Chapter II.

The Slaves' Feast.

The great Festival called _Saturnalia_ was being celebrated in Rome when these events took place. The occurrence of this feast enabled the Christians from many parts of the world to assemble in the city, and to celebrate under cover of it the feast of Christmas. History does not light us with certainty to the precise time at which this latter feast was instituted, but shows it in matured existence at a very early period. Tradition has surmised that it had its birth in the first century, and that it was celebrated in secret and security under shadow of the pagan festivities of the _Saturnalia_.

The _Saturnalia_, in honor of _Saturnus_, to whom the Latins traced the introduction into Italy of agriculture and the civilizing arts, fell toward the end of December. The agricultural labors of the year being then over, it became a kind of harvest-home with the rural population. After the Julian addition of two days to the month of December, it commenced on the 16th of the Kalends of January, that is, on the 17th December, and continued for three days. But the people generally anticipated the time and prolonged it to the end of the month, especially to the 24th, when it became merged in another feast called _Sigillaria_, on account of the earthenware figures then hawked about as toys for children.

During the feast the slaves were allowed great liberty of act and of speech. Throwing off their sombre garments of brown and black, which, together with their slippers, made up the servile dress, (_vestis servilis_,) they donned their masters' clothes, assumed like freedmen the _pileus_, or felten cap, considered the badge of freedom. Their allowance of bread and salt and oil was increased and made palatable by the addition of wine. Their masters often waited on them at table, where thoughts were freely uttered in joke and song as well as in sober earnest without restraint or blame. The whole people made merry; the toga was laid aside, and the loose-fitting garment _synthesis_ put on with a high-peaked skull-cap without brim, (_pileus_.) Wax-tapers were given as presents, particularly by slaves to their owners and by the clients to their patrons; with these lighted in their hands, they went along the streets shouting "_Io Saturnalia!_" Stores and courts were closed; schools kept holiday; war could not be proclaimed; evil-doers could not be punished; gambling, prevented by law at other times, was permitted. In private circles mock-kings were chosen, who ruled the sports with right royal dignity. All these and greater privileges, were granted the slaves.

Aurelian was in no mood for enjoyment since his interview with Flavia. Knowing that many strangers would be calling at his Roman palace, he avoided them by betaking himself to his suburban villa. There, too, he could with less fear of discovery keep his engagements with Zoilus and Sisinnius for the 8th of the Kalends of January. He was nervously anxious to prove the truth of what the former had told him.

He retired, therefore, to the country. Thither he invited Sisinnius to meet him on the day agreed on with Zoilus, under plea of seeing his slaves celebrate the feast in rural style. {530} Sisinnius found him in the _Tablinum_, a room opposite the hall door, where family records and archives were kept. Seeing Aurelian, thin, pale, and dull, writing on a parchment roll, he asked:

"Is it making your will you are? You remind me of the shade of Dido! This comes of neglecting the gods and their feasts, and shutting yourself up among those woods and stone-walls like a vestal. If you staid in the city, and lighted your wax-taper, and sang your song to Saturn like a good jolly fellow, you would be far more cheerful and comely!"

"Perhaps so. But the three destinies are not all and always kind. I have had my happy times; it is fair my sad ones should come."

"Pshaw, Aurelian! Pour out a libation to Bacchus and then empty off the goblet yourself, and you shall find the jolly god will stiffen up your drooping spirits! I know the cause of all this--your interview with that wilful girl! Cheer up! women are like the summer clouds, one time damp and dark, the next beaming with the sunshine of love and beauty."

"Very poetical, Sisinnius, but Flavia is not after the ordinary mould. Tonight, however, will decide my doubts and hopes for ever. You remember our engagement with Zoilus?"

"Yes, I am half sorry I made it. I cannot read that slave. He seems to know every one and everything; and one can scarcely distinguish between his jocose and his serious moods. Do you know where I met him as I came to the crossway of the Appian and Latin roads? Talking to that Jewish beggar who sits morning, noon, and night asking pennies from the passers-by near the Egerian fountain."

"I allowed him into the city to arrange for our admission to the meeting-place of the Christians. He certainly does know a great deal, and must be a clever deceiver. Otherwise he could not have crept into the secrets of those mysterious, plotting Jewish sects without being distrusted. However, in the present instance he is serious and to be trusted; for I have promised him and a female slave--a Jewess also, who has fascinated him--their liberty, in case he convinces me that Flavia has become a Christian. But, hush! here he comes. Well, Zoilus, you have returned sooner than I expected. What news from the city?"

"Hail, noble Sisinnius!" said the Greek, bowing. "Well, master, the divine Domitian is in a fury; the exhibition of games in the new amphitheatre has been a failure. He had ordered, it is said, nearly ten thousand beasts and a proportionate number of gladiators, a number exceeding that with which his brother Titus had dedicated it. The play of Hercules and Omphale was to be enacted before the people. A gladiator was under training for many weeks to sustain the character of Hercules, and was to have been burned alive at the end in a skirt set on fire with vitriol and tar. The gladiator went through the preparatory training well, and seemed to enjoy the good things ordered him by the emperor with the view of making him fleshier and fatter for the burning. But, while being brought to the amphitheatre this morning, he slipped his head between the spokes of the cart-wheel, and, without gratitude for the good things, or feeling for the disappointment of the imperial god, suffered his neck to broken. This was really too bad of mere slave! [Footnote 166]

[Footnote 166: An historical fact. _Friedlander_.]

"So another had to substituted; what comfort or cause of laughter would there be in witnessing the burning of the corpse? A live substitute was found, who most ungraciously refused to move either hand or foot in the love-making of Hercules and Omphale. However, this could be borne in anticipation of the fiery ending; but, wonderful to relate, when the skirt was put on and the flames were lighted, he stood unscorched in their midst, calling on the Christian God. Was not the emperor in a rage! {531} The water was let into the arena and the crocodiles and other amphibious monsters were swimming about, devouring each other; and the man was thrown in, but they would not touch him! Floating on the surface of the water, with upturned face and clasped hands, he prayed the Christian God to have pity on Domitian. This so angered the latter that, standing up from his seat above the arena, he cursed the Christian and the Christian's God, in the name of his own and of Jupiter's divinity. When, lo! as if Jupiter was provoked, a thunderbolt like a burning globe came flashing as if from highest heaven, and went hissing through the water in the arena, killing every living thing within it except the floating Christian! The veil of the amphitheatre, with the machinery by which it was sustained, was set on fire and torn away. The people rushed from their seats; it is not known how many lives were lost. The emperor himself was terrified, and, running from his throne to his chariot, drove furiously to his palace, to find it also struck by the lightning." [Footnote 167]

[Footnote 167: These facts are substantially true. Tillemont's Lives of the Emperors, and the History of the Flavian Amphitheatre, or Colosseum, relate things as wonderful of Domitian's reign.]

"This will hasten the edict of persecution against the Christians; and it is time," observed Aurelian.

The villa stood on a farm of many hundred acres. A wooded hill, from which it was separated by a stream emptying into the Tiber, sheltered it from the wintry winds. The stream drained the land, which otherwise would have been a marsh, and thus prevented the unhealthy effluvia which unfitted many parts near the city for human resilience. Its distance of some miles from the great southern road saved it from many visitors, and thereby rendered it a secure retreat for a mind seeking solitude. Attached to the villa, but at some hundred yards from it, were the dwelling-places of the outdoor slaves, in and around which they were now feasting. It consisted of two open courts, [Footnote 168] an outer and an inner one.

[Footnote 168: Cohortes, chortes, cortes--courts.]

In the buildings around the former was the kitchen, an apartment large enough to contain the whole _family_ employed on the farm. _Family_ (_familia_) was the word used to designate the total number of slaves employed on an estate or in a household. Near the kitchen were the baths, the oil and wine-presses, the cellars, and in the upper stories the granaries, carefully protected from damp, heat, and insects. At the entrance-gate of this court were the apartments for the _Villicus_, or chief steward, and for the _Procurator_ of the _family_. In the inner court were the stables, stalls, and sheds, (_equilia, bubilia,_ and _ovilia_.) In the centre of each court was a large reservoir, into which the water from the stream was carried through terra-cotta pipes, or Roman-arched drains. The reservoir in the outer court was generally used for cleansing and soaking vegetables; that in the inner was carefully supplied with fresh water for poultry and cattle. Around both courts were the chambers (_cellae_) of the slaves, which fronted southward so as to catch the sun's light and heat. Near these chambers, but partly underground, was the prison for refractory or fugitive slaves; it was partially lighted by long and narrow windows.

Aurelian and Sisinnius strolled leisurely from the villa, accompanied by Zoilus, and discussing the wonderful events he had related. When they reached the courts, they found the slaves engaged in different amusements. It was a bright, bracing day; the sun shone in a cloudless sky, which had been swept by the wind. There was nothing to remind them of December, save only the long, dry branches of the trees rustling and swaying on the hillside, and the gusts sweeping at times in eddies round the courts as if they had lost their way. Some of the slaves were playing at quoits; others at draughts (_latrunculi_) in sheltered nooks. Some indulged in the usually forbidden game of dice, while younger ones took a boyish pleasure in rattling the cylindrical dice-boxes of bone or ivory, (_fritillus_.) {532} A group in the central area of the outer court played at odd and even, (_par impar ludere_;) while another was gathered around a slave with long-flowing philosophic beard, who proposed puzzles on the abacus, or calculating tray. Many sat quietly apart; others walked moodily about, wrapped in thoughts that seemed tinged with disappointment and gloom. But the great body of the family was in the kitchen, which resounded with singing, music, and dancing. As soon as Aurelian and his companions had entered the last-named apartment, a little slave with hunchback, wiry frame bounded from a couch and seized the skirt of his master's toga, which was slung in walking style over the left shoulder.

"The gods will be angry with the senator for wearing his toga during the feast, and for not waiting on Caipor as he did last year," exclaimed the dwarf.

"No, no, Caipor! Saturnus has given me leave to retain the toga; because I am not well, and he fears I would catch cold if I laid it aside for a lighter dress."

The face of Caipor darkened and tears brightened through his eyelashes.

"Poor master is not well and shall die! Then what will Caipor do? Villicus will whip him and put him in the _furca_ for ringing his bells; or they will sell him and he will never more see or love good master or beautiful Flavia."

Aurelian assured him that there was no danger of his own death, and that he might ring his bells and should not be whipped. The little fellow shook his Phrygian cap, and rang a tiny peal from the tiny bells attached around it. The jingle caused him to laugh out with idiotic delight.

"Villicus cannot whip Caipor for shaking his bells, ha, ha! Villicus whipped Lucius to-day until the big drops of blood came from between the shoulders, and put him on the mill in the prison."

"Impossible!" said Sisinnius. "It is not lawful to punish or imprison during the feast."

"Lucius said so. But Villicus would not listen. Lucius is a big, strong man --why did he not kill Villicus? He did not cry or stir, but he kept calling on Jesus to help him; but Jesus did not come. Master, who is Jesus?" asked the fool.

Aurelian's curiosity was aroused. On questioning the steward, he was told that Lucius, with many other slaves, refused to join in honoring Saturn or any of the gods, or to award divinity to the emperor; that it was necessary to punish some one for example's sake, and that Lucius, other wise quiet and inoffensive, was chosen as being principal among the recusants.

"What is to come next?" said Aurelian bitterly to Sisinnius. "Our wives and daughters, and now our lowest slaves, are lured by this Christian seducer! Like the pestilence from the marshes, his influence is creeping into every corner and poisoning the whole atmosphere of our social system. Something must be done to check its deadly progress. A stronger dose than that administered by Nero is requisite to kill it."

Caipor was clinging affectionately to his master's side. At length, drawing the toga by a sudden jerk, he looked up into Aurelian's face and said:

"Caipor waits upon the senator the year round. Will not the senate wait upon Caipor during the festival?"

"Certainly, I will be your slave and wait on you, my Caipor! Where is your couch?"

Couches with, small tables for the guests had been arranged in form of a triclinium at one end of the large apartment. Leading Aurelian to one of these seats, the hunchback fool reclined upon his elbow in [a] most approved dining attitude; and, as Aurelian rolled the table to his side and helped him to wine and fruit, looked around the room with mingled pride and pleasure at being the only one so honored.

Meantime Zoilus told Sisinnius the history and character of several slaves. There were about four hundred present. {533} Our readers may give us credit for exaggeration if we draw attention to the vast numbers, the varied origin, and occupations of slaves owned by noble Romans in the age of Domitian. Slavery arose from three causes, namely, from birth, from civil punishment, and captivity in war. The captives by war alone would swell the number enormously. In the reign of Augustus a freedman died leaving by will over four thousand slaves, after having lost other thousands in the civil wars. Historians say that many Romans had from ten to twenty thousand. Juvenal puts the test of a person's fortune in the question, "_Quot pascit servos?_" "How many slaves does he support?" During the empire they filled every position, from the most menial to the most literary. They were tillers and caretakers of the territories of the patricians in Italy, Sicily, and in the provinces beyond the mountains and the seas. They were employed as bakers, barbers, cooks, stewards, and artisans; as tutors, clerks, amanuenses, readers, teachers, physicians, astronomers, rhetoricians, poets, and philosophers. The literature and science of the Roman world, the "Orbis terrarum" found many a worthy representative in their ranks. Hence it has been well said that the martial prowess of Rome conquered that of foreign nations, but that the civilization and learning of foreigners conquered or rather produced hers.

We need not wonder, therefore to find hundreds of slaves in the household of Aurelian. His family was among the oldest and noblest of the city. Counting those on his Italian and foreign estates, they numbered many thousands. In the assemblage which Sisinnius was scanning, many nationalities had representatives--Phrygians, Cappadocians, Thracians, Britons, Greeks, and Jews.

"Whence was Caipor purchased?" asked Sisinnius.

"The mother of Aurelian," answered Zoilus, "was driving in her four-wheeled chariot (_rheda_) through the streets of Rome. Her attention was drawn to a dwarfish figure, who, emerging from the forum of Augustus, followed the chariot-wheels, clapping his hands and crying out, 'Well done! little wheel. Run fast! Big wheel can't catch you; well done, little wheel!' He was in ecstasies on seeing the smaller wheels of the carriage, as it rolled quickly on, keep their position at the same distance from the larger. The slave-dealer from whom he had wandered came up and scourged him severely. He cried piteously and called on the lady for protection. Moved with pity, she made her husband buy him at a cost of ten thousand sestertia, ($50,000.) [Footnote 169] Since that time he has been the pet fool of the household (_morio_,) and was, according to custom, named Caipor (_Caii puer_) after my noble master's father."

[Footnote 169: A _morio_, or fool, in the reign of Nero cost $15,000! _Dio_.]

"What is the name of that female yonder? How beautiful is the symmetry of her face and figure! But there is determined purpose in her lip and eye."

"That is Judith the Jewess," said Zoilus, slightly confused. "She was bought like myself from among the slaves left by the late Consul Domitilla. She was a little girl during the siege of Jerusalem; and, having miraculously escaped was, like other girls of her age and beauty, brought to grace the triumphal return of the conqueror Titus. During the procession she was perched like a winged Iris on the same chariot with Venus and Apollo."

"And that other near her?"

"Is the daughter of a Roman plebeian, and by birth a free woman. But, having secretly married a slave, she was on discovery reduced to his level. She bears her lot patiently, however, because she cannot be separated by sale from her husband."

"I see two strongly built slaves sitting near each other. One of them wears his beard; and the fair locks of the other are down to his shoulders. They seem to look contemptuously on the amusements."

{534}

"One of these is a Getulian, the other a Briton. They were both chiefs and warriors in their respective countries. You perceive the mark (_stigma_) burned into the former's forehead? When first exposed in the slave-market, having on his neck the tablet (_titulus_) describing his various qualities, a physician was brought, before whom he was to be stripped and examined. Before they had time to so treat him he snatched up a staff, and, having prostrated slave dealer and physician, with a sweep bounded over the railing of the area and escaped among the buildings of the old forum. It cost the lives of three slave-hunters before he was captured. He was branded as a dangerous character and condemned to die as a gladiator. But Aurelian succeeded in procuring him. Since he came on this estate he has made no attempt at escape. Being allowed a percentage (_peculium_) on his work like many others employed by our master, he has become industrious, and hopes after some years to be able to purchase his liberty by his savings. The Briton is similarly situated. If they succeed in procuring freedom, depend upon it, they will return to their native hills and relight the torch of war."

"Who is that old man with bald head and long white beard, to whom Aurelian is now speaking?"

"That is Bathus, the tutor and caretaker of Aurelian's youthhood. He wears the long beard and cloak of a philosopher by license of the festival. He hates the emperor on account of his late edict of expulsion against the philosophic tribe. He also professes grammar and rhetoric. Next [to] him is Tritonios, a disciple of Hippocrates. He is famous for his skill in bleeding and in amulets. His bored ears show his Eastern origin, probably in Arabia. You may find him any morning before sunrise gathering herbs for charms. There is scarcely a slave, or a tree on the estate that has not a triangular Abracadabra, or some other amulet suspended on him or it, as a protection against disease and the evil genii."

While Zoilus and Sisinnius were thus conversing, those in the other parts of the apartment were not without their own topics and amusements. It was observable that they instinctively took their places according to their position and rank in the family. Those born in the household, the _vernae_, were more forward and talkative than the others; they well deserved the character given of them by the poet as the "_vernae procaces_."

A Roman slave-family contained all the sources of social enjoyment and happiness, such as was possible for persons in their condition, provided the owner and the superintendents were not inclined to tyranny. Their marriage was not indeed sanctioned by law; but the _contubernium_, which permitted them to live as man and wife under the same roof, was respected in its relations as much perhaps among the pagan, as among Christian nations, among whom slavery flourished. [Footnote 170]

[Footnote 170: Cod. iii. 23.]

An enactment was passed by the senate that in sales and divisions of property husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister, should not be sundered. Roman jurists, no doubt, defined slavery to be a "_constitutio juris gentium, quâ quis contra naturam alterius dominis subjicitur_," thus strictly giving the master power to do much as he liked with the slave; to sell, punish, and put to death. In consequence great cruelties were often inflicted. But generally social intercourse and positive morality softened down their severity. Positive legislation also came to the aid of the slave. Under the Antonines, a man putting his slave to death without a justifying cause was subject to a heavy penalty. If a slave were treated too harshly, he might bring the case before the public tribunal and claim to be sold to another master. If a sickly or aged slave were exposed by the owner, he became free; and, if put to death, the crime was punished as murder. Christianity, though it did not proclaim slavery to be an essential evil, made way for emancipation. {535} The great principles of charity were urged by the first Christian writers and fathers of the church. Clement of Alexandria devoted much of his eloquence to this subject. Gradually this Christian spirit impregnated society, especially after the triumph of the cross under Constantine. Slaves who became priests, monks, nuns, or were promoted to any clerical order, were made free by law. Owing to these circumstances, the number of slaves became very much lessened. Many Christian masters emancipated all they possessed; others kept them, until they were instructed and converted, and then gave them freedom. Justinian particularly did much for the overthrow of slavery: his legislation, inspired by the Catholic Church, would have wholly extinguished it, but for the invasion of the northern barbarians. These brought with them their slaves, who were mostly Sclavonians, (_sclavi_, or _slaves_,) and reduced many of the conquered to the same level. The church was true to her policy of not suddenly tearing up any of the foundations of society when not essentially wrong; but she never ceased to preach, "in season and out of season," the great principle of "doing unto others as we would have them do unto us." This is the mirror she has always held up before master and slave. Seeing their duties here reflected, the evils of slavery, and finally the system itself, began to fade like snow under the softening influence of the sun. The voice of the Catholic Church was the herald of freedom from the beginning. Wondrous changes were brought about without those calamities accompanying sudden transitions. The echoes of her teaching have been taken up by religious and political parties. But they have had the injustice of appropriating it as their own, and the ingratitude to forget that the Catholic Church was the mother at whose knees mankind learned the lessons of Christian charity and liberty! But we must return.

During the conversation between Zoilus and Sisinnius, the jests and laughter of the "vernae" were heard above all other sounds.

"Observe Zoilus," said one, "he looks as sober and serious as Rhadamanthus on the judgment-seat. What is the matter with him?"

"He is expecting to be a freedman one of these days, and thinks it time to become a gentleman and quit his old habits and associates."

"Why, as to that matter, he is as free as the wind on the hill-side. He is in and out of the city as often as he likes. What induces master to give him so much freedom? There is something in it."

"See Murena, too! He expects in a few months to buy himself out with the profits of his peculium."

"That accounts for his being so great a miser. The barber told me that, after having his hair cut and nails pared the other day, Murena gathered the cuttings in order to make a denarius on them!"

This observation of the physician Tritonios caused laughter and was not unheard by Murena, who replied:

"O doctor! that is a stale joke stolen from Plautus. Next time I will preserve the parings for your amulets, they may be as good for the toothache or the colic as the hairs on the goat's chin which you hung upon the arm of Marcus!"

"Take care, Murena!" said a third, "you don't know how soon you may require Tritonios to assist you."

"Yes, and share the fate of Procax, who only saw the doctor in a dream, and awoke no more, though he carried an amulet."

The conversation was interrupted by the entrance of two slaves, a male and female, dressed in short and close garments for the dance. They wore leathern skull-caps for protection of the head in case of falling, because as they danced they flung themselves on their heads and alighted again upon their feet. Another slave played appropriate airs on the flute. {536} After engaging in this dance, in which, after Spartan style, the hands and head and eyes were in motion as well as the feet, a rope was extended across the room. The female dancer ascended, carrying a thyrsus bound with white fillet and ending in a bunch of vine and ivy leaves mixed with berries. Balancing herself with this, she danced in many graceful attitudes, representing satyrs, fauns, bacchanals, and other mythological beings. Then exchanging the thyrsus for a crater of wine and a small drinking-cup, she danced and meantime poured the wine from one vessel into the other, balancing herself by the action, and then descended amid great applause. After the dance the amanuensis of Aurelian declaimed with great spirit the beautiful passage of Homer in which the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles is described. Here some one remarked that Zoilus had not sung or improvised during the evening, and a unanimous call was made on turn, with which, after some hesitation, he complied by singing the following:

The Song of Saturnus.

A hymn to Saturnus, a grateful hymn, With goblets festooned to the bead-crowned brim, On his festival we sing: Who once in the year Doth freedom and cheer To slave and to master bring, Bring, To slave and to master bring.

He taught unto men how to till the hard soil, To plant the green grape and to draw the fat oil Which flows in the olive's heart, To prune the vine And to tap the mine, And every useful art.

He breathed on the earth; and his breath is the spring Which flowers and fruits on its bosom doth fling, And sweetens the summer breeze As it freshly blows Where the water flows Through the roots of the leaf-clad trees.

He breathed on the sea; and the ripples came Like smiles o'er its face, and its amorous frame Kissed with its cooling lip The shore in the hours When the sky sends its showers For the thirsty earth to sip.

He breathed on the air; and its brow grew white With rays scarce concealed by the veil of night; And the sun from its blue looked down With a smile so bland As to free the land From the chill of his winter frown.

He breathed on the springs; and the streams rushed out From their mother's lap with a mirthful shout: "Oh! come to the fields," they sang, "For the parched meads Need our limpid beads," And they laughed as they onward sprang.

Then a hymn to Saturnus, a grateful hymn, With goblets festooned to the wine-crowned brim, On his festival we sing: Who once in the year Doth freedom and cheer To slave and to master bring!

"Why, Zoilus, you rival Martial the Spaniard in wooing the virgin Nine," said Bathus. "If the emperor only knew your powers, he would patronize you as well as Juvenal, Quinctilian, and the Jew Josephus."

"The renegade from his race and creed!" said Ephrem, a Jewish slave, in an underbreath to Judith, who sat beside him.

"The golden age of poesy, like that of philosophy, has departed," remarked Zoilus in answer to Bathus. "The emperor has lost his early love of verse-making, and betaken himself to the burning of vestals [Footnote 171] and of Christians.

[Footnote 171: Vestals were burned in the reign of Domitian for violation of their vows.]

"By the way, Bathus, have you heard that Epictetus and the whole host of philosophers have been exiled? They say that Dio Chrysostom is consoling himself in the Getulian desert with a tract of Plato and a speech of Demosthenes. I would advise you strongly to shave your beard and lay aside the philosopher's cloak, or the beard may be cut off with the head attached to it. Genius is at a low ebb nowadays; that is my reason for having ceased to be one."

"Beware, lest you might share a like fate; your tongue wags very freely," observed Aurelian, who overheard the conversation.

"Noble master, this is the feast of free speech. To-morrow I will padlock my lips, and nothing but a golden key will open them." said the slave, glancing knowingly at his master. Then turning to Ephrem the Jew, "Sing us that ode to your native land I heard you repeat the other day, Ephrem."

"It is in Hebrew, and would not be understood."

{537}

"No matter; the metre and air are sweet and melancholy. I will have it translated into Latin hexameter by your countryman Josephus, one of these days, if you like."

"Name him not, the arch-sycophant, who lives by flattering tyrants," whispered Judith with a fierce tone and glance, before which Zoilus blanched and trembled.

"Fair Judith, be not angry; I meant it only in joke."

"Jokes at the expense of others' feelings deserve not the award of wit," said Ephrem, who, standing up, declaimed the following with a vehement earnestness:

Ode of the Exiled Jew to Jerusalem.

I.

Thy heart, Jerusalem! is desert and drear, Thy children no more in thy bosom appear; In the land of the Gentiles they sigh and they moan, While thou, dear mother! dost pine all alone.

II.

Thy turrets, and temple, and beautiful gate-- The gems that shone bright in the crown of thy state-- Like the ark of the prophets, no longer remain, And the Philistine foxes thy beauty profane!

III.

The gold harp of David awakens no more Thy echoes where pontiff and people adore; Thy silver-voiced trumpets are silent and dead, No smoke from thy temple ascends overhead.

IV.

Like the weeds on the beach by the ocean-tide hurled, Thy daughters are cast on the shores of the world; Thy eye's filled with weeping, thy heart's filled with woe, And thy brow once so fair in the dust is laid low!

V.

The dust of thy kings in thy bosom remains Where the hoofs of the Gentiles insult thy sad plains, And their lamps sacrilegious invade the deep glooms That wrap them to rest in thy Valley of Tombs!

VI.

Jerusalem, mother! we pray unto Him Who has filled up thy chalice of woe to the brim: "A curse on the tyrants whose impious hands Have seized thee, denied thee, and bound thee in bands!

VII.

"O send down, Jehovah! by night and by day, Thy blight on apostate impostors, we pray; The Christian deceivers, whose God we nailed fast [Footnote 172] To the tree of the cross as a sail to the mast!

[Footnote 172: The Jews cursed the Christians three times a day in their synagogues, says Epiphanius in this direful form, "Send down thy curse, God! on the Christians."]

VIII.

"Since the hour he was crucified outside thy gate, His blood like a poison has mixed in thy fate! May the God of thy fathers, the God of our race, From thy forehead, Jerusalem, wipe the disgrace!

During the delivery of the first verses tears flowed down the cheeks of Judith. During the last part fire seemed to flash from her eyes.

After Ephrem others were induced to sing or deliver pieces in the languages of their respective countries. In the reign of Domitian, the Sarmatians, Dacians, Parthians, and the German tribes beyond the Rhine had been completely subdued. Agricola had broken on the Grampians the fierce hardihood of the tribes beyond the Tay and Tweed. The success of the Jewish war in the two preceding reigns had scattered that unfortunate race over the earth. We can thence understand how on a large estate like that of Aurelian so many nationalities met. Leaving them to amuse themselves, we will follow Zoilus.

He left the hall quietly, crossed the outer court and a paddock between it and the villa, and entered through a low-arched door into the garden behind it. Between this garden and the villa was the peristyle, a rectangular area so named from having stone pillars around it. In its centre was a xystus with box and other shrubs, shaped like tigers, lions, and galleys. The deepening shades of evening brought out their figures with weird-like indistinctness. Judith the Jewess stood between two pillars, and as she stood, tall, straight, and motionless, might have passed for the guardian goddess of the place.

"I have been expecting you, Zoilus."

"You do not forget your promise, then?"

"No! my part shall be fulfilled as soon as you have complied with the conditions."

"Judith! these conditions are hard. I have my misgivings and fears about the part I have to play."

"Fears and misgivings?" she repeated. "These account for your changed manner this evening?"

{538}

"Yes, I have never known any one to end well who interfered with the Christians."

"Ha, ha!" she laughed ironically. "You fear the uncircumcised dogs!"

"Not them; but I fear their God."

"_Their_ God! Is it the Galilean impostor?"

"Moreover," he went on, not noticing her question, "I do not like to betray the niece of our former owner Domitilla the consul. She was always good and kind to me."

"Look here," said the Jewess, baring her right arm, "see that scar, which after many years leaves a red seam behind. It was that girl, so good and kind, that drove her ivory hair-pin into the very bone, because I did not plat her hair to her liking. Was she not good and kind to me, Zoilus?"

"She was then young and thoughtless, but she is now different," he said.

"You see that tiger," she pointed to a shrub shaped like that animal, "does not the young cub betray the instincts of the full grown beast? But she is different, you will perhaps say, since she became a Christian. As well might you expect the drugs of Locusta [Footnote 173] to cure the leprosy. Have you heard what takes place in the private meetings of those fully initiated? Ah! _there_ she can indulge her liking for human blood!"

[Footnote 173: A famous poisoner in the time of Nero.]

Zoilus was silent. Some struggle of feeling with principle was going on. Judith, observing him, exclaimed:

"A lustrum of five long years has gone by since you asked me to become your wife. I told you I would never be a wife, or have a husband, in slavery. It is in your power now to procure freedom for both. Do so, and Judith will be yours to-morrow. Hesitate now, and she takes back for ever the promise and the pledge she made you!" She left the peristyle before he had time to answer.

To Be Continued.

From The Popular Science Review.

On the Struggle for Existence Amongst Plants.

The quaint dictum, "Plants do not grow where they like best, but where other plants will let them," which is credited to the late eminent horticulturalist, Dean Herbert of Manchester, expresses a truth not yet half appreciated by botanists. It is a protest against the prevalent belief that circumstances of climate and soil are the omnipotent regulators of the distribution of vegetables, and that all other considerations are comparatively powerless. The dean's crude axiom has lately found a philosophical exposition and expression in Mr. Darwin's more celebrated doctrine of the "struggle for life, and preservation thereby of the favored races," and if to it we add that great naturalist's more fruitful discovery of the necessity for insect and other foreign agencies in ensuring fertility, and hence perpetuating the species, we shall find that the powers of climate and soil are reduced to comparatively very narrow limits. Before proceeding to show what are the causes that do materially limit the distribution of species, it may be well to inquire how far the hard pressed soil and climate theory really helps us to a practical understanding of one or two great questions that fall under our daily observation; of these, the following are the most prominent.

{539}

That very similar soils and climates, in different geographical areas, are not inhabited naturally either by like species or like genera; that very different soils and climates will produce almost equally abundant crops of the same cultivated plants; and that, in the same soil and climate, many hundreds, nay, thousands of species, from other very different soils and climates, may be grown and propagated for an indefinite number of successive generations.

Of the first of these statements, the examples embrace some of the best known facts in geographical botany; as, for example, that the flora of Europe differs wholly from that of temperate North America, South Africa, Australia, and temperate South America, and all these from one another. And that neither soil nor climate is the cause of this difference is illustrated by the fact that thousands of acres in each of these countries are covered, year after year, by crops of the same plant, introduced from one to the other; and by annually increasing numbers of trees, shrubs, and herbs, that have either run wild or are successfully cultivated in each and all of them. The third proposition follows from the two others, and of this the best example is afforded by a good garden, wherein, on the same soil and under identical conditions, we grow, side by side, plants from very various soils and climates, and ripen their seeds too, provided only that their fertilization is insured. The Cape geraniums, London pride, and Lysimachia nummularia in our London areas, the pendent American cacti in the cottage windows of Southwalk and Lambeth, are even more striking examples of the comparative indifference of many plants to good or bad climate or soil; and what can be more unlike their natural conditions than those to which ferns are exposed in those invaluable contrivances, Ward's cases, in the heart of the city? True, the conditions suit them well, and, with respect to humidity and equability of temperature, are natural to them; but neither is the absolute temperature, nor the constitution, nor freshness of the air, the same as of the places the ferns are brought from; nor is any systematic attempt made to suit the soil to the species cultivated; for, as Mr. Ward himself well shows, the arctic saxifrage, the English rose, the tropical palm, and desert cactus live side by side in the same box, and under precisely similar circumstances, and, as it were, in defiance of their natal conditions.

Let it not be supposed that we at all underrate such power as soil and climate really possess. In some cases, as those of chalk, sand, bog, and saline and water plants, soil is very potent; but the number of plants actually dependent on these or other peculiarities of the soil is much more limited than is supposed. Of _bonâ-fide_ water-plants there are few amongst phaenogams. Sand plants, as a rule, grow equally well on stiffer soils, but are there turned out by more sturdy competitors; and with regard to the calcareous soils, it is their warmth and dryness that fits them, to so great an extent, for many plants that are almost confined to them, or are absolutely peculiar to them. So, too, with regard to temperature, there are limits, as regards heat, cold, and humidity, that species will not overstep and live; but, on the other hand, so much has been done by selection in procuring hardy races of tender plants, and so much may be done by regulating the distribution of earth-temperature, etc., that we already grow tropical plants in the open air during a portion of the year, and eventually may do so for longer periods.

Amongst the most striking examples of apparent indifference to natural conditions of soil and climate, I would especially adduce two. One is the _Salicornia Arabica_, a plant never found in its natural state, except in most saline situations, but which has flourished for years in the Succulent House at Kew, in a pot full of common soil, to which no salt has ever been added; the other is the tea-plant, which luxuriates in the hot, humid valleys of Assam, where the thermometer ranges between 70° and 85°, and the atmosphere is so perennially humid that watches are said to be destroyed after a few months of wear; and it is no less at home in north-western India, where the summers are as hot and cloudless as any in the world, and the winters very cold. {540} I may add that the tea-plant has survived the intense cold of this last January, at Kew, on the same wall where many hardy and half-hardy plants have been killed.

It is, further, a great mistake to suppose that the native vegetation of a country suffers little and very exceptionally by abnormal seasons. The most conspicuous instance of the contrary that ever fell under my observation was the destruction of the gigantic gum-tree (_Eucalyptus_) forests in the central districts of Tasmania, which occurred, if I remember right, about the year 1837. In 1840, I rode over many square miles of country, through stupendous forests, in which every tree was, to all appearance, absolutely lifeless. The district was totally uninhabited, consisting of low mountain ranges, 2,000 feet above the sea, separating marshy tracts interspersed with broad fresh-water lakes. The trees, much like the great gaunt elms in Kensington Gardens during winter, but much larger, were in countless multitudes, 80 to 180 feet high, close set, and ten to twenty feet in girth; their weird and ghostly aspect being heightened by the fact of most being charred for a considerable distance up the trunk, the effects of the native practice of firing the grass in summer during the kangaroo hunting season; and by the bark above hanging from their trunks in streaming shreds, that waved dismally in the wind; for the species was the stringy-bark gum, that sheds its bark after this fashion. And not only had the gum-trees suffered, but the hardier _Leptospermum_ (tea tree bush) and many others were killed, some to the ground and some altogether; so that, though my journey was in spring and the weather was delightful, the aspect of the vegetation was desolate in the extreme.

In such climates as our own, similar devastations are unknown, and, though we know that our island was once covered with other timber than now clothes it, we have every reason to suppose that the change was slow, and the effect either of a gradually altered climate, or of the immigration of trees equally well or better suited to the conditions of the soil and climate, but which had not previously had the opportunity of contesting the ground with the ruling monarchs of the forest.

Making every allowance, then, for the influence of soil and climate in checking the multiplication of individuals, we have still two classes of facts to account for: the one, that plants which succeed so well, when cultivated, that we are assured both soil and climate are favorable to their propagation, nevertheless become immediately or soon extinct when the cultivator's care is withdrawn; the other, that plants of one country, when introduced into another, even with a very different soil and climate, will overrun it, destroy the native vegetation, and prove themselves better suited to local circumstances than the aboriginal plants of the country. In the first case, the reasons are very various, all of them relating to the conditions of the plant's existence. Of these the two most potent are, the absence of fertilizing agents, and the destruction of seeds and seeding plants. In the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to say which of these is most fatal in its effect. In the case of our annual plants or our cereals, which never run wild, it is the latter certainly; for they seed freely enough; in the case of many perennials, shrubs, and trees, it may be the former, as with the common elm and lime, which rarely or never seed in England, though the latter is so notably frequented by insects during its flowering season; whilst a third cause is to be found in their seedling plants being smothered by others, of which we have numerous examples in our common pasture grasses, which are, perhaps, the most prejudicial in this respect. {541} A most conspicuous example of this is afforded by the common maple, of which the seedlings come up early in spring by thousands in the neighborhood of the parent tree, in lawns and plantations, but scarcely ever survive the smothering effects of the common summer grasses as soon as these begin to shoot.

When I visited the cedar grove on Mount Lebanon, in the autumn of 1860, I found thousands of seedling plants, but every one of them dead; and so effectual is the annual slaughter of the yearlings in that grove, that, though the seeds are shed in millions, and innumerable seedlings annually spring up, there is not a plant in the grove less than about sixty years old. It may hence have been sixty years since a cedar there survived the first year of its existence; that is to say, has struggled through its infancy, and reached the age even of childhood!

On the other hand, when once the natural conditions of a country have been disturbed, the spread and multiplication of immigrants is so rapid that it shortly becomes impossible to discover the limits of the old, indigenous flora. Take the English flora, for example. If we contrast the cultivated counties with the uncultivated, the difference of their vegetation is so great that I have often been compelled to doubt whether many of the most familiar so called wild flowers of the cultivated counties are indigenous at all; nay, more, I have been tempted to suspect that some of the more variable of them, as some species of _chenopodium_ and fumitory, may have originated since cultivation began. In the uncultivated counties the proportion of annual plants is exceedingly small, whereas in the cultivated counties annuals are very numerous; and the further we go from cultivation, roads, and made ground, the rarer they become, till at last, in the uninhabited islets of the west coast of Scotland, and in its mountainous glens, annuals are extremely rare, and confined to the immediate vicinity of cottages. Let any one who doubts this contrast between the floras of cultivated and uncultivated regions compare the annuals in such florae as those of Suffolk or Essex, the North Riding or Cumberland, with those of the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Arran. And it is not only that annuals abound in the cultivated districts, but that so many are nearly confined to ground that is annually or frequently disturbed. The three commonest of all British plants, for example, are, perhaps, groundsel, shepherd's purse, and _Poa annua_. I do not remember ever having seen any of these plants established where the soil was undisturbed, or where, if undisturbed, they had not been obviously brought by man or the lower animals; and yet I have gathered one of these, the shepherd's purse, in various parts of Europe, in Syria, in the Himalayas, in Australia, New Zealand, and the Falkland Islands. Were England to be depopulated, I believe that in a very few years these plants, and a large proportion of our common annual "wild flowers," would become exceedingly rare or extinct, such as the poppies, fumitories, trefoils, fedias, various species of speed-well, polygonum, mallow, euphorbia, thlaspi, senebiera, medicago, anthemis, centaurea, linaria, lamium, etc., etc.

It is usually said of some of the above-named plants that they prefer cultivated ground, nitrogenous soil, and so forth; and this is no doubt true, but that they will flourish where no such advantages attend them, a very little observation shows; and that they do not continue to flourish elsewhere is due mainly to the fact that, being annuals, their room is taken as soon as they die, and the next year's seedling has no chance of success in the struggle with perennials.

{542}

For good instances of this rapid replacement of annuals by perennials, the new railroad embankments should be examined. Whence the plants come from which spring up like magic in the cuttings many feet below the surface of the soil, is a complete mystery, and reminds us of the so-called spontaneous generation of protozoa in newly made infusions or in distilled water. In the south of Scotland in 1840-50, and many parts of the north of England, the first plant that made its appearance was _Equisetum arvense_, which covered the new-formed banks, for miles and miles, with the most lovely green forest of miniature pines. In the following year comparatively few of these were to be seen, and coltsfoot, dandelions, and other biennials, especially umbelliferae, with a great number of annuals, presented themselves. For many successive years I had no opportunity of watching the struggle for life on these banks, but when I last saw them they were clothed with perennial grasses, docks, plantains, and other perennial rooted plants.

The destruction of native vegetations by introduced is a subject that has only lately attracted much attention, but it has already assumed an aspect that has startled the most careless observer. Some thirty years ago the fecundity of the horse and European cardoon in the Argentine provinces of South America, so graphically described by Sir Edmund Head, drew the attention of naturalists to the fact that animals and plants did not necessarily thrive best where found in an indigenous condition; and the spread of the common Dutch clover, _Trifolium repens_, in North America, where it follows the footsteps of man through the pathless forests, has long afforded an equally remarkable instance of vegetable colonization. Still more recently in South Africa, Australia, and Tasmania, the Scotch thistle, brier rose, xanthium, plantain, docks, etc., have all become noxious weeds; and this leads me to the last and most curious point to which I shall allude in this article, namely, that the same annuals and other weeds that are held so well in check by the indigenous perennial plants of our country, when transplanted to others, show themselves superior to the perennial vegetation of the latter. Of this New Zealand furnishes the most conspicuous example; it was first visited scarcely more than 100 years ago, and it is not yet fifty since the missionaries first settled in it, and scarce thirty since it received its earliest colonists. The islands contain about 1,000 species of flowering plants, amongst which no fewer than 180 European weeds have been recorded as intruding themselves and having become thoroughly naturalized; and probably double that number will yet be found, as they have never been systematically collected; but the most curious part of the history is this, that whereas of indigenous New Zealand plants scarcely any are annual, no less than half the naturalized European ones are annual.

Of the effect of these introduced European plants in destroying the native vegetation, I have given examples in an article that appeared in the Natural History Review, (January, 1864,) from which I quote the following:

In Australia and New Zealand, the noisy train of English emigration is not more surely doing its work than the stealthy tide of English weeds, which are creeping over the surface of the waste, cultivated, and virgin soil, in annually increasing numbers of genera, species, and individuals. Apropos of this subject, a correspondent, (W. T. Locke Travers, Esq., F.L.S.,) a most active New Zealand botanist, writing from Canterbury, says: "You would be surprised at the rapid spread of European and other foreign plants in this country. All along the sides of the main lines of road through the plains, a _Polygonum_, (_aviculare_,) called 'cow-grass,' grows most luxuriantly, the roots sometimes two feet in depth, and the plants spreading over an area from four to five feet in diameter. The dock (_Rumex obtusifolius_ or _R. crispus_) is to be found in every river-bed, extending into the valleys of the mountain rivers until these became mere torrents. {543} The sow-thistle is spread all over the country, growing luxuriantly nearly up to 6,000 feet. The watercress increases in our still rivers to such an extent as to threaten to choke them altogether; in fact, in the Avon, a still, deep stream running through Christ Church, the annual cost of keeping the river free for boat navigation and for purposes of drainage exceeds £300. I have measured stems twelve feet long and three quarters of an inch in diameter. In some of the mountain districts, where the soil is loose, the white clover is completely displacing the native grasses, forming a close sward. Foreign trees are also very luxuriant in growth. The gum-trees of Australia, the poplars, and willows particularly grow most rapidly. In fact, the young native vegetation appears to shrink from competition with these more vigorous intruders."

Dr. Haast, F.L.S., the eminent explorer and geologist, also writes to me as follows:

"The native (Maori) saying is, 'As the white man's rat has driven away the native rat, as the European fly drives away our own, and the clover kills our fern, so will the Maoris disappear before the white man himself." It is wonderful to behold the botanical and zoological changes which have taken place since first Captain Cook set foot in New Zealand. Some pigs, which he and other navigators left with the natives, have increased and run wild in such a way that it is impossible to destroy them. There are large tracts of country where they reign supreme. The soil looks as if ploughed by their burrowing. Some station-holders of one hundred thousand acres have had to make contracts for killing them at sixpence per tail, and as many as twenty-two thousand on a single run have been killed by adventurous parties without any diminution being discernible. Not only are they obnoxious by occupying the ground which the sheep farmer needs for his flocks, but they assiduously follow the ewes when lambing, and devour the poor lambs as soon as they make their appearance. They do not exist on the western side of the Alps, and only on the lower grounds on the eastern side where snow seldom falls, so that the explorer has not the advantage of profiting by their existence, where food is scarcest. The boars are sometimes very large, covered with long black bristles, and have enormous tusks, resembling closely the wild boar of the Ardennes, and they are equally savage and courageous,

"Another interesting fact is the appearance of the Norwegian rat. It has thoroughly extirpated the native rat, and is to be found everywhere, even in the very heart of the Alps, growing to a very large size. The European mouse follows it closely, and, what is more surprising, where it makes its appearance, it drives, in a great degree, the Norway rat away. Amongst other quadrupeds, cattle, dogs, and cats are found in a wild state, but not abundantly.

"The European house-fly is another importation. When it arrives, it repels the blue-bottle of New Zealand, which seems to shun its company. But the spread of the European insect goes on very slowly, so that settlers, knowing its utility, have carried it in boxes and bottles to their new inland stations."

But the most remarkable fact of all has been communicated to me since the above was printed, namely, that the little white clover and other herbs are actually strangling and killing outright the New Zealand flax, (_Phormium tenax_,) a plant of the coarsest, hardest, and toughest description, that forms huge matted patches of woody rhizomes, which send up tufts of sword-like leaves six to ten feet high, and inconceivably strong in texture and fibre. I know of no English plant to which the New Zealand flax can be likened so as to give any idea of its robust constitution and habit to those who do not know it; in some respects the great matted _tussocks_ of _Carex paniculata_ approach it. {544} It is difficult enough to imagine the possibility of white clover invading our bogs, and smothering the tussocks of this carex, but this would be child's play in comparison with the resistance the phormium would seem to offer.

The causes of this prepotency of the European weeds are probably many and complicated; one very powerful one is the nature of the New Zealand climate, which favors the duration of life in individuals, and hence gives both perennials and annuals a lengthened growing season, and, in the case of some, more than one seed crop in the year. This is seen in the tendency of mignonette and annual stocks to become biennial and even perennial, in the indigenous form of _Cardamine hirsuta_ being perennial, and in the fact that many weeds that seed but once with us seed during a greater part of the year in New Zealand. Another cause must be sought in the fact that more of their seeds escape the ravages of birds and insects in New Zealand than in England; the granivorous birds and insects that follow cultivation not having been transported to the antipodes with the weeds, or, at least, not in proportionate numbers.

Still the fact remains as yet unaccounted for, that annual weeds, which, except for the interference of man, would with us have no chance in the struggle with perennials, in New Zealand have spread in inconceivable quantities into the wildest glens long before either white men or even their cattle and flocks penetrate to their recesses. Such is the testimony of Drs. Haast and Hector, and Mr. Travers, the original explorers of large areas of different parts of the almost uninhabited middle island, and who have sent to me, as native plants, from hitherto unvisited tracts, British weeds that were not found in the island by the careful botanists (Banks, Solander, Forster, and Sparrmann) who accompanied Captain Cook in his voyages; and which were not found by the earlier missionaries, but which of late years have abounded on the lowlands near every settlement.

This subject of the comparative great vis-vitae of European plants, as compared with those of other countries, involves problems of the highest interest in botanical science, and the subject is as novel as it is interesting; it is quite a virgin one, and requires the calmest and most unprejudiced judgment to treat it well. It cannot be doubted that the progress of civilization in Europe and Asia has, whilst it has led to the incessant harassing of the soil, led also to the abundant development of a class of plants, annual, biennial, and perennial, which increase more rapidly and obtain a greater development when transplanted to the Southern hemisphere than they have hitherto done in the Northern, and that, in this respect, they contrast strikingly with the behavior of plants of the Southern hemisphere when transplanted to the Northern; and hitherto no considerations of climate, soil, or circumstance have sufficed to explain this phenomenon.

{545}

Original.

The Leaf of Last Year

I know I am dry and decayed; My skin is all yellow and sere; I know I ought not to have staid To become an old leaf of last year.

You are youthful, and merry, and green. I feel like a stranger up here; And can see you're ashamed to be seen By the side of a leaf of last year.

My wrinkled and shrivelled up face Excites you to laugh and to sneer; And the branch thinks that this is no place For an old-fashioned leaf of last year.

I can tell, as you toss your proud heads, What you whisper in each other's ear: "Old leaves should be gone to their beds, 'Tis no time for a leaf of last year."

You may flirt with the amorous winds; With your joys I will not interfere: But I'm sad; for my heart it reminds How they jilted a leaf of last year.

Ay! flatter and laugh with the breeze, You may think that its love is sincere, But I know what it said to the trees When I was a young leaf last year.

"Each one of these silly green leaves Is so flattered if I but come near, That she dances, and smiles, and believes I most surely will wed her this year.

"With soft kisses the hours I beguile; And their prattling is pleasant to hear. When I tire, I depart with a smile And a promise to meet them next year."

Then it came to my side with a bow, Embraced me, and called me its 'dear.' I was foolish to trust it, and now It forgets its old love of last year.

{546}

Away the false summer breeze hied; And my fibres all quivered with fear. One by one my mates withered and died, And left me alone till this year.

Soon autumn will come with its blast. And your beauty will, too, disappear. When you think on the joys that are past, You'll remember the leaf of last year.

This morn, when the sun rose, I wept; On my cheek lingers yet a bright tear: 'Twas a dew-drop fell there whilst I slept And was dreaming about the last year.

Not long will I cumber the tree, For my hour of departure is near; And your beautiful branch will be free Of its faded old leaf of last year.

Original.

The Influence of the Catholic Church Upon Modern Art.

As in many a sacred painting the divine persons are seen descending upon earth, attended by angels who, with trumpets, unheard by men, announce the visitation; so religion, revealed to prepare men for the next world, sits enthroned in this with all the arts, its ministers and servants. It is a glory of the Catholic Church that it has recognized to the utmost the spirituality of art. It has denied the dogma, of all dogmas the most absurd, that with the use of the highest powers of the imagination, and with delight in the beauty with which God has clothed the world, his worship is incompatible. It has not made piety a thing ugly, repulsive, barren; a mere assent of the will to an abstraction. The child of the church, standing in a world where the rainbow bends above him, and sunset opens the burning gates of heaven, is not taught to believe the seven colors the seven sins, or, at least, but secular beauty, to be banished from the house of worship; with the voices of birds' and winds, and waters, and the gothic grandeur of forests around him, he is not taught that music and architecture interfere with piety, or, if used at all in worship, must be limited to their lowest and simplest forms. Of creeds I do not need to speak; but this much it is necessary to say in the strict limits of my subject, that the world owes to Catholicism so much of its music, and painting, and architecture, that, had the world been without the church, these arts, though of human origin, and though highly developed before the Christian era, would in their modern forms probably be still in their infancy. In sculpture, undoubtedly, the Greeks surpassed even Michael Angelo; the statues of Phidias, though in ruins, are the wonder and despair of artists. The Roman empire built temples, roads, aqueducts, the Colosseum, and, when it fell, the arts, even in these less imaginative forms, seem to have fallen with it. {547} For a long time there was no art worthy of the name in Europe. Apollo, blind and dumb, wandered without a home or a temple; for, though in those centuries there must have been men born to be composers, or painters, or sculptors, they were born too soon or too late. Athens had fallen; Christian Rome had not arisen to her destined greatness. So the world slumbered in darkness till the Catholic Church wrought the miracle by which the arts were raised from their tombs and made her interpreters and ministers. This cannot be denied, that she gave the impulse to the revival of art, encouraged its development, inspired it with energy, and purpose, and faith, and so sent it forth to bless and transfigure the world. In every city in Europe she built a cathedral. In Rome, St. Peter's; in Paris, Notre Dame; in Vienna, the Dom Kirche; in Milan, La Duomo. No town was without its church, few of them, without beauty, many monuments of the genius of their builders. Because the Saviour was born in a stable, it was not held an article of faith that he should be worshipped in barn. The church believed that the temple should show that it was built not for the service of man, but of God. To adorn these majestic buildings she summoned the sister arts. Through the stained windows,

"The panes Of ancient churches, passionate With martyred saints, whom angels wait, With Virgin and with Crucified,"

the light shone holier for that transfiguration. There the painter told in language all could read the solemn story of the religion they believed. How in a manger the Christ was born, and worshipped by the wise men whom the mysterious star had led from the Chaldean plains; how the holy mother journeyed with Joseph into Egypt, bearing in her arms the babe who came into the world himself to bear the burden of its grief; how he taught the poor and healed the sick, raised Lazarus from the grave, and bade the Magdalene sin no more; how he spake with God upon the mount, and was tempted by the fiend, betrayed by Judas, tried by Pilate, and crucified upon Calvary; how at the foot of the cross the Marys wept all night; and how, when he was buried, angels rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and apostles beheld him ascend into the depths of heaven. Upon the sacred walls, which were to these pious, worshippers as windows opening into the Holy Land, they saw miracles, transfigurations, ascensions, the agonies of martyrs, the adorations of saints, and--vision of all visions fairest--the tender face of the Virgin bending in prophetic sadness above the infant Christ. But with other than silent teachers the church appealed to the soul. Music, whose miraculous voice utters all passions, pains, delights, and truths, breathed her beautiful religion on the air. She sang of what Raphael and Titian painted; of the birth, and the death, and the resurrection; of the prayers of penitence, the anguish of strife, the rapture of heaven, the torments of hell; and in her voice were heard sobs, and cries, and supplications, thunders of divine wrath, trumpets of doom and of redemption, and choruses upon choruses of angels proclaiming the glory of God. In all the arts the church embodied Christianity; as she converted souls, so she converted music and painting. By the twelfth century, nay, before that, all the art of Europe was Catholic. In Italy, Spain, Germany, wherever a school of art existed, however humble, its highest aspirations were through the Catholic Church. The ideality of art, as we may see in its remaining works, was then almost exclusively religious; to be imaginative was to be pious. Centuries before the dawn of modern painting, in the silence and seclusion of cloisters, laborious monks, slowly perfecting their wonderful illuminated missals, were unawares preparing the advent of Cimabue and Giotto. The tradition that St. Luke was a painter was carefully cherished by his disciples, who may have found inspiration in the legend that he painted the portrait of the Saviour. {548} Thus it is probable, and other reasons might be cited, that modern art was not adopted by the church, but, born within its monasteries, was cherished till it grew too great for them alone, and then, as the child of the church, turned in natural faith and gratitude to the service of its parent.

The church was the chief patron of the early painters; it furnished not only their inspiration, but their occupation. There is little trace of the earliest Christian art; but Eusebius, whose history was written in the reign of Constantine, mentions that images of Christ were then common. In the third century pictures had been generally introduced in the churches of Palestine. But it was scarcely before the twelfth century that Catholic art gave promise of that splendor which in later days exalted it above all rivalry. We find Cimabue famous about the year 1250, and after him Giotto, almost the father of Italian art, whose portrait of Dante, recently discovered, is acknowledged as the best likeness we possess of the author of the greatest Christian poem. He painted the Last Supper of Christ, at Florence, and an idea of his influence may be formed from the fact that he had one hundred pupils, some of whom were afterward renowned. To catalogue the painters of this period would be unnecessary, but their close sympathy with the church, and the encouragement they received from it, are unquestionable. In 1308, Duccio, an artist of Sienna, was called upon to paint an altar-piece, and in his contract pledged himself thus: "I will execute it according to my best ability, and as the Lord shall grant me skill." The picture when completed was carried in solemn procession to the church. When, in 1438, it was proposed to build the Sienna Cathedral, it was ordained that "no one even suspected of immorality shall be eligible" to the position of its architect. A more earnest expression of the faith of the early artists in the dignity of their work, and their religious duty, is found in the rules adopted by the painters of Sienna in 1335. They held that, "since we are teachers to ignorant men, and since in God every perfection is united, we will in our work earnestly ask the aid of the divine grace." This spirit of devotion gave a higher direction to genius that might without it have wasted itself in empty and unmeaning tasks; and, whatever the artist was born to do, he found in the church his opportunity. To paint, in those days, for the best of those men, was to serve God; to build, was to build his temples. The purpose ennobled the work. Not merely with intellect Lorenzo Gbiberti labored when he wrought the doors of the baptistery in the rear of the cathedral at Florence--doors of which Michael Angelo exclaimed in his enthusiasm, "Worthy to be the gates of paradise!" Casts of these wonderful carvings of scriptural subjects, are exhibited in the Academy of the Fine Arts at Philadelphia. These artists were the worthy forerunners of greater men--of Domenichino, of Guido, of Titian, of Murillo, of Correggio, and of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michael Angelo. The greatest works of the three latter were upon Christian themes. The Las Supper, painted by Da Vinci, in 1497, for the Dominican convent at Milan, is accepted as the crowning proof of genius. The statue of Moses in St. Peter's, the Last Judgment, and the Dome of St. Peter's are the master works of the mighty Angelo. Raphael, who began his beautiful career by painting altar-pieces, in the Transfiguration reached its highest point, and questionings of the model who sat for his divine madonnas is idle, for not the loveliness of the face, but the holiness of the spirit gives them immortality. But I need cite no other instances. The highest subjects of the Italian painters were found in their religion, and the church was their most generous patron. {549} And not only was this dedication of art to spirituality of direct value to its intellectual progress, but indirectly it ennobled art that aimed merely to paint the things of earth and not the dreams of heaven. The less gained dignity from the sacred office of the greater, and art became more strongly rooted in that which was of the world, because of its aspiration to that which was celestial.

The vast influence of religion upon art is signally exhibited in the history of English art. Neither painting nor architecture, it is true, had made much progress in England up to the seventeenth century, as compared with their success on the continent; for, when Italy was civilized, Great Britain was still rude, and in certain respects barbarian. Yet the cathedrals which still exist in ruins, monuments of Gothic grandeur, were the expressions of a national art in close relation with religion. In England as in all other countries the Catholic Church gathered around her the arts. But with a religion which professed to see in images nothing but idols, in paintings of Christ and the apostles and the prophets nothing but profanity and blasphemy, came desolation and destruction. The Roundhead was not satisfied with the downfall of a throne, with the death of one Stuart and the banishment of that royal line, nor with the proscription of the Catholic religion. The men who followed Cromwell were iconoclasts, who destroyed Christian images to set up in their stead an idol of barbarian bigotry. They fired the churches, they shattered the statues, they made war upon the pictures of madonnas and martyrs without remorse or fear. They had driven out the Cavaliers, they were resolved to drive out the saints; and, as they had banished the church, they were bent upon sending art to keep it company. They succeeded but too well. Puritan enmity to the employment of painting in church decoration--the sweeping principle that art and religion could not be united and had different aims struck a blow at English art which almost ended it for three reigns. It did not, indeed, fully recover from the effect until near the close of the eighteenth century, when, as little more than portraiture, it was re-established by Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. To this day it is only in portraiture and in landscape that a great English school exists. There are many fine Vandykes, and Lelys, and Reynolds in the galleries of England, and many landscapes and marines by Gainsborough, Wilson, and Turner; but where is the historical painter who can be compared with Turner? Haydon, who bitterly complained that historical painting was not appreciated in England, and that those who by their wealth and position should have encouraged it cared only for their own faces on canvas, might have found the cause of its decline in the absence of any religious inspiration in English art. He admitted this truth, unconsciously perhaps, when he chose for his own subjects of "high art" Christ in the Temple and Lazarus coming from the Tomb. In the landscapes and marines of Turner there is imagination grander than Claude, or Poussin, or Salvator Rosa possessed; in Wilkie unsurpassed character is given to humble themes. But the English historical school is infinitely below English landscape and portraiture. The Boydell gallery, in which the best artists of the time were employed to illustrate Shakespeare, is an utter failure. Fuseli was fanciful and coarse; and, though I know little of Blake's pictures, it is safe to presume they were not equal to his strange and beautiful poetry. Did he ever realize with the brush such verses as

"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night"?

Reynolds failed when he sought to be imaginative, as the Death of Dido and the Deathbed of Cardinal Beaufort are proof. {550} The defeat of the repeated efforts to establish an historical school of art in England must not be ascribed solely to a deficiency of genius in the men or in the character of the nation. Art and religion were divorced. Men worshipped God in one way, and painted in another. It is a significant fact that the pre-Raphaelite school, however objectionable in some respects, owes its highest success to the religious element which inspires it. Millais and Hunt proclaim that the rudest art must be spiritual, and thus seek to atone for centuries of infidelity to that truth.

Upon music the influence of the church has probably been even greater than upon painting, certainly as great. With no exaggeration, it may be said that to write the history of the composers who have written for the church is to write the history of modern music. What this fact implies will be understood by those who know that in none other of the arts has the term modern such significance; for, while ancient painting, sculpture, and architecture were based upon the same general laws which are now recognized as absolute, the principles of music, like her own sweet sounds, have changed and passed away from age to age. There is a known difference between what may be called the musical ear of this century and that of the sixteenth. What was then felt to be harmony, and embodied in the works of the great masters, is now discord. There was a time when consecutive fifths were common, a fact almost incredible to the musician of to-day. If such changes have occurred within four or five hundred years, the gulf which divides ancient and modern music must be deep and wide; and the latter, having little visible connection or known sympathy with the former, and originating in Christian Europe, must inevitably owe much of its character to Catholic civilization.

The oldest form of music known to us belongs to the church; it is the Ecclesiastical Chant of St. Ambrose and St. Gregory. The former, near the close of the fourth century, endeavored to give a fixed form to church music, and we may judge of his success from his Te Deum. The words and the the music of this noble canticle are still sung. Of the Ambrosian chant, St. Augustine wrote: "As the voices flowed into mine ears, truth was instilled into my heart, and the affections of piety overflowed in tears of joy." It is said that St. Ambrose composed the Te Deum upon the conversion of St. Augustine. Two centuries later Pope Gregory vastly improved the system of sacred music; from him we have the celebrated Gregorian chant, solemn, severe, and pure, and still heard in Lent and in the Holy Week. Such value did St. Gregory place upon music that he established a school for singers at Rome, which flourished till the tenth century. After the Gregorian chant little reformation in music was accomplished for centuries; but the next step was also taken within the church when Guido, a Benedictine monk, early in the eleventh century, discovered the musical scale now used. Modern rhythm was invented by a French priest about the same time, and for many years music owed all its progress to religious enthusiasm. Thus, Odington, an English Benedictine monk, in 1240, wrote De Speculatione Musicae, and John Muris in the fourteenth century did much to establish fixed rules of harmony. Counterpoint was slowly developed; the canon and the fugue were introduced; and the laws of music were gradually established as the basis of the grander and more ideal genius of the strictly modern system. We need not follow the history of the art from that great master Palestrina through the long succession of famous names destined to be remembered when those of kings are half forgotten.

From the first it has been seen the church recognized the sacred offices of music, and did not merely permit, but authorized and developed its use. It is true that at one time use led to abuse. In the sixteenth century composers for the church frequently forgot religion in science. {551} "In this kind of composition," says Alexander Cheron, "the meaning of the words was entirely overlooked, and its tendencies were only to the display of the genius of the composers or the powers of the singers." The evil became so great that the Council of Trent even deliberated upon the suppression of music in religious service. Pope Marcellus II. had, indeed, resolved to banish all music but the Gregorian chant, when Palestrina composed a mass which made that step unnecessary. It was a revolution. Solemnity, grandeur, and purity were the elements of the new style, from which mere bravuras and all levities were excluded. Thus the power which authorized the employment of music had the influence to redeem it from degradation, till now the sacred music we possess embodies the genius of three centuries, and will, perhaps, endure longer than the finest lyric dramas. That the religious purposes of great masters have had vast influence upon the merely lyric composition is not to be doubted. We cannot raise one form of art without raising all. The author of Don Giovanni might not have achieved the full grandeur of that work had he not also composed his marvellous masses. Of the influence of Catholic music upon such minds, an incident in Mozart's life is proof. In his youth he heard the famous Miserere sung in the Sistine chapel at Rome--that strange and solemn harmony, composed two hundred years ago by Gregorio Allegri, for the sublime ceremonial of the Passion week. Pontiff and cardinals, when the Miserere begins, kneel around the altar, the church is darkened, the voices swell in tenor, and die into silence. Mozart twice heard this wonderful work, and then reproduced it note for note, and sang it with the exact method and feeling of the Sistine choir. And it is said that the effect of this Miserere upon him may be traced in all his other works. Haydn's piety is found in all of his music, chiefly in those masses which are known to all lovers of music. "In nomine Domini," "Soli Deo Gloria," he invariably wrote at the beginning of his scores, and "Laus Deo" at their end. When composing, if his imagination failed, he repeated his rosary, and, before beginning his greater works, he prayed to God for inspiration to praise him worthily. Of the composers inspired by religion, the list is long; longer, perhaps, that of those who unconsciously were influenced by it. When Haydn was asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he replied, The Seven Words. It was written for the service called the "Funeral of the Redeemer" at Madrid, in which the seven words uttered by the Saviour on the cross were uttered by the bishop, who explained each, and between each exposition Haydn's music in sympathy with the word was given. Upon his masses he lavished his pains, and generally required twice the time for a mass that he needed for a symphony.

Palestrina, Porpora, Clementi, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, Beethoven, are but a few of the illustrious masters whose sacred music was dedicated to the Catholic Church. Handel's religious music was chiefly written for the English, and is embodied, as well as that of Mendelssohn, in oratorio. But, for my part, I do not think the form of the oratorio as well fitted for sacred music as that of the mass. An oratorio is generally sung in a concert-room; the words are frequently poor adaptations of the language of the Scriptures; its auditors expect to be entertained. Therefore, though the music may be perfect in itself, as in the "Total Eclipse" or "I know that my Redeemer liveth" of Handel, it does not seem that the form is suited to express the deepest emotions of worship. It is in the Catholic Church alone that music and religion are wedded. Who can translate into words the profound devotion inspired by the solemn mass in the cathedral service? Over the kneeling worshippers, the illuminated altar, the pictures of the crucifixion and the ascension, the intonation of the priest, "the dim religious light" shining through the stained windows, Music breathes her voice. {552} As the great organ swells, and the deep-toned choir utters the despair of the Miserere, the heavenly beauty of the Agnus Dei, the exultation of the Gloria, the devotion of the Credo, etc., what soul is not bowed in sympathy with grief, raised with gratitude, or bathed in heavenly peace? I know no music that has a more profound effect. It is a part of worship. It expresses something to which words the most eloquent are inadequate. It is the glory of the Catholic Church, I repeat, that she has so freely recognized the spirituality of this act, and these who reject her creed are compelled to admit the propriety and supremacy of her service. How cold are the musical exercises of other churches, how little they express of this intense and passionate devotion. I do not think God is served by the exclusion of his greatest gifts from the ceremonial of worship, and that point is conceded by all sects which sing his praise. But, if any music is used, why not the best? If a hymn, why not a mass? If an organ, why not an orchestra? The objection that the Catholic Church would have its choirs composed of the best voices, its music written by the greatest composers, is too absurd to be answered; for, if the highest art is unfit for the purposes of worship, then by inevitable logic it must be shown that all art is unfit; those who hold such objections should consistently agree with the Quakers, and banish the simplest hymn. [Footnote 174]

[Footnote 174: The writer of this article is not a Catholic.--ED. C.W.]

More than this, if music may be worthily used, why not painting? The value of architecture is universally admitted, ever since it was shown by the Catholic Church, and music is more or less accepted as a mode of adoration by nearly all sects. Pictures, however, are admitted into Catholic churches alone. Is, then, the genius of Titian and Raphael less holy than that of Beethoven or Mozart? Is it right to sing the praise of God in his temple, wrong to paint the story of the Son of God upon the consecrated walls? We need not answer such questions, which are only introduced to show how it is by the Catholic Church alone that the religious influences of the arts have been first and fully understood, and by it alone that they have been made agencies of worship.

Further examination of this important subject cannot now be made, for in these limits it can be little more than suggested. If we generalize, we discover that all the great artists, in architecture, painting, and music have found their highest employment in the church, and that its history includes their biographies. Of its present influence it is unnecessary to speak, but it is felt most in architecture, at least in this country; the noblest church edifice in Philadelphia, perhaps in any American city, is incomparably the new cathedral. From what has been said, the depth, and extent, and value of the influence of the church upon art may be inferred; but no one can imagine the condition of our art had it been without the inspiration of religion. Majestic and venerable stands the Church of Rome; upon her walls the arts have registered their victories; for her the muses have forsaken the summits of Parnassus; to her the poet, painter, and musician have dedicated their genius; and, giving all they brought to her humblest and poorest worshipper, she has repaid the masters with perpetual recognition and universal fame. Far as her realm extends are known the glories of Raphael, and Angelo, and Mozart.

{553}

Original.

Adelaide Anne Procter.

Next to imagination, genius is, perhaps, the faculty of the human mind about which we have had the most instructiveness and the least instruction. Yet every one who knows anything of it at all knows the two great types of genius that appear in history--extremes between which lie all minds of mark. One is the familiar form that the word itself at once suggests--the regular fashion, as it were, of being exceptional. This is the erratic, fitful, uncontrolled, keen, brilliant, sensitive, sympathetic, eccentric character, who wears regardless collars, fights his publisher on less than no provocation, eats opium if he chooses, and sometimes chooses--or, if not opium, some other stimulant--has whims and moods and irritabilities, and the biggest heart, and the best tongue, and the most heedless head, with the most brilliant oddities in it, wherever he goes--a totally lopsided organism, where the soul cannot be kept from wearing its way through the body, and where a few faculties, preternaturally developed, domineer over a warped and stunted system, to the ultimate ruin of the whole man.

The other kind, calm, clear, broad, poised, equable, powerful, seems exactly the opposite of the first type. The strength of the one is in balance, the force of the other in overbalance. Yet the difference is only that the man of balance is symmetrically developed; it is the difference between the autumn maturity of the full-grown fruit and the hectic ripeness, with the worm at the core, of the August windfall.

Of these two types, the first is vastly the more frequent, the other the higher in history. The reason is simply this, that a moderate degree of uniform development gives neither more nor less than mediocrity, while disproportionate preponderance of the intellect, even where all the faculties are below the average, will reproduce in miniature all the phenomena of the overbalanced kind of genius. Between Byron Don-Juanning it over his gin-and-water, and the brilliant Bohemian who dashes off the cleverest leader of the next day, fresh from the convivial influences of a roystering champagne supper, and the gentle youth who floods the rural poet's corner with heaven-scaling hankerings inspired by green tea, the difference is not in kind, but in degree.

Men of this order are the ones who achieve fame and famine. Their blossoms of promise are bright, their early graves are green on all the paths of human progress. History kindles at their high hopes and deeds, and blushes for the petty failings that suffice to drag them down. Literature, above all, is a very Golgotha, all the ghastlier for its glory, of their self-conscious sensitiveness, their refined self-torture, their blasted lives and miserable deaths. Yet there is hardly one but has his little day, longer or shorter, but with always some little sunshine and flowers of popular favor. Stimulated to their utmost by susceptibility to praise, they are the most brilliant and _bizarre_ in effects, and the most blindly admired. Besides, their eccentricities are an advertisement in themselves, and very often first attract the attention which afterward discovers the powers underneath. The world, on the contrary, finds nothing about the other sort of genius to display any peculiar capabilities--a sort of pleasant self-completeness, it may be, but no salient points and queer angles--and passes on, to gape at the man with half the brains and nothing to balance them. {554} Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous: some one in Elizabeth's reign made a list (is it not D'Israeli who preserves it?) of the best writers of his day, whereon the _thirteenth_ name is that of the successful London manager and decidedly good fellow, William Shakspeare.

In fact, this latter type of genius is not only rare as all well-poised organisms are rare, but seems to evade public appreciation by some hidden inherent law of its nature. It has often happened with men of this order that not only their families--of course, it is the exception, if a man's family ever discover his powers till the rest of the world thunders his fame into their ears--but their daily acquaintance, their most intimate friends, nay, themselves, never suspect their greatness.

But, if such a man of genius is an event of his generation, and, with all a man's opportunities for appreciation, activity, acquaintance, and, above all, women and their ennobling influence, to bring out his best energies, often dies undiscovered, what chance is there for a woman of kindred abilities to struggle into the light of recognition? In literature, men are the severest judges of women possible, except, of course, their own sex. To the best of them the expression "woman of genius" is the mythical relic of some lost tradition as old as Sappho's day, and "women's thought" a contradiction in terms. All their experience teaches them to disbelieve in it utterly. The truth is, most women think very ill in print. The cause lies less in their nature than in their second nature of education. Their thought is beautiful enough--beauty is their mental as their bodily characteristic--but seldom strong, and then its strength is that of the tempered Toledo rather than the shearing Andrea Ferrara. It comes in April gleams from behind cloud after cloud. They lack concentration, terseness, sequence; in a word, training. This breeds, with mainly correct thought, constant loose digressions, diffuseness of expression, and dilution of ideas. (Hence that saddest thing on the earth, wherein women writers so abound, the _unexceptionable_ poem.) It seems as though women wrote as if conversing, forgetting how much of the charm is in themselves and evaporates on the pen. Every reader has noticed how the writings, and, above all, the poems, of really extraordinary women--women that men of mind looked up to--are to us such monuments of apparent mediocrity that we wonder what they found to worship. The most impartial critic's nose inclines involuntarily heavenward the moment a woman comes forward to claim any intellectual place of honor. And genius, the highest quality, man's special prerogative--horror of horrors! All reason says it cannot be; and underneath a subtle male _esprit de corps_ too often adds that it shall not be. Of course, the intruder cannot climb the heights, but to avoid accidents and disappointment she is seldom suffered to try. Such are the difficulties which beset the path of even the most favored female aspirant.

It ought not to surprise us, then, that Adelaide Anne Procter, even had she been the most pushing and irrepressible of blue-stockings, with every vantage-ground of circumstance, was not appreciated as she deserved. But, in addition to the original sin of being a woman, several reasons peculiar to herself concurred to render her, what we think she has been, one of the most underrated writers of her day.

First, she was an Englishwoman. Had she not been, she might never have been anything; but once being something, we do not think it was an utterly inestimable advantage. For, as being English, every one took for granted that she must be a Protestant, and every one was disappointed and provoked to find her a Catholic. Now one of the circumstances which mitigate the glory of being English is that there is very little _achromatic_ criticism in England. As a wise and keen analyst [Footnote 175] complains, each of the reviews has some set of theses nailed to its doors, whose upholding is the first thing, to which all their criticism proper must stand subordinate.

[Footnote 175: Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism.]

{555} English bigotry, under nineteenth century forms, is to-day as patent, as understood, as calculable a mainspring and motive of public judgment as in Archbishop Laud's era. Miss Procter's chance of any high praise was thus never very great. But appearing as she did on the scene of letters at a time when the Church of England was yet in the full sanctimoniousness of righteous reaction against the dismembering logic of the Puseyites, any good there was in her was very safe from discovery by most of the critics. Had she been a self asserting sectarian, cramming her dogmas, as some of us did their abolitionism, down her readers' throats, she might have been hunted down to fame by the indignant zeal of the saintly star-chamberers of letters, who lead public opinion much as the foam leads the wave. Unfortunately for this opening, Miss Procter was a lady, and such self-assertion the most foreign of traits to her nature. Not loud enough for martyrdom, she was just firmly Catholic enough for misjudgment, or rather for denial of judgment. While the tribunals of criticism could not avoid taking notice of a book by Barry Cornwall's daughter, still, with all the little good and ill the reviewers said of her, they never did her the one essential service they could render, of putting her name where the reading public would see it and pass judgment on her. There is a way of praising that keeps off, and a way of blaming that attracts, the mass of readers.

With the returning tide of ritualism, she has begun to be more appreciated, but it is only a beginning. We are so strongly inclined to think her poems at the outset of a new career in public favor, and we consider that so little justice has been done her in the critical journals of this country, that we cannot help feeling toward them accordingly; and so, in range of our attempted discussion of her merits, and copiousness of citation, we have treated her in all respects precisely as a new author.

For we believe sincerely that the clouds of circumstance and prejudice about Miss Procter's entrance into literary life have obscured from us poetical powers not only of no common order, but of that calm, self-centred kind we have spoken of as rare enough in man, and the feminine counterpart of which is almost unknown in literary history. Her mind is not Shakespeare's, nor Coleridge's, nor Goethe's, but the resistless river and the fountain of the rocks may both be the overflow of the same sunless reservoir in the deep bosom of the mountains. And her poetry is indeed a fountain of the rocks; pure, placid, deep of source, shaded yet sparkling, "making a quiet music all its own;" with no torrent nor show of force, yet musically passing all obstacles, and emerging, clear, bright, and beautiful, in the sunlight beyond. Most varied and versatile in her choice of subjects, she brings to all a poetic insight, a freedom and fancy of expression, a grasp of the topic, and, above all, a strange, noble earnestness, that altogether make up a style whose quiet charm we had rather easily illustrate than elaborately fail in describing.

The key-note of all her writings is thoughtfulness, and withal a peculiar kind of thoroughness of thought such as we have found in no other woman. Mrs. Browning (perhaps we ought to add the new Mrs. Augusta Webster, whose perceptive powers are the theme of the English reviews) is the only one who ever has analyzed nearly so well, and she and all the others seem only incidentally, while Miss Procter is habitually, analytical. Her entire superiority, indeed, is the consequence and corollary of this curious depth of mind. Bold in abstractions, tender in revealings of the heart, ingenious in incident and invention, she is sure to have a well-defined thought at bottom, always suggestive, often philosophic, sometimes profound. The rare combination of entire femininity with this thinking habit is an originality in itself. Very novel and very charming is the effect of seeing together with this strong, clear, searching introspection, all the woman's delicacy of touch.

{556}

But the reader is tired of our generalities, and would much rather see for himself how well Miss Procter thinks. So we give him a fair example in the poem called

Incompleteness.

Nothing resting in its own completeness Can have power or beauty; but alone Because it leads and tends to further sweetness, Fuller, higher, deeper than its own.

_Spring's real glory dwells not in the meaning, Gracious though it be, of her blue hours, But is hidden in her tender leaning To the summer's richer wealth of flowers.

Dawn is fair because the mists fade slowly Into day, which floods the world with light; Twilight's mystery is so sweet and holy Just because it ends in starry night._

Childhood's smiles unconscious graces borrow From strife that in a far-off future lies; _And angel glances (veiled now by life's sorrow) Draw our hearts to some beloved eyes._

Life is only bright when it proceedeth Toward a truer, deeper life above; Human love is sweetest when it leadeth To a more divine and perfect love.

Learn the mystery of progression duly: Do not call each glorious change decay; But know we only hold our treasures truly, When it seems as if they passed away.

Nor dare to blame God's gifts for incompleteness; In that want their beauty lies; they roll Toward some infinite depth of love and sweetness, Bearing onward man's reluctant soul.

This poem holds one of the great principles in Miss Procter's very noble theory of life--a theory abundantly developed in her poems. Her cardinal axioms would seem to be three: The great rule of life is progression; its great agent, sorrow; its great fact and end, love. On these pillars she builds, and 'Incompleteness' is one of the most direct statements of one part of her creed. Another fine poem, in thought a kind of companion-piece to this, in which we readily recognize the same underlying thought, is

Beyond.

We must not doubt, or fear, or dread that love for life is only given, And that the calm and sainted dead will meet estranged and cold in heaven: Oh! love were poor and vain, indeed, based on so harsh and stern a creed.

True that this earth must pass away with all the starry worlds of light, With all the glory of the day, and calmer tenderness of night, For in that radiant home can shine alone the immortal and divine.

Earth's lower things--her pride, her fame, her science, learning, wealth, and power, Slow growths that through long ages came, or fruits of some convulsive hour, Whose very memory must decay--heaven is too pure for such as they.

They are complete; their work done. So let them sleep in endless rest. Love's life is only here begun, nor is, nor can be, fully blest; It has no room to spread its wings, amid this crowd of meaner things.

Just for the very shadow thrown upon its sweetness here below, The cross that it must bear alone, and bloody baptism of woe, Crowned and completed through its pain, we know that it shall rise again.

So, if its flame burn pure and bright, here where our air is dark and dense, (And nothing in this world of night lives with a living so intense,) When it shall reach its home at length, how bright its light! how strong its strength!

And while the vain weak loves of earth (for such base counterfeits abound) Shall perish with what gave them birth-- their graves are green and fresh around-- No funeral song shall need to rise for the true love that never dies.

If in my heart I now could fear that, risen again, we should not know What was our life of life when here--the hearts we loved so much below I would arise this very day and cast so poor a thing away.

But love is no such soulless clod; living, perfected it shall rise, Transfigured in the light, of God, and giving glory to the skies: And that which makes this life so sweet shall render heaven's joy complete.

As a poem, this latter is superior, because it applies beautifully to a beautiful subject the principle which the other merely enunciates. And the style is not less remarkable than the ideas. Can anything be more clearly, calmly _right_ than the thought, more easy, lucid, _real_ than its utterance? And it is not the bald perspicuity, either, of mere logical disquisition, but full of suggestion and spirit; and it does not flag; especially in Beyond there is not a weak line nor lower thought. Now is not all this refreshing after the diffuse grace and dilute sweetness of female poetry in general? It is to the run of it as a copse of May's arbutus to a meadow strewn with buttercups.

_Apropos_ of this superiority, we find another poem which illustrates it even more strongly, because so very many women have fluttered about the same thought. {557} Every _femme incomprise_--and what poetess does not think she is one? is full of it; why have none of them said it so broadly and well as this?

Unexpressed.

Dwells within the soul of every artist More than all his effort can express, And he knows the best remains unaltered, Sighing at what we call his success.

Vainly he may strive; he dare not tell us All the sacred mysteries of the skies: Vainly he may strive; the deepest beauty Cannot be unveiled to mortal eyes.

And the more devoutly that he listens, And the holier message that is sent, Still the more his soul must struggle vainly, Bowed beneath a noble discontent.

No great thinker ever lived and taught you All the wonder that his soul received; No true painter ever set on canvas All the glorious vision he conceived.

No musician ever held your spirit Charmed and bound in his melodious chains, But be sure he heard, and strove to render Feeble echoes of celestial strains.

No real poet ever wove in numbers All his dream, but the diviner part, Hidden from all the world, spake to him only In the voiceless silence of his heart.

So with love; for love and art united Are twin mysteries; different, yet the same: Poor, indeed, would be the love of any Who could find its full and perfect name.

Love may strive, but vain is the endeavor All its boundless riches to unfold; Still its tenderest, truest secret lingers Ever in its deepest depths untold.

Things of time have voices, speak and perish: Art and love speak, but their words must be Sighings of illimitable forests, Waves of an unfathomable sea.

The positive merit of this--passing the odious business of comparison--is, to our mind, the well-managed amplification of the main thought, and the swell both of sense and sound at the close, which we find a beauty of high order. The last two lines especially seize the melodic principle of the metre, which, beyond almost any other we know, calls for long musical words. Only "voiceless silence" strikes one as tautological to the last degree. Miss Proctor very rarely makes outright mistakes, and she may have seen some subtle sense added by the word "voiceless" that we cannot. All the silences we have ever known were strictly voiceless, and decidedly apt to terminate about the time any voice began.

The next great topic with our poetess is the sweet uses of adversity. She is never weary of celebrating the beauty and benignity of sorrow. In fact, she appears to have a personal friendship for misfortune, as the great elevating and purifying dispensation of earthly existence. Grief, disappointment, death, are to her philosophy but natural incidents, to be expected and met without fear--processes tending to the higher result hereafter. But here is her whole thought, better set forth than we can say it:

Friend Sorrow.

Do not cheat thy heart and tell her Grief will pass away, Hope for fairer times in future And forget to-day. Tell her, if you will, that sorrow Need not come in vain, Tell her that the lesson taught her Far outweighs the pain.

Cheat her not with the old comfort, "Soon she will forget:" Bitter truth, alas! but matter Rather for regret. Bid her not "Seek other pleasures, Turn to other things:" Rather nurse her caged sorrow Till the captive sings.

Rather bid her go forth bravely And the stranger greet, Not as foes with spear and buckler, But as dear friends meet; Bid her with a strong clasp hold her By her dusky wings, Listening for the murmured blessing Sorrow always brings.

This is only one of a large number of poems full of varied exposition of these same views. Some are so ingenious and happy that we can hardly resist quoting them, were it not that, if those were the only qualifications, we should have to cite the major part of her poems. In fact, this conception of sorrow as a hidden blessing is peculiarly strong in all she has written. And yet, while recognizing in tribulation an elevating grace that wins it a welcome from her heart, she fully feels the sadness, the weariness, the poverty and pain of earthly lives. A strong instance of this is the "Cradle Song of the Poor," with its singular, sad refrain:

"Sleep, my darling, thou art weary, God is good, but life is dreary."

{558}

And the miseries of the poor have evoked the only bitter lines she ever wrote, which, coming, as they do, the very last in her book, seem almost like an after-addition--the strange strong lines called "Homeless." There is a force in some of the lines that reminds us of Hood:

It is cold, dark midnight, yet listen To that patter of tiny feet! Is it one of your dogs, fair lady, Who whines in the bleak, cold street? Is it one of your silken spaniels Shut out in the snow and the sleet?

My dogs sleep warm in their baskets, Safe from the darkness and snow; All the beasts in our Christian England Find pity wherever they go. (Those are only the homeless children Who are wandering to and fro.)

Look out in the gusty darkness: I have seen it again and again, That shadow, that flits so slowly Up and down past the window-pane: It is surely some criminal lurking Out there in the frozen rain!

Nay, our criminals all are sheltered, They are pitied and taught and fed: That is only a sister-woman, Who has got neither food nor bed: _And the Night cries, "Sin to be living;" And the River cries, "Sin to be dead."_

.....

There is one other piece perhaps even sadder than this when we penetrate its full, stern significance:

The Requital.

Loud roared the tempest, fast fell the sleet; A little child-angel passed down the street With trailing pinions and weary feet.

The moon was hidden; no stars were bright; So she could not shelter in heaven that night, _For the angels' ladders are rays of light._

She beat her wings at each window-pane, And pleaded for shelter, but all in vain: "Listen," they said, "to the pelting rain!"

She sobbed, as the laughter and mirth grew higher, "Give me rest and shelter beside your fire, And I will give you your heart's desire."

The dreamer sat watching his embers gleam, While his heart was floating down hope's bright stream, So he wove her wailing into his dream.

The worker toiled on, for his time was brief; The mourner was nursing her own pale grief: They heard not the promise that brought relief.

But fiercer the tempest rose than before, When the angel paused at a humble door And asked for shelter and help once more.

A weary woman, pale, worn, and thin, With the brand upon her of want and sin, Heard the child-angel and took her in.

Took her in gently, and did her best To dry her pinions; and made her rest With tender pity upon her breast.

When the eastern morning grew bright and red, Up the first sunbeam the angel fled, Having kissed the woman, and left her--dead.

Human waifs forgotten by all their kind are a sorrowful picture enough, but this of a human heart so desolate, so blank, so seared, so far from all hope or joy in life, that even God its Creator does not deny its supreme wish to die, is inexpressibly dreary. This is worthy to stand beside Tennyson's "Mariana in the Moated Grange."

One touch worth noticing is the fiction by which the angel is detained on earth; that "the angels' ladders are rays of light." It strikes us as one of the most ingenious we have ever met, and no less beautiful than happy. The whole structure of the narrative indeed, is admirable; it is difficult to see how the parts could be fitted more nicely. This skill Miss Procter has in an uncommon degree, and all her longer narrative poems exemplify it.

Of course, such thoughts on life as these last verses contain blend naturally with noble thoughts on death. Here, again, Miss Procter's prevailing thoughtfulness has developed her ideas into many beautiful applications. The lines called "The Angel of Death," which so touchingly close Charles Dickens's late sketch of her, the sweet, weary "Tryst with Death," and many others, are examples of this. But among them all there is none which more truly embodies her conceptions, or which, at the same time, is more deeply instinct with the hopefulness which underlies all her graver utterances, than the admirable lines:

Our Dead.

Nothing is our own; we hold our treasures Just a little time ere they are fled: One by one life robs us of our treasures: Nothing is our own except our dead.

They are ours, and hold in faithful keeping, Safe for ever, all they took away. Cruel life can never stir that sleeping; Cruel time can never seize that prey.

Justice pales, truth fades, stars fall from heaven: Human are the great whom we revere; No true crown of honor can be given, Till we place it on a funeral bier.

How the children leave us, and no traces Linger of that smiling angel hand; Gone, for ever gone; and in their places Weary men and anxious women stand.

{559}

_Yet, we have some little ones, still ours; They have kept the baby smile, we know, Which we kissed one day, and hid with flowers, On their dead white faces, long ago._

When our joy is lost--and life will take it-- Then no memory of the past remains, Save with some strange, cruel sting, to make it Bitterness beyond all present pains.

_Death, more tender-hearted, leaves to sorrow Still the radiant shadow, fond regret;_ We shall find, in some far bright to-morrow Joy that he has taken, living yet.

"Is love ours, and do we dream we know it Bound with all our heart-strings all our own? Any cold and cruel dawn may show it Shattered, desecrated, overthrown.

_Only the dead hearts forsake us never: Death's last kiss has been the mystic sign Consecrating love our own for ever, Crowning it eternal and divine._

_So when Fate would fain besiege our city, Dim our gold or make our flowers fall, Death, the angel, comes in love and pity And, to save our treasures, claims them all._

Her ideas regarding death are very lofty. They are equally removed from the timorous, painful harping on dissolution that characterizes the _underdone_ poetic organism, from the graphic grimness of Miss Rossetti's class of thinkers, who seem to take a ghastly delight in anatomizing the subject, and last from the passionate weak welcoming of the end--the coward courage which dares not live. In a word, Miss Procter was a Christian.

In quitting her poems of thought, it will perhaps be well to pretermit our long course of praise, and speak of the faults of her writing, most of which are strongest in these very poems. In verbal correctness, she is far above the average; for so voluminous a writer, singularly free from them. Still, by G. Washington-Moon-light, we can discover certain errors, principally of accent or collocation. Some few appear in the verses we have cited. In "Beyond," "baptism" is made a trisyllable; though, standing where it does, an appeal might well be taken to the higher equity of rhythm against the arbitrary technicality of the law of orthoepy. Also, we doubt if "perfécted" be the best pronunciation to-day. And in "Homeless," in the expression,

"Is it one of your dogs, fair lady, Who whines in the bleak, cold street?"

it might with all respect for the intelligence of the race at large, and, above all, for the prodigious latent capabilities of all ladies' dogs--it might be seriously questioned whether the canine personality is so marked as to admit of the relative "who." We feel quite sure that the original idea was to reserve this particular pronoun for selfish mankind, and we fear that the slow science of grammar is still fettered, even as to the most marvellous of the dog kind, by the trammelling traditions of comparative anatomy.

But such flaws as these are venial, occurring as they do at rare intervals, in a very large number of verses, written young, and crowded into the compass of a few years. Many of them were mere passing contributions to the periodical press of the day, and, taken as a whole, compare to advantage with the hasty emanations of almost any author.

In metre Miss Procter achieves no high effects, and attempts none. With very fair taste in selection of metre, she is by no means an artist in rhythm, and appears to aim at little or nothing beyond passable metrical correctness. She is carelessly harsh and incidentally melodious. Once or twice she tries some sort of irregular or lyric measure, and it appears rather to impede than aid her accustomed clear flow of thought.

In style she has two prominent though not great faults. One is her refinement. She is so refined that it would, even had she reached the full promise of her life, have prevented her, in all probability, from ever being broadly popular. Her field is too high and narrow: she deals mainly with sentiments and sympathies which interest only those who have not only sorrowed, but reflected. But this blame is praise in itself. The other is more of a real fault. Miss Procter tempts us to believe that the diffuseness which we have attributed chiefly to their education has some foundation in woman's nature itself. {560} Different as she is from the ordinary type, her womanhood vindicates itself, though still in a way of her own. The effect on her style is not what we spoke of--dilution--but amplification. Sometimes she is led away by her fertility of illustration to illustrate too much. She holds up the idea in too many lights, more than are needful to understand her. There is a little of this even in "Incompleteness," before cited, but the illustrations are so happy that the effect is not perceived: it is seldom we are troubled with too many good things in a poem. Very often, however, this practice of ramifying thoughts into so many applications--one natural result of her thorough thinking--greatly injures the whole, and almost always, where there is much of this amplification, it passes beyond the strict limits of the strongest effect.

There are, furthermore, some few poems liable to cavil which seem to have been mere exercises or experiments, and call for other criticism than her finished performances. Others suffer from their author's inveterate habit of seizing on every-day subjects. Now and then she takes up one so trite that all the charm of her manner cannot mend it. The result is like a pebble set in filigree.

The only grave artistic fault we ever found in her poems occurs in the Legend of Provence, one of her best narrative pieces, founded on the exquisite Legend of the Virgin Mary's assuming the personality and filling the place of a nun who has proved false to her vows and fled her convent. Repentant at last, she returns, a worn-out beggar, to die where her religion died, meets her semblance, recognizes it as what she might have been, and implores Mary's aid.

And Mary answered: "From thy bitter past, Welcome, my child! Oh! welcome home at last! I filled thy place: thy flight is known to none, For all thy daily duties I have done; Gathered thy flowers and prayed, and sung, and slept; Didst thou not know, poor child, thy place was kept?"

This strikes us as a tremendous blunder. For the nun to know that her place was kept would knock the bottom out of the entire legend. Who wouldn't sin with his pardon drawn up in advance, and entire secrecy and perfect restoration awaiting the first active twinge of repentance? We cannot imagine for an instant how Miss Procter could overlook this; unless we have made some equally egregious error in our understanding of the poem and its scope.

We find, or fancy we find, in her writings, a shade of resemblance to the taste and tact of her father, "Barry Cornwall." Perhaps it was because she feared her generic tendencies of style, that she has written few or no songs, and none at all like his sort. If her object was to avoid suspicious resemblance, she has succeeded. The likeness is utterly intangible, and there is not a trace anywhere of an imitation most natural to her relations with him, and which must have proved easy to talent like hers.

Another noteworthy fact about her is also alluded to by Mr. Dickens. It is the total absence of humor, and the sober and shaded style of what she has written. He takes occasion, while speaking of this prevailing seriousness in one so young, expressly to bar the inference that she was of the melancholy moonlit sort, and mentions her abundant wit, and keen sense of the ludicrous, and the joyous quality of her laugh. We do not think an observant reader would misconceive her, as her kind-hearted biographer apprehended. She lacks the distinctive element of morbidness. There is a soundness in her sadness, so to speak, that makes us feel it to be the shadow of a soul that knows the sunshine also. Mournful people of the true chronic mournfulness show it far more by taking dismal views of ordinary subjects than by dealing only in dismal things. But the fact itself suggests a curious question which our aphorists have not yet answered. How is it that some men naturally rollick in print, while others, not less humorous, write nothing but the gravest stuff? {561} What made Hood's pen merry on his death-bed, and took the wit so out of Sydney Smiths's sermons? These two classes are so marked that one would think there must be a principle of some sort dividing them. Yet no one has ever laid down this principle. We no more pretend to do this than the rest, but merely raise the question, leaving it to some future critic to disentangle us from a most Cartesian dubitation.

Thus far we have quoted mainly in illustration of Miss Procter's characteristics. It must not be inferred, however, that there are not in her books excellences not specially arising out of her peculiar ideas of life. On the contrary, there are a number of pieces of that provoking class of good things which we might just as well have written ourselves--only we didn't. Very few of our friends, though, would think of looking in an English author for the following strong, spirited protest, written in 1861, when it was proposed to "strengthen the hands" of the mission for the conversion of Irish Catholics:

An Appeal.

Spare her, O cruel England! Thy sister lieth low: Chained and oppressed she lieth; Spare her that cruel blow. We ask not for the freedom Heaven has vouchsafed to thee, Nor bid thee share with Ireland The empire of the sea. Her children ask no shelter-- Leave them the stormy sky; They ask not for thy harvests, For they know how to die; Deny them, if it please thee, A grave beneath the sod; But we do cry, O England, Leave them their faith in God!

Take, if thou wilt, the earnings Of the poor peasant's toil; Take all the scanty produce That grows on Irish soil, To pay the alien preachers Whom Ireland will not hear-- To pay the scoffers at the creed Which Irish hearts hold dear: But leave them, cruel England, The gift their God has given; Leave them their ancient worship, Leave them their faith in heaven.

You come and offer learning-- A mighty gift, 'tis true, Perchance the greatest blessing, That now is known to you; But not to see the wonders Sages of old beheld Can they peril a priceless treasure, The faith their fathers held.

For in learning and in science They may forget to pray: _God will not ask for knowledge On the great judgment day._

When, in their wretched cabins, Racked by the fever pain. And the weak cries of their children Who ask for food in vain; When, starving, naked, helpless, From the shed that keeps them warm Man has driven them forth to perish In a less cruel storm; Then, then we plead for mercy; Then, sister, hear our cry; For all we ask, O England, Is--leave them there to die! Cursed is the food and raiment For which a soul is sold; Tempt not another Judas To barter God for gold. You offer food and shelter If they their faith deny; What do you gain, O England! By such a shallow lie? We will not judge the tempted-- May God blot out their shame-- He sees the misery round them, He knows man's feeble frame. His pity still may save them. In his strength they must trust Who calls us all his children. Yet knows we are but dust.

Then leave them the kind tending, Which helped their childish years; Leave them the gracious comfort Which dries their mourner's tears; Leave them to that great mother In whose bosom they were born, Leave them the holy mysteries That comfort the forlorn; And, amid all their trials, Let the great gift abide, Which you, O prosperous England! Have dared to cast aside. Leave them the pitying angels, And Mary's gentle aid, For which earth's dearest treasures Were not too dearly paid. Take back your bribes, then, England, Your gold is black and dim; _And if God sends plague and famine, They can die and go to him._

This is by far the most unpolished and unequal thing Miss Procter has ever written, and full of faults of detail. But, spite of loose texture and repetition, and weak lines, and identical rhymes, there is a strength in all the essential features, and a spirit everywhere, that contrast strongly with the patriotic effusions that we have had so much of these last few years.

Another poem which has incidentally attracted no little notice is Homeward Bound, which anticipates the whole plot of Enoch Arden so completely that some shallow people felt called upon to say a number of very foolish things about the coincidence when Enoch Arden came out. {562} The chief differences are that the ship-wrecked hero is thrown on a desert island in the one and captured by Moors in the other. Enoch Arden also turns away from the agonizing picture of his forfeited home in silence, while Miss Procter's mariner reveals himself, kisses his wife once more _as if_ she were his, and departs, leaving the very awkward bigamy question wide open behind him, and in general evincing a noble ignorance of the law of England. He also perpetrates the dramatic error of surviving in a state of marine vagrancy for a quarter of a century. But, though inferior to Tennyson's, this poem has many excellent touches of pathos and nature, and must claim, equally with Enoch Arden, the full merit of its simple yet most telling conception.

_Apropos_ of resemblances, we are tempted to quote another of her best known poems, both for its real beauty and because it subtly reminds us of Longfellow, and we should be thankful if some one would only tell us why:

The Storm.

The tempest rages wild and high; The waves lift up their voice and cry Fierce answers to the angry sky. _Miserere Domine_

Through the black night and driving rain, A ship is struggling, all in vain, To live upon the stormy main. _Miserere Domine_

The thunders roar, the lightnings glare, Vain is it now to strive or dare; A cry goes up of great despair. _Miserere Domine_

The stormy voices of the main, The moaning wind and pelting rain Beat on the nursery window-pane, _Miserere Domine_

Warm curtained was the little bed, Soft pillowed was the little head: "The storm will wake the child," they said. _Miserere Domine_

Cowering among his pillows white, He prays, his blue eyes dim with fright, "Father, save those at sea to-night!" _Miserere Domine_

The morning shone all clear and gay On a ship at anchor in the bay, And on a little child at play. _Gloria tibi Domine!_

Out of many which commend themselves, we select only one more, a little gem which we were surprised and pleased to find copied the other day in a little New York evening paper. We think it very suggestive and sweet.

A Lost Chord

Seated one day at the organ, I was weary and ill at ease, And my fingers wandered idly Over the noisy keys.

I do not know what I was playing, Or what I was dreaming then, But I struck one chord of music Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight Like the close of an angel's psalm, And it lay on my fevered spirit With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow, Like love overcoming strife; It seemed the harmonious echo From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexed meanings Into one perfect peace, And trembled away into silence As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly, That one lost chord divine, That came from the soul of the organ, And entered into mine.

It may be that Death's bright angel Will speak in that chord again, It may be that only in heaven I shall hear that grand Amen.

We have yet to speak of one great element in these poems, their religion. With those who are born and bred in a church, their belief sits on them like their clothes--becomes a part of themselves. With converts it is oftener like a badge which they are proud to wear, and which some are fond of displaying. Miss Procter's was one of those rare natures in which religion seems to stain back, as it were, and color the very fountain-heads of all thought and impulse, as they are colored by the associations of childhood. In her, it was not like regalia for the processions of life or a reserve fund for emergencies, but thoroughly assimilated and vitalized; a _living_ faith; an actual, practical element in her daily doings, as present in her consciousness as her own individuality. Nor had she any of the combativeness of converts, whose zeal is apt sometimes to be aggressively meek and intolerantly lowly. Hers was a faith full of the charity that judges not. {563} Like all real feeling, it never obtrudes itself, and never shrinks from appearing in its proper place. Thus she has very few devotional and no sectarian pieces at all in her Legends and Lyrics, but once professedly entering on that line of thought, in her Chaplet of Verses, she is both Christian and Catholic throughout.

Yet among the few devotional pieces in the earlier series we find one of the best:

The Peace of God.

We ask for peace, O Lord! Thy children ask thy peace; Not what the world calls rest, That toil and care should cease; That through bright sunny hours Calm life should fleet away, And tranquil night should fade In smiling day: It is not for such peace that we would pray.

We ask for peace, Lord! Yet not to stand secure, Girt round with iron pride, Contented to endure; Crushing the gentle strings That human hearts should know, Untouched by others' joy Or others' woe: Thou, dear Lord! wilt never teach us so.

We ask thy peace, Lord! Through storm, and fear, and strife, To light and guide us on Through a long, struggling life: While no success or gain Shall cheer the desperate fight, Or nerve what the world calls Our wasted might; Yet pressing through the darkness to the light.

It is thine own, Lord! Who toil while others sleep; Who sow with loving care What other hands shall reap: They lean on thee entranced In calm and perfect rest: Give us that peace, Lord! Divine and blest, Thou keepest for those hearts who love thee best.

Very like this in sentiment are several of her best pieces, "Per Pacem ad Lucem," "Ministering Angels," and "Thankfulness." There are a number also addressed to the Virgin Mary, the best of which are too long for insertion. It is this which will restrict our quotations to one more piece, which breathes that lofty ardor that every struggling Christian has felt in his brighter hours of exaltation, and sighed to know that common moods cannot rise to it.

Our Titles.

Are we not Nobles? we who trace Our pedigree so high That God for us and for our race Created earth and sky, And light and air and time and space, To serve us and then die?

Are we not Princes? we who stand As heirs beside the throne, We who can call the promised land Our heritage, our own; And answer to no less command Than God's, and his alone?

Are we not Kings? both night and day, From early until late, About our bed, about our way, A guard of angels wait; And so we watch and work and pray In more than royal state.

......

Are we not more? our life shall be Immortal and divine. The nature Mary gave to thee, Dear Jesus, still is thine: Adoring in thy heart I see Such blood as beats in mine.

O God! that we can dare to fail And dare to say we must! O God! that we can ever trail Such banners in the dust, Can let such starry honors pale And such a blazon rust!

Shall we upon such titles bring The taint of sin and shame? Shall we, the children of the King, Who hold so grand a claim, Tarnish by any meaner thing The glory of our name?

But, although just to-day, in the present undeveloped state of woman's intellect, Miss Procter may strike us most by her advance in thought beyond her sex, she has a far higher claim on us for the admiration due to true womanhood. Where do these poets school their souls, that they come forth full of the experience of threescore years and ten? We know that Miss Procter died in the prime and summer of her days, with most of the great epochs and experiences of a woman's life yet before her. It is not even said that she ever loved; for the sake of him who should lose her, we hope it may be so. Yet her poems hold more tenderness and truth, more of real love, its anxiety, faith, fulfilment, more of woman's inner life, than any ten of the sweet soft natures who have taken these things to be their sole province; who fancy their inkstands are in their souls, and devote a lifetime of harmless harpings to rhyming some flutterings of heart and more flutterings of nerves. {564} Here, as everywhere, we meet with Miss Procter's unfailing force and clearness, and tremble at first to meet it. For of all agonizing things (as many a sensitive nature can testify) there is none like the unconscious cruelty of pure intellect when it comes to deal with the strange intuitions, the noble unreason, the holy follies of the heart. But hand in hand with her inborn analysis comes such a womanhood, so deep, so delicate, so full of sympathy and sweet counsel, as passes words. This union it is, as we said before, that stamps Miss Procter a poet. We men cannot half appreciate this; the sisterhood of sex that her poems must establish with women who have loved and suffered is for some woman only to set forth.

It is difficult to choose any one poem which stands pre-eminent in these qualities. One which will show her insight into the seemingly contradictory impulses of a woman's breast is

A Woman's Question.

Before I trust my fate to thee, Or place my hand in thine; Before I let thy future give Color and form to mine, Before I peril all for thee. Question thy soul to-night for me.

I break all slighter bonds, nor feel A shadow of regret: Is there one link within the past That holds thy spirit yet? Or is thy faith as clear and free As that which I can pledge to thee?

Does there within thy dimmest dreams A possible future shine, Wherein thy life could henceforth breathe Untouched, unshared by mine? If so, at any pain or cost, Oh! tell me before all is lost.

Look deeper still. If thou canst feel Within thy inmost soul That thou hast kept a portion back, While I have staked the whole, Let no false pity spare the blow, But in true mercy tell me so.

Is there within thy heart a need That mine cannot fulfil? One chord that any other hand Could better wake or still? Speak now--lest at some future day My whole life wither and decay.

Lives there within thy nature hid The demon-spirit Change, Shedding a passing glory still On all things new and strange? It may not be thy fault alone-- But shield my heart against thy own.

Couldst thou withdraw thy hand one day, And answer to my claim That fate, and that to day's mistake-- Not thou had been to blame? Some soothe their conscience thus; but thou Wilt surely warn and save me now.

Nay, answer _not_--I dare not hear, The words would come too late; Yet I would spare thee all remorse, So comfort thee, my fate-- Whatever on my heart may fall, Remember, I _would_ risk it all.

The strength of this is in the rendering of that eloquent instinct of love which intuitively strikes the most responsive chord. Here it hits on the strongest appeal a woman can make to a man--to save her against himself. And no one can deny the boldness and beauty of the closing turn of thought.

The following poem bears a strong resemblance to the last in tone and train of analysis, with an element of calm fruition instead of the utter devotion. The one is love's June of trust; the other its September of fulfilment.

A Retrospect.

From this fair point of present bliss, Where we together stand, Let me look back once more, and trace That long and desert land Wherein till now was cast my lot, And I could live, and thou wert not.

......

What had I then? A hope that grew Each hour more bright and dear, The flush upon the eastern skies That showed the sun was near. Now night has faded far away, My sun has risen, and it is day.

A dim ideal of tender grace In my soul reigned supreme; Too noble and too sweet, I thought, To live save in a dream; Within thy heart to-day it lies, And looks on me from thy dear eyes.

Some gentle spirit--love, I thought-- Built many a shrine of pain; Though each false idol fell to dust, The worship was not vain, But a faint radiant shadow, cast Back from our love upon the past.

And grief, too, held her vigil there; With unrelenting sway, Breaking my cloudy visions down, Throwing my flowers away: I owe to her fond care alone That I may now be all thine own.

Fair joy was there: her fluttering wings At time she strove to raise; Watching through long and patient nights, Listening long eager days: I know now that her heart and mine Were waiting, love, to welcome thine.

Thus I can read thy name throughout, And, now her task is done, Can see that even that faded past Was thine, beloved one. And so rejoice my life may be All consecrated, dear, to thee.

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There could scarcely be a truer sign of poetic power than the fidelity and finish of some of these heart-pictures. Out of many others we select two for contrast: one tracing the deep, dreary introspection of passive suffering; the other following out the subtle, restless impulses of pain with pangs. The first we take from a longer poem, "Philip and Mildred."

Dawn of day saw Philip speeding on his road to the great city, Thinking how the stars gazed downward just with Mildred's patient eyes. Dreams of work and fame and honor struggling with a tender pity, Till the loving past receding saw the conquering future rise.

Daybreak still found Mildred watching, with the wonder of first sorrow, How the outward world unaltered shone the same this very day, How unpitying and relentless human life met this new morrow-- Earth, and sky, and man unheeding that her joy had passed away.

Then the round of weary duties, cold and formal, came to meet her, With the life within departed that had given them each a soul; And her sick heart even slighted gentle words that came to greet her; For grief spread its shadowy pinions, like a blight, upon the whole.

_Jar one chord, the harp is silent; move one stone, the arch is shattered; One small clarion-cry of sorrow bids an armed host awake. One dark cloud can hide the sunlight; loose one string, the pearls are scattered; Think one thought, a soul may perish; say one word, a heart may break._

Life went on, the two lives running side by side, the outward seeming, And the truer and diviner hidden in the heart and brain: Dreams grow holy put in action, work grows fair through starry dreaming: But where each flows on unmingling, both are fruitless and in vain.

We hardly know which to like the better, the description itself or the moralizing. Very different, very far from moralizing, and yet even more to the life, is

A Comforter.

"Will she come to me, little Effie, Will she come to my arms to rest, And nestle her head on my shoulder, While the sun goes down in the west?

"I and Effie will sit together All alone in this great arm-chair: Is it silly to mind it, darling, When life is so hard to bear?

"No one comforts me like my Effie. Just, I think, that she does not try, Only looks with a wistful wonder Why grown people should ever cry;

"While the little soft arms close tighter Round my neck in their clinging hold: Well, I must not cry on your hair, dear, For my tears might tarnish the gold.

"I am tired of trying to read, dear; It is worse to talk and seem gay; There are some kinds of sorrow, Effie, It is useless to thrust away.

"Ah! advice may be wise, my darling, But one always knows it before; And the reasoning down one's sorrow Seems to make one suffer the more.

"But my Effie won't reason, will she? Or endeavor to understand; Only holds up her mouth to kiss me, As she strokes my face with her hand.

"If you break your plaything yourself, dear, Don't you cry for it all the same? I don't think it is such a comfort, One has only one's self to blame.

"People say things cannot be helped, dear, But then that is the reason why; For, if things could be helped or altered One would never sit down to cry.

"They say, too, that tears are quite useless To undo, amend, or restore: When I think _how_ useless, my Effie, Then my tears only fall the more.

"All to-day I struggled against it, But that does not make sorrow cease; And now, dear, it such a comfort To be able to cry in peace.

"Though wise people would call that folly, And remonstrate with grave surprise, We won't mind what they say, my Effie; We never professed to be wise.

"But my comforter knows a lesson Wiser, truer than all the rest, That to help and to heal a sorrow, Love and silence are always best.

"Well, who is my comforter tell me! Effie smiles, but she will not speak, Or look up through the long, curled lashes That are shading her rosy cheek.

"Is she thinking of talking fishes, The blue-bird, or magical tree? Perhaps I am thinking, my darling, Of something that never can be.

"You long, don't you, dear, for the genii, Who were slaves of lamps and of rings? And I--I am sometimes afraid, dear, I want as impossible things.

"But, hark! there is nurse calling Effie! It is bedtime, so run away; And I must go back, or the others Will be wondering why I stay.

"So good-night to my darling Effie; Keep happy, sweetheart, and grow wise: There's one kiss for her golden tresses And two for her sleepy eyes."

We do not know where to look for anything like this. It is so graphic, so simple, so true. We, at least, never _realized_ a scene so vividly, so minutely, with all the details we would notice if it actually happened, and not a touch beyond, unless perhaps after reading Maud Müller. {566} The kind of force is in many respects the same, except that the woman-poet, as usual, says what the man-poet suggests of the inner life underlying. But it is excellently said, so well that one mentally declines to apply the principles of aesthetics, which would dictate Whittier's method as the more thoroughly artistic. How well the whole logic, or illogic, of that grand solace, a good cry, is given, and how natural and how sweet if one could only chance on an Effie that would not tell nurse all about it, to have a little "comforter" that would only know the grief and never care for the causes!

We have only one more poem to quote--one which we consider in many respects Miss Procter's best. If feeling, delicacy, pathos, truth, make beauty and poetry, this alone ought to entitle its author to distinction. Bare of all factitious ornament, carrying no overload of elegances, it goes straight to the heart of every mother, and strikes the deepest key-note in the organism of the world--motherhood. And it seems to us that, if all men today were to league against her memory, this poem should win her an immortality in the hearts of womankind:

Links With Heaven.

Our God in heaven, from that holy place To each of us an angel guide has given; But mothers of dead children have more grace, For they give angels to their God and heaven.

How can a mother's heart feel cold or weary, Knowing her dearer self safe, happy, warm? How can she feel her road too dark or dreary, Who knows her treasure sheltered from the storm?

How can she sin? Our hearts may be unheeding, Our God forgot, our holy saints defied; But can a mother hear her dead child pleading, And thrust those little angel hands aside?

Those little hands stretched down to draw her ever Nearer to God by mother love: we all Are blind and weak, yet surely she can never, With such a stake in heaven, fail or fall.

She knows that, when the mighty angels raise Chorus in heaven, one little silver tone Is hers forever; that one little praise, One little happy voice, is all her own.

We may not see her sacred crown of honor, But all the angels flitting to and fro Pause smiling as they pass--they look upon her As mother of an angel whom they know;

One whom they left nestled at Mary's feet-- The children's place in heaven--who softly sings A little chant to please them, slow and sweet, Or, smiling, strokes their little folded wings;

Or gives them her white lilies or her beads To play with: yet, in spite of flower or song, They often lift a wistful look that pleads And asks them why their mother stays so long.

Then our dear Queen makes answer she will call Her very soon: meanwhile they are beguiled To wait and listen while she tells them all A story of her Jesus as a child.

Ah! saints in heaven may pray with earnest will And pity for their weak and erring brothers; Yet there is prayer in heaven more tender still, The little children pleading for their mothers.

In conclusion, we think the world will not know for a while yet how much it has lost in Adelaide Anne Procter. Her time to be missed will come when Catholic England will need to be represented in the national literature. For those who will force it into recognition, there will of necessity be strong rather than fine intellects. Then the world will turn back to her pages, and wish she were but there to represent Catholicity in England; then she will be carefully read, and, once this happens, her place is assured. And yet, even then, we can never know her as she was; for beyond almost any author we recall, Miss Procter impresses us as being far superior to her works. She is the best of examples of her own doctrine of imperfect expression. The fulness and fineness of her nature strike one from the beginning as being immeasurable by what she has written. There is something exalted and tender, rich and yet reserved, about the life which animates her poems, that interests us uncommonly. And when we come to read of her, what was her life and what its aims, and, above all, when we see how she is mourned by those who held her dear here, we recognize her for one of those rare and beautiful hearts whom God loves too well to leave us long, and conclude, in laying down these broken reflections of her spirit, that her noblest poem was herself.

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The Indissolubility of Christian Marriage.

Number One.

The frightful corruption in the legislation and practice respecting divorce which has spread so widely during the past few years in our country has at last aroused the attention of those who are interested in the preservation of the public morals. They are beginning to write on the subject, and are casting about for the means of protecting the endangered institution of marriage. We feel it to be our duty to exercise what little influence we may possess in the community at large, in the same direction. At present, we shall restrict our remarks to one single point, which is the theological question of the lawfulness of divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_, for the cause of adultery, under the law of Christ. In order to make our intent and meaning plain, we shall begin by stating the proposition we wish to maintain. The marriage of Christians, validly ratified and consummated, is absolutely indissoluble; and therefore there can be no legal and valid divorce of the parties to such a marriage _a vinculo matrimonii_. The best and ablest Protestant writers admit this with one exception, that is, of the innocent party in the case of a marriage which has been violated by adultery. We leave them, therefore, to defend the indissolubility of marriage in all other cases, and confine ourselves to the one case in which they permit divorce.

The sole argument for the lawfulness of divorce in this instance is derived from the following texts in St. Matthew's gospel. "Whosoever shall put away his wife, _excepting for the cause of fornication_, causeth her to commit adultery." (v. 32.) "Whosoever shall put away his wife, _except it be for fornication_, and shall marry another, committeth adultery." (xix. 9.) The Catholic interpretation of these passages is, that our Lord permits a final separation _a mensâ et thoro_, for one cause, and one only, which is the grievous crime mentioned in these texts. In accordance with this interpretation, we explain these passages by the following paraphrase: "Whoever, for any lesser cause than the crime of adultery, separates himself finally from his wife, places both her and himself in the danger of sinning, and is guilty of creating a proximate occasion of adultery. If he separates himself from her on account of the grievous crime above mentioned, he is not responsible for her future crimes, nor is he guilty of placing himself without just cause in a condition in which the observance of his marriage vows becomes more difficult. Nevertheless, if he marries another, he commits adultery."

In order to sustain the truth of this interpretation, it is necessary to defend three propositions. First. That our Lord declared the bond of marriage indissoluble. Second. That he condemned all _soi-disant_ marriages of persons who were divorced, as adulterous. Third. That he permitted a final divorce _a mensâ et thoro_ simply, for the cause of adultery, and for no other.

The first proposition is established by all the texts of the New Testament which speak on the subject. We will first examine the text of St. Matthew, which includes the passage that is in dispute:

"And the Pharisees came to him, tempting him, and saying: Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said to them: Have ye not read, that he who made man in the beginning, made them male and female? {568} And he said: For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they two shall be in one flesh. Wherefore they are no more two, but one flesh. _What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder_. They say to him: why then did Moses command to give a bill of divorce, and to put away? He saith to them: Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so."

It is evident from these words of our Lord that the reason for the marriage of one man with only one woman, and for the perpetuity of this union, is founded in the law of nature and the primitive revelation of God to the founders of the human race. Also, that our Lord intended to restore marriage to its primitive and perfect law, abrogating all temporary dispensations in favor of polygamy and divorce. His commandment not to put asunder what God hath joined is universal, and establishes the principle that marriage is not dissoluble by human law. In the gospel of St. Mark we are further informed that "in the house again his disciples asked him concerning the same thing. And he said to them: Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if the wife shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery." (x. 11.) St. Luke also relates the words of our Lord with the same explicitness: "Every one that putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery; and he that marrieth her that is put away from her husband, committeth adultery." (xvi. 18.) The same doctrine is established by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: "For the woman that hath a husband, whilst her husband liveth, is bound to the law: but if her husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. Wherefore, whilst her husband liveth, she shall be called an adulteress if she be with another man: but if her husband be dead, she is free from the law of her husband: so that she is not an adulteress if she be with another man." (vii. 2, 3.) This passage lays down clearly and without exception the law that the bond of marriage can only be dissolved by death. It is confirmed by other texts in the first epistle to the Corinthians: "But to them that are married, not I, but the Lord commandeth, that the wife depart not from her husband: and if she depart, that she remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband. And let not the husband put away his wife." "A woman is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth: but if her husband die, she is at liberty: let her marry to whom she will; only in the Lord." (vii. 10, 11, 39.)

There can be no question between us and that class of strict Protestant moralists who allow of divorce only in one case, and of re-marriage even in that one case only by the innocent party, that the passages we have cited lay down in general terms the indissolubility of Christian marriage. The only point to be discussed, therefore, is, whether they are right or wrong in so interpreting our Lord's words as to permit re-marriage in this one particular case. If it cannot be shown that our Lord distinctly and positively releases the innocent party in this case from the _vinculum matrimonii_, our proposition stands firm that this _vinculum_ is in all cases indissoluble except by death.

In regard to this point we remark, first, that obscure passages ought to be interpreted in conformity with those which are clear, and not the reverse. The passages we have cited which proclaim the indissolubility of the marriage-bond are clear. Those which are cited in proof of the exception are obscure. It is not clear on the face of them how far the permission to dismiss the guilty wife extends, and the conclusion that this permission includes the permission to marry another woman is a mere inference. {569} The Catholic interpretation, that the permission extends no further than a divorce _a mensâ et thoro_, harmonizes those passages with all others in the New Testament which speak on the subject, and is, therefore, in itself more probable.

We remark, secondly, that the opposite interpretation is intrinsically improbable, because it contravenes the evident scope and intention of our Lord's words, which were to abrogate the special dispensations of the Mosaic law, and introduce a stricter law in conformity with the original institution of matrimony. Our opponents explain the law as giving the wife an equal privilege of divorcing her husband with that conceded to the husband. But, according to the law of Moses, the woman could not divorce her husband for any cause whatever. If, now, our Lord gave her this privilege, he relaxed the Mosaic law in an important respect. This is highly improbable, seeing that it is only by inference that we can apply the permission given the injured husband to dismiss his wife to the injured woman in similar circumstances. We admit fully that, our Lord did intend to give woman an equal right in the premises with that which he conceded to man. But, if that right had been the one claimed by our opponents it is not to be supposed that he would have failed to express it in clear and distinct terms. We argue that, as his whole scope was to make the law of marriage stricter, and as the law of Moses gave women no right of divorce, our Lord did not concede to Christian women that right. Our opponents admit that no more was conceded to men than to women, therefore no right of divorce was conceded to men.

We remark, thirdly, that the divorce permitted by our Lord cannot have been a divorce _a vinculo_, from the concession of our opponents, who admit that the guilty party is not released from it so as to be capable of contracting a second marriage.

They admit that the guilty party commits adultery by attempting another marriage, and that the person marrying the one divorced commits adultery. Adultery is not possible where there is no _vinculum matrimonii_ subsisting. But there can be no vinculum except between two parties. It is absurd that a woman should be bound to keep faith with the man who has another lawful wife. Therefore, on the principles of our opponents, since the guilty party is still in the bonds of the first marriage, the innocent party is so also.

Let us now examine the passage itself, which permits the dismissal of a guilty consort, to see if it can fairly be interpreted in accordance with the doctrine we have endeavored to establish. Our opponents argue that the sense of the passage is as follows: "Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, commits adultery, unless the cause of his putting her away was adultery on her part." Therefore, they say, if she was put away for the crime above mentioned, he does not commit adultery, though he marries another. The mere verbal construction admits of this interpretation, but does not positively require it. It may fairly be understood to mean this: "Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, commits adultery, and whosoever shall marry another commits adultery." That is, he who puts away his wife for any lesser cause, causes her to commit adultery, and exposes himself to the danger of committing the same sin, on account of the facility given by the civil law to both parties to contract second marriages, and also because of the danger in which a woman is placed, when cast off by her husband, of giving herself up to a bad life through want and desperation, especially in a state of society which is morally corrupt. And, much more, the one who actually does contract a second marriage during the lifetime of the wife whom he has repudiated commits adultery, by contracting an invalid marriage. Both acts are a violation of the marriage vows, the desertion of the wife, and the formation of a second, unlawful union with another; and, therefore, both are classed together, although it is only the latter which is strictly and technically called adultery.

{570}

Our opponents may justly say that the text does not require this interpretation, and that, if this really was the sense and meaning of our Lord, the apostle has expressed it in an elliptical and obscure manner. Very true. And if we had no other information than that which is furnished by St. Matthew, the real doctrine of our Lord would be doubtful. This is nothing strange or surprising. The sacred writers frequently speak in an obscure, in artificial, and elliptical manner, which obliges us to interpret their meaning from sources extraneous to the text. There is no evidence that all the words used by our Lord himself to explain his doctrine to the by-standers in public, or to his disciples in private, have been recorded with verbal accuracy or completeness. St. Matthew gave a brief summary of Christ's doctrine in his own language, which was intelligible to his readers at the time, because they already knew the law which had been promulgated in the Christian church. We hope to show hereafter what this law was, from evidence furnished by the early Christian writers and by the uniform canonical practice of the church. Meanwhile, we think we have proved that the general scope of the language of the New Testament sustains the doctrine of the indissolubility of Christian marriage.

Our second and third propositions have been established in the process of maintaining the first, and flow from it obviously. It is evident that, where the _vinculum matrimonii_ subsists between two persons, either of them who attempts marriage with a third party violates the rights of the lawful consort, and makes an invalid contract, whatever the civil law may decide to the contrary. It is also evident that our Lord did permit a final dissolution of the _connubium_ between married persons for one cause, and one only. If this dissolution is not a divorce _a vinculo_, it must be _a mensâ et thoro_. We leave the subject here for the present, hoping to resume it again at a convenient opportunity; and we respectfully recommend to our learned readers, who are desirous of investigating it fully, the work of Perrone, _De Matrimonio Christiano_, 3 vols. Rome, 1858.

Miscellany.

_The Magnetic Polarity of Rifles_. Mr. J. Spiller has lately made some very interesting observations respecting the magnetic power assumed by rifles. He finds that all the long Enfield barrels of the arms in the possession of the volunteers of his company exhibit magnetic polarity as the result of the violent and repeated concussions attending their discharge in a direction parallel to the magnetic meridian. The Royal Arsenal range runs nearly north and south, and the rifles, when in use, are always pointed either due north or a few degrees toward the west--in fact, nearly in the direction indicated by a compass-needle--so that the repeated shocks brought about by the explosion of the powder may, Mr. Spiller thinks, be considered equivalent to so many hard blows from a hammer, which, as is well known, have a similar effect. Mr. Spiller goes on to say that the magnetic character appears to be permanent, which would not be the case if the gun-barrels were of the softest description of malleable iron; and the region of the breech is, in every instance, possessed of north polarity, since it strongly attracts the south pole of the compass needle. {571} These effects should not be noticed at all, or only to an inferior degree, in arms ordinarily fired in directions east and west; and it is supposed that by reversing the usual practice, if it were possible, and firing towards the south, the indications of polarity would be changed.

_Mont Cenis Railway_.--In a paper read before the Institute of Civil Engineers, Capt. H. W. Tyler has fully described the results of experiments with Mr. Fell's locomotive, which has been adopted for surmounting the steep gradients and sharp curves of the Mont Cenis route. On Mr. Fell's system an intermediate or centre rail is adopted, against which horizontal wheels worked by the engine are pressed by springs, so as to yield any requisite amount of adhesion. The engine constructed for the Mont Cenis line is partly of steel; its weight fully loaded does not exceed 17 tons. There are two 15-inch cylinders working both the four coupled horizontal and the four coupled bearing wheels. The pressure on the additional horizontal wheels can be varied by the engine-driver at pleasure; during the experiments it amounted to from 2½ to 3 tons on each wheel, or 10 tons altogether, but provision was made for increasing this pressure to 24 tons if necessary. During the official trials, with a load of 24 tons exclusive of the engine, on an average gradient of 1 in 13, with curves of 2 to 4 chains radius, the speed of 6.65 miles to 7.46 miles per hour was attained in ascending. With a load of 16 tons the speed was 10 miles.

_Fossil Man in the Rhine Valley_.--In the Lehm of the valley of the Rhine, near Colmar, there is a marly deposit composed of a mixture of clay, fine sand, and carbonate of lime. It forms part of the diluvial beds, and in it M. Faudel has found a number of human and other remains. These consisted of shells, bones of a huge stag, teeth of _Elephas primigenuis_, and a human frontal and right parietal bone of a man of middle size. M. Faudel concludes that man was contemporaneous with the mammoth fossil stag and bison.

_Tobacco Smoking Injurious to the Eyes_.--In a recent number (February 15) of the Bulletin de Thérapeutique, M. Viardin describes two cases of serious eye affection (amblyopia) resulting from the habit of smoking. M. Viardin at once, on learning the habits of the patients, induced them to smoke a much smaller quantity of tobacco than usual, and the result was a complete restoration of vision in a few weeks from the date of their application.

_Intermittent Fevers produced by Vegetable Organisms_.--Some time since, we called attention to Dr. Salisbury's observations, tending to support the theory expressed above. More recently these ideas have been, in some measure, confirmed by Professor Hannon, of the University of Brussels. In 1843, says M. Hannon, "I studied at the University of Liege; Professor Charles Morsen had created in me such an enthusiasm in the study of the fresh-water algae that the windows and mantel-piece of my chamber were encumbered with plates filled with vaucheria, oscillatoria, and confervae. My preceptor said to me: 'Take care at the period of their fructification, for the spores of the algae give intermittent fever. I have had it every time I have studied them too closely.' As I cultivated my algae in pure water, and not in the water of the marsh where I had gathered them, I did not attach any importance to his remark. I suffered for my carelessness a month later, at the period of their fructification. I was taken with shivering; my teeth chattered; I had the fever, which lasted six weeks."

_Origin of Petroleum_.--Although nearly all geologists are agreed as to the organic origin of petroleum, a great many are of opinion that the rock-oil is the result of a natural distillation of coal. Professor Hitchcock, however, no mean authority, comes to a different conclusion. Admitting, with all who have carefully studied the matter, that petroleum is of organic origin, he says that, in his opinion, it comes from plants, and that it is not, as some have suggested, a fish-oil or a substance altered to adipocere. It does not appear to be the result of a natural distillation of coal, since its chemical composition is different from the oil manufactured artificially from the cannels, containing neither nitro-benzole nor aniline. Moreover, petroleum occupied fissures in the silurian and devonian strata long before the trees of the coal period were growing in their native forests. The nearly universal association of brine with petroleum, and the fact of the slight solubility of hydrocarbons in fresh, but insolubility in salt water, excite the inquiry whether the salt water of primeval lagoons may not have prevented the escape of the vegetable gases beneath, and condensed them into liquids.

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_Structure of the Liver._--Dr. Lionel Beale's opinion as to the structure of the vertebrate liver has been recently substantiated by the researches of Herr Hering. This histologist states that the liver is constructed like the other secreting glands. It is of the tubular type, with canals, anastomosing in every direction, and having a tendency to form a series of networks. Like other secretions, the bile travels along glandular canals surrounded by glandular cells. It is easy (he says) to observe this arrangement in the livers of vertebrates. Five or more cells are disposed in simple layers around the circular and minute aperture of a hepatic utricle seen in transverse section. This arrangement loses itself insensibly in that variety of structure in which there are no utricles properly so called. Occasionally may be seen four, three, or even only two cells, uniting to form a biliary canal. The Russian anatomist denies the existence of hepatic trabeculae of biliferous capillaries, and believes that the biliary cells are persistent. He looks upon serpents' livers as the only organs for minute inquiries upon the subject.

_The Cometary Theory of Shooting-Stars--to whom does it belong?_--The Abbé Moigno, who has broached this question, and who evidently feels strongly on the point, makes the following observations in our contemporary, the Chemical News, of March 15th: "In a quite recent note inserted on March 3d, in the International Bulletin of the Imperial Observatory, and on the 8th inst. in the Bulletin of the Scientific Association of France, M. Le Verrier resumes on the cometary theory of shooting-stars, and persists in attributing the honor of it to himself, without condescending to mention the name of Schiaparelli, whose letters, however, have been published in a journal of great authority, the Meteorological Bulletin of the College of Rome, issued under the superintendence of the Rev. P. Secchi, and were translated by the writer before M. Le Verrier had published a single word of his researches. We are really frightened by this system of organized cool-blooded appropriation, and more so by these lines, the effect of which has been even more coolly calculated: _'Sir John Herschel, who, along with his son, Alexander Herschel, has paid great attention to shooting-stars, gives his complete assent to_ the theory of the swarms of November.' Poor M. Schiaparelli! Happily the Astronomische Nachrichten have collected the necessary papers, and he will soon be in a position of having his revenge."

_New Form of Telegraphy._--An invention for the transmission of despatches by an automatic electro-chemical method has been devised by MM. Vavin and Fribourg. Its object is to utilize all the velocity of the current on telegraphic lines. The Abbé Moigno, who has called attention to it in England, gives the following description of it: It consists in the distribution of the current through as many small wires, very short and isolated, as there are signals to be transmitted, all the while only employing one wire on the main line. Each of these small isolated wires communicates, on the one hand, with a metallic plate, of a particular form, fixed in gutta-percha; and, on the other, with a metallic division of a disc, which is also formed of an insulating substance. A group of eleven of those small laminae form a sort of cipher, which will give all the letters of the alphabet by the suppression of certain portions of the fundamental form. "Now," says the abbé, "suppose rows of these compound characters to be placed on a sheet of prepared paper of a metallic nature, the words of the telegram to be sent are written on them with isolating ink, leaving the other parts of the small 'stereotyped' blocks untouched. The consequence is that the current is intercepted at every point touched by the ink, and a letter is, imprinted on the prepared paper at the other end of the line where the telegram is to be received."

_A Cheap and Ingenious Ice Machine._--M. Tonelli, says the Abbé Moigno, has just devised an ice-making machine which bids fair to become very popular in this country, since it is convenient, cheap, and efficient. The inventor calls it the "_glacier roulante_." It is a simple metallic cylinder mounted on a foot. The salt of soda and the salt of ammonia are added in two operations, the smaller cylinder, containing the water to be frozen, is introduced into the interior, and the orifice is close by an india-rubber disc, and then by a cover fastened with a catch; the cylinder is then placed in a sac, or case of cloth, and it is made to roll on the table with a slight oscillatory movement given by the hand. {573} After a lapse of ten minutes, the water in the interior of the cylinder becomes a beautiful cylinder of ice. Nothing is more simple, more economical, or more efficacious than the new "glacier roulante" which costs 10 fr., and gives us, moreover, what could not hitherto be obtained with an apparatus containing freezing mixtures the means of freezing a decanter of water or a bottle of champagne. The apparatus, in a case, packed for travelling, with 20 kilogrammes of refrigerating materials and a measure, costs, at present, only 1_l._--_Popular Science Review._

_The "Cybele Hibernica."_--The invaluable work which Mr. Watson achieved for England is being imitated on the other side of the Irish Channel. Messrs. Moore & More have issued a volume upon the subject of the distribution of Irish plants, and the facts it lays before the botanical public are both numerous and interesting. Taking the number of species for Britain proper at Mr. Watson's estimate of 1,425 species, the authors of the "Cybele Hibernica" claim for Ireland about 1,000 species. Of the 532 plants of the British type, Ireland has all, or very nearly so. The Atlantic type is the only other one where she has decidedly more than half, forty-one species out of seventy. Of the boreal species, (Highland, Scottish, and intermediate types taken together,) although there is not a single one of the twelve provinces in which there is not a hill of upward of 2,000 feet in altitude, Ireland has only 106 species out of 238. Of the 458 English and local species she has just over one half; and, finally, out of the 127 Germanic species only 18.

Original.

New Publications.

History Of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the death of Elizabeth. By James Anthony Froude, M. A. Vols. VII., VIII., IX. and X. 12mo. New York: Charles Scribner & Co.

The four volumes of this work which are now before us carry the history of the reign of Elizabeth from her accession to the death of Maitland and Grange, and the consequent extinction of the Mary Stuart party in 1573. The wars and troubles in Ireland, the invasion of Ulster, the insurrections and death of Shan O'Neil, the quarrels of the Ormonds and the Desmonds; the career of John Knox; the reign of Mary Queen of Scots; the English maritime adventures of the sixteenth century; and the St. Bartholomew massacre, are some of the exciting topics which Mr. Froude touches with his brilliant pen, and upon which he lavishes his wonderful powers of narration and his skill of dramatic arrangement. That our readers should be satisfied with the pictures he presents to them is not to be expected. They must not look in his pages for candor or judicial calmness. They will find Mary Stuart painted here in darker and more horrible colors than in any other modern work; John Knox lauded as "the one supremely great man that Scotland possessed;" and the Huguenot massacre detailed with all the exaggerations and harrowing circumstances which the partisan spirit of former historians has spread about it. Mr. Froude is too anxious to make an effective story ever to be an honest historian. A picturesque grouping of events and persons has a temptation for his refined literary taste which often overcomes the cardinal principle of historical composition, to tell the truth and the whole truth. The extravagant admiration of the Tudor dynasty with which he began to write has not cooled with the progress of his labors. The fealty which he held to Henry and Edward he has now transferred unshaken to Elizabeth; but there is this to be said for him, that Elizabeth, with all her many faults, (and now and again even Mr. Froude recognizes some of them,) possessed many really great qualities, which the most uncompromising of her enemies must admire.

{574}

We have no purpose to go into the vexed question of the character of Mary Queen of Scots; but it is only fair to mention that Mr. Froude fortifies his unfavorable conclusions by copious references to authorities which have only recently been brought to light, and that he has enjoyed in particular a free use of the important manuscript archives of Simancas to which historians were so long denied access.

The Student Of Blenheim Forest; or, The Trials of a Convert. By Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey. John Murphy & Co. Baltimore.

This is a new and revised edition of an old work. It is a narrative of the trials of a convert from Protestantism to the Catholic Church at the time it was written. These trials, thank God, are daily becoming less as the doctrine and practice of the church become better known, and prejudice and misrepresentation disappear. Not every convert is called to pass through such trials as the hero of this tale, although all should have the same willingness to suffer for Christ, to give up friends and worldly hopes rather than be untrue to one's conviction.

The scene is laid in Virginia, and gives us a vivid picture of Southern life. We think, in a book intended for general reading and the diffusion of Catholic truth, it would be better to omit unfriendly allusion to what the authoress calls the "cold customs of the North."

Studies In English; Or, Glimpses Of The Inner Life Of Our Language. By M. Schele de Vere, LL.D., Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Virginia. London: Trübner & Co. New-York: Charles Scribner & Co. Printed at the Riverside Press, Cambridge.

This is one of the few American books we are called upon to notice which make a real and important addition to any solid and useful branch of learning outside of the circle of the physical sciences. It is a thoroughly scholarly production, full of the most instructive information regarding the history, formation, and component elements of the English language. This information is communicated not in a dry, technical, and college-text-book manner, but in a graceful, charming, and entertaining style, rich in illustrations and apt references to classic authors, which makes the reading of the book a true pleasure. Happily, the author does not ride the Anglo-Saxon or any other hobby, but does full justice to the Latin, Celtic, and other elements of the language. It is especially interesting to the Catholic reader to notice the abundant evidence the author furnishes of the ineffaceable impress the Catholic religion has stamped upon the English language. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of a thorough study and right understanding of _words_ as the signs of thoughts, the vehicles of the transmission of truths, the current coin of the intellectual kingdom. It is this which is one great secret of the power possessed by such great masters of the divine faculty of speech as Dr. Brownson and Dr. Newman. Sophists, like Carlyle, corrupt thought by corrupting language, and confused, inconsistent reasoners, like Dr. Pusey, obscure truth by obscuring language. The volume before us will prove an invaluable aid to the scholar who wishes to study the pure, good, sound sense, and correct use of our mother tongue. We think the author betrays some English prejudice, in ascribing a peculiar faculty of understanding the genuine doctrine of the Scriptures to the English people. This is a spice of the Anglican "True Church" theory, which all the rest of mankind laugh at. We think, also, that he somewhat exaggerates the excellence of the English language, and its influence on the world. We were reminded while reading his eulogium on the English language of the verse of Kenelm Digby:

"Greek's a harp we like to hear, Latin hath a trumpet clear, Italian rings like marriage-bells, While Spain her solemn organ swells, French with many a frolic mien Tunes her jocund violin, The German beats her heavy drum As Russian's clashing symbols come; But Britain's sons may well rejoice, _For English is the human voice._"

The English people are proud, and the American people are vain of a fancied superiority in all things, except the fine arts, over the rest of mankind. Neither are aware how far behind some other nations they are in many of the highest branches of science and literature. A little boasting will, therefore, add to the popularity of an author in the English language, as indeed it will in any other. {575} We will not quarrel over this point with Professor De Vere, for nothing is more difficult than a precisely accurate judgment concerning the relative merits of the principal modern languages. We have a mother tongue with which we have every reason to be satisfied, and therefore let us try to use it well, and preserve it from corruption. On this head, we have great reason to fear for the future, and therefore we give a hearty welcome to the learned professor's suggestion that an English Academy should be constituted, which shall decide all questions respecting the spelling, pronunciation, and right use of English words.

It is enough to say that this volume is from the Riverside press to guarantee its typographical excellence, and we hope this circumstance will counterbalance, in those minds disposed to be rigid in excluding everything which has not the Boston stamp, the fact that the author hails from Virginia.

Antoine De Bonneval. A Tale of Paris in the days of St. Vincent de Paul. By Rev. W. H. Anderdon. Kelly & Piet, Baltimore.

In this narrative are portrayed some of the most exciting scenes in French history. It tells of that period in which Richelieu, Mazarin, St. Vincent de Paul, and Monsieur Olier figured so largely, and whose history is so suggestive to the thoughtful reader. The style is vigorous and the volume worthy of a place in a Sunday-school or parochial library.

Etudes Philologiques Sur Quelques Langues Sauvages De L'amerique. Par N. O., Ancien Missionnaire. Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 55 Grande Rue St. Jacques. 1866.

The Indian dialects of North America deserve a more attentive study than they have yet received. If the inquirer did no more than confine his researches to the languages spoken by the Algic tribes, (to use an epithet happily devised by Schoolcraft to designate the native races found east of the Alleghanies,) the compensation would be fairly worth the work. Resolved into two groups, the Algonquin and Iroquois, these varieties of speech present contrasts so striking and analogies so rare as to forbid the theory of a derivation from a common stock. The words of these two families of tongues are not only wholly dissimilar, but are, for the most part, mutually unpronounceable. The Algonquin cannot articulate an _f_ or an _r_; while the Iroquois, to whom these sounds are familiar, can make nothing of a _b_ or an _m_. The two languages, with the doubtful exception of a corrupt dialect, and then in words evidently borrowed from the conqueror, agree in little else than an odd aversion to the letter _l_, and, we may add perhaps, in a plentiful lack of adjectives and a most oppressive multiplicity of _verbs_.

It is in this last-mentioned field (the analysis of Algic verbs) that our author N. O. has exerted his main strength, and has given the best proofs of his linguistic skill. The Algonquin verb to love, _sakih_, expatiates, in the course of twenty-two pages of this treatise, into two active and three passive voices, served by eight moods, three past tenses, two futures, and two first persons plural, with participles and gerunds to match; and all subject to fifteen accidents, corresponding to the various modifications of Semitic verbs. The Iroquois verb, though in quite another way, rejoices also in conjugations, moods, tenses, and numbers not unworthy of comparison with the Greek, subject to secondary forms more or less resembling the Semitic. The Algonquin participle may assume a negative shape, and it is this nullifying syllable _si_ that mainly distinguishes the two words which in that language signify Catholic and Protestant. The Catholics are _tcipaiatikonamatizodjik_, literally, "they who make upon their own persons the sign of the wood of the dead body of Christ." "Protestants" (having as usual failed to make themselves understood except as deniers of Catholicity, and who are _nothing if not negative_) are _tcipaiatikonamatizosigok_, "those who do _not_ make upon themselves the sign of the wood of the dead body of Christ." It is to be hoped that the theologians of the two professions have shorter and more convenient terms when they resort, as they have been known to do, to the refreshment of reciprocal objurgation.

We regret that we cannot go into details. The book is pleasantly written, lucidly arranged, and full of satisfactory evidence of a keen perception of philological distinctions. We cordially recommend it to those who are ambitious to gain an insight into the philosophy of the languages, before they also (we mean the languages) take their inevitable turn to be numbered with the dead.

{576}

The Literary Character Of The Bible. A Lecture delivered before the Wilmington Institute. By H. Beecher Swoope, Attorney-at-law.

The author delivered and now publishes this as "A Lawyer's tribute to the Bible," and it is surely a very graceful one. It shows a just appreciation of the literary excellences of the sacred volume, of the grandeur of its history, the depth of its philosophy, the sublimity of its poetry. We dislike, however, this consideration of the inspired volume merely as a literary production, without keeping in view its sacred character as the word of God. Containing as it does, the revelation of God's infinite perfections, it must necessarily contain all that is most beautiful, profound, sublime. We agree with the author that, "in order to bring out all the hidden beauties of the original Scriptures, we need a new translation brought fully up to the present standard of our language," and that "our present version of the Bible is sublime, grand, and beautiful, only because many of the ideas and conceptions are so essentially great and lofty that they necessarily appear magnificent in the most artless dress."

Catholic Anecdotes; Or, The Catechism In Examples. Illustrating the Sacraments. By the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Translated from the French by Mrs. J. Sadlier. New-York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co.

This is the third and last part of this series of anecdotes. They are intended to assist those engaged in teaching the Christian doctrine, by giving them examples illustrative of the subject they may be teaching. They are arranged in the same order as the subject matter of the Catechism, and are well adapted for this purpose.

Lives And Times Of The Roman Pontiffs. 2 vols. Sadliers.

This great work, in two large quarto volumes of nearly 1000 pages each, is a translation from the French of the Chevalier Artaud de Montor. The author is both a well-informed historian and an elegant writer. Although there are some faults in the translation, and some typographical errors, the value of the work is nevertheless very great, and it is a noble addition to our Catholic literature. There is much beauty in the mechanical execution, and the illustrations are numerous. Many of the portraits and other illustrations are excellent, though a few are quite indifferent. The preface is carelessly written, and has not the excellence which ought to characterize the introduction to such a great work. The hand of a finished scholar would have done great good in retouching the whole work, which is, notwithstanding its minor defects, on the whole a superb one and a credit to its publishers.

Christianity And Its Conflicts, Ancient And Modern. By E. E. Marcy, A.M. New-York: Appleton & Co. For sale by the Catholic Publication Society, 126 Nassau street.

This work comes upon our table just as we are going to press. A rapid glance over its contents shows us that it presents a comprehensive view of the church and its work, contrasted with the vain and fruitless attempts made by her enemies to set up a rival system of Christianity. It is a work which will be widely read and excite no little interest, and deserves at our hands a more extended critical notice, which we propose to give it in our next issue. It is not an ordinary book of controversy, and we advise our readers in the mean time to get a copy and read it.

H. McGrath, Philadelphia, announces a new and illustrated volume of Poems, by E. A. S.

Books Received.

From P. O'Shea, New-York. The Beauties of Faith; or, Power of Mary's Patronage. Leaves from the Ave Maria. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 272 and 145. Price, $2.

From Charles Scribner & Co., New-York. Liber Librorum; its Structure, Limitations, and Purpose. A friendly communication to a reluctant sceptic. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 232. Price, $1.50.

Studies in English; or, Glimpses of the Inner Life of our Language. By M. Schele de Vere, LL.D. 1 vol. 12mo. Price, $2.50.

From D. & J. Sadlier & Co., New-York. Peter of Castle and the Fetches. By the Brothers Banim. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 348. Price, $1.50.

From M. Doolady, New-York. The History of Pendennis, etc. By W. M. Thackeray. 1 vol. 16mo, pp. 479. Diamond Ed.

From the author. Dion and the Sibyls; a Romance of the First Century. By Miles Gerald O'Reilly, H. M. Colonial Secretary in Bermuda. 2 vols. 8vo Richard Bentlev, London.

From Leypoldt & Holt, New-York. Fathers and Sons. A Novel. By Ivan Sergheievitch Turgeneff. Translated from the Russian by Eugene Schuyler, Ph.D. 1 vol. 12mo. Price, $1.50.

The Man with the Broken Ear; from the French of Edmond About. By Henry Holt. 1 vol. l2mo. Price, $1.50.

From P. F. Cunningham, Philadelphia. Stories of the Commandments; The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy; Caroline, or Self-Conquest. Being vols. 16, 17, and 18 of the Young Catholic's Library. Price, 50 cents each.

{577}

The Catholic World.

Vol. V., No. 29.--August, 1867.

Original.

Guettée's Papacy Schismatic. [Footnote 176]

[Footnote 176: See The Catholic World, July, 1867.]

M. Guettée, it will be remembered, undertakes to establish two propositions --first, "The bishop of Rome did not for eight centuries possess the authority of divine right which he has since sought to exercise; and second, The pretension of the bishop of Rome to the sovereignty of divine right over the whole church was the real cause of the division," or schism between the East and the West. To the first proposition, we have replied, the bishop of Rome is in possession, and it is for the author to prove that he is not rightfully in possession. This he can do only by proving either, first, that no such title by divine right was ever issued; or, second, that it vests in an adverse claimant. He sets up no adverse claimant, but attempts to make it appear that no such title as is claimed was ever issued. This he attempts to do by showing that the proofs of title usually relied on by Catholic writers are negatived by the Holy Scriptures and the testimony of the fathers and councils of the first eight centuries. We have seen that he has signally failed so far as the Holy Scriptures and the fathers of the first three centuries are concerned; nay, that instead of proving his proposition, he has by his own witnesses refuted it, and proved that the title did issue, and did vest in St. Peter, and consequently now vests in the bishop of Rome as Peter's successor.

This alone is enough for us, and renders any further discussion of the first proposition unnecessary. After the testimony of St. Cyprian, who is his own witness, the author really has nothing more to say. He has lost his case. But, ignorant of this, he proceeds in the fourth division of his work to interrogate the fathers and councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, but even less successfully, as we now proceed to show. We only beg the reader to bear in mind that we are not adducing our proofs of the papacy by divine right, but are simply examining the proofs the author adduces against it. We do not put forth the strength of our cause, which is not necessary in the present argument; we are only showing the weakness of the case the author makes against us.

The author attempts to devise an argument against the papal authority from the sixth canon of the council of Nicaea. This canon, as he cites it, reads: "Let the ancient custom be preserved that exists in Egypt, Lybia, and Pentapolis, that the bishop of Alexandria have authority in all these countries, since that has also passed into a custom for the bishop of Rome. {578} Let the churches at Antioch and in the other provinces preserve also their privileges." It must not be supposed that the author cites the canon with any degree of exactness, or faithfully renders it; but let that pass. From this canon two consequences, he contends, necessarily follow: first, That "the council declared that the authority of the bishop of Rome extended over a limited district, like that of the bishop of Alexandria; and second, That this authority was only based on usage," (p. 95.)

But the authority of the bishop of Rome was not in question before the council, for that nobody disputed. "The object of the canon," the author himself says, pp. 93, 94, "was to defend the authority of the bishop of Alexandria against the partisans of Meletius, bishop of Lycopolis, who refused to recognize it in episcopal ordinations; .... therefore was merely to confirm the ancient customs respecting these ordinations, and, in general, the privileges consecrated by ancient usages. Now, according to an ancient custom Rome enjoyed certain prerogatives that no one contested. The council makes use of this fact in order to confirm the similar prerogatives of Alexandria, Antioch, and other churches."

The question before the council, and which it met by this canon, evidently was not the primacy of the see of Rome--although it would seem from the form in which the papal legate, Paschasinus, quoted it, without contradiction, in the council of Chalcedon, that the council of Nicaea took care to reserve that primacy--but certain customary rights, privileges, and dignities which the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and some other churches held in common with the bishop of Rome. As the ancient custom was preserved in the Roman Church, the council says, so let it be in Alexandria, Antioch, and other churches. The council refers to the custom in Rome as a reason for confirming the similar custom which had obtained elsewhere, and which had been violated by Meletius of Lycopolis in Egypt, and by his partisans.

To understand this, we must recollect that prior to the fall of the great patriarchates of Alexandria and the East, the administration of ecclesiastical affairs was less centralized than at present. Now nearly all, if not all bishops depend immediately on the Holy See, but in the early ages they depended on it only mediately. The bishops of a province or of a patriarchate depended immediately on their exarch, metropolitan, or patriarch, and only mediately through him on the bishop of Rome. The appointment or election of the patriarch, and of the exarch or metropolitan of a church independent of any patriarch, as were the churches of Asia Minor, Pontus, and Thrace, needed the papal confirmation, but not their suffragans, or the bishops subject to their immediate jurisdiction. The patriarch or metropolitan confirmed their election, ordained or deposed them by his own authority, subject of course to appeal to Rome. Lycopolis, by ancient custom or canons of the fathers, depended on the bishop of Alexandria, who was its bishop's immediate superior. For some reason, Meletius, bishop of Lycopolis, had been deposed by the bishop of Alexandria, and deprived of his functions; but he refused to submit, ordained bishops by his own authority, contrary to the ancient custom, and created a schism, was to meet this case, and others like it, that the council decreed the sixth canon.

The authority confirmed by that canon was the authority of patriarchs, as they were subsequently called, and of metropolitans by usage independent of any patriarchal jurisdiction, and therefore the authority of the bishop of Rome which it recognized as derived from usage, could have been only his authority as metropolitan of the Suburbicarian churches, called the Roman territory, or as patriarch of the West. {579} That this authority was limited, and dependent on ancient usage or custom, nobody disputes; but this is distinct from his authority as supreme pontiff or governor of the whole church. There are instances enough on record of metropolitan churches, like Aquileia, and those of Illyrium and Bulgaria, disputing their immediate dependence on the bishop of Rome, that never dreamed of calling in question his authority as supreme pontiff, or governor of the whole church. The schismatic Armenians do not deny and never have denied the supreme authority in the whole church of the bishop of Rome; they only assert that the pope gave to their apostle, Gregory the Illuminator, and to his successors, the independent government of the church in Armenia. St. Cyprian depended on the bishop of Rome, and acknowledged the papal authority, but it is questionable if he depended on him as patriarch of the West. We suspect Carthage was independent of patriarchal jurisdiction, and that St. Cyprian had no superior but the pope. However this may have been, the fact that churches did not depend immediately on the bishop of Rome did not in any sense deny or impair his universal authority as supreme pontiff. So the argument against the papacy from the sixth canon of the council of Nicaea, like the author's other arguments, proves nothing to his purpose.

M. Guettée, in his blind hatred of Rome, after having alleged the authority of the council of Nicaea in his own favor, undertakes to prove that it was no council of the church at all, but merely a council of the empire. He labors hard to prove that it was convoked by the Emperor Constantine by virtue of his imperial authority alone, that the emperor presided in its sessions, and confirmed and promulgated its acts. Does he not see that if it was so, the council had no ecclesiastical authority, and therefore that its acts have no bearing on the question before us? If anything is certain, it is that the church, as a polity, is independent of the state, and that civil rulers or magistrates, as such, have no authority in her government. Civil rulers have often usurped authority over the church and oppressed her: they did so at Constantinople, as Gregory III. complains; they attempted to do so all through the middle ages in the West, and they do so now to a most fearful extent in the Russian empire, as in all European Protestant states; but the authority they exercise is usurped, and is repugnant to the very nature and constitution of the church. Our Lord said, "My kingdom is not of this world." The Non-united Greeks as well as Catholics hold that there is and can be no oecumenical council without the bishop of Rome to convoke it, preside over it, and to confirm and promulgate its acts; and hence they confess their inability to hold an oecumenical council, and therefore really acknowledge that they are not the Catholic Church in its integrity though they claim to hold the orthodox faith. They admit the Roman Church is the primatial see, and that the presidency of a general council belongs to the bishop of Rome by the right and dignity of his see. If he did not preside in the council of Nicaea in person or by his legates or representatives, and approve formally or virtually its acts, it could not, by their own doctrine, have the authority of a general council. The confirmation and promulgation of its canons by the emperor might make them laws or edicts of the empire, but could not make them canons of the church.

It would be no difficult matter to prove that the author is as much out in his facts as in his inferences. The universal church has recognized the council of Nicaea as a legitimate council, and there are ample authorities to prove that its convocation and indiction were at the request or with the assent of the Roman pontiff, that he presided over it by his legates, Osius, bishop of Cordova, and Vitus and Vincentius, two Roman presbyters; that he virtually, if not formally, confirmed and published its acts; and that whatever the emperor did was merely executory; but the question is foreign to our present argument, and we have no space to indulge in extraneous or irrelevant discussions. {580} If we were endeavoring to prove the papacy, we should adduce the proofs; but our line of argument requires us only to refute the reasons the author alleges for asserting that the papacy is schismatic. If the council of Nicaea was simply an imperial council, we have nothing to do with it; if it was a true general council of the church, it makes nothing for the author, for the sixth canon, the only one relied on, has, as the author cites it, no reference to the jurisdiction of the Holy Apostolic See of Rome.

M. Guettée pretends that the third canon of the second general council, the first of Constantinople, contains a denial of the papal authority by divine right. The canon, as he cites it, which is only the concluding part of it, says: "Let the bishop of Constantinople have the primacy of honor (_priores honoris partes_) after the bishop of Rome, _because Constantinople is the new Rome._" Hence he concludes that as the primacy conferred on the bishop of Constantinople was only a primacy of honor, the bishop of Rome had only a primacy of honor; and as the primacy of honor was conferred on the bishop of Constantinople because that city was the new Rome, so the primacy of the bishop of Rome was conferred because he was the bishop of old Rome, or the capital of the empire. The reasoning, which is Guettéean, if we may coin a word, is admirable, and we shall soon see what St. Leo the Great thinks of it. But the canon does not affect the authority, rank, or dignity of the bishop of Rome; it simply gives the bishop of Constantinople the precedence of the bishop of Alexandria, who had hitherto held the first rank after the bishop of Rome. It conferred on him no power, and took nothing from the authority of any one else. It was simply a matter of politeness. Besides, the canon remained without effect.

From the second general council the author rushes, pp. 96, 97, to the fourth, the council of Chalcedon, held under the pontificate of St. Leo Magnus, in 451, and lights upon the twenty-eighth canon of that council, which, as he gives it, reads: "In all things following the decrees of the holy fathers, and recognizing the canon just read (the third of the second council) by the one hundred and fifty bishops well beloved of God, we decree and establish the same thing touching the most holy church of Constantinople, the new Rome. Most justly did the fathers grant privileges to the see of ancient Rome, because she was the reigning (capital) city. Moved by the same motive the one hundred and fifty bishops well beloved of God grant equal privileges to the most holy see of the new Rome, thinking, very properly, that the city that has the honor to be the seat of the empire and the senate should enjoy in ecclesiastical things the same privileges as Rome, the ancient queen city, since the former, although of later origin, has been raised and honored as much as the former. In consequence of this decree the council subjected the dioceses of Pontus, Asia, (Asia Minor,) and Thrace to the jurisdiction of Constantinople."

Of course the author cites the canon with his usual inexactness, and makes it appear even more illogical and absurd than it really was. The alleged canon professes to decree and establish the same thing decreed and established by the one hundred and fifty bishops who composed the second council, in their third canon, which as we have seen, was simply that the bishop of Constantinople should have the primacy of honor after the bishop of Rome, that is the second rank in the church. The canon, therefore, does not deprive the Roman pontiff of his rank, dignity, and authority as primate of the whole church, and therefore did not, as it could not, raise the see of Constantinople to an equal rank and dignity with the see of Rome. This was never pretended, and is not pretended by the author himself. {581} The council never could, without stultifying itself, have intended anything of the sort, for it gave to the bishop of Rome the title of "universal bishop," and it says expressly: "We consider the primacy of all and the chief honor, according to the canons, should be preserved to the most beloved of God, the archbishop of Rome." [Footnote 177] The Non-united Greeks and the author himself concede that the Church of Rome was and is the first church in rank and dignity.

[Footnote 177: Act, xvi. col. 637. _Apud_ Kenrick.]

Whatever value, then, is to be attached to this twenty-eighth canon it did not and was not designed to affect in any respect the rank, dignity, or authority of the Roman pontiff. What was attempted by it was to erect the non-apostolic see of Constantinople or Byzantium into a patriarchal see, with jurisdiction over the metropolitans of Pontus, Asia Minor, Thrace, and such as should be ordained in barbarous countries, that is, in countries lying beyond the limits of the empire, and to give its bishop the first rank after the patriarch of the West. It sought to reduce the bishop of Alexandria from the second to the third, and the bishop of Antioch from the third to the fourth rank, but it did not touch the power or authority of either. It violated the rights and privileges of the metropolitans of Pontus, Asia Minor, and Thrace, by subjecting them to a patriarchal jurisdiction from which, by ancient usage, confirmed by the sixth canon of the council of Nicaea, they were exempt.

The author relies on this canon because it asserts that the privileges of the see of Rome were granted by the fathers, and granted _because_ Rome was the capital city of the empire. This sustains his position, that the importance the fathers attached to the see of Rome was not because it was the see of Peter, but because it was the see of the capital--a position we showed, in our previous article, to be untenable and also that the authority exercised by the Roman pontiff over the whole church, which he cannot deny, was not by divine right, but by ecclesiastical right. But even if this last were so, since there is confessedly no act of the universal church revoking the grant, the power would be legitimate, and the author and his friends the Non-united Greeks would be bound by a law of the church to obey the Roman pontiff, and clearly schismatics in refusing to obey him. But we have seen from St. Cyprian, the author's own witness, that the primacy was conferred by our Lord himself on the Roman pontiff as the successor of Peter to constitute him the visible centre and source of unity and authority. Besides, a canon, beyond what it decrees or defines, is not authoritative, and it is lawful to dispute the logic of a general council, and even the historical facts it alleges, at least so far as they can be separated from the definition or decree itself. The purpose of the canon of Chalcedon was not to define or decree that the privileges of the see of Rome were granted by the fathers, and because it was the see of the capital of the empire, but to elevate the see of Constantinople to the rank and authority of a patriarchal see, immediately after the see of Rome, and simply assigns this as a reason for doing so; and a very poor reason it was, too, at least in the judgment of St. Leo the Great, as we shall soon see.

But there is something more to be said in regard to this twenty-eighth canon of the council of Chalcedon. The council is generally accepted as the fourth general council, but only by virtue of the papal confirmation, and only so far as the pope confirmed its acts. In many respects the council was a scandalous assembly, almost wholly controlled by the emperor and the Byzantine lawyers or magistrates, who have no authority in the church of God. The part taken by the emperor and civil magistrates wholly vitiated it as a council of the church, and all the authority its acts had or could have for the church was derived from their confirmation by St. Leo the Great. But bad as the council was, the twenty-eighth canon never received its sanction. {582} It was introduced by the civil magistrates, and when only one hundred and fifty bishops, all orientals, out of the six hundred composing the council, were present, and no more subscribed it. It was resisted by the legates of the Roman pontiff and protested against; the patriarchal churches of Alexandria and Antioch were unrepresented. Dioscurus, bishop of the former, was excluded for his crimes, and Macarius of Antioch had just been deposed by the emperor and council for heresy and expelled; a large number of prelates had withdrawn, and only the rump of the council remained. It is idle to pretend that the canon in question was the act even of the council, far less of the universal church.

Now, either Leo the Roman pontiff had authority to confirm the acts of the council of Chalcedon, and by his authority as supreme pastor of the church to heal their defects and make them binding on the universal church, or he had not. If he had, the controversy is ended, for that is precisely what Mr. Guettée denies; if he had not, as Mr. Guettée contends, then the acts of Chalcedon have in themselves no authority for the church, since through the tyranny of the emperor Marcian and the civil magistrates it was not a free council, and, though legally convoked and presided over, was not capable of binding the church. The author may take which horn of the dilemma he chooses, for the pope refused to confirm the twenty-eighth canon, and declared it null and void from the beginning.

The fathers of the council, or a portion of them, in the name of the council, addressed a letter to the Roman pontiff in which they recognize him as the constituted interpreter of the words and faith of Peter for all, explain what they have done, the motives from which they have acted, and pray him "to honor their judgment by his _decrees_"--that is, confirm their acts. St. Leo confirmed those of their acts that pertained to the definition of faith, but refused to confirm the twenty-eighth canon, which he annulled and declared void, as enacted without authority, and against the canons.

Mr. Guettée says, pp. 97, 98, that the council did not ask the Roman pontiff to confirm the canon in question, "but by his own decrees to honor the judgment which had been rendered. If the confirmation of the bishop of Rome had been necessary, would the decree of Chalcedon have been a judgment, a promulgated decision, before that confirmation?" An authoritatively "promulgated decision" certainly not; but the author forgets that the canon had not been promulgated, and never became "a promulgated decision." As to its being a judgment, a final or complete judgment it was not, and the council, by calling it _nostrum judicium_, do not pretend that it was. They present it to the Roman pontiff only as an inchoate judgment, to be completed by his confirmation. They tell the pope that his legates have protested against it, probably because they wished to preserve to him its initiation, and that in adopting it they "had deferred to the emperor, to the senate, and the whole imperial city, thinking only to finish the work which his holiness, who always delights to diffuse his favors, had begun." The plain English of which is, We have enacted the canon out of deference to the civil authority and the wishes of the imperial city, subject to your approval. "Rogamus igitur, honora et tuis sententiis nostrum judicium. We pray you, therefore, to honor our judgment by your decrees." [Footnote 178] If this does not mean asking the pope to confirm their act or judgment, we know not what would so mean. It is certain that St. Leo himself, who is one of the author's anti-papal authorities, so understood it, as is evident from his replies to the emperor, the empress, and Anatolius, Bishop of Constantinople, the assertion of M. Guettée to the contrary notwithstanding.

[Footnote 178: Opp. S. Leo, tom. i. col. 960-962. Migne's edition.]

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The Emperor Marcian wrote expressly to St. Leo, begging him to confirm by his apostolic authority the acts of the council, and especially the twenty-eighth canon, because without his confirmation they would have no authority. The Empress Pulcheria wrote him to the same effect, and finally Anatolius did the same. To the emperor the Roman pontiff replied, and set forth the reasons why he could not confirm the canon in question. He makes short work with M. Guettée's doctrine, broached in the second council, and extended in the twenty eighth canon of Chalcedon, that the rank and authority of the see derive from the rank, authority, or importance of the city in which it is established. He denies that the fact that Constantinople was the second capital of the empire, or the new Rome, was any reason for elevating its bishop to the patriarchal rank and authority. "Let, as we desire, the city of Constantinople have its glory, and, protected by the right hand of God, may it long enjoy the reign of your clemency; but different is the reason of secular things from the reason of divine things, and no edifice will be stable unless it is built on that rock (St. Matthew xvi. 18) which the Lord has laid for a foundation. Who covets what is not his due shall lose what is his own. Let it suffice this man, (Anatolius,) that by the aid of your piety and my assent and favor, he has obtained the episcopate of so great a city. Let him not disdain the imperial city because he cannot make it an apostolic see; and let him by no means hope to enlarge his power at the expense of others."

It is very clear from this that St. Leo did by no means concede that the bishop of Constantinople was entitled to be clothed with patriarchal power and take precedence of the patriarch of Alexandria, because he had his see in what had become the second capital of the empire. "Alia ratio est rerum secularium, alia divinarum; nec prater illam petram quam Dominus in fundamento posuit, stabilis erit nulla constructio;" that is, only what is built on Peter, the rock, will stand, and in vain do you build on the greatness, splendor, and dignity of earthly cities. [Footnote 179] If M. Guettée had remembered this, he would never have turned from the chair of Peter, or allowed himself to be seduced by the nationalism of the Greek sophists, and the misguided ambition of the bishop of Constantinople. Alas! he left his father's house, and, famished in the far country to which he has wandered, he is forced to feed on husks with the swine he tends. What can that man think of the church of God who holds that the dignity and authority of its prelates have only a secular origin?

[Footnote 179: Ibidem, ad Marcianum Augustum, epist. civ.]

St. Leo unequivocally refuses, in his reply to the solicitations of the emperor, to confirm the twenty-eighth canon. "And why," asks the author, p. 98, "did he refuse his assent? Because the decree of Chalcedon took from the bishop of Alexandria the second rank, and the third from the bishop of Antioch, and was in so far forth contrary to the sixth canon of Nicaea, and because the same decree prejudiced the rights of several primates or metropolitans," that is, of Pontus, Asia Minor, and Thrace. This we think was reason enough, and proves that the Roman pontiff was not only the chief custodian of the faith, but also of the canons. "The bishop of Constantinople," says St. Leo, as cited by the author, "in spite of the glory of his church, cannot make it apostolic; he has no right to aggrandize it at the expense of churches whose privileges, established by the canons of the holy fathers, and settled by the decrees of the venerable council of Nicaea, cannot be unsettled by perversity nor violated by innovation." St. Leo in the whole controversy appears as the defender of the canons against innovation, and of the catholicity of the church against Greek nationalism.

{584}

The author continues, same page, "In his letter to the Empress Pulcheria, St. Leo declares that he has 'annulled the decree of Chalcedon by the authority of St. Peter.' These words seem at first sight to mean that he claimed for himself a sovereign [supreme] authority in the church in the name of St. Peter." Undoubtedly, not only at first sight, but at every sight. The Pope uses the strongest terms to be found in the Latin language, and terms which can be used only by one having the supreme authority, _irritus_ and _cassare_. He refuses to ratify it, declares it null, and says, "per auctoritatem Beati Petri apostoli," he makes it void. He could make no greater assumption of authority. "But," adds the author, upon a more careful and unbiased examination of his letter and other writings, "we are convinced that St. Leo only spoke as the bishop of an apostolic see, and that in this character he claimed the right, in the name of the apostles who founded his church, and of the Western countries which he represented, to resist any attempt of the Eastern Church to decide alone matters of general interest to the whole church," pp. 98, 99. If he is convinced, we are not. If such was St. Leo's meaning, why did he not say so? Why did he annul when he only meant that the canon was null, because decreed by Orientals alone; or why did he not assign that reason for annulling it, and not the reason that it was repugnant to the canons of the holy fathers and the decrees of the Council of Nicaea?

"The proof that he regarded matters in this light," (p. 99,) "is that he does not claim for himself any personal authority of divine origin, descended to him from St. Peter, but that, on the contrary, he presents himself as the defender of the canons, and looks upon the rights and reciprocal duties of the churches as having been established by the fathers and fixed by the council of Nicaea. He does not pretend that his church has any exceptional rights, emanating from another source." This proof is inconclusive. St. Leo had no occasion to claim personal authority for himself, for whatever authority he had was official, not personal, and inhered in him as the successor of Peter in the apostolic see of Rome, and in this capacity he most assuredly did claim to have authority, when he declared to the Empress Pulcheria, as we have seen, that, "by authority of Peter, he annulled and made void and of none effect," the decree of Chalcedon. What the author says he did not do, is precisely what he did do. He does not annul and make void the decree by authority vested in him by the canons, or which he holds by ecclesiastical right, but "by the authority of Peter." He, moreover, was not defending the rights and prerogatives of his own see, nor his authority as metropolitan, patriarch, or supreme pontiff, for this was not called in question; the council most fully recognized it, and in his letter defining the faith against Eutyches, it professed to hear the voice of Peter. He was defending the canons, not for himself, nor for churches subjected to him as patriarch of the West, but for Alexandria, Antioch, and the metropolitans of Pontus, Asia Minor, and Thrace, which the twenty-eighth canon of Chalcedon sought to subject to the bishop of Constantinople; and he therefore had no occasion to dwell on the exceptional rights, or rights not derived from the canons, but from God through Peter, of the Roman Church. It sufficed him to exercise them, which he did do effectually.

"By ecclesiastical right he is the first bishop of the church," the author continues; "besides, he occupies the apostolic see of the West; in these characters he _must_ interfere and prevent the ambition of one particular church from impairing rights that the canons have accorded to other bishops too feeble to resist." Wherefore must he do so? In these characters he might offer his advice, he might even refuse his assent to acts he disapproved; but he could not authoritatively interfere in any matters outside of his own particular diocese, or his own patriarchate, far less to annul and make void acts which did not concern him in either of these characters. {585} He had no right to interfere in the way he did, except as supreme pontiff and head of the whole church, and Roman theologians have never claimed for the Roman pontiff greater power than St. Leo exercised in the case of the council of Chalcedon.

"After reading all that St. Leo has written against the canon of the council of Chalcedon, it cannot be doubtful what he meant." We agree to that, nor is it doubtful what he did. He annulled and made void by authority of Peter an act of a general council, and null and void it remained.

"He does not claim for himself the autocracy which Roman theologians make the groundwork of the papal authority." Very likely not, for nobody claims it for the Roman pontiff, as we showed in our former article. He is the supreme pastor, not the autocrat, of the church. "In his letter to the fathers of the council of Chalcedon he only styles himself 'guardian of the Catholic faith and of the constitutions of the fathers,' and not chief and master of the church by divine right." Does he deny that he is chief and master by divine right? Certainly not, and no one can read his letters without feeling that in every word and syllable he speaks as a superior, in the language and tone of supreme authority. His reply to Anatolius is such as could be written only by a superior not only in rank, but in authority, and while replete with the affection of a father, it is marked by the majestic severity of supreme power.

The refusal of St. Leo to confirm the twenty-eighth canon gave rise to the report that he had refused to confirm the acts of the council, and the Eutychians, against whom its definitions of faith were directed, began to raise their heads and boldly assert that they were not condemned, that the definitions of the council against them counted for nothing, since the Roman pontiff had refused to confirm them, as he refused to confirm the doings of the Ephesian Latrocinium. The imperial court became alarmed, and the emperor wrote to St. Leo for an explicit statement of what he had done. St. Leo answers that he has confirmed all the decrees of Chalcedon defining the faith, but that he has not confirmed the decree erecting the church of Constantinople into a patriarchal church. This fact does not seem to favor the author's theory that the Roman pontiff was held to have only a primacy of honor, nor that St. Leo did not claim universal jurisdiction.

It will have been observed that the council of Chalcedon undertakes to support, very illogically indeed, the twenty-eighth canon on the authority of the third canon of the first council of Constantinople, which gave the bishop of Constantinople simply the primacy of honor after the bishop of Rome. But St. Leo, in the letter to the empress just cited, denies the authority of that canon, on the ground that it had never been communicated to Rome, and therefore could have no effect.

We have dwelt at great length on the sixth canon of Nicaea, the third canon of Constantinople, and twenty-eighth of Chalcedon, because they are the author's three strongholds, and we have wished to show that they do not in the least aid him--do in no sense contradict the papal authority, but, as far as they go, tend to confirm it. The author claims St. Leo as a witness against the Catholic doctrine of the papal supremacy, and we have thought it well to show that he has in him about such a witness as he had in St. Cyprian, or as he would have in our holy father, Pius IX., now gloriously reigning. Leo Magnus is our ideal of a pope, or visible head of the universal church, and we cannot sufficiently admire the hardihood or the stupidity that would claim him as a witness against the primacy he adorned, and the papal authority which he so gracefully and so majestically wielded, and with such grand effects for the church and the empire. {586} No nobler man, no truer saint, no greater pontiff ever sat in the chair of Peter, and no higher or more magnificent character is to be found in all history. _Sancte Leo Magne, ora pro nobis_.

The author says, p. 102: "The canons of the first oecumenical councils throw incontestably a strong light upon the prerogatives of the bishop of Rome. They are the complement to each other. The twenty-eighth canon contains nothing less than the doctrine we defend, even though the opposition of the West in the person of the bishop of Rome should strip it of its oecumenical character, as certain theologians maintain." M. Guettée finds but two canons that in any respect favor his doctrine, the third of the second general council, and the twenty-eighth of the fourth, neither of which was ever accepted by the universal church, and both of which have remained from the first without Catholic authority. A doctrine sustained or favored only by irregularity and violent innovation needs no refutation. "St. Leo," the author continues, "did not protest against it, (the twenty-eighth canon of Chalcedon,) as opposed to the divine and universal authority of the see of Rome, _for which he claimed only an ecclesiastical primacy_, but simply because it infringed upon the sixth canon of the council of Nicaea." That he claimed only an ecclesiastical primacy for his see is not true, for he claimed to annul the canon _by authority of Peter_. Nor did he object to it only because it infringed the sixth canon of Nicaea, but because it contained a grave innovation in the constitution of the church, and attempted to found the authority of bishops on a temporal instead of a spiritual and apostolic basis. It proposed to change entirely the basis of the pontifical authority, which had hitherto rested on Peter, and to make it rest on the empire. The church of Constantinople was not an apostolic see, and only the bishop of an apostolic see could be clothed with patriarchal authority. This seems to us to be the great objection of St. Leo. Therefore, he writes to the emperor, as already cited: "Let not the bishop of Constantinople disdain the imperial city, which he cannot make an apostolic see." Hitherto only apostolic sees, and indeed only sees founded by Peter, had been clothed with the authority of patriarchal sees; and to give to a non-apostolic and non-Petrine church authority over other metropolitan churches was to strike at apostolic authority itself, and especially at that of Peter. The whole organization of the church was from the first based on Peter as the immediate representative of Christ and prince of the apostles. The twenty-eighth canon of Chalcedon was therefore aimed at Peter, and in the name and by the authority of Peter, whom he fully represented, St. Leo annulled it, and declared it void, and the author, without knowing well what he concedes, says: "St. Leo was right."

"One fact is certain, that they (the Roman pontiffs) did not convoke the first four oecumenical councils, that they did not preside over them, and that they did not confirm them." This is certain only of the second general council, or first of Constantinople. But suppose it, what follows? Simply that they were not councils of the church at all--which will be very pleasant news to Unitarians and Rationalists, who wish a Christianity without Christ--and can have the authority of general councils only by the _ex-post facto_ sanction of the universal church; but, as the two canons on which the author bases his anti-papal theory have never received that sanction, they have no authority, and never have had any. Hence, the author's theory, on any ground he chooses, has nothing in the church to sustain it. We shall, therefore, pass over what he adduces to prove the part taken by the civil authority in the councils, with the simple remark that the acts of several of them depend entirely on the confirmation of the Roman pontiff and the _ex-post facto_ sanction of the church for their authority.

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M. Guettée's proofs are not seldom proofs of the contrary of what he alleges. "It is undeniable fact," he says, p. 118, "that the dogmatic letter addressed by St. Leo to the fathers of the council was there examined, and approved for this reason: that it agreed with the doctrine of Celestine [his predecessor] and Cyril, confirmed by the council of Ephesus." That the letter was read in the council, and that the council adopted its definitions of faith, is true; but that it was approved for the reason alleged does not appear from the proofs the author adduces. He continues, pp. 118, 119: "At the close of the reading, the bishops exclaimed: 'Such is the faith of the fathers; this is the faith of the apostles. We all believe thus. Anathema to those who do not thus believe. Peter has spoken by Leo. Thus taught the apostles. Leo teaches according to piety and truth, and thus has Cyril taught.'" Any one not bent on proving the papacy schismatic would gather from this that the bishops approved of the letter because they recognized in it the doctrine of the apostles and the tradition of the fathers.

The author imagines that he gets an argument against the papacy from St. Leo's refusal to accept the title of _universal bishop_ offered him by the council of Chalcedon, as we learn from Pope St. Gregory the Great. He also thinks the argument is strengthened by the fact that St. Gregory himself disclaimed it; and he therefore claims both of these great pontiffs and great saints as witnesses against the pretensions of the bishops of Rome. If they had believed in their jurisdiction by divine right over the whole church, would they have refused the title of universal bishop?

John the Faster, Bishop of Constantinople, on some occasion summoned a particular council, and signed its acts, which he transmitted to Pope Pelagius II. as universal patriarch, for which, as St. Gregory says, Pelagius, "in virtue of the authority of the apostle St. Peter, nullified the acts of the synod." Gregory succeeded Pelagius, and immediately on his accession to the pontificate wrote to the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, condemning the title, and warning them and the whole church of the danger it threatened; and also he wrote to John the Faster himself, admonishing him of the impropriety of the title, not only as savoring of pride and vanity, but as involving a most serious error against faith, and beseeching him to lay it aside, lest he be obliged to cut him off from the communion of the church, and depose him from his bishopric. He does not at all disclaim his own authority as supreme pastor and governor of the universal church, but quietly assumes it. Thus, he writes to the emperor Maurice, as cited by the author: "All who know the gospel know that the care of the whole church was confided by our Lord himself to Peter, the first (St. Gregory says _prince_) of all the apostles. Indeed, he said to him, 'Peter, lovest thou me? Feed my sheep.' Again he said to him: 'Satan has desired to sift thee as wheat; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.' It was also said to him: 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it; and I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.' He thus received the keys of the celestial kingdom; the power to bind and loose was given him; the care of all the church and the primacy [_principatus_--principality, or primacy of jurisdiction] were committed to him, and yet he did not call himself _universal apostle_. But that holy man John, (bishop of Constantinople,) my brother in the priesthood, [cosacerdos,] would fain assume the title of _universal bishop_! O tempora! O mores!" (Pp. 212, 213.)

"It is certain," St. Gregory continues, "that this title was offered to the Roman pontiff by the venerable council of Chalcedon, to honor Blessed Peter, prince of the apostles. {588} But none of us has consented to use this particular title, [title of singularity,] lest by conferring a special matter on one alone, all priests would be deprived of the honor which is their due. How, then, while we are not ambitious of the glory of a title which has been offered us, does another, to whom no one has offered it, have the presumption to take it?" (Pp. 214, 215.)

In his letter to Eulogius of Alexandria and Anastatius of Antioch, St. Gregory is more explicit still, "As your holiness, whom I particularly venerate, well knows, this title of _universal_, was offered by the council of Chalcedon to the bishop [pontiff] of the apostolic see, which by God's grace I serve. But none of my predecessors would use this impious word, because in reality, if a patriarch be called _universal_, it takes from all others the title of patriarch." The author, after quoting a passage from another letter to Eulogius, adds: "Thus did Pope Gregory condemn even in the person of the bishops of Rome the title of pope and universal." But in this he is mistaken, as his own quotation shows. Eulogius answers that he will not give the title of universal patriarch to the bishop of Constantinople, but that he gives that of universal pope to the Roman pontiff. "No," says St. Gregory, "if your holiness calls me universal pope, you deny yourself what I should then be altogether." The author interpolates in his quotation the copulative _and_, which is not in St. Gregory's text. It is not to the title of pope that St. Gregory objects, which was and is applied to simple presbyters, but the title _universal_, which he will not permit to be applied to any man, because it excludes others from all participation in the hierarchy, or even the priesthood. If you call a man a universal presbyter, you deny that any others are presbyters; if you call any one universal bishop, you exclude all others from the episcopate; if you call any one universal patriarch, you deny the patriarchate to all others; and if you call the bishop of Rome universal pope, since as such he possesses the priesthood, and both the apostolate and the episcopate in their plenitude, you exclude all others from sharing the priesthood, the episcopate, or the apostolate, even the pope himself from the church, and deny the solidarity of apostles, bishops, and presbyters, asserted, as we have seen, by St. Cyprian.

Eulogius was priest, bishop, and patriarch, and as such was the brother of the Roman pontiff. This brotherhood remained all the same, whether the Roman pontiff had or not supreme jurisdiction over the whole church. When Eulogius called St. Gregory, not, as the author says, pope _and_ universal, but universal pope, he denied this brotherhood, and deprived himself of his own priestly, episcopal, and apostolic character. Hence, St. Gregory, after saying to him and other bishops. "I know what I am, and what you are; by your place or office, you are my brothers, by your virtues, my fathers," he adds, in reference to the title of universal which Eulogius had given him, "I beseech your holiness to do so no more in future, for you take from yourself what you give in excess to another. I do not ask to increase in dignities, but in virtues. I do not esteem that an honor by which my brethren are deprived of theirs. For my honor is the honor of the universal church, my honor is the unshaken firmness of my brethren. Then am I truly honored when to no one is denied the honor that is his due. For, if your holiness calls me universal pope, you deny that you are yourself what I should be confessed to be universally. Sed absit hoc, Recedant verba quae vanitatem inflant, et charitatem vulnerant." [Footnote 180]

[Footnote 180: Opp. S. Gregorii Magni, lib. viii. epist. xxx. Migne's edition, tom, iii. col. 953.]

We may call the bishop of Rome pope of the universal church, but not universal pope, nor universal bishop, because he only possesses in its plenitude what is possessed in a degree by every member of the hierarchy, and even now, as always, the pope addresses the bishops in communion with him as "Venerable Brethren." {589} The argument against the claim of the bishop of Rome to jurisdiction in the universal church, which the author attempts to build on the refusal of the title of universal bishop by St. Leo, and that of universal pope, _papa universalis_, by St. Gregory, is refuted by St. Gregory himself, as cited in the volume before us, pp. 212, 213. The holy pontiff and doctor, after asserting that our Lord had given to Peter the primacy of jurisdiction, and confided to him the care of the universal church, adds that Peter "did not call himself _universal apostle_." Peter was not the only apostle, and the others could not be excluded from the apostleship. He was prince of the apostles, their chief, the centre of apostolic unity and authority, as St. Cyprian explains, and had the care and jurisdiction (_principatus_) of the universal church, as Gregory asserts, but inclusive, not exclusive of the other apostles. Peter held in relation to the other apostles and the whole church all the supremacy claimed by Catholics for the bishop of Rome. If, then, the refusal of the title of universal apostle by St. Peter did not negative his supreme authority, why should the refusal of the title of universal bishop or universal pope by the bishops of Rome negative their supremacy, or their primacy of jurisdiction in the whole church? Peter held that primacy, and yet was not universal apostle, and why not, then, the bishop of Rome, without being universal bishop or universal pope?

The author is unhappy in his witnesses, and they are all too decidedly Roman to testify otherwise than against him. He cites other eminent fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, but he raises no new questions, and makes no points in his favor not already met and disposed of; and we may, therefore, pass over what he adduces, since, as we continue to remind our readers, we are not adducing our proofs of the papal authority, but refuting his arguments or pretended arguments against it.

In his fifth division, chapter, or section, the author examines "the authority of the bishop of Rome in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries." We have anticipated him in regard to St. Gregory the Great, the most prominent papal figure in these centuries, and shown that this great pontiff and doctor, who justly ranks along with St. Leo, offers no testimony in support of the author's vain attempt to prove the papacy schismatic. We have read this section of his book with care, but we find that, while he shows very clearly that the Roman pontiff, to save the faith and the constitution and canons of the church from the attacks of the heretics and schismatics of the East, was obliged to intervene with his supreme authority in the affairs of the Eastern churches more frequently than in earlier ages, he brings forward nothing different from what has already been refuted to prove that they did not possess the authority which they exercised by divine right. We may say, then, that the author has totally failed to establish his first conclusion, that "the bishop of Rome did not for eight centuries possess the sovereignty of divine right which he has since sought to exercise." The facts he adduces prove that during those centuries the popes did exercise all the authority they have as supreme pontiffs since exercised, and that they professed to exercise it by divine right, and without any contradiction by the universal church. No doubt the author has adduced instances in which general councils have recognized it, and made it the basis of their action; but this does not prove that the papal authority was conferred by the church, and was held only by ecclesiastical right. No doubt the civil authority on more than one occasion recognized it and made it the law of the empire, but this does not prove that it was held as a grant of the emperor, but the reverse rather. {590} The author, then, has not refuted the argument from possession, turned the presumption against the papacy, or proved that he and his friends the Non-united Greeks are not decidedly schismatics in resisting the council of Florence, in which both the East and West were represented and united.

The author, having failed to establish his first conclusion, notwithstanding his misquotations, mistranslations, and misrepresentations of facts, which are numerous and barefaced enough to excite the envy of his editor, the Protestant Episcopal bishop of Western New-York, cannot prove his second conclusion, namely: The pretension of the bishops of Rome to the sovereignty of divine right over the whole church was the cause of the division. This depends on the first, and falls with it; for it is necessary to deny the divine authority of the pope to govern the whole church before his assumption and exercise of that authority can be held to be a usurpation, and the cause of the divisions which result from resistance to it. Resistance otherwise is illegal, unauthorized, and conclusive evidence of schism, or, rather, is undeniably itself schism. The resistance on the part of the Eastern bishops and prelates to the Roman pontiff in the exercise of his legitimate authority was schism, as much so as an armed insurrection against the political sovereign is rebellion, and the rebels cannot allege that the sovereign in the exercise of his legitimate authority is the cause of their rebellion, and hold him responsible for it.

The author, forgetting that the pope is in possession, and that throughout the presumption is in favor of his authority, argues as if the presumption was on the other side, and the _onus probandi_ was on us. He, therefore, concludes that every exercise of papal jurisdiction beyond the patriarchate of the West is a usurpation, and resistance to it justifiable, unless we are able to prove the contrary. We deny it, and maintain that it is for him to prove that jurisdiction is usurped, and not held by divine right. The laboring oar is in his hands. It is always for those who resist authority to justify their resistance. The author can justify his resistance to papal authority only by producing some law of God or some canon of the universal church that restricts the jurisdiction of the Roman pontiff to the Western patriarchate, and forbids him to exercise jurisdiction over the whole church. A law or edict to that effect of the empire or canon of the Eastern churches alone, could it be produced, would not avail him; it must be a decision of the universal church, even according to his own doctrine. He alleges no such act or canon, and can allege none, for all the acts or canons of the universal church bearing on the question, unhappily for him, are the other way.

The author adduces the third canon of the second general council, and the twenty-eighth of the fourth, but these canons, having never been assented to by the West, are without the authority of the universal church. And, besides they do not distinctly deny the supreme authority of the bishop of Rome, and only profess to confer the first rank and authority after the Roman pontiff on the bishop of Constantinople. It is a strong presumption against the author that he does not even allege any law or canon of the universal church which the popes have violated, and his charge against them is that of presenting themselves as defenders of the canons against innovation, as in the refusal of St. Leo to accept the twenty-eighth canon of Chalcedon.

But the author, with his usual facility, refutes himself, and shows that it was not the pretension of the bishops of Rome, but the pretensions of the bishop of Constantinople and of the secular government that caused the division. We have seen that the third canon of the second general council, and the twenty-eighth of the fourth, which was annulled by St. Leo, were in violation of the canons, but were prompted by the ambition of the bishop of Constantinople and the secular authority. {591} "We can perceive," says the author, p. 100. "in the struggles between the bishops of Rome and Constantinople, respecting the twenty-eighth canon of the council of Chalcedon, the origin of the dissensions which afterward led to an entire rupture." And why did these dissensions lead to an entire rupture? Certainly because the same parties continued to maintain the same claims in relation to each other. The ground of the dissension remained always the same. The question, then, is, which party in the beginning was in the right, and which was in the wrong? "In principle," says the author on the same page, "St. Leo was right;" that is, right in defending the canons of the holy fathers and the decrees of the venerable council of Nicaea against their violation and subversion by the innovations of Constantinople and Chalcedon. St. Leo, the author himself says, presented himself as the defender of antiquity and the canons of Nicaea; he must, then, have been right not only in principle, but in fact. The real cause of the division was not the pretension of the bishops of Rome to an authority which they did not possess, but their refusal to assent to the violent and shameless usurpations of Constantinople. The attitude of the popes and the ground on which they resisted from first to last, were distinctly taken by St. Leo in his letter to the emperor, Marcian, already cited: "Privilegia ecclesiarum, sanctorum Patrum canonibus instituta et venerabilis Nicaenae synodi fixa decretis, nulla possunt improbitate convelli, nulla mutari novitate." [Footnote 181]

[Footnote 181: Ad Marcianum Augustum, epist. 105, edit. Migne.]

But St. Leo "could not deny," says the author, "that one general council had the same rights as another that had preceded it." But, even if so, none of the innovations proposed by the East and opposed by the bishops of Rome have ever had the authority of a general council. There is and can be, even according to the author and his schismatic Greek friends, no general council without the bishop of Rome; and the canons on which the author relies were from the first resisted by the Roman pontiff, and, therefore, could not override or abrogate the decrees of the council of Nicaea.

The whole controversy originated in the attempt to raise the see of Constantinople, which was not an apostolic, a patriarchal or even a metropolitan see, to the rank and authority of the first see in the church after that of the see of Rome, contrary to the sixth canon of Nicaea, to the constitution of the church, to ancient usage, and to the prejudice of the bishops of Alexandria and Antioch, and the metropolitans of Pontus, Asia, (Minor.) and Thrace. On what ground does the author seek to defend this attempt, always resisted by the Roman pontiffs and the whole West? Simply on the ground that the rank and authority of a see are derived from the splendor and importance of the city in the empire. He assigns and pretends to assign no other ground. "The Nicaean council," he says, "in consecrating the usage by which the bishop of Rome was regarded as the first in honor in the church, had in view not as much the apostolic origin of his see as the splendor which he acquired from the importance of the city of Rome. ... Why, then, should not the bishop of Constantinople have been received as second in rank, Constantinople having become the second capital of the empire; since the bishop of Rome was first in rank, only because of its position as the first capital?" (Pp. 100, 101.)

The argument is worthless, because its premises are false. In the first place, the question is one of authority as well as of rank. In the second place, the council of Nicaea did not consecrate the usage by which the primacy, whether of honor or jurisdiction, was ascribed to the bishop of Rome, but confirmed the usage by which the bishop of Alexandria, the bishop of Antioch, and other metropolitans held a certain rank, and enjoyed certain privileges, and gave as their reason that a like usage or custom obtained with the bishop of Rome. {592} In the third place, the council says not one word about the splendor acquired by the Roman pontiff from the importance of the city of Rome; and we have proved that, whatever his rank and authority, he derived it from the fact that his see was held to be the see of Peter, and he the successor of Peter, the prince of the apostles. Finally, the author has no ground for his assertion, except the third canon of the second general council and the twenty-eighth of the fourth, the latter authoritatively annulled and the former declared to be without effect by St. Leo, and neither ever receiving the sanction or assent of the universal church. The ground on which the bishop of Constantinople based his ambitious pretensions, that of being bishop of the second capital of the empire, is wholly untenable. "Alia ratio est rerum secularium, alia divinarum," says St. Leo. "We laughed," says Pope St. Gelasius as cited by the author, p. 198, "at what they (the Eastern bishops) claim for Acacius (bishop of Constantinople) because he was bishop of the imperial city. ... The power of the secular empire is one thing, the distribution of ecclesiastical dignities is quite a different thing. However small a city may be, it does not diminish the greatness of the prince who dwells there; but it is quite as true that the presence of the emperor does not change the order of religion; and such a city should rather profit by its advantages to preserve the freedom of religion, by keeping peaceably within its proper limits."

From first to last, one is struck, in reading the history of the controversy, not only with the superior calmness and dignity of the Roman pontiffs, but with their profound wisdom and catholic sense. They defend throughout the catholicity of the church against Greek nationalism, and the independence of the kingdom of Christ on earth against its subjection to the secular empire, which was attempted and finally succeeded at Constantinople, and is the case in Russia, Great Britain, and all modern schismatical and heretical states and empires. The author sees and appreciates nothing of this; he comprehends nothing of the church as the mystic body of Christ, the continuous representation of the Incarnation; his ideas are external, political, unspiritual, and, as far as appears from his book, pagan rather than Christian. The church he recognizes, as far as he recognizes any, is national, not catholic, and holds from the imperial authority, not from Christ, and has no completeness in itself.

It was precisely in nationalism, in regarding the church as organized for the Roman empire, not for the whole world, and in recognizing the authority of the civil power in theological and ecclesiastical matters, as the author himself unwittingly shows, that the Greek schism originated. The bishop of Constantinople, having in the hierarchy no apostolic, patriarchal, or metropolitan rank or authority beyond that which is held by every suffragan bishop, was obliged, in order to defend his ambitious aspirations to the second rank in the church, to give the hierarchy a secular origin, and to fall back on the imperial authority to support him. The idea was pagan, not Christian, and was but too acceptable to the Byzantine Caesars. In pagan Rome the emperor was at once imperator and pontifex maximus, and held in his own person the supreme authority in both civil and religious matters. He preserved the tradition of this in Christian Rome, and continually struggled to be under Christianity what he had been under paganism. In the West the imperial pretensions were in the main successfully resisted, though not without long and bitter struggles, which have not even yet completely ended; but in the East, owing to the ambition and frequent heresy of the bishop of Constantinople, rarely faithful to the church after Constantinople became an imperial capital, and the great patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, weakened by the Arian, Nestorian, monophysite, and monothelite heresies, and betrayed by the heretics, had fallen, through the pride, treachery, and imbecility of the Byzantine court, under the power of the Mohammedans, those bitter enemies of the cross, the emperor was enabled to grasp the pontifical power, to bring the administration of religion under his despotic control, to make and unmake, murder or exile bishops at his will or the caprices of the ladies of his court. Hence the Greek schism.

{593}

And this is what M. Guettée defends; and because the Roman pontiffs did all in their power to resist such open profanation and secularizing of the church, he has the impudence to contend that it was the usurpations of Rome that caused the schism, and he has found a Protestant Episcopal bishop in Western New-York ignorant enough or shameless enough to endorse him, and to assure us that he is a Catholic in the true sense of the word!

Notwithstanding the author defends the usurpations of the imperial authority and the ambitious pretensions of the courtly bishops of Constantinople, and maintains that all the general councils held in the East were convoked and presided over by the emperors, he does not blush to object to the council of Florence on the ground that the reunion effected in that council was brought about by the ambition of a few Eastern prelates and the undue pressure of the emperor of Constantinople. If the intervention of the emperor did not in his judgment vitiate the third canon of the first council of Constantinople, or the twenty-eighth canon of Chalcedon, or the fifth or sixth general council, what right has he to pretend that a far less intervention on the emperor's part vitiated the canons of the council of Florence? On the principles he has defended throughout, the emperor may convoke, preside over a council, dictate and confirm its acts, without detriment to its authority as a general council. He is by his own principles, then, bound to accept the canons of Florence as the voice of the universal church, for they were adopted by the East and West united, and are and have been constantly adhered to by the West and the Eastern churches proper, and resisted only by heretics and schismatics, who have no voice in the church.

We need proceed no further. We have said enough to refute the author in principle, and are tired of him, as must be our readers. We said in the beginning that he had told us nothing in his book that we did not know before; but we are obliged to confess that the examination of authorities into which it has forced us has made us feel as we never felt before how truly the church is founded on Peter, brought home to us the deep debt of gratitude the world owes to the Roman pontiffs, and enabled us to see more clearly than we ever had done the utter groundlessness, the glaring iniquity, and the open paganism of the Greek schism. The author has made us, we almost fear, an ultra-papist, and certainly has strengthened our attachment, already strong, to the Holy Apostolic See. He has served to us the office of the drunken Helotae to the Spartan youth. It is in relation to its purpose the weakest and absurdest book we have ever read, and has not, so far as the author is concerned, a Christian thought from beginning to end. If this book fairly represents the Christian intelligence and sentiments of the Non-united Greeks, it is hard to see wherein they are to be preferred to the Turks, or why Christendom should seek their deliverance from the Mohammedan yoke.

If M. Guettée's readers will weigh well the arguments for the papacy he reproduces for the sake of refuting them, and his quotations from the fathers and the Roman pontiffs for the sake of blunting their force, they will find that, in spite of misquotations, mistranslations, and misrepresentations, the book carries with it its own antidote. It can do real harm only to those who cannot weigh testimony, who never think, and are utterly unable to reason.

{594}

Impressions of Spain.

By Lady Herbert.

Excursions Near Seville.

The excursions in the neighborhood of Seville are full of beauty and interest of various kinds. One of the first undertaken by our travellers was to the ruins of Italica, the ancient Seville, formerly an important Roman city, and the birthplace of Trajan and of Adrian. In the church, half convent and half fortress, are two very fine statues of St. Isidore and St. Jerome, by Montanés. Here St. Isidore began his studies. He was hopelessly dull and slow, and was tempted to give up the whole thing in despair, when one day, being in a brown study, his eye fell on an old well, the marble sides of which were worn into grooves by the continual friction of the cord which let down the bucket. "If a cord can thus indent marble," he said to himself, "why should not constant study and perseverance make an impression on my mind?" His resolution was taken, and he became the light of his age and country. The well which gave him this useful lesson is still shown near the south door of the church. Here also is the monument of Doña Uraca Osorio, a lady who was burnt to death by order of King Pedro the Cruel, for having resisted his addresses. The flames having consumed the lower part of her dress, her faithful maid rushed into the fire, and died in endeavoring to conceal her mistress. In the sacristy is a very curious Byzantine picture of the Virgin. Leaving the church our party went on to the amphitheatre, which has recently been excavated, and must have contained ten or twelve thousand people. A fine mosaic has lately been discovered, which evidently formed part of the ancient pavement. The custode was a character, and lived in a primitive little cabin at the entrance of the circus: a moss bed and a big cat seemed the only furniture. He was very proud of his tiny garden, poor old man! and of his wall-flowers, of which he gave the ladies a large bunch, together with a few silver coins which had been dug up in the excavations.

On their way home they passed by a cemetery in which was a very beautiful though simple marble cross. On it were engraved these three lines:

Creo en Dios. Espero en Dies. Amo á Dios.

It was the grave of a poor boy, the only son of a widow. He was not exactly an idiot, but what people call a "natural." Good, simple, humble every one loved him; but no one could teach him anything. His intelligence was in some way at fault. He could remember nothing. In vain the poor mother put him first to school, and then to a trade; he could not learn. At last, in despair, she took him to a neighboring monastery, and implored the abbot, who was a most charitable holy man, to take him in and keep him as a lay brother. Touched by her grief, the abbot consented, and the boy entered the convent. There, all possible pains were taken with him by the good monks to give him at least some ideas of religion; but he could remember nothing but these three sentences. Still, he was so patient, so laborious, and so good, that the community decided to keep him. When he had finished his hard out-of-door work, instead of coming in to rest, he would go straight to the church, and there remain on his knees for hours. "But what does he do?" exclaimed one of the novices. {595} "He does not know how to pray. He neither understands the office, nor the sacraments, nor the ceremonies of the church." They therefore hid themselves in a side chapel, close to where he always knelt, and watched him when he came in. Devoutly kneeling, with his hands clasped, his eyes fastened on the tabernacle, he did nothing but repeat over and over again: "Creo en Dios; espero en Dios; amo á Dios." One day he was missing: they went to his cell, and found him dead on the straw, with his hands joined and an expression of the same ineffable peace and joy they had remarked on his face when in church. They buried him in this quiet cemetery, and the abbot caused these words to be graven on his cross. Soon, a lily was seen flowering by the grave, where no one had sown it; the grave was opened, and the root of the flower was found in the heart of the orphan boy. [Footnote 182]

[Footnote 182: This anecdote is from the lips of Fernan Caballero.]

Another morning our party visited the Cartucha, the once magnificent Carthusian convent, with its glorious ruined church and beautiful and extensive orange-gardens. Now all is deserted. The only thing remaining of the church is a fine west wall and rose-window, with a chapel which the proprietor has preserved for the use of his workpeople, and in the choir of which are some finely carved wooden stalls; the rest have been removed to Cadiz, where they form the great ornament of the cathedral. Here and there are some fine "azulejos," and a magnificently carved doorway, speaking of glories long since departed. This convent, once the very centre of all that was most cultivated and literary in Spain, a museum of painting, architecture, and sculpture, is now converted into a porcelain manufactory, where a good-natured Englishman has run up a tall chimney, and makes ugly cheap pots and pans to suit the taste and pockets of the Sevillians. O for this age of "progress"! It is fair to say that the proprietor, who kindly accompanied the party over the building, and into the beautiful gardens, and to the ruined pagoda or summer house, lamented that no encouragement was given by the Spanish nobles of the present day to any species of taste or beauty in design, and that his attempts to introduce a higher class of china, in imitation of Minton's, had met with decided failure; no one would buy anything so dear. They had imported English workmen and modellers in the first instance; but he said, that the Spaniards were apt scholars, and had quickly learned the trade, so that his workmen are now almost exclusively from the country itself. The only pretty thing our travellers could find, and which was kindly presented to one of the party, was one of the cool picturesque-shaped bottles made, like the "goolehs" of Egypt, of porous clay, which maintains the coldness and freshness of any liquid poured into it.

Among the many charming expeditions from Seville, is one to Castilleja, (the village before alluded to as the scene of the death of Fernan Cortes) through the fertile plains and vine yards of Aljarafa. Here begins the region which the Romans call the gardens of Hercules. It produces one of the best and rarest wines in Spain: the plants having been originally brought from Flanders by a poor soldier named Pedro Ximenes, who discovered that the Rhine vines, when transplanted to the sunny climate of Andalusia, lose their acidity, and yield the luscious fruit which still bears his name. In the centre of this fertile plain stands a small house and garden, to which is attached one of those tales of crime, divine vengeance, and godlike forgiveness, which are so characteristic of the people and country. About twenty years ago it was inhabited by a family consisting of a man named Juan Pedro Alfaro, with his wife and a son of nineteen or twenty. Their quiet and peaceable lives were spent in cultivating their vineyard and selling its produce in the neighboring town. {596} They were good and respectable people, living in peace with their neighbors, and perfectly contented with their occupation and position. One thing only was felt as a grievance. A lawyer, of the character of the "Attorney Case" in our childhood's story, had lately started an obnoxious new tax on every cargo of wine brought into the city; and this tax, being both unjust and illegal, they resolved to dispute. One day, therefore, when the good man and his son were driving their mules to market with their fruity burden, they were stopped by the attorney, who demanded the usual payment. The younger man firmly but respectfully refused, stating his reasons. The attorney tried first fair words, and then foul, without effect, upon which he vowed to be revenged. The son, pointing to his Albacetan poniard, on which was the inscription, "I know how to defend my master." defied his vengeance; and so they parted. But never again was the poor wife and mother's heart gladdened by the sight of their returning faces. In vain she waited, hour after hour, that first terrible evening. The mules returned, but masterless. Then, beside herself with fear, the poor woman rushed off to the town to make inquiries as to their fate. No one knew anything further than that they had been at Seville the day before, had sold their wine for a good price, and been seen, as usual, returning cheerfully home. She then went to the Audiencia, or legal supreme court of the city, where the magistrates, touched by her tale, and alarmed also at the disappearance of the men, who were known throughout the country for their high character and respectability, caused a rigorous search to be made in the whole neighborhood; but in vain. No trace of them could be discovered. By degrees, the excitement in the town on the subject passed away, and the poor muleteers were forgotten; but in the heart of the widowed mother there could be no rest and no peace. The mystery in which their fate was involved was so inexplicable that, the hope of their return, however faint, would not die out; and for twenty years she spent her life and her substance in seeking for her lost ones. At last, reduced to utter misery, and worn out both in mind and body, she was forced to beg her daily bread of the charity of the peasants: the "bolsa de Dios," as the people poetically call it, a "bolsa" which, to do the Spaniards justice, is never empty. The little children would bring her eggs and pennies; the fathers and husbands would give her a corner by the "brasero" in winter, or under the vine-covered trellis in summer; the wives and mothers knew what had brought her to such misery, and had ever an extra loaf or a dish of "garbanzos" set aside for the "Madre Ana," as she was called by the villagers. She, humble, prayerful, hopeful, ever grateful for the least kindness, and willing in any way to oblige others, at last fell dangerously