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CATHOLIC WORLD.

MONTHLY MAGAZINE

GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE,

VOL. L.

OCTOBER, 1889, TO MARCH, 1890.

NEW YORK:

THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD,

427 WEST FIFTY-NINTH STREET.

1890.

CONTENTS.

African Slave-Trade, The.— Rev. J. R. Slat-

Amieland Pessimism. — Brother Azarias,
Amy Howe's Inheritance. — A.B. Ward,
" And Peace on Earth." — Jeanie Drake,
Anne Catherine Emmerich and Clement Bren-
tano. — R. M. Johnston, ....

Best Music for Congregational Singing, The. —

Rev. A Ifred Young, .....

Bodas de Oro,

Canadian Example, A.— J. A. J. McKenna,
Catholic and American Ethics. — Rev. Augus-
tine F. Hewit, ......

Catholic Progress, Old and New. — Rev. Ed-
ward B. Brady, .....

Century of Catholicity in Canada, A- — J. A.

J. McKenna

Charitable Work in Spanish Prisons. — L. B.
Binsse, .......

Church and State in France. — Samuel Byrne,
Church and the Toilers, The.— Henry O'Keeffe,
Church, State, and School.— Rev. Joseph V.
Tracy, >......

Disguises of Nature. — William Seton, .

Dr. Ward and the Oxford Movement,

Dream at Christmas, A. — A.,

Egyptian Writings, The. — Jane Marsh Parker,

First Catholic Congress of Spain, The. — Man-
uel Perez Villa-mil, . . . . 31,

Fredericksburg and the Assault on Marye's
Heights. — Thomas F. Galwey,

Geographical Distribution in Natural History.
— William Seton,

How Perseus became a Star. — Maurice Fran-
cis Egan, .......

Hypnotism.— Joseph T. O'Connor, M.D.,

Irish Hamlet, An.— Rev. R. O'K., .

Legend of the Twin Trees, The.— Rev. R.

O' Kennedy,

Lessons of a Century of Catholic Education.

Brother Azarias,

Moderate Drinking and Intemperance, Thoughts

on.— Rev. P. J. McManns,
Monsieur Duval's Louis Quatorze. — Jeanie

Drake,

Nationality and Religion.— Lew's R. Hub-
bard,

New Catholic University and the Existing Col-
leges, The.— Rev. John T. .Murphy
C.S.Sp., ....

666
no
650
472

804
427
229

168

539

530

767
597
446

374
218

367

75°

574

629
39
396

New Departure in Catholic College Discipline,

A. — Maurice Francis Egan, . . , 569

New Year's Prayer, A. — Marian White, . 635

Novel Defence of the Public School, A.— Rev.

George Deshon, 677

Nuns' Centenary, The. — 77ie Author oj

" Tyborne,^ ...... 819

Organize the Laymen. — Albert Reynaud, . 285
0 114 Centenary : A Glance into the Future. —

Rev. Walter Elliott, . . . .239

" Our Christian Heritage, " . . . .661
Outrage at Anagni, The.— Rev. Edw. F. X.

McSiveeny, . . . . , .584

Painter of Barbizon, The. — Marie Louise

Sandrock, ....... 789

Plea for Erring Brethren, A. — Rev. Alfred

Presentiments, Visions, and Apparitions. — Rev.

L. A. Dutto. . . . . . .80

Protestant Propaganda, A.— Rev. H. H. Wy-

man, 468

"Put Money in Thy Purse." — M. T. Elder, 618

Religion and Mullions. — Margaret F. Sulli-
van, 155

Revolutionary Governor and His Family, A.

—M. C.L., 776

Saint Cuthbert and His Times.— Charles E.

Hodson, ....... 307

San Domingo, A Tale of— E. W. Gilliam,

M.D., . 89, 176, 323, 498

Scanderbeg. — AgnesRepplier, . . .341

Shakespeare's Handwriting. — Appleton Mor-
gan, . . . . ». . .165

Shakespeare's "Pericles." — Appleton Morgan, 723
Sisters of Mercy in New York, The.— S.M.D., 382
Study of Modern Religion, A.— Rev. Wil-
liam Bat ry, D.D., .... 72, 187

Talk about New Books, 123, 250, 400, 543, 688, 824
Temporal Power of the Pope, The. — Rt. Rev.

Francis Silas Chatard, D.D., . .213

Titles: Their Sense and Their Nonsense.-^.

F. Marshall, 521

Typical Irishman, A. — Anna T. Sadlier, 484

University of Oxford, The. — Katharine Ty-
nan, 607

Washington's Catholic Aide-de-Camp. — Wil-
liam F. Came, ...... 437

What are Our Children Reading?— Margaret

//. Lawless, 733

Wonders of the Nervous System. — William

Seton, 452

With Readers and Correspondents. — 132, 260, 412,
555, 699, 835

CONTENTS.

POETRY.

At Low Tide.— M. B. M 340

Aux Carmelites. — Katharine Tynan, . . 766

Bethlehem. — Rev. Hugh T. Henry, . . 464

By Charles' Head.— Henry H'illard Austin, . 292

By the Fountain, 7

Call, A.— y. Rev. T. J. O'Mahony, . . 164

Dream of Pilate's Wife, The.— Margaret H.

Lawless, 775

Flower-Link,' A.— M. A. C., . . . .817

Hero's Pledge, A.—Rt. Rev. J. L. Spalding,

D-D- 739

Hospitable Man, The.— Rev. Alfred Young, . 497

Madonna. — Alice Ward Bailey, . . .426

Mine Enemy. — J. Gertrude Mennrd, . . 349
Musing.— V. Rev. T. J. O'M., . . .527

My Puritan, ....... 228

North Wind, The, 583

Poem.— Mrs. John J. Littleton, ... 60

Psychnika. — John Jerome Rooney, . . 649

Recompense, ....... 803

Revelations of Divine Love. — Rev. Alfred

Young, * 7n

Rondeau of Eventide, A.— Meredith Nicholson, 186

Sat est Vixisse.— Meredith Nicholson, . . 38

Secret of Life, The. — James Buckham, . . 634

Sister Veronica. — Margret Holmes, . . 617

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Accompagnement de Chants Liturgiques, . 564

American Religious Leaders, . . v . 273

American Statesmen. Benjamin Franklin, . 844

Appreciations, 704

Babyland, ........ 564

Beginnings of New England, The ; or, The
Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to

Civil and Religious Liberty, . . . 842

Book of Superiors, The Little, . . . 273

Books and Reading, .... 420, 846

Catholic Family Annual, The Illustrated,
Catholic Home Almanac, The,
Church and Modern Society, The,

Columbiads,

Continuous Creation, The,

Dark Ages, The, ....
Distnbution of Earnings, The Just, .

Einsiedlen Kalender,

Epistle to the Galatians, The, .

Evolution,

Explanation of Constitution of U. S.,

420
420
420
420
704

273
»37

420

847
843
273

Flower Fancies, 420

Flowers from the Catholic Kindergarten ; or,

Stories of the Childhood of the Saints, . 845

Frederic Ozanam, Professor at the Sorbonne, 845

Free Method in Elementary Schools, . . 704

Good Things for Catholic Readers, . . 846

Hand-book for Catholic Choirs, . . .420

Hand-book of Humility, 273

History of Ancient Literature, Oriental and

Classical, Illustrated, . . . .841

Hymns for Catholic Schools, .... 704

Hymns to the Sacred Heart, .... 564

Introduction to Sacred Scriptures, . . -273

Leaves from the Annals of the Sisters of

Mercy, 420

Life of St. Bonaventure, 420

Life and Works of St. Bernard, . . . 420
Little Office of the Immaculate Conception Ex-
plained, 273

Manual for Interior Souls,

Oscotian, The,

Our Christian Heritage, _.

Pages Choisies du Due de Saint-Simon, .
Parish Register of Michilimackinac,
Parnell Movement, The,
Pastoral Letter of Rt. Rev. O. Zardetti, .

Percy Wynn,

Popular Mineralogy, A, ....

Prayer,

Principles of Economic Philosophy,

Salt Cellars, The,

Saint Ottilien's Missions- Kalender,
Saint Alphonsusde Liguori,

Satan in Society,

Selections from Sermons of Padre Agostino,
Short Cut to the True Church, A, .
Society Gymnastics, ....

Temperance Songs and Lyrics,
Thoughts and Counsels for Young Men,
Treatise on Spherical Trigonometry,
Two Missionary Priests at Mackinac,

Virgin Mother of Good Counsel, The,

846

420

564

273
273
564
564
273
273
273

273
420
564
'37
564
137
273

564
273
137
273

273

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD

VOL. L. OCTOBER, 1889. No. 295.

A CANADIAN EXAMPLE.

IN discussing the educational question in the United States
sufficient prominence is not given by Catholic writers to the
example afforded by Canada in the successful working of the
dual systems of state and denominational schools. To those
citizens who fancy that they see in the establishment of parochial
schools a danger to the commonwealth, an examination of the
school system of Ontario would be quite a revelation. They
would find that in that very Protestant province the law provides
— and has for almost half a century provided — for the establish-
ment and maintenance of a class of schools similar to those
which they regard with such dismay. On further inquiry they
would learn that in by far the greater part of the entire Dominion
of Canada corresponding legal provisions are made. And yet
Canada has gone on and prospered ! To those non-Catholics who
perceive the dangers of the godless system of education, the
Canadian example should point the way to a remedy ; and to
Catholics, who at so great a sacrifice are founding and supporting
parochial schools, it might suggest some plan of campaign for
the removal of the injustice under which they labor. What has
been done in Canada should be within the realm of the feasible
in that country which is called the land of the free. What works
for good in Ontario could not possibly have a directly opposite
effect across the imaginary line. Let us then give a few mo-
ments' attention to the case of Ontario.

After the rebellion of 1837 came Canadian home rule. In
1841 Ontario and Quebec (then Upper and Lower Canada) be-
came, by an imperial statute, the Province of Canada ; and in that
year the first parliament of the new self-governing colony met at
Kingston. In the popular branch of the legislature there were

2 A CANADIAN EXAMPLE. [Oct.,

eighty-four members, evenly divided between Ontario and Quebec;
and as to religious belief, the division must have been about
thirty-five Catholics to forty-nine Protestants. The upper chamber
was composed of twenty-four members, eight of whom were
Catholics, eight adherents of the Church of England, and eight
Presbyterians. This parliament made many laws, among which
was an act dealing with education; and in this act there was a
clause which provided that whenever any number of the inhabi-
tants of any township or parish professing a religious faith differ-
ent from that of the majority dissented from the regulations, ar-
rangements, or proceedings of the common-school commissioners
with reference to any common school, they should be at liberty
to establish a school of their own, to be managed by a board of
trustees chosen by themselves, and should be entitled " to receive
from the district treasurer their due proportion, according to
their number, of the moneys appropriated by law and raised by
assessment for the support of the common schools." In the
school bill, when introduced, there was no mention of denomi-
national schools; but, as numerous petitions praying that the
Bible be read in the schools were presented, the bill was referred
to a large select committee, who, seeing the necessity for moral
as well as intellectual training, and perceiving also the utter im-
possibility of evolving any common, effective scheme of moral and
religious training, equally acceptable to Catholic and Protestant,
Jew and Gentile, wisely inserted the foregoing stipulation. The
bill as amended passed without opposition. It was not, how-
ever, found to be equally well adapted to the educational require-
ments of Upper and Lower Canada, and it was in 1843 -deemed
advisable to pass separate measures for the two divisions of the
country. In both provision was made for the establishment and
maintenance of schools for dissentient minorities. A section of the
Upper Canada School Act of 1843 provided that, when the
teacher in any public school was a Protestant, the Catholic in-
habitants might, on the application of ten householders, have a
school of their own ; and a like privilege was extended to Pro-
testants. The application was to designate the trustees of the
school, which was declared to be entitled " to receive its share of
the public appropriation according to the number of children at-
tending." The act of 1843 was from time to time amended, but
in every amendment a clause similar to the one just referred to
was inserted. In 1849, however, a school law was passed which
contained no reference to the rights of dissidents ; but it was
never enforced, and in 1850 was superseded by an act, intro-

1889.] A CANADIAN EXAMPLE. 3

duced by the Hon. — afterwards Sir — Francis Hincks, which em-
braced all the decrees in relation to education that had been
enacted prior to 1849, with such modifications and additions as
the development of the school system made necessary.

In a special report on educational matters, prepared for the
information of the government and the members of the Canadian
legislature in 1858, the Rev. Dr. Ryerson, then superintendent
of education for Upper Canada, stated that " until 1850 the
leading men and press of all parties acquiesced in the separate-
school provisions of the law " ; and then the objection did not
come from Protestants. In 1841 there was but one Catholic
school in Ontario ; but as years went on our people, by availing
themselves of the separate-school provisions of the law, found
that these clauses required emendation ; for it is recorded by the
same reverend doctor that, in order to remove the objections
of the Catholics, a section was included in the " Supplementary
School Act" of 1853 which ran in this way:

"And be it enacted that in all cities, towns, incorporated villages, and
school sections in which separate schools do or shall exist according to the
provisions of the common-school acts of Upper Canada persons of the reli-
gious persuasion of each such separate school sending children to it, or sup-
porting such school by subscribing thereto annually an amount equal to the
sum which each such person would be liable to pay (if such separate school
did not exist) on any assessment to obtain the annual common-school grant
for each such city, town, incorporated village or township, shall be exempt
from the payment of all rates imposed for the support of the common public
schools of each such city, town, incorporated village or school section. . . ."

This clause went on to declare each such separate school en-
titled to a pro rata share of the legislative school grant (an
amount appropriated from the general exchequer in addition to
the sums raised by municipal assessment) ; and it provided for the
election by the supporters of such school of a board of trustees,
whom it empowered to levy and collect school rates, as well as
to direct and manage the school. The School Act of 1853, Dr.
Ryerson tells us, passed without a division ; and he adds in his
report, already referred to : "I think I am warranted in saying
that those intelligent men of all parties, whom I consulted with-
out reserve, unanimously agreed to those clauses of the separate-
school section."

It is commonly stated that the Catholics of Ontario are wholly
indebted for the benefits which they enjoy as to separate schools
to the influence of Quebec in the legislature of Canada. Yet it
must be remembered that when Ontario and Quebec formed but
one province, and when provision was first made for denomina-

VOL. L. — I

4 A CANADIAN EXAMPLE. [Oct.,

tional schools, the Catholics were in a minority both in the coun-
try and in Parliament ; moreover, we have it on the authority of
Dr. Ryerson that until 1855 the Quebec representatives never in-
terfered in Ontario school matters; and even in 1855 the inter-
ference consisted in the introduction by a member of the Legisla-
tive Assembly from Quebec of the " Upper Canada Separate-
School Bill," which had first been submitted to and approved of
by the representatives of Ontario, who agreed to its introduction
and passage and supported it at every stage by their votes.

The act of 1855 may be said to have contained the essence
of the present law. It enacted that a separate school might be
established in any city, town, or rural school district on the ap-
plication of five householders; that the supporters of such school
should be exempt from all taxes imposed for the maintenance of
common schools and school libraries, and that such school should
share proportionately in all legislative school grants. It also en-
larged and more clearly defined the duties of trustees.

About this time it would appear that some ultra-Protestant
devotees of state-schoolism endeavored — for reasons which would
not, perhaps, bear investigation — to raise an agitation for the re-
peal of the law providing for the establishment and support of
denominational schools, and by 1857 tms movement advanced
so far as to make the question of repeal one of the issues of the
general elections of that year. The party who took up the cause
of the separate schools was led by the present veteran prime min-
ister of Canada, the Right Hon. Sir John Macdonald, and that
party was sustained at the polls.

In 1863 the act of 1855 was elaborated, and the "British
North America Act" — the Canadian constitution — passed by the
Parliament of England in 1867, removed the question of the re-
pealing of the separate-school clauses of the law from the region
of practical politics by prohibiting any province of the Dominion
of Canada from making any law which would " prejudicially af-
fect any right or privilege with respect to denominational schools
which any class of persons have by law in the province at the
union." The same act stipulates that such amendments shall be
made to this law as may be from time to time deemed necessary
for its effectual working.

Chapter 227 of the "Revised Statutes of Ontario, 1887," con-
tains the present. separate-school law of that province. The first
few brief clauses deal with Protestant separate schools (which are
not in demand, presumably because the public schools are suf-
ficiently Protestant). The remainder of the chapter gives the en-

1889.] A CANADIAN EXAMPLE. 5

actments regarding Catholic schools. These provide that five or
more Catholic heads of families, resident in any rural or urban
school district, may convene a public meeting of those persons
who desire to have a Catholic school for the purpose of estab-
lishing the same ; and that such persons may periodically elect
a board of trustees to control and manage the school, which
board is invested with all the powers and responsibilities of a
body corporate. The supporters of a separate school are exempt
from paying municipal school taxes, and the trustees are em-
powered to levy school rates on the Catholic inhabitants, they
consenting, which rates are collected by the municipal collectors
and handed to the board of separate-school trustees. Companies
may require any portion of their property to be assessed for sep-
arate-school purposes; and in cases where the landlord pays the
taxes the tenant is taken as the person primarily liable, and he
decides as to whether the school rates shall be paid to the pub-
lic or separate school. Each separate school is entitled to share
proportionately in all public-school grants made by the provincial
legislature, - and is under the supervision of the Department of
Education. Two inspectors of that department visit all such
schools regularly and report on their condition.

While on this subject it might be well to quote the opinion
of a man who made a reputation as an educationist — a reputa-
tion not confined to Canada — and who was as ardent and de-
voted, many would say as prejudiced, an advocate of unsectarian
state schools as ever lived, the late Rev. Dr. Ryerson. In his
official report of 1858, already alluded to, he said: "In connec-
tion with these separate schools our public-school system has
been developed, and has advanced and extended beyond pre-
cedent or parallel in any country. In a few rural sections some
temporary or local inconvenience may be experienced from them,
but in cities and towns it may be questioned whether the char-
'acter and efficiency of the public schools are not rather promoted
by the existence of separate schools." These are the words of
one who was an opponent of denominational education, and they
were written when the separate-school law was in an early stage
of development.

As respects the present standing of these schools, the testi-
mony of the present minister of education may be found in his
report for 1887. Here is an extract: "From the reports of the
inspectors ... it will be seen that the separate schools are
steadily prospering, and that, both as regards teachers and pupils,
they are becoming more efficient every year."

6 . A CANADIAN EXAMPLE. [Oct.,

There are at present two hundred and twenty-nine Catholic
schools in Ontario, and the reports of the inspectors for last
year show that they are doing good work, "are healthy in tone,
and are making substantial progress."

I have dealt particularly with the school law of Ontario, be-
cause I think it offers the most striking object lesson to the
American mind. But I may add a few words in reference to
some of the other Canadian educational systems.

In Quebec the system is purely denominational, and the state
provides for the moral and religious training of children, in con-
nection with their secutar education, in accordance with the creed
of their parents. A council of public instruction is charged with
the exclusive - control of educational affairs. This council is
divided. '-into, .two committees, one Catholic, the other Protestant,
which have respectively the direction of the schools of the bodies
represented - by them. The system works well, and nowhere, as
stated by trre leading Protestant representative of Quebec* in the
Federal Parliament, is a minority more liberally treated than the
Protestant minority in Quebec.

The school law of Manitoba is very like that of Quebec, and
this is what Mr. J. B. Somerset, the superintendent of Protestant
schools in that province, says of it in one of his recently pub-
lished reports :

" A word regarding the law itsslf may be appropriate here. It was first
placed upon the statute book in 1871, and was founded upon the principle of
the establishment of Protestant and Roman Catholic schools, each governed
and managed independently. This fundamental principle being embodied in
the imperial and Dominion acts for the organization of the province, the
question as to its correctness is outside the scope of practical discussion ; but
in connection with its workings during the last seventeen years it may be
pointed out that the schools of the province have been managed without a
particle of the denominational friction that has caused disturbances and bitterness
in other provinces f of the Dominion. Our Roman Catholic fellow-citizens have,
under this law, their own schools, available for religious as well as secular
teaching, which is a principle invariably contended for by them; and those
charged with the management of them are accountable to their people for
their efficiency. On the other hand, Protestant schools are untrammelled in the
introduction of such Christian teaching, including the daily reading of the Bible,
as may be found practicable, and which the growing sentiment of the people
recognizes as holding an important place in the development of the child's
nature."

• Hon. Charles Carroll Colby, Deputy Speaker. See "Hansard" for 1889.

f This must refer to the maritime provinces, especially to New Brunswick and Prince
Edward Island, where the carrying out of a system similar to that of the United States
caused much disturbance and bitterness.

1889.]

BY THE FOUNTAIN.

It may seem astounding to Americans to be told that most
of their northern neighbors enjoy greater liberty of conscience
than do citizens of the great Republic. Nevertheless, the state-
ment is well founded. True liberty of conscience is incompatible
with a law that compels those who maintain schools of their own,
which they are willing to place under state supervision, to con-
tribute to the support of an educational system of which they
cannot in conscience avail themselves. Such a law is akin to that
which forced men to support a church in which they did not
believe. Is not the Canadian example more in accord with the
great underlying principle of the Constitution of the United
States : the greatest individual liberty consonant with the public
weal ? J. A. J. McKENNA.

BY THE FOUNTAIN.

BY the fountain, softly plashing,
Where I dream away the day,
Thoughts, like limpid waters welling
From their hidden deep-wood dwelling,
Ever growing strong and swelling,

Sweep me on in fancy's play :
By the fountain, softy plashing,
Where I dream away the day.

By the fountain, softly plashing,

Where I dream away the day,
Would ye know how without measure
My glad heart is filled with pleasure,
By the flitting dreams I treasure?

I will tell as best I may :
By the fountain, softly plashing,
Where I dream away the day.

By the fountain, softly plashing,
Where I dream away the day,
Put aside all thoughts of earning,
Put aside all thoughts of learning,
Live in holy, tender yearning,

White clad Love reigns there for aye
By the fountain, softly plashing,
Where I dream away the day.

CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. [Oct.,

CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE.

FRANCE has been the political volcano of Europe during the
century which closes with the present year. The lava- torrents of
human blood that have accompanied its frequent eruptions have,
each in its turn, either destroyed one system of government or
marked the inauguration of another. The last disturbance took
place in 1871, when the Third Republic received only too literally
its baptism of blood. Is the volcano extinct, or is it smouldering
still ? Let us take a peep into the crater.

Until the recent Boulanger incident challenged universal at-
tention, and set men marvelling as to what strange combination
of political and social conditions and circumstances had rendered
such a man possible, even in France, many ordinary observers
had regarded the French Republic as a country enjoying a stable
system of government, the only drawback to which was the fre-
quency with which cabinet crises and ministerial changes occurred.
And these constantly recurring political fluctuations were com-
monly ascribed rather to the capriciousness of the national tem-
perament, and to the fatal fondness of the French people for
novelty, than to any inherent defect in the constitution, or -any
grave mistake in the notions which the modern school of French
statesmen entertain in regard to the line of policy best suited to
secure the welfare and content of their fellow-citizens at home and
the maintenance of French prestige abroad. Probably those ob-
servers have altered their opinions since.

Of the causes which have contributed to bring about the
present deplorable state of things in Fraace — for deplorable it is
in all conscience — the chief and most potent was the recrudescence
in 1878, in a mild form, of the terrible fever that broke out in
the body politic at the time of the first Revolution. True, the
symptoms were not recognized then ; only by few is the malady
recognized now. It has changed in the manner of its manifesta-
tion, but a careful diagnosis discloses its true character and reveals
its distant origin. Of course, no sensible French Catholic would
desire to see a return of 1788 any more than he would desire
to see a return of 1789. It is a temerarious question to put at
this time of the day, but one may be permitted to ask, without,
I hope, being considered a blind praiser of the past or a fanatical

1889.] CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. 9

Ultramontane : What permanent salutary influence has the French
Revolution exerted upon the destiny of mankind, or upon that
of the French nation ? Certainly it put an end to abuses and
corruptions that called to very heaven for a sweeping remedy.
It razed to the ground institutions which were scandalously bad.
But with these were torn down also many which were valuable
and good. And nothing was built up to take their place. Look
abroad at the world to-day. The American Republic, pre-
eminently the land of liberty, owes nothing to the French Revolu-
tion ; and few will contend that the progress of truly liberal thought
and the solid growth of democracy in England, which have been
so marked of late, would not have occurred if there never had
been a French Revolution. The government of Germany is a
military despotism, and the vast majority of its people are strongly
devoted to their emperor. The Hapsburgs hold a firm position
in the affections of the peoples over whom they reign. Russia
is still what Talleyrand described it : " An absolute monarchy,
limited by assassination." France itself occupies a very much
inferior place among the European powers to that which it occu-
pied before 1789. Discord and discontent prevail within its
borders. Liberty, equality, fraternity are as conspicuously absent
as they were in the days of Robespierre. Southey has a pretty
poem, full of his usual simplicity and strength, in which an old
man talks eloquently to two young children about the valor of
the great Duke of Marlborough and the " famous victory " at
Blenheim. After listening to him for some time, one of the
children innocently asks : " But what good came of it at last ?"
One is almost tempted, concerning the French Revolution, to ask
with little Peterkin : What good came of it at last ? — an answer of
the boast of the military achievements incident to and following
after it.

To the country whose heart-bursting throes gave birth to it
it has brought but little good. It would not be an ungrounded
assertion to say that it has brought to it much positive evil.
The French political mind has ever since been in a state of fer-
ment. Republics have been established and abolished; royal and
imperial thrones have been set up and pulled down. A spirit of
unrest seems to brood over the land. The sacred principle of
patriotism, so dear to Frenchmen, is often violated in obedience
to the promptings of factious passion. When the Third Republic
had been fairly started, with that many-sided genius, Thiers, at
its head, the friends of France hoped, and thought they saw good
reason for the hope, that the delirium of the Revolution had at

id Ctn-Kcn ,\.\n STATE /jv FRANCE. [Oct.,

length run its course, that it had expended its last energies in
the Commune. Thiers' idea was to establish a republic on a basis
sufficiently broad to suit the generality of Frenchmen of all shades
tff political opinion, and attractive enough to win gradually the
fespect, if not the good will, of extremists of both royalist and
imperialist attachments. There is much to warrant the belief
that had Thiers' idea been realized, had the policy he outlined
been pursued, France Would be united and prosperous and con-
tented now; But when Marshal MacMahon resigned the presi-
dency, through the pressure of the Gambettist and other groups,
that hope had to be abandoned. For the republic then fell into
the hands of the Opportunists and the still more advanced revo-
lutionaries of the Clemenceau type. The advent to power of
these men signalized the beginning of a new era. In their hands
the Republic became what it is to-day, a republic in name only ;
in reality, a Masonic, revolutionary oligarchy. Under MacMahon
the Republic struck deep its roots into the hearts of the people.
Property was protected, liberty of conscience was guaranteed.
There was peace in the land, and there was prosperity. France
recovered from the dreadful disaster of 1870-71 with a rapidity
which astonished the world, and so chagrined Bismarck that he
resolved to wage war anew against his lately conquered foe.
And a war there would have been had not Russia intimated that
in such an event her neutrality could not be relied upon by her
imperial neighbor. Republican institutions, as has been stated,
were fast becoming popular. The noble example of unselfish pa-
triotism set by MacMahon — that of subordinating his personal
political preferences to the single desire to serve his country,
without reference to the form of government which she had
chosen — had been largely followed by public men of eminence,
of influence, and of conspicuous ability. But now everything was
altered. The fever of the Revolution displayed itself again. Not
by fire and sword, however, did the latter-day devotees of the
Revolution propose to actualize their principles. The times had
changed, and the revolutionaries had changed with them. The
old methods were acknowledged to have been too drastic. Their
application had always been followed by a strong reaction. They
were discarded. With the Republic at their backs, parliamentary
action, legislative measures, could be made successfully to sub-
serve their cherished purposes. The great object to be attained
was the banishment of Christianity from the country, and the
substitution for it of a Masonic cult, of which, in the words of
Leo XIII., " the foundations and laws should be drawn from

CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. u

mere naturalism." To accomplish the complete overthrow of the
church it would be necessary to paganize the schools. Laws
must be made, therefore, to place the education of the children
under the control of the state. In the meantime a policy of
persecution must be inaugurated toward the church and its ad-
herents. The religious orders must be expelled. Prelates and
priests must be harassed and annoyed. Catholics must be ex-
cluded from public office. The annual appropriation for the main-
tenance of public worship must be steadily diminished in amount.
When the proper time (fame the church should be separated
from the state.

It was only to be expected that when this insensate pro-
gramme was announced, as well as when the policy of exaspera-
tion which it sketched out commenced to unfold itself in practice,
clear-headed statesmen should have begun to consider seriously
whether they should longer remain in the sphere of active poli-
tics. Many had already followed MacMahon into retirement.
Those who still occupied positions which gave them a right to
think that they possessed influence raised their voices in solemn
warning. "We have our Republic, the best form of government
for this or any other country," they said, " but instead of con-
solidating it, these hot-headed politicians are doing their best to
destroy it." Their expostulations were received with derisive
jeers. Even an earnest and life-long republican, a philosopher
and a statesman like Jules Simon, was howled into semi-obscurity
because he had dared to affirm that the way to win respect and
secure stability for the Republic was to abstain from wounding
consciences and to adopt a policy of justice to all. A glance
over the long array of the names of the mediocrities who have
held cabinet offices since 1877 suggests the query, Where are
now France's great public men, her adepts in statecraft, her pol-
ished and astute diplomatists ? Some of them sit in the Senate, a
small minority, whose sole occupation is to protest against the
passage of iniquitous laws which they are unable to modify or
cause to be rejected. Others are in the Academy, where they
sought and have found the solace which literature never fails to
afford the bruised heart and the sorrow-filled mind. Others again,
who can see no hope for their country in the immediate future,
are shut up in their chateaux, where they dwell in the chastened
serenity of a solitude populous with remembrances and regrets.

The school laws of Jules Ferry and Rene Goblet have natu-
rally embittered Catholics against the Republic. The latter, who
is a member of the present cabinet, completed in his act, passed

12 CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. [Oct.,

two years ago, what was initiated by Ferry. That act empowers
the state to lay its atheistic hand upon the souls of the children
of Catholic France, and to hold them in its tyrannous grasp till
it has imprinted upon them a foul mark which will stain and cor-
rupt them for ever unless a merciful Providence obliterates it. It
is against the children of the poor and the religiously indifferent
that this law is principally directed. Their parents cannot afford
to pay, or are unwilling to pay, for their education in Christian
schools (free parish schools are still comparatively few and far
between), and as the law compels the children to attend some
school or other, the free state institutions are nearly filled with
them. The " education " which they receive in these establish-
ments is, needless to say, anti- Christian. They are taught to love,
honor, and adore the French Republic instead of their Creator, and
the saving truths of Christianity are either scrupulously kept from
their knowledge or openly attacked and ridiculed in their hearing.
The law which obliges young men studying for the priesthood to
serve one year in the soldier's barrack is another evidence of the
anti-religious fury which animates the ruling spirits of the so-
called Republic.

That to be a Catholic in . France nowadays is an offence pun-
ishable by civic inequality could be proved by examples of which
considerations of space forbid the citation. Two proofs will suffice.
The Finance or Budget Committee is the most important of all
parliamentary committees, and from the nature of its functions it
is clear that it should be constituted of men chosen in disregard
of party bias of any kind. The present Chamber of Deputies is
composed in round numbers of five hundred and eighty members.
Of these, four hundred Republicans of various groups represent
four millions and a half of voters, and one hundred and eighty
Catholics, or anti-Republicans, represent three and a half millions
of voters. The Catholic party forms, therefore, almost one-third
of the Chamber, and represents two-fifths of the votes cast at the
last general election. Now, if the " Republican " majority of the
Chamber were actuated by a wish to be fair and honest, one-
third of the members of the Budget Committee would be Catho-
lics. The three and a half millions of Catholic voters pay taxes as
well as the four and a half millions of Republicans, and have an
equal right to a voice in determining the disposition of the money
which they pay. But the Republican majority think otherwise ;
and the thirty-three members who are annually elected to consti-
tute the Budget Committee never include a single Catholic. The
second instance, a typical one, occurred in Paris two years ago.

1889.] CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. 13

A competitive examination was held to fill a vacant government
position, for which a thorough knowledge of chemistry was the
special qualification. At the top of the list of the names of those
who passed successfully was that of a very clever young man,
who to his proficiency in the science of the laboratory united a
character above reproach. He had won the position, and his
rivals congratulated him upon his merited victory. But in conse-
quence of a private communication which he received, M. Berthe-
lot, the then cabinet minister with whom the formal appointment
lay, passed over the winner and gave it to somebody else, whose
name was much lower on the list. The communication was to the
effect that the young man thus slighted lived with his aunt, who
was a devoted Catholic, and that he occasionally accompanied her
to Mass. An indignant protest was made by the fair-minded
press against so scandalous a proceeding, but it produced no
effect.

The exclusion of Catholics from the Budget Committee is also
dictated, probably, by a desire for unanimity on a certain point
amongst its members, who, divided on most subjects, are of one
mind when anything concerning the church comes up for con-
sideration. To worry and thwart the church is one of the most
congenial pastimes of the majority of the Chamber ; to starve her
out of the land is a cherished idea amongst the advanced wing.
During the last seven years the Budget Committee has made the
following reductions in the annual appropriation given for the
maintenance of the Catholic Church, as being the state religion :
In 1882, 18,000 francs; 1883, 414,560; 1884, 1,958,860; 1885,
6,815,193; 1886, 7,007,003; 1887, 7,710,204; 1888, 7,986,221;
1889, 8,018,621 ; total, 35,928,572 francs, or $7,000,000 — an aver-
age continuous reduction of a million dollars a year. And these
reductions, it should be borne in mind, are taken from the com-
paratively moderate sum allowed by the government under the
Concordat to the French Church in return for her renunciation
of her claims to the vast possessions which were hers before the
Revolution.

In another way the hatred of the members of the Budget
Committee towards the church finds annual expression. Year
after year, since the event already indicated as the point of de-
parture of the Third Republic from the sound principles on which
it was originally founded, they have struck off the list of appro-
priations the sum which goes to the support of the embassy to
the Holy See. This renders it incumbent upon the premier to

14 CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE, [Oct.,

move, when the committee's report comes up for discussion, that
the appropriation be restored to its place on the list; and the
debate which ensues is in reality upon the question whether the
embassy should not be suppressed. The motion made on behalf
of the government has always been carried by a majority more or
less substantial ; and this would seem to indicate that there still
exists a modicum of common sense amongst the fickle and inconse-
quent legislators of the Palais Bourbon. The blind hate of those
who oppose the government on these occasions prevents them
from seeing the ridiculous position in which they place themselves,
for before the embassy to the Holy See can be abolished the
Concordat must be abrogated. It augurs ill, however, for the
continued existence of the diplomatic tie which binds France to
the Holy See that the arguments by which successive premiers
succeed in obtaining the majority on this question are based upon
considerations of expediency and purely material advantage.
French Catholic missionaries render an important service to their
country, especially in Africa and in the far East, by extending
French political influence, and by propagating the French lan-
guage, French ideas, and French manners. That this influence is
considerable is evidenced by the efforts of other powers to sub-
stitute missionaries of their own for those sent out by the Church
of France. Therefore, it is annually argued, it is France's inter-
est to keep on cordial terms with the Pope. No account is taken
of the immense moral power of the church, of the sublimity of
her mission to mankind, of the solemn import of the message from
on high of which she is the faithful herald. This year the cyni-
cism of the French premier was imitated by the Protestant Temps,
the organ of the moderate Republicans, certainly the most serious,
and perhaps the most influential, journal in France. The Temps
expressed its regret that " considerations so lofty " as those set
forth by the premier should not have had more weight with many
of the members of the chamber who made up the strong minor-
ity who voted against him. For those acquainted with the history
of modern France it is difficult to believe in the sincerity of the
regret. The proposal to break off diplomatic relations with the
Vatican, and the larger proposal — that of the separation of church
and state — of which it is meant to be the precursor, are in the
logic of the situation which the hypocritical Temps has done a good
deal to create. The bitter war that has been kept up against the
church for the last ten years has been stealthily supported by the
very writers of the Temps who now profess to deplore its actual

1889.] CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. 15

and possible consequences. But the policy of protecting abroad
the religion which is persecuted at home, of proscribing on their
native soil the orders and congregations which are defended in
far-off regions, is one against which the conscience of a great
people must soon revolt.

On the question of the separation of church and state in
France there is as much divergence of opinion amongst Catholics
as there is amongst the different groups of Republicans. It is a
subject as to which, of course, the voice of the Catholic laity, as
such, counts for little or nothing, but with regard to which they
are entitled to entertain whatever views they deem consistent with
Catholic principles. Their action in the matter will always be
guided by the wishes of the Supreme Pontiff. No inconsiderable
number of them, men of weight and position, would hail with
satisfaction the severance of a connection which seems to them,
in the actual circumstances, to be an anomaly. They think that
there is something incongruous in the union of their church with
an atheistic state. They feel deeply humiliated at the spectacle of
their bishops and priests and sisterhoods insulted wantonly by
every political upstart who chances to get into a governmental
office, from the ministry of public worship down to the mayoralty,
of the smallest village. They believe that the spiritual interests
of their co-religionists, which suffer very much under the existing
arrangement, would be greatly advanced by the change. The
appropriation for the church has been so enormously reduced that
what remains of it is scarcely worth the having. The nation
which cheerfully furnishes the Holy Father with upwards of three-
fourths of the total sum annually subscribed by the Catholic world
as Peter Pence, and which contributes so liberally to foreign mis-
sionary enterprises, could be relied upon to support with no nig-
gardly hand the church within its own borders. By far the
gravest aspect of the present position of the church in France is
the steady decrease of vocations to the priesthood. Three years
ago I heard Pere Monsabre deliver from the pulpit of Notre
Dame de Paris an impassioned appeal to his countrymen to
undertake the self-sacrifice necessary to ward off the coming peril.
Not many months ago Mgr. Penaud, Bishop of Autun, and mem-
ber of the French Academy, sounded a similar note of alarm. In
a letter which he published he gave eloquent utterance to the
distress he felt at the prospect of what the Church of France
might suffer from the scarcity of priests ; and he prayerfully hoped
" that French Catholics will not allow those sacred sources to

1 6 CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. [Oct.,

perish from which priests of God are furnished forth," and " that
the humiliation of seeing the pre-eminently apostolic nation obliged
to have recourse to foreign priests to announce the Gospel to its
own sons " might be spared him. It is in the middle and upper
classes of Catholics that the paucity of vocations is most notice-
able. The condition of abject slavery to the minions of the infidel
state which the embracing of the sacerdotal life entails is doubt-
less the main obstacle that prevents their sons from hearkening to
the higher call. It might be thought that the very difficulties sur-
rounding the priest, the indignities to which his profession ex-
poses him, ought to act as a stimulus rather than as a hindrance
to vocations; ought to inspire young men with an ardent zeal to
dare do all for the love of God. But the human element is
strong and the flesh is weak, and heroes are not found by the
hundred nowadays.

Were it not for the fear of a royalist reaction, the various divi-
sions of the Republicans in the Chamber would have coalesced
upon a measure separating church and state long ago. The wiser
heads among the revolutionary wing, which is in power now, deem
the time inopportune for a stroke of policy which they regard as
•one of the inevitable events of the near future. This view is
tacitly concurred in by the moderate section, who are indifferent
upon the subject, except in so far as it affects the durableness of
the Republic. There is a large group, however, who want the
church disestablished immediately at all costs; but their influence
is rendered nugatory by an equally large group who desire the
maintenance of the union between the civil and the religious
powers in order that they may gratify their hatred of the church.
On the morning after a debate and division on the question of
separation, brought forward in the form of a resolution tending to
suppress the appropriation for the embassy to the Holy See, I
met a friend of mine, a Paris journalist, and a member of the
Extreme Left — the group who clamor for immediate separation. He
had voted against his colleagues. " I cannot understand your
action in the Chamber yesterday evening," I said. "The attitude
of your group, that of uncompromising hostility to the church, is
quite comprehensible. But I know your sentiments too well to
believe that in voting as you did your motive was to benefit the
church. Why do you support in practice what you condemn in
principle?" "The reason is simple," he replied. "My colleagues
may be all right in their attitude on the church question ; but if
they succeeded in giving effect to their views, one of the principal

1889.] 'CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. 17

charms which parliamentary life possesses for myself and a good
many others who are not of my group would be taken away." I
confessed that I could not see the point. "Why," he rejoined
with a smile, " so long as the church is tied to the state we can
kick the clerics whenever we like. We have an old score against
them, you know. If separation were brought about, the church
would be free and strong, and, ma foil the clerics would kick
us." In these words he voiced the sentiments of an important
section of the members of the Chamber of Deputies.

The numerous vexatious measures which have been passed into
law for the sole purpose of persecuting their church, and the civic
disabilities from which they themselves suffer, have naturally in-
spired the Catholic laity with a prejudice against the Republic as
a form of government. They yearn for a regime which will give
them liberty, equality, and fraternity. These words greet the eye
everywhere throughout France. They are painted by order of the
government officials on the walls of every church, of every school,
of every public building; they are on the very scavengers' carts.
They are every place, except where they ought to be : in the
policy of the state and in the hearts of the people. For Catholics
the only liberty that exists is the liberty to think as the govern-
ing infidels think ; the only equality, that of paying taxes for
which they get no representation ; the only fraternity, that defined
by Chamfort, the wit of the Revolution : " Be my brother, or I
will kill thee ! " Even in the matter of walking through the
public streets Catholics are discriminated against. Pardoned assas-
sins and blood-thirsty anarchists, with wickedness in their hearts
and blasphemies on their lips, can and do march through them
with impunity, flaunting the red flag, the emblem of murder and
social chaos ; and Masonic sectaries may proceed to Pere-Laehaise
decked in their idiotic insignia, and inter their dead with what-
ever fantastic rites they please. But the children of the Church
of God may not carry aloft in public procession the symbol of
man's redemption ; may not, in fact, hold any public procession
at all of a religious character. They must move out of the way
to let the " red" processionists pass, and listen in silence to the wild
shouts for the return of the " glorious brotherhood " of the "glo-
rious days " of the Revolution. A glorious brotherhood and a
glorious epoch indeed ! It would be amusing, if the theme were
not so solemn, to remember what these delirious fanatics forget —
that, Saturn-like, the Revolution devoured its own progeny ; that
in the heyday of their power its ringleaders were thinking of

1 8 CHURCH AND STATE AY PRANCE: [Oct.,

nothing else but cutting each other's throats ; that Hebert sent
Vergniaud to the guillotine; that Hebert's own head was lopped
off by Danton ; that Danton's was in turn lopped off by Robes-
pierre, and that Tallien closed the gory series by lopping off
Robespierre's.

Nor are Catholics themselves wholly blameless for the unfor-
tunate condition of their church and their country. Instead of
imitating the energy of their opponents in organizing, in register-
ing, in voting, in spreading political information amongst the
people, they have in most instances contented themselves with
uttering violent and exaggerated denunciations of the Republic.
They might as well denounce the clouds for the inclemency of
the weather. An important factor in the situation is the indiffer-
ence of the rural voter. It is very hard to induce him to go to
the polls. He is unwilling to take from the time he devotes to
the cultivation of his farm the few hours or the half-day which
the recording of his vote would consume. A despicable sel-
fishness keeps him at home. He knows little and cares less
about the issues that are to be fought out at the ballot-boxes.
So long as he has a hazy notion that there is some sort of a
government in Paris he is perfectly satisfied.

It is only a sensible decrease in the price commanded by his
agricultural produce, or a marked increase in the amount of his
taxes, that can avail to rouse him from his lethargy. As for
the cultured class of Catholics, and the members of the doomed
" aristocracy," they for the most part hold themselves aloof,
watching 'in idleness the succession of events, and awaiting an
intervention of Providence which shall set things right. The old
adage that God helps those who help themselves is utterly lost
on them. Their inactivity is culpable ; it is unpatriotic. By their
inanity they have allowed the government of their, country to fall
into the grasp of the tyrannous clique whose maladministration
brought into play that astonishing union of otherwise antagonistic
forces which almost succeeded in placing France at the feet of
an imbecile would-be dictator like Boulanger.

Such, in brief, is the France of to-day. What it shal1 be to-
morrow will depend largely upon the conduct, in the general elec-
tions which are to be held in October, of those whose rightful
place is at the head of the Catholic or conservative party. It is
incumbent upon those of them who have hitherto been living in
retirement to come forth and throw themselves into the conflict.
It is incumbent upon all of them to cast aside with their vain

1889.] CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. 19

regrets their barren loyalty to effete dynasties. To break with
the past will no doubt occasion a severe wrench. But the wel-
fare of their country demands it. True patriotism requires self-
sacrifice. The wounds which have prostrated their native land
have not been caused by the Republic; they have been inflicted
by those who have administered the Republic; those who have
proved recreant to the principles which they profess. Imperialism
and royalism have been tried and found wanting. True, there is
one grave defect in the constitution of the Republic, but it can
easily be removed. The existence of the cabinet depends upon
the mutations of opinion in a Chamber where hastily-improvised
coalitions, capable of upsetting the most powerful ministry, are
possible every day. A glance at the Constitution of the United
States will at once suggest the remedy. The forthcoming elec-
tions will present a magnificent opportunity to the leaders of the
Catholic party. If they cannot exercise much influence over the
urban voters, the rural voters are at their service. The conditions
favorable to the transformation of the -rural voter's indifference into
active interest are widely prevalent : the taxes are high, trade
and commerce languish, agricultural and industrial depression is
felt throughout the land; discontent is rife. A united and deter-
mined effort would secure to the Catholic party a majority over
their infidel adversaries in the new Chamber. Lafayette accepted
the monarchy as the best of republics. If French Catholics are
wise in their day, if they are sincerely wishful of furthering the
highest interests of their faith and their fatherland, they will
accept the Republic as the best of monarchies.

SAMUEL BYRNE.

VOL L— a

20 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NA TURAL HISTOR Y. [Oct.,

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NATURAL
HISTORY.

IN natural history few things are more curious than the geo-
graphical distribution of* animals and plants. It may be laid down
as a rule in geographical distribution that the areas in which a
given species or genus exists are continuous with each other.
That is to say, the same species or genus will not be found in
places far apart and between which no individual of the kind is
to be met with. But there are exceptions to this general rule,
and these exceptions are interesting.

In going from England to Japan we pass through countries
very unlike England in their physical characteristics as well as in
their fauna and flora. But when the whole of Europe* and a good
part of Asia have been crossed, when five thousand miles separate
us from England, we suddenly arrive in the midst of house spar-
rows, and larks, buntings, wrens, and thrushes absolutely identi-
cal with the ones at home. Again, all the members of the genus
blue-bird inhabit temperate and tropical America with one excep-
tion, a solitary form, ccelicolor, which crops up among the Him-
alaya Mountains.

Of two species of blue magpie, one inhabits Spain, the other
inhabits Siberia and Northern China. The water-mole embraces
two species, one of which dwells among the Pyrenees, the other
is in Russia, along the rivers Don and Volga.

It is certainly strange that two birds belonging to the very
limited ostrich family, and so closely allied as the rhea and the
ostrich, should inhabit regions so far asunder as Africa and South
America.

Perhaps the most remarkable instance of a mammalian genus
inhabiting widely separated areas is furnished by the tapir; one
species is a native of Borneo and Sumatra, all the other species
are natives of South America.

The implacental mammals, or marsupials, such as kangaroos,
opossums, etc., are almost entirely confined to the Australian
region. These mammals (provided with a pouch in which the
fcetus completes its embryonic development) are the earliest
to appear in geological time, having been found in Jurassic
and Triassic deposits, and they probably stand near the bottom
of the mammalian series. Now, the American opossum is the

1889.] GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NA TURAL HISTOR v. 2 1

only non-Australian representative of this extremely ancient
order.

As among the higher animals so we find among fresh-water
fishes, identical species divided from each other by half the globe.
The shovel-nose sturgeon is confined to the Mississippi River and
to the rivers of Central Asia. The perch of the Ganges reap-
pears in the waters of South Australia. The common American
sucker has one outlying representative in Siberia.

Among the mountains of Central Asia, confined to Lake Bai-
kal, two thousand feet above the sea, and a thousand miles from
the coast, is the singular fish comephorus, whose nearest allies
are the mackerels, exclusively salt-water fishes.

The general rule for the distribution of plants is the same
fundamentally as for animals. But plants being possessed of un-
common facilities for distribution, their seeds being scattered broad
and far by the wind and by means of birds, we cannot expect to
meet with so many identical species widely separated as in the
case of animals. We shall only mention that the eminent botan-
ist, Sir Joseph Hooker, found that the plants peculiar to the Gala-
pagos Islands, six hundred miles from the west coast of South
America, have decided Mexican affinities.

But if identical species may be separated from each other by
great distances, on the other hand a comparatively short distance
will sometimes show a marked diversity in the fauna and flora.
On the eastern coast of Africa we meet with giraffes, elephants,
lions, and rhinoceroses. But if we journey two hundred and fifty
miles, to the Island • of Madagascar, we find not one of these dis-
tinctively Ethiopian mammals.

The true monkey has also disappeared, and we meet with the
half-monkey, or lemur, a lowly organized and very ancient ani-
mal, which maintains its existence by nocturnal and arboreal
habits. As we go southward along the eastern portion of the
United States we seldom lose sight of oaks, sumachs, vines, and
magnolias, while the birds and insects differ very little from those
further north. But if we cross the short fifty miles which divide
Florida from the Bahamas, we find a plant-life essentially trop-
ical and differing scarcely at all from that of Cuba. The birds
and insects, too, are not the same as on the mainland ; in fact,
there is more difference between Cuba and Florida than between
Florida and Canada. Yet there is nothing in the climate or the
soil to make us look for such a marked difference.

Wallace tells us in his interesting book, The Malay Archi-
pelago, that animal life on the Island of Bali is wonderfully unlike

22 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NA TURAL HISTORY. [Oct,

that on the Island of Lombok, which is separated from it by
a channel only fifteen miles wide, but very deep. On Bali we
find red and green woodpeckers, weaver-birds, barbets, and
black and white magpie robins, not one of which exists on
Lombok, where we meet with screaming cockatoos, and friar-
birds, and the strange mound-building megapodes, none of which
inhabit Bali.

A very few animals have a world-wide distribution. Among
these is the bat, which is found in every habitable part of the earth,
even on the loneliest islands ; although so far it has not been ob-
served on Iceland, St. Helena, or on the jGalapagos. One species
of bat has been seen on Chimborazo Mountain, at an altitude of
ten thousand feet

Among birds the fish-hawk has the most extensive range.
Next to it comes the little barn-owl, which is met with every-
where except in New Zealand and a few of the Malay Islands.
Next to the bat, the mammals having the most exterisive habitat
are the leopard and the wolf. But no mammal has so great a
north and south range as the American panther, whose home
extends from Canada to Patagonia.

But if the fish-hawk, barn-owl, and bat are cosmopolitan,
there are some animals whose range is limited to only one coun-
try ; it may even be confined to a few square miles or less. Not •
a crow is found in South America, although it exists everywhere
else, even in Australia. The bird-of-paradise is confined to New
Guinea. The brown and white cactus-wren is met with only on
the Isthmus of Panama; while one species of humming-bird, the
little flame-bearer, never strays outside the extinct crater of
Chiriqui.

Among fishes the most isolated, and perhaps the most wonder-
ful of all living creatures, is the ceratodus of South Australia.
It is an extremely ancient fish, fossil remains of a closely allied
species having been found in deposits of the Permian age. Its
brain presents an embryonic condition ; it is distinguished for the
primeval form of its fin, and it appears more than probable that
from the ceratodus have descended some of the earlier amphi-
bians.

But it was not until 1870 that we knew there was any still
existing form of this remarkable genus. In that year a ceratodus
several feet long was caught in a river in Queensland. Although
it is a true fish, it leaves the water at night, progressing on its
fins with a paddling movement somewhat like a tortoise, and goes
<m foraging expeditions after vegetable food. It browses chiefly

1889.] GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NATURAL HISTORY. 23

on myrtle-leaves, and having lungs as well as gills, it is as much
at home out of water as in the water. It is covered with scales,
and is altogether fish-like in appearance ; yet its anatomy pre-
sents points of resemblance to salamanders. A good specimen of
a ceratodus is preserved in the museum of Columbia College,
New York. Here let us observe that whenever a species has a
very local range, when it does not exist outside of a certain nar-
row limit, it is a sign that it is verging toward extinction.

Having given this brief account of some of the interesting
facts in distribution, we may ask if there is any explanation of
them ? or do they all form a tangle which cannot be unravelled ?
They do not. And we shall find that the study of how animal
and plant life is distributed is an important adjunct to geology,
for it helps to throw light on the past history of our globe. The
phenomena of geological distribution entirely correspond with the
phenomena of geographical distribution. In the same geological
beds we see mingled the same species. As in geography no
species or genus is, as a rule, found in widely separated areas,
without also inhabiting intermediate localities, so in geology no
species or genus is found parted by a geological epoch ; that is
to say, it has not come into existence twice.

The geographical distribution of animals and plants is mainly
dependent on two causes, namely, the changes to which the
earth's surface has been exposed, and climatal changes; alternate
cold and warm periods, which cold and warm periods were owing
to the combined effects of the precession of the equinoxes and
of the eccentricity of the earth's orbit: the epoch of cold being
aided, in Mr. Belt's opinion* by increased obliquity of the ecliptic,
which would extend the width of the polar regions.

In regard to alterations in the earth's surface, the better
opinion is that our continents and oceans have been in the main
permanent and stable throughout all geological time ; but they
have undergone various and wonderful modifications in detail.
Every square mile of earth has been again and again under
water ; inland seas have been formed and afterward filled up with
sediment, so that now only the trained eye can detect where they
once existed ; the continents have been crossed by arms of the
sea, isolating portions of them for varying intervals; and the
effect of these repeated changes on animal life must have been
very great. To adapt themselves to new conditions, the species
of the organic world — driven from one region to another — have
been slowly changing in form, and these changes and migrations
are everywhere revealed in the actual distribution of the species,

24 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NA TURAL HISTOR Y. [Oct.,

as well as in the testimony of the rocks, which preserve for us their
fossil remains.

Undoubtedly the true explanation of many remote geograph-
ical affinities is that they date back to a time when the parent
group had a wider distribution ; groups now broken up were once
continuous ; fragmentary forms are only the relics of once wide-
spread types ; and the more widely the fragments are scattered,
the more ancient was the ancestral group.

Thus the marsupials, at present confined to the Australian
region and to America, are connected by forms which had spread
over Europe and Asia before the close of Eocene times, during
which epoch, probably, Australia became an island. America, no
doubt, got its marsupials from the Old World by way of the land-
bridge at Behring's Straits, although it was a much later migra-
tion, for no trace of marsupials appears in the New World before
the Post-pliocene age. At an early period the land connection
with Australia was cut off and has never since been restored,
while long afterwards the northern route between the eastern and
Vestern hemispheres at Behring's Straits was destroyed. The
marsupials are, therefore, an old-world group, which, though long
extinct in its birthplace, has survived in widely divided parts of
the globe ; the original type undergoing a special development —
in the one case (the opossum) to a life suited to an arboreal ex-
istence ; in the other, to a life adapted to hot, waterless plains.
Nor could there be any better evidence of the long isolation of
Australia than the great variety of its living marsupials (so differ-
ent in species from its ancient, fossil ones), as well as the almost
entire absence there of animals met with in other parts of the
globe. In Australia we have the great kangaroo; the kangaroo
rat; the native cat — the smallest not bigger than a mouse, the
biggest as big as a wolf; the tasmanian tiger, looking very
like a dog, and sometimes called the zebra wolf; the native ant-
eater ; the beautiful flying opossum, so like the flying squirrel of
North America ; and the tarsipes, not larger than a mouse, with
an extensile tongue, for it is a true honey-sucker. All these are
marsupials. But, besides them, we meet in Australia with two of
the strangest of existing mammals, viz., the ornithorhynchus, or
duck-mole, and the echidna, or native hedge-hog. They are
oviparous or egg-laying monotremes, which burrow underground
and have points of affinity to birds and reptiles. Formerly they
were classed as marsupials. Let us add to them a new mar-
supial, which is also a monotreme, discovered only last year in
Central Australia. It has a small head and rounded snout,

1889.] GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NATURAL HISTORY. 25

shielded above by two horny plates, one behind the other. The
skin is not perforated for eyes, which consist merely of two tiny
black pigmented points. The tail is hairless like an opossum's,
and ends in a button. It is an insect-eater, and in general ap-
pearance resembles a cape mole. Its marsupial character is re-
vealed by a well-marked pouch bordering the lactiferous area,
and no* external genital organs are visible. None of the natives,
except one old woman, had ever seen such a creature before, and
if this specimen be not the very last one in existence, we may
safely say it belongs to a genus which is very nearly extinct.

The tapir, which now inhabits only South America and the
islands of Borneo and Sumatra, first appeared, like the marsupials,
in Europe in the early portion of the Eocene epoch. But it was
not until the following epoch — the miocene — that the tapir ap-
peared in North America. Here, however, it seems to have be-
come extinct, only to migrate anew from Europe and Asia at a
much later time, and it was this last migration which penetrated
into South America. We see, therefore, that the tapir, like the
marsupials, had once a far broader distribution, and that, like
them, it no longer exists in that part of the world where its re-
motest known ancestor first showed itself.

The lemurs, whose headquarters are now in the continental
Island of Madagascar, had also, like the tapirs and marsupials,
their ancestors in Europe : and here let us say that the best evi-
dence points to the northern hemisphere as the ancestral home of
all the orders of mammals. It seems at first puzzling that this
great island, a thousand miles long, whose extraordinary fauna
was evidently mainly derived from the neighboring continent of
Africa (the presence of mammals on islands is a clear indication
that the islands have been united to a continent), should yet be
wanting in all the larger and higher African forms. This curious
fact may be explained by the connection of Madagascar with the
mainland during early Eocene times, when lemurs, as fossil re-
mains testify, abounded in Europe, and when there was more
than one isthmus across the Mediterranean over which these pri-
mitive mammals made their way into Africa. But the several
land-bridges leading from Europe to the southern continent ap-
pear to have been submerged for a period, and when they rose
again above the water Madagascar's connection with Africa had
been broken, so that it was not possible for the higher mammals,
which now for the first time penetrated into Africa, to reach the
island. That during the epoch following the Eocene a part of
Africa was isolated from Asia and Europe by an uninterrupted

26 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NA TURAL HISTOR v. [Oct.,

sea from the Bay of Bengal to the Atlantic, is indicated by the
marine deposits found in the Sahara and scattered far to the
eastward through Arabia and Persia. It is possible that when
Madagascar formed part of the mainland of Africa it was also
united with India by a vast region now buried in the Indian
Ocean, and to which some naturalists have given the name of
Limuria.

But the better opinion is that Limuria never existed. It may
very well be, however, that in a former age several large islands —
Mr. Wallace says perhaps not inferior to Madagascar itself — did
extend from near Madagascar to Southern India.

These ancient islands may now be represented by Bourbon,
Mauritius, Rodriguez, and other smaller islets, as well as by the
extensive shoals and coral reefs such as always indicate subsi-
dence. Nor is it at all unlikely that these detached masses of
land, at present either entirely submerged or whose highest points
only rise above the water, were the means by which the ostrich-
like bird, aepyornis, now extinct, got to Madagascar from India.
For we know that birds of this family are good swimmers, the
rhea having been seen battling with the waves as it passed from
one headland to another off the coast of Patagonia. And this
reminds us of the singular toothed bird, herperornis regalis, from
the cretaceous beds of the West, which Professor Marsh has de-
clared to have been a carnivorous swimming ostrich.

In Madagascar the aepyornis found small but active carnivor-
ous animals to struggle against, and through its struggles with
these enemies, in which the smaller, weaker birds succumbed, its
size and its strength increased until in time it developed into a
most formidable bird. But in the other large islands, which Mr.
Wallace supposes to have existed, there were no carnivoras, no
enemies to molest the birds that settled on them ; and hence
through undisturbed repose and disuse of their wings there arose,
in the course of ages, a race of birds incapable of flight, viz., the
dodo and the solitaire. They were allied to the pigeons, and a
few of them still lingered on Mauritius, Bourbon, and Rodriguez
when these islands were settled by man about two centuries ago.
But the introduction of cats and dogs soon exterminated them.

It can hardly be doubted that had the supposed continent of
Limuria ever existed, such wingless birds would never have been
developed, for the first birds coming to Limuria would have
found enemies such as the aepyornis found in Madagascar, and
they would have had plenty of use for their wings. That the
dodo and solitaire were really abortions from a more perfect type

1889.] GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NATURAL HISTORY. 27

is shown by their having possessed a keeled sternum. Wallace
maintains that the use of wings on such islands as these birds
inhabited would have been absolutely prejudicial; for the birds
that flew up into trees to roost, or tried to fly across a river or
bay, would have run many chances of being blown out to sea,
especially during the hurricanes which sweep over the Indian
Ocean.

Let us here observe that analogous, though quite distinct,
forms of wingless birds exist in New Zealand, where carnivorous
enemies are equally wanting, although we know of no birds so
utterly helpless as the dodo and solitaire.

The ancestral ostrich type, like the marsupials, % tapirs, and
lemurs, at one time no doubt spread over a great part of Europe.
We know that ostrich remains have been found in the Eocene
deposits of Europe. It was probably exterminated in its birth-
place when the higher carnivora appeared. But in Africa, South
America, and Australia, where some of the birds had migrated,
they found no enemies, for the carnivorous animals had not yet
invaded those parts of the globe; and they were able to develop
into special forms adapted to surrounding conditions. But the
great size, strength, and speed of the ostrich, rhea, and emu were
later modifications, brought about by their struggles with the
enemies who in time came to molest them.

The cases of affinity between widely separated species of fresh-
water fishes, such as the shovel-nose sturgeons and a few others,
is to be attributed either to the survival of once wide- spread
groups, or to wide-spread marine types having become adapted
to a fresh-water existence ; while the comephorus of Lake Baikal
in Asia, so distinctly allied to the mackerels, and which Wallace
calls one of the special peculiarities of distribution, surely indi-
cates that marine fishes can become modified to a life in fresh
water.

The fact that the ceratodus exists to-day only in Australia,
while its remains have been found fossil in Europe and America,
might lead us to suppose a change in the distribution of land and
water. But a closer study of this extraordinary fish, which fur-
nishes the most marked instance of persistence in the whole range
of the vertebrates, affords good evidence that the ancestral mem-
bers of the genus were of an oceanic character.

Plants being longer lived specifically than animals, do not so
easily become extinct through changes in geography or climate,
and moreover, as we have said, their seeds are broadly scattered
by the wind and by birds. We therefore find few botanical

28 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NA TURAL HISTOR Y. [Oct.,

groups whose allies are separated from them by great distances.
The interesting fact that the plants peculiar to the Galapagos
Islands have a decided affinity to the plants of Mexico, Wallace
explains by the past history of the American continent; its sep-
aration by arms of the sea at Panama; and when the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans were united, a portion of the Gulf Stream
would very likely have swept into the Pacific and on its current
the seeds of these Mexican plants may have been floated to the
Galapagos.

The marked difference between the animal and plant life of
Florida and of the Bahamas, although separated by only fifty
miles, is to be explained by each having had a different history.
The fauna and flora of the Bahamas, so similar to that of Cuba,
is essentially West Indian, and descends from the time when these
islands, as well as nearly all the West Indian islands, as sound-
ings indicate, formed part of South America ; at which time there
was not much of Florida in existence. The difference between
the fauna of Lombok and that of Bali, in the Malay archipelago,
is owing to the fact that the Island of Bali, as the shallow sea
indicates, belongs to Asia and was peopled by Asiatic types;
while Lombok, only fifteen miles distant, belongs to the Austra-
lian region ; the boundary line between the two being a narrow
but very deep channel.

And now to repeat what we have already said, the present
distribution of animals and plants has been mainly brought about
by changes in the climate and geography of the earth. Nor
could there be a better evidence of climatic change than the fact
that at one time poplars, birches, hazels, elms, and the swamp-
cypress flourished in Grinnell Land within eight and one- quarter
degrees of the pole, as well as the discovery in Yorkshire, Eng-
land, of the remains of the hippopotamus. This period of warmth
was followed by a period of cold, called the Glacial epoch ; and
it was in order to escape from the deep snow and the glaciers
which were slowly burying Europe — and which, if astronomers
are correct, lasted, with mild intervals, for almost two hundred
thousand years — that the elephants, antelopes, and monkeys, which
then inhabited Europe, passed south into Africa over the several
land-bridges at that time uniting the two continents. Soundings
indicate that one of these land-bridges connected Italy with Tunis,
and another connected Gibraltar with Morocco. The former isth-
mus is to-day from three hundred to twelve hundred feet under
water, while the Mediterranean to the east and west of it falls
in some places to more than thirteen thousand feet The sub-

1889.] GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NATURAL HISTORY. 29

merged bank at the Straits of Gibraltar is now covered by one
thousand feet of water. When the glacial epoch finally came to
an end, probably between fifty and a hundred thousand years
ago, these land-bridges had disappeared, and the animals we have
mentioned were not able to return to their old haunts in Europe.
But we find to-day the remains of three extinct species of ele-
phants in Malta, two of which are pigmy species only five feet
high when adult; and strange to say, an ape still inhabits the
rock of Gibraltar, similar in species to the Barbary ape on the
opposite coast.

But the cold period was not confined to Europe. Marks of
glacial action may be seen in many parts of North America.
Mr. Thomas Belt, a good authority, believes that the huge
boulders, three thousand feet above the sea, near Ocotal, Nicara-
gua, were carried there by glaciers. Professor Hartt, in Geology
and Physical Geography of Brazil, has found glacial drift and
true moraines from Patagonia all through Brazil to Pernambuco;
while the most extensive plateau in South Africa bears unmis-
takable evidence of ice action. But if this be true — if, as the
author of The Glacial Period in North America maintains, the
cold was simultaneous in both hemispheres — we may well ask,
What became of animal and plant life ? where did it go to find a
refuge ? Let Mr. Belt answer :

" I believe that there was much extermination during the glacial period, that
many species and some genera — as, for instance, the American horse — did not
survive it, and that some of the great gaps that now exist in natural history were
then made, but that a refuge was found for many species on lands now below the
ocean, that were uncovered by the lowering of the sea caused by the immense
quantity of water that was locked up in frozen masses on the land."

Mr. Alfred Tylor, in the Geological Magazine, vol. ix., believes
that the ice cap of this period must have caused the sea to fall
at least six hundred feet. But Mr. Belt calculates that an ice cap
existing in both hemispheres at the same time, and reaching
almost to the equator, would have lowered the level of the sea
not less than two thousand feet. There are certainly many facts
tending to prove that at the height of the glacial epoch the land
all over the world stood much higher above the water than it
does now.

The Azores might then have formed the summit of an exten-
sive plain, stretching a thousand miles from east to west ; and
Cuba, Hayti, Jamaica, and the Bahamas would have been united
with each other, as well as joined to Yucatan and Venezuela.

30 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION IN NA TURAL HISTOR Y. [Oct.,

In the East Indies, too, many islands would have been formed
into one, and it was perhaps now that the tapir found his way
to Borneo and Sumatra. And in these regions, happily laid bare
by the sea, animals and plants may have been able to exist.
But by-and-by the ice age ended. And now, if we may believe
Mr. Belt, something awful happened that has never been forgot-
ten— a cataclysm of which a dim tradition has come down to us
through the ages.

Plato tells of Atlantis having been swallowed up in one day
and one night by the ocean ; and in the Tea Amoxtli, translated
by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, we read of a country over-
whelmed by the sea, out of which thunder and, lightning issued:
"The mountains were sinking and falling when the great Deluge
happened."

Is the story told by Plato in Europe and by the Indians in
America altogether to be despised ? Atlantis may well have been
the broad plain of the Azores, and the engulfed regions men-
tioned in the Tea Amoxtli may have been the uncovered lands
in the area now included in the West Indies. When the ancient
snow and the glaciers of thousands of years began to melt and
flow down off the continents, an enormous body of water must
have poured into the ocean, and many a low land, teeming with
life, may have been drowned in the almost world-wide inundation.
And the Flood may have been accompanied by numerous rend-
ings of the earth's crust, and by volcanic upheavals of unparalleled
fury, owing to the great transference of weight from the poles
toward the equator. Indeed, an actual change in the earth's cen-
tre of gravity may have occurred. But whether or no we agree
with Mr. Belt's views of what took place when the glacial epoch
ended, these views are not so improbable.

And now let us conclude by saying that if we accept the
latest results of geological and palaeontological science ; if we make
use of the key which the theory of descent with modification
furnishes us; and if we study the various ocean depths, which
may point to a former union of islands with continents, we shall
be able to solve very many of the puzzling problems of natural
history.

WILLIAM SETON.

1889.] THE FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. 31

THE FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN.

FOR about ten or twelve years past lamentable divisions among
Catholic publicists have existed in our country. Some were par-
tisans of the dynasty restored with Alphonso XII. ; others sided
with the Carlist cause, which since 1833 has been represented by
three Carloses in as many civil wars ; the latter were most im-
placably opposed to any compromise whatever with liberal prin-
ciples, while the former favored partial tolerance. As these con-
tentions found expression in the press and were warmly advocated
by either side, the cause of religion suffered serious detriment ;
the bonds of charity were loosened, main questions were left aside
for the sake of secondary ones, and the common foe improved
the opportunity of these discords to resume their assaults against
the pope, the church, and Christian truth.

This sad state of things occasioned general sorrow. There
was need of a powerful, authoritative, and energetic hand to re-
store unity, and a clear voice to call forth from the depths of
this ever faithful land those rich fountains of living water which
in times past had made Spain the privileged soil of Christianity.

With this end in view, the wise Bishop of Madrid conceived
the idea of a great Catholic congress, at which all the Catholics of
Spain should meet by their representatives, and in which they
would undertake in common the task of defending the interests
of religion, and agree upon the most efficacious means for the
moral reform of society.

The same prelate, with the assistance of competent persons,
drew up rules and regulations, which were published on the I5th
of last October. By these he convoked the congress for the 24th
of April of this year, and indicated the topics for its discussions.
In order to proceed methodically, six sections were established :
the first to discuss clerical matters and ecclesiastical censor-
ship ; the second, those of a scientific nature ; the third, those
relative to teaching ; the fourth, those connected with charity ; the
fifth, those relative to literature, arts, and the press ; and the sixth,
questions concerning the management of the congress, precedence,
reception, and attendance of its members. In accordance with

32 THE FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. [Oct.,

these rules, the routine of the congress was placed under the di-
rection of a central committee composed of members residing in
Madrid, and chosen by the bishop of that diocese, assisted by the
representatives of the other prelates of Spain and by the heads
of the different sections. Members of the congress were either
titular or honorary. The former were to take an active part in the
deliberations, and the latter ,to support and help the congress with
their personal or social influence, with donations, subscriptions,
and in any other possible manner.

Article XIX. of the Rules provided that during the public
sittings of the congress neither discussion nor controversy should
be allowed, and only those were permitted to speak who had ob-
tained from the central committee a right to the floor, in order
either to present some of the indicated scientific theses, or to read
s6*me memoir or a brief relation concerning some work or insti-
tution of general utility from a religious or a social standpoint.
General discussion was to be confined to the meetings of the sec-
tions or large committees hereafter described. In order, also, to
prevent the public sittings from being too lengthy, forty-five minutes
was the maximum of time allowed for the presenting of a thesis,
and fifteen minutes for the reading of a paper or statement. In
order to insure the doctrinal purity of matters laid before the con-
gress, all were .to be submitted beforehand to the inspection of
the central committee.

Such, briefly stated, was the organization of the congress
recently held in Madrid, and which will mark an epoch in the
religious history of Spain during the present century.. The fol-
lowing is a summary of the subjects for study and debate allot-
ted to each section.

The first had in charge to consider the most efficacious means
in our day for reviving and sustaining the Catholic faith in the
people; to ascertain what religious orders and associations are
best adapted to spread piety and secure the frequentation of the
sacraments among the laboring classes; to devise a permanent
system for the protection of the ministers of religion from ca-
lumny ; to find ways to spread a knowledge of and promote the
works of Peter Pence, the Propagation of the Faith, and the Holy
Childhood, also for providing for the needs of convents of nuns
and of poor churches in Spain ; for promoting the observance of"
feast days and of the precept of fasting, and to secure to the
dying the reception of the last sacraments ; to devise means for
practically obtaining for the church its rights in regard to ceme-
teries, and particularly of that of denying Christian burial in cases

1889.] THE FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. 33

that call for it ; to consider what are the duties of Catholics in
the matter of the temporal sovereignty and independence of the
Sovereign Pontiff, and the best way to fulfil them ; also the ex-
pediency of having a Catholic centre for the organization of con-
gresses, pilgrimages to Rome, the Holy Land, and the most
celebrated shrines in Spain ; the best way to encourage vocations
to the priesthood, secure maintenance of the clergy, and the ex-
emption of seminarians from military service ; and, finally, the ad-
vantages to be obtained by getting up every two years statistics
about the condition of the Catholic Church in other countries.

The second section had in charge the consideration of the
subject of science in its relation to the teachings of the church,
and of the refutation of certain theories which are in opposition
to the latter.

The third had in charge to formulate rules for the better de-
fining of the respective rights of church and state, and to demon-
strate in what respect those of the former are at present suffering
detriment ; to show how far rights of parents in the matter of
the education and instruction of their children are infringed upon
by existing laws, and what measures are needed to remedy ex-
isting wrongs in that respect; to consider the rights of Catholic
educational institutions and the supervisory power of the church
in educational matters, also the best way to give effect to
Article II. of the Concordat ; to determine what standard schools
under secular direction should have in order to entitle them to
be considered Catholic; what is needed for the promotion of
Catholic Sunday-schools and catechism classes; and for the Chris-
tian training of women desirous of following teaching or some
other professional career.

Section four had in charge to report on charitable institutions
at present existing in Spain ; on present obstacles in the way of
their prosperity and usefulness ; on the condition, moral and phy-
sical, of the laboring classes ; on institutions intended for their
benefit and advancement; on objections to the labor of women
and children in great centres of production, and on other matters
for the betterment of wage-earners ; and about the share of effort
which Spain is called upon to take for the abolition of slavery in
the interior of the African continent.

Section five had in charge to consider subjects connected with
the cultivation and development of literature and the stage ; with
archaeology and Christian art and architecture, and their applica-
tion to wants present and future ; proper religious music and the
Gregorian chant ; the duties of Catholic writers in regard to the

34 THE FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. [Oct.,

•church, with the evil effects resulting from giving publicity in the
press to duels, suicides, and the perpetration of great crimes;
the management of the Catholic press, and the means to be
adopted for its extension.

Section six had specially in charge needful arrangements rela-
tive to the holding of the congress.*

II.

As every Catholic periodical in Madrid is affiliated with some
political party or other, the bishop thought it proper that none
of them should be entrusted with the task of officially represent-
ing the congress as its organ in the Spanish press. He accord-
ingly started a paper for that special purpose under the title of
The Catholic Movement. The first number appeared on the 2 7th
of last October, containing an appeal to Spanish Catholics closing
with the following words : " The editors of The Catholic Move-
ment, which has been founded to expound the ideas of the con-
gress, remove suspicions, prejudices, and animosities, and to defend
the Papacy in its spiritual as well as its temporal power, enter-
tain the hope that they will have the active support of Spanish
Catholics in this creditable and very honorable undertaking. They
consequently hope that when the hour comes for the opening of the
congress, when they will see themselves amidst a large concourse
of people, congregated around our prelates, blessed by the Holy
Pontiff, all will be prompted to exclaim : ' Behold our beloved
Spain awakened from her lethargy, shaking off her indifference,
and crushing in her robust hands the viper of discord! We are
still worthy to be the favorite sons of the Mother of God ; we
once more show that we are Catholics by our own free choice ;
again we can claim to form the vanguard of that Christian army
which will free the Vatican prisoner from the power of his ene-
mies, and restore to him, besides his freedom, the entire and ma-
jestic splendor of his sacred dignity.' " In its first number
the organ began to publish the names of promoters of the con-
gress, and kept the list open until it had assembled, when it was
found to foot up fifteen hundred names, a greater number than
ever before recorded for any Catholic Congress held in Europe.

The central committee, as soon as organized, on the iQth of
December, forwarded to His Holiness Leo XIII. a message ending

* This summary does scant justice to the clearness, comprehensiveness, and thoroughness
with which the topics referred to were drawn up.

I889-J THE FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. 35

with these words : " We proclaim ourselves determined to unite
our efforts and desires with those of all the other faithful in the
Catholic world, in order to claim the independence of the illustri-
ous successor of St. Peter ; because we believe that there is not a
member of the great Christian family who can enjoy tranquillity
of conscience and security in the profession of his faith as long
as the beloved Father and the Supreme Pastor of that family re-
mains under duress, the vassal, of a foreign power." It is un-
necessary to state the welcome which the congress received from
the Holy See. The letter of Cardinal Rampolla to the Bishop of
Madrid, under date of August 31, is as enthusiastic and eulo-
gistic as could be desired. The Holy Father showed himself ex-
ceedingly pleased with the undertaking, and looked forward to great
benefits from it for Spain and for the church.

As regards the Spanish episcopate, they all adhered to the
plan of their eminent brother of Madrid, and in the " bulletins "
of their respective dioceses they advocated it and brought to it
numerous and enthusiastic adherents. The Bishop of Madrid ar-
ranged that the public sittings should be held in one of the finest
churches of this capital, which was properly prepared and deco-
rated ; the Municipal Council, despite its liberalistic character and
the affiliation of its members with Masonry, having co-operated in
the work of decoration, so great was the influence and prestige
of the venerable bishop. Finally, the central committee resolved
that a medal commemorative of the holding of the congress should
be struck ; and as this work was entrusted to a good artist, the
result is a beautiful work of art. On its face is an engraved
cross and two palms with artistically interwoven branches, and
this inscription: " Et fiat unum ovile et unus pastor"; and on
the reverse : " Primer Congreso Catolico national, celebrado en
Madrid, en la iglesia de S. Jeronimo, siendo pontifice S.S. Leon
XIII., en 24 de Abril, dt 1889."*

Having thus disposed of the preliminaries of the congress, we
must now take up the subject of its sessions, premising that the
result has been beyond the brightest hopes, and that the first
Catholic congress of Spain opens a new era of progress and
triumph for religion in our country. Having been convoked
under circumstances apparently unfavorable, it has really proved
a great success. A few months sufficed for all needed prepara-
tions, the bishop having himself superintended the entire under-
taking.

* First Catholic National Congress, held in Madrid, in the Chinch of St. Jerome, during
the Pontificate of Leo XIII., on the 24th of April, 1889.
VOL. L.— 3

36 Tin-: /'/A'.sy CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. [Oct.,

III.

The church in which the public sittings were held was deco-
rated with remarkable taste. The walls were hung with rich
tapestries and banners, and were adorned with the escutcheons ot
Spain and the Pope ; spacious galleries were erected ; the floors
were richly carpeted, and the ensemble was magnificent.

On the 23d of April, at three P.M., a preparatory session was
held under the presidency of the aged Cardinal Benavides, as-
sisted by thirteen prelates. In the morning a general Communion
was received by the titulary members, a solemn High Mass was
celebrated in the cathedral, at which the nuncio of His Holiness
officiated, and a sermon was preached on the importance and
aims of the congress by the secretary of the nuncio, Monsignor
Almavar, archpriest of the diocese. In the afternoon the session
was largely attended, there being more than one thousand mem-
bers present. It opened by sending a telegram to Rome ex-
pressing devotedness to His Holiness. After a brief speech ot
the venerable president, many enthusiastic despatches of adherence
were read. Then the hours for meeting and the duration of the
public ., sittings, eight in number, were settled, and the places
where the different sections were to meet selected. When these
and other minor details of organization were disposed of the ses-
sion closed with lively cheers for Spain and the Pope-King. Let
us now take up the account of the proceedings at the public
sessions.

IV.

The appeal ot the venerable Bishop of Madrid had been re-
sponded to by eminent writers ready to develop the theses sub-
mitted to the consideration of the congress. It was noticed with
pleasure that among them were learned professors of the official
universities, especially of that of Madrid. The papers submitted
were many and good. A committee appointed to that end se-
lected those which were to be read at the public sessions. The
aggregate of said writings form a monument of Christian science.
Theodicy, moral laws, political economy, civil law, history, litera-
ture, and art — in fact, human knowledge in a variety of branches —
furnished the material for excellent productions. At no time in
the present century have Catholic writers made so creditable a

1889.] THE FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OP SPAIN. 37

display of their learning. It has now been made evident that in
Spain Catholics have the lead as regards science and literature.
The unbelievers make more noise, display more activity, but they
prove shams in the end. To get at solid knowledge on all
manner of subjects, recourse must be had to learned Christian
men.

The congress held its first public session on the 24th, at three
P.M. Two hours in advance multitudes of persons belonging to the
most distinguished social circles began to repair to the church,
converted, as we have said, into a hall of assembly. More than two
thousand people were gathered together within its spacious walls.
The aspect of the platform was most imposing. Cardinal Bena-
vides presided, having eight bishops on each side of him. It
looked like a council of the church.

After the session had been opened, a numerous choir sang
without accompaniment the hymn of invocation to the Holy Ghost.
Then the cardinal-president delivered an eloquent speech, duly
explaining the importance and significance of the congress just
inaugurated, its eminently Catholic character, the results it was
expected to accomplish for the triumph of the church, for the re-
form of manners, the development of sound studies, and the glory
of Spain. Enthusiastic applause greeted the words of the illustri-
ous cardinal. In conformity with the decisions arrived at in the
preparatory meetings, that at each of the public sessions three
addresses were to be delivered and two papers read, the president
called ibr the opening address by Senor Sanchez de Castro, pro-
fessor of literature in the University of Madrid, who read a most
eloquent discourse on the theme, "The Roman Pontiff should
now and for ever possess temporal power as a guarantee for
the free discharge of his apostolic duties." The numerous audi-
ence listened with an enthusiasm which showed itself by con-
stant applause during the address, which abounded with historical
facts, profound thought, and incontrovertible arguments. It was
followed by another and an eminently practical one delivered by
the young Marquis of Solana, in which he set forth a permanent
system for the defence and vindication of priests and religious
orders against the hatred and calumnies to which they are sub-
jected. It is hardly necessary to add that the address met with
the applause which it so well deserved.

Of the* two papers read at this session, one was on the origin,
development, charitable work, and general condition of the Com-
munity of the Servants of Mary, by the Rev. P. Minguella, an
Augustinian ; the other was on the Congregation of the Brothers

38 SAT EST VIXISSE. [Oct.,,

of St. Teresa of Jesus, by Senor Olivares y Biac, vice-secretary
of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice. Both congregations are Span-
ish, of modern creation, have had a rapid growth, and are among
those which recommend themselves by the good results they ac~
complish. MANUEL PEREZ VILLAMIL.

Madrid, May i, 1889.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

SAT EST VIXISSE.

To have lived !
To have felt a quickened beat

Of the heart in spring;
To have known that something sweet

Moved the birds to sing;
To have seen dim waves of heat
O'er a field of green retreat !

II.

To have found the hiding-place

Of the wild-wood rose; •

To have held, a little space,
Any flower that grows ;

To have known a moment's grace

Looking in a loved one's face.

To have lived, to have lived !

III.

Still, doth it suffice alone
That the world is fair ?
O'er what fields have these hands sown ?

Are they gold or bare ?
And though all the flowers are flown,
If to God my heart is known, .

Then shall I in truth be shown
How to live, why to live !

MEREDITH NICHOLSON.

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVAL'S Louis QUATORZE. 39

MONSIEUR DUVAL'S LOUIS QUATORZE.

THE 'lusty negro hucksters, of beggarly rags and imperial gait,
who swarm the streets of an old Southern town, saw a pretty
sight early one morning, when they paused in front of a small
shop to ask coaxingly, " Any nice berries dis mornin', my
missus ?" It was a slender girl, dark-haired and dark-eyed, the
•creamy tint of her clear skin set off by a gown of dull blue stuff
and a black velvet ribbon around her throat. She stood on tip-
toe to reach a lump of sugar to her canary overhead, and, with
red lips puckered, whistled clearly and melodiously several bars
of an operetta, to which the bird listened with his head on one
side and the depreciating air of a professional critic. Then she
looked up and down the narrow, winding colonial Main Street,
where the sun was just gilding the slanting roofs of shingle oppo-
site. An unusually energetic native, hose in hand, was watering
the ground in front of his place. The odor of moist soil came
to her with a breath of violets from a fruiterer's stand near by.
" Ah, the delicious air !" she said with a half-sigh of content-
ment; "I am glad we came here." In tKe meantime an elderly
and obtrusively bow-legged darky had taken down the shutters
from the one window, and there was disclosed a wonderful assort-
ment of curls, wigs, and toys for the head, with an array of pins
and poking-sticks of steel such as Autolycus never dreamed of.
The crash of a falling shutter brought the girl's thoughts back to
practical matters, and, with smiling response to the negro's " Mornin',
missus," she tied on a white apron with a charming air of busi-
ness, and presently disappeared, seeming to take with her half of
the delicious freshness and fragrance of the Southern spring-time.

If Hudson Longwood, clerk in a wholesale hardware store,
had not slept too late this same morning, he would not have
needed to depart from the hereditary, leisurely step which usually
took him, with due punctuality, into the uncertain light of his
employer's countenance. Nor would he, in his unwonted haste,
have nearly upset a lady into the gutter, and, just escaping this,
have carromed into the arms of a man who stood half-in and
half-out of a door-way on Main Street. " I beg your pardon," said
he with that fulness of courtesy which in an age of haste has

40 MONSIEUR DUVAL'S Louis QUATORZE. [Oct.,

come to be thought provincial. The man, not answering, reeled
from the shock and fell slowly backward. Longwood hastily
caught him, and was then conscious of a velvet coat sleeve and
a curious hardness and heaviness, and, looking into his victim's
face, encountered only the unresentful stare of a pair of glass
eyes gazing fixedly out of a waxen face. The young fellow's
ears crimsoned warmly with the instant confusion of a man with-
out humor at such a mistake. But no fleering, gibing youth of
his acquaintance chanced to be passing; and inside the shop was
no one more formidable than a dark-haired girl, who stepped
quietly from behind the counter and, without a trace of the
smile which he dreaded, helped him to steady the assaulted
effigy on its mysterious foundation. " There is no harm," she
assured him, in very pretty English, with just the faintest foreign
accent. " It is only papa's Louis Quatorze. He has often the
compliment of being mistaken for a person."

Ordinarily the youth's very practical mind would have re-
volted at this statement, in view of the dummy's preposterous-
simper, amazing curled and powdered wig, embroidered coat, and
gilt snuff-box, held stiffly forth in one waxen hand. But how
could he doubt any fact so soothing to awkwardness, and so sen-
sibly cooling to overheated ears ? Besides, he had but a moment
for hurried excuses. Such other incoherencies as: " Pretty girl";
"What shop is that? — must be a hair-dresser's"; "Who the deuce
is 'papa'? and why does he call his dummy 'Louis Quatorze'?"
— may have afterwards winged their slow way through his mind,
but were soon put to flight by a busy day with Steele & Co.

It was only when strolling homeward in the dusk, scissors
and knives, shovels and tongs, weights, chains, and similar ob-
jects of art well off his mind, that the morning's incident recurred
to him. " A. Duval, Artist," he read from the hair-dresser's sign.
" What does ' artist ' mean — a barber ? Why, that's Hatton's
place, that's been vacant so long " ; with that intimate knowledge
of others' affairs, and altruistic interest in them, less common in
large cities or where the thinker's mind is devoted to generalities,
glittering or otherwise. " I heard he had a stranger, a little
Frenchman, for a tenant. I guess he'll get the rent of the
off months out of him. Ah! here's my friend, the dummy."
But Louis Quatorze's glassy stare steadily ignored any previous
scuffling acquaintance with him, and likewise the present atten-
tions of various dusky little shoe-blacks.

"Das Mass Linkum w'en he git ole," said one, "an' he hair
dun tu'n w'ite."

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVAL'S Louis QUATORZE. 41

"You fool, boy!" was the retort courteous of another; " das
a juke! Tis on'y a juke kin hab all dat gole on de coat." If
they had confined themselves to admiring comments all would
have been well, but shortly one of them laid a sacrilegious
hand on the ribbon of no particular order worn by Monsieur
Duval's anointed ; and out came a small man with white hair
and mustache, and fierce black eyes, who swore thrice, emphati-
cally, in his own language. Over his shoulder looked another
pair of eyes, a little anxious but half-laughing. Longwood,
turning suddenly on his heel, dispersed the shoe-blacks by point-
ing out an approaching policeman, and went in.

" A thousand thanks, sir," said Monsieur Duval, effusively.
" I find them fatiguing, the street-boys here, the small negroes.
They lay hands on my admirable figure, my Louis Quatorze."

" It might be well," said Longwood, practically, " to take the
dummy in. Then your customers could admire it as well, and it
would not bother you with a crowd of boys. It's rather uncom-
mon here — so very fine, you know."

" He is fine," assented M. Duval ; " he is of inestimable value.
He has been with me for years. All the way from France he
has come. If you think* he will be safer in-doors I shall keep
him here," clearing out an available corner for him. " Monsieur
is most kind. Can I do anything for him ?"

" Some — some hair-pins, I believe," vaguely.

" Josephine, my daughter, some hair-pins for monsieur."

Longwood now, with what he thought to be deep artfulness,
appeared for the first time to perceive the young girl. On her
part she met his glance with sudden recognition, and the gleam
of amusement she had carefully avoided showing in the morning.
Spreading before 'him various little packages, taken from a glass
case, she said, smiling :

" Your interest in Louis, monsieur, is doubtless in amends for
your attempt at revolution this morning. You would not see the
sovereign insulted whom you tried to depose." Her little jest
was wasted on a rather obtuse youth ; but her pretty smile was
not so, nor her soft voice, nor the graceful turn of her head.
His unconsciously intent look caused her to assume a certain for-
mality.

" Will these suit monsieur ?"

" Oh ! — ah ! — quite well," stammering ; " and if they should
not please — ahem ! — my mother?"

" They may be exchanged, without doubt."

Monsieur Duval, who had now finished arranging Louis

42 MONSIEUR DUVAI^S Louis QUATORZE. [Oct.,

Quatorze to his satisfaction, stepped back with an enthusiastic :
" My faith ! he looks well there in the shady corner. His
Majesty is in no one's way now. It is an improvement, on the
word of Aristide Fran£ois Marie Duval !" His daughter smiled
in sympathy, and the young fellow lingered an instant, Whatever
may have been his idea on entering, it was, in some subtle way,
clear to him now that circumstances here were not favorable to
what he would have vaguely and ingenuously termed " a good
time " with a pretty saleswoman. If he had needed further proof
of this, it was given in the courteous bow which seemed to dis-
miss him.

When he reached his home the family tea was progressing ; a
meal which in this most conservative of towns sturdily holds its
own against the late dinner of the rest of the world. His mother
looked up at him from the head of the table with pitying eyes,
and a habitual nervous touch of her thin hands to the widow's
cap she wore. " At work until now, my poor boy ? How tired
you must be ! I suppose it is too much to expect of a Mr.
Steele that he should have any softness for others." This with
the restrained contempt she showed, in his absence, for her son's
employer. It seemed to her a cruel injustice of Fate that this
'* nobody from nowhere," as she had described him to an intimate,
a mere capitalist, an English mechanic originally, should hold in
thrall, for a consideration, the son of Colonel Longwood, the
grandson of Judge Longwood.

" My dear Sue," she had said that very day to the same in-
timate, who was Hudson's godmother, " I never fully realized the
contrast between former days and these until I went once into
the place where Hudson works. There I found my poor boy " —
her voice breaking and large tears suffusing her* eyes — " my son,
Hudson, on his knees before an iron machine, rubbing it " — very
slowly and solemnly — "with an oiled cloth ! Can you imagine it,
Sue ?"

" Maria, I can imagine it," replied Sue, divided between sym-
pathy and a desire to laugh. " But Henry has a better place,
you said ?"

" Henry has just obtained one of the city offices. It seems
too bad when those places go to people one never heard of be-
fore the war. Our own people, who have nothing now, ought to
be provided for."

" I would not say so, if I were you," dryly commented Sue,
otherwise Mrs. Willard. She had not an exalted opinion ot
Henry's parts, and she had lived now for some years in a metro-

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVAL'S Louis QUATORZE. 43

polis, where life is viewed from a broader plane than in her girl-
hood's home.

" One must not even talk freely these days, it seems," sighed
Mrs. Longwood ; " we did not care, nor even know, before the
war."

" My dear Maria," interrupted Sue briskly, " you remember
I was here for some time after the close of the war, and can
bear witness to much heroism in endurance. But, after all, the
present is the present. I am told," with a laugh, " that Sarah
Hawkins remarked the other day that she had had nothing to
eat since the war, and you know she is very, very stout."

Echoes of this dialogue may have been still sounding in Mrs.
Longwood's ears ; for she said, absently, as she handed Hudson his
second ,cup of tea : " I am sure I have never had cause to doubt
the existence of Providence ; for never has a Longwood, no, nor
a Hudson, wanted for bread !" The inferential humor of this,
that the mere commonplace starvation of Smith or Jones should
never tempt one to agnosticism, was unperceived by her sons,
who, after a reverential pause of adhesion to her sentiment, went
on with their discussion of country sports. Henry's animated ac-
count of a recent visit to an uncle's small Yiver plantation, the
only one left in the family, was heard with the interest common
to men who have spent much of their boyhood in the country.
The elder brother was, in contrast to Hudson, a very rapid
talker, running his words together ; which, with local peculiarities
of pronunciation, such as "I wa'nt " for " was not"; "wite" for
"white"; "cyart"; "gyarden," and " gyirl," made it sometimes
difficult for a stranger to follow him. Presently he went out ;
the mother moved away about some household task, and Hudson
was left alone.

He walked restlessly in and out through the high-ceilinged,
bare-looking rooms. The house, large and old, was built in the
colonial style, a wide hall-way through the middle, broad
piazzas to the south. The outer surroundings looked better by
night than by day ; the street, once fashionable, being very
narrow and dark, and all around having sprung up dingy shanties
and corner bar-rooms ; from the water-side, not far off, coming
often loud, quarrelling voices and odors of fish. In-doors, though
carefully neat, the household gods were few in number, and
noticeably ancient and forlorn. There was some handsome oak
panelling in the parlor, which held further a few well-worn pieces
of horse-hair covered furniture ; a pair of heavy silver candle-
sticks, and some bits of finely carved ivory, overlooked probably

44 MONSIEUR DUVAL'S Louis QUATOKZE. [Oct.,

by an invading army when collecting souvenirs of its Southern
trip. A mahogany arm-chair, in which Lafayette once sat when
visiting an ancestor, was still in evidence ; as well as several fam-
ily portraits, one with a bayonet-thrust in the corner, and some
fine miniatures smiling, indifferent to the family vicissitudes.
There had been trying times when, though deeming it sacrilege,
Mrs. Longwood would almost have treated these last in Charles
Surface's reckless fashion, Sut here they were still ; and here were
the old judge's books, unopened now by any one. Hudson
thought, in an undecided way, of countless relatives whom it was
his wont to visit evenings; and then, bringing a paper- covered
volume from a table, sat down beside the student-lamp. It was
some tale, perhaps by the " Duchess" or " Ouida," as those ladies
shared between them what admiration a very practical mind had
to bestow on literature. He presently leaned back, thinking idly
of his mother's remark about Providence. As far as he was con-
cerned, the past glories of his house were merely a fairy tale,
having come to an end before he was born. He did not remem-
ber his distinguished grandfather, nor his less distinguished father,
or, indeed, any one belonging to him, whose name might be used
to conjure by. Since his birth, shortly before his father's death,
black Care, before a clandestine visitor, had become an open and
permanent dweller in the house. The handsome coach-horses,
with plantations, slaves, plate and china, had long ago trotted
away into nothingness. So had — strange, or possibly not strange,
to relate — all taste, ambition, or culture beyond the ordinary. But
he had kept through a long term of hard work and self-denial a
fine tsimplicity, a single-minded honesty, a truthful directness, far
more than ordinary. He took his square, sturdy form and pleas-
ant, homely face across the moonlit piazza, down the steps lead-
ing into the garden. Here was contained all the poetry he knew
or cared for in life. This blooming, luxuriant, old-fashioned
Southern garden was his care, and his alone. It was he who dug
and weeded, planted and watered, and reserved to himself the
right of giving. He carefully cut now a glowing red rose, the
first on the tree; then called across the low fence to a negro
passing :

"That you, Abram ? "

"Das me, Mass Hudson, sah ; I jess comin', praise Gord!
from de class-meetin'."

" What are you doing now ? "

" I an't doin' nuttin', sah — dat's to say, studdy. I does odd
jobs fur a French gemman, Mistah Joowal, on Main Street. I

1889.] MONSIEUR D OVAL'S Locis QUATORZE. 45

has de rheumaticks a good deal, Mass Hudson, an' my jugglm*
wein's werry bad ; but de Lord '11 purwide."

" He'll provide something strong for you, Abram, if you play
off on Mr. Duval any of those tricks I've heard of from my
uncle/'

" Now, Mass Hudson, enty Mass Robert know, an' enty you
know, dat de grace ob de Lawd hab straighten up my hah't — et
he an't straighten my legs," in a lower tone.

" Keep straight, then ; and here's a dime for tobacco."

He thought, as he went upward with his fragrant rose, that
in a day or two he might exchange the package of hair-pins still
in his pocket.

II.

It was, in fact, but three days after that Josephine Duval,
singing softly to herself behind a lace curtain in the rear of the
shop, while she manipulated, mermaid-wise, locks of golden hair,
not growing, however, on her own shapely head, looked up at
sound of a footstep, and murmured : " It is the Frondeur."

She pushed aside her little wooden frame, and stepped forward,
politely attentive.

"The hair-pins I bought, Miss — Miss Duval, did not suit my
mother. She likes them longer."

" But certainly," producing others.

" She asked me to get her a comb, you know — a comb for
her back hair." He usually spoke the truth, but finding the de-
scent to Avernus delightfully easy, this unhappy youth was pre-
paring some other invention when, by good fortune, his eye fell
on Louis Quatorze.

" Ah ! does your father like the new place for him better ? "

" For Louis Quatorze ? But yes, thanks. The little blacks
give no trouble now. I found them droll, but he did not. It
surprises you, perhaps," with hesitation, "his care for that
figure? "

Then responding to his interested look : " He brought it with
him from Paris when we came to New York. It was all he had
left from his beautiful place, on the Rue St. Anne, after the
Communists smashed everything. He is Royalist, you know,
and had his clientele in the Faubourg, and he thought this
figure had the grand air, and so — and so," half-laughing, " we
have fallen into the way of calling it Louis Quatorze."

" From New York ? You thought you might do better here ? "
tentatively, leaning on the glass case.

46 MONSIEUR DUTAL'S Louis QUATORZE. [Oct.,

" Oh ! for example, no. But my father was hurt at the
trenches, and it left his chest weak, and the early spring in the
North was so bad for him, the doctor said. He did well there,
and I have been at the convent in Canada always. But he is
old now, my father, and must rest; and I learn affairs to be —
I should say — a business woman."

" You are only two ? You will not be lonely ; or have you
friends here ? " His curiosity had but the masculine justification
of her sweet voice, and dark eyes, and curved lips.

"It is lonely sometimes," with a wistful note. "We know
no one, and I miss my friends so much, and papa his. But,"
cheerfully, "we have each other." Then bethinking herself that
this was a stranger, and not knowing or accepting his justifica-
tion, she handed him his purchase with her little conventual
bow.

An excuse could readily be found for returning soon again.
He discovered as an interesting historical fact that his mother
had never worn a " back-comb " in her life. It must be ex-
changed. Josephine suggested some tortoise-shell pins, which
proved to be somewhat higher in price.

" I would rather not go over that price. I am economical, you
see," with a smile ; adding, with entire simplicity, " I am obliged
to be."

The girl quietly sought another trifle; but looking for the
first time with something like interest at the young fellow she
had heretofore found ugly, and even a little common in his gray
business suit, she saw that his teeth at least were beautifully
white and even, his eyes frankly respectful, and his figure well
knit, if undersized.

(< You see," he said, moved in unwonted fashion to talk
freely, " I must practise economy for the people before me, who
did not have to do it. You have studied, of course, about our
civil war at the convent ? "

" Certainly — yes."

" Well, my people were planters, and I was born after slaves
and all were gone, and it has been hard times here ever since."

" But we are in sympathy ! " she cried, opening wide her
brown eyes. " It is just alike, the case. Papa, come here. It
is Mr.?" — " Longwood " — " Longwood will interest you."

" A. Duval, Artist," had been reading his paper behind the
lace curtain, but his soul was yearning for a sociable chat, as
his daughter knew, and he came promptly.

" But it is precisely alike ! " he exclaimed, with enthusiasm,

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVAL s Louis QUATORZE. 47

when he understood the subject. " Our fortunes have been the
same. Just as the enemy ruined your plantations, houses and
all, so was my beautiful studio on the Rue St. Anne destroyed
by those beasts of Communists. Ah, monsieur! if you could
have seen my plate-glass windows shattered on the pavement,
and my flasks of hair- tonic, composed by myself! I have sold
it to princesses ! We are, truly, companions in misfortune ! "

Hudson Longwood was sensible of much mental confusion as
the old Frenchman stated this conviction. He had been edu-
cated to believe the material ruin of the house of Longwood
and its like a stupendous fact unparalleled in history, except,
perhaps, by the fall of the Roman Empire, or the undoing ot
the royal line of Stuart. And here was a French hair-dresser
claiming brotherhood in misfortune ! If it was true that to have
been rich and proportionately influential, and to become poor and
so obscure, was as momentously unpleasant for one human being
as for another, then certain of his ideas would require readjust-
ment. He wondered what his mother would think of these wild
and whirling words ; then his eyes falling on Josephine's piquant,
softly-tinted face, he decided not to mention the subject to his
mother for the present. Abram was now putting up the shutters
for the night, but Monsieur Duval, enchanted to have an auditor,
fitted by Lachesis herself to sympathize with him, suggested :
" Fifine, my dove, perhaps monsieur would try a cigar with me
in our little parlor."

The young man, with a poetic lightening which amazed him-
self, thought this " dove " more like a brilliant humming-bird, or
one of his own fresh, dewy, deep red roses.

"I do not smoke," he replied, "but should enjoy a little more
talk with Mr. Duval."

"You do not smoke? That is well; it is a bad habit," said
the Frenchman, with the common easy approval of other people's
abstinence from one's own small vices.

" Not because it is injurious," explained Longwood, unfor-
tunately candid, as his mother considered him, " but I never had
pocket-money as a boy to buy tobacco, and now I do not care
for it."

" Very right, very right," said M. Duval, who had not heard
him as he led the way through the tiny workshop, behind the
curtain, into a small parlor in the rear, Josephine following after
a few moments.

" How very pretty ! " thought Longwood, entering the room,
small, it is true, but very cheerful and cozy, after the large bare

48 MONSIKTK DITALS Locis QUATORZE. [Oct.,

rooms to which he was accustomed. An engraving or two and
a few aquarelles by Josephine herself brightened the walls. Her
little sewing-table stood in one corner, her father's smoking-stand
in another. The canary in his shining cage reposed after a day
of song ; a knot of violets stood in the long-stemmed vase under
a marble Psyche, poised for flight on a bracket

"You have a garden?" he asked Josephine.

" What you see," smilingly, pointing through the glass
door, which opened on a square of grass with scarcely room for
the traditional cat, and shaded by one large fig-tree. "Oh! the
violets? I buy them sometimes from the fruiterer."

That, at least, he thought, might be remedied. She took out
from a tiny buffet a foreign-looking straw-covered bottle of some
very light wine, which, with glasses, she placed where her father
could help himself and his guest. The evening was mild, and
she wore a gown of creamy paleness and a touch of golden yel-
low at the throat. Her father talked about Paris and New York,
Prussian and Communist; but what man with eyes in his head
could listen with Josephine Duval moving about the room ! As
she sat down afterwards to some bit of work, Abram came in,
reporting lights out in front and all closed. He was making
his usual shuffling bow of good-night when Longwood asked
him:

" Ever show Mr. Duval how you can jig, Abram ? He used
to be the best jig-dancer on my uncle's place once, Miss Duval."

" Mass Hudson," solemnly, " dem dar was my undegin'rate
days. I an't bin shake a foot in de dance sence tree years nex'
Chrismus ; sence I bin jine de chu'ch, all my singin' an'
shoutin's fur de Lord. 'Tis mighty ha'd to keep outer de deb-
bil's claws when you goes caperin' an' jiggin'."

" I did not know the devil was fond of jigging," said M.
Duval.

" He am fond, Mistah Joowal, sah, ob ebbry t'ing dat jubi-
lates, kase den you forgits de Lawd, an' in two shakes he got
you ! "

In a few minutes after his disappearance there came from
an African church near by sounds of congregational singing.

" I can distinguish Abram's voice," said Josephine. " It is
wonderfully rich and mellow. I think he leads. He seems very
pious."

" He may be now," replied Longwood, dubiously, " but I
ought to tell you that his plantation record was not a very good
one. He is quite a fearful liar; I know that myself."

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVAL'S Louis QUATORZE. 49

" Ah, well!" said Josephine, "he has doubtless changed."

M. Duval spoke of something else ; he was not interested in
the peculiarities of the African race, and Longwood found him-
self giving animated accounts of boating, swimming, shooting ad-
ventures in the country, making himself a little the hero ot
these events, as Othello before him was tempted to do, by a
pair of eyes softly interested, and slim hands lying idly on their
work.

"Will you sing for us, my daughter?" asked M. Duval
later on ; and the girl put the broad ribbon of her guitar
about her neck, and sang two or three French and English
ballads.

"Was not the last Spanish? You learned that at the con-
vent, too ? " asked Longwood.

"Not at the convent; from a — a friend in New York," with a
faint blush he did not perceive. This was a memorable evening
for Longwood. Here shone on him picturesqueness, grace, color,
glimpses of foreign lands, and such things as he had never known
or even dreamed of in his life, spent within a radius of twenty
miles. He thought of his cousins and other girls he knew, pale,
sweet-faced, super-refined in manner, narrow in views, and con-
trasted them with this one, so softly bright and delicately glow-
ing. He had never realized before how gray and monotonous
were his days. What had his ancestors done for him, or what
would they do ?

When he arose to go it was remembered that he had left his
umbrella in the shop, and Josephine lighted a candle to lead the
way there. While he sought the umbrella, she carelessly rested
her hand with the candlestick on the shoulder of Louis Quatorze,
whose glories were now hidden under a long gray duster.

"He looks like a ghost," said Longwood, and in the same
breath called out, too late : " Take care, Miss Duval ! " for the
candle-flame, held too close to Louis' wig, had set fire to the dry
curled hair, and it was quickly in a blaze ; the lace of her sleeve
caught from that, and a bit of burning hair falling on her skirt still
farther threatened her. At one bound Longwood had torn the
covering from the dummy, had thrown it around her, and, holding
her closely in his arms, was crushing out the flame of her sleeve.
Was it a lifetime or a minute he held her so, both hearts beating
fast, her startled, wide-opened eyes looking into his ? Monsieur
Duval, whom the sudden blaze had attracted, was here now with
a wild —

"Ah, heaven! my Louis — he will melt! " And tearing off the

50 MONSIEUR DUVAL' s Louis QUATOK/.E. [Oct.,

still burning wig, trampled it under foot. " It was, alas! his
best," he sai^l, mournfully. " But you, my daughter, what is it?
are you hurt? "

" More frightened than hurt," she answered, with an attempt
at lightness. In fact the hurt was slight, as was seen in the
other lighted room, there being only a few blisters on the round,
white arm, from which the tatters of sleeve fell back. She
was curiously white though, and her eyelids drooped. " It is a
mere nothing," she went on, smiling with pale lips, "but your
hand—"

" Can wait," said Longwood, briefly, nor would he allow it to
be looked at until the arm was duly bandaged ;' then his rather
badly burned hand was tended with gentle ministrations — sweetly
smelling rose-glycerine, cool strips of linen, little touches of soft
fingers, pitying words ; on the whole, a painful burn was a thing
to be desired.

He was already in the side-passage leading to the street, after
saying good-night, when Josephine called out : " One moment,
Mr. Longwood ; would it trouble you to mail this letter for me
on your way ? " handing a letter, stamped and addressed.

" Our friend Mr. Delgado, papa," she said, as though with inten-
tion, " will think we are neglecting him — only writing once a week."

"Delgado — who is Delgado?" pondered Longwood, passing
through the silent, dimly-lighted streets. " It's a confounded ugly
name, anyhow," he concluded with manifest injustice.

While this young Columbus carried on his discoveries in a
fair new land, other adventurous spirits would fain have done the
same. A passing glimpse, an apparently unnoticed chance word
of admiration from sister or aunt, had incited novel needs in
, shopping on the part of young men whose daily walk took
them past the sign of " A. Duval, Artist." With meagre results,
for the most part, apparently; for the Lothario of the hardware
establishment remarked one afternoon some weeks later:

" She's a beauty — that little Duval, you know, fellows ; but
seems a little stiff — distant, you know. Sort of trick, I suppose,
to draw you on."

"You find her distant ?" said Longwood, slowly; "she has, no
doubt, the reserve of a lady."

" A hair-dresser's daughter ? " replied Lothario, raising his
eyebrows.

" We are small clerks ourselves," replied Longwood, calmly ;
" and let me tell you, Johnstone, that the young lady in question
has a better education and manner, generally, than any of us."

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVA£S Louis QUATORZE. 51

"Very fine girl, no doubt, as you seem to know," mean-
ingly.

" I was presented by a friend of the family," rejoined Long-
wood, with frowning directness. The others stared, but said no
more, Longwood's dislike to a careless discussion of refined
women's names being known, and his muscle highly respected.
He found Mrs, Willard with his mother that evening.

"Well, Hudson," cried his godmother, fixing keen eyes upon
him, " why are you neglecting me so this visit ? You used to
like being with me."

" My dear Sue," answered his mother for him, " he must in-
tend his flowers to represent him, then. I never saw him get up
so early in the mornings to arrange bouquets as since you
came."

" His flowers are certainly a" credit to him," was all Mrs.
Willard said to this. The merry glance of intelligence she
directed towards Hudson proved her a woman of discretion.
She had had flowers from him but once. "You used to walk
home with me from church, too," she went on, diverging, " and
now I only see you on Sundays when I pass the Catholic
church."

" The Catholic church ! " exclaimed his mother, in horror.
The Episcopal body in this venerable city was eminently old-
fashioned in its ways. It called itself Protestant, and continued
to protest against forms and ceremonies violently rejected a mat-
ter of two or three centuries ago. It remembered that Lot's
wife, hankering after what she had left, repented it ever afterward
in briny tears. So any weak fancy on the part of younger, more
frivolous members for pictures, crosses, incense, matins, and the
like was gravely discouraged. To read privately about the Rev-
erend Machonochie was all the comfort of progressive young
" churchwomen " in this place. So Mrs. Longwood inquired
anxiously :

" Is it wise for you, Hudson, to expose yourself to such an in-
fluence ? "

" I don't know," he said simply. " I don't go in." Then,
with unfilial thought of teasing, he said : " But you ought to like
that church, mother; you admire everything old and firm in its
ways."

She was still protesting when he started with Mrs. Willard
for her hotel. When they were safely in the street the latter
began, abruptly :

" I know, Hudson, that some pretty girl is causing your neg-

VOL. L.— 4

52 MONSIEUR DUVAL' s Louis QUATORZE. [Oct.,

lect of me. I suppose I may not venture to inquire her name,
or whether I know her people ? "

" Aunt Sue," he answered, with a directness which took her
by surprise, half-jesting as she was, " it is a girl, but you do
not know her people at all. She is more to me than all the
world beside ; but it is of no use," with a change of tone, " for
she told me only to-day that she is to marry some one else."

III.

Being unendowed in either way, it seems easier for a man to
acquire an enemy than a friend ; a single chance word or deed
sufficing often for the one, while the hooks of steel necessary to
grapple the other are liable either to miss their mark, or to sub-
sequent rust or breakage. Certainly, Monsieur Duval, a well-
meaning, gregarious soul, had during several weeks' residence in
town made no intimate acquaintance, save his pastor, unless Long-
wood might be accounted his. On the other hand, he had by
some stray reflection on Bismarck converted his next-door neigh-
bor, a German jeweller, into a stolid but implacable foe. To this
Monsieur Duval was profoundly indifferent, holding the German
nation as less than the dust beneath his feet, notwithstanding its
chance successes.

" I see," said he, one evening, with some unchristian satisfac-
tion, glancing up from his paper over his glasses, " that animal
of a Mollenhauer has been robbed. His store was broken into
last night"

His daughter did not hear him, for Longwood was just then
entering, after a length of absence. Since the morning she had
told him the fact, merely, of her engagement to Mr. Delgado, a
retired tobacconist in New York, he had exerted sufficient self-
control to stay away ; but to-day, all in a moment, he had re-
marked to himself, quite unnecessarily : "I am just a man — not
an angel, and I must see her." So here he was now, with his
hands full of roses.

" I have much missed — your flowers," she admitted, smiling
enchantingly over the rose-blooms before she buried her face in
their fragrant coolness.

" It was stupid in me — I might have sent — I have been so
busy," he stammered.

" I would be sorry for Mollenhauer," pursued M. Duval, eyes
and mind still fixed on his paper, " but a little trouble may do
him good."

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVAL: s Louis QUATORZE-. 53

" I did not properly congratulate you on your engagement
the day you mentioned it, Miss Duval," Longwood said, in a
low tone and stiffly, as one recites a lesson. " Let me do so
now."

"Thank you many times," murmured she, apparently intent
on counting her roses.

"Yes, it may do him good," repeated Monsieur Duval, going
behind the screen in pursuit of a match.

" You are very kind to take an interest," said Josephine, rais-
ing her eyes now ; then, perceiving that some rash speech was
trembling on Longwood's lips, she turned hurriedly to take some-
thing out of a drawer. " It is the picture of Monsieur Delgado "
— holding it out. Longwood took the photograph, glanced at it,
then laying it down, looked at her steadily.

"Do you mean to tell me," he asked, in a tone low but full
of indignation, " that that is the man ? "

"Why?" she faltered, "he is fine-looking, I think."

" But he is old, old — as old as your father."

" Not quite," weakly.

" Can you tell me, on your honor, that you love that old
man ? "

" It is no question of love," she answered, constrained by his
vehemence. " Mr. Delgado is wealthy, a friend of my father's,
and very good and kind. He can take care of me. It was ar-
ranged while I was at the Convent."

" And you are so tame, or so cold, you will marry that old
man without caring for him ? " still at white heat.

" Mr. Longwood ! " Suddenly recalled to her dignity, she
threw back her graceful head proudly : " How do you dare — what
right have you to speak so to me ? "

" A right that you know very well — the right that comes from
loving you myself with all my heart and strength ; and Josephine,
I do believe — " Just at this point M. Duval returned through
the rear door, while through the front came Mr. Mollenhauer and
a policenlan. The German looked apoplectic. He seemed to see
no one but M. Duval, whom he abruptly addressed : " I vas robt
last night, as berhaps you know, Mistair Duval! Dey hafe took
diamants and vatches. My cook haf seen a man get ofer your
fence pefore de morning sunshine, und dinks he come not off your
yart again. I don'd say notings against nopoddy, but I must look
for my diamants."

Monsieur Duval's fierce wrath on discovering that this meant
a search-warrant for his premises was as nothing to Longwood

54 MONSIEUR DUVAL'S Louis QUATORZE. [Oct.,

beside Josephine's pale face of horror. She stood speechless, with
distended eyes, while Mollenhauer and his attendant, escorted by
M. Duval, breathing fire and flame, went over the house. The
young man's tact, newly born from deep devotion, taught him to
speak no word, but merely to push towards her a chair, on the
back of which she leaned. He quietly directed Abram, now, to
put up the shutters and leave lights burning. The search outside
was so short and perfunctory as to suggest to him an idea that
the German did not really suspect Monsieur Duval, but was using
this insulting means of paying off his grudge. They moved about
the shop, however, looking here and there; and Louis Quatorze
being in the policeman's way, he pushed him aside, then started
suddenly, for he had heard a faint jingle. The dummy's velvet
coat, made, like most articles of Paris, with artistic perfection, was
furnished with pockets deep and wide. These it was but the work
of a few moments to explore, and from the staring figure's dress
were brought forth, in the midst of general consternation, several
fine watches and chains, and four or five diamond rings. The
rest was like an oppressive dream : Josephine's frozen misery melt-
ing but for a moment to tell her father that the horrible mistake
would be quickly set right, she knew ; Mollenhauer's stupefaction,
that his charge should be justified after all. When they were
gone Longwood took the girl's hand, hanging limply by her side:
" Josephine, dearest, do not look like that, for God's sake ! It
will all be cleared up to-morrow."

"Oh!" she cried, wildly, "how could such a thing happen to
a man so old, and always brave and true and honorable ? "

" We will prove him so to-morrow, you will see," with a firm,
reassuring pressure. " My uncle is a lawyer, and I am, at least,
your friend."

The sympathizing tone was too much for her ; she burst into
tears. " Oh, my dear father ! and I am all alone without him " ;
and suddenly, in her forlornness, she threw her arms around the
waxen neck of Louis Quatorze and sobbed on his shoulder. A
furious, irrational desire to rend his pink-and-white Majesty
piece-meal took possession of Longwood. It was hard that her
tears must be shed on that irresponsive breast when he stood
there !

"Josephine, sweetest" — probably Mr. Delgado's betrothed did
not hear — " oh, my dear love, don't ! You break my heart ! "
He took her hand once more, kissing it with chivalrous devo-
tion worthy of his courtly grandfather, this youth, who had often
bluntly declared he "saw no use or sense in kissing a woman's

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVAL! s Louis QUATORZE. 55

hand." When she had recovered, in a measure, her self-control,
he left her for a moment to speak to Abram.

" Abram, can your wife come here to stay with the young
lady to-night ? "

" I sorry, Mass Hudson, but we gwine to a settin' up ; an'
we'se de bes' shouters dere. 'Tis too bad 'bout Mistah Joowal,
but I done yere him say 'tis a good t'ing fur de Dutchman."

Longwood's resolution was taken. " Miss Duval," he said,
quietly re-entering, " will you do us the honor of spending the
night at my mother's ? You can't stay here alone. The bur-
glars may be still in the neighborhood."

" Oh ! " she said, raising a tear-stained face he longed to kiss,
"your mother would be surprised. She does not know me."

With steady persistence he overruled objections ; sent her
masterfully for her hat, saw to the fastenings, and half an hour
afterwards was presenting her to his mother with a grave,
" Mother, let me introduce Miss Duval. Her father and her-
self are strangers here, and he being detained from her to-night,
I have persuaded her to accept your hospitality."

The girl's beauty and grace added a little misgiving to Mrs.
Longwood's secret amazement ; but her training enabled her to
welcome the unexpected guest with at least a show of cordi-
ality.

" No trouble at all, my dear," she assured her, and, at a hint
from her son of Miss Duval's fatigue, led the way to a spare
room.

" I knew I could trust your kind heart, mother," said her
son, on her return, forestalling searching inquiry. " Her father's
being away left poor Miss Duval very desolate this evening ;
and they are strangers."

"Yes," doubtfully, "but who is she? I don't know them."

" Her father is a fine old fellow, a Frenchman, a — ahem ! —
hair-dresser, but," — quickly, on sight of the gathering cloud —
" they are only here for a while, and the young lady is engaged
to a wealthy retired merchant in New York."

It was as well, however, that Mrs. Longwood's prejudices were
not too heavily taxed ; her hospitality being needed only until
the next evening, which restored Monsieur Duval to freedom and
to his daughter's arms. This happy result was due to Long-
wood's exertions. He might not have found courage to ask the
necessary holiday but for a letter in his pocket just received
from an intimate friend in the West, laying siege there success-
fully to fortune.

56 MONSIEUR DUVAI^S Louis QUATORZE. [Oct.,

" I have my own moderate capital," he wrote, " and what I
need in a partner are the energy, industry, and honesty I know
that you have." With this in view, it was easier to confront
Steele & Co.'s surprised reluctance; and the day was spent in
novel detective work. There was his uncle to consult, Mollen-
hauer's cook to interview, a clue obtained through one watch
which was missing and traced, and Longwood^s suspicions, all
along pointing to Abram, were confirmed. That fallen pillar of
the church, being enforced to confession, owned that since Louis
Quatorze had been his charge, "to uncover in the morning, dust
off and enwrap again at night, the innocent dummy had fre-
quently been an unconscious receiver of such unconsidered trifles
as might be conveniently hidden on his august person, until re-
moval was safe. Upon this Monsieur Duval was shortly liber-
ated, and Abram, with many appeals, led off to execution.

Was it his absence, Longwood wondered, which caused the
little shop to be unopened at the usual hour for business? It
was still closed when he approached at twilight, and he then
entered the narrow gateway, and, walking swiftly along the side
passage, tapped at the parlor door.

" Come in," said Josephine's voice, and when he went in
he found her alone, looking pale and dispirited. He asked im-
mediately :

" Is there anything wrong ? "

" It is papa that is sick to-day in bed, but not very ill, I
think. Only the shock and his excitement — anger, I would say —
that such a thing could happen to him."

"May I see him?"

" But certainly ; he wants to thank you. Will you take the
trouble to go up ? "

In half an hour he came down, saying cheerfully: "You
need not fret about your father; he will be all right in a
day or two. It was just the excitement, and he not being strong.
I think I have done him good. He likes to talk to me."

"Of course," gratefully, "you have been always so kind."

" In course of time, I do believe," very deliberately, " he
might like me as well as he does Mr. Delgado."

She blushed crimson, but only said:

" He told you we were going back ? He cannot bear this
place after yesterday."

" That is not just, when only that rascal Abram was to blame.
But I do not mind. I am going away myself. Will you let me
write a letter here ? "

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVAL' s Louis QUATORZE. 57

"But certainly," with some curiosity, arranging pen and paper
on a small table.

Then he went quite close to her and took her soft hands
firmly in his own work-hardened ones. " I want you to write a
letter first"

" A letter ? What letter? "

" Josephine, my letter will be in acceptance of a favorable
opening in the West, and I want you and your father to go with
me ; but first you must write to Mr. Delgado, and ask him to give
you back your word, because you have met some one you really
love ! "

" Mr. Longwood ! " trying to withdraw her hands.

"You need not write it, then, if you will look me straight in
the eyes and say you do not love me."

She drew herself up proudly, and commenced : " I do not"
Then her eyes falling under his gaze, she could only hide them
on his arm, murmuring : " Oh ! I do, I do ! "

After this things went badly for Mr. Delgado, retired tobac-
conist, of New York. And if " A. Duval, Artist," had been gifted
with the kind of eyes disclaimed by Sam Weller, he might have
seen two letters written in his little parlor with varied, interest-
ing, and picturesque interruptions.

It is probable that Longwood's irrepressible buoyancy of as-
pect might, in any case, have attracted maternal attention ; but
as usual with him, the straightforward way seemed the best

" Mother," he said, at the first opportunity, " I have had a
letter from Wilson, in Natoka, offering me a partnership in his
growing business. I would not have thought of it if Henry's
salary did not make you both very comfortable now. As it is, I
have accepted."

" O Hudson ! I shall miss you so. And you will miss the
dear old ways here and our own people so much. But, if it is
for your good — "

" Yes, mother," more slowly, " and you will be glad to know
that I need not be entirely lonely, as I am thinking of being
married soon."

"O Hudson! to whom?"

" To Miss Duval," very clearly ; " the young lady who was
here the other night She was engaged then, but it is broken
off, and she is to marry me."

A crash as the quaint old cup she held fell unheeded.

" A stranger ! a nobody ! tradesfolk ! One of us to marry so,
and so many nice girls among our own people !" she mourned, as

58 MONSIEUR DUVAL'S Louis QUATORZE. [Oct.,

one without hope. Hudson she knew too \vell to attempt to
dissuade.

Henry could only give the faint comfort " that it wasn't quite
so bad's if they were goin' to live here."

In her despair she resolved on a bold step ; and in the course
of the day Josephine was surprised by a visit from Mrs. Long-
wood. Her smiling welcome was acknowledged only by a
haughtier bearing of the widow's thin, black-clad form.

" I will sit a moment, thank you," accepting the offered chair ;
then without farther preface: "My son informs me, Miss Duval,
that he has made an offering of his hand to you. He may not
have told you that such a marriage would not have my approval,
nor that of any of his people. We think it most unsuitable/'

"Your disapproval would grieve me, but how * unsuitable,'
madam ? " color mounting to her cheeks.

"Unsuitable," repeated her visitor, impatiently, "that one of
the Longwood family, settled here in colonial times, and always
wealthy and influential, should marry a foreign hair-dresser's
daughter."

Josephine's color deepened into crimson, but she answered
gently : " I know from Mr. Longwood himself that all that has
been gone a long time. Our circumstances are alike, for my
father was rich and has now but a small income."

" Your father ! " with cold surprise. " I hope that you do
not compare my son to him ! "

" No, madam," replied Josephine firmly, " I do not To be
a hardware clerk, like Mr. Longwood, may be higher than my
father's business, though he was always head. In other things —
looks and manners — forgive me, I find my father much more dis-
tinguished ! " Mrs. Longwood winced. " I knew, as a child,
people of rank in Paris ; to keep up prestige they needed wealth,
or remarkable personal gifts. It must be more so in this
republic, where there are no established castes. Without any of
these things, or special culture " — here came an expressive
gesture.

" It is to be supposed," icily, " that the society my son is ac-
customed to would unfit him for your friends."

"Pardon me," still gently but very steadily, "I have been
carefully educated, yet I have not heard, before coming here, the
name of Mr. Longwood or his friends. Again, my father and his
few friends nearly all speak two or three languages, are musical,
paint or draw, have all travelled more or less, discuss the affairs
of the world. I do not find these things with Mr. Longwood."

1889.] MONSIEUR DUVAL' s Louis QUATORZE. 59

Here Mrs. Longwood winced again. " You will, perhaps, ask
me then, why, why ? " This was turning the tables indeed ; but
Mrs. Longwood sat mute, as though stunned. " Ah ! " said the
girl, with a soft illumination of her beautiful face, "he is so
good and true, and strong and manly, that I — yes, I love him ! "
When, after the little foreign bow, Mrs. Longwood found herself
once more in the street, there was left on her troubled mind an
impression that this was at least a lovely and spirited creature.

" O Sue ! " she cried piteously, seeking Mrs. Willard later,
" can you do nothing for Hudson in this infatuation ! And what
is still worse, I understand he has met the Catholic priest here
and will soon join the Church of Rome."

" I can go and see his sweetheart, Maria," answered Mrs. Wil-
lard. " He has been with me, and I have promised to 'meet him
there."

So this forlorn hope failed her too. It was dusk as Mrs.
Willard hastened to keep her appointment. The hair-dresser
seemed to be in darkness, save a faint glimmer from Monsieur
Duval's room. The lady stepped along the side passage, smiling
at the novelty. The parlor door was ajar, and as no one
answered her tap she entered. A murmur of voices drew her
attention to the door opening on the shop, which, with the lace
curtains, was wide open. A candle held by a young girl lit up
her face of delicately glowing beauty, while her fresh voice
insisted:

"Yes, sir; you must do homage to Louis. Was not he the
cause of it all ? " And there was the prosaic Hudson, while Jo-
sephine's laughter rang out, bowing lowly to a most astonishing
dummy, and saying: "I thank your Majesty."

"And I too, sire," said the girl, with a magnificent curtsy.
" Permit me to touch your gracious hand," with a pretence of
kissing the fingers which held the snuff-box.

" I call that a waste of material," said the youth sternly ;
and — " Take care ! " cried Mrs. Willard, involuntarily, at the same
moment, for Louis' wig was once more in danger.

" I suppose," she remarked later, when Josephine's blush had
subsided, "that when I visit you two some day in the West I
shall find reverently enshrined in your fine mansion Louis Qua-
torze."

"I am not sure," said Longwood, most ungratefully; "he has
played his part, and does not belong to the present. He might
retire now."

JEANIE DRAKE.

6o [Oct.,

NOT from the hot flames of sorrow

Cooled she her heart in God,
Not from a sight of sin's horror

Sought she a refuge in God,
Not from the mad whirl of pleasure

Turned she famished to God,
Not from love's dear buried treasure

Mounted her soul up to God,
Not from the pain of sad loving

Less than " an image of God,"
Not from the shame of first proving

Men false to her and to God :
But all in her youth and beauty

Turned she with joy unto God,
Rapturously loving each duty

That brought a message from God.
A creature who longed for the gladness

Intended for men by God,
And found that the world in its madness

Knew not that joy was in God.
Vowing her life richly freighted

With beautiful thoughts of God ;
Forgetting, in love, that she'd weighted

Her youth with the cross of God.
And her cheek and her brow have brightened

In the radiant glances of God,
And her smile and step have lightened

With some of the swiftness of God.
And her soul in tender communing

Expands like a flower in God,
A lily whose exquisite blooming

Is fair to the vision of God.

MRS. JOHN J. LITTLETON.

Nashville, Tenn.

1889.] ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH. 61

ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH AND CLEMENT
BRENTANO.

A THOUGHTFUL student of history is often made to pause in
order to remark what seem strange instrumentalities in the pro-
duction of great events, and in the kinds of commemoration
which rescues them from oblivion. It has pleased God at various
times, and at times when such manifestations were least expected,
to show mankind how infinitely above their greatest he may lift
up one of his least : as in the case of David the stripling, the
maiden Esther, and that long list of weaklings who by such
election have become the heroes and heroines of the world. We
have been led into this reflection after reading the Life of Anne
Catherine Emmerich, by Very Rev. E. R. Schmoger, of whose
revelations Goerres in his Mystique says: "I know of none richer,
more profound, more wonderful, and more thrilling." In some
respects these are the most interesting that have been made in
many centuries. In infancy, before she had learned to utter
words, this woman understood entirely the significance of the
feasts and holidays of the church ; afterwards recalled with full
accuracy her consciousness and the chief incidents of her baptism;
and the first words ever spoken by her mouth, when in the
second year of her age, were those of the Lord's Prayer. At four
years her habit was to rise out of sleep in the depths of the
night, and, her knees upon a little block that she had set beneath
a simple picture of the Blessed Virgin and the Infant Saviour,
spend much time in prayers, of some of which these are exam-
ples : " Ah, dear Lord ! let me die now, for when children grow
up they offend thee by great sins " ; and, " Rather let me die
than live to offend my God ! " Already, and in answer to her
own prayer for an expiatory life, she had begun to impose upon
herself penalties in behalf of the sufferings and faults of children
of her acquaintance. "I knew," she said afterwards, "that God
never sends affliction without a design. And if these afflictions
weigh so heavily upon us at times, it is because, as I reasoned
with myself, no one is willing to help the poor sufferer to pay
off his debt. Then I begged to be allowed to do so. I used to
ask the Infant Jesus to help me, and I soon got what I wanted."
These prayers were uttered day and night, in labor and pastime,
for her father was poor, and, although small and delicate herself,

62 ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH [Oct.,

she had to do much of even the hardest work in the field. Yet
she had the gayety inseparable from innocent childhood, and at
times was irritable and whimsical like the rest of her age, and it
is marvellous how even in babyhood she exaggerated her infirmi-
ties, suffered for them, and tried to subdue them. At five she
received assurance that she was to become a religious. Here is
an account of the visitation :

?* I was only a little child, and I used to mind the cows — a most trouble-
some and fatiguing duty. One day the thought occurred to me, as indeed
it had often done before, to quit my home and the cows, and go serve
God in some solitary place where no one would know me. I had a
vision in which I went to Jerusalem, where I met a religious in whom I
afterwards recognized St. Jane of Valois. She looked very grave. At her
side was a lovely little boy about my own size. St. Jane did not hold
him by the hand, and I knew from that that he was not her child. She
asked me what was the matter with me, and when I answered she com-
forted me, saying : 'Never mind. Look at this little boy. Would you
like him for your spouse?' I said, 'Yes.' Then she told me not to be
discouraged, but to wait till the little boy would come for me, assuring me
that I would be a religious, although it seemed quite unlikely then. She
told me that I should certainly enter the cloister, for nothing was impos-
sible to my affianced. Then I returned to myself and drove the cows home.
From that time I looked forward to the fulfilment of this promise. I had
this vision at noon. Such things never disturbed me. I thought every one
had them. I never knew any difference between them and real intercourse
with creatures."

It interests deeply to contemplate this little child of humble
parents, gay among the gay, in social intercourse wilful, taking
with submission rebukes, yet in this, while accorded by Heaven
visions, interpretation of prophecies, sometimes led along the
places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem where the God- Man had been
born and reared, where he had worked, suffered, died, risen from
the dead, and ascended to his Father, and in the simplicity of
childhood wondering at none of these things, believing that she
had seen nothing outside the experience of the children of her
acquaintance.

At twelve, hired as a feeder and tender of cows to a kinsman
of her father, faithfully, cheerfully minding her work, yet she
began to take advanced views of her vocation, wearing next her
person a coarse woollen garment in prelude of the expiatory life
which she was destined to lead. After three years, taken home
while making preparations to be put with a seamstress, she made
known to her parents her hopes of a religious life. They opposed
these with much hostility, urging among many other considera-
tions that a poor, ignorant peasant girl like her was most unfit for

1889.] AND CLEMENT BRENTANO. 63

such a vocation. Her answer was: "God is rich; though I have
nothing, he will supply." How much more strong often is child-
hood than manhood! — stronger because, not taught in the experi-
ence of disappointment, it trusts undoubting the promises given
to its aspirations, and boldly advances along its appointed way.
Not that this child was not to suffer from the postponement of
these aspirations, but to suffer without complaint, even with
thankfulness. In those years, from seventeen to twenty, while in
the employ of a mantua-maker for the sake of earning sufficient
money for admission into a convent, she let her wage week by
week go to the poor instead of being laid away in accordance
with her purpose. But already had she realized that superior to
the reception of heavenly visitations ; superior to the gift of
looking back and forth over time and space, tracing the events
of the distant past and future in countries far and near in the
sequence wherein they had occurred and «were to occur ; superior
to these and to all human hopes and endeavors was charity, and
that whatever apparent loss befalls the purest, loftiest aspiration
from delaying in order to answer the claims of charity was not a
loss, but a gain, and the more precious because of the temporary
disappointment in these lesser things for which greater were will-
ingly deferred. In the midst of such alternations, all in the line
of virtue and piety, these three years were spent, It was indeed
a sign of the extraordinary mission to which she had been called
that when her application without a dowry was made to the
Augustinians of Borgen, was favorably entertained, and she en-
tered among them with a thankful heart, beholding the laxity
in the spiritual state of the community, she took her leave, and
again, utterly poor in fortune, and now become as poor in bodily
health, she looked about her for another house wherein her
yearnings might be realized. First she asked for the Trappistines
of Darfeld. Answered by her confessor that in conscience he
could not consent for one so frail of body to join an order so
severe, she turned to the Clares of Miinster. The condition
imposed by them was that she should first learn the organ, and
thus be able to render some compensation for the absence of a
dowry; and although she had for music a dear love and a deli-
cate ear, she never could acquire the art. It is pitiful to hear
the reason. To Dean Overberg, who years afterwards became
her guide, she said :

"As to learning the organ, there was no question of such a thing. I
was a servant of the family " (oae Soentgen, an organist of Coesfeld). "I
learned nothing. Hardly had I entered the house when I saw their misery,

64 ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH [Oct.,

and I sought only to relieve it. I took care of the house. I did all the
work. I spent all I had saved, and I never learned to play. Ah ! I learned
in that house what hunger is ! We were often eight days together without
bread! The poor people could not get trust for even seven pence. I
learned nothing. I was their servant. All that I had went, and I thought
I should die of hunger. I gave away my last chemise. My good mother
pitied my condition. She brought me eggs, butter, bread, and milk, which
helped us to live. One day she said to me : ' You have given me great
anxiety, but you are still my child! It breaks my heart to see your vacant
place at home, but you are still my child ! ' I replied : ' May God reward
you, dear mother ! I have nothing left ; but it is his will that I should
help these poor people. He will provide. I have given him everything.
He knows how to help us all.' Then my good mother said no more."

We must uncover our heads and bate our breath in the pre-
sence of one who can act and speak like this ! Be it known
besides that at that very time she was sought in marriage by a
young man regarded by her parents as well fitted in all respects to
be her husband. But the thought of such a union was appalling
to her very heart of hearts. Thus to serve and thus to want
while waiting for the accomplishment of a purpose, a divine mis-
sion that had been longed for since earliest childhood, to see her
hopes deferred from year to year, and yet never to complain or
think of yielding up, were evidences of the preternatural as irrefrag-
able as ever have been presented in the history of mankind. For
was not her life to be a life of expiation ? She had been born
in a period wherein, particularly in Germany, little interest was
felt in the existence of a supernatural vocation ; when young
women entered convents in the main from considerations far
below those which might be expected to lead even to a very
earnest desire for such a manifestation of the divine will, and that
indifference this poor girl, of a poor family, frail, uncultured, and
undowered, must expiate. Her reception at last (after vain
applications at several religious houses) by the Augustinians of
Diilmen was due to the fact that the daughter of Soentgen, the
organist, who was a good musician, applied for admission at the
same time, and her father, influenced by gratitude to his bene-
factress, and in admiration of her virtues, would not allow his
daughter to enter except she could take along with her this dear
companion. Well may that be called the crowning act which,
towards the end of her sojourn with Soentgen's family, occurred
one day at noon-tide as she was kneeling in the Jesuits' church
at Coesfeld, when the Royal Bridegroom, in the form of a radiant
youth, presenting himself, and holding in one hand a garland,
she chose that which he simultaneously presented in the other —

1889.] AND CLEMENT BRENTANO. 65

a crown of thorns — and when laid gently on her brow, lifting
both her hands she pressed it firmly down, and afterwards car-
ried with her to the grave the glorious stigmata, which over and
over again were to be seen by all her acquaintance. " Treat me
as the last of all, and the least of all," she asked of the superi-
oress on the day of her reception, and her request was gratified.

But for the never-failing confidence which we must place in
the Creator while fitting those of his creatures whom he most
loves for their specially chosen work, we should feel too much
pain in the contemplation of the sufferings endured by this girl
during her novitiate ; hard work, the subject of unresting con-
tempt and detraction, made the victim of grossest slander, repri-
manded in full chapter on baseless accusations, apparently hated
for her physical infirmities, her poverty, and her virtues, made to
ask upon her knees pardon of her associates for offences of which
she ough«t to have been known to be guiltless, and afterwards
denied the freedom of proving herself guiltless, yet sometimes
flinging herself down before the Blessed Sacrament and crying : " I
will persevere, even if I should be martyred ! " It seems almost
incredible what she told long afterwards to the man who was to
be the chief historian of her career. " In spite of these trials, I
have never been so rich interiorly, never so perfectly happy as
while there, for I was at peace with God and man. When at
work in the garden the birds perched on my head and shoulders,
and we praised God together."

When the time of her novitiate expired, and the conventual
chapter sat in deliberation upon her case, no reason could be
assigned for her dismissal other than that from her bodily weak-
ness she must become in time a burden on the house. In fine,
she -was voted to remain, being then in her twenty-eighth year.
"After my profession my parents became reconciled to my
being a religious, and my father and brother came to see me
and brought me two pieces of linen."

During the remaining years previous to the closing (in 1811)
of the convent of Agnetenberg, the same repugnance and neglect
attended her. It is of human nature to grow wearied in time at
the sight of a frail, diseased creature that will neither grow strong
nor die. " How was it," was asked of the sisters by authority,
" that Sister Emmerich was not loved in the convent, and why
was she so persecuted ?" They could only answer by admitting
the facts and disclaiming knowledge of any reason. The mother
answered : " It seems to me that this was the cause : Many of
the sisters were jealous of the particular interest the Abbe Lam-

66 ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH [Oct.,

bert took in her, and some thought her ill-health made her a
burden on the community." The excellent old man referred to,
an exile from France, her fast friend during ten years, fatherly,
meaning to be tender, but never comprehending the greatness of
her mission, discouraged her relation of the visions that came to
her, called them mere meaningless dreams, yet bore her from
the dismantled convent to the house of a widow at Diilmen.
After the death of Father Chrysanthe, who had been her con-
fessor, Father Limberg, a Dominican, then and since the suppres-
sion of his monastery in Miinster residing in that village, came
into that relation to the nun, and he also followed in the line of
discouragement. Even while the blood was flowing from her
stigmata the abbe, who had been chaplain to the convent at
Agnetenberg, had said to her : " You must not think yourself a
Catherine of Siena " ; and he cautioned the Dominican in these
words, " Father, no one must know this ! Let it rest . between
ourselves ; otherwise it will give rise to talk and to annoyance."
And this seer of heavenly sights, in her humility, rejoiced in the
suppression, and continued so to rejoice until the command- came
from heaven to her to let the glorious things that had been com-
municated to her be made known to the world.

It comes not within the limits of a magazine article to more
than allude to the ecclesiastical commission instituted by Von
Droste-Vischering, Vicar- General of Munster, afterwards renowned
as Archbishop of Cologne, with the co-operation of Dean Over-
berg, for the investigation of the rumors concerning these appari-
tions. Persons outside the Catholic Church must wonder if they
but understood how rigidly careful is the church in such investi-
gations. It is painful to read of the many various, ingenious, ap-
parently pitiless tests to which this girl was subjected. "The
physicians," said the report, " have been more unreserved than
ecclesiastics in pronouncing the case miraculous, as the principles
of science furnish more certain rules for their guidance." Yet,
after such irrefragable evidence, Father Limberg felt or seemed to
feel it his duty to treat her as any other religious ; and it grieved
her if on any occasion he relaxed the sternness which it was his
habit to employ, to which in her spiritual life or elsewhere she
was used to yield most passive obedience. It is another evidence
of such caution on the part of the church that henceforth, dur-
ing the succeeding years, while every one was in continual ex-
pectation of her death, no effort was made to preserve the reve-
lations that were being imparted. She knew full well what was
to be done. To the eminent Dr. Wesener, who attended her long,

1889.] AND CLEMENT BRENT A NO. 67

she said (September 26, 1815) : "I have yet another task to ac-
complish before my death. I must reveal many things before I die."
Again : " It is certain that not for myself do I lie here and suffer.
I know why I suffer ! Publish nothing about me before my
death." And again : " I know indeed why I lie here. I know it
well, and last night I was again informed of it"

For three years longer she lay there in the silent endurance
of pains of which it appalls even to hear the mention, and waited
and waited for one to come from afar. She had not been told
his name nor the place from which he was to come, but for
years she had been familiar with the face he was to wear, the
tones in which he was to speak, the ways he was to lead in
doing the work that he would be sent to perform, and the trials to
which she was to be subjected in^ relation which, had it pleased
God to answer her prayers in that behalf, gladly would she have
avoided. Already she had given him a new name, The Pilgrim,
a name by which in all her speeches he was designated. At
last he came, and his coming was almost as surprising to the
simple folk of that rural community as that of Tyrtaeus, the
elegist, whom the Athenians, answering the request of the .Lace-
daemonians for a general in their war with the Messenians, sent
to them in derision. In Frankfort-on-the-Main had been born a
man who, now forty years of age, was numbered among the il-
lustrious men of letters in Germany. He was a novelist and a
poet, an ardent disciple of the Romantic School, which 'had been
making a long, patriotic struggle to throw off the yoke of the
classicism of France. He had been a thoughtful student of Dante,
Calderon, and Shakspere, and had attained much fame by his
published works, Ponce de Leon, The Founding of Prague, The
Fair Annerl, The History of Caspar the Brave, and other works,
among which was The Boy's Wonderhorn, a collection of old
popular German songs, which have had a most salutary influence
upon the modern lyric poetry of his native country. This book
he had written in connection with Arnim, another well-known
author, who was a Protestant. He was not objected to on this
account by his colleague, who, "a Catholic in name, like thousands
high and low then in that region, cared not enough how a
Catholic was bound to think, and perhaps as little how to act.
Lately, however, a change had come over him, and having made
a general confession, he felt himself, although not very definitely
it appeared, submitting to be led back to some sort of practice of
the religious duties which theretofore he had been neglecting.
One day, apparently by accident, having been shown a letter in

VOL. L. — 5

68 ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH. [Oct.,

which was related some things of Anne Catherine Emmerich, he
became considerably interested. It was yet some years before he
was to meet her. Finding himself one day in the vicinity of
Diilmen, accepting an invitation of a friend, he went to the house
wherein she dwelt, and, with the exception of a brief interval
after a first sojourn of some months, there he remained during
six years. This was Clement Brentano, whose name must be
for ever associated closely with hers, for our knowledge of whose
wonderful career we are indebted to him mainly. Fascinated by
the sight and conversation of the invalid, he lingered and lingered,
with purposes far short of being definite in his own mind, but
vaguely pointing in the direction of a poem in which he was to
immortalize in song the dreams of this most strange dreamer.
His coming, not at all understood by himself, yet foreseen and
waited for by her, served to give free vent to the thoughts and
the words which had been pent within her own being by the in-
ability of one of her directors to comprehend her and the tim-
idity of the other, and it was not until her spiritual direction had
been assumed by the wise and gifted Dean Overberg that Bren-
tano could become what he had been sent there to become, that
and nothing more, . Anne Catherine's amanuensis. A strange
person for such a task ! A high-bred poet, ardent, restless, wil-
ful, on whose brow was many a laurel-leaf won in the fields of
poesy, came to this poor abode, into the chamber of an uncul-
tured invalid, having to pass " through a barn and some old
store-rooms before reaching the stone steps leading to her room."
There he was to stay to the end of recording, what time out of
other multifold engrossments she could give to their utterance, her
rapturing words until death should put an end to the revealings
she was to disclose. How happy she was now ! " I am amazed
at myself," she said to him one day not long after his coming,
" speaking to you with so much confidence, communicating so
much that I cannot disclose to others. Yet from the first glance
you were no stranger to me. Indeed, I knew you before seeing
you. In visions of my future I often saw a man of very dark
complexion sitting by me writing, and when you first entered the
room I said to myself, ' Ah ! there he is ! ' '

The poet, dreaming of the high part that himself was to play
before the world in the poem that he was to create upon a
theme so unexpectedly found, was delighted with his finding. In
letters written to friends he described her as a " flower of the
field ; a bird of the forest whose inspired songs are wonderfully
significant, yes, even prophetic." He believed that "being sick unto

1889.] AND CLEMENT BRENTANO. 69

death, living without nourishment," her state " might be improved
if some change could be made in her exterior condition," as the
having a good servant who might " relieve her of domestic cares,
and ward off everything that could give her anxiety." Fain
would he have had her removed from that dull town which " may
have attractions for simple souls." He was too simple-hearted
himself to indulge any feeling like contempt or any other than a
sort of poetical compassion when he wrote the following :

"It is a little agricultural town without art, science, or literature. No
poet's name is a household word here. In the evening the cows are milked
before their owner's doors. The feminine employments of the gentler sex are
carried on in the fields and gardens, preparing the flax, spinning the thread,
bleaching the linen, etc. Even the daughters of well-to-do citizens dress no
better than servants. Not a romance is here to be had."

Anne Catherine knew and she felt not only that her visions
were to be recorded by this man, but that through her influence
he, a man of genius and celebrity, who, in some sense a Catholic,
yet found little peace in believing, might have his disquietude
removed to return no more. Not long before he had said : " I
feel that if I seek peace in the Catholic Church I shall find my-
self in such perplexity and embarrassment as to render my
position worse than before." Yet it was most touching after-
wards to see how blessed to his being were the influences of the
sufferer into whose confidence he had been led. " The blessed
peace, the deep devotion of her child-like countenance awoke in
me a keen sense of my own unworthiness, of my guilty life. In
the silent solemnity of this spectacle" (she was in prayer) " I
stood as a beggar ; and, sighing, I said in my heart, ' Thou pure
soul, pray for me, a poor, sinful child of earth who cannot pray
for myself!' I feel that my mission is here, and that God has
heard the prayer I made to give me something to do for his
glory that would not be above my strength !"

Henceforth the relations between these persons have an interest
more peculiar, it seems to me, than ever have been known to
exist between two friends. Transported with admiration for the
woman and her wonderful graces, yet the native ardor, wilful-
ness, and impatience that he could not entirely yield impelled
him to many an act which put upon her much distress, and at
one time brought about a separation. But through the prudent
management of Dean Overberg he was allowed, greatly to her
happiness, to return and there remain until the last, and in spite
of his continued waywardness, and his repeated expressions of

;o ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH. [Oct.,

anger and disgust that his friend had to be interrupted so often
in her narrations by the poor, dull, uncongenial people around
her, before whose claims she put not even the ecstatic beholdings
that in ever moving sequence were before her eyes, he kept
watch by her side. Sometimes she reprimanded him with a
gentleness beautiful as one of her loveliest visions, smiling at his
too anxious wish to put unneeded polish upon her rude Westpha-
lian dialect, and to plant flowers more than fruits in his garden ;
yet obeying the heavenly monitor's injunction to persevere, she
pointed before his astonished eyes to scenes which, far beyond all
dreamings of philosopher or poet, are, perhaps, the most extra-
ordinary in all the history of the militant church. That Clement
Brentano was elected to record these visions is as patent as that
Anne Catherine Emmerich was elected to behold them.

And what visions they were ! Take The Dolorous Passion
of Christ. Published but a brief while 'ago, what has it done
already in holding back an age so prone, outside the Catholic
Church, to unbelief! It is the most imposing monument to the
church that, at least for many a century, has been erected. The
great things inscribed upon it would have been far more numer-
ous, though not more splendid, but that the chosen servant of
the Most High never failed to remember that among all gifts
coming down from heaven was charity. Upon that poor bed for
years and years she lay, her wretched body always racked with
pains beyond the cure of human physician, and in the midst of
sights of ineffable beauty and significance, often denying herself
to the Pilgrim eager to catch and throw them upon his canvas,
but never, not one time, to the poor, the unlettered, the lame, the
outcast, who came, some for relief, some from sympathy, some
from curiosity belonging to the vulgar. Sometimes one is moved
to smile at the frettings- of Brentano, thoroughly honest as he was,
at these frequent interruptions of his work by the importunities of
the ragged rabble of acquaintance and kinsfolk. Yet such out-
bursts did not let him relax. The charm that at first had fasci-
nated held him bound to the last. He who had come a seeker
for a theme of poesy, remained a disciple ; alternately docile and
argumentative, but finally yielding to irresistible influences, and
accepting them with gratitude. Often she had chided him, but in
Words of affection: "The Pilgrim prays nervously, mixing things
quickly. I often see evil thoughts running through his head;
they peer around like strange, ugly beasts ! He does not drive
them away promptly; they run about as over a beaten path."
And he would answer, " Unhappily, it is only too true." Yet

1889.] AND CLEMENT BRENTANO. 71

after she died he proved the efficacy of her admonitions, spend-
ing his remnant of life in works of charity.

We might like to linger before some of the visions of this
woman : Among the wheat-fields, when the tired harvester was
exhausted with the tying of the sheaves ; with Noe in the Ark
offering incense on an altar covered with red and white ; with
Moses among the bones of Jacob ; with Josue at the sun's delay ;
with Zephyrinus suffering from persistence in maintaining the
dignity of the priesthood; with St. Louis at his first Communion;
with the guardian angel while leading into the Seven Churches ;
at the feasts of the Scapular and the Portiuncula; with Our Lady
of the Snow; on the mountain of the Prophets; with Judith
among the Mountains of the Moon ; with the suffering bishops
of the Upper Rhine ; among the sacred relics that from ruined
convents and monasteries were brought to her, of " St. Agnes,
and by her a little lamb"; before the " veil of the lady who
went from Rome to Jerusalem and Bethlehem " ; with St. Agatha,
martyred in Catana ; with the youth converted at the martyrdom
of St. Dorothea ; with Apollonia, the widow, on a cape of the
Nile ; with Benedict and Scholastica ; with Eulalia, virgin martyr
of Barcelona ; with Francis de Sales and Frances de Chantal ;
with Valerian at the side of Cecilia, first a mocker, then a con-
vert; finally before that package from Cologne enclosing shreds
of hair from the heads of the Blessed Virgin and Him who all
in all was her Father, her Bridegroom, and her Son !

In all these things were designs far beyond our ken. We
can only contemplate them with awful reverence, and strive to be
thankful both for the lowly maiden to whom the Deity made
such signal manifestations, and for the poet by whom, so strangely,
yet so felicitously, these manifestations were recorded.

R. M. JOHNSTON.

Baltimore. Md.

72 A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. [Oct.,

A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION.

II.

WHAT I find in the modern conception of God, as expressed
by philosophers like Spinoza and poets like Goethe, are these
three elements: First, an overwhelming sense of dependence on
some Power or Being, infinitely mysterious in its qualities and un-
searchable in its ways, which, dwelling " afar from the sphere ot
our sorrow," as Shelley sings, never unveils its face, yet is so near
that in momentary ecstatic moods we have a true experience ot
it, and can reply to the base Atheism which would deny all be-
yond sense and matter with an " I have felt," as the poet of In
Memoriam did long ago. Again, consequent upon those moments
of rapture that come to all, and yet more upon prolonged scien-
tific research and experiment, a conviction that the Infinite abides
in all things, and is their very life. Nature, the Earth-spirit
chants to us in Faust, is " the life-garment that Deity wears,"
woven upon the " roaring loom of Time " ; and instead of the
ancient creed wherein he appears as First Cause and Creator, we
are bidden to cherish as a grander idea the immanence, in every
atom as in all the stellar universes, of a Life, filling them with
reality ; unhasting, unresting, weaving and working everywhere.
It is the Life that does not decay when the world of vegetation,
after its hour of ripeness, goes down amid autumnal melancholy
in a blaze of color, or .when man and beast are untimely cut off;
the Power that makes generation to spring up after generation,
and " in them groweth not old " ; a fruitfulness dwelling in the
world as its heart and its seed, the root of all things, which goes
down into the depths, and rises up through stem and branches
into the heights, like its emblem, the tree Ygdrasil, in the Norse
mythology. And, because of its enduring while the visible phe-
nomena come and go like bubbles on a stream, it follows, third-
ly, that whether it be called their Substance or their Sum, it alone
is real and they are but shadows. It was, and is, and is to come ;
whilst they now are, and in a little space will have ceased to be.

It surely is but a doubtful inference from these deep thoughts,
and more like a logical sleight-of-hand than the expression of
genuine feeling, when God is declared to be impersonal ; unless
it be meant to deny a very gross and childish anthropomorphism
rejected by every church in Christendom. And a no less ques-

1889.] A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. 73

tionable conclusion is it — assuredly we cannot term it an intui-
tion of the reason — by which the individual realities have been
identified with that which upholds them, survives them, and shares
in none of their imperfection or contingency. In that most re-
markable "Credo of Naturalism," which Goethe put forth in the
year 1780, it is said: " She" — that is, Nature—" lives simply in her
children, but the Mother — where is she ? " Yet were it literally
true that her existence and theirs were identical, were she no
more than they, the principle of fruitfulness whereby from age to
age the world continues would be impossible. The ground of
things which pass cannot be in the things themselves.

Leaving, then, the inferences, true or false, of logic for a mo-
ment, let us insist rather on that common and safe foundation
where Christian and non- Christian may stand — the ground of ex-
perience, be it in things of sense or things of intellect. Those
high religious moods which are familiar to Wordsworth, and to others
less pure-minded than Wordsworth, bear assured testimony to the
fact that in the universe there is Something or Someone whom
without absurdity we may invoke. Nay, when we are not asking,
but simply meditating, what is that presence of which we become
suddenly aware, as though a light had broken out round about
us ? To have such an experience is to know that we have not
been deluded ; it is strictly of the spirit, without imagery or con-
ventional language, or symbols adapted from any ritual. It goes
beyond the dreams of fancy, and has naught in common with
them. But there is no object or scene in Nature, no vision of
stars, or of wild waters, or of morning or evening twilight, no ten-
der hue in a blossom, or sweet, simple chant, that may not be-
come the medium of this divine experience. It is spontaneous,
and will not be given for the seeking; but as surely as we know
a friend by the sound of his voice, so surely can we tell when the
Presence is about us. At such moments we feel that it would be
always there, and is there always, did we not lose ourselves in the
stream of phenomena, and so hide from it, like the guilty Adam
among the leaves of Eden. Thus we learn the religion of the
Great Silence, which is the beginning of all seriousness. " Truly
thou art a hidden God ! " cries the Hebrew seer — Deus Abscon-
ditus ! There are " secrets known to all," which distinguish
human life from that of the lower animals, truths and facts of ex-
istence consecrated in the wonderful Christian sacraments of mar-
riage, baptism, and the Eucharist. We have but to follow this
train of thought, and we shall begin to understand that the es-
sence of all religion, as of all reverence, is the acknowledgment

74 A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. [Oct.,

of secrets too awful for the loud voice of daily speech. After the
astonishingly profane controversies, indulged in by every school,
which deafened the ears of pious men from the Reformation to
the outbreak of the Revolution, it is a wholesome sign that poet
and metaphysician suspend at the entrance to their temple the
rose of Harpocrates, bidding those that would think worthily of
divine things keep silence. It is the religion of those hermits of
Thebais, who followed the device given them by Arsenius, Fuge,
tace, quiesce. And it is the meaning of that great and seldom
understood institution of contemplative orders in the Roman
Church, the abuses or dangers of which I am not now called
upon to point out, but which, in itself, is an answer to the
soul's genuine need, as its power and grace are testified in num-
berless ways by modern literature. It is one of the chief meet-
ing-places of old and new.

But we must take account of all our experience, not of one
aspect only, though the most sapred. The Infinite reveals itself
in Nature, truly, but much more in Man, to whose " deep heart "
even Shelley, the passionate lover of earth and sky, knew that
he must turn at last. The Pantheist delights to wander by the
shore of ocean and lose himself in secret communion with its
voices. But there are yet higher degrees of initiation. Life in
the individual and in the History of Nations is, on the whole,
so tragic, so full of moving incident, that it carries us away from
the scene on which it is enacted. At Thrasymene "the fury of
the combatants made them unconscious of the earthquake which
took place during the battle." Of such battles life is full; men
look coldly upon Nature as a painted hieroglyphic, the meaning
of which, in their agitation, distress, and accumulated pangs, lies
utterly remote from them. That trance of the spirit to which
a devout Buddhist aspires cannot be the normal condition of
beings constituted as we are. It is the opening of a window
upon Eternity, into the depths of the divine ether which has no
limits ; but we are limited, and our work lies in a small room,
amid the family, the tribe, and the nation where our lot is cast.
It is in these, idealized by sympathy and unselfishness, that the
Infinite reveals even a nobler aspect of himself than we could
perceive — we, I mean, the ordinary, the average of men and
women — in solitude. Left to ourselves, we should be fantastic
and stiff-necked, and our religion would become fitful and vision-
ary as a dream. We are required, then, to be " true to the
kindred points of Heaven and home," and to unite with our kind
in the bonds of doing and of suffering. There is a sense in

1889.] A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. 75

which we cannot be said to love anything but man, for it is
through man that we come to know God so as to love Him. The
largest and most divine Theology yet to be written will found
itself on those words of St. John, the advent of whose age has
so often been prophesied : " He that loveth not his brother
whom he seeth, how shall he love God whom he doth not see ? "
We need not be afraid of falling into idolatry or anthropomorphism
by maintaining that man is the highest revelation of God to man.
So far as we know by experience, we are the only living crea-
tures in the visible universe that can speak their thoughts to
one another, stranded as we are on this island-world " encircled
by the illimitable main." The exercise of virtue, the deeds of
human heroism, make us aware of a divine power in things which
not the most sublime or the most beautiful objects in Nature could
have disclosed. The Monist, therefore, who is willing to ascend
the steps of the temple, may here pass on from recognizing an
impersonal sacredness in the world to the sight of those per-
sonal attributes, Love and Duty and Self-sacrifice, which are no
more original in man than the rest of his being, but must be
derived from that which makes and dwells in him, at once his
source and consummation. Why should we not combine the
greatness with the lovingness, the nearness with the immensity,
and speak of our Father who is in Heaven? Did he breathe life
into our nostrils and not love also ? In the Great Silence there
are some of the qualities of love, such as peace, humility, glad-
ness, resignation. But in communion with our fellows they are
not to be mistaken; and Goethe's lines concerning his own Iphi-
genie hold true of the deepest human experience :

" Alle menschlichen Gebrechen,
Subnet reine Menschlichkeit."

Not a few have drawn near to this truth, by the one side
or the other, but only to give it a strange interpretation. They own
there must be a union of all men in self-denying sympathy — a
Communion of Saints — and that every man is called into it. So
far well. But to them it is no revelation of the Eternal; man's
own heart, they say, prompts him to pity and love; and though
they feel at the root of his life a something out of which it
springs, they cannot believe that there is either pity or love
in the Most High — a marvellous doctrine, making the effect
greater than the cause and allowing the phenomenon to be in
its very essence self-originated. But there is another way out
of the difficulty. Let us, all through, be loyal to experience.

76 A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. [Oct.,

Suppose, then, we behold, in the pages of a certain history, a
man devoting himself in the most heroic manner conceivable,
body and soul, life and spirit, for the good of others, and hu-
mankind the better as long as it exists by reason of what he
has undergone ; suppose the bitterest of deaths endured by a
man of sorrows, and its outcome the ennobling of death and
sorrow for evermore — as any revelation of the Infinite in Nature
equal to this? To have disclosed the secret of death, which
seems so much more hopeless than that of life, and thereby to
have created an ideal of virtue and purity higher than the world
had ever dreamt of, yet accessible to the lowliest, and to have
done so, not by preaching a dreary doctrine of annihilation, nor
by violating reason and setting up empty Nothingness above
Infinite Being — such was the fruit of Christ's dwelling among men,
and it is confessed on all hands that he has done what he pro-
posed. Regnavit a ligno !

Thus we come from the moaning, inarticulate voices of the sea,
and from the contemplation of silent, starry worlds shining in
the midnight sky — beautiful indeed, but remote from us — to Cal-
vary, the Mount of Lovers, as it is called by St. Teresa. It
is not custom or tradition only that inspires a naturally religious
mind with awe at the name of Jesus; neither was it imagina-
tion in his immediate followers, or in those who believed on
their word, that recognized in the Crucifixion the world's tra-
gedy, an atonement the like of which never was before or since,
and God reconciling mankind to himself through Christ. Listen
again to the witness of Goethe : The Religion of Sorrow, he
tells the nineteenth century, is a height to which the world has
attained by means of the Gospel, and from which it will never
fall away. I might remark on these astonishing words that they
furnish or suggest an argument for the truth of Christianity anal-
ogous to that which we find in modern science for the New-
tonian law of gravitation. All physics, as we know, must pro-
ceed in due observance of that law; to forget or deny it would
mean, in the realm of physical research, disorder which could not
be healed. In like manner, there can be no religion preached
to mankind at large that does not contain its sanctuary of sorrow,
for Christ has shown that the cross is the measure of things
and the key to all human enigmas. I am not going upon theo-
ries or inferences. I am stating -historical facts. In the develop-
ment of man's spirit, Calvary is the highest summit, up towards
which all mysteries move, as down from it illumination flows
upon the darkest places of existence.

1889.]

A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION.

Here, then, is the Unknown of which men stand in trembling
fear, manifesting itself as certainly as it does in outward phe-
nomena, and lifting from its countenance the Veil which they
have thrown over it. Whilst we study things inanimate, and
strive by music, painting, and landscape-poetry to interpret
them, it may seem as if the spirit which they adumbrate were
less like ours, by far less conscious or personal, than the Chris-
tian faith teaches ; it is the vast and vague of Eternity, not the
life answering to our life, which weighs upon so many like a
nightmare. There is art or design or law in every particle
and atom, we feel it surely; yet the experience resembles that
of a man moving through some strange enchanted palace, who
detects a presence unseen, and wanders from chamber to cham-
ber, admiring the order and the beauty, and vexed that the
master of the spell does not come forth to meet him. But in
the history of the New Testament that still atmosphere kindles
to a brightness ; the sacred Memnon-face appears. To our gener-
ation, as to the eighteen centuries past, the story of that perfect
Life and Death is the supreme of arguments ; alone it has the
power permanently to lift us beyond what we surmise in gazing
upon Nature and its marvels, multiplying as it does for us the
sweet low music until it fills the world, and giving to it intel-
ligible speech where before it did but murmur, let me say, as
with ^Eolian and unreasoning strings. The charm that drew men
to Christ will draw them yet again ; his " pure Humanity " —
reine Menschlichfyeit — is a revelation of the power behind the veil
which can never be surpassed or superseded; it tells us intensive
what God is like, as Nature is incapable ' of doing. Those that
were of his company, that touched the hem of his garment, that
heard his words and saw him in his deepest humiliation, were
convinced that he knew the secrets of Eternity, and made their
own, in a certain measure, the interpretation he bequeathed of
this world and the world to come. Let us think whether we
can go beyond it now.

It is certain that in ourselves we have no revelation but these
momentary glimpses that open and shut again, " swift as any
dream " ; for science, commonly so-called, teaches law but not
virtue, and the abstractions of metaphysics are faint and cold
when most we need an energy counter to our passions. We
must all live, as experience proves, by communion with the
strength and wisdom and purity of another. The Stoic ideal,
which was Spinoza's, of the lonely perfect man is not human
and cannot be realized. Now, I hold that the only Higher Self

7 8 A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. [Oct.,

we may reasonably look up to and follow is that Prophet of Religion
whose teachings will harmonize life, whether by renunciation or
by the use of its opportunities, whose principles abide unshaken
though knowledge and experience increase, whose recorded acts
are the pattern of perfect grace and nobleness, unrivalled when
History has written the authentic praises of hero and saint in
every creed. It matters little that conjecture and recklessness
and subtlety have done their worst trying to make many pages
of the Gospels illegible. What is left, even after men have
hacked and hewed with their too often jagged instruments of
criticism, will suffice to show what manner of man he was, how
he taught and felt and suffered, and the spirit that dwelt in
him. To me it appears that the idea, and much more the exist-
ence, of Jesus of Nazareth are, when deeply considered, fatal to
Pantheism in all its forms. For who can deny that the Person
of Christ depicted in the four Gospels, in the Epistles of St.
Paul, and in the Apocalypse — the fact as illustrated by the view
taken of him from the beginning — is a demonstration that He
came from the bosom of the Most High ? Is not, then, the
Most High an infinite, self-conscious Spirit ? To Jesus the Eternal
was his heavenly Father. Can modern thinkers, with all their
science, arrive at a grander or more intellectual conception of
That Which Is, and of its relation to men ? And if they pos-
sessed, in however slight a degree, the moral strength, the purity,
the unselfishness that are perceptible in his character, as we speak,
would not their knowledge tend to resolve itself into such a view
of life and death as lay before his eyes ? Their experience will
have to grow wider, then, until it finds room for the Idea of Jesus;
they must reconcile their speculations with his existence. The
words and works which he has left us are as truly data furnished
by experience, as real scientific facts, as the observations of
Newton or Kepler. To pass them over and not account for them,
is to neglect the elements of a perfect induction and infinitely
more disastrous to the science of life than if, while attempting
to measure the capacities of genius, we took no heed of Homer,
Socrates, Julius Caesar, and Shakspere. It is to read a curtailed
chronicle of man in which what is best can no longer be found.
Our so-called prophets, whose fame often rests at bottom on
their quotations from Christ's teaching and their skill to render
his words in every-day language, are far too silent concerning
him. When they count upon their bead-roll the great men who
have been makers of the world they will not, or dare not, pause
upon his name. Were such omission due to reverence, it would

1889.] A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. 79

add strength to the argument on which I am here enlarging ;
but as I cannot suppose that to be always the case, I look upon
it as an unwilling homage to his incommunicable dignity and a
tacit acknowledgment of his elevation above every power that is
named among men. And thus, too, we may be persuaded that
he came forth from God, not as all things do, but by a way
which no other has trodden, Verbum e sinu Patris ; and that in
very truth, and not as Spinoza deluded himself. He has beheld
the Divine Original of the Universe in the light of Eternity.
As I have written elsewhere, the life and Person of Christ, exhib-'-
ited in prophecy by the Old Testament, and in historical record
by the New, that, and no other revelation whatsoever, no power
nor argument, nor experience, will be a match for the Atheism
and Pantheism which have been fused together in a Religion of
Humanity, or of Nature, or of Nescience — for these names it has,
and many more — of which the note is that in identifying man
with the One Substance it throws him to an infinite distance
from the source of Knowledge and of Holiness. The mediator of
God and man is the Incarnate Word, by whose virtue all things,
whether in heaven or earth, are kept in their due order, a scale
or hierarchy of Being like the ladder of Jacob on which were
seen angels ascending and descending and God himself leaning
upon it. The last word of Christianity is Reason — belief in the
Divine Logos. The last word, as it is the first, of Pantheism is
Unreason, the denial and confusion of ranks and orders of exist-
ence. But from the elements which it mingles together we can,
by due separation, recover the ancient truths. Its contemplation
of Nature may thus be made subservient to the doctrine that God
is present in least and greatest, and that they are in him, though
distinct and individual. Its " pure Humanity " should lead us to
the Gospels, whence in truth it has been derived and of whose
essence it is a degradation. Its doctrine of silence may remind
us of the limits that in better days a reverent sober mysticism
set to the overbold conjectures of rationalizing theologians, to
whom the Deity was a subject for dissection instead of the object
of adoration. Its very appeal to darkness, its often frantic exul-
tation in revolt and evil, is not without some compensating advan-
tage in a day when the multitude are taught from Liberal pulpits
that "there is nothing in God to fear." There is no evil to fear
in God, but there are the consequences of evil done by man,
which his righteousness will see carried out. And the larger view
of things favored by Monism, and already, as from afar off, sug-
gested in our laboratories and halls of science, begins to prevail

8o PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS. [Oct.,

over the shallow enlightenment to which miracles, prophecies, and
the entire realm of the supernatural were things incredible and
absurd. To restore belief in the supernatural we must commence
by looking at the facts. There was a time when science obsti-
nately refused to glance their way ; but the hand on the dial
points to a change.

Yet there remains the question to which all I have said is a
preliminary. We must, I have insisted, renew our faith in Jesus
of Nazareth. But can we believe in a dead Christ ? And if not,
where is he living at this hour ? I propose, in my concluding
paper, to suggest the answer by once more appealing to facts
which cannot be denied. Mankind, said Goethe, will never de-
scend from the height they have attained in the Religion of Sor-
row. Its sanctuary, therefore, is still raised aloft ; nor can it be
in ruins or a forsaken city like Tadmor in the wilderness, far from
the haunts of men. Our duty, surely, is to seek its whereabouts.

WILLIAM BARRY.

PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS.

THE Rationalists of to-day (see Webster's definition of the
word) have shifted their ground, and abandoned, in combating
supernatural religion, the tactics of their predecessors of a hun-
dred and of fifty years ago. With the latter the Old and the New
Testament were legendary tales, and Jesus Christ himself — with
some, at least, of the more advanced . apostles of reason — a myth.
But the severest tests of criticism having only served to establish
more firmly the authenticity and genuineness of the inspired
writings, and archaeology, bibliography, and paleography having
in their onward progress all contributed to more lucidly illustrate
the reliableness of the sacred text, new weapons must now be
used to do away with the supernatural. Scores of materialists and
pantheists are entrenched behind the following a priori: The
supernatural is impossible ; therefore it does not exist. There
is, however, a school of deists who, admitting the authenticity
of the Bible and the existence of a personal God, the author of
the laws of physical nature, acknowledge the possibility of the
supernatural while they deny its actual existence. These endeavor
to explain as natural events the countless supernatural manifesta-
tions recorded in Holy Writ and in history. Rev. J. M. Buckley,

1889.] PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS. 81

the author of an article on " Presentiments, Visions, and Appari-
tions," in the July number of the Century Magazine, although a
Methodist minister, seems to belong to this school. He starts
out by saying : " Exclusive of the sphere of true religion, which
does not claim to be an infallible guide except to repentance,
purity of motive, and the life beyond, omens, premonitions, pre-
sentiments, visions, and apparitions have exerted the greatest in-
fluence over the decisions and actions of men." As repentance,
purity of motives, and the life beyond (the existence of God ad-
mitted) are readily accepted by pure reason, I gather that Mr.
Buckley's religion is free from any supernatural element. But he
admits the pbssibility of the supernatural, as can be seen from
the following sentence : " To prove that the dead are seen no
more or cannot appear to living beings is, of course, impossible."
And again : " That God could produce such impressions none
who admit his existence can doubt."

Mr. Buckley's logic appears to me defective in many points.
It would seem natural to treat of visions and apparitions
jointly, inasmuch as there can be no vision without a corre-
sponding apparition, and nothing can be seen without a seer.
To prove that there are no supernatural visions is to prove at
the same time that there are no apparitions. But the writer in
the Century, for reasons best known to himself, thought proper
to write of visions and apparitions separately. This much is plainly
noticeable. His method afforded him an opportunity of arraying
under separate heads two long lists of spurious visions and appa-
ritions, which display to advantage his encyclopaedical erudition.
But his prolixity and redundance of style render him at times
painfully obscure and his meaning problematical. Take, for instance,
his concluding paragraph, which will give us at the same time
the real motive of his writing the article : " If it be assumed that
the testimony of one person or of one hundred persons to a
supernatural event is not sufficient to prove that it occurred, the
question, What becomes of the testimony of the apostles and the
five hundred brethren to the resurrection of Christ, and of Stephen
to his seeing the heavens open ? comes up again. It admits of
but one answer. If they had nothing to give us but the fact
that they saw a person alive who had been dead, it would be
necessary to reject it on the ground that it is far more probable
that they were deceived than that such a thing occurred. But
that is not the case. They present to us the whole body of
Christian doctrine, declaring that it was received from that Person
who had predicted that he would rise from the dead, and whom

82 PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS. [Oct.,

they believed themselves to see, and with whom on various oc-
casions they conversed after his resurrection." Mr. Buckley's
logic here is not good. If the testimony of the apostles and the
five hundred brethren, taken by itself, does not prove Christ's
resurrection, it cannot do so by its being taken in connection
with the whole body of Christian doctrine, because the resurrec-
tion of Christ must first be established before we can accept the
truth of his doctrine/ St. Paul, who seems to have been a very
good logician, argued so, and wrote (according to King James'
translation) : " And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching
vain " (the body of Christian doctrine), " and your faith is also
vain." In fact, as Christ predicted his own resurrection, if his
prediction be not fulfilled, he is an impostor, and his doctrine a
mere philosophical theory. Happily, Mr. Buckley explains (?) him-
self. " If the body of Christian doctrine, in its relations to the
moral nature of the thinker, does not convince him of the divine
origin and consequent truth of the record, we know of no other
means of doing so." Why not tell us at once that the truth of
the Christian doctrine is subjective and not objective ? Visions
and apparitions evidently do not agree with the writer's system
of philosophy. Hence he needs to prove that they are subjective
hallucination.

" By vision I mean appearances to the mind's eye where there
is no corresponding reality." So writes Mr. Buckley. It would
have been more satisfactory if he had given us such a
definition as he found it convenient to do for the word "pre-
monition." But it would not have suited his purpose. However,
it has the merit of being clear. But it describes hallucinations,
not visions. The author evidently takes the two words to be
perfect synonyms of each other. What need, then, of nine col-
umns of closely printed matter to prove that " hallucinations "
are possible, and that they are not of unfrequent occurrence ?
Did Mr. Buckley think that one reader of the Century among its
thousands would be found not believing in the possibility and
occurrence of "visions" if .they be nothing more than "appear-
ances to the mind's eye where there is no corresponding real-
ity"? What need of the following? "A question of deeper
interest and of closer relation to the subject treated in these
articles is whether subjective visions are possible to the sane ;
and, if so, whether they are at all common, and liable to occur
as isolated circumstances." But the author's obvious intention was
to prove that there are not and never have been any objective
or real visions, and that all supernatural manifestations known as

1889.] PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS. 83

such are delusions. That much is plain from the conclusion quoted
above, which he draws from his premises. He should have then
clearly stated his thesis, and not take for granted from the be-
ginning the propositio probanda. His whole argument, in form, is
a petitio principii; in substance his conclusion is wider than the
premise. His process of reasoning, boiled down to its substance,
is reduced to the following : Subjective visions — that is, hallucina-
tions— are possible and frequently occur. Therefore, there are no
objective or true visions. Of .course, one proposition does not
follow the other as conclusion. The spurious coin rather argues
the existence of the genuine. True supernatural visions carry
with them the seal of their own genuineness, producing effects
impossible to account for on natural grounds. Thus, after the
vision of the Holy Ghost experienced by the apostles on the day
of Pentecost they were endowed with a universal knowledge of
languages, unexplainable except on supernatural grounds. Spurious
visions, on the contrary, generally have in themselves the ear-
marks of their falsity. The Koran demonstrates that Mohammed
lied in the recital of his pretended visions, and the writings of
Swedenborg show his to be the product of a diseased imagi-
nation. Thus the visions of Luther, of Zwingli, of the early
Methodists, etc., can be easily explained on natural grounds.
But we see that Philip's vision (Acts, ch. viii. v. 26) had a
supernatural origin from what followed it (ibidem, verses 39 and
40). It would not be difficult to multiply examples. It is the
critic's task to discern true from false visions. Stringing together
many spurious with a few genuine ones, as Mr. Buckley did,
creates confusion, but will never prove that the latter are not of
a supernatural origin. Speaking of St. Teresa, the author says
that " there is no difficulty in explaining her visions on natural
principles. She was a religious woman in such a state of health
as to be subject to trances, and they took their character from
her conventual and other religious instructions." Will Mr. Buckley
explain on "natural principles" the immediate effects of her visions
and trances ? The sources of information that tell us of them —
i.e., her biographers and herself — inform us also that during said
visions and trances she was raised more than once several feet
high without visible support, and remained stationary in mid-air
for more than an appreciable length of time ; and that she fore-
told future events (every one of which came to pass) quite beyond
the control of human or any other material agency. Was it fair
to omit, in the description of St. Teresa's visions, all the elements

VOL. L.--6

84 PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, ANJD APPARITIONS. [Oct.,

which tend to prove their supernatural origin, and then say that
"there is no difficulty in explaining them on natural principles"?
We are told that " there were great differences of opinion as to
the source of her visions," but we are not told that these differ-
ences disappeared as soon as the visions had been critically ex-
amined, and that, though " several very learned priests and con-
fessors judged her to be deluded by the devil," this very fact
proves that there was no difference of opinion as to the super-
natural nature of the visions.

Mr. Buckley treats the visions of the dying separately, and
lays down the following five canons to prove that they are all
hallucinations : " The following facts cannot be disputed nor dis-
regarded in the elucidation of the subject: First. Such dying
visions occur in all parts of the world, under every form of civiliza-
tion and religion; and if the dying appear to see anything, it is
in harmony with the traditions which they have received." The
answer to which is "Not proven." Second. "Such visions are
often experienced by those whose lives have not been marked by
religious consistency, while many of the most devout are per-
mitted to die without such aid, and sometimes experience the se-
verest mental conflicts as they approach the crisis." The argu-
ment would have force had it been proved that visions are in-
tended by God solely as a reward for virtuous lives. But such is
not the case. Third. " Where persons appear to see angels and
disembodied spirits, the visions accord with the traditional views
of their shape and expressions, and where wicked persons see
fiends and evil spirits, they harmonize with the descriptions which
have been made the materials of sermons, poems, and supernatural
narratives." The author is misinformed. If he will make a good
course of reading in hagiography, he will learn that angels and
fiends have appeared to dying Catholics under almost every im-
aginable form and shape. Very frequently he will find nothing
traditional about their visions. The argument is ab ignorantia.
Fourth. " Many of the most remarkable visions have been seen
by persons who supposed themselves to be dying, but were not,
and who, when they recovered, had not the slightest recollection
of what had occurred," etc. All those " many remarkable visions"
were evidently nothing more than hallucinations of feverish brains.
But, I must repeat, they do not prove the non-existence of genuine
visions. Fifth. " A consideration of great weight is this : The
Catholic Church confers great honor upon the Holy Virgin ;
Protestants seldom make any reference to her. Trained as the

1889.] PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS. 85

Roman Catholics are to supplicate the sympathy and prayers of
the Mother of our Lord, when they have visions of any kind, I
am informed by devout priests and by physicians that she gen-
erally appears in the foreground. Among the visions which dying
Protestants have been supposed to see I have heard of only two
in which the Virgin figured, and these were of persons trained in
their youth as Catholic."

To show that Mr. Buckley makes general assertions formulat-
ing broad theories without having sufficient ground to base them
upon it is sufficient to quote the case of Alphonse de Ratisbonne.
He was born, bred, and trained in the Jewish religion, but when
grown to man's estate gave up all religious belief and avowed
himself a sceptic. Provided with abundant wealth (he was a
banker of Strasbourg), his worldly prospects were of the bright-
est. But on the i8th of January, 1842, while on a pleasure trip,
he entered with his friend, the Baron de Bussieres, the Church
of St. Andrea delle Fratte, in the city of Rome, where he was
vouchsafed a vision of the Blessed Virgin. It proved very effi-
cacious, and caused the young De Ratisbonne to abandon home,
country, parents, wealth, the world, and to become an humble
priest. He spent upwards of forty years in the exercise of works
of charity, and died at Jerusalem in 1884. The Holy Virgin
does not reserve herself to Catholics exclusively, but grants oc-
casional visions of herself to men of good-will outside the church.
I warn Mr. Buckley that many a "devout priest" is fond of a
practical joke. About six million Catholics die yearly. Of this
number it is doubtful if six have any vision at all, true or false,
at the hour of death. Catholics are probably not as visionary as
Protestants. The two apostates mentioned by the author had
perhaps connected themselves with some of the modern sensa-
tional sects. The frequency of visions among Catholics is greatly
exaggerated by Mr. Buckley.

He gave us the definitions of premonitions and visions. Nat-
urally we should have expected him to tell us also what he means
by apparitions. The reader would have then learned the differ-
ence, according to the author's conception, between visions and
apparitions. But he begins by quoting Johnson's well-known
passage concerning apparitions. Johnson's argument is what is
known as the consensus generis hitmani — i.e., that whenever any
fact ascertainable through the senses has been accepted at all
times, in all places, by the entire human family, it must be true.
Apparitions are plainly within the dominion of the senses (unless

86 PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS. [Oct.,

we take it for granted that they are hallucinations, which is beg-
ging the question), and have been believed in everywhere, at all
times, by the entire human family. Therefore they must be true.
The following is thought sufficient by Mr. Buckley to overthrow
Johnson's argument : " The concurrent testimony of all ages and
nations can hardly create a presumption, unless it be assumed
that there have been no universal errors. The assertion that the
opinion could become universal only by its truth compels the
assumption that all universal opinions are true." The answer to
which is : There has been universal ignorance of facts, but no
universal errors ; that is to say, mankind has never been de-
ceived, everywhere and at all times, in apprehending through the
senses material objects. If it has, we must then adopt the phil-
osophy of universal doubt — scepticism ; we must reject the testi-
mony of all mankind, the statements of Mr. Buckley included.

"The testimony of a single witness to an apparition can be
of little value, because whatever he sees may be a spectral illu-
sion or an hallucination. The. state of mind of a person who
thinks that he sees an apparition is entirely unfavorable to calm
observation, and after he has seen it he has nothing but his re-
collection of what he saw, unsupported by analogies or memor-
anda taken during the vision. To say that immediately after he
witnessed such a thing he made a note of it is at best to say
only that he wrote down what he could remember at that time."
This process of reasoning would not be thought worthy of serious
criticism had it not appeared in a magazine which has serious
claims to respectability. Imagine an attorney gravely addressing
the jury in defence of his client : " Gentlemen of the Jury : The
testimony of a single witness to a murder can be of little value,
because whatever he thinks he sees may be a spectral illusion or
an hallucination. The state of mind of a person who thinks that
he sees a murder is entirely unfavorable to calm observation ; and
after he has seen it he has nothing but his recollection of what
he saw, unsupported by analogies or memoranda taken during
the murder. To say that immediately after he witnessed such a
thing he made a note of it is at best to say only that he wrote
down what he could remember at that time." According to the
author's logic, the testimony of two or a hundred witnesses would
not be sufficient to convict a murderer. He says : " It has fre-
quently been laid down as indisputable that if two persons see a
vision at the same time its objective and authentic character is
conclusively demonstrated. This by no means follows ; on the

1889.] PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS. 87

contrary, a hundred persons may be confident that they see an
apparition, and the proof that they do not may be conclusive."
To prove his assertion he tells us of the vampirism of the mid-
dle ages: that "some dreamed that these malicious spectres took
them by the throat, and having strangled them, sucked their
blood"; that "others believed that they actually saw them," etc.;
but he fails to give us a well-authenticated instance of one hun-
dred creditable witnesses testifying to their having seen an appari-
tion, when the proof that they did not was conclusive. To tell
us that the negroes in the South and sailors generally believe
easily in ghost stories proves that they are superstitious, but not
that there are no true apparitions. The tale borrowed from Mr.
Ellis (who published Brand's Popular Antiquities] proves that the
sense of sight, when properly applied, is a reliable medium to test
the truthfulness or falsity of apparitions, nothing more. Mr. Buckley
is profuse in quotations of cases of hallucinations, all of which can
be accounted for on natural principles. He could have as easily
quoted as many apparitions which cannot be explained without
the admission of the supernatural.

The concluding argument against the truth of apparitions must
be given whole to be fully appreciated. "When we consider the
horrible injustice inflicted upon orphans whose estates are squan-
dered by trustees, the concealment or destruction of wills; the in-
gratitude to destitute benefactors; the diverting of trust funds for
benevolent purposes to objects abhorrent to those who with painful
toil accumulated them, and with confidence in the stability of hu-
man laws bequeathed them ; the loneliness of despair that fills
human hearts; and the gloomy doubts of the reality of a future
existence, all of which would be rendered impossible if actual ap-
paritions took place ; the conclusion that neither in the manner of
the alleged comings nor in the objects for which they come is
there any evidence to be found of their reality, gathers almost ir-
resistible force." Were it claimed by the believers in supernatural
apparitions that they can be had at the bidding of man, this ar-
gument against them would have force. But such a claim has
never been made. As it is, Mr. Buckley's majestic period of
some one hundred and twenty words has nothing in it but bad
logic.

The author of the article in the Century evidently considers
mankind as the toy of an invisible, undefinable, unreal something.
Man, according to him, has been ever since his creation running
after an ignis fatuus called premonitions, visions, apparitions ;

88 PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS. [Oct.,

which, however, "exclusive of the sphere of true religion, have
exerted the greatest influence over the decisions and actions of
men." For six thousand years mankind has been swayed by this
mighty spell. The six hundred thousand Jews who saw "a pillar
of a cloud by day, and by night a pillar of fire," week after week,
were hallucinated (Exod., ch. xiii. v. 21). Zachary was halluci-
nated when he saw an angel by his side in the temple, and when
he was struck dumb by the vision (Luke, ch. i.) Mary the
Virgin was hallucinated when she held a conversation with the
Archangel Gabriel, after which she conceived, although she pro-
tested that " I know not man " (Luke, ch. i.) The wise men
from the east were hallucinated when they traversed the deserts
to follow a star without an orbit (Matthew, ch. ii.) The twelve
apostles and the five hundred brethren were hallucinated when
they saw Christ after his resurrection ; ate with him, travelled with
him, conversed with him, touched him, etc. Again, the apostles
were hallucinated when, on Pentecost, they beheld the Holy Ghost,
and received the gifts of tongues and of miracles. For " when
the evidence is rigorously, though fairly, examined, the Scotch
verdict, Not proven, must be rendered concerning the reality of
apparitions."

A careful perusal of Mr. Buckley's article has convinced me
that if he has not proved " that in the course of some six thou-
sand years " mankind has been persistently hallucinated, he has
undoubtedly demonstrated that even a scientific philosopher may
be betrayed into attempting to prove an absurd proposition.

L. A. DUTTO.

Jackson, Miss.

1889.] ijyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 89

I79i_A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO.

CHAPTER VI. — (Continued^}

THE day after the " Crop Over " the colonel had ridden down
to the Cape, and finding that Henry Pascal had been prompt to
make satisfactory arrangements, he decided upon bringing over
his family the following morning. But on the eve of departure,
even of a temporary character, one often finds unexpected things
to do, and, in the absence of such sources of delay, the Tourners
did not prove an exception. Preparations had not been completed
when it became evident that a storm of unusual force was de-
veloping. The departure was, in consequence, postponed till the
next day, and everything made ready against an early move, to
avail themselves of the forenoon, which even in the rainy season
is commonly open. These preparations had kept them up late,
and, after retiring, the outbursts of the elements allowed but a
broken rest. The cooled air and quietude, however, that came
with the close of the storm invited repose, and Colonel Tourner
had fallen into sound sleep, when a piercing cry from his daugh-
ter smote his ear.

Her anxiety of mind, consequent upon the general condition
of affairs, had been greatly deepened by Henry Pascal's visit and
preparations for flight to the Cape, and this evening, after a day
of bustle and fatigue, her brooding spirit had risen to a state of
positive agitation at the unexpected delay and their having to
pass another night in the midst of lurking and horrible dangers.
The terrors of the storm lent their aid, and her imagination be-
came so wrought upon that it was long before she could catch
even fitful sleep. In one of her rousings her suspicious ear de-
tected, as she thought, footfalls upon the lawn. She rose and
looked out. The heavens were shrouded, but the moon was up
and cast a dim light. She could see nothing, however, and sup-
posed, as the negroes kept late hours, it may have been some
one passing through the grounds after the storm. Examining
anew the lower sash of the windows, the fastenings of which she
had taken the precaution to secure, she again sought her couch,
when presently sounds on the piazza-roof startled her. Were they
rain-drops shaken from the boughs, or the stealthy movements o/
an intruder ? With her heart in her mouth she started up, and

9O 7/p^ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

as she drew aside a curtain a negro burst open the sash. She
sprang back terror-stricken, and with the appalling cry that aroused
her father. Bounding from the bed, he seized his sabre and a
brace of heavy double-barrelled pistols, as his daughter wildly en-
tered, exclaiming that negroes were breaking into her room.

" Be in reach of me with this, if you can, and, if I fall, use
it upon yourself," he said in a breath, thrusting a pistol into her
hand (for it would be impossible, he knew, in the struggle upon
him, to control the sabre and more than one pistol ; nor could he,
being in night-dress, secure the other about his person), and rush-
ing out, for he was a man of courage and a master of weapons,
he met the foremost negro in the hall-way and ran him through,
yet not without receiving a slash upon the upper left arm. An-
other negro, making at him with an axe, fell dead from a pistol-
shot within the door-way of his daughter's room. At a third,
who was entering the window, he fired, but in the dim light the
ball went astray, and the negro, adroitly avoiding a sabre-thrust,
sprang upon him with a yell. Colonel Tourner was a man of
strength as well as courage, but the left arm was helpless from
the stab in the muscles, and the negro, who was a powerful fel-
low, had borne him to his knees, and was wrenching the sabre
from him, when he cried out^ " Shoot, Emilie ! "

She had kept behind her father, almost expiring with terror,
yet resolute to help him, if she could. She could tell in the dim-
ness he was wounded, for his left side was all bloody, and when
the hand-to-hand struggle began, she saw his disadvantage with
an awful, despairing, sinking dread. But as her father went down
a tremendous' spring of energy suddenly steeled her, and at his
outcry, quick as thought, she levelled the weapon and fired at
close quarters, the negro pitching over, fatally struck.

Meanwhile, two of the insurgents had broken into the colonel's
chamber and were now struggling with the house-servants, who,
having rushed up-stairs at the uproar, came to their master's aid.
Seizing the pistol from his daughter, the colonel despatched one
of these with the remaining barrel, when the other negro was
overpowered.

Madame Tourner, at the outburst of terror, had remained a
moment in an agony of prayer. She was one of those ordinarily
nervous women, whose steadiness comes to the surface in extrem-
ities. Descending by a private stairway, with outcries to the
house-servants, she ran for the alarm-bell. The ringing and firings
at once aroused the plantation. The manager rushed forth with
arms, the slaves flocked from the quarters, and falling upon the

1889.] I791 — ^ TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 91

rest of the band in greatly superior numbers, speedily put them
to flight.

With a sense of infinite relief Colonel Tourner saw from the
window that his slaves were proving faithful, cheered his wife
and daughter as they stanched and bound his wound, and has-
tened out. But the insurgents had fled, leaving several of their
number slain in the melee. Calling his slaves about him, he
thanked them again for their devotion, and asked if they would
protect him to Petite Ance, where the neighboring whites, he knew,
would concentrate for safety. They answered with a will ; and
directing M. Fanchet to have a conveyance in immediate readi-
ness, he turned in for the preparations. Not an instant was to be lost,
for the insurrection would gather every moment in numbers and
ferocity. All blood-stained and among frightful corpses, Madame
Tourner and her daughter threw on their garments and entered
the double gig with the colonel and M. Fanchet. The accompa-
nying negroes, armed with plantation implements and whatever
else they could lay hands on, were fleet of foot and kept up with
the horses. A third of the distance had been made when, look-
ing back, they saw Belle Vue in flames, fired either by another
band or a disaffected remnant of the plantation negroes. At the
end of the next mile the negro guard returned, Petite Ance being
in view ; and, a few moments after, Colonel Tourner and his family,
thanking God for their lives, pressed into the distracted village.

Fugitives from massacred homes were flying in at intervals,
their agonies finding vent on realizing their personal safety, and
increasing every instant the consternation. The terrified people
thronged the street, uncertain what course to pursue. • Some were
for making a stand at the village. Others thought that if the
rising was general the negroes would soon unite in overpowering
force, and that they could make a body sufficiently numerous to
resist the individual bands in which the insurgents were for the
moment acting, and reach the Cape. Colonel Tourner's arrival
strengthened the latter view, and a considerable party at once set
out for Cape Fran£ois. Progress was as rapid as circumstances
would allow, for almost all were afoot, the greater part in naked
feet, and among them many tender women, accustomed to every
surrounding and refinement of wealth. Negro bands were met,
but the party was too strong to be resisted, and towards day-
break reached the Cape. Henry Pascal had remained at his post,
eagerly searching and inquiring among the fugitives. In this
group he found his friends, and, transported with joy, accompa-
nied them to the Hotel de Ville.

92 /7p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

CHAPTER VII.
THE BATTLE.

The morning of the 23d broke dismally over Cape Francois.
The first action of the authorities, as the formidable character of
the insurrection became more and more apparent, -was to lay an
embargo on the vessels in the harbor and send aboard the women
and children. Of the British vessels in port, one was despatched
to Jamaica for aid, and this step, following the loud talk that had
been prevalent at Cape Fran9ois of a British protectorate, gave
rise to a widespread rumor among the insurgents that the Eng-
lish were coming to possess themselves of the island.

The General Assembly was now in session at the Cape. Imi-
tating the example of the National Legislature, it had taken af-
fairs entirely into its own hands, the royalist governor-general,
M. Blanchelande, giving a mere formal assent to proceedings he
could neither arrest nor amend. The sudden presence of a great
and common danger healed the breach. The General Assembly
at once placed in the governor's hands the National Guard ; as
many sailors and marines as could be spared from the ships
were sent ashore ; all able-bodied men were enrolled into the
militia, and a force of five or six thousand straightway organized
for the city's defence. A strong mulatto contingent formed a
part of this force. For, moved by the extreme gravity of affairs,
the General Assembly not only took measures to protect the
mulattoes from the threats of the petits blancs, but by formal ac-
tion ratified the i$th of May decree. The mulattoes were, in con-
sequence, entirely won, and with all the zeal that the powerful
interests of property inspire (the well-to-do among them being
universally slave-owners), they proffered to march with the whites
against the insurgents, leaving their wives and children as host-
ages. A part of the troops was employed in fortifying and guard-
ing the city. An assault by land was possible only at two
points — the strip between the bay and the Western Morne, and a
narrow exit to the northwest between the Western Morne and its
northern companion. The guns of the British frigate Sappho
commanded the seaward strip, and the attention of the authorities
was concentrated upon making good the northwestern passage.
The larger and more efficient portion of the troops was designed
for offensive operations against the insurgents.

In the midst of all these preparations M. Tardiffe managed to

1889.] 179 z — A TALE OF SAA? DOMINGO. 93

elude military service. A soft, sensual, luxurious mode of life —
the .truffles and capons of Gonaives would alone satisfy him —
rendered him averse to war, even had he naturally possessed a
more martial spirit. He was, too, secretly with the blacks, and
believed they would ultimately triumph, if not through their vast
numerical superiority, at least by the aid of the rising Jacobin
party in France. Besides, he had no interests in San Domingo
beyond his passion for Emilie Tourner ; and in behalf of this
passion he was eager for freedom to turn to account the aus-
picious opportunities events were placing before him. Availing
himself, therefore, of the recognized influence with the blacks
which his extreme and well-known Jacobin opinions had procured
for him, he successfully represented to M. Blanchelande, while pro-
fessing hearty sympathy with the whites in the present crisis, that,
as an occasion for mediation might arise, it would be better that
he should remain neutral.

Early next morning he made a flying visit, to Madame Tourner
and her daughter on the man-of-war Sappho, where they had
quarters. Prior to going he had brought forth from its drawer
in the escritoire his bank-book, between the leaves of which were
a number of ^100 notes recently received from London, and
these he took out and held for some moments in a meditative
way. He was evidently weighing something, and presently
reached a conclusion — a conclusion quite satisfactory, judging
from the ripple of complacency that passed over his features, and
one apparently involving the use of a part of this money ; for,
drawing out a note, he very carefully folded it, and securing the
same in a neat little package, transferred it to his vest-pocket.
Before replacing the book, he turned with triumphant eyes to
his bank-account There stood the £5 0,000 record of deposit,
made four years back ! There, too, stood the interest — interest
that had been freely used, but still showed a substantial balance.
There it was ; all down in black and white, and no mistake.

" Sagacious me, happy me," ran his thoughts, " who have
this in solid British gold in place of howling, cut-throat blacks
and wasted plantations ! Emilie Tourner captured, and then for
England ! For where one's treasure is, there one's home should
be also, and there shall the nest be made for this shy bird. The
maiden disdains me, but I shall possess her with the greater joy.
And you, my potent yellow boys" — as with an exulting ha! ha!
he patted the bank-book — " aid thy master's cause."

He was cordially received by Madame Tourner, still dazed by
the shock she had sustained, and who, in an hour so dreadful,

94 I79I — -A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

thinking less of personal loss than of the common peril, was
most eager for authentic news. Notwithstanding the excited
throng aboard they succeeded in finding a place apart for con-
versation; and as they became seated he said, in the bland and
turgid style peculiar to him:

" Most heartily, Madame Tourner, do I felicitate you again " —
for his greeting had been given with an expression of joy at see-
ing her alive — " upon your marvellous deliverance. All manner
of on dits are current in regard to it."

" I am indeed thankful, monsieur."

"Where is mademoiselle, and how is she?" he asked.

"Poor Emilie! she is prostrated, and unable to see any one."

" Is it true," he queried, " that she slew one of her father's
assailants? Her magnificent conduct is the town's talk."

" She had skill with the weapon, having often practised with
her father, and fired to save him. The ebb of the terrible strain
has left her well-nigh undone. But oh! monsieur," she added,
averting her head, and with a movement of the hand as if push-
ing away something dreadful, " spare me from recalling the horrors
of that night! Let us speak of the present. What news
have you of Colonel Tourner ? I have neither seen nor heard
from him for the past twelve hours."

" Your husband, madame, is now a veritable colonel, command-
ing a citizen regiment, and fortifying the Northwestern pass
beyond the Champ de Mars."

" What is Monsieur Pascal doing ? "

"You refer, I presume, to the younger Pascal?"

" Yes. He sent Emilie a hurried note yesterday afternoon,
telling her he expected to be in battle on the 25th — to-morrow —
yet saying nothing of his special duties."

" Monsieur Pascal has been assigned to an artillery company,
and is drilling at the arsenal."

" Tell me, monsieur, how go affairs in the city, and what is
thought of the situation ? "

" The Cape is a bee-hive, void of drones," he replied ; " every
soul pressed into service and laboring most sedulously. Even
Monsieur Charles Pascal refuses to be excused, and is in the ranks
of the citizen soldiery."

" How happens it, then, monsieur, that we have you here ? "

" Have I not sufficient interest in you and yours, madame, to
importune for an hour's leave of absence?"

" Your kindness is most considerate," she answered.

" My dear madame," he said, expanding somewhat his usual

1889.] Z79r — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 95

smile, "the leave of absence is a jest. Notwithstanding, my in-
terest in your behalf is none the less sincere. The truth is, a
conference with M. Blanchelande has resulted in my being held
in reserve for special prospective duties, in the discharge of which
I may be far more serviceable than I could possibly be on the
field or in the trench."

A moment's pause ensued, when he answered the inquiry he
saw upon the lips of his hostess :

" It is known, as you are no doubt aware, that I possess in-
fluence with the blacks, and I am reserved as a possible peace-
maker."

" Are hopes of peace entertained ? " she asked eagerly, " and
do you think, monsieur, we shall regain our possessions ? "

The latter interrogatory turned the conversation in the precise
direction desired by M. Tardiffe, who replied :

" I might answer more definitely after to-morrow's battle.
The blacks are concentrating near Petite Ance under the noto-
rious Dessalines, and a number of battalions march from the Cape
to-morrow morning to attack them."

" Would our prevailing, do you think, monsieur, crush the
rebellion ? "

With a shrug of the shoulders, and lifting his brows, he
slowly answered :

" Pos-si-bly."

" * Possibly ' ! do you say, monsieur — ' Possibly,' under
these circumstances ? " she asked, as the distress upon her coun-
tenance visibly deepened. " Mon Dieu ! then you despair."

"The sentiment of France, madame, favors the blacks. The
planters may recover their estates, but their slaves, in my judg-
ment, never ! "

" What are estates without cultivators ? " she asked, with an
absent air and a tone of bitterness.

"The estates, madame, if regained would be but naked soil.
Fire, I hear, has devoured the plain. The blacks have destroyed
everything, and rendezvous in the mountains. I trust your own
sterling slaves have saved Belle Vue."

" No, monsieur ; alas ! no. The flames burst forth when we
were a mile away. We have lost everything" tears filling her
eyes, " and have sunk at once to utter poverty."

"Hundreds of others, madame, are in similar circumstances,"
said her visitor in a voice of apparent sympathy.

" So much the worse, monsieur. Tis impossible for me to re-
alize our situation. I know the dreadful truth must come — crush-

96 7/p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

ingly come ; but I am utterly confounded, and as yet it makes
little impression upon me that, except the clothes we wear and a
casket of jewelry I caught up in leaving, we are absolutely pen-
niless. My woes, Monsieur Tardiffe, are like those sudden and
fatal wrenchings of the body which deprive the victim of the
power to feel."

" It gratifies me to know," said M. Tardiffe, as if endeavor-
ing delicately to divert from herself her painful thoughts, yet
adroitly pursuing his object, " that the circumstances of our Pas-
cal friends are not so deplorable as I had supposed."

She turned upon the speaker a look of interested inquiry, and
he continued :

" You remember my mentioning, the evening of the ' Crop
Over,' a bit of Cape gossip, that the Pascal estates were to pass
under the auctioneer's hammer ? "

She nodded assent.

" Well, the gossip was an error," he went on to say, " and
arose out of Monsieur Pascal's half-formed purpose to dispose of
his profitless possessions."

" In what respect, monsieur, is he better off? "

" I apprehend, madame, that simply to lose all is preferable to
losing all and being, moreover, encumbered with debt."

" I suppose so," she answered, in a dejected and negative
sort of way.

" Last evening Monsieur Pascal was telling me he had naught
remaining save his son's right arm, and he bitterly regretted not
having realized, as he had had thoughts of doing, upon his
plantations."

" Alas ! monsieur, how many are stung with the same
regret ! "

% " At the beginning of revolutionary activity," remarked Mon-
sieur Tardiffe, " I anticipated the probability of these issues and
disposed of my possessions here ; and I would have bidden adieu
to San Domingo," he added, dropping his voice to the pitch of
emphasis, " had not my love for your daughter restrained me — a
love, alas! that has proven hopeless."

At a loss for reply to the latter sentiment, Madame Tourner
asked abruptly :

" What, monsieur, are your present purposes ? "

"To take flight the instant I can arrange my affairs. San
Domingo is no longer a domicile for whites, even for those pos-
sessing affluence."

"And whither do you go?" she asked again.

1889.]

— A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO.

" To old England."

" Your investments are there," she remarked.

" Yes, madame ; investments in lieu of what otherwise would
have been insurgent slaves and estates in ashes."

" Oh ! that my husband, monsieur, had shown the same fore-
cast ! Mon Dieu ! Mon Dieu ! " she exclaimed in tones of keen
distress, as the thoughts her visitor had been thrusting upon her
took effect, " what will become of us ? Where we shall go, what
we shall do, God only knows ! "

Deeming the wound sufficiently irritated for the emollient,
M. Tardiffe said, in his kindest manner :

" Be reassured, dear madame, be reassured ; you have a stay
in adversity, even able and willing friends. At this juncture to
realize on your bijouterie would be impossible, and I crave ac-
ceptance of this," handing her the little package from his vest-
pocket. "One word more, madame, if you please" as he saw
himself threatened with interruption. " If you can't receive it ab-
solutely, reimburse at your convenience. I concede the amplest
limit ; and remember," laying stress upon his words, " whatever I
possess is freely at your service"

She was still on the point of replying, when he again inter-
posed :

" Pray, don't speak of it, madame, don't speak of it, I must
insist. The obligation is upon myself for the opportunity. I
must now to the city," he said, rising and extending his hand.
" Remember, dear madame, you are to feel perfectly secure as re-
gards finance. What are we for but to assist each other ? And
please commend me to mademoiselle."

On opening the package immediately after the departure of
her guest, Madame Tourner was surprised at the amount, and
doubted much whether, without the concurrence of her husband,
she should have taken it. It annoyed her, likewise, that while
their pecuniary condition was most deplorable, she had gone be-
yond the strict reality in stating it, since Colonel Tourner had
saved his cash in hand, and " absolutely penniless " was not the
actual status. There was, too, a pang from wounded pride in
receiving this aid. The result of M Tardiffe's visit, however,
was a decided balance of comfort, and for his considerate and
ample generosity her thoughts went out towards him in a very
grateful way.

Thursday morning, the 25th, a force some three thousand strong,
commanded by M. de Touzard, a distinguished French officer, left
the Cape in high feather to assault the insurgent camp. The

98 //p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

march was from the arsenal along the quay, and as the troops
passed the Sappho at the southern extremity of the city, they
received a salvo from the man-of-war. Emilie Tourner was on
deck in the throng, but seemed oblivious to the roar and huzzas.
In apparent expectancy her eyes were bent upon the troops filing
by. Suddenly her 'countenance brightened as she caught the flutter
of a handkerchief from one of the batteries, and a wave from her
own answered the salute.

The San Domingo blacks were a remarkably energetic race
of negroes, and, in numbers and efficiency greatly underrated by
the 'whites, had now concentrated near Petite Ance. Their leader
was Paul Dessalines, twin brother to the famous chief, Jean
Jacques Dessalines, who, some years later, aided by yellow fever,
drove out the veterans of Napoleon, avenging the perfidious
seizure of Toussaint 1'Ouverture, and winning black independence.
The equal of Jean in ability, he would have equalled him in re-
nown had not his cruelties early in the struggle made him the
victim of a conspiracy. The brothers, physically and morally,
bore to each other the most striking resemblance. Paul Dessa-
lines was the black slave of a mulatto carpenter of the same
name, from whose cruelties he had fled to the mountains, where
he raised the standard of revolt The course of affairs in France
and the struggle of the mulattoes for civil rights engendered
among the blacks a wild spirit of liberty, which a general laxity
of rule throughout the colony greatly favored. Under these cir-
cumstances, Dessalines gained many recruits, and soon became the
recognized head of a formidable band, and was the chief fomenter
of the insurrection. His men were disciplined with inexorable se-
verity and drilled in the most careful manner, arms being readily
obtained from the neighboring Spaniards, whose troops were dis-
tributed along the line of demarcation, and between whom and
the French there existed an inveterate jealousy. They were in-
different shots, but the dreadful bayonet, attached to muskets of
unusual length, proved in their powerful hands well-nigh resist-
less. Dessalines himself was entirely illiterate, unable either to
read or write, yet possessed a shrewd intelligence, and delighted
in the display of a low cunning. His profound knowledge of
negro character, joined to great bodily strength and undaunted
courage, enabled him to acquire over his followers unbounded in-
fluence. His military talents stood in daring movement and as-
tonishing celerity. In his morals he was execrable, a lustful,
bloodthirsty monster, whose savage character was deepened by
daily potations of rum. His subordinates trembled before him,

18890

1 7 g i— A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO.

and never felt their heads safe upon their shoulders until out of
his presence. Withal, a preposterous vanity possessed him. He
surrounded himself with mimic royalty, gave his officers grand
titles, dressed in flashy uniform, and (it is said) even carried
about with him a dancing-master, whose instructions, as Mr,
McKenzie has humorously observed, very much resembled an at-
tempt to teach a tiger civilization. He made occasional forays
upon the plain, retiring with the booty beyond the Spanish line,
and his name was a terror throughout all the Northern province.

A league west from Petite Ance, or, rather, from its site, for
Dessalines had just destroyed the village in fire and blood, lay a
valley, skirted on three sides by dense woods, a sylvan cut de
sac. At the head of this valley Dessalines had encamped with
a force six or seven thousand strong, a force constantly increas-
ing, almost wholly unorganized, many without arms save an axe
or a club, yet fresh from massacres, raging with ferocious pas-
sion as famished tigers that had tasted blood, and unconscious of
the fate awaiting failure. Every step of progress on the part of
the French from the time of leaving the Cape his runners made
known to the black chief. He awaited an attack, instead of
being, as he usually was, the attacking party, because his camp
was a centre for concentration, and every possible moment was
needed to put in some sort of array the raw and swelling throng.
His trained musketeers, divided into squads, he distributed through
the mass to serve as centres of discipline and steadiness. Fearing
the effect of the artillery, in order to counteract if, as well as to
force, as far as possible, hand-to-hand fighting, and give the su-
perb physique of the blacks its opportunity, Dessalines encour-
aged a notion prevailing among them, that could they once touch
the cannon and mutter over them certain magical words the guns
would be hurtless.

M. de Touzard rested his troops through the mid-day, and
sighting the insurgents late in the afternoon, immediately advanced
upon them with his batteries in the centre. The first discharge
from the cannon was a signal for the onset of the blacks, who
rushed with wild cries to the muzzles of the guns. Several of
these were served by experienced artillerists from the ships-of-war
in port, and did fearful execution. The blacks, moreover, were
exposed to a cross fire from the wings, and before the deadly
volleys fled into the forest. The French began to think the
battle ended, when the enemy again charged pell-mell from the
woods. These charges were repeated with a promptness and im-
petuosity astonishing to De Touzard ; and though the blacks in

VOL. L.— 7

ioo lypi—A T-ALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

some instances reached the enemy's line and got in bloody work,
yet they were invariably driven back by -the fatal French fire,
and as nightfall approached, Dessalines resolved upon a change
in the disposition of his men. Concentrating, therefore, his mus-
keteers, he placed himself at their head, and, followed by his en-
tire force, threw himself resistlessly upon the batteries. The
artillerists were overwhelmed, and clubbed or bayoneted almost
to a man ; the French centre was completely broken, and De
Touzard was in despair, when, to his utter amazement, the main
body of these brave but untutored warriors, having put the spell
upon the cannon and being unconscious of their advantage, betook
themselves with a number of prisoners to the woods. The French
rallied, and drove back the remainder of the enemy.

It was now dark, and firing ceased. De Touzard, confounded at
the numbers and desperate courage of the blacks, and finding they
were receiving constant accessions, deemed it prudent to retreat.
With the camp-fires burning, he quietly withdrew, leaving his dead
and cannon behind, and reached the Cape after midnight. The
French loss was small compared with that of the insurgents, who
exposed themselves in the most reckless way.

Among the captives was Henry Pascal. He had been struck
down senseless, and was about receiving a bayonet stab when a
powerful black rushed up and, thrusting aside the weapon, ex-
claimed : " He's my prisoner ! " His rescuer, whoever he was,
became lost to him in the darkness and tumultuous retreat to the
woods.

CHAPTER VIII.
INTERCEDING.

When Dessalines discovered the retreat of the French it was
too late to pursue ; but he despatched several fleet mulatto run-
ners, who, mingling with the mulatto troops in the French army,
entered the Cape in the confusion, and during the night scattered
on the streets copies of his proclamation. As shown below, it
was a bombastic and sanguinary production, thoroughly charac-
teristic of the man, and written, at his dictation, by his secretary,
Chantalte, an educated mulatto ; for Dessalines' learning did not
go beyond the ability to mechanically scrawl his name.

" LIBERTY OR DEATH !

"Blacks! the God of justice has brought the axe to bear upon
the decrepit tree of slavery and prejudice, and raised my arm to

1889.]

/ — A TALE OF SAN* DOMINGO.

101

strike off your fetters. The irritated Genius of San Domingo
appears — his aspect is menacing — his hand is powerful. Like an
overflowing and mighty torrent, that bears down all opposition,
let your vengeful fury sweep away your oppressors. Tyrants !
usurpers ! tremble. Our daggers are sharpened, your punish-
ment ready ! Ten thousand men, obedient to my orders, burn to
offer a new sacrifice to Liberty. Awakened from your lethargy,
with arms in your hands, join your brothers, and claim your
sacred and indelible rights. Where is the black so vile, so un-
worthy of regeneration, as to pause ? If there be one, let him
fly ; indignant nature discards him from our bosom. Let him
hide his infamy far from hence. The air we breathe is not suited
to his gross organs ; it is the air of liberty, pure, august, and
triumphant.

" Yellows ! whom the infernal politics of Europeans for a long
time endeavored to divide from us, rally to our standard. Simi-
lar calamities, hanging over your proscribed heads, should make
us indivisible and inseparable. It is the pledge of your happi-
ness, your salvation, and your success. It is the secret of being
invincible. Independence or death ! Let these sacred words be
the signal of battle and of union.

" They tell us that the English from Jamaica are coming to
assist the French, and refasten upon our limbs the galling fetters
of slavery. Let these English be accursed. Every man from
Jamaica falling into our hands shall be put to death.

" Headquarters near the Cape, August 24, 1791.

"(Signed) GENERAL DESSALINES."

Tidings of the repulse spread like wild-fire, and the morning
of the 26th found the Cape in an agony of despair. The inhab-
itants were horror-stricken and in the most dreadful state of un-
certainty as to what course to pursue. It was believed that
Dessalines was marching on the city. His force was vastly ex-
aggerated, and many thought it better to at once make terms,
even with such a monster, than to provoke his rage by fruitless
resistance. Such at the moment was the fear and irresolution
that, had the black chief appeared before the Cape, it must un-
doubtedly have fallen. Happily for it, he was then planning an
assault upon Dondon and Grand Riviere, and the inhabitants
of the Cape, recovering from their panic, soon rendered its
naturally strong defences impregnable.

The news of Henry Pascal's capture at once became known
throughout the city, where his frank, open manners and generous

io2 ijc)i — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

qualities had made him a universal favorite. In view of Dessa-
lines' proclamation, there was but one opinion as to his fate; for
he was partly English or American born, had an English air, and
spoke the language as a native. Withal, he had recently arrived
from Jamaica, and, in ignorance of the proclamation, would not be on
his guard. Beyond this consideration, it was thought the savage
Dessalines would not fail to wreak vengeance on the prisoners for
the horrible tortures with which certain captured blacks had been
just put to death at the Cape. Early on the morning of the 26th
Colonel Tourner, who could not leave his duties, by one of his men
despatched a note to his wife with a copy of the proclamation,
acquainting her with the situation, and deeply commiserating the
capture of M. Pascal. He detailed the grounds for the opinion
universally entertained in regard to his fate, and added that, as
his daughter would scarcely avoid hearing the report, it would be
better she should break the news to her without delay, and as
considerately as possible.

Confused rumors of the disaster had reached the Sappho, wild
fears prevailed among the refugees abroad, and the desire for
authentic intelligence was intense. Madame Tourner, therefore,
received her husband's letter with the utmost eagerness, and im-
mediately repaired to her apartment to read it, accompanied by
her daughter. The latter was intently listening, when suddenly
her mother's voice ceased.

" What is it ? " she anxiously cried, advancing to look over
the letter.

" In a moment, Emilie ; there is something here for me"
answered Madame Tourner, as her eyes rapidly ran over the lines.

An explanation was unavoidable, and making a hurried finish,
she said before her daughter could speak, and with as much com-
posure as she could assume :

" Your father, Emilie, mentions unpleasant news as to one of
our friends."

" What friend ? Is it Monsieur Pascal ? " she exclaimed almost
in the same breath ; for she knew he had been exposed to danger,
and it flashed into her mind there could be no other friend whose
misfortune would be likely to be withheld from her.

"Yes, Emilie; but—"

" Has he been killed ? " she broke in with a quivering lip.

"No."

" Wounded ? "

"No."

" What, then, has befallen him ? "

1889.] ijt)i—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 103

" He is a captive."

"A captive in the hands of Dessalines!" she cried out, with
a countenance turning deadly pale, as the negro horrors she had
lately experienced, and all the stories she had heard of the black
chief, conjured up the most harrowing fate. " O Maman !
Maman ! it would have been better had he fallen in battle !" And
she sank into her seat and sobbed aloud in her anguish. Madame
Tourner rose, and tenderly kissing her daughter, put her arms
about her.

" He yet lives, Emilie, and while there is life there is hope."

" What does my father say ? " she asked, looking up.

Her mother remained silent

" Let me see his letter."

There was a momentary reluctance to yield it, when she wildly
cried :

" Oh ! I must see it, I must know all ! " And receiving the
letter, she read it and the enclosed proclamation with intense px-
pression, her manner the while undergoing an evident change ;
for, having finished, she said with a firm voice and resolute air:

"There is but one possible means to save him, and I must put
it into immediate execution."

Madame Tourner directed towards her daughter a quick glance
of interrogation, and she replied :

" I will crave the intercession of Monsieur Tardiffe ; he has
great influence with the blacks," rising, as she spoke, to make
preparations for leaving.

" My child! my child!" exclaimed Madame Tourner, alarmed
for her daughter's mind under these terrible and repeated strain-
ings, " are you beside yourself? Will you go to the city, and
unprotected, too, when Dessalines is hourly expected, and they
are preparing the Sappho for action ? "

" I have no fears," she replied with a calmness strange to her
mother; for her being, though powerfully roused, had become
harmonious and steady, as all the faculties settled around a defi-
nite, firm, and hopeful resolve. " My father's messenger will be
my companion."

" But, Emilie, my child, consider, I beseech you. What grounds
have you for reckoning upon success with Monsieur Tardiffe ? He
has noble, generous qualities, and such an appeal may not exceed
their limit; but it would, under all the circumstances, be strain-
ing them very far."

" I know," she answered, with the same strange and sudden
calmness, more alarming to her mother than the outgush of grief

IO4 I791 — ^ TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

had been, " that I have declined his addresses to receive those of
the man for whose life I am to entreat his intercession ; but these
very circumstances are the nobleness of the opportunity. If there
be in Monsieur Tardiffe anything great and generous, he will hear
me ; and I feel I shall succeed," she added, glowing with noble
thought, and judging him from the standpoint of her own lofty
nature. Madame Tourner knew the resolute character of her daugh-
ter. She was fearful, too, of the effect of useless opposition upon
an already overstrained mind ; and conscious, withal, that any
hope for Henry Pascal lay in the direction of the proposed step,
ceased to /remonstrate. In a few moments Emilie Tourner had
made herself ready, and stood in the presence of the Sappho s
commander, Captain Winslow, to ask a permit for an hour ashore.
Astounded at . the request, the first impulse of the captain was a
downright, peremptory refusal. But youth and beauty, pleading
for a noble object, make a powerful advocate. Captain Winslow
listened, and, as Dessalines had not been reported near, at length
yielded to his lovely suppliant on a life and death mission ;
exacting, however, her 'immediate return aboard upon the signal
of the enemy's approach, a gun from the Sappho ; and within an
hour after the arrival of her father's messenger she had landed
on the quay, with her companion, from the jolly-boat of the ship.
They at once crossed to la rue St. Nicholas, Emilie Tourner
being closely veiled and directing her companion, for the Cape
was familiar to her, and she knew the location of M. Tardiffe's
home. A few blocks off, they turned north into la rue Dauphine,
up which their course lay. Comparatively few persons were met,
the citizens being all under arms at the assailable points. Here
and there groups of mulatto women were observed gossipping in
low tones, and the city wore a hushed and oppressive air. At
the corner of la rue des Trois Chandeliers they passed " Aunt
Sabina," in those days a well-known and eccentric Cape character,
who for many years had been vending from this corner her famous
ginger-bread and sugar-candy. The terrors of the hour were ap-
parently lost upon the aged negress, who occupied her customary
stool, with a tray of merchandise before her. A twenty minutes'
walk brought them to the Place d'Armes, the most beautiful
square in Cape Francois, and fronting which on the north
side stood the mansion of M. Tardiffe. The fountain was playing,
and the park, under the influence of the early rains, in splendid
leaf and flower, but, absorbed in her thoughts, Emilie Tourner
was oblivious to external objects. Of the church alone, just south
from the park, did she appear conscious, and, in passing it, de-

1889.] ifyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 105

voutly crossed herself in supplication upon her mission. Here she
dismissed her attendant, with a message to her father to see her
as soon as possible. A stroke from the knocker brought the
valet, and she was ushered into M. Tardiffe's luxurious draw-
ing-room.

When he presently appeared he was so utterly confounded at
meeting Emilie Tourner, and at such a crisis, and with a coun-
tenance so stricken by the terrors and griefs she had experienced,
that for a moment he could not speak. Recovering himself, he
quickly advanced, extending his hand, and catching from the in-
tense soul before him a spirit of reality, broke through the mask
of blandishment he commonly wore, and exclaimed with genuine
feeling :

" Mademoiselle ! Is it possible ? In God's name, what has
happened ? "

In low, intense tones, without a blush or hesitation, for self-
consciousness was sunk in an overpowering fear for her lover, she
answered :

" Monsieur Pascal is a prisoner, and I am here to ask you, as
the only hope for his life, to intercede with Dessalines ; a word
from you, monsieur, can save him."

M. Tardiffe was again completely thunderstruck, and for an in-
stant could not reply. When he did, it was to repeat the words:

" To intercede with Dessalines ! Mademoiselle, do you know
anything of this man ? "

" I have heard of him," she replied, " as a bloody-minded,
merciless marauder, and he swears death to every comer from
Jamaica."

" Yes, mademoiselle ; and if he has heard of the horrible and
indiscriminate torturing of blacks here, his fury is boiling to re-
venge it."

" It needs not, monsieur, to deepen the character of Dessa-
lines. I know enough to feel persuaded that you alone may save
Monsieur Pascal, even if it be not already too late to make the
effort."

" It was not my design, mademoiselle, believe me," replied
M. Tardiffe, falling into his usual manner of speech, " to assure
you of the fate of these unhappy captives, but to indicate the
danger, even to an intercessor, with Dessalines in his present
mood."

"But you have great influence with the blacks," she answered.

" I have influence in that direction, they say, mademoiselle ;
though quite probably it is overestimated."

io6 1791— A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

" And I have ventured here, monsieur, to beg of you to use
it in mercy," spoke the same low, intense voice.

" Mademoiselle," he replied, still bewildered at the request,
yet begfcming to see in it possible advantages for himself, and
delaying an answer. until he could better take in the bearings,
" I have never met Dessalines."

"But Dessalines, monsieur, certainly knows of you, and he
will hear your word. Let me entreat this favor," she added with
fervid emphasis, and lifting her hands in supplication ; " beyond it
there is no hope."

It was observed just now that a lovely woman, in distress,
and pleading for a noble end, wields a magic eloquence ; and
fimilie Tourner's profound grief and appealing look and voice
drew sympathy even from a nature as cold and as selfish as that
of M. Tardiffe. He could not find it in his heart to prolong or
dally with the mental agony visible behind her comparatively
calm exterior, and which gave her an almost preternatural aspect ;
and therefore replied :

" Mademoiselle, I am at your service, freely. Whatever can
be done shall be done. But I must have time to consider.
What you ask involves difficulty and danger. The whereabouts of
Dessalines is not now known. Many think he is advancing upon
the Cape. Some definite intelligence will doubtless be received
this afternoon, and I shall be able, most probably, to give an
answer by four. Under no circumstances could action be taken
before to-morrow morn."

Warmly and fittingly Emilie Tourner expressed her thanks,
and, rising, said :

" I must now return. I had but an hour's leave of absence,
and the time is almost expired," glancing, as she spoke, at an
antique French clock, the face of which was ingeniously contrived
to form portions of a picture upon the wall.

" But, mademoiselle, you must not return afoot in the heat.
I will have a gig instanter," said M. Tardiffe, as he left the
room ; and ordering a servant to immediately place refreshments
before his guest, he went for the vehicle himself, dwelling the
while upon this startling request to intercede with Dessalines.
Returning with the livery, he rapidly drove his visitor to the
Calle opposite the Sappho. The ship's boat was hailed, and Emilie
Tourner went aboard a few moments behind time. Madame
Tourner's note and the accounts given by the messenger greatly
alarmed the colonel, and the jolly-boat had been scarcely made
fast when he hailed its return to the Calle.

1889.]

/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO.

107

" Tidings have just come," he said, as he embraced his wife
and daughter, overjoyed at seeing him, " that Dessalines is yet
in camp, and planning a move upon Dondon, and I have a bit
of time off. I am here mainly on your account, Emmie," turn-
ing to his daughter, and using the name by which he commonly
addressed her. " I reached Monsieur Tardiffe's just after you had
left. Your trip to town was reckless, RECKLESS, my child, and it
amazes me that Captain Winslow should have allowed it."

"Well, it is all over," she answered, with a faint smile, "and
you see me safe and sound."

" I don't see," he replied, " that you are altogether safe and
sound ; your face is flushed, and your eyes look congested,"
scrutinizing her. " My daughter," he added in quickened tones,
as he took her hand and pressed it, " have you fever ? "

" Oh ! no," was her answer, with an evident effort to brighten
up. " Don't you think I have passed through enough to account
for some excitement and headache ? "

" I dread, Emmie, these keen mental strainings. They are
fraught with danger; and it grieves me you should have height-
ened them this morning by what will prove, I fear, a barren effort."

" There is hope for success, my father," she eagerly rejoined.
" As far, at least, as regards Monsieur Tardiffe's willingness."

" Emmie, Emmie, don't set your heart upon this hope. It
needs a great height of generosity, such as I must believe is be-
yond Monsieur Tardiffe's reach."

This remark drew a response from Madame Tourner. The
character of M. Tardiffe, as suitor to their daughter, had often
come up for discussion between herself and her husband, and
she as often had defended it from what she considered unjust
disparagements. His recent generous conduct would not permit
her to be silent now.

" Monsieur Tardiffe," she said, " has taken all the action
which, up to this time, is possible ; he has declared his willing-
ness to do what he can, and so far, at least, I think he deserves
credit."

" Professions are cheap things, Marie," dryly observed the
colonel.

" He was our first visitor since our arrival on board," went on
Madame Tourner, worried at the unfair reflections upon her friend.
" He came here early yesterday morning to inquire after us, and
offered, too, to place his means at our service."

" Professions again, my dear, and in this quarter I have never
doubted Monsieur Tardiffe's ability." t

io8 /7p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Oct.,

Madame Tourner had determined for the present, at least, to
withhold from the knowledge of her husband M. Tardiffe's bene-
faction; but the opportunity to maintain her view and clear the
character of her friend was an irresistible temptation, and she re-
plied with an air -of triumph, as she drew forth the bill :

" Does not this £100 note Monsieur Tardiffe left with me
prove him a man of deeds ? "

The colonel's face darkened in silence. Never before had
money been received under such circumstances. Madame Tour-
ner saw his chagrin, and hastened to exclaim :

" Forgive me, my husband ! Monsieur Tardiffe's delicacy pre-
sented it not as a gift, but to be paid back whenever we choose.
I was in doubt whether I should receive it, and knew not the
amount until after his departure. But, whatever our own views
about taking it, its bestowal, I think, shows him to be something
more than a bundle of mere professions."

" Marie," the colonel gravely said, pursuing the train of thought
awakened by this incident, "we are not yet outright beggars."

" My husband, what have we left, save a remnant of cash and
a few pieces of jewelry ? "

" Getting back 'our own, Marie, is not impossible."

" Oh ! that I could see the faintest ray of hope," she ex-
claimed. " Shall we get back our slaves, with the negroes in
open rebellion, and the current of national legislation setting in
strongly towards emancipation ? "

" But, Marie, the horrible deeds of the villains must change
the current."

" And do you suppose, my husband, the negroes would yield
then, outnumbering us as they do, and flushed as they are by
their successes ? "

" And do you suppose," rejoined the colonel with emphasis,
" we shall not be able — aided, as we hope to be, from Jamaica —
to bring an effective force against them ? "

" Oh ! Colonel Tourner, I can't imagine a darker prospect.
Even were our slaves regained, how could we get on our feet
again, with fields stripped and every house in ashes ? "

" Affairs are dark, dark, Marie, I own ; yet light has broken
over darker outlooks. As for this money, I grant the gener-
osity of the act ; but my wish is that you hand it back, and that
you say to Monsieur Tardiffe we have enough for present wants.
When a loan is needed, there are other friends I would prefer
seeking."

" My dear husband," his, wife replied, still pressing into view

1889.] I79I~ A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 109

her despairing thoughts, " where can you find that other friend
who is not also beggared ? And should one be found, what se-
curity have you to offer for a loan ? Mon Dieu ! Mon Dieu !
what is to become of us ? "

" Come, come, Marie ! Our talk is distressing Emmie, whose
looks, by the way, give me concern. I've been absorbed in pub-
lic duties, with little time for thought upon personal matters, yet
I am not and shall not be hopeless. Great mercies have been
granted us in the sparing of our lives, and, whatever the dark-
ness, in the path of right I shall look for light."

" Emmie, my dear child," he continued, turning to her, and
speaking in a voice of subdued tenderness, " calm yourself, and
yield to whatever God may will. You are a brave girl and a
good Christian, and an hour like this is a trial by fire. The panic
is waning, and the Cape can be made sure against all the force
Dessalines may bring. In any hap, you and your mother are
thoroughly safe here."

" Do you think there is hope for M. Pascal ? " she asked in
an intense way, indicative of her burning thoughts.

" Have you read my note to your mother, Emmie ? "

" Yes," she said, " but I thought your opinions may have un-
dergone some change for the better."

"I have nothing to add, my child, and let us not dwell upon this."

" Do you think, please let me ask, that M. Tardiffe's interces-
sion would be successful ?"

" I have warned you," he replied, " not to set heart upon his
trying it."

" But, my father, should he attempt it, what think you would
be the issue ? "

" Well, Emmie, I can say thus much : M. Tardiffe has un-
doubted weight with the blacks, and should he have the daring
and greatness of soul to meet Dessalines and press the cause, I
believe there would be good ground for hope. But I must have
a word with the captain before leaving."

And so saying, he sought Captain Winslow, an interview with
whom in reference to certain matters bearing on the Cape's de-
fence consumed the residue of the colonel's time. Kissing, there-
fore, his wife and daughter, and bidding them keep brave hearts,
and promising, if nothing prevented, to see them again on the
morrow, he took the jolly-boat and was speedily put ashore.

E. W. GlLLlAM, M.D.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

no AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. [Oct.,

•
AMIEL AND PESSIMISM.*

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD recently stormed the reading world with
a questionable boon in the shape of a novel which was widely
read and commented upon, and which is now being safely stowed
away to give place to the next novelty. The book pictured the
disintegration of the faith of an Anglican clergyman beneath the
cold touch of scepticism. The arguments and temptations to
which the hero yielded are not stated ; they are simply hinted
at ; we do not know their strength. We only know that a soul
wrestles unto death and is overcome. The book has been regarded
as a propagator of Agnosticism. Perhaps it is. And if so, it is
because Agnosticism has become an intellectual fashion. As a
matter of curiosity, we should be glad to come upon a specimen
of the intellect honestly seeking the truth and influenced in its
search, to the extent of a hair's-breadth, by Robert Elsmere.

Mrs. Humphry Ward now introduces to the reading world
another work, the Journal Intime of Amiel, and whether it is to
be regarded as a bane or a boon we shall leave to the reader to
decide. It is a powerful book. There are passages in it worthy
of Pascal. It is the revelation of a soul wrestling in all earnest-
ness with all the various life-problems that come before it —
sounding all and solving none. Amiel was born in 1821 and
died in 1881. He was educated in the doctrines of Calvin.
From his twenty-first to his twenty-seventh year he studied in
Berlin and travelled through Europe. He afterwards settled down
in Geneva, making an indifferent professor, a solitary student de-
vouring all kinds of books, reserved, but ill-understood except by
a few intimate friends, who were continually deploring that " a man
so richly gifted produced nothing or only trivialities." Amiel was
the victim of revery. He lacked will-power. He confesses as
much himself: " I have too much imagination, conscience, and
penetration, and not enough character. The life of thought alone
seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free
enough from the irreparable ; practical life makes me afraid."

* The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel. Translated, with an Introduction and
Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward. London and New York: MacMillan & Co. 1889. Pp.
i.-xliii., 1-304.

I889-J AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. in

Such is the man whose journal is before us: a soul in which
the beliefs of Calvinism are shattered by the philosophies of Hegel
and Schleiermacher and Schopenhauer ; a soul in which you look
in vain for a consistent system of thought, and which out of all
the wreck seems to have saved the Calvinistic sense of sin, a sense
of personal responsibility, an intense feeling of the transitoriness of
all life, and a yearning for the Nirvana of Buddha. In 1848 he
began his journal with the beautiful Christian sentiment, " There
is but one thing needful — to possess God." In 1873 he is over-
come by his old enemy, the sense of the vague. " It is," he says,
" a sense of void and anguish ; a sense of something lacking :
what? Love, peace — God, perhaps/' That Presence which was a
certainty to him at first is now a perhaps. He feels and be-
moans this drifting away from the old moorings : " My thought
is straying in vague paths ; why ? Because I have no creed.
All my studies end in notes of interrogation,, and that I
may not draw premature or arbitrary conclusions, I draw
none." Unconsciously does he find himself landed in har-
mony with Schopenhauer, even while insisting that there is
good in the world. He writes : " The individual is an eternal
dupe, who never obtains what he seeks, and who is for ever de-
ceived by hope. My instinct is in harmony with the pessimism
of Buddha and Schopenhauer." * His intellect still sees the
good and the true of life ; f it revolts against the blasphemies
of Bahnsen and Proudhon, and foresees a reaction in favor of
Christianity. J His religious instincts sustain him to the end
in a spirit of resignation to God's will. But the God of Amiel is
not the God of Christianity ; it is rather the God of Spinoza. He
has retained the Christian formula of expression, but he long ago
abandoned what he calls " Semitic dramaturgy." Does not this
sentence read like an extract torn from The Imitation f " Crucify
the rebellious self, mortify yourself wholly, give up all to God,
and the peace which is not of this world will descend upon
you." § And again he says : " To me religion is life before
and in God." || And yet he is far removed from the spirit of
Christian mortification and expiation.

But the problem that pressed most heavily upon Amiel was
the problem of evil.

" Ah ! " he exclaims, " the problem of grief and evil is and will be always
the greatest enigma of being, only second to the existence of being itself. . . .
The Christian says to God : ' Deliver us from evil. ' The Buddhist adds : ' And

* 3ist August, 1869. t Ibid. J 29* December, 1871.

§ i5th April, 1870. || soth April, 1869.

ii2 AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. [Oct.,

to that end deliver us from finite existence, give us back to nothingness !' . . .
One thing only is necessary, the committal of the soul to God. Look that thou
thyself art in order, and leave to God the task of unravelling the skein of the
world and of destiny. What do annihilation or immortality matter ? What is
to be will be. And what will be will be for the best. Faith in good — perhaps
the individual wants nothing more for his passage through life. Only he must
have taken sides with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno against materialism,
against the religion of accident and pessimism." *

The vacillation running through his life is also part of his
thought. He cannot long hold to a thread of argument. The
main idea projecting from this passage is acquiescence in the
Must-be. But the problem of evil remains unsolved. It crops
up all through the journal, but with no better result. He asks :
"Is not destiny the inevitable? And is not destiny the anonymous
title of Him or of That which the religious call God ? To descend
without murmuring the stream of destiny, to pass without revolt
through loss after loss, and diminution after diminution, with no
other limit than zero before us — this is what is demanded of
us." f And to his credit be it said, he lived up to this rule of
bearing suffering and disappointments with great patience. The
pathos of his last entry, made on the eve of death, is most touch-
ing: "A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my heart
fail me. Que vivre est difficile, 6 man c&ur fatigue / " f Submis-
sion, indeed, to the Must-be, but no hope. A death worthy of a
disciple of S^kya-Mouni. Amiel struggled against pessimism
through life, but pessimism had practically taken up its abode in
his soul and he was more at one with Schopenhauer than he
ever admitted to himself. Were it not well to examine a system
that has wrecked so many promising lives, and is daily more and
more pervading our current literature ? Pessimism is a problem
of the hour.

II.

Schopenhauer is the philosopher of pessimism. Let us ask
him his solution for the problem of reconciliation between the
secular and religious elements of society. But first a word upon
the pessimism of the nineteenth century. Leibnitz was emphati-
cally the philosopher of modern optimism. He taught that all was
for the best in this best of possible worlds. During the eighteenth
century his optimism prevailed among the writers and thinkers of
Europe. It entered as a soothing element into the philosophy of
superficial complacency then prevalent. Shaftesbury and Boling-

* 24th April, 1869. t 5th January, 1877. \ igth April, 1881.

1889.]

AMIEL AND PESSIMISM.

113

broke basked in its sunshine. Pope, in his Essay on Man, feebly
reproduced its main tenets. Hume picked flaws in it. Voltaire
cleverly satirized certain aspects of it in his Candide. With the
dawning of the nineteenth century a spirit of unrest and vague
yearning hovered over sensitive natures. Chateaubriand was for
a time under its influence — during which he wrote Rene — but he
cast it off with the infidelity that threatened to blight his beauti-
ful intellect. Byron inhaled its noxious vapors ; they rendered
him cynical and embittered toward the world, and inspired Cain
and Manfred. Lamartine took the malady in a milder form ; its
presence may be detected in the melancholy tone pervading some
of his sweetest poems. Heine felt the depth of human misery,
and liis muse sang the world-pain, Der Weltschmerz, but his
moods were many and he could not long remain a pessimist
Lenau was deeply impressed with the vanity and the transitori-
ness of all things ; their fleeting seemed part of himself.*

But the poet of pessimism is Leopardi (1798-1837). A life-
long invalid, his body racked with pain, his soul ever stooping to
drink of the waters of pleasure, and, Tantalus-like, ever finding
them recede farther and farther beyond his reach, he came to look
upon life as the greatest evil and death as the greatest good, arid
he sang the song of the world's desolation and unhappiness —
infelicita — with the nerve and calm of confirmed despair. Life
was to him somethmg wretched and dreadful, f a burden which
he dragged along with loud murmuring. " He everywhere saw
lamentation, cruelty, cowardice, injustice, and weariness." \ And
the vision was to him a source of dreary delight. " I rejoice,"
he wrote to his bosom friend, Giordani, " to discover more and
more, and to touch with my hands, the misery of men and things,
and to be seized* with a cold shudder as I search through the
wretched and terrible secret of the life of the universe." § Life
had for him no other worth than to hold it in scorn. ||

Elsewhere he tells us : " We are born to tears ; . . .
happiness smiles not upon our lives ; our afflictions make heaven
rejoice." fl In the poem in which, in a final groan of despair, he
concentrated all the sorrow, all the agony, all the defiance of his
unhappy life, he assures us that " on this obscure grain of sand
called earth . . . nature has no more concern for man than

*Es braust in meines Herzens wildem Tact
Verganglichkeit ! dein lauter Katerakt ! — Die Zweifler.

t Opere, i. 59. \ Licurgo Cappelletti : Poesie di Giacomo Leopardi, p. 38.

§ Epistolario, \. 352.

|| Nostra vita a che val ? Sola a spregiarla.— A un Vindtore ml Pallone, op. i. 57.
IF // Sogno, op. i. 84.

ii4 AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. [Oct.,

she has for the worm." * Need we wonder that he should envy
the dead ? His pessimism grew into his soul till it became part
of himself. Patriotism, enthusiasm, aspirations for the good and
the true in their highest and most ennobling sense, all came to a
premature blight beneath the touch of scepticism, and his gifted
soul stands out parched and arid as the barren sides of Vesuvius
on which he was wont to gaze. His life and his writings form a
complete contrast with the life and the writings of Manzoni. Each
is perfect in his art ; but where one strikes out morbidness and
blank despair, the other is joyous, hopeful, and patriotic. And
the cause of this difference ? Within the breast of the author of
I Promessi Sposi glowed the fire of religious faith ; within the breast
of the singer of La Ginestra that fire had become extinguished
and was reduced to a cold burned cinder, such as underlay
the broom-shrub he sang, f

While Leopardi was chanting the song of pessimism, Schopen-
hauer (1788-1860) was forging its philosophy. And what is his
solution of the problem of evil ? How does he reconcile the se-
cular and religious elements of society ? To begin with, Schopen-
hauer is a rabid opponent of Hegelism. He denies the Hegelian
Idea. He sees no growth or development towards a better or a
best in this world ; he considers it the worst possible world that
could have existed, the domain of accident and error, into which
man is born that he may live in misery and^ die the victim' of a
deceiving power that overrides all things and makes the individual
miserable in the interests of the species. That power Schopen-
hauer calls Will. This is neither the infinite personal Will which
we recognize as an attribute of God, nor the finite personal will
of the human soul. In the philosophy of Schopenhauer there is
place neither for the soul nor for God. Will he* defines to be "the
innermost nature, the kernel of every particular thing, and equally
of the totality of existence. It appears in every blind force of na-
ture ; it manifests itself also in the deliberate action of man ; and
the great difference between these two is merely in the degree of
the manifestation, not in the nature of what manifests itself"!
This Will underlies all phenomena. It includes the operations of
the material world as well as those of man's consciousness — his
hopes and fears, his loves and hates. In one sense it may be
identified with the noumenon of Kant ; in another it is more than
the noumenon, or the Thing-in-itself. § It is the ultimate re-
ality of all things, the bond of unity holding the universe together.

* La Ginestra. \ La Ginestra is the broom-shrub.

\ Die Weltals Wille und Vorstellung, i. 131. $ Ding an Sich.

AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. 115

It is the real source of all human action, personal and external
motives being the special conditions for its various manifestations.*
It works without end, and apparently without aim. Pain and
misery follow its course. Pain is the positive state of life ; pleas-
ure is its negative state. The only real enjoyment in life is that
derived from intellectual culture. All others, when analyzed — and
the philosopher enters into a searching analysis of each and every
source of pleasure to man — are found to be fleeting, unsatisfactory,
and merely the absence of pain. This part of his system may be
summed up in the words of Byron :

"Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,

Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'7» something better not to &e."

What remedy is there for this state of things ? How may
the misery of man be best ameliorated ? The supreme remedy,
according to Schopenhauer, is for all men and women to lead a
life of celibacy, and thus hasten the end of all human misery.
In the absence of this universal understanding, it is the duty of
each individual to resist with all the energies of his nature the
tendencies and impulses of the tyrannical Will which is the
source of all his sufferings. In order to render his resistance
effective, he seeks an emancipation of the intellect from the
dominion of the Will. This emancipation is brought about,
in the first placCj by the practice of virtue, and especially
of charity and pity for suffering and misery ; and secondly,
by renouncing all the aims of life, and seeking self-control and
resignation in the fastings and mortifications of asceticism. It is
the remedy of Sakya-Mouni without the gentle spirit of Sakya
to give it life. It is a seeking after Nirvana. This is a consum-
mation to which the proud and selfish spirit of Schopenhauer was
certainly unequal. " He has," says Amiel, " no sympathy, no
humanity, no love."f

But why dwell upon this system in the broad daylight of the
nineteenth century ? Has it not been called " a philosophy of ex-
ception and transition "? j: It is because the exception bids fair
to become the rule. It takes no deep insight into European
thought to detect its widespread influence. "The whole of the
present generation," says Vaihinger, "is impregnated with the
Schopenhauer mode of thinking." § Von Hartmann, while ac-

* Sully : Pessimism, p. 70. t i6th August, 1869.

t M. Caro : Revue des Deux Mondcs, 1877, p. 514.

$ See Ferdinand Laban : Die Schopenhauer-Literatur, Leipzig, 1880, p. i.
VOL. L. — 8

ii6 AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. [Oct.,

cepting the same pessimistic views, undertook to reduce their so-
lution to a still more scientific demonstration. He also asserts
that creation is a mistake, the result of blind folly, and, therefore,
that death is preferable to life, not-being to being. He recognizes
a power pervading and unifying all nature and all history. He
calls this power the Unconscious. It is instinctive, blind, and yet
somehow it works with design. It is ever struggling from the
lower to the higher forms of life, bringing with it increased capa-
city for pain according as it grows into consciousness. " It is an
eternal pining — Schmachten — for fulfilment, and is the absolute un-
blessedness, torment without pleasure, even without pause." It is
not to be confounded with human consciousness. The latter is
subject to disease and exhaustion, is conditioned by material
brain or nervous ganglia, and is liable to error. The Uncon-
scious is above all conditions of space and time and matter, and is
infallible in its actions. Man is apparently free, but his work is
laid out for him and he is moved by the Unconscious. The Un-
conscious is the organizer of all life. It moulds plant and animal
each according to its kind. It determines the various forms of
life rather than Darwin's principle of natural selection, which only
accounts for physiological changes. The world was born of will
and idea. Existence Hartmann conceives to be created out of the
embrace of the two super-existent principles, " the potency of
existence deciding for existence," and " the purely existent."
Now, " the potency of existence " is simply the Aristotelian and
scholastic "matter," and the "purely existent" is their "form."
Hartmann is only repeating the time-honored idea that all
things are the product of matter and form. Will, according to
him, is the prime factor of human misery. But there is a scale
in the capacity for suffering. The animal suffers less than man,
the oyster less than the animal, and the unconscious plant less
than all. Thus does suffering increase with the degree of in-
telligence. This has been formulated as follows : " Pain is an
intellectual function, perfect in proportion to the development of
the intelligence." *

The Unconscious is the guiding spirit of history. By means
of the sexual impulse it founds the family. By means of the
social instinct it founds the clan. By means of the instinct of
"enmity of all to all," and the consequent struggle for exis-
tence, it consolidates the tribe and founds the nation. On, on
it moves in its iron purpose through the ages. Individuals are

* M. Richet : La Douleur, Etude de Psyckologie Physiologique. Revue Phllosophique, Novem-
bre, 1877.

1889.] AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. 117

sacrificed, peoples suffer, nations grow and decay and are blotted
out from the face of the earth ; but, unheeding, unpitying, onward
still it moves. It manages so that the right men are born at the
right time, that the right work is done at the right moment, caring
naught for the suffering and misery entailed in the process.
Such, in a nutshell, is the system of Hartmann.

And what is his remedy against all this pain ? Does he also
seek refuge in the teachings of Buddha ? No ; but after reading
his solution of the problem of evil, you ask if sanity can dictate
such thoughts. He considers it the highest duty of man to
work in harmony with the Unconscious, and promote general
growth of intelligence and spread of sympathy. Then, after all
intelligences shall have become enlightened, " and as wisdom grows
and the hopeless monotony of grief is acutely felt by the race,
humanity will rise up boldly to the last great act of despairing
suicide and reduce the Unconscious to its primeval nullity." To
this nightmare of a cosmic suicide does Von Hartmann reduce his
philosophic dreams. No wonder Amiel should write : " Every-
thing has chilled me this morning : the cold of the season, the
physical immobility around me, but, above all, Hartmann's Philo-
sophy of the Unconscious.'" *

III.

A cold, cold study is this. Let us now examine our results
in the warm and genial rays of truth as they have been trans-
mitted to us. Our uppermost thought is that the phases of
intellect we have been dissecting are abnormal. They are sicklied
o'er with the pale cast of thought. Amiel struggled against the
baneful current, but, as we have seen, to little purpose. Blight
and sterility mark his life. His reveries destroyed his will-power.
Hartmann had to write his autobiography in order to defend
himself against strange rumors. Books have been written to prove
an hereditary taint in the mind of Schopenhauer ; books have
been written to prove that Leopardi's views are the outcome of
his physical and moral torments. As one of his admirers forcibly
puts it: "Pain has never given birth to hymns of joy, and he
who has hell in his soul cannot certainly celebrate the glories of
the blessed, nor sing the joys of paradise."! Amid other en-
vironments, and with the aid of prayer and the habit of self-
control, these lives would have given out other notes.

* 'Journal, p. 162. t L. Cappelletti: Poesie di G. Leopardi, Parma, 1881, p. 90.

ii8 AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. [Oct.,

Still, if pessimism were confined to a few abnormally sensitive
natures, and within the covers of a few books, we might leave it
untouched and dwell upon philosophic issues of more general in-
terest. But pessimism is spreading its baneful influence over
every department of literature. It has its organs of opinion and
expression throughout the world. It has found its way into the
books of the hour. You read it in their exaggerations of the miseries
of life. It places arguments in favor of suicide in the hands of
the coward who lacks the courage to face life's difficulties. It is
the inspiring doctrine of socialism and nihilism. The philosophy
of despair, it finds no worth in life, for it recognizes life
only as a quest after one knows not what, ending in disillu-
sion and disappointment. Do you not find this view of life per-
vading many a volume in verse and prose that makes up some
of the most artistic literature of the day ? It is the inspiration
of the philosophic poems of Madame Ackerman. It runs through
the novels of Sacher-Masoch. It flavors those of Turgenieff. It
has indited the City of Dreadful Night. It traced El Diablo
Hondo of Espronceda. In Russia the godless and prayerless
asceticism of Schopenhauer has its fanatics.* Bitterness in
thought and feeling, and cynicism and inanition are its legit-
imate fruits. It destroys the normal joyousness of the healthy
soul. It is indeed a virulent malady. Thus has the ration-
alism of the day attempted to do away with God and religion.
But men must have a formula into which they can trans-
late their emotions. Religion has supplied that formula in
prayer. Rationalism now appeals to science to supplant the
religious formula, but science is unequal to the task.

Little good is to be looked for in a philosophy as purely
subjective as this pessimism. " The world is my idea — Vors-
tellung — my intellectual perception. The world is my will." So
reiterates Schopenhauer. And Hartmann tells us that there is no
such thing as happiness, just as there are no such things as God
and truth. All are subjective. Things are what we think them.
Thus all thought, all science, the moral and the material world,
even God, in this system, are reduced to a mere act of conscious-
ness. The philosophy that refuses to recognize object as well
as subject as a primary element of thought is bound to end in
just such a quagmire. The pessimist's solution for the great
modern world-problem — the reconciliation between the secular and
religious elements in society — is the destruction of God, the soul,
and all religion. He would make a waste and call it peace.

* Revue des Deux Mondes, Juin, 1875.

1889.] AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. 119

Another fundamental error underlying pessimism is that it
assumes pleasure to be the object of existence. Now, we are not
in this world for the amount of pleasure it may bring us. Both
Hartmann and Schopenhauer read in their master, Kant, a higher
purpose. He taught them that morality is the chief aim of life;
that man is here for the fulfilment of duty ; that in this fulfilment
is his supreme earthly happiness ; that in the struggle to over-
come himself he creates his own personality, and that sufferings
and mishaps are so many stepping-stones by which man rises to
the full growth and development of his nature. Kant might at-
tempt to disprove the existence of God, but he could not destroy
the moral purpose of life and the sense of duty in the human
breast. And in these planks saved from the general wreck of
the Critique of Pure Reason we have the wherewith to scale to
heaven's threshold and demonstrate the existence of God. The
pessimist may reject but he cannot destroy these elementary
truths. In their light existence has a totally different meaning,
and we begin to realize how vastly before pleasure stands
duty.

But bad as the world is in the eyes of our pessimists, the
world still retains this sense of obligation, be it ever so ignored
by philosophy. The world cannot move without the moral code.
Renan, even while denying its obligations, acknowledges its
necessity. " Nature," he says, " has need of the virtue of indi-
viduals, but this virtue is an absurdity in itself; men are duped
into it for the preservation of the race."* Surely if virtue
is an absurdity into which men are duped, then indeed is there
no obligation. Then is there no such thing as sin. This thought
caused Amiel to ask : " What does M. Renan make of sin ?"
And M. Renan, with his characteristic flippancy, answers : Eh bien,
je crois que je le supprime.^

If Renan is right, then he who rises up against this terrible
illusion and seeks to destroy it — be the consequences what they
may — is a true philosopher and deserves well of all men. If
Renan is right and Schopenhauer is right, then all honor to
pessimism for rending the veil of delusion and revealing the
reality. A simple remedy this of overcoming a difficulty, to sup-
press it, ignore it. As though the dishonest debtor could
satisfy justice by wiping out the amount of his indebtedness, or
the man who injured his neighbor by word or deed could repair
the wrong by ignoring the injured neighbor !

Although the pessimist in his speculations wanders so far away

* Dialogues Philosophiques, intro. xiv.-xvii. t Amiel's Journal, fntro. xl.

120 AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. [Oct.,

from our most elementary standard of truth, still is he a keen
observer and analyzer of men and things. He states facts even
while misinterpreting the facts. And our safest method of refu-
tation consists in separating theory from the facts and principles
underlying the theory. If we would understand any system we
must stand at its central point on a common ground with him
who holds the system. It not unfrequently happens that the
whole difference between two disputants consists in each giving a
different name to the same thing. To begin with, then, there is
in the whole animal creation — man included — a tendency that
makes for the preservation of the race at the expense of the in-
dividual. There is a struggle for survival carried out along the
whole scale of vital existence. There are in the human breast
fierce passions which, when unleashed, play havoc with the indi-
vidual and society. It is a natural tendency for man to
lift hand against his fellow-man in contention for supremacy.
What other meaning have those immense armies now exhausting
the energies and resources of Europe? So do the occupants
of neighboring ant-hills wage war; they also have their tribe
and race feuds; they fight their battles of extermination
and subjugation. So far we are at one with the pessimist. But
here our roads diverge. Man with us is not all animal ; he is
also a rational being. Those tendencies and impulses which in the
brute creation are a matter of accurately defined instinct, which
guides them and measures their use, are in man subject to his
reason. And the dictates of his reason are distinct from the
promptings of his passions or his natural tendencies. St. Paul
recognized and clearly defined £hese two tendencies in his nature,
and he called each a law : " I see another law in my members,
fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the
law of sin, that is in my members."* It is this natural tendency
and impulse that Schopenhauer calls Will and that Hartmann
interprets as the Unconscious.

Dark as is the pessimist's picture of the world's misery, it is
scarcely overdrawn. The physical suffering, the untold pangs of
the wounded and the breaking heart, the groans of remorse, de-
spair and wretchedness, the havoc of war and famine, disease and
death — all ascending at every moment from this revolving sphere
of ours, in one agonizing wail of pain, is appalling. The church
recognizes this misery. She calls us exiles passing through " a
vale of tears. "f In a variety of ways she repeats the words
of Job : " Man born of a woman, living for a short time, is filled with

* Romans vii. 23. t " Salve Regina."

1889.] AMIEL AND PESSIMISM. 121

many miseries. He cometh forth like a flower, and is destroyed,
and fleeth as a shadow, and never continueth in the same state."*
She insistently impresses upon us that we are not to look for hap-
piness here below, for ours is a higher destiny. One who has
faithfully interpreted her mind says: " Thou canst not be satisfied
with any temporal goods, because thou wast not created for the
enjoyment of such things, "f The church alone holds the
clue to the miseries of life, she alone has the solution of
the problem of evil. Mallock gave his graceful but not over-
serious intellect to the study of this problem, and what was
the outcome of his studies ? " Religious belief," he tells us,
" and moral belief likewise, involve both of them some vast
mystery ; *and reason can do nothing but focalize, not solve
it" | After questioning modern science, he finds himself
forced to seek the only satisfactory solution in the teachings of
the church. Amiel in all his wanderings finds nothing better
than Christianity, for the reason that Christianity alone has a solu-
tion for the problem of evil. " Man must have a religion," he
says; "is not the Christian the best, after all? — the religion of
sin, repentance, and reconciliation, of the new birth and the life
everlasting." To the church, then, which alone contains the ful-
ness of Christian truth, let us go for the solution of the problem
of evil.

Recognizing the sin and the misery with which life is beset, she
does not say with Sakya-Mouni : " The great evil is existence."
On the contrary, she holds existence to be a boon, since it is a
pure and gratuitous gift from a good God. The misery and the
pain, though inseparable in the present order of things, are still
mere accidents of existence. She accounts for their presence by
the doctrine of original sin. The whole struggle going on in every
human breast between reason and impulse is an effort to restore
the equilibrium in human nature lost by original sin. In her
teachings there is no room for the question, Is life worth living?
Life is a state of probation. It is within the power of every man
to make it a blessing or a curse. Man is born info this world
without his consent; he lives within certain environments, over
which he' has no control ; accidents befall him ; he is circum-
vented in many ways ; that which he most ardently seeks flies
farthest from him ; that which he least covets is what comes most
readily into his possession. But the measure of man's success in
life is not the mere attainment of his desires. This is a life-lesson
as old as human nature, but none the less a lesson that human

* Job xiv. t Imitation, iii. xvi. I. \ Is Life worth Living? p. 269.

122 AMIEL 'AND PESSIMISM. [Oct.,

nature is frequently ignoring. Conduct and motive are the two
elements that enter into the fulness of human life and make of it a
success or a failure. He whose conduct is upright and whose motive
is sincere has not lived in vain. His frame may be racked with
pain and disease ; adversities may befall him and friends forsake
him ; these things disturb not the calm of his soul ; he turns them
to account as aids to his spiritual growth. He knows that the
be-all and the end-all is not here. He recognizes a life above
and beyond the plane of the natural, to which all men are destined
and which all men can attain. This supernatural life is of the
invisible world. We can neither touch nor taste nor see it, but
it is none the less a reality. It is in us and about us. The light
of faith reveals it to us in all its beauty and harmony and glory.
Therein we read the meaning of the world, the plan and purpose
of man. By prayer do we hold communion with this unseen
world ; by the sacraments does the church communicate to us
saving grace out of this unseen world, and by hope do we live to
enter upon a new and a higher life in this unseen world.

And now, having" glanced at the current of pessimism against
which Amiel struggled in vain, we return to the Journal Intime.
It abounds in some beautiful descriptions, some very clever com-
ments upon the books he was reading or the persons he met, and,
above all, in some searching inquiries into the depths of his own
soul. Mrs. Humphry Ward has done her work well. But Amiel's
Calvinism narrowed and distorted his vision and made his criti-
cisms, especially of any and everything Catholic, extremely parti-
san. His redeeming trait is his sincerity. But we close the book
saddened at the sight of so much talent wasted, such feeble efforts
made to break the spell of inanition that was weaving its folds
about him, so much subtle egotism gnawing at what was best in
him and reducing his brightest hopes and clearest resolves to
ashes. The blight of scepticism was upon his life.

BROTHER AZARIAS.

1889.] TALK ABOUT

123

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

MR. CRAWFORD'S new novel, Sanf. Ilario (New York : Mac-
millan & Co.), is the promised continuation of Saracinesca — the
continuation but not the conclusion of that much-praised tale.
On the contrary, for after taking his amused and interested
reader through nearly four hundred and fifty pages of exciting
incident, bloody battles, family feuds, forgery, blackmail, suicide,
unwarranted jealousy and renewed confidence between his mar-
ried lovers, Sant' Ilario and Corona, and such other solids, liquids,
and confectionery as he is continually spreading before the
public, Mr. Crawford leaves Faustina and M. Gouache still un-
provided with a suitable denouement for their remarkable adven-
tures and their romantic love. Like many another prolific novelist,
Mr. Crawford seems settling down as the continuous chronicler of
the doings of a certain set of fictitious characters. The tendency
is easily understood, and it has provided the groundwork for
some of the most memorable of modern tales. Anthony Trollope
tells us that he grew so fond of Glencora Palliser, that when a
remark he overhead about her at his club drove him home to
kill her in the opening sentence of The Duke's Children, her
passing was a real loss to him. So, indeed, it must have been to
many a one among his readers. Characters so handled, in how
light and evanescent a shape soever they may first have pre-
sented themselves to their creators, must get body with age, as
wine does. To have an undisputed property in two or three
such " stand-bys," around whom new circumstances gather natur-
ally in course of time, must be a singular lightening of prepara-
tory labor to the professional novelist. What a confusion of
mind, by the way, an author might be thrown into should it oc-
cur to another equally reputable member of the craft to adopt one
or more of his most successfully vitalized creations, transplant them
into other soil, wilfully disclose their mysteries, tamper with
their consciences, abate their prejudices, amend their manners,
and totally unfit them for further use on their original lines !
Would any action for libel stand, or, say, for abduction, should
Mr. James, for example, lay violent hands on the Rev. Mr.
Sewall, or Mr. Howells undertake to tell us what was the real
secret of Mrs. Temperly's apparently objectless diplomacy?

Derrick Vaughan, Novelist, by Edna Lyall (New York : Frank

124 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS, [Oct.,

F. Lovell & Co.), is rather goody-goody in its general scope and
style. In part it is a glorification of that vocation of novelist to
which its author has been called, and which she treats as one
who believes undoubtingly that the Frenchman was right who
said "the man of letters has a cure of souls." Some of the de-
tails of the story remind . us of Mr. Harold Dijon's novel, Paul
Ringwood, lately concluded in this magazine. Like all Miss
Lyall's work, it is conscientiously done, and may be read without
weariness even by those who turn to fiction rather for entertain-
ment than instruction.

One of the most obtrusively flat of recent books — if flatness
can ever be called obtrusive except in noses — is American Coin
(New York : Appleton & Co.), by the author of Aristocracy. A
somewhat prolonged observation of American girls has never
brought one resembling either Lillie Winslow or Mamie Snelling
under our notice. Possibly that may be because our range has
included so few young ladies whose " pas " are millionaires and
whose " mas " have but recently exchanged calico and the back
kitchen for satin and the best rooms in the best native and
foreign hotels. One recognizes perfectly the Daisy Miller type,
but who, except the writer of American Coin, knows a nice Amer-
ican girl capable of losing herself in a London street at night
after the theatre, and of writing such a letter as this to her "pre-
server " the next day ?

" Earl of Atherleigh, London.

" DEAR EARL : I call it real mean of you never to have called as you prom-
ised. Pa said he wanted to take you by the hand as a man, and didn't care a
continental for your title. Ma has stopped in all day for fear of missing you.
Charlie, he kept away playing billiards down-stairs, and I — well, I just cried like
a little fool, so I did. There, now, you don't think any the less of me for telling
you ? I never so much as dreamed you were an earl. I should have been real
afraid of you if I had known. I'm afraid we won't ever meet again, as we go
home from Havre in the French line. But, if you should ever come over to
'Frisco again to see the ' Yo-zem-mite ' and the ' Geezers,' as you English people
call them, like lots of your countrymen do, why, you must be sure to let pa know
at once. I guess he can show you round pretty comfortably.

" Very truly your friend,

" LILLIE."

At this point the Talker's monologue abruptly merged into
dialogue — which for convenience of space is printed in small type.
The occasion was furnished by the inadvertent reading aloud of
the letter just quoted.

" You think that is caricature, do you?" was the unexpected remark which
followed from one of the ladies present. "Why, where were you brought up?
The woods are full of just such girls as that. I know them by the dozen."

1 889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 125

" I made a distinction," says the Talker. " I said ' nice girls.' "

" Well, I mean nice girls, as niceness goes nowadays. Girls with plenty of
money to spend, and fathers and mothers to do the modern equivalent of what
my own mother did for me in a different fashion. I see plenty of them. I've
got young friends and relatives about me all the time."

" Girls capable of getting up a german at a hotel for the express purpose of
dancing with a strange man whose name they learn only from the hotel register,
simply because, as ' Lillie ' says, ' he's just too sweet for anything,' and knows
how to dress? Don't libe your countrywomen, Polly."

"Get up a german at a hotel for that reason?" says Polly in a smiling
falsetto. " Is that the worst you've got to say against them ? Lillie and Mamie
must have been so near decorum's self that I begin to believe your author must
have selected them as real models of what ought to be what in respectable Amer-
ican society. It's not what's what, I can tell you that. Why, I've known girls —
good girls, mind you — to go off together by the half-dozen at a time to Asbury
Park, or the Branch, or wherever else, for the express purpose of having 'a good
flirt.' "

" And that means?"

" It means getting into conversation with any presentable-looking young
men they may meet there, dining or supping with them, eating ice-cream or
drinking soda at their expense."

"And then?"

" Then nothing. Sometimes they learn each other's names and keep up the
acquaintance, but usually it is dropped. If they meet each other in the street
afterward, the girl don't recognize her ' beau ' of an afternoon, and that's all
there is about it."

"Incredible!"

" I guess Polly 's about right, though," chimes in a younger speaker. " I
know when I was a girl myself, which wasn't so very long ago, I was voted de-
cidedly slow and old-fashioned because I couldn't quite see my way to that sort
of thing."

" You had a mother," suggests the Talker.

" So have they," puts in Polly. " Nice, good women, too, who go to church
and say their prayers, and don't seem to think there is anything much the mat-
ter, except that there certainly is a mighty difference between the new ways of
going on and those they were brought up to. Why, I knew a girl who met a
man just in that way, in Central Park. Afterwards he followed her up, called at
the house, she introduced him to her parents, and first thing you know they
were married. And the next thing you know, another wife turned up from
Jersey or somewhere with two children. It just ruined the whole family. Kate
was an only daughter, her father was wealthy,' and set his whole heart on her,
and when this disgrace came he took to drink, failed in business, died, and Kate
goes down-town to work now every day. And she never was brought up to it,
nor her mother before her."

" That was rough on Kate," suggests some one else, "but her father and
mother seem to have got something very like their just deserts. That sort of
thing must be more the fault of parents than of children. Haven't they common
sense ? Don't they know their girls are losing their good name and more than
that?"

"Ah!" says Polly, " that's just where you're wrong in nine cases out of ten.
I told you I meant nice girls, good girls, girls that have got their own stand-
ard of what is proper, and who don't go beyond it. They go in for fun, they

126 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

say, when you scold them about it. Oh ! I've scolded till I was tired, and much
good it does ! It goes in one ear and out the other."

" I'll tejl you about the mothers," says a male voice, coming for the first
time into the talk. " For the most part they are good, simple women, either
foreigners, or at best brought up by parents who were foreign, and under the
strictest kind of supervision. If they never had any approach to the kind of
liberty their children take, it was chiefly because * they wouldn't be let,' and they
submitted to restraint without ever getting any very definite notion that there was
any reason in the nature of things for the restrictions, beyond the fact that it is
the nature of parents to veto whatever the hearts of children are most inclined to.
The present state of affairs, caricatured by your novel there, as you seem to
think, fairly enough described according to my judgment, is in great part the
result of trying to ' swap horses in the middle of a stream.' The old-world idea
of surveillance, of governing at every point and all the time, has had to be re-
laxed here — the climate is fatal to it. We all agree that ' men are governed too
much,' and from that the step to children are governed too much is easy. Au-
thority was the word under which our parents grew up ; license, modified by
what Polly calls 'their own standard of what is proper,' is what our young people
are claiming in the rebound. The next generation will be like enough to swing
into the just medium, or even go a trifle further back. Meantime, such trash as
this American Coin, and its predecessor, Aristocracy ', serve a recognizably good
end, though whether they do so intentionally is more than doubtful. Why not
paint in all its flatness and imbecility a condition of social life to which those
epithets are substantially the worst that will generally apply ? If such a state of
things can be shown up as absurd and contemptible, so -much the better."

The Reproach of Annesley, by Maxwell Gray (New York : D.
Appleton & Co.), is plainly the work of a woman possessed of
more than common powers, though powers of which she is not
yet in complete mastery. Her previous novel, The Silence of
Dean Maitland, has been praised so highly that our anticipations
for the present one, in which we first make her acquaintance,
were raised somewhat unduly high. Nevertheless, it has unusual
merit. Like most of the more pretentious novels of the day, it
abounds in passages of more or less poetic prose, descriptive of
nature in her various moods. Many of these are fine in a cer-
tain way. The words are well chosen and full of color, the sen-
tences are musical. Their defect is that they seldom make pic-
tures to the mind. They are like landscapes which a clever
draughtsman and colorist might produce from hearsay if he had
never beheld any with his bodily eyes.

The character painting of the novel is better than the scene
painting. Some of the sketches of English rustics seem particu-
larly well done, even when they have an invincible tendency to
remind one of similar work in Adam Bede. It is not always
that they do so. Raysh Squire, the bell-ringer, and Daniel Pink,
the shepherd, hold their own extremely well, even in comparison
with Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey.

1889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 127

Mam Gale, too, is amusing, not least so when she indig-
nantly protests against the proposal made by her "betters" that
her consumptive son shall enlist in a regiment going out to India,
in hopes that the warmer climate may give him a renewed
chance for life :

"Mam Gale dropped, thunderstruck, upon a chair, regardless of the pile of
freshly-ironed caps she crushed beneath her. ' Our Hreub goo vur a soldier,"
she cried, when her indignation at last found voice — ''Hreub what never drinked
nor done aught agen the Commandments ! Our Hreuben 'list ! We've a zeen a
vast of trouble, Miss Lingard, but we never known disgrace avore ! '

"Alice ventured to say that Mr. Annesley had broken no Commandments, as
far as she knew, and that his friends were glad when he went for a soldier ; to
which Mam Gale replied with dignity that she wondered that Miss Lingard knew
no better than to forget what Reuben owed to his position in life. ' 'Tain't no
harm vur gentlevolk ; they can do without characters and hain't no call to be
respectable,' she said ; ' but our Hreub, what have always looked to hisself, it do
zeem cruel to let he down."

The1 two girls, Alice Lingard and Sybil Rickman, are also very
well studied. The men are less satisfactory. Necessary as it is
to the unfolding of her plot, more knowledge- of human nature
would have made it plain to Maxwell Gray that Edward Annes-
ley's silence when his confidence is demanded by Alice as the
sole preliminary to her acceptance of his suit, is not in the verit-
able order of things between souls bound by the tie she has
imagined. A cast-iron plot, conceived beforehand, to which all
things else must bend, is a serious thing for a novelist to burden
himself with if he aspires to the highest rank in his profession.
On that little stage which alone is his, the nearest approach which
he can make to that great, order and sequence of things which
rules the real world around him, is to be arrived at by giving
human nature its free play, preserving truth of motive and of ac-
tion as closely as he may, and then permitting a great deal
which seems pure accident to bring about his preconceived end.
In life everything may happen except radical changes in human
nature itself. There is more than one sufficient reason which
might prevail to set asunder, with their own free will, a man and
woman between whom exists that unique and pure passion which
alone deserves the name of love, and which Maxwell Gray has
essayed to describe. For the most part she has imagined it very
well. But, granting its existence, it is not in nature that a man
laboring unjustly under the suspicion of a foul crime, from which
he can clear himself by incontestable evidence, should not do so
to the woman he loves, when that is the only obstacle to pos-
sessing her ; especially when, as is the case with Edward Annes-

128 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

ley, the truth could not injure any living soul. With this serious
exception, Maxwell Gray has managed the details of her story with
much skilH Her manner of telling it is rather jerky and discon-
nected, the successive chapters being apt to come upon one with
a certain .shock of unpreparedness. The book is a clever one,
nevertheless, and more than usually worth reading.

Merze: The Story of an Actress, by Marah Ellis Ryan (Chi-
cago and New York : Rand, McNally & Co.), shows constructive
ability, and a certain literary aptness which might be used to
better purpose than in this story. It is more than doubtful, how-
ever, whether work of a higher class would gain as wide a pub-
lic as has probably been reached by the author's present venture.
The worst that can be said of it is that it is sensational. It seems
to be inevitable that the American and the French novels of the
day shall hinge in some way upon illicit love. Bad is the best.
The chief choice between them concerns the manner in which the
authors handle this perennial theme. As Miss Ryan has suc-
ceeded in steering safely between the Scylla and Charybdis
through which she .freely chose to take her course, she possibly
deserves congratulation. But it is a perilous course at best, and
we recommend her to study better models than are supplied by
the daily journals and the most widely current native fiction.

Miss Laura Jean Libbey is so absurd when considered as a
novelist, that nothing but her vogue could excuse mention of her
last preposterously silly story, That Pretty Young Girl. Im-
moral it is not, except as inanity and trash must always be de-
moralizing both to those who produce and those who consume it.
When one reflects upon the multitude of potential Laura Jean
Libbeys now standing behind counters, or mollifying conversation
with chewing-gum on the upper decks of Coney Island boats,
and to whose delight alone such books as these can satisfyingly
minister, the future looks gloomy. If anywhere the adage that
like loves like approves itself as true it is in the matter of the
reading that occupies by choice one's leisure. It is unfortunate
that the Hahnemann principle that like cures like is not equally
true in the same region. Still, since Miss Libbey finds readers in
phenomenal numbers, it is pleasant to be able to say with truth
that absurdity is her chief fault, her chief merit being, in this
story at least, the success with which she imitates — at a long dis-
tance, it is true — the scheme devised by Miss Anna Katherine
Greene in the contrivance of her plots. That scheme, as the
readers of Hand and Ring remember, is to have a murder per-
petrated early in the tale, and then confuse the reader's mind by

1889.]

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

129

throwing suspicion on several persons, whose motives and oppor-
tunities are laid bare by turns with more or less skill, and each
of whom is nearly brought to the gallows in consequ/ence. The
mystery is finally cleared up by the discovery that some entirely
unsuspected actor has done the deed. Edgar Poe worked on the
same lines in that ingenious story, The Murders in the Rue
Morgue. The trick is not a very costly one, as it consists merely
in putting together again the pieces of a dissecting map, one of
which has been purposely withheld from those to whom the
puzzle was apparently submitted in its entirety.

Miss Libbey's characters have a delightful way of subsiding
into poetry at most unexpected moments. Her hero, narrating
in the first chapter the troubles which have decided him to com-
mit suicide as soon as he has written them all down, tells how
his sweetheart informed him that notwithstanding their intense
love, "your bride I can never be." To this announcement he
avers that he responded thus:

"'Helen,' I said slowly and with great emotion, 'do you remember the
lines of an old poem we read together in a book a few days since ? Do you wish
me to repeat them and apply them to you ?

" ' Good-by for ever, my darling,
Dear to me even now.' "

And so on through three stanzas of sixteen lines each, recited,
doubtless, in the highest style of back-parlor elocution, until the
justly aggrieved Helen put an end to it by sobbing: "Stop! you
torture me ; I cannot bear it ! "

Helen herself is a confirmed elocutionist of the same type.
Called into her father's study to receive the dreadful tidings that
he more than half-believes himself to be the murderer of the
man she was on the point of marrying, and being first asked
whether she will promise "to trust and believe in me, no matter
what comes, no matter how great the shock ! " she answers :

" ' I shall always believe in you, papa. My affection is as true as steel, as
faithful as the unswerving magnet to the pole. I say with Lord Byron (sic) :

" 'Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer,

Though the herd have fled from thee, thy home still is here,'"

until she has finished the whole of the poem. Even the de-
tective, Hubert Harper, when he too falls in love with the all-
subduing Helen, that "pretty young girl," declares himself in
this style :

" ' Miss Trevalyn, Helen ! ' he whispered, clasping her hand suddenly in his,

130 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

'shall I tell you the reward, and the only reward I would take? Oh, do not
turn from me; listen to me ! I am not what I seem — an humble gardener — I
am Mr. Hartier, the detective, and I have learned to love you, Miss Helen, with
a love that is so intense it is eating my very life away day by day. I must speak,
though this is neither the time, place, nor is it under the right condition, but you
are so gentle you will listen to me. I am not a poet, but oh ! this I say unto
you :

" ' Perchance if we had never niet,
I had been spared this vain regret —
This endless striving to forget,' " etc., etc.,

for half a page. The hopeless thing about books like this, when
considered as mental pabulum for the multitude, is, of course,
their inane, vacuous mediocrity, both of ideal and of execution.

Deborah Death (New York : G. W. Dillingham) belongs to
the theosophic, " psychic " school of fiction, but is not a very
good specimen of its class. Without being ill-written, it still has
not sufficient distinction, either of good qualities or of bad ones,
to make it of importance.

The same thing may be said in substance of Mr. Edgar Sal-
tus's new novel, The Pace that Kills (New York: Belford, Clarke
& Co.) Like all its author's work, it leaves behind it a nasty taste
upon the reader's palate. In the present instance, this is attribut-
able solely to the personal flavor of its author, who cannot even
avoid immorality in a cleanly way. What Mr. Saltus says of his
hero on the occasion when that most disagreeable creature struck
his wife, expresses sufficiently well the effect this author has in-
variably upon his present critic's mind. " By instinct he was not
a gentleman," he writes of Roland Mistrial ; " for some time he
had not even taken the trouble to appear one ; yet at that moment,
dancing in derision before him, he saw the letters that form the
monosyllable Cad." It must surely be the irony of fate which
always compels Mr. Saltus to etch a portrait like this at some
spot or other of any plate he takes in hand. There is a certain
air of premeditation about them, it is true, but their final effect
is to recall the words of the apostle concerning him who, after
looking in the glass, straightway forgets what manner of man
he is.

Mr. William A. Leahy's " poetical drama in five acts," The
Siege of Syracuse (Boston : D. Lothrop Company), is smooth and
easy in versification, and permits itself to be read without weari-
ness. The scene is laid in Syracuse during the Athenian siege,
B.C. 414-413. The characters are few and sufficiently well defined,
even though they are not full enough of life to compel attention
or haunt memory. The drama is, doubtless, a clever and credit-

1889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 131

able performance, and if, in these prosaic latter days, there were
either laurel crowns to be won by skilful versifiers from the
eager public, or ducats to be hoped for by them from their pub-
lishers, a kindly critic might with a clear conscience encourage
Mr. Leahy to continue paying his court to the refractory yet not
forbidding muse.

Campion: A Tragedy (New York: Catholic Publication So-
ciety Co. ; London : Burns & Gates), is a translation made by the
Rev. James Gillow Morgan from the French of the Rev. G.
Longhaye, S.J. It reads more like an original than a transla-
tion, Father Morgan having, in common with Mr. Leahy, a
marked talent for English blank verse. The tragedy is in four
acts, preceded by a dramatized prologue, which, as its action
antedates by fifteen years the play proper, " cannot," says the
author, " be correctly considered a first act." It condenses well the
events of the Blessed Edmund Campion's life and death, and sets
them before the reader in an interesting way. It would not be
easy for the most spiritually purblind to avoid seeing a hero in
that noble and faithful soul, and impossible to keep the most plain
and simple setting forth of him void of strong attraction.

To any reader who likes a good laugh, without a shade of
malice or evil suggestion in it, we commend The Wrong Box (New
York : Charles Scribner's Sons), by Robert Louis Stevenson and
Lloyd Osborne. Mr. Stevenson is never otherwise than pleasant
in his manner, even when his matter is not altogether to one's
mind ; with Mr. Osborne's aid he has succeeded in descending to
low comedy without loss of dignity. One of the authors, says
the brief preface, "is old enough to be ashamed of himself, and
the other young enough to learn better." But their readers will
be inclined to wish that they may remain just where they are long
enough to indulge again in " a little judicious levity " of an
equally innocuous sort. We should despair of doing any manner
of justice to the fun of the book by condensation ; even to
sample it by quotation would not be easy without more prelimi-
nary explanation:, of the situations than we have space for.
Its mirth-provoking , quality is so equally compounded from its
matter and its manner that nothing short of the book itself can
adequately convey it.

VOL. L. — 9

132 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Oct.,

A
WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.

THE REVOLUTIONARY DOGMA.*

THE purpose of Mr. Lilly in writing A Century of Revolution is to refute the
French Revolutionary dogma, which he states as follows : " The essence of the
Revolutionary dogma is that only in equality, absolute and universal, can the
public order be properly founded. Arrange that every adult male shall count
for one, and nobody for more than one, and by this distribution of political
power, whatever the moral, social, or intellectual state of its recipients, you realize
the perfect and only legitimate form of the state " (p. 14). "To sum up, that
complete freedom or lawlessness — for the two things were supposed to be identi-
cal— is the natural condition of man, that all men are born and continue equal
in rights, that civil society is an artificial state resting upon a contract between
these sovereign units, whereby the native independence of each is surrendered,
and a power over each is vested in the body politic, as absolute as that which
nature gives every man over his limbs, and then ' that human nature is good, and
that the evil in the world is the result of bad education and bad institutions,' that
man, uncorrupted by civilization, is essentially reasonable, and that the will of
the sovereign units, dwelling in any territory under the social contract — that is, of
the majority of them — expressed by their delegates is the rightful and only source
of justice and of law — such is the substance of the dogma which the Revolution
has been endeavoring for a century to unite to the reality of life " (p. 15).

Having placed these definitions upon the nose of his reader as the medium of
sight, Mr. Lilly proceeds to point out to him what he wants him to see upon the
map of history. His definitions are inaccurate, and therefore misleading, and
his use of facts is neither complete nor candid. It is not true that the French
Revolution began or was carried through upon the principles stated by Mr. Lilly.
It began in hatred of admitted abuses of the governing orders which had become
intolerable, and it was carried on to the destruction of the orders themselves,
mainly in blind hatred, ferocious, bloody, and often criminal to the uttermost
degree. Thus the energizing force was negative. Positive governmental theories
and constitutions were drawn up and adopted and changed repeatedly, ranging
from anarchism to imperialism ; this positive side continually changed, but the
Revolution went on. It never gave a reason for itself that survived twelve month?,
except that something was bad and should be destroyed. And herein is the no-
torious error of the Revolution, that its only abiding principle is hatred of the bad
and its only abiding force is destruction. And it is the initial fault of Mr. Lilly
that he fastens upon it a single scheme of politics, whereas history tells us that it
has had many and various ones. Louis Philippe's last will had for its first clause a
recommendation of the principles of 1789 to his heirs, and he was a monarch and a
monarchist. The hymn of the Anarchists is the ' ' Marseillaise," and they hold every
form and quantity of government to be tyranny. Both agree in the one and only
Revolutionary dogma: Destroy. Napoleon III. claimed to be a true child of the
Revolution, and his claim was valid, though he was an imperialist and an emperor.

It is not our purpose to follow the author through his arguments, much less
to refute them, for with many of them we agree. But with the main drift of his
book we disagree. We condemn the Revolution for what it did, in so far as it
destroyed much that was good. As to what it taught, much was true, much was
false ; or, rather, it taught nothing, though revolutionists taught every theory of

* A Century of Revolution. By William Samuel Lilly. London : Chapman & Hall.

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 133

political life. The Revolution had a motto : Liberty, equality, fraternity. But
a motto is not a dogma.

It seems to us that a partial explanation of the confusion and ohesidedness of
this book' is to be looked for in its author's deep aversion for the iFrench people
as a race, evidenced in several places and plainly so. He believes, indeed, in
" prescription and privilege," and what he calls the "teaching of history," mean-
ing thereby that the few govern the many by the law of 'the survival of the fit-
test ; but this is not a sufficient explanation of his attack on the characteristics
of the French race, which is in our opinion worthy of the epithet venomous.
Together with that is what is to be looked for in its company, the divinizing of
the English people. He should have been frank enough to avow himself a Tory,
opposed to all form and name of Democracy; yet listen to him : " There are in
the modern world two types of Democracy." [By the modern world he means
Europe. America does not exist to him. Or perhaps he places the great Re-
public alongside of France in the prisoner's dock.] " There is the type moulded
by an abstract idea, and that a false one, which adopts the Credo of the Revolu-
tion ; which in the name of a spurious equality assassinates liberty and deper-
sonalizes man; which gives the lie to the facts of science and the facts of history ;
which is essentially chaotic, as lacking the elements of stability and tradition es-
sential to society ; which opposeth and exalteth itself above all that is called God
or that is worshipped, to the moral law which is its voice, to the laws of
social life which are his ordinance — the formula ni Dieu ni maitre correctly ex-
presses it ; which has no sense of any law superior to popular wilfulness, and
which is condemned already simply by the very fact that it is anarchic, that it is
consilii expers, at variance with the reason of things, which no man or nation of
men can disobey under dire penalty. . . . That is one type of Democracy,
faithfully represented by contemporary France."

We pause here to point out that if Mr. Lilly thought the United States an ex-
ception, he must have noted it in this place. What we proceed to quote from
him shows a positive exclusion of the American form of government from rational
freedom. The reader will be surprised at his exclusive list of the genuine free
states: " There is a temperate, rational, regulated Democracy, the product of
that natural process of ' persistence in mobility ' which is the law of the social or-
ganism, as of the physical ; a Democracy recognizing the differences naturally
springing from individuality, allowing full room for the free play of indefinitely
ranging personalities, and so, constructive and progressive, the nurse of patriotism
and the tutor of freedom; a Democracy in harmony with the facts of history and
of science, and with the necessary laws of human life, issuing from the nature of
things, and therefore, in the truest sense, divine ; a Democracy where the masses
are not fawned upon by the discounters and jugglers of -universal suffrage,
who so well understand the old maxim, 'Flatter and reign,' but schooled and
governed by the strong and wise ; a Democracy at once the subject and outcome
of law. Such is the Imperial fabric of Democracy which has been reared in Ger-
many, upon the sure basis of national traditions and historical continuity, intel-
lectual culture and moral discipline and domestic piety ; philosophers and poets
like Kant and Hegel and Goethe and Schiller, true kings of men like the patriot
princes of the noble house of Hohenzollern, puissant and prescient statesmen like
Stein and Bismarck, being the chief master-builders " (p. 184).

Our readers cannot help noticing that America does not exist for Mr. Lilly's
purposes. The study of revolution, democracy, liberty, equality during the past
century can be pursued and completed by him as if America had never been dis-
covered, the American Revolution never fought, and a nation of sixty millions of
people resting on manhood suffrage was but a dream. Yet the countries from

134 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Oct.,

which the people flee away to take shelter in the American Republic are the ones
that he holds up in favorable contrast with France. The French stay at home
with all their Doubles ; the Germans and the natives of the British Islands cannot
get away fast enough to a nation which believes that men are created equal and
are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pur-
suit of happiness; which is therefore tainted with the " Revolutionary dogma."

We are willing to follow Mr. Lilly in his denunciations of the French Revo-
lution, for it was a saturnalia of crime. But it was not to blame if it placed rights
instead of duties as the basis of government ; we wish it had done so, for that is
a sound theory and, carried out in practice, would have prevented crime and es-
tablished order, just as, to a limited extent, the English Revolution of 1688 had
done. That Revolution is the author's model, he all but worships it; and yet it
was but the restoring the fundamental ideas of government in England to the
acknowledgment of rights from which as a basis it had been shifted to duties by
the Protestant Tudors and Stuarts. The author says, speaking of Christendom :
" The public which gradually arose throughout Europe on the ruins of the
Roman Empire was a vast hierarchy of duties. . . . And these duties were
conceived of as the source and the measure of human rights " (p. 6).

Now, what we have first to criticise in this assumption is that the author has
herein dropped the terminology of free England and chosen that of England un-
der the Stuarts. When the English people unseated James II. by act of parlia-
ment— a parliament without a king — and made William and Mary sovereigns, it
was not a Bill of Duties but a Bill of Rights which gave utterance to their su-
preme will. The Bill of Rights is the nearest approach to a written constitution
known to English politics, and, excepting the hateful word Protestant, is a true echo
of the Magna Charta which hundreds of years before sprang to the lips of free
Englishmen from the essence of Catholic doctrine. In the concluding words of the
Bill of Rights the Lords and Commons of England "claim, demand, and insist upon
all and singular the premises as their undoubted rights and liberties " ; not even
twisting the relations of men awry and speaking of their rights as the king's du-
ties. This twisting awry is what Mr. Lilly has done throughout his book : "These
duties were conceived as the source and the measure of human rights." No;
the source and measure of duties are rights, and not the contrary. Civil govern-
ment, as St. Thomas and all sound Catholic writers teach, is for the people and
not the people for the government. There is a government that the people may
be protected in the enjoyment of their rights ; only in a secondary sense that
transgressors may be made to do their duty. In holding the opposite view Mr.
Lilly is as un-English as he is un-Catholic, and to be consistent should .hold the
Gallican theory of the divine and immediate right of kings, and therefore should
be as bitter an enemy of the English Revolution of 1688, in which the people
unseated their king and chose another, as he is of the French Revolution of a
century later.

Pope Leo, in his Encyclical on the Constitution of the Christian State, says men
are equal in having the one same nature, the same end and destiny, and the same
means of arriving at it. Now, if there be anything else in man that is essential,
let us know it. Equality of nature, of destiny, of means of arriving at it is essen-
tial equality, if the word has any meaning. Such equality generates liberty, ne-
cessitates fraternity, and this in every order of life. Nor does this militate against
inequality of function, office, gifts of nature or of Providence. But all these last
are not corrective, much less destructive, of essential equality. They do not con-
cern essential manhood. In discussing this principle and fact, for it is both, Mr.
Lilly, in assailing what he thinks is " the dogma of the Revolution," has injured
the dogma of Christianity. W. E.

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 135

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS .OF BOOKS, i ETC., SHOULD
BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION, NO. 415 WESJ1 FIFTY-NINTH
STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

How many members are needed to form a Reading Circle ? This question has
been asked by many of our correspondents. In reply we may state that the
Columbian Reading Union will not make any rules concerning the number of
members or the private management of any organization affiliated to it. Our
work is to gather information and publish lists of books which will be of assistance
to all interested in the diffusion of good literature. Individuals, as well as Reading
Clubs, may obtain the advantages thus offered.

Reading circles can be organized in different ways, either in connection with
parochial or public libraries, or on an independent basis. It makes a consider-
able saving of expense if the books to be used can be borrowed from a library.
The Cathedral Library Reading Circle and the Ozanam Reading Circle, both of
New York City, are in alliance with Catholic circulating libraries. Books re-
commended in the lists of the Columbian Reading Union are purchased in each
case by the parish library, and are made accessible without extra cost to the
members of the Reading Circles. In many places the same plan could no doubt
be applied to public libraries.

There is no fixed way of starting a Reading Circle. Some one must begin to
talk about the matter. Five members are enough, although a much larger
number should be enrolled wherever it can be so arranged. Very few rules are
necessary. It is not advisable to undertake a burdensome course of reading.
Some profound scholars read good works of fiction as a mental relaxation. The
members of a Reading Circle must decide whether they wish to have an annual, a
monthly, or a weekly meeting. From Miss Emilie Gaffney, of Rochester, N. Y.,
we have received the following

PLAN FOR FORMING A READING CIRCLE.

" I propose an initiation fee of fifty cents and an annual fee of one dollar.
With this amount to select a sufficient number of books. Each book will contain
on the fly-leaf a printed list of members, arranged according to residence. To
every member will be sent one or two books, which may be retained two weeks,
and must then be passed to the one whose name follows on the list. All books
to be passed the first and fifteenth of the month, and the dates when received and
when passed to be noted by each member.

" In forming a book club it is necessary to avoid too heavy reading, which
would soon discourage "all but those above the average literary taste. Many
timid persons might be deterred from joining a club in which too much individual
effort would be required, and my object in the start being to interest all, I con-
sider this a cogent reason for suggesting this plan, which will give each one an
opportunity of becoming conversant with Catholic literature without the necessity
of frequent discussion or public reading. However, I hope from this beginning
will emanate many local clubs for critical study and research.

" Any one desiring to purchase a club book may signify such intention. At
the close of the year it will be sold for half the original cost. Books of fiction
will be circulated with a more solid work."

The form of personal invitation by letter was adopted to put the plan given
above into actual operation. In this way conflicting opinions were avoided at the
outset, and those invited were at liberty to attend the first meeting or not as they
chose. Only two officers were selected, a librarian and a treasurer. To the
librarian was assigned the labor of selecting the list of books by Catholic authors,

136 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Oct.,

and the arranging of the names of members on a record to be pasted in each
book with a view to the speedy transfer of the volumes from house to house.

" Each.meinber receives with her book a card with a few minor directions
and the address of the one to whom her books are to be passed after they have
been retainedtwo weeks, the time allotted for reading a book.

" It is necessary to have as many books as members, but well to have more,
so that two or more small volumes may be sent together, or, if a subject is too
heavy for the ordinary taste, one of lighter nature may be passed with it.

" In assigning the books care should be taken to place them so fiction will al-
ternate with solid reading.

" Members should note on the list opposite their names the date when they
receive and pass each book. Those who wish a book the second time must wait
until the entire circuit has been made, and then apply to the librarian.

" The fee depends on the number of members. Our Circle contains sixty-
four members. With the fees given by them were purchased seventy-eight
books at a cost of $84 87, the incidental expenses, including printing, reckoned
about $8.

'' An annual meeting will be held for the payment of dues, to report the con-
dition of books, etc.

" It is intended to arrange soon for special culture by fortnightly meetings.
This will form a distinct branch of the Reading Circle.

" With sixty-four members two years and a half will be required for each
book to make the circuit. The annual fee will be necessary to replace some ot
the books which may be worn out before that time." M. C. M.

{The following addendum to "A Canadian Example" our leading article
in this issue, reached us too late to be printed with it. )

Since this paper was written an effort has been made by certain militant
politicians to create in Manitoba an agitation against denominational schools
and the official use of the French language; and the Winnipeg Free Press,
an influential secular journal, in the course of an able leading article, makes,
after referring to the language question, this argument in favor of the separate
schools :

" It is vastly different with separate schools. That is a matter of conscience,
not of convenience. Since the creation of Manitoba the English have largely
outgrown the French in numbers, and while this may be a sufficient reason for
abolishing the dual language system, it will be seen that is no reason at all for
abolishing separate schools. The same consideration which demanded that
this concession be made to the religious scruples of five thousand Roman
Catholic fellow-citizens, when they formed a full half of the population, must
be observed now when they number only a fifth. No disparity of numbers
can affect a question of conscience. The French language may go, under the
preponderating weight of the English ; but no preponderance of Protestantism
will justify the withholding of the least right from any number of Catholics,
however small. Those of us, therefore, who, in our thoughtlessness, have
agreed that because the few French must give way to many English in the absurd
and trifling matter of a double language, the few Catholics must give way to
many Protestants in the matter of separate schools, will on reflection recognize
the important difference in principle between the two."

I may add that the constitution of Manitoba provides for the establishment
of denominational schools and for the official use of the two languages, and that
the amendment of the constitution is ultra vires of the Provincial Legislature.

1889.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 137

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE JUST DISTRIBUTION OF EARNINGS, SO-CALLED "PROFIT-SHARING";
BEING AN ACCOUNT OF THE LABORS OF ALFRED DOLGE IN THE TOWN
OF DOLGEVILLE, N. Y. New York, 1889: Printed and published for the
section " Participation du Personnel dans les Benefices " Paris Exposi-
tion, 1889.

Alfred Dolge, to-day " the largest felt and felt-shoe manufacturer, as well as
the leading manufacturer and dealer in piano materials, in America," has his
works at Dolgeville (formerly called Brockett's Bridge), situated on both sides
of East Canada Creek, eight miles northeast of Little Falls, in Herkimer
County, this State. He uses water-power and employs altogether about 600
hands. His main products are organ and piano felt hammers, felt shoes, sound-
ing-boards for pianos and organs, and piano casings and mouldings. It is
pretty evident that he is not much troubled by competition in his business.
Most persons understand how great an advantage it is for a manufacturer to be
able to make his own prices and stick to them. It enables Mr. Dolge to estimate
the value of his services at $25,000 yearly, which he has declared is "what he
would ask as a salary to manage his business for a corporation, because he knows
he can earn that amount of money." He was born in Chemnitz (Saxony),
December 22, 1848, and up to his thirteenth year attended the public school
in Leipzig, and then entered his father's business of piano-manufacturing as an
ipprentice to study piano-building. When seventeen years old, and at the close
of his apprenticeship, he came to New York, returned to Leipzig for a short
time, and afterwards again to New York, where he found his first employment in
the piano-factory of Frederick Mathusek. While employed there his first success
was the importation from Germany of hammer leather, which he knew was
manufactured there of much better quality than in the United States. He
added to that business, which went on increasing, the importation of Poehl-
mann's wire, at that time comparatively unknown in America. In 1869 he be-
came an importer of piano materials, and by his efforts placed the wares of the
German makers whom he represented in the best piano-factories in the United
States. This led him to undertake the production of hammer felt, an important
article used in the manufacture of pianos. After many discouraging experiments
of all kinds he finally succeeded in turning out excellent felt on which he lost
money every year, but the profits of his importing business enabled him to stand
his losses in felt-making. In 1873 Dolge, then only twenty-five years old,
exhibited his hammer felt at the Vienna Exhibition, won the highest prize, and
received large orders from European manufacturers. In 1874 the demand for his
felts had increased to such an extent that in order to enlarge his manufacturing
facilities he removed to the village of Brockett's Bridge, already mentioned. He
built there large factories and mills, which are considered among the finest in
the United States. In 1876 Dolge received two medals and diplomas at the
Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. At the Paris Exhibition in 1878 he
exhibited for the first time, besides his piano and organ felts, piano sounding-
boards, and received first prizes for both. The enormous growth of his sounding-
board industry compelled him to purchase over 18,000 acres of forest land in the
Adirondack Mountains, and build three saw-mills, at Otter Lake, Port Leyden,
and Leipzig. He brought over from Saxony a forester learned in the science of

1 3 8 NE w PUBLIC A TIONS. [Oct.,

forestry to look after his woodland. Some ten years ago he began the manufac-
ture of felt shoes, of which 1,500 pairs are made by him daily.

Havingkfeus recounted his rise to great manufacturing and commercial pros-
perity, we ha^e now to speak of another field of labor and philanthropic utility
in which he has made himself prominent. He has conceived an idea which he
has expressed in these words, taken from a letter to the Chicago Morning News,
published January 19, 1889:

" There is no doubt in my mind that manufacturers will eventually make all their em-
ployees partners in the business, so to say, as there is undoubtedly something wrong at
present in the relation of capital to labor. In many instances capitalists enrich themselves
immeasurably at the expense of labor. It would certainly be welcomed by the majority of
the American people if a plan could be devised, just for both sides, whereby labor will get its
rightful proportion of the earnings of a business."

This basic idea is frequently reiterated in letters written and speeches de-
livered by him (these last mostly at Dolgeville to his employees), and which
have been published in the pamphlet now before us. He has not, however, as
yet found a plan of so-called profit-sharing that he considers thoroughly prac-
tical, and this because the greatest stumbling-block he has met has been that
the majority of his men were not sufficiently prepared intellectually for such an
experiment. In the meanwhile he proceeds in this wise: He sets aside each
year, according to his own decision, a calculated amount of profits of his busi-
ness for the benefit of his men. This sum, however, he does not distribute
among them in cash, but he invests it for their benefit in various benevolent
schemes, of which the principal are a pension fund, a life insurance plan, a
mutual aid society, a school society, a building fund for the erection of homes, a
club house, and a public park.

Pension Fund. — Every regular employee, after a continuous service of ten
years, becomes entitled to a pension in case of partial or total inability to work,
caused by accident, sickness, or old age, as long as such inability may last, and it
is to consist in the following quota of the wages earned during the last year of
employment, viz. :

50 per cent, after ten years' service.

60 " " thirteen years' service.

70 " " sixteen years' service.

80 . " " nineteen years' service.

90 " " twenty- two years' service.

100 " " twenty-five years' service.

In case of accident while on duty, or of sickness contracted through the per-
formance of duty, employees shall be entitled to a pension of 50 per cent, at
any time previous to the completion of ten years' service.

Life Insurance. — Each employee who has, for five consecutive years, been in
the employ of the firm is entitled to a life insurance policy of $1,000, and, at the
expiration of the tenth year of steady employment, to another $1,000 policy.
Premiums and all expenses will be paid by the firm as long as the insured is in
its employ. For those who have been rejected, an amount, equal to the pre-
miums which would have been paid had applicants been received, will be
regularly deposited in the German Savings-Bank of New York.

At present the number of policy-holders is fifty-two, of which number forty
hold policies of $1,000, six hold policies of $2,000, three hold policies of $3,000,
and three hold policies of higher amount. The total outlay in this depart-
ment since it was established is $10,441 66. Mr. Dolge discriminates in favor of
his high-priced help where he deems it just, as, for instance, the director of his
felt factory, who carries $10,000 in life insurance. To the school society he

1889.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 139

contributes $300 a year, and in 1886 donated $7,000 for a -new school-house, and
$2,000 of taxes besides. He has agreed to contribute $4,000 yearly towards
Dolgeville Academy, for which he is erecting a new building at hi^f own expense.
The large club-house cost him $10,000, and contains gymnasium, otage, bowling
alley, library, billiard rooms, etc. Beer only is sold there ; no liquor and no
gambling is allowed. He also helps his men to buy their homes. He builds
houses for his employees on plans prepared by them, and allows them to pay the
cost in monthly instalments of $10 each. He allows his workmen to leave their
wages with him, if they so desire, but does not encourage them to do so. At
the beginning of each year a reunion and banquet is given to the employees.
Remunerations, pensions, and the life insurance he considers to be an equaliza-
tion between the wages of the workingmen and the increased profits resulting
from their work. He protests against the two last-named benefactions being
called philanthropic acts on his part ; they were simply business-like moves from
which he expected to benefit and actually did benefit. In 1886 he was not
troubled with strikes. His employees knew well that he would not for a moment
submit to a strike or confer with a committee, but would consider every man
discharged who was dissatisfied. Mr. Dolge, for reasons which he gives, con-
siders any plan or system of profit-sharing a failure where the profits are divided
on a per cent, basis of wages, or by a certain fixed percentage of the net profits,
but that it must be considered the duty of every employer to pay his employee,
besides the regular wages, whatever he may have properly and justly earned, the
estimation of which must be left to the entirely arbitrary decision of the em-
ployer.

He expects by January i, 1890, to have matured a system of detail book-
keeping which will show how much more, if any, a man has earned than the
wages paid him. These earnings will be arrived at after deducting from the gross
earnings all the usual expense items> such as wear and tear of machinery, salary
for himself, interest on capital invested, and a proper amount for the reserve fund.
There will then remain the net amount for distribution, from which will first be
deducted moneys paid for life insurance and pensions. Whatever remains then
will not be paid to the men, but credited to their profit-sharing accounts, giving
the men certificates, this money to be invested for them in undoubted interest-
bearing securities, and not paid over to them until they either quit, are dis-
charged or retire under the pension law, or are sixty years of age. With such a
plan neither the men nor anybody else will know how much profit was made, for
it can happen that in a very prosperous year an entire department may not receive
anything at all, while another may receive more than usual, according to how the
men have worked — more or less faithfully.

Since no percentage has been promised to the men they have no right to ask
any questions, and yet they will be encouraged to do their best to secure some-
thing extra at the end of the year. Mr. Dolge is a firm believer in the acquisition
of knowledge and training of the intellect as the most efficacious of all means to-
wards elevating the wage-earner and the voter ; that progress in education is posi-
tively necessary; that the only remedy to prevent universal suffrage from proving
a failure is education, good schools, plenty of them, and rigid school laws ; that
it is our sacred duty to make by good education every child a good citizen ; but
he does not say if this panacea for the immortal part of our being includes train-
ing of the will through religious influences, and the inculcation of a knowledge
of God and of our duty to him. In fact, I do not recollect to have met with that
august and revered name in any of his writings or speeches, not even in a funeral
oration, in which he did not even hint that the deceased had an. immortal soul.
From the fact that in a speech to the Dolgeville Turnverein he alludes to the/a&/e of

140 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Oct.,

the forbidden fruit given us in the Bible, it is more than likely that he is an indiffer-
entist. On that same occasion he denounced " cakes, pies, and especially hot
rolls, as the tousc of dyspepsia." That was sound teaching, but he might have
mentioned th<ruse of tobacco as another powerful cause. B.

SATAN IN SOCIETY. By Nicholas Francis Cooke, M.D., LL.D., with an In-
troduction by Caroline F. Corbin, late President of the Society for the Pro-
motion of Social Purity ; together with a Biographical Sketch of the Author
by Eliza Allen Starr, author of Patron Saints, Pilgrims and Shrines, etc.
Chicago : C. F. Vent Company.

This book is a diligent research into the department of human physiology
that relates particularly to the laws of life, and a fearless condemnation of the
errors and sins which cause the nameless evils arising from the violation of those
laws. In the first part it treats of the education of boys and girls, and, in a way
in which a medical man of extensive experience alone can speak, it treats of the
solitary vice, with its frightful consequences. In the following chapters " The
Philosophy of Marriage" and the "Sphere of Women in the World" are
treated. Finally, in the last chapters, the " Social Evil " is spoken of. It is a
book on delicate subjects, yet it is a book written with an elevation of tone and
a purity of sentiment that finds no place for libidinous suggestiveness. We well
know that the country is flooded with books whose hidden purpose is to pander
to a prurient taste or to advertise some nostrum, or to gain notoriety for some
charlatan who has a specific for peculiar diseases. These books tend rather to
increase the evils they profess to mitigate. Satan in Society is infinitely dif-
ferent from this class. It is as far above it as the widespreading branches of the
stately oak is above the stagnant pool that lies at its base. The late Dr. Cooke
was a high-minded, conscientious physician, who here lays bare the social sores
only to heal them, and he does it with a delicacy of touch and a firmness of
grasp that is in the spiritual order like the sk'ill acquired by long experience with
the scalpel.

Dr. Cooke was a convert to Catholicity who sacrificed not a little in his con-
version to the faith. He acquired a thorough grasp of Catholic principles, and
on disputed points he states his own convictions with no uncertain sound.

It is refreshing to see an eminent physician state plainly and frankly, " with-
out putting a tooth in it," that the child has a divine right to be born, that it
would be better to murder the child in the cradle than the one in the womb, and
that the physician who would undertake to procure abortion or to destroy life in
the womb in any other way, or for any other reason than he would after birth, is
" a monster and a scoundrel."

It is related that when Dr. Cooke went to Cincinnati to deliver a course of
lectures before the Pulte Medical College he called to pay his respects to Arch-
bishop Purcell. When that venerable prelate entered the room he exclaimed,
extending both arms, "Dr. Cooke, author -of Satan in Society, come to my
arms, my son! You have attempted a difficult work, but it was needed, and you
have done it well."

A SHORT CUT TO THE TRUE CHURCH; OR, THE FACT AND THE WORD.
By the Rev. Father Edmund Hill, C.P. Notre Dame, Indiana: Office of
the Ave Maria.

This little book is really very much to the point and to the purpose. It is
not addressed to everybody, but merely to those who, as the author says at the
start, " believe with me in the Divinity of Christ and the inspiration of the four
Gospels, but are not in the communion of Rome." And, thank God ! there are a
good many such left yet ; the whole non-Catholic world has not become agnostic

1 889.]

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

141

or altogether infidel. Father Hill has a very large audience to address, and one,
moreover, on the whole, at least in our judgment, more sincere and earnest, as
well as more enlightened, than the unbelievers and the sceptics.^

The first part, the direct proof of the church, strikes us as uncommonly
good. It is just the plainest and clearest kind of common sense, the nail hit
on the head every time, and at very short intervals ; not a word is wasted.

In the second part, as we may call it, though there is no formal division of
this kind, the author takes up the principal difficulties which stand in the way of
Protestants, and prevent them from examining the claims of the church. These
" mountains," which he "tunnels," are four — the Papal Supremacy, Transub-
stantiation, Confession, and Devotion to the Blessed Virgin. These he handles
very ably, and in his treatment of the second and fourth especially there is a
good deal which we do not remember seeing in any popular treatise before;
The style is here necessarily more diffuse, but perhaps none the worse for that,
for the taste of the majority of readers.

The book is really an interesting one, and from the excellence of its style, as
well as the importance of its matter, an easy one to read. We would advise
Catholics as well as Protestants of the kind not a few of us ourselves have been, to
read it ; for it is so short and plain that much of it may be kept in mind, and
may be of service when we are talking to Protestant friends. And it would be a
very good idea to call their attention to it, or to lend them a copy, for they are
not very likely to see it, cr any Catholic book, unless we do so.

PAGES CHOISIES DES MEMOIRES DU Due DE SAINT-SIMON. Edited and anno-
tated by A. N. Van Daell, late Director of Modern Languages in the Boston
High and Latin Schools, etc., etc. Boston: Ginn & Co. 1889.

This small I2mo volume contains selections from the voluminous memoirs of
the Duke of Saint-Simon, which have afforded such valuable materials for writing
the history of France during the seventeenth century. There are in the text a
very few misprints which should have been avoided. Besides the preface and a
useful appendix, there are three introductory pieces ; one on absolute power, from
the writings of Alfred Raimbaud ; and the other two, one on the court of Louis
XIV., and the other on his biographer, are essays by Henri Taine. All three
are interesting and serve a purpose of instruction as well, though, to some per-
sons, the last two might seem a little onesided. Saint-Simon was the chronicler of
the miseries and meannesses which either accompanied or were concealed behind
the glory and splendor of his time, and which he industriously labored to truth-
fully reveal to succeeding generations. He was a man of strong resentments.
His style is faulty though vigorous, his sentences are frequently disjointed.
Sainte-Beuve, quoted in the preface, points out this defect forcibly in these words :
" Sa phrase craque de tous cotes." The thirteen extracts have been well selected ;
the subjects are likely to interest readers well enough up in French to understand
the author. They will find instruction and entertainment throughout, and it is
to be hoped will derive edification from two chapters, one descriptive of the
nascent virtues and excellent intentions of the young Duke of Burgundy, heir
apparent to the throne ; and another which gives a full narrative of the last mo-
ments of Louis XIV. His reign of seventy-two years, during which, as he con-
tritely confessed on his death-bed, he had too much indulged his taste for erecting
buildings and for war, and had not sought to bring relief to his subjects as he felt
he should have done, was closed by a truly Christian death. A proper apprecia-
tion of the importance of such a closing of earthly labors might lead one to say,
without exaggeration in his case, that having "set forth a deep repentance,
nothing in his life became him like the leaving it." B.

142 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Oct., 1889.

A TREATISE ON SPHERICAL TRIGONOMETRY AND ITS APPLICATION TO
GEODESY^ AND ASTRONOMY, with numerous examples. By John Casey,
LL.D., H.R.S., F. R.U.I., Member of the Mathematical Societies of London
and Fraifce, Corresponding Member of the Royal Society of Sciences at
Liege, Professor of Higher Mathematics and Mathematical Physics in the
Catholic University of Ireland.

The author's preface tells us that this work is intended as a sequel to his
treatise on Plane Trigonometry. It is certainly constructed on the same lines,
there is the same evidence of wide reading in the latest works on the subject, both
English and Continental, and the same critical and masterly treatment by
which the book has been reduced to a connected whole, instead of remaining a
thing " of shreds and patches." The old methods, where it has seemed advis-
able, have been altered for better ones, many of which are original. There are
over five hundred examples, a large number of which are themselves interesting
theorems. In particular we may draw attention to Cauchy's beautiful method for
solving the various cases of •oblique-angled triangles, to some interesting conver-
gent series due to Briinnow, and to many important theorems due to Hart,
Keogh, Neughberg, P. Serret, etc. By expressing the Spherical Excess as 2F
instead of E great simplicity has been attained in a large number of important
formulae. We have Frobenius' theorem, a determinant relation between the mu-
tual powers of one set of five small circles on a sphere to another set of five. The
deductions from this theorem and its particular applications are very numerous
and interesting. Amongst them we find here Dr. Casey's theorem, that if four
circles on a sphere are touched by a fifth, and the mutual powers of two
opposite pairs of circles be multiplied in every way, the sum of two of these pro-
ducts is always equal to the third. This theorem, which is an extension ot
Ptolemy's theorem, was proved by another method in Dr. Casey's original paper
as far as we can recollect. There is an interesting chapter on Inversion and
Stereographic Projection, much of the latter being taken from P. Serret's work.
There is another kind of Inversion used by Dr. Casey himself for the first time in
his memoir on " Cyclides and Spheroquartics," and introduced into this work (p.
105). We have no time to describe it or other matters of interest which we
have noticed in turning over the pages.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Mention of books in this place does not preclude extended notice in subsequent numbers.

THE LIFE OF ST. BONAVENTURE, Cardinal-Bishop of Albano, Superior-General of the
Franciscan Order. Translated by L. C. Skey. London: Burns & Gates; New York:
The Catholic Publication Society Co.

THE LIFE OF JOHN MITCHEL. With an Historical Sketch of the '48 Movement in Ireland.
By P. A. S. Dublin : James Duffy & Co.

THE CHURCH QUESTION IN SCOTLAND. A Proposed Scheme for its Solution. Glasgow:
James Cameron.

OUR LADY OF GOOD COUNSEL. Containing an authentic account of the translation of the
Miraculous Picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel, with full information about the " Pious
Union." By the author of The Penitent Instructed, The Augustinian Manual, etc. Seventh
Edition. Boston: Cashman, Keating & Co.

MANUALE CLERICORUM. In quo habentur Instructiones Asceticoe Liturgicaeque ac variarum
precum formulas ad usum eorum prcecipue qui in Seminariis clericorum versantur. Collegit,
disposuit, edidit P. Josephus Schneider, S.J. Editio tertia, recognita et emenclata. Ratis-
bonae, Neo-Eboraci et Cincinnati! : Sumptibus, Chartis et Typis, Frederici Pustet.

REMARKS UPON THE ORIGIN OF THE FIRST-AID MOVEMENT. By Daniel Murdoch,
M.R.C.S. London : Published by the Author.

AN EXPLANATION OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Pre-
pared for use in Catholic Schools, Academies, and Colleges. By Francis T. Furey, A.M.
New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co.

APPLETON'S CYCLOPAEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. Edited by James Grant Wilson and
John Fiske. Six vols. New York: D. Appleton & Co

OLD CATHOLIC MARYLAND AND ITS EARLY JESUIT MISSIONARIES. By Rev. Wm. P.
Treacy, author of Irish Scholars of the Penal Days, etc. Swedesboro, N. J. : St. Joseph's
Rectory.

THOUGHTS AND COUNSELS FOR THE CONSIDERATION OF CATHOLIC .YOUNG MEN. By
kev. P. A. Von Doss, S.J. Freely translated and adapted by Rev. Augustine Wirth,
O.S.B. Permissu superiorum. New York and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. L. NOVEMBER, 1889. No. 296.

THE LESSONS OF A CENTURY OF CATHOLIC
EDUCATION.

A CENTURY ago there was in the United States a single
Catholic college. Georgetown was established in 1789. Two
years later St. Mary's Seminary was opened. Since then our
colleges and seminaries have been multiplying throughout the land.
During the first half of the century our parochial schools and
academies were few and far between. The clergy were sparse,
Catholics were poor and struggling, and churches had to be built
and paid for. Hence the difficulty of maintaining parochial schools.
Here and there an Irish or German schoolmaster would wield the
rod in the basement of a church, upon no other income than the
uncertain pittance the children might bring him. Mother Seton
established the Sisters of Charity. Bishop England, in Charleston,
attempted to establish a community of sisters, but failed. Bishop
Timon made the same attempt in Buffalo with no better success.
Religious orders are not organized in a day. In 1847 tne
Brothers of the Christian Schools opened their first house in the
United States, at Calvert Hall, Baltimore. Their beginning was
very humble. In the following year they opened a school in
Canal Street, New York. Since then these and other religious
orders of men — Franciscans, Xaverians, Brothers of Mary, Brothers
of the Holy Cross, Brothers of the Holy Ghost — have spread
rapidly over the country, and the good work continues to prosper
under God's blessing. Teaching orders of nuns and sisterhoods
have multiplied with still greater rabidity. Seminaries and col-
leges and universities, free-schools and orphanages and protec-
tories, schools for the higher education of women and schools for
the deaf and dumb, schools for the Indian and schools for the
negro, all exist in one or other part of this vast continent. All

1 44 LEssoiVS OF A CENT UK Y OF CA THOLIC ED UCA no.v. [Nov. ,

these educational works are now being crowned by a great Cath-
olic University, which purposes to give the latest and best word
on all subjects of higher study. It is with no small pleasure and
thankfulness to God that every Catholic can read the following
testimony borne to our educational strength and efficiency by a
non- Catholic authority :

" All other denominational service in education is partial and irregular com-
pared with the comprehensive grasp of the Catholic Church. Their aim is all-
inclusive and assumes no other agency. Ignoring the public school, their plan
is co-extensive with their membership. With one-fifth of all the theological
seminaries, and one-third of all their students ; with one-fourth of the colleges,
nearly six hundred academies, and twenty-six hundred parochial (elementary)
schools, instructing more than half a million of children, the church is seen to be
a force which, educationally considered, is equalled by no other single agency but
the government itself. . . . As a matter of fact, ninety-three per cent, of them do
maintain parochial schools, in which are educated, generally by the priesthood,
rarely by laymen (except in the teaching congregations), the 511,063 pupils. In
addition to these are five hundred and eighty-eight academies, usually for girls,
and ninety-one colleges."*

This is the record of our centennial cycle. Those who saw the
lowly beginning have lived to witness the placing of the coping-
stone upon the structure now on the way to completion. It is a
noble showing. Our educational progress has kept pace with our
growth in other respects. But let us not allow ourselves to be
dazzled by our present splendors. Let us not take unto ourselves
the credit of what has been done for us by others. Nay, in the
midst of the sending up of sky-rockets and the waving of bunt-
ing and the blank-cartridge roars of laudation and glorification that
is now going on from throat and press, let us pause and think a
moment of* those who bore the burden and heat of the day, and
fought for us the battles and won for us the victories which we
are now celebrating. Above all must we never forget the noble
and stubborn stand taken by Archbishop Hughes in the great
cause of education at a time when the sky lowered and our very
existence as Catholics was threatened. Let us not forget the priva-
tions of teachers, the self-denials and almost heroic sacrifices of
priest and people in order to maintain these schools. It is within
the memory of all of us how brothers and sisters, after breathing
the poisonous air of ill-ventilated and over-crowded class-rooms,
would return to a wretched abode, narrow and confined and poorly
furnished, and open alike to the severe cold of winter and the in-
tense heat of summer. Day after day, year in, year out, did they
move in this circumscribed round of duty, till disease and ex-
haustion overpowered them and they died, happy that they were

* Boone, Education in ///<• (Tinted States, pp. 267-268.

1889.] LESSONS OF A CENTURY OF CATHOLIC EDUCATION. 145

allowed to do some little good among God's chosen poor. Great
was their privation and suffering, and cheerfully was it borne. We
look about us and we sum up the results of a century and we
call them splendid ; but we make no record of the religious men
and religious women whose lives have gone into the building up
of these splendid results. Be it so ; the task is faithfully done by
the recording angel of the hidden sacrifices. This day of holo-
causts is fast waning. Thanks to the thoughtfulness of the rev-
erend clergy and the generosity of the people, our school-houses
are large, commodious, well lighted and well ventilated, and our
religious teachers are comfortably housed, so that in airy rooms
they can breathe freely after the excitement of the day's duties in
class, and calmly prepare their work for the next day. Without
such a house it is impossible for the most robust constitution to
withstand for any length of time the strain of spending five or six
hours with a roomful of children, and immediately afterwards
shutting one's self up in retirement and study. A large dwelling-
house may mean luxury in the eyes of the world, but it is
simply a matter of life or death for a religious community.

In consequence of the poverty of our people and scarcity of
money, our schools suffer in many ways. Our teachers are but
ill-paid. Even our religious teachers would find it to their ad-
vantage to receive more than the mere pittance now allowed them
for food and clothing. It may be asked : What more does the
religious want ? Were man living on bread alone, personally he
would require little else. But whatever surplus remains in a re-
ligious community goes to the support of a novitiate, a normal
school, the infirm and the aged, and the running of the administrative
departments of the order. With larger means the young men and
young women aspiring to be religious teachers could be given a
more thorough training; the normal schools could be more fully
equipped with chemical and physical apparatus and specimens in
natural history — all of which are most expensive. So, also, in every
community the library could be increased and made more efficient.
Some pastors have been very thoughtful in this last respect ; we
have known them at auction sales and elsewhere to procure large
quantities of books for the libraries of the sisters and the broth-
ers. Some of our publishers, non-Catholic as well as Catholic,
have made generous donations to the libraries of religious houses.
After all, books are a teacher's tools. And what is any work-
man, be his skill what it may, without his favorite tools? Here,
then, is one advantage to be derived from more generous pay-
ment of teachers. Our religious orders will be able to man our

VOL. L. — 10

146 LESSONS OF A CENTUR Y OF CA THOLIC EDUCA TION. [Nov.,

schools with more competent and better-trained sisters and
brothers. But this is not all.

No matter how numerous our sisterhoods and brotherhoods
become, they cannot monopolize all Catholic teaching. We must
have Catholic lay teachers. Much of the success of our
Catholic schools will depend upon the character of these teachers.
Now, what is the fact ? Our parochial lay teachers have
no standing as a body. We have not far to go for the
cause. They are poorly paid. They have no inducement to
continue an hour longer at their post than they can help. If
clever teachers, they too often pass over to the public schools,
where their merits are recognized and their servkes liberally
remunerated. Here and there we meet exceptional cases of
men or women who fully realize the great dignity of being
Catholic teachers, and who accordingly devote their lives, their
energies, their talents to the noble cause in as great a spirit
of self-denial as any religious teachers. They are driven to it
from the sight of the great need, the immense harvest and
the few laborers. But theirs is the rare exception. And it is
certainly sad to contemplate that the calling in life which of all
human callings is the most elevated should be so slighted. In
whatever light you look at the teacher's profession you find it
a noble one. To mould intellect, to develop character, to influ-
ence the whole future of a soul by directing the youth and
turning his tastes and aspirations in the path you would have him
follow — there is no more sacred calling than this, after the priest-
hood, which is a divine privilege. Some are unworthy to touch
this holy work ; no man is too great for it ; no man stoops in
undertaking it. Surely it should be thoroughly respectable.
Surely our Catholic lay teachers should cultivate a sense of the
dignity and responsibility of their position. Now, though we
cannot ennoble the teacher's profession in the sight of God and
his angels, much may be done to raise its standard in the sight
of men. As things now are, no young man or young woman of
fair endowments finds an inducement to make teaching in our
Catholic schools a life-work. Remuneration is too scant. The
result is that all our best Catholic teachers, at the time that
their experience has ripened, pass from the work of the class-
room to other callings in which they are better paid, and give
place to raw recruits, who in their turn acquire experience at
the expense of the children.

Thus we find that, much as has been done, all our educa-
tional problems are not yet solved. We cannot yet rest upon

[ 889.] LESSONS OF A CENTUR Y OF CA THOLIC ED UCA TION. 1 47

our achievements. The second century of our educational exist-
ence will find many things to complete and amend in our present
institutions. It is best that we look the fact full in the face, and
recognize it, and set about supplying our shortcomings according to
time and occasion. Self-complacency is the bane of many a
noble undertaking. When we begin to congratulate ourselves on
our achievements we cease to make further effort. From that
moment decline and decay enter into our work. It is true of the
individual; it is true of nations ; it is true of institutions. And
were this paper devoted exclusively to the work of eulogizing,
it had better remain unwritten. In the midst of our jubilation a
little introspection made, not in a carping spirit, but with charity
and good-will and real desire for our educational progress, in the
same temper in which we indited other educational articles which
met with the approval and appreciation of the thoughtful and
the learned, cannot fail to be wholesome, and will meet the views
)f the reverend editors in asking an article on the subject.*

Take our primary schools. It is difficult to define the limits
to which studies should be carried on in them. In our large
;ities there should be central high-schools, in which boys who can
afford to remain long enough at school might enter and receive
a more extended training. These high-schools would determine
the extent of the primary course. But without defining what may
or may not enter the course, we can lawfully insist that the three
R's be well taught. Now, as a matter of fact, is this not a cry-
ing evil in all our American elementary training, one from which
our young men suffer in all their collegiate careers, that very
many of our children after five, six, seven years' attendance in
schools cannot read intelligibly; cannot spell; write a poor, illegi-
ble hand, and are unable to make the simplest mathematical cal-
;ulation ? Look at the examination papers of the average candi-
date for West Point, or the Naval Academy, or for entrance into any
of our colleges, and note the tale they unfold of negligent teaching
at the time that they should have been well grounded in this
primary, essential foundation of all knowledge. Can teacher and
pupil not be impressed with the fact that while it is no great
honor for any person to speak and write with ordinary correct-
ness his mother-tongue, it is a great discredit for him not to be

* To avoid repetition of what we have said elsewhere, and for clearer development of what
we here can only hint at, we would refer the reader to the following papers from our pen : i.
" Psychological Aspects of Education," a paper read before the Board of Regents of the Uni-
versity of New York, July u, 1877. New York: E. Steiger & Co. 2. "The University Ques-
tion in England and Ireland," American Catholic Quarterly Review, October, 1878. 3. "What
is the Outlook for our Colleges? " in the same Review, July, 1882.

148 LESIONS or A CExrrR v OF CATHOLIC EDUCA TION. [Nov.,

able so to use it ? Let the three R's be learned before anything
else. It will make all other study a pleasure.

Our parochial schools must be kept Catholic in tone and
spirit. Our books must be Catholic ; our historical knowledge must
be studied from the Catholic point of view ; our Catholic religion
must be clearly expounded, and her ritual and ceremonies made
attractive. Is there nothing to mend in this regard? We have
school-books enough with the name Catholic attached. How many
of them are worthy of that name ? We ask the question, acknowl-
edging our utter incompetency to decide. But we have seen in
our day many changes of books, and we have come to the con-
clusion that that publisher will succeed best who gets up the
book with brightest cover, neatest type, clearest pictures, and best
paper. Put a book written by the ablest educators in the land
into a slovenly binding and you will not find one teacher in ten
to touch it. We are in this respect becoming no better than our
non-Catholic public-school brethren. In the matter of the extrava-
gant get-up of text-books, America has become the laughing-
stock of Europe. It has more than once become literally true
that books .have been judged and adopted by school-boards
merely on the merits of their covers. However, the text-book
is the least instrument of education. Provided it is succinct and
covers the ground, the teacher can develop, and the less reliance
placed upon the book and the more the teacher explains, in
words few, clear, and to the point, the better it will be for the
pupil. He must memorize; but he memorizes in order that he
may understand the teacher's lesson intelligently. The mere reci-
tation is not the lesson. Another complaint about text-books in
parochial schools is their want of uniformity. A parent moves
into a neighboring parish, and forthwith that parent must purchase
as many new sets of books as he has children going to school.
This is found to be a great hardship. Here, also, we can
only indicate the grievance, not suggest a remedy. Tastes differ,
publishers must live, and competition is strong. But if our paro-
chial schools are to be anything more than nominal, if they are
to compete with other schools, they must be uniformly graded
and subjected to strict supervision. In each city there must be
an inspector. And this inspector must be no theorist. He must
be a practical teacher, who has taught class himself, and therefore
knows all the difficulties that beset the teacher's position. A
mere educational doctrinaire would only worry the teachers, upset
the school, and experiment on the pupils. Such an inspector
were worse than none.

1 889.] LESSONS OF A CENTUX v OF CA THOLIC ED UCA TIO.\. ' 149

We come to our academies. Here, also, thoroughness is the
reat, all-important need. Are our pupils well drilled in whatever
icy have gone over ? Are they well posted as to all that goes
to make a good sentence ? Do they know the essentials of Eng-
lish grammar ? We do not believe in the long and laborious drill
in parsing and analysis that runs over years of school and ends in
nothing practical. It makes one neither a better reader, nor a
>tter writer, nor a better speller. Were the time so spent occupied
in writing composition, or in developing sentences, or in learning to
appreciate some of our literary masterpieces, it would be a clear
rain to the pupil. Whatever our boys have studied in arithmetic,
>r algebra, or geometry, or mensuration, do they know .it well ?
Is it so known that they can continue with security their studies
in the higher mathematics ? And how are they grounded in their
Latin and Greek grammars ? Is it sought to make them familiar
ither with Latin and Greek construction than with many authors ?
The mere skimming of a classic author without a good foundation
in grammar and construction is great waste of time, and handicaps
the pupil later on in his collegiate course, when he should be
prepared to bring a certain relish and appreciation to the reading
of his author. Are the students of our academies grounded in a
few principles of natural history and the physical sciences? If
not earlier, at least in our academies should our pupils acquire
some elementary knowledge of the great divisions of the mineral,
the vegetable, and the animal kingdoms; they should understand
whence we derive the coal that warms them, the chalk with which
they write on the blackboard, and all the minerals that fall under
daily observation and are in daily use. Then the student should
be initiated into the divisions and subdivisions of the animal and
vegetable kingdoms. He should not live and die ignorant of the
origin and history of the things within his immediate environ-
ment. What he learns in this respect should be well and pro-
perly taught. We are not in favor of cramming, nor do we ask
our academies to initiate their pupils into all the 'ologies of the
day. This were folly. We are somewhat surprised to find a man
of Sir John Lubbock's attainments endorse that superficial dictum
of Lord Brougham, that one should try to know " everything of
something, and something of everything." And this he calls not
being possessed of a smattering, but "being well grounded."* It
is one of those brilliant generalities that dazzle, but will not bear
analysis. How may one know everything of any the least subject ?
How get to know something about all subjects ? Impossible.

* The Pleasures of Life, p. 181.

1 50 LESSONS OF A CENTUR Y OE CA I^IOLIC EDUCA TION. [Nov.,

Away with the vague and the indefinite from our educational
courses ! Be our teaching thorough. Again, we would not be
understood as complaining. At the writing of these words an
incident has come to us which will show that we have no reason
for complaint. A student of one of our academies presented
himself for West Point. There were several candidates, some of
them from our public high-schools, some from private non-Cath-
olic schools. They were asked to read, which they did with more
or less expression. They were then told to give in turn an ac-
count of their reading, and the only one to do so with intelligence
was the student of our Catholic academy, and he won the prize,
standing first in every branch. Nor is this an exceptional case.
In many of our academies is solid work being well done.

Turn we now to our convent schools. We are all proud of
them. They are to-day among the noblest and most powerful
strongholds of womanly virtue in the land. They have been the
educators of our Catholic mothers and our Catholic sisters. Every
convent school is a garden of choicest and rarest flowers of girl-
hood and womanhood, exhaling modesty, purity, and all those
amiable qualities that make our homes an earthly paradise. The
convent schools are real educators. Who can name the infinite
pains the nuns take with every child confided to them ? How
they study every fold of character, touch every fibre of the heart,
and mould the soul through childhood into girlhood, and from girl-
hood to budding womanhood. They never grow tired in their
efforts to control children's impetuosities, keep their vanity within
legitimate bounds, and teach them the great and useful lesson of
self-control. In after years, when worry and suffering come upon
her who was at one time "the sweet girl-graduate," with what a sigh,
an intense pleasure, she looks back to the days she spent within the
peaceful haven of the convent walls. Even a Louise Michel or a
Georges Sand cannot contemplate those days without emotion.

But while the nuns leave little to be desired as educators, is
there nothing in which they may not improve in their methods
and subjects of instruction ? Is their course in literature sufficient
to carry their pupils beyond a taste for the novel ? Do they give
them a desire for solid reading ? Do they gratify that desire ?
The instruction they impart, is it of that robust character that it
really grapples with subjects and presents their great principles
and main issues before the pupils ? Or does it simply nibble at
the odds and ends of a subject in such a manner as to conceal
the principal branches and leave the pupils content with the
crumbs given them ? Can our convent graduates in general liter-

1 889.] LESSONS OF A CENT UK v OF CA THOLIC EDUCA TION. 1 5 1

ature, in solid scientific study, hold their own with the graduates
of our non-Catholic seminaries ? Will the knowledge they have
acquired carry them through to any of the universities or any of
the professions which are now opened to our young women ?
Have they settled literary principles ? Are they prepared to form
a clear judgment as to the merits or defects of a book ? Have
they mastered a good, sound course of historical reading ? Or is
their knowledge of history confined to the mere text-book ? Are
they prepared to answer the objections raised against their reli-
gion ? Have they literary ballast enough to keep them from gush-
ing over the latest literary fad or craze, and at the same time to
see whatever merits it may possess ? Are they prepared — without
being at all blue-stockings — to undertake serious reading in
history, in popular science, or upon any of the social questions of
the day ? We only put these questions as an introspective review.
We do not pretend to answer them. We dare say some of our
convent schools are fast coming abreast of the times and prepar-
ing to do full justice by their charge ; let us hope that before
long all will be found equal to the best schools among our non-
Catholic neighbors.

Then there are our colleges. Have we reason to be satisfied
with their working? Do we find nothing in them to improve
upon ? We are now speaking of those institutions in which real
effort is made to give a thorough collegiate training; not the
numerous boarding and day-schools bearing the name. Have not
our professors been overworked ? How else may we account for
their sterility in literature and science ? Young men and old
men, in the midst of onerous duties and responsibilities, are
flooding the press with original work of considerable merit, with
editions of the classics, in Latin, in Greek, and in Anglo-Saxon,
writing thoughtful articles for periodicals, reading papers at liter-
ary and scientific gatherings ; of all these, what percentage is
Catholic ? In Germany the professor who ceases to produce is
considered a dead branch. According to this, how much dry
•wood there must be in our Catholic colleges !

Hitherto our collegiate courses have been carried out upon
exclusively seminarian lines. The classics have had a predomi-
nance. And yet, considering the time devoted to them, our grad-
uates have not acquired that proficiency which might have been
expected. Only recently an eminent professor in one of our
leading theological seminaries asked us why it was that young
men graduating from our Catholic colleges were so ignorant of
Latin construction. Is it not due to the absence of thoroughness

152 L KSSONS OF A CENTUR Y OF CA THOLIC El) UCA TIOX. [Nov. ,

in the earliest years' study, and to the superfkialness with which
authors are afterwards skimmed over ? Boys are put reading the
poets too early, and the labor expended on them is all lost so
far as Latin construction is concerned. A study of the idioms of
Cicero and Caesar is the only study that avails for purposes of
prose composition. Now, classics as they are taught, and a short
course of mathematics, and a very superficial course of history
and English, with a few experiments in physics and chemistry, is
the make-up of our collegiate training up to the philosophy
year. To these is added a course of some text-book giving the
essentials of scholastic philosophy, with or without explanation.
The whole trend of modern thought is ignored, or casually alluded
to as a thing outside and far away. Modern literatures and
modern sciences — social, political, physical, and sesthetical — are all
knocking at our doors for admission, and we cannot keep them
out without doing grave injustice to our students. These young
men are to live and labor and fight their battles out in the nine-
teenth century, and they are equipped in sixteenth-century armor.
Somehow — this is not the occasion to discuss so fruitful a theme —
an adjustment must be made, and place given to modern literatures
and modern sciences in our schedules of study. Lastly, in our
colleges, above all, must there be a complete> religious training : the
doctrines of the church fully exposed, the errors of the day pointed
out and separated from the truth on which they are based, the
beauty and significance of ritual and ceremonial shown forth. Every
Catholic student finishing his collegiate course should perceive the
plan and purpose of the church in the world's history. There
now lies before us a letter from one who has made a special
study of every eddy and current of modern thought, whose name
is identified with what is highest and best in modern literature,
and speaking of the higher education, he says: "The waste of time
and material is enormous. ... If I were to say in one word
what I think most wanting to us, I should declare it was a
reform in the principles and method of teaching. But where is it
to begin ? " Catholic educators, where is it to begin ?

We Catholics hold the traditions of all education. Whatever
is had to-day from Greece or Rome has come down through our
Catholic ancestors. As we hold supernatural truth in its com-
pleteness, so also should the whole of natural truth be ours. .
Therefore, in our schools should we find place for every science and
every art. This is another part of the work of the second cen-
tury of our existence, to establish schools for the various branches
of science and art. Have we ever considered the untried pos-

1 889.] LESSONS OF A CENTUR Y OF CA rnouc ED UCA TION. 1 5 3

sibilities of our educational institutions in America? There are
many such in which we Catholics may excel here in the future
as we have excelled elsewhere in the past. Why may we not
with time possess a school of art that will educate all America ?
Ours are the traditions of art in their purest and best forms.
To us belong the Leonardo da Vincis, the Fra Angelicos, the
Michelangelos, the Rafaels. And when one of our Catholic ladies
interprets for us their masterpieces in language classic and ele-
gant, we feel a new sense awakening within us, and we are all
the better. Compare the criticisms of Eliza Allen Starr with the
sometimes coarse remarks of Ruskin or the insinuations of Taine,
and you will at once form a faint conception of how Catholic
feelings and Catholic instincts alone can direct true art. Is it a
dream beyond all realization, in these days of wonders, that in
every large centre there may not be such schools of ecclesiastical
art as is that of St. Luke's, conducted by the Christian Brothers, in
Ghent, Belgium ? We will have churches to build and decorate
then as now. Why should we let our beautiful Catholic tradi-
tions, our noble Catholic ideals, become lost in modern realism ?
Then a wide field is open in the organization of schools for
the study of the mechanical arts. The future of the world is in
the hands of the workingman. Now is the day and the hour
in which to hold him under control and give him guidance.
The morrow may be too late. It is with a sense of terror we
notice the amount of anti-Christian and anti-social reading
matter that is being circulated among the artisans. They are
a hard-headed, logical class of men, who do their own thinking
while working at their trades ; they like to be spoken to
seriously ; they are not content with trashy reading ; they
must have solid works. You will find in their hands
treatises on political economy, tracts on the social evils and
their remedies, works of self-improvement. You will find
among them certain leading spirits who give color to their
views and teach them how to interpret their readings in a
good or bad sense. They will reason with you and look at
many sides of a question before accepting its conclusions. They
are a most independent body. They ask no favors. They stand
on their rights. You may convince them, you may lead
them, but you cannot drive them. Their children's children are the
future rulers of the land. How may they be reached ? By the
establishment of schools for the trades and mechanical arts in
which a Christian atmosphere is inhaled and the Christian
.spirit is preserved. These schools would graduate a certain

154 /- SSSl >. \ '.V OF A C EN TUX Y OF C'A THOLIC ED UCA TION. [Nov. ,

number each year, who would be in great demand as foremen,
and who by their education and general intelligence would
wield influence in the clubs and associations of which they would
be naturally the central figures. Through such a class of skilled
mechanics, with a Christian spirit, might the workingmen and
artisans of America be preserved from the socialistic deluge that
now threatens the world.

Besides the technical schools which would reach only a special
class, another and a comparatively large body -may be reached
by technical night-schools, in which mathematics, drawing, and sur-
veying could be taught. There are thousands of young men in
our large cities who would gladly attend such schools during two hours
a certain number of times in the week, and who would be most
grateful for the assistance thus rendered them.*

Lastly, a want pressing us upon all sides, an urgent want
which we cannot too soon set about remedying, and which we
cannot too earnestly study, and devise ways and means to com-
pass, is this : How may we keep our boys, especially of the
poorer class in the congested districts of our large cities, out of
the saloons and the contaminating influences under which they live
after they have left our parochial schools, say from their sixteenth
to their twentieth year? Generation after generation of this class
pass through our schools. They have made their first Commu-
nion ; they have been confirmed ; they have frequently knelt in
confession, and yet what becomes of them all ? What multitudes
of them fall into sinful habits of life ! How very many of them are
anything but a comfort to their pastors or to their aging parents !
Now, how can this class be reached and held to a sense of duty
and respectability ? How can the faith be kept aglow in their
breast so as to sustain them in temptation and render them hon-
est, upright, law-abiding citizens ? Will sodalities keep them to-
gether and bind them to the church ? Will Catholic clubs and
Catholic literary societies ? Will charitable organizations ? Will
lectures ? Will public entertainments ? These things all appeal
to the young man of respectable home and good home-training —
but do they touch the hearts of the sons of poverty and destitu-
tion ? We know not ; what we do know is that prayer will benefit
them and God in his own good time will send the man who will
reach them and teach others how to reach them and mould them
into good citizens and sincere Catholics. BROTHER AZARIAS.

* While writing this we find with pleasure the announcement made that St. Francis
Xavier's College, New York, has opened a night-school in which poor youths may be instructed
gratis in Latin and Greek (New York Sun, September 9, 1889). It is a step in the right direction.

1889.] RELIGION AND MULLIONS. 155

RELIGION AND MULLIONS.

THERE is a subdued but palpable humor, a delicately re-
served satire, not the less delicious on that account, in Mr. Wil-
frid Ward's story * of the youth of his father. It pervades without
obtrusiveness the margins of the great roadway over which that
strong and quaint man trudged, always athletic even in his
errors, always manly even in his mishaps, seeking truth and find-
ing for many years only hardship, perplexity, and opposition.
Mr. Ward has given a singularly comprehensive picture of Oxford,
of the time that drew so many intellectual giants from mere aes-
theticism of religion into rock-based theology and Christian love.
He has drawn a powerful sketch of one of the most original and
forcible leaders of that striking procession into whose still
passing ranks the finest thought of England contributes annually
many notable men and women. Equally with the truth of the
single portrait, the toning of the picture must fascinate every ob-
server. No light is forced ; no artificial draperies hang beside
the rugged and muscular subject. Ward appears in absolute sim-
plicity of character ; the view of Oxford, of his contemporaries, of
his associations and domestic and collegiate career, is alive with
charming truth. The volume deals only, it should be added,
with the earlier life ; it ends with his conversion. His great life
was to come afterward. He was to be professor of dogmatic
theology by the choice of Cardinal Wiseman ; Pope Pius IX. was
to confer upon him the Doctorate of Philosophy ; he was to be-
come editor of the Dublin Review, and in its pages refute the
theism of John Stuart Mill. He was to become, with eccentrici-
ties and imperfections, one of the stalwart figures in Catholic
England, and to leave after him — he died in 1882 — an imperish-
able addition to the best English literature.

The humor of this first volume, gentle and restrained, exists
in the phenomena of the time and the circumstances surrounding
religious life in Oxford. It is not at all in the design of Mr.
Wilfrid Ward's book. Where it appears in the text it is spon-
taneous and inevitable because of its propriety as a legitimate
part of the story. Goethe has correctly pronounced humor one
of the elements of genius. It protects the greatest of intellects
from the consequences of false reasoning ; by making incongrui-

* William George Ward and the Oxford Movement. By Wilfrid Ward. Macmillan.

156 RELIGION A. YD MULLIONS. [Nov.,.

ties obvious, it has preserved statesmen and poets from ludicrous
or mortifying blunders. The want of it deprived Wordsworth of
the power of discriminating, as Lowell has so wittily said, between
truth, which is the breath of the muse's nostril, and fact, which
suffocates her. An almost Scotch poverty of humor has prevented
Mr. Gladstone from detecting the many self-contradictions in his
controversial writings, and tricked him into that famous pamphlet
of fifteen years ago in which, having hung upon the wall of his
vast mind a ridiculous assumption concerning the Vatican Council,
he proceeded to expound therein a long series of erroneous in-
ferences and ingeniously absurd deductions. Intuitively the world
that understands the vast range of Mr. Gladstone's industry has
come to appreciate the certainty of this modern peripatetic to
lose his way in downright seriousness ; and moved by that scien-
tific approval which selects the best things a man does and forgets
the paltry, the erring, and the transient, the Vatican pamphlet
has been forgotten.

Nothing could be more unlike than the humor of Sir Thomas
More and the humor of Ward, the Oxonian. Both were devotees
of the classics ; both were trained in the austerest dialectics ;
each was profoundly religious by nature, and both, humble and
reverent, could smile at misfortune even while it tortured body
and harrowed soul. The humor of religious natures is necessarily
akin to humility. The more a reasonable creature contemplates
the folly and the term of human life, the more acute is his con-
tempt of its pomps, whose emptiness he is enabled more clearly
to perceive. The longer a disciplined mind dwells in the peaceful
calm of sane reflection, the deeper his duties or opportunities may
carry him into the quiet world of scholarship, the more fully he
realizes the vanity of pretentiousness and the insincerity of assum-
ing that it is in anybody's power to know more than a very
little of this world's knowledge, and none of that of the next ex-
cept what God has chosen to impart. It was this consciousness
which made Thomas Aquinas so impervious to flattery ; it was
the manifest incongruity between his apprehension of his attain-
ments and his conviction of the greatness of the knowledge un-
attainable in a human life that caused him to shrink with actual
grief from the posts of responsibility and distinction to which he
was so often called in vain. It was this correct but for common
mortals unintelligible appreciation of incongruities — this noble
humor — which helped to make him for all time " a mystery of
moral loveliness."

The humor of Sir Thomas More was subtle, witty, penetrating,

I889-]

RELIGION AND MULLIONS.

157

and exquisite. It was that of a temperament in which the philo-
sophic habit contended with the fancy of the poet and the charity
of a saint. There must have been an incessant combat between
his natural tendency to be caustic and his acquired grace of being
invariably sympathetic. He could not but jest even on the scaf-
fold ; but his most pungent quips wound only hypocrisy ; his
most elaborate satire is aimed only at the stupidity of the calcu-
lation that political contrivances are ever going completely to
remedy the evils and inequalities of human society. A man bred
in university erudition and expert with the foils that sawed the
air of college life during periods when air-sawing was the chief
gymnastic, he was devoid of that insistent combative spirit which
usually is inherent in energetic tempers. Ward in many respects
was the opposite of Sir Thomas, while resembling him in massive
and imperturbable simplicity. He was less subtle, more virile,
less penetrative, more resonant ; slow where More was alert,
ponderous where More would have been incisive and fatal, bel-
ligerent where More would have been patient and silent. Ward
was not the equal of More in accomplishments, and lacked the
natural inclinations that rendered the great chancellor the most
capable critic of art and of architecture, the most eminent aesthete
(we may not be pardoned for saying) of his time. Ward had
not More's versatility, his love of nature, his fondness of sea, of
sky, of the mountains, the vales, the birds and flowers, that found
in. the patron of Erasmus a lay Saint Francis. Taking into ac-
count their totally different stations in life, their corresponding
philosophic and theological habits, there is enough in common
between them to make their disparities attractive. Both prove,
in essentially unlike ways, that humor, gayety, a child-like superi-
ority over the dismal and gruesome, capacity to smile kindly at
even the rasping and anguishing of human influences, are har-
monious with, perhaps an indispensable constituent of, healthful
intellectual activity.

In his early youth the humor and the genuine morality of
Ward manifested themselves closely together. One of his pro-
genitors was clerk to one Cornwallis, involved in a pathetic inci-
dent this side of the Atlantic (at Yorktown, to wit), from the
effects of which he recovered sufficiently to participate with un-
feigned disgust in the corruption and abolition of the Parliament
of Ireland a few years afterward. The Ward who paid the king's
forces off at Gibraltar did not accompany him to America, hav-
ing engaged in the more agreeable if not more honorable duty
of marrying a Spanish wife with the suggestive name of Raphael;

158 RELIGION AND MULLIONS. [Nov.,

and certain traits in Ward of Oxford are traceable to the heritage
of intensity and enthusiasm thus introduced into Isle of Wight
veins. Ward's father was a Tory member for London, a director
of the Bank of England, an authority on finance and an investiga-
tor of the East India Company, a friend of the Duke of Welling-
ton and a famous cricketer. The family lent useful men to the
statesmanship of earlier times, one of them being a protege of
the younger Pitt; another was in one of Lord John Russell's
cabinets. Ward himself in his childhood was a sturdy fellow, not
to be dragooned into politeness nor very changeable in any re-
spect, except by the grace of God. He was addicted to music
and mathematics — a natural and delightful combination ; he yearned
for the theatre and he detested society. Prodigious talent in cer-
tain gifts was associated with an awkwardness, a clumsiness, and
a taciturnity which made him seem generally bored. On one
occasion, when forced by his father to go to a children's ball, he
behaved himself with desperate impropriety, during the whole
evening giving out what Sydney Smith so admired and rarely
got in Macaulay, "a brilliant flash of silence." Like Macaulay in
only one respect, he had an extraordinary memory, and read, like
him, everything he could lay hands on. He finally escaped alone,
and ran home through muddy roads and pelting rain, his feet wet
in his evening shoes. He was never asked to go to another party.

With all his love of fun, his pranks and propensity for ad-
venture, he felt a horror of the vices that had established them-
selves in the preparatory school to which he was sent, and be-
fore he entered Oxford a spirit had been born in him which was
to burn with unflagging zeal for the purifying of the education
of English youth. Fond of sport, but amenable to law ; indiffer-
ent to conventionalities, but rigidly honest in all his doings, his
conscientious detestation of the low, the coarse, the ignoble, be-
came so well known in his young manhood that he was easily
named among the coterie who lent in his day to the quadrangles
and river paths an odor of something better than fighting, of
something more rational than cramming.

It is not the purpose (3f this article to touch upon the grave
controversy which was developed out of the Tractarian movement.
It is only to look for a moment upon that strain' which preceded
this momentous impulse and which has survived it ; which dwells
in Oxford as in a pagan temple ; which breaks out in ritualism
and sobs in languid religious poetry ; whose germ is in every
tender and worshipful heart, and which to many excellent souls
is religion. A great architect, himself a convert to the Catholic

1889.] RELIGION AND MULLIONS. 159

Church, visited Ward several years before the latter's admission.
He was a devotee of Gothic architecture, which his father had
done so much to revive in England. He found upon Ward's
table the works of Saint Bonaventure and the Summa of Saint
Thomas. He believed with Faber, but in a material sense, that

Christian culture,

" — rejecting heathen mould,
Should draw her types from Europe's middle night."

To him Gothic architecture alone was suitable for the render-
ing of divine service. When he became acquainted with the
profound earnestness of Ward, now in the middle of the task
which he had set to himself — the solution of his own religious
doubts — the architect declared to a common friend: " What an
extraordinary thing that so glorious a man as Ward should be
living in a room without mullions to the windows."

Nothing was more natural in Oxford, and the words were
uttered in a sincerely devout spirit. Pugin spoke for a vast body
of cultivated Christians who then and now confound taste with
prayer, and to whom theology necessarily implies almost, if not
quite on par with itself, conventionalized externals artificially re-
lated to faith. The mediaeval environment, translated into a
modern fad, possesses a talisman for imaginations that conceive of
cathedrals as necessarily filled with only dim religious light, and
who amiably cherish the illusion that light to be religious must be
dim. Ward was not of this weakly if gentle tribe. " What are
mullions ? " was his brusque reply. " I never heard of them ! "

The chief trouble with Mullions Christians is that they want
only mullions and not windows, and that mullions stand to them
for the whole duty of man. The trouble with mullions under
such conditions is that they keep the light of God from getting
into a temple, and they keep the eyes of a Christian who makes
a cult of mere aesthetics in religion from seeing the beautiful
world that is outside them ; what is vastly more important, from
seeing that while the world itself is beautiful it is filled with the
lelpless, the crippled, the unfortunate, the misled ; with poverty
it needs assuagement, with children that have no parents, with
)ld age abandoned to despair on the threshold of the grave ;
rith the dead hand, which is no longer mortmain in real estate,
>ut entailed bigotry or unbelief which goes down from family to
imily, acquiring nothing but encumbrances of added doubt ; and
ie theism which ribbons itself out with various fine names, but
is dead for all good in this world and totally careless of the next.
[ullions in religion has much to do with religious mortmain.

160 RELIGION AND MULLIONS.

To poetic minds there is something very alluring in incompre-
hensible religious symbols. The mullion has been architecturally
consecrated. It is universally admitted to be, if not religious, at
least ecclesiastical. It is not exclusively Gothic. Nor has it an
antiquity to boast beyond the period when Norman-French was
stamping its graceful caprices and beautiful dreams upon the plastic
English that was not yet all English, but considerably Scandi-
navian and somewhat Dutch. If we look into its pedigree the
scriveners are found at fault. In the standard dictionary where
the Wards not in Oxford may seek to cure their ignorance, we
are told that mullion is perhaps from the French to mould ; and
possibly out of this the Mullions Christians may derive a con-
solatory myth. They may fancy that Christianity with mullions
is moulded more upon the mediaeval than Christianity without
mullions ; that it is more aesthetic and represents a higher grade
of religious sensibility and a more splendid ritual than a plainer
Christianity. Unhappily, there appears to be no warrant for this
etymology. The correct form of mullion is munnion, according
to the best authority ; and munnion is, alack ! only a stump. The
mullion of a window in a Gothic or Renaissance temple is the
stump of the division before it breaks off into the tracery.
Beautiful as well designed and skilfully executed tracery is, es-
sential as is the stump to the frame of the opening for air and
light, it is the air and the light after all that are essential ; and while
mullions are highly decorative, if the house be harmoniously
composed, it is possible to exaggerate their importance.

Oxford has become the home of mullions Christianity. The
Wards are less numerous than they were in the elder half of the
century. The university supplies England now with politicians, lite-
rary men, candidates for benefices in which the income is the only
living — the occupant is generally dead in all senses but the physical.
Honest men there are in great numbers, earnest and unselfish
men, striving, many of them, to do good for their fellows. But
the pews are empty except upon social occasions, and the gap
between the Establishment — all mullioned — and the poor, for
whom the Gospel is supposed to be peculiarly intended, since they
have nothing else, are little disposed to soil the cushions or find
heavenly consolation in the mullions. No other city in the world
is so generally mullioned as London. The light is shut out as firmly
as possible from the churches, from the Houses of Parliament,
from the Law Courts, from the Temple. It is shut out desper-
ately from the million or two of starving toilers in garrets, in
attics, in even the lowest floors of the great rat homes that

1889.] RELIGION AND MULLIONS. 161

tumble upon each other's scrawny necks in miles of narrow and
dingy lanes and courts. The learning of England is infatuated
with lancet windows ; and the mullion that ornaments the exte-
riors of the most imposing edifices in the cathedral towns is
apparently no more insensible than the smut that hides the light
from English poverty in factory centres and metropolitan dens
which the police never enter except in squads.

Ward was a Christian without mullions. Some years later he
had a house built, and Pugin was the architect. The latter had
contrived a remarkably fine screen for Old Hall College, near
which Ward's house was. But in it " comfort was preferred to
beauty of form ; lancet windows were tabooed ; plenty of light
and plenty of air were insisted on at the cost of any infringe-
ment of the rules of art." Pugin felt the barbarity of Ward
keenly. He regretted building a house for him at all after he
found how profligate was his insensibility to mullions. He deplored
that such a man was permitted^ to live near the screen of Old
Hall College. Indeed, the screen became a contention. There
were pro-screen men and anti-screen men. Because Ward criti-
cised rood screens as undevotional, Pugin wrote to him : " I con-
sider you a greater enemy to true Christianity than the most
rabid fanatic."

Life as well as religion was very practical with Ward. He
was married when he entered the Catholic Church. He resigned
his post in Oxford. He was without any but the scantiest in-
come. There were no mullions on the windows for either him
or Mrs. Ward. A very humorous glow is perhaps unintentionally
imparted to this portion of the chronicle. The clergyman who
had eased his ferry across from the younger into the older church
showed, he says, " such a knowledge of human nature. He told
Mrs. Ward to make a retreat and to practise certain austerities;
but he told me to unbend my mind as much as possible and go
to the play as often as I could." As it was necessary for
Mrs. Ward to be cook in the cottage, her retreats were possibly
culinary. There may have been mullions upon the kitchen, for
so unsuccessful was she that when friends were invited to dine
upon a haunch of venison sent as a gift to Ward, one of them had
the shocking manners to say it tasted like cold wet blanket.
Happily, Ward came into an inheritance soon afterward ; and
although he adhered to light and air in preference to mullions, they
were enabled the remainder of their days to have healthful diet
with their healthful Christianity.

The life of Ward at Oxford is felicitously as well as truthfully

VOL L.— II

1 62 RELIGION AXD J/r/././av.v. [Nov.,

written. The picture has changed little except that one who
visits the town to-day will feel that mullions are more and more,
and faith is less and less, within its enticing precincts. Ruskin
was indeed justified in pronouncing its great street the most
beautiful in the world. Whatever one's creed or cult, Christian,
Pagan, Buddhist, Confucian — or nothing but mullions — one
might well wish to live in Oxford. Westminster Abbey makes
even an Irish heart soften to hard England. In Oxford all
national and racial metes are effaced. Its clusters of colleges,
its groves, its meadows and river are monumental witnesses to
the universality of scholarship and the democracy of true learn-
ing. Intellectual and moral progress is epitomized in its hoary
structures. The prevailing tendency of the age — to get away
from religion of every positive kind — is emphasized in the mem-
ories that are most popularly cherished. The visitor is led to
Addison's walk, but the door is locked that leads to the pulpit
in which John Henry Newman Breached the sermons that have
troubled a century. The tree under which Heber, remembered
as poet, loved to study is carefully protected from clipping ; the
slab that covers Pusey must be discovered by chance. The
days when ivied cloisters echoed the chants of studious monks
are not gone more completely than the later ones when Angli-
canism felt the pulse of tremendous spiritual individualities yearn-
ing for worthier work than the dry didactics of the lecture-room
or the suave offices of state functions.

It is one of these spiritual Anglicans, Dr. Jessop,* who has said
that the Church of England has never known how to deal with a
man of genius. Where he has not been the object of relentless
persecution, he has been at least regarded with timid suspicion,
shunned by prudent men of low degree, and forgotten by those of
high. " In the Church of England there has never been a time
when the enthusiast has not been treated as a very unsafe man."
Wordsworth felt this even in his early time. Mullions were then
as they are now the preponderating feature of Oxford architecture.
The more modern the structure, the more pronounced the mun-
nioning. The ancient spirit of open air, of love of sun and de-
light in humanizing contact, has been yielding steadily to "men-
tal stone -breaking" in the closet and pedantic exclusion in libra-
ries; to palsy of spirituality and to agnosticism concerning all
things not material. Wordsworth's question was answered half a
century ago. Time has confirmed the reply.

" Is ancient piety for ever flown? "

'•' 'I'll, •" the I-'ri :>:-.

I889-]

RELIGION AND MULLIONS.

163

'The crowds who used to flock about the Anglican altars in
the earlier years had disappeared.

* " Alas ! even they seemed like fleecy clouds

That, struggling through the western sky, have won
Their pensive light from a departed sun. "

Mullions have their value. They are a graceful and monotoning
influence. They have acquired an eminent moral significance. It
is already very much deteriorated in consequence of making them
a commonplace of hotel facades, market elevations, and town-hall
fronts. They 'note the roads by which religious symbolism is dis-
appearing in England. The mullion, even in religion, is not to
be derided. Ruskin has observed in Pr&terita that it was well
for him to have been born in a humble house in Brunswick
Square and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to
have been born in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be aston-
ished at. It is certain, he adds, that it would not help matters
in the least to have Warwick Castle pulled down. So with mul-
lions and religion. It is better to have religion without mullions
and have mullions — yea, the entire category of aestheticism — to
surprise and entertain, than to have only aestheticism and no faith
here or hereafter. It is certain that religion would be badly off with-
out Gothic and Roman and Renaissance ; it is a pure and authentic
impulse in the heart that seeks to embellish ritual and temple
with decorative dignity, and to make the holy places of earth
shrines for the beauty its Creator has conferred upon it, and the
love of which he has implanted in our nature. But mullions may
be made too much of. Pugin's luminous mind became clouded
by the excess to which his culture of Gothic carried his too sensitive
imagination. The misery that pervades England to-day and has
convulsed her capital is a loud protest against a mullion Christian-
ity. Be it Agnostic, Anglican, or Catholic, it may please the eye
of the aesthetic ; the Christianity of Christ pleads for air and light,
for love and practical brotherhood. It is an affectation, not a
true thing. It is material. It is deaf and dumb. It is incap-
able of healing a soul or binding up a body. Against its wood-
enness rises up, in the verse of Katharine Tynan,

" The world's cry, desolate,

Like a sad, gray, wounded bird,
Beating wild at Heaven's gate

And One speaking not a word ;
Like a dead King keeping state
With his tender heart unstirred."

MARGARET F. SULLIVAN.

164 A CALL. [Nov.,

A CALL.

" Now what will I read ? " I was saying to myself, I thought, in

my study chair,

Looking up at my books from shelf to shelf, fondly feeling there,
In their words enshrined, lay many a mind of the greatest that

ever were.
'Twas at the moment my eyes fell on the one I had long loved

most,
And labored at, too, for all that I knew men said, " Twas love's

labor lost " ;

As if lost could be labor honestly loved, whatever it cost !
With that thought, while I looked, like a Presence stirred the

depths of my inmost sense ;
Not as seen or self-felt, but as being there known of my being's

self-reverence.

Then — ah ! why try to explain ? What more may I know
Than as of over-consciousness was mystical outflow,
My life from, to that life-word of the World's Scholar-Saint,
As there my spirit his would seize, but, yearning so, waxed faint
For very sweetness of the yearning. When forth, like a living

breath,

As the spirit of his spirit came, mine strengthening, and yet
So sweetly soothing ! Earth's cares, e'en the old self-care, did die
Within my soul, the while the whole of what used to say " I,"
Alert, instinct with some new sense, as of a second youth,
Felt living the true life at last, Love listening to Truth.
Seemed the Voice to say, not in the way of sound to hearing's

sense,

But as spirit unto spirit, in pure thought's conference :
" 'Tis time. Turn in. Within thee seek the centre of thy soul.
Self silence there. Then shalt thou hear Mind's mystic echoes roll
From out the everlasting hills, self telling of the whole.
So shalt thou sing. And though the voice, yea, though the words

be thine,

Shalt for the universal need
Of head and heart, of truth and deed,
Thought-echo the Divine ! "

T. J. O'MAHONV.

All Hallows College, Dublin.

1889.]

SHAKESPEARE' s HANDWRITING.

165

SHAKESPEARE'S HANDWRITING.

IT is rather remarkable (or perhaps, in view of certain ten-
dences, we should say, it is not in the least remarkable) that in
all the tergiversations of three hundred years of Shakespearean
Criticism, some very apparent and sublunary, and absolutely as-
certained data of his life and ways, remain entirely unhandled.

This simple, unostentatious gentleman, who, by minding his
own business, accumulated one of the largest fortunes of which
we have any record in King James the First, his times ; this
man, who brought the English stage up from the vilest condition
of the cock-pit and the bear-garden, and made it what it is at
its most and its best — an Arbiter of Letters and of manners —
this man never trod the earth ! He walked, not the London pave-
ments, but the Empyrean ! His motive and aim were to teach
Ontologies and Eschatologies to his fellow-men and to Posterity.
He wrote Julius Ccesar to warn humanity against the error of
confounding Patriotism with Passion ; his Tempest to show that
Enchantment, Astrology, and Sorcery were really Engines of
Personal Providence ; his Lear to teach how Emotion, vexed to
a Strain of Life, must centralize into an Arch-Form of Tension,
which would form a Derationalization of Nature-Movement!

I hasten to say that I do not understand the above terms.
I merely copy them literally from some of the latest London
(not Bedlam) Shakespearean Commentary ! Without comment
upon them, my only purpose, in this brief paper, is to call atten-
tion to a very commonplace concern indeed, absurdly vulgar, in-
deed, as contrasted with the noble introspection above indicated.
I merely desire to basely suggest that perhaps we could construct
an alphabet of William Shakespeare's Handwriting !

Of the four or five so-called autographs of Shakespeare (and
they are well enough known, and there is something in favor of
each of them), I do not propose a recapitulation. But, of them
all, there is one which, by English Law and by all custom, precedent,
and probability, MUST be authentic. I mean the last signature
at the bottom of the last of the three sheets of paper upon
which William Shakespeare's Last Will and Testament was sol-
emnly written. The Law required that a testator's name should
be written on each sheet. It did not say that each sheet should
be SIGNED by the Testator. But the Testator was supposed to

1 66 SHAKESPEARE 's HANDWRITIXI.. [Nov.,

sign, once and finally, the document ; otherwise it could not have
been his Will at all. Now, the first two sheets of Shakespeare's
Will bear each the name " WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE"; but the writ-
ing (and the orthography, for that matter) of each is as unlike
the other as both are unlike the " signature " in the Florio, or in
the Title Deed. But, on the last sheet, there are the words,
" BY ME, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE," as follows (and that he wrote
them thus with his own hand and not by another's, is only to
say that by the document so signed his worldly chattels were dis-
posed, and his realty devised) :

Now, I am not aware that any commentator has called atten-
tion to the fact that, out of the twenty-six letters of the English
Alphabet, here we are informed how William Shakespeare wrote
thirteen, viz. :

a — b — e — h — i — k — 1 — m — p — r — s — w — y.

And — if, perhaps, it would not be quite as transcendental as
finding the lofty purposes of Trinculo or Ariel in the Tempest ;
to conjecture, that from the forms of certain letters at the point
of a . rapid writer's pen, we might shape certain others — possibly
we might assume that William Shakespeare's g or q was some-
thing like his y or his c, and his o something like his i or his c ;
or his u and his n and his v not so very different from his my
save in a stroke the less ; or his d like his q or his g reversed,
or his t more or less like his / — if we might go as far as this, I
say, we would then have substantially the alphabet that an English
writer uses; for we have only left the /, f, ;tr, and #, four of the
least used of letters, and the /, after all, was indifferent with the —
was only in fact an initial — small i ; and // and v were mainly
written as one.

It would be interesting indeed to proceed further, to demon-
strate that the above postulate, if granted, might throw some
curious lights and shadows upon what commentators are pleased
to call the CRUCES SHAKESPEAREAN^ (by which they mean the
readings which most of us absorb, even if we cannot quite syn-
thesize the meanings of). Perhaps my limits might justify a
single example. When Juliet is longing for night to come, that

1889.]

SHAKESPEARE' s HANDWRITING.

her banished lover may snatch his first nuptial visit, she says, in
pathetic poetry (the second quarto of 1599, the first of 1597 con-
taining no such lines) :

Spread thy close curtaine, love performing night
That runnawayes eyes may wincke, and Romeo
Leape to these arms, untalkt of and unseene.

Nobody, I venture to say, who can read this passage with
any appreciation at all, is troubled because " runaways eyes " —
standing by itself — is a term not exactly definable by equivalents.
Certainly, even if unintelligibly wrenched from the context, it is a
liquid symbol most congenial to the tearful and tender invocation
of the husbandless bride. But all Juliet's tears cannot keep the
commentators off it. They read " rumours eyes " ; rumourous ;
rumourers ; Cynthia's ; rude day's ; soon day's ; roving ; sun-day's ;
curious ; envious ; sun away's ; yonder ; runabouts' ; runaway spies ;
runagate's ; Renomy's (French Renommee= Rumour), and so on, and
so on, to infinity.

/But, if we joined them, and said that perhaps the second
quarto printer of 1599 printed from Shakespeare's autograph
manuscript, and that every other printer since, from that day to
this, has simply followed him in making the word " runaway 's,'*
whereas what Shakespeare wrote was :

Spread thy close curtaine, love-performing night
That nooitf day's eyes may winke, and Romeo
Leape to these arms, untalkt of and unseene ;

(and that the figure of noonday mournfully weeping at the com-
ing of sunset was a not un- Shakespearean figure or conception),
let us timorously attempt to construct, from Shakespeare's script
alphabet, the latter word :

Would it not be something like this ? (the characteristic being
the tendency to an upward stroke at the ends of words) :

And would such a reading convince a Shakespearean commen-
tator that there was something to be said in favor of letting well
enough alone ?

APPLETON MORGAN.

1 68 CHARITABLE WORK IN SPANISH PRISONS. [Nov.,

CHARITABLE WORK IN SPANISH PRISONS.*

EVERY attentive observer or worker in the field of charity in
our country can hardly fail having noticed certain impediments
to its free general exercise, resulting from the absence of unity
of religious belief. In the first place, there is no uniform under-
* standing as to the proper base for charitable action; some place
it on religious, others on mere philanthropical, motives. Some,
through religious sympathy or necessity, confine their dispensa-
tions to members of their own denomination ; others use theirs
as a cover for active proselytism ; while others again, repudiating
any such purpose, burden what they give with something or
other that is repugnant to the consciences of the recipients. More-
over, religious aversion, or religious indifferentism, in the givers,
and the lack of sympathy resulting therefrom, will naturally make
their effects felt in many ways.

In view of the above considerations, it should be interesting
to examine into the work and results of charity in Christian na-
tions or communities where those who give and those who receive
are both fully united in one religious belief. Spain in particular
presents very suitable examples for this study, and one of them
has been selected as the subject of this article.

It is not amiss to mention here that with our people there is
a general indisposition to give that country due credit for the
good institutions and good customs which it possesses. A recent
instance occurs in the report of the commission (in this State) to
investigate the most humane and practical method of carrying
into effect the sentence of death in capital cases, wherein the fact
is ignored that Spain is more than half a century in advance of
the State of New York by adopting exclusively the garrote as
preferable to hanging, abolished in all Spanish dominions and de-
pendencies by royal decree of April 24, 1832.!

There is at present in Spain a long-established charitable
guild of laymen, called La Real Archicofradia de Caridad y Paz

* Memoria historica del piadoso institute de la Real At chicof radio, de Caridad y Paz y catalogo de
los Hermanos asistidos por ella des de 29 de Agosto de 1687 hasta 26 de Octubre de 1867 ; preset! fada
y leida en junta de 28 de Octubre del proprio aiio, por el Secretario D. Mariano de la Lama y
Noriega. Madrid, 1868. Manuscript extracts from minutes of the society.

t Although under the title of "Burning" sufficient information was given in the report
about that mode of infliction of death penalty, in use in many other European countries at the
time it was in Spain, it was besides very unnecessarily brought in under the heading of Auto da
ft. The authors of the report do not seem to have been aware that in London, as late as 1788,
one Phoebe Harris was burnt alive before Newgate for the offence of coining.

1889.]

CHARITABLE WORK IN SPANISH PRISONS.

169

[The Royal Archconfraternity of Charity and Peace), who aim at
earning the reward for having visited our blessed Redeemer in
>rison ; which merit, he tells us, will, with other special ones, be
remembered by him, and be so potent on the day of judgment.
Their charitable work consists in helping to prepare for the world
to come criminals under sentence of death, in accompanying
them to the scaffold, and providing their bodies with Christian
burial. They also, at the present day, visit for purposes of as-
sistance and consolation convicts in the prisons of Madrid and ol
the principal cities and towns throughout the realm.

A very remarkable feature in the case of this corporation is
its uninterrupted active corporate existence for at least four and
half centuries, and the active personal services which its mem-
bers have continuously rendered during so long a period.

The origin of the confraternity is connected with a very re-
markable event. At the close of the fourteenth century a pro-
fessor of the University of Paris had argued publicly against
>elief in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and also
igainst other teachings of the church. His opinions were con-
lemned as heretical by the Archbishop of Paris and the doctors
in theology of the university. From their decision he appealed
Pope Clement VII., whose chair was then in Avignon, but
fearing an unfavorable result to his appeal, he made his way to
>pain, hoping to make there converts to his teachings. But as
a belief in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was long
seated in the minds of that people, and widely spread, from the
monarch down to the humblest subject, so far from meeting with
my welcome, he was driven out of the land.

In the year 1421 John II. and his queen, Dona Maria of
.ragon, were prompted by the event above narrated to erect in
bhe Campo del Rey, in Madrid, the first church in that city in
lonor of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. They
>esides founded and instituted a lay confraternity, to whom the
:hurch was given in charge, and who had the additional duty
Laid upon them of assisting, consoling, and giving Christian burial
all criminals undergoing the death penalty, and to the friend-
less wretches who happened to die in the streets and public places
>f Madrid. The church became a favorite one, and much re-
nted to by the citizens of that capital, and possessed on its main
iltar the royal gift of a beautiful image of the Blessed Virgin.

After a lapse of sixty-five years, in 1486, the Bishop of As-
torga, Don Garcia Alvarez de Toledo, founded a small hospital,
the first one known in Madrid, and built it close to the church

170 CHARITABLE WORK IN SPANISH PRISONS. [Nov.,

above mentioned, and gave it the name of Hospital de la Con-
ception. He devoted it to female patients, equipped it with every-
thing needed for twelve beds, and gave it in care of the confra-
ternity in charge of the church. The hospital did good service,
particularly in 1580, when all Spain was afflicted with a severe
catarrhal epidemic; but in 1587, it having been thought advisable
to merge the eleven hospitals then in existence into a general
one still existing, this measure involved the suppression of the
Bishop of Astorga's foundation. Philip II. having signified
his desire to have for royal purposes the land occupied by the
church and hospital, the confraternity parted with their realty,
and with the price obtained for it bought the chapel of Santa
Cruz (Holy Cross), which they hold at the present day, and con-
tinued their charitable work in connection with it, substituting
for the care of the sick, from which they were exempted, the pro-
viding poor orphan girls with dowries, and feeding prisoners on
Christmas, Easter Sunday, and Pentecost. Their church was very
unfortunately visited by two destructive and calamitous fires ; by
one which occurred in 1620, in the sacristy, many and very valuable
documents and records, inclusive of the charter of foundation of
their society, were burned ; and by the other, which happened in
the night of September 8-9, 1763, everything contained in the church
was wholly destroyed. In the course of years two other confraterni-
ties became merged in theirs, both connected with hospitals, one
called de la Conception, and the other de la Paz* (of Peace); this
led to the formal adoption, in 1797, of their name as it is at present.
It is customary in Spain to have criminals condemned to
death spend the last three days before execution either in the
regular chapel of the prison, or in a room prepared as a chapel,
in which an altar for the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice is
placed, as also other religious emblems suitable for reviving re-
ligious impressions and arousing sentiments of contrition. This
practice is called poner en capilla (to put in chapel). As far back
as 1567 the confraternity had begun to particularly devote itself
to seeing that that class of sufferers should receive Holy Com-
munion before death, and for providing and suitably equipping
capillas in prisons where they were needed. The Holy See
recognized the value of the services thus rendered by granting
to the confraternity several privileges, one of which was that, if

* Some say that the hospital, which was for consumptives, was known as of Holy Job,
whose patience and resignation were there held up for imitation, and whose image is now on an
altar in the church of Santa Cruz, the only one in Madrid where he is venerated. But it is also-
more probable that the name was owing to the marriage of Philip II. with Isabel of Valois,
which led to a lasting peace between Spain and France.

i889.]

CHARITABLE WORK IN SPANISH PRISONS.

171

ic condemned had approached the Sacrament of Penance and
lesired to receive Holy Communion, the confraternity might have
it administered at a Mass celebrated for that purpose tivo hours
efore daivn. The charitable work of providing with Christian
mrial the bodies of destitute persons found dead, either from'
lisease or accident, in the streets of Madrid was kept up by the

lild until 1809, when a change of government and other cir-

imstances brought about its discontinuance. The expenses of

lese burials, while the custom lasted, were paid for by alms, ob-

lined by a member of the society, who for that purpose was
stationed at the portal of a certain prison, where the corpse lay

>r a stated time as in a morgue, and where he appealed to the
:harity of passers-by.

At the present day the guild administers its charity in this
rise to criminals under sentence of death.

As soon as the mayordomo mayor or president of the guild
las been notified of the death sentence, he goes, in company
the treasurer, to the prison where the condemned man is

mfined, informs him of it, draws near to him, greets him cor-
lially, embraces him, and accompanies him to the capilla. Then,.

ter attending to his immediate needs, the president arranges the
luty of attendance to be discharged by the mayordomos or mem-

>rs of the confraternity, two at a time, and relieved every two
hours. He hands the alcaide or superintendent of the prison a
list of the names of the members who are to serve, and provides-
>r the condemned man's meals. In regard to these, the regula-
tion is that they are to be plain and good, without any attempt
it gratifying whims or particular appetites ; they are to be eaten
>ut of metal utensils only, no glass nor stoneware, nor knives and

>rks being allowed ; meat or fish is served without bones, and

le bread is cut up in very small slices.

The president then hands to the member first on duty the
ceys of the chests containing the articles belonging to and needed
>y the corporation in the exercise of its functions, and also a list
)f the names of the colleagues selected for service. He then

scertains from the proper authorities the hour, place, and man-
ler of execution, and when the removal of the corpse will be

emitted. He then goes to the church of Santa Cruz, directs
lights to be kept lit on the altar of the Blessed Virgin- in

tat church and certain others until the society's work is all
)ver, and also the display at its doors of two framed statements
)f the spiritual favors granted by the Holy See to persons sen-
tenced to death, and to charitable persons contributing to their

1 72 CHARITABLE WORK IN SPANISH PRISONS. [Nov.,

spiritual or temporal relief. He arranges with the curate of the
church or his representative about the Mass of supplication to be
celebrated on the occasion, posts up a notice of the Mass in the
usual place, and, if time permits, publishes same in a paper
called Diario de Avisos (daily notices), so that the faithful that
care to do so may have it in their power to be present at the
service. A table, upon which are set a crucifix and two lamps,
is brought out into the small piazza before the church of Santa
Cruz, and members of the confraternity are present by it for
the purpose of receiving alms of charitable persons, and remain
at their post until their associates return from the cemetery after
having given burial to the body of the executed criminal.

When the sentenced man takes his meals the president,
treasurer, and one or more associates attend and serve him in
the presence of his spiritual advisers, the superintendent of the
prison, and the alguacil on guard, and recite the usual prayers
before and after the repast. On the last of the three days spent
in capilla another Mass of supplication is celebrated in the
church of Santa Cruz, which is usually numerously attended.

On the night before execution the condemned man is made
one of the Brotherhood of Caridad y Paz, so as to entitle him
to all the spiritual favors and indulgences accorded to its mem-
bers. This is accomplished in quite a formal manner by the
president, secretary, and such other members as the former may
require to be present. The newly-made brother signs in a book
of record the entry of his admission, is informed that he is at
liberty to dispose of one-fourth of the aggregate of alms collected
for his benefit, and that his last wishes will be faithfully carried
out so far as circumstances and the regulations of the brother-
hood will permit. The remainder of the alms is applied to cover
the expenses incurred by the brotherhood in the case, and any
surplus over and above these is devoted to offerings for Masses
celebrated by needy priests having very small incomes, who re-
ceive for each Mass eight reals (forty cents).

On the morning of execution the president and treasurer
are on hand, and, after the doomed culprit has received Holy
Communion, "with that tenderness and charity which its religious
meaning requires," clothe him with the black tunic which he is
to wear. For a regicide or a parricide it is yellow, with red
sleeves and with a yellow cap. He goes to the scaffold in
a cart, escorted by the entire body of the confraternity, to which
he now belongs, and preceded by a priest bearing a crucifix and
wearing a green cape. Two associates carry boxes containing

1889.]

CHARITABLE WORK IN SPANISH PRISONS.

173

rater, wine, biscuits, and vinegar for the brother's use in case he
should become faint on his way to death. In the portal of the
prison is placed an image of the Blessed Virgin, before which,
upon leaving, he kneels and implores her blessing and assistance.
The duty of going at day-break of that day through the streets
of Madrid, asking alms for the sentenced man, is also incumbent
>n the confraternity. Two boys go along on the occasion, carry-
ing locked alms-boxes, and each ringing a bell. There are, how-
iver, some cases in which this is not done.

As soon as the execution has taken place, the bells of Santa
Cruz begin to toll, and the knell continues until the confra-
;rnity have returned to it from the scaffold, reciting on the way
prayers for the repose of the soul of the departed brother. Then
follow other services and a low Mass, which also take place in
the church of San Jose, because the place for executions lies
it present in that parish.

At the time appointed by law the confraternity return to the
:affold, take down the corpse (which all other persons are for-
)idden to do), invest it with the Franciscan habit, and carry it to
te cemetery, where, after saying over it the usual prayers, it' is
lid to rest in consecrated ground.

Men in military service condemned by court-martial to be
lot are cared for by the guild the same as civilians sentenced
die by the garrote, with this difference only, that the corpse
taken in charge as soon as the shooting party has filed off
from the place of execution.

The society has kept records of the names of all the con-
lemned to whom they have ministered from the first of August,
1687, and whom, in their charity, they always designate as
hermanos (brethren). The mode of execution, the prison, and
imount of alms collected are stated in each case. Up to the 26th
)ctober, 1867, they had assisted one thousand and thirty-four, of
m a few were pardoned shortly after having been placed in
ipilla, others, in very rare instances, on the very scaffold, or as
ley were getting ready to be shot. Very many belonged to the
Spanish army; a very few were women; one of these, in 1687,
>as a slave. The names of the priest Merino, who in 1852 at-
tempted the life of the queen of Spain ; of the patriotic General
Riego, garroted in 1823 ; of a patriotic parish priest, who with many
French officers and soldiers suftered death during the period of
French domination — all appear in the record. The death penalty
was, up to 1832, inflicted principally by hanging; by burning,
once in 1702 and twice in 1704; and from 1692 to 1765, eight

174 CHARITABLE WORK IN SPANISH PRISONS. [Nov.,

times by garrote and burning, which latter part of the sentence
must have applied to the culprit's remains after death. The con-
fraternity point in triumph to the fact, ascertainable from the
records, that out of the entire one thousand and thirty-four two
only died impenitent, and these were not natives of, to use their
own words, nuestra querida Espana (our beloved Spain). The
alms collected vary greatly in amount ; for instance, in one case
they were thirty-three reals ; in another, three hundred and fifty-
three ; in another, that of Merino, three thousand five hundred
and sixty-two ; in another, four thousand six hundred and fifty-
four ; which, assuming the real to be vellon, worth five cents,
would be respectively equivalent to $i 65, $17 65, $178 10, $232 70.
But they generally exceed one thousand reals, say $50. As the
average annual number of sufferers attended to by this society
of charitable laymen during the period of one hundred and eighty
years, ending in 1867, is nearly six, it is plain that the aggregate
of their labors must have been pretty arduous, rendered more so
by the manner of annual distribution ; for while in the early
years only one, two, or three offenders have been sentenced per
year, and none in 1703, during the first half of this century
they have been numerous in consequence of very many con-
demnations of military men by court-martial. Thus the total
was forty-four in 1811, thirty-nine in 1812, forty-two in 1824,
thirty-seven in 1825, twenty-five in 1837, an^ sixty-five in 1866;. of
which last twenty were artillery sergeants, all shot at the same time.

It appears from extracts from the minutes of the society from
1878 to 1886 that, through an organization having conferences
like those of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the sphere of
utility of their labors has become enlarged and more comprehen-
sive. The Obra de la Carcel (Work in Prisons), to which they
now devote themselves, takes in imprisoned convicts, to whom they
try to do spiritual and material good. They have established
conferences in Pamplona, Santiago, Vich, Vittoria, Tortosa, Tudcla,
Montanchez, La Bispal, Huesca, Villavieja, Reus, Valli, Tor-
rente, Manresa, Montilla, Orense, Alcoy, Alicante, Antequera, Sa-
badell, Tarragona, Tuy, Banolas, Barbastro, Borja, Mataro, Si-
guenza, and Coruna.

The work of these conferences consists in visiting the pri-
soners semi-weekly, weekly, or not less than semi-monthly, ac-
cording to the needs of the locality; giving the convicts good
books to read, arranging for the recital with them of the Rosary
or Salve Regina at stated times, and, what is most important
of all, getting them to go to confession and Holy Communion

1889.] CHARITABLE WORK IN SPANISH PRISONS. 175

and perform their Easter duty, in the reception of which
last sacrament the members always, and sometimes at Easter
the prison officials, join. The conferences distribute clothes
to prisoners that need them ; in many prisons they give elemen-
tary instruction ; in others, like Manresa, where the prison
fare is very poor, they eke it out at times with a little better food,
and not unfrequently they spread out un rancho estraordinario — what
we would call an extra good square meal. In Vich efforts to
keep the convicts employed at some productive industry have
been successful, and the case is mentioned of a man who had
lived away from his wife many years, and whose evil courses had
at length brought him to prison; after his time was up he took
up a little door-mat shop and supported his family in peace and
respectability. In Valli the conferences even attend to having
the prisoners' hair cut and kept in decent appearance.

An Englishman, apparently an intelligent Protestant, who had
seen Pius IX. wash the feet of the pilgrims during Holy Week,
was heard, at table d'hote, by a lady relative of the present writer,
to give out as his impression that it was a " na-asty business." His
appreciation could not further go. It is quite probable that others
also of like tone of mind have been similarly impressed by the
sight he had seen.

Well, very unpleasant personal service is very often just what
the exercise of heroic charity requires. It is evident from what
has been related in these pages about the labors of the Real
ArcJiicof radio, de Caridad y Paz that in the past its members have
had abundant personal experience of work trying and repugnant
to human nature, and that those of the present day fare no bet-
ter. When holy Tobias, in order to give dead Israelites sepulture,
left his dinner, hid the corpses by day in his house and buried them
by night, he must have felt his labor to be somewhat repulsive.
But Holy Scripture tells us how it appeared in the eyes of God.

It is reliably stated that " over sixty thousand persons are
to-day prisoners in the various penal institutions throughout the
United States, and that, in addition to this, there are over eleven
thousand inmates of reformatories ! " No doubt a large propor-
tion of these are Catholics. Here, plainly, is a large field for
Catholic laymen to labor in, doing good in such way as may be
possible and advisable.

May the example of devoted charity to prisoners set for so
long a time by these sons of Spain serve for edification to all,
and for instruction and suggestion to some of the American Cath-
olics who may read this account of it ! L. B. BlNSSE.

176 //p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Nov.,

—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO.

CHAPTER IX.
VAIN PLEADING.

IMMEDIATELY upon her father's leaving Emilie Tourner sought
her sleeping apartment for repose, declining le second dejeuner,
the light midday repast common among the upper classes in the
West Indies. Madame Tourner had partaken of refreshments,
and was sitting at the table abstracted when M. Tardiffe's card,
requesting a private interview, was handed to her. She at once
received him, and they conferred together long and earnestly.

The substance of his communication was, that San Domingo
could no longer be a fit place for whites; that, had emancipation
been brought about peacefully and by degrees, with the institu-
tions and methods of civilization preserved, and the negroes
gradually raised to a fair standard of citizenship, their freedom,
as he believed, would have been a blessing to all ; but that,
having risen in merciless rebellion, the ignorant and bloody
wretches would keep the colony a pandemonium ; that, under the
most favorable circumstances, prosperity could not return for a
generation, and that -he had resolved, by the first opportunity, to
leave for England; that if Henry Pascal were alive, of which he
had very little expectation, his penniless condition morally freed
mademoiselle from her engagement; that M. Pascal himself, as
soon as he had time for sober reflection, could not, as a man of
honor, do otherwise than insist upon the release ; that his own
desire and purpose was to offer himself again in marriage to the
daughter ; that the effort .of his life would be to provide for her
a happy home in Old England, and that he would welcome her
parents to share it with her. He thanked Madame Tourner
very warmly for her friendliness towards him, expressed the hope
that she would second his final suit, and asked her to give to
mademoiselle the note he presented, as an answer to her suppli-
cation to intercede with Dessalines in behalf of Henry Pascal.

Madame Tourner entered into M. Tardiffe's views' and hopes
with the utmost eagerness. The latter had sedulously cultivated
her, and succeeded in thoroughly insinuating himself into her
favor. Flattered and pleased by his adroit blandishments, she

1889.] if<)i—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 177

remained deceived as to his real character, and regarded him as
being altogether the most eligible offer she knew of in the colony.
From the first she had been partial to his suit, as the colonel had
been to that of Henry Pascal. At the same time she entertained
a just regard for the high character of the latter, and, her
daughter's decision having been made, acquiesced in it cheerfully.
Now, however, as the fortunes of both families had been swept
away at a stroke, and the continuance of the engagement, in her
view, out of the question, she considered it the plainest wisdom
and a moral necessity on her daughter's part to accept M. Tar-
diffe's offer. A lady of fashion and of luxurious tastes, which
wealth had enabled her freely to gratify, the sheer poverty con-
fronting her was an unspeakable dread, and she became wrought
up almost into an ecstasy for the complete and happy deliverance
so easily within her daughter's power. She was persuaded M.
Tardiffe had the qualities to make a good husband, and could in
time win Emilie Tourner's affections; .and the contrast between
her daughter's portion as the wife of such a man, with a home
of affluence in sterling Old En^and, her father's ancestral land,
and where she herself had but recently been educated — the con-
trast between this outlook and a life of despairing poverty in
distracted San Domingo, with the island in the hands of insurgent
slaves, and not an influence at work or in prospect under which
the colonel could expect to lift himself up, was so overwhelmingly
for the former view that she could not be without hopes that
the offer would commend itself to her daughter's solid judgment.
Nevertheless, she thought with alarm of opening the subject
to her, a request M. Tardiffe had been particular in pressing.
She well knew how closely the. affections of Emilie Tourner's
strong nature were knit to Henry Pascal; the excitements and
terrors, too, of the past few days were visibly affecting her; and,
deeply loving her daughter, she dreaded to add aught to the
strain. But she regarded it as a life-and-death crisis. It was a
tal moment, not to be recalled, for attempting the deliverance
)f her daughter and family from unutterable wretchedness, and
Madame Tourner summoned her resources to the delicate and
fateful task. As four o'clock drew on, Emilie Tourner rose from
the ottoman, whereon she had vainly wooed sleep, and made
ready to meet M. Tardiffe. Her expectations for a favorable
response had been heightened by the news her father brought,
that Dessalines was yet in camp. She presently joined her
mother, and, scanning the quay, expressed the hope that M.
Tardiffe would justify his reputation for punctuality.

VOL. L.--I2

i ?8 77^7 — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Nov.,

" I trust you are feeling better, Emilie," said Madame Tourner,
greeting her daughter in a cheery way.

" No, maman, I am not better, and my father's apprehensions
may be realized. I shall be glad, indeed," shading her eyes with
her hands as she spoke, as though the light was painful, " when
the interview with Monsieur Tardiffe is over."

" I hear," remarked Madame Tourner, hesitating from a sense
of dread to open the subject her mind was full of, " that Captain
Winslow intends sailing for England as soon as the safety of the
Cape is assured and the embargo raised."

" For England ! " musingly replied her daughter — " England
is a favored land."

"It is indeed, Emilie.".

"Strange that this people should be so quiet and prosperous,
while a few miles over the channel another people are writhing
in political insanity!"

" Would to God, my child, we were all there ! "

" I have passed some happy days in England," remarked
Emilie Tourner, unheeding her mother and speaking in the same
musing way, as her eyes pensively looked out over the north-
ward waters, " days so expectant and hopeful. Ever since my
return the clouds have been darkening, darkening over us."

" I hear, too, Emilie, that Monsieur Tardiffe is to leave for
England by the first opportunity; perhaps on the Sappho."

" I'm not surprised," answered the daughter. " My surprise
is that, having transferred his wealth thither when he saw this
storm brewing, he should have remained till it burst."

"You know the cause, Emilie. Who has held him in San
Domingo ? "

" I have never given him encouragement, maman," she quickly
answered.

" Alas ! my child, 'tis but too true. As affairs have gone, it
would have been far, far better had you listened to Monsieur
Tardiffe's suit."

" But the matter is decided, maman, and why should you
recall the issue now? I hope," she added, "he will soon be
here," as she again scanned the quay and drew her hand across
her forehead.

Madame Tourner's moment had come.

" Emilie," she said, speaking slowly and with a sudden acces-
sion of mingled tenderness and solemnity, " I have somewhat to
say to you, and I beseech you, as though they were a mother's
dying words, to hear me patiently."

1889.] 1 79 1— A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 179

Surprised at the strength and abruptness of the appeal, her
daughter answered, as she drew back in the attitude of amaze-
ment:

" Maman, what can you mean ? Have I been disposed to be
wanting in proper respect for your opinions and wishes ? "

"When I look, my child, upon your stricken face," her eyes
filling at her words, " I dread to speak ; but I must speak.
Will you consider what I have to say ? "

" Maman, what do you mean ? " she replied, more and more
astonished at her mother's language and manner. " What I must
know let me know at once, and I promise the filial heed you
have ever received."

" Emilie, my word is this, and bear with me in saying it :
If Monsieur Tardiffe seeks your hand once more, let me implore
you to ponder the opportunity. "

A solicitation more unexpected, and, under all the circum-
stances, more trying, to Emilie Tourner could scarcely be conceived.
With disaster and distress multiplied around her, and her tender-
est anxieties profoundly roused at the desperate straits of Henry
Pascal, it was an appeal, at the very moment she was endeavoring
to rescue her lover, to turn her back upon him for his discarded
rival. She perceived, too, in the suggested breach of faith a moral
obliquity, and altogether her mother's words smote her intensely.
Hardly believing her ears, she exclaimed with suppressed indig-
ition :

" And this from you to me, maman ! Is it possible you can
mnsel so heartless an abandonment of Monsieur Pascal — at the
lour, too, of his utmost need, and when my effort for him
>rings from the relation I bear to him ? "

" My heart bleeds for you, my daughter," tenderly answered
[adame Tourner. " Alas ! that they who love must often weep,
hit hear me through, and decide. Have you not promised filial
iced ? "

" I have," she replied ; " but, mon Dieu ! why reopen here this
:losed issue ? "

" I will tell you, Emilie. Emilie, I love Monsieur Pascal, I
ipplaud your effort for him, yet I see not how the engagement
in continue."
" On what grounds ? "

" Because the fortunes of the families have changed, Emilie.
tonsieur Pascal is penniless, and what dowry could you bring
him?"

" If the worst should continue here, he still has expectations/'

i8o 7797 — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Nov.,

replied Emilie Tourner, with evident effort and reluctance at speak-
ing, yet unavoidably drawn into the conversation.

"You refer to the Harrison project in Jamaica?"

"Yes."

" But you are aware, Emilie, of the common talk, that this
rising of the slaves must rouse those in Jamaica, and that the
hope of England's interfering in our affairs is founded upon her
fears in this direction."

She looked towards her daughter for an answer, yet received
none.

" Monsieur Pascal's expectations, Emilie, are very doubt-
ful ; were they far more assured, mere expectations are not the
proper preparation for matrimony ; even were they realized, Emilie,
Monsieur Pascal's income would be meagre and insufficient, with
an infirm father, too, now dependent upon him."

Emilie Tourner sat silent, with eyes downcast. Fever was in
her veins, and grief swelling in her heart.

" Emilie," her mother continued, " had the fortunes of the
families a year since been what they are to-day, do you think
Monsieur Pascal, whatever his affection for you, would have
sought you in marriage ? "

Her daughter still sat silent.

" For a stronger reason, Emilie, are you morally freed from
the engagement, because both of you have suddenly sunk from
affluence to poverty, with all the trainings of affluence remaining ;
and Monsieur Pascal, as soon as he can reflect, will, I feel sure,
insist upon the release."

An answer came from poor Emilie in a flood of hot tears.

Sorrow is king of this world, thought Madame Tourner, as
her eyes tenderly dwelt upon her stricken daughter. Her tears
she deemed it best not to attempt to interrupt. She herself,
though hoping the worst now over, was nevertheless greatly
moved. The pang she felt compelled to inflict upon her daughter
touched her motherly heart to the core, and, Emilie Tourner's
paroxysm of tears having passed, she said to her, in a voice low
and full of sweet sympathy :

" It distresses me, Emilie, very deeply indeed to have to say
these things ; but a mother's love moves me, and if I have
chosen this hour to speak, it is because an unparalleled and ap-
palling crisis is upon us."

" Maman," answered her daughter, to whom tears had brought
temporary relief, and who for the moment felt less disinclined for
a part in conversation, " I understand you, and believe you speak

1 88Q.]

— A TALE OF SAA? DOMINGO.

181

for what you think is best. But even should reverse of fortune
result in cancelling the engagement " (her eyes filling again), " it
is enough that my hand cannot be given where my heart is
withheld."

" Emilie," rejoined her mother in a tone of earnest yet ten-
der expostulation, " it is a school-girl's notion that matrimony
must needs be the sequence of a passion."

" Matrimony, maman, is a sacrament, and a holy estate, and,
should I wed Monsieur Tardiffe, I would be guilty before God."

" No, Emilie, no ; what justifies marriage, on sentiment's side,
are the qualities that command friendship."

" And are you yet to learn, maman, that Monsieur Tardiffe,
in my own estimation at least, is lacking in such qualities ? "

' His wooing was rejected, Emilie, as I had supposed, not
from positive dislike, but because your preference had been won
in another direction."

" I forbear," rejoined Emilie Tourner, " to speak here of his
character as I have read it, for he shows a disposition to aid in
Monsieur Pascal's rescue, and so far I own his conduct noble,
and am deeply, deeply grateful."

' Emilie," said her mother with increasing earnestness, and
encouraged by a willingness on her daughter's part to bear the
mversation, " our straits are desperate ; one word from you can
save us."

" I know our forlorn condition, maman ; no word from you
in deepen my sense of it, and to any honorable sacrifice I
rould give myself oh! how joyfully."

" The hour is supreme, Emilie ; out of it issues for life will
come. Reflect before finally answering Monsieur Tardiffe. I beg
vou on my knees" exclaimed Madame Tourner, with passionate
energy, rising and apparently about to assume the humiliating
posture.

"Never! You must not! Will you forget, maman, a parent's
dignity ?" exclaimed Emilie Tourner, rising herself and extending
her hand deprecatingly.

" I forget everything, my child, save the pressure of this crisis.
Will you weigh your answer, Emilie ? " she added, resuming her
seat and bending upon her daughter an intense look.

" You have my word to give you filial heed. But, maman,
be brief, if *you have aught else to say. I feel I hardly- know
how," passing her hand across her brow, for the momentary bet-
terment was vanishing before the rising fever. " I can scarce sit
up, and this light seems burning into my eyeballs."

1 82 7/p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Nov.,

" Bear with me, my daughter, one moment more. Emilie,
Monsieur Tardiffe is a gentleman, amiable and in every way ac-
complished, a man of experience and ripened judgment, of ample
fortune, and with no faults that a good wife would not be able
to control."

She paused, expecting a reply, but Emilie Tourner sat mute,
with her head bowed and the left hand shading her eyes.

" A man of such a character, Emilie, devoted to your happi-
ness, should command the friendship that justifies marriage. II
you would listen to him he would take us all to England — to
England, where you have lived some happy years, and for which,
since these awful days have darkened over us, I have often heard
you sigh."

She glanced at her daughter, but no response came from the
bowed form.

" The alternative, Emilie, is wretchedness for you and for us.
We are face to face, my daughter, with absolute, hopeless pov-
erty, and this, to those who have known affluence, means a living
death. Even should our slaves be recovered — a hope I see no
expectation of ever being realized — how utterly despairing, Emilie,
would the prospect be, with the estate in ashes, our friends as
stripped as ourselves, and the colony all torn and at the mercy
of Jacobin legislation ! Your father, Emilie, is unskilled in any
calling. Were it otherwise, where would positions offer in dis-
tracted San Domingo ? And could a position be obtained, the
pay would be that of a menial and cover vulgar wants. His
mind is now absorbed in other directions — the defence of the
Cape excites and engrosses him ; but he must soon wake up to
his personal condition, and cruel, cruel days, Emilie, are at hand
— days of weary and fruitless strugglings with poverty, and of
bitter memories, and humiliation for his family. Oh ! my daugh-
ter, save yourself and us from lifelong woe ! "

Her mother again paused ; and lifting her head, and display-
ing a countenance on which grief and illness were tracing unmis-
takable lines, Emilie Tourner replied :

" Maman, I shall weigh the answer, as you have asked me to
do ; but I must retire. Call me when Monsieur Tardiffe comes."

" He has been here already, Emilie," said Madame Tourner.

" Been here already ! " she cried out in blank astonishment.
" Why did you not call me ? "

" It was unnecessary, my daughter."

" He refuses, then," she said.

" No, Emilie, he has arranged to go early to-morrow morn-

889.] ifpi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 183

ing; but he goes conditionally, and his valet is to be here at six
for your answer. This is his note."
She seized it and read :

" MADEMOISELLE : San Domingo can no longer be an eligible
abode for whites, and by the next ship I bid it adieu for Eng-
land. On the eve of departure let me solicit again the hand I
have sought so long, and place at your feet what fortune I pos-
sess, and the love that repulse has not diminished. Let me ask
you — and your parents — to share with me a happy home in a
noble land, far away from this frightful island.

" Your mother is empowered to explain matters more fully ;
and should this note receive your approval, I shall hasten to
comply with your request, and imperil my life in the attempt to
rescue M. Pascal.

" I am, mademoiselle, with profound respect,

" Louis TARDIFFE."

In her disturbed state of mind the closing sentence, for an
instant, was unintelligible. She re-read the note, and its import
delivered a blow not to be withstood. The sudden extinguish-
ment of all hope for Henry Pascal, save at the price of wedding
a rejected suitor, from whose character she shrank, and whose
heartlessness now took such an advantage of her necessity — to-
gether with her mother's distressful appeal — was too much for an
already overburdened spirit, and Emilie Tourner sank fainting to
the floor.

Madame Tourner's experience in the plantation hospital taught
her the proper course at this crisis. Quickly adjusting her daugh-
ter's form to a horizontal position, she applied cold water plenti-
fully to the face. Under these influences Emilie Tourner rapidly
revived, and, her mother having hurriedly called in help, they
assisted the patient to her apartment, where, exchanging the dress
for a wrapper, Emilie Tourner sought her bed, desiring to be left
entirely to herself and protected against light and noise. Madame
Tourner retired to the sitting apartment, and, collecting her
thoughts, received comfort at this dreaded interview's being over.
On the whole it was much more satisfactory than she had had
reasons for expecting, and she was not without some decided
hopes for a successful issue. She felt convinced her daughter's
practical mind must see that the engagement to Henry Pascal
was at an end, and several considerations encouraged the impres-
sion that she would, upon reflection, think favorably of M. Tar-

1 84 1791— A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Nov.,

diffe's offer — brilliant under ordinary circumstances, and now
plainly providential. Misinterpreting the source of Emilie Tour-
ner's comparative passiveness (for it was illness, not a tendency
to acquiesce), she considered it hopeful that her daughter did not
resist the appeal more decidedly. Her wish, too, just expressed,
to be left entirely to herself, was taken to signify reflection on
what had been said to her, and reflection, under all the circum-
stances, Madame Tourner regarded as a prelude to the hoped-for
decision. The advantageousness of the proposal in every way,
and the moral necessity of closing with it, could not but com-
mend itself, she thought, to her daughter's practical intelligence ;
and even should she regard its acceptance as a pure offering to
her parents' welfare, her mother knew there was a spirit and a
piety equal to the sacrifice, for Emilie Tourner was heroic of
soul, and a daughter, too, in whom filial affection and dutifulness
were ornaments of grace to the head and cliains of gold about
the neck. These favoring circumstances being dwelt upon by
Madame Tourner, and colored and exaggerated by her intense
desires, she was wrought up to think that what her daughter
ought to do she would do, and awaited the arrival of M. Tardiffe's
valet with some sanguine anticipations. From time to time she
softly approached the entrance to the apartment of her daughter,
whom she found apparently resting in quiet, and would not disturb.

The exterior quiet, however, was fallacious. Emilie Tourner
was on the verge of acute illness. The fever was fast passing- into
delirium, and her outward repose was in vivid contrast with the
agitation of the mind, whose chambers were thronged with dread-
ful visions drawn from the horrors of the past few days. At six
the valet arrived punctually, and Madame Tourner entered her
daughter's apartment as the latter, in a state of semi-conscious-
ness, was rousing herself from one of these frightful visions, in
which the monster Dessalines orders Henry Pascal to execution.
Seeing her daughter awake, she said :

" Emilie, Monsieur Tardiffe's valet has come ; are you ready
to give an answer ? "

"Oh ! let him save Monsieur Pascal," she cried in tones of deep-
est pathos, starting up and resting on the elbow, and speaking with
a wild, terrorized look, which, in the shaded room, was lost upon
Madame Tourner.

" On the conditions, Emilie, he has asked?"

"Yes, yes!"

"Shall I write him in your name?"

"Yes; he must save him."

1889,] ijyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 185

" O Henry ! " she cried, with an outbreak of tears, and for a
moment becoming herself, " what horrors have I dreamed ! The
light," she almost screamed, looking towards the entrance to her
apartment, the curtain of which Madame Tourner had partly
drawn, " is blinding me — oh ! my head is bursting ! — let me be
alone " — and she clasped her hands to her forehead and sank back
upon the couch.

In the agony of a great grief even a mother is an intruder, and
Madame Tourner immediately withdrew. Anxiety in regard to
the decision now gave place to sympathy for the sufferer. She
knew through what pangs the decision had been reached, and her
heart was wrung for her daughter. Still, there was a vast sense
of relief that it was all over, and over so happily. It would all
be for the best, she knew, and her daughter's words rung in her
ears as angels' voices. The prospect cleared up beautifully. A
dark, devouring cloud rolled off from before her, and a flood of
silvery sunshine began pouring in. She at once addressed herself
to the note to M. Tardiffe, and wrote as follows :

" DEAR MONSIEUR TARDIFFE : I write in haste and in Emilie's
name. She accepts the conditions ; and I trust and believe, should
you find M. Pascal alive, that you will be able to rescue him.
Emilie, as you may suppose, is in great distress. But the storm
will soon be over, and all, I am sure, will be bright and for the
best.

" Be on your guard against the claws of Dessalines. He is a
veritable tiger, and I shall be in dread till your return.

" I remain, monsieur, most sincerely,

" MARIE TOURNER."

Madame Tourner handed the note to the valet, and saw him
off, and had returned to her quarters but a few moments when,
hearing her daughter's voice, and hastening to her side, she was
astounded and very greatly alarmed to find her in a state of de-
lirium, in which the names of Henry Pascal, Dessalines, and M.
Tardiffe were continually and piteously recurring. The ship's sur-
geon was immediately summoned. After a brief diagnosis he pro-
nounced it a case of acute and critical cerebritis, superinduced by
intense mental strain. Help was called in, and the patient soon
disrobed and the prescribed remedies administered, when Madame
Tourner withdrew a moment to despatch a second note to M.
Tardiffe. As ardently as she desired the match with the ex-pro-
prietor, yet she was a woman of honor and a true mother, and

1 86 A RONDEAU OF EVENTIDE. [Nov.,

would not, for an instant, allow M. Tardifife to act under mistaken
impressions. She accordingly wrote to him that her daughter had
been suddenly stricken with brain fever, and that her supposed
assent to the "conditions" was given, as she now feared, in a mo-
ment of delirium and irresponsibility.

On applying to Captain Winslow for the service of a messen-
ger, she found that the hour for allowing permits ashore had
passed. The letter was delayed, therefore, until the following
morning, and despatched then at the earliest practicable moment.
It failed, however, of its object; for the messenger reported on
his return that M. Tardifife had left for the country an hour pre-
vious to his arrival.

E. W. GlLLlAM, M.D.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

A RONDEAU OF EVENTIDE.

AT Eventide, when we are prest
By shadows, and seek any rest

That twilight brings at waning day,

Ah ! well with us if we can say
For aye we sought and found the best.

God's hand all nature has caressed,
Till beauty is his love confessed,

Till bud and bloom his love display
Through Eventide.

Why should we not pursue our quest
For such good things as bear the test

The things worth loving bear alway ?

"Full life, full life," we sometimes pray,
Full life to higher life addressed,
Till Eventide !

MEREDITH NICHOLSON*.

1889.] A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. 187

A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION.

III.

To feel the need of religion is a first and necessary step towards
acquiring it. When the multitude of conscientious and cultivated
men have begun to cherish that feeling in their hearts, when ex-
perience has convinced them, as it will, that neither the master-
pieces of Athenian literature, nor the art of mediaeval Italy di-
vorced from its faith, nor the Renaissance, nor the laboratories of
Berlin and Paris, can give them what they seek — an assured hope
beyond the tomb and peace at the centre of their being — they
will be prepared to undertake another kind of search and, 'per-
haps, to return upon paths they had forsaken, to Christianity with
its glad tidings and its universal creed. It is much, it is
more than we can duly estimate, that Religion is coming once
again to be recognized as a faculty in the constitution of man, as
a power outside him in Nature, as an aspiration that cannot be
thwarted without disaster, and, in brief, as the crown of human
existence.

The age of Voltaire, which discarded all but the coldest
Rationalism as an unsubstantial dream, is passing away. The con-
ception, at once so disheartening but in the eyes of a great nym-
ber so plausible, that the world is merely a series of mechanical
movements regulated by the formulas of physical science, shows
signs of yielding to a larger, deeper thought. A new philosophy,
call it for the present Monism or Idealism, has come upon the
scene, and, without suffering man to linger in La Mettrie's hideous
prison, flings open all doors and strikes asunder the walls that
closed him in. It bids him, by the voice of a thousand singers,
look out upon Nature indeed, blooming around him in the sun-
shine, eternally young and fair, and breathing such a spirit of
poetry that he cannot wonder if their strains

" — modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man."

In this keen feeling of life and its mysteriousness, in its en-
thusiasm and contemplative worship of the ideal in Nature, which

1 88 A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. [Nov.,

therein appears as the. " mother of an unfathomable world," sacred
and in some way responsive to invocation, lies the charm of
Pantheism. It seems to be ever in the presence of the Great
Unknown, watching its shadow and the darkness of its steps
through worlds innumerable. It has a spiritual sense, and by
means of it is familiar with the " open secret," to the thought of
which corresponds a mood of ecstatic silence, of wonder which
cannot be expressed. Have I no warrant, then, for discerning
some at least of the elements of religion in these things ? And
may I not view them, as Cardinal Newman exquisitely suggests
in treating of a parallel subject, on the " ascending course of in-
quiry and of faith"? Why, my argument runs, should not a sin-
cere Pantheist, who has escaped from the prison of abstract forms
and dead matter, rise steadily upward on that ascending scale,
learning what the phenomena of life betoken and from them
gathering analogies whereby to apprehend, though not indeed to
comprehend, the infinite self-conscious Spirit who is their cause but
not their substance ? Why should he not from the vague Impersonal
go on, aided by his enthusiasm for Art, for the Beautiful in Nature,
even as Spinoza sometimes appears to have done, to the thought
of a categorical and perfect Intelligence (to use the expression of
Novalis) self-contained, and of so high a quality that all other
knowledge, compared with it, is ignorance ? But in thus ascend-
ing he would have discovered in man the capacity of a Beatific
Vision, and in God its object, boundless in all His attributes.
Nature, not so much worshipped as lovingly interrogated, will
then confess itself to be a means, not an end, a mythology
leading on to Religion, or a sacramental system of which the in-
ward significance is the Divine Nature itself communicating its
grace to mankind. Everything, again Novalis remarks, how indi-
vidual and chance-seeming soever, will then be capable of realiz-
ing God for us, will be an instrument in the universal organism,
in the Cosmos visible and invisible, which is upheld and informed
by the Holy Spirit. This wide-reaching doctrine takes us, on
the one hand, very near to the conception, indispensable to our
daily life, of an overruling Providence ; on the other, it prophesies
of the Incarnation.

Pantheism I look upon as the perversion of a deep instinct to
which these various teachings of the Christian creed are the
answer. The indefinable aspirations that lend to modern poetry
so strange an air, showing themselves now in an overwrought
passion of joy and now in brooding sadness — always, perhaps,
mingled with a grain of fantasy — have to my thought the pre-

1889.] A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. 189

sage in them of something beyond what is seen, like the sweet-
smelling branches and birds of a plumage hitherto unknown that,
cast upon the shores of Europe by western gales, awakened in
Columbus a suspicion of lands from which they were brought
across the ocean. This, too, I find in the pregnant writings of
the author whom I have already quoted. " There are many flow-
ers in this world," he says, " of unearthly origin, which will not
flourish in our climate, and which are peculiarly heralds and loud-
voiced harbingers of a better existence. Such, above all, are religion
and love." Let us complete the suggestion and the argument by
turning to another profoundly philosophical thinker, Pascal. " Con-
sider," he bids us in the well-known summary of his argument,
" consider the foundation of the Christian religion. Here is a
religion contrary to our nature, which establishes itself in men's
minds with so much gentleness, as to use no outward force ;
with so much energy, that no torture could silence its martyrs
and confessors. Consider the holiness, devoutness, humility of its
true disciples ; its sacred books, their superhuman grandeur, their
admirable simplicity. Consider the character of its Founder;
His associates and followers, unlettered men, yet possessed of
wisdom enough to confound the ablest philosopher; the astonish-
ing succession of prophets that heralded His coming; the con-
dition at this day of the Jewish people, who rejected Him and
His religion ; its perpetuity and its holiness ; the light which its
doctrines shed upon the contradictions of our nature ; — let any
man judge, when he has taken these things into account, if it
be possible to doubt whether it is the only true one."

So far I had reached in my last article. The Life of Christ,
I said, is a disclosure, even to the eyes of science, of moral per-
fections which must have their ground in the nature of things,
like all else that we experience. " God was in Christ, reconciling
the world to Himself," is the sum of the Gospels. But it is
likewise authentic history recorded in the world's annals. From
Jesus of Nazareth we can trace a spiritual transformation onward
which, beginning with the individual, little by little extended its

t influence till it fashioned anew the Roman Empire, and for more
than a thousand years impressed its seal upon every form of
civilized life ; so that, as the ambassadors of Pyrrhus on seeing
Rome had described it as the temple and throne of all the gods,
in like manner a pilgrim travelling from Asia to the remotest
bounds of the West, might in his own dialect have exclaimed
that Europe had become the kingdom of God and of His Christ.
All other powers had vanished before the Cross. Not only was

190 A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. [Nov.,

it borne at the head of armies and woven into the diadem of
kings, but — a far more significant token of its greatness — at the
corner of every street and the entering in of every village it was
raised on high, that all things might be seen to acknowledge the
sovereignty of Him who died upon it. The Galilean had con-
quered ; the Religion of Sorrow, not forgetting its austerity, was
seated on the thrones of the world. An ideal communion of
mankind had been established by the authority of Jesus, and on
the pattern of His Life. The Incarnation was to be perpetuated
in His mystical body, the Church, for so tradition understood
Him to have laid it down to His disciples: "Lo, I am with you
all days." If we consult history, and not imagination or preju-
dice, we shall perceive from the middle, at least, of the second
century — to go back no further — the lines growing distinct on
which the mediaeval Theocracy was founded, as well as the great,
all-embracing Ritual, inwardly sustained by His Presence, of
which all the details were signs or instruments to renew in the
hearts of His people the Birth, the Passion, and the Teaching of
the Only-begotten Son. This was that spiritual kingdom which
ruled from Constantine to Napoleon, and in which the Idea of
Jesus itself became incarnate.

Not for a moment do I forget the tragic shadows cast upon
mediaeval history, whether by the ignorance, the ferocity, or the
superstition which were ingrained in races that could not lift
themselves to the Christian height. Nevertheless, it was an age
of divine faith ; and its ideals, so far as they were derived from
the Gospel, can at no time be antiquated. When the sixteenth
century, in its reforming zeal, substituted the letter of an infalli-
ble Book for the living Spirit of Jesus, and dissolved the Chris-
tian consciousness, organized hitherto as a Church, into the private
judgment of the individual, it took a backward step, and, while
it imagined that it was restoring Israel, did in its consequences
make room for anarchic heathendom, where every man's hand
is raised against his brother's. The reliance on single texts, torn
from their place and made shibboleths of a language to which
they did not belong, has proved fatal to the religion of Protes-
tants, and has degraded the humane conception of society in which
the first Christians believed. " Texts " have been urged in de-
fence of every extravagance and of a cruelty which the heathen
never practised on so large a scale. Polygamy, free-love, perse-
cution, slavery itself, have been defended by an appeal to the
Sacred Volume. A terrible sermon might be preached — and
against how many so-called churches ? — on that most pregnant

1889.] A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. 191 •

but most neglected of single texts, "The letter killeth." Truly
it killed, in America no less than in Europe, century after cen-
tury— killed soul and body together, and is still in ten thousand
hearts doing its deadly work. Of the letter, as of the law, we
may declare with St. Paul that it is "holy and just and good."
But a dead letter, misinterpreted, can be no rule of conduct for
mankind. Idolatry, be its object Bible or Church, is always
idolatry ; and to make that which was ordained as a means of
communion with God into a wall shutting out the sight of Him,
is the essence of all "creature-worship" and "will- worship."
Rightly therefore did Lessing tax his Protestant brethren with
making an idol of the letter. He bade them think that Christ
was greater than the Bible, and was its end and true significance.
" Let that mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus." There is
no going beyond or behind those words ; they are the believer's
Great Charter, securing his freedom and tracing the path of his
development. The relation of each man and woman in the Church
to their Redeemer is personal, daily, intimate ; and while the
creed which we chant assures our community of thought, the liv-
ing, practical application of it has ever depended, under God's
Providence, on the faithfulness with which individuals enter into
its spirit. The prophetic office among Christians is not confined
to the sacerdotal order, but may be given to one or other, as
God wills. Let us consider, for instance, how it was fulfilled by
St. Catherine of Siena, or St. Teresa, by Savonarola, Dante, or
Pascal, each of them lights to enlighten their own and after ages,
while the appointed guardians of the faith were often careless and
perfunctory, doing what they must as ill as it could be done.
The formal teaching was safe, but the Idea which formal teach-
ing can never adequately represent, where was that living except
in the humble saints who looked upon it as their Exemplar, and
who enabled the multitude to see what it truly was even when
these did not follow it ?

Thus by the positive witness of history we may confront the
real Christianity with its counterfeit. That Catholic Church, pos-
sessing as it did the secret of drawing millions into closest unity,
combined with it in a wonderful degree the power of fostering, I
had almost said of creating, individual types of character. The
Gospel story painted in its frescoes, sculptured in its soaring archi-
tecture, acted over again in its most moving ritual, preached by the
wayside, wrought by meditation and penance into the very flesh
and spirit of its ascetic men, this it was that raised up the
Columbas, and the Winfreds, the Bernards, Hildebrands, Norberts,
TTt-nno.'q Of Assisi and Dominic; the hemir mediaeval kings, Louis,

192 A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. [Nov.,

Stephen, Ferdinand, and, in another class, Roger Bacon the
student of science, Columbus the explorer, Copernicus the new
geographer of the universe. With such names the calendar of
the Roman Church abounds, yet some of the grandest are wanting
there and may well some day be added, from Joan of Arc to Father
Damien, unconscious heroes of whom the highest civilization
would be proud. They did marvels and fled from the praise of
them ; they had no taint of Pantheism, yet they saw God in all
things. Their lives were full of beauty, sweetness, tenderness,
while they were marked as strongly with the greatness of daring
action. If Christ ever lived again, it was in such souls as these.
Faith, purity^ silence, patient welcoming of sorrow, renunciation of
things perishable, hope in the Unseen — to these issues were their
spirits touched, and by a strength confessedly not their own.
For if Christ was multiplied in them, to Him they gave the glory.
Now the Catholic Church, descended from those ages and
plainly inheriting their tradition, nay, their life, professes to be
supernatural in her innermost essence. If the reason of her long
continuance, her persistent vitality, be demanded, she points to
the promise of Christ in Scripture and to His presence, within her
by his Spirit, on her altars by His Eternal Sacrament of Love.
To no such vivifying presence can the Reformed sectaries lead us ;
all they took away, or could take 'away from the sanctuary which
they abandoned, was the historical truth that there had been a
Christ. Fuit Christus. From the New Testament they turned as
by instinct to the Old, for a plan of life. They renounced the
Beatitudes and with them the essentially Christian conception of
Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. They reduced St. Paul to a
metaphysician of the gloomiest type ; or they became Christians
of the school of Epictetus and Seneca. The indwelling life, the
supreme authority of Jesus in a human brotherhood to which all
must belong, they utterly denied by their doctrine of predestina-
tion, and put to scorn in their social and political economy, of
which the fundamental maxim was borrowed from Cain, " Am I
my brother's keeper ? " Personal religion came to mean selfish
isolation, as success in life meant trampling on the weak and de-
fenceless according to the law of supply and demand. "The re-
solution of religion into emotion, the negation of the value of
work, the contemplation of the scheme of salvation, with a cer-
tain quantity of devotional reading" — such is Mr. Froude's ac-
count of Evangelicalism, and we all know that Evangelicals are
Protestant of the Protestant By way of counterpoise, we may
dwell upon the intense money-making, slave-driving Secularism
which rules non-Catholic society with an iron hand, scoffs at

1889.] A STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. 193

salvation and its schemes, and talks of God and Satan as " con-
tingent futures " of no marketable value. Is not Christ dead to
these? "Dead?" echoes Heine with one of his cynical laughs;
" yes, and the Christian religion is in course of liquidation ! " If
only the churches of the sixteenth century were taken into ac-
count, beyond all doubt the sarcasm would be justified and the
bankruptcy of faith at hand.

But that which was from the beginning, " the word of life,"
which is bound up neither with a dead Book nor with empty
abstract " schemes " of " salvation," proves its vitality in our day
by its effects, as it did before the Reformation was heard of. The
past never returns ; Luther and Calvin have gone their way, leaving
no heir but Socinus, who in his descendants is visibly yielding to
Spinoza, to Giordano Bruno, to the schools of Rationalism or of
Pantheism. But while the past is in its grave, the eternal does
not change. The Idea which was made visible in Jesus Christ
manifests as great a power over the individual's thought and man-
ner of living as ever it did. The society which it created is yet
sustained by it. When we view Christianity in the Catholic
Church we see that it has retracted nothing, doubted nothing,
altered none of its dogmas, nor abated one jot of its pretensions.
In conflict with the rulers of this world's darkness it has dared
and suffered greatly ; but its unfailing persistence would be shown
to-morrow, were the flood to come and sweep away those mili-
tary governments which outwardly are strong but within have no
principle to bear them up. To overthrow historical Christianity,
resting on the rock of St. Peter, is a far more hopeless enterprise
than to turn back Europe to its primitive barbarism ; for it would
be needful to conquer not a system or a tradition of men but, as
Catholics believe (and they have the argument of eighteen hun-
dred years to confirm them in their belief) the Son of God .Him-
self dwelling among men.

When I consider, on the one hand, that renewed devotion to
the Person of Christ which is the most cheering sign of the times,
and on the other, that hatred of the idea of Personality charac-
teristic at once of Monism, of an over-driven physical science, and
of the multitude of political and social theories now in the ascen-
dant, I seem to perceive the lines of future cleavage in society
coming surely to the light. Impersonal Nature or the living God —
such are the alternatives of that tremendous battle. To have
nothing but an abstraction over one is to be lawless and free —
but free in a destructive not an ennobling sense. Those who
speak of an "autonomous conscience " in the German schools do
VOL. L.— 13

194 ^ STUDY OF MODERN RELIGION. [Nov.,

not mean a conscience not subject to man, but one which owns
no God. They are resolved not to " retain God in their knowl-
edge," for they cannot but feel that an impersonal, unconscious
Nature is incapable of becoming a true object of worship, or the
sanction of the moral law ; they are aware that it is, after all, in
the language of Milton, " a buzzard idol " without sense or intel-
gence, nay, as Goethe contemptuously remarked, it is " a goose
into which we must put a meaning if we would make anything
of it." The innate law of Spinoza fails in the long run and with
the majority of men to curb the lower instincts. Pantheism, on
the descending scale, becomes lust and self-will, artistic indiffer-
ence, or a cultus of the supposed " larger possibilities " which
Satan has always attached to the knowledge of evil and to the
taste of forbidden fruit. The abstract and the impersonal, I am
convinced, will turn out, as time goes on, to be the Great Adver-
sary " who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called
God, or is worshipped." It is the Everlasting No, " dcr Geist der
stets verneint" of which we have heard terrible things from some
of its prophets.

As, however, in the reformed churches there have always been
apparent diverse tendencies, one towards the truth of Christianity
and the other away from it, so now in the vague modern religion,
or religiosity, of which I have been speaking, we may discern
principles that make for the old faith no less than rebellious
instincts with which no worship of God in any sense is compati-
ble. In every sect there are men of good will, desirous to follow
the light. To such, be they called Agnostic or Pantheist, we who
profess the creed of the Gospels, have a mission ; we are bound
to think of them and for them, if we would enlarge the skirts of
Christendom or provide against a future in which Protestantism,
as we have known it, will be no more. It is idle to seek the
living among the dead. Books of controversy written for the
sixteenth or the eighteenth century are out of date. Methods of
arguing in which the inspiration of Scripture, the authority of
Fathers and Councils, were taken for granted, are simply futile in
the eyes of a generation that has broken with church traditions
of every kind,. Catholic or not. We must make a new beginning,
though we preach the ancient faith. And the first step towards
an undertaking which every day renders more imperative, is to
enter into the thoughts of those who differ from us, to interpret
rightly the principles on which they reason, to sympathize with
the good and the beautiful in which they believe, and, in short,
" whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, what-

1889.] THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGATIONAL SINGING. 195

soever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there
be any virtue, and if there be any praise," in the ten thousand
phenomena that make up modern life and literature, to deal with
them as our fathers did with the elements of truth in Greek and
Roman civilization, that so they may be brought to baptism, and
in the name of Him from whom every good and perfect gift
comes down to us, be consecrated. Nature has been called an
enigma and a parable ; it is for Christians to make it a Sacrament

WILLIAM BARRY.

THE BEST MUSIC FOR CONGREGATIONAL SINGING.

THAT so much of what practically concerns the form of public
divine worship can only be completely realized by congregational
singing is a thesis which has been pretty fully discussed from
various points of view in the pages of this magazine. Besides
the favorable opinions expressed in several of our Catholic jour-
nals, the writer has privately heard both from clergy and people
quite enough of unqualified agreement with the arguments pre-
sented to convince him that with the right-thinking congregational
jinging is a pathway of intelligent devotion into which multitudes
»uld gladly press if once opened to them ; and their senti-
lents are also quite assuring that no one will appear to take up
cudgel for the defence of the present system of concert music
our churches. Despite its general use, every one who cares
lough for the subject to express an opinion feels himself quite
liberty to step out and deplore, denounce, and even ridicule it
an intrusion, a nuisance, and, in not a few places, a scandal.
An amusing specimen of this popular criticism lately appeared
the London Tablet, on the performance by the choir in a
-iverpool church, from which I cull a few sentences. " I think
le whole mass that I heard last Sunday was in an exceedingly
id style. A few remarks on the Credo will explain what I
lean. The bass began very quietly to declare his belief, and
>resently the tenor woke up apparently and acquiesced in the
opinions (?) of the bass. The soprano had seemingly been en-
gaged in conversation while this was going on, and had no time
to say anything, but suddenly, though tardily, gave vent to her
belief also by a startling and unearthly yell — somewhere up at G

196 THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. [Nov.,

above the stave. At the negro minstrel performances some such
surprise is practised upon one of the ' corner men ' who is sing-
ing a song in a melancholy mood, and draws from him a startled
and indignant protest. The congregation was no doubt startled,
but it could not protest. This plan of never allowing the differ-
ent voices to say the same thing at the same time was character-
istic of the whole mass. When one voice was saying one thing,
the rest were invariably silent, or saying something else, and no
two voices saying the same, except perhaps when all joined, with
every conceivable sign of disunion, in saying Amen. At the
Crucifixus the listener became puzzled by the evidently intense
grief of the singers, not that our Lord was crucified, but that it
happened under Pontius Pilate, and their feelings seemed to be
specially lacerated by the fact that Pilate's name was Pontius.
Perhaps, however, the composer thought the word Pontio meant
' crucified ' and thus led his singers into a trap. The wailing at
this part of the Credo was very painful. ... I could not
understand why it should be so painful to the lady who used
the tremolo to express her belief in the Holy Ghost unless she
was only a half- converted Greek. She trembled and writhed
over the two words, and died away in agonizing distress, bequeath-
ing the business to the tenor, who believed in something else.
The rowdy joy of that body of singers at the prospect of ' the
life of the world to come ' was something that baffles all descrip-
tion. The whole mass was a congeries of spasms, jerks, wails,
groans, and shouts. Oh ! how I longed for a little intelligible
melody that would express the meaning of the words and speak
to the minds and hearts of simple people."

I take it that the gravamen of complaint against modern church
singing lies in this : it is nothing but a musical concert for an
audience to listen to, who, hearing it, will be pleased or displeased,
charmed or indifferently bored, by the performance ; but in any
case will be drawn instinctively to criticise it, just because it is a
concert of performers, during which, moreover, the people are pre-
vented from enjoying, or lose sight altogether of, their privilege
and duty to unite personally with the singing as an act of divine
worship. This complaint is equally applicable to the whole
system, whether the music be that of the tuneful operatic style,
or the more religious-toned compositions which the Cecilian
Society is now offering to church choirs to be used in its stead.

The writer distinctly disclaims any personal or professional
animosity against the truly commendable and well-meaning efforts
of his friends, the Cecilians, to " ameliorate " the present lamen-

1 889.] THE BESJ^ Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. 197

table state of church music. He presumes to think, however, that
all true reformations should be founded upon the affirmation of
principles which, as they generally go to the root of the evil
complained of, are justly esteemed as radical. Now, it can hardly
be said that the Cecilian movement has gone to the root of the
church-music evil. That the movement and phraseology adopted
by them is more reverent and decorous, apart from the declara-
tion in their programme that before all the chant is and should
be esteemed as the true music of the church, is indeed a great
gain in itself, not to be lightly estimated ; but it cannot be
denied that in the amelioration of the fundamental evil they have
not advanced one step, and have besides carried intelligibility of
the musical phraseology in many and specially in their choice
productions to a region where the musically uneducated mind
cannot follow.

There is another point worth noting. To give a decent
rendering of their worthy compositions would require the voices
of far more skilled performers, both as vocal artists and readers
(and, I may add, as Christians full of personal faith), than now
generally stand among the choruses who " do " the popular masses
and vespers of the old style.

On the whole, I think I would rather be present at the mur-
der of one of Mozart's or Haydn's masses than at the murder of
one of Dr. Witt's, Greith's, or Stehle's. The former might, at
least, be more or less amusing, but the latter would be exasper-
ating. But be there murder or be there none, I, who have been
one of the audience, have certainly been on the rack criticising,
d either writhing in every nerve, or else sliding deliciously
wn a musical toboggan hill in blissful excitement, and put into
a condition which makes " worship " between whiles very like
ragging the sled up-hill again ; and I fancy I can see many a
worshipper " feeling just like myself. So long as the concert
le is sanctioned the mouths of the people will be shut. " To
sing the praises of God " is a definite act of worship. If the
people do not sing, then they do not perform that act, an act of
the highest order and of the very first importance, as I think
has been sufficiently proven in former articles.

If the people are to sing, then the Cecilian masses, despite
eir reverent tone and dedication to the saints, will have to go
to the concert-hall along with the masses of Haydn, Mozart, and
others.

But now comes a very serious practical question. Having
abundantly discoursed upon " How to cook the hare," I hear

198 THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGATIONAL SINGING. [Nov.,

some one ask : " Where is the hare to cook ? " It is quite evi-
dent that the organ-loft contains no music which the people
down-stairs could sing, not only because they lack the vocal edu-
cation requisite for such a task, but because it is a form of
musical language utterly beyond their comprehension. One might
as well expect them to pray in Sanskrit or Choctaw. That the
vast majority of all modern compositions performed by church
choirs are notably lacking in melody (commonly called
tune), and depend for their effect on both mind and heart upon
the harmonic result obtained by combination • of different vocal
movements and expressions, is a fact of which most unmusical
people are ignorant. To the common people only such music is
agreeable, popularly liked, and remembered which offers to them
more or less of a distinct tune. That explains why the music of
the Cecilia Society fails in obtaining popular favor. In its own
order it is too good for the common mind to appreciate. " It may
be very fine music," I have heard remarked, " but there is no
tune to it." And, because it is not like the vulgar and flashy
music generally heard, some ignorant persons speak of it as
"poor" music.*

It would be cynical and unjust to deny to composers of sacred
music for the church the motive of desiring to dedicate to the
service of God's praise those works in which they have sought to
express greater scientific and artistic perfection of tone, even at
the risk of not being understood by the uneducated masses.
Neither can one say that such rare productions of human genius
are in themselves unworthy as offerings to the Most High, or
would be unacceptable in his sight. That question is nothing to
the present point. Worshipping God by song, and a true though
simple song, by those who can only offer such melody to him,
is an act of religious privilege and of moral duty of which they
must not be debarred because a few geniuses are able to give a

* In an article on " Dr. Witt and the Restoration (sic) of Church Music," in the Month
(June, 1889), by H. S. Butterfield, the writer says of the music composed by the Cecilia Society:
" With reference to the catalogue, it has been said that some of the compositions therein are
poor. Of course they are, because the weakness of choirs has to be considered. The humblest
village choir must be reached. ' Worthy music for divine worship, the edification, elevation,
and education of the people by means of devout and solemn music, down to the smallest village
— that was his [Dr. Witt's] programme. Is it not a grand one ? " By no means, if we are to
understand, as it seems, that poor music is good enough for poor and humble folk, but fine,
artistic music is to be given to the rich who can pay for it. Here, at any rate, is a plain con-
firmation of the justice of our complaint against the whole system. In the praises of God by
church song the people have no lot or part except to listen. All honor to Dr. Witt for his good
intentions, but had he succeeded in locking up the concert gallery and put the key in his pocket,
and used his musical genius to forge another key that would open the locked-up mouths of the
people, then indeed his programme of " Worthy music for divine worship, " etc., as above, would
be a grand one.

1 8 89. J THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. \ 99

loftier and more scientific expression of musical principles. All
sciences and arts, though capable of vast development, are based
upon very simple fundamental principles, which can be applied to
simple operations.

The clatter of the tea-kettle lid when the water boils is one
of those operations, for example, founded upon the same principle
as the working of a mighty steam-engine, and, by the way, the
song which the tea-kettle sings, simple as it is, shows how sweet
and touching even such a simple song may be when accompanied
with proper environments. Its capacity of voice and range of
tone is limited, but no one can deny its eloquence. My reader,
lover of Dickens, will doubtless be reminded of a celebrated con-
cert in which even a tea-kettle performed its part with a certain
merry " cricket on the hearth," and I take it that this delightful
picture, drawn with such life-like power by the immortal novelist,
aptly illustrates the criterion which I propose to offer upon which
to judge what is sure to be the very best music for congrega-
tional singing.

Both tea-kettle and cricket sang "as 'tis their nature to."
The truth, the beauty, the moral tone of their song lay in its
naturalness. If it were possible to suppose the least trace of arti-
ficiality in the melody of either, all charm would be gone.

In point of musical education, whether regarded as a science
or an art, it must be owned that the people, as a congregation-
ally assembled multitude, are to be esteemed as so many tea-
kettles or crickets. They can sing and they will sing what is
truest, best, and most beautiful when they sing what " 'tis their
nature to." Therefore I take it as not coming too quickly to a
conclusion for the perspicacity of my readers for me to assert
that the kind of music the fittest for congregational singing can-
not be any other more scientific or more artistic than what is
natural for all men and all women — young men and maidens, old
men and children — to sing.

The appreciation of a certain succession of tones upon which
all possible melodies are formed is the result of a natural, God-
given instinct which is practically universal.*

* In contradiction to the asserted universality of this instinct of true tone-progression some
write^ have alleged the inharmonic music of the Arabs and Hindus, and the defective scales
of the Chinese, Mexicans, and Africans. But these are aberrations, the explanation of which
would be too long to give here. As an argument a part it will be a sufficient reply to say that
the existence of polytheism and fetichism found among certain nations does not invalidate the
truth of the doctrine that the rational, natural, God-given instinct of mankind is to believe in one
God, and that barbarism is a degradation of the naturally civilized man. The popular use of
the " diabolus " has, per gratiam Christi, not yet succeeded in wholly vitiating the rational tonal-
ity amongst ourselves, or we too might be quoted as an exception.

the "
ity an

200 THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINCIVG. [Nov.,

If there be exceptions, and if there are to be found those who
do not know one note from another, and are unfortunately music-
ally deaf and dumb, that does not invalidate the general rule. It
has been noticed, by the way, that these music-deprived souls are
generally to be found, not among the simple and unlearned, but
rather among those endowed with rare gifts in the domain of
science. Hence the apt saying of the brilliant and witty musi-
cian, Gretry: " Oui, disons hardiment a celui q?ii ria ni chant, ni
invention, ' Jc te condamne a etre savant!'" — Yes, let us plainly
tell him who can neither sing nor make a song, " I sentence you
to become a scientist ! " What he thought of such a condemna-
tion compared with the enjoyments of those favored with the ca-
pacity for song, in which the simple and unlearned are seldom
lacking, may be gathered for another saying of his: " Aujour-
d'hui, phis nous deviendrons savans, plus nous nous eloignerons du
vrai" — To-day the more scientific we become the farther off we
are taking ourselves from truth. This sentiment, written in 1794,
is not without its own application in 1889.

I have endeavored to make what follows simple enough to be
understood by the general reader, but if it should appear too
technical to be interesting, I beg such persons to skip it and con-
tinue reading from page 203.

To the principles of a natural succession of tones — that is, an
order of tones ascending and descending, rightly denominated the '
true natural order, being instinctively intoned by all men alike
without special education (exceptions already noted) — I oppose
what is properly termed artificial, viz., a progression of tones, con-
ventionally assumed as true, but which will, in fact, be found on
examination to be actually false.

All musical students know that what is called modern music,
whether vocal or instrumental, is founded upon a system of tones
arranged according to an arbitrary, scientific division of the octave.
This division is either what is called but is not natural, viz. : Do,
Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do, or it is chromatic by the introduc-
tion of half-tones, named sharps of the lower, and flats of the
higher, whole tones adjacent. These half-tones are essentially re-
quisite in order to apply the principle which is peculiar to
modern music, viz. : modulation by artificial dissonance from
one tone of the scale as tonic to another ; as, for instance, mo-
dulating from the key of C as tonic or key-note to the key of
G as tonic by sounding F# instead of F£ after starting from C.
As nature demands us to sing Ft, we can only sing Fit by arti-
ficial intent and effort, in order to change the key-note of our

] THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGATIONAL SINGING. 201

tune from C to G. I will just here call the reader's attention to
a fact to be alluded to more fully further on, that if we start from
F of the so-called natural scale of C, nature would not lead us to
sing BS, but what is called Bb. For the moment one has sung
the sixth note of a scale we have affirmed the fourth as a new
tonic — F, for instance, in the scale of C.* F as tonic requires
Bb for its fourth, and to sing Bfc requires the same intent and
effort as we had to make in order to sing F£ after starting from
C. So that we actually modulate artificially from the new key
of F, made tonic by singing A, the sixth of the scale of C, back
again into the key of C by forcing ourselves with an artificial and
unnatural effort to sing Br. This will be more evident if the
reader will try to sing down the scale beginning at C. How
much easier it is to sing C, Bb, A, G, F, than C, Bh, etc., in-
stinctively accenting the C as one will ! And it will be observed
that if he forces himself to sing Bi, then he is " naturally " led
to sing thus : C, Br;, A, G, F# (instinctively accenting the Bt]), and
again G, when lo ! he finds he has come to a stop on a new
key-note and is in the scale of G. Why ? Because, as I showed
above, it is the sounding of the major third note above another
which determines the first tone as key-note : E determining C,
A determining F ; and so, when he sang Bt; (major third above
G), he announced G as the key-note, and naturally ended there.
So, again, it is proved BH is not in the natural vocal scale of C.
The conclusion is plain that both the natural and chromatic
lodern scales are artificial. No such tone-progressions exist in
lature ; and despite the fact that nowadays almost any singer can
irn a modern tune, though musically uneducated, it is not ac-
>rding to nature to do so. He does so by virtue of some tradi-
ional education, hearing all music sung and played in this way.
That modern tone-progressions are not only artificial, but
practically false and discordant, is easily proved in this way.
most persons it would be supposed that if a singer sang a
>ong of which every note was in perfect tune with a "perfectly"
tuned piano or organ, he would be singing correctly. But that
vould be a great mistake, for, saving the interval relation of each
lote to its octave, Do to Do, Re to Re, C to C, D to D, etc.,
for example, every other note of the piano or organ when per-
fectly tuned is in actual discord and out of tune. Ask the man
who comes to tune your piano if I am not right. Nature does

* This change of the tonic by natural, diatonic, concordant tone-progression differs essen-
tially from the artificial, chromatic, dissonant modulation used in modern music, and notably
in its moral effect.

202 THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGATIONAL SINGING, [Nov.,

not divide up the respective notes of an octave into equal divi-
sions of vibration, but the tuner is obliged to so divide the
octave. Our sense of hearing is not generally acute enough for
us to distinguish the difference, and we fancy the product is true
harmony ; but it is, in fact, altogether dissonant and out of har-
mony. Nevertheless, although the mind is not rationally conscious
of the effect produced by this lack of harmony, the soul may be
said to be morally conscious of it, and does suffer without know-
ing why, the result being a spiritual damage of no small conse-
quence, which I will presently point out.

Let it be borne in mind, then, that the natural sequence of
tones in an octave is not at all the same as those of the piano
or organ or of any keyed instrument But all modern music is
written to produce tunes which are founded upon such a se-
quence. Therefore, again, all modern music is artificial and not
natural.

It will be interesting to see this demonstrated by a compara-
tive view of figures representing the relative vibrations of the
tones of an octave as they are by nature, and also as we hear
them actually given by the piano and organ, and to which we
force our voices to bend and comply when accompanied by those
instruments.

The natural gamut may be represented thus, the figures repre-
senting the relative number of vibrations of sound in a unit of
time :

Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Sa Si Do

CDEFGAB^BC
240 270 300 320 360 400 426} 450 480

Compare this with the figures of the piano notes :

Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Sa Si Do

CD E F GABb BC

240 269,7(5 302iloV 320 M, 359roxo 4O3iV'> 427 iV.r 453 &'» 4-8o

From which it will be seen that I was right in saying that every
note except the octave is out of tune. There is also another diffi-
cult and unnatural complication and dissonance, arising from the
fact that nature suggests two different Re's and La's according
to whether the mind has taken up Fa as tonic to go on to its
fifth Do, or Sol to go on to its fifth Re.*

These facts explain why beginners whose ears have not been

*This fact is fully proved by r profound musical scholar, Rev. Ignatius Trueg, O.S.E.;
vide: " The'Natural Diatonic Gamut compaicd with Artificial Scales" (The Voice, April, 1888,
etseq. New York: Edgar B. Werner.)

1889.] THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGATIONAL SINGING. 203

falsified by practice with instruments appear to sing some tones
flat when they sing pieces of modern music. They naturally sing
in tune correctly with nature, and, of course, out of tune with
the artificially-tuned piano or organ, as shown above.

But now some, if not every one, of my readers will ask : To
what purpose all these refinements of differences, which I acknowl-
edge, after all, not one in a million can practically distinguish ?
Does it all amount to any more than a mere scientific demonstra-
tion ? What possible effect can all these fractional differences of
vibration have upon the singing of a congregation ? Before I
reply I would like to call the reader's attention once more to
the scientific scale of modern music given above, and remind
him of all the wonderful scientific music built upon it, and then
quote for his meditation once more the words, of the musician
Gretry : " To-day the more scientific we become the further oft
we are taking ourselves from truth."

Whether it is better that a congregation of divine worshippers
should sing the praises of God, the Author of all harmony, out
of tune and out of harmony because modern scientific music with
its false tones has the floor and the organ has the gallery, may at
least be questioned ; but what I insist upon is that, take the
people as they are en masse, uneducated to sing the artificial
scales, if they are to sing with truth — true to nature, with a corre-
sponding moral effect upon their spirit — they must have music
which, for its truth to nature, their souls will instinctively appreciate",
and therefore feel, and feeling, lead them to make a heart-offering
of their song to God. The popular ignorance of the subtle influ-
ence of music would be apt to ascribe this reasoning to pedantic
exaggeration. Serious musical writers, however, know well that
variations in tone so small as to appear unimportant have far-
reaching consequences, not only upon the general artistic charac-
ter of the music which is the product of these variations, but
upon the moral sentiments excited thereby; a consideration of
vastly greater importance in vocal than in purely instrumental
music. As has been well said : " The scale of musical tones is
like the skeleton of organized beings, who show different charac-
ters, tendencies, and developments as soon as characteristic dif-
ferences are set up in its construction." Referring to the results
of these variations in instrumental music, the same writer, speak-
ing of the scale of tones as given by piano (and organ), observes :
" Its defects have had a marked influence on the music written
for it. Sustained melody has been more and more obscured ;
and for it have been substituted infinite and complicated musical

204 THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. [Nov.,

figures, scales, cadences, shakes, etc., calculated rather to call up
the pride of a brilliant executant than the musical sentiment of
the hearers. For the few simple lines of great musical works are
substituted infinite arabesques of a new order of the grotesque."*

One instinctively offers what is natural to God, and what is
artificial to one's self; a truth exemplified in the very first
records of the human race, when the offerings of the firstlings of
his flock by Abel were acceptable to God, and the offerings of the
first-fruits of the earth, the results of his own labor and cultiva-
tion, by Cain were rejected. It is this difficulty of making a
heart-offering of modern music which is its bane. Without a
special, spiritual effort, which does violence to prevaricated human
nature, it never gets lower than the head, where it is learned,
and where its " fallen " nature breeds self-conceit — the offering
of homage to self for one's artificially-acquired attainments and
skilful performances. How very few persons nowadays think of
singing except to be heard by some one else in order to be
praised for it? Singing for pure love either of God or man,
with perfect sense of self-obliteration, pouring out one's whole self
in rapture, would be voted the fanciful ideal of a crank. And
he who writes is certainly offering himself as contending for first
prize as champion crank when he asserts that* the same is the
bane of all so-called " modern science," which I dare to stigma-
tize as artificial science when compared to what deserves the
name of natural science, whose end is the heart-offering of truth,
first to God, whom the Psalmist praises as the " Lord of all sciences,"
and secondly to man. But who cannot see that the real, if not
the professed, object sought by the self-crowned scientists of our
day is the idolatry of the intellect, shown in the vain attempt to
account for the existence and action of all things in the universe
quite apart from any logical design or moral purpose, and that
the presentation of their scientific investigations for the purpose
of inspiring the contemplation of truth as the means of uplifting
the hearts of men to God is something not at all in their pro-
gramme ? Who does not see to what a ridiculous extent this
science puffeth up ?

How does this come about ? Precisely as it does in music.
They insist upon tuning their scientific instruments to an arti-
ficial scale, each one to an artificial theory of his own devising,

* The Theory of Sound, P. Blaserna. In faith this writer is an anti-Catholic; but simply
as a musician he proves the inferiority of the artificial scale and urges its abandonment. "It
has had its day, and has no longer any raison d'etre. Man is capable of a much finer class of
music than that performed at the present day. Singing would gain enormously by a return to the
exact, natural scale. ' '

1 889.] THE BEST Music I-GR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. 205

and lo ! the Harmony of the Universe — as they understand it.
And they play to us some very pretty and even wonderfully
artistic tunes upon their instrumental scales ; but just as in the
case of modern music, their tone-progression is all out of tune
and in discord with the fundamental principles of creation given
by the Author of all natural science ; hence it all ends just where
modern music does by virtue of its artificial principle of modula-
tion out of the key, by an ever-varying denial of the Divine
Tonic — God, the logical Reason and Generator of all tone and all
creation.

Oh ! yes, only relieve yourself of the necessity of constantly
affirming God as the Fundamental Tone — the Tonic in the Harmony
of Creation — and you can make the most enchanting and sensuously
pleasing artificial scientific music. But keep Him in view always,
let Him be, as musicians say of the tonic, always " heard," be it
in your melody or in your scientific investigations, and I ac-
knowledge that your music or your science will be only simple
and natural, in perfect accordance with the common sense and
religious instincts of mankind ; but the best of it all will be that
it will be true, and therefore profoundly sublime and heart-com-
pelling.

The true scientist is always profoundly humble and religious ;
but if you wish to find the exemplars of arrogant self-conceit, I
need only to direct you to the writings of the God-denying
scientists, before whose self-glorifying dicta the ignorant and un-
reasoning world of to-day stands with mouth agape in abject
wonderment.

Is this a digression? If it be, we -have come around to the
point I wished to arrive at. The music which people are to sing
to God (as also the science which they must offer to him) must
be true, simple, natural, sublime, and heart-compelling, and that
can only be done by its being founded upon an essentially nat-
ural tone-progression, and which cannot admit the false fourth
tone ascending from the tonic known as the sensible or leading
tone, the sounding of which immediately forces the denial of
the original tonic, and compels the affirmation of a new one —
Do, Re, Mi, Fa#, or Fa, Sol, La, Si. This progression, called by
all ancient religious musicians Diabolus in musica — the devil in
music — has its counterpart in science by the introduction of that
lying spirit which, if affirmed, denies God as the Origin and
Author of the Harmony of the Universe.

No one ever yet sang, " as 'tis his nature to," Do, Re, Mi, Fa3,
or Fa, Sol, La, Si. Take the first boy you can seize upon and

2o6 THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. [Nov.,

start him at Do or at Fa ; let him sing alone, unaccompanied by
an instrument, and see how he will come out. That simple ex-
periment ought to settle the question. Modern music does, and
must so sing, and therefore it is unnatural and artificial. Being
so, it is unspiritual, lacking in the flavor of divine melody, and
does not lead one naturally to God, as all music to his praise at
least ought to. And what is more, the tone vibrations of the
boy's voice while singing, as he naturally will, Do, Re, Mi, Faq,
or Fa, Sol, La, Si?, will in neither case exactly correspond with
those tones as given by your piano or organ. You may prob-
ably not have sufficiently acute hearing to detect the differences,
but, as I have already shown, positive differences do exist, as
all musicians know. The boy's intuitive perception of nature's
laws leads him instinctively to sing true; and because true, his
heart is correspondingly .affected. The subtle power of tone
vibration, although but minutely dissonant, is none the less real
and productive of positively moral or immoral results. Force
him to sing as your piano or organ plays, and you vitiate the
heart-effect, and so much of the divinely natural influences upon
his character of what perfectly true song would impart is
frustrated.

Now, any congregation of people taken haphazard — or as they,
as a rule, assemble for divine worship — are just like this boy.
They have the same instinct of true tone-progression — they have
it more vividly and express it more naturally than musicians
educated to intone the popular false progression — and therefore
I conclude again that if they are to be brought under the purest
and highest heart-influence whilst giving expression in singing
to their sentiments of divine faith, hope, and charity, and have
the sentiments of those virtues enforced and deepened thereby ?
they must have a melody to sing which is perfectly in harmony
with that true tone-progression.

I want the best. I am arguing for that, and hoping by my
words to forcibly bring the matter home to the consciences of
those whose duty it is to give to the people that which they
can render to God, who ought to have the best. In that I am
an optimist. Just here I allow myself to enjoy a quiet smile at
the wonderment of some of my readers who have been accustomed
to argue for the use of modern music in church, indubitably the
worst kind, on the score of what they have -fancied to be a
clinching argument — that God ought to have " the best music."

I do not say I refuse to take less, if I cannot hie ct nunc
have all. Better is half a loaf than no bread. But I tell you

1889.] THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGATIONAL SINGING. 207

there was a time when all the musicians of the church would
have abhorred singing your false tone-progression of modern
music (as their greatest work, the chant, now still stands in
several volumes of melodies, wholly free from it), as they would
have abhorred the sight or sound of the devil, and they said so
in their celebrated distich,

" Si contra Fa
Diabolus est in musica " —

Si heard with (sounding against) Fa is the devil in music.

Mais, nous avons changez tout cela. But we have not nor
can we ever change the musical instincts of mankind, God-given
as they are, and given for more profound reasons than it is likely
will ever be known this side of heaven.

Is it not a singular fact that so long as church musicians
kept " the devil " out of music congregational singing prevailed ?
No, not at all singular if my arguments have been logical and
my conclusions drawn from true premises. History indeed con-
firms the truth of them by showing us that the introduction of
the " diabolus in musica " (not without strong protest) was coeval
with the rise of concert performances in church, pretty much in
the same style as we have them now, saving that the attractive
feminine element was excluded, and that the music was infinitely
superior in quality, as it was unquestionably more artistically
rendered, as in those days singers were not bond slaves to a
loisy organ. It is 'also true that as this new style of church
singing came into vogue the ancient tradition of congregational
singing died out. The history of this remarkable revolution in
lurch music is not so very ancient after all, for modern music

not over three hundred years old. Like Protestantism in
ligion, its principle of life, which conceived and gave birth to
)th, is individualism, and both will probably die and be buried
ibout the same time.

My reflective reader will here doubtless say to me : If what
assert be all true, then the shortest road to the practical
^storation of congregational singing would be to restore the
ime kind of music, written upon the scale of pure natural into-
nation, which you say prevailed before the rise of modern music.

To which I reply, that is one way, a good way, and, where
it can be done, I would judge it to be the shortest way. I am
also of opinion that in more places than is generally supposed
that way could be easily found if there was a will to look for
it. That kind of music, commonly known as Gregorian chant,

208 THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. [Nov.,

•

the church still adheres to officially in all her liturgical books,
and has indeed never officially embodied with her words of divine
prayer and praise one single piece of modern music. That
is to say, the diabolus in musica, in spite of his almost universal
triumphs in the outside world, and despite his diligent attendance
at almost all church services, at which his voice is constantly
heard, has never succeeded in getting himself officially recognized
by the church. Her words of encouragement and conditions of
what she will at least patiently endure, knowing, like God, what
is in man, and similarly long-suffering with his weaknesses, although
they may have come from persons holding the highest ecclesias-
tical offices, have never in fact amounted to more than this :
The church's own Gregorian chant is the best, and we would
rather have it ; but if you will write and sing other music, study
that chant as you would a divine model and get your inspira-
tion from it. The nearer you conform to it in style and into-
nation, the more religious, and, if we may use the term (and we
think we may), the more sacramental, will your music be in its
tone and quality, and therefore more in harmony with the sacra-
mental character of the divine worship of the church. And if
you will accompany the singing with the playing of the discord-
ant organ, play just as little and as softly as you can, remember-
ing the maxim of the councils of the church, " Music for the
words and not words for the music." I think that is a concise,
honest, and fair interpretation of all such quasi-official commenda-
tions as have been given to any other music but the chant ;
and if the contrary is believed to be true, I would like to see
some one try to prove it.

I have endeavored to come at the proof that the Gregorian
chant, of all music now known, is the very best music for congre-
gational singing on the simplest principles, and such as, I hold, it
is impossible to controvert. To go into detail and illustration of
its fitness, its aesthetic value, and to quote one hundreth part of
all I have at hand that has been written in favor of the suprem-
acy of the chant from every point of view as religious music,
by the most eminent musicians of this and former times, would
be to fill a volume.

But while the fundamental principles' of pure intonation and
true, natural tone-progression, which give to chant its unique,
unrivalled character, must be regarded as essential and as incon-
trovertible as the laws of acoustics which scientifically prove their
truth and are confirmed by experiment of centuries, as no' less
morally essential to the best expression and nurture of true

1889.] THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. 209

religious sentiment, I am not prepared to assert that the whole
musical repertory of melodies as the outcome of the eight
Gregorian modes, or even the scale divisions of true tonal
progression as made by St. Gregory, may not become the subject
of revision, and, under the inspiration of some other genius and
chosen mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost like St. Gregory, a still
more perfect and sublime religious music be breathed which the
church may adopt as a truer, holier, and more sanctifying ex-
pression of her voice of prayer and praise than the chant has
been for the past thousand and more years. I must confess,
however, that there is very little present promise of the coming
of such a mighty minstrel of divine Tone, seeing how vain a
task it would certainly be for the most skilled musicians of our
day to attempt to compose even a Gregorian melody which
would be accounted of any value. One might also as soon 'look
for the coming of another Psalmist like David, whose words the
church would accept in preference as the language of a higher
and diviner consecration of the soul, and nobler intonation of
divine praise than the Song of Israel's Royal Singer, which
has been rolling on for centuries in one ceaseless, majestic wave
of soul-inspiring and heart-uplifting psalmody. And yet, of
course, even that is not impossible. But one thing is certain,
neither will happen in an age of which it can be said with
Gretry : " Plus nous dcviendrons savans, plus nous nous eloignerons

Rvrai"
If the poets had had half the assurance of musicians, and,
ving succeeded in getting a stage erected in the church, a
choir gallery, for the recitation of their rhymes, dared to
clothe their art in like subtly sensuous garb, it is not unlikely
that ere this there would have been issued more than one similar
" official " commendation from high quarters, and rescripts of pa-
ternal advice given to rhymesters who would insist upon writing
something (" for the church," of course, and not for their own
fame), and having their verses recited by artistic "readers" at Mass
and Vespers in place of the old-fashioned and no-longer-under-
stood psalms of David — advice and counsel which (as in the case
of music) would no doubt draw the line at what, for instance,
should not be in Shaksperean, Tom Mooreish, or Swinburnian
style, or what might otherwise savor of the theatre, or be " las-
civious or impure " in diction. It is also not unlikely that the
aforesaid versifiers and their admirers would feel quite sure that
their sweet and elegantly turned periods were far superior to the

VOL. L. — 14

210 THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. [Nov.,

antiquated Hebrew antiphonal phrases — at least for high festivals !
I leave my readers to pursue this suggestive and entertaining
comparison.

Now let us get down to a practical resolution of the difficulty
of restoring congregational singing in places where it is assumed
that the shortest way through Gregorian chant cannot be taken.
Suppose it to have come to pass that in place of the people
reciting the psalms of David and the various ascriptions of divine
praise of which the Liturgy is composed we found a custom
prevailing for centuries for the people to be silent and left to
listen to the " reading " by a few chosen artists of poems written
in Miltonian, Tennysonian, Faberian, or even, alas ! in Swin-
burnian or Gilberto-Sullivanian style, and that they had become
so accustomed to this manner of worship that it would be re-
garded as practically impossible to return at once to the common
use of the church's liturgical language and its recitation by all
the people, what would practical common sense suggest as a first
step towards the desired reformation ? Would it be to make no
attempt whatever to do away with the hired artists, but to per-
mit their " readings " to go on, only substituting for the popular
and pleasing, and at least somewhat intelligible, poems of modern
poets the verses of some antiquated writer like Spenser and
Chaucer, or imitations of their style, full of obsolete words,
phrases, and incomprehensible spelling, as the Cecilians have done
in their attempt to revive or imitate the works of Palestrina, and
find equal difficulty with them in procuring artistic readers com-
petent to render them ? Would not that infallibly put con-
gregational " reading " still further beyond the hope of restora-
tion ?

It seems to me that even if the " readers " had to be tolerated
for a while, the first thing to do would be to decide that the ar-
tistic reading style is uncatholic and to be got rid of as soon as
possible. Then to get the people to do some congregational read-
ing, and encourage the practice by having them read all together
on stated occasions of devout assembly specially designed for
that end. Having become, by supposition, entirely ignorant of
the real liturgical language of the church and familiar only with
the works of great dramatic and lyric writers, it would be the
part of wisdom to prepare a selection of decent, appropriate
poems, etc., in modern style though they be, which they can
readily apprehend and are more or less accustomed to read. It
is plain to see that the two cases are perfectly parallel, and I

1 889.] THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. 2 1 1

now go on to explain what place or purpose is to be given to
the congregational singing of hymns in modern English poetry,
set to modern tunes and harmonies.

Though I seek and argue for the best, I am nevertheless not
such a rigorist as to hinder the work of encouraging the restora-
tion of congregational singing and prevent the people praising God
by the use of even inferior means if better cannot be had or is
not permitted them. If I did I would stand self-condemned ;
for, in order to entice people to sing congregationally, I have my-
self prepared a collection of modern hymns and set them to
tunes in modern music in whose accompanying harmonies and
modulations in the melodies the " Diabolus " appears, of course,
this kind of music being the only one they have ever heard in
their lives, save the chanting of the priest, and the only kind
the majority of them now living are ever likely to hear, more's
the pity ! Neither have I spared any effort to encourage the
singing of such music, hoping and praying and vigorously con-
tending meanwhile for what I know is essentially truer, purer,
holier, better in every respect for the congregational worship of
God.

Do I betray the truth by this ? God forbid ! I am a dis-
ciple of St. Paul, and have learned to give milk to babes but
to reserve strong meat for the nourishment of men, or I might
repeat the advice given me once upon a time, apropos of the
question of the immediate presentation of the claims of chant,
>y a prominent Cecilian : " Let us not throw pearls before
swine." It is of the first importance in the interest of popular
lith and morals to get the concert style of church music abol-
ished and that of congregational singing established, no matter
what music is at first employed, provided the words be at least
free from expressions of erroneous doctrine, and the melodies do
lot shock one's sense of propriety or excite disgust by their
merility. For evident reasons, the use of hymns in the vernac-
ilar, used at special devotional services, set to modern music, ac-
companied by the organ — all in discord though its tones are —
presents the most practical means to give congregational singing
start and thus establish a right custom by ousting a false one.
If this artificial music is lacking in like power with the Holy
Chant in naturally leading the singers to God by its tonal inspi-
rations, that defect can be, and care should be taken that it be,
supplemented by directing the people to make positive acts ot
spiritual offering of their song of prayer and praise. Surely, if it

2 1 2 THE BEST Music FOR CONGREGA TIONAL SINGING. [Nov.,

is taken for granted that they do make such an offering of the
song of the hired gallery singers, it ought not to be difficult to
get them to so offer their own song, in spite of the "devil" in
the harmonies of either.

But, deeply impressed as I am with the truth of the prin-
ciples I have adduced, and which have been well. proven and
sufficiently illustrated, it would ill become me and the vows of
my life if, time and opportunity being afforded, I failed to make
known their application to that special use of music as the
vehicle of divine praise by the people, for the furtherance of
which religious duty on their part I have been so persistently
raising my voice. I cannot but be conscious that, let the
efforts of the friends of the very best music for congregational
singing be what they may, they can do little more than plant
here and there a seed without the hope of living to see
or enjoy either tree or fruit. But who that comes upon an
inheritance of barren plains will not at once plant seeds which
some day may give wholesome fruit and blessed shade to
others who may come after him ? I would say to any one
who recoils from labor of which he will probably never see the
fruit : Let it be no hindrance to thee to know that hogs will eat of
the fruit of oaks which thou mayest plant, or that oxen and
asses will find shade beneath their spreading branches, and even
spurn with their hoofs the very ground that covers thy forgotten
bones beneath. Plant oaks all the same !

ALFRED YOUNG.

1889.] THE TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPE. 213

THE TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPE.

THERE is a logical sequence in events and a very inexorable
one. If we make a mistake, we must take the consequences; if
we wilfully do wrong, we shall suffer for it. The principle is one
of universal application, and the question just now is whether the
Masonic conspiracy which compassed the downfall of the Temporal
Power, and brought it about in September, 1889, did not make a
very colossal mistake, and is not at this very moment hurrying
downward in the logical course which will make it fall over the
precipice. We are of the opinion that this is so. The campaign
of Cavour and his abettors and allies, Mazzini and the Masons of
Italy, was entered on with reliance on " moral force " — La forza
morale. This moral force was to sweep away opposition. It
was to consist in the force of public opinion, which was to be
sedulously, cautiously and with great tact, directed against the
pope's temporal dominion and against the church to the cry : Una
chiesa liber a in uno stato libero — "A free church in a free state."
The press and the telegraph were secured, and misrepresentation
was the order of the day; so that public opinion was manu-
factured and presented daily for the complacent assent of all
whose early education taught them to look on Rome as the
symbol of oppression in religious belief.

The Italians have a saying: La bugia ha le gambe corte — "A
has short legs" — and a very true saying it turned out to be
in this case. This misrepresentation of the real state of things in
Rome has been trying to keep ahead ; but in these days of
pedestrianism the truth is catching up, and the moral force of the
world and of public opinion seems to be taking a direction that
will bring retribution on those who despoiled Pope Pius IX. of his
lawful authority. The great mistake the revolutionists made was
in thinking their " moral force " would meet with no opposition ;
they thought from their reliance on Freemasonry that they would
have the support of the world, Freemasonry having spread so
widely, and controlling not only cabinets and monarchs, but the
press, the great power of the nineteenth century. What could
the pope do against this ? When to moral force were added the
wily diplomacy of Cavour and Ratazzi, the plots and intrigues of
Mazzini, the acquiescence of Napoleon, the free corps of Gari-
baldi, and the cannon of Cadorno and Bixio, success was certain ;

214 THE TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPE. [Nov.,

and once gained, Rome could easily be held. And so, when they
got into the city of the popes, gazing on the trophies of anti-
quity and art of the most famous city of the world and delighted
with the sight, they complacently sat down and exclaimed : Hie
manebimns optime. But they reckoned without their host ; they
were in the pope's house. They did not think of his " moral
force," which has two elements that make it well-nigh omnipotent:
first, the truth, and, secondly, the opportunity to make the truth
known. It was a tremendous mistake on their part ; so we must
not be surprised to see the subsequent career of the despoilers of
the pope marked by unmistakable signs of that folly which leads
to ruin. To enumerate these signs would be to go over the
whole history of Rome since its capture by the Italian army.

There is one thing to be said in favor of the royal house of
Savoy : the father of the present king went to Rome against his
will and better judgment, and the present king is not responsible
for being there ; for he did not create the circumstances by which
he has been surrounded, and, as a constitutional ruler, he is
powerless to alter the condition of things without the consent of
the legislative bodies who, through the ministers, govern the land.
Both he and his father have always tried to have public order
preserved, and the safety of the Sovereign Pontiff secured. But
this said, pretty much all is said that can be urged in extenua-
tion of the presence of the king in the city of the popes. The
course of the parliament has been marked always by the spirit of
undying hatred of the Church of God which characterizes Free-
masonry in Europe, and more or less its affiliations everywhere.
Suppression of religious orders ; seizure of monasteries and eccle-
siastical revenues ; forced sale of church property — the price not
paid in cash, but by public securities at five per cent.', with an
income tax of i3T2o°o per cent.; — these and kindred acts ending
lately in the Draconian Penal Code against the clergy which is
to go into effect on January I, 1890, have marked the delirium
of enmity to the church from which the legislators of the Italian
kingdom have suffered.

As an illustration of their deep scheme of persecution, and of
their throttling of freedom of speech, we give the following
extracts from the code just named :

Art. 182 says: "The minister of worship who, in the exercise of his func-
tions, publicly blames or belittles the institutions, the laws of the state, or
the acts of authority is punished with imprisonment not longer than a year,
and by fine not exceeding one thousand francs." Art. 183: " The minister of
worship who, making use of his position, excites others to contemn the institu-

1889.] THE TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPE. 215

tions, the laws, the dispositions of authority, or to disobey the laws, the disposi-
tions of authority, or to neglect duties inherent in a public office, is punished
with imprisonment from three months to two years, by a fine of from five
hundred to three thousand francs, and by perpetual or temporary privation
of his ecclesiastical revenues. If the fact take place publicly, he may be
imprisoned three years." "The same penalty may be inflicted on a minister
of worship who, making use of his position, compels or induces any one
to acts- or declarations contrary to the laws, or prejudicial to the rights
acquired under these laws." Art. 104: "Whoever commits an act directed
to the placing of the state or a part of it under the dominion of a foreigner,
or to diminishing its independence, or to breaking up its unity, is punished
with imprisonment."

The fear of the movement going on in Italy for the restora-
tion of the temporal power has driven the lawgivers of the king-
dom to enact these tyrannical laws to punish the priest or bishop
who, in the discharge of his duty, is bound to condemn laws
that are anti-Christian, and public acts 'which violate the sacred
rights and liberty of the successor of St. Peter, or destroy the
influence over his people of him whom all Catholics regard and
believe to be the Vicar of Christ. These laws are an answer to
the demonstrations which were evoked by the wonderful Jubilee
of Pope Leo XIII., in which, we may say, all the sovereigns and
peoples of the earth joined. The moral force of the Papacy has
at last caught up with the " moral force " of the Revolution, and
these laws show that spirit of desperation which confesses ^ the
iminence of defeat.

But of all events which have occurred to show the hatred
id fear of the power of the Pope, not only as a claimant of the
imporal power but as head of the Catholic Church, the late
)theosis of the pantheist Giordano Bruno, in Rome, as a
mnter demonstration against the Pope's Jubilee, and against
;vealed religion, towers above all for the manner in which the
'hole infidel world was invited to take part in it, and by the
it did so by subscriptions to pay for the statue and by the
:ual presence of representatives. It finds its parallel only in
le so-called Feast of Reason in the French Revolution, when a
irtesan as Goddess of Reason was installed in the cathedral of
fotre Dame, in Paris. This public worship of Giordano Bruno
las served to arouse the attention of Catholics the world over,
id make them realize that the battle going on in Rome is
>etween Freemasonry and the religion of Christ, and see that the
time has come to raise their voice against this state of things,
and claim for the Pope his temporal power, of which he has
been wrongfully despoiled, and which alone can save him and

216 THE TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPE. [Nov.,

the Church of Rome from the present deplorable condition of
things. Let us hear what the Holy Father himself has to say
on this demonstration of his enemies. In his allocution pro-
nounced to the cardinals on the 3Oth of June last he tells what
occurred, facts which have already been made known through
the press.

The Holy Father begins by saying that after the taking of
Rome by the present government our holy religion and the
Apostolic See have been subjected to a long series of acts of
injustice, but that the secret societies intend shortly to do worse
things which hitherto they. were not able to accomplish. They
have obstinately determined to impose upon the chief city of
Catholicity a rule of distinctively profane character and one of
impiety, directing against this citadel of the faith the hatred of
the world. He then illustrates this by the fact of the erection of
the statue to Giordano Bruno in Rome. " Of a truth," he says,
" as if they had not brought about ruin enough during these
past years, see how they try to outdo themselves in audacity,
and on one of the holiest days in the Christian year they erect
in public a monument by which a spirit of contumacy towards
the church is commended to posterity ; and assert their will to
wage a decisive war with the Catholic faith." " They honor a
man twice a fugitive, judicially convicted of heresy, whose per-
tinacjty against the church ended only with his last breath. In
fact it was exactly for this that they gave him distinction." " He
had no remarkable knowledge; for his writings show him to
have been a pantheist and materialist entangled in common
errors, and not seldom in contradiction with himself." " He was
not a virtuous man, but a very bad one ; a man of no public
merit, but deceitful, mendacious, selfish, intolerant of others, a
flatterer, of abject mind and evil disposition. The scope of these
honors to such a man, the language describing them is this: life is
to be led without regard to revelation, and the minds of men are
to be entirely emancipated from the power of Jesus Christ. This
aim of those who honored Bruno is the same as that of the
secret societies which are striving to alienate whole peoples from
God, and fight with infinite hate and unceasing strife against the
church and the Roman Pontificate." "That this insult might be
the more marked and its cause more widely known, they resolved
to celebrate the dedication with great pomp and with a great
concourse of people. During those days Rome saw within her
walls a multitude of no mean proportions called hither from
everywhere ; banners most hostile to religion impudently carried

1889.] THE TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPE. 217

about; and, what is especially revolting, there were not wanting
some with figures of the evil one, who refused to be subject to
the Most High in heaven, the prince of the seditious and the
instigator of all rebellions. To this wicked crime was added the
insolence of the speeches delivered and of the articles in the
press, in which the holiness of what is most sacred was made a
jest of without shame and without measure, while that lawless
freedom of thought was vehemently extolled which is the fertile
source of evil opinions, and which shakes the foundation of disci-
pline and of civil order while striking at Christian morality.
This sad work was allowed to be prepared long before, and
perfected, those who are in authority not only knowing it, but
continually and openly giving it favor and incitement. It is a
sad thing to say, and like unto a portent, that the praise of
reason rebelling against God should be heralded from this foster-
ing city of the faith in which God has placed his Vicar to dwell ;
and, whence the whole world is wont to seek the uncorrupted
precepts of the gospel and counsels of salvation, there, by an evil
change, foul errors and heresy itself are consecrated with monu-
ments. To this have the times led that we should see the
abomination of desolation in the holy place"

We do not wish to detract from the eloquence and power of
the representation of the Holy Father in this remarkable allocu-
tion by any comment of ours. What is here said shows unmis-
takably the state of things and the nature of the " hostile
domination " under which the Pope lives. For Catholics every-
where the contest is for their home — pro aris et focis. The
determined foe is there, and he must be put out. The Sov-
ereign Pontiff claims his liberty and independence through the
temporal power, and more than once the voices of the epis-
copate and of the noble-hearted Catholic laity have re-echoed his
words. Oar duty is to aid him as we may, and since it may
not be possible for us to help in any other way, we should
contribute to strengthen by our prayers, our sympathy, and our
words of loyalty that moral force which is rising like a tidal
wave, in its own moment to do the augean work of cleansing
the chosen citadel of the faith of what now defiles it.

FRANCIS SILAS CHATARD.

Indianapolis i Ind,

218 FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. [Nov.,

FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN.— II.

THE second public session of the congress was no less inter-
esting than the first. The Marquis of Vadillo, professor of law
in the University of Madrid, delivered an address, which was
warmly applauded, in which he proved, with all the vigor of a
logical and learned lawyer and scholar, that " the rights of St.
Peter's successor to temporal sovereignty are indefeasible." " Why
are they subject to no lapse ? " said the orator ; because, against
all that constitutes an essential right of the institution in question,
exactly as in the case of an essential right of a human being,
there can never be recognized any limitation or bar. Who would
venture to assert, for instance, that because during many years,
nay, during centuries, human slavery existed that it ever involved
a lapse of the essential rights inherent to human nature, its dignity,
and its liberty ? After this address four papers were read in the
following order : One by Senor Lopez Novoa, precentor of Huesca,
relative to the " Hermanitas de los Ancianos Desamparados "
(Little Sisters of the Destitute Aged), established by himself in
1872, numbering to-day eight houses in Spain, and whose work
is the same as that of the Little Sisters of the Poor. The second
paper was read by Senor Aranar, prebendary of Saragossa, on
"The Rights of the Church in regard to Public Education," con-
taining an interesting statement of facts and statistics showing the
moral ravages resulting from bad education. Senor Laredo, also
a priest, read an interesting account of the " Catholic Schools of
Madrid," founded in 1870, supporting at present thirty- three
schools in the most neglected suburbs of that city, in which four
thousand children are being educated, and six hundred yearly
prepared for first Communion. Finally Senor Lajuente, professor
in the Madrid University, read an extract from a voluminous work
written by him on the subject of " Devotion to the Holy Virgin
and her Prerogatives, as proved by the Works of Ancient Art."
His erudition, eloquence, and research were much applauded.

VI.

The third session opened, as the former ones, with numerous
telegrams of adherence, two of which, from the two congresses of

1889.]

FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN.

219

Oporto and Vienna, in session at the same time, were welcomed
with particular satisfaction. Senor Vogel ascended the tribune,
and as a representative of the German Catholic press read a message
which was warmly applauded, mainly on account of a passage to
this effect : " When it comes to the common interest which
we Catholics all have in defending our rights and showing our-
selves united in love and obedience to the church and the pope,
the distinctive nationalities of French, English, German, or Spanish
cease to exist." The Cardinal-President replied to this speech
with deserved praise of the German Catholics, whose prudent and
courageous behavior has put an end to the Kulturkampf. He pro-
claimed the union of Catholics throughout the whole world in
love for Jesus Christ, in profession of one faith under the guidance
of one shepherd, and in a firm desire to bring about the social
reign of our blessed Redeemer. Senor Orti y Lara, professor of
metaphysics in the Madrid University, read a discourse on the
"Temporal Power of the Pope." He demonstrated, logically and
philosophically, that the subjection of a superior authority such as
that of the pope to an inferior one of a secular prince involves
a contradiction. " Let senators and deputies," he said, " be
elected who will pledge themselves to defend the pope's temporal
power." This address was greeted with encouraging applause.

Being unable to attend the congress, the learned Cardinal San
Zeferino Gonzales, who belongs to that foremost rank of philoso-
phers which is an honor to Europe, was desirous of contributing to
the work of his learned colleagues in the assembly by an address
worthy of his high ability. His thesis was on " The Time
elapsed since Adam and Eve appeared on Earth." Prehistoric
theories cannot affirm, on any substantial grounds, anything con-
trary to the Mosaic narrative of the creation of the world and the
antiquity of man, nor have they, up to the present time, furnished
sufficient reasons for asserting the existence of the tertiary man.
It is quite impossible to make selections from the speech, because
it is throughout a marvel of learning. " However much," his
Eminence said, " geological science may have progressed, it cannot
yet determine with precision how old the world is; and the so-called
scientists who have tried to do so have made themselves ridiculous.
They have even gone so far as to assert that the domestication
of the horse occurred nineteen thousand three hundred and thirty-
seven years ago — that is to say, in the one hundred and ninety-
fourth century before Christ; but they cannot say in what year
the reindeer migrated from southern to arctic regions, nor when
the elephant disappeared from the southern part of our Spain."

220 FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. [Nov.,

The learned cardinal nevertheless rejoices at the progress which
geology has made, and hopes that the union of all such labors
will result in solid elements for the advancement of science.

This session closed with a discourse from the Marquis de
Valle-Ameno, professor of political economy at Saragossa, in
which he demonstrated that the Catholic Church blesses the de-
velopment of industry and commerce, and alone can indicate the
legitimate place they must occupy in social life. "The church," ex-
claimed the young professor, " does not nor ever has condemned fair
profits ; she condemns abuse in that respect as in all other things,
and is opposed to mercantilism, so-called, which degrades nations,
because, having for its motive money-greed, it stifles in souls
every noble aspiration, and withers the bloom of every generous
nature."

VII.

The sittings of the congress, far from becoming languid, as
frequently happens in such assemblies, kept on exciting more and
more interest. At the fourth, held on the 29th of April, Senor
Murua, canon of Cadiz, read an address in which .he learnedly
and eloquently advocated international arbitration by the Roman
pontiffs, because of their constant love for justice and of the truth
which has always conspicuously shone forth in their decisions.
After having laid stress on the great naval and military arma-
ments now constituting an unbearable burden for nations, the
orator exclaimed : " And who is qualified to intervene between
armed nations, in order to avert the terrible shock which threa-
tens to involve Europe in its horrible whirlwinds of destruction ?
Only the church, and consequently the pope ; first, because his
power is the oldest existing at present on earth, and is the constant
protector of all others ; secondly, on account of the sacred charac-
ter with which it is invested in the eyes of all other national
governments."

Next, Senor Uribe, rector of a church in Madrid, read an
account of an ancient institution at present existing in Madrid,
known as " The Congregation of Native Priests of St. Peter,"
which is devoted to the relief of poor and sick priests. Since its
foundation the number of such relieved in the hospital established
by the congregation has amounted to two thousand one hundred,
and would have been greater but for the aversion which persons
of good social position have to entering hospital, and also the im-
pression of many that only priests natives of Madrid were assisted.

A learned professor of Barcelona, Senor Donadio, read an

1889.] FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. 221

address, proving by solid arguments from Catholic philosophy
that, " though liberty really exalts man above all other beings on
earth, it does not make him independent of law." The address
was in two parts : in the first the speaker studied and defined
the true conception of individual liberty as against the errors of
positivism and fatalism in all ages of the world ; and in the
second part he treats of the idea of liberty in nations, and refutes
liberalism, in accordance with the teachings of the encyclical
Libertas of Leo XIII.

Senor Butamonte, the principal of a college, discoursed on the
means for rendering effective the rights of fathers of family in
the matter of the education of their children, and for enabling
them to discharge their duty in that regard. The reasoning of
this illustrious professor is irrefutable against the monopoly of
education by the state. He shows the moral havoc caused by
education without religion. "The will of youth," he argued,
" remains untrained ; there is no awakening .in it of a taste and
inclination towards that moral good which it should practise ; the
noble sentiments of the soul, which should constitute its moral
character, fail to develop, and even the tenderest affections,
through want of a fertile soil in which to strike deep root, remain
exposed, to perish by the lightest breath of sensuality."

This sitting ended with a memoir by Senor Marquis del Busto,
on the " Origin, Benefits, and actual Condition of the Congrega-
tion of the Oblate Brothers," for the reformation of young people,
an institution founded by a Benedictine monk, titular Bishop of
Daulia, who not long ago passed away to a better life.

VIII.

The fifth session was held on the 3Oth of April. It com-
menced with an address by Senor Uiliguez, a learned professor of
sciences, having for its purpose to demonstrate the incompatibility
of positivism with science. " Science," he said, " entirely free on
its own ground, must ever remember that there is something
superior to it, something which, far from presenting obstacles to
its development, serves really as a luminous beacon-light." He
next went into a conscientious criticism of the materialist and
positivist schools, severely censuring that scientific humbug called
spontaneous generation. Astronomy, to the study of which he is
devoted, was termed by him the most perfect of sciences, because
founded upon the Newtonian theories of universal gravitation, while
the others, inclusive of optics and thermo-dynamics, are based

222 FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. [Nov.,

only on postulate ; his object being to show thereby how little
solidity has so far been reached by human sciences. He after-
wards took up the famed theory of Laplace, and thought that in
the irresoluble nebular hypothesis claimed by that French savant
to be the origin of the cosmic world the believer can see the
first act of Divine Power. Giving next his attention to the
genesis of our globe, he agrees with Newton that any liquid mass
submitted to a violent rotary motion ultimately adopts the sphe-
rical form. He brought out finally various other arguments, all
of them strong, scientific, and presented in a novel form, in order
to arrive at the conclusion that it is necessary to admit a pri-
mary cause, external to the world, which gave the world birth,
and which, through infinite power and adorable providence, con-
tinues to preserve it.

This splendid address was followed by another, very short but
pleasing and practical, of Senor Valentin Gomez, a dramatic poet
and a Catholic publicist. It embraced a criticism of the modern
stage from a Christian standpoint, and an explanatory statement
of the duties of Catholics in reference to fhe enjoyment of thea-
trical performances. He drew the following conclusions: ist. That
governments should be required to establish a censorship for the
purpose of prohibiting, as far as present precarious legal means
will allow, the performance of such dramatic works as by their
plot, literary form, or the display wherewith they are put on the
stage are injurious to morality. 2d. That Catholic papers should
not advertise or recommend any theatre in which such perform-
ances are given, and that they should zealously and unceasingly
contend against the abominable tendencies of such theatrical litera-
ture, using to that end sensible and conscientious criticisms.

The dean of the faculty of law of the University of Valladolid
next had the floor. He examined, and with great ability, posi-
tivism in its relations to the penal laws. After having narrated
the history of positivism, he attacked the penal anthropological
school as opposed to sound philosophy, and concluded by assert-
ing that if such absurd principles succeeded in getting admittance
into the camp of science, there would be no longer peace for
society nor tranquillity among nations.

This interesting session closed with a learned address of the
well-known geologist, Senor Vilanova, who has taken so large a
part in scientific congresses of Europe. His theme was similar to
that already developed in the third session by Cardinal Gonzales,
but he managed to give it such a new aspect and to render it so
experimental that it was very interesting.

1889.] FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN.

IX.

223

The sixth session opened on the 1st of May. It began with
a learned address from the dignified canon of Valladolid, Senor
Jerreiroa, author of a history of the popes. He chose for his sub-
ject, " The Greatnesses of the Papacy and the Benefits conferred by
it upon the World." His discourse met with deserved applause.

Another professor of the faculty of law in the University of
Madrid, Sefior Torres Aguilar, read an address in which he took
up the same topic before treated by the Marquis de Vadillo, the
rights of the Papacy. This may be considered one of the best
of the many papers read in the congress, in view of the temperance
in tone, energy in arguments, and classical correctness of style.

The learned professor of medicine, Marquis del Busto, followed,
and presented the following thesis : " The human soul is neither
a function of the brain nor of the spinal marrow, and still less a
result of physical and chemical forces, but rather a spiritual and
immortal substance, entirely independent of the body." He began
by stating that he had come to the congress as a Catholic, a
Spaniard, a physician, and a professor, in order to give evidence
of his faith and patriotism, to protest against that opinion which
supposes physicians to be materialists, and also to give his pupils
practical examples of the doctrines he teaches them. These de-
clarations called forth great applause. In the name of medical
science he made a strong attack on materialism ; he dwelt upon
the light shed upon science by the spiritual school, which he
claimed is the only one that can satisfactorily explain the myste-
ries of the brain and the marvels of thought. The novelty of his
reasoning, founded on anatomy and physiology, secured the ad-
miration of his professional colleagues themselves, who were very
numerous in the hall, and brought out enthusiastic applause from
the whole audience.

This session was closed by the Dean of Zamora with the
reading of a learned paper, in which he fully demonstrated that
the church is the real depository of truth, and by divine right
the only infallible teacher.

The seventh session, held on the 2d of May, was of varied
interest. The opening discourse by the deputy to the Cortes,
Senor Sanchez Toca, bore on several questions relative to the
teaching of youth. He ended by demanding the enactment of a
law which would make teaching free in reality.

224 FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. [Nov.,

Amidst thundering applause that wonderful man, Senor
Menendez Pelayo, ascended the tribune. At twenty years of
age he was a marvel of learning; three years later he obtained,
after successful competition, a professorship in the faculty of
letters, and to-day, when in his thirtieth year, he is a member
of all the academies in Madrid and the admiration of the entire
learned world. The subject of his address was the "Theological
and Philosophical Schools of Spain." It ended by an appeal for
the study of Spanish philosophers and theologians. "We may
make use," he said, " of foreign philosophic teachings, but subject
to very prudential control, because our own form an inexhaustible
source for all our needs, and we should make theology the golden
axis around which the whole organism of our knowledge should
revolve." The enthusiasm caused by this speech was wonderful.
It alone would have sufficed to prove the Catholic Congress a success.

The Marquis of Lerna read a very interesting and opportune
paper on the relations of the Catholic Church with all other tem-
poral powers.

The proceedings of the day closed with an essay on religious
music by the illustrious composer and academician, Senor Bar-
bieri. After a brilliant historical excursion through the field of
sacred music, to show the protection which the church has
always granted it, he made an eloquent vindication of the Grego-
rian chant as being the best adapted to the solemn majesty of
divine worship, and he expressed' ardent prayers for the return
of those times when the Spanish cathedrals were real conserva-
tories of music, when the art was professed and taught with
classic severity and without forgetting its glorious traditions, and
when those singing-schools of young men were organized which
were a prolific nursery of famous musicians. He concluded by
saying that the church has been the queen and mistress of
the art of music, and that it should be our care to prevent her
from becoming a slave to bad taste and the profanations prevail-
ing in our day.

XI.

The eighth and last session was a worthy crowning of the
edifice. After the reading by Senor Orti y Lara of a paper on
the necessity of founding a Catholic university, and after another
discourse by a professor of primary instruction upon the impor-
tance of religion in the education of youth, the tribune was
taken by the celebrated orator and ex-minister of the crown,
Senor Pidal y Mon, who delivered an admirable address, in which

1889.] FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. 225

he showed, by most solid and profound arguments obtainable from
philosophy, " the false idea of God entertained by those contem-
poraneous philosophical schools which have separated themselves
from Catholic truth." From this speech also it is impossible to
select extracts. One passage was loudly applauded : "The scien-
tist who has given himself his own diploma of learning pro-
claims from the height of his professorial chair, ' God does not
exist.' This declaration the magistrate listens to with amazement,
and, interpreting it according to his conscience, exclaims, 'There is
no suck thing as justice' ; it reaches the ears of the criminal, who
says to himself, ' There is no such thing as crime ' ; the youth
blessed with family training hears it, and logically concludes that
'There is no such thing as virtue* ; it comes to the knowledge of
the governed, and they think ' There is no such thing as au-
thority ' / the ambitious conqueror meditates on it, and says, ' Let
us seize Rome and despoil the Vicar of Christ ' ; and when the
teaching finds its way down into the depths wrhere misery excites
every instinct of rebellion and concupiscence, 'We don't want to
hear talk about God, nor future life, nor heaven, men cry out ;
"science tells us that these are a dream and a lie. We don't want
them ; what we ask for is hell, nonentity, but . . . with as much
-enjoyment as may be had beforehand.' "

It had been intended to give a popular musical festival on
the 4th of May, but such was the throng seeking admittance
that the gravest fears of accident were entertained, and the fes-
tival was postponed.

On the day following a Mass of thanks was celebrated in the
edral, at which the Archbishop of Valladolid preached, and
with this religious and solemn act the congress, which has filled
the Pope with joy and the Spanish Catholics with legitimate
satisfaction, was closed.

K3n the roth the official organ of the congress published the
lutions finally adopted, an abstract of which is as follows :
1st. The congress resolves first, and before everything else, the
nee of truth in Spain, which is comprised in the social reign
of Jesus Christ. To this end it will work unceasingly to bring
about the re-establishment of Catholic unity in our country; to
fill our lives with the spirit of the church, and to make justice
the rule of our legislation and the unalterable rule of our social life.
2d. This relates to the paramount importance of the temporal
sovereignty of the Pope for insuring his dignity, independence,
and liberty in the government of the Universal Church, and pro-
claims the unanimous vote of the congress that the Roman ques-
VOL. i..— 15

226 FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. [Nov.,

tion, far from being an internal Italian one, is, on the contrary,
one which deeply concerns entire Catholic Christendom.

3d." The congress asserts and maintains the undeniable right of
the church to direct and supervise teaching in all Spanish public
and private institutions of learning, in order to prevent anything
contrary to Catholic dogma and morals from being taught therein,
which right is recognized by the Concordat of 1851 and the
Constitution now in force.

4th. The state being Catholic, is bound to assist and defend
the church in the exercise of the right aforesaid.

5th. The congress considers the rights of the church to suffer
grave prejudice on the part of the state, because of the mono-
poly and secularization of teaching ; of the suppression of moral
and religious instruction in educational institutions, and of making
these branches in normal schools subordinate and accessory ; of
not protecting children attending primary schools from the influ-
ence of teachers who either refuse to teach Christian doctrine, or
actually teach heterodoxy, or who set bad example by manifesta-
tions of impiety and irreligion ; of not enforcing the precepts of
the church in regard to the prohibition of books and teachings
opposed to good morals and sound doctrine, and of permitting
immoral and irreligious books in the libraries of educational insti-
tutions, and to be even distributed as premiums.

6th and /th. The undoubted right and duty of Catholic parents
to instruct their children in conformity with the doctrines of the
Catholic Church ; hence their right to require, as tax-payers, from
the state, which is Catholic, that all official instruction shall be in
every respect Catholic in its character, and that neutral, secular,
or atheistical schools in which anti- Christian doctrines are taught
shall neither be established nor subsidized by any authority,
whether state, provincial, or municipal; this requirement being in
accordance with the existing constitution, which, while it tolerates
personal dissenting worship, does not authorize public education
injurious to religion.

8th. The congress denies, in carefully stated terms, the pos-
sibility of any conflict between religion, and science, points out
the need for the study of the science of metaphysics, and for the
establishment of professorships of logic and psychology, to be con-
ducted in harmony with the spirit of the encyclical ALtcrni Patris.

9th. Urges Spanish artists to keep to the path of pure Spanish
Christian art.

loth. Relates to the establishment of a central council in
Madrid, composed of the bishop of that city as president, and
such other members as he may appoint, which shall have in

1889.] FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF SPAIN. 227

charge to look after the public interests of religion until the next
congress meets, and by agreement with bishops of other dioceses,
to establish ancillary councils therein.

nth. Recommends the establishment of a Catholic daily paper
for the special end of defending Catholic interests.

1 2th. Calls on the charitable faithful not to abate their zeal in
the support of existing charitable institutions, nor in the estab-
lishment of new ones where needed.

1 3th. Implores owners of manufactories to take, as a few of
them do, measures for promoting the spiritual good of the oper-
atives in their employ, and to prevent blasphemy among them,
having recourse if necessary to the provisions of the penal code.

1 4th. Relates to obtaining from the government the enforce-
ment of the observance of Sundays and festivals by punishing
offenders who profane them, to repress the licentiousness of the
irreligious press, and prevent the circulation of shameless pictures
and caricatures.

1 5th. While thanking God for the well-known temperate habits
of Spaniards, the congress believes that the state should do some-
thing for checking the abuse of drink by exercising supervision
over drinking-saloons, seeing that they are closed at a stated hour
of the night, that prohibited games are not carried on therein,
and by stopping all immoral performances and concerts.

1 6th. Expresses fullest sympathy with the charitable purpose
our Holy Father Leo XIII. for the extirpation of slavery, par-
ticularly on the African continent, and hopes that Spain will give
e efforts of Cardinal Lavigerie generous and earnest support.

1 7th. Provides for printing and publishing the addresses and

ers read at the congress, as also the resolutions adopted.

In conclusion, the first Catholic Congress of Spain is declared
adjourned ; thanks are offered to Heaven for the success it has
had ; expressions of gratitude are tendered to the Holy Father
for the encouragement with which it has been favored by him,
d next year is appointed for the meeting of the Second Cath-
c Congress, in the church of El Pilar, at Saragossa.

I have now brought to an end my narrative of the Spanish
Catholic Congress, in which I have left facts to speak for them-
Ives, and have been moderate in comments and praises.

What remains is that the tree which has been so well planted
shall be equally well cultivated. Let us hope that Spain, shaking-
off the indifference to which she has been reduced by the sterile
contests and divisions among her Catholic people, shall regain her
place in the vanguard of the Catholic nations of the world.

Madrid, May 20. MANUEL PEREZ VlLLAMIL.

for

C;
sr

_j:

228 MY PURITAN. [Nov.,

MY PURITAN.

MY Puritan, I love thee well ;

Our souls are near akin,
Far closer knit than words can tell,

For love is most within.
Thou art not of that sturdy race
Who dared the seas and turned their face

A sterile soil to win ;
Their pains and courage I admire,
But thou hast set my heart on fire.

I scarce had thought that love would e'er
Spring in my soul and flower,

And least of all was I aware

Twould hold me with such power.

And yet I'd cast it from my heart,

And bid my Puritan depart,

In that same day and hour

Wherein I found my hopes deceived —

His worth not that I had believed.

What is it that has wrung from me

The tribute of my love ?
What but that fine nobility

That lifts and keeps above
The crowds that surge, and sway, and pass,
An unaspiring, heedless mass?

Tis this in thee I love;
Tis this that makes thee more the man,
For this I call thee Puritan.

The chains of earth enthrall thee not,

A rare, pure soul is thine,
Whose destiny is ne'er forgot —

That it should be divine,
And scorn to throw its love away
On flowers that blossom for a day

And die with day's decline.
Thy bosom Truth and Strength possess,
And Peace gives thee His blest caress.

1889.] A CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA. 229

A CENTURY -OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA.

So frequently do we hear of the undue favoritism to the
Catholic Church in this country many people have come to be-
lieve that here at least it is, and ever has been, the pampered
child of a dotingly paternal government. They imagine that at
the conquest the church of Quebec, the mother-ciiurch of Canada,
well nurtured by France, passed under the civil jurisdiction of
England robustly developed and hedged about by invulnerable
treaty stipulations, which have invariably been most liberally con-
strued. Such, however, is not the case. Even under the French
regime the church was not altogether untrammelled. The evil in-
fluence of Madame Pompadour was not confined to France. We
read that the "system of vexatious trickery organized against the
church and the people of the country by some of the chief and
subordinate officials sent out by the court of Louis XV." * was
such that Bishop Briand, the incumbent of the see of Quebec at
the date of capitulation, did not weep over the result, as he, in
the words of Mgr. Plessis, " perceived that religion herself would
gain by the change of domination."

But the effect of treaties, like that of statutes, depends very
uch on the interpretation ; and the nature of the interpretation
contingent upon the predisposition of those in authority. The
proximate consequences of the change scarcely justified Mgr.
Hand's expectations, though the ultimate result, no doubt, has
en in accord with his hope. The treaty of 1763 provided for
e free exercise of the Catholic religion in Canada in so far as
compatible with the laws of Great Britain. That was not
ry far. The proviso gave a dangerous latitude to those charged
ith the conduct of public affairs in the new colony ; and in the
rly days they were, as Governor Murray said, " a most immoral
collection of men " — men who had come to lord it over the con-
uered, and who were not at all disposed to put a liberal con-
uction upon the provisions of the treaty. The Imperial Act
of 1774 subjected the church in Canada to the royal supremacy
and handed it over to the tender mercies of those men, whose
great desire was to make the church a creature of the state and
the colony Protestant. The American Revolution cooled their
ardor. During the war, and for some time after, the Catholic

* Life of Bishop Plessis, by Abbd Ferland.

230 A CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA. [Nov.,

bishop and priests were allowed to exercise their functions in
comparative peace. In 1799, however, renewed efforts were made
by the colonial' authorities to destroy the authority of the bishop,
to control the appointment of parish priests, and to get the schools
into their hands. From the time of the conquest the primary
schools were mainly supported by the Jesuit endowments, but in

1800 the government seized the property of the society, and thus
closed the schools. Much of what was taken from the schools
went, as Catholic ecclesiastical property had gone before, to the
maintenance of Protestant worship. A great effort was made to
get possession of the estates of the Society of St. Sulpice for the
purpose of founding an educational institution. Then, as now,
it was clearly perceived that the most effectual way of undermin-
ing the faith of the people was by controlling the schools. In

1 80 1 a law for the encouragement of public instruction was promul-
gated with a flourish of trumpets and many protestations of a
righteous desire to promote the welfare of the people by supply-
ing more efficient schools than those the church had established
and the state had closed. By this law was created what might be
called a board of education, consisting chiefly of Protestants, with
the Anglican bishop as president. The Protestants at that time
were two and one-half per centum of the population. The follow-
ing extract from a letter* written by an official of the colonial
government gives a good idea of the spirit which actuated the ad-
ministration :

"I have long since laid it down as a principle (which in my judgment no
governor of this province ought to lose sight of for a moment), by every possible
means which prudence can suggest, gradually to undermine the authority and
influence of the Roman Catholic priests. This great, this highest object that a
governor can have . . . may be accomplished before ten years shall have passed
over. . . . The instructions of his Majesty, by which it is ordered that no per-
son in this province shall have the cure of souls but by virtue of a license under
the governor's hand and seal, . . . once followed up, the king's supremacy
would be established, the authority of the Pope would be abolished, and the
country would become Protestant.

"We have been mad enough to allow a company of French rascals to de-
prive us for the moment of the means of accomplishing all this, but one prudent,
decisive step might rectify this absurdity. In all events I would advise every
governor of this province most scrupulously to follow the same line of conduct
which has established so widely the authority of the Pope of Rome, to avail
themselves of every advantage that can possibly occur, and never to give up an
inch but with the certainty of gaining an ell."

This gentleman in his communication used the term "popish
clergy," and, as an apology for the employment of the not very

* Letter of Mr. Ryland, 23d December, 1804. — Christie's History of Lower Canada, vol. vi.

1889.] A CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA. 231

classical adjective, he wrote : "I call them popish to distinguish
them from the clergy of the Established Church, and to express
my contempt and detestation of a religion which sinks and debases
the human mind and which is a curse to every country where it
prevails."

At an anterior date the Anglican bishop, Dr. Mountain, who
had been given the mitre in England and despatched to Canada
as Bishop of Quebec, chagrined at the comparative failure of the
efforts to annihilate the church of the people, wrote thus to Lord
Hobart, the colonial secretary, at London : " While the superin-
tendent of the Roman Church assumes the title of Bishop of
Quebec, he, as well as his clergy, studiously denies that title to
the Protestant bishop ; he has the absolute disposal of all the
preferments in the diocese ; he erects parishes and grants dispen-
sations for marrying at his discretion, etc., etc.; all of which
functions are clearly contrary to the royal instructions, and all
of which are denied to the Protestant bishop."

Such was the animus of the governing authorities when Mgr.
Plessis became Bishop of Quebec ; and it would be impossible to
give a better picture of the condition of the church at that time
than is conveyed in this extract from a letter addressed by the
bishop to a friend in London in 1806: " Examine the map and
you will perceive the impossibility of a single bishop extending
his solicitude with any success from Lake Superior to the Gulf
of St. Lawrence. That space contains more than 200,000 Catho-
and yet there are only 180 priests to supply all their wants,
idd to that their numerous difficulties from their entanglement
dth a Protestant population, and the constant vigilance necessary
avoid being compromised with a government which views
tings only through the medium of its own principles and is con-
itly making some new effort to establish the supremacy of the
mg."

In 1807 the good bishop, weary with constant conflict and
iscouraged by what seemed insurmountable obstacles to the suc-
>s of his work, acknowledged to a friend that human resources
tiled him, and that he scarcely hoped for any amelioration
rom appealing to the treaty stipulations. The colonial office in
-ngland was being urged to inaugurate a vigorous anti-papal
)licy ; and Dr. Mountain himself repaired to London, and in
lany conferences with the ministers pressed that the grievances
)f which he complained in his letter to Lord Hobart might be
removed, and that he might be made in Canada monarch, as to
things ecclesiastical, of all he surveyed. Help came from a quar-

232 A CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA. [Nov.,

ter whence it was least expected. Lord Castlereagh, in a memo-
randum on the situation in Canada, gave it as his opinion that
the law secured to Canadian Catholics the free exercise of their
religion, and to their clergy their accustomed dues and rights,
subject to the royal supremacy ; that as the Bishop of Quebec,
who was not a foreigner, was the head of the church in Can-
ada, his jurisdiction was not opposed to the Act of Supremacy,
and that it would be a very delicate undertaking , to interfere
with the Catholic religion in Canada. It need hardly be said
that it was no sense of justice which impelled this noble lord
not to apply his Irish formula in the New World. The storm
brewing at Washington dictated his course. But even this did not
effect a truce. The conflict continued. Governor Craig, who ar-
rived in 1807, placed himself in the hands of his advisers — men
who had come to Canada to make an Ireland of Quebec ; and
the opposition to the church continued. Owing to the exigencies
of the times, however, the plan of attack was somewhat modified,
or, rather, a more insidious scheme was adopted. The govern- .
ment was prepared to fully recognize the episcopal authority of
the Catholic bishop, to confirm him in his see by commission
from the king, and even to secure him a revenue, if the gov-
ernment were accorded the privilege of nominating the parish
priests, which privilege, it was believed, "would insensibly oper-
ate in effectually undermining the people's religious faith."

Writing in 1811, Bishop Plessis gave the following account of
a conference had with Sir James Craig : " Yesterday I had a con-
versation with his excellency the governor, which lasted one
hour and three-quarters, in which he exhausted himself, and me
also, in speaking, without our being able to fall into accord upon
the only point that was agitated, to wit : the nomination to
cures. He viewed it obstinately as a civil affair, and as a pre-
rogative of the crown which it would never abandon."

The war of 1812, like the War of Independence, acted as a
sedative, of a mild and transient kind, to the anti-Catholicism of
the colonial officials. After the Revolution Sir Guy Carleton de-
clared that the Catholic priests preserved the Province of Quebec
to the crown. In the interval of peace the clergy were attacked
and their loyalty questioned. In 1813 an official despatch was
transmitted to the governor of Quebec, informing him that "his
Royal Highness, the prince regent, in the name of his Majesty,"
desired that one thousand pounds should thereafter be the allow-
ance of the Catholic Bishop of Quebec, " as a testimony rendered
to the loyalty and good conduct of the gentleman ... as well

1889]

A CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA.

233

as of the other members of the Catholic clergy of the province."
Still there was a little lump of the old leaven left.

It had been for many years the desire of the Bishop of Quebec
to have his vast diocese subdivided. The church, which in the
earlier days could easily be ruled by one ordinary and a co-
adjutor, had grown with the country. One can now scarcely
realize how Bishop Plessis, who had to be ever on the alert to
defend his church from the premeditated assaults of the civil au-
thorities, who was striving to develop two or three small semi-
naries for the training of much-needed priests, and endeavoring
to supply the wants of scattered and very differently circum-
stanced missions from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the
great lakes to the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, could
undertake a journey to distant Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton,
and the Magdalens, visiting en route the scattered settlements of
Acadians, and then making his way as best he could to the faith-
ful who were grouped at different points in the virgin forest of
Upper Canada. No wonder he sought relief. When the crozier
was placed in his hand he braced himself for unremitting toil, for
trials and tribulations. But the burden was more than one man
could bear. The zealous pastor bent beneath it and cried for
help. Rome was prepared, but another power had to be con-
sulted. In those days it was absolutely necessary to obtain the
consent of the civil authorities to the erection of new sees ; and,
although after years of useless struggling they were compelled by
circumstances to recognize the Ordinary of Quebec, they seemed
determined to have no more Catholic bishops, at least with native
titles, in the British half of the continent. In 1817 the Bishop of
Quebec was relieved of the charge of Nova Scotia, which was
made an apostolic vicariate and confided to the care of the Rev.
Edmund Burke, who had long labored there as a missionary.
This, however, was scarce a perceptible lightening of Mgr. Plessis'
charge. He wished to have Canada divided into five dioceses :
two in Lower Canada, with their centres at Quebec and Mont-
real ; another to comprise the Maritime Provinces, a fourth to in-
clude Upper Canada, and the fifth to extend over the Hudson's
Bay country and away across the Rockies to where the waves
of the Pacific lap our western shore. This plan was in part sug-
gested, and in its entirety concurred in, by the Propaganda ; and,
in order to secure the concurrence of the civil power, Bishop
Plessis journeyed to England in 1819. Just after his departure
bulls arrived from Rome elevating Quebec to the dignity of a
metropolitan see, naming Mgr. Plessis its first archbishop, and

234 A CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA. [Nov.,

giving him, in addition to the vicariate of Nova Scotia, two suf-
fragan bishops, one for Upper Canada, the other for Prince Edward
Island, New Brunswick, and the Magdalens. But, as Bishop Plessis
feared, this had only the effect of strengthening the opposition to
his plan. On no account would the government assent to his
assuming the title of archbishop ; nor would they agree to the
creation of any new sees. After much negotiating he succeeded
in obtaining the acquiescence of the powers that were in the
establishment of apostolic vicariates and in the appointment of
bishops in partibus infidelium. It was explicitly stipulated, how-
ever, that these titular bishops were not to have independent,
jurisdiction, but were merely to be auxiliaries to the Bishop of
Quebec, who alone was to have a legal status. Vicariates were
accordingly formed, and the men who had been fixed upon to
rule over the desired dioceses were consecrated.

The Reverend Jean Jacques Lartigue, a Sulpitian priest, was
placed over the district of Montreal, which then contained 189,119
Catholics of, with few exceptions, French origin.

The presence of Irish Catholics was discovered only a short
time previously. A priest was summoned to attend a dying
stranger, and the stranger was found to be an Irishman. The
priest learned that there were compatriots of the dying man
in the neighborhood, and invited them to his church. On the
following Sunday, in the sacristy of the old Bonsecours' church,
thirty Irish exiles met and had the Gospel preached to them for
the first time since they had crossed the sea. There were only a
few Irish Catholics in Canada at that time, and they came then
and afterwards, to different points, under circumstances which so
militated against their success that their prosperity cannot but be
marvelled at. The first Irish families who arrived at Quebec were
so destitute that had it not been for the kind interposition of
Bishop Plessis, who placed them with French farmers and well-to-
do towns-people, they would have reached the land of promise
only to find paupers' graves in its frozen ground. A sad story
indeed is the story of Irish emigration.

Over most of the country south of the Ottawa spread " the
forest primeval " when the nineteenth century broke upon the
world. What is now Ontario was then in the main a wilderness.
Among the United Empire Loyalists who migrated there when
the thirteen colonies cut loose from Britain were some Scotch
Catholics. These were augmented by a colony of a disbanded regi-
ment of Highlanders, led in 1803 from the old country by the
Rev. Alexander Macdonell. Both contingents were given land,

1889.] A CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA. 235

and grants were also made by the government for churches
and schools in recognition of the loyalty of the colonists and their
pastor, and with the object, no doubt, of strengthening that feel-
ing, so that the crown might have devoted subjects on the border
of the young Republic. The first Irish settlers arrived in Upper
Canada in 1823. They were not very hospitably received. Ap-
plication was even made for a military force to drive them out,
or to guard the loyal inhabitants ; and so exercised were the
home authorities by the reports which the loyalists sent them
concerning the " riotous and mutinous " Hibernians, that Father
Macdonell, who was then in England, was requested to hasten
back to Canada to do something with the wild Irtish. He assured
them there was no cause for fear, and offered to pledge his life
for the good conduct of the abused refugees. " Put that in writ-
ing," said the Under Secretary for the Colonies. And the bond
was signed.*

When Father Macdonell, who was given charge of the
vicariate of Upper Canada, came to the country there were
only two or three small places of worship f and a couple of
priests — one a Frenchman, without any knowledge of English ;
the other an Irishman, who left the country shortly afterwards.
For years the apostolic Macdonell had no fellow-laborers, and had
to travel in the exercise of his holy office, often with his vest-
ments on his back, over seven hundred miles of a country with-
out roads or bridges.

In 1821 the Rev. ^Eneas Bernard McEachern was consecrated,
and to him was confided the care of the church in the Maritime
Provinces, the Vicar-Apostolic of Nova Scotia having died two
years previously. A biography o{ this missionary prelate would
make interesting and edifying reading. His life, however, like the
lives of many of the pioneers of the faith in our country, has yet
to be written. But what at best can one write of a missionary
priest but the mere outlines of his career? Only he who has in
perils on land, on river, and on sea preached the Word and
administered the Sacraments can fill in between the lines the story
of such a life. When Father McEachern arrived in Prince Ed-
ward Island in 1790 there were no churches, no schools, no
material resources, few Catholics, poor and scattered, and difficul-
ties innumerable. The other provinces over which he was after-
wards called to exercise episcopal jurisdiction presented a some-

* Reminiscences of the late Hon. and Rt. Rev. Alexander Macdonell.

t In the Reminiscences of Bishop Macdonell we are told, in one chapter, that there were
three churches; in another chapter the bishop is reported to have said that on his arrival he
found no churches.

236 A CENTUXY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA. [Nov.,

what similar spectacle. There were a few Scotch settlers, here
and there a poor Irish emigrant, and along the shores hamlets
of Acadians, who,

" Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October

Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean,"

drifted back to their dear Acadia.

But of all the ecclesiastical districts into which the old diocese
of Quebec was then divided the most uninviting was that con-
terminous with the country extending from what was at that time
called Canada to the Pacific, and from the northern boundary of
the Republic to ihe frozen islands of the Arctic. There roamed
the red men, and with them some venturesome Canadians who
traded with the Indians for furs. Many of these voyageurs mar-
ried Indian women and settled along the Red River. Father
Provencher, who, with Father Dumoulin, was sent to this mission
in 1818, was selected for the charge of the vicariate.

In 1824 Joseph Octave Plessis, the last bishop who alone
ruled over the whole of Canada, passed to his reward. He lived
in the seed-time, and labored faithfully and well. What a trans-
formation has since taken place ! " Lift up thine eyes round about
and see." " The flowers have appeared in our land . . . the
fig-tree hath put forth her green figs, the vines in flower yield
their sweet smell." With the development of the country and the
growth of civil liberty, the church expanded and threw, off the
incubus of state interference. Before a decade of years elapsed
the titular bishops took native sees; and, in 1844, the Ordinary
of Quebec publicly assumed the title of archbishop. Now a car-
dinal sits in the chair of Laval, and with him six other archbishops,
sixteen bishops, and two vicars-apostolic guard the spiritual in-
terests of over two millions of Catholics in this Dominion ; and the
sacrifice foretold by Malachi is offered by two thousand three hun-
dred priests. An army of religious go about doing good. Cathe-
drals and churches, flanked by colleges and schools, dot the land ;
and

" The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless,
Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers."

The people, too, have prospered. There are no more con-
tented and comfortable husbandmen than the descendants of the
old colonists who till the soil. Many of the offspring of poor
emigrants have in the different walks of life attained positions of
wealth, influence, and eminence. Two gubernatorial chairs are

1889.] A CENTUXY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA. 237

filled by Catholics.* Three provinces have Catholic prime minis-
ters. In the parliaments of the nation Catholics occupy promi-
nent places, and six out of the fourteen members of the Domin-
ion cabinet are Catholics.

A most marvellous example of rapid development is furnished
by Quebec. A colony whose population at the date of the con-
quest is estimated to have been not more than sixty thousand, f
a colony of Frenchmen having to struggle for existence and for
faith against powerful and alien rulers, and depending for exten-
sion almost entirely on self-increase, has grown in Quebec alone
to nearly a million and a half,! besides extending its ramifications
into Ontario and the New England States. Counting all, the
posterity of the sixty thousand now outnumber two millions. A
cardinal wearing the pallium occupies the primatial see. The
little seminary of long ago has developed into a great university
with branches in Montreal, where presides another archbishop.
Six bishops and a vicar-apostolic watch over the flock in other
parts of the province. Over fifteen hundred priests dispense the
mysteries in one thousand temples, and teach in university, semi-
naries, and colleges. Of the latter and last there are twenty-one,
with over half a hundred commercial and classical academies, and
two hundred and fifty convents, in connection with the great
majority of which boarding and day schools are conducted.* There
are in addition to these, three thousand five hundred state-sup-
ported religious schools, thirty-seven hospitals, and seventeen
asylums. Thirteen communities of women and twelve of men
devote themselves mainly to teaching and active charity.

It is the fashion with some people to say that Quebec is priest-
ridden and crushed by clerical imposts ; and what has been
written may seem to them but proof of what they assert. Mr.
Edward Farrer, the present editor-in-chief of the Toronto' Mail, an
ultra- Protestant journal, effectually disposed of such nonsense in a
paper contributed a few years ago to the Atlantic Monthly.
He wrote : " The habitant is not crushed by clerical imposts.
. . . As a class the Canadian priests are men of much merit.
Their parishes in very many cases are as large as an English
county, and their work, especially in the winter-time, involves not
only arduous toil but no small peril. The history of the priest-
hood is the history of the country."

* The term of a third Catholic governor expired a few weeks ago.

t Garneau's History of Canada.

fin 1881 the Catholic population of Quebec numbered 1,170,718, a proportion of 861.4
per thousand of the total population 01 that province, and an increase of fifteen per cent, in
ten years.

238 A CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN CANADA. [Nov.,

In Ontario, where Bishop Macdonell in the first years of the
century labored almost unaided, three archbishops, four bishops,
and one vicar-apostolic,* assisted by four hundred priests, watch
over a flock numbering three hundred and seventy-five thousand.!
In the centres of population cathedral crosses point aloft to heaven,
and the province which boasts of its Protestantism is jewelled with
more than five hundred Catholic fanes. There are a university,
three colleges, thirty-seven academies, and two hundred and
twenty-nine state-supported parochial schools. The sick are cared
for in nine hospitals, and orphaned youth and destitute old age
find refuge in seventeen asylums. Different communities of reli-
gious teach and tend the poor and sick, while from more than
one convent of cloistered nuns ascend perpetual prayer and
praise.

Less than one hundred years ago there were in the Maritime
Provinces only a few humble chapels like that in the storied vil-
lage of Grand-Pre, " on the shores of the Basin of Minas " ; now
there are almost four hundred sanctuaries, wherein every one that
asks receives, and he who seeks finds. An archbishop, four
bishops, and two hundred and forty priests have the cure of over
three hundred thousand souls. f For the education of boys there
are four colleges, one conducted by the Fathers of the Holy
Cross, and an academy directed by the Christian Brothers ; and
four different sisterhoods have charge of forty boarding-schools for
girls. A non-religious school system is by law established in the
Maritime Provinces, but, notwithstanding this, there are many
Catholic schools, especially for girls, maintained without any assis-
tance from the state, except in Halifax, where schools under .the
direction of religious are supported by the government as the
result of a compromise.

The northwestern vicariate of former days is now an ecclesi-
astical province, embracing Manitoba, British Columbia, and the
intervening territories. The Catholics of these regions are only
about one-fifth of the population. They numbered in British
Columbia, in 1881, 10,043, and in Manitoba and the Northwest
Territories, in 1885, 23,952. These are ministered to by an arch-
bishop, two bishops, two vicars-apostolic, and one hundred and
fifty priests. The Jesuits conduct a theological seminary and col-
lege at Winnipeg, Manitoba; and in British Columbia there are
two colleges directed by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Four

* One archdiocese and the vicariate extend into Quebec.

tThe Catholic population in 1881 was 320,839, an increase in ten years of over seventeen
per cent.

Jin 1881 the Catholics numbered 273,693, an increase of fifteen per cent, in ten years.

1889.] OUR CEN TEN A RY : A GLA NCE INTO THE PUT URE. 239

sisterhoods manage a score of academies for girls, and there are
several Indian industrial schools under the supervision of religious.
There are five hospitals and seven asylums. In Manitoba and the
territories the school system is denominational, and the different
parishes have their schools. A similar system does not obtain in
British Columbia ; still a few Catholic schools are in operation in
that province.

Catholic progress in this country may not be as striking as
that in the United States ; yet in Canada the Catholic population
has in this century been blessed with a ten-fold increase, and
the church, like "a tree which is planted near the running
waters," has taken deep root, and its branches have spread over
all the land. J. A. J. McKENNA.

Ottawa, Ont.

OUR CENTENARY: A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE.

A HUNDRED years have passed since the Catholic people of
the United States received their ecclesiastical organization by the
elevation of John Carroll to the episcopate. Forty or fifty thou-
sand Catholics, for the most part of the honored stock of the
Pilgrims of the Ark and Dove, welcomed their first prelate to their
hearts ; they had long loved him as the foremost priest among
them, and as the most conspicuous clergyman of any denomi-
nation in aiding the founders of the Republic to expel the British
forces from the country. The clergy were about a score in num-
ber, excellent priests, belonging for the most part to the Society
of Jesus, then lately suppressed. A hundred years have passed,
and with the immense increase of the nation the Catholic Church
has more than kept pace. The best blood of every Catholic
people has been poured into the national life, till we number up-
wards of ten millions of souls, have eighty-four bishops to represent
to us the mild rule of the Catholic Apostolic hierarchy, and our
altars are served by more than eight thousand priests, that society
alone to which our first bishop belonged now numbering in the
neighborhood of seven hundred members among us, flourishing
in the second youth to which it was restored before his death.

We have an ample equipment of colleges, a good beginning
of primary Christian education, more than an abundance of female
academies. Best of all, we have a University in the city of Wash-
ington, founded by the spontaneous will of the people and priest-

240 OUR CENTENARY : A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE. [Nov.,

hood, the jubilant proclamation of the Vicar of Christ, and happily
controlled by the energy and wisdom of the episcopate.

The charities of the Catholic people of America are in a most
flourishing condition, standing easily first among all our works
, in financial prosperity, in fulness of success, and in the good will
of all classes and creeds in the community.

Meantime the church and her people are in good repute
among their fellow-citizens. Barring the vice of drunkenness
and the evil of saloon-keeping, there is little to be said against
the citizenship of Catholics, and these defects are odious to the
great body of the Catholics, and must and shall be remedied.
Our open enemies are a small number of bigots whose course is
a regret to the body of non- Catholics generally. It is true that
on the question of Christian schools we stand before the Ameri-
can people with a grievance. But our cause is righteous and we
are able to prove it ; our tribunal is just, and we cannot doubt
an equitable decision.

It is the purpose of this article to cast a glance into the
future and to endeavor to penetrate the very inner chambers of
the temple. We wish to consider what should be the spiritual traits
of American Catholics, for upon the spiritual life will depend the
whole external order of things.

The distinguishing trait of Catholicity here or elsewhere must
be a quality of the interior life of man, for religion is primarily
interior. A religion which fulfils the idea involved in the very
name is only at its best development in the order that is spiritual.
The main purpose of religion is not to enroll members but to
sanctify individuals. It needs organization ; but, having organiza-
tion, it may yet fail of its purpose, which is, indeed, with the
many and with all, but with the many and with all taken one
by one as well as all together. It is a delusion to fix the suc-
cess of religious effort upon the glory of its outer aspect. Men
may adhere together as religious bodies from principles of cohe-
sion which are but partly spiritual; as a matter of fact, they are
largely due to traditions of race and family. Thes.e could not
originally establish a form of religion among intelligent men and
women or maintain it in existence long.

The strongest bonds of Catholicity lie altogether deeper than
what is shown by census tables or by perfection of ecclesiastical
polity. These last may give a deceptive appearance, but a people
full of the Holy Spirit must show many signs of truth besides
unity and good public order. Holiness is a note of the truth,
and in these days, perhaps, a more necessary one than any of

1889.] OUR CENTENARY : A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE. 241

the others. Men may cling together and tlreir religious societies
resist the solvents of time for a few generations because they are
joined by the cement of blood in race-kindred, but the bond of
the Spirit is the only eternal bond.

Now, this new nation gives no bond of race-heredity; nay, it
is a powerful solvent of those brought from the Old World. Cath-
olicity finds in America principles of public conduct in the polit-
ical order consonant with its fundamental truths ; but it cannot have
aids that are governmental, national, or racial in. America as it has
had them in Europe. The only enduring life of Catholicity in
America must be sincerity of conviction in its individual members
maturely and intelligently assimilated, together with consistent and
courageous Christian behavior.

The Catholic Church among us cannot fail from want of an
efficient organization, for it has a perfect one, a divine one. Nor
can it fail from feebleness of manhood, for the Irish and the Ger-
man races, from which its membership is chiefly made up, what-
ever they may be accused of, are not accused of being effete ;
feebleness of character is not a trait of the Teuton and the Celt.
Nor, again, can we fail because we lack numbers. As already
said, our numbers are far over ten millions, and these are well dis-
tributed ; enough, surely, not only to hold our own but, having
the ever-progressive element of truth, to leaven the whole Amer-
ican lump. Under any circumstances, we are not likely to break
up and fail soon. But in a future not too distant to speculate
>n we may fail from want of religion properly so-called — that is
say, the want of cultivation of the interior life rooted in intel-
ent conviction of the truths of faith and bearing fruit in super-
itural love of God and our fellow-men.

Organization may be retained and the census table be yet
lore enlarged, but the one will be an effigy and the other a false
^itness if a very large proportion of the members of the church
ire not earnestly seeking one by one to be entirely conformed to
le divine ideal. A prominent divine of the Anglican Church,
Canon Westcott, said in one of his recently published lectures that
religion that is divine must do two things : it must give man an
ideal, and it must provide him with the means of realizing it in
lis own proper person. We add that the ideal should be super-
latural and divine. To equal the highest human ideal is, in a
fay, to equal only one's self. Now, the moment an individual
Christian loses sight of Christ as his own proper personal ideal, as
something to be assimilated and put on, to be absorbed into and
identified with himself, he may indeed go on externally using the

VOL L.— l6

242 OUR CENTENARY : A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE. [Nov.,

means of realizing his destiny, but the inevitable tendency is to drop
them also and drop everything positively religious, whether sudden-
ly or little by little. The reader has doubtless known cases of both
kinds, men who have stopped church-going of a sudden, and
others who have dropped away gradually. But the cause of all
failure in religion has ever been the same : men turning away
from God in the interior of the soul.

Let us not be misunderstood. Organization is needful, and in
the Catholic Church is divine. It is of essential necessity for the
interior spirit itself, fosters it, informs it with that brotherhood
which gives it its necessary note of universality. But it is a
means to an end. The primary end of religion is not the integ-
rity of the Church as an outward society, but it is the interior
union of its members with God in a state to which they attain
by means far above the natural. This union is, taking mankind
and the ages of the world together, conditioned upon the exist-
ence of the external society founded by Christ and called the
church ; so much is undeniable. But one must make a distinc-
tion between that which conditions and that which is conditioned,
between the means and the end. Furthermore, the church organ-
ization is more in need of the interior integrity of the Christian
life than that life is in need of valid organization in the external
order ; of course we speak in a sense apart from the divine aids
of religion in the sacraments. The organization will decay more
rapidly from the decay of the interior spirit in the people than
that interior spirit will suffer from a break-up in the external
order of religion, a misfortune which, among an intelligent and«
well-meaning people, cannot last long. Such a condition of things
can raise up saints to repair and to rebuild the tottering house of
God. The authority of the church can do many things, but it
cannot by itself create saints. The saint is the product of forces
which are interior, however truly such forces are communicated
by the very act of the worthy reception of the sacraments. The
same is true of widespread movements of men which have made
the great eras of Christendom, such as the Benedictine movement,
the mendicant, and the Jesuit. The inner force is the greater
force of Christendom. Let us not forget this while maintaining
the divinity of the outer order and pointing out its evident neces-
sity. It is not a Catholic principle that the ecclesiastical order
exists for its own sake.

So that we must trust to the interior life among Catholics for
the permanence of Catholicity in America. There must be a wide-
spread impulse towards the ascetical and mystical principles and

1889.] OUR CENTENARY : A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE. 243

>ractices which bring men's souls into union with God. Maintain
the dignity of office, but do not suppose that success in such
things is the measure of the success of our religion. Maintain
proper and uniform discipline among the people, but be not de-
rived ; conformity is not the supreme virtue, and discipline is
not the perfect fruit. What is supreme and perfect in religion
is interior union with God. The end of religion is, by the grace of
Christ, to raise human nature above itself into a state of super-
natural union with the divine nature, giving man a participation
through Christ in the nature of God. Now, the fruit and the
joy and the substance of this is mainly interior, and forms a
new life hidden from the gaze of human vision.

What has thus far been said is plainly enough true, yet needed
to be said. It is always necessary to be on one's guard against
in excess of esprit du corps. It is a good sentiment, but apt to
degenerate into boastfulness and over-confidence in appearances ;
ind this is especially true in America. One way of celebrating
>ur centenary is to count our numbers ; nor is this altogether
vain, for the Catholic citizens of the great Republic are numerous,
and the church is powerful here. Nor, taking us asv a body, can
it be said that we are not good Catholics as far, at least, as out-
ward use of the forms of religion is concerned. Various tests may

applied successfully, such as attendance at divine service, out-
spoken loyalty, generosity, obedience. But a most important
question is, do not these exist among us in a great degree from
race traits inherent in our parents and ourselves, and which come
from the Old World ? How will it be in a couple of generations
lore ? When our people have become Americans, as purely such

are now the descendants of the original colonists, what sort

Catholics will they be ? Will the American Catholics of the
lext century be good ones ?

It is certain that we cannot count on the continuance of race
traits of character after the race has been changed in the course of
successive generations. We must fall back on the interior spirit of
Catholicity ; that is the first plain fact. The second is that we must
seek aid, if we can get it, from the national traits of Americans.

We are good Catholics at this centenary largely because our
religion is held in an environment of qualities which are tradi-
tional to foreign peoples. Race traits of some sort must be had ;
religion is not in the abstract. But future generations of Catho-
lics in this country must get these quasi-religious environments at
home. The Catholic religion, in itself universal, must actually exist
in epochs, races, forms of government, social systems ; and these

244 OUR CENTENARY : A &LANCE INTO THE FUTURE. [Nov.,

make, not an essential difference indeed, yet, nevertheless, a real
one. The light of the sun is everywhere the same, but there is a
difference in it when reflected from the ruby, the diamond, and
the emerald. On one side of a prism the light is colorless, but
when it has passed -through it is broken into various tints. This
illustrates the unity and variety of the true religion ; it can be
one and yet various. Universality is not only strong but it is
elastic. It not only binds diverse elements together, but it does
so by such a pliant adjustment as to avoid crushing, or even chaf-
ing, innocent sensibilities ; nay, it uses every good trait and ele-
vates it into something better without wrenching it from its own
native place. Catholicity is one in every race, yet its homes have
a difference.

We know that essentially a Catholic is the same here and in the
Old World, for his religion is one and universal. But there is an
evident difference in the religious traits of, for example, Irish,
French, and Italian Catholics, though there is but one Catholicity
among them all. The Irishman is by nature a clansman, and that
is a chief reason why his conspicuous religious trait is loyalty or
fidelity. The Irishman's faith is his natural tendency to loyalty
and fidelity enlightened and consecrated and made supernatural ; it
is world- renowned for steadfastness. On the other hand, the
Frenchman is noted for a naturally enthusiastic temperament —
the perfervidum ingenium Gallorum is a proverb. Hence in
religion his peculiar characteristic is the heroic. Zeal is his
trait as a Christian, as is enthusiasm as a man, and that is
why no nation of modern times compares with the French
as missionaries to the heathen. The Italian differs most plainly
from both the Irishman and the Frenchman. He is endowed with
the gift of interpreting nature in a divine sense ; and all nature and
art become to him means of symbolizing to eye and ear the
truths of revelation. The Italians are supreme in religious sym-
bolism, which is certainly one of the most potent forces of life.
Italy, itself a vast gallery of the masterpieces of natural scenery,
is the studio of the divinest expression of religious truth. It is
true that the Irishman is far from being without zeal or without
symbolism ; the Frenchman partakes of much that both the Irish-
man and the Italian have for their peculiar gifts. All I say is
that each has something which is Catholic and which is yet
peculiarly his own. We might pursue these illustrations and
comparisons further, and discuss, in addition, the religious traits
of the Germans, the Sclavonians, and others. But enough has
been said — if, indeed, it were necessary to say anything — to

tha
ace

•

1889.] OUR CENTENARY: A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE. 245

make palpable the fact that nations and races, differing in natural
characteristics, must differ, and do, in their assimilation of revealed
truth. To be a Catholic is by no means exactly the same thing
for an Irishman and a Frenchman and an Italian, for a German
and a Spaniard ; yet they are all members of the same religion,
each in a way differing from the others. The difference is found
in the diversity of natural traits.

Agreement in the bare articles of faith and unity in one exter-
nal organism do not secure a uniformity so exacting as to elimi-
nate race differences in religion. Quid quid recipitur, say the
scholastics, secundum modum recipientis recipitiir ; which may be
interpreted thus : As men differ from each other, so does the
truth differently affect them.

At the present moment the Catholic people of America are
divided into parishes very much in view of the race traits of the
Old World, and are ministered to, as far as possible — and that is
pretty fully — by priests selected accordingly. The priest who
succeeds best with the Irish congregation has a strong flavor of
the " Soggarth Aroon" He is the chief of their religious clan.
Fidelity to him, personal and affectionate, has much to do with
their fidelity to the church and with their Catholicity. But in a
generation or two the Soggarth Aroon will be a poetical legend ;
yes, even now there are many parishes, whose people are of Irish
ck and good Catholics, and yet in which great harm could be
ne by placing them in charge of even the best priest who would
How the old Irish policy of dealing with the people. What
oes this show ? Does it show the stupidity of the religious traits

the more Irish parish, or the decadence of religion among
Irish-Americans ? Neither the one nor the other. It only shows
at there is a difference between them which must be taken into

:ount There are many Irish in America, but America is not
Ireland, and it is futile to attempt to make it so, idle even to
wish it. There are many Germans here, but Germany is not
here, nor is Italy, nor France. This is America.

God has sent the peoples of the Old World to this country to
ecome Americans, not to remain colonies of their mother-coun-
ies. The difference between the Yankee and the Englishman of
the present day is not greater than that which shall be between
Irish-Americans and Irishmen fifty years from now.

The following extracts from Bishop Gilmour's address to the
Congress of German Catholics, recently held in the city of Cleve-
land, is an expression from high authority of the sense of what I
have here written :

246 OUR CENTENARY : A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE. [Nov.,

"The less we have of sectionalism or nationalism among us the better.
The sooner we recognize tfie fact that we must coalesce and blend the better for
our future. This fact seems not sufficiently grasped. . . . Among the subjects
quite worthy your deepest thought and calmest discussion is the nationalism that
so gravely menaces us with danger. This subject grows steadily apace with our
increasing numbers. It will not down ; we are fully confronted with it. Shall
nationalism be engrafted on the Catholic Church of America ? Shall the Catholic
Church put on the garb of foreignism ? Shall Catholics be arrayed in separate
camps or shall they be blended together in a common faith and under a common
flag? Shall Catholics be Americans or foreigners ? These are subjects that not
only demand the best thought of this Catholic congress, but press for considera-
tion. Nationalism is pressing to the front and must be discussed. The bishops
and priests must discuss it ; the laity must discuss it. The young will not wait.
Let me urge upon you the necessity in dealing in a measure at least with this all-
important subject. Let there go out from you a clear-cut note. Let the world
know we are one in faith and one in country — Catholics and Americans."

If it be agreed, then, that Americans, whatever may be their
parent stock, are different in race traits from other nations, the
question follows, What will be their dominant characteristic as
Catholics ? — we mean, of course, in matters which do not touch
unity of faith and discipline, for in essentials our religion is the
same among all nations. What will men call the distinguishing
mark of American Catholicity ? Will it be a compound of all the
traits of all the nations blended into one in this land ? This is
an absurdity. Will it be the Irish trait of loyalty? We may
hope for a solid faith, but the renowned faith of Erin shall not
be ours. Shall the progress of taste and the cultivation of art,
keeping pace, as it does, with the increase of wealth, give us the
distinguishing feature of Italy's Catholicity, religious symbolism ?
But who dreams that any land but Italy shall be the home of
Christian art ? Shall we be borne along upon the deep current
of French enthusiastic zeal ? We shall have zeal, and symbolism,
and faith, and enough of these and of all the other qualifications
of good Catholics. I?ut we must be Americans ; we cannot be
anything else if we would.

We shall seek, then, in American environments the clue to
the difficulty. The peculiar trait of our Catholicity will be the
product of the strong forces which are especially American. We
do not claim them to be American in an exclusive sense, for they
belong to the present civilization everywhere ; but they are dawn-
ing elsewhere, and here they are beaming in nearly meridian
splendor: liberty and intelligence. These undoubtedly are the
forces of this age which must prevail everywhere, and which do
now dominantly prevail in the United States.

While not denying, therefore, these circumstances of life to

1889.] OUR CENTENARY : A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE. 247

other countries, we may fairly say that they are American in a
degree worthy the adjective distinctive. Liberty and intelligence
are meant by the providence of God to be characteristic of the
times we live in, and to be shared by all. But among the great
peoples of the world there is none which enjoys so large a
measure of education and of freedom as the citizens of this Re-
public, if, as to education, Germany be excepted. It is true that
we fought a great war for unity, and that obedience to legitimate
authority is enforced with penalties, and a large measure of uni-
formity is attained. But the war was provoked by the abridg-
ment of human liberty in the national territories, and it was
ended by the extension of equal civil freedom to a whole race
among us. Americans will stop to establish at any cost obedi-
ence to legitimate authority, but this is not the great movem.ent.
The movement onward in America is for rational liberty. The
primary purpose of the law here is to save good men from inter-
ference in the enjoyment of their native liberty, and to leave
them as free as possible in their personal and private efforts in
pursuit of happiness. The best use we have for governmental
institutions is that they secure us individually from unjust in-
terference in our endeavors to attain to our destiny. Among
the means of attaining to our happiness is a certain amount of
obedience and of conformity. But these do not hold the highest
laces, which are awarded to intelligence and liberty. To be
appy, we are persuaded in America, one should be free; and
be worthy of freedom, one should be enlightened.
" What the church," says Dr. Zardetti in his admirable book,
Devotion to the Holy Ghost* " will probably be more or less
everywhere in the world she is at present in America, a vigorous,
ree, independent church of individuals. Princes and parliaments
e church has not to deal with here, being exclusively based on
he people." He then proceeds to show, and in a manner en-
irely convincing, that the cultivation of devotion to the Holy
host is the chief duty of the Christian ministry, to aid them in
hich he has written his little volume. It is men as individuals,
ealing in the solitude of conscience with God alone, who must
sanctified. The inner life, using a sanctified freedom with an
nlightened intelligence, must be the life of the American Church.
It can be no other. It will be in vain to strive for results by
methods of past times, however glorious, or by appealing to traits
of distant nations, however near of kin they may seem, unless
these are fully adjusted to the new order of Providence, which

* Devotion to the Holy Ghost; A Manual, etc. Milwaukee: Hoffmann Brothers.

248 OUR CENTENARY: A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE. [Nov.,

deals more directly with the individual. This is the country of
the free man, and in those words the church finds her guide
in her ministrations. Where the spirit of God is there is liberty,
and where liberty is there should be the spirit of God.

" The peril of the day," says Dr. Zardetti, " is the unspiritual-
ity of man and the revival of naturalism in the world." To
counteract this influence he says that devotion to the Holy
Ghost is the most efficacious means that could be used, awaken-
ing " in us the consciousness of the presence and indwell-
ing of the Holy Ghost, not only in the church as a whole,
but also in each one of us." It is just here that we find
the application of the aids to the spiritual and supernatural
life of the Christian properly distinguished. All that a Christian
gets, from God he gets in some sense through the church, but
there is a vast difference between the gifts received, because some
are external and strictly sacramental, and others are unseen and
unknown by any but the very recipient. The former are con-
nected with the uniform practices of the faithful, the latter are the
secret touches of God's spirit, experienced in moments of special
devotion or infused gradually during seasons of special visitation.
These secret touches are evidently far more personal than the
external ones, because they are fitted to each individual in his
own peculiar personality and are bestowed in a spiritual retire-
ment made sacred against the intrusion of even the most sacred
representations of the authority of God in the external order.
Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety,
and the Fear of the Lord are the gifts of the Holy Ghost to
enlighten, guide, strengthen, sanctify us. These interior gifts are
as much the heritage of the Christian as the forgiveness of sins
in Penance and union with our Lord in Communion ; nay, they
are the very substance of that heritage, for the highest dignity
the sacraments can give us is the privilege of living by the in-
stinct of the Holy Ghost in the power of his celestial gifts. But
these graces bring us into a relation intimate and personal with
the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. Our sanctification is made
more and more perfect in proportion as the action of the Holy Ghost
is more and more immediate, which is the same as saying that the
test of fruitfulness in our external devotions is our ability to catch
the divine words of guidance ever being uttered within us.

The following words, published in this magazine by Father
Hecker less than a year before he died, are a plain statement of
the practical method to be followed in dealing with souls in our
times, and especially in this country :

1889.] OUR CENTENARY : A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE. 249

''The work of the priesthood is to help to guide the Christian people, under-
standing that God is always guiding them interiorly.

"An innocent soul we must guide, fully understanding that God is dwelling
within him, not as a substitute for God.

"A repentant sinner we must guide, understanding that we are but restor-
ing him to God's guidance.

" The best that we can do for any Christian is to quicken his sense of fidelity
to God speaking to him in an enlightened conscience.

"Now God's guidance is of two kinds : one is that of his external providence
in the circumstances of life ; the other is interior, and is the direct action of the
Holy Spirit on the human soul. There is great danger in separating these two.

"The key to many spiritual problems is found in this truth : the direct action
of God upon the soul, which is interior, is in harmony with his external provi-
dence. Sanctity consists in making them identical as motives of every thought,
word, and deed of our lives. The external and the internal (and the same must
be said of the natural and supernatural) are one in God, and the consciousness
of them both is to be made one divine whole in man ; to do this requires an
heroic life-sanctity.

"All the sacraments of the church, her authority, prayer both mental and
vocal, spiritual reading, exercises of mortification and of devotion, have for their,
end and purpose to lead the soul to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. St. Al-
phonsus says in his letters that the first director of the soul is the Holy Ghost
himself.

" It is never to be forgotten that one man can never be a guide to another
except as leading him to his only divine Guide.

" The guide of the soul is the Holy Spirit himself, and the criterion or test
of possessing that guide is the divine authority of the church."

Therefore Catholics should be made aware that they have a
witness of the truth of religion within them, and that it is a pecu-
irly Catholic virtue to be guided by the Holy Spirit. The
rhole church of God should concentrate every activity upon deep-
ming the inner life. Never was the true faith in better condition
to start upon this noblest of all her offices. Her external author-
is secure, fully rounded into dogmatic completeness by the
lecrees of the Vatican Council. Her children are one not only
>y reason of hearty agreement of mind and unity of organism,
>ut by an intercommunion among themselves wonderfully per-
^cted by the appliances of modern commerce. Her academical
equipment is approaching a completeness more ample than the
most sanguine could have hoped for, and the masses of the
Catholic people are being daily brought to the enjoyment of sound
Christian education.

If the religious life of our people be brought more and more
directly under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we
shall be secure of a future more glorious than the past, and the
external order of religion will gain proportionately in unity and
universality. WALTER ELLIOTT.

250 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

Miss MARY AGNES TINCKER'S new novel, Two Coronets
(Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), is one of those
issues of the Riverside Press which force the present critic to find
the motto of the firm, Tout bien ou rien, just a trifle over-confi-
dent. There is at least one of the first series of Miss Tincker's
novels, The House of Yorke, and one of the second, Signor
MonaldinVs Niece, which could hold their own when compared
with the work of any of the women novelists, Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps perhaps excepted, whose names appear on Houghton &
Mifflin's list. The first of those tales seemed, as her early readers
all remember, to give great promise. In reality, as the same
readers would probably admit now with equal unanimity, Miss
Tincker's talent, and her aspirations also, really touched their
highest mark in it, and have since declined. True, Signor
Monaldini's Niece was of less value than The House of Yorke from
the spiritual side alone. Its literary quality did not suffer by
comparison with her first effort. It was the author who suffered
by the comparison the book forced between her then self and
that ideal of her and her possible achievement wfiich the earlier
book had permitted one to entertain.

Her present story belongs to what might be called the com-
posite order of architecture in novels. It has no central design.
Between the two threads of her narrative, the American and the
Italian, there, is no connection not purely arbitrary and unessen-
tial. They make a twist of which each end is raw, and for
either strand of which something else might be substituted with
equal propriety and fully equivalent general effect. Even the
bearing of the title upon the novel is so occult that to determine
it is a labor we abandon in ' despair. Nor are we quite certain
whether there is a moral to Miss Tincker's tale. Against a dark
and even bloody background of Italian Catholic duplicity and
crime, a sweetly pure American Protestant domesticity is thrown
up with all the skill of which the author is capable. When
Count Alinori, being at the time a widower of twice her age,
inspires Atalanta Elizabeth Martin (a delicious combination that,
by the way ! ) with a passion which would have been her death
if her parents had really insisted on making her go back to
America and wait a year before marrying him, she is rescued

1889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 251

rom an early grave by " a civil and Protestant and private "
larriage in Venice. And when, later on, the count discovers
that a near relative of his has committed both perjury and mur-
der, his horror at those crimes is only exceeded by his dread
lest Atalanta Elizabeth should ever discover them.

" ' For God's sake, Beatrice,' he says to his cousin, ' don't let my wife know.'

" ' Why do you not tell her all ? ' answers Beatrice. ' Why do you have
any concealments from her ? '

Tell her ! ' he cried. ' Impossible ! In the name of God, Beatrice, how
can you suggest such a thing ? '

I think that you might trust to her generosity. All this is not your fault.
She will pity you.'

" ' It is impossible,' he repeated. ' It would be my ruin and hers. The
question is not how she will feel toward me, but of the effect on herself. I know
her. If she did not die of horror she would fly from us all as from a people ac-
cursed. . . . We are not like Atalanta, Bice. In the sight of God we may not
be so bad as she would think us ; but we have become accustomed to many
things which to her are satanic.'

" 'I suppose you know her best,' Beatrice answered with a sigh. ' I only
believed that a woman who truly loves is generous. ' "

Miss Tincker, we are sorry to see, has not yet cured herself of
that peculiar way of looking at her own sex through distinctively

lale eyes which has done as much as anything toward alienating
her early well-wishers. It would be easy enough to characterize
it by a word, but some words are heavy. We prefer to let Miss
Tincker herself afford our readers occasion to pronounce them.

>he is describing her American heroine as she appeared to the
eyes and thoughts of her cousin, Francis Elder, when, himself un-
seen, he watched her in the act of shooting a bear :

" She did not float up softly, though her smooth motion made no sound nor
jerk ; he saw the light strain of the lifting shoulders which seemed to raise the
body, and guessed at the lifted foot and fine, steely muscles of the leg."

And again, when Atalanta Elizabeth, descending from an
Italian railway train, is seen for the first time by her future
husband :

" A cloud of floating brown gauze was blown out the door, and a young lady
stepped down with an astonishing ease and lightness, scarcely touching the hand
raised to assist her, and not leaning at all. Then, at a word from her cousin,
she turned toward his wife. The dress, a little lifted on the step behind her,
allowed it to be seen that she turned on tiptoe, and was by no means squarely
settled on her feet. A repressed excitement betrayed itself in the count's usually
self-contained face."

self-c

252 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

Such things as these recall Mr. Egan's way of quoting Louis
Veuillot concerning " ces femmes-autetirs" We take into con-
sideration, in estimating this novel and certain others of its
author's later productions, the seeming necessity under which a
Catholic writer lies who desires to reap some more tangible
reward than an approving word from his fellow- Christians. Yet,
after all, there are ways of avoiding burning questions which touch
belief, and so rouse animosity, without betraying at any point
an apparent readiness to concede more than is demanded by the
public to which a novelist by profession must needs cater. Sup-
pose one were to suggest to Miss Tincker, that if she really finds
it necessary to jump so high in order to clear the puddles in
the road, it would be better to choose another path or stand
stock still.

Lora : The Major's Daughter (New York : Worthington Co.),
translated from the German of W. Heimburg by Mrs. J. W. Davis,
is better than either of the tales by this author which the same
publishing firm has issued within the year. It is a natural, un-
affected, and purely domestic story of a sort on which our German
kinsmen Seem to have an almost exclusive patent. An unbroken
thread of narrative conducts the reader from one incident to an-
other by well-trodden, homely ways, and through an atmosphere
suffused with sentiment, until it brings him contentedly to the
most orthodox and prosperous of endings. The good are rewarded
and the evil punished, deaths happen opportunely, and people
inconvenient to the villain of the piece turn up at the most con-
venient moment for his trembling victims. Why is not that as
good a way as any to construct a tale ? Does it not sufficiently
imitate, in that little world of which the novelist is creator, the
system of rewards and punishments to which we who are Chris-
tians look as the final explication and rounding out of that which
would otherwise be bafflingly incomplete, and too painfully mys-
terious for mere human nature to contemplate with patience ?

Besides its other merits, Lora has that of suggesting — too
indirectly, to be sure, yet still effectively — the wholesome lesson
that there are bounds beyond which self-sacrifice ceases to be a
virtue. Mr. Howells, in the face of a good deal of old-time
morality which, by dint of repetition, has got itself generally re-
cognized as infallible, has been insisting on that truth with more
or less effect ever since he put it into definite form in The Rise
of Silas Lapham. The issue made in that story, however, was a
side one. The strait in which Lora is placed is quite different
from that of Penelope Lapham ; her difficulties are not sentimental

1889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 253

ones but very real. Their counterparts occur in actual life with
more frequency, one must suppose, than such as Mr. Howells has
devised. The situation, at all events, is one which is as old as
the hills in the fiction of all lands, from the story of Andromeda
down to that of Miss Libbey's Pretty Young Girl, or the last
" shilling shocker " issued from the London press. Here are
the parents, penniless, old, and threatened with disgrace ; here is
the young, impenitent profligate whose selfishness has brought
them to distress; here is the ravening monster with his jaws all
wide, fuming with horrid fetor ; here the fair virgin, loath, reluc-
tant, trembling with personal disgust, tDrn between rival loves,
her kindred appealing to her on one side, her plighted lover on
the other. What shall be done with the virgin ? What shall she
do herself?

"Tie her fast to the rock!" her next of kin have cried with
one voice in every age, in every song and story. " When once
we are safe, let her take her chances that Perseus may happen
along in the nick of time to set her free. If he never does, as
is most likely, or if he comes just at that pinch when the only
exit from the situation is through the divorce court, still, what
sense is there in making such an outcry ? Is not marriage mar-
riage, when all is said and done ? One would think we were
murdering her instead of providing her with a most excellent
husband and ourselves with a security against bankruptcy or the
county jail. What is her religion for,- if it has not taught her
that, for women at least, the greatest of virtues is self-sacri-
fice ?"

Had we the counselling of a girl in such a plight, we should
seek to persuade her, not alone in the name of human nature
but in that of Christianity itself, not to violate her instincts
nor surrender her personal freedom for any threat, or any bribe,
nor to avert any natural evil from herself or any other. We
should point her to a line of virgins in whom the human ties
were strong, but who won their martyr's palm by overcoming
them in order to remain true to a more inward and constraining
bond. We should remind her of that "Virgin of all virgins blest"
whose fiat was not spoken to the visible messenger of God until
he had shown her that in becoming the Mother of the God-Man
she should not forfeit her allegiance to that secret instinct of the
Holy Ghost which kept her integrity ever stainless. We should
tell her that personality and love are sacred things, not to be
outraged for any reason ; that though there may be more than
one sufficient cause which ought to keep apart a man and woman

254 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

who sincerely love, yet that no call which urges to a loveless
marriage ever is a true call of duty. Nine times in ten the sequel
to such marriages proves the sacrifice to have been made utterly
in vain, even from the point of view of those who furthered them.
If they were in every case successful, merely from that stand-point,
the case against them would not be altered. Self-sacrifice is,
indeed, the essence of Christianity. Our Lord Jesus Christ has
bidden us, if we would be like Him, to deny ourselves, take up
our cross, and follow Him to the mount of immolation. But what
was it He denied Himself? Nothing but ease, pleasure, riches,
power, mortal life — the things to which the merely natural man
gravitates by the very weight of his mere human nature. But
faith, integrity, personal purity — did He ever show any sign of
yielding these ? Was He ever invited to do so but by the devil ?
For these are things which have the divine imprint on them ;
they are the only coin which can buy peace in this life and joy
eternal in the next one. And every one of them is more or less
defaced and battered, even when not wholly cast away and lost,
by whoever ventures upon a marriage from which the heart
recoils. Granted that natural love, even when mutual, is not the
one all-sufficient requisite for marriage ; yet no marriage is justi-
fiable where in some one or other of its grades it does not exist.
Why ? Because marriage is a natural good, and the means to it
cannot be disparate to the end and not defeat its purpose.

That is the sound lesson about love which the novelists, those
preachers to the rank and file of every class, would do well to
teach. So much sane doctrine any man or woman capable of
looking at social questions with unbiased eyes, and gifted with a
talent for story-telling, might well inculcate from the stand-point of
the natural order. We who are Christians are bound to go fur-
ther still. While we insist that the instincts of humanity are good
in their own nature and never to be wholly disregarded, we
must still more strongly insist that though love in its very es-
sence is of God, the Unifier, yet it cannot exist in its ideal ful-
ness apart from the true faith of Jesus Christ. Why ? Because
apart from Him there is no sure hope of that immortality which
pure love demands and foreshadows. Hence the essential evil of
mixed marriages, offensive to God and rued by men ever since
the days when " the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that
they were fair, and took them wives of all which they chose."

Max O'Rell's Jacques Bonhomme (New York : Cassell & Co.)
has the merit of being a lively, readable, and faithful representa-
tion of a most interesting subject — the well-to-do peasants, shop-

i889-J TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 255

keepers, and artisans of France. It is the work of a man who
knows what he is about, and who has acquired his knowledge
less by study than by imbibing it insensibly through his pores.
There is a tone about a book written out of the fulness of
personal observation which commends it as truthful even to read-
ers who cannot corroborate its statements of fact from studies of
their own. One does not instinctively feel as if its generalizing
were based on so narrow an induction that he shrinks from its
conclusions even when they do not seem obtrusively top-heavy.
To readers who have some first-hand French impressions of their
own, this gossipy little volume will furnish as ready an answer
as is needed to the following rather stupid remarks lately made
by Mr. W. S. Lilly in A Century of Revolution :

"Can we predicate liberty of the peasant proprietors of France? Can we
even predicate of them personality except in the most elementary sense ? . . .
The French peasant " (M. Zola being the witness against him whom Mr. Lilly
summons) " will stand revealed in .all the repulsiveness of actual life ; consumed
with ' the furious passion for possessing land ' " (a passion, by the way, which he
notoriously shares with certain English proprietors at the farthest remove from
the peasant) ; "avaricious, penurious, dishonest, tyrannical, foul ; sunken in a de-
pravation one hardly likes to call bestial ; it is unfair to the beasts."

So far Mr. Lilly. Now for Max O'Rell, to the truth of
whose portraiture the present Talker can bear some personal
testimony :

" To-day the French peasant lives in his own cottage, cultivates his own field,
and demands nothing beyond peace and fine weather. No doubt this cottage
would appear to an English tourist " (especially if he had forgotten that of the
peasant in his own island and elsewhere throughout the blest domain ruled by
Victoria the Good) " to be lacking of many comforts. It is carpetless, it is true,
but it belongs to him, and that makes up for many drawbacks. He is contented
and rich, like the rest of us, not in the things which he possesses, but in those
which he knows how to do without. He is peaceful, simple, sober, and laborious.
His ideal of life is the independence which is the fruit of labor and economy ; he
is satisfied with very little in the days of his strength, because the prospect of
eating his own bread near the door of his own cottage when his strength is gone
makes him happy. So he works steadily, unceasingly, with a wife who is a true
helpmate. He is no fire-eater, no dreamer of new worlds to conquer. The surg-
ing passions of great towns, bred and fed by vice and improvidence, are horrible
to him. He wants to be left alone, and cries for peace at the top of his voice.
So eager is he after this blessing that in 1881 his representatives in Parliament
upset the first Ferry ministry by a majority of 355 to 68 on account of the expe-
dition to Tunis, although that expedition had been highly successful from a mili-
tary point of view. In 1882 the Freycinet ministry was defeated on the vote of
credit which they asked to enable France to join with England in an armed inter-
vention in Egypt. In 1885 the second Ferry ministry was upset by a majority
of 356 to 149 on account of the Tonquin expeditions. So much to show how

256 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. . [Nov.,

aggressive the French nation is ! The permanently aggressive nations are the
nations where the people are oppressed and wretched. Militarism is not com-
patible with national prosperity and happiness. The prosperity of the common
people, and the use they are learning to make of liberty, are the great facts which
will tend to make France a nation more and more peaceful. The French peasant
might well express a wish that the government should still improve his position ;
but he is quiet, and no government thinks of him particularly. If he were to
make as much noise as the Paris workman, he might be listened to. ...
The present House of Deputies is all occupied with the question of employers
and employed, granting one by one all the demands of the latter. Nobody
seems concerned about the rural population, by far the most interesting of all.
How is that ? Simply because the peasants do not hold stormy meetings, do not
speak of erecting barricades, and are quiet, peaceful, industrious, sober, and law-
abiding people. The peasant has the sun, and if his harvest is destroyed by
the frost, the hail, or the drought, it is for him to make the best of it ; while the
Paris workman goes to the music-halls, smokes cigars, and talks politics. Sup-
pose the country engages in war, the Paris workman assumes a uniform and sings
war-songs, but the peasant sees his land laid wast* and his cottage burned down;
and this is why you will understand that he feels it his duty to hate Germany in a
theoretical way, but hopes and trusts that he may not live to see the day when he
or his sons may be called upon to avenge the disasters of the terrible year
1870."

Nevertheless, with all his love for peace and his unwillingness
to be used as a counter in games which concern him little, the
French peasant does possess by eminence that personality and in-
dependence which Mr. Lilly so scornfully denies him. We recall
one little hamlet, counting in all not more than thirteen voters,
not one of whom was a shopkeeper, and not more than two or
three artisans. The rest were peasants and fishermen. They
managed to split up into three factions, representing the Legiti-
mist, the Orleanist, and the Republican parties, in one of the elec-
tions to which Max O'Rell refers in the paragraph we have
quoted, and the canvass was vigorously if quietly carried on to a
presumably satisfactory conclusion. True, the French voter, ac-
customed to a tolerable sameness in the general condition of
things despite the frequent treading on each other's heels of what
seem opposing influences at the helm of state, probably confides
undisturbed in the truth of the maxim quoted by Mr. Ham-
erton with regard to French changes of ministry : Plus (a
change, plus c'est la meme chose. He has his own mind about it,
though. He has his local papers which are read and discussed
in every cafe. In his appearance he is neither brutalized nor
bestial, neither servile nor ill-mannered. He looks after his own
household, sends his children to school and to catechism, minds
his own business and attends to that of his commune. He is a
free man and he knows it, and he demands and receives from

1889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 257.

other men the consideration that he gives. Yet Mr. Lilly says
of him :

" Doubtless, as a rule, the French peasant must be credited with the virtues
of industry and frugality. Without them it would be impossible for him to live.
But, on the other hand, he is given over to the spirit of utter selfishness, of com-
plete indifference to all except the pettiest personal interests, of blind hatred and
unreasoning fear of everything above his social and intellectual level, of abject
meanness displayed by no other peasantry in Europe to the same degree. And in
politics he is tJie facile prey of the charlatan who can best prey upon these passions.
... In political emergencies they are absolutely helpless. They have no prin-
ciple of cohesion. They are a mere rabble, incapable not only of meeting but
even of understanding any great crisis in the affairs of their country. Shall we
account as free these human automata, these voting animals, driven to the ballot-
box as sJicep to the slaughter \ at one time by the government official, at another by
the professional demagogue ? "

Surely these would be unnecessarily hard words to apply to
one's fellow- Christians for the sake of bolstering up the hopeless
fabric of caste and prescription, and the subjection of the many
to the few, even if they were as true to fact as they are actually
untrue and misleading. But it is unfair to waste on Mr. Lilly's
venom space which might be so much more veraciously and
pleasantly filled by a less biased observer. Listen to Max O'Rell
on that ''time-honored Anglo-Saxon 'chestnut': the French lan-
guage has no equivalent for the English word home" \

" To feel the whole meaning of those sweet words chez-s.oi, chez-nous, one
ust know the language they form part of. How many English or American
ople have an inkling of their value ? Do they care to know that, some hun-
years back, the French used to say en chez (from the Latin in casa, at
me), and that the word chez was a noun ? That, later on, they took to add-
g a pronoun, saying, for example, en chez-nous ; and that the people, mis-
taking the word chez for a preposition because it was always followed by a noun
or pronoun, suppressed the en, so that now the French language has lost a noun
r home, but has kept a word, chez, which has all its significance ? "

We recommend this bright little book to any reader who
cares to look at French men and women, French ways and man-
ners through a pair of frankly French spectacles. There is
neither moralizing nor philosophizing in it, but there is what is
better, a kindly observation which any one devoid of British pre-
judices, who has lived long on French soil, will recognize as true

the facts and suffused with the spirit of the facts.
The Master of Ballantrae (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons) is a strong and admirably told story. We do not know
why Mr. Stevenson has not as fairly earned the title of En-
chanter as Sir Walter that of Wizard. Kis reader has no option

VOL. L. — 17

258 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

about yielding to any illusion which he chooses to create. His
magic is both pleasant and convincing. Somewhere, in one of
the essays of the volume called Memories and Portraits if our
memory serves us, Mr. Stevenson appears to confess that his style
is a work of art, the result of long and painstaking effort with
his first crude attempts to express himself. His labor, surely,
was like that of diamond-cutting. There was no hacking into
shape of refractory material in order to adapt it to some precon-
ceived, wholly external form. There were doubtless excrescences
to cut away, facets to polish, but there could have been nothing
to add to a possession so purely personal and individual as Mr.
Stevenson's native gift of speech. His style, independent almost
of his matter, is a thing to take delight in. And as a teller of
tales he has, to our mind, no living English-speaking rival ; his
work is so well modelled, with never a stroke too many and' not
one ineffective. He is clean-minded, moreover, and may be
safely given to young people, whom he will be certain to enter-
tain.

Jacob Valmont, Manager, by George A. Wall and George B.
Heckel (Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally & Co.), is not
bad for a first attempt. Now and then one comes across a sen-
tence in it which suggests that one or other of its joint pro-
ducers has, as Mr. Stevenson says he once had, a style in pro-
cess of extrication. As a story it is rather ineffectual and point-
less. Jacob Valmont is a Jew who poses as a Christian, that he
may the more readily grasp at Gentile gold for purely Hebraic
and quasi-religious purposes. He is a shrewd business man,
scheming and unscrupulous, dishonest in large ways and for what
he deems great ends, but punctilious enough in small ones. He
is an enthusiast for Judaism. He belongs to a secret order
whose aim it is to make Israel once more a nation, the Heaven-
appointed rulers of the world. Secretly he aspires to seat him-
self upon the throne of David. Warned by his immediate
superior in the " Holy Order," the " Patriarch of the West,
Rabbi of the Holy Temple, Prince of the Palace of Jerusalem,"
that the aforesaid " Holy Order " disapproves of his backing a
rascally candidate for office in Vermont, and forbids him to rob
his Gentile stepdaughter even to advance the Jewish triumph,
Jacob at first concludes to heed the warning, to go in for pure
politics and to be strictly honest. But presently his dreams of
Israel's future and his own prospective kingly grandeur determine
him to disobey in secret, and trust to his assured success to win
him pardon. Then one misfortune after another crowds upon

1 889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 259

him. His once-beloved Jewish wife, whom he had discarded in
order to marry a rich Gentile, turns up again as an actress, in-
sists on paying him a visit in the character of his sister, finds
out all his underhand ways and brings him to very complete
grief. He escapes the summons to commit suicide as a penalty
for his disobedience to his Order only by the accident of being
murdered through mistake by one of his discharged workmen.
The reader sees the plot to be fantastic and uncompulsory on
the imagination. There is some very fair side-play in the book,
however, and it is clean both in conception and execution.

Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer's Six Portraits (Boston and
New York : Houghton, MirHin & Co.) is made up of essays con-
tributed by her within the last three or four years to various
American magazines. They treat of Luca della Robbia ; Antonio
Allegri, commonly known as Correggio from the place of his birth ;
William Blake, Jean Baptiste Corot, George Fuller, and Winslow
Homer. In associating these artists, so far apart in time and char-
racter, the aim of the writer has been first to show "the mean-
ing of individuality in art," and secondly to illustrate the " general
truth that it is the part of the student to put himself in perfect
sympathy now with one artist and now with another." How far
Mrs. Van Rensselaer would be held by experts in art and in art
criticism to have succeeded in either of these special aims we
cannot undertake to say. She has certainly made an interesting
and well-written book, which has a literary value, and should
entertain many people to whom the pictures she speaks of are un-
known. Coming to those we personally know, we do not read
her paper on George Fuller with less pleasure because her esti-
mate of his paintings is higher than our own. With what she
says of the masterly and wholly individual work of Winslow
Homer we are altogether in accord.

260 WITH READERS AXD CORRESPOXDEXTS. [Nov.,

WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.

THE HISTORY OF A CONVERSION.

I DID not have the misfortune, as so many had who were born in New Eng-
land more than a quarter of a century ago, to hear much of Calvinism with its
pessimistic conclusions. My father belonged to none of the sects, though he
attended the Congregational Church with my mother, who was a member of it,
every Sunday.

He was, however, a religious man, reading his Bible through, "Apocrypha
and all/' as he used to say, once every year. He did this for over sixty years,
and tried to live up to the teaching which it brought home to his heart.

The religious element in my beloved mother showed itself when she prom-
ised me to God as a minister of his word while I was of the most tender age.

Every Sunday so far back as I can remember we children used to meet in my
mother's room on Sunday afternoon to read Scripture and sing hymns. It was
here that I learned the doctrines of the Trinity, the redemption of mankind, the
never-ending happiness in heaven for the just. Here I learned that God is a
merciful God, good, kind, and compassionate to sinners, wishing that all should
come to repentance.

It was towards the close of my thirteenth year, when I had completed the
first year in the high-school, that a revival was started in the church where our
family worshipped. My parents were away at the time, and I was allowed 10
attend the meetings every evening. I soon became " convinced of sin," but I
could not "feel converted." I felt that I was a sinner, and 1 felt also that I
wanted God's forgiveness for my sins. I remember to-day the keen anguish of
mind and heart which pierced me to the centre of my being when I was told the
awful, satanic lie, that the reason I did not feel as I wanted to was because in
all probability I did " not belong to the number of the elect." Thanks be to God !
I rejected this untruth, my own heart and my good angel telling me alike of the
truth which I learned from my mother in the words of Holy Scripture: " For
God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world by
him might be saved."

The rejection of this falsehood of Calvin was my first positive step towards
the Catholic Church.

The next great change in my life came during the same year. I was sent to
that great and now famous school for boys in Concord, N. H. It was here that
I came in contact with the Episcopal Church, in what is known as the "high-
church school." Never can I forget the comfort which the first words of the cate-
chism brought to me. They told me that I was by baptism "made a member
of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven."
Blessed Catholic truth ! For six weeks the sting of that revival had rankled in
my soul, and now I was at peace. I felt strong.

I asked how my sins were to be forgiven, and I was told that Christ had left
power on earth to forgive sins to his ministers. And although at this time I did
not confess my sins except to God alone, yet I felt that there was the means of
forgiveness ready at any time, and when, Sunday after Sunday, I heard the words
of the " General Absolution " read, I truly thought that by their virtue my sins
were washed away.

The question now arises in my readers' minds as to my opinion of the Catho-

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 261

lie Church at this point in my life. It may best be told by a little circumstance
which happened while I was at this school. L C and I were one after-
noon out together in a boat on the large mill-pond beside which the school stood.
He asked me suddenly, without any previous conversation on the subject : " Do
you believe in the Pope ? " Surprised, I made a very indignant answer, and stated

that I had been taught to believe and still did that he was Antichrist. C

only laughed and assured me, when I asked him, that he believed in him. It is
many years since this, and that boy is now a man and, like the writer, a Catholic
in deed and in truth. If he chances to read this, I am sure he will pardon me for
bringing him into my little story.

It was here that I learned many things — regeneration in Baptism, the Real
Presence, the sacrifice of the Mass, prayers for the dead, the invocation of
saints. I do not mean to say that these things were taught explicitly by the
authorities of the school, but they were floating about among the boys and the
masters, and I learned them and believed them as well.

I left this school at last when I was ready to enter college, and for four years
I paid very little attention to religion other than attending church every Sunday.
I was an Episcopalian, but I cared very little what church I went to at this time,
and I was as likely to go to a Catholic church, if the fancy struck me, as to any
other. In fact, I remember receiving a rather sharp reprimand from the presi-
dent for attending St. Patrick's. He told me if I did it again I should be marked
absent from church e"ach time it happened until, being absent a certain number
of times, I might suffer the penalty of suspension.

I remember calling on the Rev. Lawrence Walsh (on whose soul may God
have mercy !) and being received with the utmost kindness. My motive, which
must have been evident to him, was curiosity to speak to a Roman Catholic
priest. Nevertheless, he received me with the greatest kindness and charity,
which he knew so well how to dispense to those who needed it.

Thus by little and little were my prejudices wearing away and becoming less
and less.

In the autumn of 187 — a great thing happened which changed all my plans

the future. There had been with me in college for two years a young man,
or rather a boy, of nineteen. Between us sprang up a deep friendship that has
lasted until now. Leaving college in the spring of that same year, he went to

his home in S . It was after I had returned to college in the autumn that I

received one day a package. I opened it. It was from his brother, stating that
— had sent his love from his death-bed, and that shortly before he died he
had been baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, to which his family properly
belonged.

The lesson was a profound one. " Suppose I were to die to-morrow, where
would my soul be?" The result was the resolution then made, and not for
many years accomplished, to become a priest. It seemed as if a voice had
spoken to me, saying, " Except you become a priest you cannot save your soul."
No doubt my friend was praying for me. For nearly two years after this I wa"s
beset with difficulties which rendered it impossible to pursue my studies with the
intention I had formed. But at last a way was opened and I began to prepare for
a calling which I believed to be the greatest. I at once found the Catholic Church
staring me in the face. One day one of the professors said in class: " You can
find all the germs of Roman Catholicism in the prayer-book of the Episcopal
Church." This sort of teaching had quite a different effect on me from what he
had expected. It gave me a positive love for that church which I had once hated,
and then the step from love to union was but short.

I had been an Episcopalian minister about a month and was connected with

262 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Nov.,

a ritualistic church where they had a fine choir of boys. I had been placed in
charge of them, and one of my duties was to visit their homes and become ac-
quainted with their parents. One evening a number of new boys made their appear-
ance, and I took their names and addresses down in my note -book. There was
one among them that evening who, on being asked his name, addressed me with
the title of " Father." I asked him what church he went to, and he mentioned
the name of a certain well-known Roman Catholic church in the city. The next
day I wrote a note and delivered it myself to a gentleman of my acquaintance
who was a member of that church, requesting him for the sake of the boy to
inform his parents and his pastor that he was making arrangements to sing in our
church.

The next day I was struck at the apparent absurdity of my action. If I be-
longed to the Catholic Church, if the Protestant Episcopal Church were a branch
together with the Greek and the Roman, then why should I have done such
a deed ? I resolved then to begin at once the study of the primacy and the in-
fallibility of the pope. For five long months I labored through huge folios, pick-
ing out with much difficulty the proofs of the fact that Rome is the centre of
unity, and that in order to belong to the body of the church one must be in
communion with the see of Peter.

Once I arrived at this conclusion, or, better, when the light of God's grace
let me see this truth, then I joyfully made my abjuration and was received.

Since that day I have had, at last, the inestimable privilege of becoming a
priest. In closing I beg a prayer from my readqrs for the grace of final per-
severance. SACERDOS.

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS, ETC., SHOULD
BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION, NO. 415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH
STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

One of the largest Catholic circulating libraries in New York City has fol-
lowed the plan of admitting no book of fiction unless approved by competent
judges, a plan which should be universally adopted. In the catalogue of this
library we find an entry printed in bold type, " All the stories of Christian Reid."
This is a compliment given to but few authors in the department of fiction.
Prompted by a desire to get information on this matter from another source, we
examined the catalogue of the Boston Public Library, which is guided on liberal
principles, and we find that it contains fourteen stories written by Christian Reid,
whose real name is Frances C. Fisher. Among Catholics these praiseworthy
stories are now becoming more generally known, though they have been well re-
ceived by all classes of readers who can appreciate fiction of a high order of
excellence.

We are pleased to know that Christian Reid is a constant reader of THE
CATHOLIC WORLD. As a Catholic writer she approves, in the following letter,
the work of our Reading Union :

" I have been very much interested in all that 1 have seen regarding the
Columbian Reading Union. It appears to me admirably adapted to encourage
among Catholics a knowledge and love of literature, and to train a discriminating
faculty, which is much needed. For while intellectual culture is the ' note ' of the
present age, the means by which ideas are widely diffused and the ruin also of
unnumbered souls effected, we cannot afford to ignore it, to neglect the use of so
powerful a weapon, and provide no antidote for the subtle poison lurking in popu-

'•

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 263

lar novel, critical essay, and scientific manual alike. We need to encourage the
growth of a Catholic reading public sufficiently cultured to appreciate the best
books of the best authors, sufficiently critical to discriminate between good and
bad literature, sufficiently learned to detect false history and perceive the shallow-
ness of false philosophy. For these ends the first list of books prepared by the
Cathedral Library Reading Circle of New York seems so well arranged that no
suggestion could improve it. I hope most earnestly that the Union may succeed,
and do a great work for Catholic literature, while doing a greater work yet for
Catholic minds and souls. CHRISTIAN REID.

" Salisbury, North Carolina."

We are waiting patiently to hear from other Catholic authors on this subject.
Any one wishing to get the first list of historical novels, published by the Colum-
bian Reading Union and so highly praised by Christian Reid, can do so by
sending ten cents in postage.

From the letters received we quote some specimens to show the opinions
already formed of the movement in favor of Catholic Reading Circles :

" We feel an active and very 'lively interest in the plan for Reading Circles,
and earnestly hope it will prove a success. Anything that we can do to further its
interests will be cheerfully done. In our opinion it is one of the most useful and
praiseworthy conceptions of 1889.

" SR. M. STANISLAUS CAMPBELL, Directress.

" Academy of the Visitation, Mobile, Ala"

"The prospectus of the Columbian Reading Union has been received, with
the list of ' historical novels ' prepared by the Cathedral Reading Circle of New
York. This list, embracing as it does a most valuable and interesting collection
of works of fiction, will, with the added books of reference, prove a safe guide to
minds thirsting for the. good things of Catholic literature and a knowledge of
what the church has done and is still doing for the cause of Christian civili-
zation.

" To the youth of both sexes ambitious of preserving and enlarging the
education acquired at college or academy such a course of reading will prove of
incalculable benefit, and many an hour which otherwise would pass without
profit may be converted into a time of usefulness by bringing into the home
circle the refining influence of pure Catholic literature. Parents and friends of
maturer years will be glad to interest themselves in promoting the good work.

" In the far West it is impossible to obtain Catholic works from local dealers,
nd the generous offer of the Columbian Reading Union to purchase books for
its members is indeed a boon to be appreciated.

" I know that many difficulties will beset the way of the Union. Habits of
indifference must be overcome, an interest in Catholic literature awakened, en-
couraging words and substantial aid freely given, until success crowns its efforts,
and daily increasing numbers prove that in union lies its strength.

Gilroy, California. MARCELLA A. FITZGERALD."

The world does not know enough of Catholic thought. People are enthusi-
astic over the theories of Theosophy and Buddha, and talk as though such beauti-
ful thoughts could never possibly have been written elsewhere. Those outside the
church read a great deal, and on just such subjects ; they are always restless,
while attributing our satisfaction to a certain contentment with ignorance. It is
well to impress them with example, but if Catholics read more and could give
better explanations of their different practices, would it not in a measure counter-
act some of the anti-Christian thoughts pervading our literature? J. E. P."

act s<

264 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Nov.,

4 'Everywhere I find interest and curiosity regarding the faith. I certainly
do not invite controversy, but it seems to me I live in a state of amicable
argument with every thinking man and woman I meet. I cannot think my ex-
perience is unique, and it is this that makes me feel so strongly the necessity of a
broader and deeper religious education. Protestant clergymen, free-thinking
lawyers, cultured agnostics, all open the subject of religion in conversation.
They would not speak on the subject to a priest, perhaps would not read a
Catholic book, and it is only through social contact they learn anything of Catho-
licism. It fairly appalls me to think how much I ought to learn in order to ex-
plain my position. Aided by my experience of many years' unbelief, and a
knowledge of the weak points of my adversaries, I get along fairly well ; that is to
say, if I don't convince anybody I can at least make them thoroughly uncomfort-
able. But I know I ought to do more. It is difficult to know where to begin in
the pursuit of proper intellectual training. I would be thankful if the Columbian
Union would indicate a course of reading for those who feel this special want. I
want to fight in others the indifference and agnosticism that blighted the best
years of my own life. I so thoroughly understand the anatomy of doubt that, if
I can ever gain a knowledge of the proper remedies, I will know perhaps rather
better than those who have always had faith how to treat the disease. But, as I
say, the task is appallingly difficult, and if it were not borne in upon me as a stern
duty I would give it up. If you will help me with advice I will be truly thank-
ful. Certainly the idea of the Columbian Union is Heaven-sent, and you have
no more admiring and gratefu^ member than myself."

We are indebted for letters and suggestions to :

J. A. H., Pittsfield, Mass.; E. L. T. L., St. Thomas, Tasco Co., Fla. ;
A. M. H., Cincinnati, O. ; A. J. K., Philadelphia, Pa.; R. D., New York
City; S. M. P., Portland, Ore.; J. J. M., Toledo, O. ; K. M. J., New York
City; D. J. S., Jefferson City, Mo.; J. A. McD., New York City ; B. A.,
St. Louis, Mo. ; P. F. C., Litchfield, Ills. ; N. T. B., Buffalo, N. Y. ; C. J.,
Liberty, Ills. ; T. D., New York City; A. F. S., St. Louis, Mo. ; J. P. R.,
Chicago, Ills. ; S. M. G., Worcester, Mass.

We have received from Miss Mary M. Meline, of Cincinnati, an account of
the plan adopted for a Reading Circle lately established at the residence of Mrs.
Debar. The following is a copy of the circular sent to those who were requested
to become members :

" CONCERNING A READING CIRCLE.

" Many complaints have been lately made as to the want of patronage of
Catholic literature. In several cities Reading Circles have been formed, and in
New York it is proposed, through THE CATHOLIC WORLD, to establish a general
reading union. 1 have been encouraged to attempt the formation of a local circle
in Cincinnati, which may be affiliated with the Columbian Reading Union.

" A subscription often cents a month is the amount decided upon by those
circles in active operation. If those who are willing will pay in the year's sub-
scription, $1.20, at once, a sum sufficient to purchase books will soon be accu-
mulated.

" As soon as I have eleven names, I will ask those eleven to meet me and
discuss the matter, determine how the circle shall be governed, whether a meet-
ing of the members, for the purpose of talking over the books read and deciding
upon the purchase of others, shall be called once or twice a month and decide
(each one bringing his or her list) what books shall be obtained to form the
nucleus of the circle. t

"Rules. — Subscription to be paid on the first of every month. Those who

WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.

265

leglect this for two months to be dropped from the roll. Books not to be loaned.
Jooks to be transferred on the ist and I5th of each month. Fine for defacing a
>k, 25 cents ; for non-return or lending of book, 10 cents per week."

In explaining the mode of delivering books to members Miss Meline
writes :

" I hire a boy twice a month at fifty cents and car-fare to carry the books
)und. He has a pass-book containing the names of subscribers. Each one is
squired to enter in it the name of the book, date of reception and return, be-
sides the entry on the lists marked 'when received,' 'when returned,' in the
ront and back of the volumes. The rules are few and simple to insure the
ifety of the books.

" We have purchased books sufficient for the present membership.
" Among the books I ordered was Ozanarn's Life, which is out of print. A
reat pity, for it should be in the hands of every Catholic. Also Philosophy of
History, by Ozanam, not to be had. MARY M. MELINE.

" Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, Ohio."

The librarian of a Reading Circle writes as follows :

" In this city our list of Catholic women contains comparatively few names
of literary culture or social experience. Some read standard works, not Catholic,
and others read little else than newspapers. My plan interests all these by send-
ing into their homes miscellaneous books by Catholic authors. The reading is,
of course, desultory, but a branch for study will be formed later on.

" My experience shows that it is most difficult to unite people with varied tastes
on any plan ; hence I left nothing to the option of the members except the disposal
of the books passed through the club, but presented the details of the plan in the
form of a personal invitation. This may seem dogmatic, but has proved even
more successful than expected. We had no organization, the members accept-
ing the invitation to join elected a treasurer, consenting to leave all else to me
ter it had been explained that nothing would be required of them beside the
is, except to pass each book in turn promptly to the member whose name fol-
>ws on the list and whose address would be sent with the book. * * * "

For the convenience of those about to organize a small Reading Circle we give
fac-simile of the list to be inserted in each book :

Girafe.

Treasurer.

......... ..... Librarian.

ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION - .

PLEASE PASS BOOKS PROMPTLY ON THE IST AND I5TH OF THE MONTH.

NAMES.

Rec'd.

Pass'd.

266 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS, [Nov.,

This statement was prepared to go with the list of subscribers : '

" Considering the individual tastes of the members, it is hardly expected that
they will be interested in all the books passed, but as those selected include many
subjects — history, biography, poetry, fiction, and a few religious works — it is
thought each member will derive some pleasure therefrom, and have the satisfac-
tion of»encouraging the beginning of a work which is expected to result in an ex-
tensive intercourse with the best Catholic authors and the formation of many
libraries and literary clubs in the future."

We are much encouraged by the letters received from E. F. B., Hartford,
Conn.; S. M. C., Sinsinawa, Wis.; I. P. M., Narriston, Va.; J. A. K., Colum-
bus, O.; A. F. S., St. Louis, Mo.; O. A. H., Sunnydale, W. T.; M. G. M.,
Portland, Ore.; D. J. S., Jefferson City, Mo.; A. J. McD., Marinette, Wis.;
J. A. M., Sioux Falls, Dakota; G. H. W., St. Louis, Mo.; A. J. K., Philadel-
phia, Pa.; E. M. T., N. Y. City; E. A. McM., South Boston, Mass.; G. S. C.,
N. Y. City; E. McG., Columbus, O.; R. B. M., Portland, Ore.; A. G., St.
Louis, Mo.; S. P., Madison, Wis.; M. E. M., Springfield, O.

Through one of our correspondents we have obtained information of a circle
organized in Chicago which has proved very beneficial to its members. Our in-
formant thus writes :

"We meet weekly, under the guidance of a zealous priest, to consider
the teachings of the church on matters of religion, history, science, and
philosophy. We were advised to follow a consecutive course of reading,
consulting standard works, and were asked to submit in writing, for explanation
and discussion, any individual objections or troublesome questions. These con-
ferences led to a close study of infallibility, the Inquisition, Genesis as related to
science, Darwinism, Buddhism, etc., and resulted in Unbounded admiration for
the liberality of the church and increased confidence in her doctrines. Our circle
numbered several Protestant ladies, who were greatly edified and interested.
I wish all Catholics had such an opportunity for serious intellectual and spiritual
development. A. M."

The information which we give in this issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will
enable the writer of the following letter to answer his own questions :

" I do not think that THE CATHOLIC WORLD has done a better service to
Catholics than it is now doing in calling attention to Reading Circles. The
methods proposed by the Columbian Reading Union are practical and will suit
our people, who for the most part are great readers ; the plan will gratify the
taste for reading that which is useful as well as interesting.

" When I was sixteen years of age I followed a course of reading planned
by a high-school professor, who, I believe, meant well, but I realize now was
very injudicious; his plan included such authors as Gibbon, Hallam, Buckle, and
Lecky, with the result that it nearly destroyed my faith, and in reality did so for a
companion who pursued the same course. It need not be said that there were no
Catholic 'works on the list. I have since been interested in the methods of the
Chautauqua Reading Circles. I was about to adopt these methods for our boys
and young men when THE CATHOLIC WORLD began to discuss the subject.

" Last week, having occasion to address a society of young men, I called their
attention to the Columbian Reading Union as a practical method of literary
work, and was agreeably surprised at the enthusiasm at once aroused ; they re-
solved upon immediate action, and it is at their request that I write these lines.
We know not how to begin.

" I believe that a circular or pamphlet giving information about the organi-

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 267

zation of circles, embracing the points given below, would hasten the adoption of
the reading course very generally :

" i st. How to get up a Circle; what officers required; what fees for
membership.

" 2d. Should all the members of a Reading Club read the same book, or
should the members be divided into circles of 5, 10, or 15, each circle to read one
or other of the books suggested in the same group ?

" 3d. How much ought to be read every fortnight, supposing the society
meets fortnightly, as ours does?

" 4th. Should the reading be done privately by each member and discussed
in public meeting, or should one of the members read aloud to the Club from the
book selected to be studied ? F. H. G."

From many sources we have been favored with information asked for by one
of our correspondents on the subject of Hypnotism :

" In Brownson's Quarterly Review for July, 1875, will be found an. article on
'Our Lady of Lourdes,' in which the writer sets forth that 'Satan, though a
creature, has a superhuman power, and is able to work, not miracles, but pro-
digies which imitate miracles, and which the unvfrary may mistake for them. But
Satan, being a creature, has no creative, and, therefore, no supernatural power.'
This article may also be found in Brownson's Works, vol. viii. p. 104.

"See also Brownson's Spirit-rapper, published in 1854, and republished in
Brownson's Works, vol. ix. pp. 1-234.

"Father Hecker delivered in 1871, or thereabouts, a very able and satis-
factory lecture on spiritism. That ought to be published if it can be found in
print or manuscript. * * * "

" Inquiry was made in THE CATHOLIC WORLD whether any reader knew of
a Catholic work on Hypnotism. There is a book published by Letouzey et Ane,
Paris, called Le Merveilleux etla Science, etude sur ['hypnotisms, par Elie Meric,
docteur en theologie, professeur a la Sorbonne. The author's name is sufficient
guarantee for the scientific treatment of the subject. To me the work seems to
have the additional merit of showing the wisdom of the Holy See's decisions on
Hypnotism and kindred systems, which is seen by the care shown in distin-
guishing what is clearly false in these systems from what may be true, and in
the refusal, even before scientific proof of what is true in them had been made,
to condemn absolutely these systems, although repeatedly urged to do so.

"Boston, Mass. T. J. WHELAN."

"The subject of Hypnotism is treated in the Lyceum, a Catholic periodical
published monthly in Dublin. In February, 1889, the first article appeared and
was followed by others during three successive months. What I have read in the
numbers of the Lyceum indicates that every subject is seriously considered and
treated with ability, though, as in the case of Mr. Mivart's stand-point, with an
ultra-critical acerbity. * * * "

Through the kindness of the business manager of THE CATHOLIC WORLD
we have obtained copies of the Lyceum, with the articles on Hypnotism. It is
considered in its relations to psychology. By processes purely artificial it has
been found that persons may be subjected to an influence by which conscious-
ness becomes disordered or suspended, and strange phenomena are manifested as
well of the organic as of the mental order. For different reasons Hypnotism has
been examined by students of medicine, by lawyers and theologians. In some
respects it is very much like Mesmerism.

The Messrs. Benziger Brothers are agents for the Lyceum, to whom Amen-

268 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Nov.,

can and Canadian subscribers are requested to send their orders. The articles
on Hypnotism are from the pen of the Rev. Father Finlay, S.J., editor of the
Lyceum.

We publish this month only two of the many letters received from priests,
whose words of commendation we esteem very highly. Their active co-operation
will give valuable assistance to the Reading Circles in their parishes :

" Please enter my name on the list of membership as the representative of
the Young Ladies' Sodality and find enclosed $i yearly dues.

" I have been watching the 'development of the Union with great interest and
doubt not that it will accomplish much good among Catholics. It is certainly
deplorable to see the Catholic youth of our land forced, as it were, to derive their
intellectual life from the dangerous books of the public library. I wish all suc-
cess to this praiseworthy undertaking. * * * "

" I am in charge of a large parish in the country, and I know there exists ac-
tual spiritual thirst for Catholic reading. I hope the Union can slake this thirst,
and I will use every effort necessary to establish a flourishing branch in my
parish. * * *"

In answer to the numerous inquiries made by correspondents we are glad to
state that Brother Azarias' essay on " Books and Reading" has* been published
in pamphlet form and is sold for the benefit of the Cathedral Library. Copies
may be had by addressing the Rev. Joseph H. McMahon, Librarian, 460 Madison
Avenue, New York City. The price per copy is twenty-five cents, payable in pos-
tage-stamps. M. C. M.

THE SLAVE-TRADE.

A very interesting lecture, delivered by M. Jules Simon, on the loth of
February last, before a numerous and distinguished audience, in the great
amphitheatre of the Sorbonne in Paris, has been fully reported in the Bulletin de
la Societe Antiesdavagiste, an anti-slavery paper published monthly in that city.
The lecturer describes with careful accuracy and from reliable sources the hor-
rors and abominable cruelties of slavery and the Arab slave-trade as at present
carried on in Africa. He has derived his facts from Elisee Reclus' work on that
continent, from reported interviews with British and French officials there, and
lastly from statements of French missionaries, narrators of what they have them-
selves either seen or been told by credible native witnesses.

Slavery has existed from time immemorial in Africa, and it is estimated that
practically at least one-half of its population hews wood and draws water for the
other half in a state of slavery. Hereditary slaves are usually treated by their
owners ''as well as one barbarian knows how to treat another." The great
generators of servitude there are famine and war. In a part of the country suf-
fering from a dearth of food a family can get it from more fortunate neighbors
only in exchange for their own freedom or that of some of their members. Cap-
tives made by war often meet with a much worse fate, being reserved either for
cannibal feasts or for human sacrifices to royal majesty. The purposes for which
slaves are wanted in Africa are mainly three : If men, to cultivate the soil or
carry burdens ; if women, to supply harems. For instance, Zanzibar is one of
the spots where field-hands find their best use. The clove-plant grows well
there, and is successfully cultivated throughout the island. Its culture at first
does not require much labor, but when the season for gathering the crop comes
one man has as much as he can do in attending to twenty plants. Consequently
on some clove plantations there are as many as five hundred slaves.

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 269

The entire transportation of ivory from the interior — one of Africa's most
valuable products — and of goods in return, is done on the backs of slaves, who
are often overloaded, and then urged along cruelly by the lash. The creed of
Islam, with its accompaniments, polygamy and harems, has greatly increased in
Africa the demand for female slaves, and it may be fairly assumed that a yet
further increase of slavery will follow, as a consequence, on the growth and
spread there, already very large, of that belief.

Traffic in African slaves is carried on either openly, or surreptitiously if
forbidden by treaties made with European powers. In the former case it has the
sanction of the authority and supervision of the king of the locality, who derives a
large part, if not all, of his revenues from it, and even pays his officials their
annual salaries with slaves. In the latter case, the Mussulman princes, who have
bound themselves unwillingly by treaty to prevent a trade which, sad to say,
their consciences seem not to tell them is iniquitous, and who conceive themselves
to be the great losers by deprivation of it, have to manage things underhand.
Parties pay the prince one or two piastres for every slave introduced, and he
wilfully closes his eyes to violations of the law. Officials have to be bribed in
like manner, and, in the instances of Tripoli and Morocco, it is the only pay
governors of provinces get. It was reliably ascertained some years ago that the in-
come from this source of several of these dignitaries amounted to forty or fifty
thousand francs yearly. A piastre is the equivalent of four francs, say eighty cents.
According to a letter received by the learned lecturer only two months previous,
from Father Jamet, of the society of Lcs Missionaires d'Alger, and dated from Zan-
zibar, quotations for slaves' were as follows: In places where there was not an
active demand, fifteen kilogrammes (thirty-three pounds) of salt would easily buy
two slaves. In cities, where usually the market is better, a negro lad eight to
fourteen years old would bring twenty piastres, an adult of between twenty and
thirty years, forty piastres, and a girl a higher price, according to her attractions.
Eunuchs always fetch fancy prices. The learned lecturer then quoted from a
bulletin of the Societe Esclavagiste de France the personal testimony of a British
consul at Messfoua. He had noticed that a large number of negro children
whom he happened to meet appeared very^ ill and suffering. He inquired in
vain of the Moors who came to visit him in his tent whether the cause of their ail-
ment lay with the drinking water or the climate. Later on he was confidentially
informed that these poor boys belonged to a vast establishment for the supply of
eunuchs for the harem of his sheriffian majesty, and that out of thirty children
operated on at least twenty-eight were sure to die in a slow agony from the
effects. The consul's informant added that it would cost him his life if the caid
should happen to find out that he had revealed this horrid fact.

Slave dealers get their prohibited commodity, some by regular purchase
from owners who have it to sell; others, and these are the more numerous, by
organizing bands of two or three hundred men, well armed and mounted on
selected camels, who either stir up wars between tribes, and come in afterwards
to purchase the captives, or by making during the night raids on villages
around which they have lain in ambuscade during the day, and setting them on
fire. The result is generally that from 1,000 to 1,500 of the villagers are mas-
sacred, and the small remnant of survivors are made slaves and prepared for a
long tramp of from 1,200 to 1,500 miles. Each male captive has a sort of bridle
and bit put in his mouth ; an iron fork, the handle of which rests on the shoulder
of the man behind him, is made fast around his neck ; his hands are bound behind
his back, his feet are bare, and not infrequently his legs are hobbled in order to
render flight impossible. The women are fettered and laden with heavy bur-
dens, and their children, if they have any, trot along crying by their side, and when

270 WITH READERS AND CO-RESPONDENTS. [Nov.,

they get tired must be carried by their mothers. It is a not unfrequent occur-
rence for a suffering, overladen woman to be unequal to the task of carrying both
burdens, whereupon one of the conductors of the caravan descends from his
camel, draws a pistol from his girdle, and settles the matter by blowing the
child's brains out while in its mother's arms. The only food the captives get is
sorgo and corn. At night they are carefully inspected, and such as are plainly
too sick and weak to get to their journey's end are knocked on the head and left,
as are those who may have died on the march, to become food for the hyenas
and jackals, which always follow looking for this prey, as also do the marabouts
and vultures, soaring overhead, intent on getting their share.

The march of these caravans can easily be traced by the skeletons of slaves
who have perished on the way, and who almost always have around their necks
the iron fastening by which they were secured. It is also an ascertained fact that
these overfeasted beasts of prey have more food of this kind than they care or are
able to devour.

The waste of life is therefore frightfully great. Reliable calculations show
that on an average out of four captives setting out on the journey one only
reaches its end. One instance is cited in which 1,500 men were massacred to
secure fifty-two women ; of these hardly fifteen reached their place of destination.
In another case five caravans, organized to raid in succession in the same extent of
country, accomplished the following ruin to secure an aggregate booty of 2,500
slaves. A land twice as large as Belgium, containing one million inhabitants
and one hundred and eighteen towns, was so thoroughly ravaged and made deso-
late that neither inhabitants nor habitations remain. A British consul-general
once expressed to a Mussulman sovereign his indignation that such atrocities
were permitted. The potentate admitted that the poor sufferers had a hard road
to travel before finding masters, but that afterwards their life was not hard, and
" they were," he said, " as well treated as European servants."

After the captives have reached their destined mafket, if it be in a country
not bound by treaty for the suppression of the slave-trade, their sale takes place
at a fair, just as if they were cattle, along with other goods, and becomes the
occasion of great rejoicing. If the market lies in a country whose government is
bound by treaty, then the sale has to be managed on the sly. Some slaves are
sold for transportation either to Zanzibar or to Turkey in Europe ; in the former
event they are crowded into large sail-boats; in the latter they are shipped by the
fine steamers of the Mahsousse line, and they pass the supervision of the Ottoman
authorities by the payment of a few piastres, and by the owners exhibiting docu-
ments which attest that the negroes he has put on board are freed slaves, which
of course the poor fellows, who cannot read what is shown them, cannot contra-
dict. Slaves shipped to Zanzibar or the Island of Pemba, where there is also a
great demand for them, have to endure on the passage fresh sufferings very
different from those undergone before on land. They are stowed away, chained,
in boutres, large boats carrying one hundred or less, and are so crowded that
they have to squat with their heads resting on their knees, and can neither move
nor rise. On a platform aft the skipper and sailors sail the craft, and throw,
when feeding-time comes, balls of sorgo and maize and beans mixed among the
human cargo, each individual of which must get his share if he can. Some are
so sea-sick that they cannot eat. Sometimes a destructive epidemic breaks out
among them and carries many off. If the boutre is chased by a cruiser, the corpus
delicti with fetters on is thrown overboard, to be devoured by watchful sharks
always following in the wake of the vessel. As under the most favorable circum-
stances some slaves are sure to die at sea, and the dying are to be got rid of
as well as the dead, the work of heaving overboard has to be done almost

:889-] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 271

lily. Survivors have told a missionary that they have ever ringing in their
irs the two-fold noise of a corpse falling into the sea and that of the sharks
ishing to devour it.

The peroration of the discourse consists of eloquent and timely expressions
>f Christian charity and duty, and of grounds for hope ; of a tribute of praise to
ic missionaries who leave all to go to those suffering lands, and of complimen-
iry mention of the initiative and impulse given to the anti-slavery movement by
Ordinal Lavigerie. B.

CONGREGATIONAL SINGING IN DUBLIN.

' During last August, after celebrating Mass one Sunday morning in the

fesuit church in Dublin, I asked the sacristan at what hour Vespers would be

ing. " We have no Vespers," he replied, "but we have a devotional service

;ith a sermon in the evening at 8 o'clock." I confess that I was greatly sur-

>rised to hear this, as I had been informed by a Jesuit father with whom I had

jen travelling that St. Francis Xavier's, Dublin, was one of the best working

>arishes of the society.

But in the evening, when I attended this service, I found it to be of a most inter-
sting and practical character. About one-third of the best seats in the church were
occupied exclusively by men who were members of some confraternity. All of
the remaining seats were filled promiscuously with men, women, and children.
First the Rosary was recited with great devotion, all of the congregation respond-
ing to the prayers in loud, clear tones. Then a regular sermon of half or three-
quarters of an hour was preached, plain, practical, and to the point. As the
preacher descended from the pulpit that vast congregation united in singing a
hymn which impressed me more than any singing which I had ever heard in
church, except thp.t of the congregation of the Cologne Cathedral and that at
the Holy House of Loreto. After the hymn the Tantum Ergo was sung with
even greater effect, the preponderance of the men's voices being particularly
noticeable ; and the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament followed.

It seems to me that a better service than this for afternoon or evening could
not be found. H. H. WYMAN.

BLESSED IS THE PEACEMAKER.

The city of London claims to be Christian, but the religion of Christ exerts,
nhappily, only a feeble influence on the city's social life. A state church, half
ealous and half friendly towards its numerous rival sects, speaks, if it has a
ublic voice apart from the state at all, in tones so varying and hesitating that it
ives forth an uncertain sound ; and it is so identified with the rich and the noble
that to the common people it is an intruder ; and the smaller sects are weaker
still. When, therefore, this vast metropolis was disturbed and its prosperity en-
dangered by the strike of the dock laborers, the official church and the wrang-
ling and petty sects of Protestantism were almost powerless to intervene, although
five-sixths of the strikers were born of Protestant parents. At any moment the
conflict between labor and capital might have become a bloody social war. Jus-
tice and charity had been both violated, or such a crisis could not have arisen.

Now, on such occasions the public looks for some man with a great moral
power back of him to intervene. The Protestant clergy could not produce such a
man, for he must represent a positive moral force, kindred at once to the rich and
to the poor, and the Protestant ministry is too much divided or too much in sub-
jection to the capitalist class to answer the requirements of the situation ; even

jectio

272 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Nov.,

upon questions of plain, every-day morality they find it difficult to disencumber
their attitude of the vagueness of a religion which is essentially negative. The
labor unions and the dock companies looked for something more than a state
bishop or a dissenting minister to stand between them. These, moreover, too
often feel as little interest in such matters as they are conscious of lack of power,
of that which shall enable them to speak as men having power. Who, then,
shall represent the higher law ?

Cardinal Manning. He is a man full of courage. He is an Englishman, and
a thoroughgoing one, full of leve of country. He is a dignitary of an institution
supremely independent of all classes, and yet identified essentially with the well-
being of all. He is a judge in the highest human tribunal. His creden-
tials as a moral teacher are not doubtful. His life is an argument for his faith,
which works by charity. His endeavors to make the peace are successful be-
cause adequate causes skilfully applied produce commensurate results. The
manliness of his character, his sympathy with the poor, his participation in all
the great movements of his time and country for the relief of distress, his emi-
nently spiritual life, the unworldliness of his motives, his great age — all this and
more of the like characteristics made him welcome to the toilers of the docks,
even to the socialists, who have obtained leadership among them. On the other
hand, his standing in the intellectual world, his princely office in the great church
of mankind, above all, the absolute certainty that the power behind him was the
solid foundation of stability in the social order, made it impossible for the reluc-
tant owners of the docks to deny him.

His words touched the dead sympathies of the capitalist and awaked a sign
of life. To the workingmen his words sounded with the tones of unfeigned
brotherly love. The insignia of his splendid office was no hindrance to his access
to the poor man's heart and aroused not their suspicions ; and yet that office was
a most valuable auxiliary in his gaining the confidence of the rich.

The reason of Cardinal Manning's success is plain. He preaches
and exemplifies the living Gospel of Jesus Christ. He has a real office in that
dispensation, and he is worthy of it. That gives him a power more than human ;
he lifts up the poor man, he makes the rich man charitable, and his word is like
His who brings peace on earth to men of good will.

All human organizations are at best weak instruments ; they cannot rise
above their origin. Who can move the rich to pity ? Not those who depend
upon their favor for very existence. Who can sincerely plead the cause of the
needy toilers ? Not those who do not know them. Philanthropy needs to be
baptized by the charity of Christ and to receive the gifts of the Holy Ghost
before it can do its work. Then the evangelical virtue of poverty makes common
cause with the poverty of necessity, the divine gift of chastity rebukes and destroys
impurity wherever its influence is felt, and the' divine counsel of obedience be-
comes a powerful promoter of law and order, and a lovely ornament of rational
liberty.

Cardinal Manning's philanthropy is Christian and Catholic. He labors for
men's welfare both here and hereafter. He walks in the pathway, and directs
others to walk in the pathway, which Jesus Christ has marked out. He is a well-
c!hosen leader among men, because he seeks not his own glory, but the glory of
God. He is one whom none but the malignant fear, and whom all guileless men
love. The lord-mayor, the directors of the dock companies, and John Burns,
representing British law, British capital, and British labor, all recognize in him a
true friend and wise counsellor. "Blessed," says our Lord, "are the peace
makers, for they shall be called the children of God."

1889.] NE w PUB LIC A TIONS. 273

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

AMERICAN RELIGIOUS LEADERS. Jonathan Edwards. By Alexander V. G.
Allen, D.D., Professor in the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge,
Mass. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the Riverside
Press, Cambridge. 1889.

The series of biographies of "American Religious Leaders " is one of sev-
eral series, "American Commonwealths," "American Men of Letters," and
"American Statesmen," which are in the course of publication by the firm of
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The lives of " Religious Leaders " announced, be-
sides the one under present notice, are those of Dr. Wayland, Dr. Hodge, Dr
Wilbur Fisk, Archbishop Hughes, Theodore Parker, and Dr. Muhlenberg, to
be followed by others.

So far as the style of publication is concerned, the present volume, like all the
others of the various series which have appeared, is worthy of the publishers
and printers, which is the highest praise, for this sort of excellence, we can give it.
The editing, in respect to the index and other appendices of the biography, is in
the accurate, scholarly manner of Cambridge.

Dr. Allen writes in a pleasing style, with an evident effort at an impartial
critical estimate of the character and work of the great man who is the subject of
his memoir. It is very noteworthy that the biographer of Edwards should be
sought for in Cambridge, and in an Episcopalian seminary. The other biogra-
phers have a close affinity with their subjects. It would appear that in the circle
of eminent authors who might be supposed competent to write a biography of
Edwards, and who are in the same ecclesiastical connection, no one could be
found who would be willing to place himself in the attitude of an advocate of his
theology, or in open opposition to the same. Dr. Allen, as an outsider, compro-
mises no one by his criticism. He is in sufficient sympathy with his hero as a
religious leader whose character and career are interesting to appreciate his
great mental and moral qualities, and his marked influence in and beyond New
England in his own and succeeding generations. He is in decided opposition,
however, to his specific theological opinions, and therefore a critic, not an advo
cate or apologist, though free from the odium theologicum which would interfere
with an impartial judgment of the personal worth of the subject whose opinions
are the object of criticism.

Jonathan Edwards was a man of superior intellectual gifts, of pure and severe
morals, with a considerable tincture of imagination and amiable dispositions.
He had the native capacities of a great philosopher and theologian, and it was not
his fault, but his misfortune, that he failed to become either the one or the other
His mind and conscience were held in bondage by the tradition of his sect, and
although he labored hard to find a harmony between its gloomy tenets and the
dictates of reason, his efforts only proved the impossibility of the task. He was
earnest, and strove to be consistent in acting up to his religious convictions.

" John Ward, Preacher," is a well-drawn picture of a man of like character,
a good and loving man, in whom there is a struggle to reconcile opposing elements.
The struggle killed John Ward, and the heroic effort of Jonathan Edwards to
make his religious ideas dominant in New England ended in a collapse which
finished his career as a preacher and pastor, and gave a blow to his peculiar
theology from which it has never recovered. It is now, to a great extent, obso-
lete. Probably the majority of those who belong to the ecclesiastical connection
VOL. L.— 18

274 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Nov.,

of Edwards, and who read Dr. Allen's biography, will agree substantially with
him in his estimate of the character and work of Jonathan Edwards as a reli-
gious leader.

THE PARNELL MOVEMENT, WITH A SKETCH OF IRISH PARTIES FROM 1843.
With an addition containing an account of the great Trial instituted by the
London Times, and giving a complete history of the Home Rule struggle
from its inception to the suicide of Piggott. By T. P. O'Connor, M.P.
Authorized version. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros.

The writer of this book is a prominent member of that most energetic of all
contemporary political parties, the Irish Nationalists. He was born about the
date at which his retrospect begins, the "Fall of O'Connell," and his youth and
early manhood were passed amid the sadness of the ever-decaying fortunes of his
country. He saw his countrymen and countrywomen dying by the roadside in the
famine while the shipping bore away the abundant surplus grain of their
farms. He saw the great processions of emigrants whose tearful eyes and pallid
cheeks and drooping hearts told that they were exiles as well. He has felt all
his life the dire oppression of tyranny, alien and bigoted and greedy, brutal and
relentless. But his book is defiant in tone, and even jubilant with the joy of ap-
proaching victory.

Something like two-thirds of the volume give the story of the inception, de-
velopment, and present condition of the Irish political movement named after its
chief promoter. The other third, which is the first part, is devoted to that mis-
erable era of starvation, flight, spasmodic politics, and rebellion between the
break-down of O'Connell and the collapse of Fenianism. We have seldom read
a better summary of events and estimate of results than Mr. O'Connor gives us
in these first chapters. His thesis is always for Home Rule, understood in both
the principles and methods of the present Irish Parliamentary party; and cer-
tainly all that happened between 1846 and 1870 seems to furnish arguments
enough for the boldness of purpose and the thoroughness of performan.ee of the
present leaders. One might say that the first third of the book is a diagnosis of
the Irish nation's disease and the rest of it the minute description of the remedies
applied by the National party, their application, and the results achieved.

The success of the present movement is twofold, an Irish success and an
English one ; at any rate, it is so in its general features. The latter is the winning
of the Liberal party to the Irish cause. There were promises from both parties
before, but there was little else but disappointment and chagrin to show for them,
unless we add the periodical absorption and dissipation of the Irish parliamentary
representation in the two hostile English parties. At the present time there is
the stated adhesion, explicit and effectual — no doubt final — of the entire machin-
ery of the English Liberal party, and its electorate almost wholly gained, the
liberal dissidents being toryized to an extent that is likely to sever them for ever
from their former party affiliation ; and all this without interfering with the
autonomy of the Irish party in Parliament. Along with this has come about a
general enlightenment of the English people upon the Irish question. It is easy
enough for that people to tell what is right and wrong in politics whose lines do
not interlace with their own. But when in following the threads of investiga-
tion they find them crossing the lines of their own imperial destiny, there are none
so blind as the enlightened English, none so mean as the famous lovers of fair
play. It is a little strange that the Irishmen who have softened the British heart
and anointed British eyes with the oil of righteousness in reference to Irish ques-
tions are the most independent and defiant Irish politicians who have ever
stopped short of violence — a great fact, assuring an early and fair settlement, and
due to nothing so much as the movement so well described by the author of this

1889.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 275

book. Accompanying this result, and in a great degree its cause, is the organiza-
tion of the Irish voters in Great Britain. It is commonly enough said that Mr.
O'Connor himself has had much, perhaps most, to do with this feature of the Irish
agitation.

The author's description of the results achieved in Ireland is graphic, sym-
pathetic, and much in detail. He shows how the civil and religious elements
have become one, thus stamping the patriotic demands with the broad seal of
religious approval in the almost unanimous, not simply adhesion, but hearty par-
ticipation of the Catholic clergy ; and on the other hand adorning the altar with
the trophies of Catholic patriotism. How deep a satisfaction fills the American
priest's heart to know that the priesthood of Ireland, now leading, now following,
have been almost unbroken in their hearty, active, public, private co-operation in
the present agitation for the civil liberty of their race !

The unity of the race is another glorious victory of the Parnell movement, in
itself enough to secure the final triumph of the cause. The curse of that people
has been the clan with its narrowness and its brutish tyranny. Now the clanship
is transferred to the whole race, rendering unity of purpose and effort only the
more passionate as it unites the ardor of blood kinship to the intelligent and
appreciative love of a good cause. It was Irish unity which broke down the last
barrier in Gladstone's mind ; that the whole of Celtic Ireland, and even part of
Scotch Ireland, sent a delegation to Westminster in which there was not a single
friend of the present parliamentary union.

This unification of the Irish race embraces the members of the race in every
part of the world. The Irishman in the United States or Canada or Australia
who is not a Parnellite is considered to have broken the Celtic bond, and he is
hard to discover, anyway. Yet more: the British dependencies which enjoy
political autonomy, without, we believe, a single exception, have officially ex-
pressed their approval of the Irish demand for Home Rule. This is of far greater
weight to the English electorate than the almost unanimous adhesion of the people
of the United States, in all that the term means, private views, the press, the pul-
pit, the legislatures, and the executives of the States and of the national government.

The interest one finds in this book, if extremely engrossing, is not altogether
pleasant. There are too many sad scenes to make the drama less than tragical.
The spectacle of a small, poor, unarmed nation ridden down by the richest and
most powerful state in Christendom, brutally, continuously, without even the
hypocritical pretence of granting civil rights, is hard to look upon. Later events
have deepened the black darkness going before the dawn. It has remained for
Mr. Balfour to exhibit a new sort of British tyranny. The English race is stal-
wart, and heretofore it has been represented in the dragonnades and priest-hunt-
ings and peasant-starvings by the genuine English brute. But " the most
dangerous and the most cruel of men," says Mr. O'Connor, speaking of Balfour,
are not the robust and the bold and the brutal tyrants. It is the men of
effeminate minds and temper. Their vanity leads them to do things that look
strong, and their effeminacy induces a certain tendency to political hysteria that
has very cruel and very callous elements. . . . Mr. Balfour's acts fully justify
this conception of his character."

The author's account of the coercion policy as at present enforced in Ireland,
and which the Tory government declares to be its policy for the next twenty
years, is very circumstantial. His main line of criticism, based on notorious
fact, is that taken by Mr. Gladstone and the English Liberals. If there be any
fraction of truth in it, there is no such happy lot as mere obscurity or political
ostracism in wait for Balfour, as was the case with Forster. Balfour's name will

276 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Nov.,

be held in execration and his memory be an heir-loom of horror and loathing to
all future generations of the Celtic race, and of all other races among whom love
of freedom and hatred of cynical and smiling cruelty shall be cherished.

PRINCIPLES OF THE ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIETY, GOVERNMENT,
AND INDUSTRY. By Van Buren Denslow, LL.D. New York: Cassell
& Co.

The domain of political economy is too wide, and its regions yet unmapped
too extensive, to permit one yet to say that he can follow obediently any particu-
lar guide, even the most distinguished ; and we presume that the author of this
book would hardly claim such allegiance for his views. It must be owned that
he brings to his work very wide and, we doubt not, very mature studies, and he has
treated his dry topics with a certain rhetorical elegance which makes his work
pleasant reading to any person of intelligence. The volume is readable, some
parts of it really of much interest to even the average observer of the social and
industrial problems involved in the science — if such it really be — of political
economy. We venture to say that Mr. Denslow's work would serve for an excel-
lent book of reference. The arrangement of chapters is wisely made, each of
them being fully summarized in the table of contents, and a notably large index
of seventy-six double-column pages facilitating its use. In addition to this the
paragraphs are numbered throughout, affording greater convenience for refer-
ence in case of the revision of future editions changing the present paging.

One pleasant feature is the frequent occurrence of historical excursions with
the object of more fully illustrating the author's arguments. These are partic-
ularly well written and in a style of condensed English leading us to infer jour-
nalistic antecedents in the author. This book differs in many other ways from
an ordinary work on political economy, being an honest and fairly successful at-
tempt to philosophize on the secular relations of men to each other and to the
temporal gifts of God. We do not, as we began by intimating, quite agree with
the author in some of his conclusions, especially those referring to legal corpora-
tions, their uses and abuses. He is frankly opposed to the government absorp-
tion of railroads, whereas we think the question is, to say the truest word about
it, in a state far from settlement one way or the other, the experience of Europe
teaching the economy of the governmental system, yet not conclusively settling
the question for our peculiar commercial and political environments. The
author's theory of the division of profits between labor and capital is not original,
nor does he claim it to be so. It is, however, far in advance of the thoroughly
immoral principle that labor is a commodity with no more rights against low
wages than the soil or the metal has rights against the men who work them.
But Mr. Denslow's figures tending to show that as a matter of fact labor and capi-
tal actually do divide the profits of their joint production are suspicious and, we
fear, illusory.

What the author has to say on these subjects and the other equally interest-
ing ones embraced in his wide scheme of economic and social philosophy is
extremely valuable, not simply from the weight of his own conclusions, but be-
cause he groups together and compares statistics and authorities so numerous
and well chosen as to give him the undeniable merit of patient, intelligent, and
extensive research. With reference to the tariff controversy, he is a moderate
protectionist as to policy, and a thoroughgoing one as to theory. He is also a
moderate advocate of the uses of paper money. Taken altogether, the book is
one which may serve for a text-book for college classes and even, as we have said,
for a book of reference. There is a pleasing absence of dogmatism, and a kindly
and tolerant tone towards his opponents' views throughout.

1 889.] NE W PUBLICA TIONS. 2JJ

THE DARK AGES. Essays Illustrating the State of Religion and Literature
in the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Centuries. By S. R. Maitland,
D.D., F.R.S., F.S.A. New Edition. With an Introduction by Frederick
Stokes, M. A. London: John Hodges. (For sale by Benziger Bros.,, New
York, Cincinnati, and Chicago.)

A history of the Middle Ages written purely in the interests of truth is what
a vast number of our fair-minded countrymen are anxious to find. The writings
of the older Protestant historians are filled with such coarse and filthy abuse of
the eras which mark some of the greatest triumphs of the Christian name, wit-
nessed the holiest lives, and wrought the most wonderful moral and social reforms
in the world that they are self- condemned.

As writers of this class whose writings are useless and dead I may instance
the following : Mosheim ; Robertson, the author of History of Charles the Fifth ;
Warton, the writer of History of English Poetry ; Jortin, and Blanco White.
The author of The Dark Ages was a Protestant clergyman, distinguished for
his love of historical research and acquaintance with mediaeval books and manu-
scripts, who in the essays before us has exposed the glaring misrepresentations and
absurdities of the above-mentioned writers. No one who reads these essays of
Dr. Maitland can fail to see that he has had the cause of truth most at heart.
" Whenever," he says, " I give a reference (unless the contrary is stated) I copy
immediately from the book to which I refer." They have been extensively
read, as they were first published in the British Magazine between March, 1835,
and February, 1838, and since then three editions have been exhausted.

It is needless to remark that the old lines of misrepresentation of this period
have now been abandoned. Later Protestant historians for the most part consider
Catholic Christianity as most suitable for the Middle Ages, and as designed by the
providence of God for them, and some consider it to-day as the best form of
Christianity for vast multitudes of men and for particular races, and are not in
sympathy with those who make war upon it.

When this work first appeared in book-form, in 1844, the Oxford movement
was in its full vigor. Accessions to the party of Newman and Ward had become
so numerous that the instinct of alarm among the Evangelicals and Church-Lib-
erals was aroused to the highest degree. Everything that had ever been said or
could be said against the Catholic Church was caught up by them and reiterated
with fresh venom. At length the indignation of Dr. Maitland, the fair-minded
and scholarly librarian of Lambeth Palace, was aroused and he was prompted to
write a refutation of some of the vile historical calumnies of unscrupulous bigots.

This exposition of the falsity of the assertions of some of the most popular
Protestant writers by one who was himself a Protestant is an edifying spectacle.
Truth is mighty, and, much as its enemies then hated to see it prevail, they found
themselves disclosed as favoring falsehood and deception of every sort, and their
designs frustrated, by one in their own camp. Now, again, the enemies of the
truth are as bold as fifty years ago. They simply ignore refutation, trusting to
the ignorance of their followers. Of this class we have notable examples in Dr.

»Mendenhall, of the Methodist Review ,• Dr. Armitage, the historian of the Bap-
tists, not to mention such offensive and ridiculous creatures as Joseph Cook and
Justin D. Fulton. Dr. Maitland's book, therefore, has still a mission to fulfil.
It is truly a standard work, and worthy of further editions. The introduction by
Mr. Frederick Stokes is remarkably well written.

INTRC

INTRODUCTION TO THE SACRED SCRIPTURES. In two parts. By Rev. John
McDevitt, D.D. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

There never was a time when general information about the Sacred Scriptures

278 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Nov.,

— their origin, their authorship, their authenticity, and their inspiration — was more
needful than it is to-day, and this need is common to all believers in God's reve-
lation. Difficulties, scientific, historical, philological, and even moral, are floating
in the air. The press and the pulpit are alike playing fast-and-loose with the
inspired Word ; and outside the church, at least, the masses are losing their hold
on the essential character of divine revelation. Destructive criticism has become
the fashion of the day, and every writer that panders to it is eagerly read. The
objections that are raised and the theories that are advanced against the Sacred
Scriptures are known to school-girls, but the most intelligent men and women of
the time are utterly ignorant of the cold facts and solid arguments on which
Biblical science rests. The gross ignorance with which the flippant rationalism
of the age approaches the Sacred Writings exhibits the most disgusting phase in
the whole history of human folly and impotency. Men who have never spent
one hour in the study of Biblical science proclaim their views on the subject with
all the lofty disdain of a Voltaire ; newspaper writers, who never graduated even
from a Sunday-school class, give forth their dicta on the Sacred Scriptures with
as much affectation of original research as St. Jerome. And the deluded throng
accept their pseudo-science and repeat their views ad naitseam. The principles
of Protestantism are largely, if not altogether, responsible for this attitude of the
age towards the Bible. Thrown broadcast to the masses without note or com-
ment, and left to the private judgment of each individual reader, the natural
result has followed : confusion, doubt, denial.

In this condition of things every work that gives the general outlines of
Biblical science and marshals in clear array the chief facts and arguments on
which this science is based should receive a hearty welcome, and Dr. McDevitt's
book does all this and more. It is not as profound a work as Dr. Dixon's, and will
not supplant it, but it is more modern and, for the average reader, more useful.

The difficulties raised by modern science are boldly stated, for the most
part in the very words of their authors, and they are honestly and skilfully met.
We are glad to see that he adopts Cardinal Newman's views on the question of
inspiration, and is in other important points in harmony with the best science of
the times, though, of course, his general treatment follows the traditional lines.
The work, though primarily intended for ecclesiastical students, is quite within the
range of any intelligent layman's reading, and we trust it will have a wide circula-
tion among English-speaking Catholics all over the world. The press-work and
binding are excellent.

THE LITTLE OFFICE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION EXPLAINED IN
SHORT CONFERENCES, WITH APPROPRIATE PRAYERS SUITABLE FOR
SODALITIES OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN. By Very Rev. Joseph Rainer,
Rector of the Provincial Seminary of St. Francis, near Milwaukee, Wis.
New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

The purpose of this little book is to explain the Scriptural allusions met with
in the Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, both in a general sense and
particularly as they concern prophetical types of Our Lady found in the older
dispensation. The deep and sacred meaning of these foreshadowings of the
Messias and of his mother are brought out and explained with a view to making
the recitation of the office more intelligent, and therefore more fruitful. The
conferences were first delivered in the chapel of Salesianum, the well-known
seminary of the Province of Milwaukee ; they therefore have the merit of a
practical test of their utility. Indeed, it was by the urgent solicitation of the
ecclesiastical students that the author was induced to print them. A virtue pecu-
liarly adapted to fill the aspirations of candidates for holy orders is devotion to the

1889.] NE w PUB LIC A TIONS. 279

Mother of Jesus, and hence a custom of reciting her office is a fit accompaniment
of the study of divinity. But these conferences can be used by all clients of
Mary with much profit, whether they recite her office or not, there being no such
artificial arrangement or choice of matter as at first glance the title would
indicate.

Although there is no parade of learning in this little work, the subjects are
treated with much intelligence and in a way to show perfect competence for the
task. It gives us great pleasure to bear testimony to the elegant and idiomatic
English employed, the more so as we believe the writer is a born German.

HAND-BOOK OF HUMILITY; OR, THE LOVE OF SELF-CONTEMPT. From the
Italian of Father Joseph Ignatius Franchi, Superior of the Oratory, Florence.
New York : The Catholic Publication Society Company ; London : Burns
& Gates.

Of all the virtues which the Christian is by his vocation bound to practise
there is perhaps none so little understood as humility, and therefore so little
practised. The average man labors under the delusion that humility is a love of
one's own degradation, whereas it is in reality a short cut to one's true and ra-
tional elevation. The word self-contempt, as used by spiritual writers, would be
equivalent in meaning to self-deceit if it meant anything else but a wise distrust
of our sinful inclinations and a thoroughgoing hatred of our sins. The more a
man despises himself as a sinner, the more he loves himself, or wishes that he had
good reason to love himself, as a saint. It is a weakness to despise one's better
self; only it is dangerous to calculate on one's own goodness and to inspect it too
narrowly. It was no sin in King David to be proud of the numbers and strength
of Israel, but it was pride in him to order Joab to take the census, and he was
punished accordingly.

Hence the usefulness of this little treatise. It was written by a saintly Orato-
rian, about the end of the last century, who was conspicuous for the virtue herein
inculcated. It not only carefully lays down the doctrines belonging to the subject,
and thus solidly establishes it in the reasoning faculties, but it elaborately illus-
trates it from every-day life, interspersing here and there prayers and invocations
ippropriate to the points touched upon.

VOICES OF THE SPIRIT. By George Matheson, M.A., D.D., minister of the
parish of St. Bernard's, Edinburgh ; author of Moments on the Mount, My
Aspirations, etc. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Co.

The reader of these meditations will find little between him and the good
loughts expressed in them, unless he interpose an obstacle himself. A style of
writing more strictly a means to its end — the unveiling of the writer's mind — we
link it would not be easy to find. Simplicity of expression is the most excellent
niality of composition if the expression be adequate to ail the meaning, and that
attained by Dr. Matheson in these pages.

His little book is strictly devotional, few of the ''voices " aiming at any other
)urpose than to stimulate the longings of the soul towards a more virtuous and
iworldly and prayerful life. Being a Protestant, the author does not accentuate
Hne of the religious aids which Catholics know to be in greater or less degree
iseful, and even essential, to at least the integrity of the state of grace ; but he
does not, as far as an incomplete examination of the book permits us to judge,
say anything against them ; and whatever he does treat of he does it by the light
of sound theology, and with much maturity of thought and devoutness of ex-
pression.

There are ninety-five little chapters in the book, scarcely any of them running
over two pages. They are each divided into two parts, the first stating the words

280 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Nov.,

of Scripture to be meditated on, and enlarging on their meaning and drawing out
their lessons ; the second is usually a simply worded prayer to the Holy Spirit,
expressive of the needs of the soul discovered in the previous meditation. There
is nothing very extraordinary in this arrangement or in the matter presented, yet
there is a plain sincerity quite attractive and a large measure of unction which
keeps the reader going on further and further to a constant repetition of the
method and equally constant variety of spiritual entertainment and profit.

The writer's church was, in the days of the old religion in Edinburgh, rilled
with worshippers who found in St. Bernard, after whom they named their shrine,
a beloved patron before God's throne in heaven. We cannot help but think that
that great preacher and contemplative has obtained for Dr. Matheson and his
people, descendants of the original Catholics of the parish, some of the unction of
the Holy Spirit which was so abundantly his own. May the same intercession
obtain for him and his people the fulness of the true faith !

A POPULAR MINERALOGY AND GEOLOGY. By Katherine E. Hogan. Second
edition. New York : A. Lovell & Co.

Women are coming to the front even as writers of scientific text-books. Some
months since we had the pleasure of noticing in this magazine a thoroughly scien
tific text-book of botany written by a lady, and here we have a popular little
treatise on the kindred subjects of mineralogy and geology from a competent
female pen. Women have undoubtedly far more tact than men in teaching
children of tender years, and in this primer of physics there is a woman's tact
combined with no ordinary knowledge of science. The excellent lady takes the
young aspirant after scientific lore to her knee and tells him in the clearest and
most comprehensive way the wondrous story of creation.

The endorsement this little volume has received from the press and from
those actually engaged in the work of public instruction proves that it is one of the
most successful attempts that has yet been made to simplify science and bring
it within the reach of all.

PRAYER. By the author of Golden Sands. Offered to novices and pious people
of the world; taken from the Book of the Professed. Translated from the
French by Miss Ella McMahon. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago :
Benziger Bros.

This is a compendious treatise on prayer, its nature, necessity, efficacy, con-
ditions, and effects, together with a chapter on methods or forms of prayer. It is
primarily intended for religious, but it is useful to all, for it insists upon the ne-
cessity of prayer for the fulness of human existence in any state of life. We
particularly recommend the chapter on the " life of prayer," which clearly sets
forth the Christian doctrine that the end of man is supernatural union with
God, and that the means of attaining to it is prayer; that the realization of
human destiny is the product of prayer.

Little books like this, pleasantly and clearly written, embodying those lessons
of religion which are most fundamental, are deserving of much praise, and should
be sought after and used by all intelligent Christians.

THE SALT-CELLARS. Being a Collection of Proverbs, together with Homely
Notes thereon. By C. H. Spurgeon. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son.

This book has an interest as a collection of proverbs taken from various
sources, but principally from the folk-lore of England. We do not think it will
add anything to Mr. Spurgeon's reputation, for his "Homely Notes" seldom betray
the vigor and other peculiar qualities that characterize his utterances in the pul-
pit ; in fact, it would seem as if these notes were written with the sole view of get-

1889.] NEW PUBLICATIOArS. 28 1

ting out a book. The notes are for the most part tame, devoid of the " short-
ness, sense, and salt" he insists upon, and are often carelessly written. The
" very learned man " he quotes as saying that the three hardest words to pro-
nounce in the English language are " I am mistaken " should have added to his
learning a knowledge of English. Some of the salt of both proverb and note is
far from savory. Mr. Spurgeon, we regret to say, never allows an opportunity to
pass without giving evidence of his anti-Catholic and dissenting animus.

AN EXPLANATION OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA. Prepared for Use in Catholic Schools, Academies, and Colleges.
By Francis T. Furey, A.M. New York: The Catholic Publication Society
Company.

We do not think it too much to say that this book should be in use in every
Catholic school in the land. The study of the Constitution, of the principles
upon which our organic law is based, does not receive as a rule that attention in
the class-room which is demanded by its importance. Indeed, as the author of
the book before us notes, there are some States in which the study of our Consti-
tution has no place in the curriculum of public education. For the most part, our
young men leave college with but a superficial knowledge of the fundamental law
of the Union. In many cases this knowledge is only the indirect effect of a study
of the history and principles of the great political parties, since the criterion of
political orthodoxy is found in the Constitution.

Such a defect is to be deplored, especially in this land of intelligence and lib-
erty, and more especially still among Catholics, since in no other country in the
world have the principles of civil government so intimate a harmony with those of
our holy religion j it is in the home of intelligence and liberty that the fairest fruit
of personal sanctification can thrive. The study of our Constitution will make our
Catholic youth not only sensible of the privileges and duties of citizenship, but
wilt intensify loyalty to the land whose organic law is based upon such solid
Catholic principles.

The book is specially to be commended because of its insistence upon this
feature of our fundamental law. It is, of course, a text-book, but the condensa-
tion implied in this can be supplemented by the teacher. The book should find
place not only in our colleges and academies, but in the upper grades of our
:hial schools.

'wo MISSIONARY PRIESTS AT MACKINAC. A. lecture delivered at the village of
Mackinac for the benefit of St. Anne's Mission.

'HE PARISH REGISTER OF THE MISSION OF MICHILIMACKINAC. A paper
read before the Chicago Library Club. By Edward Osgood Brown. Chicago :
Barnard & Gunthorp.

Perhaps no one place in the interior of the United States has such interesting
:iations with persons and events of the earliest history of the European ex-
loration as the Straits of Mackinac. It is the cross-roads of the great lakes,
fater- carriage was something like a necessity, even when one had no burdens
>ut the hunter's rifle and pack to carry, for the unbroken wilderness was pathless,
ccept to the eye keen enough to detect the secret marks of the Indian trail. But
>m either Quebec and lower Canada, or the frontier settlements in Ohio, access
mid be had by the great lakes during all the summer and autumn months to the
dries of the region now known as the States of Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and
[innesota, and to the numerous tribes which roved over them. To obtain their
iltries for the ladies and gentlemen of Europe, and to supply them in exchange
nth arms and ammunition, simple ornaments, blankets, and too often rum, an

282 NE w PUBLIC A TIONS. [Nov. ,

easy route was open upon the broad bosom of these inland seas, whose great
waters are drawn by nature's grasp into a knot at Mackinac.

Hence the Indian missionaries, Jesuits and Recollect Franciscans in the earliest
days, then secular priests and other Franciscans and the Redemptorists, have al-
ways made the island itself or some point adjacent their headquarters. Summer,
and winter too. the savages would come to the lake-shore to fish, and so be made
accessible to the fathers' canoes. Mr. Brown, in this large and very interesting
pamphlet, tells much of the story of the heroic lives of these best sons of France
and of Ignatius who passed by the Straits and left their names upon the records
of the mission ; and their memory in all that region is embalmed in the tender affec-
tion of perhaps the fiercest race of savages that ever lived. Those men were the
heroes of a conflict as bitter as any war, but their glory is spotted with no blood
except their own, which jewels it with the noblest form of martyrdom. Some per-
ished in the woods, some laid their bones at mission stations or were brought
from the lonely shores to the little bark chapels by their Indian and half-breed
companions and buried near the altar, as was the case with the renowned
Jacques Marquette. Some spent a long lifetime of dauntless struggle against
the brutish savagery of man and the rigorous treatment of nature ; but the length
of life was in endurance and the lapse of time was short ; then their canoes crept
down the lakes to Quebec, bearing their broken forms but courageous hearts to die
of exhaustion.

To many the first paper here printed, treating in general terms of the wit-
ness gathered from this trysting-place of barter for skins of beasts and souls of
men, will be the most interesting. But to us the study of the baptismal register
in the second paper is of superior interest, and contains much that we have never
before seen in print. The story of the half-breed Charles de Langlade is like the
flight of the novelist's fancy. He had a whole lifetime of most exciting adven-
ture, almost from the day his name was written in the baptismal register at the
Straits in 1729 till his death in 1800. *' He could enumerate ninety-nine battles
and skirmishes in which he had taken part, and expressed in his later years regret
that he could not have rounded the even century." He was the leader of a band
of Indians from Mackinac to Fort Du Quesne, and bore a most important part in
the defeat of Braddock, perhaps more important than that of Beaujeau, the
French commanding officer. He commanded the post at Mackinac when it was
surrendered to the British after Wolfe's victory, and under the British rule he held
a commission in the army.

Altogether, Mr. Brown, searching and recording with the zeal of fervent
sympathy, has contributed to the study of our heroic age, both as a country and
as a church, some pages of vivid interest.

THOUGHTS AND COUNSELS FOR CATHOLIC YOUNG MEN. By Rev. P. A.
Von Doss, S.J. Translated by Rev. Augustine Wirth, O.S.B. New York
and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co.

In calling the attention of our readers to this timely and wholesome book we
wish to thank Father Wirth for this and other translations which he has given to
English-speaking readers. The volume we are now considering is presented to
us, owing to his prudent judgment, as if it were written for young men born on our
own soil.

So much that is good and edifying has been written for young women, and so
much time and attention is devoted to their welfare, while so little is prepared and
made suitable for our young men, that we read this book with eagerness as being
something out of the ordinary line. We find it a serviceable book from beginning
to end, filled from cover to cover with prudent counsels and good thoughts. And

1889,] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 283

yet we closed the book with a sad reflection : How few young men will read it !
And then the question we tried to solve was this : How can we get our young
men to read this and books of a like character? True, the author declares that if
but one soul be rescued from perdition, if but one youth be saved by his salutary
counsels, all his efforts will be amply repaid. But that is not enough; if the book
is worth the time and labor which he has evidently spent upon it, it should be
made to reach and save many and not one young man. But how ? Few young
men will read it, fewer still will buy it, because their interest is not awakened.
One suggestion offered would be that every priest who has any immediate charge
of young men should read it, and so fill his mind with those wholesome thoughts
that he will be able to give them out now and then to his young friends ; and
having read it himself, that he strongly recommend it to the young men. Again,
young women should read it and talk about it to their young men acquaintances.
No one should be more interested in the welfare of our young men than our young;
women. It is to their interest that their brothers and the young men who visit
them should be pure, upright, manly Christians. This book will help them to
Tae such. If they can say that they read with pleasure a book of counsels written
for young men, it is sure to beget in the young men a praiseworthy curiosity that will
be fruitful in good. An experienced teacher, a man of ripe judgment, once told
us that when all other methods failed with his young men, he was always able to-
correct their faults and secure their affection through their sisters.

Such books as this should be found in the rooms of every young men's so-
riety. Not in the library — good books usually get worm-eaten there — but always
on the reading table, where young men sitting down for five minutes may pick it
up and, opening it at any place, may find some useful though some prudent
counsel. He may close the book as soon as he chooses, but he is sure to carry
away something good and serviceable.

We wish we had more suitable books for young men, written in a plain,
forcible, straightforward style — books that would call a spade a spade. We have
heard some Christian Brothers talk to young men, and have often wished the
words they uttered co\ild reach thousands of young men, even if they were to
reach them through cold type. A great deal more thought and time devoted to
our Catholic young men is what is sadly needed just now. Will some one write
for our young men, proving to them that it is to their interest to be pure, truthful,
honest, sober young men ?

THE VIRGIN MOTHER OF GOOD COUNSEL. Containing an authentic account of
the Translation of the Miraculous Picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel, with
full information about the "Pious Union." By the author of The Penitent
Instructed, The Augustinian Manual, etc. Seventh edition. Boston : Cash-
man, Keating & Co.

Genazzano, an ancient town some twenty-four miles southeast from Rome, is
famous for the shrine of Our Lady described in this little book. There the pious
pilgrims gather about a picture which excellent historical and other evidence
proves to have been miraculously borne from Scutari, in Albania, to its present
location, and just as miraculously preserved. .The translation, as it is called, took
place in the middle of the fifteenth century, and was caused, we are assured, by
the impending destruction of Scutari by the Turkish armies. A summary of
the entire history of the occurrence, an account of the devotion practised, and
of the large number of miracles continually wrought at the shrine, together with
the authentic approvals of pontifical authority, and finally a selection of prayers
to be used by persons wishing to practise the devotion at a distance, make up the
contents of this book.

284 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Nov., 1889

THE LITTLE BOOK OF SUPERIORS. By the author of Golden Sands. Trans-
lated from the ninth French edition by Miss Ella McMahon. New York,
Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

That this book is of approved usefulness for religious subjects is shown by the
number of editions it has already run through. That it is wholesome reading for
religious superiors is shown by the letters of approval — not all of them simply
imprimaturs — of no less than eight French bishops and archbishops. That it is
calculated to edify even the laity is evidenced by the striking fact that it has
aroused the zeal of a well-known lady of literary experience and merit, but living
in the world, to become its translator. As a matter of fact, the members of the
spiritual households of religious communities will find this little book a kindly
guide to the virtues of their state of life.

BOOKS RECEIVED.
Mention of books in this place does not preclude extended notice in subsequent numbers.

VOICES OF THE SPIRIT. By George Matheson, M.A., D.D., Minister of the Parish of St.
Bernard's, Edinburgh. New York : A. C. Armstrong & Son.

THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN. Twenty-one discourses, with Greek text, comparative ver-
sions, and notes chiefly exegetical. By William Alexander, D.D., Brazenose College, Oxford,
Lord Bishop of Derry and Raphoe. New York : A. C. Armstrong & Son.

THE TRUE STORY OF THE CATHOLIC HIERARCHY DEPOSED BY QUEEN ELIZABETH;
with fuller memoirs of its last two survivors. By the Rev. T. E. Bridgett, C.SS.R., and
the late Rev. T. F. Knox, D.D., of the London Oratory. New York: Catholic Publication
Society Co. ; London : Burns & Gates.

ROPP'S COMMERCIAL CALCULATOR. A practical Arithmetic for practical purposes, con-
taining a complete system of useful, accurate, and convenient tables; together with
simple, short, and practical methods for rapid calculation. Bloomington, 111. : C. Ropp.

A POPULAR MINERALOGY AND GEOLOGY. Prepared from the latest and best authorities in
Europe and America. By Katherine E. Hogan, graduate of Columbia College Special
Course. New York : A. Lovell & Co.

AMERICAN STATESMEN.— BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. By John T. Morse, Jr., author of Life
of John Adams, Life of Thomas Jefferson, etc. Boston and New York : Houghton,
Mifflin & Co.

THE BOOK OF REVELATION. By William Milligan, D.D., Professor of Divinity and Biblical
Criticism in the University of Aberdeen ; author of The Resurrection of Our Lord. etc. New
York : A. C. Armstrong & Son.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SACRED SCRIPTURES. In two parts. By Rev. John McDevitt,
D.D., Professor of the Introduction to Scripture, 'Ecclesiastical History, etc., All-Hallows'
Foreign Missionary College, Dublin. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

THE DARK AGES. Essays illustrating the State of Religion and Literature in the Ninth,
Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Centuries. By S. R. Maitland, D.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., some-
time librarian and keeper of the MSS. at Lambeth. New Edition. With an introduction
by Frederick Stokes, M. A. London: John Hodges ; New York: Benziger Bros.

CALENDAR OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS. For the Use of the Faithful. New York, Cincin-
nati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

COLUMBIADS. Pearl Drops from the Fountain of Wisdom wrought out in Sober Settings in the
Laboratoryof Thought. By Rev. W. F. Hayes. Columbus, O. : August Ruetty.

PRAYER. By the author oi Golden Sands. Offered to novices and pious people of the
world. Translated from the French by Miss Ella McMahon. New York, Cincinnati, and
Chicago: Benziger Bros.

CONTROVERSY ON THE CONSTITUTIONS OF THE JESUITS, between Dr. Littledale and
Father Drummond. Winnipeg : The Manitoba Free Press Print.

THE DISPOSAL OF THE DEAD. By John M. Peacocke, M.D., 274 Madison Street, Brooklyn,
N. Y. New York: M. J. Rooney & Co., printers.

DER FAMILIENFREUND. Katholischer Wegweiser fur das Jahr 1890. St. Louis, Mo. : Pramie
des Herald des Glaubens.

SACRED HEART HYMNS. A Choice Collection of Bright and Melodious Hymns to the Sacred
Heart. Compiled and edited by F. Canter. Baltimore : George Willig & Co.

THE KINGDOM OF THE UNSELFISH ; OR, THE EMPIRE OF THE WISE. By John Lord
Peck. New York : Empire Book Bureau.

PERCY WYNN; OR, MAKING A BOY OF HIM. By Neenah, author of Tom Playfair, Ada
Merton, etc. Napoleon, O. : A. J. Schiml.

RHODE ISLAND HISTORICAL TRACTS. Second Series. No. i. An Inquiry concerning the
origin of the clause in the laws of Rhode Island (1719-1783) disfranchising Roman Catho-
lics. By Sidney S. Rider. Providence: Sidney S. Rider.

FLOWER FANCIES. By Alice Ward Bailey. Illustrated by Lucy J. Bailey, Eleanor Ecob
Morse, Olive E. Whitney, Ellen T. Fisher, Fidelia Bridges, C. Ryan, and F. Schuyler
Mathews. Boston : L. Prang & Co.

A HISTORY OF THE SEVEN HOLY FOUNDERS OF THE ORDER OF THE SERVANTS OF MARY.
By Father Sostene M. Ledoux, of the same Order. Translated from the French. London :
Burns & Gates ; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

THE

ATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. L.

DECEMBER, 1889.

ORGANIZE THE LAYMEN.

No. 297..

WE all know of the Roman emperor who addressed his flick-
ering spirit as "animula, vagula." An animule might do for a
>rotoplasm or for a pagan philosopher, but&a Christian should
lave a full-sized soul. I am not speaking to atheists, who, ac-
:ording to their accounts, have none ; nor to those moral corpses
seem only fit to fill a little place in space and a little space
in time, and then rot. But I address the great number of good
>eople (and how many there are, after all !) who stand by, wish-
ing well to every good cause, to every righteous effort, to every-
ling of fair report, and yet stir no hand and speak no word in
le great moral strife which is going on around them. The com-
>atants cannot even hear their applause, for, like everything else
ibout them, it is imvard. They remind us of the character in
'ooper's tales who when he laughed made no noise ; but at least he
shook.

Yes, they are all right inside, but, unfortunately, we are not
"urned that way here below, and it would take a post-mortem to find
>ut in whose favor they really had been while living. When they
leard of some great moral enterprise, some moral sore healed or
cared for, some wrong abated, they liked it; "I likes it!" as
>airy Gamp said — but what did they do ?

Here lies a fine fellow whose fervid imagination could make
(a sand-bank fertile or a mud-hole picturesque." He passed his
life dividing wild lands into city lots, or sinking holes in the
ground which he called mines. Mayhap he made money at it,
and enthusiastically exchanged the coins of his wondrous fancy
for the meaner currency of other people. There lies a lawyer

286 ORGANIZE THE LAYMEN. [Dec.,

whose glib tongue started as soon as it was " retained," and
"e'en tho' vanquished, could argue still." Further, a " leader" who
silently ruled men at the primaries or in the ward caucus. Each
had his genius, whether at the counter, in the forum, or in the
council chamber. And all expended (as do we not all do?) much
strength, great effort, and the whole span of a human life in their
respective avocations. Yet do you not think that to every one
of them, to every one of us, there have come amid the occu-
pations of material existence, at the zenith of its successes and
enjoyments, in the hour of its misfortunes and sorrows — nay,
often during the humdrum of its daily routine — aspirations of a
nobler, purer, more generous kind than any mere selfish pursuits
afford ?

If we only knew the way ! If the occasion only prompted
us as to the method and the means. But it is all out of our
line, out of our habits, and we do not know what nor how. We
give money, each in his measure, for that is an easy way — and
there it ends. We go home for a week or for ever, and the mo-
ment's inspiration dibs. Money ? That is good so far as it goes,
but no human treasury can ever stamp on metal the equivalent
of a generous blood corpuscle fresh from the mint of the heart ;
no coin ever equalled in value and effect in the moral world a
good impulse stamped into act. Ah ! if we knew but how, if the
act was ready to our hands ! You might see the coldest capital-
ist, of whom men wondered if his interior anatomy was complete,
transformed into a treasurer of a St. Vincent de Paul Conference,
and willingly performing his proper share of personal visitation
and charity. I have seen the busy tradesman converted into a
zealous collector of pew-rents, sacrificing his time and his plea-
sure of a Sunday to keep the parishioners to their financial duty.
Another will cheerfully assume charge of a church library ; still
another, who scarcely fulfils his religious duties, becomes enthusias-
tic when actively helping to build a new church or canvassing for
an intended hospital. And so they go when opportunity is foisted
upon them.

Now, what is the gist of this long preamble ?

That in every man who attends church there is an element of
moral good and of moral usefulness ; in every Catholic layman
there lies dormant a force which it behooves to make profitable
to the cause of truth, virtue, and religion.

Every idle force is waste. The utilization of forces is one ot
the intense pursuits of the age. We have learned to know better
than ever before how immense a storehouse of them lies at our

1889.] ORGANIZE THE LAYMEN. 287

feet, and we have also discovered new potencies in the united
efforts and combinations of our fellowmen.

The evolution of the modern world has developed two facts :
Increase of knowledge, of personal liberty, and of individual initia-
tive have intensified the power and the human value of the hum-
blest amongst us. Each of us, we might almost say, now plans
campaigns or sends argosies across the main ; each is a chieftain
as well as a soldier in the struggles of daily life. It is no longer
a few heads for a myriad arms, but each pair of arms owns a
head. Secondly, from this very conflict of combatants, well-
nigh equally equipped, has come a new law of association, new
methods of combination and co-operation. Union of forces under
various names has become the great feature of the age in all its
material pursuits.

Let the cry then be : ORGANIZE THE LAYMEN ! Let
there be a meeting-place connected with every church, where lay-
men can confer upon all things which come within their sphere
of endeavor ; where they can make acquaintance and active al-
liance with their priests and each other ; where those so inclined
may more profitably resort than in the many haunts to which
they otherwise might drift; where the library and the reading-
room can attract.

And, in the next place, let there be to every church an organ-
ization of Catholic laymen as Catholics, without any special de-
votional object which might deter this one or the other. It would
soon come to pass that every church-goer would be inscribed upon
its rolls.

There the more zealous would subdivide into the special asso-
ciations which piety and charity suggest. The St. Vincent de
Paul Conference, the library, the reading circle, the zelators of
congregational singing, good works of all kinds would find there
not only their recruits but a common rallying point and a wider
and more powerful support Let these church circles in turn be
>und together by diocesan organization, where every parish and

ry Catholic society should be represented, finally culminating

the Catholic Congress ; let all the links be welded into a per-
lanent and universal chain.

And where is the subject of Catholic interest, of religious im-
>rt, which would pass unheeded ?

All this, I know, has been done here and there after a fashion,
id the Catholic congresses, of which we hear so much this

r, are adumbrations of it. There is no pretence to originality

these suggestions, nor is it attempted in these brief lines to do
TOL< L. -19

288 ORGANIZE THE LAYMEN. [Dec.,

more than indicate the subject for deeper thought and wiser elu-
cidation. " Non nova sed nove" — this is at most the legend in-
scribed* upon anything connected with the Church of God. All
that it is, desired to insist upon here is to substitute permanency,
regularity, and universality in the place of sporadic, spasmodic,
and incomplete efforts ; and perhaps to emphasize the principle
which underlies them, apparently without sufficient consciousness :
Laymen can and ought to be organized.

Have you ever stood in a crowd where some feeling became
manifestly general, and yet no one spoke until a bolder spirit
broke out and freed his mind, upon which every one muttered to
himself: " Just what I thought, just what I felt"? So it is in the
larger crowd that makes the world. The uttered word on sub-
jects of general interest is scarcely ever other than the unspoken
sentiment of many, let out by that safety-valve of humanity — the
tongue of a common spokesman.

The idea so briefly outlined is one which will no doubt be
recognized as a familiar one by many ; and, indeed, the writer
would scarcely have presumed to speak at all upon so serious a
subject, in so sacred a cause, if it were not so, and if the high-
est authority had. not seemingly prepared the way for its formu-
lation.

We believe, however, that a hundred reasons urge, that the
circumstances of the age require, that the general guidance of the
church permits and encourages, a distinct, clear, and direct utter-
ance of the cry : Organize the laymen !

II.

I have been urged to add to these lines. I cannot do so
without a brief statement to prevent any possible misconception.
The church, as every Catholic knows, is a divine institution.
Any attempt to alter its constitutional lineaments is not only
fatuous, it is heresy pure and simple. Pope, bishops, priests, and
laymen are not divisions made by man. Their attributes, their
functions, their authority are radically and fundamentally different.
To put it in a general way, the theological distinction between
ecclesia docens and ecclesia discern will state all that need be here
recalled. It is not a mere diversity of calling, but of original in-
stitution. One has a divinely appointed mission to teach, the
other a divinely declared duty to hear. But who that has the
blessing of faith requires to be reminded of facts of which the

1889.] ORGANIZE THE LAYMEN. 289

excellence, the daily advantage, the notable and experienced re-
ults, are alone testimonials of their origin ? It could, therefore,
never be the audacious and monstrous purpose of a child of the
urch to dream 'or to suggest any change in this divine consti-
tution ; and I have been to the trouble of this statement only
because the general distribution of a periodical may make it fall
into hands not sufficiently familiar with doctrines and principles
otherwise assumed and understood.

This premised, it may now be permitted to emphasize the
other aspect of the church which laymen are perhaps less apt
adequately to appreciate. It is that they constitute an essential
and active element of this living church ; that it is all one co-
hesive body, in which they have functions and duties too ; one
'cclesia militans of which they are full members, enlisted men,
called to bear and do, to participate and sustain ; one body of
which the breath is theirs, the blood is theirs, the combats are
theirs, the hurts are theirs, the triumphs are theirs — the life is
theirs.

We are too apt to forget this, and when the church is at-
tacked, not only in its truths, but in their practical application
and their concomitant human interests, to feel sympathy indeed
in the matter, but not identity. We say or think : " Let the
church defend itself," as if it were something other than ourselves.
Perhaps we vaguely refer to the clergy, perhaps to some members
of it. But our sentiments too often are those of mere onlookers
at somebody else's fight, and as though it was somebody else's
business, their loss or gain, not ours.

Now, that is one thing to get over. It is our fight, our loss,
our gain, more or less immediately. Whose ? Why, of nigh
three hundred million people, mainly laymen, who profess the
same doctrines, follow the same practices, reverence the same
sacraments — who are each living and integral parts of the one,
holy, Catholic, and apostolic church. In older ages, as I read
them, this feeling of identity was much more intense — this real-
ization of a personal interest and participation in the human form
and fortunes of the church. To insist upon this note is therefore
no new thing. The great social upheavals within the last century,
the enormous increase of individual initiative to which it has led
on the part of the masses, and their advent into a much greater
activity in political life ; the rapidly growing numbers of mankind,
the facility of displacement and the fascination of quickly trans-
mitted and ever-varying news on worldly subjects — these and
other causes, perhaps, have tended to engross men's minds with

290 ORGANIZE THE LAYMEN. [Dec.,

novel vistas and increased duties at the expense of older and
deeper concerns, and thus to weaken the intensity of their atten-
tion and of their attachments to the latter.

What is the remedy ? Everything which recalls and strengthens
the bonds of their common interest in the affairs, earthly and
heavenly, of their religion.

Secondly, there come what may be called the derivatives of
religion, its natural and terrestrially practical results, the human
and temporal objects on which its broad truth and its wide
charity overflow, or whereon the virtues and the energies of its
members find active exercise and development. Here, too, the
circumstances of the age have wrought changes and present new
necessities. The destruction of the older monastic institutions of
beneficence has left voids which in many ways we are striving to
supply. Here the layman finds a splendid field of opportunity, if
nothing else, in bringing together the foundation stones of new
establishments, in securing their successful completion, their main-
tenance and prosperity. May it not be said, however, that the
corporal works «of mercy are known to the immense majority of us
only in their pecuniary aspect, and that we come in contact with the
wpes and ills of our fellow-men mainly by the cold medium of a
coin, passed through many hands to an unknown destination ? It
is "long-distance" charity with a vengeance with most of us, in
which the affections of the pocket are more involved than the
affections of a heart brought touch-to-touch with suffering.

Again, a new want, a new hunger has come to affect mankind
along with the increase in general education. We want the
"bread and circus" of the Romans, but in addition we have ac-
quired a new necessity — the necessity of print. With it have
come the sores of b'ad reading and of false reading, ailments calling
for help as piteously as any other ill that flesh and mind are heir
to. Are the works of mercy, spiritual and temporal, a new thing?
Are they confined to clerics ? Are they, as in modern corpora-
tions, to be voted and carried on by proxy ?

How shall we recall men at large to a livelier and more per-
sonal interest, a sense of duty and of individual opportunity, not
in one but in all these matters ? As in all things else in modern
life where large numbers have to be affected and directed, by
the power of organization ; as in all things else in modern life
where the free and active concurrence of men is desired, by the
sense of responsibility and participation.

Last but not least : With all the good souls who keep their
lamps burnished and their hearth-fires lit, it is felt that a wave of

1889.] ORGANIZE THE LAYMEN. 291

indifference, of tepidity, and of spiritual inertness has chilled many
hearts and invaded many homes. It seems a direct consequence
of all these new circumstances to which we have adverted. With
decreased gazing at the village and the parish steeple the thoughts
cease to rise so frequently to where the steeple points. How can
we best reconstitute the church in largest measure the centre of
attraction, not simply devotional but general ; its steeple the rest-
ing place of many otherwise idle thoughts ; its roof the home of
many interests otherwise unhoused, vagrant, fitful, and alienated ?

The refrain to all these queries, comes down, as it seems to me,
upon the steps of every line : Organize the laymen !

How many zealous souls there are who through vocation, taste,
or circumstance are barred from the rolls of the clergy, but whose
thoughts, whose voice, whose pen, whose arm are ready and ever
anxious to subserve the great interests which religion covers and
concerns; to assist, so far as they may, the great work which it
performs on earth ! Here again no new thing ; but with human
increase we find an increasing, scattered, and uncorrelated number
of such ardent spirits. We have there ready to hand a splendid
and willing army of non-commissioned officers, bred in the ranks
and fraternizing with each file. What do they need to enlist, to
drill, to inspirit the great and listless mass ? A word of encour-
agement and direction, an order, a watchword.

Behold each wave of time bringing its new millions upon the
earthly sands ! Behold the surging and turbulent seas of new con-
ditions which have irrupted upon the moral world ! God's hand
alone can lay the tempest and say to the waters : Be still. God's
church alone can save the shipwrecked and bring their souls to
port. But every man must co-operate; human co-operation is
the divine law and the divine condition. All must will, must
work, must do.

Behold the centenaries roll by as the rise of a new century
looms in the distance ! May they swell to meet and greet it with
large, fruitful, and potent resolves, and resound with the myriad-
voiced echo of an organized, active, and co-operating laity !

ALBERT REYNAUD.

292 BY CHARLES' HEAD. [Dec.,

BY CHARLES' HEAD.

OH ! come with me from morn till noon,
With me and also with my boon-
Companion, Autumn. Come and see
How fair a fading world may be !

A white frost silvers all the scene

From where in gay, theatric pride
The distant forests overlean
The audient slopes and meads between

This mound where Indian ghosts abide
And where 'mid grass yet richly green

Dear River Charles with scanty tide,
Mourning for Spring with Lear-like mien,

Seeks his " diminished head " to hide.

There is no sound upon the breeze,

Save some late locust ere he dies

A feeble fiddling vainly tries.
How different from the splendid ease

With which beneath the August skies
His whizzing, zizzing song he shot
Against the heavy silence hot,

Drowning with drouth the tender cries
Of birds just graduate from the nest,
Just learning life's imperious quest.

There is no sound upon the breeze,

For singing birds are fledged and flown,
And the late locust, lonely grown,
Sheathing his dulled and aimless tone,

Conscious of age, doth cease to wheeze :
There is no whisper— save that slow
To the brown earth some gay leaves go,

As by their own susurrus blown.

So seems this deep hush but a hollow
And empty truce with the great Foe
Whose victory is more sure than slow —

1889.] £Y CHARLES' HEAD.

A sob that Nature tries to swallow,
As summer sighs a fond adieu,

And on her parting breath doth follow
A leafy host of hectic hue.

Yet oh ! how softly down to earth

Round the dear trees that gave them birth

The wondrous-textured leaves go stealing,
To warm again the latent roots,

And then, perhaps, at Spring's appealing
To reappear as flowers and fruits;

So, though it stirs a kindred feeling
To ponder o'er their sapless ^veins
That Death so beautifully stains,

There's something more in their revealing
Than mimicry of human pains.

For sure as there be hearts that hold

Friendship with Nature's humblest forms,
Despite the stress of wracking storms

And the cold logic of the mould

In whose unfilled embrace we fold
Our treasures of long love away —
Shutting their faces from the day,

But never from our souls who must,

Through the humility of dust,

Seek them again the same dark way.

And sure as there be souls that see
With faith the unleaving of a tree,
Feeling it will put forth in spring
As many a marvellous veined thing
As now it suffers to descend,
To fade and change — but not to end.

E'en so, most certainly for some
No ponderous thunder-voice need come
Swift out of midnight's starry void
To tell us naught shall be destroyed ;
For nothing can be more than changed
In this fair world from which, howe'er
Splendid were Heaven beyond compare,
Who would desire to be estranged ?

293

294 BY CHARLES' HEAD. [Dec.

Yea, in the falling of the leaves,

The desolation of the trees,
Although at first the spirit grieves,

Tuned to the key of that sad breeze
Which heralds winter; yet one sees

At times, though dark as through a glass,,

A loftier triumph come to pass,
And in that coming thus believes.
For look thou deeper than this earth

And higher than the highest sun,
Thou seest but perpetual birth

And new life wooing to be won :
So why not, with a comely mirth,

Bury the summer that is done ?

And see ! Upon the upland scene

That white, funereal frost is fled,

And meadows, now the noon's o'erhead,

Seem trying tenderly to spread
A coverlet of warmer green
For Charles, yet royally serene,

Though prisoned in a narrow bed.

Then up, faint heart, and soul, take wings,

Singing as only souls may dare ;

Since far above the cloud, despair,
The transient shade of human things,
Thy friend, the Sun, that glorious fellow,
With some strange wine hath waxed so mellow,

And laughs through this October day

In such a large, Homeric way
That every leaf, though " sere and yellow,"

Flashes a triumph o'er decay.

HENRY WILLARU AUSTIN.

Medfield, Mass.

1 889. 1

THE LEGEND OF JHE TWIN TREES.

295

THE LEGEND OF THE TWIN TREES.

THEY stood within the walls of an Irish work-house — those twiri
trees — and lifted their bare arms against the sky. It was in the
Infirm Men's yard, a square plot of green of about a rood in
extent. The poor old men, as they walked up and down and to
and fro, looked on the trees with reverence. It was no supersti-
tious fear, no awe, but reverence, kindly reverence, and affection
almost. I noticed that not one of them, while he snatched a
clandestine " pull at the pipe " — smoking is forbidden in Irish
work-houses — or chewed a " bit of weed " on the sly, ever came
near them. They were not exactly holy in the poor men's esti-
mation, but they were the next thing to it. And indeed the
leafless boughs looked scared and ghastly, with their knotty
barked arms lifted up to the sky, as if giving evidence of or
protesting against some foul deed. As one looked at them one
felt as if a skeleton with its fleshless trunk and empty eye-balls
lad been suddenly (in some solitary or forbidding-looking place)
thrown across one's path. And the surroundings were in keep-
ing— four rough, unplastered walls, bleak and tall as those of a
>rison, the northern side of the work-house buildings, a gloom in
the autumn day, and the complaining of the wind as if before
rain.

My first thought with regard to them was, Tear up these
scare-crows ; why cumber they the ground ? — they were so wasted,
and so useless, not to say unsightly ; and heaven knows the poor
men have sad things enough on their mind, sad memories of the
past and sad circumstances of the present, without bringing (need-
lessly, as I thought) such a picture of horror before them. My next
was, How peculiarly appropriate ! Are they not types of many a
poor man here, stripped of all that once was beautiful or happy,
blighted, wasted, decayed, dead, but not buried ?

As I was revolving these things in my mind an old man of
fine physique and open countenance touched his hat to me in
military fashion, and said : " Have you not heard, sir, the legend
of these trees ? "

I answered in the negative.

" Some folks count it pretty, and I will relate it to you, sir,
if you will."

296 THE LEGEND OF THE TWIN TREES. [Dec.,

" I shall be very grateful to you," I replied.

Without a moment's hesitation he began :

" There lived many years ago, down by the verge of the
Shannon, a widower who had one daughter. She was not tall —
she was small," he repeated, nodding his head, while he seemed to
be limning before his mind the portrait of some one ; " she was
pale and a little dark, but with hair — oh ! with coal-black hair
that fell down to her waist and below it. And, my oh ! but she
was the winning little thing, was my sweet Kate Lee ! She got
married to as good a boy, I be bound, as there was in the barony
or the next to it — poor Mike Lynch.

" Well, sir, they worked late and airly, but 'twas no good.
Somehow, I think, things aren't at all as they used to be. I
remember the time, and there wasn't a blight in the whate, and
there wasn't a failure in the praytees, and there wasn't a rot in the
sheep, nor a murrain in the cattle. Glory be to God ! and them
same were the good times." And the poor man reverently lifted
his hat. " And often I seen Kate Lee's' father's barn full of corn
and the loft full of apples, and the smell of 'em would do
your heart good ; and 'tis often and often before daybreak we'd
have our flails, and the bit of a candle, or a ' dip,' lighted and
stuck on the side of the wall, and we having a good couple of
assens of the corn out before breakfast. There are none of them
times now, sir — but sure that's not here nor there. I only men-
tion it to let you know that ould Mick Lee (God rest his sowl !)
saw good days wonst.

" Times got hard, and though Mike Lynch could handle a
spade, or folly a plough, or tackle a scythree as good as any
man, I don't care where he came from ; and though Kate Lee
was as good a little housekeeper as ever made a baureen or
ironed a poor man's shirt ; and though they worked, as I have
said, late and airly, from sunrise to dark, yet from one thing or
another — loss in their cattle or loss in their corn or loss in some-
thing— they were hardly able to keep their heads above wather.

" It was settled between them — though Mick Lee could never
be got to give in to it — that Mike, the poor fellow, was to cross
the wathers while he was still young, and while Kate and her
father would be able to manage the bit of land. By this time
they had two little children, twins and both of them little girls.
One was Annie and the other was Rose.

" He went. There was a big storm soon after the vessel set-
ting sail, but, whether he lived or died, there wasn't trace or
tidings of him ever after. He must have died, I suppose," said

1889.] THE LEGEND OF THE TWIN TREES. 297

the old man solemnly, " or Mike 'ud have turned up sooner
or later.

" Worse and worse was it with them. The old man lost all
heart and courage. He'd pass the neighbors on the road and
would barely salute 'em. He'd even forget to put in his pocket
the wildeens and the apples that the wind had shaken, for he
used to give 'em to the childer that passed by the doore goin'
to school. Poor Kate worked like a horse, but you wouldn't
hear her sing a song any more as she sat under the little cow ;
and though the neighbors were as welcome as ever to step in
and set by the fire, she had hardly a word to throw at a dog.
It was a cough instead of a laugh with the poor thing now.
With her ould light heart she'd sometimes smile and pretend to
laugh ; but such a cough as would then come on ! You'd think
nothing else would come of her but burst with the dint of cough-
ing— coughing, coughing, coughing — oh, such horrid coughing!

" And the house itself was goin' to the dogs. Look now, sir,
here was the house. Suppose that was the road," said the old
man, drawing a line on the turf with his staff; "well, the house
was this way by the roadside." And the old pensioner stood erect,
as if under review, to indicate the position of the house. " Away
down there, a stone's throw, was the river. Out there at the
back was the orchard. The little parlor window looked into it ;
and as you sat at your dinner in the little parlor the roses
that were trained up along the wall peeped in their heads and
watched you — watched you, as if they were childer at play,"
added the old man. " And the ivy covered the gable. Oh !
how often in my young days did I not loop up the roses
against the wall, and climb the ivy for the sparrows' nests. Oh,
my ! oh, my ! but the sun doesn't seem to shine at all as it
used to do in thim ould days.

" Gale-day came round. They were unable to meet the gale
)f rent then due. The cattle was distraint and sould. An elec-
tion came on soon after. Mick Lee voted with the people." The old
man here shook his head, as if I ought to know the conse-
quences of voting that way. "They got notice to quit," he
continued, "and that was the last nail in poor Kate Lee's
:offin ! She took to her bed ; she lingered on for some time,
sir, but from that bed she never ruz.

" At last the day came — oh, mavrone ! — and they took her
out from Lisadoon. And her eyes were never more to see
the roses, and her feet were turned from the ould home, and
they were never more to come back again. They laid her

298 THE LEGEND OF THE TWIN TREES. [Dec.,

beside her mother in the clay, and the gray ould man and the
two little childer heard the lonesome airth fall on the coffin-lid, and
saw the little green mound heaped up over the poor dumb thing
below. And then they turned to go back home, to the empty,
lonely home that the light had left that day — to go back to that
desolate home, and lie down and rest

" 'Twas sad to hear the pitiful moans of the ould man
weeping for his daughter, but it was almost sadder still to
hear the innocent prattlin' of the childer, who thought they would
find their mother at home before 'em. They came home; but,

0 God of mercy ! the sheriff and the bailiff and the peelers
had been there while they were burying the dead, and every
stick of furniture in that little house was flung out by the roadside,
and the windows built up and the doore fastened and locked. And
the queen's soldiers had been there. And that day, that very day,"
he went on in a tone of fierce but subdued passion — " that day I was
carrying the queen's colors on the other side of the globe. May
my right hand wither and be blasted, if I had known it, but

1 would have fired on the colors and desarted ! By h — I
would ! " The poor man (I had pity for him, his emotion seemed
to be so great) stamped on the ground and left me.

" Do not blame him, sir ; he was the old man's brother,"
said a kindly voice at my elbow ; " and if it were our own case,
sir? He's provoked at present. He always is when he talks of
thim things ; and I thinks myself he doesn't be right when he
talks of 'em."

I turned and saw an old man with iron-gray hair leaning on
a staff. His figure was bent, and from time to time he was
racked with a hard, rasping cough.

" And the grandfather and the two little children," I said,
" did you know them ? "

" I did, sir, and well I ought," was the reply. " I've been in
here now for the last twenty years."

" What became of them when they were evicted ? " I asked.

" The good neighbors came and offered them a shelter. They
took it ; but when the middle of the night came the old man
rose up (he had been dreaming that they were dragging his
daughter away from the old home, and that she was calling to
him for help), and hastily waking up the sleeping children, and
putting one under each Map' of his coat, like a hen with her
chickens, he rushed to the door of the old cottage that was never
before closed against him. But it was saled now against him
and his. From fatigue and sorrow he fell on the doorstep and

1889.] THE LEGEND OF THE TWIN TREES. 299

rested his head against the jamb ; and with the folds of his old
riding-coat, and with a hand on each side, he nestled and pro-
tected the two little orphans. It was a hard bed, but for all that
they slept ; slept so soundly that they did not even feel the rain
that fell, and that wetted them through and through.

" There they remained sleeping away until the pathroul came
round. All thim peelers are not bad, sir. I have known some
of 'em," he said in his softest tone, "and I declare to you you'd
find worse. Any road, Sergeant Kelleher took compassion on
them. He asked them to go with him, and when the old man
grew obstinate and would not stir he made pretence of ordering
his men to arrest 'em. The only thing the ould man dreaded was
for fear any harm would come to the children, and directly that the
two children were taken on in front, he at once followed. He
could not bear the children out of his sight. He seemed to
care about nothing else, to forget everything but the children.
When they were brought to the barrack and kindly put to the
fire he should have the children with him all the while, one on
each side of him. The sergeant didn't want to have them put
to jai1, as they could be, you know, sir, for trespassers and
vagabonds without a home. He sent for the doctor (Dr. Tom,
God bless him !), who ordered them to the work-house hospital.

"I recollect well seeing them coming in that gate below. There
wasn't one that seen them that wasn't moved. John at the gate
couldn't ax them what was their name or where they were going,
as he is bound to do to them that passes in. The peelers them-
selves that came with 'em kept a piece away, as if they were
ashamed, as you might say. And up the front there, with a pair
of little feet, mother-naked, pattering on each side of him in the
puddles, tottered the old man.

" ' Sure they won't take ye away from me ! Sure ye won't
laive me, my darlin's,' he would cry; 'ye won't, Annie? ye won't,
Rose ? '

" But when they came to the door of the hospital, and he was
tould that the children couldn't be allowed with him, that there
was classification, and resolutions, and ordhers, and that the rules
should be carried out ; that males and females were kept asunder ;
that there was one place for men, another for women ; and
when they began taking away the children the ould man lifted up
his aged hands — oh ! may I never again see such a sight ! His
hat fell from his gray head, and he dropped down on the ground
as if dead. The poor children struggled away from the arms of
those that held them, and rushed to him. Their cries would wring

3oo THE Li-:c,i-:.\'D OF THE TWIN TREES. [Dec.,

tears from a stone ; but they had to be separated, you know, sir;
that is the law !

" The ould man was taken to the hospital, and after some time
he recovered ; but his senses were gone ! One morning, without
knowing how he came there, we found him standing between these
two trees. They weren't bare then, but green as a meadow and
covered with leaves. The thought had come into his head that
the two trees were his grandchildren — this one was Annie, and that
was Rose. And he'd put his hands around the trunks and
kiss them, and call them his poor darlin's. And when in
the summer-time their boughs 'ud meet he'd say : ' Look,
now, they're joining hands, but I'm too ould for high-gates or
thread-the-needle ayther.' And all the same he'd stoop down
and run under the boughs and laugh. And then he'd pat the
branches, and kiss the trunk of the trees, and call 'em his dar-
lin's.

"At times he'd ask them, Would they wish for a song? and in
a low voice he'd crounaun —

" 'Oh ! the sun is shining in Lisadoon,
And the flowers are smiling in Lisadoon,
And I'd love to be in Lisadoon
All the day long. '

"'Ye like that?' he'd say. 'Well, I'll sing ye another now:

" ' Oh ! the bees are humming in Lisadoon,
• And the tide is coming in Lisadoon,

And I wish I was in Lisadoon
All the day long.'

"And now, what was very singular," continued my informant
after a hard struggle with his old enemy the cough, " that was
almost the only thing he was astray in. He'd come into the
chapel — I'll show you the place if you step this way, sir."
It was not ten paces off, and we went. " He'd kneel there be-
hind the doore, and there wasn't a stir out of him; no matter who
came in or who went out, he never minded. He knelt up
straight, his gray hair came in curls on his neck, and his eyes,
which were nearly blind, looked nowhere but at the altar. If
there was a born image of that poor man that knelt far down in
the temple, and struck his breast, and cried, Lord be merciful to
me a sinner! it was him.

" He lived some years ; but when he fell sick he broke down
all at once, and died as you'd blow out a candle ; and thim

1889.] THE LEGEND OF THE TWIN TREES. 301

trees, thim two trees, as sure as he died, seemed to know it.
They pined away as if they were Christians ; the leaves fell off
one by one, and from that day to this, summer or winter, they
are as you see 'em."

This was the end of the old man's tale and the Legend of the
Twin Trees. The fact of their becoming blighted exactly at the
old man's death is undeniable.

I looked for some moments with reverent interest on those
striking memorials of a life blasted in its decline, and out of my
meditations came the wish that God would send peace to my own
dear land, and happy hearths and homes to her poor peasantry.
And oh ! but her peasantry could be happy. Give them security
in their homes, rid them of the tyranny of unjust laws, give them
the right of governing themselves, and then leave them to Heaven
and their own good loving hearts, and there will be no more
blighted lives and no more blasted twin trees.

I lingered yet a while, for there was sadness at my heart.
While I stayed a gleam of sunshine fell upon the naked trunks,
and a little robin perched first upon one, and then upon the
other, and piped his peaceful song. Was it a good omen ?

" And what of the children," I asked, as I turned to leave.

" The good nuns, the Sisters of Mercy, took them up," the old
man replied. " One of them, however, never recovered the wet-
ting she got. She pined away and died. Any road, they say it
is hard to rear twins ; that one of them almost always goes. The
other got a good education from these holy ladies here, and now
she's in a fine position, and giving every satisfaction as a certified
nurse in one of our city hospitals."

R. O'KENNEDY.

Patrickswell, Co. Limerick.

302 THE NEW CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY [Dec.,

THE NEW CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY AND THE
EXISTING COLLEGES.

BEFORE this paper comes under the notice of our readers the
Divinity School of the Catholic University of America will have
been ushered into active existence. We understand that it is in
contemplation to open the School of Arts in about two years
from now, and that the Schools of Law and Medicine and others
will follow in due succession, as quickly as circumstances will
permit. We shall thus have, please God, in the near future a
University, a Studiilm Generate, in the full and liberal sense of
the term. It will be not merely an Ecole des Hautes Etudes for
the clergy; it will also embrace the laity, to whom it will afford
the highest general culture, as well as the technical instruction
they may require for their several walks in life.

No one can question the immense good that such an in-
stitution is calculated to do for the church in America. There
is no one who has Catholic interests at heart but will wish it
God-speed. It sets out on its career under the fairest auspices,
accompanied by all the presages of success. The blessing of
Christ's Vicar, the patronage of a great hierarchy, endow-
ments sufficiently ample, suitable site and buildings, a staff of
eminent professors, a goodly number of students — all these belong
already to the Divinity School, and will, it is hoped, belong in
time to the other schools of the University. The purport of the
present paper is to draw attention to one element of success, viz.,
the material on which the University will have to work, and
which it will be expected to mould and fashion for the highest
interests of the church in America no less than for that of the state.
It is intended further to suggest some means whereby the Uni-
versity can secure this material in sufficient quantity and quality
for its purposes, and whereby, at the same time, it can render a
vast service to the cause of Catholic college education.

According to the report of the United States Commissioner
of Education for the year iS86-'87, there are in the country
some fifty Catholic educational establishments, which the commis-
sioner tabulates under the heading, " Colleges of the Liberal
Arts."

Whatever career the future may have in store for these in-
stitutions, they correspond now — nearly all of them, certainly —

1889.] AND THE EXISTING COLLEGES. 303

\vith the lycees and petits scminaires of France, the gymnasiums ol
Germany, the public schools of England. The function of the
new University will be to supplement and complete the work
done in these establishments of secondary education. It is from
them that it will derive its material. Even the Divinity School,
whose work is supposed to begin where that of the grands semi-
naires ends, cannot arTord to disregard the kind of liberal culture
which has preceded the philosophy and theology of the seminary ;
for, where this liberal training in the mother-tongue, in classics,
and in science is wanting or deficient, the superstructure built by
the seminary and University may be learned, may be beautiful,
but it will be very inefficient on the battle-field of modern thought.
It will be like grand artillery with no wheels to move it into
position ; or like a mail-clad knight, with sword and spurs and
battle-axe, but without a horse to take him into the fray. Hence,
it is in the best interest of the University to keep in touch with
and influence the source of all its material — the Catholic colleges
spread throughout the country. Such action on the part of the
University will be " twice blessed," blessing " him that gives and
him that takes." It will bless the University by supplying it with
good material ; it will bless the colleges by supplying a standard
for their work, and impressing a stamp of excellence where it is
due. At present there is no uniform standard of studies for the
institutions referred to ; there is no encouragement for such as
desire to do serious work. There is no rightly formed public
opinion brought to bear on the work done. Parents, in most
ises, are not in a position to judge it aright, and the
"atholic world in general is forced to form its opinion of
given institution from its show-days, its theatricals, its com-
icncements, its advertisements, or the notices which appear in
le papers. The new University can supply correctives to all
iis. It can mark out a standard of studies to be attained
>y all who desire to enter its own portals. Further, and espe-
:ially by a judicious system of examinations and a liberal award-
ig of prizes, scholarships, or burses, it can draw out the best
rength of the colleges and excite a healthy emulation amongst
lem. Various methods might be proposed for effecting this,
le writer would suggest one which he thinks would be found
iasible, and which would attain the end in view. It is the sys-
jm adopted by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. These
venerable universities established about thirty years ago, and
lave since kept up, a system of " local examinations," as they are
lied, which have been attended by the greatest success. The

VOL. L.--20

304 THE NEW CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY [Dec.,

writer prepared pupils for the Cambridge local examinations during
several years, so that he is familiar with their working ; and he
knows from other sources that those of Oxford are precisely
similar.

The system is as follows : The University appoints what Cam-
bridge calls " syndics " and Oxford " delegates." It is the duty
of these to trace out the programme of examinations, and to
nominate the examiners. The latter set the examination papers,
examine and classify the answers of candidates, and report thereon
to the syndics. The University, moreover, appoints for each local
centre or college a secretary, who forwards to the general secre-
tary at the University the names, baptismal certificates, and fees of
intending candidates. This office is usually filled by some one
connected with the college. In addition, the University selects
some entirely independent person to act as presiding or super-
intending examiner at the local centre. It is he who receives
the examination papers sealed from the University, unseals them
in the presence of the candidates, presides over the several parts
of the examination, and, at its close, transmits the candidates'
answers sealed to the University. As a further guarantee of fair-
ness in the examinations, candidates are known to the examiners
only by numbers. In due time the results of the examinations
are published in class or division lists, together with the reports of
the several examiners. Therein each college finds the record of
its success or failure ; and deserving students receive from the
University or from other sources appropriate reward and encour-
agement.

The local examinations, as conducted by both the universities
mentioned, are twofold — senior and junior. The former is intended
for students under eighteen years of age, the latter for those
under sixteen. Oxford confers the title of Associate in Arts on
those who pass with honors the senior examination, which em-
braces the whole field of liberal culture as far as may be ex-
pected from students about to enter a University.

As regards the expense of these examinations, they appear to
be self-supporting. A fee of one pound sterling is required from
every candidate, and this amount covers all expenses.

There seems to be no reason why this or some similar system
could not be brought into operation by the new University. The
examinations may, perhaps, in the beginning be confined to the
senior classes of our colleges. The details of age, fees, relative
importance of subjects, modes of procedure, etc., could be easily
settled by calling a convention of the presidents of colleges, to be

1889.] AND THE EXISTING COLLEGES. 305

held at the University. The good results that would flow from
such a system cannot be measured by words. The standard of
studies would be raised all round ; healthy emulation would be
excited among the colleges and students ; Catholic public opinion
would be trained to a due appreciation of what is and what is
not education, and abundance of material of the right sort would
be prepared for University purposes.

A twofold objection may be raised against this or any like
scheme — the one on the part of the University, the other on that
of the colleges.

On the side of the University it may be urged that it would
be going outside its sphere to occupy itself directly or indirectly
with the work of secondary education. Again, it would be too
much to expect of University professors that they should under-
take the drudgery of examination work.

The first part of this objection would have much force in
countries where, as in Germany, ,for instance, secondary education
is directed and controlled on a fixed definite system by the state.
But here in America the case is very different The state has
nothing to say to our Catholic colleges except words of encour-
agement; and even the church concerns herself about them only
to the extent of satisfying herself that the religious instruction
given by them is orthodox. In present circumstances the new
University alone could effectively influence them ; and it owes it
both to its own interests as well as to its function in the Cath-
olic educational system of the country to do so.

The second part of the objection, that arising from the con-
leration of the drudgery and routine of examinations, has much
be said in its favor ; but a little explanation will weaken its
rce. It is not suggested that the senior professors of the Uni-
irsity should be expected to turn aside from their lectures to ex-
tine manuscripts by the hundred and thousand. The University,
giving proper remuneration (this remuneration to be provided
by the fees of the candidates), can easily get competent men,
ther within its own walls or without, to set papers and correct
le answers. It would be easy to give a list of eminent scholars
do not hesitate to perform a like duty for the Oxford and
Cambridge locals, and other similar examinations. Calculating fifty
colleges, with an average of ten candidates from each college, and
a fee of five dollars from each candidate, we have a sum of
twenty-five hundred dollars, which would be amply sufficient to
pay examiners and cover the other expenses of the examinations.
It is hoped that the University would possess itself of a fund for

306 THE NEW CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY. [Dec.,

the purpose of these examinations, to be devoted to the founda-
tion of prizes and burses for the most deserving candidates.

The other objection to the proposed scheme is' that which
may be made on the part of the colleges. It may be said that in
a free country like this, where the interests of colleges are so
varied, it cannot be expected that they will submit to any " iron-
clad " system of studies or examinations.

To this it may be answered, in the first place, that the
proposed scheme is not in any sense " iron-clad." The colleges
would be as untrammelled, for all useful purposes, after adopting
it as before. No hard-and-fast lines need be drawn about text-
books or authors ; the examinations need take into account only
the net results of the teaching supposed to be given in the col-
leges, without entering into details about the ways and means
whereby such results are obtained.

In the next place, it is morally certain that the vast majority
of the colleges will gladly co-operate with the University in car-
rying out a project the object of which is to raise the standard
of studies, to excite emulation, and to give encouragement and
reward where they are deserved. It may be that some few will
hold themselves aloof at the outset, either because they consider
themselves above such a thing, or for some other reason. Such
will be brought into line after a time by the force of public
opinion and a sense of their own interests. If the scheme here
proposed, or something similar to it, be carried out judiciously
and liberally by the University, no college in the country worth
counting with can afford to disregard it. Only give our Catholic
people some safe standard by which they may discern the relative
worth of colleges, and they will not be slow to appreciate it.
To supply such a standard by a judicious system of examina-
tions, to keep it always at a high level by the liberal awarding
of prizes, burses, or scholarships, to bring into wholesome
rivalry the various Catholic colleges of the country — such we
believe to be one of the most practically important functions
that the new University is called upon to perform. We feel
sure that the authorities of the University will readily realize the
importance of the matter, and we trust that they will meet
with hearty co-operation on the part of the colleges.

JOHN T. MURPHY, C.S.Sp.

Holy Ghost College, Pittsburgh.

:889.]

SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES.

307

SAINT CUTHBERT AND HIS TIMES.

THE earliest glimpse we are able to gain of the great province
>f Northumbria, some two thousand years ago, exhibits it as the
inclement abode of the Brigantes, most powerful of the British

ribes. They possibly had some slight intercourse with the neigh-
>oring peoples of the continent, but were at best tattooed savages,

:antily clothed in the hides of wild oxen, wolves, beavers, and
>ther trophies of the chase, living precariously on the spoils of

teir spears and nets, and shivering in northerly blasts and wintei
mows. Their position was bettered when, after many a bloody
struggle, the Roman legions finally dominated the land, protect-
ing it from the inroads of the untamable Picts of the Scottish
lighlands by the noble wall and chain of forts stretching from

le Forth to the Clyde, and since called Graham's Dyke, raised
>y the energy of Agricola, that lieutenant of Domitian who was
the real conqueror of Britain, and whose deeds have been im-

lortalized by his son-in-law Tacitus. Christianity early gained
:onverts in Britain, and though the story of St. Joseph of Arima-

tea bearing the Sangreal to Glastonbury and there constructing

hermitage is, to say the least, uncertain, and St. P.aul's visit to

the island equally dubious, there is little doubt that Christianity

ras taught in Britain during his day. St. Alban, the first British
irtyr, suffered in 303 A.D., and about the same time Helena, a lady
>f Colchester, in Essex, married Constantius Chlorus, the Roman
iperor, and subsequently, at Eboracum (York), the great north-

'n capital, bore Constantine the Great, the first Christian em-

>eror. This St. Helena, it will be remembered, was the discoverer

>f the true cross, which now figures in the arms of her native city

)f Colchester. Morgan, a Britain, better known as Pelagius, was

notable heretic of those times.

But when Rome, sore beset by barbarian inroads, withdrew
ler legions from outlying provinces to defend the heart of the
empire, Britain was left to shift for itself, in much the same posi-
tion that India would now occupy were the British authority sud-
lenly withdrawn. How the unwarlike and decadent Britains, har-
med by the onset of ferocious Picts and Scots, and distracted
>y internal dissension, invoked the aid of Hengist and his Jutish
followers, and how the lamb found the wolf an ally of doubtful

308 SAINT CUTHBERT AND His 7/j//;.s. [Dec.,

advantage, belongs not to our present subject, except thus, that
in 454 Octa, a brother of Hengist, occupied Northumbria, osten-
sibly for the purpose of defending Britain from the Picts. Then
succeeds a long period of turmoil and carnage, in which Briton,
Pict, Angle, Saxon, and Jute lay about them with catholic im-
partiality, heeding little apparently whether they slay kinsman or
stranger so that their larlces be duly fleshed. It were of scant
interest to trace this purposeless battle of the crows and kites,
even were it possible, but " the gestes of them before Ida are
little known by croniques " ; and how should they be ? The ancient
bard of the Briton had long since been displaced and Christianity
with its monastic chroniclers had been nearly obliterated in the
clash of steel. However, Ida the Saxon, with his twelve sons,
landed at Flamborough in 547, drove off the Britons, and founded
the kingdom of Bernicia ; a dozen years later he was slain by
Owen, a British chieftain ; next year yElla, one of Ida's men,
established the sister kingdom of Deira, and Ethelfrith later com-
bined the two states, thus forming the realm of Northumbria.
The British Christians could not bring themselves to proffer the
blessings of religious brotherhood to their German tormentors, but
they rather consoled themselves, as Tertullian before them, by anti-
cipations of seeing the tables effectually turned on their enemies
in a future state of being. Pope Gregory's indignation at this
their vindictive temper is well known ; also his kindly pleasantries
on the words Angli, ^Ella, Deira, when he saw the little British
boys in the Roman slave-mart, and then resolved on the conversion
of the land, his charitable purpose subsequently taking form in
the mission of St. Augustine. A generation later Edwin the
Bretwalda (leading monarch amidst the Anglo-Saxon princes),
whose name survives in his city of Edinburgh, married Ethel-
burga, the daughter of Ethelbert, the Christian king of Kent, and
himself received baptism. Nor was this step merely a concession
to the sentiments of his spouse; he convoked the National Assem-
bly, and explained to his nobles his reasons for this momentous
step. Very dignified and temperate was the deliberation which
ensued, and the majestic utterances of one venerable graybeard
which have been preserved, give a vivid picture of the manners
of the day. He compared himself and his compeers, in their
ignorance of all which precedes or follows the brief period of
earth life, to the bird which, as the king on a winter evening with
his attendants is seated at the fire, flies from the outer cold and
darkness into the light and warmth of the hall, lingers but a brief
space, and then through the further door passes forth into the

1889.'

SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES.

309

jloom again; wherefore, said the aged noble, if these new teachers
can at all enlighten us on these obscure mysteries, let us hear
rhat they have to say. So was it decided with unanimity, and
ifi, the high-priest, mounted on his charger, rode into the
temple and, in view of the apprehensive bystanders, hurled his
ince into the image of Odin. It was a moment of dread sus-
jnse, but as the insulted divinity failed to resent the affront, the
Forthumbrians plucked up courage and followed their monarch to
the font. Gods, however, are more accustomed to act through
Luman instrumentality than by immediate interference, if we are
credit those who, of whatever else they may be ignorant, are
Iways able to expound the ways and intentions of Providence on
;very occasion. Perhaps there were such in Britain twelve cen-
iries ago, and they may have explained that the offended war-
>d stirred up Penda, the king of Mercia, to avenge the impiety,
lay Edwin, and overthrow the newly erected structure of North-
imbrian Christianity. His triumph, however, was but short-lived,
for seven years after Edwin's baptism, Oswald, a prince of the
Forthumbrian blood royal, who as a refugee had learned and
lopted Christianity in Scotland, drew together a handful of fol-
>wers, and posting himself on the wall of Severus, at the place
illed Heaven's field, defied the might of the redoubtable British
lieftain Cedwell, or Cadwallon, who was wasting the country,
"his was a work of great hardihood. Oswald was far outnum-
jred and an untried man, whereas his veteran opponent had been
rictor in forty engagements and sixty personal encounters. The
mng aspirant to regal honors, however, marshalled his band on
commanding eminence, and, in the spirit of Constantine, erected
tere a wooden cross, his followers with their hands pressing
irth around its base until it stood firm. Then Oswald invoked
le aid of Heaven on his just cause. As his opponent was also a
iristian and of the native stock of the land, he might appar-
itly, with equal justice — and possibly did — have offered up sim-
ir petitions on his own behalf. The battle was joined ; the
trategy and, energy of Oswald proved too much for the " big
ittalions " ; the grand old Briton lay dead on a heap of slain ;
remnant of his force drew off beyond the Severn, and a new
ly dawned on Northumbria. The young king now bestirred
limself for the benefit of his distracted realm, and as a first step
;nt to Donald, the Scottish monarch, for a Christian teacher,
le result was the arrival from lona of a certain Corman, a morose
lonk, and apparently a premature development of the old Scot-
ch Presbyterian Calvinist of whom Buckle gives so dismal a

3io SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES. [Dec.,

portrayal. He soon returned to his monastery, complaining of
the obstinacy and ill manners of the English, and declaring that
the mission was hopeless. He was, however, temperately reproved
by a young monk called Aidan, and so struck were all by his
sweetness and capacity that he was forthwith elected to suc-
ceed Gorman and despatched to the court of Oswald. This was
in 635, and we find the bishop selecting as his headquarters
the sombre flat islet of Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, possibly on
account of its resemblance to his former home of lona, and there
was situated the cathedral of the sixteen first bishops of North-
umbria. Aidan soon drew to him many of his old associates,
followers of the rule of St. Columba, and earnest men of simple
lives. The Irish, who are unrivalled in tracing genealogies, assert
that St. Aidan was of the same race as their St. Bridget, and St.
Bede, who was born twenty years after Aidan's death, says of
him that " he was a pontiff inspired with a passionate love of
goodness, but full of surpassing gentleness and moderation." In
his long missionary journeys he always travelled on foot, and in
many fastnesses of Yorkshire wolds and Cumbrian fells no other
mode of locomotion would have been feasible. The churches
and monasteries which he founded were always schools, and he
habitually had a dozen children under his own immediate care.
He also devoted himself to the redemption of slaves, especially
of those whose servitude was markedly deplorable, for Saxons and
Celts, worse even than modern Georgians, sold their children and
brethren like cattle. Nor were the efforts of Aidan barren of
results, for we hear of 15,000 people being baptized within seven
days. This is the less to be marvelled at when we remember
that the bishop was in his teaching assisted by the king, who,
as Aidan was at first ignorant of English, acted as his interpreter
and added his own exhortations to those of the prelate. This
charming idyllic picture illustrates the state of society in Anglo-
Saxon days ; there was no talk of church and state as of distinct
and possibly opposing institutions ; the church was the state and the
state was the church, and earl and bishop sat together on the
bench to try offenders, just as they united their deliberations in
the Witan or Great Council for the benefit of the common-weal.
Carlyle's dictum that kingship is the need of the present day
was doubtless equally true of the times we are considering, even
if it had not a universal application, for is not history a record
of great men ? At any rate, Northumbria had now got a king,
a conning or cunning man, one with brain to plan and hand to
execute, and it soon responded to his touch.

1889.] SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES. 311

" Ah, God ! for a man with heart, head, hand,
Like some of the simple great ones gone

For ever and ever by.
One still strong man in a blatant land,
Whatever they call him, what care I ?
Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat, one
Who can rule and dare not lie."

The difficulty is to discover the king by divine right. The
Saxon method was for the Witan to select the most suitable man
in the royal family ; thus Alfred the Great, on the death of his
elder brother, succeeded him, setting aside his infant son, for a
man, not a child, was a necessity. As this system led naturally
to disputed successions and bloodshed, the law of direct descent
was more rigidly adhered to as time advanced, the nation still
conserving, and frequently exercising, the right of deposing un-
suitable monarchs, as in the case of the second and fourth Stuart
Thus the principle stated in the first commandment of the Deca-
logue, that blood will tell " unto the third and fourth genera-
tion," was co-ordinated with the right, of a free people to elect
their own leader.

But Oswald had sterner work on hand than the translation of
sermons, for the sword must guard what the sword has won, and
old Penda was determined on the undoing of Oswald as he had
been on that of Edwin. Piling up a vast mass of timber and
brushwood from the neighboring forest against the walls of Barn-
borough Castle, the Mercian monarch strove to serve his North-
umbrian brother as St. Arnaud did the luckless Arabs in the

Igerine cave.* Aidan prayed for divine succor in this extremity;

le wind veered round, driving dense masses of smoke into the
faces of the assailants, and some of them perished scorched and
suffocated. However, Penda at length prevailed, and eight years
after his accession Oswald was slain in Shropshire and hung on

* " Dr. Johnson relates in his Journey that when eating, on one occasion, his dinner in
Skye to the music of the bagpipe, he was informed by a gentleman "that in some remote
time the Macdonalds of Glengarry, having been injured or offended by the inhabitants of
Culloden, and resolving to have justice, or vengeance, they came to Culloden on a Sunday,
when, finding their enemies at worship, they shut them up in the church, which they set on fire ;
and this, said he, is the tune that the piper played while they were burning." Culloden, how-
ever, was not the scene of the atrocity ; it was the Mackenzies of Ord that their fellow-
Christians and brother-churchmen, the Macdonalds of Glengarry, succeeded in converting into
animal charcoal when the poor people were engaged, like good Catholics, in attending
Mass. The Macdonalds, after setting fire to the building, held fast the doors until the last of
the Mackenzies of Ord had perished in the flames." — My Schools and Schoolmasters, by Hugh
Miller, p. 176, 2oth edition.

"... The resembling story of that Cave of Eigg, in which a body of the Macdonalds
themselves, consisting of men, women, and children — the entire population of the island — had
been suffocated wholesale by the Macleods of Skye."— Ib. p. 180.

312 SAINT CurniiEKT AND Pus TIMES. [Dec.,

a tree at the place now called from the event Oswestry (Oswald's
tree). A year later Oswald's brother ventured to remove the
remains ; the body was taken to Gloucester, the head to the Holy
Island, and the right arm, in a silver casket, was carried to Barn-
borough. The people on this recalled the words of Aidan,
" Never may this arm perish ! " which he had spoken on seeing
Oswald, when his almoner had distributed all the available money
to the destitute, stretch forth his hand, grasp the silver drinking-
cup on the table before him, and himself bestow it on a starving
suppliant. The material arm has of course long since mouldered
into dust, but the gallant young monarch's name will be held in
honor as long as England is a nation. His name is commemo-
rated in the calendar on the fifth of August. On his demise
Oswald's dominions became divided, Oswine obtaining Deira and
Oswy Bernicia. The former possessed the greater material re-
sources, and might have maintained his position had he combined
tht serpent's wisdom with his dove-like sweetness of disposition ;
he was too gentle for this work-a-day world, and, abhorring strife
and bloodshed, disbanded his forces, imagining that his guileless
conduct would be imitated by his neighbors. What could the
result be then or now ? Oswy fell on him and found an easy
prey, and the loving Aidan, unable to survive the sweet kindred
spirit, passed quietly away some ten days later, seated outside a
church in a little shed which his disciples had constructed for
him, and leaning against one of the buttresses. After this we
find Oswy defeating and slaying the aggressive old Penda and
subduing his territory. One cannot suppress a feeling of regret
for the fate of the stanch old champion of the faith of his fore-
fathers which all were forsaking, especially as his downfall sounded
the knell of the old order. Mercia and East Anglia now em-
braced Christianity, and, in point of faith at least, England was
at one. Peada, the son of Penda, was brought to the new belief
by Finan, the successor of Aidan. He appears to have been a
Briton, and to have come from the same Scotch m6nastery from
which his predecessor had issued. In Lindisfarne " Finanus
Aidanus, his successor, built a cathedral of wood thatched with
reeds, and Eadbert Saint Cuthbert, his successor, instead of this
consecrated thatch apparelled over the whole church with a robe
of lead." This building was afterwards dedicated to St. Peter by
Archbishop Theodore. Bede says of Finan that he was a hasty
man, and hot against the Roman time of observing Easter.

The controversy as to the proper time for the Easter obser-
vance and the right mode of monastic tonsure raged long and

1889.] SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES. 313

fiercely between the British and Anglo-Roman clergy, the former
with national persistency refusing to budge from their traditionary
practice, handed down, as they asserted, from the Evangelist St.
John, whilst the followers of Augustine were unbending in their
demand that the Roman ritual should be paramount. It had long
been customary in the East, as it is now with Chinese, Hindoos,
and others, to remove the hair from the head, a refreshing prac-
tice under a tropical sun, and one not altogether unknown in
Texas and other States of the sunny South. This custom the
Christian monks and eremites inherited from Essenes, Egyptian
priests, and other Eastern recluses. It would appear that the
Roman monks did not make a clean sweep of the cranium, as
did their British brethren, but preserved a circlet of hair round
the head. The question, at any rate, appears trivial when viewed
from the distance of twelve centuries, and English and American
Jesuits are efficient enough without simulating ring-worm or bald-
ness, but this dispute was grim earnest in its day. The historian
would have a pleasanter task could he present the various bands
of Christian teachers as working side by side in brotherly har-
mony for the enlightenment of hordes of barbarians rather than
as bickering over ceremonial details. But good work in this world
is often done by commonplace agents ; powerful minds, like St.
Gregory the Great, who, when despatching the missionaries, had
charged them, whilst maintaining great principles, to be tolerant
of local prejudices, being rarely found. The scene is a country
town ; time, a bitter morning in early March ; occasion, a parlia-
mentary election ; party feeling is at fever-heat, though not a
dozen persons in the borough could set forth the tenets of the
contending factions. Elys and chaises plastered with huge primrose-
colored posters speed hither and thither ; these are for the con-
veyance of Whig electors to the poll. Plethoric farmers, loud of
voice and bespattered with country clay, are grouped around the
tavern doors, their breasts decked out with rosettes of cerulean
hue ; these are the supporters of the Tory candidate. Two small
boys approach each other in the market square, exchanging
glances of scorn and defiance. " Blew ! " says the one ; " yaller ! "
retorts the other, and a hearty exchange of fisticuffs ensues. The
novelist and the apostle were right. "Blue," " yellow"; "I am
of Paul, and I of Apollos " — such is human nature. Such were
our early teachers. How striking by contrast the dignified aspect
of the Master ! who, though well able to pulverize with words of
burning scorn the hypocrite and sham who can have no quarter,
yet cared little that some who had the gist of the matter in them

3 14 SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES. [Dec.,

*' followed not with us." But there were giants in the earth in
the days we are considering, towering like Homeric heroes above
their fellows, and such was a young Scottish gentleman who grew
up in picturesque Lauderdale. Little is known of his early days;
he was an orphan, but a worthy widow lavished on him a paren-
tal affection, and in the busy after-days he always contrived to
pay her an annual visit.

The Kelts said that Cuthbert was the son of a captive Irish
princess, and Bede describes him as pre-eminent in athletic sports.
He had a rigorous though bracing schooling as a shepherd, graz-
ing his flocks on the wild folcland, or common, like a Colorado
ranchman. But he was early attracted .by the piety of the dis-
ciples of St. Columba, whom St. Aidan had established at Mulros.
Their monastery was but a rude congeries of mud-bedaubed hovels
of wattle thatched with water-reeds, the majestic pile of Melrose,
whose ruins Sir Walter Scott has immortalized, being of far later
date ; but the living stones of the original foundation were not
excelled in grace and beauty by those of any subsequent age.
It was said that the immediate cause of Cuthbert's desire to be
enrolled in their ranks was the vision of the soul of St. Aidan at
the time of his death, " the soul of which bishop St. Cuthbert
happened to see carried up with great melodic by a Quire of
Angels into Heaven." So at fifteen years of age Cuthbert,
mounted on his charger, with lance and attendant squire, rides up
to the gate of Melrose Abbey, on the banks of the Tweed, of
which Eata was then abbot, and seeking St. Boisil (or Boswell),
the prior, of him craves admission into the fraternity. Cuthbert
was placed in charge of the prior, who instructed him out of the
manuscript of St. John's Gospel which afterwards, on his account,
became so famous, " on which, after so many centuries of years,
no moth ever durst presume to feed." When under Henry VIII.
St. Cuthbert's shrine at Durham was plundered, this, with other
memorials of the saint, was removed, and Alban Butler says that
the Earl of Litchfield gave it to Mr. Thomas Philips, a canon of
Tongres. Cuthbert proved himself so capable a person that when
Eata took charge of the monastery of Ripon he took his young
disciple with him as guest-master, and when subsequently St. Wil-
frid assumed the direction of that house, Eata took Cuthbert back
with him to the Tweed, and established him there as prior when
Boswell, in 664, succumbed to the plague. Cuthbert was near
falling a victim at the same time to this dread visitation ; his
vigorous constitution, however, triumphed, and he might have re-
gained his former vigor, but his impetuous character rendering

1889.] SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES. 315

inaction intolerable to him, he refused to submit to the repose
necessary during convalescence, and suffered in impaired vitality
during the remainder of his career. But he continued his mis-
sionary journeys amongst the illiterate and semi-pagan inhabitants
of Northumbria, who retained a lingering penchant for heathen
charms and superstitions, his shepherd training here serving him
well, as he was sometimes absent for months at a time travelling
from sea to sea, for Theodore had not yet established the paro-
chial system. It is more pleasing to contemplate the saint as
patiently treading in the footsteps of his Master and St. Paul, and
supporting the hardships incidental on missionary labors, than as
emulating the feats of Hindoo fakirs and Moslem dervishes ; but
the hero was not as yet perfected, and stone bathing-places are
even now pointed out in which Cuthbert is said to have spent
whole nights, standing up to his neck in the chilly water, and
there is a story told in Northumberland of some otters licking his
frozen feet as he prayed on the strand after such an ordeaL
Elijah, in calm dignity at Carmel, contrasts favorably with his
adversaries, gashing their bodies with knives to propitiate Baal,
and we do not find the apostles or their early followers inflicting
self-torture, for they had received the adoption not of slaves but
of sons. But we may hope that these legends of our hero are
the additions of popular fancy, as great part of his story most
surely is ; they, however, are here introduced as showing the con-
ception of him current in subsequent ages, when his reputation
was at its highest. When St. Eata became abbot of Lindisfarne
he took Cuthbert with him as prior, and here he remained for
twelve years, in " such sanctity of life that the devil was much
grieved at his vertues." Cuthbert far excelled his contemporaries
in moderation and common sense.

For instance, when at the Synod of Whitby Wilfrid suc-
ceeded in establishing the observance of the Roman ritual, and
poor Bishop Colman, rather than yield, packing up the bones of
Aidan, retired to lona with some of his monks, Eata and Cuthbert,
though agreeing with Colman, resolved for the sake of peace to
accept the decrees of the council, and even condescended to argue
temperately with the monks who, with true ecclesiastical conserva-
tism, were wedded to the ancient order. The moderation of Cuthbert
is sadly needed in these days, when factions and unpatriotic poli-
ticians, because they are out of office, hamper the action of
the executive and do their utmost to involve their country in
disaster and dishonor. Cuthbert also persuaded the monks to dis-
use the gaudy plaids in which their simple souls rejoiced, he

316 SAINT C urn BERT AND His TIMES. [Dec.,

deeming robes of plain undyed wool more suited to the gravity of
their profession. Stories are also told of how he stayed the rav-
ages of the plague and healed the son of a woman when at the
point of death. Preaching at the village of his foster-mother, the
devil tried to withdraw his audience from the influence of his ex-
hortations by setting fire to a cottage. Cuthbert, however, showed
the people that it was merely fantastical fire, dissipated the
illusion, and continued his harangue. But the saint had a re-
markable delight in prayer, to which he sometimes devoted three
or four consecutive nights ; and to enjoy this exercise without
distraction, in the year 676 he withdrew from Lindisfarne to the
small island of Fern, nine miles distant, a dreary basaltic spot, ex-
posed to the unbroken violence of the east wind, from which he
screened his narrow dug-out as best he might with an ox-hide
stretched over the entrance. This place was nearly opposite the
royal castle of Bamborough, of which we have already heard. The
devils who had monopolized the island now fled, the rocks poured out
water, and the soil untilled bore rich crops, which possibly means
that the saint dug a well and cultivated a patch of ground, and that
the seals, with their habitual distrust of human intrusion, aban-
doned their ancient haunts on the beach. However, Cuthbert
appears to have possessed that extraordinary sympathy with, and
consequent control over, the animal world of which there are
occasional instances, the last we heard of being an inhabitant of
one of the New England States, a man of French origin, whose
name we have forgotten, but which will probably be known by
many of our readers. " He ceased not to preach to the Birds
that eat up his Corn, who so confuted them out of this text, non
alicna concupisces, that they would never after eat his barley. He
reclaimed two crows from stealing and rapine that pluckt off his
thatch from his Anchorage to build their nest, and made them so
penitent that they lay at his feet prostrate for absolution,
and the next day brought him a piece of Pork for satisfaction,"
" stolen," we presume, from some one else. It is said that the sea-
birds called " birds of St. Cuthbert " are still found at Feme (or
House) Island, but nowhere else in England. The fishermen say
that Cuthbert makes the shells entrochus at night. The saint
spent eight or nine years in his hermitage, but this period was by no
means one of inactivity ; so numerous were his visitors that he
built a guest-house of stone for their accommodation, though he
ordinarily remained in his cell and conversed with them through
a window. Northumbria was at this time convulsed by the strug-
gle between Wilfrid and King Egfrid ; in the presence of this

1889.] SAIATT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES. 317

prince at the Synod of Twiford, over which St. Theodore pre-
sided, Cuthbert was chosen Bishop of Lindisfarne. This, however,
as sorely against his will, and it was only on earnest solici-
tation that he yielded, and was consecrated at York by Theodore
and seven other bishops' on the i/th of April, 685, being Easter
Day. About the same time he told those near him of the death of
King Egfrid, though he was at a distance, and they learned
later that he had bfeen slain by the Picts at the time Cuthbert
had spoken of it. The bishop was most assiduous in preaching
and in visiting the various portions of his extensive diocese, em-
bracing as it did the Saxons of • the east coast and central dis-
tricts and the Britons of Cumberland. He was always patient
d cheerful, and many marvels are attributed to him, as the heal-
ing of a dying lady by means of blessed water. She was the
wife of Count Henna, and was so thoroughly and speedily restored
that she arose from her bed and handed the loving Jcup to her aston-
ished kindred. Similar is the story of the wife of a certain ealdor-
man whom Cuthbert healed of madness. So with Elfleda, niece
of Sts. Oswald and Oswy, who was recovered from sickness by
means of Cuthbert's linen girdle. This princess had succeeded St.
Hilda as abbess of Whitby, and shortly before his death Cuthbert
visited her to dedicate a neighboring church. Such was his re-
ligious abstraction that at table his knife dropped from his hand
and he remained lost in thought. During the dedication ceremony
the young abbess rushed up to him requesting a memento for a
monk of whose death she had just heard. Then we hear of the

I queen and virgin St. Etheldreda working for him splendid vest-
ments, and of his visits to Ebba, abbess of the double monas-
tery of Coldingham, and to the Abbess Verca at the mouth of
the Tyne. Here, being thirsty after dinner, Cuthbert refused both
wine and beer, preferring water. The monks, however, averred that
the rest of the cup was excellent wine. Seeing how ill he was,
the abbess presented the saint with the fine linen shroud in which
he was shortly after interred. The rule in Saxon times seems to
have been general for princesses and ladies of birth to preside
over convents, just as at present the highest distinction of prin-
ces of the blood is to bear arms and risk life and limb for the
Fatherland side by side with the humblest trooper or grenadier. After
two years of episcopal toil Cuthbert, feeling his end approaching, re-
tired to his old retreat of Feme to die. Here he lingered for
two months, his illness being long and painful ; his age was not
far over fifty years, yet he was quite worn out. But the phase of
spiritual life at which self-torture is esteemed grateful to the Father

318 SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES. [Dec.,

of all flesh he had now outgrown ; no more icy baths and mid-
night sufferings ; he bore patiently the inevitable, and might perhaps
have said with Buckle : "We must not calumniate an all-wise and all-
merciful Being by imputing to him those little passions which
move ourselves, as if he were capable of rage, of jealousy, and
of revenge, and as if he with outstretched arm were constantly
employed in aggravating the sufferings of mankind and making
the miseries of the human race more poignarit than they would
otherwise have been. These are base and grovelling conceptions,
the offspring of ignorance and darkness. Such gross and sordid
notions are but one remove from actual idolatry. All the events
which surround us, even to the furthest limits of the material
creation, are but different parts of a single scheme, which is per-
meated by one glorious principle of universal and undeviating
regularity."

The sufferings of the saint, now prematurely aged, are extreme,
and he is tenderly assisted by his mourning followers, who with
warm wine and woollen coverings seek to restore his waning forces.
He heeds not, however, these shortlived pains, " which are but for
a moment," and to him might have been applied the words of
certain writers on Buddhism, describing an Arhat : " To him who
has finished the path and passed beyond sorrow, who has freed
himself on all sides, thrown away every fetter, there is no more
fever or grief." "The disciple who has put off lust and desire,
rich in wisdom, has here on earth attained deliverance from death,
the rest, the Nirvana, the eternal state." And might he not have
employed the words of a leading disciple of Gautama as a suit-
able expression of his state of mind ? "I long not for death ; I
long not for life ; I wait till mine hour come, like a servant who
awaiteth his reward." We take the liberty of inserting these
quotations at second-hand from a volume which lies before us,
thinking that they admirably display the identity of true piety in
every age and clime. Nor is this remarkable, for " the spirit of the
Lord filleth the world," "and God fulfils himself in many ways."
The hour of relief at length arrived, the saint received the Viati-
cum and passed quietly away at the hour of Matins on the 2Oth
of March, 687, in the thirty-ninth year of his religious life and
the fifty-fourth of his age. A monk with a torch, standing on
the slightly elevated spot which the lighthouse now occupies, gave
the preconcerted signal to the house of Lindisfarne, and thither
the body.] of the deceased prelate was borne, where, robed in
the Abbess Verca's shroud, it was placed in a coffin of stone.
On a small islet in Derwentwater dwelt a priest and anchorite

SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES. 319

named Herbert, who was a close friend of Cuthbert, to whom
he paid an annual visit, and, as the saint had predicted, they both
died on the same day. In 1374 the Bishop of Carlisle appointed
an annual Mass to be said in the island in memory of this pious
friendship, with a forty days' indulgence for those who attended.

St. Cuthbert's body being inspected after a lapse of eleven
years was found to be perfect. This caused King Celwolphus to
bestow many lands on the monastery and to take the " monk's
coole " there himself. Later on the constant inroads of Danish
pirates kept Northumbria in a chronic state of alarm, and the
Saxons had an opportunity of appreciating the feelings with
which their own invading ancestors must have inspired the
Britons several centuries before. Neither age, sex, nor rank were
considered when the grim followers of Odin shouldered the
Danish battle-axe and took the field. With each recurring spring
fresh fleets from the fiords of the northern mainland would arrive,
scudding before the keen nor'easter. The invaders would repose
in some hidden inlet, awaiting the return of their scouts ; a rapid
raid of cavalry through the gloomy forests would then be made, and
the fierce warriors with axe and brand would fall on some peace-
ful slumbering town like a hurricane or a party of Arab slavers
on an African village. Then would succeed a confused tumult of
women's shrieks, old men's groans, blazing rafters and blinding
smoke, and by morning the town would be represented only by
smouldering heaps of ruins and blackened corpses. At an abbey
of nuns, as a Danish column was approaching, the abbess hastily
assembled her disciples in the chapter-house, told them briefly
what they had to expect from the uncouth foe, and then taking
a knife cut off her nose and lips ; she then handed the weapon to
another, who imitated her example, and so with the rest of
the sisterhood. When the Danes, filled with fury and lust, burst
into the chamber they shrank back appalled at the gruesome
spectacle. So in 893 we find Eardulphus, the bishop, with his
monks, fleeing from Lindisfarne, bearing with them St. Cuthbert's
body and other relics. However, a " sacrilegious storme " struck

§eir vessel in the Irish sea, and returning, they got into favor
th Guthred, the Danish king, and gained lands from the Wear
the Tees. Alfred the Great, also, in honor of St. Cuthbert
granted exemption from military service and taxation to the in-
habitants, and placed the saint's name with his own on his coins.
The bishopric, however, was now fixed at Chester-le-street, near
Durham, where Bishop Eardulphus died in 894. A century later
the see was removed to Durham or Dunholme — i.e., the hill on

VOI. U— 21

320 5^AV7 C UTH BERT AND HlS TIMES. [Dec.,

the waters — the beautiful situation of that magnificent cathedral,
built in 1080, being well known. Whether the following descrip-
tion by Mr. Hegge, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, written in
1663, will materially assist the reader is doubtful. " I may liken,"
says he, " the Bishoprick of Durham to the Letter //, and Durham
to a crab, supposing the city for the body and the suburbs for
the clawes. This countrey lyeth in the bosome of the Ocean and
is embraced in the arms of two chrystal Rivers, Teese and Der-
wen." Durham was fixed on as the resting-place of St. Cuth-
bert's body because the monks could not get it away. For some
reason they were driving the remains about in a cart, when it stuck
fast in a bog or was detained by some unseen agency, a sign
that they should remain where they were. This was in 996.
Aldwinus was the last Bishop of Chester and the first of Dur-
ham. Amongst the monks at that time was one Rigulphus, said
to be two hundred and ten years old, by whose side poor Parr,
of the life pills, with his paltry one hundred and sixty years,
would have appeared a mere child. Also, " Elfride, a monk, had
got one of St. Cuthbert's hairs which, laid upon the coals, would
be red hot, and return again to its former color."

The monks, alarmed at the approach of William the Norman,
conveyed their saint's body to Lindisfarne for security, but he is
held to have eventually frightened the victors of Senlac into sub-
mission, and before the end of his reign the present glorious
structure, the " seven altars " of the Middle Ages, was com-
menced, Malcolm of Scotland and others aiding in the work, and
for ages the Bishop Palatine was a little monarch of the northern
marches.

Cuthbert had been a regular woman-hater, or rather he had
sedulously avoided the sex, and therefore from churches dedicated
to him all women were excluded, as also from the portion of
Durham Cathedral near his magnificent shrine, a mark determin-
ing the Ultima Thule of female devotees being placed in the wall
at some distance from the tomb. But what will not the gentle
creatures do when placed on their mettle ? In the fifteenth cen-
tury two women arrayed in male attire attempted to approach the
forbidden spot, but being detected by some ungallant old monk
or crusty sacristan, were tried for their misdeed and put to
public penance. Cuthbert's mistrust of the fair sex and their
wiles arose from the following circumstance : The shame of an
unmarried daughter of the king being apparent, she, on being
accused, said, " The fault is with that young man who lives
alone ; I could not resist his beauty." On this the king and

1889.] SAIATT CUTHBERT AXD His TIMES. 321

courtiers went to Cuthbert in his solitude, reproaching him with
his hypocrisy and wickedness. Hereupon the saint with tears and
lamentations betook himself to the protection of Heaven, praying
that his innocence might be established, when lo! horresco referens,
the earth gaped, swallowing up the brazen-faced huzzy, who, like
Dathan and Abiron, of Hebrew story, descended alive into the
realm of Pluto. The afflicted parent now craved the good offices
of the outraged hermit, crying as another Lord Ullin : " My
daughter, oh ! my daughter," and of course his prayer was granted
and the princess reappeared from below in pantomimic style.

Years ago, when visiting the museum of the United Service
Institution, we came on the Franklin relics, and amongst others
were some silver spoons and forks discolored by the exposure of
years on an arctic beach, and a little girl of the party raised a
laugh by suggesting that an application of plate-powder and
chamois-leather would much improve them ; as table utensils the
spoons would doubtless have benefited had this proposition been
acted on, but as relics they would have been impaired. We have
in this sketch of the life of St. Cuthbert abstained from employ-
ing powder or leather. Those who wish to may, if they choose,
remove the incrustations of legend and fable with which posterity
has bedecked the memory of this great man, but we deem it
hardly necessary ; he was one of the noble spirits who planted the
first seeds of religion and civilization in this land and to whom
ur indebtedness is incalculable. Sad it is that a powerful and
learned English monarch should have deemed it consistent with
his kingly dignity to rifle the shrine of such a man and outrage
his remains. However, acting on the orders of Henry VIII., Dr.
Lee, Dr. Henly, and Mr. Blithman defaced the shrine, taking the
jewels and precious metal, which were of great value, for the
king. The strong chest was burst open, in which were found,
besides books, golden chalices, and other ornaments, the bones of
Bede, Aidan, and others, and the head of St. Oswald ; these were
thrown away, but according to Harpefeild, with the exception of
the tip of the nose, the body of St. Cuthbert was entire, with
beard as of a fortnight's growth, and the sapphire ring on the
finger. Viscount Montague gave this to the Bishop of Chalcedon,
who subsequently presented it to the house of English Canonesses
at Paris. Pending the decision of the king as to the bestowal of
the body it was taken charge of by the monks, and Bishop
Tunstal is said to have subsequently buried it where the shrine
had stood. This, however, is doubtful, for Dr. Whitehead, the head
of the monastery, and others who were present at the ghoulish

322 SAINT CUTHBERT AND His TIMES. [Dec.,

ceremony of ransacking the shrine at the behest of the royal body-
snatcher, say that a leg was accidentally broken. Now, in May,
1827, the cathedral and civic authorities caused the grave to be
carefully opened, some neighboring Benedictines being present by
invitation ; a body was found vested in what are undoubtedly
the robes of the saint, and of which Mr. Raine wrote an account.
But neither leg of this body was broken, a fact which lends coun-
tenance to the story that the monks abstracted and concealed the
body of St. Cuthbert, substituting another, and that only* three
Benedictines are entrusted with the secret of the resting-place of
the remains. And though this may be so and will commend
itself to those who find pleasure in mystery, yet it seems hardly
probable, for in the present age of toleration and enlightenment
such concealment and caution is wholly unnecessary. We fear,
therefore, that the remains of the Scottish shepherd and knight,
monk, hermit, missionary, and bishop, have shared the fate of
those of Aidan, Bede, and Oswald, which so long reposed with
his, and that the words of Aytoun are in a measure applicable :

" Oh ! never shall we know again

A heart so stout and true :
The olden times have passed away,

And weary are the new.
The fair white rose has faded

From the garden where it grew,
And no fond tears, save those of heaven,

The glorious bed bedew
Of the last old Scottish cavalier,

All of the olden time ! "

CHARLES E. HODSON.

1889.] IJ91 — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 323

_A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO.

CHAPTER X.

A THOUGHTFUL RIDE.

THIS last effort to capture Emilie Tourner had not appeared
very hopeful to M. Tardiffe. He was, therefore, most happily
surprised at receiving the madame's note. " The sweet bird," he
inwardly congratulated himself, " that has eluded me so long is
at last caged and shall now sing for me alone." He had really
no expectation of being able to rescue M. Pascal. It was uni-
versally believed that the prisoners had been put to death. The
excessively cruel character of Dessalines, stimulated by the car-
nival of massacre, emboldened by victory, and pressed towards
revenge by the horrible tortures with which a number of blacks,
without show of trial, had just been put to death at the Cape,
gave ample warrant for such an opinion. It was felt, too, that
Dessalines would be disposed towards violent measures, in order
to make the breach between the whites and blacks irremediable.
And in regard particularly to Henry Pascal, no one who had read
the proclamation entertained a doubt that his recent arrival from
Jamaica, should it come to the knowledge of the negro chief,
would alone and at once decide his fate.

M. Tardiffe's supposition was that he would not have to ad-
vance far into the country before receiving intelligence in regard
to the fate of the captives definite enough to warrant his return ;
and, though he should not have rescued M. Pascal, yet he felt
that Emilie Tourner would be virtually within his grasp. The
taking-off of her lover would remove the main obstacle between
them, and the attraction residing in his ample and secure wealth,
joined to the powerful advocacy of Madame Tourner, would, he
felt assured, finally win the prize. Well known though he was as
an ami des noirs, he was sensible, in the present spirit existing
among the blacks, of the danger he was encountering in advanc-
ing even a few miles beyond the Cape, and took what precau-
tions he could against them. One was to go entirely unarmed.
Weapons, though unused, would show, he argued, latent resistance
and tend to rouse aggression ; and where resistance is hopeless
complete defencelessness is the safer state. His dress, too, was of
the plainest style consistent with the air of a gentleman, and he

324 1 79* — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO, [Dec.,

discarded every kind of ornament and valuable likely to tempt
the cupidity of black marauders. He put aside, therefore, his
rings and watch, and replaced a well-lined silken purse with a
few loose coin.

To avoid the heat as well as the rain, which at this season
usually begins falling about noon, the gig had been ordered early,
and an hour before sunrise M. Tardiffe was a league beyond the
Cape. It was Saturday, the chief market-day, and within the
first few miles numbers of colored women were passed, adroitly
balancing on the head, with arms akimbo, great trays of fruit and
vegetables, and bundles of Guinea-grass. A sudden and exorbi-
tant rise in the price of such commodities, the demand being
especially pressing from the shipping in port, hacf tempted the
venders to venture forth. Beyond this limit evidences of the in-
surrection grew distinctly visible, becoming more and more pro-
nounced as M. Tardiffe advanced. But a few days before he had
driven through this splendid plain, then teeming with a busy,
prospering, and opulent population, and bearing on its fertile
bosom in richest profusion every staple of tropical growth. How
miserably had all changed ! Dessalines' plan of operations dis-
played his sagacity. This, as mentioned elsewhere, was to deso-
late the plains and rendezvous in the mountains, where the labors
of the women, aided by the soil's natural bounty, would supply a
commissariat. The results were now before M. Tardiffe's eyes.
Broken hedges and fencing, utterly wasted fields, the cane being
everywhere cut down or trodden under foot, the charred debris of
tobacco and indigo houses, of mansion and sugar-mill, had con-
verted a magnificent and exhilarating prospect into one broad
scene of desolation.

The accounts M. Tardiffe had received, though of the most
vivid character, failed to convey fit impressions of this wide and
wanton waste, and around him began deepening a sense of appre-
hension which the perfect solitude tended to enhance. Where
were the thousands and thousands of blacks who at this hour
were wont to go forth to work and greet the rising sun with
joyous song and sally, as in long lines they would hoe up the
cane or cut down the straw-colored stalks ? The greater part had
betaken themselves to the mountains, and for those remaining the
hour was too early, for the negro is a drowsy creature, and had
now ample opportunity to indulge his bent. The first blacks seen
were a couple of women sitting near the roadside beneath a lime,
not far from a massive stone bridge spanning a brawling brook.
M. Tardiffe rode by without speaking. They were uncanny, ill-

.] //p/ — A TALI-: OF SA.V DOMINGO. 325

looking objects, and he had little hope of obtaining from them
the information he desired ; and had his expectations been higher,
the impudent and malicious way in which they eyed him would
have been sufficient cause for passing in silence. He had crossed
the bridge, and was still musing upon their peculiar leers as
boding no good, when the interpretation came in his being set
upon by a gang of marauding blacks who had been sleeping off
a carouse in the cabins attached to a ravaged plantation on
his right

M. Tardiffe was one of those nervous and apparently timid
men we often see, whose impressionable nature conjures up and
exaggerates the tokens of danger, but who, when the danger
itself becomes manifest, at once stiffen themselves resolutely to
oppose it ; and he was conscious, as the maudlin blacks ran
towards him with wild cries of " Buckra ! Buckra ! " that it was a
crisis calling for all his resources. The blacks seized his bridle
and compelled him to dismount, and hustled him very roughly,
paying no regard to his asseverations that he was Louis Tardiffe
and a friend to their race, and were going through his pockets
for valuables when the leader of the gang, recognized by the
marauders as " Cap'n Cato," rode up on a mettlesome nag.
" Cudjoe ! " spoke the captain in a loud, blustering tone of com-
mand, addressing a young fellow of stout build and having the
plump appearance characteristic of sugar-mill hands who have free
access to the cane- juice, "hold dis here snaffle."

Cudjoe at once sprang forward with great alacrity, for military
obedience, he had already learned, must needs be swift. The
veriest of masters, however, is he who has once been a slave, and
Captain Cato, partly to emphasize his authority, partly to bully
the white man, thought fit immediately to add :

" D'ye hear, boy ? You Guinea nigger ! "

" I hear, sah ! " answered Cudjoe, as he seized the bridle.
Captain Cato dismounted, and eyeing his prisoner all over as he
approached him, demanded in brow-beating style who he was,
where he was going, and on what business. The latter replied
that his name was Louis Tardiffe, that he was well known as a
friend to the blacks, and that he was on his way to confer with
General Dessalines on matters of importance. At this announce-
ment, delivered in a manner at once cool and remarkably polite,
the captain's features relaxed considerably, for he had frequently
heard the name of M. Tardiffe mentioned in connection with the
asserted rights of the lower races. But the negro is suspicious
by nature, and the captain's features grew grim again as the

326 7/p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Dec.,

thought popped into his head that the prisoner might be de-
ceiving him. He therefore said, looking sharply at his man :

" Buckra, me sabe who M. Tardiffe be ; but how can me sabe
ef you be him ? "

Strange to tell, not until that moment had M. Tardiffe con-
sidered the highly probable necessity he would be under to make
good his identity, and to extricate himself his fertility of re-
source seized upon a ruse de guerre, the success of which de-
pended upon the negro's inordinate vanity. It was fraught with
hazard, yet not enough in M. Tardiffe's judgment to balance the
danger of being held by these maudlin marauders. The blacks,
here and there, had picked up a little learning and were able
to read. M. Tardiffe, however, had a conviction that Captain
Cato's intellectual progress had not advanced so far ; yet he be-
lieved the man's vanity, which he could see had been powerfully
stimulated by his new-born authority, would not permit him
to deny the accomplishment could its possession be so adroitly
insinuated as to allow him to claim it without reasonable risk
of his deceit being exposed.

Drawing forth, therefore, a chance letter — which proved to be
a brief business one conveying his last London remittance — and
speaking in a suave, engaging manner, he said :

" This, Monsieur le Capitaine, is my passport, secretly sent
me by General Dessalines, and which I read :

" ' HEADQUARTERS, NEAR PETITE ANCE.

"'This permits Monsieur Louis Tardiffe to pass and repass my
army lines. He who molests him shall answer before me.

" ' [Signed] GENERAL DESSALINES.'

" But you can see for yourself, Monsieur le Capitaine. I pre-
sume you can read a passport."

The captain took the proffered letter, and scrutinized it very
carefully with his maudlin, stupid eyes ; but the examination was
made, as M. Tardiffe observed, with the paper upside down, and
the latter felt greatly relieved at seeing his surmise justified and
the stratagem succeeding. Handing back the paper, he stepped
aside with his men, and they whispered together for some
moments, he informing them, with many gesticulations, that the
man was not only M. Tardiffe, the "nigger's friend," but that he
bore a passport from General Dessalines, and that no harm or
hindrance must come to him. In truth, the wily negro had a
thought — though the smooth and confident way in which M. Tar-
diffe had read the paper made a decided impression — that the

1889.] *79 * — -A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 327

alleged passport might be a deception. There was, however, he
felt, at least a probability of its being genuine, in which event
Dessalines' threat was one to tremble at. So Captain Cato made
up his mind to allow M. Tardiffe to pass, to which conclusion
he was materially assisted by knowing that the prisoner had about
him nothing valuable. Returning, therefore, to where he had left
M. Tardiffe standing, he grasped him by the hand, and told him
he was glad all over to know him. In his rude style he apolo-
gized for the roughness of his men, and said there would be no
further trouble, as the way was clear to an outpost " better'n a
league ahead," and that thence he would be safely escorted to
the general's presence.

M. Tardiffe returned thanks in suitable terms, and followed
with searching inquiries as to the fate of the captives, yet could
gain nothing definite. To a special question the captain replied
that he had not heard of their having been shot. At parting the
captain drew forth an ample flask of taffia and offered it to our
traveller, who saluted the bottle with apparent good-will. Shaking
hands with Captain Cato, and bowing politely to his men, now
officiously friendly, M. Tardiffe remounted his gig and rode for-
ward, with a salvo of yells from the blacks. His cogitations were
serious, as he now saw himself compelled to go on to the negro
camp. He had never for a moment contemplated meeting Des-
salines. And what if Henry Pascal should be alive ? To inter-
cede for him had been equally far from his thoughts. It became
necessary, therefore, to devise some reason for the interview, and
a plausible one quickly suggested itself in the desire to shield
certain friends at Dondon, which town Dessalines, it was currently
reported, was preparing to assault. He soon reached the outpost.
The officer in command was a young mulatto lieutenant, who at
once recognized and warmly greeted him. He had often seen
him at the Cape, where the latter, particularly after his pro-
nounced advocacy of enfranchisement, was a conspicuous object to
the colored races. His recognition and the cordiality of the
reception were most gratifying to M. Tardiffe, and he concluded
to accept an invitation to take refreshments and rest himself and
beast over the noon — a step to which he was the more inclined
as rain had just commenced falling. The inquiry as to the cap-
tives was here renewed, and our traveller received the astounding
information that not only had they not been shot, but that
Dessalines, being in want of funds (the negro insurgents having
secreted for themselves by far the larger part of the money found),
was strongly inclined to hold them at a ransom.

328 //p/ — A TALE OF SAK DOMLVGO. [Dec.,

Prior to leaving he obtained a letter of introduction to the
chief, and got some insights into his character useful in the com-
ing interview. The lieutenant declared Dessalines would be de-
lighted at seeing him, and would accord him a royal welcome ;
that he needed at this juncture just such a friend to indicate to
him the pulse of the colony, and take counsel with in regard to
future plans. He said, too, that since the victory the lower order
of negroes fairly worshipped him, that all regarded him as being
invincible, and that he was really a man of superior military sa-
gacity and indisputably brave. A squad of men were detailed to
accompany M. Tardiffe through the lines, and the latter, again
remounting the gig, proceeded on his way, protecting himself as
well as he could against a steady fall of rain.

" Well ! well ! " he inwardly ejaculated, " Henry Pascal alive,
and possibly to be ransomed ! That does not suit me at all
— it does not" he added, with an emphatic blow in the air, as if
he were hitting his rival. " Suppose I should succeed in rescuing
him ; one sight of her lover would turn mademoiselle's head, and
she would find some way to twist out of her promise. And even
were she disposed to abide by it, would not an ugly settlement
with Henry Pascal be inevitable ? "

He knew the latter was a determined man and dangerous
when roused, and that the attempt to wrest Emilie Tourner from
him would render him furious. And though M. Tardiffe, as has
been mentioned in these pages, was himself not wanting in cour-
age, yet, under all the circumstances, he shrank from the thought
of meeting the wrath of Henry Pascal. It was a subject of grave
import, and he dwelt long upon it. Some conclusion, however,
was at length reached, for a couple of miles, perhaps, had been
made when his manner suddenly changed. He raised his head,
cheered his horse, and began to inspect the surroundings. The
black camp was evidently near, for the strategic points were all
well guarded, and on every hand negro soldiers were multiply-
ing, though the weather had driven great numbers to shelter.
The rain increasing, the horses were urged, and the party soon
reached a cross-roads occupied by a large negro force. Here M.
Tardiffe deemed it advisable to remain till he could receive an
answer to the letter of introduction. This was forthwith despatched
to Dessalines' headquarters, at the residence of a wealthy mulatto
a mile away. Within a half-hour the answer came, exceedingly
polite and cordial, and M. Tardiffe, greatly raised in spirits, im-
mediately sought the presence of the negro chief.

:889-]

1791— A TALE OF SAAT DOMINGO.

329

CHAPTER XL

THE INTERVIEW.

The anticipations of the lieutenant in regard to the manner
in which M. Tardiffe would be received were fully realized.
>essalines' language was excessively coarse and vulgar, and his
lanner habitually bullying, and it was not his wont before any
>ne to place restraint upon himself in respect either to speech or
ision. But M. Tardiffe, whose keen eyes were wide open
to indications, could see that the marked cordiality was genuine,
tnd all fears for himself were dismissed. He at once proceeded
business, and informed Dessalines of the object of his mission: —
iat he had dear relations in Dondon, and having heard of the
:hief's intention to immediately assault the town, and not doubt-
ig the success of the attempt, he had risked the dangers of the
>ad in seeking him to intercede in their behalf, and he expressed
ie hope that what he had done and suffered for the blacks
rould win this favor.

Dessalines promptly replied that M. Tardiffe's wish was a law,
ind asked for the names of his friends and location of their resi-
lences, declaring, with a great oath, that not a hair of any of
lem should be touched. The memorandum was made out and
>resented, when Dessalines observed, in his vernacular — a very
irious compound of profanity and coarseness, oddity of expres-
lon, and affected smartness — that M. Tardiffe's visit -was well-
timed ; that he had upon his hands a number of prisoners, and
;ing in need of shiners, for so he denominated the sinews of
ir, he was half in mind to put them at a ransom, and hoped
ie ' could obtain from ,M. Tardiffe information in respect to their
ibility.

" Blow me, monsieur," he remarked, giving expression to his
inse of their marketable worth, " if they an't mostly officers —
rum lot, as Old Harry said 'bout the ten Commandments — and
want 'em to bring me ready money."

M. Tardiffe replied, expressing regrets that his knowledge in
this direction was so scant, that round sums could no doubt be
lad for any officers from the arsenal or ships, that he was ac-
[uainted with the circumstances of only one of the prisoners, M.
tenry Pascal, and that he knew him now to be as poor as a
barber's cat. To Dessalines' answer that no such name was upon
his list he replied that Henry Pascal's capture was the talk of

330 ijyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Dec.,

the Cape, whereupon Dessalines, producing the list, handed it to
him with the remark that he could see for himself.

He took the paper, and having rapidly glanced over it, stood
for a moment abstracted and with a puzzled air. A second look
was more carefully made, and reaching a certain name, he paused
to scan it. The result was satisfactory, for almost immediately
he exclaimed, as a smile played over his features :

" I have it, Monsieur le General, though it's under disguise.
It's given here as Henry Beattie, but it, must be Henry Pascal.
Beattie was the name of his mother, an Englishwoman," he
added.

Madame Pascal was of English blood only in so far as she
was an American. But M. Tardiffe had a purpose in making the
false statement, and the expression of his eye deepened on Des-
salines to note the effect of this last word.

" English, is he, confound him ! " growled out the chief.
be shot if that don't kinder rile me." *

" I beg pardon, Monsieur le General, //#//"- English only," put
in M. Tardiffe, to keep the English thought well before the
mind of Dessalines and nurse his rising wrath.

" That's nuf to git my hump up," said Dessalines. " What
in the dickens, anyhow, has he gone and took his mammy's
name for ? "

" I can't imagine; but it must be he; he is just now on a
visit from Jamaica, his present home," replied M. Tardiffe,
cutting another significant glance at Dessalines. To depict the
rage which upon this announcement shot from the eyes of the
brigand and expressed itself on his swelling features would be
impossible. Springing from his seat, with loud slaps on the thigh,
as was his wont, when unusually aroused, he skipped about the
room under intense excitement, crying out : " Kickeraboo ! kick-
eraboo!"f Then stopping suddenly before his guest, he con-
tinued, wildly gesticulating:

" I'll cook the buster's goose. I'm jiggered if he sha'n't dance
on air, and that in a jiffy."

M. Tardiffe had often had accounts of Dessalines, and was
prepared for outbursts of passion ; but the suddenness, the de-
gree, and the eccentricity of his fury were astonishing, and in the
" tiger " before him he recognized the justness of the title that
fame had given this famous outlaw. He saw, too, his own pri-

* Dessalines' peculiar speech, for the most part, cannot be literally rendered into our
tongue. The author has endeavored to give the best possible English equivalent.

t A term used by West India negroes and meaning " dead," being a corruption of " kick
the bucket."

1889.] IJ91 — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 331

vate scheme in the course of a perfect fulfilment Feigning sur-
prise, however, at Dessalines' deadly purpose, he said :

" Why, Monsieur le General, I thought you were meditating

a ransom

" Haven't you seed my proclamation ? I'll act on the square
with the Frenchers ; but these English furriners from Jamaica,
who come over to stick a finger in the pie and help the French-
ers put bracelets on us niggers, I'll not let up, I tell ye, on nary
one I catch. Is the chap," asked the chief, as a turn of thought
struck him, " kin to the old one at San Souci ? "

" Yes, they are the San Souci Pascals," replied M. TardirTe,
mentioning some circumstances in regard to the family.

" He's a gone goner. I'll court-martial Henry Beattie slap-
dash," said the chief, significantly emphasizing "Beattie." "We'll
receive the codger in full rig, and you be there to see how I'll
bamboozle him and slip into him. I'll flummux him as clean as
a whistle," continued Dessalines, as a twinkle in his eyes at the
trick he was concocting replaced their angry fire.

This precipitated a grave dilemma. Should anything befall
Henry Pascal, M. Tardiffe realized it would never do to have a
suspicion exist that at the time he was in the camp ; and on the
other hand, Dessalines had been drinking freely, and was in a
state in which it was sound policy not to cross his wishes in the
most trivial particular. He therefore, in his insinuating way, rep-
resented that as he was well known to Henry Pascal and to his
family, he hoped, if the chief found cause to take any step
against the prisoner, that the latter should neither see him nor
lear of his presence, nor any one learn that he had given in-
irmation concerning him.

" N. C. — nuf ced," responded Dessalines in his remarkable
lingo. " Come, I'll give yer a pig's whisper." * And suiting the
:tion to the word, he added, speaking close to M. Tardiffe's ear,
" I'll not let on, but you are bound to see the fun. We'll scrouge
in a corner where your peepers can git him but his'n can't
it you."

M. Tardiffe saw the necessity of yielding to the wish of Des-
dines, who, having conceived a plan for entrapping Henry
'ascal, was delighted with an opening for at once gratifying his
>rutal cunning and displaying his acuteness before his distinguished
^uest. He therefore made a virtue of the inevitable, and readily
[uiesced in the proposed arrangement as to his presence. At
le same time he took the precaution to ask that his name should
lot be known in the camp, and pointedly solicited Dessalines to

332 ijyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO, [Dec.,

be sure ol so placing him as to be invisible to the prisoner, re-
questing besides an opportunity to make some necessary personal
preparations, the ride and the rain having in no slight degree
disordered his dress.

" Right you are," replied Dessalines ; " and after yer drive I'll
bet you're needing inside lining, and something damp wouldn't be
away. I've got golopshus articles, to be sure ; bang up stuft,
monsieur, bang up, I tell ye; first class, letter A, No. I. Here,
you Sampson, you," he continued, calling out vigorously to an
attendant, a squat, dapper-looking fellow in gray fearnought suit,
with his wool combed up before in queer fashion, who stood in
waiting outside the doorway, " git some belly-timber for monsieur,
and a swig of ' O-be-joyful ' " — the latter being Dessalines' 'ex-
pression for his favorite rum. Sampson, who had but lately en-
tered the special service of the chief and was unfamiliar with all
of his gastronomical allusions, stood perplexed as to what was
signified by " O-be-joyful," when Dessalines broke out :

" Why don't you leg it, you lazy cuss ? Blame me, if you
wouldn't lay down yer musket for to sneeze."

Sampson explained his hesitation by saying, with the pro-
foundest servility, that he did not quite understand the order.

" Od drot a chucklehead ! Meat and drink, then, for monsieur,
and the best we've got, and plenty of it, and in a crack, or I'll
sock into you," rattled off Dessalines, menacingly shaking his
brawny arm. Sampson vanished before the redoubtable fist, of
whose vigor the chief's subordinates had not unfrequent expe-
rience; and another attendant having been called, and instructions
given to provide apartments for " monsieur," and assist in his
toilet, Dessalines hastened out to arrange for the court-martial.

CHAPTER XII.

THE COURT-MARTIAL.

The house occupied as headquarters for the black army was
a stone structure, with ample piazzas fronting north and south,
and latticed in, as usual, on their east and west sides. At a table
in its best and largest room, and an hour subsequent to the
events recorded at the close of the last chapter, sat Dessalines,
with his secretary and four of his chief officers, being the military
board for the trial of Henry Pascal, who had just been brought
in under a guard of soldiers.

1889.] ijyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 333

Dessalines alone wore his military hat. As a token of dis-
tinction it was unnecessary, for this celebrated negro possessed an
individuality amply sufficient to distinguish him without adventi-
tious aids. The first impression he produced was perhaps that
of physical power. Somewhat below the medium height, he yet
showed great breadth and depth of chest, his whole aspect being
suggestive of the personal strength for which he was remarkable.
His features presented some unexpected contrasts. The lower
portion of his face was good, singularly so for an African. There
was none of that disproportionate and peculiar development of
the inferior jaw often observed in the negro, in which the angle
protrudes backwards and the mouth is thrust forward, giving the
lower face a retreating chin and an apish aspect. The chin, on
the contrary, was relatively small and symmetrical in all its lines,
the direction and curve of what anatomists call its symphysis
being perfect — the chin rather of refinement, and delicacy.

These favorable impressions, however, were entirely overborne
by the truculent and repulsive features that formed the residue ot
the face. The forehead was low, round, and bulging; anger
gleamed in the eyes, ill-nature sat upon the mouth. The nose,
of true African type, was small and flat, and supported what lim-
ners call the "lines of malignity," which, making out from the
base of the spreading nasal wings, terminated at the commissure
of the mouth, and curved the right upper lip in such a way that
the teeth on that side were just visible. The brows were heavy
and contracted, the eyeballs prominent, standing out in fatness
and lust, with obtrusive whites, and a slight obliquity in the
visual axes. A life of perpetual danger and the necessity of
being always on guard accounted for the sudden starts of the
eyes, which looked blood-shot and angry from these abrupt and
incessant strainings ; and over the entire face a habit of deep
drinking gave unmistakable manifestations. The temple veins
were turgid, the muscles uniformly swollen and puffed up, and it
was solely for the lack of a white skin that grog-blossoms were
not more conspicuous. His uniform, a matter upon which the
inordinate vanity of this brigand laid special stress, was a kind of
blue jacket with eight rows of lace on the sleeves, a full red cape
falling over the shoulders, red cuffs and brilliant epaulettes, scarlet
waistcoat and pantaloons, with half-boots, round hat with red
feather, and a cutlass of unusual size and weight.

Over against the chief stood the prisoner, Henry Pascal. To
follow up his fortunes subsequent to the battle : The night suc-
ceeding that disaster to the French arms a copy of Dessalines'

334 ijqi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Dec.,

proclamation, by some means, no one could tell how, found its way
into the prisoners' room. Next morning it was eagerly read, by
none so eagerly as by Henry Pascal, who saw in it features
having a special interest for himself. It was not simply the clos-
ing paragraph, wherein Dessalines expressed his bloody purpose in
reference to any English from Jamaica falling into his hands, but
that these words were underscored. The lines had not been very
clearly made, but at once caught his eye. He was in no sense
an Englishman, except that he spoke the language fluently. As
for Jamaica, however, he had but recently returned from an ex-
tended visit to that island, and it was currently believed, he 'knew,
that he had removed thither. These circumstances, the rather re-
mote personal relation of which to the proclamation he might
otherwise have overlooked, the underscoring brought home to
him, and their significance grew as he dwelt on them and on
the capricious character of Dessalines.

While musing thus, with his eye still upon the passage, he
suddenly perceived with great astonishment what he thought must
be a personal allusion in the underscoring itself; for it stood in
a succession of short dashes, made by skips of the pencil point,
and these were eleven in number, answering to the letters of his
name. And he even fancied he saw a wider space between the
dashes separating the two parts of the name. Of this he could
not be certain, since the pencil, where it jumped the surface,
shaded off the lines, and the paper at this point had become
rubbed by being folded, and the tracings partly worn. Still,
there was enough to amaze and greatly interest him. Could
it be a mere coincidence ? It is true his full name was
Henry Beattie Pascal, but he was commonly known as Henry
Pascal simply. Besides, of all the prisoners he alone could be
considered as coming in any degree within the scope of Des-
salines' threat, and altogether he could not resist the conviction
that the proclamation was meant for himself as a warning from
some friendly hand.

Strange as it may seem, this circumstance, though it revealed
new and exceptional peril, was a source of real comfort. It was
a token of sympathy all unlooked for — a rift, however slight, in
the black, angry cloud that hung over him. From the short and
fitful sleep to which exhausted nature had at last yielded the
prisoners awoke that Friday morning with renewal of the most
dreadful forebodings. What mercy could be hoped for from these
cruel, red-handed, infuriate blacks, in the hour, too, of triumph,
and frantic over freedom to settle with the whites for the treasured-

1889.] ijyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 335

up wrongs of years ? The prospect was utterly despairing, and
the prisoners expected momentarily to be ordered out to execu-
tion. It was very gratifying, therefore, to Henry Pascal's feelings,
even for humanity's sake, to note a sign of sympathy emerging
from this frenzied, malevolent mass ; to feel that among these
blacks one heart at least was solicitous for him, that one hand
had been raised, at least to this degree, in his behalf. After
reading Dessalines' bloody proclamation the thought came over
him like a warm message of love and peace, and round it a
shadowy hope began to play — the reflection, perhaps, that pos-
sibly the same hand might be raised again in some more
effectual way.

As to what course to pursue in order to avoid this new dan-
ger he was uncertain. Perhaps it was meant (so his thoughts
ran) that he should be ready with explanations against any ques-
tions which might arise regarding his rumored residence in
Jamaica, or perhaps it might be better to assume another name.
His business as a fruit-buyer often carried him to the plantations,
and he must be known personally, he thought, to many in the
black army ; nevertheless, to disguise his name would lessen the
chances of discovery. He was unable to reach a satisfactory
decision, and deeming it best to. await the issue of events and
shape his conduct accordingly, he turned to the consideration of
who this friendly hand might be. Instinctively his thoughts were
directed towards Jacque Beattie. That the latter was in Dessa-
lines' army he considered highly probable ; and whose image,
under all the circumstances, would a thought of succor from the
>lacks so naturally call up as that of this faithful slave ? Against
[acque's identity, however, with the "friendly hand "'lay, upon the
e, a large balance of probability. So argued Henry Pascal,
'or, supposing it altogether certain he was in the black army,
icre was the merest chance he should know that his young
laster was among the captives.

But Jacque was not the only one, he reflected, from whom
mch a warning might have come. Throughout the province his
ither was well known as a just and humane master — a character
ill the more conspicuous for the excessively severe and capricious
xmduct which the planters often exhibited towards their slaves,
[enry Pascal, too, was himself a generous soul, with a gracious,
ittractive bearing, and had won the general favor of the blacks,
dth whom (particularly with the leaders among them) his business
rips to the plantations had brought him into not unfrequent in-
^rcourse. Towards his family, therefore, and himself especially,

VOL. L.— 22

336 ijyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Dec.,

he felt that there must be those in the black army who were
well disposed, and from whom, in return for some of his many
little kindnesses, this hint may have emanated.

Such were his thoughts that Friday morning when, at an
early hour, Chantalle, Dessalines' private secretary, entered the
prisoners' apartment to obtain a list of the names. A decision as
to his own at once became necessary, and he gave his name as
Henry Beattie. It was the thing to be done — so he~ thought at
the time. These personal reflections, which shot through the
prisoner's mind upon the discovery of the underscorings, inter-
rupted but for a few brief moments the course of thoughts that
had been torturing him ever since his capture. Loss of sleep, a
wounded temple, and the vitiated air of an overcrowded apart-
ment had brought on a raging headache ; physical discomfort,
however, was scarcely regarded under a dreadful pressure of
thoughts from without. Having no hope for himself, with what
agony did he think of his father, old and feeble, and utterly stripped
of the fortune to whose ease and delicate delights his life had
been habituated ! Why had they not gone to Jamaica — as they
had had thoughts of doing — before all this ? Oh ! that he had
taken his father thither when the first muttering of the storm
was heard ! His filial heart sank within him, borne down as by
an awful weight. And Emilie Tourner, dear Emilie Tourner, be-
reft too of fortune, and still prostrate within the shadow of the
ghastly dangers she had just escaped, what new trials must she
bear ! These harrowing thoughts, the dark impressions of which
his bodily discomfort tended strongly to deepen, became too much
even for the resolute spirit of Henry Pascal. His firmness gave
way to the pressure, and for a moment he bowed his head and
wept.

Blessed gift of tears, for saint and sinner blest ! On the be-
liever's soul, when in its arid moods and spiritual motion forced
and dull, they fall like Hermon's dew and arouse the tenderest
and sweetest intercourse with God. And for the natural man
these tears avail. They signify some lessening of the strain, some
lifting of the cloud, and turn to view the brighter side of things,
as through the humid eye a bow of hope is thrown upon the
visual nerve. Henry Pascal experienced the relief which natur-
ally follows a flow of tears, and began to take a little courage,
thinking that possibly his fortunes might not be altogether desper-
ate. In the thick darkness this warning he had received was the
solitary ray round which hope would now and then rally. The
proclamation, which he had himself retained, he drew forth for

;

XVI

1889.] /7p/ — ^ 7^z.e OF SAX DOMINGO. 337

the oft-repeated time, and scrutinized again the underscorings.
Imagination is a potent factor in practical affairs, and under its
influence uncertainties are prone to beget magnitudes. Possibly
this friend, he would say to himself, may be some one near Des-
salines and able to do a good turn. And he would dwell on
this thought, recalling the prominent blacks whom He knew and
could remember having befriended, and budding hope would color
his imaginings, and a prospect of deliverance suddenly sweep his
spirit like a breath of fresh air. From such fancyings he would
rouse himself and treat them as extravagances. The train of
thought, however, would return upon him again and again, and
in one of these reveries he was absorbed when a summons came
to appear before Dessalines.

A great sensation among the prisoners followed. Henry Pas-
cal himself was apparently the least affected. He could not un-
derstand the summons, yet the frame of mind in which it found
him inclined him to regard it rather favorably than otherwise.
He very well apprehended the character of Dessalines ; but the
monster, he also knew, had on some rare occasions been gener-
ous, and hope whispered at his ear that this exceptional summons
might in some way be connected with this unknown friend.
With such an impression on his mind he was hurried by the
guard into the presence of Dessalines and his officers. His face
bore the effect of physical and mental suffering. He was pale
and heavy-eyed, the paleness being deepened by a dark band
across the wounded temple, caused by extravasated blood ; yet
there was withal a certain air of collectedness such as a brave
pirit, animated by some secret hopes, might manifest under 'such
rcumstances.

M. Tardiffe had entered the apartment previous to the pris-
oner's arrival, and seeing no means of concealment and that rec-
ognition would be inevitable, insisted upon a position on the
piazza.. This was a spacious appendage to the building, latticed
in at the ends, and showing on the open side a partial view of
e estate, with the windmill standing among palms on an emi-
nence. Here M. Tardiffe was seated by a window connected
with the room. The sash was raised, but the shifting Venetian
blinds were down, and he had full command of the apartment
without risk of being observed. As he took in the situation on
the prisoner's entrance, his eyes sparkled and he rubbed his
hands in glee over the way things were going. Dessalines, who
was in that state of incipient intoxication signified by the word
" primed " — a state precisely suited for the display of his person-

338 if 9 1— A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Dec.,

ality — and who keenly relished such an opportunity for exhibiting
his brutal cunning, began the interrogatories with artful dissimulation.

" What's yer name ? " he asked the prisoner, in as kindly a
manner as he was capable of assuming.

"Henry Beattie."

" Chantalle," said the chief, turning towards his secretary and
attempting the high-sounding language for which negroes, even
as naturally shrewd as Dessalines, have an irresistible penchant,
" set down his deposition."

"Where d'ye live ?"

"At the Cape."

" What's yer business ? "

" A fruit-buyer."

" I thought you was somebody else," said the chief. " I thought
yer name was Henry Pascal. They've been telling me about him.
They tell me Henry Pascal's a prisoner, and I thought you was
him."

He paused and fixed his red, roving eyes full upon the pri-
soner, as if expecting some answer. The latter, however, though
profoundly startled, controlled his emotions and remained silent,
wondering what the end would be, and Dessalines continued :

"You're here, buckra, and I'll tell ye why. They call me a
devil, don't they ? And them priests say a devil can't do good ;
but blest if I an't one that can. Look a-here : I'm on top now,
but you sabe I was once on a time a poor runaway. He couldn't
catch me; I mean him I had to call master — curse that name!"
Dessalines added parenthetically and in a low gnashing tone,
and .then immediately broke out, almost in a shout, " Vive la
Revolution ! fa ira ! fa ira ! — no he couldn't catch me ; but,
I tell you what, he took it out on my old woman, Tamoen. I
used to creep in of nights to the cabin, and I knowed how she
was tormented. She got the cow-skin, got it heavy, and they
drove her to the field starved and naked ; that's what made me
a devil, buckra," lifting his great brows and shaking the forefinger
as he spoke.

" Well, one moony night I meet in the road Monsieur Pascal.
I'd heard 'em say he was a good master and had feelings for
niggers. I tell him my story, and I ask for money to git things
for Tamoen, and I got it, and I'm a devil that an't a-going to
disremember. Well, buckra, they've been telling me you is his
son, and I was going to say to his son, You is free; and if his
dad's got to the Cape, I 'was going to send him to him safe and
sound as' a remember from Dessalines."

.] i-jyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. • 339

Henry Pascal followed Dessalines' words with great and in-
creasing agitation of mind, and was entirely misled by the as-
sumed manner and apparent sincerity of the speaker, as well as
by the circumstances interwoven in the address. Monster though
he was, Dessalines had done, as young Pascal knew, some eccen-
tric acts of generosity ; the conduct attributed to his father was
altogether in keeping with his character, and paralleled by many
marked instances of kindness to blacks which Henry Pascal could
himself recall ; and the allusions Dessalines more than once made
to those who knew Henry Pascal and had been talking to the3
chief about him agreed with impressions already made by the
underscoring. Completely deceived, therefore, and with a sen-
timent of gratitude towards Dessalines as profound as the occa-
sion for it was unexpected, he eagerly availed himself of the pause
to speak out, in a husky voice, and almost overborne by emotion :

" Sire, I am the son of the man of whom you speak ; my
name is Henry Beattie Pascal. Let me — "

But he was not permitted to express his eager thanks, for,
bursting into a roar of laughter so wild and so loud as to re-
sound through the chamber, Dessalines at that instant sprang from
his seat and cried out :

"Yes, you Jamaica slubberdegullion — yes, I've heard 'bout
you, for true. I .'llowed I'd git you. Come to fight niggers, eh ?
And now the Lord has delivered you into a nigger's hand. Out
with him, guard, out with him, and make daylight through him
in a kick."

As Henry Pascal saw the trap into which he had fallen, a
ush shot athwart his countenance and as rapidly ebbed, leaving
in its track a death-like pallor. Yet he was himself in all the
whirl of thoughts — vengeful, spiritual, filial — which rushed on his
mind and pressed for solution within the compass of an instant.
Against Dessalines, whom a moment before he was regarding
th the liveliest sentiments of gratitude, the revulsion of feeling
is intense, and the impulse to curse the brute to his face in-
stinctive and all but resistless. The result, however, he foresaw
would be his death on the spot, and why sacrifice the moments
of. life now remaining and yield his soul in a tumult of passion ?
Explanations flashed on him — but would he be heard ? If heard,
would he be believed ? At least he would make the effort for
truth's sake, if no more.

It was all in vain. He was in the clutch of a fiend to whom
in such moods justice and mercy were utterly unknown, and who,
as Henry Pascal attempted to speak, broke out upon him :

wil
wa

340 AT Low TIDE. [Dec.,

" Come, come, none o1 yer lip, or I'll settle your hash right
here myself."

By this time the guard, who knew the necessity of despatch
in executing the orders of this negro, had hustled the prisoner to
the door, when Dessalines stopped them :

" Chain him down in the cage to-night. It's where they've
teached dogs to go for niggers, and I want the buster to lay
there a while and think. But hark ye," lifting a finger as he
spoke, " he's to be cold meat by sun-up !"

E. W. GILLIAM, M.D.

[TO BE CONCLUDED.]

AT LOW TIDE.

SHINING and even packed to north and to south stretch the sands,
Tenderly, daintily smoothed by the touch of the outgoing tide ;

Soft as a babe's soft hair set in place by a mother's hands
Each tress of the late-left sea- weed is straightened and spread
out wide.

Further, far off are the breakers, a sudden emerald wall
Lifted against the sky, and topped with a flame-like foam ;

Joyous the white crest gleams, then crashing down to its fall,
Creamy and spent, it sobs itself back to its ocean home.

Wide are the pale blue skies that melt in the infinite cloud
Where sea and sky are one on the far horizon's verge ;

But the light-house down at the Point stands starkly, solid and

proud,
Its feet in a baffling mist of breakers and sands and surge.

On the wide, vague sea of thought are sudden gleams of light
Lifted high up to heaven, bright with a new hope's sun ;

As we watch they waver and fall, and nothing is left in sight
But the baffling mist of doubt where faith and unfaith are one.

Yet steadfast in whirl and wave, a tower of riftless rock

Stands with its feet on a stone, crowned with a quenchless

light;
Despite the doubts that darken and the force of the tempest's

shock,

It stands a pillar of strength by day and a pillar of fire by night.

M. B. M.

889.] SCANDERBEG. 34!

SCANDERBEG.

CLIO is the most shamelessly unreliable of the Muses. She
selects her favorites with the autocratic partiality of the Russian

Catherine, decorates them with questionable honors, enriches them
other people's spoils, admires them to her heart's content,

ind thrusts them serenely to the front to receive the approbation
of the world. Occasionally she wearies of one or the other, and
flings him lightly down from the pedestal he has adorned so
bravely. Occasionally, having a fine feminine sense of humor, she
is pleased to play with our credulity, and, dressing up a man of
straw, she assures us smilingly that he is real flesh and blood,
and worthy of our sincerest admiration. And all this while her
best and noblest meet with stiffly measured praise, and her strong
sons are passed indifferently by. It is at least amusing to think
of the relative positions occupied by the true mountaineer Scan-
derbeg and the mythical mountaineer William Tell. The one sleeps
unremembered with scanty, hard-won fame ; the other carries such
a weight of laurels that poets, wearied with singing his praises,
have been driven in despair to sing the praises of those who
praise him, as Coleridge piped to the Duchess of Devonshire,

" Splendor's fondly fostered child,"

because, in a moment of mild enthusiasm, she addressed some well-
eant but highly inefficient verses to the platform from which
ell did not shoot the tyrant Gessler.

Now, if the heroic struggle for a national life is at all times
e most engrossing picture the world's history has to show us,
here shall we look for a more vivid illustration of the theme
than in the long and bitter contest between cross and crescent,
etween the steady, relentless encroachment of the Turkoman
wer and the vain and dauntless courage which opposed it? The
tory of the early Ottomans is one of wasteful and inexorable
nquest, unrelieved by any touches of humanity or any impulses
towards a higher civilization. To the ferocious and impetuous
pride of the barbarian they added an almost inconceivable wari-
ess and patience ; they knew when to wait and when to strike;
ey were never unduly elated by victory, and never demoralized
y defeat. That strange dream of their founder Othman which
won for him his Cilician wife, the mysterious vision of the full

342 SCANDERBEG. [Dec.,

moon resting in his bosom, and of the stately tree that sprang
therefrom, must have dimly hinted to the savage chief of the
glory that was to be. When in his sleep he placed Constan-
tinople as a jswel upon his swarthy finger he felt mysteriously
the rush of strange events, and, believing the prophecy would be
fulfilled in his descendant, he saluted his bride as the mother of
a mighty race of kings. It was this firm conviction of future
greatness which made him seek for his son Orchan a fairer and
nobler wife than could be found in the black tents of his followers ;
and, true to the instincts of his race, he despoiled an enemy to
enrich his own hearth. A Greek captain in command of the
castle of Belecoma was betrothed to the beautiful daughter
of a neighboring Christian chief. On their marriage night Oth-
man surprised the wedding party as they rode through the dark
mountain passes. The short and desperate conflict which ensued
could have but one bitter ending. " The bridegroom was slain,
and his Greek bride, the Lotus-flower of Brusa, was swept off by
the Turkoman robbers to their lair, to become the spouse of their
leader's son." *

Orchan was a mere boy when he received this ravished prize,
the fair booty of a barbarous strife. Fifty years later, when hair
and beard were white with age, he married again; and this time
his bride was the daughter of a Christian emperor, not stolen
away from friends and kindred, but given to him publicly with
superb ceremonies and a ghastly mockery of rejoicing. In fifty
years the Ottoman power had grown into such fierce and sinister
lustihood that Theodora, daughter of the Emperor Cantacuzene,
was assigned as a precious hostage and seal of friendship between
her father and his dreaded Turkish ally. The church refused her
blessing to this unholy sacrifice, and amid the pomp and majesty
of imperial nuptials there was lacking even the outward form of
Christian marriage. From that date the tide of Turkish conquest
spread with devastating rapidity. The impetuous encroachments of
Orchan, the steady and irresistible advances of Amurath, became
under Bajazet a struggle for life and death, not with the enfeebled
powers of Greece, but with a rival conqueror who had swept from
the broad Tartar steppes to subdue and lay waste the Eastern
world. Eight dynasties had already been destroyed, eight crowned
heads had been laid low, when Timour, grimly ready for a ninth
victim, encountered the hitherto invincible sultan. They met, and
Bajazet, who had seen the flower of French and German chivalry
perish at his command, who had sat at his tent-door to witness the

* The Early Ottomans, by Dean Church.

1 889.]

SCANDERBEG.

343

ay-long massacre of Christian prisoners, and who had shadowed
e very walls of Constantinople — Bajazet was crushed like a
orm by the lame, white-haired old Tartar, and eating out his
eart with dull fury, died in shameful captivity. But his race
survived, vigorous, elastic, defiant, and renewed its strength with
amazing swiftness under Mahommed the Restorer and Amurath
the Second, whose reign was one long conflict with the Greek
mperor Manuel, with Sigismund of Hungary, and, hardest of all
to subdue, with those warlike Sclavonic tribes who, often defeated
but never conquered, maintained with superb courage the freedom
f their mountain fastnesses. It was an unknown Servian- soldier
ho slew Amurath the First in the very moment of his triumph ;
t was the Albanian chief Scanderbeg who repulsed Amurath the
cond, and hurled him back to die, shamed and heart-broken, at
Adrianople.

Pride of race, love for his native land, a chivalrous devotion
to the cause of Christ, shame at prolonged captivity, and fury
at heaped-up wrongs — all these conflicting passions united them-
selves in the breast of this implacable warrior, and urged him
relentlessly along his appointed path. He was the outcome of
that ruthless policy by which the Turks turned the children of
the cross into defenders of the crescent, a policy pursued with
almost undeviating success since Black Halil, a century and a
alf before, had urged the training of Christian boys into a
hool of Moslem soldiers. What gives to the history of Scan-
derbeg its peculiar significance and its peculiar ethical and artistic
alue is the fact that he avenged not only his own injuries but
he injuries of countless children who, for over a hundred and
fty years, had been snatched from their homes, families, and
aith to swell the ranks of an infidel foe. Wherever the tide of
Ottoman battle raged most fiercely, there, savage, dark, invin-
ible, stood the Janissaries, men suckled on Christian breasts and
igned with Christian baptism, now flinging away their lives for
an alien cause and an alien creed, fighting with the irresistible
ourage of fanaticism against their birthright and their kindred.
Never before or since, in the history of all the nations, has a sys-
:em of proselytizing been attended with such tremendous results,
he life-blood of Christendom was drained to supply fresh tri-
mphs for its enemies, and the rigorous discipline of a monastic
ining moulded these innocent young captives into a soldiery
hose every thought and every action was subordinate to one
overpowering influence, an austere, unquestioning obedience to the
cause of Islam.

344 SCANDERBEG. [Dec.,

With the example of this extraordinary success always before
their eyes, it is little wonder that the Turks regarded the children
of the vanquished as so many docile instruments to be fashioned
by rigid tutelage into faithful followers of the Prophet, and the
first step towards this desired goal lay in their early adoption of
the Mohammedan faith. No pang of pity, no sentiment of honor
interfered with this relentless purpose. When John Castriota,
the hereditary lord of Croia, yielded up his four sons as hostages
to Amurath the Second he relied on the abundant promises made
him by that sovereign, who had, on the whole, a fair reputation
for keeping his royal word. The lads were carried to Adrianople
and reared in the sultan's palace, where one at least of the little
prisoners attracted dangerous notice by his vivacity and grace —
inheritances, it is said, from his beautiful mother, Voisava. The
fair-haired boy, then only eight years old, became first the play-
thing of the seraglio, and afterwards the jealously guarded favo-
rite of Amurath himself. He was carefully instructed, and was
forced to conform to the ceremonial rites of the Ottomans, and to
make an open profession of his new creed, receiving on this occa-
sion the name of Scanderbeg, a name destined to carry with it a
just retribution in the universal terror it excited. How much
of Christian belief still lingered in the child's soul, or how much
he gained afterwards from the Albanian soldiers who had access
to him, it is impossible to say. Young as he was, he had learned
amid the unutterable treachery and corruption of an Eastern
court to hide his real emotions under an impenetrable mask, so
that even Amurath, cruel, wily, and suspicious, found himself
baffled by this Greek boy, whose handsome face betrayed to none
the impetuous anger that consumed him. At nineteen he had
command of five thousand horsemen, and enjoyed the title of
pasha, a barren honor for one soon to be robbed of his birth-
right. After the close of the Hungarian war John Castriota
died, and Amurath, ignoring his plighted faith, seized Croia in
the name of the captive princes, ruthlessly extinguished its civil
and religious liberties, turned the churches into mosques, and
treated the whole country as a defeated and dependent province.
Scanderbeg's three brothers were conveniently removed by poison ;
he himself, the object of a curious affection on the sultan's part,
was watched with jealous and exacting eyes, and for a while it
seemed as though the free-born mountain chief would add one
more to the long list of Turkish proselytes and favorites, silenced
with doubtful titles, bought with dishonorable wealth.

But it was a time of waiting, a time ominous with delay.

1 889.] SCANDERBEG. 345

The heir of Croia, mute, patient, and resolved, bided with steady
self-control the hour when he could strike a single blow for faith
and freedom. It came with the breaking out of fresh Hungarian
troubles ; with the defiance sent by John Hunyadi and his forces
drawn up on the banks of the Moravia. While the Ottoman
armies were engaged in this most disastrous conflict, Scanderbeg
threw off his long-endured disguise, possessed himself by an un-
scrupulous device of his native city, and put all who opposed him
to the sword. From that day until his death, forty years later,
the record of his life is one perpetual heroic struggle to preserve
the hard-won liberty of Epeiros, a struggle without intermission
or relief, without rest for the victor or pity for the vanquished.
His scornful indifference to pressing dangers was in itself the best
of tonics to a people naturally brave, but taught by bitter ex-
perience to fear the inexorable Turkish yoke. Scanderbeg feared
nothing ; with him, indeed, fear was swallowed up in hatred.
He understood perfectly the nature of the warfare in which he
was engaged ; he knew that with adroitness and vigilance every
dark pass and every rocky crag became his friend and ally.
He knew, too, the slender resources of the country, and never
committed the mistake of taking more men into the field than he
could manage and support. When Amurath sent an army of
forty thousand soldiers to punish Croia and bring back the rebel
chief "alive or dead " to Adrianople, Scanderbeg limited his own
forces to seven thousand foot and eight thousand horse, when he
might, had he chosen, have trebled that amount. With this com-
pact body of picked and hardy warriors he lay in wait for the
memy, entrapped them by a feigned retreat into a narrow defile,
ind, hemming them in on either side, filled up the valley with
leir slain. Over twenty thousand Turks perished in that dread-
il snare, many of them being' trampled down by their helpless
id panic-stricken countrymen. It was Scanderbeg's first decisive
dctory, and a grim warning to Amurath of the possibilities
it awaited him in the future. It gave to Croia a breathing-
ill, and to its victorious army the rich spoils of an Ottoman
camp, so that those who had gone forth meagrely on foot re-
turned well armed and bravely mounted to their rock-built
citadel.

Had this sudden and bewildering success been followed up by
a vigorous aggressive warfare on the part of Servia, Hungary, and
Poland, then all in arms against their common foe ; had the allied
powers listened to the mountain chiefs or to the burning remon-
strances of Cardinal Julian, the pope's legate, the Turks might

346 SCANDERBEG. [Dec.,

have been driven forcibly back from Europe, and long centuries
of suffering and dishonor spared to Christendom. But the lord
of Servia, George Brankovich, yearned for his children whom
Amurath held as hostages ; Ladislaw, king of Hungary and Poland,
was weary of the perpetual strife ; even Hunyadi's fiery voice was
silenced ; and a treaty of peace was signed with an enemy who
might then, and then only, have been crushed. This treaty,
shameful in itself, was still more shamefully broken in the fol-
lowing year, when the Christian hosts again took the field, only
to be utterly routed in the terrible battle of St. Martin's Eve.
Never was disaster more complete : Ladislaw's severed head, borne
on a pike over the Ottoman ranks, struck terror and despair into
the hearts of his followers ; Hunyadi, after a vain, furious effort to
redeem this ghastly symbol of defeat, fled from a field red with
his countrymen's blood ; the papal legate and two Hungarian
bishops perished in the thickest of the fray. It was the beginning
of the end, and four years later the cause of Christendom received
its death-blow at Kossova, when Hunyadi, beaten finally back
from Servia, was taught by the bitterness of defeat that his name
no longer sounded ominously as of old in the ears of his Moslem
foe. Only Scanderbeg remained unsubdued amid his mountain-
peaks, and Amurath, flushed with conquest, now turned his whole
attention to the final punishment of this audacious rebel.

The scale on which the invasion of Croia was planned shows
in itself how deep-seated was the sultan's anger and how relent-
less his purpose. One hundred and sixty thousand men were
assembled in Adrianople, the ablest generals were united in com-
mand, and Mohammed, his savage son and successor, accompanied
the expedition, filled with fierce hopes of vengeance. Resistance
seemed almost vain, but Scanderbeg, in no way disturbed by the
coming storm, prepared with characteristic coolness to meet it at
every point. He ordered all who dwelt in the open country or
in unprotected villages to destroy their harvests and to quit their
homes, so that the enemy might find no resources in the scorched
and deserted fields. The women and children, the aged and
infirm, were sent either to the sea-coast or out of the kingdom,
many of them as far away as Venice. The fortifications of Croia
were repaired ; the garrison was strengthened and put under
command of a brave and able governor, and Scanderbeg him-
self, with only ten thousand men, took the 'field, ready to way-
lay and harass Amurath at every step of his difficult and dan-
gerous march. The first severe fighting was done before the walls
of Setigrade, a strongly guarded town which made a gallant re-

1889.] SCANDERBEG. 347

sistance, repulsing the Turks again and again, and only yielding
when a traitor, bought by the sultan's gold, poisoned the foun-
ins which supplied the city with water. From this point the
invading army marched on to Croia, covered the surrounding
plains, planted their cannon — then an imposing novelty in war-
fare— before its massive gates, and summoned the 'garrison to sur-
render. A defiant refusal was returned ; the Ottomans stormed
the walls, and were repulsed with such fury that over eight
thousand Janissaries perished in the combat, while Scanderbeg,
poised like an eagle on the cliffs, waited until the battle was at
its height, and then sweeping down on the unconscious foe, forced
their trenches, fired the camp, and drove all before him with ter-
rible havoc and slaughter. By the time Mohammed could rally

is scattered forces the Epeirots were off and away, with little
scathe or damage to themselves; and this exasperating method
of attack was the weapon with which the mountain chief finally
wore out the courage and endurance of the invaders. Every inch
of ground was familiar to him and a snare to his enemies. Did
Mohammed, burning with rage, scale the hills in pursuit, a hand-
ful of men held him 'at bay ; while Scanderbeg, appearing as if by
agic on the other side of the camp, chose this propitious mo-
ent for an attack. By day or night he gave the enemy no truce,
no respite, no quarter. Two hours out of the twenty-four he slept,

nd all the rest he spent in unceasing, unwearying, unpitying war-
fare ; until the Turks, harassed by a danger ever present but never
visible, lost heart and trembled before the breathless energy of their
foe. They were beginning also to suffer from a scarcity of provi-
sions, and Scanderbeg took excellent care that this trouble should
not be too speedily relieved. The supplies brought at an immense
cost from Desia were intercepted and carried off triumphantly to
the hills, and the unhappy Ottomans, starved in camp and

laughtered out of it, realized with ever-increasing dismay the
unenviable nature of their position.

It must be admitted, in justice to the Epeirots, that the suc-
ss of Scanderbeg's manoeuvres rested exclusively on their abso-

ute and unquestioned fidelity. Swift and sure information was
brought him of every movement on the enemy's part, and vigilant
eyes kept watch over every rocky pass that gave access to his
haunts. For once .Amurath's gold was powerless to buy a single
traitor, and the systematic perfidy by which the Turks were ac-
customed to steal what they could not grasp failed for once of its
prey. After a fruitless effort to undermine the rock on which
Croia was founded, the sultan sought to corrupt first the governor

348 SCANDERBEG. [Dec.,

and then the garrison with dazzling offers of advancement, but
these men who held their lives so lightly held their honor very
dear, and all the wealth in Adrianople could not purchase
one poor Christian soldier. Baffled and heart-sick with repeated
failure, Amurath at last offered to raise the siege and depart on
payment of a small yearly sum, a mere nominal tribute to salve
his wounded pride. But even this trifling concession was sternly
refused by Scanderbeg, who would yield nothing to his hated foe.
Then for the first time the sultan understood the relentless na-
ture of this man whom he had petted as a child and wronged
as a boy, whom he had held a helpless hostage in his hands,
and who now defied him with unutterable aversion and scorn.
Abandoning himself to grief, fury, and despair, he tore his white
beard, and recalled his countless triumphs in the past, only to
compare them with this shameful overthrow. He who had seen
the allied powers of Christendom suing at his feet to be humbled
in his old age by an insignificant Illyrian chieftain ! The blow
broke his proud heart, and on his death-bed he conjured his son
to avenge his name and honor. Gladly Mohammed undertook
the task, but the present was no time for its fulfilment. The siege
of Croia was raised, the dejected Moslem army straggled home-
wards, cruelly harassed at every step by their unwearied foe, and
Scanderbeg once more entered his native city amid the acclama-
tions of a brave people, born again to freedom, and wild to wel-
come their deliverer.

It is pleasant to think that, before being called a third time
into the field, even this indomitable fighter found a little leisure
in which to marry a wife and to cultivate the arts of peace.
Domestic tranquillity ran but a slender chance of palling on its
possessor in those stirring days ; but Scanderbeg made the most
of his limited opportunities. He carried his bride in triumph to
every corner of his little kingdom, he labored hard to restore those
habits of thrift and industry which perpetual warfare roots out of
every nation, and he wisely refrained from overtaxing the narrow
resources of his people. When his purse was empty he looked
to his enemies and not to his friends for its replenishment; and
that stout old adage, "The Turk's dominions are Scanderbeg's
revenues," is a sufficient witness to his admirable financiering.
He realized fully that the legacy of hate bequeathed by Amu-
rath to Mohammed would bear bitter fruits in the hands of that
fierce and able monarch, and so employed every interval of peace
in strengthening himself for the struggle that was to follow.
Twice again during his lifetime was Epeiros invaded by the Otto-

1889.] MINE ENEMY. 349

mans ; and Scanderbeg, driven from his lair, was hunted like a
deer from hill to hill, now lying in covert, now fiercely resisting,
but unconquered always. Wily offers of friendship from the sultan
were received with a not unnatural suspicion and courteously de-
clined ; hired assassins were detected and delivered up to a prompt
and pitiless justice. For forty years this Albanian soldier defended
his mountain eyrie from a power vast enough to destroy two
empires, and cruel enough to make the whole Eastern world
tremble. Constantinople fell, while Croia stood unharmed. The
last news brought to Scanderbeg, as he lay dying at Lyssa, was
that the Turks had invaded the Venetian dominions. The feeble
warrior raised himself in bed, and called for his sword and armor.
"Tell them," he gasped, "that I will be with them to-morrow,"
and fell back fainting on his pillows. On the morrow he was
dead.

AGNES REPPLIER.

MINE ENEMY.

HE dwells 'twixt the near gray hills and me,
And he whom I hate is fair to see.
His beauty fills me with angry pain,
I look on him with a fierce disdain ;
I shun the paths that his feet have trod,
Nor deign to touch the unhallowed sod ;
And oh ! that my wrath might rise and strike,
And mark with the brand of my dislike,
Mine enemy!

II.

I build a hearth-fire and build it well,
And sit me down that its holy spell
May wrap me about, and peace and calm
Descend on my troubled heart like balm ;

• . .
• v .

350 MINE ENEMY. [Dec.

Th&T k 'fain those vague, sweet dreams would know
TtlWt are born of dusk and the fire's glow ;
But the fire dies with a fitful gleam,
The room is chill, and my only dream —
Mine enemy !

III.

The eyes are tender that look in mine
Across the cup of the festal wine ;
And yet, O friend ! between you and me
Another loathed face do I see.
A spectre grim is hovering near,
A thing to scorn and a thing to fear;
A ghastly smile on its lips is set,
It mocks me that I would fain forget
Mine enemy !

IV.

Haply with suppliant voice of pray'r
I speak to God ; when, half unaware,
The weak words tremble and die away ;
What falsities do my vain lips say ?
Deep in my heart and deep in my brain
Are words I shall never forget again :
a And thou lov'st not him, thou lov'st not Me,
No heavy cross, but a crown should be
* Thine enemy ! "

Of my cup of hate is left but this
(The dreg which will bring me peace, I wis):
To cast me at mine enemy's feet ;
To kiss the dust in my woe complete ;
To fill his ears with my bitter cry:
" Give me thy friendship, or I must die !
Yea, fold me one instant to thy heart,
And say but once that no more thou art
Mine enemy ! "

J. GERTRUDE MENARD.

Woburn, Mass.

1889.] A PLEA FOR ERRING BRtf'^ % 351

A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN.

A FRIEND tells me he thinks that the presentation of the doc-
trines of Catholic theology concerning the true spiritual position
of non-Catholics in good faith lately made in these pages, follow-
ing upon a controversial discussion of the subject which appeared
last autumn in the columns of the New York Freeman's Journal,
will likely be widely noticed in other magazines and newspapers,
both Protestant and Catholic ; and thus much good will be done
in inducing preachers, instructors, and essayists to change their
method of discussing the subject of religious differences among
professing Christians. He thinks ilso that the plain, unvarnished
truth offers a new basis upon which to found better hopes,
brighter prospects, and a more practical plan of bringing about
that true unity of Christian faith and practice which most assur-
edly all sincere believers, on both sides earnestly desire and no
less devoutly pray for ; that our Lord's prayer may be answered,
" That they may be all one " ; and his promise fulfilled — all the
ther sheep which are his being brought back into the One Fold
nder One Shepherd.

But while my friend's words echo the fervent wishes of my
n heart, I bid him not be too sanguine of so happy a result,
or it would argue the breaking down of one of the strongest
alls within which human pride entrenches itself and bars the
ay against either advance towards unity from the one side, or a
haritable invitation to its consummation on the other ; a wall
at has been long a-building — the wall of prejudice. So far as
he discussion in a fair and fearless manner is concerned, it has
een done over and over again by Catholic theologians. In our
heological treatises the Catholic doctrine is not only plainly and
ully taught, but every conceivable objection is urged, discussed,
and refuted. Protestant theology has but little of this intellectual
courage to show. The reason of the difference is easy of explana-
tion. All that Protestantism or any non-Catholic religion possesses
that is true and good we can fully allow, and give a wide margin
besides. Grant it all it can claim, and it is at best only an incom-
plete Christianity, a conglomeration of doctrines frequently incon-
sequent and illogical, which, despite the truth of very many of
them taken separately, it is quite evident the different denomina-
tions are wholly unable to reduce to a common system of faith or

VOL. I..- -23

352 A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN'. [Dec.,

practice, although we hear not a little of their hopefully expressed
but always abortive efforts to establish some such an unity, were
it no better than a sort of religious confederation for common
defence against that ofttimes serviceable but amusing bogie, "papal
domination."

Protestant theologians cannot, therefore, afford to present the
Catholic side as it is stated by ourselves, and fairly notice or at-
tempt to refute the Catholic objector, without exhibiting them-
selves in sorry contrast.

So I tell my friend that probably little or no notice will be
taken of the arguments made even in their favor by Protestant
journals. We all know how largely many of their periodicals de-
pend for matter, if not for existence, upon keeping up the old
prejudices against the Catholic religion ; distorting our doctrinal
definitions, rehashing the many times refuted historical lies, and
shamefully eager in catching up and repeating exaggerated state-
ments of real Catholic scandals, from which they are accustomed
to draw the most unwarrantable conclusions against our holy faith,
and use as padding to bolster up weak arguments in favor of
their own.

I venture also to tell my friend that I do not think our Cath-
olic journals will take much notice, either, of the arguments pre-
sented. If there is Protestant prejudice, there is Catholic prejudice
too, not needing to be fomented, it is true, by our religious pub-
lications as a price of continued favor with their patrons and
readers, nor persistently upheld by Catholics generally as a shield
of protection for our own opinions ; but which, it must be owned,
many persons do not feel themselves called upon precisely to go
out of their way to make special and unusual efforts to dissipate.
There is a well-founded feeling that Protestantism, as a system,
richly deserves all the knocks it gets, and if Protestants do not
like the blows, they had better' get out of the system.

Again, some simple souls might possibly take scandal', and
imagine that defending the case of individual Protestants, honestly
acknowledging the evidences of the working of the Holy Spirit
among them, and the possibility of their receiving divine graces
from a pious adherence to and practice of their peculiar forms
of worship, would be tantamount to a defence of the false doc-
trines some of them hold and of the erroneous and spiritually
dangerous position of their sectarian isms. Moreover, the expe-
rience of the past has not given much encouragement to be fair
and kindly just to Protestants. A people whose intelligence it is
harder to reach in religious questions by knock-down and thrust-

1889.] A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. 353

out logical conclusions was perhaps never found on the face of
the earth. Has not argument upon argument, proof upon proof,
been wasted upon them ever since they came into existence ?
" Ephraim is joined to his idols. Let him alone!"

I think the majority of us have been accustomed to fall back
upon the comforting consciousness we have of the irrefragable
truth and divine right of the Catholic Church, the certainty of
which we hold to be itself of a higher order than the certainties
of human science. Magna est veritas, et prcevalebit ! — Truth is
mighty and must prevail. Whether Protestantism prospers and
holds its own among certain nations under favorable protection by
the state (the only way it ever has kept its head above water),
or whether, lacking this human support, it is elsewhere losing its
hold upon the masses, and unable to defend its own flock against
the attacks of the wolves of infidelity on the one hand, and deci-
mation from the contagious rot of fanaticism on the other, of
one fact we have no doubt: ultimately the Catholic truth will
prevail. Why should we trouble ourselves ? Would not that
show a sign of distrust in the invincibility, per se, of truth ? Of
course we are very sorry for all who are trying to wage their
own little battle of inevitable defeat upon the plains of their own
choosing, instead of from the impregnable entrenchments of that
citadel against which the gates of hell ever lays an unavailing siege.
Too many of them, it is true, are with us and of us ; too closely
united with us, in the nearest and dearest relations of life, not to
have our keenest sympathies aroused, and for us not to compas-
sionate their spiritual condition, half-clad and half-fed souls as
know them to be; but, loving truth, as we do, better than
ir own lives, what more can be expected of us than to say to
lem : We are right and you are wrong ; our religion is true
id yours is false. We are of Christ and his apostles; you are
Luther and Calvin and others too numerous to mention. We
re of the 'whole world, everywhere alike and always the same,
as truth should be ; you are of this place and that, everywhere
different and never the same, as error must be. Thus we sum
up the evidences in favor of our own position and against theirs,
and walk out of court, quite self-satisfied that the Divine Judge
will issue a writ of judgment and execution against them, for-
getting that the mission of Christ, as it ought to be of thos
whom he sent in his name, is a mission of reconciliation and
redemption and not one of condemnation and punishment. The
triumph of Christ is to win, not to defeat, those who know him
not, or know him only to hate him and his doctrine.

354 A PLEA FOR RRRING BRETHREN. [Dec.,

Of what spirit is he who comforts himself with a full meal
and a cheering fireside if his brother be starving and freezing
upon his doorstep ? How much less defensible is he who, thus
enriched and happy, has received all those comforts precisely on
the condition that he should share them with those who have
them not ? We seem to forget that all men are called to the
same salvation as ourselves, have the same divine right in Christ
to know the truth, and that the Holy Spirit invites each and
every one to enter both the church militant, the church suffering,
and the church triumphant on an equal footing with ourselves.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of good reasons for the exis-
tence of the prejudices of Catholics, enough to make it wholly
excusable. Protestantism has ever made itself so offensively hos-
tile to the church whenever it has attempted to defend its own
position ; and when or wheresoever it has drawn comparisons be-
tween its own systems and the claims of divine jurisdiction made
by Catholic authority it has exhibited such an unmistakable ani-
mus of heresy, that, after all, one can hardly blame Catholics
generally for the impressions they have received concerning Pro-
testants taken as individuals. They see little or nothing of the
actual interior life of so many of them as there are who, even
by the strictest judgment of the church, cannot possibly be more
than material heretics, their error being without sin on account
of their surroundings of life, the moral impossibility of their know-
ing the church, and their actual sincerity and good faith. From
the very fact that the heretical position they assume prevents us
from conscientiously holding communion with them in religious
worship we are unable to form a just estimate of the value of
their spiritual life, estimated, as it should be, on its intrinsic
merits.

What we read in Protestant books and journals, the petty and
mean persecutions which in social life many of us are obliged to
suffer on account of our faith from some ignorant ' bigots, the
regular appearance upon the public stage of some foul-mouthed
slanderer of priests and nuns, often introduced and sanctioned by
their preachers — all these things, and much more to the same
effect, combine to make such a prominent and apparently uni-
versal show of an heretical spirit that it is small wonder to find
Catholics so generally convinced that all Protestants are rightly
defined as " heretics " in the worst sense of the word. That is the
old definition of the Protestant religious field — all cockle and
briers. Nothing to gather for God there. Put a torch to it, and
let the flames save us the trouble of — well, of worrying our minds

1889.] A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. 355

or burdening our consciences about it, any way. To even sup-
pose that aught else but cockle and briers, sown by the . enemy
and fit only for burning here and hereafter, is to be found in the
Protestant field, and may be reaped therefrom, is something which
might seem to some so venturesome, if not so dangerous, an asser-
tion that they would be fain to cry out : Vade retro, Satanas ! —
Get thee behind me, Satan !

It has been the earnest desire of the present writer to do
what lay in his power, with God's help, to dissipate this (mainly
through Protestants' own fault) honestly-founded prejudice. It in-
duced him to write a certain article for a newspaper, entitled
" Have Protestants divine faith ? " and the almost universal appro-
bation of its doctrine and sentiments which has come to him from
all parts of the country, both from the clergy and laity, not only
fills him with unspeakable consolation by proving how quickly
the Catholic heart takes fire at the least spark of charity, but it
has emboldened him to make this further effort to fan the kin-
dled flame into a brighter and more ardent blaze, to arouse a

lore general interest in the subject, and stimulate others to en-
courage any lawful practical effort that may be made to gain

lese erring souls.

Catholics hear too much of the value of the soul to be
indifferent to the fate of any one, however abandoned, however
apparently hopeless, even if such persons have proved them-
selves to be their bitter enemies and persecutors. If you can
mly succeed in bringing them face to face with the threaten-
ing peril, and say : Behold ! here are souls in danger. Look
ipon the crucifix, and tell me if anything in this wide world
;an hinder you from helping their rescue ? Is there any sac-
rifice short of the betrayal of your faith or the violation of

ic moral law that you would not gladly make if their salva-
:ion demanded it of you ? — no one can doubt what would be

ic reply. I wish it were possible to give our erring Protes-

int friends one glance into the bosoms of Catholics to whom
>uch an appeal would be made, that they might observe the
emotions of divine charity it would stir up in the hearts of
those who owe nothing to Protestantism but harassing insult

tnd life-long suffering. The spectacle would give them an ex-
ample of a practical Catholic interpretation of the fundamental

loctrine of Christianity, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all
thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thy-

-lf." It would give them striking proof that to Catholics the

356 A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. [Dec.,

Cross is a standard of Christ-like self-oblation for the salvation
of souls, around which they will generously rally at the first
call to follow, if need be, the leading of a forlorn hope at all cost.

Can any one deny that the Catholic Church has just as much
of a mission to convert Protestants as it has to convert the
heathen ? Can any one deny that a grave responsibility lies upon
us to labor for the conversion of both ? " Foreign Missions
to the Heathen " is a title of a long and glorious record of
supernatural success in which all possible sacrifice, even to mar-
tyrdom, has ever been looked upon by the devoted Catholic
missionary as a small price to pay for the privilege of winning
(mark the word) some of these abandoned souls to Christ. " Home
missions to Protestants " have been indeed undertaken with no less
marvellous success by single-handed giants like a St Francis of
Sales and a few others ; but do you know of any concerted
movement being set on foot in any part of the church, or by
special bands of missionaries mainly, if not solely, devoted to
such work ? There is surely no " lion in the way without "
whose roarings would appal the stoutest heart and discourage
the hopes of even the most sanguine of such heroes.

To speak of terrors to life or limb in the hearing of a Cath-
olic missionary would be only to add fuel to the flames of his
burning zeal. The trouble does not lie there. Let the church
but once extend its hand of blessing upon a work to be done
for the glory of God or for the salvation or comfort of mankind,
and more than enough will come offering all they have and all
they are with an eagerness which might mark a crowd of beggars
coming to receive royal dignities and wealth to be had for the
asking.

No ; there will come enough when the church calls ; but —
and here the present writer is forced to speak with a boldness
which he must fain take the risk of being received by some
of his readers as presumption, bordering very closely upon self-
conceit — I dare to say that until we take our popular dictionary
and change the definition of " Protestant, et id omne gemts" and
are willing to understand it to mean (at least for very many of
them) something quite different, if not in conspectu Domini some-
thing quite opposite, to what has hitherto been understood by it,
at once suggesting and inaugurating as a necessary consequence
quite an apostolic plan of missionary enterprise which takes the
good Shepherd to the very places where the lost sheep are to be
found, making it an enterprise for the rescue of friends and not
for the defeat of enemies, little or no hope can be held out of

1889.] A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. 357

ever reconciling Protestants in any great numbers. Instituting a
opular movement of return to unity with the church by all law-
1 methods offers, in the writer's humble judgment, the only pos-
ible assurance of achieving that happy result. We may go as
we are, armed with our old-fashioned reaping-hook, spying around
the borders of the Protestant harvest, and may glean a few
handfuls here and there ; but he who would cut a wide swath
a-field must go equipped with a sickle of a fashion to suit the
grain as it is and as it now stands, and not as controversial
painters have pictured it.

We must first of all not content ourselves with sitting down
and examining it as it is described in books, but kneel down
and scrutinize its actual condition as the eye of the Lord seeth
it. The harvest to be reaped is his, and he who goeth forth to
the work armed only for reaping cockle and briers will have
little else to show for his labors ; and to my thinking no one
will be more astonished than the reaper himself at the small
amount of the same he will have been able to gather for the
brush-heap. But the wheat, the good grain ? Why has he not
gathered that? For the very good reason that he never saw
any. Why was he blind to that ? Simply because he either
never went into it or near enough to it to see any, or he saw
nly with his own eyes, blurred with prejudice, and refused to
see with the eyes of the Lord, which regardeth with mercy
and charity, and, above all, with the clear vision of truth.

But we were talking about definitions. My learned friend,
ather Lambert, who wrote those two trenchant and unanswer-
able little books, Notes on Ingersoll and Tactics of Infidels, in
which he crushes all the swelling pretensions of that illogical
swaggerer and his bottle-holder, lawyer Lacey, of Philadelphia,
as one crushes an empty egg-shell in his grasp ; and who has
earned thereby the laurels of honor and tribute of gratitude not
only from us Catholics, but from thousands of just such Protes-
tants as I am endeavoring to introduce to my readers' acquain-
tance, attested by bushel-basketfuls of letters received by him
from their clergy and laity, not a few of whom expressed their
debt of eternal gratitude to him for having thus successfully
defended their faith in God, in Jesus Christ, and the Holy
Scriptures — in one of those books very pithily remarks : " The
demand for a definition, like a motion to adjourn, is always in
order."

KNow, it will not be very difficult in this case to arrive at
i true definition of those under consideration, viz. : Protestants

358 A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. [Dec.,

of every sect, who are in perfectly good faith, sincerely seeking
the truths of religion, and honestly striving, just as Catholics
do, to conform their lives to their belief. All we have to do
is to get at their true spiritual condition in the sight of God,
tested, of course, by the light of Catholic doctrine ; no matter
what they call themselves, nor what they are termed in the
eye of the law, nor what opinions about them are held by this
or that particular, and probably ignorant, adversary.

Those of our readers who have perused the controversy al-
ready alluded to, and the articles which so fairly and with pro-
found theological accuracy discussed the question in late issues of
this magazine, need no further arguments to show that all such
persons (the reader's attention is again called to the definition as
above, strictly taken) are fully able to make acts of divine faith,
hope, and charity ; some knowing more, some knowing less of
the whole body of truths contained in the Christian revelation as
taught and defined by the Catholic Church. Proofs which could
not be called in question, from the most learned theologians, were
quoted in the course of the controversy alluded to more than
enough to satisfy any one on this fundamental point. It was
clearly shown that many non-Catholics were quite indistinguish-
able (spiritually) from ourselves, so far as to deserve the name
of " true Catholics," being certainly implicitly, and therefore in
God's sight, actually and really so.

Now, their religion or religions, so called, are, as sects, here-
sies. No one may deny that nor wish to. But it does not by
any means follow that all persons brought up in these sects are
heretics, or that their personal religion is damnable or hateful
in the sight of God. Believing what they do on a divine mo-
tive, the veracity of God revealing it, and living up to their be-
lief in good faith as they do, it must be allowed that what
religion they have is Christian, and what acts of faith, hope,
and charity they make (for in those consist all divine religion)
are essentially acts of Catholic, Christian religion.

Being in error, and in our day so many of them being in
inculpable error, they continue in the practice of erroneous ex-
ternal ceremonials of religious worship. Erroneous, I say, but not
evil in themselves nor damnable in results, though depriving them
of the spiritual benefits of the divinely ordained practices and
ceremonies of the church. For example, they lack the priest-
hood and all it gives us, and therefore fail to make many special
acts of true religion, all dependent upon a living communion
with that priesthood, and which conduce so much to the perfec-

1889.] A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. 359

tion of the soul, and so powerfully aid us in the work of sal-
vation ; to say nothing of . the marvellous comfort which we
derive from them in all the struggles of our temporal life. But
there are numberless acts of divine religion not dependent upon
that relation. These acts many do make, and make from the
highest and purest motives. Suppose we were ourselves to be
cut off from the possibility of receiving any sacrament, what
would be our condition ? Simply that we would be deprived of
a certain means of the more easily attaining a definite end.
Sacraments are only means to an end. Sacramento, propter
unifies. But who does not see that we could still make acts of
faith, hope, and chanty, and enough of them, if we would, to
make ourselves saints ?

Not only, therefore, do I say that Protestants can, and many
lo, make such acts, but I go further. Those spiritual acts of
religion which are associated with a mistaken object — they hon-
>tly supposing it to be the true object of God's revealed will —
re not devoid of merit, even though they may fail of obtaining
irticular graces which God by his divine decree has made de-
>endent upon the actual use of divinely appointed ways and
leans. Take their so called "Holy Communion," for instance.
rho can doubt that they obtain much merit from all their devout
>rayers, and acts of spiritual communion made with Jesus Christ
the Son of God and Redeemer, made by them in that service,
erroneous in form and false in doctrine though it be ? That they
lo not get the inestimable sacramental grace obtained by a real
'ommunion with the true Eucharistic Body and Blood of Jesus
'hrist is undisputed. If they but knew ! Si scirent donum Dei !
,et the extraordinary faith in and burning love of the Blessed
icrament seen in so many of those who once knew not and now
:now answer, and prove the devout, the divine sincerity of their
icarts during the days of their Babylonish captivity of ignorance
md unwitting error.

Think a moment upon the religious acts which make up the
substance of their public and private devotions. They listen with
ie utmost reverence and respect to the reading of the Holy
>criptures (the question of differences between their and our
•ersion is nothing to the present point) ; they pray either liturgi-
dly or extempore, and every prayer is offered and ended as
'atholic prayers are — per Domimim nostrum Jesum Christum.

They sing psalms and hymns of praise, of devout medita-
tion upon the Passion and death of Christ, of penitence and
contrition for sin, of faith in Christ as the Saviour of the world,

360 A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. [Dec.,

of aspiration and longing for union with God in heaven. Is
there anything wrong, evil, hateful, damnable in all this ? On
the contrary, is it not all holy, edifying, instructive, sanctifying ?
In a word, are not all their services of public and private wor-
ship just so many occasions which, by their very nature and the
spirit in which they are conducted, conduce most powerfully to
inspire the worshipper to make numberless acts of divine faith,
hope, and charity ?

Eliminate the few actually false doctrines which are now
held more by force of tradition than from intellectual conviction ;
abolish their heretical ministry — heretical in the self-assumed right
of preaching and expounding the word of God — and it is not
saying more than can be substantiated that all the rest is at least
conformable to Catholic doctrine, if not with Catholic usage, and
its matter and form (saving what pertains to their sacraments), if
it were judged to be advisable by competent authority, could be
sanctioned by the church as fitting devotional worship for Catho-
lics true and blue. Some folks imagine that a Catholic pastor is
doing something questionable, and to which his bishop is obliged
to shut his eyes, if he conducts a service of public worship in
which he is not clothed with either a chasuble or a cope. Any
religious service other than Mass or Vespers, especially if it be
entirely in the vernacular, has to them an odor of heresy (for
which they appear to possess a keen scent), even when conducted
in a Catholic Church for Catholics only. Their definition of a
Catholic would probably be the one once given by a Protestant :
" A Catholic is one who worships God through a priest in sacred
vestments standing at an altar." To be consistent, they should
define a Protestant to be " one who cannot worship God at all,
because he never hears Mass or Vespers."

It is not because there is anything intrinsically wrong or un-
Catholic in the mere matter or form of Protestant religious servi-
ces, saving some heretical expressions said or sung, that prevents
us from attending or taking part in them. It is because they are
unauthorized by the only power which has the divine right to
sanction any such religious worship, and are conducted by men
who, if they were even saints in God's sight, have no divine ap-
pointment from Jesus Christ either directly or through his church
to preach the Gospel. But because for such good reasons asso-
ciation with their worship is properly forbidden to us, we must
bear in mind that they being in good faith and ignorance, such
worship is obligatory upon their consciences, full of good to
them, lifting up their hearts to God, inspiring them with divine

1889.] A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. 361

love, leading them to contrition for sin, and serving in many
ways to help them attain their salvation.

It is reported on good authority that the saintly Bishop of
Boston, afterwards the Cardinal Cheverus, read the whole Epis-
copalian service of " Morning Prayer " to one of their congrega-,
tions and preached to them, all to their great satisfaction and
edification. No doubt the occasion was a peculiar and excep-
tional one where he judged it could be done without scandalizing
Catholics or likely to be looked upon by the Protestant congre-
gation as sanctioning the lawful independence of their church. It
simply goes to show that my observation upon the nature of their
services in themselves is just. In point of fact, the Episcopalian
service is nothing but a medley of prayers and offices selected
from our own Catholic missal and breviary translated into
English.

The day is past for the repetition of such an example, but
not for preaching to Protestants anywhere, even in their own pul-
pits. Several of our bishops, among whom notably was Bishop
England, have preached to them in their churches, and more than
one bishop has told me that they would be only too happy (as
who would not be?) to accept such invitations, and would cordially
approve of their priests doing the same. I have myself received
two such invitations, which were extended to me by both ministers
and church officials, and on both occasions my acceptance was
heartily sanctioned by the. Catholic bishops of their respective towns.
If in the considerations already presented I apparently mag-
nify the virtues of Protestants, God forbid that I should min-
lize the danger, certainly to the salvation of some, which
lecessarily arise's from the comparative spiritual poverty of re-
mrces which marks Protestant religious life, to say nothing of
te strong temptation to spiritual pride, self-conceit, self-will, and
;lf-love which their system has an indisputable tendency to
lourish. God knows well this poverty and those temptations, the
id visitation upon them, unto the third and fourth generation,
>r the sins of their fathers of the so-called Reformation; but his
ice is given to all men, his divine, yearning mercy knows no
>ounds ; and who shall think to do him service by attempting to
bind his loving hands and say to him : " Touch them not ; they
accursed " ? Who shall have the temerity to imagine he can put
forth his hand and shut the ever-open door of the Sacred Heart
of the Redeemer, whose blood was not poured out for any of his
brethren in vain, and say to them: "Stop, you cannot enter
here " ? Rather do I hear that divine Voice, in tones of awful

362 A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. [Dec.,

warning to many of us half-hearted, unfilial, scandalous-living,
worldly-minded, sacrament-neglecting, and grace-despising Catho-
lics who bask in the very sunshine of the truth and grace of
God : " Woe to thee, Corozain, woe to thee, Bethsaida. For if
in Tyre and Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been
wrought in you, they would long ago have done penance in sack-
cloth and ashes."

If the dangers and temptations of their state be great, if they
be indeed alarming, where, then, is our own love of God and of our
neighbor as ourself, that we are not all on fire with zeal for the
divine honor and glory and for the spread of the kingdom of
Christ? Why are we not besieging heaven -with prayers for their
conversion, glad in heart to know that they are doing at least
what they can, and sincerely rejoiced to see them striving for
their salvation the best they know how ? Not envious of, nor
carping at, their virtues, which, despite their unhappy state of ig-
norance, they still possess in no small degree, but rather glorifying
God for all his gracious gifts. Why are we not seeking them in
love, doing everything possible to smooth the way to reconciliation,
making every possible concession which the ingenuity of a large-
hearted love might suggest as useful, instead of driving them away
from the blessed light and truth and beatitude of the church's
communion by denunciations and revilings of all they have and
hold as true and sacred ?

What fruit have we to show from our labors, or no labors,
.hitherto undertaken to bring them to unity? Here and there
converts come and are received, many and worthy ones, I allow,
but still it must be owned singular instances, their appearance at
our doors being often as astonishing to ourselves as if they had
suddenly sprung up out of the earth ; instances of conversion in-
dicating no general return, as a mass, of these thousands upon
thousands of our erring brethren in Christ and homeless children
of the church. Even these converts have not come from fear of
our threats, but in great part have been led by secret and, for all
that we have done, little-merited inspirations of the Holy Ghost.
Thus far we may be said to have gathered in only those full-
ripened ears — ripened in the Protestant field, by the way, and
there brought to perfection too by the vivifying influences of di-
vine grace — which happen to be found bending over the church's
enclosure. Let us comfort ourselves as we may upon the intel-
lectual triumph we have achieved all along the line over their il-
logical and morally weak systems ; one thing is plain : we have
failed to win them as a mass from their errors. And what is the

.] A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. 363

consequence ? Infidelity is sweeping them by thousands into its
whirlpool of intellectual shipwreck and moral death.

Now, I dare to call upon all of good will, and appeal to all
who love God and estee.n the inestimable privileges we enjoy, to
take up the sickle which the Divine Reaper has placed in our
hands, and following his example, and that of his big-hearted
Apostle St. Paul, who made himself all things to all men that he
might gain all, let us go out and harvest upon a wider field and
cut as wide a swath as God shall give us grace.

I have written it, and I repeat the words, if we could be
fearless enough to acknowledge that the common, actual faith of
Protestants zvho are in good faith is identical with ours in its
essential quality, and saving their great and pitiable ignorance, I
am convinced that it would open the way to the conversion of
many of them. It is because they have the very thing we deny
them to have that they are prevented from conversion, for it
leaves them under the impression that they must give up that
divine faith and take some other kind, one which seems to
them can be none other than a blind, unreasoning plunge into
intellectual darkness.

He who has strong faith can afford to be fearless in telling
the truth, the whole truth. He who cramps his faith with
hide-bound- externals and limits its spiritual range to ceremonial
observances makes the church a sect. He lends his influence to
the encroachments of that spirit of worldliness from which in past
times the church suffered so* much dishonor, and which provoked a
resistance ending in wide-spread heresy and schism ; a spirit which
sets a higher value upon the external clothing, comfort, and
human liberty of the body of the church than it does upon
the divine perfections, enlargement and liberty of the soul of it,
and which concerns itself more about the means of securing and
enhancing the former than it does with inspiring the Christ-like
sacrifices necessary to foster and realize the latter. Such a one
has no true idea of the all-comprehensive character of the Catholic
religion, so perfect in its universality that not one soul on the
face of the earth to-day but is able, hie et nunc, by fidelity to
grace to enter heaven by its door. The church is the spiritual
mother of all made alive in Christ, and therefore her maternity
is as universal as the grace of her divine spouse.

Am I asked if one may believe that Protestants as a body
love truth, reverence divine things, and generally esteem holiness
of living, and that a goodly number of them aspire to realize
it; that they suffer compunction for sin and pray for forgiveness?

364 A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. [Dec.,

Yes ; one may so believe and unhesitatingly assert it. One may
say of many of them that there is absolutely nothing but exter-
nal separation which distinguishes them from us in the sight ot
God; ''implicitly and before God," as a learned theologian
(Bonal) puts it, "they are truly Catholics." To the eye of the
body it cannot be denied that even the very best of them seem
to be anything but Catholics, so unlike us, indeed, that it is not
difficult to distinguish one, be he of any class or walk in life,
after a few minutes' conversation even on only temporal affairs.
Catholics live and breathe in an atmosphere of supernatural
light, and are warmed by the ardent rays of a supernatural love,
and nourished with a supernatural food, and all this so abun-
dantly as to give a certain singular tone to even their exterior
behavior and conversation, which is felt, but not easily described.
Who has not experienced the force of this instinct when ming-
ling respectively with Catholic and Protestant acquaintances ?
But despite all this difference, observed externally, and not, I al-
low, without some corresponding interior difference, at least in
degree if not in the nature of their spiritual life, they neverthe-
less enjoy divine light and love in a not unprofitable measure, not
as Protestants, if you will, but as what such as I am pleading
for are in God's sight, and often in the church's sight- as well —
Catholics in exile and bondage.

One may also say of many of them that they shirk the know-
ledge of the truth ; are mere worldlings who seek their own lusts ;
to whom the doctrine of Christ is a constant reproach ; who hate
the purity and self-sacrifice of Catholics ; who very seldom or
ever pray ; who because of their actual gross sins are not only
lost to the church but to God, and therefore are in all the
more desperate need of our pity, our prayers, and our greater
heroic sacrifices. To be in earnest and to labor, after the exam-
ple of the saints, for these lost souls will put our own divine
charity to a worthy test.

''They are none of ours." But who will deny that they all, good
and bad, true and false, lovely for their virtues or repulsive for their
sins, are of God's own creation and his Son's redemption ? What
would we more, if called even to die for them, that we should
refuse to offer gladly that which for the best of us were of little
worth to keep at the price of what God, by our rejection of so
divine and Christ-like a sacrifice, would lose ? And if with the
grace of God we would not shrink from doing all, far be it from
us to find excuses for not doing less. The law does not bind
us, I know, but "the charity of Christ constraineth us."

1889.] A PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN. 365

It must be evident to my readers that I look upon the spir-
itual state of Protestants generally as a peculiar one, almost en-
tirely out of reach of judgment upon technical points of law.
The problem of their reconciliation with the visible church (alas !
that it has to be called a problem at this late day) is to my
mind a practical rather than a theoretical one. To deal with
the question in this light presents, I think, the only possible
hope of solution, and is unquestionably in accordance with the
true spirit of the Church, whose spirit is the spirit of her divine
Founder. The mission of Jesus Christ to the world is a mission
of reconciliation of the erring and the lost. He is the Good
Shepherd of the lost sheep, who -not <3nly can afford to but does
leave the ninety-and-nine faithful in the fold to seek the one
sinful wanderer. He has always " other sheep, not of this fold,"
whom he said he must bring into the unity of One Fold under
One Shepherd, and does not the burden of its accomplishment
for Protestants lay upon our shoulders ?

We who shrink from defiling the hems of our garments with
the touch of " heretics and all unbelievers " would do well to
ponder upon St. Peter's vision and the answer he got when he
called what God offered him to eat " common and unclean,"
and to lay to heart his own interpretation of God's reply: "In
very deed I perceive that God is not a respecter of persons.
But in every nation he that feareth him and worketh justice
is acceptable to him."

The strong natural tendencies of the human mind and heart
to assume the reins of self-sovereignty and protest against divine
authority, to resist the infallibility of true order, to fret under
the necessary restraints of the true good, and despise the simple
chastity of the true beauty, are evident ever since the human
race had a history. Mankind tends to go astray — in a word,
to become protestant ; sometimes wickedly, oftener foolishly and
pitiably. He who created man " knows what is in man," and
he knows what is to be gotten out of man ; and what by suffer-
ing and error and even sin, following upon the exercise of his
free will, is to be ultimately the means of his greater happiness
and higher perfection in the divine life to which he is called
through Jesus Christ.

Protestants are legally heretics under condemnation for their
outward adhesion to religious bodies which unite under a stan-
dard of protest. That would seem to imply that they are all
conscious of being under protest against something or some one,
but I insist that practically all that is a myth, and gives little

366 A PLEA FOR ERRIXG BRETHREN. [Dec.,

or no foundation for judgment of sin on account of obstinate
resistance to known, rightful, divine authority. In approaching
them and laboring for their reconciliation, we must take them
as they are, not in the sight of human law, but as we are con-
vinced, from well-proven facts, that they are in the sight of
God, and deal with them accordingly.

What language would our Lord use to them and concerning
them if he were here to deal personally with them ? What
plan would St. Paul lay out to reach them ? What would he
" make himself to be," if he found himself here thrown into the
work of being, not an apostle to heathen Gentiles, but an apostle
to erring Christians ?

Between the church and many such Protestants whose religious
state I have described there is a barrier of separation which to
the carnal eye appears as an impenetrable wall of granite, but
by the spiritual eye is easily discerned as being little more than
a sheet of painted paper, and one which, when approached by
them sincerely seeking the truth, being led by the grace of God
and encouraged to come by our words of loving invitation and
instruction, proves to be no thicker or stronger than blotting-
paper, and to their great amazement yielding to the first touch
and passed as quickly, often without a scratch to show that the
transit has been at the cost of perceptible effort or conscious-
ness even of the existence of an obstacle overcome.

This is the case with numbers of intelligent, pious converts
who, now realizing the logical and moral conclusions which their
own faith arjjd principles necessarily implied, cannot understand
how they could have remained so long in Protestantism, saying,
and most truly : " I see now clearly that I never was anything
but a Catholic all my life."

That tells the story and confirms the whole argument of this
essay. This same state of many of his friends, still Protestant,
appears to his mind so self-evident that he is eager to tell them
of it, and is not a little disgusted and disheartened (forgetting his
own experience) to find that both his Protestant friends, and his
Catholic ones, too, believe most firmly in the reality and impene-
trability of the painted granite wall, for by Catholic law on the
one side, and Protestant law on the other, it must be granite,
"just as any man, too," they add, "with half an eye ought to
see." And so they both go on in the same old Judaizing spirit,
in spite of St. Paul's words, ringing trumpet-toned down through
eighteen centuries : " Whosoever are led by the spirit of God,
they are the sons of God." ALFRED YOUNG.

1889.] FREDERICKSBURG. 367

FREDERICKSBURG AND THE ASSAULT ON MARYE'S

HEIGHTS.

THE bombardment of Fredericksburg, December 11, 1862, the
laying of the pontoon bridges, and the entrance of the Union
army into that city, and the assault that followed, have often been
described from the point of view of newspaper correspondents,
commanding generals, and staff-officers. To obtain a broad view
of a subject, it is true, one must remain at some distance; but in
this way interesting details are apt to be overlooked. The writer,
as a line officer of one of the fighting brigades of the fighting
Second Corps, undertakes to describe only that which came with-
in his own narrow field of observation.

By the morning of December 12, 1862, all of the Second
Corps had crossed the pontoon bridges into Fredericksburg.
The .white inhabitants had fled, but the negroes thronged the
streets, nearly all of them busy moving all sorts of material, beds,
and articles of furniture, ornaments, clothing, trunks, provisions
of various sorts ; some of them were rolling barrels of flour in
front of them. The soldiers paid little heed to their doings,
except to chaff them. " Where is that ham going with you,
uncle ? " an old negro was asked. " I declah, cap'n " — this to
the private who had asked — " I done fine a little niggah stealin'
dat po'k, an' I reckon to tote it back w'ar he done fotch it fom."

In the olden time the capture of a stronghold* was usually
lowed by its sack. Indeed, it is not so many years since
the French and English looted Pekin. The right to plunder
the conquered was of old one of the least cruel of the rights
against which even the soundest public sentiment saw no reason
to protest. To a certain extent the United States still recognize
such a right, only that they limit its exercise to the sea. Yet
prize-money for captured ships is as much the plunder of the
conquered as would be the sack of a captured city. Was Fre-
dericksburg sacked ? It was ; but the plunder was not carried
away. The men of thievish propensities who rifled the houses
of that city were but few in proportion to the great masses of
troops that filled the streets and slept in the houses during four
days. When the retreat from the city finally took place the
provost-guard seized most of the booty from the plunderers and
left it piled up to be reclaimed by the citizens on their return.
The only plunder that was indulged in by all was that of the

VOL. L. -24

368 FREDERICKSBURG AND THE [Dec.,

tobacco factories, and not even the severest martinet could with
any justice complain of this against soldiers who had for weeks
been nearly destitute of the comforting weed. The Army of the
Potomac as it was at that time, in its palmy days, before it had
been recruited with substitutes and bounty-men, was not fond of
plundering, and from the point of view of humanity no less than
discipline can fairly be said to have reflected credit on the cause
it had been enlisted to defend in spite of the momentary forget-
fulness of a comparatively few.

The night of December 12 was, however, a night of revel-
ry in Fredericksburg. Probably few small cities of the United
States have been better stocked with every variety of intoxicating
drinks — wines of all sorts, ales and porters in bottles, gin and
rum, and, above all, whiskey in abundance. Many of the pri-
vate houses seemed to have enough in their cellars to fuddle the
strong heads of the entire companies that occupied them. It
was not until near midnight that the men fell asleep. The par-
lors and bed-rooms of all the houses, the passages, the stair-
ways, every space on the floors, were full of sleeping soldiers.
Along the sidewalks other thousands slept on mattresses that
they had brought out of the houses, or in their own blankets.
By one o'clock on the morning of the I3th, when the writer,
being on duty as an officer of the guard, stood in the middle
of King Street, there was scarcely a sound to be heard except
the snoring of the tired troops whose dark forms lay in rows
on either hand. The Confederate artillery on Marye's Heights
had thrown a.n occasional shell into the town during the day,
sending bricks and coping-stones flying about and shattering
window-glass by their explosion ; but partly, no doubt, from an
unwillingness to injure the place, and partly in order to save
their ammunition for more important uses, the Confederate fire
had slackened in the afternoon and had ceased at dark.

At daylight of Saturday, the I3th, the streets re-echoed the
bugle calls for reveille, a hasty breakfast was cooked on the
, sidewalks and gulped down, and by six o'clock the ranks were
formed and the horses were hitched in the batteries. The
weather was extremely mild ; it was towards the end of that
balmy season called the Indian Summer. The gray frost that
had lain upon everything disappeared, and a thick fog filled
the air. The lofty Marye's Heights, fortified by Confederate
field-works, and surrounding the city on the south at a dis-
tance of about three-quarters of a mile, were entirely invisible
through the fog. Standing in front of the Presbyterian church,
one could barely discern the base of its tall spire, which had

1889.] A SSA UL T ON MA RYE'S HEIGHTS. 3 69

been a chosen mark for some of the Union batteries during the
bombardment two days before.

What was the feeling of the Army of the Potomac while
preparing for the memorable assault ? The Army of the Poto-
mac was a representative American army, well disciplined, but
fond of understanding what it was about. It was a body of
highly intelligent men ; many of them always carried a pocket-
map of Virginia, and nearly all were accustomed to study their
own movements and the reported movements of the other armies
with an almost scientific interest. Among the privates of every
company there was always at least one amateur strategist, who, on
account of his searching analyses and criticisms of the military
operations, was nicknamed " the General," " the Engineer," or
the like. For several weeks this army had been in winter-
quarters across the river, not more than two or three miles from
Fredericksburg, and twice or thrice a week during that time
thousands of these men had taken their turns at picket along the
river bank, where they had a close and unobstructed view of
Fredericksburg and the surrounding country. From day to day
they had observed Marye's Heights and had carefully scanned its
lines of earthworks with the naked eye and with the field-glass.
By means of generally recognized military principles and of an
experience gained in former campaigns they had been enabled to
form a just opinion of the possibilities and probabilities involved
in the situation. The universal opinion thus maturely and
leisurely formed was, that Marye's Heights could not be carried
by a direct assault. There was also a species of argumentum ad
hominem. Looking at the Confederate position' they reasoned
thus : " Give us such a position, and the whole Southern Con-
federacy could not take it from us by a direct assault.
But the Confederates are excellent soldiers, as we know from a
long acquaintance with them. Therefore, they cannot be driven
from the position." Some one may think that the prevalence of
such an opinion would of itself have rendered success impossible.
With new or inferior troops that is likely. But Fredericksburg
was precisely one of those battles which proved the magnificent
character of the Army of the Potomac ; for, although knowing the
futility of the assault, never, it is confessed by witnesses, Con-
federates and Federals alike, did soldiers march into the face of
defeat and death with greater steadiness and with firmer deter-
mination to go as far as men could go than was shown by the
Army of the Potomac hour after hour that day, until night and
darkness closed in and stopped the slaughter.

Late in the forenoon the sunlight broke through the fog,

3/0 FREDERICK S&URG AND THE [Dec.,

then the/og lifted, an 1 there again lay open to the view the plain
dotted with .old-fashioned homesteads, off to the right front a
white block of marble marking Martha Washington's tomb, and,
beyond, the heights where the Confederate army was quietly and
grimly waiting for events. The battle opened two miles below,
where Franklin with the left wing was advancing to carry out
a part of the plan, and now we who form the right wing, un-
der Sumner, are to move. Kimball's Brigade — afterwards Car-
roll's—of French's Division of the Second Corps was to open
the attack of the right. It had been a chief brigade of Shields'
Division in the Shenandoah Valley, and in all its many cam-
paigns had been particularly remarked for its dash, endurance,
and intelligence on the skirmish line. Hence the choice of it
for this serious work. The four regiments, each in a column
by itself, moved out along four parallel streets, under orders
to deploy in one continuous skirmish line as soon as they should
have got beyond the houses of the city. But before the de-
ployment had begun, just as the heads of the parallel columns
had reached the .edge of the city, little puffs of smoke rose
from the ground at the foot of the decline down which we
were descending to the plain. It was Barksdale's Mississippi
Brigade, which had held the town when the pontoon bridge
was laid, and which, on being driven from the streets, had halted
and remained just outside in a skirmish line. As their bullets
sang through our columns our bugles sounded the " Forward ! "
and onward we went headlong down the hill at the double-quick,
the brigade so promptly and skilfully obeying the next bugle-
call, " Deploy as skirmishers ! " that by the time we had passed
all the city houses and their garden-fences we extended in a sin-
gle rank, with intervals between the men, across the two roads
that led south from the city, and far out on either hand, the colors
of the four regiments pointed towards Marye's Heights and wav-
ing in gallant style.

Barksdale's line gave way slowly, and now we scrambled on
over fences and through ditches, and as, with considerable diffi-
culty and some tactical movements unnecessary to detail, we
made our way across a canal and ascended a slight rise of
ground, we could see through the embrasures of the Confederate
earthworks on Marye's Heights the cannoneers standing to their
guns. The next second those works from one end to the other
sent forth puffs of smoke, and a line of shells was bursting above
our heads. Again our bugles rang out : " Charge bayonets ! "
" Forward ! " " Double-quick ! " Click, click, the bayonets were
fixed, and the skirmishers of French's Division sent up a cheer

1889.] ASSAULT ON MARYE s HEIGHTS. 371

that, it was afterwards said, was heard a mile beyond Marye's
Heights. Barksdale's skirmishers fell back and we saw no more of
them so far as we knew. Our dead and wounded were already
considerable in number, but our advance continued until we reached
the point where the " Telegraph " road forked, the right prong
going to Orange Court-House, the left to Richmond. Here
was a cluster of houses ; the triangular space between the two
roads was occupied by a little brick grocery-store ; on the left
of the forks was a stone blacksmith's shop, with open ground
beyond in that direction ; on the right almost a village of frame
dwelling-houses. Across this fork our skirmish line halted, and fur-
ther than this no Union line passed that day but one, and that
one was the Irish Brigade.

We looked back towards the city across the plain over
which we had advanced ; there were no troops of ours in sight,
but from a knoll here and there at the edge of the city bat-
teries were firing over our heads at the Confederate works on
the heights in front of us. Our brigade seemed for the moment
to be without support. The grocery-store was a triangular
building, with the sharp angle at our side cut off, and in that
narrow face was a heavy door that was shut. A few blows
from musket-butts opened it, however, and our wounded were
carried in and laid wherever . there was room, on the floor be-
tween the boxes and barrels, and on the long counter. The
groans of pain, the lamentations and the prayers to Heaven of
the wounded and dying that came to the .ears of us who were

mtside were pitiful. " Lord Jesus, have mercy ! " " Oh, mother,

lother ! " the writer heard repeated over and over in plain-
tive wails, and, amid all, more subdued murmurings of prayer,

ind, sad truth ! oaths and curses from men whose anguish of
lin was greater than their patience could bear.
The atmosphere is now clear and the sky bright. We are

iring from every angle and window and fence-corner at the can-

loneers up on the hill in front of us. Near the foot of the hill,
id scarcely a stone's throw, as it seems to us, is a common

tone wall, and occasional puffs of smoke show that a Confederate
line is behind it. All of a sudden every gun of the Confederate

>atteries opens once more, and the air above our heads is cut by
the hissing flight of their shot and shell. From every street of
Fredericksburg a column of blue is descending to the plain, and
there a beautiful line is forming, the stars and stripes fluttering
gayly at intervals above it. The sixty Confederate cannon salute
it with accurate effect, but the blue line cheers, and forward it
comes with steady tread. From our advanced and isolated posi-

372 FREDERICKSBURG AND THE [Dec.,.

tion we can, from time to time, when the smoke clears away for
a few moments, see the faces both of the Union line and the Con-
federate cannoneers from the moment the line emerges from the
city until, essaying a charge, it moves gallantly on under the
galling and deadly fire and reaches our ground, or ground in ex-
tension of ours, and then halts, incapable of doing more. Many
striking incidents we witnessed. One will illustrate the splendid
spirit and discipline of the Army of the Potomac in battle. A
New York regiment, through some mistake or stupidity, was
brought up the Telegraph road in column of fours, and was
halted in that formation between the grocery-store and the frame
dwelling-houses. For this reason the Confederate bullets were
raking it from front to rear through its whole length, yet every
man of it who was not shot stood erect ; nor did a head stoop
unless hit when the Confederate battery just in front of us, seeing
the advantage, sent solid shot into the column. It seemed fully
five minutes before some one having authority changed the for-
mation and thus saved the regiment from being annihilated. A
hen and her brood waddled and strutted across the Richmond
road, and as the bullets whizzed past the mother-fowl snapped
actively about in the air, probably supposing that the flying mis-
siles were insects worth catching for the little ones. A horse,
with empty but blood-stained saddle, galloped down from the
Confederate lines, and, as he reached us, tumbled in the dust,
dead, alongside of a dead Union soldier from whose waist-belt
hung a gaudy dress-pattern of plaid silk, plundered in the town.

Line after line moved out from Fredericksburg in fine array,
and the plain was already thickly strewn with the Union
wounded and dead in blue overcoats. Hours had passed, and still
the right wing of the army was coming forward in successive
lines to lay its useless offering upon that holocaust. Nearly one-
half of the Second Corps who had so far become engaged were
wounded or dead, and that continued to be about the average
proportion to the end. A corporal of the writer's company was
the sole survivor of eleven who had crawled out past the grocery-
store to a fence-corner beyond to sharp-shoot the Confederate can-
noneers. When we looked back we could see the smoke-clouds
of the artillery at the edge of the city, and, still further back,
that of the heavy guns which were ranged along the Stafford
Heights north of the river, all of whose projectiles were coursing
through the air over our heads, while far up above the Stafford
Heights was Prof. Lowe's captive balloon, Confederate shells burst-
ing dangerously near it.

The thills reverberated the thunder of cannon and Marye's

1889.] ASSAULT ON MARYE' s HEIGHTS. 373

Heights were almost hid in smoke, which was pierced by the glare
of Confederate cannon and of bursting Federal shells, and by the
long flashes of infantry fire that marked the direction of the Con-
federate lines.

The afternoon was well on when other columns issued from
the city streets and deployed in line of battle, two stands of
colors to each regiment, the one the beautiful stars and stripes,
the other the banner of everlasting green. It was the Irish Bri-
gade, and every officer and man bore a sprig of green box in
his cap. Were they successful ? Only in leaving their dead
closest of all to the Confederate lines. They passed the high-
water mark which Kimball's skirmishers had set at noon, and
which no other brigade than the Irish Brigade had passed or
was to pass that day. Onward they swept, the four regiments in
a single line of battle. By the time they had reached the level
tract of ground just to the left of the clump of houses at the
forks of the road from which we were observing them, they
seemed to have attracted most of the fire of the Confederate bat-
teries. But though the shells were bursting above their heads in
almost as good an alignment as their own, and the canister was
rattling into their ranks, no sign of wavering could be perceived
in their splendid advance.

Could it be possible, we thought, that they would succeed ?
For a moment it seemed as if they could not be resisted. Cer-
tainly, if any men that bloody day gave hope that Burnside's
movement was not after all a very badly advised one, these men,
with the flag of the Union supported by the symbolic green of
ever-hopeful Erin, were foremost among them.

We had plenty, however, to occupy us in our own front.
With every advance and by whatever command, we at the clump
of houses had made efforts at support and co-operation; conse-
quently, we came in at these times for a heavy fire of the Con-
federate infantry, intended to check any possible advance on our
own part. Shortly afterwards the writer looked off to the left
and front, and there, within not more, as it appeared, than thirty
or forty yards, lay a line of men in blue overcoats. Was it the
Irish Brigade ? No ; it was the Irish dead. Their brigade had been .
withdrawn at last by whatever officer was then in command of it.

I Dusk came on, and the right wing retired from the field
into the city. The hopeless struggle was then continued by the
:entre, under Hooker, until night put an end to the . Battle of
Fredericksburg, leaving the Confederate, army victorious without
serious loss and the Army of the Potomac vanquished without
disgrace. THOMAS F. GALWEY.

374 THE EGYPTIAN WRITINGS. [Dec.,

THE EGYPTIAN WRITINGS.

THE discovery of the key to the ancient hieroglyphic writ-
ings of Egypt is ranked among the greatest scientific achieve-
ments of the century. Not until a little more than sixty years
ago, after three hundred years of indefatigable seeking on the
part of the leading scholarship of Europe, was the key to the
mysterious alphabet found, and the literature of an extinct civil-
ization, antedating the Mosaic records by centuries, opened for
our reading. We have no reason to believe that the Greeks or
the Romans ever attempted to decipher the ancient inscriptions.
If their authors wrote about them at all, it was as if dealing
with mysteries whose explanation had been irrecoverably lost. We
first hear of their study in Horapollo, an Egyptian scribe who
lived in the beginning of the fifth century of the Christian era.
He gathered up the traditions about them and such interpreta-
tions of their meaning as he could find. A translation of Hor-
apollo into Greek, made a century or two after, when every ves-
tige of certain knowledge was lost, is " the only ancient volume
entirely devoted to the task of unravelling the mystery in which
Egyptian learning has been involved ; and, ... in many instances,
unquestionably contains the correct interpretation."

In the sixteenth century of the Christian era the work of
deciphering the Egyptian writings was fairly begun, a work that
the early church in Egypt might have prosecuted with far less
difficulty ; but primitive Christianity, it is possible, looked upon
the ancient inscriptions as relics of an idolatrous past which
it were better to wipe out for ever. The idol-hating monks of
St. Anthony did their best at mutilating the long lines of pic-
tured story remaining on the temple walls. And considering what
Egypt's invaders had done, from Shepherd King to Persian, and
what Turk and scientist and tourist have done in our day, the
wonder is that anything is left on the soil of Egypt in the way
of antiquities. It is but recently that a check was placed upon
the wholesale pillage of Egyptian remains. The Egyptian gov-
ernment at last has taken steps to preserve what is left of its
monuments, and a law has lately gone into effect obliging visi-
tors to the temples and tombs to carry a ticket costing five dol-
lars. Every lover of art and history will be glad to hear that
the sum realized from this tax — some ten thousand dollars yearly,

1889.] THE EGYPTIAN WRITINGS. 375

it is anticipated — will be expended in protecting what has been
unprotected for ages. The tourist and his Arab accessory will
need close watching all the same. The typical tourist thinks
little of destroying a whole tablet if so he can get possession of
a single perfect hieroglyph. Lepsius enriched German museums
by chiselling out royal cartouches ; and so the Egyptian peasant
chips off a bit of sculpture for the farthing the tourist will give
for it. Within the last year or two English travellers have been
found chopping away at the obelisk of On with an axe. The
obelisk of On is the most venerable obelisk on the face of the
earth, and has been called the " tombstone of the ages." It
was one hundred years old at least when Abram was born. The
maiden Asenath, no doubt, looked up at its hieroglyphics on the
day she became the bride of Joseph the Hebrew.

The search for the key to the ancient writings at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century had resulted in little but contro-
versy and theories. The old inscriptions were as meaningless as
ever, and the hope of reading them was on the wane. The key
to their mystery had disappeared with the Egyptian priesthood.
That priesthood, with its mystic key to the mysteries, had first
been suppressed, then annihilated, by Christianity. Constantine
and Theodosius had Been mighty instruments in overthrowing
Egyptian paganism, and the last roots had been exterminated
in the sixth century. " Where the resurrected Osiris had been
worshipped the resurrected Christ was adored with the simple
rites of the early Coptic Church." As early as A.D. 200 the
icient system of writing had been laid aside in Egypt by the ,
lurch because of its connection with idolatry. Translations of
the Old and the New Testament, and of other religious books,
lad been given to the people in Coptic, and in those translations
ic Coptic tongue, long a dead language, had been preserved — a
ict that had much to do in discovering the lost key to the
mcient writings. According to Herodotus, who wrote B.C. 447,
all educated persons in Egypt understood or could read the hiero-
glyphics. The hieroglyphics were classified at that time under
three heads: 1st. The Most Ancient; 2d. The Hieratic; 3d. The
Demotic.

Each was written from right to left. The difference as well
as the similarity of the writing is to be found described in He-
rodotus. The Ancient hieroglyphic was the sacred writing of the
priesthood. It is the most ancient writing, and is found upon the
oldest monuments. The Hieratic is a debasement of the ancient
hieroglyphic. It came in about B.C. 3000, with the Ninth Dynasty.

376 THE EGYPTIAN WRITINGS. [Dec.,

It fell into disuse when the Demotic was introduced. The De-
motic was the ordinary script of the people, a debasemeut of the
Hieratic. It is rare upon the monuments, as it was in no way
suited for cutting upon stone. It came in about the seventh
century before Christ. It was the writing of the court. Public
annals, deeds, and documents were written in Demotic, which in
time gave way to Coptic Greek.

Coptic Greek gave an important clue to the mystery of the
ancient writings. The Copts were the lineal descendants of the
true Egyptian stock. The Copt of to-day speaks a form of the
common language of modern Egypt, an Egyptian dialect of Ara-
bic. His native tongue fell into disuse more than a century ago,
but is well known to science. The Copts exchanged the worship
of the gods for Christianity before the third century. From the
time of the Ptolemies, some B.C. 300, the Coptic tongue had been
mixed with the Greek ; its roots are identical with those of the
language written in the sacred characters upon the walls and the
papyri of ancient Egypt.

The key to the Ancient writings was lost through the estab-
lishment of Christianity in Egypt and the conversion of the Copts.
In the relation between the Coptic tongue of the early Christian
priesthood and the ancient hieroglyphics it was preserved, a
significant fact to be borne in mind in the study of this subject.
Coptic and the Egyptian of the Pharaohs are no more unlike
than Latin and Modern Italian.

The early seekers for the lost key were speedily convinced
that nothing could be gained without a sound basis for investi-
gation. Of guess-work there was no lack. Three hundred years
and more of theorizing brought forth enormous folios, volumes
of mystical rubbish, and vaporings of theorizers. One savant
would assert he had found proofs of the truths of Christianity
where another would show an exposition of astrology ; one
seeker would read a description of the mariner's compass and the
magnet where another found the Lost Word. A famous theory
was that of the Chevalier Pulius, according to which it was only
necessary to translate the Psalms of David into Chinese, and to
write the translation in the ancient Egyptian characters, to trans-
late certain rolls of papyri which he declared to be books of the
Jewish Scriptures. Everything relating to the subject had seem-
ingly been brought to bear upon its solution, and not a single
satisfactory clue had been reached, when the discovery of the
Rosetta Stone (1799) gave something like a promise of ultimate
success.

1889.] THE EGYPTIAN WRITINGS. 377-

More than one hundred men of letters had been invited by
Napoleon Bonaparte to accompany the French army to Egypt
(1798). Napoleon had another ambition than the establishing of
a French colony in the valley of the Nile, and every advantage
for study and research was extended to the members of the sci-
entific corps of the French army. He was thoroughly interested
in their discoveries of antiquities, their copies and casts. The
writings were undecipherable to them, nor did they make special:
effort to read them. They classified the monuments, however,
ranking the most ancient among the most modern, as other
Egyptologists had done before them. One day, when a squad of
soldiers were repairing the earthworks of Fort Saint Julien, a little
to the north of the village of Rosetta, some fourteen miles from
Alexandria, they brought to light an old tablet, which but for the
vigilant oversight of the scientific corps might have remained un-
noticed. Fort Saint Julien was built upon the site of an ancient
temple, where four monuments of Rameses II. had once stood.
The tablet was covered with inscriptions. It was of black granite,
much mutilated, about three feet in height and two in breadth.
Large pieces had been broken from the top and the bottom. Its
inscriptions were in the three kinds of writing: Hieratic, 14 lines;
Demotic, 32 lines; Greek, 52 lines. The scientific corps realized
its value at once. If the Greek inscription should prove to be
a literal translation of the one in the ancient hieroglyphics, the
long-sought basis for deciphering the writings had at last been
found.

Three indispensable prerequisites for the tstudy had been lack-
ig : First t a certain knowledge of the language of the inscrip-
ions ; second, a number of inscriptions or fac-similes with the
ime meaning for comparison ; third, an authentic translation of
ancient inscription into some known language.
At the time of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, Quatre-
lere had published his work, Sur la langue et littcrature de
I' Egypte, in which he proved, to the satisfaction of some at least,
lat the language of the ancient writings was Coptic.* So much
for the first prerequisite. The second was being supplied by the
:ientific corps of the expedition. The third — possibly the old
iblet would furnish the third. With the surrender of Alexandria
le stone fell into the possession of the English, and George the
lird finally had the honor of presenting it to the British Mu-

*In 1636 Father Kircher, in his study of hieroglyphics, called attention to the Coptic tongue,
[chad many successors, adopters of his views. Clues for the final victory, which is awarded
Champollion, were furnished by many, among whom is Zoega (1797), who took the ground
it the ancient characters were a real written language, representing sounds and letters.

3/8 THE EGYPTIAN WRITINGS. [Dec.,

seum, where it may be seen to-day, the priceless treasure of the
Egyptian gallery. Fac-similes of the stone were at once circu-
lated among the seekers for the key. Reading the Greek inscrip-
tion was comparatively easy, and that conveyed the information
that it was a translation of the other two inscriptions, one of
which was in hieratic, the other in demotic, writing. Perhaps for
the general reader no better account of the study of the stone
can be found than is given in Egypt and its Monuments, by Dr.
Hawks. Person, of England, according to Dr. Hawks, and Heyne,
of Germany, together with members of the French Institute,
applied themselves to a correct reading of the Greek text. De
Sacy and Akerbad devoted themselves to the demotic ; Cham-
pollion and Dr. Young were the pioneers in the field of the hie-
ratic interpretation, and their advance was long retarded owing
to their holding to false notions, particularly that the hieroglyphic
characters were purely symbolic. Fierce has been the controversy
over who may rightfully be called the discoverer of the long-lost,
long-sought-for key. Says Dr. Hawks :

" It would be most unjust to undervalue the services of Dr. Young. If he
did not discover the whole art of deciphering the mysterious characters, let it be
remembered that the merit of complete discovery belongs to no one individual,
. . . and that up to the time of Dr. Young ... no one had accomplished
so much as he. . . . But he never contemplated the possibility of an entire
phonetic alphabet as existing in the hieroglyphics. The honor of discovering
that alphabet belongs to Jean Francois Champollion, . . . discoverer, master,
guide in the intricate mysteries of hieroglyphic interpretation."

Long before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone Egyptologists
had accepted the hypothesis that a certain sign, very common on
all the monuments, /( ) stood for the name of a

king. Dr. Young called Champollion's attention to the conjecture
and the recurrence of the sign on the Rosetta Stone.* Now, in
the Greek text of the Rosetta Stone the name most frequently
repeated was Ptolemais (Ptolemy). In the ancient text the car-
touche most frequently repeated was one believed to stand for
Ptolemais.

The characters in the cartouche of the ancient text corre-
sponding to the name of Ptolemais in the Greek were compared
with those of another believed to stand for Cleopatra. The first
character of the Ptolemais cartouche would, of course, stand for P,
and the fifth in Cleopatra would stand for P. The signs were the

* It was afterwards established that the sign denotes that the name enclosed by it is of the
race of Menes, the first king of Egypt. Menes means maker of cattle-pens, or hurdle-pens.
Champollion named the sign cartouche from, its resemblance to a cartridge.

1889.] THE EGYPTIAN WRITINGS. 379

-same, a square. The third character in Ptolemais would be O,
as the fourth in Cleopatra would be O. The signs were the
same, a knotted cord. The fourth character in Ptolemais would
stand for L, as would the second in Cleopatra. The signs were
found to be identical, a lion. Letter by letter, sign by sign,
Champollion went on studying the cartouches and comparing them
with the Greek text, and he soon had the beginnings of an al-
phabet by which, in time, he could read the names not only of
the Pharaohs, but the Persian, Greek, and Roman sovereigns of
the country. In his letter to M. Dacier, published September,
1822, the complete key to the decipherment of the ancient writ-
ings of Egypt was given to the world. In 1824 he published
his magnificent Precis du Systeme Hieroglyphique, which was
soon followed by his hieroglyphical dictionary and Egyptian
grammar. Admitting that he unjustly withheld due credit to Dr.
Young, it must be allowed by every student of the subject (and
there are volumes upon it) that but for the exceptional industry
of Champollion, his unflagging persistence in following up the
many clues to the mystery — disappointment and failure but hav-
ing the effect of spurring him on — the great victory had been
greatly postponed if ever gained at all. When but a young man
he began the study of Egyptology, mastering the Coptic language,
and projecting a Coptic dictionary before he was twenty-five.
He died at the age of forty-four, his name written for all time
upon the ancient monuments of Egypt.

The science of hieroglyphics may not be briefly explained,
certainly not by a tyro. Those interested in the subject will find

exhaustively treated in Osburn's Monumental History, the
forks of Bunsen, Wilson, Rawlinson, etc., etc. Characters once
ipposed to represent only ideas Champollion proved to express
leas and sounds. Hieroglyphics were classified as picture, syl-
)ic, and alphabetical. About eight hundred signs were dis-
>vered, and the distinction indicated between writings and sym-
>lical representations.

Ancient Egyptian is now read as easily as ancient Greek, and
le cartouches of the Pharaohs are as familiar as the autographs

George Washington.

And what was written upon the Rosetta Stone ? One hun-
dred and ninety-six years before Christ it was decreed by the
priesthood of Egypt that the Ptolemy who was then upon the
throne, Ptolemy Epiphanes, should be elevated to a place among
the immortal gods. He was but a lad of fourteen, and a fair
specimen of his disreputable race, but he was to be deified all

380 THE EGYPTIAN WRITINGS. [Dec.,

the same, and that in his life-time, something a king of Egypt
had not enjoyed since Rameses II. was proclaimed "The Ever
Living," "a god born of a god," and all the rest. The decree
ordered that an inscription to the honor of this Ptolemy Epipha-
nes should be written in the Ancient, the Demotic, and the Greek
characters, and set up in all the leading temples of the land.
Another copy of it was found, not long after the discovery of
the Rosetta Stone, being a tablet upon which the Greek text was
lacking, .but evidently a space had been left for it. This tablet
supplied words and characters missing from the Rosetta Stone.

Unswathed at last from its cerements, the long entombed lan-
guage has found resurrection, and is one of the living forces of
modern civilization. "The study of the monuments of Egypt,"
says Dr. Osgood in the preface to his recent translation into
English of the French translation of the Papyrus Prisse, the oldest
book in the world, "is now an indispensable requisite to those
who would instruct others about the development of religious
thought and morality among men. . . . The views of Ptah-hotep "
(contained in the Papyrus Prisse) "set before us a far purer sys-
tem of religious belief and a nobler conception of the Supreme
Being than heathen Greece and Rome, many centuries later, ever
possessed, . . . and much nearer to the teachings of the Bible
as to God and morality." The Papyrus Prisse was discovered
some forty-five years ago in the Necropolis of Thebes. It is be-
lieved to have been written many centuries before the epoch of
the Exodus, and it gives us an idea of what society, ethics, and
religion were in Egypt more than three thousand years before
Christ. It contains the maxims of Ptah-hotep, and dates from
the Fourth Dynasty. Under the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties there
was in Egypt a powerful and elaborately organized monarchy, en-
joying a material civilization not inferior in many respects to that
of Europe in the last century. Ptah-hotep had arrived at the age
of one hundred and ten when, in obedience to the commands of
Osiris, he wrote the maxims containing the wisdom of the Ancients
as it had come down to his time, that wisdom which they had
learned from the gods, and which it was well for modern Egypt
some five thousand years ago to heed and understand. • Let us
read from this most venerable treasury of wisdom, and see if
there is anything new under the sun :

" He who is master of his own spirit is superior to him whom
God hath loaded with gifts."

" May the love that thou dost feel pass into the hearts of them
that love thee."

1889.] • THE EGYPTIAN WRITINGS. 381

" If thou art great after having been low, do not harden thy
heart on account t of thy elevation; thou hast become only the
steward of the goods belonging to God. Do not put behind
thee the neighbor who is thine equal ; be to him as a com-
panion."

" If thou art a wise man sitting in the council, set thy thoughts
towards that which is wise. Keep silence rather than pour out
thy words. When thou speakest know that objections will be
made to thee. To speak hi council is an art, and speech is
criticised more than all other work ; it is contradiction which
puts it to the proof."

" Love for the work they do brings men nearer to God."

Long before the Prophets of Israel declared that Egypt
should be a desolation, the Prophets of Egypt had written in
the Book of the Dead :

" O Egypt, Egypt ! a time shall come when, in place of a
pure religion, thou wilt possess naught but ridiculous fables, in-
credible to posterity ; and nothing will remain of them but
words engraven on stones, the only monuments that will attest
thy piety."

"The Rosetta Stone," says Bunsen, "made monuments and
accords accessible to investigation ; it gave the clue to the mys-
teries of the Egyptian language and writings, and enabled science
to penetrate the darkness of thousands of years. ... It has
opened the primeval secrets of the human race."

But for the discoveries made through the Rosetta Stone, our
knowledge of Ancient Egypt would not greatly exceed that of
Kingsley's boy-monk Phillammon in Hypatia, as he stood awe-
truck and questioning before the long lines of pictured story
n the walls of a sand-buried temple, wondering what the strange
writings were about. Marvellous has been the light let in upon
the world's ignorance of pre-historic times through the decipher-
ing of the ancient Egyptian writings. The Mosaic record has
been illuminated and confirmed. We have been made far better
acquainted with the court of the Pharaohs than we can ever
be with that of the Plantagenets. The portfolios of the copies
of the ancient inscriptions and rolls of papyri would fill a build-
ing nearly as large as the British Museum.

The Sphinx has spoken at last; it has a secret no longer.

JANE MARSH PARKER.

Rochester, N. Y.

382 THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. [Dec.,

THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK.*

FORTY years ago the region bounded by Houston and Mul-
berry Streets presented a very different appearance from what
it does to-day. Now that the time-honored old convent has
become only a sacred memory, it is almost impossible to realize
what it was in 1848, when the Sisters of Mercy first took
possession, having removed from their temporary home in West
Washington Place, where from the time of their arrival in New
York they had tasted to the full the anxieties and privations
attendant on the beginning of a new foundation in a strange land.
That their poverty often led to actual privation is shown by
a fragment of verse, in which a pressing necessity is comically
set forth :

"Of sisters we've seven, of chairs we have six,
So one's always left in a very odd fix."

The chief desire of the sisters was to establish a House of
Mercy, principally for the reception and protection of the immi-
grant Irish girls who, in consequence of the disastrous faminS
years, were at this period drifting in crowds to the great
metropolis, and being totally unprovided for, were exposed to the
worst dangers. The convent in West Washington Place barely
sufficed for the needs of the sisters, and it was with great delight
that they took possession of the large double house at the corner
of Houston and Mulberry Streets, which was to be for well-nigh
forty years (1848-1885) the scene of their zealous labors. It
may be of interest here to remark that this building had quite
a little history attached to it prior to its coming into the hands
of the sisters. It was erected many years before by the well-
known Madame Chegary, who here conducted the most bril-
liantly fashionable academy for young ladies then existing in this
country. From her it passed into the hands of the Ladies of the
Sacred . Heart, by whom it was also used for educational pur-
poses. When these religious moved to a more secluded retreat at
Astoria, Long Island, some years previous to their settlement at
Manhattanville, the property was purchased by a Mr. Abbott, and
received the name of "Young Ladies' Seminary." When, many
years after, the sisters decided to move further up-town the chcr-

* The reminiscences contained in this article are supplementary to the third volume of
Leaves from the Annals of the Sisters of Mercy.

1889.] THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK'. 383

ished convent was torn down, and on its site a large publishing
house was erected.

On the ist of May, 1848, Bishop Hughes solemnly blessed
the new convent, dedicating it to Saint Catherine of Sienna.
Always the kindest and best of fathers, he was rejoiced at
having the sisters established so near his own residence, with
abundant opportunities to assist the poor and the sick, to whom
their lives were to be specially devoted. Released from the close
quarters they had occupied for nearly two years, this entrance to
dear Saint Catherine's seemed to the sisters like a glimpse of the
promised land. The house was surrounded by a beautiful garden;
many noble trees adorned its pathways, notably a patriarchal
mulberry. The street took its name from the number of trees of
this species in which it abounded. Oak and maple, elm and lo-
cust— one superb specimen of the latter, with its fragrant, creamy-
white blossoms — gladdened the heart in this beautiful spot and
invited the religious to prayer or recreation beneath their com-
forting shade. But the charitable heart of the beloved superioress,
Mother Agnes, and the longing desires of the sisters with regard
to the House of Mercy, decreed the sacrifice of a considerable
portion of this fair garden, and when, on June 15, 1849, the
Feast of the Sacred Heart, the first stone was laid of the new

mvent, many of the beautiful trees were unavoidably cut down.

ilas ! for earth's instability. The dear old mulberry was the
irst doomed to destruction, as it stood on the very spot where
the building was begun. The work progressed rapidly, and on
the /th of November of the same year the dormitories were
fitted up for the reception of their inmates. Now at last
were the hopes of Mother Agnes to be realized ; now the poor
jxiles, driven from home and country by oppression and distress,
were to be hospitably sheltered and comfortably provided for
intil situations could be obtained for them. Very often, indeed,
were the necessary funds wanting, but Mother Agnes reposed her
xmfidence in God, and he never failed to come to her assistance.
Work-rooms were established where plain sewing and the most
exquisite needle- work, knitting, embroidery, etc., were taught to
such girls as desired to become seamstresses, while in the laun-
dry and kitchen many excellent servants were trained before be-
ing sent " out in the world," as they quaintly expressed it, to
toil for their daily bread and help the beloved ones in Ireland.
Many a peasant girl, fresh from driving the cows through
pastures rich with clover blossoms and hedged with hawthorn,
presented herself at the convent in her coarse linsey-woolsey

VOL. L. — 25

384 THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. [Dec.,

and heavy brogues, and for long months cheerfully worked at
the washboard, and the still more wonderful stationary tub, for
the one sole purpose of fitting herself to earn what would ena-
ble her father in Ireland "to keep the roof over his head."

During the first year of its existence (1849-1850) the num-
ber of situations provided from the " servants' office " in the
House of Mercy was 1,217, an<^ trie number of inmates shel-
tered and fed and clothed seldom fell below 200. Though the
doors were open to all poor girls of good character, by far the
greater proportion of those taken care of in the house were immi-
grant Irish girls. It must be remembered that at the period of
which we write there was no expectation of the noble enter-
prise at Castle Garden so ably inaugurated and carried on by
the lamented Father Riordan and his zealous successors, and
the Convent of Mercy was the only safe refuge in New York
for these homeless exiles. The good work grew apace, and its
interests were zealously promoted by Archbishop Hughes and
his priests. The records for the first five years (1849—1854)
show that 2,323 girls were cared for in the House of Mercy,
and the number of situations provided was 4,852.

One poor girl who could neither read nor write was con-
stantly coming to the circulating library (which had been estab-
lished by the sisters) asking for books of a controversial nature.
After a while she was questioned regarding the use she made of
them and whether she got some one to read for her. " Ah ! no,
sister dear," she answered ; " sure I know they are good, and I
just leave them in the way of the mistress, hoping that God may
convert her ! " That " mistress " eventually became a fervent
Catholic under the sisters' instruction, thanks to the zeal of her
humble friend. Not the least interesting feature of the old House
of Mercy was the Instruction Room. Though, strictly speaking,
its name implies the use to which it was consecrated, it was here
that all the business of the outside poor was carried on, and
here the heartrending and the ludicrous were often strangely in-
termingled. Here, for many years, Mother Catherine Seton held
potent sway, and received the number of afflicted ones who came
to have St. Edward's relic applied, and to hear a word of conso-
lation or advice. Many permanent cures were granted to their
unshaken faith and sterling piety. Here substantial aid in the
shape of food and clothing was given the needy applicant, but* oc-
casionally a poor delinquent would not be satisfied with such re-
lief, and one good woman, to whom Mother Catherine feared to
give the few pennies asked for lest they should prove a source

1889.] THF SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW Y.ORK. 385

of temptation too strong to be resisted, made the following
remarkable "prayer": "Oh! then, sister dear,, that you may
be winkin' and blinkin' for time and eternity ! " Mother Cathe-
rine suffered from a peculiar weakness of the eyelids, and created no
little merriment by relating this incident when the sisters assem-
bled for recreation. For long years, on Christmas Day, a dinner
was given in this special room to a number of poor old men,
whom it was the sisters' delight to serve ; the old were invited
on this occasion in honor of Saint Joseph.

But the distinctive work of instruction accomplished in this
well-remembered room was simply marvellous. Apart from the
evening classes, formed for those who were unable to attend dur-
ing the day, individual instruction was given at any and every
hour at which those soliciting it could find time to come. In-
struction, however, was an old specialty of the Sisters of Mercy;
the first year of their residence in New York (1846-1847) up-
wards of three hundred adults were prepared for the worthy re-
ception of the Sacraments, many approaching for the first time,
but the majority being 'reconciled to God after years of neglect.
It is no unusual thing to find in the early records notes of per-
sons instructed for confession after an absence of ten, fifteen,
twenty, and even thirty years. No allusion to the early days of
Saint Catherine's would be complete without mention of the so-
dalities, which were the first to be established in the city, and
were productive of an incalculable amount of good. Besides the
Immaculate Conception Sodality for young girls, there were also
the Confraternity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and Saint Jos-
eph's Society for married women. All three received the appro-
bation of the Holy Father and the sanction of the archbishop.
Later on a Sodality of the Precious Blood, for colored people,
was added to the list and counted many members. The average
attendance at Saint Joseph's Society, on Wednesday evenings, was
six hundred. The old members can never forget dear Mother
Joseph's fervent petitions to her great patron, or the instructions
they so delighted in, when, failing to secure the services of a
priest, she was obliged to act as the preacher herself. How often
they assured her that " it's -yourself knows how to preach ; sure
we'd rather be listenin' to you than to any priest this blessed
night ! "

The sisters were not more than ten months in the city when
the Commissioners of Charity offered them free access to the
prisons and hospitals. .The invitation was joyfully accepted, and
a visitation of these abodes of suffering and wretchedness was then

386 77/£ Sssr£A>s OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. [Dec.,

commenced (1847), which has been carried on without interruption
up to the present time. Mother Austin Horan, of beloved mem-
ory, also inaugurated the visitation of the sick in their own homes,
and the visits were not confined exclusively to the sick poor.
Her large charity easily divined that the sufferer on- a bed of
down, as well as the stricken one on a straw pallet, may find it
a hard trial to break the ties that bind to life. She knew well
that the fervent prayer, the whispered aspiration, the silent appeal
to the uplifted crucifix might be often more necessary to the rich
than to the poor, for in proportion as the .chains that rivet the
soul to earth are strong and numerous is its disinclination to pass
through the "dark valley."

The following little incident of Mother Austin's manner of
dealing with the sick, whether of mind or body, will convey to
the reader some idea of her beautiful soul. The sisters had been
entreated to visit a gentleman of superior education and fine in-
tellect, though a professed infidel. His wife was a Catholic, and
as he was very seriously ill, her anxiety was extreme. Mother
Austin undertook the case and was soon' at the invalid's bedside.
His first salutation on seeing the figure of .a religious was :
"Woman, what brings you here ? I want none like you about me ! "
With the utmost composure Mother Austin seated herself near him,
and said softly: "The blessing of God be upon you and all in
this house." "Madam," urged the sick man, "I don't want you
and your talk ; understand me." But the good mother persisted
in speaking of his immortal soul, and of the judgment of God,
apparently so near at hand for him. Trembling with rage, the
man exclaimed : " Madam, if I could, I would dash you out of
that window!" Still undismayed, the zealous mother answered:
" You poor, foolish, ignorant man ! And you are not much of a
gentleman, after all." The man's eyes fairly flashed as he said:
"Never before have I been called ignorant; I am not an igno-
rant man." "Yes, my friend, you are," insisted the quiet voice;
" many a dirty little boy or girl in the street can answer ques-
tions you know nothing at all about." And the patient instructor
began a brief explanation of the truths of our holy faith. The
wife now approached the bed, saying to the invalid that she
feared he was fatigued, the truth being that she did not wish the
sisters to be subjected to further insult, adding : " Mother Austin
will come again to see you, my dear"; when he vociferated: "I
had rather be walled up and die of starvation than listen to that
,'v-omatt again."

But Mother Austin was not to be cheated out of this soul, so

.] THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. 387

kneeling down, she and her companion (the saintly Mother
Joseph Devereux) recited aloud the Litany of Our Lady and five
decades of the Rosary. The sick man was visibly subdued during
the recital of these simple prayers, and after taking a little refresh-
ment, began to give some of his reasons for his infidel opinions,
when all at once he stopped, amazed at the look of horror and
disgust on Mother Austin's face. " Little man," said she, " stop
this foolishness, and if you talk, talk sensibly. What is your
boasted knowledge in comparison with that of the great theolo-
gians, philosophers, and others who have enlightened the world.
All these grand intellects believed in God, and you, little man, in
your ignorance, pretend to know more than they ! " As Mother
Austin went on she seemed to be inspired, and gained the sick
man's close attention for more than half an hour ; the visit had

>ted almost five hours, and as she was leaving she knelt and

jked him to repeat a short prayer after her. This request was
refused ; again and again was the entreaty made in vain. At
last Mother Austin stood up and said: " I will write it and you
shall take it as a pill, so as to have something good and holy

iside of you ! " Needless to relate that this proposition was met
scorn. Then Mother Austin declared that she would not go
iway until he had repeated some short, ejaculatory prayer, and
she and her companion again recited the Litany and the beads,

id, as they were finishing the latter for the third time, the man
mrst into a flood of tears, and exclaimed : " I am a proud man,

id I know it, l^ut you have conquered me ! "
This was a great triumph of grace, and the sisters soon took

leir departure. Mother Austin called on him again in a day or
two, and repeatedly afterward, and the victory was won ; but it
a long, hard struggle between nature and grace. The invalid

^covered, and in a few months came to the convent chapel to be

iptized, having gone through a regular course of instruction from

ic woman he had wished "never to listen to again." He became
most fervent Catholic, and when, a few years later, a return of
his malady brought his final summons, Mother Austin, in her

mtle charity, ministered to him during his trying illness, and
actually with him at the moment of his death. She was the

leans of converting more than one such infidel, and generally
startled them into the resistance that at length yielded to her
sway by seeking to convince them of their "ignorance," follow-
ing up this line of conduct by making them learn the catechism
like little children.

The arduous labor of the sisters in the City Prison is too well

388 THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. fDec.,

known to need more than a passing word. Thoroughly organ-
ized in 1847, tne work has been carried on ever since with un-
flagging energy. The " Tombs " is visited three times a week
regularly ; the State Prison at Sing Sing once every three months ;
the Penitentiary on Blackwell's Island every month ; and for
weeks previous to the execution of a criminal he is daily en-
couraged by the kindly ministrations of the Sisters of Mercy.
They have solaced and prepared every Catholic who has incurred
the dread penalty in New York for the past forty-two years,
and when solicited have cheerfully aided those who were not of
our faith.

But the sisters have sometimes had the consolation of assist-
ing some poor prisoner to meet death less painfully. On one of
the usual visits to Sing Sing a young man was found in the
hospital of the prison, apparently dying of consumption. His
story uas lamentable, but, alas! only too common. Though of a
respectable family, he had been led away by bad companions,
older in years and inured to wickedness. In some petty theft
expedition which they had induced him to join he was detected,
and on the trial was sentenced to three years in the State Prison.
Naturally a good boy, he was heart-broken, and the labor and
confinement soon told on a constitution never robust. Now the
sisters saw that the end was not far away. His shrinking from
death in a prison, his longing to see the " blue sky " and to
breathe the fresh air once again, all so pathetically told, so
touched the sister to whom he poured out his confidence that she
determined to appeal to the governor of New York (then Governor
Hoffman) in his behalf. She did so immediately, begging a par-
don for the poor young offender, meanwhile arranging for his re-
ception with the good Sisters of Saint Francis (Fifth Street) if
her application were to be successful. Governor Hoffman most
promptly and graciously granted the request, and as speedily as
possible the poor fellow was transferred to the sisters' hospital.
He had been left an orphan in early childhood, and had no re-
straining influence in his poor, blighted life. Three weeks after
obtaining his pardon on earth he was summoned to receive that
of his Father in heaven.

Death has reaped a heavy harvest in Saint Catherine's com-
munity, and of the pioneer members but two are still spared.
Among the band of earnest laborers who came to swell the ranks
of the foundation sisters before their first decade of years had
elapsed was Mother M. Alphonsus Smythe, so long and genial-
ly remembered as superioress of Saint Joseph's Industrial Home

1889.] THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. 389

(65 East Eighty-first Street), where her toiling among the chil-
dren bore such generous fruit. Of an extremely bright, joyous
temperament, her choice of a religious life was strangely deter-
mined amidst the gayeties of a ball-room. Though full of the en-
joyment of the hour, she seemed to see written in characters of
fire everywhere she turned this passage from Holy Scripture :
"They that instruct many unto justice shall shine like stars for all
eternity " ; and from that night she resolved to relinquish the
pleasures of the world and devote herself to the task of endeav-
oring to lead many into the paths of justice. Her death in March,
1884, left a great void in the community, and her exquisite voice
was sadly missed from the convent choir, where for thirty years
she had sung the praises of Him whom she had served with such
a cheerful heart from the days of her youth. As bursar of the
community for many years her practical abilities were well known
in the business circles of New York.

One of the stanchest friends of Saint Catherine's in the
olden, golden days " was the universally revered and deeply
;gretted Very Rev. Isaac T. Hecker, so recently passed from
imongst us. Father Hecker's acquaintance with the Sisters of
[ercy began in 1851, when he presided at the retreat, which is
tade in all convents of the order, for the last three days of the
'•ear. He was appointed spiritual director of the community on
ic I3th of December, 1852, which office he lovingly and faithful-
ly fulfilled until December, 1860, when other pressing cares de-
Landed his time and attention. During these years he conducted
10 less than seven retreats, five of which were the lengthened
iight days' retreat, usually taking place in August. His strong,
rivid style left life-long impress on those privileged to listen to
dm, and he left nothing undone on his part to promote the
)iritual welfare of the community. In a conference on the ob-
ligations of the religious state he once exclaimed : " Fidelity,
idelity, fidelity ! I would like to write this word everywhere, in
jvery place, for God does not confine his grace to the chapel, to
ie Blessed Sacrament, to prayer and meditation; no, it is always
iing offered to us, and great graces are received from God even
least expected. Had we only been faithful, we have re-
iived graces enough in one day to sanctify ten souls. I ask of
'ou to turn to God with courage, confidence, and generosity, re-
lecting on past unfaithfulness without trouble, and merely as a
racer does who pauses in order to gain strength for an immense
leap ; reflect on the past as a starter, and then take the leap into
mctity ! "

390 THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. [Dec.,

•
Another time, speaking of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, Father

Hecker insisted strongly on the necessity of the acquirement of
the gift of fortitude for those so actively engaged in the works
of mercy, saying: "The saints afford us beautiful examples of
this gift of fortitude. Take Saint Peter, for instance ; he was a
poor fisherman ; he had little learning ; I am not sure that he
could read ; I never found it stated anywhere, and I shouldn't
wonder if he could not; the schoolmaster .was not abroad then !
Yet he undertook to conquer the great metropolis of the world,
and he did conquer it, for though it was not until the time of his
successors that Rome became wholly Christian, still the victory
was in the heart of Saint Peter. And what led the great apostle
to undertake such an enterprise ? The gift of fortitude. I have
never yet met with a religious who was ambitious enough ! Our
hearts are all so little, so miserable; there is no 'one who would
think of converting a city ; and America — oh ! perhaps that might
come to pass in two or three centuries. Do you pray for the
heretics in the ^country where you are living? Oh! for a heart
as large as that of Christ, that we might embrace all within it,
and pray for all for whom he died."

Again, speaking of that recollectedness which he called " soli-
tude of the heart," how beautifully is the idea developed : " Many
voices come to us daily, but we do not hear them ! Yes, our
angel guardian thinks many things to our advantage, which he
would tell us, but he cannot be heard. At times God wishes you
to be silent and listen to him. God is all in all, you are noth-
ing at all. We suffer because we cannot learn this truth; we
give up if we can-not be the actor in all our affairs. When God
requires you to be active, be so — use your oars ; but when a
breath comes from God lay aside the oars and put up your sails ;
they will carry you on while you hardly know it. There is no
one who listens to him to whom God will not speak, not only
to those who are saints, but to those who are wishing to be
saints. It is the delight of God to be with us ! This is a mys-
tery of love beyond our comprehension, but let it excite our
adoration. Listen to his voice and not to that of a creature. I
would be happy if my tongue were paralyzed, and I could not
speak one word to you, if this would make you listen more at-
tentively to God. It seems as if he himself were saying this
to me : You are impertinent to speak now ; let my spouses lis-
ten to my voice! One word from God is worth more than all
I could say to you in a thousand years. I remember that when
I was a student and in retreat, and they would call me to the

1889.] THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. 391

conferences, I used to say : Let me be, let me be, let me be !
When God is heard a person feels that everything else but him
is impertinent ; God speaks to his people, to his saints, and to
those who turn to him."

His words of encouragement to those timidly inclined were
like a clarion call. " Be generous ! " " Break loose — give up all
to God ! " " Keep your feet free ! I imagine there are persons
whose feet are entangled with little yarns ; every now and then
they try to walk and cannot on account of them ; they only
wind around them more and more. These are the little scruples,
this trifle and that trifle, from which to get disentangled one
must make an act of generous confidence and then throw one's
self on God."

And thus he spoke of our Blessed Lady : " Look at your ex-
ample, the Blessed Virgin Mary ; who ever undertook more than
she did ? She is the ' strong woman ' of the Scripture from the
infancy of Jesus to the foot of the Cross. Follow in her path ;
it will be following her humility, confidence, and courage. Call
on her in every want, or doubt, or difficulty — even in your hopes.
Let the name of Mary be always on your lips ; it is a word of
predestination ; she is a ' tower of strength.' With the saints
we find that their devotion to Mary increased in proportion to
their sanctity. This Mother can carry all our burdens. If we want
to do something and cannot do it, if we have not strength, ask
her — and it is done ! Tis so with the little child ; if there is
anything he cannot do, he goes to his mother ; if he is tired, he
is carried in her arms. Mary's arms are full of graces which she
is more anxious to give than we are to receive ; she delights to
ind hearts prepared for them. You will advance rapidly and un-
msciously if you are borne in her arms. Beg of her, then, to
ive you some of her humility and courage, and call on her in
things."

What a sublime closing of a Christmas retreat is the follow-
ing : " I leave you now in the hands of the lovely Infant Jesus !
[ow can we keep our eyes from gazing continually on his
>eauty ! Ask at the manger for the spirit of those vows that
rou are about to renew. What an example he is there of these
id of every Christian virtue ! What a model of religious obe-
dience, of perfect poverty, of mortification ! Tell the Divine
Infant to put his little hands into your hearts and to take out
everything that is displeasing to him there. Ask of his sweet
Mother, Mary, perseverance in your holy resolutions ; ask her to
bless you with the holy Infant, as the church says : ' Nos cum

392 THE. SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. [Dec.,

prole pia, benedicat Virgo Maria ' — May the Virgin Mary with
her loving Child bless us ! The Blessed Virgin Mary is an inven-
tion, so to say, of God's mercy to deceive himself. He pleads
for justice in the cause of God; she for mercy in the cause of
humanity. No wonder the church calls her 'our life, our hope.'
She is our life ; our lives are sheltered from the justice of God
beneath the mantle of Our Lady of Mercy."

Father Hecker was the means of introducing to Mother Agnes
O'Connor one who was destined to become a shining light in St.
Catherine's, and for whom his friendship lasted until the very
end, Mother M. Augustine MacKenna. While engaged in mis-
sionary duty in a quaint little village on the banks of the Mo-
hawk (since a thriving city) he formed the acquaintance of this
heroic soul, to whom his voice was that of " one crying in the
wilderness." For long years circumstances had prevented Miss
MacKenna from devoting herself to God in religion, though she
led a life of no ordinary sanctity in the world. Now, under
Father Hecker's guidance, both she and her younger sister, Julia,
entered the community of which he was so fond. Father Hecker
and Mother Augustine had a strong foundation for their mutual
attraction ; they had many traits in common apart from the no-
ble, absorbing spirit of self-sacrifice that dominated in each.

When they first met Father Hecker had not yet become the
founder of the Paulist congregation, and his generous heart was
filled with the greatest desire of laboring for the conversion of his
own American people. Mother Augustine's heart, too, was bleed-
ing at the woes of her native race, and all the energies of her
strong character, even before she became a religious, were put
forth to aid and protect those whom poverty and distress were daily
banishing from the shores of green Erin. Her yearning was es-
pecially for the friendless young girls. How unceasingly she
struggled in their behalf, in the face of all obstacles, as a Sister
of Mercy for nearly thirty years, the eloquent voices of the mul-
titude thus befriended, of those saved in their early childhood
and grown to womanhood beneath her maternal care, have borne
fullest testimony. When in 1868 the burden of the office of su-
perior was laid upon her, Father Hecker, in his congratulatory
visit, said : " Now I am going to give you a maxim as a little
guide ; will you remember it ? " " Gladly, father, and practise
it if it is in rry power," was the ready response. " Monstra te esse
Matrem" repeated Father Hecker most impressively, and giving
her his blessing, he withdrew.

Never was maxim more deeply taken to heart ; never in all the

1889.] THE SISTERS OF MERCY. IN NEW YORK. 393

annals of the community was there a mother more truly beloved,
a superior more really a mother in the widest acceptation of the
endearing appellation. None ever came to her and went away
uncomforted ; no work of zeal, or charity, or mercy that did not
bear the signet of her magnanimity. For nine years she filled
the onerous post of mother-superior, but when the last triennial
had expired failing health precluded the possibility of her con-
tinuing in the office, and she was appointed to the charge of Saint
Joseph's Home, East Eighty-first Street. Here Father Hecker
visited her as often as time and his own precarious health would
permit. Among her papers is found the following allusion to one
of his visits :

" To-day Father Hecker began almost at once to speak of
faith." He said " that we are ready enough to believe in the
Power of God, that he is able to do all things, able to help us
both in natural and supernatural things ; in his Wisdom, that he
knows what is best for us, and why and when it is best; but
that we have not sufficient faith in his love, in his will to help
us. We do not believe, as we ought, that no human father ever
desired the welfare of his child as God desires it ; that no human
father ever longed for the love and confidence of his child as our
Heavenly Father desires our love and confidence. No one but
a Christian can call God his Father. He may be called Creator,
Preserver, but not Father. It is through Christ that we can say
' Abba — Father!' Was not such a visit worthy of these two
great souls ? It reads like a passage from the life of the gentle
Saint of Geneva and that of his holy daughter. At another time
rather Hecker caused a great sensation in Saint Joseph's. To
ic question of the smart little girl acting as portress : " Who shall
tell Mother Augustine ? " he laughingly answered, " Oh ! telt her
holy father wants her for a few moments." The child, in her
ccitement and admiration at his imposing appearance, thought he
id said " The Holy Father," and straightway through the house
lashes the wonderful news, " The Pope has come to see Mother
.ugustine ! " Father Hecker enjoyed the report immensely.

In the hospital conducted by the Houston Street sisters at
Beaufort, North Carolina, during the war (1862-1863) Mother
Augustine was the ruling spirit. No task too heavy, no duty
too lowly for her willing hands. Cleansing the most repulsive
/ounds ; writing home to the friends of the poor "boys"; soft-
ening many a prejudice which had its origin in total ignorance
of the faith and charity that could dictate such heroism, she and
her fellow-laborers in this corner of the Master's vineyard must

394 THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. [Dec.,

have reaped golden store for the eternal harvest. Their first
converts were a poor old colored woman and a soldier who
had never professed any religious belief whatever. The poor
negress was dying, and could only be taught the essentials, but
she seemed consumed with love of our Lord. As the sisters'
chaplain, a dear old foreigner who had not much command of
English, administered the last Sacraments he exclaimed, " I would
like to give her indulgence plenaire, but she know not, she know
not ! " And surely she knew nothing about it, but there was every
reason to hope that her soul was pleasing in the sight of its
Creator. More remarkable still was the good old father's admo-
nition to the soldier, whom he baptized with great ceremony in
the sister's pretty little chapel : " Now, you are one holy Roman
Catholic Church, and you must live in good example." The
poor fellow recovered from his wounds and really led an exem-
plary life.

Mother Augustine — always undertaking the most arduous work
that was to be found, pleasantly reminding the sisters, "I am
the daughter of an Irish giant " — contracted a painful disease
during her hospital duty that gradually undermined her great
strength, and for twenty years afterward she knew no day
without intense physical suffering. Still her life was one of labor
until 1880, when a sharp attack of pneumonia so weakened her
constitution that although she- recovered she was never again
able for active duty. The last three years of her life were
spent at the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, Balmville (New-
burg, N. Y.), which house was the last she had established
during her office as mother-superior. Through the kindness of
one of the Paulist Fathers she heard often from and of Father
Hecker all this time. His last letter, dated Saint Mary's of the
Lake, June 28, 1883, was a source of intense satisfaction to
the suffering mother, but her profound humility would not let
her see how she could possibly have been " a consolation to
him." He writes :

" MY DEAR SlSTER : I fear you will slip away unless I write
a word to you by return mail. Though we Catholics have a
telephone between this and the other world, still, while we are
here let us use the present gifts — Uncle Sam's mail. You have
always been a consolation to me by your fidelity to the grace
of God. Be of good courage, and thank God for the grace of
perseverance in his service. You do not miscount on my pray-
ing for you. The priests and students who are here for the
summer remember you in their Masses and prayers. Next

1889.] THE SISTERS OF MERCY IN NEW YORK. 395

Sunday my Mass shall be offered up especially for you. I am
only able to say Mass on Sundays and days of obligation, but
you have my constant prayers. Your good sister who went be-
fore you will rejoice at your coming. I know you will not forget
me and all that concerns the glory of God wherever you can
be of aid. I thank you in advance. As for me, ten years ago
I died. My present life is only a special prolongation. Let us
live, what time is yet given us, in the light of God's presence.
Then it is all the same whether we be here o,r there. God
bless you and keep you always in his holy Presence.

" Yours faithfully and affectionately,

"•I. T. HECKER."

There was only the slight difference of six days in the ages
of Father Hecker and Mother Augustine. He was born De-
cember 19, 1819, and she on Christmas Eve of the same year,
but his life on earth exceeded hers by five years, she having
been called to her eternal reward on the 2d of August, 1883,
the great day of the Portiuncula. In her last illness Mother
Augustine's old love for the land of her birth and for every
Irish memory increased each hour. " My ruling passion," she
used to say ; and when in the prayers recited aloud constantly
at her bedside the aspiration, " Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," was
repeated, she would quickly add, " and Patrick and Bridget"
" assist me in my last agony ! " Being questioned by dear Mother
Catherine as to what she was whispering1, she replied : "Just a
little prayer of my own, darling." When asked to pray earnestly
in heaven for the community she answered, " Why, of course,
and for every one in it ; but Ireland, Ireland ! ah ! won't I pray
for Ireland ! "

And so they pass — the great and the good — leaving us to
tread the Via Crucis without the help of their inspiring counsel.
Let us hope that in the Eternal Presence their loving supplica-
tions follow us in our painful exile through this valley of tears.

S. M. D.

396 NATIONALITY AND RELIGION. [Dec.,

NATIONALITY AND RELIGION.

The Question of Nationality and Religion in its Relations to the Catholic
Church in the United States. By Rev. A. H. Walburg, Rector of St. Augus-
tine's Church, Cincinnati, Ohio. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder.

THIS is a well-written and well-intentioned brochure on the
vexed question of nationality and religion, and as we believe it
not only reflects the sentiment but expresses the conviction of a
not inconsiderable number of our Catholic brethren in the West,
we deem it worthy of an extended notice.

The general contention ®f the reverend author is that the
national sentiment of a people is the best safeguard of their
religious sentiment, and his particular conclusion that the German
language and German customs should be preserved as long as
possible in the German Catholic churches and schools of this
country. The premises, it is true, would hardly seem to contain
the conclusion, and the argument is neither very definite nor very
direct, but it is none the less the conclusion drawn. He insists that
to Americanize the German Catholics is to jeopardize their faith,
and to make the English language the language of their churches
and schools is to Americanize them.

Very few will be disposed to cavil at his general thesis. It
would be little short of a paradox to deny that the national and
religious sentiment are closely interwoven, and that the one helps
to vivify and sustain the other. Every person of ordinary in-
telligence fully understands this ; and no Catholic who has the
interests of religion at heart could be so stupid as to seek an
absolute divorce between them. No such foolish proposition has,
we trust, been yet advanced in this country by any member of
the Catholic body worthy of notice, and we have little fear that
it ever will be. Now, it is just here, and here chiefly, that the
reverend father is greatly at fault in his view of the subject. He is
charging on a wind-mill, imagining it to be a frowning castle.
He seems to think that there is a party in the American Church
that is plotting to eradicate every feeling of foreign nationality
from the Catholic body ; he even speaks of the Know-nothing
party in the church itself, and he quotes the late Dr. Brownson and
others still prominent in Catholic affairs as representatives of this
radical spirit.

The profoundest admirer of Dr. Brownson would hardly un-

1889.] NATIONALITY AND RELIGION. 397

dertake to defend all that he said on any subject. Yet we fail to
see how any Catholic, having the welfare of the church in this
country at heart, would disapprove of the sentiments contained in
the following statement of his position as given in this pamphlet :
" Our line of policy should be to live in conformity to American
life, manners, and institutions in all respects in which they are not
directly incompatible with Catholic faith and morals. Our best
safeguard will be found, not in building up a wall of separation
between the American and Catholic communities, but in making
our children feel that the American nationality is their national-
ity, that Catholics are really and truly an integral portion of the
American people, and that we can be good Catholics and at
the same time loyal Americans, and earnest defenders of politi-
cal, civil, and religious liberty."

The noble old philosopher never advocated an absolute divorce
between the national and religious sentiments of his brethren in
the faith. He, in common with other leading Catholic minds,
wanted the church and her children in this country to put off
foreign customs and peculiarities that are local and non-essential,
and to assume a tone more in harmony with present surround-
ings ; and this was progress in the right direction, for the law
of all normal growth is harmony with environment. And when,
long years ago, the same great thinker insisted that there was no
incompatibility between Catholicity and an honest sentiment of
American nationality he. asserted a truth which every year and
every day of our national and religious life reiterates and em-
>hasizes.

There is no purpose, there can be no purpose on the part of
ly of our leaders to exorcise the patriotic feelings of any peo-
)le or race in order to make them Catholics on the American
)lan. But there must be a desire, nay, a downright sense of duty,
m the part of those who guide the destinies of the church in
lis country to exorcise all idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and ex-
rgerations, whether of foreign or native growth ; and if this be
Americanize the church, by all means let the process proceed
rapidly as may be.

The church enters upon one of the greatest enterprises of her
livine mission in this land, and nothing should be suffered to ham-
>er her progress. The faith of Peter, the faith of Rome, that
has conquered the Old World and founded its civilization, is the
faith that is destined to prevail in the New World and crown its
greatness, finding here the best conditions for its ideal develop-
ment. Old- World customs and peculiarities have no place in this

398 NATIONALITY AND RELIGION. [Dec.,

work ; they but retard it and mar its purpose. The bark of
Peter, in her long voyage down the centuries, has necessarily
picked up excrescences on the waves of time and in the harbors
of Christendom, and the constant care and effort of the great
pontiffs who guided her course have been to remove these.
Why not, then, scrape off all such when the grand old bark en-
ters on a new and propitious voyage freighted with the hopes and
destinies of a whole hemisphere ? The faith, the absolute faith
and practice, of Rome we must have ; let not one jot or tittle
be changed ; but don't impose upon us the national peculiari-
ties or religious eccentricities of any race or people under the
sun.

The intelligent author of the pamphlet under review is, we are
happy to say, in accord with us in all this, and takes much the same
ground. But, nevertheless, there is the insistance running all
through his work, indirectly of course, that the German Catholics
in this country should be allowed to manage their own religious
affairs in their own way and after the German fashion, and any
attempt to hasten their adoption of American methods is to en-
danger their faith. He takes a rose-colored view of the strength
and vigor of German Catholic organizations and their power for
good, which is probably warranted by his immediate horizon, but
certainly is not sustained by a general survey of the religious con-
dition of German Catholics throughout the country; and his state-
ments on this head, though no doubt justified by his own obser-
vations, must seem not a little exaggerated to many of his readers.
Now, we frankly confess that we fail to see the need of keeping
up strictly national organizations within the church in this country,
and while we freely admit that some good may be accomplished
by them, we are quite convinced that the harm done the general
cause of Catholic unity is far too high a price to pay for the
particular good that may be accomplished.

As to the advantages or disadvantages that may come to re-
ligion from prolonging the use of the German language in the
churches and schools of that nationality, it is altogether too grave
a matter to be decided by a stroke of the pen. The policy and
the practice of our most able and zealous churchmen has always
been, and still is, to promote the establishment of German churches
and schools whenever and wherever necessary, and to discounten-
ance their exclusively national character only when the necessity
for it ceased to exist. Whether the change should come about
after one generation, or two or three generations, is a question
largely conditional on place and prudence. And most assuredly

1889.] NATIONALITY AND RELIGION. 399

no one can accuse our American bishops of overhaste in this
matter. Our own conviction is that the sooner the change can
with safety take place the better, not only for the good of reli-
gion in general, but also for the good of the individual souls con-
cerned. The examples adduced by the writer in support of this
part of his thesis do not seem to us to affect the case in the
least. The non est similis ratio of St. Thomas may be applied
to each and all of them.

To encourage every little nationality amongst us — and they are
legion — to have each its own ecclesiastical establishment would be,
in our opinion, to postpone the progress of our faith in this
country for half a century, and lose much of the vantage-ground
we have already gained. Narrowness begotten of national and
sectional feeling would take the place of that broad and fraternal
Catholic spirit which we would all insist upon as characteristic of
our religion, whose motto is unity of spirit in the bond of faith.

No better witness to the evils that flow from exaggerated na-
tional feeling and the confusion it produces in the fold can be
quoted than the late saintly Bishop Neumann, of Philadelphia.
Few men had a wider experience as a missionary among different
nationalities than he, and fewer still had a wider charity for the
failings of human nature. On page 184 of his life, written in
German by Rev. John A. Berger, C.SS.R., and translated into
English by Rev. Eugene Grimm, C.SS.R., we find the following
[uotation from a letter written by Father Neumann, then a young
missionary in Western New York, to Rev. Father Dichtl :

f< Our Germans all live this way in the woods. . . . Here all are expected to
contribute towards the maintenance of pastors and teachers, and no matter how
trifling the contribution, there are some who think themselves entitled to a voice
in parochial affairs. Others wish to see the non-essential customs of their own
country, their own diocese — yes, even of their own parish — introduced and followed
here in their new home. The consequences likely to flow from such a state of
lings may be readily imagined. Party spirit becomes the order of the day — a
;pirit to be counteracted only by patience and prudence on the part of the
)astor."

What would be the character of our Catholicity if this petty
spirit of nationality were to assert itself throughout the whole
American Church ? if Poles, Bohemians, Italians, French, Ger-
tan, Irish, and their sub-divisions were to insist on perpetuating
indefinitely their native customs, languages, and religious pecu-
liarities ? Would there be any future for American Catholicity ?
We very much regret that the reverend author of this pamphlet
should mar the customary moderation of his language by placing,

VOL. L.— 26

400 TALK ABOUT NEW ROOKS. [Dec.,

as he unfortunately does, prohibition on a par with Mormonism,
free-lovism, etc. Though born in this country, he proves him-
self intensely German in sentiment by this ridiculous classifica-
tion. Nor do we think his strictures on American nationality in
good taste. No doubt he aims to do full justice to the positive
side of American character, but his portraiture of the negative
side is certainly rather prismatic.

That the author is actuated by only the very best intentions
in the publication of this brochure we have not the slightest doubt,
but we have very serious doubt as to the prudence and propriety
of scattering such views as he advocates broadcast ; it only adds
to the difficulties of the situation, and seeks to retard the work
of unification which is as inevitable as the march of time.

LEWIS R. HUBBARD.

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

LIKE his previous ventures into the debatable land of his-
torical fiction, Ernst Eckstein's latest novel, Nero (New York : W.
S. Gottsberger & Co.), must be accounted a success. It has that
first and most essential requisite in a novel, sustained interest, a
thing we take to be more difficult to achieve in a tale purport-
ing to find its basis in history than in almost any other case.
How nearly the present novel adheres to actual fact in its delin-
eation of its hero is another question. Certainly, Eckstein's
Nero is not the Nero of Tacitus. He is not a tiger-cub, harm-
less so long as he is caged, or until his fangs and claws are
fully grown, but with every ferocious instinct latent in the very
germ. He is merely a specimen of the domestic cat, felis do-
mestica, an extraordinarily robust one if you will, which has
been caught away by violence from the hearth where he would
have purred in peace, thrown ruthlessly into the jungle, and
trained there to savagery against his gentle inclinations. He
is, in short, the victim of circumstances, " more sinned against
than sinning " while yet malleable, and in his rehabilitated and
restored condition he makes a fit companion-piece to Froude's
Eighth Henry. There is an uncommon likeness between the two,
one must admit, in whatever guise or by whatever artist they
are limned, whether Tacitus and Nicolas Sander lay in the fresh

1889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 401

colors, or Froude and Eckstein apply the whitewash brush by
way of toning down the too vivid effects of the first por-
traits.

The pivot on which the present novel turns, and by means
of which old scenes and incidents are brought into relations
accordant with modern notions and reasonably explicable
according to modern motives, is Eckstein's conception of the
freedwoman Acte, who appears in every account of Nero's ca-
reer. The chroniclers of the time agree in awarding her, either
explicitly or by implication, the praise of having entertained a
sincere, unambitious, and persistent love for him, from those days
of his early youth when the passion was both mutual and sole on
either side, until his disgraced remains owed their sepulchre to
her faithful hands. Suetonius says that Nero, wishing to make
her his wife, suborned witnesses to swear that in her native Asia
she was of royal birth. She has been identified, how truly we
cannot say, with that concubine of Caesar's, mentioned in a pseu-
do-Clementine epistle, whose conversion by St. Paul was said
to be the direct cause of the apostle's martyrdom. Eckstein
does not follow this version of her story. In his tale she is a
Christian from the start, and one whose persuasive eloquence and
winning grace have made her a most efficient proselyter to the
faith she learned from the lips of St. Paul at Corinth. The
apostle, mentioned more than once, does not appear as a character
in the tale. Acte, the freedwoman of a zealous but not scrupu-
lous convert called Nicodemus, a friend of Seneca, is purposely
thrown by him in Nero's way. The motive of Nicodemus is the
conversion of Nero, or, if that be unattainable, at least the se-
curing of his leniency towards his Christian subjects for the
sake of the love which he believes Acte will be certain to in-
spire toward herself. For the sake of the great good which he
hopes for, he stifles the inward voice which warns him not to
do evil that good may come. What he has foreseen .happens
so soon as they are brought together. But Acte, presaging her
danger, refuses the task of persuasion which Nicodemus imposes
on her, and, flying from Rome, hides herself at once from
Nero's love and the harshness of Nicodemus. All search for
her proves unavailing, and Nero, having abandoned in despair
his hope of union with her, yields to his mother's persuasions
and marries Octavia. His impulses, which, thanks both to nature
and to the training of Seneca, had always tended toward good,
still persevere in that tendency, although robbed of their elastici-
ty by this loveless marriage and his continuous grief. Their

4O2 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

spring of hope is broken. Immortality, which had been taught
him by Seneca, as a state in which personal identity would be
lost in God, though apparently comprehensible, created no en-
thusiasm, but it had become " another thing when thought of as
consciously shared with one beloved. Could Acte have been his
wife instead of the unloved Octavia,

' ' with what mighty deeds would not love and happiness have inspired him —
deeds which, as it was, he could only strive to accomplish in weariness and grief
by the aid of Seneca's cold precepts and Nicodemus' fantastic theories. Yes,
he might have triumphed ! He might have been the immortal creator of a glo-
rious era of human freedom and fraternity. The Heaven of the Nazarene, with
its peaceful and beautiful pardon, had seemed a reality in fair Acte's eyes."

Presently Acte reappears, and, having found her, Nero suc-
ceeds, though with difficulty, in stifling her scruples. As she
will not permit him to divorce Octavia for her sake, he hides her
in a suburban villa, and there, regaining happiness, regains also
the hearty will to reign with justice and hold supreme power as
an instrument for the welfare of all his people. He listens to
the doctrines of a faith whose law she has broken but whose truth
she clings to from the lips of Acte, and finds it plausible if
not convincing. It is, at all events, her faith, and for her sake
it shall be sacred in others. Apparently the scheme of Nico-
demus has succeeded.

From this point on the story follows with more or less
fidelity the historical record. Agrippina, though not painted in
such lurid colors as in the annals of Tacitus, appears as the
direct cause of her son's crimes as well as their most hideous
result. Discovering Octavia's unhappiness and the secret cause
of Nero's new joy, she espouses the side of the wife, abducts
Acte, and plans, for her a death so like that afterwards con-
trived for herself by Anicetus that Acte is saved in almost the
same manner. She is rescued from drowning by Abyssus, that
freedman of Octavia whom Nero afterwards put to torture and
death when he divorced his wife at the instigation of Pop-
paea, and is taken to Octavia's villa. The empress recognizes
her, but pities and forgives her. Acte herself becomes peni-
tent for her fall and seeks to expiate it by hiding herself once
more, and this time finally, from the lover whose rage and
despair at his deprivation are now greater than when he lost
her first.

She does not reappear until the closing scene. Nero, mean-
while, follows his downward route through a category of crimes

.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 403

lessened by Eckstein from the classic number by the expedient
of throwing the murder of Britannicus on Agrippina, and suffer-
ing Poppaea to die from a fall instead of being kicked to death
by her spouse. Rome is burned, but not by Nero, who works
heroically to save it. But he burns the Christians, wrapped in
flaming tow, in the Vatican Gardens, and the scene is laid be-
fore the reader and made impressive. The book is translated by
Clara Bell and Mary J. Safford into correct and fluent Eng-
lish.

Miss Lucia True Ames' novel, Memoirs of a Millionaire
(Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), belongs to
the panacea class of light literature. It is, says the author in
her dedication, " written for all men and women to whom the
privilege of American citizenship has been vouchsafed, and to
whom the stewardship of wealth has been entrusted." Miss Ames
has suggestions to make concerning the wise employment of money,
some of which, that, for example, which indicates the ' use to which
the roofs of tenement-houses might be put as playgrounds, are good
and seem feasible ; others, like her plan for establishing public libra-
ries in small towns and villages, which are worth considering by
people who have brains and consciences as well as heavy pur-
ses ; others, again, like her foreign missionary schemes, which are
nothing if not funny.

The novel professes to give the history of rather more than
one year in the life of Mildred Brewster, a New England girl, a
graduate of Smith College, capable, " viewy," wholly emancipated
from the orthodox Protestantism in which she was reared, and
rith pronounced opinions concerning " the American idea " and
roman suffrage. In early youth she had felt an urgent long-
ig to go to the heathen as a missionary, but, thanks to " Kant,
[egel and Fichte, Carlyle and Emerson, Robertson, Stanley,
fillips Brooks, and, more than all, the unprejudiced study of
le Bible itself," she has been brought to the cheerful persuasion
rhich* she puts thus before a still believing friend: " Whether
le resurrection of Jesus Christ be literal fact or not, it in
rise affects my immortality. My faith rests on something surer
tan the accuracy of any historic fact."

To this airily confident and serenely beautiful young sceptic,
rhom the authors she names appear to have helped to an un-
shaken security that not one of themselves ever attained, comes,
one fine day, a windfall of something like twenty-five millions of
dollars, a bequest from a rejected lover. With it she sets to work
instanter to regenerate society, or as much of society as twenty-

404 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

five millions can be conveniently made to cover. It may do for
a Russian fanatic like Tolstoi' to preach and practise voluntary
poverty as a means to social reorganization, but Boston has its
weather eye open to the fact that "money makes the mare
go." Mildred's naive belief in the power of money, and the
whole-hearted worship given to it in this story, have certain qual-
ities we do not remember to have seen equalled elsewhere.
However they may strike the unprejudiced observer, there is noth-
ing cynical in them so far as the author's intention goes. Nothing
but pure infantile simplicity, relying in trustful confidence on the
inability of " Christian and Protestant " human nature to resist
any hook very thoroughly baited with ready cash, could have dic-
tated the scheme for foreign missions which Miss Brewster lays
before " five people of different religious faiths, the broadest-minded
and most public-spirited persons known to " her, with such sug-
gestive initials as " Revs. P — B— , A— McK— , E. E. H— , P—
M — , and Mrs. A — F. P — ." Into the complete details of it we
have not space to enter. It is to be called " The Christian Mis-
sionary Fund," and its work, so far as it concerns the five trus-
tees, one of whom is always to be a woman, is to be " entirely
unsectarian, though always distinctly Christian and Protestant."
The fund, amounting to two hundred thousand dollars yearly, is
to be applied, first, " towards promoting the spiritual and mental,
and thus indirectly the material, welfare of the most helpless and
degraded people on the globe " ; second, to promoting Christian-
ity and education in lands like Japan ; and thirdly, to endeavors
to diminish the slave-trade wherever it exists, and for preventing
the liquor-traffic between civilized and barbarous nations. These
most laudable ends having been duly laid by Miss Brewster be-
fore her silent, attentive, and reverend committeemen and woman,
she further explains to them that in the sending out of mission-
aries no acceptation of creeds shall be required of any applicant.
Every woman employed shall receive the same salary as a man
would for doing the same work. No distinction with regard to
sex shall be made in sending out preachers and pastors, and all
women who desire to preach and to administer the sacraments
shall be " authorized to do so if possessed of proper qualifica-
tions."

" I told the trustees," goes on the large-minded Mildred, "that although
their work as trustees was to be entirely undenominational, and that they were to
discourage any sectarian work in whatever schools and churches might be estab-
lished, this was not to be interpreted to mean a refusal to send good men and
women, even if they held narrow sectarian views. / hold myself too liberal to re-

1 889-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 405

fuse to send any one who can do any good, even though he hold medieval views
on eschatology. If a man can persuade a savage to wash his face and stop beat-
ing his wife, / am willing to allow him his cassock and crucifix, and all the joys
of a celibate High-Churchism, so long, at least, as he holds himself responsible to
no other body than the committee of my choosing. I have observed that a fair
amount of civilization, intelligence, and real Christianity can co-exist with a very
crude theology."

If not so brutally vehement as the good Queen Bess's ad-
dress to one of her refractory bishops, " I made you, sir, and by
God I will unmake you ! " this is quite as savagely simple in
its estimate of the weight of will and money when put in the
scale against private judgment in matters of religion. Aside
from the points we have mentioned the book does not call for
notice.

Although he has by no means written a complete biography
of his illustrious father, Mr. Wilfrid Ward has produced a most
interesting and valuable book about him : William George Ward
and the Oxford Movement. (London and New York : Macmillan
& Co.) Possibly he intends to supplement it with some fuller
account of Dr. Ward's Catholic life, the present volume bring-
ing his career just within the threshold of it. To the general
reading public that portion must be, without doubt, the most
attractive, perhaps, also, the most useful.

Viewed in the light here thrown on him from his very ear-
liest years, Dr. Ward seems to have offered in his entire inte-
rior make-up ideal material for conversion to Catholicity. There
was in him (to put the intellectual side where he would himself,
have put it, in the first and lowest place) a remorselessly clear
mental vision, which apprehended almost instantaneously what-
ever lay within its scope, which followed unerringly every ray
of light, and tracked it to its source by a sort of unconscious
instinct which made him careless of the surrounding darkness.
With this clear vision went what does not invariably accompany
it, an equally clear and uncompromising speech, a candor of ut-
terance which made his word a nearly transparent medium for his
impressions and his convictions. That trait marked him through-
out, making him as thoroughly an enfant terrible in the nursery
and the school-room as he was later on, when propounding
the natural results of " free inquiry " in religious matters with
such fatal effect in the case of Arthur Hugh Clough, or when
making the famous speech in the Sheldonian Theatre, which pre-
ceded his condemnation by Convocation and the deprivation
of his Oxford degree. As a boy it appeared to him a com-

406 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

monplace and inevitable matter to reply to a tutor who found
fault with his answer to a mathematical problem: "I don't
know why it is, but when I see that my answer to a sum is
right, I don't care if all the world says it's wrong. I know it's
right " — as, indeed, it proved to be. As a man, arraigned for pub-
lishing that remarkable book, The Ideal of a Christian Church,
which, appealing to thinking men in all camps, yet commended it-
self entirely to very few, any attempt at conciliation, or at explana-
tion which should minimize differences or represent him as in any
manner open to conviction, was as foreign to him as one might
suppose it to an unsophisticated savage. Accused of saying
that at his ordination he had signed the Thirty-nine Articles in
a " non-natural sense," his only defence was to reply that in the
first place the Oxford Convocation had. no claim to represent the
Church of England, and in the second, that, conceding for the
sake of getting a hearing that its members did hold the place of
his judges, yet they were so blinded by pre-judgment of ques-
tions which had nothing to do with his special case that it would
be almost impossible for them to decide it justly.

" All the wishes in the world cannot alter facts," he said to them. " Your
belief that certain doctrines are pernicious can have nothing to do with the ques-
tion whether they are allowed by the symbolical documents of the English
Church ; and yet I cannot but fear that vast numbers of you mix up in your
minds these absolutely distinct matters, and spare yourselves the trouble of ex-
amining this question that is before you, because of your intense conviction on a
question you have nothing to do with. And this difficulty of procuring a fair
hearing is greatly increased by the necessary nature of my defence. I subscribed
certain formularies in what I have called a non-natural sense. Granted. But is
it the intention of the Church of England that they necessarily be subscribed in
a natural sense ? If it be, then it is the intention of the Church of England that
there shall be no subscribers to them at all."

It was the tu quoque argument — the readiest and the heaviest
bludgeon — ineffectual chiefly because the heads before him, even
if naturally wooden and not incapable of being broken, were
protected by that impenetrable covering of prejudice which the
white wig worn by English judges not inaptly symbolizes. " If
I signed them, as I confess, in a non-natural sense," was the
burden of Ward's reply, " which one of you who are my accu-
sers signed them in the natural sense ? What special gloss each
put upon them he alone may know, but we all know that there
was a gloss in every case." That was William George Ward's
intellectual equipment, singleness of vision and transparent
speech.

1889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 407

Alongside of it lay something more — not so much more pre-
ious in itself as indispensable to the full use and final attain-
icnt of all that was implied in his intellectual endowment. " I
is once wondering," says St. Teresa, '' why God values humil-
ty so greatly ; and as I wondered, I saw it was because humility
truth." If it seem paradoxical to speak of so blunt, so un-
>mpromising, so aggressive a personality as yet most essentially
id thoroughly humble in mind as well as in heart, it is so only
the sense which makes of a paradox simply an unrecognized
tth. His only sovereign was Truth, and he was so loyal a subject
tat this submission freed him entirely from what the spiritual writers
ill human respect. He knew that he saw with almost unerring
Decision what came within his intellectual range, but he accounted
lat faculty as little meritorious, as little capable of supporting a
structure of personal pride as would be its counterpart of un-
clouded bodily vision. It was useful, certainly, but what more
could be truthfully said about it ? There was in him no manner
of affectation. He was able to look at his own mind just as he
would at another's, or, to put it on another plane where the fact
can be aptly illustrated, as he did at his own minor peculiarities. He
seems to have been as destitute of personal vanity as he was
guiltless of intellectual pride. During his school days at Win-
chester, while prefect, it was his habit to go to the large school-
room early, in order to get the full benefit of a custom called
" pealing," in which the juniors gave vent to their sentiments by
shouting out some characteristic criticism of their personal pecu-
liarities to each prefect as he entered. Most of them shunned
lis ordeal by coming in only at the latest moment. But Ward
ijoyed it. He could enter with perfect heartiness into any laugh
gainst him. The fact was that he rated purely intellectual gifts
so inferior to the ethical qualities which belonged to the ideal
had always entertained as highest, and consciously striven
>ward, that he could scarcely understand intellectual vanity.
Intellect is a wretched gift, my dear Henry," he said to his
•iend Wilberforce, . " absolutely worthless. Now my intellect is
some respects almost infinite, and yet I don't value it a bit."
balance that, he would speak of his moral shortcomings in
irms as unaffected — and, we believe, as really exaggerated. Since
we believe in the existence of the devil, we must believe that an
almost pure intellectuality may co-exist with moral depravity.
But moral excellence has also the nature of vision. It cannot be
•so divorced from true intelligence that it can ever be true to say
that " intellect is a wretched gift." For it is the gift which cor-

408 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

responds to faith ; it is the solid foundation of the natural rational
order on which is built the supernatural which completes, not
annuls that order. There is a true sense in which we may speak
of Satan, almost pure intelligence that he is, as extremely stupid.
The rational creature is not a Cyclops. His vision of truth is
impaired if he loses either the intellectual or the moral eye with
which he was made to contemplate it. It was because the reli-
gious side of him was developed in a degree so exactly propor-
tional to the intellectual that Ward not only saw the whole round
of speculative truth, but acknowledged so ingenuously and wore so
faithfully the yoke of Him who, proclaiming Himself the light of
the world, yet imposed but one essential preliminary on those
who would be enlightened by Him. " Learn of Me," He says,
" not to penetrate all secrets of wisdom, but first and before all,
to be meek and lowly of heart. He that will do the will of My
Father shall know of the doctrine, whether it be true."

It is interesting to find Ward preaching on that text, bear-
ing hard upon it, making it the true philosophical groundwork
of his whole system of religious thought while yet, by outward
position at least, an Anglican. Truly speaking, we suppose him
never to have been other than essentially Catholic. For what
does it mean to be that, except to have both the heart and the
intelligence candid, unbiased by pride, filled with true desire for their
only satisfaction, God, adapting Himself to the capacity of human
nature? What differenced Ward, what differences almost any
sincere Christian of clear intelligence from agnostics of the Hux-
ley type, is not their failure to see the difficulties which lie in
the way of acceptance of Christian doctrine and history on
the merely intellectual side — meaning here by intellect the power
which draws conclusions from the purely external premises pre
sented to the senses and intrinsically capable of reproduction
and re-presentation to the senses of other men. Those difficulties
are patent enough — it is supremely easy to stumble over them.
What makes a Christian of the special type which our times are
more and more demanding, is not his blindness on the side of
the discursive reason, but his^ equally clear perception of the
reality of that interior life on which all morality depends save
that which can be effectually safeguarded by the police. That
objectivity which practical reason demands, and which is the strong-
hold of the scientific man for all purposes, both constructive and
offensive, the Christian knows to be as essential to all those inter-
nal operations which make him aspire toward holiness — toward
union, that is, with the God and Father of his spirit. The impulse

1889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 409

which makes him seek bodily food is not stronger — nay, as the his-
tory of all the martyrs proves, it is often not so strong as that which
draws him to the source of that life which transcends the senses.
The Christian is a whole man ; both his eyes are open. He has
grasped the fact that Christianity is not a mere set of doctri'nes,
but a matter of experience ; a life above nature, into which
a man must be re-born, and in which he breathes a new air
and exercises new faculties. He apprehends by his senses and
assimilates by his natural reason that knowledge which makes it
possible for him to li/e with other men in a world which is
ringing on all sides with the despairing cry of those who do
not flinch from tracking their sense of duty as remorselessly
home to a purely natural source as they have done those ex-
ternal and forensic evidences on which Christianity, considered
as a simply human and historical system, rests. He sees and
feels the thorns that beset that path as keenly as any agnostic
or pessimist or profligate of the lot. But he sees, too, that the
moral and spiritual ideal remains as fixed and permanent as
the sun in the material firmament, witnessed to as certainly by
the anguish and the falls of the morally or spiritually blind
as by the security and peace of those whose vision of it is un-
clouded. Not all who are Christian see explicitly the dilemma
which confronted Ward, but each in his own measure, when
confronted with the cavil of the atheist or agnostic, finds his own
justification in a process which is implicitly the same. We can
hardly do better than quote the summary of that process which
his son has given in this volume. More and more as contro-
versy grows hotter, and the merely natural seeks to aflirm itself
to the utter denial and exclusion of its complement in the su-
pernatural, that side of the case will need reaffirmation :

" His original tendency had been, feeling the difficulty attending on all proof
in matters of doctrine on the one hand, and on the other the absolute and unde-
niable reality of the conscience and the moral law, to minimize the former, and
to insist on the latter. But when as time went on he came to feel that that very
minimum of doctrine which was necessary as a support and sanction of the moral law
must fade away before the consistent application of the latitudinarian intellectual
principles, the question presented itself: May there not be after all some indissolu-
ble connection between the plenitude of" (Christian) " doctrine and the highest
morality ? Those dogmas which I have looked upon as burdens, may they not be
after all as helpful to the full development of the moral life as belief in God's ex-
istence is indispensable to its first rudiments ? Then following on this came the
conception of church authority as the external embodiment of conscience, com-
pleting and defining both in religious knowledge and moral precept what con-
science traced faintly and imperfectly : recognized by men of good-will as the

410 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

vicegerent of God in the world : confirming with a directly divine sanction thos
reasonings from Scripture which by themselves had seemed so imperfect, just as the
arguments for God's existence' seemed imperfect without the clear, confirming
voice of conscience to seal and secure them " (p. 74) ;

and giving, we may add, precisely, and in a thoroughly ap-
prehensible and authoritative manner, that explication of man's
persistent desire for the supernatural and the permanent which
the " scientist " essays to do for the natural and passing phe-
nomena of the visible world.

We are sorry to find the Worthington Company, which has
put out so many good books as well as so many comparatively
unobjectionable ones, beginning its new "Banner Library " with
a tale of adultery, not merely vicious but vulgar in spite of its
veneer. It is rather too bad to couple John Halifax and Jane
Eyre and Adam Bede with Adolphe Belot's My Good Friend.

Marion J. Brunowe ought, one of these days, to give us
some excellent short stories for young folks, if we may judge of
her possible achievement from her present success. A Lucky
Family (New York : A. Riffarth) has some obvious faults in the
way of style — we point out the repeated use of " 'neath " for be-
neath in descriptive passages, and such expressions as " I will
never know this lesson " as examples of what we mean — but in
sprightliness, ease, good intention, and lightness of execution they
are very promising. But the volume stands badly in need of
more careful proof-reading, and in order to attain justly to its
probable destiny as a premium book, it will have to undergo a
thorough revision on both the points we have named. Even the
highest morality and the most convincing scientific truth gain
something from a correct and pleasing literary presentation, while
stories which are to be put into the hands of children and young
people in their formative stage, fail utterly of one of their final
ends when they do not measurably succeed in this one.

The Struggle for Immortality (Boston and New York :
Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) is a characteristic volume of essays by
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. They are all readable, though a flip-
pancy of expression, which their author seems to regard as a
kindly condescension to moods and ways of thinking which differ
from her own, makes them jar now and then on the sensibilities
of those who agree with her in the main. The paper which
gives its title to the series seeks to be a development on
Christian lines of the Darwinian doctrines of evolution and the
" survival of the fittest." Miss Phelps thinks it probable that
" immortality is only for the immortal," as we heard a witty

1889.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 411

sceptic sum up the result of her speculations the 'Other day.
And she thinks, moreover, that if the attainment of immortality
should be represented not merely as a victory of faith and a re-
ward of virtue, but as a prize which resolution alor;e may win,
though winning on prescribed lines, it will appeal "to self-re-
spect " and gain combatants where other motives fail. Lest we
should be thought to misrepresent her, we quote a characteristic
statement of her point :

"It is perhaps true that many a person objects to troubling himself with
immortality, either as an advantage or a disadvantage, when his attention is con-
centrated exclusively upon the fact that eternal life involves definite moral con-
ditions. That it should imply, also, certain conditions of a very different sort is
quite another matter ; that it should touch the intellect, the force, the good sense,
or even the simple pluck of a man — this is to be regarded. We may be conquered
through our pride, when we cannot be won through our conscience. He who does
not find it any longer exciting to be told that he is not good enough to live for
ever, will scarcely hear 'without interest that he is not strong enough. Many
of us would rather be called bad than weak. It is an arrest to the thoughtful-
ness of any man but an inferior one to show him reason why he may be in the
way of losing an obvious gain through inferiority. Precisely that, such a view of
the struggle for immortality as we have suggested would undertake to show."

How is that for a Yankee version of the future life, its mo-
tives, its punishments, and its rewards, as opposed to what that
other New England doctress in social reforms and moral issues,
Miss Ames, pleasantly refers to as "mediaeval eschatology " ?

412 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Dec.,

WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.

•

"OUR SCHOOLS."

IT is not necessary to force a decision from the Supreme Court of the United
States in order to ascertain positively whether any portion of the American
people can claim an exclusive ownership of the schools supported by public taxa-
tion. We know that such a claim is nflt recognized by the law of any State in
the Union. The tax-payers as a body are the real owners of the schools built
and sustained by their money. Whatever declarations may proceed from those
who want absolute dominion for their vague religious and agnostic theories, the
fundamental law requires that every honest expression of opinion from tax-payers
shall be respected. No apology is needed when we as Catholics venture to assert
our legal privilege by refusing to approve a defective educational system. Being
citizens, our protests should be attentively considered. We speak as well-wishers
of our country ; it is foul play to make us appear as enemies of the public good.
This seems to be the determined policy of the bigots selected from various places
to keep up the cry of alarm at the meetings in Tremont Temple, Boston. Every
statement on the school question from a Catholic source is there exhibited in a
lurid light as coming from the enemies of the Republic.

There is much to commend in an address on this subject delivered by Mr. T.
C. O'Sullivan to the delegates of the Catholic Young Men's National Union, in
Providence, R. I. The passages which we quote have the force of true eloquence
combined with legal precision of statement :

" From time to time, by right reverend and reverend gentlemen" (Bishop
Coxe and others), " it is resolved that ' we guard our public schools from their
Catholic enemies — the enemies of our country — that we may transmit our public
schools unimpaired to posterity.' Now and at all times we solemnly declare, in
answer to this, that we are not enemies of the public schools, and were a hostile
hand raised against them we would go at least an equal distance with our de-
famers in defence of them. But as human establishments are liable to imperfec-
tions, we believe that our public-school system is not free from them, and while be-
lieving this, if concerning them we advance a proposition which we conscientiously
hold to be for the welfare of our national existence, are we to be treated as social
mutineers, scowled at and howled at and branded as public enemies ? There
is an American institution quite as sacred as the public-school system — the Con-
stitution of the United States, the charter of our liberties. It was at first consi-
dered to be as perfect a production as wise and patriotic statesmen could formu-
late. Yet from time to time other statesmen have suggested amendments to
the Constitution. Do they live in history as the enemies of the United States ?

" Along with being somewhat uncharitable, these gentlemen seem to have
rather cross-grained notions concerning the subject of ' mine and thine ' in this
matter. Their excessive eagerness to twist the school system into the service of
their own crooked purposes has made them forgetful of the fact that they are not
the sole proprietors of the public schools. In their multifarious and sonorous re-
solutions they modify the subject schools by the use of a pronoun in the first per-
son, plural number, possessive case, ' our schools.' But, gentlemen, we respect-
fully submit that you have not as yet purchased our interest in the public schools,
and until you have received a quit-claim of that interest we protest against your
taking possession to the exclusion of all other owners. Has it never dawned upon

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 413

you, gentlemen, that we are associates in this enterprise ? It is about time that
you opened the window of your soul to the light of the fact that we are copartners
with you in the ownership of the public schools, and as long as we are, so long
will we have a voice in their management. We are glad to agree with the gentle-
men when they give us the opportunity, and we are happy to inform them of our
hearty sympathy with that clause of their resolution which declares that we shall
transmit our public schools unimpaired to posterity. But in their anxiety to
teach only physics and the multiplication table they are in danger of neglecting
the Decalogue and their own duty to the human multiplication table. Therefore,
we warn them that while they may succeed in transmitting the public schools
unimpaired to posterity, they may fail in transmitting posterity unimpaired to
the public schools.

" Until we have clothed our national wards, the red Indians, with the powers
of American citizenship, and have yielded up the reins of government to them,
we cannot have a government of simon-pure Americans. Strictly speaking, of
course we are all of alien extraction, and who has the better claim to that kind
of Americanism as between Bishop Coxe and myself is only a question as to
whether his grandmother came over in the Mayflower or mine in the Shamrock.
But for all governmental purposes the alien is a myth. In American law ' an
alien is a person born out of the United States and not naturalized.' According
to the fourteenth amendment, ' all persons born or naturalized in the United
States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.'
Once a citizen an alien no more. None but citizens can have a voice in our gov-
ernment. Therefore, we cannot have a ' government by aliens,' and when the
writer in the Forum asserts that we have such a government he must submit to
the charge either of ignorance or falsehood.

" As religion and love of country are the safeguards of the state, it is fortu-
nate for the perpetuity of our institutions that there is a religious trait in the
American character, and that we have a country which we can love. I take it to
be the object of our Catholic young men in this Union to cultivate and strength-
en this love of country, and assist in the preservation of that religious trait in the
American character. Nor is there anything in our duties as vRoman Catholics
inconsistent with our loyalty as American citizens. Those who profess to believe
ic contrary will find, if they take the trouble to inform themselves, that our re-
igious and our civil obligations are in perfect accord.

"There is nothing in the practice of religion inconsonant with the stern activ-
ties of life. The history of our country is replete with beautiful illustrations of
lis. Columbus the navigator, standing triumphant upon the deck of his ves-
;1, surrounded by his repentant companions, and gazing with joyful eyes upon
le land, is not a more inspiring picture than Columbus the Christ-bearer, bow-
ig in humble adoration before the cross on the shore of the New World.

" Victorious Washington receiving the sword of conquered Cornwallis at
rorktown is not a more thrilling sight than Washington suppliant and on
bended knees in the snows of Valley Forge, beseeching the God of battles for
strength and fortitude in that hour of tribulation." THOMAS MCMILLAN.

NOTE TO ARTICLE ON THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY.

The writer of this instructive article is no doubt aware that the rector of
the University has intimated his intention to accept the diploma of a regularly
constituted Catholic college in lieu of examination for admittance to matriculation.
He therefore has reference to examinations not only for entrance but also for

4 14 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Dec.,

place in class or for prizes. We take pleasure in printing herewith the following
sentences from a recent address of Father Richards, S.J., President of George-
town College, as they refer to matters treated of in the present article :

" There is, indeed, one other agency which, as I foresee, will be of decided
benefit in aiding us to overcome the failings I have noted. When the Catholic
University of America opens its doors to all comers and subjects them to a rigid
matriculation examen we shall have a test to which we can appeal. Then the
colleges which have been working through good and ill report to maintain a high
and ever-increasing standard will be known, and those which have traded on the
name without the substance of Catholic college must sink to their places of high-
school or academy. In this I see the shadow of good to come. I know not what
others may feel, but I for one am impatient for the day when the Catholic Uni-
versity will open its literary courses."

THE "PLEA FOR ERRING BRETHREN."

Those of our readers who may wish to peruse the original paper written by
the author of the above-named article in the present number, and entitled " Have
Protestants Divine Faith ? " which is referred to on page 355, will find it reprinted
with justificatory remarks in the New York Freeman 's Journal of dates Novem-
ber 10 and 17, 1888.

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS, ETC., SHOULD
BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION, NO. 415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH
STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

The Catholic papers of the United States have kindly given much of their
valuable space to notices of the Columbian Reading Union. A favor-
able comment in the Ave Maria, published at Notre Dame, Ind., has brought us
many letters asking for further information. For several prominent editorials we
are indebted to the Catholic Review and the Pilot. We extend thanks to the
editors whose words of approval are here quoted to show the general interest
awakened in places widely separated :

From the Catholic Columbian.

11 In order to do away with the reproach that Catholics are not acquainted
wiih Catholic literature and to direct readers in search of the best books in every
department of knowledge, especially of history, science, fiction, and biography,
THE CATHOLIC WORLD has undertaken to form and guide and advise the Co-
lumbian Reading Union, which is an aggregation of Reading Circles and of
individuals animated with the high purpose of cultivating the acquaintance of the
leading Catholic authors.

" The work is worthy of the best efforts of the scholars who conduct that
brilliant magazine.

" For the managers of the project .to be successful, however, it must be ap-
preciated. Reading Circles must be formed. Individuals must seize the oppor-
tunity for trustworthy direction in their search for information and intellec-
tual recreation. The condition of membership is only one dollar a year, and in
return for this sum members will receive the circulars, guide-lists, catalogues, and
other publications of the Union ; have books they want bought for them at a dis-
count, and obtain all the benefits of association with and suggestions from other
students of literature in the organization."

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 415

From the Dakota Catholic,

" It is not to the credit of Catholics in the United States that Catholic litera-
ture notoriously receives too little encouragement at their hands. Their indiffer-
ence to the proper support of the Catholic press is a constant topic of complaint,
but it extends to Catholic works generally. So marked is the fact that, while
secular works of all kinds 'find ready publishers and abundant sales, he who
would give a new Catholic work to the public must go down into his own pocket
for the expenses of publication, but few publishers being found willing to assume
the risks involved. Yet we have an abundance of excellent Catholic reading
matter which is unknown to the generality of Catholics. Any effort to bring
these works more largely before the people is a commendable one, bound to pro-
duce excellent results. For some time THE CATHOLIC WORLD, of New York,
has been maturing'plans for a general movement, which has now taken shape by
the organization of the ' Columbian Reading Union.' The object of the society
is the diffusion of good literature. It will consist of a central organization, and
membership to include those in charge of parochial and public libraries, Reading
Circles, and other literary organizations in the church, as well as individuals who
desire to cultivate a better acquaintance with Catholic authors and standard
writers of the best general literature. As soon as practicable, suitable lists of
books for different classes of readers, juvenile and adult, will be prepared and
generally circulated. Every one who has had experience with libraries knows that
each class has its own tastes, and that the same works are not suitable to the
educated and the partially educated, the male and the female, the working class,
the professional class, and those of leisure. The best selections can only be made
by persons of experience, who, by exchanging opinions and working together in
such an organization, can accomplish the best results. The organization will be
supported by membership fees and donations from those who desire to be its
patrons. Books can be donated and circulated through the membership of the
Union. Any organization or individual can obtain membership by sending one
dollar in postage stamps or postal note. Persons ordering books in quantities
will have the advantage of the most liberal discounts. We hope and expect
it advantages to result from this movement, and ask the hearty co-operation
our readers in making it successful, and of advantage to themselves and to
e Catholic people of the United States."

The Pittsburgh Catholic makes a good argument against unjust competition
in literature as follows :

" In complaining about the lack of support given to Catholic literature, our
esteemed contemporaries overlook the fact that general American literature
suffers in the same way. There are exceptional works which achieve great suc-
cess ; but we have not lacked them also, as, for instance, Cardinal Gibbons'
Faith of Our Fathers, whose circulation has probably reached two hundred
thousand. But these will always be exceptional. We know of two successful
novels, as they are called, from which the authors received the magnificent royal-
js, respectively, of sixty-five dollars and thirty-five dollars ; nor wjre they Cath-
lic novels, nor written by Catholics. Our whole literature suffers from the
unjust competition of limitless piracy, rendered possible through lack of an inter-
national copyright law. So long as we are flooded with these cheap reprints, so
long will the growth of true American literature be impossible. Indeed, the
question is one beyond dollars and cents, and we would be glad to see Congress
pass such a law without waiting to tinker up a treaty with other nations. Then

VOL. L, -27

4i 6 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Dec.,

we should see a vital growth of Catholic literature, along with a healthier tone in
the general productions of the country."

From the Church, News, of Washington, D. C.

" We must hail with the greatest satisfaction any plan which will lead our
people to devote more time to mental improvement, for one of the greatest evils
of the present is the indifference of so many regarding healthy literature. The
daily papers are widely read by young and old ; so are the popular novels, whose
sickly sentimentality destroys in the hearts of hundreds the noble sentiments im-
planted therein by parents and teachers. In fact, every kind of literature which
appeals to the coarsest tastes and satisfies inordinate curiosity finds a welcome,
and not unfrequently from those who have been educated in our best schools.
Hence, any plan which will create a desire for good reading-matter and a hatred
for the vile trash now so popular must necessarily receive the encouragement of
all whose approval is worthy of consideration.

" Whilst the Reading Circles may not be able to accomplish all that is claimed
for them by their immediate friends, still there is no good reason why they
should not be tried. We know that men are greatly moved by circumstances
without being aware that they are influenced by other than their own minds ; so
that we find at almost every step what is vulgarly called a ' craze ' — that is, the
popular mind is directed toward one object so decidedly that everything else is
made to stand aside in its pursuit. This being one of the customs of society, it
is well to make use of it for good rather than evil. We all know that there is no
difficulty in directing the minds of the majority of the people toward those things
which please the lower tastes, but it is not so easy to turn the tide of public
opinion in the direction of the pure, the noble, and the exalted.

" If Reading Circles should not be the great success expected, still there is no
reason why they should not be permitted to do all the good possible. By their
aid every man will be enabled to accomplish something of value to his neighbor.

" There is among all classes a desire to imitate what others are doing suc-
cessfully. If a Reading Circle be well conducted it will not prove advantageous
for its own members only, but it will cause others to be founded in the immediate
neighborhood. By this means the good work will spread, and every man who
aids in organizing a Reading Circle may be sowing the seed which shall bear rich
fruit where he little expects it. Unfortunately, quite a number of young men
when they graduate imagine that for them there is no need for further study, and
yet the most brilliant school-days are but the foundation on which to build.

" Let Reading Circles be at once organized, whether they are to be permanent
or short-lived, for they must result in great good to all brought within their

influences."

From the Catholic Home, of Chicago, Ills.

" THE CATHOLIC WORLD contains the working details of the Reading
Circles, from which much solid good is reasonably expected. To make Catholics
acquainted with the works of their own writers, and to guide them in the selec-
tion of books in the various departments of literature, history, and science, and to
stimulate and form in them a taste for the best literature, are the objects of these
Reading Circles. In places where the Catholic community is small and the whole
tone of society is hostile to the church these Reading Circles will be of great ser-
vice. Even in larger communities, where there are church libraries or sodality
reading-rooms, the list published by this nevv Reading Union will be very useful.
They will, we hope, have the effect of teaching the young Catholic not to talk of
Catholic literature, English, American, Irish, French, and German, as if it were

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 417

beneath contempt. Of the millions of Catholics able to read in this country
there are multitudes who know as little about Catholic literature as they do about
Hebrew. It is the purpose of the Reading Circles to make Catholics take an in-
terest in their own magnificent literature ; to make them acquainted with Wise-
man and Manning, with Newman and Faber, with Lacordaire and Montalembert
and Dupanloup, with Brownson and Spalding and Hecker, with Kenrick and
MacHale and O'Hagan, with Lingard, Darras. and Shea, and hundreds of others
whom we cannot enumerate. To make readers and authors acquainted, and to
form the taste of young Catholics on sound principles, will be the chief good ef-
fected by the Reading Circles."

We have received information from England of a meeting recently held at
the residence of the Earl of Aberdeen to inaugurate the Home Reading Circles
Union, the work of which will be associated with the university extension
movement. The plan proposed is to arrange courses of reading for different
classes of readers, especially for young people and artisans ; to establish local
circles for discussion of specified subjects, and to organize summer assemblies
at which lectures will be delivered, prizes and certificates given, and social
gatherings fostered. Distinguished names appear among the vice-presidents,
such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke of Argyle, Professor Bryce,
M.P., Sir W. Hart Dyke, M.P., Mr. Robert Browning, and Archdeacon Farrar.

One of our correspondents sends us a lengthy report, from which we shall
quote some passages, indicating the success which has attended the efforts of
a popular writer, Mr. George W. Cable, in directing

THE HO>ME CULTURE CLUBS.

The report says : " It is not our plan to work mainly through public, but
private relations. Our efforts are to individuals, not classes. We seek to help
one another as personal friends in one another's homes rather than to supply

>mething else instead of home. Ours is a scheme to know personally those who
can make use of our friendship, and to give them that friendship in such ex-
:hange of mutual benefits as may be mutually chosen.

" The Home Culture Clubs are an attempt to give the fullest practical rec-
)gnition to the fact that what the homes of the people are so the people will be ;

lat mere legislation, and especially compulsory legislation, cannot alone elevate
and purify public society ; that no multitude of organized benevolent efforts, ad-
dressed to men and women in mere classes and masses, and which leave the pros-
perous and unprosperous individual strangers to each other, can ever establish
that personal friendly confidence between them which is essential to the largest
and best results in character and conduct. On the other hand, our plan keeps
in view that it is human nature that makes the dividing lines of private society,
and that any sentimental effort to ignore those lines which offers sudden violence
to them must fail, whether they be the outcome of ambitions or of condescen-
sions.

" We seek now as we have not sought before to extend those clubs far and

ade. What is good and practicable for one town is good and practicable for
one thousand other goodly towns. There are thousands of good people, young

id old, male and female, who want to give some effort of their own to the bet-
terment of others less fortunate than they, yet have no fortunes to bequeath nor
any consciousness of large executive capacities calling them to the prosecution of
large benevolent schemes. Fprm a Home Culture Club. Let it be made up of
from three to seven or eight members. Never let it meet for mere play, never

4i 8 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Dec.,

give it what will either waste the time or overtask the feeblest member. Do
not let it interfere with a full share of out-door enjoyments. Do not force
gratuitous social promotions. Let the club choose its own pursuit, only see that
it is some pleasant profit, and first, last, and always bear in mind that the ulti-
mate purpose is not to see how many pages of good books a group of persons can
read or how much French or German or biology it can study, or how much good
music it can hear, but that it is to open a field in which, without those social
confessions which those in humble life abhor as cordially as any do, we can with
the. least possible condescension or embarrassment bestow a practical and bene-
ficent friendship on those that need it most.

" This scheme is beginning to cost money. Its expense is almost nothing in
proportion to its operations, but it is enough to make it very desirable that each
club should establish a penny treasury. One or two clubs did this last year. A
contribution of two pennies for each member at each weekly meeting will pay the
secretary and his or her expenses. The reading-rooms are a much larger pecu-
niary item. The expense of furnishing and keeping them open has been met
by generous citizens."

In previous numbers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD we have published many
interesting letters supporting our Reading Union, which is now attracting wide-
spread attention. Some of the most thoughtful and suggestive letters came from
Boston and other places within range of its influence. With much pleasure,
therefore, we record this month the good news that —

" Boston's first Catholic Reading Circle, according to the plan of the Colum-
bian Reading Union, effected a permanent organization on the evening of Tues-
day, October 8, in the Temperance Hall of St. .Joseph's Church, Roxbury, Mass.
Over sixty ladies were present. The Rev. J. B. Troy, of St. Joseph's, addressed
the meeting, explaining for the benefit of new-comers the object of the Catholic
Reading Circles, and the necessity of combating by the diffusion of good Catho-
lic literature the immorality and infidelity which menaces youth in so much of
the light literature of the day. Miss E. A. McMahon, of South Boston, tem-
porary chairman, then presided at the election of officers. These were chosen :
President, Miss Katherine E. Conway, of the Pilot ; Vice-President, Miss E. A.
McMahon, of South Boston ; Secretary, Miss Mary Shay, of Roxbury ; Treasurer
and Librarian, Miss K. Moore, of South Boston. It was decided that meetings
should be held at eight P.M. on the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month,
in the Temperance Hall of St. Joseph's. Miss McMahon reported the donation
of some books for a start towards a reference library. After some discussion on
ways and means the meeting adjourned."

The Boston Catholic Union opened the season of 1889-90 with the largest
attendance ever seen on any occasion since its formation. By invitation of the
Union, Miss Katherine E. Conway read a paper on " The Ideals of Christian
Womanhood," which was exceedingly well received. It was announced that the
Union had decided to call a special meeting of the members and their lady friends
to organize Reading Circles for the study of our best Catholic literature. These
circles are intended for both ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the Columbian
Reading Union we extend cordial greeting to the new Reading Circles of Boston,
and cherish the hope that they will let their light shine brightly for the benefit of
all engaged in the same good work.

We give two letters from prominent educational institutions :

" The Reading Union was a pet idea of our school, long wished for, talked

1889.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 419

of, and when accomplished under such able direction we may no longer withhold
the approval given as soon as the Union was mentioned. Our graduates have
often expressed a desire for just such a circle and wanted one formed from their
Alma Mater as a centre. That was impracticable, and we even suggested the
advantages of ' Chautauqua ' and the * Boston Society for Study at Home.'

" We are delighted that Catholic literature is to be given to our girls, and
assure you we will do all we can to promote interest in the 'Union.' I have
spoken to some of the ladies of the congregation, and they will soon form a
Reading Circle. Our graduates are charmed with the idea of self-improvement
after school-days, and we will have our present senior class begin the course so
that they will continue the good work when they leave.

" Please find enclosed one dollar, our contribution to the Columbian Reading
Union, to which we desire to be affiliated. We have quite an extensive school
library, to which our pupils have access at stated times, so that we shall be able
to supply many of the Catholic works indicated in the courses, ordering others
as they are required. To the class pursuing the course of English literature the
direction of the Union will doubtless prove highly advantageous. Being sub-
scribers to THE CATHOLIC WORLD, we take note of the suggestive remarks in
the Reading Circle department. * * * "

The writer of the following letter is entitled to our thanks for his generous
offering. We would like to see many others imitate his example :

" I heartily endorse the Reading Union, which will be of great value to
American Catholics. Could it not be brought before the American Catholic
Congress to be held in the near future ? I think it is sufficiently important. All
Catholic papers in the country should also take it up. They don't seem to be
alive to its importance as they should be. I have not seen a word concerning
in our local paper as yet, although 1 have watched for it. I enclose five dollars
help on the good work. Use it the best way you can. J. F. C."

We recommend J. F. C. to write a letter to his local paper with a request for
notice. Editors are always willing to accept good suggestions.

From the office of the Columbian Reading Union a request has been sent
to the Catholic publishers for a list of the best juvenile books among their publi-
cations. This list will be published for the guidance of our members in pur-
chasing Christmas presents. Some judicious friends give books in preference to
anything else that may be got for the little folks. Many parents have found it
no easy task to obtain a sufficient variety of books suitable to Catholic children.
re hope that our forthcoming list will be of service to them in this matter,
'rom a large city in the West comes the suggestion that as Catholic book-stores
re so scarce, an effort be made to induce the managers of stationery stores who
ceep a book-counter during the holidays to establish a department containing
Catholic literature. Further suggestions on this plan of extending the influence
)f our Reading Union will be very acceptable. M. C. M.

42O NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec.,

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

BOOKS AND READING : An Essay. By Brother Azarias. New York : Cathe-
dral Library, 460 Madison Avenue.

This unpretentious volume will supply a long and keenly-felt want among
Catholics. Its object is to show intelligent people with a taste for reading how
to read with the best profit, and as the author is a man of large experience and
extensive reading, he is well fitted to direct others in the pleasant paths of litera-
ture. The need of Catholic readers for the last twenty years has been the
guidance of such minds as his ; the reading habit has become so universal in
America, and the number of publications so large, and so often of a doubtful
character, that ordinary readers need to be guarded against vicious trash, and
also against the fault of reading much and aimlessly. Unfortunately, the rarest
publications have been essays of this character. In half a century Catholic
American publishers have been able to bring out but one or two really valuable
books of this nature. They were sadly defective, yet comparatively useful. But
in spite of their utility, publishers allowed them to go out of print, and for years
Catholic readers, the good and bad alike, have been sailing about without pilot
or compass, some fed on the husks of swine, others devouring with equal relish
whatever was printed, all more or less tainted, consciously or unconsciously, with
the errors of the time, which have tinged all literature from the novels of the
" Duchess " to the essays of Spencer.

It is curious to note, and instructive to our slow-going publishers, that the
initiative in providing readers with a safe guide in their reading has been taken
by a private association, with no experience, no capital, and outside the ordinary-
channels of trade. Moreover, their intention is to make it Pay. The quality
of the book is, of course, exceptionally good, and will appeal to the general as
well as to the Catholic public. It has three distinctive merits, which will securely
place it in the affections of readers. It has perfect literary form ; it is so thoroughly
practical that it will fit every temper ; it not only tells how to read and what to
read, but it abounds in keen and delightful criticism of our leading modern
authors. Perfect literary form is, we might say, the vice of this age. For its
sake the world swallows every abomination put forth by the licentious, the crazy
theorist, the half-cooked atheist. The meanest illustration, the weakest logic,
the most open falsehood are accepted as clean, strong, and genuine because the
style is elegant ; and some have come to maintain that the expression alone is
worth considering. Hence, genuine writers, whose matter is more to them than
their manner, are apt to receive scant consideration if they are plain, precise, and
lacking in elegance. The style of this essay is plain, precise, and elegant ; it is
nervous and concentrated ; every sentence provokes ideas, and each paragraph
is rich in illustration and allusion.

Naturally, the eager young reader will think more highly of its practical
directions than of its style at first, as he ought. The purpose of the essay is
never lost in fine writing. The rules which show a reader How to Read, and the
chapters devoted to describing What to Read cover fifty out of the seventy pages
in the book. In the first part the reader is told to read with attention, to take
notes, to consult the dictionary, to read with a purpose, to learn the art of forget-
ting, to be honest in reading and research, to read perseveringly, to master each

] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 421

book, and to remember that the best reading is that which tends to growth of
character as well as to intellectual development. In the second part the entire
field of literature is spread like a map before the reader, and its characteristics
plainly marked. History, poetry, biography, and fiction are gracefully treated,
and the great names that worked in each department held up in the light of
honest criticism. This criticism and the simple, pure style will make the book
delightful to those who may not need its advice. The essay is small, but it con-
tains a great deal. To test the capacity of its author one has but to travel over
each page at a leisurely pace and note the names, the books, the facts that are
mentioned, and the intimate acquaintance which the author enjoys with them.
The essay is a notable contribution to Catholic American literature, and it should
receive wide-spread recognition from Catholic readers and libraries.

THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY. By Julius H. Ward. Boston and New
York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. '

The author of this book has the highest kind of an ideal. He would have
the Christian Church exert that organic influence in the social which the state
exerts in the political life of the people. It might seem at first glance as if this
were a wholly un-American idea, but one who carefully follows the arguments
of Mr. Ward will find that he is not an advocate of the union of church and
state, but of harmony between church and state. This principle makes him
rather the truest kind of an American. It was never the intention of our fore-
fathers to establish a government which would antagonize the church. Far
from it ; they wished to favor the church by giving its influence the widest scope.
According to their view, the more harmony there is between the laws of the
state and the church the better. Such schemes as the national secularization
of education, the exclusive state supervision and control of private institutions,
the weakening of the marriage tie by divorce legislation, are encroachments
upon liberty which they never would have sanctioned. These destructive ten-
dencies have recently developed to such an alarming extent that we are in
danger of becoming politically an anti-Christian people. We shall, it is to be
feared, have an agnostic state while only a few of our people are really agnostics.
If our Protestant brethren were all like the writer of this book, the case would
be different. But, as it is, hatred of the Catholic religion makes most of the
sects willing to do anything for its overthrow. They prefer to see the state
positively anti-Christian, and opposed to themselves, rather than to have the old
liberties remain if Catholicism will be benefited by them. How true are the
words of our Lord, " He that is not with me is against me." The Protestant
religious papers in this country, almost without exception, approve of the war
which the governments of Europe are making against the church.

We have the greatest admiration for the few who, like Mr. Ward, dare to
follow principle without regard to popularity.

We think, however, his " collective church " is a pure figment of the
imagination. Only divine, organic unity of the church can make such a state
of things as he would wish to see possible. Until all Christians are united, and
all the people are Christian, we cannot hope for a complete influence of the
Christian religion over all the relations of life.

LIFE OF ST. BONAVENTURE. Translated by L. C. Skey. London : Burns &
Gates ; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

This book is translated into English, and not into the idiom of the language

422 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec.,

from which it came, with English words. This is more than we can say for some
of the translations of the lives of the saints into " English."

As a life of St. Bonaventure it is too short, and not enough is told about his
life, while too much is said of his works in the field of literature. It is one of
those books which, being quite satisfactory so far as it goes, yet does not go half
far enough.

The work which the saint did for the Council of Lyons would alone fill a
volume, and it is merely alluded to in a sentence. Our readers want to know
more about the lives of the saints than their writings. The book is well worth
careful reading, and we hope that the translator, having shown himself (or her-
self) so fully competent, will give us the privilege of praising more such work in
the future.

THE OSCOTIAN: A Literary Gazette of St. Mary's College, Oscott. The
Jubilee of Oscott. Oscott : St. Mary's College ; Birmingham : Hall &
English.

This book is the literary product of the jubilee celebrations of one of England's
most notable Catholic colleges. In 1838 Oscott, as at present constituted, began its
career, though before the end of the last century it had been established in a
locality, afterwards changed to the present one, in more humble circumstances,
and some of its most distinguished pupils had studied there. We should cor-
rect the above expression, " as at present constituted," for recent diocesan ar-
rangements have put an end to Oscott's career as a college for secular training,
leaving it, however, the chief seminary for ecclesiastical studies of the diocese of
Birmingham. We know not how far sincere and deep regret may have place for
an event which could not have been permitted to happen otherwise than from dire
necessity. The discontinuance of secular studies will certainly be felt as a misfor-
tune by all Oscotians, and it will tax their virtue to suffer it with equanimity.
Oscott lives no longer, except in that shadowy existence called memory, all the
brighter and more lovely in this case because consecrated to the innocence and
happiness of youth.

One of Cardinal Newman's most famous and most finished orations, "The
Second Spring," was preached at Oscott at the opening of the First Provincial
Synod of the restored hierarchy of England, and in it he gives a charming bit
of description of the college buildings, seen through the vista of his noble
thoughts, upon the restoration of the old religion to the English realm. The
words are appropriately printed on the reverse of the title-page. Then follow
jubilee poems in English, Latin, German, French, and Italian, and essays histor-
ical and biographical. There are thirteen portraits of distinguished Oscotians and
seven views of buildings, grounds, and other places of interest. A jubilee hymn,
with music composed for the occasion, completes the volume, to which is added
an appendix. This last is in some sense the most striking testimonial to the suc-
cess of the old college's mission, for it is a complete list of the superiors, pro-
fessors, cardinals, bishops, priests, noblemen, gentlemen, and students of every
kind who entered Oscott. Among these occur the names of Wiseman, Howard,
Milner, Ullathorne, and many others distinguished in the cause of religion, and
very many laymen of mark. We think that any one who knows England would
say that these one hundred and twenty pages are something like the Roll of
Honor of the Catholic people of that kingdom.

The historical and biographical sketches mentioned above are extremely val-
uable, especially as they are the contributions of that affection which is strong
enough to afford to be frank. Taken together, they are equivalent to an inner

1889.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 423

history of English Catholicity during the last seventy or eighty years, meaning
that of the pure Anglo-Saxon element. They exhibit in high relief the sin-
gular fulness of manly virtue and the very notorious excess of love of country of
the native English Catholic gentry; the former trait in the great and common
course of the li'/esof the pupils, and the latter in the strange attempt to Anglicize
the Catholic Church and yet not to de-Romanize it which was defeated mainly
through the courage and judgment of Bishop Milner. The sketch of that great
man, signed S. H. S. (Rev. Samuel H. Sole?), is a valuable contribution to the
study of that very instructive era.

We have noticed this book at so great length hoping to call the attention of
our more discerning readers to it as of much permanent value to the student of
Catholic educational methods, and as of permanent interest to those who would
fully learn what English Catholicity has been and what it has become.

LEAVES FROM THE ANNALS OF THE SISTERS OF MERCY. Vol. III. : America.
By the Author of the Life of Mother McAuley, etc. New York: The Cath-
olic Publication Society Co.

The writer of this volume is herself a Sister of Mercy, known as Mother
Teresa Austin. For many years she has been a zealous worker in several con-
vents located in the Southern States. The task of gathering the data for these
Annals has been done chiefly by representatives of the different convents estab-
lished by the Sisters of Mercy. Among the personal reminiscences thus ob-
tained from the most reliable sources we find many tributes of affection to the
memory of the valiant women who spent their lives in the heroic performance of
corporal and spiritual works of mercy. On the battle-fields of the late war, in
the prisons and hospitals of our large cities, their words and deeds have exerted a
potent influence in favor of religion, while at the same time they used all means
within their power to advance the interests of Catholic education.

The first volume of these Annals was devoted to Ireland ; the second to Eng-
land and its colonies ; and the third, which is now published, gives an interest-
ing account of the Sisters of Mercy in Newfoundland and many parts of the
United States. A fourth volume is promised to complete the history of their
foundations on this side of the Atlantic.

For those who have a desire to know what religious women can accomplish
for the good of the commonwealth we commend these volumes. No salaried
officials can be compared with them for unselfish fidelity to the poor. Philan-
thropists, no matter what may be their religious belief, must admire the gener-
ous sacrifices made by these good sisters to advance the cause of Christian civili-
zation by their works of mercy.

THE ILLUSTRATED CATHOLIC FAMILY ANNUAL for 1890. New York: The
Catholic Publication Society Co.

THE CATHOLIC HOME ALMANAC. 1890. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago :
Benziger Bros.

EINSIEDLEN KALENDER. 1890. 5o-Jahrgang. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago :
Benziger Bros.

ST. OTTILIEN'S MISSIONS-KALENDER FUR DAS JAHR DES HERRN 1890.
Herausgegeben im Missionshaus St. Ottilien zum Besten der St. Benedictus-
Missions-Genossenschaft und ihrer ersten Missionen in Deutsch-Ostafrika.
III. Jahrgang. Dritte Auflage. Commissions- Verlag : Lit. Institut von Dr.
M. Huttler, Augsburg.

This batch of calendars reminds us of the coming of the New Year. It is
sufficient praise of them to say that they surpass even their wonted excellence in

424 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec.,

good reading matter with appropriate and well-executed illustrations. We wel-
come the Catholic Family Annual as an old friend, and the Home Almanac as a
worthy competitor for popular favor. For those who read German the other
calendars are also full of interest.

FLOWER FANCIES. By Alice Ward Bailey. .Illustrated by Lucy J. Bailey,
Eleanor Ecob Morse, Olive E. Whitney, Ellen T. Fisher, Fidelia Bridges,
C. Ryan, and F. Schuyler Mathews. Boston : L. Prang & Co.

In this exquisite volume we do not know which to admire the more, the
verses or the illustrations, both charming alike to the eye and to the mind.
Prang & Co. have given us some excellent art-work, but we know of nothing
better than this. We can almost perceive the odor of the flowers as we scan
these pages, and there is a delicate flavor about the poetry which blends har-
moniously with the richness of the coloring. If even

" . . . the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"

this choice selection from the garden should be rich in suggestiveness. And so,
in truth, has the author found them. The niost pleasing and quaintest of these
" fancies " is the pansy as Puck's pallet, which must be read with its illustration
to be appreciated ; while the tenderness and depth of feeling in the poems on
the lily and the lilac carry them beyond the range of mere fancy. The author
is the A. B. Ward who wrote " Hospital Life" and "The Invalid's World"
for Scribner's Magazine of June, 1888, and January, 1889, and " Invalidism
as a Fine Art" for Harper's Monthly (November, 1888), which articles were
extensively noticed and copied by the newspapers at the time of their ap-
pearance. We recommend this book as an appropriate Christmas present to
an appreciative friend ; in fact, it is gotten up especially with that end in view.
The beauty of the binding gives us a foretaste of what lies within.

SOCIETY GYMNASTICS AND VOICE CULTURE. Adapted from the Delsarte. By
Genevieve Stebbins (Mrs. J. A. Thompson). New York: Edgar S. Werner.

This little book meets a want long felt by many teachers of the system given to
the world by Frangois Delsarte. It is, as its title indicates, a compend giving
the exercises founded on Delsarte's principles that are useful in moulding the
form, improving the bearing, and giving ease and grace to the movements of
the body.

Theories and principles are hardly more than referred to ; but as these do not
fall within the intention of the adapter, and as there are several extended treat-
ises on Delsarte's principles, we are grateful for so useful a primer. It is just the
book to put into the hands of a class of girls or young women eager for self-
improvement, if they have as its exponent an experienced teacher, one who
believes thoroughly in Delsarte's fundamental principle, viz. : that the body is to
be developed, trained, and perfected in carriage and action not for its own sake,
but that it may more truly and beautifully express the indwelling soul. Delsarte
himself was a great teacher, one of the comparatively few who teach with the fire
and genius of inspiration and the loving patience and helpfulness of grace. His
definition of art as "at once the knowledge, the possession, and the free direc-
tion of the agents by which are revealed the life, soul, and mind, . . . the relation
of beauties scattered through nature to a superior type, and therefore not the
mere imitation of nature," implies the nobility of his conception of his own pro-
fession as a teacher of art.

1889.] NE w PUB Lie A TIONS. 42 5

Chapters xviii. to xxii. inclusive are devoted to voice culture, and are less
satisfactory than those concerned with general physical culture. A good feature
is the simple music given at the end to accompany the lessons on " Swaying for
Poise," " Step and Arm Movements," and " Walking Exercises."

The book is attractively bound, and is printed from large, clear type on
poor paper.

LIFE AND WORKS OF SAINT BERNARD, ABBOT OF CLAIRVAUX. Edited
by Dom John Mabillon, Presbyter and Monk of the Benedictine Congrega-
tion of St. Maur. Translated and Edited with Additional Notes, by Samuel
J. Eales, M.A., D.C.L., sometime Principal of St. Boniface College, War-
minster. Vols. I. and II. London : John Hodges. (For sale by Ben-
ziger Bros., New York.)

The value and the merits of the writings of St. Bernard are well known. For
a whole generation his influence was the greatest of any in Christendom. A
perfect monk, the founder of the strictest of the wide-spread religious orders, he
was at the same time the most active apostle of his time. His life is a practical
refutation of the assertion that monastic seclusion and contemplation are incom-
patible with the external duties of the sacred ministry. It is, indeed, a wonder-
ful thing that this holy man, suffering from such weak health and distracted by
so many cares, could pray, study, speak, act, teach, and write as he did. God
seems to have given him all spiritual gifts in their fulness. In his writings great
natural powers also shine forth resplendently — an intellect more acute than that
of the subtle Abelard, an eloquence that was irresistible, an imagination like a
poet, and a simplicity that wins the admiration of all.

The writings of this father and doctor of the church have been extensively read,
as is shown by the number of editions in other languages through which they have
passed. But never before have they appeared in English. The translator, Mr.
Eales, has labored to put before his readers a faithful rendering of the text, and
has avoided intruding his own opinions of the saint. We desire, therefore, to
co-operate with him to the full extent of our power in increasing the knowledge
of this great light of the church among English-speaking peoples, and we hope
that the work will have a large sale among Catholics. Priests will find it a most
valuable book for spiritual reading and sermons, and it is chiefly for them that
the translator has labored.

The printing and binding of the work before us are superb.

A HAND-BOOK FOR CATHOLIC CHOIRS. Containing the Vesper Service for
every day in the year ; arranged specially for the wants of Catholic churches
and schools. By G. Freytag. Detroit Music Co., Detroit.

This is another well-meaning attempt to translate Gregorian notation into
modern. The melody alone is given for the Psalms, Antiphons, and Hymns of
Vespers. As we have already said in noticing works of this kind, the change of
notation is not a gain in order to obtain good chanting. Used to indicate chant
notes, semibreves, minims, and crotchets are notes of false lengths and must in-
fallibly mislead the singer. Prof. Freytag and other organists accustomed to the
true chant movement might be able to guide their singers using this book, but
we are quite sure they would guide them better using the square notation. Yet,
as we. would rather have chanting in any style than no chanting at all, we recom-
mend this volume to the examination and trial of all choir directors. We must
beg leave to dissent from the opinion of the author, " that almost anybody who
has taken a reasonable amount of piano lessons can learn to play the organ for
Vespers" with this book, containing only the melody, placed before him.

426 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec., 1889.

COLUMBIADS. Pearl Drops from the Fountain of Wisdom. By a Random
Thinker. Columbus, O. : August Reutty.

We had occasion last month to notice in these pages a book similar in
character to the above, and written by Mr. Spurgeon, and we only mention the
Salt-Cellars to note the fact that none of the faults we found in that book have
a place in this little work of Father Hayes. Indeed, Columbiads deserves far
more than such negative praise. Though writing of this character is very
difficult, and too often is labored and heavy, the author writes with brightness,
ease, and force. Throughout his pages one can find many a sentence " strong
enough to hang a hat upon," while not among the least of the excellences of
the book is its thoroughly Christian and Catholic spirit.

BOOKS RECEIVED.
Mention of books in thts place does not preclude extended notice in subsequent numbers.

THE PERFECTION OF MAN BY CHARITY. A Spiritual Treatise. By Fr. H. Reginald Buckler,
O.P. London: Burns & Gates; New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co.

SECTARIAN SCHOOL-BOOKS. A Series of Letters. By the Rev. Robert J. Johnson and the
Rev. George W. Cooke. Boston : Alfred Mudge & Son, Printers.

SIXTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BUREAU OF STATISTICS OF LABOR OF THE STATE OF
NEW YORK, FOR THE YEAR 1888. Transmitted to the Legislature January 15, 1889.
Advance pages. Albany : The Argus Company, Printers.

A CHAPLET OF VERSE BY CALIFORNIA CATHOLIC WRITERS. Edited by Rev. D. O.
Crowley and Charles Anthony Doyle. Published for the benefit of the Youths' Directory.
San Francisco : Diepenbrock & Co.

THE PENITENT CHRISTIAN ; or, Sermons on the Virtue and Sacrament of Penance, and on
everything required for Christian Repentance and Amendment of Life, etc. In seventy-six
sermons, with copious marginal notes. By Rev. Father Francis Hunolt, Priest of the
Society of Jesus and Preacher in the Cathedral of Treves. Translated from the original
German edition of Cologne, 1740, by Rev. J. Allen, D.D. In two vols. New York, Cin-
cinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

ANNUAL REPORT OF THE CARROLL INSTITUTE, Washington, D. C., for the year ending
October 10, 1889.

FOURTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE JOHNS-HOPKINS UNIVER-
SITY, Baltimore, Md., 1889. Advance sheets.

Two SPIRITUAL RETREATS FOR SISTERS. By the Rev. Ev. Zollner. Translated and
adapted, with the permission of the author, by Rev. Augustine Wirth, O.S.B. Second
revised edition. New York and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co.

THE HYMN-BOOK OF THE NEW SUNDAY-SCHOOL COMPANION. Being the melodies and
accompaniments of the Mass, Vespers, and Hymns contained in the Sunday-School Com-
panion. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

THE JESUITS: A Eulogy of the Society of Jesus, against Rev. Dr. Bennett, Pastor of Wesley
Chapel, Columbus, Ohio. By Rev. John B. Eis, Rector of Sacred Heart Church, Colum-
bus. 42 South Grant Avenue, Columbus, O. : L. W. Reilly.

ANCIENT HISTORY, FOR COLLEGES AND HIGH SCHOOLS. By Wm. F. Allen and P. V. N.
Myers. Part I. The Eastern Nations and Greece. By P. V. N. Myers, President of Bel-
mont College, Ohio, author of Mediceval and Modern History. Boston: Ginn & Co.

VEN. P. LUDOVICI DE PONTE, S.J. Meditationes de praacipuis fidei nostrae mysteriis. De
Hispanico in Latinum translatas a Melchiore Trevinnio, S.J., de novo editas cura Augus-
tini Lehmkuhl, S.J., cum approbatione Revmi. Archiep. Frib. et Super. Ordinis. In
duob. part. Friburgi Brisgoviaa et S. Ludovici : Sumptibus Herder.

NOTES OF LESSONS FOR YOUNG TEACHERS. With models from actual .examination papers-
By John Taylor, author of How to Compose and Write Letters, etc. Boston : Boston School
Supply Co.

A COMMENTARY ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. By John Maldonatus. Translated and edited
from the original Latin. By George J. Davie, M.A. Exeter College, Oxford, one of the
translators of the Library of the Fathers, etc. Vol. II., St. Matthew, chap. xv. to the
end. London : John Hodges. (For sale by Benziger Bros., New York.)

BEFORE OUR LORD CAME. An Old Testament History for Young Children. By Lady
Amabel Kerr. London : Burns & Oates ; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

REPORT OF THE GENERAL CONFERENCE OF THE YOUNG MEN'S SOCIETIES OF GREAT
BRITAIN, held at Hull, England, August 4 and 5, 1889. Liverpool : Printed for the Cen-
tral Council at the Catholic Publishing Depot, 30 and 32 Manchester Street. [This pam-
phlet contains a number of valuable and well-written essays on practical topics.]

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD

VOL. L. JANUARY, 1890. No. 298.

MADONNA.

OUR Lady of the gracious brow and tender eyes,
Madonna of our hearts, whate'er thy guise,
Thy power has never faded, Mother mild,
The world is on thy breast, a little child.
Vainly it masquerades with purpose bold,
Feigning to be embittered, hard and cold ;
Let but thy veil fall, Star of Christmas Night,
And tired feet climb the old ways into light
And comfort, and a blessed, peaceful rest.
The world is yet a little child upon thy breast.

ALICE WARD BAILEY.

428 CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEW. [Jan.,

CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEW.

THE recent religious celebrations mark an epoch in our his-
tory, and may well continue to arrest our attention. The cen-
tenary of the founding of the American Episcopate is an event
calculated to excite prolonged interest in every Catholic heart,
and the meeting of the Catholic Congress and the opening of
the Catholic University awaken hopes and feelings which should
find expression in every organ of Catholic opinion. To exhaust
these topics or exaggerate their importance were difficult indeed.

The remarkable progress our holy religion has made in this
country during the last hundred years is the fact that has been
most noted, emphasized, and commented upon in the sermons,
addresses, and newspaper reports which the great occasion in-
spired. That the little mustard-seed which Archbishop Carroll
nurtured a century ago should have grown into such a lofty tree,
on whose spreading branches so vast a multitude of souls find
rest, is the wonder of the hour. And while the great fact of our
Catholic progress is being echoed and re-echoed from sea to sea
it will be well for us to pause and try to solve the secret of our
success, and thus find guidance and hope for the future. That a
scattered flock of less than 40,000 souls, tended by a single
bishop, should in one short century have increased into a mighty
church organization of over 9,000,000 members, with eighty-four
bishops, more than 7,000 priests, and a large equipment of re-
ligious, charitable, and educational institutions, is in truth amply
sufficient to excite surprise. For although the growth of the
country itself in the last hundred years has been phenomenal,
it presents no parallel to this in the matter of religious devel-
opment.

When the little Catholic colony planted on the shores of the
Chesapeake was struggling to maintain its very existence, flour-
ishing commonwealths, instinct with religious convictions, were
springing into vigorous life on the New England coast, and there
the progress of religion and commerce and wealth and edu-
cation and population went hand-in-hand, so that the religious
as well as the industrial energy of New England seemed destined
to absorb the land. But the religious outlook of a century ago
has completely changed. The faith of New England has failed,
and no one will now say that it has any future before it. It

1890.] CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEW. 429

soon spent its force because its foundations were insecure, and it
is already numbered amid the dead enthusiasms of the past. But
the calumniated creed of the Maryland colony, which a century
ago seemed so likely to perish, is to-day the triumphant creed
of the country, because its foundations were fixed in the Rock
of Peter, and it received new vitality from the generous fountain
of Ireland's living faith and from the faith of continental Europe.
Thus the religious history of this Republic furnishes a new proof
of the power of Catholic faith to perpetuate itself where other
forms of Christian belief wither and decay, and here, as elsewhere
in the wonderful story of Christian progress, we can draw the
same conclusion, that our faith is successful because it is divine.
Yes, the secret of our success is the dfivine character of our faith !
Other denominations had a far better start in this free and gen-
erous soil ; they had greater wealth, more assured positions,
superior education, every natural advantage was on their side, but
we have outstripped them in the race ; they are receding, we are
advancing, and simply because of our faith.

The faith that built up the American Church, though a sim-
ple, implicit faith, was not a passive faith. It was an active, en-
ergetic faith, a courageous faith, a faith full of the spirit of
sacrifice. The evidences of its patient energy are illustrated in a
thousand ways, from the rude log chapels built up by willing
hands in the backwoods to the grand cathedrals erected by the
free and frequent offerings of the toiling masses in the great cen-
tres of population. The hundreds of Catholic institutions that dot
the land tell the same tale of constant effort, constant sacrifice in

ic cause of God and humanity that to-day excite the admiration
)f all men. Nor were we suffered to pursue our course and es-

iblish our religion unopposed. From the very beginning sec-
tarian intolerance assailed us on every side. The same generation
>f Catholic colonists that first proclaimed the great principle of

jligious liberty on the soil of Maryland were themselves perse-
cuted for conscience' sake by those whose liberty of conscience
they had defended. All through colonial days our religion was
barely tolerated, and was constantly subjected to local outbursts
of persecution. Notwithstanding the patriotic part taken by Catho-
lics in the war of the Revolution, a part which the generous spirit
of Washington fully appreciated and proclaimed to the country j
notwithstanding the invaluable services which the great patriot,
Archbishop Carroll, rendered to the national cause, our co-
religionists were still regarded with ill-concealed distrust and sus-
picion by their Protestant fellow-citizens. Nor did the additional

VOL L. — 28

430 CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEW. [Jan.,

proof of loyalty unto death to the country and its institutions
which the Catholics gave in the war of 1812 allay their unjust
suspicions. Long years before the "Know-Nothing" movement
broke out into open hostility our forefathers in the faith felt the
bitter pang of religious hate. But they bore up manfully through
it all and were never wanting in fidelity to their country and
their God. Forgetful alike of the wrongs they had suffered and
the absurd prejudices against them, they never for one moment
faltered in their absolute allegiance to the Republic. During the
great war of the Rebellion Catholics were not slow in com-
ing to the defence of the nation, and they were found conspicuous
on every battle-field until the final blow was struck for the preser-
vation of the Union.

The gallant part enacted by our Catholic soldiers and sailors
in the late war undoubtedly did much to remove prejudice and
to prove to our fellow-citizens that the institutions of our com-
mon country had no more brave and faithful defenders than the
children of the Catholic Church, and it is largely owing to their
valor and devotion in their country's cause that the church
enters on the second century of her organized existence with an
atmosphere comparatively cleared of prejudice and misconception.
Sentiments of bigotry and feelings of enmity unfortunately still
linger here and there, but among the masses of our fellow-citizens
there is no longer any question of our loyalty or any positive
opposition to our creed. The battle against religious hate and
intolerance has been fought and won, and the courage and con-
stancy of our brethren in the past has secured for us a peaceful
and a promising future. All honor, then, to the faithful souls
who .professed their belief manfully in the days of trial that are
for ever past! All honor to the true and simple Catholic hearts
who in the long years of distrust and hostility fought the good fight
and kept the faith ! And all honor to the great leaders of our cause
who stemmed the rising tide of party spirit and guided our
course into the tranquil waters of the present ! In contemplating
our success, it were unpardonable not to remember the sacrifices
that secured them, and to feel a pang of deepest sorrow at the
fearful losses we have sustained in the conflict.

The fortitude of our fathers in the faith is in truth worthy to
take its place in the great records of Christian achievement that
illumine the march of Catholic progress for eighteen hundred
years. We cannot, it is true, point to a long array of martyrs,
but we can point to heroic sacrifices without number, sacrifices
which in a multitude of cases amounted to life-long martyrdom.

1890.] CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEW, 431

In days not so remote from our own to profess the Catholic
religion and to practise it entailed social sacrifices, pecuniary
sacrifices, political sacrifices, and personal sacrifices of every kind
which we in our present assured position can scarcely estimate,
although the ghost of the dead intolerance still on occasion rises
up before us. And besides the past trials of the faithful at large,
what splendid examples of sacrifice for conscience' sake have not
the noble band of American converts furnished to the world ! —
men and women who renounced everything that life holds dear
to follow their convictions ; earnest souls who severed the
tenderest family ties, broke the strongest links of friendship, cast
aside wealth and position to embrace the truth. Yes, every page
of our history for the last hundred years is replete with sacri-
fice, and we have triumphed with Christ because we have borne
his cross.

Our faith has in very truth moved mountains in the past ; to
its depth and energy we are wholly indebted for our present
position, and to the same divine source must we look for our
future progress. But the conditions of its exercise are altered.
Hitherto we have been on the defensive. We have had to con-
stantly receive and resist attack, and make progress withal.
The time is now at hand to assume a different attitude. It is
beyond all question that the future of the Christian religion in
this country is in the hands of the Catholic Church. This is
admitted openly or tacitly on every side.. If Christianity is to
continue a factor in the growth of our institutions and in the
development of our civilization, it must be Catholic Christianity.

,very other form of Christian belief has lost its vitality, and com-
pete disintegration is only a matter of years.

The religious conflict is no longer with bitter sectarianism
but with blatant infidelity. The foundations of all supernatural
faith and of all social order are assailed. The cause of Christi-
anity is betrayed by the pulpit itself. There is no other bul-
wark to oppose the rising tide of infidelity that is setting in upon
us save the one immovable, unconquerable Catholic faith. It is
the only possible barrier. And that it is all-sufficient to meet

le shock the events of eighteen centuries bear us full witness.

>ut while we know that our foundations are secure as the ever-
>ting hills, we must not fold our arms and calmly enjoy our

xurity. We have a work to accomplish for religion and

lumanity in this age and country, and woe betide us if we

ire faithless to the divine trust.

The principles that lie at the root of all religion and morality

432 CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEW. [Jan.,

are at stake, and millions of our fellow-citizens are in danger of
losing' their hold upon them. The treasured institutions of our
country are threatened, for it is the testimony of all time that
whenever and wherever the institutions of God are swept away
the institutions of man soon follow. The law of God is the only
enduring basis of human law and order and civilization. We
are not ignorant of the instability of infidel states. The essen-
tial character of Christian principles is manifest to us, and we
must resolutely and aggressively take up their advocacy. An
aggressive attitude towards the infidelity of the day is a civil as
well as a religious necessity.

And the conflict, unlike the religious controversies of the past,
must not be left to the clergy ; the laity must enter the arena
and bear a prominent part in the combat. The proceedings of the
great Lay Congress give assurance that bur representative Catholic
laymen realize this and are girding themselves for the fight.
The stand taken by this truly representative Catholic body on all
the great questions of the hour was the most significant and hope-
ful feature of the recent celebrations. It was the first time in
our history that the laity had the opportunity of expressing their
views collectively on Catholic subjects, and they gave forth no un-
certain sound. Their noble eloquence, their thorough earnestness,
and their perfect unanimity have taken the country by surprise.
Heretofore it was supposed that the clergy were alone in agitat-
ing certain religious issues, but the action of the Lay Congress
has dispelled this delusion for ever. The College of Cardinals
could not assume a more thoroughly Catholic attitude on all the
subjects discussed, and the Senate of the United States could not
adopt a loftier tone of patriotism. Both the church and the Re-
public have reason to be proud of that assembly, and to pray that
the spirit that animated it may live on to perpetuate our faith
and maintain our free institutions. The Congress has produced
fruit already. Its resolution on the question of popular education
has inspired the best article that has yet appeared on the sub-
ject from a Protestant standpoint. We refer to the editorial that
appeared in the New York Journal of Commerce of November 15.
The writer begins by saying that " the Congress of Catholic Lay-
men, recently held in Baltimore, has attracted much attention
from all thoughtful people outside of that communion. Its dis-
cussions have been marked in the main with much good sense,
and the ' platform ' adopted at the close of the session, as ex-
pressing the views of the Catholic laity concerning their duties
and obligations, contains many admirable statements and sug-

1890.] CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEW. 433

gestions." It quotes the full text of the resolution on education,
and expresses its opinion of it in the following words : " We re-
gard it as a noble utterance, containing truths that cannot be too
attentively considered." It then goes on to discuss the vexed
question of religious education with a depth and penetration and
fairness that are unique in the controversy. If the first meeting
of the Congress has called forth such expressions of public
opinion, what may we not look for from its future deliberations ?

This is the age and this is the country of the people, and
they must make their action felt in religious as well as in sec-
ular affairs. The laity have undoubtedly kept too much aloof in
the past ; perhaps the condition of things did not afford them
the opportunity for more active co-operation in church work, but
it must not be so in the future. We do not ask them to enter
within the sanctuary rails, or to assume the role of exhorters, but
we do insist that they take their full share in the public action
of the church, and assert their convictions in season and out of
season. The power of the pulpit to reach the masses is dimin-
ishing, and the contest for the supremacy of Christian principles
has to be fought out in the highways and by-ways of life — in
the mills and shops and factories and stores and counting-houses,
nay, in the very streets and thoroughfares. The day has surely
come when every Christian man is called upon to give a reason
for the faith that is in him, and to give that reason at all times
and in all places. The deluded sons of unbelief are active and
aggressive ; and are the children of truth to be less so ? Agnos-
tics, men who have nothing to teach, are zealous in their propa-
ganda. And are Christian men, who have everything to teach,
to remain listless and indifferent? This were a paradox indeed.

Every intelligent believer amongst us should realize that, like St.
Paul in the old pagan world, he is a witness to Jesus Christ in the
lew paganism that is upon us. And to bear our testimony intelli-
gently we must have a reasonable knowledge of the truth as it
is in Christ and his church. Hence the necessity that exists to-
day of cultivating a closer acquaintance with Catholic doctrine.
Ignorance of the ground-work of our faith can no longer be toler-
ited ; it is a betrayal of our cause. Simple, earnest faith may
have sufficed for the past, but it can hardly be depended upon

secure our progress in the future. Nor need we be alarmed
or disheartened at the prospect of years of profound study and
investigation. The knowledge we want can be easily obtained.
Were our intelligent laity to give half the time to the read-

434 CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEU: [Jan.,

ing of Catholic literature that they give to reading the secular
press, they would find no difficulty in defending and advocating
our doctrines. And were they to enter into the discussion of
Christian principles with half the eagerness they display in the
discussion of political subjects, they would soon make their
convictions known and felt throughout the land, and impress
them on thousands of their fellow-citizens. This lack of know-
ledge and purpose to propagate our convictions is the great
want that we must labor with all our might to remedy in the
near future.

Catholic literature languishes for want of Catholic support.
Our best writers find little to encourage them in their work.
Our people read a good deal, but their taste for sound literature
has never been cultivated, and runs wild over the wide waste of
fiction and falsehood with which the teeming press of the day-
floods the world. We can look for no general advance on the
part of the laity in propagating Catholic principles until they
take more interest in reading Catholic books. Whatever men
read about they are pretty sure to talk about, while subjects that
do not occupy our minds have seldom any share in our conver-
sation. Nor let us forget that the taste for religious knowledge,
like every other intellectual appetite, must be cultivated.

It is encouraging to know that successful efforts are now being
made to spread sound literature among the laity and secure its
perusal. The movement is, of course, only in its infancy, but it
is full of promise; and we confidently hope that the day is fast
approaching when want of intellectuality can no more be charged
against us as a religious body.

The intellectual side of our church organization is now hap-
pily crowned by a university where the deepest problems of
philosophy and science will receive the highest order of treat-
ment. The need of such an institution has hitherto been keenly
felt, and the faith that led the intellect of the world for so many
centuries was placed in an anomalous position amongst us. Our
institutions of learning, though many and excellent of their kind,
were not up to the highest standard, and this naturally enough-
reflected on our intellectual status. But this reflection is in a
fair way to be removed. The church that founded the great
universities of the past, which are the great universities of the
present also, can build up in this genial clime an institution of
learning that will outstrip all her past foundations and be a focus
of light in the western world. We have a prescriptive right to

1890.] CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEW. 435

intellectual leadership, and it shall be ours in the future as it
was in the past. We welcome every advance of real knowledge;
we are not afraid of the light, we invoke it above all things.
No greater calumny could be uttered than to say, as has been
often said of late, that the Catholic Church is opposed to the
progress of science. Truth of every order finds a ready recep-
tion in the all-embracing arms of the mistress of truth. We
have nothing to fear but everything to gain from the growth of
knowledge ; and the efforts we are making in the cause of
enlightenment ought to be a sufficient proof of our intellectual
attitude. Ignorance is one of the great obstacles in the way,
ignorance from without and ignorance from within, and as a chief
means of making progress we insist on intelligent study and
investigation of the doctrines of our faith and the free discussion
of Catholic principles in their bearing on all the problems of the
time.

But over and above all must we prove the sincerity of our
convictions in the practical conduct of life, if we would continue
our progress. The mere profession of our faith will count for
little in the future if not illustrated by the practice of virtue.
The age is eminently practical and judges the value of principles
in the concrete, not in the abstract. If we do not prove the
superiority of our religion in every-day affairs, our arguments, be
they ever so logical and cogent, will fail to produce conviction.
The early Christians converted their pagan neighbors by their
deeds, not by their words only ; and the manilest superiority of
Christian virtue is still the best argument in favor of Christianity.
It were vain, of course, to hope that all Catholics would lead con-
sistent lives. Corrupt, unprincipled, scandalous members there will
ilways be in the fold, but the morals of the majority must be
far better than those around them, and a goodly number of noble
jouls must walk in higher paths of Christian perfection if heaven will

>ntinue to bless our course and give us increase. Perhaps there
is more reason for apprehension on this ground than on any other,

>r the age is growing more and more corrupt, and we are not
free from its influences ; indeed, our temptations are greater than
common. The means of moral reformation, however, are abun-
dant with us, and the steady growth of religious education gives
rood reason to hope that our moral tone will be raised rather

lan lowered, and that many more will aim at the highest stand-
ird of Christian virtue. Then, too, we are quite hopeful that
the terrible scourge of intemperance, which at present works such

436 CATHOLIC PROGRESS, OLD AND NEW. [Jan.,

havoc in our ranks and is so great a scandal before men, will
gradually disappear with all its attendant evils and give place to
sobriety and industry, the best safeguards of virtue. The social
surroundings of the working classes will, without doubt, undergo
considerable change for the better, and this also will be favorable
to their moral and religious improvement.

Thus, although there is much that is ominous for the cause of
religion in the future, there is also much that is bright and hope-
ful, and, clad as we are in the armor of divine faith and welded
together in the imperishable bond of Catholic unity, we have
nothing to fear. On the contrary, we have everything to hope
for. We have a strong and perfect church organization, we have
a hierarchy whose zeal and capacity are unsurpassed, we have a
priesthood able and devoted, we have a laity loyal and intelli-
gent, we are in complete harmony with our environment. Why,
then, should we not continue to make progress ? If a simple faith
that knew no compromise achieved such glorious results in the
last century, what results may not the same faith, supplemented
by a higher order of intelligence and direction, achieve in the
century of promise that is now before us ? May we not even
hope that the religion which now embraces only a fraction of
the population of this Republic will, ere another century dawns,
reign supreme in the hearts of the mightiest, the freest, the most
prosperous, the most Christian people the world has known ?

EDWARD B. BRADY.

1890.] WA SUING TON' s CA THOLIC A IDE-DE- CA MP. 437

WASHINGTON'S CATHOLIC AIDE-DE-CAMP.

THE state church of the colony of Virginia was, as required
by law, carried on " as near as may be according to the Church
of England." It used the Book of Common Prayer, but if it did
not hate bishops with the malevolence of the New England
churches, it quietly but effectually prevented any bishopric from
being " planted " in the Old Dominion ; and although there was
in Virginia a " commissary," a sort of vicar-general of the Bishop
of London, yet the vestries managed the parson, and the rich
planters managed the vestries. The rich planters wanted neither
Catholics nor dissenters in the colony, and .when Lord Baltimore
came to Jamestown he was insulted and tendered the oath against
transubstantiation. Religious liberty was, however, established in
Maryland, on the confines -of the churchman's colony. Baptists,
Presbyterians, and other " new lights " broke into the colonial
pastures, and like sheep and goats capered or browsed among 'the
lordly oxen of the state church, and as they cduld not be driven
out, they were tolerated, under conditions, until the Revolution
of 1776 came and carried to Virginia the religious freedom
founded in Maryland by Lord Baltimore. Meanwhile the Poto-
mac could not impede, nor the penal laws deter, the busy Jesuit
searching for souls, and there were Catholics as well upon the
Virginia bank as on the Maryland bank of the river. There
were probably hidden Masses sometimes at Alexandria, on the
river, and the services of the church were open at Rock Creek
chapel, within twenty miles of the town.

Among the Catholics whom the tide of immigration bore to
the Virginia town in the first days of the Revolution John Fitz-
gerald ranked of all the chief. A young Irishman, active, of fine
appearance and genial, hearty ways, warm-hearted and outspoken,
he was a man of the people. Never a suspicion of Toryism
touched him when days came that tried men's souls and all
patriots were Whigs. He had married Miss Jane Digges, the
daughter of a leading family in Maryland, and was at the time
when Alexandria resolved " If Boston submits we will not," a
rising business man of the town. He was introduced to Washing-
ton in April, 1774. On the 24th of that month, when the hos-
pitable master of Mount Vernon returned, in the afternoon, from
the direction of his fishing-shore, he found at his mansion " Mr.

438 WASHINGTON'S CATHOLIC AIDE-DE-CAMP. [Jan.,

Tilghman, Mr. Fitzgerald, and Dr. Digges, who dined and stayed
all night," says Washington in his diary. Frequently visiting-
Mount Vernon after that, he grew in favor with Washington,
and was always welcome. On the o'ccasion of a visit made in
August he carried with him another young Irishman, soon to
achieve distinction in the Continental Army, for it was then that
Colonel Moylan was introduced to Washington, and, with Dr.
Craik, of Alexandria, made his company at the generous board.
Early the next April, after Washington had returned from the
Richmond Convention, at which Patrick Henry declared, " We
must fight ; I repeat it, sir, we must fight," a few weeks before
Concord " fired the shot heard round the world," Fitzgerald, who
visited Washington with Daniel Carroll, Mr. Tilghman, and Mr.
Buchanan, of Maryland, and Mr. Herbert, of Alexandria, offered
his services to the great commander, and was accepted. Fitzger-
ald had begun business in the town, but leaving business behind
him, he followed General Washington to the war, and was made
one of his aides-de-camp. He was especially attached to the
person of the great chief. It is a tradition that Washington's
life-guard was his creation. This guard was recruited first at
Alexandria, and its flag hung in the Alexandria Museum until
it was burned with the museum in May, 1871. The Alexandria
life-guard led, however, to jealousies, and at a later period
Washington's guard was recruited by four Americans chosen from
each regiment, no one of the recruits being less than five feet
nine inches nor more than five feet ten inches in stature.

The most graphic incident of Fitzgerald's connection with the
great commander occurred at the battle of Princeton, of which
George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of Washington,
writes in his memoirs : " We have often enjoyed a touching remi-
niscence of that ever-memorable event from the late Colonel Fitz-
gerald, who was aide to the chief, and who never related the story
of his general's danger without adding to his story the homage of
a tear." Between Trenton and Princeton, Col. Mawhood, with a
force of British troops, had put to flight a body of Americans and
mortally wounded their commander, General Mercer.

' "Mawhood," writes Irving, "pursued the broken and retreating troops
to the brow of the rising ground, when he beheld a large force emerging
from a wood and advancing to the rescue. It was a body of Pennsylvania
militia, which Washington, on hearing the firing, had detached to the sup-
port of Mercer. Mawhood instantly ceased pursuit, drew up his artillery, and
by a heavy discharge brought the militia to a stand. At this moment Wash-
ington himself arrived at the scene of action, having galloped from the by-
road in advance of his troops. From a rising ground he beheld Mercer's troops

1890.] WASHINGTON' s CATHOLIC AIDE-DE-CAMP. 439

retreating in confusion, and the detachment of militia checked by Mawhood's
artillery. Everything was in peril. Putting spurs to his horse, he dashed past
the hesitating militia, waving his hat and cheering them on. His commanding
figure and white horse made him a conspicuous object for the enemy's marks-
men, but he heeded it not. Galloping forward under the fire of Mawhood's
battery, he called upon Mercer's broken brigade. The Pennsylvanians rallied at
the sound of his voice and caught fire from his example. At the same time the
Seventh Virginia Regiment emerged ;'rom the wood and moved forward with
loud cheers, while a fire of grapeshot was opened by Captain Moulder, of the
American artillery, from the brow of a ridge to the South."

Mr. Custis thus depicts Fitzgerald in that momentous scene :

" The aide had been ordered to bring up the troops from the rear of the
column when the band under General Mercer became engaged. Upon return-
ing to the spot where he had left the commander-in-chief, he was no longer
there, and, upon looking around, the aide discovered him endeavoring to rally
the line which had been thrown into disorder by the onset of the foe. Washing-
ton, after several ineffectual attempts to restore the fortune of the fight, is seen
to rein up his horse with his head to the enemy, and in that position to become
immovable. It was the last appeal to his soldiers, and seemed to say, ' Will you
leave your general to the foe?' The appeal was not made in vain. The dis-
comfited Americans rallied on the instant, formed into line, and the enemy
halted and dressed their lines ; the American chief is between the adverse hosts,
as though he had been a target for both. The arms of both lines are levelled.
Can escape be possible ? Fitzgerald, horror-struck at the danger of his beloved
commander, dropped the reins on his horse's neck, drew his hat over his face,
that he might not see him die. A roar of musketry succeeds, and then a shout.
The aide-de-camp ventures to raise his eyes. O glorious sight! The enemy are
broken and flying, while dimly, amidst the glimpses of smoke, is seen the chief,
alive, unharmed, and without a wound, waving his hat and cheering his com-
rades to the pursuit. Colonel Fitzgerald, celebrated as the finest horseman of
the American army, now dashed the rowels into his charger's flanks, and heed-
less of dead and dying in his way, flew to the side of the chief, exclaiming,
' Thank God, your Excellency is safe !' The favorite aide, a gallant and warm-
hearted son of Erin, a man of thews and sinews, 'albeit unused to the melting
mood,' now gave loose rein to his feelings, and wept like a child for joy. Wash-
ington, ever calm amid scenes of the greatest excitement, affectionately grasp-
ed the hand of his aide, and then ordered, ' Away, dear colonel; bring up the
troops; the day is our own.'"

Fitzgerald brought to Mrs. Washington at Mount Vernon,
and to his fellow-citizens of Alexandria, the news and details
of the battles of Trenton and of Princeton, and remained at
home a while, engaged in forwarding recruits and supplies. While
he was at Alexandria an event occurred which illustrates his
character. It is thus told in Jansen's Stranger in America :

"Three small British armed ships sailed up the Potomac as far as Alexan-
dria, and consequently passed Mount Vernon. They did considerable damage
in their progress, but the commanders gave strict orders not to molest Mount
Vernon, and, to their honor, it was not molested. Their arrival at Alexandria
threw the people in a dreadful state of alarm, the seat of war being far removed

440 WA SUING TON' s CA THOLIC A IDE-DE- CA MP. [Jan.,

from that place. They mustered in haste to the market-place, under command
of Colonel John Fitzgerald, one of Washington's aides-de-camp, who happened
to be there on leave of absence, with his family residing there. These ships dis-
played an intention of landing, and Fitzgerald, leaving the command to a
militia colonel, proceeded at the head of several of the citizens to Jones Point
(now the extreme 'south point of the Federal District) to repel the invaders.
Soon after the departure of this party the ships fired a few shots at the town,
upon which the commander of the militia ordered the colors to be struck, but for
his pusillanimity was chastised upon the spot."

' ' Colonel Fitzgerald, " says another author, " gave him a
sound drubbing." The ships' crews never meditated a landing,
and had merely fired random shots to create an alarm on their
departure. During the progress of the war Colonel Fitzgerald,
in order that his business in Alexandria might not remain with-
out attention, had formed a copartnership with Major Valentine
Peers, a young Scotchman, who had been aide to General
Weedon at the battle of Brandy wine, but who "from the nature
of his private affairs had been obliged to quit the service " in
1777. They bought the river-front lots on the south side of
King Street, in Alexandria, and as the cove in front was shallow,
Major Peers proceeded to fill up or " bank-out," as it was
called, towards the river-channel some hundreds of yards away.
While he was so employed Colonel Fitzgerald continued with
the army, but came home quite often, being the intermediary
by whom General Washington communicated with Lund Wash-
ington, the agent in charge of Mount Vernon.

It was on one of these visits, Alexandria and Mount Vernon
being made stopping-places en route to Yorktown, that Colonel
Fitzgerald learned of the Cabal formed to supersede Washington
in the chief command by the appointment of General Gates to
that office, and that Mr. Roberdeau, a merchant of Alexandria,
was suspected of being in the plot. On arriving at Yorktown
he called on Mr. Laurens, President of Congress, and was in-
formed by him that General Gates, then in command, had re-
ceived from General Conway, a leader in the plot, but who was
attached to the army under the immediate command of Wash-
ington, a letter which contained the words: "What a pity
there is but one Gates ! The more I see of this army the less
I think it fit for general action under its actual chief and its
actual discipline." Instantly his soul was on fire, and he hur-
ried to make inquiries, which he afterwards communicated to
Washington in the following letter :

" YORKTOWN, February 16, 1778.

" DEAR SIR : I make no doubt but you will be surprised to have a letter
of this date from me at this place. I was detained nine days on the other side

1890.] WASHINGTON'S CATHOLIC AIDE-DE-CAMP. 441

of the Susquehanna for an opportunity of crossing it, and when I did it was not
without great difficulty and some danger. Upon my arrival here, on Saturday
afternoon, I waited upon Mr. Laurens, who then being much engaged asked me
to breakfast next morning, giving me to understand that he had something
of consequence 'to say to me. In the morning he asked me if you had ever
seen the much-talked-of letter from General Conway to General Gates. I
answered I was certain that you never had, unless since my departure from
camp. He then said it was now in the hands of Mr. Roberdeau, who to his
knowledge showed it to some, and, he had reason to believe, to a great many,
and that though the paragraph quoted by Colonel Wilkenson was not set down
verbatim, yet in substance it contained that and ten times more. Upon this I
determined to demand it from Mr. Roberdeau, in order to let you have a copy
of it. I waited on him this morning, when, after a short introduction, I let him
into the intention of my visit. He assured me he had shown the letter only to
the President and no other, and gave me his honor that he had delivered it to a
French gentleman by an order from General Conway, which was sent back after
he had crossed the Susquehanna. He was lull of his assurances that the letter
did not contain the paragraph alluded to, which gave him infinite satisfaction, as
he entertained the highest respect both for you and for General Gates. He
added, however, that had the letter remained in his possession he should not
have thought himself at liberty to let a copy be taken without the consent of the
gentleman who entrusted him with it. I told him as he had pledged his honor
about the delivery of it, I thought it unnecessary to say any more upon the sub-
ject, but that I should have thought it my duty to take the most effectual meas-
ures of procuring a copy had the original remained in his hands. I then
returned to Mr. Laurens, who gave me an extract he had taken from it, which
I take the liberty of enclosing to you. The whole of that letter, I understand, was
couched in terms of the most bitter invective, of which this is a small sample. I
enclose you this extract rather for your information than with expectation of its
answering any other purpose at this time. I am of opinion that the gentlemen
who have been most active in this business are by this time heartily sick of it,
and plainly perceive that the fabric which they were endeavoring to rear was likely
to fall upon their own heads. Mr. Laurens' sentiments upon the whole of this
matter were exceedingly just, and delivered with the greatest candor.

•' I am, &c.,

"JOHN FITZGERALD."

The result of that Cabal, which left Washington untouched and
untarnished, is matter of general history. The part that Fitz-
gerald took endeared him more than ever to his great com-
mander.

At the close of the war Colonel Fitzgerald entered again
briskly into his business at Alexandria. The " banking-out "
upon the shallows of the river beyond his river-side lots was con-
tinued, and the town carried the tenth of a mile into the river.
At the pier foot of King Street, long known as " Fitzgerald's
Wharf," the Mount Vernon steamers now land on their way from
Washington City to Washington's tomb. While this " banking-
out" was in progress occurred a laughable incident at which it is

442 WASHINGTON b CATHOLIC AIDE-DE-CAMP. [Jan.,

said Washington, despite his habitual gravity, laughed immod-
erately.

While Fitzgerald's wharf was in progress a number of " young
bloods," heated with wine, conceived one night the project of sur-
prising the town, and they succeeded. While the streets were
being reduced from a higher to a lower level, and the earth
carted out and banked into the river, many houses stood on the
hill-top, and their doors were reached by ladders from the newly-
cut streetway below. The pumps had been removed and the
wells were uncovered. After the day's work had been done the
drivers of the carts had left their vehicles at the river- side to be
ready for work in 'the morning. The late roisterers silently took
the steps from the doors and threw them into the wells, and then
ran the carts over into the river. The town was crazed next
morning. The early riser fell, by the dim light of dawn, from
the doors into the clay streetways. No water could be drawn
from the wells to make coffee for breakfast, and, to add to the
trouble, the tide rose at daylight and covered the carts, so that
not one of them could be seen. It was high noon before the
difficulties were removed', the carts recovered, and the business
of the town resumed. The mayor was busy a few days after-
wards in imposing heavy fines on the practical jokers, but Wash-
ington is on record as having laughed, for all that, and with a
fair imagination one may hear Fitzgerald's hearty laughter ringing
down the aisles of time in that old town. Fitzgerald was not
mayor then, so he could laugh; but he was made mayor in 1786,
and served a term as chief officer of the municipality and pre-
siding justice of the Court of Hustings, as the old records attest.

At this time Colonel Fitzgerald carried on the business of
an importer and wholesale merchant at Alexandria. His adver-
tisement in the Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser
announces :

"JOHN FITZGERALD

" Hath just imported in the Ship Potomac, Cap. Bradstreet, from London,
and to be Sold by Wholesale only,

" A GENERAL ASSORTMENT OF EUROPEAN GOODS SUITABLE FOR THE
SEASON.

" He has also for Sale Malaga and Catalonia Wines by the Quarter Cask,
Pepper by the Bag, Olives by the Jar, Sweet Oil in Hampers of one Dozen each,
Wnite Wine Vinegar by the Hogshead, Red and Yellow Ochre, and a few Pieces
of brown Irish Linens.

"ALEXANDRIA, May 17, 1784."

In 1787 Colonel Fitzgerald was selected by Rev. John Car-

1890.] WASHINGTON'S CATHOLIC AIDE-DE-CAMP. 443

roll as one of the promoters of his project for establishing an
Academy at Georgetown, Potomac River, Maryland, and so
laying the foundations of Georgetown College. The agents ap-
pointed were, " in Virginia, Colonel Fitzgerald and George
Brent, Esq."

During all these days his relations with General Washington
continued to be as intimate as that of any other man in America
outside of the immediate family of the general. He was en-
gaged with Washington in the Potomac Company, designed to
use the Potomac River as the basis of a water-line to connect
the Atlantic with the great West. In January, 1788, Washington
notes in his diary : " Received a letter from Colonel Fitzgerald,
that the meeting of the Potomac Company at the Falls of the
Shenandoah would not be held."

St. Patrick's Day, 1788, was a red-letter day, not only in the
church calendar, but in the hospitable home of Colonel Fitz-
gerald, for on that day he entertained the great chief at a
dinner-party. An election took place the same day, which
brought most of the leading gentlemen of the neighborhood to
town, and at Colonel Fitzgerald's board they met many Catholics
from Maryland. General Washington's diary of the time says :
"March I7th, 1788. — Went up to the election of delegates to the
convention of this State for the purpose of considering the new
form of government which has been recommended to the United
States, when Dr. Stuart and Colonel Simons were chosen without
opposition. Dined at Colonel Fitzgerald's ;. returned in the even-
ing." It was at this time that the suggestion of the erection ol
a Catholic church in Alexandria was first made, and Colonel
Hooe, a large land-owner and an intimate friend of Fitzgerald,
offered to donate land as the site of a church and graveyard.
Within a few years the lot was deeded and the church built
upon Washington and Church Streets, the latter designation being
adopted by the municipality in honor of the new church. Of
this church Miss Fanny Fitzgerald, daughter of Washington's
aide, was organist. The old church is long fallen and demol-
ished, but there is one " who builds stronger than a mason, a
shipwright, or a carpenter," and the graveyard remains.

On the 4th of July, 1798, General Washington went to
Alexandria, and took dinner at the Spring Gardens, where
there was a public celebration. He invited a number of Alex-
andria gentlemen to dine with him on the I2th of that month,
and Washington's own hand records the following as the guests
at the Mount Vernon board : " Colonels Fitzgerald and Simons,

WASHINGTON'S CATHOLIC AIDE-DE-CAMP. [Tan.,

Mr. Herbert and son, Mr. L. Lee, Colonel Ramsay, Captain
Young, and Lieutenant Jones ; Mr. Potts, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Porter,
Dr. Cook, Mr. Riddle, Mr. Lear, Mr. Tracy, and six ladies and
a gentleman from Mr. Rogers's." Mr. McHenry, the Secretary
ot War, was also at Mount Vernon, having been a guest for
several days.

A few days previous General Washington had entertained,
as he writes in his diary : " Dr. Craik, wife, and son, and Mr.
Hunter of Baltimore, Mr. and Mrs. Herbert, Mr. De Bourg [Rev.
William V. Du Bourg, afterwards Bishop of New Orleans], president
of the College at Georgetown, another of the professors, and two
of the students,- viz. : a son of Mr. Laws and a neighbor of
Barry's."

The last dinner at which Fitzgerald was a guest at Mount
Vernon took place about six months before Washington's death.
Political excitement ran high. The Alien and Sedition laws
passed by the Federal majority during the administration of the
elder Adams had called forth resolutions, both of Kentucky and
of Virginia, suggesting State resistance to Federal authority.
Mr. Jefferson had drawn the Kentucky resolutions, while the
Virginia "resolutions of '98" were from the pen of Mr. Madison.
In them the General Assembly of Virginia " doth expressly de-
clare that it views the powers of the Federal government, as
resulting from the compact to which the States are parties, as
limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument con-
stituting that compact; as no further valid than they are au-
thorized by the grants enumerated in that compact ; and that in
case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise 0*" other
powers, not granted by said compact, the States, who are parties
thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for
arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within
their respective limits the authorities, rights, and liberties apper-
taining to them."

The late Edmund I. Lee, of Alexandria, was, with Colonel
Fitzgerald, a guest on the occasion, and he gives the following
account of the " table-talk " of Washington and Fitzgerald when
the ladies had retired and the nuts and wine came on the
board :

" Among the guests was Colonel John Fitzgerald, a native of Ireland and an
aide-de-camp of Washington in the Revolution. In 1799 he was a merchant of
Alexandria and a Federalist of the first water. During the dinner Colonel
Fitzgerald repeatedly attempted to give the conversation a political turn, with
a view of expressing his detestation of Mr. Jefferson, Bache and Duane, Giles

1890.] WASHINGTON'S CATHOLIC AIDE-DE-CAMP. 445

of Virginia, and other members of the anti-Federal party. But he received no
encouragement from the general, who led the conversation to the subject of the
wonderful prosperity of the country, and remarked toward the close of the din-
ner how gratifying it must be to all the survivors of the Revolutionary army to
know that their efforts to establish American independence had been crowned
with a success so signal. 'Ah!' exclaimed Fitzgerald, 'and to be assured that
all this glorious prosperity, and the very existence of the Republic itself, are
imperilled by the vile arts of an unprincipled demagogue.' At this juncture,
General Washington, bowing to his guests, remarked, ' Now, gentlemen, we
will take one more glass of wine, and then join the ladies ! ' and turning to Fitz-
gerald, said: ' I know very well to whom you allude, Colonel Fitzgerald ; but I
would willingly forgive him all his heresy if he had not seduced from his alle-
giance to the Constitution one of the best, purest, and ablest men of the country
— James Madison, of Virginia.'"

Colonel Fitzgerald's Catholicity is shown here and there by
olden publications and by oral tradition ; but the continued and
convincing evidence of his loyalty to the church is the fact that
he withstood all temptations to Masonry. The Masonic lodge in
Alexandria stands alone among lodges, for Washington, though
seldom attending its sessions, was long its titular master. All of
Fitzgerald's intimate friends were among its members, and it was,
in fact, a club of genial good-livers, Masons like Burns rather
than like Weishaupt

In the lax discipline of the times, some Alexandrians, whose
names arc now on the tombs in the Catholic cemetery, were
members of Alexandria- Washington Lodge, but Fitzgerald
withstood all temptations, and while the names of almost every
leading Alexandrian of that day are on the lodge rolls, his
name does not appear.

His later days were clouded by financial troubles. He opened
a distillery, which was not successful. His river-side property
proved unremunerative, and age came without quiet and ease.
President Adams made him Collector of the Customs of the port
of Alexandria, and he was still popular with his townsmen. His
last appearance with Washington was, as Mr. Custis relates, in " the
November of last days," when the great chief reviewed the Alex-
andria volunteer companies from the steps of the City Hotel, op-
posite the market. Colonels Fitzgerald, Ramsay, and Custis were
his honorary aides at the review. It was the setting of the sun,
for in six weeks Washington was dead. Mercury lingers in the
glory of sunset a short space after the day-god has departed,
scarcely visible in the halo, and is gone before the night falls.
Washington died in the early winter, and in the early summer
Fitzgerald followed him. WM. F. CARNE.

VOL. L. -29

446 A DREAM AT CHRISTMAS. LJan->

A DREAM AT CHRISTMAS.

To dream once in a life-time to some purpose is an experi-
ence which by no means comes in every one's way': Non cuivis
contingit adire Corinthum. With me going to Corinth was some-
thing negative, not marrying the man of my choice, but being
delivered from the man that I did not choose.

I was not my father's only daughter. I was the youngest
of three, with one brother and one sister, and at the time of
which I write I was two-and-twenty. My dear Uncle Dick, on
whom my memory ever rests with mingled pleasure and pain,
was a great favorite of mine, and I of his. He was a " mer-
chant"— vague term, as I know, which often covers a multitude of
delinquencies; but every one knew that Uncle Dick's merchan-
dise had been tea, and I am afraid every one also knew that
in those distant tea-gardens of his he had contracted a failing
which neither time nor his age tended to mend. He was far
from being a hopeless drunkard. He was still at the stage when
drink is rather a pleasure than a craving. He only " enjoyed a
glass of wine " a great deal too often, and never neglected a
pretext for taking it. My dear old home is in Gloucestershire,
a -country house big enough for entertaining on a large scale,
yet not sufficiently imposing for a show place. We have no family
portraits, no church lands, consequently no ghosts, and we were
a merry party as the Christmas of which I am writing drew
near. My Uncle Dick — Richard Effingham, to give him his due
name — was my father's brother. When he had made his fortune
at tea, being a younger brother, he bought a small place in our
vicinity, and established himself there in comfortable bachelor-
hood. When I say comfortable, I should perhaps mean disquiet-
ing, bachelorhood. His propensity gained strength from his lone-
liness, but it was of no use to wish that a man of confirmed life
and habits would take to himself a wife. My doing so used to
aggravate Lionel Cardwell, who wanted to marry me ^cvit/i my
prospects of inheriting Uncle Dick's fortune, for I suspected he
did not love me for myself. For months before the Christmas
in question that same Lionel had been the cause to me of much
misery and affliction of spirit. He was the youngest of Sir
Paul Cardwell's three sons, and was rich only in cleverness and
a striking person. .My father enjoyed his rather cynical conver-

1890.] A DREAM AT CHRISTMAS. 447

sation. He never stopped at anything likely to cause effect, and
my mother thought him "such a gentleman," for her standard
of a gentleman was measured by external acts of courtesy, of
which Lionel acquitted himself perfectly well. They were se-
cretly annoyed at me for discouraging his attentions. Only my
Uncle Dick bore me out, and told me often that he did not trust
Lionel and his fine ways. " Belongs to the whited-sepulchre
class, my dear," was his favorite expression, and this put my
own feeling into words, though it was nothing more than an
instinct with me. In fact, I tried to reason myself out of it, for
I wished to please my father and mother and to like Lionel
Cardwell for their sakes, as I saw he was acceptable to them.

It was the 23d of December, and we were expecting the
usual " family party " which is supposed to form an ingredient
of Christmas. At breakfast-time my mother looked up from
her letters and said to me : " Lionel thinks he can come, my
dear, and will be at Longhorsley at 4:30, unless he telegraphs
to the contrary, which I am sure I hope he won't."

He was not yet an accepted lover, so his communications
were made to my father or mother. My spirits did not rise
at the prospect. Still I had determined that this was to be
the test visit, when things would come to a crisis. Perhaps I
might bring myself to have him out of that old-fashioned vir-
tue, a filial regard for my father and mother ; or perhaps — my
own instincts would receive confirmation. The light of Christ-
mas has revealed many a man and woman to each other. At
this darkest period of the year we are all most thrown upon
our own resources. The sunniest temper feels the influence of
rainy skies and foggy atmosphere ; we have not, as in summer,
outside brightness, so we have to kindle within us fires of double
intensity which may protect us from nature's rigors and human
rubs.

Lionel came. I knew he would, and that I could not put
off the hour of decision, which is painful to most of us. He
established himself as my mother's man of the party, and fetch-
ed and carried for her to the delight of her heart. It was his
line to appear most discreet, and to show me his attentions
only when, so to say, I would have them. My sister Ella
liked him better than I did, and would willingly have ac-
cepted him and them ; but then did I not know of a very
good reason why this should not be ? At any rate, I believed
so, yet determined to try and watch Lionel with thoroughly
unprejudiced eyes

448 A DREAM AT CHRISTMAS. [Jan.,

Christmas day came. We had got through half of the pon-
derously dull merriment which is supposed to be necessary on
this occasion, and were sitting at our festive luncheon. Uncle
Dick was with us, and we were discussing the long-talked-of
dance which he was to give on the following day for his nieces.

" I should have liked it for the last hours of the old year,"
he was saying, " only Nellie told me that would be too late
for the gentlemen of the party." Lionel looked pleased. " By-
the-bye, my bachelor establishment will need the support of
some male arms and heads during the feast, and afterwards I
shall be very pleased to give my supporters a bed."

This speech of my uncle's was rather unguarded, for as my
brother Charlie was with his regiment in India, Lionel very
naturally offered his services, which were, I will admit, not very
graciously accepted, and it was settled that my father and
Lionel Cardwell should sleep at my uncle's house after the ball,
whilst my mother was to do the honors as hostess and return
with me and my sister. This small incident rather spoiled my
pleasures of anticipation. I felt out of sorts, as people do when
an uncongenial element is forced into their daily life, but I
scolded myself for being prejudiced. Lionel was doing his ut-
most to appear agreeable, and I fancied my mother's manner
often said to me : " What an unreasonable child you are not to
be satisfied with this man." We ate our Christmas dinner and
were, I believe, secretly relieved that the king of social days had
ended his reign for the year.

Lionel called himself one of the stewards of the ball, and
really shirked no exertion. I was rather glad he was so busy,
as I thought I should perchance evade the impending tete-a
tete. I was intent on examining the effect of our home-planned
decorations when I saw him hurrying up to me.

" Are you disengaged for the next dance, Miss Effingham ?"
he said. " I am indeed fortunate to find you in leisurely contem-
plation instead of in the commonplace crowd." And he looked in
the direction of the dancers.

" I am sure I feel commonplace enough," I said.

" Then your feelings mislead you. I — " He stopped. (I think
he was going to add, " I could not like commonplaceness," but
checked himself in time.) " I hope you think the tout ensemble
rather out of the way."

"Yes, it is pretty."

When we had danced he, of course, led me away from the
crowd.

1890.] A DREAM AT CHRISTMAS. 449

." There is something satisfactory in organizing a dance," he
said. " Things fall so naturally into their places. It is a pity we
cannot so order our lives."

" Do you think so ?" I said carelessly.

" Indeed I do. Our happiness ought to be given into our own
hands, and I am sure we should take care of it. Now, my hap-
piness is in your hands — "

At this critical moment my uncle came up to me, saying :
"Oh! Nellie, here you are at last. Your mother says she wants
you most particularly and I promised to find you." He looked
at Lionel as he spoke, and their eyes met. There was in Uncle
Dick's expression so much dislike and distrust that I wondered
whether he had invented a message to nip the incipient love-
making in the bud. Lionel's eyes flashed back revengeful hatred,
but only for a moment. Controlling himself, he merely said, " I
hope Miss Effingham will give me the pleasure of* another dance
later on," and walked away.

I was hurrying to my mother when Uncle Dick checked me.
" Stop a bit, Nellie; it is I who want you. I saw what that
fellow was after. Let us come down to supper, my dear. I sup-
pose this gayety of yours makes me more thirsty than usual."
And my uncle chuckled, but I felt more like weeping.

The lights had all gone out in the ball-room ; silence and
fatigue were creeping over us. I was in bed, but that was only
a name for repose. I could not sleep ; my brain was torn by
fancies which burst in upon it with the force of armed men and
would not be quieted. My mind was rehearsing every incident
of the day, whether I would or no. I saw the brilliant ball-
room which I had helped to decorate; my fingers convulsively
grasped the holly wreaths, and my ears listened to Uncle Dick's
words, "Stop a bit, Nellie; it is I who want you." Surely it was
no delusion, for I was now in a quiet bed-room. My uncle was
lying in a deep sleep ; the fire-light even showed me his face.
Ah ! I thought, he said he was thirsty. At the bed-side there
was an empty glass, but no bottle. Every detail engraved
itself upon my gaze. I saw, but could not be seen; I heard every
sound, but could utter none. Presently my strained ear fancied
there was a light footstep in the passage, and that the door
creaked. The curious thing was that I knew not where I was,
only I seemed to be a creature made up of ears and eyes. These

450 A DREAM AT CHRISTMAS. |"Jan-»

two faculties were intensified beyond their natural sphere. The
door surely did open, and some one peered into the room. At
first I saw a crouching figure ; it was that of a man, whose face
was hidden from me. He crept stealthily up to the bed and
looked intently at my uncle. This movement revealed him to
me. It was Lionel. He held something in his hand. Could it
be a knife ? I thought with a shudder. No, it was a bottle. Was
it ether, chloroform, or an anaesthetic of some kind ? None of
these could be administered without any apparatus, as I knew.
Lionel set it down by the bed, and looked around as if he feared
the silence of the night would speak. Alas ! I could utter no
protest. My voice died away as I tried to raise it. Then he
went noiselessly from the room, leaving the door ajar. I seemed
to breathe more freely, yet I felt he had more work to do. I
longed to rouse my uncle from his sleep. Now was my time.
I uttered a faint sound, but I could not reach the sleeper's ears,
and again I heard the stealthy footsteps outside. Lionel came in
with more assurance this time. He held a match-box. The
fire's now flickering light fell upon the little table at the bed's
head. On it were candles, Lionel's bottle (a whiskey-flask), and a
book. Quickly he pulled forward the bed-curtain and lighted
both candles. The curtain took fire ; Lionel waited for the re-
sult of his labors ; he watched deliberately to see his work set going,
then dashed from the room. How long I looked at the flames
making their way with increasing fury I cannot say. I heard
the crackle of the wooden bedstead and watched the flames
spreading, as if spell-bound.

They would soon surround my uncle as in a bed of fire.
" O Uncle Dick ! save yourself," I tried to exclaim, but my
voice died in my throat and my limbs refused to carry me. I
thought the sight would be burned into my brain as I watched
the flames curling round him, and yet could not put out a hand
to avert that terrible fate. My uncle at last gave a faint groan,
and I a piercing scream which awoke me. After all, I was
lying on my own bed, and the vivid scene had been a terrible
nightmare. But it had burned itself into my fevered brain. I
raised my head with difficulty from my pillow and dressed as
one still under the influence of a dream. I felt, I dare say, as
morphia-eaters do when they come back to their senses after
their unnatural food has ceased to buoy them up. I had truly
been feeding on horrors.

I still so fully realized my dream that it was no surprise to me

1890.] A DREAM AT CHRISTMAS. 451

to find everything in confusion down-stairs. My father had been
sent for to Horsmondean, my uncle's house, which was still
burning.

"What of my uncle?" I asked my mother breathlessly.

" My dear child — " she began.

" I know it all," I said ; " he has been burned to death, and — "

" Well, you must never say another word against Lionel Card-
well. If he had not given the alarm the whole place would have
been burned down."

" I don't care about that, now that my dear uncle is gone.
And Lionel was his murderer."

" Nellie, you should forget your foolish prejudices in this trou-
ble, and think how nobly Lionel has behaved."

" I will never speak to him again," I exclaimed, almost
shouted, I am afraid. " How do you suppose it happened that
my uncle alone was burned ?"

" You know your poor dear [why will people always " poor
dear" the dead?] uncle's failing. It is supposed that he drank
more than usual last night and set fire to the bed."

I turned away sick at heart The Hebrew prophet spoke of
the time when " old men shall dream dreams, and young men
shall see visions." I have dreamt only one dream, but it has
served me well, and was, I believe, heaven-sent At the inquest
the jury returned a verdict of "accidental death by fire," but
I thought I knew better. I did not marry Lionel Cardwell.

45 2 WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. [Jan.,

WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.

" Certum est quia impossibile."

IN studying the nervous system we call to mind these words
of an ancient author ; and it is indeed almost impossible for one
who has not made it a special study to believe all that science
teaches in regard to this most wonderful part of man's structure.
The study of the nervous system seems to a beginner to border
on the supernatural. Yet this is purely owing to his ignorance,
for chemistry, assisted by the scalpel and the microscope, proves
that it has no more to do with the supernatural than the study
of any dther part of the human body. The nervous system, we
are told by l^ater discoveries, is not divided into a brain and
spinal cord, but forms one united cerebro-spinal system, with,
however, different distributions. The aggregation of nerve-cells
is connected by nerve-fibres. In the nerve-cells (the smallest
of which is T^FIT of an inch in diameter) are concentrated the
actual powers of the nervous system, while the nerve-fibres serve
as conductors of the influence which is to be outwardly mani-
fested. Each nerve-fibre consists of a membraneous tube, lined
by a material composed of fat and albumen, and this tube en-
closes what is called an axis-cylinder, formed of a protoplasmic
substance, which is apparently the essential constituent of the
nerve. The fat and albumen lining, around the tube serve the
purpose of an insulator, whereby the contiguous nerves are kept
separated one from the other. There are two kinds of nerve-
fibres, the sensory and the motor. The sensory fibres convey
from the different parts of the body to the groups of nerve-cells
the impressions which there excite sensations ; the motor fibres
carry back from the groups of nerve- cells to the muscles the
impressions which cause the muscles to contract or expand.

When a stimulus acts upon a nerve-fibre there is an appre-
ciable period of time before the nerve-cell responds to it, and
this is known as the "excitatory stage." The period is longer
wh'en the temperature of the nerve is lowered. Hence we find
in the higher cerebral nerve-centres that cold benumbs thought.
The nature of the nerve force excited in each nerve-fibre is the
same ; and as an electric telegraph wire may convey a current
in either direction, so might the same nerve-fibre if its terminals

1890.] WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 453

enabled it to do so. But in the nervous system the two sets of
nerves are essentially distinct. And we may add, for the analogy
is interesting, that as a chemical reaction must take place between
the exciting fluid and the galvanic combination of metals in order
to originate the electric current, so for the production of the
nerve-current a reaction must take place between the blood and
the central nerve-cells, although we do not yet know what the
precise nature of this reaction is. The dependence of nervous
activity upon the physical changes kept up by the flow of oxy-
genated blood through the brain can, however, be shown experi -
mentally.

But as the cerebro-spinal system participates in all that goes
to make up conscious life, so it performs nobler work than sim-
ply to give orders to the muscles. The brain, we know, is com-
posed of sensory and motor substrata, and as the brain is the organ
immediately serving ideation, this organic action is, therefore,
the functioning of centres whose objective functions are motor
and sensory. We have not yet discovered what constitutes the
physical ground-work of life, but science is working towards its
discovery. Progress in physiological chemistry and more power-
ful microscopes may in time solve all the problems of the cerebro-
spinal system.

Already we know that with every display of brain-power
there is a correlative change or waste of nervous element ; a sti-
mulus to a nerve of sense is necessary to thought, and every
thought has its reflecting centre, perhaps in one hemisphere of the
brain, perhaps in the opposite hemisphere, which reflection of it
is the condition of consciousness.

The brain, eighty per cent, of which is composed of water,
and which is the seat of numberless multitudes of molecular
tremors, is found by experiment to be insensible to pain, while
every nerve of the spinal cord is keenly alive to the slightest
touch. Whether this least solid portion of the body, which is
notably double in structure, is really a double organ, and
whether we have two brains, as we have two eyes and two lungs,
certain it is that both hemispheres are necessary to the fullest
function of the organism. Yet it is an interesting fact that one
hemisphere is able to do the work of both hemispheres in think-
ing— although in a somewhat halting way — when the other hemi-
sphere has been partially destroyed. But it is demonstrated that

le the partial ruin of one hemisphere leaves mental function
unimpaired, this partial ruin of one destroys sensation unilaterally.
Therefore, the brain as regards sensation and motion is a single

454 WONDERS OF THE NEXYOUS SYSTEM. Dan.,

organ, but a double organ as it relates to intellect. The right
hemisphere governs the movements of the left limbs, and the left
hemisphere governs the movements of the right limbs. Which-
ever hand, for instance, is in motion — our thoughts being fixed
on what this hand is doing — the hemisphere of the opposite side
is meanwhile at rest. The speech centre being in the third left
frontal convolution, it entails long labor to teach the right hemi-
sphere speech when the other half of the brain has been de-
stroyed. And we know that although many of their functions are
in common, yet the hemispheres have not entirely equivalent
functions, and we know that -the left hemisphere is the more
richly endowed. It is also a curious fact that while the two
hemispheres can act together simultaneously at different kinds of
work, they cannot think together simultaneously of the two kinds
of work. This we readily discover if, when our hands are each
busily employed at different work, we try to think at the same
moment of what each hand is doing. We find it impossible, and
we are obliged to pass in thought from one hand to the other,
and there is a distinct pause in the transfer of thought. The
truth is, both halves of the brain have to be trained from the
beginning to close association in order that they may work
together as one centre. They have to be slowly educated from
childhood to conjoint action, just as our two hands and legs have
to be. But there is doubtless an innate predisposition of the
hemispheres to work in harmony ; and as we grasp best with our
two hands and see best with our two eyes, so we need the two
halves of our brain in order to apprehend best intellectually.

The double brain (at present attracting much attention) helps
to throw light on the disease called melancholia. There is a high
probability that in unsymmetric hemispheres lies the secret cause
of extravagant delusions, which are often in company with sanest
reason on many subjects. For a brief period at the beginning of
melancholia the sound hemisphere may be able to hold its own,
and to smother the suggestions of the unsound hemisphere. But
after a struggle the latter obtains the mastery, and reduces the
other to slavery. The words once uttered by a melancholic
patient are very significant : " My brain seems divided into two
parts, thinking independently, one side putting questions which
the other side answers." Here we see the effect of want of har-
mony between the hemispheres ; the partnership is dissolved ; self
is divided against self, resulting in confused suggestions, disor-
dered imaginations, and a disintegration of will. A person, the
two halves of whose brain are not working together owing to

1890.] . WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 455

the morbid condition of one of them, will perceive a real object
with one hemisphere and an unreal object with the other, and
he will not only think double, but act double. And this state
of doubleness and discord may result in an irresistible impulse
to do some desperate act suggested by the diseased hemisphere.
It is, in fact, the pathological parallel on the sensory side of
what a convulsion is on the motor side.

But if in what has been aptly termed the commonwealth of
the nervous system the brain is the leading member, the other
member of the physiological union — the spinal cord — is hardly less
important. In the constitution of the spinal cord are implanted
innate energies which bear the semblance of consciousness. It
would seem, like the brain, to have its memory ; and its facul-
ties— at least in man — are gradually developed by experience.
Indeed, without this God-given power of development, by which
many muscular actions originating in the spinal cord grow at
length to be automatic, it would require a whole lifetime to learn
how to do one or two things. If an act became no easier after
having been performed several times, if the direction of con-
sciousness were needed on every occasion, we should find it tire-
some work even to dress and undress ourselves. Here let us
observe that all muscular movements which are classed as pri-
marily automatic — that is, movements on which life depends — have
been wisely placed by the Creator beyond the control of our
will — such movements, for instance, as the beating of the heart,
respiration. And it is interesting to know that as the gangli-
onic cells of the spinal cord have a periodic function, so when
these cells are in a morbid state the functional derangement is
often intermittent. Thus in epilepsy, the reacting nerve-centres
must be charged by degrees until they reach a certain tension,
when they violently discharge themselves in a fit. What has been
termed the consciousness of the spinal cord is shown by. its reflex
acts, which take place quite independently of the brain. Some
of the manifestations of this consciousness are marvellous. If we
pinch the hind foot of a frog whose head has been cut off, the
foot is immediately withdrawn ; the stimulus to the sensory nerves
has set free a force which excites to action the corresponding
motor nerves. Now, if we pinch the foot still harder, there is a
wider irradiation of the nerve force, and lo ! all four feet begin
to move, and the headless frog hops away. Again, if the thigh
of this decapitated frog be touched with acetic acid over the in-
ternal condyle, the creature will rub it off with the upper part
of the foot of the same side. Cut off this foot and again apply

456 WONDEKS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. [Jan.,

the acid to the same spot, and it tries again to rub it off, but,
having lost its foot, it cannot. The frog now pauses a moment,
as if it were reflecting, then presently it makes use of the foot
of the other leg, and succeeds in rubbing off the acid. But
these movements of the headless frog do not prove that the
spinal cord is really endowed with volition. They merely prove
that actions for a definite end may be automatic and entirely un-
conscious. In the lower animals the spinal cord has implanted in
it the powers needed to produce movements for self-preservation.
In man's spinal cord designed actions are automatic also, but they
are not inborn — at least, only in a slight degree ; and they have
to be made automatic by education. Man's spinal cord must be
taught just as his brain must be taught. But we do not perceive
the powers of the spinal cord in man as plainly as we do in
the lower animals, because it is much more under the rule of
the more highly endowed brain. Whoever wishes to obtain a
knowledge of the functions of the higher cerebral nerve-centres
in man must not neglect the study of the spinal cord.

And experiments seem to prove that some of the habitual
functions of the higher cerebral nerve-centres are not less auto-
matic than those of the other member of the physiological union.
In man the sensori-motor nerves, like the nerves of the spinal
cord, must be taught by experience ; while in the lower animals
these functions are automatic. A pigeon, the upper portion ot
whose brain (cerebrum) has been removed, seems to lose all
power of spontaneous action ; it is plunged in profound stupor.
Yet if it be tossed into the air it will expand its wings and fly.
Place a light before its eyes, and the pupils contract ; ruffle its
feathers, and it will dress them ; pass a candle to and fro before
it, and it will follow with its head the movements of the candle.
Here the sensory centres, affected by the impressions of sense,
excite the proper movements, but these movements are all auto-
matic. Let this pigeon be ever so hungry, and it will die of
hunger before a plateful of food. But push the food far enough
into its mouth to excite the reflex act of swallowing, and the
food will be greedily swallowed.

Few of us realize how automatically our brain works when
once it has been taught to work. This shows how important it
is to begin early to develop a child's character in the proper
direction, for every nerve-cell is capable of receiving an impres-
sion, and from our birth we begin to receive impressions which
remain through life as so many memories.

Memory, according to the best authorities, is the revival in

1890.] WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 457

consciousness of the different memory-pictures acquired through
the senses, each through its own particular nerve of sensation
and each organically registered and stored up in its own particu-
lar part of the brain. And cerebral localization has made such
advances in the past few years that we can now locate a set
of memories — a vast gain to surgery, for if through disease these
particular memories are lost, the surgeon is able to find the spot
diseased ; and being thus guided, fifty successful operations have
been already performed on the brain which a generation ago
wouk1 not have been attempted.

In a child learning to read we see the process of the organic
registration of memories. The child has to remember the mean-
ing of each word ; his brain must tediously register the different
impressions. But these impressions being once registered, he is
able to read swiftly by unconscious memory. Nor are these
organic registrations ever actually forgotten, except when a brain
is disorganized by disease. A memory endures while life lasts.
Consciousness may not be able to recall it ; but a fever, a blow
on the head, a dream, the agony of death will sometimes draw
aside the veil which conceals the inscriptions and show vividly
a face or a scene which appeared to have vanished for ever and
ever.

It is indeed strange that when in health words and acts may
escape us, may seem not to be registered in the brain at all,
and yet when out of health they appear to us. This unconscious
cerebral action is well illustrated in the case of the servant girl
mentioned by Coleridge, who in the delirium of a fever quoted
>sages of Hebrew, not one word of which she could repeat
when well, but which, when serving in a clergyman's family, she
had heard the clergyman read aloud. The organized registration
)f the results of impressions upon our nervous centres is what
renders memory possible ; and almost the first indication of a
degeneration of nervous element is some flaw in the memory.
We forget because new impressions, new memory-pictures are
continually pressing in upon the old ones, which little by little
become concealed. Memory may be called the retention of brain-
pictures ; recollections, the reproduction of them. And this
power of reproduction shows the persistence of the nerve-currents
excited by the original stimulus whereby the original impressions
were registered. * A common example of the automatic action of
the brain in revealing what it may keep hidden for a time is
when we sometimes do our best to remember a name or a num-
ber and yet cannot remember it with all our efforts. We then

458 WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. [Jan.,

give up the attempt, and lo ! presently the thing we wished to
recall flashes upon us. Here, according to the best authorities,
the idea, the brain-picture which we wanted, was held back just
in proportion to the degree of persistent tension of the nerve-
cells' energy.

But if the nerve-cells of the brain may be viewed as the
storehouse in which the great majority of impressions are pre-
served, yet the whole nervous system is a contributor to mem-
ory, whose impressions are countless in number and which are
always represented by certain physical changes in the nerve-cells.
The contrast of the automatic action of memory with its voli-
tional exercise is seen in dreaming, in delirium, in insanity. Here
the memory may be active while the directing power of the
will is in abeyance.

As the proper registration of memory-pictures depends on a
healthy state of the nerve-cells, we are by this blessed fact pre-
vented from remembering pain. Of course we can remember
that we did at a certain time suffer a particular pain, but we
are not able vividly to recall the pain. Pain is not an organ-
ized product which abides ; the very disorganization of nervous
element which pain implies is temporary, and disappears with the
return of health to the nervous centres.

The manifold disorders to which memory is liable show how
widely and firmly it is embraced within the cerebro-spinal sys-
tem, and how keenly it is affected for good or ill by the con-
dition of the nerve-cells.

The lasting effects of the poison of a certain nameless dis-
ease prove that the organic element remembers for a whole life-
time the modifications it has suffered ; and as there is memory
in every nerve-cell, the power of registering impressions is often
much diminished by this poison.

Imagination, which is the power of assimilating material from
the numberless images stored in the brain, is dependent on mem-
ory. When imagination brings anything before our mind's eye,
if we analyze it we discover that it is merely a new form
patched together from various parts of an old one. It is not
possible to imagine a scene or an animal of which we have had
no experience through memory.

The action of the imagination upon the sensory ganglia and
central nuclei of the optic nerve can become so intense that we
may firmly believe we see persons and things which have no
objective existence, the presence of the retina of the eye not be-
ing necessary for the production of such phenomena, although

1890.] WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 459

in diseases of the retina spectral illusions may also occur. And as
a sensation is as truly a sensation whether the sensorium be
reached from within or from without, the person who declares he
sees an object when no object is present to excite the optic
nerve should be. told that he is right in declaring he is conscious
of seeing something, but that he is not right in supposing
what he sees is caused by an impression on the peripheral ter-
mination of the nerve by an external stimulus.

So intimately are the different parts of the body con-
nected through the nervous system that sometimes, when a per-
son has dreamed he was wounded, marks of inflammation have
been found on that part of the body on awaking, caused by
the action of the vaso-motor nerve-centres on the capillary cir-
culation ; the blood is always most strongly directed to the
spot which imagination points to. Here let us observe that in
dreams an internal organ out of good condition may often be
felt much more plainly than when we are awake ; the ground
tone of a dream is affected by the state of some internal organ,
and by studying the physiological sympathies revealed during
sleep not a little may be learned in regard to the hidden parts
of the body.

As we have already remarked, the different portions of the
human frame, from the highest to the lowest, have a close sym-
pathy for one another through the nervous system. An increase
or diminution of the sensibility of the skin, for instance, may
cause extravagant delusions. The brain is keenly sensitive to
the habit of the feelings. Were a sane person to wake up some
morning with his cutaneous sensibility gone (and it has hap-
pened), he would find it very hard to keep in his senses. Not
being able to feel himself, he would not know what had become
of himself. A soldier, wounded at Austerlitz, lost the sensibility
of his skin, and from that moment he thought himself dead. Hav-
ing no sense of feeling, he did not believe he was alive, and he
called himself a machine.

The change or waste of nerve element through the exercise
of the brain is proved by the chemical analysis of the extrac-
tives of nerve. There are found lactic acid, creatine, and uric
acid, which products strongly resemble those found in muscle
after its functional activity. The display of brain energy is at
the cost of the highly organized nerve matter (which is, how-
ever, soon replaced through the blood), and after severe brain-
work we recognize an increase of phosphates in the urine. The
intangible energy of the higher cerebral centres is revealed in

460 WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. [Jan.,

these excretions from the body. But, unless pushed too far,
an active brain is favorable to longevity, provided the brain-
work is not of an emotional kind. Hence, a mathematician
has more chances for a long life than a poet. It is interest-
ing to know that the .nervous energy expended in the acquisi-
tion of riches — however little it may affect the business man
himself — seems to predispose to nervous degeneration in the
offspring. The child of a successful business man is apt to be
the very reverse of its parent in brain force. Contrary to the
old-time views, we are able to do more experimentally with
the brain than with any other organ of the body. Alcohol and
drugs enable us to perform all kinds of experiments on it.
Chloral and chloroform can temporarily suspend its action ;
opium and alcohol can exalt its functions, and artificial madness
may be produced by Indian hemp and belladonna. Alcohol, in
perverting the condition of the blood, is a potent cause of nerv-
ous disorder ; and it is interesting to trace its effects. In the
first generation the alcoholic poison shows itself by brutal degrada-
tion ; in the second, by hereditary drunkenness ; in the third, by
sobriety, accompanied by hypochondria, with homicidal tenden-
cies ; in the fourth, by feeble intelligence and probable extinction
of the family.

The reason why it is so difficult to overcome the habit of
drink is that the nervous system, when repeatedly exposed to
the poison of alcohol, acquires a disposition to morbid action
even when alcohol is not present ; the perverted state of the
blood from previous excess has worked an effect on the supreme
cerebral cells. That delicate co-ordination of function which
will implies has been shattered ; the will is necessarily weakened,
until at length it disappears altogether in the dipsomaniac.

The brain lesions due to chronic alcoholism are capable of
microscopic demonstration, and when we see these lesions we
realize how vitally important it is not to let the habit of drink
fasten itself upon us. So beautifully interlaced are the different
parts of the cerebro-spinal system that when a special sense
fails the general sensibility may do much to replace it. Per-
sons stone-deaf have been known to have a peculiar suscepti-
bility to certain sounds, depending, no doubt, on an impression
communicated to their organs of touch. They could tell when
a carriage was approaching when a person with all his senses
could not tell it. It is recorded that a man perfectly deaf
had a bodily feeling of music, and different instruments affected
him differently. Musical tones seemed to his perception to

1890,] WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 461

have a great likeness to colors ; the sound of a trumpet was
yellow to him ; that of a drum was red ; that of an organ was
green. It is now a recognized fact that the brain in deep
sleep does not always remain active, for brain power exists in
statical equilibrium as well as in manifested energy. Neverthe-
less, the brain during sleep may sometimes do good work, and
this unconscious work is seen when we discover how much a
sound night's rest has improved our knowledge of a lesson or
a problem studied before going to bed. But if during sleep
the higher cerebral centres may at times be perfectly inactive,
two organs of the body are ceaselessly active, viz. : the heart and
the lungs; they never tire when acting naturally, and the rea-
son is that their rhythmical organic movements are owing to a
rhythmical nutrition, a method of nutrition with time-regulated
progress, accompanied by an intermittent discharge of nerve
force.

The need for sleep arises out of the condition ol the nerve-
centres, and the best way to bring on sleep is by the absence
of sensorial impressions, and this WTC usually find in silence and
darkness. But it may happen that instead of silence the con-
tinuance of a certain sound may be necessary for sleep. In such
a case the nerve-centres, having grown used to a particular set
of impressions constantly recurring, are as much affected by the
want of them as the nerves of another person would be by
their presence ; and it is said that an old lady in New York,
who brought a suit against the Elevated Railroad on the ground
that it was a nuisance and prevented her from sleeping, got so
accustomed to the noise that she could not sleep without it, and
accordingly she dropped the suit on the very day it was to have
been argued.

The awakening power of sensory impressions largely depends
on the habitual state of the brain in regard to them. Thus a
sleeper may often be roused by the sound of his own name
uttered in a whisper, when a much louder sound of another kind
would have failed to do it. A telegraph operator will fall into
a deep sleep from which the faintest tick of {he signaling needle
will waken him. In all such cases the nerve-centres have acquired
a peculiar physical receptivity for certain impressions. Some
persons have the power of fixing their attention, before going to
bed, on rising at a certain hour in the morning, and at this pre-
cise hour .they will open their eyes. Here unconscious cerebra-
tion plays the part of a time-keeper.

Years ago the influence of expectant imagination on the sen-

VOL. L.--30

462 WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. [Jan.,

sorium was recognized by the celebrated Dr. John Hunter. In
lecturing on it he said : "I am confident that I can fix my
attention to any part until I have a sensation in that part."
And Mr. Braid, in his work on Hypnotism, tells us that he
requested four gentlemen, in good health, to place their hands
on a table with the palms upward, and each was to gaze on the
palm of his hand in perfect silence. Within five minutes one of
the gentlemen — a member of the Royal Academy — felt his hand
turn icy cold ; another felt a pricking sensation on his palm ; a
third experienced a great feeling of heat come over his hand ;
while one gentleman's hand had become rigidly cataleptic and
he could not move it from the table. Here we see the wonder-
ful power of expectant imagination. But it sinks into insignifi-
cance compared with the phenomena of artificial somnambulism
or hypnotism, the serious study of which began only thirteen
years ago. But its germs may be traced far back. Everything
in mesmerism was not quackery; it contained some grains of
truth. Deslon, Mesmer's first disciple, wrote in 1780: "If Mes-
mer had no other secret than that of making use of the ima-
gination as an influence for good over the health, would it not
still be a wonderful secret ? For if the medicine of the imagi-
nation be the best, why not make use of it ? "

To-day mesmerism is dead, just as alchemy is dead. But
from mesmerism has sprung the hypnotic suggestion, even as
chemistry sprang from alchemy. But the phenomena of hypnot-
ism have nothing whatever to do with a magnetic fluid or an
emanation passing from one organism into another organism. In
hypnotism everything seems due to suggestion — to the dominat-
ing influence of an idea suggested and accepted by the brain
during the trance and while the will is seemingly in abeyance.

We express no opinion of our own in regard to this new
science, which is apparently working a revolution in psychology.
We will readily accept whatever the church may at any time
declare on the subject. But it is only true to say that many of
the ablest physicians in Europe are devoting themselves to the
study of hypnotism and that they have discovered nothing in
it which does not admit of a scientific explanation. The standard
work on the subject is that of Dr. Hippolyte Bernheim, professor
of medicine at Nancy. In hypnotism we are dumfounded at the
passive receptivity of the nervous system to anything suggested
during the hypnotic trance : the flow of milk, the pulsations of
the heart, the movements of the lungs, may all be changed at
the suggestion of the hypnotizer.

1890.] WONDERS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM, 463

Nor could anything be more strange than the awakening
from the trance. Dr. Bernheim sometimes tells the sleeper,
" Count up to ten. When you will say in a loud voice, Ten,
you will be awake." The moment the word " ten " is uttered
the sleeper opens his eyes. But he has no recollection of hav-
ing counted. At another time Dr. Bernheim will say, " You
shall count as far as ten ; when you get to six you will be
awake, but you shall keep on counting to ten." Having counted
as far as " six," the sleeper awakens, but he continues to count.
" When he has finished I ask him : ' Why do you count ? ' He
does not recollect that he has counted. And this experiment I
have performed a number of times on very intelligent persons."
In the trance the idea suggested would seem to be transformed
into an act with such marvellous rapidity, by the intensely excited
automatic action of the cerebro -spinal system, that the intellect,
the Ego, has not time to rouse itself and to exert its authority.

The cerebro-spinal system, apparently endowed with a con-
sciousness of its own, and having escaped from the rule of the Ego,
is able for a while to have its own way. At least this is Dr.
Bernheim's theory. And this intense excitement, this overpowering
activity of the automatic action of the cerebro-spinal system may
be prolonged beyond the trance, so that we continue even after
we have awakened from it to execute the orders given to us
while we were in¥it. And herein lies grave danger, for a crime
might be committed. The person who has been hypnotized does
not remember that he has been ordered to do anything; yet
the impulse to do a certain thing is irresistible. Happily, an in-
genious method has lately been found through hypnotism itself of
discovering the hypnotizer who may have suggested an evil deed.

The beneficial effects of the hypnotic treatment in heart dis-
eases and in Bright's disease are unmistakable. But its good
effects are most marked in nervous maladies. According to Dr.
Bernheim, there is at bottom no difference between natural sleep
and this artificial sleep. Only the natural sleeper is in touch
with nobody except himself, and it is from his own last waking
thoughts, and the condition of his own body, before his eyes
close, that his dreams arise. But in the hypnotic sleep the idea,
the personality of the hypnotizer remains ever present and up-
permost in the brain of the sleeper ; and it is this dominating
personality that gives the hypnotizer the power to call into action
the sleeper's imagination, to suggest to him dreams, and to in-
spire him to do things while the will of the person hypnotized
seems for the time being unable to say yea or nay.

464 BE THLEHEM. [Jan.,

In conclusion, let us say that the evidence points to vastly
greater potentialities in the automatism of the cerebro-spinal sys-
tem than we ever imagined. But why need this surprise us
when we know that an Omnipotent Being is our Creator ?
For ages ' past we have little by little been discovering a very
few of the wonders and glories of his work. Let us continue
our discoveries. And as our mortal body contains within it an
immortal spirit, is it not worthy of deeper study than we com-
monly bestow upon it ? If we understood it better, if we real-
ized how keenly sensitive the body is to the way we treat it, we
might live more soberly, more chastely, and we should find in
virtue the surest means to elevate the human race.

WILLIAM SETON.

BETHLEHEM.

A THREEFOLD Bethlehem I sing —
Of God the Word, of Christ the King,
Of Him this day the Priest and Guest
In Bethlehems of every breast.

" In principle erat Verbum,"- — John i, i,

In the eternal solitude,
Or ere the Spirit yet did brood
Upon the waters, or the throng

Of angel forms

Leaped into sudden life and song
To fill the emptiness with thrills
Of life and motion, and with storms
Of strenuous Hosannas break
The awful silences, and shake
The bases of the everlasting hills —

The God of Might,
Throned high in inaccessible light,
Utters, before the ages had begun,

His word of equal Deity :
THOU ART MY SON,

THIS DAY HAVE I BEGOTTEN THEE,
And lo ! the Co-eternal Son doth rest
In the first Bethlehem of the Father's breast.

1890.] BETHLEHEM. 465

II.

" Et Verbum caro factum est."— John i. 14.

A lowlier Bethlehem I sing
For Christ, the King.

Not in the inaccessible light,
Whose faintest ray the ages doth illume,
Of His, the Eternal Father's face,
The splendent fount of life and grace ;

But in a night
Heavy with sullen shades of earthly gloom,

Not in the Father's breast

The Babe doth rest —
But in a manger low he lies,
Whose feet should scale the farther skies ;
No lightning splendors glorify his head;

No courtly trains around him pass,

And show a reverend knee

To hidden Majesty;

But ox and ass
Bend an unconscious neck above his bed !

Spirits of God ! whose vision clear

Doth compass every sphere;

Whose songs can aye rehearse
The utmost secrets of the universe,

Find ye not in the Godhead here
Secrets of love beyond angelic ken ?

But oh ! children of men,

Now that your King has come —
Vision of Prophets, and the long Desire —

Why are ye dumb ?
Where is the streaming eye ? the heart with love afire ?

Whose dwelling is the universe,

On whom the Seraphim attend,

For whom the highest heavens bend,
He hath no need of worshippers !

But oh ! his heart is sore,

Yea, runneth o'er,

Not for the silent hour, the gloom,
The squalor of the royal room,

466 BETHLEHEM. [Jan.,

The swaddling clothes, the humble straw,
Nor the brute beasts that near him draw,

Nor mockery of the palace shed

That bends above his manger-bed,
Nor the rude blasts of winter-wind —

These, these were kind !

The cave of Bethlehem
Were sure meet place for them !

Ah, no ! his loving heart

Hath yet a sadder smart ;

He came to seek, . to save ;
But the rude bleakness blown from every hill

Were yet less chill
Than the cold hearts of men grown colder than the cave.

III.

" . . . Et habitavit in nobis." — John i. 14.

The lowliest Bethlehem, the least,
For Christ, the Priest!

O Bethlehem of Christ the King,
The snowy portals open wide
For simple-hearted worshipping.

No earthly lore,
No strife of schools, no tongue of books,

No torch of war,
The stubborn hearts of men shall guide

Unto thy royal seat.
Peaceful the folded flocks abide

While shepherd-crooks
Marshal the way unto thy Holy Place,

Thou new Jerusalem!

Yea, Bethlehem,

From cunning Prudence, swelling Pride,
Thou showest us 'tis good to hide

The secret of the King !

But oh ! for Christ the Priest,

What sinless doors unfold ?

What frankincense, and myrrh, and gold,
Bespeak the royal feast ?

1890.] BETHLEHEM. 467

See, humble Love and haughty Pride

Walk side by side ;
And Innocence, and horrid Sin,
And flaming heart, and sluggish clod,

All, all may enter in
Unto the holy things of God !
Nay, rather, Christ doth make of them

His unresisting Bethlehem !
Oh ! then, what tongues of Seraphim may tell
Thy love, my God, that will not utter " nay " ?

Nor yet again rehearse

The tragedy of Egypt's curse
Against thy handiwork of clay ?

With blood the Lamb hath sprinkled all the posts

Of Egypt and of Israel !
And so the weak, the halt, the blind,
The palsied feet, the faded mind,
The fainting heart, the dulled eye,
The leper, slinking fearful by,
The sick, the dead, the deaf, the dumb —

These, these are now become
The tabernacles of the Lord of Hosts!

IV.

" Amen. Come, Lord Jesus." — Apoc. xxii. 20.

God, and King, and Priest, and Guest,
Be not vain thy loving quest:

Saviour, who hast sighed for us,

Bled for us, and died for us,

In the Host dost hide for us,

In the Bread abide for us,

All, all, to be born again

In the hearts and souls of men,

Enter there, and make of them

Thine eternal Bethlehem!

HUGH T. HENRY.

Philadelphia.

468 A PROTESTANT PROPAGANDA. [Jan.,

A PROTESTANT PROPAGANDA.

THE foreign missionary operations of the orthodox Congrega-
tional churches of the United States have been carried on during
the past eighty years by the society known as " The American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions." This associa-
tion originated with a new and, among Protestants, hitherto
unheard-of movement for the conversion of the heathen, which
was started by a few devoted members of the Congregational
churches early in the present century. . They were men deeply in
earnest, who offered to go out as missionaries themselves, provided
the churches would support them in the work. Their proposal .
was accepted, and so great was the enthusiasm which their zeal
enkindled that soon the conversion of the heathen became a rec-
ognized work in which all the churches were bound to engage.
As a means for carrying it out the society of the American
Board was formed. There is something unique in this organiza-
tion which displays the natural genius of the Yankee for practical
efficiency. It is an independent corporation, elects its own mem-
bers, has its own theological standard, its own rules, and enforces
these rules after its own fashion. It is characteristic of this race
to be for organization; we see this exemplified in politics, busi-
ness, and, in fact, in everything except the one thing where it is
most needed — church government. Had they the Catholic faith
they would be invincible.

Foreign as the constitution of the American Board is to the
principles of Congregational polity, it always worked harmoniously
with it until the board* refused to sanction Progressive Orthodoxy.
Back to this issue must be traced the fundamental differences which
have disturbed its peace and prosperity during the past few years,
and which threaten to cripple its efficiency in the future. This
vagary of probation after death is one of those revolutionary ideas
which upset the whole system of revelation. According to this
theory, faith and repentance, instead of being limited to man's
proper militant sphere, the present life, are vainly looked for in
a world where he is no longer perfect man but only disembodied
spirit. The actual followers of this theory are probably few if
the whole denomination be considered, but there is a large mino-
rity who sympathize with them or are tolerant of their views.
Furthermore, they have found no difficulty in obtaining a foothold
in the churches, which are powerless through lack of organiza-

1890.] A PROTESTANT PROPAGANDA. 469

tion. " The Congregational body," says the Christian Intelli-
gencer, " has scarcely a consensus of doctrine, and in one council
may demand the strictest orthodoxy and in another allow the
widest latitudinarianism in the candidates for the ministry. The
ordination of a Congregational minister decides little or nothing
as respects doctrinal position."

But how to get along with the intolerant American Board is the
problem which the new school are trying hard to solve. At the
Cleveland session of the Missionary Society last year they were
somewhat pacified by the action of the board in choosing a Pru-
dential Committee of fifteen to . consider possible plans for bring-
ing the board and churches closer together. But when this com-
mittee reported at the recent New York meeting that they were
" unprepared to recommend any change at present in the
methods of election to corporate membership " the feeling of dis-
satisfaction became stronger than ever. It then immediately be-
came clear to every one that the board is simply an arbitrary
doctrinal and disciplinary propaganda which may snap its fin-
gers at the churches and ecclesiastical councils according to its
own pleasure. Dr. Patten, one of its members, in a vigorous
speech before the whole assembly, describes exactly how the
board deals with its candidates for service. I will quote his
words .as reported in the Independent of October 24, 1889:

" When, sir, a y9ung man, having studied in one of our Con-
gregational theological seminaries — also represented by a delegate
in our National Council — sets his heart upon going to the mission-
ary field, he perhaps applies to a Congregational local associ-
ation to be examined and to be approved as a probationer for
the ministry. He is so examined and approved, after a careful
inquiry into his doctrinal soundness. Perhaps he even goes fur-
ther, as has been done in one or more cases that might be
named. Perhaps he goes before a Congregational Council and
asks to be ordained as a Congregational minister. They subject
him to a careful theological examination ; they approve him — and
the council is not a picked one, it is a council of the vicinage;
not a small council, but a large one ; not feeble in intellect, but
composed of men of ability known through the land — such a
council approves the man theologically, and even goes so far as
to specifically declare that in that and other respects he is an
excellent man to send to the foreign field. And when he is or-
dained, in behalf of that council a brother steps forward and
gives him the right hand of fellowship. What does that mean ?
His individual fellowship? No, sir. It means the fellowship of
that council, and through that council the fellowship of the de-

4/0 A PROTESTANT PROPAGANDA. [Jan.,

nomination. Having thus received the fellowship of the denom-
ination as a doctrinally sound man, and, so far forth as that is
concerned, worthy to be sent to the missionary field (he having
expressed his wish to go thither), he makes application to the
Prudential Committee of this Board, and they, setting up a test
not recognized by our councils, a test that is not warranted
by the creed that was formed by a commission from the Nation-
al Council, a test which our denomination, as such, knows nothing
of, which it refuses to apply in case t after case of men who
come before its councils — this committee rejects the man, and
thereby flings defiance in the face of the organized ecclesiastical
fellowship of the Congregational churches. Now, sir, the case is
a very simple one ecclesiastically. I am not discussing a point
on which there may be division ; I am not saying he is right or
wrong theologically. It is the fact that a man pronounced in
fellowship with our churches ecclesiastically is then rejected on
the very ground on which he has been approved — rejected by
this body through its Prudential Committee. And yet it calls
itself our agency and represents itself by a delegate in our Na-
tional Council. These things cannot be reconciled, sir, and our
churches will never be satisfied until some steps are taken either
by an alteration of the provision of this board in that respect, or
an alteration of its constitution, by which it shall come more
under the action of the churches, and there shall be an end to
this discordant and contradictory matter. I have spoken plainly
because this is a great question and the committee must give it
consideration. If this committee can find no mode of extrica-
tion for the board, others will find a mode of extrication for
the churches. "

The American Board claims to be only an agency of the Con-
gregational churches. What right, therefore, say the minority,
has it to independent action ? It certainly has no right, if it is a
Congregational society. Moreover, Dr. Patten has a just griev-
ance against it, as every one can see. No one ventured to deny
his charges ; the only refuge for the defence was evasion ; reply
was plainly impossible.

Dr. Griffis, another member, also arraigned the board at the
last meeting on account of its opposition to the churches. He
speaks of three scandals which have arisen from its method of
action. One is the notorious fact that nearly all the Congrega-
tional ministers in the principal part of Boston, besides many
others outside, would not be permitted by the board to preach
the Gospel to the heathen ; the second is that no Congregation-
al minister, unless he comes in the character of a member, can

1890.] A PROTESTANT PROPAGANDA. 471

have a voice in the proceedings of the board ; thirdly, it is shame-
ful that every candidate for the missions has to go before a secret
tribunal to be judged, where he cannot take the position given
him by a Congregational council. And these accusations were
simply ignored ; they could not be denied. As long as the board
professes to be Congregational, it is certainly bound to abide by
the decisions of the churches and ecclesiastical councils. Its pres-
ent position is, therefore, manifestly absurd and ridiculous. If it
wishes to remain orthodox in spite of the denomination, its only
consistent cdurse is to sever its connection with these unorthodox
churches, expel its own liberal members, and become the agency
of the strictly orthodox churches. But to do this would be dif-
ficult, because the churches everywhere are more or less infected
with the new doctrines.

Now, it must become evident to every unbiased observer that
the evil which these men are seeking to remove lies deeper than
either party is willing to admit. It is inherent in the congrega-
tional polity, which has been very appropriately compared to " a
rope of sand." It is the misfortune of our non-Catholic brethren
that they never see their inconsistencies except singly, one by
one, and only when it is too late to avoid a crash. What they
all need is authority. Without it there can never be unanim-
ity. Even the vote of a majority counts for nothing if the
principle of authority be wanting ; an unauthoritative religious
body by its very nature can never require obedience. It can
never make laws or rules without unmaking itself. From such
bodies there must always be the legitimate refuge of secession,
and this, if actually carried out, would destroy the organization.
Nothing is more fallacious than the analogy which is sometimes
made between independent states and churches. For it to hold
there would have to be various authoritative churches, as there
are different sovereign states. It must be conceded that all
legitimate civil power is from God, and that the just laws of
states bind in conscience; a president of our own Republic, for
example, when duly elected, rules as validly as ever divinely-
chosen king governed Israel.

Let us now apply these principles to spiritual government.
All admit that there is such a thing as divine law through reve-
lation, but if opposing churches and individuals are at liberty to
interpret it in different ways, it becomes of no effect. A law by
its very definition means a rule which emanates from authority
and is of universal application ; it presupposes authority and
would be impossible without it. Hence we conclude that inas-

472 "AND PEACE ON EARTH!' [Jan.,

much as law is a part of revelation and depends upon author-
ity, revelation is inseparably linked with authority.

The Catholic Church is the only perfect religious society in
the world, because she alone embodies those principles which
unite men with God and with each other; and there are indi-
cations, thank God ! that many of our separated brethren, who
think and are conscientious, are beginning to see that the unity
which she alone possesses must be divine. Her unity and per-
petuity are the most prominent facts in the history of Christian-
ity, and the promises of Christ are so manifestly the foundation
of her authority that the latter could never have existed without
the former. " Facts are never misinterpretations of God's prom-
ises. God never misinterprets himself in history."

H. H. WYMAX.

" AND PEACE ON EARTH."

"WELL, good-night and a Merry Christmas to you!" said the
senior partner, shaking Ellis Whitcomb's hand. " And, dear me,
man, why do you stultify yourself any longer over those papers ?
— Christmas eve, of all nights, when the wife and bairns must be
expecting you home!"

" I get on faster when the others have gone and it's quiet,"
said Whitcomb. But when Mr. Gurney had left he seeme'd to
forget all about his work, and leaned back in his chair with a
look of abstraction, despairingly noted through the glass door by the
office-boy, waiting to close up, and longing to be out on the street
with the rest of the surging holiday throng. In truth, the young
lawyer had been retarded in his writing, and could hardly see it
now, by reason of a vision which interposed itself between his
eyes and the closely written pages, and would not down for all
his habit of concentration. It was of a man's head, younger than
his own, and of a more joyous type than were his clear-cut,
grave, intellectual features. The hair, of a much brighter brown
than Ellis Whitcomb's, waved gracefully over the boyish head,
and the curves of the smiling mouth and glance of the bright
eyes showed an ardent love of pleasure, and perhaps a touch of
recklessness. The last time he had seen it the face had
worn a look of angry defiance, and the recklessness had
degenerated into insolence. Yet still to another might have
been visible the subtle family likeness so curiously assim-

1890.] " AND PEACE ON EARTH" 473

ilating faces otherwise different. For these two heads had lain
on one pillow in care-free, dreamless nights long gone, and had
.bent together in brotherly amity over the same school-books.
And the elder could hear across the years an echo of the moth-
erly voice, silent now, which said : " And when I leave you two
alone together, you must bear with him, Ellis, for he is younger
and much more impetuous than you."

He rose and commenced pacing up and down the floor,
unknowing of the office-boy's pantomime without, which simulated
the tearing out of handfuls of hair at the further delay. Had it
been but a year ago that in this very room his indignation at
the younger brother's misconduct — betting on horses and gam-
bling at cards, wild associates and reckless courses, euphemistically
called " follies " by the wrorld — had provoked a sharp reprimand,
which, met with defiance, had ended in a merited dismissal from
the firm's employ ? In that he could feel that he was right. The
stern sense of justice which dealt equally with himself and others
fully approved. Any further condonation of negligence absolute
and entire, a little more indulgence, and chaos in the establish-
ment must have come again. Already the eye-brows of the senior
partner — something of a martinet — took a significant curve at
mention of Walter Whitcomb's name, though he forbore greatly
for his valued junior's sake. Already among the clerks had crept
in a general laxity and breaches of discipline, tacitly assumed to
be justified by the younger Whitcomb's example. Had not Ellis
tried in the years during which he had been mounting in fortune
and reputation in his profession to draw his brother with ' him
and infuse into the really brilliant though undisciplined mind his
own steady ambition and habits of work and self-control? Then,
at the last, after so much forbearance and indulgence, to have
Walter take his hat with a careless smile and say : " So I am
free at last ! No pent-up Utica of a law-office with unending
briefs and cast-iron rules need contain me longer. You see,
Ellis, having only blood and not ichor in my veins, I cannot sit
superior among the gods, like you, or like my grandsire carved
in alabaster ! "

Thus far the elder's conscience had gone with him in retro-
spect ; but now he felt a pang, remembering the incisive, freez-
ing words of cold contempt with which he met this outburst,
angered at the assumption that he who was but a man had had
no temptations to overcome, no hours of self-combat. Then his
brother, with debonnaire smile changed to a sudden white look,
had said :

474 "AND PEACE ON EARTH" [Jan.,

" I presume I may see Christine when I call ? "

"As she shall decide," sternly. After this Walter had
left without another word, to reappear at his brother's house
that night in company for the first time — for intemperance was
not his habit — with an enemy who had stolen his brains. His
careless demeanor, his wild sallies, his reckless laughter had
shocked the two women who had been his constant advocates,
his betrothed and her sister, Ellis's wife. And next day, with-
out a word exchanged between the sisters on this subject, the
girl sent her lover a note of dismissal for what seemed to
her spirited though gentle nature a deliberate insult as well
as an ill omen for the future. Since then his name had not
been mentioned among them, though her indifference to other
suitors and a recent severe illness had made Mr. and Mrs.
Whitcomb suspect that her grieved longing for the absent was
greater than pride would have allowed.

The brother frowned now, then sighed heavily, and going
to the desk began gathering the scattered papers. The office-
boy, hope springing eternally in his human breast, stood on his
hands in the deep shadow outside the radius of electric light
at this favorable sign, but resumed his usual perpendicular hastily
and confusedly at sight of a form which came in through the
outer door, while a visitor's voice asked :

" Mr. Whitcomb still here ? Ah ! yes, I see him. You need
not show me in; I know the way."

The glass door closed again, and the boy gave himself up
once more to utter depression.

" Ah ! Mr. Whitcomb," said the caller, a young man and
very carefully attired, " I hardly hoped to find you here so
late on Christmas eve. I am afraid you work too closely.
You should be more careful of your health."

" Thank you, I am very well," replied Whitcomb with the
impassive look and manner he habitually wore with all but
intimates. "What can I do for you, Mr. Hammond? Sit
down."

" As I have chanced to find you here I will detain you
for a moment, though most likely my call, as a matter of
business" — smiling — "is absurdly unnecessary. Our paying tel-
ler's frequent spasms of distrust often make us laugh at the
bank. However, in this case" — feeling in an inner pocket — " he
having raised the ghost of a doubt, it was best to have it
laid at once."

He opened his note-book, and took out a slip of paper.

1890.] "AND PEACE ON EARTH." 475

" A check of yours was presented at bank to-day and cashed.
On after-scrutiny the teller fancied there was something queer
about the signature. It looks all right to me, but he per-
sisted in finding some unfamiliar touches about it ; and to satisfy
his tardy caution I undertook to show it to you on my way
home this evening. The child is well known at the bank."

" The child ? " Whitcomb said inquiringly, taking the paper
from his hand.

" A little girl, name Green ; mother keeps house on Thirty-
fourth Street," with a swift but intent look at Whitcomb's face.
"She has often" — slowly — "been to the bank before."

The lawyer's expression changed not at all under scrutiny.
" To present my checks, usually ? " he asked.

The visitor hesitated perceptibly. " When your brother was
with you, you know. He sent her occasionally to draw money
for him — when convenient."

Whitcomb drew nearer the great green shade over his light
to look more closely at the check. Who was it that had the
faculty of copying hand-writing so exactly? Whose playful imi-
tation of his signature had often caused a smile and the point-
ing out of minute differences, one or two of which were visible
here ? With whom had Walter lodged since he had wilfully
abandoned the restraints of his brother's roof? A sort of spasm
constricted for a moment the regular features, which were as
calm as ever when he turned to the cashier and said quietly,
after glancing at his check-book : " You may tell Mr. Ander-
son that it is all right, and the bank is quite safe."

Hammond arose, buttoning a loosened glove, and cheerfully
rejoined : " Well, it will be quite a relief to the old fellow.
And you will excuse my detaining you. A lawyer must know,
even better than a bank officer, that the habit of distrust in a
business man is unfortunately well founded." He received a bow
of assent to this pessimistic view of human nature, and paused
at the door to say ceremoniously : " Will you kindly present my
compliments to Mrs. Whitcomb and Miss Selby. I am going
out of town for the holidays, or would have the pleasure of call-
ing on them" — a pleasure which he knew Miss Selby, at least,
hardly counted on his having, in view of a recent interview, dis-
appointing in nature to him ; but he trusted to her delicate reti-
cence, and was a man, moreover, tenacious of purpose. Out in
the street he smiled, lighting a cigarette, and muttered between
his teeth :

" It's all the same to me. If he chooses to acknowledge the

476 "AND PEACE ON EARTH" [Jan.,

signature, it still answers my purpose of keeping that fellow from
the house where she is; and time and I against any two." And
was presently lost in the hurrying multitude.

Up-stairs, the lawyer finished securing his papers, and gave
the office-boy, now almost past emotion, a handsome Christmas-
box, together with the welcome dismissal. The boy's grin of de-
light faded in a measure when he looked up at his employer,
whom he admired beyond all sons of men.

" I guess you're as tired as me, Mr. Whitcomb," he ventured.

" As tired as you ! Well, I have kept you late, Tom, for
Christmas eve. Enjoy yourself all you can and be a good boy."

He had to stand in the " L " car all the way home, and was
jostled and pushed and prodded with Noah's arks and dolls'
legs and tin swords and other very much considered trifles irregularly
outlining the bundles carried homeward by happy, tired shoppers.
Ordinarily the humors of this good-natured Christmas mob
would have diverted him ; and the glimpses afforded, through all
the noise and laughter of the swaying jam of people, into the
common, kindly, human affections would have appealed to the
deep tenderness underlying his rather cold appearance. But to-
night he hardly knew he was uncomfortably crowded, and only
noted, unconsciously, a sign somewhere, a flaming advertisement
of Angostura Bitters, which he must have repeated scores of
times mentally without once apprehending its meaning. When
he got out finally at his station, near the Park, he ran down
the steps, nor observed in the least the beauty of the night, with
the " white moon shepherding her stars of gold," as on another
Christmas eve long ago, under far Syrian skies. At the corner
of his street the clear, chill air struck coldly on his cheek, and
he realized the necessity of pulling himself together before going
in. He walked the length of the snow-banked pavement, which
a late frost had left crisp and firm, three, four, many times
before he had well under control the tumult of shocked feelings,
of miserable disappointment, of wretched suspicion amounting to
mental conviction; keenest of all, perhaps secretly, of mortally
wounded pride, that the family standard held aloft by him should
be dragged in the mire by another, and that other — Walter ! Did
Hammond suspect? He thought he had detected a curious ex-
pression of his once or twice. He might be intimate with Wal-
ter— belonged to the same clubs, perhaps ; how could he tell who,
through the strange chances of a great city, had not seen his
brother's face for a year ? He forcibly ceased thinking of the
matter for the time, and let himself in at his door.

1890.] "AND PEACE ON EARTH:' 477

"Papa, papa!" cried his two chubby boys, tumbling over each
other to get at him.

"They are only waiting to see you before going to bed,"
said the dainty little woman on his arm. " Boys who want to
go to five o'clock Mass should be asleep by this time. Are you
not very late, dear ? "

" I was getting ravenous myself," the tall, graceful girl under
the portiere calmly remarked. " A Barmacide's feast is all very
well up to nine o'clock, but I was just preparing to dine off
Hugh or Selby when you came in."

" We an't been killed yet ! " said darkly, with a small war-
whoop, Hugh, who addressed his aunt, and whose grammar, his
mother declared, made cold chills run up and down her spine.

" You have spent the time of waiting profitably, at least," said
Whitcomb, glancing about the pretty rooms, gay with Christmas
boughs and flowers. " What delicious fragrance! Ah! the violets."

He bent over the flat basket filled with violets of all shades
and fringed with maiden's-hair fern, and with simply an address
affixed.

" They are Christine's prettiest gift," said his wife, " and came
without card or message. She cannot guess the sender."

The faintest accession of color in the girl's fair cheek might
have seemed to contradict this.

" Mr. Hammond, perhaps," continued his wife. " He sends
flowers frequently."

" They do not look like Mr. Hammond's," said the girl. " He
thinks more showy blooms and of gayer tints better become
young womanhood's time o' day. His taste is not, I fancy, for
' violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes or Cytherea's
breath ' " — this with a caress in her voice ; then, somewhat jeal-
ously drawing her basket away from the others' eyes : " You will
not mind if I am a little selfish with these, and take them to my
oratory? The parlors are so filled with flowers."

As she carried them carefully away a sudden thought struck
her sister, and she glanced quickly and apprehensively at her
husband. But he was playing with the little sons, and she did
not see the slight, contraction of his brow which followed her
suggestive look.

Christmas day dawned clear, cold, and bright, as the night
had promised. Joy-bells rang early from the steeples, merry lit-
tle knots of people came trooping through the streets from the
first Masses. The cheery voices of his own family group return-
ing awaked Whitcomb from an oppressive dream to remember
VOL. L. — 31

478 "AND PEACE ON EARTH." [Jan.,

that a sullen cloud lowered over his day. Every trace of regret-
ful tenderness was now eliminated from his mood, which had set-
tled into bitter indignation and cold contempt for the sinner.
With all so ill about his heart, there were Christmas gifts and
greetings to exchange, his wife and sister's pretty attentions to
acknowledge, the boys1 clamorous, overwhelming, swarming, but
fortunately short-lived, gratitude to endure. He had a half-thought,
so unfit his frame of mind, of omitting attendance at the late
Mass ; but the habit of religious observance prevailed.

" O papa ! " cried Hugh, hopping about the party ready to
start, " don't mamma and Auntie Chris look beautiful in their
new coats ? "

" Forgive the ungallant omission of which Hugh reminds me,
ladies," said Whitcomb. " I should have told you before that no
nymphs of Venus, in new seal-skin coats and turbans, could ever
look half so fair as you do ! " In fact, the soft fur brought out
to charming advantage the tints of Christine's cheeks and soft
blond curls about brow and neck. Why did his wife sigh as
the girl stepped in front with a little escort on each side ? Was
it of the violets she thought ?

" If you will both permit me one criticism," said Whitcomb
hastily, in a jesting tone, " I am responsible for the seal-skin, but
not for those dead birds I see in the hats."

"They were quite dead when they came to us," said Christine
over her shoulder, with pretended ingenuousness.

" As dead as the seals were," supplemented his wife.

" The seals give warmth at least with their skins, but you
cannot pretend the poor little slain birds are useful."

"What became of the quantities of fish you used to catch last
summer in the Adirondacks ? " inquired his wife with apparent
irrelevance. A discussion, half-jest, half-earnest, lasted until they
were at the church-door. But when the girl stopped in the porch
to draw her gloved hand from the muff and touch his, whis-
pering with a smile :

" You are quite right, Ellis, and all such cruelty is wrong. I
will celebrate His birthday by abjuring it," why should the
trifling episode have made his hurt throb painfully ? Good God !
how sweet were the best of women, and how unworthy often
those to whom they gave their pure affections ! He knelt and
rose, and knelt and rose, and hardly knew where he was until
the choristers' clear, sweet, thrilling tones swelled high in the
"Gloria in Excel sis." " Et in terra pax" they sang, and a
surging wave of anger went through him, hotly. "Peace,"

1890.] "AND PEACE ON EARTH" 479

"peace," where there was none. The Prince of Peace had come,
and what then? Was there any less selfish wickedness or
triumphant sin in the world ? " Bonce voluntatis " chanted the
boyish voices. He caught at the thought ; it was only to men
of gentle will this peace was promised. But why, then, was he
so tormented who had tried to keep himself from ill-doing ?
Did any sinner suffer alone ? or did he not rather go on his way
careless, leaving the suffering to others ? " If I refrain from pun-
ishing him, I hope God will not," he had nearly hardened him-
self into thinking.

The Mass went on with chiming bells and mists of incense
and solemn intoning, and at last the preacher mounted into the
pulpit, a spare, worn-looking man, in the dress of his order, with
a singularly sweet expression. He read the epistle and gospel
appointed for this -Mass, and Whitcomb took a hard satisfaction
in such phrases as : " Making purgation of sins," " His ministers
a flame of fire," " Who hast loved justice and hated iniquity !"
But the father, after some timely affectionate Christmas greetings
to his flock, passed on to discourse otherwise.

" To-day is born to us a Saviour," he said in substance,
" who, his rulership and eternal justice in abeyance, stretches
out his hands with yearning ardor, pleading always, ' My Son,
give me your heart ; I come for it ! Behold, I stand at your door
and wait.' Oh! dearly beloved, think of it ! He waits! He waits !
Is there one of us would keep him without? The source and per-
fection of truth, beauty, light, sweetness, of all we desire and adore,
stands at our door, lovingly calling. And wide open we throw
the portals and fall at his feet, and pray him to enter because
of the love we bear him."

" But what if he, Life of our life, comes not in ? What if he
turns away with sorrowful eyes and tender voice, complaining :
'Nay, this dwelling is not for me. There is no love within!'
'Oh! Master, who could fail to love you?' And he answers in
words that himself inspired: 'If any man say, I love God, and
hateth his brother, he is a liar.' "

"Come, let us see if this it is which keeps the Lord from
our unprepared souls. Have we built around ourselves a wall
of pride and angry resentment and contempt for the little ones
and the weaker brethren ? Do we wrap our garments in phari-
saical scorn about us and withdraw them from the clinging
hands of those who might with such help arise ? Have we
that charity without which he knows we love not him ? — the
charity which is patient, is kind, is not provoked to anger ;

480 "AND PEACE ON EARTH:' [Jan.,

which beareth, hopeth, endureth all things, and which never
falleth away; the charity we so sorely need, each one from
others, for who can say: 'My heart is clean; I am pure from
sin ' ? And in his eyes there is no man upon earth who doth
good and sinneth not! But to our proud and unforgiving souls
shall we lay the flattering unction that it is the wrong we
scorn and not the offender? God is not thus mocked. His
clear eyes see the pride, the spiritual arrogance, which make
us walk far on the other side, though he has bidden us help
our brother rise not seven or seventy times, but always, as
He does. * He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is
love.' On this gracious Christmas day he came to be a pro-
pitiation for the sins of each of us."

" My dearest, if God hath so loved us, we also ought to
love one another. Let ' us love one another, dearly beloved,
for love is of God. And this commandment we have from
God, that he who loveth God love also his brother. So,
dearly beloved, may the divine Guest enter the open portals of
our souls, and finding there that ardent, helpful, humble broth-
erly love, leave with us his peace which is eternal and passeth
understanding."

A few more words, and the father left the pulpit. To Ellis
Whitcomb every word was as though addressed to him directly,
so earnest was the preacher's manner, so entirely was he pos-
sessed with the feeling of his words. " To men of good-will,"
a voice seemed whispering, and suddenly a touch of sad humility
came to soften him, and his anger was more like grief. After
the last gospel, and when the white-robed procession of priests
and choristers went winding out, their voices fading gradually
away in the " Adeste fideles," he was able to sink on his knees
and say for his first prayer that day : " Oh ! give me, a sinner,
grace to forgive ! " His secret burden was still with him, yet
his heart was certainly lighter to take part in the cheery saluta-
tions and greetings outside, where the sparkling snow and sun-
shine combined to make all bright.

" By the way," said a recent acquaintance, " I must congra-
tulate you if your namesake on the Era is a relative. To mount
from a reportership to writing brilliant leaders that every one is
talking about within one year is a rapid flight."

" My brother writes for that paper," said Whitcomb quietly ;
which, indeed, was all he knew now of Walter's life, save one
other damning fact.

High carnival reigned in the nursery, where a flock of visit-

1890.] "AND PEACE ON EARTH" 481

ing children aided Hugh and Selby to act some little Christmas
play under the able management of Aunt Christine.

" A gentleman to see you in the liberry, Mr. Whitcomb,"
announced the new butler. " Didn't give no card, sir." The
fleeting smile at the children's antics had left his lips before he
entered the library. And there stood he whose face had come
between him and work last night. " Walter ! " The surprise made
him stand mute and apparently cold. The other's eager advance
was checked.

" It is Christmas day, Ellis ; and though I acted like a brute,
and you were a little harsh, perhaps, though just, the last time I
was here, I have returned, you see. I thought after — after all the
kindness I seemed to slight— you might still be interested in hear-
ing of my success. I have worked hard since then at business
more congenial to me than law papers" — with a most winning
smile — " and have kept steady for my own sake, not to speak of
yours, and — and — well, to end the tedious, brief tale, I am pro-
moted to a desk in the editorial room now, with a fair prospect
for the future."

''I am very glad. I congratulate you," said Ellis, but so me-
chanically that his brother was chilled and repulsed.

" You may be more interested," said he in an altered tone,
" in the second matter which brought me here. I was told that
Gurney & Whitcomb had invested largely in Nirvana Mine stock.
As a journalist I happen to know that it is unsound, and to be
got rid of as soon as possible."

" We were only thinking of investing, and thank you for your
very useful information "; but still with such constraint that Walter
cried :

" As you are so ill-pleased to see me, Ellis, I will not stay ;
but surely we may shake hands first." He held his out, but his
brother made no movement towards it, and, wounded to the heart,
he turned to go.

"Stop !" said Ellis abruptly. " I was thinking of something
else. Are you still lodging with Mrs. Green, in Thirty-fourth
Street?"

"Yes/' with some wonder, "as she inclines to spoil me, I con-
tinue to give her the chance."

" Do you generally pay her several months at a time, and with
a check ?"

" Certainly not," with increasing surprise. " You are thinking
of the careless fellow I used to be. After — after receiving a certain
letter which was as torturing and salutary as the surgeon's knife,

482 "AND PEACE ON EARTH" LJan->

I laid down strict rules of life for myself, and one is to pay as I
go — or not to go."

" Then if her little girl presented one of my checks at
bank—"

*' Can't see what her little girl would be doing with checks
signed by you. I used to send her sometimes long ago, but not
for the last year, certainly, for more than one reason."

" It was a check with my signature," hoarsely and drawing
nearer, " but not signed by me." 'The brothers looked into
each other's faces, and Walter's flushed darkly-red up to the sunny
locks on his temples, then grew white.

" And could you think because I used in jest to imitate —
Gracious God ! could you think such a thing of me ? I would not
have believed the world against you."

" Our different lives — your temptations — your difficulties — I
knew nothing," Ellis said brokenly.

" If I must prove my innocence to you," Walter said hotly,
" it shall be done. But now I will go. I cannot breathe here a
moment longer, and it is I who would not touch your hand
now."

He moved towards the door. " Stay, stay !" cried the elder,
stepping between. Without further proof than the frank glance of
those wide, blue eyes, and ringing, indignant tones of the familiar
voice, the dense cloud of misery which had enveloped him since
last night seemed to roll away in a moment, and all was clear as
the day.

" My dear, dearest boy, forgive me ! Now that I see you
again, I know it was impossible." Who had seen before this new
expression of humility mixed with love on the lawyer's grave,
proud face ? He held out his arms unconsciously. " O Walter !
how I have loved and missed 'you all these days!" The eager
blood rushed once more into the younger's face, and in another
instant the two men held each other in close embrace, a hard-
wrung sob from Ellis testifying to the tense strain of the past
hours.

" You will see now," said Walter cheerfully, later on, " how
quickly we two together can clear up this matter. Tell me the
circumstances."

" Hammond ! Hammond ! " he cried, when he had heard the
account. " I know a thing or two about Mr. Hammond which
it might be well for the bank to know. He is also a bitter en-
emy of mine since I opposed his admission to a certain club,
where it would not have been safe for the younger members to

1890.] "AND PEACE ON EARTH" 483

play cards with him. I had meant to warn you when I heard
that he visited here often. Is he a favorite with — with Ada ? "

"With neither of the ladies," with commendable gravity ;• then
fiercely : " If he is the rascal, he shall pay me for what I have
endured ! We will follow Mr. Hammond's windings until they
land him in prison — or in Canada."

" But not to-day ! " said Walter, with a wistful note. " To-
morrow will be soon enough for justice. It is Christmas. This
morning I went to church, and I hope to see an angel before
night " — with questioning.

" As she shall decide," said Ellis, in words used before, but
how different a tone ! " Will you stay now ? "

" I cannot. I am late for an appointment."

" Come back to dinner. We expect some people ; but if you
came an hour early ; and I asked Christine just then to arrange
the flowers on the table " —

As Walter took off his overcoat in the hall that night he
could hear the children's voices where they sang overhead with
their mother in the nursery, before going to bed, the old carol :

"And all the choirs of heaven shall sing
On Christmas day, on Christmas day ! "

And while he stood there, the fat butler being gone, down
the wide stair-case carpeted with dull red came, in slow un-
consciousness, a vision he had dreamed of. Slender and spirituel,
in a soft, white gown bordered with a narrow broidery of gold
about neck and hem, a knot of violets at her belt, the light
shining on the blond curls, cut short during her illness and clus-
tering about her graceful head, Christine looked now like an
angel of Fra Angelico's. At the landing she stood transfixed,
suddenly meeting his upturned, ardent gaze. In a few rapid steps
he had mounted to her feet, and knelt there. " Oh ! love, can
you find -some little forgiveness in your heart for me ? I saw
you at Communion this morning, when you wore my violets, and
you wear them now. Did you guess they came from me ?
Remember over whom there is most joy in heaven, and speak to
me, sweetest ! " He raised the hem of her robe to his lips,
while with a lovely smile she laid her two hands on his should-
ers, and overhead the childish voices sang :

" And the joy-bells of earth shall ring
On Christmas day, on Christmas day !"

JEANIE DRAKE.

484 A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. [Jan.,

A TYPICAL IRISHMAN.

IT has become the fashion to publish letters, diaries, whatso-
ever personal fragments may remain of those who have in any
way gained prominence among their fellows. It is a time which
delights in analysis of one's self or of others. By means of such
personal fragments access is had in some degree to the inner life
of men of whom the outward life is, or was, matter of comment.
The letters of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, or, rather, such extracts as
have been selected from amongst many, offer no exception to the
rule. They are a true index to his character. Their testimony is
the more valuable that it was Mr. McGee's lot, as it is too often
the lot of genius, to be misunderstood. Yet when the history of
the period in which he lived comes to be written, in so far as the
history of Ireland and the history of Canada are concerned, the
name of Thomas D'Arcy McGee will stand out in bold relief. And
not alone because he was the poet, the orator, the historian, but on
account of those statesman-like qualities which aided so powerfully
the moulding of a new empire in North America, and forecast
schemes so enlightened, so wise, and so far-seeing for Ireland. In
this latter respect he was in advance of his times. He foresaw
much that has since come to pass.

Mr. McGee has been compared to Edmund Burke, and with
justice. But it must be observed that at an age when Edmund
Burke was scarcely entering upon his career of greatness Thomas
D'Arcy McGee's earthly course came to a sudden and awful stop.
The hand of a wretched fellow-creature deprived him of life at
the very time when his powers were attaining their full maturity.
It is said that he made the most brilliant speech of his life in
the hours preceding his assassination. The discourse was on the
union of the provinces, and for more than two hours he held
friend and foe spellbound by his marvellous eloquence. It was a
cherished scheme of Mr. McGee to publish biographies of the Irish
orators. Any such catalogue would have been incomplete without
his own name. The charm of finished oratory has been univer-
sally accorded him, with a personal magnetism proceeding from
fine and warm sympathy, with ready enthusiasm, with high aspira-
tion, with lofty conceptions, with the soul of a poet, the brain of
a statesman, and the heart of a patriot. What a life, how valu-
able to the cause of Ireland, how serviceable to his adopted

1890.] A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. 485

country, was cut short by that fatal bullet ! It was the saddest
irony of destiny that Mr. McGee's love for the Irish people should
have been, by a certain portion of them, so cruelly misunderstood.
Love of Ireland and the Irish was a species of infatuation with
him. He never wearied devising plans for the elevation and the
welfare of his countrymen at home and abroad. An insult offered
to his race galled him more than an affront to himself. It wounded
him most of all that Irishmen should ever seem wanting in self-
respect, or should by their conduct expose themselves to reproach.
This excessive solicitude for their good name betrayed him occasion-
ally into a warmth of language which was made a weapon against
him. However, it is neither the object of the present sketch to
enter into any of these questions, nor yet to attempt a detailed
account of the life of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the main facts of
which are tolerably familiar to the public. Besides, it will be best
to allow the letters to speak for themselves. Only, a word may
not be out of place on the most honorable fact of an honorable
career, and yet one which was most severely criticised. Mr.
McGee was reproached with inconsistency because he had gone
over from the party of violence and revolution to that of consti-
tutional agitation for Irish grievances. This he did simply because
he had grown wiser. At the risk of alienating some who had
been his friends and losing the confidence of others, he ceased
to declaim when declamation meant nothing, or, if anything, mis-
chief. He ceased to incite to violence when his maturity of
thought convinced him of the futility of such a course, as well as its
attendant dangers. When youth had ceased to throw its false
light over ground that was unsteady the traveller gained the safe
road. His eyes had risen from the will-o'-the-wisp to the tran-
quil security of the fixed star.

His reasons are clearly and admirably given in an open letter
addressed to Meagher, and published in the American Celt many
years ago. The same letter was reproduced in an introduction
to the collected Poems of Mr. McGee. Having reflected upon the
" very superficial views of political science " taught by- modern
books, Mr. McGee goes on to sum up all his arguments against
revolution and its partisans in the following propositions : " That
there is a Christendom ; that this Christendom exists for and by
the Catholic Church ; that there is in our own age one of the
most dangerous and general conspiracies against Christendom that
the world has yet seen ; that this conspiracy is aided, abetted,
and tolerated by many because of its stolen watchword, Liberty;
that it is the highest duty of a Catholic man to go over cheer-

486 A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. [Jan.,

fully, heartily, and at once to the side of Christendom, to the
Catholic side, and to resist with all his might the conspirators
who, under the stolen name of Liberty, make war upon all Chris-
tian institutions."

The boyish advocate of revolution had become a Christian
thinker. But to the hour of his death Mr. McGee believed in
the efficacy of constitutional reform for Irish wrongs, and was
ready to promote it whenever opportunity offered. In the Par-
liament of Canada, in public and private utterances, in his corre-
spondence— as, for instance, his celebrated letter to Lord Mayo — he
reiterates the necessity of reform and the means most likely to
accomplish it. His desire was to see Ireland as free as Canada.

Somewhere about 1856 Mr. McGee was invited by a number
of his fellow-countrymen in Canada to settle among them. His
years of toil and struggle in the United States had proved
unremunerative, and the prospect seemed a tempting one, though
his ambition at first only pointed to the foundation of a Catholic
newspaper there. He announces finally his determination to go to
Montreal, remarking that the step would be a turning-point in
his life. It was more. It was the beginning of a brief but
exceptionally brilliant public career. It was the working out of
that dispensation of Providence which made the Irish exile so
powerful a factor in the political life of Canada.

The journal, the New Era, which Mr. McGee founded in
Montreal in the summer of 1856 met with no great success.
But before its founder had been a year in Canada he was unan-
imously nominated by the Irish in Montreal to represent them
in parliament. Acting upon the advice of friends, he accepted
the offer, and entered into public life beset with unusual diffi-
culcies. The English, Scotch, and Irish Protestant element opposed
him as they would have any one of his race and religion. The
French-Canadians were indifferent. The new-comer was a stran-
ger, comparatively poor and unknown. The time came when
religious differences and national animosities melted away under
the magic of this illustrious Irishman's genius, under the spell
of his genial warmth of heart. He was an uncompromising Ca-
tholic to the last; but English and Scotch Protestants became
his most devoted friends, and so favorably had he impressed the
very Orangemen that it was one of the electioneering calumnies
circulated in the months preceding his death that Mr. McGee
was a member of an Orange lodge. The truth was that, per-
haps, no public man in Canada ever did so much to smooth
away religious animosities and to unite the various nationalities

1890.] A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. 487

which go to make up the Dominion. And this without the
slightest sacrifice of principle. Thomas D'Arcy McGee was no
liberal Catholic, as the phrase is absurdly used. In his public as
in his private relations, in the House of Commons as in the free-
dom of social intercourse, no man ever forgot that this noble-
hearted Irishman was devoted to the Catholic faith. In this he
was an example for all public men.

Some of Mr. McGee's letters date back to the almost pre-
historic time, when, to use his own expression, " the Grand
Trunk had not yet unified Canada." But I shall begin with
one written from Montreal on the 6th of August, 1860:

" MY DEAR S. : You know we are on the eve of a great
event here, and I believe I am to be the orator of the occasion.
The Hon. John Young asked me on Saturday if I would con-
sent to make the speech about the bridge, before His Royal
Highness." [His Royal Highness was the Prince of Wales, and
the bridge was the celebrated Victoria Railway Bridge, spanning
the St. Lawrence, and which had just been erected by the Grand
Trunk.] " Imagine Sir E. K. [then governor] forced to listen to
me for an hour on such a theme as Canada's future."

At Christmas of 1 860 comes the following letter :

" These are strange times and events in the United States. I
still cannot believe that the other cotton States will follow
South Carolina's lead — but there is no reasoning a priori on what
men will do in a revolution. A settlement by mutual conces-
sions would be the natural end of such a quarrel, but if we are
not wholly misled by the New York papers, neither party seems
in a temper for conciliation. New York will suffer most financially,
but she will be the first to recover. She has shot too far ahead
of any rival to be overtaken, and, after all, trade and credit de-
pend more on natural than on conventional laws."

Somewhere about this time there is a question in his letters of
some political contingency likely to affect the Irish. " If the
Irish people," he says, " do not rise en masse, they are politically
lost. For myself I care* little, as, unless the aspect of affairs
changes, I shall not again be a candidate for Montreal. I have
upheld my principles, and, perhaps, added to my reputation in
Canada. But I would not for any reward renew the same ser-
vitude on the same terms for four years. As an Irish citizen of
Montreal, however, I am deeply interested in maintaining the
social strength of my countrymen."

In one of his letters, later on, he makes the following re-
mark : " How horrible the news from Virginia ! Every one here,

488 A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. [Jan.,

except the plated-over Tories, feel deeply with and for the North.
God grant it all well over and soon ! " It will be as well, per-
haps, to group any farther extracts relating to the subject of the
war irrespective of chronological order. " What a war, and what
slaughter!" he exclaims; "how fervently now can I echo the
prayer: 'Lord, send us peace in our days!'' "War," he says
again, " is a horrible business, and is only relieved by individual
heroism from being a beastly one." " I do not know," he writes
again, " what report you have seen of our war meeting.
I moved a resolution desiring peace above all, but rested my
foot upon the ground of defence of our homes, but not one step
towards aggression. . . . Canada we must uphold, but beyond
that we go not."

" Although the affair of the Trent has blown over," he says,
in a letter of January 2, 1862, " I really fear we are on the
verge of war still — that is, unless the United States are prepared
to see the South introduced among nations and recognized as one.
Both England and France seem determined to break the block-
ade. Against both united what can you do ? Harry us in
Canada ? Well, that will be a poor and shabby revenge at best.
My patriotism for Canada is a future nationality, neither British
nor Yankee, and a war might contribute to that result. Peace
and settlement, however, would be certain to bring it about in
another half-century, and I should prefer to trust those slow
but sure agencies rather than the doubtful issue of arms.
However, if it must come it must, and so you and I and many
more of us will be enemies against the grain. . . . Montreal
never was gayer than yesterday. The very muttering of the dis-
tant storm seemed to give an intensity to the public enjoyment.
I can now understand how it was that the lava caught so many
of the Pompeians in theatre or banqueting-hall. Many happy
returns of the day to you and yours, and the Lord send us peace
in '62." Of course, it will be seen wider issues are touched
upon in the foregoing extract than the mere probability of
war. Mr. McGee plainly forecasts what he believes to be the
future political destiny of Canada — distinct nationality. He de-
clares distinctly : " No provocation of abuse, how undeserved you
know, shall make me contribute one chip to fan the flame against
the United States." In April, 1865, the news of the assassination
of President Lincoln having reached him, he writes : " What awful
news from Washington ! We have just heard the first fact, and
such a fact! Like a pomegranate, its seeds are countless. What
is to be the consequence of such a dreadful cause ? But all

1890.] A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. 489

speculation is vain and idle." In connection with the same sub-
ject he made use of the forcible expression, " that the bullet or
dagger of the assassin never yet reached the heart of a great
cause." In that same month of April, precisely three years after-
wards, ' Thomas D'Arcy McGee was to share the fate of
Abraham Lincoln. As the loss of the latter was in that crisis of
American history an incalculable, one, so were Ireland and Canada
by the later political crime deprived of an infinitely valuable life.
Ireland had scarcely a greater, as she never had a more devoted
son. Canada in her whole history can boast of few such states-
men.

Occasionally he touches upon public affairs, as :

" My winter leisure has so far been spent mostly in Upper
Canada, in the service of myself and the opposition. I think I
am putting a new national basis under this party; at least, I
hope so. You can hardly imagine the interest I now take in
this country and all that belongs to it. But it does not and never
can supply the field for mental labor and affectionate inspiration
which Ireland would have done. However, God disposes."

How strange it seems to find him writing of an event so long
an accomplished fact, and a mighty one, as still a future contin-
gency. He is touching upon the union of the provinces, which
Canada owes to himself with those two illustrious statesmen, Sir
John A. Macdonald and Sir George E. Cartier. " The Confed-
eration will, I think, succeed, though not without local agitations
against it. It will be conducted almost in the inverse ratio of
the American ; the general government will be sovereign, the Pro-
vincial subordinate to the general. The rights of religious mi-
norities in each section will be guaranteed in the constitution.
This I regard as my greatest gain; for I may say (confidentially)
that this clause is wholly mine ; of course, with consent of the
others."

On his return from a transatlantic trip he writes : " News
of electioneering and cabinet-making intrigues from Canada in-
duced me to hasten my return by three or four weeks, and will
start me off to Ottawa to-morrow morning. As you may sup-
pose, passing out of one state of national existence into another,
there is no end of compromise and rearrangement. About my
own position I have no anxiety. . . . The new cabinet is
to be called the Privy Council ;' the members, as in England, are
to bs called Right Honorable; the income attached to office (I
suppose) increased. The new Dominion will date from the 1st
day of July, which probably will become our national anniver-

49Q A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. [Jan.,

sary. The first elections will probably take place in August." It
was a melancholy fact that he never lived to see even one anni-
versary of the consolidation of the Provinces.

" Our first Federal elections," he writes, " will take place
shortly, probably late in July, and, the New YorkHeratd's informant
to the contrary, I only wish I was as sure of heaven as of Mon-
treal West. I am also offered local representation of Prescott
County, in the Ontario (U. C.) Parliament, and unless there is a
rule made against dual representation, I shall accept it, if only
for a session or two, in order to protect the Catholic minority in
the West, who have few constituencies open to them, and fewer
candidates."

On a subject which Mr. McGee held to be of scarcely less
vital importance than public concerns, the evil of secret societies,
he now touches. Frequently in the course of his official career,
and often in his private correspondence, he condemns them as " the
source and root of all evil." It was his great grief that they
should have taken any hold upon some " Irishmen, and, I am
told, women too," he somewhat sadly adds in one letter. " A
new clause," he writes, " has been inserted unanimously in the
Declaration of the St. Patrick Society, that all members, old and new,
are now obliged to sign, namely, ' that they are not members of
any secret society.' . . . The skirts of the national society
must be kept clear of the suspicion even of secrecy." " I have
just been reading the article in the Tablet," he says, " on Brown-
son and secret societies, and I need hardly say how thoroughly
I go with both." He goes on to speak of " the old Reviewer "
in the same letter as " a man so brave, so gifted, and so
nobly earnest. Brownson," he adds, " was too big for New
England. He should have travelled in early life and seen coun-
tries, Europe certainly, Asia if possible." He more than once
alludes to the great American with the generous admiration for
the talents of others so characteristic of him.

To quote almost at random a few extracts from his letters
which refer in one way or another to people belonging to the
world of literature : " Sam Ferguson has sent his Lays of the
Western Gael, published by Bell & Daldy, of London, one vol-
ume about the size of Miss Procter's Poems, not so large, quite.
I shall frank it to you from Quebec. They are, in my judg-
ment, the noblest and most Irish poems ever published in Eng-
lish. Since Moore no such bard has arisen. Last night I felt
poetical myself. I was at Monklands " (the Congregation Con-
vent of Villa Maria), "where Fasa " (his eldest daughter) "and

1890.] A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. 491

most of the girls went to Holy Communion. I was deeply
moved by the whole scene, and came home full to absolute
silence."

"This young Sullivan," he says in a postscript to one of his
letters, " writes the reviews and literary articles in the Nation and
deserves all I have said of him." I am uncertain whether the
Sullivan here referred to is A. M. or T. D. Sullivan.

" I knew Samuel Ferguson's letter would give you pleasure,"
he writes again, " and therefore sent it. What a fine, hearty
letter it is, from a man whom I have not seen for nearly twenty
years, who was hailed as a true poet by old Kit North so early
as 1832, in the immortal Noctes, and, above all, who is so genuinely
young-hearted in his attachment to native themes and native
honor. I have sent for his Christmas book, and you shall have
the second reading of it."

" So the poor archbishop" (Hughes) " is dead. I heard the
news suddenly at Brockville, the other day, and felt it most
sincerely. God rest his soul ! A gifted man and a great worker,
I had almost concluded to write some tribute to his character —
not in verse, for it has not to me the song-yielding qualities,
but in good oratorical prose. However, at the St. Patrick's
Society festival, on the i/th inst, in Montreal, I may probably
contribute my quoit to his cairn. A hearty, honest, though
modulated testimony would, perhaps, from me be not only fit
and proper now, but a debt due to the proprieties of the past.
I am anxious to read your tribute to the mitred tribune." The
allusion to "the proprieties of the past" related to some news-
paper controversy in which the archbishop and Mr. McGee had
once been opponents. The next extract is singularly character-
istic of the warm heart, the generous and, withal, the delicate
spirit. As all concerned are, I believe, dead, there can be no
indiscretion in making what follows public :

" I ask you to read the enclosed sad story of poor Henry
Giles. It is written by his wife, to whom I have not yet dared
to reply. I have done, however, this moment on a first impulse,
pray God it be a good omen ! what I did not think I should ever

have done ; I have written to a friendly letter, asking for

help. I suggested that perhaps a few friends in New York,
Boston, and Montreal could quietly do something. I have
promised at the same time to write to you, my dear S., and to
stir Montreal (still without publicity) whenever I hear from both.
. I propose myself out of my munificence to give $IOO.
Here is a work for . Put this letter into his hands. Let

492 A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. [Jan.,

him see D , Father K , and any other true Irishman who

ever heard Giles. But let the sacred poverty of genius be scru-
pulously respected. Oh ! if we could raise even • a couple of
thousand dollars, how rejoiced I should be, not less for the givers
than the receivers. I can write on nothing else now."

In a postscript to another letter he thus expresses some
thoughts upon some with whom he had once been associated :
" Poor Doheny's death, which I read in Quebec, came on me by
surprise, and I need hardly say to you, gave me a pang of real
regret. I felt sorry that he should have died in enmity to me,
and having done injustice unatoned for. But I felt, and have
long felt, not one particle of bitterness towards the poor fellow.
If he could have recovered himself; if he could have made himself
respected and powerful, I should have sincerely rejoiced for the
common cause's sake. But there is some infatuation over one
class of the '48 men. They have shown no growth, they have
originated nothing, they have tried to live on the memory of a
failure, and thereby, of course, have failed." He makes some
exceptions, Duffy and some other Australians, " O'Brien and
Dillon, whose fame was, however, laid before '48 "; Meagher and
O'Gorman.

"Your account of O'Gorman's letter much gratified me," he
writes. " It is well there is one such evidence left standing in
New York that Young Ireland oratory and politics might have
risen to real greatness."

Once when he had occasion to speak of Mitchell he said:
" I know of no one who in some respects is better fitted to
complete McGeoghegan's History of Ireland than Mitchell. Only
you must watch him about the Wolfe Tone and O'Connell periods,
or from the peculiar turn of his own mind he will make the sui-
cide a hero and the Emancipator a poltroon. The house of

cannot put its name to such a philosophy of Irish /history as
that."

" I send you a review of the most wonderful Catholic book
that has appeared in print in my recollection, McCarthy's
translation of some of Calderon's poems. I would send the
book itself, but the only copy belongs to the parliamentary
library. If Mrs. S. comes to Lacouna in the dog-days she shall
have it there, and really it is worth coming that far to read
and enjoy."

" How £ets on Florence McCarthy More ? In Desmond you
have the sea always near you, and your own sea-side thoughts
will often surge into the subject." Again, " I see you are going on

1890.] A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. 493

with Florence McCarthy More, with all its difficulties. The great-
est to you, I should anticipate, would be the absence of the moral
sublime from his wonderfully clever and variously endowed mind.
You will have the same difficulty Aytoun had with " Bothwell" to
make a hero out of one you cannot reverence and hardly admire.
James Fitzmaurice and Hugh O'Neil (though no saint) had some
moral inspiration; but this Munster Macchiavelli, I fear, was quite
beggared of that sort of estate." His friend, Mrs. Sadlier, was still
engaged upon the work in question at the time of Mr. McGee's
death.

" I have just sent to Dublin some contributions to Duffy's Maga-
zine and the Nation. Among the latter a monody on O'Donovan.
It is in the measure of certain coplas of the Spaniard Manrique
on the death of his father, which are translated by Longfellow. . . .
Nothing ever makes me feel my poverty more than when I am
unable to testify by some more substantial tribute my veneration
for such a man as this lost scholar was."

Mr. McGee was truly the poet-souled. He had every quality
which belongs pre-eminently to the genuine poet. The following ex-
tract shows that he felt within himself the poetic fire. It is writ-
ten from Lacouna, a Canadian sea-side resort : " I venture to send
you," he writes, " a reverie in which I have indulged during the
last two or three days. They are thoughts put to paper as clearly
and truly as my difficulties of expression permit me. If they seem
unusual or overstrained, blame the Atlantic, which always stirs up
my mind to a restless and agitated image of itself. I only wish I
dare — I only wish I could mould into shape half the thousand-and-
one ideas which float through my brain under the magnetic spell of
the ancestral sea. If I blame Bulwer and Tennyson for missing
the mark, it is because I feel within me that which, without pride,
I venture to say to you might have made me the poet of the
Celts ; but fate or Providence ordained other tasks and other
duties. I would not have the hardihood to say so much to
another ; but you, I am sure, will not misunderstand me. We are
fellow-laborers for a fallen but not all-ruined race, and therefore I
dedicate this sea-side reverie to you." The lines are published
in McGee's poems under the heading of "The Count Arnaldos "

A very beautiful letter is dated one Easter eve. It will be
impossible to give more than a brief extract : " No art, no
science, no discovery ever will be a substitute for the visible pre-
sence of a friend. Death would not be terrible otherwise, for
death is only distance unmeasured." On the occasion of the death
of his father, who he says lived for nearly half a century th? life

VOL. L.— 12

494 ^ TYPICAL IRISHMAN. [Jan.,

of a saint, and the account of whose death, written by his daughter,
he thus characterizes : " There is something uncommonly pathetic,
Irish, and Catholic in the little sketch ; at least I think so," he
writes : " I had hoped to visit Ireland again, but I care little
whether I go or not. If it were not for the graves that are there
what could the heart hold by ? God bless you and yours, and pre-
serve you all long from the touch of death paralyzing your circle."
On another occasion he says : " So long as death does not come
under the roof, there is no other trial, my friend, which man ought
not to be able to bear cheerfully."

A few fragments of letters touching on Mr. McGee himself and
his own pursuits may be of interest. His life was one of
multifarious occupations and ceaseless labor. At one time pre-
vious to the Union he was President of the Executive Council and
Acting Provincial Secretary, while at the same time he was labor-
ing at his admirable popular History of Ireland — " working," as he
tells us himself, " far into the night, rising early and working late,"
to keep his engagements with his publishers. It was at this time he
was made, by unanimous vote, corresponding member of the New
York Historical Society. He did various other literary work
under pressure of these same difficulties. In one of his letters he
announces the completion of the history, for which, " with the old
monkish chroniclers," he says heartily, " Deo gratias." But he
also took up the practice of law. " As to the law," he writes, " let
me tell you I have two or three cases on hand already, and hope
to make out of one of them — a most villainous good case — some
noise in the legal world. Talking to a jury will be an entirely
new experience to me, and I am (I confess it) painfully anxious
as to how it may take. But never despair. I knew you and

would be pleased with my debut in the law, acquitting a

poor wretch for nothing at all — only killing his wife. But he
really was daft or I should have had some scruples about arguing
him off. The professional triumph was certainly a decided one,
and the whole court, to do them justice, seemed glad that it had
fallen upon me."

The next letters relate to his journeys abroad, made in 1865
and 1867.

" OFF DONEGAL AND DERRY,
Wednesday, May 3, 1865.

" This mor.ning, at 4:30 o'clock, standing on what in steam-
boat phrase is called the bridge, opera-glass in hand, I discerned
Torry Island. Except the first officer, then in command, I was
the only one at the moment who perceived that blue, blue hil-

1890.] A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. 495

lock in the direction of where the sun was to rise. There was a
pale, pearl-like auroral tint already in the sky just over Torry Island.
We were, perhaps, twenty mile* off, and at first were doubtful
whether it was the Aran of this coast, near the Bloody Fore-
land, or the lone isle first named. By our reckoning it ought
to be Torry, and Torry, sure enough, it was. Need I tell you
what a thrill that touch of land sent from the eye to the heart?
For the third time, favored beyond hope or expectation, I
return to revisit my native soil. Shall I more than ever feel as
a ' foreigner ' ? Shall I enjoy or suffer most by what I may
see ? God knows ! / cannot even guess yet. I called the

vicar-general and D to share my happiness. We made

little demonstration of it, but I am sure our fellow-passengers
at breakfast must have noticed a certain lighting up of the eye
and an added emphasis in the voices of all of us Irish. Sev-
eral Irish Protestants on board, Dr. A." (a Protestant clergy-
man) "and his good old wife, a Mr. and Mrs. S , and

others felt the patriotic glow in all its fervor."

" I write this as we steam along parallel to the Irinishowen
mountains, the strongholds of northern memories. This is the
land of Sir Cahir, of Hugh Roe, and that other Hugh (of
the deep dissembling heart, as Camden thought), the only
modern Celt, except Roy O'Moore and O'Connell, who knew
how to play the high game of imperial policy with the sages
of Albion. God be with them all ! I shall see before Sunday
the grave of the last at Glasnevin, and if other arrangements
permitted, perhaps I might even be able to visit the tomb of
the first, ' high upon the mount whereon the martyred saint
was crucified.' But r homme propose. Let us not anticipate.
But really I cannot stay longer between decks, with the Done-
gal highlands drawing nearer. ' God bless the green moun-
tains of dark Donegal.' This was my friend Duffy's prayer
twenty golden years ago. I wonder if he is as little changed
as the hills. But I really must go on deck. Adieu, my dear
friend, till Dublin." The Duffy here mentioned was, of course,
the distinguished Irish-Australian, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy.
On the same day, May 3, he wrote a second note, enclosing
some verses. " I thought I would announce to you, thus offi-
cially, my dear Mrs. S., our making land. It may touch the
hidden spring of some Irish men and women's heart. Yours
I can fancy feeling 'what at this moment I feel. We expect
to land at Derry by noon, and to sleep in Dublin to-night"
In July he writes of his return, having reached Quebec, and

496 A TYPICAL IRISHMAN. [Jan.,

announces at the same time that the Provincial delegation to
England was successful. Much, however, he says, " remains to
be done if we are to be a northern nation, as I have always
contemplated."

On St. Patrick's day, 1867, he wrote from Rome :

" I have had a great day. I got here yesterday, very tired,
but was up at 7 this morning; took two hours to St. Peter's;
a cup of coffee; heard Grand Mass at the Irish College; dined
there with Cardinals Barnabo and Reisack and a number of
Monsignori ; the heads of the Greek, English, Scotch, American,
and some other foreign colleges ; Rev. G. M., of New York ;

Bishop R , of Chatham, N. B. ; Rev. M. O. D., of St.

Hyacinthe ; Hon. Thomas Ryan " (the lately deceased senator

for Victoria), " D , of Newfoundland, and the students. Last

evening on the Corso, the Central Park of Rome, I penned these
lines." Mr. McGee was at this time acting as commissioner to
the Paris Exhibition.

After his return he writes : " I send you another Roman
scrap. I shall never be able to get that city out of my memory
and imagination. . . . C. dines with us to-day. I am asking
him to take charge of a pair of beads, blessed especially by the
Pope at my interview with his Holiness, on the 22d of March
last. They have not been out of my possession since I carried
them away from that venerable presence on that memorable day."

The following scraps of letters, as they close the consideration
of a life now nearing its end, will be of interest. " Know, O most
sage lady," he writes, " that since the Ides of January last I
sang and still sing with Francesco Redi, poet and physician (see
Leigh Hunt's translation thereof), that cold water is my element.
It has floated me finely through these late excitements."

In another letter, which, though undated, belongs to the last
year of this great Irishman's life, 1868, he speaks of his hope of
" getting out of the legislative harness, and so be enabled to return
to literature, which was my first and at all times my favorite
line of exertion."

On March 4 he writes :

" I am quite well again, except a little lameness, and still
adhere (as I intend to do) to cold water."

March 31, eight days before the fatal 7th of April, he writes
a mere note, calling attention to what he calls

" Mr. Bright's able and manly speech, delivered at London
eighteen days ago. I continue to gain in strength, though slowly.
Always yours, T. D. McGEE."

1890.] THE HOSPITABLE MAN. 497

Early in April he wrote from his desk at the House of Com-
mons, mentioning that he was engaged upon an article for THE
CATHOLIC WORLD on Oliver Plunkett. Full of new plans for the
future, full of literary promise, busied with weighty cares,
astounding both government and opposition with his brilliant
eloquence, suddenly there fell upon Thomas D'Arcy McGee the
great silence.

ANNA T. SADLIER.

THE HOSPITABLE MAN.

HE hath a gate, a door, a hand, a heart ;
All wearing look of welcome to the world ;
All open to receive thee, happy guest !
The gate swings inward with a loose slip-latch ;
The wide-leaved door invites thee to approach ;
His large-palmed hand doth give at once defence
And draw thee to his broad, joy-heaving breast :
The color mantling to his smiling face —
Fleet-footed herald from his love-full heart —
Proclaims thy coming as a yearned-for boon.

And yet, wouldst thou depart ? Thou'lt find the gate

Wearing a look forbidding towards the road.

Without his door are storms, chill-blowing winds,

And spectres of some possible mishap.

Unwilling now that free and open hand

To touch thine own and help thee say, farewell !

E'en if thou yet canst fly these friendly bonds

His faithful heart will surely hold thee fast.

Or if thou goest or abidest, still

Thou knowest it is thine, thyself its own.

ALFRED YOUNG.

498 I791 — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Jan.

— A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE CAGE.

THE " cage " referred to by Dessalines had been brought into
the camp from the plantation of M. Latour, the brutal master
spoken of in a preceding chapter. It was a cube in shape,
measuring six feet each way, and made out-and-out of iron. The
sides were finished in with strong bars crossing each other at
right angles, and an extension of this lattice-work formed the
frame of the roof, upon which boards were laid. It had been
used by M. Latour at times as a prison for slaves under disci-
pline, but more generally as a kennel for his blood-hounds when
in training to catch runaways. In training these dogs the usual
method was as follows: They were early parted from the dam,
and, in order to develop fully their natural ferocity, were
reared as far as possible upon warm blood taken from various
animals. At a suitable age the belly of a negro dummy, filled with
blood and entrails, was opened before them, and the hounds encour-
aged to feed from it ; and this was repeated day after day until the
savage creatures associated the negro form with the satisfaction of
hunger. They were then shut up in a strong kennel or cage,
such as this from M. Latour's, and kept there without food, water
only being supplied to them, till symptoms of starvation began
to become manifest. When thus maddened by hunger the keeper
would bring a negro dummy, stuffed with their favorite food, and
place it upright before them, and the hounds, furious at the sight,
would howl dreadfully, and make frantic efforts to break through
the bars. To excite them the more the keeper presently would
slowly advance the dummy nearer and nearer, motioning all the
while towards its breast and encouraging the dogs, whose howls
would now be exchanged for low, intense whines and murmurs of
delight. Then he would suddenly remove the dummy back, at
which the wildest cries of fury would burst from the brutes, and
not unfrequently, in the rage of disappointed desire, they would fall
upon and destroy each other. At last, when they had been roused
.to the utmost, the door would be opened, and they would rush
upon the dummy and instantly rend it into pieces.

1890.] rjyi—A TALE OF SAAT DOMINGO. 499

While at the horrid meal they were carefully caressed by the
keeper, and so taught to distinguish between white and black, as
between friend and foe; and this was the keeper's protection when
the hounds were out upon their human hunts. So accustomed
were they to regard the negro as their lawful prey that it was
necessary to keep them securely chained. At times they would
break loose, and the most dreadful things are told of how on such
occasions they would rend innocent blacks, and especially children,
that they met by chance. With the greatest accuracy these crea-
tures learned to discriminate the African scent, and, once on the
trail of a runaway, followed it up with deadly sagacity. Escape
was well-nigh impossible, unless the' black took to a tree and
awaited the keepers, whose mercies, by the way, were often
scarcely more tender than those of the hounds. As may be sup-
posed, the negroes regarded them with mortal terror. Naught
else human conveyed to their minds such ideas of horror.

The morning after the battle a party of negroes, headed by
Welcome, had brought over the " cage" in triumph from the
Latour plantation, but a few leagues away, and it now stood be-
neath a lime in a rear enclosure connected with the headquarters,
where it was regarded by the blacks with great curiosity as being
intimately associated with the cruelties of a notoriously brutal
master. In this kennel Henry Pascal was locked up for the night.
Save a sawn section of a tree that had been rolled in for the
occasion, it was void of furniture. On this block the prisoner was
seated, and to it his fetters were secured by chain and staple,
while a plate of coarse dry fish that had been sent in for his
supper remained untasted beside him.

Negroes are great gossips, and " news" goes from mouth to
mouth with astonishing speed. It was almost immediately known
throughout the camp that a prisoner was on trial, and many
loitered about headquarters to hear the issue. When, therefore,
they saw the prisoner thrust into the " cage," and learned from
the guard that he was to be shot next morning, the report passed
through the camp like a flash, and the blacks began flocking to
the spectacle. Presently it was noised about that the prisoner
was no other than M. Latour himself, and this greatly increased
both the numbers and the excitement. A peering, scowling,
cursing throng became rapidly massed . about the "cage," and the
guard had difficulty in keeping hands off. In the press were many
women, great numbers of whom thronged the camp, drawn thither
either by the curiosity natural to the sex, or as connected with
the commissariat (the black army at the time received its supplies

500 . ijyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Jan.,

almost exclusively through this channel), and the hags far outdid
the men in their hideous grimacing and vituperation, and most
foul and horrible imprecations. Woman ! woman !

"In every age, race, and degree,
The main of tenderness and sweet charity
Abides with thee, abides with thee ;
Yet if thou shouldst a demon be,
A good one thou, a good one verily."

Suddenly above the tumult came a sharp bark. The allusion
was instantly perceived, and every note of the dog broke from
the angered and imitative blacks — whines, yelps, bays, barks,
snarls, growls, and howls, in a most strange and a most frightful
chorus. The effect was maddening, recalling, as the cries did,
every blocd-hound horror ; and the passions of the crowd, acting
and reacting on each other, rose into a frenzy, and it looked as
if they would drag the prisoner from the "cage" and tear him
piecemeal. The guard, however, succeeded in convincing those
nearest them that the prisoner was not M. Latour, and the rain,
which now began to fall heavily, drove many away and had a
cooling effect on the rest, to whom, moreover, the guard more
fully explained the circumstances of the trial ; and in the face of
approaching darkness these, too, began to depart, till the vicinity
of the "cage" was deserted save by a solitary black. He was a
negro of striking aspect, and his manner and actions altogether
peculiar.

CHAPTER XIV.

JACQUE.

When the key turned in the lock of the prison-door Henry
Pascal closed his eyes on earthly things. Towards his father and
towards Emilie Tourner his thoughts would now and then go
out, but it was torturing and disturbing, and he forced them back
and bent them upon himself. To prepare for death was now the
work before him ; and it pressed, as he had but a span to live.
Solemn is that closing hour — far more so if faith has enlightened
the soul — when all related things must be forgotten and we
really get face to face with ourselves. In current life such con-
verse is rarely held. These related things continually engross us
and shut the "ego" from view. What am I? Whither am I
going ? are moving questions when their eternal possibilities are
at the point of solution.

In a glance Henry Pascal took in his past life. The retro <

1890.] 7/p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 501

spect was one of light and shadow, yet far above the average of
his class. He had been upright and honorable before the world,
his filial duties had been discharged with singular devotedness,
and, compared with the young men of his day, who had very
generally become infected with the rank infidelity of France, and
whose morals were notoriously corrupt, he was religious. At an
era of aggressive, defiant, fashionable unbelief he had not been
ashamed to avow his faith, and his connection with the church,
made in early life, had never been formally broken. But the age,
as we have said, was eminently a scoffing one ; the planters,
many of them enormously rich, were steeped in licentiousness, a
race of sybarites ; every tendency towards vice and license had
been prodigiously stimulated by the spirit caught from the
mother country ; and these adverse influences were concentrated
at the Cape, where Henry Pascal had been residing for some
years, apart from his family. Besides all this, the distractions of
the colony exerted an irreligious bias, and in his mother's death
he had lost a spiritual friend. It is not surprising, therefore,
that in spite of himself, as it were, he should have yielded more
or less to such environments, and religious duties, of late years,
fallen into neglect. At heart, however, he was religious. There
remained a root of faith, strong in early culture. Weeds had
sprung up round it, but had not choked it.

As he now seated himself upon the prison block, he drew
from his pocket a small silver crucifix. It was doubly dear, for
it had been a gift from his mother years before, and ever since
he had very carefully kept it about his person. Even of nights
he would hang it round his neck or fasten it to a button-hole,
and it came to be a point with him never to have it parted from
him. Nor, had he been less enlightened, could he have regarded
so suggestive an object as a charm. As it was, he had a sence
of being uncomfortable when the crucifix now and then chanced
to become misplaced, as if some protective influence had de-
parted. His crucifix, which in other times he had so often and
so fervently pressed, and which even in the latter days of care-
lessness he had sacredly kept near him, he now drew forth. It
was fragrant with a mother's memories, and he dwelt upon her
and all she had taught him. Upon her he dwelt, for she was
among the dead, and he was soon to be numbered with her.
Of his father he would not permit himself to think.

Scarcely had these communings begun when they were
broken in upon by the tumult that almost immediately arose
around the " cage." At first it was distracting, and Henry Pas-

502 ijqi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO, [Jan.,

cal prayed for night and quietude. But the intensity of his
emotions was preoccupying, and he soon ceased to regard the
uproar,* save as it fell in with his own mental workings. As he
pressed the crucifix and thought of the Man of Sorrows, stretched
on a cross innocent and unheard, his naked body blistering
under Syria's noonday sun, and every eye that turned upon
him a dagger, he saw in his own circumstances, with this deaf-
ening storm of passion raging round him, some sort of a paral-
lel, and it gave to his supplications a vivid realism.

"Jesu ! Jesu!" he would cry within himself, "through how
much pain and how little pleasure didst thou press on to a
bitter death ! Oh ! be a friend to me. Holy Mary ! pray for
me. And thou, my guardian angel, help me at this hour."

As the numbers and rage of the crowd began to lessen rap-
idly under the influence of the elements and the explanations of
the guard, Henry Pascal welcomed the approach of peace. He
now withdrew more entirely within himself, and failed to notice
a black who had passed several times to and fro just in front of
the "cage," and each time, as he reached the rear of the soli-
tary guard (for his comrade had gone to supper), raised his
forefinger across his lips, as if soliciting recognition. This negro
had been a looker-on upon the outside of the throng, taking no
part in the demonstrations. He was a tall, powerful-looking
man, apparently in the prime of life, erect as an Indian, head
small but symmetrical and firmly set on massive shoulders. As
he passed for the third time Henry Pascal, who had lifted his
eyes and was looking out with a far-away expression into the
gathering darkness, caught the gesture, and bending his gaze
through the gloom, with a thrill recognized the form. Jacque
(for it was no other than he) saw the recognition, and repeating
the sign, passed on. Upon the return he again raised the finger
to the lips, and receiving the sign from his young master, im-
mediately withdrew.

It is no reflection upon the sincerity of Henry Pascal's spirit-
ual preparations that another train of thought now rushed into
prominence. He stood upon the threshold of life, full of
health and strength, and bound to the world by tender ties.
Naturally, he desired to live, and the hopes and conjectures
originated by Jacque's appearance on the scene rilled and agi-
tated his mind. From his knowledge of Jacque's fearless char-
acter and devotion to his family he felt perfectly certain an
attempt at rescue would be made should the slightest oppor-
tunity ' offer. But could the faithful negro succeed ? Jacque

1890.] 7/p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 503

must be single-handed, he reflected, and could he possibly res-
cue him^ imprisoned and under guard, from the centre of a
military camp ? The night was stormy, and, so far, favorable,
he thought ; the vigilance of the raw blacks, too, must be at a
minimum in such weather ; and Jacque was sagacious as well as
brave. There was a chance, and he clung to it, and kissed the
crucifix again and again for it.

The night was, in truth, a stormy one. The day had opened
bright and breezy. The sky wore a brilliant blue, and not a cloud
could be seen save a few white strata lying low along the eastern
horizon. Towards noon some mare's-tails appeared in the north,
and by-and-by there was an overcast, the sun occasionally break-
ing through; but the clouds, which moved slowly from the south-
west, seemed too high for rain. They grew more dense, how-
ever, and an hour later the rain began, at first in a drizzle,
gradually increasing, with now and then, as darkness drew on,
heavy, quiet pours. From this time a tempest developed, the
wind rising and the lightning displaying itself over the heavens
in broad areas, followed by high rolling thunder. It was one of
those growing storms sometimes seen in the tropics, the rain-
falls ordinarily being sudden and furious, with terrific descending
peals, and succeeded often by brilliant sunsets.

The prisoner being chained within an iron " cage " under lock
and key, the captain of the watch deemed two guards sufficient ;
and as the night advanced, and all save the elements had become
quiet in the camp, these arranged between themselves to take
shelter by turns in a neighboring out-house. Toward midnight
the weather was tempestuous. It rained, blew hard, and was
very dark. The man on duty was squatting against the lime that
stood at the southwest corner of the " cage," resting the muzzle
of the musket on the ground, and clasping the lock in the arm-
pit in the endeavor to protect it from the damp. His cap was
drawn down close over the eyes, and he was dwelling upon the
execution to take place in the morning, wondering how many
would be detailed to shoot, whether he himself would be among
them, whether his shot would take effect, etc., when his ear —
negroes are remarkably quick to hear — caught the sound of a
foot-fall to the rear. Supposing it was his comrade, yet sur-
prised, as he felt sure his time was not out by half, he started
up and turned in the direction of the sound. As he did so, a
deadly blow stretched him on the sod. He fell without a groan,
as dead as if the heart had been pierced.

Jacque and his companion (for the former was accom-

504 i?9T — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Jan.,

panied) at once fell to work. They dreaded the lightning, which
' in a storm of this character shone in wide sheets of mild blue
light, making objects as distinct as day. Not a word was spoken.
The door of the " cage " yielded easily to a prizing-bar, Henry
Pascal's fetters were quickly broken, and silently and rapidly the
three moved on, under Jacque's guidance, till a point in the
wood was reached outside the limits of the camp. Here Jacque
stopped and hurriedly said that he must go back, that he held
a position of prominence, and, to avoid suspicion, should be in
his place before the return of the other guard to his post and
the escape became known ; that he (Henry Pascal) could fully
trust his companion, who would explain everything; that pur-
suit, he thought, would be out of the question, as the rain would
destroy all trace of footsteps. He further told him that it was
he who had saved him in the battle and who had gotten in the
proclamation, and also that M. Tardirfe was on a visit to Dessa-
lines. All this was said in the most hurried manner possible.
Time was precious to each. Jacque held out to his young mas-
ter the hand of adieu, at which the latter fell upon his neck,
and having embraced him with the utmost ardor, struck out
with his guide. Two miles away a musket report, borne upon
the stormy wind, told the tale of the escape ; but they considered
themselves secure from pursuit, and felt assured Jacque had had
time to make good his return.

CHAPTER XV.
THE FLIGHT.

Of the insurrectionary negroes some were guided by lofty
motives and took no hand in the ghastly excesses that charac-
terized by far the larger part. Among these was Jacque Beattie.
He had been identified with the movement from its inception,
and his high character and intelligence at once secured position.
The officers for the black army Dessalines selected almost wholly
from his own trained men. Outside of this body Jacque was
one of the very few who received a responsible place. He was
known in the army as Colonel Beattie, his command consisting
of some five hundred men, at the head of whom he had shown
conspicuous gallantry in the late battle. Though not within that
limited circle around Dessalines where military measures were
authoritatively discussed, yet he was in a position to learn at
once conclusions reached. He knew of Dessalines' disposition to
ransom the prisoners almost as soon as formed, and, to warn

1890.] I791 — A TALE OF SAW DOMINGO. 505

Henry Pascal against Jamaica reports, contrived through the
guard to have a copy of the proclamation, with the pencillings
that had been correctly read, dropped into their room. He was
aware, too, of M. Tardiffe's presence in camp. He knew well
this man's real character, and shared his young master's opinion
of him, fami des noirs though they called him. As a trusted
body-servant in the Pascal family, he was fully cognizant of the
rivalry between him and his young master. When the latter was
suddenly summoned before Dessalines a suspicion at once arose
that M. Tardiffe might be at the bottom of it, and the impres-
sion deepened on his learning the nature of the false charges for
which Henry Pascal had been ordered to execution. What other
source for these charges so likely, he thought, under all the cir-
cumstances ? Upon the accusation or its origin, however, he did
not dwell. His sole thought now was the rescue of his young
master, and this he resolved to attempt if a possible chance of
success offered.

In the person of another negro, with the sobriquet of King-
fisher, Jacque had a confederate. His real name was Francis,
and in early life he% had been the property of Colonel Tourner.
His wife, however, belonged to another proprietor, whose estate
lay in the northeastern corner of the province, not far from the
town of Limonade ; and as the colonel's efforts to buy the woman
had proven fruitless, he had disposed of Francis, upon his own
entreaty, to this proprietor, that man and wife might not be
parted. In felling timber Francis had sustained an injury that
permanently disabled one of his legs, and a crab-yaw afterwards
attacked the foot. Rendered unfit for active plantation work,
his master, a kind-hearted man, had settled him, in requital for
faithful services, upon a few acres near the mouth of the Yaqui
or St. lago, a river that empties into the sea, by a broad and
deep channel, some fifty miles eastward from Cape Fra^ois.
Here Francis lived practically free. Bella, his wife, looked
after the patch. He himself devoted his time to fishing, for
which the Yaqui and its tributaries afforded an excellent • field ;
and in this occupation he became so expert that he was com-
monly known as Kingfisher. After supplying his master and
himself from the products of his nets and traps enough
remained to enable him to turn many an honest penny, and
altogether he was a well-to-do, happy "nigger."

Kingfisher had brought in fish and vegetables for the army,
ascending in his canoe a western branch of the Yaqui to
within a few miles of the camp, and soon came across Jacque

506 //£/ — A 7^ ALE OF SAN DOMINGO.

Beattie. Jacque and he were close friends, though Jacque
was much the younger. In earlier life (the Pascals and
Tourners being intimate and the estates near each other)
they had been a great deal together, and after the lat-
ter's removal they were not so far apart as not to meet at
least occasionally — the slaves, of nights, being notorious go-
abouts, and often making astonishing journeys. The moment
Jacque (who was intensely on the watch) learned the result of the
court-martial he sought out Kingfisher. He had influence with
him, and knew him to be good grit, and that he cherished a warm
regard for the Pascal family. So he sounded him, and finding
him to his mind, made known the facts in regard to Henry Pas-
cal, dwelling particularly on his belief that his young master's
hapless fate was due to the machinations of M. Tardiffe, enven-
omed against him as the successful suitor for the hand of Emilie
Tourner. All this touched old Kingfisher, under whose black skin
beat a big, tender heart. He remembered very gratefully his
good old master, nor had he forgotten the many little kindnesses
of Madame Tourner, nor the sweet face of " Ma'm'selle." He
had not seen her since she was a child, she having been abroad
at school. But her beauty and winsomeness were fresh
before him. He knew, too, Jacque's young master, especially as
the playmate of " Ma'm'selle," when he belonged to the old plan-
tation. To help him was like helping the " old folks " ; and
all this, aided by Jacque's strong personal influence, readily won
him into an ally. Jacque and Kingfisher conferred together, but
nothing definite at the moment could be settled upon. The
stormy night was favorable. The point of difficulty related to
the guard. Should a strong one be posted, an attempt to rescue
would be futile. So it was arranged that Kingfisher, when dark-
ness set in, should leave the camp with his baskets, as if home-
ward bound, and having secreted them by the wayside, meet
Jacque at a designated place some hours later for instructions.
Meanwhile the latter was on the lookout, and soon informed
himself as to the number and disposition of the guard — that two
only were detailed, and they on duty, turn about, at intervals of
a couple of hours. His plan, therefore, was to slay the guard as
soon after reaching his post as he thought his comrade would be
asleep, pilot Henry Pascal from the camp, and, placing him in
charge of Kingfisher, return to his own quarters before the dis-
covery of the rescue. How far the execution was successful has
been already mentioned.

To return to Henry Pascal and Kingfisher. Little con-

1890.] 1791 — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 507

versation occurred as they hurried on as fast as circumstances
would allow. The latter informed his companion that their
immediate destination was his own home near the mouth of the
Yaqui, where Henry Pascal might strike a brig or schooner ;
and that, in default of such good luck, he would try to get him
to the Cape by night through the country. Beyond this nothing
was said, save a necessary word now and then, Kingfisher's atten-
tion being absorbed by the difficulties of the way. Between the
camp and the country there was a vast amount of passing, and
parties might be met even at such hours on such a night. King-
fisher, therefore, whenever he could, chose turn-outs and blind
paths and obscure roads, and though he was thoroughly familiar
with every foot of the country, the darkness and the storm and
his lame leg withal made progress necessarily slow. Full three
hours were consumed in going the six miles to the point on the
Riviere du Massacre, where had been left the canoe or dugout,
as it was commonly called, being hewn and hollowed from a sec-
tion of a tree. It was well that Kingfisher had taken the pre-
caution to draw the light craft some distance ashore, otherwise
it would have been lost or destroyed in the swollen waters. The
canoe was found safe in its place of concealment, but to pro-
ceed for the present was out of the question. The Massacre, at
all times a rapid stream in this piedmont country, the heavy
rain-fall had now made a torrent. It became necessary to wait
for day, by which time Kingfisher hoped the waters would so far
have run down as to enable him, in the light, to manage the
boat.

It was a wild, unfrequented, densely wooded spot, and several
hours of delay being before them, Kingfisher urged on his com-
panion the necessity for all the sleep he could get, as the next
three leagues would be trying. They reascended, therefore, the
precipitous bank to its summit, and in an open space beneath a
pimento- tree sought repose, Henry Pascal resting against the
trunk, and the old negro stretched out upon the wet leaves.
Henry Pascal had thought that sleep was impossible, but no
sooner had he settled himself and exertion ceased than over-
wrought nature responded, to the invitation. The great and pro-
longed tension suddenly relaxed, and before he knew it he was
sleeping soundly. He awoke within an hour. Sleep had been
short, yet intense and refreshing. How changed was all ! The
morning was fair, with a few flying scuds. The stars were out,
shining beautifully bright through the cleared-up atmosphere, while
the moon, in her last quarter, hung in the western sky. Henry

77^7 — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Jan.,

Pascal felt buoyant and strong. How sharp the turns in life, he
thought; how quickly our levels rise and fall, and show the
slowly changing world in new aspects ! The occurrences of a few
hours before were a dreadful dream, resembling those storm-driven
clouds that had been drenching the earth and sending forth light-
nings and thunderings, but had now all passed away and given
place to the peaceful stars. He reproached himself for not hav-
ing expressed the fulness of his gratitude to brave, noble-hearted
Jacque Beattie. But the time was so short, all were so hurried,
Jacque would understand it, and Jacque should yet know the
depths of his heart towards him. His thoughts then turned upon
the loved ones at the Cape. How joyfully would they meet ?
The crucifix was in his hands. He knelt and poured forth thanks.
When he rose the gray dawn was just peeping over the eastern
mountains. Kingfisher still slept — heedless of the mountain gnats,
though the bite is like a spark of fire — and he was allowed to
sleep on, for down towards the shaded river it was yet densely
dark.

The deep forest silence, enhanced rather by the waters' mo-
notonous flow, the stir of life coincident with incoming day
now began to break. From a neighboring tree a potoo gave
one of its loud, hoarse ho-koos, followed by a lower note from
the depths of the throat. The mate answered; then all was
still again. Suddenly came a rushing, whizzing, startling sound.
It was a piramidig, or night-hawk, swooping on its insect
prey. The swoop apparently was a signal, for immediately
these birds, deprived by the storm of the evening's meal, were
out in great numbers, winnowing the crisp morning air with
their long, narrow, arcuate wings — now flying low, now career-
ing on, now beating up and up, to get space to swoop in per-
pendicular descent ; now following each other in close and per-
sistent pursuit, "eager for the nuptial rite upon the wing"; now
darting on prey, with their broad, viscid mouths wide opened ;
wheeling and doubling, with sudden zigzag dodgings, and sta-
tionary flutterings when a choice catch happened to be made.
As Henry Pascal sat musing and observant the while of these
birds, watching their movements and listening to their singular
cries, the day had rapidly advanced. In the glowing east, be-
neath some purple strata that hung motionless in their resplen-
dent settings, a fiery rim shot above the horizon, and anon the
glorious tropical sun, full orbed, was sending forth his level rays.

Henry Pascal roused Kingfisher, whose first care was to
hasten down the bank to learn the state of the waters. He re-

1890.] ijyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 509

ported, to the surprise of his companion, that he thought they
could proceed. These island streams run off as suddenly as they
rise, and though the Massacre was still swollen and dangerous,
Kingfisher was an expert boatman, and good reasons existed for
making the start at the earliest practicable moment. He then
explained to Henry Pascal the circumstances of the journey be-
fore them — that the course of the Massacre for the next three
leagues was through a wild, broken section, and the stream so
rapid and rough, especially in its present state, that daylight
was necessary for managing the boat ; and that as the river was
now more or less a highway for the coast negroes bearing sup-
plies to the camp, his safety required that he should covertly
follow the canoe along the bank; that he hoped these difficulties
would be surmounted early in the afternoon, and the point
reached where the river approaches the savannas of the lower
lands, and its waters grow calmer ; that here they would remain
in hiding till night-fall, and then, under cover of darkness, con-
tinue their journey together in the canoe.

They broke their fast, from Kingfisher's wallet, on cassada
cakes and roasted yams and plantains. Henry Pascal aided to
launch the boat, and the journey began. It was a toilsome one
to both, their efforts, by the way, being in precisely opposite di-
rections — Kingfisher's endeavors were to hold back, those of
his companion to press forward. The former was greatly hin-
dered by the fish-box in tow. He thought several times of cut-
ting it adrift, but it was a good one, and had been long in
use, and he decided it was worth extra trouble. In the turns
and eddies of the swift current, with this box swinging from side
to side and varying the canoe's course, his best skill as a boat-
man was called into exercise. Henry Pascal's progress was by
far the more difficult, and at very many points it became neces-
sary for Kingfisher to pole ashore and await him. To thread a
virgin tropical forest, even when one may vary his course along
the line of least resistance, is a feat. The difficulty vastly in-
creases when the course is prescribed, and that along a river's
margin. The dense vines and undergrowth, many of them, like
the sensitive plant, armed with the sharpest needles, would .have
been impenetrable but for the hatchet which Kingfisher had sup-
plied from the canoe's outfit. Great prostrate trunks, so soft
with decay as to be scarcely able to sustain their own weight, were
often in the way. Not unfrequently considerable detours became
absolutely necessary, at which times communication with King-
fisher was maintained through whistles and halloos. Here and
VOL. L.— 33

5io IJ91 — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Jan.,

there tributaries interrupted progress, when our fugitive would
either take to the water or be carried over in the boat. Besides
all this, it was necessary to be constantly on guard against
venomous insects and creeping things. In the nine miles but
one public road was passed, where a bridge spanned the Mas-
sacre, and here Kingfisher took the lead and carefully recon-
noitered. At noon a halt was made, though half a league only
of the journey remained. A delightful north wind, moderating
the weather, had followed in the wake of the storm, but down
by the river the heat was stifling, and Henry Pascal felt com-
pletely worn out. A short repose renewed his strength, and the
fugitives struck out again, anxious to finish this part of their
course as soon as possible, in order to get rest against the night
journey ; and two hours later they reached the point of which
Kingfisher had spoken, where the Massacre becomes broader and
smoother and approaches the cultivated lands.

They had suffered no interruption save from natural obstacles.
Throughout this wild, sparsely-settled section, close upon the
Spanish line, not a living soul had been seen or heard, and the
swollen waters of the Massacre had forbidden ascending boats.
Here the light cotton-wood canoe was drawn ashore, and ar-
rangements made for substantial rest. Henry Pascal had, indeed,
a battered look. He was excessively fatigued, and his garments
all soiled and rent and in the utmost disorder ; but his heart
was light, bubbling over with emotions of gratitude and joyous
anticipations. High upon the bank a spot was chosen, and the
contents of the provision-wallet having been well explored, he
stretched himself out, with the trusty negro by him, for the rest
and sleep his jaded frame needed, and to which all the surround-
ings lent their aid, for on this elevation, where the forest was
less dense and the open country in the near distance, the cool
north wind blew, the light of the effulgent sun came down to
him softened and subdued through the myriads of green leaves
.that rustled above, fragrant sweetwoods and logwoods and many
kindred growths loaded the air with "Sabean odors," and the
forest birds sang a lullaby. Beautiful little todies — the robin red-
breast of the West Indies — in grass-green coat and crimson
gorget, gave forth low, sibilant cries as they sought from twig to
twig their insect prey ; from the thickets, where they were dart-
ing to and fro, came the full, clear whistle of keen-eyed, fidgety
hopping-dicks, while overhead in the tree-tops, or circling above
them in their strong but short flights, were screaming macaws
and paroquets.

890.] i?pi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 511

CHAPTER XVI.
ON THE MASSACRE.

The negro is peculiarly sensitive to cold. He gets chilly
with the going down of the sun, and through the night sleeps
well covered, even in tropical latitudes. As the shades of even-
ing fell and the atmosphere became charged with dewy freshness,
the lowered temperature roused Kingfisher. It was time to
renew the journey. He awoke his companion ; the canoe was
launched, and the fugitives were borne along on the bosom of
the Massacre. It was one of those beautiful tropical evenings
which once seen are never forgotten. The stars, admirable for
size and radiance, shone out from the depths of a perfectly
clear sky, " a firmament of living sapphires." Westward the
distant lightning — incessant at this season — played fantastically
in the low banks of clouds skirting the horizon. The night
breeze blew deliciously ; and the canoe, for whose steerage an
occasional stroke of the paddle sufficed, glided forward on the
swift, smooth current of the river. Refreshed by his nap,
exhilarated by the surroundings, and no longer preoccupied by
the difficulties and dangers of the way, Kingfisher was talk-
ative. He knew, too, how to adapt himself to his audience,
for he dwelt almost exclusively upon incidents in the child-
life of his companion, when he himself belonged to the old
plantation, and the former was a constant visitor at Belle Vue
as the playmate of " Ma'm'selle " — to all of which Henry lent
an attentive ear.

Kingfisher's sense of deference induced him frequently to
pause, and the conversation on his part was only renewed under
some soliciting remark from his companion. One of these pauses
proved extended. The old negro had just spoken incidentally
of M. Tardiffe, and the mention of the name called up a train
of thought which Henry Pascal wondered at himself for not
having before considered. In the hurried information given by
Jacque at the parting moment one of the few items was that
M. Tardiffe was in the camp. What could he be doing there?
Many were the surmises to which this question gave rise. W7as
it in his own behalf (for he had properties at Dondon he
might wish to save), or in that of his friends, or of the pris-
oners, or the colony at large ? He finally settled down into
the opinion that the colonial legislature, then in session at the

512 ifyi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Jan.,

Cape, must have deputed him on some mission of conciliation
or humanity. Could he be the person, it flashed across his
mind, who had spoken against him to Dessalines ? No, no, he
would not entertain the thought. Little as he admired the char-
acter of the man, of so foul a plot he could not possibly be the
author. In truth, it was a satisfaction to him not to know the
author. He was so thankful for his deliverance (at least thus far
wrought), so grateful for the friends that had been given him, so
filled with happy anticipations, the frame of his mind was so joy-
ful and loving, he was glad he knew no one to rouse counter
emotions. Ruminations about M. Tardiffe, however, were far
less pleasing than Kingfisher's reminiscences, and breaking from
them with a remark in reference to the old plantation life, he
gave the cue to his companion, who started off again with his
charming anecdotes, taking care to have " Massa Henry " and
" Ma'm'selle " always appear together, and relating, with great
gusto, the prognostications the negroes were wont to indulge in
with regard to them. His narrations had all the minuteness of
detail with which age recalls early impressions, and if in his
efforts to please fancy should to some extent have lent her aid,
it was a tribute to the old negro's kindly heart, if not to his
absolute veracity.

A two-hours' run had been made, when it became necessary
for Kingfisher to concentrate energy upon the paddle. The Mas-
sacre by this time had fairly entered the savannas towards the
coast, and the current slowed. A few sharp strokes, now on this
side, now on that, and kept up with the endurance of a veteran
boatman, sent the light craft forward. An hour later they passed
into the broad, deep St. lago or Yaqui ; and within the ^iext
hour, near midnight, made a final landing at the foot of the
pathway that led to Kingfisher's home. A fourth of a mile off,
in the midst of a small clearing, stood the cabin, which belonged
to the better class of negro dwellings. The posts were bamboo, the
sides wattles, with rafters of sweetwood, on which the ordinary
thatch was laid. Interiorly it was plastered and white- washed.
There were two rooms, one for sleeping, the other for cooking,
and well furnished with ordinary negro household articles. Bella,
Kingfisher's spouse, had long retired, and not expecting her " old
man " at such an hour, and the times being so out of joint,
she was startled on hearing approaching footsteps, which her
ear, too, detected as belonging to more than one person, and
in sharp tones demanded the cause of the intrusion. Reas-
sured on recognizing the familiar voice, Bella delayed not

1890.] ijgi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 513

admittance, when, receiving a word from Kingfisher, she hastened
back to frock herself, and returning almost instantly, struck a
light, and, with every mark of alacrity, set about preparations
for lodging her guest. The provision was simple enough, yet
sufficient In a corner of the room, intended for a mattress,
lay a pile of dried cocoa-nut leaves, and these, spread out and
topped with a bamboo mat, constituted the bed into which
Henry Pascal was fain to turn.

Next morning all were up betimes, for the heartrending
condition of Cape Fran9ois, menaced by foe and famine, was
attracting succors from every quarter, and any hour they might
signal a craft making for the Cape from some one of the
Spanish towns or settlements up the river. Kingfisher started
off for his fish-pots. Meanwhile, Bella, whose manner indicated
to Henry Pascal not only that she knew all but that he had
in her a good friend also, had gotten out her bread-stones and
charcoal furnace, and having bruised the moistened corn into
the finest flour, deftly kneaded it into cakes, and had the tor-
tillas ready against Kingfisher's return with a string of snap-
pers and yellow-tails. Breakfast followed, of fish, tortillas, yams,
and plantains, each the best of its kind, with the strong coffee
in use among the negroes. Henry Pascal, who had suffered
on prison rations, lingered before the first tasty fare he had
seen for some days, and Kingfisher, leaving him at the board,
hastened out to prepare a station for signalling any incoming
or outgoing vessel. He returned speedily, and the two at once
started off, Bella, of course, receiving a warm adieu.

The location chosen was a third of a league away, just at the
river's embouchure, where the channel curved somewhat west-
ward, and a species of small, fan-leaved palm, scarce fifteen feet
high, densely covered the shore. Mingled among the palms
were sea-side grape-trees, thick with crimson-veined leaves and
bunches of red berries, and a clump of these growths, with the
slightest aid from Kingfisher, formed at once both a shelter from
the heat and a hiding-place from any chance hostile blacks,
whilst affording the amplest outlook seaward. They had re-
mained here perhaps an hour when a sail was seen making
down the river. It was a three-masted craft, with jibs out and
all her canvas set. As she stood two mi]es off, abreast the
point, Henry Pascal and Kingfisher came out upon an open
space on the beach, and waved a token repeatedly, and even
ventured halloos ; but she sailed past, not recognizing or un-
heeding the signals. It was a bitter disappointment. Kingfisher

514 I79I — ^ TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Jan.,

was sympathizing, his consolations running in this wise : that
Monday was always a good day for ships ; that he knew another
would be along after a while ; that he was sure it would come
nearer in, with a variety of similar reflections very creditable to
his kind-heartedness, after indulging in which he presently took
a turn up the river for certain nets and fish-baskets that had
now been without attention for several days, and in examining
which he could also have an eye for passing sails.

By this time the fierce tropical sun was well up, and Henry
Pascal, seeking his shelter, had leisure to observe the surround-
ings. The tide was low on a smooth, snowy beach, and the
white breakers came rolling in, to expand, coalesce, and spread
out in broad sheets upon the foamy shore. Below him, at the
extremity of the curve making from the point of the embouch-
ure, a group of pelicans were disporting, some sailing on flag-
ging wing, some plunging for prey, while others preened their
plumage, perched on the fibrous roots of the palms, which here
and there formed stretches of vaulted open network along high-
water mark. In imagination his eye followed up the beach, and
with a sweep was fifty miles away at the Cape, and many and
long were his musings. When he recalled himself to his sur-
roundings, an hour, he thought, must have thus passed. The
sun had perceptibly advanced. The tide, too, having turned,
was now rushing in with a freshening breeze, and he was watch-
ing the swift arrows of water shoot along the line of contact,
where the advancing swell, about to break on the shore, met the
reflow of its predecessor, when Kingfisher came running up as
fast as his stiff leg would allow, with the intelligence that a sail
was on the way down the river. In a moment she emerged
within view, and when nearly against the point made a tack
that brought her far towards the western side. The signals were
observed, and Henry Pascal's heart bounded, for it was the final
assurance of safety, and the cry of the ten thousand rose within
him, " Thalassa ! thalassa / " on seeing the sails slacken and the
anchor heaved. A boat put off, and Henry Pascal, after pouring
out his gratitude to Kingfisher, and wringing the old negro's
hand again and again, was presently aboard. It proved to be
the brigantine Elizabeth, trading between the Cape and the
Spanish settlements on the Yaqui.

1890.] //p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO, 515

CHAPTER XVII.

CAPE FRANgOIS AGAIN.

Storms and head-winds followed that afternoon and the next
day, retarding progress, and it was not till the afternoon of
Wednesday, the last day of August, that the Elizabeth anchored
in the harbor of Cape Francois. The news of Henry Pascal's
arrival spread with the greatest rapidity throughout the city, and
excited the liveliest interest, for he was well known and popular,
and his hapless capture had been a universal theme. He was
on everybody's lips, and great numbers sought him personally,
as well on his own account as to learn the first really authentic
tidings from the negro camp. On reaching shore he hastened
to the Hotel de Ville — where, indeed, the news had preceded
him — to meet his father, who received him as though from the
dead. While here a message comes from the governor- general,
M. Blanchelande, and the next two hours are passed in reporting
before him and the chief officers commanding in the city such
information as he had been able to gather respecting the strength,
efficiency, and temper of the black army, together with the imme-
diate movements contemplated by Dessalines, and his purpose
towards the prisoners. The circumstances of his escape he dwelt
upon only in a general way, concealing, for obvious reasons, the
names of his benefactors. But late that evening, after receiving
a host of friends, he privately gave the full details to his father
and Colonel Tourner, who were delighted beyond measure at the
devotion shown by Jacque and Kingfisher, and, in truth, often
fairly wept over the recital.

Next morning he went aboard the Sappho, whose decks now
wore the usual aspect, all the fugitives, save the Tourner family,
having returned to the Cape on the subsidence of the panic.
Madame Tourner, in expectation of the visit, was all ready to
receive him. The colonel, the preceding afternoon, the moment
he caught the report of Henry Pascal's return flying about the
city, had despatched a messenger to his wife with the news.
She communicated it to Captain Winslow, of the Sappho, who
immediately went ashore. He was one of the officers before
whom, at the governor-general's residence, Henry Pascal re-
ported, and through him the latter conveyed word to Madame
Tourner that he would call on the morrow.

A great change had taken place in certain of her views.
As her daughter lay in delirium, and life for hours trembled

516 1791— A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Jan.,

in the balance, bitterly did she reproach herself as the cause,
in having been a party to M. Tardiffe's scheme and so urgent
for his suit. In spite, also, of her partiality for the man, the
more she reflected the more her generous nature was compelled
to admit the utter meanness of this scheme, to which she had
assented under a supreme sense of helplessness and despair.
Her daughter's illness, too, had opened her eyes to values she
had hitherto not fully weighed. It has been before observed
that beneath Madame Tourner's worldliness, the accident rather
of a sunny nature and tempting surroundings, beat a warm,
womanly heart, and deep currents flowed out towards her hus-
band and daughter. But these currents had been moving on
undisturbed for years, and she knew not how vitally they bound
her till a sudden fear of interruption revealed their strength.
Never before had her daughter been so critically ill ; for the first
time she saw herself menaced with the loss of her only child —
and all this because she had been seeking M. Tardiffe's gold.
Sorely did she bewail and lament her folly. It was a grief that
swallowed up every other. -What was gold — she so often bitterly
cried within herself, as those watching, anxious hours passed —
against her daughter's life and love? She all but cursed the gold,
and, terribly stung with self-reproaches, vowed, if her child was
spared, never more to cross her affections.

For Henry Pascal's escape she was, indeed, overjoyed. All
on a sudden it opened up new hopes, and, naturally enough, she
took a more rational and better view of his prospects. The open-
ing in Jamaica she now regarded as very good, and Henry Pascal
fully able to improve it. She thought, too — doubting not they
would all go thither — that the English ancestry of her husband
would tend to help him to opportunities in this prosperous Eng-
lish colony ; and altogether there was much, in her opinion, to
be thankful for. For very plain reasons she earnestly hoped
Henry Pascal's escape had been in no way connected with the
efforts of M. Tardiffe. That the latter had not returned with
him gave ground for such a hope, and the replies to the first
questions addressed to her visitor put her mind at rest in this
direction. His first question was of mademoiselle, whose danger-
ous illness he had heard of through the colonel. A week had
just elapsed since the beginning of the attack. It had been of
great severity, but comparatively short, and it was a coincidence
that the crisis had passed the very day of Henry Pascal's return.
As the fever ebbed and the delirium went off her inquiries after
Henry Pascal were anxiously repeated, and the ship's surgeon

1890.] ijqi—A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. .517

advised that the news of his return be at once, yet gently, com-
municated. Madame Tourner had feared that complications con-
nected with M. Tardiffe might prove a source of distress, and
delayed the tidings till she had seen Henry Pascal himself and
learnt particulars. Relieved on finding that " the news " was
unencumbered, she replied in fine spirits to her visitor's question,
saying her daughter was better, and might be able to see him
presently, and asked to be allowed to retire a moment to aid in
some preparations.

The attack had left Emilie Tourner prostrated in body and in
mind. The events which immediately preceded and led up to it
seemed to her a ghastly dream, and when the reality broke upon
her the effort to recall them was unsatisfactory. She remem-
bered having interceded with M. Tardiffe, and his expression of
willingness to oblige her, but what followed was all indistinct.
Whether he had gone, or how he had gone, she could not tell.
The circumstances were wholly confused, only that she retained
an impression of something sinister connected with them ; and to
the clearing up of the mystery her earliest inquiries were directed.
Her mother, however, gave evasive replies, and endeavored, in
her enfeebled state, to lead her mind in less disquieting direc-
tions. As Madame Tourner now entered the apartment of her
fever- worn daughter the latter, still engrossed with the one
thought, turned towards her and said :

"The servant tells me you've had a visitor."

"Yes, Emilie."

" Has he brought news ? "

"Yes, my darling; some authentic tidings from Dessalines
have just reached the Cape."

" What of the prisoners ? " she cried with sudden energy,
partly raising herself as she spoke, but immediately sinking back
in the vain effort to sustain the position.

" Be calm, my dear child. The news is not bad. We hear
that Dessalines, being in need . of funds, is disposed to ransom
the prisoners."

A momentary flush of satisfaction which brightened her feat-
ures and seemed to expand her frame passed away as she
replied in slow, halting, drooping tones :

" To hear of ransom is better than to hear of death, but
where can the means be had ? and what must the end not be ? "

" Possibly, Emilie, he may have escaped. Monsieur Pascal is
known and liked by the negroes generally, and he must have
friends in the black army."

5i8 7/p/ — A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. [Jan.,

" O maman ! don't oppress me with vain hopes."

"Well, Emilie, the news really is that he has escaped."

" Escaped ! " replied the daughter, bending upon her mother
a look of the deepest interest.

" Yes, escaped through the aid of Jacque Beattie. Rumor has
it that Monsieur Pascal descended the Riviere du Massacre by
night, and he is supposed to be now at some point on the
coast."

"Heaven be praised!" exclaimed the daughter, with a beam-
ing countenance. "Yet," she added thoughtfully, "dangers must
still surround him."

"Suppose, Emilie," said Madame Tourner, as an arch smile
played over her features, " the point on the coast it is thought
he Has reached should be Cape Fran£ois ! "

Regarding her mother with a half-frightened expression, as if
she could not think she would trifle with her, yet afraid of
trusting such perfect news, she asked solemnly :

"Mamma, can you be jesting?"

" Let us thank God, my child ; Monsieur Pascal is indeed
safe at the Cape, arid all the city rejoices."

To this announcement Emilie Tourner could only reply by
burying her face in her handkerchief and weeping for joy.

When the burst of feeling had presently passed she turned
to her mother, and with eyes still filling with happy tears, said
in a deprecating voice :

"Surely, maman, you are not deceiving me?"

"Well, my child," smilingly rejoined Madame Tourner, "if
you can't believe me, I shall allow Monsieur Pascal to speak for
himself. Our visitor is none other than he, and he awaits my
return for permission to see you."

Another application of the handkerchief now became un-
avoidable, Madame Tourner the meanwhile giving hasty touches
here and there to complete the order of the apartment. It is
scarcely necessary to add that the effect of the interview was in
every way salutary, and that Emilie Tourner's improvement ad-
vanced with astonishing rapidity.

CHAPTER XVIII.
CONCLUSION.

The day following Admiral Affleck, in response to the appeal
for help, arrived from Jamaica with the frigates Blonde and
Daphne. Seeing he could effect nothing against the insurgents,

1890.] i79T — ^ TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 519

concentrated, as they were, in the interior, he resolved to return,
after landing supplies and debarking a force to aid in securing
the Cape's defence till troops should be sent from the mother
country. He delayed departure a few days, to enable certain
families who had determined upon leaving San Domingo at once
to complete arrangements. Among these were the Pascals and
Tourners.

In the mail for Cape Fran9ois, brought by the Blonde, was a
letter which Mr. Harrison had directed to Henry Pascal at
Kingston, and which the latter's uncle had forwarded. It con-
tained a formal offer, on advantageous terms, to open an agency
at Kingston, to which offer Henry Pascal, resigning h* military
office, promptly wrote an acceptance. Colonel Tourner, after full
consultation with his family, also determined upon going thither.
Nothing could now be done at the Cape. Opportunities of some
sort, he considered, would present themselves in Jamaica, and
it would be far better. to await there the issue of San Domingo
affairs. He therefore relinquished his command, his military
services being no longer necessary ; Emilie Tourner was care-
fully removed to the Blonde, and the latter part of the week
the good ship safely reached Kingston. Here Henry Pascal suc-
ceeded far beyond his expectations, and in due time his nuptials
with Emilie Tourner were celebrated. Within a few years he
became the Jamaica partner of the Harrison house. Ulti-
mately, upon Mr. Harrison's decease, the Kingston branch passed
absolutely into his hands, and he rose to wealth and influence.
As for Colonel Tourner, though his San Domingo possessions
were irretrievably lost, he fairly prospered at Kingston, living
happily near his daughter, and occasionally accompanying his
son-in-law to London, where the latter had established business
relations.

M. Tardiffe became a victim to Dessalines' wrath, falling
into the trap he had prepared for another. When the guard,
in turn, came on duty the night of the escape and found his
comrade dead and the prisoner gone, an alarm was sounded
through the camp. Little, however, could be done before morn-
ing, when every effort was made to obtain a clue, but in vain.
Dessalines was in a tremendous fury. Naturally he suspected
Jacque Beattie, as having been a favored servant in the Pascal
family, and set afoot some secret investigations. But Jacque
had cleverly concealed his tracks, and nothing was discovered.
While brooding over the matter, his rage at being baffled
growing with his potations, Dessalines remembered M. Tardiffe's

520 //p/ — A TALE OF SAA' DOMINGO. [Jan.,

saying he knew the Pascals well, and how very desirous he was
that his presence in the camp should not be known to Henry
Pascal ; and, altogether, his drunken suspicions being aroused,
he did not stickle ordering him to be searched, when, to the
astonishment of every one, including M. Tardiffe himself, who
had not thought of the ensnaring document, the note from
Madame Tourner was found. Dessalines was convinced of his
complicity in the escape, would listen to nothing from him, threw
him into prison, and a day or two after, on hearing of the tor-
tures inflicted upon captured blacks at the Cape, in a gust of
passion ordered all the prisoners to execution.

Jacqu* Beattie bore an active part in the long and dreadful
struggle that finally ended, twelve years later, in the complete
triumph of the blacks, under Jean Dessalines. He had become
full weary of war, and the peace that followed the proclama-
tion of black independence proved a profound disappointment.
Jean Dessalines was the counterpart of his twin-brother, Paul,
and his horribly wicked and bloody rule so disgusted Jacque
that he disposed of his possessions, which had now become con-
siderable, and came to Kingston. He was at once manumitted
by Henry Pascal, who with every member of his own and his
wife's family held him in great honor, and never grew weary in
manifestations of gratitude. He lived at Kingston many years,
and as " Colonel Beattie " was a familiar and highly-respected
character. It was through Jacque that Monsieur Tardiffe's perfidy
and the circumstances of his fate first became known.

Henry Pascal made repeated efforts, but in vain, to get tid-
ings of Kingfisher. For the noble old fellow he always kept ' a
fresh, warm place in his heart, and his memory as a grand hero
was transmitted to his little children, whom he would often de-
light with the story of his rescue and escape. His eldest child,
by the way, was called Jacque, and for another he gravely sug-
gested to his wife the name of "Kingfisher"; but she deemed
it altogether too bizarre, and they agreed upon Francis, King-
fisher's original praenomen.

K W. GILLIAM, M.D.

1890.] TITLES: THEIR SENSE AND THEIR NONSENSE. 521

TITLES: THEIR SENSE AND THEIR NONSENSE.

IT is curious that no book has been written on the origin and
history of titles. Mr. Frederick Marshall, in his book on Inter-
national Vanities, has written amusingly on the ceremonials of
rank, but has kept titles more or less in the background. It is
only by diving into odd sorts of dictionaries, especially French, Ger-
man, and Italian, that we are able to pick up fragments of infor-
mation on a subject which has a quaint kind of interest.

Who could have been the first man who titled himself?
Adam is said to have lived hundreds of years, so that even he
possibly may have known the bearer of the first title. If we go
back to B.C. 2000 (when Adam must have been dead one thou-
sand years), we read of Menes, which signifies " the Conductor " ;
and about B.C. 1200 there was one Tiglath Pileser, which may be
taken to mean " illustrious chief." A little later we come to
Xerxes, who styled himself " Xerxes the king, the great king,
the king of kings, the king of the many-peopled countries, the
supporter also of the great world," an assumption of superiority
which excited the emulation of other and less turbulent monarchs,
for we read that Tigranes, the Armenian, also proclaimed himself
" king of kings," and was so sensitive as to his title that he refused
to answer a letter because it was addressed only to ''The King."
Evidently the love of titles springs naturally to the human mind
when personal power has lifted a man above his fellows.

Royal titles have been, of course, the most magnificent, the most
pretentious of a sort of quasi-divine dignity. It has been sug-
gested by a Frenchman that crowned heads like great titles as
"a compensation for the riskiness of their business." This same
Frenchman says that " a sovereign's business is the least lucky
in the world, and that no insurance office ought to think of ac-
cepting his life." He has made a calculation that up to the
present time there have been 2,540 emperors and kings, ruling
over about sixty-four nations; and that of this number of crowned
heads 300 have been driven from their thrones, 64 have abdicated,
24 have committed suicide, 12 have become insane, 100 have
been killed in battle, 123 have been made prisoners, 25 have died
as martyrs, 151 have been assassinated, and 108 legally con-
demned and executed. Accepting this calculation as accurate,
we should still be disposed to question whether the magnificence

522 TITLES: THEIR SENSE AND THEIR NONSENSE. [Jan.,

of royal titles afforded any solace under such sorrows. Be this
as it may, the splendid title of Emperor (exceptionally unlucky in
point of a " natural death ") disappeared in Western Europe from
about A.D. 475 to about A.D. 805, though the title of King has
never fallen into abeyance, but has only been modified linguisti-
cally. Of semi-royal titles there have been a multitude, and not a
few of them survive to the present day. A Reigning Grand Duke
is still existent; and until lately there was a Reigning Serene
Duchess. Elector is a title which, if extinct, is historic, sug-
gesting the greater part of the history of central Europe for a
period of certainly more than two centuries. It is true that
Palatine, Margrave, and Landgrave, titles once implying a sover-
eign lordship, have vanished out of modern royal blue books ; so,
too, has Doge, with its memories of Venice, and Protector, with its
memories of Cromwell ; but Viceroy is still significant to English
minds — and very painfully significant to Irish minds, though
Lord-Lieutenant is its more customary interpretation. Such old-
fashioned titles as Hospodar and Stadtholder convey no dis-
tinct meaning to our young men. Yet there are other big titles
which mean much — Sultan, for example, which in Arabic is
"mighty man," and Caliph, which implies a "royal substitute,"
being to this day significant and portentous. Bey once meant
a bigger man than a Sultan, while Khedive is a modern growth
out of Pasha. President is the most modern of (supreme)
titles, and, to the thinking of many persons, the most respect-
able. At least, it is the simple expression of a fact, and owes
nothing to terminolggy for its power.

That the vanity of royal rulers must not be taken as pro-
portionate to the extent of their dominions or , their power is
proved by the fact that many second-rate rulers have smothered
themselves in volumes of titles. Thus, so late as the year 1826,
the King of Portugal — who was not even a "great man" — de-
scribed himself as " King of Portugal and Algarve within and
beyond the seas ; in Africa, Seigneur of Guinea, and of the
navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and the
Indies." This must have been news to the Shah of Persia and
to the English "Indian Office." The King of Sardinia had a
habit of styling himself — before he took a fancy to be King of
Italy — as King of Cyprus, Sicily, and Jerusalem, and seigneur of
forty-seven other districts, which must have puzzled some old-
fashioned geographists, who had impressions as to a different
ownership of those countries, and which indeed made the King
of Naples quite angry, as he also had a weakness for being King

1890.] TITLES: THEIR SENSE AND THEIR NONSENSE. 523

of Jerusalem, and was a very considerable royal proprietor in
Sicily. As to mighty eastern sovereigns, we will pass over such
a magnate as Khorrum Shah, the fifth Mogul Emperor of Delhi,
who contented himself with the title of " king of the world," a
quite harmless if somewhat embracing affectation, and we will
speak of a sovereign who, at 140° east, sits enthroned as the tip-
top power of the universe. It is true that he has only one title,
but it is a title which includes all other possible titles. More-
over, his ancestors from the date of B.C. 600 have claimed and
have been acclaimed by the same title. This more than human
potentate, whom we call the Mikado, but who is not the Mi-
kado in his own country, is known by his subjects as Ten-o,
which, being interpreted — if the English language is indeed com-
petent— means as nearly as possible, Heaven- Highest. This
potentate must smile serenely on modern dynasties, with their
mushroom titles of Majesty and Royal Highness, since in the
time of Nebuchadnezzar his ancestors were Ten-o, and have
always been so, and, of course, must be so to the end of time.
Now, let us respectfully contemplate this "well-born" monarch.
Not even in the British Museum is there any relic of periods
which were anterior to "Nebuchadnezzar the king"; so that we
look in vain for relics of the Japanese ancients who acknowl-
edged Ten-o as the only personage in the world. Curious that
this supremely " old-familied" monarch should have conde-
scended to adopt modern modes of government, should have
recently created a brand-new titular nobility, and should be
known even in his own country as a too liberal constitutionalist
and the patron of nineteenth century institutions! Ten-o is now
the promoter of railways ; Ten-o has practically granted a con-
stitution ; so that Nebuchadnezzar and the most modern of Chris-
tian sovereigns — B.C. 600 and A.D. 1889 — may be said, speaking
poetically, to have joined hands across the ages, and to have
linked supreme autocracy with liberalism.

Of the titles by which Christian kings have been addressed,
Majesty seems to claim the most antiquity, though in early times
many great men were addressed as Majesty, nor does it appear
that till about the beginning of the fifteenth century kings claimed
to be alone truly Majestic. Their older titles were Grace,
Grandeur, Serenity ; with Highness, Celsitude, or Altitude thrown
in as subsidiary compliments. The very superb title Imperial
Majesty was first claimed by the proud Emperor Charles the
Fifth ; while the title Royal Majesty seems to have first caught
the fancy of a French king about A.D. 1554. Highness was an

.
5.24 ' TITLES: THEIR SENSE AND THEIR NONSENSE. [Jan.,

invention of a Roman emperor, and continued popular with a
variety of Christian kings ; but the title Royal Highness is quite
a modern discovery, not earlier than the time of the French
Louis XIII. Louis XIV. presented that title to his nephews ;
while the title Prince (first, of course, the Roman Princeps) was
much used, though in Latin, a thousand years ago. As to quite
modern titles, Monseigneur was the title of only one personage, the
French Dauphin, but soon came to be extended to the French
prelates. And as to the three adjectives Excellent, Eminent,
and August, the first once belonged to kings alone ; the second,
originally reserved for royal personages, was bestowed by Urban
VIII. upon cardinals; while August, with its fictional handmaid
Perpetual, was an invention of some German notability.

But now as to the Pope's title, Your Holiness ; was it origi-
nally Catholic or only royal ? The answer is that Paternity, Be-
atitude, Grandeur, and Apostolic Majesty were the Pope's titles
down to the beginning of the fourteenth century ; but the title
Holiness had been shared by many monarchs whose saintliness
was not their primary characteristic. Not only was Louis le
Debonnaire styled Your Holiness, but even the heretic Theodoric
enjoyed the title ; and so also some of the Emperors of Constan-
tinople, and at least one Frenchman, King Robert, were honored
with the complimentary epithet. More curiously, perhaps, still,
two at least of the Roman emperors were styled not only Holy,
but Very Holy, which, after all, was but an approximation to
their titular rank, Divine, conferred chiefly after they had gone
to reside with Jupiter and Juno. As to the origin of the reser-
vation of Your Holiness to the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic
Church, it came about simply in this way : The Pontiffs adopt-
ing the title for themselves, the rest of the world respectfully
gave it up, using the title henceforth not as a recognition of
rank, but as a homage to the Pontiff's office and person.

One big royal title we have not noticed, that of Czar, or,
as perhaps it should be written, Tsar. The Great Lord Auto-
crat, Grand Duke, etc., were the earlier Muscovite titles; .but
Duke Wladimir, who died in 1125, was the first who, for some
reason, was called Tsar. Imperial Tsar was an amplification of
later times; it was first thought of about the beginning of the
seventeenth century, and the then Emperor of Germany took of-
fence at it, even protesting that he must forbid the assumption.
But the monarch of Russia was self-willed, and his successors
have always shown the same trait. In 1721, after the peace of
Nystadt, the Russian senate and synod further conferred on their

1890.] TITLES: THEIR SENSE AND THEIR NONSENSE. t

supreme head the title of Emperor of all the Russias. This
was thought too bombastic to be recognized. Many sovereigns
wrote angrily to the Big Man. For nearly half a century the
title was contested, and some of the letters of the royal objectors
are still extant. Yet one does not see why a monarch should
not indulge in grandiloquence, if such an amusement is congenial
to his subjects. "Ten-o" was never reviled for his sublimity,
nor have other monarchs been considered as his inferiors because
Heaven- Highest tops them all in self-assumption. Nonsense is
inseparable from all arrogance, and should be regarded with a
courteous contempt.

From the titles of kings have come the titles of nobility, the
nobility being, as the rays of the sovereign sun, benignly warm-
ing and warmed, complementarily. It would be impossible in a
.short space to trace the development of noble titles, and indeed
it would be tedious to attempt it. History records battles which
have been fought for " empty titles, " so that vanity can claim
the honor of having shed as much blood as its foster-brothers,
interest and love. Nor are we in these days less worshipful of
syllables — or, for that matter, of ribbons, stars, or orders — than
were our forefathers in less civilized periods. Distinctions call
for titles ; all men like distinctions ; therefore all men like to
be extra-syllabled. Moreover, differences of rank, in the modern
order of governments, necessarily require some prefix or "handle"
by which the political degree may be intimated. Even socially
we must have our nomenclature. The Englishman, if he be re-
spectable in position, is mightily offended if you do not address
his letters to Esquire, while the graduate of a university is a
decided stickler for his M.A. when his name has to appear in a
public document It is human to love titles. Just as there is
no dark chief in Africa, nor even any red Indian in the prairies
who has become illustrious in the fine art of scalping, who does
hot rejoice in some nickname of distinction, so is there no gentle-
man in either hemisphere who would not rather be entitled as a
somebody than herded with the profanum milgus as a nobody.

So that there is obviously a real side as well as a comic side
to the whole subject of royal and noble titles, and therefore of
all etiquette in " styles." It is true that men are children, how-
ever old they may become, and that they kneel to the mere
symbols of superiority [most Englishmen feel a pulsation in the
presence of a Duke and a slight ' disturbance on the approach of
a Royal Highness], yet since the aspiration after personal superi-
ority is the idea, if not the fact, of all name-worship, we must

VOL. L. — 34

526 TITLES: THEIR SENSE AND THEIR NONSENSE. [Jan.,,

allow that there would be good in titles did they guarantee the
superiority of the holder. Thus, the original idea of a nobleman
was a man who had done noble deeds ; so that the homage was
paid only to title because it was first paid to merit. This idea has
quite died out in England. A man may be now made a peer
[of political "parity," that is, with the sovereign] because he
has amassed a fortune as an underwriter or as a money-lender,,
or as a bill-discounter of vast proportions, or as a brewer of
stout ales for the thirsty multitude, or as a banker of much
craft and greater success. Nobility has, therefore, come to mean
prosperity. Titles are but the coroneting of good luck. Noble-
ness and nobility have been divorced. And again, unfortunately,
there is no obligation for an English nobleman to adopt
the sacred principle, noblesse oblige, so that his title may be-
come a watchword of reproach or of contempt, while he con-
tinues to serenely " lord it " all his life. The court catechisms
of vanity are as precise as they are complex in regard to the
homage which is to be paid to syllabic rank, but they do not
touch the questions of merit or of competency, of industry, of
morality, or even of decency. Is such a nobility worth a cent
to the public good ? This is a matter of opinion ; yet is there
not some harm done in the creation of a vulgar flunkyism,
in the cherishing of purely material standards of rank, just
as the French aristocracy for a long time did the same thing,
before the law of primogeniture was abolished ? At least we
must say that there is little incentive to virtue ; the incentive is
to greed and to vanity.

Perhaps, however, this is to take too grave a view of an in-
stitution which no one has ever supposed to be supernatural.
Titles have been the sport of all philosophers — who neverthe-
less have rarely refused to accept a title.

As the temptation is very strong to run on lengthily on this
subject — such a variety of topics being incidental — let us con-
clude with this one more observation : that Heraldry, most prob-
ably, was the father of Nobility, or rather, the father of such
nobility as was titled. And we will select but one out of a
heap of old traditions which the lovers of heraldic lore are
wont to cherish. That delightful enthusiast known as Morgan
has assured us that heraldry is so very ancient that even Adam
must be accounted to have been "armiger." Adam and Eve were
lawful bearers of " cote-armure"! " After the Fall," says the en-
thusiast [he might well put it after the Fall], " Adam was assigned
a shield gules, and to Eve another, argent.''' This is historic,

1890.] MUSING. 527

and nothing more need be said. The same learned author has
assured us that, " after the Fall, Adam bore a garland of fig-
leaves, which Abel quartered with Argent, and an apple vert, in
right of his mother." This seems likely. Moreover, in the book
of St. Alban's, printed so late as 1486, we read, among other
startling announcements (refreshing to the enthusiast in heraldry),
that "of the offspringe of the gentilman Japeth came Habra-
ham, Moyses, Aron, and the profettys, and also the great line of
Mary" — but here, for reverence' sake, we omit what follows —
all of whom were entitled to bear arms. Obviously, then, her-
aldry and titles were in the position of father and son ; and
since we must not be carried away with such romancing, we will
end with acquiescing in the quaint view, that as even Adam was
"armiger" — though it does not] appear that he was a nobleman
— it seems likely that heraldry was the precursor of all titles,
or, rather, suggested the nomenclature of rank.

A. F. MARSHALL.

MUSING.

SELF-KNOW ! Can I know so ? I know I can, for I know that

I do so know.

What ? That I am, and as I am ; here wanting, wanting so —
Some all, though what I may hardly know, and yet — yes, 'tis a

great deal.

That above all I know, for that, oh, that above all I feel !
Ay, and so feeling, I feel I feel — all wants beyond and before —
The want not to want, be the want what it may : I want not to

want any more.

* Words over the entrance to the Temple at Delphi. " Descendit e ccelo Y^vwQi deaurby "
says Juvenal, Sat. xi. 27.

528 MUSING. [Jan.,

II.

True, want is never of naught ; 'tis of somewhat there now to

pursue.
Still, is not this want I feel but to have, nor is it so much to

do;
Though what it is for, I know, would give me all I could get ;

would, too,
Make me do all I ought, and yet, for neither I long thus

I see !

In that I want not to want, I want— I want but to be let be.
Be how ? Be being, always and wholly self-finding, so suffering

no pain.
Be what ? What I am ; for what I have got, or what I've been

able to gain
So as simply to have, may go, all go ; so that what I am I

remain.
Wert vain then, O vision of Beauty and Truth, and Goodness

and Greatness, all o'er me
But beckoning me up ? — bright dream of my youth, there even

now rising before me !
Wert thou also vain, manhood's last aim ? — vain all I have tried

and have done !
No, no, but 'twas always the same ; I longed, as I long, to

become.
That longing I know now cannot be wrong, for I see 'tis my

being's feel ;
What no world-fact, or act of my own, but my Maker's in me

doth reveal :
'Tis the self-word of Sense, this want to act forth what of worth

is my life's potency,
To become what for all I am made to become, to be what 'tis

in me to be.

III.

Restless heart ! What wouldst thou now ? Doth Sense the

Right not say ?

Thou sighest so, I scarcely know whether for yea or nay
Or only doubt. Still, sigh, my heart ! Why not ? But thus

canst tell
The secret of thy nature's way ; and that too must be well.

1890.] MUSING. 529

Sigh on — yes, what if all I ought at last I came to be ?

No, 'twould not do. Nay, longing most, thought turns self off

from me

To mine — the others, father, mother, brothers — O my own
Gone for ever! Wrong? Aye, wrong were being left alone.
No matter what one's lot may be hereafter to become,
Not that may mean for what life cries while thus the heart sighs

" Home ! "
Sense shows not all the Right. There is what Sense from Self

may move :
Why, at its best, Sense is thy slave, thy willing slave, sweet

Love !

I see, with mind's clearest self-seeing, each one

Should act out as being what in him is done ;

To my spirit still is it life's fullest way shown,

Man as made is not One for his being alone . . .

Must I say, then, 'twere vain to try thought's way to find

The want that the word is of spirit and mind ;

Law of head and of heart, of the One and the Kind ;

Truth of sense and of sentiment, wisdom and love ;

The Mean making Self e'en as resting to move ?

Ah, yes, Lord, well Thy Word's word sings :
"As the hart thirsteth for the water-springs,
My soul is athirst unto Thee, O God ! "
Ah, yes, here too Thy creature sings :
" As the hart thirsteth for the water- springs,
My soul is athirst unto Thee, O God!"
I but tread the path Thy prophet trod,
And, tired of becoming, long to be
At rest — at one, First One, with Thee,
My more than self and mine to me,

My Good and theirs, and the Good of all — •

O Good — Good — God ! What can I call
Thee more ? What can I do but rest
In the thought of Thee, as for all for me,
THE BEST !

T. J. O'M.

All Hallows College, Dublin.

530 CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL. [Jan.,

CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL.

THE idea of complete separation of the state from religion
is something worthy of careful consideration. Imagine a state
appealing to its citizens upon grounds altogether unreligious !
The best thing in the way of motive the civil organism can pre-
sent is "the general good." The general good is a purely nega-
tive quantity ; namely, securing the conditions without which
happiness would be out of the question. And if this be the sec-
ular power's highest motive, its greatest sanction is on the side
of reward, civil protection, worldly prosperity; and on the side
of punishment, reformatories, jails, and scaffolds. Imagine a so-
ciety made up of men into whose lives, as citizens, no other
motive nor sanction but these entered ! It is not easy to form
the concept of, in Mallock's word, a thoroughly dereligionized
state. Such, however, would be one entirely separated from re-
ligion. The fact is that the motives and sanctions of religion are
those which most move men in the right-minded fulfilment of
civic duties. " Man's primary duty is towards God ; his second-
ary duty is towards his brother-men ; and it is only from the
filial relation that the fraternal springs." On this fraternity the
Christian state is based. The union between church and state
which the Catholic Church reaches out for, and the separation of
them which she condemns, were well summarized by Dr. Brown-
son in this magazine, May, 1870:

" For ourselves, we are partial to our American system, which, unless we are
blinded by our national prejudices, comes nearer to the realization of the true
union as well as distinction of church and state than has hitherto or elsewhere
been effected ; and we own we should like to see it, if practicable there, intro-
duced, by lawful means only, into the nations of Europe. The American system
may not be practicable in Europe ; but, if so, we think it would be an improve-
ment. Foreigners do not generally, nor even do all Americans themselves, fully
understand the relation of church and state as it really subsists in the funda-
mental constitution of American society. Abroad and at home there is a strong
disposition to interpret it by the theory of European liberalism, and both they
who defend and they who oppose the union of church and state regard it as
based on their total separation. But the reverse of this, as we understand it, is
the fact. American society is based on the principle of their union ; and union,
while it implies distinction, denies separation. Modern infidelity, or secularism,
is, no doubt, at work here as elsewhere to effect their separation ; but as yet the
two orders are distinct, each with its distinct organization, sphere of action, repre-
sentatives, functions, but not separate. Here the rights of neither are held to be
grants from the other. The rights of the church are not franchises or conces-

1890.] CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL. 531

:sions from the state, but are recognized by the state as held under a higher law
than its own, and therefore rights prior to and above itself, which it is bound by
the law constituting it to respect, obey, and, whenever necessary, to use its
physical force to protect and vindicate." . . . "We note here that this
view condemns alike the absorption of the state in the church, and the absorption
•of the church in the state, and requires each to remain distinct from the other,
each with its own organization, organs, faculties, and sphere of action. It favors,
therefore, neither what is called theocracy, or clerocracy, rather, to which Calvin-
istic Protestantism is strongly inclined, nor the supremacy of the state, to which
the age tends, and which was assumed in all the states of gentile antiquity,
whence came the persecutions of Christians by pagan emperors. We note fur-
ther that the church does not make the law ; she only promulgates, declares,
and applies it, and is herself as much bound by it as the state itself. The law
itself is prescribed for the government of all men and nations by God himself as
Supreme Lawgiver, or the end or final cause of creation, and binds equally states
.and individuals, churchmen and statesmen, sovereigns and subjects. Such, as
we have learnt it, is the Catholic doctrine of the relation of church and state, and
such is the relation that in the divine order really exists between the two orders,
and which the church has always and everywhere labored with all her zeal and
energy to introduce and maintain in society."

Many well-meaning non- Catholics think that an establishment,
or concordat, or agreement by which church authorities should
hold secular power,, constitutes the ideal union which Catholics
have longed for. On the contrary, Catholics know that the
church was never more wronged than when dealt with as an es-
tablishment or tied up by a concordat. In every such case the
tendency has been towards the assumption of church control by the
civil power. Whatever advantages the church seemed to acquire
from these alliances, her deprivation was generally, if not always,
far in excess of her gain. Through the middle ages, when it is
•commonly supposed she possessed greatest civil authority, "she
enjoyed not a moment's peace, hardly a truce, and was obliged
to maintain an unceasing struggle with the civil authority against
its encroachments on the spiritual order, and for her own inde-
pendence and freedom of action as the Church of God."

These considerations are apt to throw some light on the
Catholic aspect of the problem, which, briefly, is that both insti-
tutions were intended to act in harmony, each within its distinct
province ; one looking to man's temporal welfare, the other to
his spiritual. Withal, though the province of each be distinct,
the proximate — earthly prosperity — must not antagonize the ulti-
mate end of man, happiness hereafter.

The history of civilization tells us the value of religion to
society considered apart from its governmental functions. Indus-
try, the arts, the sciences, sanitation, commerce, discovery have
received their strongest impulse from her. If there be any ad-

S32 CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL. [Jan.,

vance which man has made in which positive dogmatic religion
has had no hand, then that advance is not yet catalogued.

It is, moreover, entirely to the church that society owes the
Home, where man finds his purest and completest earthly bliss.

But it is in the moral sphere that the church has rendered
society untold benefits. It is popular to speak of religion in one
breath and morality in another. Separate them, and what have
you on the moral side ? At best utilitarianism. This could no
more produce the high standard of actions religious motives put
before men than the cracked, kernelless acorn-shell could grow
the oak- tree. Sun would shine, rain fall in vain, the germ of life
would be wanting. A moral code without inwardness, with a
temporary value and without absoluteness, so that it would be
within " the competence of any man or all men to alter or
abolish it," would certainly be a sorry standard of social virtue,,
a veritable dummy togged out in " the clothes of religion." To
such a standard, to this kind of a god alone, has society a right
if it be separated from religion.

Still, it has been objected that the union of religion and so-
ciety tends either to corrupt the former "by debasing the spiritual
to the love of luxurious ease, as in the case of the monastic
orders," or to disorganize the latter "by proclaiming beggary
[voluntary poverty ?], the symbol of its ruin, more honored than
productive industry." To confuse beggary with voluntary poverty,,
the proximate cause of the greatest philanthropic industries the
world has seen, is to outrage language ; as well call property
theft.

Could such results as those objected come to pass, they would
be the effect of pure accident, and could be quoted no more
fairly as reason why the church and society should be entirely
cut asunder than a child's destructive carelessness in handling
matches could be urged as ground sufficient for the prohibition
of their manufacture. It is true that " each institution has its
essential place and function," but this does not disprove their
mutual usefulness. As religion makes of the individual more than
a worm of earth, and of his life more than " an idiot's dream,"
so does it, and must it, lift society up out of the slough of natural
satisfactions on to the highlands of spiritual endeavor. If in
performing this duty the church would stoop to functions un-
worthy of itself, or run a risk of debasement, then would it be
inherently unfit for the work it was set to do ; namely, to make
the natural a path to that which is above nature and rounds out
man's happiness, the divine.

1890.] CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL. 533

So much by way of introduction to what we have to say of
religion and education.

" The ultimate end of education," says Professor Huxley, "is to
promote morality and refinement, by teaching men to discipline
themselves, and by leading them to see that the highest, as it is
the only content, is to be attained not by grovelling in the rank
and steaming valleys of sense, but by continually striving towards
those high peaks where, resting in eternal calm, reason discerns
the undefined but bright ideal of the highest good — ' a cloud by
day, a pillar of fire by night.' ' The quotation is pertinent, be-
cause it defines the position of the " advanced " scientific school
of the day as -to the work education should do. This school,
of course, regards religion as a detected superstition of no future
influence. The work it did is, under the new regime, the prov-
ince of education. The inference is an easy one : granting reli-
gion, it and education should go hand-in-hand, since their ultimate
end is the same, raising men up out of " the rank and steam-
ing valleys of sense."

In other words, the object of education is the formation of
character ; character is a matter of principle, of motive ; these
are subjects of the spiritual order ; consequently, they belong to*
this order's authoritative representative, organized religion. It
is begging the question to claim for the state absolute control
of education because its own protection and the public good
require educated citizens. It has already been shown that for
the same reasons the state needs religious citizens. Should it,,
therefore, usurp a spiritual function?

The core of the matter is, secular society is unable to dis-
charge its proper functions without the co-operation and aid of
the spiritual society. Civic virtues no more than personal are
the proper effects of purely secular training; uprightness, hon-
esty (except as advantageous policy), fidelity, loyalty, respect for
authority are not direct consequences of reading, 'riting, and
'rithmetic. Secular studies are undeniably valuable auxiliaries to
spiritual progress, for religion, being a revelation of God, requires
an intellectual worshipper. Of all religions the Catholic most
thoroughly realized this truth ; else why is her history the his-
tory of universities ? The bearing of knowledge on religious
truth is the subject of Dr. Newman's " Eighth Discourse on Uni-
versity Teaching," of which the following extracts are too pertinent
to this article's purpose to be omitted :

" It is obvious," he says, " that the first step pastors of the church have to
effect in the conversion^ of man and the renovation of his nature is his rescue

534 CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL. LJan-»

from that fearful subjection to sense which is his ordinary state. To be able to
break through the meshes of that thraldom, and to disentangle and disengage its
ten thousand holds upon the heart, is to bring it, I might almost say, half-way
to heaven. Here even divine grace, to speak of things according to their ap-
pearances, is ordinarily baffled, and retires, without expedient or resource, before
this giant fascination. Religion seems too high and unearthly to be able to exert
a continued influence upon us ; its effort to arouse the soul and the soul's effort
to co-operate are too violent to last. . . . What we then need is some expe-
dient or instrument which at least will obstruct and stave off the approach of our
spiritual enemy, and which is sufficiently congenial and level with our nature to
maintain as firm a hold upon us as the inducements of sensual gratification. It
will be our wisdom to employ nature against itself. . . . Here, then, I think,
is the important aid which intellectual cultivation furnishes to us in rescuing the
victims of passion and self-will. It does not supply religious .motives ; it is not
the cause or proper antecedent of anything supernatural ; it is not meritorious of
heavenly aid or reward ; but it does a work at least materially good (as theologi-
ans speak), whatever be 'its real and formal character. It expels the excitements
of sense by the introduction of those of the intellect. . . . Nor is this all.
Knowledge, the discipline by which it is gained, and the tastes which it forms,
have a natural tendency to refine the mind and to give it an indisposition,
simply natural, yet real ; nay, more than this, a disgust and abhorrence to-
wards excesses."

If the church neglected education, she would deprive herself
of the surest means of self-development; for her progress, nay,
her existence, if you will, depends on her members -having a
secular education deficient in not an iota to that which others
would possess. Fostering of ignorance by the church would be
suicidal. There need be no apprehension that the church will
pi ly into the enemies' hands by doing herself what they have
been struggling in vain to accomplish time out of mind.

However, to hold that secular schools in which religion is ne-
glected or tabooed are not godless, in the sense Catholics use the
term, because secular knowledge prepares the way for religious,
or because therein truths of nature are taught, and all truth is
God's, is quibbling unworthy serious minds. " The truth of math-
ematics," writes a present-day sophist, " the truth of history, the
truth of science, truth anywhere round the globe, is just a word of
God ; and just in so far as children are taught that truth they
are taught religion. . . . At any rate, by taking away from
the schools all formal teaching concerning religion, suppose they
are godless, they are at least harmless as far as they go." The
assertion anent "the truth of mathematics," etc., proves alto-
gether too much ; namely, the utter impossibility of an atheistical
school of science. Unfortunately for the proposition's defender,
there have been such schools.

And the trend of " advanced " scientific teaching at present,
is it for or against God ? Is the whole truth or a half-truth

1890.] CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL. 535

taught when the fundamental principle of things is left as a mat-
ter of conjecture, of opinion ? If the visible things of the world
reveal the invisible, can the explanation of the one be given
without any reference to the other ? And will such reference be
either theistic or atheistic ? Such reference must be made, or the
existence of God treated as an unnecessary fact. And is not
that just how it is treated ? Then how can schools of this com-
plexion be harmless ? Can there be a harmless neutral stand in
regard to God, or materialism, or positivism ?

Moreover, truth as expressed in things or principles, objective
truth, apart from its concept by the human mind, is certainly
God's truth ; nobody questions the declaration that facts are
facts. It is with the attempted statement and explanation of
phenomena and principles, though with truth as a subjective ele-
ment ; truth modified or corrupted by opinion, and by theory,
and by natural bent of disposition, and by one-sided mental de-
velopment, and by dyspepsia, by all the ingredients that go to
make up human fallibility — with truth in this sense it is the
schools have to do. Consequently, the teaching of truth depends
altogether on the view the teachers take of it. Maybe now the
adjective godless as applied by Catholics to schools distinctively
secular may be understood, and the quibble as to its use esti-
mated at its proper worth.

What would be the strongest ground on which the separation
of secular and religious studies could be pressed would be that
of their inborn incompatibility. Professor Harris, in the Andover
Review, states the proposition as follows :

"The methods of religious instruction are of necessity different from the
methods in secular education. In the secular branches the good method of in-
struction trains the intellect to keep all its powers awake and alert. The thought
must be trained to be critical. The pupil must not take the words of his text-
book on faith merely. He must question and verify, demanding proofs and in-
vestigating their validity. ... In religion, on the other hand, faith is the
chief organ. . . . Religious truth is revealed in allegoric and symbolic form,
having both a literal sense and a spiritual sense. The analytical understanding
is necessarily hostile and sceptical in its attitude towards religious truth. But
such attitude is entirely appropriate to the study of science and history. It is
obvious that the mind must not be changed abruptly from secular studies to re-
ligious contemplation. A lesson on religious dogmas just after a lesson in math-
ematics or physical science has the disadvantage that the mind brings with it the
bent or proclivity of the latter study to the serious detriment of the former."

This view of religion and this method of religious criticism
and investigation may satisfy a Protestant, but the Catholic
church demands thorough rationalness in all religious inquiries.
That reason proves the existence of God is with her a dogma ;

536 CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL. LJan-»-

and she lays it down as incontrovertible that the reasoning fac-
ulty rightly exercised leads to the Catholic faith. John Henry
Newman, on the day of his reception into her fold, wrote to his
friend, T. W. Allies : " May I have only one-tenth as much
faith as I have intellectual conviction where the truth lies ! "

Catholic theology is a development of reasoning on the high-
est subjects. The acceptation of truths on the properly-tested
authority of others (the fundamental principle of revealed re-
ligion) is a problem of pure reason. If reason has already de-
monstrated the existence of God, the fact that he is the authority
on which truths are taken as such does not lift the problem out
of reason's sphere, when the fact of the revelation can be proved
by the same criterion as other facts accepted on authority — that
is, by the testimony of witnesses qualified to give testimony as
to the actual happening itself, no matter what be their qualifica-
tions for a right conception or explanation of the happening's-
meaning.

The man of strong eye-sight is best fitted for fine work at the
telescope. Burnham, who by naked eye distinguished double
stars which to others seemed a single point of light, with a small
telescope discovered hundreds of them that blinked in vain for
recognition by lenses twice the size of his. The illustration fits
the Catholic Church's position as to the relationship of Reason
and Revelation. Reason is the mental eyesight ; the clearer,
stronger, more critical it is the better use can it make of Revela-
tion, the God-given telescope, by which it looks beyond the
stars far into infinity.

While religion is held unable to bear the sharpest scrutiny
from legitimate metaphysical inquiry it is belittled, turned into
the lawful butt of infidel sarcasm. Hence the self-same methods
are fitted for the introduction and guidance of youth in the
spiritual as in the natural world of thought and fact. In one, as
in the other, the method of imparting knowledge is progressive,
proportioned to the age and abilities of the learner. Take the
child in the primaries : it learns as it eats, on the authority of
an older person declaring what is and what isn't good for it.
How absurd to hold that a beginner must assimilate the Rule of
Three through an acquaintance with the abstractions of calculus !
Why, then, is religion to be taught backwards ? A child sees a
picture of Bucephalus and Alexander ; another of Christ blessing
children. For the teacher to state one fact in a method differing
from a statement of the other would be an outrage on common
sense. There is just as much need in the one case of a critical

1890.] CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL. 537

-explanation as to why Alexander and his horse are of more in-
terest than John Smith and his donkey as there is in the other
case of a philosophical inquiry into the mode of union between
the two natures in Christ The facts come first ; the realization
of their full meaning grows in direct ratio with the development
of mental capacity and the acquirement of knowledge. Religion
alone, therefore, must not be made for the child a darkened
chamber in which mystery and indistinctness overwhelm with
awe, and which is sure to be treated as a hobgoblin room of the
imagination when reason develops and memory recalls its terrors.
On the contrary, the principle that religion is "the light that
enlightens every man that cometh into the world " should be
.acted on. It should be made not the Mystifier, but the Illumi-
natrix of Reason, which bends the more reverently in worship of
God and abasement of itself the more clearly it perceives his
unspeakable perfections.

As a corollary to what has been written, it follows that the
lesson in the catechism is not what differentiates the Catholic
from the secular school. A half-hour daily in Catholic schools
of the grammar grade, an hour or two weekly in higher schools,
is given to this study. Though this brief time were turned to
other use, the Catholic would yet differ in toto from the public
school. Catechism, as a recitation, is as the other studies, sim-
ply an intellectual exercise. The Catholic school, however, has
to do with more than the child's intelligence. The public school
cannot pretend to train the conscience or will : its province is
the intellect and memory, and even here it has to stop short
within fixed limits. Beyond this province it may not go without
positivizing as to religious truths, and positivize it cannot : it
must suit equally infidel, pagan, Jew, Buddhist, Unitarian, Trini-
tarian, and the rest.

In the Catholic school, on the other hand, all the achieve-
ments of the intellect and memory are grouped about a common
•centre, inasmuch as all have their relations to the interests of
Revealed Truth ; besides this, a set of principles for the guidance
of' will-action, as authoritative in their department as the rules of
the syllogism in theirs, is acted upon, not merely understood, by
teachers and pupils. Hence the different results of the systems.

It remains to ask, Would this " sectarian " teaching bring
about a condition of things similar to that of the middle ages,
so that the majority might proclaim the profession of other
beliefs than its own an overt act of treason ? Comparing the
nineteenth century with those days, the question bears its ab-

538 CHURCH, STATE, AND SCHOOL. [Jan.,

surdity on its face. Anyway, for Catholics Dr. Brownson an-
swered it years ago :

" This union of church and state [see the first part of this article] supposes
nothing like a competency on the part of the state [he is speaking of the Amer-
ican state] to authoritatively declare which church represents the spiritual
order. The responsibility of that decision it does and must leave to its citizens,
who must decide for themselves and answer to God for the rectitude of their de-
cision. Their decision is law for the state, and it must respect and obey it in the
case alike of majorities and minorities ; for it recognizes the equal rights of all its
citizens and cannot discriminate between them. The church that represents for
the state the spiritual order is the church adopted by its citizens ; and as they
adopt different churches, it can realize and enforce, through the civil courts, the
canons and decrees of each only on its own members, and on them only so far as
they do not infringe on the equal rights of others."

But if not from a political stand-point, from that of private
life would not separate schools beget separation and distrust of
fellow-citizens ? Since within one's own church are the elect, the
loved' of God, how can I, his friend, but hate those without, who
are his enemies ?

In answer to this we have to say that the contact the chil-
dren in the common schools have with one another is so slight
and superficial and short-lived as to be unworthy the exag-
gerated emphasis now put upon it. Up to the present this con-
tact has rather strengthened than lessened social and religious
distinctions, and it has done so in not the pleasantest of ways
for both parties concerned. It is to the ties of neighborhood,
labor, recreation, business, social equality, literary associations,
politics, patriotism, that the spirit of kinship in us all owes its
constant sustenance and consequent growth.

Furthermore, why is it to be taken for granted that in pa-
rochial schools children are not to be taught patriotically ? What
an insulting insinuation to Catholic Americans the objection
cloaks !

For the Catholic school explicitly or implicitly to inculcate
distrust or hatred of neighbors because of religious differences
would be for it to contradict every applicable principle of Cath-
olic theology. The Catholic Church was founded for the pur-
pose of benefiting those whom the objector would wish us to
style "the enemies of God." No man is God's enemy; it is the
sin within a man that comes between himself and his Maker.
Its destruction is the objective point of Christian endeavor. The
church has ever distinguished between the sinner and the sin.
Hence her asylums, hospitals, missions, good works of all sorts
for the avail of sinners, heretics, and pagans.

1890.] THE CHURCH AND THE TOILERS. 539

The phases of the discussion touched upon in this article,
with others of still more practical import, await the future devel-
opment which from the force of circumstances they must receive.
Much as has been written on the school question, the . case is
as yet but well opened. As the controversy advances Catholics
will appreciate more and more the logicalness of the position
their church has assumed. It is simply a matter of time and
active controversy until the best Protestant opinion swings into
line with the church, for right must win, at least in America.

The school movement just now is in .a state of being analo-
gous to that of the Home Rule movement in England a few
years since. Wait for half a decade, until the mists of prejudice
and sophism have been scattered, and through a clear atmos-
phere American Christians with their own eyes see the masked
spectre of infidelity, which, all unknown, has been making them
dance to his music — wait, and see how thoroughly the demon
will be " laid " !

JOSEPH V. TRACY.

Hyde Park, Mass.

THE CHURCH AND THE TOILERS.

AN English paper is our authority for the following about
Cardinal Manning :

" To those who have not ceased to believe in Christianity it will be not the
least of his claims on the gratitude of the world that he has shown a sceptical
generation that orthodoxy is no enemy of Radical progress. A young friend
•was speaking to him recently of the new London movements, and chanced
to say they might roughly be described as 'practical Socialism.' 'I prefer to
call it Christianity.' said the Cardinal."

Some Protestant historians, notably Lecky, have pronounced
the Catholic Church the protector and defender of the poor of the
past. We omit quotations from them. We omit proofs that the
first labor organizations known in history were founded by " the
lazy monks." We also omit the past events of history, which
show that when the church spiritualized the business relations of
the poor to the rich there was more peace and less poverty,
and confine ourselves to narrating a few of her recent actions
which prove her to be the protector and defender of the poor of
the present day :

First, in Belgium :

Witness the effects of the triumph of the Belgian Catholic

-540 THE CHURCH AND THE TOILERS. [Jan.,

Party, to whom the Belgian workmen owe: (i) A government
inquiry into the condition of the workingmen ; (2) the organiza-
tion of the Liege congresses on social questions, which has led
to a special movement for the reform of the factory laws ; (3) as
.a result of its report, an elaborate labor law, with special refer-
ence to the protection of women and children in the factories.

Second, in Germany :

When its financial interests and public peace were endangered
last spring by the great strike at Bochum, who formulated the
grievances and demands of the poor miners ? The answer is, the
Catholic priests of the place. Indeed, we know of no other men
who have been such heroes of the democracy there, or who
have better fulfilled the high ideal as set forth by the Eternal
Priest. They mingled fraternally with the miners of Westphalia,
and, as a consequence, all was tranquillity, intelligence, self-
sacrifice ; for they recognized in their priests pastors who thor-
oughly sympathized with them in their misery and discontent.
Moreover, the German Congress of a few weeks ago made labor
and capital the most important and prominent subject of its pro-
gramme. Dr. Windthorst, one of the many Catholic leaders who
have promoted the labor cause in Germany, said : " We have
come to Bochum to prove that Catholicism has the courage to
plant its flag in the mining region. The interests of employers
and employed are not opposed ; they complete one another ; the
workman can do nothing if work be not given to him, and the
capitalist can do nothing if the workman be not given to him.
To the one we would teach Christian humility and obedience ;
to the other Christian justice and benevolence."

Third, in France :

Ten thousand ' of the Catholic working classes answered the
Pope's request to visit Rome. Four trains each week, with
five to six hundred passengers, ran from the I4th of October
until the i8th of November. Every part of France sent its
representative workingmen, and many wealthy Catholics con-
tributed in aiding the poorer of these laborers to visit the
Eternal City. What a splendid sight for the Italian Freemason !
— the French laborer, farmer, and mechanic embracing and re-
ceiving the especial blessing of the Vicar of Christ. But more
than this, it was a new phase in the present religious life of
France. It told us that there are still multitudes of loyal Catho-
lics among the French working classes. For this we thank God,
since we have had reason to fear that it is through their grief-
. stricken hearts that the canker-worm of atheism is eating. The

1890.] THE CHURCH AND THE TOILERS. 541

French anti-religious laborer is fierce and irrational in his hatred
of the church and her priests ; and this pilgrimage of Catholic
workingmen was no doubt especially beneficial and encouraging
to that class of Frenchmen.

Fourth, in Russia :

We find the more thoughtful among her people saying that
the poor are sinking into atheism and vice, and that their
amelioration can only be effected by a reunion with the Church
of Rome.

Fifth t in Ireland :

Witness Archbishop Walsh during the strike of the brick-
layers in Dublin ; and the efforts of the whole Irish clergy,
whether in prison or in church, fighting unto death to emanci-
pate their suffering countrymen.

Sixth, in England :

Consider the London strike, one of the most serious conflicts
of modern times between employer and employed — a bloodless
war which endangered the social prosperity of the largest city
in the world. We need not say that the happy ending of the
battle was due to the moral grandeur and persevering energy of
.a leader in the Catholic Church.

" When the Cardinal," says the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, " went to
.and fro between the dockers and the directors, refusing to despair when his Es-
tablished brother of London had shaken off the dust of his feet against the
.strike and disappeared into space, combating with the utmost patience the diffi-
culties interposed by prejudice and passion, interposing a constant element of
cool common-sense in the midst of hot-blooded counsels, he must have felt sus-
tained and inspired by the best traditions of his church. The occasion, no
doubt, was less imposing than on that great historic day when St. Leo stood up
as mediator and deliverer between Attila and the Eternal City, but the spirit of
devotion and the sanctified sagacity of the cardinal were no less admirable than
those of the great pontiff."

In Africa consider Cardinal Lavigerie's action towards the
African slaves. In our own country look at Cardinal Gibbons in
his relation to the Knights of Labor.

Thus in this century the church manifests herself as the
Mother of the Poor. Modern heterodoxy, liberalism, infidelity
have done nothing and cannot do anything for poverty. The
leaders of the London strike name Dr. Parker, the leading Non-
conformist minister of the city, as one fearing to soil his hands
with the poor. The liberal Mr. Spurgeon they call " an old
autocrat " ; and as for the Non-conformists, who are supposed to
be democrats if God ever made a democrat, these, they tell us,
VOL. L. — 35

542 THE CHURCH AND THE TOILERS. [Jan.,

kept as far aloof as the Queen herself. Robert G. Ingersoll
talks of "tears and kisses, kisses and tears," of flowers, birds,
and butterflies, and other golden slobber, to ragged women and
starving children. Huxley, Spencer, and Harrison are tearing-
down everything and building up nothing. Felix Adler is giv
ing us, as a cure for evil and poverty, "ethical culture"; while
Henry George seems to think that the poor will be no longer
with us if we adopt the single tax.

No ; the Christianity of Christ alone holds the key to the
mystery of woe and want. She tells the rich that they shall be
poor indeed if they have no treasures in heaven. She reminds
the lazy, wealthy " man about town " that the kingdom of
Christ is not made up of his kind. She informs the capitalist
whose luxury is the poor man's robbery' that he shall suffer by
the decree of a just God and an honest tribunal. She points
out the lurid gleam of an everlasting hell to the fiend who has
stolen a maiden's honor or robbed a mother's love. " Verily
there is a reward for the righteous ; doubtless there is a Gocl
who judgeth the earth." She condemns, in the Plenary Council
of Baltimore, the liquor-saloon, warning the laborers from its fatal
door.

Christ knew the bitterness of tears and the privations of
poverty; not only that, but he shed his blood for each and every
one of us regardless of race or class, for the negro as well as
the white, for the tramp as well as the aristocrat. The poverty
of his life has sanctified the poverty of our life. Moreover, joys
untold has he promised the poor. He has placed most of them
in a church where " the afflicted find solace, the oppressed relief
from their burdens," and where " the poor have the Gospel
preached to them" — a church which has ever been the apostle of
popular rights and the champion of rational liberty and equality
from the day that Christ established her. At her communion-
rail the king kneels at the side of the pauper.

HENRY O'KEEFFE.

890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 543

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

IT would not be easy to point out any useful purpose which
has been served by the publication of The Letters of the Duke
of Wellington to- Miss J. They have just been issued by Dodd,
Mead & Co., New York, with an introduction and a running fire
of editorial comment by Christine Terhune Herrick. They are
accompanied by extracts from Miss J.'s own letters to the duke
and passages from her diary. All the documents of which the
present volume is an abridgment " have lain for years," says Mrs.
Herrick, " in the attic of a country house within thirty miles of
New York City. Their publication is permitted through the
kindness of a friend with whose family Miss J. was remotely
connected." So superfluous a disinterment has surely seldom
been undertaken. Considered as a study of human nature under
conditions slightly abnormal, Miss J.'s contributions to this cor-
respondence afford some material to the psychologist, but as his-
tory neither the duke's letters nor her own have any conceiva-
ble value. In fact, the editor's only shadow of excuse for pillory-
ing poor, thick-skinned Miss J. in this fashion must be found, if
anywhere, in Miss J.'s evident anticipation that her record of the
curious relation subsisting between herself and Wellington would
some day or other be laid before the public.

In 1834, when this correspondence began, Miss J. was " a
very beautiful woman about twenty years of age," belonging to
the " smaller English gentry," well educated according to the
standard of the times, and almost fanatically devout on narrowly
Evangelical lines. She was an earnest student of the Bible and
a firm believer in the doctrine of an overruling Providence which
directs even the most trivial events of life. When in doubt on
any subject, it was her custom to practise sortilege by opening
the Bible at random and shaping her course according to the
direction she fancied she found in the first passage on which her
eyes fell.

About six months before writing her first letter to the Duke
of Wellington Miss J. and another young girl had been instru-
mental in bringing to repentance and to public confession a mur-
derer with whom both Catholic priests and Protestant parsons
had labored in vain. The fact got into the public papers, and
was made the theme of a small religious book. One effect ot

544 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

this notoriety on Miss J. was to inspire her with the notion that
she had been specially elected as an instrument, in the hands of
God for the advancement of what she understood to be " the
cause of Christ." Looking around for a suitable object for her
zeal, her attention was drawn to the Duke of Wellington. He
was extremely prominent in public affairs at the time, and that
fact appears to be all that she knew about him ; she expressly states
that " when she first wrote to him she was not aware that he was
the conqueror of Bonaparte, and did not even know when the
battle of Waterloo took place." Her motive, and the theme of
her letters, are given in the following passage from her diary.
The " poor Cook " alluded to was the criminal with whom she
had previously " labored." Her capitalization is at all times pe-
culiar :

" Seeing that I have adverted in the former part of this book to the feelings
experienced on our return from poor Cook, which induced me to look up to the
Lord, inquiring what next HE would have me to do, receiving this precious reply :
' Greater things than these, that they may marvel ' ; and considering such words
must have had a reference to his condescending dealings a few months after-
wards in influencing me to write to the Duke upon the necessity of a new birth
to righteousness, I am solicitous to devote a portion of this book to his letters,
remarking thereon as the list thereof proceeds."

In 1834 the duke was a hale, hearty man of sixty-five, who
had been a widower for three years. It was his well-known
habit to read and answer all his own letters as soon as possible
alter they were received. Miss J.'s epistle, sent from Devon-
shire on January 15, 1834, was courteously responded to on the
1 8th of the same month. Encouraged by this, Miss J. ventured
to present him with a Bible when she returned to London the
following April. Her account of this eminently supererogatory
work is characteristic :

•' After earnest prayer the Bible was taken by me, with a fluttering, agitated
feeling, to the Duke's gates and delivered into the porter's hands, after asking
him if the Duke were at home. He replied, ' Yes, ma'am.' I then asked, ' Is
he engaged ?' He told me Lord — I forget his name — and Sir Thomas Somebody
were with him. I then inquired, 'Who delivers parcels into His Grace's hands?'
He respectfully said, ' I do, ma'am.' I rejoined, ' Then you will deliver that'
— returning home, marvelling wherefore such things were permitted and what the
end thereof would be. Of course, a suitable note accompanied The Bible."

The duke made no reply until late in August, and even
then his letter was delayed by his having addressed it to Mrs.
instead of Miss J. She writes that she presumes he was in doubt

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 545

as to whether she were married or single. In this note he
seems to have asked whether he might not have the pleasure of
meeting her, and in her reply Miss J. not only told him her age
and condition, but expressed her own desire to know him,
" Considering it may be The Lord's will to permit personal in-
terviews, proposing under such circumstances to use my in-
fluence with him ; accordingly craving the Divine blessing there-
on." The duke's reply is dated from Walmer Castle, October
24, 1834:

" The Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Miss J. The Duke
has received her Letter, in which she expresses a desire to see the Duke, and that
he should call upon her.

" The Duke has certainly received one, if not more, letters from Miss J., all
written upon the same important subject and with the same beneficent object in
view, although the desire to see the Duke was not expressed in them ; and the
Duke lately acknowledged the receipt of one, and of the book, etc., accompany-
ing it.

" Although the Duke is not in the habit of visiting young unmarried ladies,
he will not decline to attend Miss J.," etc.

He presented himself accordingly at the London lodgings,
which she shared with her friend Mrs. L., on the I2th of the
following month. As no account of the curious interview which
followed could be so graphic as her own, and as it seems to
throw the only glimmer of light on the patience with which
the duke continued to support his part in the correspondence,
wfiich lasted with few breaks for the next seventeen years, and
terminated on his part only a few months before his death, it
is worth quoting :

" I will proceed to describe this visit, which took place through a declaration
on his part in a former letter that the desire to see me sprang from the con-
sideration evinced by me concerning his everlasting welfare. This induced me to
receive him accordingly, praying to God to be with me every moment of the
time, directing even my dress. This He did, letting me be dressed on the occa-
sion as HE pleased, which, as my Diary relates, was in my old turned dark green
merino gown, daily worn — not permitting me to be decorated in any way likely
to attract notice, which, as the employment in view was of so sacred a nature,
was neither required nor obtained.

" Having committed myself on my knees into his gracious hand, ' whose I
am and whom I serve,' to do with me whatever seemed agreeable to his
unerring will, I descended the stairs after the Duke was announced, with these
words from dear Mrs. L. following me : ' Now if the Lord should send his arrow
into his soul ! ' (She had fancied from the commencement that God intended to
exalt me for the purpose of showing forth his praise, so that this impression
must necessarily have been powerfully strengthened by what followed.)

" I entered the Parlour, where, standing before the fire, I beheld anythingbut

546 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

the kind of individual personally imagined. I had not had the slightest idea
that the Duke has such a beautiful, silver head, such as I always from my
childhood admired, inducing me as I approached to offer my hand with addi-
tional pleasure, saying, 'This is very kind of Your Grace.' He received my
hand graciously and respectfully, but spoke not a word. I then requested him
to be seated, two chairs having been placed for that purpose each side of the
fire, — and occupied one of them myself; when, recollecting the purport of his
visit, I immediately rose, saying, ' I will show you my Treasure ! ' He also
rose, standing until I re-seated myself with this large, beautiful Bible in my arms.
I placed it upon the table between us, opening it at the Third Chapter of St.
John's Gospel, announcing the same. On arriving at the seventh verse thereof,
containing this MOMENTOUS passage, flowing from the divine lips of Him who
spoke as never man spake, ' Ye MUST be born again,'1 I, as is usual with me,
raised my hand, pointing my finger emphatically, with the solemnity so im-
portant an occasion demanded, being desirous to impress the same on his mind,
when, to my astonishment, he eagerly seized my hand, exclaiming, as before de-
scribed: ' Oh, how I love you ! ' This was his first utterance ! . . . Should
any one consider strange the expression of agonizing applied to the Duke's feel-
ings at the time he seized my hand and exclaimed as written, I can only say that
such an expression seems hardly doing justice thereto in my Estimation. Nor
can I find any language adequate to display the same, for God appeared to have
struck the Duke dumb on beholding me, giving him no. power of speech, until he
betrayed the effect such had on him. He seemed determined from first to last
to overcome or conceal these feelings ; yet on one occasion, with great solemnity
of voice and manner, on my questioning him concerning who caused him to feel
thus towards me, he replied, ' GOD ALMIGHTY.'"

Considering Miss J.'s youth and innocence, as well as the un-
doubted good faith with which she had accepted herself as a
special envoy from above, it is hardly to be wondered at that
she interpreted these avowals as an offer of marriage, especially
as they were not only repeated on the occasion of the duke's
next visit, but followed by the question whether "she felt suffi-
cient for him to be with him a whole life, to which I replied:
' If it be the will of God' ' Miss J.'s mental attitude, however,
is not an easy one to label. It was made up of contradictories.
While her words and actions flowed inevitably from her convic-
tions, and so deserve to be esteemed true, yet as she affords an
excellent specimen of the most glaring self-deception she can-
not be called sincere. Both she and Mrs. L., who being older
might have known better, but who seems to have neglected her
opportunities in that line, had evidently entertained glowing ex-
pectations for Miss J.'s future from the time when the duke an-
swered her first letter. Though they did not know that he was
the conqueror of Napoleon, they probably remembered the an-
nouncements made in the daily journals when the Duchess of
Wellington departed this life. Miss J. certainly never deserved
the epithet worldly in its ordinary acceptation, but it is fair to

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 547

credit her with a certain unworldly worldliness even less pleasant
to contemplate than its more frankly mundane counterpart. When
she came away from the duke's gates after leaving her Bible
for him, " marvelling wherefore such things were permitted, and
what the end thereof would be," her pretty little head was per-
haps already adjusting itself to an imaginary coronet. Long
afterward she writes : " I was impressed throughout my cor-
respondence with and knowledge of the Duke with a feeling that
the end God had in view was my exaltation for His Glory, or in
other words to show forth His power." Her wrath and indig-
nation when she discovered her mistake are so natural in them-
selves that one chiefly regrets the gloss of supernaturalism with
which she succeeded in veiling their true character from herself.
"I should not be surprised (although rest assured I do not de-
sire it)," she wrote the duke as soon as she had comprehended
his meaning, " at any vengeance God saw fit to shower down
for such a dreadful intention upon Your Grace's head." In
another letter to him belonging to the same period she speaks
of herself as " a Being who feels herself entitled even in the
sight of God, not only to the appellation of virtuous, in the
strictest acceptation of the word, but RIGHTEOUS. This appellation
as far exceeds the former in value as the heavens do the earth,
as the one is to be found, I trust, frequently in the unregenerate,
whilst the latter springs SOLELY from above."

To these letters the duke replied, first, that he " entirely
concurred " in her intention to see him no more ; and again,
on receiving a still more scathing rebuke for his presumption, by
a quietly worded but sincere apology, with which the whole
affair might have fitly ended. That it did not do so was owing
to the young woman's obtuseness, aided by a woful lack of hu-
mility, which seems never once to have permitted her to regard
any word or act of her own as having any source but the ex-
press will of God. That she was one day or other to become
the Duchess of Wellington, and in that capacity to be a shin-
ing example of His power to " honor those who honor Him,"
became a fixed idea in her mind, which was never shaken until
the duke's death. In one of the letters just quoted she tells
him that even had his offer been what she supposed, she would
have hesitated to accept it " until I perceived in you that change
of heart so necessary to salvation, without which ' no man can
see the Lord,' fearing I ought not to consent even under the
most flattering circumstances to partake in any outward honors
likely to bring the disapprobation of God." Doubtless she be-

548 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

lieved herself to be speaking the exact truth, but one suspects
that had the land lain in that direction she and Mrs. L. together
would have piloted her bark safely round such an obstruction into
the desired harbor. As things actually stood, Miss J. relieved
her mind by two or three tart letters, and then, instead of re-
lapsing into the natural silence of a justly offended woman, took
what she esteemed higher ground. The insult had been offered
not to her but to her Master. It was a source of trial and
confusion of face to her, but it by no means relieved her from her
divinely imposed task to labor with the duke for his eternal
welfare, " concerning which," as she confides to the diary which
she expected one day to see the light, " I was firm and faith-
ful throughout, believing God would convert him eventually,,
causing him to shine forth gloriously in His adorable service.
As in that case the erroneous impression in my mind would in
all probability have been verified, I looked forward to becoming
as ' a city set on a hill which cannot be hid,' conceiving such
exaltation would admit of showing His praises openly before
men." In this last sentence we have the key to all that follows.
That " all " meant more to the Duke of Wellington than it can
to the most untired reader of this volume of letters. Mrs. Her-
rick has given no more of Miss J.'s pietistic rhapsodies than
serves to bind together the three hundred and ninety replies
made to them by the long-suffering duke. These range in tone
from paternal kindness to curt sarcasm or dignified remonstrance.
They are always brief, almost always monotonous, and, except as
being undoubtedly authentic, they have no value either literary or
historic. Miss J.'s comments on them are now and then amusing,,
but one grows tired of smiling at self-delusion, even when it
takes such a form as this entry, made so late as 1850: "It is
evident that from this period Satan was permitted to work in
the Duke's mind, weakening consequently the power I had been
permitted to exercise, by rendering my communications tedious."
One can fancy Satan squirming under so needless an insinua-
tion against his perspicacity. Miss J.'s efforts to convert the
" nobility and gentry " were not entirely confined to the Great
Duke. Sir Robert Peel received and answered some of her ad-
monitions, and the Queen Dowager Adelaide was only saved by
the duke's foresight from a lecture on her failure to pay her
rates and taxes and her further lapse from duty in permitting
the Duke of Wellington to leave " Your Majesty at Hastings for
Dover on The Lord's Day." " She could not help lamenting the
Queen's omission to hint that Sunday was not a day for travel-

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 549

ling," wrote Miss J. to that lady, " feeling so desirous to see
Your Majesty a shining vessel in The Lord's Hands to show forth
His praise by knowing His Commands ; also that the Duke should
be restrained from doing that which on a dying bed would pain.
him to remember."

After the duke's death in 1852 had finally crushed her hopes
of worldly exaltation, Miss J. came to this country to spend the
rest of her days with a married sister. But she had become so
cranky that living with her proved too difficult, and they soon
separated. Miss J. died in New York in 1862, having appar-
ently lived to little other purpose than to afford a melancholy
spectacle of ill-judged devotion and misdirected zeal.

Life's Long Battle Won (New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.) we
take to be the work of a woman, notwithstanding the masculine
name which appears on its title-page and cover. " Edward
Garrett's " previous stories — Occupations of a Retired Life,
Doing and Dreaming, etc. — have, not fallen in our way, but
the present one would naturally incline most intelligent and sym-
pathetic readers to go a little out of their way to look them up.
It is in every sense good reading. With quite sufficient plot, in-
cident, and story to keep up interest, its strength lies, as we think
it should, chiefly in its characters. Not the least attractive of
these is that one which, standing behind the scenes, and busy
only in bringing the personages of the little drama before the
audience, has been unable to prevent its own shadow from loom-
ing up behind them all. Life-like and interesting as they are, the
gossipping Gibson wromen, gentle Lesley Baird, common-sense,
shrewd, practical, and yet unworldly Clementina Kerr, the two
old Scotchwomen, Alison Brown and Jean Haldane, patient
and loving-hearted Mrs. Crawford, and the womanly, aspiring
Mary Olrig, yet the personality of " Edward Garrett " is, on the
whole, the predominant attraction of the book. A woman, one
would say, who has known how to love and how to suffer, and
who has won to wisdom through both experiences. Shrewd,,
too, and observant, with as quick an eye for a foible or a fault
as for a natural virtue or a supernatural grace. Add to this a
sincere Christian faith, which, incomplete though it be, yet rises-
from the true root ; a pleasant, unaffected, entertaining style and
a competent mastery of her material, and you will have the sum
of Edward Garrett's stock-in-trade as a novelist.

A most charming book of essays is A Rambler s Lease, by
Mr. Bradford Torrey (Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin
& Co.) It will not pay to skip a word between its covers. Mr.,

550 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

Torrey has achieved successfully that end which, as he says in
his paper on "New England Winter," all scribblers would be
glad to reach : " To treat a meagre and commonplace theme in
such a manner that whoever begins to read has no alternative
but to finish." His work seems to us preferable to that of Mr.
John Burroughs, with whom he has so much in common as to
choice of topics and love of out-door life. Mr. Torrey's style,
however, is agreeably free from Emersonianisms and those other
minor affectations which disturb one's enjoyment in the case of
Mr. Burroughs. A good deal of his charm arises, we suspect,
from what he describes in the paper on " Butterfly Psychology "
as that " strong anthropomorphic turn of mind which impels me
to assume the presence of a soul in all animals, even in these
airy nothings, and, having assumed its existence, to speculate as
to what goes on within it" To him all nature is alive. Bee,
bird, flower, tree, and river enter into cordial relations with
him, and these essays are but the simple and delightful record
of their friendship. Doubtless there is no other road so short as
this for him who wishes to surprise the secrets of " our poor re-
lations." Like their betters, they yield willingly and in its in-
tegrity to the sympathetic touch what the dissecting-knife or the
keen scrutiny of mere curiosity banish at the very moment of
contact. It is long since a volume treating of external nature in
its lower forms only has given us so unmixed a pleasure as
the Rambler s Lease has done. Reading it, we were reminded
from time to time of a page in The New Antigone, wherein
Ivor Mardol explains that the final cause of fly-fishing is " not
to catch trout for supper, but to get back the lost sense of
Paradise and be one again with the spirit of the watery realms
from which, some forgotten morning millions of years ago, the
first amphibian crept daringly on land. He said now and then
to his scientific friends that while he agreed with them in going
forward, he thought it would be fatal to man's happiness if he
did not go backward too. . . . 'Man will rule over nature,'
said Ivor, ' only when he is at home in every part of it and
knows it from within!'" It is that sense of being "within" by
sympathy and affection which Mr. Torrey gives his readers, and
gives, to our sense, more fully than most of those who write on
kindred themes.

Roberts Brothers' " Famous Women Series " has been en-
larged, but not, as we think, enriched, by Mrs. Bradley Oilman's
monograph on Saint Theresa of Avila. It is a pity that the
subject should not have been treated by more competent hands.

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 551

Judging from the result alone, it is difficult to believe that it
could well have been entrusted to any less competent. St.
Teresa is assuredly a very famous woman, and will continue to
be so. What made her famous was not so much the fact that
she reformed the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel as the
manner of her prayer and the intimate union of her soul with
God. Not the number of convents which she founded, but the
books she wrote have made her name a familiar word among
those who are of the household of faith. Those books, however,
and the experiences to which they testify, are written in what
Mrs. Oilman has evidently found an inscrutable cipher. Speak-
ing of the account of her prayer which Teresa gave to St.
Peter of Alcantara, Mrs. Oilman says :

" This work, although one of the curiosities of religious literature to the
student, is not of enough general interest to give much time to here. It was
undoubtedly sincere in purpose, and occasionally its language rises into pure
and beautiful rhetoric ; but in all probability it was written under intense and
morbid spiritual excitement, so that to attempt to fathom or explain its
mysteries to-day would not be feasible."

Again, in the chapter called " Theresa's Perfect Conversion,"
she attempts to analyze the saint's natural endowments in such
a manner as to eliminate the supernatural entirely. To this end
she tells her readers that Teresa —

" had one of those restless, passionate natures whose ' reach ' exceeds their
* grasp,' and often reminds us of George Eliot, who in Romola urges above all
else faithfulness to the marriage-tie, but whose own wedded life was far from
being above criticism. With ideals immeasurably superior and possibilities in-
finitely greater than those with whom she lived, Theresa failed for twenty years
to reach even the conventional " (sic) " standard of duty. Her sensitive, high-
strung nature was capable of ascending loftier heights and of sinking into lower
abysses than were more commonplace souls. She was, we find, easily moved by
all the influences of the senses ; . . . the outward image was almost indis-
pensable to her special kind of piety. Her mysticism was of a coarser kind
than that of Madame Guyon. . . . Every deep spiritual experience was with
her the direct outcome of some outward sensuous impression. . . . What
she calls her ' perfect conversion ' arose from a strong sensuous impression."

Then follows, in the saint's own words, the well-known pas-
sage in which she records the effect produced upon her by the
sight of a picture of the Crucifixion. " Her nature was one, as
we know," goes on Mrs. Oilman, " which was always prone to
extremes. . . . Her enthusiastic spirit and vivid fancy could not
be cast into ordinary moulds ; they refused to grow symmetri-

SS~ TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,.

cally, and she took a sudden and extraordinary leap from world -
liness into asceticism." Presently Mrs. Oilman, who has already
told her readers that St. Teresa was upwards of forty before
this conversion took place, sp.eaks of her as an " imaginative
girl," who, in spite of the warnings of her confessors and spirit-
ual guides, " continued to see and hear all sorts of extraordinary
things." In this spirit, also, she quotes in full from the saint's
autobiography the account of the transfixion of her heart, upon
which she makes this comment :

•' What are we to say of this legend ? A nineteenth-century historian — who
is a Jesuit and a brother of Lord Chief-Justice Coleridge, of England — not only
vouches for its truth, but tells us that ' the wound was not imaginary, but real,
and material ; and that the heart of the saint may still be seen in Avila, with an
opening on each side, the rims of which are half burnt.' ' Credo quia non pos-
sunf might well be the motto of the Roman Church. ... In the light of
modern psychological investigations, what are we to think of these statements ?
We must recollect all the conditions which surrounded our saint ; . .' . and
then we must take into consideration Theresa's own imaginative mind and dis-
eased bodily condition ; she was never a robust woman, and her nervous organ-
ization was supersensitive. With these facts to direct our investigations, we may
find that Theresa's famous visions appear less mysterious."

Mrs. Oilman's conclusion seems to be that what is known as
Christian Mysticism is one thing in fact and essence with the
" Faith Cure " and the " Christian Science " of the present day.
St. Teresa, to her mind, " lays herself open to the accusation of
being called hysterical, if not insane. But among the famous women
of the world she surely has a right to stand. . . . Of all the
saints of the Roman calendar, St. Theresa has the most admirers
among modern writers. . . . The romantic story of her life has
drawn from George Eliot the exquisite prelude to Middlemarch. "

We must be pardoned for believing that to writers of Mrs,
Oilman's sort, and to the average readers of the " Famous
Women Series," it is the latter fact which has done most to give
the saint a place in the list. Her name looks odd enough in
conjunction with those of Georges Sand, George Eliot, Madame
de Stae'l, and the actress Rachel. But for Middlemarch we sus-
pect that the saint's latest biographer would still be in the condition
of that " intelligent friend " from whom she quotes the opening
sentence of her preface : " ' Was St. Theresa a real character ?
I always associated her with St. Margaret and the Dragon.' '
After studying her with such helps as are afforded by a dozen
biographies, including that written by herself, she has produced
a sketch which professes to follow the saint through a life be-

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 553

.ginning with a passionate, frivolous, flirty girlhood, into whose
real particulars Mrs. Oilman avows that she has been unable to
penetrate :

"What were the particular sins which Theresa reproaches herself for hav-
ing committed about this time, a careful study of her own writings fails to reveal.
Was her conscience like the conscience of many a religious devotee — supersensi-
tive ? Or did she at this period of her life commit some real sin for which she
needed to reproach herself ? . . . It is certain that . . . she had yielded
to many temptations, though what the nature of these temptations was we shall
probably never know."

Poor Mrs. Oilman, whose imagination has been forced to be the
rsole handmaiden of her curiosity ! She has been trying to read
the life of a saint and to explain her persistent hold upon
remembrance, and yet eliminate from it the note of sanctity !
"" It is not as a saint in the superstitious meaning of that word
that Theresa is worthy of being remembered," she tells us.

" In studying this sixteenth century woman we find love to have been the
great source of her power over her contemporaries ; she had a perfect genius for
loving all who came in contact with her ; and there were few who could resist the
natural outpouring of her impulsive, affectionate nature. In her own passionate
yearning to be loved we see Theresa touch hands with George Eliot, Margaret
Fuller, and all the great-hearted women of the world."

And so on ad libitum, and, we must add, ad nauseam like-
wise. And yet what a study might have been made of St.
Teresa !

Mr. John Habberton publishes in Lippincott for December a
novelette entitled All He Knew, to which the conductors of the
magazine call special attention as likely to prove an antidote
to Robert Elsmere. Perhaps it may have some salutary in-
fluence in that way. It is not only interesting and brightly
written, but it hits the right nail on the head. The question
of documents is of serious importance, but it is not the only, nor, in
all points of view, the essential, one in Christianity. The Chris-
tian documents do not claim to be more than a partial record
of the words and miracles of Jesus Christ. They are not now,
and they never were, the court of last appeal when the ques-
tions of his divine power, the truth of his doctrines, and his
continual presence in the world come up. That court is to-day
just where it was in the beginning. It consists in the two-fold
action of Jesus Christ. That action, embodied visibly in the au-
thority of the church he established, and invisibly in the soul
united to him, forms one inseparable synthesis. The Holy Spirit

554 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

in the external authority of Christ's church acts as the infallible in-
terpreter and criterion of divine revelation. The Holy Spirit, " the
mind that was in Christ," acts as the divine Life-giver and Sanctifier
of individual souls. The supposition that there can be any oppo-
sition or contradiction between the action of Jesus Christ in the
supreme decisions of the authority of the church and his inspir-
ations in the individual soul can never enter the mind of an en-
lightened and sincere Christian. The measure of our love for
Jesus Christ is the measure of our obedience to his authority in
the church, and the measure of our obedience to him in his
church is the measure of our love for him in the interior of the
soul. It is Christ, then, who is the court, in his duplex and in-
separable relation to mankind in the outer life of the church and
the inner life of the soul. " Do you seek a proof of Christ who
speaketh in me?" writes St. Paul to the Corinthians. Then,
having thus affirmed the external authority of his apostolic mis-
sion, he proceeds to its complement in their own souls ; " who
[Christ] towards you is not weak, but is mighty in you? . . .
Try your oivnselves if you be in the faith ; prove ye yourselves.
Know you not your ownselves, that Christ Jesus is in you unless
ye be reprobates." The visible church developed naturally out of
this two-fold life of the divine germ. The seed is the Word of
God, and it needs both a chosen sower and a good soil.

To return to Mr. Habberton : Abstracting from the divinely
instituted external order of Christ in the world, Mr. Habberton has
presented the interior life of the unintelligent believer blamelessly
lacking sacramental aids. He proves conclusively the great weight
of evidence there is in favor of the religious verities in the soul
of any one who honestly undertakes to live out the maxims of
the Gospel. Such work as his is of invaluable service to reli-
gion. Nor do we wish to say aught against its circulation and
use merely on the ground that it is a statement of but one side
of integral Christianity. So far as it goes it is both charming
and convincing.

1890.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 555:

WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.

THE DIVORCE QUESTION.

BISHOP HENRY C. POTTER, who may be taken as a fair representative of
the conservative and anti-divorce element in Protestantism, in his article in the
North American Review for November, explains the attitude of his church on
divorce as determined (i) by the law of the Episcopal Church ; (2) by the " pub-
lic opinion of the clergy and laity " of that church. We cannot help complain-
ing that his treatment of the matter is obscure and hazy ; but as far as we can
discover from him, the only positive law of the Episcopal Church on the subject
is the one prohibiting the remarriage of all divorced persons except the
innocent party in the case of a divorce for adultery. No private judgment as to
the meaning of the Word of God is allowed against this law, he affirms ; yet he de-
clares almost in the same breath that the law of the church is "by no means
identical with the opinion of either the clergy or laity," and as an instance of
this diversity between a law against which no private interpretation of Scripture
can hold and the public opinion of some of the clergy and laity, he instances
the protest of a member of a committee of the General Convention as follows :
" The undersigned finds himself unable to concur in so much of the [proposed]
canon as forbids holy communion to a truly pious and godly woman who has
been compelled by long years of suffering from a drunken and brutal husband
to obtain a divorce, and has regularly married some suitable person according to
the established laws of the land."

A more pitiable exhibition of the weakness of the Protestant Episcopal
Church and of its utter inability to cope with this monstrous evil of divorce can-
not be found. What a spectacle is this for a religious body to make through its
chief American representative ! What a comparison between this and the fol-
lowing fearless, truthful utterances of Cardinal Gibbons in the same number of
the magazine mentioned ! " To the question, then, Can divorce from the bond
of marriage ever be allowed ? the Catholic can only answer, No. And for this
No his first and last and best reason can be but this : ' Thus saith the Lord.' "

Now, if it be impossible for the greatest and most orthodox (taken as
a whole) of the Protestant churches to have a consensus of doctrine and prac-
tice in regard to marriage, how can it be expected that the state will have right
laws ? How futile, then, is it for Protestants to object to divorce laws. What
opposition does the Episcopal Church practically make to them ? Bishop Potter
says that divorce is rare among the members of this church. We should like
to think so, but it is hard to believe that a law such as he describes that of his
own church to be prevails in practice. How can those who think the law is op-
posed to the liberty of the Gospel enforce it ? Would it not be wrong for them
to do so ?

I have no means of judging what proportion of adulterous marriages are per-
formed by the clergy of the different Protestant churches or by magistrates who
are members of these churches, but such marriages are actually often performed
and without difficulty, and mostly by clergymen, and we fear some of the Episco-
pal ministers are not above suspicion in this respect. Now, the churches could if
they would make divorce laws practically a dead letter. If Protestant ministers,
and magistrates who are members of their churches, would refuse to solemnize
marriages of divorced persons, the evil of divorce would soon almost disappear ;

556 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Jan.,

but we know that they do not thus act, and even some of those who speak most
emphatically against divorce laws do not hesitate to perform the ceremony of
marriage for divorced persons. Hence they are in reality extending the evil
which they affect to lament.

But it must not be supposed that Bishop Potter, though a staunch church-
man and a strictly rubrical ecclesiastic, represents the best opinion among Pro-
testants on this question. Mr. Gladstone, England's grandest statesman, and a lay-
man of the Established Church from personal conviction, and withal a man of
.the widest experience in the public life of his country, defends the position of the
Catholic Church in regard to the indissolubility of the marriage bond. He says
in his article in the December number of the North American : " Marriage is
essentially a contract for life and only expires when life expires." " Christian
marriage involves a vow before God." " No authority has been given to the
Christian Church to cancel such avow." The American Episcopal legislation
on this question he repudiates. In answer to the objection that adultery breaks
the marriage-bond and gives the innocent party the right to remarry, he says :
" This is a distinction unknown to Scripture and to history," and, furthermore,
shows its unreasonableness from the incongruity of not granting divorce where
both parties are guilty of adultery, and from the injustice which would result if the
innocent party, though more guilty than the other, were allowed to remarry and
the latter not. What noble words ! Whose influence is most potent for purity,
that of the great layman, a champion of human rights, who upholds before the
erring world the divine law of marriage in all its purity, or that of the bishop
who cannot give the public a definite yes or no to this great question ? I
would call attention to the following words of this representative ecclesiastic :
•" The question may be asked whether the absolute prohibition of divorce would
contribute to the moral purity of society? It is difficult to answer such a ques-
tion. . . . It is quite certain that the prohibition of divorce never prevents
illicit sexual connections."

Now, what says Mr. Gladstone? "The remedy [of divorce] is worse than
the disease which it aims to cure. It marks degeneracy and the sway of pas-
sion. . . . Unquestionably, since the time [of the English Divorce Act of
1857] the standard of conjugal morality has perceptibly declined among the
higher classes of this country and scandals in respect to it have become more
frequent." Mr. Edward J. Phelps is another Protestant, who has written a power-
ful article in the Forum for December last, in which he takes precisely the same
ground on marriage as the Catholic Church. He says the evil of divorce "must
be plucked up by the roots. There is no middle ground. . . . The advo-
cates of the theory of divorce a vinculo for adultery alone base their views on
what is claimed to be the precept of Christ as given in St. Matthew's gospel.
* Whosoever shall put away his wife, save for fornication, and shall
marry another shall be guilty of adultery.' But in the gospels of St. Mark and
St. Luke the words here italicized are omitted, and the language as there given
is a distinct condemnation of the putting away a wife for any cause whatever
and marrying another. "

It is one of the brightest signs of the times that a non-Catholic dares to thus
publicly advocate the indissolubility of the marriage tie, and we trust that the
day is not far distant when a reaction against divorce will set in strong enough to
remove the foul blot of legalized polygamy from our nation. But the work must
commence with the churches. Christian ministers must stop mocking the holy
institution of wedlock by sacrilegious rites ; they must do what every Catholic-
priest does, refuse to marry those who are divorced.

1 890.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 557

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS, ETC., SHOULD
BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION, NO. 415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH
STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

The representative of the Columbian Reading Union met with a most cordial
reception at the Catholic Congress, held in Baltimore November 1 1 and 12.
He found delegates from remote places as well as from the large cities of the
United States who had already formed decided opinions as to the beneficial re-
sults to be expected from the general diffusion of good literature through the
co-operation of a chain of Catholic Reading Circles extending across the conti-
nent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The decisions of the Congress itself were
expressed officially in the report of the committee on resolutions. We are in-
debted to this committee in a special manner for the prominent recognition given
to questions which have been discussed at considerable length in the pages of
THE CATHOLIC WORLD. For the members of our Reading Union it will be es-
pecially gratifying to know that the first Catholic Congress of America made a
strong declaration in support of the work to which they have devoted so much
time and attention, not to mention their expenditure of money. It urged upon
all the duty of supporting liberally the good Catholic journals and periodicals
engaged in promoting the intellectual defence of the church, and directed atten-
tion to the necessity of having a clear knowledge of the books which correctly in-
terpret Catholic doctrine and opinion on the important questions constantly
coming to the front. Substantial encouragement given to Catholic authors of
the better type was specified as a powerful incentive to bring our literature to the
desired standard of excellence. By extending the sale of the best Catholic books
now in existence, the way will be prepared for more to be written. The practical
suggestions on this subject, endorsed by the Congress, contain these significant
words :

" We recommend, therefore, the work of Catholic circulating libraries and
Reading Circles, and also efforts to have the best Catholic books and periodicals
introduced 'vnio public libraries."

This positive sanction of the movement which led to the formation of the
Columbian Reading Union should produce some visible results by stimulating
those in charge of Reading Circles to greater activity. Naturally, we shall look to
the delegates of the Catholic Congress for practical manifestations of zeal in for-
warding the interests of libraries and Reading Circles in the vicinity of their own

homes.

•
* *

For the sake of our young people we have been gathering hints and sugges-
tions relating to mental improvement by means of literature. Without compe-
tent guidance there is danger of wandering into barren fields, seeking for
intellectual treasures where none can be found. We gladly publish a communi-
cation bearing on this matter from one who holds a prominent rank as a powerful
writer, and is a welcome contributor to THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

"The Columbian Reading Union invites me to send an assurance of personal
co-operation in its work. I know none more practical than one which circum-
stances combine to make timely — a suggestion concerning the use of indexes in
pursuing a course of reading or in getting directly at the pith of a topic. Many
young readers, animated with an earnest wish to find authentic information,
especially upon questions involving historical, scientific, or moral doubt, are
appalled by the catalogue of a great library. They do not know the intrinsic
worth of many of the books mentioned under the head which represents the
subject they are searching. They do not know how to select among authors

YOL. L. — 36

558 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Jan.,

who have written upon it, leaving out of consideration the unimportant and
concentrating attention upon the thorough and the accurate. Happily, there is
now a mode of approach shorter, more convenient, and perfectly reliable. The
periodical literature which has come into existence so plenteously in fifty years
represents the advance of the world. Whether in science, in the fine arts, in
fiction, in open historical matters (and there are few historical matters that are
closed), in commentary upon exploration and experiment, in discussion of social
and moral issues, the periodicals now precede the books. It is the aim of the
editor of every first-class periodical to anticipate the public want on every
popular or material inquiry; and the pens of the foremost thinkers in every
division of intellectual labor are constantly at work for the monthlies and the
serious weeklies as well as for the quarterlies. No periodical is a substitute for
a good book. No literature can be produced in our time which will warrant
reading to the exclusion of monumental literary works upon which the approval
of mankind has been stamped. Young readers who begin books of traditional
fame and feel compelled to lay them aside unfinished will later learn that the
defect was in their immaturity, not in the judgment of the human race. But in
the periodicals the young reader has this advantage ; the article deals, as a rule,
with only a distinct and rounded aspect of a question ; and it is only by taking
subjects apart in this manner, getting the analysis first of the parts, that judgment
is able to combine the aspects afterward and make the synthesis.

"Before the publication of Pool&slnde.r of Periodical Literature \t\vzs difficult
to use the past volumes of the magazines thus to promote culture. Dr. Poole has
included in its pages, in addition to the noteworthy secular periodicals, The Ameri-
can Catholic Quarterly Review, THE CATHOLIC WORLD, The Dublin Review -, The
Month (London), The Irish Monthly (Dublin). There is no subject of real
importance, vital in our time, which will not be found ably and authentically
discussed in the . pages of these publications. The Index is both nominal and
topical ; if you want to read upon Galileo, you turn to the great student's name
in the Index. Following it, incidents in his career or the proof bearing upon the
dispute attaching to it, or the sources whence one can approach judicial consid-
eration of the evidence, are all to be had, clearly indicated, with the name of the
periodical and writer, volume and page. No Catholic family of cultivation is
without the Catholic Quarterly Review and CATHOLIC WORLD. They are also,
it must be assumed, in every Catholic general library. They are in every public
library where other series of periodicals are kept. Poole's Index is also in every
library, or ought to be. It is necessarily a bulky volume, not portable. THE
CATHOLIC WORLD announces that it will shortly publish an index to its own
pages at a nominal price. This will be portable. When, therefore, a student
goes to a general library to consult its volumes, he can speed his labor by taking
his index with him. I do not think there is yet a separate index for the Catholic
Quarterly Review; perhaps there will be. Poole's will serve. No inquirer after
sound foundations upon any topic need plead difficulty in getting them when
Poole's Index and its companion make the task so easy. The estimate in which
these two publications are held by the most competent, and ought to be held by
all who read for profit as well as entertainment, is on record by the hands of
distinguished non-Catholics. The quarterly deals more with erudite and recon-
dite matters than the monthly. Of the refinement and acumen of the literary
spirit of the latter, it is pleasant to cite a remarkable witness, whose words have
come under my eye this week. William Michael Rossetti has just given out a
volume on his brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The latter, whose reputation is
certain to gain with every generation, had a severe struggle in the beginning for
fame — for even a good name. When nearly twenty years ago he published his

WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 559

Poems they encountered unjust censure by dull reviewers. A few great critics
perceived their beauty and truth, and stood manfully by him against a host of
assailants. William Rossetti says that no review impressed him more than that
by an unnamed writer — THE CATHOLIC WORLD did not print writers' names
then — in THE CATHOLIC WORLD. ' He thought that its writer had shown
remarkable power of penetrating into the essential and not wholly self-avowed per-
sonality of the author.' The bound volumes of the two leading Catholic period-
icals ought to be procured for every library which does not contain them. They
constitute in themselves a library of reference, sound, well written, and by
judicious editorship made continually available for meeting every new question
and elucidating every old one. MARGARET F. SULLIVAN."

It is hardly necessary to urge upon the attention of Catholic colleges and
academies the utility of making Poole's Index available for their senior students.
The modern Alma Mater must take cognizance of nineteenth century literature,
and its monumental works of fiction which exert an influence over minds that no
educational institution, however venerable and excellent in other respects, can
entirely ignore. From reliable information, it may be mentioned with regret that
there is one academy conducted on an antique model, which cannot be changed
by any words here printed, because THE CATHOLIC WORLD is not allowed to
circulate among its scholars lest they might read the stories. This same policy
excludes all fiction. It is an alarming symptom of decrepitude.

*
* *

The writer of the following letter can henceforth quote the Catholic Congress
in defending the claims of her sex. She may silence objections to her plans of
self-improvement by these words :

" It is our duty to acquaint ourselves with Catholic doctrine and opinion on
the important questions, demanding right answers and just, practical solutions."

" The avidity with which Catholic women are taking hold of the advan-
tages offered them through the Columbian Reading Union shows that there
are some in our midst who are keenly alive to a long-felt want ; namely, an op-
portunity to pursue some method of self-improvement under the proper guidance
and encouragement. While considerable has been done for men by means of
societies with libraries of more or less magnitude to encourage reading, but
little has been done to induce women to take any steps toward intellectual ad-
vancement. The reason of this seems to be a popular fallacy that women should
be discouraged from making any attempt at intellectual growth. For a reason-
able basis on which to defend such a conclusion I have long sought in vain.
Gladstone says: ' A woman is most perfect when most womanly.' We find
that womanliness needs also strength of character, and strength of character is
adorned by intelligence. Yet we cannot mingle to any extent in social circles to-
day without encountering evidence of this popular prejudice, and what seems
most surprising is the fact that it is often advanced by men of seeming intelli-
gence. I remember an incident which came, within my own notice not long
since. A young lady of my acquaintance, who was accustomed to meet a great
many Protestants, took a keen interest in investigating the charges made against
the church in order that she might answer them intelligently. Among the sub-
jects to which she had given thought and attention was that of the disputed
ground between science and revealed religion. Meeting one evening at a social
gathering some one whom she thought could aid her investigation, she pro-
ceeded to discuss the subject of all-engrossing interest to her just then. A gentle-
man who was present took it upon himself to inform her afterwards, with evident
solicitude, that she was spoiling her chances for matrimony by such conversa-
tions. Are we to conclude from this that a premium, in the form of a husband,

560 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Jan.,

is offered for a woman's ignorance? If so, is it surprising that society to-day is
composed largely of feather-brained women, whose conversational powers are
confined to the prevailing fashion or the latest piece of gossip ? There are, how-
ever, a few brave spirits who do not think that the title of Mrs. is the only thing
that life has worth living for, and these are willing to face the social opprobrium
that serious conversation entails, believing that an intelligent defence of the
church and her doctrines is something that they ought to guard as jealously as
their own good name.

" We have all heard the objection that the church fosters and encourages ig-
norance for her own sinister designs. Protestants seek to draw this inference
when they attribute to the church the apathy which prevails among some of its
members. Certainly we must admire the untiring energy and indefatigable zeal
which many of their number manifest in everything that tends to intellectual
advancement. In the words of Longfellow, * Let us, then, be up and doing,' and
since the Columbian Reading Union has decided to place within our reach well-
arranged lists, there is no longer any excuse for women to remain in ignorance
of Catholic literature. Make the Reading Circle the fashion, and it will be sure to
become popular, and we may then hope, at no distant day, to find our women
substituting intelligent conversation for much that is at present far from edifying.
If it becomes an established rule for women to talk sense instead of nonsense,
men will no longer attempt to ridicule the change for the better.

"ANNAM. MITCHELL."
*

* *

" I cannot understand how any one who has a desire to witness the spread
of Catholic literature could hesitate for a moment to approve of what seems to
me a most efficient means of promoting a noble end. That there is a need of
some way of directing the Catholic reading public cannot be doubted. Publish-
ers whose efforts are devoted to a more secular end have employed this means
of reaching the people with telling results, and there is to me no reason for
supposing that a more elevated aim should not meet with equal success.

"I will consider it not merely a pleasure, but rather a duty, to exert myself
in behalf of the Union, and will be happy to become a member.

"Detroit, Mich. T. M. O'BRIEN."

* *

''No person of ordinary intelligence will fail to admit the necessity for such
an undertaking as the work of the Columbian Reading Union. When one
thinks of the vast stream of corrupting literature poured forth one cannot
but wish there were some wholesome repressive influence interposed to save
our youth from this moral malaria. It is, indeed, true that 'some books are
to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be digested.' The ex-
tent of the ruin caused among the young by the reading of pernicious literature
cannot be estimated. It spreads its baleful influence in silence and secrecy, and
thousands succumb to the vices fostered by a corrupt imagination. It is
impossible, however, to ignore* good fiction as a powerful factor in modern
life. It has, in fact, been very influential in all ages of the world. E. M."

* *

To those who reflect upon the subject, or have it forced on their attention by
daily observation, the need of guidance for young readers is very apparent. We
wish that the friends of our movement would imitate Mrs. Leahy, whose letter
we publish, in making a personal visit to some of the public libraries where
juvenile literature is distributed indiscriminately. We would like to get reliable
information as to the quality of the books given to the young in the numerous
circulating libraries of New York.

1890.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 561

"Anyone who has ever had to train children can tell what patience and
•energy are required to aid and improve them in even the ordinary elementary
studies. When this work is done day after day the result is, in many cases,
attained only imperfectly. How, then, can we expect those very minds to under-
stand religious and moral truths without a similar course of instruction? The
education of children, especially from five to fifteen years of age, is not what it
should be when there is a total absence of religious training.

"A glance into any of our public libraries will show that many young folks
desire to utilize their leisure hours. Unless the attraction were strong grown
boys and girls would not voluntarily flock to these places. Do they ask for
Catholic literature? A Catholic book is generally hard to find in such libraries,
even when it is wanted. I have often looked over the books and papers in use
among juvenile readers and the result has not impressed me favorably.

" Public libraries are for the benefit of the public, but the good that our
young Catholics derive from them is attended by many dangers to their pliable
minds. A short time ago I read the catalogue in a public library and saw only
a few well-known Catholic names in comparison with the writers of other denomi-
nations. I asked two of the ladies in charge which Catholic books they had there.
The reply given was that there were very few and unknown to them. It has
become a crying necessity to establish a plan by which good reading can be
placed under the eyes of children in libraries and in our homes. We need books
pleasing, attractive, and useful. Plenty of this literature can be found for all
ages and classes if enlightened Catholics would wake up to the desperate neces-
sity there is for such work being done. Could we realize or measure the good
that would be accomplished in five, ten, or fifteen years none of us would hesi-
tate. We are capable of doing much more in this particular work than has been
done. By earnest and persevering action on our part public libraries will in time
recognize our demands, and prepare sections or shelves devoted to Catholic
writings. We shall be respected by others not of our faith for our efforts to ex-
tend an enlightening, refining influence, by aiding ourselves and others in a work
that has been much neglected. JOSIE WILKINSON LEAHY."

"Dorchester, Mass. ^%

" Allow me to say that in my opinion the Columbian Reading Union is just
what has long been needed by parents who daily perceive on the part of their
children a growing and ever-increasing desire for reading-matter. Left to choose
at random, the young reader will plunge into nonsensical and trashy books, while
the parent is unable or too busy to look up something for an antidote until the
mind of the young person is contaminated. The Union proposes to share with
such parents the responsible duty of selecting readily and without loss of time to
the parent the proper reading matter to place before children. Books should
pleasantly entertain, at the same time most surely instruct, the young reader and
assist in forming character. Then to all library associations, whether of young
men or women, membership in the Union will prove an invaluable aid in se-
lecting the best books to be placed upon their shelves and before their readers.
Plant good seed if you would reap a good harvest. I hope that the Union may
meet with the success it merits, and that a love for the reading of Catholic liter-
ature may be widely disseminated. L. HENELY."
" Chicago, III. *%

" In trying to satisfy various tastes I have found it necessary to get books of
every description, devotional and spiritual, lives of the saints, histories, tales, and
novels. By having a good selection of stories by Catholic authors, a number have
been diverted from the public library, where they choose their books in many
cases by their titles or depend upon what the librarian may give them. I often

562 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Jan.,

find myself wishing that I could supply boys and girls of twelve and upwards
with attractive reading of which there is so much that is non-Catholic. If while
preparing for first Communion and Confirmation they had for home-reading the
books which are written on those subjects for the young, with many such stories
as are written by Maurice F. Egan and E. L. Dorsey, full of life and American
or Irish-American life, it seems to me it would do a vast deal of good. I have
been asked by several young ladies for books which their brothers would find in-
teresting ; but are there any historical or biographical books for the young to
take the place of Dickens' Child's History of England, and Abbott's and Miss
Yonge's histories, etc. ?

" At the Sunday-school it was suggested lately that the teachers of certain
boys' classes might unite to purchase a few good books to be passed around, but
it remains only a suggestion. I believe that whenever there is some one to begin
a library or Reading Circle and afterwards continue the labor for its success there
will be many glad to avail themselves of such privileges. To furnish books for
the poor and for prisoners in particular seems to me worthy of more attention.
The latter class have so much time for thought that what they read will make
more lasting impression than in other circumstances, and they will readily accept
anything offered them if at all readable. * * * "

*
* *

The first list of stories for children is now published by the Columbian
Reading Union. It was prepared under the auspices of the Ozanam Reading
Circle of New York City, and contains about four of the best books from the
catalogue of every Catholic publisher whose name and address could be obtained.
Any omissions will be supplied in the next list of the same series if notice is sent
to the office of the Columbian Reading Union. The plan is to preserve impar-
tial relations with all the publishers.

Copies of the list of children's books will be mailed free to all those who have
paid one dollar and are entitled to membership in the Columbian Reading
Union. Others may obtain the list by sending ten cents in postage.

M. C. M.

FRENCH SCULPTURES AND PAINTINGS AT THE AMERICAN ART GALLERIES.

The works of Antoine-Louis Barye, and of certain distinguished French
painters, now on exhibition at these galleries are eminently worthy of careful and
repeated study. Indeed they require it ; no single visit would enable even a
trained observer to adjust his capacity to the demand made upon it. It is like
hearing too much orchestral music at one time ; the ear grows dull and no longer
distinguishes separate delights in what has become a great though not altogether
disagreeable noise. Two or three fine pictures, such as Corot's " St. Sebastian";
T*royon's fine, silvery " Cattle Drinking," or his " Drove of Cattle and Sheep";
Rousseau's admirable " Forest of Fontainebleau," Daubigny's " Village au
Bord de 1'Oise," Millet's " Sower," " Turkey-Keeper," his two peasants planting
potatoes, in a canvas whose title we forget, or his famous " Angelus," are more
than enough to fill the eye for one day. The latter picture it seems to be the
latest critical fashion to belittle somewhat in comparison with other paintings by
the same artist. The specimens of his work hung on these walls show an aston-
ishing evenness of achievement. They are all interesting, although they are not
all beautiful. But to our thinking " The Angelus" deserves the precedence it
has certainly taken among them. The engravings from it have made the grace-
ful lines of the two figures familiar to every one, but the lovely color and atmos-

1890.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 563

phere of the painting itself take one by surprise. It is what one expected, but it
is so much more !

The Baryes are — some of them — very wonderful. The man who made them,
one would say, must have had a fellow-feeling with the great beasts whom he has
petrified in the very moment of their most characteristic actions. "Nature red
in tooth and claw with ravin," bestial nature, rising to dignity only in the terrible
warfare whereby it perpetuates its life, hooks at you on every side of the over-
crowded space devoted to this artist. The works are of all sizes, from the colossal
•"Lion and Serpent" to that of paper-weights less than two inches square.
Great or small, they all give the same impression of a very sympathetic power in
the hand that modelled them. The man and the beast have been fused, and
the expression is dual. Look at the immense fore-paw of the lion in the plaster
just referred to — the arm and hand, one would say, of some Titanic blacksmith;
or at the lines in the bronze " Panther Seizing a Stag," where the first impres-
sion is half-human. What pleased us best, on the whole, in the collection were
the four bronzes placed on pedestals just in front of the portrait of Barye — the
"Elk Hunt," the "Bear Hunt," the "Bull Hunt," and the "Tiger Hunt."
The ensemble in these seems perfect ; the grouping and massing of figures, the
intensity of expression, the truth of action. The wounded elephant in the last-
named of these groups has something grotesquely childish in its helpless fallen
under lip, its stiffened trunk and tail, its relaxed limbs. One feels both pity and
a trifle of contempt, as for some great booby blubbering over the inevitable.

" Editor of THE CATHOLIC WORLD :

' ' DEAR SIR : Your article in the current number, entitled ' A Plea for Erring
Brethren,' brings forcibly to my mind a sermon preached by the late Most Rev.
J. B. Purcell at the laying of the corner-stone of the Church of the Blessed
Sacrament in our city many years ago. The saintly archbishop was reviewing
the history of the church in Cincinnati, a retrospect of nearly fifty years, and in
the most touching way mentioned the names of some of his old-time friends —
non-Catholics — whose genuine Christian lives he referred to in these • words :
" They thought they were good Methodists, good Baptists, good Presbyterians,
but they were all good Catholics, although they did not know it, for it is impos-
sible to escape the atmosphere of the true church; it reaches from earth to
heaven." In the same spirit I have read somewhere of late the tender words of
Dr. Manning, in which he says that the good and pious Anglicans of all the
dreary years since the Reformation, he trusts in God's mercy, have found their
way to heaven. I thank THE WORLD for many, many spiritual comforts brought
home to my mind in the doctrine of persuasion and love so beautifully taught for
all those years. Fifty years ago I heard for the first time from the lips of Dr.
Cantwcll, of Meath, who confirmed me, the loving side of our divine faith. I
have not so often heard a repetition of it that my appreciation of the ethereal
music of to-day loses a particle of its refreshing influence.

" Your servant,
"Cincinnati, O., November 20, 1889. JOSEPH P. CARBERY."

NOTICE. — The Life of Father Hecker, the first chapters of which were an-
nounced for this issue, will begin in the April number. The April number has
been chosen because it will mark the silver jubilee of THE CATHOLIC WORLD,
whose establishment was one of Father Hecker's most notable works, and whose
success was ever the object of his most earnest endeavor.

5 64 NE w PUBLICA TIONS. [Jan.,

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

OUR CHRISTIAN HERITAGE. By James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Balti-
more. Baltimore : John Murphy & Co.

It is a fortunate thing sometimes that the majority of average readers are led
to examine a book more by the sight of a distinguished name upon its title-page
than by any interest in its contents. This is especially the case with regard to
the volume before us, because a host of people will buy it, and read it, and profit
by it, who otherwise would probably never see it at all; the very class of readers,
in fact, who are likely to be most benefited by its perusal — i.e., unbelievers, in-
differentists, nothingarians — will no doubt first open its pages to see what a car-
dinal has to say. This, we repeat, is a fortunate thing ; for when a book is so
excellent in itself, so reasonable, so persuasive, so logical, so convincing as this
one, it deserves the largest circulation a book can have ; and if the exalted rank
of the author helps to disseminate the good seed of his words, it is a matter for
hearty congratulation.

Our Christian Heritage is perhaps the most helpful work that has appeared
in recent years. In the small space of five hundred pages are condensed, with
singular clearness of method and conciseness of language, answers to some of the
most profoundly important questions which can occupy the human mind — the
''whence," the " why," the " whither," which the restless intellect of mankind
never tires of asking. Such topics as the Existence of God, His Attributes, the
Origin and Destiny of Man, the Immortality of the Soul, the Freedom of the
Will, the Divinity of Christ, the Claims of Christianity, are here treated in a
way which must go far towards convincing a fair-minded reader, and which in
any case cannot fail to deeply impress a prejudiced one.

If this book has one characteristic more strongly defined than another, it is
what we may call its " sweet reasonableness." It is not dogmatic ; it is not dicta-
torial ; it is not abusive ; it is not " polemical " in any sense. It is a frank, hon-
est, straightforward presentation by the author of the reasons for the hope that
is in him, together with an affectionate urging of those reasons upon others.
Throughout the volume we recognize the same gentle courtesy, the same strong
yet simple diction, the same fervent piety, which distinguished that earlier work
of the cardinal, written while Bishop of Richmond, The Faith of Our Fathers.

We regret that the late reception of our copy of Our Christian Heritage
makes a longer notice impossible in this issue. We shall give a more extended
review of the book in a future number.

SACRED HEART HYMNS. A choice collection of bright and melodious hymns
to the Sacred Heart. Compiled and edited by F. Canter. Baltimore: George
Willig & Co.

With a very few changes in the words of these sentimental ballads, and with
no change whatever in the music, these " Hymns" would be very suitable for
the use of lovers with guitars as moonlight serenades, or to swell the repertory
of the "minstrel" troupes whose usual "solo" and "chorus" the majority of
them very much resemble. If the devotion of the Sacred Heart, which has done
so much for religion, has been wrongly esteemed by many as chiefly appealing
to sensuous women and effeminate men, we think the blame is to be justly
ascribed to much of its popular artistic expression in painting, sculpture, and
especially in such sensuous and effeminate language and melody as this volume
contains.

1 890. ] NE w PUB LIC A TIONS. 565

PASTORAL LETTER OF RIGHT REV. O. ZARDETTI, D.D., Bishop of St. Cloud,
Minn. Issued on the day of his Episcopal Consecration, October 20, 1889.
Sioux Falls, S. D. : Brown & Saenger.

Dr. Zardetti was long and favorably known in the Northwest as a learned
theologian and as a zealous and enterprising priest before his elevation to the
episcopate. By birth he is of that Teutonic race which has given the church in
America so large a number of her prelates. He has fully assimilated the spirit
of his adopted country, as the pages of this learned and devout pastoral eloquent-
ly bear witness. He believes in the providential mission of the United States,
and he well knows how it finds its counterpart in the spiritual life. His little
treatise on devotion to the Holy Spirit is one of the most valuable contributions
yet made to the religious literature of this country. We sincerely trust that the
missionary labors of a pioneer bishop will not hinder his contributing more and
more to the spiritual life of our people by theological and devotional writings.
A simple statement of the truth from the lips or pen of a bishop carries great
weight, for it is from a divinely authorized exponent ; how much rather shall a
learned bishop get a hearing, especially one who is filled with the consciousness
of the extraordinary designs of God with our generation!

BABYLAND. By the editors of Wide Awake. Boston : D. Lothrop Co.

We examined this volume of Baby land for 1889 from cover to cover, and
found each page filled with beautiful pictures and interesting reading matter.
For little children just learning to read it will be a most acceptable present. The
numerous illustrations portray many amusing incidents of baby life.

PERCY WYNN ; OR, MAKING A BOY OF HIM. By Neenah, author of Tom
Playfair, etc. Napoleon, Ohio : A. J. Schiml, Catholic Companion Print.

It is refreshing to find a new book for Catholic boys, neatly printed, with
gilt edges and excellent binding. Percy Wynn is depicted as an active boy, fond
of fishing, foot-ball, and other out-door sports. The author has succeeded admii-
ably in sustaining the interest of the narrative, using a clear, vigorous style, and
introducing many of the strong phrases invented by college boys.

We hope that Neenah will find it profitable to write more stories of this
kind, based on the actual realities of school-life in America. There are many
fine characters in our Catholic schools to furnish ideals for fiction. The Catholic
boy of the United States has decided characteristics which compare favorably
with the highest types known in the Catholic countries of Europe. His photo-
graph should be accurately reproduced in our native literature, which will be
bought eagerly as soon as it is produced. We have been waiting and watching
for some enterprising Catholic publisher to offer inducements to competent
writers in this neglected department of heal thy juvenile fiction.

ACCOMPAGNEMENT DU NOUVEAU MANUEL DE CHANTS LlTURGIQUES (de M.
1'Abbe Bourduas), Messes, Proses, Cantiques, Psaumes, Hynmes et Motets
des Dimanches et des fetes de 1'annee, harmonises pour 1'orgue d'apres la
tonalite Gregorienne, par R. Octave Pelletier, Organiste du Cathedral de
Montreal. Montreal : Eusebe Senecal et Fils.

We have to congratulate church organists, and such other students of music
as wish to know something about the legitimate harmonic treatment of Gregorian
chant, upon the appearance of this scholarly production. So far as the matter of
the work goes, it offers us an accompaniment to the selections from the Gradual
and Antiphonarium (Edition of Montreal) contained in the excellent little con-
gregational manual edited by M. 1'Abbe Bourduas indicated in the title, and which
we commended to our readers in a former notice.

5 66 NE w PUB Lie A TIONS. [ ] an . ,

Various harmonizations of chant have come under our notice, of which some
ignore both its tonality and rhythm, such as the Repertoire de rOrganiste
by J. B. Labelle, and the like erroneous attempts at chant harmony commonly
found in our American church-music books, giving us as a result neither true
chant nor good music. Other competent musicians, such as Niedermeyer, in his
Accompagnement pour VOrgue, and M. Lagace, of Quebec, in his Chants de
TEglise, although respecting the tonality and modality, have followed the system
of equal notation, which has resulted in accentuating the worst feature of that
system, by destroying not only all rhythmic movement and expression, but so
veiling the tonal harmony 'of the chant melody as to practically render it unintel-
ligible.

M. Niedermeyer and others of his school, learned though they are, seem
to have forgotten that the chant is not a mere aggregation of unrelated tones, but
that it is a true melody, of varied modal construction and thematic form ; each
mode possessing, audits formulas expressing, different aesthetic characteristics and
endued with its own spiritual power to affect the morale both of singer and listener ;
just as modern musical melodies are composed in either the major or the minor
modes, and distinguished for their martial, amorous, saltatory, humorous, or
mournful spirit.

The attention of all students of chant has of late years been specially directed
to the question of rhythm by the profound researches and writings of eminent
musicologues such as the R. P. Dom Pothier and R. P. Dom Sauter, of the Benedic-
tine Order, and the Abbe Raillard. To ignore the rhythm of chant is to deprive
it of all soul and life, and render it quite as unmeaning as any modern song
would be if all the notes were made of equal length and its measure and accents
were suppressed.

The system of harmonization of chant referred to, written in this lifeless form,
devoid of all passing notes and other devices requisite to insure a flowing rendi-
tion of the melody, such as the eminent musicians we allude to have given us, is
therefore one which gives us indeed a succession of chords, but utterly fails to
produce what chant is, and what its name implies, viz., Song.

The celebrated and lamented Lemmens, who abandoned his brilliant career
as a public musical artist to devote the remainder of his life to the study and
teaching of chant, while being impressed with the necessity of preserving the
tonality and of fully recognizing the element of rhythm as indispensable to the
true intelligence of chant, yet believed that in the accompaniment of it the ele-
ment of measure, at least to distinguish the relative value of notes, might be, and
if we understand his theory, should be, introduced together with the employment
of passing notes and intervening chord resolutions.

We acknowledge that the general effect of such a treatment is not without
certain attractive features. Yet we hold that to restrict the free, inspired move-
ment of chant to the regular alternations of strong and weak accents, forced by
measured divisions of the melody, is to rob it of its unique and most sublime
character.

The author of the work before us has, we think, chosen a happy medium in
the style of notation adopted, which, though necessarily imperfect, as we have
before said in noticing chant translations into modern notes, is on the whole
about the best we have seen. The rhythm is thus tolerably well indicated, es-
pecially for organists who already know something of it. M. Pelletier had no
easy task before him in preserving the tonality and avoiding confusion of the dif-
ferent modes without the use of modulation, and yet obtain an agreeable move-
ment of the different parts of the accompanying harmony, but it is very gratifying
to observe that, on the whole, he has accomplished these aims in a highly satis-
factory manner.

1890.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 567

Whilst 'adhering to those true principles requiring the employment of har-
mony strictly consonant for the melody, he has made most happy and effective
use of passing notes, suspensions, and anticipations, by which means he has suc-
ceeded in bringing out the rhythm into more intelligible relief, the lack of which
devices are so regrettably felt in the works of Niedermeyer and his eminent dis-
ciples. There are a few exceptions which we think deserve to be taken and no-
ticed.

The formulas for the psalm chants are not sufficiently elaborated to suit the
needs of the ordinary organist. The third termination of the fourth mode is er-
roneously given, following, as the writer has done, the evident misprint as given
in the table of these chants in the antiphonarium. The phrasing of the Kyrie
in the Missa de Angelis has thrown some of the accents upon wrong notes.
We think it an error to attribute the Lauda Sion and Veni, Creator Spiritus to
the 1 3th and i4th modes. These chants are unquestionably in the 8th
mode ; for the dominant throughout is Do, and the final, Sol. He has been
misled by a wish to avoid the apparent triton in the true formula for the conclu-
sions. It is only apparent, for the Si is not an essential and accented tone but
only one of those passing notes used in chant, like the nota liquescens. More-
over, the dominant of the I4th mode is Mi. We cannot find that tone dominant
in any part of the Lauda Sion. We are also a little surprised at the harmony
of the Creator alme siderum. We do not find the dominant treated as a La in
the harmony given. Hearing it as written, we would pronounce the hymn to be
in the I3th mode, whose scale being identical with that, of our modern major
mode, has given rise to the vulgar modern harmony commonly adopted by organ-
ists in rendering that hymn. Accompanied with proper modal harmony, and
the melody being taken at a much lower pitch, we obtain quite another and more
appropriate expression of this solemn, yearning chant of the Advent season.

If there should be, as we sincerely hope there may be, a demand for this
volume and for the manual of M. 1'Abbe Bourduas in the United States, a
brochure containing at least the Prefaces of both translated into English should
be prepared and furnished by the publishers.

With this volume before the organist and its harmonies well studied and
thoroughly practised so as to insure a free, flowing rendition of the chant
phrases, and the little corresponding manual of M. 1'Abbe Bourduas in the hands
of the people, pastors who are desirous of introducing congregational singing of
the church's own holy, edifying, and inspiring Song of Praise and Prayer may
have some reasonable hope of realizing that " consummation" of the church-
music question so " devoutly to be wished."

SELECTIONS FROM THE SERMONS OF PADRE AGOSTINO DA MONTEFELTRO.
Preached at the Church of San Carlo al Corso, Rome, Lent, 1889. Trans-
lated by Catherine Mary Phillimore. Second Series. New York: James
Pott & Co.

The translator cautions the reader in her preface that these sermons are
translated from versions never revised by the author himself, and that they do
not pretend to be more than selections from the course of sermons delivered
by Padre Agostino, and that the translations in this case are made, as they were
in the volume previously published, from the reports printed in the newspapers
and sold in the streets a few hours after the delivery of the sermons. This state-
ment is not only due to the literary honesty of the translator but also to the
preacher, for the Catholic reader can thereby explain the presence of inaccuracies
in the statement of doctrine of which the Padre Agostino is quite incapable.
But the sermons nevertheless bear internal evidence of being fairly enough re-
produced.

568 NE w PUBLICA riONS. [J an . , 1 8 90.

This series is in some ways of hardly such value as was the first, yet-it con-
tains a number of useful pieces of pulpit oratory. There are five sermons on our
Lord, some of which carry the reader to a high state of sympathy with his passion
and atonement, and others eloquently summarize the motives of credibility for his
mission. The first sermon in the book, on the necessity of religion, is in some
sense of the term a masterpiece, and might, with certain adaptations to our
people, be used with much effect in our pulpits. The last sermon, " Our Native
Land," is a high flight of oratory. It is probably the one which was misunder-
stood by some portions of the preacher's audience, and which gave him occasion
to publicly express his loyalty to the principles which guide the Holy See in the
present difficulties with the Italian government.

We recommend this volume to all classes of readers, especially to the clergy.

S. ALPHONSI M. DE LIGUORI, EPISCOPI, CONFESSORIS ET ECCLESI^E DOCTORIS.
Liber de Casremoniis Missae ex Italico Idiomate Latine Redditus opportunis
Notis ac Novissimis S.R.C. Decretis Illustratus necnon Appendicibus
auctus opera Georgii Schober, Congreg. SS. Redemptoris Sacerdotis.
Editio altera emendata et aucta. Ratisbonae, Neo Eboraci et Cincinnatii :
Sumptibus, Chartis et Typis Frederici Pustet, S. Sedis Apost. et S. Rit.
Congr. Typogr. MDCCCLXXXVIII.

This work of St. Alphonsus is so well known that it is scarcely necessary to
say anything of it. The body of the work is devoted to the main subject of the
book, the ceremonies of the Mass in general. The appendices take up and dis-
cuss the various questions arising as to the obligation of celebrating and as to the
things pertaining to votive Masses and the like. The book is a complete
treatise. The editor has enlarged the original, and gives the later decisions of
the Sacred Congregation bearing on the matter in hand.

TEMPERANCE SONGS AND LYRICS. Second edition, greatly enlarged. By
Rev. J. Casey. Dublin : James Duffy & Co.

These homely and home-made songs and lyrics, as the zealous author terms
them, have been already favorably noticed to our readers, and we have only to renew
our hearty commendation of them, and trust they may find popular use in tem-
perance societies, and thus render, as he hopes, a service to sobriety and song.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Mention oj books in this place does not preclude extended notice in subsequent numbers,
THE DIVINE OFFICE. Explanation of the Psalms and Canticles. By St. Alphonsus de Li-

guori, Doctor of the Church. Edited by Rev. Eugene Grimm, C.SS.R. New York,

Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Dr. H.von

Hoist, Professor at the University of Freiburg. Translated from the German by John J.

Lalor. 1856-1859. Buchanan's Election-End of the 35th Congress. Chicago : Calla-

ghan & Co.
A LIFE OF JOHN DAVIS, THE NAVIGATOR, 1550-1605, Discoverer of Davis Straits. By Clements

R. Markham, C.B., F.R.S. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
SERMONS FOR THE SUNDAYS AND CHIEF FESTIVALS OF THE ECCLESIASTICALYEAR. With two

Courses of Lenten Sermons and a Triduum for the Forty Hours. By Rev. Julius Pott-

geisser, S.J. Rendered from the German by Rev. James Conway, S.J. In two volumes.

New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.
GOOD THINGS FOR CATHOLIC READERS. A Miscellany of Catholic Biography, Travel, etc.

Profusely illustrated. Second Series. New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. ;

London : Burns & Gates.
THE GREAT TRUTHS. Short Meditations for the Season of Advent. By Richard F. Clarke,

S.J. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.
THE ART OF PROFITING BY OUR FAULTS, according to St. Francis de Sales. By Rev. Joseph

Fissott, Missionary of St. Francis de Sales. Translated from the French by Miss Ella

McMahon New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago: Benziger Bros.
THE DIARY OF PHILIP HONE, 1828-1851. Edited with an introduction by Bayard Tuckerman.

In two volumes. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD

VOL. L. FEBRUARY, 1890. No. 299.

A NEW DEPARTURE IN CATHOLIC COLLEGE DIS-
CIPLINE.

CATHOLIC colleges in the United States find themselves con-
fronted by conditions which seem to require a new adjustment
of time-honored methods of discipline. The Declaration of Inde-
pendence, as interpreted in our country, has come to mean that
the son is equal to his father, and entitled to a voice in the
manner and matter of his instruction and education. Whether
this be right or wrong it is de facto, and it must be considered
by the heads of educational institutions. Who believes that Yale's
prestige in the annals of base-ball influences the father to send
his son there ? But who does not know that the son's prefer-
ence is often for the college which has made the best record
in what the French call " le sport"? Of course there are
studious young men who want to learn, but they are generally
those whom circumstances oblige to take care of themselves.
And it is the faculty and apparatus that draw them, not the
fame of well-fought base-ball or boat-racing matches ; but the
young man with a father capable of paying his bills is much in-
fluenced by the scores of the year's competition in games.

Similarly, the discipline of any college is considered by him
from the point of view of his inclination and tastes. The com-
mon dormitory system, by which no student has his own room,
but all sleep in large dormitories like patients in the wards of a
hospital — a system which the French undergraduate accepts with-
out a protest — is viewed with disfavor by the American Catholic
student, and he invariably cherishes the hope 'that the day will
come when he can have a room of his own; and a college which
does not offer him this hope cannot expect to have his suffrages
after a limited time. Few fathers are unreasonable enough —

570 A NEW DEPARTURE IN [Feb.,

according to the modern definition of unreasonableness — to send
their sons of a certain age to a college some of whose arrange-
ments do not meet with their approbation. The thoughtful
father understands very well the advantages of the system of liv-
ing which obtains in Catholic colleges. He knows very well —
perhaps too well — the evils that result from the "boarding-out"
system ; he knows that young men, free from parental restraints
and the influence of public opinion, are not likely to remain
without reproach. It is the fashion to hold, with the late school
of "muscular Christianity," that young men generally "come out
all right." But experience has dissipated that myth which the
late Rev. Charles Kingsley did so much to make popular.

It is certain that boys from the age of seventeen to twenty -
one need restraint — or, rather, restrictive influence ; for at that
time there seems to be a special league of the world, the flesh,
and the devil against them. The wrorld of the college town is
too prone to look indulgently on the sins of students, and perhaps
to play the part of Falstaff, not without a thought of profit, to
their Prince Hal. If everybody concerned would be entirely frank,
there is no doubt that residence of students outside college bounds
would be condemned.

If your son be serious-minded he will need none of the
wisdom of Polohius, and you can trust him in a community of
students where the opinions of " the fast set " govern speech, if
not action. If not — if he, because of his years and the plasticity
of youth, be not proof against the laxity of youthful example —
you will find that he will have paid too much for that experi-
ence which man is best without.

Public sentiment has begun to swerve towards the conserv-
ative system of the Catholic colleges. Even the prestige of Yale
and Harvard does not now convince fathers that they are the
safest places for boys ; and there is no doubt that the wise
father is beginning to know his own son well enough to wish
that some restraint could be applied to him during his collegiate
years. A college ought to stand in loco parentis. If it seek to
divest itself of all responsibility for the morals of its students, it
fulfils the lesser part of its mission.

It is time that the Catholic colleges of the country took ad-
vantage of the trend of thoughtful opinion. But they cannot do
this until they so 'modify the dormitory system that young men
will not recoil from it. This has been declared to be impossible.
If so, the Catholic college will continue to be handicapped ; it
will continue to be filled with boys who leave its precincts at a

1 890.] CA THOLIC COLLEGE DISCIPLINE. 5 7 1

time when they should begin serious collegiate work ; it will
continue to graduate classes small in proportion to the number
of students entered on the rolls.

The need of a modification of the dormitory system — admir-
able as it is for smaller boys — has been forced on the trustees of
the University of Notre Dame by the logic of events. It is
entirely in place here to cite what they have done as an exam-
ple of what may be done — indeed, of what must be done if
Catholic colleges are to be saved from becoming mere preparatory
schools for junior students. Their work, when it began to take
form, was looked on with forebodings by conservatives who feared
that any recognition of modern prejudices against the dormitory
system, even for students in senior grades, meant anarchy.
Somehow or other, the Western atmosphere fights for the inno-
vator as valiantly as the stars did in an elder time. And what
seemed impossible was done in six months. A new building
was planned to flank one side of the great lawn and to balance
Science Hall. The plan completed, the new edifice began to
arise. At the beginning of the school-year of 1888 it was al-
most ready. A little later it received the name of Sorin Hall —
and the impossible had come to pass. It is a fixed fact now.

Sorin Hall is an oblong building, built of the white brick of
the adjacent country, planned, both for convenience and appear-
ance, in the style of the French renaissance. It contains sixty
rooms — twelve feet by fourteen — besides the apartments of the
rector and his staff, a chapel, the lecture-room and chambers of
the law department, bath-rooms, and a well-equipped reading-
room. At present it is not half its proposed size, as seventy-five
more rooms will be added, with, it is probable, the lecture-rooms
of the English course. From present appearances, it seems as if
the additional seventy-five rooms would be all too few, as there
are many more deserving applicants for rooms than there are
rooms in which to put them.

I mean to emphasize the word deserving. Admission to
Sorin Hall depends entirely on the merit of the applicant. It is
not an assemblage of " parlor boarders " under a new name.
No extra fee is demanded. The applicant for a room in Sorin
Hall must be of the elite, and mere cleverness without cor-
responding seriousness and good conduct will not gain the
coveted honor for him. A desk, chairs, a book-case, a bed and
other necessary articles, are provided by the college ; the rest
of the garnishing of the room is left to the taste of the
student. Some of the men in Sorin Hall go in for aesthetic

VOL. L.—37

572 A NEW DEPARTURE IN [Feb.,

embellishments. Chacun a son metier. Here you find the base-
ball gloves quartered, as it were, with a physiological chart, and
a microscope nestling among back numbers of the Scientific Amer-
ican, all shaded by Turcoman curtains s^nt by some loving
mamma ; there a photograph of Cardinal Newman perched on
a volume of Tennyson, and a synopsis of the Cronin case pasted
over last month's foot-ball score, while the purest simplicity in
the matter of other embellishments reigns.

The rules of order and cleanliness are not more stringent or
more scrupulously enforced at West Point than in Sorin Hall.
It has a campus of its own and a government of its own,
subject, of course, to the government of the University. It was
anticipated that the formation of this new community would
occasion a certain resentment among the less fortunate seniors,
who naturally — being thorough Americans — would hate an aris-
tocracy of which they were not members. But the exalted
seniors disarmed enmity by a prudent affability of manner,
and, as the " sweet hope " .of attaining to a room is so un-
concealed among all the seniors, any attempt at the pro-
verbial " sour-grapes" act would be conspicuously hollow. The
rules that govern Sorin Hall are not many, but they are strictly
enforced. As there is a commodious common room, visiting
in rooms is not allowed; lights must be out at a fixed time;
unseemly noises are prohibited ; in a word, every reasonable
restriction that can conduce to decorous conduct and .the for-
mation of an atmosphere inducing study is insisted on.

Nearly two years have passed since this modification of the
dormitory system was attempted. It has had a fair trial. The
sixty rooms are filled by sixty gentlemen, whose work in the
recitation rooms shows that they have made a distinct gain
by their isolation from the more bustling air of the college
proper. A man in Sorin Hall has too much respect for his
standing to forfeit his privileges. A clandestine visit to town-
were it possible — would mean expulsion ; and there have been
no expulsions. Any interference with the rights of others, if
persisted in, would meet the same punishment. The fact that
admission to this privilege of the University is dependent on
conduct and standing accounts largely for the success of what
is no longer an experiment. To have made admission dependent
on an increased fee would have crippled it at once, and have
put back an advance in the collegiate surroundings of higher
students for many years. The elite, then, would have been a
real aristocracy of money, not a picked group of men promoted

1890.] CATHOLIC COLLEGE DISCIPLINE. 573

for merit. And, if our Catholic colleges are to flourish, merit,
not money, must be the ladder of preferment ; any snobbishness
in this respect would have at once created all those difficulties
among the students which the promoters of this new departure
in discipline wished most to avoid.

Notre Dame has shown how to draw older students to its
lecture-rooms ; it has made an audacious experiment which, now
that it is so thoroughly successful, seems to have been the only
thing that could have been done. All of us who are interested
in Catholic education desire, above all things, to see our colleges
well filled with those older students who drift to what are called
non-sectarian schools, but which are more dangerous to religion
and morals than the professedly sectarian schools. In the latter
belief in God and respect for the Commandments are at least
part of public teaching. I confess that no question, social or
political, seems to me more important than this : How shall we
keep our own ?

We cannot keep our own without higher education ; the
highest is not too high. We cannot keep our own unless we
analyze carefully the causes which keep promising youths from
our colleges. These colleges have, as a rule, no endowments and
no scholarships ; they must depend on the solidity of their
teaching and the effectiveness of their discipline ; they must
form characters as well as fill minds, and they cannot afford
to neglect any chance of disarming prejudices against their meth-
ods. The modification of the dormitory system is one of the
most important steps that can be taken for the disarm-
ing of existing prejudices. As an anxious observer of the
progress of higher Catholic education — as a student of the
methods of Catholic colleges; — as a man too well experi-
enced in the objections which are made against them,— as a
teacher who puts a quiet environment above all things, except
morality, in a student's life, I beg leave to call attention to
this new departure in discipline at Notre Dame. The success
of Sorin Hall marks an epoch and the beginning of a syn-
thesis between traditions and the demands of the present time.

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN.

Notre Dame, Ind*

574 HYPNOTISM. [Feb.,

HYPNOTISM.* ,

IF the attention be directed repeatedly, by an individual in con-
ditions of bodily weakness, to any part of his organism, sensations
of different kinds, not existing previously, will be perceived in that
part. This is a fact generally accepted by physicians, and fatal
disease (hydrophobia in some cases) has, it is maintained, resulted
simply from the influence of the imagination intensified in its power
by fear at the time of reception of some slight or even fancied injury.

As one of the highest mental faculties we must consider that of
concentrating by an act of will the attention ; the converse of
such power is inability to concentrate the attention by any effort of
will, and consequently the individual's mind is here a prey to all
sorts of distraction arising from sensorial (peripheral) impressions or
from mental reproduction of previous states or ideas, these repro-
ductions being due to hyper-excitability of the cortical brain-cells.

If, now, by any process the power of inhibiting mental impres-
sions arising from occurrences without the body or within it is put
out of function, the power of concentrating the attention is lost for
the time being and imagination may run riot. Now, let the imagina-
tion be directed into a definite channel, so to say, and there being
no inhibitory check upon it, whatever power it may have in affecting
vital processes of the organism will be exercised to an unusual
degree in the direction or channel to which its operations are thus
limited.

In such condition the individual may be made to sleep, or to
enter abnormal states, such as catalepsy; to become anaesthetic in
different parts of the body ; to experience hallucinations of sight or
taste, etc.; to exhibit without any external real cause different
trophic disorders, such as the appearance of a blister which goes
through all the stages of change seen in an ordinary blister from a
burn ; to be without memory of what occurs during the condition ;

* To an inquiry in the October number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD concerning hypnotism
there were answers in the next succeeding number of such nature that it seems desirable to set
before the readers of this magazine a short sketch in which the present status of hypnotism,
from a scientific point of view, is presented. Within the limitations of an article such as this
a study of the subject cannot be expected, but it is believed by the writer that an unpartisan
view has been preserved. Many points of greater or less importance to the psychologist and
moralist have been barely touched upon, their bearing for such readers being, it is hoped, fairly
inferable. The works cited, especially those of V. Schrenck-Notzing and Bernheim, teeming,
as they are, with references to the literature of the subject published since 1860, may be con-
sulted by those desirous of fuller information. — JOSEPH T. O'CONNOR, M.D.

1890.] HYPNOTISM. 575

to become an automaton and follow the operator as a piece of soft
iron follows a magnet ; and, finally, to be so imbued with a com-
mand of the operator that at the hour directed by the latter (it may
be many hours, or even some days, afterward) the subject, then in his
ordinary condition, does precisely and at the exact time and without
knowing why just what he had been ordered to do. More than this,
diseases can be ordered away, normal secretions and discharges of
the organism can (their absence being disease) be ordered to return,
and even the normal pains in surgical operations and in childbirth
can be commanded to not appear ; and in suitable subjects these
commands have been obeyed.

These are facts, many of them repeated over and over again,
and the state or condition of body in which such phenomena are
possible is called hypnosis, or, more commonly, hypnotism.

Hypnotism is nothing new. Ancient peoples possessed it, its
practice being mixed with different forms of idolatry ; it is said to
have been employed during the middle ages combined with
"spiritism," and in later times the remarkable results attained by
its practicers, under claims that possibly were in some instances free
from conscious fraud, have been recorded Thus, Valentine Great-
rakes, stated to have been a prominent Irish officer, proclaimed, in
1662,* that he was gifted by God with the power of curing disease.
His renown became extraordinary, for cures really followed, but
attacks of frightful spasms often attended his method, which was
simply the laying on of hands. In 1700 Gessner, a Swabian and
said to be an ex-monk, won celebrity through his cures, and, after
journeying through Swabia, Switzerland, and the Tyrol, settled in
Regensburg. So many had recourse to him, it is said, that at one
time ten thousand persons were health-seekers at his hands, but
there was no room for them in the town and they had to live in the
fields. f The explanation of the cures, of which many must have
been genuine, will appear later.

The first systematic attempt to utilize the method apart from
admixture with the mystical or supernatural was by Mesmer about
1775. He had discovered, in 1772, that by stroking the human
body with a magnet certain peculiar effects followed which he
considered were due to an influence streaming forth from the
magnet, the "magnetic fluid." Later, when he accidentally was
without a magnet, he used a rod of unmagnetized iron, and the same
results followed; and, further, he found that stroking with the naked
hand was equally efficacious. Clinging to the emanation theory, he

*G. Gessmann, Magnctismus rind Hypnotismus. A. Hartleben's Verlag. 1887.
t Gessmann.

576 H YPNO TISM. [Feb. .

now ascribed his results to an influence or fluid drawn from or
emitted by the operator, similar to that from the magnet. He
called this "animal magnetism" to distinguish it from metallic mag-
netism. His fame became great, but in 17843 commission appointed
by the French . government reported unfavorably upon his claims
and suppressed • his method of cure. The term "mesmerism"
was given to the method by his disciples. Before the out-
break of the French Revolution the adherents of Mesmer among
the medical profession were not inconsiderable in number or position,
and after 18153 new society for the cultivation of mesmerism was
founded. About this time the Abbe Faria appeared in Paris, and
by his exhibitions aroused anew the interest of the public in
"animal magnetism." It is worthy of remark that Faria (nothing
is given of his clerical standing) should have been the first to see
the explanation, widely prevalent to-day in scientific circles, of the
phenomena under consideration. He maintained that the cause of
the "somnambulic " phenomena resided 'solely in the magnetized
subject. He was laughed at, made ridiculous, and abandoned his
exhibitions.

But little advance was made in discovery in this domain until
the time of Braid, an English physician, who in 1840 made the
discovery that by the subject's fixing his gaze steadily for some
minutes upon a brilliant object held in a certain position he was put
into a condition analogous to that produced by mesmerism. To this
state Braid gave the name " hypnotism," and its production by
Braid's method of fixing the gaze upon a brilliant object, usually a
faceted glass ball or button, is frequently termed " braidism." All
prominent writers upon our subject at the present time date the
scientific foundation of hypnotism from Braid's investigations.*
All the later, physiologically established, phenomena were already
described by him and he was cognizant of the lighter degrees of
hypnotism as used by the Nancy school (vide infra). He ascribes
the inability to open the eyelids to exhaustion of volitional influence
upon the muscle that raises the upper eyelid. He emphasized the
subjective nature of the influence, as well as the power of dominant
ideas in the waking state, and sought to account for the results
observed in some alteration of the cerebral circulation. According
to him, the occurrence of hypnosis is essentially dependent upon
" expectation." " The livelier the fantasy, the more intense the
attention, the stronger the belief of the patient that the expected
results will occur, the surer and more evidently will the expected

*V. Schrenck-Notzing, Bin Beitrag zur therapeutischen Vetwerthung des Hypnotismus.
Leipzig, 1888.

1890.] HYPNOTISM. 577

phenomena appear even, in many individuals, in the waking state."
He even pointed out the power of " suggestion " in sufficiently deep
conditions of hypnosis. It is worthy of note that his methods have
been followed almost exclusively by the school of Charcot, although
he considered physical methods as merely aids.

We see in Braid's works hypnotism divested of its wrappings of
the supernatural, of spiritism, of fraud, of demonism, and even of
Mesmer's magnetic influence. Braid's publications made but little
impression upon his contemporaries ; indeed, they were scarcely
known outside of England. The notion of some emanating force
found expression in the terms bestowed by different observers and
experimenters upon the cause of hypnotic phenomena. " Electro-
biology " (Grimes, 1848), "Electric Psychology" (Dods, 1850), both
of these from the United States; "Od" or the " odic force"
(Reichenbach, 1852), this being a universally diffused force through-
out space and concentrated by the operator ; and " force neurique
rayonnante," are but a few of the titles, intended to be descriptive,
invented about this time. Gradually, however, prominent members
of the medical profession were brought to give a hearing to the
claims of hypnosis, and Broca and Follin reported to the French
Academy of Sciences in 1859 the opening of an abscess under the
anaesthetic influence of hypnotism. Dr. Guerineau reported in the
same year that he had amputated the thigh under hypnotic anaes-
thesia. Similar reports had, however, been made in 1829, and
several during the period 1845-47.

Liebeault, who had been busy for several years in studying
the phenomena of hypnosis, issued in 1866 his work, Du Som-
mcil et des etats analogues considered surtout au point de vne de
r action dn moral sur le physique. He adhered to the theory ot
" suggestion," which he still further developed, and successfully
employed it as a therapeutic measure. He explained the phe-
nomena from a psycho-physiological point of view. The work of
the Nancy physician made no deep impression, and hypnotism
remained a scientific curiosity ; it was simply known that some
individuals by fixing the gaze upon a brilliant object fell asleep
and became anaesthetic, and that in others catalepsy was pro-
duced.

In 1873 Czermak published his observations on hypnotism in
animals, but as far back as 1646 Athanasius Kirchner had shown
that a chicken placed, with legs tied, before a chalk-mark on the
floor became after a certain time motionless and reactionless to
irritants, and remained in this position even after the thongs were
removed and the animal irritated. Czermak got the same results,

578 HYPNOTISM. [Feb.,

even without tying the animals, in birds, lizards, crabs, rabbits,
etc. Other observers have had similar experiences.

In 1875 Charles Richet, the Paris professor of physiology, in-
vestigated the psychical phenomena of induced somnambulism,
but the greatest impetus to the scientific study of the subject
was from Charcot's experiments upon hysterical patients at La
Salpetriere. His methods, as has been said above, are almost en-
tirely physical, and he divides the phenomena of hypnotism in
hysterical persons, upon whom alone his experiments were made,
into three classes, catalepsy, lethargy, and somnambulism, with,
however, stages of transition.

Catalepsy is produced by sudden intensive sounds, the sudden
flashing of a bright light, etc. In this condition the subject's
eyes are open, staring and fixed, the limbs are in the state known
as flexibilitas cerea and retain for some time any position in
which they are placed, reflex movements are entirely lost or les-
sened, respiration is slowed, there is anaesthesia of the skin and
of certain organs, with contraction of the peripheral blood-ves-
sels. Suggestion is possible, especially via the muscular sense.

Lethargy is caused by " fixing " a not too brilliant object,
after the method of Braid. In this state the eyes are closed, the
reflexes heightened, respiration accelerated, muscular contractures
are readily educed by mechanical irritation of the special muscles,
their tendons, or the nerves supplied to them. There is hyper-
aesthesia rather than the reverse, and the peripheral vessels are
dilated. In exceptional cases only does " suggestion " act.

Somnambulism is caused by long-lasting weak sensorial ex-
citement, or by the mere idea of sleep. The symptoms in this
stage are : normal tendon reflexes ; muscular tonicity, as in the
waking condition ; slight irritation of the skin calls forth con-
tractures of the underlying muscular groups, disappearing through
continuance of the same irritation ; analgesia sometimes ; senses
acute ; eyes half-open, lids tremulous. Consciousness and men-
tal activity cloudy. Suggestion possible, but the power of resis-
tance is present. Mental dulness, as a rule, complete.

By closure of the eyes the cataleptic or somnambulic condi-
tion passes into the lethargic, and by opening the eyes the leth-
argic into the cataleptic. Rubbing the vertex during the cata-
leptic or lethargic stage produces somnambulism.

The school of Charcot hold that only hysterics are subject to
hypnotic methods and that hypnosis itself is a disease, a neu-
rosis.

The final stage of development in the subject up to the pres-

1890.] HYPNOTISM. 579

ent writing culminates in the observations of Dr. H. Bernheim,*
professor in the Medical School at Nancy. He has shown that
the theory of Charcot has beclouded the whole subject, both from
the purely experimental and the therapeutic points of view.

All the facts which for years have been observed in the few
" drilled " hysterical subjects in La Salpetriere can be explained
by the action of " suggestion," and all the phenomena of hyp-
notism are to be thus explained. f Suggestion may be verbal or
by gesture, or by the unconscious play of the operator's features
from surprise, or disappointment, or satisfaction, etc. The expec-
tation that some special line of phenomena will appear acts, in
cases such as Charcot's subjects, as a " suggestion." The " in-
fluence " of different metals applied to different parts of the
body is proven to have been from within the subject, but aroused
by " suggestion " (auto-suggestion, as in the case of applied
plates of gold), from the old notion that, e.g., the metal gold
possesses a specially noble quality, for this metal refused to act
when the subject was made to believe it was copper, and copper,
when believed by the subject to be gold, brought out the same
symptoms as gold did in the earlier experiments. So, in Luys's
experiments with medicines in closed and sealed glass tubes held
in the hand or applied to different parts of the subject's body,
the possibility and even the likelihood of auto-suggestion cannot
be excluded.

Bernheim employs a slight " fixation " of the subject's eyes
or a few passes simply as means to concentrate the patient's at-
tention, and then he " suggests " sleep and finds it to occur in
some degree in a very large proportion of cases observed by
him. Liebeault's table (quoted by Bernheim) shows that of 1,011
persons subjected to the hypnotic method only 27 were refrac-
tory > 33 became slightly drowsy, 100 went into a light sleep,
460 into deep sleep, 229 into very deep sleep, 31 into light
somnambulism, and 131 into deep somnambulism. Bernheim adds
that the people who came to Liebeault were from the masses,
who were undoubtedly already persuaded of his 'magnetic"
power, and consequently with brains ready to yield in some
degree. Sex seemed to make no difference in the statistics.

Bernheim makes nine grades in his classification of the hyp-
notic states, these being in two groups, a, Grade I. -VI., in

* De la suggestion dans I'etat hypnotique et dans I '/tat de veille. Paris. 1884. The
references in this article from BernheLn are from the German translation by Dr. Sigm.
Freud : Die Suggestion und ihre Heil-wirkung. Leipzig und Wien. 1888.

t Forel, Der Hypnotismus : seine Bsdeutung und seine Handhabung. Stuttgart. 1889.

580 HYPNOTISM. [Feb.,

which memory is retained after emerging from the state ; and
b, Grade VII. -IX., in which there is amnesia after awaking,
or somnambulism.

Grade I. has " suggestibility " for distinct physiological acts,
e.g., the arousing of a feeling of warmth in a definite part of the
body, or cessation of pain — both through suggestion ; there is
no catalepsy, nor inability to open the eyes. The patients
assert positively that they have not slept. Grade II., inability
to spontaneously open the eyes ; otherwise the same negative
symptoms. Grade III., suggestive catalepsy, yet with retained
volitional power to overcome this, and the power can be exerted.
Grade IV., suggestive catalepsy, with loss of volitional power to
overcome it (except by suggestion). At times automatic motions,
such as turning the arm for an indefinite length of time, can be
produced. Grade V., suggestive contracture, not to be overcome
by will. Grade VI., automatic obedience in greater or less
degree. The subject is motionless if left to himself, but at com-
mand gets up, or walks, or stands still, etc. Sensory deception
or iUusions cannot be provoked in any of the foregoing stages,
and memory of what has occurred is retained, sometimes with,
sometimes without, consciousness of having slept. Grade VII.,
here belong those cases in which amnesia is present on awaking,
but no hallucination can be produced. In almost all cases of this
grade the phenomena of the previous stages can be called forth,
such as catalepsy, contractures, automatic motions and automatic
obedience. Yet it happens that one or another may be wanting.
Grade VIII., condition is the same as the last, with the production
of hallucinations during the sleep, but it is impossible to cause
hallucinations (by suggestion during the state) occurring after the
awaking. Grade IX., sensitiveness for hypnotic and post-hyp-
notic hallucinations.

More or less analgesia may be evident in all the stages,
oftener in somnambulism.

The views of the Nancy school as to the causation of the
phenomena of hypnotism — that is, by " suggestion" — are accepted
by the greater number of observers in this field, but, as has been
already stated, the Paris school holds to a physical causation.
There are some who maintain that both may be needed in
explanation. Over-irritation, sensorially, as in Braid's method, is
blamed for the appearance of convulsions, etc.

Whatever be the correct position concerning this part of the
question, it seems certain that the greatest therapeutic results
have followed the teachings of the Nancy school, and we have

1 890.] H VPNO TISM. 5 8 1

now to consider just what has been achieved here. All kinds
of hysterical diseases have been cured, many troubles of functional
character, some of inflammatory nature, hemiplegias, etc., from
apoplexy, migraine, hemorrhages, some insanities based upon hys-
teria, the pains of cancer, menstrual anomalies, etc., etc. Many
cases of bad habits, some of them of vile character, have been
cured, and also many of the alcohol and some of the morphine
habit. All of the foregoing makes 'a good showing in favor
of hypnotism as a therapeutic measure. But the question will
be, is it an unsafe measure, or more dangerous than is the use
of many drugs commonly prescribed by physicians ?

The writer believes with Dr. Friedenreich * that "an indi-
vidual who has been frequently hypnotized is thereby rendered
abnormal, and even if other abnormalities cannot be shown to
exist, he is still easily hypnotizable and readily subjected to the
influence of another person." At the same time it must be
remembered that this is probably true only of frequency of the
higher grades of hypnotism, and that Bernheim distinctly states
that the higher grades are not necessary for therapeutic pur-
poses. It is not strictly true that no one can be hypnotized
against his will, but, as Bernheim puts it, no one can be hypno-
tized who does not believe that he can be hypnotized. Thus a
slight influence obtained at a first trial inevitably makes the
second effort more successful. There is no domination of one
mind by another, properly speaking, in hypnotism ; no " clair-
voyance/' or seeing what occurs in a distant place ; no prophetic
power or power of revealing the hidden past, nor any power of
performing miracles. Suggestion accepted without resistance, and
often unconsciously, by the subject accounts for all that hypno-
tism really does; the mode of action within the body is unknown,
but it is according to natural laws of the organism. I have yet
to learn that a tumor has been removed by hypnotism or that
the results of a destructive lesion in the nervous system have
been undone, or that an ulcer has been healed suddenly.
Various superstitious practices have been employed to cure warts
(which are really small tumors), and I have been gravely in-
formed by patients that rubbing a gold ring upon a stye will
cause its disappearance; but if so, it is because of the inherent
" suggestion " becoming assimilated, so to say, in some lower
brain centre and so causing a change from the abnormal to the
normal through it. But such changes take time ; they never occur
suddenly. So, in the cases of hemiplegia, etc., reported as cured

* Vide Neurolog-isckes Centralblatt, April, 1888, p. 211.

582 HYPNOTISM. [Feb.,

by hypnotism, I would prefer to wait for the report of the post-
mortem examination before admitting that the paralysis thus
cured was anything more than what is termed an " indirect "
symptom of the brain lesion. I think that any physician who
understands the effect of destruction of part of the motor tract in
either brain or spinal cord will admit that restoration of destroyed
nerve-tubules is positively out of the question by any natural
means. And I think it well established now that whether the
phenomena of hypnosis are psychical or physical, or both, the
processes involved are natural ones.

The power of post-hypnotic suggestion to cause crime
through an innocent agent carrying out — at a time hours or days
after emerging from the hypnotic state — the action suggested
while in that state has aroused the serious attention of phy-
sicians and jurists alike, while the danger of producing a wide-
spread condition of nervous disease as a result of public
demonstrations of " mesmerism" is emphasized by all writers
upon the subject. In different European countries medical and
legal societies have petitioned the authorities to prohibit all
public exhibitions of "mesmerism" by any person whatsoever,
and to forbid the employment of hypnosis by any person not a
physician with special knowledge of nervous diseases. The use
of hypnosis by physicians should be limited to therapeutic pur-
poses, or for the instruction of medical students, and as for these
ends the lower grades of hypnotism are, according to Bernheim,
sufficient, no injurious consequences need follow. For his own
protection the physician should not use the method except in
the presence of a third reputable person as a witness.

JOSEPH T. O'CONNOR, M.D.

1890.]

THE NORTH WIND.

583

THE NORTH WIND.

" Arise, O North Wind, and come, O South Wind, blow through my garden, and
let the aromatical spices thereof flow." — Canticle of Canticles.

Go ! blighting North Wind, go !
And let the spice-trees blow.

My garden's drear.
Thy breath is chill alway,
Thy touch is slow decay.
I v/ould thou wert away,

My garden's dear.

I would my garden fair,

The South Wind I would there

With warmth ajid life.
North Wind, thou doth not please !
Thy biting airs that freeze
The moaning, sobbing trees

Are all too rife.

My garden is mine own,

My hand the seed hath sown,

For it I wrought.
Its blooming is the prize
I promised to mine eyes ;
With blood and sweat and sighs

'Twas dearly bought.

Go, North Wind, go, I say !
For thou hast had thy day,

This is mine hour.
For all thy cold and frost,
My work — done at such cost —
I will not suffer lost,

For I am Power.

584 THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI. [Feb.,

THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI.*

IN the Central Park Museum, New York, which the prudence,
justice, and generosity of certain wealthy citizens have donated
to the public, there hangs a picture that attracts in a special
manner the attention of clerical visitors. It is called "1'At-
tentat d'Anagni," and represents a pope, in complete pontifical
attire, standing aloft on a dais and seeming to challenge the
onset of certain bold, rough soldiers, led by a man who, sword
in hand, rushes up the steps to assail him, while his ecclesias-
tical associates fly in terror from the pontiff's side. This is the
representation of one of the greatest scenes in history. The
pope is Boniface VIII., who sat in the chair of Peter from 1295
to 1303. His invaders are soldiers of France and the condotti
(armed followers) of the Roman patrician family of the Colonna,
under the leadership of the chancellor of that kingdom, William
Nogaret, and of Sciarra, head of the Colonnas.

What power there is in a picture ! Go look at this one
and see. Cardinal Wiseman tells, in his essay on Boniface VIII.,
how it was through seeing his picture by Giotto in the Lateran
cathedral that he was led to study up the history of this pontiff,
and wonders that this scene had never been chosen as the
subject of the artist's pencil. Indeed, as the cardinal goes on
to say, " it exhibits, beyond almost any other in history, the
triumph of moral over brute force, the power of mind, arrayed
in true dignity oi outward bearing, over passion and injustice."
One or two other events will suggest themselves as parallel to
this. One is the sacking of Rome by the Gaub in the year
363 of the republic, when the fierce barbarians found the priests,
the consuls, and the senators calmly saat^d in their places, clothed
in their official attire, and ready to meet death, as they did meet
it, in majestic silence. Another is the sublime spectacle offered
us in the Fourth Book of Kings, chapter i. :

"And behold Elias sat on the top of a hill. And the captain of fifty spake
unto him : Man of God, the king hath commanded that thou come down.
And Elias answering, said to the captain of fifty : If I be a man of God,

* Cardinal Wiseman's Essays. O'Shea, New York.
Universal Church History : Alzog. Clarke, Cincinnati.
Bishop England's Works. Vol. II. Murphy, Baltimore.

1890.] THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNL 585

let fire come down from heaven and consume thee and thy fifty. And
there came down fire from heaven, and consumed him and the fifty that
were with him."

Nothing attracts men's interest so much as an exhibition
of courage. Even the struggle between two brutes or the duel
of gladiators entices us. The soldier is the general hero. But
the man who in his own room coolly faces death in defence of
his convictions is greater than the warrior engaged in mortal
conflict. He has no rushing battle to hurry him on, no cheering
comrades to support him, no martial trumpet to stir his blood
and divert his thoughts from danger. To suffer is immensely
greater than to do. Hence the unarmed Boniface is beyond
comparison a more striking figure than the leader of his assail-
ants ; hence the artist makes him the central figure of this
painting, the technical merit of which is forgotten in the fasci-
nating interest of its magnificent subject. Let us turn to the
pages of history and learn something of the life of this splendid
hero, and the circumstances in which he displayed the for-
titude whose " counterfeit presentment" is so attractive and
imposing.

Boniface VIII. was the successor of Pope St. Celestine V.
His name, before being raised to the papal throne, was Benedict
Gaetani, and he had distinguished himself as a cardinal in many
important and intricate affairs of state.

•

"On him," says Alzog, "nature had lavished her choicest gifts. He
was equally skilled in canon an I civil law; his talents and accomplish-
ments fitted him to be no less a secular prince than the head of the
church ; his strong sense and force of character enabled him to fully
comprehend his mission and his office, and to go straight through with
whatever business he had in hand, without turning to the right or the
left ; he surpassed all his predecessors in talent for affairs, experience of
practical life, and in his knowledge of the art of governing ; though far
beyond three score and ten, he was still in the full tide and vigor ot
manhood, and must, when looking back upon the lives and calling up the
memories of Gregory VII. and Innocent III., have resolved to follow
their example in pursuing a well-defined policy, and assuming a bold and
determined attitude."

This man was chosen to succeed the gentle, too gentle,
Celestine, and with the design, doubtless, of correcting the abuses
that had arisen in consequence of the last pope's mildness. In
fact, Boniface comes between two saints, his immediate successor
and attached friend being St. Benedict XL, who assumed this
name on his assumption of the papal chair because it was the

586 THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI. [Feb.,

baptismal one of the subject of our sketch. Protestant histo-
rians generally reprobate Boniface VIII., and even Catholic
writers have been carried away by the narrow provincial spirit
which is the characteristic of heresy as distinguished from
Catholicity.

The wizard .of poetry in that age, Dante, hated the pope
because the latter resisted the extension of the imperial power,
Dante being an ardent Ghibelline. Hence he calls him most
caustic names : " the prince of modern Pharisees " ; the " high-
priest whom evil take " (a bitter imprecation) ; nay, makes St.
Peter speak of him as a usurper and charge him with blood-
shed and crime ; he even represents a place prepared for him in
hell amongst those condemned for simony.*

"Dost thou stand there already?
Dost thou stand there already, Boniface ?

Art thou so early satiate with that wealth

For which thou didst not fear to take by fraud

The beautiful Lady [the church] and then work her woe ? "

St. Peter, speaking :

" He who usurps upon the earth my place,
My place, my place, which vacant has become,
Now in the presence of the Son of God,
Has of my cemetery made a sewer
Of blood and fetor, whereat the Perverse
Who fell from here, below there is appeased."

Yet we think it can be shown in no long space that just
as Gregory VII., Sylvester II., Innocent III., and Leo X. have
each obtained a grand though late vindication from Protestant
writers, so Boniface VIII. might also form the subject of a
similar panegyric.

The popes in the Middle Ages were accepted as feudal
superiors by many of the kingdoms of Europe, who even paid
tribute to the Holy See, and thus became secure from subjection
to the emperor and could rely on aid in case of domestic or
foreign trouble. The pope was, in fact, by international law and
custom recognized to be the Head of Christendom, the father
and the judge of nations, and much of the "pomp and circum
stance " attaching to the pontifical court was and is owing to
this state of things. Hence one need not be surprised that when
Boniface was riding from the Vatican to the Lateran cathedral

"Longfellow's Dante: Infer-no, xxvii. 70, 85; xix. 52,

1890.] THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI. 587

to be enthroned Bishop of Rome two feudatory kings led his
horse, as well as afterwards washed his hands at Mass, and served
him at the banquet following, taking seats themselves lower down
with the cardinals. Apart from temporal considerations, we can
easily understand how Catholic gentlemen would consider it an
honor to render this service to the successor of St. Peter, and,
besides, the monarchical institutions of Europe render necessary
certain, display which our democratic simplicity does not easily
understand. The new pope at once began to act in accordance
with his ideal of the lofty position he occupied. His first care
was to pacify the ever-contending Italian republics, to make
peace between Philip of France and Edward of England, to dis-
suade the German emperor from invading the former country, to
set about the reunion of the Greeks with the Holy See, and the
recovery of the Holy Land, whence the Catholics had been driven
in 1291. He gave Sicily to Charles II. of Naples, and Corsica
and Sardinia to James of Aragon, requiring tribute of each of
these kings ; he excommunicated Henry VIII., king of Denmark,
and condemned him to pay a heavy fine for having imprisoned
the guiltless Archbishop of Lunden ; he founded the famous
University of Rome called the Sapienza, and canonized St.
Louis IX., the crusading king of France.

The temporal authority of the popes had, however, been
gradually waning, and though the policy of Boniface, like that
of his predecessors, had been to establish peace among the
states of Europe, to defend oppressed princes and prelates, and
adjust differences among contending parties and factions, it was
not always his fortune to have .his labors crowned with success,
and he was not unfrequently obliged to employ weapons, both
temporal and spiritual, against those who resisted his authority.
His first great difficulty arose from an effort to settle a family
quarrel of the Colonnas, one of the great Roman families.
Two of its members — James Colonna and his nephew Peter —
were cardinals. The former was allowed by his three brothers
to administer the family estate for the common good, but, not
doing so to their satisfaction, they complained to their sovereign,
the pope. The latter exerted himself to have justice done,
but in vain. The offending cardinal and his nephew, with
others of the family, not only refused to obey, but even
became guilty of high treason by giving aid and comfort to
Frederic of Aragon, then at war -with the pope. They fled
from Rome, and though they themselves had voted for Boniface
in the conclave, now issued a manifesto declaring his election

VOL. L. — 38

588 THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI. [Feb.,

invalid, and, circulating it among the people, dared even to have
a copy nailed to the great door of St. Peter's, and another laid
upon the high altar!

Decision shows the man. The grand old pope responded
at once to the challenge. The crime and the criminals were so
well known that no long trial was called for. That very night
he excommunicated his rebellious subjects, with their clerical
adherents, and declared war against them. He made one of the
injured brothers of Cardinal James captain of his forces, and
razed to the ground the family fortress, Palestrina (native place
of the great embellisher of the Gregorian chant). But the ready
and decisive pontiff nurtured no revenge. The Colonnas came
of their own accord and sued for pardon, and though their
lives were forfeit with their goods, he absolved them from the
excommunication and let them go. How they requited his
mercy the picture intimates, and we shall see later on.

It was from France, however, that his greatest troubles came,
and by the eldest daughter was the father's honor most cruelly
outraged and his noble spirit tried. From France, did we say ?
Rather, it should be said, from the tyrant who then ruled that
noble nation — a man who set at naught the international law of
.all civilized countries, as well as violated the rights and customs
of his own. He imprisoned Guy, Count of Flanders, and his
.two sons, with several nobles, against the solemn engagement
made by his own general and cousin, Charles of Valois —
: treachery that was amply revenged by the Flemings under -the
.leadership of their renowned sovereign* the " Lion of Flanders,"
in the battle of the Golden Spurs. He interfered, as we shall
see, with the most exalted prerogatives of church government —
being a man, according to Chamber srs Encyclopedia (no friend
of Boniface, as it calls his death a victory for civilization), who
•" converted royalty, which was formerly protecting, kind, and
popular to the mass of the people, into a hard, avaricious, and
pitiless task-master, under whom the taxes were greatly in-
creased, the Jews persecuted, and their property confiscated ; and
who, when these means were insufficient to satisfy his avarice,
caused the coinage to be greatly debased." Such was the man
whose opposition does immortal honor to Boniface VIII. What
greater credit can be claimed for any one than that the unjust
and the oppressor hate and oppose him, and that he fights and
resists them to the end? "We love him, therefore, for the
.enemies he made."

The immediate cause of the outbreak between the pope and

1 890.] THE 0 UTRA GE AT ANA GNI. 5 89

Philip was the latter's levying an extra impost on the clergy
and extorting the same, without the consent of the Holy See
and after its proper protest and warning.

Wars in those days, as very often now, were frequently
gotten up for mere personal motives, ambition, or family aggran-
dizement. " Quidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi" The
pope often interfered in behalf of the oppressed people ; but at
all events, he was the proper protector of ecclesiastics and of
church property. When it is considered that Edward of England
in this war required one-half the entire income of the ecclesi-
astics in his realm, and that Philip demanded one-fifth of all
their property, movable and immovable, the grounds for the
papal bull of condemnation are plain enough. Still, not to
exasperate the king, he explained that it was not intended to
forbid the clergy giving what they liked, if only it were freely
given and not extorted illegally — that is, beyond the ordinary rate
prescribed by law. The popes were obliged to be very cautious
in censuring wilful monarchs, as they might do, and often did,
immense harm to the church and to their people when pushed
too far. Witness the conduct of Henry VIII. of England and
his successors.

Philip was not disposed to meet the pontiff half-way, but
continued to resist his authority as supreme judge in interna-
tional matters, to harass the clergy and seize their property in
the various dioceses, and, ,as he had imprisoned the Count of
Flanders and his sons in violation of an armistice, so he did
the same with the bishop sent as ambassador by Boniface. He
had this prelate (one of his own subjects) arraigned and convicted
of high treason on silly and contradictory counts, and requested
the pope to degrade him that he might be punished according
to the law in similar cases..

The pope replied by suspending the tithes which he had
allowed the clergy of France to pay for a two years' space, and
issued a bull in which he reminded the monarch that, though a
king, he was still a son of the church and a subject of her head ;
and he proceeded to complain of the violations of popular and
ecclesiastical rights, of which he had been guilty, by arbitrary
appointments of individuals to church livings, by levying oppres-
sive taxes on the clergy, and by seizing the revenues of vacant
bishoprics, as well as by debasing the coin of the realm, and
thus meanly robbing his own subjects and the neighboring
peoples. The king got very angry and claimed that he had
no superior on earth but God himself; called the pope an

59° THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI. [Feb.,

aggressor, and invited the estates of the kingdom to assemble in
congress and maintain the ancient liberties of the nation.

While the nobles and the commoners appear to have sided
with the king, the clergy assured him of their good-will, but
begged permission to attend the synod at Rome, to which the
pope had summoned them and him for the removal of difficulties
and the establishment of peace. In fact, notwithstanding Philip's
violent threats, four archbishops, thirty-five bishops, and six
abbots are said to have gone to Rome in November, 1302, to
be present at this council. The result of it was the issue of
the famous bull Unam Sanctam, in v/hich the pope defines,
as matter of faith, that all Christians, no matter what their
station, are subject to the church and to her head • on earth ; not
inasmuch as the pope may claim the jurisdiction of another king,
but that if any king's conduct in his government be against God's
law, then it is the pope's right and duty to correct him, and his
to obey the pope. Boniface now sent the Cardinal of Amiens to
Philip with the object of conciliation, but, like his predecessor in
a liks office, the eminent priest was cast into prison. Philip
again assembled the three estates (clergy, nobles, and commoners),
and once more protesting against the pope, not only rejected
his acts, but, on the suggestion evidently of the exiled
Colonnas, who had left the Roman states after the razing of
Palestrina, drew up a long, bitter, and most heinous indictment
against Boniface, whom he charged with heresy, witchcraft, idol-
atry, disbelief, simony, and murder.

The deputies pledged their fortunes and their lives in defence
of the liberties of France against the .aggressions of Rome, and
for the first time in history king and people, high and low,
appealed from the pope to the general council, thus starting the
famous " Gallican Liberties," and practically opening a schism.
" Of all the prelates and ecclesiastics present at that Gallican
assembly," says Alzog, "the Abbot of Citeaux alone had the
courage and the manliness to stand up and protest against pro-
ceedings so dishonest and violent."

But those bishops who objected to obeying the pope found
that they had to render double obedience, in spirituals as well as
in temporals, to the king, whose little finger proved heavier than
the loin of their spiritual superior, and discovered to their loss
that their emancipation from the head of the church only left
them bound hand and foot, and absolutely under control of an
unprincipled layman. Jesus Christ provided for the freedom of
Christians by establishing two distinct powers, one in the spirit-

1890.] THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNL 591

ual sphere, the other in the temporal; and thus the citizen
was free from the power of the pope in so far as the civil
allegiance was concerned, and safe from the power of the king
in matters regarding the tribunal of conscience. The so-called
" Gallican Liberties " destroyed this compensating arrangement of
the Son of God, and the clergy of France became the creatures
and slaves of tfhe " fool and oppressor " that chanced to be on
the throne, very much as the Protestant sectarians who followed
them two centuries later. Gallicanism, like heresy, always results
in political tyranny.

We need not say anything of the accusations brought against
the character of Boniface, which not only he himself solemnly
and on oath denied in a consistory of the cardinals held at Anagni,
but from which a general council, held a couple of years after
his death in that very France, and under a French pope,
Clement V., completely vindicated his memory. But we come
now to the last act in the tragedy, in which the Lion of the
Fold was brought to bay by the hounds of his enemy, and the
Vicar of Christ, exhibiting one of the grandest spectacles the
world has ever witnessed, triumphed over the Prince of this
world and his satellites.

William de Nogaret, the keeper of the royal seals, who had
taken an active part in getting up the charges against the pope,
was sent into Italy, accompanied by Sciarra Colonna, the former
ostensibly as ambassador, but really, as Rohrbacher says, with
the intention and order to seize the pope and convey him prisoner
to France (nay, even, perhaps the French Protestant historian
Sismondi is correct when he declares, "evidently to kill him"!) —
an enterprise surely more worthy of the Old Man of the
Mountain than of the Catholic king of chivalric Gaul. Nogaret
had with him a band of three hundred horsemen, and being
joined by adherents of the Colonnas and other malcontents and
traitors, came secretly to the environs of Anagni, an old town in
the ancient maritime province of Italy, and about forty miles south-
east from Rom 3. Here Pope Boniface was staying with some of
the cardinals. It was his native place, and he felt there more
security and peace thai] in his episcopal city.

The conspirators not only bribed some of the pontifical
guard, as Moroni says (Dizionzrio : art " Bonif. VIII."), but
even the chief men of the town sold the Vicar of Christ — their
king, their countryman, and their fellow-townsman — for the debased
coin of France. At midnight, September 7, 1303, the whole

592 THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNL [Feb.,

troop swarmed around the palace where the Holy Father was,
and with cries of " Death to Pope Boniface ! Long live the
King of France!" attacked it on different sides. We can imagine
the feelings of the venerable old man, who in his eighty-seventh
year found himself suddenly roused and informed of the cause of
the tumult. Doubtless, however, whatever sadness may have
invaded his aged breast gave way quickly to sentiments of con-
fidence, of courage, mayhap even of joy, that he was made
worthy to follow so closely in the footsteps of his Divine Chief.
So vigorous, too, were the efforts made by the faithful members
of his household, and so well did the great building lend itself
to the purposes of defence, that it was full midday before the
combined bands of Nogaret and Colonna succeeded in effecting an
entrance.

Meanwhile the pope vested himself in full pontificals, even to
the tiara, to which he himself had added the second of the three
crowns that encircle it, knelt awhile before the altar, then
mounted his throne and ordered the doors of the audience
chamber to be thrown open. " Since I am to be taken by
treachery," he said, according1 to Darras, "like my divine Master,
and am in the face of death,.! wish at least to die as a pope."
He then took his crucifix in one hand, and in the other held
the symbolic keys. On account of the dreadful confusion* which
now followed the bursting in of the infuriated soldiery, it is
natural that accounts, even of eye-witnesses, should vary in regard
to the details of what was said and done. Sciarra Colonna, with
drawn sword, rushed in first, but stood awed and irresolute under
the calm, intrepid eye of his spiritual and temporal superior.
Perhaps he felt a silent reproach for this return to the amnesty
granted him by his sovereign and conqueror four years before.
The leader of the French now rushed forward, and seemed as if
about to use for the first time that knightly sword wherewith
he had been girded for his services as chancellor to Philip, on the
defenceless body of an aged priest, but he also quailed before
the majesty of the pontiff. Lawyer as he was, however, he
began to use his tongue and to lash therewith the victim of his
wiles and violence. " My lord the kingf gives you your life :
lay down the tiara; resign the papacy." There was no reply.
"You will not? Then I am going to take you to Lyons to be
judged and deposed by a general council of all the bishops."
The pope made answer different from that of Elias to the
captain of fifty: "Behold my head, behold my neck! I am

1890.] THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI. 593

ready to suffer for the faith of Christ and the liberty of his
church. Pope as I am, and legitimate Vicar of Jesus Christ, I
will patiently suffer condemnation and deposition at the hands of
the Patareni." These words alluded not only to the heresies
prevalent in certain districts of France, but cut Nogaret per-
sonally, as his own progenitors had been condemned for attach-
ment to the sect named.

The pontiff was then left under a guard of soldiers while the
sacrilegious invaders of his residence scattered themselves to riot
and pillage. For two days and more the aged pope remained in
durance too vile to be described, and deprived of rest, not only,
but even of food. At last the people of Anagni, driven by shame
and pity, and excited by the appeals of Cardinal Fieschi, took
arms for the rescue of him who had come " unto his own,"
and had trusted in the hospitality of his native city. Crying
out, "Long live the Pope ! Death to traitors!" they drove out
the hostile bands, killed some of them and took others prisoners,
amongst the latter Nogaret himself, whom the Vicar of Christ,
however, set free without imposing penalty or requiring ran-
som.

A few days later Boniface set out for Rome, where he re-
ceived a most extraordinary ovation from the people. But, alas
for human nature! The cardinals of the Orsini family, another
of those Roman patrician clans, indignant that they should have
been suspected of complicity against him, would not allow him
to enter the papal residence, but imprisoned him again in his
own capital and detained him for a time. Then at length the
pontiff felt the reaction setting in and his stout constitution giving
way ; his last illness seized him. He died " like a pope," to use
his own words. We have the authority of the " process " used
in the posthumous inquiry into his conduct at the General Coun-
cil of Vienne, A.D. 1311, eight years after his death, that he
" made profession of all the articles of faith in the presence of
eight cardinals, according to the usage of the Roman pontiffs,"
received the Sacraments, and gave up the ghost on the iith of
October, 1303, one month after the "outrage at Anagni."

Considering the disturbed condition of things in Italy at that
time, and the positive, stern, and inflexible character of Boniface,
it is no wonder that many stories should be current about him
and the wildest rumors regarding his every action. Certain
Ghibelline and Gallican writers, among them Chateaubriand, re-
peat how he died in anger and despair at the unrevenged out-

594 THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI. [Feb.,

rages of which he had been the victim. " Un Colonne lui
frappa au visage," says the writer just named (quoted by Rohr-
bacher), alluding to the assertion of some that Sciarra Colonna
had struck the pope with his gauntlet at Anagni, " Boniface en
meurt de rage et de douleur."*

And here we may be allowed to remark, What a hard time
the popes had and still have ! The predecessor of Boniface died
in prison ; he himself suffered what we have related ; his suc-
cessor, Saint Benedict XL, died of poison administered in a bou-
quet by a youth in the habit of a nun (Moroni, Dizionario ad
hunc loc.) What Chateaubriand refers to is the tale that Boni-
face when dying bit his hands in impotent rage. But " history
is death to atheism : she is God's witness," and so is time. On
the nth of October, 1605, three centuries and two years after
his death, it became necessary on account of certain repairs in
St. Peter's to remove the sarcophagus of the pope, and a nat-
ural and perhaps pious curiosity led them to raise the lid of the
wooden coffin inside the marble tomb. This was done, however,
in the presence of the cardinal vicar-general of Rome, of the
whole body of canons of St. Peter, of several bishops then pres-
ent in the city, and of the chief lay magistrate and certain phy-
sicians; even the general public was admitted. What was the
astonishment of the beholders to see the body as if in sleep,
and in a wonderful state of preservation ! " Corpus integrum et
incorruptum," says the chronicler, " manus habebat longas et
pulchras cum unguibus, signis venarum et nervorum, adeo ut
videntibus summam injiceret admirationem"f (v. Darras). A no-
tary drew up a formal account of this disclosure of the body, of
its marvellous condition, of the hands which calumny had made
the dying pontiff rend with his remaining teeth, of the placid
expression of the face, and of the gorgeous pontifical robes in
which the corpse was attired. So God in time brought about the
vindication of his vicar.

Philip, the modern Pilate, \ as Dante calls him, died in 1314,
and as if in punishment for his crimes, his three sons, who one
after another succeeded him, left no legal heirs, and in 1328 the
crown that had been handed down from father to son for over

* " A Colonna struck him in the face, and Boniface died of rage and grief at the insult."
t " The body, entire and incorrupt, had long and beautiful hands, with the finger-nails
and marks of the veins and nerves so perfect as to fill the beholders with the greatest wonder."
\ " I see the modern Pilate so relentless

This^does not sate him " (the outrage at Anagni), " but without decretal
He to the temple bears his sordid sails."

—Purgatorio, xx. 91, Longfellow's trans.

1890.] THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI. 595

three hundred years passed away from the direct line of the
Capets.

And now that we are about to draw the veil over the picture
that first drew us to look into the history of Boniface VIII., let
us try and take in his remarkable character as a whole. He
had enemies, but the man who has none, according to the Rou-
manian proverb, "is not of much account." He was not con-
spicuous by his mildness ; in fact, he erred perhaps on the side
of severity, especially in his treatment, necessary though it un-
doubtedly was, of his predecessor, the ex-pope Saint Peter Ce-
lestine. "A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a barrel
of vinegar" it is true, but when rocks are to be blasted, then it
is vinegar that is required. And this was the mission of Boni-
face VIII. But he was not revengeful, and showed as much
forbearance with the prince whom Johann von Miiller calls
Philip the Insolent (Alzog, ii. 819) as Saint Francis of Sales
might have exhibited. Not a word is said against his morals,
no stain of avarice is ascribed to him. His literary ability is
shown in the style of the bulls which he issued, his political in-
terference was uniformly for peace, and for justice even at the
cost of peace.

" Catholics are too apt," says the learned annotator of Bishop England's
works (vol. ii. p. 519, ed. 1849), "to cherish an excessive admiration for that
gentle and. retiring virtue which appears in such men as Celestine V., and to im-
agine that there is something foreign to the Christian temper in that bolder and
sterner character which is seen in Gregory and Innocent and Urban and Boni-
face. But we should remember that the Old Testament sets the example of such
men as the last in a light equally advantageous with that of the former, and that
God raises them up especially to guide his church in the periods of storm and
tempest, inspiring by the ' same Spirit ' some with the holy purpose of abdicating
the world and its honors like the humble Celestine, and others with the resolution
so nobly expressed by Urban VI. when advised to take the same course : ' Stabo
et debellabo diabolum.' "

This writer might have added that even in the " Law of
Love " Boniface could find precedent for his severity, and this
not only in the examples of Saint Peter, his first predecessor, in
the interview with Ananias and Saphira (Acts v.), and of Saint
Paul with Elymas (Acts xiii.), but even of the Lamb of God
himself in his dealings with the proud and unjust (Matt xxiii.
14 ; John xviii. 6, etc.)

We have already quoted some of Dante's very hard and par-
tisan expressions regarding Boniface, but no word in that poet,

596 THE OUTRAGE AT ANAGNI. [Feb.,

nor in any other writer, however hostile, says Cardinal Wiseman
(Essays), " contains the slightest insinuation against his moral
conduct or character, nor any imputation of avarice, and this is
not a little thing in one who has been more bitterly assailed
than almost any other pontiff." The poet-laureate of Italy,
Dante's contemporary, Petrarch, calls Boniface " the marvel of the
world," and the Protestant Plaick has written a vindication of
him. There is in the history of the church, and especially in that
of her chief bishops, a very great analogy to that of Jesus Christ
himself. It is very hard to reflect how they seem to be set up,
as he was, "as a sign which shall be spoken against," as King
James' version has it, or " as a sign which shall be contra-
dicted," as it is in the Douay (Luke ii. 34), without feeling
convinced that the pope is indeed what he claims to be, really
and indeed the undying vicar and representative of our Lord on
earth. The Catholic heart of Dante melted at the parallel which
the " outrage at Anagni " suggested ; he forgot the fierce in-
vective with which he had assailed Boniface, and indignantly
sang:

'' I see the flower-de-luce Alagna enter,
And Christ in his own Vicar captive made.
I see him yet another time derided,
I see renewed the vinegar and gall,
And between living thieves I see him slain.
I see the modern Pilate so relentless
This does not sate him, but without decretal
He to the temple bears his sordid sails !
When, O my Lord! shall I be joyful made
By looking on the vengeance which, concealed,
Makes sweet thine anger in thy secrecy? " *

EDW. F. X. McSwEENY.

* Longfellow's Purgatorio, xx. 86.

1890.] DR. WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.

597

DR. WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.*

MR. WILFRID WARD'S book is a valuable contribution to the
literature and history of the Tractarian movement, in which his
father, Mr. W. G. Ward, played a conspicuous part. Indeed,
after Cardinal Newman — to whose genius and elevation of moral
purpose the movement owes its chief attraction — no name we
could mention in connection with it stood more prominently
forward from 1838 to 1845. These years were most eventful
ones, both to the actors in the Oxford drama and also to the
English Church Establishment^ whose religious character, it was
hoped, might be changed by the views, the aims, and teaching
of a few gifted and high-minded men. Their efforts to Catholi-
cize England, and their failure to do more than save their own
souls, is an oft-repeated story. Like Saul of old, they went
forth on their errand, at first but a humble one, viz., to restore
to the Establishment the teaching of the standard Anglican, but
not Catholic, divines. But as they travelled onwards their vision
grew wider and still wider, till their aim became the impossible
one of merging error into, truth, and of uniting a sect with the
church. This was not to be done — as it well might have been
done — by the submission of the former and by the renouncement
of its independence, but by what is styled " corporate reunion " —
in other words, by a system of concessions in which both Rome
and England, meeting on equal terms, were mutually each to
yield what the other refused to accept. Such a scheme, of course,
was predestined to failure ; and as a corporate body the English
Church has profited little or not at all by the Tractarian effort.
Yet at the same time their work was not all labor lost, for the
men themselves gained the Kingdom. Their aim had been so
high, their trust had been so great, and their love for all that
was Catholic had grown so strong that they could never again be
as they had once been, mere Anglican Protestants. When, there-
fore, their hope of Catholicizing England by means of the Estab-
lishment failed them, one by one they entered the church; and on
the whole, though of course there were exceptions, the Tracta-
rian leaders became Catholics. Thus was their hope fulfilled and
their fidelity to their principles rewarded ; and though the result
came to pas; very differently from their first expectations, none

* William George Ward ani the Oxford Movement. By Wilfrid Ward. London and
New York : Macmillan & Co. 1889.

598 DR. WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. [Feb.,

in the end rejoiced more than the Oxford converts that their
dream of the reunion of the churches was exchanged for the
solid reality of a simple and child-like submission to the one true
church, and the unconditional acceptance of the Catholic faith.

As we said above, all this is well known. Yet as we read
in turn of the part played by each individual Tractarian in the
Oxford movement fresh matter of interest appears, and the old
story is seen from a new point of view. The movers themselves,
too, were men whose thoughts and words are well worth our
noting. They were men by whose writings, \>y whose poetry,
by whose philosophy England will ever be the richer. In each
leader we see a special gift, and if Newman be the prophet,
and Faber, Caswell, and Keble be considered the poets of the
movement, we claim for Mr. W. G. Ward the not less important
part of being its chief philosopher.

There is no doubt that Ward was a great philosopher; but
in his case the gravity associated with deep thought was greatly
mitigated. He was a born logician, to whom insufficient or
defective reasoning was positively painful, who could never rest
satisfied with an answer that did not go straight to the root ot
a question It was in the October term of 1830 that W. G.
Ward went to Oxford and was entered as a commoner at
Christ Church. At this date no form « of religious thought was
very active in the university, and he therefore threw his chiet
interest into the political discussions of the Oxford Union, a
debating society of which he was then described as the "Tory
Chief." Of the characteristics of a genuine Tory we find, how-
ever, but few signs in Ward. His keen power of speculative
insight into every question brought before him, and the zest
and enjoyment with which he used this power, were antagonistic
to the tacit acquiescence in existing conditions which is encour-
aged by the conservative spirit. " He always brought everything
back to first principles," writes of him an old friend ; and first
principles and Tory principles are not always at one. In the
end the philosophical bias of his mind, joined to strong popular
sympathies and a general and thoroughly Catholic appreciation
of the true position of the poor in the Christian economy,
proved stronger than the hereditary instinct which on first enter-
ing the university induced him to join the party of which both
his father and grandfather were then zealous supporters ; and
though he does not appear later on in life to have been an
active politician, the bent of his mind was liberal. At this we
are in no way surprised ; for if Ward's speculative sense pre-

1890.] DR. WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 599

vented his being a Tory intellectually, it was in no way counter-
balanced by any romantic or poetical love of the history or the
sentiments of bygone times. Such a feeling enables some minds
— though they cannot intellectually admire much that is in the
past — to find therein a charm more potent than reason, which
causes them to be unwilling to disturb or to part with much
that is argumentatively indefensible. In Ward this sense seems to
have been absent to an unusual degree. The poetry of the
past did not appeal to him, and he looked on history as a
mere dry record of facts in no way more attractive than the
columns of his daily newspaper. Indeed, he would maintain that
the acts of Julius Caesar, the romances of chivalry, or the stern
zeal and fanatical devotion displayed in the English civil wars
were intrinsically no more interesting than the doings of any in-
significant Mr. Smith of to-day, and the story of his breakfast, of
his journey to the city in an omnibus, and of his return home
to dinner.

We must remember, as Mr. Wilfrid Ward bids us, that the
Oxford of to-day has little in common with the Oxford of fiftv
years ago; and that though but slight outward change may be
seen (for the old walls are so aged that a century more or less
can hardly be noted on their stones), each decade of this last
half-century has probably brought about more change of spirit
and of thought than any full century in the years gone by ;
and perhaps no years were more pregnant with new life than
those from 1835 to I%45- These were the years when the Trac-
tarian movement was at its height ; and when the movement
collapsed it did not leave ecclesiastical things as they had been
before. Its far-reaching effect has been curtly stated by Mr.
James Anthony Froude ; and though Mr. Wilfrid Ward disputes
his view, there is a certain amount of truth in it. " But for the
Oxford movement, scepticism might have continued a harmless
speculation of a few philosophers." In other words, it set men
thinking, or, rather, it would have been more correct to say it
set Anglican churchmen thinking. Thought throughout Europe
had been busy enough for some years, and in England it had not
been inactive. The semi- political philosophy of Bentham, of the
two Mills, and of other so-called radicals was, in the beginning
of this century, in possession of the most active and eager intel-
ligences in this country. We believe we do the philosophy no
injustice when we say that it was a system which claimed to be
outside all divine revelation, and that it was content to dispense
with the existence of a Supreme Being. At the same time, it

6oo DR. WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. [Feb.,

had the temporal welfare of mankind greatly at heart, and to the
following of some of its maxims much of the material prosperity
of England may be attributed. Had the triumph of the utili-
tarian philosophy, however, been complete, England would prob-
ably have lost her special characteristic of moderation in dealing
with political and social evils, and her pride in being able to cure
abuses whilst avoiding the danger of tearing up corn and weeds
alike. In the place of sober reforms she might have fallen a
victim to revolutionary chances ; for, as is well known, the
school of which we speak were anxious to abolish the English
aristocracy and to destroy the English Church Establishment.
Both, no doubt, needed much reform, but at that time it is
doubtful whether England could have spared the latter ; for
though to-day it may be argued that the Catholic Church is
well-nigh ready to take the place of the Establishment, sixty
years ago this was hardly the case.

The fear of being destroyed had, however, the effect of arous-
ing Anglican churchmen. To fight a common foe, two schools
of thought arose \fithin the Establishment almost contempora-
neously— the High and the Broad Church systems ; and these
have since then remained the most active amongst the multi-
tude of divers opinions permitted by law to exist within the
Church of England. With the latter we are but slightly con-
cerned, and were it not that for a while W. G. Ward was a zealous
follower of its founder, Dr. Arnold, of Rugby School, we had
hardly need to mention it. But no account of Ward would be
complete without some notice, which space obliges us to make
brief, of his early religious leanings — leanings which, in the
first years of his Oxford life, seem to have been in the very op-
posite direction to those of his later years. We must also en-
deavor to give a slight sketch of the working of an active and
logical mind during the change which transformed the young
Benthamite into a fervent Catholic.

Ward came to Oxford an admirer of Bentham, if not a philo-
sophic Radical. Here his first religious attraction was Whateley,
the future Archbishop of Dublin, in whom he recognized a
" breadth of sympathy and a dislike of unreality " which claimed
his adherence, and whose logical distinctness of mind he also
much appreciated. This influence, however, lasted but a short
time, and to it succeeded that of Dr. Arnold, in whose teaching
Ward's special attractions in the higher life, unworldliness, hatred
of all shams and love of the poor, found full recognition. Here
he was content for a while to abide. But, full of moral excel-

1890.]

DR. WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.

60 1

lence as was Dr. Arnold's teaching, and sympathetic and large-
hearted as was the master himself, Arnold's system rested on too
insecure a basis ultimately to satisfy so clear and keen a mind as
Ward possessed. Morally there was little fault to find, but
after a while he discovered that intellectually Arnold had no firm
ground to rest upon, and that the spirit of free inquiry on which
his teaching was based would carry a logician like Ward to the
denial of all revelation whatsoever. Through life Ward consis-
tently maintained that the unaided intellect of man was ins'uffi-
cient to furnish him with the most elementary articles of faith
(even with the belief in the existence of a God), and Arnold's
method of reaching truth — namely, by the principle of free in-
quiry applied to Scripture — whilst it furnished sufficient doctrine
for Arnold's moral teaching, was to Ward's deeper insight quite
unequal to 'found a satisfactory basis for any religion at all.

But though Arnold's religious teaching failed Ward, he was
in no danger of losing all faith, as did so many of Arnold's dis-
ciples. His strong religious sense, his deep realization of God's
presence and power in the world, and his early resolution that
his whole life should be devoted to the promotion of God's
glory, saved him from a like fate. When he discovered that in-
tellectually his creed was undermined, he decided that the main-
spring of faith was not in the intellect at all, but in the con-
science; and he was thus uninjured by the weakness of Dr.
Arnold's reasoning. The promptings of conscience, if carefully
listened to and carefully followed, lead us forward ; and the con-
nection between holy living and true teaching he discovered to
be intimate and sufficient for our guidance. " Conscience was
the primary informant, as being directly conversant with the
moral nature of the individual, and with the first principles
which that nature implied, and also as giving him intuitive trust
in others whose moral perceptions were wider and truer than
his own." Thus he gained the dogmatic principle, and this,
joined to a craving for a visible and trustworthy guide which his
nature had ever experienced, and which is supplied by the true
church, made him intellectually a Catholic some years before his
actual submission. In those far-off years it was, perhaps, not so
easy as it is to-day to tear away from the Establishment and to
enter the fold. It is true, no convert ever had fewer prejudices
to overcome or less love for the religion of his birth to hold
him back. Still, even Ward could not leap at one bound from
the latitudinarianism of Dr. Arnold into the full plenitude of
the Catholic faith and body. Like so many others, he was first

602 DR. WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. [Feb.,

a follower of Newman, and it was only -when the latter was
ready to leave the Establishment that Ward agreed to follow.

In his early Oxford days he seems to have entertained a
prejudice against the great Tractarian leader. When asked to
attend the sermons which the latter was then preaching in the
University pul-pit of St. Mary's Church, and which were stirring
the whole religious life of England, Ward's only answer was :
" Why should I go and listen to such myths?" By the strategy
of a friend, Ward found himself one Sunday afternoon at the
church door just as the clock was striking five, the hour for the
sermon. "'Now, Ward,' said he, 'Newman is at this moment
going .up into his pulpit. Why should you not enter and hear
him once ? It can do you no harm. If you don't like the
preaching you need not go a second time ; but do hear and
judge what the thing is like.' By the will of God, Ward was
persuaded, and he entered the church. . . . That sermon changed
his whole life." From this moment the personal influence which
Newman exercised over Ward was the chief motor fh his life ;
and as time went on it only increased. Many years after, when
both were Catholics, and they differed on a matter of ecclesi-
astical policy, Ward wrote plaintively to Newman : " Ever since
I have been unable to act with you, I have felt myself a kind
of intellectual orphan."

Still, in those first days Ward's intellectual convictions were
hardly with the Tractarians. It was his animus chiefly that
changed. Up to this time the movement had repelled him ;
now he felt for it a moral if not an intellectual attraction.
These were the days when Newman still believed and hoped in
and worked for the via media. This did not go far enough for
Ward. He required that the principles of the Reformation, as
well as its actual results, should be condamnsd; and for some
years this was the point at which Newman stopped short. The
appearance of Hurrell Fronde's Remains, a work in which the
Reformation was condemned and its authors met with severe
criticism, was the event which decided Ward on avowedly joining
the Tractarians. The book simply delighted him. Thoroughness
was its characteristic ; it never temporized, but put forth the
author's not over-popular views in an uncompromising way that
even Ward himself could hardly have exceeded. Hurrell Froude
professed "openly his admiration for Rome and his hatred of the
Reformers " ; and again, what greatly attracted Ward, " authority
in religion was the avowed principle. A clear, explicit rule 01
faith was substituted for perplexing and harassing speculation."

1890.] DR. WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 603

The book was edited by Newman and Keble, and was approved
by them. At length, therefore, Ward was satisfied, and allowed
his intellect to follow in harmony with the moral charm which
Newman, as we have said, already exercised over him, and he
formally joined the Tractarian party. As was generally the case
with Ward, the extremest amongst the extreme, he was soon
even ahead of it, and, regardless of all strategy, was delighting
in arousing and shocking Protestant prejudice, and was never
better pleased than when he was most paradoxical.

Newman himself tells* us the movement at this point was
joined by a new school of thought, consisting of " eager, acute,
resolute minds, who had heard much of Rome. They cut into
the movement at an angle, and then set about turning it in a
new direction." Amongst these none was more active than
Ward, nor did any other more completely scare and annoy the
older and, if more sober, the less logical Tractarians than did
he. These latter, though falsely claiming the proud name of
Catholics, and really opposed to much of the popular Protes-
tantism by which they were surrounded, were still more strongly
opposed to the claims of Rome. Indeed, like their successors,
the Ritualists of to-day, they may be termed merely fancy-
religionists, for whilst they chose here and there a point of
Catholic doctrine and insisted greatly on it, they were entirely
without any due appreciation or knowledge of the true propor-
tion of the faith, or of the key-note to all our belief, viz.,
church authority resting on a divine and guiding Spirit, which
is as potent to-day as in the time of the Apostles, to lead us into
all truth. No ; all they did was to appeal to antiquity for certain
doctrines which, however much they might be ignored in the
popular religion of the day, they believed to be taught by
their Anglican Prayer-book. Content when they found such
confirmation in the Fathers, they never troubled themselves as to
their further teaching or stopped to consider that whilst antiquity,
no doubt, teaches the doctrines of the Real Presence and the
necessity for a valid priesthood, it is equally distinct in teaching
the doctrines of Transubstantiation and of the Papal Supremacy.
The younger Tractarians — men like Ward, Oakeley, Morris, and
Dalgairns — mastered this truth early in the day, and joined the
church ; the older men, such as Pusey, Isaac Williams the poet,
Sir William Palmer, and Keble, never reached it, and they died
Anglican Protestants. Between the two, and for some length of
time, hovered Newman. He was torn asunder between the stern
logic of his principles, which the uncompromising Ward would
VOL. L.— 39

604 DK. WARD A.VD THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. [Feb.,

never allow him to lose sight of, and his love for his early
friends, for his communion, and for Oxford. The history of the
struggle of the two parties is the history of the later years of
the Tractarian movement.

When once Newman's doubts as to the truth of Anglicanism
were fairly aroused he retired from the post of leader, left Ox-
ford, and in the quiet village of Littlemore spent some years in
earnest prayer and watching for light and guidance. The practical
lead of the movement now devolved upon Mr. Ward, who, ad-
vancing beyond the point at which he* and the extreme Tracta-
rians had at first been content to aim — the corporate reunion of
Rome and England in the form of a reconciliation which was to
be neither bitter nor humiliating to either — advocated principles
which could never hope to obtain permanent sanction in the
Establishment. The most startling feature in Ward's new teach-
ing was the exaltation of the church at the expense of the
Establishment. In his own communion he can discover no good
whatsoever ; whilst not only does he accept and glory in accept-
ing all the formal doctrines- of the Catholic Church, but he goes
further, and in the innocent but thoroughly un-English devotions
and religious habits of perfervid and enthusiastic southern Catholics
he npt only sees no harm, but he would wish his northern
countrymen likewise to accept them. These views were first
promulgated in a series of articles in the British Critic, a
widely circulated periodical of that day ; and, we need hardly
add, they caused a sensation bordering on consternation amongst
old-fashioned churchmen, whose religion and whose patriotism
were closely interwoven, and who felt equally aggrieved by
Ward's exaltation of all that was foreign compared to what was
English as with his preference for what was Roman compared to
what was Anglican. The adverse criticism with which the articles
in the British Critic were received, far from inducing Ward
to soften their asperity or to tone down their supposed exaggera-
tion, made him resolve to put forth his opinions in a collected
and extreme form, and, so to say, to challenge the authorities to
allow or to disallow distinct Roman teaching in a clergyman of
the Establishment. This work, whfch Ward began as a pamphlet,
but which fast grew into a big book, was the once famous but
now little known Ideal of a Christian Church.

The Ideal was attacked a few months after its publication
by the authorities at Oxford, who proposed to summon a con-
vocation of the governing body, and to deprive Ward of the
degree which had been bestowed on him conditionally to his

1890.] DR. WARD AND THE OXFORD MOTEMENT. 605

subscribing to and holding the Thirty-nine Articles. The book,
it was not untruly said, was inconsistent with such a subscrip-
tion, and indeed Ward frankly owned that it was so. His defence
was mainly based on the inconsistency of the Articles not only one
with the other, but also with many different parts of the Prayer-
book, to which his allegiance was equally pledged. The Articles, he
pleaded, were inconsistent with the Prayer-book, and the Prayer-
book with the ordinary belief of an average churchman. The
whole thing was an imbroglio which no consistent man could ac-
cept ; his own subscription was as honest as that of any other
man at Oxford ; it was the whole illogical piece- meal system,
not Ward himself, which was in fault. To Catholics who know
aught of the Anglican formularies this is no news, and it is fully
admitted by the more reasonable Anglicans themselves. But,
although few are bold enough to claim a logical coherence for
the English Establishment, there happens to be one point on
which she speaks with an unfaltering voice. "The Church of
Rome has erred," is her presumptuously worded judicial sentence.
Now, it was the main contention of Ward's book that in this
"erring" body he found his "Ideal." "Oh, most joyful! most
wonderful! most unexpected sight! We find the whole cycle of
Roman doctrine gradually possessing numbers of English church-
men ! " was his proud boast ; and, as -those who heard his de-
fence tell us, that if he said once he said twenty times in the
course of his speech before Convocation, " I believe the whole
cycle of Roman doctrine." Thus defied, Oxford could hardly do
otherwise than condemn the book, and then deprive Ward of his
degree.

The university had done its worst; but there was one thing
which no solemn don nor woolly-headed parson could achieve;
They could not subdue Ward's lively spirits, nor take the fun out
of him. A few hours after his degradation he was discussing the
chance of his having in the future to wear an undergraduate's cap
and gown, for his degree was now gone ; and was turning into
ridicule the probable dilemma which his abnormal position might
cause the pompous head of his own college. On the following
morning, too; his friends, on coming to his rooms to discuss the
state of affairs, were amused to find that whilst he had already
written to more than one eminent lawyer as to the legal aspect
of his degradation, he had also found time to compose an amus-
ing parody on a then popular ballad, which he applied to his
position, and sang to them with much gusto.

Mr. Ward's condemnation preceded only by a few months his

606 DR. WARD AXD THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. [Feb.,

reception into the Catholic Church. In the interim he married,
an act on his part which gave great offence to his High-Church
friends, for clerical celibacy was a favorite though a rarely ob-
served point of discipline with the Tractarian party. Ward,
in the Ideal, had written strongly in its favor; but as he
had no belief in the validity of Anglican orders, he looked on
himself as a simple layman, and felt at liberty to marry without
being guilty of any inc6nsistency. His action was, however, dif-
ferently viewed by others, and it may be said to have wrecked
his influence with his party. The Tractarian movement itself was
now nearing its end, and Ward's marriage was accused by many
persons of hastening its collapse. His condemnation at Oxford
was soon followed by that of his friend, Mr. Oakeley, in London,
whose church in Margaret Street had for some time been the
centre of what to-day would be called ritualistic services. To
this blow may be added the fast-growing conviction that New-
man's final step could not now be much longer delayed. To
many whose only reason for remaining so long in the Establish-
ment was unwillingness to move before their leader gave the
word, his joining the church was only the long-expected sign
that they too might follow. Amongst such disciples Ward ranks
the foremost. Indeed, some years before, when taxed by a priest
on his inconsistency in remaining an Anglican, believing as he
did, his answer was : " You Catholics know what it is to have a
pope. Well, Newman is my pope ; without his sanction I can-
not move."

And now at length to his "pope" light, and grace to follow
the light, had been vouchsafed, and he had allowed it to be
known that his faith in Anglicanism was at an end, and that he
awaited only the opportunity to make his submission to the Cath-
olic Church. This strongly affected Ward, and a final word from
his wife, in which she announced that she could " stand Angli-
canism no longer," decided him to delay no more. Together,
therefore, they left Oxford for London, and a few days later
were received into the church by the Jesuit Father Brownbill.

1890.] THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 607

THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

THE world has a few places around which its dreams are
gathered — cities golden with glamor and gray with age, whose
names, Florence, Venice, Rome, have a sound in our ears like
the sound of exquisite music, and a fragrance like the fragrance
of the world's dead roses. Oxford is a sharer in this lovely
fame, the most sacred place in all England except, perhaps,
that other place of Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakspere's house
and Shakspere's grave draw, magnet-like, generations of loving
pilgrims from many lands ; or that holy fane of Westminster
Abbey, where the dust of the great dead lies amid the glories
man's hand has raised to God.

I wonder whether it is best to see or to leave unseen the
places one has dreamed about ? Perhaps the reality is never so
good as the vision, missing, perhaps, some enchantment of im-
agination, some mist like that which to the vision of the short-
sighted enfolds all things in a glory of vagueness. At least
with such a thought the untravelled may console themselves,
seeing with other eyes, hearing with other ears, and keeping
each his dream.

Like many another famous place, Oxford does not come forth
to meet one with her treasures. From the train, as it glides
in after its quick run from Paddington, one catches for a mo-
ment a fleeting glimpse of towers, and then is lost in the usual
grimness of a railway station. The train deposits one amid
slums, out of sight of the things which make Oxford memorable,
not profaning them with shriek and whistle. Unhappily, how-
ever, the jingle of the tram-car is heard in "the High," and the
sight of the long yellow cars is a discordant thing to one who
will look back from that special point in " the most beautiful
street in Europe," whence one sees winding away college front
and cathedral tower in a vista incomparably stately and beau-
tiful.

It was warm June weather when I first made acquaintance
with Oxford, to have my best dreams realized — Oxford, lying
low, all drowsy in golden heat, with the wide river flowing
away from her down to London town, and the little Isis and
the little Cherwell, all trembling with shoals of water-lilies, ringing
her round, cold and pure. The country was at one's door in

608 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. [Feb.,

the enchanted town, the birds waking one before dawn with little
exquisite trills breaking into one's sleep ; they were cutting the
grass in the college gardens, and the scent of it, heavy and
sweet, flooded one's dreams. Wolsey's elms, with their vener-
able heads cropped, were all verdant in the streets, having broken
out once more fnto youngling leaves ; the fritillaries were over
in Christ Church meadow, the dusky-red academic flower which
grows only here, but the cut hay was lying in luscious swaths ;
it was just that perfect time of the year when all things have
reached perfection and have not begun again the returning path.

I was visiting at the house of a professor, itself wrapped in
greenery and overlooking a college garden. I used to wake at
dawn, because the air was oversweet, and watch the mists fold-
ing themselves away and the new day arising, rose and gold,
over the city whose towers and halls and quadrangles are always
gray — always gray, yet a background for much color. The
greenery has mantled the loftiest tower, and the Virginia creeper
hangs luxuriantly on wall and gate-way ; in autumn it will be
blood-red, and the many-colored chrysanthemums will press
thickly, a yard high, against the lower walls. June had another
kind of garnishing. The English love flowers, and every window,
arched and quaint, had its window box, flaming with scarlet
geraniums contrasted vividly with the blue of lobelia or corn-
flower. It was as though the old walls had broken out riotous
with youth and bloom.

The undergraduate — there are three thousand of them at the
university — contributed also to the colors. He had blossomed
into flannels, for it was approaching commemoration, and the
proctors had relaxed their vigilance. In his striped " blazer "
and cricketing cap young England is comely — bronzed faced, blue-
eyed, frank of countenance. It is not often your English youth
gets the chance of donning colors ; let him escape from tweeds
and neutral coloring into the brilliant neglige of flannels, and all
the color-sense in him runs riot. So he fills the quads, and the
gardens and the Broad Walk going down to the river with
picturesque gleams, and is cool in the wide sunshine that floods
all open spaces. He comes and he goes, this representative of
young England ; the University gathers round her knees the sons
of men, for ever young ; the same, yet not the same. One thinks
the old buildings must take the human race to be one that does
riot grow old.

The most beautiful of all the colleges are Magdalen (pro-
nounced "Maudlin "), founded in 1474 by Bishop Waynflete, and

1890.] THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 609

New College, founded by William of Wykeham in 1380. No
Protestant foundation of later centuries can touch the beauty of
these and. the other pre- Reformation colleges. One feels in face
of them that when the Mass-bell and the Angelus ceased to
be rung in England the poetry and the art went with them.
Then, too, the beautiful, stately names departed ; for St. Mary
the Virgin, St. Mary Magdalen, Corpus Christi, All Souls', we
have Wadham, Hertford, Pembroke, and so on, with a Puritanic
hardness and coldness.

Coming down " the High," as the famous thoroughfare of the
High Street is called in Oxford, one sees Magdalen Tower facing
one, a beautiful, lofty, square structure, exquisitely proportioned.
At its angles are statues of St. Mary Magdalen, St. John, Henry
VII., in whose reign it was built, and the founder. These were
out of reach, happily, of the Cromwellian iconoclasts who in
1649 repaid the ill-chosen hospitality of Dr. Wilkinson, the then
president, to the Protector and his generals by wrecking what-
ever offended their unlovely religious formulae. The figure of
bur Blessed Lady was torn down from over the gate-way, the
precious stained glass in the windows broken and trodden under
foot, the organ looted away, by Oliver's own orders, to Hampton
Court, where it remained till the Restoration. Scarcely any
traces show this devastation, unlike others of the grand English
churches which Catholics built in an age of faith, and which
now are ill-supplied by the cold Protestant worship. In the Lady
Chapel at Ely, for example, only the exquisite tracery of stone
in window and pillar and arch resisted' the destroyer; the cold,
white glass is wintry where loving hands had set jewels for the
sun to stream through, and in the interstices of the lovely stone-
work one sees gleaming gems of gold and color remaining from
the frescoes which were defaced. Sometimes they scraped away
the faces of the saints and the Mother of God in their fanati-
cism.

On Magdalen Tower, of a May morning at sunrising, a pretty
function takes place. Here, suspended in mid-air — the tower is
one hundred and forty-five feet high — are the president, fellows,
and choristers of Magdalen, all assembled to hail the rising sun
on the first morning of summer. They sing a Latin hymn,

" Te Deum Patrem colimus,
Te laudibus prosequimur,"

in the dewy dawn, when the rose and gray are still in the sky

6io THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. [Feb.,

and the sun has but just leaped above the horizon. The birds
in the ivy for once have their songs outsung, for Magdalen
choir is unrivalled ; I have been told it costs something like
£15,000 a year to keep up. Mr. Holman Hunt is making a
picture of this impressive scene ; it will be in next year's Acad-
emy, perhaps, "The origin of this custom has been much de-
bated; some call it a remnant of sun-worship, others a Protestant
substitute for the Requiem Mass for the soul of Henry VII., but
no satisfactory conclusion has been arrived at.

Every evening at six the Even-song is sung in Magdalen
Chapel. If a Catholic wishes to be very stringent he can attend
in the ante-chapel, and indeed, admittance to the chapel itself
being had by ticket only, one need not be tempted to be less than
stringent. Above one's head there will be a beautiful rose-win-
dow in many shades of scarlet and purple ; the side windows are
filled with glass in yellower shades ; dim and religious is the
long choir, with its wonderfully carved stalls of oak rich with
age, and beyond, a beautiful rood-screen and an altar-piece of
Christ being taken from the cross. Then the choir comes filing
in, all in white surplices, and presently one young man's voice,
clear and ringing, will go leaping from height to height, soaring
into the painted and carved roof, and drawing many hearts after
its flight, truer and stronger and sweeter than the flight of any
bird. Magdalen choir has many beautiful voices and one won-
derful voice. When I was there there was a floriated iron
screen between us and the inner chapel, but after the short
Even-song was over we passed through and inspected at our
will. It is a place where every day is gold and rose, a still
place, full of richness and holiness. The men who raised this
fane to God, in the name of Mary the Sinner, gave a glory to
Him which no mutations of time or possession can take away.
One's thoughts of it took shape in verse, which, like most verse,
fell far short of what one would convey ; however, here it is :

IN MAGDALEN CHAPEL.
(June, 1889.)

" Unto a sinner, Magdalen,
This pile was given of godly men
That she to Christ might give*again.

"They raised it high, they raised it fair,
A glory in the upper air,
A glory for the world to wear.

1890.] THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 6n

" Lovely with color certainly,
Gems and fine gold and tracery,
And naught more fair by land or sea.

" Lovely to make the senses faint,
And set with many a haloed saint,
And oaken carvings rich and quaint.

" God blessed them in each rare device,
A precious thing, a thing of price —
Mary the Sinner's edifice.

" No gold that in the window high
Trembles like any western sky
Passes her hair's gold purity.

" No jewels in the window set
Shine like her tears, so salt and sweet,
Wherewith she laved her Master's feet.

" No incense, filling roof and nave,
Could pass the precious nard she gave
To make a sweetness in His grave.

"No human song or song of bird
Could dearer be to Christ the Lord
Than the poor Sinner's trembling word.

" Who loved so well, her place should be
As high as righteous purity ;
Magdalen Mary, pray for me !

" Unto a sinner, Magdalen,
Lover of One without a stain,
This pile was raised of godly men."

From this feast of colors in the chapel one passes to the
gray and green of the cloisters, where the reverence of old
age in arch and wall goes side by side with the ever-springing
youth of the velvety grasses. The cloisters run four sides of a
grassy square, vaulted passages where the feet of generations now
at rest have trodden. One looks out through a succession of
arches on the grass and the flowers, and the tower standing clear
against a blue sky, and the Founder's Tower, draped heavily
with ivy and circled about by wheeling swallows. The quiet of
the cloisters is unbroken, save for the chatter of birds. The oc-
casional artist, with his or her easel settled at some point of
advantage, is quite silent, and visitors, touched with the green
peace of the place, walk quietly, as one does in a holy place.

Outside the college are Magdalen Walks, with the little river

612 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. [Feb.,

flowing on under overhanging trees, and through great gates a
vision of dappled deer, with their fawns, feeding in an atmosphere
of green light. There is a little water-mill, with a miller's house,
all red-tiled and gable-windowed, bridging the stream. The
Walks run side by side with the Cherwell all round Magdalen
meadows. There is Addison's Walk, where one may sit and see
half a mile or so of a leafy avenue in ever-dwindling perspec-
tive, the trees, undisturbed for centuries, meeting above one's
head. It is this gathering of things held precious for centuries
the Old World has and the New World has not. They say an
American visiting Oxford asked a college man how they made
the turf in the college gardens so green and velvety. " Well,
you see," was the answer, " we lay it down, and then it is care-
fully mown and looked after for a few centuries, till we get it
perfect." For man is so much more a conservative creature than
nature as he has more pain in producing.

New College has cloisters like Magdalen, a little less beautiful
perhaps, but holier because the dead lie there. There is a curi-
ous tower with gargoyles of strange, fantastic heads, wry-mouthed
and leering, looking as if they had many a tale to tell. The
daisies were growing prettily when I was there last, and one or
two American friends who were with me, poets and Catholics,
plucked them to take over seas in memory of Oxford. We left
the white roses which were tapping against the arches undis-
turbed. We went out through a vaulted passage which was once
a college room, till the unhappy occupant having killed himself,
no one would follow his tenantcy, and so the room was utilized
in this way. We saw the chapel, with Sir Joshua Reynolds' win-
dow, his Virtues, quite unecclesiastical- looking, full of the airy
grace and naturalness we know in his portraits. I will not de-
scribe the chapel, for what I have said of Magdalen applies in
more or less degree to all the old chapels. There are the chapel
and ante-chapel, the oak stalls and stained windows, and an ex-
ceptionally splendid roof, decorated with lavish colors. They
keep the silver-gilt pastoral staff of William of Wykeham here.

The gardens, which lie sunk a little, are surrounded by the old
city walls, which Henrietta Maria held against the Parliament.
They are kept in perfect preservation, the college being bound
to keep them in 'good repair for ever by ^ the agreement of the
founder. So they are there, bastions, loopholes for arrows, and all
the rest, with the walk upon top within the parapets. One leaves
the college by a quaint gateway, over which is the warden's
house, and looking down upon you from the wall, a statue of our

1890.] THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 613

Blessed Lady in a niche, with an angel kneeling, and the foun-
der, his hands clasped in prayer, at the other side. New College
had for its statelier title, " St. Mary's College of Winchester in
Oxford " ; it came to be called the New College because it was
the' second foundation, Merton having preceded it by a century
or so. Our Blessed Lady's name is associated with many things
in Oxford. The university church of St. Mary the Virgin, with
which Newman's name is so closely associated, has never changed
its patron, and then there is St. Mary Hall, a foundation of
Oriel, the college most intimately connected with the Oxford
movement, and which was itself founded by Edward II. and his
almoner to the honor of the Blessed Virgin.

Merton, as I have said, is the oldest college in Oxford, bear-
ing date 1274. It has many beautiful things, old and new, its
dower of chapel and hall and library, in common with the other
colleges. There is a beautiful wheel-window in the chapel, the
finest in Oxford, perhaps; and the dining-hall, with its tall win-
dows filled in the upper parts with stained glass, its portraits of
departed worthies who had been on the foundation of the col-
lege, its heraldic shields, its painted ceiling, its carved mantel-
piece and splendid doorway, with scrolled iron -work of the four-
teenth century, is a fine specimen of the magnificent refectories
in which Oxford dines. The library is a very beautiful apart-
ment, shaped like the letter T, low and dim and rich, with
diamond-paned windows against which green boughs were tap-
ping, and a ceiling with square panels of painting or dead gold.

Christ Church is the largest of colleges in Oxford. Its church
is the cathedral church, and by its bell, Great Tom, Oxford sets
its clocks. By the bye, Great Tom has a quaint way of ringing
the hours through in their exactitude, till he comes to five min-
utes past nine in the evening, when he registers a hundred and
one of his great strokes. I have heard no explanation of this ;
perhaps it was for the curfew. Christ Church was Wolsey's foun-
dation, and is an example of the splendor and scope of the
cardinal's far-reaching ideas. Tom Quad., in which is Tom
Tower, measures 264 feet by 261. Cloisters to run round what
is now a terraced walk were designed, the shafts of the arches
still remaining visible, but the great cardinal fell while yet his
foundation was unfinished, and the grasping king seized on it
and its revenues. However, he finished it after a mutilated
fashion some years later, changing its name from Cardinal's Col-
lege to the College of King Henry the Eighth. Wolsey's statue,
in its arch over Tom Gate, gazes away perpetually from his

6 14 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. [Feb.,

splendid foundation. They say he docked the cathedral of its
proportions for the quad.'s sake, meaning, no doubt, to make it
up some other way, but his gift was taken out of his hands.

The cathedral is very old, dating from the twelfth century.
It was part of the convent chapel of St. Frideswide, one of "the
many small priories which were sacrificed for Wolsey's scheme.
It is cruciform in shape, with roof and arches of great beauty.
Modern days have given it stained glass by Mr. Burne-Jones, and
a reredos of sandstone and red marble, a very exquisite specimen
of ecclesiastical architecture.

Christ Church Hall is the finest refectory in England, meas-
uring 115 feet by 40, and 50 feet in height. The oak roof is
carved profusely, with pendants of the cardinal's arms and those
of Henry VIII., and with the date, 1529. There is a great bay
window by the raised dais, with a wonderful roof of fan-tracery
springing from fantastic heads, the upper lips of which foam over
a royal crown. The oak wainscoting goes half the height of the
hall, with luxuriant carving ending it, and below, the cardinal's
arms and the king's, with some of later benefactors.

There is a splendid collection of old masters, the gift of Gen-
eral Guise, in the Christ Church library, Raphael, Da Vinci, Paul
Veronese, Tintoretto, Andrea del Sarto, Vandyke, Salvator Rosa,
Titian, being among those represented.

I suppose Christ Church is the wealthiest of Oxford's twenty-
two colleges, as it is the most aristocratic. To this foundation
of the butcher's son comes the bluest blood of England for uni-
versity training and education, passing here from Eton and
Harrow and the other cradles of the lords of England, so that
to be a Christ Church man gives one a social cachet without
more to do.

One goes out from the college to the Broad Walk, a lovely
avenue of ancient trees, with Christ Church meadow to the south,
and a continuous walk by which you will come to the little
Cherwell, full of water-lilies and with overhanging trees, by which
a boat will glide unexpectedly, startling one with the plash of
oars. An off-shoot avenue of trees more lately planted goes
down to the river and that wharf known to Oxford as Salter's,
where boats can be procured for hire. Up and down the bank,
in a gay line, are the college barges, brightly painted and deco-
rated; and in the June sunshine, with groups of girls in sum-
mer frocks and undergraduates in blazers, the scene is full of
vivacity and color. How different from the Thames when it
gets down to London, long before which Sabrina and her nymphs

1890.] THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 615

shall have deserted it. Poor stream ! the water highway and the
refuse receptacle of the biggest city in the world.

I have said enough of the Oxford colleges to give the New
World reader an idea of their splendor and scope perhaps. I
have chosen to dwell on the older ones because the later
foundations seem to me to grow less beautiful in proportion to
their lateness, till we end with the glaring red brick, picked out
with yellow, of Keble College, and the strange mosaics of its
chapel. If its makers had been content to make it entirely red
brick, it would have mellowed into a certain richness with time,
and as it clad itself about with ivy and the other creeping
plants which Oxford fosters, would have taken on a certain
beauty ; now it will be always hot and ugly. Mansfield Col-
lege, still unfinished, which is to be the college of the Noncon-
formists, is better, and has a certain largeness and freedom in
its open front, flanked by the chapel and the principal's house.
The little Renaissance of the ninth century, a part of which goes
by the name of the pre-Raphaelite movement, has done little for
later Oxford buildings ; but the pre-Raphaelite spirit is essentially
an un-Protestant one. It must infuse into its religious art
warmth and color such as Protestantism abhors; it can work
with stained glass, with statues, with music, with splendor of col-
or and luxuriance of design, but Protestantism distrusts such
things.

One must not leave Oxford without speaking of the Bod-
leian Library, that great, four-square house of learning, with its
library proper, like a larger copy of the college libraries — fretted
roof and carved wood-work, with the light streaming in
from diamond-paned windows on priceless illuminated manuscripts
and many precious things. Above the. library is the picture-
gallery, following its lines, with portraits of kings and queens and
many noteworthy persons. I remember only a few, for Oxford
is a place in which one feels, or at least I felt, an indifference
to mere kings and queens, in face of the majesty of holiness and
art and learning to which the place is a monument. I remem-
ber a mournful-faced Charles the Martyr, a Mary Stuart with
beautiful brown eyes and an oval face exceedingly beautiful
despite the thick nose, with some index in the face to that fascina-
tion wherewith the living woman was able to enchain hearts. I
remember Abraham Cowley, all faint rose and white, with yellow
ringlets, like a girl; and also a modern masterpiece, by that
master of living masters, G. F. Watts, a portrait of a young
marquis who died in his Oxford days — a haunting picture, with

616 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. [Feb.,

Venetian glory of color and a dreaminess which is poetry
made visible.

From the quadrangle of the Bodleian one gains admittance
into the old Divinity School, to my thinking the most beautiful
building in Oxford. What it was when its many windows were
filled with stained glass dazzles one to imagine; now they are
all cold white, except here and there where the trees and the
ivy have joined to give them a gracious veil of living green.
It was built about 1480, and has the most beautiful decorative
work in stone. No words can describe the stone-work of the
ceiling, fine as the frost-flowers on the pane, delicate and exqui-
site as lace, and with a profusion that is unsurpassed. The pen-
dants are chiselled figures of the Virgin and Child under a
canopy, or statues of the saints, amid a wilderness of arches and
tracery and foliage. Those were days when men working for
God made their work an art.

Beyond the Bodleian is the Radcliffe Library, a round build-
ing, now used as reading-room to the Bodleian, from the top of
which one may see all Oxford to advantage, provided one has
breath and inclination for the climb. Close by is the Sheldonian
Theatre, built by Sir Christopher Wren, a horseshoe-shaped
building, wherein is held the Enccenia, or Commemoration of
Founders, the annual ceremony at which honorary degrees are
conferred, prize essays and orations and the Newdigate prize
poem recited, and the like. It is finely proportioned, with a
painted roof, and a gallery running round it, the windows above
flooding the place with a glare of daylight, which recalls the
same architect's St. Paul's.

The Ashrrolean Museum and the Clarendon Press building
are close at hand, all within this memorable square, which is
bounded on three sides by St. Mary's Church and Brasenose and
Hertford Colleges respectively.

Life in the university city ought to be livelier than life
in other places. It has its little sets, its little precedences, its
little jealousies, like the life of every community, but doubtless
it gains in dignity and loveliness from its lovely surroundings.
Art has found a kindly foster-mother here from the days when
Walter de Merton first began college-building down to the
time when Rossetti and Burne-Jones painted their strange fres-
coes on the walls of the Union — frescoes which now, alas ! have
well-nigh peeled themselves away, the rash artists having in no wise
prepared the walls for their reception. Curiously enough, Cam-
bridge, far less beautiful and romantic, has excelled her sister as

1890.] SISTER V.ERONICA. 617

the mother of poets. Religion, the mother of the arts, has a firm
foothold in Oxford, though agnosticism has well-nigh driven the
Low Church out-of-doors ; the religion which survives is some-
thing warmer, something more generous, something many steps
farther on the road that leads to the Spouse of Christ, under
whose beneficence these glories of Oxford had birth, unto
whose fold we trust all men shall turn at last

KATHARINE TYNAN.

SISTER VERONICA.

HER life-path winds through shadowed ways,

And many days

Are hidden deep in grief and pain
And drenched with sorrow's tears ;
And many nights, with saintly grace
Of heart and hand, she keeps her place
Where life and death stand face to face.
Whoe'er it needs, receives her care,
Together with her earnest prayer.
Unquestioning, serene, and still,
She waits but for the Master's will.

And so whene'er the angel calls,

And twilight falls,

And this sweet soul within the boat
That sails the waveless sea
Is faring home, her kindly deeds
For others' woes, for others' needs,
Shall spring to life like buried seeds
Of lotus, and the darksome way
Be whiter than the whitest day ;
And clouds of perfume shall arise
To waft her into paradise.

MARGRET HOLMES,

618 "Pur MONEY IN THY PURSE." [Feb.,

"PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE."

IT is a fine thing to make money. It is glorious to be rich;
and rather desirable to be honest, too. But the combination is
somewhat rare. What with dishonest pools, trusts, corners,
futures, syndicates, monopolies, combines, and all the rest of it,
the feat of making money honestly does seem difficult

Aad yet we ought to make money. It is a duty with many
of us. Not merely to make a living — that is the duty of all
men; but to make more than a living, and, for some of us, to
make a great deal more. God gives to all men (exceptions are
very few) the ability to earn a livelihood, but to some he gives the
power to make millions of money. Certainly the gift of money-
making comes from God. There is no other source. But, like
all gifts, it may be used either for good or for evil. Like all
gifts, all talents, it should be used, not hidden in a napkin. I
do not believe that God has given only to wicked men the
ability to acquire wealth. I do not believe he withholds from
good men the power to make money. I do not believe that
financial ability makes men wicked, nor that wickedness gives
men financial ability. And what excuse is there for any man
to be poor in this country ? Certainly he is not poor by choice.
No man would refuse wealth were it offered him. He is poor,
therefore, because he can't help it, and that is a miserable thing
for any man to acknowledge — I mean, for any man living in our
free country.

The old sayings, "Poverty is no crime," "It is no disgrace
to be poor," may be true in some regions, but not here. No;
here poverty is a disgrace — I feel like saying, "a crime." The
poor man is a falsehood to the bounteous generosity of our
land; he is a denial to our equitable and beneficent Constitution;
he is an admission of his own inefficiency, intemperance, inertia.
And the educated poor man is the most pitiable, not to say
contemptible, of all. What good is his education ? He is too
poor to enjoy himself or to benefit his fellow-man ; too poor to
build churches, schools, or asylums. He cannot help the Catholic
press, cannot encourage Catholic art, Catholic clubs, Catholic
enterprise. And as for diocesan and other church debts, they'll
never be paid if he is to pay them.

There is too much talk about the evil power of money. We

1890.] " PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE" 619

ought to consider more often its power for good. Money is not
necessarily an evil power. Were riches necessarily an evil, why
did God bestow them as a reward for Solomon's choice of wisdom ?
Why did God restore and largely increase Job's wealth ? Why
did he order the Jewish temples to be adorned with gold and
gems, and their services to be conducted with costly magnificence ?
The very last service which was rendered to Christ's body by
his followers was from a rich man, whose new sepulchre was
honored by that divine Guest. The three persons whom our
Saviour raised to life were persons of prominence and wealth. In
our own day, is it not, at least sometimes, our wealthy Catholics
who erect our grandest churches and charitable institutions ?
Surely it were a hard thing to say that our expensive organs,
rich windows, costly paintings are always from the scant, pinched
earnings of the poor !

Columbus, with all his determination, courage, and wisdom,
couldn't move an inch until Isabella had procured money for him.
His long, long delay was all for want of money. And the long,
long delay of many a great and much-needed enterprise is all
for want of money. For instance, without money we cannot
kill Protestant slanders, kill those majestic lies, so calm and cool
and stately, which preside over the anti-Catholic press. We
may " down " them all we can ; they come up smiling every
time. We pound them with logic, scorch them with witticisms,
annihilate them with facts, give them every sort of death and
torture that literary weapons can inflict, yet here they rise again,
good as new. Their readers never read our refutations, and all
our paper battles go for naught. But there is one way we
could rout them, had we only the funds — libel suits ! How
many Protestant papers would last under such treatment? How
many infidel lecturers, sweet-mouthed Fultons, " Bishop " Coxes,
or " escaped nuns " would prosper under it ? How could they
make a living if they were hauled into a court of justice for
each falsehood ? If our asylums and pther charitable institutions
were not so much in need, I would like to start a subscription
right now for a Catholic Libel-Suit Fund. Protestants don't feel
the truths in Catholic papers, but they would feel pretty keenly the
fines and other penalties of a libel suit. The " power of the press''
is pretty strong ; still, it isn't a circumstance to the " strong arm
of the law"; but that strong arm won't move for us till, we
oil it with money.

Aye, money is a power, and there's no use denying it. And

VOL. L. — 40

620 "Pur MONEY IN THY PURSE" [Feb.,

the moneyless man has cause to be ashamed at having no aid
to give in the great Christian enterprises which cannot be suc-
cessful without money. Would our Catholic University be the
grand fact it now is were it not for the Caldwell money ? And
the Catholic Mirror of August 10 says :

"Generous contributions are still greatly needed, that the . . . work may
advance as it ought. Funds are needed to endow other professorships. . . .
Funds are needed to endow scholarships. . . . Funds are needed to estab-
lish prizes for the reward of distinguished merit. . . . Funds are needed to
enlarge the library. . . . Funds are needed to render the buildings adequate
to the demand for accommodations. . . . What can the clergy do toward
all this ? They can earn our gratitude by sending their names . . . to be
added to the list of contributors. . . . They can spare us embarrassment by
handing in the installments of their subscriptions. They can aid the under-
taking very materially by speaking of it as a work in which Catholics of means
ought to take part. ... They can organize concerted action for the endow-
ment of scholarships."

And is there not to-day many another Christian work sorely
in need of money ? Is there not many a church deep in debt ?
many a school and asylum in dire want ? Is not the entire
Catholic press struggling for lack of money? It may be an-
swered that all this is because we need more generosity among
our Catholics. I question this. I think what we need is not
more generous Catholics but more rich Catholics. We have too
few rich Catholics.

" Is it as easy for an honest man to make money as it is
for a dishonest man ? " I asked a successful merchant the other
day.

"Just as easy," he replied, "just as easy."

" Well, then, why is it that there are so few moneyed men
among our practical Catholics ?"

" Simply because they don't give their attention to it," he
answered. " That is the whole trouble. They know the goods
of heaven will last for ever, and the goods of this world will not,
so they give but little attention to the latter."

Now, I think it is just there they make the mistake. Earthly
treasures can become a help towards the gaining of heavenly
treasures. Why may not the gift of money-making be held as
a high vocation, and devoted to the interests of heaven ?

What abominations are music, poetry, sculpture, the drama
when given over to the devil ! But what glories they are when
devoted to the service of God ! How admirable are the great

1890.] " PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE" 621

• artists who consecrated their genius to religion ! And why should
not the genius of fortune be consecrated to holy ends also ?
Art is a power, literature is a power, oratory is a power; but
what is their power compared to the power of money? And it
is a demonstrable pity that our practical Catholics hold and
wield so little of that power.

The Jew has reason to exult in his wealth and power. If
Christians will not unite, if they will not actively and co-oper-
atively oppose the Jew ; if they ^v^ll patronize him and let their
own merchants go to the wall, if they will play into his hands all
the time — they deserve to see him chuckling over his gains and
their losses. They deserve to be ground down under his heel ;
they deserve to see the press, the government, and all great
financial influences drawn into his firm clutches. Hurrah for the
Jew ! Hurrah for every one who is smart enough to take ad-
vantage of his neighbor's folly ! It's useless and ridiculous for us
to sit down and weep and wail over the moneyed power of evil
men, the venality of law, or the corruption of politics ; ridicu-
lous to weep and wail over the onmarch of the Jews. My cry
is, " Let the best man win," in whatever fight. When wicked
men triumph it is not because of their wickedness, but because
of the foolishness of their victims. Were good men always wise,
bad men would never be their victors.

Much breath is expended in denouncing "the almighty dol-
lar," and in bemoaning this age as an age of money. It cer-
tainly is an age of money; money is king; but why weep about
it ? They who write grandiloquently about " the soulless money-
making propensities of this grasping age " are usually the fel-
lows who have lost all their money by unwise speculation, or
else never had any to lose, and never will have any. Instead
of blaming their neighbor for getting rich, they ought to be
ashamed of themselves for staying poor.

By a natural law of the eternal fitness of things money is
always flowing out of the hands of the foolish into the hands
of the shrewd. Who should complain ? Isn't it a good law ?

>It assuredly is, if there be any truth — and I think there is —
in the old saying, " One fool does more mischief than ten
knaves."

Think of the thousands of Catholics who throw away their

• money in lottery schemes. If all the good people in the
United States who patronize lotteries were to cease so doing,
could any lottery company exist another year ? Aye, it is the

622 " PUT MONEY IN THY PURSED [Feb.,

folly of the many rather than the wickedness of any which
causes money to accumulate in the hands of the few.

There is one prayer which we ought to say oftener than
we now do. We pray for an increase of faith, hope, and char-
ity ; we pray for patience, for peace, for health. All very well ;
but we too rarely say, " O Lord ! give me good sense. Give
me hard, practical, every-day gumption. If I had a little of
that, I shouldn't act as foolishly as I generally do; I shouldn't
waste my time nor money; I shouldn't remain as now, unable
to aid the church and religion ; I shouldn't allow anti-Catholics
to get control of everything because of my weakness and pov-
erty ; I shouldn't be idle, or indifferent, or foolish any more.
Yes, dear Lord, please give me good sense." I wish there were
a prayer to that effect in every prayer-book.

Certainly it is the natural desire of every good Catholic
not only to see his faith propagated but also to assist materi-
ally in this propagation. Is the piety of that layman worth
anything who can coolly look on and have no wish to help in
the great work of the propagation of the faith ? Give me that
man whose solid piety — active piety — makes him work hard six
days and contribute generously from his earnings on the seventh.
Zeal may be exercised through literature, or teaching, or preach-
ing, or art; but we can't all be literati, or teachers, or preach-
ers, or artists. And when you come right down to business,
the truth is that a layman's zeal should flow chiefly through the
contribution-box. Frequent and handsome donations indicate
pretty surely that a man has the right sort of zeal. And how
can his donations be frequent and handsome if his earnings
be not abundant and reliable ?

I really consider that the educated Catholic layman who in
this country cannot munificently aid religion ought to be ashamed
to hold up his head ; except, of course, such as are rendered
incapable by unavoidable accident.

" But there is too much dishonesty in money-making now-
adays. It would not be right for Catholics to enter the contest.
Catholics cannot, must not, become rich." This is exactly the
idea I wish to combat. I cannot see why Catholics ought not
to become rich. We all want to be rich. It is a natural pro-
pensity, and the man who hasn't it is a natural freak.

The youth who has anything of the man in him soon begins
to say to himself: "I must make money; I will make money."
And if his education has left him with scant idea of how to

1890.] " PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE" 623

make it honestly, is he the only one to blame if he follow Ches-
terfield's advice, " Make money, my son, make money ; honestly
if you can, but — make money " ?

The fifth commandment of the church is, " To contribute to
the support of our pastors." It is therefore our duty to give
money ; which implies a duty to have money ; whence, a duty
to make money. Now, shouldn't it be the pastor's duty to see
that we are taught how to be honest in our money-making ? It
is easy enough to say, "Be honest." But the great question is,
How ? And the great trouble with me is : Why this " How " is
not taught and studied and written about more than it is.
True, the present crookedness of business is something out-
rageous ; there is immense power in the hands of the dishonestly
rich ; and yet, is it impossible to make money honestly ? I
claim that it is not. I claim that riches can be acquired by
good men no less than by bad. I do not believe that God in-
tends all the riches of our land to flow away from us into the
hands of our enemies — into the pockets of Masons, Jews, infidels,
anti-Catholics. But even granting that, under present circum-
stances, the legitimate acquisition of wealth is extremely difficult
to Catholics, then I will urge that it is our duty to discover a way
out of the difficulty, and also that one reason of the difficulty is the
overcrowding of the professions and our neglect of financial training.

There are in the United States ten millions of Catholics,
most of whom are poor, many wretchedly poor. Is this not a
burning shame? Is it not a crying shame that so many thou-
sands are miserable in so fair a land as ours ? Isn't it some-
body's fault ? It is a shame, a disgrace, and I contend that it is
mainly the fault of those who are, or ought to be, the leaders
and protectors of the poor. I contend that this burning shame
rests largely upon unpractical education. Cardinal Manning says
about the same, "The sin of our day is the worship of inutility."
And my point is that that worship is participated in by too
many of our schools, seminaries, and colleges.

I think we should recognize the power and commend the ac-
quisition of wealth. The graduate should leave school with the
firm intention of making money honestly and spending it wisely
— making it plentifully and spending it generously. I shall be
told that all this is heretical.

Is it? Very well. The Scriptures counsel virginity. Its merit
is taught us by the example of our Saviour himself, by that of
his Blessed Mother, of his foster-father, his beloved disciple, and

624 " PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE" [Feb.,

others. Direct counsels from our Saviour, the epistles of St.
Paul, and the teachings of the church urge the beauty and wis-
dom of perpetual virginity. Yes ; God commends the vow of
virginity ; and yet he blesses by " a great sacrament " many who
do not take that vow. Now, follow the same line with regard to
wealth, and my heresy becomes orthodox. Our Lord teaches
the excellence of holy poverty, but yet he blesses those who have
(or acquire) wealth and use it beneficently. So, why not teach
how to gain and how to use wealth ? Why not teach that it
can be nobly directed towards spiritual ends ? Kathleen O'Meara
said: "I am writing novels for the good of my soul." Why
may not every educated Catholic layman say, "I am making
money for the good of my soul, the benefit of my neighbor, and
the glory of God"?

Do I decry holy poverty ? No, no ; with all reverence I kneel
in spirit to kiss the feet of those who choose voluntarily the hard
and stony path of holy poverty, and thus walk close upon the
footsteps of their Lord. No ; but what I am afraid of is that
the many Catholics are poor not so much because of their love
of holy poverty as because of their aversion to holy industry. I
fear many of us are liable to the same arraignment which a witty
speaker made against some young men : " D' you know what's
the matter with you fellows ? Simply this : there's too much as-
piration among you, and too little perspiration ! "

A distinguished priest said, in one of the truest sermons I ever
heard : " The greatest evil of our day is, according to some,
drunkenness ; to others, greed ; to others, dishonesty ; to others,
impiety. In fact, there is considerable divergence on this ques-
tion. But my observations for many years, during a wide and
varied experience, convince me that the evil of our day is idle-
ness." And he went on to convince his hearers of the same
fact. Ever since that Sunday I have wished that education were
more directly occupied than it now is with the prevention of
idleness and the promotion of practical industry.

The Boston Pilot says it were better to study industrial facts
than to spend " valuable months and years in memorizing the
dates of worthless European kings and queens, or even in the
abstract study of fractions, proportions, etc., which are usually
rubbed out of the mind as easily as off the slate." Admirable
advice. But who is going to follow it ? Is there a single one
of our colleges or convents that will abridge the literary course
and make room for industrial teaching? Certainly not.

1890.] " PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE" 625

So noticeable is the fact that wealthy men are not usually
college bred that it seems as though education not only fails to
develop practical usefulness, but actually kills the germ of it in
those who possess it. It cannot be true that only inefficient boys
are sent to college. Therefore, since so many inefficient men
come out of college, it must be that their training is deficient
and unprofitable from a financial point of view.

I know a man who received three high-grade diplomas — mili-
tary, medical, and legal — and yet he hardly earns his salt. I
once knew a fine student, a splendid linguist and classical
scholar ; a very pious man, too. He had the handling of vast
amounts of money in his life- time, and yet he died leaving his
family and many creditors in appalling destitution, all for want
of knowing the simplest business rules. I knew an estimable
lady who had a finished education. She spoke fluently several
languages, had studied higher mathematics, and was for many
years a teacher herself. She inherited from a relative a con-
siderable sum of money, yet in a few years she was ut-
terly penniless (victim of a swindler), and had to enter an
asylum, all for want of a little financial sagacity. She had
been taught physics, literature, sciences, everything — except
one thing, common sense. She herself said to me : "I don't
know anything about money. I am as innocent as a baby
about such things." That was a true word, "innocent as a
baby." There are lots of highly-educated Gatholics such as
she who are " innocent as babies " of the plainest, easiest
business knowledge. What wonder they get fleeced by unscru-
pulous rogues !

A letter now before me, from a scholar and a gentleman,
and a true Christian, says incidentally : " You know I am a
perfect dunderhead in money matters " (I quote verbatim],
Unfortunately, many another cultivated and intelligent Catholic is
"a perfect dunderhead in money matters." This gentleman is
about seventy years of age, is exceptionally well educated, a
staunch, earnest Catholic, has been a great traveller in his day,
was professor of belles-lettres in one of our leading seminaries,
and yet — is "a perfect dunderhead in money matters." With all
his learning and intellectual abilities, he is but a poor man,
living on a small teacher's pension from the English government.
He loves his religion truly, and is just such a man as would
have been a great benefactor were he able. Too many, far too
many of our Catholics are his counterparts : finely educated and

626 " PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE." [Feb.,

very poor. Truly, if anything (outside of religion) is worth
teaching, it is how to make money.

In our universities there are chairs for this science and for
that — a chair of philosophy, a chair of natural science, chair of
belles-lettres, chair .of ancient history, etc. I wish there were a
chair of financial science. It is a great pity that that branch
has not been reduced to a science and well equipped with text-
books, professors, and endowed chairs. I'd like to see a class
listening to Professor Somebody on "How to make Money." I
warrant that there'd be no dull eyes and yawning mouths
while that subject was under discussion. When Professor This or
That descants upon hieroglyphics, or botanical technology, or
classic literature, there may be sleepy heads present, but I think
they'd wake up surprisingly when Professor S. starts in with,
•" Now, young gentlemen, we will have a talk on how to get
rich." He'd handle a rich subject, certainly ; one that would
take in honesty, industry, tact, enterprise, economy, hygiene, so-
briety, manual labor, mechanics, trades in general, agriculture,
navigation; in fact, the fertility of his theme might lead to an
embarrassment of riches.

Our schools turn out more literary people than anything else.
The time spent in spelling, reading/ writing, grammar (with its
many phases), rhetoric, composition, biography, history, the classics,
and heaven knows what else of literary pursuit, naturally bends
the mind in that direction. Is it any wonder that newspapers
are run to death with would-be writers ? and that magazines
are harassed with literary aspirants, and have store-rooms full of
accepted manuscripts, not to mention the cart-loads they reject?
and that the swarms of literati are growing appalling ? and
that real talent is almost smothered beneath those masses of me-
diocrity ? Then, why, oh ! why is it better to teach boys Greek
and Latin than to teach them the best principles of prosper-
ity ? Why better to develop literary taste than business tact and
financial acumen? Why better to encourage scientific nomen-
clature than live ideas of commerce, enterprise, and money-mak-
ing?

Our churches, seminaries, schools, and asylums are always
soliciting money. This is all right. But do these solicitors ever
teach the people how to make money? It seems strange that
their appeals for money should be so frequent — and no one can
deny that they are frequent — while instructions for making money
should be so rare.

1890.] " PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE" 627

There are not many of us whose temptations arise from our
being overwealthy. I trow not. But the souls who suffer from
the temptations and evils of poverty — their name is legion.

True, some Catholics do lose their faith because of newly
acquired wealth. They must get a newly acquired fashionable-
ness to go along with it. And so they join any convenient
Protestant church which happens to have a stylish congregation.
But who can number those who lose the faith because of pov-
erty ? — poor children who are sent to the public school ; poor
orphans who are put into Protestant asylums. One of the strong-
est sentences in Father Dougherty's annual letter to Archbishop
Corrigan is, " And these [proselyting societies], strengthened by
money and influence, are constantly doing all in their power to
steal our Catholic children." . It is among the poor, not among
the rich, that these swarms of anti- Catholic proselytizers, kid-
nappers, soupers, blanket societies, etc., get in their work.

We must fight money with money. We need money to
rescue the bodies and souls of the poor from their oppressors
and tempters. Catholics hold a lamentably small amount of this
money power. And Catholic school,s lamentably fail to assist in
the acquisition of this immense and needed power. Is it not
high time that the missing element be supplied in our educa-
tion ?

Why do we see and read and^hear so much of dire and
dreadful poverty if it be not the design of Providence that we
do our part in its removal? But we cannot to any great ex-
tent benefit the poor directly. The philanthropic notions about
educating the poor, elevating them, making them wise, industrious,
economical, cleanly, etc., are false because impracticable. "The
poor ye have always with you " — that is, the poor shall always
be poor; in other words, ignorant, foolish, improvident, dependent.
We must take them as they are.

Now, since the poor cannot be benefited directly — that is,
through immediate education of them — they must be benefited
through the rich. The rich are, and always will be, masters of
the poor. The poor are virtually the slaves of the rich. Where
the rich are good, the poor are happy ; where the rich are bad,
the poor are unhappy. This sequence is inevitable. Therefore
the only way to render the poor happy is to make the rich
virtuous. Since the present rich are not likely to become virtuous,
our best hope is for the future. It seems impossible to make
rich men good ; but mightn't we try to make some good men

628 " PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE" [Feb.,

rich ? We sorely need good rich men. It is the duty of all
leaders to consider that need and strive towards supplying it.
Now, there are some men who will be rich. This native char-
acteristic should be recognized in their education and their reli-
gion. Their capacity to make money should be not opposed
but directed. They are the natural masters of the poor ; and
should not this relationship be considered even while the future
rich man is yet a school-boy? He is destined to protect and
succor the poor.

The best way to aid the poor is to give them work, honest,
well-paid work. This is indisputable. Therefore the best philan-
thropist is he who owns factory, or mine, or railroad, or store, or
dock, or ship, or farm, whereby he can give employment to thou-
sands. Would that among our good, pious, practical Catholics there
were more bankers, merchant princes, railroad kings, wealthy plan-
ters, and ship, factory, dock, mine, and foundry owners ! Little
fear then of labor troubles, little fear of trusts and monopolies.

Would that more of our young men were throwing their
energies into manly work, into the great fields of trade and me-
chanical industry, instead of into professional or literary pursuits !
Would that our schools were turning out, not impecunious
scribes and lawyers and teachers, but capable youths, determined
to become prominent business men and manufacturers ! And
would that Catholic education were henceforth to strongly aid
in producing a rising generation resolved to make money not
only honestly and honorably but abundantly ; and to spend it
not only generously but wisely, nobly, piously, for their own
good, the benefit of their neighbor, and the glory of God !

M. T. ELDER.

New O> leans.

1890.] MODERATE DRINKING AND INTEMPERANCE. 629

THOUGHTS ON MODERATE DRINKING AND
INTEMPERANCE.

ON the moderate drinker who is not naturally predisposed to
the desire for stimulant the habit of intemperance steals insidi-
ously, if it does at all, and its power is of slow growth. But
when the total-abstinence advocate brings him into his considera-
tions of the effect of alcohol on man he is met by the theological
arguments that religion and morality require only temperance,
and that it is neither a sin to drink intoxicants nor to ask
others to do so. Why go further than the church requires ?
Here are arguments and inferences. The arguments are not dis-
puted, because unanswerable ; but many who advance them and
try to shield their explicit or tacit disapproval of total abstinence
behind them are not always just in their inferences, any more
than they are always temperate in their practice. Continually in-
sisting that bare temperance is a virtue has not restrained men from
becoming drunkards, and the limit of moderation has frequently
been overstepped by many who glibly quote what the church
requires, and in the same breath condemn honest reformers for
extravagances of which they are blameless. Total abstainers
study theology as well as moderate drinkers, and they know
what the' church commands and condemns on the use and abuse
of alcohol. Much that we hear from the selC-appointed champions
of moderation indicates that their love of orthodoxy in morals
has not an adequate complement of hatred of immorality. The
principles of Catholic morality are in greater danger from
the immoral lives of Catholics than from occasional tres-
passes of zealots beyond the boundaries of enlightened reason.
Men seem so very anxious that total abstainers may
not become heretics that they argue as if there was no sin to be
feared from drink except drunkenness, and that drunkenness is
no very serious evil anyhow. There are men who do not get
drunk, and yet who give grievous scandal by becoming tipsy.
Apart from outright drunkenness, the frequent indulgence in in-
toxicating liquors has prejudiced people very widely against the
Catholic religion, prevented many conversions to the faith ; has
caused multitudes of Catholics to neglect the practice of religion,
and in many cases to entirely lose the faith. Are we too se-
vere in saying that moderate drinking is responsible for all this ?

630 THOUGHTS ON MODERATE [Feb.,

Would it harm these people to practise self-denial to win others
to the truth, even though their fastidiousness may to a few
appear too exacting ? Consideration for others and generosity
in the way of self-denial will be rewarded.

There are others who by the excessive use of drink, and yet
without intoxication, give bad example and bring great grief to
their families, and by their spendthrift habits deprive them of the
support to which they are justly entitled ; and yet these heads
of families can truthfully say that they were never drunk. Can
they not range themselves under the banners of moderate drink-
ing ? If moderate drinkers are and remain temperate, they are
not bound to become total abstainers; but they must not expect
to hide behind the term moderate all sorts of reckless and
convivial drinking. In matters of this sort it is not talk that
convinces men but conduct. Their arguments do not prove a
theory applicable to their case, for their practice often denies
their words. Because St. Paul urged St. Timothy to use a little
wine for his stomach's sake and for his other infirmities, this does
not justify a healthy man in using alcohol to the destruction of
his stomach. Because it is not a sin to sell drink, this does not
license men to keep saloons as they are generally kept in this
country. The saloon-keepers in this country must laugh in their
sleeves at their theological defenders, just as the slave-holders of
the South and the landlords of Ireland have had reason to smile
at those who defended and yet .defend their "rights." The
slave-holders claimed that they had acquired property in men and
that slavery could not be condemned as evil in se; but behind
this screen they outraged humanity's right to justice and to free-
dom, neglected what their duties as Christians and the dictates
of humanity required, and did actions which neither religion nor
humanity could justify or condone. So it is with saloon-keepers.
Their business is admitted to be not unlawful in itself; but that
means in the abstract, and may practically apply to parts of
Europe. But here and now the business is bad, almost univer-
sally acknowledged to be a proximate occasion of mortal sin, and
is the enemy of the larger and sounder portion of every muni-
cipal community in the land; "not unlawful in itself" to the
contrary notwithstanding. As a practical problem for solution,
the saloon question is no more affected by the fact that men keep
harmless saloons in Germany or Italy than if they kept them in
the moon.

But it may be urged again that if moderation in the use of
alcoholics is no sin, why refer to it at all in the temperance

1890.] DRINKING AND INTEMPERANCE. 631

controversy ? Because, though it be no sin to drink moderately,
every one who has had experience of or has observed its work-
ings on our weak nature knows that drinking moderately has
led and is yet leading multitudes to the habit of intemperance.
Nor in our warnings about moderate drinking do we go further
than the church allows. We know that the church rejoices in the
practice of what is more perfect. Now, " temperance is good,
but total abstinence is better," says Cardinal Manning. Total
abstainers know that the church encourages, blesses, and indul-
gences their practice and their propaganda. The plain truth is
that many moderate drinkers have become drunkards just because
they did not quit drink totally. The best means for one who
considers himself a temperance man to ascertain if he still has
control of his appetite is to try the practice of total abstinence.
If the moderate drinker can refrain from drinking he is still free ;
if he cannot, appetite is gaining control, and there are many
cases in which there will be valid reason to fear the approach
of intemperate practices ; and then total abstinence will have be-
come a necessity. May God give us all the grace to know our
weakness in time and the strength to struggle and prevail against
our moral foes !

The object of total abstinence is by the practice of a counsel of
perfection to become better Christians, as well as to shun a dan-
ger and to avoid an evil. So thoroughly are many good priests
imbued with the conviction that the danger of contracting the
habit of intemperance is everywhere around us that they go
amongst the boys who are preparing for life by being instructed
for first Communion and warn them against the danger of drink-
ing intoxicating beverages, and endeavor to induce them to take
the pledge. We who favor total abstinence are, therefore, unwill-
ing to admit that it is simply a curative practice. It is also
preventive, and its fruits as a preventive bless many a home with
members of young cadet societies who frequently grow to man-
hood without having known the taste of alcohol. What father
or mother of a family would not prefer this state of things in
their children to any form or grade of " moderate drinking " ?

We have to deal with a special condition of things existing
in our own country; we have to reckon with our own tenden-
cies and to consider our own social life. Our custom of treat-
ing, our idea of hospitality, the quality of the liquors used, and
the high pressure of our temperaments — all these are causes which
have effects and must be considered by those who try to learn
why intemperance is so prevalent ; and these are the causes

632 THOUGHTS ON MODERATE [Feb.,

which make total abstinence so beneficial in this country. Ameri-
can temperance men have no apostolate to the Old World and
do not aspire to convert the nations to their views. Travellers
tell us that in portions of Europe the practice of total absti-
nence excites surprise, and its necessity or even benefit is not un-
derstood ; and yet we observe that immigrants from some of
these countries are the reverse of models of temperance after
they have been a short time in this country. The natives of
wine-producing countries become the patrons of strong drink
in this country. The custom of treating, which we are told is
an American practice, is carried on by these people in a whole-
sale manner shortly after landing here. We shall be told that
these immigrants whom we meet are not fair specimens of their
fatherlands and are of the common and rude people. That ex-
pression sounds familiar. We have been assured, in a patronizing
manner, that total abstinence is a proper practice and beneficial
for the common people of our own country. It is surprising how
the common people are supposed to benefit by the practice of
self-denial whilst the uncommon people do not need this extreme
cure and drastic preventive.

We, who have seen the common people elevated and misery
driven from their homes by total abstinence, have no hesitation
in rapping at the .doors of the wealthy and the great with our
peace-giving remedies. We believe in the frailty of human na-
ture, not in the aristocracy of virtue, nor in the power of wealth
to generate morality, nor in the influence of refinement or edu-
cation when they are pitted against pampered appetites. The
demon alcohol which is to be exorcised is no respecter of per-
sons, has no regard for rank or position, soon dulls intelligence
and blunts refinement, and wealth but hastens the results which
it is in the nature of alcohol to produce in its victims. It will
humble human pride, destroy self-respect, weaken the will, harden
the heart, destroy the health, befog the intellect, arouse the pas-
sions, destroy happiness, bring misery to the home, and cause
the eternal loss of the immortal soul — all this of the rich and
educated as well as of the clownish. The habit of intemperance
will produce these effects on all who are unfortunate or selfish
enough to contract it, and whilst it may not cause the vice of
the educated and the refined to stalk abroad, because they gen-
erally do not drink where brawls prevail, it will bring degradation
to them and unhappiness and ruin to their families.

The families of drunkards can never condone drunkenness
nor get used to it; and it is from their stand-point that Chris-

1890.] DRINKING AND INTEMPERANCE. 633

tians must view the vice. The palliation of this crime is too
common; we are sick of hearing these brutes' spoken of as
having a "weakness" for drink — "it is the poor fellow's only
fault"; "he is just a little too convivial." The dire reality is
that the vice of drunkenness, gross sin as it is against one's self,
is a foul crime against one's family, and the plainer the words
used to characterize it the better. It always hangs like a lower-
ing cloud over the wretch's home, and his family cannot rid
themselves of the misery that it always brings, nor of the dread
of the terrible calamities which are too often its further results.
The reason why drunkenness cannot be condoned is that the
drunkard is always guilty, always responsible for his condition,
always brutally selfish, always doing what is unworthy of himself
and cruel to others. Excepting rare and extreme cases, there
is no time when he cannot reform, and every motive of religion
and manhood urges him to do so. All that is required of him
is the practice of total abstinence. This is easy after the alcohol
is out of his system, but, as a rule, he cannot taper off. The
time with him for the practice of mere temperance is past. The
basest form of callous selfishness is the only motive that can
induce a man to gratify his appetite for drink when he knows
that gratification is the bane of the ' existence of those who love
him best, and the cause of unutterable misery to those who
depend on him not only for their support but for their happi-
ness also. The sacrifice of a gratification which, instead of being
necessary or beneficial, has become destructive in the highest
degree, is the least that such a man owes to his own, and a very
insignificant atonement for the misery which his vicious selfishness
has caused. There are cases where men can occasionally drink
for a time after ha^ng been enslaved to intemperance, but such
cases are extremely rare, and there is no time in their after-
life when they are free from the danger of drinking to excess.
Where, then, is the place of moderate drinking as a measure of
reform? And if barred out in that sense, it has little to do with
settling the problem of intemperance.

The most abundant evidence is at hand that the alcohol
habit once contracted can, even after reform, never be treated
otherwise than as an enemy in chains ; the fetters must be strong
and continually inspected. No position is too exalted, no pride
too sensitive, no 'influence of all those which guide and prompt
men to do right too potent to prevent such persons from yield-
ing to over-indulgence if they awaken the insatiable thirst for
stimulant by tasting alcohol. Would to God that this judgment,

634 THE SECRET OF LIFE. [Feb.,

so humiliating to our dignity as men, could be gainsaid! It is
because it is in the nature of alcohol to produce these results,
and because a large number of those who drink moderately may
become enslaved to the insatiable desire for the stimulant and
thus become drunkards, and because we need the countenance
and companionship of men whose self-control is above suspicion,
that we advocate total abstinence as a general practice. Total
abstinence elevates the drunkard, saves moderate drinkers from
the danger of intoxication into which many of them are liable
at any time to fall, and prevents those who have never indulged
in liquor from acquiring that taste for stimulant which too often
grows into an uncontrollable appetite.

P. J. McMANUS.

St. Paul's Church, Scranton, Pa.

THE SECRET OF LIFE.

O GOD ! all good inheres in Thee.
We have our being but in Thine,
As stars with borrowed glory shine,

As streams flow downward to the sea.

To live as factors of Thy plan,

To know Thy thought for us, and so
Conform our wills, in weal or woe,

To Thine — this is the life of man.

JAMES BUCKHAM.

1890.] A NEW YEAR' s PRAYER. 635

A NEW YEAR'S PRAYER.

ROBERT BROWNLY was a proud man as he gazed that first
morning of the year on a scene as lovely as any that a New Year
sun ever shone upon. His young wife, in her dainty morning
gown, was bending over the cradle of her baby boy ; the child,
who had just awakened, was extending one pretty dimpled hand
towards its mother's face.

That face alone was a study. The newly- awakened ten-
derness, the soft flush of maternal pride, lent a beauty
almost holy to the delicate and youthful features, Robert
stood looking at the picture for some minutes in silence.
Then, as the pretty mother picked up the laughing boy
and turned towards him, he exclaimed : " I wonder if any
fellow ever had before as genuinely happy a New Year as this.
T can well afford to wish every man, woman, and child to-day
'a Happy New Year' without the smallest grudge in the
world.

" And you, too, are happy, Lillian. Isn't it so ? " he said,
seeking her blue eyes for confirmation of her perfect contentment.
But Lillian* was bending over her boy and did not look up,
though she said, with a little laugh : " I know I ought to be
happy, Robert, if I were as good as you are, or baby. Who
ever had such a darling boy, or such a good husband ? "

"Ah!" said Robert, laughing in the abundance of his good
humor, "I am afraid my wife is becoming very artful."

Then, as she blushed a little, he laughed again, and said: "No,
Lillian, that is the last accusation I would want to make against
my wife, and the most unmerited. Do you know," he continued,
walking towards the window and looking out, " I sometimes think
it is very strange that I should be so exceptionally fortunate in
everything. I am a crank on the subject of sincerity. If I find any
one guilty of the smallest deceit I want to end my acquaintance
with him then and there. Now suppose I had married a tricky
woman. I might have done it. Men in love are blind, you
know, and I might have had my eyes opened too late. Good
heavens ! how I should have hated the deceitful creature ! I
can't imagine a more miserable fate than to despise the woman
one has married." And his usually genial face was drawn into a
most withering scowl.
VOL- L.— 41

636 A NEW YEAR'S PRAYER. [Feb.,

" Which reminds me," he said, as his features relaxed and he
smiled at his imaginary difficulties, " that my wife is a strictly
truthful creature as well."

" Yes," to the servant who announced a gentleman in the
library ; " I will see him in a moment. Eh ? He is in a hurry ?
Well — " And after kissing wife and baby he left the room. Just
then nurse came in to take the baby, and Lillian was left alone.

" O my God !" she cried, sinking on her knees and covering
her face with her hands, " how shall I ever tell him now ? I could
not bear it ! "

The New Year had come to Lillian as it comes to us all, a
stopping-place for reflection, a halt on the road, a fresh start-
ing-point. All other days whirl over us and bear us on un-
consciously ; but New Year's day pulls us up suddenly, as it were,
and compels us, willing or unwilling, to consider how far we have
gone and whither we are going.

A few years previous to this time Lillian Nelson had been a
bright, happy girl. Though an orphan, and so impoverished at
her parents' death that she had been obliged to earn her daily
bread as a telephone operator, her cheerfulness, frankness, and
candor made her a universal favorite. Lillian's mother had been
an Irish Catholic, her father a convert In spite of the loss of
both parents at an early age, and though surrounded by Protes-
tants, she continued firm in the practice of her religion. Sud-
denly the girl's fortune changed. She was invited to visit her
father's sister, Mrs. Carlton, a rich and influential lady, and upon
that personage taking a fancy to her, she was practically
adopted, and became the daughter of the house. The girl soon
became warmly attached to her aunt, and the latter exerted an
astonishing influence over her niece. Unfortunately, that power
was soon used to break down the structure of the girl's piety
and faith. Lillian's was essentially a clinging nature. She would
have made the typical old-time heroine — gentle, confiding, and
submissive ; but pretty and lovable as such a nature may appear
in romance, and often in reality, it lacks the element of strength,
which is as necessary a part of a perfect woman's character as a
certain elastic firmness is an essential quality of all plants that
grow. It is fair to say, however, that Lillian would have re-
sisted any open opposition to her religion. Mrs. Carlton never
opposed her openly.

"Ah! going to church so early this morning?" the latter
would say as Lillian prepared for Mass. "I really hoped you
would breakfast with me ; I wanted to have a little chat " ; or,

1890.] A NEW YEAR' s PRAYER. 637

" I don't feel well, and I should like to have you stay with me
this morning."

At first Lillian always had a polite but firm answer ready
for any such excuse, but gradually she began to grow lax and
to yield point after point. Again, Mrs. Carlton would remark
quietly, as her niece was going to make a call or preparing for
reception :

" It is not necessary, my dear, to tell any one what church
you go to. So-and-So and So-and-So are Protestants, and it
is no one's business but yours what sect you belong to."

" I am not ashamed of my religion, Aunt Caroline," Lillian
once said proudly; but imperceptibly the impression took root in
her mind that her religion was a subject to be kept in the back-
ground.

When Robert Brownly appeared upon the scene as a suitor
for the young girl's hand Mrs. Carlton, who considered him a
most eligible parti, cautioned Lillian more plainly and decidedly
than she had ever done before to say nothing about her religion.
For a moment the spark of faith still glimmering in the girl's
breast flashed in her eyes :

" No, aunt, I have kept silence too much already about my
religion, and if Robert Brownly asks me to be his wife I will
certainly tell him that I am a Catholic. He will have to con-
sider whether that is a serious objection before he goes any
further."

" You silly little goose," said Mrs. Carlton. " All that is very
fine, but it is nonsense. No one urges you to tell a lie. You
have simply to say nothing on the subject. Nobody imagines
that my niece is a Catholic, so there will be no questions asked.
When you are married, no doubt, you can tell him all, and he
will be perfectly satisfied. I understand men better than you
do, little girl," she continued caressingly, " and I know that a
trifle can crush a love affair in the beginning. It would be such
a pity, for Robert Brownly is a splendid fellow and just suited
for you, I think. Besides, I am sure that you love him al-
ready."

The girl could not deny that she loved him. Yet, although
Mrs. Carlton urged that the Brownlys had always been the strict-
est Protestants and had never been known to marry Catholics,
Lillian did not promise to keep silence. It was only when her
jealousy and pique were aroused that she yielded to the temp-
tation and tried to make herself believe that she would make
it right — afterwards.

638 A NEW YEAR' s PRAYER. [Feb.,

So the Catholic girl was married by a Protestant minister.
After marriage the stumbling-block her guilty silence had
thrown across her path loomed up before her as a mountain.
When she knew Robert better she did not fear so much that
he would object to her religion, but she dreaded to reveal her
hypocrisy. Her love and esteem for him, and consequently her
desire to appear well in his eyes, had grown stronger each day.
Robert was the soul of truth and honor. He detested anything
like deceit. How, then, could she tell him that she, his wife,
whom he loved and trusted, had concealed from him so im-
portant a fact as her religion ?

Though Lillian's spirits were buoyed up by her natural gay-
ety, though she was pleased and interested in her home, her
husband, and her baby, yet her conscience was still alive and
gave her many uncomfortable hours. At last, on the New Year
morning when Robert found her leaning over her baby's crib,
looking in those innocent eyes, she had resolved, cost what it
might, she would be a hypocrite no longer. She would confess
all and repair her guilt. She might neglect her duties, lose her
own soul, but how could she leave the little soul that God had
entrusted to her care unbaptized? Her faith was still strong
enough to make her feel that this was little short of a crime,
and that if her child should die unbaptized the evil would be
irreparable. Such a possibility seemed too terrible even to imagine.
Ah ! in what a difficult position the young wife's concealment
had placed her ! Those few words of Robert's sufficed to crush
her resolution of the morning, and to leave her still farther from
the difficult step that conscience, duty, every feeling of good
within her urged her to take.

When later Lillian came down to the quiet little lunch that
was to precede the formal dinner Robert remarked that she
looked tired and urged her to devote herself less to that
"bouncing boy," who was, he said, almost strong enough to
take care of his mother. After lunch she put on her furs
and went out for a short walk.

The exercise, the bracing air, and the subtle exhilaration ot
the scenes through which she passed made her almost forget
the painful thoughts that harassed her. She walked straight on
up the stately Fifth Avenue, when suddenly the Catholic
cathedral came in view, standing out in snowy contrast with the
dark buildings around, like a pure soul amid the world's cor-
ruption. This was the church where, not many years before,
she had prayed, where she had received the Divine Sacrament,

1890.] A NEW YEAR' s PRAYER. 639

where — ah ! the memory of those blessed moments that had
been filled with peace rushed upon her, in bitter contrast to the
tumult that an accusing conscience was now raising in her dis-
tracted mind. Hitherto she had been too ashamed of her
treachery to dare kneel before God's altar. Now she felt im-
pelled to throw herself on her knees in the spot where she had
prayed in her innocence. Hurriedly and eagerly she went up
the broad stone steps and into the sacred edifice.

She walked a few steps up the aisle, then turned into one
of the lower pews. She longed to go on to the altar- rail, to
throw herself before the Blessed Sacrament and renew her
resolution of the morning. Yet, still shrinking from the sacrifice,
she could only beg God to help her and give her strength.
There were many people scattered here and there in the great
church, but she did not notice them. Only as she walked
down the aisle on her way out, one face attracted her
strongly.

The face was irregular, uncouth, pinched with hunger and
want, the youthful features sharpened and twisted out of their
natural roundness and smoothness by the cruelly-defacing hand of
poverty ; but in the uplifted eyes, earnest and full of confidence,
spoke the faith that moves mountains, the love that knows no
fear. Lillian stood still a moment, then passed on out of the
wide door ; but she felt an irresistible desire to see that face
again. She was tempted to go back to ask the ragged boy —
he seemed scarcely more than a boy — to pray for her; but as
she opened the door again a queer, crippled figure was coming
down the aisle. His face looked commonplace enough now, but
she recognized it as that of the earnest pleader. She opened
the door again and waited for him to come outside. The boy
looked up a moment at the handsome young lady, and would
have passed on, but she came over to him, smiling. "Will you
kindly tell me," she said, " how long the church keeps open at
night ? "

This was the only question that suggested itself at the
moment.

" Until nine o'clock, I think, ma'am," answered the boy, sur-
prised and abashed before so elegant a creature. He would have
passed on, but she said : "I saw you praying in church, and you
prayed as if you wanted something very much. Can I help
you in any way? Do you need money?" And she took a
little gold coin out of her purse. The boy looked so miserably
poor that she need hardly have asked the question. The rough

640 A NEW YEAR'S PR A YER. [Feb.,

features brightened with a grateful smile, but as he took the
money a shade of disappointment flitted over his face. " Is it
not enough?" she asked, a little surprised. "I have no more
at present in my purse ; but if — "

" Oh ! thank you, ma'am," said the cripple, confused and
blushing, " it's an awful lot. I guess it's more'n I ever had in
my life ; but — I thought ; maybe — I — I mean — I — didn't ask
for no money."

" No, I know you didn't," said Lillian kindly, " but you will
take it as a little New Year's gift." The boy puzzled her. Was
he afraid of being thought a beggar?

"Oh! I mean— I— I didn't ask God for that."

"Won't you tell me," she said, "what you asked? — that is,
if I can help you. What is it you want more than money ? "

" Well, I'll tell you," he answered, hesitating at first, then
with a burst of confidence, as he looked at her kind and pretty
face. " It's — what I bin making a novena for, and I kin do it if
I only gets a chance, and bein's I've lived off alms ever sence I
was borned almost, and I want to earn somethin', and nobody
never'd give me no work becos I was crippled, and I never
learned nothin', and I kin work better'n what I always done —
odd jobs and errands and sellin' papers. What I want the most
of all is " — and " he stopped, looking up in the lady's face, as
though afraid that she might think his pretensions too exalted —
" it's — stiddy work" He said the words slowly, as though con-
sidering their great importance.

Lillian could not suppress a smile as the boy announced the
summit of his ambition.

" What is your name ? " she asked kindly.

"Jimmie Cronin."

" Well, Jimmie, come to my house — you'll remember the

direction, No. — , Street — to-morrow morning at nine o'clock,

and I will see what I can do for you. Our fireman is going-
out West in a day or two, and I believe you could take his place,
attend to the furnace, and so on. You don't look strong, but
/ think you can work"

Oh ! if she had known what happiness those words brought to
the cripple's heart. His eyes filled with tears, but he shuffled
his feet awkwardly, pursed his mouth as if about to whistle, and
said :

" You — " Then he blushed, and said : " I mean, I'll come
sure."

She had gone a few steps, when she turned back suddenly.

1890.] A NEW YEAR' s PRAYER. 641

It was the lady's turn now to look confused. She blushed as
she said hurriedly : " I — that is, my family, my household, is
Protestant. You need not mention where I met you." Jimmie
stared stupidly. His astonishment could hardly have been greater
if the lady had told him that the Pope had turned Protestant.
He answered, "No," mechanically, and she walked away, thinking
that after all he was a very stupid fellow.

The New Year's dinner passed off brilliantly, and Lillian
soon forgot her emotions of the morning and the almost pathetic
little episode that had followed. At breakfast next morning the
maid announced a queer little man to see Mrs. Brownly. "He
said you told him to come, ma'am, or I wouldn't have let him
in at all, he's that miserable-looking."

Oh ! what a nuisance," exclaimed Lillian, who now wished
that she had not bothered with the "creature." "Send him
away," said Robert carelessly.

" Oh ! no ; I suppose I must do something for him,"
Lillian said, suppressing a yawn. " He is a poor creature I
discovered yesterday ; he is in need and wants work. I thought
we might use him as fireman now that Curtis is going."

Robert looked surprised and amused. " Why, this is a new
departure ! Hunting up beggars to work for charity ! What next,
I wonder ? I suppose you'll belong to an association for pro-
viding the poor with strength, or something of the kind, before
I know where I am. My wife is charitable, if she is not reli-
gious."

"No; I am serious, Robert. You want a fireman, and here
is a young man who wants work."

" Well, that is logical, at all events, though I don't doubt that
there are thousands of young men in the same position. Where
did you pick this one up ? What do you know about
him ?"

" Nothing," she answered, " except that he is good and will-
ing to work."

" For which endorsement," he said, laughing, " I'll be bound
you can't give a reason or a proof except the usual one —
woman's instinct. Well, I suppose it's safe to engage him on the
strength of that. If he is a success, so much the better, and if
he robs us, kills us, and sets fire to the house, I'll have the
satisfaction of proving to the world that this thing about woman's
instinct is all humbug." So Jimmie was engaged. After a few
weeks had passed Robert declared that the cripple was such
an honest, upright fellow and such an energetic worker that for

642 A NEW YEAR'S PRAYER. [Feb.,

the future " Lillian's first impressions " should be his only guide
in judging character.

To Jimmie's great disappointment, he rarely saw the lovely
lady who had seemed to him an angel sent directly from God
to answer his prayer. Certainly she had fulfilled her promise, but
here her interest had ceased. The poor boy had had so little
kindness shown him that he exaggerated the " beautiful lady's "
goodness to him, and he longed and prayed for an oppor-
tunity to do her some good in return.

Little did Lillian dream as she came down the stairs in her
trailing plush reception gown, or later, when robed for the
opera or a party in her floating, gauzy fabric, that the poor
cripple was gazing upon her from some unsuspected corner with
an admiration that was the most genuine tribute her beauty
could receive. " I wish she was a Catholic," Jimmie would say
to himself. " I thought she was at first, but she an't, and I don't
believe she's got any religion at all. I wonder what made her
go in the church, anyways. When she told me 'bout not say-
ing nothin' about seeing her in church I thought she was a
Catholic and her folks was Protestants, and she was skeered of
'em. But she an't skeered a bit ; the master'd stand on his head
for her, and anyhow she an't no Catholic, for she never goes to
Mass on Sundays." If his lady had been a persecuted Catholic.
Jimmie would have had innumerable opportunities of helping
her, he thought ; but as it was, he found that she had no need
of him. Consequently, all his overflowing gratitude he lavished
on the baby boy.

Ellen, the nurse, found Jimmie a valuable assistant ; the boy
would stretch out his dimpled arms eagerly to the cripple, and
would crow with delight at Jimmie's antics, performed for his
babyship's amusement. Jimmie's love for the little one soon grew
so strong that he could not bear the thought of letting the
cherub suffer the smallest neglect, and his confidence in Ellen
being more limited than Lillian's, he generally managed to con-
stitute himself baby's guardian during its mother's absence. One
morning, however, Lillian had gone out shopping earlier than usual,
just at the time that he was busiest. Nurse had taken baby up to
the nursery for its first nap, when a short time afterwards he
heard a scream. Rushing up-stairs, he found the nurse flown,
and Polly, the kitchen-maid, running about frantically and shriek-
ing, " Oh ! he's kilt ! the darlin' ! the lamb ! He fell out of the bed
on his head ; and he's kilt, he's dead !, Ellen has run out of
the house entirely, she was so skeered ! Oh ! the lamb ! "

1890.] A NEW YEAR' s PRAYER. 643

"My God!" said Jimmie, "it will kill her. Where is he?"
There, upon the nursery floor beside the crib, lay the little son
and heir of the house, white and motionless, with his golden
hair fallen back, making a glory around his head. The cripple
bent down sorrowfully over the little form, and lifting it tenderly
in his arms, he carried it towards the window. " Hush, Polly,"
he said, "the little one has only fainted."

Then, bearing his precious burden to the marble basin, and
letting the cold water run from the tap, he sprinkled the white
face over and over again. Before long the little one opened his
. wide blue eyes, looked around m astonishment, then smiled up
in Jimmie's earnest face with an expression the cripple never for-
got.

Lillian was thrown in a flutter of alarm and excitement when,
upon her return half an hour later, she learned of her baby's
accident. "O my precious boy, my baby!" she cried, rushing
up-stairs ; and snatching the boy from the frightened Polly's arms,
carried him to the window. She looked anxiously at the blue
eyes, passed her hand over the golden head, laid her ear close
to the child's heart, and covered him with kisses and caresses.
The baby's blue eyes, she thought, looked bluer and deeper than
ever as they smiled joyously into her anxious face.

"Ah! thank God!" she exclaimed. "He's just as well as
ever he was, mum," said Polly, " and there isn't a thing in
the world the matter with him." Yet that night as Lillian lay
awake thinking of the risk her child had run, she vowed to
have him christened without delay. She knew that private bap-
tism is allowed only in case of danger. And might not an acci-
dent happen any day ? She was overcome with horror at the
thought that God might punish her by snatching her baby from
her unbaptized.

The next day baby looked tired and pale. Under ordi-
nary circumstances she would not have attached much importance
to these symptoms, but after what had happened the day before
they alarmed her somewhat and she sent for the doctor. " He
is not ill," she said, " but I fear he is not very well, and I want
to know." She spent all her morning in the nursery, bathing
the little one, and lavishing upon him a hundred little cares and
caresses.

After lunch, finding him much brighter, she yielded to Robert's
persuasions to take her usual afternoon drive. " The doctor will
not be here until after his office hours, and you will be back
long before then," he urged, as Lillian hesitated. Still she went

644 A NEW YEAR'S PRAYER. [Feb.,

out reluctantly, with a misgiving that seemed to her unreasonable ,
but that she could not altogether control.

She shortened her drive considerably, and when she alighted
from her carriage there was Robert standing in the door-way,
a look on his face that she never saw before, a look that was
sorrowful and pitying. All her fears arose tumultuously in her
heart. O heaven ! was the baby ill ?

" God grant that I am not too late," she murmured, as she
came up the steps.

"What is it?" she cried at last in an agony of fear. Robert
came towards her, his face full of grief and pity; he put his arm
around her gently, but he could not speak. Her face grew pale
and her eyes dilated wildly.

" O my baby ! " she cried. " He is ill, he is dying ! Let
me go to him before — "

She would have flown to the stairs, but he checked her. " No,
dearest," he said tenderly, " you could not bear it. Our little
baby is — "

" Dead ! " she cried, so wildly, so pitifully that R.obert's heart
ached to hear her. Then, thrusting him aside, she exclaimed :
"I do not believe you; I will see !"

But as she said the words she fell, pale as death, in Robert's
arms. He bore her gently to the library and laid her there upon
the lounge.

When she regained consciousness she called wildly for her baby.
Robert attempted to console her with loving words, but she
scarcely seemed to hear them. After a time he told her that the
little one had had a convulsion just as the doctor arrived, and that it
had died in the latter's arms. He even dwelt upon the baby's death,
hoping that the storm of tears, dreaded at first and longed for
at last, would come to her relief. But tears come to sorrow that
is blessed, not to sorrow that is despair.

The days and weeks rolled by, yet no comfort came to the
sorrow-stricken household. An expression of settled despair was
written on Lillian's face. Robert found it impossible to arouse
her interest in her surroundings, and the fear that she was losing
her mind became stronger day by day. At last a trip to Europe
was decided upon, and accepted by Lillian as she accepted every-
thing, with indifference. During the ocean voyage and amid all
the novelty and beauty of the scenes through which they passed
she showed the same stony apathy. Three months had gone by,
yet there was no change for the better; on the contrary, Lillian
was growing physically weaker every day. Since her baby's

1890.] A NEW YEAR" s PRAYER. 645

death she had not expressed a desire or shown pleasure at any
plan or prospect ; but when Robert spoke of returning, she said :
"Yes, it is better. I am glad."

So, discouraged and sorrowful, Robert prepared to return to
the home where not a year before he had been the happiest of
men. Into that home Lillian entered, the ghost of her bright,
pretty self. Her friends were " sorry," some "sincerely sorry,"
to see her suffering; but one friend, the humblest of all, grieved
for her with a sorrow almost as deep, though not as hopeless, as
her own. The more Jimmie grieved the more he prayed. In
church and out of church, at his work, everywhere, one invoca-
tion was constantly close to the grateful cripple's lips : " Dear
Lord, won't you please let me help my lady?" More than ever,
since the blow that had fallen upon her, he wished that his
lady was a Catholic.

Ignorant and humble as he was, the crippled boy could see
that the lady's sorrow was without hope or consolation. He
knew, too, that in prayer lay her only refuge, her only comfort.
Had she not prayed once on New Year's day in the dear ca-
thedral, and would she not go there again to pray if she was
only reminded? But who would remind her? who would speak
to her of God ?

It seemed to the boy, as he thought of it, that she stood
alone in her sorrow ; the books, flowers, and presents sent her by
friends, and even her husband's tenderness and love, could not
touch her or help her. Then it seemed to him that though he
could not fight for her, or risk his life for her, as he had often
wished to do, his opportunity had come to help her.

He was only her servant ; it was not his place to speak as a
friend; she might be indignant; but even though she turned him
away, he would speak. If his words made her say one little
prayer to God, would that not be worth the risk ? When Jim-
mie entered Lillian's sitting-room she was seated before the
grate-fire in a little, low wicker chair, the bright flames shining
full in her poor, wan face. Was this the lovely lady who had
appeared to him at the church-door on New Year's day, looking
like a vision of happiness ? Was this the queenly mistress of
the house before whom he scarcely dared to raise his eyes?
Sitting there in her loneliness and sorrow, she touched him as
she had never done before; he felt a rush of pity as he begged
God to let him bring his lady comfort.

" Ah ! the furnace, I suppose," Lillian said, looking up

646 A NEW YEAR' s PRAYER. [Feb.,

wearily as Jimmie entered the room. "You can speak to Mr.
Bro wnly about it when he comes in."

"Lady," he said, "you was good to me once; you give me
work, stiddy work, and God sent you to answer my prayer ; and
I bin wantin' to tell you that I can't bear to see you frettin'
and grievin' so much.

" You tole me once never to speak about seein' you in church,
and I never did to this day; but what I got to say is that if you'd
go to church ag'in, and if you'd see a priest there and hear him
tell about the Catholic religion, you'd feel a great sight better.

" I saw one Catholic baby die once, lady, and the mother
was a poor woman, but she loved that baby better'n her own
life, 'cos her husband was dead and the kid was all she had.
She cried and went on awful at first, but afterwards I used to
see her smiling all the time, and I asked her why, and she said
she loved God so much she wouldn't begrudge him nothing,
not even her little one that she know'd was safe and happy.
O lady ! if you could only feel like that ! Little babies goes
straight up to heaven — "

"How dare you speak in that way to me, boy!" cried Lil-
lian, a flash of fury blazing up in her sunken eyes. She had
caught him by the arm and was holding it tight. " Don't you
know that my baby died without baptism ? "

" Oh ! no, lady," said Jimmie, " that he didn't, for I baptized
him myself the day he fainted, in the name of the Father, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, just like the priest told us
in Sunday-school, for I thought he was in danger of dyin'!"

Her hand tightened upon his arm until he could have shrieked
with pain, but the wave of hope that rose in her breast spread
shining over her countenance. " Thank God ! " she said as she
sank on her knees and a flood of happy tears rushed to her
eyes.

She took Jimmie's trembling hand. " O boy! " she exclaimed
amid her tears, "you don't know what you have done!"

For a moment she looked in Jimmie's face, and in that mo-
ment she almost realized the poor boy's tender and grateful
compassion for her.

Good God ! had the boy deceived her so as to bring her
comfort ?

" Prove it ! " she cried hysterically ; " prove that you baptized
my baby, or if — you have deceived me — I — I — " And again
the stony look cam^ back to her poor, wan features. "Was

1890.] A NEW YEAR' s PRAYER. 647

there no one there ? Did any one see you ? Was the nurse —
was Polly ? — Oh ! tell me, did no one know of it ? "

Lillian was looking into the boy's face, watching its expres-
sion, waiting for a word as if her soul depended on his answer.

Something like a sob burst from the boy's heart.

" No ; no one saw me ; no one knew it but God. Polly,
• I believe she was running around there, but she didn't know,
and she was going on so she didn't take no notice of anything."

Jimmy was hurt, but looking in his lady's pleading eyes he
was ashamed the next moment of having thought of his own
feelings. He went quickly to the door and called, " Polly ! "
Perhaps he thought she might remember something. Yet he
had not much hope. When Polly came in the room a few
minutes afterwards Lillian was vainly struggling to keep calm.

" Tell me, Polly," she said, " all about the day my baby
fainted. You saw him, didn't you? Did you see Jimmie?
Where was Jimmie ? What was he doing?"

"Oh! indeed I does remember it, ma'am, and I'll remember it
the longest day I live. Yis, ma'am, I'll tell you ev'ry partick-
lar. Well, that mornin' Ellen came runnin' down-stairs, and
say she, all of a tremble, ' The baby's fell out of his crib, and
he's kilt ! Oh ! what'll I do at all ? I couldn't never face the
missus ! ' And she ran out the kitchen door, and then I flew
up-stairs as fast as I could go, trembling every bit of me, and
I called Jimmie, and he came running up, and there we seed
the poor lamb lying on the floor so quiet, and for all the world
like dead.

"And Jimmie took him up in his arms, and says he, ' He's
only fainted.' And he took him to the wash-stand, and let
the tap run, and he shprinkled water on the baby, and I was
that frightened I was screaming all the while, and — "

"Yes, yes!" said Lillian. "Jimmie — did you hear him speak
Did he say anything when — ?"

" Yes, he was mutt'rin' somethin' ; I thought it was prayin'
he was, and I ran to the window to see if you was comin',
and when I come back the only words I heard him say was
the ' Holy Ghost ' ! And I thought maybe the child was dyin' ;
but what did I see ? "

"Come away, Polly," said Jimmie. "The lady knows it now."

"O Jimmie! forgive me," said Lillian, whose tears were
now flowing freely. " God bless you ! Do you know what you
have done ? You have saved my soul. "

And Jimmie knew why his lady had suffered, knew that God

•

648 A NEW YEAR' s PRAYER. [Feb.

had answered his prayer, and that he had helped his lady most
at the moment when he baptized her little baby.

Ah ! why had he not told her before ? Had he known that
she believed, that the knowledge of her baby's baptism could have
given her the comfort it gave him, he would have told her long
ago. But he knew also, alas ! — and the knowledge was bitter —
that his beautiful lady had been false to her conscience and that
God had punished her.

Lillian's repentance was fervent and complete. She had been
a traitor to her God, yet he had opened • his arms with bless-
ings to invite her return. However, God's love was not human
love.

It was many years before Lillian occupied the place in her
husband's heart from which she fell when her trembling lips re-
vealed her past hypocrisy. She suffered all the more to know
that among Robert's many friends the friend of his youth whom
he had loved best was a Catholic. Robert declared that he
esteemed the Catholic doctrine above every other, though he
professed no religion ; but his wife's deceit to him and treachery
to her faith was a shock to his love and his pride, a blow
that could not easily be healed.

During those long years in which Lillian had many a struggle
to endure, many a heart-ache to bear, many a victory to achieve,
the humble friend who had been God's instrument of mercy
towards her remained her constant helper and support. Not
only was the cripple's presence a continual reminder of her
debt to God, but Jimmie's eyes seemed to read her very soul.
Before that honest soul she was ashamed of any weakness, of
any faltering that looked like slipping backwards.

When, years afterwards, Robert Brownly and his happy wife
knelt side by side to partake of the sacred Banquet perhaps
Jimmie's part in their happiness was forgotten, but there was
One who did not forget, and even on this earth blessed a hun-
dred-fold his faithful servant.

MARIAN WHITE.

I 8 90. ] PS YCHNIKA . 649

PSYCHNIKA.

To him who throws the weeds of doubt aside

And walks, faith-armored, through the changing years,

Girded with sunshine and the merry smiles

Of happy children, bidding ill be well,

And well be better still; to eyes that see

The good day broadening ever in the East

And all things circling to a nobler course ;

To hand and brain that through the stifling days

And weary nights of half-requited toil,

Undaunted urge the wheel of progress on,

No death, no final overthrow can come,

But only passage, sweet transition up,

Up to the peaks, the white, immortal heights,

Where right is law and God is all in all.

All lesser things, a mighty caravan,

Shall pass before thee; kingdoms rise and fall,

The mountains crumble and the seas roll back,

And Earth, with tremblings like a frighted child,

Uprear new ridges to the darkened sun ;

The stars shall sink in some great Waterloo,

Hurled from their thrones with all their courtly bands,

And flying headlong through the blackened space

Rise nevermore to rule the charmed night

But thou — thou shalt pass never; youth shall pass,

And riper years, and age, perchance, may touch

Thy outward husk, not thee ; within thee stirs

A something yearning for the nobler course :

Thy soul alone of all things cannot die.

JOHN JEROME ROONEY.

650 AMY Plowtf s INHERITANCE. [Feb.,

AMY HOWE'S INHERITANCE.
i

To MRS. CONRAD ALLAYNE, New York.

MY DEAR MRS. ALLAYNE : Since meeting you at Nantasket
last summer I have fallen heir to a handful of letters from your
ancestress to mine. These, with supplementary evidence in the
shape of letters from my great-grandmother Marian to my great-
grandfather George, turn your family tradition into a pretty bit of
history. Permit me to offer you the mosaic, my kindest of audi-
ences, as something of interest to you, and so a reward for the
sympathy you have shown in the things of interest to me.

Gratefully your friend,
January, 1888. ' BERKELEY REID.

To MR. BERKELEY REID, Boston.

DEAR MR. REID : The collection of old letters which
you so kindly forward seem to me to be of more than
personal value. Why do you not publish them, just as they are?
I do not think it would be necessary even to change the names
of our respective great-grandmothers, it was so long ago. With
gratitude for your thoughtfulness,

Your friend,
January, 1888. RUTH HOWE ALLAYNE.

HILLSIDE, September, 1809.

SWEET MILDRED: How you can scold when you have a
mind! Upon my word, ' I did not mean to wait so long. Since
I have, be glad of it ; for now there is news to tell.

Professor Heron has answered that grave epistle we con-
cocted in Miss White's school-room ere I left. It is little
but an answer, and written in haste, it would seem. He was on
the sailing vessel Araminta, which came to America August,
1790. He came for the material which went to make up the
book we read about him, and- he does remember a four-year-
old child they called Ama, whose mother or nurse died the
first week out, and left her to wander about the ship. He says
some pretty things about the waif; but alas ! dear Mildred, can
tell nothing more than did the sailor who carried me through

1890.] AMY HOWE'S INHERITANCE. 651

Boston streets; nor Mrs. Howe, whose husband fell upon me
borne thus, and brought me home. If Father Howe had lived
I believe he would learn my parentage. It was he, you know,
who first sent me to Miss White's school ; but Mother Howe
can but babble of the way my hair curled in my neck, 'and of
how she attired me in the long clothes that served the boys in
cradle-hood. For my own ragged little skirts were past the
saving, so she says. I would there were but an inch remain-
ing, enough to bear a monogram or tell one letter of my un-
known name. Ah me, my Mildred ! the romances we read to-
gether in the window-seat had many such a tale, but none
so tantalizing in its incompleteness.

Mother Howe is proud to see that I have not forgot my
spinning. She often declares no maiden in the country can
outdistance my flying wheel. Shall I confess something? Its
whirring prevents unwelcome talk and I can spin two threads
at once — the inner one so long, so fine at times it seems a
cocoon-web to lie about my heart.

You ask of the boys. Hosea is planning for a journey
west, to New York State. David is in a taking to go with
him; but John says one must bide with him. John is as
ever my favorite, but thoughtfuller if anything than when you
dubbed him Socrates, a year ago. Sailor Jack has not for-
gotten me, nor ever will, I think. . He brought me silk for a
gown when last he came to port, and a fine shell comb.
Speaking of finery, the peddler passed through here yesterday.
You should have seen the flocking from keeping-room and
kitchen, mistress and maid, and even the men leaving their
work to ask of news from town. His trifles did not please
me and his stories smacked too strong of hatred towards Eng-
land. I do believe myself English born. But the dear books,
hid between lawn and lace, I seized upon forthwith. They
were mostly fiction, and brought the ghost of good. Miss
White to my elbow, warning me against the sweets, so that I
took a sober elegy by one Mr. Gray as a sort of boneset
to clear my tongue afterwards. Do you ever go back to the
school ? My respectful affection to the mistress, if you ever
see her; and to yourself you know how warm a love. Write
soon again. Be no charier of commendation for this long
letter than you have been of complaint for silence.

Yours ever,

AMY HOWE.
To MISTRESS MILDRED HAVEN, Boston.

VOL. L. — 42

652 AMY HOWE'S INHERITANCE. [Feb.,

HILLSIDE, June 15, 1810.

To DR. GEORGE BERKELEY, Boston.

•

DEAREST FRIEND : I feel like offering apologies to some one ;
shall it be to you? You are the one to whom I have said most
of what I would now retract. The Howe farm is not a dreari-
ness set in silences, as I declared to you a year last winter. It
is the loveliest place in all the world, the most poetical and ro-
mantic. Mother Howe is a sweet old lady, and John — well, it
I were not yours, I know what I would do. Hosie has gone
West, and Dave is going soon. I never did like them as well
as John. He is one of the men they are going to make Presi-
dents of; thoughtful, well read in what it is necessary to read,
and a very knight for chivalrousness. I wish I had never
encouraged Amy in feeling better than her belongings, so that
she would marry John. Not that he has any idea of it himself,
any more than of plucking the roses which frame his window.
She is there, like the rose-bush ; that seems to be enough for
him. Seems, I say, for I do believe if she once showed her
heart was warm towards him she would see his aglow ; or, if
he ^thought she needed his to keep hers warm. She does ; I
would like to tell him so. There goes my mistress a-match-
making, like all women who are once betrothed, I hear you say.
Nay, love ; but when a woman has once found happiness, why
should she not try to teach her sisters what they need ?

We are having a glorious time. Constance has gained red
cheeks, and I a pound or two of flesh. Are you missing me ?
Indeed, I could not stay from you for ever. When you have
leisure seek mamma ; she misses both her girls. Farewell for
now.

THY MILDRED.

HILLSIDE, November 3, 1810.

MY MILDRED : What will you say when I relate the doings
of the past few days ? And yet I must tell you. Last Tues-
day evening the Underwoods had their harvest dance. John
'and Dave and I were there. Dave said I held my head too
high, and tempted Bethiah Underwood to pull it down. But
John declares the jade was jealous ; and it was nothing new.
But that is neither here nor there. While John and I were
leading Money Musk a strange gentleman came in with Beth,

1890.] AMY HOWE'S INHERITANCE. 653

and asked her who I was. " It is Amy Howe she calls her-
self, but no one knows how" she answered pertly, and the
whole room heard. " Say the word, sweetheart, and the
name is yours by law," whispered John in my ear. Oh!
but my heart was full to bursting with hurt pride and anger.
I nodded yes, and went upon his arm when the dance was
ended, and let him say to her, " Your compliments ! A month
hence I change a foster-sister to a wife ! " You should have
seen her redden. They say she would give her bold, black eyes
to win him for herself.

I have scarce had time to think. A month is short. The
sewing-women are now here. The date is fixed — December 3d.
Will you not come ?

Ah ! yes ; I know. The dreams of England and the grand
estate; but they are only dreams. ,

Yours ever,

AMY HOWE.

HILLSIDE, July i, 1825.
To DR. GEORGE BERKELEY, Boston.

DEAR HUSBAND : Ever since I breathed this fresh, pure air
I have pitied you, a prisoner in the city heat and dust. Little
Mildred, on the couch beside me, sighs frequently, " Poor papa ! "
The darling is much better for the change. I almost wish that
I had brought the boys along. Amy and John both chide me
for leaving them behind. They are well, as also Ruth, Matilda,
tall Jo, and little John. Such wonderful good children, George,
you never saw — never come to Amy to fret or tease, but seem
to study how to save her, and do her service. It is a ten-
dency inherited, I think. You know their father is the same.
Sometimes I question if it may be well for her. It is exact-
ing children and husbands who expect much that make us
wifely, motherly. No offence ! And Amy is as much a girl
as when she stood before the dominie in this same keeping-
room near fifteen years ago. I admire her as much as I ever
did — more than any of her kind. She is the only one 'consis-
tent with herself. The rest of us but masquerade at our ideals,
and, tired with them, are glad to be ourselves and common-
place again. Commonplace she could not be. That may be why
the village folk resent her so — that and a proud indifference

654 AMY HOWE 's INHERITANCE. [Feb.,

she has, which makes her husban'd and her boys and girls so
inordinately glad of any slight unbending.

* I love to see her come alive ; and she will do it yet for
mention of her parentage. I asked her once why Ruth was Ruth
and not another Amy. " I will learn first what is the proper
spelling of my name," she said, with sudden fire, and then,
before I could reply, she was her languid, lovely self again.

Small likeness to her husband, who, I used to think, would
come to be well known; but he will not have so much as the
country hereabouts would give, refusing all positions, Amy says,
unless a crying need induces him to speak. Then he is bold
enough, but soon resigns and lapses back to quiet ways. He
has his sly jokes at the petty magnates here, and asks us would
we have him so-and-so. I never saw any one so dread publicity
or care less for wealth and lofty ways — though he is held in
much respect.

Dear Heart, I would you could be here. I would divide
with you the days, and take my share in making rounds and
doing surgeon's work, if you could catch this breeze upon your
cheek and smell the sweet-brier by the window-sill. Tell our
Bertram and Constant to be dear good boys and write their
mother. She misses them and you.

Your loving wife,

MILDRED BERKELEY.

HILLSIDE, September i, 1827.

O Mildred, Mildred, it has surely come, and none of the
old romances read any prettier. If I can rein my pen in to take
a proper gait, I will go through from first to last. I may be
glad some time to have a record, and now I can recall the most
trifling detail. Two days ago I sat in the side porch with my
needle-work. You know how it looks down the avenue of
maples, and how often in my girlhood days I watched the road,
fancying my kinsfolk riding up for me, their tall plumes tangled
in the lowest boughs, calling, "Art thou our daughter?" And
I would bow my head for their blessing, so that Mother Howe
thought that I prayed over my work.

It all came back to me as I sat there ; and I said softly to
myself, Neither amid shower of scarlet leaves, nor past the fret of
naked boughs, nor under May's triumphal arch of green ! Over

1890.] AMY HOWE'S INHERITANCE. 655

and over I said this, until it became a sort of refrain ; and of a
sudden, as if I had used the words to conjure with, a horseman
came riding up the avenue. Why should the sight disturb me ?
Men were coming every day to talk with John of tariff and State
rights. Yet I was disturbed, and crossed the keeping-room and
entry-way with loud-beating heart. A dapper little man stood
in the door-way, lashing his boot with a gold-mounted riding-
whip. There was something in his searching stare, and in his
clothes, well made and of fine material, though frayed at the
seams and worn at the knees, that brought the color to my
cheeks. Then frowning at such bashful, maiden ways, I drew
myself together with a shrug, and answered to his question,
" Mistress Amy Howe ? " — his hat off and his head bent low
— " I am Mistress Amy Howe."

" Madam, I knew it," he said then. " You have the noble
features and high bearing of your English ancestry. I have come
on an errand to you from England."

I had liked to have fallen as he spoke, and then — do you
remember how I used to say I spun my dreams to make my
own cocoon ? — the thought came back to me as I stood there.
I felt the close web draw like bands across my heart. All these
long years, when you and I have thought that I was free from
fancies, they have held me fast.

It was Sailor Jack who did it after all. Poor Jack! he always
swore that I should have my rights, if he could win them for
me. He died a year ago of fever in a London hospital. It was
there he fell in with this lawyer, seeking evidence to save some-
one a-hanging. Jack gave him more, to save me a fortune and
a name. Ama Myrtoun — how do you like that, my Mildred? A
distant cousin stole me and sent me away, that he might have
my lands. It is all in writing — his death-bed confession, Jack's
affidavit, with the name of the ship and the testimony of another
Jack that I was there.

The very length of my nose and the curve of my eye-brows
are hugely in my favor. Oh! I am too full for sober writing.
I could laugh and cry in a breath, to think that it should come
at last, and I not yet forty — many happy years before me yet.
I wish that Ruth had yielded to1 your coaxing and spent last
winter with you. She dislikes meeting people, and, of course,
must do that now. Matilda tells already what she means to do.
John is too young to care, and Jo is as close-mouthed as his
father. He — I don't know what he thinks. He laughs and asks,

656 AMY HOWE'S INHERITANCE. [Feb..

" What do I, who have been Queen Amy here so long, want
with new titles, and a paltry lot of land, which I must cross the
seas to claim ? " There are no near relatives living. He does
not seem to care a whit to know that I am well-born. When
he is gravest, I console myself with blithe Attorney Duff, the
English lawyer. I can tell him all my romantic dreams and he
will sympathize with them ; display my little airs, and he will
take them as a matter of course.

Away with nonsense ! There is more in this than romance
and affectation. It means that I shall be brought to my feet, and
meet the large demands of life — not sit tamely waiting for its
small favors to be laid upon my lap. Write to me, and tell me
you are glad with me.

Your happy

Ama Myrtoun.

HILLSIDE, September 15, 1827.

DEAR MILDRED : If this letter of yours had come to me ten
days ago I should have missed some warmth in your congratu-
lation ; but the ten days have seen a change in me. And I
know you do not love me less for saying I am overkeen to
leave the 'land which has been more than motherland to me. I
was, Mildred, but I am not now; and as a penance for the
selfish hours between the was and am I write this frank con-
fession. Do you know, Mildred — it is a shocking fact — it is
possible to cause those nearest and most dear to seem unlovable
by looking on them as distant and unrelated to us, removed
from the partiality of love, and scrutinized as a stranger might
scrutinize them ? Little weaknesses, Mildred, which would ap-
peal pathetically to a lover, dragged into the light of criticism !
Little attractions, unimportant except as you have become at
home with them, lost sight of! You cannot know. You are
as loyal as you are loving. But I do ; I did it. I looked at
those about me with the eyes of a stranger, a new Ama
Myrtoun, who felt superior to them. And John — John, Mildred —
seemed unpolished and heavy. • The children were ill-mannered,
and Mother Howe's face, in its white cap-border, nearly drove
me distracted. It was so aggravatingly meek.

At last, one night the lawyer said I must tell him the next
day how soon I would be ready to go. The autumn storms

1890.] AMY HOWE'S INHERITANCE. 657

would be upon us if we did not leave soon. He left me sit-
ting by the fire-place and feeling more wicked and rebellious
than I can tell you.

You know how Jo lays the logs in the form of a cage. I
watched the fire, like a wild thing, climb and cling to the
highest arches, until they came down ; and then, with a purr, it
gnawed at the heart of the fore-stick. I enjoyed its fierce
destructiveness. You did not think that I could be cruel? I
have been, more than once. The sparks flew out of the smould-
ering embers in a flock, and a little gray cinder-witch picked
up her petticoats and whirled after them, leering over her
shoulder at me, as if we had a secret understanding with one
another. " You are seeing things as they are," she seemed to
say. I thought I was. But, Mildred, there are different ways
of seeing things as they are.

I went out and strolled slowly down the lane, hiding behind
a tree when I saw that John was standing by the bars. The
yearling colt came up to him for a petting. In an absent-
minded way, John made a quick stroke down its nose, so that
it turned and caught his sleeve, half-playful, half- remonstrant.
"Did I hurt?" asked John aloud. "It is a rough hand."
He held it up and scanned it curiously. It trembled — the great,
broad, gentle hand, which had so many times held mine en-
tirely hid within it. " I am a fool," he said, and nervously
pulled splinters from the fence and stuck them back in place.
I knew what he was thinking. He had told me the night
before it would be exile for him to live in England, but he
would never stand out against my will.

Turning, he let down the bars, and with slow dignity the
cows stepped through. He likes to watch the big, comfortable
creatures, treading heavily, tossing their horns, dipping their
dark muzzles down to the ground ; but that night he saw some-
thing else, and so did I — a baby girl in long clothes, clinging
about the neck of a tall, awkward boy, who tended her and
taught her from the first ; a haughty maiden, out of favor with
the other maids, and with most of the lads, but championed
by the same true lover grown a man ; a woman, who might
look from the door-stone as far as eye could reach and not
come to the limit of her thrifty husband's land ; aye, and who
might look far and wide through all his life with her, and not
come to a place where she could say his love for her would
stop ! I hastened into the house before he saw me, but

658 AMY HOWE'S INHERITANCE. [Feb.,

that was not the end. You could not change me by such
arguments.

In the evening Ruth would have me read aloud ; and
running over the books they had not heard, I came upon an
ancient volume, itself a reprint of a still older one. It had
been found in Judge Tyler's attic, and brought to me by his
son some weeks before. Ye Nature and Uses of Gemmes,
it is called ; and tells what metal or precious stone is in con-
currence with each planet, and how mankind may coerce their
destiny by wearing, every one, the stone which rules his star.
" Read it out," called the children, as I went on and on,
attracted by the quaintness of the lore ; and finding towards the
end some legends, I chose Ye Legende of ye Opal, and began
to read. Here it is, with no more change than the for ye and
our modern s for f.

THE LEGENDE OF THE OPAL.

A mayden who was so fortunate as to possess a good Genius,
was allowed by him her choice of gemmes to wear as an orny-
ment. She was conveyed to a far countrie, where no men were
but dwarfs, and these workers in precious metals and stones ot
value. It was a wonderfull place, unlighted by sun or stars, but
set thick with lamps of curious workmanship. The gemmes
were arranged on a long cushion, for the mayden to choose ;
but so great was her bewilderment that she lingered long and
spoke no word. " This is the Jewel of Beauty," said the long-
bearded dwarf, the setter-forth of the treasures, stopping before
a turquoise. " It is Venus' stone. Behold how blue it is, like
to the goddess' own eyes ; and how it doth symbolize innocence
and youthful charm."

" It will fade," whispered the Genius, plucking her by the
sleeve ; and she withheld her hand.

" This is the Jewel of Power," continued the dwarf, taking
up a diamond, which did gather unto itself all the light of the
place.

" That is good," commended the Genius ; but the mayden did
not say, " I will have it."

Then came the Jewel of Pomp and Pride, a great red ruby,
swelling with warm colors, seeming to pulsate as do flames.
Here again the Genius nodded and cried, " Good ! " but the
mayden went on.

1890.] AMY HOWES INHERITANCE. 659

There was a cold, white pearl, that was the Virgin's Stone.
An agate and a garnet ; and these were Jewels of Industry and
Thrift. Also an emerald, that was for Hopefulness ; a topaz,
that was the Dream Stone ; and an amethyst, that was the Poet's
Gift.

But the mayden passed on, until she came to one which lay
by itself, and did flush and glow like an infant in sleep. It was
the opal.

Then the Genius sought to withhold her, and cried unto her
sharply : " Take heed, it is a dangerous toy ! " But the mayden
had it already in her hands, and over her face a thoughtful look
was stealing. " I think I will take this," she said unto the
dwarf. " It doth please me right well."

" Nay, but thou art a fool," quoth the Genius. " It is the Love
Jewel. Behold how plain is the setting; and it doth make silk
more shabby than fustian to the wearer." And if was so. For
the stone was furnished with but a slender ring of dull silver,
that was almost iron color. Moreover, the rich garments of the
mayden grew tawdry beside it, and did no longer become her
as heretofore.

" Beware lest thou compare it with other gemmes," said the
dwarf.

Forthwith all disappeared and left the mayden alone in her
own countrie. And in her own countrie there was comment and
remark, when she did appear wearing the opal ; and especially
that she had donned a homespun gown. Moreover, her mood
was no less demure and quiet-seeming than her cloathes; and
everywhere folke jostled one another and made whispered gossip
go about. The mayden bore it for a time, but at last became
infect. She said unto herself: " Alas ! I am a strange, outlandish
mayd. Behold, how the diamonds and rubies, do glitter on the
breasts of my fellows. My jewel is furnished forth so plainly,
and it doth bear so marked a difference. Have I chosen happily ?"
She gave no more heed to the warning of the dwarf, but took
the opal from her bosom and held it up against the jewels 'which
she had rejected, comparing it with them.

Then a sorrowful thing did happen. The glow went from the
heart of the opal, as it does from the sky at sunset, and there
was only the whiteness of ashes there. Whereupon, the mayden
discerned the excellence of her jewel. There came to her the
knowledge that it had made her heart tender and filled her life
with joy. She saw that the splendor of the diamond was unsatis-

66o AMY HOWE 's INHERITANCE. [Feb.,

fying, the dreams of the topaz were lonely, and the emerald's
anticipations were not founded upon truth. Thrift and industry
appeared objectless ; chastity was a snow-queen, and pride a pain.
Moreover, the Beauty-stone grew tiresome, and the Poet's Gift
was but a dull thing after all. Then the mayden uttered a cry
of sorrow and caught back the jewel. She said, " How could I
compare my precious jewel, which is past compare?" And
she fled away by herself, to cover with kisses the doubly dear
stone, until its glow returned. Then she replaced it on her
bosom.

I cannot tell you how the story touched me, Mildred ; how
that my own voice sounded like a warning in my ears. The light
went from the jewel, and there was only the whiteness of ashes
there.

John saw it; he has seen everything, when I believed him
dull and blind. He sent the children trooping off to bed as
soon as they had had their good-night kiss.

I am not going to England, Mildred ; I am going to stay
here at Hillside; and the determination is four days old. The
lawyer has been gone three days. He had much to say of my
foolish relinquishment of the inheritance, of how my life here
would cramp and fetter me. But, Mildred, I do believe not every-
thing which cramps is a fetter.

John watches me closely — for a reaction, I suppose. He said
that night it was not in the glow of heroism a sacrifice was
hard, but in the twilight which comes afterward.

But by this happiness — the greatest in all my selfish life — I
know that I am at last, contentedly, AMY HOWE.

A. B. WARD.

1890.] " OUR CHRISTIAN HERITAGE" 66 1

"OUR CHRISTIAN HERITAGE."*

THE dominant error now threatening Christianity is without
doubt that which is called agnosticism. In various forms and
degrees it enters into control of very much that is accepted as
science. It is essentially unspiritual. It has superseded mere heresy
in its hold upon the minds of men. The voices that deny the
legitimate authority of the Christian Church in spiritual things
are feeble in comparison with those that deny the real existence
of spiritual things at all.

Now, while from the Catholic point of view agnosticism is the
legitimate and expected successor of heresy in its attack on revealed
religion, so also our quondam antagonists, or such of them, at
least, as still cling to the main Christian facts and truths, have
begun to recognize that their true enemy is not so much Rome
as agnosticism. We quote from Dr. Charles L. Thompson's
address at the opening of the last General Assembly of the Pres-
byterian Church. He was the retiring moderator, and speaking
of the dangers to religion, he said:

"Much of our philosophy strives to bury God in the sarcophagus ot
natural law, or to spirit him out of his universe in the vapor-clouds of a
sentiment too ethereal to attract a human vision and too unreal to anchor
a human hope. That God in whom our fathers believed, whose existence
and agency were the nerve of the inductive philosophy, whose personality
has lashed into whiteness every coast of thought as the ocean lashes con-
tinents, is to the ear of much of our thinking the dim murmur of a reality
which has almost passed from consciousness, the lingering echo of the
ocean's diapason that haunts the tinted shell of our science or our sen-
timent, but no longer has power to mould our philosophy or sustain our
life. The pantheism of the German sophists is changed into the agnosticism
of this generation. It infects our natural science, gives a glitter to our
speculative philosophy, enters into imaginative literature, giving epigrams
to the essayist and wings to the poet, and, entering the field of morals,
it loosens man's spiritual connections, makes him an actor to himself, the
world his theatre, and mammon his god. So it slips down into popular life.
We need not ask what effect the speculations of Huxley, Spencer, or Comte
can have on the morals of the people. The world is full of conductors.
The thought of the thinker filtered down from its stormy heights runs
easily to the lowest valley. No one who values the moral life of man, the
bonds that bind man to his fellows, can afford to be indifferent to the
refined worship of nature, of matter, of the present and tangible, which,

* Our Christian Heritage. By Jam«s Cardinal Gibbons. Baltimore : John Murphy &
Co.; London : R. Washbourne.

662 " OUR CHRISTIAN HERITAGE" [Feb.,

finding its first expression among thinkers, drops to the level of workers,
and blinds a whole generation to the invisible, the future — the soul and its
God."

Referring to old controversies, he asks: "Why mount guns
on parapets that are never menaced ? I notice in our harbors
the guns point the way the enemy would probably come. New
approaches demand new defences."

So, too, in the Episcopalian General Convention, Bishop
Whipple lamented that —

"We are perplexed by the unbelief and sin of our time. The Chris-
tian faith is assailed not only with scoffs as old as Celsus and Julian, but
also with the keenest intellectual criticism of Divine revelation, the opposi-
tion of alleged scientific facts, and a Corinthian worldliness whose motto
is, * Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' In many places Christian
homes are dying out. Crime and impurity are coming in as a flood, and
anarchy raises its hated form in a land where all men are equal before
the law. The lines between the church and the world are dim. Never
did greater problems confront a council of the church. An apostolic church
has graver work than discussion about its name or the amending of its
canons and rubrics. I fear that some of this unbelief is a revolt from a
caricature of God. These mechanical ideas about the universe are the out-
come of a mechanical theology which has lost sight of the fatherhood of
God. There is much honest unbelief. In these yearnings of humanity ; in
its clubs, brotherhoods, and orders; in their readiness to share all things
with their brothers, I see unconscious prophecies of the brotherhood of all
men as the children of one God and Father. Denunciation will not silence
unbelief. The name of infidel has lost its terrors. There is only one remedy.
It is in the spirit, the power, and the love of Jesus Christ. Philosophy can-
not touch the want. It offers no hand to grasp, no Saviour to trust, no
God to save. When men see in us the hand, the heart, and the love of Christ,
they will believe in the brotherhood of men and the fatherhood of God."

No doubt orthodox Protestants have far greater reason to
dread agnosticism than Catholics. The whole agnostic body has
been recruited from their ranks thus far, and their resources for
defence against any error are necessarily weak. Still, it would
be a fatal blunder for us to continue to adjust our own defences
as if the main attack were hereafter to come from heresy. It
was the realization of this fact that has prompted the most
prominent and exalted churchman among us to stand forth as
the champion of our common Christian heritage. God forbid,
he seems to say, that we should not pass on to you the inheri-
tance transmitted from our fathers. Welcoming to his side all
those who under any name still retain faith in the divine au-
thority of Christ, he addresses himself to that large and increas-
ing class of persons "who, through association, a distorted edu-

1890.] " OUR CHRISTIAN HERITAGE." 663

cation, and pernicious reading, have not only become estranged
from the special teachings of the Gospel, but whose moral and
religious nature has received such a shock that they have only a
vague and undefined faith even in the truths of natural religion
underlying Christianity." His book, written for busy men who
must run as they read, and who have no time, and perhaps no
inclination, for more elaborate volumes, whatever their merit, is
remarkable for the choice, the presentation, and the treatment of
its topics, as well as for the spirit of conciliation, chanty, and
piety that breathes through it from end to end. It is neither
an elaborate discussion of textual difficulties and obscurities nor
a finely drawn out refutation of modern systems of philosophy,
but rather the solid, practical, persuasive utterances of a good
and scholarly man who has not only read all and sifted all our
adversaries have to say, but who has deep convictions and the
desire as well as the ability and tact to make well the counter-
statement. We know of no one book that on the. whole equals
it as a presentation to ordinary readers of the grounds of our
reasonable service to God in face of present objections and diffi-
culties. We shall briefly indicate to our readers the course of
the arguments, for though essay follows essay establishing the
special truth proposed, there are certain natural divisions ; here
the scope is enlarged, there a special application is made.

Those whose vocation is to preach and to be officially teach-
ers will profit by a consideration of the needs of many of their
hearers as set forth by the cardinal in the first part of his intro
duction ; and, in general, we may say there is a distinct and
marked sermon value for priests in his suggestive treatment of
such subjects as prayer, the presence and providence of God, the
value of the soul, the divinity of Christ, and Christian education.

The general reader is led step by step from the visible things
which have been made to the invisible things of Him whose
handiwork they are, and to whose existence, power, and God-
head, and his attributes of providence, mercy, and justice, they
all witness. Next man is treated of, his origin and destiny,

-the spirituality and immortality of the soul, the freedom of the
will. Further on there is a special chapter devoted to evolu- .
tion and to such late theories as militate against the specific
unity of the race. The importance of presenting these funda-

t mental questions cannot be overestimated. The false and un-
worthy views of God and man taken by the chief Reformers,
Calvin and Luther, have borne their natural fruit in indifference,
in aversion even to natural religion, and that denial of responsi-

564 " OUR CHRISTIAN HERITAGE'' [Feb.,

bility for one's own acts now so common. It is these views
which form the staple objections on the part of the common
infidel class ; formulated, as they were, into confessions of faith,
they have now become the torment of the churches which main-
tain them, the rock of scandal and contradiction. Thus, in what
we may call the first half of the book is to be found the refu-
tation of that kind of unbelief which is produced by the too
easy reception of so-called scientific theories, and whose result,
or, more properly, utter lack of result, is summed up on page 289
in these words of Mr. Tyndall : "Whence are we? whither do \\e
go? The question dies without an answer, without even an echo,
upon the infinite shores of the unknown." Moreover, in the first
essays those diluted, undogmatic forms of Christianity known as
Deism, Universalism, Unitarianism, receives each its own refutation
in the proofs of God's providence, his justice, and the divinity of
Christ.

It is unquestionable that the faith of many even among our-
selves has been shaken and their adherence to religion strained,
while the comfort and peace of others have given place to
anxiety and doubt caused by the supposed inconsistencies and
contradictions between the teachings of science and the teachings
of religion. To such we commend the discussion and arguments
set forth in the cardinal's book. That their doubts and mis-
givings are out of proportion with their knowledge or their
capacity for making a judgment on the merits of the con-
troversy is true, but is no diminution of the difficulty. That
difficulties do exist and will continue is quite certain. But
they have been exaggerated by various causes — by a nar-
row, literal, erroneous interpretation of the sacred writings, by the
unjustifiable intrusions of scientists into provinces alien to their
own studies and methods, by an uncalled for dogmatism, and
especially by assuming as facts and verified conclusions what
with more modesty and truthfulness men would have seen to be
incomplete deductions and unsubstantiated theories. The treat-
ment of these difficulties by Cardinal Gibbons is characterized by
a liberality which will surprise not a few, and at the same time
by a cogency and force that will satisfy troubled minds.

To our own mind the gem of the book, the true pearl which
needs to he dissolved and assimilated, and so pass into current
thought and life, is contained in its third chapter, " Conscience
bearing Witness to God." We commend to especial attention
pages 52, 53, and 54. When the cardinal, after saying that to him
the best witness of God's existence is the voice of conscience

1890.] " OUR CHRISTIAN HERITAGE." 665

goes on to remark that " modern science claims to deal with
concrete facts rather than with abstract ideas ; we have here
a concrete fact, known experimentally to every one, pervading
human nature and asserting its influence everywhere," he touches
the most vital point at issue between the Christian and the
agnostic, and asserts valid rights of possession over it. There can
be little doubt that it is God's will that a conspicuous cultivation
of the virtues which are interior must now be looked for to
counteract the prevalent denial of the validity of the secret aspi-
rations of the soul. To be able to hear and to understand this
inner voice is to the true Christian the very height of good for-
tune, and to be guided by it the most eminently practical business
of life. It is peculiarly so at the present time, when, as already
said, the prevalent errors mainly result from agnosticism, for that
teaches that the reality claimed to be underlying our religious as-
pirations is non-existent or not ascertainable ; it limits the affir-
mation of truth to things known by the senses ; or, if it allows
any other certitude, it is merely of the metaphysical laws neces-
sary to deal with the exact sciences. The controversy has
changed ; why turn our faces backwards ? why rattle our armor
and brandish our weapons at enemies dead upon the field or in
hopeless flight ? But there does arise from the very rear of our
own fortress the sound of a host, numerous and powerful, ad-
vancing upon the least-protected defences, with torches towards
the magazine, with shouts of triumph, into the very entrance of
the citadel. God and the immortal soul are in controversy hot
and deadly ; scepticism is beginning to attack the firmest Catholic
strongholds ; its denials concern mainly the consciousness of God
within us, the witness of conscience, the validity of religious
longings for a future state, the reasonableness of prayer. God
the Holy Ghost is the ^refuge and strength of men and nations
in such a crisis. The leaders of thought, especially the ex-
ponents of science in the literary world, answer to St. Paul's
description : " They loved not to have God in their knowledge."
Therefore the Spirit of wisdom must be invoked. Men must
meet agnosticism with that only sufficient weapon for success,
experimental knowledge. We who have the criterion of external
authority at hand to test the correctness of our inner experience
need fear no delusions. The sounder the faith, the deeper should
be the interior life.

666 THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. [Feb.,

THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE.*

IN the interesting volume which provides the text for the
present article the accomplished editor of the London Month
has given an intelligible account of that open sore of mankind
which the illustrious Cardinal of the African Church is laboring
to heal and radically cure. The first half of Father Clarke's work
deals with the great patriarch himself; from childhood to ordi-
nation, from the professor's rostrum to the episcopal throne,
from the archiepiscopal see to the cardinalate it follows him.
On reading the wonderful narrative, the cry of St. Philip Neri
for twelve men like the apostles rings in one's ears. In this
paper we shall, however, confine ourselves to the second part of
Father Clarke's work, viz., the African slave-trade.

Towards slavery in general Father Clarke seems quite lenient.
His description of it would, in fact, satisfy the most rabid of pro-
slavery men; he even holds that "the objections to slavery are
drawn from a consideration of its moral influence on the master
rather than from that of any habitual cruelty practised on the
slaves " (p. 246). Indeed, this certainly would be news, unpalatable
in many quarters. The church labors to abolish slavery, he tells
us, as the moral educator of mankind, whatever that may mean.
But almost immediately he adds the true reason:

11 From the moment when Christianity began its work, slavery was doomed.
It must needs fade away and disappear under the standard of the Cross. It
could not withstand the Divine proclamation of universal freedom, that there is
neither barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus"
(p. 247).

Deo gratias ! in no Christian land is there a bondman. The
year of Pope Leo XIII.'s jubilee saw the last manacle fall from
a Christian slave, when Brazil by a stroke of the pen unshackled
it. Truly the pen is mightier than the sword. How well shines
out the truly Christian way in which a Catholic land broke those
chains from how they were severed in our own land twenty-five
years ago. Our slaves waded to freedom knee-deep in blood,
while the Brazilian bondmen sallied forth in peace, with the bless-
ings of their masters, their church, and their God. No sectional
strifes, no political broils, no race-prejudice, no negro question

* Cardinal Lavigerie and tke African Slave-Trade. Edited by Rev. Richard F. Clarke,
S.J. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

1890.] THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. 667

affects Brazil, because it is Catholic. But, on the other hand,
perhaps the most burning question of the United States at this
very hour is the negro and what to do with him. And why
such a question ? Because of our utilitarian views of the unfortun-
ate race — views shared in as much by Catholics, who are al-
ways affected by their environment, as by Protestants.

Unhappily, slavery as yet flourishes in Mohammedan lands,
although with two features, mentioned by Father Clarke, which
throw the blush of shame on Southern slavery. Nearly all "Mo-
hammedan slaves are domestic, and rarely employed in the
fields; whereas the vast bulk of American slaves were engaged
in out-door work, the masters, in very many cases, hiring out
their slaves to work at trades or otherwise, and keeping their
earnings. Again, "the child of a slave by her master is, ipso
facto, free in all Mohammedan countries." A hard reproach
this to our boastful land, where the old axiom, res fructificat
domino, was applied to the offspring of human chattels, no mat-
ter who the father might be. In America cuch a child was a
slave ; in Islam it is free-born. Only a few days ago a widow
came to see me about securing the pension her dead husband
was entitled to. This' man, and ten sisters and brothers, were
the children of a slave mother by her master. When the woman
died that Christian master sold his eleven children, scattering them
to the four winds of heaven. No Mussulman would do the like.

Father Clarke, following his many authorities, regards do-
mestic slavery as ineradicable in Africa. No anti-slavery crusade
will destroy it, he claims. On the whole, he seems to recognize
in it something more favorable than primeval savagery. The
only hope of extinguishing domestic slavery seems to lie in the
extinction of the slave-traffic.

" Slavery requires a continual supply from without. The children ot
domestic slaves are found by universal experience not to be sufficiently
numerous to fill up the ranks. It is not easy at first to see Why it
should be so, as the negro is remarkably prolific and of strong physique.
But men, like other animals, do not seem to breed when they are in cap-
tivity as they do when they are free, and it is not, as a rule, to the
interest of their masters that they should do so. Slaves who grow up in
the house occupy quite a different position from those that are purchased.
For them slavery is a light yoke — one so light that a great many of them
shake it off altogether, and are virtually if not actually free. There is
a sort of moral obligation on slave-owners to give their liberty to faith-
ful slaves, and their ranks are this way considerably thinned. In all slave-
holding countries in the present day the offspring of a white man and a
slave is by the law born free, and thus the license existing among the
owners of slaves in their intercourse with female slaves increases the free
VOL. U--43

668 THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. [Feb.,

population in comparison with the slaves. Moreover, a prosperous man
gradually increases his family of slaves, and such a one will go into
the market or to the trader, and look out for a healthy boy or girl
lately imported from the slave-producing countries rather than purchase
one who is home-bred. He will get thus a cheaper and more serviceable
article ; one more completely in his power and less likely to run away
than if parents or a former owner were near at hand. Whatever the cause,
an import trade is a necessity to the existence of slavery. Destroy the trade,
and slavery itself will not last long" (p. 250).

Whichever way one turns in considering this frightful horror,
that has made of Africa a by-word and a reproach, the hope
of improvement seems nil. Domestic slavery is baneful, the
slave-traffic unnatural; but worse than both are the blood-stains,
human bones, and skulls which mark the way from the villages
of the captives to the slave-marts. Primarily, these horrors have
the first claim on humanity. It would be tiresome to repeat the
numerous narratives which Father Clarke gives of the razzias of
slave-raids. During the past year the public press has kept
before our eyes these sad scenes. It may be well, however, to
give just one — a description of a slave-raid of the White Nile
traders :

" On arriving at the desired locality, the [piratical] party disembark
and proceed into the interior, until they arrive at the village of some
negro chief, with whom they establish an intimacy. Charmed with his new
friends, the power of whose weapons he acknowledges, the negro chief
does not neglect the opportunity of seeking their alliance to attack a hostile
neighbor. Marching throughout the night, guided by their negro hosts,
they bivouac within an hour's march of the unsuspecting village, doomed
to an attack about half an hour before the break of day. The time arrives,
and quietly surrounding the village while its occupants are still sleeping,
they fire the grass-huts in all directions, and pour volleys of musketry
through the flaming thatch. Panic-stricken, the unfortunate victims rush
from their burning dwellings, and the men are shot down like pheasants
in a battue, while the women and children, bewildered in the danger and
confusion, are kidnapped and secured. They are then fastened together,
the former secured in an instrument called a sheba^ made of a forked
pole, the neck of the prisoner fitting into the fork, secured by a cross-
piece lashed behind, while the wrists, brought together in front of the
body, are tied to the pole. The children are then fastened by their necks
with a rope attached to the women, and thus form a living chain, in
which order they are marched to the headquarters in company with the
captured herds." (Sir S. Baker, Albert Nyanza, quoted by Father Clarke.)

Amidst such sad scenes it is consoling to find the true Master
bringing light out of darkness. Among the students at the
College of Lille, Belgium, is one of these slaves, whom Cardinal
Lavigerie's priests ransomed. But twenty years of age, the young

1890.] THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. 669

man had six masters during his captivity, which began when he
was stolen from his home at the age of six, while on his face he
carries fifteen scars, left by the cruel knives of his many masters.
The hardships of his journey had so worn him out that the
traders were only too gjad to find a buyer for him ; this is how
the poor priests were able to secure him. He is now studying
for the priesthood, and longs to return to his still-loved land and
become an apostle to Ham's unhappy progeny. The Lord bless
and prosper him !

II.— MOHAMMEDANISM AND SLAVERY.

With slavery is connected this question : Is Mohammedanism
responsible for it in Africa ? It cannot be answered before con-
sidering a wider topic, viz. : The influence of Mohammedanism on
uncivilized nations and its attitude towards the Christian religion.
The creed of the Prophet is regarded as a blight on a large
portion of mankind by all Christians. Some learned students of
man's progress agree, on the other hand, to see in Islamism an
indispensable stepping-stone from barbarism to civilization, inas-
much as it raises the negro from the fetichism and devil-worship
of his ancestors. .

"It counts in its ranks the most energetic and enterprising tribes. It
claims as its adherents the only people who have any form of civil polity or
social organization. It has built and occupies the largest cities in the heart of
the continent. Its laws regulate the most powerful kingdoms. It produces and
controls the most valuable commerce between Africa and foreign countries; it
is daily gaining converts from the ranks of paganism ; and it commands respect
among all Africans wherever it is known, even where the people have not sub-
mitted to the sway of the Koran." (Blyden, a colored writer, Christianity ',
Islam, and the Negro Race, p. 7, quoted by Father Clarke.)

Without doubt, Islamism has a good effect on the negroes ;
the mosque takes the place of the voudoo-hut, and Turkish
prayers, said five times daily, are far more refining than the
gross dances of the pagan festivals. Hence, everywhere in Africa
the Mussulman missionary — and their name is legion — is looked

!upon as a superior being, whcse presence seems to elevate the
moral tone of the pagan villages which he visits. He travels
about with absolute freedom, making many converts, not so
much by his teaching and the doctrines of the Koran as by his
personal influence, for he acts both as teacher and physician of
the villages, which soon improve in his hands. Conscious of
their superiority, the villages adopting the doctrines of Mohammed,
unite together and are able to repel the slave-hunters' attacks,

670 THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. [Feb.,

while steadily increasing their own numbers. As a result, a
number of large towns have grown up in Central Africa, while
whole sections, like the Soudan and Nigritia, are entirely
Mohammedan. At the present day, in fact, sixty millions — almost
the population of the whole United States — of North Africans
make their prayers to Allah and his Prophet, and are a living
proof of the power of Mohammedan missionaries, not only in Africa
of to- day, but of the future.

True, Mohammedanism has exerted a beneficial influence over
the negroes ; still, no Christian can see in Islamism a stepping-
stone to Christianity. It hates Christianity ; the Crescent and the
Cross are enemies to the death. . In dealing, then, with African
slavery, there can be no truce between the two ; and so in all
plans for the overthrow of the slave-traffic the Arabian Moslems
must ever be regarded as our irreconcilable enemies. It will be
war to the knife. Once again the Cross and the Crescent will
meet ; this time in reverse positions. In Europe the Cross was
in possession and the Crescent the aggressor ; in Africa the
Crescent will be on the defensive, while the Cross will be the in-
vader. May the new crusade have a happier ending than those
of the middle ages !

III. — ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS SLAVERY.

The first means employed was blockading the coasts; natu-
rally it could but prevent the export of slaves and tended to
drive the traffic inland. It was like healing the surface and leav-
ing the cancer's roots in full strength. Nor v/as running the
blockade unfrequent, as the enormous profit more than repaid the
risk of several failures. An inland expedition next followed un-
der Sir Samuel Baker, on the White Nile and adjacent countries.
He was armed with full powers from the khedive, with the
moral support of the English government. The power of life and
death was vested in him, over all his own men as well as over
all the countries of the Southern Nile basin. From the start
Baker found himself, although honestly aided by the khedive,
thwarted by Egyptian officials, one of whom he finally cast into
prison, on;y to be released after Baker left. The following ac-
count of the capture of a slave-vessel on its way down the White
Nile to Khartoum shows how the slave-traffic was carried on
under Baker's very eye. It is related in his own words :

"Colonel Abd-el-Kader was an excellent officer; he was one of the
exceptions who took a great interest in the expedition, and he always

1890.] THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. 671

served me faithfully. He was a fine, powerful man, upwards of six
feet high, and not only active, but extremely determined. He was gen-
erally called 'the Englishman' by his brother-officers, as a bitter
compliment reflecting on his debased taste for Christian society. This officer
was not the man to neglect a search because the agent of Kutchuk Ali
protested his innocence, and exhibited the apparently naked character of
his vessel. She appeared suspiciously full of corn for a boat homeward
bound. There was an awkward smell about the closely boarded forecastle
which resembled that of unwashed negroes. Abd-el-Kader drew a steel
ramrod from a soldier's rifle and probed sharply through the corn.

'•' A smothered cry from beneath, and a wriggling among the corn, was suc-
ceeded by a woolly head, as the strong Abd-el-Kader, having thrust his long
arm into the grain, dragged forth by the wrist a negro woman. The corn was
at once removed; the planks which boarded up the forecastle -and the stern were
broken down, and there was a mass of humanity exposed — boys, girls, and
women, closely packed like herrings in a barrel, who under the fear of threats
had remained perfectly silent until thus discovered. The sail attached to the
mainyard of the vessel appeared full and heavy in the lower part ; this was ex-
amined, and upon unpacking it yielded a young woman, who had thus been sewn
up to avoid discovery. The case was immediately reported to me. I at once
ordered the vessel to be unloaded. We discovered one hundred and fifty slaves
stowed away in a most inconceivably small area. The stench was horrible when
they began to move. Many were in irons ; these were quickly released by the
blacksmiths, to the astonishment of the captives, who did not appear to under-
stand the proceeding.

" I ordered the rakul, and the reis or captain of the vessel, to be put in
irons. The slaves began to compreherid that their captors were now captives.
They now began to speak, and many declared that the greater porti&n of the
men of their villages had been killed by the slave-hunters." (Ismalia, pp. 127-8,
quoted by Father Clarke. )

It soon dawned upon Baker that his expedition was a failure;
but, brave man as he was, he held his post, manfully striving
to crush the horrible traffic, till his appointed time expired.
During the past years the British government has strengthened
the coast blockade; but again only to the increase of the in-
land traffic.

Besides the attempts to suppress the slave-trade, there
were abuses connected with domestic slavery in Africa which
called for correction. Among the negro tribes exists a be-
lief that after death the happiness of the deceased depends on
having a number of slaves to wait upon him; hence a suitable
escort is provided for the newly-dead by the sacrifice of a
number of slaves at his grave. A frightful butchery ensues
wherever this fetichism has not been rooted out by European or
Arab influence.

In 1887 the British government sent Sir James Marshall as
chief-justice to the Niger territory. As a good Catholic, the judge

672 THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. [Feb.,

was very much pained by the cruel custom of killing slaves at a
funeral, and resolved to wipe it out. In his first interview with
the native chiefs, at which were present the Catholic and Pro-
testant missionaries, the judge charged the forty chiefs gathered
before him with being murderers ; told them that he knew for
certain that slaves had been murdered only a few days before
at a chiel's funeral, and expressed his resolve to root out the
custom. Not long after three of the most important head men
of the neighborhood died, and immemorial usage demanded the
sacrifice of some slaves. This Judge Marshall determined to
prevent, but failed. Unable at once to chastise the natives, he
bided his time. At a favorable moment the military made a
sortie, burning several houses of the natives. Alarmed at this,
they sent a chief to sue for peace, which was refused unless
the murderers were given up. A few shells scared them, but a
strong attack, m which the dwellings and every temple and idol
were destroyed, brought the natives to their senses, and led them
to surrender the murderers, who were hanged. The upshot was
a treaty of peace, in which the natives agreed to give up the
horrible practice. Shortly afterward two slaves came as a depu-
tation from their brother-slaves to thank the judge for his pro-
tection. A little wholesome severity thus destroyed the worst
feature of African domestic slavery, and is an argument of
what may be done by timely measures with these savages.

IV. — SCHEMES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF SLAVERY.

Public opinion the world over is alive to the fact that all
attempts hitherto made for the suppression of African slavery
have been failures. True, an English squadron stopped the ex-
port of slaves, but the inland traffic only gained in consequence.
Neither commercial enterprise nor missionary efforts have done
aught of importance against the traffic.

" For twenty-nine years Cardinal Lavigerie has labored for the redemp-
tion of the negro ; he has sent out many bands of missioners. Some have
suffered martyrdom, others have died of fever and hardships. The survivors
report no improvement ; on the contrary, matters are growing worse. Con-
verts have been made, and individual slaves ransomed from their captors ;
but the moral influence of the missioner has not availed to prevent a single
razzia. Where nature has done much for man, and where man himself
seems capable of progress, where a numerous and happy population might
peacefully dwell, the slave-trader carries desolation. Slave-hunts are carried
on in these countries as far as the sources of the Niger. The sale of slaves
takes place publicly in all Mohammedan provinces on the same large scale

1890.] THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. 673

as ever. More than this, in the regions of the Great Lakes a fresh out-
burst of fanaticism has taken place, resulting in the massacre of the Chris-
tians and the expulsion of every white man. Throughout a wide extent
of territory the feeble flame of civilization kindled by the missioners has
been utterly extinguished" (p. 329).

Slavery is the obstacle to the civilization, colonization, and
evangelization of Africa. And this slave-traffic the church,
by the mouth of Leo XIII., declares to be against all law, divine
or human. The Pope has commissioned Cardinal Lavigerie to
preach a crusade against it, and that great prelate's burning
eloquence has aroused the conscience of Christian society ; and
everywhere, from Protestants as from Catholics, from states and
individuals, he has met cordial sympathy. Less indeed in our
own land than in Europe has this new crusade received at-
tention, and less again, we may add, among American Catholics
than among their non-Catholic countrymen. It would need the
presence and the burning words of the African Cardinal himself
to stir up the hearts of American Catholics to the greatness of
the task obedience has put upon him. And Africa has a great
claim upon us, for seven millions of our countrymen belong to
it by ties of consanguinity.

Among the many proposals which have been made for the
suppression of slavery the first is that the various powers
declare that the status of slaves be no longer recognized by
international law, and that the slave-traffic be treated as piracy.
This would destroy the trade on the coast, but would not prove
effectual inland without the co-operation of the Mussulman
governors, who keep up the slave-traffic in order to maintain
domestic slavery. The next measure proposed is to put restric-
tions on the sale of fire-arms and ammunition into regions
where slave-hunters make their razzias. To their shame, English
and German (and no doubt American also) traders supply these
weapons and cartridges.

Cardinal Lavigerie relates that a slave-dealer, when questioned
how he, could most safely penetrate into the heart of Africa, and
who was its ruler, simply laid his hand on the barrel of his gun
and answered : " The name of the ruler of Central Africa is
King Rifle." It speaks volumes.

A third and far more important scheme for abolishing the
slave-trade is to destroy Moslem ascendency. Arab rule is the
curse of Central Africa. It seems to hypnotize them, for the
slave-dealers treat the natives just as they please. Not only do
they barter with the chiefs for their subjects, but they make both

674 THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. [Feb.,

one and the other sons of the Prophet Now, Islamism is the
enemy of Christianity, and every negro who bends his neck to
the iron yoke becomes the implacable enemy of all Europeans.
How to overthrow the Arab is a debatable question. Many
believe that every approach of the white man, either as merchant
or colonizer or missioner, will eventually uproot the evil spectre
of the Arabian blight. Bring to the nations of the Dark Conti-
nent the blessings of liberty and thus end the sale and barter
of human beings. It is a pacific policy. On the other hand,
Cardinal Lavigerie favors armed intervention. He would introduce
into Africa a force of armed men, who would form a land-
blockade against the slave-caravans and open a line of stations
within easy reach of one another.

To his appeal for volunteers the cardinal received in a few
weeks the names of more than a thousand men. For some time
a M. Joubert, an ex-Pontifical Zouave, with two hundred
native soldiers under him and trained by him, has been living
near one of the missionary stations on Lake Tanganyika. With
this small force the brave soldier has effectually stopped the slave-
traffic in his neighborhood. Cardinal Lavigerie's call to the secu-
lar arm has not, however, met with universal approval. Many
well qualified to express an opinion regard it as doomed to
failure. As Napoleon's soldiers on the retreat from Moscow
were beaten by the climate, so the deadly miasmatic African heat
will make fall from the hands of the cardinal's soldiers the arms
which their fevered brains could not guide them in aiming. It
may be possible to train a negro soldiery; but to secure sufficient
of them would consume valuable time and rob many a training
officer of his life.

Two other schemes proposed will help very much, , but can-
not prove effectual. One is to establish fortified centres, follow-
ing in this Emin Pasha, who for several years, with only native
soldiers, has been a scourge to the Arab traders, passing from
post to post, defending or attacking, pursuing or arbitrating — in
short, having recourse to every weapon of sword and tongue to
root out the slave-traffic. The second may be termed a com-
mercial scheme; it consists in outbidding Arab traders in buying
ivory and other African products. This savors too much of the
utilitarian to be efficacious.

The last scheme for the suppression of slavery is colonization.
As for the whites, the same objection holds against them as
settlers that would prevent them going as soldiers. By great in-
dustry the whites might overcome these drawbacks, which now

1890.] THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. 675

beset their dwelling in Africa. But it would demand a very long
time. Meanwhile the slave traffic, and Islamism with it, ?vould
go on increasing. Hence the question of negro colonization
seems the most tangible. And Father Clarke appeals to the suc-
cess, although partial only, of Liberia as a sufficient proof why
American negroes should colonize in Africa. It is not a new
thought. As far back as 1853 Edward Everett thus spoke of it:

" When that last noble expedition, which was sent out from England, I
think, in the year 1841, under the highest auspices, to found an agricultural
settlement in the interior of Africa, ascended the Niger, every white man out
of one hundred and fifty sickened, and all but two or three — if my memory
serves me — died ; while of their dark-skinned associates, also one hundred and
fifty in number, with all the added labor and anxiety that devolved upon them,
a few only were sick, and they individuals who had passed years in a temperate
climate, and not one died. I say again, sir, you Caucasian, you proud Anglo-
Saxon, you self-sufficient, all-attempting white man, you cannot civilize Africa.
You have subdued and appropriated Europe ; the native races are melting be-
fore you in America as the untimely snows of April before a vernal sun ; you
have possessed yourself of India; you menace China and Japan; the remotest
isles of the Pacific are not distant enough to escape your grasp, nor insignificant
enough to elude your notice; but Central Africa confronts you and bids you
defiance. Your squadrons may blockade her coast, but neither on the errands
of war nor the errands of peace can you penetrate the interior. The God of
nature, no doubt for wise purposes, however inscrutable, has drawn across the
chief inlets a cordon you cannot break through. You may hover on the coast,
but you dare not set foot on the shore. Death sits portress at the undefended
gateways of her mud-built villages. Yellow fevers, and blue plagues, and inter-
mittent poisons, that you can see as well as feel, await your approach as
you ascend the rivers. Pestilence shoots from the mangroves that fringe their
noble banks, and the glorious sun, which kindles all inferior nature into teeming,
bursting life, darts disease into your languid systems.

" No ; you are not elected for this momentous work. The Great Disposer,
in another branch of his family, has chosen out a race, descendants of this torrid
region, children of this vertical sun, and fitted them by ages of stern discipline
for the gracious achievement." (Quoted by Father Clarke, page 349, from Bly-
den's Christianity \ Islamism, and the Negro Race. )

It is claimed that our negroes have no opening in the United
States worthy of national ambition. True, they are hampered
in many ways; shut out from trades, etc., etc.; in short, they
are a serious problem. The following extract, quoted by Father
Clarke, is from the pen of the same Blyden, who is a negro :

" In the United States, notwithstanding the great progress made in the direc-
tion of liberal ideas, the negro is still a stranger. The rights and privileges ac-
corded by constitutional law offer him no security against the decrees of private
or social intolerance. He is surrounded by a prosperity — industrial, commercial,
and political — in which he is not permitted to share, and is tantalized by social
respectabilities from which he is debarred. The future offers no encouragement
to him. In the career of courage and virtue, of honor, emolument, and fame,

676 THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. [Feb.,

which lies open to his white neighbors and to their children, neither he himself,
nor his sons and daughters, can have any part. From that high and improving
fellowship which binds together the elements from Europe, however incongruous,
the negro child is excommunicated before he is born." (Blyden, ibid.}

Any one giving any thought to the question of Africa must
be struck by the unanimous agreement which sees in the
American negro Africa's greatest hope. The feasibility of forced
or government colonization is certainly a debatable question.
Hard is it to understand how the United States could expatriate
native-born citizens, no matter what their color. The Constitu-
tion liberally provides for naturalizing aliens, but has no pro-
vision for denaturalizing citizens. Should negro colonization be
attempted, it seems possible only as a philanthropic measure, or
an outgrowth on the part of the negroes themselves. Still,
there seems a providential sign in this call for American negroes
to face. toward Africa. We believe that Africa will be Christian-
ized by the American negro. True, it seems far-fetched to write
in this way when only a handful of our seven millions are
Catholics. Arithmetical progression is, however, a feature of
mathematics, not of the Gospel. The apostles stayed not in Jeru-
salem till it became Christian. The best way to convert the
negroes of the South or the whites of the North is to send
missionaries to Africa and Asia. Sadly must we regret the ab-
sence of the missionary spirit. Nearly all the priests among the
Indians are Europeans, while of the nineteen Josephites laboring
for the negroes but three were born in the United States. How
to explain this! We are satisfied with saying that the fault lies
chiefly in the home. As children we are too much indulged
and humored; the hard virtue of self-denial is not implanted ; and
when at man's estate, we fear the trials and sufferings of the
foreign missionary. St. Joseph's Seminary and the Epiphany
Apostolic College in Baltimore will prove, God grant ! nurseries
to develop the missionary spirit. The "Macedonian cry" has
already echoed within their walls, which is thrilling the young
hearts there with longings to win the unhappy offspring of Ham,
here and in Africa, to the church and civilization. With this
sublime calling before the negroes of the South, every at-
tempt should be made to develop vocations among themselves.
The weakest point in all schemes regarding the blacks is that
in the work of their uplifting they themselves are ignored.
Scheme after scheme is hatched for their bettering, not one
of which seems to think of themselves as a working factor.
The true elevation of the blacks must be a growth ; it must

1890.] A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. 677

come from within, from themselves. What they need to-day
more than anything else are natural* leaders, both in the
spiritual and civic orders. Not hirelings nor political demagogues,
but apostles of grace and apostles of civic virtue. Give the
negroes plenty of their own priests, and without doubt the " open
sesame " to the negro problem of the South will be found.
And then, reversing the march of the king of day, their
priests will be the generals of the greatest crusade of Chris-
tianity— the evangelization of Africa by her own transatlantic
sons. J. R. SLATTERY.

St. Joseph's Seminary, Baltimore.

A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL.

THE Rev. Charles C. Starbuck, who writes a "good deal for the
Andover Review and other Protestant reviews and magazines, has
recently written a very noteworthy article for the New Englander
and Yale Review, entitled " Considerations Touching the School
Question." As he seems to represent the more fair-minded and
reasonable section of our non-Catholic brethren, and to have given
the subject some consideration — we cannot say a careful one — his
article is interesting as presenting the views of those hostile to us,
yet desirous ot keeping a kind and Christian spirit towards all
men, even towards those with whom they differ.

A great part of the article is devoted to showing up the
wild and unreasoning sentiments of the Boston fanatics who have
lately gone crazy on the school question. No Catholic could
have administered a more deserved but unsparing lashing, for
which we give him our heartfelt gratitude.

Yet his article shows clearly how hard it is for a partisan, let
him strive ever so hard, to rise to the level of Christian chanty.
He has found it necessary to qualify the many excellent things
he has said about us with a number of insinuations for which he
gives no proof, so as to produce in the minds of his readers an
impression of dislike and antipathy.

Vague talk and insinuation are not proof. Honorable men
should be careful not to deal in them. They stab you in the dark,
when you cannot see how to defend yourself. They sow discord
and hatred, and are altogether contrary to Christian charity, which,
when one is not certain that another is doing wrong, leads him
to put a good and not an evil construction on his motives.

678 A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. [Feb.,

Mr. Starbuck, by his talk about a fancied conspiracy among
Catholics, flaunts what I may call the " bloody shirt " before the
eyes of his readers. He talks in this vein through a good many
pages. "There is, therefore, a Roman Catholic plot carried on
against our public weal by men who are just as really conspirators
as Guy Fawkes." He sustains his statements by good, round
asseverations, such as : " We may not be exactly able to define a
particular ecclesiastical intrigue, but we all know and feel [italics
ours] that such a thing is going on among our Catholics."

We all know and feel is decidedly good for catching the
unreasoning, prejudiced multitude who have had this dinned in
their ears from infancy. This is not argument. Pro ratione stet
voluntaSj which translated is, " Let prejudices take the place
of truth and reason." Again, " There can be no doubt [italics
ours] that a good many Roman Catholic priests use the most
unscrupulous terrorism to break the laity to their ends, and
exhibit the unworthy bribes of money and place, or the latter at
least, to persuade Protestant politicians to connive at their silent
infraction of fundamental principles of public action."

Of course this " There can be no doubt" settles the case with all
those who share this conviction with Mr. Starbuck, but not with
any one else. Some proof would be decidedly desirable to con-
vince them of the truth of these statements. A few instances, at
least, would be in order, though among so large a body of
clergy it would scarcely prove much, since we know there was one
traitor even among the twelve apostles. The eight or ten millions
of Catholics, who have a better opportunity to judge of facts
relating to themselves, I am sure would exclaim with one voice
that this statement is false and calumnious. The " exhibiting the
unworthy bribes of money and place" is about as rich as
anything we have read for a long while. Mr. Starbuck seems to
feel that is rather too strong a dose, and dilutes it by adding,
"the latter, at least." Now, we cannot help saying to him: If
you doubted about the money, why did you say anything about
it? It is not right to throw out insinuations.

Let me say right here that the prospect of reaching Chris-
tian unity (a thing Mr. Starbuck professes to have much at
heart) is very slim so long as these unsupported accusations
against fellow-Christians are flung out before the public. Catholic
priests, as a general thing, mind their own business and rarely
meddle with party politics, in which respect they are a shining
example to the clergy of the several denominations. Again, Mr.
Starbuck says:

1890.] A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. 679

" The archbishop's palace and Tammany Hall have stood in
an intimacy of intercourse which has been damning to the Chris-
tian fame of the former and of more than one of its occupants."
The fame of many an innocent person has been " damned " by
false insinuations and unproved assertions, more shame to those
who made them. We have been great sufferers. A lie about us
need only be started to go the rounds. If completely refuted, it
makes no difference. The lie suits the taste of the public, the
refutation is unpalatable ; besides, is it not an injury to religion
to stop such a serviceable lie ? If Catholics did not do just the
thing they are accused of, all the same they have done things
just as bad. So the lie that the site of the cathedral was given
by the city has been completely refuted ; still it appears period-
ically, and no coubt will continue to appear ad indefinitum.

As to the intimacy of the archbishop's palace and Tammany
Hall, I suppose it can be accounted for from the fact that Mr
John Kelly, the late head of Tammany Hall, married the niece
of the late Cardinal McCloskey, and sometimes visited his house.
This is foundation broad enough for a prodigious structure of
rumor, which rumor soon grows into a dead certainty among
those interested in believing it.

Mr. Starbuck, no doubt alluding to the excesses of the Bos-
ton fanatics, says : " Matters are now, therefore, very much the
same with us as they were with the English when they had all
gone wild over the pretended popish plot in the times of Charles
II." Is he any better off himself with his wild statements, based
on no other evidence than " no doubt " and " we all know and
feel," etc.? What difference is there essentially between them and
himself, when he proceeds : " There was a real popish plot then
and there is a real popish plot now"?

Oh! what a fine phrase, "popish plot," to fire the Protestant
heart ! " There was a dangerous plot then and there is a dan-
gerous plot now. The conspirators then were Charles II., his
presumptive heir, the king of France, and the Jesuits." The
Jesuits, of course. " The conspirators now are^ the Jesuits " — they
cannot be dispensed with — " the Catholic Irish as a body, the
Curia, and such members of the American hierarchy and priest-
hood as are men after the hearts of the Jesuits and the Curia."

O the Jesuits and the Curia ! O Catholic Irish ! O Guy
Fawkes ! O Foreign Potentates ! — faggots, fire, and sword ! Wake
up, American citizens ! The gunpowder is all stowed away under
the Capitol, the train is laid, the slow match lighted ; before you
know it you will be all sailing in the air, American liberty de-

680 A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. [Feb.,

stroyed, our glorious common-school system, the very apple of
our eye, completely ruined !

We cannot help being reminded by the alarm of Mr. Star-
buck of a passage in the Acts of the Apostles : " But all for the
space of about two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the
Ephesians ! " Mr. Starbuck asks whether " the present controversy
against our public schools is a part of the Roman Catholic con-
spiracy. He answers, "Yes and no; it is taken up into the con-
spiracy and actively promoted by it." He instances in support
of this Catholic Belgium. " There, as we are credibly informed
(for I do not pretend to rest on documentary evidence), the gov-
ernment offered the priests every facility for giving the children
regular and frequent doctrinal instruction at the public expense.
But because they could not appoint and dismiss the teachers and
entirely control the schools, they waged a war in which every
instinct of charity, forbearance, righteousness, and common decency
was set at naught," etc.

There is an audacious hardihood in this statement which ill
befits one calling himself a minister of the gospel. " We are
credibly informed (for I do not pretend to rest on documentary
evidence)." Who is your informant? Is he a Protestant? Is
he free from partisan bias in this matter ? What are his
sympathies ? This being " credibly informed " has a fishy odor
about it. No doubt the anti-Catholic party in power in Belgium
had to sugar-coat their pill in the hope that the people would
swallow it; but what "every facility" for religious instruction is
afforded if the schools are stuffed with a lot of agnostic and
Freemason teachers ? The bishops and priests of Belgium were
quite right in opposing vigorously the putting education and the
appointment of teachers in the hands of an infidel government
rather than in those of the local community, not of the priests,
who do not claim it. What schools could be expected of
Mr. Van Humbeck, minister of public instruction in Belgium,
who got up this school law, may be judged by the following bit
of "documentary evidence," not untrustworthy hearsay:

" There is a dead body upon the world ; it bars the way of
progress. This dead body of the past, to call it by its name,
squarely and without roundabouts, is Catholicism. It is this
dead body which we have looked to-day in the face, and if we
have not succeeded as yet in flinging it into the ditch, we have
got hold of it in such a way that it is somewhat nearer to it
than it was."

Mr. Van Humbeck, we are glad to say, got himself and his

1890.] A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. 68 1

party into the ditch. Their heads are completely under water,
with the smallest prospect of ever getting them out again. The
Belgian people understand these things rather better than the
Rev. Mr. Starbuck. But we must not be too hard upon him.
He had what he thought a good end in view. We need not
doubt it. His means of accomplishing it are bad. The end
does not justify the means; but how can we blame severely a
fervent Protestant minister, who believes his darling Protestant
religion, the very child of his own brain and private judgment,
to be in danger from that compact organization, united in
one and the same faith, called the Catholic Church, if he looks
through his fingers at the means of defending himself?

Moreover, he intimates to his readers not to take too much
stock in the conspiracy business. " Doubtless it is better to be
fantastically alarmed than not to be alarmed at all." Yes, better
to hang some fellow, even the wrong one, than no fellow at all.

Now let us turn to something more substantial and more
pleasing. We must express our heart-felt thanks to Rev. Mr.
Starbuck for his complete vindication of us in our opposition to
a public-school education as things now stand. He shows what
any man of good sense, who knows anything about it, must see
to be the truth, that we should be false to our inmost con-
victions and hypocrites if we did not oppose- it. This is what
he says : " But Roman Catholicism can acknowledge nothing as
a Christian education which is not distinctively and extendedly
dogmatic."

Yes ; education must be distinctively dogmatic, and more or
less extended according to circumstances. " Of course, then, if
our public schools were thoroughly satisfactory to Protestants
(which they by no means are), they could not possibly be satis-
factory to Catholicism. Either the teaching in these must be
undogmatic, or, for the most part, it would be dogmatically Pro-
testant. That is, in the view of Roman Catholicism, the instruc-
tion in most of our public schools, cannot fail to be either
unchristian or heretically Christian. However mild and reason-
able, and little inclined to make trouble, our American Catholicism
might be, it is hard to see how it can ever consent to our
public-school system so long as this is so distinctly separated
from dogmatical Roman Catholic Christianity. We have no
right to say that Roman Catholic opposition to it is a mere
display of hierarchical wantonness. It is the result of an essen-
tial opposition of principle" (italics ours).

All honor to him for his fearlessness in saying this! If Pro-

682 A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. [Feb.,

testants generally would imitate this example of doing towards
others as they would wish others to do to them, we should be
honored and respected for the purity of our motives at least,
instead of being misrepresented and vilified. If Protestants would
sincerely ponder over these golden words of Mr. Starbuck, and act
according to their inmost convictions, our battle would be fought
arid the victory won. We should hear no more of our wicked
attempts to destroy "our glorious public-school system," of
priestly dictation to the laity; for the laity, if sincere Catholics
and not hypocrites, must oppose the public-school education for
their own children on principle. May God speed the day when
the Protestant clergy and laity may have enough of the spirit ol
Christ to cease from such unjust aspersions, and not allow them-
selves to say with their tongues what they are not convinced of
in their hearts !

What are Catholics asking for in regard to education ? Simply
to be put on an exactly equal footing with their fellow-citizens.
They have not the slightest desire to use the public-school
system as an instrument for proselytizing the children of their
neighbors who are not Catholics. But, on the other hand, they
do not want their own children to be proselytized at the public
expense ; above all, not to have their own money used for their
own spiritual destruction.

There is a meanness about any such proceeding which neces-
sarily creates intense disgust in their minds. We do not want an
"exhibition of money and place" to " unworthily bribe " our poor
or weak Catholics to be untrue to their religion and to violate
their consciences. We do not want to be taxed for that from
which we receive no benefit. Our forefathers in the Republic re-
fused to pay taxes to the British government because they were
not represented in it, but at least they had a show of protection
and Great Britain was responsible for the maintenance of public
order. We get no benefit from the public schools, but a positive
injury and injustice. Yet .when we complain, the only answer
we get is, " Sic volo, sic jubeo " ; or, as the Hon. William M. Tweed
used to say, "What are you going -to do about it?" We are
most anxious to live in peace and amity with our fellow-citizens.
Religious difference, when unaccompanied by injustice, does not
make Catholics feel animosity to others. What stirs up animosity
is this deep sense that we are unfairly dealt with. The state is
asking of us much more than she has a right to. We acknowl-
edge that she has the right to see that all her citizens are
educated so as to fulfil all the duties of citizenship. She can

1890.] A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. 683

use the means necessary to bring this about ; but not means
which are not necessary. If Catholics provide a satisfactory edu-
cation for their children, that is all that the state has a right to
ask. Why cannot the state, by some general law (which need not
allude even to religion), enable the individuals who have paid
the taxes to get back, under suitable conditions, what they have
paid. Then the first principle of justice would be satisfied.
" Tribue suum ctiique" — Render to each one what is his own.
No rights of conscience would be violated, either directly or in-
directly, and no additional burden or fine would be imposed on
any one for his honest endeavor to render unto God what is
God's, as well as to Caesar what is Caesar's. The public-school
system as at present constituted is nothing less then a bone of
contention. It engenders bitter feeling, sets one man against
another, and must necessarily continue this mischievous working
until it is set right. We ask our Protestant brethren to be just. If
they think we are in the wrong, by all means let them try to convert
us, but let it be by fair argument and appeal to that right reason
God has given us, but not by trying to stab us in the dark by
means of Protestant schools masquerading under the guise of a
fair, impartial public-school system. Act fairly and justly by us.
We will agree to fulfil all that the public welfare demands in
regard to education, keep it up to the mark. This is what will
more than anything else tend to the harmony and good-will of
the community. All our grievances would be removed and all hard
feeling would disappear. The best state of things would prevail ;
true liberty, civil equality, and fraternity would flourish in our
land.

It is a mistake, an entire misapprehension, to suppose that a
system of Catholic schools in which our religion should be
thoroughly taught would engender division among our citizens ;
on the contrary, it would remove that which now exists. Cath-
olics are taught kindness and fraternal charity towards all. They
recognize that Protestants have inherited their religious ideas
from their forefathers, and that, as a general thing, they honestly
hold them. There is no reason for hatred or dislike in the
actual state of things ; on the contrary, every reason for kindness
and compassion. We wish all to enjoy all the benefits we enjoy,
not by any merit of our own but by the grace of God. We
know that a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a barrel
of vinegar. What will tend to hinder this spirit of charity is
manifest injustice, lies, calumnies, insinuations, readiness to put an
evil construction on our best actions and intentions. This, I am

VOL. L.— 44

684 *4 NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. [Feb.,

sorry to say, is much too common. We, I am glad to say,
seldom retaliate. One seldom hears from our pulpits any but kind
sentiments towards Protestants. Ignorant and careless Catholics,
who have thrown off the influence of religion, may sometimes
express them, but, on the whole, our laity are remarkably free from
them.

If Protestants wish to convert us, they should rely more on
the spirit of Christ in presenting their religion and less on legal
contrivances, calumny, or contempt. They should not arrogate to
themselves all the intelligence and all the wisdom of the world,
or despise us because so many of our people happen to be poor
in this world's goods. A large portion of the poor outside the
Catholic Church are in a hostile position towards religion, while
the church keeps her own under her influence. Christ promised
that " the poor ye shall always have with you." The church
glories in the fulfilment of this Divine promise.

Protestants should not try to steal our children away by
manipulating the law, and by a sort of dark-lantern process con-
cealing a motive of proselytizing under an outward show of
candor and fairness. If they cannot succeed in their endeavors
by fair, honorable means, it seems to me they should stop and
reflect that the fault must be inherent in their Protestantism,
which must have been a grand mistake in the beginning, and that
it would be better for them to return to the church from which
they went out too hurriedly. For surely it cannot be good to
uphold a false religion which cannot please God, to whom we are
finally responsible.

We are glad Mr. Starbuck has had the frankness to avow
the following sentiments : " Now, the basis of our school system
ought to be Protestantism. We are in fact, and ought to be by
legal decision, a Protestant Christian country." Although we
admire the frankness of this, we by no means admire its justice. He
is evidently tarred by the same stick as the Boston fanatics, to
whom he has given such a merited lashing. Boston, no doubt,
is the Hub of the Universe. Boston had in old times the
honor of burning down the Charlestovvn convent. The microbe
which has lain dormant so many years has lately revived ; and
many, no doubt, would be glad to do the same again if they
dared. Mr. S. has undoubtedly a touch of the Boston grippe.
But it is a mild case, and we hope he may soon recover.

What kind of a school would Mr. Starbuck have by legal
enactment, and force Catholic people to support by their hard-
earned taxes? A huge proselytizing machine. "A school," he

1890.] A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. 685

says, "in which our children are not free to study Macaulay's
History and recite the 'Battle of Ivry ' is only half a school."
Let us see his own estimation of Macaulay's History. "What
Protestant synod or conference is there that would not raise
the most indignant remonstrances if our children in a public
school were required to recite the Jesuit Deharbe's catechism ?
Yet this, though more dogmatically definite, is not one
whit more intensely Catholic than Macaulay's History is
intensely Protestant. It is a gloriously Protestant book, in
which every Protestant youth ought to be indoctrinated. It
would do more to fortify him against Romanism than any
theological book I know of." This is the kind of teaching
he would have established by legal enactment in all our public
schools.

In Massachusetts, a community nearly half of which is Catho-
lic, mostly laboring men finding it close work to support their
families, and brought to distress in case of a stoppage of work
for any reason, he would present a free school, amply furnished
to a great extent out of their * taxes, in which, without their
suspecting it, their children are to be " gloriously indoctrinated "
into Protestantism and a hatred of their parents' religion — run-
ning the risk of moral bankruptcy ; for, once detached from their
religion by Macaulay's History and other instructions of the same
sort, they are far more likely to become agnostics or infidels
than to become Protestants. Or he will allow them the alternative
of scraping together enough, after building their church, which
their respect for God's service will lead them to make fit and
Beautiful at any sacrifice, to build a large school-house and sup-
port a sufficient staff of teachers to compete with the subsidized
Protestant public school. If they cannot do this, the cry has
often been raised that the Catholic people do not care for the
Catholic schools, and that they are dragooned into it by unscru-
pulous priests.

The public-school system is now in effect just what Mr.
Starbuck says it ought to be. The schools will be, and must be,
pervaded by the spirit of the teachers. As the teachers are for
the most part Protestants, with an inherited, ingrained prejudice
against the Catholic Church, we cannot entrust our children to
them. Every branch of study will be used as an engine to batter
down their faith.

Is this a free country ? Do we enjoy here a real, substan-
tial liberty ? There is certainly no real freedom in a country
where the majority can ride at will over the minority. It is not

686 A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. [Feb.,

a free country where the dearest parental rights can be crushed
by a state-rigged car of Juggernaut, pulled along by a multitude
lashed by their unscrupulous, fanatical leaders into a blind fury
of passion. What advantage is there in living in such a country
rather than in Russia under the autocrat, or in Germany under
the blood-and-iron Chancellor Bismarck? They at least may feel
some responsibility, which it is vain to look for in an unreason-
ing, excited multitude.

But Mr. Starbuck tries to give us consolation on the principle
that "what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,"
viz., that, being forced to pay taxes for Protestant schools when
in the minority, we can force Protestants to pay taxes for Cath-
olic schools when we come to be in the majority. We give this
delectable proposition in his own words : " But the question of
a remission of taxes is another thing. We do not exempt a
Quaker from military tax because he is opposed to war. We,
if a Protestant country, at least, ought not to support Roman
Catholic schools. Beyond that let a Protestant people decide.
And if the Roman Catholics anywhere gain a majority, we are
not to ask of them more than we have been willing to grant."

As to this comparison of Catholics with Quakers, it is a
transparent piece of clap-trap. If Catholics were conscientiously
opposed to all schooling, as Quakers are to all wars, and claimed
exemption from taxes without providing their own schools
and education, I should say by all means override their objec-
tions, for education is necessary for the welfare of the community ;
but when they are ready to fulfil all necessary requirements, do
not tax them for being conscientious Catholics.

Besides, we cannot see the logic of speaking of Protestants
paying for Roman Catholic schools when every cent of the money is
paid by the Roman Catholics themselves. When I hand a man five
dollars to go and buy me a pair of boots, is it he or I that pays
for the boots ? And if he pockets the money and I must pay
over again, it is usually called swindling.

We can assure the Rev. Mr. Starbuck we have no desire to
retaliate. We are at this disadvantage in the affairs of this mortal
life, that our religion forbids retaliation. " Do unto others as you
would have them do to you " is our motto, and we hold that
our hopes of heaven depend upon our strictly living up to it .
We do not hold the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but
hold that our faith must be made alive by Divine charity, or a
true obedience to the commandments and faithful following of
the spirit of Christ. We cannot afford to lose the grace of God

1890.] A NOVEL DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. 687

in the endeavor to get even with those who have done us an
injury.

Mr. Starbuck tells us: "When our public schools were estab-
lished we had virtually one religion, Protestantism. Now we
have at least three, Protestantism, Catholicism, and secularism.
One of these three must be at the basis of our system of public
instruction, because it is simply impossible that an extended sys-
tem of education should exist without a constitutive thought con-
cerning ultimate truth at the bottom." The " constitutive thought"
is undoubtedly secularism. Theoretically, the schools must be
neutral as to religion in this country of theoretical equal rights.
So long as all are to be taxed and no division made of the
taxes, religion must be tabooed. When it is not, there are con-
stant complaints of injustice and unfair dealing. Teachers of
positive convictions are not suited to the system, and not wanted.
The whole system gravitates to pure secularism, and secularism is
only another term for agnosticism or infidelity. Mr. Starbuck says
the same : " If it is secularism, then Christians, Catholic or Protes-
tant, cannot use it without perpetual perturbations of conscience."

Why should we not unite in stemming this tide of secularism
which is sweeping down on us ? Why not do all in our power
to have all the children educated in the fear and the love of
God ? It seems to me that sincere Protestants ought to be glad
to co-operate with their fellow-citizens who are Catholics, in order
that they may educate their children in their own faith.
Then, if they have no objection to unite in public schools among
themselves, let them do so, and we shall have nothing to say
about it. The school question will then be out of court. Each
one will educate his own children as he thinks right. Each one
will mind his own business and expect others to mind theirs.
And the principles of the illustrious founders of our Republic will
not be forgotten, nor the government in danger of merging into
a centralized despotism, in which unnecessary state interference
shall hamper and destroy the natural rights of the individual.

GEORGE DESHON.

688 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

A BEAUTIFUL book, both in its illustrations and its letter-press,
is The Poor Sisters of Nazareth (London and New York : Burns
& Oates). In form it is a small quarto. The drawings, many of
which are full-page, and all of them interesting and charac-
teristic, were made by George Lambert. Mrs. Alice Meynell
writes the very readable record of life at Nazareth House,
Hammersmith. It is done with a very free hand, and though
crowded with interesting facts, and emphasized here and there
with a suggestive comment, or a half-veiled hint looking toward
possible modifications of certain widely current views, it may be
easily read through within an hour. We learn from it that the
Order of Nazareth Nuns is a comparatively new religious family,
having been founded by Cardinal Wiseman. Although probably
not exclusively English as to its composition, it is so as far as
its work is concerned. Its apostolate is to the subjects of the
British Empire, "white and black," says Mrs. Meynell, though
perhaps with no deliberate intention of ignoring red, brown, and
yellow. Still, we observe that of the fourteen houses already
planted, the only foreign ones are the four situated in South
Africa and Australia. The work of the community is to instruct
and care for destitute children, and provide a home for the aged
poor of both sexes and any creed. The inmates are mostly
Catholics, but when they are not no constraint is put upon them.
The old are free to go outside the enclosure to any place of
worship that they choose, and their own ministers are sent for
to attend them if they are known to have any preferences.
There is no religious test for admission, and in the case of
young children, " the wishes of parents — when there are parents
and when they have wishes — are carefully respected." But
children who are not to become Catholics are not kept later
than the age of First Communion, as the nuns find themselves
unable "to take the responsibilities of consciences more than
twelve or fourteen years, and unguided by the rules of definite
religious order." The spirit of the order combines action and
contemplation. Office is recited by all, apparently in choir, and
there are no lay sisters. In these respects, as well as in the
daily quest for alms, the order resembles that branch of the

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 689

Franciscan family so well known in this country as the Sisters
of the Poor of St. Francis.

Although so modern as to date and so English as to
province, the Order of Nazareth shows few perceptible signs of
having been met at any turn by the trend of modern ways.
One thing, indeed, Mrs. Meynell says of them, possibly in order
to explain the appearance of this beautiful volume. They are
the simplest of the simple, she declares, in their dealings with
all, " even with the press ! If the newspaper can indirectly help
them to feed their flock, the newspaper may publish their neces-
sities and describe their enterprises; and their personal love of
complete seclusion is sacrificed for the sake of charity as
sweetly and undemonstratively as every other wish or thought
that is touched with self." But this willingness to encounter
on behalf of their poor that terror of modern modest woman-
hood, the interviewer, marks possibly their sole concession to
the innovating spirit of the times. Some things that Mrs.
Meynell relates concerning the customs of the community
strongly suggest that in religious houses, at least, woman is
not held to be "the weaker vessel." Is there any community
of religious men, combining contemplation with the active
labors of the ministry or of charity, of which it would be true
to say that " prayer and the duties of devotion are always
postponed to the duties of charity, but though postponed are
never dispensed with " ? Or, again, that for one of its mem-
bers " at least, in every twenty-four hours, the day never ends
at all," because while each takes in turn to watch all night
by the sick, that duty "excuses from nothing of the routine
of the following day's labor or prayer" ? Of course, if such
practices are adopted for the sake of mortification, pure
and simple, we have no intention to animadvert upon them.
But if charity to the neighbor is the end in view, they seem to
the eye of common sense like burning one's candles at both
ends ; and one is not surprised to learn that the novitiate of
Nazareth House is less full now than formerly. Why should the
flesh and blood of good women be held so cheap when they
have been so faithfully consecrated to the service of the neigh-
bor, whom the divine command obliges all of us to love as we
love ourselves? Women know no measure in their devotion, one
is told who puts such questions. They will not hear of relaxa-
tions, they are ambitious to excel, they are resolved to do all
that they can and even more. True ; but would not their holy
ambition yield somewhat, if not to holy discretion, at least to

690 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

holy obedience ? "I have been too hard on my brother the ass,"
said St. Francis, dying in his prime, and looking back with
compassion on that resigned and patient flesh which had borne
so many burdens of his imposing.

Concerning the habit of these nuns, understood to have been
devised by Cardinal Wiseman himself with considerable pains,
Mrs. Meynell remarks that " it is one of the graces of the house
that while some women in the world are asking, with all the
energy of intending acrobats, for emancipation from their draperies,
these sisters contrive to do everything, and to do it well, muffled
in close caps and hanging veils, checked by starch and enveloped
in folds, and yet to keep the health and strength which make,
their hard life possible. It may still be permitted to wonder
whether even a cardinal would not find the burden of his
fatigues increased if his head were encased in tight, empese linen,
and his brows so bound as to. prevent that relief of grasping his
overworked forehead which the most ascetic of mankind permits
himself. . . . Doubtless the immunity of nuns from all the
inconveniences of vanity helps them to bear those of their quasi-
oriental disguise and concealment. Nevertheless, an audacious
fancy may sketch for itself a future when a pope at Chicago may
legislate for sisterhoods living under the ancient interior laws, but
in the midst of new and Western conditions, set free from much
that must be a waste of strength." Mrs. Meynell seems to have
been consulting the prophets of the Contemporary and the Nine-
teenth Century. There is food for meditation, all the same, in
that word "quasi-oriental." As the German judge said to the
man who pleaded in defence of his own objectionable book that
greater licenses of speech were pardoned in Shakspere, the Latin
and Greek poets, and still more ancient sources, " Dat is very
true ; but you must remember we don't live in dose remote dark
achis."

The nameless author of Priest and Puritan (New York :
Brentano's) is clearly of opinion that as between the average
Methodist minister and the average Catholic priest, the priest may
be counted on every time as sure to possess more liberality of
mind and a more hearty sympathy with human nature. The
Rev. Charles Foster and the Rev. Father Le Grand of his story
are equally well-intentioned and honest men, but the former is a
narrow bigot, a believer in total depravity, an enemy to all
amusements, and with a special hatred for " popery " as the sum
of all villanies. Father Le Grand is a faithful priest, and a total
abstainer, as well as a man of broad views and a charitable heart.

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 691

But he allows his young folk to hold picnics in summer-
time and to amuse themselves by dancing — evils on which the
minister cannot look with any allowance whatever. Even the
lemonade, which is the sole beverage sold or drank on the grounds,
acidulates rather than sweetens his temper towards "that enemy
of free thought and mockery of Christianity, as he considered it —
Romanism." Presently, when his only son falls in love with the
priest's beautiful niece, the Rev. Charles Foster's grief and indig-
nation precipitate him into a fever in which he becomes tempo-
rarily insane, and in this state is in danger of doing himself or
some one else a fatal injury. Then Father Le Grand comes and
nurses him, and one night when the sick man wakes out of sleep he —

41 discovered the priest kneeling by the bed in prayer. The minister did not
move lest he should interrupt him, but when the priest had resumed his seat
said to him :

" 'Was it for me?'

" 'Yes,' said Father Le Grand.

' ' How often have you done this ? ' asked the minister.
" ' Every night that I have been here,' was the reply.

' ' I think your medicine agrees with me. Continue as you have been do-
ing,' said the minister."

To the mind of the author it apparently seems that while the
balance tilts favorably toward the priest where courtesy, liberality,
and charity are concerned, the two men a're equally good Chris-
tians, with nothing on that ground to choose between them. To
him Christianity is an affair of what is call " ethics," with very little
or no dogmatic foundation. It does not seem to have occurred
to him that the good qualities which he has embodied in
Father Le Grand, doubtless because he thought them typical,
are the natural outcome of an intelligent faith. And yet it
was his minister only whom he had to divest of merely Pro-
testant prejudices — his special intellectual outfit, that is — before
his heart could widen. But the religion the book is intended to
spread is not Catholicity. It is a hybrid, " half- Catholic, half-Pro-
testant," which is to be called "the religion of love." In the inter-
ests of it a mixed marriage is brought about between Ernest and
Agnes, the latter remaining a Catholic but urging Ernest, for
the sake of general good feeling, to unite with the Methodists.
The book is not very well written, and not specially entertaining ;
but, like Mr. Habberton's story, of which we spoke last month,
it gives evidence that the wall of bitter prejudice between us
and our more observant non-Catholic fellow-countrymen is break-
ing down in several places.

692 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

Dodd, Mead & Co. send us the latest of Martha Finley's
" Elsie Books," Elsie and the Raymonds. They must enjoy a
certain popularity among the purveyors of literature for Protestant
Sunday-schools, or the series, which has now taken "Elsie" from
babyhood to grandmotherhood, could hardly have been so pro-
longed. But what an idea they give one of the long-suffering
qualities of the average Sunday school scholar! In our parish
libraries any series at all comparable to this for priggishness, dul-
ness, and dryness would languish in dust upon the shelves. But
even these are not its worst faults. Consider, as a specimen of
what is still taught the children of American Protestants by
writers in good repute, this conversation between " Grandma
Elsie's " son-in-law, Captain Raymond, and one of the wives of
a Mormon elder. The captain has been telling her that Scrip-
tural teaching is all in favor of monogamy :

'"You shake my faith in Mormonism,' she said, with a startled, troubled
look.

" ' I rejoice to hear it,' he responded ; ' would that I could shake it to its
utter destruction. Popery has been well-called ' Satan's masterpiece,' and Mor-
monism is another by the same hand ; the points of resemblance are sufficient
to prove that to rny mind.'

' " Points of resemblance?' she repeated, inquiringly, ' I have never thought
there were any, and I have a heart-hatred of popery, as you may well suppose,
coming, as I do, from a land where she slew in former ages so many of God's
saints. But surely in one thing the two are very different — the one forbidding to
marry, the other encouraging men to take many wives.'

" 'The difference in regard to that is not so great as may appear at first
sight,' he returned. 'Both pander to men's lusts — for what are nunneries but
' priests' prisons for women,' as one who left the ranks of the popish priesthood
has called them ? Both teach children to forsake their parents ; both teach lying
and murder, when by such crimes they are expected to advance the cause of
their church.' "

There is a page or more of this stuff, which neither author
nor publishers can intend to be irenical in any sense, That,
however, is of comparatively small importance. The untruthful-
ness of it, patent to all who do not deliberately confine them-
selves within the walls of prejudice and misrepresentation, should
be a more heavy weight upon the consciences of those who put
it forth. It is good to fight against whatever, one honestly be-
lieves to be wrong. But it is never excusable to take a lie for
the truth when the truth is entirely accessible to all who desire
to know it.

Whatever else may be said of Miss Margaret Ryan's Songs of
Remembrance (Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son), the first impression

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 693

they make on any reader can hardly be other than that of an
unmitigated, and, indeed, an immitigable sadness. And yet the
sorrow they embody is not merely that arising from the death
of one beloved, but from the death of an exceptionally pious and
upright Christian priest, the author's brother. If it would not be
quite true to say that her grief, as here expressed, is altogether
like that of those who " sorrow as having no hope," yet it is
quite true that in these poems the note of hope and consolation
is almost lost in the less noble one of painful resignation. Miss
Ryan is too narrow, too personal, too " constant," as she calls
herself in one of her sonnets, in her attitude toward life and
death and love. Why are we Christians if the grave is
to be as hopelessly the grave to us as it might be to dis-
ciples of Schopenhauer or to "-pagans suckled in a creed out-
worn"? Miss Ryan has so good an ear, and so much facility in
verse-making that it would be a pity if she should remain so-
self-involved and despondent

Bonnie Dnnraven : A Story of Kilcarrick (Boston : T. B. Noonan
& Co.), is an interesting and well-written novel of Irish life
among the smaller gentry, by Victor O'Donovan Power. The
author has, in spots at least, a very feminine touch. The story
is plotty, full of incident, and now and then dramatic. Some of
the side sketches, as, for example, the Talbot girls at the
picnic, show closer observation and better handling of superficial
points of character than the more elaborately-conceived Bonnie
and her friend Anna Wylde. There are some very poetic de-
scriptive passages occasionally, and though the novel is not at
all what would be called "patriotic" just now, it is thoroughly
Irish in feeling.

Dodd, Mead & Co. send us another volume of the stories of
the deceased novelist, E. P. Roe, containing Taken Alive and
other brief novelettes, and also a reprint from Lippincott's Maga-
zine, of an autobiographical sketch named " A Native Author,
Called Roe." Some of the tales have been already briefly
noticed in these pages ; none of them ever called for any special
remark. There is a breezy manliness about the autobiography,
however, which awakens sympathy with the " native author's "
pluck and energy. What a good worker, one says, what a faith-

tful, industrious fellow! He deserved success! But when one
turns from the record of his patient hours at his desk to con-
sider the result arrived at — not counting, of course, the result in
dollars and cents, which was considerable — what a flat waste of
time it all seems. Was there anything intellectual in it ? Any-

694 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

thing as really dignified as growing strawberries and selling
them ? On the whole, our personal preference is altogether for
the market-gardener Roe, as against the "native author."

From the same publishers comes a translation of Ludovic
Halevy's famous story, The Abbe Constantin, too well known in
its original form and in other English renderings to call for
criticism. The present edition is well printed on smooth, heavy
paper, with wide margins, and is moreover capitally illus-
trated by reproductions of Madeleine Lemaire's beautiful water-
color drawings. Barring a few freedoms of speech on the part
of Paul de Lavardens, of the sort which very few Frenchmen
seem to be able to deny themselves even when bent on decorum,
the novel is a masterpiece, and may be safely recommended.
Halevy, we believe, is a Jew, by -birth if not by conviction, but
in this story he has been content to be an artist simply, and to
paint the good Abbe Constantin and his two American parish-
ioners with a most sympathetic hand.

Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's new poem, Wyndham lowers
(New York and Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), is not only
eminently readable for its story, but exceptionally good blank-
verse into the bargain. But that was to be expected. Its
author's lightness of touch and artistic sense of what may and
what may not be said were to be counted on for so much as
that. Nevertheless, one wonders that in describing the effect of
the sudden revelation of Griselda's charm on Richard Wyndham,
he could have allowed himself a figure so inconceivably bad as this :

"If so much beauty had a tiger been
'T had eaten him ! "

There is a certain stupid ferocity in that conception which is,
to say the least of it, inartistic. But the poem has many fine
lines and some exquisite pictures. Take this, for instance :

11 A chill wind freshened in the pallid East
And brought sea-smell of newly-blossomed foam,
And stirred the leaves and branch-hung nests of birds.
Fainter the glow-worm's lantern glimmered now
In the marsh-land and on the forest's hem,
And the slow dawn, with purple laced the sky
Where sky and sea lay sharply edge to edge.
The purple melted, changed to violet,
And that to every delicate sea-shell tinge,
Blush-pink, deep cinnabar ; then no change was,
Save that the air had in it sense of wings,
Till suddenly the heavens were all aflame,
And it was morning."

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 695

Of the five women who record their convictions on the sub-
ject of divorce in the January North American, only two, Rose
Terry Cooke and " Jennie June," have their faces set dead
against it. Mrs. Cooke takes . Protestant religious grounds for
her opposition. "It has been," she writes, "and still is, after a
long life, my fixed opinion that in all the affairs of this world,
as well as the next, the Scriptures are the only infallible guide."
Hence, in replying to the editor's four questions: "(i) Do you
believe in the principle of divorce under any circumstances ? (2)
Ought divorced people be allowed to marry under any circum-
stances ? (3) What is the effect of divorce on the integrity of the
family ? (4) Does the absolute prohibition of divorce where it
exists contribute to the moral purity of society," she states her
conviction that nothing but " the infidelity to the marriage vow
in its most personal clause, of either husband or wife," can justify
divorce. As to the remarriage of either, she not only disbelieves
in it but adds that her own " feeling is strong against any re-
marriage after separation by death" — at least for women. These
are the only salient points she makes — a sort of assertion of
individual preferences, in the first place for her own interpreta-
tion of the letter of Holy Writ, and in the second for the princi-
ple underlying the Hindoo suttee. The attitude of Mrs. Croly,
"Jennie June," will be more generally comprehensible. She dis-
approves of divorce, but not on sentimental grounds. Side by
side, she justly says, with the ease with which divorces may be
secured, there has grown up a belief in individual rights and the
pursuit of individual inclination as the highest goods. A marriage
that at the outset does not fulfil expectation is considered a
" mistake," and one which ought to be rectified because it may
have serious consequences. She goes on to remark that the
order of nature compels those who make mistakes to suffer from
their own acts, even though committed in ignorance of their con-
sequences. She refuses to consider marriage as a mere arrange-
ment "to make two people happy," and takes the ground that
it has " a much more serious intention, a much deeper meaning
than this — a meaning that the civilized world generally feels and
recognizes, and that renders it superior to the wickedness of
many legal enactments, and still preserves the married home as
the rule and separation as the exception." There is good, solid
thinking in this paper of Mrs. Croly's. Though there is nothing
formally religious in it, she has grasped the truth that marriage
in the thought of God, the union of one man with one woman, is the
gate through which life passes, and that it must be guarded in the high-

696 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. fFeb.,

est interests of life. Duty is the only solvent she knows of for the per-
plexities of this vexed question. " It clears up so many things,"
she says, " if we put ourselves out of the question, and accept
what comes to us as simple duty, as that which is given us to
do, and that we are to do as well as we can, with such patience
and judgment and ability as we possess. . . . The grave and eternal
responsibilities of marriage may well induce the thoughtful among
the young to pause and reflect before incurring them. But once
they have done so, there is no turning back ; for they are no
longer living for themselves ; they no longer exist as separate
entities ; they have formed a combination and become a new pro-
duct, a part of the eternal and ever-flowing life of the universe —
and their business is to find points of agreement in this new life
and thus aid in making it harmonious ; not reasons for difference,
which must always exist in a life and among people of infinitely
varied ideas, tastes, habits, and capacities."

Of course, the trouble with such views, just as they are in
themselves, is that they have no appreciable value as social
forces. In the absence of a definite Christian faith which can
answer satisfactorily the questions put to it by a trained intel-
ligence, human nature and individual inclinations are seldom
sufficiently "altruistic" to keep up to the difficult level of
Christian marriage. That, as Dr. Brownson writes in The
Convert, " is above the strength of human nature in our present
fallen state, and needs Christian grace." The remark is, of
course, not universally applicable, but there is no doubt that it
does apply to average men and women encountering more than
average difficulties in the marriage state. And the statistics of
divorce seem to show either that the general average of
humanity is much lower than it was even twenty years ago, or
that the common run of difficulties rises above its old standard.
The majority of the good and reputable women who have ex-
pressed their opinions in the North American seem to think both
horns of the dilemma more than sufficiently sharp. The list of
reasons for granting divorce ought to be considerably lengthened,
says Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, while Mrs. Barr puts the blunt
question why the "Seventh Commandment" of the Mosaic law
should be treated with so much respect when people have long
been exempted from most of its other enactments ? Because it
was reiterated by our Saviour? She thinks his words have been
misunderstood. " What God has joined man cannot put asunder."
It is the man-made marriages which result in unhappiness, and it
is those this lady would call on the law to sever, with permission

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 697

to one or both parties to it to remarry. Every marriage is man-
made which does not result in perfect happiness, apparently.
Colonel Ingersoll is of much the same mind, but then he has no
steady employment, that we know of, as a contributor to Sunday-
school literature and the Protestant religious press. To do Mrs.
Barr justice, her novels, so far as we are acquainted with them,
contain no trace of such opinions. Now and then they give a
vicious " little dig " at the Catholic faith, which the paper we
are referring to goes far to explain, but they uniformly breathe an
atmosphere of purity and wholesome feeling. Perhaps the
average good woman's heart is apt to be a safer guide than her
head. We take it to be the latter which Mrs. Barr consulted
when she sat down at her desk with this list of editorial
questions before her.

It would be pleasant to be able to say a hearty word of ap-
proval concerning Mr. William Forbes Cooley's Emmanuel: The
Story of the Messiah (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.) It is
an attempt to put the life of our Lord, as conceived from one
of the several Protestant standpoints, into the form of a histor-
ical novel. It runs, therefore, on the same general lines as
Wallace's Ben Hur, and differs from it less in tenor and purport
than in its manner of treating the same theme. It is as hope-
lessly dull as any book could be which introduced the Son
of God made man, and did so with an unfeigned reverence.
But Mr. Cooley's reverence for the Christ whom he has evolved
from the Gospels by the aid of a singularly tame imagination,
is quite compatible with much which must be exceedingly repul-
sive to any reader holding the Catholic doctrine of the Incarna-
tion. According to him, our Lord received the first intimation
that he might himself be the Messiah when talking with the
doctors in the temple in his twelfth year. Perhaps this impres-
sion might have faded, but the baptism at Jordan determined its
validity. To quote Mr. Cooley:

'• Startling, wonderful, and in some cases full of promise as the scene of
his baptism had been to many, to him its significance was incomparably
greater! At last the question was settled; he, and not another, was the
Chosen One, the Lord's Anointed. The great prophet of God, whose voice
was shaking the land, had recognized him ; - the voice from heaven had
confirmed and completed his recognition. The sign long waited for . . .
had come at last ; he was the Son of God, and the time of his manifesta-
tion was at hand."

Mr. Cooley gives his readers no direct means of knowing his
belief about the miraculous conception of Christ. His story

698 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

begins with the first Christmas, not with the Annunciation. But
he gives abundant grounds for the inference that he considers
St. Joseph to have been his natural father. True, he nowhere
says so. Like the author of Ben Hur, he gives the spouse of
Mary a rather ignominious part to play. He is a peasant with
a " rather stolid but honest countenance," presumably the father
of Jesus, and certainly so of Mary's other children — four or five
sons, that is, and a daughter. At one crisis in our Saviour's
life these "brethren of Jesus," says Mr. Cooley, "induced their
mother to accompany them to Capernaum," and try to persuade
him to relinquish his dangerous course. She could not quite
agree with —

" James and the other brothers that Jesus was beside himself.
Yet in her perplexity and distress she was not without the fear that she Jiad
made a mistake in relating to Jesus as he came to manhood the incidents of
his birth. Who could tell but that these narratives had really unbalanced
his mind? "

No doubt these things are very shocking. But it will sur-
prise nobody who has any knowledge of that idiosyncrasy of the
Protestant mind which permits it to pick and choose its facts and
alter or reject documents at will, and by virtue of which, indeed, it
is Protestant and not avowedly infidel, to find that Mr. Cooley
keeps pretty closely to the Gospel text, accepts all the miracles
and believes in the death, resurrection, and ascension of our
Saviour. We should add that, although at pains to provfde the
ever- Virgin Mother with so many natural protectors, Mr. Cooley
has almost lost sight of them by the time he arrives at the
Passion, and is at no loss to discover a reason for the precious
legacy to St. John. They had never been in close sympathy
with their brother, he insinuates, and it was with an eye to this
fact that he had once declared, "Whosoever shall do the will of
God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother."

Mr. Cooley's book does not deserve on its merits the space
here given it, but it affords occasion for accentuating the wide and
painful difference between what passes for orthodox Protestant-
ism in very many quarters and the true faith of Christendom.

1890.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 699

WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS, ETC., SHOULD
BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION, NO. 415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH
STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

Boston leads the way with five newly-formed Catholic Reading Circles,
started within the past year in response to the appeal of the Columbian Reading
Union. No other city on our list can claim an equal number. To Boston,
therefore, justly belongs the glory of having developed in a short space of time
the largest number of active workers. We congratulate the leaders and mem-
bers of the movement, and hope to get from them in the near future some further
account of the methods used to promote the rapid growth of Reading Circles.

We are informed that the speedy results at Boston are largely due to the
active zeal and liberality of the Rev. James B. Troy. He has generously provided
at his own expense fifty copies of the pamphlet edition of " Books and Read-
ing," by Brother Azarias, lately republished from THE CATHOLIC WORLD by the
Cathedral Library Reading Circle, of New York. At our request he has also
kindly sent some valuable suggestions in the following letter for publication :

" As to the utility of the Reading Circle there should be no question. But
to bear much fruit it should be well managed. I think the Reading Circle
should not be a religious society in the ordinary sense of the term. The object
of a Sodality of the Blessed Virgin is to encourage devotion to the Mother of
God. The end is distinctively religious. The end of the Reading Circle should
be somewhat different. Hence it should be well understood that we are to read
not only what are called " pious books," but that we are also to enter the whole
wide field of Catholic literature. Fiction, history, philosophy, theology — every
foot of the field of Catholic literature should be traversed.

" Going to the other extreme, the Reading Circle should not be merely a
social club, though it is well to cultivate the social element in our nature. But
this, I think, should be a work apart from that of the Reading Circle. Members
of a Circle are then to understand that they are not merely to come together at
stated intervals for the purpose of having a pleasant, social time. If they are to
derive any profit from the Reading Circle, they must work. I mean that they
must read the books intelligently, and also bring intelligence to the discussion of
the books at the general meeting of the Circle. It will not do, for instance, to
read only the conversational part of an historical novel and pay no attention to

»the facts of history.
" In the discussion of the books there should be a competent guide. We all
know that respect for intellectual ability is a special characteristic of the Ameri-
can people. When we listen to a public speaker and are obliged to admit that
the knows more about the matter he is discussing than we do, we respect his in-
tellectual superiority. So with the guide in the Reading Circle. She should be
a person whose opinion in literary matters the members of the Circle will re-
spect. Not, indeed, that the guide should monopolize the conversation. Her
main duty, as I conceive it, should be to make the members express the thoughts
they have with regard to the books they have read. This at times will require a
great deal of tact. JAMES B. TROY.

" Roxbury, Boston, Mass."
VOL. L. — 45

7oo WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Feb.,

We are glad to welcome the " Hecker Catholic Reading Circle," of Provi-
dence, R. I., organized in the parish of the Immaculate Conception. The sec-
retary, Miss Ellen L. Virgin, writes concerning it :

" Our Circle consists of both young men and young women, and our young
men manifest the deepest interest and enthusiasm in all the work of the Circle.
We have an active membership of twenty, and have received as many more ap-
plications for membership. We meet fortnightly in the hall attached to the
church. Several other Circles are to be organized."

To the Brownson Lyceum, of Providence, and especially to its energetic
president, Mr. John G. Hanrahan, the Columbian Reading Union is already
indebted for many favors. Its object and plans were explained by one of the
speakers at the public meeting held in honor of the delegates to the Convention
of the Catholic Young Men's National Union. From the golden words of advice
uttered by Rt. Rev. Bishop Harkins on that occasion we feel convinced that he
takes a deep paternal interest in all forms of organization having in view the
self-improvement of young people. Besides favorable anticipations, we now
rejoice to know that the " Hecker Reading Circle " is actually established, and
is the first of many others to be organized in the beautiful city of Providence.

We thoroughly appreciate the condition of things which prevails in many
small towns, as well as in the cities, where the demand for Catholic literature is
urgent and the supply is scanty. The following letter makes known an intel-
lectual want felt by thousands of Catholics in the United States :

" Those living within easy reach of Catholic literature hardly know the men-
tal starvation endured by those of less favored places where a Catholic of any
literary inclination is dependent upon the resources of public libraries, with their
indiscriminate selections. I am sorry to be so far from any local benefits to be
derived, but am glad to know that a Catholic Reading Union is a national possi-
bility. M. E. M."

* *

The list of stories for young readers prepared by the Ozanam Reading Circle
of New York City has been favorably received. We quote some passages from
the introduction, worthy of the profound attention of all who wish to assist in the
production and dissemination of healthful juvenile literature :

"Conscientious parents and teachers do not give books to children under
their charge without forming some opinion of their contents. Neither do they
permit untrained minds to choose at random books from public libraries, which
often contain an abundant supply of the worst juvenile literature and very few
specimens of that which is best. It is very easy to get stories of boys who are
made to talk like sceptics, and to perform daring acts of disobedience in school
and out of school. For many reasons, which cannot here be mentioned, health-
ful, interesting stories with a good moral tone are not so plentifully distributed.
Many have neither the time nor opportunity for a personal inspection of books
intended as presents for the young. Hence the need of making an effort to
secure reliable guidance from those competent to decide. This list has been pre-
pared, with that object in view, at the request of the Columbian Reading Union.
It contains only a few of the many good books issued by Catholic publishers, and
will serve as an introduction to more extended lists in the future.

" Bulky volumes, used chiefly as ornaments for a marble-top table, are pur-
chased at an exorbitant price from travelling agents. In vain do parents expect
children to be attracted by such books, especially when they contain specimens

1890.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 701

of worn-out woodcuts and colored pictures in shocking bad taste. The money
spent for such publications could be more profitably invested by getting handy
volumes which children will read with avidity. Very few can afford to buy books
merely as ornaments.

" It is a matter of regret that so little attention has been given to the study
of Catholic boy-life in the United States. The numerous specimens of imported
boys in books used for premiums have too much of a foreign environment to be-
come attractive heroes, or models to be imitated by young Americans. There is
urgent need of writers in this field, and from the present outlook it does not
seem likely that the supply will keep pace with the demand. Intelligent parents
and school managers can do much, however, by judicious discrimination in favor
of publishers who will offer liberal encouragement to authors fully qualified to
write books showing forth the noble traits of character to be found among Cath-
olic boys and girls of America."

The list of titles as here given is not intended to be exhaustive, only four
books being allowed to each publisher. But it is fairly representative of the best
books yet produced under Catholic auspices ; and this statement is made with
full knowledge of how much room there is for improvement.

Catholic Authors. Titles of Books. Publishers.

J. D. Bryant, M.D Pauline Seward John Murphy & Co., 182 Bal-

Frederick W. Faber Ethel's Book of Angels timore St. , Baltimore, Md.

Anna H. Dorsey Ada's Trust

" " Beth' s Ptomise " "

Countess de Se"gur Adventures of a Donkey. Illustrated. Baltimore Publishing Co., 106

Mary M. Meline Mowbrays and Harringtons E. Baltimore St. , Baltimore»

Kate Taylor Known Too Late Md.

Popular Moral Tales " •<

Maurice F. Egan A Garden of Roses Thomas B. Noonan & Co.,

Cardinal Wiseman The Lamp of the Sanctuary 17, 19 and 21 Boylston St. ,

Golden Legends of Christian Youth Boston, Mass.

Told by the Firelight " "

Memoirs of a. New York Doll. Illus-
trated Catholic Publication Society

, Uncle Ned's Stories fot Boys and Girls . Co.

Illustrated

! Little Pierre, the Pedlar of Alsace. Il-
lustrated " "

Maggie s Rosary " "

Agnes Sadlier The Children's Book. Illustrated. . .D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 33

Mary C. Crowley Merry Hearts and True Barclay St., New York City.

Rev. W. H . Anderdon The Catholic Crusoe " "

D . P. Conyngham, LL. D . . . The Flower of Avondale " < «

Winnie Rover The Neptutie Outward Bound P. O'Shea, 45 Warren St.,

" The Neptune Afloat New York City.

" The Neptune at the Golden Horn

E. Souvestre Legends of Brittany. " •<

Maurice F. Egan The Life Around Us Fr. Pustet & Co.

Harry O'Brien The Prairie Boy. Illustrated P. J. Kenedy, 5 Barclay St.,

Marion J. Brunowe Seven of Us New York City.

Valentine Williams The Captain of the Club " "

Rev. A. M. Gruissi, C.PP.S . Stories for Yoimg Readers

Rosa Mulholland Hetty Gray ; or, Nobody's Bairn The Vatican Library Co. , 13

" The Victor's Laurel. Barclay St., New York City.

Kathleens Motto

Augusta Drane Uriel. " "

Christian Reid A Child of Mary Ave Maria. Publishing Co. ,

— Once Upon a Time Notre Dame, Ind.

!. L. Dorsey Midshipman Bob " "

— Stories for Stormy Sundays " "

702 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Feb.,

Marion J. Brunowe A Lucky Family A. Riftarth, 42 Barclay St. ,

New York City.

Neenah Percy Wynn ; or, flaking a Boy of

Him A. J. Schiml, Napoleon, Ohio.

Marion Howard Peter F. Cunningham & Son,

Femcli/e 817 Arch St. Philadelphia,

Beech Bluff. Pa.

Madame Lavalle s Bequest

ATTRACTIVE BOOKS OF INSTRUCTION.

Rev. B. J. Spalding History of the Church of God. Illus-
trated Catholic Publication Society

Co., 9 Barclay St., New
York City.

Rosa Mulholland The First Christmas. Illustrated Fr. Pustet & Co. , 50 and 52

Thomas F. Brennan Shade and Light. Illustrated Barclay St. , New York City.

Eleanor C. Donnelly Our Birthday Bouquet Benziger Bros. , 36 and 38

Little Compliments of the Season . II- Barclay St. , New York City.

lustrated

Greetings to the Christ-Child. Illus-
trated

Rosa Mulholland Story of Jesus simply told for the

Young. Illustrated

For future lists of this kind we shall be pleased to get from each Catholic
publisher a marked copy of his catalogue, indicating the most attractive books
for general circulation. Send ten cents in postage for the complete list, with
comments on authors, etc., of stories for young readers to the Columbian Read-
ing Union, No. 415 West Fifty-ninth Street, New York City. M. C. M.

A MISSION SCHOOL.

ST. JOSEPH'S COLORED SCHOOL,

NORFOLK, Virginia, Dec. 9, 1889.

REV. DEAR SIR : Knowing how interested you are in our work here, I de-
layed answering your kind letter until I learned more of the condition of our
scholars, their parents, and their homes.

There is but one Catholic church in Norfolk, St. Mary's, and the colored
members of the congregation occupy a gallery at the back of the church and
near the organ-loft. There are about seventy-five or one hundred practical
Catholics at the very most, and they are all very poor. Most of the colored men
are employed in the cotton-mills or in lading English vessels with cargo during
this part of the year, while others are given work in the lumber-yards, or catch fish
for a living. The women seem to earn their bread too, at washing, sewing, or
cleaning houses, although .they get but fifty cents for a whole day's work, while
the average pay for a man is six or seven dollars per week.

In visiting their homes we found many who had been owned by Catholic
masters, and have within the past few years only dropped from their own church,
and now attend either of the Protestant denominations, and all this in spite of
the zeal and devotion of our good priests ; but they all seemed to rejoice at the
prospect of a church being built for them, and professed their willingness to
" get renewed and come back." Many of them are like children, and must be
treated with gentleness until they are taught to realize the seriousness of life and
their duty to God and their neighbor. There is still too great a tendency in
them to barter for everything they do or give, and yet it would not take very

1890.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 703

much to make them love the liberty of our religion and become faithful members.
Many among them, as is quite natural, like to be prominent, and unless they are
by themselves, and with colored people alone, there is a self-consciousness about
them which acts as a restraint ; this shyness, together with the many "lodges "
and "societies" attached to the churches where only colored members belong,
have drawn some of our colored Catholics away from the true church ; but let
us hope a better day is dawning for them, and for us who long to bring them
to the Master from whom they have strayed.

Not quite three months ago we opened the schools here, at the request of
the Josephite Fathers, to whom money had been given for the purchase of the
property and house we occupy. It was in possession of fifteen colored families,
who rented it from the owners ; so extensive repairs were necessary to make it
habitable for the four Franciscan Sisters who were appointed for the work.
Three of us are engaged in teaching every day. We have one hundred scholars,
divided into three classes, and they are attentive and anxious to learn as well
and as much as they can. The larger children learn prayers, catechism, the
'''• three R's," with geography, history, and grammar; and on Wednesday and
Friday afternoons the girls are taught plain sewing. During the sewing-class
one girl is appointed to read some sjmple tale, Catholic, of course, and the
following day it is the subject of their dictation lesson, and they show in that an
evidence of attention and of understanding which has been a great surprise for us.

I teach a primary class of thirty-seven boys and girls in one of the rooms in
our little convent, and in the room above the larger girls are taught. The little
girls showed great anxiety to be taught sewing on the two appointed days, and
as I wished to encourage them and to teach them, I was at a loss how to occupy
the boys so that we might be free to devote ourselves to the sewing. There was
nothing better, it seemed, than to furnish each little black lad with a needle and
thread and a strip of cloth and three large buttons, and let them belong to "our
class." The girls tried to laugh at them, but the boys were brave and did not
care, though the needle nearly always went through the top of their finger
instead of through the hole in the button, and the buttons were nearly every one
sewn on wrong side up, and every needle lost its point in that first awful sewing
lesson ; but it was not altogether a failure, and they all agreed that it was much
harder to sew a button on than to pull one off.

There is a singular power in their secret societies. Even these little chil-
dren often ask to be excused from school to attend their lodge meeting on
certain afternoons. One little girl told me she belonged to the " Brothers and
Sisters of Love and Charity." They pay ten cents every month and get "thirty
dollars when they die. " That is the attraction, and they go on paying from
infancy to old age.

We pass by a Methodist church on our way to St. Vincent's Hospital, where
we go to hear Mass, and on Sunday mornings and evenings meetings are held
there, and it is a reproach to us to see the congregation that comes out of that
church — three hundred at the very least, and the greater number are men, young
men, too. If we only had a big church, like the old church in Sixtieth Street,
where we could have Mass and Benediction and congregational singing, what a
harvest we might reap ! Do pray, father, that it may not be far distant.

We can work for the children in the meantime, although we have only
twenty-three Catholics among our one hundred pupils. The Sunday-school and
children's Mass are much better attended at present than before we opened the
school. Forty-three children were present last Sunday, of whom twenty-two
were non-Catholic. They are attentive and respectful, and know their catechism

704 N£w PUBLICATIONS. [Feb.,

as well as our white children. With some little tots we have had difficulty in
making them say that "man is a creature composed of body and soul," for
their decided opinion seemed to be that "man is a preacher"" !

There is an old wooden shanty back of our convent and facing Queen Street
where the boys' school is held for the present. We have to get new beams and
supports put in occasionally to keep it together, and to prevent the wind and rain
from coming in through too many places at once. The ground on which this
building stands is intended for a new school-house when we get the means to
begin work. Who speaks first with a contribution ? My letter is much longer
than it was intended it should be, and I hope you are not wearied by it. Your
letter encouraged us very much, and it was a real act of charity, for, excepting
our kind and benevolent priests, we are strangers here, and even the climate is
not familiar to us, for it is not like the Christmas weather of the dear North, and
it is not easy to realize that in two weeks the grand old Adeste fideles will be
heard once more mingling its music with the Christmas bells in so many sanctu-
aries, where the " Venite adoremus " will be accepted by Mary's Divine Child on
our altars. Very sincerely yours, SISTER MARY PAUL, O.S.F.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

APPRECIATIONS, with an Essay on Style. By Walter Pater. London and New
York : Macmillan & Co.

A book from the pen of Mr. Walter Pater is certain of a welcome from
all those whose welcome is worth the having. There is that about his style
that marks him as painstaking and exacting even to the turn of a phrase —
perhaps more painstaking as regards the turn of a phrase than as regards the
whole truth of a statement. Still, his book is such as scholars delight in, even
when bound to differ with him. Appreciations is not always easy reading. The
sentences lack directness and point. They are not unfrequently labored — ;the
sentences of one groping after fresh material and new form in which to clothe it.

The book contains suggestive essays about Wordsworth and Coleridge and
Charles Lamb. But the authors with whom Mr. Pater seems to be most in sym-
pathy are William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The whole bent of his
mind is towards the school of modern aestheticism. Indeed, his writings may well
be taken as the best prosaic exponent of that school. There is the same devotion
to art for art's sake ; there is the same careful structure of sentences ; there is the
same sense for the weird and the bizarre ; there also is the same anxiety to leave
all beaten paths and explore new fields of thought and construct new forms of
expression

To our mind the most thoughtful essay in the book is the opening one on
Style. It is fresh and suggestive. It has the advantage of being written by one
who has made a study of h'is subject, and who knows whereof he speaks. The
very names he mentions show the high ideal he has set up.

" Different classes of persons," he says, " at different times, make, of course,
very various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not only
scholars but all disinterested lovers of books, will always look to it, as to all other
fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the
actual world. A perfect poem like Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the

1890.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 705

perfect handling of a theory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them
something of the uses of a religious 'retreat '" (p. 24).

In this quotation we find Mr. Pater's central idea of literature — the
point of view from which he regards it —as well as his ideals. Literature
is to him a fine art, "like all other fine art.1' As such it must possess form.
The form may be severe and unadorned, as in some of Stendhal's best work ; it
may be luxuriant in ornament, as in Les Miserable* of Victor Hugo ; it may be
rich in the graces of unpretentious and unconscious beauty, as in The Vicar of
Wakefield ; so long as it contains the unity of design, the proportion of parts,
"the one beauty" that is of the essence of the subject and is "independent, in
prose and verse alike, of all removable decoration," so long will the work be
appreciated as a piece of art. According to Mr. Pater, the great element that
enters into the construction of artistic form is "self-restraint, a skilful economy
of means." "The artist," says Schiller, "maybe known rather by what he
omits." But, as we shall see later on, this artistic omission has various aspects,
all of which must be taken into account when criticising a work.

It is to be regretted that Mr. Pater barely touches upon the rhythm of prose.
It is a fruitful theme and it may yet lead to the construction of laws of prose
rhythm as well defined as those of poetic rhythm. It underlies every form of
approved style. It varies with a music all its own. The rhythm of Milton's
Areopagitica is distinct from that of Hooker's celebrated definition of law in the
Ecclesiastical Polity / these, again, are distinct from that of Macaulay's well-
known passage on the church or Newman's classic sentences on music. Then,
also, is there variety in each author. Now he writes in a minor key, now in a
major.

But a more serious oversight in Mr. Pater's discussion of style is the fact that
he loses sight of the possibilities of style. He speaks as though all the best forms
of style were exhausted. Indeed, he is almost a Humanist in his conception of
the importance of form. But we cannot make the past the exclusive measure of
the future. Every innovation of every great artist has been a shock to his con-
temporaries. We have before us a remonstrance of a friend and admirer of
Michelangelo's when that great artist painted "The Last Judgment " in the
Sistine Chapel. The artist represented every vice in all its horrors as his vast
brain conceived it, and the friend objected to the boldness of the conception and
the freedom of its execution. He was shocked. No doubt we shall all be shocked
on that dread day — " that day of wrath." A complacent painting of that sub-
ject must needs be a failure. The remedy for Michelangelo was not to clothe
his naked, loathsome figures, but to wipe out the great masterpiece.

Again, the admirers of Mozart and Bach and Beethoven fount! in the
music of Wagner nothing but the discord and the shrieks of nature. But who
will say to-day that Wagner has not given music a new and a noble form? So
also with Browning. He seems to have smashed every mould of literary expres-
ion, and out of the fragments fashioned unto himself a rough and rugged
lould in which he throws his magnificent soul-readings. Does not, our
disappointment arise from our bringing to the reading of him our precon-
:eived literary notions ? Of course we do not find them. His work is not that of
rehearsing and re-echoing. He has a mission all his own, and he expresses him-
self in language all his own. We look, for instance, for growth and development
of character as exemplified in a series of words and acts. Browning has nothing
to do with growth and development of character. He leaves that to the novelist.
His work is to take a soul in the supreme moment — the great crisis of its life —
id show forth the making or the marring of that soul under the touch of adver-

706 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Feb.,

sity or prosperity. Or, in a mediaeval tale, he mirrors forth some old-new
thought as applicable to-day as when the story was first told. Take as an
example his last volume of poems, Asolando, over which the critics are at this
moment so much divided. Take the story of the lawyer who has grown wealthy
out of the money extorted from the widow and the orphan, and whom the devil
is waiting to strangle as soon as he gives up saying the little prayer that he had
learned in his youth. The lawyer is on good terms with himself and with the
whole world. He gives liberally to the church. He has the ecclesiastical digni-
taries to dine at his table. But once read, can that incident of the Father
Superior wringing from his napkin the blood that had been coined into the
means by which the lawyer could live so sumptuously ever be forgotten?
And are there no deacons, no pillars and mainstays of our churches, on whom
everybody smiles, who have coined the money they are so liberal with out of the
sweat and blood and tears of the poor and the oppressed ? Is not the evil spirit
of greed and rapine awaiting the opportunity to strangle such men ? No ; there
is depth in Browning ; his meaning is hard to get at, but once you enter into his
point of view and read from that outward the whole grandeur of his conception
stands forth in all its rugged proportions.

We may not admire the new forms ; we may prefer the old ones ; but it
were unwisdom to quarrel with that which does not please us. A.

HYMNS WITH TUNES FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS AND CONGREGATIONS. The
music composed, selected, and arranged by Edmund G. Hurley, Organist
and Choirmaster of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, New York City.
New York : Catholic Publication Society Co.; London : Burns & Oates, Lim-
ited.

HYMNS FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS AND CONGREGATIONS. Selected by Edmund
G. Hurley, Organist and Choirmaster of the Church of St. Paul the Apos-
tle, New York City. To accompany Hymns with Tunes for Catholic
Schools and Congregations. New York : Catholic Publication Society Co.;
London : Burns & Oates, Limited.

The first of these little books contains the words and music of fifty hymns and
the Litany of the Blessed Virgin ; the second contains the words only of the same
hymns and litany. The first may be used for classes of larger children in schools,
and the second for the smaller children. For congregational use, choice may be
made of either, according to circumstances of the number and character of the
people and the methods adopted to introduce hymn-singing into a parish. The
larger book is sold for $10 a hundred; the smaller one, we presume, for very much
less.

This selection contains three hymns for Advent, six for Christmas-time, five
for Lent, three for Easter and Pentecost, eight for the Blessed Sacrament, nine
for the Blessed Virgin and for May devotions, and seventeen for occasional use.
Thirteen of the tunes are original compositions of Mr. Hurley, and the rest have
been selected on account of their proved fitness and beauty. All these hymns
have been tried, most of them for many years, and found good by actual experi-
ment. They are for the most part the result of selection by different judges after
long trial in the Sunday-school and congregation of St. Paul's Church, New
York. They are something like the result of " the survival of the fittest." They
are not children's hymns in the sense of being juvenile; they are fitted for all
ages and all grades of intelligence. The words and verses are simple, yet the re-
verse of dull ; the music is tuneful, easy to learn, pleasant to sing. But its best
praise is that it is religious. Very few of the tunes pass the boundaries of what is
called grave music, and not one of them is frivolous. What is called lackadais-

1890.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 707

ical or even worldly music is not found here, and nothing is borrowed from the
opera. The hymns are all calculated to arouse devotion, and are all expressive
of doctrine and worship in a good degree, some in a very high degree.

The harmonies are arranged so that any one who can play even a little can
quickly learn them ; they are good, solid harmonies, mostly diatonic, suited to
the capacities of any kind of organist and, for singing, of all who have had any
practice in singing in parts. These harmonies will be found very effective for sing-
ing, but the hymns cannot be used in less than four parts or in unison. Unison
is the best for large numbers anyway, and two-part singing is not good in the cir-
cumstances which these publications are designed to meet.

It might be objected that the number of hymns given by Mr. Hurley is too
small ; but this, we think, can only be urged by persons of limited experience.
Fifty good hymns, well practised and known, is all that can be relied on in average
congregations. The selection here offered goes through the entire liturgical year j
with the addition of excellent hymns, under the head Occasional, for the usual
devotions of the faithful. If one insists that a bigger book is needed, Father
Young's Catholic Hymnal, or some other one of like scope, will be found more
copious in repertory. But for practical use in Sunday-schools and parish schools,
and especially for the introduction of congregational singing, Mr. Hurley's little
book furnishes a practical, simple, and inexpensive manual.

For schools the best plan would be to purchase a full supply of the book con-
taining the words and tunes both, and place a copy in the hands of every child.
All scholars are taught music nowadays, and here is the first and best occasion
for practical use of that knowledge for religious purposes. The very same may
be said of choirs and sodalities. The use of the notes by persons, children or
adults, who know even a little music will make the task of learning a very short
one indeed. For the use of the whole congregation, let those who know anything
about music buy the larger book and use it, taking it home and playing and sing-
ing the hymns in their families ; the others can use the smaller one.

It is a delusion to suppose that there is any great difficulty in introducing the
singing of hymns by the whole people. This hymn-book in the people's hands,
an organist to play the tunes and accompany the singing, a priest to give some
very simple rehearsals, and the result is secured. The tune of the hymn selected
to begin with should be played over two or three times on the organ, then a few
persons prepared beforehand — for instance, the choir or a sodality scattered
throughout the church — should sing it over, after that the whole congregation
should try the first one or two lines, and then the whole verse. In fifteen minutes
or less you will have a large enough number able to go along with the organ very
well indeed, and after a short time the whole people singing in a body without
fear of mistakes. What, as a matter of fact, is most of all needed is neither
organ, book, nor practice, but a conviction that the singing of the divine praises
by all the people is pleasing to God and beneficial to souls, and then the courage
of one's conviction.

This book is also good for use on missions where the fathers are desirous of
introducing congregational singing.

THE CONTINUOUS CREATION. An Application of the Evolutionary Philoso-
phy to the Christian Religion. By Myron Adams. Boston and New
York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Mr. Adams is a theistic evolutionist of the most radical type, who seeks
to reconcile the new philosophy with the Christian religion, not as that is
authoritatively given, but as reconstructed to suit the evolutionary theory.

708 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Feb.,

Accordingly, he reverses the doctrine of man's fall from a state of original
justice to that of his rise from the condition of atoms and force to an Incarnate
Deity. He holds that there is a personal God who causes all things by this pro-
cess of evolution ; that Christ was produced by it, and was only a being in the
order of nature, and that miracles were only natural operations. As regards the
immortality of the soul, he applies the theory of the survival of the fittest, and
seems to think that the quality of holiness is essential to immortal life ; then the
continuous life, which is essential to the future existence, is made dependent
upon the possession of a quality which the soul is free to have or not have.
Moreover, according to evolution, the human intellect and will must have their
origin in certain animal instincts (p. 144), and man must consequently be only
force and matter, so developed through different eons by the power of the Eternal
Energy as to be able to pray to and worship God. We see in this instance how
a contradiction is involved in the application of the theory of the survival of the
fittest to the soul. By it a quality non-essential to existence is made something
without which the soul cannot exist. And, in regard to this theory of the origin
of the soul, reason teaches us that it is absurd to derive a spiritual substance from
the action of eternal energy upon matter and force, because spiritual and ma-
terial natures have nothing in common.

Besides, the denial of the supernatural order in the Incarnation, and the
attempt to explain miracles by natural causes, are merely endeavors to set aside
facts which are as indisputable as anything we can know by the testimony of
the senses and the light of reason. Mr. Adams ought to understand that the
historic facts which he denies — the creation, the incarnation, and its attendant
miracles — are more certain than any which can be ascertained regarding the
pre-historic periods of the earth ; and we fear that his mistake, like that of
many others, is the result of a nervous impatience lest revelation should seem
inconsistent with the speculations and half-truths of the hour. He should be
content to wait, knowing that error, like other delinquents, has a strong ten-
dency to self-destruction. It is remarkable that he, notwithstanding these errors,
claims to believe in Christianity, and dedicates his book to Plymouth Congrega-
tional Church, of Rochester, N. Y., over which he has been pastor for many
years.

TREE METHOD IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. Suggestions offered to all lovers of
children, by One of Themselves. London : Arthur J. Roche.

This commendable treatise is an English production. It is in the writer's
mind to see established the "free method" in education, of which so much is
written by his American cousins. And this, albeit, with professed loyalty to
"code requirements." We theorize so amazingly on elementary teaching, and
have put so little of our theorizing into practice, that it is mildly exhilarating to
read this suggestive work, with its fresh air of originality and simple tender of
"new" modes for "drawing out" the dormant faculties of childhood. It is
claimed for free method that it is one of the on-coming influences of the age.
We will essay to give the gist of the argument, though the book, in order to be
profited by, must be read as a whole.

" Child-gardening," so we read, to be productive, must be commenced when
the child is two or thereabouts, and at this tender age the perceptions of the
senses should be cultivated with a foil and free development of every faculty ; with
this, by the proper modes, fitting apparatus, and capable exponents, there would
be an accompanying development in each individual child of self-recognition,
self-dependence, and the healthy germs of a knowledge how to preserve and
draw on reserve forces.

1890.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 709

The " mistaken ideals of the past, in which the training of character, if recog-
nized at all, is made entirely subordinate to the aims of study " — these are to be
far distanced, and in their place the author " pleads especially for (i) Precision,
{2) Fun, and (3) Mutual Helpfulness " It is thought the aim, the very meaning
ot education (which is the development and training of the natural faculties, with
the setting of these at their true work) is flagrantly lost sight of in daily routine
of mechanical and arbitrary method. The instructors of youth are begged to
develop and nourish those germs of all that is sweet and noble innate in the soul
of each child, to satisfy the yearnings, the sometimes intense cravings, for the
good in every form of those child-souls. To teach that truth, the soul of poetry,
is likewise the soul of all that is beautiful. As for the considerable length of the-
orizing preface, a possible accusation of Quixotism is refuted by, " ' Faith worketh
by love.' Here is the true Key. The misuse of the word need not, must not,
lead to the ignoring of it, still less the loss of the sacred thing it signifies.'1''

The plea for room, p. 36, sounds familiar. " We cannot be hurried, and
must not be cramped. We want to be able to breathe and move freely." School
furniture had better take its chances, is said further on, than that" rudimentary
wings " be injured through lack of room for their activities. Elasticity, spontane-
ity, a training of the affections and of the will — these are the key-notes that reverber-
ate all through the composition ; they are emphasized as they need be, if the free
method is to take its place among the "on-coming influences " of the age. Teach
the little ones to do the right for love and happiness, not for chains.

So much for the preamble on principle, after which the practice. The ego-
ism entailed by such individual development is to be remedied by various means
proposed; among others, practical studies from the book of nature, lessons in the
sciences, " translated into the vernacular"; the tendency to idleness in its many
forms would be also thus counteracted, so it is set forth with persuasive and pleas-
ing detail. The modes of securing a silence in the school-room " not dependent
on mere outward restraint," are rich in practical wisdom. Self-imposed rules and
penalties, mutual helpfulness, a sound public opinion, these conjoin with the
practice as laid down, in an harmonious and what purports to be an eminently
practicable manner, and to be fruitful of good results to teacher and taught.
Following these twenty- five pages of principle and practice, we have practice
pure and simple. An "Outline Course from the Book of Nature " is very neatly
gotten up in matter, form, gradation, and development.

Some exceptions must be taken in regard to the chapter on writing ; we know
newer and better ways than are here indicated. Spelling — we find an apology
here offered for the phonetic system. Would they have the coming Britons speak
American? The hints on reading are pertinent and good, as also are the samples
of mental pabulum in a literary form directed to be doled out to the infant mind.
The objective method of teaching numbers is strongly emphasized; there is but
little here new to the American teacher.

But the very best portion of the book is the one hundred odd pages entitled
"Teachers on Teaching." The title fails to convey a proper estimate of its ex-
ceedingly readable quality, triply interesting to parents, teachers, and children.
Much of this is written charmingly, to say nothing of its sterling worth in the
matter of suggestive aid. Space forbids yielding to the temptation to quote.

The Utopia of childhood dreamed of by the writer forces on our mind the
iasibility of its realization in all measure desirable, but its atmosphere must be
that of religion, and this glowing light fails to pervade and warm the pages of
Free Method.

7 1 o NEW PUBLICA TIONS. [Feb. , 1 890.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Mention of books in this place does not preclude extended notice in subsequent numbers.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN EXPECTED. By Frank R. Stockton, author oi Roundabout
Rambles, etc. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.

THE GOLDEN DAYS OF '49. A Tale of the California Diggings. By Kirk Munroe. author
of The Flamingo Feather, etc. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.

Music FOR THE PEOPLE. A Retrospect of the Glasgow International Exhibition, 1888,
with an account of the rise of Choral Societies in Scotland. By Robert A. Marr, author
of Music and Musicians, etc. Edinburgh and Glasgow : John Menzies & Co.

A SHRINE AND A STORY. By the author of Tyborne, Irish Homes and Irish Hearts, etc.
London, 18 West Square : Catholic Truth Society.

THE SPANISH INQUISITION. By the Right Rev. Joseph Dwenger, D.D., Bishop of Fort
Wayne. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

ROME AND REASON. Boston : Cashman, Keating & Co.

HYMNS WITH TUNES FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS AND CONGREGATIONS. The music com-
posed, selected, and arranged by Edmund G. Hurley, organist and choir-master of the
Church of St. Paul the Apostle, New York City. New York : The Catholic Publica-
tion Society Co. ; London : Burns & Gates.

MEDICINA PASTORALIS. Edidit Dr. C. Capellmann, Medicus Aquisgranensis. Editio septima.
Latinarum altera. Aquisgrani. Sumptibus Rudolphi Barth. (New York, Cincinnati, and
Chicago : Benziger Bros.)

THE GOLDEN PRAYER. Short Meditations on the Lord's Prayer for every day in the week,
with Meditations on Prayer for every day in the month. By the Abbe" Duquesne. Trans-
lated from the French by Anne Stuart Bailey. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago :
Benziger Bros.

ST. TERESA'S OWN WORDS ; OR, INSTRUCTIONS ON THE PRAYER OF RECOLLECTION.
Arranged from her work, The Way of Perfection. By the Right Reverend James Chad-
wick. To which is added a Novena to St. Teresa, revised by the Very Reverend Felix
Varella, D.D. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

THE MIRACULOUS POWER OF THE MEMORARE, illustrated by Examples. From the French
of a Marist Father, by Miss Ella McMahon. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago :
Benziger Bros.

ST. ALOYSIUS' SOCIETY MANUAL. Compiled from approved sources with the Approbation
of the Right Rev. Bishop of Buffalo. Second edition. New York and Cincinnati : Fr.
Pustet & Co.

THE HOLY INFANCY. Short Meditations for Christmas. By Richard F. Clarke, S.J. New
York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

THE PACIFIC COAST CATHOLIC ALMANAC for 1890. San Francisco : Diepenbrock & Co.

THE RESPECTIVE RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF THE FAMILY, STATE, AND CHURCH IN RE-
GARD TO EDUCATION By Rev. James Conway, S.J., Prof, in Canisius College, Buf-
falo, N. Y. Second edition. New York and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co.

ASTRONOMY, NEW AND OLD. By Rev. Martin S. Brennan, A.M. New York : The Catho-
lic Publication Society Co.

AROUND THE WORLD. Stories by Olive Risley Seward, editor of Wm. H. Seward's Travels
around the World. Boston : D. Lothrop Co.

PAPERS ON SCHOOL ISSUES OF THE DAY. No. i. Denominational Schools. A Discussion
at the National Association, July, 1889, with Papers by Cardinal Gibbons, Bishop Keane,
Edwin D. Mead, Ph.D., and Hon. John Jay. Syracuse, N. Y. : C. W. Bardeen.

CAUSE EFFICIENTS ET CAUSE FINALE. Par E. Domet de Verges. Extrait des Annales
de Philosophic Chrtttenne. Paris: Bureau des Annales de Philosophie Chre'tienne.

AN ESSAY IN REFUTATION OF AGNOSTICISM. AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNKNOW-
ABLE. A Review with an Analogy. By Rev. Simon Fitzsimons. Rochester, N. Y.

HAPPY Go LUCKY AND OTHER STORIES. By Mary Catherine Crowley, author of Merry
Hearts and True, etc. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co.

LA REFORME ET LA POLITIQUE FRANCAISE EN EUROPE JUSQU'A LA PAIX DE WEST-
PHALIE. Par le Vte. de Meaux. Paris : Librairie Acade'mique Didier, Perrin et Cie.

LE PERIL SOCIAL ET LE DEVOIR ACTUEL. Le Mai— Le Remede. Discours prononce"e i
Geneve, les 17 et 24 Mars, 1889. Par Th. de la Rive. Geneve : H. Trembley. Paris :
Socie'te' bibliographique. (For sale by Benziger Bros.)

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. L. MARCH, 1890. No. 300.

REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE.*

MADE TO A DEVOUT SERVANT OF OUR LORD, CALLED
MOTHER JULIANA, AN ANCHORITE OF NORWICH, WHO
LIVED IN THE DAYS OF KlNG EDWARD III.

THE SEVENTH CHAPTER.

AND while my earnest thought upon this sight abode
Our Ladie Marie by our courteous Lord was shewed,

As it did seem to me :

Which means the truth and wisdome that she understood
Her God so great, so high, so mightie, and so good,

And full of majestic.

This nobletie and greatnes with which she beheld
Her God, who is her Maker, all her being filled

Of meeknes and of dreed.

For when she did her litle self with God compare,
So low, so simple, and so poor did she appear

As seemed she nought indeed.

Thus, by this ground of meeknes was she filled of grace,
And fore all creatures she doth hold the highest place;

Yea, doth her soule invest
With vertues of all sort, as soothlie we infer
From what the Angel said when he saluted her: —

" Hail ! thou of women blest ! "

In all the time He shewed this that I now have said,
Lasting I saw the plenteous bleeding of His head ; —

* Continued from THE CATHOLIC WORLD, April, 1888.
Copyright. REV. A. F. HEWIT. 1890.

;i2 REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE. [Mar.

The great drops falling down

Like pellots 'neath the garland, as from out the veins
Pierc'd by the sharp and cruel thornes with grievous pains,

In colour dark and brown.

For in the coming out the blood was thick, just where
The garland press'd his forehead all so sweet and fair,

And tore the tender flesh ;

But in the spreading out it grew more brightlie red,
And when it came unto the brows it vanished

And then began afresh.

This plenteous falling of the great, thick drops of blood
Did last till manie things were seen and understood ;

Yet there did still remain

The same sweet lovesomeness and beautie as before.
And greatlie marvailed I our Lord so patient bore

Such cruel, bitter pain.

The drops of blood did fall as fast and numerous
As fall the drops from off the evesing of a house

After a heavy rain.

They seemed round as like unto a herring scale
As they did spread upon His forehead high and pale

And its fair beautie stain.

This was a quick and hideous and a dreedful sight,
Though sweet and lovelie, and did me excite

To many thoughts of love ;

That our good Lord that is so rev'rent and so great,
Yet is so homelie to us in our low estate —

Coming from heav'n above

To be our comfort and our joy and gladful chere ;
The which I learnt the better by example clere,

And given in this wise.

It is most worshippe that a solemn king, or lord,
Unto his poor and loving servant maie afford,

If he with kindlie eies

And courteous speech and mien will homelie toward him be
With meaning true both open and in secrecie.

Then this poor creature cries : —
41 Lo ! this is more of joy and liking to my mind
That he, my noble lord, doth shew himself so kind

To one so far below,

Than if he gave me manie gifts both rich and rare,
And yet himself in manner strange and distant were,
Nor cared my name to know."

1 890. ] RE VELA TIONS OF Dl VINE LOVE. 713

So high was this example from the bodie brought

To shew more clere the meaning while my wond'ring thought

Was on the bleeding set ;

That joy of this sweet homeliness might well repay
This man all service, ravishing his heart awaie

Till he himself forget.

Thus faireth it by our Lord Jesu, of His love,
For verilie it most of joy to us doth prove

As hath before been said

That He, the highest, nobliest, and worthiest
Is lowest, meekest, homeliest, and courtsiest

To us whom He hath made.

When we shall see Him then will He reveal to us
Right verilie this joy, so high and marvaillous ;

And this will our good Lord

That we believe and comfort us, and make solace
As well we maie with His dear helpe and bounteous grace

Till He this sight afford:

That time, I wis, when we shall see it verilie
And be fulfill'd of joy in heaven's jubilee,

Which none in life may know,
Except the Lord by special gift maie it impart,
Or God the Holie Ghost with grace so fill his heart

That it doth overflow.

But faith with charitie doth well deserve the meed
Sith faith with hope and charitie is life indeed

By which our soule doth live,

And grow in strength, and wit the things which God will shew
With manie privie points most worshippful to know

That faith alone maie give.

And when this shewing, given for a time, is past,
Faith keepeth it by holy grace while life doth last,

Till we our meed receive.

ALFRED YOUNG.

VOL. L.- 46

7 14 AN IRISH HAMLET. [Mar.,

AN IRISH HAMLET.

You would like to know what an Irish hamlet is like ? Well,
I will try and describe it to you.

The glow of the autumn sunshine is just now shed over all.
As I sit here in my room and look through the open window,
it falls on the privet hedge and on the tender stalk and pearly
berry of the egg-plant. The apple-trees are behind the house,
laden with their own sweet fruit. On the green plot in front of
me there is a shadow, as correct and well defined as any right-
lined mathematician might desire — it is the shadow of this dear
old thatch-roofed cottage. I was " ordered " out here from town
at the beginning of harvest ; my hearing was becoming over-
sensitive to sound. And now I have before me the remainder of
autumn with its gorgeous dyes, the bracing winter with its curi-
ous, ever-varying frost-work and tracery on tree and window-pane,
and after that the young spring with its primrose and violet,
sweet-flavorsd and beautiful as the blissful dreams of youth. All
before me, and little or no work to do ! tMy heart is jubilant
with happiness, and in its depths it cries, " Hurrah ! hurrah ! "

This very day I had a stroll through the fields — and it was
delightful ! The cows fed at their leisure, and whisked their long
tails, more out of pastime, I suspect, or habit than from neces-
sity. A distance off I could hear the driver cheer up his horses
with a tone of voice that to uninitiated ears sounded angry, but
which the dumb beasts knew well was but affection disguised. I
passed by the end of the corn-fields and saw the yellow crop
laid low, and heard those engaged — men and women — chatting
away, possibly discussing the solitary figure dressed in black
that was walking at " the headland." The little robin sang a
sunshine hymn on the topmost bough, and the wood-pigeon
softly coo-cooed in the grove hard by. And the fences all were
laden with blackberries ; what an abundance of jam they would
have made ! If I am here by this time next year, I will try
and interest some one to teach the people what a valuable in-
dustry they have at their door. Elderberries, too, with a plenti-
ful promise of haws, sloes, and hazel-nuts! Oh! for the country,
the dear, dear country ! The 'sloes will be splendid when the
frost comes ; but I must hasten to gather the blackberries, for
the legend among us is that when the last of the corn is gath-

1890.] AN IRISH HAMLET. 715

ered -in an old man comes from the graveyard and raises his
skeleton arms to wither the blackberry. The black, glossy,
tempting things are part of my mid-day luncheon. I take a
piece of bread and butter on my rambles, and the way-side
hedge supplies dessert.

But you want to know about our hamlet ! Oh ! quite true,
quite true.

A glass of wine, then, before we start. What, no ? Teeto -
taler ? All the better, friend ! I have been so myself for nigh
thirty years, and have never regretted it. A biscuit and a glass
of water, then. "And now, I go, my chief; I'm ready!"

As you drove out from town (we are about six miles from
town here) you saw a lovely belt of wood, spanning the brow
of the ascent and somewhat resembling the hair on the human
forehead, parted on either side, with the vein in the middle for
the streetway passing through. Two huge chestnuts stand at
the corners, forming an archway, beneath which the wayfarers
pass. In their shelter and repose these trees seem to denote
domestic happiness and peace, and, taken as a whole, the scene
looks very picturesque.

This tall, white house to the left ? you ask. That is the
village school. Do you know anything of our primary schools,
or our primary system at all ? Well, on the whole the system
is a good one. It has some drawbacks, especially its school-
books ; but, taking it all in all, it has done, and is doing, a
large share of good work. We will enter. Four walls, white-
washed ! Their only adornment is (as you see) school maps and
the rules and regulations of the Board of Education, with the
time-table, and some lessons for the very small children printed
in large letters. Strong, unpretentious seats or forms, fitted with
ink-stands, take up most of the floor, and are occupied by the
children while writing their "copies" or "doing their sums,"
the vacant space being allotted to those who are " up at their
class." The children range in age from four or five to sixteen or
eighteen — even a child of three can be put down in the roll-
book and reckoned in the average attendance. The children arc
generally clean and neat. The master or mistress rules the
school. The district inspector — a government officer — holds an
examination annually, and at any time of the year may drop in
to pay "an incidental visit." After the annual examination he
draws up a report on the state of the school, which he sends to
the Board of Education, and a copy of which is sent back to
the manager. The teacher is paid one portion of his income

716 AN IRISH HAMLET. [Mar.,

according to the answering of the children ; in other words, by
"results," as it is usually called; another portion from the board,
according to his rank as a classified teacher ; and the remaining
portion from the parents of those children who can afford it.
The clergyman of the district is generally the manager, and he
can dismiss the teacher instantaneously for certain well-defined
faults, by a three months' notice for no fault at all. In an ex-
perience of upwards of a quarter of a century I have never seen
either of these two clauses acted on. The teachers, as a rule,
are moral and painstaking; now and again a tinge of pedantry
may be detected, but on the whole they form a well- trained,
devoted, and useful body of men and women.

The little street is, as you see, about a furlong in length ; no
lanes, no off-shoots, nothing but the two straight lines of houses.
The trees, scattered here and there at 'the back, or standing to-
gether in clumps, give it a pretty appearance in the distance ;
while the frequent trains in and out from town, and the all
but constant stream of carts or other vehicles on their way to
market, give it an air of life and business. We will pass up
through it.

Here to our right is the ever-present police-barrack.

11 Tread where you will on Irish ground,
From Antrim coast to wild Cape Clear,
Or east or west, but still is found " —

an Irish constabulary barrack ! (I hope Mr. T. D. Sullivan
will not see this parody on the opening of his delightful poem,
." Dunboy.")

There are six men in this barrack, and, except for some
fiddle-faddle of drill or patrol, they are absolutely doing nothing.
They are paid according to years of service and " good be-
havior"; sub-constables about £70 ($35°) a year, and the ser-
geant in or about fyo ($450) ; that is, these five sub-constables
and their sergeant cost the rate-payers about $2,250 a year;
and so on with every town, village, hamlet, and country station
all over the land.

If the people had, of their own free will, put them there, or
kept them there, there would be no grounds for complaint, but
at present the people of Ireland have as little to do with the
ordering or managing of the police force as the men in New
Zealand. They are kept for the sake of the landlords. They
are a machine of the government; and in the struggle now wag-

1890.] AN IRISH HAMLET. 717

ing between the Irish people and the English executive in Dub-
lin Castle they have proved a savage and merciless machine.

Where are these men recruited from ? you ask. From the
ranks of the people. They are mostly all the sons of laborers or
small farmers. You are puzzled, then, to account for their want
of sympathy with the very class from which they are sprung.
So are we all here in Ireland. Individually you will find them
civil, obliging, agreeable, displaying all the kindly qualities of the
Celtic nature ; but set .them in foray — at an eviction or a Land
League meeting — and they seem to lose, not alone their reason,
but even their nature. They appear almost to thirst for blood.
If analyzed, many factors might be found conducing to this:
(i) Their system of training ("obey orders first and see to the
responsibility afterwards ") ; (2) They are under officers of a caste
deadly hostile to the people ; (3) The ranks are always leavened
with Orange and Freemason members, who spy and are petted ;
(4) If not cowards, they are blessed with a strong love for a
whole skin, and, having deadly weapons in their hands, they try
to instil terror of the most abject kind into the minds of the
poor people ; and, lastly, they know they have no chance of
promotion if they do not show themselves all but wantonly cruel
at the present crisis.

It is a marvel how any man with an Irish heart can stay in
their ranks. One might indeed find an excuse for a married
man, with a wife and family, who could not easily find another
means of living; but the young, unmarried man seems inexcus-
able. His brothers or cousins or school-fellows or old neigh-
bors at home have to labor or to emigrate ; and why not he do
the same, and preserve his manly self-respect and honor ? Adieu,
Messrs, of the Royal Irish; the day may come, and that soon,
when the people will govern you, and not you the people ; and
when that day comes, may the Irish people prove themselves
noble, and not seek to avenge their wrongs!

Come away, friend. Irishmen can hardly afford to speak of
these matters with patience. Even a "galled jade will wince."

Hark ! listen to that merry ring. Have you never in your youth
entered the smith's forge, and watched the often .useless (as you
thought) stroke of the hammer intermittingly on the cold anvil ?
What a merry music it makes, and all the merrier that you know it
is the voice of honest and useful work. This house with the wide
door-way and the roof of smoke-blackened planks is the village
smithy, where Shaun Go^v (Jack the Blacksmith) lives and moves
in grime and coal-dust, among horseshoes, ploughs, cart-wheels,

/i8 AN IRISH HAMLET. [Mar.,

machines, and various old irons. Jack is not a giant, as you
may be going to imagine ; he is but middle-sized, and just pas-
sably stout. We will come over. Through all the soot you 'no-
tice that his face is regular and his eyes like brown velvet.
His voice, too, is soft, and you are disposed to think he is a
meek-mannered man without a touch of humor or drollery in
him ; but if you were in the forge when " the lads " gather in
of a wet or an idle day, and some fellow is showing off mighty
smart, you should see Shaun call on him " to hand over that
bit of iron there on the floore " (Shaun himself having quietly
dropped it there reeking hot a moment or two ago) ; and then
the moment it is touched it is of course let go, with sundry ex-
clamations of the voice and many jerkings of the hand, while
the whole forge is agape with laughter and Shaun is winking
with the left of his eye. He has shrewd sense, too.

"John, what are you going to do with Willie?"

"With Willie, sir?"

"Yes, your second boy; he used to look so nice on a Sun-
day about the altar serving Mass. We had all quite settled, do
you know, that you would send him into town."

"What would I do with him in town, sir?"

"Send him to school, or make something of him."

"Ah! begor, a thrade is betther, sir; I'll give him my own
thrade; a thrade is no load, sir; a thrade is never a load."

WTe nod our heads in assent and bid him good-day.

In the meantime John has re-entered his cavern of grime and
dust, and the merry clink of his hammer follows us on our
way. God bless him and every man like him that earns an
honest penny !

That house you point to is the court-house. It is shut to-
day, so we cannot enter; but I promise to take you in there
some day and show what Irish justice and Irish justices are like.
Comedy and tragedy never trod so hot-foot on each other's
heels.

At this side is one of the village hucksters' shops. Poor old
Moll keeps it. In the little shop-window, two by two and a
half, she has a grand display — bottles of hair-oil, boxes of
matches, soap, candles, pipes, reels of thread, sweets, and sugar-
candy. As we push in the half-door Moll is serving a customer,
the same being a little barefooted child that wants " a penn-
'orth of light (a penny candle), and a box of matches, and an
ounce of tibaccy for her dada." The child has brought half a
dozen of eggs, " and my mamma tould me to say, ma'am, that she

1890.] AN IRISH HAMLET. 719

would send you the rest agen Saturday." " That's it all but a penny,"
is Moll's soliloquy. And she hobbles feebly to the window-shut-
ter, pulls it out, and marks a stroke. The back of that shutter
is to the uninitiated like Egyptian hieroglyphics ; it is a wilder-
ness of strokes, crosses, and all manner of figures. The key to
the riddle, however, is this : one stroke stands for a penny,
a cross is sixpence, a circle or nought ' a shilling; and Moll
keeps tally as correctly as the best bookkeeper in the kingdom.
Her memory alone, so true is it from exercise, would have suf-
ficed without any tablets, no matter for how many customers. God
be with our school days, when we had to crib the penny from
our little dinner allowance to buy candy or bull's-eyes from Moll!

The next on our way is a public-house. There are three
public-houses in this little village of thirty families. It is not on
the thirty families, however, they depend for support, but on
those going into or coming out from town. The drink question
is a much-discussed and vexed one here in Ireland, as perhaps
elsewhere, and it may, therefore, be better to put off any account
of it until we come to consider the habits of our peasantry,
whether they are temperate or intemperate.

This row of low, one-storied houses that we are passing now is
occupied by day-laborers and artisans. You see, too, by the roof-
less cowels (shells of ruined houses) that eviction and emigration
have been busy here, as in every other part of the country.

Here is a better kind of a house. Tom, the shoemaker, lives
in this. A great politician is Tom. " Begor, sir, when thim
Parnell Commissions wor goin' on I nearly ran myself blind over
'em. I'd stop airly to have a look at the paper that Mr. James
gives me every day, and when I'd begin at the beginning of it
never a one could I give up till I'd get to the very ind."
With all that, Tom is a hard-working, industrious man. He built
that nice little house of his himself, out of his own savings, and
says, "A man needn't lave home if he'd mind his business;
always allowing, sir, that he got fair play."

Rody, the carman, lives here. He has a big mule, and sup-
ports himself by carting goods out from town and carrying in
other things, such as country produce or the returned empties.

We will step into this middle house in the range. Morty
Mann, the tailor, lives here. He is " one of the raal ould stock
of the place."

" Well, Mary, how is father to-day ? "

" Much the same, then, sir, dear knows; no better, no worse,
thank you."

720 AN IRISH HAMLET. [Mar.,

" Won't we see him, Mary ? "

"Ah! wisha, sir, sure 'tisn't up on the loft you'd be taking
the strange gentleman, and that ould laddher, too ! "

(A bedroom up near the roof, formed by boarding the kitchen,
is called a loft.)

" Never mind, Mary, here's up. Will you come?" (to our im-
aginary friend). We find Morty lying in bed ; a pretty patch-
work quilt is thrown over the bed-clothes, and everything looks
very clean and neat.

"This gentleman came with me to see you, Morty. How
are you ? "

"He's welcome, sir; ye're both heartily welcome, sir."

"What age are you now, Morty?"

" Something 'long with eighty, sir."

" Do you remember the time that Blood was shot ? "

" I do, sir ; a good right I have. My father lost his life by
it."

"How is that, Morty?"

" Well, now, sir " (and Morty lifts himself on his elbow), " in
thim times the poor people were very badly off; all the com-
mons where they had their houses and little patches of land was
taken from 'em and closed in, don't ye know, sir ? by the land-
lords ; and they hadn't a house, or a haggard, or a cabbage-
garden, or a haporth, but had to come into the village, every
mother's sowl of 'em. The country was swarming with people
then, and of course they couldn't starve ; so they made up in
parties and turned out at night, and they dug a piece of land in
this field, and a piece in that, and a piece in the other ; to mark it,
don't you understand, sir? And woe be to the man that refused them
that field for pratie ground. But no sooner were ' the boys '
out than ' the picket ' were out after them, with Major Monks,
grandfather to the present lord, at their head, and Colonel
Wyndham, and Mr. Hollybank, and the rest of 'em. Well, one
morning they were goin' up the village, the men with their
spades — and some of 'em too, faith, sir, with blunderbushes ; ould
Blood saw 'em — it was a fine moonlight night, an hour or two
before daybreak — and when they passed his window he fires out
at 'em. Some of 'em wor hot, and when th' others saw the
blood they doubled back and forced their way up-stairs. He
had the room doore boulted, but they fired in and broke the
boult In the sthruggle he fell on the floore, and the bottom of
the doore (the Lord save us !j caught him by the neck and
choked him.

1890.] AN IRISH HAMLET. 721

" Next day and next night the yeomen were out, and next
night again and the next night, and 'tis no knowin' all they
took. They came to my father's and knocked at the doore with
the butt of their muskets, and called out to have it opened ' in
the name of the Queen ' — queen or king, faith, I don't think
which, but it doesn't matther ; sure they're both the same ! There
was no one in the house but my father and mother and my uncle.
My father and uncle were twin brothers, and I was then a good
little bit of a gossoon. My father and uncle were arrested, and
before they were dressed they were sthrapped on the horses be-
hind two of the sodgers. You'd think my mother 'ud lose her
life, and none of the neighbors daur come near us, and small
blame to 'em !

" My father (God be good to him !) was always used to
horses, and he was main sthrong ; so as they were clathering
away round a corner in the road, he puts his leg under the
forearm of the horse, caught one of the reins out of the sodger's
hand, gave it a jerk of a sudden, and down they came, all of
'em, in a plopsh on the road. Before you could say thrapstick
my father was out of the sthrap and away across the fields ; and
where, do you know, did he face to ? Over to the Protestant
church. He knew Tom Smith, the sexton; many's the day Tom
and he spent together. He up and tould Tom, and, begor, Tom
hid him in the sacristy, or \vhatever you call it, of the church,
and fed him there like a gamecock.

" But one night the parson came. If ever there was a good
man, Parson Bennett was that man. When the poor craythurs
'ud be hungry, and 'ud come to his doore, and when more of
thim ministhers 'ud make 'em sell their sowls, Parson Bennett
'ud say, ' Tis blankets or bread ye want ? ' and he'd tell the
housekeeper, be the same token, to give 'em. ' Becky, God
never made human craythurs to starve ! ' Well, he came one
night to the church. Oh ! but they wor in a hoult ! ' Smith,'
says he, ' who can there be in the vestry ? ' Begannies ! Tom
thought it the best of his play to make a clane breasht of it.
' Throw a piece of carpet over him, Smith, that I wouldn't see
him. You know what them other fellows are saying of me' — fel-
lows, he said, sir — ' but I don't care a damn about 'em ; and see,
Smith, there's a thirty-shilling note, and if you know any poor
man to be in want, give him something to eat. '

" Well, sure, the yeomen were so mad to have my father
escape that they thried my uncle by coort-martial, and he was
sentenced to be hanged, and, of all the places in the world, on the

722 AN IRISH HAMLET. [Mar.,

big three opposite our own doore. There was no ind to all the sodgers
and milithary that was there that day. When my father heard it he
wouldn't be kep from coming to have one last look. There was
a lime-kiln just at the place, and my father hid himself in it.
The major was blazing mad all the way out, that one of his
own tenants should be hanged on his own property, and I heard
'em say he all but drew his whip to the colonel as they came
along.

"The sodgers was drawn up in two lines, and when all was
ready the hangman came over near my uncle ; but the minute
he took up the rope to put it round my uncle's neck my father
took a brick from the kiln, and with that one aim he levelled the
hangman on the ground. The major at once stepped up and with
his own swoord he cut my uncle loose. ' Run for your life, Mann! '
he cried ; ' open a way there, men ! ' And while they were
looking at one another my uncle, who was as fast as a hare,
was off behind th' ould forth, and away down toward the
cockaun-a-pisha.

" ' I'll see you yet for this, major,' said the colonel.
'"I'll see you for what you were doing in jail,' said the
major (he meant bribing the informers) ; and well the major knew
that the colonel daurn't budge.

" They never saw my uncle afther ; he got on boord a vessel
sailing for Canada and made his escape, but my father wouldn't
lave my mother or me. He was on his ' keeping ' for near a
twelve-month, and at last he fell into bad health, from thrubble,
I think, and the dampthure. Parson Bennett got him into the
county infirmary unknownst ; they thought he was a beggar-
man, and he died in the hospital. A letter came from my
uncle offering to take my mother and me out, but my mother was
heart-broken and she did not long live afther my father, and
I was left an orphan to run about the roads or do as I liked, until
Canon O'Rourke — the heavens be his bed ! — took me up and
bound me to the tailoring. Thank God, gintlemin, thim days
are gone," said Morty, as he drew a heavy breath and lay back
again on his pillow.

" I wish they were, Morty, but look at the way they are
going on presently. A few years, however, may see them gone
for good and all, and until then may the God of heaven look
with pity on the poor and weak in Ireland !" R. O'K.

1890.] SHAKESPEARE'S "PERICLES" 723

SHAKESPEARE'S "PERICLES."

IN a series of papers in THE CATHOLIC WORLD I have en-
deavored to give my reasons for believing that, if critics of
William Shakespeare and his plays would only make up their
minds to come out of the clouds and forego all transcendental criti-
cism : simply examine the evidences of their time and environ-
ment by the light of common sense and the common run of
human procedure — much, if not all, that now seems inexplicable
and paradoxical about them both would yield to simple and
satisfactory solution. In the course of these papers I have tried
to demonstrate (i) That Shakespeare — coming to London poor and
leaving it rich — must have worked at some more money-making
employment than experimenting in forms, styles of verse, the
assonance and dissonance of metrical forms, and the effect of
" stopped " and " unstopped " endings, upon the ears of his con-
temporaries. (THE CATHOLIC WORLD, December, 1884.) (2)
That the Sonnets — whatever they meant and whoever wrote
them — were not necessarily autobiographical of William Shake-
speare, although, by a very little twisting, they could be easily
made autobiographical of anybody; and the more easily so of
the one of whose life we had the fewest actual particulars. (THE
CATHOLIC WORLD, November, 1885.) (3) That, proceeding cau-
tiously in writing the record, William Shakespeare's stage life did
not necessarily compel us either to accept tradition altogether,
or to reject tradition altogether, but entitled us to examine tradi-
tion entirely by the light of probability, in the case of William
Shakespeare, precisely as in the case of any one else; and did
not, certainly, warrant us in losing sight of history or of such
documentary and circumstantial evidence of the date as was acces-
sible. (THE CATHOLIC WORLD, October, 1886.) And, finally,
(4) that, all things being considered, it was by no means im-
probable that the Shakespeare Plays grew by accretions in the
mouths of the actors entrusted with their representation; by local-
isms, " gags " (as we say now), by alterations suggested by such
circumstances or accidents as constantly occur in the stage history
of any popular and often-represented play, and that this circumstan-
tial probability would really account for much in the plays as we now
have them, which it is hard to conceive of as from Shakespeare's
pen. (THE CATHOLIC WORLD, October, 1887.) I now desire to call

724 SHAKESPEARE: s "PERICLES." [Mar.,

attention to a practical use, which, taking these postulates as true,
we can make of them in solving a question of precedence and of
authorship, especially of the latter. And first, of the author-
ship.

It is generally conceded to-day, that the Pericles is Shake-
speare's work, and it would be hard to find an editor who, to-
day, does not include it among the authentic plays. Yet it was
not included in the First Folio of 1623, nor in the Second Folio
of 1632. But in 1663-4 appeared the Third Folio. I cannot
help regarding the publication of this Third Folio edition of the
Shakespeare plays in 1663-4 as by far the most important step
in their circumstantial history subsequent to their appearance
during William Shakespeare's own life-time. As early as 1623 we
are confronted with a well-recognized and reasonable doubt as to
what plays William Shakespeare really wrote. Some thirty-six
plays had been printed in quarto during William Shakespeare's
life-time, all of them bearing his name either in full or in abbre-
viation. Which were his and which were spurious ? John Hem-
inges and Henry Condell (two of Shakespeare's fellows and friends,
whom he mentioned in his Will and made his beneficiaries therein,
in testimonial of personal attachment) undertook to make decision,
and deliberately sorted, out of these thirty-six, just twenty-six,
thus putting themselves on record as deliberately rejecting one-
third of the literary matter which was asserted to be the drama-
tist's own composition during his own life-time. Of seven plays
contemporary with this list (to only one of which — on its appear-
ing in a second edition — was Shakespeare's name ever attached)
they included all. They added one play which belonged to a
rival theatrical company which operated, during Shakespeare's
life-time, a rival theatre ("The Rose," which competed with " The
Globe " for the public favor and patronage) ; one that first ap-
peared five years after Shakespeare's death ; in all, ten that were
never known before their appearance in the First Folio. The
numerical result was about the same : let us say thirty-six plays
in the life-time list, and thirty-six in the Heminges and Condell
list. But the Heminges and Condell list is not by any means the
life-time list. " William Shakespeare " had been a well-known
name in London seven years before. It had been signed to more
than one dedication addressed to a noble lord. Had there been
an Athetuzum or a Saturday Review in 1623, we need not doubt
that these would have called rather peremptorily on Messrs. Hem-
inges and Condell to give their reasons for discarding substantially
one-half of what had passed current as "Will Shakespeare plays"

1890.] SHAKESPEARE'S "PERICLES" 725

for so many years. But there was no critical press to ask for an
accounting; and, moreover, this Heminges and Condell list does
contain — has always been admitted to contain — the best of the
plays included in the life-time list of Shakespeare.

But, since there is no literary statute of limitations, it appears
that there very soon began to be demurrer to the Heminges and
Condell pronouncement as to what was and was not Shakespeare.
The Revised List of the Third Folio of 1663—4 was, therefore, a
demurrer filed in the only way it could have been filed at all,
and which, had it appeared in the nineteenth instead of the
seventeenth century, would have made the Athenceum or the
Saturday Review, or some other prominent critical London jour-
nal, its vehicle ; and that similar demurrers have continued to be
filed from that day to this, will also appear upon opening any
modern edition of Shakespeare, all of which include the Pericles,
and many of which include the Edward Third and The Two Noble
Kinsmen, while even such plays as Titus Andronicus and the
Henry VIII. t and others, which did appear in the First Folio,
though generally included, are, by several modern editors, admit-
ted on sufferance only.

What editor thus went to the expense, in or about 1664, and
took the critical responsibility of restoring to the name of Shake-
speare seven of the life-time list of thirty-six plays, which Hem-
inges and Condell had set aside as un-Shakespearean, must, un-
happily, always remain matter of conjecture. When we remember
that these were years in London very unfavorable to literary
ventures — England being then recovering from the waste and
rapine of civil war — we can only infer that some other than merely
mercenary motives induced the publication. But why should the
unknown 1663-4 editor have had any doubts as to the Heminges
and Condell list ? I cannot answer this question, but I can give
several reasons why he might have doubted it. One of these
reasons was that Heminges and Condell, for all their assertions in
their Preface, that they now presented the plays " cured and per-
fect of their limbs and absolute in their numbers as " Shakespeare
"conceived them," were about the most careless editors that ever
edited anything. It, indeed, needed only a very superficial ex-

I animation of the quartos to lead to the suspicion that their " edit-
ing" amounted to nothing but turning into the compositors as
" copy " everything they could find bearing Shakespeare's name
— a suspicion which such critical and expert examination as has
been since given the matter has overwhelmingly confirmed — and
therefore it is not an extraordinary or unwarranted conjecture that

726 SHAKESPEARE'S " PERICLES" [Mar.,

the First Folio editors overlooked the Pericles through carelessness
rather than rejected it from critical motives. They are certainly
entitled to any benefit the supposition or doubt may bring to
their editorial reputations. The immense and incalculable benefit
they did do, by preserving to posterity the sixteen plays of which
we have no quartos, and which but for them, so far as we know,
Would have been incalculably lost ; for saving to us Macbeth,
Julius Ccesar, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII., Cym-
beline, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Timon
of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, as well as
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, and All's
Well That Ends Well (which, minor as they are, would leave a
sad void if perished) — ought, in any event, whatever else they did
or omitted to do, to for ever immortalize them in our gratitude.
And we must remember, too, that the art of printing was yet in
its infancy, was yet carried on with difficulty with clumsy types
and rude contrivances ; and most of all, that no necessity was
felt for that accuracy of types and proof-reading which to-day
we demand from printing-houses. The proof-reader was yet to
be invented; the only convenience the printers observed was, not
their readers', but their own. For example, these early printers
seem to have employed not only capital, Roman, and Italic let-
ters and the punctuation marks we now use, but a font of letters
with short dashes superimposed, which they found sometimes
convenient instead of any "justification " at all ! Thus, if they set
up the word them, and there was not room for the final m of
that word, instead o*f going back to revise their spacing to admit
it, they set it up the (and so, in a proper name, they would set
up Hey for Henry, precisely as if the word were a common noun
or particle). And not only this, but, if the word were them or
then or thee, they still used the tlie with entire insouciance, and
this while, at the same time, using the - indifferently as a dash,
or as a hyphen to connect a broken word. Nay, more, these
printers (especially the Quarto printers) even used a long dash,

, to fill up a line where the text ran short, with the most

ineffable indifference to the sense of what they were setting up.
Nor did they take care to always break the word at the end of a
line — they broke in the middle of a line quite as imperiously, if
they saw fit. The superimposed dash was used over consonants
as well as vowels, the printer breaking the word just as he found
convenient, spelling some som, or fare far, and he even went so
far as to omit a consonant after a vowel, without any superim-
position at all, in the middle of a word, as moe for more, if he so

1 890. ] SHA KE SPEA RE' s ' ' PERICLES. " 727

fancied.* Again, it is asserted by Zachary Jackson and others,
that the Elizabethan printers did not set up by eye, as do ours,
but by ear, another printer, or (usually) a boy, standing by and
droning out from the sheets of " copy " he held in his hand, while
the compositor worked. If this be so, here would be another
capital reason for the botched work turned out by the early
printing-houses, while the over-affection for capital letters is
accounted for by the fact that most of the journeymen printers
who found their way to London were Germans, in whose language
the use of small initial letters was limited to verbs and particles.
And even when, later on, proof began to be read at all, it was
not read from " copy," but only for typographical errors. To illus-
trate this, I subjoin the imprint of a curious block which I find
among the collection bequeathed by the late J. O. Halliwell-
Phillipps, Esq., F.R.S., to the New York Shakespeare Society.

Tliacftandsvpon the Swell at th^ofjull^ridc:

>. HeweretheworfefortbatiwereheaHorC
jiebeinga man-

Eno. Thatyearfe lodeed^he was trolbhd with aiume,
X.ool<e hecre I haue you,thus I /let jfou go,

bf. Madam,! heard her fpeake/hc is low vote'** P #

The lines will be recognized as those of Anthony and Cleo-
patra, iii., ii., 48, 52, 55, 64, and Hi., 17: and the careful student

* My honored friend, Dr. Rolfe, editor of The Friendly Edition, a marvel of painful and
conscientious industry that can never be surpassed, will not at all agree with me as to this
latter example. Dr. Rolfe is sure that moe is an Elizabethan word, meaning exactly the
same as more, but used only with a plural or collective noun, and that its occurrence more
than forty times in the First Folio, and always so used, justifies its classification as a word
by itself, and not as a contraction. And yet sometimes this very word more, when it occurs
in the First Folio, is printed mo in the quarto (as, for example, see Bankside Edition of
The Merchant of Venice, Quarto, line 950) ; and it seems to me quite as safe to say that mo
is an Elizabethan word as that moe is an Elizabethan word, instead of a mere printer's con-
traction for convenience' sake. That these contractions always occur with plurals or col-
lectives is, I admit, remarkable. But some late Shakespearean vagaries, "ciphers," etc.,
have taught us to examine even the largest coincidences with care before postulating upon
them.

728 SHAKESPEARE'S "PERICLES" [Mar.,

will discover that, although made, they were quite disregarded by
the corrector of the press, except in the single instance of the
fourth line. It is in spite of such crude and formative methods, and
through such perils at the hands of actors, short-hand pirates,
printers, and editors, that the matchless plays have come down to
us to be restored by modern care to what we have them. And,
bad as all these were, all of them, even the pirates, are entitled
to our praises, when we think, with almost bated breath, of the
peril of their utter loss in transmission through such hazardous
chances.

The seven plays which the Third Folio includes are as follows,
and in the following order : Pericles, The London Prodigal, Thomas
Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan, A Yorkshire
Tragedy, Lucrece. It is with the first only of these seven plays
that we are now concerned.

Admitting the carelessness with which Heminges and Condell
worked, at least it is hard to imagine that they were not anx-
ious to include — among the Histories, Tragedies, and Comedies of
Mr. William Shakespeare, their late colleague — all matter of that
description of which they knew him to have been the author.
Could it have been possible that, if they had known Shakespeare
to have been the author of the Pericles, they could have failed
to procure a copy of it ? We do not know of any so-called
Shakespeare play which had been oftener printed. To begin with,
there had been two editions of the play printed in the first year
it ever appeared — that is, in the year 1609. The reasons why we
know that there were two editions in this year are so curious,
and so illustrative of the carelessness of the printers of that day,
that they are worth stating here at length, especially as the fact
of their being two editions, instead of one edition, is of modern
discovery, and the result of very careful observation, as well as
of the application of the science of comparative criticism, as
follows :

The modern editor finds a copy of a Pericles Quarto in which
he reads these verses:

" How dares the planets look up to heaven,
From whence they have their nourishment?"

and another, also dated 1609, in which these verses read :

" How dares the plants look up to heaven,
From whence they have their nourishment?"

There is nothing, in the impressions themselves, to indicate

1890.] SHAKESPEARE 's " PERICLES" 729

that these are copies of two separate editions. The student sees,
of course, that the first is pure nonsense; planets, being in the
heavens, cannot "look up to heaven," and they do not, in any
sense, " receive their nourishment " from the heavens. Whereas,
the second version, given above, is perfectly correct; plants do
" look up to heaven," and do " receive their nourishment" from
the rain which falls upon them from the heavens.

The ordinary reader might, perhaps, explain this by saying
that, on looking at a proof, the proof-reader saw at once that
the word plants had been set up planets, and stopped the press
to correct it to the proper word. But the exact student, know-
ing that there was no proof-reader, infers the following state of
affairs ; viz. : the version in which the word plants occurs was the
First Edition. In setting up this edition, the printer setting up
from manuscript read slowly and got it all right. The second
printer setting up from print ran his eye more rapidly along,
or the boy reading to him blundered, and the word " heaven "
helped his hand to setting up the word plants as planets. The
chances that a careless printer was careless, in those days, were,
in fact, just about ten thousand to one greater than the chance
that, having the word planets before him, he was careful enough
or intellectual enough to read the sentence critically and discover
the error and proceed to correct it. In other words, carelessness
was the rule, while carefulness was the rarest sort of an excep-
tion ; so rare, indeed, as to be haidly worth computing, certainly
not of expecting. This, were it the only instance, might per-
haps have been overlooked, when there was no typographical
indication of a difference in editions. But others occur, for in-
stance; "caste" is printed "cast"; "for't" is printed "fort"; "rest
(harke in thine eare) " is printed "rest harke in thine eare" ;
" exeunt " is printed " exit" ; " to " is printed " doe " ; " bring' st"
is printed " brings? "; "chivalry" is printed " chivally" ;
"paper" is printed "taper"; "ripe" is printed "right" ; "on"
is printed "one"; "flies" is printed "fliies' "; "sight, hee, will"
is printed "sight see, will" And so in between thirty and forty
cases, such as grisled for grislee ; heave for have; hatest for
hastes, and the like. The first printer was right, and the second
printer wrong. To suppose the contrary, is to suppose that the
errors were detected by careful reading, and corrected (some-
thing entirely unheard of in that day) ; whereas, to suppose that
there were two separate editions of the Pericles in 1609 is to
merely recognize the absence of a proof-reader, and to assume
the ordinary errors of the press.
VOL. L.— 47

730 SHAKESPEARE 's " PERICLES:' [Mar.,

There were, then, two editions of the Pericles in 1609. A
third Quarto appeared in 1611, printed by " S. S.," the first
two having been printed for Henry Gosson. A fourth Quarto of
the Pericles was printed in 1619 for T. P. (Thomas Pavier), and
this edition bears,' on its face, the fact that Thomas Pavier believed
Pericles to be one of the Shakespeare list, for it happens that the
" signatures " of this edition are a continuation of those of " The
Whole Contention between the two famous houses, Lancaster and
Yorke" printed without date, but for the same publisher, Thomas
Pavier, showing that the two plays originally formed parts of the
same volume. Thomas Pavier, it is to be noticed, was a well-
known publisher of Shakespeare matters, who had printed the
"Chronicle history of Henry the Fifth," in 1608.

Now, is it possible, or, at least, is it probable, that Heminges
and Condell, undertaking so great a venture as printing the First
Folio, had they wished to include the Pericles, could not have ob-
tained a copy of one of these four Quartos, one of which was but
four years old, even supposing that they had not, as they alleged
that they had, access to Shakespeare's own unblotted manuscripts
as well as to the actor's "lengths " ? It certainly looks as if Hem-
inges and Condell had some reason, which they did not disclose,
for excluding the Pericles. But, although they did not include the
Pericles (thereby asserting that it was not Shakespeare's work),
there was somebody in London who declined to concur with them
in that judgment. A fifth Quarto was brought out in 1630, some
copies of which have the imprint : " London, printed by I. N.
for R. B., and are to be sould at his shop in Cheapside, at the
signe of the Bible, 1630"; while others have simply, "London,
printed by F. N. for R. B., 1630." In all other respects
the latter are identical with the former. Condell died in 1627,
and Heminges in 1630. The Second Folio, which was a practical
reprint of the First Folio, appeared in 1632 (and in it is to be
observed the same peculiarity dwelt on above ; namely, the seven-
teenth century tendency of printers to blunder in setting up from
print, by rapid reading, even more than from manuscript . But
again a Quarto of the Pericles appears, the sixth, in 1635 :
" Printed at London by Thomas Coates." So, again, ^his unknown
somebody pronounced a protest against the exclusion of the
Pericles from the canonical list of plays "written by the late
William Shakespeare." Whoever he was, his persistence at last
met its reward, and, in the Third Folio of 1663-4, the play is
triumphantly admitted.

Of course there is another possible supposition, and a not

1890.] SHAKESPEARE'S "PERICLES." 731

unnatural one. When Heminges and Condell published the first
folio, they " entered," that is, registered, for (what we now call)
copyright upon the Stationers' books, all the plays which had not
been previously entered to other persons. So, of course, they
must have, in some way, purchased or acquired permission to
print the Shakespeare plays theretofore printed separately in
quarto. It may be, therefore, that the simple reason why they
did not include the Pericles was because they were unable to
purchase or otherwise obtain the right to do so, the owner pre-
ferring to keep that right himself, finding it a popular and lucra-
tive play and a good paying property. Indeed, the more this
simple explanation is examined, the more plausible it becomes,
and the more one is inclined to the belief that the reason of the
exclusion of the play from the First Folio was merely that Hem-
inges, Condell, Jaggard, Blount, Apsley, and .Smithweeke — all or
any of them — were unable to get permission to print the Pericles.
The play seems originally to have been the copyright pro-
perty of the above-named Blount, and in an extract from the
books of the Stationers' Register occurs the first mention of the
present play, viz.:

20 maij [1608].

Edward Blount. Entred for his copie vnder thandes of Sir George Buck
knight and Master Warden Seton A booke called The booke of Peri-
cles prince of Tyre vjd

But Blount transferred the right to print to Henry Gosson,
who issued the play in quarto the next year (1609). The trans-
fer was not entered upon the books of the Stationers' Company,
as it should have been, undoubtedly, because the members of
the Stationers' Company, being a close corporation, protected by
rigid statutes in their monopoly, recognized each other's rights-
equally well without it, knowing that no printer not a member,
under penalty of cropped ears or worse, would dare intrude.
Gosson, it seems, found his quarto profitable enough to justify
republishing it (as we have seen) in 1609, when he in turn sold
it out to " S. S.," who printed the play in 1611. This anony-
mous " S. S." in his turn sold out again to " T. P.," who so late
as 1619 still found money enough — eleven years after its first
appearance — to justify another quarto. (It may be remarked that
a contemporary dramatic work of the present century, which
would justify a separate reprinting eleven years after its first per-
formance, would be apt to be a very superior affair.) But this
is not the end of Pericles. Not only could not Blount and his asso-
ciates recover the play, but actually in 1630, seven years after

732 SHAKESPEARE'S "PERICLES" [Mar.,

they had gone to press without it, " R. B." (Robert Bonian ? )
again issued it, and again five years, when so old a printer as
Thomas Cotes once more brought it out. And it was from this
Cotes version that at last, in 1663-4, it was permitted to be re-
printed in the Third Folio ! •

If this simple explanation is the true one, it would be interesting
to be sure of it, if only to laugh to mark how plain a tale would
put down all the aesthetic critics who have argued that Shake-
speare could not have written the Pericles for all the divers and
sundry and particular transcendental and prosodical reasons on
which they have so dilated. Certainly it would be more to the
credit of Heminges and Condell than to charge the omission to
their general slipshoddiness and indolence. Anyhow, there seems
to be a plenitude of reasons why the unhappy Pericles does not
appear where it never was put !

The question, therefore, as to which were right — the First
Folio editors who passed by, or the Third Folio editor (or editors)
who included, the Pericles — is a fairly open one by all historical,
circumstantial, and documentary evidence. As to whether it is
still an open one, by internal evidence, every reader must judge
for himself. Shakespeare, the man, is dead, and the field of con-
troversy as to what he wrote or did not write, is a very loving
and a very free field, in which anybody has a right to enter
and to tilt. But certainly, a little common sense in Shake-
spearean matters should not always remain an exotic !

For my own part, which concerns only myself, I am most free
to confess that I believe he did write the Pericles — every word.
The question as to whether the admission into the Third Folio, at
the same time, of the six dubious and internally inferior plays
above enumerated, does not cast a presumption against the
Pericles, is another and an entirely different one. As to this, in-
deed, there is something to be said, but not at present.

APPLETON MORGAN.

1890.] WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN READING? 733

WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN READING?

THE books, papers, and periodicals published expressly for the
young of both sexes nowadays present for our consideration a
subject of great importance; for this vast array of fable, fact, and
fancy, with its various leanings, motives, and inspirations, taken
in conjunction with the daily portions of reading, arithmetic,
grammar, and geography furnished by the schools, constitutes the
brain-food, soul-food, and heart-food of the average children of
the rising generation.

Realizing this, it becomes our duty as well as our interest
to examine more closely than our children are likely to do into
the material and purpose which enter into its .make. Let us
remember that this subject is an average condition, and those
who make use of the bulk of its material are an average class.
The very rich and the very poor will not invariably seek it ; the
former will be prevented by the very surfeit of material from going
into its depths, the latter by the absence of all material, caused
by the bitter poverty and grinding necessity which compel a
large class of people to put their children at work before they
have mastered the rudiments of a common-school education.

Among the children of the masses we have a different state ;
they are neither poor nor rich, only " comfortable, " and it is
these young people whom we have in mind, and the books,
papers, and magazines which they are reading concerning which
we are so greatly troubled. An examination of this class of
literature extending over late years and a wide field discloses a
significant fact : it contains scant allusion, or only the most
casual, to the Supreme Being of the universe, who is God ; 'as
little to the Redeemer of mankind, who was both God and Man ;
while that Person of the Blessed Trinity who deals with our
souls in gifts of grace and wisdom, by which we are strengthened
and prepared for the warfare of the spirit against the " world, the
flesh, and the devil" — the Holy Ghost (almost forgotten outside
of the faithful) — is, one may safely assert, entirely ignored.

Noting, then, the absence of God from the bulk of this child-
literature, let us ask, In what does it consist?

We are answered, In the lives and adventures, possible and
impossible, of all kinds of illustrious and wonderful children ex-
cept the one illustrious Child whose life and teachings have

734 WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN READING? [Mar.;

made childhood the beloved and blessed state that it is ; their
dealings and relations with kings, queens, princes, fairies, Indians,
animals, and hobgoblins ; in fact, with all beings, created and
uncreated, except God !

These narratives — which must be profusely illustrated, else
they are likely to be " skipped " by the average youth, who much
prefers a story " told " to one which must be read — are the com-
position of the "leading writers of the day" of both sexes, some
of them atheists, others of greater or less degrees of " ortho-
doxy" or "heterodoxy," as the case may be — materialist or
spiritualist, it matters little to the publisher, whose primary
object, be it remembered, is the, to him, very legitimate one of
making money. They are written in a good-natured, " rollick-
ing," sometimes slovenly, style, a supposed "coming down to"
and " seeing into " the hearts of children ; characters and events
rest on a basis of physical courage, high "principles," and firm
perseverance, combined with extraordinary good luck, these forces
being traced to no source save natural goodness. Children who
suffer from taints of vice and crime, hereditary or acquired, or
who are compelled to face great temptations in childhood, are
not welcome in the pages of the child's periodical — they jeopar-
dize its refinement ; or, if admitted, are held up only as brief,
mysterious, lurid lights of an unknown world outside the pale of
modern culture and civilization, about on a par with the hob-
goblin of the story and about as well calculated to arouse pain-
ful or serious moral or religious reflection of any kind. Indeed,
there are periodicals which especially request of their writers to
introduce into their narratives no war, religion, love, or temper-
ance ! All this may be done to protect childhood from con-
tamination, from the knowlege of evil; but since Adam and Eve
ate of that tree, so must also their children's children eat and know,
or know and be taught not to eat; and what absurdity to
claim that a scrupulous adherence to refinement of expression
and subject can ever take the place of religion or fear of God
with those who will not be governed by love of God, or who
have no knowledge of him !

And, after all, do these books and periodicals preserve their
readers from the knowledge of evil ?

Look upon the youth of the day, trained in the public schools,
enlightened by the public press, polished off" by the intellects of
the nineteenth century who bend their stately minds, after having
demolished all systems of morality and religion, to mixing this
literary pap for babes — not of grace !

1890.] WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN READING? 735

Alas and alas ! who are these droves of boys, cigar in hand,
profanity and vulgarity on their lips, well dressed and good
looking, of all ages from ten to twenty, swarming down the
streets at the edge of night-fall ?

And who are these girls, loud-voiced, rude, and bold, also of
all ages from ten to twenty, collected in groups on the corners,
leaning over the railings of bridges, standing in the entrances of
public places, most of them well dressed, many of them good-
looking, all of them pert and forward beyond description, roaming
the streets, gathering the harvest to be found there at night ? Are
they graduates of the modern school of child-literature?

Alas and alas ! for they should be at this hour safe in the
sanctuary of home, in the company of their parents, learning
wisdom, self-conquest, charity, and helpfulness — all the high and
solemn import of life contained in the relation between man and
his Maker.

Oh ! but they must be amused. Yes, for that is the curse of
modern days, that men and women, being partially freed from
the pains and penalties of necessity that demands unceasing
labor, having drifted from the anchorage of past beliefs and hopes,
must all be amused ; and to gain time and freedom from the re-
sponsibility and restraint of the constant presence of their chil-
dren, they must in turn provide amusement for them, and the
earliest form it will take will, of course, be the " picture-book " ;
and before the virgin mind is gradually unfolded in panorama a
world of adventure and characters, as different from that which
he will be called upon to live as is day from night, dreaming in
profoundest slumber from waking toil for bread! Just how "stale,
flat, and unprofitable " their every-day tasks and amusements
come to be by reason of these well-seasoned narratives indis-
criminately devoured, some mothers, at least, are learning to
know and tremble for the results. I have heard a fragile, weary-
looking mother request a son at least three times to perform
some trifling office to save her tired feet; beyond an impatient
movement and inarticulate murmur, no notice was taken of her
request, until at last she arose and, laying down the cross infant
which she had been trying to soothe, she performed the duty
herself. In her absence I looked over the boy's shoulder — he
was old enough to have been reading history or the lives of the
heroes of Christianity who unlocked the treasures of unknown
worlds of spiritual and temporal richness — and found the object
of his fascination was some wonder-book from the public library !

" Would you banish fairy tales ? " is the alarmed query of a

736 WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN READING? [Mar.,

parent who has found them a source of relief from the annoyance
of volatile and nervous children, so restless, so fully alive, so dif-
ficult to deal with wisely and firmly, so apt to triumph over a
parent in the end by sheer persistence !

Well, there are fairy tales and fairy tales ; the moral and re-
ligious tone should influence the parents' decision, but I would
certainly banish any book that seals the ears of a boy of twelve
to the voice of his mother !

Fairy tales are better narrated than read ; they are poor stuff
to leave .to the digestion of a child's mind ; and all along their
unreality should be made manifest. After a certain age they
should be dropped altogether; they are not really so attractive
to children, for those who have dealt with them cannot have
escaped noting the eager interest taken in what the child
calls a sure story as compared with pure fiction; and then,
surely, comes to the parent a bitter day of weariness and dis-
couragement when he or she has to face the consequences of
having allowed sons and daughters to feed from childhood upon
this diluted pap until the strong meats of duty, morality, and re-
ligion are unpalatable and indigestible. And, when one reflects
further upon this subject, what possible reason can there be why
children should read so much ? Why inflame their imagination
or draw out too soon intellectual processes which should be more
slow in their development than the growth of the body? It is
heart and conscience which should be cultivated ; and what chance
do they stand in the flood of children's books let loose upon the
public every year ? What thought has the publisher taken in
the matter, except that the author is popular and that the book
will sell ? What thought has the author taken ? Surely no
thought of the souls that will be caught in this sweeping flood,
for he, or she, does not, perhaps, believe in a soul or a Maker
of souls!

Again, why should children read so much ? No one can deny
that they are devouring a quantity of literary matter that is
appalling ; which, were it ever so good, from mere bulk alone,
they could never digest.

There is no need of it ; it was not done in the past ; what was
submitted to their perusal was not so strained, so embellished
and painted, so flooded with all the gorgeous trickery of mod-
ern coloring as to destroy all vigor and purpose. Why should
not children find enough to do in the necessary duties of
school, the practice of home helpfulness, the awakening ofc on-
science, the training of the sensibilities, and the discipline of

1890.] WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN READING? 737

the will, things only to be accomplished by religious instruc-
tion ? Surely, it is all wrong to begin with the intellect and
let the will and passions grow to giant power, while the least
essential part of the child's existence is given an useless for-
. wardness ? For souls may grow and become fit for heaven
whose intellect was never more than feebly lit, or if brilliant in
its time, may have gone out into darkness at noonday.

Poor little children! deprived of God when he should be
nearest, dearest, and most real to you, ye are well-nigh friend-
less among the makers and publishers of books! If all things are
to be eliminated from your " amusements " that savor of danger
to be avoided, of sin that is coarse and disgusting and unrefined
(the soul-destroying idea is left out), what is to become of you
when some mighty passion rises and confronts you in your own
hearts, where its germs entered at your birth, and have lain dor-
mant until time and soil and favoring temperature of circum-
stance have aroused it from its slumbers to a giant growth ?
Will it hinder you from giving way to it if you recognize it as
something "coarse, disgusting, low"?

Alas! for these poor children. They have been running a tilt
against monsters and overcoming hobgoblins for years ; lo ! there
are monsters which they have not been taught to overcome, nor
have they learned a magic Name whose utterance would subdue
them. The heaven of pleasure, ease, and polish that modern cul-
ture would make on earth cannot be maintained, for life is a
long battle that begins in the cradle and ends only in the grave,
and heaven is a kingdom to be taken only by storm and
violence.

What story of to-day's child-literature ever rises to the simple
majesty, the absorbing interest — to say nothing of the obvious
spiritual teaching — of the stories of the Bible? These were the
mental food of the generations of intellectual, moral, and religious
giants who have passed into history. With what care did the
church preserve these narratives during the ages of persecution,
violence, and rapine that followed the Christian era ! With what
judgment, wisdom, and tender forethought has she prepared them
for the use of her little ones, for it is in Catholic schools alone
that the Bible is taught, expounded, and rendered interesting to
children in the shape of a Bible history. From the unutterably
sublime yet crystal-clear account of the creation of the world,
through the long chain of story, character, and adventure among
God's chosen people,, to the tale of man's redemption, in a way
only possible for God to conceive and accomplish, the chain of

738 WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN READING? [Mar

real, living, teaching wonders is unsurpassed and unsurpassable.
How many youth, outside of Catholic schools, know these stones
and the grand lessons they taught as their fathers knew
them ?

Ah ! but for these fathers and mothers that has all been
settled. They no longer believe the Bible ; it has been dis-
proved ; its chronicles are fables ; man is only an improved ape ;
he needs no Saviour, he never needed one, for there is no
hell, and, most like, no heaven. Tickle this cultured ape with the
pleasant straws of modern fancy; keep him in good humor with
himself and the world, and shut vice and crime decently out
of sight in the slums and tenements where it is bred ; what have
we to do with these things, we who are so respectable ? We are not
puiblicans and sinners ! In the creed of these modern disciples of
culture there is no heaven but riches, no hell but poverty, no
calamity but death, no sin but detection, no judgment but the
world's. From among them come forth the leaders of our chil-
dren, who are being driven by them into that outer darkness where
God and heaven are not.

"By their fruits ye shall kn3w them," and we may be sure
that the evils not discovered and eradicated in childhood yield
a crop that will not fail in abundance, though its' fruits be the
bitterness of filial disrespect, ingratitude, laxity of morals and
loss of faith, and this is the harvest that awaits us, as already
betrayed by the characteristics of the rising generation.

Can it be denied ? Have we one Catholic magazine devoted
exclusively to children that can compete in bulk, make-up, and
" catchiness " of matter and illustration with the flood of period-
icals that are non-Catholic ? And in the matter of the make-up
of a magazine for children one needs to be " wise as a serpent,
harmless as a dove." We have not, for it would not be bought
or supported, unless it had enormous capital behind it, or, better
still, a religious order, as suggested in one of the papers pre-
sented at the recent Catholic Congress.

Do we, can we, buy books enough for our boys and girls,
written by Catholic authors ?

No ; there are authors enough, ability enough, zeal enough,
material enough, but no support adequate to the success of such
an undertaking, for it would mean money enough to enable the
authors to live decently, while they devoted their hearts and
brains and time to the good of Catholic youth of the day; it
would mean large sales and fair profits to the publishers; it
would mean so many things that are not !

1890.] A HERO'S PLEDGE. 739

In the meantime, what are our children, Catholic children,
reading ?

Look at the catalogue of the public library nearest to you ;
read the names of the authors of juvenile fiction (for you can-
not let them read history out of the library, it is so garbled, so
falsified) ; look at some of the books — turn the dirty things over
with a stick, for they are glazed with the accumulations of the
hundreds of fingers that have handled them ; if you have the
courage to do this, you will find the answer to this burning
question.

MARGARET H. LAWLESS.

Toledo, . Ohio.

A HERO'S PLEDGE.

UPON a day it chanced, heated with wine, '
The young Adolphus, Sweden's soldier king, .•
Meeting his mother, mocked her with rude fling

Of words, as bitter as the salt sea brine.

But on the morrow, when his spirit fine

Had cooled, he with deep shame remembering
His drunken folly, felt remorseful sting,

And made resolve to do penance condign.

" Mother," he said, holding the brimming glass,
" I drink " ; and then dashing it 'gainst a stone :

" No drop again my lips shall ever pass,
For only so can I to thee atone."

True as the heart beneath his strong cuirass

He kept his word, more precious than his throne.

J. L. SPALDING.

740 BOD AS DE ORO. [Mar.,

BODAS DE ORO.

A HOARY head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way
of righteousness, and a half- century is an exceptionally lengthy
period for a person to occupy one position. We have recently
witnessed the enthusiasm evoked by the almost coincident jubilees
of Queen Victoria and Leo XIII. , and the church in Mexico has of
late celebrated with eclat the Bodas de oro (golden wedding) of its
chief pastor. The day fixed for the principal exercises was Sun-
day, the 8th of December, and before this crowds of pilgrims,
headed by their bishops, were brought into the capital of the
republic from Puebla, Leon, and other great centres of popula-
tion, the railroad companies putting on special excursion trains
for the occasion.

Between the columns of the cathedral hung heavy curtains of
crimson velvet adorned with golden orphreys; large porcelain jars
containing plants and flowers were ranged at intervals, and the
railings were crowned by bouquets of the choice white roses,
camellias, and other flowers for which, even in mid-winter, Mexico
is unsurpassed. Festoons of cypress covered with flowers were
suspended from the roof, and religious banners emblazoned with
representations of saints hung from the columns. From the prin-
cipal arch hung a gigantic screen of iron and crystal, centred by
a blue medallion with this inscription : " The Metropolitan Chap-
ter to its Illustrious Prelate, Dr. D. Pelagio Antonio de Labastida
y Davalos — 8th Dec., i839-8th Dec., 1889." From this hung
a garland of pine, evergreen, and white flowers. In the sanctuary
were sixteen superb jars of china containing flowering plants. In
the transepts were two tribunes, the one for the accommodation
of the diplomatic corps and the other for ladies having special
invitations. There were probably six thousand persons present
in all. The stars and ribbons, blue and red, which decorated
certain distinguished ministers and ambassadors slightly relieved
the sombre aspect of the congregation, but Mr. Ryan, the Ameri-
can minister, appeared unadorned amidst his diplomatic brethren,
arrayed in true republican simplicity, and doubtless amusing him-
self at these articles of man-millinery and monarchical gauds.
In the choir with the canons of the cathedral were numerous
representatives of other cathedral chapters, and hundreds of other
ecclesiastics in cassocks and surplices lined the crujia or gang-
way between the choir and altar. The families of the president

1890.] BODAS DE ORO. 741

of the Republic and of many of the leading men in the state
were present, besides those of bankers, merchants, lawyers, and
many of the leading foreign residents.

There was in all a strong representation of the leading ele-
ments in the Mexican capital. The ceremony was fixed to com-
mence at 8 A.M., and though the writer arrived long before that
hour, he was too late to obtain a bench and had the pleasure of
standing during five mortal hours.

At half-past eight a general murmur announced the arrival
of the archbishop. The procession entered by the Sagrario,
passed by a side door into the choir, and then by the crujia to
the sanctuary. First came various surpliced ecclesiastics, then a
large body of canons from various cathedrals, and finally the
bishops in robes (mucetas) and rochets, the archbishop terminat-
ing the procession habited in a large rose-colored robe with
long train. He then proceeded to his throne, where a body of
priests habited him in the sacerdotal vestments, and proceeded to
sing Mass. After the gospel the Bishop of- San Luis Potosi, Dr.
Montes de Oca, habited in a flowing robe of scarlet, arose from
amongst his fellow-prelates, and after making a reverence to the
altar, to the celebrant, and to the bishops, advanced to the pul-
pit, preceded by his attendant clergy and two canons. The
bishop is forty-nine years of age, completely bald, rather stout
and below the middle height, yet with flashing, dark eyes, full
of intelligence, and of imposing presence ( " arrogante presencia"
according to the Tiempo), calling up thoughts of the Eagle of
Meaux. He is considered the most talented prelate and the
most powerful orator in the Mexican Republic, and it is doubt-
ful whether the ornament of the Fourteenth Louis' court could
have surpassed the masterly oration with which the bishop for
three-quarters of an hour held the vast assemblage spell-bound.
The text was from Leviticus xxv. 10 : " Sanctificabisque annum
quinquagesimum ; ipse est enim jubilceus" The preacher employed
this passage of Scripture as affording a reason for the absence
of himself and his brethren from their own churches at this
holy season, dwelt on the exceptional fact of a man being for
half a century engaged in a single purpose, and introduced his
subject. He then powerfully portrayed the scene where St.
Augustine at Hippo proposed to prefer the priest Heraclius to
the episcopal throne, and the burst of enthusiasm with which
the assembly he addressed prayed long life for the illustrious
doctor of the church : Exaudi, Christe, Augustine vita. From
this the preacher drew a parallel to the present occasion, deli-
cately pointing out the extreme difficulty of the episcopal calling

742 BODAS DE ORO. [Mar.,

in Mexico at the present time, and hinting that it would be
extremely difficult to find a successor to Dr. Labastida capable
of performing his duties with equal success: This was enforced
by a graphic historical review, and the bishop adverted to the
fact that but a few months previously the Archbishop of Guadal-
ajara had also celebrated his jubilee Mass. He then recalled his
meeting with Dr. Labastida in England when a pupil .at
Oscott, his consecration to the diaconate by the same prelate
in Rome twenty-seven years ago, and many other acts of
personal friendship, and finally closed his powerful discourse by
a fervent prayer to heaven, at which all present rose, that
the life of the bishop might be prolonged to the benefit of
his diocese and country. After the Mass, the music of which
was exceedingly fine, a chaplain ascended the epistle ambon
and read the pontifical brief authorizing Dr. Labastida to pronounce
the apostolic benediction to the people at Easter and the Feast
of the Immaculate Conception. The prelate from his throne then
intoned the Papal blessing. The cathedral choir after this
chanted the Te Deum in plain song. The faithful, headed by
the clergy, now invaded the sanctuary to kiss the hands of
the assembled prelates, and thus terminated a celebration the
like of which had never previously been witnessed in this
country.

The banquet given by the archbishop on the 8th of Decem-
ber (call it breakfast or dinner, which you will) was at half-
past one, in the episcopal place of Perpetua, three blocks from the
cathedral. On the right of the prelate was Sr. Ignacio Mariscal,
Minister of Foreign Affairs, a most capable legal gentleman, mar-
ried to an American lady, who some years ago gained great
eclat as special envoy from Mexico to London, where he arranged
for payment of the interest on the English debt, re-established
friendly relations between that country and his own, and inaugu-
rated the present period of confidence in the republic. On the
archbishop's left sat Count de St. Foix, the French minister.
Then came several bishops and cathedral canons. Facing Sr.
Labastida was Sr. Montes de Oca, with the ministers of Ger-
many and Belgium to his right and left. Near these were other
prelates and diplomatists. The repast lasted about three hours;
there were considerably over a hundred guests, and Irishmen will
note with satisfaction that Mr. O'Brien was well to the fore. At
dessert Sr. Montes de Oca presented to his venerable host a rich
pastoral ring, accompanying the gift by some elegant stanzas,
which we regret our inability to versify in suitable English, but
their import was that as a boy he had received the exiled bishop

1890.] BOD AS DE ORO. 743

in England, that on the feast of St. Lawrence the latter had
ordained him at Rome, that the prelate had knelt at his first Mass,
which he had said over the relics of St. Ignatius ; that when
Pius IX. anointed his head with the holy oil the same kind friend
had stood by on the steps of the throne, that often had they
walked side by side on the rich carpets of the Vatican and in
the shady woods, and that now, after so many years, he rejoiced to
have assisted when his friend, now aged, offered the Sacred Victim.
With some appropriate remarks, in which he begged the bishop's
acceptance of, the symbolical ring, and • in which he commended
him to the protection of the Blessed Virgin, whose festival they
celebrated on that day, the gifted prelate brought his elegant
verses to a close. In reply, Sr. Labastida, evidently much moved,
said that his brother of San Luis Potosi was clearly bent on this
day on overloading him with compliments, but, added he, I wish
every one to understand that they are entirely undeserved and
merely the offspring of his regard for me. These were the only
speeches delivered. The dinner over, the priest of Ameca, con-
ducting the archbishop into the throne room, presented him, in the
name of himself and his parishioners, with a framed portrait of
the metropolitan, executed in oil by an artist of his parish.
At half-past four the guests retired, bearing with them pleasant
memories of the reunion and of the graceful attentions of Sr.
Labastida.

The pilgrims from various dioceses were received by him at
different hours on the Saturday and Monday, and many costly
offerings were presented by them, the jewelled pastoral staff of
silver offered by the president's wife being especially noteworthy.
At six o'clock on the evening of the Qth a literary celebration
was held, when, various pieces of music were rendered by the
choir, several poems composed for the occasion by the Bishop of
San Luis and others recited, and the archbishop presented with
a volume containing the various congratulations offered him by
letter and telegram on the occasion by the Pope, and friends and
well-wishers in Mexico, the United States, and other parts of the
world.

The Right Rev. Dr. D. Pelagio Antonio cle Labastida y
Davalos was born at Zamora, in the State of Michoacan, on the
2 ist of March, 1816, being the eighth of a family of fourteen
children. His parents, who were persons of eminent virtue, were
Don Manuel Luciano de Labastida and Dona Maria Luisa Dava-
los y Ochoa.

Our bishop commenced his early studies under the paternal
roof, at first being instructed by D. Jose Antonio de Labastida

744 BOD AS DE ORO. [Mar.,

his father's brother, and then by Professor Francisco Diaz, both
men of rare intelligence. When thirteen years of age, on the 8th
of January, 1830, he entered the seminary of Morelia and made
his course of philosophy under the direction of D. Joaquin Ladron
de Guevara ; he then studied moral philosophy under Sr. D. Ig-
nacio Barrera.

In 1836 he was appointed professor of grammar in the same
seminary ; next year he was ordained sub-deacon by Dr. Juan
Cayetano Portugal, and on the 1st and loth days of November,
1839, deacon and priest respectively. On the 8th- of December,
1839, the young priest, surrounded by his parents and brethren,
celebrated his first Mass in the sanctuary of the " Senor de la
Salud" in his natal town. His apadrinadores (supporters) at this
ceremony were two curates, D. Jose Maria Benibamonde and
D. Jose Antonio de la Pena, afterwards first Bishop of Zamora.
Speaking in March last to an intimate friend, Dr. Labastida said
that although the projected jubilee rejoicings were most gratifying
to him, more on account of the authority which he represents
than from personal considerations, yet his intention had been to
celebrate his jubilee Mass at the altar of Our Lord of Succour
at which his first sacrifice had been offered, and by the ashes of
his relatives who had assisted him on that solemn occasion. Two
years after this Sr. Labastida was hastily summoned from his
scholarly retreat in the lovely capital of Michoacan by the death
of his mother. Arrived at his home, the young priest found
that the heavy affliction had deprived his father of his reason.
The old man was assiduously tended by his son, who made the
recovery of his father's intelligence his constant care at the altar.
His petition was granted, the head of the family was enabled to
arrange his affairs, and then, in spite of the most assiduous at-
tention, he sank and died in a few days. The doubly bereaved
priest returned to Morelia, the most beautiful city in Mexico,
where he occupied successively the chairs of natural, civil, and
canon law, and was then attorney-general of the ecclesiastical
courts of Michoacan, judge of wills, chaplaincies and pious foun-
dations, and at the same time prebend of the cathedral of the
diocese, and, some years later, canon. Contemporaries of his in
the chapter were Sr. Jose Antonio de la Pena, already mentioned,
and D. Clemente de Jesus Munguia, one of the most eminent
philosophers and men of letters in modern Mexico. On the death
of the bishop, D. Juan Cayetano Portugal, the first American
cardinal, in 1851, the Morelian chapter submitted to the gov-
ernment as his successor, amongst others, the names of Labastida
and Munguia, and the government of D. Jose Joaquin de Her-

1890.] BOD AS DE ORO. 745

rera presented to the latter the Holy See. Labastida continued in
the Morelian chapter, rendering powerful assistance to his old
friend. Somewhat later Labastida, with Srs. Garza and Espinosa,
was proposed for the first bishopric of San Luis Potosi, then
created, and on the death of Dr. Jose Maria Luciano Becerra y
Jimenez, Bishop of Puebla, the chapter of that diocese proposed
Dr. Labastida as his successor to the government of General
Santa Ana, by which he was presented to Pope Pius IX., and
he was preconized to the vacant see by the consistory of the
23d of March, 1855. The bulls were received on the I2th of
May ; the bishop-elect proceeded to the beautiful City of the An-
gels, and was there consecrated by his old ally, Bishop Munguia,
on the 8th of July, 1855. In his new sphere our hero speedily
gained the confidence and affection of his flock, devoting himself
to the improvement of the hospitals and schools, at his own cost
sending ecclesiastical students to study at Rome, and
showing the greatest regard and solicitude for the poor.
Though pre-eminently a man distinguished for meekness
and forbearance, within a few months of his consecration
the bishop found himself at issue with the governor, who
had imprisoned an ecclesiastic named Miranda on mere suspicion;
his remonstrances proving futile, Dr. Labastida addressed the
general government on the matter, but with no better success. The
ill success of his efforts in defence of the rights of the church did
not, however, daunt the prelate, and when by the decree of the
3 ist of March, 1856, President Comonfort enacted state supervision
over the ecclesiastical property of the diocese of Puebla, the
bishop again remonstrated with the civil power. A revolution
was the result of the president's decree, which the government
finally crushed at Puebla. Comonfort justified his decree on the
ground that public opinion accused the clergy of Puebla of
having fomented the late rising. The fact seems to have been
that both the clergy and the commercial classes were victims of
that revolution and entirely helpless.

However, on the I2th of May — that is, within the first year
of his episcopate — the government having decreed sentence of
banishment against the bishop, General Manuel Chavero, second
in command at Puebla, notified the bishop that he must leave
in a couple of hours for Vera Cruz, and thence take ship for
foreign parts. The bishop's request that he should be acquainted
with the charges against him and be granted right of reply
was refused, the officer in question having no option but to
carry out his instructions. At three in the afternoon the bishop

VOL. L.— 48

746 BOD AS DE ORO. [Mar.,,

was removed in a common hackney coach, guarded by an
armed force commanded by General Moret, the populace ex-
pressing its regret and sympathy, but powerless to resist. The
gentleness, amiability, and conciliatory disposition of the prelate,
his erudition, virtues, and evangelical conduct, which had kept
him aloof from politics, though constant in his respect for the
civil power, all these united to his noble presence, his frank
and benignant countenance, his stately carriage, and his dis-
tinguished and affable manners, had rendered him a most highly
esteemed person in the best sense of the term. Arrived at
Jalapa, he learned from the canons Francisco Suarez Peredo
and Francisco Serrano that the reason of his exile was certain
expressions employed in a sermon attributed to him by a jour-
nal, telling him at the same time that they had had an audience
of the president, who wished to know what the bishop had to
say on the subject. He immediately addressed the president,
on the 1 6th of May, denying the utterances attributed to him,
and appealing to the numerous audience that had heard him
on the occasion in question. This, however, produced no effect,,
and from Vera Cruz he addressed another letter to the Min-
ister Don Ezequiel Montes, protesting that his sole offence was
his vigorous defence of the jurisdiction and property of the church.
The bishop requested of D. Manuel Zamora, governor of Vera
Cruz, that he might be permitted to leave on the 22d of May
in the Tejas instead of in the Iturbide, which sailed two
days earlier, as had been ordered, on account of the unsea-
worthiness of the latter vessel, but his request was unheeded,
and in the Iturbide he embarked. But one of her paddles
breaking down, he was transferred to a sailing ship bound for
Havana, at which port he arrived fifteen days later, after a
trying and perilous voyage.

Having obtained permission from the Holy See, the bishop
now fixed his residence at Rome, visiting at this period the Holy
Land, Egypt, India, and the principal countries of Europe. He
was highly esteemed by Pius IX., who naturally had many
opportunities of judging of his merit, and that pontiff preferred
him to the archiepiscopate of Mexico on the iQth of May, 1863.
Meanwhile there had been bloody strife in Mexico ; the position
was entirely altered, and the conservative party, now in the
ascendant, thought that the only chance of securing the peace
and integrity of the country was to revive the empire of
Iturbide and offer the imperial throne to a member of the
House of Hapsburg. Dr. Labastida during all this period of

1890.] BOD AS DE ORO. 747

exile had as usual abstained from politics, hoping that the times
might alter and permit of his return to his diocese. At this
time the Archduke Maximilian induced the exiled bishop to visit
him at Miramar to obtain from him reliable information as to the
position of affairs in Mexico at the time of his forcible ejectment
from that country. Maximilian gave the bishop a sheet containing
one hundred and eighty-four questions written with a black pencil,
and requested him to reply to them. Dr. Labastida answered them
all in red pencil on the same sheet. The whereabouts of this
remarkable document is not known, but it is to be hoped that
it will some day come to light. However, the replies to three
of them exhibit the judicious manner in which the prelate
avoided political complications. To the inquiry as to whether a
monarchical party existed in Mexico, he replied that there had
been none such at the time of his leaving the country, and
that if there were at the present it could not be monarchical at
heart, but that it would merely desire a monarchy as the sur-
est road to peace and prosperity, but that Mexico had no
monarchical traditions nor love for such institutions. To the
question whether liberals could safely be employed in the gov-
ernment service, he replied that there were many able, experi-
enced, and patriotic men in that party, and that a government
to be stable must be truly national and representative of all good
citizens. Another question was whether an army exclusively
Mexican could be formed, and the reply to this was that this
would prove a most feasible measure, the Mexican generals
being brave, warlike, generous, and humane, encountering dan-
gers and difficulties with a calm valor not easily to be matched
elsewhere. As to the Mexican soldier, the prelate said that he
is of an heroic type, never deserting his standard, and fighting
well after long marches and hardships. He can march without
forage, rations, or transports, only encounters difficulties to
conquer them, and follows his leader with blind devotion. In
Europe people have no true conception of what the Mexican sol-
dier really is.

Penetrated with the thought of his mission and of his exalted
duties, Mgr. Labastida, seeing a throne erected in Mexico,
accepted it as he would have accepted any form of govern-
ment from which a return of order and peace might be reason-
ably anticipated for that distracted country. This he hoped
the empire would accomplish, and with no other thought than
that of serving the nation, he accepted his nomination as regent
of the empire, hoping to inaugurate a period of prosperity for
the country and of peace and tranquillity for the Mexican

748 BOD AS DE ORO. [Mar.,

Church. Mgr. Labastida was appointed Archbishop of Mexico
on the 1 9th of March, 1863, about the same time as he was nom-
inated regent of the empire, and he embarked at St. Nazaire
with Mgr. Munguia, Archbishop of Michoacan, and Mgr. Covar-
rubias, Bishop of Oaxaca, and arrived at Vera Cruz on the i/th
of September, where they were received with much distinction
by the authorities of that port, civil, 'ecclesiastical, and military.
The journey to the capital was a triumph, especially at Puebla,
whence Dr. Labastida had been forcibly removed and exiled
seven years previously; here he remained several days and the
City of Mexico was reached on the nth of October. Here his
reception was most enthusiastic, and a week later he entered on
the duties of the regency, in which his conduct was that of a
prelate and patriot. Within a few days he was in opposition to
a measure which Napoleon, by Marshal Bazaine, forced on the
regency; the other -members of that body yielded the French
demands, but the bishop was inflexible. So, also, when the French
general, Neigre, attributed certain anonymous libels to the clergy
the bishop replied to him with spirit, and he similarly faced the
emperor himself when, at the end of 1864, he gave indications
of following a " liberal and anti-Catholic " policy. The bishop
on this occasion was supported in his action by the bishops of
Michoacan, Oaxaca, Queretaro, and Tulancingo, and the conserva-
tive party say that the emperor's reply shows that a dark veil
of liberalism had been drawn over his eyes, which led to the down-
fall of his throne and to his own political murder at Queretaro.
They further assert that he permitted the formation by the
French authorities of a system of espionage to watch the action
of the archbishop and clergy, and even that of the papal nuncio ;
that the letter which D. Jose Fernando Ramirez, the Minister of
Foreign Affairs, addressed to the latter on the 2ist of January,
1865, was of a discourteous and menacing character, indicating
scant respect for the Holy See, and that the press was permitted
to calumniate the clergy with impunity. Similarly, when the
emperor published his unwise decree on religious matters on the
26th of February of the same year, the bishop protested on the
ist of March in a ''truly unanswerable" exposition of the
situation. From all of which it will be seen that the sub-
ject of these remarks has as much of Thomas as of Anselm in
his composition. He saw that the church had little to expect
from the empire, and endeavoring to remain on good terms
with the government, withdrew from all intervention in politics
from 1865, devoting himself exclusively thenceforth to his epis-
copal functions.

1890.] BOD AS DE ORO. 749

He commenced a pastoral visitation of his diocese on the 2/th
of September, which occupied him for more than an entire year.
The pope was then preparing to celebrate with great pomp the
centenary of St. Peter, and the canonization of the Japanese
martyrs, of whom San Filipe de Jesus, the Mexican proto-
martyr, was one, and Mgr. Labastida received from the pontiff
an especial invitation to attend the celebration. He accordingly
left Mexico for Rome on the 5th of February, 1867, and as-
sisted at the centenary observances. About this time the empire
was destroyed, Maximilian shot, and the liberal party under
Juarez triumphed. Dr. Labastida stayed on at Rome for the
Vatican Council, which opened in 1869, and was adjourned the
next year on the entry of the Italian troops into the Eternal
City. The Juarez government permitted the bishop to return
to his see in spite of his association with the late regime, and
he re-entered the Mexican capital on the I9th of May, 1871,
after an absence of over four years, and devoted himself anew
to his episcopal duties, abjuring politics from thenceforth. He
commenced a visitation of the archdiocese in 1872, which termi-
nated in 1878 ; and, in addition to this, he has made many
other parochial visitations, appearing in some parishes two, three,
and even seven different times. Twice a week he administers
the Sacrament of Confirmation in the cathedral ; he preaches
at the great festivals, and displays great zeal in enforcing disci-
pline amongst the clergy, and in the education of candidate
for the priesthood, many of whom he has sent to Rome to ob-
tain the best training possible. He is particularly devoted to the
cultus of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the national patroness;
obtained from Leo XIII. permission for the coronation of her
image, and the works undertaken under his auspices for the
renovation of the Collegiate Church in that suburb amount, in
fact, to the foundation of a new temple. Moreover, on reception
days, both at Tacuba and in the city, the worthy prelate re-
ceives all who approach him with attention and sympathy, and
his works of benevolence and charity are unnumbered. Though
seventy-three years of age, his faculties are still vigorous, and
it seems probable that many years of usefulness are still in
store for him. It is to be regretted that His Eminence Cardinal
Gibbons was prevented from being present at the celebration,
as had been his intention; his portrait and an account of his
life and work was, however, published in the Tiempo, together
with those of the Mexican bishops who were present.

City of Mexico.

750 How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. [Mar.,

HOW PERSEUS BECAME A STAR.

CONE CITY is well known now because the Hon. Perseus G.
Mahaffy was born there. The noise he made in the House of
Representatives when it was found that Golung Creek, on which
Cone City has the happiness to be placed, had been left out of
the first River and Harbor Bill is historical, for, reduced to
printed symbols, it is in the Congressional Globe. He was known
for the last ten years of his life as the Fixed Star of Golung
Creek, and he was supposed to equal in learning the Sage of
Hastings, Minn., and in eloquence the Tall Sycamore of the
Wabash, Ind.

The Cone City Eagle had sung his praises many times, but when he
died it exhausted itself in a burst of adulation and appeared with a
black 'border. The opposition paper, the Herald of Liberty, dropped
its series of letters under the heading of "Why did He Change
His Name ? " and likewise a respectful tear, although it said edi-
torially that death condones even the weakness which impels a
man to change his name from Patrick to Perseus. Both papers
hfed long accounts of the services which were conducted in the
First Baptist Church; the lists of the floral tributes occupied
a column, and among them was a star of lilies-of-the-valley
from Col. Will Brodbeck, who assisted at the service without, as
he distinctly asserted, taking any part in a mummery which the
world had outgrown. Still, Col. Will Brodbeck's presence at the
church was looked on as a compliment to religion and as show-
ing a very liberal spirit. The Rev. Mr. Schuyler changed his
text from a passage in Isaias to one in Robert Elsmere when he
saw that the colonel was one of the pall-bearers, and the congre-
gation, consisting of the best people in Cone City, divided its
attention between the widow's mourning suit and the colonel's
face, which wore a highly decorous and non-committal expression.
When the preacher alluded to the Hon. Perseus G. Mahaffy as
one who had cast off the bonds of early superstition, who had
seen the light lit by Luther and the Fathers of the Reformation,
who had died firm in the Protestant belief, the colonel looked scorn-
ful ; and when the colonel looked scornful he was very ugly. He was
six feet high, of that pale, waxy complexion which gamblers are

1890.] How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. 751

said to possess in works of fiction with a keen black eye, a mass
of grayish hair, and a broad chest He took off his white gloves
supplied by the undertaker, and, of course, too large even for
him, and while Mr. Schuyler made his peroration, toyed with a
large diamond on the little finger of his left hand. The mocking
look in his eyes became more evident as the diamond flashed
with his nervous movements, for he knew why and how the
Hon. Perseus G. Mahaffy had died.

The widow of the subject of Mr. Schuyler's eulogies, a
handsome woman with a haughty manner and eyes like Col.
Brodbeck's — she was his sister — sat with her three children quite
near the coffin. She did not appear to be interested in the min-
ister's discourse, and as it was known that she had violent
differences of opinion with the deceased, and that he had left a
large life insurance, many of the assembly felt that she should
have shown more signs of grief. Clara, her eldest daughter, a
girl of sixteen, was bent over the pew in front of her, a shape-
less mass of black; the two boys seemed sad and bewildered
rather than grief-stricken.

When the long prayer was over and the choir, assisted by
the Masonic Temple Quartette, had sung " Almost Persuaded,"
which was chosen with reference to the supposed effect of the
sermon on Col. Brodbeck, the funeral procession filed slowly from
the church. Nothing unusual happened until Mrs. Mahaffy
reached the door of the church. An old woman in a bonnet
and gown of rusty black bombazine rushed forward from a
corner of the vestibule and caught Mrs. Mahaffy's hand.
" Can you tell me — will you tell me, in the presence of the
dead, how he died ? " she asked in a hasty and trembling voice

The widow snatched away her hand and passed on. Clara
Mahaffy unconsciously raised her head at the words and the
old woman caught sight of her gentle face, so like that of
her father in his best moods.

"Oh, dear! oh, acushla!" she said with a pathetic ring in

• her words, "maybe you can tell me — maybe you were told — "
But the old woman was thrust aside by the undertaker^
and the mourners passed into the street. The longing, despair-

I'ng eyes of the old woman, so wretched in appearance, so
wretched in heart, never left the girl's mind until the answer
:o that strange question was found.

75 2 How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. [Mar.,

II.

The opposition paper of Cone City made a mistake when
it asserted that Perseus Mahaffy had dropped the name of
Patrick. He often remarked that he would not have been fool
enough to do that. If he had been named Patrick, it would
have been money in his pocket, for the vote which is supposed
to be attracted by that venerable name was very strong in
Cone City, and sometimes held the balance of power. He had
changed his name. His mother came from a part of Tipperary
where Boethius is a cherished patronymic, and he had been
called by that name. He had dropped it for Perseus Gifford,,
because Perseus Gifford took an interest in the clever young Irish
lad, and helped him to study law, and because Perseus was
an honored name in Cone City; it gave an air of American-
ism to his surname, which, until the Irish vote became a fac-
tor in politics, he cursed with all his might. His father had
died when he was eleven years of age. His mother, a rosy-
cheeked, wrinkled old woman, who adored her son, had passed
away about a year before Mr. Schuyler had delivered his ora-
tion over him. He had gotten " beyond her," as she said
towards the last, when he and his wife and her grandchildren
passed the end of her little garden every evening without com-
ing in. She shed many bitter tears over this; but she never
blamed him ; in her heart she laid the guilt of this desertion
on his wife.

Ah ! what an angel of light he would have been had it not
been for this wife ! she exclaimed to herself often in the twilight
when she sat alone. These idle hours in the dusk were hardest
for her to bear. She could see the lights in her son's house
from where she sat. There was a sound of music and of chil-
dren singing — his children, her grandchildren, yet so far from
her. She could never bear the music of those childish voices.
She always shut down the window when they began and tried
to say her beads. He was a good son still ; did he not send
her every week from the bank enough money — more than enough
— to keep her in comfort ? But oh ! if she could only go back
again to the old days when he was' a little boy, and such an
affectionate little fellow ! How he used to cry when she sang an
old song to him in the gloaming, after she had done her day's
work and they were waiting for the father. It was all about a
little girl that lived in a red house by the sea, without sister or
brother or father or mother. She often tried to recall it :

1890.] How PEXSEUS BECAME A STAR. 755.

"I sit alone in the twilight,

While the wind comes sighing to me,

And I see that dear little orphan

In the little red house by the sea."

Surely the loving little boy, whose eyes filled with tears,
whenever she sang those simple words, could not have changed
entirely. She had made his heart cold, the mother said of his,
wife; she had made him forget church and priest, and even his
mother. It must be said that the old woman could never re-
strain herself when, soon after his marriage, her son had often
come to see her. She never spared his wife, and from this fact
had sprung the coldness which prevented him from going to see
her. It was none the less hard for the warm-hearted old woman ;
she took no pleasure in her son's political successes. Her one
consolation, besides her religious duties, was in the company of
one more unhappy, if possible, than herself. This was another

Iold Irishwoman, Mrs. Carney, who lived in an unpainted and
bare-looking frame house at the back of her garden.
Frank Carney had been at the district school with Perseus —
Mrs. Mahany never called him by that name, but always "the
Boy " — and he had entered the same lodge as that enterprising
politician when the time came to cast off his allegiance to the
faith. Frank, a blue-eyed, light-haired, good-natured young
man, was not quite so clever as Perseus, and not quite so unscrupu-
lous. He had more conscience, but he had no firmness of will
»in face of a laugh. Moreover, he was fond of society, and, ac-
cording to the social constitution of Cone City, Catholics were not
socially eligible. He was gay, cheerful, with a fatal facility for
making himself agreeable. He was handsome; he could dance
well, and he soon acquired those graces which Cone City had
just acquired with the "swallow- tail" and other metropolitan
novelties. Perseus took him into his law office, and from that
time Mrs. Carney's life became bitter. Her only son dropped

I his habit of going to Mass with her ; he seldom came home ;
he promised when he did come that "he'd make his soul by-
and-by " — and this with a laugh. But when she heard that he
had been promoted — Cone City looked on this as promotion —
to the friendship of Colonel Brodbeck, the notorious infidel, her
heart sank; she refused to be comforted. In her heart Mrs.
Mahaffy felt that her son had drawn Frank Carney from the
way of peace. She never admitted it, nor did Mrs. Carney
speak of it. But any one who knew the two old women could
not help seeing that on one side was a desire to make amends

754 How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. [Mar.,

and on the other a determination to accept kindness simply be-
cause it relieved the one who conferred it. Each of these two old
friends — they were born on the banks of the Suir, and had crossed
in the same ship, and had lost their husbands at the same time
— bore her burden better because she thought the other's was
the heavier. At last old Mrs. Mahaffy died, blessing her son,
although, being absent at a political convention, he came too
late to receive it in person. And so great was this admirable
man's horror of superstition, and so strong his desire not to give
bad example to his fellow-townsmen, that he telegraphed to his
mother's pastor to bury her at once with solemn services. He
•did this because he wanted to be sure of his nomination and
because he did not care to be seen entering the Catholic
church. Old Mrs. Carney, who had never said a word against
Perseus, burst out at the funeral of her friend. " If I had
such a son," she cried, " I'd curse him ! " It seemed some-
how as if a change did take place in Perseus Mahaffy's life
after the death of his mother. His wife was relieved by the
disappearance of the old woman. She had had a feeling that,
•during some social function, her husband's mother might ap-
pear and destroy the " form " of things.

III.

Perseus began to be a star when he married Judge Brod-
beck's daughter. Judge Brodbeck came of an old English
family, but this would have mattered very little in the truly
Western town of Cone City had not the judge made a great
deal of money in railroad speculations. People said the railroads
had influenced his decisions on the bench ; but as he was rich
there was a certain respect for him mixed with this censure. The
judge had been the strictest of strict Calvinists ; his two children, the
colonel and Clara, hated Presbyterianism. Clara meeting Perseus
by chance at one of the dancing assemblies, found him to be a
pleasant contrast to the business-sodden men around her. And
the colonel, who saw that Perseus was vain as well as clever,
did not object to the intimacy. When the marriage was
announced Cone City was amazed. The ceremony was performed
in the First Baptist Church simply because Clara held that a re-
ligious ceremony was socially respectable.

The mother of the bridegroom knelt before the crucifix in
her little room. Her son had become an apostate to gain pros-
perity— he, the descendant of martyrs ! After this Perseus had

1890.] How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. 755

fewer scruples ; the die was cast ; his mother's entreaties fell on
callous ears.

Colonel Brodbeck determined to take advantage of Perseus'
vanity, as well as his cleverness. It was Perseus' misfortune
that his horizon was bounded by Cone City. No parvenu who
had suddenly married a princess could have been more elated
than was Perseus by his marriage.

" You have given up your God, your soul," his mother had
said to him, " for nothing."

" I have never seen God or my soul, mother," he had
answered. " See here, mother : I want a big house, I want to be
rich, I want to be one of the best people of this town, and you
can't be that if you're poor ; for all these reasons I'm going to
marry Clara Brodbeck. I'll get the best out of life I can, and
take my chances."

" And you'll turn your back on the church and the priest
for this ! Sure, you've already joined a secret society."

" Everybody knows that. As soon as I learned to read I
learned that I must get on or live down here in this shanty,
despised — nobody. I was born of the poor; everybody looked
down on the ' Irish boy ' — I'm no more Irish then they are
English or Dutch or anything else — and the Irish boy had
patches on his clothes, and he went to the church to which only
the hewers of wood and the drawers of water went."

" And his mother was only a poor Irishwoman ! " said Mrs.
Mahaffy, with a flash of sarcasm.

" She couldn't help that—"

"But her son would have helped being her son, if he could."

Perseus reddened. He admitted the truth of this in his heart.

" You ought tc be proud of me, mother. I've leaped over
ic bounds that kept me out of everything worth having. I have
in assured position in the town, and my children will have all
the advantages which I lacked. My wife is the most cultured
/oman in the town ; my — "

" God help us ! " interjected his mother, " you'd think he was
liking of Dublin after having married a great lord's daughter !
You're too ignorant to know the miserable price for which
you've sold your soul. Your grandmother starved in the famine
rather than change her religion, or seem to change it even for a
moment. Why was your father poor ? Why were we exiles ?
For one reason only: we kept the faith."

" I've heard all this before, mother," he said, " and there's
no money in it."

756 Ho w PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. [Mar.,.

" And you're leading young Frank Carney away, too," said the
old womaa, exhausted and despondent.

Perseus only shrugged his shoulders. He was satisfied that
he had done the best he could for himself. The duty of mak-
ing money was the first recognized in Cone City. " Put money
in thy purse," the spirit of the town whispered through every
medium. The churches were valued according to their financial'
status. The Presbyterians were in the ascendant in money mat-
ters ; therefore their "socials" and meetings were best attended.
The Catholic priest was respected because he paid his bills
promptly and would not permit himself to be cheated. The
Protestant- Episcopalians were poor, and their minister was a
Canadian of high-church proclivities, and though some " nice
people " sat under him — people who wore diamonds and seal-
skin sacques — yet they were, as a rule, looked down on.

Perseus must have been stronger than he was to have escaped
the fever of money- making. He saw that in a Protestant and
highly total-abstaining town Colonel Brodbeck's infidelity and
fondness for whiskey — which was not excessive, by the way — were
condoned because of his wealth. Money could do anything, he
concluded ; it might even open the way socially to a Catholic, pro-
vided he were not too Irish. He had a somewhat better educa-
tion than the other boys at school. Father Deschamps taught a
little school — he was too poor to pay a teacher — and when Per-
seus had left it and gone to the district school the kind priest,
discerning the boy's talent, had made him read Cicero and Virgil.
Father Deschamps was replaced by another pastor, and Perseus
was left to the deadening influence around him. Having planned
his career, he was somewhat relieved to have Father Deschamps
go. And yet he never felt that he was ungrateful; he became
so entirely absorbed in his desire to be rich that it seemed only
right that all the world should aid. In fact, he had become his.
own Buddha, and he was rapidly losing himself in self.

Colonel Brodbeck admired Perseus' capabilities. " If the fel-
low," he said to himself, " only knew his ability, and if his con-
founded snobbishness did not prevent him from seeing how supe-
rior he is to these Cone City chumps, he'd get away from here
as soon as possible. But he looks on the Cone -City settler as-
one of a superior race."

The colonel grinned sardonically, and opened a letter about
the selling of the Cone City water-front to the new railroad
company, whose stock was mostly owned in Chicago.

"Ah!" he said, "we shall find some work here for Perseus.'*

1890.] How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. 757

Perseus was sent to Congress. And just before the day of
election the rival candidate brought out the old story about his
having changed his name. Both of the Cone City papers had his
mother " interviewed." According to the friendly journalist, she
was a " handsome old lady, living in opulence provided by an
adoring son." The other journal said that she was "a decent
old woman, bowed down by her son's neglect, and living in
comparative' squalor." All the old woman could be induced to
say was that she " would not have cared how often the Boy
changed his name, if he had only stuck to his religion."

This brought a card from Perseus. He protested that religion
had no place in politics. His religion .was his private affair. He
would allow no human being to interfere between him and his
God. His Irish friends, he hoped, would remember that, though
an American in every fibre of his being, he loved, next to the
principles of 1776, the principles of Parnell. While he lived he
would oppose any State tax on church property. To be honest
was the first commandment of his religion, and he hoped, in
Congress, to show that this religion influenced his every act.

The card was effective ; the Home- Rule phrase and that about
church property helped him very much, though he promised the
Methodist minister to lecture at Chautauqua at an early day on
" The Aggressions of Rome."

To be frank, Perseus believed that he was honest; he often
said to himself that people did not know how good he was. His
wife's indifference to religion annoyed him. He held that a wo-
man ought to be religious ; but Clara laughed at him.

" The children shall choose their own religion," she said one
evening, after one of the Cone City functions called a "coffee."
Sixty leading Cone City ladies had eaten chicken salad and ices
with her from three until six, and the probable conversion of one
of their number to Catholicity had been discussed. " Cora
Bramber is going to turn Catholic, and I must say I like her
spirit."

" I thought you hated Catholics," Perseus said.

" I ? Good gracious, no ! I think they are more consistent
than other denominations. And I don't see why they should

I be held responsible for the awful things the Jesuits and popes
lid long ago. I'm sure the Puritans were bad enough."
"You wouldn't want the children to be Catholics, Clara."
" If they were rich and could do as they please, I think I
would. But Providence, if there is a Providence, seems rather
hard on people when he makes them Catholic and poor at the

758 How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. [Mar.,

same time. The children must have some religion or other. I
can keep straight without religion ; I've a natural tendency towards
respectability, and you're a good husband ; but Perseus, I wouldn't
trust anybody else. I'm thinking of sending Clara to a convent
school."

Perseus set down his coffee-cup in amazement — he was in
the act of making a collation from the remains of the afternoon
feast.

"I won't have it," he said; "it would ruin the girl's pros-
pects, Clara. Who'd marry a Catholic here, and if she goes to
a convent, she'll probably come back a Catholic."

" If there's anything that exasperates me," answered his wife,
calmly washing the silver, " it's your foolish reverence for Cone
City people. They're only people who came here to earn
a living; they're the sort of people who go to Europe every
year to complete an education that was never begun at home.
If Clara has money, she might be a Mohammedan. Haven't
you learned that yet? She'll be safe in a convent school."

" Well, I'll lose the Methodist vote, that's all."

"No, you won't, nor the Baptist either. The anti- church
property stand holds all denominations. Besides, haven't I
given five hundred dollars for the Methodist chapel ? You'll
gain more Catholic vptes than you ever had. Anyhow, I ivill
have Clara well taken care of. I know our boarding-schools too
well. The nuns may make her narrow-minded, but they'll
keep her gentle. These sects make their girls both narrow-
minded and aggressive."

Perseus was silent. After all, it was like the sound of far-off
bells, sweet to his ears, to think that his child might say the same
old prayers and kneel before the tabernacle. Nevertheless, he
would not sacrifice anything for this. As Clara took the responsi-
bility, he left it to her. He was resolved that the boys should
not be handicapped by religion.

He took his wife to the opera-house that night to hear her
brother lecture on " The Beautiful in Life." The theatre was
crowded. The colonel was very florid in his speech. He said
that beauty was religion, and that if religion and the enjoyment
of the beautiful were opposed, religion must go. " If God is a
God of terror," he repeated, " God must go ; when men's souls
shall have attuned themselves to the grace of the Venus of
Melos rather than to churchly ideas of womanhood, when the
use of money shall mean more beauty in life, then virtue and
sensuous enjoyment shall be one and life be complete."

1890.] How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. , 759

" I suppose you'd like Clara to hear that kind of stuff/"
Perseus' wife said as they drove home.

" It was very pretty," said Perseus ; " I don't quite see what
it means ; it certainly makes irreligion very attractive. Like
you, the colonel does not seem to need religion in order to be
good."

His wife laughed. " I don't know about that ; but I know
what he means ; he means free love. As for religion, we all
need it. Do you know, if you had stuck to your religion I
should have had more respect for you, and it is probable I
might have become a Catholic myself. There are times, Perseus,
when your silly admiration for Cone City makes you very tire-
some. As for my brother, can't you see that he is not a good
man ? He believes in God in his heart, of course he does ! The
way he protests against it shows that he does. As for myself, I
dislike any unreasonable and illogical belief founded on man's,
dictum and the Bible. But I don't know Catholicism. I might
like it. We all need religion — my brother worse than anybody
I know," she added, with a short laugh. " There is nothing in
our times, except religion, to keep a woman from dropping a
husband she does not like and taking one she does; and no
religion that can do it effectively, except yours — I beg pardon,.
I mean the religion you've progressed out of. There's Mrs.
Churton ; she has been divorced twice, and yet she's head and
front among the Congregationalists."

"You don't mean to say that you'd — " Perseus almost
gasped, as he turned to his wife.

" I don't mean to say anything but that Clara shall be for-
tified against the dangers that would beset me if I cared for any
other man than you."

This was frank enough. Perseus shuddered as he heard it.
He imagined his mother saying such a thing ! No ; toil-worn,
uneducated, old-fashioned as she was, there was a bloom of in-
nocence and womanliness about his mother which his wife lacked.
Such frankness gradually built up a wall of distrust before him ;
his wife did not see it, though she felt a difference. Later she
differed with him almost habitually, and she was generally right.
Finally, she came almost to despise him.

The question of the sale of the water-front came up. Perseus
and Colonel Brodbeck opposed it. It meant robbery. It would
open the door to monopoly. It was an outrage on the rights of
the people. It was on account of his course in this matter that
he was sent to Congress a third time, and was enabled to second

760 How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. [Mar.,

some of his brother-in-law's schemes very effectively. Frank
Carney had been his constant supporter. Frank had now no
legitimate business ; he was devoted to politics ; he lived by
subsidies from the Hon. Perseus and Colonel Brodbeck. He was
their slave, and the more self-respect he lost the more valuable
he became. Somebody must do the dirty work in politics, and
Frank's hand, once in the mire, did a great deal of it. His
mother said this to him about Easter-time, when she was urging
him to go to his "duty."

" I can't, mother," he said ; " don't ask me. I'd have to get
out of politics if I did. When I've made my pile," he added,
with a rather timid attempt at a laugh, " I'll repent."

" They say that you and Col. Brodbeck have robbed right
and left. I can't bear to hear such things."

" Oh ! it's newspaper lies. Don't you see the colonel's a big
man, for all that ? It doesn't make much difference in this country
where you get money, so that you get it."

The old woman could only cry and wring her hands. She
saw that her son had begun to drink, and it was said that he gam-
bled. Prayer, constant and unwearying, was her only resource.

The railroad company wanted the water-front badly. Its
counsel and directors knew that Colonel Brodbeck and Perseus
controlled the council of Cone City, of which the colonel was
the attorney. Had the colonel and the Hon. Perseus a price ?
An answer to this question was easily obtained through Frank
Carney. They had, and it was high. Perseus was at first in-
clined to be honest, but the colonel laughed at him.

" Nonsense ! " he said, " that sort of thing went out of fashion
with religion. You felt yourself trammelled in the process of
making your career by your Catholicism, and you gave it up.
Why should you keep up the bondage after you've emanci-
pated yourself. It ought to be whole hog or none. There's no
confession to be afraid of now."

Perseus shivered involuntarily. He had the feeling " as if" —
as his mother would have said it — " somebody was walking over
his grave."

His wife was shocked by his change of view on the water-
side question. She spoke her opinion very plainly. " I might
have known," she said in her most cutting tones, "that it was a
risk to marry an apostate, but I never imagined this disgrace.
Oh!. my brother? My brother is an infidel, but you pretend to
be a Christian still."

After this Perseus knew that his wife despised him, though

1890.] How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. 761

he had cleaved the ether and was a star. He winced under sar-
casms ; he distrusted her. What guarantee had he that she,
bound to him by inclination, not duty, might not *desert him at
any moment ? Clara, his daughter, was at a convent school ;
his boys were also away ; his life was wretchedly unhappy — but
he was growing richer in this world's goods every day.

The "deal " between the Cone City syndicate and the rail-
road company had been arranged very neatly through Frank
Carney. There had been no tell-tale checks in the matter. Frank
had delivered forty thousand dollars in cash to each of these two
most potent men in Cone City. The council had been managed, but
no one knew who did it, so that while popular indignation struck
the council, it never even glanced on the colonel and his con-
frere. It was cleverly arranged; there was no scandal; Perseus
admired his diplomacy and his success, for forty thousand dol-
lars was a great sum in Cone City, and yet it was the begin-
ning of* disaster.

Frank Carney, good-natured, plastic, credulous, began to see
that he was only a tool. He had been ignored in the division
of the spoil. He feared Perseus and the colonel too much to
find fault openly. But his discontent was growing. He was in
this mood in the spring, when Easter came again. His mother
met him one morning, just after old Mrs. Mahaffy's death, and
said nothing. She stood and looked at him with yearning eyes.
He had been drinking all night ; but he was sober enough.

" What is it, mother ? " he said.

" What is it, dear ? I'm just thinking that I'd give the world
to have my own boy back again."

Frank saw a tear on her cheek in the early sunlight as
she turned away.

"If God helps me, you shall, mother," he called after her;
and then he said to himself: "She's worth it all; I'll surprise
her; I'm tired of the mud."

IV.

It happened that the Honorable Perseus G. Mahaffy and
Colonel Brodbeck were asked to address a spring meeting of a
society called the Farmers' Alliance on one Saturday night. The
colonel made an address which was not received well. It was
not vaguely atheistical ; it was not humorously atheistical ; it was
openly immoral — a plea for affinities, an apology for a law grant-
ing easier divorces. It was hissed by the farmers who had tol-
VOL. L. — 49

762 Ho w PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. [Mar.,

erated his jokes on the Divinity and his amusing caricatures of
modern Calvinism. Going home with Perseus and Frank Carney,
his humor was ferocious. The beautiful — not even Goethe's
" Helena " or the march in " Lohengrin " could have made him
less savage. It was strange that the panaceas recommended by
the colonel for other people rarely answered for himself.

The three were walking ; it was a moonlight night. Perseus
was well satisfied with himself; Frank Carney was moody. They
were passing the arbor-vitae hedge which separated his mother's
little house from the road.

" Do you know, colonel," said Frank, " I have concluded to
go back to my first love and to get out of your infidel clique,
and likewise out of politics ? You haven't treated me right ;
but that makes no difference now. I'm going into the insurance
business at Oxhart next week, and I shall follow my conscience.
I'm a Catholic at heart and I'll be one practically, with God's
help, after this. A speech like the one you made to-night
ought to make us all religious."

Perseus laid his hand on Frank's arm ; he saw the colonel's
ugly look.

" Who hasn't treated you right ?" The colonel stood still
and confronted Carney.

" I said that was neither here nor there." They were stand-
ing near the new railroad embankment, and Carney paused near
the edge to answer the colonel.

" I suppose you mean this as a threat," sneered the colonel.
" I suppose you think we're afraid you'll go and confess certain
little things to a priest. But you can't frighten us. If you want
money, why don't you say so, instead of trying a monkey trick
like this."

Frank Carney's face turned ashy.

" I don't want thieves' money."

He had no sooner spoken the words than the colonel raised
his fist. Frank Carney tried to guard himself; the colonel
struck him, and he fell down the embankment, a descent of
twenty feet. He lay still among the stones ; then he groaned.
Perseus and the colonel went to the ladder at the side, and with
some effort dragged him up to the hedge near his mother's
house. There was a deep cut on his forehead, and another on
the back of his head. His face was white. The colonel felt his
pulse.

" He can't live," he said coolly.

The wounded man opened his eyes and his lips in a mute appeal.

1890.] How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. 763

" He wants a priest," whispered Perseus. " Stay with him,
while I run to the town ; it's not a half a mile."

The colonel showed his white teeth.

" A priest, you fool ! Do you want him to ruin us with
his silly nonsense? He knows too much. Let him confess to
us ; we'll keep his secrets."

" He must have a priest, colonel."

Again the dying man opened his lips and tried to raise his
hands.

The colonel looked at Perseus in his ugliest way. " You're a
nice person to be talking of priests — you that pretend to hate
them. I can't afford to have a priest come here ; neither can
you,"

Perseus stood irresolute. He felt that he was killing a soul.
But he had let the colonel's evil will dominate him so long that
he could not resist it now. At the same time his last hope
of all better things seemed to die out as he steeled his heart
against Frank Carney's whisper, " A priest."

Carney's voice grew stronger in his agony: "For God's sake,
get me Father Lovel — he's not far — my mother. It's all I ask.
I can't stand this much longer."

" You hear his confession, if you're so anxious about it," said
the colonel, mockingly.

Perseus had become accustomed to wince at that tone. He
turned away from the agonized face of his friend, and went
down the road ; and then it seemed to him that his own soul
went to hell and a devil of despair took possession of his body.
The colonel soon rejoined him, and spoke in his coolest voice.

" He's dead. The thing's awkward ; but I just dropped my
whiskey -flask into his pocket and rolled him down the embank-
ment. Everybody knows he drank. That will account for it all
when he's found. We'll say he left us at the Junction. The
idiot!"

Nobody cared much, except Frank's old mother. She heard
that he had died almost at her door. The whiskey-flask part of
the story was mercifully kept from her. " It accounted for it
all," as the colonel had predicted.

But the Honorable Perseus Mahaffy was never quite himself
again. One night, in the autumn, he made a great speech at
the closing dinner of the trustees of the County Fair. It was
said to be the effort of his life. The colonel, who had noticed
the change in him since the night of Frank Carney's death,
watched his face intently. At first he sneered at the orator's

764 How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. [Mar.,

grandiloquence. Then his expression became more serious, and
when the Honorable Perseus began his peroration and was inter-
rupted by cheers for the Star of Golung Creek, the colonel no-
ticed a fixed look in his eyes, and when he attempted to go on
he stammered. Suddenly the words seemed to freeze on his
lips ; he looked at the large pyramid of fruit and flowers before
him as if it were a human being of threatening aspect. The
colonel jumped up and caught him as he was falling, crying,
" What's the matter?"

" I thought I saw his ghost," he whispered. " It has killed
me; for God's sake, send for a priest!"

"Nonsense!" returned the colonel. " What good will a
priest do you? Here, take this brandy."

Perseus thrust the little glass away from him.

" A priest ! " he whispered again and again. But the group
around him thought he was raving. Who among them had ever
connected him with a priest? The sneer came back to the col-
onel's face as he made room for the doctor. In less than an
hour he was in convulsions, and so he died. The doctor gave
his disease a medical name ; the colonel said to himself that it
was superstition acting on a weak mind. And his last words
had been: " Success, gentlemen, is not measured by material
prosperity. It consists in being true to ideals, in sacrificing all
aims and objects which are not truth's. That is success in the
sight of God. All other things named success are illusions."
Certainly he had found it so; he had paid very dearly for hav-
ing become a star.

His daughter did not forget the face of the old woman who
had pulled her mother's frock at the funeral. She found out her
name, and made her acquaintance. Poor Mrs. Carney prayed
for her son as only a mother in doubt about a son's soul can
pray; and Clara prayed, too, for she had been baptized, though
she had not as yet made her First Communion.

" If I only knew how he died ! " • Mrs. Carney wailed con-
stantly; "if I only knew how he died! I've often thought your
father might know whether he was prepared or not."

Clara understood her ; she knew that the mother's thoughts
were on her son's soul. She could say nothing; she did not
dream that her father and the colonel knew only too well.

It happened that just before the summer vacation Clara had
finished a little picture of the Sacred Heart for Mrs. Carney.
The chaplain, Father Morgan, was about to go to Cone City,

1890.] How PERSEUS BECAME A STAR. 765

and he had promised to take charge of it for her. Clara knew
that the sight of his genial face would do Mrs. Carney good.

"Mrs. Carney?" he said, reading the address. "Is that the
mother of the poor young man who died under such strange
circumstances last spring ? Ah ! indeed," he continued, musingly,
in answer to Clara's assent. " I saw him that very afternoon.
I was hearing confessions in the German church, and he came
to me just as I was leaving the box. He introduced himself
and asked for some advice about the examination of his con-
science. I answered him by taking him back to the box and ,
hearing his confession. Poor young man ! "

Clara's cheeks glowed, her eyes sparkled. She had found
out how Frank Carney died ; now she knew that he had passed
from earth with the cleansing dew of absolution upon him.
She thanked Father Morgan and ran off to get permission from
the mother-superior to go with him to Cone City ; she gave
her reason, and as a great and special favor it was granted.

" What would you like most of all to have ? " she asked,
when the old woman had greeted the priest and kissed her.

" To know that I should see my son again in heaven, to
know that he died well," she answered, with a tremor in her
voice Then Clara and Father Morgan made her happy.

Colonel Brodbeck has begun to have more than a local repu-
tation. His Life of the Honorable Perseus G. Mahaffy is
much praised. The description of Perseus' " conversion " from
Romanism to a serene state of religious indifference is particu-
larly well done. His sister seldom sees him ; she is in doubt.
" If I were anything," she says, " I would be a Catholic, like
Clara — that is, if all Catholics were like her. But Perseus' ex-
ample and the example of so many like him make me pause.
There's plenty of time." And she says to herself: "I'll send
the boys to a Catholic school next year, in the hope that they
will grow up unlike Perseus and the colonel."

When the Rev. Mr. Schuyler remonstrates with her, she tells
him that she has tried Calvinism and agnosticism, and found
them hollow ; what is left to her but the Church ?

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN.

766 Aux CARMELITES. [Mar.,

AUX CARMELITES.

MADAME LOUISE sleeps well o' nights,
Night is still at the Carmelites :

Down at Versailles
The dancers dance, and the violins play.

There's a crucifix on the wall at her head,
And a rush chair set by her pallet bed,

Stony and hardy
Sweeter than balm or the spikenard.

Daughter of France and the King's daughter,
She hath one poor serge gown to her wear:

And her little feet
Shall naked go in the wind and sleet.

From things that stabbed her cheek to red
She hath taken her milk-white soul and fled.

Down at Versailles
The revels go till the break of day.

Jesus, King, is her harborer,

With His wedding-ring on her hand to wear;

And her love-vows given
All to the King who is Lord in heaven.

Sweetly singeth the nightingale

In his screen of boughs while the moon is pale.

Sweet, and so sweet,
That the night-world is faint with it.

The roses dream, and the lilies wake,

While the bird of love with his wild heart-break

Picrceth her dream ;
Soft she sighs in the faint moon-beam.

And all night long in the dark by her
An angel sits with his wings astir.

And his hidden eyes
Keeping the secrets of Paradise.

1890.] DISGUISES OF NATUXE. 767

Madame Louise sleeps well o' nights,
Night is still at the Carmelites :

Down at Versailles
The dancers dance while the dawn is gray.

KATHARINE TYNAN.

DISGUISES OF NATURE.

WHEN in Natural History we speak of Mimicry, of one
species of animal imitating another species, and putting on a
disguise so perfect that it is difficult at first to tell the two
apart, the expression is misleading, and is owing to the poverty
of our language to find a better. For this deceptive resemblance
is not a conscious act, but is supposed by the best authorities
to have been brought about by a variety of one species having
originally borne a superficial likeness to another which was
gifted with special means of protection, and in consequence of
this fortunate likeness, which had a tendency to be reproduced,
the former was able to escape from its enemies. The imitation may
have been very slight in the beginning, but as time went on, in
the course of ages, it became more and more complete by the
variety which more closely resembled the species imitated being
naturally preserved, while those which had not the disguise
perished.

It is also quite probable that the resemblance which some
animals bear to their environment has been brought about in the
same way ; for this resemblance cannot be explained by the
direct action of climate, soil, or food. In arctic regions white is
the color which best protects, by making an animal of the same
hue as the landscape. Accordingly, we find the polar bear
white, the only bear that is white. The alpine hare, the
ermine, and the arctic fox turn white in the snowy season.
Among birds, the ptarmigan in winter loses its summer plum-
age, which harmonizes so well with the lichen-covered stones
among which it hides, and turns white, so very white that ,
one may tramp through a flock lying on the snow without
perceiving a single bird. If the common raven, which even
in midwinter goes as far north as any known bird or mam-
mal, remains black, it is because it feeds on carrion and has
no need of concealment to get near its prey. The Siberian

;68 DISGUISES OF NATURE. [Mar.,

sable, like the raven, does not change color in winter, because
its habits are such that it does not need to become white ; it
often lives on berries at this season, and is so nimble on the
trees that it easily catches small birds. The woodchuck ot
Canada also stays brown in winter But it then burrows in
river-banks and subsists on fish. We know that the lion,
by its sandy color, easily conceals itself by crouching on
the desert sand ; while the stripes of the tiger assimilate well
with the vertical stems of the bamboo and tall, stiff grass of the
jungle. Almost all the other animals of the cat tribe frequent
trees, and these have often spotted skins, which help to blend
them with the background of foliage. A marked exception is
the puma, whose ashy-brown fur, the color of bark, and its habit
of clinging very closely to a limb as it waits for its prey to pass
underneath, make it uncommonly hard to distinguish. It might
be thought that the conspicuous stripes of the zebra, in a coun-
try abounding with lions and leopards, would be a danger to it.
But zebras go in herds, and are so wary and swift that in the
day-time they have little to fear. It is at dusk, when they go to
drink, that they are most exposed. But Mr. Francis Galton,
who has studied this animal in its native haunts, declares that in
the twilight the zebra's black and white stripes blend so well
into a grayish tint that at this hour it is not easy to be
seen at a short distance. Even an animal as big as a giraffe is
said by travellers to be admirably concealed by its form and
color when standing perfectly still among the dead trees often
found on the outskirts of the groves where it feeds. Its spots,
its long neck, the peculiar shape of its head and horns appear
all together so like broken branches that even the natives have
been known to mistake a tree for a giraffe and a giraffe for a tree.
In regard to the coloring of birds, the better opinion is that
the dull colors of the female have been acquired for protection
while sitting on the nest. To this rule there are exceptions,
as the kingfishers, woodpeckers, toucans, parrots, starlings, and
houguests, in which both sexes are equally conspicuous. But
these birds either nest in holes, or build dome-shaped nests
which hide the sitting bird. In the very few curious cases
* where the female is actually more conspicuously colored than the
male, it is found that the relation of the sexes in regard to
nesting is reversed — the male bird sitting on the eggs, while the
more attractive but pugnacious female stands exposed to the
enemy's eye. Such are the dotterel, an Australian creeper,
and one or two others.

1890.] DISGUISES OF NATURE. 769

In the tropics, where leaves are always green, we find whole
groups of birds whose feathers are green; while many tree-
snakes in that par* of the world, comprising both harmless and
venomous genera, are usually of a beautiful green color, and so
perfectly does it conceal them that their prey comes within
easy reach unconscious of danger. The only true arboreal snake
whose color is seldom green is the genus Dipsas, which takes
various shades, black, brown, olive. But the snakes of this
genus are all nocturnal, and by day hide in holes, so that a
green disguise would serve them no useful purpose. Professor
Cope, speaking of mimetic analogy, and the sandy hue of rep-
tiles in the deserts, says : " There is also a tendency to produce
spiny forms in such places; witness . . . the cerastes of the
Sahara . . . and horned rattlesnake of Southwestern America.
The vegetation of every order, we are also informed, is in these
situations extremely liable to produce spines and thorns."

Among the smaller marine animals, many are protected by
being so transparent as to be almost invisible, those that are
brightly colored generally having a special protection, either in
stinging tentacles or in a hard crust like the star-fish. In some
rare cases, as in the chameleon, a lizard-like animal which
turns from dull-white to a variety of tints in harmony with sur-
rounding objects, the change of color is brought about by a re-
flex action dependent on sensation ; and it has been discovered
that this curious power is due to several layers of movable pig-
ment cells buried deep under the skin, which, when the helpless
creature sees an enemy, are capable, through the emotion of
fear, of being pushed up .to the surface.

There is a shrimp called the chameleon shrimp which has
the same power of taking a protective tint, seemingly at will.
It is of a sandy hue when swimming over a sandy bottom, but
as soon as it gets among sea-weed it changes to green. And
experiment shows that, if deprived of sight, this shrimp,
not knowing the color of its surroundings, will not change
color. The colors of most fishes with Slack or brownish
backs and white bellies have very likely been acquired
for concealment. When we look down on the dark back of a
fish it is not easily perceived, while an enemy looking toward it
from below would find its white belly equally hard to distin-
guish against the light of the sky. The sea-horse (hippo-
campus) of Australia often has long, foliaceous appendages,
uncommonly like sea-grass, growing from it, and it is of a
beautiful red hue. Frequenting, as it does, marine vegetation of

7/0 DISGUISES OF NATURE. [Mar.,

the same color, it is almost impossible to discover it until it
moves.

Sometimes a conspicuous color adds to aft animal's safety.
Perhaps the best example of this is the skunk. Its bushy
white tail, curled well up over its black and white body, is a
signal to attract attention. In the dusk this white signal is
pretty sure to be seen, and prevents the skunk, a bold, presum-
ing creature, from being pounced upon by any of the night-
prowling carnivora, who turn away the moment they recognize it.
In the opinion of Mr. Belt, the light of the glow-worm and
fire fly — at least in Central America — is a sign to night-flying
insectivorous birds that they are not eatable ; their phosphores-
cent light is a warning signal. The same naturalist tells of a
frog in Nicaragua, colored red and blue, which fearlessly hops
about in the day-time ; it has perfect faith in its warning color ;
no snake or bird will touch it, for it is disgusting to the taste,
and the sooner it is recognized the better. But it is in the in-
sect world that adaptation of an animal to its environment is
most fully developed. Mr. Bates, in his interesting book, Na-
turalist on the Amazons, tells of a long- horned beetle which
is found only on rough-barked trees. It is very abundant, but
so closely does it resemble the bark that until it moves it is
absolutely invisible. The large, wingless stick insects of the
Moluccas dangle in bunches from the shrubs, and are so like
sticks that the eye alone cannot distinguish the dead twigs from
the living insects. Mr. Wallace had to touch them in order to
tell the twigs from the insects. Mr. Belt relates that he once
saw a green, leaf-like locust remain apparently dead in the midst
of a host of fierce, insectivorous ants, which swarmed over it
without discovering that it was a locust and not a leaf. Had the
locust moved it would have been quickly devoured, either by
the ants, or by the small, rapacious birds that everywhere ac-
company them. He adds: "So fixed was its instinctive knowl-
edge that its safety depended on its immovability that it allbwed
me to pick it up and replace it among the ants without making
a single effort to escape. This species closely resembles a green
leaf."

Let us now speak of what we may call mimicry proper — a
form of protective resemblance where one species of animal
appears in a disguise so like another species as to be mistaken for
it, not only by man, but by birds and insects. In Central
America there is a longicorn beetle, covered with long brown
and black hairs, and exceedingly like some of the hairy cater-

1890.] DISGUISES OF NATURE. 771

pillars. This beetle, instead of hiding like other closely-allied spe-
cies, rests exposed on the bushes, its antennae concealed against its
body, and it is so like a caterpillar that at first you are pretty
sure to be deceived. Now, insect-eating birds will not eat hairy
caterpillars, and here this beetle finds its safety. In the same
region is a small spider which resembles a stinging ant, and so
perfect is the imitation that it was not until Mr. Belt had killed
one that he discovered it was really a spider, and that there
was no danger of being stung. Unlike other spiders, this little
creature holds up its two fore-legs like antennas, and moves them
about exactly as an ant does. Small birds, which devour other
spiders, take it for a stinging ant and leave it alone.

In Brazil the Heliconidae butterflies, which most birds will
not touch on account of their nasty odor and taste, are closely
mimicked by another kind of butterfly and by moths. Mr. Belt
watched a pair of birds catching butterflies for their young, and
although the heliconidae swarmed around them and moved about
with a lazy flight, the birds did not bring one to their nest. In
the same region is another genus, the Leptalis, one species of
which so adroitly mimics the heliconidae in form, color, and mode
of flight that only a careful examination revealed to Mr. Belt
the essential differences. This species of leptalis has not the
sickening odor and taste of the heliconidse ; but the birds do not
know it, and consequently avoid them. A very curious case of
mimicry is that of a large caterpillar of Brazil, which so closely
imitates a poisonous viper that Mr. Bates was startled when he
saw one draw itself backward as if to strike..

There is in South Africa an egg-eating snake which has
neither fangs nor teeth, but is uncommonly like the dangerous
adder, Clothos Atropos, and when alarmed this harmless reptile
flattens out its ugly head and darts toward you with the adder's
hiss. Let us here observe that in the opinion of Mr. Wallace
the theory of warning coloration has thrown light on the much-
disputed question of the use of the rattle of the rattlesnake.
This snake, which is the most specialized and stands at the head
of the order, is sluggish, not hard to kill, and haunts sunny,
rocky places, where protective coloration is useful to save it from
snake-eating birds and other enemies. But other snakes, harm-
less species, equally well protected by color, frequent the same
spots, where sharp-eyed buzzards do now and then spy them
out. Here the rattlesnake finds its rattle useful.

Speaking of rattlesnakes, we may add — although it has noth-
ipig to do with mimicry — that in the structure of the end of

772 DISGUISES OF NATURE. [Mar.,

the tail of harmless snakes we discover a horny cap cover-
ing the terminal vertebrae, and this is doubtless the first button
of the rattle which in the perfected rattlesnake is developed into
several buttons or joints. Nearly all the larger harmless snakes,
when excited, violently shake the end of the tail, which frequent
vibration tends to determine an increase of nutritive fluid, or, as
it is expressed, to localize growth-nutrition, and in the rattle-
snake this finally results in new grade-structure, a repetition of
the original button possessed by the non-venomous snakes. The
best case of mimicry among mammals is that of the Cladobates
of the Malay archipelago. Several species of this genus bear a
close resemblance to the innocent fruit-eating squirrels; they have
the same shape, same bushy tail and colors. Here the likeness
enables the cladobates to approach the insects and little birds on
which it feeds. The Hyaena-dog of Africa, a weak animal, is very
like a hyena, and only for this it would probably soon become
extinct.

Plants seldom need to mimic other plants. Their safety lies
either in their spines, hairy coverings, or poisonous secretions.
There are, however, . a few cases of true protective resemblance.
The most remarkable is that of the "stone Mesembryanthemum "
of the Cape of Good Hope, whose form and color are the very
same as the stones among which it grows ; and botanists believe
that this perfect imitation has enabled it to escape the notice of
cattle and wild herbivorous animals, for it is a juicy little plant

The "Rosary bean" of the tropics has a pod which curls up
and splits wide open, on the tree, thus showing its brilliant scar-
let seeds to the birds, who mistake it for another seed they
dearly love. But the seeds of the " rosary bean " are hard and
indigestible, so that the birds, after swallowing them, pass them
through their bodies undigested, and by this deception the shrub
gets widely planted over the country.

The Ajuga Ophrydis of South Africa strikingly resembles an
orchid. This seems to be a means of attracting insects to fertil-
ize it, in the absence of enough nectar in the flower itself.

It is interesting to know that in the great majority of cases
of mimicry, the mimickers and the mimicked inhabit the same
country and are generally found together on the same spot.
The mimicking species are, however, as a rule, few in number ;
in the case of the leptalis being only one to a thousand of the
butterflies it resembles, so that there is hardly a possibility of its
being found out by its enemies. It should also be .said that
mimicry, at least among insects, is confined almost wholly to

1890.] DISGUISES OF NATURE. 773

females, who need to be protected much more than the males.
Insects pair only once in their brief lives, and the prolonged ex-
istence of the male is unnecessary.

If we often see great varieties of color among domesticated
animals, as in our horses, dogs, cattle, poultry, it is because man
protects them and attends to all their wants ; it does not matter
to the animal's safety what its color may be. But in wild animals
color and markings are, as a rule, constant ; for here nature
selects what best protects.

We may, therefore, take it as quite probable that the slight
original tendency of one variety of a wild species to resemble
its environment, or to assume a warning color, or to mimic an-
other species gifted with some special means of protection, is the
foundation of all those imitations and colorings which play so im-
portant a part in nature. What were likely the first steps in the
process of imitation in the case of the leptalis will suffice for
all other cases. The heliconidae butterflies, which one species of
this genus mimics, constitute a group of high antiquity, which in
the course of ages has become more and more specialized, until
it is now a dominant group in tropical America. But when the
first heliconidae sprang from some ancestral form, whose juices,
owing to its food, were distasteful to insect-eating animals, they
were, perhaps, not very unlike other butterflies in pattern or
color. They would at that distant epoch be often attacked by
enemies, and even if these refused to swallow them, they would
no doubt be often fatally hurt. Hence arose the need of some
conspicuous mark to distinguish them and to let butterfly-eaters
know that they were not eatable ; and every variation in shape
or tint, which tended ever so little toward this distinctive
necessary mark, nature preserved and stored up, until in time
these butterflies appeared in most unmistakable colors — their long,
narrow wings banded with black, yellow, and red, unlike the
colors of all other families of butterflies in Brazil, which distinctive,
warning coloration caused them to be immediately recognized.
From this time forth they were free from attack. And now they
grew lazy, flew very slowly, and increased abundantly.

But' during the early stages of this development some variety
of a species belonging to the genus leptalis, inhabiting the same
region, happened to be sufficiently like the heliconidae as to be
now and then mistaken for them. These happy fellows naturally
survived, while their less fortunate companions were eaten up.
The descendants of these survivors, who were superficially still
more like the heliconidae, again survived ; the mimicry becoming

774 DISGUISES OF NATURE. [Mar.,

more successful with each succeeding generation — for nothing
succeeds like success — until finally it could hardly be improved
upon. In the meanwhile the heliconidae — protected always by their
bad taste and odor — diverged into different species, all having
conspicuous, warning tints; and it is interesting to know that,
as they so diverged, the mimicking leptalis would occasionally be
able to follow them with similar conspicuous variations ; a pro-
cess which, Mr. Bates tells us, is going on to-day in the Ama-
zon valley.

The reason why mimicking forms are scarce is supposed to be
the ever-increasing acuteness of enemies, which have again and
again detected the imposture, and exterminated a feeble group
before it had a chance to become further modified. The result
of this growing acuteness, especially on the part of insect-eating
birds, has been that those mimicking insects which have been
able to survive have in the end put on such an uncommonly
clever disguise that their shrewdest enemy is not shrewd enough
to detect them.

It seems to be, as Mr. Bates says, " a palpably intentional
likeness that is perfectly staggering." Indeed, it is so perfect
that it deceives the very insects themselves. As we have ob-
served, the female, as a rule, alone mimics. But the male but-
terfly of the mimicking leptalis has been seen to follow a female
of the species mimicked until, suddenly aware of his mistake, he
has turned away.

It seems hard to believe that these wonderful resemblances
may have been brought about by the accumulation of slight,
useful variations. But we must ever bear in mind the great
amount of individual variability which exists in all organisms
(this inherent, surely God-planned tendency to variation having
enabled organic life to put itself in harmony with new conditions),
and that it has taken, perhaps, thousands of centuries to make
the disguises as perfect as they are. Accurate comparisons and
measurements demonstrating the large amount of variability in
organisms may be found in a work by Professor J. A. Allen,
late of Harvard University, to whom naturalists are much in-
debted.

WILLIAM SETON.

1890.] THE DREAM OF PILATE' s WIFE. 775

THE DREAM OF PILATE'S WIFE.

•

I SAW the great sky open down all its deeps of blue,

I saw the hosts of heaven come thronging swiftly through,

And cherubim and seraphim float softly into view.

They met, they closed together, and upward held their wings,
And arm to arm they waited with gentle flutterings,
Till one expanse of glory shone widely on all things.

Then down the wavering pathway, a sea of flaming snow,
I saw a human Presence in silent anguish go —
Great beams crossed on His shoulders, blood from His flesh did
flow.

He walked alone and downcast, weighed with a whole world's

shame ;
He turned not and He spoke not, but through the great white

flame
Adown the angels' pinions in grief and silence cane,

Yet faltered not, or changed not, with step nor slow nor fleet —
He crossed the* azure causeway, where earth and heaven meet,
Till on our world of turmoil He pressed His bleeding feet.

And then dark shadows gathered and peals of thunder broke ;
The glory of the heavens was veiled with hanging smoke ;
Earth's rocks were rent asunder, earth's dead arose and spoke.

Far in the murky darkness the shadow of the tree
I saw that Being carry stood upward, one of three ;

A shriek of mortal anguish came ringing up to me.

• .

Then all was still; the darkness pressed upward over all,
And sun and sky were hidden and earth as in a pall,
And all the spirits vanished within heaven's closed wall.

My lord ! my lord ! I charge thee, have naught to do with

Him

Who walked the flaming pathway upheld by cherubim,
And bore the tree of sorrow into the shadows dim.

7/6 A RE VOL UTIONAR Y GO VERNOR AND HlS FAMIL Y. [Mar.

Love, of its strange foreknowledge, my dream interpreteth —
Oh ! let it not be vainly ! If He must die the death,
Keep thou thy hands blood- guiltless of Him of Nazareth!

• MARGARET H. LAWLESS.

Toledo, O.

A REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNOR AND HIS FAMILY.

AMIDST a number of old letters, tender and practical, there
is one which, in spite of torn parchment, faded ink, and the
mould of more than a hundred years, still exhales a breath of
romance. The writer, afterwards prominent socially and politically
in the history of Maryland, then a youth of scarcely more than
twenty years of age, had nothing but his pleasing address and
distinguished name to recommend him to the favor of Miss Mary
Digges, only child of Ignatius Digges, Esq., of Melwood Park.

Thomas Sim Lee was descended from a Norman family
established in England at the Conquest ; in America it is well
known through the patriotism of Richard Henry Lee, Light-horse
Harry, and Robert Lee of Arlington. In England the Lees
ranked among the gentry. As early as 1192 Lionel Lee, with
his company of gentlemen cavaliers, accompanied Richard Cceur-
de-Lion in the third Crusade, and was created Earl of Litchfield
for his gallant conduct at the siege of Acre. The pioneer of the
family in America was Richard Lee, a cavalier from Shropshire,
who, " some time in the reign of Charles I. went over to the
colony of Virginia as secretary and one of the King's Privy
Council. He and Sir William Berkeley kept the colony to its
allegiance during the civil war between Charles I. and Cromwell.
While Charles II. was at Breda, Richard Lee went over and had
a private conference with him in regard to the colony. On his
return he and Berkeley succeeded in having Charles II. pro-
claimed King of England, France, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia.
In gratitude for his loyalty, on the Restoration Charles ordered
the arms of Virginia to be added to those of England."

Philip Lee, the second son of this gentleman, crossed over
into Maryland, and became the founder of that branch of the
family known as the Maryland Lees. He was the grandfather of
Thomas Sim Lee, the young aspirant to the hand of Miss Digges
and future governor of Maryland.

Mr. Digges, a wealthy proprietor of Prince George County,

1 890.] A RE VOL UT10NAR Y GO VERNOR AND HlS FA MIL Y. 777

Maryland, was the owner of a surJbrb estate and countless slaves,
and lived en prince among the Southern gentry of the period.
His magnificent household was modelled upon those of England.
Like the patroons of New Amsterdam, he was all-powerful with
his numerous dependents, to whom he administered justice. It
is not surprising that young Lee, the favored lover of his " dear
Molly," without fortune or patrimony, should have been frowned
upon by her father. To add to their difficulties, Mr. Digges was
an ardent Catholic, a friend of Lord Baltimore, and bitterly op-
posed to the union of his daughter with one not of the same
faith. He obtained from the young lady a promise not to marry
without his consent; there ensued, in consequence, a stormy and
fruitless courtship.

In the meantime, Sir Robert Eaton, governor of the colony
of Maryland, and guardian of Lee, died. The young fellow there-
upon threw up the office (clerk of Frederick County) which he
had inherited from his father, and sailed for England, in the
hope of easing his heart and mending his fortunes. Of his career
there little is known save the fact that he played whist at Bath
with my Lord Chesterfield. Through the influence of his uncle,
Mr. Russell, an English merchant, he obtained a position in the
East India Company, a guarantee of wealth in those days. The
prospect of a still more distant separation from the object of his
affections, however, made him hesitate, though the future ap-
peared golden. He requested leave to defer his answer, and set
sail for America, determined to try his fortune once more with
Miss Digges.

To the consternation of the household, he arrived at Melwood
and was again refused. In his perturbation, and somewhat ap-
palled, no doubt, by the reproaches of the angry father, he was
surprised into a falsehood, of which he immediately repents in the
letter alluded to above. The note is written from the county
town of Melwood Park. The handwriting is firm and clear in
spite* of the mental excitement under which he must have written.
He carefully reproduced his letter before despatching it, and
added in his copy a memorandum of the date of its deliver-
ance. It is from this copy that? we quote the following:

" UPPER MARLBORO, August 3rd, 1771.
" SIR,

'• I have without design told you an untruth, and I think
it's incumbent on me to acknowledge it that all things may be
placed in a proper light.

VOL. L. — 50

778 A RE VOL UTIONAR Y Go VERNOR AND His FA MIL Y. [Mar. ,

" I want to take no advantage by deceiving you, and I sin-
cerely wish that all who have interested themselves in the affairs
of your Daughter and myself hacT the same candor. This Blun-
der which I made yesterday has given me a great deal of uneasi-
ness, and I would willingly have rectified it immediately, but your
refusing your consent for me to Marry Miss Digges, and the
great hurry you were in to leave me, actually threw me into
such confusion that I was deprived of utterance. You may
recollect that you told me Miss Digges had made and repeated
a promise never to Marry without your consent. Instead of my
observing that she had told me of her having made such a
promise, I said I had never asked her to marry me against your
consent. I do now solemnly declare that I had no premeditated
design of saying those words. No ! it's what my soul abhors !
I hope this assertion of mine will gain credit with you when I
ingenuously confess that I have applied and proposed your
daughter to Marry me without your consent ; in justice to her,
I now inform you that she has repeatedly and determinately

refused "I am, Sir, Yr. Hble. Servant,

"THO. SIM LEE.

"The original of this copy was sent to Mr. Digges the 5th
August, 1771."

Whether this ingenuous confession or the force of true love
finally overcame the father's heart, history saith not. Lee was
sent for, and having declared " in the most solemn and sacred
manner, as soon as I shall be married to my Dearest Molly,
. . . I will make my will and order and direct that in case of
my Death in the minority of my children, they shall be educated
in the faith of their Mother," the lovers were united. Mr.
Digges presented them to each other, saying : " Mary will not
marry without my consent. I cannot force her to marry
another. Therefore, you may have her." *

The .engagement was short. They were married on the 27th
of October, 1771, just two months after the repentant letter.

Many letters remain in the handwriting of Thomas Sim Lee,
but there are only a few fragments from Mrs. Lee. In one of
these her mind appears to be divided between the children's
wardrobe and replying to the reproaches of her husband for not
writing more frequently during his enforced absence :

" You that have no such object continually in yr. sight as a
poor sick child, and nothing to doe but to Dress yr. self & visit the

1 890.] A RE VOL UTIONAR Y Go VERNOR AND HlS FAMIL Y. 779

Ladies in the afternoons or Receive visits, ought not to think
much of 2 or 3 Letters to any one, don't get any Nankeen
for N.acy [Ignatius], if you have any money Left that you
intend to Lay out for him, Let it be in Linen what his shirts
was made of is so bad that they are all to piecis alredy."

Lee was made governor of Maryland in 17.79, at the age of
thirty-four, and was re-elected three times by the legislature. He
declined the last nomination, however, in compliance with his
wife's wishes. The .season at Annapolis was a heavy drain upon
-their income, which was royally spent despite the Lee motto :
Non incautus futuri. Their fortunes suffered by contact with
politics ; however, Nous avons change tout cela.

After the Revolution Governor Lee was unanimously elected
to the Senate from Maryland. He declined this office, as he did
the appointment of commissioner of the City of Washington,
offered to him by -the first President. He also subsequently re-
fused to be one of the framers of the Constitution, and steadily
declined all other offices. He was greatly esteemed by General
Washington, who placed in him the utmost confidence.

At the opening of the war between the colonies and Eng-
land Governor Lee embraced the cause of liberty with ardor. He
proved an able, energetic officer during that trying time, and organ-
ized a fine band of militia to protect the State from the British, who
were endeavoring to land from the Chesapeake. At the close
of the war General Washington, in a very flattering letter ex-
pressing a " high sense of the powerful aid which I have received
from the State of Maryland, in complying with every request
from the executive of it," informs Governor Lee of the sur-
render of Lord Cornwallis, and consigns to his care half of the
prisoners taken thereby. This letter is one of several still in the
possession of his descendants.

Mrs. Lee also united in her husband's zeal for the cause.
To her General Washington also wrote, acknowledging with his-
usual grace "the patriotic exertions of the Ladies of Maryland.'

" PASSAIC FALLS, Oct. nth, 1780.
" MADAM,

" I am honored with your letter of the 27th of September,
and cannot forbear taking the earliest moment to express the
high sense I entertain of the patriotic exertions of the Ladies of
Maryland in *favor of the army.

" In answer to your enquiry respecting the disposal of the
Gratuity, I must take the liberty to observe that it appears to

780 A RE VOL UTIONAR Y Go VERNOR AND HlS FAMIL Y. [Mar. ,

me, the money which has been or may be collected, cannot
be expended in so eligible and beneficial a manner, as in pur-
chase of shirts & stocks (black) for the use bf the troops in
the Southern army.

" The polite offer you are pleased to make of your further
assistance in the execution of this liberal design & the gen-
erous disposition of the Ladies insure me of its success, and
cannot -fail to entitle both yourself and them to the warmest
gratitude of those who are the objects of it.

" I have the honor to be, Madam,

"With the highest respect & regard,

"Yr. most obed't & H. Ser't,

"GEO. WASHINGTON.
" Mrs. Lee."

The sympathy which Governor Lee felt for the Colonies in
their struggle estranged from him many friends and relatives
who remained loyal to King George. With the eminent excep-
tion of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Governor Lee was almost
the only man of prominence in Maryland who declared himself
openly againzt the British. His uncle, Richard Lee, the princely
owner of Blenheim, Maryland, rebuked him severely for his
political sentiments. When the Colonial successes became more
assured, however, Mr. Lee gladly availed himself of his distin-
guished nephew's influence, and applied for a guard of soldiers
to protect his estate, whither they were promptly despatched.

It is not surprising that the proprietor of Blenheim should
have been anxious for the preservation of his manor. It has been
described as one of the handsomest country-seats of Maryland
or Virginia. The bricks employed in its construction were im-
ported from England, as were also the superbly carved stair-
case and wainscoting. The splendors of Blenheim drew visitors
from far and near, and the renowned wood-work suffered much
from their mutilations. Unfortunately, this superb house was
burned with all its treasures. A second mansion, which is said
to be of interest, though not so beautiful as the former, was
built upon the same site.

It may be of interest to mention here that Blenheim,
England, the country-seat of the Duke of Marlborough, was
formerly tenanted by Sir Henry Lee. He was the keeper of
the royal domain of Woodstock during the time «of Charles I.
and his son, whom the fair Alice Lee aided in his flight from the
Roundheads. Maryborough's palace of Blenheim has superseded

1 8 90. ] A RE VOL UTIONAR Y GO VERNOR AND HlS FAMIL Y. 781

the interesting old pile, the last of whose towers was destroyed
by gunpowder in obedience to the commands of his indefati-
gable duchess.

A romantic story is told of Richard Lee's son, Philip Lee,
who during a sojourn in England had unwittingly won the heart
of his cousin, Miss Russell. Unconscious of the young lady's
affection, he started to make the conventional "grand tour," and
returned from his travels to find her dangerously ill. The phy-
sician having explained that a return to health would be rapid
had she the will to recover, her anxious parents entreated Philip to
find out the secret that stood in the way of her convalescence.
He accordingly catechised the sick girl gently and with much
sympathy. At length he ventured to inquire if she were brood-
ing over some love affair, the hero of which might not be
acceptable to her parents, assuring her warmly that, if such were
the case, he was convinced it might be brought to a happy
conclusion. Miss Russell blushed and replied that she was
troubled by nothing of the kind. His questions soon pressed so
closely that the poor girl, having no longer the strength to
resist, exclaimed in despair : " If you will know the truth, .Phil,
then, to use the words of Nathan, ' Thou art the man.' " This
revelation was somewhat startling to the eager interlocutor, and
the denoument natural. Miss Russell regained her health and
spirits and became Mrs. Philip Lee, of Blenheim.

But to return to Governor Lee. Some years after his mar-
riage he moved to Western Maryland, where land was thought
more fertile than on the Eastern Shore, and was to be had at
a much lower rate. In the depth of winter he set out to Fred-
erick Town, and sleighed thence with his little sons for fifteen
miles until he reached Needwood Forest, the home of Parson
Booth. According to a tradition in the family, the fences were
entirely buried and the whole landscape was one vast mantle of
snow. Mr. Booth, a clergyman of the Church of England, owned
some two thousand acres of forest land, upon which he had built
himself a small house. Little is known of him except that he
was of the family of Lord Delamere, and appeared suddenly in
the wilds of Maryland, leaving in England a wife and six sons,
five of whom were afterwards drowned on their way to America.
His household at Needwood consisted of two maiden ladies, some
students, and an innumerable retinue of cats. Governor Lee, on
his arrival, was greeted by the sight of this feline multitude
dining luxuriously from a horse-trough filled with milk. Farmers
long preserved their memory with gratitude, for during their

782 A RE VOLUJIONAR Y Go VERNOR AND His FAMIL y. [Mar.,

prosperous reign x>f many years barn rats were an unknown
quantity.

Mr. Booth had established a flourishing school at Needwood,
which was for some time one of the foremost places of instruc-
tion in the South. Southern gentlemen of the period who were
not educated abroad or by tutors were sent to Needwood Forest.
They came on horseback from the most remote districts. Mr Alls-
ton, who married the charming and unfortunate daughter of Aaron
Burr, studied here, having ridden all the way from Charleston.
Judge Purviance, of Baltimore, Judge Bushrod Washington, nephew
of General Washington, and many other eminent men were edu-
cated by the English parson.

Governor Lee purchased the entire property, and Mr. Booth,
removing still further west, crossed the mountain into Washing-
ton County. In addition to the estate of Parson Booth, Gover-
nor Lee bought other tracts of land in the same neighborhood
from various Scotch and English syndicates, uniting them under
the name of Needwood Forest. Among his purchases was a
fertile piece of land running to the Potomac, rejoicing in the
name of " Merryland Tract." The origin of this title, accord-
ing to popular theory, is due to the fact that the land once
belonged to a merry set of people, whose gay lives were
thus deemed worthy of record. It is more probable, however,
that the surveyors, whose fancy occasionally ran riot in the be-
stowing of names on the vast lands they surveyed, are account-
able for the title. Another tract belonging to Governor Lee
still bears the name of "The Lost Pen and Ink," the gentle-
men of the survey, having parted with their writing materials,
chose thus to perpetuate the memory of their misfortune.

On the close of his official life Governor Lee established
his winter home in Georgetown, where his home was for a long
time the headquarters of the Federal party. He, however, de-
voted the greater part of the year to his Needwood farm, re-
turning to Georgetown late in the fall. His daughter says in a
letter to Mrs. Quincy : " We shall not leave Needwood until
late in November. My father, who farms for revenue as well as
amusement, finds it requisite to remain until he disposes of the
fruits of his industry."

Governor Lee tore down the house of Parson Booth and
built himself a simple country house in the style of an English
cottage. His estate lay at the foot of the Blue Ridge in Middle-
town valley, one of the most beautiful and fertile valleys of
Maryland. This valley and the surrounding country, in addition

I 890.] A RE VOL UTIONAR Y Go VERNOR AND HlS FAMIL Y. 783

to their beauty and fertility, have become famous since the late
war. Harper's Ferry, noted alike for the grandeur of its scenery
and for the capture of John Brown, is within a few miles of
Needwood, while to the north, at a short distance, lies Cramp-
ton's Gap, a pass held by McClellan. The latter established his
headquarters near the home of Governor Lee, and was there fre-
quently entertained during his occupation of the valley. Still
further to the north of Needwood rises the great mas^ of South
Mountain, over which passes the western high-road disputed so
fiercely by the troops of the rival armies until the bloody battle
of Antietam was fought, about a mile from the summit of the
mountain. For the purposes of social life, however, Needwood
was but poorly equipped. Frederick, the nearest town, was fif-
teen miles away. Mr. Clerc-Lee, a gentleman greatly attached
to the governor, was the only person within several miles. He
had bought land adjoining Needwood, and had built himself a
house solely for the purpose of being near Governor Lee. The
frequent and protracted absences of the latter, however, finally
discouraged his friend, who, finding forest life rather dreary, re-
turned with his family to the more inspiriting scenes of Charles
County, then a fashionable part of Maryland. The departure of
this* family left Governor Lee and his household completely
isolated.

Governor Lee now turned his whole attention to farming, and
took great pride in his lands, which became famous for their
fertility. Writing to his daughter, Miss Eliza Lee, then married
and living in Wilmington, he says : " Some ladies and gentle-
men came from Baltimore yesterday to see Needwood farm.
Can you boast of one in Delaware that possesses such attrac-
tions ? . . . My wheat stands higher than the fences, which,
as you know, are not low, and my crop has a beautiful health
and regular appearance which is probably not exceeded by any
in the State."

For years after Governor Lee's death Needwood was still
noted. We find in an old newspaper a letter from a corre-
spondent who had been stopping near there, in which he re-
marks : " The descendants of Governor Lee form a circle as re-
markable for refinement and cultivation as their lands are famous
for productiveness and fertility."

The politician had become so absorbed in the farmer that
Governor Lee's heart was divided between patriotism and the
fluctuations of the agricultural market. During the war of 1812
he appears to be depressed, but hastens to add : " The pros-

784 A RE VOL UTIONAR Y GO VERNOR AND HlS FAMIL ) ". [Mar. ,

pect of Peace, or even a good market for Flour and Beef, would
cheer me"; and again: "We expect to hear of Peace every
day, and a high price for everything that should be high."

He owned, a fine body of slaves, two hundred in all, the
majority of whom were well-trained laborers. He was attached
to many of them, though some "perplexed and plagued him."
In a letter he describes the death of one Robin, who, after a
long illness, "went off like the snuff of an exhausted candle.
He never took a dose of Physick during the course of a long
life. 'When I told him that a doctor should be called, he warmly
objected, declaring his belief that I knew as well as the doctor
what was proper for him, from which we may clearly infer
that he had not a greater reliance upon the skill of the Fac-
ulty than Mr. Madison seems to have,"

Though no longer active in politics, Governor Lee still fol-
lowed with interest the movements of the Federal party, of
which he had formerly been a prominent member. In the fall
of 1812 he congratulates himself upon the prospect of the
county becoming Federal ; " a great meeting is soon to take
place, at which arrangements will be made, I presume, to make
the wished-for change. Of two evils it seems best to take the
least. Madison and the Jefferson crew ought in all events to
be discarded ; but Clinton, this De Witt Clinton, I like not that
Jacobinical fellow."

Mrs. Lee died in 1805, and was sincerely mourned by her
husband. He has written the following inscription in a volume
of Thomas a Kempis, given to his wife by Prince Gallitzin, the
Russian convert to Catholicity, known throughout this country by
the humble name of Father Smith. "The gift of the Reverend
Mr. Smith to Mary Lee, 1788, passed by the ever-to-be-lamented
death of my beloved wife to me, her inconsolable Husband, Thos.
S. Lee." He had joined the Catholic Church some years be-
fore his wife's death, having once made a vow so to do when
she was dangerously ill. As a tribute to the memory of her
who had been his intelligent and faithful companion during more
than thirty yeaK of married life, Governor Lee built a church
which he named St. Mary's, " in honor of my dearly loved
wife, your sainted mother." This building remained in pos-
session of the family until 1829. The bishops assembled
in Baltimore then decided that the titles of all churches should
be vested in the diocesan, on account of a great scan-
dal caused by troubles in New Orleans. The owners of the
cathedral there, having threatened to use it for other pur-

1 890.] A RE VOL U TIONAR Y Go VERNOR AND HlS FAMIL Y. 785

poses, brought the matter before the courts, where the famous
lawsuit was at length decided against them, 1842.

After the marriage of his eldest daughter, Miss Eliza Lee,
who had been his friend and companion always, but more par-
ticularly since the death of his wife, Governor Lee remained
closely at Needwood, which he was loath to leave even for
short visits to his daughter and her family, urging, in one let-
ter, as a sufficient regret, the uncomfortable and unsuitable
fashions of the period. " Golden will make my clothes fashion-
able, do or say as I may, but I cannot wear them high in
the neck, short- waisted, and flying off at the sides." Governor
Lee died in 1819, at the age of seventy- four, leaving his
estate to be divided equally between his children. There, are
now four country-seats within the radius of one mile bearing
the name of Needwood. Three of these belong to his descend-
ants, who at present own about fifteen hundred acres of the
original three thousand. The old homestead built by Governor
Lee has passed into other hands. Unfortunately, there exists
no portrait of him. It is thought that he had a great distaste
to being painted. He is said to have been a remarkably hand-
some man, standing six feet four inches, and magnificently pro-
portioned. Frederick still preserves the memory of his superb
appearance as he marched through the town at the head of
the Maryland militia to assist the governor of Pennsylvania to
crush the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. His sons were all fine-
looking men, none of them being under six feet. In 1824
Peale, writing to John Lee, Esq., youngest son of the gov-
ernor, says that he has "an engagement to paint portraits of
the governors elected in the State of Maryland since the change
of government I am desirous to know if there is a portrait in
your family of Governor Lee, and whether I may have the
favor of making a copy. "

There being no portrait, the artist suggested that William Lee,
the eldest son, said to be wonderfully like his father, should sit
for the painting, which would be placed in Annapolis as that of
Thomas Sim Lee. Unlike an enterprising Marylander, however,
who recently sat for all the portraits of his ancestors, male and
female, William Lee declined to personate his father.

The superb estate of Melwood Park, which fell to the children
of Governor Lee, was sold that the property might be divided
among the heirs.

Governor Lee left six children, four sons and two daughters.
His eldest son, William, lived the greater portion of -his life at

7 86 A RE VOL UTIONAR Y Go VERNOR AND His FAMIL Y. [Mar. ,

Needwood, where he built himself a house, and where he was at
one time the host of the charming Mrs. Lewis (Molly Custis).

Archibald Lee, another son, was a charming and accomplished
man of the world. He spent most of his time in England, where
he was a great favorite. Among his papers there are a number
of letters from eminent people whose autographs alone would
make the correspondence interesting. Invitations to famous coun-
try houses ; personal orders from Ponsonby and Sir John Sinclair
for debates in the House of Lords; a note signed John Kemble; one
requesting the pleasure of his company in a drive to Bath, from
Thomas Weld, Esq., in whose chapel at Lulworth Castle Mr. Car-
roll, first primate of Baltimore, was consecrated ; letters of friendship
from Lord Lansdowne ; Henry David Erskine, son of the famous
Baron Erskine, "the most consummate advocate of his age";
several from William Pinckney, then minister to London, and two
from Lucien Bonaparte. These are both written from Thorn-
grove, Worcestershire, where he was detained by the English,
who treated him as a prisoner. In one he expressed his great
desire to reach America, " ce pays dont la politique me tient
eloigne. . . . J'espere quelque jour que nous nous y rever-
rons et que nous benirons ensemble 1'heureuse terre oil on jouit
de la liberte civile et politique." In another, addressed to Archi-
bald Lee, citoyen Americain, he begs Mr. Lee to stop at Thorn-
grove on his way to London. Bonaparte wished to discuss a
project of sending to Philadelphia some of his effects, whose
value he places at fifty thousand pounds sterling, and which
were then awaiting embarkation at Civita Vecchia, from whence
he had himself set sail to escape from the exasperation of Na-
poleon, when he was captured by an English cruiser : " Je ne
doute pas que tot ou tard on ne me laisse continuer ma route
vers la nouvelle patrie que j'ai adoptee et, en attendant, je vou-
drais y envoyer ce qui m'appartient, comme, malgre ma deten-
tion je me regarde deja comme votre concitoyen. Je compte sur
votre obligeance, et je serais bien aise de causer avec vous de
cet objet. Agreez, je vous prie, mes salutations amicales."

Miss Eliza D. Lee, her father's eldest and much-loved daughter,
presided over his establishment during eleven years after the
death of her mother. As the head of her father's house in
Georgetown, she came in contact with all the brilliant and dis-
tinguished men of the day. She was a great favorite with Mrs.
Quincy, who, writing to a friend in Boston, says: "Eliza Lee, at
the head of her father's establishment in Georgetown, has long
commanded general admiration by her highly-cultivated mind

I 8 90 .] A RE VOL U TIONA KY GO VERNOR A ND HlS FA MIL Y. 787

and graceful and attractive manners." We find the following
passage on the admiration which Miss Lee excited in a letter
from a friend of hers : " You, I am told, have been the idol of
the winter. The woman who has the power to draw Mr. Ran-
dolph away from Miss Caton must calculate on the hatred of her
own sex and the admiration of the other." Mrs. Quincy, on
her return North, where, as she expresses it, she is " at last in
the midst of the paternal acres, and among shades and scenes
consecrated by recollections full of gratitude and tenderness,"
writes to her dear Miss Lee : " In all this restored happiness
we think of you all, and charm our enquiring friends with the
story of your worth, your kindness," etc. Her signature occurs
frequently in Miss Lee's correspondence, as does also that of
Josiah Quincy. In one place the latter writes regretting he may
not accompany her on a riding expedition which they had
planned together :

" I am denied after all the privilege of being your and Miss
Teackle's cavalier to-morrow, as I promised myself; a lighter
carriage than my own cannot be obtained, and this requires my
whole stock of cavalry and deprives me of my stud, which is a
death-blow to my Knightly pretensions. Will you convey my
lamentations to Miss Teackle. Be assured that whether on the
spur or the wheel, I am very respectfully Y. Hble. S — ,

"JOSIAH QUINCY.

" I am supported in this disappointment by being informed
that you have a devoted cavalier at y. command."

Among other writers are Mrs. Madison, John Randolph of
Roanoke, Colonel Pickering, etc. Mr. Randolph frequently in-
vites Miss Lee's attention to various reviews, hoping she "will
not find them wholly devoid of interest." Colonel Pickering
sends a sermon with the following words : " The enclosed ser-
mon, on the signs of the times, which Col. Pickering received
last night, and has just read, he presents to Miss Lee : an. un-
usual present to a young lady, but not the less acceptable to
her serious and reflecting mind."

Miss Lee married the Hon. Outerbridge Horsey, Senator
from Delaware, Mr. Randolph officiating as groomsman. Mr. and
Mrs. Horsey eventually settled upon part of Governor Lee's estate
which she inherited, and which still bears the name of Needwood.

The descendants of Governor Lee and Charles Carroll of
Carrollton intermarried several times, thus cementing by a more
intimate connection the friendship of their ancestors. John Lee,
the youngest son, for several terms member of Congress from

788 A RE VOL UTIONAR Y Go VERNOR AND His FAMIL Y. [Mar.,

Maryland, married Harriet Carroll, granddaughter to the signer,
while her brother, Colonel Carroll, married Mary Digges Lee,
granddaughter of Thomas Sim Lee.

The mother of Mrs. John Lee was Miss Harriet Chew, of
Philadelphia, one of the beauties of her day. She is represented
leaning upon the arm of General Washington in the famous
painting of Martha Washington's Reception. It is said that Mr.
Carroll went to Philadelphia to address another lady, whose charms
were, however, completely effaced by the sight of Miss Chew.
He left the city an engaged man without having once thought
of her for whose sake he had undertaken this trip.

Colonel Carroll's wife, Miss Lee, had been intimately asso-
ciated, before her marriage, with the beautiful Misses Caton,
.about whom so much has been written. In a letter to one of
her relatives, Miss Lee speaks thus of the eldest of the sisters,
who married first the brother of Madame Bonaparte (n-Je Patter-
son) and afterwards the Marquis of Wellesley : "You can form
no idea of the change that has taken place in Mrs. Patterson;
her whole soul is absorbed in religion. ... I always went into
the chapel (Doughreghan Manor) at half-past five in the morn-
ing, and invariably would find her already there. She told
me last month, in speaking of England, that she reflects with
the greatest remorse upon her dissipation while there, and that
no consideration would induce her to return again ; that her
only wish now was to atone for the follies of her past life.
. . . Mrs. Patterson showed me all her correspondence with
the Duke of Wellington, besides a variety of letters from other
great people in England, in which they spoke of her loss not
only to individuals, but to the nation. After reading these
letters, all of which were filled with compliments, she told me
that she had not shown them to me out of vanity, but to
prove to me that if she had loved the world too much, she
had been more excusable than most women '.' The fascinations
of England eventually triumphed over Mrs. Patterson's religious
determination to atone for the follies of her past life. After the
death of her first husband, his fair widow yielded to^the solici-
tations of her admirers and returned to England to console the
nation for her loss. She married the Marquis of Wellesley,
viceroy of Ireland and eider brother to the Duke of Wellington,
her great friend and admirer. Lady Wellesley then entered
upon her career of conquest, and together with her beautiful
sisters, Lady Stafford and the Dijchess of Leeds, was for many
years the reigning toast. M. C. L.

1890.] THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. 789

THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON.

*•' O world, as God has made it ! All is beauty ;
And knowing this is love, and love is duty,
What further may be sought for or declared ? "

— Browning.

THE French peasant has always been an interesting study.
The Abbe Roux and Max O'Rell are the latest of his country-
men to give us a view of his life and its difficulties. Though
lacking in many ways, their accounts are truthful and detailed
enough to deserve attention. The most thoughtful and sympa-
thetic literary handling the peasant has ever received was from
the pen of Georges Sand, whose brief tale of La Mare au
Diable is an idyl of the soil, the beginning of which breathes the
very essence of peasant life. Unhappily, the genius which could
burn with so clear and pure a flame, knew not how to resist
the gusts of wind that play havoc with most human candles.
Therefore, we can but regret that La Mare au Diable is al-
most the only expression in modern French literature of the
depth and beauty, the simplicity of suffering and enjoyment of
peasant life. In the other arts tlje peasant has fared equally
well and ill. He ' has been caricatured, pettyfied, and puttyfied,
but seldom justly^ delineated. We all know the type of peas-
ant lads and lasses that rules supreme in comic opera. We
know the type that adorns the canvases, more or less pro-
fusely, of most modern artists.

In the midst *of all this artistic untruth, a French painter,
humble and unknown, by name Jean Francois Millet, began to
reveal the peasant in the light of inner and outer reality. He
was born on the 4th of October, 1814, in the little Norman
village of Gruchy. His family, tillers of the soil from root to
branch, was in many respects remarkable. His father, Jean
Louis Nicolas Millet, had a strong and beautiful nature, con-
taining the undeveloped germs of abilities in many lines. His
mother appears to have been equally above the average ; but
the influence that made itself most felt in the life of the youth-
ful Millet was that of his grandmother — a woman whose parallel
would have to be sought among the rough-hewn, majestic por-
traits of the women of the Old Testament. A picturesque house-

790 THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. [Mar.,

hold it must have been, that homestead hidden in the little val-
ley opening toward the sea. The widowed grandmother ruled
supreme. • Jean Louis, his gentle wife, and their eight children
sought her guidance in every matter. In the evenings, while
the busy hum and burr of her spinning-wheel sounded, or the
click-clack of her knitting-needles — for the Widow Millet was
never idle — her keen eyes looked out from the net-work of
wrinkles of her kindly brown face, observant of every one in
the little group surrounding her, but ever and anon glancing to
the corner of the hearth where " her heart's favorite," Jean Fran-
9ois, was seated. As the rising and falling blaze from the great
logs illumined his face and figure, the grandmother's busy fingers
would occasionally slacken as she watched the lad, sometimes
busy with a bit of board or paper, a pencil or charcoal,
sometimes gazing dreamily into the fire, sometimes listening
eagerly to the stories, ghostly and marvellous some, others
bloody and cruel narratives of 'the days, yet near at hand, of
the Terror — stories that some of the little circle never tired of
repeating. Oftenest the narrator of these tales would be the
uncle of Jean Louis, Charles Millet, ordained priest before the
Revolution, enveloped in all its dangers, and finally leading a
peaceful and useful life, partly as priest and teacher, partly as la-
borer, in sabots and soutane, on his nephew's little farm. All in all,
they were a family that was not ill-calculated to produce a great
man. They had strong intellects, not altogether undeveloped ;
strong bodies, not without a certain rough comeliness ; hearts
tender and upright; views of life honest and r^ardy. Their life
was made up of hard work and scant rest, of privations and
few enjoyments, but they took their fate in their hands with a
ready and cheerful acceptance that was grander and nobler than
any mere philosophical content or resignation. Such were the
Millets. Such had been their fathers before them.

The grandmother's favorite, the little Fran£ois, grew to be a .
sturdy, strong-limbed, open-browed, dark-eyed youth whose broad
back had already — for was he not the eldest of the boys ? —
to bear many of the family burdens. Fortunately, he got a little
schooling, and still more fortunately, he learned with avidity all
that fell in his way. The Bible he knew intimately, and all of his
grandmother's little store of learned and pious books. A young
vicar at the church of Greville, where Francois went to be con-
firmed, taught him Latin and initiated him into the wonders of
Virgil, who became at once and remained ever after an unfailing
solace and comfort to the young peasant.

1890.] THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. 791

In all these years while Frangois was working, learning, and
dreaming, he had not forgotten the wish that had early developed
within him to transfer to canvas some of the beauty that he saw
and felt — helped thereto by Virgil, perhaps — in the life and
scenes that were his. At last, one day, the father, Jean Louis,
discovered the secret wish of his son's heart. His biographer,
Alfred Sensier, gives the following account of the occurrence that
turned the current of young Millet's life : " Coming home one day
from Mass he (Frangois) met an old man, his back bcwed, and
going wearily home. He was surprised at the perspective and
movement of the bent figure. This was for the young peasant
the discovery of foreshortening. With one glance he understood
the mysteries of planes advancing, retreating, rising, and falling.
He came quickly home, and taking a lump of charcoal, drew
from memory all the lines he had noted in the action of the old
man. When his parents returned from church they instantly
recognized it — his first portrait made them laugh.

Millet was eighteen ; his father was deeply moved by the
revelation of this unforeseen talent; they talked the matter over
and Frangois admitted that he had some desire to become a
painter. His father only said these touching words : " My poor
Frangois, I see thou art troubled by the idea. I should gladly
have sent you to have the trade of painting taught you, which
they say is so fine, but you are the oldest boy and I was not
able to spare you ; now that your brothers are growing older,
I do not wish to prevent you from learning that which you are
so anxious to know. We will soon go to Cherbourg and find
out whether you have talent enough to earn your living by this
business."

Accordingly, in a few weeks Frangois and his father went to
Cherbourg to the studio of a painter called Mouchel, a pupil of the
school of David. At first the artist cannot be persuaded that the
drawings they brought with them were the work of the big, awk-
ward young fellow before him. When he is at last convinced,
he willingly accepts him as a pupil , and assures the father :
" Well, you will go to perdition for having kept him so long,
for your child has the stuff of a great painter ! "

The father went back to Gruchy. The son remained at
Cherbourg, and for two months worked and studied indefati-
gably under the tutelage of Mouchel. Then a sorrowful blow
fell on him. One day a messenger from Gruchy came with
sad news to Cherbourg — Jean Louis Millet was dangerously ill.
Frangois rushed madly homewards and reached Gruchy only to

792 THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. [Mar.,

find his father delirious, dying of brain-fever. His death left a
grief-stricken, heart-sore family. But peasants must forego the
luxury of grief with all others, and so, as soon as the funeral
was over, Francois endeavored to take his father's place in the
labors of the field. That was his work, he felt. Peasant-like,
he accepted it as part of the inevitable, without rebellion or
complaint. But his heart was not in his work. A different
labor, not higher but other than farming, had already claimed
his allegiance. The grandmother's observant eyes discovered his
patient disquietude. One day she said to him : " My Fran-
cois, you must accept the will of God. Your father, my Jean
Louis, said you should be a painter; obey him and go back
to Cherbourg."

Very gladly he went. In Cherbourg he entered the studio
of Langlois, who gave him little advice but boundless liberty
to do as he pleased. He tried his hand at everything — copy-
ing and original work of every sort. He found time for much
reading, which he chose with judgment and discretion. The
months went by, and people began to talk of the young painter
from the country whose work showed such cleverness and origi-
nality. A few bold and good-natured spirits thought that he
should be sent to Paris. Langlois, declaring that he could teach
him nothing more, addressed a petition to the municipal council
of Cherbourg, in consequence of which they voted an annuity of
four hundred francs for Millet's education. The general council
of La Manche added later six hundred francs, to be paid until
the completion of the young artist's studies. With the splen-
did prospect of this princely allowance before him (unfortu-
nately it never became much more than a prospect), and with
the trembling counsels of his mother and grandmother in his
ears, young Millet departed for Paris in January, 1837.

At first Paris, with its seething possibilities, bewildered him,
saddened him, disheartened him. It is a trait of the peasant
nature to be comfortable and happy only in the midst of the
familiar. Millet, essentially a peasant, had a positive fear of the
strange and new. His first contact with Parisians was so unfor-
tunate that his only happiness during those early months in
the great city was in his constant visits to the galleries of the
Louvre and the Luxembourg. Very interesting are his accounts
of his first impressions of these celebrated collections. His likes
and dislikes are strongly indicated. He has an instant appre-
ciation of true, as quick a discernment of false, art. After a
good deal of dallying, Millet roused himself to action and was

1890.] THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. 793

admitted to the studio of Paul Delaroche, the fashionable painter
of the day. Here he fared very badly and was misunderstood
by master and pupils, though occasionally some of his work
compelled admiration. His first attempt in the life-class pro-
voked the universal comment, " How insolently natural ! " Dela-
roche, while admitting his talent, concerned himself very little
about this " man of the woods," as his fellow-pupils dubbed
him. Millet was too original, too eccentric, too little a wor-
shipper of the great Delaroche, to please master or pupils. When
the time came for competition for the great " Prix de Rome"
Millet was admitted and worked enthusiastically at the figure.
Delaroche, seeing his determination and much struck with his
work, called him aside and said :

"You want the ' Prix de Rome'?"

" That is the reason I compete," answered Millet laconically.

"I find your composition very good," continued the master,
"but I must tell you that I especially want Roux appointed; but
next year I will use all my influence for you."

Millet said no more, relinquished his chance and left the
studio, bitterly realizing that upon himself alone must he rely
for instruction and protection. One friend the young Norman
had made in the studio. A certain Marolle had been kind to
him and had won his liking. When he left the studio Marolle,
a good-natured, gay young fellow, went with him, and together
they established a little studio in the Rue de 1'Est. There life
very soon became a difficult problem for Millet, whose family
could not, like Marolle's, smooth his rough path for him. Per-
haps he occasionally wished that he, too, were the son of a
wealthy varnish manufacturer. His pension came very irregularly,
if it came at all, and was quite insufficient for his needs. It was
only Marolle's advice, encouragement, and assistance that made
living possible to him. He gave up the studies of forest forms
and rural scenes, to which his fancy drew him from the first,
and desperately turned his hand to whatever it could find to
do. He occupied himself with anything and everything that
would win him a few francs for daily bread. He did portraits,
pastels, imitations of Watteau and Boucher, whom he detested
— mythological subjects. It is hardly fair to accuse him, as
some critics have, of abandoning his ideals in the vulgar strug-
gle of existence. He was young, inexperienced ; his ideals had
scarcely matured, and " pot-boiling " was a necessity then as now.
He did very little in those days that shamed him later on. A
VOL. L. — 51

794 Tux PAINTER OF BARBIZON. [Mar.,

pure mind will not permit much evil to enter into the kindling
of the fire, even for youthful " pot-boiling."

In 1840 Millet made his first attempt to exhibit at the Salon.
Of the two portraits he sent, one was rejected and one accepted,
hung, and unnoticed. Discouraged by this failure, he went back to
Normandy, whither, for the next few years, he annually returned to
breathe again his native air and be again for a time with his
family. During one of these visits he painted several portraits of
his mother and grandmother. He worked at the latter's portrait
with special care, for he understood the beauty and force of her
character, and wished, he said, " to show the soul of his grand-
mother."

During one of these home visits he met and married his
first wife, a good young girl of Cherbourg. They were married
in 1841, and in 1844 she died. The marriage was not a happy
one, and the fact that his young wife was almost a constant
invalid served to further complicate the problem of existence.
Of these years his biographer says : " He never spoke of this
time without a sort of terror. He was without money, position,
or connections. His material life was a daily fight. He was
ready to do anything that chance offered, but had endless diffi-
culties to get the most trifling sums paid. He met people who
took advantage of his poverty, who wearied him with their
refusals and went to all lengths of cruelty."

After the death of his wife Millet went for a while to
Cherbourg, and there married again, this time more fortunately.
Despite Alphonse Daudet's recent utterances to the contrary,
the wife of a man of genius does sometimes understand and
appreciate him. It is a troublesome question ; therefore I leave
M. Daudet to describe as flippantly as he pleases the prizes
that the rod and line of genius generally draw from the matri-
monial fish-pond. Not one of the unions so described was Millet's
second marriage. Madame Millet proved to be a good and
earnest woman and a most sympathetic helpmate.

Before returning to Paris Millet took his bride to Havre,
where they visited several friends while he executed some com-
missions for pictures. While they remained there, a public ex-
hibition of his works was organized, which met with some suc-
cess. All in all, he got about nine hundred francs together before
they left for Paris. The Havre visit was a brief interlude of peace
and prosperity. In Paris recommenced his drudgery and failure.
Yet the little attic home was bright and cheerful in spite of

1890.] THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. 795

its poverty. A whole colony of young artists lived near at
hand, with some of whom Millet became on the most friendly
terms and who formed a little clique of admirers around him,
for thoughtful artists and critics could not fail to appreciate the
element in Millet's work, even of the " pot-boiling " order, that
raised him far above mediocrity. About this time Alfred Sen-
sier, Millet's biographer and most intimate friend, made his ac-
quaintance. They became friends from the start and till death
their friendship lasted. The day that he met Sensier was truly,
for Millet, a rift in the dark clouds of his life. Never was
friend more active or more faithful. During the hard times ot
1848 the Millets would probably have starved to death had it
not been for the unwearied exertions of this kind friend. Through
his help and that of other friends, the artist sold a picture which
the Salon had, as usual, refused, for five hundred francs, and re-
ceived a commission from M. Ledru Rollin of eighteen hun-
dred francs. This was comparative affluence, but even twenty-
three hundred francs will not last for ever. Again Millet is
hard pressed. For a time sign-painting is his only resource.
Then he makes the grand discovery that drawings can be ex-
changed for clothes and furniture. How rapidly his pencil
flew then, and how willingly he gave half a dozen drawings
for a pair of shoes ! Other drawings went for a franc apiece,
and five or six portraits for twenty francs.

The year 1849 rnarks a new era in Millet's life — not oi
prosperity, but of purpose. Heretofore his paintings had been
marked by originality, cleverness, sincerity, but in all his work
there was an absence of depth and thought that seems to have
been not so much the abandonment of the ideal as an un-
conscious ignorance of it. One evening he chanced to hear
two young men coarsely commenting on one of his pictures
that was exhibited in a picture-dealer's windowr. The truth as
well as the falsehood of their words cut him to the quick.
To the day of his death he winced at the remembrance. From
his pain and humiliation sprang forth both purpose and reso-
lution. He returned home and told his wife the story.

" If you consent," said he, " I will do no more of that sort of
pictures. Living will be harder than ever and you will suffer,
but I will be free to do what I have long been thinking of."

Madame Millet answered with much simplicity and much noble-
ness : " I am ready. Do as you will."

"And from that time on," says M. Sensier, "Millet, relieved

796 THE. PAINTER OF BARBIZON. [Mar.,

in a sense from all servitude, entered resolutely into rustic
art."

A few months before this event a number of Paris artists,
among whom was Theodore Rousseau, in later years Millet's
devoted friend, had left the capital to settle in the little village of
Barbizon, on the outskirts of the forest of Fontainebleau. In the
summer of 1849 various considerations induced Millet and his
friend, the artist Jacque, to follow their example. They came
with their families, expecting to remain a few months ; the few
months became a life-time.

II.

In the recent exhibition at the American Art Galleries, in New
York City, of the works of Barye and his contemporaries, there
was a sketch of MiUet's home at Barbizon, signed " Millet, fils"
The painting does not display inherited genius, but it gives us a
very good idea of the humble and picturesque home that Millet
and his family so long occupied. The long, low-roofed cottage
is covered with vines and surrounded by trees. Inside, the three
narrow, low rooms, which are gradually added to with the fami-
ly's increasing size, are poor indeed, but neat and tasteful. One
of these little rooms is the studio where Millet spends half his
day — the morning being always given to farming and gardening.
He felt himself to be the interpreter of the peasant. The long
years of desultory labor in Paris had given him technical skill
in the highest degree. His years of suffering and discouragement
had not embittered, but sweetened and strengthened, his charac-
ter. His birth, his early training, his later years — all helped to
make him the one artist in France who could best understand
and express rural life, who could best raise art from the debase-
ment that talented dawdlers, unbelieving and unfeeling dilettanti
of genius, had brought upon her.

"Each eyed his neighbor, and was full of enthusiasm for a
manner," is Millet's summary of the work of the soulless Paris-
ians. Always clearly and concisely expressed are his views on
art and artists. Good sense and good judgment rule his words.
'• Who shall dare to say that a potato is inferior to a pomegran-
ate ? " he demands, when accused of trampling on the beautiful in
his studies of peasant life. In various letters to M. Sensier he
defines occasionally the feeling that inspires all his work. Per-

1890.] THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. 797

haps a few excerpts from these letters will best give his creed on
the matter.

" Some tell me that I deny the charms of the country. I
find much more than charms ; I find infinite glories. I see as
well as they do the little flowers of which Christ said that
Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.
I see the halos of dandelions, and the sun also, which spreads
out beyond the world its glory in the clouds. But I see, as
well, in the plain the steaming horses at work, and, in a rocky
place, a man, all worn out, whose 'haw!' has been heard since
morning, and who tries to straighten himself a moment and
breathe. The drama is surrounded by beauty."

" One can say that everything is beautiful in its own time
and place, and, on the other hand, that nothing is beautiful
which comes at the wrong time. . . . Beauty is expression."

" I want the people I paint to look as if they were dedi-
cated to their station — that it would be impossible for them to
ever think of being anything but what they are. A work
should be all of a piece, and people and things should be there
for an end."

"At the bottom it always comes to this: a man must be
touched himself in order to touch others ; and all that is done
from theory, however clever, can never attain this end, for it
is impossible that it should have the breath of life. To quote
the expression of St. Paul, ls£s sonans aut cymbalum tinniens? '

Very happy were the early days at Barbizon. To be im-
mersed in work of the studio and the field, to be surrounded
by his wife and children, to have his friends near at hand, and
the great forest for draught of healing and consolation when
he felt in need of both — this was Millet's programme of com-
fort. His friends tell us that with those for whom he really
cared he was always genial and confidential, not disdaining an
occasional joke and never happier than when he could persuade
a couple of friends to share, for weeks at a time, the rough
but warm hospitality of his simple home. His friends loved to
be with him and often came to pay the desired visits. Pleas-
ant recollections they took home with them of the long after-
noons in the bare little studio — dreamy hours, spent by
the visitors in watching the rapid, creative strokes of their
host's pencil or brush, listening to his thoughts, opinions, con-
fidences, and all the time watching the rings of their tobacco-
smoke curl around the portraits and sketches and studies that

798 THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. [Mar.,

clustered so thick on the walls, half-veiling, half-revealing the
sturdy traits of Millet's pictured relatives. In the evenings they
went to the forest of Fontainebleau, and there it was that this
peasant artist, in his rough sabots and old red sailor's jacket,
seemed most content with life. All the capacity for joy in his
large, impressionable nature was always set vibrating by the slight-
est contact with the open. In one of his letters to Sensier he
gives an idea of his sensibility to nature as well as a pretty pic-
ture of the Barbizon life :

" If you could see how beautiful the forest is ! I rush there
at the end of the day, after my work, and I come back every
time crushed. It is so calm, such a terrible grandeur, that I
find myself really frightened ; I don't know what those fellows,
the trees, are saying to each other; they say something which
we cannot understand, because we don't know their language,
that is all. But I'm sure they don't make puns (!) To-morrow,
Sunday, is the fete of Barbizon Every oven, stove, chimney,
saucepan, and pot is in such activity that you might believe it
was the day before the ' noces de Gamache' Every old triangle
is used as a spit, and all the turkeys, geese, hens, and ducks which
you saw in such good health are at this minute roasting and
boiling — and pies as big as wagon-wheels ! Barbizon is one big
kitchen, and the fumes must be smelt for miles."

Once in a while Millet's affairs took him to Paris for a day
or two, and always, when evening brought his return, there was
an affectionate, eager little group impatiently awaiting to escort
him to the house. When things had gone well with him and
a few spare francs enabled him to come laden with toys and bon-
bons for the children, it was a very gay little party that assembled
within the cottage ; and, in any case, the Millet household never
lacked love and confidence. Often enough they lacked other
things. Even in Barbizon it is impossible to support a large
family on an income uncertain at best and often a purely minus
quantity. In the art world, that part at least that is governed
by the Salon, the critics, and the picture-dealers, Millet continued
to meet with rebuffs, neglect, and abuse. Every time that a
picture of- his, whether accepted or rejected, appeared at the
Salon, a fresh storm burst about his ears. He had a few partisans,
a few admirers, but in general he was profoundly misunderstood,
maliciously misinterpreted. He was accused of revolutionary and
socialistic tendencies. Every sort of motive was ascribed to him
save the simple conscientiousness that alone actuated his work.

1890.] THE PAINTER OF BARnr/.ox. 799

Occasionally he sold a picture, but always at a very low figure.
Usually, when he had a painting to dispose of his friends were occu-
pied in the almost impossible task of first creating a Millet taste
and then gratifying it — with a profitable result to the artist. Strug-
gling bravely along, working indefatigably, bearing his privations
as best he could, appealing to his friends only when the burden
grew heavier than he could bear, Millet is as touching a figure as
was poor John Richling with his clever inefficiency. Quite often
it happened that the baker, the butcher, the grocer, and the
tailor of Barbizon took possession of the cottage, threatening
untold ill if > their accounts were not instantly settled. Sometimes
Rousseau, oftener Sensier, came to the rescue on these occasions.
The comic side of these difficulties strikes us as often as their
pathetic, for, in truth, the difference between the pathetic and
the comic elements of human events lies principally in the dif-
ference there is between the inner and the outer view of life's
incongruities. Added to our artist's grinding poverty was the
misery of ill health, troublesome eyes, constant headache. Some
of the letters to Sensier that reveal his troubles are like the
painful echo of the groans wrung from a strong and suffering
heart. He writes one day:

" If I have not the spleen, which you tell me not to take to
myself as bosom companion, I have a settled weariness, but no
anger against any one or anything, for I do not think myself
any more a victim than lots of other people ; but I am afraid
of getting tired out. It has lasted nearly twenty years. Well,
it has not been the fault of my friends that it has not been
different; that is a consolation to me."

Several times the thought of suicide crossed his mind.
" But," says his biographer, " between the thought and the act
was a whole world which Millet would never have crossed." He
was a Christian ; therefore, a prayer or a breath of the forest
was sufficient to dispel the possibility of so wretched a release.

During the first years at Barbizon, while the sweetness and
freedom of his life there were struggling hard to overmaster its
sordid cares, Millet was tenderly thought of and tenderly longed
for by the two women, both growing old and feeble now, who
were the first to guide and care for him. Scarcely more than
a hundred leagues from Barbizon was the little Norman village
where his mother and grandmother still remained in charge of
the household that was now sadly scattered, for most of the
daughters had married and settled in homes of their own, while

8oo 7V75? PAINTER OF BARBIZON. [Mar.,

one by one the sons had all been seized with the fever for
Paris. Mother and grandmother longed for a sight of the
artist son, who had ever most tenderly repaid their tenderness.
He, too, earnestly longed to see them both again, but he was
poor and they were poor, and every one knows that when poverty
weights one's feet journeys are out of the question. How deep-
ly Millet felt the pain of this hopeless longing is shown by his
picture called " Waiting," a canvas full of grandeur, of beauty,
of sorrow. " A painted silence," it has been called. It is more.
It is resignation, patience, hope painted with the silence.

The grandmother died in 1851, and two years later the
mother also died. Not yet had Millet found means to go to her.
These deaths seemed to snap some of his heart-strings, and were
for a long time a living and constant grief to him. After the
mother's death it was necessary for Fran9ois, as the eldest son,
to go home and attend to the division of the inheritance. Luck-
ily, the sale of some canvases gave him the wherewithal for the
journey. He remained a very short time at Gruchy after asking
and receiving as his share of the inheritance the books that had
belonged to his great-uncle, and the huge wardrobe of polished
oak which from father to son had come down for many genera-
tions. It was surely a modest fortune with which he returned to
Barbizon.

The following year he met with a stroke of great good luck.
He succeeded in paying his debts, and in selling a picture for
the to him enormous sum of two thousand francs. The ques-
tion of what to do with this unexpected wealth had then to be
settled. To save it ? Very good, but — it would be so much
pleasanter to spend it for the wife and the little ones. He
deliberates, and at last concludes that he has found the treat
that will be most delightful to them. He will take them all for
a whole long month to his old home, the Norman village near
the sea, which they already seem to know, so often has he
pictured it to them with word and pencil. The month length-
ened to four, and a happy holiday it must have been' for parents
and children and the kindred living at Gruchy; this renewal of
early associations seemed the beginning of better things for the
artist and his family. Bad times were to come again, and often
again the faithful Sensier had to pilot their boat into quiet
waters, but slowly and grudgingly fortune's wheel seemed turning
towards them.

In 1860 Millet gave a hostage to the future, in the shape

1890.] THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. 80 r

of a contract in which he pledged himself to give to a certain

Monsieur M all the pictures and drawings he could do in

three years, for the consideration of a thousand francs a month.
It was a sort of bondage, but a bondage that gave Millet his
first feeling of freedom. Relief from the miserable cares that
had so long pursued him filled his whole soul with peace.
Very joyfully he worked, producing in this interval some of his
most beautiful compositions.

To the Salon of 1863 he sent three pictures that were des-
tined, despite their truth and beauty, to bring a perfect tem-
pest of abuse and harsh criticism upon the artist who had the
audacity to throw himself, again and again, so courageously
against the wall of prejudice and false ideals with which the
judges of the Salon allowed themselves to be encompassed.
These pictures were : "A Peasant Leaning on his Hoe," " A
Woman Carding Wool," and " A Shepherd Bringing Home his
Sheep " — one of the many works in which he dealt so sympa-
thetically with the most beautiful subject that the beasts of the
field can present us. Always sympathetic is Millet's treatment of
any subject When he paints horses, or cattle, or sheep, he is
equal to Barye or Rosa Bonheur, and he has all the feeling of
Corot when he gives his grand and noble peasants their
fitting background of majestic landscape.

Occasionally Sensier and he made charming little trips to-
gether through various parts of France. Once six or seven
glorious days were spent in Switzerland. From all of these ex-
cursions Millet returned with plenty of notes, sketches, and mem-
ories, full of enthusiastic plans for future work. His enthusiasm
for work was endless. A dozen life-times could scarcely have
fulfilled all his projects.

In 1868 the tide of public favor, that had slowly been turn-
ing away from the false realism and false idealism of the artists
most graciously received by the Paris Salon, rushed at last in full
force upon Millet and his honest realities. After much hesitation,
the government was compelled by public clamor to award to the
peasant-painter of Barbizon the ribbon of a Chevalier of the Legion
of Honor. In the midst of much popular enthusiasm Millet
accepted the honor, and the revenge, with quiet and self-con-
tained dignity. He was not a man to be dust-blinded, and
various sad happenings at home, chiefly the serious illness of his
wife and the recent death of his friend Rousseau, had served to
render him more impervious to the clasping or loosening of that
rope of sand, public favor.

802 THE PAINTER OF BARBIZON. [Mar.,

A year or two after this the artist's health began to fail.
Nevertheless, he continued to work. Though destitution no
longer knocked constantly at the door, " My Lady Poverty "
covered him as carefully with her weather-beaten mantle as she
had covered that Francis of Assisi in whose honor the peasant-
painter had received his name. The Franco-Prussian war ma-
terially interfered with the artist and his work while it aroused
his patriotism and his horror. For a time he was compelled to
leave his beloved Barbizon and fly, with his family, to Cher-
bourg. When the war clouds dispersed he resumed his labors,
but with many interruptions, for his brave spirit could not al-
ways fortify his failing bodily strength. At last he could no
longer continue the struggle. At the end of December, 1874,
he took to his bed. Many affecting anecdotes are told ot
these last days of his among his family and his friends. Often
he plaintively regretted that his life was closing too soon —
just as he began, he said, " to see clearly into nature and art"
— so clearly, indeed, that the dark crystal, hiding the inmost
mysteries from his eager eyes, grew so thin and bright that the
touch of his humanity sufficed to dash it into splinters.

On the 2Oth of January, 1875, Jean Fran£ois Millet peace-
fully breathed his last.

I shall not attempt to discuss or even enumerate the great
works that have finally made the French peasant one of the
most famous of the world's artists. Everybody knows the gran-
deur of subject and treatment that the humble titles of " The
Sower," "The Reapers," "Potato-Planting," "Tree-Grafting," etc.,
barely indicate. They are the autobiography of the peasant.
They are the Christian apotheosis of labor.

To speak of the greatest of all, the now more than famous
"Angelus" — since American gold has so profusely rained upon
it — would be worse than folly. Artist, critic, and dabbler, para-
grapher, learned divine, and fashionable gossip have each and all
said their word about "The Angelus." The crowd that con-
stantly surrounded the picture during its recent exhibition sel-
dom failed of comment, and the comments varied from one
young lady's whispered, "Isn't it sweet?" and another's "How
very expensive it was !" and the muttered " H'm ! what a dull-
looking thing ! " from various cheerful, color-loving souls, to the
technical praise or dispraise of the brethren of the brush. And
perhaps among the little crowd of silent worshippers who are
content to look and wonder, one or two there are who cannot
help but feel in the still and softened atmosphere of the picture

1890.] RECOMPENSE. 803

a breath of remembrance of the artist's life at Barbizon. Per-
haps the suffering there and the homage here seems to them
the old, stupid trick, the heavy frolicsomeness of fate ; or, it
may be, they get to thinking of the wrinkled old grandmother,
writing with trembling hand that message to her Benjamin in
Paris : "Ah ! dear child, follow the example of a man of your
own profession and say, ' I paint for eternity ' ! "

With the majesty and fervor of Millet's masterpiece before
us, who can say that this holy injunction was disobeyed ? Surely,
we may fancy eternity has set her seal upon "The Angelus."

MARIE LOUISE SANDROCK.

Buffalo, N. Y.

RECOMPENSE.

O GENEROUS seed

I cast with weeping in, nor dreamt to find
So large a harvest in my hour of need !

O tender moon,
Sink in thy dreamy west ! Thanks for the light

Thou gav'st my night —
Thy radiance soft, thy comfort-gleam :

Now by thy fading beam
New lights arise in heaven. The Day comes soon.

O years forlorn !

Vanished the shadow of your heart-eclipse :
Shattered your bitter cup so often quaffed —

Your night-born draught.

Lo ! at my freshened lips
The perfumed chalice of the glad new dawn !

8 04 CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS. [Mar,

CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS.

I HAVE been curious to discover what it is in the argument
for Catholic and denominational schools derived from the rights
of parents as opposed to the interference of the state, which has
touched to the quick the sensitive nerve in certain distinguished
advocates of what is called an unsectarian system of education.
Why are those who use this argument accused of insincerity,
and of substituting a plausible but fallacious issue for the true
one, and by special pleading striving to gain a judgment in
favor of a claim which is a covert for the real but hidden cause
for which open plea is withheld ? Why is the discussion turned
off on the Vatican Cpuncil, the Jesuits, foreign influence, the
designs of the court of Rome on American liberty, and Papal in-
fallibility ? It would seem that the question of the religious and
Christian element in education is a plain one, to be discussed on
general principles, some of which are common to all Monotheists,
others to all believers in a revelation contained in those books
of the Bible which they recognize as belonging to the authentic
canon, and the rest to all who acknowledge the Christian reli-
gion. As to the practical question of the way in which religious
education is to be carried on, it is admitted by all to be an
American principle that perfect freedom must be guaranteed to
societies and individuals, so long as that liberty is not abused to
the detriment of rights which the state is bound to safeguard.
Moreover, all who have distinct and specific convictions respect-
ing the doctrinal and ethical truths and rules which constitute
the substance and integrity of the Christian religion, must regard
it as of vital importance that children should be educated and
instructed in the same by competent and trustworthy persons.
Since Catholics are equal to non-Catholics of all denominations
in all respects before the law, it would seem that the education
of their children and young people in schools where they are
instructed in the principles and doctrines of their religion, ought
to- be regarded as strictly in accordance with the spirit and letter
of our laws, just as much as the celebration of our rites of wor-
ship, the preaching of sermons, and the publication of books.
The same must be said, of course, of Jewish, Episcopalian, Pres-
byterian, and Methodist schools. The President invites all to
assemble in their houses of worship, on certain special occasions,

1890.] CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS. 805

for thanksgiving or supplication to God, and, whatever his private
belief may be, he cannot discriminate in his official capacity be-
tween Jews, Catholics, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Quakers, or any
others, even though, in his own eyes, there be as much differ-
ence in their offerings as between the oblations of Cain and
Abel. So far as the state is concerned, the religion, the mode
of worship, the association of different sorts of worshippers in
common and public acts of adoration, thanksgiving, propitiation,
and supplication, are the private affair of her citizens, acting ac-
cording to the dictates of their own reason and free-will. If the
representatives of the commonwealth do well, in recognizing
and encouraging assemblages of the people in their several
ecclesiastical associations and places of reunion for public acts of
worship, why may they not give them countenance and aid in
other ways, with the same impartiality? Whatever the state may
see fit to do, in the interest of the state and its citizens, where
the element of religion enters into institutions or branches of
useful work to be begun and carried on, why should not this re-
ligious element be regarded as the affair of the conscience and
convictions of the state's co-operators, without any partiality or
preference 'in favor of one class over another?

This question did not arise so long as the state had only to
deal with Protestants, and would not probably have arisen at the
present time, if Catholicism had not assumed a formidable aspect
within the national horizon. Why is it formidable ? What rea-
son is there for putting a plea in bar of the claim of the Catho-
lic Church to educate her own children, as a right springing from
the liberty of conscience and the equality before the law which
belongs to all citizens of the republic ? What is that ele-
ment in Catholicism which makes education in Catholic schools
appear to threaten detriment to the republic ? Why should the
safety and welfare of the country appear to demand of its gov-
ernment to take measures to avert the danger, and to assume
the task of educating all children on a system which excludes
all religious instruction called denominational, chiefly for the pur-
pose of shutting out Catholic teaching ?

First of all, why does the very plea of the rights of the Ca-
tholic conscience occasion such a perplexity and vexation in cer-
tain minds ? The chief reason of the perplexity is the difficulty
of rebutting the plea, without contradicting the American prin-
ciples to which its opponents are committed. And another is,
in the case of those who are bound by their principles to advo-
cate religious education, the difficulty of making a telling stroke

806 CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS. [Mar.,

against the adversary's ball, without putting their own into the
pocket. The perplexity is one cause of the vexation. But an-
other is, that they do not think the plea is made in earnest,
and in good faith ; or that Catholics have any right to appeal
to the principle of liberty and the rights of the individual con-
science in their own cause. John Locke put the extreme form
of this maxim of exclusion in respect to Catholics into the pro-
position : " that papists should not enjoy the benefit of tolera-
tion, because where they have power they think themselves
bound to deny it to others." * The maxim itself, as distinct
from the reason given, was acted on by Protestant governments
before the principle of toleration gained recognition from ruling
statesmen. Locke's statement is important, because it shows the
ground on which an eminent advocate of the general principle
of toleration excluded " papists " from the pale of civilized so-
ciety as intolerable. There is no question of toleration in our
republic, at least for any kind of Christian society. Those who
go furthest in declaring that our laws are based on the Chris-
tian religion, do not pretend that they exclude Catholicism from
the circle of Christianity. It is true that many have assumed
that this is a Protestant country, and that toleration has been
granted to Catholics as a favor. In some exceptional cases,
State laws have discriminated against Catholics by refusing to
them equal rights with other citizens. But these are incon-
sistencies which will not be formally and explicitly justified by
any publicists who are worthy of respect. Catholics assemble
in churches on Sunday, hold councils, meet in congresses, pos-
sess property devoted to sacred purposes, organize ecclesiastical
provinces, dioceses, and parishes, precisely as Episcopalians, Pres-
byterians, and Methodists do similar acts, in the exercise of
rights which they possess equally with others, under the protection
of the law. Ecclesiastical seminaries are established for the edu-
cation of the clergy. Candidates for admission can be required
to furnish a collegiate diploma or to pass an examination which
will be an equivalent, to pursue a fixed course of study, to pro-
fess adherence to a prescribed creed, and to be approved by
certain persons in authority, before they can receive ordination.
Without the ordination deemed necessary they cannot officiate
or be appointed to parishes. In the same manner that the
qualifications for administering religious rites are determined in
each ecclesiastical society, the conditions for partaking in these
ordinances are determined. If children are to be confirmed and

* English Men of Letters ; N. Y. : Harpers, Vol. -XL, " Locke," by Thomas Fowler, p. 19:

1890.] CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS. 807

admitted to communion, the ecclesiastical authority has the
same right to prescribe the instruction which they must receive,
as it has in the case of candidates for orders. The moral obli-
gation of parents to take due care of their children in respect to
their temporal and spiritual interests, comes within the scope of
pastoral instruction, and of the discipline which is exercised by
admitting to the sacraments those who are ready to fulfil this
obligation, and rejecting those who obstinately refuse to do so.
It is one of the rights of conscience, that conscientious parents
should be free to obey the instructions and admonitions of their
pastors in regard to this, and every other moral and religious
obligation. The protest against this plea of the rights of con-
science, so far as I have been able to detect its reason, is: that
the rule according to which Catholics are required to form their
conscience is the authority of the church lodged in the hier-
archy. The declaration of this rule by bishops and councils pos-
sessing spiritual authority is represented as dictation, and is thus
made obnoxious, especially so in the case of councils which
represent not only a part of the church which lies within the
national boundary, but those parts also which are situated in
foreign countries. But most of all, on account of the suprem-
acy in teaching and ruling of the Roman Pontiff, who is assidu-
ously designated as "a foreign potentate."

This kind of language is very misleading, and tends to con-
fuse two perfectly distinct orders, the temporal and the spirit-
ual, as well as two diverse objects of the exercise of spiritual
power, a nation in its corporate capacity, and private individ-
uals taken singly. The odium attaching to a claim of juris-
diction in the temporal order is cast upon the claim of spirit-
ual power by the use of ambiguous terms. That old phantom
of a plot to subvert our republican constitution and national
independence by subjugation under papal monarchy, has van-
ished. Yet, the exercise of spiritual power in the domain of
conscience and in respect to ethical matters, is made to appear
as a dictation, which interferes with and demands the abdica-
tion of national independence and sovereignty in the making
and executing of laws concerning those temporal interests which
by their nature fall under the control of ethical principles. If
popes and councils demanded of the rulers and legislators and
judges of our States and of the nation a formal recognition of
the binding character of their decrees and instructions in re-
spect to ethical matters, there would be reason in this con-
tention. For such a demand would be equivalent to a demand

808 CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS. [Mar.,

that we should change our position in respect to religion, for-
mally recognize, as a nation, Catholicism as the one true and
divine religion, and make its moral doctrines and precepts the
basis and rule of our political administration.

In point of fact, the claim of Catholic authority on assent
and obedience, is addressed only to the mind and will of indi-
viduals, and reaches them only through their reason and con-
science. The judgments of the church become the dictates of
the consciences of the' individual members of the church, and as
such come under the cognizance of our laws, not as the dicta-
tions of an external, superior power, but as claiming under our
own rule of justice the liberty of profession and practice.

As a case in point : The bishop, clergy, and- faithful of a
diocese have a right to have the decrees of a national or oecu-
menical council, the dogmatic decrees and encyclicals of the
Pope, and such like documents read in their churches, and other-
wise published, without asking leave from any magistrate, and
without any interference of any kind, from any persons whatsoever.
Can any one pretend that these ecclesiastical tribunals, when
they command the bishops and pastors to promulgate their de-
crees, dictate to the sovereign people of the United States and
their magistrates that they shall use their authority to secure the
fulfilment of this command ?

The commonwealth is bound to respect the conscience of its
citizens, and it is none of its affair from what source and rule
they derive the motives upon which their conscience is formed,
provided that there is no collision between this operative rule
and that which is embodied in the laws of the commonwealth.
Dr. Mivart has described religion as " the sociology of intelli-
gences." This is a wide definition, and it seems to me that it
gives to religion a comprehension which includes much more
than its strictly proper contents. It serves, however, very well
the purpose of showing how very wide and universal is the re-
gion of those influences which act on the individual, in the for-
mation of the convictions, the judgments, the sentiments, which
form his intellectual and moral character, from which arise those
practical judgments respecting right and wrong which are called
the dictates of conscience. Each one is, in this respect, affected
by the past, the present, his own community, civilized Christen-
dom, and humanity in general. He is not a product of spon-
taneous generation, in these vital evolutions of his being, any
more than he is in respect to his vital principle itself, i.e., his
human nature. His liberty of thought, opinion, choice of the di-

1890.] CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS. 809

rection in which he will exert his power of action, cannot be
limited 'to' a mere development from within himself, or from
within the environment of the particular social and political com-
munity to which he belongs. In philosophy, science, literature,
art, civilization, we are in the wide circle of the " sociology ot
intelligences," citizens of Christendom and of the world. And,
whether we will or no, we are irresistibly dominated over by-
men, by classes of men, by books and works of art, by em-
bodied principles and ideas, which are outside of our own little
sphere of self- hood, and of the community and nation to which
we belong. It is absurd to pretend to make a Bostonia-n, or a
New Haven, or a New England, or even an American mould,
into which the intelligent and moral nature of all the citizens
of this republic are to be thrown and to come out as peculiar
and similar specimens of a very superior humanity, like a set ot
glass tumblers. Sanscrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Mathematics,
Astronomy, History, Poetry, Architecture, Music, are not New
England or American inventions, and their laws have not been
determined by a constitutional convention. Religion and morals
are not of American origin, or identical with our political and
social order. They are extra-national and extra-secular, like the
atmosphere, the ocean, and the movements of the solar system.

Christianity is a universal religion, and all who profess to be
orthodox Christians must admit that its moral precepts are al-
ways and everywhere binding. Supposing that God has made
the teaching of the body of Catholic bishops and of their head
the supreme rule of determining the Christian moral law, it is
plain enough that no civil power can lawfully hinder Christians
from obeying this rule.

Our opponents will aver that this is a false supposition, and
that the authority of popes and councils is usurped. But this is ,
a disputed question between us, which the state cannot decide.
It neither acknowledges nor repudiates the Catholic rule of faith,
but remains simply aloof and neutral. It cannot take cognizance
of anything prescribed by this rule to its Catholic citizens, ex-
cept as concrete matter within the political and social order
wherein its own jurisdiction is situated. That is, it begins to
take cognizance of some matter in regard to ' which the church
instructs the conscience of her children, just as soon as they, in
obedience to their instructed conscience, proceed to overt acts,
which can be qualified as legal or illegal. The question is
simply one which regards the extension which the state allows
to the liberty of doing or omitting acts on the ground of what
VOL. L —52

8 1 o CA THOLIC AND A M ERIC A N E THICS. [ M a r. ,

conscience requires or forbids. This is not an unlimited ex-
tension. Obscene rites, sacrificing children, assassination of
magistrates, cannot be tolerated, on any plea of conscience or of
divine inspiration. Many of the men who partook in the move-
ment of secession were as intelligent, as upright, as sincere, as
conscientious as any of those who were in the councils and the
armies of the republic ; but the state made war upon and
overcame them, without heeding their plea for liberty to secede.
Therefore, the state has a standard and rule in morals, and en-
forces obedience to it. It is, consequently, within and not with-
out the" "sociology of intelligences." This is the same as saying
that it not only has a religion, but is founded upon religion.
The question is, What is that religion ? Some of the best au-
thorities say that it is the Christian religion. If this contention
be admitted, it cannot, nevertheless, be affirmed that any spe-
cific form of Christian religion embodied in any visible society,
or even that any sort of eclectic creed containing certain supposed
essentials of Christianity as a revealed religion, is the formal
and recognized religion of the state in our republic. The
position taken by the state is that of acknowledged incompe-
tency in spirituals. It neither affirms nor denies anything respecting
the church, divine revelation, religious dogmas, or purely religi-
ous precepts, derived from the revealed law of God, as such. Its
religion is natural religion, in so far as this is a code of ethics,
and the animating form of political and social order. It is
Christian in so far as its code of ethics is historically derived
from the common law of Christendom. Inasmuch as religious
societies agree with the state in proclaiming the same ethical
code, they are in union with it. If the moral code of any
society goes beyond that of the state, but does not go against
it, there is no collision, and liberty of conscience can have full
play. If there is opposition between the two, the state must
decide for itself whether or no it shall tolerate what is contrary
to its maxims, as, for instance, the refusal of Quakers to bear
arms.

If the religion of the state is supposed to go further, and to
include the recognition of God, his sovereignty and providence,
and the derivation of political power from him, or other matter
contained in the Christian religion, I think that these must all
likewise be referred to natural religion. The convictions, beliefs,
sentiments, and customs of the European colonists of the terri-
tory of our republic, and of their descendants, had been formed
in that civilization which was created by Christianity. That

1890.] CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN Ernies. - 811

part of the Catholic tradition which survived in them was the
rule of their general and common conscience, which has expressed
itself in our laws. The books of the Bible which they received
with the other parts of the Christian tradition retained by them,
have had heretofore, and still continue to exercise, a powerful
influence, especially over all who are of English and Scotch
origin. In a certain sense, therefore, it is true that Christianity
is the law of the land, as eminent statesmen and jurists have
declared. Nevertheless, I think it is natural religion as contained
in Christianity, and as resting on a rational basis, and not re-
vealed truth and law, as revealed, and as demanding the assent
of faith, which is implicitly or explicitly affirmed in our laws.
The recognition of Sunday, for instance, as the Christian Sab-
bath, appears to me not to be founded on an express acknowl-
edgment of a divine law, ' but on respect for a tradition and
custom which is historical and generally held sacred, is in con-
formity with the dictates of natural religion, and is beneficial in
many ways to the moral and physical interests of the commu-
nity.

Mr. Gladstone gives utterance, as I conceive his intention, to
the same idea which I have briefly expressed, in his own pecu-
liarly dignified and impressive manner:

" How will the majestic figure, about to become the largest and most
powerful on the stage of the world's history, make use of his power? Will it
be instinct with moral life in proportion to its material strength ? Will he up-
hold and propagate the Christian tradition with that surpassing energy which
marks him in all the ordinary pursuits of life ? Will he maintain with a high
hand an unfaltering reverence for that law of nature which is anterior to the
Gospel, and supplies the standard to which it appeals, the very foundation on
which it is built up? . . . May heaven avert every darker omen, and grant
that the latest and largest growth of the great Christian civilization shall also
be the brightest and the best ! " *

Our friends of the opposition will assuredly join us in a hearty
Amen to the prayer of the great English statesman.

But as to the way of working for the attainment of this
result ! Must there be such a radical and complete opposition
between us, in respect to the fundamental ethics of the civiliza-
tion which we agree to call Christian, that we can only contend
.together in irreconcilable warfare over the principles and methods
of education ? That is, coming closer to the point at issue, is
there anything in the general Catholic conscience, instructed and
formed under the spiritual authority of the church, which must

* North American Review, January, 1890, pp. 26, 27. The italics are mine.

8i2 . CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS. [Mar.,

needs bring it into opposition, in the domain of political and
social ethics, with the principles and maxims in respect to
religion and morals explicitly or implicitly contained in the letter
and spirit of our laws? I think not. If the discussion could be
kept on the ground of principles, within the domain of rational,
candid argument, it would -be easy to prove this point, and to
show that there is nothing formidable to the country from the
point of view of non-Catholics, in any possible extension ot
Catholicism. But, unfortunately, the discussion is embarrassed
by the diversion into particular, personal, and imaginary issues
and side controversies, which raise a dust of prejudice and passion.

The claims of Italians to superiority and primacy in the world,
the definition of papal infallibility, the ambitious designs of the
Roman court and its devoted adherents in all nations, the power
of the Jesuits and their artful, far-reaching aims at spiritual domi-
nation, the conspiracy to restore medievalism on the ruins ot
modern civilization and liberty; these are the notes sounded
from the trumpet, and struck as a tocsin of alarm. The educa-
tion of American youth in Catholic schools threatens detriment to
the republic, because it will train up a large body of American
citizens owning allegiance to a foreign power, which is paramount
to the allegiance due to their country. This is the upshot of
the contention. A foreign power, i.e., the papal power, has
been raised to its acme by, the Vatican Council through the
influence of the Jesuits. They are dominant in the Roman
court, and will control the education given in the Catholic
schools in the United States. The effect of this education will
be to produce a great mass of voters, servile subjects of a
foreign and antagonistic power, which aims to obtain, through
them, domination over our republic, to the ruin of its true and
genuine civilization. So the alarmists declaim.

In this way the controversy is turned into an issue in which
the assertion of Mr. Gladstone that the Jesuits are " the deadliest
foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known " becomes
the burning question in dispute. By these polemical tactics our
opponents are able to preserve an appearance of liberality
toward Catholicism and Catholics in general, to disavow hostility
toward the Catholic religion as such, and to set up something
distinct and separable from it, under such names as " Vatican-
ism," " Ultramontanism," " Jesuitism," and the like, as the target
of their polemical rifles.

They have a wide-spread and violent prejudice against the
Jesuits to appeal to. And they contrive to make it appear that

1890.] CA T IIO LIC AND A ME RICA N E THICS. 8 I 3

the most enlightened Catholic sentiment is in sympathy with them.
Clement XIV., Charles Carroll, Dr. Brownson, and Father Hecker,
the Church of France, the lay-Catholics of England, are grouped
by Mr. Jay in a perspective which puts them in line with his
own allies in opposition to the Jesuits, so as to fortify his posi-
tion against Catholic schools.

There is no parallel to the merciless attack which has been
made against the Society of Jesus, except the war waged against
the Knights of the Temple by Philip the Fair. In this last
affair, whatever exaggeration, injustice, and cruelty many im-
partial judges may think are to be found in the accusation
and condemnation of a once illustrious order, enough evidence
of its gross degeneracy and of particular crimes by its members
was brought to light to justify its suppression. And, in the case
of the Jesuits, if one-tenth of the charges against them had been
true, the facts would have been brought to light, and the society
would not only have been suppressed for a time, but for ever,
with the approbation " of the entire Catholic world. In point of
fact, it has come out of this fire, not only unscathed but
brightened. The extravagance and virulence of the assault on
the Jesuits deprive it of all force and value for all those who
will examine it fairly and calmly. There is no document which
so completely establishes their innocence as the labored effort
of Theiner to vindicate the decree of their suppression by Clement
XIV. Mr. Jay considers that we ought to regard that act as
an infallible judgment and condemnation of their maxims and
methods by the Church of Rome. This is a misapprehension
both of the law and the fact in the case. No Catholic looks on
the brief Dominus ac Redemptor as infallible. It contains no
judgment demanding universal assent and deciding finally any
question pertaining to doctrine in the matter of faith or morals
or in respect to dogmatic facts. It is a mere exercise of authority
in a matter of discipline. It contains a recital of the reasons
and motives urged by sovereigns in support of their demand for
the suppression of the society, without any express approbation
of the same, and, .as a concession to this demand, decrees the
suppression of the society. The Pope did not act from his own
free and deliberate judgment and choice sustained by the
advice of his own proper counsellors, but yielded to the pressure
unscrupulously applied by royal ministers who were among the
worst men of their time. On the other hand, Pius VII. acted
freely, deliberately, and with the approbation of the best men in-the
Catholic Church, when he restored the society, to 'the immense

8 14 CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS, [Mar.,

benefit of science and religion, as eminent non-Catholics have
acknowledged.

Nevertheless, Dr. Brownson did not like certain philosophical
and theological opinions commonly current in the society. Ah !
this proves the danger to our youth from the Scientia Media.
And Father Hecker, also, has his word on the subject, for which
the interested reader is advised tc consult his book entitled
The Church and tJie Age.

The hidden significance ol their sayings had escaped our
notice, but not the penetrating eye of Mr. Jay :

"It must also be a source of profound satisfaction to the old-
fashioned Catholics of America, who cherish American principles,
and who have held with the illustrious prelate Pope Clement
XIV., in his condemnation as scandalous of the doctrines and
methods of the Jesuits, to find that such great authorities in the
American Church as Brownson and Hecker have given new
strength to the grave reasoning on which the venerable pontift
condemned and dissolved the order for ever and ever."*

This is like the travesty of a person's face in the back of a
burnished spoon. I knew Dr. Brownson and Father Hecker
well, and I declare on my word of honor that they do not
belong to the company of the enemies of the Society of Jesus.
What is really the purport of the passages in Father Hecker's
book which are referred to in this connection? It is briefly this:
that certain elements in Catholicism which are most completely
developed in the Society of Jesus, and reduced to their ultimate
distinctness of expression in the definition of papal infallibility,
need to be supplemented at the present time by an equal and
corresponding evolution of other elements. In few words, it was
the principle of authority, the moral virtue of obedience, the
strengthening of organic unity in the exterior discipline of the
church, to which attention was chiefly directed during the past
three centuries. At the present time, and in the actual condition
of things, it is necessary to give attention chiefly to the intellec-
tual, moral, and spiritual development of individuals, in all that
belongs to them as distinct persons. I can .illustrate this by a
parallel instance.

The highest military authorities affirm that, in consequence of
the changed condition of warfare, the old style of company and
battalion drill no longer suffices to prepare troops for going into
action. They cannot advance in company and battalion lines and

* Sen pamphlet, Denominational Schools : A Discussion at the National Educational
Association, Nashvill", Tenn., July, 1889, Mr. J.-y's article.

I 890. ] CA THOLIC AND, A M ERIC AN E THICS. 8 I 5

columns, but must advance in more open and scattered order, in
small squads or singly. The company and field officers can-
not, therefore, direct and control them in action so immediately'
and efficiently as they could formerly, there is more responsi-
bility thrown upon sergeants and private soldiers, and therefore
a different kind ol drill and manoeuvres is required in the school of
the soldier, as a preparation for the field. There is no censure
pronounced on the military instructors' or the system of drill of
the past, as if they were the cause of unfitness in soldiers for
modern warfare without a different training. Nor is there any call
for the dismissal of all officers and the appointment of an entirely
new set, because changes in drill and instruction are advisable.

Just so in regard to Father Hecker's contention concerning the
policy and methods of the church and the Jesuits. The un-
fitness of European Catholics to play the part required of
them in modern politics is ascribed by Father Hecker to the
fact that they have been trained in a way which was suitable
and necessary for another time and other circumstances. There
is no censure expressed or implied in this statement. It amounts
only to this : that the church cannot do everything at once.
The time and circumstances having changed, it is now requisite
that the church should put forth her energy in a new direction.
Does it follow from this that the Jesuits are to be discarded
and disowned, so as no longer to take an active and conspicuous
part in education and other honorable works ? Is the society like
Nelson's flag-ship, and are its members like those seamen who
only know how to work a wooden sailing-ship, but cannot
man an iron-clad ? It would not be fair to suppose that because
they have certain methods of conducting missions and schools
for Chinese and Indians, they must do precisely the same things
at Innspruck or Georgetown. Let them be judged by their
works, and by real knowledge of what they are and what they
are doing at the present moment and among ourselves. We
expect that a certain class of zealots will shut their eyes and
ears to all truth and reason, and keep up the outcries which
have been so long filling the air. But it is matter of regret,
and awakens our compassion, when the most intelligent and
noble-minded among our opponents show that they are still in
the mist of prejudice. I wish they would read Liberatore's
Ethics, and candidly consider whether the universal adoption of
its principles and maxims could do any harm to Christendom or
to any nation. Let them also visit Jesuit colleges, and see for
themselves if their students are deficient in manliness or being

8i6 CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN ETHICS. [Mar..

imbued with un-American principles. Let them make the ac-
quaintance of the young scholastics who are in the course ot
education as members of the order. I know something of these
young men, some of whom are of the elite of our Catholic
American youth, of the purest American descent. I affirm un-
hesitatingly, that if their professors wished to instil into their
minds un-American ideas, as they certainly do not wish to
do, the undertaking would be morally impossible.

It is not a fact, moreover, that the Jesuits controlled the
Council of the Vatican, that they have a dominant influence in
the Roman court, or that the Catholic schools in the United
States, apart from their own colleges and parishes, are under
their direction. They are one of the great orders in the church,
and all the intellectual and moral power they possess is due
to their ability, learning, zeal, and virtue. But they are not the
church, any more than the fifth regiment of artillery is the
United States army. Whatever questions or controversies may
arise among ourselves concerning systems and methods or dis-
tinct divisions in the clerical body, are our own affair, and can-
not be justly involved in the general question of education, any
more than the special methods followed at Harvard, Yale, Johns
Hopkins, and Cornell Universities, or the particular doctrines
taught in theological seminaries. The real question at issue is
concerning the compatibility of the Catholic religion and the
education of the Catholic youth in the United States,- under
the direction of the church, with the ethics of our national
institutions.

I find that I have not been able to treat this question as
fully as I had expected, within the limits of the present article,
and I must therefore leave it in an unfinished state.*

AUGUSTINE F. HEWIT.

* I beg leave to call Mr. Jay's attention to an oversight in his quotation of the words 01
Washington's reply to the address of congratulation offered to him in the name of the Catholic
citizens of the United States. Mr. Jay writes that Washington recognized the assistance we re-
ceived " from a na«tion in which the Roman Catholic faith, as defined by the Gallican Church,
prevailed." The phrase, "as denned by the Gallican Church," is not found in Washington's
letter, but is a gloss of Mr. Jay. It is inserted, however, in the citation under quotation marks,
and although we do not impute any intention of practising deception to Mr. Jay, yet the effect
oi his oversight is in fact to deceive unwary readers.— Denominational Schools, etc., p. 54.

1890.] A FLOWER-LINK. 817

A FLOWER-LINK.

ONCE on a time — the Present, which

The Past so oft subpoenas —
There strayed through England's midland shires

One of the Oldbuck genus,

Questioning grave and altar-tomb,

And country-side tradition,
For tidings of that by-gone world

Where woman had no mission,

And man's seemed chiefly to ride forth

Equipped as knight erratic,
Proving philanthropy in ways

If genial, yet emphatic.

One name he sought where Derby's Peak

Reveals its upper glory,
By ruined keep, by ancient hall,

By moss-grown cloister hoary —

A name once blared from herald's trump

By battlemented tower,
A name that once the minstrel bold

Had sung in lady's bower!

It had been borne by gallant men

In fields where English prowess
Had kept at bay the paladins

Of many an earlier Louis.

No trace the antiquary found

Of all this warlike pride;
From abbey, castle, tower, and town

The FiNDERNE name had died.

Musing on Time's vicissitudes

And the inefficacy
Of mural brass or monument

To eternize a race, he

8i8 A FLOWER-LINK. [Mar.,

Came on a group of little girls

Sedately binding posies
Of flowers unrecognized by his

Heraldic tomes and glosses.

Their name the Antiquary asked,

Careless of answer given ;
Little kenned he of carols not

From stone or marble riven !

One spoke, the tallest of the band,

Her peasant shyness hinted
By the slow flood of carmine which

Her modest brown cheek tinted :

" We call them Finderne's Flowers," she said,

" For from the far Crusade he,
The old 'Sir Geoffrey, brought them back,
And gave them to his lady.

"No; naught know I or if he died

In peace or fell in war-land ;
Only, if we could find his grave
We'd weave for it our garland ! "

Yes, there where garden-terrace had

Crumbled to meadowy masses,
The little pale Judean flower

Grew among English grasses,

Bearing along the centuries,

Of tender love this token ; •
Guarding the name which but for it

For ever were unspoken —

Gone with the days of lance and shield,

Of battle-axe and curtal,
Were it not made by the gentle deed

And the gentle flower immortal !

M. A. C.

NOTE. — For the central fact of the above rhyming narration, see Sir Bernard Burke's
Vicissitudes of Families.

1890.] THE NUNS' CENTENARY. 819

THE NUNS' CENTENARY.

IN the year 1790 the National Assembly governed France,
and on the I2th February it issued a decree declaring that all
religious vows were abolished and all convents and monastic
orders suppressed. This was one of the first blows levelled
against religion, and almost the first step openly taken upon that
declivity at whose foot lay the abyss of infidelity, of blasphemy,
and of sacrilege.

This persecution fell with peculiar bitterness upon the reli-
gious women of France. Monks driven from their monasteries
can fly into distant lands, disguise themselves, find various em-
ployments. Nuns, and especially cloistered ones, and especially at
the period of which we write, were helpless ; there were no rail-
roads or steamboats by which they could quickly escape, and
they had no knowledge of any language save their own. The
decree came upon them like the shock of an earthquake which
tore up the ground under their feet. Some of these poor ladies
had the simplicity to appeal to the National Assembly. The
Carmelites of France united in making the supplication. They
might just as well have appealed to the wild beasts of the forests.
They say in their appeal : " The most entire liberty presides over
our vows, the most perfect equality reigns in our establishments.
Deign, gentlemen, to inform yourselves of the life which is led
in all the communities of our order, and do not allow your
judgment to be biased either by the prejudices of the multitude
or the apprehensions of humanity. The world is fond of pub-
lishing that the only inhabitants of monasteries are victims slowly
pining beneath a load of unavailing regret, but we protest, in the
presence of God, that if true happiness exists upon- earth we en-
joy it under the shadow of the sanctuary, and that if we had now
once more to choose between the world and the cloister, there is
not one of us who would not ratify her choice with even more
joy than when her vows were first pronounced." Then follow
some sentences comforting to the English, who have had in their
turn to be ashamed of so much religious persecution practised by
their own country : " You will not have forgotten, gentlemen,
that when the Canadian provinces passed from the dominion of
France under that of another power which professes a religion
different from our own, not only did their new masters respect the

820 THE NUNS' CENTENARY. [Mar.,

orders they found established there, but took them under their
protection. May we not expect from the justice of a protecting
Assembly that which our brethren and our sisters obtained from
the generosity of a victorious people ? And after solemnly as-
serting the liberty of man would you force us to believe that we
are no longer free ? "

An appeal to the Assembly was also made by the Poor Clares
of Amiens, a supplication which almost makes us smile from its
exceeding simplicity and its revelation of these poor nuns' perfect
ignorance of the ways of the world and of what was passing around
them. Their fear was not that they should be turned out of their
convent (that seems never to have occurred to them), but that
their precious heritage of holy poverty should be taken from
them. They tell the Assembly that they have no revenues save
from charity; "for three hundred and forty-five years that our
monastery has been in existence, Divine Providence has always
provided for our wants according to the austerity of our life and
the simplicity of our condition," and they go on to implore the
august National Assembly " not to give us any property or income,
but to leave us in peace to the enjoyment of a state of holy
poverty which it is our glory to profess." Poor ladies ! their fears
on this head were quite unfounded ; the tyrants were not for giving
but for taking away.

The next attack upon the French nuns was the attempt to
force upon them the ministrations of constitutional priests, who
had taken the oath that rendered them schismatic. Had this
been accepted, it is very probable that many of the convents
would have been left in peace. But the nuns of France were
true to their God, and in no instance was this offer entertained.
We hear of a Visitation convent where the nuns had been
deprived 'for two months of Mass and the sacraments. Then
came the feast of their foundress, St. Jane Frances de Chantal,
and a constitutional priest again offered his services. Their reply
was short and clear : " We had rather never hear Mass again
than assist at one said by an apostate." So the persecution in-
creased in virulence. The nuns could not be made to yield, but
they could be made to suffer. The spouses of Christ were
destined to follow in the footsteps ot their Lord. The scourge
preceded Calvary, and to flagellations of the most barbarous
and -infamous kind these Christian virgins were submitted. Two
of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, one of them eighty years
of age, died victims of the cruel scourging which they re-
ceived on the I Qth of April, 1791. The Protestant Necker pro-

1890.] THE NUNS' CENTENARY. 821

tested against these horrors. After describing the good deeds of
the Sisters of Charity, he says : " But you perhaps venture to
believe that they will add the patient endurance of the indigni-
ties which you inflict upon them to the innumerable sacrifices
they have imposed upon themselves. Yes, they will do so ;
even to that point their unimaginable virtue will extend."

At Casoul, Sister Cassin, a nun twenty-two years of age, was
stopped by a national guard. " Wretch," said he, " when are
you coming to the parish church ? " " When my lawful pastor
returns thither," was her reply ; " not before." He drew his
sword with curses. " Sir," said the sister calmly, " give me a
few minutes to recommend myself to God." She knelt down,
and after a short prayer said: "I am ready; strike when you
please ; may God forgive you, as I do." The wretched man was
disarmed. He cried : " I was paid to kill one of you. We want
a head to carry round to all your houses on a pike, and to see
what intimidation will do, but I have not the heart to take
yours."

Forty-two nuns were thrown into prison at Orange. They im-
mediately began to prepare for their final sacrifice by continued
prayer, profound silence, and recollection. Although belonging
to different communities, they lived in common like the early
Christians. At eight o'clock every day they said together the
prayers for Mass, the Litanies of the Saints, the prayers for
Confession and Extreme Unction. Then they would make a
spiritual Communion, renew their baptismal promises and religious
vows. Some might be heard exclaiming: "Yes, I am a nun, and
this is my greatest consolation. I thank thee, O Lord, for having
vouchsafed me this grace ! " At nine o'clock so many prisoners
were summoned to the so-called trial, always followed by execu-
tion. There was a holy rivalry as to who should be first
Those left behind continued to pray. Then were thousands o!
Hail Marys addressed to Our Lady, then arose a concert ot
unnumbered litanies, then were the words of Jesus on the cross
prayed over and meditated upon again and again. When the
roll of the drum announced that the victims of the day were
being led to execution the recommendation for the departing
soul was recited. By six P.M. all was over, and then those who
had at least one night more to live had a sort of spiritual recre-
ation expressing their joy for the victories that had been gained,,
and chanting the Laudate with a foretaste of celestial joy. The
gladness -with which these holy religious went to their martyrdom
greatly served to encourage other condemned prisoners. On one

822 THE NUNS' CENTENARY. [Mar.,

occasion they spent half an hour in prayer, with their arms ex-
tended in the form of a cross. They were interceding for the
father of a numerous family, who was strongly tempted to de-
spair. Their prayers were granted, and they saw him die as a
brave Christian should. "This has hindered us from saying our
Vespers," said one. " Never mind, we will sing them in
heaven."

Sister Andrew was sad one day, saying : " I fear that God
does hot think me worthy of martyrdom." Ere the sun set on
the morrow she won her crown. Sister Bernard and Sister
Justina had prayed for thirteen years to Our Lady that they
might die on one of her feasts or on a Saturday. They were
called to martyrdom on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Car-
mel. One of them said : " What bliss ! I cannot support this
excess of joy."

"Who are you?" said one of the judges to Sister Teresa.
" I am a daughter of the church," was her reply. " And who
are you ? " he said to Sister Clare. "I am a nun," said she,
" and will remain so till I die." Sister Gertrude woke up one
morning weeping with joy. " I am in ecstasy," she said ; " I am
sure I shall be called to-day." She was called and condemned.
She then thanked her judges for the happiness which by their
means she was to enjoy, and when she reached the guillotine
she kissed it. Sister Pelagia, after her condemnation, took a box
of bonbons out of her pocket and distributed them to all those
who had been sentenced with her, saying: "These are my
wedding sweetmeats." Sister Frances exclaimed: " What joy ! we
are going to behold our Spouse."

Sister Angela de Rocher was residing with her father when
the others were arrested. She could have escaped. She asked
the advice of her father, aged eighty. " Daughter," said he,
" you can have no difficulty in concealing yourself; but first
consider well in the sight of God whether by so doing you
may not be interfering with his adorable designs upon you,
in case he may have chosen you to be one of the victims des-
tined to appease his wrath. I would say to you, as Mardochai
said to Esther, you are not on the throne for yourself, but for
your people." So Sister Angela joined the others, and she 'also
thanked the judges who condemned her for giving her the hap-
piness of going to the company of the angels. Some of the
brutal soldiery who guarded the guillotine exclaimed : " Look
at these wretches ; every one of them dies with a smite on her
face." Of the forty-two nuns, thirty-two gained the crown of

1890.] THE NUNS' CENTENARY. 823

martyrdom, and the ten who remained lamented that they were
not allowed to follow their companions to the marriage of the
Bridegroom. For them the cry used in hideous mockery by the
news-venders of Paris had a very real and deep meaning : " Be-
hold those who have drawn a prize in the lottery of the holy
guillotine ! "

A hundred years have passed now since these Christian hero-
ines won their crown, and the nuns of France are now wonder-
ing whether somewhat of a similar fate awaits themselves. Per-
haps the barbarous cruelty of the Terror could not be repeated,
but there are many forms of more civilized torture in which
the European apostles of liberty, equality, fraternity are adepts.
America alone seems to have the power of interpreting these
words in their true sense. To tear away the Sisters of Charity
from their hospitals and the teaching orders from their schools
is to scourge and torment in very truth.

But the nuns of France were true to their mission in 1790,
and their successors will not be less true in 1890. Through
evil report and good report they will persevere. When some
are worn out in the strife and go to rest, others will rise up
and take their places, and will show, if bitter persecution should
hereafter come, that now, as then, there are very many in poor,
misguided France " of whom the world is not worthy."

THE AUTHOR OF "TYBORNE."

824 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

MR. R. D. BLACKMORE'S latest story, Kit and Kitty (New
York : Harper & Brothers), is a very charming piece of work —
so charming that it forces one to consider whether the common
belief that Lorna Doone must for ever stand alone and un-
approachable, as well by its author as by other novelists of the
period, is, after all, more than a fond superstition. Not that the
present fiction takes the higher imagination by anything like so
powerful a hold as its great predecessor. Kitty Fairthorn, sweet
as she is, stands as remote from Lorna's unique and lofty charm
as the ideal dairy- maid from the ideal duchess, and Downy
Bulwrag, though a remorseless ruffian, is by no means so con-
vincing in his villainy as Carver Doone. But Kit himself, the
loving and soft-hearted and forgiving, who stands compassionate
above his deadly enemy and says truly : " I have been
through ten times worse than death, and the lesson I have
learned is mercy," is, on the whole, as pleasant a figure as one
shall meet in the entire collection of contemporary fiction. True
he is only a market-gardener, earning five shillings a week and
his board from " Corny the topper," his close-fisted, wider-hearted
uncle, and having no ambition beyond that of dwelling in peace
with Kitty while he diligently brings his fruit and vegetables
to their highest perfection. But that, or something like it, must
have been Adam's bliss in Eden. The story could hardly be
Mr. Blackmore's and not be rural, with its hero a delver and
a lover of our mother earth. It is delightfully old-fashioned in
its whole scheme and lay-out, and although the secret of
Kitty's mysterious absence is, sufficiently well kept to baffle the
most penetrating novel-reader, yet when it is divulged it turns
out to be of a piece with the narrow simplicity of all the rest.
Of course the book is not realistic in the sense in which that
term is at present understood when applied to fiction. But it
is real enough, so far as fidelity to a very simple and
unsophisticated kind of human nature goes, and not the less
so for being romantic, and guiltless of the analytic method
with its characters, and wholly free from compromising situa-
tions. It shares, moreover, in a marked degree one of the
singular excellences of Lorna Doone in that it not merely
bears well the difficult test of reperusal, but gives more pleas-

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 825

ure on the second or third reading than on the first. One
takes up a novel ordinarily for the stcry in the first place, and
if that be entertaining, as its plot deepens or its action acceler-
ates, all that is suspected as likely to be padding is extremely
apt to be skipped. If the vast majority of readers never return
to see what they may have missed, it must be owned that the
vast majority of the novels would hardly repay any such pains.
Every one remembers fictions, some of them famous ones, like
Debit and Credit for instance, through whose cumbrous mass ot
details nothing would induce him to wade again, and yet which
live in the memory by reason of a single scene, like that
between Fink and Leonora when the girl gives over fighting.
When such books are named, they rise again out of the abyss
of memory in virtue of a supremely vitalized page or two in
which their writers have struck so hard on some always tense
human chord that they produced a long vibration. But in their
totality they may never have given a hearty pleasure, or, if they
have, they are unable to reproduce it. It is not easy to catch
the secret of the books and the authors whose charm for one is
something like perennial. Why does every scrap of Thackeray,
from a private letter, or a Roundabout paper, to such a scene
as Colonel Newcome's passing, have an equally invincible at-
traction for those of us who have neither risen nor as yet felt any
desire to rise to the fashionable appreciation of those higher
and finer things which, as Mr. Howells has just been telling us
again, so many of his successors have achieved ? Why is it that
Mr. Stevenson's undeniable witchery does not suggest a repe-
rusal of his tales, and why, in picking up George Eliot once
more, does her pedantic philosophizing and her artificial
style repel more than the memory of an old-time pleasure has
power to reattract? It is hard to say. Certainly, with floating
reminiscences of Spring haven, Mary Ancrley, and Alice Lor-
raine to base a doubt on, we should hesitate to recommend
Mr. Blackmore's books as safely to be relied on as full of re-
sources for a rainy day in the country or a long sailing
voyage. But some of them may, as Lorna Doom may
witness, and, in its more homely but equally pleasant fashion,
so may Kit and Kitty.

Still, no reader of the latter novel is likely to care much
for it unless he is still capable of being interested in very
primitive English rural life and can be charmed by the most
innocent, pure, and honest sort of mutual love. There is not
a line in it from end to end which could win for its writer such
VOL. L. — 53

826 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

praise as Miss Woolson's admirers agree in according to her
capacity to express "passion." That is supposed to be her
specialty among our native women authors, though Mrs. Amelie
Rives Chanler must have been running her hard of late for
supremacy. Curious ideas these ladies appear to entertain ot
ideal wedded love! In Jupiter Lights (New York: Harper &
Brothers) we have again, as in East Angels, two women, each
desperately in love after Miss Woolson's fashion, either with a
present, a past, or a prospective husband. They differ, also, as
in the other novel, by the fact that one of them is guided
wholly by her natural instincts, while the other, as she says in
a great crisis of her passion, has " been brought up a stupid,
good woman, and can't change — though I wish I could ! " And
again, in an access of jealousy aroused by a disreputable prede-
cessor in the fancy of the man she loves, she soliloquizes :

"I wish I were beautiful beyond words! I could be beautiful if I had
everything; if nothing but the finest lace ever touched me, if I never raised my
hand to do anything for myself, if I had only dainty and delicate and beautiful
things about me, I should be beautiful — I know I should. Bad women have-
those things, they say j why haven't they the best of it? "

We said just now that Miss Woolson's brace of heroines v/ere
desperately in love after a fashion of which this author is one of
the most prominent American exponents. Perhaps the fashion
could not be more specifically described than by saying that the
love it paints is what might be looked for as the crown and
flower of sentiment in a race which really had evolved from the
beasts in the most radical, thorough-going Darwinian way — not
alone more graceful apes with a tendency to becoming dress,.
but with moral and spiritual characteristics differing from those
of their arboreal ancestors in degree only, not in kind. To our
mind there is something shameless and offensive in the way in
which Miss Woolson conceives and describes her women. Now
and then there is a touch, as in her description of Cicely on
page 20, when, as if by an irresistible necessity laid upon her,
she achieves in one stroke the same effect over which a
Frenchman would spend a page, defending himself from moral
censure on the ground that only men are supposed to read
him. Miss Woolson's hand is lighter, her malice, let us hope,
not more than half so deliberate, but the effect she produces is
about the same. And yet not the same, but even more dis-
pleasing, since it proceeds from a woman, reputable, as w*e all
know, who is of her own choice devoting herself to the analy-

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 827

sis of other women technically pure, discreet, and edifying mem-
bers of society — surely a society developed on Spencerian lines
from a Darwinian foundation. Perhaps it is our philosophy
which is at fault, or our ideals. Certainly these headstrong
creatures, overmastered by passion for men who may be drunk-
ards, licentious, unfaithful, cruel, despotic without diminishing by
a feather's weight the power of their attraction over their femi-
nine adorers, are not types of any sentiment which has ever
been recognized as Christian. Perhaps Miss Woolson does not
intend them to be such — it is only the old maids and the par-
sons in her stories who now and then drop into piety. Listen
to this conversation between Eve Bruce and her sister-in-law,
Cicely Morrison. Cicely had been for six months the widow ot
Eve's brother, who had loved her, but without return. Then she
married Ferdie Morrison, whom Eve shot in order to protect
Cicely and her child from being murdered by him in one of his
periodical drunken rages. Ferdie dies, but not, as Eve supposes,
through the effects of the wound she inflicted. Meanwhile Eve
has fallen irrevocably in love with Ferdie's half-brother, Paul,
who, after a while, returns her passion. But when the news of
Ferdie's death comes, Eve knows that she must never marry
Paul. She has told Cicely that she killed Ferdie, and Cicely
rewards her for saving her own life and her baby's by a hatred
which has some intermittent gusts of pity when a fellow-feeling
makes her realize what Eve must suffer in abandoning Paul.
Besides, Eve has just added to Cicely's obligations by saving
the child's life a second time. She has been telling the mother
that it was when she was almost in despair lest the boy should
be drowned before she could reach him that she had uttered
this prayer : " Oh ! let me save him, and I'll give up everything."
Cicely, who has a good deal of the cat about her, and never
can resist giving an easy scratch, answers :

" ' And supposing that nothing had happened to Jack, and that I had not
got back my senses, how could you even then have married Paul, Eve Bruce ?—
let him take as his wife a woman who did what you did ?'

" 'What I did was not wrong,' said Eve, rising, a spot of red in each cheek.
She looked down upon little Cicely. ' It was not wrong,' she repeated, firmly.

" « Blood for blood' ? " quoted Cicely with another jeer.

" 'Yes, that is what Paul said,' Eve answered. And she sank down again,
her face in her hands.

" ' You say you have given him up ; are you going to tell him the reason why
you do it ? ' pursued Cicely, with curiosity.

" 'How can I?'

" 'Well, it would keep him from pursuing you — if he does pursue.'

828 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

** ' I don't want him to stop ! '

" ' Oh ! you're not in earnest, then ; you are going to marry him, after all?
See here, Eve, I'll be good; I'll never tell him, I'll promise.'

" ' No,' said Eve, letting her hands fall ; ' I gave him up when I said, " If
I can only save baby ! " ' Her face had grown white again, her voice dull.

"'What are you afraid of? Hell? At least you would have had Paul
here, /should care more for that than for anything else.'

" ' We're alike,' said Eve.

" 'If we are, do it, then ; I should. It's a muddle, but that is the best way
out of it.'

" ' You don't understand,' Eve replied. ' What I'm afraid of is Paul
himself.'

" 'When he finds out?'

" 'Yes.'

" ' I told you I wouldn't tell.'

" ' Oh ! any time; after death — in the next world.'

" ' You believe in the next world, then ? '

" 'Yes.'

"'Well, I should take all the happiness I could get in this,' remarked
Cicely.

" ' I care for it more than you do — more than you do ! ' said Eve, passion-
ately.

" Cicely gave a laugh of pure incredulity.

" ' But I cannot face it — his finding out,' Eve concluded."

Eve runs away when it turns out that Paul considers that
in firing at Ferdie she did what was under the circumstances a
noble and heroic act, and is determined to marry her in spite
of herself. She would be overjoyed to marry him, but there is
that terrible future life to be faced. Some day, ages from now,
perhaps, but still in a time through which her own love will
always have increased, Paul will say to himself: ''She shot my
brother, and I loved him," and he will grow cold to her. So
she escapes, and in sixteen days from that on which she fled
from Georgia, Paul discovers her* in a convent in North Italy. By
some hocus-pocus of which only novelists know the secret, Eve
Bruce has during this brief interval passed over from her variety
of Protestantism to Catholicism, and is probably on her way to
become a nun. But Paul, when he cannot find entrance by persua-
sion, knocks down a priest, steps over his prostrate body into
the interior of the convent, " opens doors at random," and to
the superior, who remarks, " You'll hardly knock down a woman,
I suppose?" answers, "Forty, if necessary." He comes to tell
Eve that it was not of the wound she inflicted that his brother
died. Finally the superior quietly opens a door :

" ' No one has ever wished to prevent your entrance,' she said. ' Your
violence has been unnecessary — the violence of a boor. '

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 829

" Paul laughed in her face. There was no one in the room. But there was a
second door. He opened it. And took Eve in his arms."

Whereupon Miss Woolson's latest version of love between " man
and woman when they love their best " abruptly ends. It is not
inspiriting, to say the very best that one can say about it. It is
suggestive, though, to s^ee how naively she accepts the conclusion
that in this kind of love it is only a woman who can be counted
on for a unique and faithful passion.

From the New York publishing house of Worthington Co.
we have received another of Mrs. J. W. Davis' translations from
the German of W. Heimburg, Magdalen's Fortunes ; also a
version by Edward Wakefield of Francois Coppee's Henriette ;
or, a Corsican Mother. The Heimburg resembles all its prede-
cessors in being wholesomely romantic and innocently entertain-
ing, but it does not tcall for special comment. The Coppee is
beautifully told and painfully true to human nature under certain
artificial conditions, but it is pernicious, and should be kept out
of the way of young readers.

Miss Mary Catherine Crowley's second volume of stories for
children, Happy- Go- Lucky (New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co.),
is an improvement on the first one. It is pleasant to learn
that Miss Crowley not only received ample recognition from the
Catholic press, but found a ready market for Merry Hearts and
True, and saw it speedily pass beyond the first edition. We
hope that even greater success may attend this second venture.
The stories are all interesting and well told, but is there not
a slight hitch in the dialect employed by the ragamuffins ?
Did any one ever hear a boy say " ter " for "to" in just such
connections as Terry does ? "I don't want ter," everybody
knows, but "Anyhow, the time I am goin' ter tell yer about, I
took it ter Mrs. Moore ter keep for me," sounds suspiciously
difficult in point of pronunciation, especially if euphony is what
is aimed at by the untaught ear and tongue, as one naturally
inclines to believe. Happy- Go-Lucky shows real pathetic power,
and " Ned's Base-Ball Club " an eye more observant than sym-
pathetic for the weaknesses of half-grown boys. There is little to
choose between the half-dozen stories which compose the vouime
in point of merit or attractiveness. All are pleasingly told and
excellent in intention.

Linda's Task ; or, The Debt of Honor (New York : Catholic
Publication Society Co.) is another pleasant book for young
readers. It is translated from the French of some unknown
author by Sister Mary Fidelis of some unnamed religious

830 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

community. Linda, who has a truly French sense of the bind-
ing nature of money obligations, undertakes, while still a child,
to clear away the burden of debt her father left behind him
when dying. With an old uncle who writes archaeological articles
for French magazines, she settles down in Paris after her studies
are completed, to earn her living and lay aside something yearly
for the creditors. How she prospered, how she had her little
romance, and ended by paying the debt of honor and becoming a
happy wife, is told at no great length but with a certain charm ol
simplicity in this pretty volume.

Legend Laymonc, a poem by M. B. M. Toland (Philadelphia : J.
B. Lippincott Company), is beautifully printed on thick paper, beau-
tifully bound, and beautifully illustrated with full-page photogravures
from drawings made by W. H. Gibson, W. T. Richards, Bolton Jones,
F. S. Church, H. S. Mowbray, and other artists of high reputation,
as well as by certain decorations, most of which are fine, mod-
elled by John J. Boyle. But the poem on which so much pains
have been spent seems little worthy of them. It is written in
jerky, unmusical stanzas of which the following, taken at random,
afford a good enough sample:

" Where sentinels silent, like guards in command —
Tall cacti,
Stiff, stately—
Impressively stand ;

11 Where murmuring brooklets, with sallying sweep,
Meander
And wander
Through wild dingles deep."

There may be worse quatrains than these in the Legend
Laymone, but we find none that are very much better.

Georg Ebers' latest novel, completed only last September
although begun many years ago, is called Joshua, a Biblical
Picture (New York : John W. Lovell Company). It forms the
first number of the " Series of Foreign Literature " to be issued
by this house under the competent editorial supervision of Mr.
Edmund Gosse. It is an interesting novel, but not specifically
Biblical," except in the fact that certain Scriptural characters
take prominent parts in the action of the tale. Moses, Aaron,
Hur, Miriam, Nun, Joshua, appear and reappear in the course of
a drama beginning on the night of the Exodus from Egypt and
ending before the Law was given from Mount Sinai. But these

1 390.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 831

personages bear no very striking likeness to those images of
them which have been a part of the mental furniture of those of
us to whom the Old Testament stories have always been famil-
iar. It confuses one to find Miriam the prophetess represented
as a young woman of thirty, passionately in love with Joshua,
when one remembers that at the time of the Exodus Aaron was
eighty-three and Moses eighty. Of course Jochabed, their
mother, may have had other daughters besides that unnamed
one who carried Moses to the Nile and watched him in his
cradle of bulrushes, but it is she who has usually been identified
with Miriam. In Ebers' tale, it is to Miriam that Joshua owes
the changing of his name, while Scripture assigns it to Moses
himself. But this is one of those minor liberties permitted to
the historical novelist in search of more dramatic material than
the bare documents of his subject afford ; or it would be so
if the documents in this instance were not hallowed by the
peculiar veneration both of Christian and of Jew. The story
of the flight from Egypt is told with much vividness. The
interest centres, naturally, -upon the hero, Joshua; the great
Lawgiver, perhaps because too imposing a figure to be handled
easily, appears but seldom. Ebers, who professes to accept the
Second Book of Moses as historical, plainly has his private
reservations of belief with regard to portions of it. Thus,
when the people, faint with thirst, murmur against Moses,
Ebers paints with forcible details the anguish of the multitude,
and their glad thanksgiving when they came to Horeb. But
there is no striking of the rock, no miracle of any kind.
They owe their relief not to the obedience of Moses to a
divine command, but to the good memory of " the man of
God who knew every rock and valley, every pasture and
spring of the hills of Horeb better than any one, and who had
again been the instrument of such blessing to his people." And
again: "Mothers led their little ones to the spring to show
them the spot where Moses with his staff had pointed out the
spring bubbling through the rift in the granite. . . . None
doubted that they here beheld the result of a great miracle."

Joshua is described as a captain in Pharaoh's army. He has
been, if not estranged from the religion of his people, yet accus-
tomed to regard the worship of the God of Israel as almost
identical with that paid by the initiated among the Egyptians
to " the only god, who revealed himself in the world, who was
co -existent and co-equal with the universe, immanent in all cre-
ation, not merely as life exists in the body of man, but as being

832 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

himself the sum total of created things." The flight ot his people
displeases him. He is high in favor at court, and at the solici-
tation of Pharaoh and his queen, bowed down in anguish at the
loss of their first-born, he undertakes to follow the Hebrews and
communicate to Moses and their other leaders the news of the
great advantages which will be granted them if they will return.
All his own hopes and ambitions centre upon that return. With his
own people he has almost nothing in common. " They were now
as alien to him as the Libyans against whom he had taken the
field." He feels that the bereaved Egyptians have been " the
victims of ill-usage," " bereft by Moses' curse of thousands of
precious lives." Still, two strong feelings bind him to his race —
filial affection for Nun, and love for Miriam, the sister of Moses.
He follows the fugitives, therefore, with his messages from Pha-
raoh. Then Miriam undeceives him. She shows him that the
God of his fathers is the only God, and that he must cast in his
lot with his people. And when she finds that his love for her is.
greater than his fidelity to his race, or his belief in the leader-
ship of Moses, in a burst of heroic sacrifice she refuses herself to
him and binds herself in marriage to the aged Hur. Joshua,
too, receives an uplifting of soul, in which is mingled a slight
feeling of relief for his escape from an unwomanly woman. He
throws in his fortunes with the Hebrews and becomes the right
hand of Moses.

There is a good deal of picturesque description in the novel.
The journey to the mines to which Joshua is condemned when,
faithful to his oath to Pharaoh, he returns to tell him the re-
sult of his embassy, is particularly well done. So, too, the cross-
ing of the Red Sea and the engulfing of the Egyptian host is
drawn with a masterly hand, although there is neither a "cloud
by day" nor "a pillar of fire by night" in Ebers' rendering ot
the scene. Altogether, the novel, merely as such, is powerful
and well worth reading. Still, it forces a contrast with the ma-
jestic reticence and simplicity of Scripture which cannot but be
to its disadvantage.

From J. G. Cupples Company (Boston) comes a curiously
bound and illustrated novel by E. L. Mason, called Hiero-Salein :
The Vision of Peace, Its contents are not less unique than its
cover. The author, whose sex it is hard to guess at — whether
man-woman like the hero, Daniel Heem, or woman-man like
the heroine, Althea Eloi — further describes the book as a "fiction
founded on ideals which are grounded in the Real, that is greater
than the greatest of all human Ideals." The flaming red cover of-

1890.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 833

the book bears what Daniel presents to Althea as " the nuptial
diagram " — a right-angled triangle with squares described on
each of its sides — one being devoted to the " life results of Miss
Eloi," one to those of Daniel Heem, and that on the hypothe-
nuse presumably to those of their progeny. The Eloi-Heems
are to start a new era for the race. As Daniel says to old Mrs..
Eloi when pleading for Althea's hand, "The name of Eloi
blended with Heem, and placed first for euphony, gives the name
Eloi-Heem, or Eloihim, Gods." The book, though very long, is
more thoroughly packed with absurdities than one can well
imagine capable of being compressed into its five hundred pages.
Nevertheless occasional gleams of sanity, and what would not
improbably turn out to be a good idea or a profitable suggestion,
are not wholly lacking in it. The author has crammed his, or
her, or possibly its head (the seed-thought of the book, we
should explain, in excuse for the last pronoun, is the possi-
bility and probability of a New Jerusalem on this earth, in which
there shall be neither male nor female but a blending of both)
with more theosophy, Buddhism, and matters of that sort than it
was originally made to hold. But there is no harm in the book,,
chiefly by reason of its pure absurdity. Except by the author
and the proof-reader, it is probable that it never has and never
will be read in its entirety. In fact, there is too much reason to
believe that even the latter of these has disgracefully and often
shirked his toilsome duty.

Feet of Clay (New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.) is a pleasant
story in Mrs. Amelia E. Barr's best vein. The scene is laid in
the Isle of Man, and much of the interest of the tale arises
from the certainly very taking way in which the family of the
Manx fisherman, Ruthie Clucas, is described. Bella is by all
odds the best figure in the book. The proud, " iggrint and
poor" descendant of the old sea-rovers, as self-respecting as
if her pure blood and ancient lineage had brought her some
more tangible benefit than a life of hard labor, the position of
an inferior, and the deepest insult a woman can receive from
the man she loves, is drawn with a free and sympathetic
hand. Mrs. Barr shows a greater respect for her sex than
most of the younger women who to-day rush into print with what
they take to be their hearts "upon their sleeves." Bella is very
fine in her treatment of that cad, George Pennington, for whom,
nevertheless, she had felt a pure woman's utmost love. As for
Pennington himself, he seems made pretty much all of clay. Mrs.
Barr is seldom so cordial with her men as with her women, as,.

834 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

perhaps, might be expected. A Cicely Morrison, a Margaret
Harold could by no possibility enter into her conception of
what either a loving wife or a self-respecting one might be
expected to do or to suffer. In Mrs. Pennington she has
given us a brief study of a woman who has had to endure
the shame of having the father of her children and the lover
of her youth condemned to penal servitude. The mother alone
survives in her when the poor fellow comes back, not only a
reformed man but a hero of paternal love. He has shamed
her. If she so far overcomes her loathing as to call him
by his name and touch his hand for once, it is only
that she may buy his silence and his absence by the sacri-
fice. Still there is nature in that, too, one must admit. The
returned convict is so pathetically dealt with that his spotless
wife and daughter and ne'er-do-weel son seem but doubtfully
worth the price he pays for the redemption of the latter.
The elder Pennington had forged the name of his best friend,
who caused him to be sent to Australia for twenty-five years.
Just before he returns his son has put himself into a precisely
similar predicament, the new victim being the son of the old one.
But the younger Penrith is more merciful than his father. He
forgives George while dropping his acquaintance. It is during
the interval in which his mother is paying these and other debts
that George makes false love to Bella Clucas. After the convict
sees and is banished by his wife, he becomes a sort of humble
guardian angel to his son. Somehow he has honestly amassed a
good deal of money, and understanding his son's temptations, he
tries to avert danger by. supplying him liberally with funds.
But George is a spendthrift who would not require much time
nor any considerable tax on his ingenuity to empty the Bank of
England. He forges again, this time the name of his sister's
husband. To save him his father assumes the guilt, is sent to
Dartmoor, and dies there. It is only oH his death-bed that he
becomes known to George under his true character. George has
been already consumed with remorse; now he is almost in de-
spair. He goes to the Crimea with his regiment, a repentant but
not yet a forgiven man. A supernatural intimation of pardon is
given him on the eve of a battle. He is desperately but not
fatally wounded and lives to marry and be happy, Mrs. Barr
leaving her readers to conclude that either his "feet of clay"
have been changed to gold, or that he limps thereafter on stout
crutches of true contrition.

1890.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 835

WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS, ETC., SHOULD
BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION, NO. 415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH
STREET, NEW YORK CITY

Favorable reports have reached us from many sources indicating that the
movement brought into prominence by our Reading Union is productive ot
good results. We have not attempted to establish a dead-level uniformity
among Catholic Reading Circles, believing that each Circle should preserve its
own autonomy and endeavor to consult the best interests of its own members.
We are pleased to notice the individual characteristics fostered by this policy.
The general principles upon which the Columbian Reading Union is based per-
mit an agreeable diversity in the practical plans selected for different localities.
Provided something definite is done on behalf of Catholic literature, profitable
work can be performed by allowing individual members of Reading Circles to
choose magazine articles relating to events, to persons conspicuous for notable
achievements, and to prominent institutions devoted to educational and charit-
able efforts, which represent the active forces of Christian civilization. Even
where a definite course of reading has been selected, it seems advisable for each
Circle to get at stated times some information on current literature.

* *

The "Catholic Fortnightly Reading Circle," of Buffalo, N. Y., is an-
nounced as a branch of the Columbian Reading Union. From our knowledge
of the persons associated together as its members, we have no doubt of its
present and future progress. We extend to it our best wishes for success. At a
recent meeting two articles were read from THE CATHOLIC WORLD, " The Egyp-
tian Writings " and " The Stones Shall Cry Out," which were afterwards informally
discussed, with allusions to the lectures by Miss Amelia B. Edwards on the buried
cities and art treasures of ancient Egypt. We shall watch with interest the de-
velopment of the plan adopted for the "Catholic Fortnightly Reading Circle."
It seems to us particularly well suited to those personally qualified to read and
discuss the merits of the best productions of contemporary authors. The officers
of the Circle are : Mrs. John McManus, president ; Miss Matilda E. Karnes,
vice-president ; Miss Mary E. Gibbons, corresponding secretary ; Miss Joseph-
ine Greenough, recording secretary; and Miss Mary Lynch, treasurer.

* *

In reply to a correspondent, we may state that our Reading Union has found
many friends on the Pacific Coast. Several of their letters have been published.
One letter from Gilroy, CaL, entitled to prominent consideration, was written by
Miss M. A. Fitzgerald, who has won the laurels of authorship by a volume of
poems which we commend to the notice of our readers. We have received also
a marked copy of the Catholic News of San Francisco, containing a very favor-
able notice here quoted :

From the San Francisco Catholic News,

"Practical results are bound to follow the formation of Reading Circles among
Catholics. The Columbian Reading Union, under the management of the
Paulist Fathers, who believe in carrying on a literary mission, is one which we,
with others, believe will do much towards making converts and developing in

836 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS, [Mar ,

many Catholics a greater love for good literature. The Union is intended to be
a useful auxiliary to the Catholic reading public. It will endeavor to counteract,
wherever prevalent, the indifference shown towards Catholic literature; to sug-
gest ways and means of acquiring a better knowledge of standard authors, and
especially of our Catholic writers, and to secure a larger representation of their
works on the shelves of public libraries. It will aim to do this by practical meth-
ods of co-operation.

"THE CATHOLIC WORLD, that great and excellent magazine published in
New York, and whose editor is in charge of the Columbian Reading Union, was
the first to discuss the question of Reading Circles among Catholics. The work
it started out to accomplish is bearing good fruit, for in a recent letter that we
are in receipt of from headquarters we learn that, from the evidence gathered by
an extensive correspondence by the Union, the projectors are convinced that a
great many of our young people will gladly accept guidance in their choice of
reading. We hope to see soon several Circles formed in this city and Oakland."

*
* *

The Catholic Columbian has given prominence to an admirable paper on
" Reading Unions," which will be found very useful to all who can appreciate a
good outline plan for a Reading Circle. We are opposed to the spirit which
would dictate by rule to each officer and member. As these Reading Circles,
which we hope to see formed everywhere, are voluntary associations, let there be
a large margin allowed for individual taste, and as few rules as possible. One ot
the best Circles known to us has existed over three years without a constitution
or by-laws. It is very important, however, for each Circle to have a good sum-
mary of directions, suggestions, and conditions of membership. The writer, who
takes the signature " Josephus," has shown excellent judgment and skill in the
summary which we quote. It is all the more acceptable to us as it contains many
phrases which we recognize as our own.

From the Catholic Columbian.

READING UNIONS— SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR THE FORMATION OF A CATHOLIC LITERARY

CIRCLE.

'' In these times of great literary activity few persons are able to keep up
with the productions of many of even the best authors. The purchase of any
considerable proportion of the new books constantly appearing is a drain upon
the resources to which few persons and few public libraries are able or willing
to submit.

"Again, the number of books published annually is so great that few per-
sons are able to select those which are suitable from a Catholic standpoint. What
to read is a question of real difficulty to many. With the varied character of tho
literary production, guidance in the selection of reading matter is of the utmost
importance. Life is not long enough to allow time to read all the books that are
printed, therefore it is advisable to adopt some plan by which the best among
them can be secured.

" To meet the want arising from such a state of affairs the Reading Circle
has been devised, and it is but just to say that it is the best method yet suggested
for the purpose. By means of an organization of this sort a constant supply of
the latest and the best books can be had, at a very small expense to. each mem-
ber. In fact, there is no method by which a larger literary return can be secured
from a small investment.

" The following plan has been adopted in certain localities :

" The proper number of persons to form a club is about twenty. With less
than that number the funds will hardly be sufficient, unless the dues be unusually

1890.] WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 837

high ; with more it will take too long for books to pass around the whole circuit.
As soon as the proper number of names has been secured, a meeting should be
held, and the details of organization agreed upon. The club should hold semi-
annual meetings, to discuss and indicate the sort of books that may be desired.

" A presiding officer and a secretary, who should also act as librarian and
treasurer, will ordinarily be sufficient to transact the business of the club. A
committee of three on the purchase of books may be appointed.

''The secretary, who also performs the duties of the librarian and treasurer,
.should receive the new books and prepare them for circulation by covering, and
pasting in the list of members ; should start them on their journey through the
club ; receive them after they have been around, and keep them, subject to the
order of the club. He should keep a list of the books and of the dates when they
were issued, so that the whereabouts of a book may be ascertained at any time.
He should collect the dues and fines, and other moneys due the club, and dis-
burse them upon the order of the club, keeping an account of his financial trans-
actions.

" Five dollars (perhaps less) per annum from each member will supply all the
books that can be kept in circulation by a club of twenty persons. Half of the
amount should be paid at each of the semi-annual meetings of the club. A fine
of two or three cents per day should be levied for each'day that a book is retained
by any member beyond the time allowed.

" The list of names should be printed on a small slip with the rules at the
head, so that the whole may be pasted inside the cover, in form something like
the following :

" BROWNSON READING CIRCLE.

" Keep this book seven days, and then deliver to the next on the list, enter-
ing opposite your name the date of receipt and delivery. For second reading it
may be retained for two weeks. Three cents fine for each day it is retained be-
yond the time allowed.

" George Washington, received May i, delivered May 8 ; Andrew Jackson,
received May 8, delivered May 15, second reading; Mrs. Q. Adams, received
May 15, delivered May 22; Henry Clay, received May 22, delivered May 30,
second reading ; Daniel Webster, received May 30.

" The above list is as it would appear after the book in which it was fixed
had gone partly around the circuit. It shows that Daniel Webster was the last
to receive it, on May 30 ; that it passed along regularly, except in the case of
Henry Clay, who retained it one day longer than the time allowed, and is there-
fore indebted to the club in a fine of three cents. It also shows that Andrew
Jackson and Henry Clay desire to read the book a second time, and it will there-
fore, after it has passed through the whole list, be returned to them in the order
of their names, after which it will be delivered to the secretary. For the sake of
fairness, the first on the list should not always be the first to receive a new book,
but each one in turn should be the first recipient.

"There are three methods by which the books maybe disposed of at the
end of the year :

"i. To distribute them among the members, which maybe done by dividing
into sets of nearly equal value, and then casting lots for choice.

" 2. To dispose of them at auction at each annual meeting of the club, and
use. the money so obtained to purchase books for use during the next year.

"3. To form the nucleus of a circulating library by means of the books so
remaining ; this method might be found highly useful in places where there is no
such institution.

" As soon as the Circle or club is formed, it should affiliate with the Colum-

838 WITH READERS AND CORRESPOXDKXTS. [Mar.,

bian Reading Union of New York City. This Union is endeavoring to counter-
act, wherever prevalent, the indifference shown toward Catholic literature ; to
suggest ways and means of acquiring a better knowledge of standard authors,
and especially of our Catholic writers; and to secure a larger representation ot
their works on the shelves of public libraries. Much judgment is required in
preparing suitable lists of books for the different tastes of readers. The Union
arranges guide-lists for the various classes of readers, some fully and others only
partially educated, male and female, the leisured and the working classes. It has
been truly said that to allow untrained intellects or unformed tastes to choose for
themselves, and of themselves, from books gathered without discrimination, is.
often as fatal and always as dangerous as to allow a child to pluck flowers at will
in a garden filled with plants healthful and poisonous. JOSEPHUS."

*
* *

We quote another letter of special interest to Catholic young men's societies,
which have or should have abundant facilities for their members to get good
reading :

" It becomes every day more evident that the great need of our time is ta
create a Catholic atmosphere, in which Catholics may live without detriment
from those foul, fetid odors of worldly and irreligious thought and association that
prove the destruction of so* many Christian lives. The indifference of some young
men, which in too many cases eventually drifts into positive unbelief, is due ta
various causes. Some even at home are not under the most desirable influences ;
the associations of many others are not the most commendable ; while large num-
bers of still another class are without homes, and therefore lose all the advantages
of direction, training, and example rarely found outside of the domestic circle.

" It is to these young men that the greatest advantages would accrue from soci-
eties encouraging mental as well as moral improvement. Books necessarily play
an important part in these associations. Therefore, what better work could be
.done than raising the young men to a higher standard of literary culture, break-
ing the charm which holds them to that which is contemptible, which destroys
the finest and noblest qualities of the mind, and eradicates from the soul that
which is good and holy? The Catholic faith of our young men is more precious
than money ; their moral training is more important than all the gold in the world.
Give them good literature, cost what it may ; the Catholic faith and morality ot
young men are more to be esteemed than any other treasure.

" Young men should be intellectually well equipped to fight against indiffer-
entism, infidelity, and the many baneful issues which threaten them on all sides.
Therefore, the possession of a useful library is a thing which every society should
strive for, as a Catholic library is one of the arsenals containing the best
accoutrements.

" With an association like the Columbian Reading Union, proposing, as it
does, to furnish lists of the books and periodicals with which to furnish libraries,
and the best methods for their classification, we shall get a calm and judicial
criticism of books. In these days of much bad writing and wide reading there is
deep need of exact criticism of current literature and sure guidance of the public
taste. Literature should soothe and compose the mind, should be its refuge
from turbulence and care, should be a ministry of peace and refreshment to the
wearied spirit. Catholics should consider it their duty to contribute their mite to
this noble undertaking to keep gross sensationalism from the library shelves*

" Substantial encouragement will lessen the difficulty of keeping off the per-
nicious literature which strikes at the roots of our young trees in the nursery of
the church. EDWARD MOUNTEL.'*

" A'.7 ;//'<?.", Ohio.

1890.] WITH READERS AND CO-RESPONDENTS. 839,

. Among competent judges there is but one opinion concerning the Chautauqua
course of reading, viz.: that it is designed on narrow lines, with a deliberate pur-
pose to ignore the truth about Catholics in their relations to history, science, art,
and literature. Some of our correspondents have admitted that they made this
discovery by painful personal experience. We give here the testimony of another
intelligent witness bearing on the same point : "I am very much interested in
this work, and am glad to see Catholics coming to the front in a literary and
educational way. Through the Pilot and New Record I have learned something
of the Columbian Reading Union. I am well acquainted with the Chautauqua,
but its Methodistical characteristics are very offensive to a Catholic. . . ."

#
* *

Secretaries are requested to send a short account, written on one side of the
paper, of the work attempted and accomplished in their respective Reading
Circles. From such reports we can gather many useful suggestions for publica-
tion. Whenever desired these reports will be used anonymously; but we hope
that no false modesty will deprive us of valuable information. We want to hear
from all places, even the most remote, the news of Catholic enterprise on behalt
of good literature.

M. C. M.

HISTORY OF A CONVERSION.

I have been often asked, "What made you a Catholic?" and I answer
always : The grace of God. Nothing else expresses it.

I was born in New England among a class of people who had not the faintest
idea of what the Catholic Church really believes and teaches. They were so
influenced by their surroundings and early education that nothing short of a
miracle could have opened their eyes to the truth. That is why I say that the
grace of God alone made me a Catholic.

My parents were of the old Puritan order. Originally Calvinistic Baptists,
they drifted into Methodism, and I was brought up in that faith. From my
earliest recollection I attended Sunday-school and church. I knew Catholicism
only as it was represented in the books in circulation among Protestants, for I
had no Catholic friends, and had never been inside a Catholic church. Yet it
possessed a most marvellous attraction for me. When a very little girl I used
to sit upon the Catholic church steps listening to the music, longing, yet fear-
ing, to enter. For priests and nuns I had a most profound respect, although
I had been taught that they were unworthy of it. The fact was that / could not
believe the things I heard against the Catholic Church, and often wished
that I knew some Catholic personally. It seems almost incredible that so young
a child should have felt as I did, but I was a veritable book- worm, and books
are more liberal educators than men and women.

When I was nine years old my sister's profession forced her to travel.
My mother accompanied her, and I was placed in a small Methodist boarding-
school, where for three years I was carefully trained in the religious path it
was intended I should follow.

Like the majority of Protestants, I had always been taught that I must '
perience a change of heart " in order to be saved— a sort of moral earthquake,
as it were. I was a nervous, impressionable child, and many a sleepless night I
passed, praying in fear and trembling that I might be saved. Finally, during a
"revival" in our church, I confided my doubts to the minister. I told him

WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [Mar.,

that I wanted to be a Christian, but not a Methodist. He tried to convince me
of my error, but finding that impossible, and thinking it was but a childish whim
which would pass away in time, admitted me to baptism, leaving the question of
church membership to the future.

My father, when they told him what I had said, suggested that I should try
the Episcopal Church, as in his opinion one church was as good as another; it was
only a question of individual taste. At a later period I reminded him of that re-
mark, but with no apparent good result.

Well, I did try to believe the Thirty-nine Articles of faith of the Episcopal
Church, but in vain, although my sister was then and is now a devout member
of that church. My little niece rather voiced the family sentiment when she
asked me a short time ago, " Auntie, when you were going to join a church,
•why did you not join a nice, fashionable church like ours ? "

One day I had occasion to visit the servant's room in our house. I saw her
prayer-book on the table. I took it up and glanced at the contents, and I be-
came so interested that I carried it to my room, where I studied it until I
knew some of the prayers by heart. I remember particularly the Confiteor and
the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. The book being missed, there was a search
for it, and when it was finally discovered in my room I was severely repri-
manded for my Romish proclivities and was subjected to a long lecture on the
ignorance, etc., of papists.

Just at this time my mother decided to send me to a convent. I never
knew her reasons, but I remember that her fellow church-members were greatly
shocked. It was bad enough for one daughter to follow a profession, but that
fact sank into insignificance when they heard that I was to be sent to a Catholic
convent-school. I am afraid they felt an unholy joy when their predictions were
fulfilled and I became a Catholic.

Heretofore I had known nothing of the dogmas of the church, but at the
convent I studied them, secretly of course, for I was supposed to be a Protestant,
•and religious convictions of the Protestant pupils were respected, and conversa-
tion with us about religion forbidden. At last I became thoroughly convinced,
and then I openly avowed myself a Catholic. I was so simple-minded as to think
my troubles at an end, but in reality they had only begun. When I asked leave
of my parents to be received into the church, the objection was made — and it
came from all quarters — that I was too young to decide upon so serious a matter
and must wait. .

I waited. The desire did not pass away, but grew stronger with each year
of my life. Strange, nay, marvellous to say, I was given the works of Renan,
Voltaire, and Rousseau to read, but my iaith remained unshaken, and I was final-
ly received into the church.

My firmness and my fidelity to conscience cost me family and friends, but I
have never regretted it.

It has been said that "he who travels much abroad is seldom holy." I
hare been a traveller almost all my life. It is indeed more difficult to resist
temptation when away from the restraining influences of home and friends. But I
have met many faithful souls who "travel much abroad," and who, like me, if
they are not holy, at least are 'good Christians. These find their greatest safe-
guard in the church and in the Catholic offices of religion. The influence of the
church is such as to make her sanctuaries the homes of all her children, so that
in every city there is at least one place where we poor wanderers are not
" strangers in a strange land," but can go for comfort and solace to our Father's
house.

1890.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 841

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE, ORIENTAL AND CLASSI-
CAL. By John D. Quackenbos, A.M., M.D., Adjunct Professor of the
English Language and Literature, Columbia College. New York : Harper
£ Brothers.

In Professor Ouackenbos's elegantly condensed volume the reading public
is at last furnished with an authoritative and interesting work on the important
subjects of which it treats. The aim of the author has been to present a popu-
lar and attractive account of the literature of ancient nations, and thus to trace
the history of human thought from the most remote periods. Before taking up
the finished productions of Greece and Rome, he treats fully of the precious re-
mains of Oriental literature that have recently been brought to light, dealing in
turn with the Sanscrit, Persian, Chinese, Hebrew, Chaldean, Assyrian, Arabic,
Hittite, Phoenician, and Egyptian. These are all considered from the stand-
point of the most recent investigations, notably the Egyptian writing and litera-
ture, in connection with which the results of the vast amount of labor expended in
this important field during the decade just closed are for the first trme pre-
sented to English readers.

The many who have become interested in Egypt and her ancient inscrip-
tions must turn to Professor Quackenbos's history as the only accessible popu-
lar authority in which their curiosity can be satisfied. After an introductory
consideration of hieroglyphic decipherment and the principles underlying this
system of writing, the literature itself is divided into the archaic or dawn period,
its classical and Augustan era, and its age of decline. Under each venerable writ-
ings are discussed and translations presented. The Babylonian and Assyrian
cuneiform remains are similarly treated, and the historical allusions in the
Word of God are shown in many instances to be wonderfully confirmed. A
singular correspondence is noticeable between the most ancient forms of belief
and Christianity in regard to monotheism, immortality, and responsibility to a
personal God. "A belief in a future life," says the author, " is expressed in
the poem on the Descent of Istar, the moon-god's daughter, to Hades, ' the
land where the dead outnumber the living ' ; and further in the so-called Nim-
rod Epic, in which the hero is ferried across the waters of the dead to the shores
of the regions of the blessed, where he recognizes an ancestor, and exclaims :

" ' Thy appearance is not changed ; like me art thou :
And thou thyself art not changed ; like me art thou.' "

What is this but resurrection — not the mere immortality of the soul, as
taught by Plato, but the immortality of man, that mysterious union of chas-
tened soul and resurrection body, as taught by Jesus Christ ?

As we read the Vedic hymns and the Avesta philosophy, we are carried back
beyond the age of idolatry to an era of simple faith in one eternal, infinite, and
omnipotent Being, in .a heaven for the virtuous and a place of torment for the
wicked ; and we rise from our reading with the feeling that the Divine Wisdom
has raised up scholars in this material day to vindicate the truth of the Scriptures
from the pages of profane record, from the facts of history fossilized in the very-
words we use.

VOL. L.— 54

'842 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Mar.,

We heartily commend Professor Quackenbos's work to our readers, with the
•conviction that it will be found as entertaining as the average novel and far
•more instructive. The general knowledge it embodies is essential to a polite
education, and there are few who have the necessary leisure to read^Jbeyond its
covers. For the convenience of such, however, as may desire full and more sat-
isfying information, the author has scattered through the text frequent refer-
ences to standard monographs — and this is not the least among the many note-
worthy features of the book. Illustrations, diagrams, and maps further enhance
the value of the narrative. We predict for the volume a wide circulation among
.educators and general readers.

THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND; OR, THE PURITAN THEOCRACY IN ITS
RELATIONS TO CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. By John Fiske. Boston
and New York : Houghton, M ifflin & Co.

Mr. Fiske has many excellent qualities as a writer, being clear in style, di-
rect and concise in statement, and gifted with sufficient imagination to adorn
the path of history with the flowers of fancy. He is also a conscientious student.
Although he makes little parade of learning, there is evidence of extended and
patient research, though his over-frequent posing as "the historian" and " the
titudent of history" is just a trifle annoying. Nor is he without a philosophical
judgment of events and eras, races and their missions. His books are a val-
uable iricrease to our stock of American historical narrative.* It is therefore
with regret that we feel constrained to find fault with the volume before us.

We have read it carefully through, and with prepossessions in its favor, and
we yet must say that the epithet unsatisfactory belongs to its views of the politi-
cal lessons of early New England history, and that of flippant to its treatment of
the religious questions involved. Mr. Fiske, as is well known, is an agnostic
evolutionist ; this history is written with foregone conclusions that all human
events are but developments from barbarism, and all religious movements are
advances from superstition towards rationality.

He is primarily a preacher of evolutionism in its extreme type, and uses
history as doctors use corpses for dissection; he is not seeking the discovery
of healthful so much as that of unhealthful signs in the past life of man, for it is
a corollary of his principle of development that we are freer from moral diseases
than our forefathers. Can Mr. Fiske deny that what the founders of the New
England commonwealths knew, they knew as clearly as their descendants? Can
he affirm that those primary verities of rational life — the existence of a Supreme
Being, the absolute difference between right and wrong, the authority of con-
science, the certainty of a future state — are as well understood to-day in Anglo-
Saxon IStew England as they were two hundred and fifty years ago? Can he
affirm that there is as much earnestness of debate, as much sincerity of search,
about those primary verities of rational life, concerning which the beginners of
New England were at fault — namely, the freedom of the human will and the lov-
ing-kindness of God — among his contemporaries as among their ancestors ?
Are the children of the beginners equal to their fathers in sincerity, truth-
fulness, courage, generosity, affection, consistency, honesty, industry, chastity?
Do they compare with them as men and women ? Do the pilgrim fathers and
their children, taken together and viewed from that point of high history which
Mr. Fiske is so fond of claiming as his own, teach evolution from a worse to
.a better type of humanity? or, rather, do they not teach the very reverse?
Has modern New England made any better fist of the deep problems of re-
ligion than old New England, or could the men of to-day found the common-

1890.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 843

wealths and help to found the great republic which are the enduring monuments
of their fathers' prowess as men? It is true that they were infected with Calvin-
ism, the deadliest blight known to modern religious error; but there is nothing
in their successors to justify one of them in calling his age enlightened in compari-
son with that of the forefathers, any more than in his calling the beginnings
of the human race " primeval savagery."

Another fault we find with Mr. Fiske in this book is his advocacy of a
series of political theories which are at present in debate among the people, and
have ever been in debate among us. We say advocacy, but we might better
say his assumption of them as axiomatic truths of American politics. He talks
of questions which are those of constitutional interpretation as if his political
party were the final product of all evolution. This is offensive to his fairer-minded
readers and injurious to his claim of vocation as a historian. There are other
assumptions, too, which are at least equally offensive, such as the preposterous
notion that Cromwell, who was autocrat in England, was an exponent of the
right of self-government ; that Mazzini and Stein are products of Puritanism, and
that they are the noblest types of modern European statesmanship ; that Wil-
liam III., who consented to the torture and execution of Cornelius De Witt
and broke the treaty of Limerick, and who signed the edict which caused the
massacre of Glencoe, is a model statesman of a free nation.

EVOLUTION. Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical
Association. Boston : James H. West.

We have in this volume fifteen lectures by thirteen different gentlemen,
most of them residents of Brooklyn, we believe, and all of them perfervid disci-
ples of Darwin and Herbert Spencer. The first address is devoted to a briet
consideration of the life and writings of the latter philosopher, whom Mr. Daniel
Greenleaf Thompson, as a consistent evolutionist, naturally considers the
flower and perfection of such intellectual life as has up to date appeared upon
our planet. As he says, in a cheery and confident manner, which can hardly
be too much admired, "Without disparaging those really worthy Greeks"
(Plato and Aristotle), " who would be considered good philosophers, as philoso-
phers go in our time, and who, it must be remembered, were far better than
they used to run in earlier days, I do not hesitate to aver that the subject of this
sketch, for instance, is much greater than either of them. Nor would I say it ot
him alone, but also of many others who are not as prominent. The general
level of intellectual power is so far raised in modern times that it is exceedingly
difficult for any one man to become pre-eminent among his fellows "

On the whole, the sentence we have italicized seems as clever a way as any for
expressing the fact that when each man depends for his elevation on the opera-
tion popularly known as lifting himself by his own waistband no one can ever
hope to look down from any very lofty height upon his fellows. And that, we
take it, is about the sum and substance of what atheistic evolution has to offer
by way of incentive to individual endeavor. These are fortunate times, thinks
Mr. Thompson: " Carlyle's 'Great Man 'is certainly disappearing from the
earth, and soon to share the fate of the mastodon and the mammoth." In his
enthusiasm for this proximate and glorious future Mr. Thompson even forgets
to observe that the " great man " of the present will fall so far short of the
attainment of the mammoth and the mastodon that he will not even leave any
trace of himself for posterity to discover. No real animal, no fossil remains, it is
reasonable to conclude, even though one adopts evolutionary modes of rea-
soning.

844 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Mar.,

It will be regretted by careful and candid evolutionists that some of these
lecturers should not have better posted themselves on certain points before com-
mitting their lucubrations to cold type. What would Professor Huxley, for ex-
ample, have to say to the statement of Mr. William Potts, on page 1 19, that
" Protoplasm in masses, as discovered at the bottom of the sea by the Challenger
Expedition, was described by Huxley under the name of Bathybius " ? Al-
though -each of these addresses was followed by an informal discussion of
the points made, it does not appear that any of Mr. Potts's audience had later
information concerning this too famous "find" than himself. It looks as
though the Brooklyn Ethical Association were largely composed of amateurs,
who roved indiscriminately from the pews to the pulpit of the church in which the
lectures were delivered. Mr. James A. Skilton's talk on the " Evolution of So-
ciety " is about the best-considered of them all, and contains more ideas that
are fruitful. But generally the purpose of the speakers is so visibly that of ham-
mering away at the "Mosaic cosmogony," which they appear to regard as a per-
sonal foe, that they end by becoming tiresome. Mr. Skilton, by the way, differs
radically from Mr. Thompson in his estimate of the comparative merits of an-
cient and modern philosophers. According to him, the human intellect
"reached, so far as we know, its highest elevation something more than two
thousand years ago among the Greeks, but subsequently lost its position, and
has not yet regained it." The reason he believes to be that the "so-called
Christian Church " has put intellect "under a ban and in discredit." Mr. Skil-
ton, we observe, like others of his lecturing confreres, seems to confound the
Christian Church and its teachings with Protestantism and its moribund meth-
ods. He has no quarrel with Christianity as he himself conceives it. We
may add that Christianity has no necessary quarrel with evolution, when it
works on lines similar to those taken by Mr. Skilton on p. 224 of this volume.

AMERICAN STATESMEN. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. By John F. Morse, Jr., author
of Life of John Q. Adams, etc. Boston and New York : Houghton,
Mifflin & Co.

We have seldom read a more entertaining book than this, which is a por-
trait of one of the greatest men of modern times. The peculiar value of it is in
its subject, for Franklin was a " self-made man," and in this age that kind of man
has much to do with human greatness. They almost monopolize our successful
business men, and also our scientific inventors, and are fully represented in the
front ranks of literature and statesmanship.

One very instructive lesson taught by Franklin's life is learned from the kind
of religious infidelity he was tainted with. Like very many infidels who have been
brought up Protestants, Franklin was good-natured, tolerant, and mannerly.
When, on the other hand, a man passes from Catholicity to infidelity he is gener-
ally venomous, and this is because he is in bad faith. The same cannot always be
said of what one may call Protestant infidels, for the implied philosophical prin-
ciple of Protestantism is the validity of doubt as a universal predicate ; hence
many honest men have thrown away belief in the supernatural, and even in God,
because their training as Protestants had engendered a tendency to doubt.
Hence in men like Franklin and like Lincoln, the vigorous action of their minds
in early manhood resulted in infidelity ; and this was not venomous or blasphe-
mous because so largely a matter of misfortune rather than of choice. .As in
the case of Lincoln, so in that of -Franklin, the riper powers of reason, aided by
experience and study in human nature, brought the mind back to many of the
truths of natural and even of revealed religion.

.1890.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 845

The interesting story of Franklin's long and eventful life is well told, indeed
brilliantly depicted, in these pages. It is to be regretted that Mr. Morse, quite
unlike his hero, occasionally — as on page 26 — indulges in a fling at revealed
religion, and at facts and dogmas which a wider knowledge of human nature
than he seems to possess, and a deeper insight into the laws of thought, would
have saved him from.

FREDERIC OZANAM, PROFESSOR AT THE SORBONNE : His Life and Works.
By Kathleen O'Meara ; with a preface by his Eminence Cardinal Manning.
New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

We have before us a copy of the fourth American edition of this model biogra-
phy, which is a splendid monument to the intellectual power and literary skill of the
late Kathleen O'Meara. The book is deserving of the highest praise. We are
pleased to know that there has been for some time past an urgent demand for a
new edition. As a specimen of fine printing and excellent binding, this volume
will bear comparison with the best work of any publisher in the United States.

We have no hesitation in saying that this life of Frederic Ozanam repre-
sents accurately an important historical epoch, and for this reason it should
have a place in every public library. His labors were not for France alone. He
was an eloquent defender of Christian civilization as applied to the needs of the
present century. That he had studied profoundly the labor question may be
seen from his own words :

'•God did not make the poor; he sends no human creatures into- the
chances of this world without providing them with these two sources of riches,
which are the fountain of all others — intelligence and will. Why should we
hide from the people what they know, and flatter them like bad kings ?

" It is human liberty that makes the poor ; it is that which dries up those
two primitive fountains of wealth, by allowing intelligence to be quenched in
ignorance and will to be weakened by misconduct. The workingmen know it
better than we do. God forbid that we should calumniate the poor whom the
Gospel blesses, or render the suffering classes responsible for their misery;
thus pandering to the hardness of those bad hearts that fancy themselves ex-
onerated from helping the poor man when they have proved his wrong-doing.
While we have put crushing taxes on necessaries of life, we have not yet dis-
cov'ered in the arsenal of our fiscal laws the secret of arresting the multiplication
of distilleries, of raising the price of alcoholic liquors, of restricting the sale of
those detestable, adulterated, poisonous drinks that cause more sickness than all
the rigors of the seasons, and make more criminals than all the injustice of men
combined."

From the intrinsic evidence of his own statements, so carefully set forth by
Kathleen O'Meara, we are thoroughly convinced that Frederic Ozanam had a
most profound contempt for effete monarchies and bad kings. We are in-
formed that some of his nearest and dearest friends were much concerned
because of his indifference, to say the least, regarding the historic claims of
certain royal families.

FLOWERS FROM THE CATHOLIC KINDERGARTEN; OR, STORIES OF THE
CHILDHOOD OF THE SAINTS. By Father Franz Hattler, S.J. Translated
from the German by T. J. Livesey. London : Burns & Gates ; New
York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

This charmin? little book will find a ready welcome from our children. If

846 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Mar.,

the joy and innocence of childhood touch the most tender chords of the heart,
how much greater the response when, as in this little book, the childhood of
some of God's greatest saints is so beautifully, so delicately portrayed. The
book is, indeed, "em Kindergarten," a "garden of children," sweet buds of
happy childhood that blossomed into virtuous youth, to ripen and flower, at
last, into perfect men and women.

These flowers of saintly childhood have been transplanted into pure and
simple English, and have in this an added charm for all who are lovers of chil-
dren. It would make a beautiful present to the little ones.

GOOD THINGS FOR CATHOLIC READERS. A Miscellany of Catholic Biogra-
phy, Travel, etc. Profusely Illustrated. Second Series. New York:
The Catholic Publication Society Co.

The very great favor with which our Catholic reading public received the
first series of Good Things induces the publishers to issue this second series,
which is in all respects the equal and in many qualities the superior of its prede-
cessor. It is not a mere reprint of the well-known Catholic Annual, for while
there are many articles in the volume of a popular character, there is much be-
sides that will prove of lasting value to the student, and especially the student
of Catholic Church history in the United States. In this respect the book is a
veritable store-house of information, especially in the biographical sketches,,
which contain much that is otherwise inaccessible to the general reader.

The book is well bound, printed, and illustrated.

MANUAL FOR INTERIOR SOULS. A Collection of Unpublished Writings by
the Rev. Father Grou, S.J. Translated by permission from the new edi-
tion of Victor Lecoffre, Paris. London : St. Anselm's Society. (For sale
by the Catholic Publication Society Co., New York.)-

This book begins with a short account of the author's life, and consists of
sixty-three short treatises on ascetical and mystical subjects. It is a work of
much value to all who desire to serve God faithfully, whether living in the world
or in communities. It is one of those works which may be used for years with
steady profit, the style being clear and full of unction, and the matter chosen by
a master of the spiritual life. It is true that it is characterized by that detailed
and methodical minuteness peculiar to the school of the writer ; but this is
absolutely necessary for many souls, and others can readily abstract from this
peculiarity and grasp the able and powerful presentment of the maxims of the
Gospel applied to the way of perfection.

A specially instructive and really entertaining chapter is the author's ingen-
ious treatment of selfishness under the heading " On the Human 'I.'"

BOOKS AND READING. By Brother Azarias. Second Edition. New York :
The Cathedral Library, 460 Madison Avenue.

The second edition of this admirable essay of Brother Azarias makes the
rather well-worn quotation from Addison's Cato particularly apt :

" 'Tis not in mortals to command success,
But we'll do more, Sempronius ; we'll deserve it."

It is not many months since the first edition was noticed at length in these
pages, but, though it is not our purpose here to again point out its many good
qualities, we think it just to regard this early second edition as the sign of

1890.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 847

changed and better times. It is at once a testimony of the value of the pam-
phlet and an indication of the awakened interest of our people in the cultivation
of literary good taste and judgment. May this interest abide ! In press-
work and binding this little pamphlet is a beautiful specimen of the book-
maker's art, and is highly creditable to the publisher.

THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. By Rev. Prof. G. G. Findlay, B.A.,
Headingly College, Leeds. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son.

It is amusing to read a book which, like this one, sets forth the conspicuously
Catholic doctrine of grace and justification, and yet now and then rails against
the church in truly old-fashioned style. We have read this commentary with
some care and fail to find any notable divergence from Catholic truth in its ex-
position of St. Paul's teaching of the union of the soul and the Holy Ghost, in
the conflict between flesh and spirit. The exposition of the gifts of the Holy
Ghost_is really luminous. The author even adopts the traditional Catholic view
of the difference between the Apostles Peter and Paul at Antioch. Accepting,
unconsciously, we suppose, what Luther and the typical Protestant commenta-
tors so hotly rejected, the author's flings at the church are very hard to under-
stand.

Deep exegetical learning, full knowledge of the linguistic kind, a true
spirit of reverence, a thorough belief in our Lord's divinity, an orthodox view of
the doctrine of grace, are the good qualities of this work, and its only evil one
is injustice to the author's " Roman Catholic brethren."

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Mention of books in this place does not preclude extended notice in subsequent numbers.
DIARY OF THE PARNELL COMMISSION. Revised from The Daily News. By John MacDon-

ald, M.A. London : T. Fisher Unwin. (For sale by the Catholic Publication Society Co.,

New York.)
THE FOLLOWING OF CHRIST. In four books. By Thomas a Kempis. Translated from the

original Latin, with practical reflections and prayers. A new edition. Philadelphia: H.

L. Kilner & Co.
LIFE OF DOM Bosco, founder of the Salesian Society. Translated from the French of

J. M. Villefranche by Lady Martin. London: Burns & Oates, Limited; New York:

Catholic Publication Society Co.
SHOULD CHRISTIANITY LEAVEN EDUCATION? Christian Schools. Addressed to parents.

By Thomas J. Jenkins, author of Six Seasons on our Prairies. Baltimore : John Murphy

& Co.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF OLD ENGLISH THOUGHT. By Brother Azarias, of the Brothers ct

the Christian Schools. Third edition. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
ISABELLA OF CASTILE, 1492-1892. By Eliza Allen Starr. Chicago : C. V. Waite & Co.
BULLETIN OF THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION, BOTANICAL DEPARTMENT OF

CORNELL UNIVERSITY. XIV. December, 1889. I. On the Strawberry-Leaf Blight.

II. On another Disease of the Strawberry. Ithaca, N. Y. : Published by the University.
SANITARY ENTOMBMENT ; THE IDEAL DISPOSITION OF THE DEAD. By the Rev. Charles

R. Treat, Rector of the Church of the Archangel, New York City. Reprinted from The

Sanitarian, December, 1889.
VEN. P. LUDOVICI DE PON IE, SJ. — MEDITATIONES de Praecipius Fidei Nostree Mysteriis,

de Hispanico in Latinum translatae a Melchiore Trevinnio, S.J. ; de novo editae cura

Augustini Lehmkuhl, S.J. Pars III. Complectens vitam Christi publicam ab ejus

Baptismo usque ad passionem. Friburgi-Brisgovise : Herder (Herder, St. Louis, Mo.)

848 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Mar., 1890,

Fin. SCIENCE OF METROLOGY ; OR, NATURAL WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. A challenge to
the Metric System. By the Hon. E. Noel, Captain Rifle Brigade. London : Edward
Stanford.

LES OKIGINES DE LA REVOLUTION FRANCAISE AU COMMENCEMENT in; XVI. SIECLE.
La Veille de la ReTorme. Par R. Maulde-la-Claviere. Paris : Ernest Leroux.

SOUVENIR OF THE CONSECRATION OF ST. BRIGID'S CHURCH, NEW YORK. By an assistant
Priest of the parish.

THE LIGHT OF REASON. By Sebastian S. Wynell-Mayow, author of Notes on Astronomy,
etc. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.

VIA CRUCIS; OR, THE WAY OF THE CROSS. With prayers translated from those composed
by St. Alphonsus Liguon. Philadelphia : H. L. Kilner & Co.

Lux VERA. Par un Laic Ame"ricain. Paris: Victor Palme. (New York: For sale by F.
W. Christern, 254 Fifth Avenue.)

THE ELEMENTS OF ASTRONOMY. A text book for use in High Schools and Academies. With
an Uranography. By Charles A. Young, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Astronomy in
the College of New Jersey (Princeton), etc. Boston and London : Ginn & Co.

DEUS Lux MEA. Solemnities of the Dedication and opening of the Catholic University ot
America, November 13, 1889. Official Report. Baltimore : John Murphy & Co.

SERMON ON ST. AGNES. Preached in St. Agnes' Church, New York, January 26, 1890. By
Rev. Henry A. Brann, D.D. New York : D. P. Murphy, Jr.

THE IRISH UNIVERSITY QUESTION. Addresses delivered by the Most Rev. Dr. Walsh, Arch-
bishop of Dublin, at the Catholic University School of Medicine, November 7, 1889,
and at Blackrock College, December 5, 1889. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son.

MISSION WORK AMONG THE NEGROES AND INDIANS. Baltimore : The Sun office.

THE HISTORY OF SLIGO, TOWN AND COUNTY. By Rev. T. O'Rorke, D.D., M.R.I. A. In
two volumes. Dublin : James Duffy & Co.

CENTENARY EDITION OF THE WORKS OF ST. ALPHONSUS DE LIGUORI, DOCTOR OF THE
CHURCH. Volume XV. Preaching the Word of God. Edited by Rev. Eugene Grimm,
C.SS.R. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago: Benziger Bros.

THE GROWTH OF THE MARRIAGE RELATION. By C. Staniland Wake, author of Evolu-
tion and Morality, etc. Boston : James H. West.

PRIMITIVE MAN. By Z. Sidney Sampson, author of The Evolution of Theology. Boston:
James H. West.

Miss PEGGY O'DlLLON; OR, THE IRISH CRITIC. By Viola Walda. Dublin: M. H. Gill
& Son.

IMAGO CHRISTI : THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS CHRIST. By Rev. James Stalker, M.A. Intro-
duction by Rev. Wm. M. Taylor, D.D., LL.D. New York: A. C.Armstrong & Son.

THE UNKNOWN GOD ; OR, INSPIRATION AMONG THE PRE-CHRISTIAN RACES. By C.
Loring Brace. New York : A C. Armstrong & Son.

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