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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

574

629
39
39 6

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
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, * 7 n

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
2 73

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

2 73
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 shal 1 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 Franois 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 t simplicity, 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 DUVAS 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 ought 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.] ijyiA TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 89

I79 i_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.] I79 1 ^ 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 Franois. 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 I 79 I -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.] Z 79 r 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 lypiA 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)iA 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 I79 1 ^ 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.] ifyiA 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.] I 79 I ~ 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."

The 1 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 WESJ 1 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 m y
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.

6 7

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.

i88 9 .]

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<)iA 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.] ifpiA 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,] ijyiA 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 l