did. He had to explain clearly his views, his intentions, his

acts; to interpret them and to comment upon them, we can almost say, to finish them during his own life; to give the true key to his future historians; in a word, to write his own _memoirs_. This was his duty, and he has acted rightly in not delaying it. It was not less for other ends, and in the design of a greater work, that he wished for twenty years' solitude and repose at the end of his life. His desire was heard. The days of calm and retreat have come, not, perhaps, at the time that he desired, and still less under conditions that he would have chosen, but for his glory they are such that he can well think them fruitful, worthy, valuable, full of vigor and of ardor. Happy autumn! when the recollections of the world and the echoes of political strife are only the recreation of a soul incessantly engaged with more serious problems. It is in these heights, in these serene regions, while he is questioning himself on his destiny and on his faith, that war has come to seek him; not the personal war of former times, but another kind of war, less direct and more general, yet perhaps more provoking. He is not the man to refuse the contest. Under the weight of years that he bears so well, stronger, more resolute, younger than ever, he has entered the arena; he will be militant until the end.

What will he do? What is his plan? What position will he take? The volume which is before us is an answer to these questions. It is only a first volume; but it is complete in itself, it is a work that one cannot study too closely, nor diffuse too widely. The developments, the additions, and the supplements which the three remaining volumes will soon add to the work, will, without doubt, make it still more comprehensive and solid; but as it is now, we consider it, without any commentary whatsoever, to be a most effective reply to the attacks which have recently been levelled against Christian doctrines, or, to speak more correctly, against the essence of all religion.

Before entering into the work, let us say something of the manner in which it is written. We are not going to speak of the author's style. We would announce nothing new to the world by saying that M. Guizot, when he has time and really tries, can write as well as he speaks. {340} His pen for many years has followed a law of progress and of increasing excellence. He has shown in these _Meditations_ a new skill, perhaps higher than in his _Memoirs_ even, in the art of clothing his ideas in excellent language; learnedly put together, yet without effort or stiffness, true in its coloring, sober in its effects, always clear and never trivial, always firm and often forcible. Something more novel and more characteristic appears in this book. It is in reality a controversial work, but a controversy which is absolutely new. It is more than courteous, it is an _impersonal_ polemic. The author has, certainly, always shown himself respectful to his opponents; he has ever admitted that they could hold different opinions from his in good faith; and even at the rostrum, in the heat of contests, his adversaries were not persons, they were ideas; but the people he disputed with were always, without scruple, called by their names. Here it is different; there is not a single proper name, the war is anonymous. In changing the atmosphere--in passing, if we can be allowed the expression, from earth to heaven, or, at least, from the bar to the pulpit, from politics to the gospel, he changes his method and takes a long step in advance. He endeavors to leave persons entirely out of consideration, for they only embarrass and embitter the questions. He forgets, or at least he does not tell us, who his adversaries are; he refutes them, but he does not name them.

Is not this discretion at once, good manners and good taste? It is also something more. Without doubt, by speaking only of ideas and not of those who maintain them, one loses a great means of effective action. In abstract matters, proper names referred to here and there are a very powerful resource--they arouse and excite attention, they give interest and life to the argument; but what is gained on one hand is frequently lost on another. The use of proper names, though it may have nothing to provoke irritation, still always incurs the danger of causing the debate to degenerate into a personal dispute. The questions are reduced to the capacity of those who sustain them. Better take a plainer and more decided path, and keep persons completely out of view. M. Guizot has done well. In no part of his book is there reason to regret the vivacity and attraction of a more direct polemic; whilst the urbanity and the omission of names, without really changing or diminishing the questions, spread a calm gravity throughout the work, almost a perfume of tolerance, which gains the reader's confidence and disposes him to allow himself to be convinced. It is true that this kind of polemics can only be maintained when greatness of thought compensates for the lack of passion. It is necessary to take wing, mount above questions, conquer all and enlighten all. Such is the character of these _Meditations_. The comprehensiveness of his views, the greatness of his plan, and the clearness of his style, alike impress upon it the seal of true originality.

It is not a theology that M. Guizot has undertaken; he has not written for doctors; he discusses neither texts nor points of doctrine; he does not attempt to solve scholastic difficulties; still less does he wish to mingle in the discussion of incidental events, to descend to the questions of to-day, and to follow, step by step, the crisis which agitates the Christian world at this time. He has grappled with more weighty and more permanent questions. {341} He wishes to show clearly the truth of Christianity in its essence, in its fundamental dogmas, or rather in its simplicity and innate greatness, without commentary, interpretation, or human work of any kind, and consequently before all disunion, schism, or heresy. He has tried to expose the pure idea of Christianity, so that he can be more able to demonstrate its divine character.

Such is his intention. What has he done to attain it? The book itself must answer this question. But in these few pages how can we speak of it? How can we analyze a work when one is tempted to quote every paragraph? And on the other hand to give many extracts from a book, is only to mutilate it and give an incorrect idea of its real value. Let us only try, then, to say enough to inspire our readers with the more profitable desire of studying M. Guizot himself.

I.

The beginning and the foundation of these _Meditations_ is a well-known truth, which the author establishes with absolute certainty, and which at this time it is useful to keep in mind. This truth is, that the human race, since its first existence and in every place where it has existed, has been engaged in trying to solve certain questions which are, so to speak, personal to it. These are questions, of destiny, of life rather than science, questions it has invincibly tried to determine. For example, Why is man in this world, and why the world itself? Why does it exist? Whence do they come, and where do they both tend? Who has made them? Have they an intelligent and free Creator? or are they merely a product of blind elements? If they are created, if we have a Father, why, in giving us life, has he made it so bitter and painful? Why is there sin? Why suffering and death? Is not the hope of a better life only the illusion of the unhappy; and prayer, that cry of the soul in anguish, is it only a sterile noise, a word thrown to the mocking wind?

These questions, together with others which develop and complete them, have excited the deepest interest of the human race since it first existed upon the earth, and it alone is interested in them. They speak only to it; among all living creatures, it alone can comprehend and is affected by them. This painful yet grand privilege is the indisputable evidence of its terrestrial royalty; it is at once its glory and its torment.

This series of questions, or rather mysteries, M. Guizot places at the beginning of his _Meditations_, under the title of _Natural Problems_. Man, indeed, possesses them by his very nature; he does not create or invent them, he merely submits to them. We do not mean by this that for humanity in general these problems are not obscure and confused, without a distinct form or outline, surrounded with uncertainties and frequently rather seen than clearly apprehended. This must be true of the great mass of mankind, who live from hand to mouth, who go and come and work, absorbed in petty pleasures or occupied with dreary toil. Still we think that there is not a single one, even among these apparently dull and heedless men, in whatever way he may have lived and whatever hardships he has had to sustain, who has not at least once in his life caught a glimpse of these formidable questions and felt an ardent wish to see them solved. Make as many distinctions as you please between races, sexes, ages, and degrees of civilization; divide the globe and its inhabitants by zones or climates; you will no doubt discover more than one difference in the way in which these problems are presented to the soul; you will find them more or less prominent, and more or less attention paid to them; but you will find a trace of them everywhere and among all people. It is a law of instinct, a general law for all times and places.

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If such is our lot, if these questions necessarily weigh upon minds, these questions which are "the burden of the soul," as M. Guizot calls them, are we not really compelled to try to solve them? It is on our part neither vain curiosity, nor capricious desire, nor frivolous habit which leads us to attempt it. It is a necessity, quite as serious and as natural to us as the problems are themselves; a need we feel in some way to have lifted from us the weight which oppresses. We must have a reply at any cost; who can give it to us?

Faith or Reason? Religion or Philosophy? At every moment we see in what a very limited manner reason, science, and all purely human resources suffice to satisfy us. It can be said that, from the very infancy of human society up to the present day, it has been from the various religions, thought to be divine and accepted as such by faith, that humanity has asked these indispensable responses.

We readily see from this, what a deep interest is attached to these natural problems. Who will presume to tell us that religion proceeds from an artificial and temporary want, which men have gradually overcome, if the problems to which it answers are inherent in the race and can only perish with it? It is the constant work and watchword of every materialistic and pantheistic system to distort the character of these problems and make them simply accidental and individual, the result of temperament or of circumstances. Farther than this, they had not yet gone. They did not dare to deny, in the face of universal testimony, the continued existence of the problems themselves. They disguised their significance, they did not aspire to destroy them. Now they take another step. In order to get the advantage in answering, they begin by suppressing the questions. This is the characteristic feature, the first step of a system which makes a great deal of noise in the world to-day, although it only claims to reproduce efforts which have been already more than once defeated. It has, however, this kind of novelty, this advantage over its associates which, like it, have issued from pantheism, that it is not vague. It sets forth its opinions clearly and without equivocation, and by this fact this school of philosophy has gained the title by which it is commonly known. We need hardly say that it is to _Positivism_ that we are alluding. This promises with the greatest seriousness, if we will only lend it our attention, to free humanity from these untoward problems which now torment it.

Its remedy is extremely simple: it simply says to the human race, Why do you seek to know whence you have come and what is your destiny? You will never find out a word of this. Do then your real duty. Leave these vain fancies. Live, become learned, study the _evolution_ of things, that is to say, secondary causes and their relations; on this subject science has wonders to reveal to you; but final causes and first causes, our origin and our destiny, the beginning and the end of the world, these are all pure reveries, words completely without meaning! The perfection of man as well as of society consists in taking no notice of these things. The mind becomes more enlightened, the more it leaves in obscurity your pretended natural problems. {343} These problems are really a disease, and the way to cure it is, not to think of them at all.

Not to think of them! Ingenuous proposition! Wonderful ignorance of the eternal laws of human nature! "Our age," say they, "inclines to these ideas: but let us not be disturbed by this." Men will not be persuaded by speaking to them in such a clear way, any more than Don Juan could overcome Sganarelle by his discourses on "two and two are four." Positivism not only attempts the impossible, but it frankly acknowledges it. Let us suppose for a moment that by some miracle it should triumph; that man, in order to please this system, should cease to pay any attention to the problems which beset him, should renounce the idea of fathoming these questions, and should despise every attempt at a religious or even a metaphysical solution, every inspiration toward the Infinite. How long does any one believe this would continue? We do not think that the human mind would consent to be thus mutilated and imprisoned for two days in succession. Were this system far more fascinating, the human soul would still rise above the limit to which Positivism would confine it, and would say with a great poet:

"Je ne puis, l'infini malgré moi me tourmente."

And so we see, whatever may happen, Positivism is not destined to give us the solution of these natural problems. After, as before, its appearance, the mystery of our destiny claims the attention of the human race.

M. Guizot describes another attempt, of an entirely different character. It is apparently less bold, for its aim is not to suppress inquiry, but merely to elude any definite solution of these natural problems. It cannot be properly called a system; it is rather a state of the individual soul, which not unfrequently is found among cultivated minds; it is a tendency to substitute what is called religious sentiment for religion itself. They do not deny the great mysteries of life, but consider them as being very serious and extremely embarrassing. But in the place of precise solutions and categorical replies, which could be required of a system maintaining fixed and clearly defined dogmas, they content themselves with frequent reveries and long contemplations. "This is," say they, "the religion of enlightened intellects; we care for no solutions, for they only serve to agitate and annoy." It offers a complete contrast to Positivism. That recommends us, as a sort of moral hygiene, never to think of invisible things; but these "enlightened minds" would have us reflect much, if not continually, upon them, but always with the proviso that we must come to no conclusion.

The human race will not be satisfied with these modes of interpreting its destiny. It requires something more than the blind negations of the one, or the vague aspirations of the other. Man is not merely an intellectual or an emotional being; he is both united. He requires real answers, and not beautiful dreams; he requires true replies, which satisfy his intellect as well as his heart, which point out the way he must take, which sustain his courage, which animate his hope and excite his love. The ideal that he seeks is a system of facts, of precepts, and of dogmas, which will correspond to the wants that he finds within himself. Let us search for it, for it is the great question for us all. As we have already said, there are two sources from which we may hope to learn the truth, one entirely human, the other half divine. Does the first suffice? Let us see.

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II.

If science can reply to the appeals of our souls, if by its own power and light it can reveal to us the end of this life, can make us see clearly the beginning and the end, so much the better; we will cling to science without asking for anything more. We have this exact and sure guide completely within our control; why should we seek adventitious aid and inexplicable revelations? It is true that everybody cannot be learned, but everybody believes in science. However scanty her proof may be, the most rebellious yield as soon as she has pronounced her decision. There is no schism or heresy with her. If sometimes the _savans_ quarrel, which they can do perhaps even better than other men, they are not long in finding a peacemaker: they take a retort, a microscope, or a pair of scales; they weigh, compare, measure, and analyze, and the process is terminated: until new facts are ascertained, the decree is sovereign. What an admirable perspective opens before humanity if these hidden questions, which now puzzle and confuse, will in the future be cleared up and accurately determined by the aid of science. Time and the law of progress give us an easy way of putting an end to our perplexities. The fruit of divine knowledge, the old forbidden fruit, we can now pluck without fear, and we can satiate ourselves without danger of a fall!

Unfortunately, all this is only a dream. In the first place, the authority of science is not always admitted. It has more or less weight, according to the subject it may treat. In the investigations of natural things, in physics, and in mathematics, its decisions are law. But when it leaves the visible world, when it turns to the soul, interminable controversies arise. Its right to be called science is then disputed; for it appears to be only conjectural, and half the time its principal efforts consist in trying to demonstrate that it has the right to be believed. This is exactly the kind of science with which we have to do. The questions which disturb man are not the problems of algebra or chemistry; they are the secrets of the invisible world. We cannot expect unanswerable solutions of these doubts, for science, in the field of metaphysics, has none such to give us.

Can science gratify its fancy in these investigations with perfect liberty and without limit? No, an impassable barrier opposes and imprisons it in the invisible universe, as well as in the breast of physical and material nature. All science, whatever it may be, has its determined limit in the extent of finite things. Within this limit, everything is in its power; beyond it, everything escapes it. Could it possibly be otherwise? It is the product of our mind, which is finite; how then could human science be anything but the explication of the finite? Induction, it is true, transports us to the extreme frontier of this material world, to the door of the infinite, and the results of induction are with reason called scientific; yet what does this wonderful faculty, this great light of science, really do? Nothing else than to put us face to face with the unknown mysteries which are completely closed to us. It shows them in perspective, it makes us see enough to persuade us that they really do exist, but not enough to make known any truth precisely, exactly, practically, or experimentally--in a word, scientifically. The invisible finite, that is to say; the human soul, the dwelling of the human _Ego_, science is capable of explaining; the invisible infinite, the supreme, creative spirit, escapes it completely.

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But this is exactly what must be penetrated and thoroughly known, if we expect to resolve the great problems which concern our destiny in a scientific manner. It is then impossible, it is more than an illusion--it is folly to hope for a solution of these questions from human science.

Is this equivalent to saying that philosophy is powerless to speak to us about natural problems? that it has nothing to say to us about our duties, our hopes, our destiny? No, certainly not. It is qualified, it has the right to treat of these questions; to _treat_ concerning them, not to resolve them. The most daring effort of spiritual philosophy can never span the abyss; it can only make the borders more distinct. Noble task, after all! A sound philosophy, which abstains from useless hypotheses, which gives us that which it can give, namely, the clear proof that an invisible order does exist, that realities are behind these mysterious problems, that they justly disturb us, that we are right in wishing to solve them; all this, certainly, is not worthless knowledge nor a trifling success for the human race. As soon as this philosophy flourishes in a place, if it be only among a small number of generous spirits, the perfume is spread abroad, and, little by little, one after another, the whole people feel its influence, and society is reanimated, elevated, and purified. And religion, we do not fear to say it frankly, is badly advised and wants prudence, no less than justice, when, in the place of accepting the aid of this system and welcoming it as a natural auxiliary, seeing in it a kind of vanguard, which is to prepare minds and overcome prejudices, she keeps it at a distance almost with jealousy, combats it, provokes it, places it between two fires, and loads it with the same blame and bitter reproaches as the blindest errors and the most perverse doctrines receive. If these unfortunate attacks had not been made, perhaps we should not see certain reprisals, an excess of confidence, and a forgetfulness of its proper limits that its friends do not now always avoid; for if it is true that we should be just toward it, it is no less true that it should be held in check. M. Guizot, as a real friend, has frankly rendered it this service. Perhaps no one before him has traced with so sure a hand the limits of philosophical science. He claims for it the sincerest respect, and ably sustains its legitimate authority, but clearly points out the limit that must not be passed.

More than one, its adherents will complain: "You discourage us. If you wish us to maintain the invisible truths against so many adversaries, do not deprive us of our weapons; do not tell us in advance how far we may go; let us trust that some day this gate of the infinite, at which we have struggled for so many centuries, will at last be opened."

We could answer: "If you had only made some progress during these centuries, we could hope for more in the future. We would not have the right to say, 'So far shall you go, but no farther.' But where are the advances of metaphysics? Who has seen them? Possibly there has been a progress in appearance, that there is now more clearness and more method. In this sense, the great minds of modern times have added something to the legacy of the philosophers of ancient history; but the inheritance has ever remained the same. Who will presume to boast that he knows more of the infinite than did Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato? The natural sciences seem destined to increase. {346} Feeble at first, they gradually go from victory to victory, until they have created an empire, which is constantly increasing and always more indisputable. Metaphysical science, on the contrary, is great at its birth, but soon becomes stationary; it is evidently unable ever to reach the end it is ever seeking. If anything is needed to prove this immobility of metaphysics, it will be done by referring to the constant reappearance of four or five great systems, which in a measure contain all the thousand systems that the human mind has ever, or will ever invent. From the very beginning of philosophy, you see them; at every great epoch, they are born again; always the same under apparent diversities, always incomplete and partial, half true and half false. What do these repeated returns to the same attempts, ending in the same result, teach us, unless the eternal inability to make a single advance? Evidently man has received from above, once for all and from the earliest times, the little that he knows of metaphysics; and human work, human science, can add nothing to it."

If, then, you rely on science to pierce the mystery of these natural problems, your hope is in vain. You see what they can attain--nothing but vague notions, fortified, it is true, by the firm conviction that these problems are not illusory, that they rest upon a solid foundation, on serious realities.

Is this enough? Does this kind of satisfaction suffice for your soul? What does it signify if a few minds, moulded by philosophy, comprehending everything in a superficial manner, remain in these preliminaries, contented with this half-light, and need no other help to go through life, even in times of the most severe trial? We are willing to grant what they affirm of themselves, but what can be concluded from this? How many minds of this character can be found? It is the rarest exception. The immense majority of men, the human race, could not live under such a system; it is too great a stranger to the philosophical spirit; it has too limited a perception of the invisible. All abstraction is Hebrew for it. And even supposing that the vague responses that come from science were to be presented in a more accessible form; still the essential facts would be for most men without value or efficacy, and a most inadequate help.

What is the human race going to do if, on one side, it cannot do without precise responses and dogmatic notions concerning the invisible infinite, and if, on the other, science is the only means of attaining this end? If it aspires to learn truths which transcend experience, and yet takes experience for its only guide? If, in short, it will only admit and accept the facts that it observes, confirms, and verifies itself? How shall we escape from this inextricable difficulty?

To Be Continued.

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Cowper, Keble, Wordsworth; Or, "Quietist" Poetry, And Its Influence On Society.

The Spanish priest, Michael Molinos, who spent the last eleven years of his life in the prisons of the Inquisition, was destined to exert considerable influence over many of the most thoughtful and gifted spirits of his age. It was in 1675, and in the heart of Rome, that he published a _Spiritual Guide_, in which he pointed out various methods calculated to raise the soul to a state of contemplation and quietude, in which she makes no use of her faculties, is unconcerned about all that may happen, and even about the practice of good works and her own salvation; reposing on the love of God, and, through his presence, safe, all-sufficient, and entirely blest. It can be easily imagined how acceptable the unction of ascetic eloquence might render such doctrine to minds mystically disposed. Multitudes in every age are ready to run after any quack of human happiness who is ingenious enough to hide his fallacies under a show of reason; and Molinos had this advantage over many charlatans, that before deceiving others he had completely deceived himself. He was honest, therefore, and certainly a great advance on the Quietists of the 14th century, called in Greek Hesuchasts, who in their monastery on Mount Athos passed whole days in a state of immobility, "contemplating," as their historians say, "their nose or their navel, and by force of this contemplation finding divine light." Molinos found many partisans in Italy and in France, where his system was fervently embraced by the celebrated poetess and mystic, Madame Guyon, who conceived herself called from above to quit her home and travel, inculcating everywhere the gospel of quietism. Fenelon, whose sweetness and goodness flung a charm around every opinion he expressed, adopted in part the theories of Molinos, and Madame de Maintenon herself is numbered among Madame Guyon's converts to the Spaniard's novel and dreamy creed.

The inmates of Port-Royal, and the Jansenists in general, had, as may be conjectured from the example of Fenelon, strong affinities for quietism; and the sympathy entertained for their sufferings by English Calvinists in the last century, sufficiently accounts for the poet Cowper becoming an admirer of Madame Guyon's writings, and imitating in the _Olney Hymns_ many of her fervent compositions.

Without falling into the errors of the Quietists, Cowper imbibed much of their spirit, and transfused it into his verses very happily. His poetry is essentially of a quietist description, provided the term be understood in a favorable sense. His mind was naturally tranquil, and even during the melancholy of his later days, his mental aberration partook of the original placidity of his character. His rhythm is musical, his language choice, and the flow of his thoughts calm and tranquillizing. He discards stormy and passionate themes from instinct rather than resolve. He delighted in such subjects as "Truth," "Hope," "Charity," "Retirement," "Mutual Forbearance," and

"Domestic happiness, the only bliss Of Paradise that has survived the Fall."

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And he has clustered around them all the graces of poetry and charms of Christian philosophy. In that work in which his powers are exhibited to most advantage and at greatest length--_The Task_--he has touched on every topic that is most soothing, and in verses, many of which have become proverbs, has expressed, with unrivalled precision and ease, thoughts and feelings common to every Christian who is

"Happy to rove among poetic flowers, Though poor in skill to rear them."

He is never obscure, his emotions are never fictitious, his humor is never forced, nor his satire pointless. Hence he became popular in his generation, and has lost no particle of the credit he once obtained. Brighter stars than he have in the present century come forth and dazzled the eyes of beholders, by the intensity of their radiance and the boldness of their career; but they have not thrown the gentle Cowper into the shade. He still shines above the horizon, "a star among the stars of mortal night," of heavenly lustre, unobtrusive, steadfast, and serene. He still exerts a wholesome influence on society, still refreshes us in the pauses of the battle of life, still refines the taste, fills the ear with melody, elevates the soul, and fosters in many those habits of reflection from which alone greatness and goodness spring. The "Lines on the receipt of his Mother's Picture" have rarely been surpassed in pathos. There never was a poet more sententious or a moralist more truly poetic. "He was," says one of his biographers, "an enthusiastic lover of nature, and some of his descriptions of natural objects are such as Wordsworth himself might be proud to own." His poems, observes Hazlitt, contain "a number of pictures of domestic comfort and social refinement which can hardly be forgotten but with the language itself." Of all his encomiasts, none has spoken of him with more fervor than Elizabeth Barrett, afterward Mrs. Browning, and the following stanzas from her beautiful poem called "Cowper's Grave" deserve to be quoted in connection with the present subject:

"O poets, from a maniac's tongue Was pour'd the deathless singing! O Christians, to your cross of hope A hopeless hand was clinging! O men, this man in brotherhood Your weary paths beguiling, Groan'd inly _while he taught you peace_, And died while ye were smiling."

But has Cowper had no successor in the peculiar path he so successfully trod? Was Wordsworth not in one sense a Quietist? Were the subjects he selected not as passionless as those of his master, and treated with equal thoughtfulness and calm? No doubt. Yet there was an important difference between them. The quietude which Cowper inculcated was to spring from religion; while that which Wordsworth promoted had its sources principally in contemplation of the beauties of Nature, and in obedience to her powerful influences. Each of these gifted minds has benefitted society, but in different ways; and it is well that, in a poetry-loving age, there should be some counter-balance to the morbid excitement and passionate intensity which the school of Byron, Moore, and Shelley rendered so popular. It is well that minor and gentler streams should irrigate the ground which has been desolated by their torrents of impetuous verse. It is well that divine no less than human love should have its laurel-crowned minstrels, and that principle and conscience should be proved no less poetical than passion and crime.

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It is undoubtedly difficult for one who foregoes the passions to rise to a very high eminence as a poet, since the violent emotions of our nature are well adapted to verse, and full of dramatic effect. The bard of Rydal-Mount has, nevertheless, attained a lasting celebrity, after patiently enduring years--long years--of neglect and ridicule. He has carefully eschewed those stormy and harrowing subjects with which poets of the highest genius had, before his time, generally delighted to familiarize our minds. He leaves such themes as Prometheus bound by Jupiter to a rock, with a vulture preying perpetually on his entrails, [Footnote 58] Count Ugolino devouring the flesh of his own offspring in the Tower of Famine, [Footnote 59] and Satan summoning his fallen peers to council in the fiery halls of Pandemonium, [Footnote 60] to such masters as "AEschylus the Thunderous," Dante, and Milton, and addresses himself to the softer and more homely feelings, and to the calmer reason of men. He is firmly persuaded that a truer and deeper source of poetic inspiration is to be found in the every-day sights and sounds of Nature; that the changing clouds and falling waters, the forest-glades, wet with noon-tide dew, the rocky beach, musical with foaming waves, the sheep-walks on the barren hill-side, and the "primrose by the river's brim," supply the imagination with its best aliment, and effectually tend to calm, elevate, and hallow the mind. This is his great, his constant theme. His longer and more philosophical poems ring ever-varying changes on it, and may be called an Epithalamium on the espousals of Man and Nature. But for his devoting a long life to the poetic development of this fundamental idea, we should never have seen our literature enriched by the productions of Shelley and Tennyson's genius. In poetry, as in all that concerns the human mind, there is a law of progress. The poetic harvest-home of one generation is the seed-time of that which is to follow. Thus Dante speaks of two poets (Guinicelli and Daniello) now forgotten, or known only by name, in terms of strong admiration, as predecessors to whose writings he was considerably indebted. [Footnote 61] The following lines are but a sample of a thousand passages in Wordsworth which set forth the agency of natural scenery in the work of man's education and refinement. It is taken from the _Prelude_, a long introduction to the _Excursion_, which lay upon the author's shelves in manuscript during forty-five years: [Footnote 62]

"Was it for this, That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved _To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song_, And from his alder-shades and rocky falls, And, from his fords and shallows, sent _a voice_ _That flowed along my dreams?_ For this didst thou, O Derwent! winding among grassy holms Where I was looking on, a babe in arms. _Make ceaseless music, that composed my thoughts_ _To more than infant softness_, giving me, Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind, A foretaste, a dim earnest of _the calm_ _That Nature breathes among the hills and groves?_"

[Footnote 58: _Prometheus Vinctus_.]

[Footnote 59: _L' Inferno_, c. xxxiii.]

[Footnote 60: _Paradise Lost_, Book i.]

[Footnote 61: _Il Purgatorio_, xi. 97; xxvi. 115, 142, 92, 97.]

[Footnote 62: 1805 to 1850.]

Wordsworth's life was an exemplification of the doctrine he taught. Cheerfulness and peace marked his character at each stage of his eighty years' pilgrimage, and, towards the close of his career, he had the satisfaction of perceiving that his works were slowly effecting the result to which he had destined them--making a lasting impression on the literature of his age, and leading many a thoughtful spirit from artificial to natural enjoyments, from the imagery of dreamland to that of daily life, from bombast to simplicity, from passion to feeling, and from turmoil to repose.

"O heavenly poet! such thy verse appears, So sweet, so charming to my ravished ears, As to the weary swain, with cares opprest. Beneath the silvan shade, _refreshing rest_; As to the fev'rish traveller, when first He finds a crystal stream to quench his thirst." [Footnote 63]

[Footnote 63: Dryden's _Virgil_, Pastoral v.]

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Nor was Wordsworth's love of nature and her soothing influences dissociated from religious belief. He was no materialist, maintaining the eternal existence and self-government of the universe by fixed and exclusively natural laws. He was no pantheist, worshipping nature as an indivisible portion of the divine essence--a body of which God is actually the soul. He believed in other laws besides those which regulate the movements of the celestial bodies, and the gradual formation and destruction of the strata that compose the surface of our globe. The view which he took of the material universe was such as became a Christian, and is luminously expressed by him in the following lines:

"I have seen A curious child applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell. To which, in silence hushed, his very soul Listened intensely, and his countenance soon Brightened with joy; for murmurings from within Were heard--sonorous cadences! whereby, To his belief, the monitor expressed Mysterious union with its native sea. E'en such a shell the universe itself Is to the ear of faith, and doth impart Authentic tidings of invisible things. Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power, And _central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation_."

It is impossible to read the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_ without perceiving that Wordsworth's passion for natural scenery was no fictitious emotion, assumed for the purpose of appearing brimful of philosophy and sentiment, and making an effective parade of moon and stars, flowers and rivulets, in verse. No, it was a deep and abiding principle--a feeling of which he could no more have divested himself than Newton of his bent toward science, or Beethoven of his ear for music. This unaffected enthusiasm enabled him to speak with the authority of a master, and to instil into the minds of disciples the ideas that had taken so strongly possession of his own.

From the poetry of inanimate nature, the transition was easy to that of simple feelings, particularly in rustic life. In the innocent plays of children of the cot, and the sparkling dews on the cheeks of wild mountain maids, Wordsworth found themes for reflection deep enough to sink into the memory of men. Who has not felt the inimitable simplicity of the verses in which the child, who often, after sunset, took her little porringer, and ate her supper beside her brother's grave, persisted in saying: "Oh! no, sir, _we are seven_," and in ignoring the power of death to sever or to annihilate? Purity marks all which this chief of the Lake School has composed; for how could he soothe the spirit if, like Moore and Byron, he pandered to vicious inclinations? Hence his successor as Poet-Laureate congratulates himself very properly on wearing

"The laurel greener from the brows Of him that uttered nothing base."

A poet's best eulogy is that which comes from a poet. Having quoted that of Tennyson, therefore, I shall add that which Shelley also bestows on Wordsworth:

"Thou wert as _a lone star_, whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar: Thou hast like to a _rock-built refuge_ stood Above the blind and battling multitude In honored poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty."

The quietude commended by infidel poets is, at the best, that of despair. It is rest without repose, pathetic but not peaceful--a spurious and delusive calm, difficult to attain for a moment, and certain not to endure.

"Yet now despair itself is mild. Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child. And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear." [Footnote 64]

[Footnote 64: P. B. Shelley.]

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Such is their language; so writes one of the most distinguished of these "apostles of affliction." How different are the feelings of the Christian "quietist:"

"Nor let the proud heart say. In her self-torturing hour, The travail pangs must have their way. The aching brow must lower. To us long since the glorious Child is born, Our throes should be forgot, or only seem Like a sad vision told for joy at morn, For joy that we have waked, and found it but a dream." [Footnote 65]

[Footnote 65: Keble. _The Christian Year_. Third Sunday after Easter.]

Nor is this strain unreal. The writer's life was the best guarantee for the sincerity of his sentiments, and the response he has wakened in myriads of hearts is a seal set on the depth of his convictions. He hymned not the happiness of the Christian, because the theme suited an ambitious lyre in that it is lofty, or an ordinary one in that it is familiar, but because he was persuaded that the poet's highest glory consists in calming the agitated spirit, as David did when he played cunningly on the harp in the presence of Saul; and that, while it is incumbent on us to make others happy, our paramount duty is to be happy ourselves; that if we are not so, the fault is our own; and that there are in the religion we profess, in every crisis and condition, ample provisions for that happiness to which all aspire.

"O awful touch of God made man! We have no lack if thou art there: From thee our infant joys began, By thee our wearier age we bear." [Footnote 66]

[Footnote 66: Keble. _Lyra Innocentium_.]

This is the key-note of his thoughtful rhymes.

Keble's reputation as a poet was established long before the leading periodicals of the land called attention to the beauty of his compositions.

Their publication in the first instance is said to have been owing to his seeing several of them in print without being able to conjecture by what means they had found their way to public light. He soon learned, however, that some of his manuscripts, which he had lent to a lady, had been dropped in the street and lost. He therefore resolved on completing and publishing _The Christian Year_. It was not till nearly twenty years after its first appearance that it received in the _Quarterly Review_ that meed of applause to which it was justly entitled. The article which there called attention to its extraordinary merits was written, we believe; by Mr. Gladstone, whom neither the bustle of parliamentary life, nor the aridity of financial study, renders insensible to the charms of those muses who are generally supposed to haunt woods and caves, and to smile only on the recluse.

To us Catholics the name of Keble will always be remembered with interest, because he shared with Drs. Newman and Pusey the leadership of that great party in the Anglican Church which has given so many children to the true church, and has spread through England and through the world many Catholic doctrines and practices long dormant or forgotten. We think of him with affection, because he carried on to the end the work of soothing the troubled spirit by means of religious verse; because he was through life the friend of that distinguished convert to whose genius and writings we owe so much; and because he has, both in prose and verse, laid down, more clearly and explicitly than any other Protestant writer, the grounds of our veneration of the blessed Mother of God Incarnate.[Footnote 67]

[Footnote 67: _See Lyra Innocentium_, "Church Rites;" and _The Month_, May, 1866, "John Keble."]

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He did not, indeed, follow out his convictions to their legitimate results; he fancied that he responded to them sufficiently by remaining where he was. But his poems will ever remain a witness against the church in which they were composed, because it can never reduce to practice the doctrines he taught in reference to the holy eucharist, the confessional, and the communion of saints. Meanwhile they are silently imbuing the minds of Anglican readers with feelings and arguments favorable to the divine system of the Catholic Church. Though his _Christian Year_ is adapted to the services of the Church of England, and though its chief purpose, as stated in the preface, is "to exhibit the soothing tendency of the Prayer-Book," the author's sympathies are with the Book of Common Prayer in its Catholic, and not in its Protestant aspects. During more than forty years it has been chiselling the Anglican mind into a more orthodox shape. It moulds the chaotic elements of faith into substance, form, and life. It supplies the lost sense of Scriptures, and lays the foundation of towers and bulwarks it cannot build. It opens bright vistas of realized truth, and points to glorious summits from the foot of the hill. It is not inspired with genius of the highest order; the range it takes is more circumscribed in some respects than that of Cowper; it seldom reaches the sublime, and is always pleasing rather than original. But in spite of these drawbacks, it has wound itself more and more into public esteem. No poetry is read more habitually by members of the Established Church. The number of those is very large who take down _The Christian Year_ from their bookshelves every Sunday and festival. It rings every change on the theme Resignation, and presents it in all its truest and most beautiful lights. It has extracted from the sacred writings the very marrow of the text, has developed in a thousand ways the typical and mystic import of Scripture histories, expressed from them abundantly the wine and oil of consolation, and conveyed it to us in poetic ducts of no mean kind.

"As for some dear familiar strain Untired we ask, and ask again. Ever, in its melodious store. Finding a spell unheard before;" [Footnote 68]

so, many Anglicans of the devouter sort recur to Keble's poems year after year, and end the perusal only with death. Other poets charm and instruct the mind, he forms it; and while others are but read, he is learnt. Even the conviction which he cherished of the heavenly mission of the church of Queen Elizabeth, though misplaced, added to the sweetness and soothing character of his verses. But it is deserving of note that his latter volume, _Lyra Innocentium_, which contains more lamentation than he uttered before over the shortcomings of his own communion, and more intense aspirations after Catholic dogma and practice, evinces at the same time less inward quietude in the writer, and imparts less of it to the reader. One poem, indeed, called "Mother out of Sight," on the absence of the holy Mother of God from the English mind, invoking her, as it did, in a strain of glorious verse, was omitted, lest it should perplex and disquiet those who were unused to such invocations, and believed them to be forbidden by the Anglican Church.

[Footnote 68: _Christian Year_, "Morning."]

To cite passages from Keble's poems illustrative of their soothing tendency, would be to copy almost all he wrote. They fell like the dew of Hermon, and were a sign and symbol of the man himself. {353} "His bright, fresh, joyous, and affectionate nature," says one who knew him well, "was an ever-flowing spring, always at play, _always shedding a gentle, imperceptible, and recreating dew upon those who came within its reach. There was a Christian poetry about him_, a natural gift, elevated and transformed by his consistent piety and religious earnestness, which gilded the commonest things and the most ordinary actions, and cast the radiance of an unearthly sunshine all around him." [Footnote 69] What wonder that the illustrious author of the _Apologia_ used to look at him with awe when walking in the High Street at Oxford? What wonder that, when elected a Fellow of Oriel, and for the first time taken by the hand by the Provost and all the Fellows, he bore it till Keble took his hand, and then, as he said, "felt so abashed and unworthy of the honor done him, that he seemed desirous of quite sinking into the ground"? [Footnote 70] Yet the greater was blessed of the less. For depth and subtlety of reasoning, for power and pathos in prose composition. Dr. Newman has surpassed beyond all measure everything which Keble did or could accomplish. In poetry, the world in general has awarded the palm to Keble, and the world, we believe, is right. In the art, at least, of calming the ruffled spirit, the poet of _The Christian Year_ has outdone his beloved rival and friend.

[Footnote 69: _The Month_, vol. iv. p. 142.]

[Footnote 70: J. H. Newman's _Apologia_, p. 76.]

The _Lyra Apostolica_ brought Keble and Newman together as athletes in the arena of poetry; and that series of poems affords a good opportunity of comparing their several merits, to those who have the key to the writers' names. They appeared in the _British Magazine_, signed only with Greek characters representing the following writers:

Alpha J. W. Bowden. Beta R. H. Froude. Gamma John Keble. Delta J. H. Newman. Epsilon R. J. Wilberforce; Zeta Isaac Williams.

By far the greater number of the pieces were written by Keble and Newman, and almost all by the latter have reappeared this year in a series, which supplies a poetic commentary on the author's life. These _Verses on Various Occasions_ range over a period of forty-six years, and having each of them the date and the place where composed attached to it, the interest of the whole is thereby greatly increased. Among the poems is that remarkable one, "The Dream of Gerontius," which was published in _The Catholic World_ in 1865. But neither Dr. Newman's verses thus collected, nor the series entitled _Lyra Apostolica_ in general, are marked by that repose which is the prevailing feature of _The Christian Year_. The motto chosen by Froude for the _Lyra_ was truly combative, and shows the feeling both of Newman and himself, then together at Rome. It was taken from the prayer of Achilles on returning to the battle, and it implores Heaven to make his enemies know the difference, now that his respite from fighting is over.

[Greek text] [Footnote 71]

[Footnote 71: _Iliad_, [Sigma] 125. _Apologia_, p. 98.]

The scars of warfare are visible even in Newman's hymns. He has evidently passed through many an inward conflict, and fought with, many an external foe. He has vacated ground he once occupied, and he defends principles which he once assailed. He pierces many heights, and depths, and has to be always on his guard against his lively imagination. {354} He is lucid as any star, but not always as serene. He flashes now and then like a meteor; he hints and suggests in nebulous light. He is a pioneer of thought; he shoots beyond his comrades; he walks "with Death and Morning on the Silver Horns." He sees, where others grope; he is at home, where others feel confused and out of place. He is, like Ballanche, [Footnote 72] more satisfied of the truth of the unseen than of the visible world. Mysteries are his solemn pastime. He strikes his harp in Limbo, as Spaniards weave a dance in church before the Holy Sacrament. His dreams are Dantesque; he is half a seer. The veil of death is rent before him, and his soul, by anticipation, launches into the abyss. The chains of the body are dropped, and angels and demons come round him to console and to harass his solitary spirit in its transition state. His condition there, like his poetry, and like himself on earth and in the body, is one of mingled quietude and disturbance;

"And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet, Had something, too, of sternness and of pain." [Footnote 73]

[Footnote 72: _Dublin Review_, July, 1865, p. 10. "Madame Récamier."]

[Footnote 73: "Dream of Gerontius," § 2.]

The happy, suffering soul ("for it is safe, consumed, yet quickened, by the glance of God,") sings in Purgatory in a strain identical with that to which it was used in this mortal life:

"Take me away, and in the lowest deep There let me be, And there in hope the lone night-watches keep, Told out for me. There motionless and happy in my pain, Lone, not forlorn-- There will I sing my sad perpetual strain Until the morn; There will I sing and soothe my stricken breast, Which ne'er can cease To throb and pine and languish, till possest Of its sole peace." [Footnote 74]

[Footnote 74: Ibid. § 6.]

There is, indeed, one of Dr. Newman's poems, and that one the most popular and beautiful he has ever composed, which is singularly pathetic and peaceful. Yet even here darker shades are not wanting. The angel faces are "lost awhile," and the "pride" and self-will of former years recur to the memory like spectres. It was in June, 1833, when becalmed in the Straits of Bonifacio in an orange-boat [Footnote 75] that Dr. Newman wrote "Lead, Kindly Light." The _Pall Mall Gazette_--no mean critic--has said of it recently, [Footnote 76] "It appears to us one of the most perfect poems of the kind in the language."

[Footnote 75: _Apologia_, p. 99.]

[Footnote 76: Jan. 23, 1868]

"Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom. Lead thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home-- Lead thou me on! Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see The distant scene--one step enough for me.

"I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou Would'st lead me on. I loved to choose and see my path; but now Lead thou me on! I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears. Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

"So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone; And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile."

Fond as Dr. Newman is of modern poetry he has not imitated it. His style is original--a rare mixture of strength, sincerity, and sweetness, moulded rather after the choruses of Greek dramas, than the rich creations of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Longfellow. Hence his poems bear a nearer resemblance to Milton's _Samson Agonistes_ than to any other English production. His lyrical pieces, again, often remind us of George Herbert, and of Shenstone, Waller, and Cowley. They have a clearness of expression and bright fluency, which makes you love the writer even when you cannot greatly admire his verse. One of the best specimens of his poetic faculty in the _Verses on Various Occasions_ is a poem called "Consolations in Bereavement," written in 1828. {355} It turns on one idea--the rapidity of death's work in the case of the dear sister whom he mourns. He solaces himself with the reflection that the deed was quickly done, and thus derives comfort from a thought which is in most cases afflictive. Perhaps Byron's lines were unconsciously running in his head:

"I know not if I could have borne To see thy beauties fade: ......

Thy day without a cloud hath past, And thou wert lovely to the last; _Extinguished, not decayed_; As stars that shoot along the sky Shine brightest as they fall from high."

Dr. Newman's poetry did not properly fall within the scope of this article, but we have been led to speak of it because he was Keble's colleague in the _Lyra Apostolica_, and because the verses of the surviving poet have just appeared in England in a new form, and have attracted general attention and been made the subject of admiring and affectionate criticism not merely by Catholic periodicals, but by non-Catholic reviews and newspapers of every political and religious shade. Indeed, the praise bestowed on them by such journalists has exceeded that of our own critics, because it has, generally speaking, been more discriminating and uttered by higher authorities in the literary world.

Let us then rejoice that English literature includes three poets at least--Cowper, Keble, and Wordsworth--who are in a good sense quietists, and the tenor of whose writings, from first to last, is tranquillizing. They may not, perhaps, be the authors who will afford us most pleasure in the tumultuous season of youthful enjoyment; but as years advance, and the trials of life present themselves, one by one, in all their painful reality; as reason matures and reflection ripens; as the probationary character of our mortal existence becomes more and more clear to our apprehension; as the discovery of much that is formal and hollow in society enamors us of rural retreats and sylvan solitudes; as the inexhaustible treasures of beauty and magnificence in the material universe unfold before our gaze; as the things unseen triumph over visible objects in our thoughts and affections, we shall find in such poetry as we have attempted to describe, more that is congenial and charming, and shall cherish with fonder remembrance the names of Cowper, the mellifluous exponent of Christian ethics and delights; of Keble, the bard of Biblical lore; and of Wordsworth, the child and poet of nature. Like skilful tuners of roughly-used instruments, they will reduce to sweetness our spirits' harsher and discordant tones, and fit us to take our part in the everlasting harmonies of the boundless universe. They will each make poetry, in our view, the handmaid of science and revelation, accepting with rapture the vast, amazing discoveries of the one, and ever seeking to harmonize them with the momentous and soul-subduing disclosures of the other. They will impart to mute matter the voice and power of a moral teacher, imbue inanimate things (to our imagination) with life and feeling, inspire us with "a glorious sympathy with suns that set" and rise, with "flowers that bloom and stars that glow," with the birdling warbling on her bough, and the ocean bellowing in his caves; and will lead us by nature's golden steps to the footstool of the Creator's throne; for, in the eyes of such poets, earth is "crammed with heaven," and every common bush on fire with God.

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The Early Irish Church. [Footnote 77]

[Footnote 77: _Essays on the Origin, Doctrines, and Discipline of the Early Irish Church_. By the Rev. Dr. Moran, Vice-Rector of the Irish College, Rome. Dublin, 1864. Pp. vii., 337. For sale by the Catholic Publication Society, New York.]

The early Irish Church is now the subject of a close scrutiny and deep study, that bids fair to shed upon it all the light that can be poured upon the subject by such written material as war, oppression, persecution, and penal laws have been insufficient to destroy. There are two schools, and their emulating labors will allow little to escape, both being well versed in ecclesiastical history, the Irish language, annals, and literature.

It is needless to say that there are a Catholic and a Protestant school--the latter of comparatively recent origin. The Anglican Church in Ireland, studying what it had long despised, now seeks to hold forth to the world that it is the real successor and representative of the early Irish Church; while the Catholic Church in Ireland is simply a papal continuation of the foreign church, forced on Ireland by Henry II. and Pope Adrian IV., and their respective successors. Unfortunately, however, the memory of man records not the fact that, in the sixteenth century and later, the Thirty-nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer were presented to the Irish as being the creed and liturgy of its early saints. Those who burnt the crosier of Patrick broke with the early Irish Church as effectually as they did with the romanized Irish Church of later days.

At the beginning of this century, Ledwich, following in the wake of the wild theories of Conyers Middleton, denied entirely the existence of St. Patrick, and his theory met with no little favor among those opposed to the church. Now his existence is admitted, his life studied and written, and efforts made, with no little skill, industry, and learning, to show that the Roman Catholic Church has no claim to St. Patrick or the church which he founded; a church so full of life, that its missionaries spread to other lands, and went forth with papal sanction to plant catholicity or revive fervor on the continent. It is to this curious phase of controversy that we are indebted for the volume of Essays which are here contributed by Doctor Moran, and which evince his learning and research, as well as his fitness for close historical argument.

That there should be much material for a discussion as to so early a period as the fifth century may surprise many, especially those who have always been taught to clear with a bound some ten or more centuries prior to the sixteenth. And it must be admitted that it is indeed surprising, when we consider the wholesale destruction of Irish manuscripts by the English in Ireland from the time of Henry down to the present century. From the period of the invasion to the Reformation, though invaders and invaded were alike Catholic, the English treated the Irish with such contempt that only five families or bloods were recognized as human, and even monasteries were closed to men of Irish race. The literature of the proscribed was of course slighted and despised.

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From the Reformation the literary remains of earlier days were proscribed and destroyed, not only as Irish but as popish.

In this almost universal destruction, the ecclesiastical books, missals, sacramentaries, breviaries, penitentials, the canons of councils, doctrinal books, many historical and biographical treatises perished. The Irish people and their church hold by tradition to their predecessors, and claim to be direct successors of the church and converts of St. Patrick. Nor can the Anglican party which destroyed so much of Irish literature now base any argument on the silence of manuscript authority or draw any inference in their favor from the absence of proofs, for whose disappearance they are themselves accountable.

The uninterrupted adherence of the Irish nation to the Roman Church gives it the force of prescription, and it will hold good against all but the most direct and positive evidence.

No mere inferences can invalidate her claim.

The documents regarding the early Irish Church begin with the confession of Saint Patrick and his letter to Coroticus, a piratical British chief, published by Ware in 1656, from four manuscripts, and by the Bollandists from a manuscript in the Abbey of Saint Vaast.

The canons ascribed to the saint were published by the same, as well as by Spelman and Usher.

Of the lives of the saint, the least valuable of all is that by Jocelin, an English monk, who wrote soon after the conquest. This is given in the Bollandists and in Messingham's Florilegium. Earlier and better lives, four in number, were collected and published by Colgan in his Acta Triadis Thaumaturgae, a work of which we doubt the existence of a copy on this side of the Atlantic.

Among these earlier lives, one by Probus is of much value. It was printed, strangely enough, among the works of Venerable Bede, in the Basil edition of that father issued in 1563, and, apparently, the whole work was taken from manuscripts preserved at the Irish convent at Bobbio.

These are the more important material for the life of the apostle of Ireland, together with unpublished matter in some very ancient Irish manuscripts, codices known for centuries, such as the Book of Armagh, a manuscript of the eighth or ninth century, which contains a life of Saint Patrick by Muirchu-Maccu-Mactheni; the Leabhar Breac, considered the most valuable Irish manuscript on ecclesiastical matters; the Tripartite Life in the British Museum, the early national annals, etc.

As to the antiquity and value of these ancient codices Westwood in his _Palaeographia Sacra Pictoria_ (London, 1843-5) may be consulted.

For the liturgy of the early Irish Church, we have a missal preserved at Stowe, in England, and ascribed to the sixth century, but which unfortunately has never been fully and completely published; a missal preserved in the monastery founded by Saint Columbanus at Bobbio, and printed by Mabillon in his _Iter Italicum_; the _Antiphonarium Benchorense_; the Exposition of the Ceremonies of the Mass preserved in the Leabhar Breac and a treatise on the Mass Vestments in the same volume, as well as the Liber Hymnorum, and various separate hymns.

The lives of the Irish saints, many of which have been published by Colgan, Messingham, the Bollandists, as well as the meagre Irish secular annals, throw much light on the social and religious life of the ancient Irish.

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Such is, in brief, the documentary array to be appealed to in the controversy, as to the origin and character of the Irish Church.

And surely what has come down in fragments shows a church which the Anglican Church could not but condemn. The warmest advocate of the identity of the Anglican Church in Ireland with the early Irish Church, would find the old Irish mass, as preserved in the Stowe or the Bobbio missal, a very objectionable worship; the monks and nuns unsuited to our age; and the prayers, penitentiary, and belief in miraculous powers in the church utterly inconsistent with Protestant ideas; while the Catholic Irish would find the mass, if said in one of their churches, so like that they daily hear, that it would excite scarce a word of comment; monks and nuns would certainly excite less; and the prayers of that early day still circulate with the commendation of the actual head of the Catholic Church, the successor of Celestine.

The position having been abandoned that St. Patrick never existed, national pride, which from the days of Jocelin has bent its energies to prove that he was a Briton of the island of Great Britain and born in Scotland, now would prove that he was a genuine Englishman in his total renunciation of papal authority.

In the recent life of St. Patrick by Dr. Todd, this, though treated lightly as a matter of slight import, is really the marrow of the book.

The mission of St. Patrick has been uniformly attributed to Pope St. Celestine, who held the chair of Peter from 422 to 432; and is intimately connected with a previous one of the deacon of Celestine, St. Palladius, who made an unsuccessful attempt to christianize Ireland; and the mission of St. Palladius grew out, it would seem, of a deputation of Gallic bishops to Britain to check the progress of Pelagianism.

Todd endeavors ingeniously to break up these connected facts. He seeks to show that Palladius was a deacon not of St. Celestine, but of St. Germain, Bishop of Auxerre; that the history of Palladius and Patrick have been confounded; and that Patrick was not sent to Ireland till 440, and consequently could not have been sent by St. Celestine. This would, to some extent, deliver the early Irish Church from the terrible responsibility of having received its origin from Rome.

Dr. Moran's work is made up of three essays: "On the Origin of the Irish Church and its Connection with Rome;" "On the teaching of the Irish Church concerning the Blessed Eucharist;" and, on "Devotion to the Blessed Virgin in the Ancient Church of Ireland."

In the first of these essays he meets the arguments of the Senior Fellow of Trinity by a careful and close examination, showing that both Palladius and Patrick owed their mission to Rome and to St. Celestine, and settles conclusively the date of St. Patrick's landing in Ireland.

He discusses at length the mission of Palladius; sketches the life of St. Patrick, and his connection with St. Germain; and states briefly the proofs of his Roman mission. He then refutes the array of modern theories in regard to the great apostle from Ledwich to Todd, and accumulates evidence to show how the early Irish Church regarded the holy see.

The period when Saint Palladius and Saint Patrick successively proceeded to Ireland, was not one of obscurity. The church was full of vitality, and met Nestorius in the east, Pelagius in the west, the Manichees in Africa, with the power and might of a divine institution. {359} It was the day of St. Augustine, St. Germain, of Vincent of Lerins, of Cassian, Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Jerome. St. Basil, St. Ambrose, St. Athanasius, even, and St. Anthony were still fresh in the memory of those who had heard the words of life from their lips, or gazed on them in reverence. The Council of Ephesus was actually in session defining the honor due to the Mother of God. The canon of Holy Scripture had been settled thirty-five years before, in the Council of Carthage, and St. Jerome's version was gradually supplanting the Vetus Itala in the hands of the faithful.

The monastic life, a vigorous tree planted at Rome by Athanasius, had already spread over the Latin Church, in its multiform activity and zeal. It grew under the mighty hand of Augustine, was nurtured by that St. Martin of Tours, whose reputation was so widespread. It gave a Lerins, with its school of bishops, writers, and saints; the abbey of St. Victor at Marseilles, where Cassian prayed and wrote.

But if this was a great age of the church, the Roman empire showed no such signs of vitality. It was tottering to its fall. Along its whole western territory, stretching from Italy to Caledonia, the pagan barbarians of Germany were pressing with relentless power, threatening destruction to Roman, romanized Briton, and romanized Gaul--for all of whom the German had but one name, still preserved by the race, the Anglo-Saxon terming the descendants of the Britons Welsh, as the Fleming does the French or the south of Germany the Italian. A little later this German race, last in Europe to embrace the faith and first to revolt from it, overran Britain, establishing the Saxon monarchy, making Gaul the land of Franks, and giving Spain and Italy Gothic sovereigns.

Before this torrent burst, the church in Italy, Britain, and Gaul was closely united. Heresies appeared and gained ground in Britain. To meet this Pelagian enemy, the insular bishops appealed for aid to Gaul. The bishops of that country in council, selected St. Germain and St. Lupus to go to Britain; and Prosper, in his chronicle, assures us that, through the instrumentality of Palladius the deacon, Pope Celestine in 426 sent Germain in his own stead to root out heresy there, and direct the Britons to the Catholic faith.

But this was not the only work. To recover what was straying was well; but a new island was yet to be conquered to the faith, one in which the Roman eagle had never flashed, but which seems to the eye of faith a field white for the reaper.

Attached to Germain by ties of which there is no doubt, was a man of Roman-British race, whose whole associations were with the church of Gaul, who had been a slave for several years in Ireland, and yearned to return to it as a herald of the Gospel. He is stated, in the earliest lives, to have been recommended by Saint Germain to Pope Celestine, as one fitted for such a work. The pope, however, either to give greater dignity to the new mission, or to leave no doubt of the Roman character of the work, chose in 431 Palladius, deacon of the Roman Church, already mentioned, to be the first apostle to the Scots, as the Irish were then termed. Saint Germain and Saint Lupus went to Britain in 429, and labored with zeal and success there during that year and the next. The ancient Irish writer, who wrote a commentary on a hymn in honor of Saint Patrick by St. Fiacc, and who is cited by Irish scholars as scholiast on Saint Fiacc's hymn, states that Saint Patrick accompanied the Gallic bishops to Britain. {360} In itself it would be probable. The intimate relations between the Bishop of Auxerre and the British priest, would naturally lead that prelate to choose him as a companion. That Palladius, who had been the pope's agent in the matter, accompanied them, also, would seem natural. His selection for the Irish mission after Saint Germain's return in 430, would follow as naturally.

He was made bishop, and sent to the Scots (Irish) in 431; and that Saint Patrick was in some manner appointed by the pope to the same work, or connected with the mission with a degree of authority, is evident from the fact that, when Saint Palladius, after an ineffectual attempt to establish a mission in Wicklow, was driven from the country, and died, as some say, in Scotland, his Roman companions at once hastened to Saint Patrick, to notify him as one who possessed some jurisdiction in the matter; and all accounts agree that on this intelligence, Saint Patrick at once proceeded to obtain the episcopal consecration, and sailed to Ireland.

Looking at the whole action of the pope in regard to the checking of Pelagianism in Britain, and the conversion of Ireland, this theory, first suggested by Dr. Lanigan, answers every requirement. It contravenes no fact given by any early author, and is in perfect harmony with every part. The Rome-appointed subordinates of Palladius reported to Patrick as a recognized superior, and it is utterly impossible that between him, the disciple of Germain and Palladius, the Roman delegate to Germain, there could have been diversity of faith or ecclesiastical discipline. The appointment of Patrick to the Irish mission was simultaneous with that of Palladius, to whom the priority was given. On the death of Palladius he succeeded, and required but the episcopal consecration to begin his labors as a bishop in Ireland.

This would make the Roman origin of the Irish Church too clear for Dr. Todd to accept it without a struggle. With what might almost be termed unfairness, he ignores the statement of a perfect catena of Irish writers as to the character of Palladius, in order to make him a deacon, not of the pope, but of Saint Germain.

Later lives of Saint Patrick, written long after the death of the saint, by introducing vague traditions, have doubtless embarrassed the question. That some took his appointment by, Celestine to have required his visiting Rome after the death of Palladius, was natural; but he would really have been appointed by Celestine, even though consecrated in Gaul after the death of that pope, if this was done in pursuance of previous orders of the holy see. It would not be strange to Catholic ideas that Saint Patrick had what would be now termed his bulls unacted upon, either from humility or some other motive; and the history of the church contains many examples where bulls have been so held, to be acted on ultimately only when the necessity of the church made the candidate feel it a duty to assume the burden from which he shrank.

Dr. Moran proves that Patrick drew his mission from Rome by a solid array of authorities, which embrace some of the most ancient Irish manuscripts extant. The Book of Armagh contains two tracts, one the _Dicta Sancti Patricii_, expressing his wish that his disciple should be "ut Christiani ita et Romani;" the other the annals of Tirechan, written about the middle of the seventh century, stating absolutely that in the thirteenth year of the Emperor Theodosius the Bishop Patrick was sent by Celestine, bishop and pope of Rome, to instruct the Irish.

{361}

The Leabhar Breac, styled by Petrie "the oldest and best Irish manuscript relating to church history now preserved," furnishes us evidence no less clear and decisive. The second Life of Saint Patrick, ascribed to Saint Eleran, (ob. 664;) the scholiast on Saint Fiacc, the Life by Probus, are all equally explicit, showing it to have been a recognized fact in Ireland within two centuries after the apostle's own day.

Dr. Moran, besides these, accumulates other authority of a later period, some hitherto uncited, and due to the researches of German scholars among the manuscripts still extant, due to the hands of the early Irish apostles of their land.

One argument of Dr. Todd was based on the silence of Muirchu Maccu Mactheni in the Book of Armagh; but Dr. Moran answers this fully by showing that part of that early writer's work is missing; and that, as the Life of Saint Probus follows, word for word, the parts extant, we may assume that Saint Probus followed him in other parts; and in regard to Saint Patrick's mission, Saint Probus is clear and plain.

The church in Ireland, then, was the spiritual child of Rome and Gaul. Her great missionary, a Breton, came from the schools of Gaul, with authority from Rome, and the church which he founded was in harmony with the church in Britain, Gaul, and Italy. What the faith of the church in those countries was, admits of no doubt; and were there no monuments extant to give explicit evidence of the faith of the Irish Church, this would give us implicit evidence sufficient, in the absence of any contradictory authority, to decide what its faith, doctrines, and liturgy were.

The vice-rector of the Irish College marshals his authorities again and shows that the church founded by an envoy from Rome retained its connection with the holy see and its reverence for the See of Peter. He adduces hymns of the Irish Church, various writings of successive ages, express canonical enactments regarding Rome, and finally the pilgrimages to the holy city, in itself an irrefragable proof of the veneration entertained for Rome; but he crowns all this by adducing the many extant cases in which Irish bishops and clergy appealed to Rome.

But it may be thought that the terrible changes caused by the invasion of the barbarians which in a manner isolated Ireland may have led insensibly to differences of faith or practice in that island, cut off from the centre of unity by the pagan England that had succeeded Christian Britain, and the pagan France that replaced Christian Gaul.

Have we aught to prove what the Irish Church believed and taught; at what worship the faithful knelt; how they were received into the body of believers; what rites consoled them in death? Fortunately there is much to console us here, as well as to convince us. One of the most important parts of the work we are discussing is the clear and distinct manner in which he proves the Irish character of the missal found at Bobbio, and reproduced by Mabillon in his _Iter Italicum_. Having, by what light we possessed, come to the conclusion that it was in no sense Irish, we examined this portion with interest, and must admit that the proof is clear. Bobbio was a monastery founded by St. Columbanus, and its rich library gave much to the early printers, and yet much still remains in the Ambrosian library at Milan. {362} This missal has no distinctive Irish offices, and its containing an office of St. Sigebert, King of Burgundy, seemed to refute any idea of its being Irish. Yet we know that St. Columbanus founded a monastery at Luxeu before proceeding to Bobbio, and in both places retained his Irish office. The adding of a local Mass would not be strange. In itself this missal corresponds with that Irish missal preserved at Stowe in many essential points, and with no other known missal; the orthography and writing are undoubtedly Irish; the liturgy in itself is not that of Gaul; it resembles it in many respects, but the canon is that of Rome. This striking feature appears in the Stowe missal. Mabillon, from its antiquity, himself infers that Saint Columbanus brought it from Luxeu, and it is as probable that he brought it from Ireland.

It gives us the Mass of the ancient Irish Church, and Curry gives in his lectures a translation of an "Exposition of the Ceremonies of the Mass" from the Irish in the Leabhar Breac. The Mass and the exposition place beyond a doubt the belief of the Irish Church in the Real Presence. The exposition is as distinct as if written to meet any opposition. "Another division of that pledge, which has been left with the church to comfort her, is the body of Christ and his blood, which are offered upon the altars of the Christians; the body even which was born of Mary the Immaculate Virgin, without destruction of her virginity, without opening of the womb, without the presence of man; and which was crucified by the unbelieving Jews out of spite and envy; and which arose after three days from death, and sits upon the right hand of God the Father in heaven." (_Curry's Lectures_, p. 307.)

The words of the Mass are no less explicit, and the Bobbio missal contains these words: "Cujus carne a te ipso sanctificata, dum pascimur, roboramur, et sanguine dum potamur, abluimur." The whole early literature, the lives of the saints, and other monuments teem with allusions to the sacrifice of Christ's body and blood, and the saying of Mass is not unfrequently expressed by the term "conficere Corpus Domini."

The proofs adduced by Dr. Moran on this point extend to sixty pages, showing the most exact research and learning, and accumulating evidence on evidence, meeting and refuting objections of every kind.

The sacrament of penance and its use is no less apparent; nor is the devotion to the blessed Virgin and the saints a point on which the slightest doubt is left.

Dr. Moran's work is certainly, since the appearance of _Lanigan's Ecclesiastical History_, (4 vols. Dublin, 1822,) the most valuable treatise on the early Irish Church, and completely sets at rest the theories set up by W. G. Todd, in _A History of the Ancient Church in Ireland_, London, 1845; and with great learning and skill by James H. Todd, in his _Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland: A Memoir of his Life and Mission_, Dublin, 1864.

We need now a popular treatise embracing the result of his labor, in a small volume, like the work of W. G. Todd, and a volume containing the Bobbio missal, (that at Stowe is probably sealed,) with the treatise on the Mass and vestments from the Leabhar Breac, and a selection of the prayers and hymns of the early church that have come down to us. With these common in the hands of the clergy, to familiarize them with what remains of the church of their fathers, we may hope to see the old Irish Mass, the "Cursus Scottorum" or Mass of the early Irish Church, chanted by the cardinal archbishop of Dublin on the great patronal feast, as the Mozarabic liturgy is in Spain, or the Ambrosian at Milan. It would be a living proof that, if the Irish and other churches laid aside their peculiar liturgies to adopt exclusively that of Rome, it was not that the former were objectionable; but that unity was too desirable to be postponed.

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My Angel.

"He hath given his angels charge over thee."

There's an angel stands beside my heart, And keepeth guard. How I wish sometimes that he would depart, And its strong desires would cease to thwart With his stern regard!

But he never moves as he standeth there With unwinking eyes; And at every pitfall and every snare His silent lips form the word, "Forbear!" Till the danger flies.

His look doth oft my purpose check And aim defeat. And I change my course at his slightest beck. 'Tis well, or I soon would be a wreck For the waves to beat.

{364}

Translated From The French.

An Italian Girl Of Our Day. [Footnote 78]

[Footnote 78: _Rosa Ferrucci: her Life, her Letters, and her Death_, By the Abbé H. Perreyve.]

[The first Italian edition of the _Letters of Rosa Ferrucci_ appeared at Florence in 1857, a request for their publication having been made to her mother by his Eminence Cardinal Corsi, Archbishop of Pisa. The pious prelate was not less desirous of seeing the account of so edifying a death published, when he had learned the circumstances from the Prior of San Sisto, who had attended Signorina Ferrucci in her last moments.

A second edition appeared in 1858, enriched with numerous details, at the express request of Monsignor Charvaz, Archbishop of Genoa.

During a brief stay which I made at Pisa, Monsignor della Fanteria, vicar-general of the diocese, spoke to me of the profound impression which the death of Signorina Ferrucci had left on all memories, and of the edification which he hoped from her _Letters_. He expressed a wish that they should be made known in France, and even urged me to undertake their translation myself.

Authorities such as these, and the testimony of persons of undoubted judgment as to the good this little work has already done, have determined me to publish it for the second time. May it edify yet again some young souls, by showing them in Christianity an ideal too often sought elsewhere.

_December_, 1858.]

The following are the circumstances which led to the publication of the _Letters_ here presented to the reader.

Toward the end of April, last year, (1857,) as I was returning from Rome, I stopped at Pisa. The hand of God conducted me then into the midst of a family, of whose unclouded happiness I had been the witness only a few months before, but which had now, alas! been visited by death. It was one of those sudden, heart-rending bereavements which make one falter on the desolated threshold of his friend, and which chill on one's lips the tenderest words of consolation.

What would you say to the father and mother who lose an only daughter--their joy, their life, and, moreover, the pride and the edification of a whole town? Better be silent and ask God to speak.

Happily, in this case, God did speak; and the noble souls whose sorrows are to be recounted here, were of the number of those who know his voice.

After the first tears and the first outpouring of a grief which time rendered only the more poignant, the poor mother asked me to accompany her to the house where her daughter had died, and which she herself had quitted from that day. A servant belonging to one of the neighboring houses had the keys of this funereal dwelling, and he opened the doors for us. We expected to find only the presence of death and the vivid remembrance of the sorrows of yesterday in the silence of those deserted chambers; but Christian charity had watched over the spot, and from our first steps a delicate perfume of roses betrayed its loving attentions. {365} Indeed, we found the chamber of the dead girl strewn with flowers. They were fresh, some faithful hand having renewed them that very morning. This unlooked-for spectacle awakened in our minds the thought that the Christian's death is not so much a death as a transformation of life. Therefore it was that, when, kneeling near the poor sobbing mother, I asked her if she wished me to recite the _De Profundis_, she answered in a firm voice and almost smiling, "No, let us recite the _Te Deum_."

The hymn concluded, I led the pious woman from that room where her sorrow seemed changed into exultation, and I said to her on the way: "From all that I know, from all that I can learn of your daughter, she was a saint. The delicate piety of your neighbors attests how powerful is still the recollection of her: the example of her life, and the details of her holy death, must not be lost. You must preserve them for the edification of her companions; for the edification of the town which has known her, loved her, venerated her; for the edification of ourselves also, who must one day die, and whom the examples of all holy deaths encourage and support." I was not the first to express this desire; many friends had anticipated me in begging for a history which they believed well calculated to reflect honor on our holy religion.

Before I left Pisa, I had obtained the desired promise, pledging myself, at the same time, to make known in France, to some Christian readers, this history, wrung from the anguish of a mother by the single desire of promoting the glory of God. Some months later, the book appeared at Florence, with the following title, _Rosa Ferrucci, and some of her Writings, published under the supervision of her Mother_. It remains, then, for me to fulfil, on my part, the pious obligation I have contracted.

Rosa Ferrucci was the daughter of the celebrated Professor Ferrucci, of the University of Pisa, and of the Signora Caterina Ferrucci, a lady well known in Italy for her poetry, and for some excellent works on education. It is little more than a year since this young girl was, by her brilliant intellectual gifts and the holiness of her life, the honor of the city of Pisa. The grave habits of a Christian family, all the veils, all the precautions, all the fears of modesty, had not been able to shield her from a sort of religious admiration which she inspired in all who saw her. How prevent mothers from pointing out the holy child to their daughters, or the poor from blessing her as she passed? Rosa possessed natural talents of a high order, and her education was singularly favorable to the full development of every gift of mind and heart. At six years of age she read Italian, French, and German. At a later period she knew by heart the whole of the _Divine Comedy_. She read in the original, under the direction of her mother, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus; and, among modern authors, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fenelon, Fleury, Milton, Schiller, Klopstock. I mention at random the authors' quoted by her in her letters to her friends, passing by writers of our own day. She has left a correspondence in three languages--French, German, and Italian. The greater number of the Italian letters are addressed to a young gentleman of Leghorn, Signor Gaetano Orsini, a distinguished lawyer and perfect Christian, to whom Rosa was betrothed, and whose hopes have been shattered by her death. {366} Each part of her correspondence is remarkable, but it is of the last-mentioned letters that I propose particularly to speak. Independently of her correspondence, Signorina Ferrucci wrote many short treatises on religion and Christian morality, several of which have been published since her death.

Here, then, we find in a young girl a degree of mental cultivation--a depth of learning, I might say--which would be remarkable in a man even of distinguished education. To dwell long on gifts so rare would interfere with the object I proposed to myself in writing this little history. I will, then, remark here, once for all, that, having for several weeks lived on terms of intimacy with this excellent family, I have witnessed in this extraordinary girl only a child-like modesty, which made her always skilful in self-concealment.

I omit, then, all that relates to this intellectual culture, and to this taste for classical learning--a taste which was so pure, so exalted, in this young Christian maiden. Understood and accepted in Italy, this literary turn of mind would seem strange in France, where there exists an extravagant fear of raising woman above a certain intellectual level. I prefer, therefore, having said on this point merely what was necessary, to speak henceforth only of the virtues of the saintly girl.

Even of these I shall specify but one. I leave it to pious imaginations to guess what there must have been of meekness, of purity, of obedience, of modesty, of angelic devotion, in such a soul. I shall speak only of her charity. Love for the poor was with her a passion, and that from her tenderest years. Certain souls seem to come into this world commissioned by God to do honor to a particular virtue; everything in them converges to that as to a divine centre. The voice of a mother and the voice of the church have but to quicken the germ of holiness committed to such souls before their terrestrial journey, and, as soon as the development of reason allows them to act, they tend quite naturally to the end which the finger of God had pointed out to them from above. Rosa Ferrucci brought with her a tender and unbounded love for the poor. From the little birds which, while yet an infant, she used to feed in winter-time, to the poor beggars of Pisa, whom she relieved by denying herself in dress and amusements, and the neglected graves to which she carried flowers, "because," she used to say, "I feel a pity for neglected graves," all poverty touched her heart. Her mother relates some affecting incidents of her great charity. During a severe winter her parents remarked that she no longer ate bread at her meals, although she never failed to pick out the largest piece for herself. They affected not to know her motive, which she explained, blushing: "Have I done wrong? Indeed, I did not know it was wrong; but bread is so dear this year, and this piece would be sufficient for one poor person."

If she met in her walks a poor woman tottering under the weight of a load of wood, her first impulse would be to run to help her, and it was difficult to restrain this charitable eagerness. She would then complain, declaring that she could never get accustomed to seeing poor people toiling so hard.

On her birthday she ran to her mother and said to her: "Gaetano is indeed all that I could wish! We have just formed a project which makes me quite happy. We have promised that on our birthdays and saints' days, instead of making each other presents, which are often useless, we will give a large alms to some poor family."

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She was a good musician, and knew how to interpret truly the sentiment of the masters. One day she went to Florence, accompanied by her brother, to purchase some pieces of music. But just as she was entering the town, she met a poor family, who seemed to be in the last extreme of wretchedness. Their rent must be paid the next day, or these poor people would be homeless. Farewell to the pieces of music! And on her return home, when her friends, to conceal their real joy and admiration, affected to chide her, she answered: "What would you have had me do? I could not help it. Tell me yourselves how I could have done otherwise than I did? Now, you see well that it was impossible!" O holy _impossibilities!_ which embarrass only those who can never be resigned to the sufferings of others.

Innumerable are the incidents of this kind which might be related of Rosa; for charity is never weary, the more good it has done, the more it desires to do; but I leave this subject--reluctantly, indeed--to dwell at more length on the two episodes of this Christian life, in which I think may be found the most solid edification and the best encouragement for souls. I speak of a love and a death, both transfigured by the cross.

The transfiguration of the life and heart of man in chastity, in hope, in sacrifice, is a palpable glory of Christianity and one of the surest marks of its divinity. Jesus Christ, when he came to sanctify the world, did not destroy the natural conditions of human life. Since, as before, the shedding of his blood, man is born in suffering; he weeps, combats, loves, and dies. And yet, if he is a Christian, all is changed for him. From his cradle to his grave he walks in a marvellous light, which transfigures all things in his eyes and thoroughly changes the meaning of life. He suffers, but each day he adores suffering on the cross; he weeps, but he has heard that, Blessed are they who weep! he combats, but with his eyes fixed on heaven; he loves, but in all that he loves, he loves God; he dies, but then only does he begin to live. Nay, even the entrance into beatitude is for the Christian not the last transfiguration; for a blissful eternity is but a continuous transfiguration in a glory ever increasing, and, as it were, the eternal flight of created love toward Infinite Love. This divine flight finds in heaven its region of glory; but it must not be forgotten that its starting-point is earth--that before finally gaining the eternal heights, it must first cross "the fields of mourning, _lugentes campi_." [Footnote 79]

[Footnote 79: Virg. AEn. i. 4.]

Hence it is, that for the saints there is no interruption between heaven and earth; the same path that conducted them yesterday from virtue to virtue, will lead them to-morrow from glory to glory, and their death is but an episode of their love. Hence, also, perhaps that mysterious fraternity of love and death which is the soul of all true poetry; men catch a glimpse of it and chant it in their own tongue:

"The twin brothers, love and death, At the same time, gave birth to fate." [Footnote 80]

[Footnote 80: Léopardi.]

But only the saints know its true secret: "Having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ." [Footnote 81]

[Footnote 81: Phil. I. 23.]

When the young soul of whom we now speak had reached a certain elevation in her flight toward God, she, too, met the sweet and austere company of those two strong-winged angels--Christian love and death. She loved: almost as soon she presaged death, and she died. But she loved as a child of God loves, and she died as a saint.

{368}

I have, then, little more to do than to translate her _Letters_, in which shines gloriously the beauty of Christian love, and to give an account of that death worthy of the church's brightest days. As I have already remarked, these _Letters_ are addressed to a young gentleman of Leghorn, to whom Rosa had been betrothed for two years before her death; a truly noble character whom heaven seemed to have made worthy of her. A profound and tender love united these two kindred souls. The simple and sweet manners of good Italian society allowed their seeing each other often, and did not forbid their almost daily correspondence. An entire conformity of faith, of piety, of holy desires, blended into a still closer union those hearts already so strongly bound to each other; but a more celestial ray was continually passing from the soul of Rosa into that of Gaetano. Through her joys, her hopes, the festive preparations for her wedding, and the dreams of the future, this pious young girl always saw God. One idea, immense and insatiable, was dominant over all her desires, the idea of perfection. She gazed through the veil of her joyous dawnings on the divine sun of eternal beauty. Her happiness embellished earth to her, but the earth thus embellished immediately reminded her of heaven; earthly love put a song on her lips, but the song soon became a hymn, and always ended with God. It is this insensible and almost involuntary transition, of which she herself seems unconscious, from an earthly affection to ardent longings after divine love and perfection, which constitutes all the beauty of her _Letters_. The reader must not forget that they were written by one who was little more than a child, and that whatever there was of maturity in her young soul was derived from that sun of Christian faith whose warm rays ripen the intellect, in the continued childhood of the heart.

I would fain believe that this young Christian's sisters in the faith, will find in her _Letters_ something more than a subject of poetical dreaming. In truth, no life is so really practical as that of a saint; and, through the veil of beautiful language, we may discover in the letters of Rosa Ferrucci many duties faithfully performed by her, many lessons of duty faithfully to be performed by ourselves. I would then beg of those young persons to read the following pages with recollection, and, in order to penetrate their true meaning, to enter as much as possible into this young girl's ardent desire of perfection.

I have spoken of the eternal soaring of souls toward God. Have you ever, in the beginning of autumn, watched those flights of birds which, lengthening out in a long train, follow, to the very last, the same sinuosities? 'Tis said that the strongest, flying in advance, cleaves the air; and that the weaker, coming after, enter with ease the aerial furrow. Ah! too feeble that we are to attempt alone the road to heaven, let us at least learn to enter the furrows of the saints. Their strong and certain wing will draw us onward in their track; and when we shall see them so lovely because they were so loving, we shall advance with less fear toward Him who was the supreme object of their love.

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Rosa To Gaetano.

Pisa, April 6, 1856.

I can never thank God enough for giving me in you, Gaetano, an example and a guide for my whole life. I cannot refrain from often saying so to my mother, and I say it because it is in my heart. Spite of all the faults and imperfections which have so many times prevented me from remaining faithful to the good resolutions which I constantly make before God, I have so high an idea of the perfection of a Christian wife, and of the duties I shall soon have to fulfil, that I should indeed be terrified if I did not confide in the goodness of God, who can do all, and who will aid me who can do nothing. I often speak to my mother of the holy respect with which the sacrament we are going to receive inspires me; and I earnestly beg of you to ask our Lord for the graces which are necessary to make me what I ought to be. I promise you to use all my efforts for this end; and I will dedicate the prayers of the month of May to this intention, for I have great confidence that the Blessed Virgin will obtain for me what I still lack. I believe that we shall have made great progress toward perfection when we come to detest sincerely all those little daily faults which seem trifles to us, but which must be so very displeasing to the infinite perfection of God. In all this, be sure that I will receive your counsels and admonitions as they ought to be received from him who, by the will of God, takes the place of father and mother.

April 17.

I am persuaded that the true means of preparing ourselves to receive the sacrament by which we shall be united for time and eternity is, to use all our efforts to attain that state of Christian perfection to which God calls us; and I am also sure that, if we cannot arrive absolutely at that degree of perfection which we ardently desire, we can at least kindle in our hearts the flames of that divine love which is itself the whole law. In this you will be my guide and my example, Gaetano; we two shall have but one will, one love also, loving each other in God, in whom all affections become holy. Our affection did not spring from outward accomplishments, nor from fleeting beauty, that flower of a day. It was a stronger tie that bound our souls together. We love each other because we love God. In him does our union consist, because in him is all the strength, all the purity of our love; because in him also is our supreme end. Hence come those alternations of joy and sadness, according as we approach, or seem to be receding from, that ideal type of perfection which is the object of our desires. Ah! how good God is; and how often I bless him for having put such desires and such hopes into our hearts. For me, I now see in God not only the eternal power which created heaven and earth, or the eternal love which redeemed us, but also that sweet mercy which has given me in you, as it were, his crowning blessing.

April 25.

Forgive me, Gaetano, my eternal repetitions; but what can I do? For some time I have been able only to say the same things over and over again. This very day reminds me of another day, a dear and solemn one to me. I recollect with unspeakable pleasure the solitary walk I took, with my mother to speak of you. The stillness of the country, the fresh aspect of all nature, the distant voices of the peasants, which alone from time to time broke the profound tranquillity of the scene--all seemed new to me, all spoke to my heart. I shall never forget the humble little church in which, for the first time, I ventured to pray to God to bless these new thoughts--thoughts which held me suspended, as it were, between doubt and hope, but which found my heart firmly resolved to do the divine will in all things. {370} From that day I have implored, and still unceasingly implore, the graces which we need in order to lead together a truly Christian life. Do you do the same, Gaetano; and let me assure you that I cannot now pray to God for myself, without at once finding your name mingled in my supplications.

April 30.

He only is worthy of a reward who has merited it. Do you not know that combat--and what is life but a continual combat?--must precede victory? No, Gaetano, we will not be like cowardly soldiers who would fain have the honors of a triumph without having seen the face of the foe. Let us rather strive to lay hold on eternal felicity, which alone can satisfy our desires, by faithfully performing all our duties; by supporting, for the love of God, all the trials of life, heavy or light; by devoting ourselves as much as possible to good works; then the desire of heaven will not be for us a dreamy ideal or subject of vague speculation, but it will enter into our daily life to sanctify it. May your life be prolonged to serve the cause of God by strong and constant virtues!

May 2.

I believe that, without proposing to ourselves a too ideal and, as it were, an unattainable type of perfection, we can effect much by earnestly striving to strengthen our will. Let us keep a watch over it, and never allow it to incline toward what is evil, even in the smallest things. Let us always bear in mind those beautiful words of the _Following of Christ_: "If each year we corrected one fault, how soon we should become better!" Yes, strength of will is always necessary, and not less in small trials than in great ones. In this, it seems to me Christian perfection really consists; for what can be more pleasing to God than to see our will always conformed to his? [Footnote 82]

[Footnote 82: The desire of Christian perfection had inspired Rosa Ferrucci with the idea of collecting some short maxims, which were well exemplified in her pious and innocent life. Among her papers were found this little selection, which seems to us worthy of translation.

"To see God in all created things. To refer all to God. To remember always 'God sees me.' To have a tender love for the holy Catholic Church. To unite my actions to those of Jesus Christ. To keep alive in my heart the desire of heaven. To beg of God the faith and the constancy of the martyrs. To have an unwavering confidence in the efficacy of prayer. To succor the poor for the love of God. To watch and pray. To do good to all. To obey my father and mother. To be gentle and docile to my teachers. To be silent as soon as I perceive in my heart the first motions of anger. Never to read a doubtful book. To have a scrupulous regard to truth. Never to speak ill of any one. To view in the best light the actions of others. To subdue all feelings of envy. To pray often for humility. Never to slight God's holy inspirations. To work and study diligently. Frequently to raise my heart to God. To forgive all, at all times and in all things. To seek my happiness in the performance of Christian duties. To do whatever is my duty, and for the rest trust to the goodness of God. To fear sin more than death. To ask for the sacraments at the beginning of a serious illness. To speak to God as a tender and beloved father. To unite my death to that of Jesus Christ."]

May 30.

No affection which has not its source in the love of God can ever make us happy. Let us be well convinced of this, and let us dedicate our whole life to Him who has done all for us. As for me, I believe that just as the external pomp of worship is valueless in the sight of God if it is separated from interior devotion, so works can do nothing to merit grace unless they are inwardly animated by a pure intention and the desire of pleasing God alone. We must, then, always pass from what is without to what is within, and it is this that I mean when I tell you that I often seek in visible things a lever to raise me toward the invisible; discerning in all that meets my eyes here below an image of that Eternal Beauty which unveils itself only to the intelligence and to the heart. Thus nothing remains mute to me. {371} How many things the mountains tell me, and the stars, and the sea, and the trees, and the birds!--things which I should not have known if this mighty voice of nature had not taught them to me. Oh! how admirable is the goodness of God, who thus by a thousand ways leads back our souls to the thoughts and the holy affections for which they were created.

I have been reading in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, this beautiful idea of Jean Paul Richter: "When that which is holy in the soul of the mother responds to that which is holy in the soul of the son, their souls then understand each other." This thought has made a great impression on me; and it seems to me to contain a grand lesson for all mothers engaged in the religious education of their sons. It shows us, moreover, the nature of those close ties which unite us to our relations and our friends. And, indeed, why do we love one another with such a true and constant love? Because what is sacred to your soul is sacred also to mine. Why am I so deeply moved when I hear of some noble action? when I contemplate the greatness of this world's heroes, and, above all, the greatness of the saints and martyrs? Why do I weep as I think of the sacrifices they made with such self-devotion and fortitude? Because what they held sacred I also hold sacred. Could more be said in so few words? Yes, every man ought to keep alive that celestial fire which God has kindled in his heart. Unhappy he who lets it languish and die out! He loses it for himself, and is himself lost for his brethren, since he has broken the bond of love which would have united him to them for ever. As the flame ascends on high,

"Which by its form upward aspires,"

SO by nature our souls tend to rise toward God, and if they return again toward earth, there can be no longer for them either hope of peace or hope of happiness.

July 10.

Let us not be discouraged, Gaetano, let us always hope; our good God will help us to become better; for, if we lack strength, at least we are not wanting in good desires. They are a gratuitous gift of him who wills our good; of him who has given us the most living example of humility; of him who knows, and will pardon, the weakness of our poor nature, if only we will combat with that perseverance which alone has the promise of victory. Ah! if we truly loved the Lord, we should think of him alone--of him who is holy and perfect, instead of always thinking of ourselves, weak and miserable creatures; and we should end by forgetting ourselves, by losing ourselves, to live only in him so worthy of our love; and then we should indeed begin to know that we are nothing, and that he is all.

Jesus wishes us to be gentle with ourselves, and would not have us fall into dejection when, through the frailty of our nature, we fail in our good resolutions. At times when we are too much dejected at the sight of our miseries, Jesus Christ seems to say to us, as to the disciples going to Emmaus: "What are these discourses that you hold one with another as you walk, and are sad?" He who is called the Prince of Peace would have us pacific toward ourselves, and full of compassion for our own infirmity. When, therefore, we are seized with sadness at sight of our poverty and of the dryness of our souls, let us say simply and humbly this little prayer of St. Catharine of Genoa: "Alas! my Lord, these are the fruits of my garden! Yet I love thee, my Jesus, and I will strive to do better in future."

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July 19, (Feast of St Vincent de Paul.)

Do you know what we ought to desire? Neither honors, nor riches, nor any such earthly vanities, which could add nothing to our peace. Do you know to what end our will, strengthened by love, ought to turn? Yes, you know it well, and often have you taught it me; we ought both to aim at realizing in our life something of that perfection which, after all, can be but partially obtained on earth. We ought to look at the things that are immortal and eternal, rather than at those that are temporal and subject to change, living in such a manner that a true love of God may actuate our hearts and our thoughts, develop our sentiments toward what is good, and direct all our actions to a holy end. How many touching examples of virtues are recalled to our minds by this day and the festival which it brings! What indefatigable and universal charity in St. Vincent de Paul! What lively and ardent piety! What unbounded compassion for all the errors, all the faults, all the misfortunes, all the sufferings, physical and moral, of men! What exhaustless patience! And who among us will dare to say that he cannot reproduce in himself some shadow of those beautiful virtues? If we cannot, like this illustrious saint, relieve the sufferings of a great number of our fellow-beings, at least we can be humble, patient, and animated by that true religion which is ever forgiving, ever loving, because it loves Him who is all mercy and all love.

To Be Continued.

The Episcopalian Confessional.

It is with great satisfaction that Catholics behold the adoption by any class of Protestants of their peculiar rites or ceremonies. It is an indication of an approach to the doctrines so vehemently renounced at the Reformation, and ought, by strict logic, to result in the return of many to the old faith. And though, unfortunately, there are men who play with religious doctrines as if they were of no practical consequence, there are always some who are in earnest, and are found ready to make sacrifices for the sake of truth. From the use of Catholic ceremonies, which are really all founded on vital doctrine, some conversions must certainly flow; and the Protestant Church, which moves in such a direction, is drifting from its old moorings, and floating toward the safe waters where the bark of St. Peter rides out every storm.

If there be any of our practices which are essentially a part of our religious system, surely that of confession is one which is absolutely _peculiar_ to the Catholic Church. It cannot lawfully exist without the faith which we hold, and when used, it drags along with it, irresistibly, our whole moral system. It is hard to see how any one can confess his sins to a priest, without accepting the sacerdotal and sacramental system, which can have no life out of the Catholic communion. Besides, the practical influence of such confessions leads directly to those habits of devotion which have no home in Protestantism. {373} In the few remarks we are now to make, we do not intend to lose sight of these convictions, while it is our object to consider briefly the adoption of the confessional in the Protestant Episcopal Church, the logical consequences which flow from it, and even the dangers which attend it. Surely the subject is one of great moment. If it be of any importance at all, it is of _vital_ importance. It is either necessary to the soul, or it is an assumption of powers prejudicial to the interests of true religion. It cannot be looked upon as an indifferent matter, which may be used or neglected, according to the taste of the individual. To a few reflections, therefore, upon it, we earnestly invite the attention of the honest reader.

1. There is no doubt that there is quite a party in the Episcopal Church which upholds the practice of auricular confession, and seeks to extend it. There are ministers of that communion who are anxious to set up the confessional, and disposed to teach its necessity. In the city of New York, it is well known that the clergy of St. Albans' are solicitous to hear confessions and love to be styled _Fathers_, on account of their spiritual relation to their penitents. The Rev. Dr. Dix, the respected rector of Trinity Church, the oldest and most influential corporation of his denomination, is said to have quite a number of penitents, and to be the most popular confessor, especially among the higher class. We presume he makes no secret of his practice, while his position as the spiritual director of the "Sisters of St. Mary" is notorious. How general is the custom of confession in Trinity parish we have no means of knowing, nor do we know how many of the assistant ministers follow in the wake of their rector. We have heard of one or two others who are disposed to be confessors, and there are probably many such ministers whose names are not brought before the public. We cannot suppose that any high-minded clergyman would be willing to hear confessions in an under-hand or secret manner, and we must believe that they who do so are not ashamed of it, nor unwilling to have their practice made public. No offence is therefore intended by the mention of names, and we will rest satisfied that none is given. How many of the bishops favor auricular confession does not appear. So far as we have heard, no one has openly recommended it; but the Right Reverend Dr. Potter, of New York, has allowed a manual to be dedicated to him, in which the practice is strongly urged, and devotions for its use are extracted from Catholic prayer-books. While he has rebuked the Rev. Mr. Tyng for preaching in a Methodist church, he goes openly to St. Alban's, and, to say the least, gives sanction to Ritualistic performances. We have a right, then, to conclude that he favors the confessional, and is willing to see it set up in the churches which he superintends. It will be observed that this confession in the Episcopal Church, is not simply consulting a clergyman in a private conversation about spiritual matters, but the humble acknowledgment of sins in detail, in order to receive absolution from one who thinks himself authorized by Almighty God to give it. It is certainly a sacrament in the true definition of the term, an outward sign of an inward grace, administered by one pretending, at least, to bear a commission from Christ. Those who go to the Episcopalian ministers to confess their sins, surely go under this belief, and no argument is necessary to show that they would not go, unless under the conviction that their offences against God could be forgiven in no other way. {374} The Ritualists have made of this a most important matter in their devotional books, where can be found questions for examination of conscience, tables of sins, and prayers to excite contrition and improve the great gift of absolution. When, then, we speak of the confessional in the Protestant Episcopal communion, we are not drawing upon fancy, but touching upon a fact which must have an important effect upon the body which it especially interests.

2. The first remark we have to make upon this acknowledged fact is almost a truism. It is, that auricular confession is not a Protestant practice, but quite the contrary; and that they who adopt it cut themselves off from all sympathy with the doctrines of the reformation. We hardly need to prove that there is not one Protestant church which approves of the custom of which we speak, or believes that its ministers have the power to remit and retain sin. If the Church of England be adduced against us, we have only to point to the incontrovertible fact, that she declares that penance is not a sacrament, and therefore conveys no inward grace. The absolutions left in her daily services are only declaratory of God's willingness to forgive the repentant sinner, and could be as well used by a layman as by a minister. For who cannot say that "God pardoneth and absolveth all who are truly penitent"? And as for the absolution in the office of the visitation of the sick, we have only to say that it is a relic of by-gone days which is seldom used, and that whatever be its meaning, it cannot, contrary to the article, be presumed to confer grace. The English Church certainly did never consider it a matter of any necessity, otherwise it would have said so. The Episcopalians in the United States have not this form to refer to; for the compilers of their liturgy have expunged it altogether, at the same time that they omitted the Athanasian creed. In the form of the ordination of priests, a substitute was also provided for the old words, "Receive the Holy Ghost; whose sins you shall remit, they are remitted unto them." The reason of this substitution we leave the honest reader to imagine. We are informed that very few of the bishops are willing to use the old form, and an Episcopal minister of Puseyitical views once told us that he was very anxious to have the bishop who ordained him use it, but was restrained from asking this favor by the assurance of one of the prelate's intimate friends that, if he said anything about it, he would get a flat refusal, together with a good scolding. While thus the articles of faith in the Episcopalian body deny the power of absolution, the practice of that denomination of Christians is entirely against it. The ministers who hear confessions and the people who make them, live in a "dreamland," about which once we read a very pretty piece of poetry. This "dreamland" is not very extensive or tangible here, and we wonder if now there are any somnambulists in or about Buffalo. We yield the right to every man to do as he pleases, and call himself what he likes, only we object to his having two contradictory characters at the same time. It is not quite reasonable; and we say, with the good common sense of mankind, "My dear friend, choose for yourself, but please be either one thing or the other."

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But we go further, and assert that the practice of confession is the assumption of a sacerdotal power which was the very first point attacked by the reformation, and which is really the central point of the Catholic system. Once admit the great power of absolution, and you receive at the same time logically the doctrine of priesthood as it is held by the Church. This doctrine does not and cannot stand alone; it brings with it the church in her unity, and the necessary safeguards which divine wisdom has thrown around the exercise of so great a gift. Who has the power to forgive sins? Not every man, nor every one who may choose to call himself a priest. There must be some external call to so high an office; and as it is Christ's priesthood which is exercised, there must be some way of authenticating the power delegated, and articulating it to the great head of Christianity. The Catholic Church alone maintains the practice of confession, and if she is good for this, she is good for everything. Eclecticism may be advisable in matters of science, but in divine revelation it is both absurd and impossible. The foundation of faith is in the word of God. The church is no teacher if she be not guided by supernatural light; and if she be thus guided, her authority is universal. Episcopalians may believe that their ministers can forgive their sins, but they have no reason for such a belief. Their own church surely does not say so, while the Catholic voice expressly denies it. It will be hard to see how they can prove it from Scripture as applied to their particular communion. Not only is the unity of the church connected logically with the idea of priesthood, but also that of sacrifice, and of sacramental grace. And these doctrines bring with them the Tridentine system of justification, which is diametrically opposed to the Lutheran theory which underlies all consistent Protestantism. We do not believe that any one can go to confession for any length of time, and not feel the truth of these remarks. He will be irresistibly borne to the gates of the Catholic Church with whose faith his religious life will be in sympathy, and he will, day by day, lose his love and respect for his own communion.

3. So far, therefore, we have reason to rejoice in the adoption of the confessional by the Episcopalians, and to renew our prayers for their conversion to that truth which at a distance proves so attractive to them. Yet there are dangers in regard to which the sincere ought to be forewarned, and serious evils to many souls may result from the incapacity of confessors who have never been trained for this most delicate and difficult work. It is in the spirit of Christian charity that we revert to these dangers.

In the first place, we hardly need say that no one but a duly authorized priest of the Catholic Church has the power to give absolution. As we are addressing chiefly those who believe in some ecclesiastical system, we have only to advert to the fact, that to such a power both orders and jurisdiction are necessary. The Episcopal Church does not admit the existence of this power, and the whole Christian world which does accept it, unites in the opinion that the Episcopalian clergy have no orders whatever, any more than the Methodists or Presbyterians. Any layman is as good a priest as the most distinguished Anglican minister. Such is the decision of the Catholic Church, and of every sect which has retained the apostolical succession. Is this decision of no consequence to the Ritualists who pretend to believe in authority and antiquity? But orders are not sufficient for the exercise of the power of absolution. {376} Jurisdiction is also required, because they who believe in the priesthood must also believe that Christ has left this great office in order, and not in confusion. The bishop is the supreme pastor of his diocese, and no priest, without his permission, can validly either hear confessions or give absolution. This principle of jurisdiction is one which does not seem to penetrate the heads of High-Church Episcopalians; but if they will reflect for a moment, they will see its absolute necessity to the existence of the church. Suppose that valid orders are alone required to the exercise of the priesthood, and the communion of the faithful, and what is to prevent any priest from going off at any time, and carrying with him all the essentials of the church? Then there would be as many churches as there are dissenting priests.

No intelligent man would form a society on such principles, and surely our Lord Jesus Christ did not do so foolish a thing as found a church containing in itself the very seeds of self-destruction. We have heard that an excommunicated priest, who bears, to his sorrow, the ineffaceable character of priesthood, is willing to hear confessions since his apostasy. But though he has valid orders, he is no more able to give absolution than his associate ministers who have never been ordained, because he has no jurisdiction from Christ. What do these "Fathers" among the Episcopalians pretend? Do they ask jurisdiction from their own bishops, who, having none, have none to give? Or do they profess to have the whole Catholic Church in their own persons? If so, history has seen nothing so strange in all its curious record of ecclesiastical devices.

It is then a sad thing for a man to confess his sins and go through the humiliation of opening his whole life to another; and then receive no pardon for the sins he so anxiously confesses. We beg the attention of such earnest hearts to this point, and say to them, "If you really wish to confess, why not go at once where there is no doubt that Christ has left the power of forgiveness?"

Secondly, there is danger in the way and manner in which we are told that the Episcopalian ministers hear confessions. They ought, for their own sake, and for the sake of their penitents, to adopt the rules and safeguards which the experience of the church has thrown around so important a work. It is not prudent to hear the confessions of ladies in the minister's private room. The presence of a plain cross, or crucifix, does not remove the objection. It is too much of a burden to expect a lady to go through with all this unnecessary trial, especially when she has the additional conviction that she is doing something which she would not wish the world to know, or which she would not be willing to tell her husband or friends. The Catholic Church has wisely provided that the priest shall sit where he need neither see nor distinguish the penitent, and this is a safe rule to be imitated. The same objection arises to the method, said to be in vogue at St. Alban's, where the minister sits in the chancel, and the penitent kneels at his back. If there be others in the church, there is too much exposure, and if the church is locked, there is too much privacy. The Episcopalian clergy who become confessors ought to erect confessionals in their churches, and sit there at given hours publicly and openly.

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We understand, also, that in some cases, at least, the penitent is obliged to write out his confession in full, and we consider this a dangerous and far too painful practice. We have been informed that Dr. Pusey wishes the general confessions which he hears to be written out carefully and left with him for his private study some days before the confession is made. We are certain that such a course has been sometimes imitated in this country, much to the disgust of ladies, who have even spoken to us of it. A sinner will do much, no doubt, in the fervor of penitence, but no such thing as this ought to be done. It is against the practice of the Catholic Church, and in violation of instinctive delicacy and propriety. No one is obliged to expose himself, even to obtain the pardon of sin.

Again, it is unfortunate for the Protestant clergy that they hear confession only by reason of their _personal_ influence over their penitents; that they do not understand the nature of the seal of secrecy; and that they have no fixed system by which to direct their penitents. The same results follow, as if a doctor should essay to be a lawyer, or a blacksmith a dentist.

Personal influence is, no doubt, an instrument of much good; but when it alone or principally governs the relations of confessor and penitent, serious dangers may be imminent. Most of those who go to confession in the Episcopal Church are led to this step by reason of their confidence in the individual to whom they go, and through the attraction of his piety or zeal. They would hardly go to any one else, and if he were to die or be removed, they would be left without a director. It is not so much the priest to whom they unburden their conscience, as the favorite preacher whose good qualities have made strong impressions upon them. This is not a healthy state of things, and leads to sentimentality, which is often mistaken for piety. In the Catholic Church, the habit of confession is as universal as prayer, and the priestly character overshadows the individual. Among Protestants the contrary is notoriously true, and this difficulty in the way of the Protestant confessor can hardly be removed until he shall have brought about in his communion the state of feeling which is second nature to Catholics. This he can never do. He may lead individuals to the church; he cannot convert the whole body with which he is identified.

With the best intentions in the world, he does not and cannot understand the seal of secrecy which for ever closes the lips of the priest. He is disposed as a man of honor not to betray confidence, but experience teaches us that very few human secrets have been kept. He has not been taught the sacred nature of his obligation, nor the various ways by which he may expose his penitent, and as he has assumed an office to which his church did not call him, he stands or falls in human strength. No motive higher than that of honor binds him, and complicated as he is with the world, and generally with matrimonial relations, he really does not know how to act. The Catholic priest not only is bound by the fear of terrible sin, but is also aided by the system which surrounds him, in which he is trained and by that supernatural power which we know upholds the seven sacraments. He is not an individual resting upon his unaided powers, but the creature of his church, the agent and representative of a vast power which girdles the Christian world. Years of study and discipline have taught him the nature of his obligations, while he himself is as much bound to confess his sins as to hear the burden of other consciences. {378} What an anomaly, for a man who never confesses his own faults, to undertake to listen to the accusations of others! If they need the confessional, much more does he need it. Is it not Pharisaical to bind burdens upon others, which we touch not with one of our fingers?

Let men say what they will, we believe, and from experience we know, that God upholds the confessor in his difficult task; that he gives him superhuman wisdom; that within the tribunal of penance a divine shield is over him to protect him against the weakness of humanity, that he may walk unharmed where otherwise angels would fear to tread. Here we pity the poor and isolated Ritualist, going forth upon a dangerous sea, in a frail bark, with no trust but the strength of his own arm. Cast out by his own church, and refusing communion with the great Catholic heart, how long will he stand the fury of the storm?

Finally, how shall he direct his penitents, and by what system form their spiritual character? Moral theology is an extensive and subtle science. The infallible church has given clear decisions upon all essential points of fact and morals, and her doctors, by years of patient labor and centuries of experience, have matured the colossal system which has such mighty influence over the religious heart. But what is all this to the Protestant confessor? He cannot avail himself of this without confessing the authority of the church; and if he begins with such a confession, where must he conscientiously guide his penitents? If he deny this authority, and by his own fallible wisdom choose the principles of his morality, in what respect is his opinion worth more than that of the humblest layman? Can there be a more pitiable spectacle, than that of a Protestant minister with St. Liguori as his guide in leading the souls of others? His spiritual life is surely made up of contradictions which must vex and perplex his conscience if he be an honest man. And will he not unavoidably make grievous mistakes, in the use of tools without experience, in the details of a work for which he has had no preparation?

Moreover, there are often decisions which have to be made, and in these he must either be a despot, or he must make equivocal answers. If a Catholic accuses himself of unbelief or doubt, the reply is easy; for God's revelation is, according to our faith, in and through an unerring church. If the Protestant falls into a like danger, how shall he find direction, since for him there is no infallible church? Must he not go on his weary way of investigation, and is not, by his principles, doubt his normal state? If a Catholic doubts the truth of any decision of his church, he commits a sin against his own creed; but since the Episcopal communion openly disclaims infallibility, how shall the Episcopalian confessor tell his penitent not to doubt his church which herself tells him he ought to doubt her? Then it comes to this, that he will either make him no reply, or rule him with a rod of iron, and bind him by his inflexible _ipse dixit_. What has been the result, in more cases than one, of this arbitrary despotism in the hands of individuals who neither by their own church, nor by any other, have the right to direct souls? Loss of the moral sense, failure to discern the first inspirations of faith, and, sometimes, insanity. We draw from the testimony of facts. It is bad enough to be under a civil despot, but it is worse to be under a religious autocrat. {379} Then in the choice of penances we have heard of most frightful mistakes, where the good of the penitent was in no way consulted, but the vindication of the absolutism of the confessor. Think of a penance to blood for one lie, or for the great error of attending Mass in a Catholic Church. Think of penances which cover months and burden years with the chains of obligatory prayers and exercises. But all this is really nothing compared to the morbid and unhealthy religious life which they engender, in which slavish fear of God is the principal ingredient, where sighs and solemn faces, instead of cheerfulness and natural joyousness, are the exhibitions of their piety. To us, (and we have had occasion to know the interior of more than one,) they seem to be perpetually toiling up a steep ascent under the weight of heavy burdens from which it would be wrong to expect relief. Forced to confess their sins as if doing some stealthy action, they kill in their souls the bright light and, elasticity of spirit which the great Creator gave them. God is not a tyrant, but a merciful and beneficent father, whose smiles of love are ever around his children, and his priesthood are agents in the work of love to bring into even the erring heart the sunlight of a father's truth and mercy. The confessor is no minister of justice, but like his Master, the good Samaritan to bind up the wounds of the broken heart, to preach deliverance to the captive, and joy to the mourner.

In what we have said, we make no accusations against the good intentions of these Protestant confessors, for whom we especially pray. We believe that they mean well, and that they hope to sanctify their people by borrowing fruit from the garden of the church, and transplanting it where it cannot and will not grow. And as their only friends--for in their own communion they have few friends--we warn them of the risk they run, and of the dangers to which they expose their penitents. It is a fearful responsibility for them, for which they must answer alone, and in which no church will shield them. Some will, through their incapacity, lose their hold upon all religion, and either live without hope or die without consolation. Others will shut their eyes to the plainest deductions of reason, and having eyes, will see not, having ears, will hear not. Many through divine grace, and the honest heart which pursues principles to their legitimate results, will find their way to that one faith where all things are in harmony, where the aspirations of the soul are met with a full answer, and the needs of the heart are filled from God's own fulness. O children of men! how foolish it is to enter upon the province of God, and by human hands to make a religion, when the all-merciful Father, who alone knoweth our frame, has made one for us, which in its completeness answereth to every want of our being.

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Sketches Drawn From The Life Of St. Paula, By The Abbe Lagrange, Vicar-general Of Orleans.

In Three Chapters.