letter I had not replied, and I was almost entirely ignorant of

affairs at home.

I landed in New York one bright September day, and the first feeling of strangeness vanished as I walked through the crowded streets, and recognized the familiar faces of former acquaintances. My whilom landlady received me with open arms; my old quarters had just been vacated, and I was speedily reinstalled. I had not been in town two days, when Armitage rushed in one evening, glad to see me, and brimful of news.

"Strange freak of yours that, Ed," he said. "I came around here one night by appointment; old lady met me with the information that you had sailed that day. I couldn't believe it. Went to Helen's, to see if she knew any thing about it; but she didn't. Then I felt sure the whole thing was a joke. You and she were such friends that I could not think you'd have gone off in that way, without saying good-by. That solitary letter of yours was worse than none at all; provoking in you to relapse into silence again, when a fellow thought he had got on your track. How soon do you intend to be off again?"

"Not for a while yet," I answered. "I think I shall remain at home now. By the way, how is Miss Foster?--or is she Miss Foster yet?--and her grandmother?"

"The old lady died the winter after you left New York; but Helen is living in the homestead yet. A married sister of mine is domiciled there too, at present--Laura; you've heard me speak of her. She was living in Baltimore when you were one of us. Helen is not married; not for the want of suitors though; she has refused between ten and fifty splendid offers, to my certain knowledge."

"Of course she makes you her confidant?" I said quizzingly.

"_Pas du tout_--a fine one I'd be; but I guess all these things. She _is_ an odd girl. Not too pious, although a devout Catholic, but hard to please. By the way, I am due at Helen's to-night; won't you come? You can't expect her to call on you."

I made some excuse; and Fred went off without me, promising, however, to report me "safe and sound." Although I knew that, sooner or later, I should meet her, I could not face the ordeal as yet; and preferred that, when it did take place, the meeting should be accidental.

The next week I attended a concert at the Academy of Music. Directly in front of me two seats remained unoccupied until the _prima donna_ had made her first bow to the audience, and was preluding her song with a few prefatory trills.

I turned my eyes from the stage to meet those of a lady who passed to one of the vacant chairs; and the next moment Fred Armitage was saying, "You here, Moray? I am glad we are near you. He has changed, Nellie, don't you think?" as his companion extended her hand in silence. Then, as I greeted her, a single "welcome home" fell from her lips, and that was all.

No change in her. The same pure, truthful eyes; the old-time sweetness in her voice and smile; the old-time charm about her still. As I looked at her, and heard her speak, I realized how vain had been the delusion that prompted me to seek peace and disenchantment within the sphere of her influence. Once, during a pause in the music, she asked my opinion of the singer. I must have appeared constrained and awkward; for I have a half recollection of muttering some indistinct answer. I left before the performance was over. I did not care to court misery--my present situation was deplorable enough--and I was anxious to get away from Fred's pertinacity, which I knew would assert itself if we went in company from the music-hall.

Afterward I steadily resisted all solicitations from Armitage to call at his sister's; although he often expressed a desire to introduce me. However, having met him one day in company with his brother-in-law, I promised the latter gentleman to call at his residence. Not to have done so would have made my conduct appear eccentric and ridiculous. About dusk the next evening Fred came in.

"Come to Auvergne's with me to-night," he said. "Walter has gone to Baltimore on business, and Helen with him. She intends spending the winter with some relatives there. Laura is alone, and may be we could cheer her up. I am sorry Walter and Nellie are absent; but you'll get acquainted with the best little woman in the world."

There was no help for it. The present, too, afforded the best opportunity. I went, and received a cordial welcome from Mrs. Auvergne, who was all that her brother had described her, and more.

"So this is Mr. Moray," she said, as Fred introduced me. "I have heard of you so frequently that I know you already. And Helen has sometimes mentioned you."

The evening passed pleasantly. As we were about leaving, our hostess warmly invited me to renew the visit. "Come soon, and as often as you like," she said; "we shall be always pleased to see you."

Inconsistently enough, I departed from my proposed line of conduct in so far as to accept her invitation. It was lonely sitting in my bachelor abode those long winter evenings; and, after five or six weeks' acquaintance, I had called so frequently at Mrs. Auvergne's as to feel more at home there than anywhere else in New York. I did not think much of the future, of the difficulties that must arise when another member of the family should resume her place in the circle; or, if I did, I was wise or foolish enough not to anticipate them.

Meeting Mr. Auvergne near home one evening, he brought me _nolens volens_ in to tea. We found his wife in the parlor, with her three charming little girls, who had become great friends of mine, and who knew me under the title of "Uncle Fred's brother."

"Something for you, Laura," said Paterfamilias, as he threw a letter into her lap.

"From Helen, is it not?"

"Yes; excuse me, Mr. Moray, while I glance over it. I always give Helen's letters two or three readings. She is growing quite dissipated. 'I have been to three parties this week,' she writes; 'much against my inclination, you will imagine. But Maud and Alice lead such gay lives that one is kept in a perpetual round of sight-seeing and enjoyment--as the world goes. I could never be content to live this way; and feel dubious as to whether I can find it compatible with real duties at home to remain the promised time. You reproached me before I went away with being low-spirited, Laura. Your panacea has not proved beneficial. I am, if not melancholy, not half so cheerful in my mind, as Fred would say, as when I left you. So don't be surprised to see me any morning about breakfast time. Tell the children, Cousin Helen is glad they have found a new friend; but"--here the reader paused; and, after a hurried perusal of the remainder, replaced the missive in its envelope.

"Foolish Helen!" she said, as though talking to herself; then, supper being announced, there was nothing more said on the subject.

On Christmas eve I called with some presents for the children. I had promised them to enlist Santa Claus in their favor, and waited until I thought they would be asleep to bring what toys and trinkets they had told me confidentially would be acceptable. Ushered into the parlor, I did not at first perceive in the dim light that some one was standing near the window. The noise of the door closing caused the occupant of the room to look round, and, as she did so, I recognized Miss Foster.

"Excuse me," I managed to articulate in my surprise; "I did not know you had returned, or that you were expected."

"I was not expected," she answered smilingly. "But I grew homesick as Christmas approached, and astonished them all this morning at daylight. Will you sit down, Mr. Moray?" And she drew a chair forward.

"Thank you," I replied, "not this evening. I have merely brought some trifles for the little ones. We are great friends. I have become quite at home with them during your absence."

"So Laura tells me," she answered; "and they have not been silent either. They are very lovable children."

"I have found them so," I rejoined. "I suppose they are all three dreaming of Santa Claus at this moment. But I must be going. Be kind enough to present my compliments to Mrs. Auvergne, who is probably busy this evening. And allow me to wish you a very merry Christmas."

As I ceased speaking, the parlor door opened and the mistress of the house entered, bonneted and shawled for a walk, and accompanied by Fred, who announced himself a complete wreck from a frolic in the nursery.

"Good evening, Mr. Moray," said the little lady cordially. "These for the children? Thank you; you are very kind; they will be so delighted. You see our wanderer has returned. Is she not looking well? Sit down, you must not go yet. Rather late for a lady to go shopping, is it not? But I want something down-town, and Fred has volunteered to accompany me. We shall not be absent long; you must stay till we return. You and Helen are old friends, I know, and can manage to pass an hour pleasantly together."

I fancied Helen looked at me imploringly, as though to say, "Do go away," and I ventured to remonstrate.

"I am inexorable," was the reply. "You are to remain till we come back. Fred, take his gloves; and Helen, ring for lights."

There was no withstanding such importunity. Reluctantly, but with as good grace as I could summon, I allowed myself to succumb to the force of circumstances. Seeing there was no help for it, my companion in distress took some fancy knitting from a table near her, and soon appeared lost in its intricacies. For fully five minutes after the door closed on Mrs. Auvergne and her brother we sat in embarrassing silence--silence that at length grew unendurable.

"You are sitting too far from the fire," I said, by way of endeavor to mend matters; "there must be some draught from that window too."

"I prefer being near the light," she answered, without looking up; "and I am not at all cold."

Another five minutes of silence. What should I say next? Could I sit there much longer? I did not think so. I felt as though I must make a desperate move and take my leave.

Suddenly, pealing out upon the silent night, I heard the sound of bells. She heard them too, I knew, for I saw her lift her head to listen.

"The Christmas chimes," I said; "how beautifully they sound. I have heard them in Rome and Naples; last year I was in England at this season; but home music has charms peculiar to itself, and dearer than all other--at least so it seems to me."

"You believe in Christmas, then, as an institution?" she answered smilingly, and with a touch of the old sarcasm in her voice.

"Surely," I replied gravely, "since I believe in Christ. Inasmuch as a Catholic believes and reverences all that his church teaches and believes."

I looked at her face to see what effect my words would have, but it evinced no emotion of surprise. She answered quietly and assuredly, as though our ways had never been separate,

"Yes, we who are Catholics enjoy the capacity of feeling and appreciating these things as none do beside. Especially converts such as you and I, who have known the experience of doubt and fear."

"I was not aware," I rejoined, "that you knew of my conversion."

"No?" she replied. "I have known it some time, having seen you several times at Mass and Benediction. I do not believe you would make the sign of the cross unless you held it to be the sign of salvation. And you do make it, I think."

"No doubt the discovery surprised you, Miss Foster," I continued.

"No, it did not," she answered. "I did not think the change would be accomplished so soon, but I hoped great things for you."

"Even when you accused me most bitterly?" Why tread on dangerous ground; but the words were spoken, and I could not recall them.

"Even when I accused you most bitterly," she said, in a low tone.

"You are far-sighted, I perceive. Perhaps you may also have some idea of the manner in which this change was brought about. Perhaps I may have felt, may still feel, an indebtedness to some one, to whom it has been a matter of doubt with me as to whether I should acknowledge the obligation, or suffer it to go unpaid."

"I may have an idea," she replied, "yet not just such a one as that to which you make allusion. Some one may have been instrumental in awakening thought on the subject. But I have not been able to advance the idea further."

For a moment I sat silent. "Shall I tell her what she has done for me?" I asked myself; "shall I open the old wound and let it bleed afresh? Will it be any sacrifice of my manliness if I tell her what a few moments ago I held it my duty and purpose to conceal?"

I drew my gaze from the fire and directed it toward her. The ivory needle flew in and out between her slender fingers; it seemed she had a task to do. My resolve was taken. But there was not the shadow of a hope in my soul when I spoke. Something impelled me--something, I knew not what; a desperate spirit, I thought it then; my good angel, I know now.

"There is a debt and an obligation," I began, "and an acknowledgment which I am proud to make, although the fact of its existence be almost death to me. A little more than two years ago, circumstances led to the revelation of that which but for those circumstances might have been unrevealed to-day. I offered you a love that had grown in my heart until it interpenetrated every fibre of my being. You rejected it; and that you did so, or why, I find no fault or blame. The folly was mine; I alone have borne the consequences. But while you disabused my mind of any wild hope it might have cherished in moments quite as wild, you told me some unpalatable truths. Until I met you I had lived a selfish, useless life. After I met you, the germs of something better in me stirred now and then, and impulses that I more than once fought down knocked at secret doors where the dust and cobwebs of the world had gathered. Then the _dénouement_ came, and after it the change in me."

Still knitting, the soft wool flew through her fingers faster and faster, as though she bade defiance to my moan. She did not look up as I paused, but her lips were compressed and her cheek brightly flushed.

"I went away loving you. Far away from your visible influence, the thought of you followed me through all my journeyings. I passed through new scenes and experiences loving you; I come back loving you still. I am here to-night with no intent of pleading a lost cause, with no hope of drifting from desolate seas into pleasant waters, with no dream of Lethean draughts to be taken from your hands. As in the former instance, circumstances have forced it all upon me. To-morrow I shall wonder at the folly which prompts me to say what I am saying. But to-night, before I close the book for ever, let me thank you for what you have done for me; let me leave you with the knowledge that, while I have been rash and presumptuous, I have not offended you or caused you pain."

She had risen from her chair while I was speaking. Standing for a moment irresolute, with lips half parted and eyes downcast, she made a passionate gesture with her clasped hands, as though impatient with herself.

"I do not forget," she said, "any part of what I told you that night, two years ago. I was harsh--unnecessarily so. But it all came on me so suddenly that I hardly knew what I did say. I remember there was something about misused talents and a wasted life, of what you might be and were not, of great possibilities slighted and contemned. But," here her voice faltered and the words came slowly, "I do not remember telling you then or at any other time that I did not, could not love you. Do you remember it?" Looking up, her gaze met mine half smilingly, half tearfully.

"No, I do not remember it," I said; "but you sent me away from you, and I have not forgotten that there was nothing of encouragement for the future in your dismissal of me. Can it be--dare I hope that--that--?"

Somehow two warm, soft hands were clasped in mine, and the Christmas bells pealed out a tuneful chime, now softly low, now musically clear. And then she told me what I had never even fancied in my dreams: of the love that had dwelt in her heart of hearts so long; of fears that had assailed her when she grew conscious of it; of a hope in the future and its unborn possibilities that had filled her soul when she seemed most indifferent and cold; of prayers that from their fervency had been heard and answered.

"I knew you would come back to me," she said; "I knew that God would do great things for you. And even if you had not come; if some one else had taken my place, or some ambition occupied your heart, it would have been the same in the end, or nearly so. I think I could be contented to love you silently all my life long, if I knew you to be in thought and purpose what I had so longed to have you; if I felt that my prayers for you were heard and answered."

O wonderful unselfishness of woman's love! O marvellous constancy of woman's faith! How often do ye burn and die away unheeded and unprized on hollow altars!

* * * * *

Three short bright years have passed, and it is Christmas eve. Outside I hear a group of merry boys, battling with the bitter wind and laughing at its fierceness. Frost glitters on the window-panes and chills the air to-night; and blazing fires roar up the chimneys, pouring forth a welcome as they go. Here, in this quiet room, there is an atmosphere of peace and calm content that almost fills me with a reverential fear lest the sweet spell should float away and leave me desolate.

I can watch her all unnoticed as she sits in the deep shadow of the firelight, the angel of my hearth and home. The face is perhaps a shade more thoughtful than of old; but the bright head, golden brown, has still the same graceful poise and movement; the truthful eyes are still as kind and tender as of yore.

And as she sits there musing, I lay down my busy pen, and my full heart throbs with gratitude and thankfulness, as I think how lonely life would be without her this happy Christmas Eve.

MISCELLANY.

THE COUNCIL.--It is said that the Cardinals de Reisach and Cullen, and the Archbishops Manning and Spalding, have been appointed on the commission for treating with those Protestants who may come to the council for that purpose. Bishops and priests speaking twenty-eight different languages had applied to the cardinal vicar for permission to say mass, and confessionals for confessors speaking eighteen languages are provided in St. Peter's. The great variety of complexions and costumes now to be seen in Rome excites much remark in the letters of correspondents. The Archbishop of Lima, who is ninety-four years of age, being unable to attend the council, has sent to the Pope a pastoral staff of gold valued at two thousand pounds. The students of Quito University have sent him all their gold and silver medals of honor, and the President of the Republic of Ecuador has sent a jewelled medal given him by the state as an official decoration. An Italian priest, D. Mariano Matteini, has himself designed and made a small bell for the Pope's use during the council, which is a perfect gem of artistic ornamentation. It bears the appropriate inscription,

Invocatâ Immaculatâ, Pius Nonus pastor bonus, per concilium fert auxilium. Mundus crebris tot tenebris, implicatus, obcoecatus, per hoc Numen et hoc lumen, extricatur, illustratur.

The early date of going to press forbids our giving any notice of the solemn opening of the council in the great Basilica of St. Peter, which will have taken place before this number is published. We hope to have constant and authentic communications respecting the council, directly from Rome, in our ensuing numbers.

* * * * *

ABJURATION OF THE PROTESTANT MINISTER OF CORDOVA.--Don Antonio Soler, an apostate priest, who has for the past nine years officiated as Protestant pastor at Cordova, in Spain, has publicly abjured his heresy in presence of the clergy, magistrates, and a large concourse of the people of the city.

* * * * *

EASTERN AFFAIRS.--The _Civilta Cattolica_ gives a very interesting account of a council of bishops of the Latin rite, in the East, held at Smyrna last Pentecost. Mgr. Spaccapietra, Latin Archbishop of Smyrna, presided as apostolic delegate; three other archbishops, five bishops, and a deputy from the Latin church at Constantinople were present. The sessions were conducted with great splendor, and attended by vast crowds, both of Catholics and schismatics. A council of the Catholic hierarchy of the Armenian rite was celebrated at the Armenian cathedral of St. Mary, in Constantinople, on the seventeenth of July. The patriarch presided, and eighteen bishops were in attendance. On this occasion a large relic of St. Gregory the Illuminator, presented by Pius IX., was brought to the church in procession, and there deposited. The splendid procession of the bishops, accompanied by a large body of the clergy, was escorted by a detachment of Turkish soldiers, and witnessed by a vast concourse of people. Solemn mass was then celebrated by the patriarch, and the council inaugurated. This was the most open and splendid display of the Christian religion which has ever been made in Constantinople since it came under Mohammedan rule. Since that time, the same church has witnessed a ceremony of equal if not greater splendor and significance, on the occasion of the visit of the Empress Eugénie. At the close of the high mass, at which the empress assisted in state, she gave an illustrious example of that piety and Christian humility so frequent among royal personages in former times, but now so rare among the great. Rising from her throne to exchange the customary marks of respect and honor with the bishops who passed before her, when the patriarch bowed to her, and was about to move on, she requested him to pause a moment; bending over, she kissed his ring, and, descending from the dais of the throne, prostrated herself before him to receive his blessing. This was done in presence of her brilliant suite of French and Turkish officers, and of the _élite_ of the Christians of Constantinople. We trust the example of the most illustrious lady of Christendom will not be lost on Christian women in a high social position throughout the world.

It appears from the Greek papers that Nilus, the so-called Patriarch of Alexandria, whose impertinent reply to the Pope's missive of summons to the council gave so much joy to our Episcopalian neighbors, was an intruder. This monk was for a time supported in his position as designated successor to the actual patriarch, and administrator, by the viceroy. Giving out that the patriarch was ill, and had intrusted him with delegated powers, he kept him as a prisoner in his palace. He was denounced by the Patriarch of Constantinople, and at length abandoned by the viceroy, and, as says the _Byzantine Telegraph_, "this vainglorious monk, not being able any longer to resist the popular outcry and contempt, abandoned by the government and by his few friends, succeeded in escaping the anger of the people by leaving Egypt."

A letter from the Patriarch of Constantinople to the Archbishop of Canterbury has been published, which is a masterpiece of Greek irony. With a profusion of compliments, he acknowledges the receipt of a copy of the acts of the Pan-Anglican Synod, and of the Anglican Prayer-Book, and then proceeds to condemn the latter as heretical and insulting to the Eastern Church in a manner which cannot be very palatable to those who have sought to win from him a nod of recognition.

* * * * *

HINDOSTAN.--Every one who has read the accounts published in the papers of the new Hindoo sect, under the direction of Baboo Chunder Sen, called the _Brahmo Somaj_, must have seen the great interest and importance of this movement. _The Dublin Review_ furnishes us with a great deal of valuable information about this matter, and the relation generally of Hindooism to Christianity in India, accompanied by most curious extracts from publications of the party of Chunder Sen, written in very nervous but peculiar English. It is surprising to see with what force and keenness these educated Hindoos pierce and destroy the inconsistent fabric of Protestantism, which they call a system of "paper revelation and second-hand religion," whose untenable position is shown by the fact that it gives twenty different interpretations of the same t book. We are most happy to learn that Bishop Meurer, S.J., the Vicar Apostolic of Bombay, is about to recommence the missionary enterprise of De Nobili, so shamefully and stupidly thwarted by the enemies of the Jesuits. He intends to found a missionary college, whose pupils will be thoroughly instructed in Brahminical and Buddhist literature, and when they are sent out on missions, will enrol themselves in one of the high castes, adopting their dress and customs. In this way the Catholic religion will be brought in contact with the educated Hindoos, who at present know it only through the misrepresentations of Protestant missionaries.

* * * * *

M. LECOINTRE ON THE PASSAGE OF THE RED SEA.--M. Lecointre, a graduate of the Polytechnic School and chief engineer of the iron works connected with the Suez Canal, has investigated, with the assistance of M. de Lesseps, the question of the place where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, and publishes his conclusions in the _Etudes Religieuses_ of Paris, accompanied by a map. He gives, in the first place, a _résumé_ of the events of the march out of Egypt. Pharaoh feared an immense conspiracy under the leadership of Moses, and, as Josephus relates, formed an army of 250,000 men, which was assembled at Memphis. The events related in Exodus forced him to give the denied permission to the Israelites to go into the wilderness to sacrifice. He well knew the real intention of Moses, which was no secret, either, to the people themselves, to quit Egypt for ever. The orders for preparing to celebrate the passover on the 14th of Nisan had been given by Moses through the chiefs of tribes some days before. These orders had the effect of arranging the people in little groups under a head, as the best organization for a sudden march; for which they were well prepared by a substantial meal and the enlivening effect of a festivity. The signal of departure was probably given by signal-fires previously arranged. The march to Palestine was not expected to occupy more than twenty or twenty-five days, by a route well known and provided with water, and the flocks and herds which they took with them assured them a plentiful subsistence. The main body left from Rameses, a city where a great proportion of them dwelt, the others starting from the other places of their residence and moving toward a common rendezvous. Their first halting-place was Succoth, where they waited for those who were behind to come up; the second at Etham, on the border of the desert, from whence they expected to go directly into the desert above the Red Sea, and to take a direct route for Palestine. But Moses changed his route, brought them back along the coast of the Red Sea, and encamped in the plain of Pi-hahiroth, between Magdal and the sea, where they were surprised by Pharaoh's army in a situation which rendered flight in any direction impossible. The miraculous events which followed are well known. The point of passage is placed on the twentieth parallel of latitude, which nearly bisects the larger one of the Bitter Lakes, now separated from, but formerly forming a part of the Red Sea. The events related by Moses would then probably have occurred as follows. On the night of the 15th, the nucleus of the host made a short stage from Rameses to Succoth, waiting from the morning of the 15th to the morning of the 16th for the entire host to arrive. Distance travelled, five kilometres. Distance from Succoth to the most remote points of Gessen, where the Israelites lived, forty to fifty kilometres, easily travelled in twenty-four hours. Moses and Aaron could have made the journey from Memphis on the 15th on horseback, a distance of one hundred and twelve kilometres, in ten or twelve hours. On the 16th, from Succoth to Etham, twenty-two kilometres. On the 17th, from. Etham to Pi-hahiroth, twenty to twenty-two kilometres. From the evening of the 17th to the evening of the 20th, encampment at Pi-hahiroth. The change of route at Etham is supposed to have alarmed the Egyptian commander at that post, who sends a courier on the morning of the 17th to Memphis, one hundred and twenty-four kilometres, a distance which could be passed in twelve or fifteen hours by a swift horse or dromedary. On the 18th, the army marches from Memphis in a straight line for Beelsephon, a distance of one hundred and twelve kilometres. On the morning of the 20th, the advance-guard of cavalry, after a march of forty-eight hours, arrives on the heights of Beelsephon, cutting off the retreat of the Israelites. A heavy fog separates the two armies. The Egyptian infantry comes up on the 21st. During the night of the 20th, the Israelites pass the Red Sea, whose width was from ten to twelve kilometres; they are followed by the cavalry and chariots on the morning of the 21st, who traverse five or six kilometres, when they are overwhelmed by the returning waters, the main body witnessing the catastrophe from the heights behind. The march from Memphis requires for the cavalry two stages of fifty-six kilometres and for the infantry three of thirty-eight, which the author says is within the power of fresh, well-equipped troops.

* * * * *

REFORM MOVEMENT AMONG THE JEWS.--The recent convention of Jews at Philadelphia appears to have been the work of a party bent on radical and destructive reforms. The orthodox and conservative Jews condemn it wholly. We should be very sorry to see the synagogue converted into a poor imitation of the most radical Protestant sects, and this ancient, wonderfully preserved nation blended with the mass of other peoples. The ancient and venerable observances of Judaism, and the continued distinct existence of the people descended from the patriarchs, are a palpable, living witness to the divine origin of revelation, and the inspired truth of the writings of Moses and the prophets, the basis of Christianity. The reforming Jews are the successors of those who imitated the heathen in the reign of Antiochus and of the infidel Sadducees. Their approximation to Protestantism is not an approximation to Christianity but to infidelity, and, if carried out successfully, would destroy their nation. This cannot be done, however. We believe firmly that the nation is indestructible, is destined to be restored to the possession of Palestine, and to fulfil literally the predictions of the ancient prophets in such a manner as to furnish the most splendid proof of the truth of the divine religion handed down through Sem, Abraham, Moses, the Prophets, to the Messiah to whom shall be the expectation of nations. _Alieni non transibunt per Jerusalem amplius; nam in illa die stillabunt montes dulcedinem, et colles fluent lac et mel, dicit Dominus._ It is the infidel party among the Jews of Europe that is leagued with infidels of Christian origin in the war on the Catholic Church. Those who adhere strictly to their law have many principles in common with Catholics. Their law of marriage with those of their own nation exclusively harmonizes with that of the Catholic Church, which forbids intermarriage with them. Their genuine and ancient ritual bears witness to the antiquity of the liturgical and ceremonial idea embodied in Catholic worship. Their principle that the education of the youth should be religious is identical with ours, and we hope they will insist on the right of having separate schools and their just quota of the funds raised by taxation for purposes of education. So long as they remain in exile from their proper home, and separated from us in religion, we cannot desire any thing else than to see them adhere to their ancient customs. They do not seek to proselyte; their prosperity is therefore in no way dangerous to the Catholic Church. The more splendid their synagogues and the observance of their traditional rites, the more brilliant is the testimony they give to those facts and events in sacred history denied by infidel Jews and infidel Christians alike.

* * * * *

THE EDUCATION QUESTION.--_The New-Englander_, as the organ of the venerable Yale University, has recently contained some admirable articles on the methods of promoting the higher education. It makes war upon bogus universities, colleges, and systems with calm but resolute force. Among the sound and sensible suggestions it makes, these are some of the chief ones: (1) The preparatory schools should be improved by a more thorough and extensive course of study in the classics, and in some of the modern languages. (2) The collegiate course should be correspondingly improved, and modified, by imitating in part the tutor system of the English universities; but, by no means, changed into the loose system of misnamed universities. (3) The university should be gradually formed as a sequence of the improved collegiate system, and should consist of the college proper, together with post-graduate courses of higher studies in all the branches of science. The necessity of religious instruction is unanswerably proved, and the especial fitness of clergymen for the work of education well defended and advocated. The necessity of having every college under the religious care of some one denomination is also satisfactorily shown. We wonder that the remarkably frank and candid writer in _The New-Englander_ does not see, however, that he has proved this necessity as a _pis aller_, and indirectly furnished a terrible argument against his own sect and all Protestantism. He directly acknowledges that it is necessary to have _sectarian_ teachers; that, nevertheless, sectarianism is too narrow a thing for a liberal university, and that the teachers must suppress their sectarianism and teach in a sort of catholic spirit. This is as clear a proof as we could wish to have that Protestantism is incompetent to the function of a religious teacher, and, therefore, that a perfect university cannot exist except in the Catholic Church. We hope, at all events, that the influence of New Haven will be thrown fully and consistently against godless schools of all sorts, and in favor of the right of parents to have schools where their children can be taught the religion which they themselves profess.

* * * * *

THE CHRISTIAN WORLD ON THE REV. H. SEYMOUR.--This organ of the anti-Catholic crusade deserts Mr. Seymour and Mr. Bacon, in their attack on Catholic morality. The November number furnishes us with the following editorial remark, the last clause of which we would especially recommend to the attention of all our opponents, the editors of _The Christian World_ included: "The interest awakened by the present discussion of this subject leads us to print the foregoing. There is much of force in Mr. Seymour's statements and reasonings respecting the matter of homicide, even though a double or treble percentage is allowed for Protestant England. But we are constrained to say, in the interest of fair dealing, that the remaining statistics of Mr. S. respecting illegitimacy seem to us to lack the precision and discrimination essential to a conclusive argument in that direction. Moreover, the force of these statistics is, to say the least, greatly counteracted by the admitted facts respecting foeticide charged against certain Protestant communities. In conducting the issue with Romanism it is wiser to avoid every _questionable_ position."

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DR. BELLOWS THREATENING CIVIL WAR.--_The Liberal Christian_ is proving itself the most illiberal of all our religious journals of late. It recently violated literary courtesy by charging upon the editor of this magazine a deliberate falsehood, without any other reason than an unauthorized and incorrect conjecture that he was the author of an article published in our columns entitled, "Free Religion." In its issue for November 20th, it publishes a most arrogant and inflammatory article, by Dr. Bellows, on "Romanism and Common Schools," which is quite in the spirit of several other utterances of that gentleman, who appears to have contracted a taste for civil war that was not satiated by our late one. Whoever seeks to disturb the civic peace existing between Catholics and Protestants in this country, to rouse their angry passions, to array them against each other as hostile political factions, is the greatest enemy of his country, and deserves to be classed with the men who endeavored to fire our hotels, and those who stirred up the mobs of Charleston, Philadelphia, and New-York. Happily, Dr. Bellows's fits of ill-humor are so well understood that they make but slight impression on any one.

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CARICATURING AS A FINE ART.--One of our popular magazines (_Harper's_) has recently sought to distinguish itself in this line, and has succeeded both in its articles on Catholic questions, and in its burlesque illustrations, in producing something strictly _sui generis_ and far exceeding, in the strict exclusion of every other element except caricature, the feebler efforts of artists less skilled in the work of distortion. We may say without exaggeration that it has attained the _ne plus ultra_ of caricaturing as a fine art.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE OECUMENICAL COUNCIL AND THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE ROMAN PONTIFF: A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy, etc. By Henry Edward, Archbishop of Westminster. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 151.

We have received within the past two months five or six dissertations on the question of the infallibility of the _ex cathedrâ_ judgments of the sovereign pontiffs and other closely connected topics, written by some of the best theologians in Europe. They handle the subject with great learning and ability, and in a manner much more satisfactory and to the point than is usually found in treatises on the same topic in our theological text-books or popular expositions of doctrine. The reason is, that the controversy has been revived and assumed a new importance since the indiction of the council, and that the advocates of what is commonly called ultramontane doctrine have applied themselves intently to seize hold of and minutely analyze and refute the objections of the opposite party, who have themselves endeavored to bring up anew all these objections with as much force as possible. Archbishop Manning has given us one of these learned dissertations in the form of a pastoral letter, which makes a considerable pamphlet, divided into four chapters. The first chapter is on the effect of the council already felt in England and France. The second is on the opportuneness of defining the infallibility of the Roman pontiff, in which he discusses (1) The reasons against the definition; (2) answers to these reasons; (3) reasons for the definition. In the third chapter he makes a concise but very copious exposition of the tradition on the subject, tracing it backward from the Council of Constance to that of Chalcedon, and afterward giving a history of the Gallican controversy since the time of the Council of Constance. The fourth chapter is on the effect which the council is certain to produce on the evidence and proposition of the faith, and on the relations of civil governments to the church. A postscript is added on the recent defence of Gallican doctrine by Mgr. Maret. The most noteworthy and distinctive feature of this very learned and lucidly written document is, the manner in which the reasons why the council should issue a clear and precise definition of the true doctrine held by the church are presented. The illustrious archbishop argues with great force that an omission to make such a definition will be interpreted as a tacit permission to hold and teach the Gallican opinions as sound and safe probable opinions. There can be no doubt that his views and those of prelates in equally eminent positions who have publicly expressed themselves in equivalent terms will receive that grave consideration from the bishops of the Catholic Church in council which they merit. Undoubtedly, also, those who may hold different opinions will have the most ample liberty of arguing their side of the question. The decision of the council must be accepted by all as final and infallible; and if such a decision is rendered, the controversy will be set at rest for ever; a consummation, in our opinion, devoutly to be wished.

We will venture to add a few words of our own to the point of the argument presented by the Archbishop of Westminster. The ultramontane doctrine has been almost universally held and taught in the Catholic Church in the United States. Nevertheless, the manner of handling the Protestant controversy in many English books, some of which are translations from French authors, has been such as to create an impression that the doctrine of the infallibility of the pope in definitions of faith is merely a pious opinion. This is supported by the fact that the opposite opinion has not been formally condemned, and that those who held it have been recognized as in full communion with the Roman Church, and even raised to eminent positions in the hierarchy. This same impression has been created in other countries as well as in our own, and exists to a very great extent in the mind of the Catholic laity as well as to some extent in that of the clergy. The real facts in the case are not fully known. It is not generally known that those who have carried the Gallican opinions so far, and reduced them to practice in so consistent a manner, as to refuse implicit obedience and unreserved interior submission to the pontifical decretals, or who have appealed from papal decisions to an oecumenical council, have been condemned under censure of excommunication, that the whole church has given their assent to this judgment, and that it is a point of the canon law. The truth is, that the holy see has always regarded the Gallican opinions as erroneous, although it has judged it wisest to tolerate them thus far, and to proceed by the way of instruction and inculcation in teaching the opposite doctrine, waiting until the complete discussion of the subject by theologians and the pastoral teaching of the bishops should have brought such a flood of light on the subject that the truth should gain over the intelligence of enlightened Catholics, before pronouncing a formal and definitive judgment. There is a great danger, however, that this cautious and indulgent treatment of those who have held Gallican opinions in good faith and with a practical submission to the supreme authority of the holy see, may give an advantage to bold and indocile spirits to make the toleration of these opinions a _point d'appui_ for a resistance to the teaching of the sovereign pontiffs _ex cathedrâ_, having in it a schismatical and heretical tendency. The defenders and advocates of sound doctrines are placed at a disadvantage by the lack of a definitive judgment declaring the sense of the church in such a manner as to preclude all dispute or ambiguity of interpretation. There can be no question that the holy see, and the great body of bishops, including those of France with few exceptions, hold the doctrine of the papal infallibility to be a certainly revealed truth contained in Scripture and tradition, and consequently regard the contrary opinion as an error which has only been for a time tolerated. The whole action of the church is regulated by this view, and will always be so regulated. There appears, therefore, to be a very strong reason why the present council should put the whole question at rest for ever by a final decision and a definition _de fide_. We can answer for the clergy and laity of the United States that they will welcome such a decision with the greatest joy. As for the objection that it will place an obstacle in the way of conversions, it is groundless. Those who are solidly converted from Protestantism in this country are converted to Catholicity pure and simple, and not to Catholicity with a Gallican reservation.

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THE WOMAN WHO DARED. By Epes Sargent. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1870. 18mo, pp. 210.

We have every disposition in the world to treat Mr. Epes Sargent with respect, and to speak well of this his latest poem; for he has a name in the literary world, and his poem is not without some artistic merit; but, unhappily, we can do neither with a good conscience. We cannot tolerate false doctrines, mischievous sophistry, and bad morals, because expressed in chaste language and attractive verse. Mr. Sargent has poetic feeling and talent; but we do not accept the doctrine that art is necessarily moral or religious. It may be used to embellish error as well as truth, vice as well as virtue, to corrupt as well as to purify and ennoble. In the poem before us the poet has used all his art, genius, and talent to seduce his readers to swallow as a wholesome Christian beverage a most poisonous compound of spiritism, free-lovism, woman's-rightsism, rationalism, and all sorts of radicalism.

No doubt we shall be told that the poet is sincere, and that he really believes that he is chanting a great truth, and laboring in downright earnest to develop and confirm a purer and higher civilization than the world has ever yet known. It is not unlikely that Eve thought as much when, seduced by the subtle reasonings and false promises of the serpent, she reached forth her hand, plucked and ate the forbidden fruit, and gave of the same to her husband; but this did not excuse her for violating the command of God, or save her from expulsion from paradise. Men who have no infallible criterion of truth and falsehood, no infallible standard of right and wrong, have no authority from God to teach, and no right to open their mouths on any subject that seriously affects the interests or the conduct of life. No one, on the strength of his own personal conviction alone, has the right to arraign and condemn what the common sense and experience of mankind in all ages and nations have sanctioned. It is no justification, no valid excuse even, for a man who promulgates and does his best to get accepted false and mischievous doctrines--doctrines which weaken the hold of religion on the conscience, pervert the moral sense, render the family impossible, and sap the very foundation of society--to say, "I am sincere; I really believe I am laboring for a true and much needed reform." Do you _know_ it? Do you not know that you do _not_ know it? Do you not know that all the presumptions are against you? Uncertain as you are and must be if you ever think, why attempt to teach at all? Who compels you? Men are accountable for the thoughts and intents of the heart no less than for outward acts, and God will bring every man into judgment for every thought and word as well as for every deed. Every man is bound to conform his thoughts, words, and deeds to the law of God, and to use with all diligence his faculties to ascertain that law and what it enjoins. Invincible ignorance excuses from sin, it is true, one in that whereof one is invincibly ignorant; but an ignorance that may be overcome by due diligence and the proper use of the means within one's reach, is not invincible, but vincible, and therefore no excuse. The man or the woman that can seriously entertain the doctrine and morals of Mr. Sargent's poem cannot plead invincible ignorance; but must be under a delusion never possible in the case of the pure in heart, or to any but those who take pleasure in iniquity.

We have no intention of reopening the discussion of the woman question, or that of spiritists and spiritism; the questions of divorce and free religion have also been amply discussed, at least for the present, in this magazine. We can touch here only on two questions raised by the author--that of free-love and that of the right and propriety of female wooing. The aim of the author has been to defend the woman who dared woo openly and in plain words the man she wished to be her husband and the father of her child. He contends, in the smoothest and most seductive blank-verse he is master of, that this is proper, and woman's right; and that it is only the tyranny of a barbarous custom, created by male predominance, that requires the woman to wait till she is sought. Linda Percival, the bastard daughter of a bigamist, is for him the model woman. She dares break through this custom and proposes to a very respectable young gentleman; but gets at first the mitten, and succeeds finally only by buying him up for a hundred thousand dollars in hard cash, paid down to his swindled and bankrupt father. Yet Linda is a combination of incompatible qualities, an impossible woman, a monster in nature, and her conduct is no precedent for the sex. She is a man-woman, and the last in the world that a real man could love or marry. The woman who does not instinctively shrink from soliciting a man to marry her could appreciate no argument that would prove its impropriety or the gross immorality that would result from the practice, were it once held reputable. Mr. Sargent knows well enough, without our telling him, that nature has made woman strong for defence, but weak when acting on the offensive. When she solicits a man to be her husband and "the father of her child," she steps out from her strong fortress of modesty and reserve, throws off her defensive armor, and places herself at his mercy. Resistance afterward avails nothing. She has surrendered at discretion. No training on either side can protect her virtue, secure her respect, or belief in the purity of her intentions; for no education or training can reverse nature. The practice, if adopted and become general, would degrade woman to the lowest level, put an end to marriage, extinguish the family, and with it society and the race.

Mr. Sargent, whether he intends it or not, advocates free-love as he does free religion. Love, he says, must be free, and bound by no chain but its own silken cords. The least constraint kills it. The marriage is all in the mutual love; and when that leaves, the marriage is dissolved. To compel a couple who do not mutually love to come together, or, after the love is dead, to live together, as husband and wife--we beg pardon, as wife and husband--is downright tyranny, outrageous cruelty. This is the cant of nearly all female and much of male popular literature, which relies for its tragic interest on the obstacles thrown in the way of true love by an imperious mother, a despotic father, a hard-hearted old uncle, barbarous custom, or cruel and tyrannous marriage laws. This literature, the only literature except newspapers this restless, busy age reads, has already corrupted modern society, made away with parental authority, obliterated the love and reverence of children for their parents, and rendered a happy household well-nigh impossible.

This popular doctrine mistakes the love marriage demands as well as the nature and end of marriage itself. The love it extols is at best only a romantic sentiment, which in its own nature, like all sentiments, is capricious and evanescent. It can give no security to marriage, for it can neither control the senses nor be controlled by reason. Suppose it as pure and as lofty as that of the fabled knight of chivalry for his "ladie fair," to whom he devotes his sword and worships as a distant star pure and serene in the heavens above him, it cannot survive possession, and never does and never can exist between husband and wife. The reason why love matches are so seldom happy is, that they are formed with the expectation that the chivalric and romantic love of the lovers will survive in the spouses. But this is never the case, and never should be; for it is incompatible with the duties of life. The love that makes marriage blessed and is its true basis must indeed be free from coercion; but, while unconstrained by power or external force, it must be constrained by duty and subject to laws. It must be a love that it depends on one's own will to give or to withhold.

Marriage requires the free assent of the parties; and when that free assent is refused by either party, there is no marriage, and we are aware of no law of church or state that treats it as a marriage, at least of any professedly Christian state. That the assent, when once given by the parties competent and free to give or withhold it, should be held to be irrevocable, is no hardship. The parties understand and intend--nay, desire--the contract in forming it to be during their natural life, or so long as both continue to live. The nature of the contract, the purposes for which it is entered into, require that it should be indissoluble, save by death only; and this, too, even without taking into the account its sacramental character. In extreme cases the law does not oblige the parties to live together, and grants a divorce _a mensa et toro_; but the Christian law allows never a divorce _a vinculo_; for the end of marriage is not primarily nor chiefly the happiness of the husband and wife, but the preservation of purity, the founding of the family, and the rearing and training of children, on which depend the continuance of the race and the existence of society. Even if the sentimental love be wanting, with good-will on each side and a diligent study of each to perform the duties of their state, which it depends on each to have and to do, and which neither is free to neglect, the little repugnances and incompatibilities of temper may be easily got over, a solid friendship spring up, and much genuine happiness after all be enjoyed. There may not be much romance; but romance and romantic love end always with marriage, and never survive, and ought not to be expected to survive, the "honeymoon." But happily, what is better for this work-day world, duty may take its place.

Mr. Sargent is mistaken in saying in his notes that the church does not regard marriage between Protestants as indissoluble. The case he cites is not in point; for the marriage he supposes was dissolved was no valid marriage in Brazil, in consequence of the _disparitas cultus_, which, where the discipline of the Council of Trent is in force, is an _impedimentum dirimens_. So also is he mistaken in his assertion that "up to the time of Charlemagne ... concubinage and polygamy were common among Christians, and countenanced by the church." The church has never countenanced either; and if either has ever been practised by Christians, it has been only in violation of her express laws. In point of fact, at no time has either been common; but some of the Merovingian kings wished to continue, after professing to be Christians, the old practice by the pagan German princes and higher nobles of polygamy, and the church, no doubt, had great difficulty in forcing them to conform to the Christian law. But it, as concubinage, was in the eyes of the church always illicit and sinful. On this subject the law or discipline of the church has never changed. The poet is not well qualified to speak of Catholic or Christian subjects.

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THE PASTOR AND HIS PEOPLE; OR, THE WORD OF GOD AND THE FLOCK OF CHRIST. By Rev. Thomas J. Potter. Dublin: James Duffy. New-York: Catholic Publication Society. 1869. Pp. 337.

Father Potter has written this volume to give pastors some practical hints in regard to the instruction of their people. The book is really the second volume of a work published some years since, under the title of _Sacred Eloquence; or, The Theory and Practice of Preaching_. That work set forth the great theoretical principles of pulpit oratory; this volume reduces those principles to practice.

The contents of the volume are arranged under three general heads: Holiday Preaching, Familiar Instruction, and Delivery. In the first of these divisions we find minute instruction concerning the material that should be used in what is known as the "set sermon." Not merely for sermons that are preached on holidays though, but for every occasion on which a formal discourse is suitable. A chapter in this portion of the work is well devoted to a defence of these elaborate sermons. Not that such preaching will be the most useful or the most expedient, as a general rule; but simply this, that there are occasions on which the faithful have a right to expect a carefully prepared sermon. These are called set sermons, because they are composed in conformity with the fixed rules of oratory. They suppose a chaste and elevated style; and, more than this, they suppose even that the subject should be treated grandly. At such a time the preacher, by the dignity of his manner, forces us to recognize him as truly the "ambassador of Christ." We feel that the divine word is treated, as it deserves to be, with the same respect as the body of Christ. But it is true that sermons such as these can only be preached on rare occasions, because they are expected to accomplish extraordinary results. Their frequent repetition would destroy the very effect that they are intended to produce. The people, habituated to these stirring appeals, would cease to be moved by them, until at length it would be impossible to rouse them even by the most fervent and skilfully planned discourse.

Father Potter does not give too prominent a place to this elevated and polished form of preaching. By far the largest portion of his work is taken up with the most valuable hints regarding the familiar instruction of our people. He tells us that it has been "his unvarying purpose to throw out substantial ideas, to suggest leading thoughts, and to indicate lines of study." Nowhere is this object accomplished more completely than in the section of the work which explains the nature and excellence of "Familiar Instruction." No part of the book has pleased us more than this. Simple, clear, suggestive, and practical in its suggestions, the zealous pastor will scarcely rise from reading the chapters on the Homily, on the Commandments, on the Sacrament, and on Prayer, without feeling a renewed desire to teach these elementary though essential truths which the Catholic people of a missionary country do not know, or at least only know in an extremely vague and indefinite way.

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THE ILLUSTRATED CATHOLIC FAMILY ALMANAC FOR THE UNITED STATES FOR THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1870. New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 126 Nassau St. 1869.

An almanac for the family has long been an imperious American necessity. Judging from the success of the Catholic Publication Society's Almanac for the year now drawing to an end, a Catholic almanac was much needed and greatly desired by our Catholic population throughout the United States, and that it should have met with a large sale was not surprising when we remember that, in addition to all the useful information furnished by all well-prepared almanacs, _The Catholic Family Almanac_ provided agreeable, edifying, and instructive literary matter profusely and admirably illustrated with superior engravings.

In size, amount of matter, illustrations, and literary merit, the Catholic Almanac for 1870, just published, is a decided improvement upon its predecessor, and must receive universal approbation.

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THE LIFE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. From authentic Spanish and Italian Documents. Compiled from the French of Rosselly de Lorgnes. By I. I. Barry, M.D. Boston: P. Donahoe. 1869.

The translator or compiler of this work states in his preface that he has had to condense the matter of some pages into almost as many lines. We feel compelled to add that neither history nor literature would have suffered if he had gone on condensing indefinitely, even if, in the process, the book had been compressed to the vanishing point. Rosselly de Lorgnes, a veteran writer, the author of _Le Christ devant le Siècle_, and other works well known in Europe, is entitled to all respect and honor for his sincere and enthusiastic vindication of the memory of Columbus, and of his claims to veneration as a man of saintly character, over and above all his other well-known merits; but his work, in two volumes of nearly six hundred pages each, independently of other objections to it, sadly wants brevity and method.

The truth is that, notwithstanding the praiseworthy efforts of M. De Lorgnes, and of various authors who have preceded and followed him in this field, the life of Columbus is yet to be written. More than that, it can only be well written in Spain and with Spanish materials. When that country has a historian who is not afraid of telling the truth about the king of Spain who was the husband of the noble Isabella of Castile, and will use without fear or favor the writings of Columbus himself--for, after all, such a great soul is his own best interpreter--we shall have a life of Columbus, and not until then.

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THE IMPROVISATORE. THE TWO BARONESSES. Romances by Hans Christian Andersen. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

These two volumes, from the fascinating pen of the great Danish novelist, we recognize as old friends in new garments, and hasten to bid them welcome.

Andersen, who charms the little ones with the beauty and naturalness of his fairy tales, is equally a favorite with children of a larger growth.

His powers of description are surpassed by few writers in any language, and the places he has visited, Rome, Naples, Vesuvius, Venice, Copenhagen, with the islands nestling about Denmark, stand before the reader in living colors, glowing with light and truth. One feels that these graphic representations are not drawn from a highly-wrought imagination, but that they are living realities. The narratives of the ascent of Vesuvius, the _Infiorata_, the first impressions of Venice, are wonderful samples of this power of delineation.

High-toned morals and an utter freedom from maudlin sentimentality mark both these volumes; the tales are told with vigor, and the interest sustained to the end.

The _Improvisatore_, who is born and passes most of his years in Italy, tells his own story, and claims, as do most of the characters introduced, to belong to the Catholic Church; but we think a true Catholic would detect the fact that the kind-hearted, genial man who wrote the tale had not the happiness of being in the faith: though there is nothing harsh or unkind, or perhaps no intentional injustice, toward the church, yet there is here and there the slight touch of sarcasm concerning what the writer supposes to be a dogma of the faith, or a hit at some local Catholic custom, which would not have come from the pen of a loyal son of our holy Mother.

The scene of _The Two Baronesses_ is laid in Denmark, and though not so captivating as the _Improvisatore_, the tale is well told, and hangs on the lovely motto "that there is an invisible thread in every person's life which shows that it belongs to God."

The binding of these volumes is in excellent taste, and the print clear, doing credit to the Riverside press.

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THE STORIES AND PARABLES OF PERE BONAVENTURE. New York: P. O'Shea. 1869.

These stories and parables commend themselves to the reader by their quaintness and brevity. The excellent moral which forms the essential part of many of them could hardly be presented in a more pleasing manner. The explanations given by the author are, in general, satisfactory. This book should be in in every Catholic household in the country.

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THROUGH NIGHT TO LIGHT: A Novel. By Friedrich Spielhagen. New York: Leypoldt & Holt.

Were one of our first American novelists to put forth such a story as the above, it would be hissed by the voice of public opinion; but it seems we may receive from the German, and call poetic, ideal, and _spirituelle_, what would be considered coarse and immoral even in a penny journal.

We will give a specimen of the author's philosophy. Speaking of a married woman who had been in more cases than one unfaithful to her marriage relations, the author says,

"Have you not paid the penalty of the wrong, if wrong it was to follow the impulse of a free heart? Is it reasonable to sacrifice the wife to a rigorous moral law which the husband does not consider binding? Who has made that unwise law? Not I, not you." (He might have added _only_ Almighty God.) "Why, then, should you obey it? I tell you the day of freedom which is now dawning will blow all such self-imposed laws to the winds, and with them all the ordinances devised by a dark, monkish disposition to fetter nature and torment hearts."

To the corrupting influence of this style of literature we owe such scenes as the one which recently in this city shocked the public mind. The title of this book is a misnomer. It should be, not _Through Night to Light_, but _Through Light to Night_.

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THE TWO COTTAGES. Showing how many more families may be comfortable and happy than are so. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1870.

Of this simple story of humble life we cannot speak too highly. It is as valuable for its suggestions as it is truthful in its delineations.

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MARY AND MI-KA: A TALE OF THE HOLY CHILDHOOD. With an account of the Institution. Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1870.

This little volume, dedicated to the members of the Holy Childhood in the United States, will, no doubt, give increased publicity to that most admirable institution, and hence increase materially its sphere of usefulness. Full details of its aim, origin, and progress are given in the appendix, to which we would particularly direct attention.

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THE LOST ROSARY; OR, OUR IRISH GIRLS: THEIR TRIALS, TEMPTATIONS, AND TRIUMPHS. By Con O'Leary. Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1870.

The title of this volume is somewhat suggestive of its contents. In it the author graphically describes the various dangers and temptations to which the recently-arrived female emigrant is exposed, and also pays a well-merited tribute to the many virtues that distinguish the vast majority of Irish girls in America; virtues to which, in the face of many troubles and vexations, they have so heroically adhered.

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THE LIFE OF BLESSED MARGARET MARY, (Alacoque.) With some Account of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart. By the Rev. George Tickell, S.J. London: Burns & Co. (For sale by the Catholic Publication Society.)

This life of a remarkable person, the chief instrument of establishing that devotion to the Sacred Heart so dear to all devout Catholics, which was one of the most efficacious weapons against the odious heresy of Jansenism, is much superior to any heretofore published. We are glad to see certain extravagant statements concerning the treatment of the saint in the convents of her order, which were discreditable to them and likely to give scandal, entirely discredited by the author of the present life. He is not only a copious and devout biographer; but what is equally important and less frequent, a judicious one. The book is published in elegant style, and we cordially recommend it to all our readers.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. X., No. 59.--FEBRUARY, 1870.

THE FUTURE OF PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLICITY.[144]

SECOND ARTICLE.

The Abbé Martin divides his treatise into nine books, each of which he subdivides into several chapters. In the first book he labors to prove that Protestantism is imperishable; in the second, he discusses the Protestant revival and its effects; in the third, he treats of the Protestant propaganda, or Protestant missions and their results; in the fourth, of the wealth and well-being of Protestant as compared with Catholic nations; in the fifth, of Catholic and Protestant tolerance and intolerance; in the sixth, of liberty and its influence on the future of Protestantism; in the seventh, of religious liberty in its relations with Protestantism; in the eighth, of the decline of Catholic nations and governments, and the progressive march of Protestant nations and governments; and in the ninth and last, of the union or alliance of Protestantism with the revolution, or the revolutionary spirit so active in nearly all modern society.

In our former article we reviewed the subjects treated in the first, second, and part of the third books, and reserved for our present article two of the three causes the author assigns for the partial success of Protestant missions in old Catholic nations, namely, the _prestige_ which Protestant nations enjoy of surpassing Catholic nations in wealth and well-being, and of having founded and sustained civil and religious liberty. But these two causes, though treated by the author in his third book, really embrace the subject of the remaining six books. We cannot say that the author has so digested and arranged his ample materials as to avoid repetitions, or so as to bring all that belongs to the same topic under one head; but treats it partly under one head and partly under another. A glance at the titles of the last six books will satisfy the reader as well as the reviewer, that the subjects treated fall under two general heads. First, civil and religious liberty; second, the comparative wealth and well-being of Catholic and Protestant nations; and under these two heads we shall arrange our summary of the views of the author, and our own comments. We begin with the last.

I. The author assigns, as we have seen, as one of the causes of the success of Protestant missions in old Catholic nations, the _prestige_ which Protestant nations enjoy of surpassing Catholic nations in material wealth and well-being. That this _prestige_ attaches to Protestant nations is a fact not to be disputed; but is it well founded? The author seems to concede that it is, and maintains that "there is in Protestant nations and Protestant individuals a superior aptitude and a greater eagerness and tenacity in the pursuit and acquisition of the goods of this world" than there is in Catholic nations and individuals.

"Place," he says, "Catholics and Protestants side by side on the same territory, in conditions perfectly equal, and leave each to act under the influence of their respective principles, and not a half-century will elapse before the Protestants will have taken in the material order a marked superiority. The Protestants will have the finest vineyards, the best cultivated fields, the greenest meadows, the most elegant mansions, and the freshest shade. They will have almost the monopoly of industry, commerce, large capital, the bourse, the bank, money at interest, and own all the mills and factories, if any there are. If you doubt it, consult Alsace and Strasburg, Nimes, Montpellier, the environs of Bourdeaux, the mixed Swiss cantons, and the conquests the American Union has made of the Spaniards of Mexico.... Wherever Protestants plant themselves, they are able to attain a preponderating influence in all civil affairs. With only a fourth of the population they will hold three fourths of the public offices, have the majority in the municipal council, the mayor of the commune, if not the adjunct, the highest grades in the national guard, the member of the conseil-général, the deputy, sometimes the senator, and the most widely circulating journal of the district, daily filled with eulogiums on their merit.

"It is the same on a large scale among nations. Who knows not that there are more wealth, more well-being, more comfort, eleganter houses, softer couches, more sugar and coffee, in England, Scotland, Holland, Prussia, at Zurich, Berne, Geneva, New York, than in Spain, Portugal, Austria, at Rome or Rio Janeiro?

"It would seem that there is a sort of _preëstablished harmony_ between Protestantism and the earth, that they know and attract each other. Where the earth is most smiling and wears the richest decorations, it naturally becomes Protestant. In Switzerland, the richest and most fertile districts are Protestant, the rugged and barren are Catholic. The former, with their facile enjoyments, seem to invite to very forgetfulness of heaven; the latter only to raise and fix the affections above the earth, and can be made or become Protestant possessions only by force or violence." (Pp. 186-188.)

We are not prepared to make quite so large concessions. Protestants do not monopolize all the pleasant, rich, and fertile spots of the earth. The fact may be true of Switzerland, but it is not true of the Italian peninsula nor of the Iberian, in which are the richest and most fertile districts of Europe; nor, in point of climate, soil, and productions, does Protestant Germany surpass Catholic Germany. The _preëstablished harmony_ alleged has no foundation in fact, and we have heard the contrary more than once maintained by well-informed Catholic prelates. Nor are we prepared to concede that, if you speak of the whole population, there is more comfort and well-being in Protestant than in Catholic nations. The peasantry of Italy, before the late political changes, had as much comfort and well-being as the peasantry of Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, or even Great Britain and Holland, and the peasantry of Austria proper are in the same respects better off than those of Prussia or Hanover. In no countries in the world is there to be found such squalid wretchedness as in those under the British crown, and governed by the head of the Protestant church. There may be more wealth in Great Britain than in France, but there is also more and far deeper poverty. France, by a war with all Europe, was prostrated in 1815; her capital was held by foreign invaders, and she was forced to pay millions by way of indemnification to the invaders, and to support an allied army cantoned on her territory to compel her to keep the peace; and yet she met her extraordinary expenses, greatly reduced her national debt, reasserted her freedom of action and her position as a great European power, and extended her territory by the conquest of Algiers, in less than fifteen years, under the restoration and under a Catholic government. No nation under a Protestant government can be named that has ever carried so heavy a burden so easily, or done so much in so short a time to lighten it. We have seen nothing like it in England, the model Protestant nation. Since 1830, France has ceased to be a Catholic nation, under a Catholic government, and has to a great extent adopted the British industrial and commercial system. She has shown nothing since of that marvellous recuperative energy she showed under the Bourbons. She is burdened now with a constantly increasing national debt, her people are taxed for national and municipal expenses to the last cent they can bear, and there can be no doubt that she is relatively poorer and weaker to-day than she was during the last years of the Restoration.

Our experience in this country does not warrant the concessions of the author. Placed side by side and in equal conditions with Protestants, Catholics have shown themselves in no sense inferior to Protestants in their aptitude to get on in the world. Their progress here in wealth, in comfort, and ease has been relatively greater than that of the older Protestant population; for they started from an inferior worldly position, and with far inferior means. To be convinced of it, we need but look at the schools and colleges they have founded, at the costly and splendid churches they have erected, and at the large sums they have contributed for the support of Catholic charities and their friends in Ireland and other countries, from which the majority of them have emigrated. With an intense Protestant prejudice against them, they have, in a very few years, risen in the social scale, gained a respectable standing in the American community, carried away the first prizes in law and medicine, and secured their full share of public offices both civil and military.

The United States have proved themselves too powerful for the Mexicans, we concede, and they well might do so, with vastly greater resources and a population three times as large. The Mexicans are only about one in nine of pure Spanish blood; the rest are pure-blooded Indians, or a mixed race of whites and Indians, and of Indians and negroes. Yet if our officers who served in the Mexican war may be believed, braver, hardier, more enduring or energetic soldiers than the Mexicans cannot easily be found. The feebleness of Mexico is not due to her Catholicity, but to her lack of it; to her mad attempts to establish and maintain a republican form of government, for which her previous training, manners, and habits wholly unfitted her. Had she, on gaining her independence of Spain, established monarchical institutions, and not been influenced by our example and intrigues, and the insane theories of European revolutionists, she would not have fallen below her non-Catholic neighbor. No Protestant people surpass in bravery, boldness, enterprise, energy, national or individual, the Spaniards of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they were far better Catholics then than they or Spanish-Americans are now.

There is an important fact too often lost sight of in discussing the alleged superior aptitude of Protestants in relation to this world. We find nowhere braver soldiers, bolder sailors, more enterprising merchants, or more ingenious workmen than were the Venetians, the Genoese, the Florentines, and the Portuguese when in their best estate. A Portuguese sailor opened the way by the Cape of Good Hope to India; a Genoese discovered this western continent, which bears an Italian name; an Italian, also, was the discoverer of this northern half of the American continent; and it was a Catholic sovereign who aided the Anglo-American colonies to assert their independence. Yet Portugal, Venice, Genoa, Florence, when they were greatest, were Catholic, and their decline in later times is not owing to their Catholicity; for they were Catholic all the time that they were rising from their feeble beginnings, and at the period of their greatest power and splendor, more bigotedly so, as our liberals would say, than they are now; and what did not hinder their rise and growth could not be the cause of their decline. They have declined through other causes, and causes well known to the student of the rise and fall of nations.

It is, no doubt, true that in France, Belgium, and Italy, and perhaps in other old Catholic states, Catholics, even where they are the immense majority, permit the public offices to be filled, and themselves to be ruled by Protestants, Jews, infidels, and such secularized Catholics as hold the state should govern the church; and we have often felt not a little indignant to find it so; but modern society in all Catholic states recedes from the old aristocratic constitution of Europe, and tends to democracy; and democracy, as our American experience proves, elevates to power not the best men in the community, but often the worst, the least scrupulous, the most intriguing, selfish, and ambitious. The fact may also be explained by the false political education which the Catholic populations have received. Under Gallicanism they are not instructed to regard Catholicity as _catholic_, and are taught to look upon politics as exempted from the law of God as defined by the church. For them religion and politics are wholly disconnected, have no necessary relation one to the other, rest not on a common principle. Their political education relegates religion to private and domestic life, to the personal and domestic virtues, and has nothing to say in public affairs. Why then should not Protestants, Jews, infidels, or merely nominal Catholics, fill the public offices, and take the management of public affairs?

The French, and other Catholics, who see and deplore this, having received the same sort of education, make the evil worse by laboring not to bring politics up to Catholicity, but to bring the church down to the level of politics, thus lowering the one without elevating the other. They assume an attitude toward the government of distrust, if not of hostility, and exert their influence to Jacobinize the church instead of destroying her, as the revolution would do if it could. Practically, they are only Catholic instead of infidel Jacobins; and whatever their personal hopes and intentions, simply play into the hands of the revolution. It is not the church that needs liberalizing, but the state that needs Catholicizing. The evil, the political imbecility of Catholics in these old Catholic nations, results from the divorce of politics from religion, or the withdrawal of the political order from its proper subordination and subserviency to the spiritual. It is the fruit of the so-called "Gallican liberties," and the remedy is not in the alliance of the church either with democracy or with monarchy, with Jacobinism or with absolutism; but in bringing the faithful to understand that the Catholic religion is _catholic_, and has the right from God to govern them alike in their public relations and in their private and personal relations; in their public and official life, and in their private and domestic life.

In all these old nations the predominant religion is Christian, but the politics are pagan; and Protestants take the lead in political affairs because they have succeeded in paganizing their own religion, and in eliminating all antagonism between it and their politics; while the Catholics are politically inefficient because, owing to the paganism of the state, they have not been able to Christianize their politics and bring them into harmony with their religion. They themselves sympathize politically with Protestants, but are less efficient than they, because more or less restrained by their religion. Eliminate, by Christianizing politics, all antagonism between politics and religion, which now renders Catholics politically indifferent or imbecile, and enable them to act with a united instead of a divided mind, and they will show even a greater aptitude for the affairs of this world than Protestants, because they will act from a higher plane, from profounder and more luminous principles, and with the energy and tenacity of an ever-present and living faith, instead of interest or expediency. But how can they do so when politics in every state in Europe are divorced from Catholic principle, are pagan, and at war with Christianity, and to take part in them they must sacrifice their religion and give up heaven for earth?

It is not Catholicity that renders the Catholics of old Catholic nations politically imbecile, and that permits a miserable minority of Protestants, Jews, and infidels to control the state, but the lack of it; not the fact that they are, but that they are not, thoroughly Catholic. It is the paganism that rules in the state, and is the basis of modern politics, that renders them timid and inefficient. In all Protestant nations religion itself is paganized, and there is as little conflict between religion and politics as there was in old pagan Greece or Rome. They are torn, distracted, weakened by no internal conflict between the two powers; for the first act of the Reformation was to subject the spiritual order to the secular. Hence, they can act politically with undivided mind and undivided strength and energy. They have conformed their religion to their politics. But in all Catholic nations the governments, and, therefore, politics are pagan, and really, if not avowedly, at war with their religion that remains Christian. Those nations are therefore distracted, divided, weakened by the irrepressible antagonism between pagan politics supported by the secular authorities, and the Christian religion sustained only by the church, crippled by being denied her freedom.

It is easy now to understand why Protestant missions in old Catholic nations should not be wholly barren of results. They are backed by the whole weight of Protestant nations, governments and people; they are aided by the real sympathies and tendencies of the so-called Catholic governments and the pagan politics of Catholics themselves. What is surprising is, that their successes are no greater. It is no mean proof of the life and power of the church, and of her divine assistance, that she is able to retain so strong a hold as she does on so large a portion of the old Catholic populations, and to bear up against so many and such powerful enemies, enemies within as well as without the fortress.

The explanation offered by the author of the facts he concedes does not wholly satisfy us. He attributes them to the influence of the Catholic faith in inducing a renunciation of the world, producing in the minds and hearts of the faithful indifference to it, and a disposition to live only for piety and heaven.

That Catholicity has, and was designed to have this tendency, of course, we ourselves maintain; but we have studied the Gospel and Providence as manifested in human affairs to little effect if the renunciation of the world for Christ's sake is not the very way to secure it. They who give up all for Christ have even in this world the promise of a hundred-fold, and in the world to come life everlasting. "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and _all these_ things shall be added unto you." The true principle, both of political and domestic economy, is self-denial, renunciation. He who seeks the world and lives for it, shall lose it, since in so doing he violates the divine order, and takes as his end what at best is only a means. Other things being equal, then, we should expect a truly Catholic people to surpass in wealth and well-being, as in industry and virtue, a heathen, an infidel, or a Protestant people. Certainly, the inferiority of Catholic nations in material wealth and well-being is no argument against Catholicity; but it is, in our judgment, a proof that its government and people are not truly Catholic. We do not admit, to the extent the author does, the alleged superiority of Protestant nations, even as to the material goods of this life; but as far as they can claim any superiority over Catholic nations in this respect, we attribute it to what we have called paganism in politics, or to the fact that in no Catholic nation since the revival of pagan literature in the fifteenth century have politics been elevated to the Catholic standard and made to harmonize with the Christian religion.

The author concedes, also, that, during the last century and the present, Catholic nations have been steadily declining, and Protestant nations advancing. At the opening of the seventeenth century, the Catholic were the great and leading nations of the world. Italy, it is true, had begun to decline; Spain had attained its zenith; but the German empire was still the first power in Europe. France was succeeding to the rank of Spain, and Poland was regarded as the barrier of Catholicity against the North and the East, while England was weakened by revolution at home. Prussia was only a principality, though soon to become a kingdom, and the United States did not exist. At present, England is the undisputed mistress of the ocean, is a great Asiatic and a great American power, weighing heavily on continental Europe; Prussia is absorbing all Germany. The United States have the mastership of the new world, and are exerting a terrible pressure on the old; while, on the other hand, Portugal has become virtually a colony of England; Spain has lost a world, ceased to be a great power, and is worse than nothing to the Catholic cause; Poland is divided among her neighbors, and annihilated; Austria is expelled from Germany, and threatened with the fate of Poland; Italy, at war with the pope, throws her weight on the side of the Protestant nations. Russia and the new Greek empire that is to be are not Protestant; but, as schismatic powers, will sustain the Protestant policy as against Catholicity. France, if she has not declined, has abandoned her mission as a great Catholic power, and is as little to be counted on to resist Anglo-Saxon ascendency as Russia or the revived Greek empire.

The excellent abbé, however, admonishes us that this decline on the one side, and growth and preponderance on the other, is political, not religious; and indicates no decline in Catholicity, or progress of Protestantism. The Latin races, except in France, have declined; but the church has gained more members than she has lost. Only the Anglo-Saxon race, the bulwark of Protestantism, has advanced. Denmark, Sweden, and Holland, considerable Protestant powers at the opening of the seventeenth century, have lost their political importance. Holland is half Catholic, and the Dutch Catholics are not less devoted to the church, less tenacious of their rights, nor less politically active and energetic than the Catholics of Ireland, and even less distracted by questions of national relief or national independence.

One third of the population of Prussia is Catholic, and a larger proportion will be if she, as is likely, absorbs Southern Germany. Not much reliance is to be placed on Prussia as a Protestant power. The future belongs to the Anglo-Saxon race--England and the United States--to be disputed only by schismatic Russia and the new schismatic Greek empire in the process of formation. This relieves the gloom of the picture a little.

But while we agree with the author that Britain and our own country are the principal supports of Protestantism and of Protestant politics, unless we except France, usually reckoned as a Catholic power, we do not believe that even the United States and Britain, acting in concert, are so formidable, in an anti-Catholic sense, as he represents them. The British crown has more Catholic than Protestant subjects, and its Catholic subjects are for the most part enfranchised, and beginning to exert a powerful and constantly increasing influence on the policy of the government. England is obliged to count with Ireland, not only as to Irish interests in Ireland, but, to some extent, as to Catholic interests throughout the empire. The Catholic population in the United States is rapidly growing in numbers, education, wealth, and influence, and is already too large to be oppressed with impunity, and large enough, when not misled by foreign passions and interests, to prevent the government from adopting a decidedly anti-Catholic policy either at home or abroad. Were the United States even to absorb the Catholic states on this continent, it would be advantageous, not detrimental, to Catholic interests. Mexican and Cuban, as well as Central and South American Catholics would gain much by being annexed to the Union, and brought under the direct action of the ecclesiastical authority, as are the Catholics of the United States. We see nothing reassuring, we own, to the so-called Latin races in the growth and preponderance of the Anglo-Saxon nations, but not much that is promising to Protestantism; for we cannot believe that Christianity has failed, or that the future of society belongs to paganism.

The abbé does not attribute the decline of the Latin races to any religious cause, but finds its explanation--1. In the law of growth and decay, to which nations as individuals are subjected; 2. In climate--the southern climate tends to soften and enervate, the northern to harden and invigorate; 3. In geographical position; 4. In difference of temperaments; 5. Political constitutions; and 6. In accidental or providential causes, not to be foreseen and guarded against--the presence or absence of a great man, the defeat of a well-devised, or the success of a blundering policy, the gain of a battle that should have been lost, or the loss of a battle that should have been gained, etc. (Pp. 497-508.)

Most of these causes we examined and disposed of, some time ago, in a review of Professor Draper's works. The first and second we do not count. We do not believe that nations, like individuals, are subject to the law of growth, maturity, old age, and death. There are no facts or analogies from which such a law can be adduced, and a Catholic nation, if truly Catholic, has in its religion a fountain of perennial youth. Whatever disasters befall a Catholic nation, if not absorbed by another, it has always in itself a recuperative power. We believe just as little in the influence of climate as one of the causes of the decline of the Latin nations. The climate under which they have declined is the same under which they grew up and became the preponderating races. The extreme heat within the tropics is less unfavorable to mind or body than the extreme cold of the Arctic regions. The Latin races have lived both in their growth and in their decline under the finest, mildest, and healthiest climate within the temperate zone. The ablest men, as scholars, artists, statesmen, and generals, of France have belonged to her southern departments; and we found in our recent civil war that the men from the extreme Southern States, in their physical qualities, bravery, activity and vigor of body, and power of endurance, were not at all inferior to the men of the more Northern States. In fact, they could bear more fatigue, and suffer more privations, with less demoralization than the Northern man. We make just as little account of difference of temperament. The southern nations, with the same temperament, were once the preponderating nations of Europe, and the French are in no respect inferior to the English, and in many things superior. Spain in the sixteenth century not only surpassed what England then was, but even what she now is; and there was a time when it was said of Portugal, the sun never sets on her empire. We do not believe much in differences of race; for God hath made all nations of one blood.

Geographical position counts for something. The nations that have ports only on the Mediterranean, or access to the ocean only through that sea, have been unfavorably affected by the discovery of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, and of this western continent in the fifteenth century. These maritime discoveries, which have changed the routes of commerce as well as the character of commerce itself, have given the advantage to the nations that open on the Atlantic, and sufficiently account for the decline of the Italian republics. The canal across the Isthmus of Suez, just opened, will do something, no doubt, to revive the commerce of the Mediterranean, but cannot restore it, because the Indian trade is not now of the same relative importance that it was formerly. The American trade comes in for its share, rivals and even exceeds it, and this trade, whether a ship-canal be or be not opened across the Isthmus of Darien, will be chiefly in the hands of the United States and the western nations of Europe, for their geographical position enables them to command it. The insular position of Great Britain has also given her some advantages.

Political constitutions also count for something; but in the beginning of the seventeenth century, the political constitutions of the several European states, except the Italian republics, the Swiss Cantons, and the United Netherlands, were essentially the same, that is, Roman monarchy engrafted on feudalism. Monarchy was as absolute in England under the Tudors and the Stuarts as it ever was in France or Spain, and the other estates counted for no more in her than in them. The Protestant states of Germany were not more popular in their constitution than the Catholic states, and Austria has never been so despotic as Prussia. We cannot, however, attribute much to this cause; for why have the Latin states been less successful in developing and ameliorating their political constitution than the Anglo-Saxon, if we assume that they have not been?

The accidental or providential causes, in the author's sense, being measurable by no rule and subject to no known law, cannot be very well discussed, and we are not inclined to attach much importance to them. A nation is already declining, or passed its zenith, if the loss of a single battle can ruin it; and on its ascending course, if the winning of one can secure it a permanent ascendency. Napoleon won many important battles, and yet he died a prisoner on the barren rock of St. Helena. A victory by Pompey at Pharsalia, or by Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, could not have restored the patrician republic or changed the fate of Rome. The republic was lost before Cæsar crossed the Rubicon. Great men play an important part, no doubt; but a nation that can be saved by the presence of a great man is in no serious danger, or that could be lost by his absence cannot be saved by his presence. Individuals count for less than hero-worshippers commonly imagine. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.

Except in the loss of the commercial supremacy of the Italian republics by the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth century, we regard, though not in the sense of Protestants, the chief causes of the decline of the Latin nations as religious, and the ascendency of Protestant nations as, in the main, the counterpart of the decline of Catholic nations. The Catholic nations have declined, not because they have been Catholic, but because they and their governments have not been truly Catholic. Something, indeed, is due to the fact that England completed her revolution a hundred years before that of the Latin nations began. She had passed through her principal internal struggles, established the basis of her constitution, settled her dynasty, and was in a position when the Latin revolutions broke out to turn them to her own advantage. She used the madness of French Jacobinism, and the o'er-vaulting ambition of the first Napoleon. Being earlier too, the English revolution was less democratic than that of the Latin nations, and did not so essentially weaken the nation by eliminating the aristocratic element. England is only just now entering upon the fearful struggle between aristocracy and democracy, and it is very possible that she will lose her ascendency before she gets through it. Still we find the principal cause of the deterioration of Catholic nations connected, at least, with religion.

Both the nations that became Protestant and those that remained Catholic were affected by the revival of Greek and Roman paganism in the fifteenth century. The northern nations, adopting it in politics, speedily conformed their religion to it, subjected the spiritual to the secular, abandoned the church, made themselves Protestant, and harmonized their interior national life. The southern nations adhered to the church, for there were in them too many enlightened, earnest-minded, and devout Catholics to permit them to break wholly with the successor of Peter; but their governments, statesmen, and scholars, artists and upper classes, adopted pagan politics, literature, art, and manners, and thus created an antagonism between their religion and their whole secular life, which greatly impaired the influence of the church, and led to a fearful corruption of politics, manners, and morals. The cause of the deterioration of these nations is precisely in this antagonism, intensified by the so-called _Renaissance_, and which has continued, down to the present time, and will, most likely, continue yet longer.

The Council of Trent did something to check the evil, but could not eradicate it; for its cause was not in the church, nor in the abuses of ecclesiastical discipline or administration, but in the secular order, in which the secular powers would suffer no radical reforms either in facts or principles. They were willing the church should reform her own administration, but would not conform their own to the principles of which she was the appointed guardian. They would protect her against heretical powers; but only on their own terms, and only so far as she would consent to be made or they could use her as an instrument of their ambition. Charles V. would protect her only so far as he could without losing in his military projects the support of the Protestant princes of the empire; and when he wished to force the pope to his terms, he let loose his fanatical troops under the Constable Bourbon against Rome, who imprisoned him and spoiled and sacked the city for nine months; Philip II. would also serve the church and make a war of extermination on heretics in the Low Countries, but only in the hope of using her as an instrument in attaining to the universal monarchy at which he aimed. Louis XIV., and after him Napoleon I., attempted the same. They all thought they could use her to further their own ambition; but they failed--and failed miserably, shamefully. He to whom it belongs to give victory or defeat, who demands disinterested services, and who will not suffer his church to be used as an instrument of earthly ambition, touched them with his finger, and their strength failed, they withered as grass, and all their plans miscarried. It was better that her avowed enemies should triumph for a season than that she should be enslaved by her protectors, or smothered in the embraces of her friends. God is a jealous God, and his glory he will not give to another.

Here we see the cause. Paganism in the state corrupted the sovereigns, their courts, and the ruling classes in morals and manners, enfeebled character, debased society, in the Catholic states. The failure, through divine Providence, of the ambitious and selfish schemes of such professedly Catholic sovereigns as Philip II., Louis XIV., and Napoleon I., reduced the Latin races to the low estate in which we now find them, and gave, in the political, commercial, and industrial order, the ascendency to Protestant nations, as a chastisement to both, and a lesson to Catholics from which it is to be hoped they will profit. If the Catholic nations had been truly Catholic, if the educated and ruling classes had recognized and defended the church steadily from the first on Catholic principles, and unflinchingly maintained her freedom and independence as the kingdom of God on earth, representing him who is King of kings and Lord of lords, these nations would have retained their preponderance, the church would have reformed the morals and manners of society, and the Protestant nations would never have existed, or would have speedily returned to the fold.

Yet we do not despair of these Latin races; for, though their governments have betrayed the faith, and the people have been alienated from the church by attributing to her the political faults of their rulers, from which she and they alike have suffered, they still retain Catholic tradition, and have in them large numbers of men and women, more than enough to have saved the cities of the plain, who are true believers, and who know and practise in sincerity and earnestness their faith. They have still a recuperative energy, and may yet re-ascend the scale they have descended. The present emperor of the French believed it possible, and his mission to recover the Latin races. He attempted it, and his plan, to human wisdom, seemed well devised and practicable. It was to break the alliance between England and Russia; to create an independent, confederated, or united Italy; to divide the Anglo-Saxon race in the United States, and to raise up and consolidate a Latin power in Mexico and Central America, while he extended the French power in North Africa, defeated English and Russian diplomatic preponderance in the East, opened a maritime canal across the Isthmus of Suez, and recovered the commerce of India for the Mediterranean powers. By these means he would give to France the protectorate of the Latin races, and guard alike against Anglo-Saxon and Russian preponderance. But his plan made no account, or a false account, of the moral and religious causes of the decline of Latin races, and sought to elevate them not as truly Catholic but as temporal powers, and to use the church for a secular end, instead of using the secular power he possessed for a spiritual and Catholic end. He committed over again the error of his uncle, Louis XIV., and Philip II., and has failed, as he might have foreseen if he had understood that the church must be served, if at all, for herself, and that she serves the secular only when the secular serves her for her own sake.

The result of Napoleon's policy has been not to elevate the Latin races and to bring them to gravitate around France as the great central Latin power, but to weaken the power of the church over them, to strengthen the antagonism between their faith and their politics, and to depress them still more in relation to the Teutonic and Slavonic races. The emperor of the French, whether he had or had not Catholic interests at heart, has done them great injury. He began by subordinating the spiritual to the secular, when he should have begun by subordinating the secular to the spiritual. He would then have secured the divine protection and assistance, and been invincible. He has, in reality, only defeated the end he aimed at, and left the Latin races in a more deplorable condition than that in which he found them. As a Catholic and as a Latin sovereign, he has not been a success. The Protestant and schismatical powers have grown only by the faults and blunders, the want of submission and fidelity of the professedly Catholic powers; not by any means, as they suppose, by the errors and abuses of the ecclesiastical administration, nor by any positive virtue, even for this world, in their heresy and schism. God, as we have just said, is a jealous God, and his glory he will not give to another. The Latin races, so called, when in power sought not his glory but their own, and failed. But they may yet recover their former power and splendor, if not their commercial preponderance, by rejecting the subtle paganism which has enervated them, the infidel politics they have adopted; by restoring to the church her full freedom and independence as the spiritual order, and by subordinating the secular to the spiritual order; that is, by making themselves really and truly Catholic.

In France there was, at an early day, an attempt made to reconcile paganism in politics with Catholicity in religion, in what is called Gallicanism, which, however, only served to systematize the antagonism between church and state, and to render it all the more destructive to both. We look upon Gallicanism, as expressed in the four articles adopted at the dictation of the government by the assembly of the French clergy in 1682, and which had shown itself all along from Philip the Fair, the grandson of St. Louis, which broke out in great violence with Louis XII., and his _petit_ council of five cardinals at Pisa, acted on by the _politiques_ of Henry IV., and formulated by the great Bossuet under Louis XIV., as the most formidable as well as the most subtle enemy the church has ever had to contend with.

The essence, the real virus, so to speak, of Gallicanism is not, as so many suppose, in the assertion that the dogmatic definitions of the pope are not irreformible--though that is a grave error, in our judgment--but in the assertion of the independence of the state in face of the spiritual order. No doubt Bossuet's purpose in drawing up the four articles was to prevent the French government from going farther and carrying away the kingdom into open heresy and schism; but the Subtle secularism to which he gave his sanction, especially as sure to be practically understood and applied, is far harder to deal with than either heresy or schism, and it seems to us far more embarrassing to the church. It forbids the Catholic to be logical, to draw from his Catholic principles their proper consequences, or to give them their legitimate application; takes away from the defences of faith its outposts, and reduces them to the bare citadel, and proves an almost insurmountable obstacle to the church in her efforts to reach and subdue the world to the law of God. It withdraws the secular order from its rightful subjection to the spiritual order, and denies that religion is the supreme law for nations as well as for individuals, and for kings as well as for subjects.

The principal fault we find with the author, as may be gathered from what we have said, is that he appears to see in the antagonism between pagan politics and Christian, or in the original and inextinguishable dualism asserted by Gallicanism, no cause of the deterioration of Catholic nations, or of the partial success in old Catholic populations of Protestant missions in unmaking Catholics, if not in making Protestants. He seems to accept the one-sided asceticism which places the goods of this life in antagonism with the goods of the world to come, and, though he does not avow Gallicanism, originated by paganism in the state, he does not disavow it, or appear to be aware that it has any influence in detaching the people from the church, by making them Catholics only on one side of their minds, and leaving them pagan on the other.

The enemies of the church understand this matter far better, and they look upon a Gallican as being as good as a Protestant. James I., the English Solomon, declared himself ready to accept the church, if allowed to do it on Gallican principles. Protestants have very little controversy with out-and-out Gallicanism. They feel instinctively that the Catholics who assert the independence, which means practically the supremacy, of the secular order, and bind the pope by the canons which the church herself makes, are near enough to them; and if they are not separated from the church, it is all the better, because they can better serve the Protestant cause in her communion than they could if out of it. It is the Papal, not the Gallican church they hate.

We do not agree, if we may be permitted to say so, with the author as to the superiority of Protestant nations, or that they are likely to retain for any great length of time the superiority they appear now to have, nor do we accept, as we have already intimated, the one-sided asceticism which supposes any necessary antagonism between this world and the next. The antagonism grows out of the error of placing this world as the end or supreme good, when it is, in fact, only a medium. We as Christians renounce it as the end we live for; but if we so renounce it, and live only in Christ for God, who is really our supreme good, we find this world in its true place with all its goods; and a really Catholic nation that holds the spiritual and eternal supreme, and subordinates the secular to it, will have a hundred-fold more of the really good things of this life, than a nation that subordinates the spiritual to the secular, and seeks only material goods. We believe, and the author proves it, that there is even now more real wealth and well-being in Catholic than in Protestant nations; though we agree with the author, that if it were not so, it would be no argument against the church.

The question of tolerance and intolerance, and of civil and religious liberty, as related to Catholic and Protestant nations respectively, will form the subject of a future article. In the mean time we commend again to our readers the work we are reviewing.

FOOTNOTE:

[144] _De l'Avenir du Protestantisme et du Catholicisme._ Par M. l'Abbé F. Martin. Paris: Tobra et Haton. 1869. 8vo, pp. 608.

UNTYING GORDIAN KNOTS.

I.

LADY SACKVIL'S JOURNAL.

_Venice, April 3d, 185-._ Arrived this afternoon, and was received by Flora at the station in an embossed gondola with crimson awnings. Ah me! the delicious glow of a new sensation. By what blessed exception was Venice reserved to me for the thirty-first year of that stagnation we call life, and for the second year of dowagerhood? As we floated up to Beldoni Palace, the blood of nineteen flowed in my veins. But in the marble court, perfumed with orange-blossoms exhaling youth and hope, the twins rushed out upon me, crying, "Auntie!" Bah! I was again myself, smothered in crape and bombazine, with the heart of a jade-stone and the circulation of a crocodile.

As we stood beneath the fig-trees in the garden, Flora whispered, "Look at the middle window of the third story." I looked, and beheld a brown-haired woman, in a soft blue dress, pushing aside a mass of passion-vine, and watching us. A pretty picture enough, made warm and glowing in the last rays of sunset! "Who is it?" "Nicholas Vane's wife. I wrote you of his marriage two years ago. They have taken an apartment we do not use, and we are constantly together. You remember that George owes his success in life to Mr. Vane, and he has always been like an elder brother to Nicholas."

"She's rather pretty, is she not?"

"Not exactly pretty, but excessively nice. George respects her immensely."

"George, George, George!" the point of every moral and adornment of every tale. George does not respect _me_ immensely; but I am not sure that I value his opinion less for that reason--heaven help me!

Well, if Nicholas Vane makes his wife half as wretched as he made me ten years ago, I pity her. I have always wished for an _éclaircissement_ with him on the subject of my marriage with Sackvil. Perhaps it may come now.

* * * * *

_4th._--Created a revolution in the household to-day; persuaded Flora to have the Erard "grand" moved into a great old barn of a room seldom used, where one can write and practise without interruption. She had intended to give up one of her prettiest rooms to me; but I've taken a fancy to this one, which will be too desolate to tempt any one to share my solitude.

George is charmed to have me establish myself at such a distance from the rest of the family. He at once ordered in orange-trees and ivies to adorn my dungeon--a delightful thought; but the dreary waste is fast becoming a blossoming oasis. I am writing now by the jalousied window, half listening to the dip of oars as the gondolas go lazily by in the afternoon light.

A glorious piano-tuning this morning, much to Flora's disgust. "Let me send to Lupi's for a tuner, dear," she entreated, as I produced fork and key from the depths of a show work-basket. "It looks so masculine."

"It should be _feminine_ to bring harmony out of discord," I answered. "No piano of mine shall be intrusted to a hireling."

I talked and tuned, tuned and talked--not simultaneously but in strata--and had possessed myself of the interior history of the Vane family by the time the piano answered my searching ears harmoniously.

Mary Terence was the daughter of a clever author, of some pretensions to literary fame, but better known in Boston as a brilliant talker. She was left an orphan at nineteen, poor and unprotected. Vane, who had been one of the _habitués_ of her father's house, admired her sweet devotion to the crotchety old man. She was a Catholic, too; and though Nicholas never cared much for his religion himself, he was always fond of seeing other people practise it, as I remember painfully. But, however it happened, through religion or love, or caprice, or whatever, he married the young thing, and fancies there was never seen her equal.

The piano tuned, I betook myself to practising _Variations Sérieuses_, and Saran's variations in the same style, but founded on a theme far nobler than the one Mendelssohn has taken. Saran is capable of great things, but will probably fail to accomplish them, as this period of our century especially discourages development. To excite hopes and disappoint them appears to be the summit of youthful ambition, at least in the musical world.

I was feeling very happy at the piano; keys cool and smooth; nerves impressionable but not impressed; my ivy-garnished dungeon excellent in its acoustic effects; Flora, in a senseless sort of way, a sympathetic listener. Now and then a servant came to her for orders, but her voice is one that harmonizes with stillness. Flora is surely the sweetest, calmest, most beautiful simpleton I have ever known.

Mendelssohn and Saran having tired me, Chopin came to the rescue--mazurkas, preludes, nocturnes. Why did I play so well? Why was that scherzo on the music-desk, and why do its leaves turn so inconveniently? As I came within two bars of the close of the third page, a hand turned it deftly. I knew the hand of old, and its rare faculty for turning music well. With difficulty I repressed a start of surprise, for I had thought myself alone with Flora. But the agony of recollection quivered in my nerves, impressed now as well as impressionable. I had not believed myself susceptible of such emotion, or capable of such repression of feeling, if once aroused.

The scherzo ended, I paused, but for a moment could not summon courage to break the silence that followed. At last I turned to leave the piano. Vane was sitting behind me on the right. His lips parted painfully in a smile as he greeted me. Strange! What was it to either of us but a glance into a past we would both destroy if that were possible; a furtive peep into a magic mirror we thought broken long ago.

The brown-haired nymph of the passion-vine was half reclining on a lounge with the happy, musing look of one who seldom muses. I had meant to take the initiative with her, accepting her as Flora's friend, and gradually admitting her to intimacy. To my surprise, I found myself responding gratefully to her pleasant welcome, and wishing in my hidden soul she might find something in me to like. Where lies her power? As yet I cannot tell. Vane is very little changed in ten years; lines deepened but not altered. There is evidently a charming relation between him and his wife. She is the stronger of the two in character, I fancy--a simple, genuine person, what more I do not yet know.

II.

Nicholas Vane's library overlooked the garden of Palazzo Beldoni. The dimensions of the room, the windows curtained with vines in the month of April, the glowing sunlight that forced its way in between swaying branches, all spoke of Italy; but New England comfort held a cozy reign within doors; husband and wife were occupied together before the great-study table covered with plans of fortifications; she in making extracts from books of reference, he in working out the minor details of a design.

"How odd that I should have forgotten!" Mary said suddenly, pausing in her work with a look of surprise and recollection. "Flora charged me to tell you that Lady Sackvil has written to say that she is coming here. She will arrive this afternoon in all probability, and I was to have told you of it yesterday. However," she added after a pause, "you don't seem to take much interest in my great piece of news, so the delay has done no harm."

"Amelia Grant is coming--Lady Sackvil, I mean!" Nicholas said slowly, but without pausing in his work. "Very well, I hope you will like her."

"It never occurred to me not to like her," Mary answered. "In the first place, she is Flora's sister; in the second place, she is a very fascinating woman; in the third place, she is a riddle I hope to solve; in the fourth place--"

"In the fourth place," exclaimed Vane, throwing down his pencil with one of those short laughs that quench enthusiasm and kindle wrath at the same moment; "in the fourth place, my beloved Oedipus, she is a sorceress who will read you at sight. Amelia Grant is the mirror of the person she is with; when you fancy you are deciphering her, you will be simply gazing at a reflection of yourself--no unpleasant sight, I acknowledge," he added kindly, seeing that his rough answer had brought the color to her cheeks; "but it will not solve you the riddle. Look here, child. I am sorry Lady Sackvil is coming here. She is a worldly, heartless woman; full of ability, full of attraction; but let me tell you this: if eating your little innocent heart could afford her an afternoon's entertainment, she would not hesitate to do it."

He paused, rose and went to the window. Mary remained at the table, making sketches upon the baize cover with her pen-handle.

"She must play for us, though," said Captain Vane, coming out of a brown study and returning to his seat. "She was the cleverest amateur I have ever heard; and they say Lord Sackvil indulged every whim and carried her from Leipsic to Weimar, and from Weimar to Berlin, as her fancy suggested. She went through a conservatory course at Leipsic, and graduated most creditably. Yes, she is astonishingly clever, beyond dispute, and capable of great self-devotion to her art. Of all the persons I have known, men or women, she is the most impressionable, mobile, sympathetic, dramatic." And again he merged into a reverie, while Mary continued the ungrateful task of drawing on the table-cover.

"Miss Grant had a great many lovers, I suppose," she said at length.

"I don't know--yes--probably--perhaps not. Just look at plan four, and give me the length of line A-Q."

"One inch--three inches--six feet. If you don't answer my question, I shall not answer yours," said Mary, laying her head down on the table.

Vane laughed, and looked out the reference himself.

"She was married at twenty, you goose; so it is not probable that she had many declared lovers."

"What sort of man was Lord Sackvil?"

"Lift up your head and go to work and I will tell you--there. Lord Sackvil was a clever, kindly man of about forty-five, rich but fond of diplomatic life. He came to Washington on a special mission. Amelia met him in society, mirrored his cleverness, and kindliness, and diplomacy, and married him after an engagement of three weeks."

"Was the marriage a happy one?"

"I don't know--I never asked--I don't care. Stop asking questions; I'm sick of the subject."

"I verily believe she has come. I hear voices in the garden," cried Mary, springing from her seat and running to the window. "Yes; it must be Lady Sackvil, talking with Flora under the trees. There, she turned and looked at me. Oh! do come here; she is very lovely."

"Mary, come here," said Vane sharply. "Don't stand staring at what does not concern you. There, I've upset the inkstand. Now you must come and help me."

"If you had upset the universe, I should leave you to wipe it up yourself. Why, my dear, I never expected to know a live countess. I really must look at her."

"Mary, come to me," said Vane sternly, rising from his seat.

She came slowly toward him, and stood looking up in his face with an expression half of fun, half of amazement.

"I had not supposed you capable of such babyish conduct," he said, the blood rushing to his face.

"I have been very silly," Mary said. "O Nicholas! you don't know how silly I have been. I will never, never behave so again--or think such thoughts again," she added, looking at him with an expression of absolute sincerity and trustfulness. "I will all my life trust you as you trust me."

"Do no such thing," he answered hastily. "I am a man like half the men in the world, and women like you are very rare. My darling," he said tenderly, "I love you; and I revere you too--words which should be very precious to a wife. Love may pass, but reverence never. You are my preserver in this world; you are my strength, my patience, my all, God help me! When I look into those sweet, truthful, innocent eyes, they give me all the strength I need for life. Mary, never distrust me--never, never distrust me, for I love and honor you."

"Thank God for that!" she answered softly. "But please don't place your dependence on me. If I had strength to give you, you should have it if my very life had to pay for the gift. But you cannot live vicariously. You cannot receive strength through me. I do not regret behaving so foolishly to-day merely because I have displeased you. If I am silly, you had better know it. But I am afraid you will think that confessing my faults does me so little good that you will be less than ever inclined to confess your own."

"Make yourself quite easy on that point," said Captain Vane, smiling. "I will not judge things good in themselves by your malpractices. But let me speak to you very seriously, my dear child. I love you tenderly, and I love no one else in the world; but if your suspicions had been correct, you took the worst means in the world to mend matters. Suspicions are excessively irritating to a man, and none the less so, you may be sure, when they are well-grounded. And now I freely forgive you all your sins toward me, real and imaginary, and I think if Angelo were to come and wash away that pool of ink on the _parquet_, all traces of this terrible passage of arms might be effaced."

III.

LADY SACKVIL'S JOURNAL.

Flora came into the room to-day, while Josephine was dressing my hair. My cap was lying on the dressing-table. She took it up and examined it thoughtfully. "Milly," she said at last, "do me a favor. Give up wearing caps. I cannot bear to have your lovely hair covered. Besides, the usual time for wearing close mourning is passed; and I am convinced that common rules of etiquette should be followed in these matters. If you continue to wear black beyond the usual period, you will lay it aside some day because your grief is diminished, and that is not a pleasant idea."

Flora is a wise woman, within a very narrow range. And so the caps are laid aside. I do it with a kind of regret. I remember fancying, when I first adopted them, that I had assumed unworldliness with them. I do not wish to make the smallest sacrifice to duty, but no one enjoys _feeling_ good more than I do. My hair _is_ beautiful. It looks so nicely in great smooth rolls fastened with an ivory comb. I think I should go mad if I were ugly; if I were not sure of attracting any one I care to attract--except George Holston. But never mind his disapproval! It is pleasanter to be disliked than disregarded, at least to an egotist like myself. To-night we had good music. Only the Vanes were here, Flora, and I. It was interesting to introduce them to certain Schumann songs they had not seen; Franz songs of which they had never even heard; then Chopin, as the moonlight streamed in at the great window by the piano, making candles unnecessary. "More, more," said Mrs. Vane, when I paused. "No more of that kind," said Nicholas, laughing. "I need rebuilding at present." So we had glorious John Sebastian Bach, ending with an organ prelude and fugue arranged by Liszt. Vane listened, looking out of the window upon the canal. Mrs. Vane looked transfigured, like one who had found a great calmness and strength. I envied her, and yet what should I do with calmness and strength if I had them? Throw them into the great pool of life and watch the bubbles rise to the surface. Nothing can add to Flora's serenity. She rolled up her crochet work, laid it away in a blue velvet sarcophagus, and said, "Come into the other room and we will have chocolate." When we were alone, she asked, "Did you ever notice how beautifully Nicholas Vane's hair grows on his forehead? And he has the most expressive eye-lids I ever saw. You must look at them some time." I promised to do so.

I am arranging a Schumann quartette for the piano. I find that Mrs. Vane knows very little of his music. How enchanting transcription is! One finds in it, I am confident, some of the delights of creation. It is only eleven; I can have two good hours of work before going to bed.

IV.

"Nicholas, did you ever tell your wife of your engagement to Amelia Grant?" asked George Holston, abusing the occasion of a visit from his adopted brother by asking unpleasant questions.

Vane knocked the ashes off his cigar and answered curtly, "No."

"Why not?"

"Because it was a disagreeable subject; because the matter was dead and buried years before I saw Mary; because I didn't choose to speak of it."

"I think you made a mistake."

"I don't."

"I do; and I will tell you why, though you don't wish to hear. A man can't put too many barriers between himself and temptation. You are now brought unexpectedly into daily intercourse with Amelia. Long after actual love dies out, personal influence continues dangerous. If you had told your wife of your former connection, it would have acted as a useful check upon you, unconsciously, of course."

"I need no check," answered Vane in a tone of annoyance, "beyond my love for Mary, and my distrust of Lady Sackvil. Mary knows I had an old love affair, but does not know with whom. You need not disturb yourself. I know Amelia Grant of old."

"I doubt it. You exaggerate her faults. She is by no means deficient in good qualities, if she chose to use them. She is a woman ruined by bad training; educated systematically to selfishness, vanity, self-will. She is the most worldly woman of her years I have ever known; but her most dangerous trait, as accompanying so many faults, is the yearning for better things that makes her interesting. She thinks I dislike her. On the contrary, I find her very attractive, though I am determined to do nothing to induce her to prolong her stay with us."

"I don't know any thing about her capacities for good," Vane remarked dryly. "I know that we had not been engaged twenty-four hours before she was receiving Lord Sackvil's attentions freely. At the end of three days of befooling, I put an end to the farce and left the coast clear for his lordship. Flora knows all about this, of course?"

"Evidently not. They were never together during their girlhood. Besides, Amelia never reveals any thing discreditable to herself, you may be sure. Keep out of her way, Vane; she has gifts which are especially attractive to you. But, by Jupiter! it is rather an insult to fancy that any one can fascinate you after your wife, who is nearer perfection than any woman I ever saw."

"Upon my word!" said Vane, glad of a diversion, "these are agreeable sentiments. I think if any body has ground for jealousy, it is poor me. I have not the slightest doubt that Mary will eventually be canonized, but I'll thank you to defer all sentiments of veneration until then."

At this moment a servant announced that Mrs. Holston and Lady Sackvil were in the gondola waiting for Captain Vane.

Nicholas took his hat and rose. "Keep your eyes and your wisdom to yourself, George," he said, in answer to Holston's glance of amusement. "It is a bad thing to be wiser than your day and generation."

"So Cassandra found," replied Holston; "but she was right, for all that."

V.

"Lay her down by me, Debby," said Mrs. Vane to the comfortable-looking old body who was serving as nurse to a second generation. "Lay her beside her own little mamma. Was she very good? Did Padre Giulio think her lovely? Didn't she cry the least bit while he was pouring the water?"

"Just enough, mum, to let the old Adam out," answered Debby, tucking up mother and child energetically. "As for the Paddry, he thought she was a perfect pink; and he'd had the chill took off the water, thanks be to praise! It seems only yesterday," continued Debby contemplatively, "I was a holdin' Mr. Nicholas to be christened. He roared loud enough for two generations, I recollect, and now he's a cap'n in the army. Well, we're all agin'. Now, mum, I'll trust her with you a little while till I can get that gruel made. That Jovanny puts sorrel into it the minute my back's turned. Now you can take just as good care of baby, Miss Vane, as if I was here, and don't you go a tirin' yourself. Mr. Nicholas lays all the blame on me if your cheeks burn."

As the door closed behind the nurse, Mary nestled the baby close, and gave herself up to the ecstasy of her new joy. We will follow her thoughts as if they had been spoken. Happiness like hers seldom finds vent in words.

"I need no book of meditation with you beside me, baby. I gave you to God before your birth; I brought you into the world to be a saint, and, so help me heaven, I will never stand between you and Him, no matter what the struggle may cost me. O holy little head! glorified by the waters of baptism, with this kiss I offer you to God, that he may fill you with pure thoughts always tending to heaven. Sweet little mouth, speak comfort to every living creature. Sweetest eyes, look heavenward; and when you turn to earth, may you see it strewn with roses as it has been to me. Tender, pure feet, may you never be stained with the world's clay; walk firmly, bravely, steadfastly, where the Infant Jesus trod before you--yes, sweet, though it should be on thorns, my tender, precious one. And O little lovely hands! work for God, work for his poor and suffering ones, work for neglected altars. O God! O God! it is too sweet, too sublime, the possession of this soul which I am to train for thee. Make me as unflinching as Queen Blanche, steadfast as St. Monica, wise as St. Paula. May my child and I revere each other, remembering the Child Jesus and his Mother! When I stand at thy judgment-seat, dear Lord, may this plead for me, that never by example or omission have I caused my child to desist from following thee."

Turning her head upon the pillow, Mary saw her husband standing by the bedside, looking at her and the child. His eyes were full of tears as he stooped and kissed her.

"This is the happiest day of my life," she said as he sat down by her; "the day of our baby's christening. And do you know that I chose for it the anniversary of the day when I found out that you loved me."

"Tell me about that day."

"Won't nurse be here in a minute?"

"No; I have come in her stead, as bearer of apologies. Giovanni has done or left undone something with regard to your dinner, I believe. And now for the day when you made that wonderful discovery. Come, I should think the time for blushing about it was over."

"It was the day before I was to leave Boston," Mary explained. "Almost every thing in the house had been sold at auction. Oh! it was so dismal! Only my room and the library were comparatively untouched. I was sitting on my trunk, counting the money that was left after poor papa's debts were paid."

"How much was there?"

"Just ten dollars. Enough to pay my fare to Drewsville and leave me within a few dollars of absolute dependence. I hated the idea of going to live with my Aunt Jane. But that was not what I was thinking of, nor my poverty, even while I counted my money."

"What were you thinking of, dear?"

Her cheek flushed brightly. "I had never loved any one before, you know, Nicholas," she said apologetically. "I did not know what it was, or perhaps I could have helped it. I knew there was a reason why it was agony for me to leave Boston, and I did not dare to try to find out what the reason was. I knew there was a pain within me harder to bear than the grief for my father's death, but that I must not even think of it. But oh! when they told me that you were in the library waiting to see me, then I knew what the pain was, then I knew what the agony was. Do you wonder that I chose the anniversary of that day? That day when we stood together in the old house beside the empty fireplace, and you asked me to leave solitude and dependence and homesickness, and be your wife."

"Has it been all you thought it would be?"

"All, and more than all," she answered simply. And in his heart he protested that she should never be less happy in her love. As he left her with the nurse, his heart was full of wonder that so pure and true a creature had been intrusted to his keeping. Outside the door a note was handed to him, one of Mrs. Holston's perfumed, rose-colored billets, and he stepped back into his wife's room to read it.

"What is the matter?" she asked, seeing a look of annoyance or perplexity on his face. He handed her the note, and she read:

"DEAR NICHOLAS: We are going to Torcello to-morrow, and must have you with us to expound the mysteries of the old church, the arabesques, etc. We leave at ten, and shall be gone all day. Don't say no to yours very faithfully,

F. R. H.

"P.S.--My sister says, 'Oh! yes. We must have him; he is so _gemüthlich_.'"

The reason for a refusal was simple enough. His going would leave his wife for a whole day to Debby's tender but garrulous mercies; but this was not for her to see or say. An undefined distrust of Lady Sackvil, which she believed to be quite groundless made her urge his acceptance of the invitation. He went to Torcello, and all day long, in and out of measure with the oars, these words rung in his ears:

"All too good For human nature's daily food."

It is a bad sign when one feels out of harmony with one's best influences.

Mrs. Holston required her husband's attendance, and Captain Vane must do the honors of the island to her sister. He was a man of artistic perceptions and of accurate knowledge; and Lady Sackvil's capacities were of precisely the kind to draw these out. Here was the great danger. Mary, though intelligent and sympathetic, could never be any thing more than a good listener; Amelia aroused every faculty within him to full life. The day at Torcello did more harm than many months could undo.

TO BE CONTINUED.

IN MEMORIAM OF THE REV. FRANCIS A. BAKER.

WRITTEN ON ALL SAINTS' DAY, 1869.

All Saints' to-day! To-morrow is All Souls': To-morrow, blessed soul, I pray for thee. To-day, O sainted spirit! pray for me. One day--what years one day of life controls, My round eternity on that day rolls-- Retired, we prayed together; my bent knee Before thee; thy hand raised to make me free, While, as through Moses, mercy wrath withholds. And well I mind me of succeeding joy, How thanks more rapt for God's dear love arose. When my full heart did thy blest words employ: And after, though unmarked the bashful boy, How sweet thy chance inquiry thrilled me, heaven knows! How close the bond there formed, heaven will disclose.

CHURCH MUSIC.

II.

"I do not believe in giving the best music to the devil," said a friend while holding with us an amicable discussion on the subject which forms the heading of this paper.

"You quote John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist sect," we replied. "Nevertheless, we agree both with him and you. We do not believe in giving any music whatever to the devil."

"I would say," returned our friend, "that the best music ought to be given to God."

"Most assuredly," said we; "and the poorest too. Why not?"

"I mean," our friend explained, "that in the public worship of God the best music should be used that can be obtained."

"You reëcho our own sentiments," we rejoined. "But will you please to define what you call _the best_?"

"Oh! nothing simpler," replied our friend. "That music is the best which is the most agreeable."

We murmured something about "_de gustibus_," when our friend prudently added, "to the occasion."

"And the occasion is--" we suggested.

"Is divine worship," continued our friend. "Where the soul is instructed by the divine truths the holy offices of the Church impart, and inspired with sentiments now of prayer, now of praise, now of holy joy, now of penitence, now of lamentation, and so forth."

"Well said!" we exclaimed. "You have again spoken our own mind. But have you ever heard such music?"

"I have heard some very charming music in my time," answered our friend cautiously.

"Exactly answering to your definition?"

"Well, no. I cannot say _exactly_ answering to my definition."

"We have been more fortunate than you," said we. "It has been our lot to hear very charming music, exactly answering to your definition."

"Where?" demanded our friend earnestly.

"In many churches and monasteries of Europe," we replied.

"What was its style and character?" inquired our friend.

"The Gregorian Chant, pure and undefiled."

Our friend honorably closed the discussion by reiterating his definition and regretting his lack of experience.

* * * * *

In a former article we endeavored to bring before our readers such proofs of the statement we made, that the use of modern music in the ritual service of the Church was both improper and illegal, as we thought a very slight examination of the subject would suggest. These proofs were, however, not requisite, since it is a patent fact that such music is an innovation on the universal traditionary use of the Gregorian chant; an innovation, to judge from the countries where it has crept in and supplanted the old ritual song, that is the result of a religious taste vitiated by the influences of a spirit which, if not precisely Protestant, is, to say the least, worldly, anti-Christian, and therefore anti-Catholic. If there be any, then, who prefer music of this character to the authorized chant, it is necessary for them to show good reasons _for the liberty they take in using it_, or why an immediate return should not be made to what is, at any rate, lawful and ordained, if it be nothing more. In England, where the ancient Catholic spirit is again reviving, and a marked return to the old paths is observable both in and out of the Church, the subject of church music has received an attention and awakened an amount of investigation second only to that devoted to the dogmas of faith. And we may here remark that this recent study of the church chant is in no sense conducted in the spirit of simple antiquarian research--as it were, to bring to light buried fragments of a beautiful or useful institute characteristic of a former age, for the admiration of the curious--but in the express intent of reinstating the ancient church song to its rightful place in the holy sanctuaries of sacrifice and prayer.

That the Church has no notion of giving up the Gregorian chant, but, on the contrary, that she earnestly desires its complete restoration in those countries where it has fallen into disuse, we hold to be entirely beyond question. Whatever concessions to the poverty of resources, or to peculiar local circumstances, for the occasional use of modern music, the hierarchy may think it prudent to make, is a subject for the consideration of those who believe themselves to be in such a position as to need these concessions. What is certain is, that the Church by the mouth of her pastors has directed the universal use of the Gregorian chant, and as universally condemned the use of our modern music.

Knowing, however, that the healing of every sore takes time as well as medicine, we admit that in many places this much-needed reformation cannot be instantaneously made. With us in the United States, the clergy, as a body, have but a slight acquaintance, either theoretically or practically, with the church chant; and knowing, as we do from experience, what false and barbaric executions of it they have been condemned to suffer in the course of their ecclesiastical education, and from which they have been naturally led to form their judgments concerning it, we do not wonder at the wide-spread prejudice that exists against its use, and the opposition to its introduction that is met with, even at their hands. That our laity have never given expression to their own sentiments in its regard is simply due to their complete ignorance and total inexperience of the whole subject. All fears, therefore, of offending the people or of alienating them from the solemn offices of the Church, on account of the banishment of florid music and the introduction of plain chant, are, as yet, groundless.

Esteeming it as a matter of great moment, and urged by oft-repeated solicitations on the part of their hierarchy, the clergy in England and Ireland have, for several years past, been devoting their energies to carry out the wishes of their superiors, and devise some means to ameliorate the condition of church music, acknowledged to have, with them as with us, gradually degenerated since the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

As far back as 1849, an effort was made, with this end in view, to supply proper singers in the churches, at the head of which was the Cardinal, then Bishop Wiseman. The vicars-apostolic in synod had decreed, "Foemineæ voces ne audiantur in choro," hoping to gradually induce a return to the established discipline of the Church. The present Archbishop of Westminster, referring to this in a letter, says,

"Unfortunately, this decree has not been carried out. I can only suppose that the causes which brought in this deviation have prevailed to obtain its toleration until such time as we shall be able to do better. A sudden order to remove women singers, while as yet we have no boys trained to take their places, would be inconvenient and inconsiderate. I have not thought it right to issue any such order. But all that I can effect by the strongest expression of desire and persuasion I shall endeavor to effect."

In a circular letter to his clergy, dated May 8th, 1869, the archbishop prohibits the employment of women singers in all choirs to be newly formed.

We can well understand the end had in view by this order for the exclusion of female voices _from the choir_. To us it is, in effect, an order for the exclusion of all figured music, and the restoration of plain chant. The archbishop, however, seems to allow the possibility of the composition of "masses which, while they admit the full compass and perfection of modern musical science, exclude all that is secular or theatrical, by retaining the gravity and majesty of our ecclesiastical and sacred tradition." This is, however, only a concession; for he had just before written, "When once tried by experience, the grave, sweet, majestic, intellectual _music of the Church_ will win all who are now in favor of a less ecclesiastical style."

The hope expressed by Archbishop Manning, that masses would be composed for male voices only, and of sufficiently grave character to suit the services of the Church, was suggested, doubtless, by some quite respectable essays of this kind made on the Continent, and offered to the Congress of Malines at its late sessions, as well by the labors in this direction of the Rev. Canon Oakeley, to whom his letter on this subject was addressed. This reverend gentleman has been the rector of a London parish for eighteen years, and has never admitted a female into his choir, although the perfection of the musical department in his church has received many high encomiums. He supplies the soprano parts by boys' voices, to the cultivation of which he has devoted a great deal of energy. The character of his church music is as follows: At High Mass, whatever is _de rigueur_ for the Sunday or festival is sung strictly according to the Roman Gradual, save those parts which may be ranged under the title of Ordinarium Missæ, namely, the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. These portions are not as a rule chosen from the Gregorian chant, but are _morceaux_ of selected modern music. His Vesper and Compline service is wholly Gregorian, as given in the Vesperale Romanum. We believe that, encouraged by his success in this partial reformation, many priests in Great Britain have followed his example. We shall have occasion to speak of this matter and give in another paper some extracts of the canon's opinion of the feasibility and effectiveness of boy singers.

Taking the hint thrown out by his grace the Archbishop of Westminster, several skilled musicians have already published a number of masses, revised and corrected to suit the late "Instructions" given by the cardinal vicar to Roman composers and singers, with a view to restrain the attempts made even there to introduce modern music. We do not pretend to criticise these simplified masses in this place. All we desire to do is to call attention to the significance of the movement toward musical reformation. Whether second-rate musical compositions are better than the authorized chant, we think is questionable.

The original masses, composed in the same intent, which competed for the handsome prizes offered by the late Catholic Congress of Malines, possess much artistic merit; perhaps a little too much, if intended for popular use.

Wholly converted, as we are, in heart and mind, to the exclusive use of plain chant, we nevertheless commend these well-meant efforts. They are efforts in the right direction, and similar ones, we doubt not, must be made with us before the ancient discipline of the Church concerning her chant will prevail.

Something, at least, can be done, and without delay. We cannot see what possible excuse we have any longer to offer for not singing the Introit, the Gradual, Offertory, and Communion at High Mass. These parts of the Mass are quite as essential, in the mind of the Church, as the Kyrie, the Credo, the Sanctus, or the Agnus Dei. If we are able to procure the execution of most difficult compositions for these latter portions, we are surely quite as well able to procure the chanting of the former. It may be said that, if these now neglected parts be sung as they should be, and can only effectively be, in Gregorian chant, it is possible one of these different styles of music would suffer much by contrast with the other. To this we agree; but which one will be the sufferer, our objector and ourself might think differently. Such a mixture has, however, been considered, on the whole, preferable by some in England who have adopted it. Says a writer in _The Dublin Review_, "We may remark that if it be true that a constant recurrence of the same unison masses, Sunday after Sunday, would tax the patience of our people, so, on the other hand, that limited round of figured masses to which it has been the fashion to confine the choirs of almost all our churches, is found by experience to be, if any thing, more tiring still." The writer adds, "We ought to _enlarge_ our stock of mass music." We think it were better to render passably the stock we already possess. He continues, "We consider that where success has attended the efforts of clergy and choirs, to render the services of the Church noble, edifying, and attractive, it has been by the combination we have described; and to take one instance--it is to this, and to the ecclesiastical feature of a choir of boys and men chanting Vespers, etc., in their proper place in church, that we attribute the fact that the church over which Canon Oakeley presides has become the centre of so much interest. And when we mention that solemn Vespers and Benediction are sung in this Church, on all days of devotion, with as much correctness and beauty as on Sundays, and that a considerable number of the faithful always assist on such occasions, we shall have given a specimen of the results which may be expected to follow elsewhere, if a like arrangement be adopted."

We know that there is always difficulty in changing one's customs, but it is the mark of Catholic zeal never to shrink before any cost or sacrifice where plain duty, the glory of God, and the honor of the Holy Church are in question. All must admit that the custom of omitting any ceremony or rite essential to the due celebration of High Mass, or any other function, is a bad custom--a custom to be discontinued the moment it is in our power to do so. The bishops assembled in the late Plenary Council of Baltimore made a special decree concerning the due performance of the Vesper service. What difficulty is there here in obeying this decree both in its letter and spirit? There are enough books already published to supply the singers with the proper music for the entire service. Harmonized versions of the psalms, antiphons, and anthems have been made for the use of those singers and organists who are, as yet, ignorant of plain chant, and accustomed only to modern musical notation. If any thing be wanting in these, the demand for better and more convenient books would soon be met with the supply. Apart from their openly profane character, we do not see what possible plea can be put in for singing what is called "Musical Vespers"--for the most part, musical performances in which it would be wholly impossible to recognize the Vesper office, as strictly ordained and enjoined by the Church. The office of Vespers, according to the Roman rite, is what we are supposed to sing. We do not hesitate to say that no "Musical Vespers" ever sung in this country were in conformity to that rite. Were we to announce that fact to our music-loving Protestant friends, who frequent our churches at Vesper time, to enjoy the beautiful "Vesper service," it might possibly prove a little startling; and if they were at the pains to inquire of what character the service was which they saw and heard, what answer could we honestly make, but that it was a musical performance of garbled portions of the Vesper office, gotten up to answer for the same, with a view of pleasing the audience? Not only in High Mass, then, but also in Vespers, there is some amelioration possible to all, the results of which will not only bring our Church services more into conformity with the spirit of the Universal Church, and the decrees concerning the due celebration of divine worship issued by our hierarchy, but we are fully assured will prove most acceptable to the faithful, and contribute no little to their edification.

We have indulged in the foregoing somewhat desultory remarks before entering upon the special purpose of this paper, in hopes to direct the attention of our readers to the gravity of the subject in question, and to show that we are very far from being singular in its discussion. Whatever may be the merits of our modern music, and they certainly are of a very high order, when considered from the point of artistic combination, and the expression of certain sentiments of the soul, we hold, nevertheless, that the Gregorian chant is the _true song of the Catholic Church_. That it deserves this title on the score of authority, which has distinctly and universally sanctioned it, we think we have sufficiently proved; and as well that other music has been as distinctly condemned and rejected. We desire now to examine the character of the church chant, in its more intimate relations with the ritual, and its unrivalled religious expression, that its intrinsic merits may be more clearly understood and more heartily appreciated.

In the first place, the Church never enjoins any thing without good reason; and her reasons are grounded not only in the conclusions of human science, but in the perceptions of a divine inspiration. We do not hesitate to give the title of "divine" to her sacred Liturgy and Office, because we believe they were compiled with the assistance of the Holy Ghost. Is it unreasonable to suppose that her chant, proceeding, as it does, from the same source, the work of the same hands and hearts to whom she committed the labor of the composition and compilation of the words, and together accepted by her, should have had the same divine aid? The question is well put by one who has devoted much time and thought to the subject of church music:

"Can we believe that the divine assistance can have failed her so far that her work, a discordant jumble of notes, should not be fit to be sung by us in our country and century? How different were the feelings and the belief of the people during the ages of faith! The monks and other holy men who wrote those sacred chants, set themselves to work sometimes after months of holy meditation and of watching, of fasting and of prayer; and then they composed those melodies, so little appreciated now, because so little known; but to the correct religious taste of our pious ancestors in the faith, so full of heavenly harmony that they sometimes thought, and not always without reason, the angels themselves had dictated them."[145]

That the Gregorian chant is yet, as it was in former times, the true musical expression of her Divine Office, and of those portions of the liturgy of the Holy Mass, and various public functions, appointed to be sung, is plain from the fact that, in despite of all the development of the _musica ficta_ in the hands and with the influence of its composers and lovers, the Church still obstinately adheres to those ancient melodies. What can we say but that, as the Church is the best judge of her own language of prayer and praise, so she must equally as well be of the form of its expression?

But, as we said before, the Church never acts without reason. If she accepts this form of chant in the first place, it is because such a form of melody is appropriate, and well becoming her inspired language of prayer. If she retains it through so many ages, and has no thought of changing it now, it is because the same reason still holds good.

One of the most remarkable points in the character of the Gregorian chant is the fact that it has partaken, possibly by association, of the "perennial freshness" which is so strongly marked in the celebration of the rites and ceremonies of the Church. To every people, of all ages and countries, these rites and ceremonies possess a dramatic power of the highest order. Ancient yet ever new, they never weary by repetition as fast and festival recur in the ecclesiastical year. On this an English writer says,

"The very ruggedness of the Gregorian modes serves to impart to them a character of durability. These simple melodies, as we well know from the instance of the Vesper Psalms, to mention no other, somehow never pall upon the ear, and have, in fact, a perennial freshness which we can only account for by the circumstance of their having a variety of scale which modern melodies do not possess. This, too, is proved by the well-known fact that the most beautiful chants of the modern school (and we ourselves are fain to add also the most beautiful motets, Anthems, Glorias, Credos, etc.) become unendurable by constant repetition; and for this reason we find that even dissenters have been fain to adopt the old chant in their services."

This is, to say the least, a very strong practical confirmation of the wisdom of the Holy Church in preserving a treasure so precious that even time does not waste it, or use tarnish its beauty.

A second reason assigned by the same writer, we give for what it is worth. It possesses, indeed, no little _vraisemblance_:

"We may look upon it in its plaintive if not mournful character in fact, as a kind of _pilgrim's song_, by which it would seem as if the Church would have us remember, even in the midst of our festal joys, that we are the '_Exules filii Hevæ, gementes et flentes in hâc lacrymarum valle_.' It is, we may say, the grave, sweet, pathetic note which the Church puts into the mouths of her children, lamenting with the Psalmist that 'their sojourning is prolonged;' the plaintive accent in which they confess that they are strangers upon earth, and that they 'seek another, even a heavenly city.' And so Father Faber sings in his well-known hymn--itself a kind of wayfarer's song--

'While we toil on, and soothe ourselves with weeping, Till life's long night shall break in endless love.'"

This is by no means a quaint conception of modern fancy. St. Paschasius Radpert, a monk of the abbey of Old Corby, who lived about the year 800, says,

"There is no song to be found without a tone of sadness in it; even as here below there are no joys without a mixture of sorrow; for songs of pure joy belong only to the heavenly Sion, but lamentation is the property of our earthly pilgrimage."

To us, however, the Gregorian chant is the true song of the Church, chiefly because it is essentially choral in character; by which we mean that its melodies, so simple in construction, so massive in form, and its grave and majestic rhythm, fit it eminently for execution by large bodies of singers, called in church parlance the _schola_, or choir.

In the discipline of the early church it was supposed that all the congregation of the faithful present at the Holy Sacrifice responded to the salutations and solemn invitations of the priest at the altar to unite with him in prayer and acts of adoration. We have before us a very old reproduction of an ancient manuscript, entitled, ~Hê theia leitourgia tou hagiou apostolou Petrou~, _Missa Apostolica; seu, Divinum Sacrificium S. Apostoli Petri_, which purports, and on good authority, to be the Mass of St. Peter. At the close of the Offertory, we read as follows; we quote the Latin version given side by side with the Greek:

"_Deinde sacerdos voce clara dicit._

"Dominus vobiscum.

"_Populus._ Et cum spiritu tuo.

"_Sacerdos._ Oremus.

"_Populus._ Domine, miserere, _ter_.

"_Tum sacerdos alta voce._

"Præbe, Domine, servis tuis, dexteram coelestis auxilii, ut te toto corde perquirant, et quæ dignè postulant consequantur. Per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, cum quo vivis et regnas Deus noster in unitate Spiritus sancti, in sæcula.

"_Populus._ Amen. Sanctus Deus, sanctus fortis. _Et interea dum populus dicit hymnum ter sanctum, precatur sacerdos._ (Various prayers here follow, closing with the Lavabo.)

"_Mox sacerdos clara voce._

"Dominus vobiscum.

"_Populus._ Et cum spiritu tuo.

"_Sacerdos._ Ostia, ostia. (Alluding to the closing of the doors and departure of the catechumens.)

"_Populus._ Credo in unum Deum, etc.

"_Sacerdos._ Stemus honeste; stemus cum reverentia, etc.

"_Populus._ Misericordiam; pacem.

"_Sacerdos, alta voce._ Hostiam tibi Domine destinatam in oblationem sanctifica, et per eam nos clementer suscipe, per Dominum, etc., per omnia sæcula sæculorum.

"_Populus._ Amen.

"_Sacerdos._ Sursum corda.

"_Populus._ Habemus ad Dominum.

"_Sacerdos._ Gratiarum actiones submittamus, Domino Deo nostro.

"_Populus._ Dignum et justum est."

The priest continues to chant the preface. At the close of it the people sing the Sanctus, and answer _Amen_ when the priest has pronounced the words of consecration. The entire _Pater noster_ is given to the people, and they respond to the usual salutations made after the communion. A side rubrical note, referring to the parts assigned to the populus or people, says, "_Populi vox est et cantorum_."

This manner of celebrating High Mass will seem to many of our readers as strange and obsolete; but such is precisely the manner in which one can yet hear the Holy Sacrifice in many towns and villages on the continent of Europe, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-nine; and we need hardly say with what sublime and soul-stirring effect.

We do not think it at all probable that this old form of congregational accompaniment of the Mass ever can be universally revived. Yet it must be acknowledged that no more complete, intelligent, or edifying expression of the Great Eucharistic Rite could possibly be desired.

"Shall we ever see the day," asks a writer in the old _Dublin Review_, "when, on entering a Catholic church during service time, we shall be struck, not with the dampening spectacle of a congregation partly composed of unbelievers in the act of enjoying the pleasure of a Sunday concert, while the remainder, with closed books in their lap, or by their side, wait patiently or impatiently till the prolonged and a hundred times repeated _Amen_ of the Gloria or the Creed deigns to come to an end, but with the refreshing sight of an unmixed body of true worshippers, learned and ignorant, high and low, rich and poor, unostentatiously led by a select choir, engaged in heartily singing the praises of Him in whose house they are assembled? To so consoling and truly Catholic a state of things should all our reforms tend; for it will only be when it is established that we shall be able to taste the sweetness, as well as delight in the beauty and feel the grandeur of that congregational singing which so many desire, but which is incompatible with an encouragement in churches of the music of _Don Giovanni_, _Fidelio_, _Lodoiska_, _Il Barbière_, and _Faust_."

Were this revival of congregational singing in the mind of the Church, there could be no question about the form of melody to be applied. No one would think of looking elsewhere than to plain chant as the only practical and fitting resource in that event.

But, as in past times there was always the select _schola_ or choir to whom the choral selections of the divine offices were committed, so at the present day it would seem to be that which the Church aims mainly at preserving. Indeed, as Dr. Lootens well observes, the very architectural dispositions of our churches, when constructed according to the ritual, suppose such a body of singers, who, being the coadjutors of the sacred ministers, are supposed to possess a quasi-ecclesiastical character, and appear in the sanctuary properly vested as _clerici_, or clerks, and whose demeanor, as well as singing, is of that grave and decorous character which beseems the house of God and the presence of the Holy Sacrament. The learned prelate says:

"A Protestant meeting-house is built to preach in; the nearer the minister is to the people, the better he is heard. _Our_ churches are, first of all, places of worship. Nothing so affects the visitor who enters one of our churches in the old country as the mysterious depth of their sanctuaries. We allude here not merely to the Gothic cathedrals, but to all kind of churches, no matter to what particular order of architecture they belong. Architects, in those ancient times, would as soon have thought of planning a church without a chancel, (choir,) as of building one without a roof."

We also might well say that when any Catholic from the Continent visits Protestant England and enters one of those ancient cathedrals, once the glory and pride of Catholic England, now fallen into the hands of strangers who know not their meaning nor sacred uses; and when he sees those mysteriously deep sanctuaries, whose stalls are no longer filled, as of yore, with the devout white-robed clerics, or it may be with cowled monks, chanting the divine hours of prayer, or responding to the sacrificing priest, but with a few fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen looking at each other across the once consecrated place, hallowed by the footsteps of saints, and praying to be delivered "from all error, heresy, and schism," (save the mark!) what an indescribable pain must wring his soul; how involuntarily the plaintive words of the Psalmist must rise upon his lips, "_Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus, et flevimus, cum recordaremur Sion!_"

Yet, let him come to our land and visit _our Catholic_ churches--but we anticipate; it is not of the proper place for the choir, but of the choir itself we wish to speak.

A select choir of clerks, or singers vested in cassock and surplice, who, ranged in the sanctuary, chant _in chorus_ the Asperges, the Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, Gradual, Credo, Offertory, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Communion, and the responses of High Mass, and the antiphons, psalms, versicles, etc., at Vespers, is what the ritual supposes and expressly demands. A choir of mixed voices gathered in a gallery at the extreme end of the church, either hidden behind curtains or exposed to view, has neither been ever supposed or sanctioned by the ritual, much less the omission of nearly one half of what is ordered to be sung. When we look at the actual state of things as they are in vogue amongst us, and honestly look the ritual of the Holy Church in the face, does not our memory sometimes remind us of the reproach of Almighty God to the negligent priests of the old law?--"_Non servastis præcepta sanctuarii mei_;" a reflection which is not ours, but very pertinently made by the zealous American bishop whose words we have already quoted.

If, as has been well said, "Our present defective knowledge and appreciation of the liturgy is one of the indications of an enfeebled faith among a Catholic people," so we do not hesitate to affirm that a reasonable knowledge of, and constant participation in the divine offices of the Church is practically necessary to an intelligent faith in the great mysteries of religion, and the only means of keeping alive and nourishing true Catholic devotion. Prayer said in union with the Church is both the light of the understanding and the fire of divine love for the heart.

One of the directors of the seminary of St. Sulpice, in Paris, in a recent publication, entitled, _Le Saint Office considéré au point de Vue de la Piété_, significantly remarks:

"Quand on voit la piété se refroidir en tant d'endroits, il est naturel de craindre qu'on ne l'envoque le bon Dieu avec tant de ferveur, que le feu sacré ne languisse dans son sanctuaire. C'est le moment de se demander si les adorateurs ne seraient devenus plus froids en devenant plus rares, _si le silence des temples n'a pas amené le sommeil des âmes_."

When one sees piety growing cold in so many places, it is but reasonable to fear that God is invoked with so little fervor because the sacred fire is dying out in his sanctuary. It is time to ask ourselves if the worshippers have not become less devout in becoming less attentive at the services of the church; if the silence of our temples of religion has not brought on the sleep of souls.

The slightest examination of the offices of the Church will show how well they are adapted to instruction in doctrine, and for the illustration of the Gospel record and the historic acts and interior life of Christianity. We have not the time in this place, nor is it necessary, to adduce proofs of this. They whose interest in this matter we aim at arousing have a daily reminder of its truth.

That these holy offices are the fountain-head of solid, popular devotion is equally indisputable. We have nothing to replace them, nor do we care to have. We have plenty of so-called "popular devotions," admirably adapted for their special purposes; but it must be confessed that _popular devotion_ is far below that standard of spirituality which the Church aims at inspiring; and which it is not only possible to attain, but which in ages gone by, whose grade of refinement and intellectual culture we affect to despise, was the normal standard of Catholic piety. From whence did the people draw this strong and healthy nourishment of the spiritual life? The answer will be found in the fact that the people were educated from childhood in the liturgy, and they were not, as now, for the most part spectators, but participators at the celebration of the solemn, instructive, and devout offices of the Church.

The accomplished author of the remarkable work on _Christian Schools and Scholars_ thus writes:

"The fact is that, in one respect, the rude, ignorant peasantry of the middle ages were a great deal more learned than the pupils of our modern schools. In a certain sort of way, every child was rendered familiar with the language of the Church. From infancy they were taught to recite their prayers, the antiphons, and many parts of the ritual of the Church, in Latin, and to understand the meaning of what they learnt; and hence they became familiar with a great number of Latin words, so that a Latin discourse would sound far less strange in their ears than in those of a more educated audience of the same class in the present day. In many cases, indeed, the children who were taught in the priest's, or parochial school, learned grammar, that is--the Latin language; but all were required to learn the church chant, and a considerable number of Latin prayers, and hymns, and psalms. This point of poor-school education deserves more than a passing notice. Its result was, that the lower classes were able thoroughly to understand and heartily to take part in the rites and offices of Holy Church. The faith rooted itself in their hearts with a tenacity which was not easily destroyed, even by penal laws, because they imbibed it from its fountain source--the Church herself. She taught her children out of her own ritual, and by her own voice, and made them believers after a different fashion from those much more highly educated Catholics of the same class who, in our day, often grow up almost as much strangers to the liturgical language of the Church as the mass of unbelievers outside the fold. Can there be any incongruity more grievous than to enter a Catholic school, rich in every appliance of education, and to find that, in spite of the time, money, and method lavished on its support, its pupils are unable to understand and recite the church offices, and are untrained to take part in church psalmody? The language of the Church has, therefore, in a very literal sense, become a dead language to them, and it is from other and far inferior sources that they derive their religious instruction. Thus they are ignorant of a large branch of school education, in which the children of a ruder and darker age were thoroughly trained; no doubt, on the other hand, they know a great many things of which children in the middle ages were altogether ignorant; and the question is simply to determine which method of instruction has most practical utility in it. Without dogmatizing on this point, we may be permitted to regret that through any defect in the system of our parochial schools, Catholic congregations should in our own days be deprived of the solemn and thorough celebrations of those sacred offices which in themselves comprise a body of unequalled religious instruction; and that, in an age which makes so much of the theory of education, we should have to confess our inability to teach our children to pray and sing the prayers of the Church as the children of Catholic peasants prayed and sang them six hundred years ago. The English schools of that period enjoyed the benefit of no other inspection than that of the parish priest and the archdeacon, 'the eye of the bishop,' as he was called; and if their pupils knew little about 'monocotyledons,' the 'crustacea,' or grammatical analysis, they were able to recite their Alma Redemptoris and their Dixit Dominus with hearty, _intelligent_ devotion.[146] They knew the order of the church service, and could sing its psalms and antiphons in the language of the church, and to her ancient tones."

The last words of this most interesting extract will spare us the trouble of insisting at any great length upon the point chiefly in question. The sacred offices of the Church, to whose due celebration and to their intelligent participation in them the faith and piety of our ancestors is in great measure to be ascribed, and the peculiar and inimitable melodies, yet, happily, undivorced from their language of prayer, ever formed one inseparable whole.

A revival of those offices in the spirit of their ancient fidelity to the ritual is, as all must allow, a revival of Gregorian chant. The project of substituting in its place a selection of solos, duets, etc., either culled from threadbare compositions of the two last centuries, notorious for their sensuousness of style and over-wrought "word-painting," or such melodies of the modern schools as our present masters are able to produce, would be unhesitatingly ridiculed on all sides.

Far be it from us to be guilty of the presumption of questioning the wisdom of the Church in permitting to the clergy the individual and private recitation of the Divine Office; but it is beyond dispute that so much of it as is enjoined to be performed publicly, _in choir_, on Sundays and festivals, is not absolved by the _bravura_ singing of some "choice musical selections" in an organ-gallery, and the private recitation of the real office meanwhile by a lonely celebrant in the sanctuary. Moreover, the people are thereby greatly hindered in their devotions and deprived utterly of the spiritual fruit the sacred office so abundantly affords. If we gave the people a chance, we would very soon see how joyfully they would sing their Credo, and heartily chant their Dixit Dominus, as of old. "I do not like the Vespers in ---- street," a well-instructed servant was lately overheard to say; "it is nothing but a concert of four opera-singers, and I'm all astray while it's going on. Nobody seems to make it out but the Protestant ladies and gentlemen, who do nothing but talk about it all the time. Give me the singing at Father ----'s church, where all the clergy sing, and where I can sing in the Tantum Ergo myself at benediction, if I like."

What we are arguing for is a strict, rubrical celebration of High Mass and Vespers, the two public offices enjoined upon the clergy in this country. When the rubrics for these offices are observed to the letter, we shall have no fear for the fate of plain chant, which has proved itself by the experience of so many centuries to be the only adequate and satisfying expression of the spirit of prayer that breathes through all the solemn ritual service of the Holy Church.

The words of the pious and erudite Benedictine monk, Dom Gueranger, Abbot of Solesmes, are again ringing in our ears. We cannot refrain from closing our article with a quotation from the preface to his _Liturgical Year_, the beauty of which will be a sufficient apology for its length:

"The prayer of the Church is the most pleasing to the ear and heart of God, and therefore the most efficacious of all prayers. Happy, then, is he who prays with the Church, and unites his own petitions with those of this Spouse, who is so dear to her Lord that he gives her all she asks. It was for this reason that our Blessed Saviour taught us to say _our Father_, and not _my Father_; _give us, forgive us, deliver us_, and not _give me, forgive me, deliver me_. Hence, we find that, for upward of a thousand years, the Church, who prays in her temples seven times in the day, and once again during the night, did not pray alone. The people kept her company, and fed themselves with delight on the manna which is hidden under the words and mysteries of the divine liturgy. Thus initiated into the sacred cycle of the mysteries of the Christian year, the faithful, attentive to the teachings of the Spirit, came to know the secrets of eternal life; and without any further preparation, a Christian was not unfrequently chosen by the bishops to be a priest, or even a bishop, that he might go and pour out on the people the treasures of wisdom and love which he had drunk in at the very fountain-head.

"But for now many past ages, Christians have grown too solicitous about earthly things to frequent the holy _vigils_ and the mystical _hours_ of the day. Long before the rationalism of the sixteenth century became the auxiliary of the heresies of that period by curtailing the solemnity of the divine service, the days for the people's uniting exteriorly with the prayer of the church had been reduced to Sundays and festivals. During the rest of the year, the solemn and imposing grandeur of the liturgy was gone through, and the people took no share in it. Each new generation increased in indifference for that which their forefathers in the faith had loved as their best and strongest food. Social prayer was made to give way to individual devotion. Chanting, which is the natural expression of the prayers and even of the sorrows of the Church, became limited to the solemn feasts. That was the first sad revolution in the Christian world.

"But even then Christendom was still rich in churches and monasteries, and there, day and night, was still heard the sound of the same venerable prayers which the Church had used through all the past ages. So many hands lifted up to God drew down upon the earth the dew of heaven, averted storms, and won victory for those who were in battle. These servants of God, who thus kept up an untiring choir that sang the divine praises, were considered as solemnly deputed by the people, which was still Catholic, to pay the full tribute of homage and thanksgiving due to God, his Blessed Mother, and the saints. These prayers formed a treasury which belonged to all. The faithful gladly united themselves in spirit to what was done. When any affliction, or the desire to obtain a special favor, led them to the house of God, they were sure to hear, no matter at what hour they went, that untiring voice of prayer which was for ever ascending to heaven for the salvation of mankind. At times they would give up their worldly business and cares, and take part in the office of the church, and all still understood, at least in a general way, the mysteries of the liturgy.

"Then came the _Reformation_, and, at the onset, it attacked the very life of Christianity--it would put an end to the sacrifice of man's praise of his God. It strewed many countries with the ruins of churches; the clergy, the monks, and virgins consecrated to God were banished or put to death; and in the churches which were spared the divine offices were not permitted. In other countries, where the persecution was not so violent, many sanctuaries were devastated and irremediably ruined, so that the life and voice of prayer grew faint. Faith, too, was weakened; rationalism became fearfully developed; and now our own age seems threatened with what is the result of these evils--the subversion of all social order.

"For, when the Reformation had abated the violence of its persecution, it had other weapons wherewith to attack the Church. By these, several countries, which continued to be Catholic, were infected with that spirit of pride which is the enemy of prayer. The modern spirit would have it that _prayer is not action_--as though every good action done by man were not a gift of God; a gift which implies two prayers: one of petition, that it may be granted; and another of thanksgiving, because it is granted! There were found men who said, _Let us abolish all the festival days of God from the earth_; and then came upon us that calamity which brings all others with it, and which the good Mardochai besought God to avert from his nation, when he said, _Shut not, O Lord, the mouths of them that sing to thee!_

"But, by the mercy of God, _we have not been consumed_; there have been left remnants of Israel; and the number of believers in the Lord has increased. What is it that has moved the heart of our God to bring about this merciful conversion? Prayer, which had been interrupted, has been resumed. Numerous choirs of virgins consecrated to God, and, though far less in number, of men who have left the world to spend themselves in the divine praises, make _the voice of the turtle-dove heard in our land_. This voice is every day gaining more power; may it find acceptance from our Lord, and move him to show the sign of his covenant with us, the rainbow of reconciliation! May our venerable cathedrals again reëcho those solemn formulæ of prayer which heresy has so long suppressed! May the faith and munificence of the faithful reproduce the prodigies of those past ages, which owed their greatness to the acknowledgment, which all, even the very civic authorities, paid to the all-powerfulness of prayer!

"For a long time a remedy has been devised for an evil which was only vaguely felt. The spirit of prayer, and even prayer itself, has been sought for in methods, and prayer-books, which contain, it is true, laudable, yea pious thoughts, but, after all, only human thoughts. Such nourishment cannot satisfy the soul, for it does not initiate her into the prayer of the Church. Instead of uniting her with the prayer of the Church it isolates her. Of this kind are so many of those collections of prayers and reflections which have been published, under different titles, during the last two hundred years, and by which it was intended to edify the faithful, and suggest to them, either for hearing mass, or going to the sacraments, or keeping the feasts of the church, certain more or less commonplace considerations and acts, always drawn up according to the manner of thought and sentiment peculiar to the author of each book. Each manual had consequently its own way of treating these important subjects. To Christians already formed to piety, such books as these would, indeed, serve a purpose, especially as nothing better was offered to them; but they had not influence sufficient to inspire with a relish and spirit of prayer such as had not otherwise received them.

"But this liturgical prayer would soon become powerless were the faithful not to take a real share in it, or, at least, not to associate themselves to it in heart. It can heal and save the world, but only on the condition that it be understood. Be wise, then, ye children of the Catholic Church, and get that largeness of heart which will make you pray the prayer of your mother. Come, and buy your share in it, fill up that harmony which is so sweet to the ear of God. Where would you obtain the spirit of prayer if not at its natural source? Let us remind you of the exhortation of the apostle to the first Christians: _Let the peace of Christ rejoice in your hearts--let the word of Christ dwell in you abundantly, in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual canticles, singing in grace in your hearts to God_."

FOOTNOTES:

[145] Introduction to _Extracts from the Roman Gradual and other Liturgical Books_, in course of publication by the Rt. Rev. Louis Lootens, D.D.

[146] St. Godric is said to have learned (in a poor school at Durham) many things of which he was before ignorant, "by hearing, reading, and _chanting_ them." In the parochial schools, even from St. Dunstan's time, children of the lower orders were taught grammar and _church music_. Schools of greater or less pretensions were attached to most parish churches, and the scholars assembled in the porch. Thus, in 1300, we read of children being taught to _sing_ and read in the porch of St. Martin's, Norwich. At Stoke-by-Clare there was, besides the extensive college, a school in which boys were taught "grammar, _singing_, and good manners." To which answer the pictures in Chaucer of the schools in which children were taught,

"That is to say, to singe and to rede, As small children do in their childhede."

Again:

"As he sate in the scole at his primere, He Alma Redemptoris heard sing," etc.

HINTS ON HOUSEKEEPING

BY A GRANDMOTHER.

To one who has long been accustomed to a retired and solitary life, an occasional glimpse of the busy world and its ways, a peep "through the loopholes of the retreat," has a relish and an interest scarcely to be appreciated by the actual participants in the turmoil and bustle of those scenes.

In the quiet routine of rural life, undisturbed by great excitements, and to a great measure removed from the influences of stirring events, it is almost impossible to keep pace with the changes that are constantly taking place in the great outer world. I think this must be more especially true of our American society than of any other nation. We are such a restless race, so impatient of monotony, so eager for excitement and variety, that what is most in vogue to-day is forgotten to-morrow, and the most earnest pursuits of the present are liable to be rapidly superseded by others of a widely different nature.

After an absence of only a few months from the social circle with which it is my delight occasionally to mingle, I often find myself much in the predicament of poor Rip Van Winkle, after his long repose in "Sleepy Hollow," and dare not, upon my reappearance, open my lips until I have listened long enough to catch the key-note, as it were, of the topics at present engaging attention, lest my remarks and inquiries may appear as ill-timed and excite as much surprise as did those of that redoubtable victim of vagrancy and the broomstick.

Among all the changes that have come over our American world, since we who are now grandmothers could call ourselves young, there are none more utterly astounding--perhaps because, having long claimed our careful attention, they are more familiar and interesting to us--than those embraced in the household and home economy. Now, although I am not disposed to undervalue the improvements of modern times, or to decry the advance of modern ideas in other departments, I am wholly unwilling to yield the palm to modern housekeeping. In spite of every advantage furnished by the superior appliances of these days, and every facility offered by the inventive genius of our people in labor-saving machinery adapted to each department of domestic life, I insist that our housekeepers are inferior in all the qualities that contribute to the comfort of home to their mothers, and that their mothers were less efficient than their grandmothers. There has been a gradual but steady decline in the art of housekeeping, and a more rapid but equally constant increase in the expense thereof. Indeed, this last item looms up in dimensions and glares upon us with an aspect nothing less than appalling to dames like myself, who cherish antiquated notions on these subjects.

"Henry, why in the world do you not marry?" I said the other day to a highly-esteemed young friend, whom I had known from his childhood, and who is richly endowed, as I well know, with every quality necessary to make a home happy. "Why in the world do you not marry? It is a positive wrong to society, that so much domestic virtue as you possess should remain unappropriated. You are now well established in business, with every prospect of success, and you really ought to be thinking of making a home for yourself."

"I wish I dare indulge such an aspiration," he replied with something very like a regretful sigh; "but, to tell you the truth, such a step as taking a wife to myself under my present circumstances would be ruinous. My business is indeed, as you say, well established, and--within certain, not very extensive, limits--prosperous. By close attention and strict fidelity to its interests, diligent industry, and careful economy, I realize annually a very comfortable income; not large, but, under these conditions, quite sure; as years advance, this will probably increase slowly and surely. Now, if I were to marry, just imagine what a load of expense would be incurred at once! You know as well as I the manner of life I should be required to adopt, by any young lady of the class among whom I should look for a wife; and I really am not in a position to incur such a burden now, nor can I hope to be for a long time to come."

This was said in a tone of despondency and deep feeling, and I could not but sympathize with my young friend, compelled thus reluctantly to suppress the dearest aspirations of youth; nor could I avoid deploring the exigencies that constrain the greater portion of worthy young men in our country, to relinquish the hope of a happy home of their own, which would be their strongest stimulant to exertion and their best shield against temptation.

It is long since I have been in the habit of witnessing the gambols of the gay world; but I happened not long since to peep in upon a sort of fandango at the house of one of my friends, and, bless my heart, what costumes! My surprise would beggar description. I happened to be standing near the mistress of the house, and remarked to her that I was not aware this was to be a _fancy party_.

"And it is not," she replied.

"But you do not mean to tell me," I exclaimed in dismay, "that these are the ordinary costumes for full dress at parties?"

"Of course they are. Why not?" she very innocently answered.

I ventured no further remark or inquiry, but retired with my own quiet cogitations into a silent corner. Presently a sprightly young lady of whom I am very fond, and who is foolish enough to cherish a great fancy for me, came tripping up to my retreat, her face all shining with gayety and goodness. "Tell me, my dear," said I, "why you young ladies wear your pockets outside your dress, and in such an inconvenient place, and why you wear your skirts pinned up at a party, just as we used to wear them when about our housework?"

"Oh! those are not our pockets; they are _paniers_; and it is the present style to loop up the skirts this way."

"But, my child, can you tell me how many superfluous yards of silk are required to make skirts in this way, and to furnish these festoons?"

"We do not count by yards," said she, laughing; "but this is not an expensive dress. It cost only _eighty dollars_, the making and all!" And she glided away to join her young companions. So much for the philosophy of a young girl in a simple country village!

"No wonder," thought I, "that Harry does not dare to marry!"

Now here was this dear girl--lovely, accomplished, beautiful, intelligent, and fascinating--a perfect charm in society, after her fashion; but a wife? Why a man might as well marry a butterfly!

There is certainly something sadly "out of joint" in the times. The jarring and jolting of domestic machinery betrays loose screws, if not more fatal defects, somewhere in its construction. The subject is attracting general attention, eliciting general complaint, and calling forth the best energies of many minds in its discussion. Much talent has been engaged in the consideration of evils and defects, which it is asserted pervade every branch of domestic economy and every part of society. Remedial measures which have recently been proposed are also attracting much notice.

Not long ago a learned judge, lamenting the modern defects in female education, concluded with the consoling remark, "Yes, our girls are badly educated; but our boys will never find it out!"

Ah my learned friend! you see our young Henrys, though they may not detect the cause, are fully alive to the consequences.

What are these defects, what their remedy, and what the proper

WORK FOR WOMEN.

Now, it seems to me that every mother who is blessed with a daughter should begin with the first dawn of reason to instil into that daughter's mind the consciousness that she has something to do--that there is _work_ awaiting every step of her advancing progress from childhood to youth, from youth to womanhood, and from womanhood to old age.

The patronage of boarding-houses, which are entirely antagonistic to the first idea of a home, should be discarded. The daughter should be required to participate daily with her mother in household cares and duties, even while pursuing her studies.

Herein lies the difference between "modern ideas" and the antique _régime_. Here is the fault of the "century," so deplorable in its results, so widely lamented; and here--by the most culpable neglect to rear our daughters in a manner to fit them for the high responsibilities and duties of _home_--has the equilibrium between the "producer and consumer," so much talked of, been lost.

Education, like charity, should begin, be carried on, and be perfected at home, or it can be nothing elsewhere. The duties of women as "producers," in modern times, are identical with those of their grandmothers; and it is only in the family, within the dear and sheltered nook of home, that they can find profitable and legitimate exercise.

Under the ancient system--and it certainly could show as noble results as the modern mode has been able to achieve--the wife was the queen of a little kingdom, and her highest ambition was to rule within its sacred precincts wisely and well. If the resources and revenues were scanty, her study was so to manage the expenditures as to leave a margin on the credit side for future emergencies, or for increase of capital. If God gave her children, she accepted the inestimable boon with heartfelt thanksgivings, took up the holy office with all its tender cares and duties, as the crown of her glory, and presided with matronly dignity over the best and highest interests of the young immortals committed to her keeping, training her little ones diligently "in the way in which they should walk." She welcomed gracefully whatever adjuncts were furnished by schools and books, but never dreamed of abating her maternal vigilance, or trusting to these as substitutes for home culture. Her children were daily questioned, their proficiencies praised, their deficiencies or indolence in their studies reproved. Consequently she did not fall into that other dream, too common in these days, of going out from home to find something to do, because schools and systems had taken her children off her hands, and removed them beyond the scope of her jurisdiction.

Schools did not release her from the duty of watching over the development of their intellects. Sewing-machines did not stitch their garments; trained servants in every department were not at hand to perform the housework indifferently well. Verily, between one interest and another, our grandmothers had work enough to do!

WAS IT PROFITABLE?

We think any young wife and mother who will ask this question with sincerity and thoughtfulness, arousing the energies of her mind to the importance of considering it well and arriving at a true conclusion, will give an affirmative reply. There is no sphere in which a woman can be so profitable a "producer" as at home, and that simply by practising the old-fashioned virtues of "looking well to the ways of her household, and eating not the bread of idleness." By regulating carefully the consumption, she becomes the most efficient and lucrative "producer."

When every woman will accept this truth in its widest sense, and act accordingly, then, and not before, will the balance-sheet between "producers and consumers" be adjusted. Then will the toiling husband be matched by the industrious and frugal wife. Then will he return after the toils of the day, not to a palace glittering in cold splendor, and rivalling in the chilly magnificence of gew-gaws and trinkets a jeweller's show-window, but to a cozy and cheerful home, where "books that are books" abound, where the smile of an intelligent companion greets his return, and a sympathizing friend is ever ready to enter into all his cares and perplexities, to assist with wise counsels, and encourage with brave words.

It is certain that there is great need of a thorough change in the domestic discipline of the homes in our country, if a tithe of what is predicated as to existing evils be true. If our young women have really, as a general rule, become so frivolous in their characters, so fond of their ease, and so expensive in their habits, that our prudent young men dare not assume the burden of a family, or, in doing so, can have no assurance that they are providing for themselves the comforts and the blessings which should be embraced in the sacred inclosure of home, the consequences to society must be utterly ruinous. The family is the foundation of society, and only in well-ordered and happy homes can its well-being and stability be established and sustained.

NIL DESPERANDUM.

Deplorable as are the pictures which are drawn, discouraging as are the statements we daily hear of domestic confusion and misery, it is not to be admitted or believed that our American women are so swallowed up in a vortex of fashion and folly, or so enfeebled by habits of indolence, that they cannot be awakened from their fatal dream.

There is really in our national character too much intelligence, though it may be slumbering; too much energy, though it may be dormant through apathy, to permit us to sink hopelessly and helplessly into social chaos. It is only necessary to awaken the public mind to the importance of the subject, and to arouse American women to united and persevering efforts to retrieve the past, and bring about a better state of affairs in the future, and the work of reform is on the sure road to accomplishment. This is the only "_coöperative_" agency from which we may hope for beneficial results. No new plans or patent machinery will enable the wife, the mother, the housekeeper, to shirk her duty or transfer the irksome task to other shoulders. She must simply "seek out the old paths, and walk therein," humbly, diligently, at whatever sacrifice of her own ease or endurance of painful trials, which must always be the heritage of the true woman, but which, met and endured in the true womanly spirit, are richer than earthly treasures, and will secure rewards more unfailing than earthly glories.

In no other way can this painful domestic problem ever find a fitting solution.

A CONVERT'S PRAYER.

"Too late have I known thee, O ancient truth! Too long have I wandered from thee, O ancient beauty!"

SAINT AUGUSTINE.

INSCRIBED TO THE REV. FATHER WELCH, S.J.

Is it too late, O Lord! too late, To thee who count'st not time As we thy finite creatures do, By cycles as they chime? By years, and months, and fleeting days-- Not so thou countest, Lord; A thousand years are in thy sight As yesterday's brief word.

Or is it only late for _me_, Late for earth's fleeting day, Because the best of life is gone-- My youth has passed away? Its fresh love, though, was given to thee; Yet now, how cold it seems, And I as one who shadows chased In labyrinths of dreams.

In faith I walk now with thee, Lord, As when Incarnate here The wondering Jews looked on thy face, And to thy words gave ear. I am with thee at the marriage feast In Cana's peaceful dale, I hear thy Blessed Mother's voice O'er thee in love prevail.

I hear thee answer her, and bring From water even wine, And mark that wondrous miracle Which stamps thee God Divine! And then, amid thy chosen twelve The mystic supper spread, With only juice pressed from the vine, And only wheaten bread;

And yet, as at fair Cana's feast, Faith's miracle there stood, This bread thy _word_ transforms to flesh, This wine into thy blood! I hear thee say those solemn words, "_Except my flesh ye eat, And drink my blood, no life have ye_," No love for me complete!

I hear the Jew, "How can this man Give us his flesh to eat?" I mark thy silence; then, again, Thy solemn words repeat. This is faith's lesson. Lord, I bow Submissive to thy word, Nor ask I "_how_:" it is enough That thou hast said it, Lord!

O wondrous mystery of faith! Great God, thou dost retain The vision of thy _presence_ till We cease to say, "Explain." And last, I see thee on the cross, Thine arms extended wide, As if to draw the world to thee To kiss thy wounded side.

And then, down-lifted from the cross, And in the linen laid, With spices pressed by Mary's hand In wounds the spear had made. All this I see, and in the night Thy voice comes low and sweet, And bids me, sinner as I am, To kiss thy wounded feet.

And each dear hand, once raised to bless, To heal, now torn and riven-- Lord, in those bleeding hands take _mine_, Nor let them go till heaven Shall take me, wanderer, safely in, Where all these tears and sighs Shall on thy breast be hushed to rest, In golden paradise!

Then is it late, "too late," O Lord? I am waiting in the porch To hear those "gates of pearl" unbar, And enter in thy church; To find sure anchor, peace and rest, From error, sorrow, sin; I am very weary of earth's strife-- Lord, let thy wanderer in.

SOPHIA MAY ECKLEY.

St. Gertrude's Day, Nov. 15, 1869.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF CONRAD VON BOLANDEN.

ANGELA.