CHAPTER III.

SERAPHIN AND LOUISE.

Sombre spirits flitted about the head of the young man with the blooming cheeks and light eyes. He was unable to rid himself of a feeling of depression; for he had taken a step into the domain of progress, and had there witnessed things which, like slimy reptiles, drew a cold trail over his warm heart. Trained up on Christian principles, schooled by enlightened professors of the faith, and watched over with affectionate vigilance by a pious mother, Seraphin had had no conception of the state of modern society. For this reason, both Greifmann _Senior_ and Gerlach _Senior_ committed a blunder in wishing to unite by marriage three millions of florins, the owners of which not merely differed, but were the direct opposites of each other in disposition and education.

Louise belonged to the class of emancipated females who have in vain attempted to enhance the worth of noble womanhood by impressing on their own sex the sterner type of the masculine gender. In Louise’s opinion, the beauty of woman does not consist in graceful gentleness, amiable concession and purity, but in proudly overstepping the bounds set for woman by the innate modesty of her sex. The beautiful young lady had no idea of the repulsiveness of a woman who strives to make a man of herself, but she was sure that the cause and origin of woman’s degradation is religion. For it was to Eve that God had said: “Thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee.” Louise considered this decree as revolting, and she detested the book whose authority among men gives effect to its meaning. On the other hand, she failed to observe that woman’s sway is powerful and acknowledged wherever it exerts itself over weak man through affection and grace. Quite as little did Miss Louise observe that men assume the stature of giants so soon as women presume to appear in relation to them strong and manlike. Least of all did she discover anything gigantic in the kind-hearted Seraphin. In the consciousness of her fancied superiority of education, she smiled at the simplicity of his faith, and, as the handsome young gentleman appeared by no means an ineligible _parti_, she believed it to be her special task to train her prospective husband according to her own notions. She imagined this course of training would prove an easy undertaking for a lady whose charms had been uniformly triumphant over the hearts of gentlemen. But one circumstance appeared to her unaccountable--that was Seraphin’s cold-bloodedness and unshaken independence. For eight days she had plied her arts in vain, the most exquisite coquetry had been wasted to no purpose, even the irresistible fire of her most lovely eyes had produced no perceptible impression on the impregnable citadel of the landholder’s heart.

“He is a mere child as yet, the most spotless innocence,” she would muse hopefully. “He has been sheltered under a mother’s wings like a pullet, and for this I am beholden to Madame Gerlach, for she has trained up an obedient husband for me.”

Seraphin sauntered through the walks of the garden, absorbed in gloomy reflections on the leaders of progress. Their utter disregard of honor and unparalleled baseness were disgusting to him as an honorable man, whilst their corruption and readiness for deeds of meanness were offensive to him as a Christian. Regarding Greifmann, also, he entertained misgivings. Upon closer examination, however, the unsuspecting youth thought he discovered in the banker’s manner of treating the leaders and their principles a strong infusion of ridicule and irony. Hence, imposed upon by his own good nature, he concluded that Greifmann ought not in justice to be ranked among the hideous monstrosities of progress.

With head sunk and rapt in thought, Gerlach strayed indefinitely amid the flowers and shrubbery. All at once he stood before Louise. The young lady was seated under a vine-covered arbor; in one hand she held a book, but she had allowed both hand and book to sink with graceful carelessness upon her lap. For some time back she had been observing the thoughtful young man. She had been struck by his manly carriage and vigorous step, and had come to the conclusion that his profusion of curling auburn hair was the most becoming set-off to his handsome countenance. She now welcomed the surprised youth with a smile so winning, and with a play of eyes and features so exquisite, that Seraphin, dazzled by the beauty of the apparition, felt constrained to lower his eyes like a bashful girl. What probably contributed much to this effect was the circumstance of his being at the time in a rather vacant and cheerless state of mind, so that, coming suddenly into the presence of this brilliant being, he experienced the power of the contrast. She appeared to him indescribably beautiful, and he wondered that this discovery had not forced itself upon him before. Unfortunately, the young gentleman possessed but little of the philosophy which will not suffer itself to be deceived by seductive appearances, and refuses to recognize the beautiful anywhere but in its agreement with the true and good.

Louise perceived in an instant that now was at hand the long-looked-for fulfilment of her wishes. The certainty which she felt that the conquest was achieved diffused a bewitching loveliness over her person. Seraphin, on the other hand, stood leaning against the arbor, and became conscious with fear and surprise of a turmoil in his soul that he had never before experienced.

“I have been keeping myself quiet in this shady retreat,” said she sweetly, “not wishing to disturb your meditations. Carl’s wager is a strange one, but it is a peculiarity of my brother’s occasionally to manifest a relish for what is strange.”

“You are right--strange, very strange!” replied Seraphin, evidently in allusion to his actual state of mind. The beautiful young lady, perceiving the allusion, became still more dazzling.

“I should regret very much that the wager were lost by a guest of ours, and still more that you were deprived of your splendid racehorses. I will prevail on Carl not to take advantage of his victory.”

“Many thanks, miss; but I would much rather you would not do so. If I lose the wager, honor and duty compel me to give up the stakes to the winner. Moreover, in the event of my losing, there would be another loss far more severe for me than the loss of my racers.”

“What would that be?” inquired she with some amazement.

“The loss of my good opinion of men,” answered he sadly. “What I have heard, miss, is base and vile beyond description.” And he recounted for her in detail what had taken place.

“Such things are new to you, Mr. Seraphin; hence your astonishment and indignation.”

The youth felt his soul pierced because she uttered not a word of disapproval against the villany.

“Carl’s object was good,” continued she, “in so far as his manœuvre has procured you an insight into the principles by which the world is just now ruled.”

“I would be satisfied to lose the wager a thousand times, and even more, did I know that the world is not under such rule.”

“It is wrong to risk one’s property for the sake of a delusion,” said she reprovingly. “And it would be a gross delusion not to estimate men according to their real worth. A proprietor of fields and woodland, who, faithful to his calling, leads an existence pure and in accord with nature’s laws, must not permit himself to be so far misled by the harmlessness of his own career as to idealize the human species. For were you at some future day to become more intimately acquainted with city life and society, you would then find yourself forced to smile at the views which you once held concerning the present.”

“Smile at, my dear miss? Hardly. I should rather have to mourn the destruction of my belief. Moreover, it is questionable whether I could breathe in an atmosphere which is unhealthy and destructive of all the genuine enjoyments of life!”

“And what do you look upon as the genuine enjoyments of life?” asked she with evident curiosity.

He hesitated, and his childlike embarrassment appeared to her most lovely.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Seraphin! I have been indiscreet, for such a question is allowable to those only who are on terms of intimacy.” And the beauty exhibited a masterly semblance of modesty and amiability. The artifice proved successful, the young man’s diffidence fled, and his heart opened.

“You possess my utmost confidence, most esteemed Miss Greifmann! Intercourse with good, or at least honorable, persons appears to me to be the first condition for enjoying life. How could any one’s existence be cheerful in the society of people whose character is naught and whose moral sense expired with the rejection of every religious principle?”

“Yet perhaps it might, Mr. Seraphin!” rejoined she, with a smile of imagined superiority. “Refinement, the polished manners of society, may be substituted for the rigor of religious conviction.”

“Polished manners without moral earnestness are mere hypocrisy,” answered he decidedly. “A wolf, though enveloped in a thousand lambskins, still retains his nature.”

“How stern you are!” exclaimed she, laughing. “And what is the second condition for the true enjoyment of life, Mr. Seraphin?”

“It is evidently the accord of moral consciousness with the behests of a supreme authority; or to use the ordinary expression, a good conscience,” answered the millionaire earnestly.

A sneering expression spontaneously glided over her countenance. She felt the hateful handwriting of her soul in her features, turned crimson, and cast down her eyes in confusion. The young man had not observed the expression of mockery, and could not account for her confusion. He thought he had perhaps awkwardly wounded her sensitiveness.

“I merely meant to express my private conviction,” said Mr. Seraphin apologetically.

“Which is grand and admirable,” lauded she.

Her approbation pleased him, for his simplicity failed to detect the concealed ridicule. After a walk outside of the city which Gerlach took towards evening, in the company of the brother and sister, Carl Greifmann made his appearance in Louise’s apartment.

“You have at last succeeded in capturing him,” began he with a chuckle of satisfaction. “I was almost beginning to lose confidence in your well-tried powers. This time you seemed unable to keep the field, to the astonishment of all your acquaintances. They never knew you to be baffled where the heart of a weak male was to be won.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About the fat codfish of two million weight whom you have been successful in angling.”

“I do not understand you, most mysterious brother!”

“You do not understand me, and yet you blush like the skies before a rainstorm! What means the vermilion of those cheeks, if you do not understand?”

“I blush, first, on account of my limited understanding, which cannot grasp your philosophy; and, secondly, because I am amazed at the monstrous figures of your language.”

“Then I shall have to speak without figures and similes upon a subject which loses a great deal in the light of bare reality, which, I might indeed say, loses all, dissolves into vapor, like will-o’-the-wisps and cloud phantoms before the rising sun. I hardly know how to mention the subject without figures. I can hardly handle it except with poetic figures,” exclaimed he gaily, seating himself in Louise’s rocking-chair, rocking himself. “Speaking in the commonest prose, my remarks refer to the last victim immolated to your highness--to the last brand kindled by the fire of your eyes. To talk quite broadly, I mean the millionaire and landholder Seraphin Gerlach, who is head and ears in love with you. Considered from a business and solid point of view, it is exceedingly flattering for the banker’s brother to see his sister adored by so considerable a sum of money.”

“Madman, you profane the noblest feelings of the heart,” she chidingly said, with a smile.

“I am a man of business, my dear child, and am acquainted with no sanctuary but the exchange. Relations of a tender nature, noble feelings of the heart, lying as they do without the domain of speculation, are to me something incomprehensible and not at all desirable. On the other hand, I entertain for two millions of money a most prodigious sympathy, and a love that casts the flames of all your heroes and heroines of romance into the shade. Meanwhile, my sweet little sister, there are two aspects to everything. An alliance between our house and two millions of florins claims admiration, ’tis true; yet it is accompanied with difficulties which require serious reflection.” The banker actually ceased rocking and grew serious.

“Might I ask a solution of your enigma?”

“All jesting aside, Louise, this alliance is not altogether free from risks,” answered he. “Just consider the contrast between yourself and Seraphin Gerlach’s good nature is touching, and his credulous simplicity is calculated to excite apprehension. Guided, imposed upon, entirely bewitched by religious phantasms, he gropes about in the darkness of superstition. You, on the contrary, sneer at what Seraphin cherishes as holy, and despise such religious nonsense. Reflect now upon the enormous contrast between yourself and the gentleman whom fate and your father’s shrewdness have selected for your husband. Honestly, I am in dread. I am already beginning to dream of divorce and every possible tale of scandal, which would not be precisely propitious for our firm.”

“What contradictions!” exclaimed the beauty with self-reliance. “You just a moment ago announced my triumph over Seraphin, and now you proclaim my defeat.”

“Your defeat! Not at all! But I apprehend wrangling and discord in your married life.”

“Wrangling and discord because Seraphin loves me?”

“No--not exactly--but because he is a believer and you are an unbeliever; in short, because he does not share your aims and views.”

“How short-sighted you are! As you conceive of it, love is not a passion; at most, only, a cool mood which cannot be modified by the lovers themselves. Your apprehension would be well grounded concerning that kind of love. But suppose love were something quite different? Suppose it were a passion, a glowing, dazzling, omnipotent passion, and that Seraphin really loved me, do you think that I would not skilfully and prudently take advantage of this passion? Cannot a woman exert a decisive and directing influence over the husband who loves her tenderly? I have no fears because I do not view love with the eyes of a trader. I hope and trust with the adjurations of love to expel from Seraphin all superstitious spirits.”

“How sly! Surely nothing can surpass a daughter of Eve in the matter of seductive arts!” exclaimed he, laughing. “Hem--yes, indeed, after what I have seen to-day, it is plain that the Adam Seraphin will taste of the forbidden fruit of ripened knowledge, persuaded by this tenderly beloved Eve. Look at him: there he wanders in the shade of the garden, sighing to the rose-bushes, dreaming of your majesty, and little suspecting that he is threatened with conversion and redemption from the kingdom of darkness.”

TO BE CONTINUED.

THE NECESSITY OF PHILOSOPHY AS A BASIS OF HIGHER EDUCATION.

BY F. RAMIERE, S. J.

FROM THE ETUDES RELIGIEUSES.

We have shown what secondary education does for the formation of man, and how powerfully it is aided by philosophy in the accomplishment of its task. Secondary education in the soul of the young man completes the work sketched out by the primary lessons given to the child; it develops his faculties, teaches him their use, invests him with full dominion over himself, and prepares him to carry out, according to his high vocation, the great duty of life. Philosophy is the necessary complement of this education, since it is indispensable for the development of the sovereign faculty, reason, and consequently for the complete formation of the man, and the perseverance of the Christian.

We might dispense with further proofs of the utility of philosophy, although we are still very far from having examined it from every point of view. The man whom primary and secondary education have placed in possession of his faculties is not destined to live alone in the world, and employ those admirable instruments wherewith his Creator has endowed him simply for his own advantage. He is made to live in society; it is to society he owes, after God, his existence, his nurture, his instruction, his development, his physical and moral being, in a word, all that he is. During the period of his education, he has remained almost passive in its hands, and has received everything from it. Arrived at the term of this long career, justice obliges him to set to work to pay back to it the immense debt he has contracted. Moreover, that which in him is but a just duty is at the same time a necessary condition of his dignity and happiness. For, if he does not force himself to utilize his faculties in the interests of his fellows, those faculties will infallibly become for him a source of wasting _ennui_ and cruel torment. If, then, he wishes to become an honorable man, let him see that he become a useful citizen.

For this purpose a multitude of careers open out before him; for there is many a way of serving society; and the most useful of all is not always that whose results are the most immediate, and whose fruits are the most easily gathered.

Undoubtedly the father of a family who improves his land or devotes himself laboriously to the exercise of a mechanical profession accomplishes his whole duty to society; and, if he gives to it virtuous children, he pays it in overrunning measure the debt which he has contracted in its regard. We do not deny that these more humble callings are the most common, and we acknowledge that to fulfil all their conditions it is enough to have learned well that divine philosophy which is contained in the maternal teachings of the church. But a society could never attain a great development, it could scarcely exist, whose members possessed no higher knowledge than that which goes to make a good agriculturist, a diligent workman, or an honest father of a family. Beyond these common callings there are others more choice which present themselves to souls more richly endowed. Some more inclined to the theoretical, rush at the conquest of science; others of a more practical tendency betake themselves to the study of laws and the administration of justice. One studies deep the experience of the past in order to illustrate the present; another would be an orator, and is ambitious of the triumphs of eloquence; a third is a poet, and he believes, and believes rightly, that he makes himself of use enough to his fellows by lifting up their souls to the contemplation and love of the beautiful. Others, again, feel themselves called upon from on high to become the representatives of God before men, and the interpreters to them of his oracular teachings. We have named the principal careers which lie open to the young man whose mind has been cultivated by a liberal education. But to whatever side his choice may bend, he will find philosophy of an almost indispensable utility for the attainment of solid success. After having made him a finished man, it will aid powerfully in making him a true scholar; it will provide the lawyer, the historian, the orator, the poet, with the seeds of truth, which each one of them should cause to fructify after his fashion. In fine, to form the summit of its glory, it will lend to revelation an invincible arm for the defence of its dogmas; and in uniting its light to that flowing from this divine torch, it will form the first and most divine of all sciences--theology. Such in a few words are the various aspects under which we have still to present its utility.

NECESSITY OF PHILOSOPHY FOR THE FORMATION OF THE SCIENTIST.

I do not ignore to what I expose myself when I dare affirm that without philosophy there is no true scientist. People will tell me that therein lies a prejudice of the middle ages, the defence of which no one can undertake to-day without denying all the progress which science has made within three centuries. They will sing me the old song of the panegyrists of Bacon. They will point out to me the incomparable advance of the physical sciences in modern times, dating precisely from the day when they shook off the yoke of metaphysics, and when, laying aside the syllogism which clogged their march, they claimed a right to their own process and an independent existence.

I will not stop to discuss the truth of these assertions; but, accepting them all provisionally, I will maintain my thesis, and, with God’s help, will prove it.

What is the legitimate conclusion derived from the fact they oppose to us? It is that the physical sciences are distinct from philosophy, and that the middle ages were perhaps mistaken in identifying them too closely with it. But because metaphysics and physics are distinct sciences, does it follow that the man who pretends to the title of a scientist can content himself with the one and neglect the other altogether? Clearly not. Such a man, on the contrary, condemns himself in despising philosophy to remain imperfect, not merely as a man, but also as a scientist.

To demonstrate this truth let us define science, and give an exact account of its conditions.

All knowledge does not deserve the name of science. The animal knows after a certain fashion; the infant and the idiot know still more; there is no man so ignorant as not to know an innumerable multitude of things; but neither the one nor the other possesses science. Science is, in relation to a certain order of truths, what philosophy is in relation to man and to God; it is knowledge reasoned out; that which places in a state of explication the wherefore of things, to tell of them their essence and their laws, their causes and their effects, their faculties and their destinations; to connect their consequences with their principles, and draw their principles from their consequences: “the knowledge of things by their causes.” Man is, therefore, a greater scholar in proportion as he is capable of mounting higher in the region of principles, and of embracing in a more general conception a greater number of particular truths. Science indeed is like a luminous mountain composed of many a height, some more elevated than others. As we mount, the horizon expands, and we are able to embrace with the same glance a vaster space. He alone will possess complete science, and he alone consequently will deserve, in its absolute sense, the title of a man of science, who arrived at its loftiest height, and grasping in its infinite simplicity the first principle of all things, shall behold in the splendor of this focus all the rays which burst forth from it and spread abroad to illumine the whole sphere of truth.

But this complete science is not within the reach of mortal man, and in its absolute perfection belongs alone to God.

Fettered by his nature, and fettered still more by the conditions of his earthly existence, man can only aspire to a partial science; and it is left him to choose in this immense sphere that particular ground whereon to pursue his investigations with more profit. The entire field is open to us. “God,” says the Scripture, “has delivered the world to the searchings and the disputes of men.” In bestowing on us the faculty of finding a reason for things, he has authorized us to make use of this faculty in regard to all the truths of the natural order, provided we see on all sides the boundary of the mysterious, which reminds us of our essential infirmity.

But though every science is equally lawful, they are not all equally useful. We may divide them into three classes, which form the three circles of the great sphere of truth. There are the sciences which concern the inferior world, the mathematical and physical sciences; those whose object is humanity, the psychological and moral sciences; thirdly, those which concern the higher world, the science of first principles and of the primal cause of all things. This last, which holds the centre of the great sphere of truth, is called metaphysics; and it is joined to the psychological and moral sciences, which are drawn from the same principles, under the common name of philosophy.

This simple statement of the place which belongs to philosophy in the hierarchy of the sciences is enough to prove our thesis, namely, the necessity of philosophy for the formation of the true _savant_.

What man, in fact, is truly worthy of this name, unless it be he who is possessed of the necessary science? But I would ask: Does that man possess this science, does he know what he ought to know, who possesses a perfect knowledge of the inferior world, and who ignores himself; who has passed his life away in studying the laws of bodies, yet has never given a thought to his own nature and the destiny of his own soul? Tell me that that man is a great physicist, and I will not gainsay it; but I can never consent to your bestowing on him the title of a man of science. The ancient Greek unites with me in denouncing an error so opposed to the dignity of the human intelligence. “Know thyself.” Such was the precept impressed on all those who went to Delphi to consult the oracle of Apollo. The gate of the true temple of wisdom opens only to those who have put this recommendation into practice. But wisdom is the true science. The true scholar is not he who knows something, but he who knows enough of it. No one thinks of praising unreservedly a statue whose head and bust are scarcely outlined, and whose lower members alone are finished. It is to the whole, it is above all to the principal parts, that we look, when we wish to estimate a work definitely. Reason commands that we act in the same manner when we wish to judge of the absolute value of an intelligence. As there are for a people liberties which are necessary, so is there also for a man knowledge which is indispensable, of his own nature, his origin, and his destiny; and he who is deprived of this, although he possess all sorts of superfluous knowledge, cannot pretend to the title of a man of science.

To this first motive for the necessity of philosophy derived from its object we are able to add another deduced from the very idea of science. Science, we have said, is the knowledge of things by their principles. Its perfection consists in attaching particular truths to truths which are more general, which comprise them, and which enable the intelligence to catch them at a single glance. But this unity, which forms the perfection of the sciences, and which each of them establishes among the particular truths which constitute their several objects, it is the province of philosophy to establish among the sciences themselves. Metaphysics, in fact, which is the principal part of philosophy, has for its special object not the study of particular truths, but of those general principles which throw a light upon the other sciences. It is then their necessary complement, and their indispensable crown. Set in the very centre of the great sphere of knowledge, it is to the other sciences the polar star, whereon they must turn their eyes in order to see their way. It points out to each one of them the relation of the truths which constitute their special object with the primary truth which is their common centre. The geometrician and the physicist, who occupy themselves exclusively with the relations of numbers and the laws of bodies, are like explorers voyaging in regions where the disc of the sun is never seen, placed without the power of tracing to their luminous focus the rays of truth which their studies permit them to catch.

But far beyond this, philosophy alone can make the geometrician or the physicist acquainted with the inner essence of the objects which form the special material of their studies. Geometry analyzes the relations of magnitudes, but it does not seek to give an account of the very idea of magnitude: natural philosophy evolves from experiments the laws of bodies; but it cannot, by induction at least, which is its special process, arrive at a knowledge of the essence of bodies. Philosophy alone scrutinizes, as far as it is possible for human reason so to do, the mystery of that inner essence by which each thing is what it is. Philosophy is therefore necessary for the completion of the special sciences, and to furnish scholars with the knowledge of their different objects.

Lastly, a fourth and still more incontestable motive for the necessity of philosophy for the formation of the true scientist is deduced from the scientific education of the intelligence, which philosophy alone is capable of undertaking. One of the most important parts of philosophy is logic; that is, the science of reasoning, and of the different processes by means of which the human intelligence can find truth. These processes are not only those which philosophy avails itself of, but also those which obtain among the other sciences. It belongs to philosophy, and to philosophy alone, to study their nature, to fix their laws, to prevent their wandering. The other sciences borrow these processes from it; they make use of them; but they would depart from their object if they studied them in themselves. One cannot, then, dispute the utility of philosophy for the formation of the scientist, without maintaining an evident absurdity; to wit, that it is useless for the workman to obtain a knowledge of the instrument he uses in the exercise of his craft. Who can fail to see that, without a profound knowledge of the different intellectual processes, the scientist is exposed to a double danger--on the one hand, to the danger of deceiving himself in the use of the special process which is proper to him; on the other, to the danger of exaggerating its importance, and not holding in sufficient estimation those processes equally legitimate which are in use among other sciences? The first of these dangers is to be feared, above all, in the inductive sciences. Induction is a mode of reasoning perfectly legitimate in itself; but of all the intellectual processes it is the one which is most easily abused, and which, pushed beyond its just limits, may lead to the gravest of errors.

The mathematical sciences which work by equation are not equally exposed to the danger of diverging from their track, but they threaten with a still greater peril the mind of the scholar whom the study of philosophy has not set on his guard against the too exclusive influence of this process. Equation, as its name indicates, does not pass from one truth to another, but from a like to a like, from the expression of a relation of number or magnitude to another simpler expression of the same relation. It is not, then, surprising that this process offers to the mind an exactness far more easy of comprehension than that by means of which we are enabled to grasp moral truths and give ourselves a reason for our own nature. The philosophic mathematician will take this difference perfectly into account, and his progress in the science of numbers will hinder him in no wise from seizing upon substantial truths. But the man who all his life long has occupied himself with nothing save the study of mathematics is very much exposed to becoming incapable of comprehending that which is not demonstrated by equation; and he will experience a greater estrangement and inaptitude for the science of God and of himself in proportion as he advances further in the science of the inferior world.

In good faith, can we see progress in this? Is it not, on the contrary, a degradation, not only from the moral, but also from the intellectual point of view? Has not the absence of a sound philosophy stood as much in the way of that man’s scientific elevation as of his moral greatness? Though he may have become a more able manipulator of formulas, he surely has not become a greater _savant_. Nothing, on the contrary, is more calculated to cramp and mutilate the faculties of the soul than this exclusive concentration on one of the collateral objects of its activity. In the same way as a limb which is never set in motion wastes away and becomes paralyzed, so the powers of the soul cannot cease to act without losing their vigor. Such is the state to which a too exclusive study of what are called the exact sciences reduces certain minds: these are the minds whose higher faculties have been wasted. All their activity is turned to one side; the eye of their intelligence is so constructed for the lesser light of equation, that, when they rise from the subterranean world of geometrical abstractions to enter into the region of moral realities and into the world of souls, they are dazed, and can see naught but darkness. True it is that they are much enamored of their blindness, and attribute it to excess of light. Fain to acknowledge that their formulas, the only legitimate arguments according to them, are powerless to solve the great moral problems, they suppress those problems with the declaration that it is folly in human reason to trouble itself with them, and that for him who wishes to ascertain truth and possess certainty it is enough to study the relations of numbers and the laws of bodies. Such is true science in the eyes of the disciples of Auguste Comte. These men are perfectly logical. They adopt the only means to ensure their title to be really scientific men without the aid of philosophy; they suppress philosophy altogether, and suppress consequently its object, that is, the human soul and God, the beginning and the end of things. With adversaries of this stamp I refuse to dispute. I can only appeal to their conscience against the disdain which their lips affect for the formidable questions whose suppression they in vain decree. They exist in spite of them; and wherever they go they carry about in themselves the problems which they refuse to examine. As for those for whom God and the soul have still a meaning, I believe I have said enough to compel them to admit that no one has a right to the title of a wise man so long as he ignores the science which learns all that reason can know of those grand objects, and that the other sciences when separated from it are often more hurtful than useful to the real improvement of the intellect.

I might go still further; and, coming back to the concession which I appeared to make in favor of the loud-voiced preachers of the exact sciences, I stand on perfectly firm ground in denying that the excessive importance which a very great number of minds bestows on them, and the exclusive study to which they give themselves up, are for the sciences themselves a condition of progress. What this study can produce is able practitioners, who will solve successfully problems whose data somebody has already furnished them; the artisans of science, who may build up with skill the edifice whose plan they find traced out beforehand; watchful pilots, who by the aid of their compass and marine chart may guide their ship safely into port. But the geniuses capable of discovering new lands, of opening up to science new horizons, you will never find among the minds who have only learnt to navigate by the compass of equation. Not by the aid of formulas are great discoveries made; they are the effect of that sort of divination which those intelligences possess which are accustomed to raise themselves in all things to the most general principles, and grasp in the variety of phenomena the analogy of laws. If Kepler had only proceeded by the aid of formulas, he would never have discovered the laws of worlds; and Leibnitz would undoubtedly have been a far less distinguished geometrician had he not been an equally eminent philosopher.

We may, then, affirm that the study of philosophy--which is necessary to enlarge the mind of the scholar--is of immense utility in the advancement of the sciences, even of those very ones which seem to have the least connection with this queen of sciences.

II.

NECESSITY OF PHILOSOPHY FOR THE FORMATION OF THE JURISCONSULT.

If it is thus with the sciences whose objects are distinct from that of philosophy, what shall we say of jurisprudence, which treats of the rights and duties of the members of human society? Here the connection is much more direct, since the object which we are about to indicate is precisely that which moral philosophy treats of. Between the two sciences there is no other difference than this: while moral philosophy treats only of essential rights and duties, that is to say, of those which result from the very nature of man, and depend on the necessary will of the Creator, jurisprudence has for its more particular object those rights which are derived immediately from the civil authority, and which have been established by a positive law. But who does not see that this second species of rights and duties presupposes the first and leans upon it for its necessary support? In order to proceed rationally to the study of the acts of civil authority, and take into account the duties which it imposes, we must know whence proceeds this authority, from whom does it hold the right of making laws, what is its mission, and how far does its power extend. We must know also what is law, what are its conditions, when it begins and when it ceases to compel, what are the causes which dispense with its observance, what the objects to which its provisions should extend. Where shall we seek the solving of these questions, and of many others which form the necessary preliminary of all rational jurisprudence, unless from philosophy? Open the most celebrated treatises; the _Treatise on Laws_ by Domat, for instance, and see if he is ashamed to borrow from the metaphysicians their principles and their definitions. By how many eminent jurisconsults has the _Treatise on Laws_ of Suarez been used? How often have his general theories, though altogether removed from the different special legislations, served, nevertheless, as the connecting clue to lead them out of the labyrinth of their provisions, and furnished the most precious indications for the determination of the rights which they only defined imperfectly?

More than ever has it become necessary in our days to establish solidly, in the minds of those who are destined to make laws or watch over their execution, these fundamental notions on the origin, the end, and the extent of civil authority, and on the conditions of its exercise. For one must be blind not to comprehend that from the ignorance and reversing of these notions springs the overturning of modern societies. Strange it is that public order, which has never had to withstand such radical attacks as in these our days, should find its worst foes, not in those who deny the legitimacy of law, but, on the contrary, in the very men who have exaggerated beyond measure the power of the law. What in effect is that system but socialism, according to which we must recognize no other right, no other duty, save such as emanate from the social will; which extends to everything the power of the law; and which, grinding under this pitiless roller every natural right and every relation of property and family, leaves nothing to subsist before the state, save isolated individualities? Since the hand of God first founded human society, never has an error so fatal to its existence sprung up. Yet this error, since we must confess it, has had for its upholders, through many ages, a great number of jurisconsults, who have done their best to establish the principles on which it leans, detesting all the while the consequences which it deduces from them. In place of borrowing from a sound philosophy the true notions with regard to the mission of civil authority, they are pleased to give it an extension without limits, not perceiving that they thereby impose on it an overwhelming responsibility, and that in lessening the rights which should give it equilibrium, they weaken at the same time its solidity. Alas! how many “men of order,” how many grave jurisconsults, are in our days completely socialistic in their ideas, and yet fail to perceive that their doctrines only furnish that party, whose criminal efforts they oppose with all the force that is in them, with arms which are only too powerful!

Philosophy is not only useful to the jurisconsult in furnishing him with the general notions on the origin, end, and exercise of legislative power; in addition, it throws a light over the detail of laws, atones for their deficiencies, fixes their uncertainties, reconciles their opposition, and by discovering the motives of their provisions, determines the limits within which they ought to be restrained.

The written law, in fact, is not enough for itself. Its end is not to promulgate all duties. There are a great number, and they are the most essential, which are anterior to it, and which the finger of God has graven on the soul of every man coming into this world, and which his Eternal Word promulgates in the depth of every conscience. It is on this unwritten law that human society leans; it is only in virtue of the rights and duties of which it is the source that men have been able to unite themselves into different groups and establish civil societies. Unless they had been previously submitted the one to the other by some obligation, they would never have bound themselves by any contract; their agreements would have been determined by convenience; they would never have believed in duties. The civil law presupposes, then, a law anterior and superior to it, by which all the necessary relations of men are defined with a sovereign authority, since it is the authority of God himself, and with an irresistible clearness, since it is the very light of reason. The mission of the human legislator consists merely in adding to the essential duties, which the natural law prescribes for all men, those which result from the constitution of the different groups which form civil societies. It is the natural law which bids man love his fellows and co-operate for their happiness; the civil law, supporting itself on this general obligation, determines the particular services which the citizens owe one another for the common defence of their interests. The natural law establishes the family, and promulgates the essential rights of parents and children; the civil law surrounds the exercise of these rights by the guarantees necessary to certify their existence, to ward off the dangers which threaten them, to ensure their stability, and prevent their conflict. The natural law lays the foundation of property, in bestowing on each man the fruit of his labor, and commanding him to provide for his own future and that of his children; but it belongs to the civil law to determine the necessary forms for the authentication of the acquisition and transfer of property, and to prevent this right, which is so necessary to social order, from becoming a source of disorder.

We see, then, that in all its provisions the civil law presupposes the natural law, of which it is but the complement and final determination. The rights which it establishes are real rights beyond doubt; they are sacred and inviolable rights, which divine justice, the protector of all order, takes under its guarantee, and for which it reserves a sanction as eternal as for the rights of which it is the immediate source: but nevertheless these are but secondary rights, which are only binding so long as they are conformable with the rights which are preordained, and lose all their force from the moment that they become contrary to them; for there is no such thing as right against right, as Bossuet has so well said. Whence it follows that no man can acquire a complete and sure knowledge of civil legislation, unless he has first of all made a serious study of that part of philosophy which is called _natural right_.

But it is clear that this moral and practical part of philosophy does not subsist alone; it is only the consequence of principles established in the speculative and metaphysical part; it is, then, philosophy in its entirety which he ought to study with the most laborious attention who destines himself for the teaching or the practice of jurisprudence. There alone will he find the final reason of human laws: thence will he draw those great principles to which he ought to go back at all times when he wishes to solve one of those difficult cases which the civil law has not foreseen, or for which she has furnished insufficient data. It will often happen that two laws appear in opposition, and right will clash against right. To whom shall we turn to reconcile these apparent or real antinomies, which are found in the letter of the law? To whom, unless to the supreme lawgiver, of whom the framers of laws are but the interpreters; to the spirit of the law, to that eternal reason whose oracular decisions philosophy records? Unhappy the jurisconsult who, before investing himself with the toga of the magistracy, or taking upon himself the defence of the rights of his fellows, shall not have entered into the sanctuary where these luminous oracles are expounded by the mouth of sages, and who persuades himself that the letter of the code is enough to enable him to acquit himself of his difficult functions! The letter is a useful instrument undoubtedly, an instrument necessary even, indispensable; but it is nothing more than instrument. To hit its mark it requires to be ably handled. Philosophy alone gives this power and freedom in the management of the written law, because it alone shows its end, mechanism, and motives. Guided by its light, the true jurisconsult will advance with confidence, and apply the law with intelligence; he will resolve it into its different parts, take in his hands the links that bind them together, and show their connection with the different problems, whose complexity rendered their solution more difficult. The superficial jurisconsult, on the contrary, unaided by the torch of philosophy, will always grope upon the earth when he seeks to penetrate the inner mechanism of laws and the essence of things; as the law cannot foresee the diversity of particular cases, he will ever be embarrassed in the application of its general provisions; a slave to the letter, he allows himself to be guided by, instead of guiding it, as every good workman ought to guide his instrument. If he strives to free himself from it, and lift himself above it, it is only to wander at haphazard in the region of guesswork. So he goes on, pushed from one extreme to another, not fleeing a servile application of the written law, more or less opposed to its spirit, and always uncertain, only to lose himself in conjecture more uncertain and more dangerous still; in place of being the defender and the minister of justice, he will too often be its executioner, and will verify but too faithfully the truth of that saying: “The letter without the spirit can only be a principle of death.”

III.

UTILITY OF PHILOSOPHY FOR THE FORMATION OF THE HISTORIAN.

History is not a science properly so-called, since it only occupies itself with contingent facts, and does not pretend to deduce those facts from first principles by any necessary connection. Differing from the physical world, where phenomena seemingly the most accidental are the effect of constant laws, the moral world is the product of human liberty, acting under the control of the Divine Providence in all the spontaneity of its expansion. History, which presents us with the faithful tableaux of this world, must refuse therefore to admit into its process that severe order which constitutes science; and if at times in the recital of human acts it can point out to us the accomplishment of the moral law, far more frequently does it show the most flagrant and persistent violation of it.

Must we say, then, that history ought to resign itself to presenting to the mind a mere disconnected and aimless chaos of facts, and that it cannot seek to cast on its recitals the light of principles, and give to them that order and that unity without which there is nothing truly beautiful? Who dare say this? To what purpose would the study of history serve us if it were nothing else than an incoherent tableau of the caprices of human liberty? In place of being one of the most useful studies for the formation of the mind and heart of a young man, it would be nothing but an idle pastime and dangerous food for curiosity. Instead of illumining the present by the light of the past, it would only serve to transmit to the present generations the consequence of the scandals of the generation which went before; in place of pointing out a God still working in the world and thus becoming a school for religion, it would be simply a school for atheism, in permitting us to see in the moral world nothing but human liberty abandoned to itself, a worthy emulation of that blind and impious science which in the physical world would show us nothing save a nature self-produced, self-acting by its own power.

History, then, is a study truly worthy of man; with a power to charm his intellect and make a beneficial impression on his heart, only so long as it marches ever under the light of principles, and keeps its eyes ever fixed on the moral laws, to show where they agree or where they clash with the facts with whose recital it is charged. That is to say, history cannot fulfil its mission without calling in philosophy to its aid; and, however able a writer may be in the narration of facts, he can never merit the title of historian if he is not a philosopher.

Not that I wish to bring myself forward here as the defender of the _philosophy of history_, as understood by the greater portion of modern historians. I know well that this pretended science, so vaunted in our days, is one of the deadliest engines of war which impiety has set in action in its attack on the church. The philosophy of history thus understood is to true history, such as St. Augustine and Bossuet taught, what the philosophy of the sophist is to the philosophy of reason. I cannot help, therefore, repudiating with all my power this word, if they persist in giving it the sense which Voltaire, who first introduced it, gave, or the still more impious sense which the pantheistic school gives it. I maintain that there is no philosophy of history if you understand thereby the fatalist development of human activity, after certain fixed formulas as necessary as those which govern the movements of matter; such a philosophy of history is nothing else than a denial of the human soul and of God, the legitimizing of all crime, the exciting of all the worst passions, the overthrow of all society, that is to say, the destruction of all philosophy and of all history.

But the false philosophy of fatalism and pantheism is not the only one, thank God, which can be applied to history. There is also a true philosophy of history, which shows us God glorifying himself in the reparation of the disorders of the moral world after a manner as admirable in its kind as is the maintenance of the order of the physical world. If he showed his power and wisdom, when with sovereign hand he caused the splendors of the heavens to radiate from the womb of chaos with the harmony of the stars and the life of nature, how much wiser and more powerful does he not seem to us when we behold him making use of a chaos a thousand times more rebellious, the chaos of the passions and perverseness of humanity, in order to produce the most beautiful of all his works--the manifestation of his truth and the triumph of his goodness!

It is this sovereign action of the Divine Providence, irresistibly shaping to its own end the will of man without infringing an iota on his liberty, that the true philosophy of history purposes to contemplate. It is part of this principle that God, sovereignly wise, who could not call into being the least atom without giving it an end worthy of himself, could not for a stronger reason produce the masterpiece of his hands, the rational soul, without giving it an end, and without urging it unceasingly to the realization of that end. That which is true of the individual is true of society, and is truer still of all humanity.

This end being attainable by visible means, and, on the other hand, being conformable to the nature of God and the nature of man, it ought to be possible to discover it by means of a study of facts, which constitute history, and by means of a profound observation of those two natures, which constitute philosophy. Philosophy furnishes the data _a priori_; history possesses itself of these data and verifies them by experience. The result of this double revision is one of the most attractive branches of knowledge for the mind, and most capable of enlarging the soul, the knowledge of the divine economy, and of the secret resorts by which Providence governs the affairs of this world.

The divine government operates in three different spheres, to which respond three degrees of the philosophy of history.

The first sphere of action chosen by Providence is the conscience of each man. Undoubtedly we are not to look in this world for the definite accomplishment of individual destinies. God has reserved for a more durable life the full award of his law. Meanwhile it has often been his will to anticipate this eternal award by a temporary one, which, in this life, may avenge his justice for the outrages of crime. Thus, there are some lives most obscure; there are, for a still stronger reason, brilliant lives which leave their mark on the memory of the human race. It is not often possible to discover this award. To arrive at it, history will borrow from philosophy the moral laws which ought to regulate the conduct of individuals; and she will look for the confirmation of these laws in the prosperity or misfortune which have accompanied their observance or their neglect. Such is the study which constitutes the first degree of the true philosophy of history, and which makes this science an excellent school for morality.

But history mounts still higher by the aid of philosophy; its mission, in fact, is not merely to recount the life of certain individuals, who by their talents, their virtues, or their crimes have left a deep trace in the memory of generations: above all, it is the tableau of the destiny of peoples which it is called upon to paint; it is social events which, above all, form the interest of its pictures. Therein each people appears like a moral personality, with its infancy, its growth, its maturity and its decrepitude; its special character, its qualities and faults, its good points and its crimes, its prosperity and its misfortune. The life of each people is, then, a grand drama, wherein not one of the elements of the most moving interest is wanting; but this drama must have its moral, and, in order to give it one, history must have recourse anew to philosophy. Philosophy will not fail it; she will furnish it with the social laws, that is to say, those by which societies are constituted, governed, and developed. The application of these laws, which she deduces from the nature of man, she invites history to seek in the facts. If her theories are true, it is impossible that their accomplishment should not confer happiness on society, and their violation misfortune. History ought therefore, again, from this point of view to be the counter-proof of philosophy; and it ought to become so after a manner still more complete than when it occupied itself with the destiny of individuals. In truth, this destiny, playing its part chiefly on the invisible theatre of conscience and carrying it on into after-time, often escapes the application of history. Societies, on the contrary, having an existence temporal in its duration and public in its most important events, ought to show forth in their history with great clearness the award of the laws which the Creator has imposed upon them, and which philosophy establishes _a priori_ by its deductions. The study of this award must purchase, then, at the price of very great difficulties, the precious advantages which it promises. It is this which constitutes the second degree of the philosophy of history, and which makes this science the best school of politics.

Lastly, history mounts a degree still higher: beyond the moral individualities which we call peoples, she discovers an individuality much more vast and much more lasting--humanity, the immense body whose members are all peoples, and in which each individual plays his _rôle_, like a living molecule which influences in its part the destinies of the whole. As each nation has its character and as it were its own style of feature which distinguish it from other nations, so humanity is distinguished from the other species of rational beings wherewith the Creator has peopled the universe, by prerogatives and by infirmities which no other shares with it. It also has had its infancy, its growth, its ripe age; and everything leads us to believe that it will one day have its decrepitude. It also, in fine, has its mission, which it accomplishes in the course of ages, and at the term of which its development will cease.

This common destiny of humanity constitutes, together with its common origin, the unity of this vast body. It permits us to lift ourselves up even to the divine thought, which, in sowing this innumerable multitude in the immensity of the ages, proposed to itself a plan as harmonious in its unity as when it launched into space this immense variety of globes and atoms which compose the universe. Behold herein the true unity of the human race, whose substantial unity, as seen by the pantheist, is nothing but an absurd parody.

It is here, in fact, that we find ourselves face to face with the two philosophies of history--the false and the true. Both wish for unity, because unity, which is the essence of God and the law of the world, is also the last want of our mind and the last end of science. But the first of these philosophies only establishes unity in the world by destroying its diversity, which is an essential condition of beauty and of life. In its eyes individuals are nothing but unreal phenomena, which appear, only to vanish; space alone is something; it alone remains while all the rest passes away. And as it would be too absurd to give space a separate reality, independent of that of individuals, to make humanity something existing outside of man, it is forced to conclude, in the final analysis, that this humanity, which alone truly exists, is nothing in itself but a form which is developed by some fatality in time and space; and all of us who persuade ourselves that we each have our own existence are in reality but the varied expressions of this form, the passing vibrations of an ideal fluid, the fleeting tints of a cloud. Behold the philosophy of history according to pantheism!

How much greater, how much more consoling, how much more beautiful is the true philosophy of history--that of which St. Augustine and Bossuet have made themselves the eloquent interpreters! And in the meantime, in the midst of all these varied existences, in the midst of these actions so divergent, in the midst of these liberties so often at war, she finds a perfect unity, the unity of the divine thought--bringing back to its end all these divergencies, and making of their very opposition so many means thereto. But what is this thought, what is this one end, which God is working in the world, and for the realization of which, willingly or unwillingly, all these individuals and peoples labor? For a reply to this mighty question, it has pleased God not to abandon us to uncertain conjecture. He hath spoken from the beginning of the world; and in proportion as the human race has developed has he manifested more clearly its destiny--a destiny thrice divine since it has God for its principle, God for its term, and God again for its means; it is the divinization of man by Jesus Christ the God-man, the conquest of eternal happiness by God himself, by the fulfilling of the earthly ordeal in the image of God Incarnate.

Such is the divine thought which it has pleased God to reveal to us from his own mouth. The incarnation of the Son of God is, therefore, the pivot around which roll the events of history--as the divinization of men in him is the term where these events ought to meet. The glory of the Word Incarnate: such is the closing scene to which all the catastrophes of this drama ought infallibly to lead up--a drama whose every historic period forms a scene, whose plot borrows a most captivating interest from the apparent triumph of human passions. Jesus Christ: such is the word which unlocks the great enigma of the ages--Jesus Christ: behold the Sun, whose dawn and coming form the natural division of the ancient and modern world, whose presence and whose absence make the day and the night in the moral order, and whose final triumphs over the mists and vapors, which to this day have striven against him, will give to the earth the unity and the happiness for which it sighs.

But one may stop me, and tell me that I am no longer treading on philosophic ground. I am happy to confess it. For the same reason that in seeking the final explanation of his individual destiny man is compelled to have recourse to his Creator, so must he abide his final explanation alone of the destiny of the world. Reason tells him that in the existence of humanity God pursues one end, and that this end should be the manifestation of his divine attributes. It can tell him no more. As for the mode of this manifestation, it rests entirely with the will of God; and it would consequently be a presumption on the part of philosophy to pretend to determine it, since its power does not stretch beyond necessary truths. We acknowledge, therefore, that, without the aid of faith, the science of history cannot reach its third degree. Therein we detract in no wise from philosophy; for, if it must necessarily borrow from revelation this fact of the free end of God, as it borrows from history the knowledge of the free actions of men, it is no less true that by its processes these different facts meet together to form the most harmonious of all the tableaux, and the most inspiring of all the poems which human thought has ever conceived--the divine epic of humanity.

TO BE CONTINUED.

A SUMMER IN THE TYROL.

The Tyrol is--or was, when we knew it--one of the most primitive countries in Europe. Entirely Catholic, it comes up to the ideal of the faith of the middle ages far better than even the most historic cities of Italy, that by-gone cradle of our faith. It is not sufficiently overrun with tourists to be corrupted by them, and their stay in any of its towns is seldom long. Before the Brenner Railroad was opened, it was almost, practically speaking, as secluded a spot as the interior of China.

Twenty years ago, hardly any language but a _patois_ of German was understood by the Tyrolese, and when a couple of English explorers made a tour among the mountains, journeying on foot nearly the whole of the way, they were amused one night by finding their old English valet seated in the kitchen of a very unpretending _Gasthaus_, with his bare feet stamping on the floor within a cabalistic-looking circle drawn in white chalk. The old man had been frantically but vainly endeavoring to make the natives understand his master’s need of--a foot-bath! One of the travellers was luckily able to come to his assistance in good Hanoverian German, which itself, however, was only just barely comprehensible to the simple mountaineers.

Although we have no personal reminiscences of that style of travelling which skims over half a continent in a two months’ tour, yet the local knowledge we acquired by a four months’ residence in one town of the Tyrol will perhaps not be entirely uninteresting. Innsbruck, although the capital of the province, is nothing more than a large village with two or three roomy and tidy but very old-fashioned inns, and a church or two not remarkable for either beauty or antiquity. Besides the inns, which were too much embedded among streets and houses to be suitable to our taste, there were, outside the town, a few cheap “places of entertainment,” where lodging could be had for next to nothing, and where unlimited quiet might be enjoyed. One was a “Schloss,” anciently some baronial or monastic dependency, very picturesque and inaccessible, and on the inside very susceptible of English home comfort, but for an invalid this could not be thought of. The road that led to it was enough to jolt any springs to pieces, and once a carriage had safely got up, it seemed impossible that it should ever get down again. So this had to be given up despite the romantic name and position of the “Schloss.” Lower down, and on the turnpike road, just beyond the bridge over the Inn (which gives the town its name), was another house, partly a _châlet_, comfortable enough and very quiet. It was delightfully primitive. A wide wooden staircase led right up from the entrance door on the left hand, and never, on the darkest night, was there by any chance a light to guide you over it. The first floor consisted of a wide passage with rooms on each side, like a monastery, and a large _Saal_, or public room, with a clean boarded floor and a billiard table. Beyond this were three or four other rooms. Our party took the whole floor, including the _Saal_, which during our stay was to be a private room. Sufficient furniture was brought in to make one corner of it look civilized, and it served for drawing, dining, and billiard room alike. Nothing cooler nor more rustic could have been imagined, and, to add to the pleasantness of this retreat, the windows opened on a balcony, just like those on the toy Swiss _châlets_ we have so often seen. There was a chapel in the house, and the proprietor claimed that he had a right to have Mass said there every Sunday. However problematical this sounded, Mass _was_ said notwithstanding, but under a legitimate permission obtained for our own party. There in the little dark closetlike room, with a congregation of servants and stray guests or laborers out in the corridor beyond, Mass was offered every Sunday and very often on week-days. Sometimes the Jesuits from the town would officiate, sometimes the parish priest of the little church half a mile further up the country. The Jesuit church, standing on the edge of the town, among great lindens and elm-trees, was a large, tawdry renaissance building, where brick and stucco did duty for the marbles of Italy, and artificial flowers and gilded finery reigned supreme. There was not one feature worth noticing about the whole church, and even the Madonna shrine was but a sad burlesque on the wonderful idea it symbolized. But, on the other hand, the priests worked hard and earnestly, services were frequent and well attended, the confessionals crowded, and the communions numerous. There were real sympathy and sound counsel to be had there; strength to be gathered from the exhortations given in secret, and instruction in all necessary religious knowledge to be reaped from the plain and practical sermons delivered in public. The devotion of the Tyrolese is as simple as it is deep; it has no need of exalting externals to draw it to God, it is so full of vitality and manliness that it does not ask for the æsthetic helps whose absence often makes such a void in our own devotion, and we cannot choose but admire it, though it is vain for our weaker if more cultured Christianity to endeavor to imitate it.

The parish church outside the town to which we have referred was much smaller and poorer than that of the Jesuits, but a great feeling of peace came over you as you entered it, and as, pacing to and fro under its low, simple roof, you thought of the many holy and acceptable peasant lives that had been lived under its shadow, and ended joyfully within its churchyard. It stood on a small but abrupt hill, which, from the singular flatness of the vale of Innsbruck, looked higher than it was. Iron crosses with rude metal rays or crowns attached to them replaced in this Tyrolese cemetery the broad gravestones to which our northern eye is so well accustomed, and so it is throughout all Germany and Switzerland. About a mile further than this church stood a little private chapel, near a deserted villa, or, as the French would call it, a _château_. This chapel was always open, and was our invariable resting-place every day during a long stroll into the country. A high gate of rusty and intricate iron-work divided the main chapel from the lower and narrower part accessible to the public at all times, and remains of gilding and heraldic colors denoted the connection, in the past at least if not in the present, of this little oratory with some old family of high standing. Here and there a group of cottages that hardly made a hamlet was dotted on the green landscape, and the only sound to be heard was the tinkling of the great square cow-bells, or the peculiar _jödel_ of the mountaineer, a cry now made familiar to the outside world by “Tyrolese minstrels” (or their spurious personifiers). The Tyrol is famous for its wild flowers, as are all Alpine tracts, the gentian and the wild rhododendron[177] predominating. All kinds of summer meadow flowers grow well in the green pasture lands near Innsbruck, and the forget-me-not lines the frequent brooks with thick fringes of blossom.[178]

Water-mills are very often found on the line of these mountain brooks, and as only the old-fashioned appliances are known, the places where they are built are fortunately not disfigured by business-looking arrangements or alarmingly active squads of men. One of these picturesque mills we well remember, standing over a beautiful, foaming brook, and surrounded by hay-fields. It was a very silent, lonely walk, and used to be almost a daily one with us, until the old farmer to whom the mill and hay-field belonged once waylaid us at the door of his cottage and began expostulating in no very choice language, and ordering us not to trample his hay any longer unless we liked to pay him for the damage. The old fellow was very small and wizened, and whether the garment he had on was a smock-frock or a night-shirt it was difficult to determine, though the certainty of his unmistakable nightcap was apparent.

Of course, like all thoroughly Catholic countries the Tyrol is full of wayside shrines, with rude daubs reminding the passer-by of some religious event or point of Christian doctrine. Besides these, however, one thing cannot fail to strike a stranger as he walks through the lands round Innsbruck. On every house or building that is not an absolute “shanty” appears in the flaming colors sacred to the chromos of the cheap press the figure of a young Roman soldier pouring water out of a common jug on a most terrific and disproportionate conflagration. This is meant to represent St. Florian, a saint much honored in the Tyrol, and to whom tradition attributes a particular sovereignty over fire. The buildings, both farm and dwelling-houses, that abound most in that part of the country, are of wood, and very liable to the kind of destruction over which St. Florian has power. Hence his image is painted on the outer wall by way of a preservative, a kind of “insurance,” that may make stockholders smile, but that will bring in more of those riches garnered up where “the rust doth not eat, nor the moth consume,” than their long-headed thriftiness will ever be able to gather.

Pilgrimages, among a people so devout as the Tyrolese, are numberless. Every village has its chapel where of old miracles were wrought or some proof of divine favor was manifested. Five or six miles from Innsbruck is one of these hamlets, called Absam, where the shrine is of a somewhat peculiar nature. Among the several visits we paid to it was one on the day of the Assumption. The road leads through fields of flax, one of the crops most cultivated in the Tyrol. Its tiny blue flowers were thickly spread over the fields, and August seemed thus to have put on a fitting livery with which to greet the blue-mantled Queen whose triumph is commemorated on the 15th of that month. The village church at Absam is small and otherwise uninteresting. The altar, over which hangs the miraculous image, is covered with ornamental ex-votos, while larger votive offerings, curious little commemorative pictures, and plain tablets adorn the walls for a long space beyond. The image itself is on glass, a common thick pane, of very small dimensions, with the veiled head of the Virgin scratched in dark outline upon it. Tears are coursing down her cheeks, and the expression is wonderfully strong and sweet. It is strange that these few rude lines should be able to speak so energetic and unmistakable a language, but then we must remember the legend which calls this image the work of an angel. It was suddenly found in the church one morning, four or five centuries ago, and was immediately transferred from the window to a private chamber. A great deal of religious litigation and examination had to be gone through before it was allowed to be placed in a shrine and publicly venerated. Since then cures have been yearly obtained in this church, which has become famous through the Tyrol. We do not remember another instance of a miraculous image being graven on _glass_. It has none of the attributes of stained glass, neither in color nor in style, and is all of one piece. It is now framed in a showy gilt frame with a royal cross-surmounted crown ornamenting the top. Both pictures and prints of it are to be procured in the village, and also representations on glass, two or three inches square, but whose likeness to the original are perhaps not entirely reliable.

This was not the only shrine we visited while at Innsbruck. The pilgrimage of Waldrast included a picturesque journey half-way up the Brenner pass, and through some very wild and beautiful Alpine scenery among the lesser peaks. We slept at a little inn at the foot of Waldrast, so as to be able to make the most of the early morning. The day was beautiful; it was in the beginning of September, and just that season when, in Europe, summer and autumn seem to make but one. A thin mist hung over the mountain tops, the path was rugged and winding, and there were frequent brooks and fences to jump over or climb. Heather grew in purple masses under foot, and the growth of trees varied from oak to chestnut, till it left the higher and more barren ground to the pines alone. After two or three hours’ good walking, we reached the chapel, which is only one level lower than the uncovered mountain top. It had grown quite chilly despite the sun which was advancing on his way. We were just in time to hear Mass, if we remember right, and had but little time to spare for refreshment. There is a _Gasthaus_ opposite the church, a little solitary, whitewashed, low-roofed cottage, very clean and comfortable. It is pretty full all the summer, but entirely deserted, even by its keeper, during the winter. We asked to see the priest. He turned out to be a Servite, and told us that the church belonged to his order. There was next to it a bare-looking house with one (and the larger) portion in ruins, a gaunt shell with no roof and full of _débris_ inside. It had been a monastery, but circumstances, chiefly of a persecuting nature, had obliged the monks to abandon the place. One of their community, however, was always there, to attend to the shrine and receive the still numerous pilgrims; he himself had never left the place for ten years, and, saving the visitors to the shrine, never saw a human being. During six months out of twelve he could safely say he was a hermit. We asked him how he spent his time. “I have a small library,” he answered, “and read a great deal, but when I have more time than I can fill by reading, or my office, or even the work of the church, I turn carpenter.”

And he took us into a workshop, littered over with shavings and sawdust, where among planks and rough logs of wood were various useful things of his own making. We particularly noticed a little wooden sleigh, and asked him its use.

“I use it in the winter,” he said, “to take me down to the village, to buy necessaries every week; and, when there is plenty of snow to cover the inequalities of the path, it works very well. Coming back, however, I have to load my purchases on it, and drag it up after me. It is good exercise,” he added, with a good-humored laugh, “and keeps me warm.”

He led us into the church, and told us the story of the apparition. This image was not so old as that of Absam, although it could boast of three centuries’ antiquity at least. It had been found by a woodman while chopping a tree on the mountain very near the spot where the church now stands. The figure suddenly appeared, surrounded by a marvellous light, in the cleft made by his axe in the wood. Years of suspense followed, during which authentications of this wonderful occurrence were severely tested, the devotion of the villagers preceding, however, the permission of the church to venerate the image as miraculous. During this time it was housed in the hamlet at the foot of the mountain, where crowds flocked to visit it. When it was removed to the Servite church and monastery, built expressly for its reception, on the spot where it had first appeared, its translation was a cause of grief as well as joy, those who had guarded it till then loudly lamenting their loss. The monastery, we believe, was reduced to its present condition through the decrees against monastic orders issued during the unhappy reign of the infidel Emperor Joseph. The church was never, however, without its chaplain. It is a plain, whitewashed building, with a flat frontage, irregularly pierced with a great many windows, while to the back rises one of those extraordinary steeples so often seen in the Tyrol, suggestive of a farm-house rather than a church. Often and often have we come upon such, sometimes of red tiles and not unfrequently of green, so that we were forcibly reminded of St. George and his scaly dragon. The interior of Waldrast church corresponds to the exterior, and is very plain and inartistic. The image itself is of wood, and peculiarly German in its cut. Our Lady is covered with a stiff, heavy mantle, and bears her Divine Son, also robed in the same kind of garment, absolutely shapeless except where his hand comes forth. The Virgin bears a globe in her hand, and both she and the Divine Infant are crowned. The crowns, however, and the chains and ornaments on the figures, are due to the devotion of the faithful.

The Servite father who kindly showed us over the church was still a young man, and seemed very quiet and refined. His ten years’ solitude had not taken any of the grace of civilization--ought we not rather to say of charity?--from his manner, nor given him in any way the air of a Nabuchodonosor. He wore his black habit and a long black beard. We were sorry to be able to see so little of him, for we had a long journey home before us, and the greater part had to be performed on foot. We left Waldrast at midday, feeling that in these out-of-the-way nooks more can be learnt of the inner life of a people than in larger centres of bustle and activity.

The way down the other side of the mountain led through sparse forests of pine, where workmen were felling the trees and piling them in heaps as high as houses along the path. Glimpses might be caught now and then of far-off precipices, walls of rock or of snow with the intense golden white of the noonday sun glorifying their stern beauty, and reminding one of those still more difficult ascents to virtue, seemingly so inaccessible, yet so gloriously transfigured in the light of God’s help and God’s promises. Wild flowers abounded through the wood, and mosses and ferns grew in great tangles of greenery by the brooks which their growth overshadowed. It was a delightful expedition, and one that we should very much like to repeat. But nothing in this world ever duplicates itself; the places we once visited with such confident hopes of returning to enjoy them the next year, have we ever seen them again, or if we have, has it ever been with the same feelings, the same hopes, the same companions, nay, even the same _self_? In this law of change lies, to our mind, the sad side of travel. We go to a place, we learn to admire it, we remember it with pleasure, we almost begin to have associations with it and its surroundings, it grows in fact into our soul’s history, and makes itself a place in our life. We leave it, and never see it again. We have the regret of having seen and felt beauty that is not for us, we have longed for what we could not have, we have dreamed of utopias that were never to be realized, and we have prepared for ourselves a nest of disappointments for the future. Is not this so much time and energy lost? so much vitality taken out of our life which might have been usefully employed at home? But if the place we have visited once becomes a frequent resort, if we go back to it again and again and find ties and duties to bind us there, the charm of life is doubled, and the happiness of home reproduced under a different set of circumstances. No one knows a place if he have not lived there in all seasons and spent quiet months in finding out its hidden beauties. Places, like people, grow upon you; and what once seemed bare will, by long acquaintance, appear as full of interest as it was once devoid of it. It happened thus to ourselves in a seaside town in England, where the coast is rather bare of trees, and the country mostly flat and divided without hedges into com and hay fields. Again, the country round Milan, which is always conventionally styled “the fertile plain of Lombardy,” is of this nature. Wide fields of rice, half-flooded, and a network of roads fringed by pollard willows or low hedges, with here and there a neat little farm-house, do not at first sight constitute a beautiful country. But after three or four weeks’ constant driving through these lanes, you discover the loveliest bits of “Pre-Raphaelite” nature, small triangular patches of luxuriant grass, with flowers of brilliant hue and starry shape; tiny brooks running through meadows with fire-flies making movable illuminations on their banks by night, and many more beautiful and minute details that naturally enough escape the first glance. The Roman Campagna, even with its desolate, Niobe-like grandeur, is susceptible of this alchemy of habit. To the unaccustomed eye of a stranger it may look grand, but scarcely beautiful; to one who has walked, ridden, and driven through it in all directions, it reveals secrets of pastoral beauty, soft vales hidden by groves of ilex or cork, with violets growing plentifully in their recesses, and rivulets trickling through their rocky crevices. Even cities are better known when seen gradually, after the manner of a peaceable resident rather than that of a hurrying tourist. What do we know, to take our own case, of the Campo Santo of Pisa, which we visited between the arrival and departure of the two trains from Leghorn, compared to what we learnt of St. Mark’s at Venice, where we heard Mass every day for five months? And this feeling is surely enough to breed a weariness of _mere_ travel, however instructive it may be. The only places we should care to revisit are those where we stayed long enough to make them feel like home. Innsbruck is certainly one that recalls many touching domestic scenes, many of those little memories which, like a daisy-chain, bind life together, childhood and youth, sickness and health, trouble and joy--frail links, but so fair, begun in early childhood and winding themselves round the heart, through the vicissitudes of many years, the wanderings in many lands, and, above all, through the intangible changes of a restless mind and soul.

For the general reader, this sketch may perhaps have no further interest than to make him acquainted with some of the local traits of a country not so well known as other European fields of travel; for the Catholic, it ought to possess the additional interest of an effort meant to show how thoroughly this country is still imbued with the faith. Its patriotism, too, ever closely bound to faith, was conspicuous in the wars against Napoleon and in the Tyrol. The first decade of this century is noted chiefly for the name, not of the resistless invader Bonaparte, but of the stubborn defender of mountain freedom, Andreas Hofer. Here and there are his relics--his gun, or his cap, or the cup out of which he drank. Every other inn has his figure for a sign, and every other child bears his name in memory of his gallantry. His descendants, poor and simple peasants as he was himself, are as proud of their ancestry as the haughtiest Montmorency or the oldest Colonna; and no Tyrolese mountaineer can talk for half an hour without mentioning some of Hofer’s exploits against the French.

We cannot conclude without again speaking of that weird _jödel_ or herd-song peculiar to the Tyrol. We have never heard it as performed by the hired companies of “minstrels” so often advertised in large towns, but we had the opportunity of listening to it under very pleasant circumstances at Innsbruck. In the beginning of September, just before our pilgrimage to Waldrast, a rural _fête_ was given in honor of one of our party whose birthday it was. The open court-yard behind our house served as an _al fresco_ dining-hall, a band was engaged, and fireworks and illuminations prepared. In this primitive assemblage, speeches were actually made, and, as it was not easy for the English and Tyrolese to understand each other, an interpreter was found in the bright and quick-witted courier who had superintended the whole thing. After this cordial display of mutual friendship, and a few songs and pieces, the people were left to their private enjoyments, the priest from the nearest parish being present among them. About an hour afterwards, and before the party of mountaineers dispersed, they begged leave to sing us their _jödel_, thinking it was the most interesting thing for strangers to hear well done. Thirty men in rugged costumes, whose ornamentation chiefly consisted in silver buttons, were then brought into the great _Saal_, and the chorus began. Suddenly a single voice broke in with the marvellous _jödel_; all the others dropping into silence, and then again joining in the national song. It was indeed strange and weird-like, the echoes seemed to break again and again in renewed bursts of plaintive sound; it was not like the cry of a bird or of any animal, nor yet was it suggestive of a human voice; it had in it something of what, were we Pantheists, we might call the “voice of nature.” The effect was indescribable, and, because so beautiful, saddening. We should not wish to hear it again on the stage or in the concert-room; the effect would be lost, and merged into a dramatic trick. Sung by those thirty strong voices, used to no concert hall but the open air and the mountain passes, the _jödel_ was one of those things that one likes to look back upon and place among the fresh, healthy remembrances of the past. Sung before those who have always been at our side through weal or woe, this Tyrolese song becomes more than a mere remembrance, and remains a sacred memory, shared with the dead and the absent, the ever beloved and unforgotten ones of our heart. So true is it that a thing unconnected with love, however brilliant it may be in the field of art or literature, is a failure as far as our individual appreciation of it is concerned--that this simple mountain song, vigorously but hardly skilfully performed, is far dearer to our remembrance than the perfect strains heard at other times from the lips of finished artists.

The Tyrol, no doubt, is fast putting off its early garb of faith and simple honesty; with Manchester prints and chignons, the free grace of its peasant women will vanish, and with the poisonous teaching of the International, the frankness and charm of its men will go. Already we have heard of the earnest workers of the Jesuit church being annoyed and insulted, and it may not be long before the cupidity of public officials will rob the shrines of many of their votive treasures. In these days of ruthless destruction, even the Tyrol may be dechristianized and made over to a worse barbarism than that of its savage bands of early settlers, and a worse slavery than that against which Andreas Hofer so ably and successfully fought. Still, it will always be a pleasure to us to think that we visited it in the days of its Catholic prosperity, and saw there the remains of that state of peace and public safety which everywhere characterizes a truly Christian land.

FOOTNOTES:

[177] Falsely called _rose des Alps_ by the French.

[178] The real “Alpenrose” of the Tyrolese is a strange-looking growth, a starry flower of a dull white, with thick velvety petals, five in number. It grows only in very inaccessible places, and is considered a great prize.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE MISSION OF THE BARBARIANS.

SECOND ARTICLE.

During the centuries of persecution, then, the Northern heavens grew darker and darker, and the storm-clouds thickened on the horizon. God was at work behind that dark and heavy cloud-wall planning the most terrible campaign that was ever executed. The heedless, sinning empire little thought what fire and tempest would sweep over it when that storm-cloud should burst. It considered itself a veritable part of the rock-built earth, and immovable while the world lasted; that it would only perish when the universe should cease to exist. But behind that fiery storm-cloud that hangs heavy and threatening in the Northern skies, there is a mightier God than paganism knows of, who will sweep the Roman power away as the leaves are swept by the autumn blasts. The moment of vengeance is fixed. Whilst the cry of the martyrs’ blood has been sounding in the ears of God, he has been preparing for that moment of wrath. But there was another cry, too, rising up to heaven from the length and breadth of the empire, and calling down vengeance and wrath. It was the cry of sin--a never-ceasing, clamorous, many-voiced cry--going up night and day from city and town and hamlet over the wide area of Roman dominion. The corruption, then, deep and universal, of the Roman Empire was the second cause of the barbarian invasion. Of this we have still to speak.

We must remark at the outset that, when we speak of the corruption of the Roman Empire, we are not referring to that period of history which preceded Christ. We wish to speak of that period which immediately preceded the great invasion of the Northern barbarians in the fifth century. We are about to point out another object which God evidently had in view in sending down his wild warriors, and why their course was one of fire and devastation. In a word, we are about to speak of that moral rottenness which had eaten through the very vitals of the Roman Colossus, and which God, unable to bear it longer before his high heaven, infecting, as it was, the very universe with its pestilent stench, sent his messengers of wrath with flaming sword and fiery torch to cleanse away from the afflicted earth. We must insist upon God being an active power in the world. We are no followers of Professor Seeley, who lectures to the young men of Cambridge on the Fall of the Roman Empire as if God had had no hand in it. However ingenious Prof. Seeley may be, he will never convince us that God does not make and unmake empires. We want no new theory of the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Invasion of the Barbarians. The grandest and the truest was given us long ages ago by St. Augustine in his immortal work _De Civitate Dei_, and it has satisfied all Christian thinkers up to the present day. Prof. Seeley asks what is the cause of the decaying condition of the empire? “It has been common,” he says, “to suppose a moral degradation in the Romans, caused by luxury and excessive good fortune. To support this, it is easy to quote the satirists and cynics of the imperial times, and to refer to such accounts as Ammianus gives of the mingled effeminacy and brutality of the aristocracy of the capital in the fourth century. But the history of the wars between Rome and the barbaric world does not show us the proofs we might expect of this decay of spirit. We do not find the Romans ceasing to be victorious in the field and beginning to show themselves inferior in valor to their enemies. The luxury of the capital could not affect the army, which had no connection with the capital, but was levied from the peasantry of the whole empire, a class into which luxury can never penetrate. Nor can it be said the luxury corrupted the generals, and through them the army.... Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have been, the immediate cause to which the fall of the empire can be traced is a physical, not a moral, decay.”[179]

This specimen of Mr. Seeley’s philosophy of history gives us a very low opinion of his powers of penetration. If the professor could see a little further below the surface, he would surely discover that a frightful moral decay was the underlying cause of the physical decay. He cannot persuade us that, if the capital were so corrupt, the generals and the army would still maintain a manly and a vigorous character. If the central heart be corrupt, a corrupting influence will flow out over the whole body. It was so, beyond doubt, with the Roman Empire in past days; it has been so with another mighty empire in our own times. Moral corruption flowed out from the capitals of both empires, and destroyed the vigor, courage, and all the manly virtues of their peoples. And then the messengers of God came. They came from the North in both cases, and terrible was the devastation which God gave them power to effect. In both cases they were irresistible, simply because he who beckoned them on and was hid in the smoke of battle was the God of battles himself. This is the theory which a Christian professor at least will naturally follow. There is something far more satisfactory in this, both to the intellect and to faith, than in any theory that can be suggested by the naturalistic views of men of Mr. Seeley’s school. We wonder if the young men who sat under Mr. Seeley at Cambridge were satisfied when the professor summed up his theory of the fall of the empire in these words: “Men were wanting; the empire perished for want of men”? To go no further than that seems to us pitiably shallow indeed. We are not at all captivated by Mr. Seeley’s view. We feel far more satisfied in believing the grand, old Christian theory, viz., that the empire perished at the hands of God for its savage cruelty to the holy martyrs and for its widespread corruption and revolting crimes.

We have already endeavored to sketch out the history of the age of blood: it now remains for us to give a picture of the corruption in which the empire lay steeped at the period previous to the descent of the barbaric hordes. But we most honestly state that we cannot do more than give a faint portraiture of what is so offensive to Christian purity of mind. To point to the life in this case, even if we were able to do so, would be too painful for Catholic ideas. The picture would necessarily be too frightful for the eye of modesty to gaze upon. It would be a dreadful exposure to the light of day of the blackest and the most shameful side of fallen human nature. Of necessity, then, must the painting be in somewhat dim outlines. But even so, it will sufficiently answer our present purpose.

For well-nigh five centuries, then, had Christianity been at work over the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, and yet paganism and its demoralizing influence were not dead. We know well how boldly and triumphantly the apostles went from the Cenacle to the conversion of the pagan world. The heavenly fire that had come down upon them had lodged itself in their hearts. It shot its wondrous power through their whole bodies, darting forth from their eyes in living light, issuing from their mouths in burning words, nerving them up to brave tortures and racks. They went forth, did that little band from the Cenacle, fire-girt and heaven-inspired, to the most arduous task ever confided to mortal men. Their wondrous success we need not here recount. It was such as only men with God in their midst could effect. They no longer knew fear of earthly powers; they quailed not in the presence of the terrors of death. Nothing could withstand them in their course. The demons of paganism fled before them; a thrill of horror ran through the vast Pantheon of pagan worship, and the idols trembled on their pedestals. Like the Titans of old, those messengers of the Crucified scaled the Olympus of paganism, and hurled down the false gods that were enthroned there. Hell and Olympus mingled their groans at the sounding blows which were levelling the idols of false worship and shaking the universe. But was, then, paganism utterly destroyed? Did it never recover from the shock which it received at the hands of the apostles of Christ? Did the darkness flee away before the bright torches of light which Christians held up in the midst of cities and towns and on every hill-top, and never return? Did the demons who lurked in the pagan temples and spoke by the mouths of the idols plunge into the deep abyss at the approach of Christ’s preachers, and never come back again? It is usual to think that something like this was the case. But it is far from the historic truth. We must admit, indeed, that the success of the first apostles of Christianity was the most amazing fact which we have ever read of in history. The light of divine truth flashed with miraculous swiftness through the world. Thousands of persons abandoned the idols of paganism, and joined the strange, new standard of the Cross. But yet paganism, continued to exist and to spread its baneful influence--it was not a dead thing. It had become welded into the very substance of the empire. It was associated with so much of the grand historic past.

The Roman could not read of the warlike glories of his country without finding them mingled with the worship of Jupiter and Mars. He could not take up the verses of his immortal poets without meeting at every page with the gods and goddesses of Olympus. The laws of the empire recalled pagan gods; the customs and festivals and games kept their remembrance fresh in the mind. We do not wonder, then, that paganism was not easily destroyed. It would almost seem that the life of the empire and the life of paganism were one; that the pillars of the pagan temples were, so to speak, identical with the pillars of the state. When we bear all this in mind, we are not so much surprised to find that paganism was still a living thing more than eighty years after the first Christian emperor had taken the Labarum for his military standard, and had lifted Christianity out of the dark caves of the Catacombs to place it on the throne of the Cæsars. We are also more prepared for what we read regarding the Emperor Honorius. When in 404 he visited Rome, in order to celebrate his sixth consulate, pagan temples still surrounded the imperial palace, the sanctuary of Jupiter Tarpeius still crowned the capital, and from sacred edifices still standing on every side a whole host of pagan gods yet looked down, as of old, on Rome and the world. So real a thing was paganism still even in the fifth century that the pagan poet Claudian, who had been appointed to celebrate in verse the occasion just referred to, could with impunity and, we suppose, with apparent propriety, point out the gods as seeming to guard the imperial palace by their divine presence and smile propitiously upon one who was the heir of so many Christian emperors.[180] Some years later a work was written by an unknown author who lived in the time of Honorius or of Valentinian III., giving a topographical description of Rome, and mentioning those monuments which had been spared by the fire and sword of the Goths. The writer enumerates as still existing 43 pagan temples and 480 cediculæ. The Colossus of the Sun, a hundred feet high, still towered aloft close by the Coliseum, where so many holy martyrs had poured out their blood for Christ. The statues of Apollo, of Hercules and Minerva still stood, as of old, at the crossings and in the public squares. Still the fountains flowed under the invocation of nymphs. And this, though Constantine and Theodosius had wielded the sceptre of the empire, and SS. Sylvester and Damasus had sat in the midst on the throne of Peter. Time passes on, and with it the age of the great fathers of the church. Those days which Christianity filled with its spirit, when Gregory and Chrysostom and Basil and Jerome and mighty Augustine preached and taught, go by with their brightness and their glory, and yet in 419, in the time of Valentinian III., we find Rutilius Numatianus celebrating the greatness of pagan Rome, the mother of gods and heroes. Christianity had been throwing bright gleams of light over the whole world for these 400 years, the voices of the great fathers of the church had been thundering in the principal cities of the empire, yet Claudian and Rutilius Numatianus were as though they had caught no glimpse of the light which shone around them nor heard a sound from Hippo or Milan. Claudian had found a cord of that Latin lyre which was broken to pieces on the day when Lucan opened his own veins in the bath. Though living in Christian times, he was as pagan as his great model, and his imagination revelled amid the fabled splendors of Olympus and the baseless fictions of mythology. He can sing of the rape of Proserpine whilst the cultus of our Blessed Lady is taking possession of the temple of Ceres at Catana. He invites the graces, the nymphs, and the hours to prepare their garlands for the fair spouse of Stilico, though she had, in hatred and contempt of the gods of paganism, snatched the golden collar from the neck of the statue of Cybele. His genius takes even a more daring flight when he introduces Christian princes into the abodes of the immortals, and represents Theodosius, the greatest hater of the gods, as holding familiar converse with Jupiter. Rutilius Numatianus, on the other hand, pours out his soul in passionate words of patriotism upon Rome herself, the last and the greatest divinity of the ancient world. To him Rome is the ever beautiful queen of the universe, whose dominion she holds for all ages. To him she is the mother of men and of gods. “When we pray in thy temples,” he exclaims in his burning ardor, “we are not far from heaven. Of all nations she has made one country, of a whole world one city. Her trophies are countless as the stars of heaven, her temples too dazzling for the eyes to look upon. Spread yet further thy laws; they shall govern ages yet unborn which shall become Roman despite themselves, and thou alone, of all earthly things, shalt not fear the power of the fates.”[181]

We might easily imagine on reading these two writers that Christianity had not yet dawned upon the world, yet we are in the fifth century. We naturally ask if the Christian emperors used their power to crush out paganism. History tells us of many imperial edicts which ordered the pagan temples to be closed and the sacrifices to be discontinued. We find those edicts often renewed, and hence, we argue, often disobeyed. Nothing, however, surprises us so much as to find that in the middle of the fifth century the sacred chickens were still kept at the capital, and the consuls, on their appointment to office, went to seek from them the auspices which they were supposed to be able to give. At this date also the public calendar indicated the feasts of the false gods by the side of those in honor of Christ and his saints. In a word, paganism is yet a living power, with its temples and idols, and sacrifices and sacred groves.

In Rome itself, where the smoke of incense ascends to the only true God, the smoke of sacrifice also rises to the false gods of Olympus. And beyond Rome, over Italy and Gaul and throughout the whole of Western Christendom, there are still symbols of pagan worship; still undoubted indications of its enduring influence over thousands who believe that the empire and the pagan gods are equally eternal, and will still be in existence when men here become tired of the folly of the cross and the name of the crucified Nazarene has faded from their minds. How true, then, does it appear that paganism continues to hold its ground to a far greater extent than is commonly imagined! It was a fearful task for Christianity, divine though it was, to level to the ground the temples and idols of pagan worship. Paganism seemed to hold on to the empire with unrelaxing tenacity; it was bound up with its institutions; it seemed built with the very stones into the walls of the great capital.

The incontrovertible fact, then, that paganism still existed and retained a stout hold upon the empire even so late as the fifth century will prepare the reader to believe that its demoralizing principles were still working their natural results. We will not maintain that human sacrifices were as common at this date as they had been some centuries before; but we do not feel sure that they were altogether abandoned. We know that in the time of Constantine, when Christianity was looking down from the throne of the Cæsars over the empire, pagan priests poured out each year a patera of human blood to Jupiter Latial. The example which the Romans themselves had set was followed by the conquered nations, and those dreadful horrors long continued to be practised among them in spite of imperial decrees and prohibitions. “All the laws of civilization,” says F. Ozanam in his striking way, “could not smother the instincts of that savage beast which paganism had unmuzzled in the heart of fallen humanity.” But even if human sacrifices had altogether ceased, yet the essential principles of paganism were still at work. The direct tendency of pagan worship was to enslave man to his senses. The fearful degradation to which mankind were thus brought, it is almost impossible for Christian minds to credit. St. Augustine, in the seventh book of his _City of God_, tells us of horrors which we cannot read without a sense of shame and disgust for our race. Those processions through the towns and fields of Latium on the feast of Bacchus are too shocking to describe. We know, also, that unnamable crimes were honored with a religious cultus, and had temples dedicated to their worship at Cyprus, Samos, at Corinth, and on Mount Eryx. When we read of this utter degradation to which paganism reduces human nature, we wonder how such a religion could endure. But it was precisely because it ministered so readily and so generously to the worst passions of human nature that it maintained its influence so long. When in course of time, and, by the repeated pressure of imperial edicts, the priests of Cybele and the priestesses of Venus were dispersed, paganism still had its temples and its thousands of worshippers in the circus, the theatre, and the amphitheatre. In these centres of resort, where the most reckless and the most unholy passions had full play, the gods were in their strongholds. St. Cyprian had understood the true nature of paganism well when he said that it was “the mother of the games.” Nothing could have seized upon human nature with a more powerful grasp than paganism did by making pleasure into a religious worship. The two strong tendencies of mankind, viz., the religious sentiment and the intense love of pleasure, were thus directed to one and the same object. The combats of the gladiators, which exercised such a fascination on the Romans for so many years, were supposed to appease the spirits of the departed; the dances of the stage were thought to avert the anger of heaven. The symbolism which covered all lent an air of mystery and solemnity to these exciting entertainments. We are told that the courses of the circus represented the evolutions of the stars, the dances of the theatre symbolized the voluptuous whirl of pleasure in which all living beings were hurried along, and the combats of the amphitheatre were a type of the struggles in which the human race is ever engaged. The circus, theatre, and amphitheatre were, then, so many temples of worship, and, as we may well believe, the most popular and the best frequented temples that paganism ever consecrated to its false and corrupting rites. The other religious temples of the Roman were notoriously small and poor, but on these he lavished his gold, his marble, and all that he held most precious, so that he has left behind him nothing grander or richer than the monuments of his pleasures, and, we may add, nothing more defiled, more foul or more bloody.

The circus was dedicated to the sun; so proclaimed the obelisk which rose in stately height in the centre of the arena. Everything about the circus breathed idolatry. If we accept the view of the Greeks, its very name was taken from Circe, the daughter of the sun. If we take up the scathing work of Tertullian, _De Spectaculis_, we shall be told that “every ornament of the circus was in itself a temple. The eggs those assign to Castor and Pollux, who blush not in believing that these were born an egg from a swan which was Jupiter. The pillars vomit forth their dolphins in honor of Neptune; they support their Sessiæ, so-called from the sowing of the seed; their Messiæ, from the harvest; their Tutelinæ, from the protection of the fruits. In front of these appear three altars to three gods, mighty and powerful; these they consider to be of Samothrace. The enormous obelisk, as Hermatetes affirmeth, is publicly exposed in honor of the Sun; its inscription is a superstition from Egypt. The council of the gods were dull without their great mother; she therefore presideth there over the Euripus. Consus, as we have said, lieth buried beneath the earth of the Marcian Jail; even this jail he maketh an idol. Think, O Christian! how many unclean names possess the circus. Foreign to thee is that religion which so many spirits of the devil have taken unto themselves!”[182] It would seem that the circus was a sort of Pantheon, where almost every god received his tribute of worship. If the pagan deities had lost some of their temples in the onward advance of Christianity, they still retained a shrine where they were worshipped all at once. And no opportunity was lost when an act of religious worship could be brought in. Before the courses were opened, the gods were carried on rich litters round the circus by a grand cortége of priests. Tertullian speaks of the dazzling _pompa_ which preceded the games, “the long line of images, the host of statues, the chariots, the sacred images, the cars, the chairs, and the robes” with which the gods were clothed. “How many colleges,” he says, “how many priesthoods, how many offices are set in motion, the men of that city know in which the council of the demons sitteth.”[183] Sacrifices without number were celebrated in the course of the performances. They preceded, they came between, they followed them. And it is difficult to conceive the height of frenzy to which the people were excited by these games. “On the longed-for day of the equestrian games,” Ammianus Marcellinus tells us, “ere the clear rays of the sun yet shine, all hurry headlong, outpoured, as though they would outspeed the very chariots which are to contend.” Before the races began, all eyes, wild with the fire of excited passions, were fixed on the magistrate, who held in his hand the handkerchief whose falling was to signal the commencement of the sports. As that handkerchief fell, there came rushing into view those charioteers who were the delight of the Roman people. The crowd raised a wild cry of joy, and then, breathless with suspense, followed with their glaring eyes the rushing horses and the rattling cars as they dashed along the course. As the horses bounded over the ground, now losing, now gaining, on one another, and the dust-clouds rose from beneath the rattling chariot-wheels, louder and wilder rang the shouts of the spectators, and passion rose to its height in Roman hearts. Furious factions were formed, which soon developed into violence and internecine battle. This was the grand climax, sought for and expected. The gods were appeased; Romulus now recognized his people. From this state of wild excitement we naturally expect cruelty and bloodshed. We are quite prepared to believe what Suetonius tells us. He records that Vitellius massacred some of the people because they cursed the faction which he favored. Caracalla is said to have done the same for some jest on a favorite charioteer. But to add more vivid coloring to the picture, we will borrow the striking language of Tertullian. “Behold the people,” he says, “coming to the show already full of madness, already tumultuous, already blind, already agitated about their wagers. The prætor is too slow for them. Their eyes are ever rolling with their lots within his urn. Then they are in anxious suspense for the signal. The common madness hath a common voice. I perceive their madness from their trifling. ‘He hath thrown it,’ they say, and announce to each other what was seen at once by all. I possess the evidence of their blindness. They see not what is thrown; they think it a handkerchief, but it is the gullet of the devil cast down from on high.”[184]

Thus, then, in the stormy days of the fifth century did the great Roman people forget their troubles and their dangers in the excitement of the circus. What was so vividly described by Tertullian went on through the centuries that came after him. The Roman people had, in truth, lost the empire of the world; it had purchased its capital out of the hands of savage hordes by heavy sums of gold; but it forgot all in the delirium of the circensian games. There, as has been said, it found its temple, its forum, its country, and the term of its hopes. Through the storms of war against barbarians, in spite of the thunders of Christian eloquence, under the dazzling light of the Christian Gospel, still the circus stood, and its multitudinous gods received their tribute of worship, and the maddened crowds thronged to the games, as of old. In the year 448, the calendar marks 58 days for the public games. We may well be amazed as we read it. Fifty-eight days still dedicated to this wild self-abandonment, whilst on the Northern borders of the empire the threatening armies of Genseric and Attila were amassed, with the sword of fire and vengeance in their hands, awaiting the signal of God!

The theatre was another temple where paganism still retained a terrible hold. It was dedicated to Venus, the unholy goddess who swayed the hearts of almost all mankind. If we would see the great Roman people at its lowest, we must look upon it as it lies in prostrate adoration in this temple of Venus. Here it is grovelling in the veriest mire of abasement. Here, more than anywhere else, it forgets its dignity, and plunges into the deepest depths of sensuality and degradation. But we cannot paint the scene in bold colors. The picture would shock by its startling horror and deformity. The eye of Christian modesty would turn away in disgust and pain. We must let the outlines even be faint, lest they should offend the delicate sensitiveness of pure minds.

In the midst of the theatre stood the altar of the unholy goddess, crowned with garlands. Before this altar were represented the shameful histories of the pagan gods. There the wretched mimes, by look, and gesture, and suggestive attitude, displayed before the lascivious eyes of the multitude the loves of Jupiter and the fury of Pasiphaë. But as time went on, and the passions of the people became more and more inflamed, the mute language of look and gesture did not satisfy. Far worse horrors were demanded. Shadows and unrealities were not enough for the hungry fire of unrestrained passion. Realities, revolting, shameless, and unnamable, must be enacted before the eyes of a vast multitude, composed of old and young of both sexes. He who played the part of Hercules must be burned in the presence of a maddened throng; the horrid history of Atys must have a reality answering to it, and be carried into effect before the full gaze of the people. We can conceive nothing more pitiable than the sight of the great Roman people, so sadly fallen into baseness, so completely abandoned to shameful sensualities, and lying prostrate before the foul goddess of unholy passions in the theatre. The empire might perish and the heavens fall upon their heads, but the people must have their pleasures. This was their madness and their worship. Three thousand dancers ministered, like so many priestesses, in the theatre-worship of Rome. For these panderers to their vile pleasures, the Romans were willing to sacrifice all that was dear to them. These favorites they crowned with flowers, and flattered by their manifestations of applause. They retained them in the city, as Ammianus Marcellinus tells us, at a time of severe famine, where a decree was passed which expelled men of letters and those who exercised the liberal professions. Old Ammianus, though a pagan, is filled with wrath at this shameful abandonment of his countrymen, and pours out his indignation in vehement, fiery words. But what hope was there? Corruption had affected every class. The dancers were the favorites of all, and even the senators of Rome were not ashamed to sit in the first seats of the theatre gazing upon the nudity of these priestesses of Venus. Thus had the Romans fallen below even the most fallen of other nations, which had once been great, but had perished for their crimes. Egypt had deified its agricultural products and domestic animals, Phœnicia its commerce, Assyria its sciences, Persia the elements, Greece its arts.[185] But Rome had gone down far deeper than all into folly and idolatry; it had raised altars to its own base passions. And this theatre-worship was existing in its full life in the latter days of the empire. Christianity had not abolished it. The demons held their own in their temples of sinful pleasure, and the people came and adored in countless multitudes, and their passions were kept alive and burned wildly with unholy fire--and all under the dark, bodeful shadow of the storm-cloud which hung so black and threatening in the Northern skies.

But we have yet to speak of another great centre of paganism and moral corruption--the amphitheatre. “This,” says F. Ozanam, “was the greatest school which was ever opened for the demoralization of men.” It exercised a power of fascination beyond all conception, and was irresistible. The people rushed there in countless thousands, frantic with excitement. The thirst for blood maddened them like a wild indwelling demon. The games of the circus were tame in comparison with the sight of wild beasts engaged in death-struggle or the savage conflict of well-matched gladiators. There the emperors presided under the shadow of their pagan gods; there were gathered together the senators and the great ones of Rome; there rose tier upon tier round the vast arena the waving mass of countless human heads. There all Rome assembled for brutal pleasure and pagan worship, for the amphitheatre was a temple. Tertullian tells us this in his characteristic way. “The amphitheatre,” he says, “is consecrated to deities more numerous and more barbarous than the capitol. It is the temple of all demons. As many unclean spirits sit together as the place containeth men.”[186] Under the shadow, then, of so many pagan gods, breathed upon by so many devils, we can picture to ourselves the wild excitement of these thousands of spectators, as they assemble on occasion of a Roman holiday. They have caught a rumor, perhaps, of what is prepared that day, by a subservient emperor, for the amusement of his people. It may be that hundreds of ferocious beasts are to tear one another to pieces before them, as often happened in the time of Septimius Severus; or it may be that two hundred lions are to die in a horrid, bloody affray, as took place in the reign of one of his successors. Or, perhaps, Roman senators are to descend into the arena, to sacrifice their lives for the amusement of their fellow-citizens, as was the custom from the time of the first Cæsars. Perhaps it is near mid-day, and the crowd has been thronging in for hours. The sun is pouring down his blazing rays over the scene, though their heat is tempered by the canvas awnings which stretch a kind protecting shade wherever it is possible. But the bright light penetrates every nook and corner, and makes every figure stand forth to view. It flashes off the shining armor of Roman knights, dances and glistens in many a dark young eye, falls with a flood of glory upon Cæsar’s throne, and plays around the imperial robes which gold and precious stones so gorgeously bedeck. The brightness of the day adds to the excitement of the people. They talk with vivacity upon the nature of the expected conflicts; they lay their wagers, and become more excited as time flies on. They are impatient for the “shows” to begin; they clamor; they can wait no longer. We will here let a more brilliant pen than ours help to complete the picture. “And now, with peal of trumpets and clash of cymbals, a burst of wild martial music rises above the hum and murmur of the seething crowd. Under a spacious archway, supported by marble pillars, wide folding-doors are flung open, and two by two, with stately step and slow, march in the gladiators, armed with the different weapons of their deadly trade. Four hundred men are they, in all the pride of perfect strength and symmetry, and high training and practised skill. With head erect and haughty bearing, they defile once round the arena, as though to give the spectators an opportunity of closely scanning their appearance, and halt with military precision to range themselves in line under Cæsar’s throne. For a moment there is a pause and hush of expectation over the multitude, while the devoted champions stand motionless as statues in the full glow of noon; then, bursting suddenly into action, they brandish their gleaming weapons over their heads, and higher, fuller, fiercer rises the terrible chant that seems to combine the shout of triumph with the wail of suffering, and to bid a long and hopeless farewell to upper earth, even in the very recklessness and defiance of its despair:

“‘Ave Cæsar! Morituri te salutant!’

“Then they wheel out once more, and range themselves on either side of the arena: all but a chosen band who occupy the central place of honor, and of whom every second man at least is doomed to die.”[187]

We can imagine how the thousands who had come to feast their eyes on the cruel spectacle would now be frantic for the real work to begin. We can picture to ourselves how all would proceed. We see the huge rhinoceros with his overlapping plates of armor led forth into the arena. He rolls his glowing eyes around in the fury of his hunger, but sees only the smooth white sand. He stamps with his large flat foot, and digs madly into the earth with his “horned muzzle.” We see, too, his enemy come sneaking in--the Lybian tiger, with his sleek, striped coat and glaring eyes. They approach each other. The spring is made; they are in a death-struggle. And now that blood is seen, a maddened shout of savage joy from the gratified spectators rends the air. More blood is wanted. The trumpets ring out again. The gladiators step forth and range themselves in opposing ranks. They are “all armed alike with a deep, concave buckler, and a short, stabbing, two-edged blade.” Then is heard the sharp clash of meeting steel. Men’s breath is hushed; their hearts beat quick; their eyes glare with a wild fire and are riveted on the struggling athletes. Then the ranks of the combatants waver and are broken; blood is seen upon the white sand: it flows from large gashes in the gladiators’ sinking forms. The huge giants fall one after another, hard and brave to the last.

And this is the hideous sight which day after day delights and never satisfies the Roman public. It is sad to think of so much noble strength and magnificent bravery sacrificed so ignobly. It sickens the heart to dwell on the brutal, reckless destruction of manly life perpetrated to amuse a blood-thirsty populace in “those Roman shambles.” Yet “so inured were the people to such exhibitions, so completely imbued with a taste for the horrible, and so careless of human life, that scarcely an eye was turned away, scarcely a cheek grew paler, when a disabling gash was received or a mortal blow driven home, and mothers with babies in their arms would bid the child turn its head to watch the death-pang on the pale, stern face of some prostrate gladiator.”[188]

We have now said enough to show the reader the corrupting influence of those three mighty powers of paganism--the circus, the theatre, and the amphitheatre. Many pagan temples had no doubt fallen under the crushing arm of Christian teaching, but these three, in which so many gods and goddesses had taken refuge, stood their ground. They were found in every province of the empire, and everywhere were well frequented. The demoralizing effect produced by them it is not easy to estimate--it was simply never-ceasing and universal. And when the persecutors had passed away, and there was no longer the constant presence of cruel death to keep alive the fervor of Christians, we find that they too came under the demoralizing influence of these mighty powers of evil. This is the cause of that bitter cry of grief which bursts forth from every page of the writings of the great saints of the fourth and fifth centuries. Pagan corruption was rushing upon them like a strong flood on every side. They found themselves overpowered and engulfed. Listen to the plaintive words of SS. Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine, laden with the sobs and groans of grief-stricken hearts. Open the pages of Salvian, and you will soon be convinced that mortal degradation has invaded every city and town, and that all classes of society are grovelling in the lowest depths of corruption. The holy bishop pours out his soul in the most moving language. His words sometimes flash with holy wrath and indignation; sometimes they are the wailing cry of despair; sometimes, again, they are the tears of deepest sorrow, flowing out of his inmost soul. “How different,” he exclaims, “is now the Christian people from itself, that is, from what it formerly was!... What is now every assembly of Christians but a sink of vices?... We make it our study not only not to accomplish the precepts, but even to do the contrary. God commands us to love one another; we tear one another to pieces in mutual hatred. God commands us to help the poor; and we all rob others of what belongs to them. God commands every Christian to be chaste even in look; and who is he who does not grovel in the mire? I appeal to the conscience of those to whom I speak. Who is the person who has not to reproach himself with some of these crimes, or, rather, who is the man who is not guilty of all? It is easier to find Christians guilty of all these crimes than to meet with any exempt from some of them; it is easier to find great criminals than ordinary sinners. Many of the Romans who have been baptized have arrived at such a laxity of morals that it is a kind of sanctity amongst the faithful to be less vicious. Audacious criminals rush into the temples of the true God without any respect for the Divine Majesty. They go there to meditate in silence upon some fresh iniquity. Scarcely are the divine mysteries concluded than some return to their thefts, others to drunkenness; these to their bad habits, those to their deeds of violence. What is the life of courtiers? Injustice and iniquity. What is the life of public officers? Lies and calumny. What is the life of soldiers? Violence and rapine. What is the life of merchants? Fraud and deceit. Alas! our vices disinherit us of the beautiful name of Christians; for the depravity of our morals renders us unworthy of the privileges of our birth. Base behavior destroys the glory of an honorable title. As there is no condition which is not disgraced, no place which is not filled with the crimes of Christians, let us no longer glory in this beautiful name. It will only serve to render us more culpable, and to aggravate our offences.”[189]

We think the picture sufficiently complete. Over this huge mass of moral rottenness; over the heads of pagan gods yet standing erect in the midst of this foul corruption; over the great sinning empire, pagan still in its vices and its tastes, the threatening storm-cloud hangs, waiting the moment when God shall bid it belch forth its hidden terrors of fire and flame. That moment is close at hand. Then shall the martyrs be avenged, and this universal crime be punished.

FOOTNOTES:

[179] _Lectures and Essays_, p. 48.

[180] See Claudian, _De Sexto Consulatu Honorii_, v. 43.

[181] See Ozanam, _Civil. au 5me Siècle_, p. 82.

[182] _De Spectaculis_, viii.

[183] _De Spectaculis_, vii.

[184] _De Spectaculis_, xvi.

[185] _Leroy_, vol. ii. p. 450.

[186] _De Spectaculis_, xii.

[187] _The Gladiators_, by Whyte Melville, p. 135.

[188] _The Gladiators_, p. 140.

[189] Salvianus, _De Gubernatione Mundi_, lib. iii. _passim_.

THE LAST DAYS BEFORE THE SIEGE.