CHAPTER IV.

A GLIMMER OF LIGHT.

A popular writer of the day says there is this to be observed in the physiology of every murder, "that before the coroner's inquest the sole object of public curiosity is the murdered man; while immediately after that judicial investigation the tide of feeling turns; the dead man is hurried and forgotten, and the suspected murderer becomes the hero of men's morbid imaginations." If this be true--as it is--in the generality of cases, there are also exceptions in which just the contrary takes place. So was it now. Amidst the hue and cry which arose against Hugh Atherton, the suspected murderer of his uncle, Gilbert Thorneley, the murdered man, was almost forgotten. The announcement in the morning papers of the inquest to be held that same day following the discovery of the murder was hailed but as an acceleration of the justice which was to hunt him down to a felon's death. Three executions had taken place during that summer in London, and they had but whetted the public appetite. Like a wild beast that had tasted blood, it ravened and hungered for more; it _could not_ sicken at the sight of a human creature, a fellow-man, strung up like a dog, strangled like an animal; it _could not_ shudder to behold the quivering limbs, the covered face, the convulsed form, as it swung from the gibbet. They had become used to the sight, familiar with the whole scene in its awful solemnity; but they were far from satiated; and eagerly did the public voice clamor for another victim on whom to gloat their inhuman eyes. Ah! that is a fearful responsibility which England has taken upon herself in these public executions--in baring to such a gaze as that which is fastened upon the small black-draped platform outside the walls of Newgate the solemn, awful spectacle of a creature going to meet his Creator, of an immortal soul passing into the dread presence of its God! Much has been said for, much against, those exhibitions of public justice; I doubt if a true view will ever be arrived at until the question has been considered as one vitally affecting England as a _Christian_ nation.

Hugh Atherton was a suspected man, and the press did its work well that morning in trying to criminate him. Already in those brief four-and-twenty hours his name--the name of one incapable of hurting the tiniest insect that lay across his path--had become a byword and a reproach in the mouths, not of many, but of multitudes, throughout the length and breadth of the land.

Gilbert Thorneley had been a rich man--a notedly rich man--a millionaire; and we may not touch the rich with impunity. He had not been a good man nor a useful man, nor philanthropic; none had loved him, not a few had hated him, many had disliked and dreaded him; but he was rich--he had wealth untold, and it did wonders for him in the eyes of the world after his death. Yet withal he was forgotten, comparatively speaking, whilst the interest of the public was riveted upon his supposed-to-be-criminal nephew. The scanty evidence elicited at the police-court was twisted and turned against him by ingenious compilers of leading-articles, and only one journal ventured to raise a dissenting voice in his favor. It was a paper that had vindicated many a man before; that had done for accused persons what perhaps their poverty would not permit them to do for themselves,--in ventilating facts and clearing up evidence with the care and eloquence of a paid counsel. It was a paper hated by many in authority, by big wigs and potentates, and was to many country magistrates a perfect nightmare; nevertheless its influence told largely upon the public mind and led to the rooting out of many an evil.

{458}

The inquest on Gilbert Thorneley was appointed for two o'clock, and I was cited to appear as one of the witnesses. I had gone late the evening before to Hyde-Park Gardens with all the tidings that could be gathered, and left poor Ada more calm and composed than could almost have been hoped for. Still, what her fearful grief and anxiety was, heaven only knew; for her only thought seemed to be that Hugh should hear she was keeping up bravely for his sake. After the inquest, I promised to try and obtain that she should see him: But I went away, haunted by her poor pale face, her heavy sleepless eyes, her look of suppressed anguish; haunted by an overwhelming dread of the morrow; haunted by the vision of a future laden with sorrow and suffering for us all. And at last the morning dawned of the day which would bring forth such important results, and affect the fate of Hugh Atherton so very gravely. I went early to Merrivale's office, and found him full of business and very anxious. Lister Wilmot had never appeared; and repeated messengers sent to the Albany only brought back word that he had not been home since he went to the police-court the preceding day. He had neither dined nor slept at home.

Smith and Walker were savage and taciturn, refusing all information, although their clerk let out that Wilmot had been there several times; and Merrivale's hopes were all centred in the detective he was employing, but who had not been seen since he had received his instructions.

The hours wore round, and at twelve o'clock I was to be at the Leslies'. As I left Mr. Merrivale's office in Lincoln's-Inn Square, a man bowed to me in passing. It was Jones the detective. A sudden thought struck me, and I turned back after him.

"Jones," I said, "do you happen to know a Mr. de Vos, who lodged some two months ago at No. 13 Charles street, Leicester Square?"

"No, sir; not by that name. What is he like?"

I described him; but he shook his head.

"I don't recognize him, sir; but, if you'll allow me, I'll make a note of it. Have you any particular reason for wishing to hear about him?"

"Yes; and I should be glad to know _anything_ you can gather concerning the man."

"I'll be on the look-out, sir." And Jones touched his hat and went off.

The old butler came to the door in Hyde-Park Gardens, and in answer to my inquiries informed me that Miss Leslie was "very middling indeed, and that Mr. Wilmot had just been there."

"Mr. Wilmot!"

"Yes, sir; he wished partiklar to see Miss Ada--which he did, sir, and her ma too: very nice gentleman he seems, and terrible cut up about his poor uncle and his cousin. A shocking thing, sir, for you to have to witness _against_ Mr. Atherton."

Against Mr. Atherton! Then it had reached here--this news, these tidings--that I was to help to condemn the man I loved best on earth! What was known in the servants'-hall had no doubt been discussed in the drawing-room, and Ada must now fully be aware of what I had found no courage to tell her yesterday. How had she received the intelligence? what was she thinking of it--of me? Reflecting thus, I followed Kings into the library, and found Mrs. Leslie alone. Now that lady and I never got on as amicably as we might have done; joint guardians seldom do, especially when they are of opposite genders; and this I say with no sort of reflection upon the fairer sex, simply mentioning it as a fact which, during a long legal course of experience, has come before me. _I_ considered Mrs. Leslie frivolous, weak, and extravagant, very unlike her child, very far from fit to be instrusted with the sole guidance of a mind such as Ada's. But I kept my own counsel {459} on the subject, and tried by action rather than words to counteract and shield Ada from evils arising from her mother's foolish conduct. She thought _me_ very uncompromising, very particular and rigid in my notions, often perhaps very crusty and disagreeable, nor spared she any pains to conceal her thought. That I did not mind; for Ada trusted me implicitly in all things, and it was all I cared for. This morning there was a stiffness and less of cordiality than ever in Mrs. Leslie's manner of receiving me.

"How is Ada?" I asked.

"She passed a very restless night, poor dear, very restless; and is fit for nothing this morning. Indeed, I am almost in the same state myself, I have been so terribly upset by this affair, and my nerves are very delicate. Most trying too! I have had to put off our _réunion musicale_ for next Thursday, and the Denison's dinner-party for to-morrow. I can't think how Hugh came to do it--for of course he _must_ have done it, though Ada won't hear a word against him."

"He did _not_ do it, Mrs. Leslie! Ada is right, as she always is."

"Ah! well, so Lister Wilmot tried to make me believe; but then he says everything is against poor Hugh, and that even you feel obliged to give evidence against him. I must say, John Kavanagh, that I think it very strange of you to have volunteered to give evidence. Wilmot was explaining it all to us, and said you couldn't help yourself; for the first words you had said to the policeman when he came to you criminated your friend."

A glimmer of light was beginning to dawn in my mind; but its ray was very faint and dim as yet; and after all it might only prove a will-o'-the-wisp. Still I would not lose it if possible.

"Wilmot told you that, did he? Does Ada know?"

"Yes; she was here when he came. He told us everything that had passed all that had been said by his uncle the last evening he saw him alive. He mentioned a great deal which had been kept back--purposely I suppose, and for some motive we don't understand now, but which will come out by and by, no doubt," said Mrs. Leslie with a burst of spite in her voice.

"Would you have the goodness to send word to Ada that I am here?" I said very stiffly.

"Oh! I forgot. She desired her kindest regards when you called, but she could not see you this morning. She will write."

I looked at her, and something convinced me she was telling a lie. I got up very quietly and rang the bell.

"Let Miss Leslie know I am here, Kings."

"Yes, sir."

Then Mrs. Leslie's anger broke forth. How dared I presume so far-- take such a liberty in her house! I forgot myself; I was no gentleman, but a meddling, interfering man, disappointed and soured because I had not secured Ada and her fortune for myself. _She had seen it all along_. So she raved on--so I let her rave; and when she ceased I answered her:

"If I have taken a liberty in giving an order under your roof and to your servant, I beg your pardon. But this is no time to stop at trifles or considerations of mere etiquette involving no real breach of good breeding. So long as your daughter is a minor I shall hold myself responsible for the trust her dead father confided to me conjointly with yourself; and, so help me God, I will perform the sacred duty to its utmost limits and regardless of human respect! There is foul play going on around us, and some influence--I know not yet whose--is at work to undermine the happiness of us all. There is bitter need that no fatal misunderstanding should arise between my ward and myself; that no subtle representations of interested persons should shake the reliance upon my integrity and honor, which hitherto Ada has placed in her father's friend. A life more precious to her than her own, and {460} dear to me as a brother's, is at stake; and I foresee, though dimly and darkly, that it imports far more than perhaps we dream of now to keep everything clear between us in our several relations with each other. At any rate I will allow no foolish fancies, no weak pride, to stand between your daughter and myself, her legal guardian and _sole trustee_."

I spoke very sternly, and purposely laid a stress upon my last words, knowing the woman with whom I was dealing, and the full weight they would have with her. Nor was I mistaken. She burst into a feeble querulous fit of crying; and the servant returning at that moment with a message from Ada asking me to go up-stairs, I left Mrs. Leslie to her reflections.

My ward was in her little morning-room. She was writing at the table, and the room was partially darkened, as if she could not bear the full sunlight of that bright autumn day. There were birds and flowers and music around her; but the birds had hushed their song, the flowers drooped their heads, as if missing the careful hand that tended them; and the music that generally greeted one there was silent. Oh! when would she sing again? I felt something about my feet as I advanced towards her, and heard a piteous whine I looked down; it was a little rough shaggy terrier,--Hugh's dog. Poor Dandie! He recognized me, and looked for one with whom he was so accustomed to see me.

"I sent for him," said Ada, lifting her weary wan face as I stood beside her. "I fancied he would be happier here--less lonely; but he is not--he wants _him_."

The dog seemed to understand her; for he came and, putting his forepaws upon her knee, laid his head upon them, and looking toward me whined again. She laid her cheek down upon his rough head and caressed him.

"Not yet, Dandie,--not yet. We must be patient, doggie, and he will come to us again."

It was a few moments before I could speak; but time was hastening on apace. Whilst I stood by the fire thinking how best to begin the subject I had at heart, Ada came and laid her hand on my arm.

"I have been wishing for you; I thought you would never come."

Then her mother had told a lie; but I said nothing.

"Lister Wilmot has been here this morning, talking a good deal." She stopped and hesitated.

To help her, I said, "Yes; so your mother tells me."

She looked at me inquiringly. "Has she told all that passed--all that he said?"

"She told me a great deal; but I would rather hear everything from _you_. My child, don't hesitate to confide in me. You don't know how it may help to clear matters up, which seem to be so fearfully complicated now."

I think she understood me, for she sighed wearily, and I heard her murmur to herself, "Poor mamma!"

"Lister was very kind this morning, and was in dreadful trouble about --_him_. He said he had thought of me more than any one, and would have come yesterday, but had so much to arrange and see to."

And then Ada went on to relate what passed, a great deal of which I had gathered from Mrs. Leslie.

"There is one thing," she concluded, "which I did not and would not believe. He says you have volunteered to give evidence against _him_," (it seemed as if she could not bring herself to mention Hugh by name;) "but I said it could not be,--that there must have been a mistake. What is the worst of all is, that since Lister was here, mamma persists in saying _he_ is guilty; somehow, though his words defended, his tone and manner implied he thought his cousin guilty."

"Ada, it is true I shall have to give evidence which may help to criminate Hugh; but it is more than equally false that I ever volunteered to bear {461} witness against him. You were right; _never believe it_."

Then I told her how it was, and how I had shrunk from letting her know it before.

"And now, my child, I must go. You know the inquest is to take place this afternoon, and I have to be there; but first I must return to Merrivale's, and settle many things with him."

"You will come back to me afterward."

"Surely; as soon as it is over."

"Do you think _he_ will be present?"

"I trust not, oh! I trust not! But perhaps he will wish to watch the proceedings himself, as well as Merrivale. God be with you, Ada, and good-bye!"

I was on the threshold of the door when she called me back.

"I am very foolish, guardian, not to have said it before; but I could not--and yet I ought and must."

Her hand was resting on a well-worn morocco case. I knew it well--it was Hugh's likeness, and a faint color tinged her white cheeks; but she mastered the shy feeling, whatever it was, and looked clearly and earnestly at me.

"Something was said by Lister Wilmot of what had dropped from poor Mr. Thorneley the last night of his life about you and me. I don't know why he should have repeated it; but as it is, I wanted to ask you not to mind it; at least, not to notice what may be said by others--by my mother. I only fear lest anything of the kind being said should come between us, and destroy our confidence in one another, because we understand each other so well--you and I and Hugh,"--how lingeringly she spoke his name!--"and we have no secrets between us that all three may not share. And I have feared lest this worse than foolishness, dragged out publicly, should change anything in our intercourse, or prevent you from acting, as hitherto, a parent's part toward a fatherless girl."

"_Nothing_, Ada, can change me toward you; and when people think of you and then of me, they will not heed the childish babble that may go about."

"Thanks, guardian."

"Worse than foolishness!"--I said the words over to myself many times as I drove back to Lincoln's Inn; and in the hazy distant future I saw a weary wayworn pilgrim slowly toiling along life's lonely road, who, looking back to this past year come and gone, would still repeat, "Worse than foolishness!"

I found Merrivale in deep conference with a mean-looking little man with a short stubbly head of hair that bristled up like a scrubbing-brush, and of a melancholy cast of countenance, as if accustomed to view life darkly, through the medium of duns and such-like evils to which man is heir. His eyes were the only redeeming point about him, and they really were two of the sharpest, most intelligent orbs I ever saw in my life. They lighted upon me the moment I entered the room, and seemed to take in my whole exterior and interior person with a knowingness that was perfectly alarming.

"This is the gentleman, I suppose, sir, who was with the defunct party the night of the murder," said a wonderfully soft voice.

"Yes; Mr. Kavanagh.--This is Inspector Keene, the very clever officer I mentioned to you, Kavanagh."

I acknowledged Mr. Keene's salute with becoming deference.

"Have you any news?" I asked.

"Well, sir," with a quick cautious glance at Merrivale, "I have and I have not. Before I say anything further, I should be glad to ask the gentleman a few questions, Mr. Merrivale, if agreeable."

"By all means," I answered.

He put me through a sharp cross-questioning on every point with which the reader is acquainted, making rapid notes of all my answers and remarks. Then he sat silently scraping his chin and gnawing his nails for some minutes. At last he looked up suddenly.

"The funeral, I understand, is fixed {462} for next Tuesday, and after that is over _the Will is to be read_. Perhaps that may throw some light on the subject."

I could not for the life of me repress a start, and Inspector Keene made a mental note of it, I knew.

"Good-day, gentlemen. I will call on you, Mr. Merrivale, to-morrow. _I think I am on the scent_."

"Come," said Merrivale, "we must be off, or we shall be late."

TO BE CONTINUED.

[ ORIGINAL. ]

OUR MOTHER'S CALL.

Come home, O weary wanderers, from error's tangled maze, My mother-heart yearns sore for you in all your troubled ways. I've rest, and food, and shelter, for all the earth can hold-- Then hasten, weary wanderers, home to the single fold.

I am the Master's gamer, which ever yieldeth more, The more the needy millions receiving from my store; No number's can exhaust me; no beggar at my gate For rest and food and shelter, shall ever have to wait.

If in mine inner chamber the Master seems to sleep, While fearful storm and peril are out upon the deep. My lightest tone will call him to rescue of his own For his dear children's haven I am, _and I alone_.

Almighty wisdom made me the home upon the rock-- The Saviour's fold of safety to all his ransomed flock. My door is ever open, and they who enter in. Find rest from all their wanderings, and cleansing from their sin.

One thing, and but one only, the Master doth demand. That they who seek shall find him as he himself hath planned; Beneath my lowly portal shall bow each haughty head, And to my narrow pathway return each wandering tread.

_I cannot lift the lintel, nor widen out the posts, For every stone was fashioned by him, the Lord of hosts_. _My Master_, and thy Master if thou wilt hear his voice And in his pleasant pastures for evermore rejoice.

Can human handcraft ever compete in skill with him, Whose throne is in the heavens amid the cherubim? Then cease your idle toiling another home to raise; He on my fair proportions toiled all his mortal days.

{463}

When out of depths of darkness he called the glorious sun In all its dazzling splendor, _he spoke_ and it was done; His sweat and blood were both poured out that he might fashion me His sun to souls in darkness till time no more shall be.

Hold it no light offending that you can turn aside, And scorn in wilful blindness the Saviour's spotless bride. He who hath full dominion unchecked o'er all the earth, Made me the mighty mother of the blest second-birth.

Come, weigh ye well the value of his three and thirty years, And number o'er the treasure of all his prayers and tears. And count ye out the life-drops that flowed from his cleft side. And learn the wondrous bounty with which he dowered his bride.

Rich-dowered for your salvation, ye dearly bought of earth! By his dying, and my living, oh! weigh salvation's worth, And in the single shelter his mighty love hath given. Learn the dear will that maketh the blessedness of heaven.

GENEVIEVE SALES.

EASTERTIDE, 1866.

[ORIGINAL.]

USE AND ABUSE OF READING. [Footnote 81]

[Footnote 81: "Appel aux Consciences Chrétiennes contre les abus et les dangers de la lecture."' P. Toulemont. Etudes Religieuses, Historiques et Literaires. Tome 8, N. S.]

We have been much interested in the grave and earnest essay on the abuses and dangers of reading, by P. Toulemont, in that excellent periodical, the "Etudes," so ably conducted by fathers of the Society of Jesus, and we would translate and present it to the readers of the Catholic World in its integrity, if some portions of it were not better adapted to France than to the United States; yet much which we shall advance in this article is inspired by it, and we shall make free use of its ideas, facts, authorities, and arguments.

This is a reading age, and ours is to a great extent a reading country. The public mind, taste, and morals are with us chiefly formed by books, pamphlets, periodicals, and journals. The American people sustain more journals or newspaper than all the world beside, and probably devour more light literature, or fiction, or trashy novels than any other nation. Reading of some sort is all but universal, and the press is by far the most efficient government of the country. The government itself practically is little else with us than public sentiment, and public sentiment is both formed and echoed by the press. Indeed, the press is not merely "a fourth estate," as it has been called, but an estate which has well-nigh usurped the functions of all the others, and taken the sole direction of the intellectual and moral destinies of the civilized world.

The press, taken in its largest sense, is, after speech--which it repeats, extends and perpetuates--the most powerful influence, whether for good or for evil, that man wields or can wield; and however great the evils which flow from its perversion, it could not be annihilated or its freedom suppressed without the loss of a still greater good, {464} that is, restrained by the public authorities. In this country we have established the _régime_ of liberty, and that _régime_, with its attendant good and evil, must be accepted in its principle, and in all its logical consequences. If a free press becomes a fearful instrument for evil in the hands of the heedless or ill-disposed, it is no less an instrument for good in the hands of the enlightened, honest, and capable. The free press in the modern world is needed to defend the right, to advance the true, to maintain order, morality, intelligence, civilization, and cannot be given up for the sake of escaping the evils which flow from its abuse.

Yet these evils are neither few nor light, and are such as tend to enlarge and perpetuate themselves. Not the least of the evils of journalism, for instance, is the necessity it is under in order to live, to get readers, and to get readers it must echo public opinion or party feeling, defend causes that need no defence, and flatter passions already too strong. Instead of correcting public sentiment and laboring to form a sound public opinion or a correct moral judgment, its conductors are constantly tempted to feel the public pulse to discover what is for the moment popular, and then to echo it, and to denounce all who dissent from it or fall not down and worship it; forgetting if what is popular is erroneous or unjust, it is wrong to echo it, and if true and just, it needs no special defence, for it is already in the ascendant; and forgetting, also, that it is the unpopular truth, the unpopular cause, the cause of the wronged and oppressed, the poor and friendless, too feeble to make its own voice heard, and which has no one to speak for it, that needs the support of the journal. When John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to our Lord to ask him, "Art thou he that is to come, or are we to look for another?" our Lord said: "Go and tell John . . . that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the gospel preached to them." Here was the evidence of his messiahship. "They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick."

This is not all: needing to be always on the popular side, the press not only plants itself on the lowest general average of intelligence and virtue, but it tends constantly to lower that general average, and hence becomes low and debasing in its influence. It grows ever more and more corrupt and corrupting, till the public mind becomes so vitiated and weakened that it will neither relish nor profit by the sounder works needed as remedies.

In the moral and intellectual sciences we write introductions where we once wrote treatises, because the publisher knows that the introductions will sell, while the elaborate treatise will only encumber his shelves, or go to the pastry-cook or the paper-maker. Not only do the journals flatter popular passions, appeal to vitiated tastes, or a low standard of morals, but books do the same, and often in a far greater degree. The great mass of books written and published in the more enlightened and advanced modern nations are immoral and hostile not only to the soul hereafter, but to all the serious interests of this life. A few years since the French government appointed a commission to investigate the subject of colportage in France and the commission reported after a conscientious examination that of nine millions of works colported eight millions were more or less immoral. Of the novels which circulate in the English-speaking world, original or translated, one not immoral and possible to be read without tainting the imagination or the heart is the rare exception. Under pretence of _realism_ nature is oftener exhibited in her unseemly than in her seemly moods, and the imagination of the young is compelled to dwell on the grossest vices and corruptions of a moribund society. Chastity of {465} thought, innocence of heart, purity of imagination, cannot be preserved by a diligent reader even of the better class of the light literature of the day. This literature so vitiates the taste, so corrupts the imagination, and so sullies the heart, that its readers can see no merit and find no relish in works not highly spiced with vice, crime, or disorderly passion. The literary stomach has been so weakened by vile stimulants that it cannot bear a sound or a wholesome literature, and such works as a Christian would write, and a Christian read, would find scarcely a market, or readers sufficiently numerous to pay for its publication.

It is boasted that popular literature describes nature as it is, or society as it is, and is therefore true, and truth is never immoral. Truth truthfully told, and truthfully received, is indeed never immoral, but even truth may be so told as to have the effect of a lie. But these highly spiced novels--which one can hardly read without feeling when he has finished them as if he had been spending a night in dissipation or debauchery, and with which our English-speaking world is inundated--are neither true to nature nor to society. They give certain features of society, but really paint neither high life nor low life, nor yet middle life as it is. They rarely give a real touch of nature, and seldom come near enough to truth to caricature it. They give us sometimes the sentiment, sometimes the affection of love with a touch of truth--but, after all, only truth's surface or a distant and distorted view of it. They paint better the vices of nature, man's abuse or perversion of nature, than the virtues. Their virtuous characters are usually insipid or unnatural; nature has depths their plummets sound not, and heights to which they rise not. There they forget that in the actual providence of God nature never exists and operates alone, but either through demoniacal influence descends below, or through divine grace rises above itself. They either make nature viler than she is or nobler than she is. They never hit the just medium, and the views of nature, society, and life the young reader gets from them, are exaggerated, distorted, or totally false. The constant reading of them renders the heart and soul morbid, the mind weak and sickly, the affections capricious and fickle, the whole man ill at ease, sighing for what he has not, and incapable of being contented with any possible lot or state of life, or with any real person or thing.

Beside books which the conscience of a pagan would pronounce immoral, and which cannot be touched without defilement, there are others that by their false and heretical doctrines tend to undermine faith and to sap those moral convictions without which society cannot subsist, and religion is an empty name or idle form. The country is flooded with a literature which not only denies this or that Christian mystery, this or that Catholic dogma, that not only rejects supernatural revelation, but even natural reason itself. The tendency of what is regarded as the advanced thought of the age is not only to eliminate Christian faith from the intellect, Christian morality from the heart, Christian love from the soul, but Christian civilization from society. The most popular literature of the day recognizes no God, no Satan, no heaven, no hell, and either preaches the worship of the soul, or of humanity. Christian charity is resolved into the watery sentiment of philanthropy, and the Catholic veneration of the Blessed Virgin lapses, outside of the church, into an idolatrous worship of femininity. The idea of duty is discarded, and we are gravely told there is no merit in doing a thing because it is our duty; the merit is only in doing it from love, and love, which, in the Christian sense, is the fulfilling of the law, is defined to be a sentiment without any relation to the understanding or the conscience. Not only the authority of the church is rejected in the name of humanity {466} by the graver part of popular literature, but the authority of the state, the sacredness of law, the inviolability of marriage, and the duty of obedience of children to their parents, are discarded as remnants of social despotism now passing away. The tendency is in the name of humanity to eliminate the church, the state, and the family, and to make man a bigger word than God. In view of the anti-religious, anti-moral, and anti-social doctrines which in some form or in some guise or other permeate the greater part of what is looked upon as the living literature of the age, and which seem to fetch an echo from the heart of humanity, well might Pope Gregory XVI., of immortal memory, in the grief of his paternal heart exclaim, "We are struck with horror in seeing with what monstrous doctrines, or rather with what prodigies of error we are inundated by this deluge of books, pamphlets, and writings of every sort whose lamentable irruption has covered the earth with maledictions!"

"There doubtless are men," as Père Toulemont says, "who have very little to fear from the most perfidious artifices of impiety, as, prepared by a strong and masculine intellectual discipline, they are able to easily detect the most subtle sophisms. No subtlety, no _tour de metier_, if I may so speak, can escape them. At the first glance of the eye they seize the false shade, the confusion of ideas or of words; they redress at once the illusive perspective created by the mirage of a lying style. The fascinations of error excite in them only a smile of pity or of contempt.

"Yes, there are such men, but they are rare. Take even men of solid character, with more than ordinary instruction, and deeply attached to their faith, think you, that even they will be able always to rise from the reading of this literature perfectly unaffected? I appeal to the experience of more than one reader, if it is not true after having run over certain pages written with perfidious art, that we find ourselves troubled with an indescribable uneasiness, an incipient vertigo or bewilderment? We need then, as it were, to give a shake to the soul, to force it to throw off the impression it has received, and if we neglect to assist it more or less vigorously, it soon deepens and assumes alarming proportions. No doubt, unless in exceptional circumstances, strong convictions are not sapped to their foundation by a single blow, but one needs no long experience to be aware that this sad result is likely to follow in the long run, and much more rapidly than is commonly believed, even with persons who belong to the aristocracy of intelligence.

"This will be still more the case if we descend to a lower social stratum, to the middle classes who embody the great majority of Christian readers. With these mental culture is very defective, and sometimes we find in them an ignorance of the most elementary Catholic instruction that is really astounding. What, at any rate, is undeniable, is that their faith is not truly enlightened either in relation to its object or its grounds. It ordinarily rests on sentiment far more than on reason. They have not taken the trouble to render to themselves an account of the arguments which sustain it; much less still are they able to solve the difficulties which unbelievers suggest against it. Add to this general absence of serious intellectual instruction, the absence not less general of force and independence of character, and the position becomes frightful. In our days it must be confessed the energy of the moral temperament is singularly enfeebled, and never perhaps was the assertion of the prophet, _omne caput languidum_, the whole head is sick, more true than now. Robust and masculine habits seem to have given place to a sort of sybaritism of soul, which renders the soul adverse to all personal effort, or individual labor. See, for example, that multitude which devours so greedily the first books that come to hand. Takes it any care to control the things which pass before its eyes, or to {467} render to itself any account of them by serious reflection? Not at all. The attention it gives to what it reads is very nearly null, or, at best, it is engrossed far more with the form, the style, or the term of the phrase, than with the substance, or ground of the ideas expressed. The mind is rendered, so to say, wholly passive, ready to receive without reflection any impression or submit to any influence."

The great body of the faithful in no country can read the immoral, heretical, infidel, humanitarian, and socialistic literature of the age without more or less injury to their moral and spiritual life, or without some lesion even to their faith itself; although it be not wholly subverted. Can a man touch pitch and not be defiled? It is precisely the devouring of this literature as its daily intellectual food, or as its literary pabulum, that produces that sybaritism of soul, that feebleness of character, that aversion to all manly effort or individual exertion without which robust and masculine virtue is impossible.

There is certainly much strong faith in the Catholic population of the United States, perhaps more in proportion to their numbers than in any of the old Catholic nations of Europe; but this strong faith is found chiefly amongst those who have read very little of the enervating literature of the day. In the younger class in whom a taste for reading has been cultivated, and who are great consumers of "yellow covered literature," and the men who read only the secula and partisan journals, we witness the same weakness of moral and religious character, and the same feeble grasp of the great truths of the gospel complained of by Père Toulemont. To a great extent the reading of non-Catholic literature, non-Catholic books, periodicals, novels and journals, neutralizes in our sons and daughters the influence of Catholic schools, academies, and colleges, and often effaces the good impression received in them.

The prevalence of such a literature, so erroneous in doctrine, so false in principle, and so debasing in tendency, must be deplored by Catholics, not only as injurious to morals, and too often fatal to the life of the soul, but as ruinous to modern civilization, which is founded on the great principles of the Catholic religion, and has been in great part created by the Catholic Church, chiefly by her supreme pontiffs, and her bishops and clergy, regular and secular. The tendency of modern literature, especially of journalism, a very modern creation, is to reduce our civilization far below that of ancient gentilism, and it seems hard that we who under God have civilized the barbarians once should have to begin our work anew, and go through the labor of civilizing them again. Our non-Catholic countrymen cannot lose Christian civilization without our being compelled to suffer with them. They drag us, as they sink down, after them. This country is our home and is to be the home of our children and our children's children, and we more than any other class of American citizens are interested in its future. It is not, then, solely the injury we as Catholics may receive from an irreligious and immoral literature that moves us; but also the injury it does to those who are not as yet within the pale of the church, but between whom and us there is a real solidarity as men and citizens, and who cannot suffer without our suffering, and civilization itself suffering, with them.

As men, as citizens, as Christians, and as Catholics, it becomes to us a most grave question--What can be done to guard against the dangers which threaten religion and civilization from an irreligious and immoral literature? This question is, no doubt, primarily a question for the pastors of the church, but it is, in submission to them, also a question for the Catholic laity, for they have their part, and an important part, in the work necessary to be done. There can be no doubt that bad books and irreligious journals are dangerous companions, and the {468} most dangerous of all companions, for their evil influence is more genial and more lasting. Plato and most of the pagan philosophers and legislators required the magistrates to intervene and suppress all books judged to be immoral and dangerous either to the individual or to society, and in all modern civilized states the law professes either to prevent or to punish their publication. Even John Milton, in his "Areopagitica," or plea for unlicensed printing, says he denies not to magistrates the right to take note how books demean themselves, and if they offend to punish them as any other class of offenders. English and American law leaves every one free to publish what he pleases, but holds the author and publisher responsible for the abuse they may make of the liberty of the press. In all European states there was formerly, and in some continental states there is still, a preventive censorship, more or less rigid, and more or less effective. Formerly the civil law enforced the censures pronounced by the church, but there is hardly a state in which this is the case now.

Whatever our views of the civil freedom of the press may be, ecclesiastical censorship, or censorship addressed to the conscience by the spiritual authority, is still possible, and both proper and necessary. The act of writing and publishing a book or pamphlet, or editing and publishing a periodical or journal, is an act of which the law of God takes account as much as any other act a man can perform, and is therefore as fully within the jurisdiction of the spiritual authority. So also is the act of reading, and the spiritual director has the same right to look after what books his penitent reads, as after what company he keeps. The whole subject of writing, editing, publishing, and reading books, pamphlets, tractates, periodicals, and journals, comes within the scope of the spiritual authority, and is rightly subjected to ecclesiastical discipline. In point of fact, it is so treated in principle by heterodox communions, as well as by the church. The Presbyterians are even more rigid in their discipline as to writing and reading than Catholics are, though they may not always avow it. The Methodists claim the right for their conferences to prescribe to Methodist communicants what books they ought not to read, and seldom will you find a strict Methodist or Presbyterian reading a Catholic book. It is much the same with all Protestants who belong to what they call the church as distinguished from the congregation--a distinction which does not obtain among Catholics, for with us all baptized persons, not excommunicated, belong to the church. There is no reason why the church should not direct me in my reading as well as in my associations, or discipline me for writing or publishing a lie in a book or a newspaper as well as for telling a lie orally to my neighbor or swearing to a falsehood in a court of justice.

But when the church, as with us, is not backed in her censures by the civil law, when her canons and decrees have no civil effect, the ecclesiastical authority becomes practically only an appeal to the Catholic conscience, and while her censures indicate the law of conscience in regard to the matters censured, they depend on our conscience alone for their effectiveness. Hence our remedy, in the last analysis, as Père Toulemont implies, is in the appeal to Christian consciences against the dangerous literature of the day; and happily Catholics have a Christian conscience,--though sometimes in now and then one it may be a little drowsy--that can be appealed to with effect, for they have faith, do believe in the reality of the invisible and the eternal, and know that it profiteth a man nothing to gain the whole world and lose his own soil. The church declares by divine constitution and assistance the law of God which governs conscience, and when properly instructed by her, the Catholic has not only a conscience, but an enlightened {469} conscience, and knows what is right and what is wrong, what is useful and what is dangerous reading, and can always act intelligently as well as conscientiously.

Père Toulemont shows in his essay that it is not reading or literature that the church discourages or condemns, but the abuse of literature and its employment for purposes contrary to the law of God, or the reading of vile, debasing, and corrupting books, periodicals, and journals which can only taint the imagination, sully the purity of the heart, weaken or disturb faith, and stunt the growth of the Christian virtues. The conscience of every Christian tells him that to read immoral books, to familiarize himself with a low, vile, corrupt and corrupting literature, whatever may be the beauty of its form, the seductions of its style, or the charms of its dictation, is morally and religiously wrong.

Père Toulemont shows by numerous references to their bulls and briefs that the supreme pontiff have never from the earliest ages ceased to warn the faithful against the writings of heretics and infidels, or to prohibit the reading, writing, publishing, buying, selling, or even keeping impure, immodest, or immoral books or publications of any sort or form, as the civil law even with us prohibits obscene pictures and spectacles. It was to guard the faithful against improper and dangerous reading that St. Pius the Fifth established at Rome the congregation of the Index; and that publications by whomsoever written judged by the congregation to be unsafe, likely to corrupt faith or morals, are still placed on the Index. Nothing is more evident than that the church, while encouraging in all ages and countries literature, science, and art, has never allowed her children the indiscriminate reading of all manner of books, pamphlets, tractates, and journals. There are writings the reading of which she prohibits as the careful mother would prevent her innocent, thoughtless child from swallowing poison. Her discipline in this respect is accepted and felt to be wise and just by every man and woman in whom conscience is not extinct or fast asleep. Even the pagan world felt its necessity as does the modern Protestant world. The natural reason of every man accepts the principle of this discipline, and asserts that there are sorts of reading which no man, learned or unlearned, should permit himself. The Christian conscience once awakened recoils with instinctive horror from immoral books and publications, and no one who really loves our Lord Jesus Christ can take pleasure in reading books, periodicals, or journals that tend to weaken Christian faith and corrupt Christian morals, any more than the pious son can take pleasure in hearing his own father or mother traduced or calumniated; and what such publications are, the Catholic, if his own instincts fail to inform him, can always learn from the pastors of his church.

The first steps toward remedying the evils of the prevailing immoral literature must be in an earnest appeal to all sincere Christians to set their faces resolutely against all reading, whatever its form, that tends to sap the great principles of revealed truths, to destroy faith in the great mysteries of the Gospel, to subvert morality, to substitute sentiment for reason, or feeling for rational conviction, to ruin the family and the state, and thus undermine the foundations of civilized society. This, if done, would erect the Christian conscience into a real censorship of the press, and operate as a corrective of its licentiousness, without in the least infringing on its freedom. It would diminish the supply of bad literature by lessening the demand. This would be much, and would create a Christian literary public opinion, if I may so speak, which would become each day stronger, more general, more effective, and which writers, editors, publishers, and booksellers, would find themselves obliged to respect, as politicians find themselves obliged to treat {470} the Catholic religion with respect, whenever they wish to secure the votes of Catholic citizens. Fidelity to conscience in those who have not yet lost the faith, and in whom the spiritual life is not yet wholly extinct, will go far toward remedying the evil, for the movement begun will gather volume and momentum as it goes on.

The next step is for Catholics to regard it as a matter of conscience to demand and sustain a pure and high-toned literature, or ample, savory, and wholesome literary diet, for the public. Reading, in modern civilized communities, has become in some sort a necessary of life, a necessity, not a luxury, and when we take into consideration the number of youth of both sexes which we send forth yearly from our colleges, academies, private, parochial, conventual, and public schools, we cannot fail to perceive that it is, and must be a growing necessity in our Catholic community; and we may set this down as certain, that when wholesome food is not to be had, people will feed on unwholesome food, and die of that which they have taken to sustain life. But if people, through indifference or negligence take no heed whether the food be wholesome or unwholesome, or through a depraved appetite prefer the unwholesome because more highly spiced, very little wholesome food will be offered in the market. Many complaints are heard from time to time of our Catholic press, because it does not give us journals of a higher order, more really Catholic in principle, of higher moral tone, and greater intellectual and literary merit. Even supposing the facts to be as these complaints assume, the complaints themselves are unjust. The editors and publishers of Catholic journals edit and publish them as a lawful business, and very naturally seek the widest circulation possible. To secure that, they necessarily appeal to the broadest, and therefore the lowest average of intelligence and virtue of the public they address. They who depend on public sentiment or public opinion must study to conform to it, not to redress or reform it. The journals of every country represent the lowest average intelligence and virtue of the public for which they are designed. The first condition of their existence is that they be popular with their own public, party, sect, or denomination. Complaints are also frequently heard of our Catholic publishers and booksellers, for not supplying a general literature, scientific and philosophical works, such as general readers, who though good Catholics, are not particularly ascetic, and wish to have now and then other than purely spiritual reading, and also such as scholars and scientific men seek, in which the erudition and science proper are not marred by theories and hypotheses, speculations and conjectures which serve only to disturb faith and stunt the growth of the spiritual life. But these complaints are also unjust. The publishers issue the best books that the market will take up. There is no demand for other or better books than they publish; and such books as are really needed, aside from bibles, prayer-books, and books for spiritual reading, they can publish only at their own expense. They are governed by the same law that governs editors and publishers of newspapers or journals, and naturally seek the broadest, and therefore in most respects the lowest average, and issue works which tend constantly to lower the standard instead of elevating it. The evil tendency, like rumor, _crescit eundo_.

There is no redress but in the appeal to Christian consciences, since the public now fills the place of patrons which was formerly filled by princes and nobles, bishops and monastic or religious houses. The matter cannot be left to regulate itself, for the public taste has not been cultivated and formed to support the sort of reading demanded, and will not do it from taste and inclination, or at all except from a sense of duty. The great majority of the people of France are Catholics, yet a few years ago there {471} were Parisian journals hostile to Catholics, that circulated each from 40,000 to 60,000 copies daily, while the daily circulation of all the Catholic journals and periodicals in all France did not exceed 25,000. It should be as much a matter of conscience with Catholics to open a market for a sound and healthy literature as to refrain from encouraging and reading immoral and dangerous publications. We gain heaven not merely by refraining from evil, but by doing good. The servant that wrapped his talent in a clean napkin and hid it in the earth was condemned not because he had lost or abused his talent, but because he had not used it and put it out to usury. The church attaches indulgences to doing good works, not to abstaining from bad works.

The taste of the age runs less to books than to reviews, magazines, and especially to newspapers or the daily journals. People are too busy, in too great a hurry, for works of long breath. Folios and octavos frighten them, and they can hardly abide a duodecimo. Their staple reading is the telegraphic despatches in the daily press. Long elaborate articles in reviews are commended or censured by many more persons than read them, and many more read than understand them, for people nowadays think very little except about their business, their pleasures, or the management of their party. Still the review or magazine is the best compromise that can be made between the elaborate treatise and the clever leader of the journal. It is the best literary medium now within reach of the Catholic public, and can meet better than any other form of publication our present literary wants, and more effectively stimulate thought, cultivate the understanding and the taste, and enable us to take our proper place in the literature and science of the country. But here again conscience must be appealed to, the principle of duty must come in. Few men can write and publish at their own expense a magazine of high character, of pure literary taste, sound morals, and sound theology, able in literary and scientific merit, in genius, instruction, and amusement, to compete successfully with the best magazines going, and there is at this moment no public formed to hand large enough to sustain such periodical, and even the men to write it have in some sort to be created, or at least to be drawn out. It must be for a time supported by men who do not want it as a luxury or to meet their own literary tastes, but who appreciate its merits, are aware of the service it may render in creating a taste for wholesome instead of unwholesome reading. That is, it most be sustained by persons who, in purchasing it, act not so much from inclination as from a sense of duty, which is always a nobler, and in the long run, a stronger motive of action, than devotion to interest or pleasure; for it is in harmony with all that is true and good, and has on it the blessing of heaven. It is precisely because Catholics can act from a sense of duty that we can overcome the evil that is ruining society.

No doubt we are here pleading, to a certain extent, our own cause, but we only ask others to act on the principle on which we ourselves are acting. THE CATHOLIC WORLD is not published as a private speculation, nor with the expectation of personal gain. Our cause is what we hold to be here and now the Catholic cause, and it is from a sense of duty that we devote ourselves to it. We are deeply conscious of the need for us Catholics in the United States of a purer and more wholesome literature than any which is accessible to the great majority, and than any which can be produced outside of the Catholic community, or by other than Catholics. We need it for ourselves as Catholics, we need it for our country as a means of arresting the downward tendency of popular literature, and of influencing for good those who are our countrymen, though unhappily not within our communion. There is nothing personal to us in the cause {472} we serve, and it is no more _ours_ than it is that of every Catholic who has the ability to serve it. If we plead for our magazine, it is only as it is identified with the Catholic cause in our country, and we can be as disinterested in so soliciting support for it as if it was in other hands, and we solicit support for it no farther than it appeals to the Catholic conscience. We have seen the danger to the country, and the destruction to souls threatened by the popular literature of the day, and we are doing what we can in our unpretending way to commence a reaction against it, and give to our American public a taste for something better than they now feed on. We cannot prevent our Catholic youth who have a taste for reading from reading the vile and debasing popular literature of the day, unless we give them something as attractive and more wholesome in its place, and this cannot be done without the hearty and conscientious cooperation of the Catholic community with us.

Catholics are not a feeble and helpless colony in the United States. We are a numerous body, the largest religious denomination in the country. There are but two cities in the world that have a larger Catholic population than this very city of New York, and there are several Catholic nations holding a very respectable rank in the Catholic world, that have not so large, and upon the whole so wealthy a Catholic population as the United States. We are numerous enough, and have means enough to found and sustain all the institutions, religious, charitable, educational, literary, scientific, and artistic needed by a Catholic nation, and there is no Catholic nation where Catholic activity finds fewer "lets and hindrances" from the civil government. We are free, and we have in proportion to our numbers our full share of influence in public affairs, municipal, state, and national; no part of the population partakes more largely of the general prosperity of the country, and no part has suffered less from the late lamentable civil war. We have our Church organized under a regular hierarchy, with priests rapidly increasing in numbers, churches springing up all over the land, and Catholic emigrants from the old world pouring in by thousands and hundreds of thousands. We are numerous enough and strong enough in all religious, literary, and scientific matters, to suffice for ourselves. There is no reason in the world, but our own spiritual indolence and the torpidity of our consciences, why we should continue to feed on the unwholesome literary garbage provided for us by the humanitarianism and pruriency of the age. We are able to have a general literature of our own, the production of genuine Catholic taste and genius, if we will it, and at present are better able than the Catholics of any other nation; for our means are ample, and the government and civil institutions place no obstacles in our way, which can be said of Catholics nowhere else.

Our Catholic community is large enough, and contains readers enough, to sustain as many periodicals as are needed, and to absorb large editions enough of literary and scientific works of the highest character to make it an object with the trade to publish them, as well as with authors to write them. Works of imagination, what is called light literature, if conceived in a true spirit, if they tend to give nature a normal development, and to amuse without corrupting the reader, ought to find with us a large public to welcome and profit by them. What the people of any Catholic nation can do to provide for the intellectual and aesthetic wants of a Catholic people, we Catholics in the United States can do. If we are disposed to set ourselves earnestly about it with the feeling that it is a matter of conscience.

And we must do it, if we mean to preserve our youth to the church, and have them grow up with a robust faith, and strong and masculine virtues, to keep them clear from the humanitarian sentimentality which marks the {473} age and the country. Universal education, whether a good or an evil, is the passion of modern society, and must be accepted. Indeed, we are doing our best to educate all our children, and the great mass of them are destined to grow up readers, and will have reading of some sort. Education will prove no blessing to them, however carefully or religiously trained while at school, if as soon as they leave the school, they seek their mental nutriment in the poisonous literature now so rife. No base companions or vicious company could do so much to corrupt as the sensation novels, the humanitarian, rationalistic, and immoral books, magazines, and journals, which, as thick as the frogs of Egypt, now infest the country. Our children and youth leave school at the most critical age, and a single popular novel, or a single sophistical essay, may undo the work of years of pious training in our colleges and conventual schools. Parents have more to apprehend for their children when they have finished their school terms than ever before, and it is precisely when they have left school, when they come home and go out into society, that the greatest dangers and temptations assail them. From their leaving school to their settlement in life is the period for which they most need ample intellectual and moral provision in literature, and it is precisely for this period that little or no such provision is made.

Hence the urgency of the appeal to Catholic consciences first to avoid as much as possible the pernicious literature of the age, and second to create and provide to the utmost of our ability, good and wholesome literature for the mass of our people, such a literature as only they who live in the communion with the saints, drink in the lessons of divine wisdom, and feast their souls on celestial beauty, can produce--a secular literature indeed, but a literature that embodies all that is pure, free, beautiful and charming in nature, and is informed with the spirit of Catholic love and truth--a robust and manly literature, that cherishes all God's works, loves all things, gentle and pure, noble and elevated, strong and enduring, and is not ashamed to draw inspiration from the cross of Christ. It will require much labor, many painful sacrifices to work our way up from the depths to which we have descended, and our progress will be slow and for a long time hardly perceptible, but Catholic faith, Catholic love, Catholic conscience, has once succeeded when things were more desperate, transformed the world, and can do so again. Nothing is impossible to it. It is your faith that overcomes the world. Leo X. said when the press was first made known, "The art of printing was invented for the glory of God, for the propagation of our holy faith, and the advancement of knowledge." [Footnote 82]

[Footnote 82: Decree of Leo X. Session 10 of the Council of Latern.]

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Translated from the French.

EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN'S LETTERS FROM PARIS.

In the following paper we propose to fill as far as possible the hiatus which occurs between the seventh and eighth books of Mlle. de Guérin's journal, giving such details from her letters as will satisfy the curiosity that many of her readers must have felt concerning the visit she made to Paris at the time of her brother's wedding.

In a letter to M. Paul Juemper, dated March 15, 1838, Guérin describes his fiancée, with more accuracy perhaps than ardor, and yet there can be no doubt that the marriage was one of love and congeniality. In the latter part of his life Maurice appears to have concealed his deepest emotions as successfully as he had revealed them in earlier years.

"I find myself on my return better in health, and full of hope for the future. What does that mean? What novelty is this? Nothing but the most common event in the world, one which takes place every day in every country--namely marriage, here, in Paris, to a child who was born for me, eighteen years ago, six thousand leagues from Paris, in Batavia! She is named Caroline de Gervain, has great blue eyes that light up her delicate face, a very slender figure, a foot of oriental minuteness--in short (without any lover-like vanity), an exquisite and refined _ensemble_, that will suit you very well. Her fortune is in Indian trade: not large now, but with every prospect of development. The contracts are drawn up and everything is in order; we are only awaiting the arrival of some documents from Calcutta, indispensable to the celebration of a marriage, to tie the last knot. If you leave in May, you will be here in time to stand by the death-bed of my bachelorhood, and to see me cross the Rubicon."

Mlle. de Gervain lived with her aunt, Mlle. Martin-Laforêt, in a _pavillion_ in the Rue Cherche-Midi, and it is from this charming Indian house that Eugénie's first Parisian letter is dated.

TO M. DE GUÉRIN.

Paris, Oct. 8, 1838.

Oh! how I slept in the little pink bed beside Caroline! I wished to write to you, dear papa, before going to bed, but they would not let me, and they said too that the mail would not go out before this morning, so that you would get the letter no sooner. I should have written to you at each relay if it had been possible, for I said to myself: "Now papa and Euphrasie, Mimi and Eran, are thinking of the traveller." How I thought of you all! you followed me the whole way. At last I am here, out of the way of dust, diligences and the annoyances of travelling, and welcomed and cosseted enough to compensate a thousand times over for the four long days of fatigue. I should like to tell you everything, but there are so many, many things;--how I left you, and bowled away towards Paris, and met them all and fell into a dozen arms. Why weren't you on the Place Notre Dame des Victoires when, just as I was driving off in a carriage with Charles, I saw Maurice and Caro and Aunt running and calling me, and kissing me, one through one window and another through the other? Oh! it was so nice!

No one ever entered Paris more pleasantly. We went as fast as we could to Rue du Cherche-Midi, talking, laughing and questioning. "How is papa? and his leg? is he as well as he was last year?" Maurice, poor fellow, cried as he looked at me, and talked of you all, Mimi, Eran, everybody, they all love you and ask after you. When I came down stairs, I distributed your letters, and then came breakfast, which was very welcome to me. Half through breakfast, Auguste entered, a little surprised that I had arrived so early, and full of kind inquiries for you all . . .

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I thought I should reach Paris ground to powder, and here I am as fresh as if I had just stepped out of a bandbox. The dust was suffocating during the thirty leagues of that tiresome Sologne, and the rumbling was like thunder on the paved road from Orleans to Paris. It was impossible to sleep that night, but during the others I took naps, and even slept several hours--but oh! the difference of sleeping in a rose-colored bed, and in a diligence, tossed and jerked about! It was dreadful in the Sologne, where we went at a snail's pace, but fortunately it did not rain--then the passengers have to get out sometimes and push the wheels.

After breakfast I went to mass at St. Sulpice, and then to the Tuileries when the king was absent. It was very grand and regal; the throne is superb, and with "my mind's eye" I saw Louis XIV. and Napoleon. There were a great many visitors, English people, and some brothers from the Christian schools. A friend of Maurice's had got us entrance tickets for yesterday, and as I don't often have a chance to see palaces, I was glad to get the opportunity.

Good-by, dear papa; to-day I say only two words of greeting. Maurice embraces you all as he embraced me yesterday. This is for Mimi and Eran. I send much love to Euphrasie from myself and from Maurice, who is delighted to know she is at Le Cayla. All sorts of kind messages to the parsonage and above all to the gimblette maker,--they were very welcome and every one liked them. They asked me if Augustine had grown tall and if she was mischievous, and I said yes and no;--yes for the height, you understand,--she is all virtue since her first communion.

M. Angler came to bid me welcome, and we are already acquainted; he looks good and is good. M. d'A. is coming this evening. I must leave you, dear papa. Keep well,--take care of yourself; and don't be uneasy you your traveller, who has but one trial, that she cannot see you, and knows you are two hundred leagues away. Two hundred leagues! but my thoughts ran every instant to Le Cayla. We are in such a quiet place that I think myself in the country, and I slept without waking once until six o'clock. Tell Jeanne-Marie and Miou that everyone asks after them. My compliments to the whole household and to all who are interested in me.

But this charming picture had its _wrong side_, only revealed by Eugénie to Mlle. Louise de Bayne, and to the cousin with whom she lived during part of her stay at Paris, Professor Auguste Raynaud. There was a worm at the heart of the bud, and she knew too well that it must wither without blooming. At the very meeting in the Place Notre Dame des Victoires, which she described so gaily in the letter to Le Cayla, the sight of Maurice's pallor aroused her anxiety, an anxiety that increased daily and marred the pleasure to which she had looked forward for months with ardent longing. "At the time of his marriage," says M. Barbey d'Aurevilly, an intimate friend of both brother and sister, "Maurice was already attacked with the disease of which he died a short time after. He already felt its first sufferings, its first illusions and early symptoms, which made his style of beauty more than ever touching; for among imaginary heads he had that beauty which we may attribute to the last of the Abencerrages. Now what others did not see in the joy and excitement of that day, she saw, with those sad, prophetic eyes that see everything when they love!"

"I want for nothing, my friend," she wrote to Louise de Bayne; "they love me and treat me most cordially at my future sister-in-law's, and here my kind cousin and his wife vie with each other in friendly attention. My sister-in-law gets my dresses, gives me a pink bed, and a jewel of an oratory next my room, where one would pray for mere pleasure. Oh! there is enough to make me happy, and yet I am beginning to weary of it, and to say that happiness is nowhere. Write to me; tell me what you are doing in the mountains. I am waiting impatiently for news from Le Cayla. I long to hear about them all, and to see them in thought. Write to Marie sometime, it will please her, and papa too, who loves you, you know, but do not speak of Maurice's health, for I say nothing to them on the subject, thinking it useless to alarm them when the trouble may pass off."

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This was the one uneasiness that disturbed her enjoyment in Paris, "the drop of wormwood with which God wets the lips of his elect, that they be robust in virtue and suffering," as d'Aurevilly said.

TO MME. DE MAISTRE. Oct. 23.

I have seen many churches, new and old, and I prefer the old. Notre Dame, Saint Eustache, Saint Roch, and others whose names I forget, please me more than the Madeline with its pagan form, without belfry or confessionals, expressive of an unbelieving age; and Notre Dame de Lorette, pretty as a boudoir. I like churches that make one think of God, with _vaulted roofs leading to contemplation_, where one neither sees nor hears people. I am perfectly contented in l'Abbaye-aux-Bois, a simple little church that reminds me of the one at Andillac. I go there because it is in our parish, and then, too, I've found an excellent priest there, gentle, devout, and enlightened, a disciple of M. Dupanloup. I should have liked to go to him, but they told me that he lived at a distance, and I must have everything within my reach, for I am still like a bird just let out of a cage, hardly daring to stir; I should have lost myself a hundred times in one quarter if I had not always had a companion. However, I have scoured Paris thoroughly in every direction; first mounting the towers of Notre Dame, whence the eye reaches over the immense city and takes in its general plan, after which they took me to the Invalides, the Louvre, and the Bois de Boulogne. The dome of the Invalides, Notre Dame, and the picture galleries, struck me most. You ask for my impressions of Paris--it is all admirable, but nothing astonishes me. At every step the eye and mind are arrested, but in the country, too, I paused over flowers, grass, and wonderful little creatures. Every place has its wonders--here those of man, there those of God, which are very beautiful, and will not pass away. Kings may see their palaces decay, but the ants will always have their dwelling places. Having made these reflections I will leave you, and work on a dress. . . .

TO MLLE. LOUISE DE BAYNE. All Saints' Day, 1838.

. . . . I do not send you news. I ought to write to you of what goes on within and around me, that you might know my life, and it would be charming to write so, but time flies like a bird and carries me off on its wings. In the morning: church, breakfast, a little work; in the afternoon: a walk or drive, dinner at five o'clock, conversation, music--the day is gone, and nine and ten o'clock come to make us wonder where it went. We go to bed at ten, just like good country folk. In that and many other things I follow my usual habits, and live in Paris as if I were not there. Good by, the bell is ringing.

Seven o'clock. Here I am, pen in hand, sitting by the fire, with the piano sounding, people reading, Pitt (our Criquet) asleep, and memories of you mingling with all these things in this Paris _salon_. . . . It is not apropos, but I take my recollections of things as they come, and I must not fail to tell you what pleasure you gave me at the Spanish museum of painting where I met you. It was you, Louise: a head full of life, oval face, arch expression, and your eyes looking at me, your cheeks that I longed to kiss. I was so charmed with the likeness that I passed by again to see my dear Spanish maiden. Certainly there must be something Spanish about you, for I see you in St. Theresa, and in this noble and beautiful unknown.

The museum amused, or rather interested me extremely, for one does not get amusement from beautiful things, or among wonderful works with ascetic faces such as compose this museum of painting. And what shall I tell you of the mummies, the thousand fantastic and grotesque Egyptian gods--cats and crocodiles--a paradise of idolatry that no one would care to enter? I looked long at some cloth four or five thousand years old, and at a piece of muslin and a little skein of thread, all framed under glass--how many ages have they been in existence? I should never end if I were learned and could describe these curiosities and antiquities by the thousand--Etruscan vases, exquisite in form and color, that look as if they were made yesterday. The ancients certainly possessed the secret of eternal works.

This is my life, seeing and admiring, and then entering into myself, or going in search of those I love to tell them all that I see and feel. If I could I would write to you forever, which means very often, and what should I not scribble? what do I not scribble? Know that I am writing in the midst of musicians, under Maurice's eye as he sits laughing over my journal, and adds for its embellishment the expression of his homage to the ladies of Rayssac. It was he who noticed that picture first and pointed it out to me. He knows what gives me pleasure and leads me to it.

{477}

We always go out together when the weather is good, sometimes to the Tuileries, sometimes to the Luxembourg; but I like the Tuileries best with its pretty things-sculpture, flowers, children playing about, swans in a basin, and looking down on it all the royal château illuminated by the setting sun. I begin to know my way about a little in the streets and gardens, and I look upon it as a great triumph to be able to go to l'Abbaye-aux-Bois alone, which is a great convenience, for I can go to week-day mass without troubling any one, which was a restraint upon me. One can go about here as safely as in Albi or Gaillac. They had frightened me about the dangers of Paris, when there are really none except for imprudent or crazy people. No one speaks to any person going about his own business. In the evening it is different. I would not go out alone then for the world, especially on the boulevards, where they say the devil leads the dance. We pass through sometimes returning from Mme. Raynaud's, and nothing has ever struck me except the illumination of gas in the cafés, running along the streets like a thread of fire. I annoyed a Parisian by saying that the glow-worms in our hedges were quite as effective. "Mademoiselle, what an insult to Paris!" It made us laugh, as one does laugh sometimes at nothing. Now I am going to the concert; I want to know what music is, and tell you my impressions.

TO M. DE GUÉRIN. PARIS, NOV. 6, 1838.

Never was a day more charming, for it began with Grembert's arrival, and it ends with a letter to you, my dear papa. . . The wedding day is fixed for the 15th. Last Sunday the bans were published for the last time at l'Abbaye-aux-Bois. . .

You ask if I have everything I need, and if I am satisfied in every respect with my Parisian life. Yes, dear papa, in every sense, and especially for this reason, that I admire the care and assistance that Providence bestows upon us in all places. I have never been struck so forcibly with the abundant aids to piety anywhere as in Paris; every day there are sermons in one place or another, associations and benedictions. If the devil reigns in Paris, perhaps God is served there better than in other places. Good and evil find here their utmost expression; it is Babylon and Jerusalem in one. In the midst of all this, I lead my customary life, and find in my Abbey everything I need. M. Legrand is a friend of l'Abbé de Rivières, holy and zealous like him, and full of kindness. He provides me with books and with kind and gentle advice; it will not be his fault if I don't improve very much. One can save one's soul anywhere. . .

Our quarter of Cherche Midi is charming. M. d'Aurevilly calls it _Trouve Bonheur_, an appropriate name so far Maurice is concerned. He will be happy, as happy as he can be--at least everything looks hopeful. He could not be allied to better souls. Caroline is an angel; her pure, tender soul is full of piety. You will be pleased with her, and with Maurice too, who only does things slowly, as his fashion is; but there is much to thank God for in such conduct, which is very rare among young Parisians. M. Buquet speaks very highly of him; he will bless the marriage, much to our gratification. The great day, which is to open a new life to our Maurice, engrosses us in a thousand ways. He is the most peaceful person concerned, and regards his future and all these affairs with admirable _sang-froid_. M. Buquet says the fellowship is worth nothing to him, and that he will find something else for him; so you see he is established in the good nest Providence has provided for him, without troubling yon.

Have I told you everything, and made you see thoughts, words, and actions, just as you like? Eran is reading the paper and warming himself. Everybody sends you kisses, and Caro her filial affection. Yon would do well not to go to Rayseac when it is cold or rainy. Advice given, and bulletin finished, I throw my arms around your neck, and pass on to Mimi.

----

You dear Mimi, I thank you more than I can express for your night letter, written in defiance of sleep. Poor Mimi, plagued and busy, while I play the princess in Paris! This thought comes to me often in the day, disturbing my repose a little, my _gentle quietude_. I say to myself that our time is differently employed, but I help you in my heart. We are as well as possible here and at Auguste's. Don't let Euphrasie leave you, I beg and beseech; you would be too lonely without her gaiety and kindness. I put both my arms around her to keep her. M. le Curé is very good to come and amuse papa: it is an act of friendly charity that I shall not forget Remember me to him and to Mariette. Also to Augustine, Jeanne-Marie, the shepherd, Paul, and Gilles, and thank them all for their compliments. Good-by, with a kiss from Maurice, Caro and myself.

----

TO THE SAME. Nov. 7, 1838

I shall write to you every day until I receive letters from home, that you may see that I do not forget you, dear inhabitants of Le Cayla. The whirlwind of Paris will not blow me away yet awhile. That remark of papa's made me laugh, and showed me that he does not know me yet. I am very sure that you, Mimi, had no such idea. I have told you that I lead the same life here as at Le Cayla, and with this {478} advantage, that there is nothing to worry me, for I have a church within reach, and entire liberty. We are all busy with spiritual matters now--our ladies with theirs and I with mine. Maurice is consigned to Sunday, M. Buquet's only free day. All is going on well in this respect, and Caroline is so edifying that she seems to be following in Mimi's footsteps. In this too I admire the workings of Providence in using this marriage as an occasion of salvation.

It is beautiful to-day, one of those fine days so rare in Paris, where the sky is almost always pale and cloudless. This struck me at first, but now I am used to it as to other things that I see. I am used to carriages, and am no more afraid of there running over me than of Gilles' cart. We shall go in the sunshine to see Mme. Lamarlière Auguste, and I don't know whom besides, for there is no end to visits when one is once in train. In going to see our cousin at M. Laville's, Erembert and Maurice met M. Lastic, who is living in Paris. It is astonishing how many acquaintances one meets in the great world where one thinks one's self unknown.

Indians visit here, Indians without end. A friend of Maurice's, H. Le Fèvre came to spend the evening; a nice little young man, who looks very gentle and refined. He asked me when I was going to see my good friend De Maistre; he is a friend of M. Adrien's, who is at present wandering amid the snows of Norway, so that he can not come to the wedding. We shall muster pretty strong, though only the _indispensable_ will be there.

. . . 13th. We have just come from the Pantheon, a church passed over from God to the Devil, from St. Genevieve to the heroes of July, and to Voltaire and Rousseau. It is an admirable work of art, however; the interior, the dome, and the crypts, gloomy, secluded, buried beneath vaults and only lighted here and there with lamps, are quite effective. The imagination would easily take fright in this darkness of death, or of glory if you choose, for all the dead are illustrious there, as in the Elysium of which Voltaire and Rousseau are the gods. In the depths of the crypt stands the statue of Voltaire, smiling apparently at the glory of his tomb, which is decorated with magnificent emblems. That of Rousseau is more severe--a sarcophagus, from which a hand is thrust forth, bearing a torch, "that illumines and ever shall illumine the world," according to our guide, who was a cicerone as brilliant as the lantern he carried. The summit of the dome is at a prodigious elevation, twice the height of the steeple of Ste. Cécile. Paris is seen beautifully from there, but the picture needed sunlight and there was none. Good-by; to-morrow at this time Maurice will be married at the Mayoralty, and day after tomorrow in church.

16th. Yesterday was the grand and solemn day, the beautiful day for Maurice, Caro and all of us. We only needed you, papa, and Mimi, to complete our happiness, as we all said with sincere regret. You would have been delighted to see this family festival, the most beautiful I ever witnessed. Everything went smoothly, the weather was soft and pleasant, and God seemed to smile on the marriage, so suitably it was conducted, and in such a Christian manner. How pretty Caro was in her bridal dress, and wreath of orange flowers under her veil à la Bengali! and Maurice looked well too. H. Angler was so charmed that he wanted to paint them in church, kneeling on their crimson Prie-Dieu. The church displayed all its grandeur, and the organ playing during mass was very good. M. Buquet blessed the marriage, and said mass, assisted by M. Legrand. Many of the _beau monde_ were present, and a dozen carriages stood before the church doors. Soeur d'Yversen was to be there. M. Laurichais, confessor to our ladies, in short all the friends and relations united their prayers and good wishes during the ceremony. I send M. Buquet's discourse, which every one thought perfect. Why can't I add to it his kindly voice, and the look of joy and emotion with which he spoke to Maurice, whom he loves sincerely.

You will like to know, papa, how everything passed off on the memorable day, and I like very much to describe it, for it seems as if you would be able to share our pleasure, and see your children in church, at dinner and at the evening party. The dinner was charming, like every thing else, each course served elegantly; fish, meats, dessert and wines. The turkey, dressed with our truffles was king of the feast. We drank freely and merrily of Madeira and Constance, and it all seemed like the marriage of Cana. I sat between Auguste and M. d'Aurevilly, very charming neighbors, and we talked and laughed very pleasantly, though Auguste scolded me for having no poetry, which he felt disposed to read, and we had never thought of writing; there's something bettor for Caro, which comes from the heart and will be unfailingly hers every day. How modest she was in church, and how pretty she looked in the evening! She was quite the queen of the occasion. A dozen ladies came, all very elegant, and I don't know how many men, friends of Maurice's. They were very gracious, and asked me to dance; yes--_dance!_ _M. le Curé_ had better take holy water and exorcise me. I danced with my groomsman, Charles; it was _de rigueur_, and I could not decline without being conspicuous, and playing {479} the not very amusing part of wall-flower. Auguste performed his paternal duties admirably. He begs me to say a word of commendation for him, and I might well say a hundred in praise of his friendship and devotion to us.

The friend referred to in the following letter, and with whom Mlle. de Guérin left Paris early in the December of 1838, was the _Marie_ to whom she wrote the two delightful letters, introduced into the sixth and seventh books of her journal. Mme. la Baronne Henriette Marie de Maistre was the sister of M. Adrien de Sainte Marie, a friend of Guérin's, and her intimacy with Eugénie had its first foundation in ceremonious notes written about Maurice when he was ill with a fever at Le Cayla in 1837. Mme. de Maistre soon became endeared to Eugénie by her fascinating powers of attraction, and also by her mental and physical sufferings, for sufferers belonged to the "dove of Le Cayla" by natural right.

TO MLLE. LOUISE DE BAYNE. Paris, Dec. 1, 1838.

M. de Frigeville is the most gracious, amiable, and obliging of men. At length I found out his address, and sent my parcel with a little note, which he answered at once, and followed in person the next day. The good man had taken infinite pains to find me and ended by applying to the police--a last resource that amused us a good deal. We cannot profit by the acquaintance even now, or by his offers of politeness "for anything in his power," as he expressed himself to our ladies, for I was out when he came,--the fates are against me. Mlle. Laforêt thought him very agreeable and exquisitely courteous. I send this little notice of him for you, dear friend, and make use of the chance to write to you up to the last moment.

I am going to the country, to another Rayssac, for Les Coynes is among the mountains;--shall I find another Louise there? She is a little like you, I think; but, my friend, you will always be my friend. I will write to you from there if you like. Whom and what shall I see? Everything looks very attractive, and yet I go forward with timidity to meet these unknown and known. Pity my wandering life, dragged from place to place;--no, do not pity me, for it is the will of heaven, and all we have to do is to follow the hand that leads us without reasoning: that alone sustains and consoles us, teaching us to turn all things to account for heaven. I am less attracted to the world than ever; there is more calmness and happiness within Sister Clementine's door than in any place in the world. I went to see her yesterday, but she was to be in retreat until Monday, much to my regret, for I love to see and listen to these good religious, these souls set apart from the world. . . I should like to send you something charming and worthy of Paris, but charming things are rare everywhere; so rare that I have none to spare today. However, I did see the outside of Versailles;--the king was expected, so they shut the gates on us. Did I tell you of this, and of our _royal_ wrath? perhaps I did in my last letter.

I should have described the concert to you this morning, if Maurice, who was to have been my escort, had not been taken ill just as we were going;--pain instead of pleasure, no uncommon change in life. His little wife, quite crimson with emotion, began to nurse him and make much of him, and all grew calm under her gentle influence. I hope Maurice will be happy with her,--I do not know any woman like her in disposition, heart, or face. She is a foreigner, and I study her, that I may adapt myself to her, and enter into her feelings if she cannot into mine. There must be mutual concessions of taste and ideas among us all, to ensure affection and family peace:--that you see everywhere, but we shall have no difficulty with one so amiable and generous. There is not a day when I do not receive proofs of affection from my charming foreign sister. They always speak of her to us as the Indian. Mme. Lamarlière thought her very charming;--pretty and well dressed. Today a bulletin of the visit and her _toilette_ is at Gaillac, and I am sure that it is all over town by this time that the Indian wore a dress of _soie antique_, a black satin shawl, trimmed with blond and lined with blue, a lace collar, and a black velvet hat with ostrich plume, "overwhelming heaven and earth," as Mme. Lamarlière says

Good-by, my dear. I kiss you and say love me, think of me, believe me, write to me, talk of me. Love to you all.

One word more; I like to talk to you best because we seem to understand each other. I will say good-by soon, for two o'clock is striking and I have an appointment in my chapel at l'Abbaye-aux-Bois, for I wish to put my conscience in order before going away. I do not know to whom I shall have recourse in the country, so far from any church. Fortunately, we {480} are to spend Christmas at Nevers, and I shall try to grow calm, for I am not so today. I tell you this because you are alone with Pulchérié, whom nothing surprises. Pray in the chapel at Rayssac for your poor friend, the Parisian, who will repay you as well as she can. Good-by, good-by; till when? . . .

TO MLLE. DE BAYNE. CHRISTMAS EVE, NEVERS, 1888.

I have only time to date my letter, dear friend, for the bells are calling me to midnight mass. I listen to their clashing peals, and think of the pretty little tinkle of the Andillac bell. Who would have said last year that I should be so far away? but so God leads us to things unforeseen. I'm going to the cathedral to pray for all whom I love, and so for you.

Two days since those lines--two days of festival, prayer, offices, and letters written and received, without preventing me from being with you, my dearest. Our hearts can always be together before God, and we cannot meet in a better way or in any other way for a long time. I shall not be at Le Cayla before the fine weather comes, and we can have flowers and sunshine to show our Indian; far enough we are from that season, as I see by the white earth and pallid sky, all snowy and cold.

How you would love my friend, dear Louise! She is so good, so charming and attractive, and of such a high order of mind, that I keep congratulating myself upon possessing her friendship and affection. . .

Her father takes the best of care of me, and even comes to my room to see if I have a good fire when I say my prayers. He is afraid this cold climate may hurt me, and said laughing one very cold day, "The southern flower will be frozen." Good, holy man! I love him very much, and he makes me think of your father in his mode of thought and culture. He has read everything, and he writes too; some selections from his works, that he was kind enough to read to me, might have been written by a Benedictine. He knows Carmelites, Trappists, charitable orders, every one in short who is learned or religious. Charles the Tenth loved him and saw him often; if he had only listened to him!

Travellers from Goritz come here, among others a M. de Ch----, who comes and goes for the exiles, from St. Petersburg to Vienna and sometimes to Spain, from one court to another. He charms us with stories of his adventures, and I never saw a man more agreeable, handsome, witty or cultivated. He is a learned geologist, and collects specimens, goes down into volcanoes and domesticates himself among ruins.

He lived a week in Sallust's room at Pompeii, drove about the streets in his carriage, entered the theatre, made excavations under the very eyes of the Duchess of Berry, and saw a thief whom the lava had caught while he was stealing a purse, at which we laughed, and remarked that iniquity is sooner or later discovered. I have seen his cabinets of natural history, mineralogy, and antiques, and also the borders of Cicero's dining-hall exquisitely painted with a delicacy inimitable or unimitated. To all these gifts, M. Ch---- unites those of a good Christian; he turns all his studies and discoveries to advantage for the faith, and proves that science and faith, geology and Genesis, are of one accord. If you think me very learned, remember that I've seen Paris, and that Paris sharpens one's wits; however, most of this I have acquired in the neighborhood of Les Coques.

TO MLLE. MARIE DE GUÉRIN. NEVERS JANUARY 12.

We return to Paris early in January, and shall be introduced to the grandeurs of the world. Hitherto I have known only amiable, pretty simplicity; now come baronesses, duchesses, princesses, and as many clever people as I choose. It will amuse me like a picture-gallery, for the heart finds no place among such scenes, far less the soul. God and the world do not agree. Ah me! how little they think of heaven amid all this rush and sparkle! So says my friend, who knows the world and is detached from it.

M. d'Aurevilly, in his unpublished reminiscences of Mlle. de Guérin, gives a graphic description of her as she appeared in the Parisian world, where no doubt she was subjected to a close scrutiny as the sister of the elegant and gifted Maurice de Guérin.

"We can affirm," he says, "that never did creature of worldly attractions appear to us so sweet and lovely as this charming fawn, reared like St. Genevieve among _pastours_. . . .

"Drawn from her country home, brought in state like a princess into the intimidating light of lustres, she came without embarrassment or awkwardness, with a chaste, patrician self-possession, that showed in spite of fortune's wrongs for what class in society she was born. Without ever having been there, she was _Faubourg Saint Germain_, Byron tells us in his {481} memoir that he witnessed the introduction of Miss Edgeworth into London society, and that she made him think of Jeanie Deans. But the country girl of La Cayla was the descendant of the fairest falcon-bearers who appear in the mediaeval chronicles, gloved with buckskin, corseleted with ermine, and wearing a train. . . . This was what we admired, this was what impressed the world, astonished at her who did not wonder at them. If, in speaking of such a woman, I dared to use an expression debased to theatrical uses in our times, I should say that she had a great success wherever she went. Women whispered together about her genius for expression and the feeling revealed in her letters; but no one offered her the prying importunities so coarsely mistaken sometimes for homage. They did not call her interesting or amusing, as the world says, patting a proud cheek with its awkward, familiar hand. They respected her. The world treated her as a woman of the world, for that is what it holds in highest esteem; but she knew that she was not so. She knew that there was a second meaning in the world's language that escaped her, as she said once _with her accent_ in a letter, but what observer would have guessed it in seeing her? Excepting now and then a charming swallow-glance, piercing the tapestry and seeking the wall at Le Cayla covered with honeysuckle and wall-wort, who would have doubted that this tranquil maiden was a woman of the world, capable of pleasing it, and of ruling it too, had she thought it worth her while?

Mlle. de Guérin had one of those imaginations that are easy to live with. She did not offend common people, those sensitive, coarse souls to whom the least distinction causes terrible pain, and who push their way everywhere, even in the country. They handled with their rough touch this divine opal with its vaporous shades, as indifferently as the mock ivory counters on their card-tables. Though she did not resemble a sphinx, this lovely maiden with her lingering smile, there was perhaps in her placid regularity the immovability of the sphinx, and immobility suits all things. It lends a mystery to nature, and takes from human beings the puppet-like gesticulation that ever mars the lofty _Sidera Vultum_.

And now we will return to Eugénie's letters, dated once more from Paris, where she was staying with the Baroness de Maistre, and seeing the world in a more brilliant light than in her visits to the Rue Cherche-Midi, and at the house of "Auguste and Félicité;" but it never dazzled her eyes, no matter how brightly it shone and glittered.

TO M. DE GUÉRIN. Paris, Jan. 20, 1839.

You have had a line from me almost every day, dear papa, but I will write more at length to-day.

The good General called here as soon as he heard of my return from Nevers; but to tell the truth his visits are not entirely for me, for he finds Caroline so pleasing, that I think our Indian has her full share of the kind old gentleman's friendship. One day he came when she was dressing a doll in Indian fashion, for the little De Maistres, and he was so delighted that he insisted on working himself, and wished to stay till the end of the toilette, which was unluckily interrupted by visitors. The Marquis left us, but Caro wrote to him the next day that the Indian lady was ready, and would be charmed to be presented to him, so the good man came, passed the afternoon with us, and offered to take us today to M. Aquado's museum of painting. We shall go, for it is said to be very beautiful, and afterward we are to see the interior of the Palais Royal. There is nothing we may not expect of the good Marquis, and we owe a great deal of pleasure to Palchérie, who has already received my acknowledgments. I send a package to Rayssac with this one.

We have no want of friends in Paris, dear papa. How can I say enough of the perfect family I have just left, who are untiring in their friendships and kindness! I am engaged, to go to-morrow, Saturday, to a large and elegant party at M. de Neuville's, [Footnote 83] but I shall give up my place to Eran, who will go with Mme. de Maistre. There will be a sort of reunion of beauties of every country--English, German, {482} Spanish, and the lovely ambassadress from the United States.

[Footnote 83: Ex-Minister to Charles X.]

'Twill be a pretty sight for anyone who likes society, but I refuse as often as possible. However, I cannot help going to M. de Neuville's, for he has been so gracious to Erembert. I have seen the Baroness de Vaux, Henry Vth's Joan of Arc, who, in 1830, asked an officer of the Royal Guard to rout Philip, herself and her sword at their head. She is a man-woman in figure and energy. Now she is devoted to God, visiting prisons and exhorting those who are condemned to death. With all this she has a charming simplicity. I am to make other acquaintances, whom I shall describe to you. All this does not prevent my thinking of Le Cayla very, very often, and longing impatiently for the month of May,--I shall go with Erembert at the beginning of Lent if I can. Mmes. de Maistre and de St. Marie beg to be remembered to you. "They think Caro charming, as fascinating as possible," said Henriette, and indeed she was radiant the evening they saw her. She is prettier than before her marriage, and she is an excellent little wife, as devoted to Maurice as he is to her. They are happy, and Maurice is most exemplary; a hundred times better than last year, as he says himself. His confidence in me is unchanged and we talk very intimately;--he longs to see you, and thinks very often of Mimi;--we shall all be glad to meet at Le Cayla. Saturday I shall think of you, Mimi, at St. Thomas Aquinas', where we are to hear l'Abbé Dupanloup, [Footnote 84] who is also to give the Lenten instructions. There is no lack of teaching in Paris, but the well taught are very rare;--the more one sees of the world, the more glaring appears the ignorance of essential things. Soeur d'Yversen comes now and then to see us; she has mentioned to me Mme. L----, who would like to know us, but we know, so many people already, that I've lost all desire for new acquaintances. Our whole time slips away in dressing and receiving or making visits, so that one can hardly read or work at all. The Lastics have been here, Mme. Resaudière, the Barrys, an English family who like Maurice very much, and an infinity of other people whom I do not know even by name. Then the De Maistres and the acquaintances they make for me;--you see I have more than I need.

[Footnote 84: Now Mgr. Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans.]

Oh! how I shall rest at Le Cayla. I shall feel the contrast so much, passing from the whirlwind of Paris to the calm of the fields, from the rolling of carriages to the little rumble of carts, from Paris noises to the cackling of our hens;--it all seems to me very charming without thinking of you and Mimi;--how I long to kiss you! They treat me very well here, and I am spoiled by everybody. My health is good, so don't be anxious about me. How does Winter treat you in the new parlor? Better no doubt than it did in the hall. "Is Wolff banished from the parquet?" Maurice asks. Passing from parlor to kitchen, tell me how all our people are. I'm sorry about the partridge.

May 9th.--We heard M. de Ravignan Sunday at Notre Dame. It is curious to see this assemblage of men, a sea of people overflowing the immense cathedral to listen to one voice--but such a voice! From time to time some stricken soul, some young man in doubt or conviction, seeks the orator as a confessor. Then too they rush to see plays, and Mlle. Rachel draws at least as great a crowd to the theatre as M. de R. does to the cathedral. I'm not surprised at the enthusiasm of the Castrais about this young marvel. She is ugly, though, at least so I am told by those who have seen her off the stage. Alas! the profanity of my words in Lent!

TO H. DE GUÉRIN.

Paris; March and April, 1839. This bit of a letter, will tell you, dear papa, that I am with my poor invalid friend, waiting for M. Dupanloup, and that catching sight of an ink-stand, I am going on with my writing at the expense of the sacristy. But I will put a sous in the box for my ink, and my paper too, as I mean to steal a sheet to go with these; if we are left alone long enough. Now and then a peaceable abbé or sacristan passes through, glancing at us, and looking rather astonished at my office improvised in the sacristy. But M. D.'s name protects us, and we need only mention him to get a safe-conduct. . . .

Never was there such a holy week--continual agitation and running about. Andillac is better than Paris for recollection; but God is everywhere and in all things, if we know how to find Him. Poor dear papa, I have prayed well for you in these beautiful monuments of Notre Dame, St. Roch, and others that we have visited. I thought of yon in the simple little chapel of Andillac. I suppose they used the new chapel for the tomb, or Paradise, as they call it here.

Was there ever such a piece of scribbling as this letter--begun, left, begun again, in so many places? Now I am at Maurice's, after sitting five hours for my portrait, which M. Angier kindly insists on painting for you, and for your sake, I have submitted. Dear papa, my painted self will go with Eran, who has had his likeness taken too, and, happier than I am. {483} is to see you and kiss you, and talk to you of Paris, and many, many other things.

My absence is to be prolonged more than I supposed, but how could I refuse these good friends a request they had such a right to ask? They will be grateful to you, I assure you.

I shall bring you the little book of poetry that you care for so much;--it is now in the hands of Count Xavier, which will be its greatest glory, I have been presented to this celebrated and charming man, who was very kind and gracious; he loves his cousin, and under her patronage I could not but be well received. We found him alone in his room, reading the office of Holy Week;--he must be religious, being a worthy brother of his Brother Joseph. Thus he is consoled for his great griefs, for the death of his three children at eighteen or twenty years of age.

The same evening, they took me to the great Valentino concert of eighty musicians. I had been there once before. There is much more to be seen here, but one might spend a thousand years in Paris, and leave many things unseen. I value more the knowledge of persons than of things.

I am uneasy about your health, however well Mimi may take care of you; be very careful of yourself.

Good-by, dear papa, good-by, dear Mimi. I have no time to write to you. Maurice sends to papa M. de Luzerne's _reflections_ upon the Gospels. Good-by to all.

I send a waistcoat to Pierril and an apron to Jeanie; to you and all everything that can reach your hearts. Thank M. Angler for his kindness, when you write to Maurice. My portrait must be finished at Le Cayla, for I found it impossible to have a sitting to-day. I do not want to leave you, and yet good-by. I will write to you from Nevers. Erembert will be much pleased to see you again; I see already the happy day of arrival.

April 2d, in the evening.

And here we must leave Eugénie. Eight days later she resumed the journal at Nevers and wrote that wonderful eighth book, so pathetically expressive of the pain of waiting--fit prelude of the coming tragedy.

From Once a Week.

DAY-DREAMS

Call them not vain and false day-dreams we see With spirit-vision of our quicker youth; Thoughts wiser in the world's esteem may be Less near the truth.

When against some hard creed of life we raise Our single cry for what more pure we deem, 'Tis oft the working out in later days Of some old dream!

Dream of a world more pure than that we find Sad is the wak'ning, but not dull despair, While we can feel that we may leave behind One bright ray there.

Let us work up then to our young ideal, Nor weep the present nor regret the past, Till the soul, struggling 'twixt earth's false and real, Reach heaven at last.

{484}

From The Dublin Review.

THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS OF ALEXANDRIA--ORIGEN.

The scholar next comes to the more strictly ethical part of Origen's teaching. The preliminary dialectics had cleared the ground, and to a certain extent replanted it; physics made the process more easy, pleasant, and complete; but the great end of a philosophic life was ethics, that is, the making a man good. The making of a man good and virtuous seems now-a-days a simple matter, as far as theory is concerned, and so perhaps it is, if only theory and principles be considered; though morality is an extensive science, and one that is not mastered in an hour or a day. But in Origen's day a science of Christian ethics did not exist. The teaching of the Scripture and the voice of the pastors was sufficient, doubtless, for the guidance of the faithful; but science is a different thing. Such a science is shadowed out to us by the scholar in the record we are noticing. St. Thomas, the great finisher of scientific Christian ethics, embraces all virtues under two great classes, viz., the theological and the cardinal. The whole science of morality treats only of the seven virtues included under these two divisions. The master's teaching comprehended, of course, faith, and hope, and charity; indeed, it would be more correct to say that these three virtues were his whole ultimate object; but the scholar says little of them in particular just because of this very reason, and also because they were bound up in that _piety_ which he mentions so often. But it is a most interesting fact that the virtues, and the only virtues, mentioned in the summary of Origen's moral teaching given by St. Gregory, are precisely the four cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The classification dates, of course, from the Stoics, but the circumstance that the framework laid down by a father in the beginning of the third century was used and completed by another father in the thirteenth, gives the early father an undoubted claim to be considered the founder of Christian ethics. And here we lay our hands on one of the earliest instances of heathen philosophy being made to hew wood and carry water for Christian theology. The division of virtues was a good one; all the schools pretended to teach it; but the distinctive boast and triumph of the Christian teacher was that he taught _true_ prudence, true justice, fortitude, and temperance, "not such," says the scholar, "as the other philosophers teach, and especially the moderns, who are strong and great in words; he not only talked about the virtues, but exhorted us to practise them; and he exhorted us by what he did far more than by what he said." And here the scholar takes the opportunity of recording his opinion about "the other" philosophers, now that he has had a course of Origen's training. He first apologizes to them for hurting their feelings. He says that, personally, he has no ill-will against them, but he plainly tells them that things have come to such a pass, through their conduct, that the very name of philosophy is laughed at. And he goes on to develop what appeared to him the very essence of their faults, viz., too much talk, and nothing but talk. Their teaching is like a widely-extended morass; once set foot in it, and you can neither get out nor go on, but stick fast till you perish. Or it is like a thick forest; the traveller who once finds himself {485} in it has no chance of ever getting back to the open fields and the light of day, but gropes about backward and forward, first trying one path, then another, and finding they all lead farther in, until at last, wearied and desperate, he sits down and dwells in the forest, resolving that the forest shall be his world, since all the world seems to be a forest. This is, perhaps, one of the most graphic pictures ever given of the state of mind, so artificial, so unsatisfied, and yet so self-sufficient, brought about by a specious heathen philosophy, and the effect of enlightened reason destitute of revelation. The scholar cannot heighten the strength of his description by going on to compare it, in the third place, to a labyrinth, but the comparison brings out two striking features well worthy of notice. The first is, the innocent and guileless look of the whole concern from the outside; "the traveller sees the open door, and in he goes, suspecting nothing." Once in, he sees a great deal to admire, (and this is the second point in the labyrinth-simile;) he sees the very perfection of art and arrangement, doors after doors, rooms within rooms, passages leading most ingeniously and conveniently into other passages; he sees all this art, admires the architect, and--thinks of going out. But there is no going out for him; he is fast. All the artifice and ingenuity he has been admiring have been expended for the express purpose of keeping in for ever those foolish people who have been so unwary as to come in at the open door. "For there is no labyrinth so hard to thread," sums up the scholar, "no wood so deep and thick, no bog so false and hopeless, as the language of some of these philosophers." In this language we recognize another of of the characteristic feelings of the day--the feeling of profound disgust for the highest teachings of heathenism from the moment the soul catches a ray of the light of the Gospel In Origen's school the confines of the receding darkness skirted the advancing kingdom of light, and those that sat in the darkness to-day saw it leaving them to-morrow, and far behind them the morrow after that; and all the time the great master had to be peering anxiously into the darkness to see what souls were nearest the light, and to hold out his hand to win them too into the company of those that were already sitting at his feet. In such days as those, sharp comparisons between heathen wisdom and the light of Christ must have been part of the atmosphere in which the catechumens of the great school lived and breathed; there was a reality and interest in them such as can never be again. And yet the master was no bigot in his dealings with the Greek philosophies. "He was the first and the only one," says his scholar, "that made me study the philosophy of Greece." The scholar was to reject nothing, to despise nothing, but make himself thoroughly acquainted with the whole range of Greek philosophy and poetry; there was only one class of writers he was to have nothing to do with, and those were the atheists who denied God and God's providence; their books could only sully a mind that was striving after piety. But his pupils were to attach themselves to no school or party, as did the mob of those who pretended to study philosophy. Under his guidance they were to take what was true and good, and leave what was false and bad. He walked beside them and in front of them through the labyrinth; he had studied its windings and knew its turns; in his company, and with their eyes on his "lofty and safe" teaching, his scholars need fear no danger.

This brief analysis of part of St. Gregory's remarkable oration will serve to give us some idea of Origen's method of treating his more learned and cultivated converts, of whom we know he had a very great many. It will also have admitted us, in some sort, into the interior of his school, {486} and let as hear the question in debate and the matters that were of greatest interest in that most influential centre of Christian teaching. It does not, of course, deal directly with theology, or with those great controversies which Origen, in a manner, rendered possible for his pupils and successors of the next century. The scholar, indeed, does go on now to speak of his theological teachings; but he describes rather his manner than his matter, and rather the salient points of characteristic gifts than the details of his dogmatic system. As this is precisely our own object in these notes, we need only say that St. Gregory, in the concluding pages of his farewell discourse, sufficiently proves that the great end and object of all philosophic teaching and intellectual discipline in the school of his master was faith and practical piety. To teach his hearers the great first cause was his most careful and earnest task. His instructions about God were so full of knowledge and so carefully prepared that the scholar is at a loss how to describe them. His explanations of the prophets, and of Holy Scripture generally, were so wonderful that he seemed to be the friend and interpreter of the Word. The soul that thirsted for knowledge went away from him refreshed, and the hard of heart and the unbelieving could not listen to him without both understanding, and believing, and making submission to God. "It was no otherwise than by the communication of the Holy Ghost that he spoke thus," says his disciple, "for the prophets and the interpreters of the prophets have necessarily the same help from above, and none can understand a prophet unless by the same spirit wherein the prophet spoke. This greatest of gifts and this splendid destiny he seemed to have received from God, that he should be the interpreter of God's words to men, that he should understand the things of God, as though he heard them from God's own mouth, and that through him men should be brought to listen and obey." Two little indications of what we may call the spirit of Origen are to be found in this address of his pupil. The first is the great value he sets upon purity as the only means of arriving at the knowledge and communion of God. We know what a watchword this "union with God" was among the popular philosophers of the day. To attain to it was the end of all the Neo-Platonic asceticism. It was Origen's great end as well; but he taught that purity alone and the subjugation of the passions by the grace of God will avail to lead the soul thither, and that no amount of external refinement or abstinence from gross sin will suffice to make the soul pure in the sight of God. The second is, his devotion to the person of the Son, the ever-blessed Word of God. The whole oration of the scholar takes the form of a thanksgiving to "the Master and Saviour of our souls, the firstborn Word, the maker and ruler of all things." He never misses an opportunity all through it of bursting into eloquent love to that "Prince of the universe;" he cannot praise his master without first praising him, or ascribe anything to the powers of the earthly teacher without referring it first of all to the heavenly Giver. He had learned this from Origen, the predecessor, unconsciously certainly, but in will and in spirit, of another Alexandrian, the great Athanasius. And here again error was bringing out the truth, for unless the Gnostics and the Neo-Platonists had been at that very time theorizing about their demiurge and their emanations, we should probably have missed the tender devotion and repeated homage to the eternal Word which we find in the words of Origen and his disciple.

Theodore, or Gregory, as he had been named in baptism, had to thank his master and to praise him, and he had, Moreover, to say how sorry he was to leave him. He concludes his speech with the expression of his regrets. He is afraid that all the grand teaching he has received has been to {487} a great extent thrown away upon him. He is not yet prudent, he is not just, he is not temperate, he has no fortitude, alas, for his own native imbecility! But one gift the master has given him he has made him love all these virtues with a love that knows no bounds; and he has made him love, over and above them all, that virtue which is alike their beginning and their consummation--the blessed virtue of piety, the service and love of God. And now, in leaving him, he seems to be leaving a garden full of useful trees and pleasant fruits, full of green grass and cheering sunshine. And he thereupon compares himself, at considerable length, to our first parents banished from Paradise. "I am leaving the face of God and going back to the earth from whence I came; and I shall eat earth all my days, and till earth--an earth that will produce me nothing but thorn and briers now that it is deprived of its good and excellent tending." He goes on to liken himself to the prodigal son; and yet he finds himself worse than he, for he is going away without receiving the "due portion of substance," and leaving behind everything he loves and cares for. Again, he seems to be one of that band of Jewish captives that hang up their harps on the willows and wept beside the rivers of Babylon. "I am going out from my Jerusalem," he says, "my holy city, where day and night the holy law is being announced, where are hymns and canticles and mystic speech; where a light brighter than the sun shines upon us as we discuss the mysteries of God, and where our fancy brings back in the night visions of what has occupied us in the day; I am leaving this holy city, wherein God seems to breathe everywhere, and going into a land of exile: there will be no singing for me; even the mournful flute will not be my solace when my harp is hung on the willows; but I shall be working by river-sides and making bricks; the hymns I remember I shall not be allowed to sing; nay, it may be that my very memory will play me false, and my hard work will make me forget them." The youthful heart, that has left a cloistered retreat of learning and piety, where masters have been loved, studies enjoyed, and God tenderly served, will test these words by itself, and read in their eloquent painting another proof that nature is the same to-day as yesterday. Gregory the wonder-worker was truly a scholar to be proud of, but the master's pride must have been obliterated in his emotion when he listened to such a description of his school as this.

But the scholar, after all, will leave with a good heart. "There is the Word, the sleepless guardian of all men." He puts his trust in him, and in the good seed that his master has sown; perhaps he may come back again and see him yet once more, when the seed shall have sprung up and produced such fruits as can be expected from a nature which is barren and evil, but which he prays God may never become worse by his own fault. "And do thou, O my beloved master ([Greek text]), arise and send us forth with thy prayer; thou hast been our saviour by thy holy teachings whilst we were with thee; save us still by thy prayers when we depart. Give us back, master, give us up into the hands of him that sent us to thee, God; thank him for what has befallen us; pray him that in the future he may ever be with us to direct us, that he may keep his laws before our eyes and set in our heart that best of teachers his divine fear. Away from thee, we shall not obey him as freely as we obeyed him here. Keep praying that we may find consolation in him for our loss of thee, that he may send us his angel to go with us; and ask him to bring us back to thee once more; no other consolation could be half so great." And so they depart, the two brothers, never again to see their master more. They both became great bishops, Gregory the greatest; we find Origen writing to him, soon after his departure, a letter full of affection and good counsel; and who can tell how much the teaching of the catechist of Alexandria had to do with that wonderful life and never-dying reputation that distinguish Gregory Thaumaturgus among all the saints of the church?

{488}

Origen presided at Alexandria for twenty years--that is to say, from 211 to 231. In the latter year he left it for ever. During this period he had been temporarily absent more than once. The governor of the Roman Arabia, or Arabia Petraea, had sent a special messenger to the prefect of Alexandria and the patriarch, to beg that the catechist might pay him a visit. What he wanted him for is not recorded; but Petra, the capital of the Roman province, was not so far from the great road between Alexandria and Palestine as to be out of the way of Greek thought and civilization, and its interesting remains of art, belonging to this very period, which startled modern travellers only a short time past, prove that it was itself no inconsiderable centre of intellectual cultivation. We may, therefore, conjecture that his errand was philosophical, or, in other words, religious.

The second time that Origen was absent from Alexandria was for a somewhat longer space. The emperor Caracalla, after murdering his brother and indulging in indiscriminate slaughter, in all parts of the world from Rome to Syria, had at last arrived, with his troubled conscience and his well-bribed legions, at Alexandria. The Alexandrians, it is well known, had an irresistible tendency to give nicknames. Caracalla's career was open to a few epithets, and the unfortunate "men of Macedon" made merry on some salient points in the character of the emperor and his mother. They had better have held their tongues, or plucked them out; for in a fury of vengeance he let loose his bloodthirsty bands on the city. How many were slain in that awful visitation no one ever knew; the dead were thrown into trenches, and hastily covered up, uncounted and unrecorded. The spectre-haunted emperor took special vengeance on the institutions and professors of learning. It would seem that he destroyed a great part of the buildings of the Museum, and put to death or banished the teachers. As for the students, he had the whole youth of the city driven together into the gymnasium, and ordered them to be formed into a "Macedonian phalanx" for his army--a grim retort, in kind, for their pleasantries at his expense. Origen fled before this storm. Had he remained, he was far too well known now to have been safe for an hour. Doubtless obedience made him conceal himself and escape. He took refuge in Caesarea of Palestine, where the bishop, St. Theoctistus, received him with the utmost honor; and, though he was yet only a layman, made him preach in the church, which he had never done at Alexandria. When the tempest in Egypt had gone by, Demetrius wrote for him to come back. He returned, and resumed the duties of his post.

After this he took either one or two other journeys. He was sent into Greece, and visited Athens, with letters from his bishop, to refute heresy and confirm the Christian religion. He also stayed awhile at the great central see of Antioch.

On his journey to Greece, he had been ordained priest at Caesarea, by his friend St. Theoctistus. When he returned to Alexandria, about the year 231, Demetrius, the patriarch, was pleased to be exceedingly indignant at his ordination. We cannot go into the controversy here; we need only say that a synod of bishops, summoned by the patriarch, decreed that he must leave Alexandria, but retain his priesthood; which seems to show that they thought he had better leave for the sake of peace, though they could not recognize any canonical fault; for if they had, they would have suspended or degraded him. Demetrius, indeed, assembled another synod some time later, and did degrade and excommunicate him. But by this time Origen had left Alexandria, never to return {489} and was quietly living at Caesarea. We dare not pronounce sentence in a cause that has occupied so many learned pens; but we dare confidently say this, that it is impossible to prove Origen to have been knowingly in the wrong. We must now follow him to Caesarea.

If some Levantine merchantman, manned by swarthy Greeks or Syrians, in trying to make Beyrout, should be driven by a north wind some fifty miles further along the coast to the southwest, she might possibly find herself, at break of day, in sight of a strange-looking harbor. There would be a wide semi-circular sweep of buildings, or what had once been buildings; there would be a southern promontory, crowned with a tower in ruins; there would be the vestiges of a splendid pier; and there would be rows of granite pillars lying as if a hurricane had come off the land, and blown them bodily into the sea. An Arab or two, in their white cotton clothes, would be grimly looking about them, on some prostrate columns; and a stray jackal, caught by the rising sun, would be scampering into some hole in the ruins. Our merchantman would have come upon all that is left of Caesarea of Palestine. If she did not immediately make all sail to Jaffa, or back to Beyrout, it would not be because the place does not look ghostly and dismal enough. And yet it was once the greatest port on that Mediterranean coast, and far more important than either Jaffa, Acre, Sidon, or even Beyrout now. It owed its celebrity to Herod the Great. Twelve years of labor, and the expenditure of vast sums of money, made the ancient Turris Stratonis worthy to be rechristened Caesarea, in honor of Caesar Augustus. Its great pier, constructed of granite blocks of incredible size, afforded at once dwelling-places and hostelries for the sailors and a splendid columned promenade for the wealthy citizens. The half-circle of buildings, all of polished granite, that embraced the sea and the harbor, and terminated in a rocky promontory on either side, shone far out to sea, and showed conspicuous in the midst the great temple of Caesar, crowned with statues of Augustus and of the Roman city. An agora, a praetorium, a circus looking out to sea, and a rock-hewn theatre, were included in Herod's magnificent plans, and fittingly adorned a city that was to become in a few years the capital of Palestine. We see its importance even as early as the days immediately after Pentecost. It was here that the Gentiles were called to the faith, in the person of Cornelius the centurion, a commander of the legionaries stationed at Caesarea. His house, three hundred years later, was turned into a chapel by St. Paulo, and must therefore have been recognizable at the time of which we write. It was here that Herod Agrippa I. planned the apprehension of St. Peter and the execution of St. James the Greater; and it was in the theatre here that the beams of the sun shone upon his glittering apparel, and the people saluted him as a god, only to see him smitten by the hand of the true God, and carried to his palace in the agonies of mortal pain. St. Paul was here several times, and last of all when he was brought from Jerusalem by the fifty horsemen and the two hundred spearmen. Here he was examined before Felix, and before Festus, in the presence of King Agrippa, when he made his celebrated speech; and it was from the harbor of Caesarea that he sailed for Rome to be heard before Caesar. For many centuries, even into the times of the crusaders, it continued to be a capital and haven of great importance. Between 195 and 198, it was the scene of one of the earliest councils of the Eastern Church, and, as the see of Eusebius, the founder of church history, and the site of a celebrated library, it must always be interesting in ecclesiastical annals. But perhaps it would require nothing more to make {490} it a place of note in our eyes than the fact that when Origen was driven from Alexandria, in 231, he transferred to Caesarea not the Alexandrian school, it is true, but the teacher whose presence and spirit had contributed so much to make it immortal.

Caesarea, indeed, was at that time a literary centre only second to Alexandria or Antioch. It was in direct communication with Jerusalem by an excellent military road, and with Alexandria by a road that was longer, indeed, but in no way inferior. It was not far from Berytus both by land and sea. Like Capharnaum and Ptolemais, but in a yet higher degree, it was one of Herod the Great's model cities, in which he had embodied his scheme of _Grecianizing_ his country by the influence of splendid Greek art and overpowering Greek intellect. It was also the metropolis of Palestine. St. Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, Origen's fellow-student, was the intimate friend of Theoctistus, bishop of Caesarea; and it is clear that bishops, or their messengers, from the cities all along the coast, as for as Antioch, and even the distant Cappadocia and Pontus, were not unfrequent visitors to this great rallying-point of the church and the empire.

When Origen, therefore, left Alexandria and took up his abode in a city that was in a manner the diminished counterpart of one he had abandoned, he did not find himself in a strange land. St. Theoctistus received him with delight. It was not long before he journeyed the short distance to Jerusalem, to renew his acquaintance with St. Alexander; and these two bishops were only too glad to put on his shoulders all the charges that he would accept. "They referred to him," says Eusebius, "on every occasion as their master; they committed to him alone the charge of interpreting and teaching Holy Scripture and everything connected with preaching the Word of God in the church." From the way in which the historian joins the two bishops together, it would appear that Caesarea was a common school for the two dioceses, and a sort of ecclesiastical seminary whither the clerics from Jerusalem came, as to a centre where learning and learned men would abound more than in ruined and fallen AElia. It is certain, however, that Origen, in a short time, was teaching and writing as fast as at Alexandria. His name soon began to draw scholars. Firmilian, bishop of so distant a see as Caesarea of Cappadocia, one of the most stirring minds of his age, who had controversies on his hands all round the sea-coast to Carthage in one direction, and Rome in the other, was a friend of Theoctistus. It is possible that he knew Origen also, perhaps from having seen him at Alexandria, but more probably from having met him when Origen travelled into Greece. At any rate, he conceived an enthusiastic liking for him. Nothing would serve him but to make Origen travel to his own far-off province to teach and stimulate pastors and people; and, not long afterward, we find himself in Judaea, that is, at Caesarea, on a visit to Origen, with whom he is stated to have remained "some time," for the sake of "bettering himself" in divinity. And, as Eusebius sums up, "not only those who lived in the same part of the world, but very many others from distant lands, left their country and came flocking to listen to him." We need not mention here again the names Gregory and Athenodorus.

The position now occupied by Origen at Caesarea was, therefore, one of the highest importance. He was no longer a private teacher, or even an authorized master teaching in private; he was no less than the substitute for the bishop himself. In the Eastern Church, indeed, the custom by which no one but the Bishop ever preached in the church was not so strictly observed as it was in the West; but if a {491} presbyter did received the commission of preaching, it was always with the understanding that what he said was said on behalf of the pontiff, whose presence in his chair was a guarantee for its orthodoxy. When Origen, therefore, on the Lord's day, after the reading of the holy Gospel, stood forward from his place in the presbytery, and began to explain either the Gospel text itself or some passage in the Old Testament which also had formed part of the liturgical service, it was well understood that he was speaking with authority. And this is the first light in which we should view his homilies.

It would be saying little to say that Origen's homilies and commentaries (for we need not distinguish them here) marked an era in the exposition of Scripture. They not only were the first of their kind, but they may be said to have created the art, and not only to have created it, but, in certain aspects, to have finished it and to have become like Aristotle in some of his treatises, at once the model and the quarry for future generations. It may be true, as of course it is, that he was not absolutely the first to write expositions of Scripture. The splendid eloquence of Theophilus of Antioch had already been heard on the four Gospels, and his spirit of interpretation seems to have had much more affinity for Origen's own spirit than for that of the school of his own Antioch two centuries later. Melito had written on the Apocalypse, but his direct labors on Scripture were only an insignificant part of his voluminous works, if, indeed, they were not all rather apologetic and hortatory than explanatory. The Mosaic account of the creation had occupied a few fathers with its defence against Gnostic and infidel. But we know from Origen's own words that he had read and used "his predecessors," as he calls them. And yet we may truly say that he is the first of commentators, not only because no one before him had dared to undertake the whole Scripture, but on account of his novel and regular method. He is turned by one great authority, Sixtus Senensis, "almost self-taught," so little of what he says can he have gleaned from others. But in estimating how much Origen owed to those before him, we should lose a valuable hint towards understanding him if we forgot Clement of Alexandria and the great body of tradition, oral and written, of which the Alexandrian school was the headquarters. We know that the Alexandrian Jew, Philo, two hundred years before Clement's time, had written wonderful lucubrations on the mystical sense of Holy Scripture. The Alexandrian catechetical teachers, catching and using the spirit of the place, had always been Alexandrian in their Scriptural teachings. Clement himself had commented on the whole of the Scriptures in his book called the "Hypotyposes." Origen entered into inheritance. We see the spirit of the time and place in those questionings with which, in his early years, he used to puzzle his father. The unrivalled industry that made him collect versions of the sacred text from Syria, Asia, and even the shores of Greece, must have scrupulously sought out and exhausted every source of information and every extant document relating to Scripture exposition that was at hand for him in his own city. So that Origen, though in one sense the founder of a school, was really the culmination of a series of learned men, and, by the influence of his name, made common to the universal church that knowledge and method which before had been confined to the pupils that had listened to the Catechisms.

Although, however, we may guess, we cannot be certain how progressively or gradually a methodical and scientific exegesis had been growing up at Alexandria; and we come upon the commentaries of Origen with all the freshness of a discovery. Before him we have been accustomed to writings like those of the apostolic fathers: we have been reading apologies of the most wonderful eloquence, whose Greek shames the rhetoricians, {492} or whose Latin has all the spirit, earnestness, and tenderness of new language, but in which Holy Scripture is at the most only summarized and held up to view. Or, again, we have been listening to a venerable priest crushing the heretics with the word of God, or to a philosopher confuting the Jews out of their own mouth. Or, once more, we have heard the pagan intellect of the world convinced that truth was nowhere to be found but in Jesus, that the writings of the prophets were better than those of the philosophers, and that the morality of the New Testament cast far into the shade the sayings of Socrates. Splendid ideas, striking applications, telling proofs, grand views, all these the early fathers found in holy Scripture, and all these they used in the exhortations, apologies, or refutations that were called for by the several necessities of their times. But sustained, regular commentary, as such, they have none, or, what is the same to us now, none has come down. The explanation of words, the classification of meanings, the distinction of senses, the answering of difficulties and the solution of objections--all this, done, not for an odd portion of the text here and there, but regularly through the whole Bible, is what distinguishes the labors of Origen from those of all who have gone before him, and makes them so important for all who shall come after him. In making acquaintance with him we feel that we have come across a master, with breadth of view enough to handle masses of materials in a scientific way, and with learning enough never to be in want of materials for his science. We see in his Scripture commentaries the pressure of three forces of unequal strength, but each of them of marked presence, the tradition of the church, the teachings of the great school, and the needs of his own times. To understand him we must understand this pressure under which he wrote. The first two forces may be passed over as requiring no explanation. We must dwell a little on the latter, for unless we vividly realize the necessities under which the Christian teacher in his time lay, of meeting certain enemies and withstanding certain views, we shall be led to join in the cry of those who exclaim against Origen's Scripture exposition as partly useless and partly dangerous.

These necessities arose from two phenomena that appeared almost with the birth of Christianity, and which, with a somewhat wide generalization, we may call the Ebionite and the Gnostic. No one can have looked into early church history without being struck by the difficulty the church seems to have had to free herself from the trammels of Judaism. We need not allude to St. Paul, and his Epistles to the Galatians and to the Romans, and his various contentions with friend and foe for the freedom of the Gospel. The Epistle to the Hebrews, with its thoroughness of dogmatic exposition and its grand style, was also addressed to the Judaizants. Nay, if Ebion himself ever had an existence, it is more than probable that he was teaching at Jerusalem about the very time at which the Epistle seems to have been written and sent, if sent, to the Christian Jews of that city. It is certain, however, that Alexandria was one of the very earliest of the churches which shook itself free, in a marked manner, from the traditions of the law. The cosmopolitan spirit of the great city was a powerful natural auxiliary in a development which was substantially brought about by the Holy Ghost and the pastors of the patriarchal see. The Hebrew element hardly ever had such a footing at Alexandria as it had at Antioch. We can see in the writing of Justin Martyr, (_circa_ 160,) whose wide experience of all the churches makes his testimony especially valuable, a. picture of Christianity, young and exuberant, with its face joyously set to its destined career, and with the swathing-bands of the synagogue lying neglected behind it. Justin had an {493} Alexandrian training, and among his many-sided gifts shone pre-eminent that intellectual culture which was the most effectual of the human weapons that beat off the spirit of Judaism. And in Clement himself there is no trace of any narrow formalism, but, on the contrary, a grand, world-embracing charity, that can recognize the work of the Divine Logos in all the manifold varieties of human wisdom and human beauty. So that long before the time that Origen succeeded his master, the Alexandrian church was free from all suspicion of clinging to what St. Paul calls the "yoke of bondage;" and knew no distinction of Jew or Greek. But the party that had troubled the Apostle, and spread itself through the churches almost as soon as the churches were founded, was by no means extinct, even at Alexandria. Since the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews had become scattered all over the empire. The great towns, such as Antioch, Caesarea, and Alexandria, each contained a strong Jewish community. At Alexandria they were numerous enough to have a quarter to themselves. Now, it is not too much to say that many so-called Jews and Christians in such a city were neither Jews nor Christians, but Ebionites; that is, they acknowledged the divine mission of Christ, which destroyed their genuine Judaism, but denied his divinity, which was still more fatal to their Christianity. The consequences of such a state of things to the interpretation of Scripture are manifest. The law was still good and binding. Jerusalem was still the holy city, the chosen of God, and the spiritual and temporal capital of the world. St. Paul was denounced as one who admitted heathen innovations and destroyed the word of God. Everything in holy Scripture, that is, in the Old Testament and in the scanty excerpts from the New, which they admitted, was to be understood in a rigorously literal sense; and the "Clementines," once falsely attributed to St. Clement of Rome, but now considered to belong to the second century, and to be the work of an Ebionite, are the only writings of the period in which the allegorical sense is totally and peremptorily denied. Ebionism was not very consistent with itself, and the Ebionites of St. Jerome's time would hardly have saluted their sterner brethren of the apostolic age; but the name may always be truly taken to typify those whose views led them to hold to the "carnal letter" of the Old Testament. They carried the old Jewish exclusiveness into Christianity. They considered the historical parts of the Scripture to have been written merely because their own history was so important in God's sight that he thought it right to preserve its minutest record. The prophecies were only meant to glorify, to warn, or to terrify themselves, and had no message for the Gentiles. Even the parables and figures that occurred in the imagery of the inspired writer were dragged down to the most absurd and literal significations. The adherents of Ebionism were neither few nor silent in the time of Origen.

But if the Ebionite party in Alexandria, and in the Church generally, was strong and stirring, there was a party not less important, perhaps, who, in their zeal for the freedom of Christianity against the bonds of Judaism, were in danger of going quite as far wrong in a different direction. It is always the case in a reaction, that the returning force finds it difficult to stop at its due mark. So it had been with the reaction against the Ebionites, and especially at Alexandria. There was a body of advanced Christians who did not content themselves with not observing the law, but went on to depreciate it. It was not enough for them to see the Old Testament fulfilled by Jesus Christ, but they must needs show that it never had much claim to be even a preparation and a type. It was full of frivolous details, useless records, and absurd narrations. {494} Who cared for the _minutiae_ about Pharaoh's butler, Joseph's coat, or Tobias's dog? Of what importance to the world were the marchings and counter-marchings, the stupid obstinacy and the unsavory morality of a few thousand Hebrews? Who was interested to hear how their prophets scolded them, or their enemies destroyed them, or their kings tyrannized over them? How could it edify Christians to know the number and color of the skins of the tabernacles or the names of the masons and blacksmiths that built the Temple, or the fact that the Jewish people considerably varied their carnal piety by intervals of still more carnal crime and idolatry? The state of things represented by the Old Testament had passed away, and they were of no interest save as ancient history; and therefore, it was absurd to treasure up the Pentateuch and the Prophets as if they were anything more, and not rather much less, than the rhapsodies of Homer and the travels of Herodotus. In fact--and to this conclusion a considerable party came before long--the Old Testament was certainly not divine at all; at any rate, it was not the work of the Father of the Lord Jesus, but of some other principle. And here the Gnostic interest was at hand with an opportune idea. Who _could_ have written the Old Testament but the Demiurge? That primary offshoot of the Divinity, just, but not good, (this was their distinction,) can never have been more worthily employed than in concocting a series of writings in which there was some skill, some justice, and very little goodness. The Demiurge was certainly a handy suggestion, and the consigning of the Old Testament to his workmanship made all commentary thereon compressive into a very brief space. Away with it all, for a farrago of nonsense, lies, and nuisances!

Of course, neither of these parties, when extremely developed, could lay any claim to Christianity. But the world of that day had in it Ebionites and Gnostics of every degree and every changing hue of error. They were not unrepresented in the very bosom of the Church. Pious Christians might be found who, strong in filial feeling to their Jewish great-grandfathers, would see in the records of the old covenant nothing but a most interesting family history, with delightfully long pedigrees and a great deal of strong language about the glory and dignity of the descendants of Israel. On the other hand, equally pious Christians, and among them a great majority, perhaps, of the Gentile converts, would consider it an extravagant compliment to read in the house of God the sayings and doings of such a very unworthy set of people as the Hebrews. And the remarkable fact would be, that both these sets of worthy Christians would begin with the same fundamental error, though arriving at precisely opposite conclusions. That the Old Testament had a literal meaning, _and no other_ was the starting-point of both Ebionite and Gnostic The former concluded, "therefore let us honor it, for we are a divine race;" the latter, "therefore let us reject it, for what are the Jews to us?"

It would not require many sentences to prove, if our object in these notes were proof of any sort, that Origen's leading idea in his Scripture exposition is to look for the mystical sense. His very name is a synonym for allegory, and he is perhaps as often blamed for it as praised. But even blame, when outspoken and honest, is better than feeble excuse; and and unfortunately not a few of the great Alexandrian's critics have undertaken to excuse him for having such a leaning to allegory. The Neo-Platonists, they say, dealt largely in myths, and allegorized everything; somebody allegorized Homer just about that time. Now Origen was a Platonist. We might answer, that Origen was above all a Christian, and knew but very little of Plato till he was thirty years old; and that the Greek allegories {495} were invented by a more decorous generation for the purpose of veiling the grossness of the popular mythology; whereas the Christian allegory, as introduced by St Paul, or indeed by our Blessed Saviour, was a spiritual and mysterious application of real facts. Others, again, offer the excuse that Philo had allegorized very much, and Origen admired Philo. This is saying that allegory was very usual at Alexandria, as we have said ourselves when speaking of St. Clement. But it is not saying why allegory was kept up so warmly in the school of the Catechisms, or what was the radical cause that made its being kept up there a necessity for the well-being of the Church. This we have endeavored to state in the foregoing remarks.

When Origen, then, announces his grand principle of Scripture commentary, in the fourth book of the De Principiis, we may be excused if we see in it the statement of an important canon, whereby to understand much that he has written. He says, "Wherefore, to those who are convinced that the sacred books are not the utterances of man, but were written and made over to us by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, by the will of God the Father of all through Jesus Christ, we will endeavor to point out how they are to read them, keeping the rules of the divine and apostolic Church of Jesus Christ." This is the key-note of all his exposition, and derives its significance from the state of opinions among those for whom he wrote; and a dispassionate application of it to such passages as seem questionable or gratuitous in his writings, will explain many a difficulty, and show how clearly he apprehended the work he had to do. If the Old Testament be really the word of the Holy Ghost, as, he says, all true Christians believe, then nothing in it can be trivial, nothing useless, nothing false. This he insists upon over and over again. And, descending more to particulars, he states these three celebrated rules of interpretation, which may be called, with their development, his contribution to Scripture exposition. They are so plainly aimed at Ebionites and Gnostics, that we need merely to state them to show the connection.

His first rule regards the old Law. The Law, he says, being abrogated by Jesus Christ, the precepts and ordinances that are purely legal are no longer to be taken and acted up to literally, but only in their mystical sense. This seems rudimentary and evident nowadays; but at that period it greatly needed to be clearly stated and enforced.

His second rule is about the history and prophecy relating to Jew or Gentile that is found in the Old Testament. The Ebionite who kissed the Pentateuch, and the Gnostic who tore it up, were both foolish because both ignorant. These historic and prophetic details were undoubtedly true in their letter; but their chief use to the Christian Church, and the main object the Holy Spirit had in giving them to us, was the mystical meaning that lies hidden under the letter. Thus the earthly Pharaoh, the earthly Jerusalem, Babylon, or Egypt, are chiefly of importance to the Church from the fact that they are the allegories of heavenly truths.

Origen's third canon of scriptural exposition is this: "Whatever in holy Scripture seems trivial, useless, or false," (the Gnostics could not or would not see that parabolic narratives are most unjustly called false,) "is by no means to be rejected, but its presence in the divine record is to be explained by the fact that the divine Author had a deeper and more important meaning in it than appears from the letter. Such portions, therefore, must be taken and applied in a spiritual and mystical sense, in which sense chiefly they were dictated by Almighty God."

These three rules look simple now; they were all-important and not so simple then. It was by means of them, {496} and in the spirit which they indicate, that the great catechist led his hearers by the hand through the flowery paths of God's word, and in his own easy, simple, earnest style, so different from that of the rhetoricians, showed them the true use of the Old Testament. We hope it is not a fanciful idea, but it has struck us that, the difference of circumstances considered, there are few writers so like each other in their handling of holy Scripture as Origen and St. John of the Cross. Both treat of deep truths, and in a phraseology that sounds uncommon--the one because his hearers were intellectual Greeks, the other because he is professedly treating of the very highest points of the spiritual life. Both use holy Scripture in a fashion that is absolutely startling to those who are accustomed to rationalistic Protestantism, or to what may be called the domestic wife-and-children interpretation of the Evangelicals. Both bring forward, in the most unhesitating manner, the mystic sense of the inspired words to prove or illustrate their point, and both mix up with their more abstruse disquisitions a large amount of practical matter in the very plainest words. From communion with both of them we rise full of a new sense of the presence and nearness of the Spirit of God, and of reverence for the minutest details of his Word. Finally, both the Greek father and the Spanish mystic interpret the ceremonial prescriptions, the history, the allusions to physical nature, and the incidents of domestic life that occur in the Old Testament, as if all these, however important in their letter, had a far deeper and more interesting signification addressed to the spiritual sense of the spiritual Christian.

To illustrate Origen's principles of Scripture interpretation by extracts from his works would exceed our present limits, however interesting and satisfactory the task might be. Neither have we space to notice his celebrated division of the meaning of the text into literal, mystical, and moral, a division he was the first to insist upon formally. To answer the objections of critics against both his principles and his alleged practice would also be a distinct task of great length. We must content ourselves with having briefly sketched and indicated his spirit. There are grave theological controversies too, as is well known, connected with his name; and on these we have had no thought of entering. The purpose of this and the preceding articles has not been dogmatical, but rather biographical. We have attempted to set forth on the one hand the personal character of this great man; on the other, the external circumstances by which that character was influenced, and through which it exercised influence on others.

{497}

Translated from the Spanish.

PERICO THE SAD; OR, THE FAMILY OF ALVAREDA.