Thoughts and memories

'CO
CD

,co

CO

. o

THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

Thoughts and Memories

BY

Rev. HENRY E. O'KEEFFE

of the Paulists

THE PAULIST PRESS

120 West 60th Street

New York

1920

COFYRIGHTj 1920, BY "THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF

ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE IN THE STATE

OF NEW YORK"

TO

M. F. O.
WHO MADE THIS BOOK POSSIBLE

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

CONTENTS

PAGE

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS 1

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS 8

THE MODERN MONK, LACORDAIRE .... 15

CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERIC ' 18

MISSIONARY TO THE BAHAMAS ...... 25

COVENTRY PATMORE 30

MISTAKES CONCERNING FRANCE 55

EMERSON AND HECKER 61

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS 71

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS 80

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 95

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 106

SUFFRAGETTES AND NUNS 117

WOMAN SUFFRAGE 123

A DISAPPOINTED NATION 129

CARDINAL NEWMAN ONCE MORE 142

HILLIS AND NEWMAN 148

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTIVITY 152

AUGUSTINE HEWIT . . • 162

THE NEW FRANCISCAN CULT 179

THE GREGORIAN CHANT 183

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 188

ix

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS

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

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

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

2 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS

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

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

4 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS 5

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

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

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

6 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

PROSELYTISM AND ITALIANS 7

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

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

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

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

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS

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

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

8

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS 9

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

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

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

10 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS 11

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

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

12 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS 13

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

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

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

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

14 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

THE MODERN MONK, LACORDAIRE

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

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

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

15

16 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MODERN MONK, LACORDAIRE 17

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

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

CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA

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

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

18

CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 19

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

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

Yet, he must have been profoundly grateful,

20 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 21

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

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

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

22 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 23

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

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

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

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

24 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

MISSIONARY TO THE BAHAMAS

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

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

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

25

26 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

MISSIONARY TO THE BAHAMAS 27

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

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

28 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

MISSIONARY TO THE BAHAMAS 29

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

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

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

COVENTRY PATMORE

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

30

COVENTRY PATMORE 31

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

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

32 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 33

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

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

34 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 35

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

"It was not like your great and gracious ways I

Do you, that have naught other to lament,

Never, my Love, repent

Of how that July afternoon

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

More at the wonder than the loss aghast,

With sudden unintelligible phrase

And frightened eye,

And go your journey of all days

With not a kiss or good-bye,

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

'Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways."

36 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 37

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

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

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

38 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

"proud

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 39

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

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

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

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

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

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

40 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 41

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

"0 season strange for song!"

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

42 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 43

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

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

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

44 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 45

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

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

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

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

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

46 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 47

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

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

48 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 49

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

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

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

50 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 51

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

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

accurst.

And now they tell

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

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

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

52 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

COVENTRY PATMORE 53

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

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

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

54 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

MISTAKES CONCERNING FRANCE

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

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

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

55

56 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

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

MISTAKES CONCERNING FRANCE 57

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

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

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

58 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

MISTAKES CONCERNING FRANCE 59

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

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

60 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

EMERSON AND HECKER

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

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

61

62 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

EMERSON AND HECKER 63

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

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

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

64 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

EMERSON AND BECKER 65

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

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

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

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

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

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

66 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

EMERSON AND HECKER 67

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

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

68 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

EMERSON AND HECKER 69

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

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

The following is Emerson in this contemplative
mood:

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

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

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

70 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

Where arches green, the livelong day,

Echo the blackbird's roundelay,

And vulgar feet have never trod

A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

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

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

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS

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

71

72 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

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

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS 73

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

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

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

74 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS 75

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

76 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

A few lines further down in the diary he adds :

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

In Memphis he notes:

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

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

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

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

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS 77

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

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

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

78 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

THE NEGRO RACE RIOTS 79

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

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

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

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS

(( A RE not five sparrows sold for two farthings

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

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

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

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

80

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS 81

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

"Farewell to the neighing steed,

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

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

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

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

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

82 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

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

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS 83

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

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

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

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

84 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS 85

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

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

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

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

86 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS 87

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

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

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

88 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS 89

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

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

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

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

90 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

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

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS 91

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

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

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

92 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

THE STORY OF THE SPARROWS 93

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

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

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

94 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL

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

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

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

95

96 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 97

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

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

98 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

"HEADQUARTERS UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY,

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

Respectfully forwarded to the Adjutant-General, United

States Army.

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

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 99

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

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

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

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

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

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

100 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

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

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

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

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 101

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

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

102 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 103

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

104 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

THE WEST POINT CHAPEL 105

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

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN

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

106

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 107

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

108 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 109

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

110 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 111

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

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

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

112 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

Again, it may be questioned whether this argu-

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 113

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

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

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

114 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

CARDINAL NEWMAN AGAIN 115

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

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

116 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

SUFFRAGETTES AND NUNS

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

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

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

117

118 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

SUFFRAGETTES AND NUNS 119

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

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

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

120 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

SUFFRAGETTES AND NUNS 121

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

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

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

122 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

WOMAN SUFFRAGE

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

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

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

123

124 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

WOMAN SUFFRAGE 125

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

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

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

126 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

WOMAN SUFFRAGE 127

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

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

The Spanish women are slender in form and

128 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

A DISAPPOINTED NATION

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

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

129

130 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

A DISAPPOINTED NATION 131

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

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

132 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

A DISAPPOINTED NATION 133

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

134 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

A DISAPPOINTED NATION 135

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

"A terrible and splendid trust

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

"Croagh Patrick is the place of prayer,

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

"From Dursey Isle to Donegal,

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

136 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

"A dream, a dream, an ancient dream,

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

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

"Some way to faithful Innisfail

Shall come the majesty and awe

Of martial truth, that must prevail

To lay on all the eternal law."

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

A DISAPPOINTED NATION 137

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

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

138 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

A DISAPPOINTED NATION 139

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

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

140 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

A DISAPPOINTED NATION 141

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

0 shall the darkness close around them ere the sun-

blaze
Break at last upon thy story?

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

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

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

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

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

damps
Should not chill my bosom's burnings.

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

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

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

CARDINAL NEWMAN ONCE MORE

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

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

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

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

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

142

CARDINAL NEWMAN ONCE MORE 143

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

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

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

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

144 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

CARDINAL NEWMAN ONCE MORE 145

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

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

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

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

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

146 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

CARDINAL NEWMAN ONCE MORE 147

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

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

HILLIS AND NEWMAN

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

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

148

H1LL1S AND NEWMAN 149

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

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

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

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

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

150 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

"Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.,

"Oct. 19, 1912."

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

HILLIS AND NEWMAN 151

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

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

(Signed) "NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS."

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTIVITY

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

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

152

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTIVITY 153

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

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

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

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

154 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTIVITY 155

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

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

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

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

156 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTIVITY 157

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

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

158 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTIVITY 159

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

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

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

Even when the ancient Romans fell into a period

160 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTIVITY 161

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

AUGUSTINE HEWIT

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

162

AUGUSTINE HE WIT 163

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

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

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

164 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

AUGUSTINE HE WIT 165

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

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

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

166 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

In the early summer of the year 1843 Father

AUGUSTINE HE WIT 167

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

168 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

AUGUSTINE HEWIT 169

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

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

"Edenton, February 19, 1846.

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

170 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

AUGUSTINE HEWIT 171

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

172 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

"AUGUSTUS."

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

AUGUSTINE HE WIT 173

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

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

174 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

AUGUSTINE HEWIT 175

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

176 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

AUGUSTINE HEWIT 177

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

178 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

THE NEW FRANCISCAN CULT

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

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

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

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

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

179

180 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

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

THE NEW FRANCISCAN CULT 181

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

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

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

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

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

182 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

THE GREGORIAN CHANT

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

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

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

183

181 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

THE GREGORIAN CHANT 185

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

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

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

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

186 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

Perhaps some musical genius will fix a practi-

THE GREGORIAN CHANT 187

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

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

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

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE

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

These indeed are the very words of my lecturer
188

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 189

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

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

190 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

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

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 191

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

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

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

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

seems?

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

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

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

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

doom,

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

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

Spirit can meet —

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

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

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

192 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

cannot see;

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

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

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

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

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 193

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

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

"0 World invisible, we view thee,

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

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

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

The angels keep their ancient places;

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

That miss the many splendored thing.

194 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

"But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

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

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

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

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

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 195

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

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

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

196 THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES

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

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

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S LECTURE 197

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

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