Chapter VIII.

Those whom Hullin named met in the hut attached to the saw-mill around the immense chimney. A sober sort of merriment seemed to play about the face of more than one.

"For twenty years I have heard people talking of these Russians and Austrians and Cossacks," said old Materne, smiling, "and I shall not be sorry to see one at the muzzle of my rifle."

"Yes," answered Labarbe; "we shall see enough of them at last, and the little children of to-day will have many a tale to tell of their fathers and their grandsires. And how the old women of fifty years hence will chatter of it at evening around the winter fire!"

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"Comrades," cried Hullin, "you know the country--you know our mountains from Thann to Wissembourg. You know that two grand roads--the imperial roads--traverse Alsace and the Vosges. Both starting from Bâle, one runs along the Rhine to Strasbourg, and enters Lorraine by Saverne. Huningue, Neuf-Brisach, Strasbourg, and Phalsbourg defend it. The other turns to the left to Schlestadt. Leaving Schlestadt, it enters the mountains, and passes on to Saint-Dié, Raon-l'Etape, Baccarat, and Lunéville. The enemy would like to force the passage of these two roads, as they are the best for cavalry, artillery, and wagons; but, as they are well defended, we need not trouble our about them. If the allies lay siege to the cities upon them, the campaign will be dragged out to a great length, and we shall have nothing to fear; but this is not probable. After having summoned Huningue to surrender, and Belfort, Schlestadt, Strasbourg, and Phalsbourg, on this side of the Vosges, and Bitche, Lutzelstein, and Sarrebrück, on the other, they will fall upon us. Now, listen. Between Phalsbourg and Saint-Dié there are several defiles practicable for infantry, but only one for cannon, that is, the road from Strasbourg to Raon-les-Leaux, by Urmatt, Mutzig, Lutzelhouse, Phramond, and Grandfontaine. Once masters of this road, the allies can debouch in Lorraine. This road passes us at Donon, two leagues hence, to our right. The first thing to be done is, to establish ourselves upon it at the place most favorable for defence--that is, upon the plateau on the mountain; to break down the bridges, and throw heavy abatis across it. A few hundred large trees, with their branches, will do the work, and under their cover we can watch the approach of the foe. All this, comrades, must be done by to-morrow night, or by the day after, at the latest. But it is not enough to occupy a position and put it in a good state of defence. We must see that the enemy cannot turn it."

"That is just what I was thinking," said old Materne. "Once in the valley of the Bruche, and the Germans can bring their infantry to the hills of Haslach, and turn our left; and there is nothing to hinder their trying the same movement upon our right, if they gain Raon-l'Etape."

"Yes; but to prevent their doing either, we have only to occupy the defiles of the Zorn and of the Sarre on our left, and that of Blanru on our right. We must defend a defile by holding the heights, and, for that purpose, Piorette will place himself, with a hundred men, on the side of Raon-les-Leaux; Jerome, on Grosmann, with the same number, to close the valley of the Sarre; and Labarbe, at the head of the remain on the mountain, will overlook the hills of Haslach. You will choose your men from those belonging to the villages nearest your stations. The women must not have far to come to bring provisions, and the wounded will be nearer home. The chiefs of each position will send me a report each day, by a messenger, on foot, to Donon, where will be our headquarters. We will organize a reserve also; but it will be time enough to see to that when our positions are taken, and no surprise from the enemy is to be feared."

"And I," cried Marc-Dives, "am I to have nothing to do? Am I to sit with folded arms while all the rest are fighting?"

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"You will superintend the transporting of our munitions. No one among us understands keeping powder as you do--preserving it from fire and damp--or casting bullets and making cartridges."

"That is a woman's work," cried the smuggler. "Hexe-Baizel can do it as well as I. Am I not to fire a shot?"

"Rest easy, Marc," replied Hullin, laughing; "you will find plenty of chances. In the first place, Falkenstein is the centre of our line--our arsenal and point of retreat, in case of misfortune. The enemy will know by his scouts that our wagons start from there, and will probably try to intercept them. Shots and bayonet-thrusts will not be wanting. Besides, we cannot confide the secret of your cave to the first comer. However, if you insist--"

"No," said the smuggler, whom Hullin's' reflections upon the cave touched at once. "No; all things well considered, I believe you are right, Jean-Claude. I will defend Falkenstein."

"Well, then, comrades," cried brave Jean-Claude, "we will warm our hearts with a few glasses of wine. It is now ten o'clock. Let each one return to his village, and see to the provisions. To-morrow morning, at the latest, the defiles must be occupied."

They left the hut together, and Hullin, in the presence of all assembled, named Labarbe, Jerome, and Piorette chiefs of the defiles; then he ordered those who came from the Sarre to meet, as soon as possible, near the farm of Bois-de-Chênes, with axes, picks, and muskets.

"We will start at two," said he, "and encamp on Donon, across the road. To-morrow, at daybreak, we will begin our abatis."

He kept old Materne, and his two sons, Frantz and Kasper, by him, telling them that the battle would surely begin on Donon, and sharp-shooters would be needed there. Mother Lefevre never seemed so happy. She mounted her wagon, and whispered, as she embraced Louise:

"All goes well. Jean-Claude is a man. He astonishes me, who have known him forty years. Jean-Claude," she cried, "breakfast is waiting, and a few old bottles which the Austrians will not drink."

"Good Catherine, I am coming."

But as he struck the horses with the whip, and as the mountaineers had just begun to scatter on their way to their villages, they saw, on the road to Trois-Fontaines, a tall, thin man, mounted upon a red mare; his hare-skin cap, with a wide peak, pulled well down upon his head. A great shepherd-dog, with long black hair, bounded beside him; and the skirts of his huge overcoat floated like wings behind him.

"It is Dr. Lorquin, from the plain," exclaimed Catherine; "he who at the poor for nothing; and that is his dog Pluto with him."

It was indeed he, who rushed among the crowd, shouting:

"Halt! stop! Halt, I say!"

His ruddy face, large, quick eyes, beard of a reddish-brown, broad, square shoulders, tall horse, and dog, in a moment appeared at the foot of the mountain. Gasping for breath, he shouted, in his excitement:

"Ah the villains! They wanted to begin the campaign without me! They shall pay for it!"

And, striking a little box he carried at his crupper, he continued:

"Wait awhile, my fine fellows, wait awhile! I have some things here you'll want by and by; little knives and great ones--round and pointed ones--to cut out the bullets and canister your friends yonder will treat you to."

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So saying, he burst into a gruff peal of laughter, while the flesh of his hearers crept. After this agreeable pleasantry, Dr. Lorquin said gravely:

"Hullin, your ears should be cut off! When the country was to be defended, was I to be forgotten? It seems to me that a surgeon might be useful here, although may God send you no need of one!"

"Pardon me, doctor; it was my fault," replied Hullin, pressing his hand. "For the last week I have had so many things to think of that some escaped me, in spite of myself. But a man like you need not be called upon by me to do his duty."

The doctor softened.

"It is all well and good," he cried; "but by your fault I am here late. But where is your general? I will complain to him."

"I am general."

"Indeed!"

"And I appoint you surgeon-in-chief."

"Surgeon-in-chief of the partisans of the Vosges. Very good, Jean-Claude." And, approaching the wagon in which Catherine was seated, the doctor told her that he relied upon her to organize the hospital department.

"Very well," she answered; "forward. You dine with us, doctor."

The wagon started, and all the way the brave doctor laughingly told Catherine how the news of the rising reached him; how his old house-keeper Marie was wild with grief, and tried to keep him from going to be massacred by the Kaiserliks; the different episodes of his journey from Quibolo to the village of Charmes. Hullin and Materne and his sons marched a few paces in the rear, their rifles on their shoulders; and thus they reached the farm of Bois-de-Chênes.

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Catholicity And Pantheism.

Number One.

Introductory.

Man is made for truth. The ray of intelligence beaming from his countenance and kindling his looks with life marks his superiority over all inferior creation, and loudly proclaims this fact. Intelligence must have an object; and what can this object be but truth? As a necessary consequence from this fact, it follows that error can be nothing else than fragments of truth; ill-assorted, improperly joined together. Error does not consist in what logicians call simple ideas, or self-evident propositions; but in complex ideas, the result of a long chain of syllogisms. Another consequence, closely allied to the first, is, that the greater the error, the more universal and more widely spread, the more particular truths it must contain. Or, if it does not contain a greater number of partial truths, it must have the power of apparently satisfying a real and prevalent tendency of our mind, otherwise it would never exert dominion over the intelligence; or else it must possess the secret of awakening and alluring a true and imperative aspiration of our nature.

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It is through these views that we have been enabled to explain to ourselves the prevalence of Pantheism. The simple utterance of the word Pantheism, the Deity of everything, would seem to carry its refutation with it, so plain and evident is its falsehood, so glaring its absurdity.

Pantheism, however, has been the universal error in time and space. In India, Persia, China, Greece, Rome, Pantheism flourished; now under a religious, and then under a philosophical form. After the Christian era it was the religion or system of those who did not understand the Christian dogmas as taught by the church; and the fathers of the first centuries, in battling against Gnosticism, Eclecticism, and Neoplatonism, were struggling with this old error of the world--Pantheism. Depressed for awhile by the efforts of the doctors of the church, it arose with fiercer energy under the forms of all those heresies which attacked the dogma of the Incarnation of the Word.

In the middle ages there were many philosophers who held Pantheism; and in modern times, since the dawn of the Reformation, it has become the prevalent, the absorbing error of the world. Always the same as to substance, it assumes every variety of form: now you see it in a logical dress, as in the doctrine of the German school; again it takes a psychological garb, as in that of the French school with Cousin at its head; or it assumes a social and political form, as in the Pantheism of Fourier, Leroux, Saint Simon, and all the progressists of every color or shade; and finally, it puts on a ghostly shroud, as taught by the American spiritualists. Under whatever garb it may appear, it penetrates and fills all, and pretends to explain all. It penetrates philosophy, natural science, history, literature, the fine arts, the family, society and the body politic, and religion. It holds its sway over all, and exhibits itself as having the secret of good and evil. How is this to be explained? If the falsehood of Pantheism be so evident, whence is it that it is the universal error in time and space, and has made such ravages in man's intelligence? The greater its falsehood, the more inexplicable becomes its prevalence. Has the nature of man changed? Has his intelligence lost its object? It is true, man's intelligence is not perfect. Since the fall it is weakened and obscured, but doubtless it has not ceased and could not cease to be intelligence; truth has not ceased to be its natural essential object. How, then, are we to explain the prevalence of so mighty an error?

By the fact that it is a system which by its generality seems to satisfy a supreme tendency of our mind, and to appease one of the most imperative cravings of our souls. Man's intelligence has a natural tendency to synthesize, that is, to bring everything into unity. This tendency arises both from the essential oneness of the mind and from the nature of its object. The object of the mind is being or reality in some form or other. That which does exist cannot even be apprehended, and hence cannot be the object of the mind. To understand and to understand nothing is, at the same time, the affirmation and the negation of the understanding. {183} Now, if the object of the intelligence, in order to be known and understood by the said faculty, must represent itself under the form of being or reality, it is under this respect necessarily one. Under whatever form it may exhibit itself, under whatever quality it may be concealed, it must always be reality or being, and, as such, one. But if being, reality, or unity, taken in the abstract, was the sole object of the intelligence, there would be an end to all its movement or life. All science would be at an end, because science is a process, a movement; and movement is not possible where an abstraction is the sole object of the mind. Being and unity, then, abstractly considered, would be the eternal stupor of the mind. This cannot be so, however. Intelligence is action, life, movement. Now, all this implies multiplicity; hence the object of the intelligence must also be multiple. But does not this second condition also destroy the former, which requires that the object of the intelligence should be one? Here reason finds a necessary, though, as we shall see, only an apparent contradiction, both in the logical as well as ontological order. In the logical order, because the intelligence seems to require unity and multiplicity as the conditions without which its action becomes impossible. In the ontological order, or the order of reality, because if the object is not at the same time one and multiple, how can those conditions of the mind be satisfied?

The intelligence, then, in order to live, must be able to travel from unity to multiplicity in an ascending or descending process, and to do so, not arbitrarily, but for reasons resting on reality.

In this lies the life of the intelligence; science is nothing but this synthetical and analytical movement. Let the mind stop at analysis or multiplicity, and you will give it an agglomeration of facts of which it can neither see the reason nor the link which connects them: and hence you place it in unnatural bonds, which, sooner or later, it will break, it matters not whether by a sophistical or a dialectic process. On the other hand, let it stop at unity, and you condemn it to stupor and death.

The foregoing ideas will explain the fact how a particular error will either have a very short existence or fall into the universal error of Pantheism. For in this, so far as we can see, lies the reason of the universal dominion of Pantheism. Because it proposes to explain the whole question of human knowledge, it takes it up in all its universality, and the solution which it sets forth has all the appearance of satisfying the most imperative tendency of our mind. To be enabled to explain the numberless multiplicity of realities, no matter how, and, at the same time, to bring them into a compact and perfect whole, strikes to the quick the very essence of man's intelligence and allures it with its charms. If this be not the main reason of the prevalence of Pantheism, we acknowledge we do not understand how such a mighty error could ever take possession of man's mind; we are tempted to say that human understanding was made for falsehood, which is to deny the very notion of intelligence.

What Pantheism proposes to do for the mind it also promises to accomplish for the soul.

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There is, in man's heart or soul, impressed in indelible characters, a tendency after the infinite, a craving almost infinite in its energy, such is the violence with which it impels the soul to seek and yearn after its object. To prove such a tendency were useless. That void, that feeling of satiety and sadness, which overwhelms the soul, even after the enjoyment of the most exquisite pleasure, either sensible or sentimental; the phenomenon of solitaries in all times and countries; the very fact of the existence of religion in all ages and among all peoples; the enthusiasm, the recklessness and barbarity which characterize the wars undertaken for religion's sake; the love of the marvellous and the mysterious exhibited by the multitude; that sense of terror and reverence, that feeling of our own nothingness, which steals into our souls in contemplating the wide ocean in a still or stormy night, or in contemplating a wilderness, a mountain, or a mighty chasm, all are evident proofs of that imperious, delicious, violent craving of our souls after the infinite. How otherwise explain all this? Why do we feel a void, a sadness, a kind of pain, after having enjoyed the most stirring delights? Because the infinite is the weight of the soul--the centre of gravity of the heart--because created pleasures, however delightful or exquisite, being finite, can never quiet that craving, can never fill up that chasm placed between us and God.

The pretended sages of mankind have never been able to exterminate religion, because they could never root out of the soul of man that tendency. I say pretended sages, because all real geniuses have, with very few exceptions, been religious; for in them that tendency is more keenly and more imperiously felt.

This is the second reason of the prevalence of Pantheism. To promise the actual and immediate possession of the infinite, nay, the transformation into the infinite, is to entice the very best of human aspirations, is to touch the deepest and most sensitive chord of the human heart.

Both these reasons we have drawn _a priori_; we might now prove, _a posteriori_, from history, how every particular error has either fallen into Pantheism or disappeared altogether. But since this would carry us too far, we will exemplify it by one error--Protestantism.

The essence of Protestantism lies in emancipating human reason from dependence on the reason of God. It is true that at its dawn it was not proclaimed in this naked form, nor is it thus announced at the present time; but its very essence lies in that. For if human reason be made to judge objects which God's reason alone can comprehend, man is literally emancipated from the reason of God.

What does this supreme principle of Protestantism mean, that every individual must, by reading the Bible, find for himself what he has to believe?

Are the truths written in the Bible intelligible or superintelligible; that is, endowed with evidence immediate or mediate, or are they mysteries?

If they be purely intelligible, endowed with evidence mediate or immediate, there is no possible need of the Bible, for, in that case, reason could find them by itself. If they be mysteries, how can reason, unaided by any higher power, find them out? It will not do to say, They are written in the Bible, and reason has merely to apprehend them. Suppose a dispute should arise as to the right meaning of the Bible; who is to decide the dispute? Reason? Then reason must grasp and comprehend mysteries in order to decide the dispute. For none can be judge unless he is qualified thoroughly to understand the matter of the dispute. From this it is evident that to make reason judge of the faith is to make it judge of the mysteries of the infinite, and, therefore, is to emancipate the reason of man from subjection to the reason of God. Hence, Protestantism was rightly called a masked rationalism.

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It soon threw off the mask. The human mind saw that it can never be emancipated from the reason of God unless it is supposed to be independent, and it could never be supposed independent unless it was supposed equal to the reason of the infinite.

The result of all this is necessarily Pantheism. And into Pantheism Protestants soon fell, especially the Germans, who never shrink from any consequence if logically deduced from their premises. Such was the latent reasoning of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others, in building up their form of Pantheism.

To understand is to master an object, to mould it so as to fit our intelligence. We can understand the infinite, we can master it. Therefore, we are at least equal to the infinite, 'we are ourselves the infinite,' we ourselves lay it down by a logical process. Hence the astounding proposal which Fichte made to his disciples, that the next day he would proceed to create God, was nothing else but the echo and logical consequence of the cry raised by the unfrocked monk of Wittenberg, proclaiming the independence of reason from the shackles of all authority.

On the other hand, the denial of human liberty and the absolute predestination of the Calvinists give the same result. If we are not free agents, if God can do what he lists with us, we are no longer agents in the strictest and truest sense of the word. Now, every substance is an act, a _monos_, a force; if, then, we are not agents, we are not substances, and hence we become qualities, phenomena of the infinite substance. All this as regards doctrine. But Protestantism ran into Pantheism by another road almost as soon as it arose, for the action of the feelings is swifter and more rapid than logic. Protestantism being rationalism in doctrine is necessarily naturalism with regard to the soul; and by presenting to the soul only nature, its authors left the craving after the supernatural and the infinite thirsty and bleeding. What was the consequence? Many Protestant sects fell into mysticism, which is but a sentimental Pantheism, a species of interior theurgy. History is too well known to render necessary any proof of these assertions. These are the consequences at which active minds must arrive when, in their researches, they do not meet with truth.

As to those minds which are not active, or not persevering in their inquiries, they fall into indifference, which is but a scepticism of the soul, as doubt is the scepticism of the mind.

Now, the question arises, What is the best method of refuting Pantheism? Many have been the refutations of Pantheism, but they are limited to pointing out the absurd consequences following from it, which consequences, summed up, amount to this: that Pantheism destroys and makes void the principle of contradiction in all the orders to which it may be applied; that is to say, it makes void that principle in the ontological order or order of realities, in the logical order, etc.

But, notwithstanding the truth and force of this refutation, we do not know that it has converted a single Pantheist. From the fact that Pantheism is more prevalent at the present time than ever it was, we should conclude that it has not. We say this with all the respect and deference due to those who have exerted their talents in the said arena. {186} For we know that some of the noblest intellects have brought their energy to bear against this mighty error. But, if we are allowed to express our opinion, we say that all former refutations have been void of effect for lack of completeness, and a determination on the part of their authors to limit themselves to the abstract order, without descending to particulars, and to the order of realities. The result was, that while Pantheism, without any dread of consequences, applied its principles to all orders of human knowledge, and to all particular questions arrayed under each order, and was, as it were, a living, quickening system--false, indeed, in the premises, but logical and satisfactory in the consequences resulting from those premises--the refutations of it, confined within the limits of logic, were a mere abstraction; true, indeed, and perfectly satisfactory to any one who could apply the refutations to all the orders of human knowledge, but wholly deficient for those who are not able to make the application. We think, therefore, that a refutation of Pantheism should be conducted on the following principles:

1st. To admit all the problems which Pantheism raises, in all the generality of their bearing.

2d. To examine whether the solution which Pantheistic principles afford not only solves the problem, but even maintains it.

3d. If it is found that the Pantheistic solution destroys the very problem it raises, to oppose to it the true solution.

These are the only true principles, as far as we can see, which will render a refutation of Pantheism efficient. For, in this case, you have, in the first place, a common ground to stand upon, that is, the admission of the same problems; in the second place, if you can prove that the Pantheistic solution of the problems destroys them, instead of solving them, it will be readily granted by the Pantheist for the sake of the problems themselves. When you have done all this, you do not leave the mind in doubt and perplexity, but you present to it the true solution, and it will then be ready to embrace it.

A refutation conducted upon those principles we have attempted in the articles we now publish.

We take Pantheism in all its universality and apparent grandeur; we accept all its problems; we examine them one by one, and we show that the Pantheistic solution, far from resolving the problems, destroys them; and we substitute the true solution. In a word, we compare Pantheism with Catholicity; that is, the universality of error with the universality of truth--the whole system of falsehood with the whole system of truth. We make them stand face to face, and we endeavor to exhibit them so plainly that the brightness and splendor of the one may thoroughly extinguish the phosphoric light of the other. We show the Pantheist that, if he ever wants a solution of _his_ problems, he must accept Catholicity, or proclaim the death of his intelligence.

To do this it will be necessary for us to compare Pantheism and Catholicity in all orders; in the logical order, in the ontological order or the order of reality; and under this order we must compare them in the moral, social, political, and aesthetic orders. The truth of the one or the other will appear by the comparison.

It is true we undertake a great task; great especially as regards the positive part of the refutation. For it embraces the whole of theology; not only with relation to what is commonly regarded as its object, but in the sense of its being the supreme and general science, the queen of all sciences, the universal metaphysic in all possible orders. {187} We own that we have felt the difficulty of such a task, and many times have we abandoned it as being far above our strength. But a lingering desire has made us return to the work. We have said to ourselves: Complete success and perfection are beyond our hope, but we can at least make the attempt; for, in matters of this kind, we think it well to reverse the wise maxim of the Lambeth prelates, and rather attempt too much than do too little.

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Friendships.

The glowing wreaths that 'mid curled locks repose, Through night of pleasure worn, Myrtle and jasmine, orange-flower and rose, Fall shrivelled by the morn.

The simple immortelles for loved ones twined-- With many a tear and sigh, Hung round the cross--the rain-compelling wind And winter snows defy.

Thus gilded friendships, knit by pleasure brief, Fade when joy's scenes have passed; But duller links, annealed by burning grief, Through checkered years shall last.

_The Lamp._

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Translated From Le Correspondant.

Discourse by the Rev. Père Hyacinthe. [Footnote 65]

[Footnote 65: Delivered on the occasion of a profession of Catholic faith and the first communion of an American Protestant lady, in the chapel of the convent of "Les Dames de l'Assomption," at Paris, July 14th, 1868]

"Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo," "I will sing eternally the mercies of the Lord." --_Psalms_.

Madam and my sister in Jesus Christ:

It is you who have given me the text and the subject of this exhortation. It is you who, overflowing with gratitude toward him who has called you from darkness to his admirable light, have asked me to forget this audience and to think only of you and of God, and to speak only of his loving-kindness which has been manifested in every event of your life. I will obey you; and, taking this life in its three divisions which mark time, I will endeavor to speak in simple truth, and the pious confidence of an overflowing heart, of the mercies of God over your past, your present, and your future career.

The history of Christian souls is the most marvellous and yet the most hidden of all histories. The more exterior events which agitate society find only in these interior histories their true sense and their highest reason; and when we shall read these entire in the book of life, and by the light of eternity, we will find therein the unanswerable justification of the providence of God over human affairs, and the true titles of the nobility of mankind in the blood and by the grace of Christ. "We will sing eternally the mercies of the Lord!"

I.

And first, madam, what were these mercies of your past life? Or, to be better understood, what were you? What have you been until now? I acknowledge some embarrassment in giving an answer to my own question. Although born in the bosom of heresy, you were not a heretic. No, by the grace of God you were not a heretic; and nothing shall force me to give you this cruel name--justly cruel--against which cries out all the knowledge I have of your past. One of the doctors--the most exact and the most severe--of Christian antiquity, Saint Augustine, refuses in several of his writings to class among heretics those who, born outside the visible communion of the Catholic Church, have kept in their hearts the sincere love of truth, and are disposed to follow it in all its manifestations and in all its requirements. [Footnote 66]

[Footnote 66: See particularly the letter xliii. of the edition of the Benedictines of Saint-Maur: "Qui sententiam suam, quamvis falsam atque perversam, nulla pertinaci animositate defendunt, praesertim quam non audacia praesumptionis suae pepererunt, sed a seductis atque in errorem lapsis parentibus acceperunt, quaerunt autem cauta sollicitudine veritatem, corrigi parati, cum invenerint; _nequaquam sunt inter haereticos deputandi_."]

That which makes heresy is the spirit of pride, of revolt, and of schism, which burst forth in heaven when Satan, separating the angels of light, attempted to remodel, according to his liking, the theology of eternity, and reform the work of God in the world; it is that breath blown from the nostrils of the archangel in wrath to stir up about him his propagandists throughout time. Gentle and humble of heart, you have never breathed that breath. You are not, then, a heretic.

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But then, what were you? One day I interrogated one of your most distinguished fellow-countrymen, Protestant by birth, now a Catholic and a priest, and in the outburst of that pious curiosity which is awakened by the history of souls I asked him this same question: "What were you?"

He answered me thus: "I did not belong to any Protestant communion; I had been baptized in the church of my parents, but I had never professed their faith." "You were, then, a rationalist?" said I. "No," responded he smilingly; "we of the United States know nothing of that mental malady of the Europeans." I blushed and was silent an instant, then pressed him to explain further, when he gave me this noble reply: "I was a natural man, seeking the truth with my whole intelligence and heart."

Well, madam, you were like that: you also--a noble, womanly nature--seeking the truth in love, and love in truth. But you were more: you were a Christian; ay, a Catholic.

This is a fundamental distinction without which it becomes impossible to be just toward communions separated from the Catholic Church, and toward the souls which compose them. All religious schisms contain within their bosom two elements entirely contrary: the negative element, which makes it a schism and often a heresy; and the positive element, which preserves for it a portion more or less great of its ancient heritage of Christianity. Not only distinct, but hostile, these two elements are nevertheless brought together in constant combat; the darkness and the light--life and death--meet without mingling, or without either being vanquished; and then results what I shall call the profound mystery of the life of error. As for myself, I do not give to error that undeserved honor to suppose that it can live of its own life, breathe of its own breath, or nourish of its own substance souls who are not without virtue, and peoples who are not without greatness.

Madam, Protestantism, as Protestantism, is that negative element which you have repudiated, and which with the Catholic Church you have condemned and abjured. But the spirit of Protestantism has not been alone in your religious life: by the side of its negations there were its affirmations, and, like savory fruit confined within its bitter husk, you were in possession of Christianity from your infancy.

Before coming to us, you were a Christian by baptism, validly received, and when the hand of your minister poured the water upon your forehead with the words of eternal life, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," it was Jesus Christ himself that baptized you. "Of little importance is the hand," writes Saint Augustine, "whether it be that of Peter or that of Paul: it is Christ that baptizes."

It was Christ who affianced you, who received your plighted faith and pledged you his. The depths of your moral being--that sacred part which in noble souls feels instinctively a repugnance to error--the Word consecrated to himself, and like a chaste virgin he reserved it for the skies! "_Virginem_ castam exhibere Christo." [Footnote 67]

[Footnote 67: 2 Corinthians xi. 2.]

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Christian by baptism, you were also one by the gospel. The Bible was the book of your infancy; and therein you have lisped at once the secrets of this divine faith, which is of all time because it comes from eternity, and the accents of that Anglo-Saxon tongue which is of all lands because it prevails over the globe in civilizing it. Without doubt the principle of private judgment, so-called--the principle under which you have formerly lived--is the source of numberless errors; but again, let us render thanks to God, besides the Protestant principle, with the Protestants themselves there is the Christian principle. Besides private judgment, there is the action of that supernatural grace received in baptism, and the mysterious sense, of which Saint Paul speaks, "We have the mind of Christ," [Footnote 68] and of which Saint John said, "Ye have unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things." [Footnote 69] When we have read together that Scripture which has separated our ancestors, I was agreeably surprised to find that we understood its every page in the same sense, and consequently in reading it alone, and out of the Church, you have not read it without the spirit of the Church.

[Footnote 68: "Nos autem sensum Christi habemus." (i Cor. ii. 16.)]

[Footnote 69: "Sed vos unctionem habetis a Sancto, et nostis omnia. ... Et non necesse habetis ut aliquis doceat vos: sed sicut unctio ejus docet vos de omnibus, et verum est, et non est mendacium." (i John ii. 20, 27.)]

Again, my child: with Baptism and the Holy Scriptures, with the sacrament and the book, you had prayer; that interior, invisible, ineffable, and withal common property; that language pre-eminently of the soul to God, and of God to the soul; that personal and direct communion of the humblest Christian with his Father in heaven.

In what, then, were you wanting? I remember what you once said to me when you were still a Protestant: "You, monk as you are, and I, Puritan that I am, are, nevertheless, of the same blood royal." You spoke truly, not because you were Puritan, but because you were Christian: we were of the same blood, both royal and divine. You were a child of the family like myself; but your cradle was carried away in a night of storm by imprudent hands from the paternal mansion--that mansion of which your eyes could no longer retain the image, of which your lips knew not the name, but which you reclaimed by your tears, by your cries, and by all the emotions of your soul. What you needed, my daughter, was to find it again, to weep upon its threshold, to embrace its old walls, and to dwell therein for ever.

You found it at Rome, in the temple of Saint Peter, the vastest and the most splendid which man has ever built to his God; but vast and splendid above all to the eyes of faith, because it is to them the image of the universal brotherhood of the children of God upon the earth. "To gather together in one the children of God that were dispersed." [Footnote 70] Coming from the great dispersion of souls, which is the work of man in Protestantism, you contemplated at last their supreme unity, which is the work of God in Catholicity. Deeply impressed and suddenly moved, you looked about you--it is your own touching account that I repeat here--you looked about you for a priest of your own tongue; not to confess to, for you did not then believe in its necessity, but to whom you could unburden your soul, and to whom you could tell your joy at having found at last a hearthstone for the heart, a _home!_--word so dear and sacred to your race and more necessary in the religious than in the domestic life. "This is my rest for ever and ever: here will I dwell, for I have chosen it." [Footnote 71]

[Footnote 70: "Ut filios Dei, qui erant dispersi, congregaret in unum." (John xi. 52.)]

[Footnote 71: Psalm cxxxi. 14.]

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II.

I have tried, madam, to tell what was your past, and how the mercy of God prepared you in it by his far-reaching hand for the marvels of the present. What is now this marvel? It is the mystic marriage with Jesus Christ, by the communion with his real body and with his real blood, in the sacrament of his true church. Affianced of God in baptism, you become his spouse in the Eucharist. "Oh! blessed are you to have been called to the marriage feast of the Lamb." [Footnote 72]

[Footnote 72: Apocalypse xix. 9.]

It is not without a touching motive that you have chosen the 14th of July to consummate this solemn act. This is the anniversary of your marriage--of that marriage sundered by death. You have made your entry into the Catholic Church the epoch of a great transformation in your spiritual life: you have chosen the day most appropriately, desiring that this date, so full of the remembrances of tenderness and grief, should mark your entire union with your crucified Lord, to be no more separated for ever.

How beautiful is he--in his blood, and through your tears--this Spouse of Calvary, and how lovely, and how truly is he made for you, my daughter! It is not

"Patience on a monument smiling at grief:"

it is love transported with sorrow and reposing in death.

I remember well the day when I met you for the first time in the parlor of my humble convent. The Catholic crucifix you already wore upon your breast, and from time to time your eyes were turned toward that other cross suspended against the wall, and which presided over our interview, full of light and full of tears, with an expression which revealed your whole soul--all that it still lacked--all that it already foresaw.

I would exaggerate nothing, and above all I would offend no one; but can I not say that the orbit wherein, ordinarily, Protestant piety moves is the divine, rather than God himself? It is conscience, with its steel-like temper, which is at the same time evangelic and personal. It is respect for truth--the instinctive taste for what is moral and religious. All these are what I call the divine: it is not God. It is the glorious ray of the sun, but it is not that resplendent disk. Where, then, is the elevation of the soul to the living God? "My soul has thirsted for the strong and living God; when shall I come, and appear before his face?" [Footnote 73]

[Footnote 73: Psalm xli. 3.]

Where is the habitual communion of the heart and its works with the Word made flesh? and the tears poured out like Magdalen at his feet? and the bowed head--like that of John--upon his breast? and all that which the book of the _Imitation_ so well calls the familiar friendship of Jesus? Where, in a word, is that Real Presence which, from the holy sacrament, as from a hidden fountain, flows forth to the true Catholic, like a river of peace, all the day long, fructifying and gladdening his life? It was this Emmanuel--this God with us--who awaited you in our church, and in the sacrament which attracted you with so much power even when you but half-believed in it. As in the ancient synagogue, you found in your worship only symbols and shadows; they spoke to you of the reality but did not contain them, they awakened your thirst but did not quench it. Weak and empty elements which have no right to existence since the veil of the temple has been rent asunder and the eternal reality discovered. {192} "Old things have passed away, and all things are become new." [Footnote 74] Oh! blessed are you to have been admitted into the nuptial chamber of the Lamb.

[Footnote 74: 2. Cor. v. 17.]

However, madam, if Christ has taken captive your heart, it is the language of the prophet: "Thou hast beguiled me, O Lord, and I am beguiled: thou hast been stronger than I, and thou hast prevailed." [Footnote 75] But he has respected all the rights of your reason and of your liberty. That which you have resolved, that which you are about to accomplish, you have weighed well and long in the balance of investigation, study, reflection, and prayer; and I owe you this justice to say that you have carried your reflection to the utmost scruple, and completion almost to delay--so much have you feared, in this great religious act, any other argument but of personal conscience; to such a degree have you persisted in rejecting the shadow of any human influence, or the shadow of the influence of imagination or sentiment.

[Footnote 75: Jer. xx. 7.]

It is thus, however, that Jesus Christ would have you to himself. Spouse of love, he is at the same time the Spouse of truth and liberty, and this is why, in drawing souls to him, he never deceives nor constrains them. He is the eternal Word, begotten of the reason of God the Father; born in the outpouring of infinite splendor, he remembers his origin, and when he comes to us it is not under cover of our gloom, but in the effulgence of his light. And because he is the truth he is also liberty. He bows with respect [Footnote 76] before the liberty of the soul, his image and daughter, and forgets the language of command that he may only employ that of prayer.

[Footnote 76: "Cum magna reverentia disponis nos." (Sap. xii. 18.)]

As in the sacred song, he says: "Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is full of dew, and my locks of the drops of the nights." [Footnote 77]

[Footnote 77: Canticle v. 2.]

"Here am I." He says again in the Apocalypse, "I stand at the door, and knock: if any one shall hear my voice, and open to me the door, I will come in, and will sup with him, and he with me." [Footnote 78] He never forces an entrance into the heart; he enters it only when it is opened for him. How tender and beautiful those words that prove that with God as with man there is the same love and the same tenderness! True love respects as much as it loves, and disdains triumph at the expense of liberty!

[Footnote 78: Apocalypse iii. 20.]

Is this all, however? For his love is jealous and liberty is not enough; there must be the combat and the sacrifice. What were the desperate conflicts, free though you were, that rendered your decision so difficult and so painful? I may not speak of them. Family, friends, country: I have seen these sacred wounds too near to dare to touch them. I will only say that I was ignorant until now of what it costs even to the mind most perfectly convinced, and to the strongest will, to leave the religion of their mother and of their country!

Ah! why is it that on that noble soil of the United States our church is still, I do not say unknown, but despised, by so many souls? Would to God it were only unknown! A new apostle will invoke upon her shores the God whom Paul invoked before the Areopagus, _ignoto Deo_, the church which they love in the ideal, without knowing it in its reality; and, free from prejudices, the sober-minded Americans will receive it better than did the frivolous Athenians. {193} But they think they know us, while they see us through such base report that even our name excites disgust and hatred. How much longer must these sectarian misapprehensions continue? and when will God at last command that the walls of division shall be thrown down? At all events, it depends upon us to prepare for that much desired day, by coming together, not with doctrinal concessions, which would be criminal if not chimerical, but by abandoning our respective prejudices before the better known reality, and by the formation of those kindly relations, while esteem and charity could yet unite those whom diversity of beliefs still separate. As for me, this is my most ardent prayer, and as far as I understand and appreciate the situation of religious affairs in this century, this feeling is invested with a quickened and more pressing character. And since, then, the time has come when judgment should begin at the house of God, [Footnote 79] let us Roman Catholics know how to give the example; let us arise resolutely and give a loyal hand to our separated but well-be-loved brethren.

[Footnote 79: "Quoniam tempus est ut incipiat judicium a domo Dei." (i Peter iv. 17.)]

But what do I say? Is it not you, madam, who have come to us first, surmounting obstacles which I cannot recount? You have overcome them not only with the sweat of your brow, but by the blood of your soul; for, as Saint Augustine so truly says, "there is a blood of the soul." And it is this which you have poured out; you have removed by your heroic hands the hewn rocks which shut you in. Like the daughter of Zion, you have made straight your way and have come. [Footnote 80]

[Footnote 80: "Conclusit vias meas lapidibus quadris, semitas meas subvertit." (Lam. iii. 9.)]

Ah! let me welcome you with these words of your own, in which you expressed the inspiration which was your strength: "My love, my beautiful, calls me: I know his voice, and though I am weak and trembling I will come to him."

III.

Let us finish this song of the loving-kindness of God in your soul. Affianced by baptism, even in the bosom of your involuntary errors, espoused by the Eucharist in the integrity of Catholic faith and charity, what remains for you to complete the cycle of divine love and to consummate your life therein, except to become a mother in the apostolate?

Our Lord was speaking one day to the multitude, when he was told that his mother and his brethren were without and had asked for him. Surveying the people with his look of inspiration, he asked, "Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?" Then stretching out his hand over the listening multitude, he said, "Behold my mother and my brethren. For whosoever shall do the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my brother and my mother." [Footnote 81]

[Footnote 81: Matthew xii. 49, 50.]

The Pope Saint Gregory the Great, explaining, in one of his homilies, this teaching of the Master, found some difficulty in his saying, "This is my mother." "We are without doubt his brothers and his sisters, by the accomplishment of the will of the Father; but how could any being other than Mary be called his mother?" And the great pope remarks, as soon as a soul by a word, by example, by a spiritual influence, whatsoever it may be, produces or develops in another soul the Word, the God, the Truth, substantial and living, justice and charity, in fact, Jesus Christ--for Jesus Christ is all these--she becomes in a way superior to the reality of maternal conception, the mother of Jesus in that soul, and the mother of that soul in Jesus.

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Well, madam, if I mistake not, God reserves for you a part in his choice of this spiritual maternity. It is of those cherished ones of whom I cannot speak--respect and emotion forbid--but you will be their mother in Jesus, their mother in the integrity of their liberty as you have been his spouse in the plenitude of your own. Since there are other souls without number and without name, at least to our feeble minds, but who are counted and inscribed in the book of divine election, and who, by the mysterious power of your apostleship, shall be gathered from the four winds of heaven; for the Lord hath not spoken in vain: "And many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven." [Footnote 82] Yes, many, born like you in heresy without having been heretics, ignorant without being culpable, are hastening to the banquet of Catholic truth, to the joys of a refound unity; while, alas! some there are among us, zealous for the letter, but using it to smother the spirit, who will see themselves perhaps excluded from the kingdom of God, for which they do not bring forth fruit. [Footnote 83]

[Footnote 82: Matthew viii. 11.]

[Footnote 83: Matthew xxi. 43.]

Go, then, as a missionary of peace and of light to the land that awaits you, and of which by an especial design of Providence the moral future is almost entirely in the hands of women. You will not regret the public preaching which is forbidden your sex; you will speak in the modest and persuasive eloquence of conversation; you will speak by your person and your entire life, free yet submissive, humble yet proud, austere yet tolerant, carrying the love of God even to aspirations the most sublime, and the love of your fellow-beings to condescensions the most tender.

But I would define more clearly the special character of your apostolate. In recounting to me the history of your soul, with its loves and hates, you have said, "I have hated three things: slavery, the Catholic Church, and immorality." Of the three hates only one remains. Slavery is no more: God has effaced the sign of Cain from the brow of your people with a baptism of blood. As for the Catholic Church, when you came to know it your hate was turned to love, and you have espoused it to battle more efficiently with it against the last enemy; and it is in the firm foundation of her dogmas, replacing the slippery sand whereon your uncertain feet trod; it is in the fecundity of its sacraments, substituted for the sterility of your worship; it is under the guidance of its hierarchy, and in the force of its unity, that you will combat the double immorality which dishonors the Christian world--the immorality of mind, which we in Europe call Rationalism, which you in America call Infidelity; two wounds unlike I know, but two wounds equally mortal: and the immorality of the heart, that which corrupts the senses as the former does thought. These two immoralities are sisters; one attacks the virginity of faith, the other the virginity of love, and both have found in woman a special enemy. To the serpent which crawls on its belly and eats the dust of the earth, the Lord has said from the beginning, in pointing to woman, who is the ideal being springing from the heart of man: "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." [Footnote 84]

[Footnote 84: Genesis iii. 15.]

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But now, behold the woman above all women! Mary, the young wife, the young mother, going over the hills of Judea to visit her friend, advanced in years, and hopeless as it seemed in sterility. She carries in her womb the infinite weight of the Word, but her step is light like truth, like love. Under the charm of the chaste love of God she greets Elizabeth, who feels at her approach the germ of nature quicken within her breast. "From whence cometh this happiness that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" The children were yet mute, but their mothers prophesy, Elizabeth before John the Baptist, Mary before Jesus Christ. "Already," to speak with St. Ambrose, "already the day of the beginning of the salvation of man had begun," [Footnote 85] and because sin had commenced by woman, regeneration commenced by her.

[Footnote 85: "Serpunt enim jam tentamenta salutis humanae." In Luc.]

It seems to me I see now the Christian woman, espoused of Jesus and his mother, advancing toward this century, bowed down like Elizabeth in the sadness of sterility. The obstacles which have repelled us do not hinder her. She will imbibe in the inspirations of her charity, faith, and hope, which we have too often failed to show; rising like Mary upon the delectable heights, walking in the paths of the spring-time and of the dawn; she will cause to be heard in the ears of the men of this century this cry of the heart which recognizes the presence of Jesus: "Behold, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy." [Footnote 86]

[Footnote 86: Luke i. 44.]

Arise, daughter of Zion, unbind the cords about your neck, you who were captive: "_Solve vincula colli tui, captiva filia Sion_." [Footnote 87] How beautiful are the feet of those who stand upon the mountain-top, proclaiming peace and bringing the glad tidings of salvation, crying: "The Lord shall reign!"

[Footnote 87: Isaiah iii. 2.]

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Glimpses of Tuscany.

Santo Spirito.

III.

Santo Spirito is not as well known to strangers as the other large churches of Florence. It is on the south, or less frequented, side of the river, and is so hemmed in, hidden away, and thrust out of sight, by compact masses of tall dwellings and old palaces, that, although just round the corner from the Pitti, it was a month before I found it out. Indeed, I was only then apprised of its existence by the drums of the Sixth grenadiers beating for military Mass.

A piazza in Florence means an acre, more or less, of oblong, open, flat, macadamized, unornamented ground; without tree, or shrub, or flower, or even the picturesque grasses of the deader Italian towns. The Piazza of Santo Spirito is peculiarly bald and insipid. The exterior of the church itself is dreadful; shabbiness and dilapidation unrelieved by a single line of beauty. The cupola, for which Brunelleschi is responsible, is mean almost to vulgarity; almost as mean as the cupola of San Lorenzo. Two such cupolas would ruin any other reputation than his who vaulted Santa Maria del Fiore. The only redeeming feature in the whole quadrilateral is the charming Campanile, or belfry of Baccio d'Agnolo's, which hovers like the dream of a poet over Ser Filippo's prose. The facade of the church is unfinished, and, what is worse, disfigured by the introduction of the scroll, that poorest, falsest, shallowest of architectural devices. The scroll is properly the symbol of the fleeting; a line described through air or water with wand or wheel; the scriptural type of evanescence: "_And the heavens shall be rolled away like a scroll_." (Isaiah.) "_And the heaven withdrew, as a scroll rolled up together._" (Revelation.)

How monstrous a violation of all fitness to adopt it as part of the fixed form and outline of an edifice--to fasten the sign of the transient on the front of mansions dedicated to the service of the Eternal! The front is the weakest elevation of the basilica, but the scroll only makes it worse. See how well the matter can be mended by the gold mosaic and linear grace of San Miniato, by the arched colonnades of Pisa, by the pointed buttresses--_not_ the wretched windows--of Milan. You are in a rage with Ser Filippo and the Renaissance at once.

But enter; push the green baize aside; step fairly in. Heaven, how beautiful! What breadth, what calm, what repose! Round-arched aisles of dark Corinthian columns, not stopping at the choir, but running clean round transepts and apsis, traversing a Latin cross of more than three hundred by nearly two hundred feet. No stained glass--all in transparent shadow, like the heart of a forest. A church built for use, not show; yet lofty, spacious, beautiful, with an atmosphere of its own which is luxury to breathe. Not the gloom of the Duomo, nor the glow of St. Peter's, nor yet the gray of San Lorenzo; the place is haunted by a dim, mysterious gladness. {197} Although in the round style, and comparatively barren of detail, it looks larger even than it is; larger than Santa Maria Novella or Santa Croce. Its real magnitude is enhanced by its perfect proportions; a fact which should keep us from flippantly imputing to the same cause the illusive littleness of St. Peter's.

But the grenadiers are marching in, "fifty score strong;" their bayonets are flashing in nave and aisle. You would think the church would never hold them all; yet there is room beneath those brown arches for thrice as many more. As soon as the men are formed, the officers march down the nave amidst complete silence--their breasts covered with decorations won at Magenta and Solferino--and range themselves before the choir. In the transept on their right is stationed their band, much the best in Florence--some forty instruments, admirably led, and nearly as good as the Austrian. Just as the music begins, the chaplain, a handsome, grave young ecclesiastic--followed by two tall grenadiers who serve his Mass--advances from Cronaca's beautiful sacristy; and, without the least appearance of haste, and with the utmost dignity, Mass is said in fifteen minutes. No noise, no shuffling, no whispering, none of the effort and formality of a festa; the charm is that of a ceremony first beheld just as the celebrants are first at home in their parts. The cavalry Mass at Santa Maria Novella is far less imposing; dismounted troopers are always awkward, and their band, in this instance, is a poor one. But it was very fine at La Novella--the two dragoons flanking the altar with naked sabres, else motionless at their sides, flashed forward in swift salute at the elevation.

As soon as Mass was over, the troops dispersed and I was at liberty to explore the church. What a relief to find the pictures covered! it almost reconciled me to Lent. What a delight to find all the details unobtrusive--all the chapels modestly in the background, instead of parading their comparative insignificances. Nothing blank or bald: a broad, single effect like the Sistine Sibyls and Prophets, or the Madonna of the Fish, or the Idylls of the King.

In the ages of faith, the monk, the noble, and the state went hand in hand in erecting and adorning the house of God--in making it gigantic, beautiful, imperishable, complete. Not only in Italy, but throughout Europe, there was a silent compact between the present and the future--an assurance that the inspiration of to-day would remain the inspiration of tomorrow--an abiding conviction that the creed of the sire would remain for ever precisely the creed of the son. In this belief, the founders of the great churches cut out work for three centuries with less misgiving than we should now have in projecting for as many years. The builders of the English abbeys foresaw not the day when the torch and sword and hammer of the descendant would be uplifted to burn, to stain, to shatter a repudiated inheritance; when the rites of new and hostile doctrines would affront the few ancestral temples that were spared. The architects of St. Peter's foresaw not the large revolt for which they were unconsciously paving the way in Germany. Like ourselves, to be sure, they had the record of the past before them. They knew, as well as we, that naught was left of Corinth, and next to nothing of Athens, and little of ancient Rome save her Colosseum and her Pantheon; that the temple of Solomon was ashes; that the obelisks were pilgrims to the West; that the _tented_ sepulchres of the _shepherd_ kings stood solitary and meaningless in the desert. {198} But, in spite of all this panorama of mutation and decay, they could not subdue the sacred instinct of building for eternity. Christianity was so charged with promise, triumph, and immortality that they fancied her tabernacles as indestructible as herself. There was a joyous trust, too, that "the time was at hand," a confident expectation that those domes and spires would abide till the coming of the Son of man in the glory of his Father with his angels.

But the English Reformation, the French Revolution, and Italian Unification have taught us that the monuments of the new faith, instead of being specially exempt from injury, are peculiarly liable to insult and mutilation. Men and nations have measurably ceased to care or expect to perpetuate themselves through the temple and the tomb. The soul of architecture has received a shock. Her throne is the solitude or the waste. She lurks amidst ruins and relics, the very Hagar of art. She that seemed mightiest has proved weakest; her daintier sisters, sculpture and song, have triumphed where she failed. The statues that adorned her porticoes are upright still, but the porticoes themselves are overthrown. The lay, the legend, the chronicle, committed with plying finger to paper or parchment, are living, while the forms of beauty and grandeur entrusted to marble are broken or beneath the sands. Here and there you meet her skeleton in the wilderness, her white arm upraised in sublime self-assertion; but though the story of Zenobia is immortal, there is scarcely a column of Palmyra standing. The very mummy, with his dry papyrus which a spark might annihilate, may chance to survive his pyramid! Nature has turned against her; matter has played her false. She has toiled a thousand years in granite, iron, cedar--in all that seemed solidest, hardest, firmest: her back is bent with honest toil, her hands are roughened with mallet and chisel; yet the dream of a poet traced on calfskin outlasts the vision embodied in travertine or porphyry. If an earthquake shook the Val d'Arno, the canvas of Giotto would survive his campanile.

What mockery, then, to persist in attempting the indestructible when dissolution or disintegration is the inevitable doom of the material! Time has demonstrated that the more ponderous the instrument of expression, the less easy of perpetuation the art. The obliterated manuscript can be forced to reappear, but no chemistry can reproduce the vanished temple. The greatest forces of the universe are precisely those which are subtlest and least substantial. Steam and electricity are well-nigh impalpable and invisible. It is the spirit, not the body, save as purged and spiritualized by decay, that exists for ever. Away, then, with the unattainable! Away with a miscalled _real!_ If it, too, is a cheat, may it not be counterfeited with impunity? Away with column of stone, with lacework of fretted marble, with blazonry in oak and walnut! Away with all stubborn, difficult truth, and welcome brick and mortar, lath and plaster, paint and whitewash, gilt and varnish. If the cheap will look as well or nearly as well as the dear, why not use it? It is no falser, only _sooner_ falser. When it wears out or burns up or tumbles down, try it again. Be done with the tower of Babel: its curse clings faster to architecture than to speech. And as for the gigantic, drop it! {199} It is always a disappointment--a disappointment in nature and art, in minster, mountain, stream--a disappointment in all things save the broad dome of the empyrean with its floor of emerald, its ceiling of unfathomed blue or studded bronze, its draperies of shifting, winged, ethereal cloudland.

Yes, art, like the artist, must encounter death. But shall we embrace the mean because sooner or later we must relinquish the great? Shall we forsake the permanent for the transient because the enduring falls short of the everlasting? Shall we inaugurate a reign of sham because the real is not always the perpetual?

"Il pessimo nemico del bene é l'amator del ottimo."

The muses should never pout: each art should reverently accept its limitations. Though the pen is mightier than pencil or chisel, though only the word and the song are privileged to pass intact from age to age, yet a portion of the soul of plastic art may sometimes baffle decay. Even in ruin, architecture is not without its prouder consolations. _Ex pede, Herculem_. While a bone of her survives, imagination can approximate a resurrection of the departed whole. The malice of her sworn enemies, the elements, is sometimes providentially her salvation; the shrouded lava of Vesuvius embalmed a more vivid presentation of Roman life and manners than lives in the pages of Terence or Plautus. A broken shaft, a fragmentary arch, a section of Cyclopean wall, is at once a poem, a chronicle, and a picture. The ruin is time's authentic seal, without which history were as inconclusive as the myth. The past is a present voice as long as a vestige of its architecture remains. The Column of Trajan is the best orator of the forum now; there is a deeper charm in the living eloquence of the Colosseum than in the dead thunder of the Philippics. [Footnote 88] We are as awed and startled when unexpectedly confronted by some mouldering but still breathing monument of antiquity, as if the form of the deathless evangelist stood bodily before us.

[Footnote 88: "Tully was not so eloquent as thou, Thou nameless column with the buried base!"]

We perfectly understand and sympathize with the modern instinct that recoils from imparting a more than needful permanence to private dwellings. The home of man is sullied with low cares and offices; beneath the screen and shelter of its roof the worst passions are often nourished, the darkest mysteries are sometimes celebrated. In many an ancient manor, there is scarcely a chamber without its legend of sin, scarcely a floor without its bloodstain. But the _House of God_ is the witness of the virtues, not the vices, of humanity; within its hallowed precincts the casual profanity and levity of the few are quite lost in the earnest adoration of the many; the whispers of blasphemy drowned in the ceaseless tide of general thanksgiving; the rebellious beatings of passion hushed in the solemn chorus of penitence and praise. The longer it endures, the holier it becomes. Its aisles are impregnated with prayer, its vaults enriched with ashes of the blest, its altars radiant with the wine of sacrifice. Behind the doors of the palace and the dwelling, time is sure to plant the spectre and the thorn; behind the doors of the cathedral, the angel and the palm.

The primary charm of church architecture is veracity. The interior of Santo Spirito is perfect truth. The columns are, what they claim to be, stone; the balustrade of the choir is, what it claims to be, bronze; the altar what it claims to be, _pietra dura_. {200} You do not sound a pillar and hear a lie, or scratch a panel and see a lie, or touch a jewel and feel a lie. All is fair, square, honest--not even the minutest lurking insincerity to vex the Paraclete. I soon learned to love Santo Spirito as well as any Florentine; to love it better than the Duomo with its windows of a thousand dyes; better than the bride of Buonarroti With her frescoes of Masaccio, her Madonna of Cimabue's, her Crucifix of Giotto's; better even than Santa Croce with its ashes of Angelo, its Annunciation of Donatello's, its Canova's Alfieri. I used to sit for hours in its spacious choir, undisturbed even by the dull, nasal, inharmonious chanting of the good Augustinians, and listen to the sermons preached by those dim, unending arches.

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Translated From The Revue Du Monde Catholique.

The Statue Of The Cure D'ars, Inaugurated At Ars, August 5, 1867.

God's purposes sometimes reveal themselves in a manner greatly to perplex us. They move contrary to all foresight or to any human logic. Day succeeds to night, light to darkness, hope to despair, without any apparent reason, indeed in spite of reason itself. When all seems lost, then everything is regained, and even death itself appears to live anew. The history of religion is full of such decay and such regeneration.

After the frightful crisis of the eighteenth century, one would have thought the Church entirely abandoned, and that no new breath could revive the fallen ruins which the efforts of a hundred years had accumulated. "The pinnacle of the temple is crumbled, and the clew of heaven comes to moisten the face of the kneeling believer," says, in his theatrical and pseudo-biblical style, the most celebrated enemy of our time. [Footnote 89]

[Footnote 89: M. Renan.]

Many Christians were distressed, and the timid braved with difficulty the universal defection. That which they believed in was denied, that which they adored was burned, and that which they loved was disgraced.

God permits these humiliations, to show us that "the work is all of his hand," and sustained only by him. To the triumphant cries of his adversaries, to the cry of distress from his faithful, he has responded by the glorious miracle which eternally attests his power. Lazarus was in the tomb; he has restored him to life! The Church, said its enemies, was crushed to the earth; he has revivified it. To the eighteenth century, the most impious and corrupt of centuries, he has caused the nineteenth to succeed, which will remain in history one of the most fruitful and beautiful of the Church. To speak properly, the nineteenth century seems to have for its mission the raising of the ruins made by its predecessor. {201} Following it over all the earth, and taking up its work as a counterpart, the present century repairs the breaches made before it and re-establishes at each point the fortresses and ramparts of virtue.

Without doubt the enemy is still vigorous; he is far from being vanquished, and puts forth his last efforts. The nineteenth century is a list where truth and error, good and evil, give themselves up to solemn combat. The ground is cleared, the intermediate questions laid aside, and each party knows well what he wishes and where he goes. Scepticism and materialism never had a more brilliant career; never have truth and Christian virtues shone with greater _éclat_. In which camp will rest the victory? This is God's own secret, and only from the past may we predict the future. In no age, perhaps, even in its best days, has the Church collected around her so many and such valiant champions. The greatest bishops, the greatest writers, the greatest orators, have succeeded each other for nearly a hundred years, and have formed for their spiritual mother a magnificent crown of science and genius. Speaking in a literary point of view, the age belongs to Catholics; our adversaries, by the side of our apologists, make but a paltry figure.

Works, too, are on a level with the minds that inspire them. Never have they been so numerous, and never so fruitful. Foundations of all sorts, churches, monasteries, orders, missions, schools, hospitals, orphan-asylums, have multiplied in emulation of each other. A small part of the works of our day would suffice for the glory of any epoch. The clergy encourage and direct these movements; they display zeal and self-abnegation; and, devoted to their chiefs, they become more and more devoted to the church. The _élite_ of society do them honor by following in their footsteps. Disabused of the unhealthy and destructive ideas by which their fathers were lost, and instructed by a hundred years of experience and misery, the higher classes, in France especially, return with simplicity to the faith and to the Christian virtues. Obedient to the eternal law which regulates society, the lower classes by degrees model themselves according to their example. The centenary _fêtes_, the canonizations, the pilgrimages of Salette, Lourdes, and others, are living witnesses of the fervor of the clergy and the public faith.

And, to crown all, the Church never attested its supernatural fecundity by such a number of saints and martyrs. The nineteenth century is the richest in canonizations. When the Church is accused of being exhausted, she replies by showing a new harvest. And what saints! what models! The Labres, the Germaine Cousins, the Marie Alacoques, the Cure's d'Ars! The greatest defiance thrown at our time, and the most violent antithesis of its ideas and instincts, is the actual Christianity in our midst--so hostile to the spirit of the world and the spirit of the age.

II.

Two men seem to represent and renew the periods that follow them, and the eternal tendencies of humanity. These two men offer a similitude and a contrariety so strange, that it seems as if God had opposed the one to the other to make the balance equal. Their skulls even, and the form of their faces, present striking analogies. The expression is contrary, but the mark is the same. {202} Both, born a hundred years apart, have inhabited the same country; both have passed the greater part of their lives in two villages that touch each other, and these two villages, so obscure before their time, have through them attained extraordinary celebrity. Each has been the object of the world's attention, and each the goal of eager pilgrimages. The eighteenth century rushed with ardor to Ferney; the nineteenth goes to Ars in greater transports. As the nineteenth century is to Catholics the retaliation for the eighteenth, so Ars is the retaliation for Ferney. [Footnote 90]

[Footnote 90: This expression is from the Abbé Monnin, a missionary at Ars, who has given to the life of the Curé d'Ars several popular works of rare merit.]

These are the resemblances, and great they are. The differences are greater still.

One, to speak properly, personifies the genius of evil. Scepticism, wicked irony, hardness of heart, corruption of mind and senses, egotism and cupidity, united in forming a modern corypheus. The other personifies the spirit of good. Truth, purity, self-abnegation, love of God and man, the spirit of sacrifice and mortification, in a word, all of moral grandeur revealed to man by Christ himself, has rarely an exemplifier more perfect. One is the type of the Christian, elevating himself to the saints, to the angels; the other is the anti-Christian type, descending to the cursed, to the demons.

Each has attracted the attention of man by the most opposite means: the first by his delicacy of wit equalling his duplicity; the second by his integrity and a simplicity of character brightened apparently by supernatural rays; the first by his pride, the second by his humility; the first by noise, the second by silence. Each has exercised toward his contemporaries results the most contrary. The refined in wickedness, the utterly corrupted, visited the scholar to plunge deeper in perversity. Entire populations, just men and men of good will, visited the priest to establish themselves in justice, or submit their doubts to him, and go on toward perfection. Both still effect by their minds and their remembrance--from one portion of the world to the other--the same consequences.

And that is not all.

The world flies from the first, as his character and doctrines become better elucidated. It approaches the second, as he is better known, and the beauty of his character developed. Ferney was abandoned shortly after the death of him who was its centre; the factitious or true admiration accorded him by the most brilliant and perverted of his age could not survive the perishable attraction which Voltaire exercised. To-day Ferney is only visited by amateurs in human curiosity. Ars, on the contrary, grows greater and greater. The sentiment which attracts people thither increases hour by hour, and the entire world knows the name of the obscure village, whose echo even seems to arouse the most indifferent. Multitudes flock there incessantly, and when Ferney and the memory of Voltaire, the hero of impiety of the last age, shall by degrees have disappeared, Ars and the memory of its curé, the hero of truth and of the present age, will attract still greater crowds, still greater homage.

By a circumstance not less strange than those already mentioned of these two men so totally different, the erection of a statue to each is now occupying the public mind. Unheard of efforts have been made to erect that of Voltaire--as Raymond Brucker says--by the hand of the executioner, for the meanest stratagems and the most trifling falsities have been resorted to; and by dint of puffing and scandal, our little Voltairians, whom Voltaire himself would disown, will perhaps attain their glorious end. {203} And without effort, without puffing, without scandal or imposture of any kind, by the simple emotion of love and of Christian veneration, to the saint of the nineteenth century is being erected a statue worthy of him.

Before criticising this work, lately inaugurated at Ars with great solemnity, I will relate its history. It is sufficiently striking to merit being known, and places in bold relief one side of the person it is destined to represent.

III.

The Curé d'Ars obstinately refused to sit for his portrait. On this point he was more obdurate than a Mussulman, and never lent himself to any proposition or stratagem the end of which was to reproduce his person. Several artists, working openly, had been rejected; others, using hidden means, watching for the priest, and following him in the street or in church, had been warned to keep quiet. Under these circumstances, M. Emilien Cabuchet, the author of the statue of which we are going to speak, presented himself at Ars. He was furnished with a letter from the bishop, and numerous recommendations. He did not doubt his success, and accosted the curé, and spoke of his business with a deliberate air. "No, no, I do not wish it," said the curé; "neither for monseigneur, nor for you, my artist-friend! At least," added the priest, changing his mind, and taking up a favorite idea, "unless monseigneur will permit me to go away immediately, and weep over _my poor life!_" "But, Monsieur le Curé--" "It is useless."

The discomfited artist ran to relate his adventure to the missionaries established near the curé. They gave him new courage. "Persevere!" said they to him. "You are not here to make your court to the Curé d'Ars, but to make his portrait. Go on, we will sustain you."

Thus reassured, the artist risked everything, and commenced by following the curate to church. During the Mass he was behind the curate, at the sermon back of the good women, and at the catechism behind the children. Every one assisted him, and took part in the enterprise. The artist held the wax between his fingers, and modelled in the bottom of his hat--his eye now on the curé, now on his work. Sometimes, to mislead the priest, he pretended to pray with fervor, or to follow attentively the instruction. He thought he was very adroit.

One day the curé bent toward him.

"You are well aware, monsieur," said he in a gentle tone, "that you are causing distraction to every one--and to me also!"

What was he to do? How defend himself to a man so very polite! "I would have preferred harshness," said the artist to me. "This gentleness disconcerted me."

He returned to the monastery decided to renounce the enterprise. "Persevere!" again said the missionaries.

The artist renewed his work.

Two days after, in the street, where he now worked from choice, the curé again addressed him:

"Have you, then, nothing to do at home?"

"O Monsieur le Curé! one would think that you would turn me out of doors."

This time the curé was disconcerted.

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"No, no," said he eagerly, and slightly embarrassed. "Stay as long as you choose, but don't begin again!" ...

The next day, seeing the curé so surrounded that he could not disengage himself, and in danger of leaving his cassock in the hands of the pilgrims, the artist ran to his relief and offered him his arm.

"I constitute myself your bodyguard," said he gallantly.

"Then I am emperor! ... But this is not the question. Do you know, I would like to excommunicate you?"

"Really, Monsieur le Curé, what a tremendous word! Have I, then, committed so shocking a crime?"

"Bah! you understand me well enough."

"Well then, what?"

"You cause me constant distraction; and when you think seriously, would it not be far better to take the head of the first dog you meet?"

"O Monsieur le Curé!"

And when the model was finished and the curé saw it,

"Well," said he, "it is not a subject of rejoicing! Look at the poor Curé d'Ars! How odd it is," added he, "your power of giving life to plaster!"

IV.

I have given this dialogue at length, as it was repeated to me by the artist. If I am not deceived, it represents well the character of the good priest; his humility, his humor, his brusqueness touched with raillery, his politeness and goodness--all are well portrayed. All this is reproduced in the statue. It gives us the character of the dialogue, and the almost legendary figure that our contemporaries have seen, and which will pass to posterity.

The Curé d'Ars is kneeling in his cassock, with the surplice, rabat, and stole. His hands are joined, his eyes uplifted to heaven. A sweet smile brightens his face. His hair, cut off square, falls on his neck in abundant locks, and shaven closely on the top of his head; his forehead is left free. The priest prays with such fervor and such faith, I may say a passion which makes us think of paradise. Angels must pray in this way. His hands are extended toward heaven with an intensity of emotion; the eyes have so much ardor in their expression that the spirit of prayer seems to lift the body from earth and carry it to heaven. I know no work with more life in it; there does not exist a more impassioned statue. Faith, love, and desire, transfigured in this marble block, animate it and give it a striking reality.

As a whole, the work offers a new and excellent type of the religious sculpture of our age. The artist has set aside classical lessons and proved himself in the right. The remembrances of antiquity should not interfere in the realization of an ideal taken from the very heart of contemporary life and the present Christian age. Gothic traditions are even neglected, and the author has been careful to give the figure the seal of its own time, his good taste causing him to avoid the quicksands into which so many others have fallen. Wishing to represent a man of our time, the sculptor would have committed an anachronism to be regretted if he had impressed his character with a mysticism and power which distinguished the personages of the art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the spirit of truth he was to give to the world a saint, and in this saint the beatific expression which in the prerogative of the saints of every age; but over and above this general feature there was an order of secondary shades he was obliged to respect, to give to the figure its age and physiognomy.

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M. Cabuchet has admirably seized and rendered the double character I have tried to define. His saint is as mystical as the saints of the middle ages, yet he has the reality of a man of our time. Gothic, or rather Christian, in sentiment, he is modern, and even French, in his exterior aspect. Such, in a few words, is the exact appreciation shown in this work of M. Cabuchet, and the double reflection gives him, in my opinion, the highest rank among sculptors of his age.

The imitation of antiquity would have produced a dead work; the imitation of the middle ages would have produced a work impersonal and hieratic; but going out of himself and all national traditions, inspired only with his subject and his time, the artist has brought to light a new and striking piece of work, a true specimen of religious and modern sculpture.

It is easy to see what remembrances and what masters have directed this statue. French sculpture, as its painting, has particular traits which are easily recognized. Less correct, perhaps, and less noble than Greek or Italian sculpture, it has an ease, a power, a life, that has no equal. Puget and Houdon are the two foremost artists in our school, so essentially French. Using Greek models only to simplify and enrich their style, they have sought beyond everything expression and the power of motion. M. Cabuchet has followed their example, and, walking in their footsteps, has given us a work of which his masters could not be ashamed.

In looking at the statue of the Curé d'Ars the spectator is reminded of the celebrated statue of Voltaire by Houdon; not only that the resemblance of the two faces is unaccountably striking, but because the build and the exterior appearance of the marbles offer incontestable analogies. In both statues we find the same amplitude, the same facility, the same light and soft manner; in both the details are uniformly sacrificed to the whole, and the whole owes to this mode of execution a more decorative and lifelike representation.

Voltaire is seated, his hands leaning upon, almost clinching, the arms of his chair. The Curé d'Ars is on his knees. Voltaire smiles with a cynical air, as if rejoicing in the ruin he has made. "_Dors tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire_." [Footnote 91]

[Footnote 91: "Rest content, Voltaire, and thy hideous smile."--Alfred De Musset.]

The Curé d'Ars smiles with the ineffably sweet smile of those who see God and dream of the happiness of their equals. In the two marbles, the head is the same; the forehead is the same; the two cheek-bones, so prominent, are the same; the receding chin is the same; the mouth opens by the same smile. In one it has a repulsive and satanic character; in the other it is angelical and attractive. Everything is similar except the expression. The features are brothers--twins, I might say; the souls that animate these features are as divided as the poles. In each face the cornea of the eye is represented by a deeply cut circle, a style of carving peculiar to the best age of statuary. This has given to each an intensity of look; and while that of Voltaire is lowered toward the earth, and only expresses the baser passions, that of the Curé d'Ars is uplifted to the sky, and reflects the joys of his moral superiority.

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Thus, we see, the two statues give perfectly the character and life of their respective models. The first seems to rise from regions of hope and love, the second from despair and malevolence. One represents the consoler and saviour, the other the spoiler, the demolisher of souls and consciences.

It would be easy to point out other resemblances and other contrasts.

To complete this analysis it is well to add, that the statue of the Curé d'Ars recalls an element that the author has not taken from our own school. Every one conversant with art will remember the figure of San Diego in Murillo's picture vulgarly called the Kitchen of the Angels. The saint prays to God for the actual necessities of the abbey, and God sends his angels to prepare the repast of the monks. Several gentlemen, visiting the convent, look on with astonishment at the saint raised from the earth, ravished with ecstasy, his hands joined, his eyes uplifted to heaven, while the angels are getting ready the dinner. The natural and supernatural were never more widely separated. Murillo has painted the personages working a miracle as he would any person in any ordinary action of life; yet who that has seen this picture will ever forget it? It is evident that our artist was struck by it, and that the San Diego of Murillo has occurred to him more than once when he represented the Curé d'Ars. He has been inspired by it as a true artist, guarding his own originality. His hero has very much the same simplicity that characterizes the saint of the Spanish painter, the same natural in the supernatural, the same ease of vision and ecstasy. Both see, and in seeing they evidence none of the fear or surprise which could actuate the less assured believer. They see; they are in heaven with God and his angels; they converse with them, and their faces express no other sensation than the tender and deep joy of the man who has discovered his ideal.

Delicate and profound characteristic! shade difficult to seize, and which constitutes the true essence of men living in God, and beginning on earth their immaterial existence. It needs more than an artist to fix this and give it form. Only a simple and pious Christian could crown the heads of our blessed ones with the mystical aureole that the believer alone discovers; only a Christian could give to the figures of which we speak the attitude and life so manifestly stolen from regions of beatitude. The great difficulty of the work consisted in this shade, and that may be said to form the perfect whole. The artist's title to glory is in his having known how to comprehend and realize this, and so give to his statue the freedom of none other.

Let us dwell on this expression of sanctity--the distinctive feature in the personage produced by M. Cabuchet. Sanctity has a strikingly physiological character. It changes the exterior man, and transforms his countenance. The action of Jesus Christ, dwelling constantly in the soul, gives to the features a reflection of a superior order. Sanctity, to speak properly, represents the fusion of divine and human nature. The pervading feature of saints is a calm, a serenity, a natural goodness which attracts and subjugates us. The transfigured soul transfigures its envelope, and we might imagine divinity showing itself through the encasement of the body. If the beautiful is the glory of truth, the saint is the glory of good.

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The statue of the Curé d'Ars possesses to a striking degree this _suprasensible_ aspect that I have just noticed. By contact with divinity the marble itself is transfigured--grace sheds its beams and gives to the features a kind of immaterial transparency. Jesus Christ is present and breathes into the passionate and ravished eyes, into the lips and the blessed smile; the personage lives in another world; his attitude, his movements have nothing in common with earth. If the spectator could ignore the name of the priest represented, his attention would not be less arrested, and he would easily recognize in his face the presence of a supernatural element, heightening the human personality.

Here, however, I will make a remark. The body of the Curé d'Ars is not in unison with his face; it is too material, too vigorous, too vulgar even, if I dare speak from my heart. "The cassock of the Curé d'Ars seems to have nothing under its large folds," said the biographer. ... "He was a shadow," added he still further. Now, the Curé d'Ars of the artist has nothing of a shadowy appearance. His shoulders are strong, his breast large, his hands knotty. The sculptor has wished to express the humble origin of the priest, but in my opinion he has forgotten the transformation which the contemplative and mystical life had necessarily operated in the organization of the saint.

This remark, necessary to be made, detracts nothing, or almost nothing, from the merit of the work; it could only be appreciated by those who have personally known the Curé d'Ars, and ceases to be of import since his death.

V.

We can now understand the character and various merits of the statue of M. Cabuchet. All who see it retire satisfied, and the mass of spectators are struck by the pious and compassionate expression of the holy priest. Connoisseurs admire the freedom of the effect and of the execution. The author may be proud of his success. He has paid for it by effort and anguish of every kind, and it is well to know sometimes these artist-struggles, that we may rightly value the works that charm us so much.

When the statue came from the workshop of the finisher, the sculptor did not recognize it. He had expected his model to be reproduced on a less grand scale, and the difference of proportion rendered it not easy to be known again. At such a result Cabuchet experienced one of those counter-blows which have made certain young artists of twenty grow old in a quarter of an hour, and only those who have tried to realize an ideal can perfectly understand such emotion. Benvenuto and Palissy in similar moments were taken with fevers which brought them to the very portals of the tomb. Sigalon, noticing his picture of Athalie compromised by difference of light, saw his hair turn gray in two minutes. Cabuchet had no less trouble, and the wonder is he escaped a similar shock; he withstood it, however, and, seeing no other means, he did what any valiant artist would have done in his place; he took his chisel and mallet, and in the style of Michael Angelo and Puget he attacked the marble. Each blow knocked off a piece, but each blow soothed the heart of the sculptor, for in reducing his statue he re-established it in its first form, and restored its true physiognomy.

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Cabuchet has devoted a year to such labor. For a whole year he has worked with chisel and mallet, seeking the form, the movement, the life; and finding, little by little, this form, movement, and life at the end of his tools. He played a dangerous game; the first stroke of the hammer could have destroyed his work. Driven to a corner, the artist acted as a great captain. He risked all to gain all. Fortune, which encourages audacity, or rather the good God who sustains energetic and faithful artists, came to his aid; and at the end of a year Cabuchet saw his statue re-created by his chisel, and become truly and doubly the daughter of his brain and of his hands. He gained more than one wrinkle at this task and more than one white hair. According to his own expression, he _sweated many shirts_. But he forgot difficulties and anxieties when he saw the long dreamed of figure, the ideal of his days and nights, realized and looming before him!

VI.

They have given this excellent work a reception worthy of it. At its arrival at the dock at Villefranche, near the village of Ars, a numerous cavalcade, and a multitude composed of the entire surrounding population, rushed to meet it, and received it with transports of love and admiration. The faithful, the penitents of the holy curé, saw again their master and their model. The parish saw again its venerated father. They surrounded the marble, they tried to touch it; many fell on their knees, and prayed as before the images of the saints. On the day of the inauguration the demonstrations were the same; every moment a newly collected crowd prostrated itself at the foot of the statue; flowers were hung on it, and rosaries and medals laid on the pedestal. Each believed that new and strengthening virtue would escape from the marble and regenerate those happy enough to approach it; and yet this marble was nothing more than a work of genius; it had not even been blessed, it had no place in the church, it had received no certificate or consecration from Rome--no matter! the crowd saw none of these obstacles. Abandoning themselves without after-thought to the impression which sanctity always produces on the masses, they rushed to the image of the man who appeared to them a saint, as we seek the Consoler and Alleviator of all human suffering.

The inauguration was conducted with a ceremony befitting the occasion. Monseigneur de Langabrie, Bishop of Belley, a prelate as remarkable for the urbanity of his manners as his superior mind, came himself to preside over the occasion. A great admirer and friend of the Curé d'Ars, he wished to give to his memory some proof of his affection. More than a hundred priests of neighboring parishes accompanying him, presented an imposing _cortége_. Quietly, calmly, and with recollection, they rendered homage to the remembrance and virtues of a saint. The secular and official element was represented by the Comte de Carets, a true Christian gentleman, and for thirty years the friend of the Curé d'Ars. A numerous crowd from all the neighboring country testified by repeated manifestations the ardor of its faith and sentiment. The church of Ars, enlarged by a talented architect, was entirely too small for all this wealth of offering.

The Mass was celebrated with pomp; at the gospel the Abbé Ozanam, vicar-general, mounted the pulpit, and described the most striking points of physiognomy of the Curé d' Ars. {209} Inspired by his text from St. Paul, he showed how God always employed the same means to act upon and govern the earth; weakness to confound strength, humility to confound pride, and littleness to confound grandeur; all that is despicable in the eyes of man to confound all that is powerful and worthy his respect. A staff in the hands of an old man is sufficient for God, and well represents the instruments he sometimes employs to rule the world. The Curé d'Ars was of obscure parentage; the Curé d'Ars was humble, ignorant, illiterate, according to the world, without power, without birth, without _prestige_. He seems of still less repute, in that before God he so completely annihilated himself. Son of a poor farmer, with difficulty he reached the seminary, with difficulty he staid there, with difficulty he attained the different grades. Everywhere, always, the weakness of his faculties proved the signal of distrust from his superiors, of contempt from his equals. He knew but one thing, to love, to pray, to humble himself--above all to humble himself. The less he felt himself, the less he made himself; the more he was despised, the more he despised himself. But wait! the hand of God appeared, and the ordinary movement of the see-saw was reproduced. The lower the world placed him at one end, the higher God uplifted him at the other, and he became the instrument God always uses for his great works--an instrument lowly yet powerful, and that confounds, attracts, and subjugates the whole world. This humble priest--powerless, lacking ability, and awkward in appearance--saw millions of men, great and small, wise and ignorant, known and unknown, flock from all corners of the earth to hear his word, see his countenance, listen to his advice, feast on his holy expressions--to touch his vestments. He will govern consciences and hearts; he will read their souls, enlighten them, touch them. He will predict the future, will overcome nature, and subject to his will the world of mind and the world of matter. ... Admirable effect of humility which produces sanctity! The most humble shall become the most celebrated, and his name resound from pole to pole. He shall agitate multitudes, and no living man can hear him without thrilling with love or anger. His image will provoke enthusiasm. The world will prostrate itself before it and kiss its very traces; and when other images, other glorified, other renowned conquerors, poets, legislators, politicians, are only a remembrance, a vain sound which cannot thrill a single human fibre, the name of the obscure, the despised Curé d'Ars will radiate in an ever new orbit of splendor, and produce emotions and effects ever new in millions of hearts. Strange consequence! Contrast truly striking; which shows that Catholicism by a brilliant overthrow of events is alone heard to give glory and immortality!

After the Mass, monseigneur was heard in his turn, and related the efforts made at Rome to obtain the canonization of the defunct whose memory was then and there celebrated. He spoke of the hope which he cherished to see ere long the Curé d'Ars and his image among the glorified ones, and placed on those altars where public veneration had already given them a place.

VII.

After the ceremony was over, the priests and some of the pilgrims coming to the solemnity united in an old-fashioned feast at the house of one of the missionaries.

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The day was passed in recalling the virtues and actions of the saint, while the crowd continued its homage and demonstrations.

Nothing could be more striking than the appearance of the village of Ars during this _fête_. The spectator goes backward several centuries; he lives in the earliest age; legend becomes reality in his eyes, and the natural world is entirely forgotten in the consciousness of the supernatural that surrounds him. M. Renan speaks somewhere with contempt of times and populations for whom the natural and supernatural have no exact limit. Ars presents every day, and especially those days in which the saint is honored, the same character. The natural and supernatural touch and mingle. The multitude kneels, it intercedes, it asks; and sometimes, in the simplest manner, extraordinary favors are granted, which strike with wonder the Christians of our day, so much less habituated than others to the manifestations of the immaterial world. The church is always full; the tomb of the good pastor, recognizable by a black slab, covered perpetually by an eager crowd. Some are kneeling, others standing awaiting their turn, and prostrating themselves as soon as a vacant place offers itself. They dispute a corner of the tomb of the Curé d'Ars, as during his life they disputed a corner of his confessional or an end of his cassock. All pray, some weep, others kiss the funereal marble. Mothers bring their sickly children, and rest them on the slab. Paralytics and the lame take their places. Each one touches the tomb with his cross, his medals, or his beads, and carries it away persuaded of its renewed efficacy. Every object, every part of the church, bears the trace of what I may call a pious vandalism. The confessional, the pulpit in which the holy priest passed nearly all his life, are cut in a thousand places. Each one has chipped the wood to carry off a relic.

Outside of the church the eagerness and veneration are no less. The places frequented by the defunct are pointed out, and into the old presbytery they hurry and almost smother each other on the stairs. One has to pause on his way a quarter of an hour sometimes before reaching the bedroom of the Curé d'Ars. The chamber has been barricaded, and provided with an opening in the wall, that it may escape the general devastation. The door is armed with a strong grating and plated with iron. Without such precaution all would have been long since broken open, demolished, and carried away. As it is, there is more than one hole in the wood-work, and even the walls are broken in, in places. It is said that workmen armed with crow-bars have attempted to throw down the wall. The shrubs and herbaceous plants in the court-yard are spoiled incessantly; as if the visitors, unable to molest the walls, revenge themselves on the flowers and verdure. But they cannot penetrate into the chamber and are forced to stay behind the barricade. They succeed each other, as on some grand occasion of public curiosity in Paris, when the crowd is unusually large. From the kind of vestibule which forms the opening in the wall the visitor can take in the whole apartment, if not entirely at his ease, on account of the pressure of the crowd, at least without losing any detail. Everything remains as it did during the life of the Curé d'Ars. Here is the bed, sheltered under its green tapestry, a present from the Comte de Carets, in place of another bed which was burned under extraordinary circumstances. {211} Here is the wooden chimney where the priest came each day--after spending from sixteen to eighteen hours in the confessional--to revive his exhausted body by the still living flame of a simple branch. The table is always set, as if it awaited its old companion. An earthen porringer, with a pewter spoon, a little pitcher, also of earth, which held the milk, an earthen plate, and a coarse linen napkin; and nothing more. This modest service, and the necessarily modest repast it supposes, had sustained, for nearly forty years, the most valiant and fruitful life of the age. Man lives not by bread alone; this man lived almost without it; a little milk sufficed him, and on this he existed nearly all his life--a trait not less astonishing than the power and energy with which this milk seemed to inspire him. Two oaken chests, presented also by pious persons, some sacred engravings, enough books to fill the simple shelves, two or three straw chairs, complete the furniture of this poor chamber, as popular today as the apartments of the Louvre or the Museum of Sovereigns. A niche in the wall, covered with a glazed partition, preserves and exposes to the piety of the pilgrims the cassock and cap of the poor priest.

The presbytery is no longer inhabited. No one has been reported, or felt himself, sufficiently worthy to occupy it after its last possessor. There is no longer a Curé d'Ars, there never will be a Curé d'Ars--no one feeling strong enough to struggle with such a remembrance, nor bear the legendary title. The missionaries who during his lifetime were established near the presbytery, do the duties of the parish and suffice for the pilgrims.

VIII.

Such is the _prestige_ of the Curé d'Ars since his death; and the influence he exercised during his life was no less astonishing. We are amazed at hearing or reading the details of this exceptional existence. Eighty to a hundred thousand persons came to Ars every year, and from all parts of the world. France, Belgium, Germany, England, Italy, America, Asia, by turns sent their pilgrims; and the enthusiasm of old--of the days of Bernard, Dominic, Francis d'Assise, Vincent Ferrier, Philip de Neri--has been renewed. Petitions were addressed to the Curé d'Ars as to a superior being. Every day he received letters, demands, confidences, and prayers. "One must come to Ars," said he sometimes, "to know the sin of Adam and the evils he has caused his poor family!" Sinners, the ill in body and mind, the suffering of all kinds, went to the Curé d'Ars as the healer sent by God himself. His faith, his humility, his love of God and man, his frightful austerity, his perfect abnegation of self, astonished and ravished souls; the gift given him to read the human heart, his marvellous intuition, his power over nature, his predictions, his miracles, ended by according him the supernatural aureole, and the signs of election which in all ages have carried away multitudes. At Ars one could learn how the Christian religion was founded; by what virtues, what miracles, its initiators had acted on the public mind and conquered. The life of the gospel and the glorious days of the church reappeared; hagiography lived again; the supernatural and legendary history of Catholicism became comprehensible and impressed itself on every mind.

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According to calculations which may be called official, nearly three millions of pilgrims have been admitted to the Curé d'Ars. Every kind of human misery has presented itself before him, and how many have been comforted! The blind have seen, the deaf have heard, the paralyzed have walked; bread, wine, and corn have been multiplied; and all the miracles of the gospel, except the resurrection of the dead, have been reproduced. The greatest miracle of the Curé d'Ars was, perhaps, the resurrection of the living and the conversion of sinners, to which the holy priest had dedicated his life, and was the principal end of all his efforts. Notwithstanding his ardent desire for death and heaven, he would have consented to remain on earth until the end of the world to gain hearts for Jesus Christ. It was in this _rôle_ that so brilliantly shone the supernatural character of the life and mission of the Curé d'Ars. When we think of the sixteen to eighteen hours of the confessional, of the eighty to a hundred penitents who knelt daily at the feet of the holy priest, we may form some idea of the attraction that he exercised, and the deep furrow he ploughed in the soul of the present age.

So many shining traits give to the Curé d'Ars the most wide-spread fame of his time. Chateaubriand, De Maistre, Goethe, Voltaire even, and others less famous, are only known to the more refined. Their names have not penetrated the stratum of an immense humanity. The Curé d'Ars was known to all, and his name had traversed every country, every ocean, every race. In Europe, America, Asia, it echoed and wakened souls; and everywhere we find his portrait, in every town, in every country. Siberian huts can show the Curé d'Ars. No face--not even that of Napoleon I.--is as popular. His hair, his cap, his cassock, his shoes, his furniture, his books, his breviary, have been sold over and over again for more than their weight in gold. His blood, if taken from him in illness, was collected and treasured as a relic; and we see still at Ars, in several places, vials containing this blood, as pure as the day it flowed: can science account for this? The phenomenon is, to say the least, unique, abnormal. The objects that he blessed were almost taken by assault, and before his death rival countries disputed for his body, and the dispute came near degenerating into a bloody conflict. No honor, homage, or public respect was wanting to the Curé d'Ars, and once again piety and Christian virtues have proven themselves the surest means of acting on the world and attracting the masses, because they represent the superior and eternal ideal of life and of humanity.

IX.

But I must pause. I have wished to sketch in a few words the appearance of this remarkable man, but yesterday our contemporary, and of whom an extraordinary work of art has given me the opportunity to speak. I fear I have been prolix, and, forgetting the statue, have occupied my readers' attention with the person represented; but I hope to be forgiven, as the best way, surely, to impress the merit of a portrait is to make known the model the artist has wished to depict. The statue will be better appreciated as the Curé d'Ars himself is fully understood.

Again, it seems to me that the appearance and actions of such a man, in the uncertain times in which we live, are a symptom and hope of something better, to which we cannot give too much weight. Truly the age is bad enough; hardened against God, it is hardened against his church, and tries to sap every foundation of virtue and honesty. {213} It destroys faith, attacks good principles and the virtuous instincts that prompt them, and endeavors to replace the ancient order of consciences by a sort of individual independence which, sowing division, can only produce ruin. Character and manners are falling as low as ideas; cupidity, egotism, unbridled pleasure, sensual enjoyments, sought for and held up as the only end of life; the expansion of luxury by every ingenuity gives to society an ideal of Babylonian civilization; revolution, that is to say, revolt and universal overthrow, cap the climax, and threaten to swallow up everything: behold the situation and its dangers! Seldom have ages been more troubled, or the symptoms more terrible.

But hope revives and the mind is elevated when it contemplates the opposing camp. So long as an age is able to produce a Curé d'Ars, it is full of strength; and if the Catholic faith can excite such a sensation as that of which I have just spoken, she assures her future. Monarchs, generals, politicians, legislators, writers, may become powerless. They could not preserve the society of old, and saints alone saved it, walking in the footsteps of Christ. They reconstructed and regenerated it, because they were the last and unique expression of the true and beautiful in morals, the only pivot of progress, the only lever which lifted a people to lead them onward to God, the only source of life. Producing the same men, modern society may hope for the same regeneration; its cure and its future health will not depend on human means or agents, but on the divine grace exercised by its saints.

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Dante Alighieri.

The fame of the _Fiero Ghibellino_, as the Italians are wont to call Dante Alighieri, is great, not in extensiveness, but in weight. Wherever and to whomsoever he is known, his name and his works carry a charm and an authority vouchsafed to only a few in the department of authors. Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are _the_ poets, whose names are enshrined on an elevation above the rest; they breathe, so to speak, in an atmosphere of their own. They are, indeed, masters and guides,

"Maestri di color che sanno."

In truth, to understand their works, the study thereof must needs be made a specialty. Yet even those who have lisped their names in their mothers' tongue find that "_ars longa, vita brevis_." The student will drink at those pure fountains with ever-increasing pleasure. "How often have you been in St. Peter's?" asked of us a venerable monk, the first time we entered the Vatican. "Never before, sir." "Well," replied he, "I have been coming here almost every day for the last thirteen years, and every day I find some new thing to admire and study!" The same has been averred by those who have been familiar with Dante, Homer, and Shakespeare.

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We well remember how, in our youth, and in our native schools, we were so trained in the study of Alighieri that it was an easy matter to discover whether an author, be he poet or prose-writer, had been formed on Dante, whether he had drunk at the head fountain or at side streams. Only few poets we remember whose verses we read with an enchanted devotion--Gasparo Leonarducci, of Venice; Vincenzo Monti, of Milan; and Alfonso Varano, of Ferrara. Of the prose-writers, Paolo Segneri, Sforza Pallavicino, of the seventeenth, and Pietro Giordani, of the nineteenth century, are the only _Danteschi_ in whom we delighted, as we were delighted in reading Homer transformed into the _succum et saporem_ of the _AEneid_. Those above mentioned were poets, historians, and orators, than whom more ardent and persevering students of Dante are not recorded in the annals of Italian literature. Theirs was not, however, a pedantic servility: Dante was the father that engendered their style, the eagle who provoked them to fly; and they did fly, and soared above the rest, and fixed their pupils on the brightness of the sun. Which remarks afford us also the measure by which to value the success of those who have attempted to translate Dante into foreign languages, an attempt which to the Italian scholar sounds almost presumptuous. For, if the style and the meaning of Dante have proven a matter of so much difficulty and labor to the countryman of Dante, how much more laborious and difficult must they prove to the foreign-born student?

Whoever attempts to translate a poet must join "the fidelity of rendition to the spirit of a poet." The former presupposes a thorough knowledge of the two languages, even to the commonest idioms. Then, unless one is born a poet, the attempt will be the very madness of folly, which truth receives additional evidence when the work to be translated is one of transcendent merit in its originality; ay, more, when it is _incomparable_: incomparable, we mean, as a human work can be.

Such is the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante Alighieri. Pindaric in flights, supernatural in conception, inventive in expression and language, (for Dante is "the father of the Italian tongue,") Dante stands before the scholar as a most difficult author. Nor are the numberless commentators and voluminous comments, agreeing or conflicting, ingenious or absurd, a mean proof of our assertion!

Commentators have, in fact, pushed their folly and their presumption to an excess equalled only by the absurd twisting of Holy Writ in favor of the thousand and one senses which defenders of opposite doctrines have fancied they read in one and the same text. A witty Italian imagines he sees Dante crouching low, and vainly endeavoring, with wild gesticulations and lusty cries for help, to parry the blows by which clergymen and laymen, _laico o cherco_, endeavor to force him to admit such meanings into his words as he never dreamt of; at the same time they, falling out among themselves, exchange blows, and throw at each other's head their heavy comments, bound in wood, and rudely embossed with brazen studs. It is related that once the stern poet, while passing by a smithy, heard snatches of his poem sung, but so interlarded with strange words, and the ends of verses so bitten off, that the grating upon his ears was unendurable: whereupon he entered the shop, and fell around wantonly throwing into vast confusion the tools of the churl, who, thinking him mad, rushed upon him and yelled: "What the ---- art thou about?" "And what art _thou_ doing?" retorted Dante, sobering down at once. {215} "I am at my work, and thou art spoiling my tools!" replied the smith. "If thou wishest me to leave thy things alone, leave mine alone also." "And, pray, what am I spoiling of thine?" "You are singing my verses, but not as I made them; it is the only art I possess, and you spoil it." [Footnote 92]

[Footnote 92: Had Shakespeare this anecdote in mind when he made Orlando cry out, "I pray you, mar no more of my verses with reading them ill-favoredly"? (_As You Like It_, act iii. sc. 2.)]

On another occasion the poet met a churl driving before him a mob of donkeys, and enlivening his wearisome journey by singing also snatches of the divine poem. But, very naturally, he would intersperse his songs with an occasional pricking of the haunches of his asinine fellow-travellers with the goad, and the shout of _arri, arri_--the Italian _g'long, g'long_. Dante at once visited the fellow's back with an earnest blow, and cried: "That _arri, arri_, I never put it in that verse!" The poor _asinaro_ shrugged his shoulders, and darted to one side, not well pleased with the uncouth salutation; but when at a safe distance, ignorant as he was of the cause of the blow and of the man who had inflicted it, he thrust his tongue out, and said, "Take that," an indecent act even for an Italian boor. Dante replied: "I would not give mine for a hundred of thine!"

What the smith and the drover did, in their own way, and in Dante's time, has been repeated down to our days. Volumes might be filled with merely the titles of essays, treatises, and theories, at times ingenious, seldom interesting, always betraying the conceit of the writer. Editions innumerable are crammed with interpretations conflicting with each other, and by which the sense of the poet has been cruelly distorted. We, who have been reared in the deepest reverence for Dante's orthodoxy, have always felt indignant at the irreligious and unphilosophical inordinations to which the _Divina Commedia_ has been made to afford foundation and development.

For the nonce we mean to deal with translations, yet not in a general or comprehensive treatise; for to treat of all English translations of Dante, down to Sir J. F. W. Herschel's, the latest of all, would carry us over fields too extensive and uninviting. We have been led to beg for a corner of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, in order to introduce to its readers what, after a close and careful study, we deem the best of all translations of Dante. We allude to _The First Canticle (Inferno) of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri_. Translated by Thomas William Parsons. Boston: De Vries, Ibarra & Co. 1867.

That Mr. Parsons possesses the spirit of a poet, no one who has read ever so little of his original compositions will gainsay. Whatever he writes has the true ring; there is nothing transcendental in him, and no mannerism; his sentiments are spontaneous, and flow into his diction with a naturalness that takes hold of the heart of the reader at once, like a peaceful streamlet mingling its waters with kindred waves. Opening a collection of his poems at random, we do not hesitate to transcribe, without any studied choice, what first offers itself to our eye. He writes on the death of his friend, the sculptor Crawford, and thus he suddenly gives vent to his feelings:

"O Death! thou teacher true and rough! Full oft I fear that we have erred, And have not loved enough; But, O ye friends! this side of Acheron, Who cling to me to-day, I shall not know my love till ye are gone And I am gray!

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Fair women, with your loving eyes, Old men that once my footsteps led, Sweet children--much as all I prize, Until the sacred dust of death be shed Upon each dear and venerable head, I cannot love you as I love the dead!

"But now, the natural man being sown, We can more lucidly behold The spiritual one: For we, till time shall end, Full visibly shall see our friend In all his hands did mould-- That worn and patient hand that lies so cold!"

On a Palm-Sunday, as he wends his way to the bedside of a dying young convert, he begs of a little Catholic girl a twig of the blessed palm she is carrying home. Whereupon he extemporizes the following:

"To A Young Girl Dying: With A Gift Of Fresh Palm-leaves.

"This is Palm-Sunday: mindful of the day, I bring palm branches, found upon my way: But these will wither; thine shall never die-- The sacred palms thou bearest to the sky! Dear little saint, though but a child in years, Older in wisdom than my gray compeers! _We_ doubt and tremble--_we_, with 'bated breath, Talk of this mystery of life and death; Thou, strong in faith, art gifted to conceive Beyond thy years, and teach us to believe!

"Then take my palms, triumphal, to thy home, Gentle white palmer, never more to roam! Only, sweet sister, give me, ere thou go'st, Thy benediction--for my love thou know'st! We, too, are pilgrims, travelling toward the shrine: Pray that our pilgrimage may end like thine!"

Mr. Parsons's poetical gift manifests itself most sensibly in what might be called "fugitive pieces." They are gems, like the above, and as they are offered to the reader they are at once set in the most fitting corner of his heart. We regret our limited space will not allow us to transcribe the poems _To Magdalen_, "Mary from whom were cast out seven devils;" or the death of _Mary Booth_; or the _Vespers on the Shores of the Mediterranean_, when the Italian mariner

"In mare irato in subita procella Invoca Te nostra benigna Stella."

But we must be allowed to quote one little poem; an impromptu one, written on the death of a Catholic prelate (February 13th, 1866) whose memory is held in benediction by a vast number of our readers:

"Son of St. Patrick, John, the best of men, Boston's blest bishop bids good-by again. Not long ago we parted on the shore, And said farewell--nor thought to see him more: That brain so weary, and that heart so worn With many cares! The parting made us mourn. But he came back--he could not die in Rome. Tho' well might those bones rest by Peter's dome, Or Ara Coeil--and the sacred stair That climbs the Capitol--or anywhere In that queen city. ...

"Scholar and friend! old schoolfellow, though far Past me in learning, that was ne'er a bar To our free intercourse; for thou hadst thine One muse to worship--leaving me the nine. Thy faith was large, even in thy fellow-men: And it pleased thee to patronize my pen When I turned Horace into English rhyme, And thought myself a poet for the time, In Latin school-days--but, alas! thy shroud Drives from remembrance all this gathering crowd Of tender images; farewell to all! I cannot think of these beside thy pall. Thine, good Fitzpatrick, noble heir of those Who went before thee--Fenwick and Bordeaux's Gentle apostle Cheverus, and Toussaud-- Whom in my boyhood I was blest to know.

"But the bell moves me. Christian, fare thee well. I loved my bishop and I mind his bell."

Let us now approach our subject more closely. But here the difficulty is how to enable our readers, who are not acquainted with the original Italian, to appreciate the fidelity of the American translator--a fidelity the beauty whereof consists in that Mr. Parsons translates almost _literally_ and at the same time his translation _is_ poetry. After all, he is not entitled to extraordinary praise who, being endowed with poetical genius, catches the sense of the original and gives it in foreign verses. The best plan seems to us to give the text, then a literal (pedantic or lineal) translation, and afterward Parsons's. Thus, for instance, Dante reads on the architrave over the entrance to hell:

[Transcriber's Note: The arrangement of the text of pages 217, 218, and 219 is confusing, including two parallel renderings and numerous footnotes. The renderings have been placed in sequential order and the footnotes placed following the references.]

{217} {218} {219}

"Per me si va nella città dolente. [Footnote 93] Per me si va nell' eterno dolore: Per me si va tra la perduta [Footnote 94] gente. Giustizia mosse 'l mio alto Fattore: Fecemi la divina Potestate, La somma Sapienza, e 'l primo Amore. Dinanzi a me non fur cose create, Se non eterne, ed io eterna duro: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi, che 'ntrate."

[Footnote 93: _Dolente_ means sorrow without any mixture of hope-- _wailing and gnashing of teeth_.]

[Footnote 94: _Perduta_, in the sense of that _pecunia sit tibi in perditionem_, (Acts viii. 20,) absolute condemnation. _Uemo perduto_ in Italian is the _ruptus disruptusque_ of Cicero, a "gone" man, beyond all hope of moral recovery.]

To wit: Through me you go into the doleful city; through me you go into eternal grief; through me you go among the lost people. Justice moved my lofty Builder; Divine Power made me; and the supreme Wisdom and the first Love. Ere me were no things created--unless eternal, and I eternal last; relinquish all hope, you who enter.

Now compare with Parsons's:

"Through me you reach the City of Despair: Through me eternal wretchedness ye find: Through me among perdition's tribe ye fare. Justice inspired my lofty Founder's mind: Power, Love, and Wisdom--Heavenly First Most High-- Created me. Before me naught had been Save things eternal--and eterne am I: Leave ye all hope, O ye who enter in!"

Can any translation be more literal? Can it be more faithful? We have tried to find fault with it, but gave it up in despair; yea, the more we strain our critical eye, the more perfectly does the original beauty appear reflected in the translation. It is not the reflection of the mirror; it is the reflection of the sun's light on the moon's face.

To economize room, we shall give no more text: we will only add a lineal translation by way of note, presuming on the reader for his trust in our knowledge of both languages, and in our honesty.

The long extract we are going to make is, perhaps, the noblest specimen of descriptive poetry in the Italian language. It is, however, founded on a historical mistake, inasmuch as Ugolino was starved to death not by Archbishop Ruggieri, but by Guido da Montefeltro, Lord of Pisa. The true account runs thus: Ugolino dei Gherardeschi, Count of Donovatico, and a Guelf, had, with the connivance of the archbishop, made himself master of Pisa. But having put to death a nephew of Ruggieri, and sold some castles to the Florentines, that prelate, at the head of an infuriated mob, and aided by Gualandi, Sismondi, and Lanfranchi, three powerful leaders, attacked the count in his own palace, and made him prisoner with his two sons Gaddo and Uguccione, and three nephews, Ugolino Brigata, Arrigo, and Anselmuccio. Thus bound, they were all thrown into the donjons of the Tower at the Three Roads. Montefeltro, having meanwhile got the power into his own hands, forbade any food to be administered to his prisoner rival, whereby Ugolino and the rest died of hunger. Dante, (_Inferno_, c. xxxii. and xxxiii.,) admitted to the ninth circle, or bolgia, on entering that part of it which was called Antenora, witnessed the horrible punishment of the traitor and of the murderer:

[Transcriber's note: Rendering 1]

"In a single gap, Fast froze together other two I saw, So that one head was his companion's cap: And as a famished man a crust might gnaw, So gnawed the upper one the wretch beneath, Just where the neck-bone's marrow joins the brain: Not otherwise did Tydeus fix his teeth On Menalippus' temples in disdain. While thus he mumbled skull and hair and all, I cried: 'Ho! thou who show'st such bestial hate Of him on whom thy ravenous teeth so fall, Why feedest thou thus? On this agreement state: That, if thou have good reason for thy spite, Knowing you both, and what his crime was, I Up in the world above may do thee right, Unless the tongue I talk with first grow dry.' From his foul feast that sinner raised his jaw, Wiping it on the hair, first, of the head Whose hinder part his craunching had made raw. Then thus: 'Thou wouldst that I renew,' he said, 'The agony which still my heart doth wring, In thought even, ere a syllable I say; But if my words may future harvest bring To the vile traitor here on whom I prey Of infamy, then thou shalt hear me speak, And see my tears too. I know not thy mien, Nor by what means this region thou dost seek; But by thy tongue thou'rt sure Florentine. Know then, Count Ugolino once was I, And this Archbishop Ruggieri: fate Makes us close neighbors--I will tell thee why. 'Tis needless all the story to relate, How through his malice, trusting in his words, I was a prisoner made and after slain. But that whereof thou never canst have heard, I mean how cruelly my life was ta'en, Thou shalt hear now, and thenceforth know if he Have done me wrong. A loophole in the mew Which hath its name of Famine's Tower from me, And where his doom some other yet must rue, Had shown me now already through its cleft Moon after moon, when that ill dream I dreamed Which from futurity the curtain reft. He, in my vision, lord and master seemed, Hunting the wolf and wolf-cubs on the height Which screeneth Lucca from the Pisan's eye: With eager hounds, well trained and lean and light, Gualandi and Lanfranchi darted by, With keen Sismondi--these the foremost went; But after some brief chase, too hardly borne, The sire and offspring seemed entirely spent, And by sharp fangs their bleeding sides were torn. When before morn from sleep I raised my head, I heard my boys, in prison there with me, Moaning in slumber and demanding bread. If thou weep not, a savage thou must be: Nay, if thou weep not, thinking of the fear My heart foreboded, canst thou weep at aught? Now they woke also, and the hour was near When used our daily pittance to be brought. His dream made each mistrustful; and I heard The door of that dread tower nailed up below: Then in my children's eyes, without a word, I gazed, but moved not; and I wept not: so Like stone was I within, that I could not. They wept, though, and my little Anselm cried, 'Thou look'st so! Father, what's the matter, what?' But still I wept not, nor a word replied, All that long day, nor all the following night, Till earth beheld the sun's returning ray; And soon as one faint gleam of morning light Stole to the dismal dungeon where we lay, And soon as those four visages I saw Imaging back the horror of my own, Both hands through anguish I began to gnaw; And they, believing want of food alone Compelled me, started up, and cried, 'Far less, Dear father, it will torture us if thou Shouldst feed on us! Thou gavest us this dress Of wretched flesh--'tis thine, and take it now.' So to relieve their little hearts, at last I calmed myself, and, all in silence, thus That and the next day motionless we past. Ah thou hard earth! why didst not ope for us? On the fourth morning, Gaddo at my feet Cast himself prostrate, murmuring, 'Father! why Dost thou not help me? Give me food to eat." With that he died: and even so saw I, As thou seest me now, three more, one by one, Betwixt the fifth day and the sixth day fall; By which time, sightless grown, o'er each dear son I groped, and two days on the dead did call: But, what grief could not do, hunger did then. This said, he rolled his eyes askance, and fell To gnaw the skull with greedy teeth again, Strong as a dog upon the bony shell. Ah Pisa! shame of all in that fair land Where _si_ is uttered, since thy neighbors round Take vengeance on thee with a tardy hand, Broke be Capraja's and Gorgona's bound! Let them dam Arno's mouth up, till the wave Whelm every soul of thine in its o'erflow! What though _'twas said_ Count Ugolino gave, Through treachery, thy strongholds to the foe? Thou needst not have tormented so his sons, Thou modern Thebes!--their youth saved them from blame-- Brigata, Hugh, and those two innocent ones Whom, just above, the canto calls by name."

[Transcriber's note: Rendering 2; the dash at the end of each line is probably a typesetting artifact; all the poetic lines are run together.]

I saw two _persons_ frozen in one hole,-- so that one head to the other was hat:-- and as bread in hunger is eaten,-- so the uppermost his teeth into the other stuck,-- there where the brain is joined to the nape.-- Not otherwise did Tydeus gnaw-- the temples of Menalippus through disdain-- than he did the skull and the other things.-- O thou who showest by so bestial token-- hatred over him whom thou eatest,--[Footnote 95] tell me the why, said I: on such condition,-- that, if thou with reason of him complainest,-- knowing who you are, and his offence,-- in the world above I also may repay thee for it,-- if that [tongue] with which I speak does not _become_ dry.

The mouth [he] raised from the beastly [Footnote 96] food,-- that sinner, wiping it on the hair-- of the head which he had disfigured (maimed) behind.-- Then [he] began: Thou wishest that I renew-- desperate grief, which me to the heart oppresses,-- even only thinking, before I speak of it.-- But if my words must (may) be a seed-- that will bear fruit of infamy to the traitor I gnaw,-- thou shalt see me both speak and weep.-- I know not who thou be nor by what means-- art thou come here below; but Florentine-- _thou_ seemest to me truly, when I hear thee.-- Thou shouldst know that I was Count Ugolino,-- and this Archbishop Ruggieri:-- now I'll tell thee why I am such [Footnote 97] neighbor.-- How by the means of his evil mind,-- trusting in him, I was taken-- and then killed, there is no need of telling.-- But that which _thou_ canst not have heard, (known), [Footnote 98] that is, how cruel my death was,-- thou shalt hear; and [thou] shalt know whether he hath done me wrong.-- A narrow hole within the mew-- [Footnote 99] which from me has the title of Hunger,-- and in which it needs that others be confined,-- had shown me through its opening-- many moons already, when I had the fatal dream-- which tore from me the veil of the future.-- This [man] seemed to me leader and lord,-- driving the wolf and wolf-cubs [Footnote 100] to the mountain, for which the Pisans cannot see Lucca.--[Footnote 101] With hounds, [she-hounds,] lean, keen on the scent, and well trained, (_cagne magre studiose e conte_,)-- Gualandi with Sismondi, and with Lanfranchi-- had [he] put before him in the van.-- After a short run they seemed to me borne down,-- the father and the sons, and by those sharp teeth-- I deemed their sides torn open.-- When I became awake ere the morning-- I heard weeping in their sleep my children,-- who were with me, and ask for bread.-- Indeed thou art cruel if thou dost not already grieve,-- thinking of what to my heart was then foreboded:-- and if thou weepest not, at what art thou wont to weep?-- They were now awake, and the hour was drawing near-- when food used to be brought in,-- and his dream gave each misgivings.-- And _then_ I heard the door bolted [Footnote 102] below-- in the horrible tower: whereat I looked-- into the face of my children without saying a word.-- I was not weeping, so was I petrified (_impietrai_) within:-- they were weeping; and my little Anselm-- said: Thou lookest so! Father, what aileth thee?-- Yet I shed no tear, nor answered I-- all that day, nor the following night,-- until another sun arose over the world.-- As soon as a little gleam of light (_un poco di raggio_) began to creep-- into the doleful prison, and I saw in four faces my own very image, both my hands through pain I bit;-- and they, thinking that I did it for wish of food, instantly arose,-- and said: Father, far less painful will it be to us-- if thou eatest of us; thou didst dress-- [us with] this miserable flesh, do thou take it off.-- I then calmed myself, not to make them more wretched.-- That day and the next we all lay silent:-- alas! cruel earth, why didn'tst thou open?-- After we had reached the fourth day-- Gaddo threw himself prostrate at my feet,-- saying: Father mine, why dost thou not help me?-- There he died; and, as thou seest me,-- did I see the three fall one by one,-- betwixt the fifth day and the sixth, whereat I began,-- already blind, to grope over each:-- and three days I called them after they were dead.-- Then more than the grief did the fasting overwhelm me.-- When he had said this, with eyes distorted-- he resumed the loathsome skull between his teeth,-- which, like a dog's, stuck to the bone.-- Ah Pisa! disgrace to the people-- of the fair land where the _si_ sounds;--[Footnote 103] as thy neighbors are slow to punish thee,-- let Capraja and Gorgona [Footnote 104] arise,-- and build a dam on Arno's mouth-- that may drown every mother's child in thee.-- For if Count Ugolino had the name-- of having defrauded thee of thy castles,-- thou shouldst not have put the children to such torture.-- Innocent were by their youthful age,-- Modern Thebes! Uguccione and Brigata,-- and the other two whom my song has mentioned."

[Footnote 95: _Ti mangi_, "thou selfishly holdest for thy dainty food." This is one of those idioms expressed by the reciprocal pronoun "ti," almost impossible to translate. Its meaning is felt only by the native Italian.]

[Footnote 96: _Fiero_, here as the carcass on which a beast of prey will feed, from _fiera_, savage beast.]

[Footnote 97: _Tal vicino_, a neighbor so barbarously distressing another.]

[Footnote 98: _Inteso Udire_, hear by chance; _ascoltare_, to listen, _intendere_, to understand what you hear, or are told.]

[Footnote 99: _Muda_, the place where the republic's eagles were kept during moulting-time. _Mudare_, to moult.]

[Footnote 100: Ugolino had the dream while suffering the acute pangs of hunger. He dreamt of a famished wolf and its whelps, hunted by she-hounds, under which allegory he recognizes the Ghibellines, himself being a Guelf.]

[Footnote 101: _San Giuliano_, a mountain between Pisa and Lucca.]

[Footnote 102: The Pisans, about eight months after Ugolino's imprisonment, bolted the dungeon's massive doors, locked them, and threw the keys into the Arno.]

[Footnote 103: Dante calls the language of Southern France the language of _oc_, and the Italian the language of _si_; both _oc_ and _si_ meaning "yes."]

[Footnote 104: Two small islands at the mouth of the Arno.]

We had marked one or two more pieces for transcription, but we deem it useless; for a diligent collation of Mr. Parsons's text with the literal translation we have given _ad calcem_ will at once convince the reader of the faithfulness of the work. Of course, it would be absurd to expect that words were rendered for words. It is simply impossible. Again: there are words which cannot be rendered. We know the Italian language pretty well--and why shouldn't we?--yet we have never been able to find the Italian word corresponding with the English "home"; nor have twenty-three years of close and earnest study of the English language yet enabled us to find an English word corresponding with the Italian _vagheggiare_. We say, "He was lost in the contemplation of a picture:" the Italian will simply say, "_Vagheggiava la pittura._" Translate, if you can, "L'amante vagheggia la sua bella!" You can do it no more than the Italian can render with corresponding meaning the words, "Home! sweet home!"

In our opinion a too literal translation will not give us Dante; it will only give his words. Although we must admit that the meaning of the word, as it conveys the idea, must be scrupulously rendered as well as the idiom, yet it is evident that too great an anxiety in translating the word into that which bears the greatest resemblance to the original may lead into a misconception or misrepresentation of the author's idea. In an elaborate article in the _Atlantic Monthly_, of August, 1867, the word _height_, employed by Mr. Longfellow in his translation of Dante, (_Purgat_, xxviii. v. 106,) receives the preference over _summit_, employed by Cary. True, _height_ is the literal rendition for _altezza_; yet Dante there employs _altezza_ not in its literal meaning, which is one of measurement, but in that of a _summit_, or a _top_. A comparison with parallel cases in the _Commedia_ will bear us out in our remark. We must not be understood as if we meant to prefer Cary to Longfellow. By no means: for the former gives us Cary's Dante, whereas the latter gives us, if we may be allowed the expression, _Dante's Dante._ Which remark, however, must not be taken as if we were disposed to endorse the fidelity of every line of the American translator. {220} The very narrow limits to which he has confined himself often place him under the necessity of employing words which convey not the original's idea; while, on the other hand, often must he add words in order to fill up his line; for example,

"When he had said this, with _his_ eyes distorted."

That _his_ Dante never put there; why, it is a pleonasm.

While we do not like nor did ever like the freedom of Cary, nay, have felt indignant at the liberties he has taken with the text, we are amazed at the boldness with which Mr. Longfellow has endeavored to master his Procrustean difficulties; but we give preference to the work of Dr. Parsons, because his translation is easy (_disinvolta_, the Italians would call it) and yet faithful; it is poetical, and yet we challenge our readers to point to any idea which is not conveyed to the English mind in scrupulous fidelity to Dante's ideas. He sits in Alighieri's chair, and he is at home.

Were we requested by him who knew Italian only moderately as to the easiest method to understand and enjoy Dante, we would say: Read the text, collating it verse for verse with Longfellow; then read Parsons. Yet, to be candid, we hope no American scholar will form his idea of Dante's transcendental merit on the translation of Mr. Longfellow, who, it must be admitted, has done more meritorious work in behalf of Dante than the one hundred thousand and one who have written comments on him. But one feels a painful sensation in alighting from Dante's text on Longfellow's translation, whereas the transition from the perusal of the original to Parsons's causes no jerking in our soul, and the pleasure, _decies repetita_, never abates. To the Italian scholar Mr. Longfellow's translation will never prove satisfactory.

Lest our readers should think that we are _blind_ admirers of Dr. Parsons, we will conclude this part of our paper with the remark that we wish different words were in a few occasions employed by him. Thus, for instance, the word, "in blackest letters," (_Inf_. c. iii, v. 10,) do not convey the full meaning of Dante's "parole di colore oscuro." Of course the doctor can easily defend his rendition (and we know he long pondered on the suitableness of the word) with the obvious remark that a _scoundrel_ may be _black_ without being an Abyssinian, hence his "blackest letters" must be taken in a moral sense; yet it requires an after-thought to understand it, whereas the word "oscuro" at once hints at something black in itself and dreadful in its forebodings. But what English word will convey the idea?

Our article, incomplete as it is, would yet appear more deficient were we not to give our readers a general idea of what the _Divina Commedia_ is, what it proposes to convey to the reader's mind. Were we to form an idea of the nature of this poem from what has been written about it, we should call it _a saddle_. For there is no system, theological, philosophical, or political, the supporters whereof have not taken their proofs from Dante. According to some, Dante was a Catholic devotee; while others, especially in these our days, will represent him as the most determined and conscientious foe of everything Catholic, _et sic de ceteris_.

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In the language of an accurate modern Italian scholar, "Dante lifted the Italian language from its cradle, and laid it on a throne: in spite of the rudeness of the times not yet freed from barbarism, he dared to conceive a poem, in which he embodied whatever there was most abstruse in philosophical and theological doctrines; in his three canticles he massed whatever was known in the scientific world; after the example of Homer and Virgil, he knew how to select a national subject which would interest all Italy, nay, all whose hearts were warmed by the warmth of Catholic faith; in a word, he became the mark either of decay or of prosperity in the Italian literature, which was always enhanced according as his divine poem was studied and appreciated, or laid aside and neglected." [Footnote 105]

[Footnote 105: Cav. G. Maffei, _Storia Lit. Ital._ I. iii.]

Dante was born in Florence, in March, 1265, and died in Ravenna an exile in 1321, September 14. His father's name was Alighiero degli Alighieri. His education was as perfect as the times could afford in science, belles-lettres, and arts. When only nine years old he became acquainted with Beatrice di Folco Portinari, a young damsel of eight summers, but endowed with great gifts of soul and body, and her praises he sang in prose and verse, and to her he allotted a distinguished place in paradise. Dante served his country faithfully both in the councils of peace and under the panoply of war. When only thirty-five years old, he attained the highest dignity in the gift of his countrymen. On the occupation of Florence by Charles of Valois, whose pretensions he had opposed and so far thwarted, Dante was banished from Florence, (Jan. 27, 1302.) At the time, he was in Rome endeavoring to interest Pope Boniface VIII. in behalf of his dear Florence. Dante never saw his native place again, but after nineteen years of exile and poverty he died highly honored and very tenderly cared for by the Polentas, the masters of Ravenna.

Dante was the author of many excellent works; but to the _Divina Commedia_he owes that fame by which he stands of all the Italians _facile princeps_. At first, it was his intention to write his poem in Latin verse; but seeing that that language was not understood by all, and many even among the educated laity could not read it, and just then the great transformation of the new language taking place he wisely conceived the plan of gathering all the words which were then used from the Alps to the sea, and exhibited a uniformity of sound and formation, and thus to write a poem that might be called national, and at the same time be a bond that would unite all the Italian hearts. This may be looked upon as the political or patriotic aim of his work. A moral end had he then in view: thus, laying down as the principle of common destiny that man was created for the double end of enjoying an imperishable happiness hereafter, to be attained by securing a happiness in this world, which should arise from attending to the pursuits of virtue, in _Paradise_ he described the former, which cannot be attained without a soul entirely detached from the affections of this earth, a process of schooling one's self and purification so well represented by what he imagines to have witnessed in _Purgatory_. But as the soul needs be animated to do works of justice by the promise of reward, as well as by the intimidation of deadly punishment, so he depicts the horrors to which the lost people, those who were dead to even the aspiration of a virtuous nature, will be doomed in _Hell_.

Naturally, this triple state of the soul, lost, redeeming herself, glorified, gave him a chance of embodying into his work theological expositions of the duties of man, of the working of grace, and of the economy of religion; revelation, natural religion, and science, all in turn lend him a helping hand. {222} And because examples should be adduced to practically prove the truth of his assertions, he freely quotes from the past and from the present; and while he is perfectly alive to the importance of placing in high relief the beautiful deeds of those who gained glory in paradise because of their being faithful to the behests of faith and religion in whatever concerns our relations to God, ourselves, and our neighbors, at the same time, his heart burning with love for his country, he will admit of no mitigation in the Conduct Of such as he considers unfaithful to it or in the least hostile to that Florence he loved so well.

And here we pause. We have not done justice to the subject: we have not said all we could wish about Dante and Mr. Parsons. Yet we hope the few remarks we have made will enkindle in the breast of some of our readers a desire of becoming better acquainted with the father of Italian literature, the idol of the Italian student, the _Fiero Ghibellino_:

"Onorate l'altissimo Poeta."

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Aspirations.

O dread Jehovah! who before the world Had being dwelt eternal and alone, Ere yet our planet on its path was hurled Through space, ere angel or archangel shone, Ere waves had learned to roll or winds to sweep, And darkness brooded on the mighty deep!

Thy glance searched through infinity around, And there was none save thee; thy spirit warm Moved over chaos, and its vast profound Heaved up a thousand worlds, dark, without form. "Let there be light!" And, kindled at thy ray, Burst radiant morning teeming with the day.

And what am I to thee? A raindrop placed In an o'erteeming cloud? A snowflake drifting o'er the northern waste When winds are loud? An atom or a nothing where sublime Worlds, planets piled, thy praise unceasing chime?

Not so; for in thy living image made, Conscious of will, of immortality, In thy tremendous attributes arrayed, Like thee, a Lord, yielding alone to thee-- What awful dignity! what power divine! A semblance of infinitude is mine.

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Yet did thy breath no less Create me; sprung from thy eternal fires, I glow; without thee, I am nothingness; Thy wisdom guides me and thy love inspires. "Give me thy heart"--O strange benignity! What is a mortal's heart, O God! to thee?

My bursting heart expands To meet thee, and thy presence weighs me down: He who contains the heavens within his hands, Annihilating systems with his frown, Comes clad in garments of mortality To dwell on this dim, shadowy earth with me.

For what shall I exchange thee? For the shine Of worldly pomp and pageantry and power? This spark, within eternal and divine, Spurns the false baubles of a fleeting hour. Thou art all glory, power, infinity-- Thou _art_; what can I want, possessing thee?

Thou shalt unchanged behold The starry host, quenched like a firebrand, die; The firmament is as a vesture rolled Around thee--as a vesture 'tis cast by. A thousand years are nothing in thy sight-- Or as a watch that passes in the night.

And when this earth shall fly To atoms; when the mountains shall be tossed As chaff; when like a scroll rolls back the sky, And Nature and her laws for ever lost; When thou shalt speak in fire the dread command And hurl it from the hollow of thy hand--

What hope for me? Thy promises sublime That o'er the wreck of worlds I shall survey, With eye unmoved, beyond the touch of Time, The stars grow dark, the melting heavens decay, And sit arrayed in immortality In peace eternal and supreme with thee.

C. E. B.

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Shall we have a Catholic Congress?

All our readers must have read with interest the account given of the last Catholic Congress at Malines. The importance and utility of such assemblies are generally understood. Shall we have a Catholic Congress? The feasibility of introducing it into the United States can scarcely be doubted. The people here are more accustomed to self-government than in Europe. We are thoroughly acquainted with the management and rules of popular, deliberative assemblies. We have learned members of the clergy, and educated laymen, who appreciate the value of a congress, and are competent to render its workings practical and make its deliberations effective. The episcopacy is ever ready to aid undertakings for the benefit of religion. There can, therefore, be no doubt of obtaining the necessary sanction from the ecclesiastical hierarchy for the assembling of the congress.

Who, then, will begin it? And when will it be held? Many earnest Catholics of the country, who have seen the great benefits derived to Belgium and France from the congresses at Malines; and to Germany from those at Munich and elsewhere; who have witnessed the powerful influence for propagating doctrines and concentrating forces of the sectarian or philanthropical assemblies which annually meet in New York or elsewhere, are asking these questions. Our forces are scattered; a congress would unite them. There is no centre, no unanimity, no harmony of action among us in reference to many important matters which might be treated of in a congress.

Let us briefly enumerate some of the objects which could be discussed and studied in an assembly of our learned clergy and educated laity.

FREE SUNDAY AND DAY SCHOOLS, their regulation and amelioration, might be one of the objects. In large cities like New York, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia, where Catholics are, many of them, wealthy and instructed, the teachers of parochial or Sunday schools are often highly capable of conducting their establishments. The large cities afford so many opportunities of study and improvement that every one can learn. But in the poor country districts, how is it? The teachers are isolated. They need more system. There is no central point to which they may look for light. The rural clergy in remote districts are often suffering from want of some large and powerful organization which could assist them in their labors, either for the improvement of their schools, their choirs, etc., or for the counteracting of Protestant propagandism.

The influence which has been exercised on education in Belgium by the Catholic congresses is well known. The labors of the German Catholic congresses is not so public. The Nineteenth General Assembly of the Catholic associations of Germany took place at Bamberg, in Bavaria, during the interval between the 31st of August and the 3d of September, A.D. 1868. These German congresses, like those of Belgium, are composed of laymen as well as ecclesiastics. They exclude all political questions from their sessions. {225} Their only aim is to sustain and support the Catholic cause. In the three first meetings, one at Mayence, in 1848, under the presidency of the Chevalier Buss; the other at Breslau, presided over by M. Lieber, while the city was in a state of siege, in 1849; and in the third, held at Ratisbon in 1850, the members organized a unity of action among the societies of St. Vincent de Paul, established schools and reading-rooms in the interest of Catholic literature, and watched over the religious wants of the Germans in Paris and throughout the rest of France. The Congress of Ratisbon, presided over by Count Joseph de Stolberg, founded the Society of St. Boniface, which has since then realized the sum of $700,000, and by this means established one hundred and ten missions and one hundred and fifty schools for the poor German Catholics living in Protestant countries.

Münster, in Westphalia, had a Congress in 1852. The president was the Baron of Andlau. In it was discussed the method which the Catholic associations could take to promote Christian education and to found a Catholic university. These deliberations were continued the following year at the Vienna Congress, where Dr. Zell presided. In 1856, at another Congress, in which Count O'Donnel was president, the foundation of children's asylums was discussed. Salzburg was proposed as the seat of the Catholic university. The Salzburg Congress, in 1857, was specially occupied with this project, and with the means of developing the power of the Catholic press, founding Catholic publication societies, and giving pecuniary aid to the Catholics of the East. At Freyburg, in 1859, the Congress, presided over by the Count de Brandis, treated of the Catholic press and religious music. The Thirteenth Congress at Munich, in 1861, founded the literary review known as the _Litterarischer Handweiser_, edited by Hulskam and Rump, at Münster.

The Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, in the following year, took up again the question of the establishment of a Catholic university. A committee was appointed to found it; but the government opposed them. This rather excited than diminished the zeal of the persevering German Catholics. Professor Moeller, of Louvain, on this occasion said: "_The word impossible is not Christian._" There was not one of those congresses that did not oppose the secularization of education; not one of them that did not materially and morally aid the cause of Christian doctrine.

In these German congresses we have a good model to imitate. Isolated attempts to obtain public support for our own schools will rarely if ever succeed. There must be union; a union of the Catholic brain, intelligence, and wealth, not only in one state, but all over the country.

Our CATHOLIC REFORMATORIES is another object worthy the attention of a Catholic congress. No one can exaggerate the importance of these institutions. That of New York, supported and maintained by our good and zealous archbishop, has produced incalculable benefits in our city already. A Catholic congress would strengthen the hands of our zealous prelate; would increase the efficiency of the institution; would encourage the Catholics of other cities, where they are not already established, to found similar establishments for the orphaned or homeless children who swarm in our country. How many of the poor sons and daughters of our Catholic emigrants are lost for ever to faith and virtue in our cities! {226} Will not their blood cry out on the last day against their fellow-Christians, who have the wealth and the intelligence, but not the zeal, to save them from a life of crime and ignominy?

The ST. VINCENT DE PAUL SOCIETIES could also profit by union of action among the different conferences throughout the country. In the South, especially, the war has multiplied widows and orphans. The poor there have not the same advantages as in the North. Some of the dioceses were poor before the war. They are now all very poor. The bishops and priests are trying to build up what the sword or the cannon destroyed. It is true there are regular assemblies of the different conferences; but they need a stronger impulse from without to make them flourish as they should and as they are needed.

Then there is the question of RELIGIOUS MUSIC, [Footnote 106] which none of the European congresses ever omit in their deliberations.

[Footnote 106: Professor Jacovacci, of the Propaganda College, in a recent circular to the bishops, urges this point on the next General Council.]

We are not disposed to find fault; but every one knows that the music of our churches is frequently anything but rubrical or ecclesiastical. We are in favor of the best music; the very best, whether it be figured or plain chant; but let it be at least CHURCH music, not rehashed operas. We know that many of the pastors are unable to procure singers who are competent to render Catholic music as it should be in our churches. We need a Catholic training-school of music. A Catholic conservatory might easily be formed in New York. It is no exaggeration to say that the best of the foreign musicians in the United States are Catholics, whether they be remarkable for their skill with instruments or for the culture of their voices. There is besides much native talent, which only needs the opportunity to become distinguished. Let there be founded a national Catholic conservatory of music, with prizes and exhibitions; let the members of it see that their efforts will be even pecuniarily and profitably remunerated, and we venture to predict that in a short time America will stand as high as her European sisters in religious music. Toward the close of the last Malines Congress, a multitude of Belgian Catholic amateurs gave an oratorio on the _Last Judgment_, which was magnificent. A Catholic conservatory of music in New York could give similar entertainments, as an appropriate termination to our Catholic congresses, and be able thereby to pay all its expenses, and have even much left with which to remunerate its members.

LIBRARIES, READING-ROOMS, and the PRESS could also be discussed. Nothing will do more good in a community than a supply of good reading matter. We have already discussed the method of founding family and Sunday-school libraries in the pages of this magazine. A Catholic congress would encourage those who wished to found them; would bring out the energies of many of the laity and clergy who only seek a good opportunity to display them. In this respect we might learn a lesson from many of the Protestant sects. Whatever we may think of the real zeal of Protestants, however much we may condemn their external show of piety, their confounding Christian charity with philanthropism, we must admire the energy which they manifest in the cause of education. No church of theirs but has its Bible class, its well-organized Sunday-school, its Sunday-school library, its young men's association, reading-room, and newspaper. {227} No doubt these are but the accidentals of Christianity; but they help very much in propagating or sustaining the essentials.

It is certain that our CATHOLIC PRESS does not receive all the support which it deserves. We have Catholic newspapers, which could be rendered much more useful and efficient were they better patronized; and as for our magazine, our readers must judge whether we do not endeavor our utmost to satisfy their intellectual wants. In Europe, every petty, poor Catholic community is willing to support a journal. We often find many reviews flourishing in countries far less wealthy and populous than our own. Ought not the five millions of Catholics of the United States to give THE CATHOLIC WORLD a subscription list of at least fifty thousand? And if they do not, what is the reason? Is it because they are poor? No, but because there is no central point from which the current of electricity can be sent leaping through the brain and heart of our population. Let us have a congress for these purposes also.

Then there is the project of a CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY. Every day we read of wealthy gentlemen leaving donations of thousands of dollars to educational establishments belonging to the state or to religious denominations other than Catholic. In Europe this is also a common custom. We have read of Mr. Peabody's donation to Yale College. Girard, an infidel, founded the institution in Philadelphia which bears his name. Our Catholic millionaires of New York and other cities, we are sure, only need to be asked to show their generosity in the founding of a Catholic university. Several of the petty German states have theirs. Even impoverished Ireland has had the courage to originate one. Will not rich America follow her example? What is wanting? Not the money; not the patronage; not the ability to conduct it; but simply that there is no united, powerful body of Catholics to undertake it. Give us a congress, and we can have this union; a congress of the brain, good sense, and faith of the American church.

Are we to have a school of CATHOLIC ARTISTS in this country? Shall we do anything to promote the Catholic arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture? What style of church ornament shall we keep? Shall we cultivate the taste of our clergy in these matters? After what fashion shall our churches be built? Will we make no effort to unite the Catholic architects and artists of the country to consult, compare their experiences, and improve their taste and talent by mutual contact? They individually desire to be brought together. There is no true artist who does not wish for an opportunity to be appreciated; and where can so just an appreciation of an artist's work be had as in a Catholic congress of American Catholic talent which would influence even the remotest parts of our vast country?

Our priests all feel the want more or less of a central point to which they can look with safety for _proper vestments, altar furniture_, and _altar wine_, It may be suspected without rashness that many of the merchants who sell wines for the altar are not always reliable. In many cases the wine is adulterated. In such a state of uncertainty, would it not be well to have a "Bureau of Safety" established? Would it not be well to have some authorized and reliable agents who could transport to this country, cheaply and safely, some of the treasures of Europe--vestments, chalices, pictures, and the like--instead of obliging every priest to depend on his own individual knowledge, or leave him at the mercy of some purely mercantile monopoly? {228} If there were a Catholic congress, all this state of disorder could be remedied, if not in one year, at least in two or three. There are zealous Catholics enough in the country to devote a portion of their time to the general interests of religion.

The condition of CATHOLIC PRISONERS in jails or penitentiaries could form not the least important object of a Catholic assembly. There are many unfortunate members of our church in the prisons on the neighboring islands of New York who are in the best dispositions to profit by spiritual consolation, yet they have no books, save the few which the devoted chaplain may give them when charity affords him the necessary funds. The prisoners in more remote districts are worse off. Does it not stir up the fire of zeal in the heart of a Catholic to know that he can save a soul, reclaim the vicious, and give consolation to a poor wretch who may have unfortunately forgotten the sanctity prescribed by his religion? Would not a supply of good books be a godsend to Catholic prisoners? Would it not tend to reform them, to beguile their weary hours, and sanctify them? Now, a Catholic congress could establish a permanent committee, to see that the prisons of the country were supplied with Catholic literature. If we want to convert the United States, we must be in earnest about our work. We must take every method that our means will enable us to use and our piety suggest. Let Catholic doctrines percolate through the veins of society not only by preaching in our churches, but by spreading Catholic tracts, Catholic newspapers, Catholic books in the city, in the country, in the work-house, even in the jail and penitentiary. Let our religion be like its Founder, "going about everywhere doing good:" "_pertransiit benefaciendo._"

Although centralization, in a political point of view, when carried to excess, is injurious to liberty, too much individualism is equally pernicious, for it entails too much responsibility. A Catholic congress would not destroy individual zeal, but only concentrate it. A Catholic congress could coerce no man's will. It would only be an index to show men what they could do; to ask them to be unanimous and to pull together.

The details of the congress could be arranged at its meeting. The constitution and by-laws of the Malines congresses, or of those which succeeded so admirably in Germany, could be adopted with slight modifications. The approbation of the Holy Father would be given to it as to those in Europe. Our venerable archbishops and bishops would sanction it. The prelate in whose diocese it would assemble might preside at its deliberations or appoint a substitute. Committees would be appointed, some permanent, others transitory.

In the interest of the laity, then, we ask for a Catholic congress. We ask for it in the interest of the clergy also, who are anxious to keep up their own tone of respectability, and at the same time influence by unanimity the great work of the conversion of the whole United States to Catholicity.

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Translated From Le Correspondant.

The Present Disputes in Philosophy and Science.

By Dr. Chauffaid, of The Imperial Academy Of Medicine.

I.

Philosophy or rather philosophical discussions are being renewed. On the one hand, materialism rages like a tempest over the regions of science; menacing our scientific, intellectual, and moral past and future with destruction. On the other side, we behold noble efforts, beautiful works, and eloquent protestations, on the part of reason and liberty, in favor of the dignity of human nature against the debasing tenets of positivism. We know what shall be the result of this struggle. Materialistic doctrines and hypotheses can never conquer the best aspirations and real glory of humanity. But if final triumph is certain, when will it take place? Immediately, or only after a passing victory of the great philosophical error of the day? This is a serious question; for a temporary victory by materialism would be a fatal sign of our time, and humiliate our race beyond anything that can be imagined. The philosophical discussions, therefore, which have been raised around us are not a mere useless noise; but they are the most important subject for our consideration, bearing with them great destinies--those of science, and perhaps of national life.

To appreciate the true character of the materialistic movement which is stirring every layer of society, and whose action the learned and the ignorant equally feel, we must examine all the remote and proximate, latent and manifest, causes which influence the currents, the ebb and flow of materialism. It would be well to determine how actual materialism has its exclusive origin and its new sources in the bowels of modern science; what new support it has met with in recent scientific discoveries, and what are the value and bearing of those discoveries.

In beholding the tumult which the partisans of the experimental method in philosophy create, the enthusiasm which they show, and the passionate defence of their theory, one would suppose they had made a new conquest of the human mind, and made some astounding discovery. Yet we know what the exact value of the experimental method is. Why, then, so much nervous excitement over it? Yet the excitement is probably only artificial; still it has an aim. The experimental method is clamorously extolled for the purpose of covering with its authority sophisms destructive of all philosophy and of all science. This method is a great flag under which all causes that are not science are sheltered. M. Caro, in his excellent book, _Materialism and Science_, has endeavored to dispel all confusion on this subject, and to re-establish facts and the truth. Positivism--which must not be confounded with positive science--tries to unite its destiny with that of the experimental method; calling itself the necessary fruit of the latter, the systematized result of a method which subjects all visible nature to man. Positivism concludes from the premises that it has the same certainty as the experimental method.

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M. Caro, with a strong hand, upsets all such pretensions. He demonstrates that, if positivism has skilfully stolen the name and some of the processes of positive science, the experimental school, to which the positive sciences owe so much, owes nothing to positivism. Taking for guide, in the study of the experimental method, one of the _savants_ who understands it best, and who, after practising it successfully, has exposed its precepts with incomparable authority, M. Caro proves that this method is not bound by the tyranny of positivism. "Nothing is less evident to my eyes," he writes, "than the agreement of M. Cl. Bernard's manner of thinking with certain essential principles of positivism. His independence is clearly manifested especially in regard to two points: Firstly, in opposition to the spirit of the positive doctrine, he gives place to the idea _a priori_ in the constitution of science. Secondly, contrary to one of the most decided dogmas of the positivist school, he leaves a great many open questions, and thus allows his readers to revert to metaphysical conceptions for their solution."

In the thought of M. Cl. Bernard, the _a priori_ element loses all absolute sense and becomes a purely relative and accidental fact. It has no longer any of those eternal forms of the understanding, of those necessary conceptions through the aid of which the human mind sees and judges the things of nature, contingent facts, and phenomena which happen before our eyes. It is not that power, obscure yet admirable reflection of the divine power, which enables us to apprehend the immutable relations of things, and establishes science by compelling us, by an irresistible attraction, to seek in their cause the reason of phenomena. No; M. Cl. Bernard does not rise directly to that alliance of the infinite and finite, of cause and effect, which takes place in the active depths of the human mind. To this great experimentalist the idea _a priori_ is revealed only in face of experience; it is an instinct, a sudden illumination which strikes and seizes the mind, when the senses act and perceive, as impassible and mute witnesses. "Its apparition is entirely spontaneous and individual. It is a particular sentiment, a _quid proprium_, which constitutes the originality, the invention, and genius of every man. It happens that a fact--that an observation--remains for a long time before the eyes of a _savant_ without inspiring him with anything, when suddenly a ray of light flashes on him. The new idea appears then with the rapidity of lightning, as a sort of sudden revelation." This flash, this ray of light, is well known to medical tradition, and often called tact, sense, and medical skill. These expressions will exist notwithstanding the denials of a narrow science, which thinks to ennoble itself by suppressing art. There are physicians who, in face of the obscure manifestations of a disease, perceive, with a rapid and sure intuition, the hidden relations of the malady, its nature buried in the living depths of the organization, its future tendencies and probable solutions. This intuition has nothing mysterious in it, and is not the play of a capricious fancy; it is the flash of light, the new idea, the sudden revelation, of which M. Cl. Bernard, the learned _savant_ and most severe of experimentalists, writes. This, then, is what M. Cl. Bernard calls the idea _a priori;_ certainly he does not pretend nor think that he is writing metaphysics. {231} Nevertheless, when we attentively consider it, is not this idea _a priori_ a species of prolongation or consequence of the necessary ideas, the true ideas _a priori_, of the human mind? Is not the idea _a priori_ a perception of a cause through its effects; at one time the perception of a contingent and particular cause; and again the perception of a cause in itself--of the supreme, necessary, and infinite cause? Does not M. Cl. Bernard himself seem to admit metaphysical conceptions, when, after considering the spontaneity of the intellect under a general aspect, he writes as follows, "It may be said that we have in the mind the intuition or sentiment of the laws of nature, but we do not know their form"?

The experimental school has not, however, determined this point of doctrine; it has so confusedly felt and expressed it that the positivist school could not avoid refuting those rather vague aspirations, and admit, without denying its own principles, those soarings of the understanding in presence of facts. But the experimental school, of which M. Cl. Bernard is the interpreter, puts itself in opposition to positivism. He allows those high truths which cannot be demonstrated by sensible phenomena to have some place in science. He tells us that true science suppresses nothing, but always seeks and considers, without being troubled, those things which it does not understand. "Deny those things," says M. Cl. Bernard, "and you do not suppress them; you shut your eyes and imagine that there is no light." Positivism could not be more formally condemned by positive science.

Will it be pretended that, although the experimental school accepts the order of metaphysical truths, it rejects, them disdainfully when there is question of the natural sciences; and that thus rejected by science they cannot be counted among the serious knowledge of humanity? Nothing could be more unjust than such a condemnation; for nothing proves that there is not another knowledge besides that of experience. M. Cl. Bernard discovers, even in the order of biological truths, capital truths which are not at all experimental, susceptible of a _real determinism_, to use the expression of which he is so fond. When he tries to define life by using a word which expresses exactly the idea, he calls it _creation_. In every living germ he admits a _creating idea_, which is developed by organization, and is derived neither from chemistry nor physical nature. In fine, the experimental school, such as tradition presents it to us and its ablest expounders teach it, must not be confounded with _positivism_, which tries to steal its name and flag.

The experimental school, healthy and fruitful, gives to metaphysical truths their legitimate influence, their superior and imperishable sight, and does not suppress them by a violent and arbitrary decision. Especially, it does not resolve difficulties by denying all other causes and activity than what is purely material. The experimental school is not fatally materialism.

Materialism is the legitimate consequence of positivism. The positivist sect, at the beginning of its career, pretended to take hold of materialism with a superb indifference and dogmatic insolence, in presence of those eternal problems which, to the honor of humanity, have always puzzled and tormented it. But it is easy to show that most of the definitions and teaching of positivist philosophy correspond with the materialist dogmas, from which positivism pretended to hold itself aloof. {232} How could it be otherwise? Those supreme questions and their answers are not isolated facts, distinct from our particular knowledge, regarding the things of this world. They penetrate necessarily into all our cognitions; become incarnate and visible under the form of all the particular existences which we analyze. We cannot give the character of one of those existences, without this definite character implying a corresponding solution of the primary truths, which were supposed to be entirely forgotten. All the special science of positivism is identical with materialistic interpretation; and one would have wished that the human mind had not tried to ascend from these special sciences to general and primary science and explain it like them. Was this possible? No; and hence illusion is no longer possible. Positivism has logically terminated in materialism.

To demonstrate this inevitable fusion, M. Caro examines one of the absolute precepts of positivism, namely, the subjection of psychology to cerebral physiology. He proves that this subjection is only an indirect method of resolving both psychology and cerebral physiology by materialism. Stuart Mill has been rejected by the positivists for not having followed the founder of the positivist school, resumed in the principle that there is no psychology outside of biology. "Psychology, we are told," writes M. Caro, "is identical with biology; faculties, consciousness which observes them, attention which analyzes them, and, thanks to memory, classes them; all these are in the dependence of the organs on each other. This dependence is called by a very expressive word: the affective and intellectual faculties become, in positivist language, the _cerebral faculties_. The rest follows. We are assured that there is identity between those two relations: the intellectual and moral manifestations are to the nervous substance what weight is to matter, that is to say, an irreducible phenomenon, which in the actual state of our knowledge is its own explanation. 'Just as the physician observes that matter is heavy, so the physiologist proves that the nervous substance thinks, without either of them being able to explain why the one is heavy and the other thinks.'" [Footnote 107]

[Footnote 107: M. Littré, préface au livre intitulé _Matérialisme et Spiritualisme_.]

"Let it be so," continues M. Caro; "yet which of the materialists has ever pretended to explain why the nervous substance thinks? They merely attest the existence of the fact. The real question is to know if it is the nervous substance which thinks, and if it can think. To affirm that it thinks is to close the question. I take as witness M. Moleschott, whose teaching is not doubtful, and which has been published with applause. What does he say in a discourse recently delivered at Zurich? 'The identification of spirit and matter is not an explanation; it is a fact, neither more nor less simple, more nor less mysterious, than any other fact; it is a fact like weight. No one assuredly pretends to explain gravitation by means of distinctions between it and matter.' Is there, I ask, an appreciable difference on this question between the language of the present chief of the positivists and that of the most decided positivists?"

A journal, devoted to the defence and propagation of scientific materialism, _La Pensée Nouvelle_, proclaimed the same doctrine: "The positivist school is a sect which proceeds from materialism; it has no value or aim except through materialism."

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II.

Materialism absorbs, therefore, the positivist school. It tries to resolve the important questions regarding the origin and end of man. It does not proscribe metaphysics on the pretence that it wishes to know the eternal unknown, and approach the inaccessible. It admits neither unknown nor inaccessible. It substitutes for the primary causes of metaphysics, considered as pure chimeras, other causes the reality of which it pretends to prove. This is a bold but frank attitude, and preferable in every respect to the constrained position of positivism.

How has materialism tried to solve the questions it proposes? It cannot appeal to pure reason or to the revealing faculties of the human understanding, affirming or denying God as primary cause of existences, and the soul as secondary cause of the human person. Where would be the authority of materialism if its process of demonstration, if its methods were not separated from the process and methods of traditional spiritualism? The latter cannot be conquered on its own ground; it would always find there the height of its moral inspirations, and the power of its demonstrations. Materialism has felt this, and pretends to repudiate both the methods and the doctrines of the old metaphysics. Instead of asking the understanding for imaginary means of demonstration, it proclaims its adherence to infallible experience, its belief in the senses alone, and the analysis of sensations. Just like positivism, it calls itself the immediate production of the experimental method, and attributes to itself the certitude which belongs to the positive and experimental sciences. The old doubt should thus be dissipated, and man would enjoy the full brightness of this universe, whose secrets would no longer be redoubtable, and whose eternal and necessary laws would be opposed to all idea of a higher origin, and government regulated by any exterior will.

But let us leave aside for a moment the examination of those sad illusions and past solutions and the part which experience has in them. Let us consider at first, from the stand-point of method alone, those problems of origin which materialism pretends to resolve. How are those problems capable of being solved by the experimental method? Such is the true question, and it is this one the study of which completes the beautiful book of M. Caro. "We shall not be opposed," says the eloquent author of the _Idée de Dieu_, "by any unprejudiced _savant_, when we assert that, in the actual state of science, no positivist dogma authorizes conclusions like those of materialism on the problem of the origin and ends of beings, on that of substances and causes; that to give exact knowledge on these points is contrary to the idea of experimental science; that this science gives us the actual, the present, the fact, not the beginning of things; at most, the immediate _how_, the proximate conditions of beings, and never their remote causes; finally, that from the moment materialism becomes an express and doctrinal negation of metaphysics, it becomes itself another metaphysics; it falls immediately under the control of pure reason, which may be freely used to criticise its hypotheses, as it uses them itself to establish them and bind them together."

This _a priori_ dogmatism imposes itself as a necessity on materialism, and destroys the experimental character which it loves. {234} The learned, devoted to the worship of positive science, are obliged to admit this, and M. Caro cites, on this point, the precious admission of an illustrious _savant_, M. Virchow, whom the materialists claim as one of themselves. "No one, after all," says M. Virchow, "knows what was before what is. ... Science has nothing but the world which exists. ... Materialism is a tendency to explain all that exists, or has been created, by the properties of matter. Materialism goes beyond experience; it makes itself a system. But systems are more the result of speculation than of experience. They prove in us a certain want of perfection which speculation alone can satisfy; for all knowledge which is the result of experience is incomplete and defective."

It is not a metaphysician who speaks thus; it is a _savant_, who, in Germany, ranks at the head of experimental biology, who leans to materialism, and admits, nevertheless, that materialism has no other root than an undemonstrable _a priori_; consequently M. Caro has the right with ironical good sense to draw these conclusions: "Until materialism leaves that vicious circle which logic traces around its fundamental conception; until it succeeds in proving experimentally that that which is has always been as it is in the actual form of the recognized order of phenomena; so long as it cannot strip those questions of their essentially transcendental character, and subject its negative solutions to a verification of which the idea alone is contradictory; until then--and we have good reason to think that period far distant--materialism will keep the common condition of every demonstration that cannot be verified. It may reason, after a fashion, on the impossibility of conceiving a beginning to the system of things, to the existence of matter and its properties, but it will prove nothing experimentally, which is, according to its principles, the only way of proving anything; it will speculate, which is very humiliating for those who despise speculation; it will recommence a system of metaphysics, which is the greatest disgrace for those who profess to despise metaphysics. We are continually reproached with the _a priori_ character of our solutions concerning first causes. Materialism must necessarily accept its share of the blame, no matter how full it may be of illusions regarding its scientific bearing and value, no matter how intoxicated with the conquest of positive science with which it essays in vain to identify its fortune and right."

We have just seen, with M. Caro, whether materialism can call itself the faithful representation and direct product of the experimental method. M. Janet, in one of those little volumes, _Le Matérialisme Contemporain_, destined to a happy popularity, and in which high reason and good science are made clear and simple to convince better, shows us what is the value of the solutions proposed, even nowadays, by materialism. The two works of MM. Caro and Janet thus complete each other: the one discusses the question of methods, and judges materialism in face of its own work, and systematic development; the other asks it, after its labors, whither the method it has used has led it, and interrogates it on those questions of origin and end which it treats and so boldly resolves.

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III.

Materialism has two grand problems to solve: matter and life. No one would hesitate to say that the first of these is within its scope, and the solution easy for it. What should be better able to teach us what matter is than a system which recognizes nothing but matter? Has matter in itself the reason of its existence, the reason especially of the motion which impels and moves it, causes all its changes, and what seems now to be the only origin of all its properties and of all its manifestations? M. Janet, in a chapter particularly original, _La Matière et le Mouvement_, demonstrates that matter cannot present the conditions of absolute existence which are necessary to it if we admit nothing above it. Materialism, instead of arriving at a substantial and freed matter, has nothing ever before it but an intangible unknown. To find nothing for basis of its affirmations but the unknown, and pretend on this basis to build a philosophical belief, seat the destinies of humanity on the unknown, is an outrage on reason and good sense. What a chimerical enterprise! "What would signify, I ask," writes M. Janet, "the pretensions of materialism in a system in which one would be obliged to confess that matter is reduced to a principle absolutely unknown? Is it not the same to say that matter is the principle of all things, in this hypothesis; and to assert that _x_, that is, any unknown quantity, is the principle of all things? It would be as if one should say, 'I do not know what is the principle of things.' What a luminous materialism this is!" But let us leave pure matter aside; although it touches and bounds us on every side, it does not seem to contain the peculiar secret of our origins and destinies. Let us go further and interrogate materialism regarding life and living beings, among which we are counted, and the study of which penetrates so deeply into our own life.

Materialism pretends to explain the mysterious origin and first appearance of life; and imagines that it can establish by experience the conditions and cause of the formation of simple and rudimentary organizations. The theory of spontaneous generation answers these experimental conditions, and is the proximate and sufficient cause of the existence of life. Having obtained those primary organic forms, materialism explains the immense multiplicity of living species by the gradual transformation of the rudimentary organic forms, produced by spontaneous generation; a transformation effected by natural conditions. Spontaneous generation is consequently a primary thesis of materialism.

"We see," says Lucretius, "living worms come out of fetid matter when, having been moistened by the rain, it has reached a sufficient degree of putrefaction. The elements put in motion and into new relations produce animals." The whole theory and all the errors of spontaneous generation are contained in these phrases.

The progress of the natural sciences gradually extinguished the belief in spontaneous generation. In proportion as science studied this pretended generation it disappeared, and ancestral generation became evident. M. Pouchet has reawakened the discussion of the question by transporting it into the study of those lives of only an instant in duration, which the immense multitude of animalcula presents. Those lives, still so little known and so hard to observe in their rapid evolution, offered a favorable field for confusion, premature assertion, and arbitrary systems. To affirm their spontaneous generation, or demonstrate their generation by germs detached from infinitely small organizations in their complete development, was a task equally obscure and apparently impenetrable to experimentation. {236} The one theory was opposed to all the known laws of life, while the other was in conformity with those laws. It seemed, therefore, that unless demonstrated by all the force of evidence, the spontaneous generation of animalcula should find no legitimate place in science. But not only was evidence always wanting, but thanks to the wonderful ability displayed by M. Pasteur; thanks to the beauty, precision, clearness, and variety of the experiments performed by him; thanks to the penetrating sagacity with which he has exposed the defects of the contrary experiments of M. Pouchet and M. Jolly, all the evidence is in favor of ancestral generation; and the Academy of Science, so prudent and ordinarily so reserved in its judgments, has not hesitated to pronounce openly in this sense. Let us hear the eminent M. Cl. Bernard, judging spontaneous generation; even that which, not daring to maintain the complete generation of the being, sought refuge in the spontaneous generation of the ovulum or germ, which being evolved produced the entire being:

"That generation," says M. Cl. Bernard, "which governs the organic creation of living beings has been justly regarded as the most mysterious function of physiology. It has been always observed that there is a filiation among living beings, and that the greatest number of them proceed visibly from parents. Nevertheless there are cases in which this filiation has not been apparent, and then some have admitted _spontaneous generation_, that is, production without parentage. This question, already very old, has been investigated in recent times and subjected to new study. In France, many _savants_ have rejected the theory of spontaneous generation, particularly M. Pouchet, who defended the theory of spontaneous ovulation. M. Pouchet wished to prove that there was no spontaneous generation of the adult being, but of its egg or germ. This view seems to me altogether inadmissible even as a hypothesis. I consider, in fact, that the egg represents a sort of organic formula, which resumes the evolutive conditions of a being determined by the fact that it proceeds from the egg. The egg is egg only because it possesses a virtuality which has been given to it by one or several anterior evolutions, the remembrance of which it in some sort preserves. It is this original direction, which is only a parentage more or less remote, which I regard as being incapable of spontaneous manifestation. We must have necessarily a hereditary influence. I cannot conceive that a cell formed spontaneously and without ancestry can have an evolution, since it has had no prior state. Whatever may be thought of the hypothesis, the experiment on which the proofs of spontaneous generation rested were for the most part defective. M. Pasteur has the merit of having cleared up the problem of spontaneous generation, by reducing the experiments to their just value and arranging them according to science. He has proved that the air was the vehicle of a multitude of germs of living beings, and he has shown that it was necessary before all to reduce the argument to precise and well-formed observations.

"In order to express my thought on the subject of spontaneous generation, I have only to repeat here what I have already said in a report which I have had to make on this question; that is to say, that in proportion as our means of investigation become more perfect, it will be found that the cases of supposed spontaneous generation must be necessarily classed with the cases of ordinary physiological generation. This is what the works of M. Balbiani and of MM. Coste and Gerbe have recently proved in reference to the infusory animalcula."

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These latter works, especially those of M. Balbiani, [Footnote 108] completely overturn the basis of the doctrine of spontaneous generation. Those infusory animalcula which were supposed to be produced by a silent self-formation are really produced by sexual generation, and those germs floating in the atmosphere are real eggs, the laying of which M. Balbiani discovered.

[Footnote 108: Balbiani "Sur l'Existence d'une Reproduction sexuelle chez les Infusoires."]

Nevertheless, spontaneous generation has still some decided partisans. Some, like Messrs. Pouchet and Jolly, still believe the theory as _savants_. The observations which they trusted in affirming spontaneous generation or ovulation still preserve their value for them. It is not easy to give up one's ideas and works. The children of our mind are often dearer to us than the offspring of our blood. It requires a species of heroism for a _savant_ to immolate what he has conceived with labor, protected and defended against all assailers. But besides these illusions and attachments which may be respected, interested passion arose and transformed into aggression and violent quarrel the peaceful discussions of science. _The Origin of Life_, [Footnote 109] such is the title of a recent publication on spontaneous generation; such is the problem which those who nowadays maintain a cause scientifically lost pretend to resolve.

[Footnote 109: L'Origine de la Vie: Histoire de la Question des Générations spontanées. Par le docteur George Pennetier, avec une préface par le docteur Pouchet.]

The origin of life! Observe the general meaning of the terms; there is question of life in itself, of the essence of all living beings. Human life is a particular case of this general problem; the solution of both is the same. Behind the animalcula and their spontaneous apparition is man. The higher origin, the high aspirations, the predestined end of which man thought he had the right to feel proud--all these vanish like vain dreams and puffs of pride in presence of the origin of primary life through the energy of matter alone. It alone is the true creator, the only cause, and it alone contains our end; beyond it there is nothing; science shows it, at least that science which places spontaneous generation at the top of its conceptions. The importance of the consequences explains the reason why the partisans of materialism have been so ardent in defence of their principles. If a simple problem of chemistry had no more proofs in its favor than the theory of spontaneous generation, no _savant_ worthy of the name would have maintained it or founded on so fragile a basis a multitude of scientific deductions. But there was question of the order and constitution of the world, of the reason, of the being of every creature, and hence the proofs seemed good and sufficient to a materialism which calls itself scientific and experimental. An aggressive polemic represented even as enemies of progress, as retrograde spirits, all those who rejected errors to which too easy a popularity had been given.

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IV.

Spontaneous generation gave materialism a point of departure at once rash and weak; bold if one looked behind, almost miserable if one looked ahead! What efforts to draw out of some rudimentary animalcula the regular development of the whole animal kingdom, man included--that being who thinks and wills, who is conscious of its acts and liberty, who possesses the notion of good and evil, who aspires after the true and the beautiful, who feels himself as cause and admits other causes in nature! How can the abyss which separates those two extremities of living creation be bridged? What omnipotence will be able to produce from these infusoria the prodigious number, the infinite variety of those animated beings, all those living species which, no matter how profoundly or how far the world may be investigated, are almost like each other, as it were immutable in their precipitate succession, stationary even in motion!

The same science which affirmed spontaneous generation has not balked before this enterprise, and it has pretended to prove the hidden mechanism which, from the egg spontaneously laid, produces the fearful immensity of animate forms! There have been found naturalists, eminent _savants_ in other respects and possessing great authority, like Lamarck and Darwin, who have imagined that they discovered the laws of the transformation of species.

M. Paul Janet, in the book which we cited above, has made a sharp and searching criticism of the theories of Lamarck and Darwin. He asks, in the first place, in what the hypothesis of a plan and of a design of nature, otherwise called the doctrine of final causes, would be contrary to the spirit of science. We must not undertake phenomenal analysis with the premeditated design of finding the phenomena conformable to an object decreed in advance; this preconceived object should never take the place of reason and be the explanation of the facts observed; such a manner of proceeding is hardly scientific, and leads fatally to arbitrary and erroneous conceptions. But does it follow that the facts observed and analyzed in themselves should not, by their collection and connection, express to the human intelligence a superior design, a progressive and ascending harmony, which are its final reason and vivifying spirit? To refuse in advance every final cause is an error similar to that of imagining it altogether and before the observation of the phenomena. Flourens has well said: "We must proceed not from the final causes to the facts, but from the facts to the final causes." These are the fruitful principles, and this is true natural philosophy.

"The naturalists," says M. Janet, "imagine that they have destroyed final causes in nature when they have proved that certain effects result necessarily from certain given causes. The discovery of efficient causes appears to them a decisive argument against the existence of final causes. We must not say, according to them, "that the bird has wings _for the purpose_ of flying, but that it flies because it has wings." But in what, pray, are these two propositions contradictory? Supposing that the bird has wings to fly, must not its flight be the result of the structure of its wings? And from the fact that the flight is a result, we have not the right to conclude that it is not an end. In order, then, that your materialists should recognize an aim and a choice, must there be in nature effects without a cause, or effects disproportioned to their causes? Final causes are not miracles; to obtain a certain end the author of things must choose secondary causes precisely adapted to the intended effect. {239} Consequently, what is there astonishing in the fact that in the study of those causes you should be able to deduce mechanically from them their effects? The contrary would be impossible and absurd. Thus, explain to us as much as you please that, a wing being given, the bird must fly; that does not at all prove that the wings were not given to it for the purpose of flying. In good faith we ask, If the author of nature willed that birds should fly, what could he do better than give them wings for that object?

The demonstration of the reality of final causes, and of a decreed and premeditated plan in nature, furnishes a primary and powerful refutation of the systems which pretend to explain the successive formation of organized beings by the sole action of natural forces, acting fatally, petrifying, modifying, transforming living matter in an unconscious and blind manner. Lamarck and Darwin, as we have said, are the two naturalists who have substituted most successfully a fatal, necessary, and in some sort mechanical plan, instead of a premeditated plan, realized by an intelligent and spontaneous cause. Lamarck appealed especially to the action of means, habit, and want. The combined action of those agents sufficed to him to conclude from the rudimentary cell to man himself.

The action of means, exterior conditions, can modify the form and the functions of living beings; this is a fact of which the domestication of animals offers the most striking examples. But does it follow that because we can modify certain animal and vegetable species, we can therefore create their species? Can we imagine the possibility of modifications so active and powerful that they arrive at the most complex creations, at the construction of the great organs of animal life, and of those organs of the senses, so diverse and so marvellously adapted to their functions? "For instance," says M. Janet, "certain animals breathe through their lungs, and others by the bronchial tubes, and these two kinds of organs are perfectly adapted to the two means of air and water. How can we conceive that these two means should be able to produce so complicated and so suitable organizations? Is there a single fact among all those proved by science which could justify so great an extension of the action of means? If it is said that by _means_ we must not understand merely the element in which the animal lives, but every kind of exterior circumstance, then, I ask, let the materialists determine what is precisely the circumstance which has caused such an organ to take the form of the lung, and such another to take the form of the bronchia; what is the precise cause which has created the heart--that hydraulic machine so powerful and so easy, and whose movements are so industriously combined to receive the blood which comes from all the organs to the heart and send it back through the veins; what is the cause, finally, which binds all these organs together and makes the living being, according to the expression of Cuvier, "a closed system, all of whose parts concur to a common action by a reciprocal reaction?" What will it be if we pass to the organs of sense; to the most marvellous of them, the eye of man or that of the eagle? Is there one of those _savants_ who have no system who would dare to maintain that he sees in any way how light could produce by its action the organ which is appropriated to it? Or, if it is not light, what is the exterior agent sufficiently powerful, sufficiently ingenious, sufficiently skilled in geometry, to construct that marvellous apparatus which has made Newton say: "Can he that made the eye be ignorant of the laws of optics?" {240} Remarkable expression, which, coming from so great a master, should make the forgers of systems of cosmogony reflect an instant, no matter how learnedly they may dilate on the origin of planets, and who pass with so much complacency over the origin of conscience and life!

If the action of means is incapable by itself of explaining the formation of organs and the production of species--what Lamarck calls the power of life, namely, habit and want--how can they give us the sufficient reason for those great facts? According to Lamarck, necessity produces organs, habit develops and fortifies them. But what is this necessity and this habit which are appealed to so complacently, and who proves their strange power? Let us take the necessity of breathing, of which M. Janet wrote as we have quoted. Whence comes this necessity? From the necessity of giving to the blood the oxygen which is necessary for it; and this latter necessity is derived from the necessity of keeping up the organic combustion, and furnishing the nervous system with an appropriate stimulant. Who does not see that there is here a connection of functions and organs which requires a simultaneous creation, which displays a preconceived plan, and not a successive growth of organs according to wants which find in each other the principle of their being, and which cannot be perceived and satisfied separately? What unheard-of aberration, what decadence of the scientific spirit, to transform necessity into a sort of effective and creative power; to make of a sentiment, ordinarily vague and obscure, a new and active entity, which not only animates the created being, but actually creates it!

Lamarck, it is true, admits that observation cannot demonstrate the producing power which he attributes to want; but if a direct proof is wanting, he considers an indirect proof sufficient by appealing to custom. What does he mean? Habit can develop and fortify existing organs by an appropriate and sustained exercise; but how does that prove that want can create them? How can habit develop an organ which does not exist? How can the development of an organ be compared to the creation of this organ, or make us realize the mode of creation of the organ? We can conceive want as the reason not of the creation but of the development of an organ, and habit as excited and sustained by this need; but the need of an organ which is absolutely wanting cannot be born of itself, cannot produce the organ, cannot excite habit. How can an animal deprived of every organ of seeing or hearing experience the want of sight or hearing, or acquire the habit of either? What chimerical hypotheses!

Let us hold to the judgment of Cuvier on all these hypotheses, whose authority is very great:

"Some naturalists, more material in their ideas, and relying on the philosophical observations of which we have just spoken, have remained humble followers of Maillet, (Talliamed,) [Footnote 110] seeing that the greater or less use of a member increases or diminishes its force and volume, have imagined that habits and exterior influences, continued for a long time, could change by degrees the forms of animals so as to make them attain successively all those shapes which the different species of animals now have. {241} No more superficial and foolish idea could be imagined. Organized bodies are considered as a mere mass of paste or clay, which could be moulded by the fingers. Consequently, the moment these authors wish to enter into detail, they fall into absurdities. Whoever dares to advance seriously that a fish by keeping on dry land could change its scales into feathers and become a bird, or that a quadruped by passing through narrow places would become elongated like a thread and transformed into a serpent, only proves his profound ignorance of anatomy."

[Footnote 110: Benoit de Maillet was the predecessor of Lamarck.]

The forms of scientific error change rapidly; only the principle always remains. But this principle requires to be clothed from time to time in new garments, which rejuvenate and disguise it. The system of Lamarck, for a moment popular on account of the philosophic ideas to which it gave support, could not maintain itself in lasting honor in science. It was as it were buried in deep oblivion, when Darwin undertook to awaken it from its ashes by substituting for the antiquated conceptions new ones, destined to give a similar satisfaction to the passions which had applauded the enterprise of Lamarck.

The work of Darwin--we must do him the justice to say it--is an important work, and displays rare science. The author, gifted with great penetration, employs to the greatest advantage what he knows to deduce from it what he does not know; and if he goes beyond experience, it is always in appealing to experience; so that he seems to remain faithful to observation even when he ventures far beyond its limits. Nevertheless so much science and sagacity can hardly blind us to the radical weakness of the system; and it would not have met with so favorable a reception if all the prejudices of the materialists whom it satisfied had not become its ardent champions. A first fact strikes one who studies impartially the theory of Darwin, namely, the incalculable disproportion between the means of demonstration and the immense problem to be resolved. There is question, let it be remembered, of the origin of living species. Darwin tries to explain this origin by the action of a natural selection, incessantly at work, which draws the collection of organisms out of one or several primitive, simple, and rudimentary types formed by the simple action of forces proper to matter. This natural selection is the image of the method according to which new races of domestic animals have been created, as the modern doctors maintain. In order that this, natural selection should produce the powerful effects which Darwin gives to it, he imagines two agents always active--changes in the conditions of existence, and especially _vital concurrence_. The changes in the conditions of existence, the accidental characters acquired by a living individual and transmitted by inheritance to its descendants, create certain varieties of type. Vital concurrence, the battle of life, the struggle of animated beings to subsist, allow only some of those varieties to last on the scene of the world; the others are vanquished and disappear. These transformations, continued and accumulated from age to age, increased by the indefatigable labor of an immense number of ages, have produced all the animal species actually existing; which are imperceptibly their predecessors in a continuous line of transformation, under the permanent influence of the same natural forces.

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The notion of species as well as that of variety and race disappear in this order of ideas, or at least lose the determined sense which the naturalists had attributed to them. Variety and race become species in the way of transformation, in course of development. The living form passes insensibly and by eternal motion from the one to the other, from the species to the variety, from the variety to the race, and from the latter to a new species which appears only to disappear in its turn. It is only an affair of time. The living kingdom is in perpetual transformation. No one can tell what it will become naturally.

Such is the essence of the Darwinian theory. It begins by the hypothesis of a natural selection which no direct fact proves or confirms. But can the method of selection as Darwin explains it be the foundation of such a hypothesis? But in this artificial election, due to the labor of man, man is the agent who chooses, who works; he becomes the final and active cause of the transformation undergone by the species; he takes care that the character of the races which he has obtained should be maintained by an ever-vigilant election. Can anything of this kind be invoked in the natural selection of Darwin? Who replaces the choice of man? If the natural selection is made according to a plan decreed and premeditated by the omnipotence which has created nature, this selection changes its character; it is no longer anything but one of the forms of creation; it is an interpretation of the mode of acting of the creating cause, it is no longer the negation of this cause. Darwinism, which consists in conceiving the order of things without any superior intervention, under the simple action of accidents passing fortuitously to permanence; Darwinism, hostile to all finality, disappears if the idea of plan is perceptible in the natural selection. Can vital concurrence replace the intelligent action, and assure to the natural selection that fecundity and power which are not in it, and which must come to it from without? But can "vital concurrence, the battle of life," be the means of creation; can they engender directly organic modifications, varieties, animal species? Evidently not the battle of life can make subjects; it is an agent of elimination for weak and defective species; it cannot produce by itself a new species. Natural selection remains always delivered up to itself, to its blind resources, which nothing directs or regulates, which acquire fecundity only by chance. To imagine that the harmonic and infinite collection of living species can be legitimately referred to a given agent, even by granting to it thousands of years to manifest its action, seems to me arbitrary and sterile rashness, which has nothing in common with a noble rashness of science, with the intuitions of a genius which sometimes forestalls experience and the proofs which it adduces.

M. Janet has given a general refutation of the theories of Darwin, and sufficiently strong to show their folly. General facts have their own light, but it does not shine the less far or the less brilliantly for being general. Nevertheless, in a question obscured by so many prejudices, and by the assertions of a science which calls itself entirely experimental, that is to say, entirely particular, particular facts acquire a singular eloquence and power of demonstration which the most audacious systematizers cannot refuse to acknowledge.

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Those facts embrace the infinite individualities of the living kingdom continued across the known ages. The source of information is inexhaustible. What does it teach us? Do particular facts confirm the ideas of Darwin regarding the gradual mutability of species; do they even furnish the sketch of a demonstration limited to certain determined points, to certain animal or vegetable species; do they finally show us some of those transformations which are the foundation of the system? Man has been observing and studying nature for centuries: tradition, the ruins preserved from the past, permit us to remount far up the stream of time; have they apprehended in nature any traces of those great changes which incessantly and fatally transform the vegetable and animal species? Or, on the contrary, does not everything go against those supposed transformations, and prove the fixity in time and space of those real species; a fixity which is not contradictory, which rather adapts itself to a certain normal physiological variability, which always allows to subsist and be perceptible through it the type of the species, the essential and primary form? We easily conceive the importance that a sincere response to these questions may acquire. They strike at the experimental foundation of Darwin's theory; if this experimental basis is wanting, what becomes of those theories? Are they not mere personal and arbitrary conceptions; brilliant plays of an imagination strong and creative, it is true, but which cannot be substituted for Nature herself and her direct teachings?

A learned professor of the faculty of science of Lyons, M. Ernest Faivre, has just undertaken this particular and experimental study of the origin of species, of their variability and essentiality; and we signalize his work to our readers--_La Variabilité des Espèces et les Limites_. It is impossible to write, on so complex and obscure a question, a book more rich in facts, more clear in its developments, or more authoritative in its conclusions. It seems to us the condemnation without appeal of the system of Darwin.

The vegetable kingdom is considered less rebellious than the others to the theories of Darwin; variety has more extended limits in it, less fixed than in the animal; generation, increase, the exterior conditions, present the occasion of many changes often profound in appearance. M. Faivre shows that the true species exists through all these changes, and that it is reproduced of itself from modified types, when circumstances or the artificial selection of man no longer supports the latter. Nowhere has man been able to create a real and durable species; and the species from the most remote times to our days are maintained with a fixity which has become one of the essential characters of species. The ancient land of Egypt is full of moving revelations on this subject: the animals, the plants, the grains buried in the caves, are the same as the plants and animals which cover the borders of the Nile at the present time. All the naturalists have proved this identity of a considerable quantity of animal and vegetable species. Hence, Lamarck and Darwin, to lessen the value of an experience of more than three thousand years' duration, have pretended that the conditions of life and the conditions of the exterior medium had not changed in Egypt from the historical times, and that the permanency of the species became consequently an ordinary and logical fact. But history, geography, the study of the soil, prove that the situation of Egypt has been profoundly modified. {244} The level of the Nile, the limits of the desert, the extent of the cultivated lands, the culture of the soil, the number of populous cities, the proximity or distance of the sea, the great public works, everything which transforms a country under the action of men, all have changed in Egypt as much if not more than in other countries, and nothing is found changed in the productions of this soil, in the living beings which it supports and nourishes. But we may go further than the historical period. The permanence of species is proved to-day from the glacial period; the bogs of Ireland, the submarine forests of England and of the United States, conceal in their depths relics of mammifera or of vegetable species exactly comparable to the vegetable and animal species actually living in those same countries. We could not enumerate all the proofs which establish the great fact of the permanency of species; the number of these proofs is immense, and no fact seriously contradicts them, and yet it is in the name of experience that the partisans of natural selection pretend to speak! The accidental, temporary, and superficial varieties which they produce become for them a sufficient warrant of absolute and permanent varieties which they cannot produce, but of which they impudently suppose the formal existence; thus destroying species by a mere hypothesis.

Natural selection has artificial selection for its ideal godfather, but what has the latter produced? Not only no species, but not even a permanent race definitively fixed and acquired. All the races made by the hand of man die if they are left to themselves, unsupported by an artificial selection constantly at work. It is a fact which M. Faivre supports with superabundant demonstration, taken from both the vegetable and animal kingdoms. The collection of those facts is truly irresistible. What! the continued transformation of species is given to us as a law, and yet we cannot find a solitary transformed species! The transformation of races, which must not be confounded with that of species, is itself conditional and relative, is soon effaced if nothing disturbs the return of the race to the pure type of the species, and yet we are told of the power of natural selection and of the battle of life which consecrates this power! This selection, this vital concurrence, this action of means, have been all employed to modify the proximate species, as the horse and the ass; domestication offered here all its resources; the hand of man could choose, ally, and cross the types at will.

"Assuredly," says M. Flourens, "if ever a complete reunion of all the conditions most favorable to the transformation of one species into another could be imagined, this reunion is found in the species of the ass and horse. And, nevertheless, has there been a transformation? ... Are not those species as distinct to-day as they have always been? Among all the almost innumerable races which have been produced by them, is there one which passed from the species of the horse to that of the ass, or, reciprocally, from the species of the ass to that of the horse?" Why, say we with M. Faivre, pay no attention to such simple facts, and take so much trouble to seek outside of evidence explanations which do not agree with the reality?

The theories of Darwin have become the chief support of those who attribute to man a monkey origin. "I prefer to be a perfect monkey to a degenerate Adam," says one of the partisans of these theories. {245} But why can they not perfect an ass so as to make a horse of it? There is not between these two latter species the profound anatomical difference which exists between the monkey and man--a difference so well established by Gratiolet, a great mind and a true _savant_. On what, then, can be founded the theory of our descent from the monkey species, since the slightest change resists all fusion, all transition from one neighboring species to another?

The book of the _Variabilité des Espèces_ is the answer of facts to the spirit of system. Calm and severe, rigorous and cold, this book admits only the testimony of nature. It will instruct and convince those who doubt on those questions. The author terminates by those conclusions which we willingly reproduce because they allow us to divine something else besides the indifferent study of facts; they are perhaps the only lines of the work where the sentiment of the moral dignity of man is apparent. "This hypothesis (namely, of the mutability of species) is not authorized," says M. Faivre, "either by its principle, which is a mere conjecture; or by its deductions, which the reality does not confirm; or by its direct demonstrations, which are hardly probabilities; or by its too extreme consequences, which science as well as human dignity forbid us to accept--the theory of spontaneous generation, the intimate and degrading relationship between man and the brute."

Notwithstanding the ability--we may almost say the genius--which illustrious _savants_ have employed in defending the doctrine, reason and experience have not weakened the reserved and just judgment which Cuvier has passed upon it, and which will serve as the conclusion to this essay: "Among the different systems on the origin of organized beings, there is none less probable than that which causes the different kinds of them to spring up, successively, by developments or gradual metamorphosis."

One word more before quitting the subject. All these great forms of scientific error spring up in our old Europe, where they find at the same time numerous and passionate adherents, and firm and eloquent opponents. The attack and the struggle are kept up incessantly in the press, in our books, in our learned bodies, in our teaching faculties. If we examine the general character of these conflicts, we find in them truth almost intimidated, certainly less bold and less respected than error. Truth is self-conscious, and that is sufficient to prevent it from becoming weak or yielding to fatigue and discouragement; but it has not popular favor; it is tolerated, but hardly ever greatly encouraged. If we quit this tormented Europe, which is drawn only toward new errors, and cast our eyes toward those great United States of America, that fertile land appears to us as favorable to truth as to liberty. Let us listen an instant to that illustrious _savant_ who has no superior in the domain of natural science, M. Agassiz; let us follow his teaching in the University of Cambridge. What elevation and what sincerity! How all those systems which seduce so many minds in these cisatlantic regions are brought to their true proportions--judged in their profound disregard of the laws of nature! Let us take, for instance, the influence of exterior conditions and of physical agents on animals--the basis of the system of Lamarck, and one of the principal conditions of the mutability of species in Darwinism. M. Agassiz, on this point, uses again the firm language which from the days of Cuvier natural science has not spoken in France:

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"In so far as the diversity of animals and plants which live in the same physical circumstances proves the independence as to the origin of organized beings, from the medium in which they reside, so far does this independence become evident anew when we consider that identical types are found everywhere on the earth in the most varied conditions. Let all those different influences be united--all the conditions of existence, under the common apellation of cosmic influences, of physical causes, or of climates--and we shall always find in this regard extreme differences on the surface of the globe, and nevertheless we shall see living normally together under their action the most similar or even identical types. ... Does not all this prove that organized beings manifest the most surprising independence of the physical forces in the midst of which they live, an independence so complete that it is impossible to attribute it to any other cause than to a supreme power governing, at the same time, physical forces and the existence of animals and plants, maintaining between both a harmonical relation by a reciprocal adaptation in which we can find neither cause nor effect? ... It would be necessary to write a volume on the independence of organized beings of physical agents. Almost everything which is generally attributed to the influence of the latter must be considered as a simple correlation between them and the animal kingdom resulting from the general plan of creation." [Footnote 111]

[Footnote 111: _Revue des Cours scientifique_, Mai 2, 1868.]

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Canadian Customs.

The neighboring British provinces of the north--the new Dominion of Canada--from various reasons, claim at this time the public attention. From intrinsic merits they are worthy of notice. With much of interest in the natural prospects and the interior life of this country and its denizens, it is almost a _terra incognita_ to the general traveller, and few penetrate to those remote portions where the ancient customs of the original settlers are faithfully retained and kept up in their primitive simplicity. Although closely contiguous to the American line, bordered by its lakes and its forests of dense timber, rich in valuable mines and costly furs indigenous to northern latitudes, it is chiefly for these possessions that the province is sought by the utilitarian trader, rather than visited by the pleasure-seeking tourist. And yet the general beauty of scenery and the peculiar characteristics of the people are worthy of close observation, and one might vainly seek in a wider range for material so grand, or characteristics better deserving of appreciation. The noble St. Lawrence is bordered by shores of smiling fertility in the summer months. The country rises in gradual ascent from the present boundaries of the stream, and geological inquiry demonstrates that at an earlier period the bed of the river extended to much wider limits than at present. {247} Still it is a grand and noble stream, as it goes sweeping onward majestically to the ocean, gemmed with a thousand isles, and having hundreds of peaceful villages that nestle on either shore. A mere passing voyage on this route of travel presents a rich and varied panorama of natural beauty. Still more interesting to the mind of serious thought than this mere material attraction, is the suggested idea presented in every village, crowned hill, or hamlet, nestling in some nook along the shore, of the happy unity and devotion of a people who make, within their humble homes and in the practice of piety, the sacred faith of their worship the _main_ object of their existence. Strangers to their zeal many deride this devotion and call it _fanaticism_; but no system can offer, in practical moral results, a higher order of virtuous life than that presented by the Catholic _Habitants_ [Footnote 112] of Lower Canada.

[Footnote 112: The _Habitant_ is a generic name applied to the farming population of Canada East.]

Retaining, with their French origin, the happy temperament of the Latin race--courteous, hospitable, and enthusiastic--foreign refinements have not destroyed original purity of character; and in their simple lives, wisely directed by zealous, self-denying curés, they illustrate in piety and contentment the happy results of this influence. To notice, then, the habitudes of this class, to enter their homes and penetrate the _arcana_ of their inner life, is a profitable study to all who are willing to receive the high moral lessons that grandeur does not constitute comfort, and that contentment may prevail where wealth does not abound, and that piety in simple faith presents a consolation that mere material possessions fail to bestow. While the patriotic Canadian claims as his motto,

"_Notre culte, notre langue, notre lois,_" he properly places his religion first and above all other mundane considerations. This religion is the Catholic faith; and while the Canadian submits to political innovations, and recognizes the rights of the conquering arm of the British, he claims, in unbending adherence to his church, the observance of every ancient rite. The Code Napoleon may be modified by Saxon legislation; but the great common law of traditions in religious forms must ever remain undisturbed. Hence arises a peculiar charm in the simplicity, fervor, and unity of devotion among the Catholic Canadians. Voyaging from Montreal to La Rivière du Loup, at every intervening two or three leagues are defined the boundaries of a Catholic parish, denoted by the dome or spire of the village church. The proportions of these edifices present a solid character and generally harmonize in style; and, although lacking the finish of architectural design, they are constructed of stone, with ample accommodations for from one to two thousand worshippers. In this one edifice gathers, for miles around, the populace of the entire district; for here no discordant sects prevail to divide and weaken congregations. This one church, then, is the grand centre around which the people cluster, and which usually occupies the most commanding point of observation. If an ancient edifice, the building occupies the centre of the plateau of cottages, at once in former times the house of worship and fortress of defence. Should the approach of hostile Indians be signalled, the populace retired within the sacred precincts until after the danger passed, which was generally escaped by the appeal for peace, on terms of mutual accommodation, by the venerable priest. {248} The influence of moral force often served to lead the minds of the aggressive savage to better and higher purposes.

Thus in this barren and bleak land whole tribes have been reclaimed from heathenism, though many priests, especially those of the Jesuit order, fell victims to their holy zeal, and offered their lives in sacrifice to their sacred efforts. Others lingered for years, prisoners in the hands of their captors, but still teaching in bondage, and finally, gaining influence from their virtues and learning, made proselytes of their persecutors. Thus whole tribes were brought within the influence of Christianity, and Canada was reclaimed from the savage customs of the natives, who have been elevated and preserved by the happy influence of the Church. These tribes have not disappeared, as elsewhere, before the rude invading march of the Christian, so-called, but continue in their united character and distinctive habits to live prosperously with their white brethren, and to venerate the religion they have embraced. Their principal villages dot the shores of the St. John and St. Lawrence, and even approach so near Quebec as Loretto. Their church edifices are generally of a simple character; but of late years, throughout Canada, many have been rebuilt, enlarged, or superseded by magnificent structures of more modern style than the ancient village church, in which, in times of a more primitive civilization, their forefathers worshipped. But the worship, in its outward ceremonies, remains unchanged. The same faith that won amid Siberian snows the land from savage rites, is alone fostered tenaciously in all its ancient forms. The devoted zeal of the French mission priest, driven from France by the bloody Revolution, carried the seeds of the true faith to the bleak shores of the Canadas; and their influence is well maintained by the curés of the present day, who continue not only to console spiritually, but in all the affairs of life give that wise direction which their superior intelligence enables them to exercise. The efforts of modern missionaries, who exhaust themselves in temporary efforts in remote regions, might take a wise lesson from this concentration of labor and dedication of life to the service of religion within fixed limits. It is granted, (for the fact cannot be controverted) that this people and country have been Christianized by the labors of the Catholic missionaries, and that the religion they inculcated is universally established and practised by the French population of the rural districts. It must, also, in fairness be admitted that the good effects of the system is demonstrated by the superior _morale_ of the people under this control, who compare favorably with other sections where mixed sects predominate. Canada East, from the ocean to Quebec, is settled almost universally by Catholics, principally agriculturists, though along the shores the fisheries and pilotage occupy their attention as a means of livelihood. Among this people crime is almost unknown, so efficient have been the influences of their faith upon their moral habitudes. Notwithstanding this favorable condition of morality, emissaries from Canada West are diligently sent yearly with their stock of tracts for distribution and well-bound Bibles for sale. The preaching from one text, "Be not a busy-body in other people's matters," would be a judicious commentary on this course, especially as the influence of their own system fails to produce the benign influences of Catholicity, in freedom from the ordinary evils from which these happy, peaceful French parishes are exempted.

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Devotion to their religion defends them from the influences of vice. Murder is a crime that rarely occurs among the native population, and other minor offences are equally unfrequent. To a people thus living harmoniously under an established religious influence, faithful in observance of their duties in patriarchal simplicity, and devoted to their religion, such invasion of the Protestant colporteur is a gratuitous impertinence. If the Catholic faith protects its votaries practically from sin, the substitution of another system, from the section of Canada West, (which by no means contrasts favorably with Catholic Canada East in comparative statistics of crime,) is no recommendation for the propagation of a faith that does not produce equal exemption from evil where their own influence prevails. Notwithstanding this common-sense proposition, zealots from the Bible societies yearly arrive among these devoted Christians, each one successively quarrelling about the proper construction of a book they universally recommend. The logical Canadian might well ask: "Why don't you agree among yourselves before you come to teach us? We are all happy in one opinion here!" Notwithstanding such rebuffs, the colporteurs proceed from house to house, leaving their incendiary documents, which inform the people that the creed that defends them from the influence of sin is a snare and delusion, and that to be saved they must forego its exercise, and advantageously adopt that of some one of the fifty Protestant sects. Any of these may be supposed to possess a sufficient diversity of doctrine to satisfy the most exacting inquirers in their search after religious novelties. If these so-called religious propagandists confined themselves exclusively to these statements, in conscientious diversity of belief, their action might be regarded as an ardent desire to do good to the souls of their fellow-men. But the basest means are used to proselytize, by deliberate forgeries of the truth. The following incident is recorded from personal knowledge of its occurrence, and can be verified by witnesses to the transaction: A colporteur of this beneficent class, from Canada West, entered the cottage of a poor _Habitant_ family in the third range of the village of Saint-Michel, some fifteen miles from Quebec. One of the family was dying, in a room apart, and the priest of the parish was administering the last rites of the Church. The other members of the family were in the general room, during the confession preparatory to the anointing, and, although in grief, their circumstances did not protect them from the intrusion of the insidious stranger. The pedlar in piety vaunted his tracts, but as they were unable to read, these were unappreciated, and he finally displayed his costly Bible, which, he informed them, unless they possessed, studied, and read, they never could be saved. A stranger present--companion of the curé--asked the question: "Is it a Catholic edition?" "Oh! yes, certainly, a Catholic Bible," pointing to the binding with the embellishment of a large cross, the imprimatur of a bishop in France, and the recommendatory note from some Pope recommending its perusal to the study of the faithful. One had only to look within at the text to discover the perversion from the truth, and expose the fact that all these emblems were but a _false pretence_, to make the book sell among those who would be more attracted by its external resemblance to the authorized version of Holy Scriptures. {250} The curé at this moment entered, and, in taxing the man with his duplicity, he answered with effrontery, "It is a Catholic Bible, but not the Romish edition;" adding, unless all read it they must certainly perish. "Then," answered the priest, "all here must be lost, for not one can read; and unless you remain, in your Christian benevolence, and instruct them, they cannot avail themselves of your written instructions." Fortunately, as a protection against the insidious wiles of such base pretenders to exclusive possession of religious truth, the laws of Lower Canada protect the people against dangerous forms of proselytism, calculated to create breaches of the peace; and the invasion of a harmonious parish by these disturbers of the contented people can be promptly punished as a penal offence. They may sell or give away their books, but here their influence for evil ends; and the trouble these colporteurs give themselves, if expended in a more legitimate manner, might prove quite as effective for their personal good in earning an honest livelihood by more worthy methods. To uproot these tares of evil is the one trouble given to the worthy curés, who diligently watch and guard their flocks from the invasions of wolves, as well as instruct and guide them truthfully in the way of life. The result of their self-denying labors is manifest; and Catholic Canada compares favorably in its morality with any portion of the Christian world. An American Catholic entering one of these rural parish churches described, though recognizing the same service in the offering of the holy sacrifice, would be struck by several distinctive features in the Mass and congregation, and perhaps more than one observance that, as a republican Catholic, he never before witnessed. Distinctions in society are observed, but the deference is paid to superior goodness only; the lines that mark the grades of superiority in society being drawn by the personal worth of the possessor in his elevation to the place of honor. Three chief officers are elected from among the congregation every two years. They occupy the seat of honor in the church on a raised _banc_, in some cases canopied, but always decorated by two candles and a crucifix. To these points the priest first proceeds at the aspersion, and, making his obeisance and blessing, proceeds with the ceremony. And they are likewise first served on the distribution of the _pain bénit_, and always take precedence in the grander ceremonies of the church, being admitted within the sanctuary to receive the palms, and on other appropriate occasions having the _place notée_ assigned to their occupation. This gives the laity an active part and place of honor in the service of the church. Personal worth, and aptitude to look after the secular interests of the church, are the sole qualifications for this position, and the united voice of the congregation, in assembly, declares their choice. No alteration or repairs, or any movement connected with changes in matters pertaining to the interests of the church, can be undertaken without their approval. They are the defenders of the secular interests, as the priest is exclusively of the spiritual direction, but most generally harmonize with their curé in any plans of improvement he may suggest.

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An American participating in these Canadian services could intelligently follow all that is exhibited in the ritual, though he would be surprised in a simple rural population at the pomp and exactitude with which on grand occasions the services would be performed. No ceremony is omitted that would give dignity to devotion, and the Roman ritual is closely followed. Although the American stranger might not understand the French sermon or hymn, generally sung during the gradual or communion service, still in common faith he would recognize the offering of the great sacrifice, expressed in the same sonorous language in which the service of the Church offers her devotions in every clime. Thus, as a foreigner, in the Catholic Church he would in the most solemn parts of the service feel at home. In common with Roman discipline, the Diocese of Quebec excludes female singers from the organ-loft, save by dispensation during the month of Mary, when this joyful season is marked by this indulgence. The choristers, composed of men and boys, sit within the sanctuary, in stalls arranged in a double row on either side, and these are chosen for their excellent character as well as vocal powers. [Footnote 113]

[Footnote 113: They sometimes number forty or fifty in an ordinary village church.]

None would be admitted who did not possess the one qualification of piety. All are decently surpliced, and on Sundays and fête-days four of the boys wear, in addition to the surplice, pendent wings of muslin, neatly plaited, and act as the prominent assistants to the Mass. At the feast of Corpus Christi, the grandest ceremonial of the Church, (after the consecration of a bishop,) as many as eight censers are used, and the road through which the _cortége_ passes is garlanded with flowers, and banners are waving from every point. The grandeur of the ceremonial exceeds that of cathedral pomp in American cities, for the procession makes the out-door circuit of the village, stopping at four sections for the benediction. Two of these are erected temporarily of boughs of trees tastefully decorated, and most villages possess two small chapels distinct from the church that are permanently constructed for these purposes, and used on various occasions, whenever the bishop prescribes peculiar devotions. Thus, at the blessing of the seeds of the earth, in invoking prayers for a plentiful harvest, in times of plague, war, or inundation, these specialty services are peculiarly enjoined, and these chapels are then ever ready for the reception of the sacrament. Otherwise they are closed and unused, and only stand as memorials of the faith of the people; marking with the emblem of Christianity the Catholic land of Canada. At every mile a black cross stands as a milestone to point the way and keep religious hope alive on every side and every step; and sometimes, to mark special blessings in answer to prayers, these crosses are handsomely carved and of stone, and almost always enclose, even when of ordinary material, some sacred statue of venerated saint. Thus in the frigid clime and snow-capped hills of Canada, a Catholic love of the beautiful, pure, and good stands in memorials as frequent as may be found in the sunny climes of Italy or of the smiling lands of the south. Who will say that these objects of veneration do not tend to keep faith alive? The rustic Canadian, as he passes the memorial, lifts his mind to the higher reality to which it points, and in respectful adoration either raises his hat or devoutly crosses himself in prayer. Call it superstition if you will, but it is at least a harmless form of decent respect to the earthly insignia of heavenly realities which the emblem represents. {252} The same respect, too, is universally extended to the curé when he passes abroad; all bow or lowly make their obeisance to the man of God. These outward manifestations of human respect only teach lessons of honor for the office proper to be observed; and, to the credit of Protestant gentlemen it may be added, in Lower Canada, the character and influence of the priest are so highly esteemed that, even though strangers to the Church, in many instances they conform to the custom. A Catholic never passes the clergy of the church without the compliment of the _salut_; to omit the observance would be a mark of disrespect. These peculiarities, like the order of the church service, arrest the attention of the American Catholic. The whole Mass is uniformly performed in Gregorian tones. The versicle of the day and the _Introit_ are chanted by leading voices in the sanctuary. The choir commence the _Kyrie_, and it is likewise responsively intoned alternately, first by voices in the sanctuary, and then, with organ accompaniment, answered by singers in the organ-loft. And so the service is carried on most impressively, throughout the _Gloria_ and _Credo_, even unto the canon of the Mass, with the same tone that is proper to the Mass of the day. Thus is produced an effect of solemn harmony and unity with the celebrant at the altar. No light operatic air clashes with the severe ritual, but all is grave and subdued, and only relieved by the simple pathos of some French hymn, creditably chanted, and most frequently as a solo, by the best voice of the choir. The Canadians are a music-loving people, and all orders cultivate this gift of nature. Their melodies are spirit-stirring and deserving of wider cultivation. As it is, many of our popular airs spring from _la chanson Canadienne_. Frugal in their tastes, the simple pleasures of social companionship are their chief relaxation; though the games and enjoyments of their hardy clime have their many votaries, and they excel in all the manly out-door exercises, in which even their women participate. Perhaps this may be one reason, besides higher moral causes, that account for the peculiar longevity and large families of the Canadian people. If more primitive in their customs than in lands where luxurious habits prevail, they are exempted from many evils consequent on their indulgence, and the virtues of the heart flourish and abound in luxuriance as the teachings of the church prevail and are practised. Hospitality is the crowning merit of the Canadian people. The stranger ever receives a generous welcome and courteous attentions. The French origin of the people retains all the idiosyncrasies of the latter race, and that easy grace of manner inseparable from French habitude. A Canadian peasant will receive a stranger with a ready tact that is universal, even to those in the simplest rank in life. This frankness and generosity of manner are partially the influence of the Church, which inculcates the practice of courtesy springing from goodness of heart and virtuous intention, and it is especially inculcated in a rite peculiar to the Catholic Church in Canada. During the course of the Mass, every Sunday, is duly observed the generally obsolete custom called the _Agapae_, of apostolic institution. It is one of those ceremonials which in its latent significance teaches a wholesome truth and duty, and it is to be regretted that it should have fallen into desuetude elsewhere. {253} Significant of the good-fellowship that should prevail among all members of the human family, and in recognition of our common dependence one upon the other, and the duty of mutual aid and support to our brother-man, this feast of love is eaten in common by all ranks and conditions in life. If a Protestant should be present, and conduct himself orderly during the service, the courteous Canadian would extend a portion of the bread for the acceptance of his dissenting brother, as there is nothing of a sacramental character in its reception, and it is as free as the holy water fount in which the curious unbeliever often dips his hand with more superstitious dread than the Catholic believer. In this rite, large loaves of bread are prepared in rotation by the respective families of the parish, each in their order supplying the demand. This is called _le pain bénit_, blessed bread; and, after its benediction by prayer, that our daily food may be used to our advantage, which ceremony takes place from the steps of the altar, just before the _Gloria_, it is cut and divided into small pieces among the congregation, who receive it from the ushers, (the _maires_ being first served,) in whatever position they may be in during the course of the service--either kneeling, seated, or standing. Its distribution usually commences during the course of the _Credo_, and, unless the congregation is very large, concludes at least before the commencement of the most solemn period of the Holy Sacrifice. The ceremony creates no confusion, but is received as an ordinary part of the day's duties. The morsel is accepted, the recipient blesses himself, with a short prayer, and the particle is consumed. The value of the observance of this rite is, the sacred lesson that it so significantly teaches. Its absence would only create remark in the mind of the _Habitant_, who is singularly tenacious of any innovation on the established customs of his forefathers, even where they manifestly are somewhat burdensome to be observed; for the preparation of bread in three or four large loaves for a thousand people is not entirely an insignificant matter. In the city churches of Quebec, the rite by dispensation is not observed, but it is universal in all the rural parishes. "_La religion est changée_." the _Habitant_ would say with a sigh, should an effort be made to cut loose from any of the ancient landmarks and customs to whose practice he had been accustomed. The observance of this habit is therefore wisely retained, as teaching a wholesome lesson of charity to our fellow-man. All are recipients alike, young and old, the sinner as well as the saintly, for all have need of the tender indulgence of each other in deference to their common infirmities. Many lands of softer clime possess fairer scenes and a richer soil; but for the elevated affections of the heart in simplicity, none possess in a rarer degree those virtues calculated to render man noble and happy, and to elevate him in the social scale, than the people of these northern possessions that bound our American limits. Perhaps in the march of events, should their country ever be absorbed with our own republican institutions, the strongest bond of fellowship will be, the common religion they hold in such perfect unity with numbers of their American brethren. It is this principle that will render them adaptive to our political institutions as good citizens; and, perhaps, in simple faith, earnest devotion, and rigid standard of observances of the Catholic faith, the American Catholic could well borrow from his Canadian brethren a portion of that zeal for which they are so justly conspicuous.

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Our limits forbid all that might be said of the Catholic hierarchy in Canada; a body of men who, for learning, piety, and self-sacrifice, furnish so many glorious examples worthy of imitation. Zealous in the cause of education, as fervent in their piety, they have made the sterling worth of the Canadian Church a subject for praise and imitation in every land. The simplest Canadian follows the language of the Church in his daily prayers; and as the Angelus sounds within her borders thrice a day, or the passing-bell tells of a soul departed, or the joyful chime proclaims a Christian received within the Church, the Latin prayer universally ascends from a thousand hearts, and Heaven's benisons follow in benignant response. May the sun of prosperity ever lighten her borders!

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Translated From The French.

The Story Of Marcel, The Little Mettray Colonist.