day, and the Shekina or visible Divine Presence resting on the mercy
seat in the Holy of Holies in the Temple were all so many shadows
of things to come in the distant future. In fact, St. Paul, in his
Epistles to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, and to the Hebrews,
explains the entire Aaronic Ritual, with all its ceremonies and sacri-
fices, as foreshadowing the realities of the future Church of Christ.

As almost any one of these types bears so many and so remark-
able resemblances to their corresponding antitypes, that there can
be no doubt that they were divinely intended, what shall we think
when dozens of such types are found, consisting of persons, events,
things or institutions and described with the greatest variety and
complexity of detail, yet all foreshadowing their antitypes in the
remote future ? St. Paul says : "Now all these things happened to
them in figure ; and they were written for our correction, upon whom
the ends of the world are come." (I, Cor. x., 11.) "Which are a
shadow of the things to come ; but the body (substance) is Christ's."
(Coll. ii., 17.) "Which serve as a shadow of heavenly things."
(Heb. viii., 5.) "Which things are said by an allegory." (Gal.
iv., 24.)

Sometimes a knowledge of God and His attributes was revealed
through the Prophecies of Scripture. Much of the future that is pre-
dicted in the Bible is foretold directly, and not through the interven-
tion of type and figure. Those direct Prophecies were made at a
time and under circumstances when there was no indication in the
course of events that such predictions cannot be ascribed to the
shrewd political forecast, to the happy conjecture, or to the mental
acumen of the Prophet, but must have come supernaturally from
God. Combined, these prophetic glimpses into futurity form a long
series of prophecies which, when fulfilled, are converted into a
record of ancient historical events of prime importance to the His-
tory of Religion. Since many of the predictions of the early Pro-
phets of Israel referred to the fate that overtook most of the neigh-
boring nations, their fulfillment ever impressed more and more on
the Hebrew mind that their God: was not a mere local or national
Deity, but was the one Universal God, who regulates the destinies
of nations as well as the fate of individuals.

Another series of direct prophecies refers to the gradual develop-
ment of the Messianic Idea, to the future establishment of "the
Kingdom of God," and to the Redemption of the whole human
race through Him "who was to come." But of this later on.

Since many of these predictions referred to events that were
to happen only in a remote future, and that were dependent on

366 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

many unforeseen contingencies, and on the free will of so many
unknown men not yet born, and bore on matters that were beyond
the reach of human sagacity, their fulfilment makes it clear that the
Hebrew Prophet read the future in the light of "Him who knows
the end from the beginning," and proves to every reflecting mind
that this very considerable portion of the contents of Scripture is
also Divine.

Sometimes a knowledge of God and of His attributes was revealed
in the form of Theophanics. By Theophany is generally meant a
sensible manifestation of God. Such manifestations have been made
in a great variety of ways. Some have been made through an audi-
ble voice, as when God spoke to Adam, Abraham or the other Patri-
archs; some through the "Angel of Jehovah;" some through the
pillar of fire and of the cloud ; some through the Shekina, or visible
presence of God on the wings of the cherubim ; some through vis-
ions and prophetic dreams ; some through various other displays of
the glory and majesty of God ; but principally through the Incarna-
tion, Birth, Baptism, Transfiguration, Resurrection and Ascension of
Jesus Christ.

The frequency of such apparitions and the distance in time and
place at which they happened teach that God is not the mere local or
national God of the Hebrews, but the God of all the earth ; and that
while He is so transcendent as to be above and beyond the universe,
yet He is so immanent as to be everywhere present in the world —
in it, but not of it. The Theophanies teach that God is not so far
from any of us, and that, if we but reach out our hand to Him and
feel after Him, we shall find Him.

If God is ubiquitous, if He is everywhere present in nature, if He
pervades the universe, this truth could not have been more impres-
sively taught than by these Theophanies, which prove, even to
sense, that He is not so far off but that He can also be near, and a
present help in time of need to all that call upon Him. "Thus saith
the High and Lofty One who inhabiteth Eternity ; the Holy One is
His Name ; I dwell in the Heights and in the Holy Place, and with
those who are lowly and humble in spirit." (Isaiah Ivii., 15.)

(b) contents of supernatural revelation.

Whatever else it may be, Scripture is a religious Book. To
appreciate this statement at its proper value, we should know what
is meant by reHgion. St. Thomas teaches that religion is a bond of
union between God and man. It is, of course, a moral bond, be-
cause it exists between two intelligent and free beings, who are
united by means of intelligence and free will. Now, the relation
which religion establishes between God and man is the relation of

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation, 367

supreme dominion over man on the part of God and of absolute sub-
jection to God on the part of man. In religion, then, there is an
acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God and of the dependence
of man and a voluntary expression of that relationship in acts of
worship. The first part of this complex act, which consists in a
knowledge of certain speculative truths to be believed about God and
man, belongs to the intellect and is Theoretical; the second part,
which consists of certain resultant duties to be performed towards
God, concerns the will and is Practical. Now Scripture contains
much Theoretical and much Practical knowledge, supernaturally re-
vealed, about God, about man and about the God-man, Jesus Christ,
and about their mutual relations.

As to the Speculative Teachings of Scripture, God's character
is everywhere described in a manner worthy of the Supreme
Being. His Unity, His Eternity, His Infinity, His Immensity,
His Personality, His Self-Existence, His Perfection, His Wis-
dom, His Inscrutable Will, His Fatherly Compassion, His all-em-
bracing Love, His unlimited Divine Presence, His Truthfulness,
His Almighty Power, His Awful Sanctity, His Mysterious Divine
Life, and all the moral excellences of His Being are, on nearly
every page of Holy Writ, again and again insisted upon in a tone
calculated to win Him the admiration, the reverence, the obedience
and the love of every rational creature.

In fact. Scripture is full of God. While inspiring it, He must have
breathed Himself into it. Accordingly the Book has thoughts
above every human thought. It contains truths that penetrate the
soul and arouse it as no other truths can arouse it. To the sorrow-
ful, to the repentant, to the afflicted, to the abandoned, to all that
long for light, and strength, and grace to do what is right and avoid
what is evil. Scripture speaks of God and speaks of Him in such a
manner as to inspire a love of truth, justice and holiness.

"Thus saith the High and Lofty One who inhabiteth Eternity;

The Holy One is His Name;

I dwell in the Heights and in the Holy Place,

And with the contrite and the humble of spirit,

To revive the spirit of the humble,

And to revive the heart of the conttite."

Isaiah Ivu., 15.

"He was a man of sorrow and acquainted with infirmity;

He was wounded for our iniquities,

He was bruised for our sins,

And by his stripes we are healed;

And the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all.

He was led like a lamb to the slaughter; . ^^

For the wickedness of my people have I struck him."

Isaiah lin., 6-8.

"How lovely are Thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts!
My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord.
My heart and my fiesh have rejoiced in the living God.

368 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

For the sparrow hath found herself a home.

And the turtle dove a nest.

Where she may lay her young.

Thy altars, O Lord of Hosts, my King and my God.

Blessed are they that dwell in Thy house.

Blessed is the man whose help is in Thee.

I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God

Than dwell in the tabernacle of sinners.

For God loveth mercy and truth;

The Lord will give grace and glory.

Upon the harp will I give thanks to Thee, 0 God, my God."

Psalm Ixxxiv., 1-12.

These are not isolated instances of the pure and lofty worship in
which the soul is brought face to face with God in this wonderful
collection of songs. In fact, the Psalter is full to overflowing with
passages that breathe forth the deepest homage of the heart for God.
Thus is this book a fitting symbol of the fearful struggle of the soul
for all that is worth having, a struggle lasting a lifetime, a struggle
full of pitfalls and lapses, full of conversions and tears of repentance,
yet crowned with victory in the end.

"Have mercy on me, O Lord;

For I am alone and poor.

Keep Thou my soul and deliver me.

Show Thy ways to me and teach me Thy paths;

For Thou art my Saviour.

Wash me thoroughly from my sins,

And cleanse me from my iniquity.

Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.

Turn away Thy face from my sins,

And blot out my iniquities.

Cast me not away from Thy face,

And take not Thy holy Spirit from me."

Psalm 1., 6-8.

While a former shepherd boy sat on the throne of Israel, the recol-
lections of his early youth, when he lovingly and tenderly followed
and fed his flock on the hills around Bethlehem, furnished him with
beautiful metaphors for the most touching psalms.

"The Lord is my Shepherd;

I shall want nothing.

He hath made me to lie down in green pastures;

He hath led me beside the restful waters.

He hath brought me in the paths of justice

For His Name's sake.

Though I should walk in the midst di the shadow of death,

I will fear no harm; for Thou art with me;

And Thy mercy will follow me all the days of my life.

And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

Psalm xxii.

As to man, nothing can be more noble than the speculative teach-
ings of Scripture about his physical and moral nature. Man is
represented as having been created immediately by God Himself;
his body from the dust of the earth and his soul from the breath of
God. Man was created after all other creatures, so as to show that
he is the "Lord of the fowl and the brute," and that while all are
subject to him, he is subject to God alone. He is also endowed with
reason and free will to show that he must serve his Creator intelli-

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation. 369

gently and freely. He is adorned with grace and destined to a super-
natural end, which consists in seeing God face to face in the Beatific
Vision in heaven.

"What is man that Thou art mindful of him? .^

And the son of man that Thou didst visit him? ^

Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor, J

And placed him over the works of Thy hands.
[ Thou hast put all things under his feet;

All sheep and oxen and the beasts of the field;

The birds of the air and fishes of the sea, J

That pass through the paths of the sea.

Thou hast made him little lower than the angels."

Psalm viii., 5-9.

finally, man having fallen from his high estate, a Redeemer is
promised in the Old Testament and the completed work of Redemp-
tion is related in the New.

The Practical teachings of Scripture concerning man's duties to
God, to himself, to his parents, to his neighbors and to society at
large are so sublime, so profound, so perfect and so true to the
majesty of God and so worthy of the exalted dignity of man that
they must have been revealed by God Himself.

The Decalogue or Ten Commandments might be mentioned as a
brief resume of our moral duties ; for there, in a few words, our obli-
gations, both negative and positive, are inculcated as is done in the
code of no other ancient people. It is wonderfully well drafted..
First come our duties towards God, then towards our parents, them
towards our neighbors. As to the latter, the gradation should be*
noticed. A man's most precious blessing and the foundation of alE
the others is his life. His next greatest treasure in his wife. The
next is his fortune. And finally his reputation. In the same order,
murder, adultery, theft and calumny are forbidden. In what follows
the gradation is no less remarkable and complete. For not only
wicked deeds, but also wicked words are forbidden ; and not only
wicked words, but also wicked desires.

Elsewhere in Scripture our duties are described and insisted upon
more in detail. We are told **to rise up before the gray head ;" "to
honor the person of the aged ;" "to be honest in weight and meas-
ure ;" and "to speak the truth every man to his neighbor." In the
Gospels a higher order of morality is inculcated. "Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul,
and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first com-
mandment. And the second is Hke unto this : Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself." (Matt, xxii., 38.) "Love your enemies; do
good to them that hate you ; bless them that curse you ; and pray
for them that persecute and calumniate you ; that you may be the
children of your Father in heaven, who maketh His sun to rise upon
the good and the bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust; and
Vol. XXVI— 11

^70 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

do unto others as you would that others should do unto you."
(Matt, v., 44-46.)

Their civil and religious code imposed on the Hebrews the obli-
gation of protecting the weak, the helpless and the downtrodden of
every description. Nor can it be shown that the Constitution of
any other people of antiquity takes so carefully into account the wel-
fare of this class of persons as does the legislation of the Hebrews.
For this reason it would be difficult to find in the code of any other
people, unless borrowed from this, a law more humane and at the
same time more Divine than the following : "Thou shalt not molest a
stranger, neither shalt thou afflict a widow, or a fatherless child.
(Ex. xxii., 22.) 'The gleanings of thy olive tree, of thy harvest and
of thy vineyard, thou shalt not return to take them, but thou shalt
leave them for the stranger, and for the fatherless child, and for the
widow." (Deut. xxiv., 20-22.)

A knowledge of God and of man and of their mutual relations was
still further revealed through the God-man, whose life is related in the
Holy Gospels. Jesus Christ is the Central Figure in history. Ap-
pearing on the border-line, where the two Testaments meet, the one
pointing forward to Him and the other looking backward to Him,
He filled both Prophet and Apostle with all the truth that they could
contain and with more than they could impart. The Old Testament
Revelation shines, but it shines, like the moon, with a borrowed
light, with a light borrowed from Him. It is ever looking forward.
It is ever approaching nearer and nearer to its source, and becoming
more and more illumined by the light shining from Him. The
golden age of the Old Testament Revelation was not in the past, as
was the case with all other ancient nations, but in the future. It
was the age in which the long expected Messiah was to be the light
oi the world. In fact, the Messianic idea is the golden thread that
runs through the entire fabric of the Old Testament, warp and woof,
and gives to it whatever beauty or value it possesses. Of a truth,
the Old Testament existed for Him, and without Him it would never
have existed. Somewhat unlike His mother, the Jewish Synagogue,
who bore Him and then expired, the Old Testament is still pregnant
with Christ. "Lex gravida Christo." If you take Him out of the
Old Testament, what remains ? If you take Him out, what is the
remainder worth ? Worth as much as the figure without the reality ;
or the shadow without the substance ; or the shell without the kernel.
"For to Him all the Prophets give testimony." (Acts x., 43.) And
not only the Prophets, but all the Laws, all the Doctrines, all the
Types, all the Miracles, all the Histories, all the Ritual Observances,
all the Theophanies, all the Teachings, both Theoretical and Prac-
tical, of the Old Testament lead up to Him, prepare the way for His

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation. 371

Coming, and, like converging rays of light, point to Him, who is the
*Tromised One," and are all absorbed in the sunshine of His blessed
countenance. "For Christ is the end of the Law." (Rom. x., 4.)

Beginning with the vague prediction that the Saviour of the race
was to be ''the seed of the woman," the Old Testament Prophecies
grow ever more and more definite as time rolls on. It was foretold
that He was to be of the family of Abraham, then of Isaac, then of
Jacob, then of the tribe of Judah, then of the royal line of David and
Solomon, then of a Virgin ; that He was to be born in Bethlehem and
after seventy weeks of years ; that He would be both a glorious and
a suffering Messiah ; and that He was to be Priest, and Prophet, and
King, and more than man. These and many other circumstances
regarding the life and character of the future Redeemer are de-
scribed in all the beauty of poetic numbers, with all the magnificence
of Oriental imagery and with an ever increasing accuracy of detail
to the end. In fact, so clear, so itemized, so circumstantial are some
of the Messianic prophecies of Isaiah, written about B. C. 700, that,
if the verbs were uniformly expressed in the past tense, as they often
are, the author would appear to have written, not a Prophecy, but a
history and might be considered a fifth Evangelist.

Indeed, so thoroughly did the faith of the Hebrews in a Messiah
fashion their character and arouse their hopes that, while other
ancient nations have looked back to a golden age in a remote past,
the Israelites alone have ever looked forward to a golden age in the
future, when the great Deliverer, upon whose head are many bene-
dictions, would arise from among their own brethren and rule the
destinies of nations. And what is still more strange, so deep was the
impression made on the minds of neighboring nations by these
prophecies of the Jews that there prevailed throughout the Orient
the expectation that a King was to be born who was destined to rule
the world.

At length the fulness of time is come. The Messianic age arrives.
The long delay is ended. Salvation is nigh. He is here. The
rude outline, roughly drafted by Moses in the early chapters of
Genesis, was filled out by successive Prophets, as by so many artists,
till the life-colors glowed on the canvas and, at the appointed time,
H^ "who was to come," He who was "the Expected of the nations,"
"the Desired of the eternal hills," "the End of the Law," and the real-
ization of all the Old Testament ideals, drew aside the veil of prophecy
and stood before the world in the human garb of the divine Rabbi of
Nazareth.

Henceforth Revelation shall no more be given through Seer or
Prophet. "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, in
times past, spoke to the fathers through the prophets, last of all, in

372 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

these days, hath spoken to us through His Son, ... by whom
also He made the world." (Hebrews i., 1-2.) The Logos, the
Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, having revealed
God through the Prophets of old, now becomes man Himself, and
through this man He becomes the perfect revelation, the completed
revelation, the final revelation of God to man, the revelation of grace,
and love, and mercy, and righteousness, and redemption, the revela-
tion which can never be surpassed or even equaled, the revelation
of "God manifested in the flesh."

But how is it that Jesus Christ is the most perfect revelation of
God? How is it that His deeds, even when not accompanied by
words or other verbal expressions, are a revelation at all? The
answer to these questions should not be difficult to grasp once the
fact and the nature of the Incarnation of the Son of God are pro-
perly understood.

Jesus Christ is the only Being in whom the two natures, human
and Divine, are combined in such a way as to form but one indi-
vidual, one person, a person who is at the same time both God and
man, God from all eternity, made man in time. For, without ceas-
ing to be God, as He was from everlasting, the Logos, the Second
Person of the Blessed Trinity, took to Himself a perfect human na-
ture, consisting of soul and body, and thus began to be man. He
clothed Himself in our nature as in a garment, to show us how we
also should wear the same garb. He folded Himself in our nature,
as in an external form or medium, through which He might become
visible, tangible and accessible to us. By becoming man, He never
ceased to be a Person, and the human nature never began to be a
Person, but was, from the first moment of its existence, united to
the Person of the Eternal Word.

This union between the human and the Divine in Jesus Christ is a
personal or hypostatical union, like the union between the soul and
body of man, a union so close as to make but one person of the two
natures, one individual, one principle of action, one responsible
agent. This union is so intimate that the person of the divine Word
is the only person that remains, and He so dominates and directs
the human nature in Christ as to become the only agent responsible
for all the actions of Jesus Christ. Therefore, all that was ever said
or done or thought by the man Jesus Christ was said or done or
thought by the second person of the Trinity, who is at the same
time both God and man. From this it follows that all the acts of
the head, or of the hand, or of the heart, all the thoughts, desires,
emotions and affections of the human soul of Christ were perfectly
conformable to the mind of God. They were God's acts and
thoughts, and they revealed God to the world. And because God

Divine Element in Scripture — Revelation. 373

dwelt in Christ and made use of His human nature to communicate
His own mind to men, it follows that to see Christ, to hear Christ,
to be taught by Christ was the same as to see God, to hear God and
to be taught by God. Thus it is that, while men looked upon the
human countenance of Christ, and conversed with Him, and heard
His human language, and observed His human mode of life, they
were in direct communication with God Himself and were receiving
Divine revelations through all that He said or did.

One necessary result of the Incarnation is that the intellect of
Christ knows nothing but what is true, and the will of Christ loves
nothing but what is good. Hence all that He says or does or wills
is a supernatural revelation of the mind of God. If, then, Christ
loved the poor, or forgave sinners, or dined with publicans, or drove
the buyers and sellers out of the Temple, or cast out devils, or
cursed the barren fig tree, or fasted whole days, or passed the night
in prayer, or was present at a marriage feast, or obeyed the laws of
the land, or commanded to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, or
allowed Himself to be called the Son of David, or the Son of man, or
the Son of God, or sacrificed His life for others, the mere fact that He
did such things is proof conclusive that it was at least lawful for Him
to do them under the circumstances, and that we may imitate His
example. Thus such deeds, even when not accompanied by words,
are a revelation of the mind of God in our regard. His every act was
a revelation of God.

Jesus Christ is the Person revealing, and the Person revealed, and
the revelation itself. For though He revealed Himself by His
words, yet He revealed Himself still more luminously by His works,
by His example and by His whole life. And it is especially by His
voluntary death on the Cross to save sinners that He has revealed
Himself as the God of infinite justice and of infinite love and mercy.
He revealed Himself more by what He did and by what He was, than
by what He said. He is the perfect revelation. For no matter
how well revelation may have been made through the prophets of
old, all that is as nothing when compared with that more luminous
revelation that flashed from the eyes, and beamed from the face, and
welled up from the heart, and flowed from the lips of Him who is
"the Way, the Truth and the Life," and "the Light of every man
that cometh into the world." Augustine says : "Facta Verbi verba
sunt." And Gregory adds : "Dominus et Salvator noster, . . .
aliquando nos sermonibus, aliquando vero operibus admonet. Ipsa
Ejus Facta Prsecepta sunt ; quia dum aliquid tacitus facit, quid agere
debeamus, innotescit." Yet what we know about His life, His work
and His character we learn from the Holy Gospels.

This statement is confirmed by Leo XIII. in one of his official

374 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

utterances. In his latest and noblest Encyclical "On Jesus Christ
Our Redeemer," he says : "We beg all Christians throughout the
world to strive all they can to know their Redeemer as He really is.
. . . There is nothing more salutary than His law ; there is noth-
ing more Divine than His teaching. . . . You should look upon
it as the chief part of your duty to engrave upon the minds of your
people the true knowledge and the very image of Jesus Christ ; to
explain His Love, His Mercies, and His Teachings by your writ-
ings, and by your words, in Schools and Universities, and from the
Pulpit, and wherever an opportunity is offered. . . . This de-
votion we should hand on to the New Century as a pledge of better
times to come." Elsewhere in the same document he says : "The
greatest of all misfortunes is never to have known Jesus Christ."

But where is this knowledge of Jesus Christ to be found ? This
question Leo XHL answers very forcibly in his Encyclical "On
the Study of Holy Scripture," where we read, "Nowhere is there
anything more fully or more clearly expressed in regard to the
Saviour of the world than is to be found in the entire range of the
Bible." St. Jerome says : "To be ignorant of the Scriptures is to
be ignorant of Jesus Christ." In its pages the Image of Jesus
Christ stands out living and breathing and diffusing everywhere
around consolation in trouble, encouragement to virtue and attrac-
tion to the love of God.

ChAS. J. GRANNAfi.
Catholic University, Washington.

SANCTISSIMI DOMINI NOSTRI LEONIS, DIVINA PROVI-
DENTIA PAPAE XIII., EPISTOLA ENCYCLICA.

AD PATRIARCHAS, PRIMATES, ARCHIEPISCOPOS, EPISCOPOS,

ALIOSQVE LOCORVM ORDINARIOS

PACEM ET COMMVNIONEM CVM APOSTOLICA SEDE HABENTES.

Venerahiles Fratres, Salvtem et Apostolicam Benedictionem,

GRAVES de communi re oeconomica disceptationes, quae non
una in gente iam dudum animorum labefactant concordiam,
crebrescunt in dies calentque adeo, ut consilia ipsa hominum
prudentiorum suspensa merito habeant et sollicita. Eas opinionum
fallaciae, in genere philosophandi agendique late diflfusae, invexere

Encyclical "Graces de Comtnuni." 375

primum. Turn nova, quae tulit aetas, artibus adiumetita, commea-
tuum celeritas et adscita minuendae operae lucrisque augendis omne
genus organa, contentionem acuerunt. Denique, locupletes inter ac
proletaries, malis turbulentorum hominum studiis, concitato dissidio,
eo res iam est deducta, ut civitates saepius agitatae motibus, magnis
etiam videantur calamitatibus funestandae.

Nos quidem, pontificatu vix inito, probe animadvertimus quid
civilis societas ex eo capite periclitaretur ; officiique esse duximus
catholicos monere palam, quantus in socialismi placitis lateret error,
quantaque immineret inde pernicies, non externis vitae bonis tantum-
modo, sed morum etiam probitati religiosaeque rei. Hue spectarunt
litterae encyclicae "Quod Apostolici muneris," quas dedimus die
XXVIII. decembris anno MDCCCLXXVIII.^-Verum, periculis iis
ingravescentibus maiore quotidie cum damno privatim publice,
iterum Nos eoque enixius ad providendum contendimus. Datisque
similiter litteris *'Rerum novarum," die XV. maii anno
MDCCCXCI., de iuribus et officiis fuse diximus, quibus geminas
civium classes, eorum qui rem et eorum qui operam conferunt, con-
gruere inter se oporteret; simulque remedia ex evangelicis prae-
scriptis monstravimus, quae ad tuendam iustitiae et religionis
causam, et ad dimicationem omnem inter civitatis ordines dirimen-
dam visa sunt in primis utilia.

Nee vero Nostra, Deo dante, irrita cessit fiducia. Siquidem vel
ipsi qui a catholicis dissident, veritatis vi commoti, hoc tribuendum
Ecclesiae professi sunt, quod ad omnes civitatis gradus se porrigat
providentem,atque ad illos praecique qui misera in fortuna versantur.
Satisque uberes ex documentis Nostris catholici percepere fructus.
Nam inde non incitamenta solum viresque hauserunt ad coepta
optima persequenda ; sed lucem etiam mutuati sunt optatam, cuius
beneficio huiusmodi disciplinae studia tutius ii quidem ac felicius
insisterent. Hinc factum ut opinionum inter eos dissensiones,
partim submotae sint, partim mollitae interquieverint. In actione
vero, id consecutum est ut ad curandas proletariorum rationes,
quibus praesertim locis magis erant afflictae, non pauca sint constant!
proposito vel nove inducta vel aucta utiliter; cuiusmodi sunt: ea
ignaris oblata auxilia, quae vocant secretariatus populi ; mensae ad
ruricolarum mutuationes ; consociationes, aliae ad suppetias mutuo
ferendas, aliae ad necessitates ob infortunia levandas ; opificum sodal-
itia ; alia id genus et societatum et operum adiumenta.

Sic igitur, Ecclesiae auspiciis, quaedam inter catholcos turn coni-
unctio actionis tum institutorum providentia inita est in praesidium
plebis, tam saepe non minus insidiis et periculis quam inopia et labor-
ibus circumventae. Quae popularis beneficentiae ratio nulla quidem
propria appellatione initio distingui consuevH : socialismi christimU

376 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

nomen a nonnullis invectum et derivata ab eo baud immerito obsole-
verunt. Earn deinde pluribus iure nominare placuit actionem chris-
tianam popularem. Est etiam ubi, qui tali rei dant operam, sociales
christiani vocantur : alibi vero ipsa vocatur democratia Christiana, ac
democratici christiani qui eidem dediti ; contra earn quam socialistae
contendunt democratiam socialem. lamvero e binis rei significandae
modis postremo loco allatis, si non adeo primus, sociales christiani,
alter certe, democratia Christiana, apud bonos plures offensionem
habet, quippe cui ambiguum quiddam et periculosum adhaerescere
existiment. Ab hac enim appellatione metuunt, plus una de causa:
videlicet, ne quo obtecto studio popularis civitas foveatur, vel ceteris
politicis formis praeoptetur ; ne ad plebis commoda, ceteris tamquam
semotis rei publicae ordinibus, christianae religionis virtus coangus-
tari videatur : ne denique sub fucato nomine quoddam lateat proposi-
tum legitimi cuiusvis imperii, civilis, sacri, detrectandi. Qua de re
quum vulgo iam nimis et nonnumquam acriter disceptetur, monet
conscientia officii ut controversiae modum imponamus, definientes
quidnam sit a catholicis in hac re sentiendum : praeterea quaedam
praescribere consilium est, quo amplior fiat ipsorum actio, multoque
salubrior civitati eveniat.

Quid democratia socialis velit, quid velle christianam oporteat, in-
certum plane esse nequit. Altera enim, plus minusve intemperanter
eam libeat profiteri, usque eo pravitatis a multis compellitur, nihil ut
quidquam supra humana reputet ; corporis bona atque externa con-
sectetur, in eisque captandis fruendis hominis beatitatem constituat.
Hinc imperium penes plebem in civitate velint esse, ut, sublatis ordi-
num gradibus aequatisque civibus, ad bonorum etiam inter eos
aequalitatem sit gressus : hinc ius dominii delendum ; et quidquid
fortunarum est singulis, ipsaque instrumenta vitae, communia
habenda. At vero democratia Christiana, eonimirum quod Christiana
dicitur, suo veluti fundamento, positis a divina fide principiis niti
debet, infimorum sic prospiciens utilitatibus, ut animos ad sempiterna
factos convenienter perficiat. Proinde nihil sit illi iustitia sanctius ;
ius potiundi possidendi iubeat esse integrum; dispares tueatur
ordines,sane proprios bene constitutae civitatis ; eam demum humano
convictui velit formam atque indolem esse, qualem Deus auctor in-
didit. Liquet igitur democratice socialis et christiance communionem
esse nullam : eae nempe inter se differunt tantum, quantum socialismi
secta et professio christianae legis.

Nefas autem sit christianae democratiae appellationem ad politica
detorqueri. Quamquam enim democratia, ex ipsa notatione nominis
usuque philosophorum, regimen indicat populare; attamen in re
praesenti sic usurpanda est, ut, omni politica notione detracta, aliud
nihil significatum praeferat, nisi banc ipsam beneficam in populum

Encyclical "Graves de Communi" 2>77

actionem christianam. Nam naturae et evangelii praecepta quia
suopte iure humanos casus excedunt, ea necesse est ex nullo civilis
regiminis modo pendere ; sed convenire cum quovis posse, modo ne
honestati et iustitiae repugnet. Sunt ipsa igitur manentque a par-
tium studiis variisque eventibus plane aliena : ut in qualibet demum
rei publicae constitutione, possint cives ac debeant iisdem stare prae-
ceptis, quibus iubentur Deum super omnia, proximos sicut se dili-
gere. Haec perpetua Ecclesiae disciplina fuit ; hac usi Romani Pon-
tifices cum civitatibus egere semper, quocumque illae administra-
tionis genere tenerentur. Quae quum sint ita, catholicorum mens
atque actio, quae bono proletariorum promovendo studet, eo profecto
spectare nequaquam potest, ut aliud prae alio regimen civitatis
adamet atque invehat.

Non dissimili modo a democratia Christiana removendum est
alterum illud offensionis caput : quod nimirum in commodis infer-
iorum ordinum curas sic coUocet, ut superiores praeterire videatur ;
quorum tamen non minor est usus ad conservationem perfection-
emque civitatis. Praecavet id Christiana, quam nuper diximus, cari-
tatis lex. Haec ad omnes omnino cuiusvis gradus homines patet
complectendos, utpote unius eiusdemque familiae, eodem benignis-
simo editos Patre et redemptos Servatore, eamdemque in heredita-
tem vocatos aeternam. Scilicet, quae est doctrina et admonitio
Apostoli : "Unum corpus, et unus spiritus, sicut vocati estis in una
spe vocationis vestrae. Unus Dominus, una fides, unum baptisam.
Unus Deus et Pater omnium, qui est super omnes, et per omnia, et
in omnibus nobis." (Ephes. iv., 4-6.) Quare propter nativam
plebis cum ordinibus ceteris coniunctionem, eamque arctiorem ex
Christiana fraternitate, in eosdem certe influit quantacumque plebi
adiutandae diligentia impenditur; eo vel magis quia ad exitum rei
secundum plane decet ac necesse est ipsos in partem operae advocari,
quod infra aperiemus.

Longe pariter absit, ut appellatione democratiae christianae propo-
situm subdatur omnis abiiciendae obedientiae eosque aversandi qui
legitime praesunt. Revereri eos qui pro suo quisque gradu in civitate
praesunt, eisdemque iuste iubentibus obtemperare, lex aeque natur-
alis et Christiana praecipit. Quod quidem ut homine eodemque
christiano sit dignum, ex animo et officio praestari oportet, scilicet
propter conscientiam, quemadmodum ipse mcnuit Apostolus, quum
illud edixit : "Omnis anima potestatibus sublimioribus subdita sit."
(Rom. xiii., i, 5.) Abhorret autem a professione christianae vitae,
ut quis nolit iis subesse et parere, qui cum potestate in Ecclesia an-
tecedunt: Episcopis in primis, quos, integra Pontificis Romani in
universos auctoritate, "Spiritus Sanctus posuit regere Ecclesiam
Dei, quam acquisivit sanguine suo." (Act xx.. 28.) lam qui secus

27^ American C-atholie Quarteiiy Revkw.

sentiat aut faciat, is eniTTivjet-o gravissimtim eiiisdem Apostoli praie-
ceptum obiitus convincittif : "Obedite praepositis vestris, et sUbia-
cete eis. Ipsi enim pervigilant, quasi rationem pro animabtis vestriS
reddituri/' (Hebr. xiii., 17.) Quae dicta permagni interest ut
fideles universi alte sibi defigant in atiimis atque in omni vitae ccm-
suetudine perficere studeant : eademque sacrorum ministri diligentis-
sime reputantes, non hortatione solum, sed maxime exemplo, ceteris
persuadere ne intermittant.

His igitUr revocatis capitibus rerum, quas ante hac per occasionem
data opera illustravimus, speramus fore ut quaevis de christianae
democratiae nomine dissensio, omnisque de re, eo nomine signifi-
cata, suspicio periculi iam deponatur. Et iure quidem speramus.
Etenim, iis missis quorumdam sententiis de huiusmodi democratiae
christianae vi ae virtute, quae immoderatione aliqua vel errore non
careant ; certe nemo unus studium illud reprehenderit, quod, secun-
dum naturalem divinamque legem, eo unice pertineat, ut qui vitam
manu et arte stistentant, tolerabiliorem in statum adducantur,
habeantque sensim quo sibi ipsi prospiciant ; domi atque palam officia
virtiitum et religionis libere expleant ; sentiant se non animantia sed
homines, non ethnicos sed christianos esse ; atque adeo ad unum illud
necessariuin, ad ultimum bonum, cui nati sumus, et facilius et stu-
diosius nitantur. lamvero hie finis, hoc opus eorum qui plebem
christiano animo velint et opportune relevatam tt a peste incolumem
socialismi.

De officiis virtutum et religionis modo Nos mentionem consulto
iniecimus. Quorumdam enim opinio est, quae in vulgus manat,
quaesti(memsocialem,(\\x2i-m2Lmnt,oecononiicamtssQ^ tantummodo : quum
contra verissimum sit, eam moralem in primis et religiosam esse, ob
eamdemque retii ex lege morum potissime et religionis iudicio diri^
mendam. Esto namque ut operam locantibus geminetur merces;
esto ut contrahatur operi tempus ; etiam annonae sit vilitas : atqui,
si mercenarius eas audiat doctrinas, ut assolet, eisque utatur exem-
plis, quae ad exuendam Numinis reverentiam alliciant depravan-
dosque mores, eius etiam labores ac rem necesse est dilabi. Pericli-
tatione atque usu perspectum est, opifices plerosque anguste mise-
reque vivere, qui, quamvis operam habeant breviorem spatio et
uberiorem mercede, corruptis tamen moribus nullaque religionis dis-
ciplina vivunt. Deme animis sensus, quos inserit et colit Christiana
sapientia ; deme providentiam, modestiam, parsimoniam, patientiam
ceterosque rectos naturae habitus : prosperitatem, etsi multum con-
tendas, frustra persequare. Id plane est causae, cur catholicos
homines inire coetus ad meliora plebi paranda, aliaque similiter insti-
tuta invehere Nos nunquam hortati sumus, quin pariter moneremus,
ut haec religione auspice fierent eaque adiutrice et comite.

Encyclical ^'Graves de Communi'* 379

Videtur autem propensae huic catholicorum in proletarios volun-
tati eo maior tribuenda laus, quod in eodem campo explicatur, in quo
constanter feliciterque, benigno afflatu Ecclesiae, actuosa caritatis
certavit industria, accommodate ad tempora. Cuius quidem mutuae
caritatis lege, legem iustitiae quasi perficiente, non sua solum iube-
mur cuique tribuere ac iure suo agentes non prohibere ; verum etiam
gratificari invicem, "non verbo, neque lingua, sed opere et veritate"
(I. loann. iii., 18); memores quae Christus peramanter ad suos
habuit : ^'Mandatum novum do vobis : ut diligatis invicem, sicut di-
lexi vos, ut et vos diligatis invicem. In hoc cognoscent omnes quia
discipuli mei estis, si dilectionem habueritis ad invicem." (loann.
xiii., 34-35.) Tale gratificandi studium, quamquam esse primum
oportet de animorum bono non caduco sollicitum, praetermittere
tamen haudquaquam debet quae usui sunt et adiumento vitae. Qua
in re illud est memoratu dignum, Christum, sciscitantibus Baptistae
discipulis : *'Tu es qui venturus es, an alium expectamus V deman-
dati sibi inter homines muneris arguisse causam ex hoc caritatis
capite, Isaiae excitata sententia: ^'Caeci vident, claudi ambulant,
leprosi mundantur, surdi audiunt, mortui resurgunt, pauperes evan-
gelizantur." (Matth. xi., 5.) Idemque de supremo iudicio ac de
praemiis poenisque decernendis eloquens, professus est se singular!
quadam respecturum ratione, qualem homines caritatem alter alteri
adhibuissent. In quo Christi sermone id quidem admiratione non
vacat, quemadmodum ille, partibus misericordiae solantis animos
tacite omissis, externae tantum commemorarit officia, atque ea tam-
quam sibimetipsi impensa : "Esurivi, et dedistis mihi manducare ;
sitivi, et dedistis mihi bibere ; hospes eram, et collegistis me ; nudus,
et cooperuistis me ; infirmus, et visitastis me ; in carcere eram, et
venistis ad me." lb. xxv., 35-36.)

Ad haec documenta caritatis utraque ex parte, et animae et cor-
poris bono, probandae, addidit Christus de se exempla, ut nemo
ignorat, quam maxime insignia. In re praesenti sane suavissima
est ad recolendum vox ea pat^rno corde emissa : "Misereor super
turbam" (Marc, viii., 2), et par voluntas ope vel mirifica subveniendi:
cuius miserationis praeconium extat : "Pertransiit benefaciendo et
sanando omnes oppressos a diabolo." (Act x., 38.) Traditam ab
eo caritatis disciplinam Apostoli primum sancte naviterque coluer-
unt ; post illos qui christianam fidem amplexi sunt auctores fuerunt
inveniendae varia« institutorum copiae ad miserias hominum quae-
cumque urgeant, allevandas. Quae instituta, continuis incrementis
provecta, christiani nominis partaeque inde humanitatis propria ac
praeciara sunt ornamenta: ut ea integri iudicii homines satis ad-
mirari non queant, maxime quod tam sit proclive ut in sua quisque
feratur commoda, aliena posthabeat.

380 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Neque de eo numero bene factorum excipienda est erogatio stipis,
eleemosynae causa; ad quam illud pertinet Christi: *'Quod super-
est, date eleemosynam." (Luc. xi., 41.) Hanc scilicet socialistae
carpunt atque e medio sublatam volunt, utpote ingenitae homini
nobilitati iniuriosam. At enim si ad evangelii praescripta (Matth.
vi., 2-4), et christiano ritu fiat, ilia quidem neque erogantium super-
biam alit, neque affert accipientibus verecundiam. Tantum vero
abest ut homini sit indecora, ut potius foveat societatem coniunc-
tionis humanae, officiorum inter homines fovendo necessitudinem.
Nemo quippe hominum est adeo locuples, qui nullius indigeat ; nemo
est egenus adeo, ut non alteri possit qua re prodesse : est id innatum,
ut opem inter se homines et fidenter poscant et ferant benevole.
Sic nempe iustitia et caritas inter se devinctae, aequo Christi mitique
iure, humanae societatis compagem mire continent, ac membra sin-
gula ad proprium et commune bonum providenter adducunt.

Quod autem laboranti plebi non temporariis tantum subsidiis, sed
constanti quadam institutorum ratione subveniatur, caritati pariter
laudi vertendum est ; certius enim firmiusque egentibus stabit. Eo
amplius est in laude ponendum, velle eorum animos, qui exercent
artes vel operas locant, sic ad parsimoniam providentiamque formari,
ut ipsi sibi decursu aetatis, saltem ex parte cpnsulant. Tale proposi-
tum, non modo locupletum in proletarios officium elevat, sed ipsos
honestat proletarios; quos quidem dum excitat ad clementiorem sibi
fortunam parandam, idem a periculis arcet et ab intemperantia
coercet cupiditatum, idemque ad virtutis cultum invitat. Tantae
igitur quum sit utilitatis ac tam congruentis temporibus, dignum
certe est in quo caritas bonorum alacris et prudens contendat.

Maneat igitur, studium istud catholicorum solandae erigendaeque
plebis plane congruere cum Ecclesiae ingenio et perpetuis eiusdem
exjsmplis optime respondere. Ea vero quae ad idconducant, utrum
actionis christiance popularis nomine appellentur, an democratiae
christiance, parvi admodum refert ; si quidem impertita a Nobis docu-
menta, quo par est obsequio, integra custodiantur. At refert mag-
nopere ut, in tanti momenti re, una eademque sit catholicorum
hominum mens, una eademque voluntas atque actio. Nee refert
minus ut actio ipsa, multiplicatis hominum rerumque praesidiis,
aygeatur, amplificetur. Eorum praesertim advocanda est benigna
opera, quibus et locus et census et ingenii animique cultura plus
quiddam auctoritatis in civitate conciliant. Ista si desit opera, vix
quidquam confici potest quod vere valeat ad quaesitas popularis
vitae utilitates. Sane ad id eo certius breviusque patebit iter, quo
impensius multiplex praestantiorum civium efficientia conspiret.
Ipsi autem considerent velimus non esse sibi in integro, infimorum
curare sortem an negligere ; sed officio prorsus teneri. Nee enim

Encyclical ''Graves de Communi." 381

suis quisque commodis tantum in civitate vivit, verum etiam com-
munibus: ut, quod alii in summam communis boni conferre pro
parte nequeant, largius conferant alii qui possint. Cuius quidem
officii quantum sit pondus ipsa edocet acceptorum bonorum prae-
stantia, quam consequatur necesse est restrictior ratio, summo red-
denda largitori Deo. Id etiam monet malorum lues, quae, remedio
non tempestive adhibito, in omnium ordinum perniciem est ali-
quando eruptura: ut nimirum qui calamitosae plebis negligat
causam, ipse sibi et civitati faciat improvide. Quod si actio ista
christiano more socialis late obtineat vigeatque sincera, nequaquam
profecto fiet, ut cetera instituta, quae ex maiorum pietate ac provi-
dentia iam pridem extant et florent, vel exarescant vel novis institu-
tis quasi absorpta deficiant. Haec enim atque ilia, utpote quae
eodem consilio religionis et caritatis impulsa, neque re ipsa quid-
quam inter se pugnantia, commode quidem componi possunt et
cohaerere tam apte, ut necessitatibus plebis periculisque quotidie
gravioribus eo opportunis liceat, collatis benemerendi studiis, con-
sulere. Res nempe clamat, vehementer clamat, audentibus animis
opus esse viribusque coniunctis ; quum sane nimis ampla aerum-
narum seges obversetur oculis, et perturbationum exitialium im-
pendeant, maxime ab invalescente socialistarum vi, formidolosa dis-
crimina. Callide illi in sinum invadunt civitatis : in occultorum con-
ventuum tenebris ac palam in luce, qua voce qua scriptis, multitudi-
nem seditione concitant ; disciplina religionis abiecta, officia negli-
gunt, nil nisi iura extollunt ; ac turbas egentium quotidie frequen-
tiores sollicitant, quae ob rerum angustias facilius deceptioni patent
et ad errorem rapiuntur. Aeque de civitate ac de religione agitur
res ; utramque in suo tueri honore sanctum esse bonis omnibus debet.

Quae voluntatum consensio ut optato consistat, ab omnibus prae-
terea abstinendum est contentionis causis quae offendant animos et
disiungant. Proinde in ephemeridum scriptis et concionibus popu-
laribus sileant quaedam subtiliores neque ullius fere utilitatis quaes-
tiones, quae quum ad expediendum non faciles sunt, tum etiam ad
intelligendum vim aptam ingenii et non vulgare studium exposcunt.
Sane humanum est, haerere in multis dubios et diversos diversa sen-
tire : eos tamen qui verum ex animo persequantur addecet, in dispu-
tatione adhuc ancipiti, aequanimitatem servare ac modestiam mu-
tuamque observantiam ; ne scilicet, dissidentibus opinionibus, volun-
tates item dissideant. Quidquid vero, in causis quae dubitationem
non respuant, opinari quis malit, animum sic semper gerat, ut Sedi
Apostolicae dicto audiens esse velit religiosissime.

Atque ista catholicorum actio, qualiscumque est, ampliore quidem
cum efficacitate procedet, si consociationes eorum omnes, salvo suo
cuiusque iure, una eademque primaria vi dirigente et movente pro-

382 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

cesserint. Quas ipsis partes in Italia volumus praestat institutum
illud, a Congressibus coetihusque cathoHcis, saepenumero a Nobis lau-
datum : cui et Decessor Noster et Nosmetipsi curam hanc demanda-
vimus communis catholicorum actionis, auspicio et ductu sacrorum
Antistitum, temperandae. Item porro fiat apud nationes ceteras, si
quis usquam eiusmodi est praecipuus coetus, cui id negotii legitimo
iure sit datum.

lamvero in toto hoc rerum genere, quod cum Ecclesiae et plebis
christianae rationibus omnino copulatur, apparet quid non elaborare
debeant qui sacro munere fungantur, et quam varia doctrinae, pru-
dentiae, caritatis industria id possint. Prodire in populum in eoque
salutariter versari opportunum esse, prout res sunt ac tempora, non
semel Nobis, homines e clero allocutis, visum est affirmare. Saepius
autem per litteras ad Episcopos ahosve sacri ordinis viros, etiam
proximis annis (Ad Ministrum Generalem Ordinis Fratrum Minor-
um, die XXV. nov. an MDCCCLXXXXVIIL), datas, hanc ipsam
amantem popuH providentiam collaudavimus, propriamque esse
diximus utriusque ordinis clericorum. Qui tamen in eius officiis
explendis caute admodum prudenterque faciant, ad simiHtudinem
hominum sanctorum. Franciscus ille pauper et humiHs, iile calami-
tosorum pater Vincentius a Paulo, alii in omni Ecclesiae memoria
complures, assiduas curas in populum sic temperare consueverunt,
ut non plus aequo distenti neque immemores sui, contentione pari
suum ipsi animum ad perfectionem virtutis omnis excolerent.
Unum hie libet paulo expressius subiicere, in quo non modo sacro-
rum administri, sed etiam quotquot sunt popularis causae studiosi,
optime de ipsa, nee difficili opera, mereantur. Nempe, si pariter
studeant per opportunitatem haec praecipue in plebis anima fraterno
alloquio inculcare. Quae sunt : a seditione, a seditiosis usquequaque
caveant ; aliena cuiusvis iura habeant inviolata ; iustam dominis ob-
servantiam atque operam volentes exhibeant; domesticae vitae ne
fastidiant consuetudinem multis modis frugiferam ; religionem in
primis colant, ab eaque in asperitatibus vitae certum petant solatium.
Quibus perficiendis propositis sane quanto sit adiumento vel Sanctae
Familiae Nazarethanae praestantissimum revocare specimen et com-
mendare praesidium, vel eorum proponere exempla quos ad virtutis
fastigium tenuitas ipsa sortis eduxit, vel etiam spem alere praemii in
potiore vita mansuri.

Postremo id rursus graviusque commonemus, ut quidquid consilii
in eadem causa vel singuli vel consociati homines efficiendum sus-
cipiant, meminerint Episcoporum auctoritati esse penitus obsequen-
dum. Decipi se ne sinant vehementiore quodam caritatis studio;
quod quidem, si quam iacturam debitae obtemperationis suadeat,
sincerum non est, neque solidae utilitatis efficiens, neque gratum

Encyclical ''Graves de CommuniJ* 383

Deo. Eorum Deus delectatur animo qui, sententia sua postposita,
Ecclesiae praesides sic plane ut ipsum audiunt iubentes ; iis volens
adest vel arduas molientibus res, coeptaque ad exitus optatos solet
benignus perducere. Ad haec accedant consentanea virtutis ex-
empla, maxime quae christianum hominem probant osorem ignaviae
et voluptatum, de rerum copia in alienas utilitates amice impertien-
tem, ad aerumnas constantem, invictum. Ista quippe exempla vim
habent magnam ad salutares spiritus in populo excitandos ; vimque
habent maiorem, quum praestantiorum civium vitam exornant.

Haec vos, Venerabiles Fratres, opportune ad hominum loco-
rumque necessitates, pro prudentia et navitate vestra curetis horta-
mur ; de iisdemque rebus consilia inter vos, de more congressi, com-
municetis. In eo autem vestrae evigilent curae atque auctoritas
valeat, moderando, cohibendo, obsistendo, ut ne, uUa cuiusvis specie
boni fovendi, sacrae disciplinae laxetur vigor, neu perturbetur ordinis
ratio quem Christus Ecclesiae suae praefinivit. Recta igitur et con-
cordi et progrediente catholicorum omnium opera, eo pateat illus-
trius, tranquillit^tem ordinis veramque prosperitatem in populis
praecipue florere, moderatrice et fautrice Ecclesia; cuius est sanc-
tissimum munus, sui quemque officii ex christianis praeceptis ad-
monere, locupletes ac tenues fraterna caritate coniungere,, erigere et
roborare animos in cursu humanarum rerum adverso.

Praescripta et optata Nostra confirmet ea beati Pauli ad Romanos,
plena apostolicae caritatis, hortatio: "Obsecro vos. . . . Re-
formamini in novitate sensus vestri. . . . Qui tribuit, in simpli-
citate ; qui praeest, in sollicitudine ; qui miseretur, in hilaritate. Di-
lectio sine simulatione. Odientes malum, adhaerentes bono : Cari-
tate fraternitatis invicem diligentes ; honore invicem- praevenientes :
Sollicitudine non pigri: Spe gaudentes; in tribulatione patientes;
orationi instantes : Necessitatibus sanctorum communicantes ; hos-
pitalitatem sectantes. Gaudere cum gaudentibus, flere cum flenti-
bus: Idipsum invicem sentientes: Nulli malum pro malo red-
dentes : Providentes bona non tantura coram Deo^ sed etian^ coram
omnibus hominibus." (xii., I-17.)

Quorum auspex bonorum accedat Apostolica benedictio, quam
vobis, Venerabiles Fratres, Clero ac populo yestro amantissime in
Domino impertimus.

Datum Romae apud Sanctum Petrum die XVIII. i^uarii J^Pnp
MDCCCCI, Pontificatus Nostri vicesimo tertio.

Leo PP. XIII.

384 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

APOSTOLICAL LETTER OF OUR HOLY FATHER LEO
XHL, BY DIVINE PROVIDENCE POPE.

TO THE PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES, ARCHBISHOPS, BISHOPS AND

OTHER ORDINARIES IN PEACE AND COMMUNION

WITH THE APOSTOLIC SEE.

Venerable Brothers, Health and Apostolic Benediction.

THE grave discussions on economical questions which for some
time past have disturbed the peace of several countries of
the world are growing in frequency and intensity to such a
degree that the minds of thoughtful men are filled, and rightly so,
with worry and alarm. These discussions take their rise in the bad
philosophical and ethical teaching which is now widespread among
the people. The changes also which the mechanical inventions of
the age have introduced, the rapidity of communication between
places and the devices of every kind for diminishing labor and in-
creasing gain all add bitterness to the strife ; and lastly matters have
been brought to such a pass by the struggle between capital and
labor, fomented as it is by professional agitators, that the countries
where these disturbances most frequently occur find themselves con-
fronted with ruin and disaster.

At the very beginning of our Pontificate we clearly pointed out
what the peril was which confronted Society on this head, and we
deemed it our duty to warn Catholics, in unmistakable language,
how great the error was which was lurking in the utterances of
Socialism, and how great the danger was that threatened not only
their temporal possessions, but also their morality and religion.
That was the purpose of our Encyclical Letter Quod Apostolici Mu-
neris, which we published on the i8th of December, in the year 1878 ;
but as these dangers day by day threatened still greater disaster,
both to individuals and the Commonwealth, we strove with all the
more energy to avert them. This was the object of our Encyclical
Rerum Novarum of the 15th May, 1891, in which we dwelt at length
on the rights and duties which both classes of Society — those
namely, who control capital, and those who contribute labor — are
bound in relation to each other ; and at the same time we made it
evident that the remedies which are most useful to protect the cause
of religion, and to terminate the contest between the different classes
of Society, were to be found in the precepts of the Gospel.

Nor, with God's grace, were our hopes entirely frustrated. Even

Encyclical "Christian Socialism." 385

those who are not Catholics, moved by the power of truth, avowed
that the Church must be credited with a watchful care over all
classes of Society, and especially those whom fortune had least
favored. Catholics, of course, profited abundantly by these letters,
for they not only received encouragement and strength for the ad-
mirable enterprises in which they were engaged, but also obtained
the light they desired, by the help of which they were able with
greater safety and with more plentiful blessings to continue the
efforts which they had been making in the matter of which we are
now speaking. Hence it happened that the differences of opinion
which prevailed among them were either removed or their acrimony
diminished and the discussion laid aside. In the work which they
had undertaken this was effected, viz. : that in their efforts for the
elevation of the poorer classes, especially in those places where the
trouble is greatest, many new enterprises were set on foot; those
which were already established were increased and all reaped the
blessing of a greater stability imparted to them. Some of these
works were called Bureaus of the People, their object being to supply
information. Rural Savings Banks had been established, and vari-
ous associations, some for mutual aid, others, of relief, were organ-
ized. There were Working Men's Societies and other enterprises
for work or beneficence. Thus under the auspices of the Church,
united action of Catholics was secured as well as wise discrimination
exercised in the distribution of help for the poor who are often as
badly dealt with by chicanery and exploitation of their necessities as
they are oppressed by indigence and toil. These schemes of popular
benevolence were, at first, distinguished by no particular appellation.
The name of Christian Socialism with its derivatives which was
adopted by some was very properly allowed to fall into disuse.
Afterwards some asked to have it called The Popular Christian
Movement. In the countries most concerned with this matter there
are some who are known as Christian Socialists. Elsewhere the
movement is described as Christian Democracy, and its partisans
Christian Democrats, in contradistinction to those who are designated
as Socialists, and whose system is known as Social Democracy. Not
much exception is taken to the former, i. e.. Christian Socialism, but
many excellent men find the term Christian Democracy objectionable.
They hold it to be very ambiguous, and for this reason open to two
objections. It seems by implication to covertly favor popular gov-
ernment, and to disparage other methods of political administration.
Secondly, it appears to belittle religion by restricting its, scope to the
care of the poor, as if the other sections of Society were not of its
concern. More than that, under the shadow of its name there might
easily lurk a design to attack all legitimate power, either civil or

Vol. XXVI— 12

^/^ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

sacred. Wherefore, since this discussion is now so widespread, so
exaggerated and so bitter, the consciousness of duty warns us to put
a check on this controversy and to define what CathoHcs are to think
on this matter. We also propose to describe how the movement
may extend its scope and be made more useful to the Common-
wealth.

What Social Democracy is and what Christian Democracy ought to
be, assuredly no one can doubt. The first, with due consideration
to the greater or less intemperance of its utterance, is carried to such
an excess by many as to maintain that there is really nothing exist-
ing above the natural order of things, and that the acquirement and
enjoyment of corporal and external goods constitute man's happi-
ness. It aims at putting all government in the hands of the people,
reducing all ranks to the same level, abolishing all distinction of
class, and finally introducing community of goods. Hence, the
right of ownership is to be abrogated, and whatever property a man
possesses, or whatever means of livelihood he has, is to be common
to all.

As against this. Christian Democracy, by the fact that it is Chris-
tian, is built, and necessarily so, on the basic principles of Divine
Faith, and provides for the betterment of the masses, with the ul-
terior object of availing itself of the occasion to fashion their minds
for things which are everlasting. Hence, for Christian Democracy
justice is sacred ; it must maintain that the right of acquiring and
possessing property cannot be impugned, and it must safeguard
the various distinctions and degrees which are indispensable in every
well-ordered Commonwealth. Finally it must endeavor to preserve
in every human society the form and the character which God ever
impresses on it. It is clear, therefore, that there is nothing in com-
mon between Social and Christian Democracy. They differ from
each other as much as the sect of Socialism differs from the profes-
sion of Christianity.

Moreover, it would be a crime to distort this name of Christian
Democracy to politics, for although democracy, both in its philologi-
cal and philosophical significations, implies popular government, yet
in its present application it is to be employed that, removing from it
all political significance, it is to mean nothing else than a benevolent
and Christian movement in behalf of the people. For the laws of
nature and of the Gospel, which by right are superior to all human
contingencies, are necessarily independent of all modifications of
civil government, while at the same time they are in concord with
everything that is not repugnant to morality and justice. They
are, therefore, and they must remain absolutely free from political
parties, and have nothing to do with the various changes of admin-

Encyclical ''Christian Socialism" ^f3k§

istration which may occur in a nation ; so that Catholics may an(|
ought to be citizens according to the constitution of any State,
guided as they are by those laws which command them to love Go4
above all things, and their neighbors as themselves. This ha^
always been the discipline of the Church. The Roman Pontiff^
acted upon this principle whenever they dealt with different coun-
tries, no matter what might be the character of their governments.
Hence, the mind and the action of Catholics who are devoted to the
amelioration of the working classes can never be actuated with thq
purpose of favoring and introducing one government in place of
another.

In the same manner, from Christian Democracy, we must remove
another possible subject of reproach, namely: that while looking
after the advantage of the working people they should act in such a
manner as to forget the upper classes of Society ; for they also are
of the greatest use in preserving and perfecting the Commonwealth.
As we have explained, the Christian law of charity will prevent us
from so doing. For it extends to all classes of Society, and all
should be treated as members of the same family, as children of the
same Heavenly Father, as redeemed by the same Saviour, and called
to the same eternal heritage. Hence the doctrine of the Apostle who*
warns us that : "we are one body and one spirit called to the one
hope in our vocation ; one Lord, one Faith and one Baptism ; one God
and the Father of all who is above all, and through all, and in us all.'*
Wherefore on account of the nature of the union which exists be-
tween the different classes of Society and which Christian brother-
hood makes still closer, it follows that no matter how great our
devotion may be in helping the people, we should all the more keep
our hold upon the upper classes, because association with them is
proper and necessary, as we shall explain later on, for the happy
issue of the work in which we are engaged.

Let there be no question of fostering under this name of Christian
Democracy any intention of diminishing the spirit of obedience, or of
withdrawing people from their lawful rulers. Both the natural and
the Christian law command us to revere those who, in their various
grades, are above us in the State, and to submit ourselyes to their
just commands. It is quite in keeping with our dignity as men an4
Christians to obey, not only exteriorly, but from the heart, as the
Apostle expresses it, for conscience' sake, when he commands us tp
keep our soul subject to the higher powers. It is abhorrent to th,(?
profession of a Christian for any one to be unwilling to be subject
and obedient to those who rule in the Church, and first of all to th^
bishops whom (without prejudice to the universal power of thje
Roman Pontiff) ''the Holy Ghost has placed to rule the Churclj c^

38S American Catholic Quarterly Review.

God which Christ has purchased by His blood." (Acts xx., 28.)
He who thinks or acts otherwise is guilty of ignoring the grave pre-
cept of the Apostle who bids us to obey our rulers and to be subject
to them, for they watch, having to give an account of our souls.
Let the faithful everywhere implant these principles deep in their
souls, and put them in practice in their daily life, and let the ministers
of the Gospel meditate them profoundly, and incessantly labor not
merely by exhortation but especially by example to make them enter
into the souls of others.

We have recalled these matters which on other occasions we have
made the subject of our instructions, in the hope that all dissension
about the name of Christian Democracy will cease and that all sus-
picion of any danger coming from what the name signifies will be
put at rest. And with reason do we hope so ; for neglecting the
opinions of certain men, with regard to the power and the efficacy
of this kind of Christian Democracy, which at times are exaggerated
and are not free from error, let no one, however, condemn that zeal
which, according to the natural and Divine law, has this for its ob-
ject, viz. : to make the condition of those who toil more tolerable ;
to enable them to obtain, little by little, those means by which they
may provide for the future ; to help them to practice in public and in
private the duties which morality and religion inculcate ; to aid them
to feel that they are not animals but men, not heathens but Chris-
tians, and so to enable them to strive more zealously and more eag-
erly for the one thing which is necessary, viz. : that ultimate good
for which we are all born into this world. This is the intention ; this
is the work of those who wish that the people should be animated
by Christian sentiments and should be protected from the contamina-
tion of Socialism which threatens them.

We have designedly made mention here of virtue and religion.
For, it is the opinion of some, and the error is already very common,
that the social question is merely an economic one, whereas in point
of fact, it is above all a moral and religious matter, and for that
reason must be settled by the principles of morality and according
to the dictates of religion. For even though wages are doubled and
the hours of labor are shortened and food is cheapened, yet if the
workingman hearkens to the doctrines that are taught on this sub-
ject, as he is prone to do, and is prompted by the examples set before
hiQi to throw ofif respect for God and to enter upon a life of immor-
ality, his labors and his gain will avail him naught.

Trial and experience have made it abundantly clear that many a
workman lives in cramped and miserable quarters, in spite of his
shorter hours and larger wages, simply because he has cast aside the
restraints of morality and religion. Take away the instinct which

Encyclical "Christian Socialism." 389

Christian virtue has planted and nurtured in men's hearts, take away
prudence, temperance, frugality, patience and other correct natural
habits, no matter how much he may strive, he will never achieve
prosperity. That is the reason why we have incessantly exhorted
Catholics to enter these associations for bettering the condition of
the laboring classes, and to organize other undertakings with the
same object in view ; but we have likewise warned them that all this
should be done under the auspices of religion, with its help and
under its guidance.

The zeal of Catholics on behalf of the masses is especially note-
worthy by the fact that it is engaged in the very field in which, under
the benign inspiration of the Church, the active industry of charity
has always labored, adapting itself in all cases to the varying exi-
gencies of the times. For the law of mutual charity perfects, as it
were, the law of justice, not merely by giving each man his due and
in not impeding him in the exercise of his rights, but also by be-
friending him in case of need, "not with the word alone, or the lips,
but in deed and in truth ;" being mindful of what Christ so lovingly
said of His own : "A new commandment I give unto you, that you
love one another as I have loved you, that you love also one an-
other. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you
have love one for the other." This zeal in coming to the rescue of
our fellow-men should, of course, be solicitous, first for the imper-
ishable good of the soul, but it must not neglect what is necessary
and helpful for the body.

We should remember what Christ said to the disciples of the Bap-
tist who asked him : "Art thou he that art to come or look we for
another?" He invoked, as the proof of the mission given to Him
among men, His exercise of charity, quoting for them the text of
Isaias : "The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the
deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the Gospel preached to
them." (Matth. xi., 5.) And speaking also of the last judgment
and of the rewards and punishments He will assign, He declared
that He would take special account of the charity men exercised
towards each other. And in that discourse there is one thing that
especially excites our surprise, viz. : that Christ omits those works
of mercy which comfort the soul and refers only to external works
which, although done in behalf of men. He regards as being done to
Himself. "For I was hungry and you gave Me to eat; I was thirsty
and you gave Me to drink ; I was a stranger and you took Me in ;
naked and you covered Me ; sick and you visited Me ; I Was in prison
and you came to Me." (Matth. xxv., 35.)

To the teachings which enjoin the twofold charity of spiritual and
corporal works, Christ adds His own example so that no one may

i^go American Catfwlic Quarterly Review.

fail to recognize the importance which He attaches to it. In the
present instance we recall the sweet words that came from His pa-
ternal heart: "I have pity on the multitude" (Mark vii., 2), as well
as the desire He had to assist them even if it were necessary to in-
voke His miraculous power. Of His tender compassion we have
the proclamation made in Holy Writ, viz. : that "He went about do-
ing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil." (Acts
X., 38.) This law of charity which He imposed upon His apostles,
they in the most holy and zealous way put into practice ; and after
them those who embraced Christianity originated that wonderful
variety of institutions for alleviating all the miseries by which man-
kind is afflicted. And these institutions carried on and continually
increased their powers of relief and were the especial glories of
Christianity and of the civilization of which it was the source, so
that right-minded men never fail to admire those foundations, aware
as they are of the proneness of men to concern themselves about
their own and neglect the needs of others.

Nor are we to eliminate from the list of good Works thfe giving of
money for charity, in pursuance of what Christ has said : "But yet
that which remaineth, give alms." (Luke xi., 41.) Against this,
the Socialist cries out and demands its abolition as injurious to the
hative dignity of man. But if it is done in the manner which the
Scriptiire enjoins (Matth. vi., 2), and in conformity with the true
Christian spirit, it neither connotes pride in the givet or inflicts
shame upon the one who receives. Far from being dishonorable
for man it dratvs closer the bonds of human society by augmenting
the force of the obligation of the duties which men are under with
regard to each other. No one is so rich that he does not need an-
other's help ; no one so poor as not to be useful in some way to his
fellow-man ; and the disposition to ask assistance from others with
confidence, and to grant it with kindness is part of our very nature.
Thus justice and charity are so linked with each other, under the
Equable and sweet law of Christy as to form an admirable cohesive
power in human society and to lead all of its members to exercise a
Sort of providence in looking after their own and ih seeking the
common good as well.

As regards not merely the temporary aid given to the laboring
classes, but the establishment of permanent institutions in their be-
half, it is most cornmendable for charity to undertake them. It will
thus see that more certain and more reliable means of assistance will
be afforded to the necessitous. That kind of help is especially
worthy of recognition which forms the minds of rtiechanics and
laborers to thrift and foresight so that in course of time they may be
able, in part at lieast, to look out for themselves. To aim at that is

Encyclical "Christian Socialism.'' 39t

not only to dignify the duty of the rich towards the poor, but to ele-
vate the poor themselves ; for while it urges them to work jfor a better
degree of comfort in their manner of living, it preserves them mean-
time from danger by checking extravagance in their desires, and acts
as a spur in the practice of the virtues proper to their state. Since,
therefore, this is of such great avail and so much in keeping with
the spirit of the times, it is a worthy object for charity to undertake
with all prudence and zeal.

Let it be understood, therefore, that this devotion o<f Catholics to
comfort and elevate the mass of the people is in keeping with th«
spirit of the Church and is most conformable to the examples which
the Church has always held up for imitation. It matters v^ry little
whether it goes under the name of "The Popular Christian Move-
ment/' or "Christian Democracy," if the instructions that have been
given by Us be fully carried out with the submission that is due.
But it is of the greatest importance that Catholics should be one in
mind, will and action in a matter of such great moment. And it is
also of importance that the influence of these u^idertakings shouM
be extended by the multiplicatioil of men and meatis devoted to the
same object.

Especially must there be appeals to the kindly assistance of those
whose rank, worldly wealth and culture give them importance in the
community. If their help is excluded, scarcely anything cafi bfe done
which will be of any assistance for the wants which how clamor for
satisfaction in this matter of the Well-being of the people. Assuredly
the more earnestly many of those who are prominent in the State
conspire effectively to attain that object the quick'er aftd surer will
the end be reached. We wish them to u«iderstand that they are not
at all free to look after or neglect those who happen to be beneath
them, but that it is a strict duty which binds them. For no one lives
only for his personal advantage in a community ; he lives for the
common good as well, so that when others cannot contribntte their
share for the general object, those who can do so are obliged to
make up the deficiency. The very ex?tent of the benefits they have
received increases the burden of their responsibihty, and a stricter
accotmt will have to be rendered to God who bestowed those bless-
ings upon them. What should also urge all to the fulfillment of
their duty in this regard is the widespread disaster which will even-
tually fall upon all classes of Society if this assistance does not arrive
in time ; and therefore is it that he who neglects the cause of t^e *dis^
tressed poor is not doing his duty to himself or to the S.tate.

If this social movement extends its scope far and wide in a true
Christian fashion, and grows in its proper and genuine spirit, thete
will be no danger, as is feared, that those other institutions, which

392 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

the piety of our ancestors have established and which are now flour-
ishing, will decline or be absorbed by new foundations. Both of
them spring from the same root of charity and religion, and not only
do not conflict with each other, but can be made to coalesce and com-
bine so perfectly as to provide by a union of their benevolent re-
sources in a more efficacious manner against the graver perils and
necessities of the people which confront us to-day.

The condition of things at present proclaims, and proclaims vehe-
mently, that there is need for a union of brave minds with all the re-
sources they can command. The harvest of misery is before our
eyes, and the dreadful projects of the most disastrous national up-
heavals are threatening us from the growing power of the socialistic
movement. They have insidiously worked their way into the very
heart of the State, and in the darkness of their secret gatherings,
and in the open light of day, in their writings and their harangues,
they are urging the masses onward to sedition ; they fling aside re-
ligious discipline, they scorn duties and clamor only for rights ; they
are working incessantly on the multitudes of the needy which daily
grow greater, and which, because of their poverty, are easily deluded
and hurried off into ways that are evil. It is equally the concern of
the State and of Religion, and all good men should deem it a sacred
duty to preserve and guard both in the honor which is their due.

That this most desirable agreement of wills should be maintained,
it is essential that all refrain from giving any causes of dissension in
hurting and alienating the minds of others. Hence in newspapers
and in speeches to the people, let them avoid subtle and useless ques-
tions which are neither easy to solve nor to understand except by
minds of unusual ability and only after the most serious study. It is
quite natural for people to think differently in doubtful questions,
but those who address themselves to these subjects in a proper spirit
will preserve their mental calm and not forget the respect which is
due to those who differ from them. If minds see things in another
light it is not necessary to become alienated forthwith. To what-
ever opinion a man's judgment may incline, if the matter is yet open
to discussion, let him keep it, provided his mental attitude is such
that he is ready to yield if the Holy See should otherwise decide.

This Catholic action, of whatever description it may be, will work
with greater effect if all of the various associations, while preserving
their individual rights, move together under one primary and direc-
tive force.

In Italy we desire that this directive force should emanate from
the Catholic Congresses and Reunions so often praised by us, to
further which our predecessor and we ourselves have ordered that
these meetings should be controlled and guided by the Bishops of

Encyclical ''Christian Socialism." 393

the country. So let it be for other nations, in case there be any
leading organization of this description to which this matter has
been legitimately entrusted.

Now in all questions of this sort where the interests of the Church
and the Christian people are so closely allied, it is evident what they
who are in the sacred ministry should 'do, and it is clear how indus-
trious they should be in inculcating right doctrine and in teaching
the duties of prudence and charity. To go out and move among
the people, to exert a healthy influence on them by adapting them-
selves to the present condition of things is what more than once in
addressing the clergy we have advised. More frequently also in
writing to the Bishops and other dignitaries of the Church, and espe-
cially of late (to the Minister General of the Minorites, November
25, 1898,) we have lauded this affectionate solicitude for the people
and declared it to be the especial duty of both the secular and regular
clergy. But in the fulfillment of this obligation let there be the
greatest caution and prudence exerted, and let it be done after the
fashion of the saints. Francis, who was poor and humble, Vincent
of Paul, the Father of the afflicted classes, and very many others
whom the Church keeps ever in her memory, were wont to lavish
their care upon the people, but in such wise as not to be engrossed
overmuch or to be unmindful of themselves or to let it prevent them
from laboring with the same assiduity in the perfection of their own
soul and the cultivation of virtue.

There remains one thing upon which we desire to insist very
strongly, in which not only the ministers of the Gospel, but also all
those who are devoting themselves to the cause of the people, can
with very little difficulty bring about a most commendable result.
That is to inculcate in the minds of the people, in a brotherly way and
whenever the opportunity presents itself, the following principles,
viz. : to keep aloof on all occasions from seditious acts and seditious
men ; to guard inviolate the rights of others ; to show a proper re-
spect to superiors ; to willingly perform the work in which they are
employed ; not to grow weary of the restraint of family life which in
many ways is so advantageous ; to keep to their religious practices
above all, and in their hardships and trials to have recourse to the
Church for consolation. In the furtherance of all this, it is very
efficacious to propose the splendid example of the Holy Family of
Nazareth, and to advise the invocation of its protection, and it also
helps to remind the people of the examples of sanctity which have
shone in the midst of poverty, and to hold up before them the reward
that awaits them in the better life to come.

Finally we recur again to what we have already declared and we
insist upon it most solemnly, viz. : that whatever projects individuals

394 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

or associations form in this matter should be doile with due regard
to Episcopal authority and absolutely under Episcopal guidance.
Let them not be led astray by an excessive zeal in the cause of char-
ity. If it leiads them to be wanting in proper submission it is not a
sincere zeal ; it will not have any useful result and cannot be accept-
able to God. God delights in the souls of those who ptit aside their
own designs and obey the rulers of His Church as if they were obey-
ing Him ; He assists them even when they attempt difficult things
and benignly leads them to their desired end. Let them show also
examples of virtue, so as to prove that a Christian is a hater of idle-
ness ^nd indulgence, that he gives willingly from his goods for the
help of others, and that he stands firm and unconquered in the midst
of adversity. Examples of that kind have a power of moving peo-
ple to dispositions of soul that make for salvation, and have all the
greater force as the condition of those who g'ive them is higher in
the social senile.

We exhort you. Venerable Brethren, to provide for all this, as the
Necessities of meii and of places may require, according to your
prudence and your zeal, meetitig as usual in council to combine with
^ath other in your plans for the furtherance of these projects. Let
you*- solicitude watch and let your authority be effective in control-
ling, compelling, and also in preventing, lest any one undet the |>re-
text of good should cause the vigor of sacred discipline to be relaxed
or the order which Christ has established in His Church to be dis-
turbed. Thus by the correct, concurrent and ever-increasing labor
r^ all Catholics, the truth will flash out more brilliantly than ever,
Viz. : that truth and true prosperity flourish especially among those
pec^les whom the Church controls and influences : and that she holds
it as her sacred duty to admonish every one of what the law of God
enjoins, to unite the rich and the poor iA tile boinds of ffaternal
charity, and to lift up and strengthen men's souls in th^ times when
adversity presses heavily upon them.

Let our commands and otir wishes be confirmed by the words
which are so full of apostolic charity which the Blessed Paul ad-
dressed to the Romans : *'I beseech you therefore, brethren, be re-
Ibitned in the newness of your mind ; he that giveth, with simplicity ;
he that ruleth, with carefulness ; he that showeth mercy with cheer-
fulness. Let love be without dissimulation^hating that which is
evil ; clinging to that which is good ; loving one another with the
charity of brotherhood ; with honor preventing one another ; in care-
fulness, not slothful; rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; in-
stant in prayer. Communicating to the necessities of the saints.
Pursiling hospitality. Rejoice with them that rejoice ; weep with
them that weep ; being of one mind to one another ; to no man ren-

Encyclical "Christian Socialism** ' 395

dering evil for evil ; providing good things not only in the sight of
God but also in the sight of men."

As a pledge of these benefits receive the Apostolic Benediction
which, Venerable Brethren, we grant most lovingly in the Lord to
you and your clergy and people.

jGiven at Rome in St. Peter's the i8th day of January, 1901, in the
23d year of our Pontificate.

Leo XilL, Pope.

39^ American Catholic Quarterly Review,

Scientific Cbronicle^

ARTIFICIAL VS. NATURAL INDIGO.

The synthetic process of building up in the chemical laboratory
products which were known only as the results of the natural devel-
opment of plant life, has in the past caused the abandonment of cer-
tain kinds of plant culture. This was shown in a striking way in
regard to the madder plant. As late as 1870 this plant was exten-
sively cultivated to obtain the important dye-stuflf alizarin. But in
1869 a process for manufacturing this dye by fusing anthraquinone
sulphonic acid and caustic soda was patented, and as a consequence
the cultivation of the madder plant was abandoned. Now that such
rapid strides have been made in the production of synthetic or artifi-
cial indigo the fate of the natural product is eagerly discussed by
those interested.

England is most interested, for if natural indigo is driven out of
the market the wealth of her Indian possessions would be tempo-
rarily, if not permanently, diminished. The indigo plant is culti-
vated principally in the provinces of Bengal, Madras and Oude,
India. The seed is sown at the end of March or the beginning of
April, and by the ist of July, when it is cut, the plant has attained
its full growth, a height of about three feet. About the beginning
of September a second crop, somewhat smaller than the first, is cut.
The land on which the indigo plant grows is often very poor, and
very little attention is given to enriching it by fertilizers, the only
manure employed being seet, that is indigo refuse, leaves and stalks
taken from the vats after the steeping of the plants. Still the yearly
yield is about the same in quantity and quality.

The process of extracting the indigo from the plant is briefly this :
After the cutting the plants are tied into bundles and packed into
large cement lined vats, where they are' covered with clear fresh
water. The plants remain in these vats until the process of fermen-
tation, which begins quickly and lasts about 15 hours, is completed.
The yellow colored liquor is then drawn off into other vats, where it
is agitated either by oars worked by hand or else by machinery.
During this beating the indigo separates out in blue flakes which
precipitate to the bottom of the vat. When the indigo has thor-
oughly settled the water is drawn off and the remaining pulpy mass

Scientific Chronicle. 397

is boiled with water to remove impurities, then filtered and pressed
and cut into cubes and finally air dried.

The method of cultivating the plant and the process of extracting
the indigo are certainly old-fashioned and in a great measure de-
pendant on the whim of the grower and manufacturer. There has
been no attempt to improve the fertilizer or to discover whether it
can be improved or not. Their fathers used seet, and so did their
grandfathers, and therefore the present growers use seet. No expert
chemist is employed to improve the process of manufacture. Should
the bundles be packed tightly or loosely in the vat? Should the
water used be hard or soft? Should the plants be steeped 10, 15 or
20 hours ? These questions are all answered not on a scientific basis,
but according to the whim of the individual.

English scientists have awakened to the fact that something must
be done to improve the methods of cultivating the indigo plant and
of manufacturing the indigo if this industry is to be spared the fate
of the madder industry. Artificial indigo, which is about to crowd
out the natural, is the result principally of the work of German chem-
ists and the liberality of German firms that spend large sums of
money in perfecting the process of manufacture. .

The process employed by the Badische Auilin und Soda Fabrik
Company is that of Heumann, in which phenylglycine-ortho-car-
boxylic acid is fused with caustic soda. At first this process yielded
a product which cost more than the natural indigo. But the
Badische Company employs more than 100 highly trained research
chemists, and to some of these was entrusted the work of devising a
way of producing phenylglycine-ortho-carboxylic acid more cheaply.
As the starting product they took naphthalene, which is obtained
from coal tar in very large quantities. This they oxidized by con-
centrated sulphuric acid in the presence of mercury or a mercury
salt with the production of phthalic acid. This acid is then reacted
upon to form anthranilic acid. The latter combined with mono-
chloracetic acid yields the desired phenylglycine-ortho-carboxylic
acid.

During the process large quantities of sulphur dioxide are pro-
duced, the loss of which would be a serious matter, for on the scale
on which indigo is manufactured from 25,000 to 30,000 tons of
sulphur dioxide are amiually produced. This is not lost, but passed
over heated oxide of iron and converted into sulphuric anhydride,
which by the action of water is converted into profitable sulphuric
acid. In the manufacture of indigo chlorine is required to prepare
the chloracetic acid and caustic soda is needed to fuse the phenylgly-
cine-ortho-carboxylic acid. Both of these are obtained by the elec-
trolysis of sodium chloride. The mere mention of these processes

398 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

shows what has been done for artificial indigo and what an active
opponent the natural product has to contend with.

That the competition is and will be a sharp one may be gathered
from the fact th^-t at present the price of artificial and of natural
indigo is about the same. The Indigo Planters' Association is
awakened. They have employed Mr. Rawson, an expert chemist,
to improve the method of manufacturing the natural product, and
appeals have been made to the government, which has responded
by ordering that all the cloth supplied the army and navy be dyed
with natural indigo. The question will undoubtedly depend on
whether the artificial indigo can be made in sufficient quantities and
sold at a lower price. It is quite safe to say that it will, seeing the
energy displayed so far in its manufacture. The Badische Company
alone has spent nearly $5,000,000 in improving the manufacture of
artificial indigo, and other companies like the "Farben Fabrik" are
following this lead. It is safe to predict that the indigo industry
will pass from England to Germany, the supply being furnished not
by the fields of India, but by the laboratories of Germany.

This is another instance of the success that attends an alliance
between science and industry and pointedly stated last September
in an address by Professor Carhardt to the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers. After mentioning some details with regard
to the large sums of money spent in scientific work in Germany, he
says : 'The results have already justified, in a remarkable manner,
all the expenditure of labor and money. The renown in exact scien-
tific measurements formerly possessed by France and England has
now largely been transferred to Germany. Formerly scientific
workers in the United States looked to England for exact standards,
especially in the department of electricity; now they go to Ger-
many." And again: "Germany is rapidly moving toward indus-
trial supremacy in Europe. One of the most potent factors in this
notable advance is the perfected alliance between science and com-
merce existing in Germany. Science has come to be regarded there
as a commercial factor. If England is losing her supremacy in man-
ufacture and in commerce, as many claim, it is because of English
conservatism and the failure to utilize to the fullest extent the lessons
taught by science."

SPACE TELEGRAPHY.

Wireless telegraphy has proved its utility as a means of communi-
cating with ships at sea and with isolated stations which could not

ScientHic Chronicle. 399

be reached by cable. Here its utility seemed to cease, because at
any one station the transmitter would influence all the receivers
within its field of influence, and in turn its receiver would be actuated
by all the transmitters within its range of susceptibility. There was
therefore no privacy in the messages sent out, for there was no selec-
tive system of signalling, and there was, moreover, nothing but con-
fusion when two or more stations tried to communicate with a given
station at the same time. The labors of several workers have been
directed to the overcoming of this difficulty, and a solution seems to
have been reached by Professor Slaby, of the Charlottenberg Tech-
nical High School.

Professor Slaby was working on a system of wireless telegraphy
for use in the German navy which would not infringe the Marconi
patents when he found the solution referred to. He describes his
invention in a lecture published in the Electrotechnische Zeitschrift.
In every station from which messages are sent out by wireless tele-
graphy there is a tall vertical wire. Electrical oscillations are set
up in this wire and their wave-length depends on the length of this
wire. The longer the wire the longer the wave length of the electri-
cal oscillation sent out. An idea of this may be gathered from the
analogy of a vibrating rod. A vertical rod clamped at its lowest
point in a vise and set in vibration oscillates backward and forward
to the right and left of its position of rest. The motion is greatest
at its upper free end and is zero at the point at which it is clamped.
This latter point is called a nodal point or a node. Suppose the
vertical position of the rod to be extended upward in space. Begin
at the node and to the right of this line and draw lateral perpen-
diculars to the line of rest of the rod, making the lengths of the per-
pendiculars proportional to the velocities of the parts of the vibrating
rod. We will have a series of lines to the right gradually increasing
in length from zero to a maximum representing the velocities of the
rod as it moves from rest to its furthest position to the right. If we
continue these perpendiculars upward in reverse order to represent
the relative volicities as the rod returns to its position of rest and
then connect the extremities of these perpendiculars by a line we
shall have a curve beginning on the right at the bottom of the rod
and extending outward to a maximum distance opposite the top of
the rod and gradually returning to the line of extension of the rod
until it meets that line at twice the height of the rod. But the rod
moves past its position of rest to the left, and a similar curve con-
structed to the left of the vertical and beyond the first curve repre-
sents the excursion to the left and return of the rod to its vertical
position. The whole curve, that is, the part to the right plus the
part to the left, represents the complete to and fro motion of the rod

400 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

or a complete oscillation, and is called a wave. It is evident that
the rod is just one-quarter of the length of the wave.

So it is with the electrical oscillation set up in the vertical wire used
in wireless telegraphy. The lowest point, or that at which it is
grounded, is at rest electrically or is at what is technically called zero
potential, and the free end is at maximum potential just as the free
end of the rod had maximum velocity. So just as the rod was one-
quarter of the wave length, so the length of the wire is one-
quarter of the electrical wave length set up in it and radiated into
space. Hence by varying the length of the wire electrical waves of
any desired length can be sent out into space.

These oscillations will be taken up by another wire whose rate of
electrical vibration is the same, and a receiver connected with this
wire will be worked by these electric waves. But as the most vigor-
ous part of the oscillation of the rod was the top, so the most vigor-
ous part of the electric oscillation is at the top of the vertical wire.
Hence to make sure of the working of the receiving apparatus it
should be connected with the top of the vertical wire. This, how-
ever is not practicable, and here Professor Slaby overcomes the dif-
ficulty by a very simple device.

Reverting to the analogy of the vibrating rod, it is clear that if a
rod of twice the length was clamped in the middle and both ends
left free there would be developed in the lower half oscillations of
the same amplitude as those in the upper half when the rod was set
vibrating. In a similar way Professor Slaby attaches to the bottom
of the vertical wire, just where it is grounded, a wire of the same
length, and electrical oscillations of the same amplitude as those in
the vertical wire are set up in this extension wire, which may be
straight or coiled. The receiving instruments are attached to this
extension wire.

This extension wire forms the main feature of Professor Slaby 's
invention and enables him to arrange a multiple system of signalling.
For this arrangement of wire will respond to waves of only one
length, and waves of all other lengths will go to earth at the point at
which it is grounded. By varying the length of the extension wire
the nodal point of the oscillation will be shifted from the ground
point to some point along the extension wire, and thus waves of dif-
ferent lengths will be detected. Thus it is possible to arrange by
means of the extension wires the receiving apparatus of a certain
station so that only the waves of a certain length will actuate the in-
struments, and therefore only the messages intended for that station
will be received there. Thus secrecy is secured unless the wave
length of the transmitter be known. There can be at any one sta-
tion a number of receivers, each actuated only by its corresponding

Scientific Chronicle, 401

stransmitter, and hence a number of messages can be received at the
same time.

Improvements have been made in the transmitting apparatus by
which the length of the wave sent out is completely under control.
Experiments are to be made on German naval vessels to determine
the length at which signalling with this improved apparatus is possi-
ble, and the results are awaited with interest.

NOVA PERSEI.

On February 21 Dr. T. D. Anderson, of Edinburgh, discovered
in the constellation Perseus a new star. On the report of this dis-
covery the Harvard photographic plates of that part of the sky were
examined. The plates examined were those taken during the
month preceding the discovery. The plates of February 2, 6, 8, 18
and 19 showed the new star. Its magnitude, according to the plate
of February 19, was less than 10.5. It rapidly grew in brightness,
and on Sunday morning it rivaled in brilliancy the beautifully bright
star Sirius. Since that date it has begun to grow fainter, but yet
remained during the week following a star of the first magnitude,
distinctly brighter than its most conspicuous neighbors, which are
stars of the second magnitude.

One of the most remarkable things about this event is the fact that
only now are we receiving knowledge of an event which took place
long ago, may be one thousand years ago. We learn of it only from
the few rays of light that have just reached us. They may have
been on their journey one thousand years or more. How long these
messengers have been traveling we cannot say. They have been
with us so short a time that we have not been able to determine what
the astronomers call the parallax, by means of which we calculate
the distance of the star from us. We know the rate at which these
l)right messengers traveled, but not knowing how far they havt
come we cannot say how long ago they started. In fact, the star we
see may have been extinct for the last one hundred or perhaps thou-
sand years.

What happened so long ago? What news do these messengers
bring us? It is not easy to interpret the message. By quite a gen-
eral consent the best interpretation has been given by Seeliger. This
hypothesis was advanced shortly after the appearance 'in January,
1892, of Nova Auriga, which was also discovered by Dr. Anderson.

According to this explanation a dark orb traveling through space
with a great velocity encounters a nebula or cloud of cosmic dust.
"ToL. XXV r— 13

402 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The result of the colHsion and the friction would be the generation of
a great quantity of heat sufficient to render the surface of the dead-
star incandescent and to vaporize some of its material. Parts of the
nebula would also glow from the same cause. They would continue
to emit light until they had radiated this heat into space ; when cooled'.
down they would again disappear from view.

The spectroscopic study of Nova Auriga supplied the data for this
hypothesis. The new star gave two superimposed spectra, indicat-
ing two sources of the light received. One spectrum was character-
istic of a nebula, the other of an incandescent solid. There is already
some indication of a similar condition of things in the present new
star Nova Persei. Whether this be the explanation of the phe-
nomena of temporary stars or not the Nova Persei is attracting at-
tention and careful observations are being taken which may throw
light on such occurrences. Rev. John Hagen, S. J., Director of the
Georgetown College Observatory, has issued a chart of the neigh-
borhood of the new star. Accompanying this chart there is data for
observing the brightness of the star and the comparison stars are
given. It is intended for observance of brightness while the star is^
a naked-eye variable. A new chart is preparing for work on the star
when it grows too faint for naked eye work.

THE STEAM TURBINE.

The principles of steam engineering have just completed one revo-
lution. They have gone through a circle and have just returned to^
the starting point. Beginning in the year 120 B. C. with Hero's-
reaction steam turbine, steam engineering passed through the steam
impact engine of Bianca and then the diflPerent forms of reciprocat-
ing engines to return again to the rotatory turbine as the most effi-
cient form of engine. In Hero's engine the wheel or sphere was.
turned by the reaction of two jets of steam issuing from two bent
pipes inserted at opposite ends of a diameter of the wheel. In,
Bianca's engine a paddle wheel was set in rotation by a jet of steam
blowing against the vanes.

Both of these principles are made use of in the steam turbines of
the present day. The blades of the turbines receive motion first
from the impact of the steam striking them and secondly from the-
reaction of the steam leaving them.

Recent experiments with steam turbines show an efficiency of yo
per cent., a result never attained by any piston engine. The steam
turbine such as we have it to-day is undoubtedly the coming form
of steam motor, for the line of development involves high speeds and*

Scientific Chronicle. 40J

transmission of energy in the form of electricity. In the steam tur-
bine there are no reciprocating parts ; there is the rotatory engine
adapted for direct connection with electric generators. There is
high speed, steadiness of motion and a steam economy higher than
that attained by any piston engine yet constructed.

NOTES.

Motive Power for Street Railways. — To understand the rapid appli-
cation of electricity as the motive power for street railways we have
but to compare the cost of operating such roads by electricity with
the cost of operating them by other systems. The means of com-
parison is furnished by the report of the Metropolitan Street Rail-
way Company of New York. According to this report the average
cost for horse cars was 18.98 cents per car mile, and then it must be
remembered that the cars were much smaller than those used on
other systems. The cost for cable cars was 17.76 cents and for elec-
tric cars 13.66 cents per car mile. The item of cost, then, is decid-
edly in favor of electric traction. There is only one other system
that may compete with the electric system, and that is the com-
pressed air system. The data furnished from this system as applied"
in New York on a road in which the round trip is five and a half
miles at present gives 17.42 cents per car mile as the running ex-
pense. However, it is not fair to compare these figures with those
given for electric traction, for the compressor used is of far too great
capacity for the work it now does and is capable of doing three times;
the work at about the same expense. Still it is doubtful if for long-
distances it would ever prove satisfactory and as cheap as electricity.
Electricity has come to remain as the most reliable, most convenient
and most economical form of energy for traction on street cars.

Aluminum. — Fifty years ago aluminum was a laboratory curiosity
and was worth more than its weight in gold on account of the cost
of reducing it. Thirty years ago the annual production was about
one ton a year and the cost of the metal was twelve dollars a pound.
Twenty years ago its production began to increase on account of a
cheapening in the production of rodium, which was up to that time
employed in the reduction of aluminum. About this time the price
of aluminum fell to five dollars a pound. To-day the industry is on
an entirely diflFerent basis. It is now produced in quantities not of
70 tons a year, but the annual output reaches 7,000 tons, and the
price is reduced to 30 cents a pound. The supply is unable to keep
up with the demand. The increased supply was possible by the use

404 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of electricity to reduce the metal, and the demand increases on ac-
count of the fine qualities of aluminum and the possibilities of using
it more extensively since the price is lowered. This briefly tells the
story of an unparalleled development in a branch of applied science.

Metric System. — The committee of the House of Representatives
in charge of the bill to substitute the metric system in place of our
present system of weights and measures has decided to make a favor-
able report. Besides the numerous other advantages there is the
commercial advantage by abolishing a system that hampers our
trade with almost all foreign countries, especially with the South
American republics. The English speaking races only hold on to
the old clumsy system in spite of every argument of utility and con-
venience in favor of the decimal system. It is encouraging to note
the equally strong agitation in England in favor of the metric sys-
tem, and if both England and the United States would simultan-
eously adopt it its application would be easier and more rapid.

New Gutta-Percha. — ^The report comes from Zanzibar that a new
material resembling gutta-percha has been discovered. It is derived
from a tree. When the tree is tapped a white fluid exudes which in
boiling water coagulates into a substance which in character bears a
strong resemblance to gutta-percha. This material becomes very
hard on cooling, but while soft it can easily be moulded into any de-
sired shape. Although it is not equal to genuine gutta-percha, still
as it is quite suitable for many of the purposes for which the latter is
used it will undoubtedly assume a commercial importance.

Count Zeppelin's Airship. — This airship has made another trial,
that of October 17 last, which is thus described by Herr Eugen Wolf,
who took part in the ascent : "The trial lasted one hour and twenty
minutes. The start upwards was first rate. The airship moved at
an almost unvaried height of 300 metres and went against the wind.
All the steering tests proved the efficacy of the new gear, and the
airship satisfactorily answered the movements of the steering ap-
paratus. The horizontal stability of the vessel vras wonderful. Any
list was easily counteracted by shifting the sliding weight. The
speed of the airship was such that when going against the wind it
outstripped the motor boats on the lake. In still air its own speed
was at least eight metres per second. We descended at full speed
in the direction of the airship's shed, rather faster than we expected,
owing to an as yet unexplained escape of the whole of the gas in one
of the balloons in the forward part of the ship. No damage of any
importance happened the ship." The German Emperor has con-
ferred on Count von Zeppelin the Order of the Red Eagle, First
Class. In his letter to the Count the Emperor says: 'The ad-
vantages of your system — the division of the long, extended balloon

Scientific Chronicle. 405

into compartments, the equal distribution of the burden by means
of two independent engines and a rudder working with success for
the first time in a vertical direction — have enabled your airship to
move with the greatest speed which has hitherto been attained, and
have rendered it amenable to the rudder." The Emperor has placed
the advice and experience of the balloon division of the army at the
disposal of the Count.

Wireless Telegraphy. — The satisfactory results obtained in testing
the utility of wireless telegraphy as a means of communication be-
tween the vessels that run from Dover to Ostend and either of the
above named points shows that it is practicable. The vessel selected
for the test was the Belgian mail packet Princess Clementine. The
receiving and sending wires were connected to the foremast, which
had been previously increased considerably in height. The land
station was between Ostend and Dunkirk at La Panne. The mast
Vised at La Panne was 130 feet high and the distance to Dover 6r
miles. As the vessel left Ostend a message was sent to La Panne
and messages continued to be transmitted at frequent intervals up
to the time the vessel reached Dover. These messages were trans-
mitted at the rate of twenty words a minute. The results were satis-
factory beyond what had been expected.

Another invention in connection with wireless telegraphy is an
apparatus by which ships may be warned of their approach to
danger in time of fog or in places where a simpler means of signaling
cannot be employed. A revolving wheel having teeth of varying
sizes on its circumference is made to work a Morse key which is
connected with a set of wireless telegraph transmitting instruments.
The varying sizes of the teeth depress the key for a longer or shorter
time, and thus a system of dashes and dots can be transmitted. By
a proper arrangement of the teeth on the revolving wheel the
dashes and dots may be made to spell the name of a place or vessel.
Any vessel coming within the zone of influence of this system and
provided with instruments for receiving electric waves can be warned
by the ringing of a bell and the reception of the message.

Still another advance in wireless telegraphy is reported. Pro-
fessor Fleming has announced to the Liverpool Chamber of Com-
merce that Mr. Marconi has succeeded in transmitting messages a
distance of 200 miles, and that messages could be sent simultan-
eously in both directions and two or more could be received at once
at each station. This result indicates that the difficulty of interfer-
ence of messages has been at least partially overcome.

The Malaria Campaign. — The numerous and extensive experi-
ments conducted during the last two years and the clear results
reached leave no doubt as to the method by which malaria is pro-

4o6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

pagated. The mosquito is convicted. Now attention is turned to
the plan of campaign to be followed to stamp out malaria. The
first views on the best method of malaria prophylaxis seems on re-
flection impracticable. The hope that the mosquito would be ex-
terminated by drainage and the use of culicicides is too sanguine.
There are very large districts where this cannot be accomplished.
Still in some localities joined with a use of mosquito curtains and
quinine it will bring about a marked improvement. Still, strange
as it may at first appear, the most successful plan of campaign seems
to be to work to preserve the mosquito from infection and thus limit
the chances of disseminating the parasites. This may be done by
a prolonged treatment of patients with quinine, and during the time
they have parasites in their blood they should be isolated and pro-
tected from mosquitoes by a proper use of mosquito netting.

A Use of Liquid Air. — The cartridges used for blasting trials in
the Simplon tunnel consisted of a wrapper filled with some car-
bonaceous material such as a mixture of equal parts of paraffin and
charcoal and dipped into liquid air until they were completely
soaked. These cartridges had to be kept in liquid air until they
were needed and then put quickly into the shot holes and detonated
with a small guncotton primer and detonator. This haste in using
the cartridge is necessitated by the short life of the cartridge. Those
used at the Simplon tunnel measured eight inches in length and
three in diameter and had to be used within fifteen minutes after
their removal from the liquid air in order to avoid a missfire. Their
use on this account was abandoned, but much time and labor is
being devoted to their improvement, especially in Germany.

.Historic Astronomical Instruments. — From Nature of December 27,
1900, we take the following note, which will be of interest to our
readers : "Our attention has been directed to the following surpris-
announcement made by the Pekin correspondent of the Times: 'In
pursuance of their regrettable policy of appropriation, the French
and German generals, with Count von Waldersee's approval, have
removed from the wall of Pekin the superb astronomical instru-
ments erected two centuries ago by the Jesuit fathers. Half of them
will go to Berlin and the rest to Paris. The explanation of this act
of vandalism is that, inasmuch as the return of the Court is so im-
probable, such beatiful instruments should not be exposed to the
possibilities of injury when Pekin is no longer the capital.' "

D. T. O'SULLIVAN, S. J.
Boston College.

Book Notices. js^j

Boofe IRoticee*

Philosophia Lacensis. Institutiones Juris Naturalis ad usum Scholarum ador-
navit. T. Meyer, S. J. Pars II. Herder: Freiburg and St. Louis, Mo., 1900.
8vo, pp. 26, 852.

With the present volume the Philosophia Lacensis the course of
neo-scholastic philosophy emanating from Maria Laach,the one-time
scholasticate of the German Jesuits, is brought to a close. Begun
twenty years ago, shortly after the appearance of the memorable
Encyclical of Leo XIII. on Thomistic studies, the Cursus Lacensis
is to-day the most scholarly and perhaps profound work of its kind
that has thus far been produced. As to its eruditional features, it
is certainly unrivaled. Its authors have set forth the complete sys-
tem of Catholic philosophy not only in detail, but in its relations to
the manifold forms of alien speculation, past and present. The
only other work that heretofore aimed at establishing so full a com-
parison between the philosophia perennis and other systems and
phases of philosophy is Sanseverino's well-known Philosophia Chris-
tiana Antiqua Cum Nova Comparata. The latter work, however,
never came within more than a third of completion, where the la-
mented death of its author left it a quarter of a century ago. It
•contains no word, therefore, of the movements of thought in more
recent years. The Cursus Lacensis, however, brings its subject mat-
ter close en rapport with contemporary speculation. Indeed, there
is hardly any philosophical theory or opinion worthy of note that
has appeared during the past decade, especially in that radiating
centre of new philosophies, Germany, that has not been weighed and
■sifted. It is perhaps this feature of the work, its references to the
recent German literature of philosophy as viewed by neo-scholasti-
<:ism, that gives it its special importance for the Catholic student.

As regards profundity, however, and particularly clarity of expo-
sition, the work in our estimation has, to say the least, a compeer in
the colossal monument reared by Father Urrabni. Nor if we ex-
cept the references to German philosophy are the Institutiones Philo-
sophiccB of the eminent Spanish Jesuit much inferior in point of
erudition to the present production of his brethren beyond the Rhine.
For the benefit of the reader interested in the subject it may here be
said that the Cursus Lacensis as it now stands embraces three royal
octavos, containing in all about i,8oo pages devoted to Logic, three
volumes of almost equal extent on Psychology, two volumes of
about half that compass on Philosophia Naturalis, one volume rival-

4o8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ing the latter in bulk on Theodicy. The first volume on Moral Phil-
osophy contains in round numbers 500 pages, and the second about
850. These figures will help to give the reader some impression as
to the amplitude of the series. It should be noted, however, that
about one-third, i. e., the last volume of the section on Logic, em-
braces the matter ordinarily allotted to the department of Ontology,
the author, Father Pesch, having subsumed under what he calls logica
realis, an exposition of the fundamental concepts and principles of
General Metaphysics. There are, of course, valid reasons for the
latter arrangement. On the whole we prefer the treating of so sin-
gularly vital a section of the philosophical system as Ontology under
its traditional caption, particularly as such an arrangement gives due
emphasis to the objective character of metaphysical concepts, an
emphasis that cannot, we believe, be too strongly insisted upon in
times when the tendency is to relegate metaphysics to the realm of
purely subjective figments.

It should also be noted that the Cursus Lacensis provides no treat-
ment of the history of philosophy. We cannot but regard this as-
the one lacuna in the work. The literature of scholastic philosophy
is unfortunately inadequate in this department and students inter-
ested in the matter had hoped that the present series would provide
what is so much needed. An historical exposition of the develop-
ment of philosophy, with supplementary and critical references to the
contents of these volumes, would both enhance the value of the Cursus
Lacensis itself and promote very considerably the general aim for
which the work has been produced. Failing, however, this much to
be desired completion, no more fitting crown could have been given
to the structure than that which is embodied in Father Meyer's
Moral Philosophy, a work which keeps quite up to the high standard
set by the preceding portions of the course.

The first volume, dealing with General Ethics, was published fif-
teen years ago and was subsequently reviewed in these pages. The
matter covered in that volume is confined to the general principles
of Ethics, individual and social. The second volume, which, by
the way, almost doubles the compass of its predecessor, is devoted
to special ethics, to the applying that is, of the general notions and
principles of morality to the various relations of human life. The
whole falls under the caption Jus Naturae Sociale, and divides spon-
taneously into individual right, private social right and public social
right. Under the first section come the rites of the individual to-
wards God, himself and his fellow-men ; under the second are exam-
ined the juridic concepts growing out of domestic society and the
relations of property ; whilst the third and by far the largest portion
of the volume is concerned with the rights and duties emanating

Book Notices.

409

from the civil and public relations inherent in the body politic,
Staatsrecht, as the Germans call it; and from the external relations
of nations, international right, the Volkerrecht of the Germans.

The lines of treatment here laid down are, of course, those familiar
to every student of Social Ethics, essential as they must be to the
subject matter itself. The special merit of the work consists in the
depth and breadth with which individual questions are examined.
Thus, for instance, to the right of property over one hundred pages
are devoted. This affords room for a satisfactory examination of
the leading features and claims of socialism. A fundamental ques-
tion of supreme importance is that which centres in the end or pur-
pose of civil society. This the author has discussed very carefully
and adequately in no less than six goodly "theses." The functions
of civil authority are also treated with the comprehensiveness de-
manded by such vital topics as the relations of the State to religion,
economics, education, etc.

In fact, there is no important question that enters into the peren-
nial organism of moral philosophy or that has grown out of the more
complex relationships of modern society, or that has been necessi-
tated by the attacks of scepticism against the basis or framework of
Christian Ethics that does not receive in this volume their just
measure of consideration. Readers of the "Newer Ethic" may
miss in it reference to some names that cast a large shadow in the
recent book world ; but the line of such reference, whether to ortho-
dox or to heterodox writers, had to be drawn somewhere, and the
author has temperately drawn it at the most noteworthy and endur-
ing literature of his subject.

On the whole, we believe we can give the work no more fitting
commendation than by saying that it deserves to take a place by the
side of the great Saggio of Taparelli and the Moral Philosophie of
Cathrein, the two works that stand easily to the front in the nine-
teenth century Hterature of Ethics.

Course of Religious Instruction. Institute of the Brothers of the Christian
Schools.

Exposition of Christian Doctrine. By a Seminary Professor, Intermediate
Course. Part III. Worship. 12mo, pp. xvi., 833. Philadelphia: John Joseph
McVey.

This volume completes a course of religious instruction which
must appeal to all teachers whose duty it is to instruct others in
Christian doctrine ; to all students who are trying to acquire such
important knowledge, and to all intelligent Catholics who feel every
day the necessity of being able to explain the doctrines and cere-

4IO American Catholic Quarterly Review.

monies of the Church. St. Peter recommended the first Christians
to be always ready to give an account of their faith. The same ad-
monition has been given by the Church to her children in all ages.
She is confident that if men know her they will love her and follow
her teachings, because she is the spouse of Christ, and her doctrines
are His doctrines. Those who refuse to listen to her ; who persecute
her and caluminate her, do so because they are ignorant of her true
teachings and her true history.

Catholics themselves are largely responsible for this. We do not
speak of those who are poor, hard-worked and unlearned. Through
no fault of their own they are prevented from gaining that fuller
knowledge which would enable them to enlighten others. But God
has given the grace of faith to them, and they are deserving of all
honor for preserving it, and submitting humbly to the guidance of
His Church. Their lives speak more eloquently than words. But
at the present day those who are born and brought up in this coun-
try cannot excuse themselves for ignorance of the doctrines of the
Church. In this age of schools, libraries and books, if any one
remain ignorant of any important subject it must be because he will
not enlighten himself. This is certainly true of the Catholic Faith.
The explanations of Catholic faith, morals and ceremonial which
have come from the press in recent years are so many and so
various that every one should be able to prove to the world that the
Church is the spouse of Christ, speaking to men by His authority
and in His name. The "Exposition of Christian Doctrine" which is
completed by the volume before us, is a striking illustration of this
truth. In these three volumes the whole field is covered. It is a
clear, concise, complete summary of Catholic faith, morals and cere-
monial. With this book in hand an apostle could convert the world.

The first volume of the series treated of Dogma, the second of
Morals and the third treats of Worship. As worship is the living and
active expression of dogma and morals, it follows them in logical
order.

In the introduction the plan of the present volume is thus clearly
set forth : "It may be divided into four sections : A preliminary
section : On Grace, without which we can neither please God nor
sanctify ourselves. Three principal sections: i. On Prayer, by
which we raise ourselves to God and ask His grace. 2. On the Sac-
raments, which are sensible signs that signify and produce grace.
3. On the Liturgy, which regulates public prayer, the administration
of the sacraments and above all the celebration of the holy sacrifice
of the Mass. We recommend the book to priests who have already
gained the knowledge which it contains, but who must constantly
refresh their memories and verify their statements, and who can.no-

Book Notices. 411

where else find all that they need so easily as here. We recommend
it to teachers who are using other manuals, because it conflicts with
none, but completes all. We recommend it to every Catholic family,
because it is a complete library of Christian Doctrine. We recom-
mend it to every intelligent Catholic who ought to know the doc-
trines and ceremonies of his Church well enough to explain them to
■others. Finally, we recommend it to all fair-minded Protestants
who want to know the truth about this great Christian Organiza-
tion, the Roman Catholic Church, which claims to speak to all men
in the name of Jesus Christ, and by His authority, and demands
from all that obedience which they owe to Him. No one can afford
to be ignorant of such an organization, and it is only fair to ask her-
self for her credentials.

The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Travels and Explorations of
the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. The Original. French, Latin
and Italian Texts, with English Translations and Notes. Illustrated by Por-
traits, Maps and Facsimiles. Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. Vol. LXXI.
Lower Canada, Illinois, 1759-1791. Miscellaneous Data. 8vo, pp. 404. Cleve-
land: The Burrows Brothers.

With this volume the text of the great work is completed. Vol-
umes 72 and 73 will contain an analytical index to the seventy-one
volumes of text. In addition to the usual interesting letters, this
volume has an important document which enumerates and describes
the fiefs and seigniories belonging to the Jesuits in Canada in 1781-
-88. For the further information and convenience of students the fol-
lowing addenda have been made to the text : A list of the Gov-
ernors and intendants of New France (1608-1760), and of English
Governors of Canada (1760- 1805) ; a catalogue of Jesuit missionaries
to New France and Louisiana (1611-1800), prepared for this volume
"by Rev. Arthur E. Jones, S. J., of Montreal ; Hsts of the documents
and illustrations published in this series ; a list of authorities (printed
and MSS.) cited or consulted in the preparation of the series, and
some necessary errata and addenda, inevitable in so long a series as
the present.

The text covers an interesting period, for it deals with the close of
the war between France and England and the passing of Quebec into
the hands of the conqueror. Some of the questions which are now
■claiming the attention of the United States authorities in the Philip-
pines are here discussed; questions of right to property justly
acquired and lawfully held by the Church or communities.

At the end of the volume we have an excellent copy of the oil
■portrait supposed to represent Pere Marquette, which was dis-
covered in Montreal in 1897. It is the first portrait of the great

412 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

missionary and explorer that has been found, and the proofs of its
authenticity are becoming stronger every day. The story of its
rescue in the shape of a panel, from a hand-cart filled with rubbish
and broken boards which two French boys had procured from an
old house that was being torn down, and which they were taking
home for fire-wood, is very interesting. Fortunately the rescue was
made by Donald Guthrie McNab, the well-known portrait painter
of Toronto. At first he saw in it only a panel with an old picture
painted on it. After keeping it for about two years he cleaned it.
This was a very difficult task, for the dirt that covered it was held:
fast with many coats of varnish. At last after much patient care,
because the paint was cracked, the artist saw revealed a face that
might have been the work of Rembrandt. Further effort revealed-
the name of the painter, "R. Roos, 1669," and above it the words,
"Marquette de la Confrerie de Jesus." On the back of the panel,
which measures 13^x17^ inches, and is about half an inch thick,,
are carved the words, 'Tere Marquette." This portrait is a fitting
ending to this splendid reproduction of the Jesuit Relations.

Meditations on the Life, the Teaching and the Passion of Jesus Christ
for Every Day of the Ecclesiastical Year. With an appendix of Meditations
for the i^estivals of Various Saints. By Rev. Augustine Maria Ilg, 0. S. F. G.
Translated from the latest German Edition. Edited by Rev. Richard F.
Clarke, S. J. 2 vols., 12mo, pp. 561, 510. New York: Benziger Brothers.

'The present work is principally compiled from an old book of
meditations by a Capuchin monk, Father Alphonsus von Zussmer-
hausen, Definitor and Vicar Provincial, published in Cologne in the
year 171 2, and entitled "A Mirror of the Virtues Displayed in the
Life and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ."

A few years ago a copy of this old book fell into the hands of
Father Ilg, of the same order. He recognized its merits, brought
it to the attention of his superior, and at his request he compiled
from it a series of meditations for every day in the year, written in
modern language, fitted to the requirements of the present day and.
suited for the use of priests and religious of both sexes. Those who
were familiar with the old book would hardly recognize it in the new.
The author of the later work "compares himself to an architect, wha-
being commissioned to restore an old house of solid construction
and make of it a modern residence, finds it the better way, instead of
repairing here and altering there, to pull down the whole structure
and rebuild it on the same sit on a new plan, employing the same
substantial materials, and only adding others where they proved in-
adequate for his purpose. Thus the author took the greater part of
his matter — the most solid and valuable stones needed for the edi-

Book Notices. 413

iice he was raising — from the work of the old Capuchin Father ; he
-also introduces many apt quotations from well-known ascetical
writings, such as Rodriguez's Christian Perfection and the incom-
parable Imitation of Christ."

The work is begun with "An Introduction to Mental Prayer in
General, and to This Book in Particular." Each meditation con-
sists of an introductory picture and three points. The matter is very
clear and very logical. The author seems to have found the secret
of giving just enough to excite thought without distracting the
mind or destroying individuality.

In the appendix we find meditations for certain feasts of Our
Blessed Lady and some of the saints. No particular order has been
followed in this department, and the reader will find some names
■almost unknown to him, while he will search for better known names
in vain.

Following the appendix there is an "Index to Meditations Suitable
for Retreats," and then an "Alphabetical Index." The appearance
of works of this kind is a healthy sign. It indicates the growth of
mental prayer. We do not doubt that the present work will prove
thought-provoking for many minds, and that is the end of meditation
books.

Short Lives of Dominican Saints. By a Sister of the Congregation of St.
Catharine of Siena (Stone). Edited, with introduction, by Very Rev. Father
Proctor, S. T. L., Provincial of the English Dominicans. 8vo, pp. xxiii., 352.
New York: Benziger Brothers

This book contains nearly a hundred names of persons who have
been canonized or declared blessed. Nearly all were members of
the Dominican Order ; some few are included because of their close
connection with the order, although they were not actually mem-
bers of it. They are arranged, not in alphabetical or chronological
order, biit in the order suggested by the Calendar of the Dominican
rite. The lives are short in order that they may be included in one
; volume, and in order to attract the reader who might be repelled by
longer biographies. The principal authorities from which the facts
are taken are Marchese's "Diario Domenicano," the Lessons in the
Dominican Breviary and the excellent work, "L'Annee Domini-
caine." The last named work has only reached the end of August,
-although it already numbers sixteen large volumes.

We find many illustrious names in this compendium. St. Ray-
mund of Pennafort, St. Catharine de Ricci, St. Thomas Aquinas, St.
Vincent Ferrer, St. Catharine of Siena, and the great founder of the
order, St. Dominic, are but a few of those who stand out promi-
nently.

414 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Father Procter's Introduction is a very valuable part of the work.
It sets forth clearly and in an attractive manner the value of the lives
of the saints and the profit to be gained from the study of them. It
points out in a particular manner the excellence of the lives recorded
in this volume. The book ought to do all that the compiler and
editor hope for it. Lessons of virtue are best taught by the lives of
those who practiced them. Most persons learn by example. Pic-
tures appeal to all children, small and big, young and old. Here
are pictures of all the virtues worthy of imitation.

Institutiones Theologi^ Dogmatics. Tract, de Sacramentis. Pars I. De
Sacr. in gen., Bapt., Confirm,, Euch. Auctore P. Einig. Treviris, ex Officina
ad S. Paulinum, 1900. 8vo, pp. 10, 248. Price, 3 marks.

The preceding volumes of these Institutes of Dogmatics have
been successively brought to the attention of our readers. They
appeal, of course, primarily to the student and professor in our ec-
clesiastical seminaries. Their didactic method, clarity and precision
of statement and brevity, combined with comprehensiveness of ex-
position, adapt them perfectly for their end as text-books. The fact^
too, that each volume, though part of an organic whole, is complete
in itself, has also an advantage in the same connection. The clergy
in the ministry will also find these tracts of service for ready refer-
ence and as facile instruments for reviewing former studies. Their
bibliographical references, which embrace the best authorities, old
and new, on their respective subjects, will prove helpful. The pres-
ent treatises on the Sacraments in general. Baptism, Confirmation
and the Eucharist, sustain the merit of the earlier volumes. One
more volume, promised for the near future, will complete the work.

Beati Petri Canisii, Societatis Jesu Epistul^ et Acta. Colleeit et Adno-
tationibus Illustravit. Otto Braunsberger, 8. J. Vols. II., III. Jreiburg and
St. Louis: Herder. Price, $7.50 per vol.

These two magnificent volumes cover the important period of
the life of Blessed Peter Canisius between the years 1556, when he
was made provincial of the Jesuits in Germany and founded the
College of Ingolstadt, and 1562, when he took a prominent part in
the closing scenes of the Council of Trent. The correspondence
presents the saintly missionary in the very prime of life, with grow-
ing fame and influence. There was scarcely a distinguished Cath-
olic of the age, from Pius IV. and Emperor Ferdinand down, who-
did not figure among the correspondents of this remarkable man.

Book Notices. 415

He was the acknowledged leader of the great Catholic Reaction in
Germany, and thanks to the documents which Father Braunsberger
is now bringing to light, we are enabled to follow the process of the
reacquisition of German territory step by step. The subject demands
more than a mere notice.

The Law and Policy of Annexation, with Special Reference to the Philip-
pines. Together with Obgervations on the Status of Cuba. By Carman F.
Randolph, of the New York Bar, author of "The Law of Eminent Domain."
8vo, pp. 226. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.

"The annexation of the Philippines is the immediate reason for
this book, which, in dealing with the event itself, advocates with-
drawal of our sovereignty from the islands and suggests a method
for its accomplishment. In the larger and permanent purpose of the
book the event is but the text for a general discussion of annexation,
with regard to the policies proper for the guidance of the United
States in the matter of enlarging their territory, and to the obliga-
tions that go with their sovereignty."

This is a very timely book. It is interesting and valuable, not
only to those who are in authority and who must deal directly with
this important question, but to all citizens, who should understand
clearly the reasons that underly the actions of their representatives.
It is so easy to learn law from newspapers that generally are the
organs of parties or individuals, and are too often the creatures of
prejudice. History has too many examples of injustice done in the
name of law, but in obedience to public clamor raised by ignorant or
wicked men. Such mistakes can be prevented by right-minded and
well informed citizens.

THfi New RaccolTa; or, Collection of Prayers and Good Works, to which the
Sovereign Pontififs have attached Holy Indulgences. Published in 1898 by
Order of His Holiness Pope Leo XIII. From the Third Italian Edition,
authorized and approved by the Sacred Congregation of Holy Indulgences.
12mo, pp. 684. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham & Sons.

Here is a complete and authentic collection of the prayers and
pious exercises to which the Roman Pontififs have attached indulg-
ences. Other editions of the book have appeared from time to time,
but the present edition was ordered by our Holy Father Leo XIII.,
because new prayers and good works which have been enriched with
indulgences were not contained in previous aditions, and because
others had been omitted that were not presented at the proper time.

This book is the authorized translation of the Italian Raccolta,
which has the approval of the Holy Father, and is to be regarded
by all as the correct and authorized collection of indulgences hitherto
granted for all the faithful. "If by chance any doubt should arise

4i6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

cither as to sense of the grant or the conditions requisite for gaining
the indulgences, it must be determined solely by this Raccolta which
His Holiness has directed to be considered the complete guide."

BiBLiscHE Studien. Herausgegeben von Professor Dr. 0. Bardenhewer. Frei-
burg and St. Louis: Herder. Price, $1.20.

The series of "Biblical Studies" begun on occasion of the Papal
Encyclical on the Holy Scriptures has gone on increasing in interest
and importance and has now reached the sixth volume. The several
numbers are the work of the first Catholic writers of Germany and
present the results of their studies in a concise and attractive manner.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Teactatus de Gratia Divina. Auctore P. Sancto Schiffini, 8. J. Freiburg
and St. Louis: Herder. Price, $2.90 net. ^ m r^ ^ ■

Teactatus de Deo Teino. Auctore Laurentio Janssens, S. T. U. Jbormmg
Vol. III. of Summa Theologica ad modum commentarii in Aquinatis Summam.
Freiburg and St. Louis: Herder. Price $3.60 net.

Plain Sermons on the Fundamental Teuths of the Catholic Chuech.
By the Rev. R. D. Browne. Second Edition. 12mo, pp. 514. New York:
Benziger Brothers

In the Beginning (Les Origines). By J. Guilbert, 8. 8., Superior of the Insti-
tute Catholique," of Paris. Translated from the French by G. S. Whitmarsh.
12mo, pp. 379. Illustrated. New York: Benziger Brothers.

The Influence of Catholicism on the Sciences and on the Aets. From
the Spanish. 12mo, pp. 160. St. Louis: Herder.

St. Feancis of Assisi. By the Rev. Leopold de Cherance, 0. 8. F. G. Author-
ized translation from the French. By R. F. O'Connor. Third Edition. En-
larged and Illustrated. 12mo, pp. 411. London: Burns & Gates. New York:
Benziger Brothers.

EucHAEiSTic CoNFEEENCES. Preached in Lent, 1881, in the Cathedral of Notre
Dame, Paris, by Rev. Father Monsabr6, O. P. Translated from the French
by Comtesse Mary Jenison. 12mo, pp. 181. New York: Benziger Brothers.

Maey Waed: a Foundress of the Seventeenth Century. By Mother M. 8alome,
of the Bar Convent, York. With an Introduction by the Bishop of >Jewport.
12mo, pp. 272. Illustrated. London: Burns & Gates. New York: Benziger
Brothers.

Life of the Veey Rev. Felix de Andeies, C. M., First Superior of the Con-
gregation of the Mission in the United States and Vicar General of Upper
Louisiana. Chiefly from sketches written by the Right Rev. Joseph Rosati,
C. M., First Bishop of St. Louis. 12mo, pp. 308, with portrait. St. Louis:
B. Herder.

Magistee Adest; or. Who is Like to God? With Preface by the Rev. Charles
Blount, S. J. 12mo, pp. 388. Illustrated. New" York: Benziger Brothers.

Illusteated Explanation of the Apostles Ceeed. A Thorough Exposi-
tion of Catholic Faith. Adapted from the Original of Rev. H. Rolfus, D. D.,
by Very Rev. Ferreol Girardey, C. SS. R. 12mo, pp. 360. New York:
Benziger Brothers.

The Saints. Saint Nicholas I. By Jules Roy. Translated by Margaret Mait-
land. 12mo, pp. 200. London: Duckworth & Co. New York: Benziger
Brothers.

A Shoet Inteoduction to the Liteeatube of the Bible. By Richard O.
Moulton, M. A., Ph. D., Professor of English Literature in the Universitv of
Chicago. Author of the "Literary Study of the Bible." 12mo, pp. 374. Bos-
ton: D. v.. Heath & Co.

The Confessoe, after the Heart of Jesus. Considerations proposed to Priests,
bv Canon A. Guerra, Honorary Chamberlain to His Holiness. 12mo, pp. 165.
St. Louis: B. Herder.

Life of Oue Loed and Saviour Jesus Christ. By Rev. J. Puiseux, Hon-
orary Canon and Former Student of the Carmelite School. 12mo, pp. 195.
Somerset, Ohio: The Rosary Press,

THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC

QUARTERLY REVIEW

(Extract from SaluUtory, July, 1890.)

VOL. XXVI— JULY, 1901— No. 103.

ROYAL OATHS AND DOCTRINAL SUBTERFUGES.

,,y)HILAGATHARCHES," says the Rev. Sydney Smith,
r^^ "is an instance of a love of toleration combined with a
love of persecution. He is a Dissenter, and earnestly
demands religious liberty for that body of men ; but as for the
Catholics, he would not only continue their present disabilities, but
load them with every new one that could be conceived. He ex-
pressly says that an Atheist or a Deist may be allowed to propagate
their doctrines, but not a Catholic."

The state of opinion in England to-day is precisely the state of
mind of Philagartharches. Toleration is the boast of the country;
the removal of disabling statutes from the legislative code is pointed
to as the unmistakable token of the highest enlightenment ; but per-
secution, for all that, will not be given up as a principle of State
policy. It is not necessary that persecution be linked with physical
or social suffering to make it an outrage by man upon man. Moral
degradation is as keen in its effects as the pain of the rack or the
lash. To affix a stigma upon any one by reason of his religion is
to inflict a greater injury on him, because the injury is permanent
and enduring, than to condemn him to jail or the triangles and
dismiss him after he has worked out his sentence.

The scenes which are being enacted in England to-day are an ex-
pression of the sentiments of Philagatharches. The King has had

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1900, hy Benjamin H. Whittaker,
iu the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

4i8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

a very humiliating experience. Naturally a tolerant, easy-going
man, who has gone through the world for nigh sixty years without
giving offense or engaging in polemic, he has had to pass through
the Caudine Forks of an instrument forged in the days of Titus
Oates in the shape of a test oath. By the terms of the Constitution
— or rather the Declaration of Rights — before he could open Parlia-
ment he was obliged to read and subscribe to a shocking denuncia-
tion of the religious belief of a very large proportion of his subjects
and hundreds of millions of Christians outside. The scene was
trebly degrading. It degraded the monarch who was obliged to
give utterance to the deadly insult ; it degraded, or was intended to
degrade, the Catholic nobility and gentry and populace in the
British Isles ; and it degraded the framers of the insult as persons
incapable of any real religious or humane feeling, because the
essence of the Christian religion is charity toward your neighbor
and tenderness for his honest convictions and modes of expressing
them. A gorgeous scene, we are told, was that of the opening of
Parliament by the new monarch. A scene of abasement and shame,
we should rather say. The King, we are told by a High-church
organ, read the insulting passages in the oath in a low voice — a
token that he was ashamed of them. In his heart he was probably
saying what Daniel O'Connell said of a similar oath tendered to him
in Parliament : "One-half of it I know to be false ; the other I be-
lieve to be untrue."

It is one of the most singular facts in regard to the oath or
declaration now causing such a stir that while it attacks the chief
doctrines held by the Catholics, it makes no profession of faith in
regard to Protestant doctrine. It is true that in the form of declara-
tion presented to the monarch at the coronation ceremony, words
appear affirming adherence to "the Protestant reformed religion
-established by law," but no allusion is made, direct or indirect, to
the doctrines held by that Church. Can imagination picture any-
thing more grotesque, more puerile, more ostrich-like, than this
cowardly attempt to evade responsibility by attacking systems which
never displayed a like temerity? The Catholic religion is an affir-
mative religion. What it believes, and what it requires of its chil-
dren to believe, it states in explicit terms. We defy any member
of the Anglican Church to state in precise terms what it believes and
what it really means by anything it pretends to state as articles of
faith, beyond the declaration of faith in a triune God and the sacra-
ment of baptism. Is the denial of what others hold as Christian
creed to be regarded as a just equivalent for a substantial alternative
belief? How many negatives are required to construct a single
positive ?

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges. 419

The purpose of the framers of this oath was malign. Like all
people actuated by malice, they were rendered so stupid as to be
unable to realize that their malice was transparent. They desired
not only to insult the belief of Catholics and the Head of the Cath-
olic Church, but the royal personage to whom it was proffered.
These are the exact words of the ingenious contrivance:

"I, A. B., by the Grace of God, King (or Queen) of England, Scotland, France
and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, do solemnly and sincerely in the Presence of
God, profess, testify and declare that I do believe that in the Sacrament of the
Lord's Supper there is not any Transubstantiation of the elements of bread and
wine into the Body and Blood of Christ at or after the consecration thereof by any
person whatsoever; and that the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or
any other Saint, and the Sacrifice of the Mass, as they are now used in the Church
of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous. And I do solemnly in the presence of
"God profess, testify and declare, that I do make this declaration, and every part
thereof, in the plain and ordinary sense of the words read unto me, as they are
commonly understood by English Protestants, without any evasion, equivocation
or mental reservation whatsoever, and without any dispensation already granted
me for this purpose by the Pope, or any other authority or person whatsoever, or
without any hope of any such dispensation from any person or authority whatso-
ever, or without thinking that I am or can be acquitted before God or man, or
absolved of this declaration or any part thereof, although the Pope, or any other
person or persons, or power whatsoever, should dispense with or annul the same,
or declare that it was null and void from the beginning,"

In Other words, the royal person to whom this form of abjuration
is tendered is told by implication that he or she is one capable of
making such mental reservation, and would do so if circumstances
so seemed to require, were it not for the safeguard provided by this
super-cunning cobweb of formula The population of Lilliput pin-
ning Lemuel Gulliver down with threads and pegs was not more
farcical than the idea of the oath-builders that in practical matters
their contrivances would be of any use. Queen Victoria, as an
illustration, at her coronation took another oath, or declaration
which she swore to solemnly on the Gospels, to the effect that she
would maintain the Protestant Church, as by law established, in
England and Ireland. Thirty years afterwards she signed the bill
disestablishing that Church as far as Ireland was concerned, with-
out asking anybody to absolve her from her solemn oath. "Good
manners, Kate, must curtsey to great Kings."

In the case of Queen Victoria the tendering of such an oath was
•denounced by the famous Dr. Lingard as "both cruel and indeco-
rous," considering her youth and that want of judgment and in-
quiry into the subject which so solemn an undertaking necessarily
demanded as a condition precedent. How could such a young girl
as she take it on herself to say that any doctrines were "superstitious
and idolatrous" when she had had no opportunity of examining
into them ? If she did have such an opportunity, was her judgment
so ripe as to justify her in coming to a decision on such a solemn
subject ?

"Toleration combined with a love of persecution" characterizes

420 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the attitude of the British Government toward this stupid heirloom
of the Stuarts. When Lord SaHsbury had his attention called to the
protest of the Catholic peers, he admitted that the terms of the oath
were offensive, but added that the wishes of those who demanded
security for the Established Church should be respected! Where
is the security in compelling Protestants to swear what they believe
or do not believe regarding the belief of Catholics ? Of what value
is any man's opinion on the objective character of certain beliefs
subjectively held by others ? A man might with as much sanity and
rationality swear to what he believes to be the characteristics of the
flora and fauna of the Southern Pole as to the objective value of a
religious belief into whose foundations and doctrines he has had no
opportunity of inquiring. Lord Salisbury is too well-educated a
man to believe that the dogmas of the Catholic Church are either
blasphemous or idolatrous, but he does not wish to stir the sleeping
dogs of Orangeism and Nonconformist bigotry; therefore he will
not say that persecution must cease outright. The susceptibilities of
bigotry must be tenderly regarded in any modification that may be
proposed.

What is this Protestant Reformed Church which the monarch is
compelled to swear to support before the crown can be assumed?
"Two honorable gentlemen assert," said Edmund Burke, "that if
you alter her symbols you destroy the Church of England. This,
for the sake of the liberty of that Church, I absolutely deny. The
Church, like everybody corporate, may alter her laws without chang-
ing her identity. As an independent Church, professing fallibility,
she has claimed a right of acting without the consent of any other ;
as a Church she claims, and has always exercised, a right of reform-
ing whatever appeared amiss in her doctrine, her discipline, or her
rites. She did so when she shook ofif the Papal supremacy in the
reign of Henry the Eighth, which was an act of the body of the Eng-
lish Church as well as of the State (I do not inquire how obtained).
She did so when she twice changed the liturgy in the reign of King
Edward, when she then established articles which were themselves
a variation from former professions. She did so when she cut off
three articles from her original 42 and reduced them to the present
39 ; and she certainly would not lose her corporate identity nor sub-
vert her fundamental principles though she were to leave ten out of
the 39 which remain out of any future confession of her faith. She
would limit her corporate powers, on the contrary, and she would
oppose her fundamental principles, if she were to deny herself the
prudential exercise of such capacity of reformation."

An independent Church, professing fallibility! What a subtle
satirist was the great Edmund as he posed as the defender of this

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges. 421

wonderful "corporation !" "Capacity for transformation" he should
have said, not reformation. And it is to the maintenance of this
wonderful construction that the English Sovereigns are pledged — an
undertaking just as rational as the condemnation of doctrines of
which they know nothing whatsoever ! How they can be supposed
to maintain and defend what is always in a process of mutation they
do not pause to inquire. The fetish rites which accompany the in-
auguration of a Congo chief might easily be more intelligible than
the oath and the declaration exacted by law from the British sover-
eign before he is invested with the insignia of royal power.

Lord Salisbury is a descendant of the statesman, Burghley, who
was the chief adviser of Queen Elizabeth. It is curious to trace the
similarity of policy between these two Cecils separated by an interval
of three hundred years. When Father Campian and twelve other
priests were condemned to death on a trumped-up charge of con-
spiracy against the Queen, many people said that it was at least
impolitic to kill so many Catholics on the scaffold at the time when
the Duke of Anjou, a Catholic prince, was in London as a suitor
for the sovereign's hand. Burghley met this sensible objection by
the plea that "it was necessary to allay the apprehensions of the Pro-
testants." Much as Cecil loved lenity and toleration, he loved per-
secution more — for the sake of the Protestant interest. The same
tenderness for that particular interest is clearly seen in his descendant
of to-day. Elizabeth, Burghley would have the world believe, was
so devoted to that interest that she did not shrink from sacrificing her
dearest personal feelings, in running the risk of offending the suitor
whom she loved unfeignedly — ^^as she had given him reason to know
— in order to demonstrate it. What a master of finesse was the states-
man who established a reputation for vast wisdom on the strength of
taciturnity and a habit of shaking the head ! Nobody was very cer-
tain about Elizabeth's religion. She was never very certain about
it herself. All she was sure of was that she was the head of the
Church, and this Church was in a chrysalis state. To prove her un-
equivocal attachment to it, therefore, by a sublime act of self-sacrifice
seemed to Burghley an opportunity not to be lost. And so ten of
the thirteen priests went on hurdles to Tyburn to suffer the ferocious
punishment of treason according to old English law.

Is it not more than ordinarily curious to recall that the real be-
ginning— the fans et origo malorum — was celebrated by a Mass — the
very same mystery of worship which is now consigned to perdition
by the terms of the royal oath ? At dawn, on the 25th of January,
1532, one of the chaplains of King Henry VIII., Dr. Rowland Hill,
received an order to celebrate Mass in a certain room in Whitehall
Palace, and there he found the King, with attendants, on the one

422 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

side, and the Lady Anne Boleyn, with other attendants, on the oppo-
site. Perceiving that it was a Nuptial Mass that he was expected to
celebrate, the priest demurred, as the quarrel between the Pope and
the King had not, so far as he knew, been composed. But his fears
were stilled by a lie from the lips of the King. He assured the chap-
lain that the Pope had pronounced in his favor in the matter of the
divorce from Queen Catherine, and that he (the King) had the
Pope's document on the subject in his own private apartments. This
fraudulent marriage was gone through with the object of shielding
the already shattered reputation of the bride, and in eight months
after its celebration the woman was delivered of a child, who in time
became famous as Queen Elizabeth and infamous as the author of
the laws which declared the Mass which was invoked to sanctify her
unlawful conception and to legitimize her coming birth was blas-
phemous and idolatrous, and so to brand her parents as persons on
a level with pagans in matters of religious belief. There appears to
be a peculiar appositeness, therefore, in the circumstances attending
the genesis of the anti-Catholic oath. Fraud and sin were present
at its cradle ; the sinful child of that fraud and sin was the agent and
originator of the persecution of which it was the verbal expression.
Everything unhallowed shed its influence over the sinister festival.
Broken marital faith, base dissimulation, insatiable sensuality, brutal
injustice, sickening hypocrisy — all these on the part of the royal
bigamist, combined with ambition and uncontrollable passion on the
part of the frail mother to render the furtive nuptials a ceremony
attended by the rejoicing of the fiends rather than one meriting the.
blessing of heaven.

After the mockery of a divorce by Cranmer, Henry and Anne were
again married, lest the coming issue of their cohabitation should be
pronounced as born out of wedlock. Cranmer's connection with
these proceedings and the subsequent religious overthrow has all
the fitness of a great tragedy. In special was he a proper adjunct
of transactions which eventuated in the formulation of ab juratory
calumnies against the doctrines hitherto accepted by the whole of
Europe, When Cranmer was called to the archbishopric there had
been no open rupture between the Pope and Henry, and so his nomi-
nation was ratified by the Holy Father and the necessary bulls were
forwarded prior to the consecration. He was fully aware of the
strained relations which subsisted between the Pope and the King
because of the divorce proceedings as well as the question of Papal
supremacy, and had made up his mind to sustain the cause of the
monarch as against the claims of the spiritual Head of the Church
Universal. Therefore, when the time came to act he went, with a
notary and witnesses, into the chapter-house at Westminster and

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges, 423

made a formal declaration that in the oath of obedience to the Pope
which he was about to take, as required by the existing law, he did
not bind himself to anything contrary to the law of God, to the rights
of the King, or the intention of any reforms which the latter might
find necessary to institute in the Church in England. Then, after
this attempt to liberate himself from the responsibility for intended
perjury, he marched straightway to the high altar of the cathedral
and took the pontifical oath, after declaring in the presence of the
same witnesses that he adhered to the reservation he had declared in
the chapter-house. It is not surprising that a prelate whose con-
science would permit him to juggle thus with the most solemn pro-
testations that man can take had prepared himself for the down-
ward path by breaking loose from the bonds of the priesthood in
other respects. Cranmer had thrown off the restraints of celibacy
as he had pre-determined to throw oif his allegiance to the See of
Peter. He had been married twice in his life and left his second
wife behind him in Germany when the news of his appointment came
to him. But he seems to have concealed the fact from the King,
who, with that singular inconsistency which marked his conduct in
his later years, had always insisted on enforcing the canonical rule
in the matter of clerical celibacy, and even punished violators of it
with death.

When, therefore, the framers of the present oath of abjuration
are blamed for tagging to it the declaration disclaiming mental
reservation on the ground of a Papal dispensation to that end, it
must be remembered that they had ample justification in Cranmer's
case. Cranmer's trick imposed on nobody but himself. His pro-
test that he did not intend to be bound by what he was about to
swear he would be bound by was that sort of device which in popu-
lar parlance is styled "cheating the devil in the dark." To compel
the English sovereigns to swear that they shall not be guilty of the
perfidy and perjury of Cranmer is the worst insult that could well
be offered to mortal. And so the framers of that form stand con-
victed of such crass stupidity as not to be able to perceive that they
were guilty of something very like high treason in thus insulting the
head of the realm and the head of the Church of England.

We hear the reproach of casuistry and Jesuitry frequently flung at
the professors and teachers of the Catholic faith. Where can be
found so gross an example of casuistry as Cranmer's ? Of a piece
with the performance at Westminster was the play between Henry
and himself which followed quickly upon that event. Knowing full
well that the reason why the King made him an archbishop was
that he desired his services in the matter of the divorce, he sat down
to pen a letter intended to show that he was quite ignorant of the

424 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

motive of his elevation. This document was written for the world
and for history, but it was so transparently tricky that it served no
purpose but to show what a simpleton after all was this super-subtle
simulacrum of a cleric. How the grim Tudor must have smiled
when he read the missive imploring him to quash all fears of a dis-
pute over the succession, and asking him was it his royal will and
pleasure that the question of the divorce should be heard in the
archiepiscopal court ! The King, to do him justice, was not insen-
sible to the ludicrous aspect of this transaction. The comedy was
too broad: the playwright was compelled to mend his hand. He
was made to write a second letter couched in terms more suitable
to Henry's part in the comedy. The Archbishop was put in the
position of a man taking a bold step on his own responsibility. The
King was urged as a matter of duty to put an end to the uncer-
tainty regarding the succession, which was said to be a source of
grave anxiety and a menace to the peace of the world, by having
his cause heard and determined before the primatial see; and the
petitioner was made to declare before heaven — he was quite an adept
by this time in making these awful protestations — that he had no
object whatever in making the request but the benefit of the realm
and the relief of his own conscience. The precautions taken by him
to prevent Queen Catherine from getting any word of the intended
proceeding, at the same time, attested the sincerity of this almost
sacramental protestation. The farce was completed by the finding
of the tribunal of partisan theologians and canonists and the pro-
nouncement of the divorce decree by the forsworn Archbishop.

In the drama of perfidy in high places thus opened we behold the
real beginnings of the royal oath scandal. Although no word
about doctrine had as yet been spoken, although the King was still
as firm a Catholic in matters of faith as he ever had been, the soil
was being prepared for the sowing of heresy's seed. Even when
the Pope had set aside the decree of Cranmer's court and the English
Parliament had by statute severed the connection between Rome
and the English Church, the question of doctrine was not involved ;
the independent Church still remained Catholic, in its own view,
although separated from the general body and the head of Catholic-
ity. The infant Elizabeth, who was destined afterwards to pro-
nounce the religion of her father and mother blasphemous and
idolatrous, was baptized duly in that religion. But it is instructive
to follow the developments which quickly ensued, for no lesson is
more palpable than that which they teach, that one act of disobedi-
ence to lawful authority entails a host of evils whose destructive
course is irresistible even to the hand which has opened the flood-
gates. Passions which had not as yet revealed themselves, or lain

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges. 425

dormant, in the King's nature now began to operate ; and when once
the Sovereign sets the example, we all know how dutiful subjects
deem it right to comport themselves. If the King have a hump,
then round shoulders are found to be part of the line of beauty in
the human form; if the Queen limp, then a mincing gait becomes
the standard of feminine locomotion. Avarice seized upon the mind
of Henry — a mind relaxed and dulled to moral perceptions from a
long course of sensual indulgence and the uncontrolled assertion
of its own variable will. In the transfer of the spiritual authority
to himself he beheld a source of revenue which must secure him im-
munity, for his whole lifetime, from the trouble and worry of extort-
ing money from unwilling parliaments ; and he had those about him
whose greedy eyes had long been noting the extent and the rich-
ness of the lands attached to the great abbeys and monasteries and
the generosity of the resources which enabled the abbot and the
monk to feed and clothe whole armies of the indigent and enfeebled
day after day. Step by step went King and Parliament down the
steep slope of Avernus, totally unable now to arrest the pace or
check the increasing momentum of the descent. The new eccle-
siastical situation required a new oath for bishops, clergy and office-
holders ; and in the test then drawn up we discern the embryo of the
thing that has since evolved in such direful and shocking form — an
incantation that makes the sincere and sensitive Catholic shrink
as from a whisper from the damned. The bishops were required
to swear that they abjured the supremacy of the Pope and acknowl-
edged only that of the monarch; and they were also required, in
doing so, to abstain from following the trick of Cranmer, in reserv-
ing anything in their minds or availing of any prior dispensation to
do or say anything contrary to the oath of supremacy.

Whether or not Cranmer had any part in the construction of this
new test is a point on which history is silent : the probability is that
he was one of those who assisted in its composition. In that case,
he must have been the possessor of a mind singularly apathetic on
the subject of personal guiltiness, since he did not fail to condemn
in others that of which he himself had, in the knowledge of living
witness, been guilty.

It is not in human power to devise a form of abjuration applicable
to every phase of society and every successive era, and as Henry de-
sired to cover the present as well as the future, it became necessary,
in order to effect his monstrous purposes, to devise a catalogue
of specific disavowals designedly framed to ensnare the most promi-
nent men who had opposed, as a conscientious duty, the divorce of
the King. These men, Henry knew, were of that inflexible integ-
rity that they could never be got to acknowledge his iniquitous

426 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

claim to spiritual supremacy Chief among these intended victims
were the illustrious More and the early tutor of Henry, the saintly
Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. The oath of supremacy which was ten-
dered to these two was accompanied by the side statements that
there was no power on earth competent to dispense within the de-
grees of kin prohibited in the book of Leviticus, and that the mar-
riage of Catherine and Henry had from the beginning been unlawful
and void. Other declarations and denials were tacked on to the
oath from time to time by the King, to suit other phases of his war
on Pope and Church ; but in the case of More and Fisher, the great
object sought was indicated in the two statements to which they
were asked to subscribe, and by subscribing to which they might
have saved their lives. The particular stress laid on this, in the
cases of these two eminent men, was prompted by the knowledge
of the high esteem in which they were held, not only at home, but on
the continent of Europe, because of their integrity and wisdom ; and
if only Henry could boast that they had acknowledged that they
were wrong in their opposition to his criminal conduct, he would
have gained a great moral — or rather immoral — ^victory. It is
necessary to observe the sort of double-action in ethics employed in
connection with these momentous events, in order to gain a true
estimate of their infernal cunning and unscrupulousness. We have
seen how the King's Archbishop absolved his conscience from the
guilt of an intended perjury, having no sanction for his conduct but
his own pre-determination to do wrong : we behold, in the hectoring
tone and shallow arguments adopted by Henry's tool, Cromwell,
toward the dignified ex-Chancellor, an attempt to deceive one's self
with similar idle sophistry. More had been pressed by his judges —
if one may so call them without degrading the idea of the judicial
office — to give his reasons for refusing to take the oath. He had
pleaded that he feared his doing so would give offense. Had he
an assurance from the King that he would not give offense, he said,
he would state why he objected. Whereupon Cromwell interposed
with the bold equivocation that even the Kjng's warrant would not
save him from the penalties of the statute by which the oath was
prescribed. An exquisite specimen of sophistry, truly, seeing that
it was the King who had got the statute enacted, and that the men
who enacted it knew that if they refused they would lose their heads.
To assume that the work was superior in authority to the artificer
shows a novelty in argument quite of a piece with the childish self-
deception initiated by Cranmer. And all through the long series
of conflicting alternations that marked the gestation of the Anglican
Church may be traced the same spirit of self-deceptive reasoning.
The work was accepted as superior in authority to the hand that

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges. 427

made it ; the religion and the civilization that had been bestowed by-
Rome were assumed to be above and independent of the bestower.
How grotesque an idea that a self-amputated limb carries with it the
vitality and energy and will-power of the trunk from which it has
been disparted !

More and Fisher frustrated the King's design to use them as wit-
nesses for the justice of his cause ; and his deep chagrin is percepti-
ble in the energy with which retaliatory measures were pushed for-
ward thenceforth against the Church His suspicions were not al-
layed with every new declaration he wrung from weaker prelates.
Month after month he hedged himself and his successors around
with fresh barbed-wire affirmatives ; and, taking Cranmer as a type,
rather than Fisher, he carefully exacted from each prelate a declara-
tion that he had not saved himself from a perjury by a reservation
like Cranmer 's. Foolish man to think that such a device would
secure the allegiance of any one worth having! If the power of
mental reservation is such as to impose upon one's own conscience,
what limit can be placed upon that power ? One has nothing to do
but to add reservation to reservation, in order to escape from any
dilemma, no matter how bewildering, with which conscience may be
confronted.

The extraordinary delusion that even the thought of man may be
controlled by acts of parliament was amongst the monstrous products
of this period of heretical parturition. It is truly wonderful to look
back on the series of enactments solemnly debated and passed by
successive sets of men, popular representatives as they were ficti-
tiously described, the central idea of all being that the power of the
Crown and the law-making authority was competent to coerce not
merely the human conscience, but even the secret action of the mind
itself. For instance: It wag taken as a proof of internal malice —
that is, the secret conviction of the mind — that a man should refuse
to acknowledge the spiritual supremacy of the monarch; and to
"wish or will" maliciously anything injurious or derogatory to the
King, or to style him a schismatic — as he plainly and ostensibly was
— or a tyrant — which everybody was now convinced he was — was
declared to be high treason, punishable by the horrid butchery of
hanging, "drawing" and quartering. Amongst the false charges
laid at the door of the Catholic Church is that of nullifying the
Divine gift of free will by the assertion of power to control even the
involuntary thought and the working of the mind. Here we behold
a savage ruler asserting even such a tremendous power as an inhe-
rent appanage of secular sovereignty, and exercising the function of
supreme spiritual authority — supreme lord of every human being,
body and soul, in his realm — even vicariously, and even his vicar

428 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

vicariously. We behold him clothing Cromwell with his self-
bestowed supreme authority and giving him priority in the councils
of archbishops and bishops, and Cromwell's very clerks assuming
that power, in Cromwell's absence! Gesler's cap, on high in the
market-place of Altorf, was a badge of freedom in comparison with
the vicarious ink-horn bearers of his High Mightiness the Lord
Cromwell. The Grand Llama of Thibet, upon whose august linea-
ments no mortal is deemed good enough to look in public, claims
nothing in the way of human degradation to be compared with the
authority bestowed by King Henry first upon himself and then upon
his tool Cromwell, and the whipper-snapper clerks of the same
miserable instrument.

It is not strange to find that successful assault upon the spiritual
rights of the Church should be followed by another assault on the
civil rights of the people. By the terms of the old coronation oaths
the principle of consent of the governed was recognized in the form
of undertaking proposed to the monarch previous to consecration.
From the earliest times of the English monarchy the democratic
principle was expressed in the terms of the oath, in the shape of the
promise exacted from the King that he would govern justly, in
accordance with the laws and customs of England and maintain the
privileges of the clergy. When the sanguinary Tudor was called
to his dreadful account the cunning hand of Cranmer was again visi-
ble in the construction of a modified coronation oath adapted to the
new times and the new ideas of monarchy superinduced by the cut-
ting loose from Rome. No longer was it deemed necessary to so-
licit the acceptance of the sovereign at the hands of the people, ac-
cording to ancient usage, but the managers of the young King took
that acceptance for granted, and he was made to pledge himself to
keep the laws and respect the liberties of the people, to keep peace
and concord in the Church, to do equal justice, and to make no laws
but to the honor of God and the good of the Commonwealth. Hav-
ing thus cut down the right of the people in the compact betv/een
the sovereign and the nation, the crafty-minded ecclesiastic pro-
ceeded to undermine the power of conscience in the infantile mind
of the King, with all the unscrupulous casuistry of the Serpent in
the Garden. While the words to which he had sworn the King still
trembled on the air, he, in presence of the Blessed Sacrament on
the altar, upon which, it is said, the King had been sworn, proceeded
to inform him that his right to rule was derived not from people or
Pope, but from God alone; that no power whatever lay in the
Bishop of Rome or any other bishop to impose terms upon him,
and so forth. Yet, in spite of this assurance of absolute irresponsi-
bility, Cranmer himself proceeded to lay down terms, by telling the

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges. 429

King his duty. Now for the first time we catch a glimpse of the
monstrosity which had been long incubating in that dark and tortu-
ous mind. The word which for his life he dared not speak, the
thought which for his head he dared not breathe even, to the late
King, for all his tyranny and presumption, it was now safe to spring
upon the world, for the time was ripe. Idolatry, he said, it would be
the King's duty to extirpate — the ^'idolatry" in question being the
worship of Christ in the Sacrament on which the monarch had been
sworn. What an awful picture of impiety! The human mind is
incapable of realizing any treason to God or man more abysmal.
The worship which his monarch had just rendered, as pledge of his
sincerity in the bargain made between the nation and himself, he
heard now cynically described by the priest who led in it as the
degradation of paganism — identical with the dark rite of the British
druid and the gross superstition of the African barbarian !

Now we have, for the first time in England, official promulgation
of Protestantism's cardinal idea. On the Continent it had been
broached and preached by the bolder among the so-called reformers,
although Luther, with all his hardihood, quibbled about it and tried
to compound with the plain words of Christ in the Bible on which
the apostate monk was so insistent. But the guilt of the first official
denial of Christ in the sacrifice of His love, in the country which had
acquired the title of Mary's Dower, belongs to Cranmer. History
fails to furnish, from its long roll of arch-hypocrites, any just com-
peer of Cranmer in versatility of apostasy. When we recall that
many and many a one he himself had consigned to the stake for the
expression of beliefs which he now denounced as idolatry, we can-
not but shudder at the thought of his hideous insensibility to shame
or remorse.

After going through this extraordinary performance with respect
to the Sacrament and the King, Cranmer, in his character of Arch-
bishop, proceeded to sing High Mass, with all the unction of a
genuine pontifical celebrant.

Such, then, was the scene which ushered in a new system in the
English sovereignty. The law of Divine right was for the first time
enunciated in the civil sphere ; the principle of mental reservation in
the taking of a solemn oath illustrated and declared just, and the
duty of the monarch to become persecutor in spiritual affairs incul-
cated. It must be owned that every dramatic propriety is visible
in the awful sacrilege. From this point d'appui to the definite de-
nunciation of certain theological tenets was but a step;

It can hardly be doubted by any dispassionate reader that the
material advantages accruing in the first place to the sovereign, and
in the next to the counsellors by whom he or she was surrounded,

430 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

from the application of test oaths to persons of position and property-
was a prime factor in the development of spiritual tyranny in these
curious products of the new religion. No obscure persons were
called upon to subscribe to them ; invariably it was to persons high
in ecclesiastical rank or influence or those who held great landed
estates or valuable movables or personal effects — anything, in short,
that might readily be converted into money — that the searching
formulae were tendered. Death or forfeiture was the certain pen-
alty of refusal : in most cases forfeiture went along with the death
penalty. Monarchy, in those days, while always extravagant, was
always needy ; and there were times when it was next to impossible
to get money from Parliaments. The modern system of loans on
international securities was then unknown ; the internal resources of
each country were the chief reliance of the Crown for its wars and its
costly entourage; and when the religious difficulty came, with its un-
limited prospect of attainders, we may be certain that it was hailed
by royal theologians as a special dispensation for their especial relief.
When a man or woman has had the notion firmly rooted in the mind
that rule comes by right divine, it is not difficult to conceive how the
corollary doctrine that the larger right involves the smaller, that
spiritual rule means material ownership, may quickly follow. While
the bloated Henry asserted what he fully believed was his heaven-
derived right as spiritual lord, he never had the smallest doubt that
he was equally justified in filling his coffers and rewarding his
minions by the spoliation of all who disputed his outrageous claim.
In due time it dawned upon the minds of men, as the system of rule
by political parties began to emerge from the long conflict with ab-
solute royal power, that the principle of religious test could be util-
ized with immense effect in political life ; and so we see it begin to
take shape as a methodical modus vivendi, at a time when the asser-
tion of the royal prerogatives in the matter of recusants' property
became alarming even to the parasites who had procured them from
Parliament. This was in the reign of James I., when the penal sta-
tutes against Catholics assumed a character of ferocity so minute
and far-reaching as to draw from the French Ambassador to Eng-
land the indignant comment that they were characteristic of bar-
barians rather than Christians. The force of this condemnation
will be realized when we reflect that at the time it was uttered per-
secution of opponents and cruel punishments by torture and im-
murement were the rule and the law universally in vogue. It is little
wonder that the Catholics who were in a position to betake them-
selves out of the kingdom did so, since life was no longer tolerable
in it for them. Those who were compelled to remain were split up
into two parties, and thus rendered impotent as a political factor,

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges. 431

through the artful machinations of their persecutors. The new oath
of allegiance was so cunningly devised as to draw a distinction be-
tween those who denied and those who admitted the temporal
rights of the Roman See. The former class were decreed exempt
from any penalties for recusancy other than those already enacted ;
while the others were subjected to imprisonment as long as they con-
tinued obstinate, besides to forfeiture of both real and personal
property. This drastic test was not intended to be a dead letter, or
a punishment held in terrorem merely. No sooner was it passed into
law than it was ordered to be tendered to all those recusants already
convicted under previous laws, to all others suspected of Catholicity
because of non-reception of the Protestant sacrament twice in the
year in a church, and to all travelers who were unknown in the parts
where they were found. At one blow the King was thus enabled to
enrich himself and his followers at the expense of their helpless ad-
versaries, as well as to reap an enormous political advantage by ex-
cluding them from both Houses of Parliament and the local magis-
tracy. Divided in opinion, something like a schism arose in the
Catholic ranks. Blackwell, the archpriest, who had sworn allegi-
ance to Elizabeth, regarded the new oath as one that might con-
scientiously be taken, even though it had been condemned by the
Pope, and to lead the way took it himself, and in a circular advised
his clergy to take it also, in the sense in which it had been explained
to him by the Royal Commissioners. This subserviency, while it
rent the Catholic body in twain, did not save the archpriest from the
malice of his enemies. He was flung into prison, where he lan-
guished until his death. Meanwhile James sought to improve his
advantage by plunging into the sea of theological discussion in vin-
dication of the oath. While his headsmen and hangman and fagot-
men were busy burning and decapitating and disembowelling priests
and gentry, he kept his pen busy on dissertations on Antichrist and
the Apocalypse as an "Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance," getting
them printed, and then tearing them up and trying his hand again.
When the effort was over the result was seen in a book, copies of
which he sent to various crowned heads as well as to the different
English prelates, and whose singular compound of learning and
false reasoning, we may surmise, prompted the choice epigram of
Sully on the character of James — "the wisest fool in Europe."

Previous to this time the spirit of those safeguarding oaths had
been defensive rather than aggressive. In James' case we see a new
turn of thought. The head of the realm deems it kis'duty, as head
of the Church of Parliamentary enactment, to assert the functions of
theologian and proclaim the King's sway as spiritual lord over the
souls and consciences of men. The mind which, fresh from scenes

432 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of disgusting bacchanal debauchery, could enter into a profound
disputation with doctors of divinity, then invade the precincts of
Satan in an excursus on demoncraft, and then proceed to think out
tests and punishments for ancient hags and others suspected of
witchcraft, was surely one to deceive itself into the belief that no
domain in heaven above or earth beneath was exempt from its influ-
ence and authority. Theology he believed to be the highest of
sciences, and himself the greatest theologian he knew. Familiarity
with canon law led him on to the belief that his position as head
of the Church gave him the inherent faculties of the priestly office,
if it did not actually, as in the case of Heliogabalus, delude him into
the idea that he was a divinity himself. So, in the famous case
wherein Archbishop Abbot, while on a hunting party, accidentally
shot and killed the keeper of the park, James took on himself the
duty of giving him absolution from all irregularity ad majorem
cautelam, as under the old canon law it was necessary should be done
by the highest ecclesiastical authority. When, therefore, he under-
took to act in an ecclesiastical function, it is not matter for surprise
that he should undertake to define what was heretical with regard to
the opinions of his Catholic subjects. It was not alone that they
were coerced to deny the deposing power of the Pope, but they must
needs also swear that to entertain the belief in this power was
"heretical, impious and damnable."

Rapid had been the evolution of the "divine right" idea. Eman-
cipating itself from the tradition of the consent of the governed, by
the manipulation of Cranmer, the monarchy, within a century, had
also emancipated itself from all spiritual responsibility. The de-
posing power resided neither with Pope nor people. Boldly as-
suming that inherent right was sufficient warrant for the assertion of
sovereign power, the Crown began that war upon constitutional
right which ended only when the head of King Charles rolled from
the block. The growth of heresy and civil despotism began at the
same hour and were tended by the same hands. It was a despotism,
too, more intolerable than that of the Tarquins, since it was not satis-
fied with absolute sway in temporal concerns, but dared to deal with
the concerns of the human soul beyond the grave. When a tyrant
sovereign is responsible neither to heaven nor his subjects, there is
no escaping from the crux that either slavery or revolution must be
the outcome of the situation.

Still, no oath or affirmation that had been as yet proposed went
any farther, as a doctrinal utterance, than a repudiation or denial of
something. If the process of building up could be furthered by
mere demolition, the lineaments of the Anglican Church must have
been so well defined that no uncertainty could be entertained re-

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges. 433

garding its expression. But here is the anomaly in the case. While
men were again and again asked to avow that they did not beUeve
in this thing or that, no one ventured to suggest an alternative be-
lief. Each monarch swore to defend the faith ; yet the faith which
one monarch defended was altogether different when his successor
appeared to take the same oath. The first attempt to identify *'the
faith" with a particular Church is found in the coronation oath
agreed on by the Parliament which settled the crown on William and
Mary after the Revolution of 1688. The sovereign was made to
swear, by the terms of this covenant, to uphold "the Protestant re-
ligion established by law," but not until after a stiff debate whether
the form should not rather be, *'as it should be hereafter established
by law." But the phrase, "the Protestant religion as established by
law" meant nothing or anything, so far as doctrine was concerned.
No doubt it had been decreed by the House of Commons, in 1673,
that no one should be given public employment, civil or military,
who refused to take the oath of supremacy and allegiance and to re-
ceive the sacrament "according to the rites of the Church of Eng-
land." But only ten years before this decree was passed there had
been an abortive attempt at the Savoy, the Bishop of London's resi-
dence, to revise the Book of Common Prayer, by a commission of
clergy from both the Episcopal and the Presbyterian communions,
with a view to rendering its meaning intelligible and acceptable to
both regular and dissenting Protestants. These learned men, after
a very long discussion, found themselves unable to agree upon any
form of revision that would fulfil the desired end; and so King
Charles was obliged to summon Convocation and get the altera-
tions made perforce by the Established bishops, that he might carry
out the undertakings on the subject of toleration given by him to
the commissioners at Breda. The Act of Uniformity which was the
outcome did nothing more than prescribe certain external forms as
to the reception of the sacrament : of the nature and essence of the
sacrament itself the recipient might entertain the widest or the nar-
rowest opinion, just as is the case to-day. The fact that many in
the Protestant communion still believed in the Real Presence in the
sacrament of the Lord's Supper is strikingly shown in the stringent
declarations embodied in the Test Act of 1673, and the still more
stern one of 1675. Several times during the debates in Parliament
over these measures the ministers who proposed them were chal-
lenged to state what they really meant. "What," asked the Earl of
Shaftesbury, "is the Protestant religion ? Where are its boundaries ?
How are they to be ascertained ?" Parliament was asked to compel
men to swear that they would not attempt any alteration in a re-
ligion the limits of which were unknown. It was in vain that
Vol. XXVI— 2

434 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Shaftesbury, Buckingham and other peers sarcastically exposed the
inconsistencies of the proposers of these absurd Test Acts, and chal-
lenged them to state in terms what doctrines were to be safe-
guarded. All that was aimed at was to keep Catholics out of the
public service, and so the shocking passages about Transubstantia-
tion, copied from earlier Puritan declarations in the reign of Charles
I., were inserted in the new tests ; and in 1678, owing to the fears of
the accession of a Catholic prince, the oath, in its present outrageous
form, was extended even to the wearer of the Crown.

The great object of the Test Act of 1673 was to exclude the Duke
of York from the succession because he had become a Catholic ; and
its first effect was to make him resign the office of Lord High Ad-
miral. Lord Clifford, who filled the post of Treasurer, also declined
the oath and resigned.

When Titus Oates got up his nefarious scare about a Popish Plot,
Parliament was once more invited to turn its attention to the de-
fenses of Protestantism, which no amount of strengthening and but-
tressing seemed to be able to render secure enough. Then came
the bigot Danby with his amended Test Act excluding Catholic
peers from Parliament, despite their hereditary privileges, which
were regarded as having their roots in the very Constitution. From
the Lower House Catholics had been debarred since the time of
Queen Elizabeth. But the case was different from that of the peers,
whose right to sit and vote by virtue of their descent was an integral
portion of the organic law of the realm, as settled since the Con-
quest.

It must be owned that the apprehensions of the nervous defenders
of Protestantism, "as by law established," were not altogether
groundless, bearing in mind the shifting foundations on which the
structure was raised. Of stability in doctrine or discipline there
was none. A process of mutation as constant as the action of the
tides on a sand-bar was its normal characteristic. But, indepen-
dently of the peril possible from this phenomenon, there was also the
equally subtle danger of those subterranean streams of mental re-
servation so forcibly exemplified in the amazing convolutions of
Cranmer. A somewhat different order of self-deception, yet one
equally ominous of insecurity to framers of armor-clad abjurations,
is seen in the case of the Duke of Argyll. To retain him in his
office of Justice-General and his hereditary sheriffdoms, from which
powerful enemies sought to oust him, the Duke was tendered the
oath. After some hesitation he consented to take it subject to an
explanation. The explanation was remarkable. He would bind
himself by the oath, he said, "only in so far as it was consistent with
itself and the Protestant religion, and would not bar himself from en-

Royal Oaths and Doctrinal Subterfuges. 435

deavoring, in a lawful way and in his station, to make such changes
in Church and State as he might deem beneficial." Casuistry is often
imputed to theologians of the Catholic faith as a dangerous and un-
lovely peculiarity. The most experienced teacher of the art might
not disdain a lesson from this Highland chief, who was the type of
a very numerous class that gained for Scotland a reputation for in-
genuity at a time when a divided allegiance threatened ruin to the
chief landholders of the country. Still, this remarkable instance of
logical dexterity was ineffectual to save the Duke. Although it
satisfied the Duke of York, Charles and his commissioners were
doubtful of such a man's reliability. They saw in his mental atti-
tude an extension of the principle of private judgment in a direction
more dangerous far than that of religious faith — the temporal
things of the State. So that when he appeared again to qualify as
Commissioner of the Treasury and again proffered his explanation
when about to take the oath, he was placed under arrest and tried for
treason, and only saved his head by disguising his person as he tried
to do his thoughts and slipping out of his prison.

No fact is plainer than the falsity of the pretense that those royal
oaths and parliamentary tests were devised out of zeal for religion.
As we trace them step by step, the material considerations which
really prompted their invention are seen developing themselves in
growing boldness and definiteness. To oust people of a different
kind of conscience from their lands and possessions, to garner up
political power in the one direction so securely that the men gradu-
ally getting the upper hand could reckon on its possession perma-
nently for themselves and their descendants ; to use these tests for
the Machiaveillian purpose of setting Catholic against Catholic, son
against father, brother against brother, wife against husband, and
so to gradually stamp out the old religion from the face of the land —
these were the real purposes of the Coronation Oath and the Par-
liamentary and official tests. We have this sardonic purpose openly
avowed by many of those engaged in the furtherance of it. Straf-
ford set up the Court of Wards in Ireland in order to carry it out,
and he tells us so with the frankest cynicism in his own papers.
He wanted the estates of the old Catholic nobility for the King's use,
and so he seized the heirs when they were minors, sent them to be
trained in some Protestant den, and kept them from their inherit-
ance until they would "conform," the court meanwhile getting the
"livery" of their lands. He quotes a remarkable instance of his suc-
cess in this policy in the case of the Earl of Ormond, "who, if bred
under the wings of his own parents," he observes, "had been of the
same affections and religion his brothers and sisters are; whereas
now he is a firm Protestant."

436 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The subtle mind which devised this policy was not in all cases at
fault. While many of the old native Catholic families stood firm,
newcomers like the Butlers and Fitzgeralds at length succumbed.
Ormond was so successfully imbued with the virus of anti-Catho-
licism and denationalization that he is found later on practising on
others the same insidious arts as he had himself been ensnared by.
In a letter quoted by Carte, speaking of a declaration adopted by a
Catholic synod, which was copied from the Galilean Church, he says
his aim in rejecting it was "to work a division among the Romish
clergy ;" and "I believe I had accomplished it, to the great security
of the government and the Protestants and against the opposition
of the Pope and his creatures and nuncios, if I had not been re-
moved."

It was in Ireland that this remorseless policy was mostly exerted
in all its unnatural malice. By means of it and of the wars to which
it gave birth as the centuries rolled on, the land of Ireland was three
times confiscated. But its religion never was. It is there to-day,
as firmly rooted as ever ; and, by a singular fitness in retribution, it
was by an Irish hand that the oath of perjury and blasphemy was
dashed to pieces in the midst of the shrine wherein it was forged.
It is now only taken by a "Defender" of the Faith which it was
designed to destroy ; and its effectiveness is seen in the fact that the
monarch just passed away had no hesitation in signing the death
warrant of the Established Church in Ireland, which under its terms
she pledged herself to uphold as solemnly as she repudiated the
"idolatry" of Transubstantiation.

John J. O'Shea.

AN OLD-IRISH MONASTERY IN THE APENNINES.

ONE summer day, in August of 1897, it fell to the lot of the
writer to find himself on a pilgrimage to the little and almost
inaccessible town of Bobbio that lies hidden away in the in-
nermost folds of the mighty Apennines. I had left my traveling
companions at Milan and made my way to Piacenza, whose streets
of fortress-like palaces seemed doubly sombre and mysterious at that
midnight hour which found me knocking at the gate of an ancient
hostelry. A kindly and courteous welcome, such as one usually
meets in out-of-the-way Italian towns, added to the comfort of a few

An Old-Irish Monastery in the Apennines. 437

hours' sleep, too soon broken by the necessity of catching the first
train that pulled out for Rivergaro about four in the morning. For
more than three hours I shivered in the open tramway car that sped
with great rapidity over the level fields of the Placentine territory,
amid vineyards and olive groves and orchards, by tiny hamlets clus-
tered around ancient churches, over rivers and creeks arched roman-
tically by willows and sycamores and wild native shrubberies,
through ancient towns whose corner-stones were laid by some pre-
historic Italiots, and whose archives are gray with age, perhaps rusty
with a thousand stains of blood and conflict. It was painful to fly
like a thoughtless bird across the plains of

"fruitful Lombardy,
The pleasant garden of great Italy."

It was more painful to know that we were skimming so rapidly
across one of the world's greatest battle-fields, where, between two
seas and under the shadow of the highest Alps, the original conten-
tions of our remotest Aryan ancestors were fought out ; where the
mercenaries of Hannibal overthrew Scipio and Sempronius (B. C.
218); where a thousand mediaeval conflicts had been fought; where
the Russian Suwarrow repulsed Macdonald in 1799, and for one
hour checked the victorious flight of the Napoleonic eagles. Here,
too, was initiated one phase of the great mediaeval struggle of
Church and Empire — that wonderful mixed conflict of the powers
political and spiritual that is not yet off the stage. On the Plain of
Roncaglia, near Piacenza, in 1158, Frederic I. promulgated the Code
of Justinian with all its absolutistic Caesaropapism as the future
fundamental law of Christendom. This suggestion of his Bologna
law school was the opening scene of the second number in the mar-
velous trilogy of mediaeval struggles that centres about the names of
Henry IV., Frederick I. and Philip the Fair. How little men fore-
saw in the time of Dante, when the fierce Ghibelline poet still re-
called with joy

lo imperio del buon Barbarossa
Di cui dolente ancor Milan ragiona,

what should be the outcome of the world-shattering duel between
these Kings of the Rhineland and the priesthood of Rome! The
Kings are dust in the lonely vaults of Speyer, where their marble
statues, crowned and sceptred, keep solemn ward in the great
basilica ; but the Bishops of Rome are still a central influence in the
affairs of Europe, though it is now, politically, antipodal to the sys-
tem and the ideals of the Hohenstaufen. Here Spaniard, French-
man, German, Swiss and Austrian — the whole horde that old Pope
Julius, with a genuine Renaissance temper, called the barbarians —
have in more modern times held sway, for a briefer or longer period ;

438 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

yet what remains of the ''forestieri" to-day ? Is there not something
indomitable in the immemorial racial instincts of a population rooted
to the soil and feeding forever on its own ideals as incarnated in his-
tory, monuments, letters ?

The sun was high when we brought up with a clatter at Rivergaro,
a picturesque Lombard hamlet, with its feet in the glorious plain and
its back long drawn out upon rising slopes that are as the first rung
of the great ladder of mountains whose top is the snowy crown of
Mount Blanc. Here I was bundled into a "diHgenza," or old-fash-
ioned Italian express coach, not of the Concord type, nor, again, like
the archaic vehicles that run yet between Rome and the neighboring
hill towns, rather a comfortable and secure conveyance, with perch
upon perch and pocket upon pocket, truly a stout equipment for the
long journey that stretches between Rivergaro and Bobbio.

How good it was up there beside the driver, even if he was merci-
less to the poor "bestie" as they toiled up every winding steep and
rattled down every long hillside to the music of a grinding brake that
alone stood between us and the sulfureted torrent that whirled be-
neath in a mimic fury of white loam and green waves ! The splen-
did road, so broad and firm, shining in its dress of crushed lime-stone
that the peasants replenish constantly from the little blueish heaps
that are piled up at intervals, gave back a sense of security. Over
there, across the deep and narrow valley that often took on the
character of a cafion or gulch, arose sweep above sweep of naked
rock — the gaunt gray peaks of the Apennines. It was oppressive to
gaze long at this wilderness of stone hung there in the upper air,
every convolution and boss and ravine brought out by the accusing
sunlight. Right and left, at every turn in the long journey, these
massive ramparts of the peninsula glowered down upon us. Occa-
sionally patches of oak and chestnut broke the fierce monotony of
these stony "rafters of Italy," and again, a shepherd's hut or his
browsing sheep. The distant tinkling of their bells, the thin fine
note of some cowherd's pipe, relieved from time to time the white
stillness that lay upon all nature save for the" brawling of the torrent
as it caught up forever and ground the fresh masses of limestone
that were forever crumbling down into its remorseless mill. Not
unfrequently a whitewashed chapel rose against the blue line of the
horizon, some lonely mission station telling of a divine presence, of
God's interest in the scattered herdsmen, of the long journeyings
and fastings of their good clergy.

On the lowest slopes, however, vegetation was abundant. The
vine and the olive grow poorly enough. Now, as of old, the wines of
the Apennines are weak and thin ; there is in them no melted sunlight
of the South. These are cold and stern regions. We are moving

An Old-Irish Monastery in the Apennines. 439

through the heart of ancient Liguria, not the maritime Liguria, but
the Liguria of the mountains. Here, between Genoa and Pisa, lay
of old those almost autocthonous tribes which came so slowly under
the yoke of Rome. Neighbors, perhaps kinsmen, to the Gauls be-
yond the Po, they outlived in their rude independence of shepherds
and hunters the liberties of the Roman Republic and yielded only
under Augustus. They had long been the Swiss of the Roman
State, mercenaries for every power that would pay them, from Car-
thage to Athens, distrustful of the intentions of the Golden Queen
by the Tiber, "montani, duri, agrestes,"as Cicero called them. A hun-
dred years of warfare in the last century of the Republic had made its
soldiers familiar with the long-haired mountaineers, agile as their
own wild goats, sure-eyed slingers, an invaluable foot auxiliary,
sober and frugal, their few "impedimenta" neatly cinched on the backs
of dwarf horses or mules, their oblong shields of brass hung loosely
at their backs. Then, as now, life was a severe discipline for the
hill-man of the Apennines. Vergil, in the Georgics, speaks of the
"assuetum malo Ligurem,"the Ligurian broken to all hardships. The
ancients used to say that these mountaineers quarried the soil rather
than dug it, and we may well believe them, for the fertile terraces
that stretch up the lower belt of the mountains have been created by
the industry of centuries and are saved only by the continuous care
of each generation. An intelligent irrigation, watchful buttressing
of the sunniest exposures, steady repression of the gnawing tooth
of multitudinous torrents, are now as needed as in the days when
Polybius and Strabo described these hills.

In antiquity this constant toil had its reward. The classic writers
speak of the numerous small towns and prosperous hamlets that lay
scattered through the Ligurian and Emilian hills. Vergil, notably,
dwells on this Apennine scenery, where

"Many a peopled city towers around.
And many a rocky cliff with castle crowned,
And many an antique wall whose hoary brow
O'ershades the flood that guards its base below."

I wondered, as we held our way along and against the shrunken
torrent of the Trebbia, how much of this old Ligurian blood had
come down to the peasantry of the surrounding scenes. Since those
days when the republic was satisfied with a fair roadway through
the heart of the mountain tribes, as the result of two centuries of
stubborn warfare, what vicissitudes has not Northern Italy under-
gone! From Genoa to Venice every valley, every mountain pass,
every hillside, has been overrun by some fierce German tribe drawn
southward by the fatal gift of Italian beauty. Goth and Schwab and
Herul and Lombard swarmed in this region for fully two hundred
years ere they finally settled down as peaceful tillers of the soil. But

440 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

long before them the Keltic blood of those Gauls who became
naturalized on the same site had mingled with the aboriginal strain,
or as much of it as had not spent itself in the endless wars with the
Republic.

"Ah me! What armed nations— Asian horde

And Lybian host, the Scythian and the Gaul —

Have swept your base and through your passes poured!

Like ocean tides uprising at the call

Of tyrant winds, against your rocky base

The bloody billows dashed and howled and died."

Perhaps we shall never know the conditions of this wonderful and
providential amalgamation, this smelting of many races in one
strong deep current. Later historians of Europe maintain that the"
Gallo-Roman blood absorbed the rich Prankish contingent ; that the
genuine Greek of classical times found a way in his walled towns to
perpetuate an untainted blood in spite of Slav and Avar and Bulgar.
It may, therefore, be that yonder shepherd whose silhouette bars the
horizon is a genuine son of an Italian race whose origins are lost in
nebulous myth and archaic saga.

My companions are some men and women from the picturesque
hamlets that we met upon our way. A few had come from distant
Piacenza, the rim of their social horizon. But they were kindly and
gossipy, quite curious about the "Americano," when they learned his
nationality, full of startling questions about the great Western world
that came before them in all the hues and outlines of Paradise. They
chattered among themselves about the probable purpose of one who
had come from the depths of the West to their lonely and uninterest-
ing mountains. In their vigorous and picturesque dialect that holds
yet some echo, some savor of the old Vergilian tongue, they pro-
claimed him a man

"Qui multorum hominum mores vidit et urbes."

In their manner and speech, it seemed to me, there was something of
an old-time innocence and simplicity of life, as of men and women
whose imagination had never been stirred, and whose interests and
passions were bounded and conditioned by these walls and towers
of granite that encircled their existence from an immemorial day.
Not otherwise did Nausicaa and Alcinous, their Phaeacian counsel-
lors and peers, listen to the storm-tossed Ulysses as he recited in
their presence the moving chapters of his great woe. When,
finally, I declared that I was only a poor pilgrim to the shrine of San
Colombano at Bobbio, and that I belonged, by descent, to the same
race that had sent this good and holy man to them so long ago, I
felt that the mystery had fallen away from me. I was even like one
of themselves, an intelligible being, one who fitted every way into
their ideas and experiences. Sicuro ! it was a wise and correct thing

An Old-Irish Monastery in the Apennines. 441

to come to San Colombano. Yearly multitudes still came from the
hill-towns of Ottone and Varzo and Zavattarello, from Pregola and
Cerignale and Corte Brugnatella. Indeed, from great cities like
Genoa and Pavia men and women came occasionally to the holy
shrine. Yes ! he was a "Scozzese," and "Irlandese." Every child in
Bobbio knew that. And he had been a "prince" in that land, they
thought. Only a short while ago there had come bishops and priests
out of Ireland to pray at the tomb of their "Santo." Was he still
good and powerful ? What a question ! Every cabin in these hills
had been blessed by him. Every shepherd and peasant loved him as
a father ; the young and the old revered him. Clearly I had come
upon loyal clients of the marvelous old Irishman. They had misty
notions of time and space, it is true, but between their primitive
paganism and their actual Christianity loomed up to-day, as thirteen
centuries ago, the figure of the Christian priest who had made his
way hither from the banks of Lough Earne and the precincts of
thrice holy Bangor. On every side rose the wrecks of mediaeval
castles, but the fame of Columbanus was already old when their walls
were first raised by Lombard nobles, like human eyries upon every
gray crag and inaccessible peak that pierced the cloudless blue above
us. And now, at the end of the nineteenth century, that fame was
still fresh and sweet, like the heart of cedar, in that still more incor-
ruptible casket, the heart of man. As our "diligenza," after many
changes of horses, climbed the last slopes and rounded the last
angles that hid the view of this miniature Holy Land, these good
"Bobbiesi" turned often my attention to various landmarks con-
nected with the dwelling and work of San Colombano in their se-
cluded valley. Historical truth and decorative legend were, of
course, intertwined in their speech. But who would rob them of
their legends would surely plunder the robin's nest, pluck the ivy
from the ruined wall, violate his father's ashes — in a word, be guilty
of any horrid impiety against the gentle amenities and sweet com-
pensations of life. That day, at least, my temper was. in no such
iconoclastic mood, and San Colombano surely counted me in with his
legitimate brood as we reached the long stone bridge that spans the
shallow bed of the Trebbia. With its many arches of varying size
and shape, its quaint ascending and descending slopes, it brought to
my mind the bridge in Biirger's great ballad :

"Auf Pfeilern und auf Bogen schwer,

Aus Quaderstein von unten auf

Lag eine Briicke driiber her,

Und mitten stand ein Hailschen drauf."

Now, at last, we were on the level ground of the little plain of
Bobbio, a kind of clearing some four miles square and the only one
of such size that the jealous Trebbia has tolerated from its source in

442 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

the near mountains to its issue from those foot hills of the Apen-
nines that are visible from Piacenza. Did worldly business or pleas-
ure invite us we should scarcely rest here, but pursue our way to
''Genoa the Superb," the queenliest city of these regions, some sixty
miles away. A fair road, old and much used, lay before us, and at
its end the palaces and markets, the great churches, galleries and
villas of the city of the Dorias and the Balbis, its white-sailed ships
from many ports and its elegant caravansaries where meet daily the
streams of travel converging upon Milan and Florence and Rome.
Bobbio, on the contrary, is forever a most unworldly spot, a little
green paradise, rimmed by solemn mountains, a natural home of
piety and learning, a kind of backwater along the swift stream of
human life as it bears its miscellaneous freight through the cen-
turies. I had come a long way, in loving respect and veneration to
feast my eyes upon the site that could fascinate a Columbanus and
to grant my heart the comfort of one day's dwelling amid scenes of
antique piety to God and devotion to humanity. And so when our
chatty and picturesque postillion cried cheerily to his horses and
rattled over the stony streets into the little mediaeval piazza and set
me down in presence of a portly but gentle Boniface in the very
doorway of his inn, I experienced a delight known only to those
who have the "passion" of the past.

II.

Perhaps there is no better proof of the passing of the old Graeco-
Roman social order in the course of the sixth century, at least in the
West, than the presence and function of such an Irishman as Saint
Columbanus in the heart of Northern Italy, almost at the gate of
Milan, one of ancient Italy's richest towns, second only to Rome,
when the City was in its golden prime. This saint is surely the most
famous, also the most influential of that memorable band of apos-
tles who went forth from the Island of Saints and Doctors between
the years A. D. 500 and 800 to restore or establish Christianity along
the smoking pathways of barbarism, and to create those centres of
learning and education whence the episcopal schools of the later
middle ages should draw their models, their inspiration — very often
their school books — the art of writing, and that skill in illumination
to which our modern art historians now refer the first independent
origins of Western mediaeval painting and sculpture.

A full century, indeed, before the coming of Columbanus upon the
Continent other Irish saints had made their way thither. The most
renowned is Saint Fridolin, of royal race in Ireland, originally a
domestic missionary, then Abbat of All Hallows in Poitiers, friend

An Old-Irish Monastery in the Apennines. 443

and counsellor of King Clovis, zealous rebuilder of the great basilica
of Saint Hilary of Poitiers, finally missionary to the Alamanni of
Baden and founder of the Old-Irish monastery of Sseckingen on the
Rhine-island of that name. Fridolin is a real hyphen between the
perishing classicism of the West and its embryonic mediaevalism.
Nor is his influence departed ; his portrait is yet in the blason of the
Swiss canton of Glarus, and pilgrims from Ireland yet make their
way to the site of his missionary labors in Baden. It was already
no very uncommon thing for pious bishops of Gaul to draw to their
churches some Irish recluse, like that Arnanus who was the "very
faithful friend" of the famous Saint Desiderius (Didier), of Cahors
(590-655), one of those great Gallo-Roman bishops who stood for
religion and civil order in the truly dark centuries that followed the
collapse of the Roman power in the West. To one of the personal
disciples of Columbanus, the saintly Gallus (Callech or Kellach in
Old-Irish), is owing the great monastery from which went forth
religion and culture through all the valleys and along all the up-
lands of Switzerland, along the waters of the upper Danube and into
the forests and mountains of Bavaria. In the lifetime of Columbanus
another Irishman, Disibod, with a band of disciples, settled on the
lovely heights of the actual Disibodenberg, where the Nahe and the
Glan encompass with their waves this famous centre of German
mediaeval religious life. Yet in the same seventh century the remote
deeply wooded uplands of Thuringia were the scene of the labors of
Saint Kilian, over whose remains rises the noble Cathedral of Wiirz-
burg. Three famous brothers, Ultan, Foillan and Fursey, left Ire-
land about this period, and by way of England reached the Conti-
nent, where their names are still honored as saintly patrons of
Belgium and France. The former land holds in special reverence an
Irish saint of the seventh century, Livinus, and Saint Fursey is well
known as the creator of a peculiar vision-literature that one day cul-
minated in the Divina Commedia. Other Irishmen of this period
stopped half-way in England like Dicuil, the builder of Bosham, and
the forerunner of Saint Wilfred in the conversion of the South
Saxons. The little island deserves also the credit of those English
disciples who were brought up in its schools like Saint Willibrord,
the apostle of the Frisians, and one of the most interesting of the
ecclesiastical figures of the seventh century. Even Southern Italy
welcomed Irish missionaries ; the See of Tarentum boasts of Saint
Cataldus, otherwise known in the seventh century as the chief light
of the Old-Irish school of Lismore on the Blackwater. .

The labors of Saint Columbanus are, therefore, but one phase of a
great religious movement that is only now beginning to meet with a
proper scientific appreciation — a renaissance of religion and letters

444 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

in lands once illustrious in both, and a conquest of the gross and
rude heathenism that was then all too close to the outer margins of
Western Christendom, and was eating its insidious way, via laxity
and naturalism, into Gaul and Italy and Spain. No doubt a deli-
cate refinement of asceticism, the desire to abandon a passionately
loved fatherland, drove many such missionaries away from the be-
loved island. The lyric farewell of Saint Columbcille is a touching
evidence of this, also a first example in literature of that romantic
attachment to one's native land that antiquity never knew, and that
owes its origin in Europe very largely to the plaints and threnodies
of the wandering Scotic monks to whom the icy horror of the Alps
and the coarse manners of the Alamannic and Thuringian barbar-
ians recalled only too sharply the "fair hills of holy Ireland" and the
gentle habits of their calm cloisters. The rather difficult chronology
of our saint's life has been unravelled by Bishop Greith in his excel-
lent account of the Old-Irish Church (1867). Acording to his calcu-
lations Columbanus was born in the western part of Leinster about
the year 535, when the reign of Justinian was climbing to its zenith,
when Saint Agapetus was sitting in the Chair of Peter and the noble
Ostrogoths were beginning their heroic stand for the Italian king-
dom of Theodoric. In pious anticipation of his gentle and mystic
character he was called Columba, or The Dove, by his parents, who
are said to have been of royal descent. But he has always been
known by the more Gallic form of Columbanus, perhaps to distin-
guish him from his famous contemporary. Saint Columba of the
Churches (Columbcille), the founder of lona. He was certainly
addressed by his own monks as Columbanus, for his life, written by
the monk Jonas of Bobbio, shortly after the holy founder's death,
has the following paragraph otherwise notable as one of the earliest'
mediaeval references to Christian Ireland :

"Saint Columbanus, who is also called Columba, was born on the Island of Ire-
land. This is situated in the ex^treme ocean, and according to common report is
charming, productive of various nations and undisturbed by contests with other
people. Here lives the race of the 'Scoti,' who, although they lack the laws of the
other nations, flourish in the doctrine of Christian strength and exceed in faith
all the neighboring tribes. Columbanus was born ' amid the beginnings of that
race's faith, in order that the religion, which in part that race cherished uncom-
promisingly, might be increased by his own fruitful toil and the protecting care of
nis associates."

It is said that his later youth was passed under the care of the holy
Sinell, in the latter's school of Cleenish (Cluan-Inis), located on a
low sloping island in Lough Earne, not far from Enniskillen. Some
ruins of this foundation are still visible that may go back to the time
of the saintly founder, himself a disciple of Saint Finnian of Clonard,
one of the twelve great saints of the immediate succession of Saint
Patrick. We are, therefore, yet within the classical period of the
Irish Church, in touch with the swift absorbing enthusiasm that

An Old-Irish Monastery in the Apennines. 445

caught the hearts of those ''sons of the Scots and daughters of the
Kings" whose conversion Saint Patrick loves to boast of in the re-
markable booklet of his "Confession."

The biographer of Columbanus tells us that in his earliest youth
his mother watched over him with so great care that she would
scarcely entrust him to the nearest relatives. Before his birth she
had seen him issue from her bosom like a resplendent sun — her more
learned neighbors explained that she was bearing a man of remark-
able genius. So the life of the boy, says Jonas, "aspired to the culti-
vation of good works under the leadership of Christ, without whom
no good work is done." The same venerable authority gives us a
glimpse of what the young Columbanus could learn at his mother's
knee, or with old Sinell in the shadow of his apple tree or on the steps
of his Keltic cross :

"When the childhood of Columbanus was over and he became older^ he began
to devote himself enthusiastically to the pursuit of grammar and the sciences, and
studied with fruitful zeal all through his boyhood and youth until he became a
man. But as his fine figure, his splendid color and his noble manliness made him
beloved by all, the old enemy began finally to turn his deadly weapons upon him
in order to catch in his nets this youth, whom he saw growing so rapidly in
grace. And he aroused against him the lust of lascivious maidens, especially of
those whose fine figure and superficial beauty are wont to enkindle mad desires in
the hearts of men."

After praising the prudence of the youth against the wiles of
these Nora Creinas and Lesbias of long ago, and curiously citing the
pagan Livy to the effect that no one is rendered so sacred by religion
that lust is unable to prevail against him, Jonas relates the following
extremely interesting incident of the life of Columbanus, an incident
that effected the saint's whole career and thereby all the mediaeval
interests of religion and literature :

"He feared lest ensnared by the lusts of the world he should have spent in vain
so much labor on grammar, rhetoric, geometry and the Holy Scriptures. And in
these perils he was strengthened by a particular aid. For as he was still meditat-
ing upon his purpose, he came to the dwelling of a holy and devout woman. He
at first addressed her humbly; afterwards he began to exhort her as far as lay
in his power. As she saw the increasing strength of the youth she said: 'I have
gone forth to the strife as far as it lay in my power. Lo! twelve years have
passed by since I have been far from my home and have sought out this place of
pilgrimage. With the aid of Christ, never since then have I engaged in secular
matters; after putting my hand to the plough I have not turned backward. And
if the weakness of my sex had not prevented me, I would have crossed the sea
and chosen a better place among strangers as my home. But you, glowing with
the fire of youth, stay quietly on your native soil; out of weakness you lend your
ear even against your own will to the voice of the flesh and think you can asso-
ciate with the female sex without sin. But do you recall the wiles of Eve, Adam's
fall, how Samson was deceived by Delilah, how David was led to injustice by the
beauty of Bathsheba, how the wise Solomon was ensnared by the love of a woman?
Away, O youth! away! Flee from corruption into which, as you know, many have
fallen. Forsake the paths which lead to the gates of hell.' "

From this speaking picture of the ancient Irish ,asceticism, the
numerous solitaries, male and female, in waste and lonesome places,
the struggle in their new Christian hearts between the delights, inno-
cent enough perhaps, of the common social life, and the strong im-

446 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

pulses of the spirit, we return with Columbanus to his mother's side.
The words of the holy recluse had shattered his already disturbed
conscience. He would, indeed, quit the world — his companions of
both sexes, the games and races of his clan, the company of his deep-
mouthed hounds and his gaunt gigantic wolf-dogs, the mimic battles
of wrestling and hockey, the chase of the flying red deer, the wild,
free life of the ocean. Often enough, tossed about on its bosom in
his little coracle, he had wondered at the beauty and glory and power
of the great Christian God, who had but lately driven from Ireland
cruel Crom Cruach, gusty Manannan MacLir and all the Keltic
Pantheon that his grandfathers in Leinster had so often invoked in
the terrible stress of battle, when Ulster came on to compel the
famous "Tribute" that made life bitter to every Leinsterman. Now
he should nevermore look upon the sweet things of life with attach-
ment. He would cleave henceforth to "his Druid" Christ.

"His mother in anguish begged him not to leave her. But he said: 'Hast thou
not heard "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me?" '
He begged his mother, who placed herself in his way and held the door, to let
him go. Weeping and stretched upon the floor she said she would not permit it.
Then he stepped across the threshold and asked his mother not to give way to her
grief; she would never see him again in this life, but wherever the way of salvation
led him, there would he go."

Thus Columbanus, as did later Saint Jane Frances de Chantal,
trampled under foot every natural feeling and made the first great
renunciation. Clearly he belonged to a family of repute, and his
future life might well have been one of distinction and happiness
among men. It is here that his relations with Sinell, or Senilis,
begin, through whom the study of the Scriptures became henceforth
the chief occupation of Columbanus. His aged instructor, recog-
nizing the ability and ardor of the youth, taught him the mysteries
of the Old and the New Dispensation, tried him before the other
pupils with all manner of difficult questions, made endless objections,
all of which, obediently and without vain glory, Columbanus solved.

"Thus Columbanus," says Jonas, "collected such treasures of holy wisdom in
his breast that even as a youth he could expound the Psalter in fitting language
and could make many other extracts worthy to be sung and instructive to read."

This may mean, as Cardinal Moran believes, that our saint wrote
at this early date in his life an exposition of the psalms, together
with many hymns, both Latin and Irish, and tractates of doctrine or
edification.

There is a charming poem in Irish on the vanity of human things
that Dr. John O'Donovan has translated into English. He thought
it a remnant of the sixth century, the production of a primitive bard
turned Christian. It was sung at the court of King Diarmid about
the year 554, during the last great Feis or triennial assembly of the
Kings, nobles, chieftains and musicians of Ireland. Many of the

An Old-Irish Monastery in the Apennines. 447 ']

similes and metaphors I have recognized in the Latin writings of j
Columbanus, notably in his metrical homily "On the Vanity of Life." i
It may well be one of the hymns written by him in the school of i
Cleenish, for the delectation of his master and brethren. In any ;
case, it is from the hand of a contemporary and may, not without
reason, be set before my readers as a specimen of the poetical train- '<
ing given in the Old-Irish schools. The charm of the delicate and
intricate original metre must, of course, be enjoyed only in imagina- 1
tion, as well as the intertwined rhymes that call musically to one an-
other all over this highly academic poetry of ancient Ireland : ,'

Like a damask rose you see, i

Or like a blossom on a tree, ^ <

Or like a dainty flower in May, * j

Or like the morning to the day, ' j

Or like the sun, or like the shade, ;

Or like the gourd which Jonah made; ^^

Even such is man whose thread is spun, .,

Drawn out and out and so is done. ■

The rose withers, the blossom blasteth.

The flower fades, the morning hasteth, !

The sun sets, the shadow flies, i

The gourd consumes, the man — he dies. i

Like the grass that's newly sprung, . 1

Or like the tale that's new begun, I

Or like the bird that's here to-day, -

Or like the pearled dew in May,

Or like the hour, or like the span.

Or like the singing of the swan;

Even such is man who lives by breath.

Is here, now there, in life and death. - i

The grass withers, the tale is ended, j

The bird is flown, the dew's ascended, i

The hour is short, the span not long, ■
The swan's near death, man's life is done.

Like to the bubble in the brook.

Or in a glass much like a look, ;

Or like the shuttle in weaver's hand, }

Or like the writing on the sand, .

Or like a thought, or like a dream, j

Or like the gliding of the stream;

Even such is man, who lives in breath, I

Is here, now there, in life and death. '

The bubble's out, the look forgot.

The shuttle's flung, the writing's blot,

The thought is past, the dream is gone, i

The waters glide, man's life is done. '

Like an arrow from a bow.

Or like a swift course of water flow.

Or like the time 'twixt flood and ebb.

Or like the spider's tender web.

Or like a race or like a goal, •

Or like the dealing of a dole;

Even such is man whose brittle state ^

Is always subject unto fate. '

The arrow shot, the flood soon spent, ,

The time no time, the web soon rent, ;

The race soon run, the goal soon won, ^

The dole soon dead, man's life soon done. *.

Like to the lightning from the sky, i

Or like a post that quick doth hie, i

Or like a quaver in a song, \

Or like a journey three days long, I

Or like the snow when summer's come, i

44^ American Catholic Quarterly Review,

Or like the pear or like the plum;
Even such is man, who heaps up sorrow.
Lives but this day, and dies to-morrow.

The lightning's past, the post must go.

The song is short, the journey so.

The pear doth rot, the plum doth fall.

The snow dissolves, and so must all.

At Cleenish, we may believe, he was well instructed in Latin,
which he writes with great skill. He is, indeed, by far the best Latin
writer of the latter half of the sixth century. We may believe, too,
that he knew Greek and Hebrew — the former language, it is now
well known, could then be learned by Western men only in Ireland,
where, up to the invasions of the Danes, it continued to be culti-
vated, as the philologian Ludwig Traube has proven beyond a doubt
in his elegant little work "O Roma Nobilis \"

IIL

But now the time had come for a final choice of callings. Jonas
says no more of his internal trials — the mediaeval writers seldom pay
attention to a minute personal psychology of doubts and fears ; not
that they ignore it, but that it was a part of Christian modesty and
self-restraint to spare the world the sight of a soul's travail. Noth-
ing could be more foreign to the mediaeval temper than the Byronic
bawling of one's sorrows into the ear of an already over-worried
humanity.

"Then he endeavored to enter a society of monks, and went to the monastery of
Bangor. The abbot, the holy Comgall, renowned tor his virtues, was a father to
his monks and was held in high esteem for the fervor of his faith and the order
and discipline which he preserved. Here Columbanus gave himself entirely to
fasting and prayer, to bearing the easy yoke of Christ, to mortifying the flesh, to
taking the cross upon himself and following Christ, in order that he who was to
be made a teacher of others might show the learning which he taught more fruit-
fully by his own example in mortifying his own body, and that he who waa to
instruct might first instruct himself.

Bangor had been founded by Saint Comgall in 552 or 558, and it
seems to have been a few years later (560), at the age of 25, that
Columbanus entered the famous monastery. Comgall was one of
the "twelve apostles" of Ireland, and one of- the seven great insular
writers of monastic rules, the others being Patrick, Bridget, Kieran,
Columba, Molaise and Adamnan. His rule was written in Old-
Irish verse, and later was the model for that which Columbanus
gave to Luxeuil and Bobbio. Very soon he gathered about him
three thousand monks, who dwelt in huts of wattles or osier or in
small cells shaped like bee-hives and made of rude uncemented
stones, some specimens of which cells may yet be seen on the Skellig
Rocks. The fare was poor and rare ; for a long time milk was un-
known, and even fish, plentiful enough in the neighboring bay of
Carrickfergus, was provided only for guests. The Martyrology of

An Old -I risk Monastery in the Apennines. 449

Donegal (1156-1173) says that the "old books of Erin" relate how
Comgall was the educator of many saints and kindled in their hearts
the love of God. He, too, had studied with Finnian of Clonard, and
had been ordained priest at Clonmacnoise. His school companions
had been the holy Columbcille and the holy Cainnech.

One of the most venerable monuments of Old-Irish verse is pre-
cisely a lament of the holy man of lona over his enforced exile, with
its separation from these friends of his youth. The personal note is
here, the subjective standard of the universe and life, the poignant
cry of the stricken heart, a genuine root of romanticism, that shall
later blossom into an entrancing but peculiar and unique literature :

O Son of my God, what a pride, what a pleasure

To plough the blue sea!
The waves of the fountain of deluge to measure.

Dear Erin, to thee.

We are rounding Moy-n-Olurg, we sweep by its head, and

We plunge through Lough Foyle,
Whose swans could enchant with their music the dead, and

Make pleasure of toil.

Alas for the voyage, O high King of Heaven,

Enjoined upon me,
For that I on the red plain of bloody Cooldrevin

Was present to see.

Three things I am leaving behind me, the very

Most dear that I know,
Tir-Leedach I'm leaving, and Durrow and Derry,

Alas, I must go!

Yet my visit and feasting with Comgall have eased me

At Cainnech's right hand,
And all but thy government, Eire, had pleased me.

Thou waterfall land!

When Columbanus had spent many years at Bangor, it is said as
the head master of the school, a longing came upon him to go out
like Abraham from his country and kindred into a strange land. In
the words of his biographer, "he began to desire a pilgrimage."
Doubtless the words of the old recluse were yet ringing in his ears.
His desire was the cause of great sorrow to Comgall, who was now
growing deaf and infirm. Yet in the end he overcame his personal
interests, remembering, perhaps, that in his own youth he, too, had
wished to cross the Irish Sea and labor for the salvation of the
heathen Angles and Saxons. So we are told by Jonas that the good
old abbat called to himself Columbanus "and bestowed upon him the
bond of peace, the strength of solace, and companions who were
known for their piety." Columbanus was then (589-590) probably
some 55 years old. With the prayers of all, and surrounded by his
twelve companions, "under the guidance of Christ," he went down
to the neighboring seashore.

"Here they waited to see if the mercy of the Almighty would allow their pur-
VoL. XXVI-3

450 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

pose to succeed, and learned that the Spirit of the all-merciful Judge was with
them. So they embarked and began the dangerous journey across the channel and
sailed quickly with a smooth sea and a favorable wind to the coast of Brittania
(Scotland). Here they rested for a while to recover their strength and discussed
their plans anxiously until finally they decided to enter the land of Gaul. They
wanted zealously and shrewdly to inquire into the disposition of the inhabitants,
in order to remain longer if they found they could sow -the seeds of salvation; or
in case they found the hearts of the people in darkness, go on to the nearest
nations."

Columbanus was destined never more to see Bangor. His warm
heart must have ached as the sea-going galley bore away towards
the Scottish coast. Perhaps more than once, Hke his namesake, he
''turned a gray eye" towards the "waterfall land" of Eire. Perhaps,
too, he bore with him in his "scatula" or sack some of those docu-
ments that were soon to be copied into the famous Antiphonary of
Bangor that was certainly in the library of his beloved Bobbio be-
fore the year 691. In it is the sweet quaint Latin hymn, "O Ben-
chuir bona regula !" that is all made up of tender reminiscences of
the primitive monastic paradise which overlooked the waters that
now lap the strand of the little Bay of Bangor on the northernmost
coast of Down.

Eastward, across the rough and stormy waters of the North Chan-
nel, lay the hospitable "White House" (Candida Casa) of the monks
of Wales, at Whithern, a site dear to the Irish brethren ; for thence
had come since a hundred years and more no little of religion, litera-
ture, piety and sweet social intercourse. Saint Gildas, nebulous as
his person appears, an early benefactor of the Church in Ireland, had
been abbat of Whithern. In these waters also lay the Isle of Man,
once a mysterious resort and nursery of Druidism, now the seat of a
Christian bishopric established by Saint Patrick. Northward from
Bangor lay those innumerable rocky islets that stretched away to the
Orkneys and the Shetlands, already inhabited by a host of Irish soli-
taries who disputed with the dripping rocks and the clinging seals
and the wave-tossed "duilisc," or dulse, the right to praise the love
and goodness of a provident Creator. Where, in all Aryan litera-
ture, is there any such piercing challenging personal note of min-
gled faith and nature-kinship like the very old sea-song that from
time immemorial has borne the thumb-mark of Saint Columbcille
(Columbcille fecit) ? It is as though a poet-saint had been placed in
charge of some great lonely light amid the terrible joys and more
terrible sorrows of the wooings of Earth and Sea, as they come be-
fore the eye of mythopoeic fancy.

Delightful would it be to me in Uchd Ailiun

On the pinnacle of a rock.
That I might often see

The face of the ocean;
That I might see its heaving waves

Over the wide ocean.
When they chant music to their Father

Upon the world's course;

An Old-Irish Monastery in the Apennines. 451

That I might see its level sparkling strand.

It would be no cause of sorrow;
That I nught hear the song of the wonderful birds.

Source of happiness;
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves

Upon the rocks;
That I might hear the roar by the side of the church

Of the surrounding sea;
That I might see its noble flocks . ,

O'er the watery ocean;
That I might see the sea monsters,

The greatest of all wonders;
That I might see its ebb and flood

In their career;
That my mystical name might be, I say,

Cul Ri Erin;
That contrition might come upon my heart

Upon looking at her;
That I might bewail my evil all.

Though it were difficult to compute them;
That I might bless the Lord

Who conserves all
Heaven with its countless bright orders.

Land, strand and flood;
That I might search the books all

That would be good for my soul;
At times kneeling to beloved Heaven;

At times psalm-singing;
At times contemplating the King of Heaven,

Holy the chief;
At times at work without compulsion,

This would be delightful.
At times plucking duilisc from the rocks;

At times at fishing;
At times giving to the poor;

At times in a carcair;
The best advice in the presence of God _ J^

To me has been vouchsafed. ' "',

The King whose servant I am will not let ^ '

Anything deceive me.

Such music must have been in the heart of Columbanus and his
twelve monks as they put out into the deep. Other things than the
swelHng uplands of Bangor, its green fields and silver strand, were
henceforth shrouded from the sight of these apostolic men. The fu-
ture devastations of the cruel Picts and the still more cruel Northmen
were happily hidden from their view ; so, too, was the restoration of
the holy house by Saint Malachy that has found no less a chronicler
than Saint Bernard. I do not doubt that the opening strophes of
the hymn on the rule of Bangor are the lamentations of Columbanus
over his departure from that holy place ; perhaps they are his very
words piously treasured at Bobbio, where the letter and the spirit of
Bangor were long observed.

"Holy is the rule of Bangor; it is noble, just and admirable. Blessed is its com-
munity, founded on unerring faith, graced with the hope of salvation, perfect in
charity — a ship that is never submerged, though beaten by the waves. A house
full of delights, founded upon a rock. Truly an enduring city, strong and fortified.
The Ark shaded by the Cherubim, on all sides overlaid with gold. A princess meet
for Christ, clad in the sun's light. A truly regal hall adorned with, various gems."

When Jonas says that they went first to Brittania, he means the
northern part of Britain or the modern Scotland, where Christianity
was flourishing at the end of the sixth century. The little band seems

452 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

to have moved about those Dalriadan communities for a while and to
have preached the Gospel, after the principles above stated. As
they moved along the coast of Western Scotland, through the Chris-
tian monasteries of Wales and Cornwall, they were following the
beaten path of Irish missionaries. Their white garments would
draw attention, likewise their curious tonsure that left the head bare
in front of a line drawn from ear to ear, while the rest of their long
locks hung freely. Each priest bore, hanging from the neck, a
"scatula" or bag, in which were to be found his relics, his ritual
books, psalter, sacramentary or Mass-book and the like, his "Chrys-
male" or apparatus for baptism, his chalice, the Holy Scriptures,
other objects of a liturgical character and his mazer or hard- wood
drinking cup.

Their altar was easily set up, in an open field, by the seashore, be-
neath a spreading oak. Their speech was direct and burning, often
rude and unsparing. They were a new apostolate and laid every-
where the knife to the root. Many a semi-Christian breathed more
freely when they shook the dust of his dwelling from their feet and
set forth again, with high uplifted cross and ringing their odd little
bells, each man with his trusty staff cut from an Irish hedge, each
voice thundering the psalms of David or the dear old canticles of
Erin, written anew or transformed for Patrick by those high singers
like Dubtach, whose conversion had turned the long-wavering bal-
ance in favor of Christianity.

Perhaps even then Columbanus had the desire of converting the
Angles and Saxons yet heathen — the Roman mission (596) was,
however, already taking shape in the heart and brain of Saint
Gregory the Great (590-604). Not improbably the contact with the
Christians of Wales and Cornwall had already in some way affected,
no doubt through the Markland of holy Gloucester, the general tem-
perament of the conquering Low Dutch tribes. Perhaps, too, hav-
ing broken the resistance of the Keltic Britons, they were aweary of
slaughter and destruction and, like the Vandals and Goths, sought to
possess and enjoy in peace. No little intermarriage took place
along the smoking border between the Dutch warriors and the cap-
tive women of the Britons. Welsh and Cornish slaves and outlaws
were long an entering wedge for Christianity. A Christian woman
was Queen in Kent. W^ho knows what might have happened had
Ethelberga dared what a few years later the Lombard Theodolinda
did — the calling of Irish missionaries as the first step in a national
conversion ?

Thomas J. Shahan.

Catholic University, Washington.

II Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 453

IL DIALOGO DI GALILEO GALILEI LINCEO.

THE first portion of our article (which appeared in the April
number of this magazine) brought down our narrative to
the point when Galileo was commanded to present himself
in Rome in order to explain his conduct, and the printing of his work
was suspended by an order from the Master of the Sacred Palace.
We did not attempt, lest we should exceed the limits of our space,-
to give a full precis of the Dialogue ; but we might have observed
that even in the first part of it, though less interesting and less imme-
diately bearing on the great question at issue than those which fol-
low, there are yet some remarkable passages indicating the author's
knowledge of mechanics, as, for instance, the velocity acquired by
a ball rolling down a perfectly smooth inclined plane. There are
also some curious specimens of the ideas current among unscientific
though well-educated men at that day. Salviati, for example, finds
it almost impossible to convince Simplicio that the surface of the
Moon IS rough and irregular, like that of the Earth, and not, as he
persists in thinking, perfectly smooth, like a polished mirror.

To resume, however, the narrative where we left it, a special com-
mission which had been appointed to examine the book reported that
Galileo had been disobedient to orders by affirming as an absolute
truth the movement of the earth instaed of stating it as a hypothesis ;
*ii;jB9 sq; jo ;u9ui9Aoui puB uopn^OAaa gq; o; S9pp 9^; Supnqu;;^ Xq
and by deceitfully keeping silence as to the order given him in 1616
to abandon the opinion that the earth revolved, and that the sun was
the centre of the universe.

Another memorial drawn up about the same time accused him
(besides those things just mentioned) of having without leave placed
at the beginning of his work the permission for printing delivered
at Rome ; of having put the true doctrine in the mouth of a fool and
having approved it but feebly by the argument of another inter-
locutor (Sagredo) ; of having treated the subject as one that was not
already decided, in allusion doubtless to the decree of the Index in
1616, and of having affirmed (untruly) the equality supposed to
exist, for understanding geometrical matters, between the divine
and human intellect — an accusation pointing to some apprehen-
sions then existing that false philosophical and theological doc-
trines might be drawn out of Galileo's opinions. The result of all
this was that the old philosopher was summoned to Rome to answer

454 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

for his offenses, and notwithstanding his plea of infirm health and ad-
vanced age he was obliged to obey the summons. On arriving at
Rome he was received at the palace of the Tuscan ambassador,
Niccolini. After a short interval he was conveyed to the office of the
Inquisition and lodged there by the Pope's order well and com-
modiously. On the 12th of April, 1633, he appeared for the first
time before the Inquisition ; he admitted the authorship of the Dia-
logue, and also that the decree of the Index had been notified to
him ; but he stated that Cardinal Bellarmine had informed him that
it was allowed to hold the Copernican doctrine as a hypothesis, and
he did not think he had contravened the order given him that he
should not defend this doctrine; this prohibition, however, we may
observe was probably intended to include indirect support of the
theory in question, as through the medium of a personage in a dia-
logue, though he did not so understand it. This may well have
been the case, but it seems strange indeed that he should have said,
as he appears to have done, that he had not embraced or defended
the opinion that the earth is in motion and the sun stationary, but
had, on the contrary, shown that the reasons produced by Coperni-
cus were feeble and inconclusive. It must be also remembered that
at a subsequent hearing he stated, after having referred to his Dia-
logue, that there were some arguments (one being that of the tides)
which he had put too forcibly. He is also recorded to have said
that he had not held as true the condemned opinion, and was ready
to write something fresh in order to refute it.

It does indeed seem that he had not the courage of his convic-
tions, and it is very possible that he did not make a favorable impres-
sion on his judges, who might well have considered him wanting in
candor and sincerity. In fact, the Pope gave orders that he should
be questioned as to his intention; then after being threatened with
torture (apparently without the view of putting the threat into exe-
cution) he should be made to pronounce an abjuration, and should
be condemned to prison according to the discretion of the Inquisi-
tion, that his treatise should be prohibited and that he should be
forbidden henceforth to treat of the subject by word or by writing.
It has also been stated (though we do not feel quite sure of the fact)
that the last mentioned injunction was laid on him sub poena relapsus;
that is to say, that in case of his disobedience he would be treated
as a relapsed heretic would be; and an attempt has been made for
controversial purposes to show that this threat was tantamount to a
definition that the Copernican theory was a heresy.

It is true that when the Church solemnly condemns a heretic, the
opinion held by the condemned individual is thereby declared to be
heretical. But to maintain that an injunction issued by the Pope

// Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 455

as Head of the Congregation of the Inquisition, and communicated
personally to Gahleo, however severe in a discipHnary point of view,
is to be considered as an ex cathedra decision, is not only contrary
to the best theological opinion, but we may venture to add con-
trary also to common sense. A threat of the practical treatment to
be expected from the Inquisition under certain contingencies is
surely not to be compared with a solemn doctrinal decision by the
Pope speaking e.v cathedra and manifesting his intention (as he does
in such cases) of binding the consciences of all Catholics. The
Pope was in this instance administering discipline rigorously if you
please, but not defining any dogma ; and to attempt to confound the
two things, in themselves essentially different, is one of those con-
troversial stratagems of which we may recognize the smartness,
while we deny its relevancy to the true questions at issue. To re-
turn, however, to our narrative : he was accordingly asked (on the
2 1 St of June) how long he had held the opinion that the sun and not
the earth was the centre of the universe, and he replied that before
the decree of 161 6 he held that the two opinions could be equally
maintained, but that since the decree, being convinced of the pru-
dence of the superior authorities, he had adopted and still held the
opinion of Ptolemy on the mobility of the sun as true and indubita-
ble. Certain passages in his book were then put to him as being
irreconcilable with such statements, and he was threatened with tor-
ture if he did not tell the truth. Yet he persevered in his answer,
as already stated ; and the tribunal, after making him sign his depo-
sition, dismissed him. On the next day (226. of June) he was taken
to Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, and brought before the Cardinals and
Prelates of the Congregation that he might hear his sentence and
pronounce his abjuration.

He had been accused of having openly violated the order given
him not to maintain Copernicanism and of having unfairly extorted
permission to print his book without showing the prohibition re-
ceived in 1616, also of having maintained the condemned opinion,
although he alleged that he had left it undecided and simply proba-
ble, which, however, was still a grave error, since an opinion de-
clared contrary to Scripture could not be in any way probable.

Now it is not generally known, but we believe it to be certainly
the fact, that neither the Cardinals who composed the tribunal of
the Inquisition, nor the Consultors, were unanimous in the con-
demnation of Galileo — a minority being in his favor — but the Pope,
following presumably the general usage, sanctioned the decision of
the majority, though he was by no means obliged to do so. Tech-
nically speaking, this circumstance makes no difference, but it may
be considered as weakening the moral weight of the judgment. The

456 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

sentence was to the effect that GaHleo had rendered himself strongly
suspected of heresy in maintaining and believing a doctrine false
and opposed to Holy Scripture and in believing that one might
maintain any opinion that had been declared contrary to Holy
Scripture. He had therefore incurred the censures in force against
those who offended in such ways, from which, however, he would
be absolved provided that with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith
he would abjure the said errors and heresies, but he was as a penance
and warning to others to undergo certain inflictions, the book was to
be prohibited, he himself was to be condemned to the ordinary
prison of the Holy Office for a time and was to recite the seven peni-
tential psalms once a week for three years. The Holy Office re-
served to itself power to remit or change part or all of these pen-
ances. It is well known that Galileo abjured accordingly. There
is a legend, also well known, that after doing so he stamped with his
foot on the ground, and said : "E pur si muove" (and yet it, i. e., the
earth, does move), but there is no authority for this most unlikely
story, and it may be dismissed as fabulous. The Pope at once com-
muted the sentence of imprisonment to one of seclusion in the Palace
of the Tuscan Ambassador in the Monte Pincio. Indeed all
throughout there had been a disposition to treat him in such a way
as to avoid personal or bodily severity, the above mentioned threat
of torture not being intended presumably to be ever carried out.
He was afterwards allowed to retire to Siena, the Archbishop of
which place (Piccolomini by name), one of his warmest friends, re-
ceived him into his palace and treated him with all possible kindness
and attention ; indeed, if the reports that reached Rome were true,
the Archbishop seems to have gone beyond the limits of prudence,
considering the peculiar circumstances of the case, for he is said to
have hinted to varjous persons that in his opinion Galileo had been
unjustly condemned ; that he was the greatest man in the world and
would always live in his writings. If so, he did more harm than good
to his friend, for the report of these observations, coupled with an
accusation from some hostile source that Galileo had, under the en-
couragement of his host the Archbishop, spread opinions in Siena
that were not soundly Catholic, caused some additional strictness
to be enforced as to the manner of his subsequent seclusion.

Whatever may have been the injudicious remarks of the kind and
friendly prelate, we are not disposed to believe in the truth of the
accusation against Galileo himself; prudence and discretion were
not leading features in his character, but we do not credit the report
that he spread dangerous opinions in Siena ; it would have been the
height of folly on his part to do so, instead of occupying his leisure
in gazing on the beauties of the magnificent Cathedral, the glory of

// Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 457

that city, built within and without of black and white marble, and
marking the transition from the old Italian to the Gothic style of
architecture, with its row of circular arches, surmounted by the fine
Gothic windows above. He did not, however, remain very long at
Siena, but went back to his house at Arcetri, near Florence, where
he lived for four years in a somewhat strict seclusion. At a later
period, in 1638, owing to his increasing infirmities — for he had be-
come at least partially blind — permission was given him to reside
in Florence on condition that he should not speak to his visitors on
the subject of the movement of the earth. He consequently re-
sided in Florence during the few remaining years of his life, and he
died on the 8th of January, 1642, in his 78th year. He had occu-
pied his time since his condemnation in mathematical and mechan-
ical studies, and in fact had published another dialogue on these very
subjects, introducing the same three disputants as before. Sim-
plicio bears a somewhat similar part to that in the former dialogue.
He is no simpleton, but he is uninstructed in these questions, yet
willing to learn.^

We are not, as we have already intimated, writing a full biograph-
ical notice of Galileo, nor are we giving a full list of his discoveries,
but we may justly say of him that in a scientific point of view he was,
with the possible exception of Kepler, the first man of his day. It
is related of him that by watching the motion of a lamp suspended
in the Cathedral at Pisa he acquired the knowledge of the law which
regulates the vibrations of a pendulum, a law familiar at the present
time to all persons who are acquainted with the principles of me-
chanics, but not then known. We have already stated that he was
amongst the first, indeed probably the very first, who applied the
telescope to astronomical purposes, and thereby did more than any
one before him to demolish the old system of Ptolemy and others.

He it was, moreover, who first understood the law that regulates
the velocity of falling bodies ; he perceived that they were acted upon
by an uniformly accelerating force, that of terrestrial gravity, the
existence of which he recognized, though not, of course, understand-
ing the far-reaching character of that mysterious force.

We have said, too, that his mind was never in a state of stagna-
tion ; as long as he lived he was progressing in the acquirement of
scientific truth, and thus before the close of his life he emancipated
himself from the erroneous notion that circular motion alone is
naturally uniform, and we can scarcely suppose that Kepler's dis-
coveries should have been without some influence. on his active
mind. Again, in the Dialogue on Mechanics to which we have

1 There is a copy of this curious work in the library of the Royal Astronomical
Society in London, contained in a handsome Italian edition of Galileo's works;
there is also an English translation of it, published early in the eighteenth century.

458 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

alluded (published as late as 1638) he introduced words which im-
plied a discovery of what is known as the first law of motion, the
first of the three laws which now bear Newton's name and which
is to the effect that every body perseveres in its state of rest or of
uniform motion in a straight line unless it be compelled to change
that state by forces impressed on it. This law involved nothing less
than a revolution in the conception of the laws of motion as pre-
viously understood. Many people, though otherwise educated,
probably even now do not understand it, and in Galileo's days it was
wholly unknown.

We think it right to call attention to the great attainments of this
eminent man of science, for we think we have noticed in the remarks
of some Catholic writers a tendency to undervalue them and to rep-
resent him as one who made certainly a good guess, which subse-
quently turned out to be correct, but which at the time was based
on false or insufficient proofs. How far this is from being the fact
we have already seen. Writers of this class have never studied the
Dialogue, as we have already remarked, nor have they learnt to ap-
preciate the important contribution that Galileo made to the science
of his day.

The condemnation of the Copernican theory involved in the sen-
tence of the Inquisition was, we believe, enforced stringently, nor
was it relaxed for more than 120 years. But in the year 1757, under
the Pontificate of Benedict XIV., a new Index was pubHshed, in
which the prohibition of books teaching the Copernican theory was
omitted. Such a step would not have been taken without the sanc-
tion of the Inquisition; it was nevertheless considered expedient
after the lapse of more than sixty years to give a more explicit de-
cision on the subject, and in the year 1820 a distinct permission was
given by the Holy Office for teaching the movement of the earth,
and again in 1822 (a re-examination of the whole subject having
taken place) a decree was issued, sanctioned by the reigning Pope,
Leo XII., declaring that the printing and publishing at Rome of
works treating of the movement of the earth and the immobility of
the sun was henceforth permitted.

Much hostile criticism, as we all know, has been leveled against
the Roman Congregations of the Inquisition and the Index for their
prohibition of Copernican writings and books and for the condemna-
tion of Galileo, and we do not consider it to be any part of our duty,
writing though we are from a strictly Catholic standpoint, to de-
fend them. Yet there are circumstances that require to be borne in
mind as at least affording some explanation of the inflexible severity
with which the advocates of the new astronomical theory were
treated.

// Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 459

We who have been taught from our childhood that the earth re-
volves daily on its axis and annually round the sun may well be
surprised at the opposition which these elementary truths (as we
now consider them) encountered in an age not so very remote from
our own as the early part of the seventeenth century. But the teach-
ing of this astronomical theory struck a formidable blow at various
notions and ideas prevalent in the middle ages, and natural enough
before the telescope was invented. It must have been a terrible
revulsion of feeling for men who had always looked on the earth as
the physical centre of the Universe to be taught that it was a planet
moving like others round the sun. Then we must also remember
that good and sound as were some of the arguments used by Galileo
in the Dialogue, they were not absolutely conclusive, and indeed
were not considered by himself to be so; for had they been so, he
could not, without being guilty of gross falsehood, have answered his
judges in the way he did. Even as it was, he seems to have made
an unfavorable impression on them by his apparent want of candor ;
besides which a circumstance which tended to create a prejudice
against him in their minds was the fact of the Dialogue having been
written in the vernacular language. To us that may indeed appear
a strange objection to make to any scientific work, but Latin was at
that time the language in general use among men of learning and
was adopted by Newton many years later when he published his
"Principia." The feeling amongst the Roman ecclesiastics proba-
bly was that an essay addressed to experts in a language known only
to the learned was a different thing from one addressed to the gen-
eral public in a language known to all.

Speculations on what might hav^e been the result if people had
acted differently are perhaps not much to the purpose, but we have
sometimes thought that if Galileo had been more plainly straight-
forward, had acknowledged that he inclined to Copernicanism as a
scientific hypothesis, but stated that he would not teach it if the ec-
clesiastical authorities forbade him to do so, he might have made a
far better impression on his judges, and perhaps have converted the
minority already disposed to favor him into a majority.

We may here observe that having so frequently used the word
Copernican to designate the modern system of astronomy as opposed
to that of Ptolemy and others, we employ the expression for the
sake of convenience, and not as intending to imply that the theory
as stated by Copernicus is now held by any astronomer ; for his idea
was that the earth and the planets moved in circles, round the sun,
which we now know to be a mistake, as was afterwards shown by
Kepler and Newton. The orbits of the planets are elliptical, the
sun being in one of the foci.

460 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Having given a brief but (as we hope) a sufficient resume of the
facts bearing on GaHleo's case, we now proceed to discuss the ec-
clesiastical force and bearing of the decrees of the Inquisition and the
Index, both as regards contemporary Catholics and as regards our-
selves, or in other words, the Church considered generally and apart
from the particular case of the Catholics of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The latter question, though immeasurably
the more important, is easier and simpler to deal with. In answer
then to the hostile critics who have alleged that the infallibility of the
Church is compromised by the above mentioned sentence and de-
crees, we state what we believe is the doctrine generally if not uni-
versally held by the best Roman theologians. It amounts to this :
No decision of a Roman Congregation as such, even though sanc-
tioned by the Pope as Head of the Congregation, is infallible ; or to
employ the usual technical expression, irreformable. If, however,
the Pope takes up any decision and promulgates it in such a way
that he makes it his own, and manifests his intention of binding all
Catholics to receive it, then, provided, of course, that it be a matter
of faith or morals, it becomes irreformable, as indeed is evident from
the decree of the Vatican Council. This certainly was not done in
the case of Galileo, nor in fact was it ever done in that age in any
case whatever.

The Roman Congregations, as we have ventured to remark else-
where, seem to us to resemble the outworks of an impregnable fort-
ress ; they may be taken by the enemy (owing to the mistake of some
officer) and subsequently recovered; damage more or less serious
may have been caused, but the fortress remains secure as ever. We
must not, however, be understood as denying that there have been,
and may again be, decisions of a Congregation of such a purely
doctrinal character that though technically speaking not irreforma-
ble, they may be considered as morally and theologically certain, and
their reception as such be enforced by the Holy See. The case of
Professor Ubags seems one of this nature. No work of his was put
on the Index, but certain doctrines or opinions extracted from his
works were condemned by the United Congregations of the Index
and Inquisition, and the decision was ratified and confirmed by the
Pope, Pius IX.

During the same Pontificate there occurred another instance,
totally different as to the details of treatment, but similar in princi-
ple, in the condemnation of the works of Giinther, a theologian and
philosopher of some distinction. His books appear to have been
put upon the Index without any extracts being selected for censure
or any reason assigned (as indeed is generally the usage with books
that are prohibited), upon which Giinther and many of his followers

// Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 461

submitted, but others contended that a mere disciplinary decree was
not conclusive. The Pope, however, addressed a brief to the Arch-
bishop of Cologne, intimating that a decree sanctioned by his au-
thority and published by his order (which had already been done)
should have sufficed to close the question ; that the doctrine taught
by Giinther could not be held to be true, and that it was not hence-
forth permitted to any one to defend it.

This may strike us, at the first moment, as exceptionally strong
language to use in the case of a prohibitory decree in which no ex-
plicit censure was pronounced and for which no reason was as-
signed, but the fact is that the decree, though in form merely of a
disciplinary character, was founded on important doctrinal reasons,
since Giinther's chief error had been already condemned by the
Council of Vienne, We may observe, moreover, that the words in
the Pope's brief to which we have alluded do not read as if they were
a definition of a matter of faith, stringent and forcible though they
were.

We have heard it remarked by a theologian holding an important
official position in one of the Roman Congregations that all the
Congregational decisions, even those that touch upon doctrine, are
to a certain extent disciplinary in their character, and in fact have
the nature of what the Italians would term a "providimento." At
the same time (as the same able theologian stated on another occa-
sion) there are decisions which impose internal assent per se, but not
the assent of faith. This is implied by the duty of obedience and
our knowledge of the care and prudence brought to bear on the
point at issue, but even so such decision may not always be binding
on some one who has special reasons for entertaining a misgiving
as to its being a sound decision. Hence — he proceeded to state —
the possible and in some cases actual reversal of Congregational de-
cisions propter noviter deducta. It must still be remembered that the
prohibitive action of any Roman Congregation must in any case be
obeyed, and that it is not lawful for any one to teach a doctrine so
condemned as long as the prohibition is in force.

It is obvious that the decisions of the Roman Congregations may
be divided into three classes: those which are so immediately and
directly doctrinal, as in the two cases mentioned above, that even if
not properly speaking infallible, they must be considered as prac-
tically irreversible. Then on the other hand there are the purely
disciplinary decisions, some of them of a temporary nature, but all
requiring obedience as long as they are in force. Finally there are
others which are, strictly speaking, disciplinary, but are grounded on
doctrinal reasons to such an extent as to give them indirectly the
character of doctrinal decisions (and to impose the obligation of in-

462 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ternal assent, at least under the limitations above mentioned), but
not so as to render them irreformable.

Considerations such as these lead us to the answer we have to give
to the former of the two questions which we undertook to discuss,
namely, the efifect of the anti-Copernican decrees on the conscience
and conduct of Catholics — we mean, of course, good and obedient
Catholics — between the time of Galileo and that of the new Index
(omitting the former prohibitions) under Benedict XIV. The de-
crees evidently belong to the last named class ; they were disciplinary
in respect of their immediate purport, but were based on the ques-
tion of the interpretation of Scripture.

Thus we have seen that the majority who carried the decision of
the Holy Office in 1633, condemning Galileo, referred to the former
decree of the Index as having declared the Copernican theory to be
contrary to Holy Scripture, that having been the reason explicitly
stated for the prohibition of certain works written on the Copernican
side.

Decrees such as these may be reconsidered and (to repeat the
words we have already quoted) be reversed propter noviter deducta.
It is notorious that the interpretation of Scripture has in some re-
spects varied at different times. We say in some respects, because
there are some portions of Scripture, relating t6 doctrine in the strict
sense of the word, which we are forbidden to interpret otherwise than
according to the common consent of the Fathers. But it is evident
that the interpretation of passages bearing on some other subjects,
such as physical science, has considerably varied at different periods.

Besides the case now under consideration, there is one which must
occur to every one who reflects on the subject, the Scriptural narra-
tive of the creation of the world. We ourselves can remember the
time when it would have been considered a rash and dangerous thing
— and perhaps by Protestants more than by Catholics — to interpret
the six days of the Mosaic record otherwise than as meaning natural
days of 24 hours, and yet scarcely any one does so now. Then,
again, the opinion that the body of man, as" considered separately
from his soul, was derived from a lower animal, would formerly
have been considered as rank infidelity; and yet it is not now sup-
posed generally to be contra Mem, though perhaps temerarious.

Indeed this principle of Scriptural interpretation was held by no
less a man than Cardinal Bellarmine ; for in a letter addressed to the
Carmelite Father Foscarini, after admitting that there was no objec-
tion to the Copernican doctrine if stated hypothetically, though there
would be if stated positively and as a reality, he goes on to say that
when there should be a real demonstration that the sun stands in
the centre of the universe and that the earth revolves around it, it

// Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 463

would then be necessary to proceed with great consideration in ex-
plaining those passages of Scripture which seem to be contrary to
it ; and rather to say that we do not understand them than say that a
thing which is demonstrated is false. He would not, however, until
it had been shown to him, beheve that there could be any such
demonstration, and in a case of doubt one ought not to leave the in-
terpretation of Scripture as given by the Fathers. This letter was
dated ist April, 161 5, nearly a year before the decree of the Index;
but Bellarmine probably foresaw at the time that some such decree
would take place ; and indeed he is generally supposed to have had
a considerable share in bringing it about.

And he did not by any means stand alone in his opinion. The
Jesuit Father Fabri, many years later (probably about fifty years), in
replying to some correspondent who maintained the Copernican
theory, wrote as follows : "There is no reason why the Church
should not understand those texts in their literal sense and declare
that they should be so understood so long as there is no demonstra-
tion to prove the contrary. But if any such demonstration here-
after be devised by your party (which I do not at all expect), in that
case the Church will not at all hesitate to set forth that these texts
are to be understood in an improper — i. e., non-literal — and figura-
tive sense, according to the words of the poet, Herraque urbesque
recedunt.' " This Father Fabri appears to have held the office of
Canon Penitentiary of St. Peter's.

It is also said that Father Grassi in an interview that he had with
Guidacci some few years subsequently to the decree of the Index
(probably about 1623) expressed himself in similar language : "When
a demonstration of this movement" (that of the earth) "shall be dis-
covered, it will be fitting to interpret Scripture otherwise than has
hitherto been done ; this is the opinion of Cardinal Bellarmine."

If this then was the opinion of a learned theologian like Cardinal
Bellarmine, who when he expressed it was in all probability laboring
to get the Copernican theory condemned by such a decree as was
subsequently issued, we have a strong confirmation of the view we
have stated above, viz., that decisions of this nature, that is, resting
on the question of the interpretation of Scripture, are reversible
''propter noviter deducta," i. e., when a fresh light has been thrown on
the subject.

We incline then to the opinion that men whose education and
knowledge of astronomy fitted them to form any judgment upon
the question at issue were not at any time bound tp give interior
assent to the decrees of the Index and the Inquisition ; and even if
they had been so, it would not have involved more than a suspension
of judgment until fresh evidence were forthcoming. Outward

464 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

obedience was, however, required, and no one could read the forbid-
den works without permission or publish a work advocating the
Copernican doctrine excepting as a scientific hypothesis, merely-
stated as such.

An illustration of the attitude expected from Catholics qualified
as we have just supposed may be found in the conduct of the two
Fathers of the order of Minims, Le Seur and Jacquier, who pub-
lished without rebuke an edition of the Principia of Newton in the
year 1742, when the decrees were still in force, in which they inserted
a protest to the effect that they entirely conformed themselves to
the decrees of the Church on the question involved. It need scarcely
be remarked that the principles put forth by Newton were entirely
destructive of the old Ptolemean system of astronomy, and indeed
supplied the key to the true motion of the heavenly bodies in a way
which had never before been done.

And this leads us to observe that the discovery of the law of uni-
versal gravitation has justly been attributed to Newton; for he was
the first to grapple with it thoroughly, and to show by the aid of his
great mathematical genius how strong were the probabilities of its
truth. Others, however, had guessed, at least partially, that some
law of the kind regulated the motions of the heavenly bodies, and
Hooke (a contemporary of Newton) had certainly come very near
to the perception of its truth. Indeed, a young curate in the north
of England, Horrox by name, the first observer of a transit of Venus,
which took place in the year 1639, whose brilliant scientific career
was cut off by an early death, might if he had lived have left a name
in astronomical history as the discoverer of the great problem ; for
the identity of the force which acts on the heavenly bodies with that
which attracts the objects we see around us to the earth — the great
point of Newton's discovery — appears to have occurred to his mind ;
but as we have already said, he did not live to work it out, and New-
ton has obtained the credit, and rightly so, of "the greatest scientific
discovery ever made," as it has not inaptly been called.

Even so, however, there were difficulties in its reception, and it
was not until after the lapse of several years that it was universally
received even by men of science.

Our space does not allow of our explaining in detail the reasons
which we now have for considering the Copernican theory of astron-
omy (using the word Copernican in the sense we have already stated)
as a scientific truth admitting of no appreciable doubt. The theory
of universal gravitation may be treated as a moral certainty, and if it
be true, it follows that when two heavenly bodies have a motion
of revolution imparted to them, they both revolve round their
common centre of gravity; if the masses of the two bodies are

// Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo. 465

nearly equal or at least not vastly unequal, the centre of gravity
will lie somewhere between them, and they will both revolve round
it, as is the case with many of the stars, the double stars as they are
termed ; if the mass of one body is enormously greater than that of
the other it may be that the common centre of gravity lies within
the volume of the larger and more massive body, as is the case with
the earth and the sun, and therefore the earth revolves truly round
the sun ; but as Newton (confirming Kepler's theory) showed, not in
a circle, but in an ellipse, in a focus of which the sun is situated.

The invention of the telescope shook to its foundation the old
Ptolemean system of astronomy ; the establishment of the theory of
universal gravitation (with some subsequent discoveries) gave it its
death-blow.

It must still be remembered that the conviction we have of the
truth of the Copernican system is not the same in character as that
arising from rigid experimental treatment (such as one gets in some
sciences) ; experiments of a strictly demonstrative nature are not
practicable in this case. What we, however, have is a moral cer-
tainty so strong as to exclude all reasonable doubt.

We have been led to make these observations partly by the cir-
cumstance above mentioned of the permitted publication by the two
Minim fathers of the Principia of Newton with the protest inserted
as to their submission to the decrees of the Church. Any capable
mathematician on reading such a work could not but see that though
stated as a mere hypothesis, Newton's theory carried with it a con-
siderable probability of its truth.

We must not omit to notice the Bull of Alexander VII., published
in 1644, which authorized a new Index and for that purpose incorpo-
rated it with the Bull itself. This also has been used for a contro-
versial purpose, it being alleged that a solemn Papal sanction was
hereby given to the anti-Copernican decrees. This is a good argu-
mentum ad honiinem as against certain theologians who have tried to
draw a distinction between decrees that are actually signed by the
Pope and those that (like that of the Index of 161 3) are not so
signed, though it is notorious that they had the Pope's approbation
as Head of the Congregation. As we do not adopt that line of
argument, all that is necessary for us to say is that we consider the
Bull not as a dogmatic one, but one of a purely disciplinary char-
acter, and that it gave no greater sanction to the new Index than
the old one already had. We scarcely think it necessary in address-
ing the readers of this Review to argue that the Church has a right
to put some restriction on the indiscriminate publication of books
and on indiscriminate reading, even though the books should be of a
scientific character and should advocate some theory, doubtful at
Vol. XXVI— 4

466 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the time, but which afterwards turns out to be true. The interests
which the Church is safeguarding are far more important than those
of physical science, even if the latter sustain some temporary draw-
back ; and we cannot admit that the occurrence of a mistake in ad-
ministering ecclesiastical discipHne (as in the case before us), how-
ever much we may regret it, can be considered as interfering with
the soundness of the general principle.

Indeed we believe that Galileo himself, were he still living amongst
us, would agree with the opinion we have just stated ; that he might
complain of the application of the ecclesiastical discipline in his own
case, but would approve of the principle of it, for he lived and died
(notwithstanding certain faults, and one grave fault in early life) a
good and devout son of the Catholic Church.

And perhaps this circumstance may help to explain the retractation
before the Inquisition. True it is that his conduct seems wanting in
candor, and it probably gave that impression to his judges ; but we
do not know what passed in his mind, and it is possible that in a mat-
ter which was not free from doubt, however great the probability of
the theory might appear to be, he thought it right to defer to the
ecclesiastical authorities for the time being and waive his own scien-
tific judgment. At all events, it is more pleasing to take this view of
his abjuration than to attribute it entirely to fear or other unworthy
motive.

We think it will not be inappropriate if we quote here an extract
from a work of Cardinal Newman's, for he particularly refers to the
case of Galileo. It is from the introduction to the "Via Media," the
edition published many years after the Cardinal's conversion :

*'As to the particular measures taken at the time with this end, I
neither know them accurately nor have I any anxiety to know them.
They do not fall within the scope of my argument ; I am only con-
cerned with the principle on which they were conducted. All I say
is that not all knowledge is suited to all minds ; a proposition may be
ever so true, yet at a particular time and place may be 'temerarious,
ofifensive to pious ears and scandalous,' though not 'heretical' nor
'erroneous.' It must be recollected what very strong warnings we
have from our Lord and St. Paul against scandalizing the weak and
unintellectual. The latter goes into detail upon the point. He says
that true as it may be that certain meats are allowable, this allow-
ance cannot in charity be used in a case in which it would be of
spiritual injury to others."

We quote these words as confirming by the opinion of this illus-
trious author the general principle for which we are contending, not
as meeting all the difficulties that have been raised as to Galileo.
The learned Cardinal admits that he did not know the details of the

// Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo, 467

case ; if he had known them he would have seen that it was not a
mere question of putting a few works on the Index because they
were inopportune or because they gave scandal to weak brethren,
or without assigning any reason (as is now customary) ; but that far
graver issues were raised. Moreover, with regard to the assertion
made by some writers that public opinion was so much excited by
the Copernican theory at that time that it was necessary to take some
steps to satisfy it and so avoid scandal, we should like to know what
evidence there is for such statements, for we do not ourselves believe
them to be true. A certain number of learned ecclesiastics, some,
too, in high places, were no doubt alarmed; those who took their
science from Aristotle were up in arms ; but it is probable that the
mass of the faithful knew very little and cared very little about the
subject. Nor was the theory in question a mere novelty; it had
been before the minds of the learned since the days of Copernicus,
whose work, printed shortly before the death of the author in 1543,
had been dedicated to the reigning Pope, Paul III., and had in fact
been rather favorably received.

We think then that the true answer to be made to our antagonists
who use the case of Galileo as a handle to attack the Church is to
insist upon the principle that the Church has a right to prohibit the
indiscriminate reading of any book, even if it contain very probable
speculations and theories on physical science ; but to admit frankl)r
that a mistake was made in this particular instance, for it is obvious;
to those who are acquainted with the facts that the action taken by
the Cardinals of the Index and the Inquisition went much beyond
the mere suspension or temporary prohibition of an inopportune or
imprudent work.

We doubt whether there is another instance of a work being so
severely censured as was the Dialogue, considering that it bears no
less than four ecclesiastical "Imprimaturs" — that of the Vicegerent
of Rome with the condition ''si videhitur Reverendiss. P. Magistro
Sacri Palatii Apostolici;" that of the Master of the Sacred Palace
himself. Fa. Riccardi ; that of the Vicar General of Florence, ''ordin-
ibus consuetis servatis" and lastly that of the Inquisitor General of
Florence.

There is, we believe, a memoir of Galileo written by his daughter,
one of those mentioned in the beginning of our article. The book,
we suppose, is a rare one, and we have not seen a copy of it. This
lady was a nun in a convent at Florence or in the neighborhood,
and was greatly attached to Galileo. If we are correctly informed,
she quite bears out what we have already stated, that no personal ill
treatment or bodily severity was inflicted on him. We need not,
however, dwell upon this, as the antagonists against whom we are

468 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

writing do not, generally speaking, allege this supposed cruelty, or at
least do not lay any stress upon it, their object being rather to dis-
credit the Catholic Church than to excite feelings of pity for the
individual sufferer.

We commenced our article by pleading, in justification for recur-
ring to such a well-worn subject, that whether we like it or not it is
being constantly revived at intervals and handled afresh fairly or un-
fairly.

An instance of this occurs at the present time. At the ancient
University of Oxford there is an annual competition for an English
prize poem on a given subject, and the successful competitor recites
his poetry in public amidst the plaudits of his friends and fellow-
students. The subject given for 1901 is Galileo. Let us hope that
the youthful aspirants for this popular distinction may on the one
hand avoid the temptation to assail the Catholic Church, and yet on
the other hand do justice to the character of the great philosopher —
the pioneer of modern astronomy.

F. R. Wegg-Prosser.

London, England.

THE SOCIALISM OF THE SOCIALIST.

IT is often said that one way to foster a cause is to misunderstand
it. Opposition which is based on misunderstanding seems to
make more intense the attachment of those who believe in the
cause ; their enthusiasm is sustained, their sense of justice is quick-
ened and their methods of propaganda acquire a pointedness which
undoubtedly gives them force. This is noticed often in social move-
ments. In the earlier stages the movement is vague, confused, un-
certain; the details of its essential meaning are not clear because
thought and feeling lack precision. Hence they who embrace it
may least understand. Such a condition very naturally leads to
misunderstanding which in turn invites opposition. But when the
movement meets opposition it becomes introspective. The defense
which is made brings about clear thinking and exact expression.
Gradually the vital thought of the movement comes to conscious
expression, and then force, unity and organization result. Objec-
tive study from those outside largely displaces prejudice and the
movement receives dignified recognition.

These thoughts find illustration in the history of Socialism. In
its earlier stages it was wild, fantastic and impossible, an air castle

The Socialism of the Socialist. 469

in many forms built by excited dreamers. Later it was a confused
mass of popular agitation, conspiracy and politics, boundless aspira-
tion and keen economic analysis, allied by choice, accident or fate to
anarchy, riot or revolution, a favorite resort for all who hated insti-
tutions and had lost reverence for the past and hope for the future.
In that confused stage Socialism invited and met misunderstanding
and organized opposition. It has, however, succeeded in disengag-
ing itself fairly well from all that is more radical and all that is less
radical than itself ; from anarchy on one hand and from Populism,
Trade Unionism and the like on the other. It is true that there are
points of contact, but the differences of policy and principle are pro-
nounced and they are understood by reflecting persons. To-day
Socialism knows its own essential idea, though hopelessly at sea
concerning its details. It is self-conscious, direct and aggressive
with recognized methods of propaganda and a record of achieve-
ment which we may not ignore. It is the doctrine of a political
party which has reached extraordinary proportions in Germany,
great proportions in France, Belgium, Italy and Austria, though
not yet a factor of much importance in American life. It has created
a literature and a press ; it has its poets, historians and economists ;
it has taken a place in modern life which promises it a future with
which society must reckon.

Setting aside for the moment the many "socialisms" which are
spoken of nowadays, we may say for present purposes that there are
three Socialisms. First, we have the movement in itself; a deep,
far-reaching social force whose full meaning is not yet grasped by
men, working out its providential role in human history indepen-
dently of our efforts to master it. Secondly, there is a Socialism
which opponents see : minimized in what is attractive, magnified in
what is hideous, illogical and defective. Thirdly, we have the Social-
ism of the Socialist ; real, comprehensive, satisfying ; its own apology
and explanation, answering all questions with authority, allaying all
fears with power. It does not occur to the Socialist that his pre-
possession converts assumptions into axioms, baseless promise into
infallible prophecy, and that it has so perverted his mental tests that,
as regards the present social order, criticism is true if only radical,
wisdom is real if only confident and statement is true if only bold.
Socialism seems to me to mean just such a mental revolution, but
the Socialist is not conscious of the psychological process which
brings it about. Those of us who cannot accept its creed certainly
find it gravely at fault and a source of danger to society. Neverthe-
less, it is not our view of it that is the power. It is the Socialism of
the believer, of the Socialist, that is the world movement which has
won adherents, created a literature, organized parties, fought battles,

470 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

won and lost them. If we persist in taking only our own view of
Socialism, our opposition to it is useless toil and vain concern. We
may, perhaps, prevent it from spreading in certain directions by the
attempt to show that there is in it too much reckless hope and
despair. But something more is needed. We must understand
the Socialist's subjective side, know him sympathetically, seek the
sources of attraction other than argument to which Socialism owes
much of its strength.

Fair minded observers agree that many phases of the conditions
in modem life are deplorable. "Only too abundant is the harvest
of miseries," to quote the recent encyclical. The evils complained
of are absolute and they are not softened by any relative considera-
tions of those who in the past suffered more or of those who in the
future may suffer less. The relative view may be of service in judg-
ing institutions, but it is useless to console their victims. One of
the chief factors in the situation is the distribution of wealth.
Though we admit, as is maintained, that the present distribution is
the best possible in the circumstances, it is at best very bad. For a
century and a quarter individuals have been left to themselves and
circumstances to earn their living, to accumulate property. Life
has so shaped itself and institutions are so adjusted as a result that
the amount of wealth which one possesses or of which one disposes
practically determines one's opportunity of education, culture, health
and home. We are accustomed to say that a man is "worth" a cer-
tain sum, and if the amount is large, that statement is generally the
second headline in his obituary notice. Individuals are enabled to
project the sphere of their influence into the future by inheritance
laws which permit men to control property long after they have
passed away. We cannot escape this central fact that the accident
of property affects and largely controls life, crime, morals, culture,
home. The struggle among individuals to acquire property has
become unremitting, fierce and almost savage, and it has charged
the atmosphere with inhumanity and materialism which have af-
fected nearly every phase of life.

Like heavy, grimy smoke, settling down on the city from which
it has just ascended, on marble and granite, smirching cathedral,
mansion and capitol, that social atmosphere has tainted our re-
ligious, political and social institutions to a marked degree. This
was made possible by the disintegration to which social life had
been subjected. The middle ages saw the organic unity of social
life realized. Religion was the basic element; political, industrial,
social and domestic interests were conceived as closely related, and
thus organic unity was not only a fact in individual life, but as well
in social life.

The Socialism- of the Socialist. 471

The first break in that social unity came in the Reformation,
whose individuaHsm practically placed religion in a secondary place
in society. Political individualism followed later, reducing the State
as a political force to a very restricted field. Then came the eco-
nomic gospel of laissez faire, in which individualism pure and simple
is the law of industrial action. The organic unity of social life thus
destroyed, the economic forces forged ahead. The industrial war —
the struggle for property — ^waged fiercely. The sense of the re-
sponsibility of society to the individual and of the individual to
society even in economic interests was weakened. Selfishness, class
antagonism, inhumanity and materialism naturally resulted and
marked the history of individualism with dark lines.

Since this individualism is the antithesis of Socialism, which is
merely a reaction, the fundamental relations of the two require a
word.

State stands between individual and society. We may imagine a
condition of society in which the individual enjoys a maximum of
liberty; we may imagine another in which a minimum only is ac-
corded to him. As a rule individuals have accorded to society as a
whole the right to protect and direct them and to preserve order.
Society doing this is called the State. It is the State that defines
and guarantees rights, raises armies, levies taxes and punishes crime.
The State can interfere much or little in any line of social activity ;
it can direct and even coerce individuals, or it may leave them free
in matters relating to religion, education, industry and the like.
When the policy of the State is to interfere as little as possible and to
allow as much liberty as possible, the trend is called individualistic ;
when the policy of the State is to interfere extensively, control de-
tails and leave but little room for self direction, the tendency is
literally socialistic. Historical development, however, has restricted
the use of the terms to political and economic activity. The theory
which allows the State to interfere as little as possible in industry is
called Individualism, while the theory which requires that the State
or society take over the entire field of industry is called Socialism.

The line of thought which the Socialist of to-day takes is some-
thing like the following: Life in society has been practically re-
duced to a struggle for property. The strong are arrayed against
one another and the weak are their victims. In principle the State
may not check the former or assist the latter, since it admits little re-
sponsibility for the economic condition of the individual. It does
not limit the amount of wealth that one may accumulate nor does it
measure the pangs and distress that one may suffer. Endowment,
cunning and circumstances largely determine one's lot in life. The
benefits of civilization are not distributed evenly to men as men;

47^ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

they are distributed unevenly to the owners of property. All crimes
and vice, degradation and misery, defeat and arrested development
due to the struggle for property, all due to its excess or to the lack
of it, must be charged to individualism.

The social condition, the number and kind of evils which mark it
have become such that a radical remedy is imperative. The situa-
tion contradicts our best thinking, hence the mad struggle for prop-
erty must be stopped. A plan of social reorganization must be de-
vised which will eliminate the property motive from individual life ;
one which will rest on the principle that all the members of society
are responsible to each member and each is responsible to all, even
in industrial life. If man is social, if he has human rights and these"
rights spring from his nature as man, not from his ability to outwit
his fellow-man in a competitive struggle, then industrial life must be
in harmony, in peace. Social organization must be tender to the
weak, humane to the suffering, masterful to the strong and just to
all. This is possible, continues our Socialist, only under Socialism.
Individualistic institutions must be banished; instead of private
ownership of capital, social ownership; instead of the competitive
struggle, orderly cooperation; instead of private enterprise, social
direction of industry ; instead of individual ownership of the product,
social ownership with distribution according to some principle yet
to be devised, but one which at all events will directly protect man's
essential dignity and rights.

The stupendous revolution in social life which that proposition
implies cannot be measured. The vastness of the project renders
it vague and the vicissitudes of its history but add to the indefinite-
ness. Socialism is the platform of a party ; it is a religion, it is ma-
terialistic; one could enumerate mafty forms which seem mutually
exclusive. But that variety need not engage us now. For the pur-
poses of this study we may take it as a deep, radical, comprehensive
criticism of society. It holds that social conditions and institutions
violate our accepted appreciations of man, his dignity, nature, rights.
The right to liberty, equality, fraternity, to fullest mental, moral
and physical development, to exemption from misery, degrada-
tion and ignorance, are not enjoyed except by the favored few.
Socialism takes these accepted views of man and his rights and
aspires to establish social institutions which will infallibly guarantee
them. That being its object, it proposes as a means thereto that
society own all capital, control all industry and distribute the pro-
duct according to principles of justice. We thus find in the essen-
tial thought of Socialism definite ethical conceptions, economic and
political doctrine and a dominant ideal.

Unfortunately for clear thinking, the word socialism is much

The Socialism of the Socialist, 473

abused. We have the terms Christian Socialism, Catholic Social-
ism, Municipal Socialism, State Socialism and many more. The
habit of applying the name to any reform movement, as is often
done, has caused much difficulty to those who wish to think honestly
and clearly. Since the movement is known, in outline at least, to
all who are interested in social questions, and abundant socialistic
literature is easily found, no further attempt is made to examine the
meaning of the term Socialism. It may be well to quote from the
recent encyclical of the Holy Father the meaning which the term
has in his mind and the form in which he has condemned it :

The Socialists ''would have the supreme power in a State to be in
the hands of the common people, in such sort that all distinctions of
rank being abolished and every citizen made equal to every other,
all might have equal access also to the good things of life ; the law of
lordship is to be abolished, private fortunes confiscated and even
socialization of the appliances of labor carried out."^

A glance at society as we see it and live in it to-day reveals to us
that dissatisfaction is well nigh universal. From every recognized
centre of social influence there comes the tone of bitter discontent
and disappointment. The achievements of our institutions, all that
we have done for civilization, the conditions in which social forces
are now operating and all the prospects for betterment fall far short
of the demands that are made by the awakened and sympathetic in-
telligence of to-day. The complaints vary in depth, character and
motive, but they are none the less marked, none the less efficient in
fostering a restless desire for relief from any source.

We hear persistent criticism of society from religious centres.
Professedly Christian as is our civilization, only a fraction of our
people are churchgoers, and of that fraction perhaps a minority con-
sistently accept the Gospel standards in their lives. The trend of
things has relegated religion to the domain of individual concern,
and public opinion is scarcely more than deferential to it. The in-
tensity, concentration, ideals and methods of industrial life have
created an atmosphere in which no religion but that of wealth can
thrive. Religion, the keeper of life, guardian of its great moral
purpose, the gentle firm power which holds man in check, receives
his respect and directs homage to God, the Author of life — religion,
the greatest fact in a man's life, is relegated without apology or regret
to a secondary place in the scheme of things by the force of mere
economic development. The competitive struggle, the central in-
dividualistic institution, merciless in process, savage in principle and
demoralizing in effect, has no place for religion and its standards.
But the need of its saving power is seen in the problems that now

1 The English translation in the "London Weekly Kegister," February 1, 1901.

474 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

confront us, in the vice and crime and injustice, in the corruption
and inhumanity which we behold on every side. Timidly, as an
unbidden and scarce tolerated thing, it makes answer to the cry for
reform.

The principles of the Gospel must be introduced into industry.
We must shape our ideals according to its spirit; social powers
must cooperate to make that spirit dominate in all life, and men
must shape their individual lives thereon. Such is the tone of the
suggestions for reform made by religion, but its voice is scarcely
heard while the all but unchecked economic forces of society go on
in their savage career.

Complaint comes from scientific centres. Students and teachers
of social sciences who devote their energy to the careful study of
society are constantly in the presence of the awful effects of the mal-
adjustment of social forces. In crime, degradation and poverty
they discover far beyond the individual causes which are in and of
our institutions. They see in factory, tenement house, sweatshop
and dreary homes ; in the broken health and blighted morals of boys
and girls ; in injustice and oppression, the working of law and cause
for which society is accountable. They see in the separation of the
ethical from the economic in industry the expected fruit of our social
philosophy. They write and criticize and suggest reform. Some
legislation is recommended, appeal is made to public opinion, social
settlements are founded, but little that is direct, searching and com-
plete is accomplished. All feel helpless in the presence of the actual
situation in society and of the massive indifference to general wel-
fare which characterizes the public.

Complaint comes from the laboring men. They bear the bur-
dens of civilization and share disproportionately in its joys. They
are the weakest factor in the process of production, hence they are
the first to feel the evil effects of the competitive struggle and the
last to share in its benefits. Conscious of all this they determine to
force the remedy on society by combining their powers and demand-
ing specific reforms in their interest. They have accomplished
more than any other reform element in modern life, but even their
work is far from being comprehensive enough to bring social peace.

In the same way we find complaint and suggestions for reform in
the press, in literature, among philanthropists, public men, reform
clubs, municipal ownership leagues, political parties. The criti-
cisms may be local or national, they may concern one phase of life
or many phases, the effect is the same. Much of this bitter criticism
is true, well meant and of great value ; some is undoubtedly dishon-
est, exaggerated and selfish ; all serves to foster dissatisfaction, en-
courage pessimism and predispose minds to radical measures. Each

The Socialism of the Socialist. 475

criticism is based on a different perspective and naturally reform
propositions do not correspond. One result is that society is keenly
conscious of the presence of great evils, but hopelessly confused
about reform ; partly awake to the situation and helpless before it ;
eager for peace, justice and joy for all its members, but not knowing
where to find them.

There is in the human mind an overpowering tendency to unify
its conceptions. Isolated fragmentary facts tantalize. They are of
no value without interpretation, and they cannot interpret them-
selves. We seek relations among them, uniformities, laws, cause.
To this bent of the mind is due all science, all philosophy. This
constant effort to systematize things reveals the fact that system
possesses a great fascination for the mind. It combines two ele-
ments which are seemingly at variance, both of which appeal to us
strongly, simplicity and completeness. The small mind is won by
the ease with which apparently a system is grasped; the greater
mind is attracted by the completeness of detail, harmony of part
and simplicity established after painstaking research. That many
views of reality cohere in apparent unity is very often taken as prima
facie evidence of their truth. Whenever the mind advances from
the stage of disconnected experiences or views to a systematic view ;
that is, when it has classified many facts and secured a unified in-
terpretation of them, as is the case, for example, with one who ac-
cepts the theory of evolution or the organic concept of society, cer-
tain well defined psychological changes take place. Correct appre-
ciation of detail is apt to be lost, the critical faculty suffers, judg-
ment is biased. The mind is predisposed to accept anything which
strengthens its belief in the system as such and it is predisposed
against everything which seems to question its truth.

This fascination of system, then, produces certain moral effects.
It becomes a "cause," enthusiasm is engendered, schools are formed
and it becomes more or less of a fashion. It seems that men are
constantly on the lookout for something on which to lavish devotion
and expend enthusiasm as well in science as in society. Exactness,
caution and sense for detail — traits of the true scholar — do not lend
themselves to such devotion as readily as does system.

Never before was the world more eager for system than it is to-
day. In the natural sciences, in biological sciences, in history, phi-
losophy, sociology, the quest is for system, unification. Facts are
heaped mountain high awaiting the interpretation which system
alone can give. This is particularly true in the srocial situation.
The number and gravity of our problems cannot be gainsaid ; but we
are at a loss to understand them and their relations. Society feels
the absolute need of reform, but it cannot devise a comprehensive

476 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

and safe method which will meet the situation in all of its details
and at the same time safeguard what is of value in our institutions
now. Socialism presents itself to society as an answer to its peti-
tion for guidance. Dressed out with all the charm of system and
speaking with the confidence of a prophet, it offers the complete and
satisfying interpretation of our problems and it indicates the single
simple way that leads to the peace, joy and justice for which men are
longing so earnestly. It is system in criticism and system in re-
form ; it touches the instinct in society that makes for system, and
by that touch it fascinates.

It was noted a moment ago that persistent criticism is emanating
from nearly every centre of social influence ; from religion, science,
literature, from laborers and reformers in general. But these criti-
cisms are more or less superficial, incomplete, isolated. Socialism
replaces them by one deep, radical, comprehensive, systematic criti-
cism of our entire social organization. It has attacked our most
prized institutions fearlessly and has triumphantly claimed to have
found in them the immediate organic cause of all social ills. It has
a place for every fact, an interpretation for every misery, a key to
every mystery. It has gone more deeply ; it has claimed to find in
the ultimate principle on which our institutions rest. Individualism,
the single final cause of all the ills from which society suffers.
Everything in the maze of modern misery is traced to its cause;
great problems and lesser ones, national and local, distorted mo-
tives, evil tendencies — everything is classified. To the Socialist's
thinking, the analysis is perfect, the system is without a flaw. The
simplicity of the criticism is unparalleled, while its apparent com-
pleteness leaves nothing to be desired; it is plain enough for the
laborer and pretentious enough for the scholar. The bold and con-
fident tone with which socialism always speaks only adds to this
fascination. It has no traditions to love, no past to revere, no insti-
tutions to cling to ; the advocate of the victims of civilization and of
them alone, it has no source whence to draw conservatism, patience
or prudence. Where the isolated and divergent criticisms which are
now heard harm one another and confuse, the unified radical criti-
cisms of Socialism lend one another strength and confirmation.
Under the baton of Socialism the mighty chorus of discontent sings
in balanced harmony.

Socialism is also a systematic plan of social reconstruction. It
offers to replace the hesitating and insufficient proposals of many
reformers by one coordinated series of radical reforms which prom-
ise joy, peace and justice to all men. Laborers aim at one kind of
reform, municipal movements at another, consumers' leagues at an-
other, but they fail to understand one another or to give effective

The Socialism of the Socialist. 477

mutual aid. Just as the criticism of Socialism carries one down to
Individualism, the plan of reconstruction leads one to the antithesis,
Socialism. It sets over against the cruel inhuman principle that
to-day dominates industrial life — laissez faire — which being inter-
preted means, "Every man for himself," its own fervent and humane
principle that all must live for each and each for all, that man is the
highest object of care in the world and that all social institutions
shall be subordinated to his true interests as man. Socialism has
thus given unity to the reform idea, brought into it simplicity and
completeness. The socialization of industry, the distribution of
wealth according to a humane principle, the guarantee of oppor-
tunity to every one, the realization of our cherished ideals of life,
liberty, culture and happiness — all these are promised as easy of
accomplishment under the simple plan of social reorganization pro-
posed. While other social critics are at variance, confused, hesitat-
ing and incomplete, it is unified, definite, confident and complete;
while other reform forces are offering palliatives and measures which
treat symptoms and not causes, it reaches causes and gives a phil-
osophy which promises joy, peace and justice. The contrast is not
without its effect ; we must not forget it.

But Socialism has attempted to draw even more power from the
charm of system. It has essayed to teach an interpretation of the
Christian Gospel in which it. Socialism, appears as an essential
part of the large religious organic conception of life. It has
insisted through doctrinal and historical arguments on the kinship
between itself and Christianity, but the effort has not resulted in any
great success. It has reached out in the direction of materialism —
its more natural tendency — and attempted to build up around itself
an imposing system of thought, of which again it becomes an organic
part. It offers a unified interpretation of history through material-
istic philosophy, in which it appears as the fulfilment of prophecy,
the realization of all the vital upward tendencies of the past, the goal
of all the struggle and war of history for human rights and growth.
It has devised its own economics and politics, its own psychology
and sociology, its own ethics, literature and theology. To quote
Schaefifle: "In reality it is a comprehensive philosophy of life as
Bebel says; Atheism in religion, democratic republicanism in the
State, democratic collectivism in economics, and we may add, bound-
less optimism in ethics, naturalistic materialism in metaphysics, loos-
ening of the family tie and marriage bond or something leading
thereto, in the home. State education in pedagogics, .general 'illumi-
nation' in instruction."^

It would not be an easy matter to say just how much influence the

2 "Aussichtslosigkeit," etc., fourth edition, p. 4.

478 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

fascination of system has had in the development of Socialism. The
psychological traits found frequently among its adherents would
lead one to think that the influence had been considerable. Such
are, for instance, the dogmatic tone, ready blindness to detail, poor
critical sense, exaggerated confidence and evident bias ; the "all or
nothing" policy by which advanced Socialists reject "partial" Social-
ists, such as Fabians and all reformers who are willing to make com-
promise of any kind. It is sufficient to have suggested that the
fascination of system is found in the movement ; the purpose before
us does not require that we attempt to measure it accurately.

Aside from all question of system there is in socialism a fascina-
tion of doctrine which gives it much power. It takes our best
teaching on fundamental human rights, life, Hberty, equality, happi^-
ness, and promises to construct a civilization which will safeguard
them effectively for all men and not alone for the favored few. We
have taken human rights as problems to be solved only by patient
endeavor, and at best capable of but partial realization here below.
We conceive man's development as toward larger liberty, greater
equality and more widely-realized development, but at best the
realization can be but partial and defective. Socialism takes these
radical human rights as axioms ; it makes them absolute and capable
of actual realization. It promises that there will be liberty, equality,
entire justice, not only in formal definition, but as well in fact.
Wage slavery will follow political bondage to extinction, and no
other form will succeed it ; the aristocracy of money will follow the
aristocracy of blood to a memory and there will be no other form
to take its place ; the struggling rich and the struggling poor will be
replaced by fraternal cooperators, who will know no selfish motive
and seek no selfish end. Poverty and vice and degradation and
ignorance will be abolished and joy, peace and justice shall reign.
"Socialists look forward to a time when three or four hours in
twenty-four devoted to labor will be all that is required to supply
every physical need, the remaining hours of the day to be devoted
to rest and rational pleasure of mind and body, education, reading,
study, the mastery of science and philosophy, music and the drama,
athletics and esthetics. Now only the rich enjoy such satisfactions.
Under Socialism all would be rich enough to have all the enjoy-
ments derived from mind culture. This done, and there is no good
reason why it should not be done, the world would have a new
civilization and life would be worth the living."^

Socialism promises to make society anthropocentric ; all institu-
tions are to be devised and controlled in a way to protect human
rights rather than to foster trade, as seems now to be the case, and

3 "Social Democratic Herald," February 16, 1901.

The Socialism of the Socialist. 479

human labor will be no longer a commodity, bought and sold Hke
iron or coal. In the new order man is freed from individual blame
for his errors and sins. Environment is the adequate cause of all
misery; release will come not by personal effort and individual
reform, but by the radical reform of environment, of society.

There is another element in the teaching of socialism which is
more subtle, though less conscious; one which many would admit
and many would deny, yet I think a source of power. Christ in
His mission to mankind emphasized boldly and unmistakably the
fact that the centre of life is beyond the clouds ; that man's destiny
is there ; that thence must be taken the only absolute criterion which
fixes all values in human life. The mysteries of life — and they are
many and deep — cannot be explained except thereby. Thus it is
that hope in a future life and future perfection have been and is and
will be forever the characteristic of Christian civilization, and Chris-
tians will look for no redemption from social ills except through
Christ. Such social reform as is undertaken in His spirit and such
individual reform as is strengthened by His grace, such and no other
can promise relief. This is the Christian's real belief; but the
world is unfortunately growing tired of it. Socialism has essayed
to reach into the clouds, snatch back the centre of life and place it
on earth. Rights and obligations are to be explained in and through
society; the enjoyment of perfection is to be immediate; the mys-
teries of life are merely unnecessary problems that social reform will
explain away. For many of its adherents socialism is a religion ; it
captivates them, seems to satisfy the liigher longings of their nature.
In earlier days it sought to ally itself with religion, but its tendencies
seem to be decidedly away from it and into materialism. It some-
times tries to distinguish between "churchianity" and religion. It
condemns the former for "hollowness and soullessness ; its petrifac-
tion and false pretense ; its fostering of prejudices, superstition and
narrow sectarian exclusiveness ; its tendency to side with the power-
ful and strong and preach slavish virtues to the humble and lowly
proletarians ; its blasphemous attempts to sanctify the crying injus-
tices of the social institutions of their time and country." Socialism
can, however, see some good in religion. It "may be of great assist-
ance to secular Socialism by arousing the human passion for right-
eousness, by appealing to race instincts and noble emotions, by
directing imagination to a grand vista of future human bliss and
happiness, of heroic deeds, of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, of fame
and glory, of immortality."* This attitude of socialism toward reli-
gion is not without effect, for it is a view which pleases those who
are tired of restraint and seek comfortable ideals rather than high

* Both citations from "Social Democratic HeralH," February 16, 1901.

480 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ones. These and similar doctrines of socialism, which it is not
necessary to mention, appeal strongly to many men. Individualism
had not neglected to teach men their rights and dignity, but the
form in which socialism presents them and promises realization has
an added force. They touch the sense of human dignity and the
instinct of justice in men. The apology of individualism was pro-
gress and its highest product a perfect business man; the apology
of socialism is justice and its promised product a perfect human man.
We must not forget this, we who see so much to condemn, so
much to fear and so much to oppose in socialism. Send its
representative into a factory where all that is repulsive and
annoying and oppressive in our institutions is concentrated on
poor laborers whose awakened intelligence makes them restive.
Let the facile-tongued apostle whisper of sunlight and shorter
hours; of brighter home and happy life; of the reign of justice
and humanity and the downfall of economic tyranny; send a
second man into the mines with the same enticing and soothing
message; send a third into the congested districts of our cities to
harangue the multitudes and give promise of culture and joy to them
as soon as the hated institutions of capitalism can be destroyed;
send emissaries of the new gospel in all directions. At every spot
where those institutions have pressed heavily and caused distress and
blighted human lives let the orators speak. Let them speak to those
who have everything to gain and nothing to lose except their misery
about the idleness and corruption of the rich, the sufferings and
dependence of the poor and of the coming kingdom of man, to be
established when they, the people, will it. Send after these apostles
the apologists of our institutions as they are or as we would reform
them. Send them to teach that sin and self-indulgence are the
causes of much misery, that human limitations permit only partial
relief, that the mysteries of life cannot be explained here below, that
the laws of social growth forbid radical departures in social organiza-
tion, that our immediate aim can be scarcely more than that outlined
in the recent encyclical — "to make the lives of the laborers and arti-
sans more tolerable and gradually to give them the opportunity of
self-culture, so that at home and in the world they may freely fulfil
the obligations of virtue and religion, may feel themselves to be
men and not mere animals. Christian men, not pagans, and so strive
with more facility and earnestness to attain the 'one thing needful' —
that final good for which we came into the world." Let the socialist
teach the people their untried strength and let us try to show them
their demonstrated weakness ; let the former give them enthusiasm
in their sufifering and let us ofifer them only patience. Let all of
this be done and then we may wonder not that there are socialists,

The Socialism of the Socialist. 481

but that there are not thousands where now there is one. Reason
and experience tell us that we are right and that the socialist is
advocating an impossibility, but there are times in life when reason
and experience cannot overcome the seductions of hope and the
illusions of an excited imagination. This is the case with those
who suffer keenly and eagerly seek relief. Socialism enjoys certain
advantages of situation which merit some attention. It is the un-
tried ideal of attacking the defective real. It can and does con-
centrate all the odium which it can excite against the past on the
institutions of the present. It need not discriminate as to causes,
since it is not required that it be accurate in establishing relations of
cause and effect in social ills. It presents itself as the champion of
the oppressed and shows all the dash, vigor and aggressiveness of
an ideal champion. We, on the contrary, appear to be at least
indifferent to the oppressed and to be the champions of the favorites of
fortune, since we preach conservatism and hold to our institutions
in substance. The admitted evils of the present social organization
— the economic, intellectual and moral waste, not to speak of the un-
necessary suffering and disappointment which we see on every side —
defy apology and invite the thought that we who defend a system in
which they are possible are not the friends of mankind. The social-
ist need not exaggerate ; the actual condition shames our institutions.
He, however, cannot be criticized except theoretically, for socialism
has no history as the basis of social life.

Then, too, we must not forget that the day of pure individualism
is past and that socialism represents a set of principles and institu-
tions toward which — if not to which — we are tending. The trust,,
the trade union, government enterprises and government monopoly
have latent in them an unmistakable sign of it. Phases of our
school system, such as free text books, transportation to and from
school, show us the same, while all factory laws, reform legislation
and the constant extension of public functions in all directions show
that the drift is strong. This whole complex movement is exactly
in the line that socialism has marked for itself. True, the tone and
language are still individualistic, but we seem to forget that in
backing out of individualism we move toward socialism. The fol-
lowing from Kautsky, a recognized Socialist thinker, expresses well
the position in modern life which socialism marks out for itself:
*The proletariat, as the lower stratum of society, cannot free itself
without putting an end to all oppression and exploitation. So
wherever the class-conscious proletariat has become 'a power, it
becomes the advocate of all the oppressed, of oppressed classes,
oppressed nations, of an oppressed race, as far as their interest do
not conflict with those of the social evolution. Out of this hiscorical
Vol. XXVI-5

482 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

role there develop for the proletariat duties which are beyond its
direct class interests. But this does not fill out the circle of social
duties which the class-conscious, aggressive proletariat has assumed.

"It cannot free itself by the principle of the wages system. It is
necessary to put an end to the present institution of property and
method of production, a high social end must be set up — and it is
the only class to-day that cherish an ideal. It is the only revo-
lutionary class, that is . . . which aims at a social ideal . . .
the only class in which there is any idealism.

'Thus, out of the class struggle of the proletariat arises the highest
ethical power, consecration to an ideal and the revolutionary class
struggle of the proletariat is the ground where the idealists of all
classes ... in modern society unite.

*The more revolutionary, the more ideal the proletarian class
struggle becomes ; the more it emphasizes its final aim, the greater
is its ethical power, its power for the moral regeneration of the
proletariat."''

In the preceding pages an attempt was made to show that social-
ism possesses the two-fold fascination of system and of doctrine and
that its position gives it certain advantages which should not be
overlooked. It is not my desire to make a consecutive analysis now
to show just where and how these sources of attraction operate in
the socialistic movement. To have suggested that they do operate
is sufficient. We may then advance to a brief consideration of the
question, who are the socialists ?

The general answer is — the victims of our institutions and those
who sympathize with them. The propertyless class is, of course, most
fully represented, and by that is meant the laboring class. We
must, however, take care lest an exaggerated impression be con-
veyed. The immense majority of laborers are really indifferent to
the whole situation, at least such is the case in the United States.
Not over one-ninth of them belong to organizations; the number
is about 1,200,000. As a body organized labor is not socialistic; 011
the other hand, it is not at all opposed to socialism on principle.
The columns of the labor press are open to the most active social-
istic propaganda; recognized socialists are active in the movement
and entire freedom is allowed to all concerning it. The labor move-
ment has a concentrated purpose ; it has set out to strengthen itself
and to accomplish certain reforms. It regards socialism as a dis-
traction, but as soon as it sees that socialism will best accomplish
that purpose, the movement is prepared to embrace it. The expo-
sition of the laborer's point of view which the writer attempted in
the January Quarterly might be of service to those who would wish

6 In "Die Neue Zeit," November 24, 1900, article "Klassenkampf und Ethik."

The Socialism of the Socialist. 483

to examine the relations of socialism to the labor movement more
in detail. The brief observations here made may call attention to
the fact that socialistic sentiment and sympathy for its ideals are
much more widespread than many think or are willing to admit.
The total Socialist vote in 1900 in the United States is reported in
the press as 131,069, but the number of those who actively sympa-
thize with all that socialism represents is very much greater. If I
mistake not. Professor Ely has estimated the number in the United
States as half a million.

There are certain types of temperament which are attracted to
socialism. Natures inclined to hate are easily won, for such a dispo-
sition is pessimistic and the very life of socialism lies therein. The
fierce denunciation of institutions, resentful criticism of all inequality
in the enjoyments of the comforts of life have a certain charm for
this type of man, who may pay little attention to economic loctrine
or social ideals; he is content in his hate; he does not aspire to
upbuild and may not even long for anything better. Those of
milder type, "who live of their admirations rather than of their
disgusts," find much that allures in the bright promises and buoyant
enthusiasm of socialism. Idealists and dreamers naturallv follow
them. Fine natures which cannot easily bear the thought of pain
and sufifering and are angered to rage when they see villainy suc-
cessful, vice triumphant and virtue persecuted or unrewarded have
much sympathy with socialism. They are natures which are noble,
but untaught in the school of stern reality ; natures which have not
yet learned that idealism is a good beacon light for civilization, but
a poor foundation. I recall one socialist who in reply to my ques-
tion, "What made you a socialist?" replied laconically, "Hate." He
was born very poor and had suffered much. I recall a second whose
love of order and harmony was so great that he became an active
socialist; a third was one whose socialism was due to the massive
dishonesty practiced and implicitly approved in all branches of busi-
ness. I recall a fourth, who was a believer in free love and worked
and wrote for socialism in the hope that the movement \YOuld
further his unholy cause.

One will find that in public meetings of socialists the orators
appeal often to sentiments such as those referred to. The most
plausible socialist speech that I ever heard was in Chicago some
years ago, when an able man addressed the sociaUsts in a very poor
quarter of the city. He merely told his hearers how the then Vice
President of the United States had become a millionaire by going
through bankruptcy three times. The attempt to argue socialists
out of their views seems, therefore, to rest on a false assumption that
argument makes the socialist. One who has had much experience

4S4 American Catholic Quarterly Review. .

with socialists knows how useless it is to try to affect them by rea-
soning. Some time ago a prominent university professor made a
long and learned argument against socialism before a socialist meet-
ing in an Eastern city. When he had finished, a laborer, poorly clad,
who spoke with a foreign accent, remarked, "He don't know any-
thing about it; he never shoveled coal." If we wish to understand
a man's socialism, we must study his life and know his feelings.

The course of thought has led us from the consideration of
socialism to that of the socialist. If we now undertake to construct
his point of view, we need only work out in detail what has been said
in outline. As far as socialists come from the ranks of organized
labor, their point of view is merely one more advanced than that
of the laborer, but both are largely identical. There is the same
despair of help through government, the same sense of resentment,
of injustice, the same consciousness of a high and holy mission to
save humanity. There is this difference : the laborer's analysis is
less deep or less pretentious and his immediate hopes are far less
high. The socialist has completed his thinking, while the laborer
has not. The socialism of those who have not gone through the
labor movement may be a question of temperament, of personal
experience. That there may be some, many, if you will, who have
reasoned themselves into socialism I do not pretend to deny; that
the argument may have been poor, that it may have been skilful, is
a question of fact as much as of effect. All of this is true of any
argument or of its presentation ; it is true of any system of thought
in the world. In all life much depends on temperament and cir-
cumstance. There is much in socialism that is possible and much
in it that is desirable, just as there is much in present conditions
that is hideous and depressing. Hence there is an argument for the
one and against the other. Without questioning the validity of
either argument, we may safely question the role which the argument
for socialism plays in its propaganda. No attempt has been made
to offer an objective study of socialism ; its theory of value, its view
of history, psychology or politics was not examined. Nor was the
purpose to show how much in socialism is helpful or how much
dangerous. Where dissent has been expressed it concerned the
socialism which is idealistic, comprehensive, final ; it was not the
intention to condemn thereby what is hopeful or useful in its
essential idea. It seemed desirable to call attention to the attractive-
ness of socialism in the hope of awakening thought and arousing
action.

The social conscience is still largely dormant in the United
States. It is appalling that in the presence of the gigantic evils
of modern society there should remain so much of indifference in

Catholic Secondary Schools. 485

public opinion. Public leaders, legislatures, men high in industrial
life seem not to heed the situation too lightly. Some among them
are interested, but the mighty force which all could exert for the
cause of humanity is not exercised at all. Difficult situations have
rapidly multiplied themselves. Up from among the ranks of the
victims have sprung movements and leaders who were stung to
bitterness by their suffering and stirred to action by the indifiference
of those to whom they looked for protection. Trade unionism and
socialism are the products of such circumstances. To them we
must give credit for forcing society to know its wrongs. They have
a lesson for us. Political and industrial leaders and legislators must
admit their responsibility and come to give relief; public opinion
must force them. Religion will give its aid. Its representatives
must study and know conditions and interpret moral obligation to
meet normal social demands. We who in and of the Catholic faith
feel and know that we have the truth, and with it a superb and
active organization which is the greatest social power on earth, we
must rise to the occasion and meet it. We must study social science
and fit ourselves ; we must study the organic relation of the Church
to society and form a social conscience ; we must bravely follow its
dictates and assist in the work of reform. The Church has already
done this in Europe, but it must be done here. The age is drifting
to the conviction that the last decisive test of any religion is its
power to solve the social question. The test should be welcomed
by us, for the Catholic Church can meet the situation and bring
social peace.

. William J. Kerby.

Catholic University, Washington.

CATHOLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS.

AMONG the striking phenomena in the educational world at
the present time is the movement observable in the domain
of secondary education.^ The mere numerical growth of the
secondary schools is remarkable enough. Within the past decade the
public high schools in the United States increased in number from
2,526 to 5,495, and the pupils from 202,963 to 476,227. This is an in-
crease of 117 per cent, in the number of schools and 135 per cent, in
attendance. The rate of increase in the number of pupils is nearly

1 The terra "secondary" throughout this paper is used in the sense which gen-
erally attaches to it in this country and in which it is used by the National
Bureau of Education. It embraces the work between the grammar grades and the
college.

486 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

five times that of the population of the country during the same
period, and is rightly regarded by Commissioner Harris as **one of
the most remarkable facts in the educational history of the de-
cade."^

But this numerical increase is only one of a series of phenomena
which evidence the action of a cause or of causes profoundly affecting
the whole status of secondary education. Side by side with the
growth in numbers there has been a movement making for the in-
creased efficiency of the public high schools. The standard of
scholarship in the teachers has steadily risen. The curriculum has
been enriched and extended. In most places its length is now four
years, but here and there it is being prolonged to six, and the strong
current setting in this direction is made plain by the adoption of a
resolution recently by the National Educational Association favoring
"a unified six-year high school course of study beginning with the
seventh grade.''^ At the same time the ideals and spirit of the school
have broadened, the principle of election of studies along broad lines
has been introduced, and the requirements for entrance and gradua-
tion have been so raised that the claim is made that the public high
school of to-day is almost the equal in these respects of the college
of a generation or two ago.

The relation of the high school to the college has also undergone
an important change. The original purpose of the public high
school seems to have been simply to place within reach of the
masses the opportunity for an education superior to that of the ele-
mentary school. The college interests were not considered. In
fact, at the time the high school movement began, in the second
quarter of the nineteenth century, there already existed a system of
secondary schools known as academies, one of whose principal ob-
jects was to prepare boys for college. To-day the public high school
system, comprising 82 per cent, of the secondary students of the
country, is securely linked to the State college system, and the
natural evolution of the present conditions can only result in binding
the two together more firmly.

Among the causes which have operated to bring about this affilia-
tion, legislation must be mentioned. The Board of Regents, in New
York, and the Boards of Education in the various States, afford
familiar instances of the influence of legislation in this direction.
The Accrediting System, by which the graduates of certain specified
schools are admitted to a college without examination, has also con-
tributed powerfully to the same result, and it is being practised to-
day by some institutions on a scale that may help to account for their
rapid increase in attendance. In 1896 there were forty-two State

2 Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1898-99, p. 1,844. 3 Proceedings
of the National Educational Association, 1899, p. 659.

Catholic Secondary Schools. 487

universities and colleges and about 150 other institutions in which
this system had been adopted.* The University of Michigan has
now 200 on its list of formally accredited schools, and more than
one-half the freshmen who entered Cornell last year were admitted
without examination, on the certificates of their respective high
schools.'^ Another strong influence which has made for closer union
between high school and college has been their cooperation in joint
associations. There is the National Educational Association, the
associations for the several groups of States, besides those for the
individual States, and in all of these bodies the schools and colleges
meet upon common ground, discuss matters of mutual interest, and
cooperate for the solution of problems common to both school and
college, but which from their very nature neither can successfully
solve alone. Such a problem is that of uniform entrance require-
ments for colleges. A plan has been formed to establish a joint
entrance examination board, composed of school and college repre-
sentatives, which is to give uniform examinations that will suffice
for both high school graduation and admission to college, and it is
now being put to a practical test by the Association of Colleges and
Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland. This is an
attempt to complete, at a single stroke, the work of unification, and
if successful it is likely to have important consequences. Catholic
educators may watch the experiment with profit.

"Public education," a distinguished Catholic educator has said,
"is a people's deliberate effort to form a nobler race of men." The
position of the secondary school, between the primary and the higher
education, makes it naturally the chief point of stress for the appli-
cation of this progressive educative effort. The secondary school
is the hinge upon which the modern educational system turns. In
Germany the new ideals in education, springing from the new indus-
trial and political conditions and the new ideals of national life, have
found expression chiefly in the present movement for the reform of
the gymnasium ; and in France, outside of the religious question alto-
gether, as well as in other nations of Europe, the burning questions
of the day in education concern the secondary schools. In America
the secondary school is more important than anywhere else. From
its academic independence it is able to influence powerfully the
higher education ; while, through its organic relation to the primary
school, it is able to reach the masses and mold their intellectual
ideals. In America, as nowhere else, the public secondary school
opens up to the whole people, irrespective of social conditions, the
possibility of fullest mental development. It brings the rudiments
of the higher culture to the threshold of every home, and offers to

* Education in the United States, Vol. I., p. 125. s President Schunnan's
Report, 1899-1900.

488 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

every child a free and easy passage to the open gates of the college.
It is preeminently "the people's college." It cannot be doubted,
therefore, that the public high school movement, whose surface
manifestations I have touched upon, is the expression of a popular
demand for more and better education, and that it is destined to ex-
ercise a profound and far-reaching influence in shaping the education
of the future.

In view of these conditions it seems opportune to inquire into the
status of Catholic secondary education.

Catholic secondary schools for boys belong to three widely differ-
ent classes. There is, first of all, the secondary school proper, repre-
sented by academies and high schools, whose curriculum as a rule
extends no farther than the freshman year, although in the other
direction it generally includes the studies of the grammar school.
Many of the institutions of this class are of long standing, but a large
number are of a comparatively recent date, probably one-third hav-
ing been established within the past decade. Most of them are con-
ducted by religious orders, and are entirely independent of parish
control, deriving their means of support from the tuition fees of
their pupils. Then, there are the high schools attached to parochial
schools. These high schools consist of one or more grades of sec-
ondary work, serving as a sort of appendix to the ordinary work of
the school, although they often carry the pupil as far as the fresh-
man year. The number of these schools has increased very rapidly
of late, and although their total attendance is comparatively incon-
siderable and their methods often open to criticism, yet, as instancing
an increasing popular demand for secondary education, and as point-
ing the way to a possible solution of problems of Catholic secondary
education, they are worthy of serious study. Finally, there are the
preparatory departments of our colleges, which still contain the
majority of Catholic secondary students.

With the view of ascertaining some facts not otherwise attainable,
I sent a letter of inquiry to each of the ninety secondary schools of
the first class, and received replies from forty-nine. In these forty-
nine schools the number of students of high school grade was given
as 2,947, and of elementary grade 4,917. There were 992 boys
studying Latin, and 244 in Greek. The average age of pupils in
forty-seven schools when entering the high school curriculum is 14.7
years. The average annual tuition fee, if we exclude those schools
that aim at educating only the wealthier classes, was found to be
$36.85 in forty schools. The number of schools not answering my
letter of inquiry was forty-one. The total number of students in
these last year, as given in the Catholic Directory for 1901, was 6,706.
Assuming that the ratio of secondary to elementary pupils obtained

Catholic Secondary Schools. 489

in the case of the schools heard from holds good for these also —
although I think it is somewhat too high for the latter — we get for
these forty-one schools 2,513 pupils of secondary grade and 4,193
of elementary. This would give a total of 5,460 students of sec-
ondary grade in the ninety Catholic secondary schools.

In reflecting on these results, one is struck by the comparatively
large number of pupils pursuing the classics. Those studying
Greek constitute 8.3 per cent, of the whole number of secondary
pupils in the schools reporting. The percentage of pupils in the
public high schools studying Greek is only 3.1.^ Those studying
Latin are 37.5 per cent, of the whole, a number which compares
favorably with the 50.4 per cent, in Latin in the public high schools,
when we remember that some of the religious orders most promi-
nent in secondary school work do not teach the classics at all, and
the further fact that in the twenty-five schools reporting pupils in
Latin their percentage was as high as 66.5.

The average age of entrance upon secondary studies is much
higher than I had expected. It is quite as high as in the case of the
public schools, and invites serious attention to the need of shorten-
ing and enriching the curriculum of the elementary school — a prob-
lem that far-seeing educators like President Eliot long ago pointed
out as of fundamental importance to college as well as school.

It is interesting to compare the cost of secondary education in
Catholic and in public secondary schools. The Commissioner of
Education has kindly furnished me with some statistics relative to the
cost of public high school education, from which it appears that the
average annual cost per pupil for salaries and incidentals in ten of the
principal cities of the country is $52.44. The average annual tuition
fee in forty Catholic secondary schools is, as stated, about $37. As
the only source of revenue to these schools is the tuition fees, it is
safe to say that secondary education in the Catholic school costs
considerably less than in the public high school.

So far as the efficiency of Catholic secondary schools of this class
is concerned, such examination as I have been able to make has con-
vinced me that they will fairly bear comparison with the preparatory
schools in our colleges. There are exceptions, it is true. There are
secondary schools, graduation from which would not fit for the
freshman year in any reputable college, just as there are colleges
whose preparatory curriculum is inferior to that of any reputable
high school. But in general, making due allowance for the fact
that many of our secondary schools are commercial i-n character, I
believe that our college preparatory departments have little to offer
the Catholic boy in the way of educational facilities beyond what he

6 Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1898-99.

490 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

can get, often nearer home and at lesser cost, in the Catholic sec-
ondary school.

Catholic high schools attached to elementary schools are repre-
sented in the current report of the Commissioner of Education by
fifty-three schools, with an attendance of 646 boys and 1,342 girls.
This is an average of twelve boys to a school. These schools are
mostly in the hands of the various orders of teaching nuns, and are
nearly all co-educational. Most of them offer four grades or years of
high school work, although the average number of teachers to a
school is only three. It is worthy of note that the pupils preparing
for college in these high schools formed 9.6 per cent, of the whole.
In the public high schools those preparing for college form 11.6 per
cent of the whole.'' The comparatively large number preparing
for college in Catholic secondary schools of this class is a fact of
highest interest for college men, and suggests what might be ex-
pected in the way of increased college attendance, if we had a com-
prehensive, efficient and well articulated system of parochial high
schools.

The list of Catholic secondary schools of this class given in the
Report of the Commissioner of Education is, however, far from being
exhaustive. Scattered over the country are hundreds of other
parochial schools in which one or more grades of high school studies
are taught, the general disposition being to keep the pupils, espe-
cially the brighter ones, as long as possible. The total of attend-
ance, however, is not large. Thus in the Archdiocese of Boston
there are a number of schools of this class not enumerated above, but
the total of secondary pupils amounts, in the case of boys, to but
108. It is no uncommon thing to find a school of several hundred
pupils with half a dozen or so of secondary grade, who stand in about
the same relation to the rest of the school as do the "post-grads"
in a small college, and who pursue their studies in much the same
loose and leisurely way. Sometimes a number of these inchoate
high schools are found in the same city, and we have the condition
of a series of ill-supported rival establishments, where not more than
a single one is needed or can be successful. In such cases, so far
from the high schools being a source of strength to the parochial
schools, as they could not fail to be if combined in one central, well
graded institution, they become only an element of weakness and a
drag, because the teaching they get, scant and feeble as it may be,
has to be subtracted from that which is due the elementary grades.
There is an enormous waste of energy going on in this way in our
schools. Nevertheless, the attempt to project the parochial school
beyond what has been hitherto regarded as its proper limits, seems

^ Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1898-99.

Catholic Secondary Schools. 491

to be in answer to a popular demand, and is doubtless destined to
continue. The movement is bright with possibilities, for the sec-
ondary schools of this class, however unsatisfactory and open to
criticism they may be in some respects at present, constitute a firm
forward step in the work of bridging over the gap that now sepa-
rates Catholic higher education from the parochial schools.

In estimating the number of collegiate and secondary students in
Catholic colleges, I have classed as colleges all institutions recog-
nized as such by the Commissioner of Education, and have added
such others as I could ascertain to have an actual collegiate attend-
ance. This gave a list of sixty-eight Catholic colleges. The total
number of students in these, as given in the current Catholic Di-
rectory, is 12,031. If we take the estimate of Dr. O'Malley,® made
in 1898 and based on direct investigation, that the proportion of pre-
paratory to collegiate students in our colleges is as two to one, then
the number of collegiate students in the sixty-eight Catholic col-
leges would be 4,010, and the preparatory or secondary students
would number 8,021. This is somewhat more than a majority of
the total number of Catholic secondary students.

The statistics of Catholic secondary schools for girls are interest-
ing and instructive. The total number of academies for girls, given
by the Commissioner of Education,^ is 233, with an attendance of
8,238 pupils of secondary grade and 22,957 o^ elementary. To these
must be added 386 other academies given in the Catholic Directory,
with a total attendance of 41,853. Assuming the same ratio of sec-
ondary to elementary pupils as in the case of the academies given in
the report of the Commissioner, there would be 11,294 secondary
pupils in these 386 academies. Besides these, there are also the 1,342
female pupils in the secondary grades attached to elementary pa-
rochial schools. This would make a total of 20,874 girls of sec-
ondary grade in all classes of Catholic schools. The number is un-
doubtedly somewhat too high, for some of the academies ranked as
secondary schools by the Bureau of Education deserve a place
among the colleges, and many others, while rightly to be regarded
in the main as secondary schools, have some students of collegiate
standing. As a matter of fact, there are only two Catholic institu-
tions for girls that are recognized by the Bureau of Education as
colleges.

We are prepared now to estimate the probable numerical strength
of Catholic education in proportion to the total Catholic population.
The following table is a summary of the results of my investigation
on this point, and shows the ratio of attendance in each class of
Catholic schools to the Catholic population, compared with the ratio

8 Catholic World, 50, 399. » Report for 1898-99.

492 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of attendance in all schools of the class in question throughout the
country to the total population of the country. As the ratio of per-
centage would be too small for the purpose of this comparison, I
have chosen as more convenient the ratio of i to 10,000. It ap-
pears, then, that there are,

FOR EACH 10,000 OF RESPECTIVE POPULATION:^**

Students
Elementary Secondary in higher

students. students. education.

Male and
Female. Male. Female. Male.

In Catholic institutions 898 13 19 4

In the entire United States .2,143 39 49 ^^^

These figures show that our educational institutions, including all
classes of schools except seminaries, have only from about one-third
to one-half of the number of students they ought to have. Not that
it is to be inferred, necessarily, that no more than this proportion
of our Catholic youth are being educated. Undoubtedly, a large pro-
portion are receiving their education in institutions other than Cath-
olic; but I am loath to believe that the number of these is large
enough to account for the above differences. Nevertheless, the ex-
planation must be either that our Catholic youth are not getting as
much education as the youth of the country generally, or that Cath-
olic parents, to a far greater extent than is commonly believed, and
in every department of education, are sending their children to in-
stitutions that are non-Catholic, or else that both of these conditions
obtain, and this last seems to me the most likely explanation.

It is to be observed that the lowest level of numerical strength is
reached in the case of secondary schools for boys. The attendance
here, it seems, falls short by two-thirds of what it ought to be.
In the case of our colleges, if we exclude from consideration the
large number in non-Catholic institutions who are following what I
have classed as non-collegiate courses, the attendance is just one-
half of the normal. Contrary to a widespread impression, it ap-
pears that our academies for girls have less than one-half of their
due proportion of secondary pupils. The number of academies is
indeed very great, amounting all told to 672, but in most of them
the secondary pupils are comparatively few, and probably the great

10 The population of the United States is taken for the year 1898, from* the
Report of the Bureau of Education for 1898-99. The Catholic population is from
the Catholic Directory for 1901. n The number of students represented by
this figure was gotten by subtracting from the total in higher education in
the United States as given in the Report of the Bureau of Education, students
of law, medicine, theology, technology (in technological institutes), dentistry,
pharmacy and otner technical branches, and all women students, as these classes
are not, ay a rule, found in Catholic colleges.

Catholic Secondary Schools. 493

majority of the academies are in the main Httle more than select ele-
mentary schools.

These statistics make it plain, in a concrete way, that the problem
of the future for the Church in America is the problem of education.
We are still far from the realization of that noble ideal of Catholic
education set forth so clearly and eloquently, and with such authori-
tative insistence, by our ecclesiastical councils, especially the Third
Plenary Council of Baltimore — the ideal of a system of Catholic
schools in articulate and harmonious cooperation, numerous enough
and well distributed enough to accommodate our entire school pop-
ulation, and embracing parochial school, high school, college and
university. Much, indeed, has been done. Foundations have been
laid strong and deep, all along the lines of the national system of
education. Magnificent beginnings have been made, notwithstand-
ing the general poverty of our people up to the present, and the
powerful attractions of the State schools, to whose support they
have been obliged by law to contribute ; and the records of education
the world over may safely be challenged for evidence of a zeal so
great, of a generosity so self-sacrificing and sustained, of practical
results so conspicuous, in the cause of learning. But we must not
forget that with all this the structure is still far from being complete.
It is going to take much time, self-sacrifice and cooperative efifort
to bring the Catholic educational system, in certain important re-
spects, notably in comprehensiveness and unity, up to the condi-
tion of the State system of schools. In the meantime, the latter
are not going to wait for us. As I have indicated, in numbers,
in efficiency, in closer union among themselves and with the col-
leges, they are making wonderful strides. Under these condi-
tions it will not do to simply hold our own. To halt would mean
inevitably to retrograde and fall behind. If Catholic education is to
continue to function as a healthful, growth-producing process in the
Church's life, it must advance and expand with the advancing and
expanding intellectuality of the modern world.

How shall we best apply our efforts, under these circumstances,
for the improvement of Catholic education? I believe it to be by
building up, as the connecting link between parochial school and
college, a system of schools parallel, as nearly as may be, to the sys-
tem of public high schools ; and this not only because the secondary
school, from whatever side we view it, is the weakest point in our
educational system, but because it is through the secondary school,
and through it alone, that we can efifectually strengthen and uplift
the parochial school and the college.

It is not difficult to see how the establishment of Catholic high
schools will benefit the colleges. Whether the fact that the number

494 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of students in our colleges is so far below the normal is to be ex-
plained on the theory that the rest go to non-Catholic colleges or
do not go to college at all, or by the operation of both these causes
combined, the lack of Catholic secondary schools must be consid-
ered as a cause more fundamental still. Of the Catholic boys attend-
ing the public high schools, it is inevitable that most of those who go
to college will drift into the non-Catholic colleges. The gap be-
tween the public school and the Catholic college is too great. Their
studies, their methods, their spirit and ideals are widely different.
They belong to two fundamentally divergent systems of education.
Take it in the matter of the classics, for instance. Only a little over
three per cent, of the public secondary pupils study Greek. It is one
of the most unpopular branches in the high school. Yet many of our
colleges will not admit to the freshman class without Greek. The
practical consequence is that whereas the high school graduate who
has not taken Greek is welcomed to the State university, he may not
be able to enter the freshman class in the Catholic college without
extra preparation or irksome conditions. On the other hand,
the path from the public school to the State university is short,
straight and enticingly easy. The high school diploma often admits
without examination. The last year of the high school is made to
dove-tail into the freshman curriculum. There is no gap, no break,
no jar of any kind. It is an interlocking, double-action combina-
tion. The lack of endowment in our colleges is, of course, an ele-
ment of importance here. The foundation of scholarships would
unquestionably operate in favor of increased attendance ; but it may
reasonably be questioned, I think, whether, even if our colleges were
not behindhand in this respect, the fact would be sufficient to offset
the strong current now flowing in the other direction, since Catholic
boys would have equally good chances for financial assistance in the
non-Catholic institutions.

If, on the other hand, we accept the hypothesis that the falling off
of the attendance in Catholic institutions is due, in whole or in part,
to the fact that Catholic youth, owing to the general poverty of our
people, do not get as much education as the children of their fellow-
citizens, the argument for the Catholic high school rests on reasons
none the less cogent. The poverty of the majority of Catholics is
a fact not to be gainsaid. It undoubtedly diminishes their opportuni-
ties for education, and is certainly responsible, to some extent, for the
comparatively low attendance at Catholic institutions. But since the
Church discountenances the acceptance by her children of the lavish
opportunities for education offered them by the State, are we not
bound to provide for them opportunities not inferior to those pro-
vided in the public schools ? In a democracy like ours and in times

Catholic Secondary Schools. 495

of universal education such as these, education is, ordinarily speaking,
the measure of influence and success. To be without it is to be to
that extent crippled for the race of life. To be deprived of oppor-
tunity for it is to be robbed of that which is, after religion, best and
most ennobling in life. Surely we cannot look without concern
upon conditions by which any class of the Church's children are
deprived of educational opportunities to which they are entitled. Yet
such conditions obtain. Taught to distrust the public schools, Cath-
oHc parents, in the absence of Catholic high schools, too often come
to look upon the completion of the parochial school curriculum as
the natural term of the mental development of the child.

The preparatory departments of our colleges are not a satisfactory
substitute for a system of Catholic high schools. Purely from the
point of view of college interests, much might be said against the
continued union of preparatory school and college, for it may
be questioned, I think, whether collegiate attendance depends so
much as is commonly supposed upon the presence of preparatory
departments in the colleges. A record of observation, telling how
many third year preparatory boys in any given college kept on
through the college course to graduation would be highly inter-
esting and instructive. However, I am concerned now, not with
the relations of preparatory school and college, but simply to
state the reasons for my contention that our preparatory depart-
ments are not acceptable substitutes for Catholic high schools
in the case of pupils who do not intend to go to college — and it
is pupils of this class that constitute nine-tenths of all secondary
students. Besides the fact that the day colleges are neither numer-
ous nor well distributed enough, the distance between the parochial
school and the college is too great. The absolutely private char-
acter of our colleges, so far as management is concerned, seems to
make anything like close affiliation with the parochial school system
a difficult if not an impossible matter. Moreover, the curriculum of
the preparatory school looks chiefly, if not solely, to the interests of
boys who are fitting themselves for college. In many colleges no
attempt whatever is made to reach out after the great mass of boys
of secondary grade, by providing courses of study that shall offer
opportunities to fit more directly for active life. But the chief reason
that militates against the preparatory departments is the fact of ex-
pense. Education cannot be given as cheaply, grade for grade, in
the college as it can in the secondary school. The average annual
tuition fee of $37 in forty of our secondary schools, including many
of the strongest schools of this class, is far less than the average
annual tuition fee for day scholars in the preparatory departments of
our colleges ; and it is to be noted that the tendency in many col-

496 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

leges is steadily towards the increase of tuition and other fees. I
am aware that some colleges in the larger cities have reduced their
rates to a comparatively low figure and are making heroic sacrifices
in order to give the children of the poor a chance; but, speaking
generally, the cost of tuition and its inseparable accompaniments in
college preparatory departments puts it entirely beyond the reach
of many parents who could and would send their children to a free
or cheap Catholic high school. How many there are who are pre-
vented in this way from giving their children an education superior
to that of the parochial school, may be a matter for dispute ; but it is
worth remembering that an investigation made some years ago in
the case of the public high school pupils in a number of the prin-
cipal cities of Massachusetts, revealed the fact that fully 25 per cent,
were children of parents who were too poor to possess taxable
property. ^^

Parochial schools, even more than the colleges, will benefit by
the establishment of a system of Catholic high schools. "Progress,"
says Bishop Spalding, "spreads from the summits." The greatest
need of the parochial school at the present time is the stimulus that
would come from affiliation with a superior school. The impetus
given to parochial school education by the Third Plenary Council of
Baltimore has largely subsided, and there is evident in many quar-
ters a growing spirit of indifference. The number of pupils, which
increased very rapidly in the decade immediately following the
promulgation of the decrees of the Council, is still less than one-
half of the normal, and in the last half dozen years, as the tables of
the Catholic Directory prove, the increase in parochial school at-
tendance has not kept pace with the increase of the Catholic popu-
lation.

Nor have the expected results followed from the general adoption
of the elaborate scheme of examination and supervision devised by
the Council. The practical difficulties in the way of the efficient en-
forcement of the plan are immense, and although a great deal of
progress has been made in some dioceses, in many others things run
on much the same as before the examining boards and committees
were appointed. In many places the parochial schools are still de-
plorably in need of definite and regular grading. There is much
confusion in the matter of text-books, preventing any approach to a
common standard of grades. Many of the religious orders have
their own series of text-books, and in the larger cities, where the re-
ligious orders often work side by side, the variety of text-books is a
frequent source of trouble and expense. The influence of a Cath-
olic high school, with which all the parochial schools of a city would

12 Educational Review, 2, 48.

Catholic Secondary Schools. 497

be affiliated, would tend to eliminate these and similar defects. It
would set the standard of a definite quantity and quality of
work, and school grading and substantial uniformity in grades and
text-books would follow as a matter of course. Above all, the Cath-
olic high school would benefit the parochial school by strengthening
and elevating its tone, by awakening a sense of healthful ambition
and rivalry in both pupil and teacher. Experienced parochial
school teachers with whom I have discussed the matter assure me
that it is this lack of tone, due to the absence of conditions that in-
spire intellectual ambition, that constitutes the most deadening and
difficult evil they have to contend against. A boy who is ambitious
to go to the high school will do better work, as a rule, than one who
is not, and parochial school teachers would find in the establishment
of Catholic high schools a most effective remedy for the pupil's dis-
inclination to home study. The annual entrance examination for
the high school would become a test of the strength and competi-
tive standing of the various schools, and would spur the teachers on
to the best possible work in their respective spheres. These con-
victions, I may add, are not based upon fancy or speculation, but
are the result of a careful study of the influence of Catholic high
schools actually existing, and of the views of those most competent
to discuss parochial school conditions and problems the country
over.

I have said nothing thus far about practical plans for overcoming
the difficulties in the way of the establishment of Catholic high
schools. The difficulties are certainly not slight, but the chief diffi-
culty does not consist in any lack of practical plans. There are
several admirable plans in successful operation, that may be studied
in the concrete by any one. There is the plan of the free, endowed
high school, such as the magnificent Catholic High School in Phila-
delphia ; there is the free high school supported by the funds of the
parish or parishes, as in New England ; there is the high school sup-
ported by the tuition fees of the pupils, and in charge of a religious
order. There are plenty of religious men and women for the work
of Catholic secondary schools, and with the inevitable evacuation of
the field of the parochial school by religious men, these ought to be
available in increasing numbers for their greater, more pressing and
more proper work in the secondary school.

The main obstacle in the way of the Catholic high school move-
ment lies deeper than the question of means. It is due rather to
widespread lack of faith in the utility and desirabihty of Catholic
high schools, and it is not confined to the laity. Pastors who are
zealous enough in the cause of the parochial school disavow
belief in the necessity or possibility of Catholic high schools, and
Vol. XXVI— 6

498 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

permit without scruple the attendance of Catholic children at the
public high school. Men in the walks of higher education look with
coldness or disfavor upon the project of a system of Catholic high
schools, out of the fear that they might injure existing institutions.
The result is apathy and indifference well-nigh universal.

And yet what sound reason can be given, outside of the reason of
necessity, why the Catholic parent should be freely allowed to send
his child to the public school in the one case and strictly for-
l^idden in the other ? Is there less need of the religious instruction
and moral tone of the Catholic school for the boy of 16 than for the
lad of 12? Are the dangers of companionship less great in the pub-
lic high school than they are in the grammar school ? Does the sub-
ject matter of the lessons or lectures bear less upon matters of morals
and religion ? As a matter of fact, it is in the high school that the
boy gets his first world-view of things. Literature and history are
the two eyes through which the soul scans the universe of human
life. Is it tolerable that the view may be distorted or colored for
the Catholic boy by non-Catholic bias? If history and literature
may be studied in the public school without danger to faith, why
may not, with greater reason, grammar and arithmetic ? If the boy
of 16, with his ripening passions and impressionable moral nature,
may live in a "godless" atmosphere without harm, why may not the
boy of 12, with his less developed impulses to evil? And the
-same argument would apply, with no less truth and cogency, to the
question of higher education. There is really no more reason to
prevent a Catholic boy from going to a non-Catholic college than
there is to prevent his going to a public high school. The logical
^applicability to parochial school and college of any general princi-
ple that may be admitted for the secondary schools is too plain to be
missed by even the most ignorant, and the present widespread atti-
tude of indifference in respect to Catholic high schools must, if con-
tinued, extend eventually to the parochial schools and the colleges,
and profoundly affect the entire system of CathoHc education.

It is because of the realization of this that our ecclesiastical coun-
cils, in conformity with the instructions of the Holy See, have in-
sisted so strongly and steadfastly upon the necessity for a complete
system of Catholic schools, along the lines of the national educa-
tion, and that our ablest and most far-seeing leaders are devoting so
much of their practical efforts in education to the building up of
Catholic secondary schools in their respective dioceses. The vast
expansion of public secondary schools in recent years, the rapid
educational evolution going on visibly about us, with the possibility
•of the complete unification of all public education, makes the ques-
tion of Catholic high schools, with which that of the systematization

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. 499

of Catholic education is intimately bound up, a vital and a pressing
problem for Catholics. It commends itself especially to the atten-
tion and earnest study of Catholic educators. The present condi-
tions are abnormal and illogical, and, in the nature of things, must
operate to the detriment of the religious as well as the educational
interests of our people. In the words of one whose abilities and ex-
perience entitle him to rank as an authority: "There is far less
danger in allowing young children to attend the ward schools and
young men to attend the non-Catholic technical schools and uni-
versities, than in permitting the frequentation of the non-Catholic
high schools and academies. We believe it would be better to
frankly accept the public school system as a whole and make special
provisions for supplying its deficiencies in religious teaching than to
expose our children to the influence of a dual system. "^^

James A. Burns, C. S. C.

Washington, D. C.

TWO CENTURIES OF CATHOLICITY IN DETROIT.

THE authentic documentary records of two centuries of Catho-
licity in Detroit commence with the dedication of a chapel
in honor of the mother of the Blessed Virgin on the festival
of Ste. Anne, July 26, 1701.

The locality was the high bluff on the northwestern littoral of the
strait, through which flowed the crystal waters of the great lakes
above on their way to Lake Erie, twenty miles below.

The ceremonies of dedication were performed by two venerable
priests, Father Constantin D'Lhalle, Recollet, from the monastery
of this order at Quebec, and Father Francis Vaillant de Gueslis, S.
J., ci devant Iroquoian missionary, from the Jesuit College of Quebec.

The attendants at this ceremony comprised fifty officers and sol-
diers of the army of France and the same number of artisans and
agriculturists selected for colonists from the sparse settlements of
Canada, comprising the initial expedition of the Chevalier La Mothe
Cadillac, who had been commissioned by Louis XIV. to establish a
colony and fort sur le d'etroit du Lac Erie, en lieu avantageux.

The surroundings of this religious ceremony may be accurately
described. The commandant, the Chevalier Cadillac, was an adept
in North American frontier experience ; he was also a fairly qualified
engineer. As a site for the nucleus of the intended colony he had
outlined a square of four acres on a plain of the high bluff overlook-

i3Rev. John T. Murphy, C. Sp. S.,in American Catholic Quarterly Review, 22, iQl.

500 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

ing the strait where the stream was narrowest. On the water front
he had enclosed with paHsades 200 square feet, on which was erected
a bastioned fort, on the right and left of which had been mounted
the two small cannon which had been brought from Quebec, so as
to command the approach by water from up or down stream. From
a high mast planted on the esplanade of this little fort floated the
lilied flag of far distant France.

The four acres had been enclosed with high palisades with pointed
tops, while the land front of the square as well as its sides were pro-
tected with loopholed watch towers. A strong double gate on the
land side permitted entrance or exit from or to the forest bordered
plain beyond. Inside the enclosure a circular road had been out-
lined, called in military parlance le chemin de ronde; this was patroled
by sentinels day and night.

The defensive works had been named Fort de Pontchartrain, in
honor of Count Jerome of that name, Minister of Marine and Colo-
nies in the Cabinet of Louis XIV. The enclosure within the chemin
de ronde had been laid out in narrow streets, on which had been
built the dwellings of the commandant and his officers, the chapel of
Ste. Anne, the priest's house and the storehouse.

A row of lesser dwellings provided shelter for the artisans and
farmers, while the soldiers were lodged inside the fort. The con-
struction of thes« buildings was necessarily simple and more or less
uniform. They were built, says Rameau, "of square hewed timber
fresh from the forest, the pieces of equal length were laid one over
the other, like in mason work," perforated for doors and windows
and provided with good sized hearths and chimneys. They were
roofed with bark and made habitable and comfortable by the methods
usual in frontier settlements. The male sex alone comprised human
life, while not a domestic animal could be found in the little colony,
neither horses, cattle, swine or sheep !

With the exception of Captain de Tonty, second in command,
who was an Italian, the community was solidly French. The in-
tended colonists were mostly from Normandy, while the command-
ant was a typical Gascon.

It is to the honor, while it is due the memory of Louis XIV., as
well as of his predecessors and particularly of their respective Cabi-
net Ministers, to testify from authentic records, as also from the
royal edicts issued from time to time, to their solicitude for the spir-
itual welfare of those of their subjects who left their homes in France
and crossed the ocean to become colonists in the founding of the
new empire on North American soil. But their Christian charity is
still more in evidence by the substantial arrangements made for the
conversion to Christianity of the aboriginal occupants and rulers of

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. 501

the country over which France had assumed political control by
right of conquest.

The Jesuits and RecoUets entered the missionary field in North
America early in the seventeenth century and made progress; but
their small bands were forced to return to France by anti-Catholic
hostility. Cardinal Richelieu determined to extend missionary work
in North America with headquarters at Quebec. He invited the
Capuchins to undertake the work. The superior of this branch of
the Franciscan Order in Paris at the time, judging from the experi-
ence of the RecoUets, deemed the service too hazardous and declined
to peril the lives of his brethren ; but he advised the selection of the
Jesuits for such heroic work. Under such auspices the latter order
entered the missionary field and were joined later on by the Recol-
lets.

Dr. John Gilmary Shea, who recites these facts, states that he saw
and read in the archives of the Bureau des Terres at Quebec the pass-
port signed by Cardinal Richelieu of the first band of Jesuit mis-
sionaries who came from France to Quebec.

The jpolicy of the rulers of France during all their subsequent
political history in their new empire in North America was charit-
ably appreciated and substantially supplemented by wealthy Cath-
olics, who contributed liberally and who not only established founda-
tions for permanent annual incomes in support of missionary and
educational work, but who likewise continued to devote each year
certain portions of their wealth for such work as long as France con-
trolled affairs in her American colony.

Under such favorable auspices was the Catholic religion founded
in Detroit two hundred years ago ! How different from the subse-
quent parochial beginnings in other American communities, where
the Catholic faith was proscribed by English colonial laws and where
its faithful adherents were compelled, surreptitiously, at infrequent
occasions, when a priest was available, to assist at the Holy Sacrifice
and enjoy the sacraments in private houses and out-of-the-way locali-
ties !

The venerable and subsequent martyr Recollet, Father D'Lhalle,
had been appointed aumonier of the expedition of La Mothe Cadillac
by Governor General de Calieres ; he in fact was the founder of the
Catholic religion in Detroit.

The presence of the Jesuit Iroquoian missionary, Father Vaillant
de Gueslis, as stated, as participant in the ceremonies of the dedica-
tion of the first chapel of Ste. Anne was by the direction of the
father superior of his order at Quebec, who had been asked by the
Governor General to send a Jesuit missionary conversant with In-
dian dialects with the expedition of the Chevalier Cadillac.

5P2 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

When, however, the venerable father superior learned from au-:
thentic sources that the intention of the Chevalier Cadillac was to
bring the Lake tribes, most of whose members had been evangelized
by the Jesuit missionaries, whose centre of operations had for many
years been at Michilimacinac, to new homes in the vicinity of Fort
de Pontchartrain, it became evident that the system of the Lake
missions perfected by the zeal as well as by the martyrdom of some
of the most eminent of the fathers of the Society of Jesus in North
America was menaced with disruption by depopulation, while in
their new homes in the vicinity of a colony of whites their spiritual
control would be wrested from the missionaries, who would become
subordinate to the commandant of the colony, the father superior
did not hesitate to send by trusty messengers instructions to Father
Vaillant for his immediate return to Quebec, which he accomplished
before the end of the year, much to the annoyance of the Chevalier
Cadillac.

Some years previous to the events related the Chevalier Cadillac
had been appointed by Governor General Frontenac military com-
mandant at Michilimacinac, which at that period in the history of
New France was a post of political as well as of strategic importance
in relation to the nations of her Algonquian allies. It was situated
on the main land at the conjunction of the straits of the waters of
Lakes Huron and Michigan and opposite what is now known as the
Island of Mackinac.

This locality had long been the centre of the missionary opera-
tions of the Jesuit Fathers, who had evangelized the Indian nations
on the littorals of the Lakes Huron, Michigan and Superior, whose
tribes had made it their rendezvous while making their canoe voy-
ages to or from Quebec. It was also the depot of the Western fur
trade, where cargoes for this traffic were received from Quebec by
way of the Ottawa river and Georgian Bay route and distributed,
and where the furs received in return were assorted and prepared for
shipment by way of the same route to Quebec and thence to France.^

The capital invested in this hazardous commerce, which at the
time extended to Hudson's Bay, was large; but the profit realized
was great. The local traffic was quite remunerative, so much so
that the military commandant, the Chevalier Cadillac, was tempted
surreptitiously to engage therein. His heroic wife at Quebec ob-
tained by loan partly a sum of 5,000 livres, which she invested in
eau de vie and goods for the Indian trade, which she had freighted on,
large trading canoes and shipped to her husband at Michilimacinac.
It is very doubtful if the Governor General had knowledge of this
illicit operation. With this stock, with his prestige as commandant

1 This traffic was exploited by the monopoly of the "Canada Company."

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit, 503

of the military post, the Chevalier became largely interested in its
local traffic.

The most profitable article sold by the French fur trader to the
Indians at the time was eau de vie. The unlimited traffic in this Hre
water, as it was called, resulted disastrously to the Indian and to his
family. The first to realize its ruinous effects to the bodies and souls
of their neophytes were the Jesuit missionaries. They protested to
the commandant first, but without result ; and in turn to the colonial
authorities at Quebec, from whom they received no redress. They
then appealed to Louis XIV., and with such success that the traffic
in are water at Michilimacinac was to a great extent suppressed.
The epistolary controversy growing out of this result is known in
French colonial history as the "Brandy War." Prominent in the
correspondence relating thereto was the Chevalier Cadillac, surrep-
titiously interested as he was, and he does not figure to advantage ;
but the success of the Jesuit Fathers in their humane crusade made
themselves and the members of their order the mortal enemies of the
Chevalier Cadillac. He was subsequently relieved of his command
at Michilimacinac and returned to Quebec.

Such had been the antecedents of the founder of the colony of
Detroit. His ability as well as his courage cannot be questioned.

But the success of his plans for the formation of his colony would
run counter to the interests of the great monopoly of the Canada
Company, which by royal charter had the exclusive control of the
trade of New France on land and at sea. It would interfere with
their control of the fur trade in the West and Northwest. Their
wealthy directors in Paris had powerful influence at court ; the result
of their intrigues was that the civil and commercial control of the
young colony was taken from the Chevalier and given to the repre-
sentatives of the company.^ The equally potent directors at Quebec
were instructed to carry into effect this arrangement and to install
their factors at Detroit. Besides this combination there was a reli-
gious opposition, which was less demonstrative, but still formidable.
The father superior of the Jesuits could not favor a colony whose
success during the second year of its existence resulted in the depop-
ulation of their missionary fields centering at Michilimacinac.
During six years the functions of the Chevalier at Detroit were min-
imized to that of commandant of the troops; he had succeeded in
inducing the Lake tribes to leave their homes and settle in the
vicinity of the post, but since the eclipse of his power his influence
over these tribes had waned.

He had been cited to appear before the Chancery Court at Quebec,
where for several years he was annoyed with litigous persecution

2 The commandant was inhibited from sharing in the trade of the colony.

504 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

until he finally succeeded in bringing the situation of affairs to the
knowledge of Count de Pontchartrain, with the result that the privi-
leges of the Canada Company were withdrawn, their agents removed
from Detroit and the Chevalier restored to the full control of the
colony, with a liberal grant of money for its development. He then
actively recruited the colony by inducing emigration from Canada
and by liberal grants from the royal bounty to settlers for agricul-
tural needs.

In a few years the colony was in a flourishing condition, but in
1710 the Chevalier Cadillac was promoted to the Governorship of
Louisiana, and he departed forever from the scene of his greatest suc-
cess. It was no friendly interest that brought about this result. In
the meantime the first chapel of Ste. Anne, with other buildings, had
been destroyed by fire in 1703. It was rebuilt on a larger scale, but
a few years later, while the post was in danger of attack, the second
chapel had to be destroyed for strategic reasons ; a third and larger
chapel was built by the Chevalier Cadillac. During the enforced
absence of the latter at Quebec the first pastor of the colony, the
saintly Father D'Lhalle, was treacherously murdered by a hostile
Indian ; his martyr blood consecrated the soil on which the Catholic
faith had been first established in Detroit. The same year the
Recollet, Father de La Marche, arrived and succeeded to the pas-
torate of Ste. Anne; he retired in 1709 and was succeeded by the
Recollet Father Deniau.^ Thus religious service, with but slight
interruption, had been continuous.

The line of Recollet pastors continued unbroken until the closing
decades of the eighteenth century.* The colony of Detroit had con-
tinued to increase during French colonial rule and had developed
on both Httorals of the strait. In 1728 the Jesuit Fathers had re-
appeared; Father Armand de La Richardie, S. J., established the
' Mission des Hurons du Detroit on the south littoral, which was con-
tinued until the last of the Huron missionaries. Father Pierre Potier,
S. J., was accidentally killed in 1781. With Recollets on one side of
the strait and the Jesuits on the other during nearly a century three
generations of Catholics had lived in the faith. In the meantime
important political changes had occurred.

The fine Empire of New France had been lost to the mother

3 We are indebted to the Abbe Gosselin, of Quebec, for a copy of his discourse
before the Royal Society of Canada, the subject of which was: "Un Soldat de Fron-
tenac Devenu Recollet, 'in which the romantic history of Father Deniau is outlined.
While pursuing his theological studies at the seminary at Angers an unfortunate
accident occurred which rendered flight necessary, and he took refuge in Paris,
where he enlisted as a soldier, and was subsequently sent with a detachment of
troops to the army of Frontenac at Quebec. The Governor, learning of hia
history, secured his appointment as professor in the Seminary of Quebec, from
which institution he was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Laval, December
3. 1700. * See "The Recollets at Detroit During Nearly All the Eighteenth Century,"
American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. xxiii.. No. 92, October, 1898, p. 759.

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. 505

country on the Plains of Abraham ; subsequently the lilied standard
of France had been lowered on this frontier to the British con-
querors, while the Northwest became an adjunct of the EngHsh
colonies.

The conspiracy of Pontiac ensued and in time the American Revo-
lution ; the strait now known as the Detroit river became the national
boundary line; the north shore was American and the south British.

In 1796 the British forces evacuated Detroit, and the Bishop of
Quebec*^ ceded his spiritual sway to the future Metropolitan of the
United States, Right Rev. John Carroll, of Baltimore, over Detroit
*'and its dependencies."

From this event dates the progress of the Catholic religion in
Detroit, as well as the foundation of spiritual and educational pro-
gress among the people of its dependencies from the head of Lake
Erie as far west and northwest as Lake Superior.

The disciples of St. Francis had prepared the soil and the disciples
of St. Sulpice reaped the first harvest under American episcopal
jurisdiction.

The Sulpitian, Very Rev. Michael Levadoux, was the first incum-
bent of Ste. Anne's under Bishop Carroll ; he was recalled to France
two years later and succeeded by Very Rev. Gabriel Richard, who
had for his assistant his brother Sulpitian, the accomplished and
subsequent historian. Rev. John Dilhet.

With two such holy priests and accomplished men religion and
education were developed in Detroit and the widely extended field
of its parochial dependencies. Father Richard found the fourth
church of Ste. Anne too small to accommodate the local parishioners ;
so also were the school buildings. He enlarged all three and built
academies for young men and women, while he and Father Dilhet
instructed teachers of both sexes for the education of young men
and women in the primary and higher branches. He then made
pastoral visits to missionary stations on the American littorals from
the head waters of Lake Erie to the Sault de Ste. Marie, remaining
several weeks at the Island of Mackinac, whose population of whites,
half-breeds and Indians he found in a demoralized condition. This
tour occupied six months and enabled him to report to Bishop Car-
roll the population as well as the spiritual status of all under the
jurisdiction of Ste. Anne's of Detroit.

He then, with his assistant, began the instruction of his local par-
ishioners for the reception of the Sacrament of Confirmation, which,
during the months of July and August, 1801, was, by invitation of
Bishop Carroll, administered to 521 persons, whose ages ranged

« Right Rev. Jean Francois Hubert, D. D., who was ci devant pastor of Ste,
Anne's, Detroit.

5o6 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

from thirteen to eighty years, in the Church of Ste. Anne by Right
Rev. Pierre Denaut, D. D., twelfth Bishop of Quebec. In June,
1805, the church, academies, presbytery and schools were destroyed
by the fire which in a few hours wiped out of existence the old
colonial town of Detroit.

Many priests would have been utterly discouraged by such a
calamity, which was disastrous alike to pastor and immediate par-
ishioners, but Father Richard, although saddened at the material
loss to religion and to his people, made great efforts to assist the
latter and provide food and temporary shelter. He soon obtained
possession of a large building a mile below the former city, which
he arranged for religious services and for his presbytery. His acade-
mies and primary schools were reopened and better arranged. The
former were supplied with first-class chemical apparatus. In a
school especially designed for the education of Indian girls these
were instructed in the minor rudiments, while a dozen spinning
wheels and other technical appliances were provided for their use,
which were designed to prepare these girls with a practical knowl-
edge useful in their future life. In 1809 Father Richard set up the
first printing press in the West, and by the aid of Mr. Coxeshawe, a
practical printer whom he had brought from the East, he published
a series of religious and educational books in French and in English
and French, which were sold at a moderate price and which re-
placed the books which had been destroyed by the fire of 1805. The
War of 1 81 2 ensued. Father Richard, who was American in all
essentials save his nativity, was, contrary to the usages of war,
arrested by order of General Brock, British commander, and taken
in irons to the prison at Sandwich, on the opposite side of the strait,
when Detroit was surrendered. The farmhouses and dwellings of
the well-to-do parishioners of Ste. Anne up and down the American
shore were plundered and their floors and fences used for the camp
fires of the Shawnee Indian allies of his Britannic Majesty.

The battle of the Thames ended this last episode of British rule on
American soil. When Father Richard was liberated and returned to
Detroit he found his parishioners on the verge of starvation. They
had been robbed of their stores of food and of grain; they had
neither seed-grain nor vegetables to plant in their fields.

The credit of this venerable apostle was such that he was enabled
to purchase the requisite supply of food and grain, which he dis-
tributed ; the danger of famine was averted by his prompt and active
assistance and his spiritual children were soon restored to their
former comfortable status.

The spiritual control of Detroit and its dependencies had in the
meantime been vested in the See of Bardstown, Ky.

Tzi'o Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit, 507

Father Richard, like other saintly prelates and priests in Eastern
cities, experienced annoyance from scandals caused by rebellious
trustees. But these afflictions did not occur in the parochial corpo-
ration of Ste. Anne's Church, Detroit.

In 1808 Paul Malcher, a wealthy bachelor, donated a farm one-
quarter mile in width and three miles in length, extending from the
bank of the river to the forest, for religious and educational purposes,
situated at the Cote du Nord Est, two miles above Ste. Anne's. The
deed was made to a syndicate of his neighbors, who, like himself,
were good Catholics. In 1809 a church and school were built on
the river front and a parish was organized, taking the name of the
Cote du Nord, with the parties named in the deed as marguilliers
or trustees. This little church was of great convenience to Catholics
living in its vicinity, some of whom lived four or five miles from the
Church of Ste. Anne. It became a succursal of the latter and divine
service was held therein on Sundays and festivals by Father Richard
or his assistant.

In the new plan of Detroit Ste. Anne's corporation was assigned,
in exchange for its former holding, a square now in the centre of
the present city as a more extensive site for church and cemetery,
which was acceptable to the pastor, to the marguilliers and to the
parishioners generally and formally accepted; the front of the old
site, including the ancient cemetery, being included within the lines
of the present Jefferson avenue, was ceded to the city, while the rear
portion, fronting on the southerly line of the present Larned street,
was left to Ste Anne and subsequently sold as a nucleus for the fund
for building the new church on the new site.

It was stipulated by the corporation of Ste. Anne that the remains
of the dead in the ancient cemetery would be removed to the new
cemetery. These transactions were bitterly opposed by a faction of
the marguilliers of the Cote du Nord parish, which developed into
open schism. The great majority of the people of the little parish
were faithful to their revered pastor, but they were made to suffer
the consequences of the action of their trustees.

The Right Rev. Benedict Joseph Flaget, D. D., was Bishop of
Bardstown at this period. A deputation went to Bardstown and
both sides were heard. Bishop Flaget sustained Father Richard,
and issued in 1817 a mandement,^ which is a model document of epis-
copal jurisprudence, addressed to all the faithful at Detroit and
vicinity, placing the Cote du Nord church and parish under interdict '
unless certain formalities were compHed with.

It was a dread sentence, but the recalcitrant marguilliers remained

6 A copy of this document is on record in the parish register of Ste. Anne, of
Detroit.

5o8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

obdurate. In the following year the heart of the saintly prelate
was moved with compassion for the destitute condition of so many
faithful Catholics. He made the journey from Bardstown to De-
troit^ and soon had the satisfaction of reconciling the rebellious ones
with their venerable pastor. The mandement of the Bishop was
accepted by the margmlliers ; a grand procession, headed by the
regimental band, was formed, which conducted the Bishop from
Ste Anne's through the city, the cannon of the fort firing a salute
as it passed to the Cote du Nord. An affecting reconciliation took
place between the schismatics and their venerable pastor, Father
Richard; addresses were delivered in English and French and the
interdict was formally removed by Bishop Flaget and a handsome
amount subscribed for the fifth Church of Ste. Anne, the corner-
stone of which was laid by the Bishop June ii, i8i8.^

In 1822 the saintly Dominican, Father Edward Fen wick, was ele-
vated to the newly-erected See of Cincinnati, under whose spiritual
jurisdiction was placed Detroit "and its dependencies." The build-
ing of the new Church of Ste. Anne imposed a heavy burden upon
its pastor ; its basement was first dedicated in 1820 for divine service,
and the upper portion so far completed that it was dedicated on
Christmas, 1828. It was a large and imposing structure at that
time ; having two towers in front and rear and a large dome in the
centre, it dominated all other buildings and was a conspicuous land-
mark to the traveler in his approach to the city by land or water.

In 1823 Father Richard was elected by a decisive majority as the
third territorial representative of Michigan to Congress. He ac-
cepted the office with a view to utilize its salary in completing Ste.
Anne's. His appearance in the House of Representatives created
a sensation; his demeanor commanded great respect. "He spoke
but little, and that wisely, and did much for his constituents and the
Union."** Through his efforts the military roads from Detroit lead-
ing to Chicago, the Grand River Valley, Lakes Michigan and Huron
were built by the Federal Government, over the lines of which have
since been constructed the iron roadways which connect the East
with the West and open Michigan to the commerce of the world.
While in Washington he solicited and obtained government aid for
the maintenance of schools among the Indian tribes under his juris-
diction.

In July, 1824, Father Richard made a tour of the lake missions.
While at Mackinac he visited the site of the Jesuit missionary sta-
tion at Michilimacinac of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
He located and marked the grave of Father Marquette, he visited

J This tiresome journey was made in the saddle. 8 Spalding's "Life of Bishop

Flaget," pp. 182-187. » See the Congressional Globe of 1823-24.

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit, 509

all the island missionary stations and the Sault de Ste. Marie. Re-
turning by way of Saint Louis, he went to Cincinnati, where he
assisted at the ordination of Rev. Francis Vincent Badin, with whom
he returned to Detroit. This young priest, learned, accomplished
and pious, subsequently became the assistant and solace of the ven-
erable Father Richard.^^

With the cooperation of Bishop Fenwick the missionary work
among the Indian tribes of the Lake regions was developed. Father
Francis Vincent Badin was sent to the Ottawas and Pottawatomies ;
the circuit of these missions included the littorals of the islands of
Lakes Huron and Michigan, of the Georgian Bay and the littoral of
Lake Michigan, which included the site of the present city of
Chicago.^^

The same year Fathers De Jean and Bellamy arrived from France,

volunteers for the Indian missions of the Lakes. After a course of

linguistic instruction at the presbytery of Ste. Anne these young

priests were assigned to the missions on the Lakes, relieving Father

Badin, who returned to Detroit. Father de Jean subsequently.

evangelized the Ottawa tribes and restored them to Christian
life."^2

One of the most zealous priests sent from Cincinnati by Bishop
Fenwick to Father Richard for missionary work in the lake regions
was the Rev. Frederick Rese, who, as a preliminary for this work,
underwent a course of study of the Indian dialects at the presbytery
of Ste. Anne. He was an apt scholar in Indian linguistics.^^ The
same year, 1826, Father Badin was sent to Wisconsin to revive
religion in the former missionary fields of this region. He extended
his visits as far North as Prairie du Chien, where he restored the
former missionary establishments, comprising a population of about
600 souls.

This was the hardest work the city bred priest of Orleans had ex-
perienced in America, but he accomplished much. After his return
to Detroit he resumed parochial work in the parish of Ste. Anne and
in the succursal parish of the Cote du Nord, thereby relieving Father
Richard of much routine work.

In the meantime the missionary field had been extended from the
islands and littoral of the Georgian Bay up the River St. Mary to the

10 He was a younger brother of Rev. Stephen Theodore Badin, the first priest or-
dained in the United States. The brothers were natives of Orleans, France, n Ann.
Prop. IL p. 247. 12 Ibid., p. 344. is Dr. Frederick R6s6 was bom in Hildesheim,
in the Kingdom of Hanover, Germany, in 1797. In his youth he was a soldier and
served as a minor cavalry officer in tne corps of Marshal Blucher at the battle of
Waterloo. After the eclipse of Napoleon he resigned the sword to take up the
cross. He entered the College of the Propaganda at Rome and studied for the
priesthood; he earned the title of D. D. and was ordained. He was then sent to
Africa on missionary service, and on his return to Rome he offered himself to
Bishop Fenwick, first Bishop of Cincinnati, aa a volunteer for missionary work
among the Indians of Michigan. He arrived at Cincinnati in 1825 and became
secretary to the Bishop.

510 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Sault and across Lake Superior to its head waters at Fond du Lac,
including the Httorals of the islands and main land of what now con-
stitutes the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, parts of Minnesota and of
Wisconsin. This extensive region was almost exclusively inhabited
by the tribes of the once great nation of the Chippewas, whose peo-
ple, alternately freezing and starving, were probably among the most
miserable of the human race.^* The indefatigable Father Rese was
recalled to Cincinnati and was promoted by Bishop Fenwick to the
office of vicar general of the diocese. He had become thoroughly
posted with the missionary work directed from Detroit by Father
Richard and the pecuniary requirements necessary for its vigorous
prosecution which were not available at the time. He was author-
ized by Bishop Fenwick to go to Europe in 1828 and solicit pecun-
iary assistance for religious work generally, but especially for Indian
missionary service among the tribes of the Lake regions, for which
he was to solicit volunteers. He went directly to Vienna, where he
had influential friends.

Among others he interested the Archduchess Leopoldine of Aus-
tria, who exercised considerable influence at the Imperial Court and
among the wealthy nobility of the empire. Under the patronage
of this Imperial Princess the Leopoldine Society was founded and
capitalized liberally for the promotion of the missionary work of the
Diocese of Cincinnati operated from Detroit.

Financial assistance from other wealthy Catholics was also re-
ceived for the same objects. Being thus assured of pecuniary aid
from the annual allocations of the Leopoldine Society, and rein-
forced as stated, he sought and obtained volunteers for the sacerdotal
part of the missionary system, with whom he returned to his diocese.
The square which had been assigned the corporation of Ste. Anne
by the judicial and civil authorities of the city and territory was ex-
tensive. On the south it fronted on Larned street, while it was
bounded on the north by Michigan Grand avenue, since renamed
Cadillac Square ; on the east by Randolph street, and the west by
Bates street.

On the southeast corner of Larned and Bates, 100 feet north of
the former street, had been built and completed the spacious church
known as the Fifth Ste. Anne, which, as stated, had been dedicated on
Christmas, 1828. On the east, on the Randolph street front, about
100 feet north of Larned street, had been built and completed the
presbytery of Ste. Anne; on the northeast corner, the Academy of
Ste. Anne, for the education in the higher branches of young men,
while across Larned, on the corner of Randolph, was the young

yl^Si7^li2!%7nS89tp"^^^ ^'^''''"" ^''''''''' ^"^"'^"'^ ^'''''''

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. 511

ladies' academy. On the east side of Randolph were free primary
schools for boys and girls. ^^ The presbytery was a three-story
frame building about 70 feet square. A hall 10 feet wide extended
through the centre of the first and second stories, on each side of
which were good sized rooms. The third story contained three bed
rooms and a large room in which was the historic press of Father
Richard, the depository of his published books and of his precious
manuscripts.

A broad path extended from the rear of the presbytery to the base-
ment entrance of the church. The Larned street front and the Bates
street front to the rear of the church was enclosed by an open fence.
From the south of the presbytery a path led to the Larned street
side, by which the young ladies of the academy and their teachers
had access to the church. On the north a similar path led to the
entrance of the Academy of Ste. Anne. The south front of the
square was reserved for garden and orchard, while north of the path
to the entrance of the church referred to was the second cemetery of
Ste. Anne, covered with tombstones and containing the bones and
ashes of the Catholic dead of 125 years. The remainder of the
square was enclosed with a high board fence.

In the Catholic annals of the Northwest the presbytery of Ste.
Anne was historic. It was the home of the Venerable Father Rich-
ard and of his distinguished confrere and immediate successor,
Father Badin. It was the abiding place of the saintly Bishop Fen-
wick when this prelate made his apostolic periodical visitations. It
was the preparatory school, the alma mater, of the zealous young
priests who came from Europe to serve as missionaries among the
Indian tribes of the Upper Lake regions, where they were instructed
in the Chippewa, the Ottawa and the Pottawatomie dialects, a far
more difficult study than that of the classics during their collegiate
experience.

The greatest missionary work accomplished under the direction
of any one Bishop or priest in North America during the first three
decades of the nineteenth century may be claimed for Father Rich-
ard. In fact, in no part of the United States was there a field so ex-
tensive or so difficult of access as that confided to his care under the
metropolitan administrations of Archbishops Carroll, Neale, Mare-
chal and Whitfield and under Bishops Flaget and Fenwick.

The dependencies of the parish of Ste. Anne of Detroit extended
from the River Raisin, at the head waters of Lake Erie, along the
littoral of the straits of Detroit, Lake St. Clair and tributary streams ;
Lakes Huron and Michigan, as far as the River St. Joseph, and on

15 These institutions evidence the continuous educational policy of Father
Richard.

512 . American Catholic Quarterly Review,

the Illinois border where Chicago has since been built. In Wiscon-
sin as far north as Prairie du Chien and the country tributary to
Green Bay it included the islands of Lakes Michigan, Huron and the
Georgian Bay, and up the River St. Mary to the Sault, and around
the head waters of Lake Superior to Fond du Lac. With the pass-
ing of the century, during the early part of which Father Richard
directed the planting of the faith in the extensive territory we have
generally outlined, there now exists, in Michigan, the Dioceses of
Detroit, Grand Rapids and Marquette; in the other States, three
archiepiscopal provinces, seven dioceses, with a total Catholic popu-
lation of over two million souls.

In the summer of 1832 the Asiatic cholera afflicted Detroit, then
badly prepared to resist an epidemic. The Catholic population felt
its ravages most severely, for many among them were strangers and
poor people. Fathers Richard and Badin devoted themselves to the
sick and dying day and night, administering the Holy Sacraments
and burying the dead.

During the two months in which the pestilence raged the vener-
able pastor allowed himself but little rest. When first attacked by
the dread disease he was saved for the time, but he never fully re-
covered, and died without pain September 13, 1832. There were
present during his last hours Bishop Fenwick, Fathers Badin,
Baraga and Hotsher, the pioneer Redemptorist of the West. His
remains were deposited in the crypt beneath Ste. Anne's, which he
had labored so long and so hard to build and which he loved so well.

Father Badin succeeded to the pastorate. Father Richard was
tall and spare; his face seemed like parchment, so little flesh was
there on his high cheek bones, his forehead prominent, his bearing
dignified and graceful. His confrere. Father Francis Vincent Badin,
was similar in appearance and as gentle mannered. Both were per-
fect types of the ascetic priests who brought to our shores more than
a century ago the fervent faith and charming manners of the ancien
regime of Catholic France. Fifty years succeeding his death the
local historian, Bela Hubbard, placed upon the massive fagade of the
City Hall of Detroit four statues designed to commemorate the men
most identified with the exploration and the civilization of the West
in their respective epochs. These were the soldiers of the cross,
eminent members of two great religious orders, James Marquette
and Gabriel Richard, and of the chivalry of old France, Robert de
La Salle and Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac.

Preceding the demise of Father Richard it had been decided by
the American hierarchy to erect the Diocese of Detroit, the mitre
being intended for Father Richard ; but Divine Providence decreed
otherwise. The venerable appointee for the episcopate of Detroit

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. 513

was spared the burden of such well deserved honor and called to a
never ending celestial reward.

March 8, 1833, the Diocese of Detroit was established. The Very
Rev. Frederick Rese, D. D., vicar general of Cincinnati, was ap-
pointed to the see ; but it was not until October 6 of the same year
that he was consecrated by Bishop Rosati, in the Cathedral of Cin-
cinnati.

In the meantime the first Bishop of Cincinnati, the saintly Fen-
wick, had died September 26, 1832, while his successor, Right Rev.
John B. Purcell, was consecrated October 13, 1833.

At the time of his consecration Bishop Rese was in his 36th
year. His personal appearance was not ascetic. He was of medium
height, while his military career had left him square built and erect.
His countenance was pleasing, with bright black eyes and closely
curled crow-black hair. He was a fair type of manly beauty, while
his manner was agreeable.

From the time of his nomination to the newly created see the
Archduchess Leopoldine of Austria became his patroness and the
benefactress of the Diocese of Detroit in all that related to the per-
sonal and religious appointments of the young Bishop. It may be
claimed that no Bishop in the hierarchical history of the Church in
the United States assumed control of his diocese under more favor-
able auspices than did the first Bishop of Detroit. His episcopal
wardrobe was of the finest ; his respective suits of vestments were of
the richest procurable in Europe, while the linen and lace appurte-
nances thereto were in keeping. The chalices and patins for his
personal use were of solid gold ; his crozier, mitres, cross and ring
were resplendent with costly jewels ; the ciboriums, monstrance and
chaHces for sanctuary use were of massive silver fire-gilt, as were
also the censers, cups and cruets. The altar was appointed with
solid silver fire-gilt candlesticks and candelabrums ; the sanctuary
was richly carpeted, while its walls were hung with pure silk broca-
telle arras, every square yard of which must have cost fifty Austrian
florins.

When Bishop Rese came to Detroit to assume possession of his
see he brought with him two Oratorian Fathers from their house in
Belgium, destined to establish a college for the education of ecclesi-
astical students and young men. These were John de Bruyn and
Louis F. Van den Poel, both in the prime of life. With the Ora-
torians, as members of the faculty of the intended college and as
theological students, were Francis Boens, Thomas Cullen, Law-
rence Kilroy and William Olwell. In addition to this religious en-
semble was John Pontius, intended as sacristan and master of cere-
monies, familiarly known as "Brother John," who was a fine basso
Vol. XXVI-7

514 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

and a great wit, and to complete it were Revs. Bernard O'Cavanagh,
intended for pastor of the English speaking Catholics, and Martin
Kundig, of Swiss nationality, but a fluent and accomplished preacher
in the English, German and French languages, intended for pastor
of the Catholics of German nationality. Added to this clerical
company were John B. Schick, a young Polish exile, professor
of music, who was to be organist ; a brother professor from New
York, who had a fine tenor voice ; Miss Martha Levi, a recent con-
vert from Judaism and a fine alto singer, and Miss Julia O'Cavanagh,
sister of the priest above mentioned, who was a fine contralto
singer.^**

It might be claimed that the episcopal as well as the religious
establishment of Bishop Rese was complete for the purpose intended.
It was not only so, but at the same time it was cosmopolitan and of
the highest attainable standard of excellence. But this was not all.
Captain Alpheus White, an established architect of Cincinnati, had
with his family accompanied the Bishop.

This gentleman of the Irish family of this name prominent in the
American history of New Orleans had once been a privateer captain,
sailing in the Gulf of Mexico, who after the War of 18 12 had re-
moved to Cincinnati, in which city he had acquired a fortune in his
adopted profession.

The experience of the Bishop during his military career had prob-
ably been such as to convince him that the commissary department
of any expedition was a feature which required attention. He had
accordingly brought with him a chef whose familiar household name
was "Charlie," but whose family name we never knew. We have
mentioned that a large section of the Larned street front of the
domain of Ste. Anne had been reserved for a garden and orchard.
To develop this appendage the Bishop had brought from Cincinnati
a professional gardener named Ferdinand Erb. We remember him
well. He was a tall, good natured German and not too stingy with
his ripening fruit.

The young ladies of the episcopal colony were cared for in the
academy for their sex, on the southwest corner of Randolph and
Larned streets. Professor Schick and his confrere were lodged with
a Catholic family in the vicinity. Captain White built a residence
on the east side of Randolph street, while the Bishop and his
entourage occupied the ci devant presbytery of Ste. Anne, which had
become the episcopal residence of Detroit. Captain White re-
modeled Ste. Anne's' and built the College of St. Philip Neri, on the
river front of the Cote du Nord church farm, to which the Oratorian

16 These accomplished and beautiful ladies subsequently married the brothers
James and John Watson, who were among the leading Catholic merchants of the
city.

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. 515

Fathers with their faculty removed and opened the collegiate work
which attracted a number of students.

The Bishop also brought with him Mr. Charles Schwab, a com-
petent organ builder of Cincinnati, who erected his little factory on
the eastern line of Ste. Anne's domain, and with his skilled work-
men built the largest organ for the Cathedral at that time in use in
the United States. All these details are authentic. They are not
given upon traditional authority, nor have we any knowledge of any
printed account of them.

We write them de science certaine. It may be asked where the
money came from ? It was supplied most liberally from Vienna.
And from this city the United States Consul General Schwartz*^
sent a fine processional fire-gilt cross to the first Bishop of Detroit,
which is still in use.

In the spring of 1834 Captain White was authorized to purchase
a site for a church for the Irish and English speaking Catholics.
This he did on the northwest corner of Bates street and Michigan
Grand avenue. About the same time he purchased from the First
Protestant Society of Detroit their large frame church on the north-
east corner of Woodward avenue and Larned street, which he had
moved to the Bates street corner. But before this building could
be remodeled for Catholic worship the Asiatic cholera again ap-
peared and became epidemic in Detroit. In the meantime the popu-
lation of the city had been considerably increased by newcomers
from the Eastern States and from Europe. Large numbers of the
latter were Irish Catholics. There was no hospital at the time in
Detroit. The unacclimated of the poorer classes fell victims in large
numbers. The Bishop directed Captain White to prepare the vacant
church for hospital uses, which he did, and Father Martin Kundig
was placed in charge and empowered to succor the stricken ones
without regard to race or creed. In this noble work Father Kundig
was substantially assisted by Charles C. Trowbridge, Mayor of
the city, and by the active cooperation of the medical faculty of
Detroit.

In the annals of charitable work in Detroit the heroic work of
Father Kundig in connection with this temporary Catholic hospital
earned for him the title of the Apostle of Charity in Detroit.^®

In the summer of 1835 the remodeled church was dedicated to the
Holy Trinity and Father Bernard O'Cavanagh was installed as
pastor. Ste. Anne was the first, Holy Trinity became the second
and in time the most populous parish in Detroit. T)ie numerical

17 The Consul at Vienna was a brother of General John E. Schwartz, of Detroit.
18 Father Kundig procured an ambulance and visited the parts of the city
most infected daily. He removed the stricken ones to his ambulance, drove to
the church hospital and carried the patients in his arms to the ward assigned
them.

5i6 Atnerican Catholic Quarterly Kevifoo.

preponderance of the Franco- American Catholic population of De-
troit proper from this period was ended.

The Oratorian college of St. Philip Neri became a prominent fea-
ture of the religious life of Detroit. At this time there were but
fourteen priests in the entire diocesan territory committed to the
young Bishop's care and not more than twelve churches. Bishop
Rese established two convents of the Poor Clares, one at Detroit
and the other at Green Bay, Wisconsin. He also established schools
for the Indians and made great efforts in behalf of their spiritual,
their social and their temporal welfare.

This was the golden period in the early history of the Catholic
religion in the city of Detroit during the nineteenth century. The
pontifical service in the Cathedral of Ste. Anne under the manage-
ment of "Brother John" during the term of Bishop Rese surpassed
in its splendor that of any church in the United States, Baltimore not
excepted. It was only during the past three decades that its re-
ligious pomp and grandeur has been excelled.

The relations of the Bishop with the indigenous Franco-Catholics
was of the most cordial nature. In all the improvements which had
been effected they had not been called upon to contribute a dollar.
In 1836 he obtained from the marguilliers a lease for himself and his
successors in the episcopate, under certain conditions, for 999 years
of all the temporalities of the corporation of Ste. Anne.^®

In the spring of 1837 Archbishop Eccleston convoked the Third
Council of Baltimore. At this early period the American hierarchy
comprised ten prelates, but when the Council was opened nine only
were present. At the first secret session the following letter from
the Bishop of Detroit was submitted :

""Most Reverend Fathers in Provincial Synod at Baltimore assembled.

"It is known that I reluctantly accepted the episcopal consecration, and I soon
learned by experience that the erection and administration of a new diocese, with
its numberless difficulties and cares springing up on every side, were a burden far
too great for me to bear, and I have accordingly frequently entertained the inten-
tion of resigning my diocese into the hands of His Holiness the Sovereign Pontiff ,
or at least soliciting a capable coadjutor from the Holy See. This intention I
desire to carry out by these presents, and for this purpose I have empowered my
two actual vicars general, Messrs. Badin and De Bruyn, to exercise joint jurisdic-
tion in my absence until other arrangements are made.

"Such is the matter which I deem proper to lay before ''^ou. Most Reverend
Fathers, and I beg you to excuse me if I cannot take part in tuis Council, and
also to aid me to obtain the successful realization of my desires, if it shall seem
good in our Lord.

"Feedekic R6s]&, Bishop of Detroit.

"St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, April 15, 1837."

The deliberations of the fathers upon this letter ended in a resolve
to ask the Holy See's acceptance of Bishop Rese's resignation and
the appointment of a new Bishop as successor to his see in Detroit.

19 We saw this lease finely written on parchment two feet square and framed
in glass during the "forties" in the office of James A. Vandyke, counsel of the
Bishop.

Tzvo Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. 517

This was refused at Rome, the Holy Father deferring a decision as
to the acceptance of the resignation or appointment of a successor
until Bishop Rese had been heard in person. These events were
unknown to the Catholic community of Detroit. The causes im-
pelling the Bishop to resign the mitre of Detroit must have been
serious. They were not warranted by diocesan affairs in Detroit, for
all was tranquil, properous, while the Bishop was idolized. In the
Third Council there were nine prelates, eleven distinguished theo-
logians, most of whom subsequently attained high rank in the
hierarchy; the heads of the Jesuits of Maryland and the Missouri
provinces and five minor officials. It is a remarkable fact that all
have passed to eternity without disclosing the secret of the Council
in regard to Bishop Rese, while no Catholic historian has been war-
ranted in assigning a reason for this serious event.

The Bishop returned to Detroit, and two years later, in 1839, he
embarked at New York on a Havre packet ship on his way to Rome,
He had as compagnon de voyage as far as Paris Pierre J. Desnoyers,.
a wealthy French Catholic merchant of Detroit.

The influence of the friends of Bishop Rese at Rome appears to
have been potent, for he retained his title as Bishop of Detroit and
enjoyed a revenue from his diocese during his life. He remained in
the Eternal City until forced to leave during the Revolution of 1848.
He died in Hanover December 19, 1871, in his 75th year; but his
mental faculties had been clouded for some time previous to his
death.2o

In the meantime one of the founders of the College of St. Philip
Neri, the Oratorian Father Van den Poel, had died January 28, 1837.
His obsequies in the Cathedral of Ste. Anne were among the last of
the grand ceremonials performed by Bishop Rese. On September
II, 1839, his associate and the president of this college. Father John
de Bruyn, also died.^^ This left Father Francis Vincent Badin sole
administrator of the Diocese of Detroit.

The grand pontifical ceremonies of the Cathedral of Ste. Anne
were ended with the departure of the young and brilliant Bishop
Rese. While the indigenous Franco-Catholic community of De-
troit increased from natural causes, the cosmopolitan Catholic ele-
ment was being rapidly multiplied by immigration from the Eastern
States and from Europe.

20 Captain White, in grief at the departure of his friend the Bishop, sold his
property and returned to Cincinnati, "Brother John," as well as "Charlie," the
chef, also returned to the same city. 21 The remains of both these Oratorian
fathers were deposited in the crypt beneath Ste. Anne's. When in 1886, after the
sale of the property and the fifth church of this name was demolished, the remains
of Father Ricnard were translated to the vault beneath the new and splendid
sixth church of this name. The remains of the two Oratorian fathers were given a
final resting place in the square reserved for the burial of priests in Mount Elliott
Cemetery, while those of General Antoine Beaubien we'-e removed to the burial
place of this family in the same cemetery.

2i8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The cares and responsibilities of the saintly administrator devel-
oped more and more, while he appealed to Baltimore and Cincinnati
for relief. In the meantime the zealous Father Kundig in his char-
itable zeal for the welfare of the orphan victims of the Asiatic cholera
had become involved in hopeless financial embarrassments and had
retired to Milwaukee, where he became vicar general. The Revs.
Anthony Kopp and Clemence Hammer succeeded to the spiritual
direction of the German CathoHcs. In 1840 Father Badin obtained
from Antoine and Monique Beaubien the donation of a half square
on the corner of St. Antoine street and Monroe avenue as a site for a
German church and presbytery, and early the following year the
corner-stone of St. Mary's Church was laid, which was soon after
completed. For four years Detroit was without a resident Bishop.
The position of coadjutor and administrator had been offered to
several prominent ecclesiastics, who had declined, alleging as a rea-
son that they did not care to occupy a see whose titular Bishop was
in the prime of life and who might return to assume control. Finally
the position was accepted by Rev. Peter Paul Lefevere, at the time a
missionary in Missouri and Southern Illinois. He was born in
Roulers, Belgium, April 30, 1804. Educated for the priesthood, he
came to St. Louis in 1828, where he completed his theological studies
and was ordained by Bishop Rosati in 183 1. He was consecrated
November 21, 1841, at Philadelphia, by Bishop Kenrick as Bishop
of Zela, coadjutor Bishop of Detroit and administrator of the dio-
cese. He came immediately to Detroit and assumed control. He
was then in his 38th year.

In the following year the saintly Father Badin returned to his
native city, Orleans, France, where he died at a mature age. Bishop
Lefevere soon after appointed Rev. Peter Kindekens, a young priest
from his native province, vicar general of the diocese.

The want of priests was the first great difficulty which confronted
the new Bishop. To supply this want he brought a number of
ecclesiastical students from Belgium and Holland, who were in-
structed in theology by the vicar general and' in the English language
by such American professors as could be obtained.

In 1843 the States of Illinois and Wisconsin were removed from
the jurisdiction of the See of Detroit. Of the theological students
at the College of St. Philip Neri Messrs. Boens,^^ CuUen and Olwell
had been ordained by Bishop Rese. Messrs. Lawrence, Kilroy,
Charles Van den Drieschen, who entered the Society of Jesus in Cin-
cinnati, and Francis Halpin were ordained by Bishop Lefevere in
1842. In the spring of this year the college was struck by lightning

22 This voung priest, of an excellent Belgian family, died from malarial fever at
the college soon after his ordination.

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. 519

and entirely destroyed by fire. The faculty and students were cared
for at the episcopal residence in Detroit. The church had been
saved, but a few years later it was closed and rented for storage pur-
poses.

This was the end of the collegiate institution established by the
learned Oratorian Fathers. The site of the college was on the bluff
of the shore of the Detroit, a fine location, directly opposite, perhaps
a quarter mile distant, from the northerly shore of what is now Belle
Isle Park, which at the time was marshy and probably was the cause
of so much sickness at the college.

After the departure of Father Badin Vicar General Kindekens
became pastor of the Cathedral of Ste. Anne. His pastorate con-
tinued for some years, but it was not altogether harmonious. On
the festival of SS. Peter and Paul, 1845, the Bishop laid the corner-
stone of his new Cathedral on the northeast corner of Jefferson
avenue and St. Antoine street. The extensive site had been paid for
before the ceremony had been performed. On the same festival,
which was that of his paitron saints, June 29, 1848, the Cathedral
was dedicated by Archbishop Eccleston, of Baltimore, who was as-
sisted by a large concourse of prelates and priests. Its ensemble had
been completed and paid for as the work progressed without calling
for assistance from the Catholics of the city.^^ It is a spacious
edifice, having a frontage of 80 feet on Jefferson avenue and extend-
ing on St. Antoine street 180 feet to Larned street.

A year previous Bishop Lefevere's staff had been increased by
Rev. St. Michael Edgar Evelyn Shawe, a distinguished priest from
the University of Notre Dame, a fine scholar and linguist as well as
a most eloquent preacher. It will be remembered that Bishop Rese
had served under Blucher as a cavalry officer at the Battle of Water-
loo. Father Shawe, who was of noble British descent, had com-
manded a squadron of British cavalry in the same battle under Well-
ington, and left grievously wounded on that bloody field. He
subsequently studied, was ordained a priest and was one of the vol-
unteers secured in Paris by Bishop Brute for missionary work in
Indiana.

As the Cathedral had no parochial territory proper, the Bishop^
transferred the congregation and records of Trinity Church to SS.
Peter and Paul's, which he made the parish church of all the Eng-
lish speaking Catholics of the city. Trinity Church was closed.^*

23 This church had been designed by Very Rev. Father Kindekens. The Bishop
did not like its interior arrangenaents and expended $15,000 in remodeling and
improvements. Its tower as originally designed still remains incomplete. The
organ, the second largest in the United States at the time, was built by Henry
Erben, and cost $6,000. 24 The vacant church was subsequently removed to Sixth
and Porter streets, where it was rededicated under the same patronage and soon
became the parish church of the Irish Catholic nationality in the western part of
the city.

^20 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The Cathedral congregation was mostly composed of American born
and of Irish-American Catholics as well as those of Irish nativity,
the latter preponderating. From its pulpit English sermons only
were preached ; French in Ste. Anne's and German in St. Mary's.

When every detail connected with the opening of his new
Cathedral had been cared for the Bishop resumed his episco-
pal visitations, which usually required from four to six months.
His territorial circuit included the Lower and Upper Peninsulas of
Michigan. In the discharge of this duty he traversed the State from
the Detroit river to the shores of Lake Michigan in one direction,
and from Lake St. Clair to the head waters of Lake Superior. Now
in the open boat from Mackinac around the coasts and islands where
were still to be found the remnants of the Indian tribes, and further
up among the hills of the mining regions of Lake Superior to seek
out the scattered Catholics and to see to their spiritual wants ; again
in the Lower Peninsula in the uncomfortable wagons and coaches,
over roads barely passable for man or beast, to serve his flock, bap-
tize the little ones and to bring the sacraments to the isolated Cath-
olics wherever to be found in the growing settlements of the time.
In July, 1853, the burden of the episcopal visitations was much light-
ened by the separation of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from the
Diocese of Detroit ; its creation into a Vicariate Apostolic and sub-
sequently into the See of Marquette, with the Apostolic Bishop
Baraga in charge. That same year the Catholics of Detroit mourned
the untimely death of Father St. Michael Edgar Evelyn Shawe.

In the meantime, by the liberaHty of Monique and Antoine Beau-
bien, who donated the ground, St. Mary's Hospital was established.
The Poor Clares had left the city and had been replaced in their
former convent by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, who
organized St. Vincent's Orphan Asylum and conducted a school for
girls. The Academy of Ste. Anne had ceased to exist, but the edu-
cation of youth had been confided to the Christian Brothers, who
opened their school in the basement of Ste. Anne's. The Diocese of
Detroit had at the time sixty churches, thirty-four priests and a Cath-
olic population of 85,000. In his titular city Bishop Lefevere from
time to time, as the city increased in population, had the happiness
to dedicate new churches and to witness the growth of the local
Catholic population. At his suggestion, with the cooperation of
Bishop Spalding, of Louisville, the subsequent Metropolitan of
Baltimore, the American College of Louvain, Belgium, was estab-
lished, whose first rector was Monsignor De Neve, of Detroit.
Vicar General Kindekens soon after joined the rector and remained
at this college until his premature death.

The episcopate of Bishop Lefevere extended from November,

Two Centuries of Catholicity in Detroit. 521

1 84 1, to March 4, 1869, the date of his death, at St. Mary's Hospital,
where in a poorly furnished room, after laying aside his high pre-
rogatives of the episcopate of a great city and diocese, he humbly
came to prepare for eternity. His mortal remains have since re-
posed beneath the main aisle of the Cathedral he had built, which
he had loved so much. There were at this epoch in the history of
Catholicity in Detroit eight churches and other parishes in forma-
tion, St. Mary's Hospital, the Michigan State Retreat, several asy-
lums, convents, academies and schools.

The administration of the diocese devolved upon Vicar General
Peter Hennaert,^^ who was relieved upon the advent of Right Rev.
Caspar Henry Borgess, consecrated at Cincinnati by Bishop Rose-
crans April 24, 1870, Bishop of Calydon and coadjutor administrator
of Detroit, with the right of succession, which he succeeded to on
the death of Bishop Rese in December, 1871. Bishop Borgess was
born in the Grand Duchy of Oldenberg August i, 1826. At the
age of 13 he was brought by his parents to Cincinnati in 1839. In
this city he studied for the priesthood and was ordained by Arch-
bishop Purcell December 8, 1848. He was pastor of Holy Cross
Church, at Columbus, Ohio, during ten years, when he was recalled
to Cincinnati, where he became rector of the Cathedral and chancel-
lor of the archdiocese, which positions he filled until his accession
of the See of Detroit. He was pious, zealous and conscientious.
He appointed Rev. Henry J. H. Schutjes chancellor of the diocese.^®
This young priest, who was an able financier, had been placed in
charge of the fiscal affairs of the diocese by Archbishop Purcell on
the death of Bishop Lefevere. Under his management the chancel-
lerie of the Diocese of Detroit was first organized and systematized,
to the great relief of Bishop Borgess.

'The memorable pastoral letter of the Bishop in 1873 addressed
to the priests and people on the subject of parochial schools was at
once the declaration of his policy on that subject and, so to speak, the
mot d'ordre to priests and people. The present advanced condition
of Catholic education in the diocese is due to that pastoral and
Bishop Borgess' adherence to the policy indicated in it."

May 19, 1882, the Diocese of Grand Rapids was created, separating
the western half of Michigan from the territory of the Diocese of
Detroit. In this diminished territory there remained 139 priests and
155 churches.

Bishop Borgess reintroduced the Redemptorists to Michigan.
His most memorable work was the introduction of the Jesuits in

25 Father Hennaert was among the theological students from the native province
of Bishop Lefevere, by which he was ordained. Obiit., 1880. 26 Father Schutjes
was one of the theological students brought from Holland by Bishop Lefevere and
ordained at Detroit.

^22 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Detroit. He conveyed to this order his Cathedral, his episcopal
residence and a valuable property on the northeast corner of Larned
and St. Antoine streets, the understanding being that the order
would assume the pastoral care of the Cathedral parish and establish
a college.

These implied conditions were carried out. The Bishop then
purchased a church on Washington avenue, which he had refitted
for Catholic worship and which he dedicated to St. Aloysius. He
then built a spacious episcopal residence on the opposite side of the
avenue. Upon the return to Europe of Father Schutjes the Rev.
Camillus P. Maes was appointed chancellor, and so remained until
1885, when he was elevated to the vacant See of Covington, Ky."
He was succeeded by Rev. M. P. J. Dempsey. In the meantime
Rev. Edward Joos, of Monroe, was made an additional vicar gen-
eral. Bishop Borgess possessed the love and esteem of the Catholic
population of Detroit. This was made evident by his enthusiastic
reception on the evening of his return from a visit made to Rome.
Every congregation of the city was marshaled to greet his arrival
at the central depot. A double line with burning torches was
formed on Jefferson avenue as far as SS. Peter and Paul's, through
which the carriage of the Bishop and his escort was driven, while a
splendid display of fireworks added inspiration to the scene, and the
cheers of the immense assemblage manifested the joy of the people
as they greeted their Bishop's return. The progress of religion
during the episcopate of Bishop Borgess is shown by the following
summary: In Detroit there were twenty churches with parochial
schools, served by forty priests ; the extensive establishment of the
Detroit College, conducted by the Jesuit Fathers ; the Academy
of the Sacred Heart ; the academy, convent and asylum of the Fe-
lician Sisters ; the spacious hospitals and asylums of St. Mary and
St. Vincent ; several educational establishments of a high order and
a Catholic local population of 80,000. In the diocese at large there
were 137 priests, 164 churches, fifty-seven parochial schools and a
total population aggregating 125,000.

Bishop Borgess resigned April 16, 1887.^^ He died at Borgess
Hospital, Kalamazoo, which institution had been established by his
bounty. May 3, 1890, in his 64th year.

The last decade of the nineteenth century was made memorable
in the history of the Church in Detroit during the two centuries of
its existence by the appointment of Right Rev. John S. Foley, D. D.,
as fourth Bishop of the diocese. He was the protege of the Cardinal

27 Prior to the departure of Bishop-elect Maes he was honored by the Catholics
of Detroit with a public ovation, when he was presented with an episcopal outfit
of such costly appointments as evinced the love and esteem in which, he was held.
28 Vicar General Hennaert and Joos assumed control of the diocese.

Saint Ennodiiis and the Papal Supremacy. 523

Archbishop of Baltimore, by whom he was consecrated in the his-
toric Cathedral of this metropolitan city November 4, 1888. There
were present at this magnificent ceremony more than 100 priests,
six monsignors, nineteen Bishops, three Archbishops and a lay dele-
gation of twenty of the prominent citizens of Detroit. Among the
priests present were nearly all the pastors of the churches of De-
troit. The sermon was preached by the Most Rev. Archbishop
Ryan, of Philadelphia.

It was claimed at the time that this grand ceremony had a dual
signification ; that while the Cardinal Archbishop thus manifested his
high esteem for his protege. Bishop and diocese shared the honors.

Richard R. Elliott.

Detroit, Michigan.

SAINT ENNODIUS AND THE PAPAL SUPREMACY.

11.

THE murderous riots, which were organized by the disap-
pointed factionists, were the immediate occasion of King
Theodoric's visit, but the cautious conqueror of Italy had
been long awaiting a plausible opportunity that circumstances might
spontaneously offer to take formal possession of the old capital of
the empire, and to strengthen the foundations of his throne by rest-
ing it on the cheerful support of the Roman Senate and on the solid
attachment of all the people, nobility and democracy. He sur-
rounded himself with all that pomp and magnificence, gorgeously
equipped cavalry and splendid chariots, which the old Romans loved
and admired so much ; and, like their conquering heroes of happier
days, he halted at the city walls, where he was met and accorded a
princely reception by the Consuls and proud Senators in their rich
official robes. The orator selected to act as spokesman, represent-
ing Senate and people, was the most distinguished Roman of his
day, Boetius, the author of the well-known work, "The Consolation
of Philosophy." On his father's side he belonged to the ancient and
renowned stock of Manlius Torquatus, and on his mother's to that of
the Severini. His illustrious birth, his brilliant eloquence, his ster-
ling character and his abilities as a statesman raised him to the high-
est honors and dignities that the city and the King could bestow.
Eventually his unflinching assertion of his fidelity to the Church
won for him the crown of martyrdom. His address of welcome to
Theodoric, called a panegyric as Greek pronouncements of such a

524 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

character were designated, was worthy of the historic occasion and
of the illustrious monarch. In him and in Avienus, one of the Con-
suls for that year and a former pupil of Ennodius, the Pope possessed
two warm and uncompromising supporters. No sooner had the
royal visitor been received within the walls than he proceeded to pay
his respects to the Roman Pontiff. During his prolonged sojourn
of six months in the Holy City the flames of strife were smothered ;
only, however, to break out more violently than ever as soon as his
intimidating presence was removed. It is scarcely necessary to
remark that the agents of dissension left no scheme untried to secure
the King's favor during his long stay in the city; but their out-
rageous conduct repelled his sympathy, while their hollow protesta-
tions failed to shake his just convictions.

The renewed outbreak of riot and violence following the with-
drawal of the King and his numerous retinue of soldiers caused the
peace-loving Pontiff to offer spontaneously to submit to the judg-
ment of a duly convened council of his brother bishops the whole
question of the incriminations fabricated against him. With a view,
therefore, to terminate the tumult and scandal, even at the expense
of humiliating himself in the most self-sacrificing manner, he wrote,
as already explained, begging the King to summon the bishops to
Rome and promising to place no obstacle in the way of their fully
and freely deliberating and arriving at a definite decision. It will
be readily understood how much more conveniently and effectively
the King could call together all the prelates than could the Pope in
the existing circumstances ; but, of course, the convocation was due
to the Papal authority and initiative.

From the acts of this third Council we gather that the first session
was held in August, 501, when Pope Symmachus presented himself
at the very opening and explained that the assembly had been canon-
ically convened, since the King, whom he thanked most cordially,
had acted in strict conformity with his request. Two points, how-
ever, he would insist upon preliminary to a judicial hearing of the
charges brought against him : first, that the Visitor should at once
and permanently withdraw, since the existence and presence of such
an official were manifestly uncanonical; secondly, that he himself
should be reinstated in the possession of all the property and treas-
ure of which the intrigues and violence of his enemies had deprived
him. Both these demands were applauded warmly by the great
majority of the assembly ; but for the sake of peace and with the hope
of ending the unseemly business once and forever, it was agreed to
send deputies to solicit the King's advice in the matter. Theodoric
was reported by the messengers to have decided that the Pope ought
to await the restitution of his property until the investigation of the

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 525

charges preferred against him would have first concluded. Ob-
viously the criminal despoilers of church property were not in a posi-
tion to bring forward accusations against anybody; nor was there
any guarantee that, if their insidious efforts to compass the deposi-
tion of the Pope ended in failure, as they were doomed to end, such
reckless miscreants could be made amenable to the authority of
Council or Pope. This first session had been held in the JuHan
Basilica; but the second took place in the Jerusalem BasiHca, after
an interval of some weeks.

When the deputation that had been commissioned to obtain the
King's decision on the principal point raised by the Pope had de-
livered their message some of the Antipope's partisans proposed that
the assembly should now proceed to formulate their judgment, as
the King had given the deputation this order in virtue of his convic-
tion, duly and maturely arrived at in Rome, that Symmachus was
guilty of the crimes imputed to him. This allegation was at once
met with the objection that if the King had judicially investigated
the case and found the Pontiff guilty, why did he entreat them to
try to arrive at a decision without even suggesting that he himself
had examined the charges at all, much less formed a clear and de-
cisive judgment of the guilt of the accused? The falsity of this
statement was too obvious to provoke any lengthened debate; but
when that difficulty was removed another was raised. The faction-
ists demanded that the Pope should deliver up his slaves, who, they
alleged, were material witnesses in the most damaging of the in-
criminations. Both the canon and civil law prohibited the admis-
sion of the evidence of slaves unless they were subjected to torture —
assertio servilis innocenti examine non probanda — and even then their
testimony would not be sufficient to justify either acquittal or con-
demnation unless other reliable witnesses were forthcoming. There
is no proof that the Pontiff himself refused to give up the slaves to
the Council; everything points to his readiness to comply with any
conditions exacted, however humiliating. But, as Ennodius argues,
the oath of a slave without the application of torture was inadmissi-
ble in any court ; to apply torture was against the spirit of the
Church and so cruel a relic of barbarism that the bishops could not
for a mpment entertain the idea of resorting to it ; the accusers must,
therefore, see that this evidence is utterly excluded, and it is clear
they are not bona fide in their unheard-of demand. It is hardly
necessary to caution the reader against regarding the existence of
slaves in the Papal household as anything extraordinary in those
days ; Christianity had lightened the yoke of slavery, but did not at
once entirely abolish this ancient institution. The final extinction
of slavery in the countries dominated by the spiritual sway of the

526 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Latin Church was only effected by the famous edict of Pope Alex-
ander III. in the twelfth century. We read of St. Symmachus in
the Liber PontiUcalis: "Episcopis Africanis exulibus pecuniam et
vestes singulis annis mittebat; captivos per diversas provincias pe-
cunia redemit, et dona multiplicavit et dimisit."

In the meantime, while these animated discussions were engaging
the attention of the assembled bishops, the venerable Pontiff, bend-
ing under the terrible weight of humiliation and heart-bleeding grief
for his poor flock, who were being scandalized and torn from their
loving shepherd, set out from St. Peter's to confront his clamorous
and conscienceless accusers. But it was not in vain that the blood
of the two great apostles and of countless holy martyrs had conse-
crated and endeared the old city to the Sacred Heart of the Re-
deemer. If the Christian sentiment of Rome had not rebelled
against the infernal savagery with which its revered Bishop and spir-
itual Father was being persecuted, "the very stones would rise in
mutiny." Such scenes of wild indignation had not been witnessed
in the city of Seven Hills since the soul-stirring and tragic event
of Virginia, a thousand years before. Ladies of noblest birth con-
tended with ragged beggar-women, proud senators with the pious
plebeians, in their efforts to show their sympathy for their beloved
Pontiff by crowding around him, and consoling him by their pray-
ers and tears on his way to the hall, where the synod was being held.
These manifestations of heartfelt love and piety maddened the hos-
tile party, who were strangers to every feeling of religion or public
decency ; a hired mob assailed the sad and peaceful procession with
undiscriminating fury, smiting everybody who came in their way,
wounding hundreds of the defenseless multitude, and murdering
numbers of persons, lay and cleric, without distinction and without
mercy. The Liher PontiUcalis presents a sickening picture of the
outrages committed: "Caedes et homicidia in clero ex invidia fie-
bant. Qui vero communicabant beato Symmacho juste, publice
qui inventi fuissent intra urbem gladio occidebantur. Etiam et
sanctimoniales mulieres et virgines deponentes de monasteriis vel
de habitaculis suis, denudantes sexum feminineum coedibus plaga-
rum afflictas vulnerabant, et omni die pugnas contra ecclesiam in
medio civitatis gerebant. Etiam multos sacerdotes occiderunt inter
quos Dignissimum et Gordianum presbyteros et multos alios Chris-
tianos."

The malignant accusers, possessing no legal or trustworthy evi-
dence and seeing the current of justice and sympathy irresistible,
abandoned the Council and devoted themselves to the more con-
genial work of stimulating brutal assault and promiscuous violence.
From the very opening of the assembly the sweeping majority of the

Saint Ennodms and the Papal Supremacy. 527

bishops had strenuously opposed the hearing of the charges at all,
inasmuch as they were incompetent to deal with them judicially,
the Holy See being entirely above their jurisdiction. Common
prudence, however, and the good of the Church demanded that they
should comply with the wishes of the King as far as was consistent
with the canons ; and since he had so urgently impressed upon them
to settle the matter definitely before they would break up they re-
mained in the city and forwarded to him an exhaustive report of the
sessions they had held and of the tumultuous sequel to their delibera-
tions. Naturally enough Symmachus declined to leave the precincts
of his palace again, as his life would be exposed to extreme peril, and
all who would venture to show sympathy or to extend protection
would incur similar risk. On the previous occasion three officers
of the King had sworn to protect him, and, faithful to their oaths,
they succeeded in rescuing himself, but could make no attempt to
defend his helpless followers. Theodoric's reply to the message of
the prelates requesting him to relieve them from their perplexity is
a most marvelous document from whatever standpoint we may view
it. Having premised that if he had considered this trial a matter in
which he could interfere, he felt quite convinced that himself and his
chief magistrates could have judicially examined all the bearings of
the case and have long since arrived at an impartial and just deci-
sion ; he adds : *'It is a matter entirely resting with you under God's
guidance, and if you regard it as wrong to take cognisance of the
charges, then adopt some other means of quelling sedition and riot"
— "Qualiter vultis ordinate, sive discussa sive indiscussa causa, pro-
ferte sententiam, de qua estis rationem divino judicio reddituri."
The unconscious testimony of secular princes and of men of trans-
cendent genius, even outside the pale of her communion, to the
divine commission of the Church, has been both frequent and strik-
ing, but we question whether a more remarkable instance of it is re-
corded than that which the conduct and correspondence of the en-
lightened Arian Theodoric furnished during this controversy.

The bishops reassemble on the 6th of November and decide that
in the eyes of men Pope Symmachus is free from crime and stain ; but
that the question of his culpability or innocence in the sight of
heaven must be reserved to God, who alone has jurisdiction to judge
the Vicar of Christ. They pronounced him ''free from every alleged
incrimination and outside the reach of legal pursuit in all things that
regarded men, reestablished in full jurisdiction over all churches
dependent on the Holy See and entitled to all the ecclesiastical rights
of Sovereign Pontiff within and without the city of Rome. Let no
Christian, therefore, in those churches hesitate to communicate with
him or to receive Holy Communion at his hands" — 'Totam causam

528 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Dei judicio reservantes, universes hortamur, ut sacram commun-
ionem (sicut r^spostulat) ab eo percipiant."

Just at the moment when the Church seemed almost strangled
by sedition her voice rings out clearly, to be carried down through
the centuries on the winds of time, her unchanging and infallible
accents. It was a decree of colossal importance, at once solidifying
and entrenching the Papal supremacy, while it thrust back in confu-
sion and impotence the powers of hell that had charged with such
desperate ferocity. Digitus Dei est hie; undoubtedly, but humanly
viewed the brunt of the fight was borne cheerfully and well by the
material resources, the tact, the ability and the Christian fortitude
of Ennodius, powerfully supported by the Senator Faustus. The
faithful and illustrious Bishop of Milan, the warm friend and zealous
fellow-worker of Ennodius in this holy cause, is the first to append
his name, and the form of his subscription excludes the possibility
of doubt as to the meaning of the decision: ''Ego, Laurentius,
Episcopus ecclesiae Mediolanensis, subscripsi huic sententiae a nobis
latae qua tota causa judicio Dei relata est." Pardon is extended to
the bishops and clergy who had taken part in this disgraceful cam-
paign of calumny and violence, on condition of their immediate re-
turn to the bosom of the Church and the renunciation of the calami-
tous career they had been following. The Senate had already de-
creed to follow the sage and inspired example of non-interference
so admirably set them by the King. And now everything appeared
settled and tranquillity once more returned to the streets and
churches of the sacred city; but the calm was only on the surface.
There were still raging ugly undercurrents of discontent, and mur-
murs of indignation at the alleged miscarriage of justice were sedu-
lously propagated by a contemptible and rapidly dwindling clique.
These secret whisperings soon found expression in a cleverly written,
insidious pamphlet entitled "Adversus Synodum Absolutionis In-
congruae," which Ennodius rightly designates an ''opus foetidum."

One hundred and fifteen bishops had attended the first session of
this famous Council, but many of them had retired to their respec-
tive sees during the riots and lengthened interruptions. Sixty-seven
names are appended to the decrees. The heads of the Church in
Gaul had in the meantime learned that their brother prelates in Italy
had assembled to judge the recognized Supreme Pontiff of the Uni-
versal Church, and being unaware that the proceedings were initi-
ated by the Pope himself, they were astounded beyond measure
that anybody had dared to sit in judgment on the highest earthly
judge. When the decree of acquittal was received by them they
assembled in council under the presidency of Saint Avitus, Bishop
of Vienne, grandson of the Emperor Avitus and an illustrious

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 529

Roman Senator as well as a cultured and zealous ecclesiastic. They
addressed a memorable letter to the chief men among the Senate:
''When we perused the decree bearing on the subject of the Pontiff
we were seized with the deepest alarm, being persuaded, as we are
still, that the whole episcopal fabric is shaken when its foundation
and source of strength is attacked. We cannot conceive what law
there is that could confer on inferiors the right to judge their su-
perior. If anything is considered irregular or unlawful in the con-
duct of other prelates, there is their common Head, the Roman
Pontiff, to pronounce judgment and to demand reformation; but
when the authority of the Roman Pontiff himself is impugned, then
it is not an individual bishop, but the whole episcopacy that is placed
in peril. When the sailors meet and attack the captain of the ship,
is it right to encourage the mutineers? That supreme shepherd
who is at the head of the flock of our Lord must render an account
of his conduct, but it is the Sovereign Judge, and not the flock, that
can exact from him that account. We find some consolation in the
fact that the assembled prelates have referred the judgment to Al-
mighty God and have attested before the world that neither they nor
King Theodoric have discovered any evidence in support of the ac-
cusations preferred." This unmistakable and emphatic assertion of
the traditional teaching of the Church on the question of the Papal
supremacy is not merely the expression of the deep-rooted belief of
the Bishops of Gaul ; it is, furthermore, a strong and a bright link in
the golden chain of unity in faith and in allegiance that then as now
bound the Catholic churches of all nations to the Holy See, "the
mother and the mistress of all the churches."

The Liber PontiUcalis informs us that one happy result of the
groundless arraignment and honorable acquittal was to restore thor-
oughly the high prestige of the Roman Pontiff and to enhance his per-
sonal reputation and popularity. But the work was incomplete as
long as the foul breath of calumny was allowed to taint the atmos-
phere. Falsehoods and base insinuations were the last ramparts of
the ignoble vanquished, and even these had to be demolished. Hith-
erto the organizer of victory kept in the rearguard of the fight ; now
it was necessary that he should be placed in the very forefront. A
fourth council was convened, and it is generally affirmed by histor-
ians that the prelates who had come from very distant parts re-
mained in the Holy City by desire of the Pope during the interval
of close on twelve months between the issue of their historic judg-
ment and this fourth council. This hypothesis is grounded on the
identity of names and the slowness and other difficulties attending
locomotion in those days ; and its probability is much increased when
we consider the constant signs manifested of a recrudescence of the
Vol. XXVI— 8

530 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

sedition and scandal. The assembly now convened for the autumn
of 502 is known in history as the "Synodus Palmaris," from the name
of the hall where the bishops met in deliberation. The opening
address of the Roman Pontiff, who of course presided, confirms the
opinion of Baronius, who regards this synod merely as a continua-
tion or the concluding sessions of the third council. "This vener-
able assembly," says His Holiness, "faithful to the observance of the
ecclesiastical laws and with a becoming fear of the wrath of God,
has rightly decreed everything it was their duty or privilege to de-
termine, and thereby discharged the debt of justice with scrupulous
exactitude. Your decision has provided for all contingencies ; there
is nothing to be added to it, more particularly as regards those ec-
clesiastics whose ambition for power has broken the yoke of canoni-
cal discipline."

It has been already stated that one of the indictments brought
against Pope Symmachus was the alleged reckless expenditure of
public funds of which he was merely the administrator and not thq
proprietor. The manuscript of Verona gives great prominence to
this charge; hence it is manifest that his accusers made the most
effective use of it that facts and a wilfully wrong interpretation of
what was meant by Canon Law of binding force enabled them to
make. To the charge of scandalous conduct Symmachus had al-
ready given an answer more weighty and crushing than any defense
in words. He had induced the bishops to enact that every ecclesi-
astic bound by a vow of chastity should have always near him, day
and night, a syncellanus, who could testify to the purity of his life if
exigencies required. Even Ennodius expends on this point very
little of his impassioned eloquence; he quotes Cicero for the self-
evident dictum that accusation is one thing, but calumny quite an-
other ; adduces some telling citations from Scripture, and then justly
upbraids the maligners with the total absence of proof. But being
now reinstated in power and restored to liberty of action and of
speech, the Pontiff himself brings before the synod the alleged mis-
management of Church funds and secures important legislation on
the subject. Here, again, we have the plainest evidence of the inti-
mate connection between the two councils ; what is introduced as an
impeachment before the first assembly is fully answered and the mat-
ter legislated upon in the second. In language of just indignation
His Holiness exclaims in his introductory address: "In omnes,
quos in me vanus furor excitavit, agnoscant me nihil magis studere,
quam ut salvum esse possit quod mihi est a Deo sub dispensatione
commissum."

The particular statute which the Pontiff was charged with in-
fringing was designated the Law of Odoacer, from the circumstances

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 531

in which it was sought to have it imposed upon the Church in the
name of that monarch. Six days after the death of Pope SimpHcius,
in 483, the clergy, Senate and people assembled in St. Peter's to elect
a successor, according to the custom that then prevailed. Before
the proceedings had concluded the patrician Basilius presented him-
self in presence of the assembly as the accredited representative oi
the King, Odoacer. Having first complained that the election
should not have been undertaken without the sanction of the King,
he proclaimed aloud there and then the enactment in question, hav-
ing neither asked nor obtained the concurrence or fiat of any ecclesi-
astical authority. It ran thus: "That the Pontiff about to be
elected and his successors forever are hereby forbidden to alienate
to any other purpose or to the use of any other building than those
named by the donor, any possessions or goods, immovable or mova-
ble, that have been presented to or acquired by the Church, whether
in the city or outside its walls. Any sale or conveyance in contra-
vention of this law shall be null and void, and the person attempting
such conveyance shall by that very act incur anathema. A similar
penalty and censure shall be entailed by the purchaser as well as
by his heirs in actual possession of the property, whether immediate
or mediate, and so forth."

In the Acts of the Council we find a clear and exhaustive state-
ment of the position in which the Roman Pontiff stood in reference
to this pronouncement of a purely secular r.uthority. ''Suppose the
priests of a diocese apart from their bishop or the bishops of a prov-
ince in defiance of their metropolitan were to assemble and to at-
tempt to pass a law that would be binding on the said bishop or said
metropoHtan, would such pretended legislation have the binding
force of a statute ? And if not, with how much greater reason must
we regard as utterly null and void the so-called laws that secular
authorities, laics, have presumed to dictate to the Apostolic See?
There was even at the time no existing Roman Pontiff who alone
in virtue of the supremacy derived from St. Peter could give force
and sanction to such a statute. Such decrees can in no sense be
reckoned among the number of canonical laws." The "law of
Odoacer" was, therefore, declared uncanonical and nugatory, but a
synodal statute was now passed embodying many of its provisions.
Thus was Symmachus exonerated and the domains and other prop-
erty of the Church at the same time protected against destruction
or alienation. Nothing further remained to be transacted by this
Council except the question of dealing with the vile and dangerous
pamphlet that assailed so insidiously the legality and motives of the
Synodus Palmaris. A commission is formally given to Ennodius
in the name and by the authority cf the Council to embody the views

532 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of the assembly and the arguments supplied by the Canon Law, with
which he was known to be so intimately conversant, in an orderly
and exhaustive reply to all the enemy's statements of law and fact.
Some writers are of opinion that this order was issued by the fifth
Council ; that Ennodius happened to be at Rome, as indeed we may
fairly assume, and that a few days sufficed to enable this brilliant and
ready expert in pleading to prepare his famous "Apologia." It mat-
ters little from which assembly he received the command ; both pos-
sessed the same supreme authority under the presidency of the Pope,
and even in personnel there is not any notable difiference. The
opening address supplies the date, "after the consulship of Avienus,"
or 503, and proceeds to announce the object for which the synod
was convened, namely, to hear the "Apologia" composed by Enno-
dius read by that eminent ecclesiastic and to approve of it as em-
bodying the principles of true doctrine and right discipline. We
have already given numerous quotations from this wonderful docu-
ment as the subject-matter appeared to demand, and hence we shall
here confine our attention to a few points that seem to need further
elucidation.

Mere allegations of fact do not touch the question of Papal su-
premacy at all save in a remote or accidental manner, and it is with
this aspect of the case that we are mainly concerned. On comparing
the acts of the various Councils with the "Apologia" we cannot fail
to be struck with the remarkable agreement of the tone and general
aim of the assembled bishops and of the "Apologist." Was it
merely by chance, for instance, or with a view to assert the said su-
premacy of the Apostolic See that such a marked divergence of form
was observed by Symmachus, the Roman Pontiff, and by Laurence
of Milan and the rest of the prelates in the signatures of the acts of
the fourth Council? "I, Coelius Symmachus, Bishop of the Church
of Rome, have signed this constitution made by Us," and "I, Coelius
Laurence, Bishop of the Holy Church of Milan, have signed this
constitution made by the venerable Pope Symmachus."

Every argument and every specious ' allegation that ingenuity
could suggest were resorted to in order to weaken the deadly effect
on the schismatics of the crushing judgment of the "Synodus Pal-
maris," or as they indignantly designated it, the "Synodus Absolu-
tionis Incongruae." The first and most obvious of their objections
has been already solved by anticipation, where it was explained that
many of the bishops attending the early sessions of the third Coun-
cil had been taken themselves to their respective homes before the
proceedings, retarded by long interruptions, had reached the happy
termination so ardently wirhed for. But the pamphlet suggests that
there were many prelates in Rome who absented themselves from

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 533

the final session and in no way endorsed the judgment impugned.
Though Ennodius had warned his illustrious audience, in his exor-
dium, that all ornaments of style were to be carefully avoided in his
efifort to present unvarnished narrative and plain arguments, yet he
here dashes forth into the sublimest flights of oratory. "No doubt
there were some black sheep in the flock ; they hid themselves in the
obscurity that became them; they had loved to plot and plan and
intrigue in secret. Will they feel grateful to their friends for drag-
ging them into the light ?" Naturally enough, when the factionists
found themselves in such a wretched minority, and saw no prospect
of being able even to create a riot of respectable dimensions, owing
to the presence of three high military functionaries of Theodoric at
the synod, they discreetly withdrew.

Here it may not be out of place to remark that it would be at once
unjust and untrue to represent all the opponents of Pope Symmachus
as utterly devoid of personal sanctity. On occasions of the kind
there are invariably some unfortunate dupes that allow themselves to
be swayed by private predilections or to be misled by false appear-
ances. Conspicuous as an example of that class was the exemplary
and saintly Paschasius, of whom Saint Gregory narrates that al-
though he had done great penance and died a holy death, he was
detained in Purgatory for a considerable time on account solely of
the part he took in the schism, though his error was not fully delibe-
rate or malicious. Thirty Masses had been ordered by St. Gregory
to be celebrated for his soul on so many consecutive days, and at the
conclusion of that time, though Gregory had quite forgotten the in-
structions he had given, Paschasius appeared to a companion to
return thanks for the Masses and to say that it was the efficacy of the
Holy Sacrifice so constantly offered that had satisfied even then for
his already forgiven crime against the Holy See.

There is one portion of the "Apologia" that appears at first sight
overweighted with hyperbole, but on closer examination it becomes
manifest that the strict limits of fact and logical reasoning are fairly
well observed. Even friendly critics sometimes admit that the lan-
guage is somewhat too strong, but plead that the exaggeration is at
once natural and pardonable. No doubt isolated sentences smack of
exaggeration, but viewed in the context the statements and deduc-
tions are truthful and legitimate. The writers who have sought to
place the Papal authority on a level inferior to that of an (Ecumenical
Council labor this point with disgusting excess and subtlety. They
affirm roundly that the doctrine conveyed by Ennodius may be
enunciated in these terms : Every successor of St. Peter is either
already impeccable or his elevation to the Papacy renders him so;
and they base the sweeping inference they wish to be deduced from

534 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

this false proposition on the well-worn axiom of philosophy, ''Qui
nimis prohat, nil probat.'' Take, for instance, the following passage,
and see whether it supposes the Roman Pontiff incapable of sinning :
"I have searched carefully and probed to the very bottom the alleged
irregularities of Symmachus. I am not the man to wish that this
See, on which so many distinguished Popes have shed the lustre of
their learning and sanctity, should now be dishonored ; fear not that
I have failed to make the most exhaustive investigation. If Pope
Symmachus is guilty, believe me, the judgment of God will fall
heavy upon him at the close of his brief and troubled career. In
the balance of that all-seeing and all-just Judge the scale of chastise-
ment or the scale of reward will incline by the infallible test of
merit."

It is perfecty needless to multiply quotations. These few sen-
tences abundantly show that Ennodius neither believed nor asserted
that the Pope is impeccable. To be exalted above the jurisdiction
of earthly tribunals is one thing, as Ennodius well knew, and to be
raised above human frailty and the liability to sin is quite an-
other. But the orator very justly observes that such instances of
vicious habits or of gross crimes on the part of the Roman Pontiffs
have been neither so frequent nor so glaring as to break notably the
continuity of strong virtue as well as faith transmitted from St. Peter
untarnished through the long line of his unimpeachable successors.
This immunity of the Holy See from grave blemishes, as a general
rule, is the result of two causes principally. First, the extreme care
and numerous precautions employed in the selection of a suitable
man to elevate to that highest of all dignities in this world is in itself
an important guarantee that his future life will be as edifying at least
as his past career is known to have been. Again, the weighty re-
sponsibility and the ever-present consciousness of what is expected
from him, even humanly speaking, steady the wavering efforts of
nature and strengthen the healthy influence of self-respect. Lastly
but chiefly, the supernatural aids merited by personal holiness and
good works or obtained through the intercession and sufferings of
the first Pope, St. Peter, who cannot cease to watch over the spot-
lessness of the tiara, and of the many illustrious Pontiffs, saints and
martyrs whose powerful prayers are unceasingly offered before the
throne of God for the latest successor in their imperishable dynasty.
"Saint Peter, of glorious memory, has transmitted to his succes-
sors an undying heritage of merits as well as of sanctity. What he
himself gained by the abundant and lustrous excellence of his works
is communicated to them, in some measure, as associated with him
m the same dignity. For who can doubt the holiness of that bishop
who has the grace of holiness supplied to him in abundance by the

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 535

example and merits of his predecessors, even though he had not been
himself remarkable in the past for personal sanctity in any extra-
ordinary degree ? In a word, either St. Peter raises to that honor
such persons only as are illuminated with the grace of God, or he
procures for them that illuminating grace at their elevation ; for he
is singularly in a position to appreciate what is needful for the foun-
dation on which the fabric of the Universal Church is to be sup-
ported."

This passage presents the head and front of his offending, and
yet when viewed in conjunction with and in the light of the entire
context, no impartial reader will detect in it such undue exaggera-
tion as can detract in the slightest from his estimation of the
cogent reasoning and excellent discernment of the orator. The
various forms of support that combine to secure the successor of
Peter against the assaults of Satan and a wicked world are enume-
rated, and among them the special protection and intercession of the
first great Vicar of Christ; but the infallibility of the Pope in his
teaching capacity rests on the divine promises alone : "Thou art
Peter (Rock), and upon this Rock I will build my Church, and the
gates of Hell shall not prevail against it." "I have asked on thy
behalf that thy faith fail not, and do thou, being once converted, con-
firm thy brethren." The infallibility of the Church is a different ele-
ment of unfailing immunity from error vested in the corporate body
as well as in the head, and indicated in the texts: "Behold I am
with you all days even to the consummation of the world;" "He
that hears you hears me," and so forth. Whereas impeccability,
either in regard to personal righteousness or official freedom from
faults other than doctrinal, is nowhere promised in the Sacred Writ-
ings, and has never been claimed by either the Prince of the Apostles
or any of his successors. Unfortunately, history proves but too
conclusively that an unworthy aspirant may succeed in reaching that
sublime dignity and that his elevation does not necessarily change
him into an angel. The same Divine Redeemer who permitted an
unworthy follower to be enrolled and to remain to the end in the
sacred community of the Apostles has permitted also, for the same
inscrutable motives, an ambitious or simoniacal ecclesiastic to fill
the chair of Peter, from time to time, but the infallibility ever
emerges unsmirched from such searching tests.

"But," demanded the adversaries of Symmachus, "if the Roman
Pontiff and the majority of the bishops, as you maintain, beUeved
consistently from the beginning that no earthly power can sit in
judgment on the Pope, why did they allow the Council to be con-
vened for that express purpose ? And, secondly, if the Council thus
assembled were right in their much applauded decision that they had

536 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

absolutely no jurisdiction in the case — qualitas negotii transit audi- ,
turos— then surely their acquittal of the accused cannot claim any
value or respect." It is on this last point of alleged inconsistency
that the title of the pamphlet is based, "Adversus Synodum Absolu-
tionis Incongruae."

In reply to the first objection here advanced, Ennodius quotes a
decree of the Council of Carthage, which prescribes special pro-
cedure in regard to accusations that emanate from individuals be-
longing to the household of the person arraigned. Obviously pri-
vate hatred, wounded pride, disappointed ambition, grasping avarice
or some such malignant motive may naturally be suspected to have
prompted such incriminations. Now, if the bishops remained away
each in his own cathedral town, they could take no collective action
or make no proper inquiry into the origin of these charges, and
would necessarily run the risk of allowing an innocent man to suffer,
a fair reputation to be blighted and the Head of the Church to be
unjustly and cruelly calumniated, to the ineffable scandal of all the
faithful. Besides, the King repeatedly points out in his letters what
was also in the minds of the assembled prelates the dominant reason
why they were called to Rome and detained there until they would
arrive at a final decision ; namely, to restore tranquillity to Church
and State, causa discussa aut indiscussa.

The obvious answer to the second point of inconsistency alleged
is that even a "court of first instance," that possesses no jurisdiction
to mark punishment, can undoubtedly declare that the case against
the accused is unsustainable and, as the English jurists express it,
find "no bill," that is, declare there is no prima facie credible evidence
of guilt. Before a criminal charge is submitted to a Judge of Assize
the heads of the available testimony in support of it are examined
by the "grand jury," and by finding a "true bill" or "no bill" they
send the case for trial or scout it out of court. The Scottish legal
phrase "not proven" expresses still more precisely the meaning of
the sentence pronounced in favor of Symmachus.

But supposing the evidence had been both abundant and convinc-
ing against Pope Symmachus, what course remained open to the
bishops while discharging their conscientious duty on the one hand
and respecting the Papal supremacy, as they were bound, on the
other ? Any reader acquainted with ecclesiastical history will recall
the remarkable story of the condemnation of Pope Marcellinus,
which rightly interprets the spirit of the Church and accurately con-
veys the traditional teaching from the earliest ages. It was during
the persecution of Diocletian, and Marcellinus is said, by many
writers mostly on the authority of Donatists, to have been frightened
into an open act of apostasy by swinging a censer before an idol.

Saint Ennodius and the Papal Supremacy. 537

Three hundred bishops and thirty priests, it is stated, assembled at
Sinnessa Pometia to hold an indignation meeting and to publicly
dissociate themselves from such a scandalous betrayal of his high
trust. The acts of this Council inform us that the unanimous de-
cision of the assembly was expressed in these words, which the Pope
was summoned and duly presented himself to hear : "Tu eris judex ;
ex te enim damnaberis et ex et justificateris, tamen in nostra prae-
sentia." Marcellinus publicly confessed his scandalous abjuration
of the faith and pronounced judgment upon himself according to the
terrible penances prescribed in those days. Then the bishop who
was to affix his signature first, Helciades, arose and declared in a
solemn tone : "Juste condemnatus est ore suo, et ore suo anathema
in se suscepit ; nemo enim unquam judicavit Pontificem, quoniam
prima Sedes non judicabitur a quopiam."

The long-sustained plaudits accorded by the august assembly to
the eloquent deacon of Milan were echoed throughout the wide ex-
panse of Christendom ; for the "Apologia" was stamped by the Pope
and Council with the seal of approval and ordered to be incorporated
with the official acts. This was an unprecedented honor ; but it was
not to enhance his own fame that he labored. Had he been ambi-
tious, the dignities of the Church were at his acceptance, for his merit
and qualifications were unquestionable. It was eight long years
afterwards that he was prevailed upon to exchange the humble and
laborious post of teacher and deacon for the higher and more re-
sponsible dignity of Bishop of Pavia. His life-long friend and en-
thusiastic admirer. Pope Hormisdas, employed him afterwards, on.
two different occasions, to execute a mission of supreme importance
and of trying delicacy to the imperial court of Constantinople. The
hardships and perils so heroically endured on the second trip shat-
tered his constitution and contributed largely to his early and la-
mented death. His bones rest in his beloved Pavia, near those of the
great Saint Augustine, after whose illustrious example he had pat-
terned his life and works.

E. Maguire.

Vienne, France.

538 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

PROTESTANT DOMINATION OVER WEAK COMMUNI-
TIES.

AN HISTORICAL STUDY.

MANY public men throughout the United States assert that
the subjugation of the people of the Philippine Islands will
prove of great advantage to the Filipinos; that under
American rule they will be taught a much higher grade of civiliza-
tion than that which they now have, or that they could possibly have
attained under Spanish authority, or that they could reach through
any effort of their own unaided by outsiders.

Many American Protestant preachers in the press and from pulpit
and platform assert with equal assurance that the subjugation of the
Filipinos will mean for them a much higher type of Christianity
than they now exhibit ; that it will mean for them the Gospel truth
as represented by the multifarious Protestant sects, and hence that
they will be morally benefited by the establishment of American
authority over them. The assurance of politician and preacher is
quite flattering to our national vanity and it appeals with force to
pious Protestant souls who still cling with desperate fidelity to the
Bible despite the "higher criticism" and the wholesale disintegration
of the Protestant sects into Rationalism.

Without questioning in the least the perfect sincerity and good
faith of politician or preacher respecting the temporal and the eternal
welfare of the Philippine Islander, this question must arise in the
mind of every simple American : **What reasonable ground have
we before us which tends to support the flattering assertions of poli-
tician and preacher ?" This we know : We have had considerable
experience already in our history in this matter of dealing with so-
called inferior races, that is to say, with people not of the Caucasian
race. For nearly three hundred years we have been engaged in
civilizing and Christianizing the red man. And what is the result of
our efforts with him ? It is this : within the extent of our dominion
the red man is almost extinct. In a brief space of time the last rep-
resentative of that race will have escaped our control by death.

Our experience with the black man extends over an almost equal
period of years. And how do we find the black man as he exists in
our midst to-day ? He is looked down upon generally as an inferior
being, as one created inferior in the order of Nature ; the taint of
African blood in his veins, however scant it may be, is regarded as a
stigma and mark of inferiority. He is trampled upon from time to

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 539

time, his person is insecure, he is subject to the animosity of indi-
viduals or lawless mobs without adequate redress under the laws.
Special laws are passed by white men who call themselves Chris-
tians to emphasize the distinction between the races, and these laws
are passed with the assent and approval of Godly Protestant preach-
ers. In a word, the story of our relations with the red man has been
a tragic one, now practically ended. We are yet in the middle of
the chapter with the black race, with a most gloomy outlook ahead.

Yet in the face of these facts, notwithstanding those lurid chap-
ters of our history which should bring the blush of shame to every
Christian brow, we are strenuously invited, nay, we are appealed to,
in the name of Christianity, to try our civilizing influences on the
brown man, seven thousand miles from the territory in which we
have all but exterminated the red man.

That we have failed disastrously respecting the red is a conclusive
historical fact, and that we are doofned to failure with the black is al-
most indubitable unless some new element enters into our mode of
action. But why have we failed? Our intentions were doubtless
good towards both races, and yet absolute failure has been the result
of our efforts. The answer to this question opens up a larger one
which essentially includes it. It may be stated in the simplest terms
in this form :

1. No Protestant nations or Protestant missionaries have ever
yet converted to Christianity or civilized a pagan nation or com-
munity.

2. The domination of a Protestant nation over every so-called in-
ferior race has resulted either in the extermination of the latter or in
its absolute subordination to the Protestant conqueror, who has ex-
ploited the people for the material benefit of the rulers.

3. Catholic nations and Catholic missionaries alone have been suc-
cessful in converting and civilizing pagan communities.

These statements are simply questions of fact supported by abun-
dant testimony from the pages of history. Before entering upon a
brief consideration of them let us first clear the air of false concepts
respecting inferior races. It is quite certain that the idea of an in-
ferior race is not a Catholic idea. It is essentially a pagan concept
and has been adopted by Protestantism, as exemplified by Protestant
nations in their dealings with weak peoples.

"Of one blood God hath made all mankind." "Go, teach all na-
tions," was the command of the Master to His disciples. "There is
neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian
nor Scythian, bond nor free ; but Christ is all in all." These and
other injunctions of the Master express the Catholic concept of the
brotherhood of the race in full essence and vigor. That there are

540 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

weak races and communities, just as we find weak individuals, defi-
cient it may be in coherence or cunning or physical strength or arms
of precision for destroying human life, is quite true. But they may
not be inferior, therefore, in all that constitutes true greatness. We
know that the Spotless One was offered an extensive territory, pro-
vided He bowed down and worshiped the Evil One, and that He re-
fused, and we know the sequel ; the motley mob who looked for a
Messiah of worldly power crying out, "Crucify Him! Crucify
Him !" and then the awful consummation on Calvary.

Weak nations or communities, be they civilized or uncivilized, are
regarded quite generally as possessing no rights that the so-called
world powers are bound to respect. Power and right are regarded
generally as convertible terms by diplomatists and politicians who
represent the world spirit. Indeed, of late it would seem that some
American Catholics are seriously affected in this respect by the semi-
pagan environment which surrounds them. Colonel Denby, ex-
Minister to China, who, it is alleged, is a Catholic, is a notable in-
stance of this, as evidenced by various articles from his pen that have
been published from time to time during the past two years in
various publications, in which he advocates not only the subjugation
of the Filipinos, but suggests that the United States should grab a
portion of the Chinese Empire in the interest of civilization.

We find also an excellent priest of the Dominican order in a book
which he has written about the Filipinos characterizing them as an
inferior race and referring to the black people of Hayti and Santo
Domingo in the same way. This, to say the least, is rather a singu-
lar attitude for a priest of the order of Saint Dominic to take. Just
here a word respecting these Filipino Christians. The writer of this
article in a lengthy conversation on the subject with an American
priest who had spent several months on the Island of Luzon asked
him this question : "From your observation of the Filipinos whom
you met, how will they compare — say the 2,000,000 people of Luzon
with the 2,000,000 people of the city of Chicago?" His answer was
substantially that as well as he could judge the Luzon Christians in
the observance of the moral law and the practice of the domestic vir-
tues would compare more than favorably with the population of
Chicago. They do not possess such enormous buildings nor such
evidences of material wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but
neither do they present such evidences of abject poverty and moral
degradation. He said further that the Filipino Christian could
with much truth say to the American, as Athenagoras of Athens,
one of the early Christian apologists, said to the pagan philosophers :
"Among us will be found the ignorant, the poor, laborers and old
women who cannot, perhaps, define by reasoning the truth of their

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 541

doctrine. They do not enter into discussion, but they do good
works. The most aged they honor as their fathers and mothers.
The hope of another Hfe makes them despise the present, even in the
midst of lawful pleasures. Marriage with them is a holy vocation,
which imparts the grace necessary to bring up their children in the
fear of the Lord."

With this clearing of the atmosphere respecting the phrase "in-
ferior races," let us now proceed to the consideration of the first
point, namely : "No Protestant nations or Protestant missionaries
have ever yet converted to Christianity or civilized a pagan nation
or community."

Let us take first the case of England's dealings with pagan com-
munities, because that nation is recognized as the leading Protestant
one of the world and the source heretofore of the greatest volume of
Protestant missionary effort. And first as to its dealing with India,
an extensive territory containing a population of nearly 300,000,000
of people under British control. England became the paramount
power in that territory in 1757 as a consequence of Lord Clive's
signal victory over the Mogul power. After the victory the British
officials established a system of government which has been de-
scribed by many eminent authorities as forming one of the most re-
volting and horrible chapters to be found on the page of history.
The natives were robbed, imprisoned and murdered by the British
governing classes without remorse or mercy. Those were the days
of Vansittart and Hastings. Edmund Burke declared in the British
Plouse of Commons that "were we to be driven out of India this day
nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the
inglorious period of our dominion, by any better than the ourang-
outang or the tiger."

From that day to this the rule of Britain in India has been marked
by pestilence, periodical famine and rebellion. Wholesale famine
sweeps off the natives by the million every few years, while they are
compelled to support an enormous native army paid to hold them in
subjection, as well as a European army, and also to pay enormous
salaries to a host of British officials. The country is dominated
primarily with a view to British interests, and it is squeezed as a
lemon is squeezed to subserve those interests solely. The Hindoo
has no voice in the making of the laws which he must obey or of
saying anything about how he shall be taxed ; the British officials
make the laws, levy the taxes and collect them. The Indian Gov-
ernment permits the Hindoo to worship his idols in peace as long as
he pays his taxes ; the Juggernaut worship, involving the sacrifice
of human lives, was permitted as long as the taxes were promptly
paid. If the latter were not paid he must go to jail. While Britain's

542 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

government in the eighteenth century and well on into the nine-
teenth was forcing Protestantism upon Irish and British Catholics,
it was studiously liberal towards the followers of Mahommed and
Buddha and the other religious sects of India.

The first British officials with their numerous European followers
in India seem to have paid very little regard to the observances of
their own religion, if they can be said to have had any. A well-
known English writer and minister of the Established Church, Dr.
Close, the dean of Carlisle, in his work written in 1858, informs us
that "more than half a century elapsed from the first appearance of
the British in India before they thought of erecting a church for
themselves." And Dr. Close makes the somewhat startling asser-
tion regarding the attitude of the British rulers in that great de-
pendency towards Christianity that "of the government of India it
may be truly affirmed and fully established by circumstantial evi-
dence that its whole weight, influence and authority has been direct-
ed against the progress of Christianity among the heathen." And
he adduces abundant testimony in his book to prove that assertion.
He shows that American Protestant missionaries in 1812 were
driven out from Calcutta to Bombay, where they were imprisoned,
and that when they escaped in a coasting vessel they were pursued,
retaken and confined to the fort. And that as late as 18 13 not a
single missionary would be permitted to go to India in a British ship,
and that it had become a definite rule of the British to permit no
attempt to convert the natives and that that rule was rigidly main-
tained as long as possible. Not only maintained, but a law was
made in 1 814 by the governing authority, by virtue of which native
Christians were excluded from holding any office of responsibility
under the British. A host of witnesses, Protestant and Catholic,
bear testimony to the anti-Christian attitude of British rule which
was maintained exclusively to subserve the material welfare, first of
the East India Company and its retainers, and afterwards of the
British people themselves.

Referring to the personal example shown" by the British garrison
and officials to the Hindoos, Dr. Wolff, in the narrative of his travels
there, informs us that "a well-known Protestant missionary called
upon the celebrated Hindoo potentate, Runjeet Singh, at his palace
in Lahore about half a century ago to have a conversation about re-
ligious and political matters, and in the course of the conversation
the Hindoo Prince said to the missionary: 'You say you travel
about for the sake of religion ; why, then, do you not preach to the
English in Hindostan, who have no religion at all ?' And when the
missionary related that conversation to Lord William Bentinck, the
British Governor General, the latter observed : This is, alas ! the

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 543

opinion of all the natives over India/ " The evil example of the
whole British establishment in India is testified to by a multitude of
unimpeachable witnesses.

From this it may be readily seen that the leading Protestant na-
tion of the world not only did not convert or try to convert to Chris-
tianity any portion of the vast population of that great Indian Em-
pire, but that it potentially threw serious obstacles in the way of
their conversion even by Protestant missionaries, some of whom
were undoubtedly very zealous and sincere men. Yet the British
sovereign on being crowned takes a solemn oath to maintain "The
laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel and the Protestant
religion as it is established by law."

Now let us glance briefly at the operations of the Protestant mis-
sionaries in that country. Dutch and German Protestant clergy-
men were first on the ground, having entered by the way of the
Dutch trading settlements. The harvest that followed their labors,
according to their own showing, amounted to practically nothing.
Toward the close of the eighteenth century the English Church,
through its "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel," employed
some German and Danish Lutheran ministers to introduce 'Pro-
testantism among the natives. A most singular selection truly this
was, inasmuch as the English Church regarded the tenets of
Lutheranism as downright heresy and Lutheran ministers as mere
laymen who were engaged in the propagation of heretical
views. But the clergymen of the Established Church could not be
induced to volunteer for Christ's service in that torrid and deadly
climate, and hence the zealous Lutherans were commissioned to dis-
seminate doctrines that the English Church reprobated. A Pro-
testant author who traveled extensively in India, Mr. Kaye, in his
work, "Christianity in India," referring to the situation at the close
of the eighteenth century, informs us that there was urgent need for
earnest work there, because "up to that time Protestant efforts had
resulted in small progress in the country." He adds that "some con-
versions had been made, but, alas ! some of these were entirely in
the wrong direction," a statement which he explains by pointing
out that some of the English residents — Protestants, of course — had
embraced Mahommedanism, while others, including the son of Sir
Heneage Finch, had become Catholics. Strange spectacle. Those
who became Catholics were virtually entering the Church in the
catacombs in India at that time, because the Catholic Church was
most rigorously proscribed by the Indian Governm'ent, which al-
lowed perfect liberty to the Mahommedan and Brahmin worships.
Even the very soldiers in the ranks of the army must be non-Cath-
olics. No Catholics could be admitted to serve even as privates —
as food for powder. In 1769 a resolution offered in the British Par-

544 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

liament to give authority to the East India Company to enlist Cath-
oHc recruits for service in India was defeated by an overwhelming
majority. And at the same time no Catholics were eligible for ad-
mission into the British regular army.

Yet we perceive the marvelous fact that the Gospel of the Cruci-
fied One which had been preached by Saint Francis Xavier and his
companions two hundred and fifty years before had not only taken
root in that country, but that it had gained adherents within the
shadow of British proscription and dire peril. How perilous it was
to receive converts by the proscribed Catholic clergymen who at-
tended the Indian missions at that time is referred to in his book
by the Rev. Mr. Anderson, one of the Indian army chaplains, a Pro-
testant, of course, who says that the government grew alarmed "at
the progress of Romanism, and they resolved to enforce against its
professors the penal statute. Twenty-third of Elizabeth, Chapter I. ;
and having discovered that one John da Gloria, a Portuguese priest,
had baptized Matthew, son of Lieutenant Thorpe, deceased, they ar-
rested him on a charge of high treason for procuring a person to be
reconciled to the Pope."

Quite an inflow of Protestant missionaries from various countries
poured into India towards the close of the first quarter of the nine-
teenth century. Protestant zeal was then at its height ; there was at
that time a stalwart dogmatic Protestantism resting on the Bible,
without question or doubt of its inspiration, animated by a burning
desire to convert the heathen to membership in some one of the
sects and thus save him from the errors of paganism if not the worse
errors of Rome. Money was contributed without stint to pay liberal
salaries and liberal expenses to male and female evangelizers. Bibles
by the million were printed in the vernacular and distributed broad-
cast among the natives. Glowing reports were made by the evange-
lizers of that time of many conversions partly made and of several
real conversions. It would appear from reading these reports that
the sun of Christianity was arising in glory and splendor over the
whole of Hindostan. The Church of England sent out its first
bishop, a gentleman named Middleton, to administer affairs in its
behalf. He arrived in 1814, accompanied by his wife and servants.
As money was of little account compared with the salvation of souls.
Bishop Middleton received for his spiritual exertions the modest sum
of $25,000 a year, and each of his two archdeacons received $10,000
a year. When the bishop and his wife set out on his spiritual tours
he was granted an additional liberal allowance for traveling expenses.
All of which and many other interesting things concerning the
bishop and his labors are told at considerable length by his biogra-
pher, a Protestant clergyman, Rev. C. W. Le Bas.

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 545

Mr. Le Bas says the bishop was much distressed at the condition
in which he found things; that the native converts were few and
they were divided, if not distracted, by the rival preachers of the
Weslfeyan, Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, American Puritans and
other sects. He further describes the effect of this rivalry upon the
natives by saying: ''Next to the suspicion that the Europeans are
generally destitute of all real religion, the grand impediment the
Gospel has to contend with among idolaters arises from the multi-
plicity of shapes under which our visible religion presents itself to
their notice. Their observation uniformly is that they should think
much better of Christianity if there were not quite so many diiiereni
kinds of it."

From the time of Bishop Middleton to the present day money has
been poured into the Protestant missionary field of India in great
abundance, but it has disappeared as if thrown into a quicksand
without leaving any substantial trace behind. Conversions have
been reported by the missionaries, but independent observers, both
Catholic and Protestant, agree in stating that no substantial gain
has been made by them. British Government officials of high stand-
ing admit that to be the fact. Some Protestant missionaries them-
selves admit it. In times of famine some children have been secured
by the missionaries and have been brought up as Protestants, but
they generally relapse to their former worship or become atheists.
Famine converts are very seldom reliable, as was exemplified by the
failure of Protestant efforts to seduce the Irish from their ancient
faith in the great famine of 1846-9. In a word, the past one hun-
dred and fifty years of strenuous Protestant missionary effort in
India has failed. Many writers assure us that the evangelizers have
succeeded in unsettling the Hindoo's faith in his own religion, mak-
ing of him an unbeliever and scoffer of all religions.

What has been said in reference to the Protestant propaganda in
British India can also be stated of those portions of the country
that came under the control of the Dutch and Danes. On the other
hand, it may be remarked, and with significance, that the Gospel
seed sown by Xavier and tended by his successors has found a lodge-
ment in that arid soil and has struck root deeply, despite the enmity
of the evil one exemplified by the persecutions to which Catholic
missionaries, more especially the Jesuits, have been subjected, not
only by the Dutch and British rulers, but by the Portuguese and
French Governments when the latter were controlled by infidels.

A similar state of things obtains in Ceylon, Borneo and the Straits
Settlements, where the Catholic missions hold the field under Pro-
testant governments, and Protestant efforts at conversion have sub-
stantially failed.
Vol. XXVI- 9

546 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Let us now glance at the work of England and Protestant mis-
sionaries in Australasia. The great continent of Australia up to
about one hundred and fifty years ago was inhabited only by un-
civilized aborigines, and so also were the large islands of New Zea-
land and Tasmania and other groups of islands ofif the coast. All
these became subject to the rule of England, and Protestant mis-
sionaries for a long time had the field exclusively to themselves.
Here certainly was virgin soil upon which to extend the blessings of
Protestant civilization to an inferior race. The operation of the
penal laws against Catholicism excluded Catholic effort. But what
has been the result ? Simply this : the natives have been slaughtered
without remorse or compunction ; they have been exterminated by
the so-called superior race. One of the most tragic chapters of
modern history is that written on Australasian soil in the blood of
the native race. We are told by an English Protestant writer, Mr.
George T. Loyd, who lived in that country thirty-three years, that
when the first English settlers arrived in the great island of Tasmania
the natives evinced the most friendly disposition towards them, but
the native confidence was betrayed and they were slaughtered indis-
criminately under the direction of the colonial authorities on one
pretext or another. Military expeditions were fitted out to extermi^
nate them en masse, as if they were wild beasts, and at length, about
forty years ago, the last native of Tasmania had disappeared.

It took only the short period of twenty years to carry out the ex-
termination of the natives of Tasmania. And such also has been
substantially the fate of the whole native race on the Australian con-
tinent and in New Zealand. The black fellows of the continent and
the heroic Maories of New Zealand have been wiped out without
mercy or pity. There was no Las Casas on hand among the Pro-
testant missionaries to denounce the murderous work of the civil
rulers and their followers before England's Queen and Parliament.
On the contrary, quite a number of the very missionaries who were
there ostensibly to convert the natives to Protestantism were more
interested in securing for themselves the lands of the native chiefs
for nominal considerations. Instead of any effort on the part
of these evangelizers to arouse the House of Commons to the bloody
holocaust of the natives by the colonists, they were more interested
in securing the spoils, as was succinctly shown by an investigation
into their conduct by the House of Commons, which obliged quite a
number of them to disgorge their ill-gotten wealth.

Under the domination of Britain and the evangelical work of the
Protestant missionary the aboriginal race in that country is gone.
But why ? That is the question which forces itself upon the atten-
tion of every student of history in these days when our ears are as-

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 547

sailed and insulted by un-Catholic references of politician and
preacher to superior and inferior races.

Let us now glance briefly, as we necessarily must within the limits
of a magazine article, at the picture presented by China, which has
not yet become subordinate to the so-called world powers, but seems
likely in a short time to become so. The first substantial efifort to
introduce the Christian Gospel to the Chinese was put forth a little
over three hundred years ag'o by the self-sacrificing fathers of the
Company of Jesus. These spiritual athletes, unaccompanied by
armed battalions and unsupported by warships, entered the Flowery
Kingdom to win souls to Christ after the manner of the fishermen
who were first commissioned. They were received with respect by
the learned and high officials of the Chinese Empire and listened to
with attention by the masses to whom they expounded the doctrine
of the brotherhood of the whole human race. They prosecuted their
mission with such remarkable success that it may be accurately esti-
mated that at the end of the first hundred years of their labors there
were about as many native converts in China as there are at the pres-
ent hour, or in the neighborhood of about 1,000,000 souls. It would
,be a turning aside from the object in view to trace the history of
Christian effort in that country and point out a probable reason —
as it appears to the natural eye — why the effort has not been crowned
with a greater measure of success. Suffice it to say here that since
the commercial nations, these exemplars of Western civilization,,
have undertaken to force their manufactured products and other
things upon the Chinese the latter have viewed with suspicion and
distrust the aims and objects of the former, and unfortunately the
religion which they professed as well.

And certainly the people of China had good reason to doubt the
nobility of purpose and the morality of a Christian nation like Eng-
land, who made war upon them to compel them to allow opium to be
sold in their markets. So also they might doubt the morality of
France when it seized the vast province of Tonkin and aided Eng-
land in imposing the blessings of Western civilization by force upon
them. Or the seizure of the province of Shantung by Germany a
few years ago as an indemnity for the murder of some German Cath-
olic missionaries, while at the same time certain orders of Catholic
priests were declared by German law to be illegal societies. The
whole course of the Western powers was not calculated to inspire the
natives with a high regard for their code of public morality as ex-
emplified by their policy of grab and spoliation.

In fact, the course pursued by the Christian nations in the East
has thrown serious obstacles in the way of converting the pagans.
Crooked diplomacy, quick-firing guns and armored ships of war

548 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

were not the weapons of the Crucified One. It is hardly an extrava-
gant flight of the imagination to surmise that had the struggle in
China between paganism and Christianity, which was substantially
opened by the Jesuits at the close of the sixteenth century, continued
upon the lines of the first hundred years, Christianity would be domi-
nant in that vast territory to-day. But, alas ! it was not so continued.
The diabolical powers, reinforced by the cupidity and greed of pro-
fessing Christians and their governments, have rendered the task of
bringing those hundreds of millions of people with their ancient
civilization under the banner of the Cross a work of extreme diffi-
culty.

There is little doubt, however, that the influence of Protestantism
represented by its missionaries has had a most deleterious influence
against their conversion. It could not be otherwise in the nature
of things. Presenting themselves before a civilized community like
the Chinese, many of whom are highly educated men, professing an
ancient religion, retaining many of the primary truths of the patri-
archal days, and each missionary claiming to preach the Gospel of
Christ, but each sectarian preaching a different version of that
Gospel, is it to be wondered at that a strong presumption should
arise in the mind of an intelligent or even an ignorant heathen
against the divine origin of such a Gospel, about which its teachers
themselves cannot agree? Then, also, in all the ancient religious
systems of the East mortification of the flesh, penance and chastity
are recognized as marks of exalted manhood, while Protestantism,
through its missionaries, denies their efficacy and presents itself to
the heathen mind as of the earth, earthy. While the sects have been
<ioing a certain good work in the establishing of schools among the
Chinese, as they have been doing in Hindostan and elsewhere, yet
it is the general consensus of opinion among the great majority of
independent onlookers that it has not succeeded in gaining any sub-
stantial foothold among the people. The Catholic missionary has
achieved a measure of success in the face of great obstacles, as the
missions scattered all over the country show. Protestant writers
bear witness to the far-reaching influence of the latter. One of
these, a well-known writer, Mr. Henry Norman, M. P., who has
traveled extensively in China, recently says : "A distinction must be
made between Catholic and Protestant missionaries. The former
receive high recognition from natives and foreigners, and the result
of their labors is more encouraging. They have established them-
selves in China, once for all, adopting the costume and attitude of
mind of the people and managing to live on moderate resources ;
they are the living expression of those qualities which are thought
both in the East and in the West attributes as essentials to the

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 549

priesthood: poverty, chastity and obedience. . . . Moreover,
they are subject to a single authority, preach and practice one doc-
trine. I certainly need not explain that I am not prejudiced in
favor of the Catholic propaganda ; but I should be disloyal to both
did I not acknowledge the deep respect which I feel both for the
character and work of the many Catholic missionaries whom I met
in China."

During the recent outbreak of the Boxers, which had its origin
in deep-seated antipathy to foreigners and the religion which they
profess, the Catholic priests, foreign or native born, stood by their
flocks, ministering to them that their faith might not fail in the pres-
ence of death, while the Protestant shepherds, wherever the roads to
the rear remained open, fled with their wives and families to a place
of safety. Reports of the trials and persecutions and martyrdom of
the Chinese Catholics remind one of the constancy and fidelity of the
early Church in Rome, Corinth and Damascus. It seems quite
probable that the partition of China among the physically strong
powers of the world is close at hand. It may be expected that when
that scheme of national plunder is consummated the spoliation of
the inhabitants by the new rulers will begin. The population of
China, like that of India, is too dense to be wiped out. Fiscal poli-
cies, exclusive commercial control will accomplish the purpose of the
conquerors.

In Africa, as in Australasia, in the islands of the Pacific, as on the
North American Continent, wherever Protestant authority has be-
come predominant, the uncivilized heathen has already been exterm-
inated or is rapidly undergoing that process. Such is the simple fact
illustrated on every hand by the history of Protestant contact with
every such community. Protestantism in its effect upon them has
been as a devastating pestilence. On the other hand, where Cath-
olic nations have controlled the uncivilized heathen the reverse has
invariably been the case. In the Philippines, in the Gambler and
Ladrone Islands, in the Catholic settlements dominating African
tribes, as well as on the great continent of South America, the native
peoples have been steadily advancing in civilization as well as ma-
terially increasing in population. This statement is amply sup-
ported by indisputable testimony, so that it may be taken as an in-
variable law of Catholic domination over such communities.

The limits of this article are necessarily too brief to permit our en-
tering into details respecting the testimony on every hand. Let us
take as an instance one of the new possessions added -to the United
States — the Hawaiian Islands. Protestantism for many years, since
18.20, held undisputed sway there. The natives were active, robust,
docile, teachable, and they welcomed the first Protestant mission-

550 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

aries who came among them with open arms. It was not until sev-
eral years later that Catholic missionaries were suffered to work
among them, the first Catholic priests who attempted to do so being
forcibly expelled. The teachings of the various sects were expound-
ed in those islands with perfect freedom, but the results seem to have
had as fatal an effect as the angel of death over the host of Senna-
cherib. It was as if. the plague had secured a permanent lodgement
upon the islands. Continuously and rapidly the people have been
dying out. Rev. Gustavus Hines, one of the American Protestant
missionaries, writing in 185 1 of the frightful loss of life among the
natives, says: "The astonishing rapidity of the decrease of the
Hawaiian population is perhaps without a parallel in the history of
nations. ... In the course of four successive years it dimin-
ished by 21,730." It may be observed that that frightful decline has
continued to the present hour, so that only a small remnant of the
native race is now left.

It is, however, here upon the American hemisphere that we can
view most clearly the contrast afforded by the Protestant and Cath-
olic contacts with partially or wholly uncivilized communities.
After French authority was ousted on the North American conti-
nent about the middle of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of
the North American continent became subject to Protestant Eng-
land, while upon the South American continent Spain and Portugal,
both Catholic countries, were the dominant powers. Let us take a
snap-shot glance at the story as told in history. First as to North
America. The pages of Parkman and the chronicle of the Jesuit
Relations tell us of the trials, sacrifices and martyrdoms of the Jesuit
apostles, who plunged into the primeval wilderness armed only with
breviary and cross to win the souls of the fierce tribes for Christ.
And emulating the sons of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the followers of
Saint Francis were on hand. Bancroft says that "The first perma-
nent efforts of French enterprise in colonizing America preceded
any permanent English settlement north of the Potomac. Years
before the Pilgrims anchored within Cape Cod the Roman Church
had been planted by missionaries from France in the eastern moiety
of Maine; and Le Caron, an unambitious Franciscan, had pene-
trated the land of the Mohawks, had passed to the north in the hunt-
ing grounds of the Wyandots, and, bound by his vows to the life of
a beggar, had, on foot or paddling a bark canoe, gone onward and
still onward, taking alms of the savages, till he reached the rivers of
Lake Huron. While Quebec contained scarce fifty inhabitants,
priests of the Franciscan order — Le Caron, Viel, Sagard — had la-
bored for years as missionaries in Upper Canada or made their way
to the neutral Huron tribe that dwelt on the waters of the Niagara."

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 551

It is of value to observe here that Mr. Bancroft's reference to the
work of these missionaries as mere efforts of French enterprise to
found French colonies in America is incorrect. These missionaries
were engaged in winning heathen colonies for Christ. It may be
worth while also to ask the reader to fix his attention upon the fact
that these missionaries were unaccompanied by armed battalions.
A faraway faint glimpse of their trials, struggles and death may be
had in the written record, but the full story is known only to the
Master Who inspired them. While they had crossed the seas in
French ships and the majority were subjects of the King of France,
they were more than Frenchmen, and the commission which they
held, bearing date of 1600 years before, was a more exalted one
than any issued by any French monarch or earthly potentate.
Their success was large and the influence of their lives and
death yet lives among the Catholic Indians of Canada and the
Northwest.

They had powerful evil influences to contend with other than the
untamed ferocity of the savages. At times they experienced the
hostility of the French Government when controlled by atheists, and
they always had to encounter the enmity of the English Protestant
colonies upon the Atlantic seaboard. While the Jesuits and Fran-
ciscans were engaged in establishing mission chapels throughout
the wilderness, the Protestant colonists were occupied in establish-
ing trading posts on the edge of the wilderness in which to barter
rum and tobacco for peltries and skins with the Indians. On the
one side the desire was to extend the gospel ; on the other to extend
trade. The Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay enacted a penal
statute as early as 1647 which provided for the exclusion of Catholic
priests from its jurisdiction. The statute is headed "J^suites ;" it
provides condign punishment for any priest 'Mevoted to the reli-
gion and court of Room (Rome)," and declares that if he "be taken
the second time within this jurisdiction, upon lawful tryal and con-
viction he shall be put to death." Such was the attitude generally
of the Protestant colonists towards Catholic missionaries, and such
it has continued to be until within a comparatively recent period.
Their attitude towards the aborigines may be gathered from the
laws enacted in reference to them. In 1675 the following law was
passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony : "Ordered by the Court,
that whosoever shall shoot off any gun on any unnecessary occasion,
or at any game whatsoever, except at an Indian or a wolf, shall for-
feit five shillings for every such shot, till further liberty shall be
given."

Another law passed by the General Court held at Boston on Feb-
ruary 21, 1675, is as follows : "Upon consideration of many skulking

552 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Indians about our plantations, doing much mischief and damage,
and a probable way for their surprisal is by scouting in small par-
ties ; for encouragement thereof ; — This Court doth order that every
person or persons that shall surprise, slay, or bring in prisoner any
such Indian on the south side of Pascataqua River, he or they shall
be allowed three pounds per head." . . . And Mr. Bancroft in
his history of the United States informs us that "The Legislature of
Massachusetts by resolution in July, 1722, declared the^Eastern In-
dians to be traitors and robbers ; and while troops were raised for
the war, offered private men for each Indian's scalp — at first a
bounty of fifteen pounds, and afterward of a hundred."

The attitude of the Puritan colony toward the aborigines and the
men who were endeavoring to civilize them is strikingly shown by
the wanton destruction of the flourishing Jesuit mission at Norridge-
wock, in the wilds of Maine, and the murder of the missionary and
many of his people. Bancroft recites the story in the following
words : "At Norridgewock, on the banks of the Kennebec, Sebastian
Rasles, for more than a quarter of a century the companion and in-
structor of savages, had gathered a flourishing village round the
church, which, rising in the desert, made some pretensions to mag-
nificence. Severely ascetic, using no wine, and little food except
pounded maize, a rigorous observer of the days of Lent, he built his
own cabin, tilled his own garden, drew for himself wood and water,,
prepared his own hominy, and, distributing all that he received, gave
an example of religious poverty. Himself a painter, he adorned
the humble walls of his church with pictures. There he gave in-
struction almost daily. Following his pupils to their wigwams, he
tempered the spirit of devotion with familiar conversation and inno-
cent gayety, winning the mastery over their souls by his powers of
persuasion. He had trained a band of forty young savages, arrayed
in cassock and surplice, to assist in the service and chant the hymns
of the Church ; and their public processions attracted a concourse of
red men. Two chapels were built near the village, and before them
the hunter muttered his prayers on his way to the river or the
woods. When the tribe descended to the seaside, in the season of
wild fowl, they were followed by Rasles ; and on some islet a chapel
of bark was quickly consecrated. In 171 7 the Government of Mas-
sachusetts attempted in turn to establish a mission ; and its minister
made a mocking of Purgatory and the invocation of saints, of the
Cross and the Rosary. 'My Christians,' retorted Rasles, 'believe
the truths of the Catholic faith, but are not skilful disputants,' and
he prepared a defense of the Roman Church. . . .

"The expedition to Penobscot in 1723 was under public auspices.
After five days' march through the woods, Westbrooke, with his

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 553

company, came upon the Indian settlement that was probably above
Bangor, at Old Town. He found a fort seventy yards long and
fifty in breadth, well protected by stockades, fourteen feet high, in-
closing twenty-three houses regularly built. On the south side
near at hand was the chapel, sixty feet long and thirty wide, well
and handsomely furnished within and without; and south of this
stood the 'friar's dwelling house.' The invaders arrived there on
the 9th of March, 1723, at six in the evening. That night they set
fire to the village, and by sunrise next morning every building was in
ashes. Twice it was attempted to capture Rasles. At last, on the
23d of August, 1724, a party from New England had reached Nor-
ridgewock, unperceived, till they discharged their guns at the cabins.
There were about fifty warriors in the place. They seized their
arms and marched forth tumultuously to protect the flight of their
wives and children and old men. Rasles, roused to the danger by
their clamors, went forward to save his flock by drawing down upon
himself the attention of the assailants, and his hope was not vain.
Meantime the savages fled to the river, which they passed by wading
and swimming, while the English pillaged the cabins and the church,
and then set them on fire. After the retreat of the invaders, the red
men returned to nurse their wounded and inter their dead. They
buried Rasles beneath the spot where he used to stand before the
altar."

And then Mr. Bancroft adds : "Influence by commerce took the
place of influence by religion and English trading houses sup-
planted French missions." Such was the spirit which seems to have
animated the Protestant colonists of North America in their dealings
with the natives. The conversion of the Indians seems to have been
of secondary importance compared with acquiring possession of
title to the lands or the opportunity of driving shrewd bargains with
them for the fruits of the chase. It is true that some of the Puri-
tan clergymen like John Eliott showed considerable zeal in endeav-
oring to convert the sadly demoralized remnants of the aborigines
in the vicinity of Massachusetts Bay and of Hartford, on the Con-
necticut River, but it is likewise certain that the efiforts of such men
proved a dismal failure. There seemed to be something lacking, a
want of some essential element in their ministrations to insure suc-
cess. The Indian and wolf, coupled together in the phraseology of
the old Puritan statute already quoted, disappeared simultaneously ;
the advance of the Protestant colonists into the wilderness meant
the extermination of both. Such in brief is the story of the contact
of Protestantism with the aborigines of the North American conti-
nent. In a few more years when the last red man will have been
gathered to his fathers, a monument might be erected over his re-

554 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

mains bearing this epitaph : "Here lies the last representative of the
American Indian ; done to death by Protestantism."

The United States is referred to as a Protestant or non-Catholic
country because its beginnings were dominated by Protestants ; they
have in a great measure shaped its history ; it was their impact upon
and dealings with the unfortunate Indians that have proved so dis-
astrous to the latter. The Catholic population has not been suffi-
ciently large and united to exercise much of a saving influence in the
body politic in reference to the Indians, as has been quite recently
shown by the governmental treatment of the Catholic Indian schools
and in various other respects. In addition to this, some American
Catholics seem to have become more or less infected with pernicious
ideas respecting so-called inferior races through inhaling the Pro-
testant atmosphere surrounding them.

The last red man will soon disappear among us, but we have the
problem of the black man before us for solution. The Negro we
formerly held in a state of absolute subjection, but he was liberated
thirty-six or thirty-seven years ago, not through any act of grace on
our part, but because it was considered necessary as a war measure
to save the integrity of the Union. Although the Negro has been
declared politically free by the organic law of the nation, he has been,
and he is regarded to-day by a great majority of the people, North
as well as South, as an inferior being to the white man. His natural
rights have been trampled upon by individuals and mobs ; he has
been denied the protection of the laws in many cases ; his prospect in
the future is exceedingly dark and gloomy. The color line is rigidly
drawn between black and white.

Many if not all the Southern States where Negro slavery formerly
exj^ted have enacted laws prohibiting the intermarriage of black
and white people and imposing penalties on clergymen who per-
form the marriage ceremony between them. Surely these enact-
ments are in contravention of natural law, if not the law of God.
The State of Georgia, or any other State, has no more right to pro-
hibit or to declare invalid the marriage of a red, black or brown
skinned person to a white person than it has to prohibit red-headed
men and black-haired women from entering into the marriage rela-
tion. Certainly these laws and the insensate widespread racial
prejudice of which they are but an expression are as opposite to
Catholic thought and teaching as is the North from the South Pole.
"Of one blood God hath made all mankind." Down through the
ages that blessed evangel has come. It was heard by master and
slave in the catacombs of Rome ; it was testified to by both on the
sands of the Flavian amphitheatre ; it has been enunciated on the
altars and from the pulpits of gorgeous Cathedrals ; it has been an-

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 555

nounced in dim forest aisles on the banks of the Parana and Ama-
zon and in the interior of Africa ; on the burning sands of Hindo-
stan, where paganism recognizes caste and privilege, the lowly pa-
riah has heard it, and it will be heard with a fuller and more preg-
nant meaning when all these shameful statutes and racial prejudices
against any of God's creatures are abolished.

And now that we have glanced at the effect of Protestant domina-
tion over weak races on the North American continent, let us take a
glimpse at the effect of Catholicism upon similar races in South
America. Macaulay says the conquest of Mexico by Cortes was an
event almost similar to the conquest of the Mogul power in India
by Chve. The historian draws a comparison between the events ;
but there the comparison ends. The characters of the Spanish and
English conquerors were as dissimilar as the results which have
flown from their action. Cortes was an upright, honorable gentle-
man and an able soldier ; Clive was an unscrupulous, dishonorable
man, a corruptionist and forger, but an able soldier. Each con-
quered an extensive territory for his sovereign. That conquered by
Cortes has been advancing in population and prosperity and is now
enjoying the blessings of republican government, while the territory
conquered by Clive has been held in subjection by a standing army
and it is scourged with periodical famines — the famine now ending
having cost, according to some estimates, over a million of lives.
Cortes was a crusader ; Clive was an adventurous soldier, who en-
riched himself at the expense of his employers and of his victims.
Mr. Prescott in his "Conquest of Mexico" says : 'There can be no
doubt that Cortes, with every man in his army, felt he was engaged
in a holy crusade; and that independently of personal considera-
tions he could not serve heaven better than by planting the cross on
the blood-stained towers of the heathen metropoHs."

The primary motive of the Spanish conquerors was the subjuga-
tion of the aborigines to the yoke of Christianity. When Monte-
zuma was overthrown the first object of the victor was the reclama-
tion of the natives from their idol worship. The loathsome re-
ligious rites in which they indulged and their abominable human
sacrifices were summarily suppressed. Father Diaz, Gomara and
Olmedo, who accompanied the expedition directed by Cortes, were
preaching incessantly, explaining the truths of Christianity to the
natives, and with such wondrous effect that multitudes were con-
verted and were baptized.

When the conquest of practically the whole continent was secured
and the Spanish or Portuguese authority was firmly established the
real work of the missionary began. The Jesuit, Dominican and
Franciscan set forth with burning zeal into the wilderness to Chris-

556 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

tianize and humanize the heathen tribes, some of whom were un-
speakably ferocious and practiced cannibalism. Chili, Paraguay,
Peru, Guatemala, Central America were soon invaded by the sol-
diers of the Cross, men as steadfast as St. Stephen, zealous as St.
Paul and enthusiastic as St. Peter. The disciplined soldiery of Spain
and Portugal could not penetrate into the interior of the country,
except they went in large bodies ; but the missionaries in ones and
twos could and did. There was no hesitation, no faltering among
these apostles of the South American continent. No difficulties,
however great, daunted them. They flung worldly prudence and
wisdom to the winds, and made fools of themselves for the sake of
Christ's Kingdom. By ones and twos these cultured and tenderly
nurtured Christian gentlemen entered the forest fastnesses to combat
the Evil One and rescue the perishing native. They were unable
to perceive any inferior race in the wilderness, save such as
were in bondage to Satan. They scaled every mountain side,
crossed every river to bring the tidings of the Son of God to every
tribe.

Here is a description of the Jesuit Anchieta setting forth on his
mission : "Barefooted, with no other garment than his cassock, his
crucifix around his neck, the pilgrim staff and breviary in his hand
and his shoulders laden with the furniture requisite for an altar,
Anchieta advanced into the interior of the country; he penetrated
virgin forests, swam across streams, climbed the roughest moun-
tains, plunged into the solitude of the plains, confronted savage
beasts and abandoned himself entirely to the care of Providence.
. . . Sometimes when the savages rejected his first overtures
he threw himself at their knees, bathing them with his tears, press-
ing them to his heart and striving to gain their confidence by every
demonstration of love. He made himself their servant and studied
their caprices like a slave."

How strangely this description of the Jesuit reads by way of con-
trast with that of the Puritan minister Stone, who accompanied the
Massachusetts Puritans on their mission to exterminate the Pequod
Indians. And Anchieta was only one out of thousands such as he
who in a similar manner undertook and eventually wrought out the
conversion of the aborigines on the Southern continent. This, too,
despite the fact that when the Governments of Spain and Portugal
came under the control of atheists such as Aranda in Spain and
Pombal in Portugal, the efforts of these self-sacrificing men were
stopped and the missionaries themselves for a long period of years
treated as criminals. But notwithstanding every obstacle thrown in
their way by corrupt Spanish and Portuguese officials, the simple
fact remains that they did conquer South America for Christianity

Protestant Domination Over Weak Communities. 557

with just such men as the Jesuit Anchieta and through just such
means. The aborigines of the Southern continent, Uke the natives
of the PhiHppine Islands, have been Christianized and consequently-
civilized in just that way.

And that is only a portion of the story. The significant point is
that the aborigines of the South American continent have been
steadily increasing in numbers and advancing in prosperity and in-
fluence since their conversion. Peru, Mexico, indeed almost all, if
not all the South American countries have had as their chief magis-
trates full-blooded natives. There is no color line drawn upon the
South American continent among the people. And that is not all.
Negro slavery at one time obtained throughout that country. But
there it did not present the most abhorrent features which it bore in
the slave holding districts of the North American continent. The
influence of the Catholic Church continually exerted for generatiotis
served to ameliorate the sad condition of the slave under the civil
rule of Catholics. He could get married and his marriage was as
indissoluble as the marriage of the master. The law of every
Catholic country recognized that important fact, and further it was
a provision of law in most if not all of the South American countries
that the slave husband and wife could not be sold apart to different
masters, but must be transferred together, and that the slave child
could not be sold from the mother until it had reached a specified
age. The gracious and yet stern unyielding influence of the Church
in defense of the family was as a shield for the slave family in the
one case ; where that influence was wanting the slave was regarded
as a mere chattel, a thing without natural rights, absolutely the
property of the master.

Slavery no longer exists in South America ; black, white and red
are equal before the law. The freedom of the black race was accom-
plished, too, without any serious convulsion such as our Civil War.
There is no color line drawn between the races in any South Amer-
ican country. Every person, whatever the color of the skin, is
valued according to personal character. There are no "Ji"^ Crow"
cars, nor race churches, nor "nigger galleries" in theatre or other
places of public amusement, nor is there any legal prohibition of
marriage on account of color or race over the broad expanse of the
continent. The saintly men who won the natives for Christ did
their work well ; they did it in the spirit of the Master whose mis-
sionaries they were.

This article has grown somewhat lengthy, but the subject is a
grave one at the present moment, when the pagan concept respect-
ing so-called inferior races is dinned into our ears by politician and
preacher. It would indeed require a great volume to do even scanty

558 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

justice to the men who have brought pagan communities within the
pale of Christian civiHzation.

To the student of history these two considerations must arise from
the facts pointed out :

1. Is it not a very remarkable fact that Protestant colonization
has been attended everywhere among uncivilized aborigines by their
degradation and eventual destruction ?

2. Is it not an equally remarkable fact that Catholic colonization
has been attended everywhere with the civilization and advance-
ment of the natives, notwithstanding serious obstacles thrown in the
way of Catholic missionaries by pseudo Catholic authorities who at
times wielded the civil power ?

Some Protestant writers have attempted to explain why the
American people have failed with Indian and Negro. They ascribe
it to what they term the masterful spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race,
which they allege is so constituted that it cannot recognize the
equality of weak peoples. Pride of race, we are told, is the cause.
But this explanation boldly assumes that the population of the
United States is chiefly of British origin or extraction, while the
contrary is the fact, a great majority of the American people being
of other than of British origin or extraction. The Anglo-Saxon
race myth is but a lame excuse for a valid explanation. Surely the
masterful Spaniard in whose veins coursed the undiluted blood of
Castile and Arragon entertained as high a pride of race as the con-
glomerate population of the United States, of which Europe, not
England, is the mother country, and many of whom fled to escape
the tooth of poverty or the grip of military service in their native
land.

The true explanation of the remarkable contrast is that the s}'irit
of the Catholic Church was on the one side, the spirit of commercial-
ism and Protestantism animated the other. The Count De Maistre
gave expression to the true explanation in these words: ''Chris-
tianity is Catholicity, and Catholicity is Christianity ; they are identi-
cal in every sense."

James E. Wright.

Boston, Mass.

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 559

THE TRUE CRITICAL TEST OF NATURAL SELECTION.

WE are all Darwinians now. The intention in this article is
to inquire whether we may not be so in advance of the
evidence.
We are well aware that there are many who try to make a distinc-
tion between evolution and Darwinism. There are many Catholic
writers even who profess to be able to make such a distinction. They
will tell us that though Darwinism may be false, evolution is still
true. But we have yet failed to find any writer who professed to
make such a distinction who was able to withstand the current for
any length of time, and who did not find himself finally engulfed in
the vortex of Darwinism itself. The fact is that there is no other
form of evolution before the world at the present day that is worth a
moment's notice. Even those who undertake to combat Darwinism
are forced to take his doctrine of natural selection as the main and
prime factor of evolution. There is, indeed, division in the school
of evolution, but all the various divisions, with one insignificant ex-
ception, accept natural selection as primarily the basis of the doc-
trine. The various divisions in the school of evolution group them-
selves into three principal classes. First come the Neo-Darwinians
— as Mr. Herbert Spencer has somewhat contemptuously styled
them — and who are, as the same authority has said, more Darwinian
than Darwin himself. To this school belong Professor Weismann
and his followers. They endeavor to prove that natural selection is
able to account for everything. This is the end of all their labors,
the burden of all their controversies. Their new-fangled doctrines
of Panmixia, of special determinants, of plus and minus variations
have been all invented for the purpose of explaining away the diffi-
culties of natural selection and answering the objections to it. Next
in order comes the school of Mr. Herbert Spencer, who having par-
tially renounced his allegiance to Darwin and natural selection,
nevertheless still stoutly maintains that it, and it alone, can account
for the major part of the facts, while maintaining that another por-
tion of the facts can be accounted for only by the inheritability of
functionally produced changes. The third division, of which Pro-
fessor Henslow is one of the principal leaders, it is true, excludes
natural selection altogether ; but as the principle which they substi-
tute in whole for it is the Lamarckian theory, which was laughed out
of existence a century ago, the influence of the school carries but
little weight. Hence we see that the Darwinian doctrine of natural
selection still dominates the entire school of the Neo-Darwinians,

560 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

who still regard it, in a more or less modified form, as the sole factor
in the production of all phenomena ; while the school of Mr. Spencer
admits that it has been at least the principal factor. Moreover,
many of those who indulge in the luxury of ''special views" on the
subject of evolution make natural selection the basis or groundwork
of their new theories. Hence we find that natural selection still
occupies by far the largest place in the theory of evolution, and that
were Darwinism, as it is called, subtracted from the doctrine, there
would be little left worthy of attention. This being premised, we
may proceed to an examination of the doctrine of natural selection
itself.

Mr. Darwin's attempt in his famous work was, first, to show that
species may be originated by natural selection; secondly, to show
that natural causes are competent to select ; and, thirdly, that, to ex-
press it generally, to natural selection as to a cause may be traced
all the phenomena of species. Have forty odd years of trial borne
out the truth of Mr. Darwin's principles ? Let us see.

Lest we might be accused of injustice in dealing with the doctrine
of Mr. Darwin by applying false methods of criticism, let us adopt
the form employed by Mr. Huxley himself when he first dealt with
the theory. Not even the most orthodox Darwinian can suspect a
form of criticism emanating from such a source.

In his very first critique of the now famous doctrine Professor
Huxley laid down three criteria to be applied as tests of its truth.
They were, in his own words : "Is it satisfactorily proved, in fact,
that species may be originated by selection ? that there is such a thing
as natural selection? that none of the phenomena exhibited by
species are inconsistent with the origin of species in this way ?"

With the first two criteria of Professor Huxley — Is it proved that
species may be originated by selection? and is there such a thing'
as natural selection ? — there is no fault to find. The third, however,
must be peremptorily challenged. The consistency of the phe-
nomena exhibited by species with the theory of natural selection
would by no means amount to a proof of that theory. It might re-
move difficulties. It might show that the theory was probable, but
it could never attain the dignity of a proof. History is full of in-
stances in which, to all seeming, a given cause was quite consistent
with all the effects, but which, nevertheless, proved not to be a causa
vera at all. Whatever value, then, the third member of Professor
Huxley's standard possesses is of a negative, not a positive nature.
It smooths the way. It invites examination, even confidence ; but
it does not compel assent. With this weakness admitted, the third
member even may be permitted to stand. In testing the hypothesis,
however. Professor Huxley overlooked two points essential to a

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. '561

true critical analysis, and without which the three he has used would
be absolutely worthless. They are : First, does it explain all the
facts? and, secondly, does it explain them better than any other
hypothesis? With these necessary corrections and additions, the
importance of which no one will deny, we may proceed to the ex-
amination of natural selection; first, however, recasting Professor
Huxley's three in their logical order. The logical order would run
thus : (i) Is there such a thing as natural selection? (2) Is it satis-
factorily proven that species can be originated by it? (3) Is it con-
sistent with all the facts? (4) Does it explain all the facts? (5)
Does it explain them better than any other theory ?

To the very first question : Is there such a thing as natural selec-
tion? evolutionists are, after forty years of inquiry, unable to give
an affirmative answer. No one has ever seen it. No one dare
affirm that it really exists. When Mr. Darwin first propounded his
startling theory to the world, nearly half a century ago, he did not
feel warranted in maintaining that natural selection actually existed.
He undertook, indeed, to prove that it might, could, should exist;
that, in fact, to meet the requirements of his theory it ought to exist ;
but he never mustered up sufficient courage to proclaim its actual
existence. No one since his day professes to have discovered it.
No one has held it up to the gaze of an admiring world and pro-
claimed loudly : ''Eureka, I have found it." If we pass from Mr.
Darwin to Professor Huxley matters do not mend much. Professor
Huxley admitted candidly that "Mr. Darwin does not so much prove
that natural selection does occur as that it must occur;" and his
justification of Mr. Darwin on this point is nothing if not puerile.
He says: *Tn fact, no other sort of demonstration is attainable,"
which is, to say the least, neither very reassuring nor very scientific.
It is nothing but the old circulus vitiosus, which in this particular in-
stance tells us that we know evolution takes place because there is
such a thing as natural selection to cause it ; and we know that there
is such a thing as natural selection because the doctrine of evolution
requires it. His further attempt to defend Mr. Darwin's position is
simply a pleading of the baby act. He adds: "A race does not
attract our attention in nature until it has, in all probability (mark
the probability) existed for a considerable time, and then it is too
late to inquire into the conditions of its origin." That is to say, in
other words : perhaps natural selection exists, and perhaps we could
prove that it does actually exist were it not for the wretched per-
versity of a probable condition which perhaps, too, has an existence,
and which, perhaps, interferes with our demonstration. And so we
leave the great master and the great coryphaeus of the mighty move-
ment without much light on the question. When we come to Mr.
Vol. XXVI— 10

562 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Spencer we become bewildered and perplexed. It has been else-
where seen that he is at one and the same time both the champion
and the foe of natural selection, and this rather anomalous position
leads him into strange contradictions. He blows hot and cold with
the same mouth, asserting boldly on one page what he contradicts
on the next. Yet, like all the other evolutionists, while he is ready
to make an act of faith in natural selection when it suits his argu-
ment, and while he at times speaks of it with as much confidence as
if it were an actual existence which he beheld before his eyes, like
them, too, when he is placed upon the witness stand and forced to
speak the language of reason and logic, he will tell us that "the facts
at present assignable in direct proof that by progressive modifica-
tions races of organisms which are apparently distinct from ante-
cedent races have descended from them, are not suMcientf' in other
words, that natural selection has failed to establish proof of its exist-
ence. Again, in one of his fiercely-fought battles with the Neo-Dar-
winians, speaking of natural selection, he makes this contemptuous
retort : ''We might naturally suppose that their own hypothesis (of
natural selection) is unassailable. Yet, strange to say, they admit
that there is no direct proof that any species has been established by
natural selection. The proof is inferential only." Which admission
in the hands of an anti-evolutionist at once becomes a two-edged
sword as destructive to the natural selection maintained by Mr.
Spencer himself as to the form of it held by the Neo-Darwinians, and
which shows clearly that, so far at least, no one dares maintain that
there is direct proof for the existence of natural selection. And as
if to throw as much discredit on the theory as possible, Mr. Spencer
further adds : "When to uncertainties in the arguments supporting,
the hypothesis we add its inability to explain facts of cardinal signifi-
cance, as proved above, there is, I think, ground for asserting
that natural selection is less clearly shown to be a factor in the
origin of species than is the inheritance of functionally wrought
changes."

But if there be any proof of the existence of natural selec-
tion it certainly should be found among the Neo-Darwin-
ians. Their doctrine demands it. They are uncompromising
in their insistence on Darwinism. Their work has been, not to
contradict the work of the great master or set up rival claimants,
but to expound his teachings, mayhap to strengthen them when
found weak. There, if anywhere, should be preserved in tablets of
gold the proofs of its existence. And truly enough Professor Weis-
mann, the leader of the school, comes nearest to furnishing us with
traces of its existence. But, alas! even here the proof is merely
negative, and even at that it is controverted by Mr. Spencer. In

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 563

endeavoring to account for the soldier-neuters which exist among
certain kinds of ants, Professor Weismann says : "It is just because
no other explanation is conceivable that it is necessary for us to ac^
cept the principle of natural selection." Of course Mr. Spencer,
with whom reasons for anything and everything are always as plenti-
ful as blackberries, at once furnishes him a reason other than natural
selection ; but what concerns us here is neither the truth nor falsehood
of the reasons of either scientist, but the extreme poverty of the
strongest proof which Darwinism furnishes for the existence of its
idol. But even this proof, such as it is, and contradicted, too, as it is
by Mr. Spencer, is further discounted by a statement of Professor
Weismann himself, in which he tells us "that it is really very diificult
to imagine the process of natural selection in its details, and to this day it
is impossible to demonstrate it in any one point." And so after forty
years of observation and analysis the existence of natural selection
is just as shadowy as ever. The fact is that natural selection is the
Mrs. Harris of the world of evolution. The illustrious Sairey Gamp
found that mythical personage a very useful factor in all her achieve-
ments. Her name overawed Sairey's companions. An infinite fund
of possibilities as well as counterfeit actualities, according to the
veracious Mrs. Gamp, lay hidden in that entity which itself always
seemed to court the background. To Mrs. Harris Sairey constantly
appealed. Mrs. Harris' praises were continually on her lips. Mrs.
Harris' picture was pointed out to every new-comer. But that much
quoted individual never deigned to appear in the flesh. No one had
ever seen her. She was known only to Mrs. Gamp. Mrs. Gamp's
companions had longed for a glimpse of her beauty, possibly for a
share of her patronage. And the immortal Betsey Prig, driven to
desperation by having constantly dinned in her ears virtues and
charms which were denied to her eyes, at last mutinied against this
species of absentee despotism. In a fatal moment the baffled Betsey,
unconsciously grasping the force of the axiom, ''De non apparentibus
et non existentibus eadem est ratio," gave utterance to the awful words :
"Bother Mrs. Harris !" And while Sairey Gamp stood stock still,
speechless at the awful blasphemy, scarcely believing her own ears,
the undismayed Betsey, as Mrs. Gamp's veracious historian avers,
followed up with these memorable and tremendous words : "I don't
believe there's no sich person." Once afterwards, and once only, did
Mrs. Gamp venture to quote Mrs. Harris, but the eflfort was accom-
panied with such spasmodic action and gasping that it was never re-
peated. Verbum sap. Let Darwinians beware. The virtues, the powers,
the charms of natural selection have been extolled before the world
forwell-nigh half a century. We have been asked to admire its picture
— a rather dim one — in the workings of nature. Sairey Gamp's

564 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

mythical friend was never paraded before her friends with half the
energy with which the followers of Darwin paraded natural selec-
tion. But it was always in speech. No mortal eye was ever per-
mitted to see the wonder — not even unto this day. A long-suffering
world may some day rise up against the established tyranny of the
yoke and with as much justice as Betsey Prig rudely vociferate:
*'Bother natural selection !" and complete its downfall by further add-
ing : "I don't believe there's no sich thing."

Indeed, the very existence of the supreme factor of evolution is
to-day in doubt quite as much as it was half a century ago. If not,
who has seen it at work ? Where are the demonstrable evidences of
it to be found? What traces of its existence has it left behind?
Who will venture to assert that its existence has been proved as the
^existence of gravitation has been demonstrated ? The most intrepid
Darwinian dare not presume to proclaim its existence as an estab-
lished fact. The strongest proof we have of it is precisely of the
«ame calibre as the proof of the existence of Mrs. Harris. And
what lends additional force in the matter is that in the case of special
creation absence of proof of its existence was one of the primary,
nay one of the palmary counts in the indictment against that doc-
trine. **No one ever saw a special creation," triumphantly pro-
claimed Mr. Spencer, and special creationism, blushing with shame
and confusion, fled precipitately from the court. Should the special
creationist undertake to turn the tables on the Darwinians at the
present time, he could do so on at least equally logical grounds.
Hence we see that on the first count natural selection totally fails.

When we come to the second : Can species be originated by natu-
ral selection ? the answer is even more disastrous. After forty years
of observation and experiment the answer of Professor Huxley still
holds in all its force ; nay, on account of the failure of so many ex-
periments, in greater force than ever. Professor Huxley's answer
was : "After much consideration . . . it is our clear conviction
that, as the evidence stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group
of animals, having all the characteristics exhibited by species in
Nature, has ever been originated by selection, whether artificial or
natural." This little rift within the lute, as he called it, has been
widening. No evolutionist will claim that we are now nearer a sat-
isfactory answer to this question than when Professor Huxley wrote.
If proof be needed from living authorities, let those already given
from Mr. Spencer suffice, inasmuch as they cover the ground as well
for Mr. Spencer himself as for the Neo-Darwinians. "We might
naturally suppose ," he says, "that their own hypothesis was unas-
sailable. Yet, strange to say, they admit that there is no direct proof
that any species has been established by natural selection. The proof

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 565

is inferential only." And he forthwith proceeds to demolish this
"inferential proof," concluding with these words :

"When to uncertainties in the arguments supporting the hypothesis we add its
inability to explain facts of cardinal significance . . . there is, I think, ground
for asserting tnat natural selection is les3 clearly shown to be a factor in the orig-
ination of species than is the inheritance of functionally-wrought changes."

These admissions would be quite sufficient, without going any
further, to answer the question: Has species been originated
by natural selection? but we shall add one more from Mr.
Spencer. Commenting on an admission of Professor Weismann's,
which we have already quoted from his article on "The All-Suffi-
ciency of Natural Selection," and in which he says "that it is really
very difficult to imagine this process of natural selection in its de-
tails ; and to this day it is impossible to demonstrate it in any one
point," Mr. Spencer very pertinently presses the matter home by
inquiring : "But now if the sufficiency of an assigned cause cannot in
any case be demonstrated, and if it is 'really very difficult to imagine*
in what way it has produced its alleged effects, what becomes of the
'all-sufficiency' of the cause ? How can its all-sufficiency be alleged
when it can be neither demonstrated nor easily imagined? Evi-
dently to fit Professor Weismann's argument, the title of the article
should have been 'The Doubtful Sufficiency of Natural Selec-
tion.' "

This failure of natural selection to originate a new species, which
we learn from the admissions of the evolutionists themselves, is
equally demonstrated by observation and experiment. During
almost half a century the doctrine has been before the world. Dur-
ing that time a body of active inquirers has been constantly engaged
in seeking a verification of the theory by experiment and trial. Has
it been shown during all that time that selection has developed a new
species ? To the stimulus of the glory awaiting scientific discovery
was added the motive of profitable industry. Stock-raisers, horse
and cattle-breeders, dog-fanciers, poultry-fanciers, agriculturists and
florists, all lovers of variety, as well as experimentalists and natural-
ists by profession, have been eagerly industrious in the work of se-
lective breeding. All the resources of nature have been reinforced
by all the ingenuity of art. During all that period has a new species
been originated by selection, either artificial or natural ? In spite of
protests to the contrary, the time has been ample for large results,
especially in the case of short-lived specimens. While natural se-
lection alone and unaided might be expected to show some results
during that period, much might be looked for where nature was so
strongly seconded by art. Yet while artificial selection has resulted
in variations without number, nowhere can it be shown to have re-
sulted in a new species.

566 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

But, we are told, it takes thousands of years — perhaps eons — to
originate a new species. Such is the explanation which evolution
from the outset imposed on a credulous generation. Such was the
pretext of Darwin. Such has been the argument of Huxley. Such
is the doctrine of Spencer. And we may add such is the generally
accepted belief in the world of evolution to-day. If pressed further,
the question is asked why such a long period should be required;
the evolutionists have nothing to say, but change the subject as
quickly as possible. To this wretched subterfuge, however, which
has so long masqueraded in the guise of science, there may be given
briefly three answers : First, that it is a wholly unwarrantable as-
sumption, without stronger foundation than mere conjecture. Even
so, it is an appeal ad ignorantiam, an awsome phrase to conceal our
ignorance ; whereas, the business of science — and indeed the especial
duty of natural selection as proclaimed by its founders — is not to
mystify, but to clear up and explain. In the second place, it is diffi-
cult to conceive how or why it should take thousands of years to
effect a change of species in organisms which have only an ephemeral
existence, since the required variation must take place during the brief
existence of some one individual organism. And since between the
species ex qua and the species ad quam countless myriads of the va-
riants could have lived — and consequently countless myriads of va-
riations have taken place — during the period of a century, or even
within a period of forty years, it is somewhat singular that all the
acute observations of science have not been able to detect the devel-
oping and developed species as well as all the intermediate varia-
tions which bridge the abyss between them. Indeed, the assump-
tion that a long period of time is required to effect a change of spe-
cies in the case of short-lived organisms is negatived by the parallel-,
ism which the Darwinians themselves insist upon tracing everywhere
between the individual and the species. That it should require eons
of time for the rise of a species whose individuals are characterized
by shortness of life and rapid breeding is a curve in the parallels
of phylogeny and ontogeny which Darwinians might find it dif-
ficult to explain. Again, in the third place, the slowness of
the process of change of species is wholly at variance with
the conception of natural selection itself. For according to
the theory of natural selection, the rise of a new species
is nothing more or less than a single stage in the process of
variation. But why this single stage in the process of variation
should require untold eons for its appearance, while all the other
stages of variation occur instantly, is what no evolutionist has yet
undertaken to explain. The fact is that no evidence having been
forthcoming for the transmutation of species, evolutionists have

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 567

been obliged to seek a remedy for the difficulty somewhere, and that
accordingly they have taken refuge in the abyss of time as being the
least likely to betray them.^ It appears, however, that even the
abyss of time has, quite recently, come to be regarded as a not alto-
gether secure refuge, and a new remedy for the difficulty has been
discovered by no less a personage than Mr. Spencer himself. This
last expedient highly deserves the foremost place among the curiosi-
ties of literature as well as the curiosities of science. It is nothing
more or less than that the question of the origin of species — the
question which to the scientific world has been for the last half cen-
tury the question of questions, the question which during that period
has been the be-all and the end-all of evolutional science — is now of
no consequence whatever. It is "irrelevant." It "is beside the
question." It is merely a "collateral" result. The proper answer to
the question is to "ignore" it. The curious passage is too long to
quote at length, so we shall condense it.

"The centre," he tells us, "around which the colHsion of arguments
has taken place is the question of the formation of species. But
here we see that this question is a secondary and, in a sense, irrelevant
one. (Italics ours.) Whether organic forms "are or are not
marked off by specific traits, and whether they will or will not breed
together, matters little.'' Even if they do, it is not an essential, "but
a collateral result." . . . The biologic atmosphere has been
vitiated by conceptions of pa:t naturalists . . . who regarded
the traits which enabled them to mark off their specimens from one
another as the traits of most importance in Nature. But after ignoring
these technical ideas, it becomes manifest that the distinctions, mor-
phological or physiological, taken as tests of species, are merely
incidental phenomena.'' But what else has been the aim of specu-
lative science for the last forty years but to endeavor to explain
the origin of species? What has been the goal of observation
and experiment ? What have meant the labors of Darwin, of Hux-
ley, of even Mr. Spencer himself, as well as of their hosts of indus-
trious disciples, but to bridge the chasms that separate species from
species, to level the walls of adamant that separate them ; in a word,
to solve the question which Mr. Spencer now discovers to be merely
"secondary," "collateral," "irrelevant," and the proper treatment of
which is "to ignore" it altogether? Mr. Spencer's novel position
would be extremely ludicrous if it were not extremely pathetic.
For it must be remembered that with the fall of the origin of species

1 The objections brought against the Darwinian hypothesis by Agassiz, Pictet
and Sedgwick, and parried but not answered by Mr. Darwin, also apply here.
These paleontologists showed from the geological record that whole groups of
allied species suddenly appear in certain formations, and although the geological
record is the Bible, Koran and Talmud in one, of Darwinism, Mr. Darwin's only
reply was an appeal to the imperfection of the geological record.

^68 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

by means of natural selection he sees his own life-work coming tum-
bling about his ears. But while Mr. Spencer is pleased to ignore
the distinction of species, nature by no means ignores it. It is still
as stubborn a fact as if Mr. Spencer had never disapproved of it,
and yet remains to be accounted for. For the outcome of all ex-
periment, observation, theory, hypothesis, speculation, inquiry, re-
search for the past forty years has been — what ? To show that nat-
ural selection has originated a new species? To demonstrate con-
clusively that natural selection can originate a new species? To
prove the truth of the theory which science undertook to establish as
truth ? Assuredly no. On the contrary, the result has been to es-
tablish more firmly than ever the immutability of physiological spe-
cies, to show that the impregnable walls which divide species from
species are still as impenetrable as ever, and that the only law of
species which may not be successfully controverted is the law
which science started out to disprove — the law of the first chapter of
the Book of Genesis ; that herb, and plant, and tree, and shrub, and
every living thing should bring forth fruit after its kind. Indeed,
so far is natural selection from standing the test of the second ques-
tion : Has it originated or can it originate a new species ? that, on the
contrary, it has proved a veritable Balaam, blessing where it meant
to curse and cursing where it meant to bless. The answer to the
second question is worse than failure. All the evidence it gives is in
favor of the opposing counsel.

The third test : Is natural selection consistent with all the known
facts? seems at first sight to be the stronghold of natural selection.
The late Professor Huxley has indeed left on record that "it cannot
be shown to be inconsistent with any of the known facts" of science ;
but this, as we have seen, is at best but a negative proof, or, to speak
more correctly, a mere presumption in its favor. The known facts
of science are to the unknown as a point to infinity, and even were it
true (as it is not) that natural selection is not inconsistent with any of
the known facts of science, to-morrow or the day after may bring to
light a multitude of facts totally at variance with it. The waysides
of history are strewn with the wreckage of theories which for the
time being were supposed to be consistent with all the known facts
which the theories were supposed to explain. The late Duke of
Argyll, for instance, once showed Professor Huxley, to his deep and
bitter mortification, how Bathybius at one time could not only "not
be shown to be inconsistent with any of the facts," but that on the
contrary, it was consistent with all of them ; and how, nevertheless,
it soon proved to be an exceeding false and foolish hypothesis. A
Darwinian speculation regarding the formation of coral reefs was
found for the moment to be "not inconsistent with any of the known

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 569

facts" concerning these strange formations ; nay, it even accounted
for them splendidly and minutely ; nevertheless, when the truth was
discovered, the speculation was gathered to the ashes of baseless
hypotheses. The corpuscular theory of light and the geocentric
system were both found to be in harmony with the known facts, but
both are now relegated to the limbo of defunct theories. Hence,
even were we to admit Professor Huxley's statement that the theory
of evolution cannot be shown to be inconsistent with any of the facts,
the value of natural selection is not thereby greatly enhanced. At
best this would only constitute a presumption in its favor. But this
consistency with facts cannot be admitted at all. Mr. Spencer's
testimony on this point will be far more acceptable than ours;
hence we quote him. For instance, Mr. Spencer — dealing
with the cellular doctrine, and showing how the individual
cells of a living organism have all sprung from a single
nucleated cell, become clusters of nucleated cells, and go on
ever multiplying and modifying, thus forming the tissues and organs
of the living animal, the while each cell carries on its own indepen-
dent individual life — tells us that "On the hypothesis of evolution
this universal trait has to be accepted not as a fact that is strange
hut unmeaning." Here, according to Mr. Spencer, is a fact, or,
rather, a whole body of general facts, wholly at variance with natu-
ral selection. The natural selectionist will be forced here to quarrel
either with Mr. Spencer's facts or with his conclusion. To us it is
immaterial which he elects.

Again, in endeavoring to show how complex forms of matter have
arisen from a degree less complex, Mr. Spencer tells us: "In the
absence of that cyclical series of metamorphoses which even the sim-
plest living thing now shows us, as a result of its inherited constitu-
tion, there could he no point d'appui for natural selection." Again, Mr.
Spencer comes to our aid in showing that natural selection is not
always consistent with all the known facts, when he tells us that
"Especially in the case of powers which do not subserve self-pre-
servation in appreciable degrees does development by natural selec-
tion appear impracticable." And once exasperated beyond all endur-
ance by the nagging of the Neo-Darwinians, Mr. Spencer, Samson-
like, is even ready to pull down the temple on his own head, forget-
ting his own safety in his determination to compass the destruction
of his tormentors. He comes out into the open and explicitly ac-
cuses natural selection of its inconsistency with facts, when in his
attempt to explain the case of the Amazon ants — which are unable
to feed themselves — he tells us that even "the old hypothesis of
special creation is more consistent and comprehensihle" than natural
selection. So that according to Mr. Spencer, what was supposed

570 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

to be the stronghold of natural selection cannot be accorded the
dignity of even a negative proof or favorable presumption.

We now come to the fourth test of the doctrine, and it is really the
crucial one. For even though it were shown that there is such a
thing as natural selection, even though it were clearly proven that
species could be originated by it, and even though it were shown
not to be inconsistent with any known fact, unless it explains all the
facts, the theory is worthless. Does it then explain all the facts?
It would, indeed, be difficult to find a scientist of any repute who
holds that it does explain all the facts of biological science. Pro-
fessor Huxley left among his last utterances the confession that
natural selection was "not at once competent to explain all the facts
of biological science," although he maintained that it was not incon-
sistent with any. Mr. Spencer, as we have already seen, tells us
"that it by no means explains all that has to be explained, that it
leaves us without a key to many phenomena of organic evolution,"
and that a "very extensive part of the facts" cannot be ascribed to it.
But what need is there of quotation? Did not Mr. Spencer write
his "Factors of Organic Evolution" for the express purpose of show-
ing its inadequacy ? Was it not because of its inadequacy to explain
that he sought to discover new factors to explain what natural selec-
tion had failed to explain? Has he not within the last decade
written four different articles, now collected under the title of "The
Inadequacy of Natural Selection," fully to demonstrate its failure?
Has he not confronted the Neo-Darwinians with three different
problems insoluble by natural selection and told them that "failure
to solve any one (italics Mr. Spencer's) would, I think, alone prove
the Neo-Darwinian doctrines untenable ; and the fact that we have
three unsolved problems seems to me to be fatal ?" Indeed, has not
Mr. Spencer, since the middle of the last decade, bent all his ener-
gies to the task of showing that natural selection is utterly incompe-
tent to account for all the facts cf biological science, and that the
doctrine of the inheritance of functionally-produced modifications is
absolutely necessary to carry on the work of explanation where it
fails ? The truth is that any one who wishes for a refutation of the
doctrine of natural selection need only open Mr. Spencer's later
writings to find proof in abundance of the inadequacy of natural
selection to explain all the facts of biological science.

And if we go to Mr. Spencer's opponents, who still aflfect to be-
lieve that natural selection is all-sufficing, we find that in order to
solve the problems inexplicable by natural selection they are obliged
to supplement it by such processes as Panmixia, special de-
terminants, plus and minus variations. The vascular system,
the muscular system, the nervous system, the varied bodily and

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 571

mental faculties in man; the higher powers, such as the artistic
and the cesthetic faculties, so highly developed in some particular
instances in the human family ; the increase in weight of the head of
the bison and moose deer; the enormous horns of the extinct
Irish elk, sometimes weighing more than a hundred-weight, as
we are told — these and many others of like difficulty form the real
crux of natural selection. With all the straining and stretching of
the doctrine by the Darwinians, natural selection cannot be made to
cover these cases; while in such cases as the dwindling away of
organs, for instance; the supposed revolution of the reproductive
system in mammals ; and, to descend to particular cases, the singular
combination of the physiological and the psychological processes in
what are called the mason wasps ; natural selection stands com-
pletely dumfounded and absolutely speechless. Or, if we take the
familiar case of the close connection between the structural change
in the vocal organs in man and his sexual development, evolution-
ists of every school will candidly admit that it is wholly inexplicable
on the hypothesis of natural selection, even when that doctrine is
reinforced by the new theories, whether of gemmules, or determi-
nants, or germ cells and sperm cells, or physiological units.

We shall add one further instance in which Mr. Spencer combats
the doctrine by a reductio ad absurdum. It is that of the colored
rings in the peacock's tail and the wonderful symmetry of the ar-
rangement by which the eyes in the ends of the feathers fall into line,
both as to color and position, so as to form from the separate threads
in each feather the beautiful and symmetric whole. In attempting
to account for it on a basis of natural selection the only available
explanation would be that of special determinants — a hypothesis of
the Neo-Darwinians which simply means that every variable part in
an organism must have a special determinant which decides in
every instance the form and function of this particular part, this
determinant being of necessity contained in the microscopic head of
the spermatozoon from which the organism derives its existence. Mr.
Spencer has calculated that in order to give the color to the four
wings of a butterfly no less than two hundred thousand of these
special determinants would be necessary. And in the case of the
tail of a peacock, he figures that there are three hundred threads in
each feather, and that each thread bears on an average sixteen hun-
dred processes, each process requiring a special determinant. Hence
he very justly concludes that according to the doctrine of natural
selection, for each feather four hundred and eighty thousand of these
determinants would be necessary, and consequently for the whole
tail many millions. And when to these we add the determinants for
all the other feathers, and also for the different variable parts of the

572 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

body at large, and then recollect that all these millions of determinants
must have been contained in the microscopic head of a spermatozoon,
we shall be ready to exclaim with Mr. Spencer : ''Hardly a credible
supposition/* Evolutionists have imagined all manner of explana-
tions for the difficulties they meet with ; but, as Mr. Spencer con-
fesses :

"Imagination, whatever license may be given, utterly fails us. At last, then,
we are obliged to admit that the actual organizing process transcends conception.
It is not enough to say that we cannot know it; we must say that we cannot even
conceive it."

Hence not only has the origin of species not been discovered and
not only has the origin of life not been solved, but there is still a large
body of residual phenomena, a large number of facts that natural
selection admits its inability to account for ; as Mr. Spencer phrases
it : "There remain many unsolved problems." Consequently sub-
jected to this, the real test, we find that on the authority of evolution-
ists of every shade, not only has natural selection, but all the other
theories as well, whether taken individually or collectively, been ut-
terly discredited.

The fifth test is hardly worth considering, for it is hardly conceiv-
able how a theory which fails utterly to account for all the facts of
biological phenomena can be regarded as explaining them better
than any other. From a scientific point of view it is not a question
as to which has succeeded best, but as to which has most conspicu-
ously failed. . We are not arguing the case for special creation. We
are merely demonstrating the utter failure of evolution by means of
natural selection. But the nature of this last test of the doctrine
challenges at once a consideration of the comparative merits of the
two theories. An exhaustive comparison would extend this article
beyond due limits, but a few leading points may be briefly indicated.

In the first place, a claimant already in possession has at least the
right of possession as against all usurpers; all recognize in such
cases such right of possession. In the next place, the title of such a
claimant is usually regarded as strengthened, or at least not im-
paired, when such usurpers and pretenders fail to establish their pre-
tensions. In the third place, the title of such a claimant is far su-
perior to that of the rival claimant or pretender who fails to prove
his claims.^ Special creation is the claimant in possession — has been
in possession during the entire period of man's history. Natural
selection is one of the pretenders and usurpers — and one of the
usurpers that has confessedly failed to establish its claims. Two
years after the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species," Pro-

2 Special creation ig not a dogma of religion, but of science. Linnaeus was the
first to formulate the doctrine in his famous stately phrase: Species tot sunt
quot diversas formas ab initio produxit Infinitus Eius.

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 573

fessor Huxley, in his overweening confidence that the Darwinian
hypothesis was bound to succeed, remarked concerning special cre-
ation :

"Two years ago, in fact, . . , their position (special creation) seemed more
impregnable than ever, if not by its own inherent strength, at any right by the
obvious failure of all tne attempts which had been made to carry it."

Professor Huxley evidently did not then dream that in less than
half a century the same words could be used in connection with the
admitted failure of Darwinism "to carry" the position of special cre-
ation ; and that, to use his own reasoning, that position seems now
"more impregnable than ever by the obvious failure" of Darwinism.

Let us briefly enumerate the points where Darwinism has con-
fessedly failed and we shall find that they are the all-important points,
the points essential to a victory. First comes the gulf dividing in-
organic from organic matter which science had promised to bridge
for us, but where every attempt has met with ignominious failure.
The distinguishing element between the organic as separating it
from the inorganic world is not so much the presence of an organism
as the presence of a principle to which the organism ministers, which
is nowadays termed the vital principle and commonly called life.
What light has natural selection thrown on life? "Under what
form are we to conceive the dynamic element" in life ? "Is this prin-
ciple of activity inherent in organic matter, or is it something super-
added ?" "Is there one kind of vital principle for all kinds of organ-
isms, or is there a separate kind for each?" "How are we to con-
ceive that genesis of a vital principle which must go along with the
genesis of an organism ?" In the presence of these and hundreds of
other similar questions which science set out to answer, it stands
dumb and confounded. Mr. Spencer sums up its failure thus :

"In brief, then, we are obliged to confess that Life in its essence cannot be
conceived in physico-chemical terms. The required principle of activity, which
we found cannot be represented in living matter. If by assuming its inherence
we think the facts are accounted for, we do but cheat ourselves with pseud ideas."3

Next comes the transition from plant life to animal Hfe. It is
indeed true that natural selectionists claim to have bridged over this
gulf, yet we must confess that we have never seen the structure so
securely adjusted as to ensure a safe passage over it. Mr. Darwin
himself never actually believed that there was such a transition. He
believed that plants and animals had entirely distinct origins. His
words are : "I believe that animals are descended from at most only
four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser num-

3 It is not a little singular that Mr. Spencer, as he somewhere tells us, saw fit
to omit that part of his vast programme which should deal with the transition
from inorganic to organic matter. Is it not also a little significant? Two whole
volumes, he tells us, were omitted by him— volumes which should bear directly on
this subject.

574 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ber." It is true he seemed inclined to go still further, but admitted
that in taking such a step he would be led only by analogy, and he
very wisely remarks : "But analogy may be a deceitful guide."

Again, the hiatus between man and the other animals is one of
the difficulties which natural selection has again and again declared
as triumphantly solved, but which still persists — rather perversely
indeed — in still coming up for solution. To use a slang but some-
what expressive phrase, it refuses to remain solved. Then we have
the immutability of species. As has been shown, natural selection
has egregiously failed to solve the very question here which it set
out to solve. The different species remain still independent, immu-
table, invariable. They rise up like so many atolls out of the bio-
logic sea, with walls sheer and with the outside waters separating
them from their neighbors of unfathomable depth. They are still
as distinct from one another as separate mountain peaks whose
bases meet, but whose snow-capped summits can never intermingle.
Indeed, the investigations of natural selection have all gone to show
that each physiological species is a walled castle whose frowning
battlements sternly forbid all approach or intercourse of neighboring
species. So much so indeed that as we have already seen Mr.
Spencer has at last concluded that the proper treatment of such
feudal exclusiveness is to entirely ignore it. And lastly we have
the large realm of facts which natural selection confesses its inability
to explain. These are common, everyday facts which unsought
have obtruded themselves upon the notice of scientists ; and doubt-
less were any one to undertake ex professo to discover still others,
the number might be increased a hundredfold. Add to these the
deeper questions which natural selection does not dare to touch upon
at all, and the ignominious confession that, in many of the solutions
it claims to have arrived at, it has employed symbol and mystery,
pseud ideas or symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order — which
at the outset it so mercilessly branded with fiercest condemnation —
and we have in brief the humiliating story of natural selection's ad-
mitted failure. This failure Mr. Spencer thus sums up :

'*Thu8 the process of organic evolution is far from being fully understood. We
can only suppose that as there are devised by human beings many puzzles appar-
ently unanswerable till the answer is given, and many necromantic tricks which
seem impossible till the mode of performance is shown, so there are apparently
incomprehensible results which are really achieved by natural processes. Or
otherwise we must conclude that since Life itself proves to be in its ultimate
nature inconceivable, there is probably an inconceivable element in its ultimate
workings.

The failure then of natural selection is not only proved, but ad-
mitted ; so that to return to our question of the comparative merits
of natural selection and special creation, we may now let Professor
Huxley answer it for us. He told us, as we have seen above, that

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 575

when Darwinism first flung its glove into the arena to challenge
special creation, that doctrine "seemed more impregnable than ever
. . . by the obvious failure of all the attempts which had been
made to carry it." Since that time evolution by means of natural
selection has been the only challenger ; and as, by the confession of
Mr. Spencer, evolution by means of natural selection has ignomin-
iously failed, we do not see why Professor Huxley's reasoning will
not apply as well now as it did half a century ago, and the conclusion
be as legitimate now as it was then ; that the position of special cre-
ation is ''more impregnable than ever, if not by its own inherent
strength, at any right by the obvious failure" of evolution.

Still we hold no brief for special creation. We are wilHng to ac-
cept the doctrine of evolution when the evidence in its favor justifies
in so doing, but it surely cannot be our fault if the reasoning of the
evolutionists themselves, coupled with their admissions of failure,
forces us to accept the former as the only theory left us. There may
be added further that, as compared with natural selection, special
creation would seem to have all the force of logic and dignity on its
side. For in ascribing at the outset all the changes manifested by
phenomena to a Being of infinite intelligence and infinite skill, it at
once assigned an adequate cause for all phenomena. All that could
be further expected of it logically was to establish the relation of
effect and cause. It was relieved of the task of accounting for dif-
ficulties by simply referring them to this cause whose ways it de-
clared inscrutable and whose wonders were incomprehensible. This
position was eminently logical. Natural selection, on the other
hand, starting out with a rigid exclusion of the supernatural and
everything which transcended conception, boldly unfurled its banner,
on which was inscribed the motto : "All phenomena must be solved
by simply rational processes," and now it finds itself forced by stress
of circumstances to admit its mistake and to refer back all its difficul-
ties to sources which transcend conception — the very process against
which it primarily revolted. At the same time, with noisy and bois-
terous clamor, it decried special creation and drove it from the field,
while it loudly boasted that it was ready to solve all difficulties by
natural methods. Now it is forced ignominiously to confess that it
finds those difficulties insoluble. Thus we find that on every point
of a true and logical critique the evidence for natural selection utterly
breaks down.

Some years ago some enemy of man's peace devised a puzzle of
the kind above alluded to by Mr. Spencer. The contrivance was
simplicity itself, almost primitiveness. It consisted of a little wooden
shallow frame four or five inches square, into which fitted small
movable blocks, also of wood, numbered i, 2, 3, etc., up to 15.

576 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The puzzle consisted in arranging the blocks in order from i to 15.
It was the most harmless looking affair imaginable ; yet, if we are to
credit the newspapers of the period, men sat down to it in the great-
est confidence and ended in a strait- jacket. Whatever way one
started to solve the puzzle everything worked well up to a certain
point. The numbers fell into perfect order almost automatically
until the last two or last three were reached. The arithmetical pro-
gression was perfect up to this point, but when the last three were
expected to fall into Hne and read 13, 14, 15, to the surprise of the
solver they read — 14, 13, 15. Smiling at his mistake, the performer
started anew, when, to his surprise, the end read — 13, 15, 14. Some-
what annoyed at his second failure and determined not to be caught
napping a third time, he again manipulated the blocks, this time to
find the ending, perhaps, 15, 14, 13. Beginning now to realize that
there was, perhaps, some difficulty in the puzzle after all, he entered
on the solution in dead earnest — perhaps, adopted a new method —
only to find the termination was — 14, 15, 13. Again and again it was
tried with similar results. Every combination seemed to come easily
except the regular series, 13, 14, 15 ; and at last the puzzle was flung
aside in despair. What we wish to note particularly here is : First,
that the order was always perfect up to a certain point; next, that
there were only two or at most three recalcitrant numbers in the
end; and, lastly, that with the perfect order of almost the whole,
while the two or three recalcitrant numbers remained at the end, no
man pretended to claim that he had solved the puzzle.

The evolutionists have a similar problem on their hands ; but they
do not act quite so rationally. They go over the evolutional series
with natural selection as the key, only to find that the residual phe-
nomena will not fall into line, but end with 15, 14, 13. Encouraged
by the perfect arrangement of the rest of the work, they go over the
ground again with similar results. They abandon natural selection
and start afresh, using the new key of functionally-produced modifi-
cations, but end with 14, 13, 15. After a few further attempts — fol-
lowed always by failure — they try a combination of natural selection
and functionally-produced changes as the key, only still to find that
residual phenomena will read anything but 13, 14, 15. They have
produced beautiful combinations and cannot persuade themselves
that such perfect arrangement up to a certain point meant nothing —
just as the series in the puzzle runs for a long distance in perfect
progression — but the residual phenomena remain, like the numbers
at the end, unsolved and insoluble. But while the champion prize-
winner who undertakes the puzzle and gets only 14, 13, 15 knows
that he has failed and that he would only be laughed at should he
claim that he had solved the puzzle, the evolutionist will not admit

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. ^77

that his 15, 14, 13 is failure at all. He insists that his beautiful com-
binations must count for something ; that, in fact, he has solved the
problem. This is what we are told is a demonstrated conclusion in
science.

We may be all anxious to become evolutionists provided the
evidence will permit us. But here it is manifestly a question
of believing not only in spite of the evidence, but in spite of the
admission that the evidence is false. To believe a wrong doctrine
which we imagine to be right may be only an error of perception;
but to persist in believing a doctrine which we admit to be false is
against good morals. Shall it be said that we are not asked to do
this ? Then let us put it to the test. Does the evidence show that
evolution by means of natural selection is the law of nature ? No.
On the contrary, it has been demonstrated to be false. The few
who will not yet admit it to be false are forced to admit — what is the
same thing — that it is defective. Does the evidence show that evo-
lution by means of functionally-produced modifications is the law
of nature? No. On the contrary, all Darwinians and all Spen-
cerians admit its insufficiency. Does the evidence show that evolu-
tion by means of natural selection and functionally-produced modifi-
cations combined is the law of nature ? Darwinians and some others
ridicule the notion as absurd. Mr. Spencer maintains that with the
exception of some classes of phenomena which we may here call the
13, 14, 15 of phenomena, it is all-sufficient; which is equivalent to,
saying that it is manifestly insufficient. *i

As Mr. Spencer, however, is still the highest authority on evolu-
tion, let us glance briefly at the workings of the combined factors ink
the realm over which Mr. Spencer claims the allied forces have sway«
Formerly he deemed one factor sufficient to account for all phenom-
ena ; now we are told three are required. Some phenomena, we are
told, are inexplicable otherwise than by natural selection ; some can
be explained only by the inheritance of functionally-produced
changes ; while other some still are explicable only by the aid of the
primordial factor — the direct action of the medium. But the ques-
tion naturally arises : What are the respective duties of these three
factors ? What relations do the factors themselves bear to one an-
other? Are they three separate, independent sovereigns? Do
they reign conjointly, consecutively or distributively ? Are we to
regard the world of evolution as a region ruled over by a triumvirate
which, like Caesar, Crassus and Pompey, partition among them-
selves the organic, possibly the inorganic world also? Or is it an
ideal republic — a new Utopia — where there are only three possible
candidates for the presidency, and where, by some new felicitous ar-
rangement, each candidate reaches the presidential chair at the
Vol. XXVI— 11

5/8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

proper time without the time-honored campaign courtesies, the
pledging of the spoils of office, or even the traditional ceremony of
purchasing votes ? Some phenomena, we are told, have their expla-
nation in one factor, some in a second, some in a third, while others
some seem to have their explanation in a combination of two or
even all three of the factors; but whether all three exercise a joint
sovereignty or whether each has its own independent sphere within
which the other two would be regarded as intruders; or whether
each reigns for a fixed period, handing over his sceptre to the next ;
or whether natural selection, the inheritance of functionally-produced
modifications and the direct action of the medium are, like Mrs. Mal-
aprop's Cerberus, simply "three gentlemen at once ;" is what neither
Mr. Spencer, Mr. Darwin nor any of their followers has succeeded in
satisfactorily explaining. Cooperation can hardly have been the
rule that has been followed, for if we take Mr. Spencer's word for it,
"he will point out to us whole realms where he avers that natural
•selection has been the sole exclusive factor, while on the other hand
he will show us numerous instances in which it must be wholly ex-
cluded as a factor. And the same reasons will militate against any
theory of consecutiveness or distribution of empire.

Indeed, there are few things more amusing than Mr. Spencer's
well-meant efforts to effect a balance of power between the various
factors. The assignment of their different provinces to those ambi-
tious factors and the prevention of mutual encroachments has been
a sore trial to Mr. Spencer ; and he has not always succeeded to his
own satisfaction. If it be true that "uneasy lies the head that wears
a crown," Mr. Spencer could truthfully assert, from his own experi-
ence, that still more uneasy lies the head whose task is to maintain
the proper limits of each of many crowns, and to keep its own proper
crown on each particular head. Mr. Spencer's experience is that
there is liable to be a confusion of territories as well as a confound-
ing of diadems. Take, for instance, natural selection. Mr. Spencer
at first made it sole and absolute ruler, with sovereign, undisputed
sway on land and sea throughout all time, past, present and future.
Its empire was the universe. But now all this is changed. Old age
grows apace on the once proud monarch. A new and active world
which it has brought into being springs up around it, so progressive
and so intricately complicated that natural selection is no longer
able to keep pace with the times. From the very outset it was
merely a plodder, and now in "the multiplicity of directly-coopera-
tive organs" and "the multiplicity of organs which do not cooper-
ate," except in a certain way, natural selection, while not yet a hin-
drance, shows unmistakable symptoms of its inability to march in
the van of progress.

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 579

"Where the life is simple,'' Mr. Spencer tells us, "or where circumstances render
some one function supremely important, survival of the tittest may readily bring
about the appropriate structural change."

But here began and ended its usefulness. Mr. Spencer somewhat
regretfully adds :

"But in proportion as the life grows complex — in proportion as a healthy exist-
ence cannot be secured by a large endowment of some one power, but demands
man\ powers — in the same proportion do there arise obstacles to the increase of
any particular power by 'the preservation of favored races in the struggle for
life.' '—(Natural Selection.)

And Mr. Spencer, as if insisting on the abdication of natural selec-
tion, repeats his remarks, regretfully indeed, but firmly.

"As fast," he says, "as the number of bodily and mental faculties increases and
a^ fast as maintenance of life comes to depend less on the amount of any one
and more on the combined actions of all, so fast does the production of specialties
of character by natural selection alone become difficult. Particularly does this
seem to be so with a species so multitudinous in its powers as mankind; and
above all does it seem to be so with such of the human powers as have but
minor shares in aiding the struggle for life — the aesthetic faculties, for example."

It may be remarked in passing that thus does Mr. Spencer
at one fell stroke despoil natural selection of its long-vaunted
honor of producing a race of men on this planet. Man
is too fearfully and wonderfully made, Mr. Spencer informs us,
to be the product of natural selection; and that doctrine he gently
but firmly relegates to the region which, for want of a better name,
is called in common parlance "fossil," "back number," "has been"
and such like. No sooner, however, has the dethronement taken
place than Mr. Spencer, conscience-smitten for an act which was
surely imperative, finds the bowels of his compassion moved in favor
of the discrowned ruler ; and lest natural selection should feel too
sorely aggrieved over its degradation he hastens to assure it that
it must not regard itself as altogether useless. No ; no ! No such
thing. The dethroned and degraded doctrine is yet good for some-
thing. Quite touchingly he tells us :

"It by no means follows that in cases of this kind natural selection plays no
part. Wherever it is not the chief agent in working organic changes it is still,
very generally, the secondary agent."

But, alas ! even for this place, second though it be, Mr.
Spencer evidently finds the dethroned doctrine incompetent.
In the advancing cycles, and rapid changes, and increasing
•complexity of things natural selection is but a laggard, and
Mr. Spencer is forced at last to deal with it after the manner
of all incapables. He drops it altogether. In a quasi aside he
tells us "there are, however, some modifications in the sizes and
forms of parts which cannot have been aided by natural selection.'' It
was inevitable. Facilis descensus Averni. The degraded chieftain is
now despised and dropped entirely out of sight. Still this dismissal

580 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

does not rest easy on Mr. Spencer's conscience. The ghost of
natural selection evidently haunts Mr. Spencer's waking thoughts
and walks uneasy in his dreams. Like Banquo's, it will not down.
Natural selection too long loomed up majestically in the evolutional
heavens to submit easily to so ignominious a dismissal, and Mr.
Spencer is forced again to recognize its claims. Mr. Spencer is at
his wit's ends to find an appropriate office to which he can assign it,
and feeling guilty at heart because of his shabby treatment of the
once potent factor, he hastens to soothe the outraged feelings of the
deposed sovereign. What wonder then that in his confusion he
should forget what he told us a moment before, and that almost be-
fore the words had died away on his lips in which he told us of the
instances in which natural selection was a complete supernumerary,
he reassures that doctrine that : To be sure — to be sure —

"Always there must have been, and always there must continue to be, a sur-
vival of the fittest; natural selection must have been in operation at the outset,
and can never cease to operate."

But now that Mr. Spencer has reinstated in its claims natural
selection, the question comes, what shall be done with it? In-
deed to Mr. Spencer the question, what shall we do with our ex-
factors ? is quite as perplexing as is to us the question, what shall we
do with our ex-Presidents? And here it is that Mr. Spencer exe-
cutes a coup which proves him to be alike a brilliant statesman and
an unflinching friend. It was, indeed, somewhat awkward to have
natural selection stalk back again into court and assert its claims
when it was confidently believed that both claims and owner had
been got rid of forever ; but Mr. Spencer was equal to the occasion.
He promptly established for its special benefit an entirely new office,
that of headsman of the kingdom of evolution ; and natural selection
was promptly installed as general fool-killer of the realm. Here is
the statute creating the office, and by virtue of which natural selec-
tion was duly inaugurated. (The inconsequence of thought and inco-
herence of language are unusual with Mr. Spencer, and only serve
to show the perturbed condition of Mr. Spencer's mind.) It reads :

"The production of adaptations by direct equilibration then takes the first
place, indirect equilibration serving to facilitate it. Until at lengtn, among the
civilized races, the equilibrium becomes mainly direct, the action of natural selec-
tion being limited to the destruction of those who are constitutionally too feeble to
live, even with external aid."

One would naturally suppose that such an office was a per-
fect sinecure. It would require the genius of Mr. Spencer to
determine precisely just what amount of energy was needed to kill
off those who could not live, even when externally aided. Assuredly
neither the strength of a Samson nor the power of a Hercules was
required to fulfil the duties of Lord High Executioner. And yet it
must be confessed on looking over the field of evolution that the

The True Critical Test of Natural Selection. 581

office is but indifferently administered, and that here, too, natural
selection shows itself to be a delinquent functionary. But that is
neither here nor there. The main point which we must not lose
sight of is Mr. Spencer's almost insurmountable difficulties in main-
taining intact his inter-factorial arrangements. Nor is this all. It
must be remembered that all these difficulties confronted him in
times of comparative peace. What, then, in time of warfare ? For
we must not forget that the dethroned monarch, natural selection,
has, if not a powerful, at least a noisy following, and that its followers
insist on nothing less than a restoration of the dethroned factor to
all its original dignities and prerogatives — a movement which, know-
ing as he does the utter incapacity of natural selection — Mr. Spencer
feels it his bounden duty to strenuously oppose. And if in the melee
Mr. Spencer is forced from time to time to sacrifice his humane and
philanthropic intentions in behalf of his old friend to his sense of
right, and even to deal that friend a somewhat rough blow now and
then, the fault is not Mr. Spencer's, but theirs who will persist in
forcing natural selection upon him in spite of its demonstrated in-
capacity.

We have here indicated in brief some of the difficulties of a divided
factorship, roughly outlining Mr. Spencer's perplexity in assigning
its province to natural selection. Natural selection, however, is
but one single factor ; and Mr. Spencer has not one, but three, upon
whose discordant claims he is called upon to arbitrate. And as the
claims of some of the others are as fiercely contested as those of
natural selection are urged, Mr. Spencer's lot as general adjuster is
anything but a happy one.

And this is the doctrine, demoralized beyond all understanding,
to which we are asked to subscribe. As it stands before the world
to-day it bears rather the imprint of bedlam than that of science,
logic or reason.

But we are told Catholic scientists accept the doctrine of evolution.
They all agree that evolution is a fact. That they do so is not at all
impossible or even improbable. The ovine instinct is, undoubtedly,
as strong in the Catholic scientist as in any other. But without in-
tending any disrespect to Catholic scientists, it might be safe to ask
them where are the proofs of the doctrine ? Infidel and materialistic
scientists admit that the evidence has broken down ; possibly Cath-
olic scientists have been more fortunate. If so, the world would be
pleased to see the proofs. We are all willing to become evolution-
ists when we are convinced of the truth of the doctrine ; but we main-
tain that until the proofs are forthcoming it would be immoral to
accept it. We are somewhat loath to accept the doctrine on the
mere word of the scientists, since we have yet to learn that the con-

582 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

sensus communis of Catholic scientists has been established as a
new criterion of certitude. We further know that evolutionists were
fully as certain and fully as dogmatic twenty years ago in their
teachings that evolution by means of natural selection was a fact as
they are to-day that evolution is a fact. But if evolution is a fact,
may it not be legitimately asked, evolution of what kind ? Is it the
evolution of the Darwinian ? or the evolution of the Neo-Darwinian ?
or the evolution of the Spencerian? or the evolution of the Neo-
Lamarckian ? If any, which of them, and what are the proofs ? It
will not do to say that evolution is true ; because evolution without
some key to unlock it conveys no meaning. It is as intelligible as
the signals which Professor Tesla tells us he is receiving from Mars.
This much at least could be said for those who followed the dogma-
tism in vogue a quarter of a century ago : False as was that dogma-
tism, it masqueraded as truth. The evangelists of the doctrine pro-
fessed faith in their own teachings; now, however, they admit the
inadequacy of their doctrines. Yet, strange to say, the disciples
multiply as the evidence weakens. Formerly we believed because of
an inadequate evidence which we falsely supposed to be adequate.
Now we believe in spite of the fact that the evidence has been proved
and is admitted to be inadequate. It cannot, however, be regarded
either as sound philosophy or as sound morals to change our credo
quia impossibile est to a credo quia falsum est.

S. FiTZSIMONS.
Lima, N. Y.

LUTHER AND HIS PROTESTANT BIOGRAPHERS.

IF Emerson's hackneyed and jaded axiom that "there is properly
no history, only biography," is not a meaningless platitude,
and conceals a bare substratum of truth, a fact that may be pre-
sumptively entertained, if not tacitly admitted, then every student
of history must join the increasingly large and vehemently insistent
chorus which demands a new life of Martin Luther. Confessedly
one of the most conspicuous figures in the life of Germany, one of
the epoch-creating minds in the history of religious thought, one of
the most potent agencies in the political trend of modern nations,
whether for weal or woe, remains an open, arguable, stubbornly con-
tested controversy — his career in many of its diversified workings

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 583

stands without an authentic, trustworthy chronicle. A Colossus,
whom the popular mind represents as bestriding the two most cru-
cial epochs in history since the dawn of Christianity — ^the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance — beaconing aloft the new light which
should dispel reHgious and intellectual darkness: a Titan whose
dominant will, infectious eloquence and unbridled impulsiveness
diverted a large part of Northern and Western Europe from the
stream of a sixteen-centuried, unbroken current — he still awaits the
advent of the critical, scientific biographer. Not that assiduous
efforts in this direction have not been made, or that abundant results
are not in evidence. The Luther biographical literature is cum-
bered and weighted down with the luxuriant fertility and tireless in-
dustry of the last three centuries. But the success of these en-
deavors is not always commensurate with the opportunities. Rever-
ential tenderness, hagiologic unctuousness, pietistic exaltation and'
indurated credulity, overstrained panegyric and grandiose rhetoric
are keyed in their highest pitch when they have Luther as a
theme.

In almost every instance the biographer seems struck with a sense
of awe and infinitude when he applies his critical rule to the Re-
former. He discovers nothing but immeasurable heights or un-
fathomable depths. There are no depressions or elevations, no
low-lying country and mountain peaks, no gullies and ravines, no
defiles and cliffs and escarpments. With compass and sounding line
he is stupefied with wonderment at the prospect of an

Illimitable ocean, without bound.

Without dimension, where length, breadth and height

And time and place are lost.

He forgets to make even an endeavor to take his correct bearings.

But in this farrago of flattery and pedantry we search in vain for
distinctness and completeness of the Reformer's personality. The
clearly etched lineaments of the man of flesh and blood, the man of
moods and impulses, of angularities and idiosyncrasies — in the ful-
ness of his stature, the maturity of his work, the results of his mis-
sion— is slighted and ignored. It is seemingly overlooked that "the
Old Adam in Martin Luther . . . was a very formidable person-
age ; lodged in a body of surpassing vigour, solicited by vehement ap-
petites and alive to all the passions by which man is armed for offen-
sive and defensive warfare with his fellows."^ The veil shrouding
his sacrosanct person is not Hfted ; he is not taken from the incense
laden altar of hero-worship, **that ditch of prehistoric prejudice," to
submit to the scrutiny of criticism's piercing searchlight, psychol-
ogy's subtle analysis, logic's inflexible canons. The mythical hero
1 Edinburgh Review, vol. 68, p. T6.

584 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

Luther has been fully exploited ; the historical man Luther awaits
disinterment.

Nietsche, one of the ripest developments of modern German intel-
lectualism, speaks of an "Umwertung der Goethe' schen Werte," "re-
appraisement of the Goethe values," which is now rudely shaking
the Weimar prophet on his Parnassian heights. No student, histor-
ical, political or theological, can blind himself to the fact that for well
nigh a century there has been among Protestant scholars an insur-
rectionary movement, with bated breath at times, mutinous intracta-
bility at others, but always active and mordant as an acid, inciting a
reappraisement of the Luther values. His greatness was taken on
trust. A more observant and critical, less credulous and reverent
posterity is now scanning the Reformation period, and conjointly
Luther. Both may be taken as convertible terms, for, as Professor
Eaumgartner comprehensively puts it, "to study the Reformation is
to study Luther ;" and he sounds a keynote when he adds that it is
because Luther is insufficiently studied that a veil covers the history
of the Reformation.^

The result of this movement is already apparent. The fictions
and chimeras are gradually melting away like dissolving views from
the historical horizon. In this hegira from the borderland of his-
torical obscuration to the noonday of truth, the Reformation has
changed its entire character and aspect. Luther is a star wavering
in its orbit ; the nimbus circling his brow emits an unsteady, paling
light. The man Luther is brought from the twilight of the gods to
the tribunal of calm, critical scrutiny. The adventitious appendages
stripped off, the glamour of devoutly woven romance dissipated, the
solid core of his being laid bare, the undazzled eye of philosophic
criticism reveals an entirely new character, discloses startling results
and unravels unaccounted motives. In fact, the new Reformation
studies have effected a veritable metamorphosis, a metamorphosis
that forms not a mere incident or episode, but, to use the words of a
weighty English critical review, "marks an epoch in the progress of
historical scholarship."^

The first rude shock the Luther myth received was when Bossuet
revealed the Reformer as a theologian* in a work which Brunetiere
pronounces the greatest historical monument of the last centuries,*
and Buckle designates as "the most formidable work ever directed
against Protestantism."* Here in dealing with Luther, says Hallam,
"the eagle of Meaux is . . . truly seen, lordly of form, fierce
of eye, terrible in his beak and claws." Yet aside of his incompara-
ble eloquence, luminous perspicuity, ardent sincerity, his whole

2 "Luther Redivivus/' p. 115. 3 Athenceum, Dec, 1884, p. 729. * "History of
the Variations of the Protestant Churches," 2 vols. » The Bookman, Vol. v., p.
26. 6 "Hisrtory of Civilization in England," Vol. I., p. 569.

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 585

strength lies in his perfect mastery of the Reformer's works, which
were then as little known as they are now. An intuitive prescience
told the historian, Catholic and Protestant, long ago that when
students "find, as assuredly they will find, when some Roman Cath-
olic historian chooses to lift a corner of the veil that has hitherto con-
cealed the fanaticism of the reformers how carefully the view has
been closed by Protestant historians,'"^ disillusion, if not bitter re-
sentment, will be the penalty. Bossuet lifted a corner of the veil,
showed us Luther as a theologian, his doctrinal system with its con-
tradictions, paradoxes, vacillations, inconsistencies, rhetorical arti-
fices, in a light that has not been dimmed, much less obscured, to this
day. This was the first rift in the Reformation fabric, long known to
exist, but now first publicly disclosed.

Then came Dollinger,^ rivetting the attention of scholarship on
the inner development of the Reformation, with Luther again as a
pivotal figure. In this work, remarkable for its penetrative vision,
constructive skill, logical coherence and unwearied research, with
deft hand and passionless speech, he probes Luther and his work to
the very hilt. His terrible surgery of the Reformation dissects and
anatomizes its every organ, tissue, nerve centre ; lays open its most
hidden processes, auscultates its feeblest heartbeats, gives articula-
tion to its inarticulate speech. This he does with such a photo-
graphic fidelity and microscopic minuteness and unerring divina-
tion, such an accuracy, definiteness and trustworthiness of statement,
the Reformers themselves giving their evidence in their own words,
that the work remains to this day an unanswered and unanswerable
monument of German objectivity, industry and erudition.^ What
Schliemann did for Troy and Tiryus, Dollinger did for the Reforma-
tion. The work was at once a prophecy and a fulfilment.

With the fatal breach widened, it only needed a Janssen,^^ with
his careful analysis, patient investigation, cautious inference,
guarded statement and a matchless architectonic skill that might be
called genius, to blaze like a pillar of fire into the full domain of the
German Reformation, dissipating its foggy mistiness and tearing
away the whole mythical toggery which screened it from the eyes
of honest thinkers. The first discharge of his well directed artillery,
"with its new material, its careful selection, its width of grasp, its

7 Athenwum, 1836, p. 271. » "Die Reformation, ihre innere Entwiekelung," etc., 3
vola. Regensburg, 1846. » "The fear inspiring book of Dollinger on the Keforma-
tiou," says the Protestant Profeseor Nippold. himself a Reformation specialist,
"which develops the thesis with an unapproacnable knowledge of original sources,
that all the Reformers were obliged to look back upon the fruit of their work with,
sorrow, [a historian] who has searched hundreds of contemporary writers, a whole
array of forgotten names, in whose bearers we have since rediscovered important
factors of the Reformation, when and where was the work ever controverted?"
Deutsch-evang. Blatter, 1881, p. 631. 10 "Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes," 8 vols.
Freiburg.

586 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

essentially popular character,"" laid prostrate the whole disorderly
and panic-stricken squadron of legends and myths. His "crushing
examination of the Luther myth" are the significant words of one
of the foremost English Protestant critical journals "produced a
tremendous uproar in Germany. ... It called at once Ebrard,
Kostlin, Kawerau and a host of minor disputants in the field. . . .
It reached its climax in the foundation of the 'Verein fur Reforma-
tionsgeschichte/ which may shortly be described as a society for the
suppression of Janssen and the perpetuation of the Luther myth."^*

The last step from the twilight of fable to the dawn of historical
truth was at length taken. The attitude of Catholic historical writ-
ing was changed from the defensive to the offensive. The whole
structure of German Reformation history must undergo a radical
change, rehabilitation and restoration, and that, moreover, from
foundation base to tower finial. Incident to the changed attitude
are the cognate difficulties that affect the very existence of the Re-
formation, go to its very root, and which find themselves voiced in
the queries of Professor Karl Pearson : "Possibly Northern Europe
took a wrong step at that time ; possibly the Reformation was the
outcome of passion rather than of reason ; possibly more good was
destroyed than evil reformed"^^ — queries that not only clamor for
solution, but are in the nature of an historic portent.

It is not to be inferred that Bossuet, Dollinger and Janssen were
the first argonauts to set sail in quest of the historical treasure- trove
buried in library, fading in manuscript or doomed to designed ob-
scurity, that they published what was unknown and unavailable.
"That the ordinary account of the Reformation and Luther" is the
well-founded declaration of a reviewer already quoted, "to be found
in the works of a certain class of Protestant theologians is purely
mythical was a fact undoubtedly known to those historical students
who had investigated the period at first hand."^* But why not make
this knowledge accessible to the common reader; why maintain a
mystification about data which must and will come to light ? Here
it is where we find the heroism of the Catholic authors fully revealed
and the sacred cause of historic truth championed. They garnered
the whole harvest to the inclusion of every stray ear worth gleaning.
They purged the historic accumulation of its dross and slag. They
waited in weary patience until the perturbed, murky stream de-

11 Athenwum, Dec, 1884, p. 729. 12 lb. '. '. ] "It aa far surpasses Von Ranke's
'History of Germany at tne Time of the Reformation,' " continues the same
authority, "as the latter book itself threw historians of the calibre of Menzel in
the shade." No less significant are the words of the great German historiographer
Georg Waitz, maintaining that "Janssen is at present the first of living histo-
rians." This said in the lifetime of Von Ranke points its own moral. Jahres-
bericht der Gorres Geselschaft" fur 1891, p. 22. The fact that Janssen is now
in his eighteenth edition and Von Ranke in his sixth, though published in 1839-
1847. shows popular appreciation as well as scholarly recognition. 13 AthenCBum,
Oct., 1883, p. 530. 14 Athenwum, 1884, p. 729.

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 587

posited its sediment at the bottom. Then they gave their results
broadcast to the world, and in spite of howling zealotry and national
fury gained a victory, they still claim, by the indefeasible rights of
honest, legitimate and well earned conquest.

Keen scented, indefatigably plodding German scholarship was
long aware of this hived wealth. But it likewise knew that the con-
cealment of this wealth insured the security of the legends and pres-
tige of the Reformation. Instinctively it felt that the promiscuous
publication of this suppressed evidence would be the opening of a
veritable Pandora's box, create a national ferment, a religious up-
heaval, an explosion of sectarian wrath. In spite of the Scriptural
injunction applauding the pursuit of ''whatever things are just and
whatever things are true," a fatuous blindness mistaken for patriot-
ism, a shrinking timidity to oppose single handed a century-rooted
tradition, an involuntary reluctance to take the initiative in dethron-
ing a popular deity, dwarfing a religious hero, unmasking a national
saint, were not subjects of comforting contemplation. Besides, what
would be gained in lifting the magic spell, the poetic romanticism
that enthralled the German mind and make it voice its elegiac grief
in the words of its Schiller :

. Die alien Fabelwesen sind nicht mehr;
Das reizende Geschlecht is ausgewandert?i5

A dim recollection of Socrates and hemlock, of Protagoras and
exile, of the Damoclean sword forged in the heated fires of Augsburg
— cujus regio, illius religio — may somewhat have shaken its pedantic
stoicism. It was said of Dr. Johnson that he started in hfe with his
fagot of opinions made up, and felt that whoever drew out a single
stick weakened the whole. German tradition and nationality have
their bundle of fagots, ''have certain hereditary landmarks," as
Lord Acton puts it, "not good to disturb, certain names too closely
associated with national glory to be exposed to profanation.
Luther," he continues, "is one of them, and Frederic and Goethe. "^^

The German mind was fed and nourished, became imbued and
permeated with the idea that the Reformation was a divine fact in
history; its birth signalized by a second Pentecostal outpouring;
the instruments employed elect vessels of supernal wisdom, angelic
purity, seraphic ardor, untinged by worldliness, unaffected by pas-
sion, with no human, sordid motive discoverable. This was an arti-
cle of faith — the articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesice. With a unique
positiveness of logic and superlativeness of rhetoric, always driving
a furious pen, the Mythopceic Oligarchy never swayed until forci-

15 The dear old fables no longer exist;
The charming race has left us.

16 English Historical Review, Vol, I., p. 14.

588 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

bly driven from this fallacious position. He who would call in ques-
tion the attributes of the Reformers or deny the divine mission of the
Reformation placed his lever and wedge at the very foundation of
Protestantism and Nationalism. He was alike traitor and apostate,
disloyal to his country, blasphemous to its creed. Planck, the first
and probably greatest historian of the Protestant doctrinal system,
even during the last century laments that "that historical writing was
branded with sacrilege which had the temerity merely to touch upon
the faults of our Reformers."^^ "We Protestants," is the statement
of a semi-official State publication, "are reared and nursed, as is well
known, in a hatred of Papacy and in unquestioning reverence for
Luther and Lutheranism. He who attacks it violates our holiest
sensibilities. Even should he in single instances have right, we
revolt against him and will simply not tolerate it."^® National
vanity more than religious sincerity or love of truth seems to motive
the unwritten Draconian law which threatens inevitable shipwreck
to the historian who must steer between the Scylla of Goethe's
"poetry is the only form of truth" and the Charybdis of Von Sybel's
"the historian must first be ?. patriot."

The biographic lacuna, as far as the critical history of Luther is
concerned, becomes all the more obtrusively patent in view of the
fact that few, if any single character, since the close of the Middle
Ages affords more autobiographic, plastic, dramatic elements and
data. Luther was no taciturn, self-absorbed misanthrope ; no soli-
tary, self-communing spirit. No one ever paid a more contemptuous
heed to the golden maxim.

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

No one ever treated with more flagrant disregard his own chosen
maxim, in silentio et spe erit fortitude vestra. He was not only a
man of strong passions, unbending spirit, violent temper, of irregu-
lar, wayward and undisciplined will, of insurgent, radical originality,
of half-formed, ever changing theories, of continually excited nerves
and seething blood, but of a most blunt, fearless, brutal frankness.
Morley tells us, and the mot is really most happy, that Carlyle com-
pressed the Gospel of the Eternal Silence into thirty handsome vol-
umes. Luther, who never claimed the Nirvana of silence, expanded
the Gospel of Unfettered Speech into a voluminousness of library
proportions. Of no man can it be more infallibly declared that 'He
style c'est Vhommef in no man do we find the paramountcy of the
personal equation more accentuated. He was fearless to the border
of irresponsible rashness, blunt to the exclusion of every qualm of
delicacy, audacious to the scorn of every magnanimous restraint,

17 "Gesehichte des Protestantisehen Lehrbegriffs," Vol. I., p. 16. is Deutsche
Jahrhucker, 1841, p. 514.

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 589

coarse beyond the power of reproducible Anglo-Saxon, lubricous to
a degree that even pales Rabelaisian foulness. His was a volcanic,
torrential personality. Like the eagle, he disported himself in the
tempest ; like the stormy petrel, he found joy in breasting the storm.
He loved the blare of trumpets, the clash of arms, the din of war,
the howl of embattled hosts. Even in moments of repose and tran-
quillity he was, to use Byron's apt illustration, a

"Slumbering earthquake pillowed on fire."

Yet blended with all these conflicting elements we discover momen-
tary flashes of a contemplative mysticism fairly steeped in the spirit
of the Imitatio Christi; our hearts are thrilled by occasional sublimi-
ties of a spiritual utterance that rival the most inspirational moments
of the great Christian pulpit orators ; glimpses of a haunting spirit-
uality, outbursts of a sweet human tenderness strike us that are more
like reflections and refrains from Assisi than the inspirations of Wit-
tenberg.

Here we have a biographic composite, the fusion of which forms
at once the delight and embarrassment, the ambition and discom-
fiture, the hope and despair of the historiographer.

Let us see how Protestant scholarship met this vexatious problem,
first in England and America, and then in Germany.

More than eighty years ago Coleridge, probably the first English-
man to inoculate Great Britain with German thought, with that
critical perception that seldom forsakes him, expresses his regret
that " a life of the man Luther as well as Luther the theologian is
still a desideratum in English literature, though perhaps there is no
subject for which so many unused materials are extant, both printed
and in manuscript."^'' Coleridge's infatuation for the German Re-
former was only inferior to that of his quondam disciple Carlyle.
His rare philosophic intuitions, however, evaded the task and peril
of writing the Reformer's life, a pitfall into which the Sage of Eccle-
fechan incontinently fell. How the Prophet of the Eternal Verities
felt when he heard Coleridge apostrophize Luther, "Yes, heroic
swan, I love thee even when thou gablest Hke a goose ;"^^ or when
with philosophic composure he epigrammatically tells us "even in
Luther's lowest imbecilities what gleams of a vigorous sense ;"^^ or
when hopelessly entangled in Luther's ever recurring paradoxes and
inanities, "heaving the gentle misery of a sigh," to use his own
words, he lays aside his book with the despairing confession, "O
swan, thy cygnets are but goslings,"^^ Froude for once fails to chron-
icle. To the present day the desideratum has not b^en filled in the

19 "Complete Works," Vol. II., p. 126. New York, 1858. 20 "Works," Vol. V.,
p. 301. 21 lb. 22 lb., 298.

590 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

English tongue, and as we will presently see, most unsatisfactorily
and uncritically in the German.

D'Aubigne's translated work^^ was for a long time, and among
the uncultured is yet, the source from which the English reading
public drew its knowledge of Luther. His historical methods
are the subject of a crushing review by Maitland.^* He is "a. Pro-
testant of the original stamp" is the estimate of the Edinburgh Re-
view,^^ "and a biographer of the old fashion, not a calm, candid, dis-
criminating weigher and measurer of a great man's parts, but a warm-
hearted champion of his glory and a resolute apologist even of his er-
rors," . . . and continues the same writer, "he is no mean profi-
cient in that art which reaches to perfection only in the Drama and
Romance." He "is always coloring," says Mozley in his masterly
essay on Luther, "and will let nothing speak for itself. ... If
the historian has no remark to make the preacher has, and the reader,
harassed with an endless reiteration of small reflections and officious
instructions, retaliates by regarding M. D'Aubigne as a writer a
good deal more copious than weighty. His omissions in the line of
fact are nearly as large, moreover, as his additions in the way of
comment ... A lively and pointed style" is his conclusion,
"but he is a thoroughgoing partisan."^®

Michelet, the French skeptic, whose religious creed Saintsbury
tells us was "a mixture of sentimentalism, communism and anti-
sacerdotalism," and whose violent anti-Catholic propaganda while
occupying the chair of history in the College de France gave him
an international notoriety, likewise gave us a life of Luther.^^ This
work, written with much literary charm and emanating ostensibly
from a Catholic, enjoyed a large popularity. It "hardly professes
to be more than a crude and struggling performance, its composition
having been the amusement of the writer during an illness. It con-
sists principally" (we are quoting Mozley) "of passages strung to-
gether from the table talk and those parts of Luther's writings where
the Reformer speaks of himself. ... An admiration of Luther's
greatness, sympathy with his genial flow of. spirits and amusement
at his faults and extravagances compose . . . the feeling of the
impartial biographer toward his hero, and the skeptic seems to gaze
with quiet pleasure upon the medley which the religious leader,
saint and prophet of so many millions of Christians exhibits."^^
"There is but one French historian of the first class," writes a re-
viewer in the Literary Era, "who distorts incidents and misreads

23 "History of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Germany,
Switzerland," etc. By J. H. Merle D'Aubigng. Vols. I.-III. ' London, 1838.
24 "The Dark Ages," p. 540 et seq. London, 1890. 25 Vol. 68, pp. 314-315.
26 "Essays, Historical and Theological," p. 322. 27 "Life of Luther," etc., trans-
lated bv Hazlitt, 1846. 28 Mozley, ut sup., p. 323.

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 591

documents to establish a theory — Michelet. He owns frankly, how-
ever, that he is partial ; he believed from the marrow of his soul that
Catholicism had blighted the fair promise of the * Reformation' in
France, and he forced every evidence and incident to corroborate his
parti-pris." Critically it has no more historical value than Diedrich
Knickerbocker's "History of New York." .

Following D'Aubigne and Michelet, Carlyle gave us his Doresque
prose-epic,-^ a work which he himself in his "Reminiscences" classi-
fies as "a detestable piece of prophecy and play-actorism." His
morbid and melancholy introspectiveness is here flamboyantly dis-
played in the same lurid phrase-coining, extravagance of diction,
over effusiveness of sentiment, platitudinous banalities which make
his writings more bizarre than lucid, more picturesque than reliable.
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, Carlyle was congenitally
handicapped by a refracting mind, one acting like water, which
causes the straightest rod placed in it to appear bent and crooked.
His judgment was warped, his vision distorted, his critical faculties
dulled, his bile stirred, his language quivering with rage when Cath-
olicism crossed his path. Moreover, as Mozley very pertinently
reasons of Carlyle's idiosyncratic "hero-worship," "a rationale of
heroism was not likely to tell much in English minds," he might
have made the statement more generic by including all rational
minds "which appealed to Mahomet, Odin, Dante, Knox, Luther,
Rousseau, Dr. Johnson and Voltaire as one grand specimen of it,
and which seemed to demand a complete intellectual suicide and de-
composition in the recipient previous to its reception."^^ It
was in these essays, according to Goldwin Smith, that Carlyle
"set up a worship of force and kindled a spirit of vio-
lence totally subversive of the Sermon on the Mount." Again, it
is a psychological enigma that has never been adequately explained,
whether the reckless irregularity and brilliant wilfulness of a man
who calls Guizot "wishy-washy," speaks of his friend Emerson as
"talking moonshine," dismisses Hugo as "a glittering humbug,"
characterizes Newman as destitute of "the intellect of a moderate
sized rabbit" and spits his venom at one of the sweetest of modern
hymnologists as that "little ape called Keble," is not after all a cross
between Cato and Punch ; whether a prophet who in Holmes' char-
acterization lives "with half his self-consciousness habitually centred
beneath his diaphragm" is a qualified judge to give in his dyspeptic
croakings a rational, just estimate of even his stable boy. No won-
der "his friends sighed in silence" over the monograph, which neither
added to the hero's grandeur, contributed to the author's fame, en-
larged mankind's knowledge or strengthened history's sanctity.

29 "Lecture on Heroes and Hero Worship." so Mozley, ut sup., p. 229.

592 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Next in order, both chronologically and in the range and extent of
its circulation, is the biography issued under the aegis of the Encyclo-
pedia Britannica, ^^ by Professor T. M. Lindsay. The sponsorship
of the great international work gives this sophomoric effort an ac-
cessibility and authority which under the most favorable conditions
it could not otherwise obtain. The article is marked by an absence
of original research, historic accuracy and literary distinction. It
bristles with such a mass of stalking, even ludicrous blunders that a
sheer sense of self-respect compelled the American publishers to
issue a supplemental postscript correcting the more egregious ones.
How a historian ignorant of the elementary knowledge of a language
can has the courage, or rather rashness, to deal with the idiomatic
plasticity, colloquial terseness, brawny vigor, coruscating invective
and cyclonic sweep of Luther's cyclopean German is hard to under-
stand. Yet here we have an historian of accredited reputation, in
one of the most erudite works in the language, translate Luther's
truculent letter, ''Wider die morderischen und rduberischen Rotten der
Bauern'' (Against the murderous and pillaging rabble of Peasants),
"Against the murdering, robbing rats of Peasants !"^^

The large work by Bayne^^ is of no conceptional originality, being
slavishly Carlylean in method, diction and garrulous egotism. We
do not proceed far in the work, however, before we discover that
Carlyle's strength is Bayne's weakness, for no matter if the former's
style excites admiration or provokes censure, it at all events always
defies imitation. Even making allowance for the flashing gems of
originality occasionally illumining its hazy wordiness the work adds
nothing to our knowledge of Luther or gives us a more comprehen-
sive estimate of his work. Its vagueness of narrative and lack of
consecutiveness, poetical rhapsody and apostrophic interjection,
basing as it does the life on a paraphrastic variation of De Wette's
letters, while it leaves no clear image on the reader's mind, carries
the author to the verge of cheap affectation and fuddled bathos.

The last biography, that of Dr. Jacobs,^* in which the author may

have been limited in the full exercise of his opportunities by the

scope and intent of the publishers — the biography being one of a

series — hardly claims more than a passing notice. While devoid of

orthodox fury and theological partisanship, the work bears the marks

of a compilation rather than an organic unity. Philologists would

probably classify it as agglutinative, in which the author, reluctant

31 Vol. XV., p. 75. Ninth ed. 32 The latest biography of Luther is writteii by
Professor Lindsay ("Luther and the German Reformation," The World's Epoch
Makers. Scribner, 1900.) Age and experience have not improved him, and a con-
densation of more blunders in the same allotted space can hardly be found. He
even gives a wrong date of Luther nailing his theses on the Castle church at Wit-
tenberg! (F. 64.) 33 "Martin Luther: His Life and Work." By Peter Bayne. 2
vols. London, 1887. 84 "Martin Luther, the Hero of the Reformation. New
York. 1898.

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 593

or fearful of sustained, original and independent thought, gives us
a dioramic exhibition of conventionally popular scenes pieced to-
gether. The retention of a number of exploded myths will be no
contributing factor to the dignity or authority of the work. How-
ever, it is the most readable and reliable we have thus far touched
upon.

As soon as we approach Germany we find ourselves compassed by
a stupendous literary productivity dealing with every phase of the
Reformer's character and achievements, but, paradoxical as it may
seem, we search in vain for a biography which satisfies the demands
of modern critical writing. In almost every instance the promise is
greater than the performance. The bibliography of Luther alone,
even in the last century, filled two goodly volumes,^^ to which the
following century added another,^® and no doubt the recent centen-
nary celebration superadded another. But the absence of all objec-
tive method, critical tone and judicial fairness was, and continues of
such a nature, that a restive, rebellious tendency is clearly discerni-
ble, and the jarring tones of ominous mutterings and sullen protests
•charge the atmosphere. German students have become suspicious,
even alarmed, about their historical patrimony. Its title had been
frequently challenged. Now with the vigorous, well-directed, docu-
mentarily authenticated labors of a new school threatening its utter
invalidation, they demand the abolition of myth and legend, the
menacing ballast that presages disaster. The Heidelberg Professor
Holtzmann is not the first to sound the warning note against "a
Luther myth, in which theological partisanship and at least uncon-
scious falsification was enlisted." "Long ago" are the pregnant
words of an authoritative English review, "long ago Moritz, Arndt
and Bunsen complained that Germans knew nothing of the real
Luther, but contemplated in his stead a thing of shreds and patches,
made up of fragments of truth distorted by modern party spirit ; and
Weingarten in his edition of Rothe's 'Lectures on Church History'^''
anticipates that the history of the Reformation will take quite an-
other form when it comes to be written by men who have really read
Luther's writings. In the present state of literature of the Reforma-
tion history Luther ... is the least known writer of the six-
teenth century."^^

A confirmation of this deprecatory language, which we will pres-
ently give, and more yet a cursory survey of the original sources of
Luther's life, will impart to these opinions almost the validity of a
demonstrable truth and prove that these Cassandra vaticinations
are not groundless; that in almost every instance the biographies

35 "Centifolium Lutheranum sivB notitia literaria scriptorum omnis generis de
Luthero," etc. J. A. Fabricius. 2 vols. Hamb., 1728. 3« Bibliotheca biographica
Lutherana," Vogel, 1851. 37 Vol. IL, p. 329. ss Academp, March, 1884, p. 197.
TOL. XXVI— 12

594 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

are lamentably defective in the substantive elements of historiog-
raphy; that with few exceptions their positions have been success-
fully impugned, others partially discredited by archival research, and
many more are threatened with condign repudiation when the Docu-
mcnta Vaticana emerge from their seclusion.

The first of the four contemporary biographers of Luther is Me-
lanchton.^^ The work is featureless and colorless. It is more the
appreciation of an affectionate friend than the foundation for subse-
quent biographers. Prescinding from the allusive mention it makes
that Luther had his autobiography in contemplation,*** that his
mother recalled the hour and day of his birth to the oblivion of the
year, it is barren of all interest and data. One unique incident it
relates in all seriousness, that Luther the Reformer was a man
habituated to bodily mortification and austere asceticism, "some-
times when in good health going four entire days without eating or
drinking," at other times satisfying the cravings of hunger by a
frugal repast on a herring and small piece of bread. This informa-
tion, so irreconcilable with the accepted habits of the Reformer, in
such open collision with the epicurean sentiments of his writings,
so antagonistic to the natural conception of the apostle of good
cheer, whose hedonistic, though perhaps apocryphal **wine, wife and
song" maxim forms a prouder heritage of the German people than
his whole doctrine of justification, has been wisely abandoned by
most subsequent writers.*^

The second published life was that of Mathesius/^ a devoted
friend and ardent admirer of his hero and a frequent sharer of his
proverbial hospitaHty. Whether a life embraced in a series of
seventeen plenarily inspired sermons delivered to an audience mainly
composed of rustics and miners (Joachimsthal) during a period of
frenzied passion — these sermons, as the author tells us, being not

so "Die Historie vom Leben und Geschichten des ehrwiirdigen Herrn Dr. Mar-
tin Luther." The Latin biography appeared in 1546. 40 js ot inapt are the re-
flections of a writer in the Academy anent this prospective autobiography . . ,
"it would be perfectly natural to suppose that an imagination [Luther's] which
could so far gain the mastery over its possessor as to lead him to believe that he
had Deriodical bodily conflicts with evil spirits would not fail to lend a powerful
coloring to his conception of his own pet career, and even to exercise its creative
faculty in the shape of definite incident." Jan., 1884. p. 53. *i We need only
recall the scene in Auerbach's cellar, ("Faust," Part I.), where the national poet
places this legend in the mouth of Brant:

Es war eine Ratt'im Kellernest,
Lebt nur von Speck und Butter,
Hatt sich ein Kanzlein, angemaast
Als wie der Doctor Luther.

Once in a cellar lived a rat,
He feasted there on butter;
Until his paunch became so fat
As that of Doctor Luther.

*2 "Anfang, Leben, Lehr, Bekenntniss und seligen Abschied Martini Lutheri/'

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 595

*'a mere history, but also a consolation, a doctrine and counsel" —
whether such a vehicle is the best for the transmission of authentic
history is, to say the least, problematical and hazardous. Dollinger,
quoting him, tells us that this worthy divine made it his mission
"above all things to preach ag. inst the Papists and fearlessly expose
their wickedness."*^ . . . "Our old friend Mathesius" is the com-
ment of Bayre, "the prattling, credulous man who so dearly prized
any semblance of miracle in relation to his adored friend" — "whose
sincere affection for Luther engages us in his favor, but who is intel-
lectually a child.""** Every page gives evidence that the author
unflinchingly carried out his mission, and at the same time proves
Bayne a man of phenomenal perspicacity. Mathesius is the fons et
origo of the discredited incident of Luther's "chancing upon the
Latin Bible, which before during his lifetime he had never seen,"
and with infantile ingenuousness tells us in the same sermon that
before the Reformer took his monastic vows (1506) "the convent at
his solicitation presents him with a Latin Bible, which he reads with
the greatest earnestness and prayerfulness and of which he mem-
orizes much."**^ He is likewise the author of that climacteric epi-
sode where Luther hurls defiance at the Diet of Worms, "Here I
stand," etc., now tottering on its unstable feet and abandoned by
honest Lutheran scholars. "He prattles about the prophecies that
announced Luther's birth."*® Such a thing as eccentric vicissitudes,
inconsistent passions, capricious anomalies in the life of his hero
fall outside of his purview, while the satiric levity of his tongue in
assailing the Papacy admirably displays his sense of historical equity
and philosophical detachment. ^

In 1 7 18 Ernest Solomon Cyprian discovered and published the
manuscripts of the two remaining contemporary biographers of
Luther, which, strange to say, lay buried for a hundred and fifty
years. Myconius*^ and Spalatin*® are cognate and coequal spirits.
Both have an intellectual affinity with their predecessors; with
uncritical docility, though considerable variation of narrative, they
pursue the same historical methods. We hardly look, nor do we
expect, a balanced adjustment of historical perception, and Carlyle's
"piercing radiance of a most subtle insight" in worshiping, incense-
wafting devotees.

What the twelve tables and the pontifical college, with its augurs
and flamens, were to the devout Roman, these four biographic col-
umns and their gradually surrounding peristyles were to the devout
Protestant. But what if these columns are discovered to be funda-
mentally unsound and morally out of plumb, for columns, Hke men,

43 "Die Reformation," Vol. II., p. 127. ** Bayne, ut sun.. Vol. II., pp. 66, 304.
*5 "Leben," etc. Neanders ed.— 8, pp. 7-9. *« Bayne, ut sup., p. 66. 47 Frederici
Myeonii, ''Historia Reformationis." 48 Georgii Spalatini, "Annaleg Reformationis."

596 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

must be upright to sustain their burdens? What if the Muse of
History during this period and even to our own day was under
duress? What if credulous admiration on the one hand and bUnd
hatred on the other consciously or unconsciously guided the pen
in its propagation of error and falsehood ?

The unraveling of this tangled skein is the mission of modern
critico-historical writing. The most hopeful sign is that Protestant
writers themselves are roused to a sense of uncompromising earnest-
ness to hasten the day of Truth's ultimate triumph.

The question naturally suggests itself have not later biographers
deviated from the rut of conventionality and traditionalism and given
us a fearlessly honest and conscientiously faithful, full-sized portrait
of Luther?

An eminent German writer, Professor Henke, gives us little hope.
"Luther's pupils almost deified their master," he writes, "and as
rehearers of other men's sayings always speak in more exaggerated
and boisterous language than they who use their own discretion, so
these simon-pure Lutherans howled down every one who did not
chime in with them in honoring the religious arbiter, who after
death was elevated above all fallibility, and who did not acclaim his
work the acme of perfection.*^

We will not attempt the ordeal of threading our way through the
mazy, tortuous labyrinth of the cumulative Luther literature of the
last three centuries, or risk the weariness of analyzing the superseded
works of Sleidan, Seckendorf, Loscher, Uckert, Meurer, Pfizer,
Jiirgens, Thierisch, Lang, Schenkel, etc., etc., but focalize our
attention on the ripest and richest fruit of contemporaneous success.
Three names give us the crystallized sublimate of the last results in
this field. We may designate the coalition collectively as the Luther
Dreibund, alliteratively they appear as Kolde, Kawerau and Kostlin.

By a common consensus Dr. Julius Kostlin, professor of theology
at Halle, stands forth as the chosen and accredited representative of
these three Horatii, and in reviewing him we review the last word
that has been spoken in the cause he defends. His work'^" is the
most mature, scholarly and popular biography of Luther thus far
written. It is at once the norm that guides and the arsenal that
equips all modern Lutheran scholars and combatants. He brought
to his work an intimate, if not thorough, acquaintance with Luther's
theological writings and tendencies.'*^ His biography shows marked
evidence of extensive reading, careful analysis, keen judgment and
good taste — as far as Luther is concerned. Most of these attributes,

48 H. P. K. Henke in Villers, "Versuch iiber den Geist und den Einfluss der
Reformation Luthers " Vol. II., p. 79. Second ed, 50 "Martin Luther, Sein
Leben und seine Scnriften." 2 vols. Elberfeld, 1883. 5i "Luther's Theologie
in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung," etc. J. Aostlin. 2 vols., 1863.

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 597

however, forsake him when he deals with the Catholic Church. In
Catholic doctrine and practice he is an irreclaimable recidivist, who,
in spite of repeatedly administered critical and public penance, re-
lapses into his habitual sins. His aversion to the Middle Ages, his
toning down of Luther's scurrility while flaunting that of his out-
rivaled opponents, his slurring of those moot points — Luther's rela-
tion to Hutten, Sickingen and the revolutionary propaganda, Philip
of Hesse's bigamy, the anti-Jewish pamphlets, the misrepresentation
of Erasmus, which almost becomes a caricature — all plainly show
that Froude, when he gleefully assures us that the student will leave
this work "with no further questions to ask," is about as reliable a
literary prophet as he is trustworthy as an historian. His attitude
to the Catholic Church may best be inferred by the confession he
boldly made in controversy that although he did not find in the
Papacy absolute anti-Christianity, yet he detected "a progressive
realization of anti-Christendom, which from the time of the Reforma-
tion even to the Council of the Vatican has made noteworthy ad-
vances." Of course, such a profession "will suffice to show," says a
disinterested English writer, "that Dr. Kostlin writes rather from the
standpoint of the Lutheran theologian than of the pure historian."'^*
"Notwithstanding the apparatus of material cited or printed in the
two volumes of the original work," we are drawing upon an equally
representative authority — "the information is manifestly too exclu-
sively from one side and the bias is throughout clearly discernible.
Some of the statements," it continues, "resting solely on Luther's
own authority, clash singularly with those which we find on official
record; for instance, in the lecently published fasciculus of the
Monumenta Reformationis Luther ance."^^ "The further we continue
in Dr. Kostlin's book," is the arraignment of a reviewer already
quoted, "the less sympathy does the writer show with mediaeval con-
ceptions, the greater misunderstanding of Catholic doctrine. It is
impossible to help feeling," and in a writer dealing with the Reforma-
tion this deficiency seems almost criminally inexcusable, "that for
some reason mediaeval writings have remained for him a sealed
book.*** He has represented the Church rather as it appeared to
Luther than as it existed in reality in his accounts of the doctrines
of penance, indulgence and invocation of saints," continues the same
indictment ; "he is considerably removed from the standpoint of the
judicial historian. "^'^ His adhesion to the legends, "memorable

52Athenwum, Nov., 1883, p. 661. ^s Academy, Jan., 1884, p. 53. 54 "It is
indispensably necessary," says Maurenbrecher, "that the status of theology
between the years 1490-1519 be most carefully examined. We must tear
ourselves from the caricature which we read in the writings of the Reformers —
from the misunderstandings they occasioned, and to ascertain what the theolo-
gians of that time really thought and taught from their own words." "Studien
und Skizzen zurGeschichte der Reformationszeit/'pp. 221-222. ^^ Athenwum, ut sup.

598 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

words" (Kraftausdriicke) which rest on unverifiable evidence, and are
discarded by scholars or hang on the slenderest thread for a preca-
rious support, have forced from Von Sybel the reluctant admission
that in the biography "critical winnowing does not always keep pace
with patient research. It (the biography) is not calculated to entirely
set aside the later whitewashing (Uebermalung) of the real Luther
picture." With the deep-rooted, firmly grafted German Luther
cultus in view, the same reviewer continues in a tone of regret rather
than expostulation that "a life of Luther in all directions a finality
was simply an impossibility."'^® Though we may not altogether
concur with the Quarterly Review when, in a most admirable review
of Luther's life and writings, it dismisses Kostlin's work with the
remark that it "is a mine of valuable information, but it is dull in
style, partisan in tone and displeases by its pietistic twang,"''^ yet
we cannot shake off the conviction that it most signally fails to
give us the picture of the — real Luther. With a change of names
Kawerau's criticism of Plitt's life of the Reformer ^^ applies most
appositely to Kostlin's. "With this biography," is the contention
of an acknowledged Reformation specialist, "just as with many
others of our Luther, the impression as far as the reviewer is con-
cerned remains, that not the whole gnarly Luther is presented to our
Evangelical populace, but a Luther glossed over and toned down in
reverent love — one conjured under the influence of partisan-colored
traditions intended for his justification. . . . The customary
way of portraying Luther gives us a colorless picture and will
always allow those who do not share our reverence for Luther to
brand this method of historical writing;" with bias."**®

With the historical integrity of Dr. Kostlin questioned, the vul-
nerable parts of his armor exposed, his partisanship forming the
very jest of critical scholarship,®*^ the thesis no longer remains a
speculative or debatable one, but enters the domain of verifiable
and verified truth.

Thus far, in order to maintain the most scrupulous objectivity,
we allowed only Protestant authorities to support our attitude.
Following this precedent we cannot close more appropriately or
escape the suspicion of historic bias more effectually than by allow-
ing a few eminent Protestant scholars — shining lights in church
and literature — to summarize for us and bring in vivid realization
the fact that mankind yet awaits the advent of the true Luther
biographer.

5a "Historische Zeitschrift," Vol. XLI., p. 230. 57 July, 1897, p. 3. 58 '*M»r.
tin Luther's Leben und Kirken." Dr. Gustav Plitt und E. F. Petersen.
5» Theologische Literaturzeitung, Leipz., May 5, 1883. so Writing of the easy cre-
dulity which still swallows the Luther legend, Karl Pearson satirically allows:
"It must be true; I saw it in the newspaper;" or shall we say: "I saw it in Pro-
fessor Kostlin's book or Mr. Froude's essays!" Athenceum, Oct., 1883, p. 465.

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 599

"On the part of Protestants," writes one of Germany's great his-
torians, Menzel, "it is an accepted maxim to represent to oneself the
Reformers as lords and half saints. This prejudice is indeed broken
in historically versed circles, but among the large mass of the evan-
gelical population it is still, not, however, to the preservation of truth,
maintained. It passes current as 'cultured' and is paraded as a
mark of 'scientific investigation' when they (the populace) with
their criticism and negation cut from even the fundamental doctrines
of Christianity. But woe to him who with the torch of science
invades the vestibule of the temple in which prejudice and tradition
have erected the throne to the "heroes of the Reformation" and
their works. The historical investigator who possesses such a fool-
hardiness is sure to be decried as a crypto-Catholic. . . . Who-
ever," he continues, "swerved from the path (of the legendary
Reformation history) had to be prepared for the most shocking
defamation and enmity, and must, in spite of all praise and exaltation
of German impartiality, be prepared for the same to-day.""^

About thirty years after this lament, in view of the rapid and
sweeping strides historical writing made, better results were to be
expected. Professor Maurenbrecher, of the Konigsberg University
— no sciolist in Reformation literature, but a man whose contribu-
tions permanently enriched that period and who perhaps better than
any Protestant author of the century possessed the qualifications of
giving us a history of the Reformation — deplores the absence of a
Luther biography. "In spite of all that contemporaries, posterity,
theologians and historians and publicists have written about Luther,
his life, his person, his character, his theology, only the initiative
steps have thus far been taken to a real history of the man, to a
proper estimate of his actual significance. . . . Too great is the
rubbish and garbage (der Schutt und der Unrath) which intention-
ally or unintentionally the prevailing theological standpoint concern-
ing the Reformation period has inaugurated ; too strong is the power
of the deep-seated nonsense which one is accustomed to have
oflfered and be satisfied with; who would flatter himself with the
hope that without the most exhaustive researches the current fable
convenue can be set aside, that without the most arduous labor the
real facts can by critical methods be secured from original
sources ?"'^

The Luther revival commemorating the four hundredth birthday
of the Reformer, celebrated in Germany with a national hysteria of
festivity and productive of an incredibly large literary output of
poems, dramas, novels, music dramas, pamphlets and more preten-^

61 "Neue G«schichte der Deutschen." K. A. Menzel. Vol. II., p. 44; Vol. III.,

E. 3. C2 "Studien und Skizzen zur Geschichte der Reformationszeit," pp. 207-208.
eipz., 1873.

6oo American Catholic Quarterly Review.

tious works, fairly glutting the book market, left the authentic
Luther biography a still crying want, in spite of Kolde's, Plitt's and
Kostlin's eflforts. In 1896 Professor Krogh-Tonning, of the Chris-
tiania University, and the most prominent and admittedly com-
manding theologian in Norway, raises his voice in indignant pro-
test that historic verity should still be stifled by romance and myth.
"There are two Luthers" is his stressful language — "a mythical and
historical. Usually one occupies oneself with the mythical one
decked out in all perfections. . . . The saddest feature of this
Luther cultus is the demand that the man (Luther) should claim ex-
emption from all judgments regulating the universal moral stand-
ards. All should be excused in him. To quote his own words,
where they are unpardonable, is looked upon as a downright
libel. . . . It is strictly orthodox to designate his most ofifensive
language as heroic faith. Here the cultus simply becomes disgust-
ing. If a courageous soul should make a mild attempt with the one
hand to portray the true Luther, he can only escape the danger of
giving scandal by placing at the same time with the other hand the
aureole of sanctity on Luther's head."*^

As a representative of the cultured lay and political element in
Germany few names are more honored and carry greater weight than
that of George Frederic Kolb. A publicist, statistician, sociologist,
editor of two of the most influential German papers,®* his name
became a household word. "A proper judgment of the man who
above all was the leading spirit of the Reformation," is his statement
of the case, "was until recently hardly possible, because not only
were most writers prejudiced by this or that confessionalism, but
because Luther, almost like a Catholic saint, became a legendary
character, so that a proper estimate, based on the evidence of well-
established facts, was absent. . . . Luther's was a violent,
despotic nature. The right he assumed for himself he unhesitatingly
denied to others. His will was to be the only standard. . . .
The 'Man of God,' the supernatural spirit, in which character he is
represented — Luther was only in legend."®*^'

Two vital truths impress themselves upon the mind of the thought-
ful reader in weighing and measuring the full import of what has
been discussed ; the first is emphatic, if not indisputable : that in the
words of Maurenbrecher "there exists to-day not one work which
can honestly, with a safe conscience, be recommended as a scientific
biography ; yes, judging from the present condition of affairs, there
is little prospect that a good 'life of Luther' can be written in the

63 "Der Protestantismus in der Gegenwart" (translation), p. 77. Berlin 1896.
«* Frankfurter and AugsMrger Allgemeine Zeitung. «» "Jvultur Geschichfe aer
Menschheit," Vol. II., p. 316 et seq. Leipz., 1873.

Luther and His Protestant Biographers. 60 1

near future ;"®^ the second not less significant and provocative of
serious reflection, when an English critic tells us "that some day
possibly a history of the Reformation may be written by an impartial
historian," and "that it will paint Luther as the reverse of an apos-
tle."«^

H. G. Ganss.

Carlisle, Pa.

66 Ut sup. fiT Athenceum, 1884, p. 726.

6o2 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Scientific Cbronicle*

MAXIMITE.

The tests made at Sandy Hook of the new explosive, the invention
of Hudson Maxim, place it first among high explosives. Like
Lyddite, Maximite is a picric acid compound, but while the former
is very sensitive to shock, the latter is remarkably insensitive.

The tests to which the Government put a new explosive before
accepting it are very severe. First, perfect stability is required, and
this is tested by subjecting it to a severe heat test for 15 minutes.
Secondly, it must be insensitive to shock. This is determined by
the height from which a heavy hammer must fall to explode it.
Next its explosive force is determined. A shell is filled with the
material and a powerful exploder, set off electrically, is used to ex-
plode it. The number and shape of the fragments into which the
shell is broken indicate the explosive force. If satisfactory up to
this point, then an armor-piercing shell is filled with it and the shell
is fired through a nickel steel plate almost thick enough to stop the
shell. If the explosive stands this shock, where the entire velocity
of the shell is checked in passing through the plate, there will be no
danger in projecting it from ordnance at any desired velocity.

Maximite withstood all these tests most satisfactorily. Melted
cast iron may be poured upon Maximite without danger of explod-
ing it. A 12-inch steel armor-piercing shell weighing 1,000 pounds
was filled with the new explosive. By means of a detonating fuse,
electrically fired, the Maximite was exploded. So great was the
force of the explosion that 7,000 fragments of the shell were recov-
ered. A 12-inch shell containing 70 pounds of Maximite was fired
through a 7-inch Harveyized nickel steel plate and recovered from
the sand-butt behind the plate. When this proved that it was insensi-
ble to the shock, a time fuse was attached to a similar charge and it
was fired through a 5^-inch plate. The shell exploded when it
was about half way through the plate. The plate was shattered into
fragments and the abutment demolished. The time fuse used is
capable of withstanding the shock of the projectile against the armor
plate and is intended to detonate the charge immediately after the
shell pierces the armor. This requires delicate adjustment ; the tim-
ing is gauged to hundredths of a second. It is better that the shell
should explode in the plate than one hundred yards beyond. The
best results would come from an explosion just as the shell comes
through the plate. But the experiment referred to shows that

Scientific Chronicle. 603

Maximite exploded in the armor of a battleship would put it out of
action.

The Scientific American for May 25, 1901, thus describes what was
the most interesting test of the series, "when a 12-inch mortar
shell, known as the torpedo shell, was fired from a 12-inch seacoast
rifle at full velocity and pressure, with a charge of brown prismatic
gunpowder. The shell carried 143 pounds of Maximite, was armed
with a fuse and fired through a sand-crib faced with heavy timbers.
The velocity of the projectile was probably about 2,100 feet per sec-
ond, and as the column of explosive was four feet long, the shock of
acceleration upon the Maximite must have been very severe, al-
though not comparable, of course, with the shock on even a much
shorter column in penetrating heavy armor plate. This was the
largest charge of high explosive ever thrown from a powder gun in
a service shell and at service pressure and velocity. The projectile
exploded just as it emerged from the back side of the crib. The
projectile was broken into very small fragments, averaging from the
size of a rifle ball to several ounces. A crow and a ground sparrow
were struck upon the wing and brought down from the sky by the
flying fragments and fell near the sand-crib, the sparrow falling
directly into the crater, a result which suggests the completeness of
the fragmentation."

This new explosive has a low fusing point, namely, 174 degrees F.,
considerably below the boiling point of water. When heat is ap-
plied it first melts and then evaporates. So that a building filled
with it might take fire and burn to the ground without any danger
of explosion.

The success of the aerial torpedo implies a complete change in our
war vessels. Mr. Maxim, writing in the Popular Science Monthly
March, 1901, says: "The war vessel that must follow as a natural
result of the success of the aerial torpedo will be an unarmored, or
only partially armored, gunboat or cruiser of small dimensions,
capable of traveling at very high speed. It will be a sort of floating
gun platform, and will cost only a fraction of what the battleship
costs, while a single one of these gunboats will aflford far more pro-
tection than the most powerful battleship."

THE TELEPHONOGRAPH.

Among the many improvements in the phonograph since its in-
vention by Edison, that of M. Waldemar Poulsen is perhaps the most
interesting. The familiar way of making a phonographic record is
by means of a stylus attached to the under side of a diaphragm and

6o4 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

bearing upon a surface of wax or soft metal. The diaphragm is set
in vibration by the sound waves and the stylus moving with it indents
the moving surface upon which it bears. These indentations form
the record. When the stylus is passed over this record, the dia-
phragm is set in vibration and the sound is reproduced.

In the ordinary phonograph the record is a mechanical one. In
the improved form of Mr. Poulsen the record is magnetic. A steel
wire is wound spirally upon a cylinder, with a clear space between
the coils of the helix. A small electro-magnet is adjusted so that its
poles are close to but not in contact with the wire. This electro-
magnet is so mounted that it can travel axially along the spiral. A
telephone transmitter and a battery are placed in a circuit with the
electro-magnet.

To make a record the operator speaks into the telephone trans-
mitter. The vibrations of the diaphragm cause variations in the
electric current passing through the circuit and hence vary the mag-
netization of the electro-magnet and consequently produce corre-
sponding variations in the magnetization of the spiral steel wire, in
front of which the magnet passes. This steel wire then holds the
record in the varying degrees of magnetization along its length.

When the operation is reversed every variation in the magnetiza-
tion of the wire produces a corresponding change in the magnetic
intensity of the core of the electro-magnet. These changes induce
electric pulsations in the circuit and these pulsations bring about a
vibration of the diaphragm of the transmitter similar to those with
which it moved to produce the record, and thus the sound is repro-
duced.

Among the advantages claimed for this form of record are superior
faithfulness to the original and durability without the slightest de-
terioration. Experiments have shown that after 10,000 repetitions
of a record had been made there was no appreciable weakening in the
reproduction.

The wire may be passed before several receivers and the record
sent to different telephone stations. Such- an arrangement might
also be employed as a telephone relay for long distance lines, the
record made at the end of one section being delivered into the trans-
mitter of the next. When this is done the phonograph will assume
a commercial importance. In this connection we may call atten-
tion to Mr. Edison's improved record for the well-known form of
instrument.

The wax record was undoubtedly a great improvement on the
tin-foil one, but still it deteriorates under frequent repetitions and
it is easily scratched or broken. A recent patent issued to Mr.
Edison is for an improved record. Mr. Edison takes a copper

Scientific Chronicle. 605

electroplate of a wax record. This copper relief of the record is
electroplated with silver, the silver, of course, taking the same form as
the original record. The copper is then dissolved away by an acid.
Before the copper electroplate is made the wax cylinder is revolved
in a high vacuum, through which an electric discharge is passing
between gold electrodes. Under these conditions the wax cylinder
is subjected to a shower of gold dust from the terminals, and this
dust adheres to it, forming a uniform coating of excessive thinness.
As this gold is not affected by the acid when the copper is eaten
away, we have a gold-plated silver record. The silver shell may be
backed up by other material, the hard metal surface holding the
permanent record.

PURITY OF ALCOHOLIC LIQUORS.

Last fall several cases of arsenical poisoning in Manchester, Eng-
land, led to an investigation of the cause, which disclosed that it was
due to a certain brand of beer. In brewing this beer the manufac-
turers used glucose of a certain make. This glucose was made by
means of a sulphuric acid which had been made from pyrites con-
taining, as is almost always the case, arsenic. Prior to this the
sulphuric acid employed had been made from sulphur. The chain of
evidence was complete and established the fact that the arsenic in the
beer came from the pyrites and in sufficient quantity to produce the
evil effects witnessed.

The examination brought out the difficulty of detecting arsenic
in beer and disclosed the fact that the most reliable test is that of
Reinsch. The beer is acidified strongly with pure hydrochloric acid
and boiled with a piece of clean copper foil. The black deposit on
the copper is sublimated in a glass tube and the appearance of a sub-
limate of bright octahedral crystals of arsenious oxide is an evidence
of the presence of arsenic in the beer.

Another result of these investigations is the necessity of watching
more closely the manufacture of many products used in pharmacy
and in the manufacture of which sulphuric acid is used. These
results have led to a further study of the injurious constituents of
distilled liquors. The researches of Dujardin-Beaumetz some
twenty years ago showed that the toxic action of pure ethyl alcohol
was zero. Hogs kept in a state of continual intoxication for the
space of three years, on being allowed to sober up, were in perfect
health, and after slaughtering showed no lesions of any organ.
This, however, was the case when absolutely pure liquor was used.
When, however, ordinary spirits were fed to the hogs, they quickly

6o6 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

succumbed, showing lesions, especially of the liver, similar to those
in the case of human inebriates.

The conclusions drawn from these experiments by Dujardin-
Beaumetz was that the toxic action was due to the presence of higher
alcohols, especially amyl alcohol, the chief ingredient of fusel oil.
The experiments made lately by Sir Lander Brunton seem, on the
other hand, to prove that the presence of fusel oil in such quantities
as it usually occurs is not a menace to public health. The greatest
danger comes from furfural and other similar aldehydes which come
from the husk of the grain. Furfural is present in all whiskies, but
in quantities it is found especially in those made by modern pro-
cesses, where the distillation is pushed to its furthest limit, so as to
obtain the greatest amount of liquor possible per bushel of grain.
In Brunton's experiments animals intoxicated with liquor from
which furfural had been removed showed no bad effects when they
sobered up, while those made drunk with liquor containing furfural
did. The "bracers" used after intoxication seem to point to furfural
as the source of the evil effects. All these "bracers" contain am-
monia or similar compound, which chemically combine with the
furfural and neutralizes its effects.

THE NICARAGUA CANAL.

The discussions growing out of the building of an Isthmian Canal
bring to light grave questions, which demand that hasty partisan
advocacy of any particular route must yield to an enlightened study
of all the difficulties of the situation if we are to reach a solution in
accordance with sound engineering and commercial principles. Of
late M. Bunau-Varilla, a distinguished French engineer, has been
lecturing on the subject, and the Railroad Gazette gives many telling
extracts from these lectures. While the lecturer discussed compara-
tive length, curvature, magnitude, cost and conditions of stability,
still he lays special stress on the discussion of the seismic disturb-
ances which will be an important factor affecting the stability of the
canal. The discussion concerns only the two routes of which there
is question, Panama and Nicaragua.

According to M. Bunau-Varilla, "in Panama there is within a
distance of i8o miles from the canal no volcano, even extinct."
Nicaragua, on the contrary, has always been the theatre of earth-
quakes. At Panama the isthmus has not been modified since the
quarternary period. At Nicaragua the lake was formerly a gulf in
the Pacific and is associated with the most terrible volcanic eruption

Scientific Chronicle. 607

ever recorded in history before that of Krakatoa. "The explosion of
the volcano Coseguina in 1835 lasted forty-four hours, the noise was
heard at a distance of 1,000 miles, the ashes were brought 1,400
miles by the wind. During these forty-four hours the volcano
ejected every six minutes a volume of stone and ashes equal to the
total volume of the prism of the Nicaragua Canal, as it was calcu-
lated by the Nicaragua Canal Commission and which will necessitate
eight years of excavation."

The volcano Omotepe, which is continuously active and which was
in violent eruption in 1883, is in the centre of Lake Nicaragua. Be-
sides these two volcanoes there are several others on the shore of the
lake or in the neighborhood which are at present active or have re-
cently been so.

Mr. Bertrand, of the Institute of France, a distinguished geologist,
has recently established two facts. First, Lake Nicaragua is one of
the lines of least resistance in Central America, and hence the site
of earthquake disturbances. Secondly, the subterranean fire is going
south and increasing in Nicaragua. There was a gain of five per
cent, in the number of explosions or earthquakes recorded in
Nicaragua during the nineteenth century over preceding centuries.
No volcanoes have become extinct in Nicaragua, but a new one,
Las Pilas, was born in 1850.

These facts require careful consideration, for a fissure in a dam
made by a seismic disturbance or a tidal wave in the lake due to the
same cause would mean the destruction of the whole work.

NOTES.

Geology and the Deluge. — In the June number of McClure's Maga-
zine Dr. Frederick G. Wright, of Oberlin College, gives an interest-
ing and instructive account of a geological trip through Central
Asia and Southern Siberia. The writer went to study the evidences
of the "Ice Age" in Asia, but contrary to his expectations, he found
none either in Central Asia or Southern Siberia. The geological
conditions which confronted him in these regions were such that the
only explanation that would fit them was that of an extensive sub-
mergence of the region where Scripture and tradition locate the
Flood that destroyed the whole human race except Noah and his
family. After describing his itinerary and pointing out some of the
evidence for the submergence that extends from Mongolia to the
western borders of Russia, the writer has this to say on the relation of
these discoveries to the Bible narrative of the Deluge : "Our belief

6o8 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

in the occurrence of the Noachian deluge must always rest primarily
on the historical evidence, and only secondarily on the scientific. A
flood of the short duration described in the Book of Genesis could
not be expected to leave any permanent record in the superficial de-
posits made during its continuance. The most which science can do
is to remove the objections which she herself has raised. These ob-
jections have principally been in the line of showing that such
changes of level as are implied in the story of the flood are so highly
improbable that scarcely any amount of human testimony could
establish the fact. What the recent discoveries have shown is that
during and subsequent to the glacial period, and since the advent of
man, there has existed such an instability of the earth's crust that
the present cannot be made a measure of the past. Man has cer-
tainly witnessed catastrophes by flood which are quite analogous to
the one described in Genesis."

Hydrogen in the Atmosphere, — For a number of years past the re-
searches of Gautier have tended to establish the fact, now admitted,
that hydrogen is a normal constituent of the atmosphere. Dewar,
in England, has condensed hydrogen directly from the atmosphere,
and Gautier has made quantitative determinations of the amount in
different localities. Some of these results show that in Paris hydro-
gen is not a constant quantity in the air. In forest air only traces of
hydrogen were found, while at a certain mountain station in the
Pyrenees seventeen volumes were found to the 100,000 of air. At
a sea station on the coast of Brittany two volumes of the gas were
present in 10,000 of air. The source and function of atmospheric
hydrogen are as yet unknown. A more careful determination of the
boiling point of hydrogen recently made by Dewar places it at
— 252.5 degrees, or about 20 degrees above the absolute zero.

Wireless Telegraphy. — In our last Chronicle we referred to a useful
application of wireless telegraphy in warning ships from danger
points along coasts, and in time of fog, of each other's approach. In
tests recently made at the mouth of the Thames the efficiency of such
a system was clearly proved. In these tests the shore station was
established at Shoeburyness. A steam launch provided with a re-
ceiving instrument put off from South End. A stiff breeze was
blowing and a thick fog hung over the water. When the launch
stood about eight miles out to sea they began to work the apparatus
on shore. The zone of influence of this apparatus extended only
seven miles from shore. The launch put about and moved shore-
wards. As soon as it came within the sphere of influence of the
shore instruments the bell on the launch began to ring, and at the
same time the word "Southend," the danger point, was printed on

Scientific Chronicle. 609

the tape machine. The vessel then repeatedly put out to sea and
left the field of influence to return to it at different points. But
whenever it entered the field of influence the instruments received
the warnings from the shore station. The trials lasted two hours,
and the instruments never once failed.

Development of Photographs. — Up to a very recent date we have so
associated the dark-room with the development of photographs that
it was regarded as absolutely indispensable. Professor Nipher, of
5t. Louis, has rudely shattered this beHef by showing that the most
sensitive photographic plate may be manipulated in open day and
perfect pictures developed upon them in sunlight. The plate may be
carried out into the sunlight, unwrapped, placed in the holder and
after exposure in the camera taken from the holder and put into the
developing bath in full daylight and there developed. To develop
pictures in this way the exposure in the camera must be longer than
when they are to be developed in the dark-room. Pictures devel-
oped in sunlight are positives, while those developed in the dark-
room are negatives. The distinction between the two is that the
shadows show light in the negative and dark in the positive. Pro-
fessor Nipher has also shown that no plate need ever be lost on ac-
count of over-exposure. When the exposure has been so great that
the development cannot be controlled in the dark-room, it may be
developed in the light, even if a million times over-exposed. The
"best results have been obtained by a hydrochinone developer.

Phototherapy. — This is the name given to the new art of healing
certain skin diseases by means of solar radiations. It is well known
that these radiations are not confined to the luminous ones which
give us the visible spectrum. Below the red we have calorific radia-
tions, so called because their presence is readily detected by an in-
crease in temperature. Beyond the violet there are radiations which
are especially characterized by the chemical effects they produce.
The calorific rays have been employed in the treatment of small-pox
patients. The theory underlying the treatment was that in this
erruptive affection the irritation of the skin was due to the action of
the chemical rays. By cutting off these rays and allowing only red
light to reach the patient the inflammatory effects of the eruption are
reduced to a minimum, as has been proved by experiment. These
results suggested the possibility of using the chemical rays to cure
certain skin diseases that are parasitic, the chemical violet radiations
being destructive of the microbes. Professor Finsen, of Copen-
hagen, was the first to practically test the efficiency of this treatment.
Professor Finsen has especially directed his experiments to the cure
of lupus. In practice the solar rays are filtered through lenses filled
ToL. XXVI— 13

6io American Catholic Quarterly Review.

with water that has been colored blue. Through such lenses only
the chemical rays pass, and they are directed on the affected part of
the patient to be treated. Electric light may be employed instead of
sunlight. It is reported that up to the ist of January, 1900, out of
462 cases treated for lupus, Professor Finsen had 311 cures. The
reason given for the number of cures not being greater was that in
the other cases the treatment was interrupted for one reason or an-
other. It is further stated that only four cases proved refractory
under the treatment. That the experimental stage of phototherapy
is passed seems clear from this success and from the fact that MM.
Lortet and Genoud, of the Faculty of Medicine of Lyons, have in-
troduced the Finsen methods with like success.

Solar Eclipse of May 18, ipoi. — The weather conditions prevailing
at many of the stations selected to observe the total solar eclipse were
unfavorable. For the American observers Professor Todd reports
from Singkel, Sumatra, that the sky was cloudy and that during the
total eclipse no instruments could be operated except the polariscope
and the X-ray apparatus. Professor Burton, in charge of the party
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, telegraphs that
the weather was cloudy during a portion of the eclipse, but that all
four contacts were observed and at totality a brilliant corona was
visible for nearly six minutes. Photographs were taken and the
shadow bands also were observed photographically. The observers
at the Government Royal Alfred Observatory at Mauritius report
that the first contact was lost, but the other three were determined
fairly well. Fifty-two photographs of the corona were obtained dur-
ing totality. Forty-one photographs of partial phases were also
made. During totality eighteen photographs of the spectrum were
also secured. In addition a kinematographic record of the eclipse
was secured. The Greenwich instruments, set up about six miles
from the coast of Sumatra, were, as in the case of Professor Todd's,
idle on account of cloudiness. The Dutch party in the same neigh-
borhood reports that throughout the time of eclipse the sky was cov-
ered with thin clouds. The observations at Solok were almost a
total failure. At Singapore the eclipse was very well seen and
series of observations on temperature variations made. The tem-
perature in full sun before eclipse was 143 degrees and during totality
it fell to 81 degrees. At this writing no detailed account of the re-
sults is at hand.

Pine Needles. — The needles from the yellow Oregon pine are the
source of a new industry on the Pacific Coast. The leaves of this
pine average twenty inches in length. The oil extracted from these
leaves and the fiber are both in demand. Those suffering from

S dentine Chronicle. 6ii

asthma obtain relief from the use of the oil, and it is claimed that in-
somnia is cured by sleeping on pillows stuffed with the fragrant fiber
of the pine leaf. Stripping the pine of its leaves has been pro-
nounced beneficial to the tree by the expert of the Forestry Commis-
sion. Two crops are gathered yearly, one in April and one in Octo-
ber, the latter being the larger. Men and women are employed to
strip the leaves from the trees and receive 25 cents per hundred
pound of the pine needles. They average about $1.25 per day. The
present factory can handle 2,000 pounds of leaves daily, and the
yield in oil from this amount is ten pounds. It requires about four
days to prepare the fiber, to steam, to wash and to dry it. If no
oil has been distilled from the leaves, the fiber is of a better quality
and brings about ten cents a pound in the market. The fiber may
be woven into fabrics. Mixed with hair it is used for mattresses and
pillows. It is also employed as a partial filler for cigars. The oil
is used for scenting toilet soaps and flavoring candies. This indus-
try has come from Germany. There the laws are more stringent.
In some places they may use only the needles that have fallen on
the ground. These dead leaves give an inferior oil and fiber.
Hence it is clear that this industry will grow where the stripping of
the profitable green leaves from the pine is regarded as beneficial to
the tree.

New Edison Storage Battery. — The storage battery has already
secured a permanent place in the work of direct current central sta-
tions. But the cell in use is the Plante lead cell of i860. Mr.
Edison has now brought out what seems to be the first successful
improvement in the storage battery. He started out to make a cell
that would not deteriorate by work, that would have a large capacity
per unit of mass, that could be rapidly charged and discharged, that
could stand careless treatment and would be inexpensive. He
claims these advantages for his new storage cell. The cell is a
nickel-iron cell. The iron is the positive element and a superoxide
of nickel is the negative element of the cell. The electrolyte or
liquid is a twenty per cent, solution of potassium hydroxide. The
positive plate consists of cakes made of a finely divided compound of
iron and graphite, formed under hydraulic pressure and supported
by a steel framework, into which they fit. The cakes in the negative
plate are of a finely divided nickel compound and graphite. The
graphite does not take part in the chemical action. Its function is
to increase the conductivity of the cakes or briquettes in the two
plates of the cell. In action the cell is an oxygen lift. In charging,
oxygen is carried from the iron plate to the nickel, and in discharge
it falls back to the iron on account of greater chemical affinity. In

6i2 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Mr. Kennelly's description of this cell before the Institute of Elec-
trical Engineers, New York, May 21, 1901, the energy of the cell is
expressed by says that the energy furnished at its terminals is suffi-
cient to lift the weight of the cell approximately seven miles against
the force of gravity. The well-known lead storage cell could lift its
own weight from two to three miles only. Among the other ad-
vantages of this cell may be mentioned structural strength due to
the steel which replaces the weak, heavy lead of the old type. There
is also a gain in the new cell on account of the fact that no period of
formation or incubation is required as was the case with the lead
cell. As soon as the salts are inserted in the steel framework the
plate is ready for charging in the ordinary way. In the old style
efficiency of the cell fell oflf partly on account of the acid being used
up, but in the new cell the alkaline solution does not enter into the
chemical action. The plates may be removed after charging and
dried in the air without impairing their efficiency, for on being put
back into the liquid they act at once and normally on charge and
discharge. Even when the plate has been reversed by sending the
current in the wrong direction, and it is again brought back, it works
as well as ever, showing that it can withstand considerable abuse.
We must, however, await the action of this cell under practical con-
ditions as soon as the inventor will be able to put it in the market.

D. T. O'SULLIVAN, S. J.
Boston, Mass.

Book Notices. 613

ffiooft IRoticee*

In the Beginning (Les Origines). By J. Quibert, S. 8., Superior of the "Insti-
tute Catholique" of Paris and formerly Professor of Science at Issy. Trans-
lated from the French by G. S. Whitmarsh. 12mo., pp. xvi., 379. New
York: Benziger Brothers.

This work was written by the reverend author for his pupils at
Issy, while he was professor of science at that institution. Speaking
of his intention in composing the work, he says : "Having to give
instructions on natural sciences to young philosophers, I found it
impossible to confine myself to the experimental and practical part
only ; it was necessary to go back to first causes, and treat of such
questions as the study of nature invariably raises in thoughtful
minds."

It is necessary for young ecclesiastics to propagate the faith and
defend it against all attacks, and since none of its enemies are bolder
than Materialists, who make great progress with the ignorant and
wrongly educated, because they appeal to the natural sciences and
claim that they contradict Christian revelation, it is most important
that defenders of the faith should be able to meet them on their own
ground. What is more comnjon than the assertion that faith is
opposed to science? It is repeated so often that it is pretty gen-
erally accepted. Those who believe in the truths of Christian revela-
tion are looked upon as narrow-minded and unprogressive. It is so
easy to make a show of learning and to move the crowd by ridicule.

Those who are firmly grounded in their faith are not troubled by
the vain show of their enemies, and as it is not possible for all to
inform themselves on such matters, they very wisely fall back on
their infallible guide and the divinely appointed custodian and in-
terpreter of God's word, the Church. They know that He cannot
err because He is truth, and that she cannot err because she is guided
by Him, and that truth cannot contradict truth, and hence that the
opposition between science and revelation is apparent only. Per-
sons on both sides often deceive themselves by supposing that faith
and science teach things which they do not teach at all. Hence also
apparent contradictions. There cannot be any real contradiction.
In order to make this truth clear, the author of the work before us
has prepared it. He says :

"Materialists have for some time had great weight with the people,
because they alone (almost) had strengthened their position with the
aid of science. It is also most essential that the young clerics should
be wanting in no knowledge concerning humanity, and that they

6i4 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

should be able to give incontestible proof of their competence, both
in order to obtain a hearing when they speak and also that they may
learn to speak with accuracy and power. Not only have they noth-
ing to lose in the study of human sciences, but their apostolic min-
istry will benefit by the earnest endeavors they have made to inform
themselves on these matters. Science is not the exclusive right of
one particular school of thought ; it renders up its secrets to those
who study it with care. It is by a mistaken construction that it is
made to serve the ends of materialism and atheism. In causing it to
add its testimony to the glories of the Author of Nature learned
Catholics would make science forward its legitimate object."

Of course, the book does not pretend to be an exhaustive scientific
treatise, nor does it treat of exegesis or dogma. The author's pur-
pose is to give to theologians and exegetists sufficient data to enable
them to interpret correctly texts dealing with psychical and physical
origins.

He has been careful to keep before his mind the requirements of
the class for which he writes, and to avoid the two great dangers
that confront a writer on this subject, namely, an unwarrantable
compliance with theories in favor among the learned, and a blind
attachment to certain ideas which have no firm foundation, but which
some men erroneously consider as identical with the faith.

"In order to maintain the via media/' he says, "which truth fre-
quents, I imposed on myself the three following obligations : Hon-
estly explain systems, even those which I have to oppose ; assert with
firmness what is well established ; leave the questions open which
have not yet received a solution."

One can see at a glance the excellence of this plan. It has been
faithfully followed. The work is unusually well arranged, clear and
convincing. Each chapter is begun with a statement of the ques-
tion ; the false system is described, and the arguments of its defenders
are stated ; then follows the true system with the arguments to prove
it, and the whole is closed with a summary, followed by a bibliogra-
phy. This last feature is particularly commendable, not only be-
cause of its great value, but because of its rarity.

The book is illustrated with very good engravings that will help
the reader very much. Altogether it is a very satisfying work, and
one that can be recommended without hesitation to do all that it
promises.

The History of the Jesuits in England, 1580-1773. By Ethelred L. Taunton,
author of "The English Black Monks of St. Benedict," etc. 8vo., pp. x., 513,
illustrated. London: Methuen & Co.

This is one of the notable books of the year. Its author is a
Catholic priest who has been devoting his time to historical work,

Book Notices. 615

and who has appeared before the public on several occasions, proba-
bly most prominently when he published his "History of the Black
Monks of St. Benedict." He is evidently a hard student and a con-
stant writer. But these are not the only qualifications required in
a historian ; indeed, one might say that these are the least important.
If the writer be not a person of good judgment ; if he be not able to
hold the scale in his hand without incUning in the least to one side or
to the other ; if he have a grievance to air or a wrong, real or imag-
inary, to avenge ; if he be easily swayed by likes and dislikes, or if he
hold a brief for any client, whether king or subject, community or
nation, then his industry will work harm to himself and others.

There are many historical writers, but few historians. Some are
bad from the start, and should never have begun ; others begin well,
but fail as they go on ; a few succeed until the end, and then spoil all
by false reasoning.

Father Taunton has chosen an important subject this time. The
sons of Ignatius are never lay figures on the stage of any country ;
they are star actors whenever they appear. This is true of every
country and every age since their foundation ; but it is particularly
true of England during the two centuries which ended in 1773.
During the persecutions which were carried on under successive
sovereigns they were active figures, several of them laying down
their lives for the faith.

It is very clear from the first page of the preface to Father Taun-
ton's History that he is against the Jesuits. On that page he de-
clares that in England ''The Jesuits, as a body, stood for the Catholic
Reaction, from first to last a political expedient. The clergy, on
the other hand, contented themselves with the course of religion."
From that point until the end he pictures them as tricky, unscrupu-
lous men, scheming always for the advancement of the society, and
not hesitating to trample on others in order to advance their own
interests. They are accused of lying, even under oath. They are
held up as traitors plotting to unseat a rightful sovereign and give
his throne to a usurper. Their actions may seem good sometimes,
and their declarations of purpose sincere, but this historian can
always prove, at least to his own satisfaction, that they are not to be
trusted. He is willing to take the word of their enemies against
them almost without exception ; he quotes some authorities who are
really not worth mentioning; and he makes accusations at times
without giving the authority at all, or without giving the place from
which the quotation is taken. When factions speak in their favor
their motives are always questioned. In his anxiety to down them
he forgets his premises sometimes when drawing his conclusions.

For two reasons especially he condemns them : because, he says,
they were opposed to the secular clergy, and because they wished to

6i6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

place a Spaniard on the English throne. We cannot find any good
reason for either assertion. If any misunderstanding arose between
the secular clergy and the Jesuits, it does not follow at all that the
latter were ambitious for the places which the former occupied, or
that they wished to gain the ascendency over them in order to
gratify their desire to rule, nor has it been proved. If they tried ta
bring about the succession of a sovereign who would treat Catholics
fairly, they were justified in using all lawful means to that end. We
cannot find that they went any further.

It is important in judging men to take an account of all their cir^
cumstances : time, place, education, training, customs and manners —
all must receive due consideration. This Father Taunton failed to
do when writing his history of the Jesuits in England.

We had intended to quote from the book, but the general tone is-
so biased that limited quotations would not serve our purpose. We
are sorry to have to speak so severely of a work which is evidently
the result of much time and labor, and which might have done very
great good. We are afraid that it will do great harm. The writer
of it has whetted a knife for the enemy. At this very time when
French infidels are warring on the religious orders and when the
Venerable Head of the Church stretches forth his aged arm in their
defense, this book comes with very bad grace indeed from the pen-
of one of our own household.

The Bible and Rationalism; or, Answer to Difficulties of the Bible. Com-
pletely revised and greatly enlarged. By Rev. John Thein. Four volumes,
royal octavo. Vol. I., Answers to Difficulties in the Books of Moses. Vol. 11.^
Answers to Difficulties in the Historical, Didactic, Sapiential and Prophetical
Books of the Old Testament. Vol III., Answers to Difficulties in the Books
of the New Testament. Vol. IV.j Answers to Difficulties in the Mosaic^
Cosmogony, Anthropology and Biblical Chronology.

Father Thein's work is already well known in a former edition.
Its many excellencies have been recognized and it has received a
warm welcome from all thoughtful persons who believe in divine
revelation, irrespective of creed. The general Catholic reader
learned from it that the sneers of the infidel and the scoffer are the
result of ignorance and not of learning. These did not understand
this wonderful book of the Sacred Scriptures ; they had not time nor
inclination nor ability to study it ; their pride prevented them from
submitting their judgment to the divinely appointed interpreter of
it ; their vicious lives tempted them to deny the authenticity of the
law and even the existence of the law giver.

Protestants were not slow to see in it an effectual weapon against
those who sought to destroy their sole rule of faith. Even if by
some almost impossible accident every copy of the Sacred Scrip-

Book Notices. 617

tures were destroyed, the Catholic would have the Church to guide
him, which existed before the Bible was written, under whose direc-
tion it was made and who alone can vouch for its genuineness ; but
the Protestant would be left without any guide and would be forced
to accept the direction of the Church of Christ, which indeed he now
does, although perhaps unconsciously.

For the Protestant the most important thing in religion is the
Bible. He ought to be very jealous of it, and he ought to defend
it against all attacks. He, more than any one else, should welcome
every weapon of defense against the enemies of the Sacred Text, and
hence he should appreciate Father Thein's book.

Evn those who have no practical religion, but who live rightly
according to the natural law, should stand for divine revelation,
because the natural law is founded on the divine, and should join
hands with the defenders of the faith against those who would
destroy all faith and necessarily all true morality.

These thoughts help us to understand the value of the work before
us. All right minded persons acknowledge the importance of .the
Sacred Scriptures because they contain God's communications to
man. All believe in them because they have stood the test of ages
and because they have been preserved by the Church, the appointed
custodian of them. All know that the attacks of the present are
futile, as were the attacks of the past, and that there is an answer to
every objection that can be brought forward. It is not possible,
however, for each person to find the answers to these objections,
because the necessary time, ability, mental training, education and
opportunity are not at the command of every one. All men do not
try to master the diflficulties of medicine, law, astronomy and other
sciences. Why, then, should all be expected to fit themselves to
grasp the full meaning of the Sacred Text, which is professedly dif-
ficult and which requires more knowledge than any of the sciences,
and indeed presupposes a mastery of several of them ? Hence the
importance of a guide, and we have a good one in the book under
review.

It is not perfect, for the perfect book is as rare as the perfect man ;
but it is a work that was very much needed and that should be well
patronized. It may be well to note that the volumes are distinct
and may be purchased singly, although we imagine that most readers
will want the complete set.

A Day in the Cloister. Aaapted from the German of Dom Sebastian Von
Oer. 0. S. B., of St. Martin's Abbey, Beuron. By Dom B'ede Camm, 0. S. B.,
of St. Thomas' Abbey, Erdington. 12mo, pp. 291. St. Louis: B. Herder.

The world knows little about monks and monasteries. It thinks

that it knows a great deal. It has asked many questions about them.

6i8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

and they have been answered by persons who, unable or unwilling to
learn the truth, have told lies. The world gets most of its notions
about monks and monasteries from novelists, and poets, and artists,
who draw mainly on their imagination, and place before their
patrons fiction and caricature instead of fact and truth.

And yet there are in the world many persons who wish to know
the truth about this subject — not only Catholics, but Protestants
and unbelievers. Thinking persons who have any knowledge of
history at all must realize that those monasteries which were the
centres of industry, learning, prayer and charity, and which in many
instances became the foundations of important universities and
cities, could not have been the work of lazy, ignorant, licentious and
bibulous monks.

For the benefit of fair-minded searchers after truth, a Benedictine
monk has written down in the volume before us a description of a
monastery in the present day. Not a ruined, deserted monastery,
such as the traveler sees so often in Italy, France and England, but
one full of life and energy. He introduces the reader into all its
parts; presents him to the different persons who dwell in it, and
shows him the work that is done there. There is no mystery, no
secret, no fiction, no poetry, but the plain unvarnished truth.

He who makes this visit under the guidance of the author will be
well repaid for his trouble. He will see a Christian household
modeled on the home at Nazareth. He will behold a true Chris-
tian community founded on the precepts and maxims of Christ. He
will not find the lazy, dirty, wicked monk of so-called history and
miscalled art, but on all sides he will be edified by the pictures of
industry, prayer and virtue that are presented to him.

We wish most heartily that we could get this book into the hands
of those poor deluded souls who hunger for the stories of converted
priests and escaped nuns, but this is too much to hope for. We
must content ourselves with commending it highly to all intelligent
persons without distinction.

It is gotten up in a manner worthy of the subject ; it is a master-
piece of the bookmakers' art. Such creamy paper, such clean-cut,
clear-faced type, such becoming head pieces that tell the stories of
the chapters, such an inviting and satisfying volume is rare. It
comes from an Edinburgh house, and we recommend it to the book-
makers and book readers of America.

A General History of the Christian Era. J^'or Catholic Colleges and
Reading Circles and for Self-Instruction. Vol. I. The Papacy and the Empire.
By A. Guggenberger, S. J., Professor of History at Canisius' College, Buffalo,
N. Y. 8vo, pp. 447, with maps. St. Louis: Herder.

This work is to be in three volumes, treating of "The Papacy and

Book Notices. 619

the Empire," "The Protest and Revolution" and 'The Social Revo-
lution," these titles being based on the character of the different
periods. It has for its main object the history and development of
the Teutonic race and its relations to other nations. The purely
Roman history of the Christian era is treated by way of introduction.

The term general in the title is used in opposition to "ecclesias-
tical," "special," etc., because, although the books are confined to
the most important period of the world's history, they contain all the
features of general histories of this class.

The aim and spirit of the work is outlined in these words : "As
Jesus Christ, the God Incarnate, is the centre of all history, so the
divine institution of the Primacy of the Holy See and the indepen-
dence of the Catholic Church is the centre of the history of the
Christian era. Most of the great historical contests since the coming
of Christ were waged around the rock of St. Peter. It is impossible
to understand and appreciate the course of human events in its
proper meaning and character without giving full consideration and
weight to these two central facts of history."

As the title page announces, the work is intended to serve as a
guide for Catholic college students, reading circles and for self-in-
struction. The author claims that "in the class-room it will serve
the purpose of consecutive reading. The private student will find
ample references to enlarge his reading on any historical question
of importance within the period in which he may be interested.
Reading circles will find more than sufficient matter for any number
of essays or debates by consulting the book lists."

Some valuable suggestions are made in the beginning for the use
of the book in the class-room.

The Hsts of books and magazines which the sections include are
unusually large. The author very modestly announces that he does
not hope to have produced a perfect work, because a perfect history
within the compass of this book is impossible ; but he does claim
credit for patient and painstaking care. This is evident throughout,
and we feel sure that the readers of the book will give to the author
more credit than he claims.

Political Economy. By Charles E. Devas, M. A., Oxon. 12mo., VL.-662. Sec-
ond Edition, rewritten and enlarged. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.

There are two a priori arguments in favor of this book : it is one of

the Stonyhurst Series, and it has reached the second edition. We

presume that all who are interested in the subject, especially from

the Catholic point of view, are acquainted with the excellencies of the

work in the former edition ; we shall therefore content ourselves with

620 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

noting the changes made in it. It has been very much enlarged
and rewritten in many parts. It has been everywhere revised be-
cause of the many changes in laws, economic conditions and preva-
lent opinions since the first edition was published. Strict account
has been kept of the main new books and periodicals on economics
that have appeared in the meantime. The doctrines of the Austrian
School and discussions on value have been so much developed,
especially in America, as to require more attention than formerly.
The teachings of Ruskin are now so much studied as to require a
place in a guide book to economics. Questions of practical reform
are constantly changing, and call for frequent revision.

It is noteworthy that several views which the author put forward
in his first edition, and which were opposed to the current teaching
of the time, have since been widely accepted as true. For example,
that consumption requires almost as much study as production ; that
combination is just as "natural" a force as competition, and maybe
just as powerful ; that neither differential gains nor the law "of
diminishing returns" are confined to agriculture. Above all, the
main and central doctrine, that economic science is essentially
ethical, has made great progress. This encourages the hope that
anarchy and confusion may at last be followed by order and agree-
ment.

Another encouraging sign for the author of a book like this is the
practical movement for some of the reforms urged in it. Such
movement was begun after the appearance of the first edition, nota-
bly in the legislative efforts to repress usury and fraud and to enforce
the responsibility of the employer.

One of the highest compliments paid to the book is due to the
Methodist Times, which says : "Space forbids us, as does the techni-
cal nature of the subject, to go into detail over the economic canons
of Mr. Devas ; suffice to say that they are arrived at by the light of
nature and the light of Christian ethics, and that the Christian phil-
osophy of life is everywhere definitely assumed. We heartily com-
mend this manual to Protestants ; it is economically sound, as well
as economically progressive and Christian."

The Great Supper of God; or, Discourses on Weekly Communion. By Rev.
Stephen CoubS, 8. J. With appendix of Historical Doctrine and Other Im-

Jortant Statements Pertaining to the Subject. Translated from the French by
da Griffiss. Edited by Rev. F. X. Brady, S. J. 16mo., pp. 255. New York:
Benziger Brothers.

At the Twelfth Eucharistic Congress, which was held in August,
1899, at Lourdes, Father Coube, S. J., one of the foremost preachers
of France, was invited by Bishop Doutreloux, of Liege, to deliver
the evening discourses. Twenty Bishops and four thousand mem-

Book Notices. 621

bers were in attendance, and the preacher selected for his subject,
''Weekly Communion." In making this selection he had in mind
not only the large audience which he saw before him, and for which
he considered it most opportune, but that larger multitude scattered
throughout the world which stood in still greater need of instruction
on this important subject and which he hoped to reach through other
channels. He tells us that he addressed himself chiefly to the second
class, and for their benefit the discourses were soon brought out in
book form. The first edition was quickly exhausted and a second
was called for. The book now appears in English for the first time.
The author tells us that it is not an apologetic work written to con-
vince unbelievers, but an appeal to that body of Catholics whose
name is legion ; who although believing in the real presence of Our
Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, nevertheless seldom approach Him.

He wishes to draw all persons to frequent communion, and he en-
deavors to prove that the weekly reception of the Blessed Sacrament
is not only pleasing to our Divine Lord, but that it is supported by
the constant tradition of the Church. In the first discourse he shows
the advantages and necessity of communion ; in the second he advo-
cates weekly communion, and in the third he addresses himself
directly to men because they seldomest approach the holy table.

In the appendices much valuable historical matter is supplied.
We cannot better indicate the excellence of the book than by repro-
ducing the words of one who knew it well and appreciated it :

"The 'Great Supper of God' is a book out of the beaten track, in-
teresting, convincing, suggestive and devotional, and will surely be
an efficient help to members of the Eucharistic League, Perpetual
Adoration, Holy Hour, Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament,
Apostleship of Prayer, Holy Name Societies; in fact, to every one
who wishes to have a just value of Holy Communion. Religious
communities who practice frequent communion will be greatly en-
couraged by the reading of this volume."

Faith and Folly. By the Right Rev. Mgr. John S. Vaughan, author of
"Thought for All Timeg," "Life After Death/' etc. 12ino., pp. x., 485. Lon-
don: Burns & Oates. Received from Benziger Brothers, New York.

The author thus explains his title : "We call it 'Faith and Folly'
because our chief purpose in publishing it is to strike a blow, how-
ever feeble, however unworthy and however ill-directed, in defense of
the Faith, and of the supernatural structure erected by Faith, against
attacks of modern infidelity and the assaults of the worldly wise."

Most of the chapters have already appeared in reviews or maga-
zines, but that does not prevent them from fitting well together and

622 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

forming a united whole that covers the field pretty completely. The
right reverend author is particularly suited for work of this kind,
and it is a rare qualification. He writes clearly ; picks the argu-
ments of his opponents to pieces coolly and completely ; illustrates
aptly, and concludes logically. It is easy to hunt v hile the chase is
across open fields, but quite difficult when the game leads the hunter
over fences, across ditches, through forests which the sun hardly
penetrates and in which the path is hidden with tangled under-
growth. So it is comparatively easy to argue with an opponent who
will meet you in the open and use the ordinary weapons of intellec-
tual warfare ; but difficult indeed when one objects, asserts, denies
and sneers, following no law and ignoring logic. Then the game
leaves the open field.

This book is very useful at this time, when the old song is being
sung over and over again with slight variations, but always with
the same refrain: ''Science contradicts Faith." Mgr. Vaughan
tears the mask from such seeming learning which pretends to make
this discovery, and calls it by its true name, folly.

Geschichte der Christlichen Kunst. Von Franz Xavier Kraus. Vol. II.
Herder: Freiburg and St. Louis. Price, $2.10 net.

In the present instalment of his great History of Christian Art
(which bears the peculiar designation of volume second, part second,
first half), Mgr. Kraus treats of art in the early days of the Renais-
sance. Like the preceeding parts, the book is brought forth in mag-
nificent style, copiously embellished with illustrations, 132 in num-
ber. Being written for the people, the author has avoided technical-
ities, and his book is as interesting as a romance.

When we consider how intimately the history of art is bound up
with that of the Catholic Church, the fostering mother of all arts and
sciences, we cannot but deeply regret that there is not a single book
in the English language in which the story of what the Church has
done for art is presented to the eye with anything approaching the
clearness with which it appears in the pages of Kraus. There un-
doubtedly would be a large sale for just such a work as this if issued
in our language.

The Scale (or Ladder) of Perfection. Written by Walter Hilton. With
an Essay on the Spiritual Life of Mediaeval England. By the Rev. J. B.
Dalgairns Priest of the Oratory. 12nio., Ix., 355. London: Art and Book
Co. New York: Benziger Brothers,

This ascetical work is certainly stamped with the approval of time.
Its author, Walter Hilton, died in 1395. His "Scale of Perfection"

Book Notices. 623

is found in five MSS. in the British Museum alone. Many editions
of it were published in the latter part of the fifteenth century and
the early part of the sixteenth. One printer brought out three edi-
tions of it, in 1494, 1 5 19 and 1525. It was published again in 1659,
1672 and 1679. In our own times two editions have appeared, in
1869 and 1870. Finally this latest edition is placed before the public.
It has had a remarkable history. It was written by an obscure
author in a small house of Augustinian canons in Nottinghamshire,
and addressed to the most solitary of all the varieties of monastic
life, and yet it has been reprinted for several centuries and recom-
mended as a book of devotion, not for the cloister alone, but for good
Christians in the world. Surely it is well worthy of the attention of
all who are interested in the spiritual life. They will find it a clear,
practical guide, easily understood and easily followed.

History of the Diocese of Hartford. By Rev. James O'Donnell. Koyal
8vo., pp. 473. Illustrated. Boston: D. H. Hurd Co.

We welcome most heartily the history of any diocese, because we
believe that we shall never have the complete history of the Catholic
Church in this country until the history of each diocese has been
written. The number of such histories has been increasing more
rapidly in recent years, and the good example of those who do the
work is having the proper effect. These diocesan histories are
worthy of special honor, because they are generally busy men who
devote their leisure time to gathering material for the future history
of the Church in the United States. New England has been sin-
gularly fortunate in this respect, having recently surprised the coun-
try with two large volumes of the Church in that section. The
present volume is a reprint from that history and it is in every way
admirable : full, clear, well arranged, well illustrated and showing a
progress that is remarkable. Those who wish to keep pace with the
growth of the Church in this country must study these diocesan
histories, and they should get possession of them at once, because
they may go out of print in the near future.

Geschichte der Weltliteratur. Von Alexander Baumgartner, 8. J. Vol.
IV. Herder: St. Louis and Freiburg. Price, $3.75 net.

The fourth volume of Father Baumgartner's valuable "History
of the Literature of the World" is devoted to the Christian literature
of the Greek and Latin peoples. It is a comprehensive survey of the
literary activity of the Greco-Latin world as inspired by Christian
principles and sentiments, from the apostolic times to modern days.
The distinguished author is here more than ever at home, and tells

624 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the story of the Christian regeneration of letters with an enthusiasm
that is truly infectious. The volume is all the more important, since
in the ordinary histories of literature the achievements of Christian
writers are dealt with in a very superficial and unsatisfactory man-
ner. There is no longer any doubt that Father Baumgartner's great
history will be recognized as away and beyond the best work of its
kind that has appeared in any language.

Apologetik als Spekulative ukundlegung der Theologie. Von Dr.
Al. V. Schmid, o. 6 Professor der Apologetik an der Universitat Miinchen.
Freiburg and St. Louis: Herder. Price, $1.60.

This little octavo volume of 350 pages may be pronounced a com-
plete, up-to-date Apology of Christianity. It is the work of one
who understands his subject thoroughly, who has read all that has
been written on every side of it, and who knows how to express his
thoughts with force and precision. We hope to see it soon in an
English dress. It is eminently a book for the times.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Ceremonies of Some Ecclesiastical I^'unctions. By Rev. Daniel O'Loan.

Third Edition. 12mo., pp. vii., 335. Brown & Nolan, Limited. Dublin, 1901.
Canadian Essays, Critical and Historical. By Thomas O'Hagan, M. A.,

Ph. D. 12mo., pp. 222. Toronto: William Briggs, 1901.
Come, Holy Ghost; or. Edifying and Instructive Selections. By Kev. A. A.

Lambing, LL. D. 12mo., pp. 1., 438. St. Louis: B. Herder, 1901.
The Divine Plan of the Church. By Rev. John MacLaughlin. 12mo., pp.

xxiii., 334. London: Burns & Gates Limited, 1901.
Life of the Venerable Thomas a Kempis. By Dom Vincent Scully, C. R. L.

12mo., xxi., 278. London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1901.
EucHiRiDiON Gradualis Romani sive Uantiones Missae. 12mo., pp. iv., 284

[132] 93*. Ratisbon: Fr. Pustet, 1898.
The Little Flower of Jesus. Translated from the French by M. H. Dziewicki.

12mo., vii. 294. London: Burns & Gates, Limited, 1901.
La Vie de N.-S. J^sus Christ par Fabbg E. Le Camus. 3 vols., 12mo. Paris:

H. Gudin, 1901.
A Daughter of New Prance. By Mary Catherine Crowley. 12mo., pp. xii.,

408. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1901.
Institutiones Metaphysicae Specialis. Psychologia. P. Stanislaus de

Backer, S. J. 12mo., pp. 266. Paris: Beauchesne & Co., 1901.
Spiritual Letters of the Venerable Francis Mary Paul Libermann,

C. S. Sp. Translated by Rev. Charles L. Grunenwald, C. S. Sp. Vol J.

12mo., pp. lv„ 550. Detroit: Fathers of the Holy Ghost, 1901.
Joan of Arc. By L. Petit de Julleville. Translated by Hester Davenport. 12mo.,

pp. 190. London: Duckworth & Co., 1901.
History of England. By F. York Powell, M. A., and T. F. Tout, M. A. 12mo.,

pp. xhi., 1 115. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1900.
Heart and Soul. By Henrietta Dana Skinner. 12mo., pp. 308. New York:

Harper & Brothers, 1901.
Meditations on Psalms Penitential. 12mo., pp. vii., 153. St. Louis: B.

Herder, 1901.
Manual of Sacred Rhetoric. By Bernard Feeney. 12mo., pp. x., 336. St.

Louis: B. Herder, 1901. > vv ,

The Roman Missal, for the use of the laity. 16mo., pp. Ixiv., 736, s. 102. New

York: Benziger Brothers, 1901.
Meditations AND Exercises for the Illuminative Way. By R. P. J.

Michael, of Coutances. Translated by Kenelm Digby i^est, Priest of the

Gratorv. 12mo., pp. xxiii. 199. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1901
Fourth ^eading^ook Columbus Series. Bv W. T. Vlymen, Ph D. 12mo.,

pp. 416. New York: Schwartz, Kirwin & Fauss, 1901.

THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC

QUARTERLY REVIEW

•* Contributors to the Quarterly will be allowed all proper freedom in the ex-
pression of their thoughts outside the domain of defined doctrines, the Review not
holding itself responsible for the individual opinions of its contributors."

(Extract from Salutatory, July, 1890.)

VOL. XXVI—OCTOBER, 1901— No. 104.

THE WORK OF THE PHILIPPINE COMMISSION.

THE making of a Constitution extempore is a political task
often attempted in theory, but rarely successful in practice
It took two or three years to get the Constitution of our
own land fitted for use, though every State of the thirteen had already
a republican government. The experience of the States of Spanish
America is sufficient to show how hard is the task of making a na-
tional Constitution, even where foreign interference is absent. Our
own State Constitutions, with the making or mending of which the
public mind is familiar, are wholly different from the work of model-
ing the institutions of a people. In the American States the Consti-
tution is the basis of national life and the State Constitutions merely
adaptations to it of local conditions. The history of France may
show how difficult is the work of changing the social and political
organization of a people according to theories of politicians, even
when attempted by the chosen delegates of an intelligent people.
The English Cromwellian Revolution was a lesson of the same kind.
If even advanced nations find the task of establishing new Consti-
tutions on a permanent basis a hard one, there has hardly been an
instance in which they have been successfully framed for any people
by foreigners. During the last years of the eighteenth century the
Republicans of France deemed it their mission to establish republi-
can institutions in other lands as well as their own: While half a

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1900, by Benjamin H, Whittaker,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

626 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

dozen of republican Constitutions were succeeding one another be-
tween the monarchy of Louis and the empire of Napoleon, the en-
thusiasts of liberty were bestowing republican Constitutions on every
neighboring land which French armies could penetrate. The
Batavian Republic replaced the old States of Holland, the Ligurian
the Republic of Genoa, the Parthenopean the Kingdom of Naples,
the Cisalpine the Austrian rule in Lombardy. French political ex-
perts furnished patent new Constitutions for each, guaranteed truly
republican, as readily as they turned out new systems of weights and
measures. Within five years they had vanished from the map as
suddenly as they appeared.

The Taft Commission seems engaged on a task in the Philippines
like that which the French Citizen Commissioners tried so unsuc-
cessfully in Milan and Naples. It is trying to mould the language,
religion, schooling, laws, land tenures, methods of taxation and cor-
porate life of a people of eight millions within a few months. It is
doing all this, not according to the wishes or wants of that people,
but on ideas borrowed from the experience of a community foreign
to them in language, race, ideas of government and social life. The
Commissioners are not men experienced in administration or ac-
-quainted with even the language, much less the character and his-
tory of the millions whose destinies they undertake to mould so con-
■fidently. Two of them are college professors and three lawyers.
Moreover, their task is not to apply the principles of government
with which they themselves are familiar, but to devise a new system
for Philippine conditions different either from what the Filipinos are
used to or Americans use for themselves.

The task would appall most thinking men of conscience, but it
seems to offer no difficulty to the learned five. They landed in
Manila in June, and in November they confidently inform Secretary
Root that they have examined many witnesses and ascertained that
the ''mass of the people in the islands are ignorant, credulous and
childlike," and that the electoral franchise must be much limited be-
cause the large majority will not for a long time be capable of intelli-
gently exercising it. The fourteenth amendment embodies the judg-
ment of the American people on the question of keeping the suf-
frage from the lately emancipated Negroes on grounds of birth, color
or previous condition of servitude. The ideas of Messrs. Taft, Wor-
cester and their fellows do not seem in accord with American ideas
in that respect. Edmund Burke put on record his inability to frame
an indictment against a people of three millions after thirty years of
political life. Judge Taft and his colleagues feel quite equal to such
a task after six months in office.

In justice it should be said that other Americans have spoken as

The Work of the Philippine Commission. 627

disparagingly of the common people in our own land as the Taft
Commission speaks of the Filipinos, and even more so. Judge Jay,
in the days of John Adams, lamented that the majority of every peo-
ple were deficient both in virtue and knowledge. Secretary Timothy
Pickering held the majority of every people was vicious. Fisher
Ames, of Massachusetts, shuddered at the idea of the mere laborers
of his State taking share in its government, and declared that the
property rights of good men would be subverted in consequence.
*'Men of sense and property even a little above the multitude," he
urged, ''wished to keep the government in force enough to govern."
Even the immaculate Aaron Burr called for the "union of all good
men" to save the young Republic from falling under control of the
rabble. These sentiments find echo in the report of the Commission
after a lapse of a hundred years. They were then branded as "Brit-
ish" in America. Messrs. Taft and Worcester style them American
in the Philippines.

It raises serious thought to find American officials pronouncing
the unfitness of the Filipinos to rule themselves after a hundred years
of popular sovereignty in these United States. One looks to find
what substitute the Commission has to offer as the source of author-
ity in the Philippines for the self-government which alone Americans
recognize, and the answer is hardly satisfactory. Military methods
of absolutism have been tried and are pronounced unsatisfactory.
The Spanish rule has not built up any aristocracy during its three
hundred years' existence, strange as that fact seems, considering the
tales told of its disregard of native rights. The Commission seems
to lean to the rule of a bureaucratic civil service which would be
selected and graded solely by merit as tested by competitive exami-
nations. This is the system prevalent in the neighboring Chinese
Empire ; but even for this the Commissioners see formidable difficul-
ties. It is essential that it be administered with the utmost rigidity
and impartiality ; but then it must be administered, after all, by men,
and the Commissioners pathetically point out that the proportion of
Filipinos who can be trusted is quite small. They must be taught
by better salaries and by "the example of Americans a different
standard of integrity." Unfortunately, we are told the Americans
who come to the Philippines do not come as bearers of any moral
standards. They come with the idea of making money, and they are
exposed, poor fellows, to constant temptations offered by interested
persons, who have no other conception of a public officer than that
he is to be bribed if his price be known. "Men may leave the United
States honest, but with the weakening of home associations and the
greed for profit, demoralization and dishonesty are much more likely
to follow than at home." Considering that here at home in ordinary

^2S American Catholic Quarterly Review.

times the proportion of convicts to the population is eight times
larger than among the Filipinos under Spanish rule, it makes one
anxious to know what the proportion will be when the much greater
demoralization and dishonesty are developed among Americans in
the Filipinos. Judge Taft's only remedy is to "banish all favoritism
and political considerations from the selection of civil servants and
to awaken an enthusiasm in the service by reasonable prospects of
promotion !" It is satisfactory to note that the danger of favoritism
or overgreed for wealth is not considered possible in American Com-
missioners, The Commission has passed a law which "goes further
than any in the United States in carrying out the theory of the merit
system." It also commends the "earnest assistance and cooperation
of President McKinley and Secretary Root in maintaining pure the
civil service of the islands." It is well to know that these high
officials, at least, are truly righteous men.

The "qualifications by merit" of the five Commissioners for the
highest positions in the government of the Phiilppines are not men-
tioned in the Report. Judge Taft's are that he is an Ohio lawyer
who has filled, in the words of an admirer, more good $6,000 a year
positions than any man of his years in that State. Mr. Ide and
General Wright are both lawyers well-known in their own States,
and that must remove them from all danger of moral weakness. Mr..
Dean Worcester was assistant professor of zoology in the University
of Michigan, and had twice visited the islands before the war. He
has also written a book of travel, in which he roundly abused the
Catholic priests of the islands. Professor Bernard Moses was un-
known to public life outside the University of California when he was
called on the recommendation of its new president, Mr. Wheeler,
to help in making a Constitution for the Philippines. One can see
at a glance how well merited is the tribute paid to President McKin-
ley and his War Secretary for their earnestness to secure the highest
standard of fitness in the civil service of the Philippines from these
facts.

The Commissioners divided the work of Constitution making
among them. It does not appear from the Report that any of them
is familiar with the Spanish or native languages or the institutions
established in the islands during the last three centuries. Indeed,.
the English of the report itself seems to need a good deal of improve-
ment both in style and grammar, but that may be passed over. At
all events, Judge Taft undertook for his part to provide for a new
civil service, a new land system and to deal with the question of the
Spanish clergy. Mr. Worcester, as a zoologist and author, was as-
signed the regulation of mining laws, forestry, agriculture and public
health. He also was set to frame a system of municipal government

The Work of the Philippine Commission. 629

to take the place of that already existing in the islands for three
centuries. General Wright, of Tennessee, took to himself the ques-
tions of organizing a new militia and new police force. He also, as
a legal expert, undertook a new criminal code. A new system of
public works and the general regulation of franchises were thrown
into his share of the Philippine new Constitution. Mr. Ide took on
his shoulders the formation of a new civil code and the regulation of
courts, registration, banks and currency. To mould the education of
the people on new lines was the task assigned to the professor from
Berkeley. Incidentally he was directed to frame a new system of
general taxation, and to do it pretty quickly, as money was of urgent
need in the Philippines. The general problem of organizing the
government the Commission kept for its united wisdom.

It had not done much in the latter line when the report was sent
to Mr. Root. It took a district of pagan uncivilized tribes in the
mountains and called it the province of Benguet. A Governor at
$1,500 a year, a secretary at $1,000 and a traveling inspector at $400
were created and named by the Commissions. The native tribes
under Spanish rule had been left to manage themselves under their
own laws, paying only a poll-tax of twenty-five cents a head and
rendering some days' labor on the roads. The chief changes made
by the Commission were to have the head men elected annually and
to increase the poll-tax to a dollar, with an additional property tax
of a half of one per cent. It was further provided that the provincial
Governor and secretary should be the majority of an Assessment
Board on the hitherto untaxed property of the natives, and his
approval should be necessary for all acts of the elected village gov-
ernments. This method of combining popular elections with an ab-
solute government, independent of their results, is regarded with
much satisfaction by the Commission.

The franchise under those conditions might safely be universal,
and the Commission so provided in the Igorrote pagan villages.
In the civilized towns, however, it is to be limited to those who can
read or write Spanish or English or who paid thirty dollars of taxa-
tion annually or own property worth five hundred. As the Com-
mission states that it is assured the great mass of the population
only speak or write their native languages, this provision secures
effectually that none but comparatively wealthy natives shall have a
share in municipal governments. Tlie Commission regards this as
a very liberal course, and speaks in severe terms of the "cruel oppres-
sions" of the former governments.

Oddly enough, this is contradicted in a long report written by a
German resident of Benguet, who says that the "intentions of the
government in Madrid, as expressed in the laws, were, on the whole,

630 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

just, kind and fatherly. The Madrid government repeatedly issued
strict orders to employ towards non-Christian tribes a policy of
gentle attraction, and the Igorrotes were left to live in the villages,
into which they were gradually drawn from their scattered ranchenas,
under headmen of their own race, and with all their peculiar habits
not in open contradiction with a gradual advance in civilization."
This testimony from a non-Catholic foreign resident to the methods
of the government of Spain in the islands is noteworthy. The Com-
missioners themselves, while freely applying disparaging epithets of
a general character to the Spanish administration, furnish several
facts which appear incompatible with the existence of real oppression
or tyranny. We are informed at page 80 that "before the rebellion
in 1896 for many years the Spanish had less than 5,000 peninsular
troops in the islands. All the rest were natives. The latter as a rule
remained loyal to Spain until it was manifest her sovereignty was
ended." The Commission adds, gratuitously: "This was the case,
though the masses from whom these native soldiers were drawn were
cruelly oppressed by the Spaniards." One would like some more
tangible instance of this alleged oppression than the word of the
Commissioners before believing its existence, in face of the admitted
loyalty of the native troops to their old rulers down to the last.

How sincere the sympathy of at least one of the Commissioners is
against oppression of the natives may be judged from the following
extract describing a scene in Palawan under Spanish rule : "From
the outset our servants stole from us. Finally we missed a box con-
taining twenty-five pounds of gunpowder. . . . We shut
Paraiso (one of the servants) into a room and introduced him to the
business end of a shotgun at very close range. We told him that
he must choose between confessing and parting company with his
upper story. He at first denied all knowledge of the matter, then
admitted he had taken the powder, but said he had forgotten where
he had put it. The doctor stimulated his lagging nerve cells by
vigorously applying to his person a cleaning rod of good Michigan
hickory. This treatment had the desired effect, and we set out to
find the powder, the doctor bringing up the rear and occasionally
refreshing recollection with the rod." The unfortunate suspect was
unable to find the powder even with these stimulants. The writer
adds: "We took Paraiso to the headquarters of the guardia and
turned him over to the captain, who ordered him whipped. As
this failed to produce the desired result, he was afterwards bastin-
adoed." All was in vain, and the unfortunate native, who had in-
curred his employer's suspicion, was lodged in prison and left there.
We can imagine what would be thought of an employer in this coun-
try who, on mere suspicion, would lock up and flog his hired at-

The Work of the Philippine Commission. 631

tendant at discretion and threaten him with immediate death unless
he recovered property which he had never stolen to all appearance.
The parties who perpetrated it in distant Palawan were Dr. Steere,
Dr. Brown, late health officer of Manila, and Dean C. Worcester,
now one of the Commission entrusted with the task of governing
the Philippines on ''American principles." The tale is told by him-
self at page 87 of his work on the Philippine people published in 1898.
The character of the Spanish legislation also finds unexpected tes-
timony in its favor in the report. 'The civil code," we are told, "as
a system of jurisprudence in its essentials undoubtedly meets the
needs of the people of the Philippine Islands and furnishes a just
measure of their rights and duties. It is thought that only such
changes should be made as are rendered necessary by reason of the
changed conditions in passing from the sovereignty of Spain to that
of the United States." This statement is not affected by the criti-
cism bestowed on the methods of civil procedure and the numerous
delays attributed to the action of the law. Precisely similar criti-
cisms on the ''law's delay" are to be found in every American news-
paper on the dilatoriness of our own courts. When we are told
that "charges of corruption and incompetence against the present
FiHpino judges are common," we naturally ask are such charges
against the judges of our own land unknown? The deduction that
"the number of Filipinos fitted by nature, education and moral sta-
bility to fill such positions is very small" seems hardly warranted.
The report on the administration of justice in the Philippines by
Chief Justice Arellano, which fills a large part of the Commission's
return, is a document which in fullness and clearness of information
stands much above the average of American legal documents. One
is inclined to think that the "widespread feeling that these positions
must be filled mainly by Americans" is confined to the legal office
seekers of the Commission's surroundings in the islands. The part
of the report dealing with the rights of the Catholic clergy in the
islands and that relating to the proposed system of non-Catholic
schools controlled by American agents in independence of the will
of the people are of vital importance. The non-interference of the
General Government in matters of religion is a part of the Constitu-
tion for over a century. It is the chief boon that Catholics can re-
ceive from a non-Catholic State, and they cannot afford to see it
disregarded in the islands which have become a part of the American
domain. Judge Taft in that part of the report which he claims as
his own shows no scruples about subordinating the rights of con-
science to political ends of other kinds. The question was presented
to him whether the Spanish priests, who formed nearly two-thirds
of the clergy of the country at the time of the American invasion

632 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

and had been driven from their parishes by the insurgent leaders,
would be allowed to return to their posts and provide for the spirit-
ual wants of their people. The right to do so had been guaranteed
to them on the public faith of the United States by the treaty of ces-
sion from Spain. Its exercise has been refused since by the will of
the generals, whose absolute authority has been the representative
of American government in the Philippines. The Taft Commission
having announced its mission to establish a civil government of some
kind, the representatives of the Catholic Church asked that freedom
of sending priests to the Catholic populations at their own risk
should be given them, as required by the treaty. The answer of
Judge Taft, while avoiding any positive statement, virtually denied
this right in terms which do no credit either to his intelligence as a
Judge or his ideas of tolerance for Catholics. We shall examine
his own words.

For the sake of clearness we shall first deal with his views on the
right of Catholic priests if members of certain religious orders to ex-
ercise their functions among those of their communion in the islands.
We pass over the question of their property rights and Judge Taft's
personal ideas of their morality, which he ventilates at length in the
manner familiar to anti-Catholic lecturers, though, as he says, quite
"irrelevant to the point."

•'Ordinarily," Judge Taft writes to the Secretary of War, "the
Government of the United States, or its servants, have little or no
concern with religious societies. With tis the Church is so com-
pletely separated from the State that it is difficult to imagine cases
in which the policy of a Church in the selection of its ministers and
their assignments to duty can be regarded as of political moment
or as proper subject of comment in the report of a public officer.
In the pacification of the Phillipines, however, it is impossible to ignore
the very great part which such a question plays. Except the Moros
and the wild tribes, the Philippine people belong to the Roman
Catholic Church. The total of the Catholic souls shown by church
registers in 1898 was six millions five hundred and fifty-nine thou-
sand nine hundred."

The distinction drawn between the American Government ''with
us" and "in the Philippines" is very significant. It is emphasized
by the explanation that the Filipino people are not entitled to the
same non-interference with their religion as "with us," because "they
are all Catholics." Does the Judge hold Catholics specially liable
to have the selection of their priests considered of political moment
and proper subject of comment by public officers, while such inter-
ference is unimaginable in the case of any other religion ? It might
be recalled, too, that the non-interference of Congress or Govern-

The Work of the Philippine Commission. 633

ment in such matters is not merely a matter of ordinary custom,
"but distinctly prohibited by the Constitution which he and his supe-
riors are sworn to maintain. We proceed to the further statement of
the particular case in Judge Taft's words :

''By the revolutions of 1896 and 1898 against Spain all the Domin-
icans, Augustinians, Recollects and Franciscans acting as parish
priests were driven to take refuge in Manila. Forty were killed
and four hundred and three imprisoned and not released until, by
the advance of the American troops, it became impossible for the in-
surgents to hold them. Of the 1,124 in the islands in 1896 but 474
remain. The remainder zvere either killed or died, returned to Spain
or zvent to China or South America. The burning question which
strongly agitates the people of the Philippines is whether the mem-
"bers of four orders shall return to the parishes from which they were
driven by the revolutionists. . . . The commissioner to whom
the subject was assigned (Taft) was enabled, by the courtesy of
Archbishop Chapelle, to take the statements of the Archbishop of
Manila, the Bishops of Vigan and Jaro and of the provincials of all
the orders resident in Manila. The questions asked covered all the
charges which have been made against the friars, the feeling of the
people towards them, the extent of their property and the possibility
(sic) of their return to their parishes. Other witnesses, Philippine
laymen, army officers, American Catholic priests and newspaper
correspondents, were examined in great numbers, though all their
statements could not be reduced to writing.''

One notes as peculiar in a judicial investigation that while the
claimants of the friars' rights are all definite persons and described
by Judge Taft as "all educated gentlemen of high moral standards,"
the other "witnesses'' are all anonymous. Of the four classes called,
three could have no personal knowledge of any facts relating to the
relations of the friars with their parishioners before their violent
expulsion or to their characters. They could give nothing but hear-
say gossip on these subjects, and even this the Judge did not deem
it needful to have written down. As to the qualifications of "Phil-
ippine laymen" in that quality alone, to give trustworthy evidence, it
would seem to need some further explanation with six and a half
millions of persons entitled to the name. Of the Filipinos connected
with the American civil service, the report says, at page 20, "the per-
centage who can be trusted to handle public money or exercise con-
trol over their fellow-residents without peculation is comparatively
small.'' Of the people at large it says, two pages earlier: "The
difficulty they have in communicating with the Americans because
of a want of knowledge of their language, character or customs
would tend to make them silent in any event, and when this is ac-

634 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

companied by the very present prospect of being abducted, boloed
(sic) or tortured, it is not remarkable that the insurgents are able to
assume the role of amigos (friends) when pressed." It would add to
the value of the unwritten statements of the numerous Philippine
laymen if we knew whether they belonged to the class that cannot be
trusted to handle public money or to the much larger one which
dare not speak truth through fear of assassination by the very revolu-
tionists who had expelled the friars and murdered so many of them.
How could even a Judge know under the circumstances how far the
matter at stake was really a burning question among a people whom
his Commission describes as absolutely terrorized? What "army
officers" would have to say in the matter as their opinion passes
comprehension. Of the class described as American Catholic
priests, there were not over four, we believe, in Manila, and at page
i6, speaking of the evidence of one of them on another point, the
Commission thinks it ''probably erroneous." No oaths were admin-
istered in any case, nor, as it would appear later, was any attempt
made to compare the statements made, largely in language foreign
to the Judge, with public documents in possession of the Commis-
sion. The naivete of a Judge when applied to for permission to
return to certain places gravely asking the general public whether
it was possible to return is remarkable in legal practice. We freely
assert that no similar trial of the rights of several hundred clergymen
to exercise the functions of their office, as secured to them by the
national honor, can be found in the history of civilized nations.
Judge Taft's own description of it when he calmly says, **We have
attempted without bias to reach a conclusion as to the truth and
shall now state it," hardly commands the belief of fair-minded men.

Having described the case to be tried and the methods adopted
for its examination, the Judge goes on to give Secretary Root, and
through him, Congress and the American people his own judgment
on the friars. The case placed before him as ruler of the islands
was, in fact, a demand on the part of the latter for the right to return
to their parishes, of which they had been arbitrarily deprived by the
Military Governor. The Judge gave no decision, which practically
left the applicants without their rights. By way of compensation
he has laid before Mr. Root the conclusions formed by himself on
the expediency of getting them out of the Philippines either by
threats or promises. Of their undoubted right to remain under the
treaty, the only mention anywhere made is this : "If the friars return
to their parishes, though only under the same police protection
which the American Government is bound to extend to any other
Spanish subjects commorant (sic) in the islands, the people will re-
gard it as the act of the Government. It is likely to have the same

The Work of the Philippine Commission. 635

effect on them that the return of General Weyler as Governor of Cuba
under an American commission would have had on the people of that
island." This what Mr. Taft considers stating the truth without
bias most men will regard as a specimen of partisan special pleading
of a peculiarly low kind.

The inconvenient treaty rights of the friars having been thus dis-
missed, the Judge goes on to give the opinions he has formed from
his numerous informants. The only authority, besides his own,
given for them is a statement said to be by the Franciscan provin-
cial, but which, on the face of it, has been wilfully or ignorantly gar-
bled into nonsense. Perhaps we should add the novel of Dr. Rizal
of some years ago, which is gravely quoted as evidence, though we
venture to say it has not been read by the man who quotes it.
The Spanish friars having asked the Commission as official Ameri-
can authority for the rights guaranteed them by the American Gov-
ernment, the head of the Commission sees fit to give to the Secretary
of War his own opinion of Spanish friars in general. It is, of course,
drawn from hearsay entirely of the ''witnesses" just described, offic-
ers, correspondents, etc.

The friar, as a parish priest, was usually the only man of intelli-
gence and education who knew the native dialect and the Spanish
language well in his parish. His position as spiritual guide of the
people necessarily led to his acting as intermediary between them
and the rest of the world in secular matters. At first actually, and
afterwards by law, he came to discharge many civil functions and to
supervise or veto everything which was done in the pueblo which
was his parish. The provincial of the Franciscans describes his civil
functions as follows :

He was inspector of primary schools, president of the Health
Board and Board of Charities, of the Board of Urban Taxation, In-
spector of Taxation, president of the Board of Public Works. He
was president of the Board of Statistics. It was against the will of
the priest to do this, but he could only do as he was told. They did
not have civil registration here, and so they had to depend on the
books of the parish. These books were sent in for the cedula taxa-
tion (income tax), but were not received by the authorities unless
vised by the priest.

He was president of the census taking of the town. He had to be
present by law when there were municipal elections. Very often he
did not want to go, but the people would come to him and say:
"Come, for there will be disturbances, and you will settle many diffi-
culties." He was censor of the municipal budgets, president of the
Prison Board and inspector of the food provided for the prisoners.
He was a member of the Provincial Board. Before it came all mat-

636 American Catholic Quarterly Reviezv.

ters relating to public works. He was also member of the board for
partitioning crown lands. After the land was surveyed and divided
and a man wanted to sell his land he would present his certificate
and the board would decide whether or not he was the owner. He
was also counsellor for the municipal body when it met. The priest
was supervisor of election of the police force. He was the censor of
plays, comedies and dramas in the native language, deciding whether
they were conformable to law and morality. These plays were acted
at the popular fiestas. Besides there were other small things which
devolved on the priest.

Judge Taft concludes confidently: "It is easy to see from this
that the priest was not only the spiritual guide, but in every sense
the municipal ruler." He goes on to heighten the picture so worked
up from the words of the unsuspecting Spanish provincial : "To
the Filipino the government in these islands under Spain was the
government of the friars. Every abuse of the many which led to
the revolutions of 1896 and 1898 was charged by the people to the
friars. Whether they were in fact to blame is, perhaps, aside from
our purpose, but it cannot admit of contradiction that the autocratic
power which each friar curate exercised over the people and civil
officials gave them a most plausible ground for belief that nothing
of injustice, of cruelty, of oppression was imposed on them for which
the friars were not directly responsible. The revolutions against
Spain's authority began as movements against the friars. Such was
the tendency of Rizal's chief work, the novel 'Noli me Tangere.' The
treaty of Biacnabato, which ended the first revolution, is said to have
contained the condition that the friars should be expelled. In the
second revolution (Aguinaldo's) at least forty friars were killed and
over four hundred imprisoned. In view of these circumstances the
statement of the Bishops and friars that the mass of the population
are friendly to them, except only a few leading men in each town
and the native clergy, cannot be accepted as accurate. All the evi-
dence derived from every source" (tapped by Judge Taft), "except
the friars, shows that the feeling of hatred for them is well nigh uni-
versal and permeates all classes."

Let us examine these assertions to see how far Judge Taft's judg-
ment deserves to be regarded as a truthful statement of facts. It
was probably true that the friar parish priests were usually the most
intelligent persons in their parishes, and as such extensively con-
sulted in the worldly concerns of the natives whom their predecessors
had civilized. This will hardly be held a crime deserving expulsion.
The good Franciscan provincial apparently tried to explain this state
of things to the man whom he regarded as the friendly and conscien-
tious representative of American rule. The grotesque garbling of

The Work of the Philippine Commission. 637

liis words which Mr. Taft presents to the American public speaks its
falsehood in terms plain to any comprehension. Does he really
believe that the Tagal and Visaya villages were equipped with the
Boards of Health, charities, prisons, statistics, census, local police,
crown lands, general taxation, urban taxation, police and elections,
with the presidency of which he tells us the terrible friar priests were
universally invested ? If there were no such boards, and a glance at
the Spanish records under his hand would show him they had no
existence, why does he not say so when pretending to give the testi-
mony of the Franciscan provincial ? As a matter of fact, the official
position of the parish priest was simply that of a member of the local
village council. In the sketch of the Spanish administration by
Chief Justice Arrelano, which forms a part of the report, we are told
at page 231 that the local chiefs, known as Gobernadorcillos, as-
sumed the exercise of both executive and judicial functions within
their sphere of action. If Judge Taft had desired information on
the accuracy of the wonderful Pooh Bah functions which he says the
Franciscan provincial laid before him, could he not have applied for
information to the learned Justice. If there was no civil regulation
and no police force, what would be the functions of Boards of Sta-
tistics, Census and Police ? The urban taxation of the whole archi-
pelago, the report tells, reached only a hundred and forty thousand
dollars, nearly all paid in three cities. What would boards for col-
lecting it have to do among Indian huts? These questions would
occur to any man of sense. They either did not occur to Judge
Taft or he preferred not to make them that he might build up an in-
dictment of autocratic powers against the friars on false evidence.
If these had no existence, there would be no plausibility in the belief
that the friars were responsible for everything of injustice, of cruelty
and oppression that a lurid imagination could suggest and which the
unbiased Judge cautiously hints are good reason for violation of the
treaty obligations of the United States.

Strong as this language seems, it is scarcely as strong as deserved.
When a Judge tells us that a treaty made five years ago *'is said" to
have promised to expel the friars, why does he not find whether it
exists or not? He confidently declares that the murder of forty
friars and the expulsion of the others by the violence of Aguinaldo's
revolutionary following proves conclusively, against the statement
of the friars themselves, that the mass of the people cannot be friendly
to them and that hatred to the friars is well nigh universal. The
same Judge on page 17 explains why murders of police officers in
the American service are no proof of ill will to the American govern-
ment. He says in this case :

"From all the information we can get it seems clear that a great

638 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

majority of the people are for peace and willing to accept the estab-
lishment of a government under the supremacy of the United States.
They are, however, restrained by fear from taking action to assist in
the suppression of the insurrection, which has for its indispensable
support a conspiracy of murder. Any one suspected of giving in-
formation to the Americans is immediately marked for assassination.
The ramifications of the conspiracy are so wide that it has effected
the terrorism of an entire people. It is a Mafia on a very large
scale." Page 17.

Judge Taft within thirteen pages asks us to believe this as the ex-
planation of native hostility to x\mericans and scouts it as unworthy
of credence when made by the whole body of Catholic Bishops and
provincials as the explanation of the hostility to the friars. The
insurgents now in arms are precisely the same organization that
murdered forty friars and imprisoned four hundred in 1898. Does
a Mafia cease to be criminal when its victims are unarmed priests
whose crime is that they were usually the only men of intelligence
and education in the native villages ?

We must come to the conclusions drawn by the Chief Commis-
sioner from the evidence just examined. He says : "We are con-
vinced that the return of the friars to their parishes will lead to law-
less violence and murder, and that the people will charge the course
taken to the American Government, thus turning against it the
resentment felt towards the friars. We earnestly hope that those
who control the policy of the Catholic Church in these islands will
see that, it would be most unfortunate for the Philippine Islands
for the Catholic Church and for the American Government to send
back the friars. The question for the prelate and statesman is not
whether the bitter feeling towards the friars is justified or not, but
whether it exists. It does not seem to us, therefore, to aid in reach-
ing a conclusion to point out that all the civilization found in the Phil-
ippines is due to the friars. Be it so. Ought they, on this account,
to return to their parishes in the face of deep popular feeling against
them ? It is enough to say the political question will be eliminated if
the friars are not sent back."

What political question the Judge means is not clear. He can
hardly mean the whole opposition of the people to the American
rule, though most readers will so take it. That opposition has been
conducted, he tells us, by a "Mafia on a large scale," directed by the
same parties who murdered or drove away the friars. If he means
nothing but the political question of providing the same police pro-
tection for the friars as for other residents, it may certainly be true ;
but that means no more than saying if there were no friars to deal
with it would not be necessary to deal with them. The higher po-

The Work of the Philippine Commission. 639

litical question, whether the United States Government can honor-
ably break its solemn treaty obligations, will remain still and cannot
be evaded.

It is evident that the Commission is most anxious to deport all the
friars, if it possibly can, as Captain Leary deported the Franciscans
from Guam a few months ago. The Protestant prejudices of the
Commissioners, which in the case of Mr. Worcester are shown suffi-
ciently in his book and in Judge Taft's by his report, may keep them
from seeing the consequences involved, but to any intelligent Cath-
olic or clear-sighted impartial man they must be obvious. The ex-
pulsion of the Spanish friars means that five millions of Filipino
Catholics must be left without priests, sacraments or religious in-
struction for at least a generation. There are less than seven hun-
dred native priests for seven millions of a Catholic population, and
there are no other priests, either American or European, familiar
with Filipino language or customs except these friars. They and
they alone have given the people the civilization it possesses, as
Judge Taft himself admits. They possess seminaries, formed on the
experience of ten generations, for training a clergy to the special
needs of this body of Asiatic Christians which in many points has
nothing similar to it in the world outside. The people, as he also
admits, love the Catholic Church. Indeed, he doubts whether there
is any country in the world in which the people have a more pro-
found attachment for their church. It "is and ought to continue a
prominent factor in the life, peace, contentment and progress of the
Filipino people. As to use of intoxicating liquors, drunkenness and
disorder, Manila's -condition is better than any American city of the
same size." This is Judge Taft's testimony to the result of the moral
teaching of the men whom he is so anxious to expel lest the United
States Government should incur the resentment of the people. His
own deduction from it is an unconscious piece of humor worthy of
Dogberry itself. 'The depth of their feeling against the friars (as
gathered from army officers, newspaper correspondents and hostile
natives) may be measured by the fact that it exists against those
who until two years ago administered the sacraments of the Church
upon which they feel so great a dependence and for which they have
so profound a respect." Might not the feeling be accounted for by
"the terrorism of an entire people" which he also finds existing when
explaining the duration of the war against American rule? From
whom but the friars have they learned this profound respect for the
Church ?

The elaborate plan imposing a compulsory school system moulded
on "non-sectarian" lines on the Catholics of the islands gives further
reason to believe that the rooting out of the Catholic religion is a

640 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

prominent object with the Commission. Mr. Moses, who, we are
informed, is a Swede and famiUar with the system of intolerance of
CathoHcs still prevailing in Sweden, has been charged with the
task of providing schools for the people whom Judge Taft would
leave without priests. As a help this foreign pedagogue has been
allowed to regulate the whole system of taxation, as if schools of a
new pattern were the central principle of administration. A land
tax is to be imposed to meet the general public wants. Twenty-five
cents on the dollar is made imperative on the native villages when-
ever they shall receive the municipal rights which they have hitherto-
enjoyed under the oppressive Spanish Government. That sum has
to be handed over to the School Commissioners, who, by the plan
of Mr. Moses, are to be wholly independent of local control and, in
fact, to be wholly Americans as far as the higher posts are con-
cerned. It is significant that while in the organization of the first
province established by the Commission the election of ''ecclesi-
astics" by the people is prohibited, we learn by California papers
that a newly ordained Baptist minister, the Rev. Mr. Brink, has been
invited to "take charge of the public schools of one of the large
islands." The reverend gentleman's only qualification, as far as
known, consists in his being a Baptist clergyman. His case is but
one of others already spoken of in the press. The report mentions
that ''General Otis wished military officers to open as many schools
as possible, and that several of the district commanders appointed
officers to act as superintendents of schools. Among these are
several army chaplains. To put Protestant ministers in the place of
Catholic friars seems the dream of Judge Taft.

How far the ideas go of the professor who has been suddenly
called to mould the whole education of the Filipinos may be gath-
ered from his own words :

**Under Spanish rule there was established a system of primary
schools. In these reading, writing, sacred history and the catechism
were taught, the four arithmetical processes were attempted, and in
a few towns a book of geography was used as a reading book.
Girls were taught embroidery and needlework. In the typical pro-
vincial school at first a religious primer was used in the native lan-
guage, and later a book on Christian doctrine was taught. The
text-books were crude and provided a large amount of religious instruc-
tion. It has been stated there were in the islands 2,167 public
schools. The ineifectiveness of these schools will be seen when it is
remembered that school under the Spanish regime was a strictly-
sectarian ungraded school."

The propriety of this language in a wholly Catholic country- speak?
for itself. In the eye of Mr. Moses "religious instruction" is appar-

The Work of the Philippine Commission. 641

ently incompatible with effective teaching and Catholicity identical
with sectarianism.

His own scholastic methods, as told in the report, are, if not crude,
certainly remarkable. His chief authorities seem to be army officers.
He tells us that though the employment of soldiers as teachers has
not been always successful, and that the schools that have been estab-
lished by them are poor, still the ''commanding officers" are unani-
mous in urging English instruction and asking for English teachers.
One brilliant officer named Echols, a captain in the army, assured
him of a strange thing that "to teach English to the natives a knowl-
edge of Spanish or Tagal is not necessary." One involuntarily
thinks of the experience of young Primrose in the "Vicar of Wake-
. field" when he went to Holland to teach English and found some
acquaintance with Dutch indispensable. The remarkable officer,
however, declares that he himself at one time had charge of four
thousand American Indians with six boarding schools, and that not
a child could speak a word of English, and in three months they learned
it fairly well. And this was accomplished by teachers utterly un-
familiar with the native dialects. The captain's statement deserves
the verdict once passed on Gulliver's travels. Some things stated
in it go to the very bounds of credulity.

It seems to be accepted with implicit faith by good Professor
Moses, who went on to consult with "military officers, presidentes
and other" educational experts to ascertain the exact educational
situation and the general opinion as to the educational policy to be
pursued. It is sad to learn he discovered a "great diversity of opin-
ion," but anyhow he appointed a Dr. Atkinson general superin-
tendent of education and put out his own programme. "It is not
practical," he says, "to make the native languages the basis of in-
struction, for this would necessitate the translation of many texts into
the native dialects." Most of his authorities, the "commanding
officers," state that no instruction in native languages is desirable
and also that there is no need of perpetuating Spanish. This com-
fortable, if hardly practical, theory of educating a people in a lan-
guage unknown to them enables the professor to find a large field of
employment for teacher friends at home who would find a knowl-
edge of any tongue but their own a task beyond their powers. He
sums up :

"The system of instruction must be largely centralized. There
will be a general superintendent of education and as many assistant
superintendents as there are departments. There will be a system of
local advisory hoards.

"All schools must be free and unsectarian.

"The text-books and English teachers will have to be furnished to

Vol. XXVI.— 2.

642 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

municipalities by the insular government (the superintendent afore-
said).

"The present educational system will have to be modernized and
secularized and adapted to the needs of a people who have hitherto
been deprived of the opportunities of a rational education."

Though Professor Moses can accept Captain Echols' narrative
without scruple we learn he regards Catholic teaching as not rational!
His emphatic order, after six months in public ofBce, that Philippine
schools ''must be free and unsectarian" is suggestive of Kaiser
William's language to his soldiers. Yet the Commission is sup-
posed to be remodelHng the Filipinos on "American ideas." They
may be so in the sense that such ideas are entertained by some
American individuals as in former times they were by Burr and
Benedict Arnold, but not otherwise.

Any person familiar with the history of the English penal code and
the attempts made by some English politicians to draw the Irish
people from their faith by means of the public schools cannot but be
struck by their likeness to the methods suggested by Professor
Moses. The municipalities must have no voice in the matter and
the schools must be entirely controlled by the irresponsible agents of
the government at Washington. In like manner the national educa-
tion of Ireland was handed over in 1839 ^o the control of a Presby-
terian minister, and it was claimed as unparalleled liberality, after
the lapse of several years, that two nominal Catholics were allowed
places in a board of seven.

The exclusion of Catholic instruction from the Irish schools was
required, as it is by Mr. Moses in the Filipino schools. The ignoring
of the native languages might have been taken bodily from the Eng-
lish school legislation in Ireland. The Commission does not go
quite so far as to make it a felony for a Catholic to teach school, but
the spirit which describes Catholic schools is incapable of giving a
rational education is the same as that which moulded English legis-
lation. The will shown by the whole body to expel the only avail-
able Catholic priests as "Spanish friars" is. exactly parallel to the
policy which prohibited the landing of seminary priests or Jesuits in
British territory as treason. and which sent Campion and Southwell
to the gallows, "not as priests, but as traitors to the Queen's
majesty." In like manner Judge Taft dwells effusively on his re-
spect for Catholicity in America and praises the sagacity of the Cath-
olic Church authorities while he throws out his low appeals to popu-
lar prejudice here against the Philippine clergy as Spanish friars and
is not ashamed to drag in the name of General Weyler to help in the
misrepresentation. How far his professions in this respect merit
confidence may be judged by the garbled absurdities which he under-

spencer's Philosophy. 643

takes to pass on the American public as the words of the Franciscan
provincial. That should be a warning to all Catholics who may be
tempted to put faith in the professions of good will of Messrs. Taft,
Worcester and Moses. Indeed^ the nomination of the second
named, after the publication of his book, should be ample notice that
to the present administration hostility to Catholic priests and teach-
ings is sufficient qualification for office in the PhiHppines.

We may add as another parallel that the system which the Com-
mission favors has a close resemblance to that which the American
missionaries set up in Hawaii. Compulsory education on American
ideas, a civil service filled by foreigners on foreign tests of fitness,
the turning over the public lands to foreign capitalists and general
reprobation of the former laws and customs of the native people are
all conspicuous in the reports of the missionary agents to the Ameri-
can Board of Missions. They are all to be found in the report of the
Taft Commission to Congress. The missionary Constitution
makers had their way in Hawaii, and within seventy years the native
population has well nigh melted out of existence under their en-
lightened methods. Fathers Bachelot and Short were deported
from Hawaii in 1830, as Mr. Taft would like to deport the Spanish
friars from the Philippines to-day and as Captain Leary has already
done in Guam. How far does the experience of the Hawaiian peo-
ple justify the expectation that Judge Taft's Constitution will raise
the condition of the seven millions of the Filipino population ?
Catholics in America are certainly bound in duty to see that the
religious liberty of the Filipinos is not trampled under foot in the
name of American legislation. That the Commission has no scruples
about attempting the task seems abundantly evident from their own
report.

Bryan J. Clinch.

San iTrancisco, Cal.

SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY.

MR. SPENCER has undertaken to prove by what he calls the
Synthetic Philosophy a cosmical evolution embracing all
things but the Absolute Reality. The latter is the sole
reality; all other existences are relative, not even contingent. We
fail to find a use for the Absolute Reality, for Mr. Spencer gives him
no place in morality ; he lies as a darkness on the face of the deep,
the negation of light, intelligence and power ; and yet he is the sum
of physical and mental phenomena. He is an eternal nothing, an

544 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

impotent omnipotence, an infinite contradiction. Justly does Mr.
Spencer speak of him as "unknowable," for he is "unthinkable/'

We extract the five great issues which Mr. Spencer seeks to estab-
lish:

1. That there was no external agency in the change from matter
without motion to matter in motion; which is his first assumption
with regard to cosmical evolution.

2. That there was no external agency in the change from the in-
organic to the organic.

3. That there was no external agency in the change from the non-
sentient to the sentient.

4. That there was no external agency in evolving the highest con-
:sciousness from the lowest forms of animal life ;^ assuming that the
change was wrought by a process describable as evolution.

5. That all intellectual activities are expressible and solely ex-
pressible in terms of matter and motion as part of the universal
movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity.

We do not purpose expressing our own opinion on any of the
issues raised — that they include the whole philosophy of Mr. Spencer
no one can question — we shall, possibly, avoid the declaration of oUr
•opinion on the innumerable subordinate points which are employed
.as media of proof, make-weights to the media, or matters in con-
firmation of the issues — or, to put this last in another way, as sug-
gested verifications of the issues. Our course shall be to ascertain
whether he establishes the issues. If he fails in any one of them,
his theory has broken down. He gives this challenge when he
holds that consequences are not the test of a theory ; that the cohe-
rence and consistency of the thoughts is the standard by which a
system of philosophy is to be judged; that this is the measure of
truth where knowledge is conditioned as ours is to the merely rela-
tive, that is, where it is limited to the perception of relations and the
relations between relations.

To illustrate the method we are employing we take the last issue :
Thought is to be expressed in terms of matter and motion, if his
theory of evolution be true. His corrected formula of evolution is
that it comes about by "an integration of matter and concomitant
dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an in-
definite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity
and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel trans-
formation." Is this a law of intellectual activities ? Does it in any
way fit the facts from the stimulation of the nerve to the sensation
and thence to the record in consciousness of the landscape before
the eye ? Where is the integration of matter there and concomitant
1 He speaks of sub-vital organisms, but this is meaningless.

spencer's Philosophy. 645

dissipation of motion? Assuming that the nerve is stimulated by
the oscillation of molecules, how is their homogeneity converted
into the heterogeneity of the mental picture? We cannot conceive
it as an explanation at all of the fact that we have the reproduction
of the landscape in consciousness, and the belief that what is in the
consciousness corresponds with something external. Matter in the
formula of evolution is the vehicle of motion as in the initial change
at which evolution begins. If the law of evolution be correctly
stated, and if it be that mind and its processes are governed by that
law, a tune that starts various associations and the associations
themselves are the parallel transformation of the retained motion of
the vibrations proceeding from the piano or violin. We have no
connection between the performer's thought passing through the
instrument to the hearer's consciousness and evoking the latter's
sympathy with the other's tenderness, passion, art, expressing them-
selves by touches and muscular exertion. All that the touches and
the muscular activities could reveal — assuming bare consciousness
of them in performer and listener — would be some mode of resist-
ance to the first and a succession of identical sounds to the latter.
In other words, the sense of hearing would only convey homo-
geneity of sound plus difference of intensity in the impression on the
auditory nerve; while the performer could only connect the resist-
ance with a certain noise or a series of noises. Even to make this
possible an enormous assumption must be made — namely, the evolu-
tion from the unconscious to the conscious, from the non-vital to the
vital. If mind and its processes could be expressed in terms of mat-
ter and motion we must first assume a sort of consciousness — a re-
cording relation between the mind and the senses ; but it would still
appear that a whole series of assumptions should be made. We
should assume the vibration of molecules is convertible into the
power of ordering, shaping, creating, reviewing, judging, inferring,
commanding with authority, punishing with justice, and so on, by
some modification of motion — modifying nerve stimuli.^ The re-
tardation of motion generates heat, but how can it be converted into
the categorical imperative ? or how can intensified vibration of mole-
cules give us the idea of a God or a sense of the necessity of some
polity for the successful life of man? Matter and motion are the
sufficing terms to express all the activities of mind. We cannot
conceive the discovery of a mathematical truth in no way dependent
on laws of matter or motion as expressible in these terms. If there
were no matter, no motion, the three angles of a triangle would be
equal to two right angles. We cannot conceive a pure intelligence

2 We here allowed the assumption of consciousness of nerve stimuli to put Mr.
Spencer's formula in the fairest way for application.

5^6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

thinking of any relation but that of equahty between them. In the
demonstration leading to that conclusion man, who is not a pure
intelligence, has no conception of matter and of motion before him.
The imagination which conceives the weakness of Macbeth yielding
to temptation and the tragic terror of his remorse afterwards cannot
be described as an indefinite incoherent homogeneity passing to a
definite coherent heterogeneity by the transformation of one mode
of force into another, as, say, of heat into electricity. Mr. Spencer's
theory is a rigidly mechanical view^ of nature's processes in the
orders of mind and matter — and he is quite consistent, quite cohe-
rent in maintaining that mind can be expressed by the terms of a
mechanical force — but we require him to prove that it can be so ex-
pressed.

On his initial assumption there was a period when indefinite inco-
herent homogeneity was the only existence, the only fact. It is
very difficult to make out what he has in view. He assumes a
strictly limited homogeneity — he must do this if motion is after-
wards to appear on the scene — ^but though he rejects the notion of
eternal matter, we find the homogeneity not a blot on the azure, not
tendrils of "mind stuff" swaying in limpid depths indeed, but a some-
thing occupying space before anything began to bring about the
movement now progressing or retrogressing throughout what Mr.
Carlyle would call the infinities.

We must pause a moment to ask the ground for the assumptions
that matter is not eternal, that there is a vacuum. He asserts its
infinite divisibility; why not its infinite duration? The mind fails
to put a limit to its divisibility, he says; on the same principle it
must fail to put a limit on its duration. How can he assume on the
principle of infinite divisibility a limited extension? Motion must
have room ; therefore there are unoccupied spaces. This is hardly
sufficient, unless he confounds unresisting matter with solid bodies
— and this we think he does, for from solid body we derive the pri-
mordial and universal concept, which expresses all other concepts,
and which no other concept expresses — ^namely, resistance. Mr.
Huxley is too jaunty in approving of Mr. Spencer's conception of
evolution as not troubling the mind about theories of creation.
First, his hypothesis tries to evade a difficulty; surely that would
not be a solution. But does it evade the difficulty when it involves
him in assumptions more difficult to conceive than the "unthink-
able" positions of the creative theory ?

First Mr. Spencer posits matter; where does he get it? From

3 The theory of creation used to be described by the skeptics as a mechanical
system ; they meant artificial. Mr. Spencer compares the conception to a carpenter
fashioning his wood into a chair or table, that is, if there had been preexiatent
material.

spencer's Philosophy. 647

rather vague hints we judge it to be molecules in ether, but what-
ever it is, it is in a condition of unstable equilibrium. What held the
balance ? What, in the absence of force or motion, caused the mole-
cules to tremble like magnetic needles? These molecules are not
said to be animated, but there is a reference to the cell of embryol-
ogy. This inference may contain, if not all the potentialities of ter-
restrial life, a loophole for Mr. Spencer. The important point here,
however, is that the hypothesis demands a period of immobility,
that is, the period before change. Matter only existed, setting aside
the Absolute Reality; though there was no consciousness, he ex-
isted— eternity without a consciousness ! he is only an ornamental
excrescence, at this stage at least. He may in some future work of
this philosopher figure as a Deus ex machina, for Mr. Spencer is fer-
tile in expedients, but how matter in equilibrium got there is an-
other thing. It, and it alone, existed until "change" entered on the
scene. From that entrance we have the transforming process of the
indefinite, incoherent homogeneity into the earth and its living
things, the countless solar systems and into the activities now work-
ing changes, the universe towards completed progress, equilibra-
tion and dissolution. It must be understood that evolution means
all this.

It would certainly be more satisfactory if Mr. Spencer told us
what he means by the indefinite, incoherent homogeneity. He was
very angry with Mr. Kirkman and Professor Tait for their criticism
on the formula of evolution ; but these gentlemen could have been
spared his indignation. They did not hit the blot in the formula.
No doubt the words are pedantic, long-tailed, charlatanish words,
in our poor opinion ; but if they convey definite conceptions, what
more is to be said ?* Our complaint is not that the words are An-
glicized Greek and Latin ; we are tolerant ; we see such words every
day in quacks' advertisements, dentists' advertisements, barbers'
advertisements and the advertisements of the professors of such arts
generally. What we complain of is that the formula as it stands is
either nonsense or it rests on assumptions impossible of proof. We
said we would not give our own opinion, that is, that we would only
examine the validity of Mr. Spencer's positions. Well, then, in-
stead of "assumptions impossible of proof" let us say assumptions
that have not yet been proved or attempted to be proved.

We are reminded of the gambler's method of securing himself by
"hedging ;" he is pretty safe on either issue, of course, but he makes
his haul on one. No one has remarked that Mr. Spencer hedges on

* Mr. Spencer's style is a great instrument for all we say above. He has had
unparalleled influence on the thought of England, America and the Continent of
Europe. We may have to show how it aided the predisposition to scientific
atheism prevailing in progressive circles.

648 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the evolution formula coupled with the appeal to the differentiation
in the plasm as it evolves. If he be reminded that the early pro-
cesses of evolution were purely physical, and yet from these life
must have emerged, he can turn round and say : Look at my cell ;
look how it differentiates, becomes complex, as embryology shows
you. On the other hand, if he be charged with slyly assuming
animal vitality and a mind in matter conscious or unconscious,'^ he
raises his eyebrows, metaphorically, of course, smiles at your sim-
plicity which takes an illustration for a scientific theory. Verily,
the science men of this world are wiser in their generation, etc. !

The entire agnostic school insist that the hypothesis of evolution
must be taken as established in its widest sense. There are differ-
ences as to the recognition to be allowed to the linking of stages,
but the resolution of mind into a physiological phenomenon is
accepted. We want to have this last point proved. Mr. Spencer
makes us only a relation, not even a contingent being; we have no
existence except as a relation, that is, in relation to some other ex-
istence, namely, the Absolute Reality. We are an appearance, noth-
ing more; the Absolute Reality, without conscience or conscious-
ness, is the sole existence. But let him allow us a right to doubt
him, at least provisionally, though we may not claim to exist be-
cause we doubt. There are some differences in the school respect-
ing the method of "becoming,"® but these may be said to be matters
of det^iil. Still the details have their value. Do they not include
differences in the nature or the properties of that which "began to
become," the esse? At any rate, the doctrine of evolution applies
to all phenomena without exception, that is, to all mental as well
as physical phenomena.

Mr. Huxley sometimes plays the part of candid friend of evolu-
tion, but he can at times be very thoroughgoing. He was so in the
dialectical gymnastics exhibited when scornfully and savagely at-
tacking the opponents of the doctrine of evolution because they
argue, he said, for the most part from the etymology of the word.
It must be borne in mind that with Mr. Spencer we are dealing with
universal evolution. Darwin's cattle-breeding is not in the play at
all. Instead of unfolding, Mr. Huxley insists that Mr. Spencer's
interpretation of growing complexity is the true one. How does
that alter the case? Complexity is Mr. Spencer's shibboleth, cer-
tainly. Complexity is evolution and evolution is complexity; but
we have complexity followed by equilibrium, which is the highest
complexity, and this is to be succeeded by disintegration — a return
to simplicity or, in his own term, homogeneity. At all events,

5 We should not be surprised if the Absolute Reality were projected as a bait
to swallow the hypothesis of a world soul. Romanes took it, hook and all. « Feari.

spencer's Philosophy. 649

whether or not "unfolding" can take place, it is of the very essence
of the hypothesis to formulate continuity of growth. The popular-
ity of the doctrine was due to some extent to its promise of progress
to perfection, due to a larger extent to the moral irresponsibility it
implied. If greater complexity meant greater virtue in the social
body, and if the social body's interaction generated morality, the
many-sided, diplomatically-minded man was the righteous man.
Violate the ten commandments, but do so in a gentleman-like, well-
bred manner, or, as lago would say, put money in thy purse.

Continuity of growth must have been as distinctly in the mind of
the objectors assailed by Mr. Huxley as a process of unfolding.
Change would be open to objection as employed by Mr. Spencer —
for, after all, we are entitled on their own principles to look at suc-
cession of phenomena — but what we want is their proof that the
succession of phenomena, beginning with and including the
"change" from the indefinite homogeneity, can be explained by pliy-
sical laws alone. If this cannot be done, what is the value of the
hypothesis? The Synthetic Philosophy professes to accomplish
this. We shall see. One issue may be hurt already.

The keynote of Mr. Spencer's argument is the identity of all
mental processes. This is the burden of his Psychology. If he can
establish this thesis he considers he has advanced a great step to-
wards including mental phenomena in the Law of the Correlation of
Forces. He would still have to bridge the chasm between not-life
and life, but he is on his way to unification of the mental and physi-
cal orders. There is no difference, according to him, between an
impression on the senses not adverted to or hardly adverted to and
self-consciousness. He admits, no doubt, as we shall have to men-
tion later on, that there is "a vast difference" between the modes of
consciousness of an animal with a life apparently one remove from
vegetable life and the modes of consciousness in the higher organ-
isms ; but a sensation hardly awaking response is in its nature, he
says, the same as the highest exertion of what is called intellect.
The difference between the modes of consciousness in a rudimentary
organism and in ourselves would appear fatal to his theory. We
are not pressing that ; what we rather complain of is the confusion of
an issue. All mental life is identical; its processes vary in degree.
The suggestion is that sensations hardly noticed stand at the foot of
the expansion of the human mind and correspond with the modes
of consciousness of rudimentary organisms. The admission that
man's consciousness has fuller revelations than the actinia's, or of
some animal even more differentiated, though very low in the scale,
is unavoidable. If he said anything else he would make himself
ridiculous. The modes of man's consciousness are different from

650 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

those of the lower organism, but what we complain of is the issue
suggested— that a sensation hardly evoking a response in man is
identical with the consciousness or feeling of the rudimentary or-
ganism.

If there be no difference between impressions on the senses hardly
noticed and self-consciousness, between a feeling and the intuition
of a truth save in the intensity of the impressions and their persist-
ence, the result would bear an analogy to the difference in effect
between a single electric current and a number of currents from
different points simultaneously poured into the subject to be
charged. The physical character of processes of mind would be
suggested, though not proved ; still, when we know that there are
a large number of "progressive" readers who not alone have their
thinking done for them, but who flatter themselves that they are
doing some thinking on their own account when they detect an
implied analogy and mistake it for a proof, we can estimate the
utiHty of suggestion in the hands of such a master of rhetoric as
Mr. Spencer. It serves for argument.

For the present we shall content ourselves with pointing out that
a feeling, say, is not the same reproduction in consciousness as the
perception of a truth mediately or immediately, and with denying
that a combination of feelings, sensations and perceptions respond-
ing to never so many impressions can be described as a multifold
resultant of feelings, sensations, much less hardly attended-to im-
pressions. We shall also notice a curious obliviousness, yet even
this is apparently part of his method ; that while pretending to rise
from the hardly conscious action to be observed in the simpler forms
of life to the highest gradations of the human mind he forgets that
the attempt to show identity of nature and the terms employed in
showing it demonstrate differences more than in degree, even if
these were compatible with identity in his sense.^

We are not departing from our attitude of reserve in stating that
no one really says physical and mental phenomena are identical.
Mr. Spencer will go no farther than that they are subject to the
same law of evolution, and that mental phenomena are expressible
in terms of physical. But it is suggested all the time ; for what else
is the meaning of the attempt to account for the results in the case
of mental phenomena on the theory of increased vibration in the
molecules over the vibration of the molecules when the results are
set down as physical? Sentience in the molecules we pass over,
because it appears to be an explanatory consequence of the in-
creased vibration; in other words, an hypothesis for debate where

f He assails philosophical language as well as the ordinary use of language when
he finds a difficulty in words for his sleight-of-hand.

spencer's Philosophy. 651

silence will not do. At the same time it is not altogether to be lost
sight of, for it certainly is a confession of the weakness in the theory
of matter and motion accounting for mind.

But we pause to ask the question, is there any one whose opinion
is worth hearing who will say we can obtain the first genesis of mind
from the laws of physical evolution? Both Huxley and Tyndall
have very plainly declared that the mystery enveloping the dawn
of feeling in the simplest organism is as profound as the genesis of a
distinct sensation in the most developed. Now, Huxley says that
the first dawn of feeling in the simplest organism is a gap that evo-
lution has not bridged.

The difference in the mental processes of the two classes of or-
ganism must have struck this thinker as it seems to have struck
Mr. Spencer himself, but the first has received it frankly. The
mere instinct of self-preservation as directed to its prey in the case
of the rudimentary organism must be something different, we think,
from what has been observed perhaps in the lowest order of human
•experience. The movement of a low organism towards an object is
•something supremely different from the perception a savage has of
the thunder which causes him to prostrate himself to the spirit
'whose voice he thinks is in the sound. It may be urged that what
is in the mind of the savage is not a sense perception represented by
an idea, but a complex of consciousness ; that this complex consists
of many elements, each one of which is significant of a phase of evo-
lution in an order of its own and the whole the result of a history
■extending through innumerable reaches of time.

Such a rejoinder would be an evasion of the point. The point is
the identity of mental processes ; we can only see this by compari-
son. We think what is before the savage is the idea of a power
above him. The constituents of the idea is not the question, while
the thunder is but a bell calling him to worship, whether through
fear or gratitude. Assuming that the idea of a superior power was
generated through associations giving it the complex character of
•constituent elements, it may be doubted — Mr. Spencer himself
would doubt — that it could be resolved in the mind into its com-
ponents. The most he would admit of such an idea is that it could
l)e verbally analyzed, but unless he can show that such a complex of
associations, crystallized into one conception, can be attained by the
very lowest form of life, it appears to us he breaks down. Remem-
ber, we must begin with the dawn of feeling, and unless in an organ-
ism in which feeling only has dawned there is to be found a com-
plex of consciousness similar to what the lowest type of human life
is shown to be possessed of, there can be no such identity of mind as
that one must grow out of the other, evolve from the other, change

652 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

from the other by internal action. If there be such a thing as evo-
lution in Mr. Spencer's sense, it can only be arrested by equilibra-
tion ; but that is the middle stage between growth and dissolution,
between integration and disintegration. At this stage by his own
authority, and necessarily from the force of the words, the slightest
motion from outside disturbs the balance and then dissolution be-
gins. We wonder how low types of organism survived on this
theory.

We express no opinions of our own, but we might suggest one or
two points: If the law of mental and physical evolution be the
same, we should know by this time how mind resulted from the
antecedent action of physical laws ; we should be able to climb the
steps from the inorganic world to the vegetable order, from the
vegetable life to the animal life which seems as volitionless as the
very vegetable life, and we should finally have ascended from the
barely conscious creature to the consciousness of man.^ But this
does not exhaust the list of scientific subjects which should be clear
to us as household words; the puzzle of the most adventurous
materialists — how a nerve stimulus is converted into a sensation —
should be understood by us. Why should this conversion take
place ? and why the infinite succession of ideas so ordered, arranged,
combined that express themselves in all the facts of human life from
the intercourse of nations to the details of the humblest family?
Why should these take their start from repetitions of such stimuli ?®
For instance, though it may be inexplicable in words — as Mr.
Spencer and his school say it is — how motion is caused, we under-
stand that bodies communicate motion to each other. We all
understand that it is a force distinctly physical which produces the
change of place ; we have the power, the resistance and the resultant
in exact figures at our hands, but from the nerve to the sensation is
a mystery deeper than the grave. From the sense perception to
the world of imagination we can step along a path opening new
prospects to us, because we are in the same order of phenomena.

We are not undervaluing a single statement put forward by Mr.
Spencer ; we are confessing ourselves free from "bias ; but we require
reasonable grounds for accepting views which are a little startling
in themselves and their consequences. He objects to arguments
from consequences as unscientific in the case of social, moral and
political questions, and, as one might expect, he objects to argu-
ments drawn from the apparent incompatibility of certain revealed
doctrines with certain declarations said to be made by science. As
to the validity of objections from religious sources we could

8 We say "barely conscious" in the method of what Mr. Spencer calls "inverted
anthropomorphism" to give some notion of an animal life so remote from our ex-
periences of our own conscious life. » Start as distinguished from source.

spencer's Philosophy. 653

-■■■ ^^^-^

quote himself as a witness ; our statement seems hard to credit, but
we trust before we conclude that the reader shall find some strange
inconsistencies in this philosopher, and among them that religious
belief has an authority.

There is a point, however, that does not seem to have been taken
by any critic, or at least enforced. The great characteristic of the
positive school, and particularly that branch of it known as the
agnostic, is insistence on scientific methods. The theory must be
verified. If there be a law governing a class of phenomena, it must
be called in ; no other authority has a title to be heard. If it be an
hypothesis when it suits the purpose of the school, it must be re-
garded as a law. If it be a guess, though amongst themselves
science men will rate it at its value, the moment literary men, sci-
ence men who belong to the "churches," or men capable of esti-
mating the authority of statements in relation to the reasons for
accepting them attack it as a mere assumption or suggestion, then
all the science men rally round the flag, the guess becomes an
hypothesis on the point of verification, if not an established fact.
They form a close corporation, these men of science!

But to our point. The doctrine of the correlation of forces Is
called a law. We ask when was it established, when did it appear
that all forces were convertible ? It may be that they are, but this
has not yet been proved. Besides, we have always understood that
a law should not be applied to an area of phenomena not necessary
to it. Theories are not to be multiplied any more than unnecessary
beings. Conservation by energy is not necessary to the mind or to
mental phenomena. If there were no mind, the physical forces
could work as they do throughout the inorganic order. As far as
they are physical they could work in the organic world apart from
mental processes. It is confessed no science man knows what
mind is beyond the assumption that it is a function of the brain
which the matter threaded with nerves could do physically very
well without. If all physical forces must be convertible into other
forces, but not into psychological activities, to sustain the doctrine
of conservation of energy, there would seem on the scientific and
mechanical side reason for holding that mind and matter are two
totally distinct regions.^*^

There seems to be much solemn trifling in the opinions of Mr.
Spencer, and it would strike one as somewhat strange he could ex-
ercise such an influence on contemporary thought. His reputation
is due in part to learning and ability of no common order, to a

10 Mr. Spencer's argument from "the odor of the insane" and the experience of
the connection between mental and physical conditions is beside the matter in the
text.

654 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

boldness that strikes one as the very effluence of genius, a style the
quality of which baffles all description. Though indebted to every
one of his predecessors in English philosophy, he has infused into
the ideas taken from them that appearance of originality which
proceeds from energy of diction. He is a wizard at his spells ; his
style controls the reader like an incantation. He may carry the
latter to a Witch's Sabbath, he may transport him like Byron's
Cain over the wrecks of pre- Adamite worlds to the endless magni-
tudes revolving in space, but the reader feels at home in the orgy, is
confident on the wing of a potent spirit. Contrasting the labor
with which he is dragged through the morasses of Dr. Bain, he
revels in the desert speed of Spencer, ''not torrents more rapid and
more rash."

In common with the other Positivists he could claim a share in
the eclat arising from the results of physical discovery which so dis-
tinguish the nineteenth century. The changed conditions of life
could be pointed to as the vindication of a system which made the
senses the test of truth. These, improved by instruments, were
thought to unlock the secrets of nature. Well, they have increased
the number of facts concerning the relations of certain phenomena,
as Mr. Spencer himself would say, but did they shed a single ray on
any problem that has vexed man from the moment the mystery of
existence confronted him ? To the solution of these problems Mr.
Spencer has devoted himself; we shall ask himself what difficulty
has he removed ? what perplexity cleared up ?

At an early period he published what has been described as a
crude work full of youthful enthusiasm. This is his "Social Statics."
Twelve years later, namely, in 1862, he gave the world ''First Prin-
ciples," thenceforth he became a power with the English-speaking
world and the Continent of Europe. We have a prospectus of the
work he proposed to himself in carrying out his classification of the
sciences into a system of knowledge. Critics have pronounced the
classification illusory; they have said it was appropriated without
acknowledgment from Comte, that the best ideas were Comte's and
that he himself had fallen into the faults he criticized in Comte.
We think a scheme for the unification of knowledge reflects honor
on both men ; but we think, too, that the founders of the old univer-
sities of Europe, the schoolmen^ ^ and their patrons should be al-
lowed credit for their comprehensive views coordinating and subor-
dinating the sciences constituting the whole range of human knowl-
edge; we think Aristotle should not be forgotten for his encyclo-
paedic knowledge and his transcendent employment of it.

We hear of a reaction from Mr. Spencer's influence. We doubt

11 This is Professor Huxley's opinion, too, as we shall show later on.

spencer's Philosophy. 655

this, at least in any important sense. There is an interesting arti-
cle in the June number of the North American Review which would
seem one of the straws showing this direction of the wind/^ were it
not that the article in the place of honor, ''Anticipations ; an Experi-
ment in Prophecy," discusses an aspect of the social problem under
the dominion of ideas which look at human life with the calm
cruelty of Nature in her work of selection.

But apart from the two articles referred to, it may be admitted that
there is a disposition to limit the scope of Mr. Spencer's hypotheses.
From the very nature of his speculations this was to be expected.
Putting aside any question as to whether or how far he was in-
debted to Darwin, Mr. Spencer invited criticism by the plunge from
biological evolution to cosmical. His application of principles has
been disputed by his allies or disciples ; we do not say that their ob-
jections were invariably fortunate, though no doubt some were so,
as Mr. Huxley's statement that Mr. Spencer's conception of a
perfect gradation from purely physical to conscious life does not
help us in understanding the first genesis of mind from any law or
all the laws of physical evolution. From the opposite camp Mr.
Balfour's later work was pronounced an epoch-making one; but
though it aroused great interest not only among the friends of a
sound philosophy, but among those who thought as Mr. Spencer
thought, the empire of the latter is not weakened.

We fear there is no sign of this. A denial of conclusions here and
there he would sneer at as the carpings of "scholars' mates,"^^ or
of "litterateurs,"^* or the objections of "so-called scientists''^^ touch-
ing the fringes of profound questions. He is such an autocrat that,
as we have already hinted, he will not allow the test of consequences
in moral and social questions. It may be pointed out that his sys-
tem derives moral and social phenomena alike from mechanical
forces and thus subjects them to the test of verification. No, the
soundness of his views must be judged a priori. The theory is to
be judged by the consistency of the terms as though any good work
of imagination would not fulftl this test.^^

It has been very stupidly charged that the schoolmen tried to dis-
cover natural laws by the aid of the syllogism and without the aid of
observation. Mr. Spencer, an empiricist of the most pronounced
type, evolves from his inner consciousness social facts and the
competitive value of institutions, but he will not permit an objector
to appeal to that experience called history, to that which is to be
found in the practical business of government or to that in the

12 "Great Religions of the World." i3 So he described Lord Salisbury.
1* A North American Reviewer and Matthew Arnold, i^ Professor Tait^
16 It will be admitted that the consequences to which a theory leads are not
16 It will be admitted that the consequences to which a theory leads are not neces-
sarily a test, but in moral and social questions consequences may be the best test.

656 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

knowledge of local administrators and clergymen. He has not
been ridiculed for this as the schoolmen are for the use of the
syllogism attributed to them. He finds a constant principle in so-
ciety inherited from law-abiding human ancestors and, we judge,
from pre-human ancestors whose sweet reasonableness enabled
them to escape the red tooth and claw and be selected for the propa-
gation of their virtues to mankind. He has the answer of evolu-
tion, namely, that all is moving to perfection for the despairing dis-
ciple who, seeing how pitiless Nature really is, judges she must
go on pitilessly in the future as in the past. How is this? On
man's little planet progress onward and upward, while out in the in-
finites— homogeneity, balance and dissolution proceeding concur-
rently, a struggle of competing universes forever, systems dying and
renewing from end to end of space — or, on the other hand, a uni-
versal dissipation melting into aimless force while man's little planet
floats like an ark triumphantly in the azure.

That such a nightmare under the guise of scientific conceptions
should strangle those who like to be thought progressive people
would not disturb us overmuch, but the mischief is becoming more
deeply seated because going down to the lower strata of society.
In the meeting places of Scientific or Revolutionary Socialism Mr.
Spencer is the great figure. Marks and Engels interpret him ; Mr.
Robert Rives La Monte has his gospel in "Herbert Spencer's little
book. The Study of Sociology.' " Whether he intended it or not,
Mr. Spencer, by weaving together into one work of world-wide
evolution religion, society and inorganic change, has captured the
tremendous discontent which in Germany used to be the inheritance
of the scholar, a discontent now going down to the worker without
the scholar's unselfish ideals. This is a peculiarity of the German
mind. The students who were afterwards to become professors
dreamt dreams of personal, philosophical, political and social en-
vironments with which they were at war. Goethe's "Faust" is rep-
resentative as well as ideal. Though no frenzy of political or social
ideas burns in him, he is perplexed by deep problems from which
he seeks escape in the Lethe of sensual passion. It is not difficult
to guess the influence of wild aspirations, imbedded in the stream of
German story, giving fire and energy to illusions. Faust is not only
the embodiment of that craving for knowledge beyond the horizon
of life which is a property of mankind when unsettled in belief, but
he expresses the hatred of naked hands beating against the bars of
power and the infinite hope of generous youth that it can accom-
plish all it aims at. These were the hidden sources of many of the
currents in that great and seldom realized creation. But not the
Germans only, but the French and the Italians have surrendered

Spencer's Philosophy. 657

to the sway of Mr. Spencer; these the most logical peoples of Eu-
rope have put him in the pantheon of high philosophy.

We think it is time, therefore, that his philosophy should be
severely examined as the stronghold of the secular or anti-Christian
spirit of our age. We say this, of course, in no hostility to science.
He himself admits a modus vivendi as possible between what he calls
these two great orders of human activity,^^ namely, religion and
science. But in any case Mr. Spencer's philosophy can hardly be
called the science of the relations between the subject and the object ;
yet this is what philosophy really is, as distinguished from the
sciences of the subject and the sciences of the object. If he be
criticized, science or philosophy is not therefore criticized. It occurs
to us we have to some extent obtained from him admissions of failure
in constructing a philosophy of the universe in which, by his system,
both subject and object are intended to be united in their relations,
that is, that his philosophy is no true philosophy.

Catholics, we apprehend, look at certain mtellectual performances
with the indiflference with which they regard those religious or
socio-religious aberrations which appear and disappear in the march
of life. This mood will no longer answer. Men recognize the
Church as the great power for order because she is the asserter of
inviolable morality, and they like to know the secret of her influence
in terms which may satisfy the exacting demands of the critical in-
tellect. Our opponents have possession of the reading public. We
are out in the cold. The Church is among our opponents, but she
is not understood. They see that all Catholics are not ignorant
and that some of the most educated are the staunchest believers.
These very readers of the publications of science men have got rid
of his Satanic majesty, so the activity of that potentate cannot ac-
count for intelligent Catholics being loyal ones. As long as it was
believed by Protestants that the devil could promote morality as
well as work miracles of mercy with infinite sweetness, sympathy
and solicitude, there was no need to seek farther for Catholic good
works. But Satan or any other infernal power is no longer in
existence to be divided against himself. Science men have dis-
missed him from the stage ; so the wonderful beauty and life of the
Church must be otherwise explained, and they seek that explana-
tion. Galileo's palatial prison is a fact, but intelligent CathoHcs love
their Church. The Spanish Inquisition was a fact, but that Church
abounds in inexhaustible treasures of charity and sacrifice for others.
Looking at the matter in this way, decent outsiders might be con-

17 We are reminded here of a blot in Mr, Balfour's practical conclusion in his
"Defense of Philosophic Doubt." He feels ihe need both of religion and science.
This is as bad as the temporary equality Spencer gives them; with the latter reli-
gion is deposed like Lepidus between Octavius and Antony.

Vol. XXVL— 3.

658 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ceived as big D-ing the Inquisition, Galileo, Bruno, bloody Mary
as nuisances, or regarding them with the contempt with which Mr.
Weller, we think, spoke of the lion, the unicorn and the arms of the
crown as a collection of fabulous animals.

A good-humored indifference will no longer serve if Catholics are
desirous of doing their duty, for there is a non-Christian generation
rising. Mr. Gladdens' statistics^® are encouraging, but outside
the Church there is a deplorable tendency to rationalism with which
the instinct of religion or, more accurately, the religious sentiment
is struggling, but hopelessly struggling, when a cultivated Natural-
ism plays the apologist of interest and passion. To this we have
in addition the dogmatic pretensions of pseudo-science, accepted as
true science, scoffing at the claims of the Church to speak as the
voice of God. It will be necessary to give some instances of the
dogmatic intolerance on the part of representative scientific men —
not mere amateurs or dabblers, for these, as one would expect,
hardly if ever possess the modesty of knowledge^® or of the con-
sciousness of their limits — we mean representative men like Mr.
Huxley and Mr. Clifford, of real power in the scientific world as
dogmatically intolerant.

The Church has not made the attack on science, not in a single
instance. We care not how this statement may be received, we
stand over it; but men of science, notably in France during the
eighteenth century, in Germany during the nineteenth century,
went out of their way to attack the Church, the latter finally widen-
ing the line of battle to include all religion. England hardly counts,
for her opposition was purely political, except during the brief rule
of the revolutionary sects of all kinds that sprang from Puritanism.
These Puritan infidels hated the Church with the honesty of an in-
tense passion and a profound ignorance.

It is a little too much of lupus in fabula to talk of the despotism
of the Church and thence by transition to speak of the opposition of
religion to science, while "priestcraft," "clericalism," "tyranny over
thought," "bigotry," "hostility to progress," "love of power" are
among the amenities of science. We dismiss this point for the
present and proceed with our advice that a war should be at once
begun against false science. We say that the campaign should be
opened by an analysis of Mr. Spencer's system of knowledge, and
opened in this way. A man versed in the scholastic philosophy
should lay hold of his psychology and whatever may be called his
ethics.

18 "Great Religions of the World." i» The late Lord Rosse, if he may be
called an amateur, Avas one of the most modest of men in estimate of his attain-
ments. The present, a fellow-student of the writer, is totally devoid of conceit,
though he knows more than many a professor.

spencers Philosophy. 659

This phrase "whatever may be called his ethics" means more
than perhaps meets the ear. His ethics turns up in his social the-
ories as his sociology confronts you in his ethics. The attempt is to
make the problem of both the same; both are evolutionary. This
must be admitted by Mr. Spencer himself. We are not offering an
opinion of our own ; if we w^ere doing so it might be that his ethics
and sociology are to be the new guide to conduct, the authority to
replace morality and religion. In pursuance of the line of attack
a specialist in biology who is at the same time well read in the his-
tory of institutions should contribute his help to this part of the
work. In dealing with his views of social forms and the origin and
nature of morals the various branches of anthropology should be
brought into requisition. There are some excellent suggestions in
Abbe Hogan's "Clerical Studies" which the reader can interpret for
himself in a manner that will more clearly express our views than
we have the power to convey them. The difference is only in the
direct employment of the suggestions. The Abbe does not refer
to Mr. Spencer — that would be no part of the office he undertook —
and his apologetics is of the parry, ours is of the thrust.

It is obvious from what we have been saying about this part of
the Synthetic Philosophy that an intimate acquaintance should be
had with the policies that have appeared in action and those that
have been formulated by theorists. Although we have no confi-
dence in speculations proceeding from conceptions of the primitive
man and his relation to surroundings, what has been said on the
subject should be considered, if for no other reason, to take away an
excuse for retorting that the critic was ignorant of a material part
of the philosophical structure. If we dared to offer an opinion,
Mr. Spencer and his school talk nonsense when they go back to a
period antecedent to history to explain the origin of social institu-
tions. History in our meaning includes every trace man has left of
himself, though there is an insuperable difficulty in deciding as to
the comparative antiquity of traces. A cranoge community in Ire-
land, a lake village in Switzerland, a cave dwelling in England or
France might be contemporary with or subsequent to a politic em-
pire totally effaced by a later one at the cradle of the race, a pastoral
kingdom with all the highest elements of civilization blotted out by
an invasion long anterior to Hellenic settlements. That this diffi-
culty is on the surface ought to be clear from the speculations of
Biblical critics respecting Canaanite progress and its effect upon the
hordes that conquered the Canaanite, from the speculations sur-
rounding the origin of Rome and the inferences drawn from words
and religious ideas about the men who lived in Greece before the
Greeks. But, though on the surface, the difficulty will not be seen

66o American Catholic Quarterly Review,

by an intellectual pride that makes a science man a god unto him-
self. He beHeves his imagination is a witness.

Assuming that Mr. Spencer and all evolutionists in the moral
order back to Critias are right in saying man was at first a savage
of a lower type than a Bosjesman or an Australian black fellow,-**
what can they know about him except by a comparison with the
Australian black fellow or the Bosjesman? Yet they will not take
the trouble to learn all that either of this type of savage tells them.
If the assumption be sound, a comparison of savage tribes and peo-
ples should be exhaustively made, no matter where they are to be
found ; whatever earlier writers said on the subject should be criti-
cally but dispassionately considered. Is this what is done? It is
not. A preconceived theory is fortified by a few alleged facts from
travelers who neither knew the dialects of the tribes they visited
nor were capable of catching the meaning of their institutions and
customs. This is not all ; "facts" presented are arbitrarily selected.
This is a grave allegation ; we could prove it.

Our philosopher and the whole phenomenalist school go back to
a time the evidence of which they only infer from evolution and
report phenomena of life as though they were eye-witnesses. These
gentlemen who take all their data from experience give us the
conditions and circumstances of a period which only exists in their
imagination. They appear to have come across a few hunters wan-
'dering over large regions for their livelihood, preserved to that
moment by the selection of nature from her own forces, from strong
brutes and from the hostility of savages hunting like themselves.
How a few of these could have come together and have kept together
we are told — we shall deal with this tale by and by — but we have
them, nomads of the most simply animal type. We may concede,
but without prejudice to our right to withdraw the concession, that
they had some notion of government, some notion of authority and
obedience, however rudimentary. Later on one or two animals are
"domesticated" — the dog especially. They sleep amongst the
branches of trees — their arboreal habits are clearly traceable in the
hairs on the arms of their descendants in high places of Europe and
America to-day — the dogs watching at the foot of the trees over the
safety of their masters' families and the safety of the goats which
accompany the migrations.^^ Next we have settlements; agricul-
ture begins, the idea of property and the idea of religion emerge.
We shall have to look at this account of the origin of society and

20 Critias tells us that at first man was without law or order ( dracroe ) , a mere
brute (hepioici). He hits the blot on the theory of morals from society.
Laws having arisen, evil actions which no longer could be done openly continued
to be done in secret. We commend this to Mr. Spenceiand Mr. Leslie Stephen.
21 The goat must have been "domesticated" at an early period for the nurture
of th- infants. The women at this stage were warriors 'and hunters, doubtless.

spencer's Philosophy. 66 1

morals from another point of view, namely, when criticizing the
evolution of man from the highest anthropoid or purely animal stage.
But we repeat that the assumptions contained in the theoretical his-
tories of primitive man should be severely examined. The bare
hypothesis of a rise from the lowest condition of savage life may not
appear to be of much consequence one way or the other. We now
know that man is capable of guiding a great or high civilization, and
we know that he has progressed from a savage condition in Europe
to the semi-civilization of the middle ages, and has attained the place
we find him in to-day. Do we know all this ? Do we know all that
is contained in these assumptions ? There is first the rather import-
ant question whether man can emerge from a savage to a higher
stage without contact from outside, whether from barbarism even to
civilization without such contact; but besides these considerations,
important in their implications though they are, we find involved in
the evolutionary accounts of man and society a menace to religion
and to the principle that man is endowed with conscience as a funda-
mental law of his nature. We shall attempt to show this when say-
ing a few words about the nature of knowledge and the manner we
acquire what Mr. Spencer described as, perhaps, the larger part of
our knowledge.

The aim he had in view was to realize his conception of a universe
of phenomena — his own term would be a universe of relations. We
must translate into explicit terms his interpretation of its origin;"
and our translation is that matter, in molecules lifeless, invisible and
absolutely alike, existed until finally at the end of what must have
been a space of duration in comparison with which vast cycles are
nothing, motion as a sort of demiurge set the molecules in activity.
Mr. Spencer denies, apparently with reluctance, the hypothesis of
self-creation, but that does not free him from the burden of holding
that matter exists from all eternity and existed in the same condi-
tion until change began. We have said, at what must have been the
close of unbeginning cycles, motion comes in and sets things going.
There is no time, but immeasurable, absolutely measureless reaches
of duration before change began, because any point of time, however
far back, is definite and finite. But when we go backward from that
to the not beginning, there is no measurement possible. Some very
interesting questions spring from this aspect of Mr. Spencer's theory.
We regret we have no room for them in this paper, but one of such
questions would be the possibility of thinking of such a period with-
out a conscious intelligence existing through it. Mr.. Spencer only

22 It is absurd for Mr, Huxley to say Mr. Spencer kept aloof from a theory of
the origin of this universe. He posits matter in First Principles and tries to refute
the fact of creation out of nothing as an untenable hypothesis.

^2 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

gets out of this by a sort of harlequinade into the trap door of his
Absolute Reality.

We cannot be charged with unfairness in our translation, for we
are keeping to his text, but putting it into intelligible language.
We cannot too often insist that the units of matter must have been
alike before the appearance of the demiurge. Where did he come
from? We are not calling him motion now; we insist on calling
him a spirit of intelligence and will. He must have been there be-
fore or have been created. By whom ? The Absolute Reality is not
even the shadow of a shade ; at most he is the ghost of words phos-
phorescing unthinkable attributes like dead lights on a grave. Then
by whom was the demiurge or sub-creator rtiotion created? He
was endowed with more than gnostic aeons possessed of power ; for
if the units of matter were of one size, weight, solidity altogether
one and the same, motion, by converting them into the infinite
shapes of nature and infusing into so many of these shapes all that
life expresses, was a spirit of no mean order. In this way we have
read Mr. Spencer's account of the process which theists call crea-
tion.23

The "fulness as yet unrealized" spoken of in the foot-note is an
implication contained in the prophetical hypothesis of perfection that
all things were evolved for man. When First Principles tells us
this, we are reminded of the excellent wit employed in laughing at
the old Christian and the ancient Hebrew view of God's relation to
His people. Every reader will remember that the handiest objection
of Rationalistic friends to so many of the great truths of Revelation
was that no one could conceive such a theory of relations as would
make God a doting father and man the spoiled child of dotage. It
was absurd to suppose such a Being as God would create the uni-
verse for man. The history in Genesis meant that and nothing else.
The earth and s^a and air and all they contain were made for him ;
the sun, moon and stars to minister to him. The Great Creator con-
descended to watch over him, to be interested in his moods, his
changes from joy to grief, his affections, his passions, articulate or
inarticulate, the wild waywardness of his impotent rage, the desolat-
ing path when his power was commensurate with his anger, conde-
scended to rebuke and instruct him. All this we believe, but we
ask is it more ridiculous to believe this than that all nature was evolv-
ed to provide an unassailable dwelling place for the Spencerian man ?

23 An American disciple of Mr. Spencer unconsciously confirms this interpreta-
tion. We are not sure, though, that by drawing out his master's principles from
their folds he does not involve him in a reductio ad absurdum. He tells us "the
inorganic" does not exist "save as a reminder of a fulness as yet unrealized." The
fulness is to be realized by change, but change is the equivalent for organism and
organism "only exists in the subject." This stilted blundering implies a truth—
that with all his realism Spencer is a material idealist.

spencer's Philosophy. 663

It is unnecessary to say there are omissions, and not accidental
ones, from Mr. Spencer's data for his science of society and morals.
He has set the example of experimenting in statistics. We venture
to say, if sociology be a science, partial statistics are of very little
value. For departmental government they are important, but socio-
logy, if it be the science of society, must rise to the rank of a philos-
ophy; in other words, a synthesis of all the studies that deal with
man as a social animal. Truncated by its system as political econ-
omy had been when it aimed at so vast a conception, it went nearer
to realizing it than its recent supplanter. If we were to say that the
science of society is religion, we would be at once put down as a fool
or knave.

But what is Mr. Spencer when he gives an elaborate list of sub-
jects to be tabulated and gives no place to the present or past labors
of the Church in the work of social amelioration ? This is positive
knowledge. Does Positivism mean there are no facts cognizable
save those of experimental physics, the facts of animated nature, the
statistics of labor, the statistics of prisons? We can well under-
stand he was brought up with a prejudice against the Church. Sup-
pose in maturer years his love of truth would not permit him to
emancipate himself from such a prejudice as the opinion that from
the Pontificate of Leo X. she has been the enemy of progress ; he
could have taken that period as a starting point and gone back
century and century to the age of the Apostles.

With his rare power of dissection he could have separated the ele-
ments of social life, he could have gone to the hut of the serf, to the
castle of the baron, to the provincial parliament, to the municipal
corporation, to the palace of the King and the palace of the Bishop.
He could have seen the life of the trade guilds; he could have
learned the work done in the monastery. He could have observed
how the guilds regulated every detail of industry, settled every dis-
pute, and how commercial integrity was to the artisan a religion, as
unselfishness and honor were to the knight. He could have learned
that chastity became a realm of thought and life necessary as the
atmosphere one breathed ; so that it was fabled the wild and terrible
things of the forest were tame and gentle in the maiden's presence.

He could have seen how in the midst of tumult and disorder art
expressed itself as thougfh all that was best and noblest in human
nature found a voice. Great unselfishness went forth to the works
of architecture, sculpture, painting in mediaeval times. The me-
chanic cutting the stones for a cathedral, ay, or for a village church,
worked for eternity. The same spirit animated the architect whose
conception was to be the embodiment of an almost apocalyptic
vision. We need go no farther. We need not say what he could

664 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

have beheld of laborious, sympathetic, patient life in monasteries.
Hard study, endless copying, teaching were a part of silent unknown
lives ; so that he himself owes to the monks more than he does to the
far-off brute ancestors he is forever bringing on the scene as the
sources of intellect and virtue. He could mark the steps of progress
of the whole social universe of those days, difficult, no doubt, at
times, for violence and fraud ruled then as unconscionable contract
rules now — slow and faltering steps, but onward steps, bringing to
us here to-day that sense of honor, duty, courtesy, charity we
boast of.

The fact seems to be that it was easier for him, as it is for all who
think like him, to invent a system of morals and imagine a society
than to accept social institutions which owe their solid and enduring
qualities to Christian morals. We hear of the contrast furnished by
the unloveliness of the lives of so many Christians as compared with
the beauty of unbelievers' lives. We do not know ; we suggest what
Critias said about the evolution of morality. We, of course, recog-
nize externally a difference between a gentleman in his laboratory or
study and the toiler, in sordid surroundings, home from work that
gives no promise of a gracious day, or the semi-detached of the in-
dustrious class, those creatures never sufficiently employed and who
are drawn by temptations ever to a lower depth. Society is very
hard on them, very hard on those gravitating to the criminal classes,,
and of course on the criminal classes themselves as the great danger.
It might be worth considering whether society is not responsible,
whether or not she has been the cruel stepmother compelling them
to lie in ashes or eat the husks of swine. If religion can do anything
for them, she ought to be permitted and not sneered at by Mr. Leslie
Stephen ; if the priest can do anything for them he should not be
ostracized by Professor Clifford, treated as an enemy of the human
race. Who are these ? Who is Mr. Spencer that he should take it
on himself to mould the lives of men as he has tried to set the uni-
verse in motion? They will not recognize virtue as a law to the
individual, therefore they cannot recognize it as rising to a height
of heroism under the fosterage of religion. Yet there are men out-
side the Church, outside any church, who are ready to acknowledge
that Christianity has taken up the potentialities of such virtues as
forbearance, chastity, honesty, truthfulness, charity and that which
pagans called magnanimity and we the every-day virtue of forgive-
ness of injury, and nourished them into attributes which we may
without exaggeration describe as above humanity. The acknowl-
edgment of this would not do for the Naturalism of science ; there
was some generosity in the Naturalism of literature, but the man of
experiments has the soul of a charlatan ; he cannot give credit to a

spencers Philosophy. 665

rival. We should like to know how the contrast between the lives
of certain unbelievers and so many who profess to be Christians can
prove the theory of evolution, unless it be assumed that descent from
brute ancestry is a higher guarantee for virtue than the conviction
that the soul came from the hands of God.

That there is much to regret in the lives of Christians is true, but
take Christians and unbelievers of the same social rank and let us
then make comparison. For that matter, there is a depth of sin and
sorrow over human life which must move the reflecting mind more
profoundly than any feeling besides. The ambition of the states-
man, the soldier's love of glory, the poet's passion for fame are all
great incitements to exertion, but there is nothing in them that sinks
to the inner recesses of the heart ; they are a sort of nervous vanity
satisfied by effort. But to him who feels for the care and misery
around us, who knows that this is but a small part of the blight lying
over the range of man's existence now, and that the same experience
marked his path through all the ages since first his disobedient will
disturbed the universal harmony, there are but two gates out, despair
or belief that the evil is but a temporary one. Man brought the
evil on himself is so logical a view that it puzzles one to understand
how it is not received as readily as any of their hypotheses by men
of science. Aristotle was wise enough to see that, positing a uni-
verse, men judged badly in thinking that what struck them as evil
in their own poor little experience would not be found good in rela-
tion to the entire order of things. Mr. Spencer's era of perfection to
which this little planet is moving is not as satisfactory a theory as
that a continued consciousness when the lamp of life shall have gone
out will receive compensation for pain of mind and sickness of the
heart endured in patience here. Any other alternative would be a
thought more terrible than the oppression that makes the wise man
mad.

We come to the evolution of man. We ask for a little informa-
tion. Critias was thoroughgoing and precise. Man was a brute
until laws made him a hypocrite. This was the differentiation which
he seems to have transmitted to his descendants under the name of
diplomacy. But Mr. Spencer gives us the hazy hero who left a
rudely cut stone axe-head in a cave. We suppose his father was a
beast hardly distinguishable from himself in mind and body. This
must have been so. From the protoplasm upwards the differentia-
tions were minute. All forms of rudimentary life must have been
entered and gone through ; in the higher stages parallel develop-
ments began to take place perhaps. Nature favored a particular
family of anthropoids; this family went on improving by gradual
stages, or deteriorating into more graceful but less useful physical

666 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

qualities. Why did the arms shorten? This did not improve the
cHmbing powers, the catching powers, the powers of strangulation.
What necessity was there for standing or walking erect? The in-
fant does not begin that way ; it does not seem natural. What ad-
vantage were the looking-upward eyes which made the Greeks call
man avSpojTto?? Use-inheritance is Mr. Spencer's chief agent in
evolution, but this factor would stand in the way of every step of
what we mistake for progress. A differentiation survives if it be
useful to the animal ; but what of one that is not only useless, but an
embarrassment ?

We cannot get man on along that line ; we must try another.
If the anthropoid father were separated from the human son by a
mental line so fine, he should be moved by passions, cares, sorrows,
hopes with a keenness hardly less than his son's. He should have
his traditions about the intermediate stages through which the
family had passed to their rise in life ; and these would be verified by
seeing in the woods so many specimens in whom the tendency
towards human differentiation had been arrested. The "links"
would have then existed ; unfortunately they have disappeared since.
He would have done some little carving on fish bones or rocks, and
so preserved their counterfeit presentments. All the more devel-
oped animals have the rudiments of the vocal organs ; this last an-
thropoid at the door of humanity would have them only a shade less
than perfect, his less human ancestor only a degree inferior to his
own, and so on. So we could have evidence from tradition and art
of the days when the more remote ancestors swung from branches
by their tails, flung themselves from heights, hardly touching projec-
tions, and landed safely hundreds of feet below. The race was
clearly degenerating. Those remote ancestors would be made gods.
Perhaps the totems of primitive creeds and of modern savages are
survivals of such traditions, but distorted or confused in their physi-
ology by the disintegrating action of time or through the vanity of
professional historians or the fatal influence of priestcraft. On the
other hand, if the race were degenerating, and here we mean in rela-
tion to the energies directed to self-preservation, why should it have
survived tailless, talking, standing erect, walking on hind legs, sit-
ting down in the most uncomfortable manner and undertaking a
system of synthetic philosophy?

It must be borne in mind that in the evolution of the higher spe-
cies from less useful types there must have been spent a vast period
of time. Artificial selection is no criterion at all ; in the first place,
it is only employed on varieties ; in the second, every precaution is
taken against misses and indiscriminate pairing. Mr. Spencer was
so sensible of this that he adopted Lamark's theory of use-inherit-

spencer's Philosophy. 66y

ance, not merely to hasten the physiological side of the process, but
to account for the steps of mental and ethical evolution. That
theory is his sheet-anchor. Well, Weisman may be trusted to deal
with that factor. But even allowing use-inheritance, the time of
development must have been immense, for that agent would not
have the same control of the process, nor could it act as intelligently
as a cattle breeder or pigeon fancier. The gradation slight from
the lower to the higher — we are not dealing with pigeons or cattle ;
we are starting from monkeys and coming up to men — if at all con-
ceivable, should have taken a long time. We ask why are there no
traces of the steps ? The gradation of intelligence would be imper-
ceptible ; there should be traces wherever paleontology finds fossils
of extinct animals ; above all, wherever traces of man are found. We
cannot admit that there was a bridgeless chasm between the first
man and his brute father. There would be no appreciable difference
in their habits or affections ; the ties uniting them would be the same
as those between the son and his own family. Whatever consti-
tuted the difference between the man and the brute, it was not the in-
tervention of society, for if the man were capable of forming social
relations, his father was capable.

Mr. Spencer denies reason as a differentiating principle. The
differentiating fact is the size and substance of the brain. The rea-
soning faculty is only a developed memory aided by imagination.
The process we call reasoning is nothing more than the grasping of
associations recalled by present sense-perceptions or by an act of
memory purely volitional. Then there could have been no recog-
nizable difference between the anthropoid father and the human
son. Why call him a brute rather than his son? Critias was con-
sistent.

But suppose the brain became large and more fitted for higher
processes — Mr. Spencer does not allow thought, though he is for-
ever using the word unthinkable when displeased with an opinion —
a curious consequence might follow. Is it not the fact that as the
faculty we call reason becomes more highly developed it does so at
the expense of the more purely animal qualities? Or, to put it
another way, the development of mind is at the expense of body.
That is, that as mind develops the expending physical qualities of
strength, activity, hardiness and endurance, and the recuperating
ones of sleep, digestion, and so on, suffer, if not deterioration, a
transformation less adapted to survival in the conditions which must
liave existed in that most distant time in which man must be placed
according to the hypothesis.

The answer, doubtless, would be that his superior mind enabled
"him to cope with the difficulties, and that this more than compen-

668 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

sated for his increased sensitiveness to the conditions of environ-
ment. Now, this we deny. His larger brain would make him
more helpless in his infancy; he would' require a longer period of
care. His brute brothers would have all the physical advantages.
Remember, differentiation does not manifest itself in all the off-
spring; and if they allowed him to reach the adult age at all, he
would reach it broken in spirit, owing to his finer nerves, the weak-
hng of the family and soon to be a victim of the red tooth and claw.
There are other points which might be urged in this connection, but
we cannot unfold them in our space.

It is difficult to regard with seriousness a philosophy which denies
that law and religion are fundamental conceptions. The authority
of both is an intuitional principle, and though everything is derived
from sense by Mr. Spencer, he does not deny that this authority is
one of those persistent phenomena of human nature which rest on
some ultimate truth or necessity. Now, if religion have an authority
and law an authority of this kind, the concepts of both must be capa-
ble of mental embodiment and must, of course, be fundamental. An
animal origin for all mental processes leads him to deny that we can
have such concepts, or, for that matter, anything like ideas of a
general or abstract nature, though he correctly says that such ideas
— general and abstract — form the large part of the subject matter on
which mental processes are employed. We say "correctly" because
general ideas are necessarily the subject matter of every step in rea-
soning, and certain abstract ones may be the ''forms" of sense per-
ceptions. But we think that his term "symbolic conceptions" for
ideas of both kinds — general and abstract — is a totally inadequate
manner of describing their character. Not only that, but knowledge
would be impossible if we could only have symbols instead of ideas.
It is easy enough to see how his confusion of mind arises — it may
not be quite so easy to set him right — but he will not allow the
faculty of intellect, he will only acknowledge an idea that can be
painted in the imagination ; but a general idea, or an abstract idea
as distinguished from a general idea, he will not allow because we
have no picture of it in the mind ; we have nothing but some vague
presentation linked to the word. That there is a plausibility about
his report of what takes place in the mind respecting the employ-
ment of such ideas and of the chief characteristic of them we admit.
Unless the report possessed such an appearance of resemblance to
what our own experience records he would not be listened to ; but
we say plainly the general idea of "triangle" is not a symbolic con-
ception, nor is the abstract idea of "time." A symbolic conception,,
if it means anything at all, means a more or less arbitrary sign
selected by the mind to mark something, but having no essential re-

spencer s Philosophy, 669

lation to that something — ^just as it is selected to denote an unknown
quantity.

Now, the word time is so essentially associated with the succession
of events that even if we have no definite relation of time-places at
the moment, an indefinite succession is fancied. The same may be
said with regard to the abstract idea of motion, some indefinite asso-
ciation, a body changing place, the same with regard to the general
idea of a triangle, an indefinite picture, though possibly the figure
may be outlined like a particular triangle. In all these there is
nothing symbolical ; each has a relation to a reality from which it
cannot be separated. The symbol X, though susceptible of being
employed to represent an unknown value, might as easily change
places with A and become the known quantity symbol.

It was only incidentally we referred to his view of reasoning and
his view of general ideas. We suggest, however, that an examina-
tion of his theories should be instituted by a competent man, who
shall dissect them bit by bit. What remains for us to say must be
rather general than would be such an examination. We are simply
asking from Mr. Spencer his proofs of certain media used by him to
establish the five issues standing at the beginning of this article as
the crystallized sense of his philosophy. We have not laid much
stress on the changing employment of terms, though that inconsis-
tency with which he is charged might be shown to be greater if we
did so. Though denying reason, he insists upon it as the only test
of truth ; but we are ready to admit that the process which he makes
to stand for the reasoning process is the standard to which he in-
tends that his truth should conform. Still we cannot quite allow him
to escape on our admission ; for there is something so like a policy
in the employment of terms and in the denial of distinction between
mental processes that it would not be altogether safe to overlook his
use of terms.

Broadly, then, whatever cannot be judged by reason is non-
existent, that is to say, whatever has not taken hold of the mind
through a succession of impressions of such intensity as to be re-
corded in consciousness does not exist. All we know of existence
is relation ; of truth all we know is the relation of relations. A judg-
ment which is a deduction of reason-* expresses the experience that
two ideas are related, because we have invariably found them in
association. It might be objected that this was not merely con-
founding inference with immediate knowledge, but it was making
inference a merely complex idea, and the mind a storehouse of ideas
differing in complexity instead of a power or a union of powers of

•-•* Tt is nothing of the kind; it is the immediate knowledge of a property common
to the two terms that express it.

670 American Catholic Quarterly Reviezv.

reshaping, transforming, uniting ideas ; so as to make them give pic-
tures Hke the Prometheus Desmotes or the Divine Comedy, or draw
conclusions in mathematics, or make predictions in celestial physics,
or frame hypotheses to be verified in chemistry. This objection,
startling as it is when offered to a view from such a man as Mr.
Spencer, is really well taken. If these Titans of science walk about
with their heads in the clouds, we are not responsible. A cast-iron
view of nature leads to their absurdities. If it were not necessary
to evolve everything through physical laws, it would not be neces-
sary to make the most fundamental intuitions and the most com-
plicated chains of reasoning nothing more than a brute's more de-
veloped memory.

As we have shown, the greater number of our ideas are such as do
not admit of association in Mr. Spencer's sense. Either the univer-
sal is made by abstraction, as we may be allowed to say it is, or it it
merely a symbolic conception, that is, a symbol like X or 7, that is
to say, no conception at all. There has been a good deal of fencing
as to whether the word "adequate" might not be used as an epithet
qualifying Mr. Spencer's statement that we can have no conception
of God because we can have no conception of His attributes. A finite
intelligence cannot grasp them. Any such qualification is not neces-
sary, or rather it would concede his thesis at least impliedly. It is
rather better to ascertain whether his psychology starts from sound
principles than to answer objectionable positions by restrictions like
the word "adequate." His utter misrepresentation of I'eason and the
reasoning faculty affords ground for doubting his genesis and nature
of ideas, not merely abstract or general, but ideas for which a sin-
gular name stands. In point of fact, admitting that we cannot have
an "adequate" conception of "infinity," "eternity," "omnipotence,"
and so on, it appears to us the acceptance of Locke's theory of
their formation is improved by Mr. Spencer into a denial of their
existence. They are "unthinkable," and therefore they do not exist.
We must return to the brutes. They have "emotions ;" but they
have memory and imagination. Mr. Spencer gives them concep-
tions, at least rudimentary, of space, time, motion, and necessarily
must give them the primordial concept, resistance.^'' Mr. Suther-
land, who must be taken as an interpreter of the master, speaks of
the "sympathy" of brutes as the basis of altruism, and Mr. Spencer
attributes all moral and social feelings to experiences inherited from
brute ancestors through the human ones. There is one very strange
conclusion — it may be called irrelevant and even frivolous — that
granting the brute's equipment as just described, he need not trouble
himself about a future state. As a matter of fact he does not ; this
25 So Mr. Spencer calls it.

spencer's Philosophy.

671

of course will be at once admitted, for whatever question there
may be as to his having ideas of class,'^ there is none concerning
his opinions on the immortality of the soul. But, then, man has
no evidence that his soul will outlive the body, or that, which is a
correlative of the proposition, there is a future state. We must
take things calmly.

It is very true Mr. Spencer places all such knowledge as we pos-
sess in experiences derived from sense. Clearly the brute could
not from this source obtain the idea of a future state, and he has no
other avenue ; he is in the same condition as man as to knowledge,
of it. But is the condition of both the same? The brute has no
idea of it at all ; we are inclined to think he has no idea beyond the
present moment. Without looking at brutes, as in Descartes'
sense, automata — though mistaken as that philosopher was in his
estimate of experience, he has been too severely criticized by com-
paring his animals to animated chairs and tables — we submit that
even those acts which appear as proceeding from foresight in the
lower animals are present impulses, like the succession of steps to
secure their prey. Mankind has a dread of or belief in a future state,
that is, much more than the idea of it. Mr. Huxley's test is an unfor-
tunate one ; if he could not recall from the other world or arrest on
his way to it the friend he valued by however great an effort of his
will, he could not make the soul survive by as great an effort when
the time of separation came. There is no connection between the
two efforts of will ; they are directed to different objects, over one of
which he might have a compelling influence conceivably, over the
other of which he could not conceivably have a compelling influ-
ence.^^ So despite Mr. Huxley, we insist that mankind has a per-
sistent conviction that something in him survives the body. Our
science men recognize it in their primitive man. All their theories
of the origin of religion assume it. Whether he learns it from
dreams revealing himself to himself at a distance from where his
body lies in sleep, or revealing to him the apparitions of the dead
who visit him in his dreams, the idea and the conviction are there..
They persist in all the religions ; they are said to be the underlying
substance of all of them, however various in doctrine, ceremonial
and influence. But a persistence in belief of this kind is, according
to Mr. Spencer, proof of an ultimate fact ; so we have here, according
to his principles, something that not merely distinguishes man from
the brutes, something not referrible to sense perceptions, but we
have the most plausible of all the reasons, given since modern science
made materialism the fashionable hypothesis, for the conclusion that

26 The instinct or sense of kind is not the same. 27 lais queer statement shat-
ters the theory of will being merely the balance of attrrction.

672 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the doctrine of the immortality of the soul does not contain as a
necessary implication the immortality of all other living things.

As we cannot get all our convictions from animal sources, it is
possible that the processes of human reasoning are not obtained
from animal processes. If the syllogism be the form to which all
sound reasoning must submit, all deliverances of reason must be
expressible by it. Mr. Spencer says that it ''fails utterly" to express
any of them ; this opinion is too important to be passed over, but
our space gives us no choice. The policy of his philosophy depends
upon it ; but what is more to the purpose — his own trustworthiness
is weighed and found wanting by it. We charge him with resolving
processes of inference into successions of concepts. It might be
sufficient to say that we "derive"^* certain ideas from observing
such successions, but we could not draw the inference led up to by
the word ''therefore." However, among the deliverances of reason
which the syllogism cannot express he includes such intuitions as
the axioms of Euclid. This is more than amazing. The notion he
intends to convey by this pronouncement is that relations seen by
the intellect are associations derived from sense experience. As
usual, the prehuman ancestor's experiences account for these intui-
tions as they do for the rules of morality. One is in a labyrinth,
from which it is easy enough to break forth if common sense (not
the metaphysical, but plain common sense) presided. But we might
be compared to a bull in a china shop if we got out by treating the
involutions as imaginary boundaries ; we have, therefore, to keep the
paths. Things which are equal to the same are equal to one another,
set down as an inference by Mr. Spencer, is one of those axioms
which children find in the front page of their Euclids, and which are
similar to those contained in the old Logical tracts l3 the conditions
precedent to the elementary study of the science.

It is a misrepresentation of a very remarkable kind. The axioms
were supposed to be recognized by the learner as fundamental prin-
ciples of knowledge before he entered on the subject. They were
never referred to afterwards. The lengthened and elaborate rules
for the various figures of the syllogism supposed them part of the
learner's mental furniture. He compared Lord Salisbury for criti-
cizing some of the pretensions of the sensional school to the savage
who makes a deity in order to chastise him — what he meant was that
Lord Salisbury invented opinions for the school and then proceeded
to refute them. Well, we charge himself with the method of attack
attributed to Lord Salisbury. Either Mr. Spencer does not know
what a syllogism is, either he thinks intuitions are inferences — in

28 Elicit would be the more correct word because, say, time is not derived from
succession, but elicited by the perception of it.

spencer's Philosophy. 673

other words, that intuitions are not intuitions — or else by an appear-
ance of acuteness and a parade of considerable knowledge of mental
science he has tried to throw dust in the eyes of his readers. He
makes the ordinary proposition, which logicians call a judgment, a
deliverance of reason that cannot be put into the form of a syllogism.
We are not going to waste time over this fetish of the angry phil-
osopher ; no one but himself has ever pretended that that which is
but a step in an argument is the whole argument. The judgment
may have been the conclusion of a previous syllogism, but when it
becomes a premiss it holds the authority of an intuition; it is no
longer inferential knowledge ; it belongs to the higher form of truth,
immediate knowledge. And here we may throw out a notion for
what it is worth : does Mr. Spencer suppose that mediate knowledge
is of a higher kind, carries a greater certainty than immediate ?

In First Principles, in order to prepare the way for proving the
theistic conception of God unthinkable, Mr. Spencer begins to say
how we have, or think we have, an idea of the earth, or of all organic
beings. What conception do we form of the earth? he asks; and
he admits that the name calls up *'some state of consciousness." ''We
have learnt by indirect methods that the earth is a sphere ; we have
formed models proximately representing its shape and the distribu-
tion of its parts. . . . Such perception as our eyes give us of the
earth's surface we couple with the conception of a sphere. And
thus we form of the earth not a conception properly so called, but a
symbolic conception."

We deny very distinctly that his own account of the acquisition of
the idea of the earth makes the conception symbolic. We can, he
admits, obtain a true conception of the globe before us ; that is the
model, with its distribution of land and water. The reason we can-
not grasp the conception of the earth is its vastness. Now he him-
self seems to set the limit to our conception of God at the inability
to pass the finite. The greatness of the attributes of God, if finite,
would be conceivable or thinkable, as Mr. Spencer would say in the
scientific jargon which imposes like the sonorous platitudes of Carlyle.
If the idea be unthinkable because God's attributes are unlimited, the
idea of God would be thinkable if the attributes, however much they
surpassed those we associate with humanity, were finite. We insist
that by his own tests we can form as definite an idea of the earth as
of the terrestrial globe over whose continents and oceans we pass
our hands. The gradual mode of acquisition, we submit, has nothing
to do with the greater or less definiteness of the concept, though of
course the gradual mode of acquisition has everything to do with its
greater or less completeness as a subject of attributes.

The confusion arises from his denial of the intellectual faculty.
Vol. XXVI— 4.

674 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

His measure of "a conception properly so called" is the power of the
imagination to picture it ; we ask first what constitutes the difference
in conceivability between the artificial globe and the earth? He
replies the immensity of the one. Second, we ask in what way is a
universal idea "not actually conceived?" Everything man thinks
about has to do in some degree with such ideas ; and whenever he
lifts himself from the narrow considerations of particulars he
has to do with such ideas. They must be ''actually con-
ceived to enable him to do this — actually conceived as in some
degree corresponding to the realities they stand for.^® These ideas
are clear in the intellect as the products of it, though incapable of
imaginative representation ; they are conformable to the realities they
stand for to the extent of the mind's knowledge of these realities ;
nor is there a school of mental philosophy which has ever questioned
the belief in such conformity.

We have most inadequately dealt with this dream of a dream ; we
mean the philosophy of Mr. Spencer. We have no knowledge, we
have no God, no conscience, but we are promised an era of human
perfection. The imagination of a period ere change began, that is
the period of ''the being" before the "becoming" disturbed the mo-
tionless silence of eternity, is more fantastic than any stuff that
^dreams are made of, more airy than gossamer, less substantial than
threads of moonlight woven for Titania. For this reflection of a
-mirage we are asked to throw away everything that makes life valu-
able, the authority of conscience over the powers of the intellect and
heart. We are no longer to live in the light of loyal performance of
duty — because it is duty, not merely because it has relation to others,
but because it is duty, always duty, to be thought of as such at every
moment of our lives, in the privacy of the secret chamber as well as
in the market-place, and alike in the desert or the city. We are to
surrender to the social body the keeping of conscience, because con-
science is its child, its emanation, effluence. Then shall dawn the
happy world when professors shall rule in the high departments of
State, inferior schoolmasters in the lower ones, when favorite pupils
shall be the police, when in theory property shall be in common, in
practice the possession of the few. But after a few years of it men of
science with a vestige of humanity will call for the dissolution of a
universe accursed, and plain men, outraged in their affections by
learned licentiousness, will look around them for the banished God
to bring back the old order of belief, fidelity, purity, justice.

George McDermot, C. S. P.

New York, N. Y.

29 Concept and idea are not happy words to express what is in the mind when
the object there is expressed by a universal.

Harnack and His Critics on the "De Aleatoribus," 675

HARNACK AND HIS CRITICS ON THE "DE ALEATO-

RIBUS."

WITH the sole exception of the higher criticism of the Scrip-
tures, there is probably no branch of ecclesiastical learn-
ing on which more labor has been spent during the last
fifty years than the study of the documents of the primitive Church,
We know so little of the growth and development of the Christian
communities in the earliest times, of their internal government, of
the relation of their members to the external world, that any addi-
tional evidence which we can obtain is of no small value. Moreover,
the twilight of the first two centuries is at the present time the chosen
ground for controversy. Every line, every expression of the writers
of that period is eagerly scanned by rationalist, Protestant, and Cath-
olic scholars, in the hope of finding some fresh support for their
respective doctrines. Hence the publication by Professor Harnack
in 1888 of his commentary on the "De Aleatoribus" — a small treatise
preserved among the works of S. Cyprian, but which has long been
known not to have come from his pen — aroused the very greatest
interest among all students of Church history. In this commentary
the learned professor undertook to show that the work in question
was the oldest ecclesiastical document in the Latin language, for it
was nothing less than a homiletic treatise addressed to the bishops
and the faithful by Pope Victor I. (192-202) ; in short, that we pos-
sess in it a Papal encyclical of the second century.

Till the publication of Harnack's comment the "de Aleatoribus"
had rested in comparative obscurity. Bellarmine, in his "De Script.
Eccles." (1612), notices that the author was evidently not S. Cyprian,
but a Pope. It seems, how^ever, that it is to Nicholas Faber (ob.
1612) that we must allow the credit of having been the first to detect
the indication of a Papal origin ; for Rigaltius, who included in his
edition of S. Cyprian (Paris, 1648) some annotations of Faber's,
gives the following note to chapter vii. ; "Nic : Faber notat hunc trac-
tatum non esse Cypriani: nam ex hoc loco apparere alicujus Pon-
tificis Romani scriptum esse ?" But save for a few scattered notices,
the work had shared the fate of the other pseudo-Cyprianic writings
and had been neglected by the commentators.

It is needless to say that so important a discovery gave rise to a
controversy among continental scholars which may almost claim to
form a small literature of its own. At first the conclusions advanced
in the commentary were received with no little favor, and several
eminent Catholic scholars — among others Fr. Grisar, S. J., and

fif^i American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Professor Le Jay — held that the case was proved. But before long;
the arguments on which the theory was based were submitted to a
rigorous criticism by Professor Funk, of Tubingen ; and from that
time the majority of those who had a right to be heard pronounced
themselves unfavorably to Harnack's view. It must, however, be
owned that when it came to giving a definite answer to the questions
as to authorship and date, the opinions of Professor Harnack's cri-
tics were widely divergent.^ The discussion was for the most part
carried on in reviews and periodicals. Separate editions of the "de
Aleatoribus" were, however, published by Hilgenfeld, Miodonski
and the members of the Louvain ecclesiastical history society.^ Of
these Hilgenfeld regards it as unquestionable that the expressions
of the author imply a claim to be Pope, but holds that the rigorist
doctrine contained in the work makes it no less certain that the writer
was not the true occupant of the chair of Peter, but a Novatian anti-
pope. Hence he assigns it confidently to that Novatian Bishop
Acesius who was present at the Council of Nicaea. Our readers
may possibly recall the story of how he was asked by the Emperor
Constantine to explain the difference between his tenets and the doc-
trines of the Church ; and how, when the Emperor had heard his ex-
position of the stern views of the rigorists, he replied: "Get your
ladder, Acesius, and climb up to heaven by yourself." This theory^
of Professor Hilgenfeld lessens the value of his work ; for Acesius is
not mentioned by Socrates as anti-pope, but as one of the Novatian
bishops of Constantinople. We know nothing of any Novatian
anti-popes besides the founder of the schism himself. Miodonski's
edition, as was to be expected from that learned classical scholar,
aims at restoring as far as possible the corrupt text of the work to its
original form. To do this was a task requiring very special qualifi-
cations, as the treatise is written in late colloquial Latin. He holds
that the author must have been one of the Popes between 250 A. D.
and 350 A. D. The writers in the Louvain edition incline on the
whole to adopt the same view.

Notwithstanding the wide divergence of opinion which exists
among authorities, it seems to the present writer that a careful con-
sideration of the facts and arguments adduced may enable us to
arrive at certain definite conclusions about the work. It would be
beyond the scope of this paper to touch on all the questions, some of
them of great interest, which have afforded material for investiga-

1 A full bibliography of the subject may be found in Ehrhard's "Altchristliche
Literatur und ihre Erforschung von 1894-1900." Ehrhard gives it as his opinion
that the controversy cannot yet be regarded as finally settled. 2 Hilgenfeld:
"Libellus de Aleatoribus" (Freiburg, 1889); Miodonski: "Anonjrmous adversus
Aleatores" (Erlangen, 1889) ; "Etude critique sur Topuscule *de Aleatoribus/ "
par les membres du sSminaire d'histoire ecclfisiastique 6tabli k Tuniversite de
Louvain (Louvain, 1891).

Harnack and His Critics on the "De Aleatoribus,*' 6^^

tion. Hence after some account of the work itself and of the sources
from which our knowledge of it is derived, we shall simply deal with
(i) its nature and purpose, (2) the question of its Papal origin and (3)
its date.

The treatise is not found in the old MSS. of Cyprian's writings
which we possess, nor in the ancient catalogue of his works dating
from 359 A. D. discovered by Mommsen. There are, however, four
MSS. of importance in which it has a place. Of these, one, the
Munich manuscript (M) dates from the ninth century, the Troyes
MS. (Q) is of the eighth or the ninth century, while those preserved
at Ratisbon (T) and Paris (D) are assigned to the tenth and ninth
centuries respectively. These all belong to what has been termed
by Hartel the second family of Cyprianic MSS. Besides these four
there are a certain number of manuscripts of later date ; but they do
not differ in any important particulars from the earlier authorities,
and are manifestly derived from the same source. The editio prin-
ceps of the "de Aleatoribus" is the edition of S. Cyprian's works
published by Morel at Paris in 1564; we have no record of the au-
thority which he followed. A careful comparison reveals the fact
that the four MSS. are all derived from a common archetype. This
we may assume to have been extant in the eighth century ;' hence
this common archetype is the sole source from which the work has
come down to us.

Our four authorities differ to some extent among themselves. M,
Q, and T, are somewhat closely related; but the Paris manuscript
diverges from them in many places. Hartel in his edition of S.
Cyprian has preferred to follow the Paris MS., and Harnack de-
cides even more definitely for its readings. Miodoriski is, however,
no less unhesitating in his preference for the group M, Q, T, and as
it seems to us, on good grounds. He shows that these three manu-
scripts in many places have preserved forms which, though at first
sight may appear mere blunders, are really characteristic of the
Latin in- which the Work was written, viz., the vulgar Latin of daily
life. The Paris mfanuscript, on the other hand, again and again re-
places these forms by their classical equivalents.* Harnack, it must
be confessed, has declared himself ("Texte und Untersuch," 1900, pp.

3 Such is the conclusion of Hartel in his edition of S. C>T>rian, Vol. III., p.
xlxiv. Exstitit igitur saeculo octavo codex litteris uncialibus scriptura continua
exaratus. *■ One case in which the ^i-oup M, Q, T has preserved for ua what ii^
evidently the right reading is sufficiently interesting to merit separate mention.
At the beginning of chapter viii. D reads, "scientea quoniam furor iste malefi«ua
et venenarius est, sed iterum in die judicii igne rotante torquebitur." M, Q, T
read, "scientes quoniatn foris maleficus et venenarius et iterum in. die judicii igne
rotante torqueri," a reading which appears hopeless till it is observed^that it
contains two quotations from the Apocalypse, and should be translated, ' Knowing
that 'without are criminals and prisoners' (Apoc. xxii., 15): and moreover that
*on the day of judgment they will be tormented on the wheel of fire. (Apoc.
xiv., 10).

578 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

112 and seqq) still unconvinced on the question of the respective
value of our authorities ; but he does not bring forward any argu-
ment to meet the reasoning of his opponent.

The point is of some interest even to those who are not specially
concerned with questions of philology. For this small tract, which
only extends to some 250 lines of printed matter and would scarcely
occupy more than six pages of this review, is one of the few docu-
ments we possess composed in the form of Latin used when that
tongue was first employed as the ecclesiastical language. The
Latin of the "de Aleatoribus" would surprise those who have never
made acquaintance with other than classical models. It is, as we
have said, the dialect of the common populace, and it brings home
to us somewhat forcibly that the laws of Latin syntax were not
scrupulously observed in ordinary life. We find such forms as
"parentorum" for "parentum," "tuemur" used as a passive verb,
"perdet" as a present tense, "a Dei servos," ''ab illos mores" for "a
Dei servis," "ab illis moribus" and the like. In addition to this
there are a few forms used which are recognized as characteristic of
the Latin employed in the province of Africa. It is not quite the
only document in this lingua rustica that we possess. Preserved
among the letters of S. Cyprian are five letters which are now known
to have been originally composed in the same dialect. And it is
important to observe that one of them is a formal missive from the
Roman to the Carthaginian clergy, showing us that it was so com-
pletely the ordinary language of the Roman Christians of that date
— 250 A. D. — that the clergy did not scruple to use it in an official
document.

But if the language is somewhat uncouth, the sequence of thought
which connects the eleven chapters into which the work is divided
is perfectly clear and logical. The author says what he wishes to
say with uncompromising directness. This will appear plainly from
the following brief analysis :

Chapters i to 4 form an exordium in which the writer dwells on
the grave responsibility imposed on him. as a Bishop, since if he
neglect to correct the faults of his flock he will most assuredly be
himself punished by Christ (cc. 1-4). From this consideration he
passes in the next five chapters to the actual sin with which he de-
sires to deal. Gambling is one of the ways in which the devil
catches those who have escaped from his snares (c. 5). The gaming
table is the natural home of a whole catalogue of sins ; it leads men
to perjury, hatred, the scattering of ancestral wealth, and further
even to dissolute living; for the gambling hell is only too often a
brothel also (c. 6). The main indictment is then preferred — ^that
gambling is inseparably connected with idolatry. This is proved

Harnack and His Critics on the ''De Aleatorihus" 679

by an account of the invention of the practice. A man of great at-
tainments in learning invented the dicing-board by the direct inspir-
ation of the devil; to the images of this wicked man the gamblers
pay divine honor (c. 7). A Christian who gambles has ceased to be
a Christian, and has become a pagan; for even if he does not for-
mally sacrifice, he is a partaker in the sin (c. 8). The ninth chapter
sums up the last three in a piece of passionate invective. The tenth
is of peculiar importance. In it we are assured that the Scriptures
warn us that while for some sins there is forgiveness there is none
foi" offenses against God. The work then concludes with a perora-
tion (c. 11), in which Christians guilty of this sin are exhorted to
put their riches to a better use; instead of scattering them at the
gaming table to lay them in the presence of Christ, the angels and
the martyrs on the table of the Lord, and by distributing them to
the poor to lay up a treasure in heaven.

It will, perhaps, be well to quote in extenso the two passages in the
tract which have given rise to most discussion — the opening sen-
tences in which the author speaks of the eminence of his own posi-
tion and the chapter in which he tells us that for sins against God
there is no forgiveness. Father Ryder, of the Oratory, indeed gives
it as his opinion that had it not been for these two passages we
should not have waited so long for commentaries on the "de Alea-
toribus ;" but that while Protestants were deterred by the testimony
to Papal claims, Catholics were no less daunted by the difficulty of
explaining rigorist doctrine in the mouth of a Pope.*^ The first
chapter runs as follows : **A heavy charge is laid upon us, fellow-
Christians, the care of the whole brotherhood. It is made yet
heavier through the reckless wickedness of abandoned men who are
drawing others into crime and involving themselves in the snares of
death.® It is gamblers to whom I refer. The fatherly goodness of
God has bestowed on us the authority of the Apostolate; of His
heavenly mercy He has ordained that we should occupy the chair by
which we represent the Lord ; through our predecessor we have as
ours that source of the true apostolate on which Christ founded His
Church, and have received authority to bind and loose, and with due
regard to reason to forgive sins. And on these very grounds we
are warned by the doctrine of salvation to take heed, lest if we con-
stantly overlook the faults of sinners we suffer with them a like
penalty."

The following is the passage (c. 10) which is said to contain a
rigorist doctrine: 'The Lord says in the Gospel that for a sin

5 Dumin Review, 1889, July and October, p. 84. e We here adopt Miodonski's
emendation "ex saeva perditonnn hominum audacia, id est aleatoninii. om alios ad
neouitiam se in laquenm mortis demergnnt." The reading of the MSS et rea
perditorum omnium audacia id est aleatorum aninios ad nequitiam se m latu mortis
emergunt" is hopelessly corrupt.

58o American Catholic Quarterly Review.

against God there is no excuse nor forgiveness, and that none re-
ceives pardon. 'If any one,' says He, 'shall speak blasphemy against
the Son of Man it shall be forgiven him ; but to him who shall have
sinned against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven neither here
nor in the world to come' (Matt, xii., 32 ; Mark iii., 28) ; and again
the prophet says : 'If by trespass one man sinneth against another
prayer shall be made for him to God ; but if a man shall sin against
the Lord, who shall pray for him?' (I. K. ii., 25). And the blessed
Apostle Paul, the Steward and Vicar of Christ, in the exercise of his
care over the Church says : 'Ye are the temple of God, and Christ
dwelleth in you ; if any man violate the temple of God, him shall God
destroy' (I. Cor. iii., 16). And again, the Lord in His Gospel denies
sinners and reproaches them, saying: 'Depart from me all who
work iniquity; I never knew you' (Matt, vii., 23). And the Apostle
John says : 'Every one that sinneth is not of God, but of the devil ;
and ye know that the Son of God shall come to destroy the sons of
the devil' (I. John iii., 8)."

A feature of the work which plays a considerable part in the con-
troversy concerning it is the large number of citations from Scrip-
ture. Harnack reckons thirty-one of these. But if we add those
which escaped his notice and count as separate references words
which the author has taken from more than one chapter of the Bible,
and united to form one quotation, the number is somewhat greater.
Thus in the margin of the Louvain edition we count no less than
thirty-nine references. These quotations are not from the Vulgate,
but from the Itala, and are practically identical with the form in
which the same verses appear in S. Cyprian's writings. This alone
would show that the work could not date later than the fourth cen-
tury; and when the treatise first engaged Professor Harnack's at-
tention he did not venture to determine its date more closely than
this. In his edition of the Shepherd of Her mas (1877) he tells us
that it seems to have been written not long after the time of Cyprian
— at latest perhaps in the fourth century.'' It is not the canonical
books only of which the author avails himself. He quotes from
Hcrmas and from the Didache. In chapter 2 he cites Herm. Tim.
ix., 31,5, introducing the passage with the words "the Divine Scrip-
tures say (dicit scripture divina) ;" and again in chapter 4, after quot-
ing St. Paul's words, I. Cor. v., 11, he says : "And in another place
[it is written] : 'If any brother lives after the manner of the Gen-
tiles and is guilty of deeds like unto theirs, cease to be of his com-
pany. And unless thou do this thou shalt be a partaker in his
works.' "—Herm. Mand. iv., I, 9.® This quotation is immediately

' Op cit., p. 21. 8 These words, "Quicunque frater more alienigarum vivit." etc.,
are referred by Harnack to this passage of Hennas. There are, however, certain
differences between them. Hilgenfeld denied their identity, and P. Minasi went

Harnack and His Critics on the "De Aleatorihus'' 68i

followed by one from the Didache: "If any brother sins in the
Church and does not obey the law, let him not be reckoned amongst
you till he do penance, and let him not be received into fellowship
lest your prayer be defiled and hindered" (Didache xiv., 2 ; xv., 3).
When we remember that both the author of the Muratorian frag-
ment and Tertullian (de Pud., c. 10) deny to the Shepherd a place in
the canon, and that the Didache certainly never held so high a place
in the estimation of the Western Church as did the writings of
Hermas, we must own that there are good prima facie grounds for
thinking that we have to deal with a very early document. As we
have seen, the "de Aleatoribus" calls the Shepherd "scriptura
divina," and quotes it and the Didache in juxtaposition to the words
of S. Paul.

Nor have we yet exhausted the problems which arise from our
author's citations. In chapter ii. he quotes some words which have
not hitherto been traced to any book, canonical or otherwise.® And
yet another issue is raised by the words in chapter iii., "The Lord
warns us and says, 'Grieve not the Holy Spirit who is in you,' and
^Quench not the light which has shined in you.' " Professor Har-
nack believes that we have here two apocryphal sayings of our Lord.
We are ourselves inclined to think that this is an error, and that
there can be no doubt that the author is simply quoting with some
freedom Ephes. iv., 30 : "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God," and
I. Thess. v., 19, "Quench not the Spirit ;" but to this point we shall
return later. Here then we may leave our description of the "de
Aleatoribus ;" our readers will probably be satisfied that brief though
it be, it offers for solution not a few questions of more than ordinary
interest.

NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE WORK.

With regard to this the first of the three points which we proposed
to discuss we cannot but think that the most natural conclusion
to arrive at is that it is a homily, and that we possess it in the precise
form in which it was originally delivered. The style of the work
would appear to indicate this — the vigorous invective of certain
passages (cc. vi. and ix.), and the formal peroration at the end. More-
over, the author twice addresses his audience as "fideles" — in chapter
i., which opens with the words: "Magna nobis ob universam fra-
ternitatem cura est, fideles," and in chapter v., where we find the
words : "Quid illud est, quaeso vos, fideles ;" while after having de-

«o far as to endeavor to show that they are a quotation from a lost letter of S.
Paul to the Corinthians {Civilta Cattolica, 1892, 409-489). He is refuted by M.
Callewaert in "Une lettre perdue de St. Paul et le 'de Aleatoribus.' " Louvain,
1893. 0 This quotation runs as follows: "Existimate sacerdotem esse cultorem, qt
omnes esse apud eum Tdelicias], granaria plena, de quo quidquid desideraverit
populus meus saturetur.'*

(^2 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Glared in chapter v. that the gaming table (aleae tabula) is ''one of the
devil's plagues and an incurable wound of sin," he opens chapter vi.
with the words : "Aleae tabula dico, ubi diabulus praest," a rheto-
rical repetition which scarcely appears possible except in a speech
intended to be actually delivered.

This, however, is not Professor Harnack's view. As we have
said, he holds the work to be a homiletic treatise addressed to the
Bishops and faithful. He bases this opinion on the fact that in the
first four chapters the duty of Bishops to exercise their disciplinary
authority is developed with much care. The obligations of the
episcopate are, he tells us, urged with far too much earnestness for
us to suppose that this part of the work was merely intended ta
justify the severity with which the writer was about to speak. Be-
sides, although after these chapters the author throughout uses the
singular number, yet in this introductory passage he employs the
plural, dwelling not on his own responsibilities alone, but speaking
as it were in the name of the collective episcopate. The only legiti-
mate conclusion from the passage is that the author knew that his
audience comprised both Bishops and faithful, and that he desired
alike to rouse a lax episcopate to the fulfilment of their duties and
to move the consciences of the faithful at large in order that they
might not be recalcitrant under a discipline more severe than that ta
which they had grown accustomed.

This argument does not appear to us in any way convincing.
What could be more natural than that a Bishop who intended to re-
buke a serious fault in his flock with great severity should devote a
considerable part of his sermon to reminding his listeners of the
solemn obligations which the episcopal office carries with it ? With-
out such a justification it might well happen that his words would
be taken amiss as imperious and unwarranted by the very men whose
hearts he desired to move. More especially might he think it well
thus to preface his reprimand if the delinquents were to be found, as
was probably the case here, among the wealthiest members of his
flock, and perhaps were for that very reason the less amenable to
control. Nor can the fact that in these chapters he speaks in the
plural number be urged as an argument against this view ; the em-
ployment of the plural of dignity in such a passage is only what was
to be expected.

It is, however, the treatment of the question of gambling that
most clearly shows us that the work, whether a homily or not, was at
least addressed to a local church, and was no encyclical directed to
the faithful at large. The severity of its tone astonishes us. A
gambler is no longer a Christian but a pagan, he is an idolater, he
has committed a sin against God, for which there is no forgiveness.

Harnack and His Critics on the ''De Aleatoribus." 683

Harnack assumes that these denunciations are directed against all
gambling of whatever kind. Such a supposition involves us in in-
superable difficulties. For though the practice is condemned by
certain writers in the early Church, they never speak of it in terms
such as these. Clement of Alexandria (Paed. iii., 11, 75 ; P. G. viii.,
651) severely reprehends those who spend their time in taverns,
idling, dicing and insulting the passers-by. S. Ambrose describes
the gambling hell in a passage of singular vehemence (de Tobia xi.,
38) ; but neither of these fathers accuses the gambler of a relapse into
paganism. The same is to be said of the decrees of Councils. The
earliest official condemnation of the practice which we possess is
contained in the acts of the Council of Elvira (canon 79), about A.
D. 300. But in this, although the guilty person is excommunicated,
he is to be readmitted to communion after he has shown his repent-
ance by abstaining from the practice for a year.^® No severe disci-
plinary penance is imposed on him. The measures prescribed in the
apostolic canons are equally mild. The 42d and 43d canons deal
with gambling and prescribe that Bishops, priests and deacons, if
they do not desist from the practice, are to be deposed ; the inferior
clergy and laity are to desist or to suffer excommunication. How
are we to explain this manifest difference? The author of the "de
Aleatoribus" brands gambling as an act of apostasy ; all other author-
ities treat it as a mere offense against Christian morals. The expla-
nation offered us by Professor Harnack is that the author belonged
to the party who favored a more rigid ecclesiastical discipline, and
further that it is evident that he must have written before St. Cor-
nelius (251 A. D.) definitely decided that there were no sins which
the Church could not forgive. Such an explanation is wholly inade-
quate. No party, however averse it may have been to exclude the
penitent from pardon, ever took a tolerant view of idolatry or could
have inflicted lenient penances on a practice which involved the
burning of incense to a pagan deity. Had the customs described in
the "de Aleatoribus" been universally prevalent, the decree of Elvira
and the expressions of Clement and Ambrose would have been im-
possible. The only satisfactory explanation appears to be that sug-
gested by M. Callewaert, viz., that by a custom peculiar to the city
where the sermon was delivered, images of the patron of dicing were
erected in the public gambling rooms, so that those who frequented
them became by an almost necessary consequence guilty of the sin of
idolatry.^^

10 The decree runs, "Si quis fidelis aleam id est tabulam luscrit nummis, plamit eum
abstineri: et si emendatus cessaverit post annum poterit communion, reeonciliari.'*
11 This apT^ears to be the solitary reference in the whole of Latin literature to
the practice of offering sacrifice before casting the dice. Who was this inventor
of dicing to whose statues worship was paid? Probably the Egyptian god Thoth
whom Cicero (de deorum nat., III., 22-55) identifies with the last of the five

684 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

It is important in this connection to observe that the author's
strictures are almost certainly not directed against games of chance
played merely for purposes of recreation, but against that social
ulcer, the gambling hell, and against certain specific acts of idolatry
which took place there. All the evidence we possess goes to show
that games of dice were played by the primitive Christians. The
mere habit of playing apart from gambling may have been regarded
as unbecoming in a cleric, but could scarcely have been looked on
as a sin. Dice are not infrequently seen carved on the tombs of
Christians in the Catacombs, and in some cases dice-boards have
been found placed by the bodies. Lynesius (ep. 105, P. G. 66, 1484)
when pleading to be excused from the responsibilities of the
Bishopric of Ptolemais, mentions among the reasons which render
him unfit his inveterate habit of playing dice. It is clear that he is
not speaking of a sin, but simply of a habit indicative at the worst of
some trivial idleness. Was the view correct which holds that the
idolatry described in the "de Aleatoribus" was practised whenever
and wherever dice were thrown we should have to attribute to the
Christians of the first age of the Church a laxity totally inconsistent
with the testimony of history. It is, however, far more consonant
with probability that the reverence paid to the image of the inventor
of dicing was restricted to the public gaming tables. Indeed, unless
it be admitted that this was the case, and that further even as regards
the public tables the custom was local and not general, the diversity
between our author and other early Christian writers is totally inex-
plicable.

THE QUESTION OF PAPAL ORIGIN.

We may now turn to the question of the Papal origin of the tract.
Even though it be not an encyclical, yet if it could be shown that we
possess in it a homily addressed by one of the early Popes to the
Church of Rome it cannot fail to be of great interest. The argu-
ment rests wholly on the passage from chapter i translated above.
There are three expressions in this passage capable of being inter-
preted so as to indicate a Papal authorship. In the first the author
tells us that God has bestowed on him the authority of the apostolate
(apostolatus ducatum) ; in the second he claims to occupy the chair
by which he represents the Lord (Vicariam Domini Sedem) ; in the
third he uses the words "through our predecessor we have as ours

divinities bearing the name of Mercury, whom he distinguishes; this Mercury i»
known in the Greek mythology as the slayer of Argus. Thoth is said to have
Uught the Egyptians laws and letters as well as the art of dicing (Plato Phae-
drus, 274, C), so that the description of him as a man of great attainments m
learning (studio litterarum bene eruditus) is justified. Some difficulties which
seemed to be involved in this explanation of the passage are answered in the
Louvain edition, pp. 39-41.

Harnack and His Critics on the ''De Alcatoribtis.'' 685

that source of the true apostolate on which Christ founded His
Church"^^ (originem authentici apostolatm super quern Christus funda-
vit ecclesiam in superiore nostro portamus) . In weighing the value of
these expressions we must remember that while doctrine remains
unchanged the precise signification of some term may become more
definitely fixed, so that whereas it was once employed in a looser
and more general sense, it gradually is appropriated exclusively to a
particular application. It is hardly necessary to refer to the term
Homoiousion as example of this, which at first, susceptible of a per-
fectly orthodox interpretation, was eventually used only to signify a
definitely heretical doctrine on the personality of our Lord. For
this reason we cannot say with any certainty that either apostolatus
ducatus or vicaria Domini sedes denote a Papal origin. Although
we could not use them at the present day of any but the Holy See,
yet examples may be found in early Christian writings of similar
terms applied to other Bishops besides those of Rome. Thus
Faustus of Regii writes to the Bishop of Ruricius^^ (ep. xi., P. L. 58,
862) : "Domino beatissimo . . . atque apostolica sede dignis-
simo ;" the author of the life of S. Basil attributed to S. Amphilochius
says of S. Gregory Nazianzen (P. L. 73, 295): ''Throni apostolici
gubemacula moderatus est," while Sidonius Apollinaris says of S.
Lupus of Troyes that he spent forty-five years ''in apostolica sede*'
(P. L. 58, 551). These expressions are sufficiently similar to aposto-
latus ducatus to make it impossible to build any argument on it.
And the words vicaria Domini sedes find their equivalent in the fol-
lowing citations : John of Avranches in his de Officiis Eccl. (P. L.
147, 33) tells us that the Pax Domini said by the Bishop in the Mass
**ostendit eum esse vicarium Christi;" and the monk Abbon on be-
half of the Bishops of Paris and of Poictiers uses the words '*unde
fratres, nos episcopi sumus vicarii Domini nostri Jesu Christi" (P. L.
132, 766). If, then, any proof of Papal authorship is to be found, it
must be looked for — as Harnack admits — in the words "originem
authentici apostolatus super quern Christus fundavit ecclesiamin superiore
nostro portamus." This "source of the true apostolate on which
Christ founded His Church" can, says Harnack, have no other possi-
ble reference than to the Cathedra Petri. The words themselves
contain a quotation from our Lord's promise to S. Peter in Matt,
xvi. We may add yet another reason for feeling confident that the
professor's interpretation is correct. The homily, as we shall shortly
show, contains not a few echoes from the works of S. Cyprian. The
author was evidently thoroughly familiar with his writings. Now

12 On the sense here given to the words "portare" and "in" vide Harnack "d
Aleat," pp. 99, 101, 134. is I am indebted for these and the following quotations
to an article by P. Lenain in the Revue d'hiatoire and de Utt: religieuscs" Nov.,
1900.

686 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

no one can read this expression without being reminded of the well-
known term which S. Cyprian several times employs of the Petrine
prerogative, origo unitatis. When we consider the remarkable char-
acter of the phrase origo authentici apostolatus, and also the evident
familiarity of our author with Cyprian's works, it does not seem too
much to conclude that the one expression is derived from the other.
Now was it possible for the Bishop of any other see but that of
Rome to make this claim? There is no doubt that it was not infre-
quent for other Bishops to style themselves successors of Peter.
Peter of Blois (ep. 113, P. L. 207, 341) says to Geofifrey, Arch-
bishop of York : "Quia igitur estis successor et vicariiis Petri." S.
Hilary also apostrophizes the Bishops thus : "O dignos successores
Petri and Pauli'' (fragm. ii., 78, P. L. 10, 645), and S. Gaudentius
(serm. 16. P. L. 20, 958) tells his hearers that S. Ambrose will ad-
dress them "tanquam Petri apostoli successor ^ But after all, though
these expressions would not now be used, yet to claim to be the
vicar and successor of S. Peter (which each Bishop in his own dio-
cese in some respect really is) is very different from claiming to
possess through inheritance from Peter the source of the apostolate.
That the words superior noster refer to the apostle himself is not, we
think, really open to question.

Funk urges that but little weight is laid on originem in the sen-
tence ; that the really emphatic words are authentici apostolatus, and
that it is on the apostolate, not on its source, that our Lord is de-
scribed as having founded His Church. He maintains that the
passage should be understood simply as a claim to possess that share
in the apostolate which was the common inheritance of the Bishops.
To this it may be replied that in this case originem would have been
omitted, and that its employment by S. Cyprian is quite sufficient to
show that it is not a word of little moment.

It may be noted that Harnack himself has put a weapon into the
hands of those who deny the Papal authorship of the tract of which
they have not failed to avail themselves. We have seen that he holds
that in the first four chapters the author employed the plural because
he was speaking in the name of the collective episcopate. Con-
sistently with this view he maintains that throughout the whole
passage the author associates the other Bishops with himself, and
makes no claim in which he is liot speaking for them as much as for
himself. According to this view, the chair of Peter is the preroga-
tive not of the speaker alone, but of all Bishops equally ; the Pope
sets up no special claim to be regarded as his successor.^*

1* To avoid the difficulty to this interpretation occasioned by the words "it.
superiore nostro," Harnack proposed to translate them as thoiiph they were in
the plural, "each through his predecessor." Recently he has declared for the
readinj? of D "in superiore nostra," which he translates "in our ancient Church"—
i. e., the ancient Church of Rome (Texte und Unters, 1900, p. 112.)

Harnack and His Critics on the "De Aleatoribus." 687

Though he adopts this view he holds fast to the Papal authorship
of the work ; he urges that such language would be natural in the
mouth of none but a Pope, since the employment of the promise of
our Lord to S. Peter in Matt. xvi. and of the commission given to
the apostle in John xxi. (which is quoted in chapter ii.) are character-
istic of the Roman Church. We do not doubt that the literary in-
stinct of the professor, which led him to feel that the language em-
ployed was distinctively Papal, is correct. But it is, of course,
patent that if his analysis is accurate, and this claim was made on
behalf of all the Bishops, any one of them might have urged it in the
same terms and have quoted the same texts. No convincing argu-
ment can in this case be brought to prove that a Pope was the
author. We have, however, shown that there are no reasons to sup-
pose that the writer was speaking in the name of the collective epis-
copate, and that the plural number which he employe may well be
simply the pluralis dignitatis. Hence it is quite unnecessary to as-
sume that he is claiming the possession of the origo authentici aposto-
latus for any others than himself, and we venture to disbelieve that
any instance will be discovered in which such an expression as "to
possess through S. Peter the source of the apostolate" is applied to
any other than the Pope.

DATE OF THE WORK.

The question of the date to which the work should be assigned
may be considered the most important of all, since if we attribute
to it a second century origin it must be held to be the oldest ecclesi-
astical document in the Latin language which we possess. Pro-
fessor Harnack in assigning it to this period relied on three lines of
argument, (i) the relation of the work to the canon of Scripture, (2)
the peculiar character of the Latin in which it is composed, (3) the
rigorist nature of the ecclesiastical discipline set forth in it. That
his reasoning was not devoid of force may be gathered from the
favor it met with from men whose competence to form a judgment
is undoubted. But a formidable difficulty was almost immediately
urged against attributing an early date to the work, in face of which
we doubt if any arguments such as those adduced can stand. The
objection in question was that to which we have already referred —
the connection between the work and the writings of S. Cyprian.
The most striking instance of the acquaintance of our author with
the writings of the great Bishop of Carthage is found in the tenth
chapter, the passage on the irremissibility of the sin of idolatry of
which we have given a translation above. It will' be remembered
that the passage runs as follows : "For the Lord says in the Gospel
that for a sin against God there is no excuse nor forgiveness and

588 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

that none receives pardon," and these words are followed by five
proof texts, viz.: Matt, xii., 32; I. Kings ii., 25; I. Cor. iii., 16;
Matt vii., 23 ; I. John iii., 8. It is hard to believe that it is a mere
coincidence that in S. Cyprian's Testimonia III. (a book of proof
texts for the use of preachers) the 28th chapter runs thus : "That
there is no remission in the Church for him who has sinned against
God;" and then follow two out of the five texts quoted, Matt, xii.,
32, I. Kings ii., 25. But what is more remarkable is this : the two
texts which follow next in the **de Aleatoribus" are found in the two
immediately preceding chapters of the Testimonia. It certainly
seems to suggest to us that the preacher consulted his Testimonia
for proof texts, that his eye caught the texts in the previous chap-
ters and that he applied them to his purpose, though as a matter of
fact they do not prove the point which he desires to establish. The
threat against those who violate the temple of God (I. Cor. iii., 16)
and our Lord's words : "Depart from me all ye who work iniquity"
contain no proof that there is no forgiveness for sins against God.
It may be observed that this remarkable parallelism had not escaped
Harnack's notice, but he was of opinion that the difficulty was not
of much weight because the authenticity of the third book of the
Testimonia was not above suspicion. The genuineness of the work
has, however, since then been vindicated by Dombart.^*^

This parallelism, striking as it is, is far from being the only one.
A tabulated scheme of sixteen other passages in the "de Aleatori-
bus," with corresponding extracts from S. Cyprian, is given by
Miodonski, and this list is greatly amplified by M. Callewaert in the
Lou vain edition. At first sight it might appear that we are en-
deavoring here to prove too much. It may be asked whether it is
probable that a chance sermon would contain such a number of
echoes from S. Cyprian's works. We reply that it is far from un-.
likely when we consider the great authority possessed by S. Cyprian
before his fame was eclipsed by the greater name of Augustine. S.
Lucifer uses no authorities but Holy Scripture and the works of
Cyprian. S. Jerome (ep. 107, 12) to the advice to 1 e constant in the
reading of Scripture adds the words, "Cypriani opuscula semper in
manu teneat," and Prudentius (Hymn 13, Passio Cypriani 1., 8) says r
"Te leget omnis amans Christum, tua, Cypriane, discib." In a
paper like the present it is, of course, impossible to reproduce the
researches of the two authors we have mentioned. We can only
refer the reader to their works. We may, however, be permitted to
quote two of the cases in point so as to afford some indication of the
character of the more striking of the resemblances found. In "de

15 Hilgenf eld's "Zeitschrift fiir wissensehaftliche Theologie," xxii., 385. Vide
Harnack "de Aleat.," p. 2.

Harnack and His Critics on the "De Aleatorihus." 689

Aleat.," c. 3, we find "episcopo negligente et nulla de scripturis
Sanctis documenta promente." S. Cyprian ad Dem. 3 has these
words: ''Nobis tacentibus et nulla de scripturis Sanctis praedica-
tionibusque divinis documenta promentibus." In "de Aleat./' c. v.,
we have : "Quam magna et larga pietas Domini fidelium quod in
futurum praescius nobis consulat nequis f rater incautus denus laqueis
diaboli capiatur." In Cyprian de Mortalitate 19 we meet with:
*'Quod Dominus praescius futurorum suis consulat," and in de Uni-
tate 2, "ne denus incauti in mortis laqueum revolvamur."

If it, then, be really the case that our author is under considerable
obligations to S. Cyprian we cannot assign an earlier date to the
work than 250 A. D. Let us, however, consider the arguments
brought forward on the other side by Professor Harnack ; for, as we
have already said, he pleaded his case so well as to convince not a
few that we really possessed an original treatise of S. Victor.

We will notice first the argument from the language employed ;
for after what we have already said, this may be dealt with very
briefly. It is urged that we possess some of the writings both of S
Cornelius (251 A. D.) and of Novatian, the antipope who opposed
him ; that both of these wrote in the Latin of the cultivated classes,
and that it is highly improbable that after their day a Pope would
be elected who wrote in the dialect of the common people. We may
admit this — though the force of such reasoning is always somewhat
uncertain — and yet say that an argument which would be good when
applied to the case of a formal treatise has no weight in regard to a
sermon. Even if a Pope could write in good Latin, it by no means
follows that he would not preach in the language of his auditors.
There is no indication that this sermon was ever what we may term
revised for publication ; it was very probably delivered exactly as it
stands at present.

The argument to which the professor himself attached most weight
was, however, that drawn from the position adopted by the author
towards the canon of Holy Scripture. He points out to us that in
the work we have no less than twenty-seven texts introduced with
various formulas of quotation, yet that in all these there is no indi-
cation that the author recognized the division of the sacred books
into the Old and New Testaments. In place of this division we can
detect by the aid of the formulas mentioned a tripartite classification.
Citations from the Gospel are introduced with the words ''Doniinus
dicit in evangelist the second formula is ''dicit scriptura divina" or
*'dicit scriptura'' or "dicit Dominus/' and these words preface the quo-
tations from the Old Testament, the Apocalypse, the Shepherd of
Hermas and the Didache ; while the quotations from the epistles of
S. Paul and S. John are cited with the words "dicit apostolus." He

Vol. XXVI.— 5.

690 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

further notes that while the quotations from the Gospels and the Old
Testament are accurate, those from the epistles are given with utmost
freedom, and from this, when taken in connection with the fact that
they form a distinct class, he draws the conclusion that at the early
date at which the author wrote the epistles had not yet come to be
regarded as of equal authority with the remainder of the canon.

It need not be pointed out how momentous such a discovery
would be in regard to the history of the canon, even if we prescind
from the theory about the position which Harnack supposes S.
Paul's epistles to have held. It will probably strike every one that
the author's greater accuracy in quoting the Gospels is easily ex-
plained if, as is far from unlikely, he was more familiar with them
than with the epistles. Yet if it be true that previous to the separa-
tion of the canon into the Old and New Testaments the early
Church possessed a tripartite division such as that indicated by the
professor, to have detected this will have been indeed an epoch-
making discovery. The value of the professor's conclusion can only
be estimated by a somewhat close scrutiny of the evidence.

Now with regard in the first place to the quotations from the
Gospels, there are but four of them in all, and of these four one (c. 2}
lacks the required formula and is simply introduced with the words
"cum dicat" Though one exception may seem a trifle, yet when the
whole induction is based on four instances it is not devoid of im-
portance.

There are eight quotations from the epistles, and here again we
are confronted by an awkward exception. This exception is con-
tained in the words we have cited above : "The Lord warns us and
says, 'Grieve not the Holy Spirit who is in you,' and 'Quench not the
light which has shined in you.' " In view of the admitted freedom
with which our author quotes the epistles we do not doubt that these
words are simply Eph. iv., 20 and I. Thess. v., 19 freely cited ; and
this seems to be the opinion of all the commentators except Har-
nack. He regards them as two apocryphal Logia, which the author
is attributing to our Lord. We own that we are tempted to think
that he would not have been so unwilling to trace their origin to S.
Paul had it not been for the fact that to assign such an authorship
to them would have been destructive of his theory. There would
then have been a quotation from the epistles introduced not with the
formula "apostolus dicit" to indicate that it could only claim the in-
ferior authority of apostolic origin, but with the words "monet Domd-
nus et dicit" which clearly denote that to the speaker it possessed the
full character of the inspired Word of God.

But it is the third class which presents the greatest difficulties to
the theory. It contains fifteen quotations, but of these six are of no

Harnack and His Critics on the "De Aleaioribus" 691

value to the professor, for they merely follow other quotations and
are introduced with ''et iterum'' or "et alio loco.'* The nine which
remain are divided among no less than five different formulas. We
have "dicit Dominus' four times, *'dicit Scriptura" twice and "propheta
dicit,'' ''dicit Scriptura divina'' and "i« doctrinis apostolorum" once
each. Surely there is but little ground here for saying that the
formulas employed are sufficient evidence to prove the existence of
a special division of the canon. Nor indeed can it be said that the
quotations from the Old Testament are uniformly more accurate
than those from S. Paul. Some of them are correctly cited, others
not so, while two which are apparently drawn from the Old Testa-
ment defy all attempts at identification.

Is it not far more natural to suppose that the author quoted with-
out any special desire to indicate the part of Scripture he was using,
and that though he usually cited the words of the four Gospels with
the formula "dicit Dominus in evangelio," and those of the apostles
with "dicit apostolus," yet he was not greatly concerned to hold fast
to this manner of speaking, and did in fact sometimes deviate from it ?
If this be admitted, and it seems a reasonable explanation, we have
not a shred of evidence for the alleged tripartite classification. More-
over, if further proof be required that Harnack was too hasty in
drawing his conclusions, it may be found in the fact that the formulas
in question are precisely those usually employed by S. Cyprian in
quoting from Scripture. There is no doubt that he at least was cog-
nizant of the division of the canon into the Old and New Testaments,
for Tertullian habitually uses it; yet he scarcely ever thus distin-
guishes the sacred books. Our author's mode of quoting does in
fact but provide us with a new proof that Cyprian was the master
whom he followed.

The employment of passages from Hermas and from the Didache
among the Scriptural quotations need not afford us much difficulty,
though Harnack attributes considerable importance to it. Here,
again, even if we concede that texts from these works might not
have been employed in a formal homiletic treatise at so late a date
as that to which we assign the work, there is nothing to surprise us
in their occurrence in a sermon. It is true that Tertullian speaks
scornfully of Hermas in the dc Pudicitia, but it must be remembered
that this was written after his lapse into Montanism ; previous to his
fall he had used it as a work which, if not canonical, was possessed
of high authority. These books were part of the recognized relig-
ious literature of the period, and nothing could be rnore natural than
that a preacher who recalled a text from them suitable to the purpose
in hand should employ it without hesitation.

It only remains for us to answer the argument derived from the

692 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

alleged rigorist teaching of chapter x. It is, we are told, quite im-
possible that any Pope living after S. Cyprian could have taught
publicly that there were sins for which there is no forgiveness. It
was the Pope who in the question of the lapsi had taken the lead in
insisting on the great truth that the Church has power to grant abso-
lution for the most heinous crimes. It was due to the defense of this
doctrine by the Pope that the Church of Rome was torn by the No-
vatian schism ; nor had any voice spoken more clearly in their sup-
port than that of S. Cyprian himself. Who, then, can imagine that
after this a Pope would teach the exact contrary, and, further, would
assert that gambling — a much less grave sin than that of the lapsi —
was one of the sins for which there is no remission ? We reply that
in the first place we have shown that the crime denounced by our
author was not mere gambling, but the idolatry which he regarded
as necessarily connected with gambling, and therefore the most
grievous of all sins; and secondly that the words in question are
susceptible of a perfectly orthodox interpretation, namely, that after
wilful and persistent apostasy to obtain the grace of a true repentance
is so difficult as to be morally almost impossible. That he does not
■teach that any single lapse into idolatry is a sin for which there is no
"forgiveness is evident from his exhortation to the gamblers in the
following chapter to repent. He bids them in lieu of staking their
money at the gambling table place it on the table of the Lord ; which
they could not have done were they to remain till death cut them
off from the Church's communion. Such, too, and no other must
have been the sense in which S. Cyprian desired Testimonia iii., 28,
to be understood, unless we believe that in that passage he contra-
dicted all his other utterances on the subject. It is only in virtue of
a misunderstanding that our author can be credited with inculcating
a rigorist doctrine, and that on this ground a very early date can be
postulated for the work.

We may therefore safely conclude that we must not date the
homily earlier than 250 A. D. It may have been composed by any
of the Popes between that date and the middle of the next century.
It seems impossible to arrive at a more precise result than this ; for
though certain peculiarities distinctive of the Latin of North Africa
led Professor Landay to suggest that the author was S. Melchiades
(311-314), who was "natione Afer," the use of these forms may well
be due to the influence exerted on the author by his master Cyprian.

It is doubtless to be regretted that the results of our inquiry are to
some extent negative, and that we must leave the name of the Pope
who wrote the work an open question. Yet the study of the "de
Aleatoribus" may be of value in more than one way. It is hard to
read Professor Harnack's comment, enriched as it is with the wealth

Harnack and His Critics on the "De AleatoribusJ* 693

of learning which he is able to bring to bear on the subject, without
being at least for the moment persuaded that he is right. As we
have seen, many Catholic scholars accepted his results as assured,
and rejoiced over the discovery of so early an encyclical. It required
the patient investigation of scholars specially qualified for the work
to estimate the true value of his conclusions ; but when that investi-
gation had taken place the results so eagerly accepted proved to be
as unsubstantial as the baseless fabric of a dream. Has not this its
application with regard to much of that higher criticism of the Scrip-
tures which is in vogue at the present day? Theories of the con-
struction and the date of the sacred books are put forward by men
possessed of great erudition and gifted with all the endowments re-
quisite to state their case with lucidity and power. It is no wonder
that their arguments seem to the reader overwhelming. Still it is
well to learn from the history of this discussion that a really brilliant
piece of reasoning based on internal evidence may, when weighed in
the balances, be found wanting. We shall do well not to accept such
theories too readily, but wait in patience till they have been tested by
that rigorous scrutiny which they must in due time undergo.

In itself, too, the work is full of interest and will well repay any
one who cares to peruse the few pages of which it consists. It is a
veritable voice from the first ages of the Church which here speaks
to us. It is not a treatise addressed to a circle of educated readers,
nor even a homily revised for publication ; but a sermon couched in
the homely rough language in which it was preached. In it we can
still hear the faithful shepherd of his flock reproving, entreating and
rebuking. And he is speaking to his hearers with that note of au-
thority which has been the characteristic of the Catholic Church in
all ages — that authority which her enemies cannot understand, and
which the sects who have left her dare not imitate. He was prob-
ably a man of no social position, nor was he, as far as we can judge,
a highly educated man. Yet he bids his flock listen to his warnings
and obey them at their souls' peril, for he is the successor of the
apostles and speaks as the representative of Christ.

G. H. Joyce, S. J.

St. Beuno's College, St. Asaph, North Wales.

■^ ^

694 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

THE GREEK TEMPLES IN SICILY.

PROBABLY most visitors to Sicily enter the island at Palermo,
to which a daily service of steamers runs from Naples. On
arrival there the luxury of comfort, perfection of climate,
beauty of scenery and the riches of Saracenic and Norman art all
combine to beguile the traveler, so that he lends a willing ear to the
Siren-song to "quit all hope of further progress" and makes his
sojourn there absorb most of the time at his disposal. Yet all true
tr^ivel should be the means of furnishing the mind with an aftermath
of instruction, and if this motive arouses the will to activity, there
are few spots upon this earth within so narrow a limit that are so
full of remuneration to intelligent enterprise as Sicily affords us.
No well-read man can go there and not find his mind excited by a
keen interest at the historic scenes this small island will recall to his
memory, scenes that will take him back to the days of Troy, the
voyages of Ulysses, of the mythology of those times, and which carry
the memory on in continuous current through the palmy days of
Greece and Rome, Carthage and Byzantium, until the stream be-
comes mingled with Arab and Norman, French, Spanish and mod-
ern Italian. Even the great headland at Palermo, now known aai
the Mount of Pilgrims, has upon its summit the traces of the camp
of Hamilcar Barca (Barak), and this will set in motion a train of
enquiry which will follow you all round the island, and produce
reminiscences of school reading which still need solution and eluci-
dation. Who were the men this general commanded, this race who
have left their memorial on every shore from Syria's strand to Corn-
wall, from Sicily, Spain and Southern France to Rhodesia in South
Afric?^ ? We have called them Phoenicians as the Roman did Poeni,
and the Greeks Phoinikes from the palm trees that marked their set-
tlements; others named them Sidonians, Tyrians or Cathaginians
from their towns, while to the Israelites they were Canaanites or
"dwellers in the lowlands." But who they were or whence they
came as a race is still an unsolved riddle. They were the first of all
early commercial peoples, we believe, and Homer's epithet for them
is that of. a race "skilled in trickery." Here to this lovely Sicilian
land they came bringing with them their Eastern instruments of
music and fabrics of matchless purple, and here on every "high
place" they reared their temples to cruel and insatiable Ashtaroth,
or Astarte and kindled their fires to the blood-stained Moloch.

It is not, however, the signs of Phoenician or Carthaginian occu-
pation that we now propose to trace, although this might be made

The Greek Temples in Sicily. 69S

the subject of singularly interesting investigation and serious reflec-
tion for modem peoples who seem to be setting up commerce as
their national deity ; we are about to visit the remains left by a suc-
ceeding race of higher ideals and nobler aspirations, and one to
which the human race will ever owe the debt of its gratitude. From
Palermo we can now go by the railway to the Greek temples at
Segesta, Selinunte and Girgenti, so that the difficulty of access no
longer remains, and although especial provision has to be made for
a visit to the two first mentioned, yet at the last we shall find a hotel
as delightful as the Hotel des Palmes at Palermo itself.

Most of us have never seen a Greek temple save in pictures, and
desire to look upon the reality even though it be battered by the buf-
fets of time, for that is a far less cruel fate than falling into the hands
of the adapter or modern type of ''restorer." Let us then start first
for Segesta, to within five miles' ride of which the train will take us,
landing us in a part of the country reputed to have been the settle-
ment of the very descendants of the fugitives from Troy itself. What
one barters for the five hours in the train (although the distance be
but little over fifty miles !) is the acquaintance with the old roadways
over wild mountains with gorgeous scenery and exhilarating air;
yet these are not entirely wanting even to the ease-loving traveler
of to-day. You round the base of Mount Pellegrino, where within
a cave so lately as 1664 were discovered the remains of Sta. Rosalia,
niece of the Norman William the Good —

That grot where olives nod,
Where, darling of each heart and eye,
From all the youths of Sicily
St. Bosalie retired to God.

MarqiioQ i., 23.

Then skirting the beauteous Bay of Castellamare for half its cir-
cuit the line strides inland and you alight beneath the precipitous
front of Calatafimi. The name is better known now for the victory
which Garibaldi here gained in i860 over the Bourbon troops, but
to us it is the boundary of those venerable travelers whose wander-
ings we revel in during school days as told by Virgil in his entranc-
ing song. Here, taking mule or carriage, you thread a valley
through which runs the stream Scamander — so named by the colo-
nists in memory of that of their native land. Egesta, later Segesta,
was one of their most important cities ; now it is nearly as barren a
waste as Troy itself. Once it had a teeming population and great
riches, for this very stream ran ensanguined with the blood of 10,000
of its inhabitants, slain by Agathocles of Syracuse to obtain their
treasures.

As we advance soon the great temple comes in sight upon our
left, and it is a picture never likely to be forgotten. In appearance

696 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

it is unquestionably the grandest for general effect of all the temples
that remain erect in Sicily. It stands at the end of a long, broad
valley, upon the natural pedestal of an isolated mountain spur, on
the brink of a profound precipice, a site chosen with that wisdom of
artistic perception which never failed the Grecian architect. Wild
and lonesome heights surround it on every side, bare in the extreme.
In a wilderness of wandering mountains and savage cliffs, where all
is depth and height, the temple of Segesta rises yellow, majestic and
solitary. Its awful desolateness strikes awe and even terror into
the mind of the beholder. The silence adds to the impressiveness of
the picture ; the absence of all signs of human life, the stillness, the
sky unflecked with cloud, the sun with its powerful light and heat
all seem to urge the valley into slumber. There comes upon one
the sense of an oppressing, overpowering Necessity or Fate against
which all effort of resistance is futile; the immensity of Time in
which the span of human life is so minute a fraction, the boundless-
ness of Space in which this world is such an atom — all these seem
forced upon the mind's emotions.

On ascending one hill you see in the distance Eryx, standing like
a sentinel of the Western coast, where was the shrine of Astarte,
Aphrodite, Venus — which you will ; the sea glitters in the sun at an-
other point, while the eye ranges with glorious sweeps of vision over
a saddened, melancholy, weird and fearful panorama. Nought is
to be heard save the breeze as it soughs among ruins or rustles the
thistles and wild fennel at our feet; the butterfly aimlessly drifts
hither and thither and comes across the eye like a silent monitor of
the shortness of man's day and the infirmity of his purpose, or like
some soul of the dead, as the peasantry believe, to revisit its old
home. Birds of prey hover in the serene and silent sunlight like
omens of approaching evil, and one treads the ground as if it were
a cemetery paved with the tombs of the dead, so solemn and oppres-
sive is the spot. You stand on one hill of ruins, amongst which a
theatre has been excavated from the rocky sides, and in which only
tragedies would now seem suitable to be enacted, and you gaze
across a ravine to another hill where the temple crowns a precipitous
crest, while again you see beyond still another height also strewn
with the stones of edifices. Amid so much desolation we turn grate-
fully to a testimony of that eternal truth that never dies, a witness to
man's best nature in his strivings after God, and a sign that earnest
effort is never wholly lost.

The Doric temple that is the object of our visit is one of the best
preserved in Sicily, for its stone is less corroded than in the others.
Its thirty-six huge columns— six in front and back and fourteen on
either side— have never been finished and are still unfluted, and

The Greek Temples in Sicily. 697

hence there is a heavy appearance about them. At their base they
are nearly seven feet in diameter, and the height of the column nearly
five times this diameter. It is raised upon a stylobate or platform of
four high steps, but these are unhewn, and the cella or sanctuary
was not even begun, so that this temple can never have been used
for worship. It is 192 feet long by yy or 78 feet wide, or inclusive
of the steps, 200 feet by 85 feet. The entablature is nearly entire all
round, and the present government has taken praiseworthy care
to maintain by iron rods the architrave, whose enormous blocks span
from column to column. It must have been begun before B. C.
409, but the continual quarrelling with the Greek town of Selinus,
or Selinunte, over fifty miles south of this, to assist the inhabitants
against which was the cause of the Carthaginian, and four years
previously (B. C. 413) of the Athenian, invasion, must have impeded
its progress. The city, however, continued to exist long after its
antagonist was destroyed, and we have a vivid picture in Cicero of
how a Roman praetor was able to misuse his power, to which an
event here furnished an illustration. The people of Segesta pos-
sessed a statue of Artemis, or Diana, in brass, **not only invested with
most sacred character," he says, "but also wrought with the most
exquisite skill and beauty, so that it seemed even to enemies worthy
of being religiously worshiped" (in V err em, xxxiii). It had been
carried off by the Carthaginians, but was brought back and restored
to the city by Publius Scipio Africanus on the taking of Carthage.
It was replaced in Segesta amid the joy and delight of the citizens
and was "worshiped by them, visited by all strangers, and when I
(Cicero) was quaestor it was the very first thing they shewed me."
But Verres, "that enemy of all sacred things, the violator of all
religious scruples, saw it" and ordered the magistrates to pull it
down and give it to him. They did all in their power to resist, but
entreaties and opposition were futile. He oppressed the city to such
a degree that eventually, subdued by ill-treatment and fear, they had
to save themselves by letting their treasure go. Even then no
Segestan could be found to do the evil work of the praetor and dis-
lodge the statue from its pedestal, and barbarians had to be brought
from Lilybaeum (the modern Marsala) before it was removed.

Egesta was an unfortunate town, and if we translate its name by
the Latin for poverty we may still find an appropriateness in the title,
for nothing can exceed the misery of its few present inhabitants or
the squalor and brutality of the life that prevails. The old inhabi-
tants found the name so full of ill-luck that they changed the name
to Segesta during the first Punic war, but the blessing of the corn
field was not for them, and it remains to this day profoundly impres-
sive in its history and its desolation.

1698 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

We can continue our journey by rail from this temple to within
eight miles of the next celebrated spot, viz., Selinunte, for which
Castelveltrano is the nearest station, and here we shall find ourselves
upon the western limits of the power of the ancient Greeks. This,
their frontier town, is not only memorable for possessing the relics
of the grandest temples in Europe, but for its siege by the Cartha-
ginians in B. C. 409, when the stubborn bravery of its people held
out against Hannibal Giscon and his 100,000 men for ten days. The
descendants of the Tyrian at Carthage were summoned by the de-
scendants of Troy at Segesta to give them help against Selinunte ;
landing at Lilybaeum, the present Marsala, about thirty-five miles
away, they marched straight on Selinus. Help was sent to the be-
leaguered town from Syracuse, but arrived too late, and of its 24,000
inhabitants only a tenth are said to have escaped to Girgenti. And
here let us note that it was the "eternal Eastern question" that is the
keynote of the history of ancient Sicily, as it is so frequently still that
of Europe. It was Greece fighting against the Phoenician, Roman
against Carthaginian, Norman against Saracen. As Freeman says,
Sicily was the "breakwater" between the Eastern and Western divi-
sions of the Mediterranean, and surely we owe a debt of gratitude to
the brave little island for withstanding each attempt to wrest it from
Europe. Her 500 years of Greek rule may be regarded as a single-
handed combat with Orientalism, and even though at a later date
Sicily became for 200 years a province of Africa, yet at the bidding
of the Norman she again shook herself free and set herself in the
forefront of the battle between Christendom and Islam. It was here
at Selinunte that Africa began its most serious attacks upon Europe,
and it was here in this "Village of Idols," as they termed it, that in
later times the Moslem made his longest stand against King Roger.
Christian hermits taking abode here after the Arab expulsion have
left behind them their signs upon its stones to testify to the triumph
of the Cross against the faith of Mahomet.

Although the remains at Selinus are simply tremendous and pre-
sent the most remarkable mass of ruins in Europe, yet they do not
render the pleasure we should anticipate, since there is not a perfect
column erect, and the mind has to reconstruct out of these gigantic
heaps the glorious structures that Grecian art spread upon these
hills. On one eminence are three important temples and on another
three large ones and one small,* the last a temple in antis, i. e.y con-
sisting only of a cella with columns in front. Between the two hills
is a valley through which a small stream makes its way to the sea,
and whose sides are strewn with the stones of the city. The mouth

* They measure, including steps, 139 feet by 60 feet, 230 feet by 88 feet, 192 feet
by 89 feet, 281/2 feet by 15 feet.

The Greek Temples in Sicily.

699

of the stream now choked up with sand and water plants was once
the harbor still called the Marinella di Selinunte, but this once well
drained valley, the work, it is said, of the wise Empedocles of Gir-
genti, is now a swamp, and the monument to his memory erected by
grateful citizens has its fragments removed to the Museum of
Palermo.

Selinus stood on two plateaus formed by the spurs of the moun-
tains as they descend to the coast, and between them is the valley or
Gorgo di Cotone, of which we have spoken. The more western
of these spurs was occupied by the Acropolis with the town at its
rear, the whole enclosed by walls, while the eastern plateau was a-
sacred precinct without any secular buildings attached. At first
sight the mass of ruins seems so chaotic that it appears hopeless to
describe them. Sixty mighty columns He on the earth dike regi-
ments of overturned ninepins. In their stupendous ruin and desola-
tion they are appalling, and from their colossal size deserve their
local title of / pillieri dei giganti. The largest of the temples on the
Acropolis hill, supposed to have been dedicated to Hercules, had
seventeen columns on either side and a double row in front ; those
•on its northern side have fallen outward and lie in regular order, the
drums of the shafts disjointed, but section above section, and beyond
these come the huge blocks of architrave, frieze and cornice, as if
awaiting the mason to fit them together. Those on the southern
side have fallen inwards and crushed the cella in their descent, a
grievous scene of destruction. Some of the pillars were monoliths,
but usually they are composed of six separate blocks. They vary in
diameter, but were 28 feet in height. They have not the usual num-
ber of flutes (viz., twenty), those in the portico having 16 and the
others 18. Another diversity in this temple to most others is the
great narrowness of the cella or sanctuary compared to its length,
for while the length of this temple, inclusive of the steps, is 230 feet
.*nd breadth 88 feet, the cella is 131 feet by 30 feet. This once mag-
nificent structure stood upon a stylobate or platform of four steps,
but was approached in front by an additional nine. It is the oldest
of the shrines raised by the Selinuntans and is thought to have been
erected soon after their settlement here in B. C. 628. In the inter-
esting Museum at Palermo are preserved portions of its entablature
and three of its metopes which must have been executed at the same
time. Copies of them are in the British Museum, for they are
precious as illustrating the earliest period of Doric sculpture in the
■island. They are without beauty, but although stiff and grotesque
they contain evidence of the earnest effort to portray vigorous life;
they are not conventional, for it is a struggle in the fetters of archaic
tradition; there is a freedom and hopefulness in them that makes

700 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

them highly interesting and important to the student of art, for not-
withstanding their uncouthness they are the work of early genius
and unique. Their exaggeration of limb and feature is startling
when seen in a museum. As Gothic carvings made to stand high
above the beholder, when viewed near by are appallingly hideous and
distorted, yet from beneath appear graceful and suitable, so these no
doubt produced a more effective and chastened aspect when in their
lofty position in the frieze. The subjects are, as is usual, derived
from ancient myths. One is a conqueror in his four-horsed chariot
in almost complete relief, with female figures of Victory holding
above his head the laurel crown; another Perseus beheading Me-
dusa, with the Goddess Athena in the background, and the third
Heracles and the Cecropes.

Twenty-five yards north of this temple is another which had thir-
teen fluted columns on each side and six in front, thirty-four in all,
whose capitals have enormous projections. The columns taper
more than those of the earlier temple near by, and their height is
rather more than five times their diameter. Its peristyle or sur-
rounding court of pillars is unwontedly spacious, since the cella here,,
too, is extremely narrow. It is approached by five steps in front
and stands upon a platform of four. Its dedication is unknown^
There is the small temple in antis, as it is termed, to the south of the
most ancient one of Heracles, and beyond this, above the waters of
the African sea that beat against the rock a hundred feet below, is
another large one that stood upon a stylobate of four steps and had
thirty-six columns of twenty flutes each, but not one of which is now
entire.

The eastern hill, nearly a mile away, was made a sacred enclosure
in the sixth century B. C. The stupendous remains of its three
temples are all together, facing east and west, the most northern
thought to have been dedicated to Apollo, the most southern to
Hera, but the deity of the intervening one is unknown, and of its
columns only a few sections remain. The temple of Hera had an
approach of eleven steps and stylobate of four; it measures with
steps 228 feet by 91 feet and had fifteen columns on either side, six
in front, and of these portions of three alone stand erect. Dis-
jointed they lie like those of Heracles on the opposite hill, ranged
on the ground, appealing to the generosity of the learned societies-
of Europe to restore them and thus do honor to our new century.
The porticoes have fallen outwards. Metopes from this temple are-
also at Palermo and mark a period when the art of sculpture was at
its highest development and perfection. Their subjects are Athena
slaying the giant Enceladus, whom Zeus placed beneath ^tna;
Heracles slaying the Amazon Hippolyta ; Zeus and Hera on Mount

The Greek Temples in Sicily. 701

Ida ; Artemis and Actseon. The skill evinced in their composition
and execution is not so great as that which characterized the best
Attic art, but is still of a very high order. The female figures have
the exposed part of the body inlaid with white marble, but there is a
lack of the freedom of action and drapery that we have learnt from
the schools of Greece. Yet the progress from the work of the
Metopes of Heracles to those of Hera is astonishing.

The northernmost of these three temples is one of the largest Gre-
cian temples known. Like those of Egesta it was left unfinished.
Its huge columns are unfluted, and it would seem not to have had the
full number intended, as others were being quarried when the work
was arrested. It differs from other temples here in being octastyle
peripteral instead of the usual hexastyle, i. e., it had eight columns
in front and rear and a row on either side, making forty-six alto-
gether. It was probably dedicated to Apollo, as an inscription found
in it indicates. Measuring 371 feet by 177 feet, it exceeds in length
all others in the island, but is surpassed in area by one at Girgenti.
The height of its columns was 533^ feet and their diameters taper
from 1 1 54 ^eet to 6)4 or 8 feet. Shaken down by some convulsion
of nature that destroyed so many of these marvelous buildings, the
heaped up columns and entablature form a "most stupendous and
sublime mound of ruins," and one sighs for some effort to be made
to replace its stones.

A visit to the quarries whence the material for these temples was
taken will be made by all who are capable of feeling the peculiar help
that it gives the imagination to be actually in touch with the vanished
workman. Like the pleasure afforded the beholder by seeing the
very marks of the Egyptian draughtsman for his design on the walls
of some of the tombs of the Kings at Thebes, or by the sight of the
more recently opened houses in Pompeii, where the authorities have
wisely left everything in its original place and not removed it to a
museum, so in these quarries we may easily perceive the actual
method of work and picture the laborer at his toil. Indeed it needs
in this case little effort to annihilate centuries and to think that the
workmen have gone to their meal and will presently return, instead
of the truth that they have for over 2,000 years been wrapped in
their long siesta. They were evidently hewing and shaping these
mighty drums for the pillars of Apollo's temple out of this limestone
rock when the cry arose that the Carthaginian was upon them and
his hosts approaching along the Lilybaeum road. They had to leave
incontinently and fly across the moorland towards the fortified
Acropolis five miles away. Some had been transporting those fin-
ished sections of the columns that now lie at the foot of the quarry,
aiid you may trace others along the road to Selinus and almost see
the patient oxen slowly dragging the heavy wooden trolley upon

702 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

which one was placed. The news comes that the enemy is at hand
on this Campobello road where we are, the men hastily unyoke the
creamy white buffaloes and drive them before them, but others only
seek safety for themselves and leave their teams, which remain
dreamily standing in the sun flicking their heavy tails across their
flanks, indifferent to the human catastrophe that is being enacted
around them. The invaders come up and under new masters there
is no cessation, but only an alteration of toil for the captured beasts,
and they are employed for the purposes of the transport of the army.
There probably on the roadway the cart and its load stood and rotted,^
and there you may see the stones of Apollo which have lain from that
day until this.

Selinus is spoken of by Virgil as "palffwsa Selinus," and it is hard
to realize this amid the bareness and desolateness of the present city,
but a dwarf fan-palm is very abundant, the only species native to
Europe, and perhaps this is what he refers to. The city is said to
have taken its name from the plant (selinos) sacred to Heracles, to-
whom the first temple was reared. It is commonly spoken of as
parsley, but it was not our culinary vegetable, and it is doubtful what
was meant. We know that it was some fragrant herb used in festival
garlands, at funeral rites or as the wreath of victory in the games
of the Corinthian isthmus, and some have thought that it might be
the wild celery that grows freely here, but this is too interesting a
subject to deal with.

To see the next group of Sicilian temples we must go eastwards to
Girgenti, about sixty-eight miles off, and we may avoid returning^
to Palermo to obtain the direct line of railway thither if we will drive
along the new road that will take us there in nineteen hours. A
railway is projected, but if we drive we can break our journey at
Sciacca la degna (24 miles), and the road which passes through
vineyards and cornfields and along the sands of the Libyan Sea is
useful in affording an insight into outlying districts of the island.
We shall leave to the left the quarries at Menfrici from whose rock
the metopes of the temples at Selinus seem to have come. From the
highlands we shall catch a view of the island of Pantellaria, between
which and the mainland arose on i8th of July, 183 1, a volcanic
island of four or five miles' circumference, only to disappear as
mysteriously on the 18th of January of the next year. Now the
coral fishers are busy near its site. Spots will recall to our mind
every varying race and visitor that has been connected with this fair
land from the mythic Daedalus to Norman Roger, until we reach
the modern Porto Empedocle within four miles by a rail of the
towering heights of Girgenti, the Greek Acragas and Roman Agri-
gentum.

The Greek Temples in Sicily. 703

No Sicilian city is more nobly situated than this — the towns of
Castro-giovanni, or Enna, and Taormina alone compete with it.
Whether approached by sea or land it is equally grand and striking.
The lofty chain of rock rising precipitously from the northern low-
lands, but descending in terraces and roUing slopes like mighty
waves to the south, is composed of cockle, scallop, oyster, whelk and
other shell and marine deposit, and seems like a huge wall raised by
Neptune or some god of the ocean to guard from the sea some spot
where his nymphs might play and his Nereids slumber. In billow
upon billow of gray and purple hill it mounts up until the long steep
ridge of its citadel stands forth over 1,200 feet in height against a
background of serene and violet sky. Imagination can scarcely
form an exaggerated picture of what a glorious vision it must have
presented when with its Acropolis intact at one end of the ridge and
the mighty temple of the Parthenon upon its Rupe Atenea at the
other and adorned with long lines of the finest monuments of Gre-
cian art upon its terraced front it looked down upon the southern
sea. It is singularly unlike other Greek colonies in Sicily in being-
withdrawn from the water, but the seaboard, with its harbors and
fleets, never had any attraction for the company of Dorian settlers
that came here. They were a pastoral and agricultural people, wor-
shipers of Demeter rather than Poseidon. They were also lovers
of horses, and this interest they probably first brought to Sicily, if
the chariot-loving Phoenician had not done so previously, and it con-
tinues still a trait in the island's character. Many a Sicilian steed
won the Olympic and Pythian crown for the lords of Acragos and
Syracuse. Diodorus records with enthusiasm the numerous
chariots of the people of this city and the world renowned breed of
steeds that carried everything before them in the games of ancient
Hellas. We have, moreover, the name at least of one, viz., Phren-
icos, that won the prize in the seventy-third Olympian games for
Hiero of Syracuse in the entries for single racers. Thus the popular
taste was much more directed to their inland plains than to the sea,
which they sadly neglected. Not that there was any natural harbor
on their coast, but people who could raise such temples as they did
could easily have made a haven if they had wished to do so. The
degenerate modern inhabitant is actually doing this and using for it
some of the precious stones of which the ancient Greek was the
hewer. May Neptune and all the gods avenge themselves on such
sacrilege !

The preference for the horse, I have said, is still a marked char-
acteristic of the island. The Arab domination for 200 years, no
doubt, has helped to continue it from earlier date, but just as in Italy
and southern lands you most frequently meet with oxen, mules, asses

704 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

and donkeys as the beasts of burthen, so here you find the horse.
Camels were once common as they were in Gaul and exist occa-
sionally still in parts of Spain and in the neighborhood of Pisa, but
they have now disappeared in Sicily. The Agrigentines ought to
have taken the horse as their badge, but they perversely chose a
crab, not that they appreciated salt water, but because that crea-
ture's form of dwelling seemed to typify their own ridged home on
the seashore. Later they chose an eagle when their pride soared
high after their victory at Himera, and finally they have adopted a
Telamon or Gigante from a rebus upon their modern name of
Girgenti.

Acragas and Syracuse were by far the most prosperous of all the
Greek colonies in Sicily, and far outstripped the others in magnifi-
cence and wealth. Acragas was ten miles round, and divided into
five townships, of which the present city occupies but one, and that
the oldest. In the number of its ancient divisions and in its present
shrinkage to one, and this the first chosen, it resembles its great
compeer, modern Syracuse. The goats now feed upon the Rock
of Athena ; oliveyards and orchards of fig, lemon and orange cover
the ancient quarters known by the names of Agrigentum, Agrigen-
tum in Camico and Neapolis ; rolling fields and garden enclosures
have erased the once busy Agora and its paved and pillared ways,
and the earthy deposit of the centuries now covers the dwellings of
its nobles.

In shape it was quadrangular, the side tilted up to the top of the
high chain of rock we have spoken of and then coming down to-
wards the seashore. The approach therefore from the south dis-
plays the whole city before us. The temples all seem to have clus-
tered on this side, and if the position of those still erect be singularly
striking and grand, how far surpassing these must have been the
grandeur of the Parthenon that once stood, not on this lower terrace
of rocky barrier forming the city's wall, but upon the lofty crest of
the Rupe Atenea rising 1,240 feet in air. Alas! all that remains of
this temple is the stepped platform or stylobate upon which the wise
builders of those times always placed their work, as we give a
pedestal to any object of especial artistic value. It is not quite cer-
tain whether it was dedicated to the goddess whose name it now
bears and whose sacred trees surround her throne, but it is most
probable. Far out to sea would the mariner have been able to see
the shrine of the deity that had a dwelling so high. Simple and un-
adorned though its architecture would be, it would be imposing,
majestic and inspiring. Greek genius displayed itself in selecting
such elevated spots as this whereon to fix the witness of his wor-
ship, the tribute of his piety and the embodiment of his skill. By

The Greek Temples in Sicily. 7^5

their beauty and dignity he raised in the mind a sense of awe and
reverence and in the heart of the departing child of Hellas a yearn-
ing for the protection of his gods and a love of his native land.

As we approach from the seaside we pass a few remains of the
Temple of yEsculapius that once contained the famous statue of
Apollo, **on whose thigh there was the name of Myron inscribed in
diminutive silver letters" (Cic. in Verr. xliii.), and which was stolen
finally by Verres the praetor. Then just without the walls is the
later tomb of the wise ruler Theron, and we enter the city by a sunk
road at the Porta Aurea, by which Carthaginian and Roman have
passed. We have immediately upon our left the temple of Zeus,
and on the right we stand beneath the posticum of that of Heracles.
The king of the gods and the king of heroes were thus placed as
warders of this, the main entrance to the city, and remiss those
porters must have been or sadly lukewarm their suppliants to have
permitted so many enemies to gain access to ancient Acragas. We
turn at once to the left and we are amid the huge remains of the
temple of Zeus, begun about 480 B. C. and finished all but the roof,
if that were intended to be finished, in 406 B. C, when Carthage took
the town. It was not only the largest temple raised by Acragentines
or other Sicilian colonists, but the largest ever attempted by the
Greek architect anywhere, and worthily dedicated to the king of the
gods himself. It may be that the Ionic temple of Diana at Ephesus
exceeded this in size, but it is difficult to ascertain the dimensions of
that temple so entire was its destruction, but some authorities give
its length as 388 feet by 187 feet, while this of Zeus is 363 feet by 182
feet. This that we are now considering was a heptastyle, i. e., seven
columns in front ; it was also pseudo-peripteral, i. e., its surrounding
columns did not stand free, but the wall was built up between them,
the huge weight of the entablature making this necessary. Diodorus
states that the "columns were built up in the same mass as the wall
and all rounded externally, but with a square face to the interior of
the temple," and this wall was pierced with windows. It differed in
plan from all others in Sicily, for this outer walled and pillared en-
closure was succeeded by a second one similar to it inside, and then
came the cella within this, so that it was something like one of those
Oriental boxes fitting one within another ! Diodorus also gives the
height to the top of the portico, exclusive of the basement, as 120
feet, so that it must have had a row of columns above the lower
range. In length and width it must have been as large as St. Paul's
Cathedral, London, and covered an area as large as that of Cologne
Cathedral ! Great portions of the side walls have fallen down, their
stones lying in their relative positions. Those that remain of its
thirty-seven or thirty-eight enormous pillars lie prostrate like a regi-
YOL. XXVI— 6.

7o6 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

ment mowed down by some destructive artillery. Some of thes^
measure nearly fifteen feet in diameter and have flutings twenty
inches in breadth and deep enough to permit a man to stand within
their groove. They rose fifty-five feet in height and their capitals
are mighty blocks weighing at least twenty tons ! Figures are very
unsatisfactory to convey to the mind any conception of the real char-
acter of such a huge edifice as this must have been. Moreover, all
measurements of buildings are never very accurate, being most dif-
ficult to obtain, and can only be approximate ; still Polybius, Dio-
dorus and other ancient writers give minute descriptions of this
temple, whose magnificence they extol. Amidst the universal ruin
lie colossal figures of Atlantes twenty-five feet in height that once
stood before the pilasters of the cella, it may be, and one of these
monsters has been reconstructed on the ground and lies like the
mighty figure of Rameses II. at Memphis, only in thirteen dis-
jointed blocks. The brown, weird giant is carved, too, in the severe
style of Egypt with arms raised and stretched out, and seems like
some Samson in the temple of the Philistines, who has gathered
about him as his sepulchre the ruins of the great shrine in which he
has been derided and has laid himself down in the midst of the
catastrophe which he has created for the long sleep of the cen-
turies.

Up to 1401 a considerable part of this temple was standing, but
eventually earthquakes sucoeeded in dislodging its noble entabla-
tures, capitals and columns, since no assistance had been given to
the sterling art of the mason for eighteen centuries. In modern
time the miserable mind of man has only been directed as to how
best to transport stones that mock his imbecility in order to cast
them into the sea to form a mole at the port of Empedocles, and this
is the reason why the remains seem scant for so vast a structure.

From the elevation of the environing walls of the ancient temenos
of the temple we look across gardens and undulating fields and may
notice the piscina or fish pond mentioned by Diodorus with remains
of the famous Cloacae of Phaeax. To the right are seen four Doric
columns reerected by M. Cavallari, which recall a temple, probably
that of Castor and Pollux, that once stood here, but these are all that
remain of its thirty-four columns. Further on, where the ancient
walls run by the side of the river Hypsas, are the stones of what is
termed the temple *of Vulcan, but there is little to induce the visitor
to visit them.

Leaving the temple of Zeus we made our way along the ridge of
rock that formed the city's bulwark, and have a succession of re-
markable buildings. First comes the temple of Heracles, now like
its fellow warder of the Golden Gate, utterly overthrown save one

The Greek Temples in Sicily. yoy

solitary column. The disjointed stones of its pillars lie bleaching
upon the ground like the articulations of some monster skeleton of
pre-historic periods. In size and plan it must have resembled the
Athenian Parthenon. The latter was 228 feet long without its steps ;
this was 241 feet with them. The Parthenon was lOi feet wide ; this
was ninety feet. The Parthenon was octastyle-peripteral, i. e., with
eight columns in front and rows on either side ; this was hexastyle-
peripteral, with only six. The height of the columns of Athene's
temple is just over thirty-four feet, these thirty-three feet; their
diameter in the former is more than six feet at the base, here it is
seven feet. Here there are but thirty-eight Doric shafts ; at Athens
there are very many more, both large and small. It must, however,
have been the most effective in appearance of all the temples of
Acragas, next indeed to that of Zeus in position and size ; it probably
exceeded it in beauty. It is the earliest of all of them, as shown by
the short and rapidly diminishing shaft, widespread abacus or
capital and the bold curve of the echinus immediately below. Its
restoration in Roman times did not improve it. Its sacred cella has
an arrangement that is probably of this time, for it is quite unique,
making it to consist of three chambers adjoining each other at the
back. Xeuxis presented to this temple his famous picture of Alc-
mene, the mother of its hero-deity, for which he said he could accept
no remuneration because it was priceless. Here, too, was the bronze
statue of Heracles, another of those which "that man Verres" tried
to carry off. A vivid description is given of the attempt by Cicero
in his oration against the praetor. "There is a temple of Hercules
at Agrigentum," he says, "not far from the forum, considered very
holy and greatly reverenced among the citizens. In it there is a
brazen image of Hercules himself, than which I cannot easily tell
where I have seen anything finer; so greatly reverenced that his
mouth and chin are a little worn away because men in addressing
their prayers and congratulations to him are accustomed not only to
worship the statue, but even to kiss it." Verres suddenly sent out a
band of armed slaves one stormy night to attack the temple. The
watchmen and guardians within its sacred precincts raise the alarm
and endeavor to stop the invaders, but are driven in by bludgeons
and stones ; the bolts are forced, the doors are dashed in and they
begin to endeavor to pull the statue off the pedestal, part of which
may still be seen. They are pulling at it with ropes and making
holes for their levers to get a purchase when the news is noised
abroad. "No one in Agrigentum was either so advanced in years
or so infirm in strength as not to rise up on that night, awakened by
the tidings, and to seize whatever weapon chance put into his hands."
They hurry to this temple, where for an hour the scoundrels had been

7o8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

doing their best to overthrow the statue. The citizens rush in ; the
sacred close of the temple yard, lighted up with torches and lanterns,
resounds with yells and blows, and eventually the robbers are driven
away. Thus the statue was preserved from the infamous Verres,
and "the Sicilians, who are never in such distress as not to be able to
say something facetious and neat," remarked on this occasion that
Hercules had added a fresh labo.- to those already accomplished,
since he had conquered another boar (Verres— a boar) in the person
of the praetor in addition to that of Erymanthus !

About three hundred yards further on in the same direction we
come in succession to the two great temples that are erect, and if it
be the first time that the visitor has seen one not a ruinous mass of
stone, it will be a moment of thrilling enjoyment. Here we can
trace for ourselves the cause of the effect produced in the mind with-
out guessing at reconstruction. We feel at once the force of the
beautiful law of proportion that pervades the whole, the exquisite
simplicity, the natural sense of rhythmical beauty that must have
been instinct to the builders, and this to an extent scarcely compre-
hensible to us. All this is so acutely and sensitively embodied in
these stones that we naturally leave the language of architecture for
that of its sister arts of literature and music and can only describe
our feelings in such terms as a poem, a melody, an epic or a sym-
phony ; and after all it is rhythm that gives form to music and Scrip-
ture alike. Nor can we be in the presence of such works as these
without being tempted to trace the intellectual and national disposi-
tion of the Greek mind as shown in the art they have bequeathed to
us to the language they employed. To see how their conception of
Order (xofffxas ) is a convertible term with Beauty, as also with the
great Universe of which we form a part, how to fulfil our appointed
share in this universal order Beauty and Goodness must be inti-
mately related {r.aloxayadi»- ), how the Happy man is he who stands
well with his God {thbaiinMa) , or even how Truth in word or work
is incapable of oblivion {alriOtio). Cannot we also see in the sub-
limely passionless, cold and statuesque character of these temples
the same supreme sense of abstractedness that we feel in the char-
acters of their ancient drama ? The persons come before us as the
creature of some stern, relentless Necessity, spell-bound by some
mysterious power that fetters their free-will, impelling them to their
doom. Religion was the source of their drama as it was of their art,
and the frigidity of spirit, a certain uniformity or sameness, a certain
recurrence of thought and expression, that pervade at least some of
the realms of their ancient literature seem reproduced in their archi-
tecture. The humanity that pervades Gothic architecture is lacking
in classic ; in fact, is it not ethically the difference between the dread

The Greek Temples in Sicily. 709

goddess Ananke, Necessity or Fate, and the Christian doctrine of
Free- Will ? But to our subject.

The first of these temples is dedicated to a goddess of whose pres-
ence the men of Acragas were sadly in need, viz., Concordia, one of
the charities of social life that seems to have been the most difficult
for them to acquire, for in the checkered history of their town when
it was not external attack that they had to combat it was perpetual
internal dissension. The fair goddess of Concord must have sadly
hardened her heart, for her votaries evidently charmed very sweetly
to her in this temple. If the almighty Zeus and the god-like hero
Heracles had as an offering the most extensive works of their hands,
it was to Concord they raised the most completely beautiful and per^
feet specimen of Greek architecture extant on the island and per-
haps in Europe. Harmonious and loveable as such a deity's shrine
should be, it stands 138 feet long by 64 in width, with its thirty-
four yellow sandstone shafts erect, six in front and rear and eleven
on either side, with a circumference tapering from fifteen to nine
feet and about twenty-three in height. Above them rise complete
both architrave and pediments, and except it be the Theseum at
Athens no more complete Doric temple is existing. Situated on the
edge of the steep ridge of rock that forms the natural bulwark of
the ancient city, it spoke aloud for peace, peace to invading Cartha-
ginian and Roman as well as to the men of the once crowded Agora
at its side ; but alas ! there was no peace. Yet we probably owe its
preservation to times when all those who had reared its finished
beauty had long passed away, when the lords of the height and the
moiling crowds of the mart were alike hushed in death, when the
market place had become an oliveyard and the paved streets ter-
races for fig and vine, and there arose another people who placed
here the altar of the God of Peace Himself, choosing as their days-
man the husbandman's patron saint of St. Gregory of the Turnips !
Its sacred cella remains the most perfect in the island, its side walls
pierced with circular openings made when it was used as a church,
and instead of blaming Christianity for adapting temples to its uses
as the too eager antiquary is often prompted to do, he should
remember to be grateful at least here. In A. D. 399 Arcadius and
Honorius commanded all the Greek temples to be destroyed and
used to repair bridges, roads, city walls, aqueducts and the like, but
those that could be used by the Christian communities were to be
exempted from this decree. Our regret therefore should be that
the Church did not take more of them than it did.

A walk of half a mile further on takes us along a road bordered
by the ancient wall hewn out of the natural rock which Virgil saw
from the sea (^n. Hi., 703), and this is honeycombed with niches

710 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

and tombs on its inner face now bereft of their marbles and their
ashes. We come to the temple that is rather hesitatingly styled
that of Juno Lacinia, magnificently situated at the southeast corner
of the city's circuit, on the highest point of this rocky terrace that
forms the last step down from the soaring crest of the Acropolis.
The steep precipitous edge upon which it is placed is 390 feet above
the level of the African sea that lies glittering in the sun 2>^ miles
away, yet looking far nearer ; and here the temple is raised upon a
lofty stylobate or platform with a grand flight of steps leading to its
eastern portico, and huge masses of the city wall upon its southern
side. It is slightly earlier in date than that of Concord, very slightly
smaller and in a less perfect condition. It is similar in design and
in the number of its columns, but of these twenty-five only are now
complete, the remainder being but half columns, and these reerected.
Those on the south have been mainly injured by the scirocco blow-
ing across the Mediterranean from the African deserts, and are
more deteriorated than those on the north, which remain perfect,
while little of the entablature is left. A portion of the pedestal
upon which stood the statue of the goddess still is seen in the nave,
and in front of this seats are observable for the purpose of viewing
the sacrifice made to her. Sometimes this temple is called that of
the Virgins, the reason given being that Xeuxis was asked to paint
for it a picture of the Queen of the Gods and chose for his models
five maidens of Girgenti from whom to form a perfect figure; but
there is probably a confusion with a temple to Juno at Croton and
a picture of Helen of Troy.

These temples are lighter in proportion than those of Egesta and
Selinus and are therefore probably a little later in date. Diodorus
states that they were all erected by means of the money obtained by
the sale of the city's olive oil at Carthage, while the captives made in
B. C. 480 (about the date of the temple of Juno) at the battle of
Himera provided so large a number of slaves that they were no
doubt employed in this work. Some of the citizens are said to have
possessed 500 slaves apiece, and by their labor the subterranean
canals, the fish ponds and temples would be formed ; for quarrying
stone was a very ready means of utilizing prison labor.

It was a saying of the ancients that the "Acragentines built as if
they were to live forever and feasted as if they were to die to-mor-
row," and we may judge for ourselves, now more than 2,000 years
after, how true the first part of the epigram was. We are not likely
to be able to exceed in imagination the magnificence that this ter-
race of cathedrals must have displayed when these temples stood
fair and perfect within a few yards of each other, nor should we be
satisfied with simply inspecting their remains. It is a liberal educa-

The Greek Temples in Sicily. 711

tion to sit down amongst them and recall the history also of the
wonderful city of which they only formed a part, and little is done if
the visitor come but to mark the antithesis that the shrunken mod-
ern Girgenti presents to the mighty Acragas. We can scarcely at
first realize that it was once the wonder of the island, and unless we
have studied the history of the period in which it flourished we are
unflushed with the enthusiasm that the scene about us should kindle.

The story of the fine buildings that once abounded at Acragas in
the height of its pride, the prosperity and riches of its herding citi-
zens, their affluence in statuary and paintings, the luxury and ele-
gance of their homes are dwelt upon with delight by Diodorus the
Sicilian. They had a short life and a luxurious one, but not a peace-
ful one by any means, for the city presents a singularly checkered
career. From its foundation to its overthrow by the daughter of
Tyre was only 174 years, and like Tyre, its fall is one of the most
appalling disasters recorded in history. Twelve years after its foun-
dation Phalaris, whose name is most familiar for his cruelty, had
raised it to so high a pitch of splendor that it ranked at once as the
second city of the island, but it rose in magnificence and beauty only
to become besotted with luxury and to be finally cast down from the
pinnacle of its glory. It allied itself with its conquerors, only to be
destroyed by Rome. It transferred its fickle affections to Rome,
only to be betrayed again to Carthage, and the intervals it filled up
with mutual quarrel and dissension.

Two names will be uppermost in the minds of every visitor to
Girgenti, viz., those of Phalaris and Empedocles, not because they
are the most worthy of remembrance or the only distinguished ones
in its history, but because they are the most romantic; for whilst
few recall the wise ruler Theron, whose Romanized tomb is seen
without the Golden Gate of the city, every schoolboy knows of
Phalaris and his brazen bull and the leap into ^tna of Empedocles.
It is unfortunate that the barbarities of Phalaris are so proverbial as
to obliterate a due consideration of his ability as a ruler and a recog-
nition that it was to him the city owed its rapid rise to the height of
its magnificence. The vague use of the word tyrant is so entirely
harmful in popular parlance that it sounds like a contradiction in
terms to speak of a ''benevolent and just tyrant." Yet in Greek
republican days many such existed, for the word only means one
who raised himself to kingly and autocratic power when a monarchy
was not the recognized form of the Constitution. The cruelty of
the tyrant Phalaris has become associated with all tyrants, but quite
unjustifiably. Modern critical history is inclined to whitewash all
sinners and blacken all saints ; but while doing justice to the pro-
gress made under Phalaris it has been very doubtful as to the story

^12 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of his bull. Yet, as is usually the case with these ancient traditional
tales, further investigation confirms them and we are now again told
that this one is to be accepted. Pindar, writing only eighty years
after the fall of the tyrant, is little likely to have spoken of this in-
strument of torture unless it had been notorious at the time, and he

speaks of

Phalaris with blood defiled.
His Brazen Bull, his torturing flame.
Hand o'er alike to evil fame ^ , . ^ , m

In every clime. Pyth. i., Gary's Trans.

Eventually this bull was carried to Carthage by the victors of
Acragas, but restored again by Scipio Africanus, whom Cicero
records as having said when he did so that "he thought it reason-
able for the Acragentines to consider whether it was more advan-
tageous to the Sicilians to be subject to their own princes or to be
under the dominion of the Roman people when they had this as a
monument of the cruelty of their domestic masters and of Roman,
liberality." (Verres. V. xxxiii.) The comparison, I fear, was a
very weak one, especially with the rapacious and sacrilegious Verres
as the representative of Roman generosity. The Castle of Licata,.
the ancient Phintias, was called Ecnomos the monstrous, from being
the place where this bull was kept, but the figure now lies beneath
the sands of the sea into which it was hurled. The Sicilian peasant
retains it as prominently in his mind as do the youth of England,
and you may see depicted upon one side of their pretty country carts
the scene of Perillus being cast in the brazen oven with the ruler of
Acragas near by, while some sacred story will adorn the second, a
ballet dance be upon a third and King Roger fighting the Arab upon
the fourth ! There seems to have been an importation of Phoenician
cruelty in the adoption of this punishment, which was so singularly
unlike Greek practice, and perhaps in it we may trace some connec-
tion with the bull of the Herculean Melkart and the fires of Moloch.
High up on the acropoHs beneath the Church of Sta. Maria dei
Greci we may see the columns of the most ancient temple in Acra-
gas, within whose walls Phalaris himself may have stood making
his offering to Zeus of the Atabyrian hill of Rhodes, while away at
Ecnomos the air resounded with the bellowings of the victims of his
displeasure.

We have no experience that enables us to vitalize the figure of
these ancient despots, the awe and fear they inspired and the man-
ner of their going are alike unknown to us, so that we cannot place
them in fancy among the moving throngs about the temples and
streets of the city. We probably greatly exaggerate and make quite
an over-colored picture in our brain. But it is not so difficult to
localize the presence of the philosopher Empedocles, the disciple of

The Greek Temples in Sicily. 713

the "long-haired Samian," Pythagoras. We have a part of his lit-
erary labors remaining to us and many descriptions indicative of his
influence. They show him to have been poet, philosopher, natural-
ist, physician and philanthropist, yet penetrated with an all-consum-
ing vanity that has made men skeptical as to whether the philosophy
exceeded the charlatanism in his character. Roman scorn for all
things Greek may have been the source of this, for the coarser fibred
Latin had not only national and political prejudices, but a less finely
strung mental endowment than the Greek. The Pythagorean was
regarded probably as a magician for averting sickness by such sim-
ple remedies as modern times have revived, such as improved venti-
lation and drainage. The cutting through of the crest of the great
wall of rock that connected the Acropolis with the Rupe Atenea
was, according to local tradition, made by his advice, so that the Tra-
montana from the north might get through to the town on the south
and dispel the malaria occasioned by its stagnant air. We may
picture him in his robes of purple, his temples wreathed with the
bay leaves of Apollo, and his feet shod with sandals of saffron and
(they say) gold, charming a listening throng of the luxurious citi-
zens with his eloquence and his reasoning from the natural world
about him, as he sat in the bright sunshine within the precincts of
one of these temples. In the beginning of one of his works — the
Catharma — in which he urges moral conduct as the best medicine,
we seem to see the vanity that has qualified his fame. "An im-
mortal god and no longer a mortal man," he says, "I wander among
you, honored by all, adorned with the priestly diadem and bloom-
ing garlands. Into whatever famous town I enter men and women
do me reverence, and I am accompanied by thousands who thirst for
their advantage, some being drawn to know the future and others
tormented by long and terrible disease, waiting to hear the spells
which will soothe suffering," etc., etc. And thus by the sad irony
of fate in both cases — of Phalaris and Empedocles — it is the evil or
the weakness in them that has lived the longest ! Even in seeking
his romantic death it is said that he desired to secretly disappear
from amongst men so that, according to Lucian, as Milton says, he

to be deemed
A god, leaped fondly into ^tna flames.

Paradise Lost, iii.

But the very cauldron into which he cast himself punished his pride
by ejecting one of those attractive sandals that he had been wont to
display, and thus revealed the truth.

Deus immortalis haberi
Dumcupit Empedocles, ardentem frigidus ^tnam
Insiluit. Hors. A. P., 464.

In the modern town of Girgenti, three or four miles from the

yi4 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

temples, there is nothing much to delay us. It occupies the ancient
Acropolis only and the views from it are wonderfully beautiful and
inspiring. The present population is about the same in number as
is now that of its old compeer Syracuse, but in its prosperity the
latter possessed no less than half a million and this about the same.
The 22,000 modern inhabitants number 300 less than those taken
prisoners by the Romans in the last siege of B. C. 262, yet children
swarm everywhere. It is said to be the most prolific population in
Italy or the island, and Fazzello mentions an Agrigentine woman
who bore seventy-three children at thirty births! The people are
now much employed in the sulphur works, but still we may see pre-
vailing the solid, simple love of agricultural pursuits that marked
the first Dorian settlers. But above all the memory will return to
its magnificent panorama and to the scenes that are summoned to
the stage of the mind's theatre as evening closes in and the sun sinks
over western Lilybseum, Drepanum and Eryx ; when under the in-
fluence of its reflective glamor upon the senses, we repeople again
these Libyan waters, the deserted Agora and lonely temples, and
we gaze down from the Rock of Athena over Girgenti la magniiica.

A. E. P. R. Bowling.

London, England.

MICHAEL SERVETUS AND SOME SIXTEENTH CEN-
TURY EDUCATIONAL NOTES.

FOR centuries before the so-called renascence the University of
Paris was a name to conjure with among the educated classes
of every country in Europe. Even the greatest of the Minne-
singers, Walther von der Vogelweide, in the famous contest on the
Wartburg that has been immortalized by Wagner, boasted that he
had been at the University of Paris. In the old poem attributed to
him, "Die Zwolf Meister zu Paris" — "The Twelve Masters at Paris"
— occurs a quotation that is of interest not only because of its refer-
ence to the University of Paris, but because it shows how much
closer the old German was to the language of the Netherlands and
at the same time nearer in many ways to our modern English. The
quotation is: "Wil man fragen nach den wisosten pfafen die of
ertrich sint die vindet man ze Paris in der schuol." "If a man is
looking for the wisest teachers that exist on earth he must go to the
schools in Paris."^

1 "Die Universitaet Paris und die Fremden an Derselben im Mittelalter." Voa
Dr. Alexander Budinszky, Professor an der Universitaet Czernowitz. Berlin:
Hertz, 1876.

Michael Servetus. 715

For centuries Paris deserved the reputation she enjoyed as the
great centre of learning. Then, mainly as the result of possessing a
sort of monopoly, and having too many privileges conferred on the
faculty and too much power placed in their hands so that individual
enterprise had no proper stimulus, the University lost much of its
usefulness as a teaching institution. At the beginning of the six-
teenth century, despite the fact that most of the great scholars of
Europe thought it necessary to spend some time at the University
of Paris, it does not seem to have been seriously fulfilling its educa-
tional mission. L'Abbe Paquier in an article on the University of
Paris and the teaching of the humanities at the beginning of the
sixteenth century says that there was practically no direct study of
the Latin classics. The text-books used in the teaching of Latin
were mainly certain works written in that language during the im-
mediately preceding century. The principal ones among these were
Despauteres Rudiments, the Floretus, or the Combat, of Thedulus
or Theodatulus, and the Distichs of Jean Facetus.^

Latin was very commonly talked at the University, but the lan-
guage in use would surely have made Cicero turn in his grave had he
heard it. It was so bad that the German historian of the foreigners
at the University of Paris, from whom we have quoted before,
speaks of it as Kauderwalsch, an expressive German term for which
we have no English equivalent, but whose signification would per-
haps be best conveyed to English readers by some such expression
as hog Latin, or jargon.

The main business of the University was the interminable discus-
sion of sophistical questions of all kinds. Even law and medicine
were taught by the discussion of hypothetical questions founded on
the old authors in these branches. Medicine, for instance, was
taught by taking a passage from Galen, the interpretation of which
might reasonably, or unreasonably, be called into doubt, and then
its different significations were discussed and arguments brought
forward founded on quotations from other parts of the author's
work. When this was true of so practical a subject as medicine, it
can be easily understood how the argumentative system formed the
basis in all other branches of education.

A quotation from a letter written by a student of the University
at the time shows how far this foolish devotion to the disputation
system had gone: ''Les inombrables cohortes de sophistes empechent
tout progres. Dans une seance on n'en voulait pas peu a Adam de
n' avoir pas mange de poires au lieu de pommesJ' "The endless cohorts
of sophists prevent all progress at the University. One lecture hour

2 "Revue des Questions Hiatoriques." New Series, Vol. XX. and XXI.; x\rti-
cle "L'Universite de Paris, et L'Humanisme au Debut," XVI. eme Sieole, par
Xi'Abbe Paauier.

7i6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

was taken up with the question whether Adam was not to be
seriously blamed by his descendants for not having eaten pears in
place of apples." This passage occurs in a letter of Glarean's to
Erasmus written August the 5th, 15 10. It is to be found in the third
volume of Erasmus' collected works.

Notwithstanding this unfortunate state of affairs, distinguished
scholars still found their way to the University. Sir Thomas, after-
wards Blessed Thomas More, having become embroiled with the
English King, Henry VIII., by refusing to submit to his will in
Parliament, had to resign his seat and found it advisable to spend
several years on the Continent. At least one of those years was
passed at the University of Paris. This was about 15 10. It is in-
teresting to note that he passed some time also at the University of
Louvain and seems to have been quite taken with Netherlandish
educational ways. More does not seem to have been very much
impressed with the University of Paris, however. Later on, when
the question of the education of his own children and those of
friends was under discussion, he said that he knew no reason why
they should be sent to Paris rather than to Oxford or to Cam-
bridge.

Shortly before More's sojourn in the French capital, some time
between 1505 and 15 10, Erasmus of Rotterdam was at the Uni-
versity of Paris. We have no definite opinion of his with regard ta
the teaching value of educational methods at the University of Paris,
though their neglect of Latin does not seem to have spoiled his own
classic Latinity. For a number of years there were friends of
Erasmus at the University of Paris, from whom he received letters
containing accounts of events there. Most of his friends seem not
to have been overmuch impressed with the value of Paris University
training.

The reputation enjoyed by the University of Paris in the outer
world may be gathered from two noteworthy incidents at the begin-
ning of the sixteenth century. When Luther's doctrines first began
to be a source of discussion, and consequently of religious discord
in Germany, Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, applied to the faculty
of the University of Paris for a decision with regard to their tena-
bility. A little later, when Henry VIII. , with Anne Boleyn already
in view, wished to obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he
also applied to the University of Paris for a decision with regard tO'
the theological and ethical points at issue. These appeals for judg-
ment give a better idea of the universal appreciation of the position
of the University of Paris than any discussion of its actual value as
an educational centre.

Most of the repute enjoyed by the University of Paris and the ele-

Michael Servetus. 717

ment in its teaching that probably led Frederick and Henry VIII.
more than anything else to make their applications was undoubtedly
the well-known subtlety of its dialecticians. Surely, if ever, the days
of the old sophists had returned here in Paris, and her logicians
would have deserved very well the satirical pen of another Aristo-
phanes for their unfailing efforts to make the worse appear the better
part. This had become so remarkable that in 1530 the faculty of
arts of the University of Paris confessed with sadness : ''UUniversite
etait devenue la risee Ues stations etr anger es pas les subtilites de
sa dialectu tiqueo." 'The University of Paris has become the laugh-
ing stock of foreign nations because of the subtility of its dialectics."'

Very little improvement came in the teaching of the classics at the
University of Paris until competition became a factor in arousing the
dormant energies of university professors. About 1560 the Jesuits
were allowed, by Papal rescript, to open the College de Clermont.
After this the classics were better taught, for the Jesuits made them
a special feature of their curriculum, and very soon raised the
standard of the teaching of Latin all over Europe.

Jourdain, who takes up the history of the University of Paris in
the sixteenth century where the old University Chronicler Boulay
leaves off, apologizes for the condition of the University at the be-
ginning of the sixteenth century and blames it on the unsettled state
of the times. He says :

"Any one who knows the history of France well will surely recog-
nize that there never was an age more disturbed by ideas and ex-
pectations of revolution and by warring diversity of opinion than the
sixteenth century. Civil war lent all its acerbity to make these con-
ditions more and more unbearable and to disturb the usual order of
things."*

Notwithstanding all that has been said about the low standard of
education at the University of Paris, the picture of University life
at the beginning of the sixteenth century is not without its brighter
side. For instance, Aleander's work in introducing Greek into the
University must ever remain as a noble landmark in Western educa-
tional development. At the beginning of his career Aleander seems
to have been very little appreciated. After an absence of several
years, however, at a rival university he was recalled to become one
of the bright lights of the University of Paris.

The neglect of the classics at the University of Paris was not with-

3 "Die Universitaet Paris und die Fremden an Derselben in Mittelalter," Von
Br. Alexander Budinszky, Professor an der Universitaet Czernowitz. * Cuilibet
Gallicse Gentis annales investiganti nullam unquam aetas oecurrit quae novarutn
Terum studio et expectatione variis opinionum adversarum concertationibus diu-
turna belli plus quam civilis atrocitate. Magis elata fuerit magisque exagitata et
afRicta quam seculum sextum decimum. "Index Chronologicus Chartarum Per-
tinetium ad Historiam Universitatis Parisiensis. Studio et cura Caroii Jourdain."
Supplement to the History of the University of Paris by Jourdain.

71 8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

out its compensations in other ways. To the emptiness of educa-
tional ideals we doubtless owe the fact that Francis Xavier, the
brilliant young professor at the College Dormans-Beauvais for
several years during the third decade of the century, was ready to
give up his professorship and follow Ignatius of Loyola, whose ac-
quaintanceship he had made at the university on the quixotic mission
to the Holy Land. Their mission proved not to be in partibus inii-
delium, but in the very heart of the Church itself. The foundation of
the great teaching order that was to reform education and, incident-
ally, revolutionize the methods of classical teaching at the University
ofParis was to result from this unnoticed movement among a few
Spanish students.

Ignatius himself spent the six years between 1528 and 1534 at the
College Sant Barbe. In the latter year he received there the degree
of Master of Arts. Laynez and Salmeron, Lefevre and Rodriguez,
the other original members of the Society of Jesus, were, like
Francis Xavier, acquaintances made by Ignatius during his course
at the University.

There were always a good many Spaniards in attendance at the
University of Paris, and the autumn after Ignatius and his compan-
ions left on their pilgrimage Michael Servetus, who came, as did
Ignatius himself and Francis Xavier, from the Spanish provinces
near the Pyrenees, took up the study of medicine at the University.
Servetus came from Villanueva in Aragon, and he is sometimes
known as Michael Villanueva. He was only 25 when he came, but
he had already signalized himself by a tendency to independent
thinking. After only two years of the study of medicine he set up-
as a lecturer on the subject himself.

One of the beneficial results of the exaggerated tendency to fritter
away time on what the faculty of the University rather leniently and
euphemistically called "the subtleties of dialectics" was that more
attention than was usual at Universities of that period was devoted
by serious students to the practical professions of law and medicine
and to original investigation in the nascent physical sciences.

Servetus' favorite teacher at the University of Paris was Vesalius.
Vesalius was a young man, but he had already accomplished some-
of that work in anatomy which deservedly gained for him the title
of "Father of Anatomy." Vesalius had been attracted to Paris by the
reputation of Sylvius, whose name and fame are bound up with the
subject of brain anatomy. One of the most important fissures in the
brain, near which lie the great motor centres, is called the Sylvian
fissure because of its discovery and description by this distinguished'
University of Paris professor. Vesalius was especially noted for his^
dissections while at the University of Paris, and most of the materiaK

Michael Servetus. 719

for his famous work, "De Humani Corporis Fabrica," was obtained
during his work at the University.

These early years of the sixteenth century practically saw the be-
ginning of the modern inductive sciences. The observations from
which the great principles of the succeeding centuries were to be
drawn were being made in many places throughout Europe. When
Vesalius left the University of Paris it was to continue his studies in
anatomy in Italy, especially at Bologna and Padua. In Italy he was
brought intimately into association with men like Eustachius and
Fallopius, whose names are forever attached to structures in the
human body which they were the first to describe.

The plates for Vesalius' great work are probably the best ana-
tomical illustrations that have ever been prepared. There has al-
ways been a discussion as to the artist who assisted Vesalius in his.
work. A reasonably well founded tradition exists to the effect that
their designer was no less a personage than Titian, the Venetian
artist. Titian is known to have been a friend of Vesalius, and the
plates are worthy even of his reputation. His artistic interest in
anatomy would have been sufficient to encourage him to undertake
the work. Its accomplishment would really have been a labor of
love, a precious bit of training for his artistic development. It was
but shortly before this time that that other of the greatest artists,
Leonardo da Vinci, numbered among manifold attainments a won-
derfully exact knowledge of human anatomy and insisted that the
artist must possess this knowledge to be successful.

Everywhere were the signs of the awakening of that spirit of in-
vestigation of nature and enthusiasm for independent observation
which was to prove the origin of modern science. Bacon, who
lived at the end of this century and the beginning of the next, is often
spoken of as the father of the inductive sciences. By a curious mis-
conception in history it not infrequently happens that the collator of
the work of others becomes, to posterity, the originator of ideas of
which he was only an especially impressionable recipient. Bacon
himself was not a scientist in any true sense of the word, and his
work consisted only of the expression and arrangement of the prin-
ciples of observation that had been, long before his time, applied by
men who were real scientific discoverers.

Into what unexpected dangers the pursuit of science might bring-
a devotee may be gathered from Vesalius' career. He gave up his
position of anatomist at the University of Paris in order to become
the private physician of Philip 11. of Spain. He gave excellent sat-
isfaction and continued his anatomical work whenever the oppor-
tunity offered. One of his patients, a prominent nobleman, died of
some disease that Vesalius could not explain. He asked and ob-

720 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

tained permission from the family to make an examination of his
internal organs in order to find out the cause of death. He allowed
some friends of the deceased to be present while he was making the
autopsy. They either saw, or thought they saw, life in the dead
body after Vesalius made his incision for examination purposes.
How easy it would be for the lively imagination of friends to per-
suade them that motion occurred where there really was none ? It
may have been that Vesalius mistook one of the cases of cataleptic
trance which sometimes simulate death so completely as to make
their recognition extremely difficult.

However that may be, for his unintentional homicide he was con-
demned to death. The sentence was commuted by Philip H. to a
pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. This Vesalius made success-
fully, but on his return he was shipwrecked on the Island of Zante
and died as a consequence of the exposure and over fatigue. His
death took place October 15, 1564, when he was only 50 years of
age and when there was still promise of great advances in anatomy
at his hands.

It was during this transitional period that the future martyr for
heresies on the Trinity came to Paris. Under the inspiration of
Vesalius' example, and very probably with his personal guidance
and assistance, Servetus devoted himself to human anatomy with
great enthusiasm. Besides Vesalius, Servetus came under the influ-
ence of Sylvius, whose work had made him famous throughout
Europe and whose success would prompt the ambitious young
Spaniard to hard work. At the end of two years Servetus received
his license to practice, after having demonstrated before the
faculty his ability to defend a set of theses from Galen's works.
He would be said in modern terms to have carried off the
honors of his class. Vix ulli secundus cognitione Galeni — scarcely
second to any in his knowledge of Galen — ^was the verdict of the
faculty of the University after they had listened to his brilliant dispu-
tation.

As we have already said, the training in medicine given by the
University consisted in these disputations. The study of patients
was very little encouraged. It was much more important in the
eyes of the medical faculty to know the various passages in Galen's
works that referred to a special type of disease than to have seriously
investigated the individual symptoms that a series of patients might
present. With this verdict of the faculty, then, as the stamp of his
knowledge of medicine Servetus was ready to set up as a lecturer
at the University immediately after his graduation.

There was a large number of students at the University at this
time, some ten thousand altogether, and as the courses taken were

Michael Servetus. 721

not arranged in the methodical fashion usual at universities now, it
was not hard for a young lecturer to get a set of pupils. Servetus
was especially favored by the fact that he came from the Pyrenees
region in Spain, for there were, at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, a large number of Spanish students from this region in
Paris. Of this the best evidence is that such men as Ignatius of
Loyola and Francis Xavier, and Laynez and Salmaron had gone out
of their own country in order to complete their education at Paris.
There seems to have been not a- little national solidarity. Servetus
proved to be a very popular lecturer, and, as events shortly showed,
made many friends among those in attendance at the University.

His special application to the study of Galen during his under-
graduate years does not seem to have given him that exclusive rever-
ence for that master's work which was usually imbibed by the
students of the period. His tendency to think for himself very soon
manifested itself. During the course of his professorship at Paris
he published a book on the use of syrups in medicine, in which he
completely broke away from Galenic traditions with regard to the
treatment of disease.

It is characteristic of the temper of the times that the publication
of this book almost led to serious disturbance in the University.
Members of the faculty took different sides as to the advisability of
allowing the book to appear under the aegis of the University or
permitting its author to teach any longer within the precincts of
Paris, or with the sanction of the University authorities. To break
with established tradition in any line of knowledge was a serious
matter. Any departure from the teachings of the ancients was a sort
of heresy. Heresy meant choice of doctrine, and there was to be no
picking nor choosing of the dogmas that were to be taught in the
University in any department. Everything was to be regulated by
authority, and the authority in medicine was Galen, whose ipse dixit
must be regarded as infallible and must be maintained at all cost.

It is a pregnant sign of the times that there were enough of the
reactionary party in the faculty of the University and among the
students to support Servetus in his risky declaration of independence
of thought. For a long time, however, the situation at the Uni-
versity was very tense. Many a hard word was bandied, and there
was even rioting on the street and some serious injuries were in-
flicted. Servetus refused to withdraw his book, and finally was
allowed to maintain his position. Peace, however, was not fully
restored until after a decree of Parliament had made it a penal
offense to discuss in public, either pro or con, certain' of the mooted
points that had been brought up by the controversy.

Those were days when people took themselves and their ideas very

Vol. XX VI.— 7.

722 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

seriously. When individuals held opinions they seemed always
ready to fight for them, no matter how trivial the subject matter of
the opinions might be. Controversies over disputed points in which
ordinarily sane men of later times can see nothing of importance
might easily lead, and did often actually lead, to bloodshed. Par-
liaments and municipal councils in most of the cities of Europe had
for this reason often to interfere by formal decrees in what seemed
purely academic discussions of the most impractical and impersonal
character.

Controversy of all kinds took on an acerbity that we can scarcely
comprehend in the midst of our lackadaisical indifferentism. Cul-
ture has at least brought this benefit in its train that we have learned
to conceal our impatience in public with those who disagree with us.
During the sixteenth century mere wordy discussions, in which op-
ponents were really disputing over nothing more serious than a dif-
fering assumption of significance in terms, were prone to become
extremely bitter. Towards the end of the century zealous church-
men, representative members of great educational institutions, could
scarcely disagree over a minor point in theology without accusing
one another of unnatural crimes and impugning one another's an-
cestry.

As the result of his first book and certain letters in which he criti-
cized Calvinistic doctrine, a lively epistolary discussion ensued be-
tween Calvin and Servetus, in which some extremely bitter things
were said on both sides. The general impression outside of Swit-
zerland, or rather outside the pale of Calvin's influence, seemed to
have been that Calvin got the worst of it in the dispute. For this
he never forgave Servetus. It was evidently personal rancor, rather
than religious zeal, that prompted the Genevan reformer to take
advantage of his power and put Servetus to death, when, by an un-
fortunate combination of circumstances, his young opponent fell
into his hands.

The odium theologicum, so characteristic of the time, can be gath-
ered very well from some of the courtesies that passed between these
two representatives of sacred truth, as they considered themselves,,
during the course of their discussion. "Calvin was so incensed
against Servetus" (as the result of this epistolary discussion) "that
he could not forbear to revile him in his commentaries upon the
Bible. He calls him a 'profligate fellow' (un mescant garnement),
'full of pride and a dog.' This is in the edition of the year 1553, in
the commentary upon the first verse of the first chapter of St. John's
gospel. Calvin wrote those words before Servetus came to Geneva,
for the epistle dedicatory (of this edition) is dated January first, 1553.
In 1546 Calvin had written to Farel a letter in which he says: T

Michael Servetus, 723

am informed that Servetus is coming hither (to Geneva), on purpose
to have some conversation with me. If I have any influence on the
magistrates of Geneva, I will take effectual care that he never goes
from hence alive.' "*

The next century was not very old before two learned and pre-
sumably phlegmatic Dutchmen became embroiled in a discussion
over a Greek enclitic particle. Before the controversy was ended,
we may say, by the way, that it was never decided, these two most
distinguished classical scholars in Europe provided an exhibition
of give and take in Latin Billingsgate that has amused students of
the classics ever since and been a precious mine for terms of con-
tempt and slang abuse couched in classical latinity.

Those were dangerous times in which to indulge in the luxury of
original ideas. We may still be of the profound conviction that
people who disagree with us in important ethical principles are in-
sincere. But we do not consider that they deserve to be hang^,
drawn and quartered, or to be burned until dead for their opinions.
In the sixteenth century, however, the spirit of intolerance ran very
high. Men were only beginning to realize that they need not neces-
sarily follow the lines of thought laid out for them by Plato and
Aristotle and Hippocrates and Galen. The consciousness that they
could think straight for themselves without consulting authority on
every subject apparently aroused in men's minds the conviction that
when others took the same liberty and came to conclusions different
from theirs, then those who disagreed with them must be wrong and
deserved to be punished.

Of Servetus' treatise on syrups, over which there was so much
disturbance, it may be said that it represents a distinct advance in the
prescribing of drugs. To the casual medical reader of the present
day it is an insoluble problem why there should have been so bitter
a controversy over the book. It is, of course, a marked departure
from Galen and Galenic methods of treatment. This departure is,
however, distinctly in the line of advance. There are many falsities,
of course, but some of Servetus' ideas were to be adopted by the
medical profession generally before very long. This book contains
the first suggestion of the proper employment of vehicles in prescrip-
tions, that is, of solutions tasty and pleasant smelling which, while
of no special service in themselves, are useful because the^ enable
other drugs to be held in solution. The book contains some of the
first steps in progress away from the nauseous mixtures that were so

5 These quotations are from "An Impartial History of Michael Servetus, Burned
Alive at Geneva for Heresy." Anonymous. London, Printed 'for Aaron Ward
at the King's Arms in Little Britain, 1724. The book is rare, but there is a copy
of it in the Library of the Academy of Medicine of New York City and another
in the library of the Catholic Summer School, the latter a donation from the New
York Academy of Medicine.

724 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

popular during mediaeval times. The principles on which Servetus
suggests the making of syrups would eliminate the tendency to pre-
cipitation of drugs, so common in the old mixtures, and laid the
first principle by which the mingling of incompatible ingredients
could be avoided.

It is surprising to think that this work could have been accom-
plished by a man whose main purpose was not practical, but emi-
nently theoretic. It must have required a number of experiments
and a considerable amount of careful observation to secure the data
necessary for the detailed information the book contains. The
faculty of observation was, in fact, the strong side of Servetus' mind.
When he wandered into the realm of theory and metaphysics he fell
into egregious errors difficult to understand. Unfortunately, how-
ever, as is so often the case, instead of cultivating his most promis-
ing faculties, he looked for his fame from the employment of powers
that had not been granted him.

All through his books we find the marks of his acute and accurate
powers of observation. We shall have occasion to remark on the
great discovery of the minor circulation which he made as the result
of his dissecting work. He ignored the value of these precise ob-
servations so much that it is only when his knowledge of supposedly
unknown facts is introduced casually and for the purpose of illustrat-
ing phases of his metaphysical speculations that we know anything
of his having made them.

Deeply interested as Servetus must have been in his scientific
medical work, in various departments, it is not a little difficult to
explain why he should have left Paris to take up the position of an
ordinary practitioner of medicine in the provinces. It may well have
been that financial reasons weighed most in influencing his decision.
Lecturers at the University of Paris were but illy paid, and while
money was not nearly as important a consideration in those days as
in ours, this reason might well have its weight with a young man
who found himself rather unpopular with one faction of the Uni-
versity faculty and so could not look for rapid promotion.

It has been suggested that there may have been a woman in the
case. At the time when Servetus was teaching at the University of
Paris, and for most of the century that followed, the old mediaeval
monastic tradition with regard to bachelor professors still continued
in vogue. No one of the teaching staflf of the University was al-
lowed to be married. This was true not only for the members of
the faculties of arts and letters and theology, departments which
more properly belonged to monastic teachers, but was insisted upon
also for the members of the faculties of the schools of medicine and
law. It was not until 1600 that the professors of medicine, who were

Michael Servetus. 725

usually at the same time, as they are at present, practicing physicians
in the city of Paris, were allowed to take to themselves wives, with-
out resigning their University professorship. This regulation of
enforced bachelorhood remained in effect for even the lay professors
in the other faculties until nearly the middle of the seventeenth cen-
tury.

It is almost needless to say that these regulations, which con-
cerned also the students of the University, none of whom were al-
lowed to be married, did not conduce to the morality of the Uni-
versity quarter of the town. Many of the traditions of the notorious
Quartier Latin come down from the days when these University
regulations were in force. They account for some of the queer Uni-
versity decrees in which there is evidence of what to us seems a
totally unwarranted compounding with vice.

Whether the proverbial woman in the case had anything to do
with Servetus' removal from Paris is extremely doubtful. We have
no record of his marriage. Some years later there ' are obscure
references to a proposal of marriage on his part, but the data are
so incomplete as to leave the issue of the marital negotiations in
doubt. The trouble over his book may well have provided pretext
enough to leave Paris gladly.

When the Bishop of Vienne and Dauphiny offered him the post
of private physician, Servetus accepted it. His idea very probably
was to obtain time for what would in our day be called literary labor.
In his active brain, unshackled by traditions, many thoughts were
seeking expression. At that time no one amounted to anything in
the educational world unless he had written something on theolog-
ical subjects. The air was full of controversy. Every one who pre-
sumed that he could think straight on any subject felt impelled to
dabble in theological discussion. Servetus' first work had been pub-
lished several years before his connection, either as student or pro-
fessor, with the University of Paris. It had attracted considerable
attention because of its hardihood and the fact that its author was
scarcely beyond his majority. The subject taken was the loftiest in
theology, and the method of treating it was the form least calculated
to make friends for its author. Its title was "De Trinitatis Errori-
bus." Something of the avidity with which such books were read
may be gathered from the fact that the second edition of the book
was called for within a year after its first publication. This second
edition was revised and enlarged and received the title "Dialogorum
de Trinitate, Libri Duo."

It might have been hoped that Servetus' devotion in the mean-
time to serious anatomical and medical studies would have taken
him out of the dangerous field of theological discussion. As a

726 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

matter of fact, it seems to have had this effect for a number of years.
For some years Servetus devoted his spare time to editing scientific
books of various kinds for a pubHsher in Lyons not far from Vienne.
Among other books which he edited was the geography of Ptolemy.
This seems to have been a popular book, for a second edition was
called for within a year or two. Servetus' notes on the geography
of Ptolemy are eminently characteristic of the man. He rises above
the limited circle of ideas of the old geographer to see the wide rela-
tions that geography may have with all the sciences. While Ptole-
my's descriptions and maps were concerned only with political, and
to a certain extent with physical, geography, Servetus conceived the
idea that the science of the description of the earth should be made
to include scientific data of various kinds, botanical, zoological,
astronomical, according to the varying physical phenomena to be
found in different parts of the known world. As a consequence of
this broad view of the application of geography, Servetus has been
called by a number of good authorities the Father of Comparative
Geography.

In the meantime Servetus seems to have been careful not to
neglect his medicine. There is an account of his having taken sev-
eral courses at the University of Montpelier, whose medical faculty
has been distinguished almost as far back as the history of universi-
ties in Europe extends. These intervals of attendance at the Uni-
versity of Montpelier may very well have occurred during the ab-
sence of the Archbishop of Vienne, either on a journey to Paris or to
Rome, for Servetus continued to hold his post of body physician to
that prelate. In 1 545 the Council of Trent began its session and the
absence of the Archbishop at some of the sessions of the Council
may have given Servetus opportunities for scientific work at the
University of Montpelier, which was somewhat easier to reach and
had none of the forbidding associations of Paris.

About the middle of the decade, 1540 to 1550, Servetus was
tempted once more to enter the field of theological discussion. He
denied some of the doctrines of Calvin, and this led to a discussion
with the Geneva reformer in which the usual absence of amenity on
both sides is the distinguishing characteristic. That this discussion
did not cause him to neglect his practice as a physician is evident
from the fact that when, a few years later, the authorities of Vienne
wished to arrest and imprison him because of his book, which was
deemed to be heretical, they found it very easy to secure his impris-
onment by summoning him as if to see a sick prisoner, and then
retaining him under duress.

It was not. until 1553 that Servetus published the book which
caused his death. There is only one complete copy of the first edi-

Michael Servetus. y2j

tion of that book in existence. It is one of the world's bibliophilic
treasures, and is in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris. There is
an imperfect copy, the only other example of the first edition that
is known to be in existence, in the Imperial Library of Austria at
Vienna. The Paris copy was purchased by the Bibliotheque Na-
tionale through an English agent in Louis XIV.'s time. The price
then paid for it was 13,000 francs, about $2,600. Its value at the
present time, of course, can scarcely be computed.

Besides being the only perfect copy of a first edition the book is
interesting for other reasons. It belonged for a number of years to
the library of Dr. Richard Mead, the most famous English physician
of his time. Dr. Mead, himself a prolific writer in medicine, and
Chief Physician to the English Court, was a great friend of the
literary men of his time, and included among his intimates such men
as Pope, Johnson, Hogarth and others. Mead was very much inter-
ested in Servetus, and began the publication of an edition of this book
which was to be in every way a replica of the original edition. He
did not live to complete his work, though there were some copies of
an edition of Servetus, imitating the original in every way, issued
shortly afterward in Holland.

There is a tradition that the volume owned by the Bibliotheque
Nationale in Paris is the original copy that was used by the public
prosecutor at Geneva for the abstraction of the passages that were
used at Servetus' trial to demonstrate the heresies contained in the
book. There are certain brownish patches here and there on the
edges of the leaves that look as though they would crumble at the
touch and certain parts that have actually crumbled. These are
pointed out as marks of the fire in which the unfortunate author of
the book perished. For there is a tradition that this copy was de-
posited on the funeral pyre to be burned with Servetus in accord-
ance with the decree of the Court at Geneva. It is supposed to have
been rescued by some one whose zeal was not exactly according to
Calvin and to have been sent to England to avoid the danger that
might well come from its possession in either France or Switzerland
at the time.

The book is not in the original binding, and so the question of its
having been singed by fire is hard to decide. There seems no good
reason to think that the Geneva copy escaped the holocaust prepared
for it. Unfortunately for the picturesque tradition, recent investi-
gation seems to show that the crumbly patches are only the result of
mildew.

The visitor to the Museum of the Bibliotheque Nationale will still
he told, however, that this is the public prosecutor's copy saved from
the flames. I have even heard one of the best known members of

728 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

the medical faculty of the University of Paris, Professor Charles
Richet, the distinguished physiologist, state in a public lecture his
belief in the old tradition with regard to this being the public prose-
cutor's copy.

The book was published without either author or publisher's name
on the title page. Servetus realized the danger which his notions on
the Trinity made him incur. The title of the book is a curiosity in
itself. It runs :

CHRISTIANI-
SMI Restitu-
TIO.
arranged exactly in the way we have placed it here. The whole of
the title is "CHRISTIANISMI RESTITUTIO, Totius Ecclesiae
Apostolicae est ad sua Limina Vocatio,in Integrum Restituta Cogni-
tione Dei, Fidei Christi Justificationis Nostrae Regenerationis Bap-
tisme et Caenae Domini Manducationis. Restuto Denique Nobis
Regno Ceolesti, Babylonis Captivatate Soluta et Anti-Christo Cum
Suis Penitus Destructo."

They were not sparing of words in their titles in those days, and
the peculiar division of the first and principal words of the title,
which are in large capitals, show how near we are to the incunabala
of printing.

The anonymity of the book as regards author and publisher did
not save Servetus, however. The book was condemned by the
ecclesiastical authorities and search made for the writer. When it
was discovered that Servetus was the author it was resolved to throw
him into prison in order to await the action of the civil authorities.
There seems to have been some hesitancy as to the legal status of
this decision, or else there was fear that if Servetus were served pub-
licly with a warrant his friends might find some way to warn him
before being brought to prison. Perhaps the ecclesiastical authori-
ties had no formal agents to carry out their decrees. As a conse-
quence Servetus was inveigled to prison by the scheme which has
been mentioned. Utterly unsuspicious, he answered the call of pro-
fessional duty that brought him presumably to see a sick prisoner
and then was detained in prison.

The most remarkable feature of Servetus' life is the number of
friends he made and the readiness they displayed in supporting him
in difficult and dangerous circumstances. At the University of
Paris during his trouble with the University authorities this is espe-
cially manifest. That he had succeeded in making many friends in
Vienne also we have hinted already in a suggested explanation of the
stratagem employed to get him to prison. These friends were not
numerous and powerful enough to assure his acquittal, but they sue-

Michael Scrvetiis.

729

ceeded in enabling Servetus to escape from prison. Servetus at
once made his way out of France with the purpose of eventually-
reaching Naples, where he had some Spanish friends, on whose pro-
tection he could rely. On the way to Naples, unfortunately for him,
he delayed for a day or two at Geneva.

Perhaps he was tempted to see for himself some of the political
conditions that surrounded Calvin and that he hoped to do this
incognito. The most important characteristic of the quasi-republi-
can government at Geneva under Calvin's influence was the fact that
nearly every second person was a spy, ready to furnish information
spontaneously, or for a proper reward, to the authorities. The Pro-
testant reformer, who believed that a certain number of the human
race were predestined to damnation and could not by any effort of
their own secure their salvation, acted up to his belief in practical
life. He utterly distrusted those around him, and by a system of
extensive espionage hoped to secure the subservience of the people
and their fidelity to his religious tenets.

Servetus was recognized, arrested and thrown into prison. He
lay in prison for some time until the Council of Geneva had been
properly prepared to give him the benefit of the sternest justice.
This seems to have required no little persuasion on Calvin's part.
The trial lasted for nearly two months. The reformer's bitter
hatred, however, of the man who had made him ridiculous in con-
troversy finally succeeded in winning the Judges over to his own
cruel decision. Servetus was condemned to death, his death to be
on the funeral pyre.

On October the 14th, 1553, the sacrifice was consummated. There
is a tradition that the wood used for the pyre was green and did not
burn well. When the match was first put to it, it flared up and for
the moment it seemed to be all over with the young reformer whose
life was ending thus unhappily at the age of 42. In the first moment
of pain Servetus cried out in Spanish, in a voice evidently directed
to heaven: "Misericordias ! Misericordias !" "Mercy! Mercy!'-
Then, as the slow burning wood failed to put him out of agony at
once, he was heard to pray : "J^sus, Son of the Eternal God, have
mercy on me." In order to hasten his death, the executioner seems
to have been directed to rearrange the burning wood. This is sup-
posed to have given the opportunity for the rescue of the book^
which was condemned to be burned with its author.

It would be absurd to blame Calvin alone for the death of Servetus.
The execution was really the outcome of the intolerance of the Pro-
testantism of the time. Many of the reformers of that day supported
the action of Calvin and wrote him letters commending the course
pursued by the Council of Geneva. ZwingHus was outspoken in his

y^o American Catholic Quarterly Review.

commendation of Calvin's action. Martin Butzer, of Strasbourg,
and Oikolampadius, of Basle, publicly expressed their justification
of Servetus* execution. Even the gentle Melancthon, mildest of the
reformers, sent letters of congratulation to Calvin on the pious deed
he had done that would form "a memorable example for posterity."
Alexander Hales said "that the citizens of Geneva had deserved well
of all the churches by overcoming the new Mahomet, whose invasion
of Christianity was even more dangerous than the Eastern Prophet's
had been.""

As the result of the death of Servetus a reaction set in among all
classes with regard to execution for written or spoken heresy. The
spirit of this reaction is best expressed by some famous sentences of
Castalion, a Professor at the University of Basle at the time. Cas-
talion in a public letter addressed to the authorities at Geneva said :

"To kill a man is not to defend any doctrine ; it is only to kill a
man. The magistrates of a city are bound in duty to protect the life
and property of its citizens. As to the defense of truth, that is not
the business either of the magistrate or of the executioner. It con-
cerns the teacher and the pastor. When a heretic attacks religion
only by words and arguments, religion must be defended only by
arguments and words, that is to say, by purely spiritual arms.""^

In general the eflfect of Servetus' death was to produce a new
point of view with regard to freedom of speech and writing. Under
the circumstances one cannot help but recall the famous self-sacrifice
of the monk, Telemachus, in order to stop the gladiatorial shows that
continued to be held even under the Christian Emperors. Servetus,
of course, did not anticipate any such happy consequence of his sad
fate, and yet his execution foreordained quite as eflfectually as the
sad fate of Telemachus put an end to the human sacrifices of the
arena the abolition of the death penalty for heresy. The ardent
young scientist might have met a kindlier fate for his foolish over-
zeal, but scarcely one that would have satisfied him more could he
have foreseen its eventual results for science and thought.

Servetus was one of those unfortunate men, enviable geniuses to
posterity, but uncomfortable human beings in their relations to their

« These quotations are from the article "Charakterbild Michel Servetis, von
Henri Tollin," contained in Virchow's "Sammhing Wissenschaftlicher v or-
traege," Eleventh Series, No. 254. ^ This seems to be the first formal expression
ever made of the right of liberty of speech and writing in matters of religion. It
thus reflects the first ray of the dawn of the era to which we have grown accus-
tomed. For this reason the passage in its succinct entirety seems worth quoting
in the original. "Tuer un homme ce n'est pas defendr^ une doctrine ce n'est que
tuer un homme. Le magistrat doit defendr^ la vie et les biens des citoyens, quant
a defendrfi la verit6 c'est TafEaire non du magistrat ni du bourreau, mais du doc-
teur, et du pasteur. Quand un heretique n'attaque la religion que par des paroles
et des arguments il ne faut la defendrS que par des arguments en des paroles
c'est Si dire par des armes jurement spirituelles." Quoted from Article "Serve-
tistes" in the Dictionnaire La Rousse.

Michael Servetus. 731

fellow-men. His career occurred when "the times were out of joint,"
and he thought that he was born ''to set them right." Had he come
in the nineteenth century he would surely have been recognized as an
independent thinker, would have been hailed probably as the founder
of a new school of philosophic thought, would have tried to reconcile
science and religion with sufficient leaning towards science to make
him mildly suspect of heresy, and would have "lived happy ever
after." In the sixteenth century he was eminently out of place, and
his unfortunate end was the result.

One of the most surprising things in his book on the Trinity is to
find the first description of the pulmonary circulation that was ever
penned, brought in as a figure that he thought would serve to make
clear some of the ideas evolved in this conception of the Trinity and
the relations of the Divine Persons to one another. When Servetus
came to talk of the Holy Spirit animating the other persons of the
Trinity, he compares it to the air animating the flesh through the
blood in this human trinity that constitutes man.

The vital spirit, he says, "is generated by the mixture in the lungs
of the inspired air with the subtly elaborated blood, which the right
ventricle sends to the left. The communication between the ventri-
cles, however, is not made through the midwall of the heart, but in
a wonderful way the fluid blood is conducted by a long detour
from the right ventricle through the lungs, where it is acted on by
the lungs and becomes red in color, passes from the arteriac venosa
into the vena arteriosa, whence it is finally drawn by the diastole
into the left ventricle."

A better description of the lesser or pulmonic circulation could
not be written in our own day, and yet this was printed 150 years
before Harvey "discovered" the circulation of the blood. This does
not detract from the value of Harvey's wonderful synthetic work, but
it serves to show that, like all great discoveries, the realization of the
circulation of the blood was not the sudden inspiration of an indi-
vidual intellect, but a gradual evolution of human opinion, finding
its first clear and culminating expression in the mind of a genius.
After that expression has come, it behooves posterity not to forget
the names, or the labors, of the men who paved the way for genius
and made possible the great step of advance.

When one reads the involved, cloudy style of Servetus in other
parts of his book on the Trinity, and is hampered by the obscurity
in which Servetus' ideas are constantly wrapt up, and then stumbles
suddenly on this passage of pure physical science, expressed so suc-
cinctly and completely, one is almost tempted to believe that the
passage is a surreptitious later addition made by another hand. The
•description of the pulmonary circulation, however, is to be found

732 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

in the original edition preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale at
Paris, with its perhaps fire-charred edges and the name of the
Prosecutor Colladon going down to an infamous immortality on its
fly leaf.

Poor Servetus is a characteristic representative of a tendency that
has always existed in scientific men, especially in those whose inves-
tigations carry them beyond the bounds of knowledge as fixed up
to their time. Another striking example of this tendency was mani-
fest in Galileo about fifty years later, at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century. To these men there came, unfortunately, the seduc-
tive idea that the methods that have served to widen human science
and light up its obscurities will surely accomplish a similar purpose
in theological science. A corollary of this belief is the feeling that their
own scientific attainments will help to illustrate theology and illumine
its obscurities. Scientific men down to our own time have felt sure
that their successful investigations demanded a serious modification
of theological tenets. They have been surprised if a reformation has
not been at once undertaken in existing beliefs and an alteration of
accepted dogmata. When conservative churchmen haVe, unac-
countably as it seemed to their scientific minds, hesitated to begin
the reform, they have been ready and eager to point the way.

The old dogmata remain unshaken despite the scientific advances
of three centuries and a half since Servetus' death. Scientific men,
in constant succession since his time, have each in turn, with certain
noteworthy exceptions, felt the impulsion to invade the domain of
theology. All of them who have done so have aroused enmity;
none of them have done any direct good. The precious lesson suutn
cuique has not been learned. The acerbity of feeling that charac-
terized the resistance to earlier unwarranted invasions on the part
of as yet inchoate science has died out. There remain, as the herit-
age of the past, a precious warning for later times, the inevitable
errors of the scientist supra crcpidam impatient for religious reform.
Some of the theological errors of the latter day scientist are quite
as inexplicable as the obscure wanderings of Servetus with regard
to the Trinity. The experience of the past will not, however, pre-
vent others from taking up theological discussion to their discomfi-
ture, and so the world goes on learning from the past, but so slowly
and with so many a swing of the pendulum of opinion in reverse
direction that intellectual progress seems almost negative to an im-
patient generation hoping for so much for humanity and attaining
so little in the span of one human life.

Tames J. Walsh.

New York, N. Y.

The Supernatural. 733

THE SUPERNATURAL.

STUDENTS of ecclesiastical history have said that nearly all the
heresies in the Church took their rise in some confusion of
notions with regard to what is called the natural and the
supernatural order of things. If this be so, we need not be surprised
to find that this want of clearness of apprehension should lead to
errors of the most opposite kinds. And so we do. Certainly the
narrow rigor of Jansenism seems to be the very antipodes of that
tendency to broad liberality which is the apprehended religious dan-
ger of the present day. And yet this confusion is at the root of both
these schools of error. In the letter of our Holy Father condemn-
ing this liberalism, or disposition to liberalism, he says : "It is hard
to understand how those who are imbued with Christian principles
can place the natural above the supernatural virtues, and attribute
to them greater power and fecundity." Therefore, according to
the Holy Father, there are some men at the present time whose ideas
are so obscure on this subject that they appear actually to place the
natural virtues higher in their estimation than those of the super-
natural order. Now what about the Jansenists? Thus Jansenius
expresses himself in the introduction to his famous work: "God
had to create the first man perfect like the angels, not only innocent,
but positively pure, good and holy or happy. This is original grace,
which consequently is natural to man ; it is given to him essentially
by and with creation, not as an additional gift." A more radical
error could not have been invented; the whole Christian idea of
grace is destroyed by making it something due to nature.

Nothing is more clear than the doctrine of the Catholic Church on
grace. Nevertheless it is not generally very much explained or
developed to our children or the people. The more exterior dog-
mata of religion are dwelt upon at length. This part of our belief
which is innermost in our faith, the soul, so to say, of our doctrine,
is, to a great extent, passed over or at least is not exposed very
minutely. The writer of this article at one time wished to give a
course of instructions on the seven capital sins or vices. He came
to envy. Now envy is as existent in the human heart as grass on
the fields. He looked over a number of books to find a sermon on
envy. He could not find one. Sermons on all kinds of subjects,
practical, actual or otherwise. But a sermon on envy, not one to be
got. Perhaps, then, at the risk of appearing to write a catechetical
dissertation rather than an essay proper to a review or magazine, I
m?.y be permitted to give a brief and simple explanation of the teach-

734 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ing of our holy mother the Church on this question of the super-
natural as interpreted by the most approved authorities.

According to Christian revelation, as taught by the Catholic
Church, grace is not due to nature at all. God might have created
man and the angels, too, in what is called a state of pure nature. We
are told that He made both man and the angels in a sanctified state,
giving to the latter a degree of grace corresponding to, or suited to,
their individual perfection. Thus if one angel were many times
more perfect naturally than another angel, God gave to him so many
times more grace. To this one grace the angels corresponded or
they did not. Those who did obtained immediately their reward.
So that the angels preserve their hierarchical order in heaven, ac-
cording to the common opinion, the same as if they had been created
and remained in a purely natural condition. It is a pious belief that
the souls of men are sanctified in various degrees so as to fill the
gaps left in this blessed hierarchy by the defection of the fallen
spirits. To the first man God gave a certain measure of sanctifying^
or habitual grace as he saw fit. God might have created him with
or without grace, as he is now, in what we call his fallen state, sub-
ject, that is, to suflfering, with evil inclinations, etc. He did not ; He
created him exempt from all these things, with the additional posses-
sion of grace. Now this grace is always accompanied by, if it is not
one with, the theological virtue of charity. For grace is a real some-
thing, something existing in the soul, created there by God, not due
to nature, of an incomprehensibly higher order than the order of
nature, entirely different in kind, something which makes man re-
semble his Maker as He is personally constituted, as by nature he
resembles Him in substance or being.

Without grace man would never have suspected or known the ex-
istence of the Trinity ; he would not have been called to the beatific
vision ; God would have been his last end, and after his present life,,
if his soul were pleasing to God, he would enjoy a happiness great
indeed, but incomparably below that to which he is now called. He
would see God as from outside, as we look at a picture, or as we look
at the outside of a palace ; whereas, if he dies in the possession of
grace, he will be received into the bosom of the blessed Trinity ; he
will be like the child of the house, who has the whole run of it and
from whom nothing is concealed. If Adam had been created with-
out grace, he naturally would have died and then entered into the
possession of his natural happiness, if he deserved it. But being
once called to a life of grace, he had no longer the choice to be con-
tented with a state of natural perfection or to aim at that which was
higher. He was obliged to correspond with grace, and to die, if he
died, in a state of grace. For the grace of God was of two kinds,.

The Supernatural. 735.

actual and habitual. Habitual grace was a permanent thing which
was infused into Adam's soul at the moment of his creation, and
which is now received by infants with their baptism. Actual grace
is the help or assistance God gives to the soul in order to enable it to
perform actions of the supernatural kind. To man God did not give
so much habitual grace and no more. On the contrary, so long as
man lives he can increase the sum of his habitual grace, and this he
does by corresponding with the actual graces he receives. Every
time that man cooperates with the impulse of the Holy Ghost, ac-
complishes an act of obedience and love for God, the Almighty at the
same time increases in a proper proportion the amount of grace ift
his soul. This is similar to what takes place in the natural order»
Habits are strengthened by acts. It is by repeated acts that we
become confirmed in our habits both of virtue and of vice. The
supernatural virtues grow in the same way, only in this case God
must Himself cause the augmentation directly by His creative power
in the supernatural order. Of course, God always creates or pre-
serves us in the natural order, too ; but in the natural order man's-
action has something to do with the increase of the habit.

By his sin Adam lost the grace of God. But there is no difference
between the grace of Adam before his fall and that which he after-
wards received and which we possess through the death and merits-
of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here the teaching of the Roman Cath-
olic Church is contradictory to that of all the so-called reformers of
the sixteenth century, and infinitely more worthy of our conception
of the Deity. But to occupy ourselves in this place with their mon-
strous imaginings would be to lose our way and our time. The
grace of God was amissible both to Adam and to Christians. Grace-
was given and is offered freely, and just as freely man may accept or
reject it. If he rejects it, then he is no friend of God. Nor will he
be his friend in the life to come. Heaven was closed to all the sons,
of Adam when he fell. But Christ died, and heaven was opened
again. All men may enter there, because all men may obtain
and keep the grace of God. All men are called to do so. Christ
died for all, and all men are under an obligation to profit by His.
death.

Here comes a tremendous question. How can they? How can-
the Negroes of Central Africa, how can the inhabitants of Thibet
know of Christ and profit by His grace? How, indeed, to come-
nearer home, can the majority of the people living all around us.
know that the Roman Catholic Church is the true church ? To be
saved we must believe and be baptized. Sometimes we answer
questions by recounting a fact. A story then is told of Hermann,
the pianist, who was a converted Jew, and who died in the odor of

736 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

sanctity. When he was thinking with grief of the death of his Jew-
ish mother, who would not see or speak to him, our Lord made
known to him interiorly that He Himself had appeared to the dying
lady, declared that He was the Messiah, and she, like St. Paul, be-
lieved and was saved. She obtained the baptism of desire. God
can communicate His gifts independently of the visible organization
which we call the church. How often does He do so? Always, it
seems to me, in this sense, that He always offers His grace, the first
grace first. If the soul corresponds to that one, then He offers an-
other. Christ died for all, all are under the obligation to lead a
supernatural life. Therefore God must ofifer them His grace.
Theologians tell us there is a moment when every man reaching the
age of reason is obliged to choose what is morally right or morally
wrong. Why should God not give him the grace to choose super-
naturally? St. Thomas says that God would send an angel to in-
struct a well-meaning man rather than let him die in ignorance and
sin. The Lord has many angels. What is to prevent them from
suggesting thoughts of repentance even to sinning and guilty men ?
Who knows what takes place between the soul and its Lord at the
hour of death ? No one has ever told us that. The chief one of His
attributes which God was pleased to reveal in the work of creation is
that of mercy. The whole work of creation is a manifestation of-
mercy. This is true of both the natural and the supernatural cre-
ation. In the natural order nothing can be more miserable than
nothingness itself. Mercy means goodness to misery. To give ex-
istence to that which was not is certainly an act of mercy. To give
the life of grace is an additional act of mercy. To restore divine
charity to the guilty soul black with sin, that surely is a most won-
derful act of mercy. And to be desirous to forgive, and willing to
forgive again and again and again, that is mercy indeed. But to
take the nature of guilty man, and in that nature to die for him, that
all men might be saved — who can call in question the proof that the
one object of creation was to show a power of being merciful limited
only by the divine omnipotence and wisdom itself ? We know that
all men need this mercy ; and, although we cannot sit in judgment on
the Almighty, still, when He chooses some souls and rejects others,
we know that it is not without reason and justice. We know that
always and at all times and under all circumstances this God of in-
finite charity and of infinite mercy wishes every soul of men to be
saved and wishes it intensely. Our God is a God of love. Our
God is not only not a tyrant or a selfish being who acts like a kind
of blind fate, but to every child that has been formed by His own
hand we believe that He is the tenderest of fathers, more loving than
a million mothers. Another thing to be remembered is this: we

The Supernatural. 737

know positively all that the Church has made known to us dog-
matically from revelation, and we know the conclusions which follow
necessarily from such premises ; but all this is comparatively little.
Outside of that little our ignorance is immense. We are like a man
who walks out in the morning in a fog; he sees before, behind, to
the right and to the left, a little but enough. When we die the fog
will be lifted and the whole glorious horizon shall appear distinctly
to our satisfied view.

Nevertheless, every man coming into this world is obliged to enter
the Roman Catholic Communion. He cannot take this step, how-
ever, till he realizes the obligation so to do, nor could any Catholic
priest baptize him until he says that such is his conviction. How
long persons remain in good faith before entering the Church, how
many of them are in a state of grace, how many die outside the visi-
ble fold of the Church really in friendship with God, how many^
though they may have sinned grievously, repent and are saved, God
knows ; we do not. This is the safest way to talk on this subject.
God alone sees men's hearts. What we do know is — and this is a
ground for almost infinite hope — that He is infinitely good, and has
perhaps a thousand secret ways of saving souls of which we possess
no knowledge. Our duty is to tell people to revere God and to
pray, to be ready to give a reason for the faith that is in us, to
preach the Gospel if we are priests, to help our neighbors in every
way in our power, especially by good example.

But the natural virtues are very beautiful! Undoubtedly they
are, as everything is which God has made — the stars, the moun-
tains, the forests, the fields, the sea. And things which God has
made in the intellectual and spiritual order are more beautiful than
anything in the merely animal or vegetable or mineral kingdom;
the song and flight and plumage of birds, the fragrance and bloom
of flowers, the brilliancy of the Aurora Borealis, the cataract of
Niagara, what are these to the beauty of moral virtue? This moral
virtue is the highest gift of God to man — in the natural order. To
be brave, to be generous, to be true, to give and to forgive — that is
glorious! To take one instance out of the hundreds we read of
every day in our papers of man's fidelity to duty, of our firemen or
policemen, of life-savers on the seacoast, of locomotive engineers,
of that commonest of kinds of heroism which men will never tire of
admiring, of physical courage ; take the example of that Japanese
soldier — he may have been a Christian, most probably he was a
pagan — who, when there was no other way, rushed forward and blew
up the Chinese breastwork, blowing himself at the same time into
eternity. That man was another Arnold Winkelreid. But the
natural virtues are not confined to mere animal courage under the
Vol. XXVI— 8.

7^8 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

excitement of the enthusiasm of a moment. All the moral virtues
can exist in the natural order. And all these virtues are God's
gifts. What has man got which he does not owe to his Creator?
And his Creator is ready to help him to gain increase and become
perfect in the practice of these virtues, too. Only in practice we find
that too often the men who have left us examples of the exercise of
these heroic gifts were inconsistent. Read Plutarch's lives of his
heroes ; you will find that those men who at one time were merciful,
at another were cruel ; he who in one circumstance proves himself
chaste, in another shows himself libidinous ; and so on. But ordi-
nary Christians cannot reproach the great men of antiquity very
much, for they themselves are often little better. And no wonder ;
for Christians, too, are generally poor travelers who stumble on the
way. Only the saints were consistent men.

These natural virtues possess another great, very practical ad-
vantage, for they dispose a man to be more fit to receive the gifts
of a higher kind. The absence of vice is not a virtue, the presence
of natural virtue is not a proof of grace. But certainly if we remove
impurities from the water which we drink it is less liable to be
injurious to our health. It is clearly a matter of common seiise that
a soul rich with these natural virtues is a better field in which for
God to plant the seed of His grace than a soul which is choked full
with the weeds and thorns of vice. Nevertheless God may show
Himself liberal to the sinful soul and apparently withhold His mercy
from the more upright men. He may do this because he is free.
He may do it for reasons simply inscrutable to us at present. He
may do it because He sees things in the heart of the so-called natur-
ally just man which displease Him and finds probabilities in the
sinful man which appeal to His designs of mercy. Who can under-
stand His ways and who can call Him to account ? What we know
is this, that not all the natural virtue which has ever been exhibited
is equal to a degree of supernatural grace. The grace received by
an infant baptized in danger of death deserves a greater recompense
than the merits of all the natural acts of virtue of all mankind from
the day of Adam till the day of doom. Without it no man shall see
God ; with it that child shall rejoice in the happiness of His presence
during an eternity of glory. More than this, all the valor, patience,
self-control, fidelity, truth, benevolence, spirit of sacrifice that have
appeared in the history of all men are not worthy, in the sight of
God, to deserve one degree of that grace which was first freely given
to Adam, but which is now imparted to the believing soul onlv in
virtue of the merits of the blood of Jesus Christ. The first act of
faith is a free gift of God. The first supernatural grace, actual
grace, the inspiration to pray, is a thing which cannot be bought

The Supernatural. 739

of the Holy Spirit by all the combined efforts of a purely natural
kind of all the race of men and all the angels of heaven. So that
here is a great gulf fixed.

The institution of the sacraments in the Christian Church may
throw some additional light on this matter, especially what are called
the sacraments of the dead, baptism, penance, extreme unction.
Before the coming of our Lord, to be forgiven their sins men were
obliged to make acts of perfect contrition. There was no other pos-
sible way of obtaining pardon. Now we are forgiven through the
sacraments without perfect contrition. How? By acts of natural
sorrow? Not a bit. All the natural sorrow in the world will not
deserve forgiveness of sin. A man may go to confession with regret
for his misdeeds, from excellent motives, but all in the natural order.
He may make a good confession, so far as the mere accusation of his
faults goes, imagine he has been pardoned, be in perfect good faith
and yet remain guilty before God. This is why Catholic theolo-
gians have established the distinction between perfect and imperfect
contrition. If perfect contrition were necessary, as it was before the
time of Christ, then the sacraments would be useless. Mere natural
repentance does not count. Therefore they concluded that there
were two sorts of sorrow, both of the supernatural kind, one which
deserved at once the remission of sin, the other which was imperfect
and incomplete in its kind. This latter, however, as it is super-
natural also in its origin and character, so disposes the soul that it
may be elevated by additional grace to that perfection of repentance
which brings with it the infusion of sanctifying grace and charity.
It is this additional grace which is received more easily and expedi-
tiously through the sacraments. Probably before the coming of our
Lord no Jewish rabbi would have thought of making this distinc-
tion in the ways of loving God and grieving for offense against
Him. But its reality helps to enlighten us more on the absolute
abysm which extends between the highest energy of mere nature
and the lightest influence of grace.

This may explain some things apparently unintelligible or which
may scandalize persons of weak mind and especially of weak faith.
These natural qualities of honesty, industry, sobriety, etc., which
are found in men of every religion and no religion at all, deserve
some recompense. That recompense cannot be in the life to come.
St. Augustin says the Romans were rewarded with the empire of
the world for their natural virtues. Why should not nations, and
individuals, too, be recompensed in the same way to-day as well as
in past times? An individual may become rich, a family may
prosper, a nation may obtain a great empire, and this may be the
return made by heaven in this life, for their practice of natural virtue.

740 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

to those whom God shall call to account for their neglect of super^
natural grace in the next.

Then, however, the natural virtues shine out most resplendently
when they have been vivified by a supernatural principle. When
the hero who fights for his country at the same time fights for God ;.
when he who, knowing that he leaves a wife and children desolate,
throws away his own life to save that of others, does it from a motive
of religion as well as a natural sense of duty, ah ! then you have the
grandest thing in man. When the Indians tore out the heart of
Father de Breboeuf, burning at the stake, that they might infuse into-
themselves something of his courage by drinking his blood, it was
because Breboeuf was naturally a brave man. But compare his
constancy with that of the savages who tortured him. They, from
a motive of pride characteristic of their race, would endure every
torment without flinching. The priest bore his sufferings with a
quiet dignity as superior to the bravado of the savage as his religion
was above that of the manitou and the sorcerer. Great are the natu-
ral virtues, good are the natural virtues ; but it is because the Cre-
ator intended that, in the present disposition of things, they should
be elevated to a higher plane, so that by their use the souls of men
should not only give greater glory to God on earth, but earn higher
crowns for themselves in heaven. By all means let us admire every-
thing that is good in our neighbors and give them credit for it, and
let us try to practise ourselves all the moral virtues, only with a
supernatural motive.

This article would not be complete without some more direct allu-
sion to the momentous question of the distribution of grace. The
scholastic theologians tell us that all questions end in mystery. If"
there be anything, then, which is a mystery to the human mind, it
is this most serious question of the distribution of grace. Why
does God give so much to some and so much more to others? If"
Christ died for all, why are not all saved ? It is the same question
and the same mystery as the permission of evil. Why does God
permit suffering, sin, the loss of souls ? Why .was Abel innocent and
Cain a reprobate? Here we can only bow down our heads and
adore, knowing that God is not unjust. He would not force the
human will. He permits evil to draw from it greater good. To
save the fallen race of Adam, Christ became man. But there was
no special incarnation for the race of Cain. On the contrary, God
tells us that He will punish the sins of parents on their children to the
third and fourth generation, while he will show mercy to thousands
of those who love and serve Him. God would not force the human
will. With infinite prescience He knows whieh is the proper and
fitting grace to give to every soul. That grace is always sufficient:

The Supernatural. 741

for salvation, probably superabundantly sufficient. If the soul cor-
responds with the grace which it receives, that grace becomes effi-
cacious, and if the soul preserves and corresponds to its final grace,
it will be saved.

But here comes in another consideration. Do we know that we
correspond with the grace of God? Absolutely, with a positive
knowledge, no. The grace of God and the whole supernatural
order is something insensible and invisible. We cannot be con-
scious of the presence and the action of grace. The supernatural
world is something nature and our natural faculties cannot be cog-
nizant of. We can conclude the presence of grace, however, by its
evident effects. By their fruits ye shall know them. A good tree
produces good fruit. Those who live up to the norm and standard
of Christian ethics we may believe to be actuated by the Christian
spirit. But this is only a guess, a probability or what is called
broadly a moral certitude. No man knows, the Scripture says,
whether he be worthy of love or hate. My conscience reproaches
me nothing, says St. Paul, yet not therefore am I justified. God
alone sees the heart ; we do not know our own. Not that this possi-
bility of doubt should discourage us. In this life, in almost every
business, we must act on probabilities, and in the all-important
business of our salvation we must act on this moral certitude, this
great probability. If we live in doubt and darkness, we know that
God is good and wise, merciful and loving. It is well for us that
we should be in a state of incertitude in this life; it stirs us to exer-
tion and vigilance and keeps us in God's holy fear and in a salutarv
humility. More than this, even if we were aware that we were now,
this moment, in God's friendship, we know not what the future may
bring about. Therefore we can despise no one. We can never say,
like the Pharisee, I am righteous and this man a sinner. And even
if we did know that we were in God's grace and our neighbor in a
state of sin, we know not how it will be to-morrow, and especially
when the end comes. We may yet be reprobates, we may have a
-comparatively low place in heaven, and he whom we now despise
ma}' be high up among God's blessed in the celestial hierarchies.

In the light of eternity all God's ways will be made evident and
plain. Now and here even an almost infinitely beautiful variety
manifests itself in the distribution of his natural gifts, subject to
some hidden unity of plan; the day will come when His ways
in the spiritual world will be justified before all men, and we
shall see that all was well and all was wise and all was done in
goodness. Meanwhile we must not allow ourselves to be
influenced by the Thomas-like incredulity of those who fear to
believe — and fear to hope — because with moles' eyes they cannot

742 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

pierce the sun. To be men as well as Christians we must stand by
v/hat is certain, no matter how many difficulties present themselves
to our exceedingly weak intellect in the explanation of details. God
is necessarily, absolutely, infinitely good ; He loves all things that He
has made. He wishes all men to be saved, and Christ died for all,
and the God-man did this with a charity so great that all the angels
that could ever possibly be created would not begin even to appre-
ciate it. So we must conclude that, whether men correspond with
these designs or not, it is the ardent wish of heaven that all mankind
should lead a supernatural life and enjoy in the hereafter a super-
natural reward. Therefore if any of us come to grief, not only will
it be by our own fault, but in spite of earnest, careful, sincere, to
speak humanly, whole-hearted efforts on the part of our Creator to
prevent our going astray. Short of forcing, the human will, and so
far as is consistent with the dictates of his omniscient judgment in
the organization of things which he has chosen to establish. He en-
deavors to make every one lead a supernatural life, kindly and ener-
getically, infusing into men's souls, as the beginning of wisdom,
His holy fear, but wishing them to love Him with a love, if possible,
as boundless as His own beauty, goodness and immeasurable mercy.

D. A. Merrick, S. J.

New York. N. Y.

THE MYSTIC RITES OF ELEVSIS.

IN many natural religions there are performed at certain recur-
rent festivals and on the occasion of portentous events, peculiar
clandestine and orgiastic rites which may be witnessed only by
members of the clan or brotherhood. Secret ceremonies of this kind
were not absent from the old Hellenic religions. Of all mystic sanc-
tuaries to which only properly qualified and duly approved specta-
tors were admitted, the most celebrated in the classic ages and in
subsequent history was the shrine of the twain goddesses at Elevsis.*
Investigators are unable to date the first beginnings of this Attic
town of Elevsis. However, the discovery of prehistoric tombs near
its ancient citadel indicate that it was well inhabited in the second
millenium before Christ. Its advantageous position made it a centre
of opulence. It owned the fertile Rharian fields which stretch west-
ward along the sea towards the Megarid, and the equally productive
plain of Thria which extends eastward along the road to Athens.

1 Pavsanias Description of Greece, 10, 31, 11; Diodoros Historical Library, 5, 4;
6, 77.

The Mystic Rites of Elevsis. 743

Through Elevsis passed the chief overland route between Attika and
the rest of Greece. Its secure harbor made it an acceptable com-
mercial station for the Phoenicians and other roving merchants of
the eastern Mediterranean. The waters of its expansive bay teemed
with fishes and sea fruit. But more than six hundred years before
the beginning of our era the Elevsinians lost their independence and
were absorbed in the Athenian Commonwealth. This change, in-
stead of proving detrimental to their local religious practices, rather
contributed to their preservation and further development. For the
Elevsinian cult was adopted by the victorious Athenians and became
part of the State religion.

The divinities in whose commemoration the mystic rites were per-
formed are most popularly known through a fable called "the anthol-
ogy/' which has often been retold by poets and mythologists.^ The
divine Persephone while romping with the daughters of the ocean in
the flowery fields of Nisa is kidnapped by Polydegmon or Plouton,
the King of the Dead, and carried oflf to become his consort and to
reign with him forever in his silent halls. Her forlorn mother,
Demeter, not knowing what fate had befallen Persephone, travels
the earth in search of her. The Sun, who was the only witness to
Polydegmon's act, finally revealed the facts. Thereupon Demeter,
in her displeasure, wandered ofif to Elevsis, where she revealed her-
self to Keleos the King, and caused him to build a temple sacred to
her. In this temple she took up her abode, refusing to return to
Olympos and to associate with the other gods until after her daugh-
ter was restored to her. She sent a destructive drought and blight
over the earth, and it ceased to give forth its fruits. The human race
was about to perish through famine, and then there would be no
men to honor the gods by sacrifice. To avert these impending
calamities a reconciliation was effected through the mediation of
Zevs. Persephone was to stay for nine months of every year in the
company of her mother, and for the remaining three was to reign
with her gloomy husband over the inane souls of the departed.

This myth, like the mystic cult based upon it, underwent various
changes during the successive ages. How and when it began can-
not be ascertained. Perhaps it was brought to Elevsis from Krete,
as Gruppe confidently states.'' At least in later times the Kretans
are reported as believing that the worship of Demeter had, like other
Attic cults, been transplanted from their island into Attika.* Ac-
cepting the Kretan provenance of the cult, the ninth century before
Christ may be assigned as the epoch during which the Elevsinian

2 Homeric Hymn to Demeter; Apollodoros, Bibliotheke, 1, 5, 1; Ovid, Fasti, 4,
417-618; Metamorphoses, 5, 358-408; Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae. s Gnechische
Mythologie und Religions geschichte, p. 17. * Diodoros Historical Library, 5, 77;
Cf. Hymn to Demeter, 122-123.

744 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

sanctuary was established. But if Foucart's reasoning be correct,
the cult is still older, and came from Egypt in the epoch of the
Pharaos of the eighteenth dynasty, sixteen or seventeen hundred
years before our era."^ The earliest literary mention of this sanc-
tuary is in the hymn to Demeter, which was composed towards the
close of the seventh century. The hymn shows, however, that^the
rites were then already venerably ancient. It also refers to their
mystic character and to the blissful fate of all mortals to whose lot
falls the happiness of being initiated into them. In the most primi-
tive stages of their existence these mysteries were probably religious
ceremonies performed at a shrine belonging to a few of the promi-
nent families of Elevsis. Circumstances now unknown added some
special virtue or glory to these rites, and the privilege of participat-
ing in them was extended to other Elevsinians. In historic times
two Elevsinian families, the Evmolpids and the Keryks, possessed
the secret of the mysteries by ancient inheritance transmitted from
generation to generation. They conducted the mystic rites and pre-
sided over all the acts of initiation. It may therefore easily be sup-
posed that those who originally established this cult in Elevsis were
the progenitors of the Evmolpids and Keryks.

In the anthologic myth there are survivals of two kinds of primi-
tive cult. Demeter, the corn Lady, and Persephone, the seed which
annually remains hidden in the earth for a third of the year, are
deities which naturally belong to agrarian rites ; while Plouton, as
the dark receiver and possessor of the dead, is a divinity closely con-
nected with the worship of ancestors. In their later development
the Elevsinian mysteries grew into a series of magnificent cere-
monies which bore very slight resemblance to rites of such an origin.
But, nevertheless, the emphatic and exceptional way in which these
mysteries nourished the hope that after death the human soul sur-
vives, recalls these primitive agrarian and funereal practices, and may
be explained by thinking that some resemblance was seen between
the fate of mortals after death and of the seed which is covered and
hidden in the earth, but does not lose its vitality.

The shrine of Demeter and Kore, her daughter, must have been
highly revered in the seventh century before Christ. On that ac-
count the Athenians, when they annexed Elevsis to their territory,
incorporated the rites of these goddesses into the State religion of
Athens. This official act occasioned a number of modifications in
the Elevsinian cult. Presence at the celebration of the mysteries,
and participation in them, was no longer the exclusive privilege of
the Elevsinians. Any Athenian citizen, any inhabitant of Attika,
might under prescribed conditions be initiated and allowed to enjoy
5 Recherches sur Torigine et la nature des raystSres d'Elevsis, p. 75.

The Mystic Rites of Elevsis. 745

all the blessings that the mysteries could give. For the accommoda-
tion of the increased number of participants a larger temple or hall
had to be constructed at Elevsis. Mystic rites of this kind could not
be performed in the open air, like most other Hellenic religious exer-
cises. The preliminary and preparatory rites and purifications and
sacrifices which each candidate had to fulfil before being received
into the temple of Demeter and her daughter were hereafter to take
place not at Elevsis, but at Athens. And after the completion of
these preparatory ceremonies then all who were to see the mysteries
went in sacred procession on a fixed day from Athens to Elevsis.

When the armies of Xerxes invaded Greece, in 480 before Christ,
they pillaged and burned the sanctuary of Demeter,® where the
mystic ceremonies used to be celebrated in Elevsis. But immedi-
ately after their departure the sanctuary was restored and the rites
were continued. By their wise and patriotic conduct in the struggle
against the Persian invaders the Athenians created for themselves
the well-merited reputation of being the foremost and most enviable
of all the inhabitants of the Greek world. Athens was for the Greeks
what Paris once was for the inhabitants of Europe. The Athenians
were regarded as models in everything that related to the higher and
more cultivated and more spiritual life.'^ From all quarters of the
Hellenic world candidates applied for admission to the Elevsinian
rites. The extension of the privilege to all Greeks, whether Athen-
ians or not, must have occurred shortly after the Persian wars, if not
even earlier.^ Herodotos and Isokrates and others refer to it as to
an established practice. And about 440 B. C., so widely recog-
nized were the claims of the Elevsinian sanctuary that the Athen-
ians passed a law regulating the manner in which the annual regular
offerings of first fruits were to be delivered. These gifts Athens
seems to have confidently expected and received for the sanctuary,
not only from her allies, but also from many of the other independent
Greek States.*

No amount of investigation will ever reconstruct for us a com-
plete picture of what took place at these mysteries. The obligation
of secrecy which was imposed on every candidate for admission was
never openly violated. Two chief considerations checked all indis-
creetness in this direction. Whoever dared to divulge what he saw
and heard within the holy walls not only committed an offense
against religion and thus exposed himself to the vengeance of the
gods, but also made himself a culprit before the laws of the State
and liable to punishment by death. Those who knew the mysteries
never conversed about them without first assuring themselves that

6 Herodotos, 9, 65. 7 Cf. Thoukydides, 7, 63, lines 12-14, ed. Boehme, 1864. » Cf.
Herod6tos. 8, 65; Isokrates, Panegyric^ 46, a-c; Libanios, Korinthiac Oration, 4,
p. 356. 9 Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, 2d ed.. No. 13.

746 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

no initiated person was within hearing.^"^ In the year 421 the ene-
mies of Alkibiades succeeded in having sentence of death passed
against him by accusing him of different crimes, the principal one,
and perhaps the only one mentioned in the official indictment, being
that with a number of riotous companions he had one night parodied
and ridiculed the rites of Elevsis."

About the year 315 B. C. a young man named Theodoros was sit-
ting and chatting with Evrykleides, the hierophant of the mysteries.
Theodoros, wishing to tease his solemn companion, said that every
hierophant was guilty of the crime of revealing the mysteries because
when accepting postulants and initiating them the hierophant always
imparted to them a knowledge of the secrets. Evrykleides, how-
ever, refused to regard the mysteries as a suitable topic for pleas-
antry. He brought an accusation of impiety against the wit-loving
philosopher. Theodoros was condemned to die by drinking hem-
lock, but perhaps the sentence was remitted through the influence
of the archon Demetrios of Phaleron.^^ Pavsanias, who as an intel-
ligent and curious tourist was disposed to describe in detail the archi-
tecture and much of the history of the shrines of the two goddesses
in Athens and Elevsis, suddenly cuts off his description with the
remark that in a dream he had been directed not to proceed further
in this respect.^^

But notwithstanding this severe reticence regarding everything
connected with these hidden rites, it is quite probable that something
of what was to be seen and heard within the hall of initiation became
known even to the "profane." Early Christian writers, in their
attacks on paganism, refer to the mysteries and mention rites and
formulas peculiar to them. This fact indicates that these ecclesiasti-
cal scholars, although not initiated in the mysteries, were neverthe-
less acquainted with them, at least partially. And their statements
concerning the performances and utterances tfiat constituted part of
the mystic services are one of our chief sources of information.

As a welcome supplement to the rare and meagre bits of informa-
tion scattered throughout the ancient texts come some interesting
facts furnished by archaeological research. A few antique vases have
been found in Italy and Greece which are decorated with scenes
illustrative of mystic initiation ceremonies. Scientific excavations
made at Elevsis have laid bare the foundations of the ancient hall
where the initiations took place, and of the other shrines and edifices
belonging in some way or other to the Elevsinian cult. A number
of inscriptions found at Elevsis and others found at Athens give
precise information concerning many of the outward features of the

lopiaton, Theaetetos, 155 e. n Thoukydides 6, 28, 53, 60-61; Andokides, On
the Mysteries, 11; Ploutarch, Life of Alkibiades, 19, 22. 12 Diogenes Laertios,.
Lives of the Philosophers, 2, 101. is Pavsanias, 1, 14, 2-3.

The Mystic Rites of Elevsis. 747

celebrations. And pieces of sculpture representing the divinities
worshiped in these rites assist in teaching us the nature of the divini-
ties in question and therefore also the nature of the cult by which
they were worshiped.

In the fifth century and ever thereafter the postulant went through
three sets of ceremonies or three stages of initiation. In the city of
Athens he was admitted to what may be called the "first degree ;" a
few months later he went to Elevsis and entered the first degree of
the Elevsinian branch, or the second degree of the full series; and
after the lapse of a year he again presented himself at Elevsis for the
highest and last degree.^ ^ The entire process was about as follows :

For several consecutive days in Anthesterion, the vernal month of
flowers, the Athenians annually celebrated within the city a festival
in honor of Demeter and Kore. The rites performed at this festival
were not open to the public and might be witnessed only by accepted
and ritually prepared postulants. To distinguish them from the
greater celebration at Elevsis these less important ones were known
as the "Little" or "Lesser Mysteries. "^^ From the name of the
locality where the temple stood in which these Little Mysteries took
place they were also known as the "Mysteries in Agrae."^** Strangers
who undertook the journey to Athens as postulants for admission
were protected from all molestation, even in time of war, by a truce
which lasted about fifty-five days.^'^ As a preparation for beholding
the ceremonies each candidate bathed himself in a way prescribed by
ritual in the River Ilisos,^^ and offered certain propitiatory sacrifices.
The purificatory rites may have varied according to the needs of the
candidates. Those who were guilty of deeds of blood and of other
heavy crimes, if they had never been ritualistically purified, were not
admitted. This exclusion^® of unfit candidates and preparation of
others by a purification adapted to their condition, presupposes some
kind of confession of grave sins. After witnessing the secret rites
each candidate was known as an "initiate" or "myst." Concerning
the mysteries at Agrae no further and deeper information is avail-
able. In later times, in order to accommodate the great numbers of
strangers who presented themselves for initiation, these lesser mys-
teries were sometimes celebrated twice in the same year,^® for no one
might enter the Great Mysteries without previously being prepared
by acceptance into those at Agrae.^^

Every autumn, in the month of Boedromion,^^ the mystic rites

1* Ploutarch, Life of Demetrios, 26. is Polyaenos, 5, 17; Corpus Inscriptionum
Attiearum, I., p. 4n. IB. i« Ploutarch, Life of Demetrios, 26; Kleitodemos, in
Muller's Fragmenta Historicoruin Graecorum, L, 359; Dionysius Periegetes, 424;
Himerios, in Photios' Bibliotheke, 1,119; Polyaenetos, 5, 17. 17 C. L A., 1 p., 4
n., 1 B. 18 Polyaenos, 5, 17; Clement of Alexandreia, Strom. 5, 689. i9 Theon
Smyrnaeos, 14, 20-25; Celsus, apud Origenem, 253, ed. Koetschau. 20 Inscription
in the Ephemeris Archaeologike, 1887, p. 177. 21 Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 5,
204, ed. Svlburg. 22 Ploutarch, Demetrios, 26; Phokior, 6; Alexander, 31.

748 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

were performed at Elevsis. Every four years they were celebrated
with exceptional magnificence^^ and accompanied by agonistic con-
tests. Long before the time appointed for the beginning of the
festival messengers sent out from Athens announced the sacred truce
to all the neighboring States.^'* The celebration lasted about twelve
days. The first few days were devoted to preparation. On the 14th
of the month certain sacred and precious objects which were needed
in Athens for the preparatory days of the festival, and which when
not in use were kept carefully hidden in the sanctuary at Elevsis,
were carried by priestesses to Athens and deposited in a holy house
called the Elevsinion, near the Akropolis. These objects were prob-
ably vestments and utensils used in the performing of the sacred
rites and also certain objects connected with the worship of lakchos,
whose cult had been associated with that of Demeter and Kore.
Perhaps, also, statues representing these divinities were among these
sacra. From an inscription^'^ we learn that in the second century
of our era it was customary for a company of young Athenian
knights to constitute a mounted guard of honor accompanying these
venerable sacra from Elevsis to Athens. The bearers of the sacra
were escorted part of the way by the people of Elevsis, and on their
approach to the city they were met by the people of Athens, who
accompanied them to the Elevsinion with acclamations of pious
welcome. As soon as these objects had been placed in the tempo-
rary repository in the Elevsinion the phaedyntes, or official who had
charge of them, announced the fact to the priestess of Athena, the
tutelary goddess of the city, and with this announcement the festival
began. 2*

On the following day the mysts who intended to go to Elevsis were
convoked into an assembly to hear the warning against all who were
guilty of manslaughter or other heinous offenses^^ and all who by
reason of other prohibitions might not be initiated. Women pos-
sessed equally with men the privilege of initation. Children were
received into the Little Mysteries, and possibly also into those of the
first night at Elevsis. It seems that slaves of Greek descent were
also occasionally allowed to participate.-^ This condescension in
favor of the slaves is the more remarkable because as a rule slaves
were not allowed to associate on equal terms with free citizens in
religious rites at Athens.^^ Barbarians were strictly excluded.^**.

Each postulant, in order to be accepted and to receive instruction,
placed himself under the guidance of a mystagogue.^^ The mysta-

23 Aristotle, Polity of Athens, 54; C. I. A., III., 663. 24 Aeschynes, 2, 133;
Dittenberger, Syll. Inscr. Gr., 2d ed., 646. 25 c. I. A., III., 1 p., 5 n, 5. 26 C. I. A.,
III., 5. 27 Polydevkes, 8, 90: Theon of Smyrna, p. 22, ed. Dupuis. 28 C. I. A.,
II., 834 b; Theophilos, in scholion to Dionysios Thrax, p. 724. 29 Philon, That
every honest man is free, 20, n. 468 M. so Isokrates, Panegyric, 73, d-e. 3i C. I,
A., IV., 1, I. supplement, p. 3 f.

The Mystic Rites of Elevsis. 749

gogue was by descent a member of either the Evmolpid or the Keryk
family. Perhaps such postulants as were rejected by the mysta-
gogues might make a final appeal to the hierophant. Or perhaps
the hierophant might reject candidates even when introduced and
recommended by a mystagogue. In the year 31 of our era the cele-
brated wonder-worker, Apollonios of Tyana, came to Athens and re-
quested the privilege of initiation; but the hierophant hesitated^
saying that the gates of Elevsis were not open to magicians who
communed with unclean spirits.^^ But Apollonios was later ad-
mitted. It may be that occasionally the hierophants were put to
their wits' ends to observe the strict law and yet accept candidates
who though debarred for some cause or other could not recklessly
be turned away. When Demetrios came from Asia and won the
temporary gratitude of the Greeks by driving the Makedonians out
of the Peloponnesos, he sent a message to the Athenians saying that
he was about to arrive in their city and that he desired initiation into
all the degrees of the mysteries. The Athenians, unable to expect
the hierophants to violate the law which ordained that the first initia-
tion should take place in springtime and the second in autumn and
the third in the autumn of the following year, removed all difficulties
by means of a wonderful casuistic juggling with the official calendar.
They decreed that the month of Demetrios' arrival in Athens should
for the nonce be officially known as the spring month Anthesterion,.
and that after the Prince had received the first initiation in the Little
Mysteries, this same month should immediately take on the name of
the autumn month Boedromion, and that after the complete initia-
tion was over this polyonymous month should reassume its own.
proper name.^^

The candidates underwent some fixed kind of probation and pre-
paration. They performed certain purificatory ablutions in the sea^*
and offered prescribed propitiatory sacrifices, including that of a
sacred pig. Magnificent sacrifices were also offered by the Archon
Basilevs to bring the favors of the gods upon the Senate, the citizens
of Athens, their wives and children. In commemoration of Deme-
ter's nine days' wandering and grief in search of Persephone, the
mysts fasted for nine days. Perhaps this fast consisted in eating-
nothing between sunrise and sunset ; perhaps it was merely an absti-
nence from certain kinds of food, as from meat, fish, beans, pome-
granates and apples.^^ These various rites and practices all be-
longed to the first days of the festival and were all performed at
Athens.

32 Philostratos, Life of Apollonios, 4, 17. 33 Ploutarch, Demetrios, 26.
34Ploutarch, Life of Phokion, 28; Polyaenetos, 3, 11. 35 Porphynos, De abstin^
earn. 4, 16; Aelian History of Animals, 9, 65; Ploutarch, de solert, anim. 35, U;
Pavsanias, 1, 37, 3; 8, 15, 1.

750 Americm Catholic Quarterly Review.

On the twentieth^* day of the month the mysts went in gorgeous
procession from Athens to Elevsis, where the most sacred and secret
part of the rites were to be accompHshed. They were accompanied
by their friends, by the mystagogues, by a military escort of ephebs
and by a multitude of men, women and children who took part in
the pilgrimage out of piety towards the gods or out of simple curios-
ity. Thirty thousand may not be an exaggerated number to repre-
sent this crowd.^^ By consecrated custom the journey was made on
foot. This was not a light undertaking, for the Sacred Way which
joins Athens and Elevsis measures more than eleven miles. When
Athens became opulent and luxurious it began to grow common for
richer individuals, especially fashionable ladies and courtesans, to
accompany the procession in carriages.^® In order to abolish this
growing fashion Lykourgos introduced a law forbidding it and im-
posing a heavy fine on all who might violate the law. Lykourgos
himself was the first to pay the fine, for his wife was the first to offend
against the law.^® The mysts wore crowns of myrtle,*** for myrtle
was sacred to Demeter and Kore as being chthonic deities. In
later times they usually dressed in garments of white.*^ Each man
carried a torch, which was to be lighted at nightfall.*^

In this procession the sacred objects which had been brought to
Athens a few days previously were carried back to Elevsis by priests
and priestesses and attendants. But the holiest object in the pro-
cession was a statue of the young god lakchos, a sort of agricultural
and orgiastic deity, whose worship had been combined with that of
Demeter and Kore ever since the cult of Elevsis had become portion
of the religion of Athens. According to one myth, he was the son
of Persephone. Specially designated officials had charge of the
processional car which carried the statue. In a kind of ecstatic
frenzy the great multitude kept singing and shouting the name of
this god, "lakch, O lakchos, lakch, O lakchos."*^ It seems that
the statue was needed in the performance of the secret rites. No
other reason explains why it should thus be brought to Elevsis.

Along the Sacred Way there were holy places, shrines, altars and
temples at which the pilgrims stopped and performed acts of wor-
ship.** These delays so retarded their advance that night came on
three or four hours before they reached Elevsis. Their last station
was at Krokon's Castle, a village near the ancient confines of Athen-
ian and Elevsinian territory. Here the descendants of the mythic
hero Krokon, who inhabited this village, distributed saffron-colored

36 pioutarcn, Life of Camillus, 19; of Phokion, 28- Scholion to Aristophanes,
Frogs, 324. 37 Herodotos, 8, 65. 38 Aristophanes, Ploutos, 1013-1015; Demos-
thenes, Against Meidias, 158. 39 Pseudo-Ploutarch, Lives of the Ten Orators, 7,
14-15. 40 Scholion to Aristophanes, Frogs 330. *i C. I. A., III., 1,132. 42 Hime-
rios. Oration, 7, 2, ed. Dubner. 43 Aristophanes, Frogs, 316. 44 Ploutarch, Life of
Alkibiades, 34.

The Mystic Rites of Elevsis. 751

ribbon^, and each myst tied one of these round his right arm and
another round his left leg.**^ Shortly after this ceremony night came
on, and the thirty thousand lighted their immense torches.** They
entered Elevsis towards midnight. After feasting and dancing and
ringing for some two or three hours longer each one found some
corner in which to rest as well as he could from his fatigue and regain
strength for the great rites which were to begin on the evening of
the coming day.

On the following night all who had a right to be received into the
iirst mysteries at Elevsis, or the second degree in the entire mystic
series, gathered into the great Telesterion, or Temple of the Twain
Goddesses. Modern excavations and investigations at Elevsis prove
that at least three times this temple had been rebuilt, and each time
on a larger scale. The newest of the three was built in the fourth
•century and could accommodate about three thousand sitters, being
about one hundred and seventy feet square. If one-tenth of those
who came to Elevsis in the procession were postulants, then this
Telesterion could contain them all at one sitting. Certain prelimi-
nary ceremonies took place outside of the Telesterion,*^ but within
a great enclosure shut ofif from the eyes of the "profane." Here
probably the warning against all uninitiated was repeated.*^ We do
not know what precautions were taken to be certain that no unini-
tiated intruders entered the Telesterion. Only one instance is known
when outsiders succeeded in passing within this mystic Temple.
They were two young countrymen from Akarnania. They were
put to death. *^ After ascertaining that none save mysts were present
the obligation of secrecy was enjoined.^^ They then passed into the
Mystic Temple.

Within this hall the mysts were made to experience the most
"blood-curdling sensations of horror and the most enthusiastic ecstasy
of joy.'*^ No lamps were burning to illuminate the hall. The weak
light that dimly entered through the openings in the roof was on
these moonless nights insufficient to allow the mysts to locate them-
selves in the spacious room or to recognize each other. They be-
came a frightened crowd.^^ The interminable suspense of the awe-
stricken and groping mysts was at intervals relieved and prevented
from turning into madness by occasional mystic phrases uttered by
some unseen priest reminding them that their gropings were com-
memorative of the wanderings of Demeter in search of her lost
daughter, and that these horrors would therefore finally turn to some

45 Stephanos Byzantios, s. v. "krokoo;" Bekker, Anecdota, p'. 273. *« Scholion
to Sophokles, CEdipous at Kolonos, 1048. 47 Themistios, Oration 5, 71 a. 48 Lou-
kian Alexander, 38. 49 Livy, 31, 14. so Sopatros, in Walz ed. of Greek Rhetors,
8 118; Clement of Alexandreia, Protreptika, 1, 10. si Aristeides, Elevsinian Ora-
tion, p. 256. 52 Cf. Ploutarch, On the Soul, 2, 5, ed. Dubner.

752 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

mysterious delight. It is probable that in later times tableaux were
shown in the dim light, representing scenes in the Under World.^^
In the midst of this oppressive darkness a voice cries out in joy.
Demeter is represented as having found her daughter. Brazen
gongs resound.*^* The doors of a sanctuary filled with dazzling
light" are swept open. The dazed mysts behold resplendent images
of the gods, gorgeous priests, glorious scenes. The second and
ecstatic act of the drama has begun.

The secret rites seem to have been really the enacting of a great
and thrilling drama, in which the mysts, though not the chief actors,,
were nevertheless not entirely passive. The scenes enacted were
taken from the local Elevsinian myth as it had been preserved by
tradition in the sacred families of the Evmolpids and Keryks regard-
ing Demeter's grief for her lost daughter and her joy when Perse-
phone was restored to her.**^ The myth as employed in the Mys-
teries was supposed to differ from the common legend in many de-
tails and to be fully known only to the initiated, and to reveal it
would be sacrilegious.'^^ But, nevertheless, since nearly all Athen-
ians were initiated, the secret myth thus became a common piece of
knowledge, and some of its details have entered into literature. It
was chiefly a drama of action and of wondrous sights, interrupted
now and then by the chanting of legends, or when the actors of the
drama occasionally enunciated mystic and symbolic formulas. This
prevailing silence increased the mysterious and impressive nature of
the rites.

Of the officials who presented the mystic drama, the principal ones
were the hierophant, the torch-bearer, the altar priest and the holy
herald. In a certain portion of the drama the hierophant repre-
sented the Demiourg or Creator of the universe, the torch-bearer
acted the part of the light-giving Sun, the altar priest represented:
the moon and the herald impersonated the messenger god Hermes.*^*
The hierophant was the most important personage, the grand master..
He was appointed from among the Evmolpids and held the position-
for life.*^® When ordained to this office he renounced his individual
name and became hieronymous, being usually known and spoken
of simply as "the hierophant."®® It would seem that he lived a life-
of strict chastity.'^ For the performance of the duties of his ofice
it was regarded as necessary that he possess a good voice. '^ This

BsPloutarch, On the Soul, in Stobaeos' Florilegium, 120, 28, iv., p. 107, 27ff.;
Loukian, Kataplous, 22. 54 Scholion to Theokntos, Eidyll 2, 36; Apollodoro,
fragm. 36 in Fragmenta Hist. Graec. ed. Didot, 1, 434. ss Cf. Dion Chrysostom,
Oration 12, p. 387, ed. Reiske. 56 Gregory Nazianzene, Oration 39, 4; Clement of
Alexandreia, Protreptika, 4, 27, ed. Migne. 57 Igokrates, Panegyric, 28. 58 Evse-
bios, Preparation for the Gospel, 3, 12. 59 Pavsanias, 2, 14, 1; Ephemeris Archaeo-
logike, 1883, p. 81, 8; 1895, p. 119. eo Loukian, Lexiphanes, 10; Evnapioe, Life of
Maximus, 475, ed. Dttbner. ei St. Jerome. Epist. 123, 905: Arrian Epiktetos' dis--
sertations, 3, 21. «2 Philostratos, Lives of the Sophists, 2, 20.

The Mystic Rites of Elevsis. 753

requisite quality probably refers to the masterly manner in which he
was expected to sing his parts in the mystic drama.

When the doors of the sanctuary were swung open and the blazing
light streamed out upon the initiated a feeling of blissful consolation
took possession of the assembled multitude. Before the eyes of the
spectators the hierophant and other sacred persons robed in glitter-
ing vestments continued performing mystic rites. According to the
Elevsinian version of the wanderings of Demeter, when the goddess
arrived in the house of Keleos, the King of Elevsis, she refused all
offers of refreshing nourishment until finally, recalled from her
moody sadness and made to smile by the humorous remarks of the
maid lambe, she ordered that a beverage be prepared for her from
meal and water.®^ In commemoration of this mixture which the
goddess drank the mysts after their fatiguing gropings in darkness
received and tasted of a similar beverage called the "kykeon."**
They also seem to have partaken of some kind of food.

After these holier ceremonies were over, and the mysts had seen
and venerated and even touched such of the sacred objects as were
to be shown to the initiates of the first night, proceedings of a less
decorous nature seem to have followed. These were exhibitions and
words which served to recall the pleasantries of lambe®'^ in the pres-
ence of Demeter. In other forms of the legend the girl who caused
Demeter to smile was called Bavbo. And the fragmentary informa-
tion which has been preserved concerning Bavbo is of such a nature
that it tends to justify the attacks of the early Christian writers who
often accused the pagans of having immoral rites in their mys-
teries.®® Still it is probable that the impersonation of Bavbo in the
mysteries was rather coarsely humoristic than really immoral.

From the sketch just given some notion may be formed regarding
the proceedings that took place on the night when the first set of
Elevsinian mysteries was enacted and made known to the initiated.
On the following night a second series of similar revelations were
shown. But to these none were admitted save such as had received
the lower initiation a year before.®^ The mysts who witnessed these
higher mysteries received the title of "epopts." Since the name
merely means "beholders," it indicates that in these as in the mys-
teries of the preceding night the rites consisted more in acts than in
words. The greatest event of this night was the "showing of the
sacra," an act from which the hierophant received his title. In this
ceremony the doors of the anaktoron or penetralia were opened.

63 Hymn to Demeter, 200-211. 64 Clement of Alexandreia, Protreptika, p. 18,
€d. Potter. 65 Apollodoros, Bibliotheke, 1, 5, 1-3; rfikandrds, Alexipharmikon,
128-132, and scholion thereto; Proklos, Chrestomatheia, apud Photium, Biblio-
theke, 319; Etymoloorieum Magnum, s. v. "lambe." ee Clement of Alexandreia,
Protreptika, 2, 77 f; Arnobius, adversus Gentes, 5, 26. 67 Ploutarch, Life of
Demetrios, 26.

Vol. XXVI.— q.

754 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

No one might enter here save the hierophant alone.«« He stood at
a holy table, upon and near which were the mysterious and much
revered sacra. These the hierophant exposed one by one and held
up to the worshiping gaze of the beholders. Decorations, drapery,
illumination, incense increased the illusion and added to the mag-
nificence. The epopts rivetted their eyes on the holy objects in awe
and silence approaching to fear."* We do not know with certainty
what these sacra were, but it seems probable that they were statues of
the gods and sacred relics of different kinds. They must have in-
cluded those sacred objects which had a few days before been carried
with such pomp to Athens and then back to Elevsis in the lakchos
procession.

Perhaps it is in this part of the initiation that the notorious hiero-
gamic scene took place, in which the marriage of Plouton and Perse-
phone and the birth of lakchos was represented."* The hierophant
and the priestess of Demeter, acting the parts of Plouton and Perse^
phone, descended into a dark retreat to represent the manner in
which Persephone had been carried off to the kingdom of the god
of the Under World." On returning to the sanctuary the hiero-
phant proclaimed that "the great lady Brimo has brought forth the
divine Brimos,"'^ probably announcing by this formula the mystic
birth of Ikachos, the son of Plouton and Persephone. Probably
they carried up from the hidden retreat an image of the young
lakchos and placed it in a cradle which as one of the "sacred ob-
jects" was waiting to receive him.

Like the details concerning Bavbo, this gamic scene and another
scene, from which nothing has been preserved except the words
"Hye Kye," that is, "descend in rain, O Zevs, and generate,"^* and
another detail representing perhaps the birth of an Elevsinian hera
called Evboulevs,^* have been attacked as indecorous. All that can
be said in extenuation of the evident strangeness of these details is
that they appealed to the ancient Greeks in a way absolutely different
from the manner in which they would affect people of to-day imbued
with more careful principles of morality. The attacks of the ecclesi-
astical writers were certainly justifiable.

In commemoration of the fact that it was Demeter who first taught
the inhabitants of Elevsis how to sow grain and to prepare food from
it, heads of wheat were distributed to the epopts, who received them
in silence and reverence. This was regarded as one of the most en-

o ^^l?a"' Fragm. 12, ed. Didot. «» Ploutarch, De Prefect. Virt. sent., p. 258.
ToSchohon to Platon's Gorgias, 497 c. 7i Tertullian ad Gentes, 2, 7: Asterios,
Encomium of the Martyrs, 113 b.; Cf. also Origen, Philosophoumena, V. 1. 171;
Servus ad Ver^lii Aeneid 6, 661; Scholion to Perseus, Satire 5^ 145; St. Jerome
^r ; 1^?°' A'/!^: " SlP.P^^y*?^' I^efutatio Heres. 5, 8; Orijren, Philosophoumena,
X C-h T,'^!"' Philosophoumena, V. 1, 171. w Scholion to Ariateides, 22;
Orphic Hymn, 41, 5-9.

The MysHc RHes of Ekvsis. 755

Bobling events of the mystic rites/' And with this ceremony the
cpoptic initiation ended.

It is quite clear from abundant literary testimony that the general
final effect of initiation in the mysteries was elevating and consoling.
The principal convictions which the initiated carried away with them
seem to have been that in the continued existence of the soul after
death the initiated would have a happier lot than the darkness and
punishments which awaited the "profane." From the first begin-
nings of Greek literary history down to the last days of pagan Hel-
lenism high-flighted poets, thoughtful philosophers and careful his-
torians agree in sounding the praises of the graces bestowed by these
mysteries.'^" But the lesson taught at Elevsis seems to have been
one of enthusiastic emotions and impressive suggestions rather than
of intellectual conviction. No well defined and formulated doctrines
were taught, except in later times, when neo-Platonic philosophy
held the ascendency in Athens, and some of its precepts were perhaps
incorporated into the Elevsinian cult; for in those later days there
were hierophants who had become members of this philosophical
school. Initiation into the mysteries imposed no obligation of there-
after leading a better life. According to the opinion of the initiate,
they would enjoy happiness after death not as a reward for any good
or noble acts while on earth, but purely as a grace proceeding from
the mysteries.

In his famous painting on the walls of the Lesche in Delphi, repre-
senting the Under World, the artist Polygnotos represented some
women as condemned to keep forever trying to fill bottomless tubs
with water, because they had while on earth neglected to be initi-
ated.^^ The cynic philosopher Diogenes turned his sarcasm against
the Elevsinian rites because pickpockets and rentgatherers if ini-
tiated would have a happier future than Epameinondas, who had not
provided himself with the favor of the mysteries." Philo the Jew
objected to them on the same grounds.'^'* But the cynic scoffer and
the Hebrew follower of Platon did not represent the common Hel-
lenic feeling in regard to Elevsis, as is evident from the multitudes
who crowded thither for initiation every year for more than ten cen-
turies, and which even in the last days of Hellenic paganism "was a
bond of union in the human race."^^ For few indeed are those who
viewed the question of secret doings with the philosophic indepen-
dence of Demonax, who would not be initiated because he thought

7T5 Clement of Alexandreia, Philosoiihoumena, V. 1, 115. ^6 Hymn to Demeter,
480-483; Pindar, Fragment 114, ed. Bergk; Sophokles, Fragment 848, ed. Didot;
Platon, Phaedon, 13 and 29; Gorgias, 47; Republic, 2, 6; Axiochos, p. 196;
Isokrates, Panegyric, 28; Panathenais, p. 185, ed. Jebb; Diodoros of Sicily, 5, 49, 6;
Cicero, Laws, 2, 14; Inscription from third century A. D. in Ephemeris Archaeo-
logike, 1883, p. 81. 77 Pavsanias, 10, 31, 11. 78 pioutarch. Morals, 22 a; Diogenes
Laertios, 6, 39; Julian, Oration 7, 238. 7» De Vict, offer. 12, p. 261 M. so Zosimos,
4,3.

756 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

that whatever was good ought to be promulgated broadcast, and
what was bad ought to be exposed.*^

After the initiation ceremonies were over the plemochoan rites
were performed. These seem to have been Hbations in memory of
the dead." Then all prepared to return to Athens, unless, as was
the case on fixed years, if not annually, they prolonged their stay for
two or three days in order to celebrate a series of athletic and stadiac
games.^' Properly enough, the prizes offered in the contests cele-
brated here in the territory sacred to the corn goddess Demeter were
measures of barley, reaped perhaps in the sacred Rarian plain.«*

The return to Athens took place in the form of procession, for
the god lakchos had to be escorted back to his sanctuary with be-
coming pomp. A short distance outside the city of Athens there
was a bridge over the Kephisos river, which in the classic days of
antiquity was as famous as was the statue of the Pasquino in the
days of the Humanists in Rome. The returning mysts and epopts
were encountered here by an immense crowd of sportive Athenians,
and assailed by all kinds of raillery, jibes and quolibets.^'' The in-
itiated vigorously answered this shower of ribald darts by retorting
in kind. Many in the crowd wore masks. Noted public men and
their acts were open to the scorchings and criticisms of wit. Coarse
vulgarisms could not have been absent.^* After the battle of
"gephyrisms" was over, all proceeded on to the city, where the
statue of lakchos was replaced in the sanctuary, and the rites of
Elevsis were finished for that year.

Even after Greece lost her independence and became a Roman
province the mysteries continued to flourish. The Romans had
accepted Hellenic culture, and were therefore not to be excluded
from Elevsis, and great numbers of them took the trouble of being
initiated, including several of the emperors.^^ But the sun of pagan-
ism began to lose its splendor. Julian, in his attempt to recall the
disappearing forms of the past, tried to arouse new enthusiasm for
the mysteries. In the year 364 the Christian Emperor Valentinian
issued an edict forbidding all nocturnal heathen celebrations, but,
yielding to the prayers of the pro-Consul of Achaia, made an excep-
tion in favor of the cult of Demeter at Elevsis.*® But the doomed
end was near, for the Great Master of higher mysteries, the Naza-
rene, had conquered. The house of the Evmolpids, which for a
thousand years had controlled the Elevsinian cult and from which
the hierophant was always to be chosen, perished heirless. Towards

81 Loukian, Life of Demonax, 11. 82 Athenaeos, 11, p. 496. 83 C. I. A., II., 341,
402, 444, etc.; MUller, Fragmenta Hist. Graec, II., p. 189, 282; Marmor Parium, 30.
8* Scholion to Pindar, Olympic Ode, 9, 150. 85 Hesychios, s. v. "gephyrismos;"
Scholion to Aristophanes Acharnians, 708. se Cf. Aristophanes, Frogs, 409-412.
87 E. g., Hadrian; Cf. Spart. Hadr., 13, 1; Evsebios, Chronicles, 2, p. 166, ed.
Schone. 88 Zosimos, 4, 3, p. 176.

Cardinal Mermillod. 757

the middle of the fourth century the hierophant who initiated the
rhetorician Maximus and his biographer Evnapios was indeed an
Evmolpid, but he was the last of his line.^® In the year 394 the Em-
peror Theodosios the Second ordered the temple at Elevsis to be
closed. But, taking advantage of some favorable opportunity, the
wrecked but stubborn adherers to the old cult called a Mithras
priest from Thespiae and set him up as hierophant in the temple of
Demeter.®** But the usurper's exaltation was brief. In the year
395 Alaric and his army of Visigoths came to Elevsis and completely
pillaged it.®^ Earthquakes and all-destroying time and the hands of
man have continued the work of desolation. And now Elevsis is
merely a hillside overlooked by a mediaeval Prankish tower and
covered with intricate heaps of ruins which the natives used to carry
ofif as building material for their huts, and where English dilettanti
and French savants and Greek archaeologists have loved to make
researches, and among which the daughters of Illyrian invaders, who
dwell near by, step their dances to Albanian music on the feast days
of their patron saints.

Daniel Quinn.

Athens, Greece.

CARDINAL MERMILLOD.

I know not when God will call me to Himself; if it be in Rome, I pray of the
R. R. F. F. Carthusians to give me the hospitality of the tomb within their vault
at the Campo Verano, should this be not inconvenient to them. If I die near
Geneva, I desire to be laid within the vaults of Monthoux, or beside my parents,
beneath a plain stone slab bearing the inscription of what I have been, with
these words added,

Dilexit EccUaiam.

, ^"TTjrE loved the Church !" It was, in truth, the very sum and

I 1 substance of his life who, prince of the Church and con-
fessor of the faith, far-famed preacher and idol of the
multitude, champion of the workingmen and beloved of his Pontiflf-
king, was yet constrained to ask "the hospitality of the tomb" of a
humble monastery far removed from the dear land of his birth, while
the grand and gracious edifice built by the fruits of his own toil and
eloquence within his native city stood empty and desolate and dese-
crated by the presence of an ignoble schism.

Those of our readers who remember a former paper in this Review
on 'The Restoration of Catholicity in Geneva" may easily recall
how, after the great apostasy under Calvin, Geneva had become so

89 Evnapios, Life of Maximus, p. 52, ed. Boisonnade. »<> Evnapios, Maximus, p.
52. 91 Evnapios, p. 53.

758 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Protestant a city that not only the presence of a priest and the saying
of Mass, but even the sale of a cross, a crucifix, a rosary or a Cath-
olic book was forbidden by law within the precincts of the town ;
and how, later on, for a hundred years or more the chapel of the
French Embassy (opened in spite of vehement opposition on the
part of the Genevan government) was the sole spot within the town
or canton where Mass was allowed to be said.

During the French Revolution Geneva was approached in mis-
sionary spirit by many an apostle from the neighboring Catholic
cantons and provinces, and became a refuge for numbers of exiled
Savoyard priests, who, like the emigre ecclesiastics in England,
doubtless brought a blessing with them. When persecution was
relaxed, with Napoleon's Consulate, the vicars general of Lausanne,
who administered Geneva under its absent titular Bishop, essayed
to establish a permanent mission there, and at the instance of Cath-
olic France the Grand Council made reluctant cession of an old
Catholic church, St. Germain, to the French and other Catholics of
the town under their first cure, M. Lacoste. It was only at this
time, in 1801, that the titular see of Geneva was finally suppressed,
or, rather, merged in that of Chambery, on the publication of the
famous Concordat which involved the remodeling of the whole eccle-
siastical administration of France. Up to this date the lineal succes-
sion of Bishops of Geneva had been faithfully kept up, the holders
of this empty title residing for the most part at Annecy, and from
there administering the affairs of their diocese. Mgr. Paget, the
last of these prelates and a most saintly man, was forced, on the
French invasion of Savoy, to retire to Turin, whence he watched
over his diocese as best he could and provided a refuge for such of
his flock as desired to avail themselves of it, sending from thence in
1795 a touching pastoral, said to recall in its language and spirit that
of early Christian times, in which he divided his diocese into twenty-
four districts, to be visited in due order by missionaries and lay
helpers as occasion served.

When the Church of St. Germain was handed over to the Catho-
lics, in 1803, under the pastoral protection of the Archbishop of
Chambery, now their Bishop, the former chief pastor, Mgr. Paget,
happened to be staying in Geneva, paying a farewell visit to his
little flock, and it was he who, a few days after its restoration to
Catholic worship, formally blessed and said Mass therein, his last
episcopal act ere retiring to his native town, St. Julien, to die.

Thus the old order of things was linked to the new, and the Church
of St. Germain, under its energetic and saintly cure, M. Vuarin,
became a very living centre of Genevan Catholicity. At his death,
in 1843, Geneva held within its walls some seven thousand Catholics,

Cardinal Mermillod. 759

schools taught by Christian Brothers and by the Sisters of St. Vin-
cent de Paul, a Catholic hospital and orphanage and other flourish-
ing good works.

It was during the halcyon period of M. Vuarin's long and fruitful
pastorate that, on the feast of St. Maurice, Switzerland's chief patron
saint, Gaspard, the first child of Jacques Mermillod, a baker of
Carouge, and of Pernette, his wife, first saw the light, September 22,
1824. Carouge is a small and quiet suburb of the town of Geneva,
and few must have been the Catholic families who gathered there in
the bare and humble village chapel, not many years erected probably,
for their use. To its font was brought a frail and tiny babe, whose
passionately loving mother could scarce keep breath of life in him
with all her untiring devotion and still more tireless prayers, little
dreaming of the day when he should return to her wrapped in the
purple robe of the episcopate.

The boy grew and thrived, always a delicate, precocious, lively
and sensitive child, as he began his early studies at the local day
school, played with his companions at saying Mass or preaching
(principally the latter) and in soberer earnest took part in that ser-
vice of the altar which has so often proved precursor to the priest-
liood. His cure noticed the boy's interest in sacred things, his de-
vout attendance at the altar, and urged his parents to let him study
Latin, admitting him, too, at an earlier age than was customary to
make his first Communion. On entering his fourteenth year he
left the paternal roof to become a student at the "mixed" college in
Geneva, where he headed the small group of Catholic boys he found
there and formed them into a kind of confraternity for converting
their Protestant comrades ! But he was no sanctimonious or solemn
youth, this slender, excitable boy, in spite of his premature propa-
gandism, his childish imitations of priestly functions and his very
genuine love of the poor, which sometimes led him even to the
questionable lengths of appropriating his father's loaves for their
t)enefit, an act of charity one is sure must have been less condemned
than applauded, if not by the sturdy baker himself, at least by his
gentle and pious mother, who is said to have been singularly re-
fined both in mind and person, "a born lady," as the saying goes ; on
the contrary, young Gaspard immortalized his story at one college
after another by acquiring a reputation for perpetual high spirits and
a great love of boyish pranks and practical jokes of all kinds, of
-which various instances are still remembered by his comrades.

In 1837 he passed on to more definite theological studies at the
Petit Seminaire of St. Louis du Pont, near Chambery, and having
finished his "rhetoric" there, went for "philosophy" to the severer
Jesuit College at Fribourg. The letters which his affectionate

760 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

family received from him at this period breathe a spirit of joyous
contentment which told well for his love of learning.

"I would not exchange my little study and my books for all the
gold in the world," he writes. "The hours pass quickly, and I am
plunged in work up to the eyes: from five in the morning until
eight at night all my moments are counted. I have eight professors I
So you may judge whether I have leisure to count the flies, or rather
to see the snow, for winter is here."

It was the custom in this, as in most seminaries — ^we say "was,**
for unhappily since those days the Jesuits have been expelled from
Fribourg — for each priestly aspirant to preach a trial sermon before
professors and fellow-students, prepared and written out beforehand.
Young Mermillod, however, having at the duly appointed time
written and committed to memory the first part of his discourse,
declared, to the consternation of his hearers, that he would deliver
the second part extempore and unprepared. The little audience
settled to listen in some anxiety, but when, after the gracefully
rounded and studied periods of the first part, young Mermillod burst
forth into a sudden torrent of eloquence, they felt that one of those
orators who are *'born, not made," stood among them. A later
incident, recorded in the unpublished notes on his life, now in the
possession of his family, exhibits, under another phase, the dawning
of that gracious gift which was to hold thousands spellbound in
later years, as well as possessing a peculiar interest for all lovers of
that devotion which is our most precious consolation in these evil
and lukewarm times. It seems that the chaplain of the convent
school of the Sacre Coeur at Montet had engaged a Jesuit preacher
for the "Fete du Sacre Coeur" on the nth of June, 1847. Almost
at the last moment he was prevented from fulfilling his engagement,
and the chaplain hurriedly sent to Fribourg for a substitute. No
other preacher being apparently obtainable, the good fathers sent off
young Mermillod, then only a deacon of twenty-two.

Now, on the vigil of the feast day all the girls who were about to
receive Holy Communion were talking together about the coming
festival, and they agreed among themselves, "were inspired," as the
story goes, to unite in earnest prayer, offering their communions of
the next morning and other pious acts and sacrifices for the special
intention "that God would send to them an apostle of the Sacred
Heart." Next day, after their communion, the girls began to de-
scribe one to another the "apostle" for whom they had been asking.
He was to be eloquent, of course, devoted to the Holy Father, a
faithful and devout son of the Church, very zealous against heresy^
and then, they all agreed, he was to have "Vaureole de la souif ranee et
de la persecution." What secret promptings of the Divine Heart

Cardinal Mermillod. 761

may have given birth to this strange girlish wish, who can tell?
But that evening, after Vespers, a young, unknown preacher, a mere
boy they must have deemed him, mounted, with evident nervousness,
the pulpit steps and began a timidly spoken discourse on the subject
of the day — the words of our Lord to Blessed Margaret Mary
Alacoque. Gradually the youthful speaker seemed t^ gain courage
as he told his hearers that he was not even yet a priest and was
preaching that day for the first time; and presently, in an impas-
sioned burst of fervor, he exclaimed: "Seigneur, je m 'engage a
consacrer ma vie a procurer la gloire de Votre Cceur adorable. J'en
fais le serment, je serai Vapotre du Sacre Cceur T

Years afterwards Monseigneur Mermillod, preaching in another
convent of the same order, referred to this incident with the follow-
ing remark : "Your companions' prayers were heard even beyond
their aspirations, since Pius IX., when consecrating me Bishop, at
the time of the beatification of the Venerable Marguerite M.
Alacoque, bestowed on me the title of eveque du Sacre Co^urJ'

The youthful preacher had received the sub-diaconate about two
years before the votive incident at the hands of his friend and master,
Mgr. Rondu, before the tomb of the great Apostle of Savoy at An-
necy, and some days after this impassioned consecration of himself
to a like apostolate he received, from his own Bishop, Mgr. Marril-
ley, the further dignity of the priesthood, "with dispensation of age,"
on the 24th of June, 1847. His first Mass was said in Geneva on the
feast of SS. Peter and Paul, and though we hear nothing of those
who assisted at it, one is sure that the devoted mother and proud
father and all their little family circle would not have failed to be of
its congregation. The young abbe was at once appointed Vicaire of
Geneva under M. Marilley's successor, M. Dunoyer, and found
himself immediately plunged, not only into parochial, but into con-
troversial work.

For the disastrous civil war called the War of the Sonderbund,
which resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Redemptorists and
other religious orders from Fribourg and the rest of the Catholic
cantons, was about to open, and after a short but fierce struggle the
Catholic army, overpowered by numbers, was forced to capitulate.
Convents were suppressed, seminaries closed, priests harassed and
persecuted and their venerable chief, the Bishop of Fribourg, was
first imprisoned in the historic Castle of Chillon and then exiled.

Probably the ever keen antagonism of the Genevan world to Cath-
olicity in any shape or form was accentuated, if possible, by the con-
sciousness of that struggle beyond. The young curate found ample
scope for his controversial tastes and love of fighting in polemical
writings and the founding of a religious paper treating of the ques-

^62 Atmrkan Catholic Quarterly Review.

tions of the day, VObservateur de Geneve, as well as two later period-
icals, the Annales Catholiques de Geneve and the Correspondence de
Geneve.

But an event was now to occur which would carry his name and
fame far beyond the boundaries of his native country. Towards the
end of 1850 the Genevan Council, priding itself in possession of cer-
tain portions of territory where the ancient ramparts of the city had
formerly been and were now demolished, presented these lands as
building sites to various public bodies, and amongst others a portion
was allotted to the Catholics, on which to build a church, that of St.
Germain being far too small to contain half their number. It had
been the dream of M. Vuarin's life, and now his successor was to
carry it out. But though the site was there, the money to build was
lacking, and so, remembering the large handed generosity of Catholic
France, the Cure of Geneva set out on a begging tour therein, ac-
companied by his young vicaire.

Their first halt was in Paris, where they met with an encouraging
reception, and it so happened that one evening the two Genevese
priests were in the reception room of Mgr. Sibour, then Archbishop
of Paris, when the venerable Cure of Notre Dame des Victoires and
saintly founder of its renowned confraternity, M. Desgenettes, came
to lay before his chief an unexpected difficulty which had just be-
fallen him. The Lenten preacher chosen for that office in his church
had been suddenly prevented from fulfilling his undertaking; the
time was at hand, and M. Desgenettes could find no fitting substi-
tute. Of course, in a church at once so popular and so fashionable,
no mediocre preacher would pass muster, and Mgr. Sibour stood
reflective for a moment reviewing the situation. Then, with a sud-
den flash of inspiration, he turned to M. Desgenettes. "Do not
distress yourself, M. le Cure," he said; "here is the man who can
help you in your need !" And he presented, by a gesture, the young
priest by his side, who, almost speechless with surprise, stammered
a humble disclaimer as the worthy cure of Notre Dame turned to
proffer a formal request for his services. "Do not be afraid," urged
the saintly priest gently, "the Blessed Virgin will assist you!"
After much hesitation he yielded to the persuasion of his superiors,
and finally that time-honored shrine, with its miraculous statue, its
ex-voto hung walls, its air heavy with a million prayers, a thousand
heartfelt thanksgivings, saw our youthful debutant entering his public
career in the pulpit of Notre Dame des Victoires.

"From that time," writes one of his biographers, "there was no
more peace or repose for the Abbe Mermillod ;" his fate was decided ;
he was to be a popular preacher. Possessing to an exceptional ex-
tent the three great qualities of a preacher, clearness of thought,

Cardinal Mermillod. 763

ready command of language and above all that indescribable *'unc-
tion" which appeals to heart and brain alike with its subtle, intangi-
ble charm, its burning words, its inner and consuming fire, Gaspard
Mermillod found himself, from the hour of his first success, launched
on one unending round of sermons, Lents, missions and retreats.
Paris called him again and again to her pulpits, side by side with
Lacordaire and Ravignan and all the great names of the day. Turin
saw him preaching before Victor Emmanuel and his Piedmontese
Court in 1852 ; Marseilles, Rouen, Toulouse, Dijon, Bordeaux, all
the great cities of France welcomed him north and south, till, like
another great contemporary preacher, Father Hermann, the Carme-
lite, he might have answered when questioned as to his place of resi-
dence: "Madame, I live ... on the train!" Soon he was
called on to give ecclesiastical retreats, a branch of priestly labor
which soon became one of his specialties, and when, on account of
a delicate throat, he was ordered to winter in Rome, Cardinals, Am-
bassadors and a host of other distinguished personages swelled the
ranks of his auditors and admirers.

Meanwhile the walls of a graceful Gothic building, "the most cor-
rect and most finished work of our century," were slowly rising, paid
for by the results of his eloquence, on the site of the wall originally
raised by the King of Prussia to defend Protestant Geneva against
Catholic Savoy !

The church was completed in 1857 and consecrated ceremonially
on Rosary Sunday, in the presence of a brilliant congregation,
Queen Christina of Spain, the Due and Duchesse de Montpensier,
the Abbot of the great African monastery at Staonch, Dom Frangois
Regis, and some four thousand others, representing the Catholic
world in various countries, even as the building itself, raised by the
alms and subscriptions of all nations, represented and belonged to
all. The Abbe Mermillod preached the opening sermon, and it was
a strange and a striking one, having as its title the words, "Notre
Dame is an act of liberty and of nationality."

He was named its first rector, M. Dunoyer continuing to hold the
post of "cure of Geneva," and for some years afterwards his life was
an uneventful one, passed partly in pastoral and parochial labors and
partly in responding to the numerous invitations which besieged him
to preach in France and elsewhere. Among the more famous of
these sermons is one which should specially touch all English-speak-
ing peoples. It was the famine year of 1862, which devastated all
Ireland with its ravages, and the young preacher, whose heart
vibrated with sympathy for every distress, whether moral or physical,
ascended the pulpit of Ste. Clotilde, in Paris, to plead for the hunger
stricken Irish. He gave as his text the words :

764 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

"I have compassion on the multitude because they have now been
with me three days, and have nothing to eat." And, enlarging on
these familiar words, he drew a thrilling picture of the poverty, the
hunger, the ghastly distress of the peasantry, with the additional
horror, so familiar to us now, that "fourteen Protestant societies ex-
pended their annual millions in tempting to apostasy the unhappy
people who cried for bread. Let me proclaim aloud," he cried, in
irrepressible indignation, "I declare here, before the holy altar, be-
fore this vast assembly, in the sight of God and of His angels, that
if ever, I do not say a Pontiff or a priest, but even a simple layman^
should attempt that ignoble propaganda which makes of the rich
man a religious speculator on the misery of the poor, if ever a Cath-
olic dared to enter the dwelling of a poor man and tempt his soul by
such vile means, let his name be forever tarnished in face of the
Faith, in the face of honor and before the public conscience. The
priest who should protect such efforts would dishonor his priest-
hood forever, for the Church, that holy guardian of the liberty of
souls, forbids such spiritual traffic and protests against this buying
and selling of conscience."

The collection which followed this discourse was a scene never to
be forgotten by those who witnessed it. Ladies stripped themselves
of their bracelets, rings, jewels; men emptied their purses. One
poor workman was heard to say as he threw his watch into the col-
lecting plate : "One does not need to know the time when a nation
is dying of hunger !" And a young student, amongst others, came
into the sacristy, trembling with emotion, and handed to the
preacher the whole of his worldly goods, consisting of the sum of forty
francs, a touching homage to that land "whose pure and ardent
patriotism," in the preacher's words, "is guarded by her women and
blessed by her priests !"

Seldom, indeed, was the young preacher's tongue more eloquent,
his words so powerful as when he touched upon the subject of
patriotism.

"Never forget," he cried to the exiled children of Poland on an-
other occasion, "that you are awaiting another Jeanne d'Arc. Only
your Jeanne d'Arc, your deliverer— you know who she is to bet
No other than the Catholic Church !"

The frequent visits of the Abbe Mermillod to the Eternal City had
resulted in his being not only well known to, but persona grata to the
venerable Head of the Church ; but nothing could have been less
anticipated than the imperious summons which, in the month of Sep-
tember, 1864, called him to the feet of Pius IX., there to learn, from
the Pontiff's own lips, that he had resolved to consecrate him a
Bishop. This the Holy Father proceeded to do with his own hands^

Cardinal Mermillod. 765

on the 24th of the same month, delivering a touching little allocu-
tion to the newly ordained Bishop and three others who had recently
been invested with the same dignity, while tears of emotion gathered
in his mild blue eyes and rolled down his withered cheeks as he ex-
horted his new-made brother to "go and gain for me that Geneva
which dares to call itself the Protestant Rome; bless those peoples
who may be ungrateful, but who are my children. Sustain, console
the great Catholic family, and convert those whom heresy keeps
back from the fold of Christ." His preconization was thus worded :

"For the episcopal see of Hebron, in partibus iniidelium, the Rev-
erend Gaspard Mermillod, of the Diocese of Geneva, named auxil-
iary, with residence at Geneva, of His Grace Mgr. Marilley, Bishop
of Lausanne and Geneva."

Some days later, when he went to take leave of his beloved Pon-
tiff and friend ere returning to his new diocese, he could not refrain
from expressing to that august confidant some of those fears for the
future which necessarily suggested themselves even to so sanguine
a mind as that of the young Bishop who was going back to face the
outpoured hatred of a city whose very foundations were set in bitter-
est, most bigoted, most virulent persecution. The Pope told him
not to fear, but to remember that the Holy Ghost guides the Church,
and that his appointment was the work of the Holy Spirit through
the Sovereign Pontiff.

So he returned — Bishop of Hebron in name, of Geneva in reality,
to the place of his birth. His first episcopal act had been a tele-
gram conveying his blessing to the clergy and people of Geneva;
his first act on alighting within Swiss territory, to meet and receive
the congratulations of his parents, his mother's greeting being:
**Now, my son, I have but one more grace to ask of God for thee,
that He would keep thee in humility." Then came the solemn
entry into his beautiful Notre Dame, where Catholic and Protestant
forgot for a moment their mutual antagonism to kneel side by side
for his benediction, while the priest who had baptized him, just forty
years before, hung round his neck a handsome pectoral cross.

It was soon found that the episcopal purple brought little change
to the kindly, simple, self-sacrificing life of the former humble Swiss
cure. The new "Bishop of Geneva" (for such, in truth, was and was
well understood to be the so-called Bishop of Hebron) might have
vied with his great predecessor, St. Francis of Sales, in the simplicity
of his lodging as well as in the almost reckless generosity of his never
failing alms. We interview-loving readers of to-day must needs
know how his simple study held none but the barest necessities — a
writing bureau, a set of bookshelves, a priedieu and crucifix, a few
•chairs and fewer pictures, the only non-religious one among them

^66 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

being his mother's portrait, while the still humbler bedroom beyond
contained the poorest and narrowest of iron bedsteads, curtained in
rough serge, with the benitier surmounted by its bit of blessed palm
and simple crucifix at its head.

His way of life was as simple as its setting. At six in the morning
he rose and went down to his private chapel, where almost daily a
group of penitents awaited his coming, and not until his confessional
duties had been discharged did he say his daily Mass, as though he
had been still a parish priest. After his thanksgiving he would take
a cup of tea and then repair at once to his study, where the unfailing
pile of letters and an often irksome succession of visitors filled the
morning hours. All who came, all who wrote, men of business, re-
ligious disputants, souls in need, beggars of every degree, each re-
ceived his utmost, his most kindly attention. Sometimes pacing to
and fro within the narrow limits of his room, striving to prepare
some important discourse or dictating rapidly letter after letter to
his secretary and interrupted perhaps twenty times in the course of a
morning, now by some rich idler in search of amusement, or half
envious working man, comrade of former college days; his house
was open to all. One grande datne, calling upon "the celebrated
preacher" to beguile with his gentle presence some idle half hour,
left in his hand at parting a twenty franc piece, in clumsy or haughty
acknowledgment of her encroachment, and "Oh," said the long-suf-
fering Bishop as he returned to his interrupted work, "I did feel in-
clined to say to her, Take back your money and return to me my
wasted time !' "

Again, too, as before, his sermons, missions, retreats continued
from one place to another. Again and again his voice was heard,
before fashionable Parisian congregations or at still larger gather-
ings elsewhere, on some one of the burning questions of the day,
notably that one, "la question ouvriere" as it was termed, which
was only then beginning to be a prominent part of Christian ethics.
His voice rang out with no uncertain sound as he told a vast assem-
bly how "in crowning him (St. Joseph) it is Christian democracy
which is crowned, it is the glorification of Labor."

Again he was urgent on the necessity for the Church's showing
herself to be in the vanguard of progress, accepting and welcoming
all modern inventions, all scientific discoveries : "Plus que personne
nous devons saisir des forces sociales modemes, de I'electricite,
des chemins de fer, pour preparer I'avenement du regne de Jesus
Christ, de ce regne ou il n'y aura qu'un seul troupeau et un seul pas-
teur." ^ And with this thought, when he was requested by the P. L.
M. Railway Company to bless their new station at Geneva (for by a
curious legalism the railway station at Geneva is French and not

Cardinal Mermiilod. 767

Swiss territory), he caused a special * 'thanksgiving" service to be
performed at his own beautiful Church of Notre Dame, and preached
himself on *'How the Church is the friend of modern progress in the
domain of letters, arts and industries."

When the Vatican Council assembled, in 1869, the Holy Father
summoned Monseigneurs Mermiilod and Manning to his presence
together, and in his own gracious way told them of his joy in wel-
coming the pastors of "the two dioceses which had not been repre-
sented at the Council of Trent, London and Geneva." And during
his sojourn in the Eternal City the Bishop of Hebron, "thanks to his
astounding activity, which enabled him to be everywhere and at
everything at once," as Louis Veuillot wrote of him, "was occupied
as incessantly as ever in preaching at one church after another."

On the 1 8th of July, 1870, the doctrine of Papal infallibility was
solemnly proclaimed by Pius IX. in council, and on the following
day war was declared between France and Germany. Two months
later Rome was in the hands of the Piedmontese, the Pope a prisoner
in the Vatican and the members of the interrupted Council scattered
far and wide, returning to their own dioceses. The "Bishop of
Hebron" on his return lost no time in announcing from the pulpit
the newly defined dogma ; but the displeasure of the Genevan Gov-
ernment at this (as they deemed it) daring action was momentarily
set aside by the more immediately pressing political events which
absorbed all thoughts. Bourbaki's fugitive army, 80,000 strong,
had crossed the border and taken refuge in Switzerland, where, biK
leted here and there in the different cantons, their destitute and suf-
fering condition appealed not unsuccessfully to the pity of their
Swiss hosts. Monseigneur Mermiilod was foremost in the many
good works set on foot in aid of the wounded or famine-stricken
soldiers, and his love of the poor, his ever open hand and generous
heart were taxed to the uttermost on their behalf.

But when political matters became less stormy without, a blacker
cloud arose upon the horizon at home. A certain M. Carteret, a
fanatical Protestant, took advantage of his appointment to a promi-
nent post in the government to declare open war against Catholic-
ism, and his first step was to procure the banishment of the humble
Christian Brothers, who ever since M. Vuarin's time had lived and
worked in the city. Their Bishop flew to defend them and poured
forth an indignant protest from the pulpit on the nth of August,
1872. It was not the first time he had opposed M. Carteret, who
bitterly disliked him, and the answer of his opponent came swiftly.
On the 30th of the same month a decree of the Council of State en-
joined on Mgr. Mermiilod to "abstain from any act which he might
perform as vicar general or bishop's delegate."

768

American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Mgr. Mermillod replied "that he would submit the matter to his
ecclesiastical superiors."

Six days afterwards he was summoned to appear in person before
the Council and to give an answer, in its presence, to the following

question :

"Does Monsieur Mermillod, the cure of Geneva, intend to con-
form, from the present moment, to the prescriptions of the Council
of State contained in its letter of the 30th of August?"

Without a moment's hesitation Mgr. Mermillod dictated his reply
to the Chancellor of the Council :

"Monseigneur Mermillod does not recognize the competence of the Council of
State in a question of spiritual administration, .... he therefore cannot
rehnquish his spiritual functions until the spiritual authority which confaded
them to him takes them back. Never, since 1815, have vicars general been either
accepted or suspended by any Council of State. Consequently Mgr. Mermillod
cannot yield to the orders and the threats of the Council of State to cease exer-
cising the functions of Auxiliary Bishop and vicar general; it is a case of duty,
of inviolable fidelity to the rights of the Church, which are compatible with

^'"'Tsig^'edf ''"'''■ "GASPARD MERMILLOD.

^^'^^^^ "Bishop of Hebron."

"Well," cried M. Carteret bitterly as they stood face to face, "it
is a case of war between us two. We shall see who will gain the
victory 1"

The Bishop retired, calm and unmoved, and the Council con-
tinued its debate, Carteret exclaiming excitedly :

"We must draw up an article preventing Monsieur Mermillod
from being cure any more. Courage, gentlemen ; no half measures T

On which a fellow-Councillor gravely commented :

"I confess I feel very little courage when it is a question of laying
hands upon the conscience of my neighbor."

But Carteret's more violent counsels prevailed, and on the 20th
of the same month (September) two decrees were issued by the
government which enacted that "Monsieur" Mermillod thereby
ceased to be recognized as cure of Geneva, was forbidden to exer-
cise any ecclesiastical function, and his stipend was withdrawn. A
storm of indignation burst from his people and from the whole
Catholic world when these decrees were made public. Addresses of
sympathy or more energetic remonstrances poured in on all sides.
The well-known Catholic champion, Louis Veuillot, immediately
opened a subscription list in the pages of the Univers to supply for
the withheld stipend of the Genevese "cure," which in the course of
a few days amounted to 25,000 francs and was closed by a Papal
donation of 2,000 francs.

Monseigneur Marilley, the Bishop of Lausanne and Geneva,
whose "suffragan" Mgr. Mermillod in reality was, now formally re-
signed his sway over the Genevan portion of his diocese, which

Cardinal Mermillod. 769

thus lapsed to the direct authority of Rome, and the Pope, finding
negotiation useless, appointed as vicar general of Geneva direct
from himself, by special brief, Monseigneur Mermillod 1 The brief
was dated January 16, 1873.

On receiving from the Papal Nuncio at Berne the brief in ques-
tion, which was officially communicated also to the Council of State,
Mgr. Mermillod notified its contents to the faithful in a circular
which was read in all the pulpits of the canton on Sunday, February
2, and that same evening Carteret convoked a special meeting of the
Council, at which he proposed to seize Mgr. Mermillod and put him
in prison.

His proposition was rejected, but another carried, in which the
Council summoned the recalcitrant Bishop to declare "within twen-
ty-four hours, before midday on Saturday," whether he would per-
sist in fulfilling the functions of Vicar Apostolic, or renounce them
according to the injunctions already served on him by the cantonal
and federal authorities.

The Bishop replied within the prescribed period in a document of
some length, stating that he "must remain faithful to the eternal
principle, 'Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to
God the things that are God's.' "

He himself expected the answer to this statement to be immediate
imprisonment, and begged his flock, should this take place, to "be-
lieve no false reports" as to his having swerved from this position.
On the following day, Sunday, he preached as usual at Notre Dame,
referring to the question of the hour in his usual half genial, half
sarcastic way, with "The Genevans would die of ennui if they had not
the interests of the Catholics to discuss ;" and the next day, Monday,
as he sat reading his morning paper as usual, he came to the words :
"The Federal Council of Switzerland has just passed a decree ban-
ishing Mgr. Mermillod from Swiss territory."

He took up his pen to write a telegram contradicing the report,
but while he was in the act of writing it his servant rushed into the
room with tears in his eyes, and behind him — a police officer.

"This time, Monseigneur, you must prepare to leave. I have
orders to arrest you. Here is the warrant."

"Very well, I accept it," replied the Bishop, holding out his hand
for the document. "It will be my passport to heaven !"

He passed into the next room, followed by the police officer, and
there, surrounded by his priests, he dictated to his secretary an en-
ergetic protest against his illegal arrest. Then, after paying a last
visit to the church and praying for a few moments before the
Blessed Sacrament, he stepped into the carriage which awaited him,
escorted by a body of police, who conveyed him across the frontier

Vol. XXVI— id.

jyQ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

and left him on French territory, close to the little village of Ferney.
"Well," said the illustrious exile with a flash of his old gaiety, "here
is Calvin sending me to Voltaire ! How are they going to agree
together?" And he walked on to the humble village presbytery
and asked shelter of its cure.

Hardly had the exiled Bishop left his native soil before the gist of
M. Carteret's manoeuvres became apparent ; for only two days later
the Genevese Grand Council (an assembly, be it remembered, com-
posed exclusively of Protestants and free thinkers) voted "the reor-
ganization of the Catholic Church."

The series of articles which they proceeded to draw up are too
long to be inserted here, but their aim was, in brief, to reduce Cath-
olicism in Geneva to a State Church somewhat on the lines of "An-
glicanism" in England; and they were deluded enough to believe
that a large percentage, at least, of the Catholic clergy would em-
brace their proposals, Carteret himself having the effrontery to ex-
claim with an expressive gesture in the Council chamber: "Cut
the cords of the purse and you will see how the clergy will yield to
a compromise !" The would-be reformers, however, had the mortifi-
cation of finding not only that every single Catholic priest in the can-
ton rejected their proposals with scorn, but even Protestants and infi-
dels (Ernest Renan among them) loudly condemned their attempt.

The modest little village of Ferney now became a centre for
pilgrimages, visits, processions, deputations from all parts. One
incessant stream of friends, admirers, indignant supporters flocked
there to lay their homage at the exile's feet, and he was soon obliged
to hire a small house, formerly occupied by Voltaire's niece and im-
mediately opposite to the Chateau Voltaire, in which to receive his
numerous visitors.

Meanwhile the Genevan Government, irritated by their non-suc-
cess, set to work in earnest. They seized one after another the
churches and chapels of the canton, ejecting priests from their pres-
byteries and banishing such as were not of Swiss nationality. They
sent to M. Loyson, the unfrocked Carmelite, inviting him to come
and give a series of conferences in Geneva, to teach "Old Catholicism."
And he went. Then various suspended or otherwise "irregular"
priests, tempted by the "loaves and fishes" held out to them, flocked
in to fill the places of the expelled Catholic priests, ministering to
miscellaneous flocks of malcontents and unbelievers who flaunted
their false liberty and license in public journals and assemblies. M.
Loyson and two of his associates were "elected" to the "triple cure"
of Geneva, this curious arrangement being explained as "lest one
cure alone should have too much power," and many disgraceful
scenes took place.

Cardinal Mermillod, 771

A howling mob, with a police officer at its head, broke open the
doors of the Church of St. Germain, flooded the sanctuary, refused
permission to the cure even to carry away the Blessed Sacrament
until the Council of State, appealed to, authorized the action, and
Loyson was installed there. Next morning the same turbulent
crowd attacked Notre Dame and surged impotently between church
and presbytery all day long until dispersed by the police and the
firemen with a jet of water from a fire engine ! For Notre Dame
could hardly be ceded so lightly, even by the high-handed Genevese
Government. It was indisputably private property — the property of
the Catholics of all nations, whose money had built it — while the site
was a gift from the town to "the Catholics of Geneva." So, when
the rumor went abroad that it was to be ceded to the schismatics, a
cry of indignation went up from the Catholics in all countries, who
claimed their ozvn, from Pope Pius IX. himself to the representatives
of the English subscribers, Lords Denbigh and Gainsborough. So
many that the printed report of these protests alone fills a volume of
ninety-two pages.

But all was in vain. The Genevan Government, while not daring
openly to seize Notre Dame, gave secret encouragement to a so-
called "Protestant Commission" to do so ; and very early one morn-
ing, while the priests in the neighboring presbytery were still asleep,
a little band of robbers — a juge de paix, a locksmith and some police
officers — stole up to the great door and forced the lock, afterwards
affixing the government seals. While they were at work the priests
rose as usual and perceived what was going on. They rushed to
the doors in a vain attempt to defend their beloved church, and M.
Lany, one of the curates, with his brother priests, fought his way in
through the mocking, struggling crowd, seized the ciborium which
held the Blessed Sacrament and carried it in safety to a convent near,
while the venerable rector, M. Dunoyer, was being dragged down
the steps by the gendarmes, amid the applause of a handful of Pro-
testants who shouted "a I'eau ! a I'eau," their old savage cry. The
white-haired successor of M. Vuarin, thus doubly insulted and be-
reaved, never recovered, either physically or mentally, from the
shock, and sank into a premature grave.

The summer of 1873 passed in one long round of pastoral duties as
before, for the Bishop's exile had but increased his ever-abundant
labors a hundred fold. Without once infringing on Swiss territory
he passed from village to village, from town to town, preaching,
visiting, holding confirmations, everywhere welcomed with open
arms, with tears of affection, with garlanded paths and triumphal
arches, till the passage of the exiled and insulted vicar general be-
came one long triumphal march. His enemies within the city were

772 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

furious and tried to force the French Government to banish him in
their turn ; but this much was not conceded to their hatred, and they
were forced to be unwilling witnesses of a triumph as genuine as it
was unexpected. They contrived, however, to continue their perse-
cutions. The ninety-seven cures of the Bernese Jura, part of the
formerly French and newly annexed territory within his diocese,,
having declared in writing that they remained faithful to their
Bishop, were immediately suspended from their posts and exiled
from Switzerland, in defiance of the "Act of Union" of 1815, in
which the Swiss Government, taking over this portion of French
territory, promised entire freedom in religion to their new Catholic
subjects.

Exiled and penniless, these ninety-seven confessors took refuge
within the French frontier, and there, suffering but steadfast, they
watched over their flocks from afar. "They are there, sad but un-j
conquerable," wrote a passer-by some time later of the little band of
exiled priests. "They were ninety-seven at the beginning, and now,,
after two years and a half, not one has deserted." From time to
time they crossed the frontier in disguise by night to minister to their
bereaved flocks. They visited the sick, they heard confessions, they
said Mass in secret, in some loft or cellar, and disappeared again as
silently as they had come; while their Bishop, on whom the onus of
their support necessarily fell, was working his hardest at the erec-
tion and maintenance of various chapels and missions in other parts
of his diocese.

In Geneva itself every convent, hospital, orphanage and other
good work was swept away, and as one contemporary writer re-
marks, "in bygone times Calvinist intolerance tried to send the
French resident to Mass across the frontier ; to-day, being unable to
proscribe the Mass, it proscribes charity and sends the orphans, the
sick and the poor across the frontier."

A fortunate chance enabled the Catholic body to buy a "Masonic
Temple," no other than the one built on a companion site (of former
city walls) to the Church of Notre Dame, and the congregation of
St. Germain migrated thither when consecrated. under the title of
"L'Eglise du Sacre Coeur." A second chapel, that of Notre Dame
des Paquis,* received the dispersed congregation of Notre Dame ;
that of St. Francois de Paul rose in another quarter, and the most
crowded parish church of all, that of St. Joseph, was bought back
by a generous layman and is at present the only original parish
church in Geneva restored to Catholic worship.

During the ten years of his exile Mgr. Mermillod saw no less than
thirty new churches and chapels erected within his persecuted and

• The Empress of Austria was agsassinated dose to this chapel, and one of it«
vicairea gave her the last rites of the Church, on September 10, 1898.

Cardinal Mermillod. 7*73

'dispossessed diocese. The expenses of their erection and mainten-
ance rested, as usual, upon his shoulders, and again he took up his
pilgrim staff and went from church to church and from town to
town, preaching and pleading for his orphaned people. We are told
that more than a hundred thousand francs were annually spent upon
this work, gathered almost entirely from France and Belgium, as the
fruits of his preaching in these countries. With redoubled activity
he had journeyed hither and thither, preaching sometimes as much
as five and six times in one day ; while to the pitying spectators who
noted his labored breath, his swollen throat and aching breast, and
begged him to take some period of repose, he announced only : "I
shall have Eternity to rest in !"

Ten years passed thus, and then a new and unexpected turn of
events took the wondering world by surprise. The Bishop of Lau-
sanne, Mgr. Cosandez, died in 1882, and it rested with the Holy See,
as usual, to name his successor. For some five months the see re-
mained vacant; and then, one evening— it was the 14th of March,
1883 — Leo XIIL sent for Mgr. Mermillod, who was in Rome, ind
told him how, after five long months of prayer and examination of
the question, he, the mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost, had "of his own
personal initiative, resolution and decision," determined to name the
exiled Bishop of Hebron to the vacant see.

**My heart full of emotion and my eyes of tears, I could otily
answer: The will of the Pope is the will of God!'" wrote Mgr.
Mermillod to his Genevan brethren next day. "All that I am is at
your service henceforth — -my powers, my devotion, my life."

The preconization of the new Bishop took place on the following
<iay, March 15, in a public consistory at the Vatican, and the news,
flashed to Fribourg and all over Switzerland with brief delay, awoke
a great thrill of joy within that pious and convent crowded city, "the
little Rome," as its inhabitants still love to call it ; while the Federal
Council, glad, no doubt, to put an end to the unseemly and strained
situation of so many years past, revoked on its side the decree of
€xile and prepared to receive the new-old Bishop of Fribourg-Lau-
sanne — and Geneva.

His arrival in Fribourg was welcomed with th€ greatest rejoicings,
with garlanded streets and festive decorations, while on his part no
w^ord of triumph or any reference to his long exile was heard. He
seemed to come among them overflowing with love, with tenderness,
with the most exquisite charity towards all, even as he had written to
them from Rome in announcing his arrival, "count on my heart, as
I on my side crave to feel myself loved by you."

He threw himself heart and soul into his episcopal work, preached
occasionally outside his own diocese and took part in every pious

774 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

work or pilgrimage which asked his presence. In 1889 his grateful
people insisted on celebrating with great pomp his "silver jubilee"
to the episcopate, and although his humility yearned to commemo-
rate it in silence, he yielded to their wishes, and a splendid "function*'
and series of fetes crowned the close of his twenty-five years of epis-
copal life.

Not long after this undesired but well merited triumph he was
obliged by failing health to leave for a time the scene of his labors
and to pass the winter of 1889-90 in Cannes and Rome. Here he
occupied himself in the interests of his diocese, especially in one pro-
ject which lay very near his heart, the establishment of a Catholic
University in Fribourg ; and when the balmy month of May seemed
to give promise of speedy return to his northern home he presented
himself before the Pope in what he believed to be an audience of
farewell. But the Pontiff who had summoned him greeted him with
these words : "This is not a visit of farewell ! You are to remain
here in Rome until the next consistory ; for my will is to create you
Cardinal. It is a legitimate recompense, for you have worked and
suffered much for the Church." His hearer, surprised and much
moved, found voice to reply with, "Holy Father, to work and to
suffer for the Church is in itself the greatest honor and the highest
recompense that God can deign to give to a man called to such mis-
sion." "That is true," answered Leo XIIL, "but the Church must
also be just and grateful ; that is why I wish to make you a Car-
dinal. It is I myself who have chosen you, without any human in-
tervention. I have it at heart to show my affection for Switzerland,
as I have already done for England and the United States."

So, on the 25th of June, in the Vatican, Monseigneur Mermillod
received the Cardinal's hat from the hands of the Supreme Pontiff
himself, with the words: "The whole world knows the trials, the
lengthened labors, the exile you have endured to serve the cause of
the Church and of its Head. All men know, too, your indefatigable
zeal for the faith and for the salvation of souls, as well as the efficacy
of your words for enlightening intelligences and drawing hearts
to God. But if the Cardinalate be a recompense for services ren-
dered and a stimulant towards rendering more, we will also that it
should be a fresh proof of our consideration and of our special regard
for that Switzerland whose son you are."

A series of fetes and ovations followed, with the stately ceremony
of installation in his titular Basilica, that of SS. Nereus and Achil-
leus, and his return to Switzerland was one long triumphal proces-
sion. The remainder of that summer— after a short sojourn in Fri-
bourg—he passed, in but indifferent health, in a little property of
his own near Geneva called the Chateau de Monthoux.

Cardinal Mermillod. 775

Then, what was in all truth another cross, and not a light one,
though scarcely suspected at the time, came upon him. The Holy
Father summoned him again to Rome and signified his wish that
the new Cardinal should take up his abode there and — as a neces-
sary consequence — resign the See of Fribourg.

Probably his own failing health would soon have rendered this
step necessary, but none the less it came upon him as a blow. His
passionate patriotism, innate in almost every Swiss heart, and spe-
cially prominent in his, made any other country than his own, even
Rome, a land of exile ; and the grief he felt at being again separated
from the land of his birth grew into a long drawn agony which
ceased but with his life. **C'est le Cardinalat qui I'a tue," said one
of his intimate friends to the present writer; and little as it was
guessed at the time, there is little doubt now that it was so. In
obedience to the wish of the Pope he resigned his see and conse-
crated with his own hands his successor, Mgr. Deruaz, in the Cana-
dian Chapel at Rome, on the 19th of March, 1891.

The following summer he passed at Monthoux, the internal
malady which consumed him making rapid progress, and then, as it
was hoped that the mild air of Rome might retard his end, he was
brought back there by slow and easy stages, and lingered for some
months until, in the month of February, an attack of influenza super-
vened and his strength failed rapidly. As he lay dying, surrounded
by relatives and friends, he showed the same gracious, kindly sweet-
ness of word and demeanor which had ever characterized him. The
watchers who knelt by his bedside would receive from his trembling
hand not one, but five or six "signes de croix" upon their foreheads
when voice had failed ; for "in death, as in life, he was never tired of
giving benedictions." While life was ebbing his secretary came
from the Vatican bearing the last Papal Benediction to his dying
master, who lifted the hand of the welcome messenger to his lips in
token of grateful recognition, and not long afterwards sank grad-
ually into unconsciousness and breathed his last on February 23,
1892.

Eleven Cardinals in full state and vast crowds of clergy and people
followed the simple coffin ''without flowers or state," according to
his expressed desire, to the Carthusian vault within the same stately
basilica where Pius IX., his friend and father, lay, and "He will have
a great reward," spoke Leo XIII. to his sorrowing family as they
knelt before him some days later. "He was looked upon by every
one as an apostle and a saint."

"Monseigneur Mermillod," says a recent writer in one of the
French reviews, "is assuredly one of the most sympathetic figures

776 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of the second half of the nineteenth century. A marvelous gift of
eloquence and a charming amenity of manner were added in his per-
son to every priestly virtue. The charm of his manner was but
equaled by the dignity of his life and the ardor of his zeal and
charity. Very popular in the highest society, he was especially the
friend of the humble and the obscure, and was one of the first to dare
to preach before the rich and the powerful in support of the claims of
the working classes. His enemies accused him of ambition and
social intrigue. His ambition was — to bring back his country to its
ancient faith, to reconcile his beloved Geneva with Rome. He
proved that he had no other ambition by refusing the flattering ad-
vances made to him by the French Government, which offered him
successively the Bishopric of Nice and the Archbishopric of Cham-
bery. As to his politics, his former fellow-workers, those who were
th'.* best fitted to know him intimately, declared that he had none.
With his delicate minded and generous nature, all sentiment and
confiding goodness, he could never divine in others a maliciousness
of which he felt himself to be incapable. His great mistake was
never to have doubted the loyalty of his enemies, and his great illu-
sion, to believe that the republican and democratic institutions of his
country, for which he had a perfect enthusiasm, were a sort of in-
violable palladium for the Catholic apostolate."

T. L. L. Teelin-g.

London.

THE TEMPORAL POWER.

FOR Catholics the momentous question of the day, religious
and quasi-political, is that of the Pope's Temporal Power.
Nor does it concern Catholics alone, but the whole world.
For, indirectly, the whole world—Catholic and non-Catholic, Chris-
tian and non-Christian— is interested in its settlement; first on
grounds of abstract justice, to see that a great wrong is righted ;
secondly, because on its due solution the tranquillity and content-
ment of the world, to some extent, depend. As long as the Roman
Pontiff remains a prisoner in his own city, practically under the lock
and key of a usurper, so long will this politico-religious difficulty
remain an open sore and so long will two hundred million Catholics,
scattered throughout the world, be restless and unwilling to accept
the status quo. Directly, however, the question affects the Christian
nations alone, for they alone by baptism are subjects of the Church.

The Temporal Power. yyy

Moreover, in practice, it concerns Catholics only. Its bearing on
Protestants is chiefly of a speculative character, since far from admit-
ting the Pope's jurisdiction over them, they emphatically deny it.
At the lowest they are indifferent, and in the main they are hostile.
Indeed, had it not been for the moral and material support of Pro-
testants in general, and of British Protestants in particular, the revo-
lutionary Italians in 1870 could not have accomplished this crying
act of injustice — the usurpation and spoliation of Rome.

Nine times before has Rome been captured by the enemies of the
Papacy, and nine times was the peace of Europe disturbed. More-
over, that peace was never once restored except by the restoration of
the Temporal Power.

Taking stock of the confronting forces on this great battlefield of
religion and politics, we find ranged, on one side the compact army
of sound and well-informed Catholics, and on the other side a motley
array of infidels, revolutionists, communists, most non-Catholic
Christians, many liberal — that is, unsound — Catholics and lastly not
a few Catholics who err, not from malice, but from inculpable ignor-
ance. These last are ignorant for want of due instruction on this vital
question. That such ignorance exists probably no one would care
to deny. Differences of opinion in matters of minor detail are legiti-
mate enough, but it is surely a curious sign of the times to find
Catholics — and sometimes Catholics who ought to know better —
professing the laxest views on this all-important question.

I propose in this article to set forth, as far as I understand them,
our obligations in regard to the Temporal Power, and the grounds
of those obligations. However, before entering on the specific topic
of the Pope's Civil Princedom, there are some preliminary questions
which I intend to touch on by way of clearing the ground. This
seems all the more necessary, since the most exaggerated views have
at times been current as to what the Holy Father's temporal powers
really are — as to their nature, their limits and their necessity. On
the one hand the extravagant opinion has been propounded by some
theologians — Henry of Segusia, Augustinus Triumphus, Alvarus
Pelagius — that the Pope's direct temporal power is coextensive with
the earth.^ More unbalanced still in their opinions, some few —
Hostiensis, for example- — have taught that by Christ's coming all
heathen lands were confiscated to the Pope, and that he, conse-
quently, could assign them to whomsoever he chose. On the other
hand, Calvin, Peter Martyr and others defended the heretical opinion
that the Roman Pontiff, as such, was de jure divino debarred from all

1 This opinion is emphatically denied by Bellarmine, '"Tertia Controversia Gen-
eralis;" "De Kom. Pontif," v., 1; cf. Hergenrother, "The Catholic Church and the
Christian State"— Essay 13, part 2, sec. 3. 2 Bellarmine 1. c.

778 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

temporal powers and possessions and that for him to bear a temporal
sword was a hall-mark of Anti-Christ.

I begin then by laying down four introductory propositions which
I will number for the sake of clearness.

The first proposition is this, that in no sense whatever has the
Roman Pontiff direct temporal jurisdiction over the whole world.
He has, indeed, jurisdiction, temporal but indirect, over all Chris-
tians scattered over the whole world; but nothing more. What,
however, is meant by direct and indirect jurisdiction? The two
terms play an important part in this discussion, and therefore call
for clear definition. By direct temporal jurisdiction I mean that
which is exercised primarily for the advancement of temporal inter-
ests ; by indirect, that which is exercised for the furtherance primarily
of spiritual and only secondarily of temporal interests. That the
Pope has no spiritual or temporal, direct or indirect, jurisdiction
over the whole world is obvious from the fact that Christ gave him
none. Our Lord's command to "go and teach all nations" gave
only the right to preach and conferred no jurisdiction over all.

The second proposition is this, that the Pope has no direct tem-
poral authority even over the Christian world. Direct spiritual
authority he has, conferred by the words, "Feed My sheep, feed My
lambs." But neither Scripture nor Apostolic Tradition shows any
trace of any such direct temporal jurisdiction. When to Peter and
his successors Christ gave "the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven,"
that gift carried with it direct spiritual, but not direct temporal, au-
thority over Christendom. Were it otherwise, an infidel king, by
conversion to Christianity, would forfeit his throne to the Pope —
which is absurd. Therefore it is that the Church says in the Vespers
of the Epiphany :

Cnidelis Herodes, Deum
Regem venire quid times?
Non eripit mortalia,
Qui regna dat coelestia.

The third proposition is this, that the Roman Pontiff has temporal
power, supreme but indirect, not over the whole world, but over all
Christendom. Not over the whole world; for the direct spiritual
and the indirect temporal powers are coextensive, and as the former
does not embrace the whole world, so neither does the latter. But
over all Christendom ; for as that is the extension of the spiritual
power, so also must it be the extension of the temporal. For the
indirect temporal is but an aspect of the spiritual power, and was
given concomitantly with the spiritual.

It is essential to notice that this indirect temporal power is tem-
poral but in name and is spiritual in reality. It concerns the tem-
poral aspect of spiritual things and the spiritual aspect of temporal

The Temporal Power. 779

things. Hergenrother,^ in an admirable essay on this subject,
writes: "This indirect power of the Church in matters temporal
. . . is not a temporal, but a spiritual power. It is exerted in
matters temporal only in so far as they trench upon religion and thus
cease to be purely temporal."

It follows then that within certain due and well defined limits the
civil is subordinate to the spiritual power. And reasonably so, since
the end of the former is temporal and mediate, that of the latter
spiritual and final. The one promotes temporal interests, the other
eternal salvation. Nevertheless both Church and State have their
own clearly defined spheres into which the other has no right to in-
trude. Hence St. Bernard wrote : "When temporal rulers make no
opposition to the divine law, they then hold their kingdoms and their
rights entire and with full power."* Both these spheres are, how-
ever, concentric and the radius of the ecclesiastical sphere is greater
than the radius of the civil sphere, so that while the State has no
power outside her own circumference, the Church has direct spiritual
power throughout her whole circumference and indirect temporal
power within the circumference of the State. However, this leaves
the State absolute mistress within her own proper domain. If, for
example, the State cannot define doctrines, so neither may the
Church command conscription. Therefore St. Thomas writes:''
"The secular power is under the spiritual power in so far as it is
placed under it by God ; that is to say, in those things that concern
the salvation of souls. Consequently therein we must obey the spir-
itual rather than the temporal authority. But, in what belongs to
the civil sphere, we must obey the temporal rather than the spiritual
authority, according to those words, 'Render unto Caesar the things
that are Caesar's, but unto God the things that are God's.' " This
indirect temporal power — direct as to the moral law, indirect as to
the temporal matters involved — Christ exercised when He drove the
buyers and sellers from the Temple, and again when He cast the
Gadarene swine into the sea ; and the Pope exercised it when he con-
demned the Plan of Campaign in Ireland, the Falk Laws in Ger-
many, the Divorce Courts in Christendom, when he upheld the
claims of the French Republic, when he denounced the claims of the
Italian monarchy.

Our fo;irth proposition runs thus, that the Roman Pontiff is, by
divine right, exempt from and superior to all secular authority and
civil jurisdiction of whatsoever kind or degree. This doctrine is an
accepted conclusion of theology and is thus enunciated by Suarez :•
"The Roman Pontiff is free and exempt from all. secular judgment

3 L. c, sec 4. ■* Ep. 255. Migne. P. L. Tom. 182, col. 462. 5 L. II., Sent. d. etq.
ult. 6 Contra Sectam Anglic, L. 4, c. 4, n. 3.

ySo American Catholic Quarterly Review,

and jurisdiction, even of Emperors and of Kings. This doctrine is
held by all Catholic doctors who declare this exemption to be a
divine right."

But in what sense "a divine right?" To answer that question
clearly we must define our terms. What then is "a divine right?"
St. Thomas says pithily : ^'Divine is that right which is made known
to us by revelation."*^ Revelation, or promulgation, is, however,
two-fold— natural (or non-positive) and positive ; natural when it is
implicitly given, as a logical concomitant or reasonable consequence
of some supernatural dignity conferred by God on man; positive
when it is given explicitly by God. As, therefore, a supernatural
dignity expressly bestowed would be de jure divino positivo, its logi-
cal concomitant or necessary consequence, though not expressly
mentioned, would be de jure divino naturali. In this acceptation of
the term "natural" as distinguished, not against "supernatural," but
against "positive," the positive precedes the natural as the cause pre-
cedes the effect.*

Papal exemption is then a divine right, but is it a positive or a
natural right ? Was it conferred on St. Peter and the Roman Pon-
tiffs explicitly and directly by Christ's special and peculiar will, or is
it merely connatural to and logically deducible from the spiritual
dignity of the Head of Christendom? Suarez explains it to be a
divine right in both senses, natural and positive ; but positive only in
a secondary way.

It is de jure divino naturali because as Christ constituted Peter and
the Roman Pontiffs the Supreme Head in spirituals, it follows logi-
cally that He must also have conferred on His Vicar exemption from
the secular jurisdiction of all and any of his spiritual subjects. A
subject may not be the sovereign of his own Sovereign Lord.
Suarez, however,® admits that this deduction is not without its diffi-
culties. For might not an opponent argue that the Pope's supreme
and direct spiritual jurisdiction and his supreme but indirect tem-
poral jurisdiction on the one hand were not incompatible with his
direct temporal subjection on the other? Does an official's super-
iority over another in one respect prevent his subjection to that other
in another respect ? Is not a King's mother superior to her son, but
inferior to the King, just as the King as a son is inferior tp his
mother, but superior as her King? Without denying a certain co-
gency to this objection Suarez^** replies : "Nevertheless the connec-
tion between the privilege of Exemption and the dignity of Spiritual
Head, if not fully evident, is at least most consonant to reason ; and
in many ways. First, because the superior who gives jurisdiction is

T "Jus divinutn dicitur quod divinitus promulgatur," 2-2, 57, 2, ad. 3m. 8 Cf .
Schiffini. "Disp. Phil. Mor.," Vol. I., u. n. 195, 198. Suarez, Contra Sect. Aug.,
4, 4-6. » 1. c, n. 8. lo 1. c., n. 9.

The Temporal Power, 781

also held to give all the adjuncts necessary for its due execution.
Now, that the Pope may exercise his spiritual office over all Chris-
tians, princes and people, it is morally necessary that he should be
himself subject to none of them. . . . For it is certainly unmeet
that the Supreme Head of the Church, to whom all Christian princes
are subject, should be judged, constrained or punished by any of
them. Again, the Pope's secular subjection would be a standing
cause of parties and divisions. Moreover, the Pope could not, with
due liberty and authority, exercise his spiritual jurisdiction and use
his indirect temporal power over princes if at the same time he was
himself civilly subject to them and they were able legitimately to im-
prison and punish him. Therefore Papal Immunity is de jure divino
naturaliJ*

But the Pope's Immunity is also de jure divino positivo^^ in this
sense, not that Christ's explicit word first created the privilege, but
only afterwards declared it. For Immunity is a logical deduction
from the Spiritual Primacy, and the positive right superadded only
declared explicitly the deduction to be true. Exemption already
implicitly existing in the divine law, Christ, by a positive act, ex-
plicitly affirmed so to exist.

The classical proof of this positive and confirmatory act of our
Lord is drawn from the Payment of the Tribute Scene in St. Mat-
thew (xvii., 24-27), which reads thus :

"And when they were come to Capernaum, they that received
tribute money came to Peter and said. Doth not your Master pay
tribute? He saith, Yes. And when he was come into the house,.
Jesus forestalled him, saying. What thinkest thou, Simon ? Of whom
do the Kings of the earth take custom or tribute? Of their own
children, or of strangers? Peter saith unto Him, Of strangers.
Jesus saith unto him. Then are the children free. Notwithstanding,
lest we should scandalize them, go thou to the sea and cast an hook
and take up the fish that first cometh up, and when thou hast opened
his mouth, thou shalt find a stater ; take that, and give it to them for
Me and for thee."

Thus Christ pays the tax for two, since the poll tax was two
drachmas, and one stater equaled four drachmas. He paid, not be-
cause He and His Vicar were subject to the law, but to avoid scan-
dal of the ignorant. Yet though He and Peter paid, nevertheless
they were not taxed. The tax gatherers received the money, yet
neither Christ nor Peter was mulcted of it. It was taken neither
from their earnings nor from the common purse. Christ, therefore,
a "Child of the King" — God — worked a striking rniracle in order —
without scandalizing the weak — to vindicate exemption and immun-

iiSuarez, 1. c, cap. 5.

^82 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

ity from the law, both for Himself and for His Vicar, St. Peter, and
in St Peter for the whole line of the Roman Pontiffs.

We have now cleared the horizon by the brief statement of these
four propositions; that the Pope has direct temporal power neither
over the whole world, nor over the whole Christian world; that he
has power— supreme, direct, spiritual, and supreme, indirect, tem-
poral—over all Christendom, but not over heathendom ; and that he
is exempt from and superior to all secular authority whatsoever.
We may now more conveniently pass on to our main investigation
into the nature of the Roman Pontiff's de jure civil sovereignty over
Rome and the Roman States. Of what right is it, divine or only

human?

I reply that over no territory whatsoever has the Pope by divine
right, natural or positive, direct temporal sovereignty. Therefore,
not over Rome.

He has not a divine positive right, for no express command of God
to that effect is found in either Scripture or ApostoHc Tradition.

He has not a divine natural (i. e., non-positive, but implicit) right
deducible by reason as a corollary of his spiritual dignity of Supreme
Pontiff. Of such a right there is no proof, as I shall now show.

Bellarmine and Suarez both deny the existence of such divine
right, whether natural or positive.

Bellarmine's^^ argument is this, that since Christ, as Man, while
He lived on earth, willed not Himself to possess temporal and terri-
torial sovereignty over any particular province or city, so neither
did He give any such sovereignty to St. Peter and his successors.
It becomes, therefore, of importance to investigate what Christ's
temporal authority before His Passion was. Christ, as God, was, of
course. Sovereign of the Universe, but His authority as God He did
not, and indeed could not, transfer to His Vicar. Again, Christ, as
Man, was the spiritual Sovereign of all men, so that He could, and
did, bind all men, under sanction of heaven or of hell, to accept His
religion. By this direct spiritual, and therefore by its concomitant
indirect temporal, jurisdiction Christ could dispose of all temporal
possessions, as He did — ^to cite again the instances already quoted —
when He overturned the tables of the money changers and indirectly
caused the destruction of the Gadarene swine.^^ Moreover, Christ,
even as Man, could — had He willed — ^have assumed territorial Lord-
ship of the whole earth. He had the power to do so, but that power
He did not will to exercise. Hence not only He did not exercise ter-
ritorial dominion, He did not even possess it. For Temporal Prince-
dom is built on one or more of these four titles — inheritance, popular
election, conquest, divine donation — and Christ had none of them.

12 De Rom. Pont., cap. 4. i8 Mk. v., 13; Mt. xxi., 12.

The Temporal Power. 783

Not inheritance. For though descended from the royal family
of David, there is no evidence that He was a nearer heir than a multi-
tude of others of the same stock. Moreover, there was no throne in
Judah to inherit, for the sceptre had passed out of David's family,
and that, too, as it seems, with God's approval. For, speaking in
God's name, Jeremiah the prophet^* had clearly foretold that aboli-
tion of Jewish sovereignty. He predicted that no offspring of
Jehoiakin, King of Judah, should sit upon David's temporal throne :
"Thus saith the Lord, Write ye this man childless, a man that shall
not prosper in his days ; for no man of his seed shall prosper sitting
upon the throne of David and ruling any more in Judah." And
again :^^ 'Thus saith the Lord of Jehoiakin, King of Judah : He
shall have none to sit upon the throne of David." Now Christ was
a descendant of Jehoiakin — or Jechonias — as St. Matthew expressly
tells us.^^ Therefore as the prophecy was necessarily true, it must
necessarily be false that Christ ever sat as temporal King on the
throne of Judah.^^ Nor may we argue that Jeremiah's was incon-
sistent with Gabriel's prediction that "the Lord God shall give unto
Him the throne of David His father."^^ For both fathers and theo-
logians explain that the prophet refers to a temporal, but the arch-
angel to a spiritual throne.^®

Not election by the people. Our Lord's own words prove this ;
for when He was invited to intervene, as a King might, in a dispute
He replied: "Man, who made Me a judge or divider over you?"^®
And should it be argued that the sceptre was at least offered to
Christ, the reply is obvious that neither was it the people's to give
nor did He accept it : "When Jesus perceived that they would come
and take Him by force, to make Him King, He departed again into
a mountain Himself alone."^^

Not conquest in war. For Christ's warfare was not with flesh
and blood, but with principalities and with powers, with the rulers
of this world of darkness, with the spirit of wickedness in high

14 Jer. xxii., 30. i5 xxxvi., 30. is Matt, i., 11. i7 To invalidate this argument
it has been oDJected, for example, in Smith's "Diet, of the Bible," s. r. " Jehoai-
chin," that Jeremian's prophecy referred only to the childless Jehoiachin, the last
of Solomon's (though not of David's) line; but that the right of succession duly
passed to the line of Nathan, son of David, whose descendant, Salathiel, the son
of Neri, was consequently called by St. Matthew i., 12, the son of Jehoiachin (or
Jechonias) ; "Jechonias begat Salathiel." But this explanation seems very
strained, not to say unnecessary. Professor N. J. White, in Hastings' "Diet, of
the Bible," II., p. 557, writes: "Needless difficulty has been raised over the
question of Jehoiachin's children. Whatever be the truth as to the parentage of
Salathiel, the very prophecy which is alleged to prove his childlessness (Jer. xxii.,
28) mentions his seed twice. Like Ezk. xxi., 26, it is a declaration of the abroga-
tion of the temporal power of David's line. It explains in what sense he was to
l)e 'childless' {iKKvp^tKrov — 'proscribed'), 'for no man of his seed shall prosper,'
words surely unnecessarv if he had no seed at all." i^ Lk. i., 32. lo Cf. Ambrose.
Tn Lk., L. 3, c. 1. Migne, P. L. Tom. 15, col. 1607. Jerome. In Jer. xxii., 30.
Migne. P. L. Tom. 24, col. 819. Augustine, "De Civ. Dei." L. 17, c. 7. Migne.
}\ L. Tom. 41, col. 538. Bellarmine, "De Rom. Pont.^' v., 4. Suarez, "De
Incar." xlviii., 1-3. 20 Lk. xxii., 14. 21 Jo, vi., 15.

y^ American Catholic Quarterly Review,

places. This title Christ had, not to a temporal, but to His spiritual
kingdom.

Not a divine donation. For there is no proof of any such gift.
Nay, there is clear proof against it. To relieve Pilate of all suspicion
that He aimed at a temporal sceptre, our Lord declared that His
Kingdom was not of this world.^'^

Under no title, then, was our Lord, as Man, a temporal Prince
over Judaea. Moreover, to Him royal power would have been not
an aid, but a hindrance. For the end to attain which He came on
earth, the redemption of mankind, supreme power was indeed-
needed, but spiritual and not temporal power. We must bear in
mind, too, that by virtue of that spiritual power He possessed indi-
rect jurisdiction over all things temporal to dispose of them as He
knew best for spiritual purposes. Therefore temporal power would
have been superfluous. Nay, it would have been positively harmful.
It would have stood as a stumbling-block in the path of Christ's as-
cetic teaching. For our Lord both by example and word — since
"He came to do and to teach,"^^ "not to be ministered unto, but to
minister"^* — sought to lead men to despise wealth and position and
honor and power and glory. Therefore with what playful sarcasm
He questioned those who had gone out into the desert in quest of
John the Baptist :^' "What went ye out to see ? A man clothed in
soft raiment ? Behold they that wear soft clothing are in the houses.
of Kings."

Christ neither exercised temporal and territorial sovereignty over
Judaea nor possessed it. Theologians teach that He had neither the
use nor the dominion. Bellarmine^^ writes: "Christ was in the
fullest sense a poor man as regards both use and dominion." Nor
is Suarez less emphatic :" "Christ assumed dominion neither over
the whole world nor over any temporal kingdom ... as His
poverty evinces. For perfect evangelical poverty consists in the
renunciation of all things temporal, as regards not only use, but also
power and dominion over them."

David's temporal throne was, therefore, but a figure of Christ's
spiritual throne. It follows, then, that as He had not territorial sov-
ereignty Himself, so neither did He give it to Peter and his suc-
cessors. For the Pope exercises that same visible office which
Christ, as Man, exercised during His temporal life and before His
Passion. The prerogatives of the Risen Christ, immortal and glori-
fied, were not transmitted to Peter and the Roman Pontiffs. Peter
and the Popes rule the Church as Christ ruled it before His cruci-
fixion.

W.^'S^fct r^'**^-''- "^•^•'*5- -Mtrxi., 18. 2eop.cit.v.,4. 2T^^De

The Temporal Power. 785

I do not mean, of course, and the distinction is of supreme im-
portance— that to Peter Christ, even as Man, communicated all His
power. Theologians distinguish a three-fold dominion and jurisdic-
tion— divine, human, dei- virile.^** The first belongs to God as God ;
it is essentially independent and incommunicable, and Christ, as
Man, was subject to it. The second belongs to man, as man ; it is
mainly founded on human suffrages ; its end is to preserve the State
in peace and concord. The third belongs to Christ as Man, but as
Man substantially united to God ; it is a function of the Man-God,
and is styled the "dominion of excellence." It stands midway be-
tween the divine and the human. It is inferior to the divine because
it is subordinate to God. It is superior to the human, and that in at
least three ways : in origin, coming directly from God and not from
man ; in stability, being eternal ; in object, extending to all creation,
natural and supernatural, men and angels. Hence every jot and
tittle of that temporal sovereignty which Emperors and Kings
possess, and incomparably more, Christ the Man-God wielded
eminenter, not indirectly but directly, for the attainment not merely
of spiritual but also of temporal ends. By this "dominion of excel-
lence" Christ, as Man, by His own power and by virtue of His own
authority, worked miracles, uttered prophecies, instituted sacra-
ments, forgave sins without a sacrament.

Now of these three, Christ gave to Peter and the Popes neither
divine dominion nor the "dominion of excellence,"^' for they were
not comunicable, nor yet human dominion, for it was not His to
give. Nay, even their spiritual jurisdiction He restricted to the
faithful: "Feed My sheep, feed My lambs." Of that jurisdiction
which can be conferred on a mere man and which was necessary for
the government of Christians unto eternal life, He transferred to
them only a part.

Hence St. Thomas writes :^^ "Theologians attribute to Christ a
certain power possessed neither by Peter nor his successors. They
call it the 'power of excellence.' Therefore the power of Peter and
his successors does not equal Christ's power. Nay, His power ut-
terly exceeds theirs. For Christ could save without baptism. And
consequently Jerome says that Christ cured no man's body without
at the same time curing his soul, and that without baptism. Yet
Peter could not do as much, for even after the coming of the Holy
Ghost he baptized with water Cornelius the Centurion and all his
family. Christ, too, could change both form and matter of the sacra-
ments, which Peter and his successors could not."

The Popes have no divine right to the Roman States. This propo-

28 Suarez, "De Incar." xlviii., 2, 4. 29 Suarez, "De Incar." xlvii., 1, 4. 30 "De
Regirnine Principum," iii., 10.

Vol. XXVL— II.

^35 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

sition I may now be allowed to support by authority. Bellarmine
says emphatically: "The Pope has, directly and by divine right,
no merely temporal jurisdiction.""

Nor is Suarez less explicit :" "Christ gave no temporal dommion
directly and immediately to the Roman Church; but what she
actually possesses comes from the donation of Emperors and Kings."
And again:" "By the title of donation only has the Pope direct
temporal jurisdiction over the patrimony of St. Peter given by Con-
stantine." And again :" "Christ neither instituted the Pope a sov-
ereign prince nor commanded him to be so instituted."

In the following passage the mind of Suarez is made clear beyond
all possibility of mistake :" "Christ did not forbid the Pope to be a
temporal prince. For no such prohibition can be adduced. Nor is
it essentially wrong for one and the same individual to be both
Prince and Pastor. On the contrary — although too ample a tem-
poral sway would not be in keeping with spiritual duties — neverthe-
less a moderately sized temporal princedom is not only permissible,,
it is even expedient for the maintenance of the Church's authority
and splendor, to provide the necessary income, and for other similar
purposes. Christ, therefore, did not prohibit a temporal sover-
eignty, but left it to human arrangement, regulated by right reason,,
and to the opportunities which time would offer."

The Temporal Power of the Popes over the Roman States is there-
fore de jure humnno only,

I have labored rather to prove this conclusion, because it is of
great importance, and it has been seriously controverted. At least
two modern writers have made earnest, interesting and able attempts
to prove a divine right for the Temporal Power. They have striven
to adduce Scriptural warrant to show that it is de jure divino positive,
and therefore (I presume) that the denial of it would be formally
heretical. I refer to the Hon. Colin Lindsay's learned work, "De
Ecclesia et Cathedra ; or, The Empire-Church of Jesus Christ," and
to the Rev. C. F. P. Collingridge's careful thesis on "The Civil Prin-
cipality of Christ."

Mr. Lindsay'^'' writes : "It is evident then that the principle of the
Temporal Power, long ago foretold by the prophets, would be con-
tinued in the Christian Dispensation, and that the place wherein it
would be established was ancient and Imperial Rome, at that time
the future metropolis and centre of Christendom."

And again :"^ "The principle of the Temporal Power is one orig-
inally ordained by God. . . . The Temporal Power has been
established upon earth as a divine principle."

81 Op. cit. v., 4. 82 De Leg. iii., 2, 5. ss Cont. Sect. Angl. iii., 5, 13. 84 Ibid, n. 1».
»6 Ibid, n. 19. 8«p. »02. arp. 918. ^ , ,

The Temporal Power. 787

Father Collingridge,^® after implying that the Temporal Power
**is an essential part of the Divine Plan," writes : "I maintain that
the Civil Principality or Temporal Princedom is a gift of Jesus Christ
and a divine institution foreshadowed in the Old Testament and
vindicated in the New." In other words, it is de jure divino positivo!

I am bound, however, to confess that Mr. Lindsay's argumenta-
tion seems to me, in large measure, fanciful, and that Father ColHng-
ridge deduces from his premises far more than they logically con-
tain. I fail to see that either writer has proved more than the two
conclusions which are common-places in theology, viz., that Christ
possessed the "dominion of excellence" and that the Roman Pontiff
is exempt from secular jurisdiction. Both authors assume that our
Lord was, by divine right, a territorial King in Judaea, that He gave
that right to Peter and the Popes, and that He transferred the seat
of empire from Jerusalem to Rome. Father Collingridge^® writes :
"Jesus the Son of David was therefore the last bearer of the sceptre
of Juda." It seems to me abundantly plain that He was not. Bel-
larmine*** says : "From this false principle that Christ, as Man, was
a temporal King, two opposing errors have arisen," etc. Before
Father Collingridge, Mr. Lindsay had written :*^ "This principle of
the Temporal Power was clearly and unequivocally established by
God and that principle is indelible." Suarez, however, thought
otherwise :*^ "The Pope's temporal kingdom was founded, not im-
mediately by God, but by the devotion of men, or by some other
similar cause."

It might, perhaps, be objected that both Popes and theologians
were for centuries mistaken in their contention that the Temporal
Power was based, wholly or mainly, on the so-called Donation of
Constantine. I think they were mistaken. But how does that
vitiate their conclusion? They deny unanimously that the Tem-
poral Power is de jure divino^ whatever the precise title may be on
which it is held; "hominum devotione, vel alio simili humano
titulo."*-^

But may it not be argued that having proved Papal Exemption
from secular jurisdiction to be de jure divino, it follows that the
Popes, not being subjects, must, with equal right, be sovereigns?
Is not every non-subject a sovereign? In a prefatory letter to
Father Collingridge's booklet, Cardinal Vaughan seems to lend his
weighty support to this opinion. His Eminence writes:** "The
great theologian, Suarez, who speaks for the whole school, says that
Christ declared Peter to be exempt from tribute, just as He Himself
was, and that we are to understand that Christ granted this privilege

38 p. 8. 39 p. 27. -to Op. cit. v., 4. *i P. 877. 42 "Contra Sect. Angl." iv., 4, 1.
*3 Suarez, 1. c. ** P. 5.

gg American Catholic Quarterly Review.

of exemption to Peter because Peter was to be Prince and Head of
the Church and the Vicar of Jesus Christ Himself. This privilege
was therefore, not personal to Peter, but real, and attached to the
dignity and office which passes on to his successors in virtue of
Divine power and of the peculiar institution and will of Christ. If
tribute be the sign of temporal dependence and subjection, he who
is not really subject to the payment of tribute is not really under
temporal subjection."

Thus far His Eminence's argument is uncontrovertible. It is the
same argument which has been sketched out in the preceding pages.
It is the common opinion of theologians. Moreover, I have shown
that Peter's non-subjection is undoubtedly de jure divino. But the
letter then continues :

"The Pope is independent. If independent, he is sovereign. The
principle of the temporal independence of the Pope appears to be
contained in the text of the Gospel just referred to."

His Eminence's argument runs thus :

With what right a person is exempt from secular subjection, with
that same right he is a secular sovereign.

But with divine positive right the Pope is so exempt.

Therefore with divine positive right the Pope is a secular sover-
eign.

I may remark that even thus the Cardinal's contention does not
by any means reach the level at any rate of Mr. Lindsay's. The
former draws the conclusion that the Pope is de jure divino a sover-
eign, but the latter that he is the sovereign of Rome.

I should like, if possible, to endorse the Cardinal's argument, but
I must confess my inability to follow His Eminence's reasoning.
With much mistrust of my own judgment, I venture to express a
doubt as to the validity of the above syllogism. The minor is unde-
niably true ; but can the major be proved ? Is it evident that every
non-subject is of necessity a sovereign? I think not. Not to go
beyond the Scripture passage in question,**^ are not "the children of
Kings" exempt from taxation and yet are they sovereign? Our
Lord Himself was preeminently exempt, and yet He was not a sov-
ereign. Is it therefore certain that the essentially non-subject Pope
is also essentially a sovereign? Suppose the nations of Europe
united {as they might) to guarantee the exemption and immunity of
the present Prisoner of the Vatican, the Pope would be non-subject,
but he would not be a sovereign.

Let us, however, examine the question on a lower ground. The
Pope is de jure divino positivo non-subject ; does it not logically fol-
low that he is at least de jure divino naturali sovereign ? Is not some

"Matt, xvii., 25.

The Temporal Power. 789

sovereignty — if not sovereignty over Rome — a logical and necessary
deduction from the Pope's non-subjection ? Again I am constrained
to answer in the negative.

But again it may be objected against me that not only is the de-
duction necessary, but that both the Papacy and the Episcopacy
have repeatedly declared it to be necessary. Take two instances.
In his Allocution of March 12, 1877, Pius IX. said: "In no way
does the Roman Pontiff possess, nor can he ever possess, full liberty,
or exercise his full authority, so long as he is subject to others ruling
in his city. In Rome he must be either a sovereign or a captive."*®

And in his Letters of September 20, 1895, Leo XIII. wrote:
"Nothing can ever confer true independence on the Papacy so long
as it has no temporal jurisdiction."*^

Both Popes therefore maintain the fiecessity of temporal sover-
eignty.

I reply that they do not maintain it as a necessary deduction from
exemption. They never claim that it is de jure divino. On the
contrary they expressly refrain from that claim. The Temporal
Power is, in these days, a practical necessity. For with all the facts
clearly before them, the authorities have never affirmed more than
this, that the Temporal Power came to the Holy See, "not as the
effect of chance," but "by a peculiar design of Divine Providence,"
and "by a special disposition of God" — as Father CoUingridge him-
self bears witness.*^ With all the data before them on which to base
a sound judgment — for the present imbroglio is not new, since Rome
has nine times already been captured by enemies — the authorities
have ever advocated divine right of any kind for the Temporal
Power. Neither in the Collections of the Councils, nor in the BuU-
arium, nor in the Acta Sanctae Sedis, nor in the tomes of any father,
doctor or theologian — so far as I am aware — is there on the one
hand a single passage which maintains the divine right of the Tem-
poral Princedom, while on the other hand there are scores of
passages which explicitly affirm that right to be merely human.

However, let us look more closely into this most important ques-
tion of the necessity of the Temporal Power. Is the Civil Princedom
of the Popes really necessary? I reply that both from extrinsic
authority and from intrinsic evidence we know for certain that it is.

Before, however, setting forth the rulings of ecclesiastical author-
ity, I may first point out that this doctrine of necessity is not new.
It was taught by the Holy See at least as far back as the thirteenth
century. On August 4, 1278,*^ in the Encyclical Letter, Funda-
menta Militantis Ecclesiae, addressed to the French Bishops, Pope

46 "Acta Sanctae Sedis/' 1877, p. 57. 47 "Acta S. Sedis," 1895, p. 200. -ts p. 5.
49 BuUarium Romanum, Mainard, Tom. III., pt. 2, p. 23.

790 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Nicholas III. wrote: "That Holy Mother Church, in her pastoral
care of the faithful, should not stand in need of temporal aids ; nay,
rather, in order that, helped by them, she might ever progress in
spiritual growth ; not without a miracle was the design conceived by
Constantine of leaving the City of Rome to Pope Sylvester. . . .
For Constantine deemed it unmeet that where the Heavenly King
had established the High Priest and Head of the Christian Religion,
there an earthly Emperor should hold sway. Nay, rather he held
that Peter's See, now established on the throne of Rome, should
possess full liberty in its action, nor be subject to any man, seeing
that bv divine choice (aere divino) it is known to have been set over
all." '

Of all arguments for the Temporal Power, the chief — at least for
Catholics — is that from authority. For a Catholic the high road to
certain truth in religion is not the beaten path of argument. His
Church, with her supreme authority, must be to him the ultimate
court of appeal. Such a one will look to the authoritative decisions
of Popes or Councils, to the sense of the Church expounded by theo-
logians, to the traditional view prevalent among pastors and people.
And on this subject of the Temporal Power all these authorities are
at one. Three quotations will set this assertion in a clear light.

Pius IX. in his Encyclical of i8 June, 1859, and addressed to all
the Bishops of the Church, said: "We publicly proclaim that a
Civil Princedom is necessary to this Holy See, that it may be able to
exercise its sacred power without any impediment."

And again in Apostolic Letters of 16 March, i860: "Since the
Catholic Church, founded and instituted by Christ the Lord to pro-
cure the eternal salvation of men, has, by virtue of its divine institu-
tion, obtained the form of a perfect society, it ought consequently to
possess such liberty that in the exercise of its sacred ministry it
should be subject to no civil power. And because to act freely, it
needed defenses corresponding to the condition and necessity of the
times, therefore, by a decidedly singular counsel of Divine Providence,
it happened that when the Roman Empire fell and was divided into
several kingdoms, the Roman Pontiflf, whom Christ has constituted
the Head and Centre of His whole Church, acquired a Civil Prince-
dom, whereby in truth it was most wisely provided by God Himself
that, amidst such a multitude and variety of temporal Princes, the
Sovereign Pontiff should enjoy that political liberty which is so
necessary that he may exercise his spiritual power, authority and
jurisdiction throughout the whole world, without any impediment."

Thirdly, the Bishops assembled in Rome in 1862 in an Address
dated July 9 repeated this doctrine. That Address may be looked
upon as coming from the whole episcopate, seeing that it was signed

The Temporal Power. ygi

hy 265 Bishops in Rome, that many at a distance afterwards sent in
their adhesion and that the Pope accepted and approved it. The
document ran thus :

"We recognize the Civil Princedom of the Holy See as something
necessary and manifestly instituted by God's Providence, nor do we
hesitate to declare that in the present state of human things this
Civil Princedom is altogether required for the good and free govern-
ment of the Church. It was assuredly necessary that the Roman
Pontiff should not be the subject, nay, not even the mere guest, of
any Prince, but that, residing in a kingdom and dominion of his own,
he should be his own master. . . By all of us, therefore, it is to
be held as most certain that this temporal rule did not fortuitously
accrue to the Holy See, but by a special disposition of God was as-
signed to it, and during a long series of years confirmed and pre-
served to it, with the unanimous consent of all kingdoms and em-
pires and almost by a miracle J'^^

The summary of the doctrine laid down in these passages is this :
First, that the Temporal Power was established and maintained by
God through a special Providence ;^' secondly, that it has been bene-
ficial ; thirdly, that it was, and still is, necessary for the Church ;
fourthly, that its beneficial character and necessity continue to the
present day ; and fifthly, that all this is most certain.

The Temporal Power, therefore, is undoubtedly, in some sense at
least, necessary. But with what degree of necessity? This neces-
sity is one "corresponding to the condition and necessity of the
times" — as Pius IX. expressed it, in the language of the Bishops —
"in the present state of human things." It is a necessity, not abso-
lute but relative, not essential but accidental. It is essential neither
to the existence of the Church nor to the indispensable action of the
Holy Father. That much seems plain from these two facts alone:
First, that the Church existed in the Catacombs without any Tem-
poral Power, either de jure or de facto, for some three centuries;
secondly, that she exists now without that power de facto. More-
over, it is clear that, by a change in His Providence, God could
make the Church flourish more without than she ever flourished
with her civil sovereignty.

The Temporal Power, therefore, is necessary to the Church ; not
to her esse, but her bene esse; not to her being, but her well-being.

But to what degree of well-being ? Well-being is an elastic term
and admits of a very considerable latitude of interpretation. For
example, is a mechanic in a state of well-being with thirty shillings a

50 Quoted in extenso by Father Collingridge, p. 70. 5i By "Providence" is under-
stood that care which God takes of His creatures both in 'the natural and super-
natural orders. It is the natural or supernatural provision which He makes for
them.

7^2 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

week? Or a County Court Judge with thirty pounds? Or the
Archbishop of Canterbury with three hundred pounds ? Or a mer-
chant prince with three thousand pounds ? If these are all cases of
well-being— as they seem to be — they are certainly not the same
well-being. Then for what degree of well-being is the Temporal
Power necessary to the Church ? I think I am safe in saying that the
authorities quoted understand a well-being that is not superlative^
not superfluous ; not a well-being of extreme prosperity, but a well-
being such as is reasonably due to the Church, such as is in keeping
with her state, such that without it she would be hampered and em-
barrassed, such that if it were lost permanently she would be in a
state, not indeed of ruin but of want, not of collapse but of distress.

That answer, however, does not quite solve the problem. For
what is a due well-being ? Protestants think the Church has a due
well-being now; Catholics are sure she has not. Who is to define
what is fit and becoming as regards her well-being? A somewhat
similar difficulty confronted Aristotle in his definition of "Virtue.""
According to him, virtue stands in the mean.'^^ But what is the
mean ? Neither excess nor defect. But what is excess and what is
defect? If a rich Duke gives a half-penny for the Westminster
Cathedral, and the poor widow in the Gospel gives to the Temple
two mites, which make a farthing,*^^ would the Duke be twice as
generous as the widow ? No, for the mean is not absolute, but rela-
tive— relative to the individual. Well, then, what donation would be
generous in a Duke ? For if the mean is relative, who is to define
it ? Aristotle replies : "Defined by reason." Yes, but whose rea^
son? The miser's or the spendthrift's, Shylock's or Antonio's?
Aristotle again answers and finally: "As the prudent man would"
define it." Who, then, are the "prudent men" fit to define what is
necessary to the due well-being of the Church? The Pope and
Bishops.

I have said that the Temporal Power is so necessary to the Church
that without it she would be straitened, but not starved. It is neces-
sary for the modest competence of the Church. And in thus saying
I mean, not the Church of the Catacombs before she reached her
adult stature, but as she is now, in her normal condition, widespread,
full-grown, mature. Moreover, I mean the Church in her perma-
nent condition and not in a state of passing trials and occasional dis-
turbances.

But another obscurity presents itself. This well-being, defined as
necessary by the "prudent," is it that moderate well-being which
duly befits the Church, or is a minimum rigidly due to the Church?
Is it only that which ought to be there, or is it that which must be

62 Ethics, B. 2, c. 6, n. 10. bs Mk. xii., 42.

The Temporal Power, 793

there and which God has promised shall be there ? Unless He found
a substitute for the Temporal Power, God of course could not posi-
tively will its final extinction ; but could He permit it ? Would such
permission invalidate His promises? Has God guaranteed that it
shall not become finally extinct ? If He has, then He will restore it.
If He has, then the Papal and episcopal declarations of necessity
imply that the final abolition of the Temporal Power is a moral im-
possibility and that God is bound to and therefore will reestablish it.

I must, however, confess that a degree of necessity so high as that
seems to me theologically incapable of demonstration. I hope the
Temporal Power will be restored. I hold, personally, arguing from
past historical analogies and from present political embarrassments,
that it will be restored. But that such restoration is certain, that
divine guarantees make it certain, that Pope and Bishops implicitly
declare it to be certain — where is the proof? Christ said i*** "When
the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth ?" And in
like manner we may ask : "Shall He find His Church in possession
of her Temporal Power ?" Who knows ?'^^

Next, if we pass from the declarations of authority to the dictates
of reason, it is not hard to assign grounds for the necessity of the
Pope's civil sovereignty. Those grounds I propose to explain at
length in another article, but they are summed up in the sentence of
Pius IX. : "That the Holy See may be able to exercise its sacred
power without any impediment." In a word, these are the main
reasons: To secure freedom from secular dictation; to possess
ability to carry on, without let or hindrance, the world-wide govern-
ment of the Church ; to enjoy the possession of competent revenues
for that purpose ; to wield the power necessary to uphold the dignity
and even the splendor of the Pope's unique position.

Let us next ask what precise obligation lies on Catholics to accept
this teaching ? How far is a Catholic bound to recognize the neces-
sity of the Temporal Sovereignty? Is that necessity a mere opin-
ion? Is it a dogma of the faith? Or is it a doctrine intermediate
between mere opinion and absolute dogma? In view of the loose
views prevalent on this subject, this question calls for a clear reply.

Would a denial of the necessity of the Temporal Power be heresy ?
For those writers who think the Temporal Power to be of positive
divine right — "clearly, evidently and unequivocally," as Mr. Lindsay
holds — and writ plain in Scripture, perhaps it would.

64 Lk, xviii,, 8. b5 On this subject there is a curious speculation in Suarez,
"Contra Sect. Angl.," v. 7, 9 and 11, that Rome will perhaps some day be de-
stroyed, its buildings uprooted and the whole city burned to the ground and
blotted out. Nor does he think that such an event would run counter to the
divine promises in behalf of the Church, since Peter's See shall never fail whether
it be set up in this place or that, whetner the Church remain visible or be driven
by persecution to fly to the mountains or to hide in secret holes. As the Church
began in the Catacombs, he thinks it not improbable that she may end in them.

794 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Again, for those who hold it to be a natural divine right, the denial
might be heretical.

But, as I have said before, I doubt if there be reasonable grounds
—I am sure there is no obligation— to hold either of these superla-
tive opinions. No one is bound to believe that the Temporal Power
is based on anything higher than human right, though he must hold
that a special Providence guided men to confer that right.

This then is the practical question : What is the obligation to
submit, founded on the plain, repeated and authoritative teaching of
the Papacy and the Episcopacy ? That question I shall now strive to
answer.

In a letter of His Eminence Cardinal Prosper Caterini, Prefect
of the S. Congregation of the Council of Trent, and written by com-
mand and under the direction of Pius IX., after granting that "the
matter in question does not directly concern the faith," the writer
says :^^ "To assert that the doctrine as to the necessity and fitness
of the Civil Princedom of the Holy See is a novelty of but recent in-
troduction is historically false and doctrinally erroneous. It is equiva-
lent to attributing error and usurpation to the Popes who have
received and maintained their temporal sovereignty over the States
of the Church and to gainsaying the two celebrated Councils of
Lyons and Constance, which both, by word and deed, have sanc-
tioned this Temporal Princedom. To assert the contrary would be to
renew the error of Arnold of Brescia, Calvin and other heretics, who
in their hostility to the Church and the See of Rome taught that it
was foreign to the spirit of the Gospel to conjoin spiritual jurisdic-
tion with civil power — a proposition deservedly branded as heretical."

According to Caterini, therefore, to call the necessity of the Tem-
poral Power a novelty is doctrinally erroneous and "equivalent" to
heresy.

A practical test of the Church's mind on this subject is supplied
by the fact that when in 1877 Father Curci, S. J. — one of the most
distinguished men of his order— held and taught the non-necessity
of the Temporal Power, he was called upon to recant and, refusing,
was expelled from the Society of Jesus, of which for forty years he
had been so bright an ornament.

Moreover, the Syllabus of Pius IX. contains two condemned
propositions touching the Civil Princedom which throw a very clear
light on the obligations of Catholics. One denies the necessity of
the Temporal Power ; the other affirms its extinction to be beneficial.
But before citing them verbatim I may be allowed to preface their
quotation with a few words of explanation.

The Syllabus was published as an appendix to the Encyclical

6« The letter is printed in the Month, February, 1869, p. 195.

The Temporal Power, 795

"Quanta Cura," of December 8, 1864, and is a catalogue of proposi-
tions enunciating the principal errors of the day, all of which had
been already condemned before the Syllabus appeared." The cen-
sure under which each proposition is branded is not affixed in the
Syllabus, and to discover what the particular note of condemnation
is recourse must be had to the original Papal document in which
each error was originally stigmatized. It is certain, however, that
not all were condemned as heretical. Some of them evidently de-
serve a minor censure, such as "false" or "erroneous" or "rash" or
"impious" or "dangerous" or "scandalous." Again, it is certain
that many, at least, of the condemnations are not "doctrinal Pontifi-
cal definitions, not ex-cathedral judgments." Fessler^^ expressly
teaches this : "It is certain that several of the documents contain-
ing these condemnations and from which the proscribed propositions
are drawn, do not contain Papal definitions or ex-cathedral judg-
ments."

There is, however, a further question. When Pius IX., in the
Syllabus, renewed the condemnation of these proscribed propositions
in globo, did he raise the original censures to the dignity of definitions
of faith? It cannot be proved that he did. To quote Fessler
again :^^ "Did the Pope, from the fact of his sending the Syllabus
to the whole episcopate, mean to raise the censures passed by him to
the dignity of definitions of faith, such as, according to the dogmatic
decision of the Vatican Council, would constitute a formal judgment
ex-cathedra f That is a question about which many theologians
think it permissible to raise a doubt, until at any rate there comes a
new declaration from the Holy See."

The two condemned propositions concerning the Temporal Power
are, therefore, not heretical. They are, however, "false and perverse
opinions." For in the concluding sentence of the Quanta Cura^^ all
the propositions of the Syllabus are collectively proscribed and con-
demned as, at least, "false and perverse opinions and to be so pro-
scribed and condemned by all true children of the Catholic Church."
Moreover, in the Syllabus itself, in a note appended to the two con-
demned propositions in question, it is laid down that the contradic-
tions of these are to be most firmly held by all Catholics.*^

But, it may be asked, are Catholics bound to accept anything more
than the dogmas of the Church? To that question Pius IX. re-
turned an emphatic answer in the Brief Tuas Lihenter, addressed to
the Archbishop of Munich December 21, 1863 : "It is not enough to
venerate and receive the dogmas of the Church. It is further neces-
sary to submit to the doctrinal decisions of the Pontifical Congrega-

57 Cf. Hergenrother, "Church and State," Essay V. 58 "True and False Infalli-
bility," French Trans., p. 133. 59 P. 134. 60 Denzinger, "Enchiridion," n. 1,54/.
«i Denzinger, n. 1,625.

796

American Catholic Quarterly Review.

tions, as also to those heads of doctrine which by the common and
constant consent of Catholics are held as theological truths and as
conclusions so certain that though the opposite opinion cannot be
called heretical, nevertheless it deserves some other theological cen-
sure.""

But might not an opponent argue that though the two proposi-
tions in question have undoubtedly been condemned as false and per-
verse opinions, and though the Pope has declared that Catholics are
bound so to hold them, yet that neither condemnation nor declara-
tion need be taken to bind under a grave obligation ? For is it an
infallible declaration that these two propositions are false and per-
verse opinions? If the proscribed propositions themselves are not
heretical, but only false, would it be heretical to deny that they are
false? Is the Syllabus infallible? I reply that the Syllabus cannot
be proved to be infallible, nevertheless that it binds under a grave
obHgation. Hence Christian Pesch, S. J., writes :«» "Although
some have doubted whether the Syllabus be a formal ex-cathedral
definition, still the propositions whereof the Syllabus is an authorita-
tive catalogue have been condemned by the Pope in such a way as to
show that he intended to bind the Universal Church to reject them.
This, too, is proved by the unanimous consent of the Catholic Episco-
pate, since no Catholic is now allowed to defend these proscribed
propositions. But what note must be affixed on individual proposi-
tions, and with what degree of assent the opposite doctrines must
be held is to be gathered partly from the documents out of which
the propositions have been culled, partly from the subject matter."

Therefore the Syllabus, if not formally, is at any rate practically
infallible. For it is the common teaching of theologians that the
Church is substantially infallible in branding false doctrines, what-
ever be the note with which she may proscribe them. De Lugo
writes:** "Theologians commonly admit that the Church's judg-
ment in affixing these minor censures is certain. To say that the
Church can err in this judgment is an error, or is allied to error. To
persist in saying it Malder holds to be heretical. To say that the
Supreme Pontiff can err in decreeing these censures Turrian stigma-
tizes as an error, while I think it to be erroneous or proximate to
error, since the infallible assistance of the Holy Ghost promised to
the Church should not, I think, be limited to dogmas proposed as
de Ude, but it ought to extend to all those subjects which the faithful
at the bidding of the Church are bound to believe."

The obligation, then, is grave. But to what sort of an assent is it
an obligation — internal or only external ? Is it only an obligation to

«2 Denzinger, n. 1,537. «3 "Institutiones Propaedenticae," Vol. I., n, 520.
«* "De Virtute Fidei Divinae," D. 20, sec. 3, nn. 108,109.

The Temporal Power. 797

observe a decorous silence? That question hardly merits a reply.
However, the Encyclical Quanta Cura puts the matter beyond dis-
pute. Pius IX. wrote :^^ "We cannot pass over in silence the fool-
hardiness of those who, not enduring sound doctrine, maintain that
it is possible, without sin and without any detriment to the Catholic
profession, to withhold assent and obedience to those judgments
and decrees of the Apostolic See the object of which is declared to
refer to the Church's general good, her rights and her discipline.
How profoundly opposed this opinion is to the Catholic dogma of
the plenitude of power in the Roman Pontiff, divinely conferred on
him by Christ Himself, of feeding, ruling and governing the Uni-
versal Church, any one in his senses can understand."

The Pope says "assent and obedience." Had he said "obedience"
alone a strained construction might have limited it to merely external
acts. But he adds also "assent," which can only refer to internal
conformity both of intellect and of will. The Holy Father's teach-
ing is then clear that we cannot without sin, and without grave sin —
that is, without detriment to our Catholic profession — withhold
internal assent to the converse of these condemned propositions.

With that preamble I now proceed to quote the proscribed propo-
sitions in question. The former affirms the necessity of the Tem-
poral Power to be doubtful: "The children of the Christian and
Catholic Church are not at one (disputant) as to the compatibility of
the Temporal and Spiritual Powers."

The latter goes further and affirms not only that the Temporal
Power is not necessary, but that its abolition would be beneficial:
^The abolition of the Temporal Power, whereof the Apostolic See
is possessed, would greatly contribute to the Church's liberty and
prosperity."®*

I quoted above Caterini's judgment, endorsed by Pius IX,. that
to hold these branded propositions was "doctrinally erroneous and
equivalent to heresy." I end by quoting a similar criticism on the
same propositions, passed by one whose theological erudition and
well-balanced judgment have hardly been surpassed in our genera-
tion. I refer to Father Edmund J. O'Reilly, S. J., some time pro-
fessor of theology, first at Maynooth, then at St. Beuno's, North
Wales, and finally in the Catholic University of Ireland. In his
book, "The Relations of the Church to Society,"®^ he writes about
these propositions : "The question, therefore, is not debated among
sound Catholics. Indeed, I look upon the condemnation of the
Pope's Temporal Power as constructive heresy. For if the Temporal
Power is wrong, the Church, too, is wrong in a way in which our
faith forbids us to admit she can be wrong." And in a masterly

65 Denzinger, n. 1,547. «« Denzinger, nn. 1624, 1625 «^ P. 345?

798

American Catholic Quarterly Review.

article in the Mon//t«« the same theologian writes even more sternly :
"What is to be thought of those professing Catholics who pretend
that the extinction of the Temporal Power would be beneficial to the
Church ? Taking into account the Papal and Episcopal declarations,
and at the same time the action of the Popes, and the sense of the
Church manifested in many ways for ages, I cannot bring myself to
believe that such a view falls short of heresy, at least of constructive
heresy. I do not want to imply that it is contradictorily opposed to
a dogmatic definition on the utility of the Temporal Power, but that
it obviously charges the Church with a very serious error, doctrinal
and practical ; for if that condemned view be right, the Church is
grievously and mischievously mistaken concerning her own condi-
tion, and has been so for ages. And such an imputation cannot be
cleared of heresy."

Our obligations in regard to the Temporal Power are, therefore,
very grave ; much graver indeed than many Catholics seem to realize.

Charles Coupe, S. J.

Stoneyhurst, Engl nd.

FROM SILVIO PELLICO TO FRANCESCO CRISPI.

LITERATURE stands at one end of the chain of Italian Revo-
lution, License at the other. Both were well personified, the
one in the gentle prisoner of the piombi, and the other in the
wrecker of the Roman Bank. In the same sense that the poet makes
Hamlet bitterly cry, "Frailty, thy name is Woman," it may be truly
said of the demagogic ideal, "Liberty, thy name is Avernus." Once
embarked on that fatal slope, there is no halting until the depths
where ruin lurks are touched. There can hardly be a doubt that the
writings of Silvio Pellico were the means which won that intense
outside sympathy with Italian conspiracy without which it could
hardly have achieved the ambiguous success it did. A very large
number of persons, well-meaning and influential, in England as well
as on the continent of Europe, and not a few in the United States,
were greatly moved at the recital of prison sufferings in Italy. And,
while this fact is creditable to the humanity of such sentimentalists,
it must not be suffered to obscure the moral of the episode that in
the several countries wherein those philanthropists shed the gentle
ray of their influence on human progress, there existed, in Sflvio

«8 September, 1871, p. 186.

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi. 799-

Pellico's day, and for many years afterward, prison systems no less
revolting to the sense of humanity than those depicted with such
graphic force by the poetic Italian revolutionist.

It was in Great Britain that the Italian Revolution found its larg-
est number of sympathizers, and it is a very suggestive fact that
Great Britain is the only one of the civilized powers which draws
now no distinction between political prisoners and ordinary crim-
inals. Much sympathy found expression in the United States also,
and it is therefore useful to recall what Dickens said of the American
penitentiary system about the same period as witnessed the begin-
nings of the Italian Revolution. One of its most terrible results
was the alarming increase of insanity among the convicts.

No doubt there were many really philanthropic persons in the
ranks of those who denounced Neapolitan and Venetian and Aus-
trian methods of rule and prison treatment, as well here as in Great
Britain, at that particular epoch. But in their enthusiasm these for
the most part overlooked the fact that in Ireland, on the one part,
there was then actually existent a state of things, politically and
socially, absolutely without parallel, for bungling despotism and
acute physical suffering spread over wide areas, in any part of the
globe; and on the other that the system of Negro slavery was one
of the institutions of the land. Therefore, it required the hardihood
of guileless unconsciousness for any one, even a statesman of Mr.
Gladstone's rank and character, to advert to any political or social
system, outside Ireland and the British prison system, as a "nega-
tion of God."

Yet it was by means of the feeling begotten of such appeals that
the Italian Revolution was nursed, from infancy to maturity. So
incessantly did Italian writers like Azeglio and Guerazzi din the
enormities of Bourbon and Papal rule into the ear of Europe, that
numerous deluded sympathizers became firmly persuaded that the
picture had no side but the sable one, and that the men who were
banded together for the overthrow of Bourbon and Papal rule were
patriots of the purest type, who sought to accomplish their ends by
purely legitimate means. Of course Englishmen like Palmerston
and Stansfeld, who had traveled in Italy, knew better. They were
fully aware that all the most dangerous elements in Italian life were
engaged in the general insurrectionary movement. They knew
Mazzini and the doctrine he preached ; they knew the Carbonari and
its constituent elements; they knew the Mafia and Camorra— and
knowing all these fearful resources of Revolution, and the predomi-
nant power they held in its counsels, they yet did not hesitate to
render to the cause all the aid and comfort they were capable of
bringing, directly and indirectly.

goQ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

In framing a bill of indictment against the Papacy not the least
scruple was shown about laying at its door the sins of its neighbors..
Austrian repression in the Quadrilateral and Venetia,and the tyranny
of the Bourbons in the Two Sicilies, the misrule of the Duchies of
Tuscany, Parma and Modena— all these were named, habitually, in
the same breath with the rule in the States of the Church, and all
anathematized undiscriminatingly by British and other sympathizers
with the Revolution.

Somehow it appears to have been altogether overlooked by at
least British sympathizers with the Italian Revolution that the re-
sponsibility for Italian turmoil lay, not at the door of the Pope, but
at that of the great powers of Europe. After the overthrow of
Napoleon these irresponsible parties, through their representatives
assembled in Vienna, proceeded to knock to pieces the Kingdom of
Italy as constituted by the Corsican conqueror, and make a new
arrangement of the Italian map. The best way to appease the revo-
lutionary spirit which was then seething in every former principality
of the peninsula, it appeared to these pseudo Solomons, was to
restore the status quo before Bonaparte, and divide the country up
nearly as it was in the days when every principality and every
republic was in a state of chronic or intermittent war with its neigh-
bor. The King of Sardinia, an irreclaimable plotter against the
peace of Italy, was recalled, and had Genoa added to his dominions,
with the same vain hope of appeasing his land-hunger as when a
bone is thrown to a wolf. The Bourbons were restored to the king-
dom whence they were ousted by Murat ; Austria grabbed at Lom-
bardy and Venetia for herself, and the duchies were rehabilitated
much in their old shape. Such measures were thought likely to
satisfy the aspirations of the various revolutionists, whose unrest
was thought to be provincial rather than national. These petty
governments found it necessary to begin their new career with a
system of repression more rigorous than that of Bonaparte, and the
usual result ensued. The numbers and modes of conspiracy became
multiplied ; clever manipulators like Mazzini went about sowing the
seed of the dragon ; more coercion was applied by the stupid rulers,
and the attention of the world was called to the miserable scene by
the writings of men like Silvio Pellico and Guerazzi.

The part which England — or at least many leading Englishmen —
took in the campaign of calumny which resulted from this propa-
ganda is especially discreditable because all Europe knew at that
time that the gentle Pope, Pius VII., was persecuted by Napoleon,
whose prisoner he was, chiefly because of the firm attitude he main-
tained toward his design to promote a continental league against
Great Britain. The Sovereign Pontiff, as spiritual father of all

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi. 80 1

nations, could not declare war against any of his family, and Na-
poleon's proposal virtually involved such action. If the common
herd were not all aware of this, statesmen and scholars and public
men, such as moulded public opinion either by their writings or
public addresses, were well aware of it ; and yet many such responsi-
ble persons were found at the head of the agitation whose central
object was the hounding of the Papacy and the destruction of its
temporal rule. Well they knew, these English public men, that
political assassination was one of the means looked to by the Italian
associations for the regeneration of Italy. Palmerston was aware
of it — and he was at the head of the Government; Gladstone was
aware of it, and he, too, was in the Government ; Stansfeld, Roe-
buck and several others prominent in Parliamentary life, hesitated
not to countenance principles so dramatically denounced by Edmund
Burke when a preceding Revolution had startled the world by the
enunciation of a new and monstrous doctrine in political develop-
ment. Eminent men of letters began seriously to discuss the
morality of murder for the public weal. In his young days Mr.
Gladstone had written some worthless verses in praise of "the valiant
and the good" who in their time had "clove a priest or peer in
twain ;" and the inclusion of the priest in the class whose fitting meed
was the assassin's blow gave particular point to the circumstances
of the agitation of those days. Walter Savage Landor lent all the
verve and picturesqueness of an unusually fertile fancy to a glorifi-
cation of the bloodbond for the removal of adversaries who might
be dubbed tyrants. It may be well to reproduce some of his ardent
sentences, as an example of the vein of thought running at that
epoch through the British mind, and finding expression even in such
staid newspapers as the Times. Landor write, inter alia:

"Public wrongs may and ought to be punished by private vindi-
cation, where the tongue of law is paralyzed by the bane of despot-
ism ; and the action which in civil life is the worst becomes, where
civism lies beneath power, the most illustrious that magnanimity
can achieve. The calmest and wisest men that ever lived were unan-
imous in this sentence; it is sanctioned by the laws of Solon, and
sustained by the authority of Cicero and Aristoteles. . . .
Teachers, the timid and secluded, point it out to youth among a
thousand pages; colleges ring with it, over chants and homilies;
piety closes her thumbed lesson, and articulates less tremulously this
response. The street cries 'Caesar,' the study whispers 'Brutus.'
Degenerate men have never been so degenerate, the earth is not yet
so efifete, as not to rear up one imitator of one great deed. Glory
to him ! — peace, prosperity, long life and like descendants ! Remem-
ber, brave soul, this blow fixes thy name above thy contemporaries.

Vol. XXVI— 12.

3o2 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

Doubt not, it will have its guard to stand under it, and fill the lamp
that shows thy effigy."

While the poet was thus weaving the laurel wreath for the dagger
of Harmodius, the prose writer was pointing out that the time for
using it had come. "Liberty," wrote the Titnes, "is to be fought
for, not with fine speeches, but with knives and hatchets."

That it was not really liberty which those British dwellers in glass
houses were enamored of, but a blind hatred of Pope and Papacy, is
easily apparent from many passages in the higher literature of the
period. Here is a specimen taken at random. It is from the North
British Review, a shining Scottish searchlight, for May and August,

1853:

"Italia, O Italia, how long shall thy harp hang on the willows ?
How long instead of retaining such men as these" (anonymous con-
spirators) "within thy bosom, to make thee what thou mightst be-
come, shalt thou have to drive them forth as now to show what that
might be? Arise, thou noble land; arise in thy strength to right
thine own wrongs, and, while righting these, to render at the same
time that service to the world which the world expects from thee.
Destroy that Nuisance crowned with a tiara which not thou alone
but a whole earth is tired of ; crush, crush that Spider of the nations
whose home-nest is in thee, but whose web overspreads the world !
Arise, and take thy place among the nations, O fair Italy ; do among
them as thou hast capacity and will ; and be estimated according to
thy deserts !"

If we would get the just historical perspective in our survey of
sequential things, we must study for a little the background against
which the figure of Francesco Crispi, the greatest statesman of
"United Italy," was first projected on the political stage. He was
the last of the quartette of sinister renown whose names are sculp-
tured on the blood-red granite pillar that marks its rise on the field
of history. In himself he comprised in a singular degree all the dif-
ferent qualities of the other three. He was a mixture of the states-
man Cavour, in his profound dissembling mind ; the wily conspirator
Mazzini, in his readiness to adapt himself to any and every condition
to gain his ends ; of the impetuous and sensual Garibaldi, in his prone-
ness to get into a fight for fighting's sake ; and whatever the others
lacked in downright rascality and hardihood in brazening it out on
discovery was more than made up in him.

This is not our verdict upon the departed revolutionist. It is the
exegesis of the various pronouncements on his career by the leading
public journals of Europe. To an unholy cause he brought the
service of an unholy life.

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi is a descent indeed. The

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi. 803

prisoner of the Austrians was no less sincere in his religion than in
his patriotism. Even in his hours of greatest mental and physical
anguish, as he lay helpless in his dungeon, the faith in which he had
been nurtured stood firm. Those who have read his prison life will
recall with what indignation he speaks of one who had wormed
himself into his confidence by means of letters smuggled through a
friendly jailor, and at last disclosed his intention to convert him to
his own base atheism. From that moment the friendship was re-
jected, and the poet prisoner was content with his solitude, preferring
it to contact with a designing tempter. His mind on this point
speaks clearly and nobly in his tragedy of Gismonda da Mendrisio,
wherein he makes one of the characters (Ermano) say, in answer to
one who would ensnare him into treacherous action : > ^ ..».» .1

The high deeds of war ' ' ' ' . ^

Are virtuous only when the cause is so. ' *

In him who is the champion of treason ' :,J
I hate, I brand them with the name of crimes.

What a delightful glimpse of character is afforded in Pellico's
chapters on the deaf and dumb boy whom he found in the prison of
St. Marguerite! It reads like a sweet idyll, composed in a sylvan
dell or noble forest, rather than the reflections of a man cooped up ia
a gloomy fortress, with no prospect before his eyes but the forbid-
ding quadrangle of the courtyard. The poor mute's affections were
easily gained. Pellico shared his bread with him, and the poor child,
unaccustomed to kindness — for he was a mere waif, an outcast — at
once turned to his new-found friend with all the prodigal affection of
a canine for his master. "Though expecting nothing from me," he
says, "he would continue to gambol beneath my window, and with
the most amiable grace, delighted that I should see him. One day
a turnkey promised that he should be allowed to visit me in my cell ;
the moment he entered he ran to embrace my knees with a cry of
joy. I took him in my arms, and the transports with which he
caressed me are indescribable. What attachment there was in this
poor creature ! How I longed to educate him, to save him from the
abject condition in which I found him ! I never learned his name.
He himself did not know that he had one. He was always gay, and
never did I see him weep but once, when he was beaten, I know not
for what, by the gaoler. To live in a prison seems the height of mis-
fortune, and yet assuredly this child was then as happy as the son of
a prince. I reflected on this ; I learned that it is possible to render
the mind independent of place. Let us keep the imagination in sub-
jection, and we shall be well everywhere."

What a touching example of the philosophy which wrote

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage.
Minds innocent and quiet take

These for a hermitage.

go^ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

This ray of light in the two poor prisoners' lives was soon shut
off. Pellico was transferred to another room, where he could see
nothing, only a corner of the courtyard, and he never learned the
fate of his affectionate little protege. We can readily imagine what
anguish must have torn that tender little heart at this cruel separa-
tion. Hardly more tragically pathetic is the story of Ugolino and
his children in the tower than this glimpse of prison life in St.
Marguerite.

The deeply religious tone of Pellico's life is further revealed in
what he goes on to tell of the succeeding days. Shut off from the
sight of all things outside, he was happily afforded some distraction
for his mind in the sharpness of his sense of hearing. The portion
of the prison set apart for female offenders was nigh, and he could
hear the women talking, scolding, laughing and, sometimes, singing.
He tells us that amongst those voices there was one that especially
attracted him by the sweetness of its quality, and the favorite refrain
of the singer :

Che rende alia meschina
La sua felicita?

Often the others joined in the refrain, and sometimes all sang the
Litany. Pellico tells of the delight with which he listened to this
girl's warbling, and how without seeing the owner of the voice he
had come to form an attachment for her. He was destined never
to behold her, for he was soon afterwards taken to Venice, to be
lodged in the terrible quarters known as the piombi.

In his earlier years Pellico had been careless about religion, but
immediately after his imprisonment began his thoughts instinctively
turned toward the lessons he had learned in his childhood. When
he thought of his parents and the anguish they must feel over his
incarceration, he consoled himself, he tells us, by thinking of the
overruling God and the comfort which stricken hearts derive by ap-
pealing to His mercy. Rigorous though his detention was, his
jailors still allowed him the use of two books — the Bible and Dante.
While the latter afforded him much intellectual pleasure at first, the
constant repetition of its lines, which he had soon committed com-
pletely to memory, began in time to make the work pall upon him.
Not so, however, with the inspired volume. He began to meditate
upon its eternal truths with greater intent than ever; its salutary
mandates and maxims began to impress themselves with irresistible
force upon his memory. The wholesome precept, "Pray without
ceasing," in especial, commended itself so to his understanding
that by its help he gradually grew accustomed to the consciousness
of an ever-present Deity, and to conform all his thoughts to the
Divine will, in so far as he was enabled to realize what its direction

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi. 805

was. This habit grew upon him so that he could not emancipate
himself from it, even if he so desired. It superinduced a tranquility
of spirit, a gentleness of thought, a mansuetude and a magnanimity
which seemed hardly short of saintly, and which, glowing through
his pages, impress all readers with the idea of a truly noble being,
elevating suffering into dignity and suffusing even a dungeon with
the softened brilliancy of genius devoted to the service of hu-
manity.

Such was Silvio Pellico : a man never moulded for a conspirator,
yet drawn into the fatal whirlpool of conspiracy by an irresistible
influence, at a time when conspiracy was epidemic. The exact anti-
thesis of this gentle rebel was the man who, hoary but not venerable,
was borne to his grave a little while ago.

If ever there lived an individual who could be described as em-
bodying two different persons in the one psychology, the man
Francesco Crispi was surely he. Although Palermo was his birth-
place, he was of Albanian blood — an evil strain, for the Albanians
are the descendants of renegade Christians, who, to save their lives
or lands, renounced their religion and adopted that of their Moslem
conquerors, and so brought disgrace upon the country of Scanderbeg
and his gallant compatriots. Renegades though they be, the Alban-
ians are valiant to ferocity, and this quality was possessed by Crispi
in its intensest shape. To this high physical courage he united all
that Sicilian cunning which makes the secret bond of the Mafia an
imperiuni in imperio which no earthly power seems capable of sup-
pressing or destroying. The Mafia was long in existence when
Crispi began his career in Palermo, and it is there still. It is ex-
tremely probable that Crispi was, in his teens, a prominent member
of this peculiar organization. The origin of the Mafia is obscure,
but in all probability it was the result of the successive invasions by
which Sicily was scourged, ever since the dawn of history — since it
is a well-known law in human nature that deceit and lying, the only
alternatives left to people between two fires, so to speak — between
the fury of the invaders and the vengeance of their own fellows if
they aid them — become part and parcel of the mental fibre and a
hereditament that no moral training may entirely overcome. Mr.
F. Marion Crawford, in his work entitled 'The Rulers of the
South," presents us with a good picture of what a gentleman of the
Mafia looks like and represents. He quotes from the report of
Signor Antonio Cutrera, the chief of police in the city of Palermo.
He is describing a low Mafiusian :

"He wears his hat upon the left side, his hair smoothed with plen-
tiful pomatum and one lock brushed down upon his forehead; he
walks with a swinging motion of the hips, a cigar in his mouth, a

8o6 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

heavy knotted stick in his hand, and he is frequently armed with a
long knife or revolver. He stares disdainfully at every man he
meets with the air of challenging every comer if he dare. To any
one who knows Palermo this type of the lower class is familiar. He
is the common 'Riccotaro/ a word which I will not translate, but
which broadly indicates that the young man derives his means of
support from some unfortunate woman who is in his power. It is
a deplorable fact that the same mode of existence is followed by
young men of the middle classes, whose plentiful leisure hours are
spent in play, and who have constituted themselves the official
claque of the theatres, imposing themselves upon the managers as
a compact body. Moreover, during elections they can be of the
utmost assistance to candidates, owing to their perfect solidarity.
With the most atrocious vices they possess the hereditary courage
of the Sicilian, and will face steel or bullets with the coolness of
trained soldiers; and though they will insult and even beat their
women when in the humor, they will draw the knife for the least
disparaging word spoken against what they regard as their prop-
erty."

Palermo is the chief home of the Mafia. It is impossible to say
whether Francesco Crispi was really initiated into this terrible cult
or not. But, from the universality of the system, and the impossi-
bility of any one getting along in the world without its influence, as
in American cities where the "machine" is indispensable in political
life, it is extremely probable that he was an influential member of it —
a capo-Mafia in a short time — that is, an acknowledged leader. Al-
though he was brought up to the profession of the law, he may still
have been a member, for, as Signor Cutrera says, "the capo-Mafia
may be a lawyer and a member of the muncipal or even the provin-
cial council, or a deputy, or a cabinet minister, rising to the moral
control of the whole society simply by his prestige and predominant
will." We might almost think that this shrewd police official
actually had Francesco Crispi in his mind's eye when penning this
sketch of the Mafia organization, since if ever there was a man who
possessed a predominant will, and soon, by means of it, acquired
prestige and power over his fellows, Crispi was his name. It is,
therefore, almost morally certain that he was a member of the
Mafia, and there is no doubt whatever that he belonged to the still
more formidable society of the Carbonari. The year of revolutions,
1848, found him at the head of an insurrection in Palermo, and after
a period of anarchy called republican government, in which many re-
spectable men were put to death by the mob, he is found in flight
from the city, in common with other ringleaders, and a wandering
outcast in several European cities. Like many other penniless

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi. 807

patriots he turned at last toward Turin, then the capital of the peri-
patetic government of Savoy, but he found little opening for his
talents there. He belonged to the party of Mazzini, and as Cavour,
who found it politic to disavow Mazzini and his methods, was firmly
in power there, Francesco Crispi had no chance of a political job.
Neither could he find any employment as a lawyer, for the market
was glutted with the briefless ones. He was in sore straits — so sore,
indeed, that he applied for a very modest post, a mere village berth
as town clerk, at a salary of a hundred and forty dollars a year, and
did not even get it. As there was nothing but starvation facing him
in Piedmont, Crispi shook the dust of the country from his sandals
and hied him oflf secretly, somehow, back to Sicily. There he again
began the work of conspiracy, in agreement with Garibaldi, with
whom he had formed a political connection. All the plans having
been carefully laid, Garibaldi, in company with Bixio, Turr and
other officers, and with the connivance of the Turin Government, it
would seem, set out to attack Sicily. The expedition must certainly
have been a failure were it not for the resources in villainy possessed
by Crispi and Turr. The former forged a telegram which was sent
on to Garibaldi, purporting to emanate from political leaders in
Sicily, and announcing that all was in readiness for an uprising in
the provinces as well as Palermo; whereas the fact was the very
reverse, and Crispi saw that all must be lost unless Garibaldi and his
filibusters appeared on the scene in a position to fight. Turr's
duplicity was equally daring. He himself afterwards told it to Mr.
Haweis. When Garibaldi was about to start he found to his dismay
that supplies of ammunition which had been promised him by the
government had not come. In this strait he sent General Turr to
the commandant of the arsenal at Ortebello to endeavor to get what
he wanted by any strategem possible. Turr told the commandant
a bold lie to the effect that he had the King's permission to get the
ammunition. He succeeded, by additional lies, in inducing the
officer to hand over the supplies. The expedition was successful;
and it is worth while to reproduce Turr's own story of what ensued
in order to understand the double-dealing of Victor Emmanuel and
his Ministers, and the discreditable connection that existed between
these lofty personages and the cutthroats who accompanied the hero
of the red shirt :

''Passing through Turin, I heard that the commandant of the
fortress of Ortebello had been arrested and shut up in the fortress of
Alessandria. I instantly went to His Majesty King Victor Em-
manuel, and said to him : 'If any one deserved imprisonment it was
myself, for it was I who led the commandant into error, making
him believe that we were acting under your Majesty's orders.' The

8o8 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

King said, with one of his short laughs: 'Perfectly true; I have
got to square accounts with you, for you have robbed me of one of
my fortresses/ But I answered : 'We have given your Majesty the
crown of Sicily, and presently will follow the crown of Naples !'

'The King promised with a smile that no harm should come to
the commandant. He then told me to speak to the War Minister,
General Fanti. To him I gave an accurate description of the way
we had got the ammunition, and I obtained from him the assurance
that no proceedings whatever should be taken against General
Giorgini."

Once again the revolution was installed in power in Sicily, and
Garibaldi put Crispi at the head of the temporary government there,,
as a reward for his valuable assistance. He was too radical, how-
ever, even for radicals, and he turned not only the conservative party
but the moderates as well against him by his arbitrary behavior.
He was thus early beginning that gradual process of metamorphosis
whose finish was to behold the conversion of a red republican of the
most uncompromising type turned into an out-and-out supporter of
monarchy and a foe to all those secret associations whose help had
been found so valuable in the realization of his daring ambitions.
As long as Cavour lived he kept at a distance, but a little while after
his death he boldly threw of? the mask of republicanism and pro-
fessed himself an adherent of the house of Piedmont. "The mon-
archy unites us," he said; "the republic would divide us." His
brother in arms, Garibaldi, practically did the same when he ac-
cepted a pension from the King. We may smile at their tergiversa-
tion and their duplicity, but were they any worse than what we be-
held in the case of Victor Emmanuel and his subtle Minister, the
profound Cavour ?

It is not our purpose to follow the career of this curious political
adventurer, even in a cursory way, only to draw from its more salient
phases the lessons of hypocrisy and fraud by means of which the-
outside world was imposed upon regarding the real nature of the
Italian designs upon the Papacy and the perfidy which attended
their realization. The man's life was a succession of conspiracies.
When there were no longer any Bourbons to conspire against he
conspired against the Moderate party with the help of the Reds ; and"
when he joined the Monarchists he spent the remainder of his life in
conspiracies against the power of the Reds. His bitterest enemies,
for years, were the two men with whose help he scrambled to power
— Mazzini and Garibaldi— and the wonder is how he escaped the fate
of those disciples of the dagger who retire from business or turn
against their companions in guilt. There is no doubt that he ran
great risks and was the recipient of many threatening letters, and at

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi. 809

least on one occasion a serious attempt was made upon his life.
But the proverbial longevity of threatened men was vividly realized
in his case, and it would seem that the length of years vouchsafed
him was a providential opportunity afforded him to repent of an
evil career and turn toward a merciful Redeemer, only to be con-
temned and thrown away. Crispi's inordinate egotism it was, seem-
ingly, that prevented him from repenting of his exceptionally sinful
life. He believed he was born to be a leader of men, and so it was
that when he was called on to take a place in the Italian Cabinet for
the first time it was no easy matter to get him to work in harness.
It may be said that all great men have had a strong sense of their
own importance, but that fact does not make it a converse truth
that all men of excessive vanity are entitled to be regarded as great.
Richelieu was a vain man who was truly great, for he saved and
reorganized his country. Crispi, on the other hand, brought his
country to the verge of ruin, and brought disgrace upon himself,
and with all this stolidly preserved his egotism to the last.

Next to this unconquerable personal defect, the trait which pre-
dominated most with Crispi was a fanatical anti-clericalism. Most
of the men who ranged themselves under Garibaldi's banner had a
tiger hatred of Church and Pope and priest, yet it might not be the
truth to describe them all as atheists. But Crispi differed in noth-
ing from an atheist. Long association with men of murder and
intrigue had obliterated every trace of that religious instruction he
had imbibed in his childhood. In his old age he manifested some
tendencies toward a reconciliation with the Papacy, but this was only
a deceptive move, made to cover some hidden purpose which never
came to light, because a storm was then brewing which was destined
to hurl the intriguer to irretrievable ruin. It was shortly before the
Roman Bank scandal. Possibly Crispi had an instinctive sense of
the danger which was looming in the immediate future, and he may
have dreamed that an arrangement with the Holy See, if such could
be effected, might be the only possible way of safety for him wh^n
his gigantic malfeasances must inevitably be brought to light.

Looking back now, over the chasm of half a century, it must be
evident that were it not for the counsels of the violent party the
destiny of Italy might have beeen peaceably arranged and a grand
dream of the ages realized in the formation of a new and majestic
empire in the form of a confederation of all the Italian States with
the Papacy as the centre and bond of unity.

When the illustrious Pontiff Pius IX. acceded to the Chair of
Peter, he was hailed by Europe and America as the saviour of the
situation in the distracted Italian peninsula. "The man of the age,"
as he was styled, was known to be fully in accord with the national

3 10 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

aspirations of the Italian people and with the object of uplifting the
masses from the feudal slough and the clinging weeds of a worn-out
system. His fame as a reformer had been so noised abroad, his
personal character had been so widely eulogized, that the highest
hopes of a new era for Italy under his glorious reign found universal
expression. Meetings with this object were held in the chief capi-
tals, amongst others in New York. In the address thereat adopted,
the Pope was described as one who had succeeded in uniting revolu-
tion with prescription, progress with stability and the energy of
youth with the majesty of immemorial antiquity. The dream of the
new Pontiflf, as revealed in word and act, was truly ethereal. He
deemed it possible to inaugurate a new era, wherein love would be
the soul of the State and kindness the only force that would be
necessary to compel obedience to law. He stemmed the torrent of
revolution which he found raging at his feet by issuing, in opposition
to the advice of his Council, the decree of amnesty headed "Pro-
prio Motu." By virtue of this decree all those who had been impris-
oned for political oflfenses in the preceding Pontificate, as well as all
those who had been exiled or disqualified, were set free on their own
bond to behave as orderly and dutiful citizens in the future. This
totally unexpected act of generosity threw Rome into a frenzy of
joy, and the Pope was everywhere hailed as the ideal ruler and Pon-
tiflf. But these golden opinions of a fickle populace proved to be
ephemeral. Artful and treacherous men abounded, violent men
upon whom all gentleness was wasted — men of whom Gioberti may
be taken as type in subtlety of guile and disloyalty of action. Gio-
berti is to many minds even yet a mystery, so inconsistent had been
his action when in power in Sardinia with his professions and his
theories regarding the Sovereign Pontiflf and the place of the Holy
See in the governmental orrery. While denying that civil society
had the right to emancipate itself from ecclesiastical supremacy by
means of violence, he was yet surrounded by a crowd of enthusiasts
of the school of Young Italy — Mazzinians and leaders of other revo-
lutionary circles, all bent upon overthrowing the Papacy and mak-
ing the Democracy the masters of the Pope and the real rulers of the
Papal Court. All this double-dealing was sugared over with the
coating of a philosophy so plausible as to remain to the present hour
a source of perplexity to the most experienced in dialectics as to its
real character. It is diflficult to decide, when all things are weighed,
whether the Papacy has not more reason to dread the influence of
men like Gioberti, with their fair exterior, than the undisguised en-
mity of profligates like Crispi.

It is something like the converse of Dante's progress through the
hidden world when one seeks to follow the circles of development in

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi. 8ii

Italian unification. The climbing is not upward. The movement
which began in romance and pathetic biography grew into the sem-
blance of philosophy, and the endeavor to crystallize the philosophy
into action as a working system proved it to be empiric, so direful
have been its results. Philosophy and conspiracy are impracticable
yoke-fellows. When we survey Crispi, the typical embodiment of
this pseudo-philosophy, in his character as it stands stripped by the
unsparing hand of history, it is possible to imagine how the novel
of "Frankenstein" may have been a prophetic prefigurement of the
outcome of Italy's political travail in those days of agony.

While the whole American nation is quivering under the blow of
an assassin, it is useful to recall that its press had nothing but regret
when the news of Crispi's demise came, and Crispi was of the cult
of political assassination, and it was by the help of assassins he
climbed to fame and opulence. In the house of an English resident
named Pearse, in Palermo, masquerading as a commercial person-
age, he superintended the manufacture of bombs for the destruction
of the Sardinian monarch's supporters, and showed his companions
how to use them. This fact he used to speak of himself. He was
one of those arrested in Paris in connection with Orisini's plot to
blow up Louis Napoleon, but as he was careful to destroy all letters
referring to such things, according to an understanding with Maz-
zini, the police were unable to connect him with the outrage when
it was perpetrated. His signature was openly affixed to a proclama-
tion offering, on the part of the revolutionary government in Sicily,
a reward of ten thousand ducats for the assassination of King Ferdi-
nand, declaring that political homicide is no crime. Is it to be
wondered at that such lessons bore fruit in time? When the apt
scholars to whom they were addressed turned them to account
against the teachers themselves, they did but apply the principles of
Mazzini's philosophy to the conditions which had most immediate
concern for themselves. Victor Emmanuel made a pact with assas-
sination when he condoned the filibustering raids of Garibaldi on
Sicily and the States of the Church ; and when Garibaldi's lieutenant,
Crispi, became a renegade to the Revolution and espoused the cause
of the Monarchy, nothing could be more of course than the applica-
tion of the methods of the Revolution to the situation thus created.
Automatically, so to speak, the machinery of the accoltelatori, began
to work, and if Crispi contrived to escape the fate that overtook
King Humbert, it was not because he was less the object of ven-
geance than the doomed son of Victor Emmanuel.

Why is it, when men are casting about for reasons why anarchy
IS synonymous with murder, that the true genesis of the dread mon-
ster is not traced ? No story is simpler, if those who profess to be

gi2 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

in search of it will only read what is written. The principles of
anarchy are old, but the practical adaptation of them to modern con-
ditions is so interwoven with the story of United Italy as to be in-
separable. It was under the shelter of England that the horrid in-
cubation was made a success. Crispi was the example of anarchy
successful in seeking rehabilitation as applied philosophy.

Hatred of the Papacy did not mean merely, in the case of Crispt
and his associate Garibaldi, hatred of it as a politico-religious sys-
tem. It meant a passionate fury against the whole religious idea,
and especially against the Catholic idea. This rabies is strikingly
illustrated in the history of the Bruno incident. Herein is a point
upon which Crispi's admirers in the English-speaking secular press
are singularly silent. That press would fain pose as respectable in
its attitude toward religion. Therefore, in its survey of Crispi's
career, the Bruno incident was allowed to drop out of sight. Was
this silence that of charity, or was it prompted by the same motive
which slurred over Crispi's connection with the men of the dagger
and the hand grenade ?

Crispi, if he had any notions of religion at all, appears to have
some leanings toward the pantheism of the "Naturalists." At all
events he believed that Christianity, if it ever had any useful pur-
pose in the modem dispensation, was played out, and must.be abol-
ished if the car of civilization were not to be impeded in its benefi-
cent progress. The struggle between civilization and Christianity,
he declared through his mouthpiece, Signor Bovio, had been going
on for fifteen centuries, and the day of victory for the former had
dawned with the inauguration of the Bruno memorial. The phil-
osophy of Nature was to take the place of the philosophy of Christ ;
there were to be thenceforth nor priesthood, nor creed, nor temple ;
the Church of the Universe, into which all men should freely enter,
was to take the place of the Catholic Church which has Rome for its-
centre, and no man evermore should be excommunicated for hold-
ing any doctrine or holding no doctrine at all. These were Crispi's
religious sentiments, as interpreted by his friend, Bovio. They are
Shelley's without the poetical envelope — and Shelley got the burial
of an atheist and a heretic.

If there was a woful decline from the beginnings of New Italy to<
its consummation, in the matter of religious faith, not less conspicu-
ous was the contrast presented with regard to private morality. Men
who spurn God have usually Httle squeamishness about spurning^
social canons. Garibaldi and Crispi were notoriously profligates in
their private lives. In the case of Garibaldi this fact might not have
mattered much, so far as his relation to politics was concerned. But
in Crispi's position it became a consideration of some consequence

From Silvio Pcllico to Francesco Crispi. 813

He was thrust into prominence wherein social standing and be-
havior was an element that could not but count for something, and
his shameful connections affected his own fortunes and brought
menace and discredit to the country which he professed to serve with
a patriot fervor.

The basest of profligates who live upon the wages of sin could
not have eclipsed the statesman who is called great in his ingratitude
toward the victims whom he made his providers. In this respect
there was a striking resemblance between Garibaldi and Crispi.
Still, Garibaldi was not guilty of the baseness of deserting the woman
who followed him as a faithful dog, after she had deserted her lawful
husband ; they clung to each other until he was a fugitive outcast,
and she died in the woods near Ravenna, and he left some directions
when dying that showed he cherished her memory. But not so with
Crispi. The woman whom he married on the second occasion, and
who roughed it with him in all his campaigning in the field and con-
spiring in the wineshop, he basely deserted when his fortunes bright-
ened, and secretly married another. This scandal was too much.
The Queen, it was said, stirred Crispi's parliamentary enemy, Nico-
tera, to take action in the matter ; he attacked him in his paper, the
Bersagliere, and so palpable was the case that there was nothing for
it but to set the law in motion against the hardened offender. Crispi
was prosecuted for bigamy, although in reality his offense was
more, and he got out of the scrape by the following specimen of
Italian legal finesse: ''When Signor Crispi married for the third
time, his first wife was dead ; his second marriage was illegal, because
it was contracted during the first wife's lifetime ; his third marriage,
therefore, is legal." This third marriage proved his undoing. His
third wife was an ambitious, robust-minded female. Her influence
on his fortunes is thus sketched by the late Mr. Stillman, the intimate
personal friend of Crispi and Roman correspondent of the London
Times:

At the receptions of the Queen, Signora Crispi, who was really an antipathetic
person, had her seat in the Royal circle, where she sat as completely ignored by
all present as if she were a statue of Aversion, I am convinced that the larger
part of animosity shown for Crispi by the better classes in Rome was due to her.

On one occasion I heard General (one of the Thousand) saying to another

person: "Poor Crispi, he has not a friend in the world. Nonsense, he has
thousands of friends/' replied the other, "No," returned the General, "if Crispi
bad one friend he would kill that woman," , . , .

Signora Crispi had more than ambition ; she had a great itching
ioT money, like most other ambitious people ; and Crispi, the master
of men, in some unaccountable way, became the slave of this grasp-
ing, designing woman. For her sake he plunged his hands into the
coffers of the Banca Romana, and the connection of himself and his
interesting family, the relatives and hangers-on of Donna Lina, with

8j^ American Catholic Quarterly Review.

that bank and with several other banking institutions, from the time
of his third marriage until his disgrace and downfall, was that of the
blackmailer and his victim.

Of Crispi's niche in the Valhalla of great statesmen it is not neces-
sary here to speak. If statesmanship consists in bringing one's
country to bankruptcy by means of crushing military burdens, the
outcome of foreign alliances, then indeed Crispi was a phenomenal
success, since the drain ofthe Triple Alliance in manhood and treas-
ure, as far as Italy is concerned, has been incessant, relentless and
utterly barren of good. The overwhelming military disaster at
Adowah stands on record as a monument of his maladroit genius in
the field of colonial compensations. To "scatter plenty o'er a smil-
ing land" was not Crispi's idea of a great Minister's function, but
rather to squeeze a poverty-stricken, resourceless land to the last
point of human endurance ; and this he continued to do until he was
at last forced to yield up his office in utter ignominy.

What is the political and social condition of the Italy which Crispi
and his policy have created? Professor Fiammingo, in the Con-
temporary Review (September, 1900) gave the world a glimpse. He
declares that "everywhere in Italy there is profound discontent and
dissatisfaction with a government which extracts two-fifths of the
whole earnings of the country in taxation. There is not an Italian,"
he adds, "who does not attribute the terrible and profound financial
calamities of his country to the mistaken action of the government,
and the chorus of condemnation against this government, which
appears to be doing its best to impoverish thirty-five millions of
inhabitants, and to restrict in every possible way their personal
liberty, is every day becoming more pronounced, and almost threat-
ening in its intensity. It is difficult now to meet a young Italian of
a certain degree of culture who does not style himself a 'literary An-
archist,' or at least a 'Marxian Socialist.' "

Professor Fiammingo does not hesitate to say that brigandage is
a secular institution in his country; that there is no other nation
with such a criminal record. It has twenty murders for every one
committed in England. There were a hundred and fifty regicides
during the past century, and two-thirds of these were the work of
Italians. It is the curse of militarism which seems to be making
brigandage, and famine, too, "secular institutions." In the Monthly
Review of last July a writer named Edward C. Strutt, in the course of
a paper on "Famine in Italy and Its Causes," gives some terribly
suggestive details of the effect of the military system on the peas-
antry. In Sardinia in twelve years and a half, he testifies, no fewer
than 52,060 judicial sales of houses and lands took place for non-
payment of taxes, or one out of every fourteen inhabitants was

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi. 815

despoiled by government. Out of 445 such sales in the first week
of the new century, eighty-five per cent, were for sums less than one
lira (lod.) each. Sometimes the amount is as small as five centimes
(>^d.) ! Mr. Strutt remarks on the paradox that just "those regions
which have been more plentifully endowed with natural wealth, such
as Sardinia, Sicily, Calabria and Apulia, are those which now suffer
most cruelly." The writer says it would be difficult to find a people
more frugal or more easily satisfied than the Pugliese peasantry;
and yet, olive-blight, insurrection and savage repression have left
them in despair. Life in gaol appears a paradise to the starving,
to attain which innumerable crimes are committed where crime was
formerly unknown.

No government in the world ever was the target for such vitupera-
tion as that of the Papal States prior to the Italian occupation. Cor-
ruption and incompetency were said to be its perennial character-
istics as a political system, while the condition of the people, ap-
pressed by taxation and grovelling in helpless ignorance, was de-
picted as the most forlorn and wretched of all European populations.
English travelers gave out such tales year after year, while the other
side of the picture was as carefully kept from the public vision as the
farther hemisphere of the moon. Let us see how the real state of
affairs in the Papal territories compared with the conditions of
modern Italy as evolved by Depretis and Crispi. Happily we have
some data on which we can rely, supplied from a most impartial
source. The Count de Tournon, who was appointed by Napoleon^
acted as Prefect of Rome and Administrator of the Papal States for
the four years from 18 10 to 18 14. He is described, even by a British
authority, as one of those highly intelligent and honorable men
whom the conqueror sometimes sent to the countries he had occu-
pied as if to make them some compensation for the evils of military
conquest. He has left us a book of the most valuable character,
composed with that rare combination of scientific precision and
sympathetic observation which makes French descriptive literature
so much prized by those in search of style as well as fact. Tournon
gives in the most unreserved and unvarnished way a history of the
frightful evils caused by the French invasions and the successive
abductions of the Popes by the imperious conqueror. He does not
spare the French generals who emulated their master in the work of
pillage and oppression; and it may well be surmised that it was a
fortunate circumstance for the author that the overthrow of Waterloo
had taken place before his book was ready for the press, else he must
have been made pay the penalty of his candor. He cannot be
suspected by any one of any kind of bias in the matter. He was
incessantly on the wing throughout the territory, while fulfilling his

8i6

American Catholic Quarterly Review.

trust, observing methods of agriculture, taking statistics of births,
marriages and mortahty, measuring farms and compiling tables of
cost and profit on all kinds of products— making, in fact, a most
exhaustive study of Italy's economic state, in the manner of Adam
Smith.

The banditti were the great trouble of De Tournon's administra-
tion. These gentry had largely increased owing to the French occu-
pation, and De Tournon frankly lays the blame for a large portion
of the trouble at the door of the French administration of Rome and
Naples. By dismissing the local police, or sbirri, the French author-
ities had thrown so many semi-military men on the world without
employment, and these could find nothing to live by save the pro-
fession in whose extinction they themselves had formerly been most
engaged. These banditti were gradually decimated until, at the
close of the French occupation their number was reduced to about
fifty. The state of Rome at this time is thus depicted :

* 'Eight commissioners of police, with a small municipal guard,
maintained the city in perfect safety. The lighting of the streets, a
measure then introduced into most Italian cities, contributed to the
public security. . . . The influence of the parochial clergy and
the respectable part of the country people assisted the governmnet
in the work of reformation. The peasants and villagers, now sure
of protection, understood that it was their interest to aid the magis-
trates and police in arresting malefactors, a thing they would have
spurned before. By these means," the writer concludes, "it was
proved that the Roman people could be soon raised to a very high
degree in the scale of morality and rendered as humane, mild and
orderly as their neighbors of Tuscany. Indeed, there is nothing in
the dispositions of the modern Romans opposed to this assumption ;
they are full of intelligence, having a strong feeling of self-respect;
and, although prone to anger under provocation, they are in the
common relations of life gentle, benevolent and warm-hearted, and
particularly expressive of their gratitude."

This was the state of a peasantry just recovering from the wrongs
and alarms of war and the brutal license of an. invading army, it
must be remembered. Concerning the criminal statistics of the
time, De Tournon gives some remarkable figures. In the tWo
years from August, 1811, to September, 1813, there were 2,072 per-
sons tried for offenses in Rome, being at the rate of one to every
1,000 yearly. Another writer had asserted that there were 10,000
criminal cases yearly in the Roman courts, and De Tournon seemed
to feel it his duty to remove this false impression of the criminality
of the Roman States. Again, the prisons of Rome, he declares, were
better than in most other toWns of Europe. Charitable societies.

From Silvio Pellico to Francesco Crispi. 817

confraternite, supply the indigent prisoners with food and raiment,
and are a useful check on the avarice or tyranny of jailors. Regard-
ing the much-maligned Inquisition, or Holy Office, in Rome, this is
what the author has to say :

"When the French took possession of Rome they found the prison
of the Inquisition nearly empty — (it had been so for many years
before) — and nothing in the regulations or internal arrangements
of the house showed that it had been the scene of any act of cruelty ;
on the contrary, the comfortable size of the apartments intended for
the prisoners, their airiness and cleanliness, bespoke the humanity of
those who presided over the establishment. It may be asserted that
the Holy Office in Rome is nothing more than an ecclesiastical tri-
bunal to check any misconduct of the clergy themselves."

The hospitals and benevolent institutions in Rome at this time
are minutely described and enthusiastically dwelt upon by De Tour-
non. They sheltered, when the French entered the city 3,500 help-
less beings. He states their income thus :

Francs. Francs.

Eent of lands 331,399

Rent of houses 230, "

Mortgage, fees, etc 169;

Various receipts, donations, etc., 95,622

Produce of labor of inmates 22,000

C!redit8 on the State 332,000

The population of the city, at that period, owing to the absence of
the Popes and the French invasion, had dwindled down to 123,000.

Concerning^ the so-called tyrannical sway of the Papacy, the
author gives some very remarkable illustrations of the fallacy. For
instance, he says :

"There is a congregation called del Buon Governo, which is inde-
pendent of Ministers ; it is presided over by a Cardinal Prefect, and
composed of Cardinals and prelates; it superintends the communal
administrations, watches the interests of the communes, and often
takes their part against the pretensions of government — a very re-
markable institution," he remarks, "under an absolute government."
A very liberal system throughout, indeed, seems to have been this
"absolute government" of the Papal States. "The towns and vil-
lages have each a municipal council. . . . The members are
taken in equal proportions from the nobles and from the citizens
and farmers. . . . The council discusses the wants and the
means of the commune, and makes out the yearly budget, which is
sent to the delegate of the province for approval. The council
fixes the rates to be paid, superintends the expenditure and audits
the accounts. It appoints the servants of the commune, pays the
local police, the schoolmaster, the apothecary and surgeon, who
receive a fixed remuneration, and are obliged to' attend gratis all the
poor inhabitants. This system of municipal administration," goes

Vol. XXVI.— 13.

8i8 American Catholic Quarterly Review,

on De Tournon, "will surprise those who imagine that in the Papal
States everything is left to the will or caprice of the government.
Abuses of power are common, no doubt, but the written law is more
favorable to the liberties of the people than is commonly supposed."
We could quote much more to show that for many years before
the system of local government had been created in England the rule
which she forty years later had been denouncing as a barbarous
anachronism had set it up throughout the territory known as the
States of the Church ; and, furthermore, that the people under it were
infinitely better oflf, in a material as well as a moral sense, than the
bulk of the Italian population under the sway of United Italy. Sa
much for the statesmanship of Francesco Crispi.

John J. O'Shea.

Scientific Chronicle. 819

Scientific Cbronicle*

BRITISH CONGRESS ON TUBERCULOSIS. \

The success of medical science in combating disease depends
largely, as is evident, on a knowledge of the causes producing the
malady, while preventive medical science is effective in holding it
in check only when intelligently directed at the root of the evil.
Hope of relief, as far as human means can bring it, is held out in the
case of many of the ills that flesh is heir to, for medical science has
determined with great accuracy the source whence they spring and
is able to point out with precision the best method of prevention. A
summary of a few important cases will be of interest. These are
recalled by Dr. Koch in his address to the congress.

The old theory of the transmission of pestilence was that the plague
patient was the centre of infection and transmitted the disease
directly to other patients. On this theory the arrangements for
preventing the spread of the dread bubonic plague were based.
Now, however, it is known that only those patients who have plague-
pneumonia are centres of infection and that the real transmitters of
the plague are the rats. Hence is it that the application of anti-
toxic serum and protective inoculation have had such little effect in
preventing the spread of the plague. There is no longer any doubt
that the spread of the plague was due to plague among the ship rats.
Wherever the rats were exterminated the plague rapidly disappeared,
wherever this precaution was not taken the pestilence continued.

Cholera may under certain conditions be transmitted from one
human being to another, but the most dangerous propagator is
water. Therefore the proper manner of fighting the disease is by
preventing the use of polluted water.

An outbreak of hydrophobia is prevented in an infected person by
inoculation, but this does not prevent the infection itself. This can
be secured only by compulsory muzzling of all dogs.

Leprosy is a parasitic disease and is transmitted only from person
to person when they come into close contact in small dwellings and
bedrooms. As immediate transmission plays the important part,
the way to combat the disease is to prevent the too close contact of
the sick and the healthy. By isolation of the infected in leper houses
during the Middle Ages the disease, which had spread to an alarm-
ing degree, was stamped out of Central Europe.

820 American Catholk Quarterly Review,

The methods suggested in the case of these diseases have proved
effective ; therefore we look forward to the direct method of attacking
other formidable diseases at their origin as the best method of bring-
ing relief to suffering humanity.

Keeping in view the progress that has been made in the study of
the causes of diseases and the satisfactory results that have been
achieved by attacking these causes, Professor Robert Koch outlined
the course that he judged proper for the treatment of consumption,
in an address delivered before the British Congress on Tuberculosis,
on July 23 last.

From the address as it appears in the Popular Science Monthly
for September and in Nature we select the following points of interest
to our readers :

We know that the real cause of the disease is a parasite, that is,
a visible and palpable enemy which we can pursue and annihilate,
just as we can pursue and annihilate other parisitic enemies of man-
kind. I suppose there is hardly any medical man now who denies
the parasitic nature of tuberculosis, and among the non-medical
public, too, the knowledge of the nature of the disease has been
widely propagated. Now we know that every disease must be
treated according to its own special individuality and that the meas-
ures to be taken against it must be most accurately adapted to its
special nature, to its etiology.

In by far the majority of cases of tuberculosis the disease has its
seat in the lungs, and has also begun there. From this fact it is
justly concluded that the germs of the disease — the tubercle bacilli
— must have got into the lungs by inhalation. As to the question
where the inhaled tubercle bacilli have come from there is also no
doubt; on the contrary, we know with certainty that they get into
the air with the sputum of consumptive patients. This sputum,
especially in advanced stages of the disease, almost always contains
tubercle bacilli, sometimes in incredible quantities. By coughing
and evefi speaking it is flung into the air in little drops, that is, in a
moist condition, and can at once infect persons who happen to be
near the coughers. But then it may also be pulverized when dry,
in the linen or on the floor, for instance, and get into the air in the
form of dust. The sputum of consumptive people, then, is to be
regarded as the main source of the infection of tuberculosis.

Dr. Koch then discusses the question of other sources of the dis-
ease and his conclusions are thus summed up : Great importance
used to be attached to the hereditary transmission of tuberculosis.
Now, however, it has been demonstrated by thorough investigation
that though hereditary tuberculosis is not absolutely non-existent,
it is nevertheless extremely rare, and we are at liberty, in considering

Scientific Chronicle. 821

our practical measures, to leave this form of origination entirely out
of account.

Genuine tuberculosis has hitherto been observed in almost all
domestic animals, and most frequently in poultry and cattle. From
a large number of experiments made under his own direction Dr.
Koch is of opinion that bovine tuberculosis, which is the only form
that has been considered dangerous to man, differs from human
tuberculosis and that the latter cannot be transmitted to cattle. Im-
portant as this question is, it is far more important to know if bovine
tuberculosis can be transmitted to man. Most medical men believe
that it is transmitted. In attacking this question Dr. Koch referred
to the fact that here direct experiment is not possible, as in the former
case. The experiment is, however, made daily by millions of peo-
ple, who unintentionally consume in meat and milk virulent and
living bacilli of bovine tuberculosis. This being so. Dr. Koch con-
tends that a great many cases of tuberculosis caused by the consump-
tion of alimenta should occur among the inhabitants of large cities,
especially among the children. He holds, however, that this is not
the case. The Doctor contends that a case of tuberculosis caused
by alimenta can be assumed with certainty only when the intestine
suffers first, that is, when a so-called primary tuberculosis of the
intestine is found. He cites from his own experience and from hos-
pital records of such cases to show how few they are, and adds that
it is just as likely that they were caused by the widely-propagated
bacilli of human tuberculosis, which may have got into the digestive
canal in some way or other, for instance, by swallowing saliva of the
mouth.

Dr. Koch holds that now it is possible to determine whether the
tuberculosis of the intestine is of human or animal origin. All that
need be done is to inoculate cattle with a culture of the bacilli, and
if it be bovine tuberculosis, they will be attacked by it; if human
tuberculosis, they will not be affected. So strongly convinced is he
of his view, that tuberculosis is not transmitted from cattle to man,
that he does not deem it necessary to take any measures against it.
This is a complete change from the original position of Dr. Koch,
that bovine and human tubercle were practically identical.

This change of view aroused great interest, and as the new posi-
tion can only be assailed by the production of positive evidence that
bovine tuberculosis is communicable to man, it was the source of
much interest to have such evidence brought forward by Dr.
Ravenal, of Philadelphia. He brought forward three cases of such
infection that had fallen under his observation. He stated that death
had resulted in one of these cases, and in another the bovine tubercle
bacillus was recovered from the local lesion. As there was doubt

g22 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

cast on the position taken by Dr. Koch, it was agreed that further
investigation was absolutely necessary and that the present vigilance
exercised in the inspection of meat, milk and butter should not be in
the least relaxed until more conclusive results were reached.

The Congress was a great success and far surpassed the expecta-
tions of the organizers. The effect of the meeting was manifest in
the resolutions presented at its close. They may be thus summed
up : To prevent tuberculosis it is necessary to attend to the housing
of the people, to the provision of a sufficient supply of fresh air, as
good nutrition as possible, and to the prevention of the dissemination
of the tubercle bacillus. For this purpose proper care should be
taken to have it collected and destroyed as soon as it comes from the
patient. To cure consumption, fresh air, good food and well-regu-
lated exercise are required.

ELECTRICITY AT THE PAN-AMERICAN EXPOSITION.

Probably the most interesting feature of the Buffalo Exposition,
to the student of mechanical engineering, is the comparison, inten-
tional or otherwise, of the development, transmission and utilization
of power by water, gas, steam, compressed air and electricity. While
all these different sources of power are well represented, it is clear
that electricity had the advantage in a contest which was waged so
close to the great electrical plant at Niagara Falls.

The ordinary visitor, however, is most impressed with the electrical
illumination of the Grand Court. This Court covers 1,390,000
square feet and is therefore equal in extent to the like features of the
Chicago and Paris Expositions combined. The grounds, buildings
and electric tower are illuminated by using for that purpose 5,000
horse-power of the energy from Niagara Falls. The power gene-
rated at the Falls, by the Niagara Falls Power Company, is a two-
phase alternating current of 25 cycles at 2,200 .volts. It is at once
transformed to a 22,000 volt three-phase current and transmitted
twenty miles over copper and aluminum lines to Buffalo. At the
city station, on Ontario street, the voltage is reduced to 11,000 and
the current then sent about two miles to the rheostat house near one
of the entrances to the Exposition grounds. In the rheostat house
there are three large water rheostats, each measuring 7 feet long, 3
wide and 3 deep. Blades 6 feet long, which may be lowered into the
tanks by a small direct current motor, serve to bring the lamps slowly
up to full brilliancy, when metallic contact is made at the bottom of

Scientific Chronicle. 823

the tanks. These resistance tanks may be operated from the Elec-
tricity Building.

From the rheostat house the current is transmitted to the trans-
forming sub-station in the Electricity Building. At this station 18
air-blast transformers reduce the voltage of the current to 1,800.
Thence the current goes to about 40 transformer-pits, scattered
about the grounds, where the voltage is brought down to 104 for
the incandescent lamps that are used for illuminating the grounds.

The electricity from Niagara is used chiefly for the exterior incan-
descent decorative lighting. The only other use made of it is the
alternating current series arc lighting of the Electricity Building.

The decorative lighting of the grounds is accomplished by 800
artistically designed lamp-posts with from 12 to 26 eight candle-
power incandescent lamps on the smaller ones and 59 on the larger
posts. The illumination is increased by the rpws of electric lamps
that cluster along the prominent lines of the high structures that
surround the Grand Court, and the lights on the mammoth electric
tower are the culmination of a magnificent scene of exterior illumina-
tion by incandescent lamps, marking the furthest advance and most
extensive application of this method of illumination.

The success of this method at Buffalo has undoubtedly settled the
question for all future occasions where illumination on a large scale
will be required. Heretofore a combination of arc and incandescent
lights with gas-light was employed. This combination did not pro-
duce the smooth uniform illumination which is characteristic of the
Pan-American. This uniform distribution of light was secured by a
minute sub-division and multiplication of the units of illumination.
No unit larger than an eight or a sixteen candle-power incandescent
lamp was employed. These were arranged in coronet or crescent
form so as to avoid massing. The only exception to this arrange-
ment was in the Court of Fountains, where there were clusters in
imitation of a flambeau. Here there was a glare of light in the Hne
of sight which marred slightly the evenness of the illumination. In
such a scheme of general illumination the eye can endure points of
light of eight or sixteen candle-power. If, however, a brilliant
cluster or an arc light is in the line of vision the eye is so impressed
by looking at this exceptionally brilliant point that the less brilliantly
lighted places seem dark and like shadows, thus destroying the
evenness of the illumination. It was the avoiding in general of such
intensely brilliant points by the sub-division of the illuminating units
that secured the uniformly bright illumination which was so greatly
admired at the Pan-American Exposition.

The size and number of the great engineering projects which, from
«very part of the continent, claimed a place in this Exposition, could

324 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

be satisfied only by representing them in model. Hence representa-
tion by model is a striking feature of this Exposition. Large central
engines with long lines of shafting are as a rule absent from this
exhibition, and as electricity is used as the driving power they are
more artistically placed and conformity with the architectural design
is secured.

Although we have referred in a special way to the use of electricity
for lighting purposes, its application to power service is represented
in more varied ways at the Exposition. Electric motors of varied
styles and embodying new departures in the application of the
electric current, electric pumping, both by alternating and direct cur-
rent, electric elevators and hoists, electric traction, electric brakes
and car-heating apparatus, electrically propelled vehicles and
launches, electrically operated control for steam engines, electric
train lighting, telegraph, telephone and X-ray exhibits indicate a few
of the ways in which the visitor is impressed with the important part
electricity plays in the service of man.

This, however, gives but a very faint idea of the immense power
of electricity as shown within twenty miles of the Exposition. This
growing centre of industry, made possible by converting the power
of Niagara into electricity, must be regarded as a part of the exhibit.
25,000 horse-power in the form of electrical energy is used in the
calcium carbide, graphite, carborundum and emery products. The
electro-chemical industries use 3,600 horse-power, while the electro-
metallurgical industries at present require 5,700 horse-power. Such
is the growth of industries around the Falls that the Niagara Falls
Power Company is at present doubling the size of its plant.

THE MOSQUITO AND YELLOW FEVER.

The mosquito has been convicted as the "intermediate host" in
transmitting malaria and therefore the only way to fight the disease
intelligently is to prevent the mosquito from being infected. This
same vigilance must now be used in fighting yellow fever, for the
report of the Havana Yellow Fever Commission shows that this
same insect acts as the "intermediate host" or medium of propagat-
ing this disease.

The evidence in the case is clearly summed up in an article in the
Popular Science Monthly by George M. Sternberg, Surgeon General
U. S. A. From the reports of this committee it is evident that the

Scientific Chronicle. 825

greatest care has been taken to secure only results that will stand the
most severe examination.

Some extracts from the report issued from Headquarters Depart-
ment, Cuba, will give a good idea of the conclusions arrived at. "So
far as yellow fever is concerned, infection of a room or building
simply means that it contains infected mosquitoes, that is, mos-
quitoes which have fed on yellow fever patients. Disinfection, there-
fore, means the employment of measures aimed at the destruction of
these mosquitoes. The most effective of these measures is fumiga-
tion, either with sulphur, formaldehyde or insect powder. The
fumes of sulphur are the quickest and most effective insecticide, but
are otherwise objectionable. Formaldehyde gas is quite effective if
the infected rooms are kept closed and sealed for two or three hours.
The smoke of insect powder has also been proved very useful; it
readily stupifies the mosquitoes, which drop to the floor and can then
be readily destroyed. The washing of walls, floors, ceilings and
furniture with disinfectants is unnecessary.

"As it has been demonstrated that yellow fever cannot be conveyed
by fomites, such as bedding, clothing, effects and baggage, they need
not be subjected to any special disinfection. Care should be taken,
however, not to remove them from the infected rooms until after
formaldehyde fumigation, so that they may not harbor infected mos-
quitoes.

"Medical officers taking care of yellow fever patients need not be
isolated; they can attend other patients and associate with non-
immunes with perfect safety to the garrison. Nurses and attendants
taking care of yellow fever patients shall remain isolated so as to
avoid any possible danger of their conveying mosquitoes from
patients to non-immunes.

"The infection of mosquitoes is likely to take place during the
first two or three days of the disease. It is therefore essential that all
fever cases should be at once isolated and so protected that no
mosquitoes can possibly get access to them until the nature of the
fever is positively determined. Patients not ill enough to take to
their beds and remaining unsuspected and unprotected are probably
those most responsible for the spread of the disease.

"All persons coming from an infected locality to a post shall be
kept under careful observation until the completion of five days from
the time of possible infection, either in a special detention camp or
in their own quarters; in either case their temperature should be
taken twice a day during this period of observation so that those
who develop yellow fever may be placed under treatment at the very
inception of the disease."

From the investigations of this committee it seems evident that a

g26 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

mosquito that has fed on the blood of a yellow fever patient is not
dangerous at all times following its infection, but a certain period of
incubation is required in the body of the insect before the germ
reaches its salivary glands and consequently before it is able to
inoculate an individual with the germs of yellow fever. This period
is put at from ten to twelve days.

To test whether yellow fever was transmitted by fomites a special
building was constructed. This building was mosquito proof and
in it were placed three large boxes filled with sheets, pillow sHps,
blankets, etc., contaminated by contact with cases of yellow fever
and their discharges were received and placed therein. On the 30th
of November, 1900, Dr. R. P. Cooke and two privates of the hospital
corps, all non-immunes, entered the building, opened the boxes,
giving each article a thorough shaking. They then hung the arti-
cles around the room and slept in the room that night. This opera-
tion was repeated for twenty days and nights, and these non-im-
munes did not contract the fever. This building was afterwards
occupied by other non-immunes with like results.

To complete the proof a second building was erected and every
possible source of infection was removed. The building was divided
into two compartments by a mosquito-proof wiring. On one side
of the partition a non-immune and on the other two non-immunes
were placed. In the compartment in which the one non-immune
was fifteen mosquitoes which had previously fed on yellow fever
patients were freed. This man was bitten by these mosquitoes. For
three days he was bitten by these insects and contracted yellow fever.
The two others who lived under the same conditions, minus the
mosquitoes, did not contract the fever.

This brief account of some of the methods of investigation shows
how thoroughly the work has been done and the value attaching to
the published results.

THE NERNST ELECTRIC LAMP.

The exhibit of Nernst lamps in the Electricity Building at the
Pan-American Exposition is the first public exhibit of the lamp in
the United States. In experimental form it was shown at the Paris
Exhibition. At the Pan-American the lamp has passed the experi-
mental stage and is showing by actual work what it is capable of
doing. In the grand dome of the Electricity Building and around
the Westinghouse exhibit it produces magnificent lighting effects.
The color value of the lamp is superior to that of any other electric

Scientific Chronicle. 827

light. It is practically equal to sunlight in enabling one to match or
detect delicate shades or tints in fabrics or other material.

The steady improvement in the Nernst lamp dates from 1898,
when Dr. Nernst, the inventor, came to this country and exhibited
his lamp before Mr. George Westinghouse, at Pittsburg. The latter,
holding the right for the United States, engaged a number of com-
petent electrical engineers to develop the lamp, and the present per-
fected lamp is the result.

The source of light in the Nernst lamp is a glowing rod of rare
earths. It is made by expressing from a die a paste made of rare
earths. It is cut into suitable lengths, dried and roasted. This rod
of enamel measures about one and one-half inches in length and one-
thirty-second of an inch in diameter. A platinum bead is imbedded
in each end of the rod and to these beads the wires can be easily
fused.

This glower, as it is called, is a non-conductor when cold, but
becomes a conductor when heated. It is therefore necessary to
heat the glower to bring it to a conducting temperature. In the
first lamps the inventor did this by means of an alcohol lamp or even
by a match. He also employed electric heaters. The glower is
lighted at a temperature of about 950 degrees C. To secure this
temperature in the present lamp the heater employed consists of a
thin porcelain tube, around which a fine platinum wire is wound and
pasted with cement. The paste serves to protect the wire from the
intense heat of the glower. These tubes are wound for 1 10 volts and
are connected by pairs in series according to the service required.
The life of a heater when running constantly is about 200 hours.
This indicates a long life in actual service, for each time the lamp is
lighted the heater is used for about 30 seconds onlv.

As the temperature of the glower rises its conductivity increases.
The voltage across the terminals of the glower also increases, at
first rapidly, and then more slowly, until it reaches a maximum.
Then it falls oflf as the current and temperature increase. This de-
•crease after maximum is so rapid that it makes it difficult to control
the current. To meet this difficulty a steadying resistance has been
introduced. This consists of an iron wire mounted in a glass tube
which contains some inert gas. Under normal conditions the re-
sistance of the iron wire is a minimum, and throughout the high cor-
rective region the wire can be worked, as there is no danger of its
destruction, since oxygen is excluded. The protection this ballast
gives the glower is evident, when for a ten per cent, rise in current
the resistance of the ballast increases 150 per cent. In series with
this regulator and the glower is the control magnet of the heater.
When the current flows through the regulator and the glower it

American Catholic Quarterly Review.

passes through the control magnet and cuts out the heater when the
lamp has been brought into service.

This lamp works with alternating currents, and when such cur-
rents are used there is no electrolytic action observable in the glower.
Improvements are being made in the lamp for use with direct currents.
When such currents are employed the glower acts as a true electro-
lyte, there being a black deposit on the negative end of the glower
which rapidly extends to the positive end and reduces the efficiency
of the glower. The life of the glower is, as determined by actual
service, 800 hours. This is about double the life of an incandescent
lamp of lowest watt consumption and of equivalent candle-power.
The unit for lamps is the single 50 candle-power glower, and by
multiplying the number of glowers a lamp of any desired efficiency
may be had.

D. T. O'SULLIVAN, S. J.
Boston, Mass.

Book Notices. 829

Booft IRoticee*

Institutiones Metaphysicae Specialis, quas tradiderat in CoUegio Maximo
Lovaniensi. P. Stanislaus De Backer, 8. J. T. II.. Psychologia. Pars. 1.,
De Vita Organica. Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne & Cie., 83 Rue de Rennes.
1801, pp. 266.

Institutiones Philosophiae Moralis et Socialis, quas in CoUegio Maximo
Lovaniensi tradiderat. A. Caatelein, S. J. Bruxelles: Schepena & Cie., 16
Rue Treurenberg, pp. 662.

There are obviously good grounds for that point of view adopted
by some recent CathoHc philosophers which restricts psychology to
the philosophy of the human soul. This position escapes on the one
hand the necessity of expending energy in the study of living organ-
ism inferior to man, and on the other hand avoids the recent mutila-
tion of psychology which results from confining it to the classifica-
tion and surface analysis of merely psychical phenomena.

There are, however, no less potent arguments in favor of that
broader conception which defines psychology as the philosophy of
the soul, taking the latter term in its widest Aristotelian sense for
the root principle of life in an organism including therefore the plant
and the animal. The human soul is more than the basal principle of
intelligence and will. It is the source of all vital activity within the
body, vegetation as well as sentience. The higher spiritual func-
tions and hence the nature itself of the rational soul cannot be scien-
tifically explained unless its vegetative and sentient powers and
activities are understood. These, however, will be most satisfac-
torily explained by investigating the operations and principle of life
in the plant and animal. Father De Backer has wisely, we think,
accepted the peripatetic definition of psychology as the scientia
(philosophica) de anima, and has accordingly made two distinct parts
in the treatment of his subject, one devoted to the organic, the other
to the super-organic life. The present volume deals with organic
life in the plant and the animal. These organisms are studied
philosophically, of course, that is, as to the essential nature of their
informing principle of vitality and in interest of the light they throw
upon the working and nature of the human soul — the noblest princi-
ple of life in the world of organisms. But whilst adhering to this
ancient conception of psychology, the author is very far from treat-
ing his subject in an antiquated fashion. The main bulk of his
argumentation is, of course, to be found in the works of St. Thomas
and other eminent scholastics ; but in passing through his own mind
it has undergone a simplification and clarification and an arrange-
ment that make the reading of his book easy and pleasant as well as

g^o American Catholic Quarterly Review.

profitable. Moreover, he gladly admits that psychology has ad-
vanced in recent times, especially on the side of physiological phe-
nomena. These modern developments he has assimilated and ac-
corded them their place in the scholastic system. Students who have
acquired their knowledge of psychology from the manuals published
a generation ago will probably be surprised at finding in a Latin
text-book plates illustrating the microscopy of vegetation, and en-
gravings of the cerebrum, spinal cord, nerve cells and neurons,
motor-reflexes, etc. This pictorial apparatus may not be deemed
essential to a work on philosophy, but it is certainly helpful to the
student and is significant of the development of neo-scholasticism
in the direction which is most demanded at the present time — viz.,
in the sensible facts and empirico-scientific classifications and imme-
diate inferences. ^

Besides this, another feature will commend the book to the stu-
dent, viz., the perfect transparency of the style. The author has
undertaken a work of magnitude, one which will probably be read
most by professors or advanced students. He might, therefore,
have easily been tempted to adopt an elevated strain of Latinity.
Instead of this, however, he has adhered throughout to that perfectly
simple diction which helps to make the works of St. Thomas and
the other great schoolmen so luminous and satisfying.

Though treating of a different division of tthe philosophical sys-
tem. Father Castelein's "Institutes of Moral Philosophy" may be
brought here into connection with the foregoing work because of its
similarity of view-point and method. The key to the treatment is
set down at the start : Pontes Philosophiae moralis sunt turn principia
turn facta; principia, quibus regitur methodus deductiva et facta quae
sunt elementa methodi inductivae. This standpoint and method — the
blending of deduction with induction — gives scientific solidity to the
author's system without depriving it of the interest which accom-
panies the concrete or fact-element. The conclusions demonstrated
in theodicy and psychology are unfolded so as to explain, classify and
reduce to law the ethical facts which history and experience present.
A signal excellence in Father Castelein's work is the prominence
given to the subjects about which men's minds are busiest to-day.
Though the fundamental and traditional questions of ethics receive
their just share of discussion, the actual problems of the hour are
treated with special fulness. Thus the questions centering in social-
ism and the rights of property receive a hundred pages of the book.
The wage question, the relation between capital and labor and kin-
dred topics are given proportionate space. An appendix of a hundred
pages contains some important and interesting matters regarding the
history of socialism, the effects of modern industry on the economic

Book Notices. 831

order, comparative labor statistics, a brief exposition and critique of
various recent systems of economics, etc. In compass Father Cas-
telein's treatise holds a middle place between the well-known Latin
manual of Father Cathrein and the two volumes on the same subject
contributed by Father Meyer to the Cursus Philosophiae Lacensis.
We can give the work no higher commendation than to say that for
depth, breadth, orderliness and perspicuity it fully deserves a place
by the side of Meyer's Institutiones and Cathrein's Moral Philosophies

F. P. S.

Meditations on Psalms Penitential. By the author x>t "Meditations on
the Psalms of the Little Office." 12mo., pp. vii., 153. St. Louis: B. Herder.

This is one of the most satisfying books of meditation that has
come under our notice. Too often such books place before us the
particular application of certain truths to the needs of the writer and
the result of such application ; they appeal to a limited number only.
In other books too much attention is given to erudition and too little
to spirituality. In them there is more discussion than prayer ; they
appeal to the head rather than to the heart. But the end of medita-
tion is to move the heart ; to bring us to sorrow and love and service.
The book before us fulfils these requirements.

The author has chosen his subject well. He has taken those
seven songs of the Church that have been the voice of her penance
in every age. From the wealth of her treasure in the Psalter she
singles them out especially for use in her public affairs and com-
mends them for the private devotion of her faithful children. They
bear a message of consolation and hope not only to the sons and
daughters of the Church, but to every weary soul that wanders
through this vale of tears disappointed, tempted, fallen. They hold
up before us the picture of the penitent king who has fallen and risen.
"They are deep living wells. The profound spiritual experience
which they reveal finds a response in the yearning of every unsatis-
fied heart ; the assured faith of their inspired writer is a beacon light
to the perplexed and despondent. In them the true penitent has an
inexhaustible fount of devotion; for the contrite soul can find no
fitter words wherein to break silence and utter its lamentations be-
fore God." The Latin and English text are printed in parallel
columns, with a running commentary in English. Then follows a
brief sketch of the history of the psalm and then the meditation
proper. The meditation is short and the prayer that succeeds it is
long. This is exactly as it should be, although we generally find
the reverse arrangement. Page after page is enriched with refer-
ences to other parts of the Sacred Text and to the Fathers. The

8^2 American Catholic Quarterly Review.

writer has caught the spirit of the composer, and this is praise in-
deed. To all who know the beauty and pathos of the Psalms Peni-
tential we recommend this book that they may know them better ;
to those who do not know them, we recommend it that they may
learn them well.

Synodorum Archidioeceseos Neo-Eboracensis Collectio, Excellentissimi
ac Reverendissimi Michaelis Augustini Corrigan Archiepiscopi Jussu Edita.
Neo-Eboraci: Typis et Sumptibus Bibliothecae Cathedralis.

This new edition of the synodal decrees of New York was brought
out as a memorial of the golden archiepiscopal jubilee of the see. It
is a most becoming souvenir, for it shows the development of the
diocese during the half century in a striking manner. Its various
decrees which regulate the discipline and ceremonial of the Church
to suit the requirements of the times without changing them in any
essential point, speak to us of phenomenal growth. They tell us of
wise, watchful heads, who observed and planned carefully, and of
faithful, obedient followers who aided them well in perfecting the
work. The successive stages of growth can be followed in the series
of synods. The volume will be very useful not only for the priests of
New York, where the statutes are in force, but also for the bishops
and priests of other dioceses that have not yet fully developed. They
will find in it answers to many questions that have not arisen in their
own midst, and models for many disciplinary regulations, which ex-
perience has shown to be wise and useful. The book is very nicely
gotten up, well arranged and well indexed.

Breviarium Romanum. 4 vols., 16mo., half mor., $6.50. Mechlin: H. Dessain.
New York: Benziger Brothers. 1901.

This is the latest and smallest Breviary. It contains all the offices,
and it is the most convenient book for those who wish to carry it in
the pocket. In shape and appearance and weight it resembles a
small Horae Diurnae, and at first sight most persons refuse to beHeve
that it is the complete Breviary. The second exclamation of sur-
prise is heard when the book is opened. The paper and type are ex-
cellent. It is not true, as it was formerly, that, a small book must be
printed in type that is almost illegible. The great improvements in
paper-making enable the printer to use a type that is comparatively
large and remarkably clear. When this book was first announced,
many persons expressed doubt as to the possibility of making it use-
ful. Some seemed to think that the limit in compactness had been
reached, and that any attempt to go further would prove a failure.
Such is not the case. This Breviary is all that the publishers in-
tended it to be — the smallest book of its kind, with excellent paper
and type. '^

Iff;

(U8RARVJ

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