Chapter v.

When Christmas came around again, and made the first break in the routine of his life after his ever-memorable visit to the country, Dick, now no longer a follower at a distance of that Sunday morning crowd, but a devout and well-instructed Catholic, to whom all the glory and grandeur of the Christmas lights and flowers, the music and the bells, were no longer mysteries; after hearing the grand high mass--not the only one he had heard that day--turned down Fourteenth street, according to the custom of many years, in order that he might pass the Brandons' house, which had ever held a charm for him, since on its broad steps he had first seen the beauty and loveliness of charity. But he was not thinking just then of Miss Brandon, nor of his newsboy days, nor yet of the fast approaching hour when he should present himself at Carl Stoffs's table, in a quarter of the city very different from this, where he was to eat his piece of Christmas turkey. His thoughts, I am afraid, will seem wild ones; but he was young, it was Christmas-day, he had just come from that glorious mass, and the world seemed so small and easy to conquer to one who had heard the "glad tidings," so that he may be forgiven for dreaming, in a less prosaic and unspiritual manner than I can tell you, of a time when he would eat his Christmas dinner neither at a boarding-house nor at another man's board, but would carve his own Christmas turkey, at his own table. Of whatever he was thinking, he did not fail to notice the house, and to glance upward when he came to the stoop where he--was it really he, that rough, shaggy, ragged little newsboy, ignorant and dirty?--where he had, for the first time in his hard young life, heard a voice address him kindly; and his glance changed to a steady gaze of surprise when his eye caught a name on the door-plate that was not Brandon. He looked at the number--that was all right, but the old name was gone. He was perplexed, and walked absently backward and forward for several moments.

"Then Mr. Stoffs was right," he said, "and he" (meaning Mr. Brandon) "has had to come down a peg or two, or he would not have given up his house at this season. I wonder where they have gone now."

He remembered, at this moment, that none of the family had been at Ames & Harden's during the whole fall, and that he had not seen Miss Brandon since she and Mr. Irving had ridden down the lane for the flowers that Rose had forgotten to have ready at the usual hour. It so happened that, remembering the neglected flowers, why they had been forgotten, and how the negligence had been repaired, Dick's thoughts strayed from the graceful figure of the beautiful lady, who had seemed to him more magnificent and gentle than a vision, and turned to another figure, not tall nor stately--to another face, not grand nor graciously sweet.

But when he met Mr. and Mrs. Stoffs, almost the first words he said were,

"I went by the house on Fourteenth street to-day, and Mr. Brandon's name was off the door. I had not heard of their going away."

"It's long ago, though," said Mr. Stoffs.

"Is it any difficulty made them leave their old house?" asked Dick.

"There's been no end of difficulties," answered the German, puffing out great clouds of smoke between every sentence. "Things were bad enough last summer, and when Mrs. Brandon died--"

"Mrs. Brandon dead!" exclaimed Dick.

"Oh! I forgot that was after you left; it was quite an excitement. The horses ran away one night--those same stylish bays of which she was so proud--when she and her daughter were returning from some party, and she was dead before morning."

"And Miss Brandon?" Dick could hardly ask, his terror of the answer was so great.

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"Miss Brandon," answered Mr. Stoffs in a formal way, and puffing out greater clouds of smoke than ever, "Miss Brandon was ill for some days, and they were afraid would never get over the shock; your fine ladies are so nervous!"

"Miss Brandon is not that kind," said Dick hastily, vexed by the contemptuous tone of his friend's remark. "And I don't believe fine ladies are any more--more--fussy than others."

"I suppose you know them well enough to be a certain judge," said Carl, who seemed in a very ugly humor.

"Of course I don't know one in the world," answered Dick, with considerable animation and a deeper color in his face. "But I can't see the good of always running down people, just because they happen to be richer than ourselves."

"Hush! now," interposed Mrs. Stoffs, as her husband was about answering, "or no dinner shall you have this day. I will not let you two quarrel."

"You were going to tell me about Mr. Brandon's difficulties," suggested Dick very gently, after both he and Mr. Stoffs had assured their peacemaker that they were never in better humor toward each other. "You were going to tell me about Mr. Brandon's difficulties."

"Yes. His wife she died, and it was found he had used all her money and had lost it, as he had his own; there was a failure and everything was sold out, and so--there's an end of him."

"Did he leave New-York?"

"I don't know. Who asks what has become of a one-time rich man after the bubble has burst?"

"I think I heard he wanted some situation to start life again," said Mrs. Stoffs. "Poor man!"

Mrs. Stoffs was right. Mr. Brandon had tried to start again; but he had been a hard man in his days of prosperity, and an unfaithful man, or he would not be as he was now; and so, many who heartily pitied him and his family for their fall, and who would willingly have given them assistance out of their own pockets, did not feel justified in giving him a position that could be better filled by some man in whom they could trust. Thus among all his rich friends, not one of whom felt unkindly toward him, there was none to push him a plank with which to save himself from drowning.

Dick had learned all that his hosts could tell, and knowing well how fearfully rapid is a man's fall when once he is over the precipice of failure, his heart was heavier than it had ever been for troubles of his own. He sought to sustain his part in the conversation, feeling that a silent guest seems selfish and ungrateful, and tried to laugh as heartily at his friend's jokes as ever; but it was not without an effort, and his friends were keen and saw that he was troubled.

"I do not like it," Carl grunted in his deepest tones, that Christmas night after Dick had gone and the children were asleep; "I do not like it."

"You must not think too hardly of him," answered Mrs. Stoffs, who, with that sort of perception women obtain when they become wives, knew her husband referred to Dick's troubled manner, the anxious way in which he had asked about Miss Brandon, and his hot resenting of Carl's careless words. "You are too hard on him," said Mrs. Stoffs, not because she did not equally dislike it all, but because there would be no conversation between them if old married folks were always to agree.

{669}

"Fine ladies, indeed!" muttered Mr. Stoffs, puffing away harder than ever. "Miss Brandon--what for should he care if Miss Brandon was hurt, more than for any other lady?"

"She is poor enough now," said Mrs. Stoffs musingly. "It would not be so strange now;" and under her breath she sighed, "Poor Rose!"

"Not that he has one thought of such a thing," Carl went on consistently; "you women always get such ideas into your heads."

Mrs. Stoffs, being an experienced wife, raised no question about the ownership of the "ideas," whatever they were, but sat looking into the fire for a long time before she spoke again, and then it was to say, "After all, I am glad we were too poor to have Rose come up for Christmas."

"If she would not be satisfied with what we had, so am I," grumbled Mr. Stoffs.

"I was not thinking of that," answered his wife mildly.

"I know Heremore's never such a fool as to be thinking of one so much above him as Miss Brandon," remarked Mr. Stoffs.

"She is not above him now that they are poor," answered his wife.

"It isn't the money that made the difference," said Carl rather impatiently, "it's the habits that money gives. That's what is the matter. Miss Brandon may not be half worthy of him, and yet he would be mad to think of her; it is misery when people marry out of their rank, misery to both."

"But if they love each other?" suggested his wife.

"That only makes the matter worse; he knows not her ways. She has a language that is not his; if they did not care, they could go their own ways, and seek their own. I think Heremore is a great fool; I do!"

"I don't believe he has a thought of such a thing," said Mrs. Stoffs; but there was a manifest question in her voice.

"If he has, he'll rue the day he thought of it first," said her husband emphatically; and there the conversation ended; but when Mrs. Stoffs wrote again to Mrs. Alaine, which she did not do for some time--for to write a letter was an event in the honest woman's life--she thought proper to give her sister a hint of that which they had observed; and Mrs. Alaine, in her turn, thought proper to convey the hint, in the form of information, to Rose, who, however, answered readily,

"Love Miss Brandon? Well, mamma, and why shouldn't he?"

"Because Miss Brandon is not in the same class of life that he is, dear."

"I am sure Mr. Heremore is better off than her father is now," urged Rose; "for he has a regular salary, and Mr. Brandon has nothing left, and nobody will give him any place."

"No doubt, my child; but it is not money that makes the difference. Miss Brandon has her ideas of life now just as she had them when she was rich; and Mr. Heremore is what he is, and would not be different if he were suddenly made a millionaire."

So Rose said no more.

While Mr. and Mrs. Stoffs were thus disturbed about him, Dick, unconscious of any cause he had given for their disquietude, was walking slowly and thoughtfully home. "Where was that little Mary with her fair hair and gentle smile this cold Christmas night?" was the question he kept putting to himself. It was a clear, bright night, with the moon shining on the pavements and the frozen earth, not at all such a night as that during which he had slept by her father's steps, and there was no fear that her fair head was shelterless; but still it was very sad to think of her, whose Christmas days had been such pleasant ones, in mourning for her mother, and perhaps in troubles such as those which men hear, but shudder to see, clouding the girlish youth that is so short, and should be so sunny.

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"With God's help I'll find them out before to-morrow night if they are in this city," said Dick to himself, and then walked on more rapidly.

And he kept his word, though not without much trouble; and within twenty-four hours he stood in front of the wretched boarding-house to which poverty and sickness had already reduced the family that, a few months before, had never dreamed of the meaning of want.

But though he had found them out and stood before their door, Dick had done and could do nothing to lessen their trouble. Mr. Brandon had not seemed more unapproachable when, a rich man, he scowled and said hard words to the ill-dressed errand-boy--than he now did to the simple clerk, though Dick himself was richer now than was the once rich merchant. Miss Brandon was, in his eyes, now no less a lady, belonging to a sphere far above him, than she had been when, in all the glory of wealth, youth, and beauty, he had seen her ride down to the Stoffs's cottage to buy flowers for her hair. It seemed to him greater presumption for him to think of approaching her now than it would have been then, so he passed and repassed her door, grieved for her trouble, but more grieved, if possible, that he, with his youth and strength, should be powerless to give her one grain of comfort. How often and often, as he had watched her--she all unconscious of him and his grateful reverence--in her days of prosperity, had he dreamed of her as like some damsel of olden romance in sore distress, and thought that never had knight rushed more joyously or more potently to the rescue than he would to hers. Now his dream had come to pass--she was a damsel in sore distress; but where was his prancing steed, his burnished armor, his ready lance? Then, as he smiled in remembrance of his boyish fancy, he suddenly thought of Mr. Irving, the gentleman--just a boy's ideal of a gallant knight--whom he had seen so often with Miss Brandon in the country. He recollected well the manly bearing of that "perfect gentleman," whom he and Rose had looked upon as a veritable Sir Launcelot; he had seen many an act of "gentle courtesy" shown in a grave, tender way, to the fair lady by whose side he always rode; and where was he now that that fair lady needed her knight as never before?

There was nothing morbid or bitter about Dick. When he asked himself that question, it was with no thought of the common judgment pronounced upon "summer friends." He recognized Mr. Irving's right to aid and comfort the family of his former host. He knew that he had wealth, position, character, and, of course, ample influence, and not for an instant doubted that he would use every means in his power to befriend Mr. Brandon, if only for the sake of that beautiful daughter whom he so evidently admired. Where, then, was Mr. Irving? If he had been here, all this could not have happened. But as Dick asked himself this, it did not occur to him that Mary thought as he thought: if Mr. Irving had been here, all this would not have happened.

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At last Dick, fully convinced that he would be guilty of no presumption in speaking his mind to Mr. Irving on this subject, cheerfully turned his steps homeward, and resolved that the first moment he had of his own should be spent in seeking Mr. Irving, and informing him of what he could not now be aware of, the downfall of the Brandons. For the fall of the Brandons, as he heard from one or two who knew, had been very great, very rapid, and, it was feared, was not yet completed. Mr. Brandon had never held his head up since his failure, but dragged around, shabbily dressed, querulous and half-sick, dejected and clearly miserable. His two sons had been given very poor situations, on very niggardly pay, by a relative in another city, who, having always been odiously cringing to Mr. Brandon when he had money, seemed to delight now in heaping humiliations upon his sons. So great a crime it was in his eyes to be better bred, better educated, and more kindly cared for than were his own rude, blustering, ignorant boys. If only Fred and Joe had been taught whence come adversity and prosperity, doubtless these humiliations would have been crowns of glory for them; but theirs had been only a vague, dreamy sort of faith, which they never suspected had any application to their real life. I dare say they were very idle, useless, self-conceited and aggravating boys; but I can't help feeling sorry for them in their troubles. Miss Brandon, Dick was told, had not recovered her strength since the accident, and however well she might have been, with all her accomplishments, could not have done more than she was now doing: giving music-lessons to a few persons residing near her new home.

But all hope of seeing Mr. Irving faded the first thing the next day; for Dick's questions brought the unwelcome information that he had left home in October for two years' travel in Europe, and Dick, of course, could not presume to write to him.

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Porter's Human Intellect. [Footnote 272]

[Footnote 272: _The Human Intellect; with an Introduction upon Psychology and the Soul_. By Noah Porter, D.D., Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics in Yale College. New-York: Scribner & Co. 1868. 8vo, pp. 673.]

This formidable volume is, unless we except Professor Hickok's work on _Rational Psychology_, the most considerable attempt that has been made among us to construct a philosophy of the human understanding. Professor Porter is able, patient, industrious, and learned. He knows the literature of his subject, and has no little facility and fairness in seizing and setting forth the commanding points in the views and theories of others; but, while he shows great familiarity with metaphysical and psychological questions, and some justness and delicacy as an analyzer of facts, he seems to us to lack the true philosophical instinct, and that synthetic grasp of thought which seizes facts in their principles and genetic relations, and reduces them to a dialectic whole, without which one cannot be a philosopher.

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The professor's book is a hard, book for us to read, and still harder for us to understand. Its mechanical aspect, with three or four different sizes of type on the same page, is repulsive to us, and prejudices us against it. It is not absolutely dull, but it is rather heavy, and it requires resolution to read it. It has nothing attractive or enlivening, and it deals so much with particulars and details that it is difficult for the reader to carry what he reads along in his memory. Even when we have in our minds what the author actually says, it is not easy to understand it, or determine which of several possible meanings he adopts. Not that his language, though seldom exact or precise, and disfigured occasionally by needless barbarisms, and a terminology which we hope is not yet in good usage, is not clear enough for any one accustomed to philosophical studies, nor is it that his sentences are involved and hard to be construed, or that his statements, taken as isolated statements, are not intelligible; but it is hard to determine their meaning and value from his point of view, and in relation to his system as a whole. His book is composed of particulars, of minute and not seldom commonplace observations, without any perceptible scientific reduction to the principle which generates, co-ordinates, and explains them.

It is but fair to the professor to say, in the outset, that his book belongs to a class of books which we seldom read and heartily detest. It is not a work of philosophy, or an attempt even to give us a science of things in their principles and causes, their progress and destiny, but merely a _Wissenschaftslehre_, or science of knowing. Its problem is not what is or what exists; but what is knowing, how do I know, and how do I know that I know? With all deference to the Fichteans, we venture to assert that there is and can be no science of knowing separate from the science of things, distinct from and independent of the subject knowing. We know, says all that, we know that we know, says. He who knows, knows that he knows; and if one were to doubt that knowing is knowing, we must let him doubt, for we have only knowing with which to prove that knowing is knowing.

We can by no possible anatomical dissection of the eye, or physiological description of its functions, explain the secret of external vision. We are told that we see not external objects themselves, but their pictures painted by the light on the retina, and it is only by them that we apprehend visible objects. But suppose it so, it brings us no nearer to the secret of vision. How do we see the picture? How by means of the picture apprehend the external object? Yet the man who sees knows he sees, and all that can be said is, that to elicit the visual act there must be the visible subject, the visible object, and the light which mediates between them and illuminates them both. So is it with intellectual vision. We may ascertain some of the conditions under which we know, but the knowing itself is to us an inexplicable mystery. No dissection or possible inspection of the soul can explain it, or throw the least light on it. All that can be said is, that to the fact of knowledge, whatever its degree or its region, there must be the intellective subject, the intelligible object, and the intellectual light which places them in mutual relation and illumines alike both subject and object. Having said this, we have said all that can be said. Hence works intended to construct the science of science, or knowledge, are not only useless, but worse than useless; for, dealing with abstractions which have no existence in nature, and treating them as if real, they mislead and perplex the student, and render obscure and doubtful what without them is clear and certain.

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Professor Porter is a psychologist, and places all the activity in the fact of knowledge on the side of the soul, even in the intuition of principles, without which the soul can neither exist, nor think, nor feel. His purpose in his Introduction is to establish the unity and immateriality--spirituality, he says, of the soul against the materialists--and to vindicate psychology not only as a science, but as an inductive science. With regard to the unity and immateriality of the soul, we hold with the professor, though they are not provable or demonstrable by his method; and we recognize great truth and force in his criticisms on materialism, of which we have to deplore in the scientific world, and even in popular literature, the recrudescence. That psychology is, in a secondary sense, a science, we do not deny; but we do deny that it is either "the _prima philosophia_" as the professor asserts, or an inductive science, as he endeavors to prove.

All the inductive sciences are secondary sciences, and presuppose a first science, which is strictly the science of the sciences. Induction, the professor himself maintains, has need of certain first principles, or _a priori_ assumptions, which precede and validate it. How can psychology be the _prima philosophia_, or first philosophy, when it can be constructed only by borrowing its principles from a higher or prior science? Or how can it be the first philosophy, when that would suppose that the principles which the inductive sciences demand to validate the inductive process are contained in and derived from the soul? Is the professor prepared to maintain that the soul is the first principle of all the sciences? That would imply that she is the first principle of things, of reality itself; for science is of the real, not of the unreal. But this were pure Fichteism, and would put the soul in the place of God. The professor would shrink from this. He, then, must have made the assertion that psychology is the _prima philosophia_ somewhat hastily, and without due reflection; unless indeed he distinguishes between the first principles of science and the first principles of things.

The inductive sciences are constructed by induction from the observation and analysis of facts which the soul has the appropriate organs for observing. But psychology is the science of the soul, its nature, powers or faculties, and operations; and if an inductive science, it must be constructed by induction from psychical facts observed and analyzed in the soul by the soul herself. The theory is very simple. The soul, by the external senses, observes and analyzes the facts of the external world, and constructs by induction the physical sciences; by her internal sense, called consciousness, she observes and analyzes the world within herself, and by way of induction from the facts or phenomena she observes, constructs psychology, or the science of herself. Unhappily for the psychologue, things do not go so simply. To this theory there are two grave objections: First, the soul has no internal sense by which she can observe herself, her acts or states in herself; and second, there are no purely psychical facts to be observed.

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The professor finds the soul's faculty of observing the facts of the internal world in consciousness, which he defines to be "the power by which the soul knows its own acts and states." But consciousness is not a power or faculty, but an act of knowing, and is simply the recognition of the soul by the soul herself as the subject acting. We perceive always, and all that is before us within the range of our percipient powers; but we do not always distinguish and note each object perceived, or recognize the fact that it is we who are the subject perceiving. The fact of consciousness is precisely in the simple perception being so intensified and prolonged that the soul not only apprehends the object, but recognizes itself as the subject apprehending it. It is not, as the professor maintains at great length in Part I., a presentative power; for it is always a reflex act, and demands something of memory. But the recognition by the soul in her acts as the subject acting is something very different from the soul observing and analyzing in herself her own powers and faculties.

The soul never knows herself in herself; she only recognizes herself under the relation of subject in her acts. Recognizing herself only as subject, she can never cognize herself as object, and stand, as it were, face to face with herself. She is never her own object in the act of knowing; for she is all on the side of the subject. She cannot be on one side subject, and on the other object. Only God can be his own object; and his contemplating of himself as object, theologians show us, is the Eternal Generation of the Son, or the Word. Man, St. Thomas tells us, is not intelligible in himself; for he is not _intelligens_ in himself. If the soul could know herself in herself, she could be her own object; if her own object, she would suffice for herself; then she would be real, necessary, self-existent, independent being; that is to say, the soul would be God.

We deny not that the soul can know herself as manifested in her acts, but that she can know herself in herself, and be the object of her own thought. I can not look into my own eyes, yet I can see my face as reflected in the glass. So the soul knows herself, and her powers and faculties; but only as reflected from, or mirrored in, the objects in conjunction with which she acts. Hence the powers and faculties are not learned by any observation of the soul herself, but from the object. The soul is a unit, and acts always as a unit; but, though acting always in her unity, she can act in different directions, and in relation to different objects, and it is in this fact that originates the distinction of powers and faculties. The distinction is not in the soul herself, for she is a unit, but in the object, and hence the schoolmen teach us that it is the object that determines the faculty.

It is not the soul in herself that we must study in order to ascertain the faculties, but the soul in her operations, or the objects in relation with which she acts. We know the soul has the power to know, by knowing, to will, by willing, to feel, by feeling. While, then, the soul has power to know herself so far as mirrored by the objects, she has no power to observe and analyze herself in herself, and therefore no power of direct observation and analysis of the facts from which psychology, as an inductive science, must be constructed.

But there are no such facts as is assumed to be observed and analyzed. The author speaks of objects which are purely psychical, which have no existence out of the soul herself; but there are and can be no facts, or acts, produced by the soul's own energy alone. The soul, for the best of all possible reasons, never acts alone, for she does not exist alone. {675} "Thought," says Cousin, "is a fact that is composed of three simultaneous and indissoluble elements, the subject, the object, and the form. The subject is always the soul, [_le Moi_,] the object is something not the soul, [_le non-Moi_,] and the form is always the relation of the two." The object is inseparable from the subject as an element of the thought, but it exists distinct from and independent of the soul, and when it is not thought as well as when it is; otherwise it could not be object, since the soul is all on the side of the subject. The soul acts only in conjunction with the object, because she is not sufficient for herself, and therefore cannot suffice for her own activity. The object, if passive, is as if it were not, and can afford no aid to the fact of thought. It must, therefore, be active, and then the thought will be the joint product of the two activities. It is a grave mistake, then, to suppose that the activity in thought is all on the side of the soul. The soul cannot think without the concurrent activity of that which is not the soul. There is no product possible in any order without two factors placed in relation with each other. God, from the plenitude of his being, contains both factors in his own essence; but in creatures they are distinct from and independent of each other.

We do not forget the _intellectus agens_ of St. Thomas, but it is not quite certain what he meant by it. The holy doctor does not assert it as a faculty of the soul, and represent its activity as purely psychical. Or if it be insisted that he does, he at least nowhere asserts, implies, or intimates that it is active without the concurrence of the object: for he even goes so far as to maintain that the lower acts only as put in motion by the higher, and the terrestrial by the celestial. Hence the _praemotio physica_ of the Thomists, and the necessity in conversion of praevenient grace--_gratia praeveniens_.

But even granting that there is the class of facts alleged, and that we have the power to observe and analyze them, as, in the language of Cousin, "they pass over the field of consciousness," we cannot by induction attain to their principle and causes; for induction itself, without the first principles of all science, not supplied by it, can give us only a classification, generalization, an hypothesis, or an abstract theory, void of all reality. The universal cannot be concluded, by way of induction, from particulars, any more than particulars can be concluded, by way of deduction, from the universal. Till validated in the _prima philosophia_, or referred to the first principles, without which the soul can neither act nor exist, the classifications and generalizations attained to by induction are only facts, only particulars, from which no general conclusion can be drawn. Science is knowledge indeed; but the term is generally used in English to express the reduction of facts and particulars to their principles and causes. But in all the secondary sciences the principles and causes are themselves only facts, till carried up to the first principles and causes of all the real and all the knowable. Not without reason, then, has theology been called the queen of the sciences, nor without warrant that men, who do not hold that all change is progress, maintain that the displacement, in modern times, of this queen from her throne has had a deleterious effect on science, and tended to dissipate and enfeeble the human mind itself. {676} We have no philosophers nowadays of the nerve of Plato and Aristotle, the great Christian fathers, or the mediaeval doctors, none of whom ever dreamed of separating theology and philosophy. Even the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a grasp of thought, a robust vigor of mind, and a philosophic insight into the truth of things and their higher relations that you look in vain for in the philosophers of the eighteenth century and of our own. But this by the way. When things are at the worst, they sometimes mend.

Psychology, not psychologism, is a science, though not an inductive science, nor a science that can be attained to by the study of the soul and her phenomena in the bosom of consciousness. The psychologists--those, we mean, who adopt the psychological method, a method seldom adopted before the famous _cogito, ergo sum_ of Descartes--seem incapable of comprehending that only the real is cognizable, and that abstractions are not real but unreal; and therefore that the first principles of science must be real, not abstract, and the first principles of things. Thus Professor Porter appears to see no real connection between them. True, he says, (p. 64,) "Knowledge and being are correlatives. There must be being in order that there may be knowledge. There can be no knowledge which is not the knowledge of being. Subjectively viewed, to know implies certainty; objectively, it requires reality. An act of knowing in which there is no certainty in the agent, and no reality in the object, is impossible in conception and in fact." This would seem to assert that only being can be known, or that whatever is known is real being, which is going too far and falling into ontologism. Only being is intelligible _per se_; but existences which are from being and participate of being, though not intelligible in or by themselves, since they do not exist in and by themselves, may yet be really known by the light of being which creates them. We know _by_ being, as well as being itself.

But be not alarmed. The professor's being, the only object of knowledge, his reality without which there is no cognizable object, is nothing very formidable; for he tells us, in smaller type, on the same page, that "we must distinguish different kinds of objects and different kinds of reality. They may be _formed by the mind, and exist_ [only] _for the mind that forms them_, or they may exist in fact and space for all minds, and yet in each case they are equally objects. Their reality may be mental and internal, or material and external, but in each case it is equally a reality. The thought that darts into the fancy and is gone as soon, the illusion that crosses the brain of the lunatic, the vision that frightens the ghost-seer, the spectrum which the camera paints on the screen, the reddened landscape seen through a colored lens, the yellow objects which the jaundiced eye cannot avoid beholding, _each as really exists_ as does the matter of the solid earth, or the eternal forces of the cosmical system." The "eternal forces" of the cosmical system can be only God, who only is eternal. So the illusions of fancy, the hallucinations of the lunatic, and the eternal, self-existent, necessary being whom we call God, and who names himself I AM THAT AM, SUM QUI SUM, are alike being, and equally real!

The learned author tells us elsewhere that we call by the name being beings of very different kinds and sorts, owing to the poverty of our language, which supplies but one name for them. He will permit us to say that we suspect the poverty is not in the language. {677} We have in the language two words which serve us to mark the precise difference between that which is in, from, and by itself alone, and that which exists in, from, and by being. The first is _being_, the other is _existence_. Being is properly applied only to God, who is, not Supreme Being, as is often said, but the one only being, the only one that can say, I AM THAT AM, or QUI EST; and it shows how strictly language represents the real order that in no tongue can we make an assertion without the verb TO BE, that is, only by being, that is, again, only by God himself. Existence explains itself. Existences are not being, but, as the _ex_ implies, are _from_ being, that is, from him in whom is their being, as Saint Paul says, "For in him we live, and move, and are," "_vivimus, et movemur, et sumus_." Reality includes being and all that is from and by being, or simply being and existences. Nothing else is real or conceivable; for, apart from God and what he creates, or besides God and his creatures, there is nothing, and nothing is nothing, and nothing is not intelligible or cognizable.

Dr. Porter understands by reality or being only what is an object of knowledge, or of the mind in knowing, though it may have no existence out of the mind, or, as say the schoolmen, _a parte rei_. Hence, though the soul is certain that the object exists relatively to her act of knowing, she is not certain that it is something existing in nature. How, then, prove that there is anything to correspond to the mental object, idea, or conception? In his Second Part, which treats of the representative power, he tells us that the objects represented and cognized in the representation are purely psychical, and exist only in the soul and for the soul alone. These, then, do not exist in nature; they are, in the ordinary use of the term, unreal, illusory, and chimerical, as the author himself confesses. If the object of knowledge can be in any instance unreal, chimerical, illusory, or with no existence except in and for the soul itself, why may it not be so in every instance, and all our knowledge be an illusion? How prove that in any fact of knowledge there is cognition of an object that exists distinct from and independent of the subject? Here is the _pons asinorum_ of exclusive psychologists. There is no crossing the bridge from the subjective to the objective, for there is no bridge there, and subject and object must both be given simultaneously in one and the same act, or neither is given.

Dr. Porter, indeed, gives the subjective and what he calls the objective, together, in one and the same thought; but he leaves the way open for the question, whether the object does or does not exist distinct from and independent of the subject. This is the difficulty one has with Locke's _Essay on the Understanding_. Locke makes ideas the immediate object of the cognitive act; for he defines them to be "that with which the mind is immediately conversant." If the soul can elicit the cognitive act with these ideas, which it is not pretended are things, how prove that there is any real world beyond them? It has never been done, and never can be done; for we have only the soul, for whose activity the _idea_ or concept suffices, with which to do it, and hence the importance to psychologists of the question, How do we know that we know? and which they can answer only by a paralogism, or assuming the reality of knowledge with which to prove knowledge real.

For the philosopher there is no such question, and nothing detracts so much from the philosophical genius of the illustrious Balmes as his assertion that all philosophy turns on the question of certainty. {678} The philosopher, holding that to know is to know, has, after knowing, or having thought the object, no question of certainty to ask or to answer. The certainty that the object exists in nature is in the fact that the soul thinks it. The object is always a force or activity distinct from and independent of the subject, and since it is an activity it must be either real being or real existence.

The error of the author, as of all psychologers, is not in assuming that the soul cannot think without the concurrence of the object, or that the object is not really object in relation to the soul's cognitive power, but in supposing that the soul can find the object in that which has no real existence. He assumes that abstractions or mental conceptions, which have no real existence aside from the concrete or reality from which the mind forms them, may be real objects of the soul in the fact of knowledge. But no abstractions or conceptions exist _a parte rei_. There are white things and round things, but no such existence as whiteness or roundness. These and other abstractions are formed by the mind operating on the concretes, and taking them under one aspect, or generalizing a quality they have in common with all concretes of their class, and paying no heed to anything else in the concrete object. But these abstractions or general conceptions are cognizable and apprehended by the mind only in the apprehension of their concretes, white or round things. They are, as abstracted from white things or round things, no more objects of thought or of thought-knowledge than of sensible perception. We speak of abstractions which are simply nullities, not of genera and species, or universals proper, which are not abstractions but real; yet even these do not exist apart from the individual. They and their individuals subsist always together in a synthetic relation, and though distinguishable are never separable. The species is not a mere name, a mere mental conception or generalization; it is real, but exists and is known only as individualized.

The unreal is unintelligible, and, like all negation, is intelligible only in the reality denied. The soul, then, can think or know only the real, only real being, or real existences by the light of real being. If the soul can know only the real, she can know things only in their real order, and consequently the order of the real and of the knowable is the same, and the principles of the real are the principles of science. The soul is an intelligent existence, and the principles, causes, and conditions of her existence are the principles, causes, and conditions of her intelligence, and therefore of her actual knowledge. We have, then, only to ascertain the principles of the real to determine the principles of science. The principles of the real are given us in the first verse of Genesis: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," and in the first article of the Creed, "I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible." Or, as stated in strictly scientific terms, as affirmed in intuition, Being creates existences. The real and necessary being given in the scientific formula or intuition is indeed God; but this is not intuitively known, and can be known only discursively or by contemplation and reflection. We must not, then, in stating the first principles of the real, and of knowledge as given in intuition, use the term God, but being. We know by intuition being, but do not by intuition know that being is God. Hence the mistake of those who say we have intuition of God, or know by intuition that God is. {679} We have intuition of that which is God, but not that what is given is God. Ontology is a most essential part of philosophy; but exclusive ontologists are as much sophists as are exclusive psychologists.

The first principles of reality are being, existence, and the creative act of being, whence the ideal formula or judgment, Being creates existences. This is the _primum_ in the real order. All that is real and not necessary and self-sufficing being must be from being; for without real uncreated being there can be nothing, and existences are something only in so far as they participate of being. Things can exist from being, or hold from it, only by virtue of its creative act, which produces them by its own energy from nothing, and sustains them as existent. There is only the creative act by which existences can proceed from being. Emanation, generation, evolution, which have been asserted as the mode of procession of existences, give nothing really or substantially distinguishable from being. Existences, then, can really proceed from being only by the creative act, and, indeed, only by the free creative act of being; for necessary creation is no creation at all, and can be only a development or evolution of being itself. In theological language, then, God and creation include all the real; what is not God is creature or existence, and what is not creature or existence is God. There is no reality which is neither God nor creature, no _tertium quid_ between being and existence, or between existence and nothing. The _primum_ of the real is, then, the ideal formula or divine judgment, _Ens creat existentias_, for it affirms in their principle and their real relation all that is and all that exists. This formula is a proper judgment, for it has all the terms and relations of a judgment, subject, predicate, and copula. Being is the subject, existences is the predicate, and the creative act the copula, which at once unites the predicate to the subject and distinguishes it from it. It is divine, because it is _a priori_, the _primum_ of the real; and as only the real is intelligible or knowable, it must precede as its principle, type, and condition, every judgment that can be formed by an existence or creature, and therefore can be only the judgment of God affirming his own being and creating the universe and all things, visible and invisible, therein.

Now, as the soul can only know the real, this divine judgment must be not only the _primum_ of the real, but of the knowable; and since the soul can know only as she exists, in the real relations in which she stands, and knows only by the aid of the object on which she depends for her existence and activity, it follows that this judgment is the _primum scientificum_, or the principle of all real or possible science.

Is it asked, How is this known or proved, if not by psychological observation and analysis? The answer is, by the analysis of thought, which discloses the divine judgment as its idea, or necessary and apodictic element. This is not psychologism nor the adoption of the psychological method. Psychologism starts from the assumption that thought, as to the activity that produces it, whatever may or may not be its object, is purely psychical, and that the ontological, if obtainable at all, is so by an induction from psychological facts. The first assumption is disproved by the fact just shown, that thought is not produced or producible by the psychical activity alone, but by the joint action of the two factors subject and object, in which both are affirmed. {680} The other assumption is disposed of by the fact that what is found in the analysis of thought is not particular facts or phenomena from which the first principles are concluded by way of induction, which could give us only a generalization or abstraction, but the first principles themselves intuitively given.

Philosophers generally assert that certain conditions precedent, or certain ideas _a priori_, are necessary to every fact of experience or actual cognition. Kant, in his masterly _Critik der reinen Vernunft_, calls them sometimes cognitions, sometimes synthetic judgments, _a priori_, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and holds them to be necessary forms of the subject. Cousin asserts them and calls them necessary and absolute ideas, but fails to identify them with the real, and even denies that they can be so identified. Reid recognized them, and called them the first principles of human belief, sometimes the principles of common sense, after Father Bouffier, which all our actual knowledge presupposes and must take for granted. Professor Porter also recognizes them, holds them to be intuitively given, calls them certain necessary assumptions, first truths or principles without which no science is possible, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and seems to regard them as abstract principles or ideas, as if abstractions could subsist without their concretes, or principles ever be abstract. We deny that they are abstract ideas, necessary assumptions, or necessary forms of the understanding or cognitive faculty, and hold them to be the principles of things, alike of the real and the knowable, without which no fact exists and no act of knowledge is possible. They cannot be created by the mind, nor formed by the mind operating on the concrete objects of existence, nor in any manner obtained by our own mental activity; for without them there is no mind, no mental activity, no experience. Dr. Porter, after Reid, Kant, Cousin, and others, has clearly seen this, and conclusively proved it--no philosopher more conclusively--and it is one of the merits of his book. He therefore justly calls them intuitions, or principles intuitively given; yet either we do not understand him, or he regards them as abstract truths or abstract principles. But truths and principles are never abstract, and only the concrete or real can be intuitively given. Those intuitions, then, must be either real being or contingent existences; not the latter, for they all bear the marks of necessity and universality; then they must be the real and necessary being, and therefore the principles of things, and not simply principles of science. Dr. Porter makes them real principles in relation to the mental act; but we do not find that he identifies them with the principles of the real. He doubtless holds that they represent independent truths, and truths which are the principles of things; but that he holds them, as present to the mind, to be the principles themselves, we do not find.

Dr. Porter's error in his Part IV., in which he discusses and defines intuitions, and which must be interpreted by the foregoing parts of his work, appears to us to be precisely in his taking principle to mean the starting-point of the soul in the fact of knowledge, and distinguishing it from the principle of the real order. He distinguishes between the object _in mente_ and the object _in re_, and holds that the former is by no means identical with the latter. He thus supposes a difference between the scientific order and the real, and therefore that the principle of the one is not necessarily the principle of the other. {681} This is to leave the question still open, whether there is any real order to respond to the scientific order, and to cast a doubt on the objective validity of all our knowledge. The divine judgment, or ideal formula, we have shown, is alike the _primum raale_ and the _primum scientificum_, and therefore asserts that the principles of the two orders are identical, and that the scientific must follow the real, for only the real is knowable. Hence science is and must be objectively certain.

The intuitive affirmation of the formula, being creates existences, creates, places the soul, and constitutes her intelligent existence. The author rightly says every thought is a judgment. There is no judgment without the copula, and the only real copula is the copula of the divine judgment or intuition, that is, the creative act of being. Being creating the soul is the principle of her existence; and as we have shown that she can act only as she exists, the principle of her existence is the principle of her acts, and therefore of her knowing, or the fact of knowledge. There is, then, no thought or judgment without the creative act for its copula. The two orders, then, are united and made identical in principle by the creative act of being. The creative act unites the acts of the soul, as the soul itself, to being.

The difficulty some minds feel in accepting this conclusion grows out of a misapprehension of the creative act, which they look upon as a past instead of a present act. The author holds that what is past has ceased to exist, and that the objects we recall in memory are "created a second time." He evidently misapprehends the real character of space and time. These are not existences, entities, as say the scholastics, but simple relations, with no existence, no reality, apart from the _relata_, or the related. Things do not exist in space and time; for space and time simply mark their relation to one another of coexistence and succession. Past and future are relations that subsist in or among creatures, and have their origin in the fact that creatures as second causes and in relation to their own acts are progressive. On the side of God, there is no past, no future; for his act has no progression, and is never in _potentia ad actum_. It is a complete act, and in it all creatures are completed, consummated, in their beginning, and hence the past and the future are as really existent as what we call the present. The Creator is not a _causa transiens_, that creates the effect and leaves it standing alone, but a _causa manens_, ever present in the effect and creating it.

Creation is not in space and time, but originates the relations so-called. The creative act, therefore, can never be a past or a future act, an act that has produced or that will produce the effect, but an act that produces it always here and now. The act of conservation, as theologians teach, is identically the act of creation. God preserves or upholds us in existence by creating us at each instant of our lives. The universe, with all it contains, is a present creation. In relation to our acts as our acts or our progressiveness toward our final cause or last end, the universe _was_ created and will remain as long as the Creator wills; but in relation to God it is created here and now, and as newly created at this moment as when the sons of the morning sang together over its production, by the divine energy alone, from nothing; and the song ceases not; they are now singing it. {682} There is nothing but this present creative act that stands between existences and nothing. The continuity of our existence is in the fact that God creates and does not cease to create us.

We have only to eliminate from our minds the conceptions that transport the relations of space and time to the Creator, or represent them as relations between Creator and creature, where the only relation is that of cause and effect, and to regard the creative act as having no relations of space and time, to be able to understand how the divine judgment, intuitively affirmed, is at once the principle of the real and of the scientific, and the creative act, the copula of being and existence, is the copula of every judgment or thought, as is proved by the fact already noted, that in no language can an assertion be made without the verb _to be_, that is, without God.

Dr. Porter, engaged in constructing not the science of things, but a science of knowing--a _Wissenschaftslehre_--has apparently been content with the intuitions as principles or laws of science, without seeking to identify them with the real. He is a doctor of divinity, and cannot intend to deny, with Sir William Hamilton and the Positivists, that ontology can be any part of human science. The Positivists, with whom, in this respect, Sir William Hamilton, who has finished the Scottish school, fully agrees, assert that the whole field of science is restricted to positive facts and the induction of their laws, and that their principles and causes, the ontological truths, if such there be, belong to the unknowable, thus reducing, with Sir William Hamilton, science to nescience. But though Dr. Porter probably holds that there is an ontological reality, and knows perfectly well that it cannot be concluded from psychical phenomena, either by way of induction or of deduction, he yet seems unable or unwilling to say that the mind has in intuition direct and immediate apprehension of it. The first and necessary truths, or the necessary assumptions, as he calls them, which the mind is compelled to make in knowing particulars, such as "what is, is," "the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time," "whatever begins to exist must have a cause," etc., are, in his doctrine, abstract ideas, which, though they may represent a reality beyond themselves--and he tries to prove that they do--are yet not that reality itself. These ideas he states, indeed, in an abstract form, in which they are not real; but they are all identified in the ideal formula, or divine judgment, which is not an abstract but a real, concrete judgment. He holds them to be intuitions, indeed; but intuition, in his view, simply stands opposed to discursion, and he makes it an act of the soul immediately affirming the object, not the act of the object immediately affirming itself by its own creative act. Till being, in its creative act, affirms itself, the soul does not exist; and the intuitive act is that which creates it, and creates it intelligent. The intuition cannot, then, be the act of the soul, unless you suppose the soul can act without existing, or know without intelligence. If we make intuition the act of the soul, and suppose the necessary truths intuitively given are abstractions or representative ideas, how can we know that there is any reality represented by them? The old question again: How pass from the subjective to the objective?--from the scientific to the real?

{683}

The doctrine of representative ideas comes from the scholastics, and most probably from the misapprehension of their philosophy. Plato maintained that we know by similitude, which similitude he called _idea_. No doubt, Plato often means by _idea_ something else; but this is one of the senses in which he uses the term. This idea, with the peripatetics, becomes in sensibles the phantasm, in intelligibles the intelligible _species_. The intelligible _species_ was assumed as something mediating between the soul and the intelligible object. But though they asserted it as a medium, they never made it the object cognized. In their language, it was the objectum _quo_, not the objectum _quod_; and St. Thomas teaches expressly that the mind does not terminate in the _species_, but attains the intelligible object itself. In this magazine for May, 1867, in an article entitled "An Old Quarrel," we showed that what the scholastics probably had in mind when they spoke of the intelligible _species_, is adequately expressed by what we, after the analogy of external vision, call the light, which illuminates at once the subject and object, and renders the one cognitive and the other cognizable. This light is not furnished by the mind, but by being itself light, and the source of all light, present in every fact of knowledge in the creative act.

The Scottish school has made away with the phantasms, and proved that, in what our author calls sense-perception, we perceive not a phantasm, but the real external object itself; but in the intelligible or supersensible world, this direct apprehension of the object Dr. Porter appears not to admit. He consciously or unconsciously interposes a _mundus logicus_ between the mind and the _mundus physicus_. The categories are with him abstract relations, and logic is a mere formal science. This is evident from Part III., in which he treats of what he calls "thought-knowledge." But the categories are not abstract forms of thought, but real relations of things; logic is founded in the principle and constitution of things, not simply in the constitution and laws of the human mind. Its type and origin are in being itself, in the Most Holy Trinity. The creative act is the copula of every strictly logical judgment. The Creator is logic, the [Greek text], or, as Plato would say, logic in itself, and therefore all the works of God are strictly logical, and form, _mediante_ his creative act, a dialectic whole with himself. Whatever does not conform to the truth and order of things is illogical, a sophism; and every sophism sins against the essence of God, as well as against the constitution of the human mind. Psychologism is a huge sophism; for it assumes that the soul is being, and can exist and act independently when it is only a created, dependent existence; that it is God, when it is only man. Satan was the first psychologist we read of. Ontologism is also a sophism of very much the same sort. Psychologism asserts that man is God; ontologism asserts that God is man. This is all the difference between them, and they terminate at the same point. Existences cannot be logically deduced from being, because being, sufficing for itself, cannot be constrained to create either by extrinsic or by intrinsic necessity. Existences are not necessarily involved in the very conception of being, but are contingent, and dependent on the free-will of the Creator. God cannot be concluded by induction from psychological facts; for the universal cannot be concluded from the particular, nor the necessary from the contingent.

{684}

Both the ontological _primum_ and the psychological must be given intuitively and in their real synthesis, or no science of either is possible. The mind must take its starting-point and principle of science from neither separately, but from the real synthesis of the two, as in the ideal formula. The attempt to construct an exclusively ontological or an exclusively psychological science is as absurd and as sophistical as the attempt to express a judgment without the copula, or to construct a syllogism without the middle term. The real copula of the judgment, the real _medius terminus_ that unites the two extremes of the syllogism, is the creative act of being.

All Gentile philosophy failed, because it failed to recognize the creative act. Outside of Judaism, the tradition of creation was lost in the ancient world. In vain will you seek a recognition of it in Plato or Aristotle, or in any of the old Gentile philosophers. In its place you find only emanation, generation, or formation. The error of the Gentiles reappears in our modern philosophers, who--since Descartes detached philosophy from theology, of which it is simply the rational element--are endeavoring to construct science and the sciences without the creative act, and if they escape pantheism or atheism, it is by the strength of their faith in revelation, not by the force of their logic. Dr. Porter really attempts to construct the philosophy of the human intellect, unconsciously certainly, on purely atheistic or nihilistic principles; that is, without any principles at all. He, of course, believes in God, believes that God made the world; but most likely he believes he made it as the watch-maker makes a watch, so that when wound up and started it will go of itself--till it runs down. This is a very wide-spread error, and an error that originates with so-called philosophers, not with the people. Hence we find scientific men in large numbers who look upon the world God has made as a huge machine; and now that it is made, as independent of him, capable of going ahead on its own hook, and even able to bind him by its laws, and deprive him of his freedom of action, as if it were or could be anything but what he at each moment makes it. He ought, as a doctor of divinity, to understand that there can be no science without the efficacious presence of God, who created the soul, and none without his presence creating it now, and by his light rendering it intelligent. To construct science without God in his creative act as the principle, is to begin in sophism and end in nihilism.

We need hardly say that, in asserting the divine judgment or ideal formula as the principle of all science, and as the necessary and apodictic element of every fact of knowledge, we do not pretend that the mind is able in the first moment of intellectual life to say to itself, or to others, God creates existences. This is the real formula which expresses in principle the entire real order, but it is the formula to which the principles given in intuition are reduced by reflection. There are a large number of minds, and among them our illustrious Yale Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics, who do not recognize the identity of being with God, or are aware that the intuition is of that which is God. A still larger number do not distinguish the so-called necessary ideas from the contingent objects of experience cognizable only by them, and very few, even among professors of philosophy, ever identify these ideas--the necessary, the universal, the eternal, and the immutable--with real being, or reflect that they cannot subsist as abstractions, and that the universal, the eternal, the immutable, the necessary, of which we have intuition in all our mental acts, is and must be real, necessary, universal, eternal, and immutable being, that is to say, God himself. {685} Few reflect far enough to perceive that in intuition the object is real being; and the number of men who distinctly recognize all the terms of the formula in their real relation is a very small minority, and every day growing smaller.

But the intuition is not, as Dr. Porter supposes, of ideas which lie latent or dormant in the mind till occasion wakes them up and calls them into action; but they are the first principles, or rather the principles from which the mind proceeds in all its intellectual acts. They are intuitively affirmed to the mind in the creative act, and are ever present and operative; but we become aware of them, distinguish them, and what they imply or connote, only by reflection, by contemplating them as they are held up before the mind, or sensibly represented to it, in language. Though the formula is really the _primum philosophicum_, we attain to it, or are masters of what is really presented in intuition, and are able to say, being is God, and God creates existences, only at the end of philosophy, or as its last and highest achievement.

The principles are given in the very constitution of the mind, and are present to it from its birth, or, if you will, from the first instant of its conception; but they are by no means what Descartes and others have called _innate ideas_. Descartes never understood by _idea_ the intelligible object itself, but a certain mental representation of it. The idea was held to be rather the image of the thing than the thing itself. It was a _tertium quid_ somewhere between real and unreal, and was regarded as the medium through which the mind attained to the object. In this sense we recognize no ideas. In the fact of knowledge, what we know is the object itself, not its mental representation. We take _idea_ or the ideal in the objective sense, and understand by it the immediate and the necessary, permanent, immutable object of intuition, and it is identical with what we have called the _primum philosophicum_, or divine judgment, which precedes the mind's own activity. Hence we call that judgment the "ideal formula." With this view of idea or the ideal, analogous, at least, to one of the senses of Plato, from whom we have the word, it is evident that the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas, which was afterward changed to that of innate faculties, cannot find in us an advocate.

The formula is ideal and apodictic, but it is not the entire object of the cognitive act. It is that which precedes and renders possible experience, or what Kant calls synthetic judgments _a posteriori_. We have said the soul can know only as she exists, and that whatever object she depends on for her existence must she depend on for her acts, and it enters into all her thoughts or facts of knowledge. The soul depends for existence on God, on humanity and nature. In the formula, we have only the ideal principle of man and nature, and therefore the ideal formula, while it furnishes the principle and light which render knowledge possible, does not supersede experience, or actual knowledge acquired by the exercise of the soul and her faculties. Here the soul proceeds by analysis and synthesis, by observation and induction, or deduction, according to the nature of the subject. We do not quarrel with the inductive sciences, nor question their utility; we only maintain that they are not sciences till carried up to the principles of all real science presented to the mind in intuition. Induction is proper in constructing the physical sciences, though frequently improperly applied; but it is inapplicable, as my Lord Bacon held, in the construction of philosophy; for in that we must start from the ideal formula, and study things in their principles and in their real synthesis.

{686}

We have got through only the author's Introduction, yet that has brought up nearly all the salient points of his entire volume. Here we might stop, and assuredly should stop, if we had no higher object in view than to criticise its author, or simply to refute his psychological method. We believe one of the first steps toward arresting the atheistical or pantheistical tendency of the age, and of bringing the mind back to truth and the logic of things, is to set forth and vindicate sound philosophy, the philosophy which in substance has always been preserved in the Christian church. To use up an author or to denounce a false system is a small affair. The only solid refutation of error is in presenting the truth it impugns. As there are several questions of importance raised by the author on which we have hardly touched, we propose to return to the book and consider them at our earliest convenience.

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The Catholic View Of Public Education In The United States.

[We republish the following article from _The American Educational Monthly_, with the permission of the editor, on account of the importance of the subject, the intrinsic value of the article, and to aid in giving it a wide circulation. ED. C. W.]

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It would be wholly superfluous to address an argument to any portion of the American people upon the absolute necessity of popular education. Upon that point there is no diversity of opinion. The fundamental principles of our social system rest upon it as a corner-stone; such as, that government derives all of its authority, under God, from the consent of the governed; the people possess the sovereignty; public officers are only public servants; the multitude rules by representation; Congress, the President, and the Courts are the people--without the people they have no existence; constitutions and laws are but the well-ordered expression of the public will, at all times revocable, in an orderly manner, and binding upon each citizen as the will of all, unless the popular decree be against the law of God, when, of course, it bind's no man's conscience. Hereditary rights, class privileges, ancient social divisions, and distributions of power have all disappeared, or rather, have never existed here. Even in Colonial times, the Crown was almost a myth, and cast but a shadowy reflection into the deep waters of the Hudson and the Mississippi, as they rolled on to the sea from the illimitable forests where the moccasined hunter was then as free as the Red Indian had been for unrecorded centuries. The Revolution of '76 changed the government, but really left the cardinal points of our American civilization very much as it found them. In fact, our political education is traceable back to the days of Alfred and Edward the Confessor; for the Norman king gave us no concession in Magna Charta which was unknown to Saxon liberty. In our Republic we have only drawn out these principles to their extreme conclusions. We have gone back to the original hypothesis, that society is an association of equal rights for mutual protection; and that power, under God, belongs to the whole body of corporators--that is, the multitude. From this postulate we are obliged to pass immediately to the axiom that there can be no fit administration of power without knowledge. Knowledge may be acquired in several ways. The most direct and impressive is experience. Alcuin was master of books; but Charlemagne was master of men. The great emperor could not read, but he possessed the wisdom to govern. Who shall say that he was not "educated" in the highest sense of that vague term? And yet, it is very clear that knowledge gained only by the slow accretions of experience will not answer the wants and rapid movements of such a republic as ours in the age of steam and electricity. Each generation must be trained from the cradle, and made to possess, enlarge, and transmit to its successor all the accumulated knowledge of its predecessor. As no atom of matter perishes, but is for ever recombining and reproducing; so every true idea and sound moral sentiment must be made the inheritance of society, and never cease to exert its power for good among men. Not that moral truth can ever change; for it is now precisely what it has been from all eternity; nor is it better understood by the divine to-day, than it was by Moses when he came down from the mountain; but the multitude may be made more fully to comprehend and reverence it. Christianity, although specially revealed and miraculously propagated, did not suddenly conquer and civilize barbarous peoples. It has been eighteen hundred years struggling with the powers of darkness and the corruption of the human heart; and yet, alas! how very, very far removed are not even the most polished nations from the severe standard of Christian perfection! See the tyrannies, the oppressions, the cruelties, the wars, the pride, the luxury, the folly and deceit which fill the fairest parts of the earth with mourning, and drag mankind down into the slough of sin and sorrow! To be sure, there is a certain stereotyped class of saints and philosophers who cry aloud, "Compare our enlightened era with the rude times of the crusaders; or place the nineteenth alongside of the ninth century; and let the celestial light of our civilization shine down into the abysses of monkish superstition!" We shall, nevertheless, refuse to close our eyes to those stupendous sins which have supplanted the violent crimes of our ancestors. We shall see how their robber-sword has been put aside for our forger's pen; how their wild foray has given place to our gigantic stock speculation or bank swindle, which sweeps widows and orphans, by the ten thousand, into utter poverty and despair; how their fierce lust has been civilized into the decorous forms of the divorce courts; {688} how their bold grasping of power has been changed into the arts of the whining demagogue; how their undisguised plunder of the public treasure in times of civil commotion has been superseded by the adroit peculation and covert bribery of our times of peace; how their courageous, rude anger has vanished before the safer and more efficacious process of concealed hatred, nestling, like the scorpion, among the roses of adulation. We certainly shall be obliged to remember these things, to the great reproach of our times, and in serious dread of the future; and we shall feel anxious to go to work to find the cause and the remedy. We are all agreed that education, that is, knowledge and moral training, cannot be dispensed with for an hour--that no nation can be governed safely, much less govern itself at all, without a clear head and a sound heart--that, if governed as a dumb brute, it will kick against the pricks, fly in the face of its hard master, and dash out its foolish brains against the stone wall! It will sing the _Marseillaise_ and cover its garments with the blood of kings and aristocrats; until, having spent its fury, it will return to its crust and shout "Vive l'Empereur!" Should it attempt to govern itself, it will become the prey of the infamous men who are the spawn of its own passions. Without knowledge, the nation is either a silent sepulchre, where all hopes are buried, or a raging sea, where they are quickly wrecked. Knowledge, then, _it must have_. But _what_ knowledge? Shall we say, knowledge of the arts? Ask Phidias and Praxiteles if the arts saved Greece! Shall we say, polite literature? Ah! let the mournful chorus of Sophocles, AEschylus and Euripides give utterance to the sad cries of those old pagan hearts for a higher virtue than the sublimest tragedy could teach them! Shall it be the eloquence of the orator or the wisdom of the legislator? We shall hear in the Philippics how vainly the master of orators appealed to a degenerate race, and we shall read in the closing annals of Athens and Sparta how utterly the wisdom of Solon and Lycurgus had failed to save polished and warlike states from the penalty which God has affixed to the crimes of nations. Shall we take refuge in human philosophy? Socrates and the divine Plato had cast off the degrading superstitions of paganism, and had proclaimed to their intellectual countrymen the eternity and unity of God, and the immortality of the soul of man. They had most earnestly enjoined upon them the sanctity of all the natural virtues--temperance, industry, patience, courage, honesty, benevolence, patriotism, continence, filial duty, conjugal fidelity; but what did their philosophy avail? Why did it not save the Grecian states? They went down into the night upon which no sun ever again shone! Their Roman conquerors seized upon the rich treasures of their knowledge. The Senate listened with rapture to the wisdom of the old Hellenic sages translated by Cicero into the noble Latin tongue. Virgil and Livy sought to inspire the Roman heart with grand ideas borrowed from the Greek masters. What did it all avail? The Roman republic had practised the natural virtues as fully as unregenerated man is capable of doing by the power of vigorous and cultivated reason. What did it avail? They, too, went down into the tomb of dead nations; and a few broken columns remain to mark the seat of their world-wide empire! {689} It is very manifest, then, that intellectual culture, even when carried to the highest development of which men are capable, can never subdue their passions, nor enable them to uphold the civilization to which they may have attained in the freshness of their national life. If this were not so, then we could not clearly perceive the necessity of the Christian revelation. If man was self-sustaining, he would not require the arm of God to lean upon. The apothegm of the Greek sage, "_Know thyself_," was a dead letter. It was precisely to teach a man how to know himself that our Saviour came. And this is the whole knowledge! No poetry, oratory, history, philosophy, arts, or sciences could teach that, else the world would have learned it four thousand years ago, and the primitive races would not have perished. Even under the Christian dispensation, and in very modern times, men and nations have failed to know themselves, because they turned their backs on Christ and placed their hopes in human science and natural virtue. And so we have seen an enlightened nation in our day deify humanity, refuse to adore God, and prostrate itself before a harlot, as the high-priestess in the apotheosis of Reason! We have seen an antichristian conspiracy, formed of the most learned, eloquent, witty, and fascinating men of modern Europe, exerting the highest arts of genius to repaganize the world. We have seen science, rudely torn from religion, waging an insane war against the peace of society. That terrific phase of blasphemous infidelity has passed from our immediate view; but has it left nothing more dangerous behind? We think it has. The mass of mankind shrank with horror from the defiant blasphemy of Voltaire; and they recoiled with alarm from the ruin caused by his teachings. We love liberty; but we dread license, anarchy, chaos. Man is, also, naturally religious. Long after he had forgotten the traditions of the patriarchs and had lost God in the night of heathen idolatry, he still clung to

"The instinct of old reverence!"

and his wretched soul yearned after its Creator.

The false worship of Greece and Rome was the inarticulate cry of a lost people for that true worship which was promised to the Gentile at the appointed time. False and hideous as it was, who will not say that it was far preferable to atheism? It was only when the Epicurean philosophy had destroyed the faith of those people, that they cast off all moral restraint, and were swept away in the torrent of their vices. Man is naturally religious; and therefore the world will not long patiently tolerate the presence of blatant infidelity. _The danger is not there_. He who goes about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, knows very well that mankind is more easily seduced under the forms of virtue than by gross sin. His incarnate agents on earth know this too. Hence we find all the world covered over with gossamer nets of seduction! The press teems with books and journals, not confessedly infidel, yet working in the interests of infidelity; fanning the passions and exciting the morbid sensibilities of youth; teaching religious indifference under the pleasing garb of liberality; holding up the discipline of the church as hostile to personal freedom; depicting the doctrines and ceremonies of the Christian religion as trammels upon mental activity and intellectual progress; arraying the laity against their pastors; insisting that to be a humane man, an honest and industrious worker, a faithful friend, a good husband and father, a patriotic citizen, is to be all and to do all that the highest Christian morality can require or the welfare of the human race demand; asserting that the specific dogmas of the Christian faith, with perhaps one or two exceptions, are not essential, and may be rejected without concern; receiving with indifference and polite complacency either the divinity or the humanity of Christ; and accepting him as a God-Saviour, a man-prophet, or a harmless, self-deluded impostor, as your fancy may please to dictate; in a word, deifying man, and making this world, with its wealth, its pleasures, its pride and pomp, its power and magnificence, its civilization and nationalities, the sole object of his anxiety and love. {690} Such, we say, is the growing evil of this nineteenth century, which is so scornful of the "dark ages;" an evil infinitely more subtile and destructive than the rage or gibes of Voltaire. This poison has gone through the chilled blood of renegade old men, destroying the religious vitality which had sustained their faith from the baptismal font to the very edge of the grave; how must it not, therefore, affect the hot veins of inexperienced youth, whose generous impulses are their greatest peril! See how, in those European revolutions gotten up by avowed enemies of religion, the students of the universities flock to the standards of infidelity, with the seductive cry of "_Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!_" They enlist, with enthusiasm, under what they believe to be the consecrated banner of inalienable human rights--their young, sympathetic hearts are justly moved by the sufferings of the toiling millions caused by unequal laws--their sense of justice and human brotherhood is outraged at the sight of domineering classes who monopolize the blessings of government--they see very clearly all the existing wrongs, but they do not see the practicable and wise remedies; and when they hear prudent voices counselling patience, and reminding them that the evil works of centuries, like old forest trees, have deep roots, and cannot be rudely torn out of the bosom of society without endangering its life, they cry out in their enthusiasm, "These are the voices of the enemies of the people, the voices of priests and aristocrats, away with them to the guillotine!" Only too late do they experience the retribution which God invariably visits upon those who presumptuously seek to drive the chariot of his Providence!

Not one word of what we have said is inapplicable to our own land. We live, move, and have our whole being in the midst of these same perils. Steam, electricity, commerce, and emigration have made us a part of the great European family. Every throb of their heart is felt in our own bosom. We are of their blood and civilization. We have their laws and their religion. We are nurtured by their science and literature. From us they have received more thorough ideas of democratic freedom, but from them we have derived all else that constitutes the intellectual life of man. It would be the height of folly in us to despise the lessons of their experience. Our children should be carefully instructed in all of it. They have a difficult task to perform in perpetuating our institutions as they were shaped by the fathers of the Republic. They must be well trained in the knowledge necessary for that purpose. From what has already been said it will be at once understood that we do not mean human science alone, _nor principally_. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

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This brings us to the consideration of the immediate subject of this article; which can now, we think, be briefly stated; inasmuch as the foundation has been properly laid, if our views are correct as to the principles which we have presented.

Enlightened rulers all over Europe have been profoundly impressed with the lessons of this and the last century. It was once believed by monarchs that to enlighten their subjects would be to imperil their thrones. It is now very clearly seen that "the divinity which doth hedge a king" has long ceased to be an oracle to the people. The French emperor erects his dynasty upon popular suffrage. Hereditary right has come down from its ancient pedestal to accept from the people the confirmation of its authority. It is now too evident for further doubt that no ruler can rule modern nations by any appeal to the mausoleum of his ancestors. The garish light of the sun has penetrated every royal tomb, and has altogether annihilated the mystery which once filled the hearts of nations with awe and unquestioning obedience. Public opinion now rules the ruler. Kings and their ministers have now to elect between intelligent and virtuous opinion on the one hand, or revolutionary passions on the other. The wisest of them, therefore, are hastening to educate the people; and they are striving above all things to make such education distinctly _Christian_, and not simply _moral_; for they well remember the fate of all nations who have staked their salvation upon the sufficiency of the natural virtues. While kings are doing this to preserve the shadow of their royalty from the aggressive spirit of the age, we, in this chosen land, are doing or aiming to do the same thing, in order that we may rear successive generations of virtuous and enlightened heirs to the rich inheritance of our constitutional democratic freedom. Ours should be much the easier task; as we labor for no dynasty, but strive only to make a nation capable of self-preservation. We are no less in earnest than the kings; and we may surely examine their work and see what is good in it. The kings tried the pagan idea of intellectual culture adorned with the glittering generalities of moral philosophy; and they added to it the maxims of the Christian gospel, whenever that could be done without getting entangled in the conflicting creeds of the numerous sects. The school was like Plato's lecture-room, only that the sacred voice of the evangelist was heard occasionally in such passages as do not distinctly set forth faith and doctrine, about which the scholars could differ. Sectarianism, as it is called, had to be excluded, of course, in a mixed system of popular education, wherein freedom of conscience was conceded to be a sacred right and proselytism was disavowed. The result was twofold: first, tens of thousands of children were deprived of distinct religious instruction and doctrinal knowledge; and secondly, in countries where the Roman Catholic population was large, though in a minority, other tens of thousands were left without secular education, because their parents would not permit them to be brought up in habits of indifferentism, which means practical infidelity, or trained in knowledge hostile to their religious faith. Prussia, though she is the very embodiment and representative of Protestant Europe, soon came to the conclusion that this would not do--that education must be Christian--that it must be doctrinal and conducive to religious practices--that, as all could not or would not believe alike, each should have full opportunity to be reared in his own faith, to learn its doctrines and to fulfil its duties and discipline--and, therefore, that enlightened government established the denominational system, giving to each creed practical equality before the law, a separate school organization, (wherever numbers made it practicable,) and a ratable share of the public school-fund; reserving to the government only a general supervision, so as to secure a faithful application of the public money, and to enforce a proper compliance with the educational standard. The public schools are organized so that every citizen shall obtain the complete education of his child, in the faith and practice of his own church. All difficulties have disappeared, and perfect harmony prevails.

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In France, by the last census, the population was thirty-seven millions, divided about as follows: 480,000 Calvinists, 267,000 Lutherans, 30,000 of other Protestant sects, and 73,000 Jews; the remaining thirty-six millions being either practically or nominally Catholic. Although the dissenters from the national faith are less than one million, that government has provided for them, at the public expense, separate primary schools, where each sect is at full liberty to teach its own doctrines. There are likewise three seminaries for the higher education of Lutherans and Calvinists.

Austria also supports schools, colleges, and universities for a Protestant minority.

The British Government has likewise adopted the same principle of public education for the Catholics and the Protestant dissenters of England; while, with her traditional and malignant hatred of the Irish people, she still denies them the justice which she extends to all of her other subjects, at home or in the colonies, even to the Hindoos and Mohammedans of her Indian empire!

And thus the most powerful and enlightened nations have decided that Christian civilization cannot be maintained upon pagan ideas; and that the safety of every commonwealth depends upon the Christian education of the people. They have also clearly seen that _doctrines, discipline, morals_, and "_the religious atmosphere_" must be kept united, and made to penetrate and surround the school at all times; and that, however greatly the Christian denominations may differ from each other, or even err in their belief, it is far better for society that their youth should be instructed in some form of Christian doctrine, than be left to perish in the dreary and soul-destroying wastes of deism. Experience has proved to them that moral teaching, with biblical illustrations, as the piety of Joseph, the heroism of Judith, the penitence of David, will not suffice to establish the Christian faith in young hearts, or to quiet the doubts of inquiring minds. The subtle Gibbon, mocking the cross of Christ, will confront the testimony of the martyrs with the heroes of pagan history. Voltaire did the same for the French youth of the last century, to their destruction. No. The experience of wise governments is this: that _morals_ must be based upon _faith_, and faith made efficient in deeds of practical virtue; for faith worketh by charity. And another experience is this, which is best given in the very words of the eminent Protestant statesman and historian, M. Guizot: "_In order to make popular education truly good and socially useful, it must be fundamentally religions. I do not simply mean by this, that religious instruction should hold its place in popular education and that the practices of religion should enter into it; for a nation is not religiously educated by such petty and mechanical devices; it is necessary that national education should be given and received in the midst of a religious atmosphere, and that religions impressions and religious observances should penetrate into all its parts. Religion is not a study or an exercise to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour; it is a faith and a law, which ought to be felt everywhere, and which after this manner alone can exercise all its beneficial influence upon our minds and our lives_." {693} The meaning of which is, that not a moment of the hours of school should be left without the religious influence. It is the constant inhalation of the air which preserves our physical vitality. It is the "_religious atmosphere_" which supports the young soul. Religion cannot be made "_a study or an exercise to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour_." It will not do to devote six days in the week to science, and to depend upon the Sunday-school for the religious training of the child. M. Guizot is right. The enlightened governments of Europe have accepted his wisdom and reduced it to practice in their great national school-systems.

Now, the Catholics of the United States have said no more than that; have asked no more than that; and yet, a wild cry of anger has been raised against them at times, as though they were the avowed enemies of all popular education. They pay their full quota of the public taxes which create the school-fund, and yet they possess, to-day, in proportion to their wealth and numbers, more parochial schools, seminaries, academies, colleges, and universities, established and sustained exclusively by their own private resources, than any other denomination of Christians in this country! Certainly this is no evidence of hostility to education! And why have they made these wonderful efforts, these unprecedented sacrifices? It is because they believe in the truth uttered by M. Guizot. It is because they believe in the truth established by all history. It is because they believe in the truth accepted and acted upon by enlightened men and governments of this age. It is because they know that revealed religion is to human science what eternity is to time. It is because they know that the salvation of souls is more precious to Christ than the knowledge of all the astronomers. It is because they know that the welfare of nations is impossible without God. And yet, they fully understand how religion has called science to her side as an honored handmaid; how learning, chastened by humility, conduces to Christian advancement; how the knowledge of good and evil (the fruit of the forbidden tree) may yet be made to honor God, when the sanctified soul rejects the evil and embraces the good. Therefore the Catholic people desire denominational education, as it is called.

That is the general view of the question; but there is a particular view, not to be overlooked, and which we will now briefly consider.

The most marked distinction between pagan and Christian society is to be found in the relations which the state bears to the family. Scarcely was the Lacedaemonian boy released from his mother's apron-string, when the state seized him with an iron hand. The state was thenceforth his father and his mother. The sanctities and duties of the family were annihilated. Body and soul, he belonged to the Moloch of Power. Private conscience was no more than a piece of coin in circulation; it was a part of the public property. Christ restored the family as it existed in Adam and Eve. Christian civilization denies that the state can destroy the family. {694} The family is primary; the father the head; the mother the helpmate; the children in subjection, and for whom the parents shall give an account to the Father in heaven. The Christian state has no authority, by divine or human appointment, to invade this trust. It has, therefore, no mission either to coerce conscience or to dictate the education of it. It is the duty of the state in every way to facilitate, but it cannot arbitrarily control the mental and moral training of the people's children. That right and that responsibility are domestical, and belong to the parent.

Now, the Catholic parent is aware that there are between his creed and all others the widest and most irreconcilable differences, and that it is impossible to open the New Testament, at almost any page, without forthwith encountering the prime difficulty. To read the Bible, without note or comment, to young children, is to abandon them to dangerous speculation, or to leave them dry and barren of all Christian knowledge. In mixed schools there is no other recourse; because it is impossible to make any comment upon any doctrinal teaching of Christ and his apostles, without trenching upon the conscientious opinions of some one or other of the listeners. "The Father and I are one;" "The Father is greater than I;" here at once we have the Unitarian and the Trinitarian at a dead-lock!" This is my body;" "It is the spirit which quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing;" here we have the primitive Lutheran, who believed in the real presence, (_consubstantially_,) and his Calvinistic coadjutor in reform squarely at issue! "Unless you be born again of water and the Holy Ghost," etc.; here we have the Baptist and the Quaker very seriously divided in opinion. Nevertheless, widely as they differ the one from the other, there is a fundamental assimilation between all the Protestant sects, which may render it possible for them to unite in one educational organization; and yet, we find many of the most enlightened and earnest among the Protestant clergy of America now zealously advocating the denominational system, such as we find in the European countries above referred to. They believe that education should be distinctly based upon doctrinal religion; and they are liberal enough to insist, that, by natural right, as well as by the constitutional guarantees of our free country, no doctrine adverse to the faith of a parent may lawfully be forced or surreptitiously imposed upon his child. It is well known, however, that, between the Catholic faith and all Protestant creeds, there is a gulf which cannot be bridged over. It would, therefore, be simply impossible to adopt any religious teaching whatever in mixed schools without at once interfering with Catholic conscience. No such teaching is attempted, as a general rule, we believe, in the public schools of the United States; and hence we have only a vague announcement of moral precepts, the utter futility and barrenness of which we have already alluded to. Catholics, agreeing with very many enlightened and zealous Protestants, believe that secular education administered in that way is not only vain, but eminently pernicious; that it is fast undermining the Christian faith of this nation; that it is rapidly filling the land with rationalism; that it is destroying the authority of the Holy Scriptures; that it is educating men who prefix "Reverend" and affix "D.D." to their names, the more effectually to preach covert infidelity to Christian congregations; that, instead of the saving morality of the gospel of Christ, which rests upon revealed mysteries and supernatural gifts, it is offering us that same old array of the natural virtues or qualities which pierced, like broken reeds, the sides of all heathen nations. {695} And more than this, Catholics know by painful experience, that history cannot be compiled, travels written, poetry, oratory, or romance inflicted upon a credulous public, without the stereotyped assaults upon the doctrines, discipline, and historical life of their church. From Walter Scott to Peter Parley, and from Hume, Gibbon, and Macaulay, to the mechanical compilers of cheap school-literature, it is the same story, told a thousand times oftener than it is refuted; so that the English language, for the last two centuries, may be said, without exaggeration, to have waged war against the Catholic Church. Indeed, so far as European history is considered, the difficulty must always be insurmountable; since it would always be impossible for the Catholic and Protestant to accept the same history of the Reformation or of the Papal See, or the political, social, and moral events resulting from or in any degree connected with those two great centres and controlling causes. Who could write a political history of Christendom for the last three hundred years and omit all mention of Luther and the Pope? And how is any school compendium of such history to be devised for the use of the Catholic and Protestant child alike? And if history be philosophy teaching by example, shall we expel it from our educational plan altogether? Or shall we oblige the Protestant child to study the Catholic version of history, and _vice-versa?_ Certainly, it is quite as just and politic to oblige the one as the other! Shall the "_majority_" control this? Who gave "_majority_" any such power or right? With us, the "_majority_" controls the "_state_;" and we have seen that the "_state_" becomes a usurper when it attempts this! We are quite sure that, if the Catholics were the "_majority;_" in the United States, and were to attempt such an injustice, our Protestant brethren would cry out against it, and appeal to the wise and liberal examples of Prussia and England, France and Austria! Now, is it not always as unwise, as it is unjust, to make a minority taste the bitterness of oppression? Men governed by the law of divine charity will bear it meekly, and seek to return good for evil; but all men are not docile; and majorities change sides rapidly and often in this fleeting world! Is it not wiser and more politic, even in mere regard to social interests, that all institutions, intended for the welfare of the people, should be firmly based upon exact and equal justice? This would place them under the protection of _fixed habit_, which in a nation is as strong as nature; and it would save them from the mutations of society. The strong of one generation may be the weak of the next; and we see this occurring with political parties within the brief spaces of presidential terms. Hence we wisely inculcate moderation and justice in political majorities, under the law of retribution.

Profoundly impressed with these views, and impelled by this commanding sense of duty, our Catholic people have created a vast network of schools over the country, _at a price_ which the world knows little of--the sacrifice which the poor man makes, who curtails the wheaten loaf that he may give to his child the spiritual bread! Ah! how many humble cottages and dreary tenement-houses could testify to that! {696} There are six millions of them here now; and still they come, from the deserted hearths beyond the seas. They are upright, industrious, and love the new land like the old! In war, they shoulder the musket; in peace, they are found filling every avenue of labor and enterprise. They contribute millions to the public revenue, and hundreds of millions to the productive industry of the country. Their own welfare and the highest interests of the country demand that their children and their children's children should be well instructed in secular learning, and thoroughly grounded in moral and religious knowledge. As we have shown, they cannot avail themselves of the public school system, as now organized, though they contribute largely to its support by their taxes. _They do not desire to interfere with that system_, as it seems at present to meet the wants, or at least the views, of their Protestant fellow-citizens; and they are, therefore, _not_ "opposed to the common schools" in the sense in which they have been represented to be. They simply ask that they may be allowed to participate in the only way open to them, that is, by the apportionment to them of a ratable part of the fund, in aid of their existing schools, and of such others as their numbers, in any given locality, may properly enable them to establish, subject to the limited supervision of the state, as we have before explained. We need go no further than Canada to witness this system operating harmoniously and to the best advantage. The argument generally used against it is, that this would destroy the unity and efficiency of the whole. Why is it not so in Prussia, Austria, France, England, and the British Colonies? Besides, the Catholic populations in this country are very much aggregated, as in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and in the large agricultural settlements throughout the North-Western States. Certainly, in such localities there could be no difficulty. It is contemplated by the school law that all these are to be educated. Then, why can they not be permitted to organize separate schools, as in the countries referred to? Such organization would be an integral part of the whole system; and the cost would be precisely the same. In fact, we learn from the Reports of Assistant Superintendents Jones and Calkins, made to Hon. S. S. Randall, the City Superintendent, and also from his Report made to the Hon. Board of Education, in December, 1866, that the school room provided in the city of New York (especially in the primary department) is altogether inadequate; and yet we know that tens of thousands of Catholic children could easily be cared for, if the means were afforded those who, even now, with the scantiest resources, are erecting parochial schools all over the city.

It would be impossible in a brief article to enter into details. Our purpose has been rather to set this question before a liberal public in its great leading aspects, as we are quite willing to trust to the wisdom and experience of our legislators to devise the proper plan and specifications. They will be at no loss for precedents. The statute-books of half a dozen countries may be consulted profitably. All we ask is, that this momentous question may be candidly considered and justly and generously disposed of. We hope that the day has gone by when such a question as this shall be met with passionate declamation or the obsolete cry of "no popery." {697} Disraeli has failed to stem the tide of popular reform in England by reviving the insane clamor of Lord George Gordon. The world has outgrown such narrow bigotry. Vital questions, affecting the conscience and the rights of multitudes of men, and deeply involving the welfare of nations, must henceforth be settled by calm and just decisions. Christendom will tolerate nothing else now. And surely, this free and wise Republic will not be the last to put into practice those principles of equality before the law, justice, and generous confidence in human nature, which it published to all the down-trodden nationalities of the earth, almost a century ago, over the signatures of Hancock, Livingston, and Carroll of Carrollton.

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The Eclipse Of The Sun Of August 18, 1868.

A Report Addressed By M. Janssen To The Marshal Of France, President Of The Bureau Of Longitudes.

Calcutta, November 3, 1868. M. Le Maréchal Et Ministre:

I have the honor of addressing to you, as President of the Bureau of Longitudes, my report on the eclipse of the 18th of last August, and upon some subsequent observations, which led me to the discovery of a method of observing the solar protuberances when the sun is not eclipsed. I will beg you to have the kindness to communicate this to the Bureau.

I have the honor to be, etc. etc., Janssen.

Mr. President:

I had the privilege of writing to you on the 19th of September last, to give you a brief account of my expedition. I am now able to furnish you with a more complete report of my observations during the great eclipse of the 18th of August.

The steamer of the Messageries Imperiales, in which I left France, landed me, on the 16th of July, at Madras, where I was received by the English authorities with great courtesy. Lord Napier, the governor of the province, gave me passage to Masulipatam upon a government boat. Mr. Grahame, an assistant collector, was sent with me to remove any difficulties which I might meet with in the interior.

On arriving, I had to select my station.

A chart of the eclipse shows that the central line, after crossing the Bay of Bengal, enters the peninsula of India at Masulipatam, and crossing the great plains formed by the delta of the Kistna, passes into a hilly country, containing several chains of mountains, on the frontier of the independent state of Nizzam. After receiving and considering much information on the subject, I determined to choose the city of Guntoor, situated on this central line, half-way between the mountains and the sea. I thus avoided the sea-fogs, very frequent at Masulipatam, as well as the clouds which often hang about lofty peaks.

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Guntoor is quite an important place, being the centre of a large cotton trade. This cotton comes mostly from Nizzam, and is shipped to Europe from the ports of Cocanada and Masulipatam. Several French merchants, with their families, live at Guntoor; they are descended, generally speaking, from those ancient and numerous families which in former times were the glory of our beautiful Indian colonies.

My observatory was at the residence of M. Jules Lefaucheur, who was so kind as to place at my disposal all the first story of his house, which is in the highest and best part of the city. The rooms of this first story communicated with a large terrace, upon which I erected a temporary structure suitable for the observations intended.

The instruments were several achromatic lenses of six inches aperture, and a Foucault telescope of twenty-one centimetres. The former were all mounted upon one stand. The general movement was given by a mechanism constructed by Messrs. Brunner Bros., which enabled one to follow the sun by a simple rotation.

The apparatus was furnished with finders of two and two and three quarter inches aperture, which were themselves good astronomical glasses. In spectral analysis, these finders have a peculiar importance; for by means of them the precise point of the object under examination is known, to which the slit of the spectroscope in the principal telescope is directed. It is therefore necessary that the cross-wires, or in general the sights placed in the field of the finder, should correspond with great exactness with the slit of the spectral apparatus, and I had, of course, taken great care to secure this essential point. Special micrometers were also provided, to measure rapidly the height and angle of position of the protuberances. As for the spectroscopes, I had chosen them of different magnifying powers, so as to answer to the different requirements of the various phenomena. Finally, the apparatus carried, at the eye-piece end, screens of black cloth, forming a dark chamber, in order to preserve the sensibility of the eye.

Besides these instruments, intended for the principal observations, I had brought a full set of very delicate thermometers, made with great skill by M. Baudin; also some portable spy-glasses, hygrometers, barometers, etc. Thus I was able to turn to account the kindness of MM. Jules, Arthur, and William Lefaucheur, who offered their services for the subsidiary work. M. Jules, who is a good draughtsman, undertook to sketch the eclipse. An excellent telescope, of three inches aperture, furnished with cross-wires, was assigned to his use; he practised with it the representation of the expected phenomena by means of artificial imitations of eclipses. The thermometric observations were given to M. Arthur, who was also directed to ascertain the brilliancy of the protuberances and of the corona at the moment of totality, by a very simple photometric process.

I was assisted in my own operations by M. Redier, a young subaltern, whom the commander of the steamer L'Imperatrice had supplied to me. The services of M. Redier, who has excellent observing qualities, were very useful to me.

The time which remained before the eclipse was employed in preliminary study and practice, which served to familiarize us with the handling of our instruments, and suggested to me various improvements in them.

{699}

The day approached, but the weather did not promise to be favorable. It had rained for some time all along the coast. These rains were considered as extraordinary and exceptional. Fortunately, they moderated gradually before the 18th; and on that day the sun rose unclouded, and dimmed only by a mist out of which it soon passed; and at the time when our telescopes showed us that the eclipse began, it was shining with its full splendor.

Every one was at his post, and the observations immediately commenced. During the first phases some thin vapors passed before the sun, which interfered somewhat with the thermometric measurements; but, as the moment of totality approached, the sky became sufficiently clear.

Meanwhile the light diminished sensibly, surrounding objects appearing as if seen by moonlight. The decisive moment was near, and we waited for it with some anxiety; this anxiety took nothing from our powers of observation, it rather stimulated and increased them; and it was, besides, fully justified by the grandeur of the spectacle which nature was preparing for us, and by the consciousness that the fruits of our thorough preparations and of a long voyage would depend on the use now made of a few minutes.

The solar disc was soon reduced to a narrow bright arc, and we redoubled our attention. The slits of the spectroscopes were kept precisely upon the part of the moon's limb where the last light of the sun would be seen, so that they would be directed to the lower regions of the solar atmosphere at the moment of contact of the discs.

The total obscuration occurred instantaneously, and the spectral phenomena also changed immediately in a very remarkable manner. Two spectra, formed of five or six very bright lines--red, yellow, green, blue, and violet--occupied the field in place of the prismatic image of the sun which had just disappeared. These spectra, about one minute (of arc) long, corresponded line for line, and were separated by a dark space in which I could see no lines.

The finder showed that these two spectra were caused by two magnificent protuberances which were now visible on each side of the point of contact. One of them, that on the left, was more than three minutes (or one tenth of the sun's diameter) in height; it looked like the flame of a furnace, rushing violently from the openings of the burning mass within, and driven by a strong wind. The one to the right presented the appearance of a mass of snowy mountains, with its base resting on the moon's limb, and enlightened by a setting sun. These appearances have been carefully drawn by M. Jules Lefaucheur. I will therefore only remark before quitting the subject, which I shall have to treat subsequently under a special aspect, that the preceding observation shows at once:

1st. The gaseous nature of the protuberances, (the lines being bright.)

2d. The general similarity of their chemical composition, (the spectra corresponding line for line.)

3d. Their chemical species, (the red and blue lines of their spectrum being no other than the lines C and F of the solar one, and belonging, as is well known, to hydrogen gas.)

Let us now return to the dark space which separated the spectra of these protuberances. It will be remembered that, at the moment of the total obscuration, the slits were tangent to the solar and lunar discs, and were therefore directed toward the circumsolar regions immediately above the photosphere, in which regions M. Kirchhoff's theory places the atmosphere of vapors, which produces by absorption the dark lines of the solar spectrum. {700} This atmosphere, when shining by its own light, should, according to the same theory, give a reversed solar spectrum, that is to say, one composed entirely of bright lines. This is what we were expecting and trying to verify, and it was to make the proof decisive that I had used so many precautions. But we have just seen that only the protuberances gave positive or bright-line spectra. Now, it is very certain that, if an atmosphere formed of the vapors of all the substances which have been found in the sun really existed above the photosphere, it would have given a spectrum at least as brilliant as that of the protuberances, which were formed of a gas much less dense and less luminous. It must, then, be admitted that, if this atmosphere exists, its height is so small that it has escaped notice.

I must also add that this result did not much surprise me; for my investigations on the solar spectrum had led me to doubt the reality of any considerable atmosphere around the sun, and I am more and more inclined to think that the phenomena of elective absorption, ascribed by the great physicist of Heidelberg to an atmosphere exterior to the sun, are clue to the vapors of the photosphere itself, in which the solid and liquid particles forming the luminous clouds are floating. This view is not merely in harmony with the beautiful theory on the constitution of the photosphere which we owe to M. Faye, but even seems to be a necessary deduction from it.

In fine, the eclipse of the 18th of August appears to me to show that the formation of the solar spectrum cannot be explained by the theory heretofore admitted, and I propose a correction to this theory as above indicated.

To return to the protuberances. During the total obscuration, I was much impressed by the extreme brilliancy of their spectral lines. The idea immediately occurred to me that they might be seen even when the sun was unobscured; unfortunately the weather, which became cloudy after the eclipse, did not allow me to try the experiment on that day. During the night, the method and the means presented themselves clearly to my mind. Rising the next morning at three, I prepared for these new observations. The sun rose quite clear; as soon as it had risen from the haze of the horizon, I began to examine it, placing the slit of the spectroscope, by means of the finder, upon the same place where, the day before, I had seen the protuberances.

The slit, being placed partly on the solar disc and partly outside, gave, of course, two spectra, that of the sun and that of the protuberances. The brilliancy of the solar spectrum was a great difficulty; I partially avoided it by hiding the yellow, the green, and the blue portions, which were the most brilliant. All my attention was directed to the line C, dark for the sun, bright for the protuberance, and which, coming at a rather faint part of the spectrum, was seen with comparative ease.

I had not examined the right hand or western part of the protuberant region long when I suddenly noticed a small bright red line, forming an exact prolongation of the dark line G of the sun. Moving the slit so as to sweep methodically the region which I was exploring, this line remained, but changed its length and its brilliancy in the different parts, showing a great inequality in the height and brightness of the various parts of the protuberance. {701} This examination was resumed at three different times, and the bright line always appeared in the same circumstances. M. Redier, who assisted me with much interest in these experiments, saw it as well as I, and soon we could even predict its appearance by merely knowing what region we were examining. Soon after, I ascertained that the line F showed itself simultaneously with G.

In the afternoon, I returned to the region examined in the morning; the bright lines again showed themselves, but they indicated great changes in the distribution of the protuberant matter; the lines broke up sometimes into isolated fragments which would not unite with the principal one, notwithstanding the shifting of the slit. This suggested the existence of scattered clouds formed during the forenoon. In the region of the great (or left hand) protuberance, I found some bright lines, but their length and arrangement showed that great changes had also occurred here.

These first observations already showed that the coincidence of the lines G and F was real, and that hydrogen was certainly the most important element in these circumsolar masses. They also established the rapidity of the changes which these bodies undergo, which cannot be perceived during the short duration of an eclipse.

The following days, I availed myself of all the opportunities allowed by the weather to apply and perfect the new method, at least as far as was permitted by the character of the instruments, which had not been constructed to suit this new idea.

Observing very attentively the lines of the protuberances, I have sometimes noticed that they penetrated into the dark lines of the solar spectrum, showing thus that the protuberance extends over part of the sun's disc. This result was naturally to be expected; but the interposition of the moon has always made its proof impossible during eclipses.

I will also detail here an observation made on the 4th of September at a favorable time, which shows how rapidly the protuberances change their form and position.

At 9h. 50m., the examination of the sun showed a mass of protuberant matter in the lower part of the disc. To determine its shape, I used a method which may be called chronometric, since time is employed in it as the standard of measure.

In this method, the telescope is placed in a fixed position, so chosen that by the diurnal movement of the sun all parts of the region to be explored shall come in turn into the field of the spectroscope; and at determinate times the length and situation of the spectral lines successively produced are noted.

The time occupied by the sun's disc in passing before the slit gives the value of a second of time in minutes of arc. This, combined with the length of the lines estimated in the same unit, gives the means for a graphic representation of the protuberance.

The application of this method to the study of the solar region just mentioned as seen on this occasion, showed a protuberance extending over about thirty degrees (or one twelfth) of the sun's circumference, ten of which were east of the vertical diameter, and twenty west. Near the extremity of the western part, a cloud was lying, distant one and a half minutes, or one twentieth of the sun's diameter, from its limb. This cloud, about two minutes long and one high, was parallel to the limb. {702} One hour afterward, a new drawing showed that the cloud had risen rapidly, and taken a globular form. But its movements soon became still quicker; for ten minutes later, at eleven o'clock, the globe was enormously extended in a direction perpendicular to the limb and to its previous position. A little mass of matter was also detached from the lower part, and hung between the sun and the main body of the cloud. Thick weather coming on prevented further observations.

To resume our remarks. Considered in regard to its principle, the new method is based upon the difference of the spectral properties of the protuberances and of the photosphere. The light of the latter emanates from solid or liquid particles, which are incandescent, and is incomparably brighter than that of the former; so that these have hardly been visible hitherto, except during eclipses. But the case is quite altered when we use the spectra of these bodies. For the solar light is spread over the whole extent of its spectrum, and thus much weakened; while that of the protuberances, on the contrary, is condensed into a few lines whose intensity bears some proportion to that of the corresponding solar ones. Hence their lines are quite easily seen in the field, together with those of the sun, though their ordinary images are entirely effaced by the dazzling light of the photosphere.

Another very fortunate circumstance for the new method comes to the support of the one just mentioned, namely, that the bright lines of the protuberances answer to the dark ones of the solar spectrum. Hence they are not only more easily seen in their own proper field, outside and on the edge of the solar spectrum, but they can even be followed into the interior of the latter, and by this means the protuberances can be traced upon the globe of the sun itself.

As regards the determination of chemical composition, the methods followed during total eclipses always carried with them some uncertainty; since, in the absence of the sun's light, graduated scales had to be employed to fix the position of the lines. The new method enables us to compare the two spectra directly.

As to the results obtained during the brief period in which this method has been used, they are as follows:

1st. That the luminous protuberances observed during total eclipses belong unquestionably to the circumsolar regions.

2d. That these bodies are mainly or entirely composed of incandescent hydrogen gas.

3d. That they are subject to movements of which no terrestrial phenomenon can give us any idea; since, though they are masses of matter having several hundred times the volume of the earth, they change completely their form and position in the course of a few minutes.

Such are the principal facts arrived at. I hope, notwithstanding the state of my eyes--fatigued by protracted experiments upon the subject of light--that I shall be able to continue my labors, and have the honor of submitting the results to the Bureau.

In conclusion, I will add, that I have also had an opportunity to continue my researches on the spectrum of the vapor of water. The climate of India, which is very moist at present, is quite favorable to these investigations. I am inclined to attribute to this spectrum a continually increasing importance. The whole series of my observations here and at Paris has made me confident of an elective action upon all the solar rays as far as the extreme violet, though in the latter such an action is much more difficult to establish with certainty. These experiments will form the subject of a separate communication.

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{703}

Who Shall Take Care Of The Poor?

First Article.

The duty of caring for the poor, which Christ laid upon his church, has been assumed in modern times by the civil power; and governments have sought, by legislative enactments and political machinery, to fill the place of those ecclesiastical charities which disappeared in the convulsions of the sixteenth century. It is needless to say that their attempts have failed, and that the problem, "Who shall take care of the poor?" is still, in all Protestant countries, practically unsolved. We feel, therefore, that no apology is necessary for entering upon its discussion here, and that any light which may be thrown upon the subject by ourselves or others will tend to elucidate one of the most perplexed and difficult social questions of the present age.

There are certain fundamental principles which any examination of this subject, from a Christian point of view, must assume, and in accordance with which all Christian theories and practice concerning it must proceed.

These principles may be thus briefly stated:

I. That the care of the poor devolves upon those who continue the mission of Christ in the redemption of mankind and accept and obey his command, "Feed my flock;" upon those whose discipline of character, at once personal and corporate, enables them to help the helpless, to reform the vicious, and to conciliate the dangerous, while their organization affords a guarantee of persistence in these good works and of the proper use of the means confided to them; in a word, upon those who combine the attributes of a providence at once universal and discerning, with equity in administration and energy in execution.

II. That the principle of action, by which this work alone can be effected, is what may be termed "absorbent substitution," that is, the voluntary assumption of poverty out of practical sympathy with the poor.

III. That the legitimate effect of this action is to encourage, aid, and guide the poor to help themselves, and to infuse into them that love for their neighbor which, by this mediation, becomes reciprocal.

IV. That the established means by which this work must be performed are, first: The church in her collective capacity; second, the orders of charity; third, the variously constituted beneficial societies; fourth, the hand of private Christian charity, the latter of which, in the discussion of this question as a public one, does not, however, enter into our consideration. {704} The three first mentioned are often found united in the same community: the church, represented by the congregation, containing Sisters of Charity or Mercy, and also assistant orders of pious persons, who, though bound by no vows, work in the world and aid the other orders with their purse and influence. Still, those who take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and who, in organized communities, devote themselves to works of charity, must be regarded as the most perfect organs of this Christian work. And these become thus voluntarily poor, self-denying, and exclusive, because not only is the healthy soul fortified and preserved in spiritual power by privation of the pleasures of the senses, but poverty itself becomes ennobled by the assumption, and its degradation disappears.

Treating these principles, for the present, as self-evident, we now inquire:

Who are _our_ poor, and how shall they be cared for?

Upon this question, the Catholic Church cannot limit her providential mission or assume a sectarian attitude. While preaching, by example, to the pious and humane of every creed, the zeal of active charity, she must extend her benefits to all those who need and seek her, without favor or distinction. This she must do to be consistent with her own historic record, and to fulfil the behest of her Lord.

Wherever Christian faith and love exist, "by their works ye shall know them." Charity is the test of the Catholic faith. Our Douay Catechism says that "the first fruit of the Holy Ghost is charity." Then it tells us what charity means, in the language of its effects, namely, "To feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to visit and ransom captives, to harbor the harborless, to visit the sick, to bury the dead:" a very matter of fact definition, but which implies that,

"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

The practice of charity alone can reconcile mankind by dissipating schism, and by thus re-establishing their unison, secure the triumph of the Christian church over the world.

This universal unity of spirit employs in its methods of action many distinct organs and corresponding varieties of function, and the time-honored maxim, _Una fides, una domus_, "One faith, one house," and the obedience to constituted authority, bind in the circle of good-will those orders which, though each adopts a particular rule and special use, amicably co-operate in their separation, like the branches of the same vine.

Whatever principles of action experience has sanctioned in Catholic charities, commend themselves alike to all Christians.

"Why is it," asks Mrs. Jameson, "that we see so many women, carefully educated, going over to the Catholic Church? For no other reason than for the power it gives them to throw their energies into a sphere of definite utility, under the control of a high religious responsibility."

To each of the notable aspects of human affliction corresponds, in the history of Christendom, one or more orders consecrated to its relief, and, far from being confined to mere palliative expedients, organic efforts toward the radical cure of our social evils have been developed under the influence of the Catholic Church.

Distinctive characters of the Catholic orders, though not confined to them, are celibacy and community of property. A bond of union purely spiritual dissolves and replaces those ties which develop the personality of the individual.

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No fair comparison can be instituted between Catholic and Protestant orders of charity, for the simple reason that marriage and the family, which perpetuate secular estates by entail or inheritance, or seek, in the exchange of love, an earthly heaven, act as effectual dissolvents on religious orders consecrated to a special work. The vitality of the Episcopalian charities, St. John's and St. Luke's, is now undergoing this experiment, to-wit: Can the requisite number of efficient nurses and officers be maintained without binding vows? Can the service of the order be organized with influences that shall counterpoise the temptations of worldly vanities and interests, the powerful attraction of the sexes, and the honorable ambition of becoming one's self a focus of social radiation?

Of course, it is not necessary to the effectiveness of a given service that it should always be rendered by the same individuals; but numbers avail not without discipline; and, while relays and successions are allowed, they must not be too frequent. The sacrifice of personal liberty, to a certain extent, is indispensable to the order and efficiency of co-operative charity. Hence it is not surprising that the first attempts in England to constitute Episcopalian orders of charity should generally have failed. This impulse was due to the humiliating lesson of the Crimean war, when Sisters of Charity and Mercy flocked from all Europe to the assistance of the French sick and wounded, when similar orders of the Greek Church came to befriend the afflicted Russian soldiers; but the English were perishing miserably, until their unlooked-for succor by the intervention of Miss Florence Nightingale and her heroic band.

The necessity thus apprehended, to fall back on the institutions of Catholicity, has recently occasioned the formation of orders, who take the vow of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Sisters of Mercy and Sisters of the _Contemplative Life_ may be seen in London, repairing to chapel through deserted streets in the early morning hours. Will such vows, unsanctioned by the public opinion of Protestant countries, be really binding? How has it proved at Valle Cruce?

Oppressed and alarmed by the increase of pauperism, and the worse than inefficiency of her poor-rates and secular measures of pauper-relief, England now feels that she has committed something near akin to suicide in the destruction of her religious orders. No longer "merry and wise," her political economists are splitting hairs to find just what pittance may suffice to keep the poor from dying of hunger without making them more comfortable than others whose pride refuses alms, so as not to set a premium on idleness.

"The notion popularized by Cobbett," says Herbert Spencer, arguing the question, "that every one has a right to a maintenance out of the soil, leaves those who adopt it in an awkward predicament. Do but ask them to specify, and they are set fast. Assent to their principle; tell them you will assume their title to be valid; and then, as a needful preliminary to the liquidation of their claim, ask for some precise definition of it; inquire what is a maintenance. They are dumb! Is it, say you, potatoes and salt, with rags and a mud cabin? or is it bread and bacon, in a two-roomed cottage? Will a joint on Sundays suffice? or does the demand include meat and malt-liquor daily? {706} Will tea, coffee, and tobacco be expected? and if so, how many ounces of each? Are bare walls and brick floors all that is needed? or must there be carpets and paper-hanging? Are shoes considered essential? or will the Scotch practice be approved? Shall the clothing be of fustian? If not, of what quality must the broadcloth be? In short, just point out where, between the two extremes of starvation and luxury, this something called a maintenance lies. How else shall we know whether enough has been awarded, or whether too much? One thinks that a bare subsistence is all that can fairly be demanded. Another hints at something beyond. A third maintains that a few of the enjoyments of life should be provided for. And some of the more consistent, pushing the doctrine to its legitimate result, will rest satisfied with nothing short of community of property."

What this argument renders most apparent is, the necessity for an umpire, or mediatorial power, between collective society and the individual or family requiring aid, a power sympathetic alike with those who have more, and with those who have less, than necessity demands, and whose social position shall derive, from a source superior to either, a _prestige_ which will inspire confidence in its discretion and give a certain authority to its decisions. If personal beneficence or corporate guarantees suffice for the relief of sufferers, or to obtain for those able and willing the opportunity of suitable employment, the mediatorial power will not interfere. If, on the other hand, appeal be made to it, it may act either by the exercise of its own faculties, or as the trustee of social goods; a mutual intelligence bureau of higher grade than our ordinary business offices. Such a function the Catholic Church and its orders of charity fulfilled in England, and may yet fulfil in America.

Mr. John Stuart Mill well observes, that the state cannot undertake to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving indigent. It owes no more than subsistence to the first, and can give no less to the last. Since it must provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor--who have not offended is to give a premium to crime. Guardians and overseers are not fit to be trusted to give or withhold other people's money according to their verdict on the morality of the person soliciting it, and it would show much ignorance of the ways of mankind to suppose that such persons, even in the almost impossible case of their being qualified, will take the trouble of ascertaining and sifting the past conduct of a person in distress, so as to form a rational judgment on it. Private charity can make these distinctions, and, in bestowing its own money, is entitled to do so according to its own judgment.

It is admitted to be right that human beings should help one another; and the more so in proportion to the urgency of the need. In all cases of helping, we distinguish the consequences of the assistance itself, and the consequences of relying on the assistance. The former are generally beneficial, but the latter for the most part injurious; so much so, in many cases, as greatly to outweigh the value of the benefit. There are few things more mischievous than that people should rely on the habitual aid of others for the means of subsistence, and unhappily there is no lesson which they more easily learn. The problem to be solved is, how to give the greatest amount of needful help with the smallest encouragement to undue reliance on it. {707} Energy and self-dependence are, however, liable to be impaired by the absence of help as well as by its excess. It is even more fatal to exertion to have no hope of succeeding by it than to be assured of succeeding without it. When the condition of any one is so disastrous that his energies are paralyzed by discouragement, assistance is a tonic, not a sedative. It braces instead of deadening the active faculties, always provided that the assistance is not such as to dispense with self-help by substituting itself for the person's own labor, skill, and prudence, but is limited to affording him a better hope of attaining success by those legitimate means. This accordingly is a test to which all plans of philanthropy should be brought, whether intended for the benefit of individuals or of classes, and whether conducted on the voluntary or the government principle.

Overlooking the spiritual forces which religious charity brings to bear in elevating the moral tone of character, Mr. Mill finds the foregoing principles well applied by the English Poor-Law of 1834, because, while it prevents any person, except by his own choice, from dying of hunger, it leaves their condition as much as possible below that of the poorest who find support for themselves. Mr. Mill's logic here seems to arrive at the _reductio ad absurdum_; for the state of these poorest of the working poor, whom pride forbids to claim pauper relief, is too distressing for charity, acting only below that level, to be of any avail. Usually inclined to the most liberal and humane views, Mr. Mill has here given way to a Protestant prejudice, which regards as ill-advised the more whole-souled Catholic style of charity. The following extract from De Vere's work shows the contrast, and affords a good answer to this overcautiousness about doing too much. All depends upon the spirit in which charity is bestowed; it should be cordial, not humiliating and distressing:

"Most of the Sisters are from the class of servants and needle-women; but there are many who, having been brought up to enjoy all the comforts and even elegances of life, have willingly renounced all to make themselves the humblest servants of the poor, to wash, and cook, and _beg_ for those who have been beggars all their lives. The secret of all this lies in this, that the Sisters see, in their poor, Jesus Christ himself, to wait on whom must be their highest glory. From this, then, springs the most delightful interchange of feeling between the Sisters and their pensioners; for these poor people reverence with the liveliest gratitude those who seem to them as the angels of God sent to redeem them from all their misery and wretchedness, to comfort their bodies, and enlighten their souls. The change wrought in the old people after they have been with the Sisters a little while, is said to be most remarkable. From being fractious, complaining, and idle, they grow cheerful and contented in the highest degree, and every one is anxious to do something to contribute to the common stock. '_Our_ houses, _our_ Sisters,' they say--a type of the perfect union which reigns amongst them. Everything is done by the Sisters to cultivate a spirit of cheerfulness; they are treated as children, and every opportunity is embraced of making them a little festival. The beautiful simplicity of childhood seems to return in all its fulness to these poor creatures, whose lives have been spent in vice and misery. From a state approaching to brutality, they revive even to gayety. Well may they say as they do, 'We never were happy until we came here.' On great occasions they sing and dance, and the Sisters join with them. When the anniversary of the house of Rouen was lately celebrated, the old woman who had been the first pensioner was crowned as the queen of the day, and her lowly seat decked with flowers, whilst her aged companions cheered her with the heartiest good will.

{708}

"The tender regard with which the Sisters cherish the poor on whom they wait, calls forth the best feelings of their hearts, so long dead to every human charity. They respond by the most refreshing cordiality; but truly hearts could not resist the winning kindness with which they are invariably treated. One little incident may illustrate how above all selfish considerations the law of kindness prevails: One old woman was anxious to be received among the 'Little Sisters' somewhere in France. Her case well deserved the privilege, but the old woman insisted on bringing also into the house her hen and her sparrow. Without these companions, she would not enter; she would rather forego the advantage offered to her. The old woman, her hen, and her sparrow were all admitted together, anything rather than lose an opportunity of doing good.

"Selfishness cannot long exist where such examples of self-denial are ever present in these Sisters. They take the worst of everything for themselves. Even in the longest established houses there are no chairs except for the old people; the Sisters 'sit upon their heels.' A Jesuit father, on one day visiting one of the houses, found the Sisters just sitting down to dinner. They had nothing to drink out of but odd and broken vessels, mustard-pots, jam-pots, etc.; all in such a dilapidated condition that the good father hastened off the very first penitent, who came to him for confession, with an injunction to buy a dozen of glasses and send them to the house of his '_Petites Sceurs_.' Such is their voluntary poverty!

"Every time a house is opened, so soon as a sufficient number of poor are collected, a retreat is preached. The fruits of these retreats, in those who have been so long absent from the sacraments, is wonderful. Thus the house is furnished with those who serve to set a good example to all those who are afterward admitted.

"Nothing can exceed the gratitude of these poor creatures when reconciled with God. They embrace the Sisters with tears. 'It is seventy-five years since I drew near to God,' said one; 'and now I am going to receive him to-morrow.' A poor barber who had lost the use of his hands through rheumatism, and, being unable to exercise his profession, had fallen into such a state of destitution that he was thankful to accept an asylum in one of the houses of the 'Little Sisters,' was observed, after his confession, to be looking at his hands. 'What are you doing?' was asked of him. 'I am looking at the finger of God,' he replied. This spirit of resignation and gratitude is nearly universal, and the Sisters are not without their consolation even in this world."

To the special ministry of the Sisterhoods of Charity have been assigned the sick, infirm, and aged poor, whom all regard as proper objects of relief and pious care. We have shown, in our October number, how well they satisfied alike the Christian and the economic need. Mrs. Jameson, in the work there referred to, [Footnote 273] has strongly contrasted the conditions of the "English workhouse system" (which is the same as ours) with the religious management not only of the sick-poor, but also of the criminal and most degraded classes. Take, for instance, the Austrian prison at Neudorf. This prison is an experiment which as yet had only had a three years' trial when Mrs. Jameson visited it, but had already succeeded so well, both morally and economically, that the Austrian government was preparing to organize eleven others on the same plan. It began by the efforts of two humane ladies to find a refuge for those wretched creatures of their own sex who, after undergoing their term of punishment, were cast out of the prisons. They obtained the aid of two Sisters of a religious order in France, devoted to the reformation of lost and depraved women. Government soon enlarged their sphere of action, and confided to them the administration of a prison, penitentiary, and hospital, with several buildings and a large garden.

[Footnote 273: _Sisters of Charity, Catholic and Protestant_.]

"In its management, I found more than two hundred criminals, separated into three classes. The first class consisted of desperate characters, the refuse of the prisons at Vienna, who are brought under a strong armed guard, bound hand and foot. Their appearance was either stupid, gross, and vacant or frightful from the predominance of evil propensities. The second class, drafted from the first, were called the penitents, and showed, in the expression of their countenances, an extraordinary change from the newly arrived. They were allowed to assist in the house, to cook and to wash, and to work in the garden, which last was a great boon. There were more than fifty of these, and they were, at least, humanized. The third class were the voluntaries who, when their term had expired, preferred remaining in the house and were allowed to do so. Part of the profit of their work was retained for their benefit.

{709}

"Twelve women, aided by three chaplains, a surgeon, and a physician, none of whom resided in the establishment, managed the whole. They had dismissed the soldiers and police-officers, finding that they needed no other means of constraint than their dignity, good sense, patience, and tenderness. There was as much of frightful physical disease as there was of moral disease, crime, and misery. Two Sisters acted as chief nurses and apothecaries. The ventilation and cleanliness were perfect. When I expressed my astonishment that so small a number of women could manage such a set of wild and wicked creatures, the answer was, 'If we want assistance, we shall have it; but it is as easy with our system to manage three hundred as one hundred or as fifty. The power is not in ourselves, it is granted from above.' Here men and women were acting together; and in all the regulations, religious and sanitary, there was mutual aid, mutual respect, and interchange of experience; but the Sisters were subordinate only to the chief civil and ecclesiastical authorities; the internal administration rested with them."

The "Little Sisters of the Poor" have inspired the following remarks, which apply to many other orders actively engaged in works of charity:

"Their records demonstrate that religious institutions do, effectually and cheaply, what the clumsy and lifeless machinery of the state does at an enormous cost and peril, with a very questionable preponderance of gain over loss. Charity is a religious work, and these orders are specially qualified, as religious, to lead the charity of the country; they have a special vocation and a supernatural aim; they unite the strongest motives for individual exertion with the highest development of the co-operative system; they are free from the impediments of other parties; what they give establishes no legal or political right, yet it recognizes a moral claim and provides for a human want. In addressing the statesmen of this country, we can prove that one thousand dollars a year, thus wisely spent in well-organized charity, goes twice as far as two thousand dollars a year spent with a blundering alternation of prodigality and cruelty, such as characterizes the management of our secular charities. Organic bodies contain within themselves a principle of endless adaptation. The church, herself an organic body, is the fruitful mother of all such organizations as the moral needs of man require; nor is there any reason to doubt that she can help the modern pauper as readily as the captives, the lepers, and the laborers in mines for whom her mediaeval orders worked. The recent institution of the 'Little Sisters of the Poor' derives a peculiar interest from the mode in which it approaches that special trial of modern society, pauperism, and it may, with the divine blessing, advance from its present humble beginning to enterprises which, alike on the ground of theology and of sound political economy, are beyond the efforts of the most beneficent governments now existing."

The gospels abundantly attest the loving and tender behavior of Christ toward the poor and the afflicted of every class. It is important to note how lively and loyal is the tradition of this conduct in the Christian church, from its earliest periods to our own day. It was a favorite turn in the mediaeval legends of charity that our Lord should reveal himself, even in the body, to those who had, for his love, consoled some poor object of compassion. It is written of St. Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary, that she kept always near her, and herself served, thirteen sick poor, in memory of Christ and the twelve apostles.

"Among the sick was a poor little leper named Helias, whose condition was so deplorable that no one would take charge of him. Elizabeth, seeing him thus abandoned by all, felt herself bound to do more for him than for any other; she took and bathed him herself, anointed him with a healing balm, and then laid him in the bed, even that which she shared with her royal husband. Now it happened that the duke returned to the castle whilst Elizabeth was thus occupied. His mother ran out immediately to meet him, and when he alighted she said, 'Come with me, dear son, and I will show thee a pretty doing of thy Elizabeth.' 'What does this mean?' said the duke. 'Only come,' said she, 'and thou wilt see one she loves much better than thee.' Then, taking him by the hand, she led him to his chamber and to his bed, and said to him, Now look, dear son, thy wife puts lepers in thy bed without my being able to prevent her. {710} She wishes to give thee leprosy, thou seest it thyself.' On hearing these words, the duke could not repress a certain degree of irritation, and he quickly raised the covering of his bed; but, at the same moment, the Most High unsealed the eyes of his soul, and, in place of the leper, he saw the figure of Jesus Christ crucified extended on his bed. At this sight he remained motionless, as did his mother, and began to shed abundant tears without being able at first to utter a word. Then, turning round, he saw his wife, who had gently followed in order to calm his wrath against the leper. 'Elizabeth,' said he, 'my dear, good sister, I pray thee often to give my bed to such guests. I shall always thank thee for this, and be thou not hindered by any one in the exercise of thy virtue.' Then he knelt and prayed thus to God, 'Lord, have mercy upon me a poor sinner. I am not worthy to see all these wonders.'" [Footnote 274]

[Footnote 274: Montalembert, _Life of St. Elizabeth_.]

For the many illustrations of the wonderful diffusion of benevolence in the early ages of the Christian church, in contrast with the truculent spirit of the contemporaneous paganism, see Rev. Dr. Manahan's _Triumph of the Catholic Church_, etc.

We recall here the mention of John, Patriarch of Alexandria, who asked of his clergy a register of all the poor and destitute in that city. "Go," said he, "and get me a full list of my masters."

From the Theodosian code, it appears that the church owned large vessels, employed either in bringing to some dioceses provisions for their own flocks, or in sending help to the most afflicted communities, from Egypt even unto Gaul.

"The Cenobites, or Monks of the Desert," says St. Augustine, "used to freight these ships of charity with grain, obtained by them in exchange for the mats and baskets which they manufactured." The vast hospital, founded by St. Basil, of Cappadocia, near Caesarea, is called by St. Gregory" a new city built for the sick and poor."

Hospitals were so great an innovation on the customs of the ancient classic world, that the Emperor Julian, surnamed "The Apostate," tried in vain to introduce them. Repelling the Christian doctrine, he was sensible of the influence of Christian charity, and would fain have engrafted on the pagan stock this fruit of another dispensation.

Why are the poor and afflicted especially given in charge to the church, and why does the Christian see them with quite other eyes than those of mere benevolence? Why is Christ identified, in his birth and companionship, with the poor? Why are the most suffering classes the first objects of his care and mediation?

If it is written that "He who shall give to one of my disciples only so much as a cup of cold water in my name, shall not lose his reward," it is also written that the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the prisoner, are all our brethren in Christ. It is by virtue of that susceptibility, which the exercise of charity develops in us, that we become consciously "members one of another in the body of Christ."

Jesus Christ came to awaken in humanity a conscience including our neighbor, a conservative instinct embracing the relations of the individual with the species, unlimited by family, clan, or nation; and which transcends the analysis of a Malthus, a Locke, or a La Rochefoucauld. [Footnote 275]

[Footnote 275: That Sister of the Poor, whom you pass in the street with her basket, and perhaps look down upon as on a creature of inferior grade, is living closer to the heart of universal love, is deeper in celestial wisdom than the proud philosopher; leads a life more heroic in its abnegation and humility than the general with his bloody laurels. This is so, because the divine influx of life moulds the will and the affections, and moves the bowels of compassion long before the brain matures its schemes of action.]

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The suffering persons or classes are the atoms, the organs, or the local points where the life of humanity is threatened or compromised; thither, with unwonted energy, must its vital resources be directed; and how directed? Here we find the contrast between the spirit of Christ and that of pagan or schismatic countries. Ignoring the true unity of man, paganism merely suppressed the effects of misery by suppressing the person of the miserable. It did not consider that the spirit of cruelty, developed or encouraged in this elimination, is itself a living cause and propagator of human misery. Religious sympathy alone could quicken the intelligence to this perception, and find something precious in the life of the wretch rescued from his wretchedness; find beneath the rags, the dirt, and the chains, beneath ignorance, the vices, and diseases, that "a man's a man for a' that." Again, Christianity discerned precious discipline of virtue in the exercise of charity, and practised it no less for the sake of the giver than that of the receiver. This is a practical commentary on the axiom of human unity or solidarity, anticipating the fuller light which may be expected from a knowledge of our ulterior destinies.

Wherever the church has nobly filled her part as the social conscience of Christendom, (a function for which the confessional so well adapts her,) she has been the intelligent mediator between those who need to give or to serve, and those who are really in need; she has maintained a social equilibrium while averting the jealousies and hatreds of classes, and by her enlightened and judicious distribution has prevented charity from ministering to vices and imposture.

"The _poor_ ye shall have always with you." The worst prejudices only will interpret this saying of our Lord so as to discourage our efforts to eliminate, from the condition of the poor, its actual vices, disgraces, and miseries. This once effected by means, the success of which experience has verified, there remains an honorable poverty due to the disinterested devotions of science, art, and social affections, in which the love of our neighbor, under divers forms, absorbs cupidity and the cares of self-preservation. The church has always encouraged vows of voluntary poverty, and directed the zeal which animated them to Christian uses. She has permitted the rich to expiate their crimes by sharing their fortunes with the poor, even by soliciting alms for them; and we are told that Roman nobles have been seen, during this very year, thus begging in the streets of Rome. To a noble poverty belong the first years, and often the whole life, of the inventor, of the true artist, of all whose originality of conception or fidelity to the ideal transcends prudential economy. We may glance but in passing at that "Bohemia," where floating wrecks mingle in disorder with germinal forces of the social future. In proportion as the constitution of societies shall be perfected in kind and useful labors, those in whose characters friendship predominates, whether attached to holy orders like the Trappists and Sisters of Charity, or simply members of the church of Christ, will content themselves with the common _minimum_, and work in their elected spheres without care for any other material compensation. To such has Christ said: "Take no care what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed," etc. "Consider the lilies," etc. We shall not confound these noble poor with paupers, a term which comprehends indifferently the victims of misfortune, of vice, and of disease; deficient in faculties either corporeal or mental, or in consistency of purpose, principle, and will. {712} _Pauperism_ is not to be regarded as a state of suffering to which the Christian should be resigned; far from being an expiation of sin, it is not only humiliation, but degradation and perversion, and owes its parasite existence to the absence or decline of Christian life.

The Catholic Church commenced an exterminating war on pauperism in those fraternal associations which sprang from the breath of the Saviour, and which its religious orders have never intermitted. Disbanded by the persecutions of the Roman empire, they rallied to works of charity; and, gradually obtaining spiritual ascendency over Europe, organized agriculture and the arts of peace. In the sixth century, the Benedictines and Columbans reclaimed the soils of Europe from their wilderness, and their peoples from the worst of barbarism.

The monasteries and convents, considered from the point of view of political and social economy, were agricultural, scientific, and domestic associations, with fields, gardens, and orchards, libraries, laboratories, and workshops, provided with all the means and facilities known in their age and country for the subjection of nature's resources to the progressive evolution of humanity. Fusing the nobles and the people, absorbing, in the sentiment of our common fatherhood in God and brotherhood in Christ, the invidious distinctions of caste, reconciling again in their administration the behests of spiritual culture with the exigencies of material existence and refinement of taste in letters and the arts, the monastic orders were for Christendom a most benign providence. Their charities never have been limited to the necessities of mere subsistence, like the secular dolings out of _so-called_ modern charity. Hearts must respond to the needs of hearts, and brains to those of brains; in other words, the organization of Christian charity essentially embraces social life and education, intellectual and moral culture, as well as the conditions of labor, of remuneration, of lodging, of clothing, and nourishment, comprised in the guarantee of access to the soil. By separating the material from the spiritual elements of charity, Christendom retrogrades into paganism; less brutal, less ferocious, the economic (?) workhouse system is colder and still more inhuman than those methods of summary destruction by which Greece removed her supernumerary helots, or Rome her infirm poor.

"It is not without a mingled shame and fear," says Mrs. Jameson, of the English workhouse, "that I approach this subject. Whatever their arrangement and condition, in one thing I found all alike--the want of a proper moral supervision.

"The most vulgar of human beings are set to rule over the most vulgar; the pauper is set to manage the pauper; the ignorant govern the ignorant; every softening or elevating influence is absent or of rare occurrence, and every hardening and depraving influence continuous or ever at hand. Never did I visit any dungeon, any abode of crime or misery, in any country, which left me the same crushing sense of sorrow, indignation, and compassion--almost despair--as some of our English workhouses. Never did I see more clearly what must be the inevitable consequences where the feminine and religious influences are ignored; where what we call charity is worked by a stern, hard machinery; where what we mean for good is not bestowed but inflicted on others in a spirit not pitiful, nor merciful, but reluctant and adverse, if not cruel. Perhaps those who hear me may not all be aware of the origin of our parish workhouses. They were not designed as penitentiaries, although they have really become such. They were intended to be religious and charitable institutions, to supply the place of those conventual hospitals and charities which, with their revenues, were suppressed by Henry VIII.

{713}

"The epithet 'charitable' could never be applied to any parish workhouse I have seen. Our machine-charity is as much charity, in the Christian sense, as the praying-machines of the Tartars are piety.

"These institutions are supported by a variable tax, paid so reluctantly, with so little sympathy in its purpose, that the wretched paupers seem to be regarded as a sort of parish locusts, sent to devour the substance of the rate-payers; as the natural enemies of those who are taxed for their subsistence, almost as criminals; and I have no hesitation in saying that the convicts in some of our jails have more charitable and more respectful treatment than the poor in our workhouses. Hence, a notion prevails among the working-classes that it is better to be a criminal than a pauper--better to go to a jail than to a workhouse.

"Between the poor and their so-called guardians, the bond is anything but charity.

"A gentleman who had served the office said to me: 'I am really unfit to be a poor-law guardian; I have some vestige of humanity left in me!' Under these guardians, and in immediate contact with the poor, are a master and a matron, who keep the accounts, distribute food and clothing, and keep order. Among them some are respected and loved, others hated or feared; some are kindly and intelligent, others of the lowest grade. In one workhouse the master had been a policeman, in another the keeper of a small public-house, in another he had served in the same workhouse as porter. The subordinates are not of a higher grade, except occasionally the school-master and school-mistress, whom I have sometimes found struggling to perform their duties, sometimes quite unfitted for them, and sometimes resigned to routine and despair.

"In the wards for the old and the sick, the intense vulgarity, the melancholy dulness, mingled with a strange license and levity, are dreadful. I attribute both to the utter absence of the religious and feminine element.

"But is there not always a chaplain? The chaplain has seemed to me in such places rather a religious accident than a religious element. When he visits a ward to read and pray once a week, perhaps there is a decorum in his presence; the oaths, the curses, the vile language cease; the vulgar strife is silenced, to recommence the moment his back is turned. I remember one instance in which the chaplain had requested that the poor, profligate women might be kept out of his way. They had, indeed, shown themselves somewhat obstreperous and irreverent. I saw another chaplain of a great workhouse so shabby that I should have mistaken him for one of the paupers. In doing his duty, he would fling a surplice over his dirty, torn coat, kneel down at the entrance of a ward, hurry over two or three prayers, heard from the few beds nearest to him, and then off to another ward. The salary for this minister for the sick and poor was twenty pounds a year. This, then, is the religious element; as if religion were not the necessary, inseparable, ever-present, informing spirit of a Christian charitable institution, but rather something extraneous and accidental, to be taken in set doses at set times. This is what our workhouses provide to awaken the faith, rouse the conscience, heal the broken spirit, and light up the stupefied faculties of a thousand unhappy, ignorant, debased human beings congregated together.

"Then as to the feminine element in a great and well-ordered workhouse, under conscientious management, (to take a favorable specimen,) I visited sixteen wards, in each ward from fifteen to twenty-five sick, aged, bedridden, or helpless poor. In each ward all the assistance given and all the supervision were in the hands of one nurse and a helper, both chosen from among the pauper women supposed to be the least immoral and drunken. The ages of the nurses might be from sixty-five to eighty years; the assistants were younger.

"The number of inmates under medical treatment in the year 1854 in the London workhouses was over 50,000, (omitting one, the Marylebone.) To these there were 70 paid nurses and 500 pauper nurses and assistants, (not more than one fifth of the number requisite for effective nursing, even if they were all able nurses.)

"As the unpaid pauper nurses have some additional allowance of tea or beer, it is not unusual for the medical attendant to send such poor feeble old women as require some little indulgence to be nurses in the sick wards."

Such is the standard of qualification, and as for their assistants, Mrs. Jameson found some of them nearly blind and others maimed of a limb. She remembers no cheerful faces; their features and deportment were melancholy, or sullen, or bloated, or harsh, and these are the nurses to whom the sick poor are confided!

{714}

"In one workhouse the nurses had a penny a week and extra beer; in another the allowance had been a shilling a month, but recently withdrawn by the guardians from motives of economy. The matron told me that while this allowance continued, she could exercise some control over the nurses, she could stop their allowance if they did not behave well; now she has no hold on them! They all drink. Whenever it is their turn to go out for a few hours, they come back intoxicated, and have to be put to bed in the wards they are set over!"

Mrs. Jameson speaks of bribery as the only means by which some of the bedridden patients could obtain help.

"Any little extra allowance of tea or sugar, left by pitying friends, went in this way. One nurse made five shillings a week by thus fleecing the poor inmates. Those who could not pay this tax were neglected, and implored in vain to be turned in their beds. The matron knows that these things exist, but has no power to prevent them; she knows not what tyranny may be exercised in her absence by her deputies, for the wretched creatures dare not complain, knowing how it would be visited upon them."

In some workhouses many who can work will not; in others the inmates are confined to such labor as is degrading, such as is a punishment in prisons, which excites no faculty of attention, or hope, or sympathy, which contemplates no improvement, namely, picking oakum, etc., and this lest there should exist some kind of competition injurious to tradesmen.

As to the "out-door relief" at certain workhouses, Mrs. Jameson says it was distributed to creatures penned up for hours in foul air, who waited sullenly for the bread doled out with curses. She complains again here of the system which brings a brutal and vulgar power to bear on vulgarity or brutality, the bad and defective organization to bear on one bad and defective, "so you increase and multiply and excite, as in a hot-bed, all the material of evil instead of neutralizing it with good, and, thus leavened, you turn it out on society to contaminate all around."

Rev. J. S. Brewer, a workhouse chaplain, in his lectures to ladies on practical subjects, writes of the insensible influence which the mere presence of ladies, their voice, their common words, their ordinary manners, their thoughts, all that they carry unconsciously about them, can exercise on the poor; but this applies to real ladies, cultivated, gentle, well-born, well-bred. There are no people more alive to gentle blood and gentle manners than the English poor. He confirms in other respects the preceding remarks of Mrs. Jameson, and says of the children:

"The disorderly girls and boys of our streets are mainly the produce of the workhouse and the workhouse schools. Over them the society has no hold, because they have been taught to feel that they have nothing in common with their fellow-men. Their experience is not of a home or parents, but of a workhouse and a governor, of a prison and of a jailer."

Nature exhibits two contrasted methods for controlling that _tendency to increase of population beyond a due proportion to the means of subsistence_, which seems to justify in the eyes of some political economists the partial destruction of the species by war. One of these methods is extermination; the other, elevation. Malthus says, in substance: I would share all my having with the poor. I would proclaim this the duty of the rich, were it possible, by even enforcing and continuing the most liberal distribution of goods, while all were working faithfully to increase the yield of the earth as fast as the mouths that consume it would multiply; but extensive observation and experience proves that, the easier life is made for the poor, the faster they increase; this increase is at a ratio so much greater than the means of subsistence are capable of reaching, that we should soon be all paupers unless we restrain each local population within the ratio of its provisions.

{715}

Malthus understood that high-toned character and uncommon force of will were essential to the perfection of such restraint. He invokes the influence of the church and of education to this effect. One step further, however, in the filiation of ideas would have led him to perceive a supreme harmony in the equilibrium between population and subsistence, arising out of the perfection of organic types and individual characters; so that _quality is the cure of quantity_.

If it be true, as travellers affirm, that in Europe the _temperate_ are divided from the _intemperate populations_ by a curve which, commencing at the eastern extremity of France, intersects Berlin and terminates at Sevastopol, being the northern limit of the vine-growing countries; then, _a fortiori_, will the greatest temperance be found among peoples whose refinement not only rejects distilled liquors but the coarser qualities of wine, and will have either the very best or none.

This law is universal. Compare the order of mammifers, a high type like man or the elephant, with a low type like the rabbit or mouse. Species are more prolific with each grade in their descent. Now compare the order of mammifers with the order of fishes, passing through the birds and reptiles, embracing all vertebrate animals; still the lower are more prolific, and consequently more subject to destruction. Now compare the vertebrate type with the insect, passing through the articulate. Still the same increase of numerical ratio down the scale of life; and when we reach polyps and plants, every section, every bud, may become a complete organism, and multiplication takes place by several methods at once--seeds, tubers, roots, suckers, buds, etc. Follow this law in the science of breeding. Even among fish, the fat and well-conditioned breed but slowly, and "ponds of misery" are kept for breeding carps. The history of the _turf_ verifies similar facts in the physiology of the horse.

We no longer wonder that the hovels of the suffering poor should swarm with children; but the analogies of the animal kingdom encourage us to believe that social and industrial procedures, which convert these children into Christians and launch them in the path of a general prosperity, will itself tend to reduce the ratio of their increase by a method more expedient than those of war, pestilence, or famine.

In conclusion: If the first of these natural methods of checking population be adapted to the world of the _fall_--a world of selfishness and sin--the other method is adapted to the world of the redemption--a world of Christian co-operation and love of our neighbor. By the first method, population is reduced so effectively that the most agreeable portions of the earth's surface remain almost untouched by human culture. When, by the triumph of true religion, wars and their consequences cease to vex humanity, population may increase until it covers the area of the habitable globe, without danger of starving itself, without sinking into pauperism. The numerical population of the world may increase while its actual ratio of propagation is diminished, and is harmonized with its capacity of production. Such is the logic of charity, which in relieving suffering aims at the spiritual elevation of character and the permanent protection of mankind.

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New Publications.

History Of Louisiana: The American Domination. By Charles Gayarré. New York: William J. Widdleton. 1866.

This is a handsome 8vo volume of 693 pages, of which 250 are devoted to the story of the defence of New Orleans by General Jackson, and 60 pages to a sketch of leading public events from 1816 to 1861. The first chapter opens thus:

"On the 20th of December, 1803, the colony of Louisiana had passed from the domination of Spain into that of the United States of America, to which it was delivered by France after a short possession of twenty days, as I have related in a former work," (_History of Louisiana, Spanish Domination_.)

It is to be regretted, we think, that this relation of the cession is not given in the volume before us. The causes, the antecedents, the inevitable necessity of the cession, are all practically American, and, therefore properly the subject for the opening chapter of the "American Domination."

We have not seen Mr. Gayarré's preceding volume, but presume he has well told the story of the cession. It is an interesting one. Martin's _History of Louisiana_ was very meagre on that point, and gave, if we remember correctly, little else than the text of the treaty. True, Martin's book was completed some forty years ago, when the author had not at hand the materials that now exist. Barbé Marbois's work was not then published.

The "American Domination," we venture to suggest, should have opened with at least a sketch or _résumé_ of the state of facts immediately preceding the cession--the condition of trade between the Upper Mississippi and New Orleans, the order of Morales, (October, 1802) closing the river, the supposition throughout the West that the action of Morales was authorized by the French government, the excitement caused by it, etc. etc.

The Mississippi to be closed!

It would be difficult at this day to convey an idea of the consternation and indignant anger of the inhabitants of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys at the announcement. The country was in a blaze of excitement. Meetings were held, resolutions passed, and, what was more significant, rifles were repaired, powder purchased, and knives sharpened.

When Germany, a few years since, sang and shouted

"Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien Deutschen Rhein,"

war may or may not have been imminent; but when the hunters of Kentucky and the backwoodsmen of Ohio swore, as they picked their flint-locks, "They sha'n't have the Mississippi!" the oath meant business. In their eyes the free navigation of the Father of Waters is a part of every Western man's heritage, [Footnote 276] and when he clears a farm in the great valley, the right freely to carry his produce down to the mouth of the Mississippi is to him simply what the lawyers would call an _easement_, passing with the title to his acres.

[Footnote 276: "No power in the world shall deprive us of this right."--_Petition to Congress_.]

Prominent on Mr. Gayarré's pages stands out the figure of Claiborne, Governor of Louisiana from 1804 to 1816. We rise from the perusal of Mr. Gayarré's book with a higher estimate than ever of this distinguished man.

Calm, prudent, wise, temperate, and magnanimous, Claiborne is one of the most admirable characters in American history.

{717}

When a virulent libel was published against him, on which the attorney-general thought it his duty to institute suit, Claiborne wrote him a noble letter requesting him to stop the prosecution, (p. 227.) "An officer whose hands and motives are pure," he said, "has nothing to fear from newspaper detraction, or the invectives of angry and deluded individuals. My conduct in life is the best answer I can return to my enemies. It is before the public, and has secured, and will, I am certain, continue to secure me the esteem and confidence of that portion of society whose approbation is desirable to an honest man. The lie of the day gives me no concern. Neglected calumny soon expires; notice it, and you gratify your calumniators; prosecute it, and it acquires consequence; punish it, and you enlist in its favor the public sympathy."

The story of the heroic defence of Fort Bowyer is well and spiritedly told by Mr. Gayarré, and that of the defence of New Orleans, in the various skirmishes and battles that for weeks preceded the grand culminating victory of January 8th, is, for the first time, clear and intelligible to us. Here Mr. Gayarré gives us several pages of nervous and picturesque writing. His description of "the night before the battle," and of the brave but disastrous charge of the British troops upon the American line, is excellent in spirit and in detail.

Mr. Gayarré explodes the popular story of the cotton-bale fortifications. There were none. "Some bales of cotton had been used to form the cheeks of the embrasures of our batteries, and notwithstanding the popular tradition that our breastworks were lined with it, this was the only one," etc. etc. (p. 456.)

The account of the two colored battalions which rendered such excellent service is interesting, as also Mr. Gayarré's comments on the celebrated British countersign of "Beauty and Booty."

Mr. Gayarré's history closes with a long paragraph, somewhat in the same dithyrambic vein that marks the pages of his first volume of Louisiana. He has, however, greatly improved both in style and judicious arrangement of matter, and, combining many of the best qualities of the historian with great aptitude of research and study, has undoubtedly made a mark in literature, his state may well be proud of, even though she be amenable to the reproach conveyed by the author at page 391.

It appears that, in 1814, Governor Claiborne advised one David McGee in regard to some literary work of the latter: "A love of letters has not yet gained an ascendency in Louisiana, and I would advise you to seek for your production the patronage of some one of the Northern cities."

"How bitter," comments Mr. Gayarré, "is the thought that it is true! How hard it is for the veracity of the Southern historian to admit that, even in 1864, a judicious and frank adviser would be compelled to say to a man of letters, in the language used by Claiborne in 1814, "I would advise you to seek for your production the patronage of some one of the Northern cities"!

----

Memorials Of Those Who Suffered For The Faith In Ireland in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries. By Myles O'Reilly, B.A., LL.D. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 462.

An elegant volume, containing biographies of the martyrs of the Reformation in Ireland, which we intend to notice at length in a future number.

----

Lectures On The Life, Writings, And Times Of Edmund Burke. By J. B. Robertson, Esq. London: John Philp. For sale by the Catholic Publication Society, 126 Nassau Street, New York.

{718}

In this volume, Professor Robertson, as an extremely conservative monarchist, and as an enthusiastic admirer of what he calls the "old temperate monarchy," best typified in modern politics by the government of England, the native land of the lecturer, treats of the history of the life, writings, and times of Edmund Burke, the most illustrious Irishman of the eighteenth century, and, in purely civil affairs of all times, from a monarchical point of view; and makes his lectures, which he seems to have designed for a biography of the greatest of British orators and statesmen, really the medium of an exposition of his own peculiar doctrines and opinions in the political relation, with such incidental notices of the immortal Burke as were deemed pertinent to the illustration and enforcement of the political speculations of the gifted lecturer, who appears to live and move in utter awe of "the spirit of revolution," and in utter detestation of "the sovereignty of the people" and of "the republic." The book is of value chiefly as showing how the complex affairs known as constituting the modern world are viewed by an Englishman of fine culture, eloquent expression, and very conservative instincts and sympathies.

The book is got out in Mr. Philp's best style; the paper, type, and binding are faultless.

----

Sadlier's Catholic Directory, Almanac, And Ordo, for the year of our Lord 1869.

This work is published in the same style as heretofore, and is, we presume, about as correct as can be expected of such a publication. There is one improvement, however, which _could_ be made at the expense of _one cent_ a copy, namely, to sew the book instead of _stitching_ it. The way it is now bound, several pages are defaced by the large holes punched through the book.

----

A Practical And Theoretical Method Of Learning The French Language. By A. Biarnois. D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1868.

Of all the systems hitherto devised to facilitate the study of the French language, and at the same time offer to the student a method which, in its development, will prove attractive to him, we are inclined to think the present one by M. Biarnois is in many respects to be preferred.

The idea in the invention of most of the modern systems is a good one: to give the pupil words and phrases before he is taught the rules for their grammatical construction. This is the design proposed by our author, and after an introductory article on pronunciation he gives us at once a sentence.

"On nous dit que le Sultan Mahmoud, par ses guerres perpétuelles, au dehors et sa tyrannie à l'intérieur, avait rempli les états de ses ancêtres de mine et de desolation; et avait dépeuplé, l'Empire Persan."

This sentence is thoroughly analyzed, which gives him occasion to explain: 1. Transposition and contractions of pronouns. 2. The gender and number of substantives. 3. Formation of the feminine of adjectives. 4. Of the plural of adjectives. 5. Place, elision, and contraction of the article. 6. Forms of negation. 7. Possessive pronouns. 8. Possessive, demonstrative, and indefinite adjectives, with many grammatical relations of all these.

This is followed by an original set of rules to find French words to express what we know in English, how to form verbs out of substantives, and to determine, without a dictionary, the conjugation to which each of these verbs belongs.

Again we have more phrases, accompanied by running explanatory notes, and the whole couched in a familiar conversational style which cannot fail of fixing the attention and impressing the memory of the student.

The latter half of the work, under the title Recapitulation, takes up the parts of speech in more regular order.

We confess that for young beginners we would prefer a certain amount of study in the admirable work of Dr. Emile Otto, as revised by Mr. Ferdinand Bôcher for English students, before taking up the method of M. Biarnois. The latter supposes a considerable advance in the knowledge of the English language, and he is compelled at the very outset to make use of words and phrases which, to youthful pupils, might need explanation fully as much as the corresponding ones in French. But for students in our colleges, who have already some notion of English or Latin grammar, we think this grammar of M. Biarnois is one of the best, and in many respects better than any that have come under our notice.

----

{719}

Tobacco And Alcohol. I. It Does Pay To Smoke II. The Coming Man Will Drink Wine. By John Fiske, M.A., LL.B. New York: Leypoldt & Holt. 1869.

It was hardly possible that Mr. Parton's attack on the "smokers and drinkers" of this generation should pass without a reply. Mr. Fiske has sprung into the lists, while yet the gauntlet of the challenger has scarcely reached the ground, and has begun the battle with a force and vigor which, to say the least, must temporarily startle his opposers. Scientifically, he appears to have the advantage. There is very little of assertion; very much of authority and argument about him. His manner of dealing with the sweeping statements of his adversary is more effective than courteous. His theory of the value of alcohol and tobacco, as stimulants for daily use, is certainly plausible, and must be welcome to all who either smoke or drink, or who aspire to do so. Physiologically, also, it appears sound, and in accordance with the latest therapeutical discoveries. But it will be indeed a task of difficulty to lead Mr. Parton, or his sympathizers, into the belief that either smoking or drinking are profitable to mankind; a task equalled only by that of bringing smokers and drinkers to observe that golden mean of temperance which even Mr. Fiske admits to be of indispensable necessity.

But whatever may be the scientific merits of Mr. Fiske's treatise, we can but feel that, morally, he is on the losing side. The advantages and disadvantages of tobacco and alcohol are to be estimated by their effect upon mankind at large, as mankind uses and will use them, and not by the medical influence they exercise when taken by the proper persons, in proper quantities, at proper times. Many things are _per se_ useful and beneficial which, _as used_, are sources of great injury and destruction. Some of these can scarcely be used as they ought by man in general, but become, almost inevitably, the cause of ruin and disorder. To this class we believe that tobacco and alcohol belong. Experience seems to teach that their abuse necessarily follows from their use, and that, whatever their peculiar beneficial properties, they have been, and still are, among the worst enemies of man. For this reason we regret to see any argument put into the mouths of smokers and drinkers, whereby they can quiet their own consciences or beguile others into self-indulgence; and we feel that it were safer and better that the nerve-power of the individual should waste a little faster, and the stimulus be denied, than that the misery and wretchedness which tobacco and alcohol have already occasioned should find either an increase or an apology.

----

A Book About Dominies: Being the Reflections and Recollections of a Member of the Profession. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1869.

But for one fault this were a charming book. There is a freshness and genial warmth about it which is very welcome to the heart of any one who has ever been "a boy." The keen appreciation of the "boy nature," of the "boy aspirations," of the "boy troubles," which the dominie, whose experience is here narrated, seems to have possessed, gives a rare relish to his sketches, and makes his book almost a story of the reader's own youth and school life. For these merits it will be read not once only but often, and will serve both to maturity and age as "a tale of the times of old--a memory of the days of other years."

{720}

The fault of which we speak is the tone of religious sentimentalism which runs through the whole book, and crops out in various flings at positive religious faith, and in innumerable expressions of an unhealthy, mawkish, self-congratulating piety. Latitudinarianism is bad enough, but when it reaches to the open contempt of dogma, and elevates the undisguised conceit which despises all authority and law above the humility which acknowledges some truth outside its own conclusions, it becomes the worst possible kind of teaching both for boys and men. It is difficult to realize that the writer of the substance of this book should also be the author of these dangerous and disagreeable sentimentalisms.

----

An Illustrated History Of Ireland, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. With several first-class full-page Engravings of Historical Scenes, designed by Henry Doyle, and engraved by George Hanlon and George Pearson; together with upward of One Hundred Woodcuts, by eminent artists, illustrating Antiquities, Scenery, and Sites of Remarkable Events; and three large Maps, one of Ireland, and the others of Family Homes, Statistics, etc. 1 vol. 8vo. Nearly 700 pages, extra cloth. New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 126 Nassau Street. 1869.

We are glad to see this new and improved edition of this excellent history of Ireland. The first edition we noticed at length, on its appearance, some months ago; but the demand for it was so great that it was soon exhausted. The distinguished authoress, (Sister Mary Frances Clare,) having made several additions and improvements, presents us with a finely illustrated volume, worthy of a place on the shelves of every library, public or private, in America.

It is very important that the people of the United States should study the history of Ireland intelligently. They have, as a people, too long neglected it; and all the greater portion of them know about Ireland and her history is that which they have learned out of their school-books, and vitiated novels. In fact, our public men, writers and speakers alike, have not thought it worth their while to read Ireland's history; it was, to many of them, a country beneath their notice, _except to slander_, by quoting her history from the biased writers of England. But those times are passed. We now have good histories enough. Besides, there is no country of Europe that has sent so many of her people to populate this country; her children or their descendants are to be found in every town and hamlet from Maine to Oregon. It is therefore incumbent on _all_ American citizens, native or adopted, to study the history of that

"Isle of ancient fame,"

whose history is almost as old as that of Judea. We trust that those who have not yet done so will now procure a copy of this work. Apart from its intrinsic merits, which are manifold, there is another which is of some importance. It is sold for the benefit of the Convent of Poor Clares, Kenmare, Ireland, which institution gives education to hundreds of poor Irish children.

----

Books Received.

From Ivison, Phinney, Blakeman& Co.:

Analysis of Civil Government: including a topical and tabular arrangement of the Constitution of the United States. Designed as a class-book for the use of Grammar, High, and Normal Schools, Academies, and other institutions of learning. By Calvin Townsend, Counsellor-at-Law. New York. 1869.

From Lee & Shepard:

Gloverson and His Silent Partners. By Ralph Reder. 1869.

Words of Hope. "That ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope." 1869.

From J. B. Lippincott & Co.:

A Few Friends, and how they Amused Themselves. A tale in nine chapters; containing descriptions of twenty pastimes and games, and a fancy dress party. By M. E. Dodge, author of Hans Brinker and The Irvington Stories. 1869.

From D. & J. Sadlier & Co.:

Songs of Ireland and other Lands; being a collection of the most popular Irish sentimental and comic songs, 1 vol. 18mo.

From Charles Scribner & Co., New York:

Essays on the Progress of Nations, in Civilization, Productive Industry, Wealth, and Population, etc. By Ezra C. Seaman, 1 vol. 12mo.

From D. Appleton & Co., New York:

Mental Science; a Compendium of Psychology, and the History of Philosophy. By Alexander Bain, M. A. 1 vol. 12mo.

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{721}{722}{723}

The Catholic World.

Vol. VIII., No. 48.--March, 1869.

An Apostolic Letter From His Holiness Pope Pius IX.

The letter of the Holy Father which we publish below, in Latin and English, together with one from Cardinal Barnabo, Prefect of the Congregation of the Propaganda, have just been received from Rome. The readers of _The Catholic World_, and those persons especially who have taken an active interest in, and have generously contributed to, the establishment of the Paulist Congregation, the Publication Society, and other associated works, will doubtless feel gratified and encouraged by the approving words with which the Holy Father has deigned to give them his sanction and apostolic blessing. These gracious words of the Vicar of Jesus Christ ought to encourage us all to redoubled efforts for the advancement of our holy religion, and such, we trust, will be their influence.

Admodum R. D.:

Cum Sanctissimus Dominus Noster non levi inter quibus afficitur acerbitates jucunditate ex pluribus nunciis acceperit, D. Tuam per Catholicos ephemerides curam omnem impendere ad religionis nostrae sanctissimae studium fovendum, ad falsas doctrinas refellendas, et ad hujus Apostolicae Sedis jura tuenda, aliquod suae paternae dilectionis testimonium voluit exhibere. Pergratum proinde erit D. Tuae literas Sanctitatis suae hisce adjectas reperire, quibus factum iri confido ut majori usque studio et alacritate inceptum opus prosequaris.

Cui quidem benevolae, quam Sanctissimus Pater erga Te testari voluit, voluntati propensionis meae significationes addens, Deum precor ut D. Tuae fausta quaeque largiatur.

Romae, ex Aed. S. Cong. de Prop. Fide, die 5 Januarii, MDCCCLXIX.

D. Tuae. Addictissimus, Al. C. Barnabo, Pr.

[Transcriber's note: English translation.]

Very Reverend Sir:

Inasmuch as the Sovereign Pontiff, our Holy Father the Pope, amid his many afflictions, has received great joy at hearing, through many different sources, that your Reverence is taking such great care to spread the knowledge of our most holy religion through Catholic publications, adapted to refute false doctrine and to defend the rights of this Apostolic See, he has desired to give you a testimony of his paternal affection. Accordingly, it will be most pleasing to your Reverence to receive, together with this, the letter of his Holiness, by which I trust you may be encouraged to pursue the work you have undertaken with still greater zeal and alacrity.

Adding to the sentiments of good will which the Holy Father declares toward you, the expression of my own regard, I pray God that He may grant to your Reverence every kind of prosperity.

Rome, Office of the S. Cong. of the Propaganda, January 5th, MDCCCLXIX.

Most affectionately, Al. C. Barnabo, PR.

----

Dilecto Filio, I. T. Hecker, Presbytero Ac Rectori Missionariorum Collegii A S. Paulo Nuncup., Neo-eboracum.

PIUS, PP. IX.

Dilecte Fili, salutem et Apostolicam Benedictionem. Gaudemus, Dilecte Fili, te tui propositi memorem voce scriptisque constanter adlaborare propagandae Catholicae religioni dissipandisque errorum tenebris; ac tibi gratulamur ex animo de incrementis, quae initis a te operibus accessisse discimus. Scilicet confertae illae conciones, ubi Catholicam exposuisti doctrinam, quaeque tui desiderium ita fecerunt aliis, ut ad nobiliores ac frequentiores inviteris; existimatio, quam apud ipsos dissentientes ephemeridi tuae CATHOLIC WORLD eruditio et perspicuitas compararunt; aviditas qua passim expetuntur editi a Societate Catholica, per te coacta, libelli; novi sodales, qui culturae a te susceptae fines latius porrecturi, dant familiae tuae nomen; alumni tandem, qui in idem opus, se tibi tradunt excolendos, totidem sunt amplissimi fructus et diserti testes zeli solertiaeque tuae, ac coelestis illius favoris, quo coepta tua foecundantur. Quod sane facile intelliges quam jucundum Nobis contingere debeat, qui id potissimum optamus, ut evangelium nuncietur omni creaturae, ut sedentes in umbra mortis ad viam salutis adducantur, ut demum destructis erroribus universis, ubique veritatis regnum constituatur, in quo justitia et pax se invicem osculantes, humanae familiae reddant ordinis tranquillitatem jamdiu a monstrosis opinionum commentis abactam. Dum itaque studia tua, et eorum, qui tibi opere, subsidio, ingenio opitulantur, libentissime commendamus, maximas Deo gratias agimus, quod ipsis obsecundare voluerit; eumque rogamus, ut gratiae suae virtute, novos tibi jam currenti veluti stimulos addat, aliosque atque alios adjutores tibi conciliet, qui tecum industriam viresque suas conferant in commune Christiani populi bonum. Coelestis vero favoris auspicem, et paternae nostrae benevolentiae testem Apostolicam Benedictionem tibi tuaeque Missionariorum familiae peramanter impertimus.

Datum Romae apud S. Petrum die 30 Decembris, 1868, Pontificatus Nostri Anno XXIII.

[Transcriber's note: English translation.]

To My Beloved Son, I. T. Hecker, Priest And Superior Of The Missionary Congregation Of St. Paul, New York.

PIUS IX., POPE.

Beloved Son, health and apostolic benediction. We rejoice, beloved son, that you, mindful of your purpose, labor continually, by your word and writings, to spread the Catholic religion, and to scatter the darkness of error; and We heartily congratulate you upon the increase which, as We have been informed, the works undertaken by you have received. Undoubtedly those thronged assemblies where you have set forth the Catholic doctrine, and have thereby excited in others such a desire to hear you, that you are invited to address audiences still larger and more notable; the esteem which your periodical, THE CATHOLIC WORLD, has, through its erudition and perspicuity, acquired, even among those who differ from us; the eagerness with which the tracts and books of The Catholic Publication Society, established by you, are everywhere sought for; the new associates who enroll themselves in your congregation to extend more widely the good work you have undertaken; finally, the students who offer themselves to you to be educated for the same work, all these are so many abundant fruits and eloquent witnesses of your zeal and skill, and of the divine favor through which your undertakings are made fruitful. You will easily understand, of course, how gratifying this must be to Us, who desire, above all things, that the gospel should be preached to every creature; that those who sit in the shadow of death should be brought into the way of salvation; that, in fine, all errors being destroyed, the reign of truth should be everywhere established; in which justice and peace, kissing each other, may restore to the human family the tranquillity of order, so long banished by the extravagances of error. While, therefore, We most cordially commend your zealous efforts, and those of your associates who contribute to the success of the same by their labor, their gifts, or their talents, We give especial thanks to God that He has condescended to second them, and We pray Him that, by the power of His grace, He may stimulate still more your already strenuous exertions; and may give you more and more associates who, with you, shall bestow their industry and strength on the common good of the Christian people. And as a token of the divine favor, and an evidence of Our paternal good will, We impart most affectionately to you, and to your congregation of missionaries, Our apostolic benediction.

Given at Rome, at St. Peter's, on the 30th of December, 1868, in the twenty-third year of Our Pontificate.

Pius IX., Pope.

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{724}

The Progress of Nations. [Footnote 277]

[Footnote 277: _Essays on Mm Progress of Nations, in Civilization, Productive Industry, Wealth, and Population_. By Ezra C. Seaman. First and Second Series, 12 mo. PP. 645, 659. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1868.]

The first series of the Essays which compose these two stout volumes appeared as long ago as 1846, and has now been revised, amended, and enlarged, and, after being long out of print, republished in connection with a second collection similar in character and general design. Mr. Seaman's purpose has been to inquire into the principal causes of the welfare of nations, such as morality, education, personal and political liberty, commercial, mechanical, and agricultural development, and those natural conditions of climate and geographical position which man has no power to modify, and to show how these causes have operated at various times and in various countries. To the adequate treatment of so vast a theme, there should be brought the labor of a life-time, the learning of a ripe scholar, and the intellect of a philosopher. Mr. Seaman, we must frankly say, has brought neither of the three. He has attempted what not one man in a thousand would be wise to attempt; and if he has failed, he has at any rate failed in very respectable company. The essays are crude and fragmentary. They lack a sustained train of thought and logical connection; they are encumbered with commonplaces and repetitions; and the statistical and historical illustrations with which they are thickly interwoven have the disadvantage of being borrowed from sources that convey no weight of authority. Citations from incompetent witnesses carry no force, but rather weaken the effect of an author's statements.

The fundamental fault of Mr. Seaman's work is not its raggedness, however; but it is the misapprehension, with which he starts, of the meaning of his subject. He understands "Progress" merely as material prosperity. "Civilization" means nothing in his mind but "Productive Industry, Wealth, and Population." That people is the most advanced which owns the most money and wears the best clothes. The destiny of man is commerce and manufactures. The end of civil society is the acquisition of wealth. Liberty is good because it leaves man free to invent telegraphs and railroads. Government is good because trade would be impossible without it. Education is valuable because it stimulates production and regulates industry. Religion is respectable because it develops the intellectual faculties, and teaches us to restrain the appetites whose free indulgence would undermine the constitution or injure our fellow-man. We do not mean to say that Mr. Seaman teaches these doctrines in so many words. He does not know that he teaches them at all. If he ever sees this article, he will no doubt be shocked at our interpretation of his argument. Yet, pushed to their fair and by no means remote conclusions, these are the teachings to which his essays amount. He seems to forget that man was created to know and love God and promote the divine glory, and that is the highest state of civilization in which he most perfectly fulfils the end of his creation. There is no true progress except toward this end. {725} There is no real prosperity, where this heavenly destiny is lost sight of. There is no education which keeps it not constantly in view. Mr. Seaman treats religion merely as an agency for the development of civilization, whereas it is the very essence of civilization itself. He thinks of the worship of God as a useful mental exercise, which sharpens a man's wits and makes him keener at a bargain. One who has practised his brain in theological controversy must of necessity be the clearer-headed when he has to decide between free-trade and protection, or calculate the rate of exchange and the fluctuations of stocks. But theology is not worship. Religion is a matter of the affections as well as the intellect. The unlettered peasant can praise God, and is bound to praise God, no less than the scholar. A purely intellectual religion could not be of divine origin, since it would only be suitable for a small minority of the human race; it could not be the great business of every man's life, as religion must be, if it is worth anything at all. "Happiness, in a future world as well as in this," says Mr. Seaman, "is the sovereign good of man, and constitutes the end and chief purpose of his existence." That statement may pass if you understand happiness to consist in the promotion of the divine glory; but not if you place it in bank-notes and steam-engines. These seem to be the goal of progress in our author's eyes, and he looks at nothing beyond them.

With his false conceptions of the nature of society and religion, it is not surprising that Mr. Seaman should thoroughly misapprehend the work and purpose of that divinely organized church to which we owe all the true civilization there is in the world, and all the progress we have ever made. The only thread of thought which can be clearly discerned running through his essays, is the idea that Catholicism is the great enemy of civilization. We wish it were quite as clear by what line of argument he purposes to prove it. In one chapter, the church is an enemy to education because she does not teach the people enough. In another she is the enemy of free thought because she teaches them too much. Now her offence is neglect, now it is overmuch care. We don't see how it can be both.

"A part," he says, "and one of the most efficient parts of government in all civilized countries, consists in the education of the people." And he argues the necessity of education from the fact that "the great mass of mankind ... are guided by imitation, precedent, and the instruction of others." They have very few ideas except those which are put into their heads by better educated people, or are derived directly from the senses. "Such people in all countries are under the influence and control ... of the aristocracy, the clergy, the members of the learned professions, and the military and civil officers of government." The policy of the pope and the priesthood, he complains, is to retain the masses in a state of ignorance. "The Bible is kept from them; they are denied the right to read, and exercise their own individual judgments in matters of religion, but must allow their priests to read, think, and judge for them, and to form their opinions; and no efforts are made by the priests to establish common schools, or to teach the common people anything beyond the catechism, and the ceremonies and dogmas of religion, and absolute, unconditional submission in all things to their priests and rulers. {726} Their whole efforts in matters of education are directed to founding colleges and high-schools, for training up young men for the priesthood, and instructing and breathing their opinions into the children and youth of the aristocracy and the wealthy classes." Now, before we go any further, let us prick a few of the mistakes in this paragraph. There are so many we hardly know how to begin.

1. The Bible is _not_ kept from the common people. It is freely circulated in the vernacular, and our current English version is older than the translation of King James. From the time, in fact, when Bishop Ulphilas in the fifth century translated the Bible into the Gothic tongue, down to our own day, it has been the constant practice of the church to supply the faithful with correct translations of the Holy Scriptures. The use of false and garbled versions is indeed forbidden; but that is another matter altogether.

2. Catholics are _not_ forbidden to read (!), nor do their priests claim the right to read and think for them, or to form their opinions. Mr. Seaman's statements on these points are so preposterous that in his cooler moments we suppose he is sorry for having made them.

3. Efforts have _always_ been made by our clergy to establish schools for the common people. The first work of the parish priest after he has built his church is to build a school-house. The free education of the children of the poor has the next place in his care to the service of the altar. There is not a step in the whole system of education, from the alphabet-class to the highest university cursus [Footnote 278], to which the Catholic Church does not devote the labor of some religious order or congregation, blessed and sanctioned and assisted by the supreme Pontiff.

[Footnote 278: Transcriber's note: "course"]

She does not confine, she never has confined, her solicitude to theological studies or the education of the rich. Teaching the poor has been the chosen labor and chief glory of hundreds of her saints, and is now the crowning work of many a flourishing order, such as the Sisters of Charity, the Brethren of the Christian Schools, and similar organizations, the prime object of which, be it remarked, is the education not of the upper classes but of the mass of the population. The Jesuits are more celebrated for their colleges and higher seminaries than for rudimentary schools; but they too have their primary classes in all places where there is both need and opportunity for them; and even in their colleges where every student is supposed to pay for his education, a system of gratuitous instruction is pursued with a delicate secrecy designed to spare the poor scholar any possible mortification. Of course it is chiefly "the masses" who profit by this hidden charity. Even Mr. Seaman himself, in another part of his book, interrupts his censure of religious orders in general by a confession that many of the communities of monks and nuns have done good by devoting themselves to the education of the young: if he had not confessed it, indeed, he must have been a marvel of ignorance or dishonesty. With the history of the common-school agitation led by Bishop Hughes in New York so fresh in mind, he must be a bold partisan who would deny our anxiety to keep in the very van of educational progress. The Catholic demand for a share of the school fund was in reality a demand for the admission of our parochial schools to the common school system of the State. We were ready, nay anxious, to carry out the State programme of instruction to its fullest extent, and admit the State inspectors and examiners to scrutinize our operations whenever they saw fit. {727} But sectarian bigotry has imposed a double tax upon our efforts for the education of our children, and rather than we should teach them about God opposes our teaching them anything at all. We do the best we can. We pay our tax for the support of the schools we do not approve; we pay another voluntary tax for such parish schools as our poverty can afford; and if these are too small to receive our children and too poor to do as much for them as they would be glad to do, the fault is not ours but the law's, which deprives us of the aid to which we are justly entitled from the common fund. One thing is clear to every dispassionate observer: the Catholics do twice as much for education as any other denomination--nay, do that which no other denomination would think of attempting. A state system of gratuitous instruction is often referred to as one of the exclusive boons of Protestantism. Well, in how many of the great countries of the world, besides our own, is such a system known? Only in France and Austria, which are Catholic, and in Prussia and Scotland, which are Protestant. Protestant England has done less for popular education, and has consequently a more grossly ignorant peasantry than any other country on the globe equally advanced in general civilization. Her great universities and grammar-schools are the relics of Catholic foundations. The half a million of pounds annual income which they enjoy is drawn from Catholic endowments, perverted from their ancient uses; and it is estimated that not more than three-fifths of this sum is actually made available for educational purposes in any way whatever. So shamelessly have these legacies of the ancient faith been misapplied, that there are masters drawing large salaries for presiding over schools which have no scholars, and a few years ago it was found that the teachers of 708 inferior schools and 35 grammar-schools signed their returns with a mark! Of late the government has made efforts for a reform, and the various dissenting sects have also done a great deal in the establishment of denominational schools; but no general system of popular instruction has yet been devised. Popular education in fact is a purely Catholic idea, almost as old as Christianity itself, and the germ of the modern common-school system was in the bosom of the ancient church. "After the introduction of Christianity," says _The American Cyclopaedia_, (art. "Common Schools,") "and its accession to power, the duty of the authorities to educate the young was speedily recognized by the bishops and clergy. The object of this education was of course their training in the doctrines of Christianity, but it was the first recognition of the duty of giving instruction to the masses. As early as A.D. 529 we find the council of Vaison recommending the establishment of public schools. In 800 a synod at Mentz ordered that the parochial priests should have schools in the towns and villages, that 'the little children of all the faithful should learn letters from them. Let them receive and teach these with the utmost charity, that they themselves may shine for ever. Let them receive no remuneration from their scholars, unless what the parents through charity may voluntarily offer." A council at Rome in 836 ordained that there should be three kinds of schools throughout Christendom: episcopal, parochial in towns and villages, and others wherever there could be found place and opportunity. The Council of Lateran in 1179 ordained the establishment of a grammar-school in every cathedral for the gratuitous instruction of the poor. {728} This ordinance was enlarged and enforced by the Council of Lyons in 1245. Thus originated the popular or common school as an outgrowth of the Christian Church. "A council of the 16th century speaks of schools in the priests' houses, and the decretals abound in mention of popular instruction as one of the first duties of the clergy and one of the traditional and most ancient glories of the church. "If the important knowledge of reading and writing was spread among the people," says the socialist philosopher St. Simon, "it was owing to the church." If that knowledge, during the political and social disorders of the middle ages became so difficult of attainment that only a favored few could acquire it, it was the church alone who kept the sacred flame of learning alive in the schools and the cloisters, maintained the great universities and grammar classes in the midst of the most turbulent periods; and when society crystallized again into order, brought forth the treasure of knowledge which she had guarded so long, and gave it to the world. [Footnote 279]

[Footnote 279: See _The Catholic World_ for February, 1869-art. "The Ignorance of the Middle Ages."]

Nearly all the most famous institutions of learning in Europe are of Catholic foundation. Rome is especially well provided with schools, and the Roman College gives free instruction in the classics and the sciences. And in "the face of all these facts--knowing as he must know if he has studied the "progress of nations" with a particle of intelligence, that the Catholic Church has been the most munificent patron of learning the world ever saw--Mr. Seaman has the sublime effrontery to say that "no effort has ever been made in any Catholic country to educate the mass of the people or any of the common classes, except some few selected by the priests, to be educated and trained for the ministry," and that "the great body of Catholics seem to be studiously kept in profound ignorance, that they may be managed and governed the more easily"! It seems to us it would be a good and a just thing if the penalties against malpractice by which the law protects the medical profession from ignorant charlatans could be extended to the profession of literature. There is a graceful compliment to the literature of the Catholic Church in Matthew Arnold's essay on "The Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment." For the benefit of Mr. Seaman and his class we cite the passage nearly at full length:

"In spite of all the shocks which the feeling of a good Catholic has in this Protestant country inevitably to undergo, in spite of the contemptuous insensibility to the grandeur of Rome which he finds so general and so hard to bear, how much has he to console him, how many acts of homage to the greatness of his religion, may he see if he has his eyes open! I will tell him of one of them. Let him go, in London, to that delightful spot, that Happy Island in Bloomsbury, the reading-room of the British Museum. Let him visit its sacred quarter, the region where its theological books are placed. I am almost afraid to say what he will find there, for fear Mr. Spurgeon, like a second Caliph Omar, should give the library to the flames. He will find an immense Catholic work, the collection of the Abbé Migne, lording it over that whole region, reducing to insignificance the feeble Protestant forces which hang upon its skirts. Protestantism is duly represented, indeed; Mr. Panizzi knows his business too well to suffer it to be otherwise; all the varieties of Protestantism are there; there is the library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, learned, decorous, exemplary, but a little uninteresting; there are the works of Calvin, rigid, militant, menacing; there are the works of Dr. Chalmers, the Scotch thistle, valiantly doing duty as the rose of Sharon, but keeping something very Scotch about it all the time; there are the works of Dr. Channing, the last word of religious philosophy in a land where every one has some culture, and where superiorities are discountenanced--the flower of moral and intelligent mediocrity. {729} But how are all these divided against one another, and how, though they were all united, are they dwarfed by the Catholic leviathan, their neighbor! Majestic in its blue and gold unity, this fills shelf after shelf and compartment after compartment, its right mounting up into heaven among the white folios of the _Acta Sanctorum_, its left plunging down into hell among the yellow octavos of the _Law Digest_. Everything is there, in that immense _Patrologiae Cursus Completus_, in that _Encyclopédie Théologique_, that _Nouvelle Encyclopédie Théologique_, that _Troisième Encyclopédie Théologique_; religion, philosophy, history, biography, arts, sciences, bibliography, gossip. The work embraces the whole range of human interests; like one of the great middle-age cathedrals, it is in itself a study for a life. Like the net in Scripture, it drags everything to land, bad and good, lay and ecclesiastical, sacred and profane, so that it be but matter of human concern. Wide-embracing as the power whose product it is! a power, for history, at any rate, eminently _the Church_; not, I think, the church of the future, but indisputably the church of the past, and in the past, the church of the multitude.

"This is why the man of imagination--nay, and the philosopher, too, in spite of her propensity to burn him--will always have a weakness for the Catholic Church; because of the rich treasures of human life which have been stored within her pale. The mention of other religious bodies, or of their leaders, at once calls up in our mind the thought of men of a definite type as their adherents; the mention of Catholicism suggests no such special following. Anglicanism suggests the English Episcopate; Calvin's name suggests Dr. Candlish; Chalmers's, the Duke of Argyll; Channing's, Boston Society; but Catholicism suggests --what shall I say?--all the pellmell of the men and women of Shakespeare's plays. This abundance the Abbé Migne's collection faithfully reflects. People talk of this or that work which they would choose, if they were to pass their life with only one; for my part, I think I would choose the Abbé Migne's collection. _Quicqnid agunt homines_--everything, as I have said, is there."

But Mr. Seaman complains, not only that the Catholic Church neglects to teach the people, but that she neglects to let them alone. Not only has she never had any schools, but she has had too many schools. She has taken no care of education, and moreover she has meddled officiously with popular instruction when she ought to have confined herself to masses and sermons. The clergy, being for long ages the only teachers of letters, science, philosophy, and religion, acquired an influence over men's conduct and opinions which can only be regarded as unfortunate. Yet, a little while ago, he said that in all conditions of society the majority of mankind are ruled by the thoughts and instructions of others, and that education is one of the most important parts of government. Is it better that this tremendous influence should be exerted by the wisest and most virtuous class, or by those who are eminent only because they are the most powerful? If any set of men are to mould the opinions of the rest, should they not be the men who are best qualified by study and by sacred pursuits to exercise that function with intelligence and sincerity? We believe that when the child passes from the hands of the parent, its best guides are the servants of the church who have devoted themselves to the training of the young in order that they may do good to their fellow creatures and give glory to God. Mr. Seaman would entrust this sacred duty to pot-house politicians, who covet office for the sake of gain. The theory of a paternal government, which watches over all our relations in life, and rears children to be good citizens, may be all very well; but we know what governments are in practice, and petty office-holders are the last men we should want to trust with moulding the opinions of society. There is something too demoralizing in the means by which they generally get their places; and, after they have got them, how many are fit for them? {730} It is the duty of government to promote education and general culture, that is very true; but _how_ this ought to be done is another question. Mr. Seaman says the proper way is to remove children from the influence of the two institutions which God has designed for their guides and educators--the family and the church--and to put them under the control of place-hunters, who may possibly have a special talent for instruction, but are just as likely to be fools and rogues. But he has no arguments to support his opinions, and it is not worth while to answer sheer dogmatism.

Mr. Seaman is not satisfied with once gravely declaring that "in all Roman Catholic countries education by means of schools and books is confined to the wealthy classes," and then blaming the priests for interfering with the secular studies of the people instead of confining themselves to religious teaching; asserting that the Church has "usurped the whole domain of metaphysics and philosophy," and yet that she has never done anything for education at all; praising the Presbyterians of Scotland for making schools a part of their religious establishment, so that the young might be instructed "in the principles of religion, grammar, and the Latin tongue," and upbraiding the church because centuries earlier she had done the same thing; but he returns time and again to the same misstatements and the same contradictions. During the Dark Ages, he says, coming back again to the Bible question, "the Scriptures were in the possession of those only who were learned in the dead languages. _They had never been translated into any of the modern languages._ A good explanation of this remarkable fact may possibly be that the modern languages, at the period to which Mr. Seaman refers, had not yet taken a literary form. He probably means to say that the sacred books had not been translated into the vernacular of any people. If he does, he makes a great mistake. In the first place, the Latin Vulgate was by no means a sealed volume. That version had been made expressly to render the Scriptures accessible to all. The tongue into which it was turned was the one most generally understood by whoever had education enough to read any book at all; and during the so-called Dark Ages, Latin was still in common use all over the continent of Europe. It was not then a dead language, so far as books were concerned, though in the conversation of common life it had passed out of use. Moreover, as we have already seen, translations of the Bible into other languages were made as fast as those languages took shape. Translations of the New Testament were made very early into all the tongues then spoken by Christians. Portions of the Scriptures were turned into Saxon by Adhelm, Egbert, the Venerable Bede, and others, between the 8th and 10th centuries; and there was a complete English version as early as 1290, that is to say, 90 years before Wycliffe's, which Hallam erroneously calls the earliest. The first book printed at Guttenberg's press was a Latin Bible, and in Italy, under the very eye of the church, there were translations in use in the 15th century. The popular fable that Luther first threw open the sacred book to the world is one of the most mischievous falsehoods in history.

On almost every page we find errors hardly less monstrous. "Not one valuable invention, discovery, or improvement," says Mr. Seaman, "during the last three centuries and a half, has originated where the human mind has been subject to Catholicism .... and the same may be said of jurisprudence, government, and science, as well as the useful arts." {731} The impudence of this assertion is enough to take away one's breath. France, then, has done nothing for the arts or for science, Catholic Germany has done nothing, Belgium has done nothing, Italy has done nothing. Nay, more; if the Church for three hundred and fifty years has blighted material progress, if the Catholic clergy during that time have, as our amazingly ignorant author declares, "restrained the human mind from the prosecution of new discoveries in natural science under pretence that the new opinions promulgated were contrary to Scripture, and therefore impious and heretical," how does it happen that the world made any discoveries at all before that period? Why, does Mr. Seaman forget that the art of printing itself, the greatest invention of all time, dates from that "dark age" when the power of the Church was at its height, and Luther had not yet arisen, and that its first use was in the service of the sanctuary? Does he forget that Copernicus was a Catholic priest? that some of the most brilliant of modern discoveries in the positive sciences, in astronomy, in medicine, in natural philosophy, have emanated from Catholic Italy and France, and that the science of jurisprudence, to which he especially refers, owes more to those two countries and Germany than to all the rest of the world? The case of Galileo, to which of course he alludes, has so recently been examined in two elaborate articles in this magazine that we need give but little space to it here. It is enough to say that although the Florentine philosopher was forbidden to wrest Scripture to the support of his theory, and was censured for his disobedience of a solemn obligation to let theology alone and confine himself to science, the Church stood throughout his patron and protector, and the Pope and the Cardinals were the most zealous among his disciples. Mr. Seaman's statement that "when Galileo taught in Italy the Copernican system of astronomy as late as the year 1633, it was decided by the POPE and a COUNCIL OF CATHOLIC CARDINALS AND BISHOPS" that the doctrine was absurd and heretical, and he was "consigned to the _dungeons_ of the INQUISITION and compelled to recant and abjure his opinions in order to save his life," (the capitals and Italics are Mr. Seaman's,) is a plain up-and-down falsehood. There is no justification of it in any reputable history. "The Pope and a council of Catholic Cardinals and Bishops" never pronounced any judgment whatever either upon Galileo or his doctrines, and never had anything to do with the affair. The judgment, such as it was, expressed merely the opinion of the "qualifiers," or examiners of the Inquisition--an irresponsible committee attached to a civil tribunal, whose report carried no theological weight, and no more represented the doctrine of the Church, or the sentiments of Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops than the Munchausenisms of Mr. Seaman represent the sober verdict of history. The Church is not to be reproached for the blunders of her individual members. Moreover, Galileo never was consigned to the "dungeons of the Inquisition," and never was in peril of his life.

The course of Mr. Seaman's argument leads him to a sketch of the constitution and history of the church, and here he wanders in such a maze of error, that it is bewildering to follow him. {732} He tells us that the Pope and the bishops have the most absolute and unlimited power over the inferior clergy, sending them wherever they choose, and appointing and removing them at pleasure, and that the Pope exercises similar authority over the bishops. Has our learned historian ever heard of such a thing as _canon law_, which secures to the inferior clergy a perfect immunity from arbitrary interference by their superiors, and which is in force all over the Christian world, except in new countries, where the church is yet too young to complete her organization? He tells us that the church invented and upholds the doctrine of the divine right of kings, and teaches that the people are bound to submit passively under all circumstances, and that no amount or continuance of oppression and tyranny can justify resistance or rebellion in any case whatever. All history contradicts this statement--contradicts it so plainly that we can hardly account for the author's temerity. If we had the patience to read his book straight through, we should probably find him on some other page blaming the Popes for encouraging rebellion and insurrection. As it is, he declares that "this tyrannical and despotic doctrine, ... is the work of the clergy of a comparatively modern period, and as late as the year 1682 the University of Oxford, in England, adopted it." We presume Mr. Seaman is aware that Oxford University in 1682 was _Protestant_. He tells us that the Catholic Church is a cruel and persecuting church, and refers to the penal statutes against heresy, which were in force in England, from the 14th to the 16th century, and under which, during the reign of Queen Mary, "several hundred persons were burned;" but he seems not to know that _all_ denominations, in those cruel times, persecuted one another impartially; that Henry VIII. had set Mary the example, and Elizabeth was a worthy follower of her father and Calvin and the continental reformers were as bad as "bloody Mary," and even the Protestant settlers of America had little conception of the principle of religious freedom, until it was taught them by the Catholics of Maryland. He declares that the persecution of heretical sects during the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries, and the tyranny of the ecclesiastical aristocracy were the actual causes of the decline of the Roman empire. This is too much! Why, the commencement of the decline dates from the second century, and the Roman ascendency was entirely overthrown by the middle of the fourth; and during this period of decay, the church had no power in the state, but was herself persecuted and driven into the darkness of caverns.

We have spoken our mind plainly about this book, because we think it is one of a class that deserve no mercy. A man who sets himself to write history without consulting even the ordinary sources of historical information commits an offence against truth and against society. Ignorance does not excuse him. Ignorance in such a case is a crime. Of course we do not suppose that Mr. Seaman intentionally makes false statements. But he makes random statements which the slightest examination would have satisfied him were false. He was bound to undertake such an examination, and not having done it, he bears the responsibility of the falsehood. The passage we have already cited about Galileo is a good example of what we mean. There is no color of authority for the erroneous version of the case which Mr. Seaman gives. {733} He could only have evolved that story out of a vague impression that the Pope and the Cardinals had done some very cruel and illiberal thing to the philosopher; and he must have put it into the words he used, because he considered those words effective in representing the action of the church in a black aspect. But the errors are very serious ones. They amount to the assertion that the church has declared a scientific fact to be a theological heresy. If this were true, the church would be no church. Not being true, the words amount to a gross slander. If Mr. Seaman, having been educated in a prejudice against Catholics, and believing that they are cruel and vindictive people who ought to be excluded from good society, should print a pamphlet, charging the Archbishop of New York and his Vicar-General, and the editors of _The Tablet_ and _The Catholic World_ with a conspiracy to torture or murder the Rev. Dr. Prime, the fact that he thought it probable the accusation _might_ be true, would be no justification, and would not save him from the consequences of a libel suit. The author who is guilty of slander in writing the history of the past, cannot be mulcted in damages like the criminal who carelessly destroys a private character; but he deserves to be placed in the pillory of moral criticism and to be held as a literary outlaw.

----------

The Silent Clock.

Its sounds were hushed by weeping love, A sad heart bade it cease to move, And one long hour of sorrow prove.

A heart and it did beat their last, A trembling hand before it passed, And endless silence on it cast.

A spectre from the silent lands, A shadow of life's grief it stands, Still pleading with uplifted hands,

Whose awful stillness seems to say; Here was the closing of his day-- Here was the loosing of the clay.

Forget not one, of old so dear, Lift up your hearts for him in prayer As we are ever lifted here.

{734}

It shames the soul--that silent clock, Its mournful muteness seems to mock The love we thought no years could shock.

Our sighs and tears of fond distress Have changed to smiles of happiness It stands unchanged, dumb, motionless!

Geraldine. ----------

Who Shall Take Care Of Our Poor?

No. II.

The point of view in which we propound this problem is that of the adequacy of the Christian Church, by its organic institutions, to counteract, in America, those social and political aberrations which, in the eastern hemisphere, have developed and maintained the scourge of pauperism. On this question, history is prophecy; an incomplete prophecy, yet containing all the principles of action which a plastic intelligence and fresh inspiration from its fountain life may enable the church to adapt to our present exigencies.

Under myriad forms and faces, pauperism is the sphinx that devours every society which cannot, within a certain time, find its solution, unless wars have anticipated its fate.

Result of international wars, and source of intestine wars--those irruptions of organized crime--pauperism is the ulcer on the leg of civilization which betrays the impurity of its blood.

It behoves us on the threshold of this inquiry to distinguish between accidental impoverishment, and pauperism as an organic malady, which develops, as in Great Britain, _pari passu_ with population and even with the increase of wealth.

An earthquake devastates Peru, prostrates its cities and destroys its harvests: its inhabitants suffer the greatest privations, but having ready access to the soil in that prolific climate, little or no chronic pauperism will result. The white population of our immense South has been recently reduced by war to an extreme distress. Flanders, Germany, France, the most prosperous countries of Europe, have been scourged still more severely; yet industrious generations suffice to efface the trace of war. Pestilences, which decimate the population of a country, yet respect property, and do not pauperize the survivors, but the contrary; for they have freer access to the means of production. But why is it that Great Britain--the old monarch of the seas, with her predatory grasp on the neck of the Indies, with all her stupendous machinery of production, and fearing no enemy from abroad--is rotting with pauperism amid peace and wealth, perishing like an old eagle, condemned to starvation by the excessive curvature of his overlapping beak? {735} Behold our mother country, she whose laws and institutions we are now in the main reproducing, she whose crimes against charity we reorganize by exposing our soil to the cupidity of speculators, whose pauperism we inherit by emigration, and whose fate we must share, as certainly as the same causes produce the same effects, unless we reform in our youth.

One hope, one faith, one path of social salvation, remains for us both and for all the world--namely, cooperative Christian association, that, baffling pride and greed, restores to the workman the produce of his work, and renders the practical love of our neighbor the means of satisfaction for our own needs, whether of the senses or the soul. Now, Rochdale and its kindred co-operative enterprises, whose success is so encouraging in England; the masons and other artisan associations of Paris, like the trades co-operations of Barcelona and the old Italian cities; even the Hanseatic League, so monastic in its discipline--all proceed in direct line from the Columbans, the Cistercians, and other religious orders of the Benedictine group, who initiated the agricultural Christianity of Europe. The seed sown in the mediaeval heart did not rot amid that dissolution of society which is called the _Reformation_. It has survived the oppressions of aristocracy and capital no longer tempered by monastic orders; it has survived the internecine competition of our modern _proletariat_; and now the same organic type, under new names, puts forth its leaf, buds, blooms, and fruits.

"If we look," says Balmes, "at the different systems which ferment in minds devoted to the study of pauperism and its remedies, we shall always find there association under one form or another. Now, association has been at all times one of the favorite principles of Catholicity, which, by proclaiming unity in faith, proclaims unity in all things. If we examine the religious institutions characteristic of Europe in its darkest period of ignorance, corruption, and social dissolution, we observe that the monks of the west were not content with sanctifying themselves; from the first they influenced society. Society had need of strong efforts to preserve its life in the terrible crisis through which it had to pass. The secret of strength is in the union of individual forces, in _association_. This secret has been taught to European society as by a revelation from heaven."

Sufficient attention has not perhaps been paid to the merit of the industrial organization, introduced into Europe from the earliest ages, and which became more and more diffused after the twelfth century. We allude to the trades-unions and other associations, which, established under the influence of the Catholic religion, had pious foundations for the celebration of their feasts, and for assisting each other in their necessities.

We must recognize here that highly effective organizations of labor had taken root in Europe, either by the initiative of the religious orders, (to whom the north owed its civilization,) or in the congenial atmosphere of Catholicity; that in this organization, co-operation, the Christian spirit, had supplanted or prevented internecine competition, the secular spirit; that this system of labor rendered pauperism impossible and elevated the working classes to a plane of virtue, of dignity and prosperity elsewhere unattained; that it had conquered and kept its ground against feudal oppression and aggression, by a series of bloodless battles in which wisdom and patience, self-control and forethought, perseverance and the love of honorable uses, vindicated the political superiority of the Christian principle; finally that it possessed within itself vigorous reproductive or propagative forces, and had indeed become the manifest destiny of Europe at that epoch when schism in the church sowed everywhere hatreds and discord, and denatured civilization, substituting the ideal of individualism for that of solidarity. {736} Hence, incoherence and destructive competition alike in the market as in the church. For labor, its result is pauperism; for piety, despair.

Besides the religious motives which brought property into the hands of the monks, there is another title, remarks Balmes, which has always been regarded as one of the most just and legitimate. The monks cultivated waste lands, dried up marshes, constructed roads, restrained rivers within their beds, and built bridges over them. Over a considerable portion of Europe, which was in a state of rude nature, the monasteries founded here and there have been centres of agriculture and the arts of social life. Is not he who reclaims the wilderness, cultivates it, and fills it with inhabitants, worthy of preserving large possessions there?

The religious and moral influence of the monks contributed greatly, in early European epochs, to the respect of property as well as persons against attacks which were so frequent in the turbulent ages succeeding the overthrow of the Roman empire by barbarian nations, that in some countries almost every castle was a den of robbers, from which its chief overlooked the country and sallied forth to collect spoils.

The man who is constantly obliged to defend his own is also constantly led to usurp the property of others: the first thing to do to remedy so great an evil was to locate and fix the population by means of agriculture, and to accustom them to respect property, not only by reasons drawn from private interest, but also by the sight of large domains belonging to establishments regarded as inviolable, and against which a hand could not be raised without sacrilege. Thus religious ideas were connected with social ones, and they slowly prepared an organization which was to be completed in more peaceable times.

It is to the protection afforded to farmers by the monasteries in retired places that we owe the dissemination of the people in rural districts, which would have been otherwise impossible. Those who have lived in a country convulsed by war, like our South, can best appreciate this.

Mallet (_History of the Swiss_, vol. i. p. 105, a Protestant authority) tells us that "the monks softened by their instructions the ferocious manners of the people, and opposed their credit to the tyranny of the nobility, who knew no other occupation than war, and grievously oppressed their neighbors. On this account the government of monks was preferred to theirs. The people sought them for judges, (that is, as umpires.) It was a usual saying that it was better to be governed by the bishop's crosier than the monarch's sceptre."

The kindness and charities performed by the religious orders, remarks Cobbett, (_History of the Protestant Reformation_,) made them objects of great veneration, and the rich made them in time the channels of their benevolence to the poor. Kings, queens, princes, princesses, nobles, and gentlefolk founded monasteries and convents, that is, erected the buildings and endowed them with estates for their maintenance. {737} Others--some in the way of atonement for their sins, and some from a pious motive, gave while alive, or bequeathed at their death, lands, houses, or money to monasteries already erected. So that in time the monasteries became the owners of great landed estates; they had the lordship over innumerable manors, and had a tenantry of prodigious extent, especially in England, where the monastic orders were always held in great esteem, in consequence of Christianity having been introduced into the kingdom by a community of monks.

One of the greatest advantages attending the monasteries in the political economy of the country was that they of necessity caused the revenues of a large part of the lands to be spent on the spot whence those revenues arose. The hospitals and all the other establishments of the kind had the same tendency, so that the revenues of the land were diffused immediately among the people at large. We all know how the state of a parish changes for the worse when a great land-owner quits his mansion in it, and leaves that mansion shut up, and what an effect this has upon the poor-rates. What, then, must have been the effect of twenty monasteries in every county, expending constantly a large part of their incomes on the spot? If Ireland had still her seven hundred or eight hundred monastic institutions, there would be no periodical famines and typhus fevers there; no need of sunset or sunrise laws shutting the people up at night to prevent insurrections; no projects for preventing the increase of families; no schemes for getting rid of a "_surplus population_;" no occasion for the people to live on third-rate potatoes--not enough, at that; for their nakedness, their hunger, their dying of hundreds with starvation, while their ports are crowded with ships carrying provisions from their shores, and while an army is fed in the country, the business of which army is to keep the starving people quiet.

Sir Walter Scott thus exposes the nonsense of the "economists on the non-influence of absenteeism." In the year 1817, when the poor stood so much in need of employment, a friend asked the Duke of Buccleugh why his grace did not prepare to go to London in the spring? By way of answer, the duke showed him a list of laborers then employed in improvements on his different estates; the number of whom, exclusive of his regular establishments, amounted to nine hundred and forty-seven men, who, with those whose support depended on their wages, would reckon several thousand; many of whom must have found it difficult to obtain subsistence had the duke not foregone the privilege of his rank in order to provide with more convenience for them. The result of such conduct is twice blessed, both in the means which it employs and in the end which it attains in the general economy of the country. This anecdote forms a good answer to those theorists who pretend that the residence of proprietors on their estates is, a matter of indifference to the inhabitants of the district. Had the duke been residing and spending his revenues elsewhere, one-half of these poor people would have wanted employment and food, and would probably have been little comforted by any metaphysical arguments upon population which could have been presented to their investigation.

"Many such things may be daily heard," says Howitt, "of the present Duke of Portland."

{738}

The monks, whose religious character gave them an extraordinary security, as they were the first restorers of agriculture, so they were the first improvers of our gardens. Their long pilgrimage from one holy shrine to another, through France, Germany, and Italy, made them early acquainted with a variety of culinary and medicinal herbs and various fruits, and amongst the ruins of abbeys we still find a tribe of plants that they have naturalized.

Lingard, writing of the consequences of the "_Reformation_," tells us that "within the realm poverty and discontent generally prevailed. The extension of inclosures, and the new practice of letting lands at rack-rents, had driven from their homes numerous families whose fathers had occupied the same farms for several generations, and the increasing multitudes of the poor began to resort to the more populous towns in search of that relief which had been formerly distributed at the gates of the monasteries. The reformation preachers of the day--Knox, Lever, Gilpin, Latimer--avow that the sufferings of the indigent were treated with indifference by the hard-heartedness of the rich; while, in the pursuit of gain, the most barefaced frauds were justified, robbers and murderers escaping punishment by the partiality of juries or corruptions of judges. They tell us that church-livings were given to laymen or converted to the use of the patrons," etc.

In dealing with that shameful _pauperism_, the annual reports of which ring in the ears of the British government--"_mene, mene, tekel, upharsin_" which presaged the fall of Babylon--it behoves us to distinguish the victim poor and the _fighting poor_. The fighting poor exasperate the evils of poverty by ineffective insurrections against the organized government of the rich. Protesting against injustice and maladministration by strikes, which they cannot sustain, and which soon leave them at the mercy of the employers they have defied, they provoke the severity of the laws by disorderly conduct, by poaching, robbery, arson, etc., necessitating the maintenance of a numerous and rigorous police, and even of standing armies. These withdraw great numbers from productive industry, and double the expenses of government, which must, at last, be borne by the working classes, however indirect the methods of taxation. It is true that the aristocracy in command of armies could enrich England by the spoil of India, or Spain by that of Mexico and Peru; but these ill-gotten gains have cursed alike the robber and the robbed. No country has ever maintained a real prosperity except by home production and the contentment of its producing classes. The _fighting poor_, not organized in armies under the discipline and pay of governments, but remaining an integral part of the people, are intimately leagued with the _victim poor_ by family ties, and even by the imminence of a common fate, since a wound, a fit of illness, a fraud, the prolonged lack of work, or other misfortune, may depress them into pauperism. This class of poor is the most dangerous element of a nation, and costs in waste and in precautions a great deal more than the sum expended in pauper relief. An administrative method which conciliates this class with the rich, with the established government and public order, is evidently master of the situation. This end has been achieved by the religious organization of labor.

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What the Catholic Church once did for England, under military feudalism, she can do again, and more, because the present financial and industrial feudalism is pacific in its tendencies and susceptible of being harmonized with the interests of the church and of labor by co-operative association; whereas the former feudalism existed for war, was essentially opposed to the spirit of Christianity, to the honor of productive industry, and the prosperity of the people. Now, what is cure for Great Britain may be prevention for America, which undergoes, like England, the yoke of industrial feudalism. Allowing for the category of accidents, for relief needed by the infirm, etc., vastly the larger proportion of pauperism remains to be prevented by opportune employments, of which the soil serves as the basis. Let the religious orders reacquire everywhere, by all legitimate means, the control of large bodies of land, which they shall withhold from speculation, which they shall either administrate by leases or by direct culture, and on which they shall establish the arts of fabrication. Then they may subdue the world with its own weapons, commanding capital and labor, conciliating them in Christian action, and producing wealth without sacrificing the producer to the product. They would lease farms or hire workmen according to local and temporary expediency, but in either case they would constitute, as of old, a bulwark between the people and speculators, and they would reattach the masses by intimate household ties. This begins as of old with the voluntary assumption of social burdens, especially with the care of the sick and infirm. By organizing a high order of attractive social life at its rural institutions, where it is so much easier to find healthful work for either sex and every age, the church will counteract that destructive fascination which the city now exerts over the country-folk. In restoring and upholding an order of yeomanry, subject to its general administration of agriculture, but free in a scope of action sufficient to content them, within a predetermined plan, the Catholic Church would counterpoise the present league of the Church of England with its aristocracy, as its corporate philanthropies would counterpoise the corporate selfishness of simple business firms.

Pursuing the noble initiative which the Jesuit order took in the work of education, especially in Paraguay, it remains for the church to second the views of American legislation in the foundation of art and labor-schools, or agricultural and polytechnic institutes, for the support of which public lands were appropriated in 1842, although Minnesota alone has had the wisdom to protest against the malversation of this fund to the comparatively sterile work of our common schools.

It is not by any means an unreasonable assumption that, after a few years of experience and discipline for the teachers, art and labor-schools, embracing all the departments of rural and domestic economy with religious and social training, may be made self-supporting. From that day their popularity will be assured, and pauperism will be well-nigh eradicated, together with the vices and crimes which it engenders. The diploma of such an institution might confer either a lease of land or an appointment to some office of social use and profit. The administration of the schools and charities of the church would supply a great many such places.

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We shall not ask whether it be not expedient and just to oblige every family, in so far as it may be competent, to provide for its own poor, because modern civilization has not the patriarchal basis, the family has no such collective unity or substantial existence among us, as formerly in Palestine, or still in the Arab _douar_. At most can the family be held responsible for its minors, since its authority does not extend beyond this class; but we remark that the largest proportion of pauperism is due to the neglect of efficient education during the years of minority; so that with the actual population of the world, and even in the most thickly settled countries, there need be no such thing as pauperism, if the productive energies of the whole people received during childhood and youth a practical direction; while the diplomas of our labor and art-schools conferred valid titles to the use of the soil or other means of remunerative employment. If to organize such education for the children of poor families be regarded as beyond the province of our governments or secular powers, how much more extravagant must this seem for the children of the rich, who are, however, exposed every day to become poor, and whose wasteful idleness subtracts so much from the possible resources of mankind? Is it not self-evident that the influence of religious organizations has every advantage over secular authority in reforming education while rendering it universal? At once personal and corporate, they can take an initiative which is refused to governments or which governments decline. Now, as in the middle ages, in civilized as in savage or barbarous states, they can restore to labor its religious honor, they alone can successfully combat the idleness and vices of fashionable dissipation, they can substitute the arbitrament of Christian equity for that of fire and sword, and while pouring oil on our troubled waters, they can teach by example as well as by precept, those wholesome restraints which prevent the increase of a local population faster than the means of its subsistence.

If pauperism in this country is chiefly exotic, it is none the less real, and none the less afflictive or disastrous. If an obvious remedy exist in our vast tracts of unoccupied land, it is so much the more urgent to organize while directing the tide of emigration by the spirit of Christianity. By colonizing emigrants under the guidance of religious orders we obviate the twofold evils of their pauperism and their isolation.

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The Iliad Of Homer.

Rendered Into English Blank Verse By Edward, Earl Of Derby.

It is our custom, or that of our time, to decry classical education. We have a right to do so, no doubt, if our unfavorable judgment regarding it is based upon a correct and intelligent estimate of its value, as a method of training the youthful mind and of disciplining the intellect by the exercise of its nascent power upon works of model taste and unrivalled elegance. Submitting classical education to this test, we cannot glibly join in the outcry against it of those who see in it only a process for acquiring a knowledge of Greek and Latin words, of no earthly use to the possessor or to anybody else. {741} Neither, on the other hand, would we, upon such test, accept it as the only canon of liberal education, to the exclusion of others that may serve the purpose of instruction with more practical advantage.

We would fain offer Earl Derby's translation of the _Iliad_ as an example, according to our notion, of the practical process to be followed in studying the classic authors in order to profit by their beauty, and of the gifts the mind receives from the cultivation of classic literature. Not a poet himself, the noble lord has imbibed into his own plastic mind the conceptions of the "sovereign poet" in all their poetic beauty and serene grandeur, and reproduces them for the English reader, shapely moulded, not distorted nor disfigured. We shall not enter into a comparison of his translation with that of Pope or Cowper, neither shall we discuss the fitness of the metre he has adopted. His own translation, if argument were wanted, would compel us to agree with him that he has selected that metre best suited for rendering the Homeric poem into English verse, and we give him our hearty accord in his condemnation of the English hexameter-- a lumbering rhythm, not inaptly compared, by some author, to the noise of pumpkins rolling on a barn-floor. We shall merely show, by a few extracts, how he has succeeded in reproducing the conceptions of the poem, and how happily he has caught, without imparting any admixture of modern sentiment, the flowing style in which the poet pours forth, as it were, without drawing breath, his grand melodious strain. His translation is not a dead cast, but a copy, and a copy instinct with life. His task was not an easy one; and when we reflect upon his life and eminent station, we cannot help thinking that to ordinary men the difficulty would be much enhanced thereby. Still, it redounds the more to the honor of English scholarship and English statesmanship, that the foremost among its orators and statesmen, who, for more than a quarter of a century, has borne a large share of the weighty affairs of a vast empire; who by his talents has helped to solve the thousand vexed questions of modern politics and reform, could, during leisure, withdraw his mind from the absorbing interests of the political arena, and allow it to repose on the sublime naturalness of the _Iliad_, and float in placid unison with the serene grandeur of Homer's song. Though the translation is truly Homeric, yet, wrought as it is with spirit and genius, it bears in it something of the mind it springs from. The reader will not fail to discover in the echo of the _Iliad_, so faithfully reflected in its purity, natural freshness, and vigor, something of that splendid eloquence heard amid strife as angry and as fierce as raged between Agamemnon and Achilles.

In giving quotations, we shall omit those finer passages that are familiar to most readers, such as those well-known passages of the Third Book, with their beautiful similes, that describe the Greeks assembling and passing in review before their leaders. On these many a youthful and full-grown bard has tried his skill; but never have we seen them so beautifully rendered as in the translation before us. We select for our readers, first, that picture in the Fourth Book, in which all the raging elements of battle are thronged together--the maddening vengeance, the wrath, the fury of hostile ranks in the horror of collision--and which commences with the description of

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"Discord unappeased, 504 Of blood-stained Mars the sister and the friend; With humble crest at first, anon her head, While yet she treads the earth, affronts the skies. The gage of battle in the midst she threw, Strode through the crowd and woe to mortals wrought, When to their midst they came, together rushed 510 Bucklers and lances, and the furious might Of mail-clad warriors; bossy shield on shield Clattered in conflict; loud the clamor rose. Then rose two mingled shouts and groans of men Slaying and slain; the earth ran red with blood, 513 As when descending from the mountain's brow, Two wintry torrents from their copious source Pour downward to the narrow pass, where meet Their mingled waters in some deep ravine, Their weight of flood; on the far mountain side 520 The shepherd hears the roar; so loud arose The shouts and yells of those commingling hosts."

Nothing can give a better idea of the power of the translator than the manner in which he has compressed this passage, with its bewildering throng of elements, into the same number of lines as the original. We miss none of the simple grandeur, none of the _directness_, none of the even, rapid movement so characteristic of Homer. There is no importation of what belongs not to Homer into it, no amplification, no turning aside from the object, or indirectness in introducing and depicting every incident in the picture. It is Homer's strain; grand, rapid, and simple.

A few lines further on we have one of those beautiful images by which the poet has a fondness for describing the fall of his young heroes. Depicting the death of the stripling Simoisius, he sings:

"Prone in the dust he fell; 552 As some tall poplar, grown in marshy mead, Smooth-stemmed, with boughs up-springing toward the head."

Again of young Gorgythion, in the Eighth Book:

"Down sank his head, as in a garden sinks A ripened poppy charged with vernal rains; 350 So sank his head beneath his helmet's weight."

And of Asius, in the Thirteenth Book:

"He fell as falls an oak, or poplar tall, Or lofty pine."

These passages are placed together as containing some of the poet's favorite and beautiful images, and as showing how happy the translator has been in rendering them with truthfulness to their natural grace.

Earl Derby is not less successful in reproducing the deep tenderness and moving pathos that form a conspicuous feature of the _Iliad_. We quote from the Sixth Book, from the affecting scene between Hector and Andromache; but, instead of Andromache's words, so well known through Pope's translation, we give the answer of the noble Hector, the hero of the _Iliad_, in which, with soul-felt tenderness, he seeks to console his desponding wife: [Footnote 280]

[Footnote 280: To illustrate what we mean by the directness, simplicity, and even rapid movement of Homer's verse, we cite here from a popular English poet an extract which, though not a parallel to the above, is somewhat kindred; it is the first at hand, and will serve our purpose.

"Trust me, whatever fate my soul may gall, Thou at thy woman's choice shall ne'er repine. Trust me, whatever storm on me may fall, This man's true heart shall ward the bolt from thine. Hark, where the bird from yon dark ilex breathes Soul into night so be thy love to me; Look, when around the bird the ilex wreathes Still sheltering boughs, so be my love to thee! O dweller in my heart! the music thine; And the deep shelter--wilt thou scorn it? mine."

It will be observed, in reading these exquisite lines, how complex is the web of thought; how the artist, as it were, lingers to work into it embroidery of words and images borrowed from foreign objects. In Homer there is nothing but the natural artless flow of feeling; the even movement, as it springs from the soul, is not crossed by shadow or image from any other object, nor does it diverge this way or that to borrow of other sources in metaphor or comparison, tone, color, or pathos. The movement in Homer is natural, direct, even, rapid; and yet this natural, simple, deep gush of feeling presents to us a most truthful, touching, and expressive picture of a soul overwhelmed with tender love and sorrow commingled, but facing the stern task of duty.]

"Think not, dear wife, that by such thoughts as these 512 My heart has ne'er been wrung; but I should blush To face the men and long-robed dames of Troy, If, like a coward, I could shun the fight. Nor could my soul the lessons of my youth So far forget, whose boast it still has been In the forefront of battle to be found, Charged with my father's glory and mine own. Yet in my inmost soul too well I know 520 The day must come when this our sacred Troy, And Priam's race, and Priam's royal self, Shall in one common ruin be o'erthrown. But not the thoughts of Troy's impending fate, Nor Hecuba's, nor royal Priam's woes, 525 {743} Nor loss of brethren, numerous and brave, By hostile hands laid prostrate in the dust, So deeply wring my heart as thoughts of thee, Thy days of freedom lost, and led away A weeping captive by some brass-clad Greek. 530 Haply in Argos, at a mistress' beck, Condemned to ply the loom, or water draw From Hypereia's or Messais' fount. Heart wrung, by stern necessity constrained, Then they who see thy tears perchance may say, 535 'Lo! this was Hector's wife, who, when they fought On plains of Troy, was Ilium's bravest chief!' Thus may they speak, and thus thy grief renew For loss of him who might have been thy shield To rescue thee from slavery's bitter hour. 540 Oh! may I sleep in dust ere be condemned To hear thy cries and see thee dragged away."

The opinion of Lord Derby's oratory, entertained on this side of the Atlantic, may tempt those who admire it to think that in this translation his splendid eloquence and vigorous language would have their fitting scope in depicting the scenes of camp and field, in transmitting, lifelike, those angry encounters in the councils of gods and men; but, that the most tender and delicate tones of human feeling are not alien to his speech, is amply proved by the lines we have quoted. The same deep chord of feeling is struck by the words and modulations of this beautiful passage that vibrates in the pathetic language and melody of the Ionian bard.

We add another of those magnificent incidents of the _Iliad_, where the struggle of warriors on the very brink of battle is so grandly described by the poet. In the Thirteenth Book, the Greeks, closely massed under the Ajaces,

Waited the Trojan charge, by Hector led Spear close to spear, and shield by shield o'erlaid, Buckler to buckler pressed, and helm to helm, And man to man, the horse-hair plumes above, That nodded on the warriors' glittering crests, Each other touched, so closely matched they stood. Backward, by many a stalwart hand, were drawn The spears, in act to hurl; their eyes and minds Turned to the front and eager for the fray. On poured the Trojan masses; in the van Hector straight forward urged his furious course: As some huge boulder, from its rocky bed Detached, and by the wintry torrent's force Hurled down the cliff's steep face, when constant rains The massive rock's firm hold have undermined, With giant bounds it flies; the crashing wood Resounds beneath it, still it hurries on, Until, arriving at the level plain, Its headlong impulse checked, it rolls no more; So Hector, threatening now through ships and tents Even to the sea to force his murderous way, Anon, confronted by that phalanx firm, Halts close before it."

This truly fine passage is the perfection of Homeric poetry. We doubt if pen or brush has ever produced a picture abounding so much in life and action. The marvellous combination of objects presented to view in these lines, each heightening the effect of the other, and all blending into one tumultuous action, stirred by the fiery spirit of war, gives us a grand and terrific picture. In reading it, with almost the noise and din and the fray of warring men ringing in the words employed in the translation, we feel as if we had never before been enabled, by any English version, to enter into the full spirit of Homer himself.

We give a last quotation from the closing scene of the poem, where the cry of mourning Troy is raised over the lifeless body of its brave defender. The wail of his wife and of his mother has been heard; but there remains one other, the beauteous Helen, whose fatal charms had deluged the plains of Troy with blood, had inflicted on the lifeless hero on whom she now gazes in sadness many a day of toil and many an hour of pain, and now had crowned the heap of Ilium's sorrows with this last scene of woe. Her words of love commingled with self-reproach, are the highest tribute the poet could pay, in his closing verse, to the hero whom, throughout his song, he endows with all the noblest traits of son, of patriot, of brother, and of husband.

"Hector, of all my brethren dearest thou! True, godlike Paris claims me as his wife, Who bore me hither--would I then had died! But twenty years have passed since here I came And left my native land; yet ne'er from thee 895 I heard one scornful, one degrading word. And when from others I have borne reproach, Thy brothers, sisters, or thy brothers' wives Or mother, (for thy sire was ever kind Even as a father,) thou hast checked them still With kindly feeling and with gentle words: For thee I weep, and for myself no less; For through the breadth of Troy, none love me now, None kindly look on me, but all abhor."

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In the portions of Lord Derby's translation we have here given, we have not selected what are universally regarded as the most beautiful passages of the poem. We have selected such passages as from their crowded incidents, their bewildering throng of objects, their rapid succession of scenes or deep and tender pathos, appeared to us the most difficult for the translator to reproduce. We doubt if there be a student of Homer who will fail to find them a transcript of the poet's meaning, with almost literal exactness, as well as a copy of the genius and spirit of the poem. We had purposed selecting some passages which would give our readers a sample of his manner of rendering the Homeric epithets. The beauty of the few occurring in the above extracts will not escape them. Students of Homer are aware how constantly he appends distinctive epithets to persons, things, and places. To translate these wherever they occur would give a strange, unnatural cast to the poem. The English language, not like the plastic Greek, could not bear along the burden of them; besides, many of them would require an awkward paraphrase, which would only add words, not vividness or distinctness, to the thought of the poet. Lord Derby has wisely and discriminately dealt with these; when he renders them, he does so with so much exactitude and expressive force, that we feel rise within us, at this late hour, a sigh of regret that we had not at our hand his version of them, when we were students of Homer. In reading the translation through, we cannot say where we would have an epithet added that has been omitted, or where we would have stricken it out where it has been preserved. We said that the translation is a copy of the _Iliad_--a copy produced with genius and spirit. It will be read with pleasure by the classical scholar, to whom it will recall in their freshness and grandeur the scenes of that poem which charmed him in years long past. It will be welcomed by the general reader, who has not before tasted the charms of Homer's song, and who will gratefully acknowledge it as a new treasure to the storehouse of English literature. In it--and in the life of the noble author, whose devotedness to classical literature could not have lived through his busy political life, did he not in his own inward consciousness ever find the great benefit and elegant pleasure he had gained from it--is furnished for the public at large the strongest argument we know against banishing classical education from our schools and colleges.

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Lines written by Theodulphus.

Translated From The Latin.

Lines

Written By Theodulphus, Bishop Of Orleans, A.D. 820, In A Copy Of The Holy Scriptures, Transcribed By His Own Hand.

Light of God's law! divesting earth of gloom, More white than snows, more bright than starry skies, Beneath whose radiance good and virtue bloom-- From whom all error flies.

Blest word of God! gift of that wisdom, whence Springs life and light! what worth exceeds thy worth? Word that excels all words in sound and sense As heaven excels the earth.

Whate'er of wonders human arts have taught Have here their fountain--hence derive their force; Of all the grand achievements of man's thought Here wells the living source.

By day, by night here meditate, here school To holiness thy hands, and lips, and soul: Thou rulest others--be this book the rule That shall thyself control.

This sharer of thy couch--joy of thine eyes, Clasped in thy arms and on thy knees shall rest; Thy watcher when soft slumber on thee lies-- Thy earliest morning guest.

Be not for knowledge only thy desire; In virtue's presence learning's light is dim: Deeds and not words the Almighty will require-- Yet offer both to him.

By ceaseless study learn, by actions teach, Untiring seek for Wisdom's pathway here. This meditate, a light thy heart will reach, And make all fair and clear.

Who walks a tangled forest's briery way By frequent treading makes it broad and plain. And what the quick mind wins from day to day, Slow study doth retain.

C. E. B.

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From The French Of Erckmann And Chatrian.

The Invasion; Or, Yegof The Fool.