Volume I. London: Longman, Green & Co. 1868.

For sale at the Catholic Publication House, New York.

Dr. Smith has given us in this volume the first instalment of an extensive work on the Pentateuch. The authorship alone is treated of in this portion of the work. Dr. Smith happily combines orthodoxy of doctrine with a scientific spirit. He has evidently studied Egyptology, geology, comparative philology, and other sciences bearing on sacred science. He has also made himself familiar with Jewish and Protestant, as well as Catholic commentators. From a cursory examination, we are inclined to judge that his great and useful task has been thus far very well and thoroughly performed, and to expect that it will be completed in a satisfactory manner. The volume is brought out in the best style of English typographical art, with fac-similes of ancient pictures and inscriptions, which add much to its value. We recommend it to all students of the Holy Scriptures as one of the most valuable aids to their researches which has yet been published in the English language.

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Life of St. Catharine of Sienna. By Doctor Caterinus Senensis. Translated by the Rev. John Fen, in 1609, and Reëdited, with a Preface, by Very Rev. Father Aylward. New York: Catholic Publication Society. 1868.

This biography is a charming one, translated in the inimitable English idiom of the 17th century. Father Aylward has very successfully imitated the antiquated style in his valuable preface. The biography leaves nothing to be desired as a history of the private, interior life of the saint, though her wonderful public career is but slightly touched upon. The sketch of it in Father Aylward's preface induces us to wish that he would add to the history of Saint Catharine's private life by Caterinus, an equally complete history of her public life, with translations of her letters, from his own graceful and devout pen, which would furnish the English public with one of the best and most valuable biographies of a truly great and heroic woman to be found in any language.

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{143}

Prayer the Key of Salvation. By Michael Müller, C.S.S.R. Baltimore: Kelly & Piet. 1868.

This book is an expansion of the excellent work of St. Alphonsus Liguori on Prayer. The object of it seems to be, to explain the saint's doctrine and illustrate it by examples, so as to bring it more within the comprehension of the mass of the people. But we are sorry to be obliged to say that the execution of the work does not come up to the idea. Without commenting on the matter, which is, in general, very good, we are compelled to say that the style is faulty in the extreme; the sentences are mostly un-English in their construction, and sometimes so long and involved that they are hard to understand. It also abounds in grammatical errors. In short, it is a pity it was not first thoroughly overlooked and revised by a competent hand before being allowed to go to press. However much we may desire to commend this book, we cannot in conscience do so, so long as it continues in its present dress.

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La Reforme en Italie, les Precurseurs: Discours Historiques de César Cantu. Traduits de l'Italien par Aniset Digard et Edmond Martin. Paris: Adrien le Clere, 29 Rue Cassette. 1867.

Caesar Cantu is the author of the best universal history extant, and of other historical works of the first class. He has undertaken the task of crushing the destructive pseudo-reformers of Italy under the weight of his massive historical erudition. The first volume of the present work, which is the only one yet published, brings down the subject to the 16th century, and will be followed by three others. The author is a sound and orthodox Catholic, yet, as a layman and as a historian, his work has not the distinctively professional style and spirit which are usually found in the works of ecclesiastical authors. He is fearless and free in speaking the historical truth, even when it is discreditable to ecclesiastical rulers and requires the exposure of scandals and abuses in the church. His spirit is calm and impartial, and the theological and ascetical elements are carefully eliminated. He has gone back to the very origin of Christianity, in order to trace the course of events from their beginning, and has traced the outlines of the constitution of historical Christianity. Church principles and dogmas are, however, exhibited in a purely historical method, and as essential portions of the history of facts and events. Such a writer is terrible to parties whose opinions and schemes cannot bear the light of history. The whole class of pseudo-reformers, whether semi-Christian or openly infidel, are of this sort. Cantu sweeps them off the track of history by the force and weight of his erudition, as a locomotive tosses the stray cows on the track of a railway, with broken legs, to linger and die in the meadows at each side of it. It is only Catholic truth, either in the supernatural or the natural order, which can bear investigation, or survive the crucial test of history. The so-called Reformation retains its hold on the respect of the world only through ignorance. When history is better and more generally known, it will be universally admitted that it was not only a great crime, but a great blunder, a _faux pas_ in human progress.

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The Infant Bridal, and other Poems. By Aubrey De Vere. London: MacMillan & Co.

We are glad to see this book, rather for the memories than the novelties it brings us. Almost all its contents have been published in the author's other volumes, and there is nothing in this to alter the opinions, either good or ill, that we took occasion to express in a former review of them at large. The most remarkable about the book is the selection of the republished pieces. {144} It only verifies anew the observation that authors, no more than we of the world, have the giftie to see themselves as others see them. Some of the best poems are there, and some of the worst. _The Infant Bridal_ and _The Search for Proserpine_ are perhaps the very two poorest of all the author's longer productions. Still, perhaps the many faults we fancy we see in the tact of the compilation, only come to this--that we ourselves would have compiled differently, and possibly worse.

But we meet, all over these elegant tinted pages, lines and beauties that we fondly remember loving of old--fine blank verse, wonderful descriptions, delicious idyls. These latter, by the way, are equally remarkable and unremarked. They are from the same fount with Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. We cannot resist giving one extract, from _Glance_, p. 64:

"Come forth, dear maid, the day is calm and cool, And bright though sunless. Like a long green scarf, The tall pines, crowning yon gray promontory, In distant ether hang, and cut the sea. But lovers better love the dell, for there Each is the other's world. How indolently The tops of those pale poplars, bending, sway Over the violet-braided river brim! Whence comes this motion? for no wind is heard, And the long grasses move not, nor the reeds. Here we will sit, and watch the rushes lean Like locks, along the leaden-colored stream Far off; and thou, O child, shall talk to me Of Naiads and their loves."

One more sample of the contents of this volume, and we have said all there is to say. It is an unusual vein for De Vere, but one in which, like Tennyson, he engages never lightly and always with telling success. It is the close of _A Farewell to Naples_, p. 255:

"From her whom genius never yet inspired. Or virtue raised, or pulse heroic fired; From her who, in the grand historic page. Maintains one barren blank from age to age; From her, with insect life and insect buzz. Who, evermore unresting, nothing does; From her who, with the future and the past, No commerce holds--no structure rears to last. From streets where spies and jesters, side by side. Range the rank markets and their gains divide; Where faith in art, and art in sense is lost. And toys and gewgaws form a nation's boast; Where passion, from affection's bond cut loose, Revels in orgies of its own abuse; And appetite, from passion's portals thrust. Creeps on its belly to its grave in dust; Where vice her mask disdains, where fraud is loud. And naught but wisdom dumb, and justice cowed; Lastly, from her who planted here unawed, 'Mid heaven-topped hills and waters bright and broad, From these but nerves more swift to err has gained And the dread stamp of sanctities profaned; And, girt not less with ruin, lives to show That worse than wasted weal is wasted woe-- We part; forth issuing through her closing gate. With unreverting faces, not ingrate."

Cannot this book speak better for itself than our good word?

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Folks and Fairies. Stories for little children. By Lucy Randall Comfort. With engravings. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1868.

Judging, not, however, from perusal, but from hearsay, we think the pleasure of Mrs. Comfort's juvenile readers would be increased if she had given them more "Folks" and less "Fairies." On the same high authority we also protest against some of the engravings, for example, "Otho returning home," as illustrations of the text.

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Books Received.

From Leypoldt & Holt, New York:

Mozart. A Biographical Romance. From the German of Heribert Ran. By E. R. Sill, 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 323.

Easy French Reading: Being selections of historical tales and anecdotes, arranged with copious foot-notes, containing translations of the principal words, a progressive development of the form of the verb, designations of the use of prepositions and particles, and the idioms of the language. By Professor Edward T. Fisher. To which is appended a brief French grammar. By C. J. Delille. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 232.

From Kelly & Piet, Baltimore:

A Catechism of the Vows. For the use of persons consecrated to God in the religious state. By the Rev. Father Peter Cotel, S.J.

From Samuel R. Wells, New York:

Oratory, Sacred and Secular: or, The Extemporaneous Speaker. With sketches of the most eminent speakers of all ages. By William Pittenger, author of Daring and Suffering. Introduction by Hon. John A. Bingham, and appendix containing a Chairman's Guide for conducting public meetings according to the best parliamentary models, 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 220.

Life in the West; or, Stories of the Mississippi Valley. By N. C. Meeker, Agricultural Editor of the New York Tribune, 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 360.

From Lee & Shepard, Boston:

Red Cross; or, Young America in England and Wales. A story of Travel and Adventure. By Oliver Optic, 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 336.

{145}

The Catholic World.

Vol. VII., No. 38.--May, 1868.

Tennyson In His Catholic Aspects.

For a poet eminently modern and English in his modes of thought, Tennyson is singularly free from the spirit of controversy. His native land is distracted by religious feuds, yet he who has been called "the recognized exponent of all the deeper thinkings of his age," takes no active part in them, and seldom drops a line that bespeaks the school of theology to which he belongs. At long intervals, indeed, devout breathings escape him. Once now and then he extracts a block of dogma from the deep quarry within, and fixes it in an abiding place. He never scatters doubts wantonly; he is always on the side of faith, though not perfect and Catholic faith. He alludes to Christian doctrines as postulates. For his purpose they need no proof. It would be idle to prove anything if they were not true. They are the life of the soul, and the vitality of verse.

"Fly, happy, happy sails, and bear the press,"

he cries; but he adds this apostrophe likewise:

"Fly happy with _the mission of the cross_."

_The Golden Year._

He looks for the resurrection of the body, and bids the dry dust of his friend (Spedding) "lie still, _secure of change_." (_Lines to J. S._) When the spirit quits its earthly frame, he follows it straight into the unseen world and the presence of its Creator and God. He points to "the grand old gardener and his wife" in "yon blue heavens," smiling at the claims of long descent, (_Lady Clara Vere de Vere;_) and he speeds the soul of the expiring May Queen toward the blessed home of just souls and true, there to wait a little while for her mother and Effie:

"To lie within the light of God, as I lie upon your breast-- Where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest."

_The May Queen_.

Intensely as he loves nature, Tennyson is no Pantheist. Though like the wild Indian, he "sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind," he does not therefore confound matter with its Maker, nor lose sight of the personality of the Being whom he adores. He is no disciple of fate or chance, but recognizes in all human affairs the working of a divine and retributive providence, whose final judgment of good and evil is foreshadowed and begun during our mortal life. {146} To His presence and promptitude in reply to prayer, he refers more than once in pathetic and pointed language. He tells us how Enoch Arden, when cast away on a desert island, heard in his dream "the pealing of his parish bells," and

"Though he knew not wherefore, started up Shuddering, and when the beauteous, hateful isle Returned upon him, had not his poor heart Spoken with that, which, being everywhere. Lets none who speak with Him seem all alone, Surely the man had _died of solitude_."

_Enoch Arden._

It would not be difficult for those who are acquainted with Tennyson's earlier history, to discover the church of which he is a member, and the section of it whose views he adopts. _In Memoriam_ takes us into the interior of his father's parsonage, to the Christmas hearth decorated with laurel, and the old pastimes in the hall; to the witch-elms and towering sycamore, whose shadows his Arthur had often found so fair; to the lawn where they read the Tuscan poets together; and the banquet in the neighboring summer woods. We almost hear the songs that then pealed from knoll to knoll, while the happy tenants of the presbytery lingered on the dry grass till bats went round in fragrant skies, and the white kine glimmered, couching at ease, and the trees laid their dark arms about the field. "The merry, merry bells of Yule," with their silver chime, are referred to more than once in Tennyson's poems. They seem to be ever ringing in his ears. They controlled him, he says, in his boyhood, and they bring him sorrow touched with joy.

It is in singing of Arthur Hallam that the poet's faith in the immortality of the soul is brought out with beautiful clearness. The bitterness of his grief draws him to the "comfort clasped in truth revealed," and he looks forward with hope to the day when he shall arrive at last at the blessed goal, and He who died in Holy Land shall reach out the shining hand to him and his lost friend, and take them "as a single soul." (_In Memoriam_, lxxxiii.)

From the verses addressed to the Rev. F. D. Maurice, (January, 1854.) we learn that one of Tennyson's children claims that gentleman as his godfather, and we gather from it and other poems, what all the Laureate's friends know, that his sympathies are with the _Broad Church_, of which Mr. Maurice, Kingsley, Temple, the Bishop of London, and Dr. Stanley are distinguished leaders. It is one of the peculiarities of this school to moderate the torments of the lost and to deny that they are eternal, to hope that good will in some way be the final goal of ill, and that every winter will at last change to spring. It cannot be disputed that this teaching is at variance with Catholic doctrine; but it is one which Tennyson puts forward with singular modesty, describing himself as

"An infant crying in the night; An infant crying for the light; And with no language but a cry."

_In Memoriam_, liii.

The _Broad Church_, as its name implies, professes large and liberal views. Not wishing to be tried by too strict a standard itself, it repudiates all harsh judgments on others. Accordingly, we find in Tennyson few allusions to errors, real or supposed, in the creed of others. He regards as sacred whatever links the soul to a divine truth. He has many friends who are Catholics, and we have heard that he has expressed sincere anxiety to publish nothing relative to the Catholic religion calculated to give offence to its followers. {147} There are few lines in his volumes which grate on the most pious ear, and no devout breathings in which we do not cordially join. It is in one of his earlier poems, and only in sport, that he makes the Talking Oak tell of--

"Old summers, when the monk was fat, And, issuing shorn and sleek, Would twist his girdle tight, and pat The girls upon the cheek, Ere yet, in scorn of Peter's pence, And numbered bead, and shrift. Bluff Harry broke into the spence, And turned the cowls adrift."

In conning his verse, therefore, the Catholic mind is at ease; it lights on no charges to be repelled, and (so far as we know, after long and close study of every line he has published) no mistakes regarding our faith which require to be rectified. There are those who imagine that in _St. Simeon Stylites_, he has wilfully misrepresented the character of a Catholic saint; but we venture to entertain a more lenient opinion, and shall endeavor presently to justify it. It is in a tone of irony, such as we must admire, that he describes the "heated pulpiteer in chapel, not preaching simple Christ to simple men," but fulminating "against the scarlet woman and her creed," and swinging his arms violently, as if he held the apocalyptic millstone, while he predicts the speedy casting of great Babylon into the sea. (_Sea Dreams_.) Nor are there wanting points of contact between Tennyson's ideas on religious matters and some of those dwelt on by Catholic divines. Thus he, like Dr. Newman, finds the arguments for the existence of God drawn from the power and wisdom discoverable in the works of nature, cold and inconclusive in comparison with that one which arises from the voice of conscience and the feelings of the heart. The cxxiiid section of _In Memoriam_ runs singularly parallel with this beautiful passage in the _Apologia_, (p. 377:)

"Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist or a polytheist, when I looked into the world. ... I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society; but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice."

The arguments adduced by infidels, in support of their unbelief, have never been rebutted in verse more cleverly than by Tennyson. His blade flashes like lightning, and severs with as fine a stroke as Saladin's scimitar. _The Two Voices_ may be cited in proof, and also the following passages in the matchless elegy on Arthur Hallam:

The Fates not blind, (_In Memoriam_) iii.

Life shall live for evermore. (_In Memoriam_) xxxiv.

If Death were death, love would not be true love, (_In Memoriam_) xxxv.

Individuality defies the tomb, (_In Memoriam_) xlvi.

Immortality, (_In Memoriam_) liv. lv.

Doubt issuing in belief. (_In Memoriam_) xcv.

Knowledge without wisdom. (_In Memoriam_) cxiii.

Progress, (_In Memoriam_) cxvii.

We are not all matter. (_In Memoriam_) cxix.

The course of human things, (_In Memoriam_) cxxvii

These verses are no doubt the record of a mental conflict carried on during some years of the author's earlier life--a battle between materialism and spiritualism, between faith and unbelief, reason and sense. The _Two Voices_ is philosophy singing, as _In Memoriam_ is philosophy in tears. The _English Cyclopaedia_ well calls the last poem "wonderful," and adds: "In no language, probably, is there another series of elegies so deep, so metaphysical, so imaginative, so musical, and showing such impassioned, abnormal, and solemnizing affection for the dead."

But it is now time to point to those passages in which Tennyson may be said to have, more particularly, Catholic aspects. Be they few or many, they are worth noticing, even though they prove nothing but that a Protestant poet of the highest order has such aspects, intense, striking, and lovely in no ordinary degree. {148} Every true poet is in a certain sense a divine creation, and nothing but a celestial spark could ignite a Wordsworth, a Longfellow, or an Emerson. It has ever been the delight of the ancient church and her writers to discover portions of her truth among those who are separated from her visible pale. Far from grudging them these precious fragments, she only wishes they were less scanty, and would willingly add to them till they reached the full measure of the deposit of the faith. It would be easy to make out a complete cycle of her doctrine in faith and morals from the poems of Protestant and Mohammedan authors, but it would be only by combining extracts from many who, in matters of belief, differ widely from each other. In looking through the Laureate's volumes for traces of the church's teaching, we are in a special manner struck by his treatment of the invocation of the departed. With what deep feeling does he invite the friend, who is the subject of his immortal elegy, to be near him when his light is low, when pain is at its height, when life is fading away. (_In Memoriam_, xlix.) It reminds us of good Dr. Johnson's prayer for the "attention and ministration" of his lost wife, as Boswell has given it us. Can any Catholic express more fully than the Laureate the frame of mind becoming those who desire that the departed should still be near them at their side? (_In Memoriam,_ 1.)

"How pure at heart and _sound in head_, _With what divine affections bold_. Should be the man whose thoughts would hold An hour's communion with the dead.

"In vain shall thou, or any, call The spirits from their golden day, Except, like them, thou too canst say, My spirit is at peace with all.

"They haunt the silence of the breast, Imaginations calm and fair, The memory like a cloudless air, The conscience as a sea at rest.

"But when the heart is full of din, _And doubt beside the portal waits_. They can but listen at the gates. And hear the household jar within."

_In Memoriam_, xciii.

"If I can," says the dying May Queen in _New Year's Eve_--

"If I can, I'll come again, mother, from out my resting-place; Though you'll not see me, mother, _I shall look upon your face_; Though I cannot speak a word, _I shall hearken what you say_, _And be often, often with you, when you think I'm far away._"

It is not, therefore, in a vague and dreamy way, but with the full force of the understanding, that Tennyson invokes the spirits in their place of rest. It is not merely as a poet, but as a Christian, that he exclaims:

"Oh! therefore, from thy sightless range, With gods in unconjectured bliss. Oh from the distance of the abyss Of tenfold, complicated change,

"Descend, and touch, and enter: hear The wish too strong for words to name; That in the blindness of the frame My ghost may feel that thine is near."

_In Memoriam_, xcii.

We say "as a Christian;" for we warmly repudiate the harsh interpretation which is often put on his words addressed to the Son of God:

"Thou _seemest_ human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood thou."

"See," it is said, "this is the most you can get from your favorite about Christ--that he _seems_ divine. It is an appearance, a semblance only." Now, this reasoning is most unfair. The remainder of the verse implies his godhead--

"Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, _to make them thine._"

The verses which follow are a prayer to Christ, imploring from him light and aid, wisdom and forgiveness. (Prefatory lines to _In Memoriam_) {149} In fact, it is evident from other parts of Tennyson's elegy, that he does not use the word _seem_ in the sense of appearing to be what a thing is _not_, but in the sense of its appearing to be _what it is_. Thus, in the fifth stanza, below the lines just quoted, we have--

"Forgive what _seemed_ my sin in me; What _seemed_ my worth since I began; For merit lives from man to man, And not from man, O Lord! to thee."

So again, _In Memoriam_, xxxiii.,

"O thou that after toil and storm, May'st _seem_ to have reached a purer air;"

where "_seem_ to have reached" is equivalent to "thou who _hast_ reached," with that delicate shade of difference only which belongs to Greek rather than to English diction. Thus the verb [Greek text] is repeatedly used in the New Testament as an expletive, not meaningless to the ear, though adding no distinct idea which can be expressed in a single word, [Greek text], (St. Matt. iii. 9,) means to all intents, simply, "Say not in yourselves," and [Greek text] (Gal. ii. 9) means, "who were really the pillars they seemed to be." Such passages, it is true, prove nothing as to Tennyson's use of the word _seem_, but they do illustrate it. The perfect godhead of Christ is brought out fully in the sermon preached by Averill in _Aylmer's Field_. "The Lord from heaven, born of a village girl, carpenter's son," is there styled in the prophet's words, "Wonderful, Prince of Peace, the Mighty God."

When the Laureate prays that his very worth may be forgiven, he employs the language of deep humility which meets us so constantly in the writings of Catholic saints. It reminds us of their prayers to the Father of Lights that the best they have ever done may be pardoned, that their tears may be washed, their myrrh incensed, their spikenard's scent perfumed, and their breathings after God fumigated. It is no shallow view that he takes of repentance when he makes Queen Guinevere ask:

"What is true repentance but in thought-- Not e'en in inmost thought to think again The sins that made the past so pleasant to us?"

_Idylls of the King._

He has been accused of making St. Simeon Stylites a self-righteous saint. That he makes him ambitious of saintdom is true, but this hope which he "will not cease to grasp," is fostered by no sense of his own merits, but, on the contrary, springs from the deepest possible conviction of his unworthiness. He describes himself as

"The basest of mankind, From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin, Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet For troops of devils mad with blasphemy."

He proclaims from his pillar, his "high nest of penance,"

"That Pontius and Iscariot by _his_ side Showed like fair seraphs."

He details, indeed, in language strikingly intense, his sufferings, prayers, and penances; but he disclaims all praise on account of them, and ascribes all his patience to the divine bounty. He does not breathe or "whisper any murmur of complaint," while he tells how his teeth

"Would chatter with the cold, and all his beard Was tagged with icy fringes in the moon;"

how his "thighs were rotted with the dew;" and how

"For many weeks about his loins he wore The rope that haled the buckets from the well. Twisted as tight as I could knot the noose;"

yet the climax of it all is, "Have mercy, mercy: take away my sin."

The Catholic aspects in _St. Agnes' Eve_ and _Sir Galahad_, are no less marked than those of _St. Simeon Stylites_. {150} As a devout breathing of a dying nun, the first of these poems is touching and exquisite. The snows lie deep on the convent-roof, and the shadows of its towers "slant down the snowy sward," while she prays and says:

"As these white robes are soiled and dark. To yonder shining ground; As this pale taper's earthly spark, To yonder argent round; So shows my soul before the Lamb, My spirit before Thee; So in mine earthly house I am, To that I hope to be."

All heaven bursts its "starry floors," the gates roll back, the heavenly Bridegroom waits to welcome and purify the sister's departing soul. The vision dilates. It is mysteriously vague--mysteriously distinct:

"The sabbaths of eternity. One sabbath deep and wide-- A light upon the shining sea-- The Bridegroom with his bride!"

There is in such verse an indescribably Catholic tone. It is like the heavenly music of faith, which pervades the _Paradise_ of Dante, and which (in spite of the lax lives of the authors) runs through the "Sacred Songs" of Moore, and the _Epistle of Eloisa_, and _The Dying Christian's Address to his Soul_, by Pope. But if Tennyson has proved equal to portraying a Catholic saint, he has also depicted most graphically a Catholic knight of romance. Sir Galahad, one of the ornaments of King Arthur's court, (_Idylls of the King_., p. 213,) whose

"strength is as the strength of ten, Because his heart is pure,"

goes in quest of the Sangreal--the sacred wine. He hears the noise of hymns amid the dark stems of the forest, sees in vision the snowy altar-cloth with swinging censers and "silver vessels sparkling clean." He sails, in magic barks, on "lonely mountain meres," and catches glimpses of angels with folded feet "in stoles of white," bearing the holy grail.

"Ah! blessed vision! _blood of God!_ My spirit beats her mortal bars. As down dark tides the glory slides, And star-light mingles with the stars. ... So pass I hostel, hall, and grange. By bridge and ford, by park and pale. All armed I ride, whate'er betide. Until I find the holy grail."

_Poems_, p. 336.

A Catholic aspect may sometimes be observed in a single word. "And so thou lean on our fair father Christ," (_Idylls, Guinevere_, p. 254,) may perhaps sound strange to some ears, and is familiar to Catholics only. "He alone is our inward life," says Dr. Newman, speaking of Christ; "He not only regenerates us, but (to allude to a higher mystery) _semper gignit_; he is ever renewing our new birth and our heavenly sonship. In this sense he may be called, _as in nature so in grace, our real Father_." (_Letter to Dr. Pusey_, p. 89.) Hence, in the Litany of the Holy Name we say, "Jesu, _Pater_ futuri seculi," and "Jesu, _Pater_ pauperum."

The Catholic who well understands his own faith will always be very scrupulous about disturbing that of others. If there is anything abhorrent to him, "it is the scattering doubt and unsettling consciences without necessity." (_Newman's Apologia_, p. 344.) There is a well-known poem in _In Memoriam_, (xxxiii.,) which admirably illustrates this feeling. We quote but one verse, as the reader's memory will no doubt supply the rest.

"Leave thou thy sister, when she prays, Her early heaven, her happy views; Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse A life that leads melodious ways."

The theory and practice of the wisest Catholics conform to the spirit and letter of this injunction. Their devotional life, too, is perfectly reflected in Tennyson whenever he writes of prayer. {151} There is a depth of feeling in his expressions on this subject which reaches to the fact that prayer is the truest religion--that it is the link which unites man more closely to his Creator than any outward acts, any meditations, any professed creed, and is the spring and current of religious life.

"Evermore _Prayer_ from a living source within the will, And beating up through all the bitter world, Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, Kept him a living soul"

_Enoch Arden_, p. 44.

"Thrice blest _whose lives are faithful prayers_. Whose loves in higher love endure: What souls possess themselves so pure? Or is there blessedness like theirs?"

_In Memoriam_, xxxii.

Thus again, in the _Morte d'Arthur_, which was a forecast of _The Idylls of the King_, we are reminded of the efficacy of prayer in language worthy of being put into a Catholic's lips:

"Pray for my soul. _More things are wrought by prayer_ _Than this world dreams of_. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats. That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? _For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God._"

In the following lines, on the rarity of repentance, there is a reference to the coöperation of human will with divine grace, which equals the precision of a Catholic theologian:

"Full seldom _does_ a man repent, or _use_ _Both grace and will_ to pick the vicious quitch _Of blood and custom_ wholly out of him. And make all clean, and plant himself afresh."

_Idylls of the King_, p. 93.

In the same poem we find lines of a distinctly Catholic tone on the repentant queen's entering a convent, and on a knight who had long been the tenant of a hermitage. Guinevere speaks as follows:

"So let me, _if you do not shudder at me_, Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you; Wear black and white, and be a nun like you; Fast with your fasts, _not feasting with your feasts_; Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys. _Bid not rejoicing_; mingle with your rites; Pray and be prayed for; _lie before your shrines_; Do each low office of your holy house; Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole To poor sick people, richer in his eyes Who ransomed us, and haler, too, than I; And treat their loathsome hurts, and heal mine own; And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer The sombre close of that voluptuous day Which wrought the ruin of my lord the king."

_Idylls of the King_, p. 260.

The hermitage is thus described:

"There lived a knight Not far from Camelot, now for forty years A hermit, _who had prayed, labored, and prayed_. And ever laboring had scooped himself In the white rock a chapel and a hall On massive columns, like a shorecliff cave. And cells and chambers: all were fair and dry."

_Idylls of the King_, p. 168.

Among Tennyson's earlier poems, the picture of Isabel, "the perfect wife," with her "_hate of gossip parlance, and of sway_," her

"locks not wide dispread. Madonna-wise on either side her head; Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign The summer calm of golden charity;"

and

"Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed With the clear-pointed flame of chastity,"

_Poems_, pp. 7, 8,

is worthy of a Catholic matron. The description of St. Stephen, in _The Two Voices_, has all the depth and pathos of the poet's happiest mood; and, though neither it, nor some other passages which have been quoted, contain anything distinctively Catholic as opposed to other forms of Christianity, it is strongly marked with those orthodox instincts to which we are drawing attention:

"I cannot hide that some have striven, _Achieving calm_, to whom was given The joy that mixes man with heaven; Who, rowing hard against the stream, Saw distant gates of Eden gleam. And did not dream it was a dream; But heard, by secret transport led, E'en in the charnels of the dead, The murmur of the fountain-head-- Which did accomplish their desire, Bore and forbore, and did not tire; Like Stephen, an unquenched fire, He heeded not reviling tones. Nor sold his heart to idle moans. Though cursed, and scorned, and bruised with stones; But looking upward, full of grace. He prayed, and from a happy place God's glory smote him on the face."

_Poems_, p. 299.

{152}

We are anxious not to appear to lay undue stress on these extracts. Let them go for as much as they are worth, and no more. We do not stretch them on any Procrustean bed to the measure of orthodox. Others might be adduced, of a latitudinarian tendency, but they are few in number, and do not neutralize the force of these. In view of many passages in Shakespeare of a Catholic bearing, and of several facts favorable to the belief that he was a Catholic, M. Rio has come to the probably sound conclusion that he really was what he himself wishes to prove him. We put no such forced interpretation on our extracts from Tennyson as M. Rio has certainly put on many which he has brought forward from the Elizabethan poet; but we think that they are sufficiently cast in a Catholic mould to warrant us in applying to Tennyson the words which Carlyle has used in reference to his predecessor: "Catholicism, with and against feudalism, but not against nature and her bounty, gave us English a Shakespeare and era of Shakespeare, and so produced _a blossom of Catholicism_." (_French Revolution_, vol. i. 10.)

But religion, as we have said, does not occupy a prominent place in Tennyson's pages. He is, in the main, like the great dramatist--a poet of this world. Love and women are his favorite themes, but love within the bounds of law, and woman strongly idealized. License finds in him no apologist, while he throws around purity and fidelity all the charms of song. The most rigid moralist can find nothing to censure in his treatment of the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere, the wedded love of Enid and Geraint, the meretricious love of Vivien, and the unrequited love of Elaine. If Milton had, as he intended, [Footnote 43] chosen King Arthur as the subject of his epic, he could not have taken a higher moral tone than Tennyson has in the _Idylls of the King_, and, considering how lax were his notions about marriage, it is probable he would have taken a lower one.

[Footnote 43: See his _Mansas_, and Life, by Toland, p. 17.]

King Arthur's praise of honorable courtship and conjugal faith is too long to be quoted here, but it may be referred to as equally eloquent and edifying. (_Idylls of the King_.)

The Laureate has learned at least one secret of making a great name--not to write too much. "I hate many books," wrote Père Lacordaire. "The capital point is, to have an aim in life, and deeply to respect posterity by sending it but a small number of well-meditated works." This has been Tennyson's rule. With six slender volumes he has built himself an everlasting name. He has, till within the last few months, seldom contributed to periodicals, and when he has done so, the price paid for his stanzas seems fabulous. The estimation in which he is held by critics of a high order amounts, in many cases, to a passion and a worship. The specimen he has given of a translation of the _Iliad_ promises for it, if completed, all that Longfellow has wrought for the _Divina Commedia_. The attempts he has made at _Alcaics, Hendecasyllabics_, and _Galliambics_ in English have been thoroughly successful, and stamp him as an accomplished scholar. (_Boädicea_, etc., in _Enoch Arden and other Poems_.) As he does not write much, so neither does he write fast. The impetuous oratory of Shakespeare's and Byron's verse is unknown to him. He never affects it. He reminds us rather of the operations of nature, who slowly and calmly, but without difficulty, produces her marvellous results. {153} Drop by drop his immortal poems are distilled, like the chalybeate droppings which leave at length on the cavern floor a perfect red and crystal stalagmite. "Day by day," says the _National Review_, when speaking on this subject--"day by day, as the hours pass, the delicate sand falls into beautiful forms, in stillness, in peace, in brooding." "The particular power by which Mr. Tennyson surpasses all recent English poets," writes the _Edinburgh Review_, "is that of sustained perfection. ... We look in vain among his modern rivals for any who can compete with him in the power of saying beautifully the thing he has to say."

O degli altri poeti onore e lume, Vagliami 'l lungo studio e 'l grande amore Che m' han fatto cercar lo tuo volume. [Footnote 44]

[Footnote 44: _L Inferno_, i. 82.]

During a long period, the originality of Tennyson's verse was an obstacle to its fame, and indeed continues to be so in the minds of some readers. His use of obsolete words appears to many persons affected, while others applaud him for his vigorous Saxon, believing, with Dean Swift, that the Saxon element in our compound tongue should be religiously preserved, and that the writers and speakers who please us most are those whose style is most Saxon in its character. If Tennyson has modelled his verse after any author, it is undoubtedly Shakespeare, and the traces of this study may perhaps be found in his vocabulary. Yet no man is less of a plagiarist; not only his forms of thought but of language also are original, and though he owes much to the early dramatists, to Wordsworth and to Shelley, he fuses all metals in the alembic of his own mind, and turns them to gold. His love of nature is intense, and his observation of her works is microscopic. Yet he is never so occupied with details as to lose sight of broad outlines. In 1845, Wordsworth spoke of him as "decidedly the first of our living poets;" but since that time his fame has been steadily on the increase. Many of his lines have passed into proverbs, and a crowd of feebly fluttering imitators have vainly striven to rival him on the wing. What the people once called a weed has grown into a tall flower, wearing a crown of light, and flourishing far and wide. (_The Flower. Enoch Arden_, etc., p. 152.) A concordance to _In Memoriam_ has been published, and the several editions of the Laureate's volumes have been collated as carefully as if they were works of antiquity. Every ardent lover of English poetry is familiar with Mariana, "in the lonely moated grange;" the good Haroun Alraschid among his obelisks and cedars; Oriana wailing amid the Norland whirlwinds; the Lady Shalott in her "four gray walls and four gray towers;" the proud Lady Clara Vere de Vere; the drowsy Lotos-Eaters; the chaste and benevolent Godiva; Maud in her garden of "woodbine spices;" the true love of the Lord of Burleigh, and the reward of honest Lady Clare. The highest praise of these ballads is that they have sunk into the nation's heart. They combine the chief excellences of other bards, and remind us of some delicious fruit which unites in itself a variety of the most exquisite flavors. This richness and sweetness may be ascribed in part to that remarkable condensation of thought which enriches one page of Tennyson with as many ideas and images as would, in most other poets, be found scattered over two or three pages. "We must not expect," wrote Shenstone in one of his essays, "to trace the flow of Waller, the landskip of Thomson, the fire of Dryden, the imagery of Shakespeare, the simplicity of Spenser, the courtliness of Prior, the humor of Swift, the wit of Cowley, the delicacy of Addison, the tenderness of Otway, and the invention, the spirit, and sublimity of Milton, joined in any single writer." Perhaps not. {154} But Shenstone had never read Tennyson, and there is no knowing what he might have thought if he had conned the calm majesty of _Ulysses_; the classical beauty of _Tithonus_ and the _Princess_; the luxuriant eloquence of _Locksley Hall_; the deep lyrical flow of _The Letters_ and _The Voyage_; the _'cute_ drollery of the _Northern Farmer_; the idyllic sweetness of _OEnone_; the grandeur of _Morte d'Arthur_; the touching simplicity of _Enoch Arden_; the power and pathos of _Aylmer's Field_; the perfect minstrelsy of the _Rivulet_, and the songs, _O Swallow, Swallow_, and _Tears, Idle Tears_; and the sharps and trebles of the _Brook_, more musical than Mendelssohn.

Far be it from us to carp at any poetry because it proceeds from one who is not a Catholic. We believe, indeed, firmly that, if Tennyson had been imbued with the ancient faith, it would have cleared some vagueness both from his mind and his verse. But in these days, when Socinianism, positivism, and free-thinking in various shapes are taking such strong hold of educated men, we rejoice unfeignedly to find popular writings marked, even in an imperfect degree, with Christian doctrine and feeling. The influence exerted by the Laureate in the world of letters is great, and we have, therefore, endeavored at some length to show how far it is favorable, and how far unfavorable, to the cause of truth. Though unhappily not a Catholic, we recognize with delight the fact that he is not an infidel, and we feel persuaded that some at least of our readers will be pleased at our having placed in a prominent point of view the redeeming features in the religious character of his poetry.

Poland

When, fixed in righteous wrath, a nation's eye Torments some crowned tormentor with just hate. Nor threat nor flattery can that gaze abate; Unshriven the unatoning years go by; For as that starry archer in the sky Unbends not his bright bow, though early and late The syren sings, and folly weds with fate, Even so that constellated destiny Which keeps fire-vigil in a night-black heaven, Upon the countenance of the doomed looks forth Consentient with a nation's gaze on earth: To the twinned powers a single gaze is given; The earthly fate reveals the fate on high-- A brazen serpent raised, that says, not "live," but "die."

Aubrey de Vere.

{155}

Professor Draper's Books. [Footnote 45]

[Footnote 45: 1. _Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical; or, Conditions and Course of the Life of Man_. By J. W. Draper, M.D., LL.D., Professor of Chemistry and Physiology in the University of New York. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1856. 8vo, pp. 649.

2. _History of the Intellectual Development of Europe_. By the same. Fifth edition. 1867. 8vo, pp. 628

3. _Thoughts on the Civil Policy of America_. By the same. Third edition. 1867. 8vo, pp. 323.

4. _History of the American Civil War_. By the same. In three volumes. Vol. I. 1867. 8vo, pp. 567.]

Professor Draper's works have had, and are having, a very rapid sale, and are evidently very highly esteemed by that class of readers who take an interest, without being very profoundly versed, in the grave subjects which he treats. He is, we believe, a good chemist and a respectable physiologist. His work on Human Physiology, we have been assured by those whose judgment in such matters we prefer to our own, is a work of real merit, and was, when first published, up to the level of the science to which it is devoted. We read it with care on its first appearance, and the impression it left on our mind was, that the author yields too much to the theory of chemical action in physiology, and does not remember that man is the union of soul and body, and that the soul modifies, even in the body, the action of the natural laws; or rather, that the physiological laws of brute matter, or even of animals, cannot be applied to man without many important reserves. The Professor, indeed, recognizes, or says he recognizes, in man a rational soul, or an immaterial principle; but the recognition seems to be only a verbal concession, made to the prejudices of those who have some lingering belief in Christianity, for we find no use for it in his physiology. All the physiological phenomena he dwells on he explains without it, that is, as far as he explains them at all. Whatever his personal belief may be, his doctrine is as purely materialistic as is Mr. Herbert Spencer's, which explains all the phenomena of life by the mechanical, chemical, and electrical changes and combinations of matter.

It is due to Professor Draper to say, that in this respect he only sins in common with the great body of modern physiologists. Physiology--indeed, all the inductive sciences--have been for a long time cast in a materialistic mould, and men of firm faith, and sincere and ardent piety, are materialists, and, therefore, atheists, the moment they enter the field of physical science, and deny in their science what they resolutely affirm and would die for in their faith. Hence the quarrel between the theologians and the _savans_. The _savans_ have not reconciled their so-called science with the great theological truths, whether of reason or revelation, which only the fool doubts, or in his heart denies. This proves that our physicists have made far less progress in the sciences than they are in the habit of boasting. That cannot be true in physiology which is false in theology; and a physiology that denies all reality but matter, or finds no place in it for God and the human soul, is no true physiological science. The physiologist has far less evidence of the existence of matter than I have of the existence of spirit; and it is only by spirit that the material is apprehensible, or can be shown to exist. Matter only mimics or imitates spirit. {156} The continual changes that take place from time to time in physiology show--we say it with all deference to physiologists--that it has not risen as yet to the dignity of a science. It is of no use to speak of progress, for changes which transform the whole body of a pretended science are not progress. We may not have mastered all the facts of a science; we may be discovering new facts every day; but if we have, for instance, the true physiological science, the discovery of new facts may throw new light on the science--may enable us to see clearer its reach, and understand better its application, but cannot change or modify its principles. As long as your pretended science is liable to be changed in its principles, it is a theory, an hypothesis, not a science. Physiologists have accumulated a large stock of physiological facts, to which they are daily adding new facts. We willingly admit these facts are not useless, and the time spent in collecting them is not wasted; on the contrary, we hold them to be valuable, and appreciate very highly the labor, the patient research, and the nice observation that has collected, classified, and described them; but we dare assert, notwithstanding, that the science of physiology is yet to be created; and created it will not be till physiologists have learned and are able to set forth the dialectic relations of spirit and matter, soul and body, God and nature, free-will and necessity. Till then there may be known facts, but there will be no physiological science. As far as what is called the science of human life, or human physiology, goes, Professor Draper's work is an able and commendable work; but he must permit us to say that the real science of physiology he has not touched, has not dreamed of; nor have any of his brethren who see in the human soul only a useless appendage to the body. The soul is the _forma corporis_, its informing, its vital principle, and pervades, so to speak, and determines, or modifies, the whole life and action of the human body, from the first instant of conception to the very moment of death. The human body does not exist, even in its embryonic state, first as a vegetable, then as an animal, and afterward as united to an immaterial soul. It is body united to soul from the first instant of conception, and man lives, in any stage of his existence, but one and the same human life. There is no moment after conception when the wilful destruction of the foetus is not the murder of a human life.

As we said on a former occasion, or at least implied, man, though the ancients called him a microcosm, the universe in little, and contains in himself all the elements of nature, is neither a mineral nor a vegetable, nor simply an animal, and the analogies which the physiologist detects between him and the kingdoms below him, form no scientific basis of human physiology, for like is not same. There may be no difference that the microscope or the crucible can detect between the blood of an ox and the blood of a man; for the microscope and chemical tests are in both cases applied to the dead subject, not the living, and the human blood tested is withdrawn from the living action of the soul, an action that escapes the most powerful microscope, and the most subtile chemical agent. Comparative physiology may gratify the curiosity, and, when not pressed beyond its legitimate bounds, it may even be useful, and help us to a better understanding of our own bodies; but it can never be the basis of a scientific induction, because between man and all animals there is the difference of species. {157} Comparative physiology is, therefore, unlike comparative philology; for, however diverse may be the dialects compared, there is no difference of species among them, and nothing hinders philological inductions from possessing, in the secondary order, a true scientific character. Physiological inductions, resting on the comparative study of different individuals, or different races or families of men, may also be truly scientific; for all these individuals, and all these races or families belong to one and the same species. But the comparative physiology that compares men and animals, gives only analogies, not science.

We do not undervalue science; on the contrary, what we complain of is, that our physiologists do not give us science; they give us facts, theories, or hypotheses. Facts are not science till referred to the principles that explain them, and these principles themselves are not science till integrated in the principles of that high and universal science called theology, and which is really the science of the sciences. The men who pass for _savans_, and are the hierophants and lawgivers of the age, sin not by their science, but by their want of science. Their ideal of science is too low and grovelling. Science is vastly more than they conceive it; is higher, deeper, broader than they look; and the best of them are, as Newton said of himself, mere boys picking up shells on the shores of the great ocean of truth. They, at best, remain in the vestibule of the temple of science; they have not entered the penetralia and knelt before the altar. We find no fault with Professor Draper's science, where science he has; we only complain of him for attempting to palm off upon us his ignorance for science, and accepting, and laboring to make us accept as science what is really no science. Yet he is not worse than others of his class.

The second work named in our list is the professor's attempt to extend the principles of his human physiology to the human race at large, and to apply them specially to the intellectual development of Europe; the third is an attempt to apply them to the civil policy of America, and the fourth is an attempt to get a counter-proof of his theories in the history of our late civil war. Through the four works we detect one and the same purpose, one and the same doctrine, of which the principal _data_ are presented in his work on human physiology, which is cast in a purely materialistic mould. They are all written to show that all philosophy, all religion, all morality, and all history are to be physiologically explained, that is, by fixed, inflexible, and irreversible natural laws. He admits, in words, that man has free-will, but denies that it influences events or anything in the life and conduct of men. He also admits, and claims credit for admitting, a Supreme Being, as if there could be subordinate beings, or any being but one who declares himself I AM THAT AM; but a living and ever-present God, Creator, and upholder of the universe, finds no recognition in his physiological system. His God, like the gods of the old Epicureans, has nothing to do, but, as Dr. Evarist de Gypendole, in his _Ointment for the Bite of the Black Serpent_, happily expresses it, to "sleep all night and to doze all day." He is a superfluity in science, like the immaterial soul in the author's _Human Physiology_. All things, in Professor Draper's system, originate, proceed from, and terminate in, natural development, with a most superb contempt for the _ratio sufficiens_ of Leibnitz, and the first and final cause of the theologians and philosophers. {158} The only God his system recognizes is natural law, the law of the generation and death of phenomena, and distinguishable from nature only as the _natura naturans_ is distinguishable from the _natura naturata_ of Spinoza. His system is, therefore, notwithstanding his concessions to the Christian prejudices which still linger with the unscientific, a system of pure naturalism, and differs in no important respect from the _Religion Positive_ of M. Augusta Comte.

The Duke of Argyle, in his _Reign of Law_, which we reviewed last February, a man well versed in the modern sciences, sought, while asserting the universal reign of law, to escape this system of pure naturalism, by defining law to be "will enforcing itself with power," or making what are called the laws of nature the direct action of the divine Will. But this asserted activity only for the divine Being, therefore denied second causes, and bound not only nature, but the human will fast in fate, or rather, absorbed man and nature in God; for man and nature do and can exist only in so far as active, or in some sense causative. The passive does not exist, and to place all activity in God alone is to deny the creation of active existences or second causes, which is the very essence of pantheism. Professor Draper and the positivists, whom he follows, reverse the shield, and absorb not man and nature in God, but both God and man in nature. John and James are not Peter, but Peter is James and John. There is no real difference between pantheism and atheism; both are absurd, but the absurdity of atheism is more easily detected by the common mind than the absurdity of pantheism. The one loses God by losing unity. and the other by losing diversity, or everything distinguishable from God. The God of the atheist is not, and the God of the pantheist is as if he were not, and it makes no practical difference whether you say God is all or all is God.

To undertake a critical review of these several works would exceed both our space and our patience, and, moreover, were a task that does not seem to be called for. Professor Draper, we believe, ranks high among his scientific brethren. He writes in a clear, easy, graceful, and pleasing style, but we have found nothing new or profound in his works. His theories are almost as old as the hills, and even older, if the hills are no older than he pretends. His work on the Intellectual Development of Europe, is in substance, taken from the positivists, and the positivist philosophy is only a reproduction, with no scientific advance on that of the old physiologers or hylozoists, as Cudworth calls them. He agrees perfectly with the positivists in the recognition of three ages or epochs, we should rather say stages, in human development; the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific or positivist. In the theological age, man is in his intellectual infancy, is filled with sentiments of fear and wonder; ignorant of natural causes and effects, of the natural laws themselves, he sees the supernatural in every event that surpasses his understanding or experience, and bows before a God in every natural force superior to his own. It is the age of ignorance, wonder, credulity, and superstition. In the second the intellect has been, to a certain extent, developed, and the gross fetichism of the first age disappears, and men no longer worship the visible apis, but the invisible apis, the spiritual or metaphysical apis; not the bull, but, as the North American Indian says, "the manitou of bulls;" and instead of worshipping the visible objects of the universe, as the sun, moon, and stars, the ocean and rivers, groves and fountains, storms and tempests, as did polytheism in the outset, they worship certain metaphysical abstractions into which they have refined them, and which they finally generalize into one grand abstraction, which they call Zeus, Jupiter, Jehovah, Theus, Deus, or God, and thus assert the Hebrew and Christian monotheism. {159} In the third and last age there is no longer fetichism, polytheism, or monotheism; men no longer divinize nature, or their own abstractions, no longer believe in the supernatural or the metaphysical or anything supposed to be supramundane, but reject whatever is not sensible, material, positive as the object of positive science.

The professor develops this system with less science than its inventor or reviver, M. Auguste Comte and his European disciples; but as well as he could be expected to do it, in respectable English. He takes it as the basis of his _History of the Intellectual Development of Europe_, and attempts to reconcile with it all the known and unknown facts of that development. We make no quotations to prove that we state the professor's doctrine correctly, for no one who has read him, with any attention, will question our statement; and, indeed, we might find it difficult to quote passages which clearly and expressly confirm it, for it is a grave complaint against him, as against nearly all writers of his school, that they do not deal in clear and express statements of doctrine. Had Professor Draper put forth what is evidently his doctrine in clear, simple, and distinct propositions, so that his doctrine could at once be seen and understood, his works, instead of going through several editions, and being commended in reviews and journals, as scientific, learned, and profound, would have fallen dead from the press, or been received with a universal burst of public indignation; for they attack everything dear to the heart of the Christian, the philosopher, and the citizen. Nothing worse is to be found in the old French Encyclopedists, in the _Système de la Nature_ of D'Holbach, or in _l'Homme-Plant_, and _l'Homme-Machine_ of Lamettrie. His doctrine is nothing in the world but pure materialism and atheism, and we do not believe the American people are as yet prepared to deny either God, or creation and Providence. The success of these authors is in their vagueness, in their refusal to reduce their doctrine to distinct propositions, in hinting, rather than stating it, and in pretending to speak always in the name of science, thus: "Science shows this," or "Science shows that;" when, if they knew anything of the matter, they would know that science does no such thing. Then, how can you accuse Professor Draper of atheism or materialism; for does he not expressly declare his belief, as a man of science, in the existence of the Supreme Being, and in an immaterial and immortal soul? What Dr. Draper believes or disbelieves, is his affair, not ours; we only assert that the doctrine he defends in his professedly scientific books, from beginning to end, is purely physiological, and has no God or soul in it. As a man. Dr. Draper may believe much; as an author, he is a materialist and an atheist, beyond all dispute: if he knows it, little can be said for his honesty; if he does not know it, little can be said for his science, or his competency to write on the intellectual development of Europe, or of any other quarter of the globe.

{160}

But to return to the theory the professor borrows from the positivists. As the professor excludes from his physiology the idea of creation, we cannot easily understand how he determines what is the infancy of the human race, or when the human race was in its infancy. If the race had no beginning, if, like Topsy, "it didn't come, but grow'd," it had no infancy; if it had a beginning, and you assume its earliest stage was that of infancy, then it is necessary to know which stage is the earliest, and what man really was in that stage. Hence, chronology becomes all-important, and, as the author's science rejects all received chronology, and speaks of changes and events which took place millions and millions of ages ago, and of which there remains no record but that chronicled in the rocks; but, as in that record exact dates are not given, chronology, with him, whether of the earth or of man, must be very uncertain, and it seems to us that it must be very difficult for science to determine, with much precision, when the race was, or what it was, in its infancy. Thus he says:

"In the intellectual infancy of the savage state, man transfers to nature his conceptions of himself, and, considering that everything he does is determined by his own pleasure, regards all passing events as depending on the arbitrary volition of a superior but invisible power. He gives to the world a constitution like his own. The tendency is _necessarily_ to superstition. Whatever is strange, or powerful, or vast, impresses his imagination with dread. Such objects are only the outward manifestations of an indwelling spirit, and, therefore, worthy of his veneration." (_Intellect. Devel_. p. 2.)

We beg the professor's pardon, but he has only imperfectly learned his lesson. In this which he regards as the age of fetich worship, and the first stage of human development, he includes ideas and conceptions which belong to the second, or metaphysical age of his masters. But let this pass for the present. The author evidently assumes that the savage state is the intellectual infancy of the race. But how knows he that it is not the intellectual old age and decrepitude of the race? The author, while he holds, or appears to hold, like the positivists, to the continuous progress of the race, does not hold to the continuous progress of any given nation.

"A national type," he says, (ch. xi.,) "pursues its way physically and intellectually through changes and developments answering to those of the individual represented by infancy, youth, manhood, old age, and death respectively."

How, then, say scientifically that your fetich age, or the age of superstition, the theological age of the positivists, instead being the infancy of the nation, is not its last stage next preceding death? How determine physiologically or scientifically that the savage is the infant man and not the worn-out man? Then how determine that the superstition of which you have so much to say, and which, with you, means religion, revelation, the church, everything that claims to be, or that asserts, anything supernatural, is not characteristic of the last stage of human development, and not of the first?

Our modern physiologists and anti-Christian speculators seem all to take it for granted that the savage gives us the type of the primitive man. We refuted this absurd notion in our essay on _Faith and the Sciences_. There are no known historical facts to support it. Consult the record chronicled in the rocks, as read by geologists. What does it prove? {161} Why, in the lowest and most ancient strata in which human remains are found, along with those of extinct species of animals, you find that the men of that epoch used stone implements, and were ignorant of metals or unable to work them, and, therefore, must have been savages. That is, the men who lived then, and in that locality. Be it so. But does this prove that there did not, contemporary with them, in other localities or in other quarters of the globe, live and flourish nations in the full vigor of the manhood of the race, having all the arts and implements of civilized life? Did the savages of New England, when first discovered, understand working in iron, and used they not stone axes, and stone knives, many of which we have ourselves picked up? And was it the same with Europeans? From the rudeness and uncivilized condition of a people in one locality, you can conclude nothing as to the primitive condition of the race.

The infancy of the race, if there is any justice in the analogy assumed, is the age of growth, of progress; but nothing is less progressive, or more strictly stationary, in a moral and intellectual sense, than the savage state. Since history began, there is not only no instance on record of a savage tribe rising by indigenous effort to civilization, but none of a purely savage tribe having ever, even by foreign assistance, become a civilized nation. The Greeks in the earliest historical or semi-historical times, were not savages, and we have no evidence that they ever were. The Homeric poems were never the product of a savage people, or of a people just emerging from the savage state into civilization, and they are a proof that the Greeks, as a people, had juster ideas of religion, and were less superstitious in the age of Homer than in the age of St. Paul. The Germans are a civilized people, and if they were first revealed to us as what the Greeks and Romans called _barbarians_, they were never, as far as known, savages. We all know how exceedingly difficult it is to civilize our North American Indians. Individuals now and then take up the elements of our civilization, but rarely, if they are of pure Indian blood. They recoil before the advance of civilization. The native Mexicans and Peruvians have, indeed, received some elements of Christian civilization along with the Christian faith and worship; but they were not, on the discovery of this continent, pure savages, but had many of the elements of a civilized people, and that they were of the same race with the savages that roamed our northern forests, is not yet proved. The historical probabilities are not on the side of the hypothesis of the modern progressivists, but are on the side of the contrary doctrine, that the savage state belongs to the old age of the race--is not that from which man rises, but that into which he falls.

Nor is there any historical evidence that superstition is older than religion, that men begin in the counterfeit and proceed to the genuine,--in the false, and proceed by way of development to the true. They do not abuse a thing before having it. Superstition presupposes religion, as falsehood presupposes truth; for falsehood being unable to stand by itself, it is only by the aid of truth that it can be asserted. "Fear made the gods," sings Lucretius; but it can make none where belief in the gods, does not already exist. Men may transfer their own sentiments and passions to the divinity; but they must believe that the divinity exists before they can do it. {162} They must believe that God is, before they can hear him in the wind, see him in the sun and stars, or dread him in the storm and the earthquake. It is not from dread of the strange, the powerful, or the vast, that men develop the idea of God, the spiritual, the supernatural; the dread presupposes the presence and activity of the idea. Men, again, who, like the professor's man in the infancy of the savage state, are able to conceive of spirit and to distinguish between the outward manifestation and the indwelling spirit, are not fetich worshippers, and for them the fetich is no longer a god, but if retained at all, it is as a sign or symbol of the invisible, Fetichism is the grossest form of superstition, and obtains only among tribes fallen into the grossest ignorance, that lie at the lowest round of the scale of human beings; not among tribes in whom intelligence is commencing, but in whom it is well-nigh extinguished.

Monotheism is older than polytheism, for polytheism, as the author himself seems to hold, grows out of pantheism, and pantheism evidently grows out of theism, out of the loss or perversion of the idea of creation, or of the relation between the creator and the creature, or cause and effect, and is and can be found only among a people who have once believed in one God, creator of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible. Moreover, the earliest forms of the heathen superstitions are, so far as historical evidence goes, the least gross, the least corrupt. The religion of the early Romans was pure in comparison with what it subsequently became, especially after the Etruscan domination or influence. The Homeric poems show a religion less corrupt than that defended by Aristophanes. The earliest of the Vedas, or sacred books of the Hindoos, are free from the grosser superstitions of the latest, and were written, the author very justly thinks, before those grosser forms were introduced. This is very remarkable, if we are to assume that the grossest forms of superstition are the earliest! But we have with Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, no books that are of earlier date than the books of Moses, at least none that can be proved to have been written earlier; and in the books of Moses, in whatever light or character we take them, there is shown a religion older than any of the heathen mythologies, and absolutely free from every form of superstition, what is called the patriarchal religion, and which is substantially the Jewish and Christian religion. The earliest notices we have of idolatries and superstitions are taken from these books, the oldest extant, at least none older are known. If these books are regarded as historical documents, then what we Christians hold to be the true religion has obtained with a portion of the race from the creation of man, and, for a long series of years, from the creation to Nimrod, the mighty hunter or conqueror, was the only religion known; and your fetichisms, polytheisms, pantheisms, idolatries, and superstitions, which you note among the heathen, instead of being the religion of the infancy of the race, are, comparatively speaking, only recent innovations. If their authenticity as historical documents be denied, they still, since their antiquity is undeniable, prove the patriarchal religion obtained at an earlier date than it can be proved that any of the heathen mythologies existed. It is certain, then, that the patriarchal, we may say, the Christian religion, is the earliest known religion of the race, and therefore that fetichism, as contended by the positivists and the professor after them, cannot be asserted to have been the religion of the human race in the earliest stage of its existence, nor the germ from which all the various religions or superstitions of the world have been developed.

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But we may go still farther. The attempt to explain the origin and course of religion by the study of the various heathen mythologies, and idolatries, and superstitions, is as absurd as to attempt to determine the origin and course of the Christian religion by the study of the thousand and one sects that have broken off from the church, and set up to be churches themselves. They can teach us nothing except the gradual deterioration of religious thought, and the development and growth of superstition or irreligion among those separated from the central religious life of the race. In the ancient Indian, Egyptian, and Greek mythologies, on which the author dwells with so much emphasis, we trace no gradual purification of the religious idea, but its continual corruption and debasement. As the sects all presuppose the Christian church, and could neither exist nor be intelligible without her, so those various heathen mythologies presuppose the patriarchal religion, are unintelligible without it, and could not have originated or exist without it. The professor having studied these mythologies in the darkness of no-religion, understands nothing of them, and finds no sense in them--as little sense as a man ignorant of Catholicity would find in the creeds, confessions, and religious observances of the several Protestant sects; but if he had studied them in the light of the patriarchal religion, which they mutilate, corrupt, or travesty, he might have understood them, and have traced with a steady hand their origin and course, and their relation to the intellectual development of the race.

We have no space to enter at length into the question here suggested. In all the civilized heathen nations, the gods are divided into two classes, the Dii Majores and the Dii Minores. The Dii Majores are only the result of a false effort to explain the mysterious dogma of the Trinity, and the perversion of the Christian doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son, and the Eternal Procession of the Holy Ghost. The type from which these mythologies depart, not which they realize, is undeniably the mystery of the Trinity asserted, more or less explicitly, by the patriarchal religion; and hence, we find them all, from the burning South to the frozen North, from the East to the West, from the Old World to the New, asserting, in some form, in the Divinity the sacred and mysterious Triad. The Dii Minores are a corruption or perversion of the Catholic doctrine of saints and angels, or that doctrine is the type which has been perverted or corrupted, by substituting heroes for saints, and the angels that fell for the angels that stood, and taking these for gods instead of creatures. The enemies of Christianity have sufficiently proved that the common type of both is given in the patriarchal religion, hoping thereby to get a conclusive argument against Christianity; but they have forgotten to state that, while the one conforms to the type, the other departs from it, perverts or corrupts it, and that the one that conforms is prior in date to the one that corrupts, perverts or departs from it. No man can study the patriarchal religion without seeing at a glance that it is the various forms of heathenism that are the corrupt forms, as no man can study both Catholicity and Protestantism without seeing that Protestantism is the corruption, or perversion--sometimes even the travesty of Catholicity. {164} The same conclusion is warranted alike by Indian and Egyptian gloom and Greek gayety. The gloom speaks for itself. The gayety is that of despair--the gayety that says: "Come, let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." Through all heathendom you hear the wail, sometimes loud and stormy, sometimes low and melodious, over some great and irreparable loss, over a broken and unrealized ideal, just as you do in the modern sectarian and unbelieving world.

But why is it that the professor and others, when seeking to give the origin and course of religion, as related to the intellectual development of the race, pass by the patriarchal, Jewish, or Christian religion, and fasten on the religions or superstitions of the Gentiles? It is their art, which consists in adroitly avoiding all direct attacks on the faith of Christendom, and confining themselves in their dissertations on the natural history of the pagan superstitions, to establishing principles which alike undermine both them and Christianity. It is evident to every intelligent reader of Professor Draper's _Intellectual Development of Europe_, that he means the principles he asserts shall be applied to Christianity as well as to Indian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythology, and he gives many broad hints to that effect. What then? Is he not giving the history of the intellectual development of Europe? Can one give the history of that development without taking notice of religion? If, in giving the natural history of religion, showing whence and how it originates, what have been its developments, its course, its modifications, changes, decay, and death, by the influence of natural causes, science establishes principles which overthrow all religions, and render preposterous all claims of man to have received a supernatural revelation, to be in communion with the Invisible, or to be under any other providence than that of the fixed, invariable, and irresistible laws of nature, or purely physiological laws, whose fault is it? Would you condemn science, or subordinate it to the needs of a crafty and unscrupulous priesthood, fearful of losing their influence, and having the human mind emancipated from their despotism? That is, you lay down certain false principles, repudiated by reason and common sense, and which all real science rejects with contempt, call these false principles science, and when we protest, you cry out with all your lungs, aided by all the simpletons of the age, that we are hostile to science, would prevent free scientific investigation, restrain free manly thought, and would keep the people from getting a glimpse of the truth that would emancipate them, and place them on the same line with the baboon or the gorilla! A wonderful thing, is this modern science; and always places, whatever it asserts or denies, its adepts in the right, as against the theologians and the anointed priests of God!

The mystery is not difficult to explain. The physiologists, of course, are good Sadducees, and really, unless going through a churchyard after dark, or caught in a storm at sea, and in danger of shipwreck, believe in neither angel nor spirit. They wish to reduce all events, all phenomena, intellectual, moral, and religious, to fixed, invariable, inflexible, irreversible, and necessary laws of nature. They exclude in doctrine, if not in words, the supernatural, creation, providence, and all contingency. Every thing in man and in the universe is generated or developed by physiological or natural laws, and follows them in all their variations and changes. {165} Religion, then, must be a natural production, generated by man, in conjunction with nature, and modified, changed, or destroyed, according to the physical causes to which he is subjected in time and place. This is partially true, or, at least, not manifestly false in all respects of the various pagan superstitions, and many facts may be cited that seem to prove it; but it is manifestly not true of the patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian religion, and the only way to make it appear true, is to not distinguish that religion from the others, to include all religions in one and the same category, and conclude that what they prove to be partially true of a part, is and must be true of the whole. That this is fair or logical, is not a matter that the physiologists, who, where they detect an analogy, conclude identity, trouble themselves at all about; besides, nothing in their view is illogical or unfair that tends to discredit priests and theologians. Very likely, also, such is their disdain or contempt of religion, that they really do not know that there is any radical difference between Christianity and Gentooism. We have never encountered a physiologist, in the sense we use the term here, that is, one who maintains that all in the history of man and the universe proceeds from nature alone, who had much knowledge of Christian theology, or knowledge enough to be aware that in substance it is not identical with the pagan superstitions. Their ignorance of our religion is sublime.

We have thus far proceeded on the supposition that the professor means by the infancy of the savage state the infancy of the race; we are not sure, after all, that this is precisely his thought, or that he means anything more than the infancy of a particular nation or family of nations is the savage state. He, however, sums up his doctrine in his table of contents, chapter i., of his _Intellectual Development_, in the proposition: "Individual man is an emblem of communities, nations, and universal humanity. They exhibit epochs of life like his, and like him are under the control of physical conditions, and therefore of law;" that is, physical or physiological law, for "human physiology" is only a special department of universal physiology, as we have already indicated. It would seem from this that the author makes the savage state, as we have supposed, correspond, in the race, in universal humanity, as well as in communities, to the epoch of infancy in the individual. But does he mean to teach that the race itself has its epoch of infancy, youth, manhood, old age, and death? He can, perhaps, in a loose sense, predicate these several epochs of nations and of political or civil communities; but how can he predicate them all of the race? "Individuals die, humanity survives," says Seneca; and are we to understand that the professor means to assert that the race is born like the individual, passes through childhood, youth, manhood, to old age, and then dies? Who knows what he means?

But suppose that he has not settled in his own mind his meaning on this point, as is most likely the case; that he has not asked himself whether man on the earth has a beginning or an end, and that he regards the race as a natural evolution, revolving always in the same circle, and takes, therefore, the infancy he speaks of as the infancy of a nation or a given community. Then his doctrine is, that the earliest stage of every civilized nation or community is the savage state, that the ancestors of the civilized in every age are savages, and that all civilization has been developed under the control of physical conditions from the savage state. {166} The germ of all civilization then must be in the savage, and civilization then must be evolved from the savage as the chicken from the egg, or the egg from the sperm. But of this there is no evidence; for, as we have seen, there is no nation known that has sprung from exclusively savage ancestors, no known instance of a savage people developing, if we may so speak, into a civilized people. The theory rests on no historical or scientific basis, and is perfectly gratuitous. In the savage state we detect reminiscences of a past civilization, not the germs of a future civilization, or if germs--germs that are dead, and that never do or can germinate. There are degrees of civilization; people may be more or less civilized; but we have no evidence, historical or scientific, of a time when there was no civilized people extant. There are civilized nations now, and contemporary with them are various savage tribes, and the same may be said of every epoch since history began. The civilized nations whose origin we know have all sprung from races more or less civilized, never from purely savage tribes. The physiologists overlook history, and mistake the evening twilight for the dawn.

But pass over this. Let us come to the doctrine for which the professor writes his book, namely, individuals, communities, nations, universal humanity, are under the control of physical conditions, therefore of physical law, or law in the sense of the physiologists or the physicists. If this means anything, it means that the religion, the morality, the intellectual development, the growth and decay, the littleness and the grandeur of men and nations depend solely on physical causes, not at all on moral causes--a doctrine not true throughout even in human physiology, and supported by no facts, except in a very restricted degree, when applied to nations and communities. In the corporeal phenomena of the individual the soul counts for much, and in morbid physiology the moral often counts for more than the physical; perhaps it always does, for we know from revelation that the morbidity of nature is the penalty or effect of man's transgression. It is proved to be false as applied to nations and communities by the fact that the Christian religion, which is substantially that of the ancient patriarchs, is, at least as far as science can go, older than any of the false religions, has maintained itself the same in all essential respects, unvaried and invariable, in every variety of physical change, and in every diversity of physical condition, and absolutely unaffected by any natural causes whatever.

The chief physical conditions on which the professor relies are climate and geographical position. Yet what we hold to be the true religion, the primitive religion of mankind, has prevailed in all climates, and been found the same in all geographical positions. Nay, even the false pagan religions have varied only in their accidents with climatic and geographical positions. We find them in substance the same in India, Central Asia, on the banks of the Danube, in the heart of Europe, in the ancient Scania, the Northern Isles, in Mexico and Peru. The substance of Greek and Roman or Etrurian mythology is the same with that of India and Egypt. M. Rénan tells us that the monotheism so firmly held by the Arabic branch of the Semitic family, is due to the vast deserts over which the Arab tribes wander, which suggest the ideas of unity and universality; and yet for centuries before Mohammed, these same Arabs, wandering over the same deserts, were polytheists and idolaters; and not from contemplating those deserts, but by recalling the primitive traditions of mankind, preserved by Jews and Christians, did the founder of Islamism attain to the monotheism of the Koran. The professor is misled by taking, in the heathen mythology he has studied, the poetic imagery and embellishments, which indeed vary according to the natural aspects, objects, and productions of the locality, for their substance, thought, or doctrine. {167} The poetic illustrations, imagery, and embellishments of Judaism are all oriental; but the Jew in all climates and in all geographical positions holds one and the same religious faith even to this day; and his only real difference from us is, that he is still looking for a Christ to come, while we believe the Christ he is looking for has come, and is the same Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified at Jerusalem, under Pontius Pilate.

We know the author contends that there has been from the beginning a radical difference between the Christianity of the East and that of the West; but we know that such is not and never has been the fact. The great Eastern fathers and theologians are held in as high honor in Western Christendom as they ever were in Eastern Christendom. Nearly all the great councils that defined the dogmas held by the Catholic Church throughout the whole world were held in the East. The Greeks were more speculative and more addicted to philosophical subtleties and refinements than the Latins, and therefore more liable to originate heresies; but nowhere was heresy more vigorously combated, or the one faith of the universal church more ably, more intelligently, or more fervently defended than in the East, before the Emperors and the Bishop of Constantinople drew the Eastern Church, or the larger part of it, into schism. But the united Greek Church, the real Eastern Church, the church of St. Athanasius, of the Basils, and the Gregories, is one in spirit, one in faith, one in communion with the Church of the West.

The author gravely tells us that Christianity had three primitive forms, the Judaical, which has ended; the Gnostic, which has also ended; the African, which still continues. But he has no authority for what he says. Some Jewish observances were retained for a time by Christians of Jewish origin, till the synagogue could be buried with honor; but there never was a Jewish form of Christianity, except among heretics, different from the Christianity still held by the church. There are some phrases in the Gospel of St. John, and in the Epistles of St. Paul that have been thought to be directed against the gnostics; and Clemens of Alexandria writes a work in which he uses the terms _gnosis_, knowledge, and _gnostic_, a man possessing knowledge or spiritual science, in a good sense; but, we suspect, with a design of rescuing these from the bad sense in which they were beginning to be used, as some of our European friends are trying to do with the terms _liberal_ and _liberalist_. Nevertheless, what Clemens defends under these terms is held by Catholics to-day in the same sense in which he defends it. There never was an African form of Christianity distinct from the Christianity either of Europe or Asia. The two great theologians of Africa are St. Cyprian and St. Augustine, both probably of Roman, or, at least, of Italian extraction. {168} The doctrine which St. Cyprian is said to have maintained on baptism administered by heretics, the only matter on which he differed from Rome, has never been, and is not now, the doctrine of the church. St. Augustine was converted in Milan, and had St. Ambrose, a Roman, for his master, and differed from the theologians either of the East or the West only in the unmatched ability and science with which he defended the faith common to all. He may have had some peculiar notions on some points, but if so, these have never been received as Catholic doctrine.

The professor might as well assert the distinction, asserted in Germany a few years since, which attracted some attention at the time, but now forgotten, between the Petrine gospel, the Pauline gospel, and the Joannine gospel, as the distinction of the three primitive forms of Christianity which he asserts. We were told by some learned German, we forget his name, that Peter, Paul, and John represent three different phases or successive forms of Christianity. The Petrine gospel represents religion, based on authority; the Pauline, religion as based on intelligence; and the Joannine, religion as based on love. The first was the so-called Catholic or Roman Church. The reformation made an end of that, and ushered in the Pauline form, or Protestantism, the religion of the intellect. Philosophy, science. Biblical criticism, and exegesis, the growth of liberal ideas, and the development of the sentiments and affections of the heart, have made an end of Protestantism, and are ushering in the Joannine gospel, the religion of love, which is never to be superseded or to pass away. The advocate of this theory had got beyond authority and intelligence, whether he had attained to the religion of love or not; yet the theory was only the revival of the well-known heresy of the Eternal Evangel of the thirteenth century. So hard is it to invent a new heresy. It were a waste of words to attempt to show that this theory has not the slightest foundation in fact. Paul and John assert authority as strenuously as Peter; Peter and John give as free scope to the intellect as Paul; and Peter and Paul agree with John in regard to love or charity. There is nothing in the Gospel or Epistles of John to surpass the burning love revealed, we might almost say concealed, so unostentatious is it, by the inflamed Epistles of Paul. As for Protestantism, silence best becomes it, when there is speech of intelligence, so remarkable is it for its illogical and unintellectual character. Protestants have their share of native intellect, and the ordinary degree of intelligence on many subjects; but in the science of theology, the basis of all the sciences, and without which there is, and can be, no real science, they have never yet excelled.

Nor did the reformation put an end to the so-called Petrine gospel, the religion of authority, the church founded on Peter, prince of the apostles. It may be that Protestantism is losing what little intellectual character it once had, and developing in a vague philanthropy, a watery sentimentality, or a blind fanaticism, sometimes called Methodism, sometimes Evangelicalism; but Peter still teaches and governs in his successor. The Catholic Church has survived the attacks of the reformation and the later revolution, as she survived the attacks of the persecuting Jews and pagans, and the power and craft of civil tyrants who sought to destroy or to enslave her, and is to-day the only religion that advances by personal conviction and conversion. {169} Mohammedanism can no longer propagate itself even by the sword; the various pagan superstitions have reached their limits, and are recoiling on themselves; and Protestantism has gained no accession of territory or numbers since the death of Luther, except by colonization and the natural increase of the population then Protestant. The Catholic Church is not only a living religion, but the only living religion, the only religion that does, or can, command the homage of science, reason, free thought, and the uncorrupted affections of the heart. The Catholic religion is at once light, freedom, and love--the religion of authority, of the intellect, and of the heart, embracing in its indissoluble unity Peter, Paul, and John.

The professor's work on the intellectual development of Europe proves that religion in some form has constituted a chief element in that development. It always has been, and still is, the chief element in the life of communities and nations, the spring and centre of intellectual activity and progress. Even the works before us revolve around it, or owe their existence to their relation to it, and would have no intelligible purpose without it. The author has written them to divest religion of its supernatural character, to reduce it to a physiological law, and to prove that it originates in the ignorance of men and nations, and depends solely on physical conditions, chiefly on climate and geographical position. But in this patriarchal, Jewish, Christian religion there is something, and that of no slight influence on the life of individuals and nations, on universal humanity, that flatly contradicts him, that is essentially one and the same from first to last, superior to climate and geographical position, unaffected by natural causes, independent of physical conditions, and in no sense subject to physiological laws. This suffices to refute his theory, and that of the positivists, of whom he is a distinguished disciple; for it proves the uniform presence and activity in the life and development of men and nations, ever since history began, of a power, a being, or cause above nature and independent of nature, and therefore supernatural.

The theory that the rise, growth, decay, and death of nations depend on physical conditions alone, chiefly on climate and geographical position, seems to us attended with some grave difficulties. Have the climate and geographical positions of India, Persia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, essentially changed from what they were at the epoch of their greatness? Did not all the great and renowned nations of antiquity rise, grow, prosper, decline, and die, in substantially the same physical conditions, under the same climate, and in the same geographical position? Like causes produce like effects. How could the same physical causes cause alike the rise and growth, and the decay and death of one and the same people, in one and the same climate, and in one and the same geographical position? Do you say, climate and even physical geography change with the lapse of time? Be it so. Be it as the author maintains, that formerly there was no variation of climate on this continent, from the equator to either pole; but was there for Rome any appreciable change in the climate and geography from the time of the third Punic war to that of Honorius, or even of Augustulus, the last of the Emperors? Or what change in the physical conditions of the nation was there when it was falling from what there was when it was rising?

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Nations, like individuals, have, according to the professor, their infancy, youth, manhood, old age, and death. But why do nations grow old and die? The individual grows old and dies, because his interior physical machinery wears out, and because he must die in order to attain the end for which he lives. But why should this be the case with nations? They have no future life to which death is the passage. The nation does not rise or fall with the individuals that found it. One generation of individuals passes away, and another comes, but the nation survives; and why, if not destroyed by external violence, should it not continue to survive and thrive to the end of time? There are no physical causes, no known physiological laws, that prevent it. Why was not Rome as able to withstand the barbarians, or to drive them back from her frontiers, in the fourth century, as she was in the first? Why was England so much weaker under the Stuarts than she had been under the Tudors, or was again under the Protector? Or why have we seen her so grand under Pitt and Wellington, and so little and feeble under Palmerston and Lord Russell? Can you explain this by a change of climate and geographical position, or any change in the physical conditions of the nation, that is, any physical changes not due to moral causes?

We see in several of the States of the Union a decrease, a relative, if not a positive decrease, of the native population, and the physical man actually degenerating, and to an extent that should alarm the statesman and the patriot. Do you explain this fact by the change in the climate and the geographical position? The geographical position remains unchanged, and if the climate has changed at all, it has been by way of amelioration. Do you attribute it to a change in the physical condition of the country? Not at all. There is no mystery as to the matter, and though the effects may be physical or physiological, the causes are well known to be moral, and chief among them is the immoral influence of the doctrine the professor and his brother physiologists are doing their best to diffuse among the people. The cause is in the loss of religious faith, in the lack of moral and religious instruction, in the spread of naturalism, and the rejection of supernatural grace--without which the natural cannot be sustained in its integrity--in the growth of luxury, and the assertion of material goods or sensible pleasures, as the end and aim of life. There is always something morally wrong where prizes need to be offered to induce the young to marry, and to induce the married to suffer their children to be born and reared.

So, also, do we know the secret of the rise, prosperity, decline, and death of the renowned nations of antiquity. The Romans owed the empire of the world to their temperance, prudence, fortitude, and respect for religious principle, all of them moral causes; and they owed their decline and fall to the loss of these virtues, to their moral corruption. The same may be said of all the ancient nations. Their religion, pure, or comparatively pure, in the origin, becomes gradually corrupt, degenerates into a corrupt and corrupting superstition, which hangs as a frightful nightmare on the breasts of the people, destroying their moral life and vigor. {171} To this follows, with a class, scepticism, the denial of God or the gods, an Epicurean morality, and the worship of the senses; the loss of all public spirit--public as well as private virtue, and the nation falls of its own internal moral imbecility and rottenness, as our own nation, not yet a century old, is in a fair way of doing, and most assuredly will do, if the atheistic philosophy and morality of the physiologists or positivists become much more widely diffused than they are. The church will be as unable, with all her supernatural truth, grace, life, and strength, to save it, as she was to save the ancient Graeco-Roman Empire, for to save it would require a resurrection of the dead.

The common sense of mankind, in all ages of the world, has uniformly attributed the downfall of nations, states, and empires, to moral causes, not to physiological laws, climatic influences, or geographical position. The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God. Righteousness exalteth a nation, and sin is a reproach to any people. This is alike the voice of inspiration and of universal experience. The traveller who visits the sites of nations renowned in story, now buried in ruins, of cities once thronged with a teeming population, the marts of the world, in which were heard, from morning till night--till far into night--the din of industry, and marks the solitude that now reigns there; the barren waste that has succeeded to once fruitful fields and vineyards, and observes the poor shepherd that feeds a petty flock on the scanty pasturage, or the armed robber that watches for a victim to plunder, receives a far less vivid impression of the dependence of nations on physical causes and conditions, than of the influence of the moral world on the natural, and reads in legible characters the meaning of that fearful penalty which God pronounced, when he said to the man: "And the earth for thy sake shall be cursed." The physical changes that have come over Assyria, Syria, Lybia, Egypt, and Palestine, are the effects of the moral deterioration of man, not the cause of that deterioration.

The professor, after dilating almost eloquently, and as a sage, on the changeability, the transitoriness, the evanescent nature of all the visible forms of things, says: "If from visible forms we turn to directing law, how vast the difference! We pass from the finite, the momentary, the incidental, the conditional, to the illimitable, the eternal, the necessary, the unshackled. It is of law I am to speak in this book. In a world composed of vanishing forms, I am to vindicate the imperishability, the majesty of law, and to show how man proceeds in his social march in obedience to it," (_Ibid_. p, 16.) This sounds well; but, unhappily, he has told us that communities and nations, like individuals, are under the control of physical conditions, and _therefore_ of law. If _therefore_ of law, then under the law of physical conditions, and consequently of a physical or physiological law. He dwells on the grandeur of this conception, and challenges for it our deepest admiration. But we see not much to admire in a purely physical law manifesting itself in ceaseless instability, metamorphosis, and death. Will the author forgive us, if we hint that he possibly does not very well understand himself, or know precisely what it is that he says? Hear him. "I am to lead my reader, perhaps in a reluctant path, from the outward phantasmagorial illusions which surround us and so ostentatiously obtrude themselves on our attention, to something that lies in silence and strength behind. {172} I am to draw his thoughts from the tangible to the invisible, from the limited to the universal, from the changeable to the invariable, from the transitory to the eternal; from the expedients and volitions so largely _amusing_ in the life of man, to the predestined and resistless issuing of law from the fiat of God." (_Ibid_. p. 16, 17.) Very respectable rhetoric, but what does it mean? If it means anything, it means that the visible universe is unreal, an illusion, a phantasmagoria; that nothing is real, stable, permanent, but law, which lies in silence and strength behind the phantasmagoria, and that this law producing the illusion, dazzling us with mere sense-shows, is identically God, from whose fiat the phantasmagorial world issues. Is not this grand? is it not sublime? The scientific professor forgets that he may find readers, who can perceive through his rhetoric that he makes law or God the reality of things, instead of their creator or maker, simply their _causa essentialis_, the _causa immanens_ of Spinoza, and therefore asserts nothing but a very vulgar form of pantheism, material pantheism, indistinguishable from naked atheism; for his doctrine recognizes only the material, the sensible, and by law he can mean only a physiological law like that by which the liver secretes bile, the blood circulates through the heart, seeds germinate, or plants bear fruit--a law which has and can have no indivisible unity.

If the professor means simply that in the universe all proceeds according to the law of cause and effect, he should bear in mind that there are moral causes and effects as well as physical, and supernatural as well as natural; but then he might find himself in accord with theologians, some of whom, perhaps, in his own favorite sciences are able to be his masters. It is not always safe to measure the ignorance of others by our own. No theologian denies, but every one asserts the law of cause and effect, precisely what no atheist, pantheist, or naturalist does do, for none of them ever rise above what the schools call _causa essentialis_, the thing itself, that which, as we say, _makes_ the thing, makes it itself and not another, or constitutes its identity. Every theologian believes that God is logical, logic in itself, and that all his works are dialectical and realize a divine plan, which as a whole and in all its parts is strictly and rigidly logical. If the professor means simply to assert not only that all creatures and all events are under the control of the law of cause and effect, but also under the law of dialectics, there need be no quarrel between him and us; but in such case, if he had known a little theology, he might have spared himself and us a great deal of trouble, for we believe as firmly in the universal reign of law as he or his Grace of Argyle. But he would have gained little credit for original genius, depth of thought, profound science, or rare learning, and most likely would not have lived to see any one of his volumes reach a fifth edition.

But we must not be understood to deny in the development of nations or individuals all dependence on physical conditions, or even of climate and geographical position. Man is neither pure spirit, nor pure matter; he is the union of soul and body, and can no more live without communion with nature, than he can without communion with his like and with God. Hence he requires the three great institutions of religion, society, and property, which, in some form, are found in all tribes, nations, or civil communities, and without which no people ever does or can subsist. {173} Climate and geographical influences, no doubt, count for something, for how much, science has not yet determined. There is a difference in character between the inhabitants of mountains and the inhabitants of plains, the dwellers on the sea-coast and the dwellers inland, and the people of the north and the people of the south; yet the Bas Bretons and the Irish have not lost perceptibly anything, in three thousand years, of their original character as a southern people, though dwelling for that space of time, we know not how many centuries longer, far to the north. Among the Irish you may find types of northern races, some of whom have overrun the Island as conquerors; but amid all their political and social vicissitudes, the Irish have retained, and still retain, their southern character. The English have received many accessions from Ireland and from the south, but they remain, the great body of them, as they originally were, essentially a northern people, and hence the marked difference between the Irish character and the English, though inhabiting very nearly the same parallels of latitude, and subject to much the same climatic and geographical influences. The character of both the English and the Irish is modified on this continent, but more by amalgamation, and by political and social influences, than by climate or geography. The Irish type is the most tenacious, and is not unlikely in time to eliminate the Anglo-Saxon. It has a great power of absorption, and the American people may ultimately lose their northern type, and assume the characteristics of a southern race, in spite of the constant influx of the Teutonic element. What we object to is not giving something to physical causes and conditions, but making them exclusive, and thus rejecting moral causes, and reducing man and nature to an inexorable fatalism.

In the several volumes of the professor, except the first named, we are able to detect neither the philosophical historian nor the man of real science. The respectable author has neither logic nor exact, or even extensive, learning, and the only thing to be admired in him, except his style, is the sublime confidence in himself with which he undertakes to discuss and settle questions, of which, for the most part, he knows nothing, and perhaps the sublimer confidence with which he follows masters that know as little as himself.

We own we have treated Professor Draper's work with very little respect, for we have felt very little. His _Intellectual Development of Europe_ is full of crudities from beginning to end, and for the most part below criticism, or would be were it not that it is levelled at all the principles of individual and social life and progress. The book belongs to the age of Leucippus and Democritus, and _ignores_, if we may use an expressive term, though hardly English, Christian civilization and all the progress men and nations have effected since the opening of the Christian era. It is a monument not of science, but of gross ignorance.

Yet in our remarks we have criticised the class to which the author belongs, rather than the author himself. Men of real science are modest, reverential, and we honor them, whatever the department of nature to which they devote their studies. We delight to sit at their feet and drink in instruction from their lips; but when men, because they are passable chemists, know something of human physiology, or the natural history of fishes, undertake to propagate theories on God, man, and nature, that violate the most sacred traditions of the race, deny the Gospel, reduce the universe to matter, and place man on a level with the brute, theories, too, which are utterly baseless, we cannot reverence them, or listen to them with patience, however graceful their elocution or charming their rhetoric.

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Morning At Spring Park.

Along the upland swell and wooded lawn The aged farmer's voice is heard at dawn: That well-known call across the dewy vale Calls Spark and Daisy to the milking-pail.

The robin chirps; from farm to farm I hear The bugle-note of wakeful chanticleer; And far, far off, through grove and bosky dell, The dreamy tinkle of sleek Snowflake's bell.

The huddling sheep, just loose from kindly fold, Their nibbling way along the hill-side hold; And timid squirrels and shy quails are seen Flitting, unscared, across the shaded green.

The low horizon's dusky, violet blue Is tinged with coming daylight's rosy hue, Till o'er the golden fields of tasselled corn Breaks all the rapture of the summer morn.

Through forest rifts the level sunbeams dart, And gloomy nooks to sudden beauty start; Those long, still lines which through rank foliage steal, Undreamed-of charms among the woods reveal.

The yellow wheat-stooks catch the early light; Far-nested homesteads gleam at once to sight; While, from yon glimmering height, one spire serene Points duly heavenward this terrestrial scene.

Long may the aged farmer's call be heard. At dewy dawn, with song of matin bird. Among his loving flocks and herds of kine, A guileless master, watchful and benign.

And, when no more his agile footstep roves These flowery pastures and these pleasant groves, Good Shepherd, may thy call to fields more fair Wean every thought from earth, make heaven his care!

{175}

Nellie Netterville; Or, One Of The Transplanted.