CHAPTER I.

MR. CULPEPPER MAKES A PROPOSAL--A RENCOUNTER IN A CHURCHYARD.

It was one of those golden November mornings that throw a mystic glamour over New York. A warm haze draped the great city, softening its deformities, blending its beauties. In its magic light the very street-cars took on a romantic air, as they sped along loaded with their living freight. The bales of goods on the sidewalk, huddled together in careless profusion, were no longer the danger which they are generally supposed to be by elderly gentlemen who have due regard for life and limb, but gracious droppings rather from Pandora’s box, raining down fresh and bright from the hands of the genial goddess. What in the garish sun were vulgar business houses filled with sober goods and peopled with staring and sleek-combed clerks, assumed under this gorgeous drapery the aspect of mystic temples of commerce, where silent and solemn-eyed priests stood patiently all the day long to call in the passers-by to worship. The lofty policeman, looming like a statue at the corner, was not the ferocious, peanut-chewing being that he is commonly supposed to be, but a beneficent guardian of the great temple of peace. The busy crowds of brisk business men that hurried along, untouched as yet by the toil and the soil of the day, were fresh-faced and clear-eyed, chatty and cheerful. Thompson stepped out as cheerily as though he were just beginning that strange task, on which so many ambitious mortals have gone down, of performing his thousand miles in a thousand hours; for Thompson, happy man! knew not as yet what was so calmly awaiting him on his desk--that heavy bill that he was bound to meet, but which, strange to say, had quite slipped his memory. And there is Johnson walking arm-in-arm with Jones, Johnson’s face wreathed in sunny smiles the while. Johnson’s heart is gay and his step light, and he feels the happy influence of the morning. Jones is sadly in want of a confidential clerk, and his friend is dilating on the treasure that he himself possesses--that very clerk who, he learns on reaching his office, absconded last night with a fearful amount of Johnson’s property. Nor, on the other hand, does that eager-faced youngster, the shining seams of whose garments tell of more years than his seamless face and brow, know that at last the gracious answer that he has so longed for awaits his arrival, and that the bright opening at length lies before him that is to lead him on to fortune, if not to fame, more than the five hundred and forty-six rival applicants know that their addresses have been rejected. As yet the day is marked with neither white bean nor black, and so let us hope, with this mighty stream pouring on and on and on down the great thoroughfares of the city, that the white beans may outnumber the black when the day is done, and that what is lost here may be gained there; for we are of them, brethren of theirs, and joyous hopes of this kind cost little, while, at least, they harden not the heart. And so the whole city, with its hopes and fears, its life and its death, moved out under the November haze that morning, and with it, as the central figure in the vast panorama, he whose stray leaves, it is hoped, may prove at least of passing interest to the many of whom he is one.

My special point of attraction that day was the office of _The Packet_, “a monthly journal of polite literature,” to quote the prospectus, which was supported by “the ablest pens of both hemispheres,” as the same prospectus modestly admitted. As at this time I was a pretty constant contributor to _The Packet_, I suppose that, according to the prospectus, I was fully entitled to take my stand among “the ablest pens of both hemispheres,” whether I chose to insist on my literary rank or not. And as I contributed occasionally to other journals which were respectively, according to their several prospectuses, “the leading weekly,” “the greatest daily,” “the giant monthly,” “the only quarterly,” “the great art journal,” etc., there could not possibly be any doubt as to my literary position. For all that, I confess I was still among the callow brood, and fear that, if any person had referred to me in public as “a literary man,” the literary man would have blushed very violently, and felt as small as a titmouse. Still, I had that delicious feeling of the dawning of hope and the glorious uncertainty of a great ambition that always attend and encourage the first steps of a new career, whatever be its character. It was natural enough, then, that I should step out lustily among my fellows, my head high in air, and my heart higher still, drinking in the inspiration of the morning, piercing the golden mist with the eye of hope, feeling a young life throbbing eagerly within me, feeling a mysterious brotherhood with all men, gliding as through a fairy city in a gilded dream.

As I had several places to call at, it was late in the afternoon when I arrived at _The Packet_ office to draw my little account. On entering I found an unusual commotion; something had evidently gone very wrong. Mr. Culpepper, the experienced editor of the journal of polite literature, was, to judge by the tones of his voice, in a towering rage. I fancied that I caught expressions, too, which were not exactly in accordance with polite literature. When Mr. Culpepper’s temper did happen to fail, it was an event to be remembered, particularly as that event took place, on an average, some two or three times a week. Everything and everybody in the office was in a turmoil; for Mr. Culpepper’s temper had an infectious quality that affected all its immediate surroundings. An experienced eye could tell by the position of the dictionary, the state of the floor, the standing of the waste-basket, the precise turn of the editor’s easy-chair, how the wind blew to Mr. Culpepper. On this mild November afternoon it was clear that a terrific gale had sprung up from some unexpected quarter. It had ruffled what was left of Mr. Culpepper’s hair, it blew his cravat awry, it had disarranged his highly intellectual whiskers, it spared not even his venerable coat-tails. His private office showed the effects of a raging tornado. Pigeon-holes had been ransacked; drawers had been wrenched open and rifled of their contents; Webster and Worcester lay cheek-by-jowl in the waste-basket; the easy-chair had a dangerous crick in the back; Mr. Culpepper himself was plunged ankle-deep in manuscripts that strewed the floor in wild confusion; while Mr. Culpepper’s hands were thrust in his cavernous pockets, as he stood there on my entrance, a very monument of editorial despair.

Mr. Culpepper, like most men, was preferable when good-tempered. Indeed, though his opinions at times, particularly on the merits or demerits of my own compositions, were apt to be more emphatic than polished, Mr. Culpepper, when good-tempered, was by no means an unpleasant companion. In his stormy periods I always coasted as clear of him as I could; but it was now too late to sheer off. So, making the best of a bad bargain, I advanced boldly to meet the enemy, when to my surprise he greeted me with the exclamation,

“Oh! you are just the man I wanted. Can you tell a story--a good, lively Christmas story, with a spice of fun, a dash of love, a slice of plum-pudding, a sprinkling of holly and ivy, with a bunch of mistletoe thrown in? And, by the bye, if you have genius enough, a good ghost. Yes, a good, old-fashioned ghost would be capital. They are dying out now, more’s the pity. Yes, I must have a ghost and a country churchyard, with a bowl of punch, if you want it. There are your materials. Now, I want them fixed up into a first-class Christmas story, to fill exactly eight pages, by four o’clock to-morrow afternoon at the latest. Must have it to fit this illustration. Clepston was to have done it, but he has failed me at the last hour. Just like him--he must go and get married just when I want my story. He did it on purpose, because I refused to advance his pay--married out of revenge, just to spite me. Well, what do you say?”

I said nothing; for Mr. Culpepper’s rapidity and the novelty of his proposal fairly took my breath away. I had never yet attempted fiction, but there was a certain raciness in Mr. Culpepper’s manner of putting it that urged me to seize my present opportunity. A good ghost-story within just twenty-four hours! A pleasant winter tale that should be read to happy families by happy firesides; by boys at school, their hair standing on end with wild excitement, and their laughter ringing out as only boys’ laughter does; by sweet-faced girls--by everybody, in fact, with a vast amount of pleasure and not a twinge of pain. Thousands whom I should never know would say, “What a dear fellow this story-teller is!” “What a pleasant way he has of putting things!” “What--”

“Well, what do you say?” broke in Mr. Culpepper rudely; and I remembered that the story which was to win me such golden opinions from all sorts of people was yet to be written.

“I hardly know. Four o’clock to-morrow afternoon? The time is so very short. Could you not extend it?”

“Not a moment. Printers waiting now. If I can’t have yours by that time, I must use something else; and I have not a thing to suit. Just look here,” he said pointing to the floor, and glancing ruefully around; “I have spent the day wading through all these things, and there is nothing among the pile. A mass of rubbish, all of it!”

My resolution was made; I started up.

“Mr. Culpepper, I will try. I will stay up all night; and if there be a ghost yet unlaid, a pudding yet unmade, a piece of holly yet ungathered, or a bunch of mistletoe that has not yet done duty, you shall have them all by four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.”

“Now, I rely on you, mind. Four o’clock sharp. Let it be brisk and frosty, bright as the holly-berries, and soothing as a glass of punch! We owe you a little account, I believe. Here it is, and now good-by till to-morrow afternoon.”

Who has not experienced that half-fearful and yet wholly pleasant feeling of setting foot for the first time in a new and strange land? It was with some such feeling that my heart fluttered as I left the office of _The Packet_ that afternoon. Yet what was I to achieve within the next four-and-twenty hours? An eight-page Christmas story of the approved pattern, with the conventional sauces and seasonings--nothing more. The thing had been done a thousand times before, and would be done a thousand times again, as often as Christmases came round, and thought nothing of. Why should I be so fluttered at the task? Was this to be the great beginning at last of my new career? Was this trumpery eight-page story to be the true keynote to what was to make music of all the rest of my life? Nonsense! I said to myself; and yet why nonsense? Did not all great enterprises spring from small and insignificant beginnings? Were not all great men at some time or another babies in arms, rocked in cradles, fed on soothing syrups, and carried about in long clothes? Did not a falling apple lead Newton on to the great discovery of gravitation? Was it not a simmering kettle that opened Watt’s eyes to steam, and introduced the railway and the packet? Did not a handful of sand reveal the mines of California? Must not Euclid have started with a right reading of axioms as old as the world? Who shall fix the starting-point of genius? And why should not my first fictitious Christmas pudding contain the germ of wonders that were to be?

I can feel the astute and experienced reader who has been gracious enough to accompany me thus far already falter at the very outset of the short excursion we purposed taking together. I can feel the pages close over me like a tomb, while a weary yawn sings my death-dirge. But allow me, my dear sir, or my dear madam, or my much-esteemed young lady, to stay your hands just one moment, until I explain matters a little, until I introduce myself properly; and I promise to be very candid in all I have to say. You see--indeed, you will have seen already--that the gentleman who has just left Mr. Culpepper’s presence was at this period of his life very young indeed, and proportionately ambitious. These two facts will explain the fluttering of his heart at the cold-blooded proposal of spending an entire night at his writing-desk, delving his brain for the materials of a silly little story, while you, dear sir, have drawn over your ears, and over that head that has been rubbed into reverent smoothness by the gentle hand of time, the sleep-compelling night-cap; and while you, dear madam, while you have--done nothing of the kind. I plead guilty, then, at this time, to the twofold and terrible charge of outrageous youth and still more outrageous ambition. But I have long since contrived to overcome the disgrace of excessive youth; while, as regards ambition, what once happened to a literary friend of mine has never happened to me: that morning I have been waiting for so long, so long, when I was to wake up and find myself famous, has not yet arrived--looks even as though it never meant to dawn. Literature was to me an unknown sea, upon which I had not fairly embarked. I had paddled a little in a little cockleshell of my own in sunny weather around friendly coasts, but as yet had not ventured to launch out into the great deep. The storm and the darkness and the night, the glory and the dread of the tempest, the awful conflicts of the elements, were as yet unknown to and unbraved by me. Indeed, as I promised to be candid, I may as well whisper in your ear that the main efforts of my pen at this precise period of my life were devoted to meeting with a calm front and easy conscience the weekly eye of Mrs. Jinks. Mrs. Jinks was my boarding-house keeper, a remarkable woman in her way, and one for whom I entertained an unbounded respect; but she was scarcely a Mme. de Staël, unless in looks, still less a Mme. de Sévigné. Mme. Jinks’ encouragement to aspiring genius was singularly small when aspiring genius could not pay its weekly board--a contingency that has been known to occur. Mrs. Jinks never fell into the fatal mistake of tempting the man to eat unless the man was prepared to pay. But even Mrs. Jinks could not crush out all ambition, so that I hugged Mr. Culpepper’s proposal, as I went home that evening, with a fervor and enthusiasm that I had never before experienced; for it seemed to open up to me a new vista of bright and beautiful imaginings.

For all that, I could not strike the clew. It seems a very easy thing, does it not, to concoct a passable enough Christmas story out of the ample materials with which Mr. Culpepper had so lavishly supplied me? Just try; sit down and write a good, short, brisk Christmas story, out of all the time-honored materials, and judge for yourself what an easy task it is, O sapient critic! a line from whose practised pen stabs to death a year of hopes, and projects, and labor. Strange to say, my immediate project dissolved and faded out of my mind, as I plodded homewards along the great thoroughfare I had trodden so serenely in the morning. The little Christmas story gave place to something new, something larger, something vague, indefinable, and mighty. A great realm of fiction unfolded itself before me--a realm all my own, a fairy island in a summer sea, peopled with Calibans and dainty Ariels, Mirandas and Ferdinands, and a thousand unseen creatures, waiting only for the wave of my magic wand to be summoned into the beauty of life, to bring sweet songs down from the clouds of heaven, and whisperings of spirits far away that the earth had never yet heard. A mist sprang up around me as I walked, and through it peered a thousand eyes, and from it came and went a thousand shapeless forms, whose outlines I could half discern, but hold not. I could not bid them stay until I grasped them. Something was wanting, a touch only, a magic word, but I could not find it. A charm was on me, and more potent than I. It was there, working, working, working, but I could not master it. I walked along in a dream. Men in throngs passed me by in what seemed a strange and awful silence. If they spoke, never a word heard I. Carriages and vehicles of every description I felt rolling, rolling past; but their wheels were strangely muffled, for never a sound fell on my ear. The fair, bright city of the morning was filled now with silent shadows, moving like ghosts in a troubled dream. Lights sprang up out of the mist as I passed along, but they seemed to shine upon me alone. Intensely conscious of my own existence, I had only a numb feeling of other life around me. At last I found myself at Mrs. Jinks’ door. I took a letter from her hand, and seated at length in my own room, with familiar objects around me, the shadows seemed to lift, and I was brought back to the subject of my proposed night’s work.

Still, I could not collect my thoughts sufficiently to bring them to bear, in a practical way, on the central idea around which my fiction was to take body and shape. The sudden strain on my imagination had been too severe; a kind of numbness pervaded my whole being, and the moments, every one of which was precious as a grain of gold, were slipping idly away. The feeling that all the power to achieve what you desire lies there torpid within you, but too sullen to be either coaxed or bullied into action, laughing sluggishly at the most violent effort of the will to move it, is, perhaps, one of the most exasperating that a man can experience. It is like one in a nightmare, who sees impending over him a nameless terror that it only needs a wag of a little tongue to divert, and yet the little tongue cleaves with such monstrous persistency to the roof of the parched mouth that not all the leverage of Archimedes himself could move it from its place. That fine power of man’s intellect, that clear perception and keen precision which can search the memory, and at a glance find the clew that it is seeking; that can throw out those far-reaching fibres over the garden of knowledge, gathering in from all sides the necessary stores, was as far away from me as from a madman’s dream. I could fasten upon nothing; my brain was in disorder, while the moments were lengthening into hours, and the hours slipping silently away.

In despair I tried a cigar--a favorite refuge of mine in difficulties; and soon light clouds, pervaded with a subtle aroma, were added to those thinner clouds of undefined and indefinable images that floated around me, volatile, shadowy, intangible; mysterious, nebulous. Mr. Culpepper’s “materials” had quite evaporated, and I began to think dreamily of old days, of anything, everything, save what was to the point. I remember how poor old Wetherhead, of all people in the world--“Leatherhead” we used facetiously to style him at college--came up before me, and I laughed over the fun we had with him. What a plodder he was! When preparing for his degree, he took ferociously to wet towels. He had the firmest faith in wet towels. He had tried them for the matriculation, and found them “capital,” he assured us. “Try a towel, Leathers,” we would say to him whenever we saw him in difficulties. Poor fellow! He was naturally dull and heavy, dense and persistent as a clod. It would take digging and hoeing and trenching to plant anything in that too solid brain; and yet he was the most hopeful fellow alive. He was possessed with the very passion of study, without a streak of brightness or imagination to soften and loosen the hopeless mass of clay whereof his mind seemed composed; and so he depended on wet towels to moisten it. He almost wore his head out while preparing for the matriculation examen. But by slow and constant effort he succeeded in forcing a sufficient quantity of knowledge into his pores, and retaining it there, to enable him to pass the very best-deserved first class that ever was won. The passage of the Alps to a Hannibal or a Napoleon was a puny feat compared with the passing of an examination by a Wetherhead. We took him on our shoulders, and bore him aloft in triumph, a banner-bearer, with a towel for banner, marching at the head of the procession. “You may laugh, but it was the towels pulled me through, old fellow,” he said to me, smiling, his great face expanding with delight. “Stay there, and don’t go any farther, Leathers,” I advised, when he proclaimed his intention of going up for the degrees. “Nonsense!” said he, and, in spite of everybody’s warnings, Wetherhead “went in” for the B.A. It was a sight to see him in the agonies of study; his eyes almost starting out of his head as the day wore on, and around that head, arranged in turban fashion, an enormous towel reeking with moisture. “How many towels to-day, Leathers?” “How’s the reservoir, Leatherhead?” those impudent youngsters would cry out. As time went on and the examination drew near the whole college became interested in Wetherhead and his prospects of success. Bets were made on him, and bets were made on his towels. The wit of our class wrote an essay--which, it was whispered aloud, had reached the professors’ room, and been read aloud there to their intense amusement--on “Towels _vs._ Degrees; or, The probabilities of success, measured by the quantity of water on the brain.” He bore it all good-humoredly, even the threat to crown him with towels instead of laurel if he passed and went up for his degree. A dark whisper reached me, away in the country at the time, that he had failed, that the failure had touched his brain, and that he was cut down half-strangled one morning from his own door-key, to which he had suspended himself by means of a wet towel; which, instead of its usual position around his brow, had fastened itself around his throat. Of course that was a malicious libel; for I met the poor fellow soon after, looking the ghost of himself. “How was it, Wetherhead?” I asked. “I don’t know, old fellow,” he responded mournfully. “I got through splendidly the first few days; but after that things began to get muddled and mixed up somehow, so that I could hardly tell one from another. It was all there, but something had got out of order. I felt that it was all there, but there was too much to hold together. The fact is, _I missed my towel_. A towel or two would have set it all right again. The machine had got too hot, and wanted a little cooling off; but I couldn’t march in there, you know, with a big towel round my head; so I failed.”

The clock striking twelve woke me from my dream of school-days. I had just sixteen hours and a half left to complete the story that was not yet begun. Whew! I might as well engage to write a history of science within the appointed time. It was useless. My cigar had gone out, and I gave up the idea of writing a story at all. And yet surely it was so easy, and I had promised Culpepper, and both he and _The Packet_ and the public were awaiting my decision. And this was to be the end of what I had deemed the dawn of my hope and the firstling of my true genius!

“Roger Herbert, you are an ass,” spake a voice I knew well--a voice that compelled my attention at the most unseasonable hours. “Excuse me for my plainness of speech, but you are emphatically an ass. Now, now, no bluster, no anger. If you and I cannot honestly avow the plain truth to each other, there is no hope for manhood. Mr. Culpepper and the public waiting for you! Ho! ho! Ha! ha! It’s a capital joke. Mr. Culpepper is at this moment in the peaceful enjoyment of his first slumbers; and the public would not even know your name if it were told them. Upon my word, Roger, you are even a greater ass than I took you to be. Well, well, we live and learn. For the last half-a-dozen hours or more where have you been? Floating in the clouds; full of the elixir of life; dreaming great dreams, your spirit within you fanned with the movement of the _divinus afflatus_, eh? Is not that it? Nonsense, my dear lad. You have only once again mounted those two-foot stilts, against which I am always warning you, and which any little mountebank can manage better than you. _They_ may show some skill, but you only tumble. So come down at once, my fine fellow, and tread on _terra firma_ again, where alone you are safe. You a genius! Ho! ho! Ho! ho! ho! And all apropos of a Christmas pudding. The genius of a Christmas pudding! It is too good. Your proper business, when Mr. Culpepper made his proposal to you this afternoon, was to tell him honestly that the task he set you was one quite beyond your strength--altogether out of your reach, in fact. But no; you must mount your stilts, and, once on them, of course you are a head and shoulders above honest folk. O Roger, Roger! why not remember your true stature? What is the use of a man of five foot four trying to palm himself off and give himself the airs of one of six foot four? He is only laughed at for his pains, as Mr. Culpepper will assuredly laugh at you to-morrow. Take my advice, dear boy, acknowledge your fault, and then go to bed. You are no genius, Roger. In what, pray, are you better, in what are you so good, as fifty of your acquaintances, whom I could name right off for you, but who never dream that they are geniuses? The _divinus afflatus_, forsooth! For shame, for shame, little man! Stick to your last, my friend, and be thankful even that you have a last whereto to stick. Let Apelles alone, or let the other little cobblers carp at him, if they will. The world will think more of his blunders than of all your handicraft put together, and your little cobbler criticisms into the bargain. And now, having said my say, I wish you a very good-night, Roger, or good-morning rather.”

So spake the voice of the _Daimon_ within me; a very bitter voice it has often proved to me--as bitter, but as healthy, as a tonic. And at its whisper down tumbled all “the cloud-capt towers and gorgeous palaces” that my imagination had so swiftly conjured up. It was somewhat humiliating to confess, but, after all, Roger Herbert, Senior, as I called that inner voice, was right. I resolved to go to bed. Full of that practical purpose, I went to my desk to close it up for the night, and all dreams of a momentary ambition with it, when my eyes fell upon a letter bearing the address:

ROGER HERBERT, ESQ., Care of Mrs. Jinks, ---- Street, New York, United States, America.

What a quantity of writing for so small an envelope! One needed no curious peep within, nor scarcely a second glance at the neat-pointed hand, with the up-and-down strokes of equal thickness, to guess at the sex of the writer. I remembered now; it was the letter Mrs. Jinks gave me at the door, and, good heavens! it had been lying there disregarded all these hours, while I was inflated with my absurd and bombastic thoughts. The writing I knew well, for my hand had been the first to guide the writer through the mazes and the mysteries of chirography. One sentence from the letter is sufficient to give here. “Dear, dear Roger: Papa is sick--is _dying_. Come home at once.” It was signed “Fairy.”

“Home at once!” The post-marks said London and Leighstone. London, it may be necessary to inform the reader, is the capital of a county called Middlesex, in a country called England, while Leighstone is a small country town some thirty miles out of London. From Leighstone writes “Fairy” to “Dear, dear Roger” some thousand--it seems fifty thousand--odd miles away. The father reported dying is my father; Fairy is my sister. It is now nearly two in the morning, and by four in the afternoon Mr. Culpepper and the printers expect that brisk, pleasant, old-fashioned Christmas story that is to make everybody happy, and not a hint at pain in it! And I have been puzzling my brains these long hours past trying to compose it, with that silent letter staring me in the face all the time. A pleasant Christmas story, a cheery Christmas story! How bitterly that voice began to laugh within me again! Oh! the folly, the crime, of which I had been guilty. It was such vain and idle dreams as these that had lured me away from that father’s side; that had brought me almost to forget him; that, great God! perhaps had dealt the blow that struck him down. Merciful heavens! what a Christmas story will it be mine to tell?

At four in the afternoon a steamer sailed for Liverpool, and I was one of the passengers. Years have passed since then, and I can write all this calmly enough now; but only those--and God grant that they may be few!--who at a moment’s warning, or at any warning, have had to cross more than a thousand miles of ocean in the hope of catching a dying parent’s last breath, can tell how the days pall and the sleepless nights drag on; how the sky expands into a mighty shroud covering one dear object, of which the sad eyes never lose the sight; how the winds, roar they loud or sing they softly, breathe ever the same low, monotonous dirge.

It was scarcely a year since I had parted from my father, and our parting had not been of the friendliest. He was a magnate in Leighstone, as all the Herberts before him had been since Leighstone had a history. They were a tradition in the place; and though to be great there in these days did not mean what it once meant, and to the world outside signified very little indeed, yet what is so exacting or punctilious as the etiquette of a petty court, what so precise and well preserved as its narrow traditions and customs? Time did not exist for Leighstone when a Herbert was not the foremost man there. The tomb of the Herberts was the oldest and grandest in the churchyard that held the ashes of whole generations of the Leighstone folk. There had been Crusading Herberts, and Bishops Herbert, Catholic and Protestant, Abbots Herbert, Justices Herbert, Herberts that had shared in councils of state, and Herberts that had been hanged, drawn, and quartered by order of the state. Old townsfolk would bring visitors to the churchyard and give in their own way the history of “that ere Harbert astretched out atop o’ the twomb, wi’ a swoord by his soide, and gluvs on his hands, the two on ’em folded one aginst t’other a-prayin’ loike, and a cross on his buzzum, and a coople o’ angels wi’ stone wings a-watchin’ each side o’ ’im. A had fowt in the waars long ago, that ere Harbert had, when gentle-folk used to wear steel coats, a used, and iron breeches, and go ever so fur over the seas to foight. Queer toimes them was. Whoi, the Harberts, folks did say, was the oldest fam’ly i’ the country. Leastwoise, there was few ’uns older.”

My father was possessed with the greatness of his ancestry, and resented the new-fangled notions that professed to see nothing in blood or history. Nurtured on tradition of a past that would never reappear, he speedily retired from a world where he was too eager to see that a Herbert was no more than a Jones or a Smith, and, though gifted with powers that, rightly used, might have proved, even in these days, that there was more in his race than tradition of a faded past, he preferred withdrawing into that past to reproducing it in a manner accommodated to the new order of things. In all other respects he was a very amiable English gentleman, who, abjuring politics, which he held had degenerated into a trade unbecoming a gentleman’s following, divided his time between antiquarian and agricultural pursuits, for neither of which did I exhibit so ardent an admiration as he had hoped. As soon as I could read, and think, and reason in my own way, I ran counter to my father in many things, and was pronounced by him to be a radical, infected with the dangerous doctrines of the day, which threatened the overthrow of all things good, and the advent of all things evil. He only read in history the records of a few great families. For me the families were of far less interest than the peoples, historically at least. The families had already passed or were passing away; the peoples always remained. To the families I attributed most of the evils that had afflicted humanity; in the peoples I found the stuff that from time to time helped to regenerate humanity. I do not say that all this came to me at once; but this manner of looking at things grew upon me, and made my father anxious about my future, though he was too kind to place any great restrictions in the way of my pursuits, and our disputes would generally end by the injunction: “Roger, whatever you do or think, always remember that you represent a noble race, and are by your very birth an English gentleman, so long as such a being is permitted to exist.”

As I grew older problems thickened around me, and I often envied the passive resignation with which so spirited a temperament as my father’s could find refuge from the exciting questions of the day in the quiet of his books and favorite pursuits. Coming home from college or from an occasional excursion into the great world without, Leighstone would seem to me a hermitage, where life was extinct, and there was room for nothing save meditation. And there I meditated much, and pondered and read, as I then thought, deeply. The quaint, old churchyard was my favorite ground for colloquy with myself, and admirably adapted, with its generations of silent dead, was it for the purpose. In that very tomb lay bones, once clothed with flesh, through which coursed lustily blood that had filtered down through the ages into my veins. In my thoughts I would question that quiet old Herbert stretched out there on his tomb centuries ago, and lying so still, with his calm, stony face upturned immovably and confidently to heaven. The face was not unlike my father’s; Leighstone folk said it was still more like mine. That Herbert was a Catholic, and believed earnestly in all that I and my father as earnestly disbelieved. Was he the worse or the better man for his faith? To what had his faith led him, and to what had ours led us? What was his faith, and what was ours? To us he was a superstitious creature, born in dark ages, and the victim of a cunning priestcraft, that, in the name of heaven, darkened the minds and hearts of men; while, had he dreamed that a degenerate child of his would ever, even in after-ages, turn heretic, as he would say, the probabilities were that in his great-hearted earnestness, had it rested solely with him, he would rather have ended the line in his own person than that such disgrace should ever come upon it. The man who in his day had dared tell him that flesh of his would ever revile the church in which he believed, and the Sacrament which he adored, would likely enough have been piously knocked on the head for his pains. What a puzzle it all was! Could a century or two make all this difference in the manner of regarding the truths on which men professed to bind their hopes of an eternal hereafter?

One afternoon of one of those real English summer days that when they come are so balmy and bright and joyous, while sauntering through the churchyard, I lighted upon a figure half buried in the long grass, so deeply intent on deciphering the inscription around the tomb of my ancestor that he did not notice my approach. There he lay, his hat by his side, and an open sketch-book near it, peering into the dim, old, half-effaced characters as curiously as ever did alchemist of eld into an old black-letter volume. His years could not be many more than mine. His form would equally attract the admiration of a lady or a prize-fighter. The sign of ruddy health burned on the bronzed cheek. The dress had nothing particular in it to stamp the character of the wearer. The sketch-book and his absorbing interest in the grim old characters around a tomb might denote the enthusiasm of an artist, or of an antiquarian like my father, though he looked too full of the robust life of careless youth for the one, and too evidently in the enjoyment of life as it was for the other. Altogether a man that, encountered thus in a country churchyard on a warm July afternoon, would at once excite the interest and attract the attention of a passer-by.

While I was mentally noting down, running up, and calculating to a nicety the sum of his qualities, the expression of his face indicated that he was engaged in a hopeless task. “I can make all out about the old Crusader except the date, and that is an all-important point. The date--the date--the date,” he repeated to himself aloud. “I wonder what Crusade he fought in?”

“Perhaps I could assist you,” I broke in. “Sir Roger Herbert followed the good King Edward to the Holy Land, and for the sake of Christ’s dear rood made many a proud painim to bite the dust. So saith the old chronicle of the Abbey of S. Wilfrid which you see still standing--the modernized version of it, at least--on yonder hill. The present abbot of S. Wilfrid is the florid gentleman who has just saluted me. That handsome lady beside him is the abbot’s wife. The two pretty girls seated opposite are the abbot’s daughters. The good and gentle Abbot Jones is taking the fair abbess, Mrs. Jones, out for her afternoon airing. She is a very amiable lady; he is a very genial gentleman, and the author of the pamphlet in reply to Maitland’s _Dark Ages_. Mr. Jones is very severe on the laziness and general good-for-nothingness of the poor monks.”

My companion, who still remained stretched on the grass, scanned my face curiously and with an amused glance while I spoke. He seemed lost in a half-revery, from which he did not recover until a few moments after I had ceased speaking. With sudden recollection, he said:

“I beg your pardon, I was thinking of something else. Many thanks for your information about this old hero, whom the new train of ideas, called up by your mention of the Abbot Jones and his family, drove out of my mind a moment. The Abbot Jones!” he laughed. “It is very funny. Yet why do the two words seem so little in keeping?”

“It is because, as my father would tell you, this is the century of the Joneses. Centuries ago Abbot Jones would have sounded just as well and as naturally as did Queen Joan. But, in common with many another good thing, the name has become vulgarized by a vulgar age.”

My companion glanced at me curiously again, and seemed more inwardly amused than before, whether with me or at me, or both, it was impossible to judge from his countenance, though that was open enough. He turned from the abbot to the tomb again.

“And so this old hero,” said he, patting affectionately the peaked toe of the figure of Sir Roger, “drew his sword long ago for Christ’s dear rood, and probably scaled the walls of Damietta at the head of a lusty band. What a doughty old fellow he must have been! I should have been proud to have shaken hands with him.”

“Should you, indeed? Then perhaps you will allow a remote relative of that doughty old fellow to act as his unworthy representative in his absence?” said I, offering my hand.

“Why, you don’t mean to say that you are a descendant of the old knight whose ashes consecrate this spot!” he exclaimed, rising and grasping me by the hand. “Sir, I am happy to lay my hand in that of a son of a Crusader!”

“I fear I may not claim so high a character. There are no Crusaders left. Myself, and Sir Roger here, move in different circles. You forget that a few centuries roll between us.”

“Centuries change the fashion of men’s garments,” he responded quickly, “not the fashion of their hearts. Truth is truth, and faith faith, and honor honor, now as when this warrior fought for faith, and truth, and honor. The crusades end only with the cross and faith in Christ.”

So spake with fervent accent and kindling glance the gentleman whom a few moments before I had set down as one eminently fitted to attract the admiration alike of lady or prize-fighter. The words struck me as so strange, spoken in such a place and by such a person, that I was silent a little, and he also. At length I said:

“You are like my father. You seem to prefer the old to the new.”

“Not so; I am particularly grateful that I was born in this and in no other century. But I object to the enthusiasm that would leave all the dead past to bury its dead. There were certain things, certain qualities in the centuries gone by, a larger faith, a more general fervor, a loyalty to what was really good and great, more universal than prevails to-day, that we might have preserved with benefit to ourselves and to generations to come. But pardon me. You have unfortunately hit upon one of my hobbies, and I could talk for hours on the subject.”

“On the contrary, I ought to feel flattered at finding one interested even in so remote a relative of mine as Sir Roger. As I look at him this moment the thought comes to me, could he bend those stiff old knees of his, hardened by the centuries into triple stone, rise up and walk through Leighstone, live a week among us, question us, know our thoughts, feelings, aspirations, religions, ascertain all that we have profited by the centuries that have rolled over this tomb, he would, after one week of it all, gather his old joints together and go back to his quiet rest until that

‘Tuba mirum spargens sonum Per sepulchra regionum Coget omnes ante thronum.’

“I can’t help laughing at the conceit. Imagine me escorting this stiff and stony old Sir Roger through the streets of Leighstone, and introducing him to my relations and friends as my grandfather some six centuries removed. But the fancy sounds irreverent to one whom I doubt not was as loyal-hearted a gentleman as ever clove a Turk to the chine. Poor old Sir Roger! I must prevent Mattock making such constant use of his elbow. It is getting quite out of repair.”

“Who is Mattock, may I ask?”

“Mattock is a character in his way. He is the Leighstone grave-digger, and has been as long as I can remember. He claims a kind of fellowship with those he buries, and he has buried a whole generation of Leighstonites, till a contagious hump has risen on his back from the number of mounds he has raised. He is a cynic in his way, and can be as philosophic over a skull as Hamlet in the play. He has a wonderful respect, almost a superstitious regard, for Sir Roger. Whenever he strips for a burial, he commends his goods to the care of my ancestor, accompanied always by the same remark: ‘I wonder who laid thee i’ the airth? A weighty corpse thou, a warrant. A deep grave thine, old stone-beard. Well, lend’s your elbow, and here’s to ye, wherever ye may be.’ Mattock takes special care to fortify himself against possible contingencies with a dram. ‘Cold corpses,’ he says, ‘is unhealthy. They are apt to lie heavy on the stomick, if ye doant guard agin ’em; corpses doos. So doos oysters. A dram afore burial and another dram after keeps off the miasmys.’ Such is Mattock’s opinion, backed up by an experience of a quarter of a century. You are evidently a stranger in this neighborhood?”

“Yes, I was merely passing through. I am enjoying a walking tour, being a great walker. It is by far the best method of seeing a country. When in the course of my wanderings I come across an old tomb such as this, an old inscription, or anything at all that was wrought or writ by reverent hands centuries ago, and has survived through the changes of time, I am amply repaid for a day’s march. Doubly so in this instance, since it has been the fortunate means of bringing me in contact with one whose opinions I am happy to think run in many things parallel with my own. And now to step out of the past into the very vulgar present, I am staying at the ‘Black Bull.’ The ‘Black Bull,’ I am assured, is famous for his larder, so that, if you feel inclined to ripen the acquaintance begun by the grave of your ancestor, in the interior of the ‘Black Bull,’ Kenneth Goodal will consider that he has fallen on an exceptionally happy day.”

“Kenneth Goodal?” The name struck me as familiar; but I could not recollect at the moment where I had heard it before. I repeated it aloud.

“It sounds quite a romantic name, does it not? It was my absurd mother who insisted on the Kenneth, after a Scotch uncle of mine. For that matter I suppose it was she who also insisted on the Goodal. At least my father says so. But she is the sweetest of women to have her own way, Heaven bless her! Of course I had no voice in the matter at all, beyond the generic squeal of babyhood. Had I been consulted, I should have selected Jack, a jolly, rough-and-ready title. It carries a sort of slap-me-on-the-back sound with it. One is never surprised at a Jack getting into scrapes or getting out of them. But it would cause very considerable surprise to hear that a Kenneth had been caught in any wild enterprise. However, Kenneth I am, and Kenneth I must remain, as staid and respectable as a policeman on duty by very force of title.”

“Now I remember where I heard the name. There were traditions at Dr. Porteous’, at Kingsclere, of a Kenneth Goodal who had just left before I went there. But he can’t have been you.”

“No? Why not?”

“He was an awful scape-grace, they told me. He used to play all kinds of tricks on the masters, though as great a favorite with them as with the boys. He was a great mimic, and Dr. Porteous, who is as solemn as an undertaker at a rich man’s funeral, and as pompous as a parish beadle, surprised Kenneth Goodal one day, surrounded by a delighted crowd, listening with such rapt attention to a highly wrought discourse, after the doctor’s best manner, on the history and philosophy of Resurrection Pie, that it required the unmistakable ‘ahem!’ of the doctor at the close to announce to actor and audience the presence of the original. The doctor in the grand old-school manner congratulated the youthful Roscius on talents of whose existence he had been hitherto unaware, and hinted that a repetition of so successful a performance might encourage him to seek a wider field for so promising a pupil. And when the same Kenneth thrashed the Kingsclere Champion for beating one of the youngsters, bribing the policeman not to interfere until he had finished him, the doctor, who was a model of decorum, had him up before the whole college, and delivered an address that is not quite forgotten to this day; acknowledging the credit to the establishment of such a champion in their midst; a young gentleman who could mimic his superiors until his identity was lost, and pummel his inferiors until their identity was lost, was wasting his great natural gifts in so narrow an arena; and so on--all delivered in the doctor’s best Ciceronian style. It took a deputation of all the masters and all the boys together to beg the delinquent off a rustication or worse. In fact, the stories of him and his deeds are endless. How odd that you should have the same name!”

My new acquaintance laughed outright.

“I fear I must lay claim to more than the name; that historical personage stands before you. I was with Dr. Porteous for a couple of years, and had no idea that I left such fame behind me. The doctor and I became the best of friends after my departure. And so you and I are, in a manner, old school-fellows? How happy I am to have fallen across you. But, come; the ‘Black Bull’ is waiting.”

“By the elbow of mine ancestor, nay. Such dishonor may not come upon the Herberts. Why, Sir Roger here would rise from his tomb at the thought and denounce me in the market-place. You must come with me. Dinner is ready by this time. Come as you are. My father will like you. He likes any one who is interested in his ancestors. And my sister, who, since my mother’s death, is mistress of the house and mistress of us all, shall answer for herself.”

“So be it,” he said, and we passed under the yews, their sad branches flushed in the sun, out through the gate, under the old archway with its mouldering statues, up the pretty straggling road that formed the High Street of Leighstone, arm in arm together, fast friends we each of us felt, though but acquaintances of an hour. The instinct that out of a multitude selects one, though you may scarcely know his name, and tells you that one is your friend, is as strange as unerring. It was this unconscious necromancy that had woven a mesh of golden threads caught from the summer sunlight around us as we moved along. Its influence was upon us, breathing in the perfumed air. I had never had a real friend of my own age before, and I hailed this one as the discovery of a life-time. We should strike out together, tread the same path, be it rough or smooth, arm in arm until the end come. Damon and Pythias would be nothing to us. The same loves, the same hates, the same hopes, were to guide, animate, and sustain us. Castles in the air! Castles in the air! Who has not built them? Who among the sons of men in the neighborhood of twenty summers has not chosen one man out of thousands, leant upon him, cherished him, made him his idol, loved him above all? And so it goes on, until some day comes a laughing eye peeping from under a bonnet, and with one dart the bosom friendship is smitten through and through, and Damon is ready to sacrifice a hecatomb of his Pythiases on the altar of the ox-eyed goddess.

TO BE CONTINUED.

IN MEMORIAM.

E. T.

OBIIT ANNOS NATA XV.

Who says she has wither’d, that little White Rose? She has been but remov’d from the valley of tears To a garden afar, where her loveliness glows Begemm’d with the grace-dew of virginal years,

I knew we should lose her. The dear Sacred Heart Has a nook in earth’s desert for flowerets so rare; And keeps them awhile in safe shelter, apart From the wind and the rain, from the dust and the glare;

But all to transplant them when fairest they bloom, When most we shall miss them. And this, that our love May be haunted the more by the fadeless perfume They have left us to breathe of the Eden above.

Farewell, happy maiden! Our weariest hours May gather a share of thy perfect repose. And fragrantly still with the Lord of the flowers Thou wilt plead for thy lov’d ones--our little Saint Rose.[14]

FEBRUARY 27, 1875.[15]

THE TRAGEDY OF THE TEMPLE.

History is like a prison-house, of which Time is the only jailer who can reveal the secrets. And Father Time is slow to speak. Sometimes he is strangely dumb concerning events of deep importance, sometimes idly garrulous about small matters. When now and then he reveals some long-kept secret, we refuse to believe him; we cannot credit that such things ever happened on this planet of ours, so respectable in its civilized humanity, so tenderly zealous for the welfare and freedom of its remotest members. But this same humanity is a riddle to which our proudest philosophers have not yet found the clew. It moves mountains to deliver an oppressed mouse, and sits mute and apathetic while a nation of weak brothers is being hunted to death by a nation of strong ones in the midst of its universal brotherhood; seeing the most sacred principles and highest interests of the world attacked and imperilled, and the earth shaken with throes and rendings that will bring forth either life or death, exactly as humanity shall decide, and yet not moving a finger either way. Then, when the storm is over and it beholds the wreck caused by its own apathy or stupidity, it fills the world with an “agony of lamentation,” gnashes its teeth, and protests that it slept, and knew not that these things were being done in its name.

Sometimes the funeral knell of the victims goes on echoing like a distant thunder-tone for a whole generation, and is scarcely heeded, until at last some watcher hearkens, and wakes us up, and, lo! we find that a tragedy has been enacted at our door, and the victim has been crying out piteously for help while we slumbered. History is full of these slumberings and awakenings. What an awakening for France was that when, after the lapse of two generations, the jailer struck the broken stones of the Temple, and gave them a voice to tell their story, bidding all the world attend!

The account of the imprisonment and death of Louis XVII. had hitherto come down to his people stripped of much of its true character, and clothed with a mistiness that disguised the naked horror of the truth, and flattered the sensitive vanity of the nation into the belief--or at any rate into the plausible hope--that much had been exaggerated, and that the historians of those times had used too strong colors in portraying the sufferings of the son of their murdered king. The _Grande Nation_ had been always grand; she had had her hour of delirium, and run wild in anarchy and chaos while it lasted; but she had never disowned her essential greatness, never forfeited her humanity, the grandeur of her mission as the eldest daughter of the church of Christ, and the apostle of civilization among the peoples. The demon in man’s shape, called Simon the Cordwainer, had disgraced his manhood by torturing a feeble, inoffensive child committed to his mercy, but he alone was responsible. The governing powers of the time were in total ignorance of his proceedings; France had no share in the blame or the infamy. The sensational legend of the Temple was bad enough, but at its worst no one was responsible but Simon, a besotted shoemaker. It was even hinted that the Dauphin had been rescued, and had not died in the Tower at all, and many tender-hearted Frenchmen clung long and tenaciously to this fiction. But at the appointed time one man, at the bidding of the great Secret-Teller, stood forth and tore away the veil, and discovered to all the world the things that had been done, not by Simon the Cordwainer, but by the _Grande Nation_ in his person. M. de Beauchesne[16] was that man, and nobly, because faithfully and inexorably, he fulfilled his mission. It was a fearful message that he had to deliver, and there is no doubt but that his work--the result of twenty years’ persevering research and study--moved the hearts of his countrymen as no book had ever before moved them. It made an end once and for ever of garbled narratives, and comforting fables, and bade the guilty nation look upon the deeds she had done, and atone for them with God’s help as best she might.

In reading the records of those mad times one ceases to wonder at recent events. They give the key to all subsequent crimes and wanderings. A nation that deliberately, in cold, premeditated hate and full wakefulness of reason, decrees by law in open court that God does not exist, and forthwith abolishes him by act of parliament--a nation that does this commits itself to the consequences. France did this in the National Convention of 1793, and why should she not pay the penalty?

Of all the victims of that bloody period, there is none whose story is so touching as that of the little son of Louis and Marie Antoinette. He was born at Versailles on the 27th of March, 1785. All eye-witnesses describe him as a bright and lovely child, with shining curls of fair hair, large, blue eyes, liquid as a summer sky, and a countenance of angelic sweetness and rare intelligence--“a thing of joy” to all who beheld him. Crowds waited for hours to catch a glimpse of him disporting himself in his little garden before the palace, a flower amidst the flower-beds, prattling with every one, making the old park ring with his joyous laughter. One day, when in the midst of his play, he ran to meet his mother, and, flinging himself into a bush for greater haste, got scratched by the thorns; the queen chided him for the foolish impetuosity. “How then?” replied the child; “you told me only yesterday that the road to glory was through thorns.” “Yes, but glory means devotion to duty, my son,” was Marie Antoinette’s reply. “Then,” cried the little man, throwing his arms, round her knees, “I will make it my glory to be devoted to you, mamma!” He was about four years old when this anecdote was told of him.

It is rather characteristic of the child’s destiny that two hours after the bereavement which made him Dauphin of France, and while his parents were breaking their hearts by the still warm body of his elder brother, a deputation from the Tiers Etat came to demand an audience of the king. Louis XVI. was a prey to the first agony of his paternal grief, and sent to entreat the deputies to spare him, and return another day. They sent back an imperious answer, insisting on his appearing. “Are there no fathers amongst them?” exclaimed the king; but he came out and received them. The incident was trifling, yet it held one of those notes of prophetic anticipation which now first began to be heard, foretelling the approaching storm in which the old ship of French royalty was to be wrecked.

On the 6th of October the palace of Versailles was stormed by the mob; the guards were massacred, the royal family led captives to Paris amidst the triumphant yells of the _sans-culottes_. Then followed the gilded captivity of the Tuileries, which lasted three years; then came the 10th of August, when this was exchanged for the more degrading prison of the Temple; then the _Conciergerie_--then the scaffold.

The Temple was a Gothic fortress built in 1212 by the Knights of the Temple. It had been long inhabited by those famous warrior-knights, and consisted of two distinct towers, which were so constructed as to resemble one building. The great tower was a massive structure divided into five or six stories, above a hundred and fifty feet high, with a pyramidal roof like an extinguisher, having at each corner a turret with a conical roof like a steeple. This was formerly the keep, and had been used as treasury and arsenal by the Templars; it was accessible only by a single door in one turret, opening on a narrow stone stair. The other was called the Little Tower, a narrow oblong with turrets at each angle, and attached, without any internal communication, to its big neighbor on the north side. Close by, within the enclosure of the Temple, stood an edifice which had in olden times been the dwelling-house of the prior, and it was here the royal family were incarcerated on their arrival. The place was utterly neglected and dilapidated, but from its construction and original use it was capable of being made habitable. The king believed that they were to remain here, and visited the empty, mouldy rooms next day, observing to Cléry what changes and repairs were most urgently required. No such luxurious prospect was, however, in store for them. They were merely huddled into the Prior’s Hotel while some preparations were being made for their reception in the tower. These preparations consisted in precautions, equally formidable and absurd, against possible rescue or flight. The heavy oak doors, the thick stone walls, which had proved safe enough for murderers and rebel warriors, were not considered secure for the timid king and his wife and children. Doors and windows were reinforced with iron bars, bolts, and wooden blinds. The corkscrew stair was So narrow that only one person could pass it at a time, yet new iron-plated doors were put up, and bars thrown across it at intervals, to prevent escape. The door leading from it into the royal prisoners’ apartment was so low that when Marie Antoinette was dragged from her children, after the king’s death, to be taken to the _Conciergerie_, she knocked her head violently against the upper part of it, exclaiming to some one who hoped she was not hurt, “Nothing can hurt me now!” The Abbé Edgeworth thus describes the access to the king’s rooms: “I was led across the court to the door of the tower, which, though very narrow and very low, was so overcharged with iron bolts and bars that it opened with a horrible noise. I was conducted up a winding stair so narrow that two persons would have had great difficulty in getting past each other. At short distances these stairs were cut across by barriers, at each of which was a sentinel; these men were all true _sans-culottes_, generally drunk, and their atrocious exclamations, re-echoed by the vast vaults which covered every story of the tower, were really terrifying.” For still greater security all the adjoining buildings which crowded round the tower were thrown down. This work of destruction was entrusted to Palloy, a zealous patriot, whose energy in helping to pull down the Bastile pointed him out as a fit instrument for the occasion. These external arrangements fitly symbolized the systematic brutality which was organized from the first by the Convention, and relentlessly carried out by its agents on each succeeding victim, but by no one so ferociously as Simon the shoemaker. The most appalling riddle which the world has yet set us to solve is the riddle of the French Revolution. The deepest thinkers, the shrewdest philosophers, are puzzling over it still, and will go on puzzling to the crack of doom. There are causes many and terrible which explain the grand fact of the nation’s revolt itself; why, when once the frenzy broke out, the people murdered the king, and butchered all belonging to him, striving to bring about a new birth, a different order of things, by a baptism of blood, the death and annihilation of the old system--many wise and solemn words have been uttered concerning these things, many answers which, if they do not justify the madness of the Revolution, help us to pity, and in a measure excuse, its actors; but the enigma which no one has ever yet solved, or attempted to solve, is the excess of cruelty practised on the fair-haired child whose sole crime was his misfortune in being the descendant of the kings of France.

The Princesse de Lamballe fell on the 3d of September at the prison of La Force. The National Guards carried the head on a pike through the city, and then hoisted it under the windows of the king, and clamored for him to come out and show himself. One young officer, more humane than his compeers, rushed forward and prevented it, and saved Louis from beholding the dreadful spectacle. The king was deeply grateful for the kind action, and asked the officer’s name. “And who was the other who tried to force your majesty out?” enquired M. de Malesherbes. “Oh! I did not care to know his name!” replied Louis gently. That was a night of horrors. The two princesses, Mme. Royale and Princess Elizabeth, could not sleep; the drums were beating to arms, and they sat in silence, “listening to the sobs of the queen, which never ceased.” But more cruel days were yet in store. Before the month was out the Commune de Paris issued a decree for the separation of the king from his wife and children. “They felt it,” says this curious document, “their imperious duty to prevent the abuses which might facilitate the evasion of those traitors, and therefore decree, 1st, that Louis and Antoinette be separated.

“2d. That each shall have a separate dungeon (_cachot_).

“3d. That the _valet de chambre_ be placed in confinement, etc., etc.”

That same night the king was removed to the second story of the great tower. The room was in a state of utter destitution; no preparations of the commonest description had been made for receiving him. A straw bed was thrown down on the floor; Cléry, his _valet_, had not even this, but sat up all night on a chair. A month later (October) the queen and her children were transferred to the story over that now occupied by Louis in the great tower. On the 26th the Dauphin was torn from his mother under the pretence that he was now too old to be left to the charge of women, being just seven years and six months. He was therefore lodged with his father, who found his chief solace in teaching the child his lessons; these consisted of Latin, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. The separation was for the present mitigated by the consolation of meeting at meal-times, and being allowed to be together for some hours in the garden every day. They bore all privations and the insults of their jailers with unruffled patience and sweetness. Mme. Elizabeth and the queen sat up at night to mend their own and the king’s clothes, which the fact of their each having but one suit made it impossible for them to do in the daytime.

This comparatively merciful state of things lasted till the first week in December, when a new set of commissaries were appointed and the captives watched day and night with lynx-eyed rigor. On the 11th the prince was taken back to his mother, the king was summoned to the bar of the Convention, and on his return to prison was informed that he was henceforth totally separated from his family. He never saw them again until the eve of his death. The Duchesse d’Angoulême (Mme. Royale) has described that interview to us with her usual simplicity and pathos: “My father, at the moment of parting with us for ever, made us promise never to think of avenging his death. He was well satisfied that we should hold sacred his last instructions; but the extreme youth of my brother made him desirous of producing a still stronger impression upon him. He took him on his knee, and said to him, ‘My son, you have heard what I have said, but, as an oath is something more sacred than words, hold up your hand and swear that you will accomplish the last wish of your father.’ My brother obeyed, bursting into tears, and this touching goodness redoubled ours.”

The next day Louis had gone to receive the reward promised to the merciful, to those who return love for hate, blessings for curses. When the guillotine had done its work, the shouts of the infuriated city announced to the queen that she was a widow. Her agony was inconsolable. In the afternoon of this awful day she asked to see Cléry, hoping that he might have some message for her from the king, with whom he had remained till his departure from the Temple. She guessed right; the faithful servant had been entrusted with a ring, which the king desired him to deliver to her with the assurance that he never would have parted with it but with his life. But Cléry was not allowed the mournful privilege of fulfilling his trust in person; he was kept a month in the Temple, and then released. “We had now a little more freedom,” continues Mme. Royale. “The guards even believed that we were about to be sent out of France; but nothing could calm the agony of the queen. No hope could touch her heart; life was indifferent to her, and she did not fear death.”

Her son, meanwhile, had nominally become King of France. The armies of La Vendée proclaimed him as Louis XVII., under the regency of his uncle, the Comte de Provence. He was King of France everywhere except in France, where he was the victim of a blind ferocity unexampled in the history of the most wicked periods of the world.

The “freedom” which the Duchesse d’Angoulême speaks of lasted but a few days; the royal family were all now in the queen’s apartment, but kept under, if possible, more rigid and humiliating supervision than before. Their only attendants were a certain Tison and his wife, who had hitherto been employed in the most menial household work of the Temple. They were coarse and ignorant by nature, and soon the confinement to which they were themselves condemned so soured their temper that they grew cruel and insolent, and avenged their own privations on their unhappy prisoners. They denounced three of the municipals whom they detected in some signs of respect and sympathy for the queen, and these men were all guillotined on the strength of the Tisons’ evidence. The woman went mad with remorse when she beheld the mischief her denunciations had done. At first she sank into a black melancholy. Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth attended on her, and did their utmost to soothe her during the first stage of the malady; but their gentle charity was like coals of fire on the head of their persecutor. She soon became furious, and had to be carried away by force to a mad-house.

About the 6th of May the young prince fell ill. The queen was alarmed, and asked to see M. Brunier, his ordinary physician; the request was met with a mocking reply, and no further notice taken of it, until the child’s state became so serious that the prison doctor was ordered by the Commune to go and see what was amiss with him. The doctor humanely consulted M. Brunier, who was well acquainted with the patient’s constitution, and otherwise did all that was in his power to alleviate his condition. This was not much, but the queen and Mme. Elizabeth, who for three weeks never left the little sufferer’s pillow, were keenly alive to the kindness of the medical man. This illness made no noise outside the Temple walls; but Mme. Royale always declared that her brother had never really recovered from it, and that it was the first stage of the disease which ultimately destroyed him. The government had hitherto been too busy with more important matters to have leisure to attend to such a trifle as the life or death of “little Capet.” It was busy watching and striving to control the struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondists, which ended finally in the overthrow of the latter. On the 9th of July, however, it suddenly directed its notice to the young captive, and issued a decree ordering him to be immediately separated from Antoinette, and confided to a tutor (_instituteur_), who should be chosen by the nation. It was ten o’clock at night when six commissaries, like so many birds of ill-omen, entered the Temple, and ascended the narrow, barricaded stairs leading to the queen’s rooms. The young prince was lying fast asleep in his little curtainless bed, with a shawl suspended by tender hands to shade him from the light on the table, where his mother and aunt sat mending their clothes. The men delivered their message in loud tones; but the child slept on. It was only when the queen uttered a great cry of despair that he awoke, and beheld her with clasped hands praying to the commissaries. They turned from her with a savage laugh, and approached the bed to seize the prince. Marie Antoinette, quicker than thought, flew towards it, and, clasping him in her arms, clung despairingly to the bed-post. One of the men was about to use violence in order to seize the boy, but another stayed his hand, exclaiming: “It does not become us to fight with women; call up the guard!” Horror-stricken at the threat, Mme. Elizabeth cried out: “No, for God’s sake, no! We submit, we cannot resist; but give us time to breathe. Let the child sleep out the night here. He will be delivered to you to-morrow.” This prayer was spurned, and then the queen entreated as a last mercy that her son might remain in the tower, where she might still see him. A commissary retorted brutally, _tutoyant_ her, “What! you make such a to-do because, forsooth, you are separated from your child, while our children are sent to the frontiers to have their brains knocked out by the bullets which you bring upon us!” The princesses now began to dress the prince; but never was there such a long toilet in this world. Every article was passed from one to another, put on, taken off again, and replaced after being drenched with tears. The commissaries were losing patience. “At last,” says Mme. Royale, the queen, gathering up all her strength, placed herself in a chair, with the child standing before her, put her hands on his little shoulders, and, without a tear or a sigh, said with a grave and solemn voice, “My child, we are about to part. Bear in mind all I have said to you of your duties when I shall be no longer near to repeat it. Never forget God, who thus tries you, nor your mother, who loves you. Be good, patient, kind, and your father will look down from heaven and bless you.” Having said this, she kissed him and handed him to the commissaries. One of them said: “Come, I hope you have done with your sermonizing; you have abused our patience finely.” Another dragged the boy out of the room, while a third added: “Don’t be uneasy; the nation will take care of him!” Then the door closed. Take care of him! Not even in that hour of supreme anguish, quickened as her imagination was by past and present experience of the nation’s “care,” could his mother have pictured to herself what sort of guardianship was in preparation for her son. That night which saw him torn from her arms and from beneath the protecting shadow of her immense love, beheld the little King of France transferred to the pitiless hands of Simon and his wife.

Simon was a thick-set, black-visaged man of fifty-eight years of age. He worked as a shoemaker next door to Marat, whose patronage procured for him the office of “tutor” to the son of Louis XVI. His wife is described as an ill-favored woman of the same age as her husband, with a temper as sour and irascible as his was vicious and cruel. They got five hundred francs a month for maltreating the “little Capet,” whom Simon never addressed except as “viper.” “wolf-cub,” “poison-toad,” adding kicks and blows as expletives. For two days and nights the child wept unceasingly, refusing to eat or sleep, and crying out continually to be taken back to his mother. He was starved and beaten into sullen silence and a sort of hopeless submission. If he showed terror or surprise at a threat, it was treated as insolent rebellion, and he was seized and beaten as if he had attempted a crime. All this first month of Simon’s tutorship the child was so ill as to be under medical treatment. But this was no claim on the tutor’s mercy; if it had been, he would have been unfitted for his task, and would not have been chosen for it. He was astonished, nevertheless, at the indomitable spirit of his victim, at the quiet firmness with which he bore his treatment, and at the perseverance with which he continued to insist on being restored to his mother. How long would it take to break this royal “wolf-cub”? Simon began to be perplexed about it. He must have advice from headquarters, and fuller liberty for the exercise of his own ingenuity. Four members of the Committee of _Sûreté Générale_ betook themselves to the Temple, and there held a conference with the patriot shoemaker which remains one of the most curious incidents of those wonderful days. Amongst the four councillors was Drouet, the famous post-master of Sainte Ménéhould, and Chabot, an apostate monk. One of the others related the secret conference to Sénart, secretary of the committee, who thus transcribed it at the time: “Citizens,” asks Simon, “what do you decide as to the treatment of the wolf-cub? He has been brought up to be insolent. I can tame him, but I cannot answer that he will not sink under it (_crever_). So much the worse for him; but, after all, what do you mean to do with him? To banish him?” Answer: “No.” “To kill him?” “No.” “To poison him?” “No.” “But what, then?” “_To get rid of him_” (_s’en défaire_).

From this forth the severity of Simon knew no bounds but those of his own fiendish powers of invention. He applied his whole energies to the task of “doing away with” the poor child. He made him slave like a dog at the most laborious and menial work; he was shoe-black, turnspit, drudge, and victim at once. Not content with thus degrading him, Simon insisted that the boy should wear the red cap as an external badge of degradation. The republican symbol was no doubt associated in the child’s mind with the bloody riots of the year before; for the mere sight of it filled him with terror, and nothing that his jailer could say or do could persuade him to let it be placed on his head. Simon, exasperated by such firmness in one so frail and young, fell upon him and flogged him unmercifully, until at last Mme. Simon, who every now and then showed that the woman was not quite dead within her, interfered to rescue the boy, declaring that it made her sick to see him beaten in that way. But she hit upon a mode of punishment which, though more humane, proved more crushing to the young captive than either threats or blows. His fair hair, in which his mother had taken such fond pride, still fell long and unkempt about his shoulders. Mme. Simon declared that this was unseemly in the little Capet, and that he should be shorn like a son of the people. She forthwith proceeded to cut off the offending curls, and in a moment, before he realized what she was about to do, the shining locks lay strewn at his feet. The effect was terrible; the child uttered a piteous cry, and then lapsed into a state of sullen despair. All spirit seemed to have died out of him; and when Simon, perceiving this, again approached him with the hated cap, he made no resistance, gave no sign, but let it be placed on his little shorn head in silence. The shabby black clothes that he wore by way of mourning for his father were now taken off, and replaced by a complete _Carmagnole_ costume; still Louis offered no opposition. He was taken out for exercise on the leads every day, and, to prevent the queen having the miserable satisfaction of catching a glimpse of him on these occasions, a wooden partition had been run up; it was loosely put together, however, and Mme. Elizabeth discovered a chink through which it was possible to see the captive as he passed. Marie Antoinette was filled with thankfulness when she heard of this, and overcoming her reluctance to leave her room, from which she had never stirred since the king’s death, she now used every subterfuge for remaining on the watch within sight of the chink. At last, on the 20th of July, her patience was rewarded. But what a spectacle it was that met her gaze! Her beautiful, fair-haired child, cropped as if he had just recovered from a fever, and dressed out in the odious garb of his father’s murderers, driven along by the brutal Simon, and addressed in coarse and horrible language. She was near enough to hear it, to see the look of terror and suffering on the child’s face as he passed. Yet, such strength does love impart to a mother in her most trying needs, the queen was able to see it all and remain mute and still; she did not cry out, nor faint, nor betray by a single movement the horror that made her very heart stand still, but, rising slowly from the spot, returned to her room. The shock had almost paralyzed her, and she resolved that nothing should ever tempt her to renew it. But the longing of the mother’s heart overcame all other feelings. The next day she returned to her watch-point, and waited for hours until the little feet were heard on the leads again, accompanied as before by Simon’s heavy tread and rough tones. What Marie Antoinette must have suffered during those few days, when she beheld with her own eyes and heard with her own ears the sort of tutelage to which her innocent child was subjected, God, and perhaps a mother’s heart, alone can tell. That young soul, whose purity she had guarded as the very apple of her eye, was now exposed to the foulest influences; for prayers and pious teachings he heard nothing but blasphemy and curses; his faith, that precious flower which had been planted so reverently and watered with such tender care, what was to become of it--what had become of it already? None but God knew, and to God alone did the mother look for help. He who saved Daniel in the lions’ den and the children in the fiery furnace was powerful to save his own now, as then; he would save her child, for man was powerless to help. One of Simon’s diabolical amusements was to force the prince to use bad language and sing blasphemous songs. Blows and threats were unavailing so long as the boy caught any part of the revolting sense of the words; but at last, deceived no doubt by the very grossness of the expressions, and unable to penetrate their meaning, he took refuge from blows in compliance, and with his sweet childish treble piped out songs that were never heard beyond the precincts of a tavern or a guard-house. The queen heard this once. Angels heard it, too, and, closing their ears to the loathsome sounds, smiled with angels’ pity on the unconscious treason of their little kindred spirit.

But this new crisis of misery was not of long duration to Marie Antoinette. About three days after her first vision of Simon and his victim, the commissaries entered her room in the dead of the night, and read a decree, ordering them to convey her to the _Conciergerie_. This was the first step of the scaffold. The summons would have been welcome to the widow of Louis XVI., if she had not been a mother; but she was, and the thought of leaving her son in the hands of men whose aim was not merely to “slay the body,” but to destroy the soul, made the prospect of her own deliverance dreadful to contemplate. But God was there--God, who loved her son better and more availingly than even she loved him. She committed him once more to God, and commended her daughter to the tender and virtuous Elizabeth, little dreaming that the same fate which had befallen the brother was soon to be awarded to the gentle, inoffensive sister.

On the same day that the queen was sent to the _Conciergerie_, preparatory to her execution, a member of the Convention sent a toy guillotine as a present to “the little Capet,” doubtless with the merciful design of acquainting the poor child with his mother’s impending fate. A subaltern officer in the Temple, however, had the humanity to intercept the fiendish present, for the young prince never received it. It was the fashion of the day to teach children to play at beheading sparrows, which were sold on the boulevards with little guillotines, by way of teaching them to love the republic and to scorn death. It is rather a curious coincidence that Chaumette, the man who sent the satanic toy to the Dauphin, was himself decapitated by it a year before the death of the child whom he thought to terrify by his cruel gift.

While the mock trial of the queen was going on, Simon pursued more diligently than ever his scheme of demoralization. A design which must first have originated in some fiend’s brain had occurred to him, and it was necessary to devise new means for carrying it into execution. He would make this spotless, idolized child a witness against his mother; the little hand which hers had guided in forming its first letters, and taught to lift itself in prayer, should be made an instrument in the most revolting calumny which the human mind ever conceived. Simon began to make the boy drink; when he attempted to refuse, the liquor was poured into his mouth by force; until at last, stupefied and unconscious of what he was doing, unable to comprehend the purpose or consequence of the act, he signed his name to a document in which the most heinous accusations were brought against his august mother. The same deposition was presented to his sister for her signature; but without the same success. “They questioned me about a thousand terrible things of which they accused my mother and my aunt,” says Mme. Royale; “and, frightened as I was, I could not help exclaiming that they were wicked falsehoods.” The examination lasted three hours, for the deputies hoped that the extreme youth and timidity of the princess would enable them to compel her consent to sign the paper; but in this they were mistaken. “They forgot,” continues Mme. Royale, “the life that I had led for four years past, and, above all, that the example shown me by my parents had given me more energy and strength of mind.” The queen’s trial lasted two entire days and nights without intermission. Not a single accusation, political or otherwise, was confirmed by a feather’s weight of evidence. But what did that signify? The judges had decreed beforehand that she must die. Hébert brought forward the document signed by her son; she listened in silent scorn, and disdained to answer. One of the paid assassins on the jury demanded why she did not speak. The queen, thus adjured, drew herself up with all the majesty of outraged motherhood, and, casting her eyes over the crowded court, replied: “_I did not answer; but I appeal to the heart of every mother who hears me_.” A low murmur ran through the crowd. No mother raised her voice in loyal sympathy with the mother who appealed to them, but the inarticulate response was too powerful for the jury; they dropped the subject, and when the counsel nominally appointed for her defence had done speaking, the president demanded of the prisoner at the bar whether she had anything to add. There was a moment’s hush, and then the queen spoke: “For myself, nothing; for your consciences, much! I was a queen, and you dethroned me; I was a wife, and you murdered my husband; I was a mother, and you have torn my children from me. I have nothing left but my blood--make haste and take it!”

This last request was granted. The trial ended soon after daybreak on the third day, and at eleven o’clock the same forenoon she was led to the scaffold.

Seldom has retribution more marked ever followed a crime, than that which awaited the perpetrators of this legal murder. Within nine months from the death of Marie Antoinette every single individual known to have had any share in the deed--judges, jury, witnesses, and prosecutors--all perished on the same guillotine to which they condemned the queen.

The captives in the Temple knew nothing either of the mock trial or the death which followed it. It is difficult to understand the motive of this silence, especially as concerns Simon. Perhaps it was owing to his wife’s influence that the young prince was spared the blow of knowing that he was an orphan. If so, it was the only act of mercy she was able to obtain for him. The brutalities of the jailer rather increased than diminished after the queen’s death. The child was locked up alone in a room almost entirely dark, and the gloom and solitude reduced him to such a point of despondency and apathy that few hearts, even amongst the cruel men about him, could behold the wretched spectacle unmoved. One of the municipals begged Simon’s leave to give the poor child a little artificial canary bird, which sang a song and fluttered its wings. The toy gave him such intense pleasure that the man good-naturedly followed up the opportunity of Simon’s mild mood to bring a cage full of real canaries, which he was likewise allowed to give the little Capet. The birds were tamed to come on his finger and perch on his shoulder, and had other pretty tricks which amused and delighted the poor little fellow inexpressibly. He was very happy in the society of his feathered friends for some time, until one unlucky day a new commissary came to inspect his room, and, expressing great surprise at “the son of the tyrant” being allowed such an aristocratic amusement, ordered the cage to be instantly removed. Simon, to atone for this passing weakness towards the wolf-cub, set himself to maltreat him more savagely than ever. The child, in the midst of the revolting atmosphere which surrounded him, still cherished the memory of his mother’s teaching; he remembered the prayers she had taught him, the lessons of love and faith she had planted in his heart. Simon had flogged him the first time he saw him go down on his knees to say his prayers, so the child ever after went to bed and got up without repeating the offence. We may safely believe that he sent up his heart to God morning and night, nevertheless, though he did not dare kneel while doing so. One night, a bitter cold night in January, Simon awoke, and, by the light of the moon that stole in through the wooden blind of the window, beheld the boy kneeling up in his bed, his hands clasped and his face uplifted in prayer. He doubted at first whether the child was awake or asleep; but the attitude and all that it suggested threw him into a frenzy of superstitious rage; he took up a large pitcher of water, icy cold as it was, and flung it, pitcher and all, at the culprit, exclaiming as he did so, “I’ll teach you to get up Pater-nostering at night like a Trappist!” Not satisfied with this, he seized his own shoe--a heavy wooden shoe with great nails--and fell to beating him with it, until Mme Simon, terrified by his violence and sickened by the cries of the victim, rushed at her husband, and made him desist. Louis, sobbing and shivering, gathered himself up out of the wet bed, and sat crouching on the pillow; but Simon pulled him down, and made him lie in the soaking clothes, perishing and drenched as he was. The shock was so great that he never was the same after this night; it utterly broke the little spirit that yet remained in him, and gave a blow to his health which it never recovered.

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.

SPRING.

The spring-time has come, But with skies dark and gray And the wind waileth wildly Through all the drear day. Few glimpses of sunshine, No thought of the flowers, No bird’s songs enliven These chill, gloomy hours.

The snow lieth coldly Where lately it fell, The crocus and daisy Yet sleep in the dell; The frost yet at evening Falls softly and chill, And scatters his pearls Over meadow and hill.

But April, sweet April-- Her tears bring no gloom-- Will pour on the zephyr A violet perfume; Will bid the rill glance In the sunlight along, And waken at morning The bird’s gushing song.

I am thinking of one Who oft sought for the flowers In the sunlight and shadow Of April’s bright hours. But when winter’s bleak winds Sang a dirge for the year, With pale lips, yet smiling, She lay on her bier.

The flowers then that died Will awaken again, But her we have loved We shall look for in vain; Yet, though we have laid her Beneath the dark sod, She bloometh this spring In the garden of God.

SUBSTANTIAL GENERATIONS.

I.

We have shown that the intrinsic principles of the primitive material substance are _the matter_ and _the substantial form_; and we have proved that in the material element the matter is a mere mathematical point--the centre of a virtual sphere--whilst the substantial form which gives existence to such a centre is an act, or an active principle, having a spherical character, and constituting a sphere of power all around that centre, as shown by its exertions directed all around in accordance with the Newtonian law. Hence the nature of the matter as actuated by its substantial form, and the nature of the substantial form as terminated to its matter, are fully determined.

It would seem that nothing remains to be investigated about this subject; for, when we have reached the _first_ constituent principles of a given essence, the metaphysical analysis is at an end. One question, however, remains to be settled between us and the philosophers of the Aristotelic school concerning the _mutual relation_ of the matter and the substantial form in a material being. Is such a relation variable or invariable? Is the matter separable from any given substantial form, as the Aristotelic theory assumes, or are the matter and its form so bound together as to form a unit substantially unchangeable? Can substantial forms be supplanted and superseded by other substantial forms, or do they continue for ever as they were at the instant of their creation?

Some of our readers may think that what we have said in other preceding articles suffices to settle the question; for it is obvious that simple material elements are substantially unchangeable. But the peripatetic school looked at things from a different point of view, and thought that the question was to be solved by the consideration of the potentiality of the _first matter_ with respect to all substantial forms. Hence it is under this aspect that their opinion is to be examined, that a correct judgment may be formed of the merits and deficiencies of a system so long advocated by the most celebrated philosophers. For this reason, as also because some modern writers have resuscitated this system without taking notice of its defects, and without making such corrections as were required to make it agree with the positive sciences, we think it necessary to examine the notions on which the whole Aristotelic theory is established, and the reasonings by which it is supported, and to point out the inaccuracies by which some of those reasonings are spoiled, as well as the limits within which the conclusions of the school can be maintained.

_Materia prima._--The notion of “first matter,” which plays the principal part in the theory of substantial generations, has been the source of many disputes among philosophers. Some, as Suarez, think that the _materia prima_ is metaphysically constituted of act and potency; others consider the _materia prima_ as a real potency only; whilst others consider it as a mere potency of being, and therefore as a non-entity. The word “matter” can, in fact, be used in three different senses.

First, it is used for _material substance_, either compound or simple; as when steel is said to be the matter of a sword, or when the primitive elements are said to be the matter of a body. When taken in this sense, the word “matter” means a _physical_ being, substantially perfect, and capable of accidental modifications.

Secondly, the word “matter” is used for _the potential term lying under the substantial form_ by which it is actuated. In this sense the matter is a _metaphysical_ reality which, by completing its substantial form, concurs with it to the constitution of the physical being--that is, of the substance. It is usually called _materia formata_, or “formed matter.”

Thirdly, the word “matter” is used also for _the potential term of substance conceived as deprived of its substantial form_. In this sense the matter is a mere potency of being, and therefore _a being of reason_; for it cannot thus exist in the real order: and it is then called _materia informis_, or “unformed matter.” It is, however, to be remarked that the phrase _materia informis_ has been used by the fathers of the church to designate the matter as it came out of the hands of the Creator before order, beauty, and harmony were introduced into the material world. Such a matter was not absolutely without form, as is evident.

Of the three opinions above mentioned about the nature of _materia prima_, the one maintained by Suarez is, in the present state of physical science, the most satisfactory, though it can scarcely be said to agree with the Aristotelic theory, as commonly understood. Indeed, if such a first matter is metaphysically constituted of act and potency, as he maintains, such a matter is nothing less than a primitive substance, as he also maintains; and we may be allowed to add, on the strength of the proofs given in our preceding articles, that such a first matter corresponds to our primitive unextended elements, which, though unknown to Suarez, are in fact the _first_ physical matter of which all natural substances are composed. But, if the first matter involves a metaphysical act and is a substance, such a matter cannot be the subject of _substantial_ generation; for what is already in act is not potential to the first act, and what has already a first being is not potential to the first being. Hence we may conclude that the first matter of Suarez excludes the theory of rigorously substantial generations, and leads to the conclusion that the generated substances are not new with respect to their substance, but only with regard to their compound essence, and that the forms by which they are constituted are indeed _essential_ to them, but not strictly _substantial_, as we intend hereafter to explain.

The second interpretation of the words _materia prima_ is that given by S. Thomas, when he considers the first matter as “matter without form,” and as a mere potency of being. “The matter,” he says, “exists sometimes under one form, and at other times under another; but it can never exist isolated--that is, by itself--because, as it does not involve in its ratio any form, it cannot be in act (for the form is the only source of actuality), but can merely be in potency. And therefore, _nothing which is in act can be called first matter_.”[17] From these words it is evident that S. Thomas considers the first matter as matter without form; for, had it a form, it would be in act, and would cease to be called “first” matter. In another place he says: “Since the matter is a pure potency, it is _one_, not through any one form actuating it, but _by the exclusion of all forms_.”[18] And again: “The accidental form supervenes to a subject already pre-existent in act; the substantial form, on the contrary, does not supervene to a subject already pre-existent in act, but _to something which is merely in potency to exist_, viz., _to the first matter_.”[19] And again: “The true nature of matter is _to have no form whatever in act_, but to be in potency with regard to any of them.”[20] And again: “The first matter is a pure potency, just as God is a pure act.”[21]

From these passages, and from many others that might be found in S. Thomas’ works, it is manifest that the holy doctor, in his metaphysical speculations, considers the first matter as matter without a form. In this he faithfully follows Aristotle’s doctrine. For the Greek philosopher explicitly teaches that “as the metal is to the statue, or the wood to the bedstead, or any other unformed material to the thing which can be formed with it, so is the matter to the substance and to the being”;[22] that is, as the metal has not yet the form of a statue, so the first matter still lacks the substantial form, and consequently is a _pure_ potency of being.

Nevertheless, the Angelic Doctor does not always abide by this old and genuine notion of the first matter. When treating of generation and corruption, or engaged in other physical questions, he freely assumes that the first matter is something actually lying under a substantial form, and therefore that it is a _real_ potency in the order of nature, and not a mere result of intellectual abstraction. Thus he concedes that “the first matter exists in all bodies,”[23] that “the first matter must have been created by God under a substantial form,”[24] and that “the first matter remains in act, after it has lost a certain form, owing to the fact that it is actuated by another form.”[25] In these passages and in many others the first matter is evidently considered as matter under a form.

It is difficult to reconcile with one another these two notions, matter _without a form_, and matter _under a form_; for they seem quite contradictory. The only manner of attempting such a conciliation would be to assume that when the first matter is said to be without a form, the preposition “without” is intended to express a mental abstraction, not a real exclusion, of the substantial form. Thus the phrase “without a form” would mean “without taking the form into account,” although such a form is really in the matter. This interpretation of the phrase might be justified by those passages of the holy doctor in which the first matter, inasmuch as _first_, is presented as a result of intellectual abstraction. Here is one of such passages: “First matter,” says he, “is commonly called something, within the genus of substance which is _conceived_ as a potency abstracted from all forms and from all privations, but susceptible both of forms and of privations.”[26] It is evident that, by this kind of abstraction, the matter which is actually under a form would be conceived as being without a form. As, however, the conception would not correspond to the reality, the first matter, thus conceived, would have nothing common with the real matter which exists in nature. For, since the whole reality of matter depends on its actuation by a form, to conceive the matter without any form is to take away from it the only source of its reality, and to leave nothing but a non-entity connoting the privation of its form. Hence such a _materia prima_ would entirely belong to the order of conceptual beings, not to the order of realities; and therefore the matter which exists in nature would not be “first matter.” It is superfluous to remark that if the first matter does not exist, as _first_, in the real order, all the reasonings of the peripatetic school about the offices performed by the first matter in the substantial generation are at an end.

The confusion of actuated with actuable matter was quite unavoidable in the Aristotelic theory of substantial generations. This theory assumes that not only the primitive elements of matter, but also every compound material substance, has a special _substantial_ form giving the _first_ being (_simpliciter esse_, or _primum esse_) to its matter. Hence, in the substantial generation, as understood by Aristotle, the matter must pass from one _first_ being to another _first_ being. Now, the authors who adopted such a theory well saw that the matter which had to acquire a first being, was to be considered as having no being at all; else it would not acquire its _first_ being. On the other hand, the matter which passed from one first being to another was to be considered as having a first being; or else it would not exchange it for another. Hence the first matter, as ready to acquire a first being, was called a _pure_ potency--that is, a potency of being; whilst, as ready to exchange its first being for another, it was called a _real_ potency--that is, an actual reality. That a _pure_ potency can be a _real_ potency, or an actual reality, is an assumption which the peripatetic school never succeeded in proving, though it is the very foundation of the theory of strictly substantial generations as by them advocated.

Before we proceed further we have to mention S. Augustine’s notion of _unformed_ matter, as one which contains a great deal more of truth than is commonly believed by the peripatetic writers. This great doctor admits that _unformed_ matter was created, and existed for a time in its informity. “The earth,” says he, “was nothing but unformed matter; for it was invisible and uncompounded, … and out of this invisible and uncompounded matter, out of this informity, out of this almost mere nothingness, thou wast to make, O God! all the things which this changeable world contains.”[27] Some will ask: How could such a great man admit the existence of matter without a form? Did he not know that a potency without an act cannot exist? Or is it to be suspected that what he calls _unformed matter_ was not altogether destitute of a form, but only of such a form as would make it visible as in the compound bodies?

S. Thomas believes that S. Augustine really excluded all forms from his unformed matter, and remarks that such an unformed matter could not possibly exist in such a state; for, if it existed, it was in act as a result of creation. For the term of creation is a being in act; and the act is a form.[28] Thus it is evident that to admit the existence of the matter without any form at all is a very gross blunder. But, for this very reason that the blunder is so great, we cannot believe that S. Augustine made himself guilty of it. We rather believe that he merely excluded from his unformed matter a visible shape, and what was afterward called “the form of corporeity” by which compound substances are constituted in their species and distinguished from one another. Let us hear him.

“There was a time,” says he, “when I used to call _unformed_, not that which I thought to be altogether destitute of a form, but that which I imagined to be ill-formed, and to have such an odd and ugly form as would be shocking to see. But what I thus imagined was unformed, not absolutely, but only in comparison with other things endowed with better forms; whilst reason and truth demanded that I should discard entirely all thought of any remaining form, if I wished to conceive matter as truly unformed. But this I could not do; for it was easier to surmise that a thing altogether deprived of form had no existence, than to admit anything intermediate between a formed being and nothing, which would be neither a formed being nor nothing, but an unformed being and almost a mere nothing. At last I dropped from my mind all those images of formed bodies, which my imagination was used to multiply and vary at random, and began to consider the bodies themselves, and their mutability on account of which such bodies cease to be what they were, and begin to be what they were not. And I began to conjecture that their passage from one form to another was made through something unformed, not through absolute nothing. But this I desired to know, not to surmise. Now, were I to say all that thou, O God! hadst taught me about this subject, who among my readers would strive to grasp my thought? But I shall not cease to praise thee in my heart for those very things which I cannot expound. For the mutability of changeable things is susceptible of all the forms by which such things can be changed. But what is such a mutability? Is it a soul? Is it a body? Is it the feature of a soul or of a body? Were it allowable, I would call it a _nothing-something_, and a _being non-being_. And yet it was already in some manner before it received these visible and compounded forms.”[29]

The more we examine this passage, the stronger becomes our conviction that the word “form” was used here by S. Augustine, not for the substantial form of Aristotle, but for _shape_ or geometric form, and that “unformed matter” stands here for _shapeless matter_. For, when he says that “reason and truth demand that all thought of any remaining forms should be discarded,” of what remaining forms does he speak? Of those “odd and ugly forms” which he says would be shocking to see. But it is evident that no substantial form can be odd and ugly or shocking to see. Moreover, S. Augustine conceives his “unformed matter,” by dropping from his mind “all those images of formed bodies” by which his imagination had been previously haunted. Now, it is obvious that substantial forms are not an object of the imagination, nor can they be styled “images” of formed bodies. Lastly, the holy doctor explicitly says that the matter of the bodies “was already in some manner before it could receive _these visible and compounded forms_,” which shows that the forms which he excluded from the primitive matter are “the visible and compounded forms” of bodies--that is, such forms as result from material composition. And this is confirmed by those other words of the holy doctor, “The earth was nothing but unformed matter; _for it was invisible and uncompounded_”--that is, the informity of the earth consisted in the absence of material composition, and, therefore, of visible shape, not in the absence of primitive substantial forms.

It would be interesting to know why S. Augustine believed that his readers would not bear with him (_quis legentium capere durabit?_) if he were to say all that God had taught him about shapeless matter. Had God taught him the existence of simple and unextended elements? Was his shapeless matter that simple point, that invisible and uncompounded potency, on account of which all elements are liable to geometrical arrangement and to physical composition? The holy doctor does not tell us; but certainly, if there ever was shapeless matter, it could have no extension, for extension entails shape. It would, therefore, seem that S. Augustine’s shapeless matter could not but consist of simple and unextended elements; and if so, he had good reason to expect that his readers would scorn a notion so contrary to the popular bias; as we see that even in our own time, and in the teeth of scientific and philosophical evidence, the same notion cannot take hold of the popular mind.

If the unformed matter of S. Augustine is matter without shape and without extension, we can easily understand why he calls it _pene nullam rem_, viz., scarcely more than nothing.[30] Indeed, the potential term of a primitive element, a simple point in space, is scarcely more than nothing; for it has no bulk, and were it not for the act which gives it existence, it would be nothing at all, as it has nothing in itself and in its potential nature which deserves the name of “being”; but it borrows all its being from the substantial act, as we shall explain later on. It is, therefore, plain that the matter of a simple element, and of all simple elements, is hardly more than nothing, and that it might almost be described as a _nothing-something_, and a _being non-being_, as S. Augustine observes. But when the primitive matter began to cluster into bodies having bulk and composition, then this same matter acquired a _visible form_ under definite dimensions, and thus one mass of matter became distinguishable from another, and by the arrangement of such distinct material things the order and beauty of the world were produced.

Thus S. Augustine did not admit the existence of matter deprived of a substantial form, but only the existence of matter without shape, and therefore without extension. And for this reason we have said that his doctrine contains more truth than is commonly believed by the peripatetic writers. His _uncompounded_ matter can mean nothing else than simple elements; and since the components are the material cause of the compound, and must be presupposed to it, the simple elements of which all bodies consist are undoubtedly those material beings which God must have created before anything having shape and material composition could make its appearance in the world. Hence S. Augustine’s view of creation is, in this respect, perfectly consistent with sound philosophy no less than with revelation. His shapeless matter must be ranked, we think, with the first matter of Suarez above mentioned, under the name of _primitive_ material substance.

As to the first matter of S. Thomas and of the other followers of Aristotle, it is difficult to say what it is; for we have seen that it has been understood in two different manners. If we adopt its most received definition, we must call it “a pure potency” and “a first potency.” According to this definition, the first matter is a non-entity, as we have already remarked, and has no part in the constitution of substance, any more than a corpse in the constitution of man; for, as the body of man is not _a living corpse_, so the matter in material substance is not _a pure potency in act_, both expressions implying a like contradiction. Hence the first matter, according to this definition, is not a metaphysical being, but a mere being of reason--that is, a conception of nothingness as resulting from the suppression of the formal principle of being.

From our notion of simple elements we can form a very clear image of this being of reason. In a primitive element the matter borrows all its reality from the substantial form of which it is the intrinsic term--that is, from a virtual sphericity of which it is the centre. To change such a centre into a _pure_ potency of being, we have merely to suppress the virtual sphericity; for, by so doing, what was a _real_ centre of power becomes an _imaginary_ centre, a term deprived of its reality, a mere nothing; which however, from the nature of the process by which it is reached, is still conceived as the vestige of the real centre of power, and, so to say, the shadow of the real matter which disappears. Thus the _materia prima_, as a pure potency, is nothing else than an imaginary point in space, or the potency of a real centre of power. This clear and definite conception of the first matter is calculated to shed some additional light on many questions connected with the peripatetic philosophy, and, above all, on the very definition of matter. The old metaphysicians, when defining the first matter to be “a pure potency,” had no notion of the existence of simple elements, and knew very little about the law of material actions; and for this reason they could say nothing about the special character of such a pure potency. For the same reason they were unable also to point out the special nature of the first act of matter; they simply recognized that the conspiration of such a potency with such an act ought to give rise to a “movable being.” But potency and act are to be found not only in material, but also in spiritual, substances; and as these substances are of a quite different nature, it is evident that their respective potencies and their respective acts must be of a quite different nature. Now, the special character of the potency of material substance consists in its being a _local_ term, whilst the special character of the potency of spiritual substance consists in its being an _intellectual_ term. And therefore, to distinguish the former from the latter, we should say that the matter is “a potential term _in space_” and the first matter “a potency of being in space.” The additional words “_in space_” point out the characteristic attribute of the material potency as distinguished from all other potencies.

Moreover, our conception of _materia prima_ as an imaginary point in space may help us to realize more completely the distinction which must be made between the non-entity of the first matter and absolute nothingness. Absolute nothingness is a mere negation of being, or a _negative_ non-entity; whereas the non-entity of the first matter is formally constituted by a privation, and must be styled a _privative_ non-entity. For, as the matter and its substantial form are the constituents of one and the same primitive essence, we cannot think of the matter without reference to the form, nor of the form without reference to the matter. And therefore, when, in order to conceive the first matter, we suppress mentally the substantial form, we deprive the matter of what it essentially requires for its existence; and it is in consequence of such a process that we reduce the matter to a non-entity. Now, to exclude from the matter the form which is due to it is to constitute the matter under a privation. Therefore the resulting non-entity of the first matter is a privative non-entity. Indeed, privation is defined as “the absence of something due _to a subject_,” and we can scarcely say that a non-entity is a subject. But this definition applies to _real_ privations only, which require a _real_ subject lacking something due to it; as when a man has lost an eye or a foot. But in our case, as we are concerned with a pure potency of being, which has no reality at all, our subject can be nothing else than a non-entity. This is the subject which demands the form of which it is bereaved, as it cannot even be conceived without reference to it. The very name of _matter_, which it retains, points out a _form_ as its transcendental correlative; while the epithet “first” points out the fact that this matter is yet destitute of that being which it should have in order to deserve the name of _real_ matter.

But, much as this notion of the first matter agrees with that of “pure potency” and of “first potency,” the followers of the peripatetic system will say that _their_ first matter is something quite different, as is evident from their theory of substantial generations, which would have no meaning, if the first matter were not a reality. Let us, then, waive for the present the notion of “_pure_ potency,” and turn our attention to that of “_real_ potency,” that we may see what kind of reality the first matter must be, when the “first matter” is identified with the matter actually existing under a substantial form.

The matter actuated by a form is a _real potency_, and nothing more. It is only by stretching the word “being” beyond its legitimate meaning that this real potency is sometimes called a real being. In fact, the potential term of the real being is real, not on account of any real entity involved in its own nature, but merely on account of the real act by which it is actuated. How anything can be real without possessing an entity of its own our reader may easily understand by recollecting what we have often remarked about the centre of a sphere, whose reality is entirely due to the spherical form, or by reflecting that negations and privations are similarly called _real_, not because of any entity involved in them, but simply because they are appurtenances of real beings.

We have seen that S. Augustine would fain have called the primitive matter a _nothing-something_ and a _being non-being_, if such phrases had been allowable. His thought was deep, but he could not find words to express it thoroughly. Our “real potency” is that “nothing-something” which was in the mind of the holy doctor. S. Thomas gives us a clew to the explanation of such a “nothing-something” by remarking that _to be_ and _to have being_ are not precisely the same thing. _To be_ is the attribute of a complete act, whilst _to have being_ is the attribute of a potency actuated by its act. That is said _to be_ which contains in itself the formal reason of its being; whilst that is said _to have being_ which does not contain in itself the formal reason of its being, but receives its being from without, and puts it on as a borrowed garment. Of course, God alone can be said _to be_ in the fullest meaning of the term, as he alone contains in himself the _adequate_ reason of his being; yet all created essence can be said _to be_, inasmuch as it contains in itself the _formal_ reason of its being--that is, an act giving existence to a potency; whereas the potency itself can be said merely _to have being_, because _being_ is not included in the nature of potency, but must come to it from a distinct source. And therefore, as a thing colored _has_ color, but _is not_ color, and as a body animated _has_ life, but _is not_ life, so the matter actuated by its form _has_ being, but _is not_ a being.

Some philosophers, who failed to take notice of this distinction, maintained that the matter which exists under a substantial form is an _incomplete being_, and an _incomplete substance_. The expression is not correct. For, if the matter which lies under the substantial form were an incomplete being, it would be the office of the form to complete it. Now, the substantial form can have no such office; for the form always inchoates what the matter completes. It is always the term that completes the act, whilst the act actuates the term by giving it the first being. Hence the matter which lies under its substantial form is not an incomplete entity. Nor is it an entity destined to complete the form; for, if the term which completes a form were a being, such a term would be a real subject, and thus the form terminated to it would not be strictly substantial, as it would not give it the first being. Moreover, the matter and the substantial form constitute _one_ primitive essence, in which it is impossible to admit a multiplicity of entitative constituents; and therefore, since the substantial form, which is a formal source of being, is evidently an entitative constituent, it follows that the matter lying under it has no entity of its own, but is merely clothed with the entity of its form.

But, true though it is that the matter lying under a substantial form has no entity of its own, it is, however, a _real_ term, as we have already intimated; hence it may be called a _reality_. And since _reality_ and _entity_ are commonly used as synonymous, we may admit that the formed matter is an entity, adjectively, not substantively, just as we admit that ivory is _a sphere_ when it lies under a spherical form. Nevertheless the ivory, to speak more properly, should be said _to have sphericity_ rather than _to be a sphere_; for, though it is the subject of sphericity, it is not spherical of its own nature. In the same manner, a body vivified by a soul is called _living_; but, properly speaking, it should be styled _having life_, because life is not a property of the body as such, but it springs from the presence of the soul in the body. The like is to be said of the being of the matter as actuated by the substantial form. It is from the form alone that such a matter has its first being; and therefore such a matter has only a borrowed being, and is a _real potency_, not a real entity. Such is, we believe, the true interpretation of S. Augustine’s phrase: “nothing-something” and “being non-being”--_Nihil aliquid, et est non est_.

Nor is it strange that the matter should be _a reality_ without being _an entity_, properly so called; for the like happens with all the real terms of contingent things. Thus the real term of a line (the point) is no linear entity, though it certainly belongs to the line, and is something real in the line; the real term of time (the present instant, or the _now_) is no temporal entity, as it has no extension, though it certainly belongs to time, and is something real in time; the real term of a body (the simple element) is no bodily entity, as it has no bulk, though it certainly belongs to the body, and is something real in it; the real term of a circle (the centre) is no circular entity, though it certainly belongs to the circle, and is something real in it. And in like manner the real term of a primitive contingent substance (its potency) is no substantial entity, though it evidently belongs to the contingent substance, and is something real in it. In God alone, whose being excludes contingency, the substantial term (the Word) stands forth as a true entity--a most perfect and infinite entity--for, as the term of the divine generation is not educed out of nothing, it is absolutely free from all potentiality, and is in eternal possession of infinite actuality. Hence it is that God alone, as we have above remarked, can be said _to be_ in the fullest meaning of the term.

As the best authors agree that the matter which is under a substantial form is no being, but only “a real potency,” we will dispense with further considerations on this special point. What we have said suffices to give our readers an idea of the _materia prima_ of the ancients, and of the different manners in which it has been understood.

_Substantial form._--Coming now to the notion of the substantial form the first thing which deserves special notice is the fact that the phrase “substantial form” can be interpreted in two manners, owing to the double meaning attached to the epithet “substantial.” All the forms which supervene to a specific nature already constituted have been called “accidental,” and all the forms which enter into the constitution of a specific nature have been called “substantial.” But as the accident can be contrasted with the _essence_ no less than with the _substance_ of a thing, so the substantial form can be defined either as that which gives the first being to a certain _essence_, or as that which gives the first being to a _substance_ as such. The schoolmen, in fact, left us two definitions of their substantial forms, of which the first is: “The substantial form is that which gives the first being to the matter”; the second is: “The substantial form is that which gives the first being to a thing.” The first definition belongs to the form strictly substantial, for the result of the first actuation of matter is a primitive substance; whereas the second has a much wider range, because all things which involve material composition, in their specific nature, receive the first specific being by a form which needs not give the first existence to their material components, and which, therefore, is not strictly a substantial form. Thus a molecule of oxygen, because it contains a definite number of primitive elements, cannot be formally constituted in its specific nature, except by a specific composition; and such a composition is an essential, though not a truly substantial, form of the compound, as we shall more fully explain in another article.

The strictly substantial form contains in itself the whole reason of the being of the substance; for the matter which completes it does not contribute to the constitution of the substance, except as a mere term--that is, by simply receiving existence, and therefore without adding any new entity to the entity of the form. Whence it follows that the form itself contains the whole reason of the resulting essence. “Although the essence of a being,” says S. Thomas, “is neither the form alone nor the matter alone, yet the form alone is, in its own manner, the cause of such an essence.”[31] It cannot, however, be inferred from this that the strictly substantial form is a _physical_ being. Physical beings have a complete essence and an existence of their own; which is not the case with any material form. “Even the forms themselves,” according to S. Thomas, “have no being; it is only the compounds (of matter and form) that have being through them.”[32] And again: “The substantial form itself has no complete essence; for in the definition of the substantial form it is necessary to include that of which it is the form.”[33] It is plain that a being which has no complete essence and no possibility of a separate existence cannot be styled a physical being, but only a metaphysical constituent of the physical being.

The schoolmen teach that the substantial forms of bodies _are educed out of the potency of matter_. This proposition is true. For the so-called “substantial” forms of bodies are not strictly substantial, but only essential or natural forms, as they give the first existence, not to the matter of which the bodies are composed, but only to the bodies themselves. Now, all bodies are material compounds of a certain species, and therefore involve distinct material terms bound together by a specific form of composition, without which such a specific compound can have no existence. The specific form of composition is therefore the essential form of a body of a given species; and such is the form that gives _the first being_ to the body. To say that such a form is educed out of the potency of matter is to state an obvious truth, as it is known that the composition of bodies is brought about by the mutual action of the elements of which the bodies are constituted, which action proceeds from the _active_ potency, and actuates the _passive_ potency of the matter of the body, as we shall explain more fully in the sequel.

But the old natural philosophers, who had no notion of primitive unextended elements, when affirming the eduction of substantial forms out of the potency of matter, took for granted that such forms were strictly substantial, and gave the first being not only to the body, but also to the matter itself of which the body was composed. In this they were mistaken; but the mistake was excusable, as chemistry had not yet shown the law of definite proportions in the combination of different bodies, nor had the spectroscope revealed the fact that the primitive molecules of all bodies are composed of free elementary substances vibrating around a common centre, and remaining substantially identical amid all the changes produced by natural causes in the material world. Nevertheless, had they not been biassed by the _Ipse dixit_, the peripatetics would have found that, though accidental forms, and many essential forms too, are educed out of the potency of matter, yet the strictly substantial forms cannot be so educed.

The matter may be conceived either as formed or as unformed. If it is formed, it is already in possession of its substantial form and of its first being, which it never loses, as we shall prove hereafter. Therefore such a matter is not in potency with regard to its first being; and thus no strictly substantial form can be educed from the potency of the formed matter. If, on the contrary, the matter is yet unformed, it is plain that such a matter cannot be acted on by natural agents; for it has no existence in the order of things, and therefore it cannot be the subject of natural actions. How, then, can it receive the first being? Owing to the impossibility of explaining how the unformed matter could be actuated by natural agents, those who admitted the eduction of substantial forms out of the potency of matter were constrained to assume that the _first_ matter had some reality of its own, and consisted intrinsically, as Suarez teaches, of act and potency. But, though it is true that the matter must have some reality in order to receive from natural agents a new form, it is evident that such a new form cannot be strictly substantial; for it cannot give the first being to a matter already endowed with being. Hence no strictly substantial form can be naturally educed out of the potency of matter.

If, then, a truly substantial form could in any sense be educed out of the potency of matter, such an eduction should be made, not by natural causes, but by God himself in the act of creation; for no agent, except God, can bring matter into existence. But we think that even in this case it would be incorrect to say that the substantial form is educed out of the potency of matter. For, although the unformed matter, and the nothingness out of which things are educed by creation, admit of no real difference, yet the unformed matter, as a privative non-entity, involves a formality of reason, which absolute nothingness does not involve; and hence to substitute the unformed matter for absolute nothingness as the extrinsic term of creation, is to present the fact of creation under a false formality. God creates a substance, not by educing its _form_ out of a privative non-entity--that is, out of an abstraction--but by educing the _substance_ itself out of nothingness. And for this reason it would be quite incorrect to call creation an eduction of a substantial form out of the potency of matter.

There is yet another reason why creation should not be so explained. For the philosophers who admit the eduction of substantial forms out of the potency of matter, assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that such a potency is _real_, though they often call it “a pure potency,” as we have stated. Their matter is therefore a _real_ subject of substantial generations. Now, it is obvious that creation neither presupposes nor admits a previous real subject. Hence, to say that creation is the eduction of a substantial form out of the potency of matter, would be to employ a very mischievous phrase, with nothing to justify it, even if no other objection could be raised against its use.

We conclude that strictly substantial forms are never educed out of the potency of matter, but are simply educed out of nothing in creation. As, however, every such form gives being to its matter, without which it cannot exist, we commonly say that the whole substance, and not its form as such, is educed out of nothing. S. Thomas says: “The term of creation is a being in act; and its act is its form”[34]--the form, evidently, which gives the first being to the matter, and which is therefore truly and properly substantial. Hence, before the position of this act, nothing exists in nature which can be styled “matter,” whilst at the position of this act, and by virtue of it, the material substance itself is instantly brought into existence. Accordingly, the position of an act which formally gives existence to its term is the very eduction of the substance out of nothing; and the strictly substantial form is educed out of nothing in the very creation of the substance, whereas the matter, at the mere position of such a form, and through it immediately, acquires its first existence. The matter, as the reader may recollect, is to its form what the centre of a sphere is to the spherical form. Hence, as the centre acquires its being by the mere position of a spherical form, so the matter acquires its being by the mere position of the substantial form, without the concurrence of any other causality.

This last conclusion may give rise to an objection, which we cannot leave without an answer. The objection is the following: If the matter receives its first being through the substantial form alone, it follows that God did not create the matter, but only the form itself.

We answer that when we speak of the creation of matter, the word “matter” means “material substance.” For the term of creation, as we have just remarked with S. Thomas, is _the being in act_--that is, the complete being, as it physically exists in the order of nature. Now, such a being is the substance itself. On the other hand, to create _the being in act_ is to produce _the act_ which is the formal reason of the being; and since the position of the act entails the existence of a potential term, it is evident that God, by producing the act, causes the existence of the potential term. But as this term is not a “real being,” but only a “real potency,” and as its reality is merely “borrowed” from the substantial form, it has nothing in itself which requires making, and therefore it cannot be the term of a special creation.

The old philosophers, who admitted the separability of the matter from its substantial form, and who were for this reason obliged to grant to such a matter an imperfect being, were wont to say that the matter was _con-created_ with the form, and thus they seem to have conceived the creation of a primitive material substance as including two partial creations. But, as a primitive being includes but _one_ act, it cannot be the term of _two_ actions; for two actions imply two acts. On the other hand, the matter which is under the substantial act has no entity of its own, as we have shown to be the true and common doctrine, and therefore has no need of a special effection, but only of a formal actuation. Hence the creation of a primitive material substance does not consist of two partial creations. We may, however, adopt the term “_con-created_” to express the fact that the position of the act entails the reality of the potential term, just as the position of sphericity entails the existence of a centre.

The preceding remarks have been made with the object of preparing the solution of a difficulty concerning the creation of matter. For matter is potential, whilst God is a pure act without potency; but a pure act without potency cannot produce anything potential, since it does not contain in itself any potentiality nor anything equivalent to it. Therefore the origin of matter cannot be accounted for by creation.

The answer to this difficulty is as follows: We grant that the matter, as distinguished from the form which gives it the first being, and therefore as a potential term of the primitive substance, cannot be created, for it is no being at all, but only a potency of being; and yet it does not follow that the material substance itself cannot be created. Of course God does not contain in himself, either formally or eminently, the potentiality of his own creatures, but he eminently contains in himself and can produce out of himself an endless multitude of acts giving existence to as many potential terms. And thus God, by producing any such act, causes the existence of its correspondent potency, which is not efficiently made, but only formally actuated, as has been just explained. Creation is an action, and action is the production of an act; hence “the term of creation is _a being in act_, and this act is the form,” as St. Thomas teaches; the matter, on the contrary, or the potency of the created being, is a term coming out of nothingness by formal actuation, and consequently having no being of its own, but owing whatever existence it has to the act or form of which it is the term; so that, if God ceased to conserve such an act, the term would instantly vanish altogether without need of a special annihilation. Nothingness is the source of all potentiality and imperfection, as God is the source of all actuality and perfection. Hence even the spiritual creatures, in which there is no matter, are essentially potential, inasmuch as they, too, have come out of nothing. This suffices to show that God, though containing in himself no formal and no virtual potentiality, can create a substance essentially constituted of act and potency. For we have seen that, to create such a substance, God needs only to produce an act _ad extra_, and that such an act contains in itself the formal reason of its proportionate potency; because “although the essence of a being is neither the form alone nor the matter alone, yet the form alone is in its own manner (that is, by formal principiation) the cause of such an essence.”

And let this suffice respecting the general notions of first matter and substantial form.

TO BE CONTINUED.

THE LEADER OF THE CENTRUM IN THE GERMAN REICHSTAG.

The Catholics of Germany have suffered a great loss in the death of Herman von Mallinkrodt, deputy to the Reichstag. Germany now realizes what he was, and it is indeed a pleasure for us to honor in this periodical the memory of this extraordinary man by giving a short sketch of his life.

Herman von Mallinkrodt was born in Minden (Westphalia), on the 5th of February, 1821. His father, who was of noble birth and a Prussian officer of state, was a Protestant; his mother, _née_ Von Hartman, of Paderborn, was an excellent Catholic. All the children of this marriage were baptized Catholics--which is very seldom the case in mixed marriages--and were filled with the true Catholic spirit.

Like Herman, so also did his brother and sister, who were older than he, distinguish themselves by their decidedly Catholic qualities. George, who had become the possessor of the old convent of Boeddekken, founded in the year 837 by S. Meinulph, cherished a special devotion towards this the first saint of Paderborn, and rebuilt the chapel, destroyed in the beginning of this century by the Prussian government. This chapel is greatly esteemed as a perfect specimen of Gothic architecture, and is now held in high honor, as being the final resting-place of Herman von Mallinkrodt. His sister, Pauline, the foundress and mother-general of the sisterhood of “Christian Love,” has become celebrated by the success she has achieved in the education of girls. (The principal teacher of Pauline was the noble convert and celebrated poetess, Louisa Aloysia Hensel, in whose verses, according to the criticism of the Protestant historian Barthel, more tender and Christian sentiments are expressed than are to be found in any German production of modern times.) These excellent Sisters were also expelled, as being dangerous to the state, and sought as well as found a new field of usefulness in America, the land of freedom.

The true Catholic discipline of these three children they owe to the careful training of their mother and the pure Catholic atmosphere of Aix-la-Chapelle, to which city their father was sent as vice-president of the government. Herman followed the profession of his father, and studied jurisprudence. The interest felt by the young jurist in whatever concerned the church is seen in the following incident, which had an important influence on his whole life: When the time had arrived for him to pass his state examination, he retired to the quiet of Boeddekken. From different themes he selected the one treating on the judicial relations between church and state. Not being satisfied with the view taken by certain authors, he endeavored to arrive at a knowledge of the matter by personal investigation, and after fourteen months of close application he succeeded in establishing a system which proved itself on all sides tenable and in harmony with the writings of the old canonists of the church. The person to whose judgment the production was submitted declared that the treatise, although excellent, was too strongly in favor of the church, but that the author had permission to publish it, which, however, was not done. Herman, nevertheless, as he afterwards told one of his friends, had never to retract one of the principles he then maintained; he had only to let them develop themselves more fully. As he in his youth did not rest until he had become perfect master of any theme he had to discuss, so also did he never in afterlife ascend the tribune, upon which he won imperishable honors, until he had digested the whole matter in his mind. We make no mention of the positions which Mallinkrodt occupied as the servant of the state. It is well known that his strong Catholic sentiments were for the Prussian government an insurmountable objection to his being elevated to a post corresponding with his eminent ability, until he, as counsellor of the government at Merseburg, left the ungrateful service of the state. It was, however, his good fortune to apply the talents which Almighty God had given him in so full a measure, to his parliamentary duties for eighteen years, from 1852 to 1874, the short interruption from 1864 to 1868 excepted.

In his life his friends recognized his merits, and in his death even his enemies confessed that a great man had passed away.

This prominent leader Almighty God has taken from us in a sudden and unexpected manner. The last Prussian Diet, at whose session he was more conspicuous than ever before, had adjourned, and in paying his farewell visits before his return to his home in Nord-Borchen, where he possessed a family mansion, he contracted a cold, which finally developed itself into an inflammation of the lungs and of the membrane covering the thorax. On the fifth day of his sickness the man who, by his indefatigable public labors and the grief he felt for the afflictions undergone by the church, had worn out his life, passed to his eternal reward, on the 26th of May, in the 53d year of his age. He had married Thecla, _née_ Von Bernhard, a step-sister of his first wife, several months before his death, and she was present when he died. Placing one hand in hers, he embraced with the other the cross, which in life he had always venerated and chosen as his standard.

No pen can describe the heartfelt anguish which the Catholic people of Germany felt at their loss. At the funeral services in Berlin the distinguished members of all parties were present. The government alone failed to acknowledge the merit of one who had so long been an eminent leader in the Reichstag. Paderborn, to which city the body was conveyed, has never witnessed such a grand funeral procession as that of Von Mallinkrodt. From thence to Boeddekken, a distance of nine miles, one congregation after the other formed the honorary escort, not counting the crowd of mourners who had gathered together at Boeddekken, where the deceased was to be buried in the chapel of S. Meinulph. A large number of members of the Centrum party, nearly all the nobility of Westphalia, were here assembled, and many cities of Germany sent deputies, who deposited laurel wreaths upon the coffin. It was an imposing sight when his Excellency Dr. Windthorst approached the open grave to strew, as the last service of love, some blessed earth upon the remains of his dear friend, the tears streaming meanwhile from his eyes. During the funeral services the bells of the Cathedral of Münster tolled solemnly for two hours, summoning Catholics from the different districts to attend the High Mass of Requiem for the beloved dead; so that the words of the Holy Scriptures applied to the hero of the Machabees can be truly applied also to Von Mallinkrodt: “And all the people … bewailed him with great lamentation” (1 Machabees ix. 20). It is a remarkable fact that even his opponents, who during his lifetime attacked him with all manner of weapons, could not but bestow the most unqualified praises upon him in death. It would seem that the eloquence of Von Mallinkrodt during his latter years had been all in vain; for although every seat was filled as soon as he ascended the tribune to speak, and he was listened to with profound attention, yet he exercised no influence upon the votes, for the reason that they had previously been determined upon. No one was found who could reply to his forcible arguments, for they were unanswerable. Not only his graceful oratory, but the very appearance of a man so true to his convictions, had its effect even upon his opponents. It will not be out of place for us to give a few of the tributes paid to his memory by those who differed from him in politics. Even in Berlin, where titles are so plentiful, the general sentiment was one of sorrow. “With respectful sympathy,” writes the _Spener Gazette_, “we have to announce the unexpected death of a man distinguished not only for talent, but for integrity--Herman von Mallinkrodt, deputy to the Reichstag. He was sincerely convinced of the justice of the cause he espoused. Greater praise we cannot bestow upon a friend, nor can we refrain from acknowledging that our late adversary always acted from principle.” “Von Mallinkrodt,” says the correspondent of the Berlin _Progress_, “stood in the first rank when there was question regarding the policy of the government against the church; no other orator, not only of his own party, but even of the opposition, could compare with him in logical reasoning or in rhetorical skill. His speeches give evident proof of the rare combination of truth and ability to be found in this great man.” The fault-finding Elberfelder _Gazette_ testifies as follows to the eloquence of our deputy: “Who that has listened to even one of Von Mallinkrodt’s speeches can ever forget the fascinating eloquence or the picturesque appearance of the orator--reminding one of the Duke of Alba, by the perfect dignity of his manner and the classic form of his discourse?” The Magdeburg correspondent almost goes further when he says: “He served his party with such disinterestedness, and was so indifferent to his own advancement, that it would be well if all political parties could show many such characters--men who live exclusively for one idea, and sacrifice every temporal advantage to this idea. The Reichstag will find it difficult to fill the vacuum caused by the death of Von Mallinkrodt. In this all parties agree; and members who combated the principles of the deceased with the greatest earnestness, nevertheless confess that in energy and vigor of expression he was seldom equalled and never excelled by any one.” “In regard to his exterior appearance,” the Magdeburg _Gazette_ says: “Von Mallinkrodt, with his erect person, beautifully-formed head, stern features, and flashing eyes, was a fine specimen of a man who knew how to control his temper, and not give way to an outburst of passion at an important moment. He was a leader who, in the severest combat, could impart courage and confidence to his followers, and he stood as firm as a rock when any attempt was made to crush him.… He will not be soon forgotten by those with whom he has had intellectual contests. Of Von Mallinkrodt, who stands alone among men, it can be truly said: ‘He was a great man.’”

The reader will pardon us for selecting from among the many tributes of respect paid to the memory of Von Mallinkrodt one taken from the democratic Frankfort _Gazette_, edited by Jews, which journal at other times keeps its columns open to the most outrageous attacks upon the Catholic Church. It says with great truth: “The single idea of the church entirely filled the mind of this extraordinary and wonderful man; and firmly as he upheld the system of Mühler-Krätzig, as steadfastly did he oppose the policy of Falk. In this opposition he grew stronger from session to session, the governing principle of his life developed itself more and more fully, and he became bolder in his attack upon the ministers and their parliamentary friends. Talent and character were united in him; a true son of the church, he was at the same time a true son of mother earth, and his healthy organization had its effect upon his disposition. The last session of the Reichstag saw him at the height of his usefulness; his last grand speech, in reference to the laws against the bishops, was, as his friends and opponents acknowledge, the most important parliamentary achievement since the beginning of the conflict.… In him the Reichstag loses not only one of its shining lights, but also a character of iron mould, such as is seldom found preserved in all its strength in the present unsettled state of public affairs. We cannot join in the requiem which the priests will sing around his catafalque, but his honest opponents will venerate his memory, for he was, what can be said of but few in our degenerate times--_a true man_.”

With these noble qualities Von Mallinkrodt possessed the greatest modesty; he was accessible to every one, cheerful and familiar in the happy circle of his friends, respectful to his political opponents, just and reasonable to Protestants, and devoted to his spiritual mother, the Catholic Church. Like O’Connell, during his parliamentary labors he had constant recourse to prayer. “Pray for me!” were his farewell words to his sister when he went to Berlin to enter the arena of politics. When he had concluded the above-mentioned last and grand speech in the Reichstag, in regard to the laws against the bishops, with the words, _Per crucem ad lucem_, which he himself translated, “through the cross to joy,” and when he descended the tribune, he went directly to the seat of Rev. Father Miller, of Berlin, counsellor of the bishop, stretched out his hand to him, and said, “You have prayed well!” It is said of him that before any important debate in the chambers he went in the morning to Holy Communion. The people of Nord-Borchen tell one another with emotion how, without ever having been noticed by him, they have observed their good Von Mallinkrodt pass hours in prayer in the lonely chapel near Borchen. What pious aspirations he made in that secluded spot God alone knows. He was always very fond of reciting the Rosary, which devotion displayed itself particularly upon his death-bed. He asked the Sister who nursed him to recite the beads with him, as his weakness prevented him from praying aloud. When his wife approached his couch of pain, after greeting her affectionately, he told her to look for his rosary and crucifix, which she would find lying beside him on the right. The following day, when his sister, the Superioress Pauline, had arrived in Berlin, after a friendly salutation, he said to her: “It is indeed good that you are here; say with me another decade of the Rosary.” It is related of O’Connell that in a decisive moment he would always retire to a corner in the House of Parliament, in order to say the Rosary; it was also the habit of Von Mallinkrodt.

The same living faith which animated him in life gave him also consolation in death. “Think of S. Elizabeth,” said he to his wife, Thecla; “she also became a widow when young.” When his wife, the day previous to his death, spoke to him of the love and grief of his five children, tears filled his eyes; but he wiped them quietly away without uttering a word, and looked up to heaven. He explained to the Sister who attended him why during his whole illness he had never felt any solicitude concerning his temporal or family affairs; for, said he, “I have confidence in God.”

Another remarkable feature of his last sickness, which testifies to the peaceful state of mind of this Christian warrior, who fought the cause, but not the individual, was the fact that he evinced real satisfaction that his personal relations toward his political opponents had become no worse, but even more friendly. It was this sentiment which, when the fever had reached its height, caused him to exclaim: “I was willing to live in peace with every one; but justice must prevail! Should Christians not speak more like Christians when among Christians?” As Von Mallinkrodt lived by faith, so also did he die, embracing the sign of redemption; and thus he passed away _per crucem ad lucem_--through the cross to joy.

AN EXPOSITION OF THE CHURCH IN VIEW OF RECENT DIFFICULTIES AND CONTROVERSIES AND THE PRESENT NEEDS OF THE AGE.[35]

“These are not the times to sit with folded arms, while all the enemies of God are occupied in overthrowing every thing worthy of respect.”--PIUS IX., Jan. 13, 1873.

“Yes, this change, this triumph, will come. I know not whether it will come during my life, during the life of this poor Vicar of Jesus Christ; but that it must come, I know. The resurrection will take place and we shall see the end of all impiety.”--PIUS IX., Anniversary of the Roman Plébiscite, 1872.

I. THE QUESTION STATED.

The Catholic Church throughout the world, beginning at Rome, is in a suffering state. There is scarcely a spot on the earth where she is not assailed by injustice, oppression, or violent persecution. Like her divine Author in his Passion, every member has its own trial of pain to endure. All the gates of hell have been opened, and every species of attack, as by general conspiracy, has been let loose at once upon the church.

Countries in which Catholics outnumber all other Christians put together, as France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Bavaria, Baden, South America, Brazil, and, until recently, Belgium, are for the most part controlled and governed by hostile minorities, and in some instances the minority is very small.

Her adversaries, with the finger of derision, point out these facts and proclaim them to the world. Look, they say, at Poland, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Bavaria, Austria, Italy, France, and what do you see? Countries subjugated, or enervated, or agitated by the internal throes of revolution. Everywhere among Catholic nations weakness only and incapacity are to be discerned. This is the result of the priestly domination and hierarchical influence of Rome!

Heresy and schism, false philosophy, false science, and false art, cunning diplomacy, infidelity, and atheism, one and all boldly raise up their heads and attack the church in the face; while secret societies of world-wide organization are stealthily engaged in undermining her strength with the people. Even the Sick man--the Turk--who lives at the beck of the so-called Christian nations, impudently kicks the church of Christ, knowing full well there is no longer in Europe any power which will openly raise a voice in her defence.

How many souls, on account of this dreadful war waged against the church, are now suffering in secret a bitter agony! How many are hesitating, knowing not what to do, and looking for guidance! How many are wavering between hope and fear! Alas! too many have already lost the faith.

Culpable is the silence and base the fear which would restrain one’s voice at a period when God, the church, and religion are everywhere either openly denied, boldly attacked, or fiercely persecuted. In such trying times as these silence or fear is betrayal.

The hand of God is certainly in these events, and it is no less certain that the light of divine faith ought to discern it. Through these clouds which now obscure the church the light of divine hope ought to pierce, enabling us to perceive a better and a brighter future; for this is what is in store for the church and the world. That love which embraces at once the greatest glory of God and the highest happiness of man should outweigh all fear of misinterpretations, and urge one to make God’s hand clear to those who are willing to see, and point out to them the way to that happier and fairer future.

What, then, has brought about this most deplorable state of things? How can we account for this apparent lack of faith and strength on the part of Catholics? Can it be true, as their enemies assert, that Catholicity, wherever it has full sway, deteriorates society? Or is it contrary to the spirit of Christianity that Christians should strive with all their might to overcome evil in this world? Perhaps the Catholic Church has grown old, as others imagine, and has accomplished her task, and is no longer competent to unite together the conflicting interests of modern society, and direct it towards its true destination?

These questions are most serious ones. Their answers must be fraught with most weighty lessons. Only a meagre outline of the course of argument can be here given in so vast a field of investigation.

II. REMOTE CAUSE OF PRESENT DIFFICULTIES.

One of the chief features of the history of the church for these last three centuries has been its conflict with the religious revolution of the XVIth century, properly called Protestantism. The nature of Protestantism may be defined as the exaggerated development of personal independence, directed to the negation of the divine authority of the church, and chiefly aiming at its overthrow in the person of its supreme representative, the Pope.

It is a fixed law, founded in the very nature of the church, that every serious and persistent denial of a divinely-revealed truth necessitates its vigorous defence, calls out its greater development, and ends, finally, in its dogmatic definition.

The history of the church is replete with instances of this fact. One must suffice. When Arius denied the divinity of Christ, which was always held as a divinely-revealed truth, at once the doctors of the church and the faithful were aroused in its defence. A general council was called at Nice, and there this truth was defined and fixed for ever as a dogma of the Catholic faith. The law has always been, from the first Council at Jerusalem to that of the Vatican, that the negation of a revealed truth calls out its fuller development and its explicit dogmatic definition.

The Council of Trent refuted and condemned the errors of Protestantism at the time of their birth, and defined the truths against which they were directed; but, for wise and sufficient reasons, abstained from touching the objective point of attack, which was, necessarily, the divine authority of the church. For there was no standing-ground whatever for a protest against the church, except in its denial. It would have been the height of absurdity to admit an authority, and that divine, and at the same time to refuse to obey its decisions. It was as well known then as to-day that the keystone of the whole structure of the church was its head. To overthrow the Papacy was to conquer the church.

The supreme power of the church for a long period of years was the centre around which the battle raged between the adversaries and the champions of the faith.

The denial of the Papal authority in the church necessarily occasioned its fuller development. For as long as this hostile movement was aggressive in its assaults, so long was the church constrained to strengthen her defence, and make a stricter and more detailed application of her authority in every sphere of her action, in her hierarchy, in her general discipline, and in the personal acts of her children. Every new denial was met with a new defence and a fresh application. The danger was on the side of revolt, the safety was on that of submission. The poison was an exaggerated spiritual independence, the antidote was increased obedience to a divine external authority.

The chief occupation of the church for the last three centuries was the maintenance of that authority conferred by Christ on S. Peter and his successors, in opposition to the efforts of Protestantism for its overthrow; and the contest was terminated for ever in the dogmatic definition of Papal Infallibility, by the church assembled in council in the Vatican. Luther declared the pope Antichrist. The Catholic Church affirmed the pope to be the Vicar of Christ. Luther stigmatized the See of Rome as the seat of error. The council of the church defined the See of Rome, the chair of S. Peter, to be the infallible interpreter of divinely-revealed truth. This definition closed the controversy.

In this pressing necessity of defending the papal authority of the church, the society of S. Ignatius was born. It was no longer the refutation of the errors of the Waldenses and the Albigenses that was required, nor were the dangers to be combated such as arise from a wealthy and luxurious society. The former had been met and overcome by the Dominicans; the latter by the children of S. Francis. But new and strange errors arose, and alarming threats from an entirely different quarter were heard. Fearful blows were aimed and struck against the keystone of the divine constitution of the church, and millions of her children were in open revolt. In this great crisis, as in previous ones, Providence supplied new men and new weapons to meet the new perils. S. Ignatius, filled with faith and animated with heroic zeal, came to the rescue, and formed an army of men devoted to the service of the church, and specially suited to encounter its peculiar dangers. The Papacy was their point of attack; the members of his society must be the champions of the pope, his body-guard. The papal authority was denied; the children of S. Ignatius must make a special vow of obedience to the Holy Father. The prevailing sin of the time was disobedience; the members of his company must aim at becoming the perfect models of the virtue of obedience, men whose will should never conflict with the authority of the church, _perinde cadaver_. The distinguishing traits of a perfect Jesuit formed the antithesis of a thorough Protestant.

The society founded by S. Ignatius undertook a heavy and an heroic task, one in its nature most unpopular, and requiring above all on the part of its members an entire abnegation of that which men hold dearest--their own will. It is no wonder that their army of martyrs is so numerous and their list of saints so long.

Inasmuch as the way of destroying a vice is to enforce the practice of its opposite virtue, and as the confessional and spiritual direction are appropriate channels for applying the authority of the church to the conscience and personal actions of the faithful, the members of this society insisted upon the frequency of the one and the necessity of the other. In a short period of time the Jesuits were considered the most skilful and were the most-sought-after confessors and spiritual directors in the church.

They were mainly instrumental--by the science of their theologians, the logic of their controversialists, the eloquence of their preachers, the excellence of their spiritual writers, and, above all, by the influence of their personal example--in saving millions from following in the great revolt against the church, in regaining millions who had gone astray, and in putting a stop to the numerical increase of Protestantism, almost within the generation in which it was born.

To their labors and influence it is chiefly owing that the distinguishing mark of a sincere Catholic for the last three centuries has been a special devotion to the Holy See and a filial obedience to the voice of the pope, the common father of the faithful.

The logical outcome of the existence of the society founded by S. Ignatius of Loyola was the dogmatic definition of Papal Infallibility; for this was the final word of victory of divine truth over the specific error which the Jesuits were specially called to combat.

III. PROXIMATE CAUSE.

The church, while resisting Protestantism, had to give her principal attention and apply her main strength to those points which were attacked. Like a wise strategist, she drew off her forces from the places which were secure, and directed them to those posts where danger threatened. As she was most of all engaged in the defence of her external authority and organization, the faithful, in view of this defence, as well as in regard to the dangers of the period, were specially guided to the practice of the virtue of obedience. Is it a matter of surprise that the character of the virtues developed was more passive than active? The weight of authority was placed on the side of restraining rather than of developing personal independent action.

The exaggeration of personal authority on the part of Protestants brought about in the church its greater restraint, in order that her divine authority might have its legitimate exercise and exert its salutary influence. The errors and evils of the times sprang from an unbridled personal independence, which could be only counteracted by habits of increased personal dependence. _Contraria contrariis curantur._ The defence of the church and the salvation of the soul were ordinarily secured at the expense, necessarily, of those virtues which properly go to make up the strength of Christian manhood.

The gain was the maintenance and victory of divine truth and the salvation of the soul. The loss was a certain falling off in energy, resulting in decreased action in the natural order. The former was a permanent and inestimable gain. The latter was a temporary, and not irreparable, loss. There was no room for a choice. The faithful were placed in a position in which it became their unqualified duty to put into practice the precept of our Lord when he said: _It is better for thee to enter into life maimed or lame, than, having two hands or two feet, to be cast into everlasting fire_.[36]

In the principles above briefly stated may in a great measure be found the explanation why fifty millions of Protestants have had generally a controlling influence, for a long period, over two hundred millions of Catholics, in directing the movements and destinies of nations. To the same source may be attributed the fact that Catholic nations, when the need was felt of a man of great personal energy at the head of their affairs, seldom hesitated to choose for prime minister an indifferent Catholic, or a Protestant, or even an infidel. These principles explain also why Austria, France, Bavaria, Spain, Italy, and other Catholic countries have yielded to a handful of active and determined radicals, infidels, Jews, or atheists, and have been compelled to violate or annul their concordats with the Holy See, and to change their political institutions in a direction hostile to the interests of the Catholic religion. Finally, herein lies the secret why Catholics are at this moment almost everywhere oppressed and persecuted by very inferior numbers. In the natural order the feebler are always made to serve the stronger. Evident weakness on one side, in spite of superiority of numbers, provokes on the other, where there is consciousness of power, subjugation and oppression.

IV. IS THERE A WAY OUT?

Is divine grace given only at the cost of natural strength? Is a true Christian life possible only through the sacrifice of a successful natural career? Are things to remain as they are at present?

The general history of the Catholic religion in the past condemns these suppositions as the grossest errors and falsest calumnies. Behold the small numbers of the faithful and their final triumph over the great colossal Roman Empire! Look at the subjugation of the countless and victorious hordes of the Northern barbarians! Witness, again, the prowess of the knights of the church, who were her champions in repulsing the threatening Mussulman; every one of whom, by the rule of their order, were bound not to flinch before two Turks! Call to mind the great discoveries made in all branches of science, and the eminence in art, displayed by the children of the church, and which underlie--if there were only honesty enough to acknowledge it--most of our modern progress and civilization! Long before Protestantism was dreamed of Catholic states in Italy had reached a degree of wealth, power, and glory which no Protestant nation--it is the confession of one of their own historians--has since attained.

There is, then, no reason in the nature of things why the existing condition of Catholics throughout the world should remain as it is. The blood that courses through our veins, the graces given in our baptism, the light of our faith, the divine life-giving Bread we receive, are all the same gifts and privileges which we have in common with our great ancestors. We are the children of the same mighty mother, ever fruitful of heroes and great men. The present state of things is neither fatal nor final, but only one of the many episodes in the grand history of the church of God.

V. WHICH IS THE WAY OUT?

No better evidence is needed of the truth of the statements just made than the fact that all Catholics throughout the world are ill at ease with things as they are. The world at large is agitated, as it never has been before, with problems which enter into the essence of religion or are closely connected therewith. Many serious minds are occupied with the question of the renewal of religion and the regeneration of society. The aspects in which questions of this nature are viewed are as various as the remedies proposed are numerous. Here are a few of the more important ones.

One class of men would begin by laboring for the reconciliation of all Christian denominations, and would endeavor to establish unity in Christendom as the way to universal restoration. Another class starts with the idea that the remedy would be found in giving a more thorough and religious education to youth in schools, colleges, and universities. Some would renew the church by translating her liturgies into the vulgar tongues, by reducing the number of her forms of devotion, and by giving to her worship greater simplicity. Others, again, propose to alter the constitution of the church by the practice of universal elections in the hierarchy, by giving the lay element a larger share in the direction of ecclesiastical matters, and by establishing national churches. There are those who hope for a better state of things by placing Henry V. on the throne of France, and Don Carlos on that of Spain. Others, contrariwise, having lost all confidence in princes, look forward with great expectations to a baptized democracy, a holy Roman democracy, just as formerly there was a Holy Roman Empire. Not a few are occupied with the idea of reconciling capital with labor, of changing the tenure of property, and abolishing standing armies. Others propose a restoration of international law, a congress of nations, and a renewed and more strict observance of the Decalogue. According to another school, theological motives have lost their hold on the people, the task of directing society has devolved upon science, and its apostolate has begun. There are those, moreover, who hold that society can only be cured by an immense catastrophe, and one hardly knows what great cataclysm is to happen and save the human race. Finally, we are told that the reign of Antichrist has begun, that signs of it are everywhere, and that we are on the eve of the end of the world.

These are only a few of the projects, plans, and remedies which are discussed, and which more or less occupy and agitate the public mind. How much truth or error, how much good or bad, each or all of these theories contain, would require a lifetime to find out.

The remedy for our evils must be got at, to be practical, in another way. If a new life be imparted to the root of a tree, its effects will soon be seen in all its branches, twigs, and leaves. Is it not possible to get at the root of all our evils, and with a radical remedy renew at once the whole face of things? Universal evils are not cured by specifics.

VI. THE WAY OUT.

All things are to be viewed and valued as they bear on the destiny of man. Religion is the solution of the problem of man’s destiny. Religion, therefore, lies at the root of everything which concerns man’s true interest.

Religion means Christianity, to all men, or to nearly all, who hold to any religion among European nations. Christianity, intelligibly understood, signifies the church, the Catholic Church. The church is God acting through a visible organization directly on men, and, through men, on society.

The church is the sum of all problems, and the most potent fact in the whole wide universe. It is therefore illogical to look elsewhere for the radical remedy of all our evils. It is equally unworthy of a Catholic to look elsewhere for the renewal of religion.

The meditation of these great truths is the source from which the inspiration must come, if society is to be regenerated and the human race directed to its true destination. He who looks to any other quarter for a radical and adequate remedy and for true guidance is doomed to failure and disappointment.

VII. MISSION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

It cannot be too deeply and firmly impressed on the mind that the church is actuated by the instinct of the Holy Spirit; and to discern clearly its action, and to co-operate with it effectually, is the highest employment of our faculties, and at the same time the primary source of the greatest good to society.

Did we clearly see and understand the divine action of the Holy Spirit in the successive steps of the history of the church, we would fully comprehend the law of all true progress. If in this later period more stress was laid on the necessity of obedience to the external authority of the church than in former days, it was, as has been shown, owing to the peculiar dangers to which the faithful were exposed. It would be an inexcusable mistake to suppose for a moment that the holy church, at any period of her existence, was ignorant or forgetful of the mission and office of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit established the church, and can he forget his own mission? It is true that he has to guide and govern through men, but he is the Sovereign of men, and especially of those whom he has chosen as his immediate instruments.

The essential and universal principle which saves and sanctifies souls is the Holy Spirit. He it was who called, inspired, and sanctified the patriarchs, the prophets and saints of the old dispensation. The same divine Spirit inspired and sanctified the apostles, the martyrs, and the saints of the new dispensation. The actual and habitual guidance of the soul by the Holy Spirit is the essential principle of all divine life. “I have taught the prophets from the beginning, and even till now I cease not to speak to all.”[37] Christ’s mission was to give the Holy Spirit more abundantly.

No one who reads the Holy Scriptures can fail to be struck with the repeated injunctions to turn our eyes inward, to walk in the divine presence, to see and taste and listen to God in the soul. These exhortations run all through the inspired books, beginning with that of Genesis, and ending with the Revelations of S. John. “I am the Almighty God, walk before me, and be perfect,”[38] was the lesson which God gave to the patriarch Abraham. “Be still and see that I am God.”[39] “O taste, and see that the Lord is sweet; blessed is the man that hopeth in him.”[40] God is the guide, the light of the living, and our strength. “God’s kingdom is within you,” said the divine Master. “Know you not that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?”[41] “For it is God who worketh in you both to will and to accomplish, according to his will.”[42] The object of divine revelation was to make known and to establish within the souls of men, and through them upon the earth, the kingdom of God.

In accordance with the Sacred Scriptures, the Catholic Church teaches that the Holy Spirit is infused, with all his gifts, into our souls by the sacrament of baptism, and that, without his actual prompting or inspiration and aid, no thought or act, or even wish, tending directly towards our true destiny, is possible.

The whole aim of the science of Christian perfection is to instruct men how to remove the hindrances in the way of the action of the Holy Spirit, and how to cultivate those virtues which are most favorable to his solicitations and inspirations. Thus the sum of spiritual life consists in observing and fortifying the ways and movements of the Spirit of God in our soul, employing for this purpose all the exercises of prayer, spiritual reading, sacraments, the practice of virtues, and good works.

That divine action which is the immediate and principal cause of the salvation and perfection of the soul claims by right its direct and main attention. From this source within the soul there will gradually come to birth the consciousness of the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, out of which will spring a force surpassing all human strength, a courage higher than all human heroism, a sense of dignity excelling all human greatness. The light the age requires for its renewal can come only from the same source. The renewal of the age depends on the renewal of religion. The renewal of religion depends upon a greater effusion of the creative and renewing power of the Holy Spirit. The greater effusion of the Holy Spirit depends on the giving of increased attention to his movements and inspirations in the soul. The radical and adequate remedy for all the evils of our age, and the source of all true progress, consist in increased attention and fidelity to the action of the Holy Spirit in the soul. “Thou shalt send forth thy Spirit, and they shall be created: and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.”[43]

VIII. THE MEN THE AGE DEMANDS.

This truth will be better seen by looking at the matter a little more in detail. The age, we are told, calls for men worthy of that name. Who are those worthy to be called men? Men, assuredly, whose intelligences and wills are divinely illuminated and fortified. This is precisely what is produced by the gifts of the Holy Spirit; they enlarge all the faculties of the soul at once.

The age is superficial; it needs the gift of wisdom, which enables the soul to contemplate truth in its ultimate causes. The age is materialistic; it needs the gift of intelligence, by the light of which the intellect penetrates into the essence of things. The age is captivated by a false and one-sided science; it needs the gift of science, by the light of which is seen each order of truth in its true relations to other orders and in a divine unity. The age is in disorder, and is ignorant of the way to true progress; it needs the gift of counsel, which teaches how to choose the proper means to attain an object. The age is impious; it needs the gift of piety, which leads the soul to look up to God as the Heavenly Father, and to adore him with feelings of filial affection and love. The age is sensual and effeminate; it needs the gift of force, which imparts to the will the strength to endure the greatest burdens and to prosecute the greatest enterprises with ease and heroism. The age has lost and almost forgotten God; it needs the gift of fear, to bring the soul again to God, and make it feel conscious of its great responsibility and of its destiny.

Men endowed with these gifts are the men for whom--if it but knew it--the age calls: men whose minds are enlightened and whose wills are strengthened by an increased action of the Holy Spirit; men whose souls are actuated by the gifts of the Holy Spirit; men whose countenances are lit up with a heavenly joy, who breathe an air of inward peace, and act with a holy liberty and an unaccountable energy. One such soul does more to advance the kingdom of God than tens of thousands without such gifts. These are the men and this is the way--if the age could only be made to see and believe it--to universal restoration, universal reconciliation, and universal progress.

IX. THE CHURCH HAS ENTERED ON THIS WAY.

The men the age and its needs demand depend on a greater infusion of the Holy Spirit in the souls of the faithful; and the church has been already prepared for this event.

Can one suppose for a moment that so long, so severe, a contest, as that of the three centuries just passed, which, moreover, has cost so dearly, has not been fraught with the greatest utility to the church? Does God ever allow his church to suffer loss in the struggle to accomplish her divine mission?

It is true that the powerful and persistent assaults of the errors of the XVIth century against the church forced her, so to speak, out of the usual orbit of her movement; but having completed her defence from all danger on that side, she is returning to her normal course with increased agencies--thanks to that contest--and is entering upon a new and fresh phase of life, and upon a more vigorous action in every sphere of her existence. The chiefest of these agencies, and the highest in importance, was that of the definition concerning the nature of papal authority. For the definition of the Vatican Council, having rendered the supreme authority of the church, which is the unerring interpreter and criterion of divinely-revealed truth, more explicit and complete, has prepared the way for the faithful to follow, with greater safety and liberty, the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. The dogmatic papal definition of the Vatican Council is, therefore, the axis on which turn the new course of the church, the renewal of religion, and the entire restoration of society.

O blessed fruit! purchased at the price of so hard a struggle, but which has gained for the faithful an increased divine illumination and force, and thereby the renewal of the whole face of the world.

It is easy to perceive how great a blunder the so-called “Old Catholics” committed in opposing the conciliar definition. They professed a desire to see a more perfect reign of the Holy Spirit in the church, and by their opposition rejected, so far as in them lay, the very means of bringing it about!

This by the way: let us continue our course, and follow the divine action in the church, which is the initiator and fountain-source of the restoration of all things.

What is the meaning of these many pilgrimages to holy places, to the shrines of great saints, the multiplication of Novenas and new associations of prayer? Are they not evidence of increased action of the Holy Spirit on the faithful? Why, moreover, these cruel persecutions, vexatious fines, and numerous imprisonments of the bishops, clergy, and laity of the church? What is the secret of this stripping the church of her temporal possessions and authority? These things have taken place by the divine permission. Have not all these inflictions increased greatly devotion to prayer, cemented more closely the unity of the faithful, and turned the attention of all members of the church, from the highest to the lowest, to look for aid from whence it alone can come--from God?

These trials and sufferings of the faithful are the first steps towards a better state of things. They detach from earthly things and purify the human side of the church. From them will proceed light and strength and victory. _Per crucem ad lucem._ “If the Lord wishes that other persecutions should be sown, the church feels no alarm; on the contrary, persecutions purify her and confer upon her a fresh force and a new beauty. There are, in truth, in the church certain things which need purification, and for this purpose those persecutions answer best which are launched against her by great politicians.” Such is the language of Pius IX.[44]

These are only some of the movements, which are public. But how many souls in secret suffer sorely in seeing the church in such tribulations, and pray for her deliverance with a fervor almost amounting to agony! Are not all these but so many preparatory steps to a Pentecostal effusion of the Holy Spirit on the church--an effusion, if not equal in intensity to that of apostolic days, at least greater than it in universality? “If at no epoch of the evangelical ages the reign of Satan was so generally welcome as in this our day, the action of the Holy Spirit will have to clothe itself with the characteristics of an exceptional extension and force. The axioms of geometry do not appear to us more rigorously exact than this proposition. A certain indefinable presentiment of this necessity of a new effusion of the Holy Spirit for the actual world exists, and of this presentiment the importance ought not to be exaggerated; but yet it would seem rash to make it of no account.”[45]

Is not this the meaning of the presentiment of Pius IX., when he said: “Since we have nothing, or next to nothing, to expect from men, let us place our confidence more and more in God, whose heart is preparing, as it seems to me, to accomplish, in the moment chosen by himself, a great prodigy, which will fill the whole earth with astonishment”?[46]

Was not the same presentiment before the mind of De Maistre when he penned the following lines: “We are on the eve of the greatest of religious epochs; … it appears to me that every true philosopher must choose between these two hypotheses: either that a new religion is about to be formed, or that Christianity will be renewed in some extraordinary manner”?[47]

X. TWOFOLD ACTION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

Before further investigation of this new phase of the church, it would perhaps be well to set aside a doubt which might arise in the minds of some, namely, whether there is not danger in turning the attention of the faithful in a greater degree in the direction contemplated?

The enlargement of the field of action for the soul, without a true knowledge of the end and scope of the external authority of the church, would only open the door to delusions, errors, and heresies of every description, and would be in effect merely another form of Protestantism.

On the other hand, the exclusive view of the external authority of the church, without a proper understanding of the nature and work of the Holy Spirit in the soul, would render the practice of religion formal, obedience servile, and the church sterile.

The action of the Holy Spirit embodied visibly in the authority of the church, and the action of the Holy Spirit dwelling invisibly in the soul, form one inseparable synthesis; and he who has not a clear conception of this twofold action of the Holy Spirit is in danger of running into one or the other, and sometimes into both, of these extremes, either of which is destructive of the end of the church.

The Holy Spirit, in the external authority of the church, acts as the infallible interpreter and criterion of divine revelation. The Holy Spirit in the soul acts as the divine Life-Giver and Sanctifier. It is of the highest importance that these two distinct offices of the Holy Spirit should not be confounded.

The supposition that there can be any opposition or contradiction between the action of the Holy Spirit in the supreme decisions of the authority of the church, and the inspirations of the Holy Spirit in the soul, can never enter the mind of an enlightened and sincere Christian. The same Spirit which through the authority of the church teaches divine truth, is the same Spirit which prompts the soul to receive the divine truths which he teaches. The measure of our love for the Holy Spirit is the measure of our obedience to the authority of the church; and the measure of our obedience to the authority of the church is the measure of our love for the Holy Spirit. Hence the sentence of S. Augustine: “_Quantum quisque amat ecclesiam Dei, tantum habet Spiritum Sanctum_.” There is one Spirit, which acts in two different offices concurring to the same end--the regeneration and sanctification of the soul.

In case of obscurity or doubt concerning what is the divinely-revealed truth, or whether what prompts the soul is or is not an inspiration of the Holy Spirit, recourse must be had to the divine teacher or criterion, the authority of the church. For it must be borne in mind that to the church, as represented in the first instance by S. Peter, and subsequently by his successors, was made the promise of her divine Founder that “the gates of hell should never prevail against her.”[48] No such promise was ever made by Christ to each individual believer. “The church of the living God is the pillar and ground of truth.”[49] The test, therefore, of a truly enlightened and sincere Christian, will be, in case of uncertainty, the promptitude of his obedience to the voice of the church.

From the above plain truths the following practical rule of conduct may be drawn: The Holy Spirit is the immediate guide of the soul in the way of salvation and sanctification; and the criterion or test that the soul is guided by the Holy Spirit is its ready obedience to the authority of the church. This rule removes all danger whatever, and with it the soul can walk, run, or fly, if it chooses, in the greatest safety and with perfect liberty, in the ways of sanctity.

XI. NEW PHASE OF THE CHURCH.

There are signs which indicate that the members of the church have not only entered upon a deeper and more spiritual life, but that from the same source has arisen a new phase of their intellectual activity.

The notes of the divine institution of the church--and the credibility of divine revelation--with her constitution and organization, having been in the main completed on the external side, the notes which now require special attention and study are those respecting her divine character, which lie on the internal side.

The mind of the church has been turned in this direction for some time past. One has but to read the several Encyclical letters of the present reigning Supreme Pontiff, and the decrees of the Vatican Council, to be fully convinced of this fact.

No pontiff has so strenuously upheld the value and rights of human reason as Pius IX.; and no council has treated so fully of the relations of the natural with the supernatural as that of the Vatican. It must be remembered the work of both is not yet concluded. Great mission that, to fix for ever those truths so long held in dispute, and to open the door to the fuller knowledge of other and still greater verities!

It is the divine action of the Holy Spirit in and through the church which gives her external organization the reason for its existence. And it is the fuller explanation of the divine side of the church and its relations with her human side, giving always to the former its due accentuation, that will contribute to the increase of the interior life of the faithful, and aid powerfully to remove the blindness of those--whose number is much larger than is commonly supposed--who only see the church on her human side.

As an indication of these studies, the following mere suggestions, concerning the relations of the internal with the external side of the church, are here given.

The practical aim of all true religion is to bring each individual soul under the immediate guidance of the divine Spirit. The divine Spirit communicates himself to the soul by means of the sacraments of the church. The divine Spirit acts as the interpreter and criterion of revealed truth by the authority of the church. The divine Spirit acts as the principle of regeneration and sanctification in each Christian soul. The same Spirit clothes with suitable ceremonies and words the truths of religion and the interior life of the soul in the liturgy and devotions of the church. The divine Spirit acts as the safeguard of the life of the soul and of the household of God in the discipline of the church. The divine Spirit established the church as the practical and perfect means of bringing all souls under his own immediate guidance and into complete union with God. This is the realization of the aim of all true religion. Thus all religions, viewed in the aspect of a divine life, find their common centre in the Catholic Church.

The greater part of the intellectual errors of the age arise from a lack of knowledge of the essential relations of the light of faith with the light of reason; of the connection between the mysteries and truths of divine revelation and those discovered and attainable by human reason; of the action of divine grace and the action of the human will.

The early Greek and Latin fathers of the church largely cultivated this field. The scholastics greatly increased the riches received from their predecessors. And had not the attention of the church been turned aside from its course by the errors of the XVIth century, the demonstration of Christianity on its intrinsic side would ere this have received its finishing strokes. The time has come to take up this work, continue it where it was interrupted, and bring it to completion. Thanks to the Encyclicals of Pius IX. and the decisions of the Vatican Council, this task will not now be so difficult.

Many, if not most, of the distinguished apologists of Christianity, theologians, philosophers, and preachers, either by their writings or eloquence, have already entered upon this path. The recently-published volumes, and those issuing day by day from the press, in exposition, or defence, or apology of Christianity, are engaged in this work.

This explanation of the internal life and constitution of the church, and of the intelligible side of the mysteries of faith and the intrinsic reasons for the truths of divine revelation, giving to them their due emphasis, combined with the external notes of credibility, would complete the demonstration of Christianity. Such an exposition of Christianity, the union of the internal with the external notes of credibility, is calculated to produce a more enlightened and intense conviction of its divine truth in the faithful, to stimulate them to a more energetic personal action; and, what is more, it would open the door to many straying, but not altogether lost, children, for their return to the fold of the church.

The increased action of the Holy Spirit, with a more vigorous co-operation on the part of the faithful, which is in process of realization, will elevate the human personality to an intensity of force and grandeur productive of a new era to the church and to society--an era difficult for the imagination to grasp, and still more difficult to describe in words, unless we have recourse to the prophetic language of the inspired Scriptures.

Is not such a demonstration of Christianity and its results anticipated in the following words?

“We are about to see,” said Schlegel, “a new exposition of Christianity, which will reunite all Christians, and even bring back the infidels themselves.” “This reunion between science and faith,” says the Protestant historian Ranke, “will be more important in its spiritual results than was the discovery of a new hemisphere three hundred years ago, or even than that of the true system of the world, or than any other discovery of any kind whatever.”

XII. MISSION OF RACES.

Pursuing our study of the action of the Holy Spirit, we shall perceive that a deeper and more explicit exposition of the divine side of the church, in view of the characteristic gifts of different races, is the way or means of realizing the hopes above expressed.

God is the author of the differing races of men. He, for his own good reasons, has stamped upon them their characteristics, and appointed them from the beginning their places which they are to fill in his church.

In a matter where there are so many tender susceptibilities, it is highly important not to overrate the peculiar gifts of any race, nor, on the other hand, to underrate them or exaggerate their vices or defects. Besides, the different races in modern Europe have been brought so closely together, and have been mingled to such an extent, that their differences can only be detected in certain broad and leading features.

It would be also a grave mistake, in speaking of the providential mission of the races, to suppose that they imposed their characteristics on religion, Christianity, or the church; whereas, on the contrary, it is their Author who has employed in the church their several gifts for the expression and development of those truths for which he specially created them. The church is God acting through the different races of men for their highest development, together with their present and future greatest happiness and his own greatest glory. “God directs the nations upon the earth.”[50]

Every leading race of men, or great nation, fills a large space in the general history of the world. It is an observation of S. Augustine that God gave the empire of the world to the Romans as a reward for their civic virtues. But it is a matter of surprise how large and important a part divine Providence has appointed special races to take in the history of religion. It is here sufficient merely to mention the Israelites.

One cannot help being struck with the mission of the Latin and Celtic races during the greater period of the history of Christianity. What brought them together in the first instance was the transference of the chair of S. Peter, the centre of the church, to Rome, the centre of the Latin race. Rome, then, was the embodied expression of a perfectly-organized, world-wide power. Rome was the political, and, by its great roads, the geographical, centre of the world.

What greatly contributed to the predominance of the Latin race, and subsequently of the Celts in union with the Latins, was the abandonment of the church by the Greeks by schism, and the loss of the larger portion of the Saxons by the errors and revolt of the XVIth century. The faithful, in consequence, were almost exclusively composed of Latin-Celts.

The absence of the Greeks and of so large a portion of the Saxons, whose tendencies and prejudices in many points are similar, left a freer course and an easier task to the church, through her ordinary channels of action, as well as through her extraordinary ones--the Councils, namely, of Trent and the Vatican--to complete her authority and external constitution. For the Latin-Celtic races are characterized by hierarchical, traditional, and emotional tendencies.

These were the human elements which furnished the church with the means of developing and completing her supreme authority, her divine and ecclesiastical traditions, her discipline, her devotions, and, in general, her æsthetics.

XIII. SOME OF THE CAUSES OF PROTESTANTISM.

It was precisely the importance given to the external constitution and to the accessories of the church which excited the antipathies of the Saxons, which culminated in the so-called Reformation. For the Saxon races and the mixed Saxons, the English and their descendants, predominate in the rational element, in an energetic individuality, and in great practical activity in the material order.

One of the chief defects of the Saxon mind lay in not fully understanding the constitution of the church, or sufficiently appreciating the essential necessity of her external organization. Hence their misinterpretation of the providential action of the Latin-Celts, and their charges against the church of formalism, superstition, and popery. They wrongfully identified the excesses of those races with the church of God. They failed to take into sufficient consideration the great and constant efforts the church had made, in her national and general councils, to correct the abuses and extirpate the vices which formed the staple of their complaints.

Conscious, also, of a certain feeling of repression of their natural instincts, while this work of the Latin-Celts was being perfected, they at the same time felt a great aversion to the increase of externals in outward worship, and to the minute regulations in discipline, as well as to the growth of papal authority and the outward grandeur of the papal court. The Saxon leaders in heresy of the XVIth century, as well as those of our own day, cunningly taking advantage of those antipathies, united with selfish political considerations, succeeded in making a large number believe that the question in controversy was not what it really was--a question, namely, between Christianity and infidelity--but a question between Romanism and Germanism!

It is easy to foresee the result of such a false issue; for it is impossible, humanly speaking, that a religion can maintain itself among a people when once they are led to believe it wrongs their natural instincts, is hostile to their national development, or is unsympathetic with their genius.

With misunderstandings, weaknesses, and jealousies on both sides, these, with various other causes, led thousands and millions of Saxons and Anglo-Saxons to resistance, hatred, and, finally, open revolt against the authority of the church.

XIV. PRESENT SAXON PERSECUTIONS.

The same causes which mainly produced the religious rebellion of the XVIth century are still at work among the Saxons, and are the exciting motives of their present persecutions against the church.

Looking through the distorted medium of their Saxon prejudices, grown stronger with time, and freshly stimulated by the recent definition of Papal Infallibility, they have worked themselves into the belief--seeing the church only on the outside, as they do--that she is purely a human institution, grown slowly, by the controlling action of the Latin-Celtic instincts, through centuries, to her present formidable proportions. The doctrines, the sacraments, the devotions, the worship of the Catholic Church, are, for the most part, from their stand-point, corruptions of Christianity, having their source in the characteristics of the Latin-Celtic races. The papal authority, to their sight, is nothing else than the concentration of the sacerdotal tendencies of these races, carried to their culminating point by the recent Vatican definition, which was due, in the main, to the efforts and the influence exerted by the Jesuits. This despotic ecclesiastical authority, which commands a superstitious reverence and servile submission to all its decrees, teaches doctrines inimical to the autonomy of the German Empire, and has fourteen millions or more of its subjects under its sway, ready at any moment to obey, at all hazards, its decisions. What is to hinder this ultramontane power from issuing a decree, in a critical moment, which will disturb the peace and involve, perhaps, the overthrow of that empire, the fruit of so great sacrifices, and the realization of the ardent aspirations of the Germanic races? Is it not a dictate of self-preservation and political prudence to remove so dangerous an element, and that at all costs, from the state? Is it not a duty to free so many millions of our German brethren from this superstitious yoke and slavish subjection? Has not divine Providence bestowed the empire of Europe upon the Saxons, and placed us Prussians at its head, in order to accomplish, with all the means at our disposal, this great work? Is not this a duty which we owe to ourselves, to our brother Germans, and, above all, to God? This supreme effort is our divine mission!

This picture of the Catholic Church, as it appears to a large class of non-Catholic German minds, is not overdrawn. It admits of higher coloring, and it would still be true and even more exact.

This is the monster which the too excited imagination and the deeply-rooted prejudice of the Saxon mind have created, and called, by way of contempt, the “Latin,” the “Romish,” the “Popish” Church. It is against this monster that they direct their persistent attacks, their cruel persecutions, animated with the fixed purpose of accomplishing its entire overthrow.

Is this a thing to be marvelled at, when Catholics themselves abhor and detest this caricature of the Catholic Church--for it is nothing else--more than these men do, or possibly can do?

The attitude of the German Empire, and of the British Empire also, until the Emancipation Act, _vis-à-vis_ to the Catholic Church as they conceive her to be, may, stripped of all accidental matter, be stated thus: Either adapt Latin Christianity, the Romish Church, to the Germanic type of character and to the exigencies of the empire, or we will employ all the forces and all the means at our disposal to stamp out Catholicity within our dominions, and to exterminate its existence, as far as our authority and influence extend!

XV. RETURN OF THE SAXON RACES TO THE CHURCH.

The German mind, when once it is bent upon a course, is not easily turned aside, and the present out-look for the church in Germany is not, humanly speaking, a pleasant one to contemplate. It is an old and common saying that “Truth is mighty, and will prevail.” But why? “Truth is mighty” because it is calculated to convince the mind, captivate the soul, and solicit its uttermost devotion and action. “Truth will prevail,” provided it is so presented to the mind as to be seen really as it is. It is only when the truth is unknown or disfigured that the sincere repel it.

The return, therefore, of the Saxon races to the church, is to be hoped for, not by trimming divine truth, nor by altering the constitution of the church, nor by what are called concessions. Their return is to be hoped for, by so presenting the divine truth to their minds that they can see that it is divine truth. This will open their way to the church in harmony with their genuine instincts, and in her bosom they will find the realization of that career which their true aspirations point out for them. For the Holy Spirit, of which the church is the organ and expression, places every soul, and therefore all nations and races, in the immediate and perfect relation with their supreme end, God, in whom they obtain their highest development, happiness, and glory, both in this life and in the life to come.

The church, as has been shown, has already entered on this path of presenting more intimately and clearly her inward and divine side to the world; for her deepest and most active thinkers are actually engaged, more or less consciously, in this providential work.

In showing more fully the relations of the internal with the external side of the church, keeping in view the internal as the end and aim of all, the mystic tendencies of the German mind will truly appreciate the interior life of the church, and find in it their highest satisfaction. By penetrating more deeply into the intelligible side of the mysteries of faith and the intrinsic reasons for revealed truth and the existence of the church, the strong rational tendencies of the Saxon mind will seize hold of, and be led to apprehend, the intrinsic reasons for Christianity. The church will present herself to their minds as the practical means of establishing the complete reign of the Holy Spirit in the soul, and, consequently, of bringing the kingdom of heaven upon earth. This is the ideal conception of Christianity, entertained by all sincere believers in Christ among non-Catholics in Europe and the United States. This exposition, and an increased action of the Holy Spirit in the church co-operating therewith, would complete their conviction of the divine character of the church and of the divinity of Christianity.

All this may seem highly speculative and of no practical bearing. But it has precisely such a bearing, if one considers, in connection with it, what is now going on throughout the Prussian kingdom and other parts of Germany, including Switzerland. What is it which we see in all these regions? A simultaneous and persistent determination to destroy, by every species of persecution, the Catholic Church. Now, the general law of persecution is the conversion of the persecutors.

Through the cross Christ began the redemption of the world; through the cross the redemption of the world is to be continued and completed. It was mainly by the shedding of the blood of the martyrs that the Roman Empire was gained to the faith. Their conquerors were won by the toil, heroic labors and sufferings of saintly missionaries. The same law holds good in regard to modern persecutors. The question is not how shall the German Empire be overthrown, or of waiting in anticipation of its destruction, or how shall the church withstand its alarming persecutions? The great question is how shall the blindness be removed from the eyes of the persecutors of the church, and how can they be led to see her divine beauty, holiness, and truth, which at present are hidden from their sight? The practical question is how shall the church gain over the great German empire to the cause of Christ?

O blessed persecutions! if, in addition to the divine virtues, which they will bring forth to light by the sufferings of the faithful, they serve also to lead the champions of the faith to seek for and employ such proofs and arguments as the Saxon mind cannot withstand, producing conviction in their intelligence, and striking home the truth to their hearts; and in this way, instead of incurring defeat, they will pluck out of the threatening jaws of this raging German wolf the sweet fruit of victory.

This view is eminently practical, when you consider that the same law which applies to the persecutors of the church applies equally to the leading or governing races. This is true from the beginning of the church. The great apostles S. Peter and S. Paul did not stop in Jerusalem, but turned their eyes and steps towards all-conquering, all-powerful Rome. Their faith and their heroism, sealed with their martyrdom, after a long and bloody contest, obtained the victory. The imperial Roman eagles became proud to carry aloft the victorious cross of Christ! The Goths, the Huns, and Vandals came; the contest was repeated, the victory too; and they were subdued to the sweet yoke of Christ, and incorporated in the bosom of his church.

Is this rise of the Germanic Empire, in our day, to be considered only as a passing occurrence, and are we to suppose that things will soon again take their former course? Or is it to be thought of as a real change in the direction of the world’s affairs, under the lead of the dominant Saxon races? If the history of the human race from its cradle can be taken as a rule, the course of empire is ever northward. Be that as it may, the Saxons have actually in their hands, and are resolutely determined to keep, the ruling power in Europe, if not in the world. And the church is a divine queen, and her aim has always been to win to her bosom the imperial races. She has never failed to do it, too!

Think you these people are for the most part actuated by mere malice, and are persecuting the church with knowledge of what they are doing? The question is not of their prominent leaders and the actual apostates. There may be future prodigal sons even amongst these. Does not the church suffer from their hands in a great measure what her divine Founder suffered when he was nailed to the cross, and cried, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do”?

The persecutors in the present generation are not to be judged as those who were born in the church, and who, knowing her divine character, by an unaccountable defection, turned their backs upon her. Will their stumbling prove a fatal fall to all their descendants? God forbid! Their loss for a time has proved a gain to the church, and their return will bring riches to both, and through them to the whole world; “for God is able to ingraft them again.”[51]

The Catholic Church unveils to the penetrating intelligence of the Saxon races her divine internal life and beauty; to their energetic individuality she proposes its elevation to a divine manhood; and to their great practical activity she opens the door to its employment in spreading the divine faith over the whole world!

That which will hasten greatly the return of the Saxons to the church is the progressive action of the controlling and dissolving elements of Protestantism towards the entire negation of all religion. For the errors contained in every heresy, which time never fails to produce, involve its certain extinction. Many born in those errors, clearly foreseeing these results, have already returned to the fold of the church. This movement will be accelerated by the more rapid dissolution of Protestantism, consequent on its being placed recently under similar hostile legislation in Switzerland and Germany with the Catholic Church. “The blows struck at the Church of Rome,” such is the acknowledgment of one of its own organs, “tell with redoubled force against the evangelical church.”

With an intelligent positive movement on the part of the church, and by the actual progressive negative one operating in Protestantism, that painful wound inflicted in the XVIth century on Christianity will be soon, let us hope, closed up and healed, never again to be reopened.

XVI. MIXED SAXONS RETURNING.

Christ blamed the Jews, who were skilful in detecting the signs of change in the weather, for their want of skill in discerning the signs of the times. There are evidences, and where we should first expect to meet them--namely, among the mixed Saxon races, the people of England and the United States--of this return to the true church.

The mixture of the Anglo-Saxons with the blood of the Celts in former days caused them to retain, at the time of the so-called Reformation, more of the doctrines, worship, and organization of the Catholic Church than did the thorough Saxons of Germany. It is for the same reason that among them are manifested the first unmistakable symptoms of their entrance once more into the bosom of the church.

At different epochs movements in this direction have taken place, but never so serious and general as at the present time. The character and the number of the converts from Anglicanism to the Catholic Church gave, in the beginning, a great alarm to the English nation. But now it has become reconciled to the movement, which continues and takes its course among the more intelligent and influential classes, and that notwithstanding the spasmodic cry of alarm of Lord John Russell and the more spiteful attack of the Right Hon. William E. Gladstone, M.P., late prime minister.

It is clear to those who have eyes to see such things that God is bestowing special graces upon the English people in our day, and that the hope is not without solid foundation which looks forward to the time when England shall again take rank among the Catholic nations.

The evidences of a movement towards the Catholic Church are still clearer and more general in the United States. There is less prejudice and hostility against the church in the United States than in England, and hence her progress is much greater.

The Catholics, in the beginning of this century, stood as one to every two hundred of the whole population of the American Republic. The ratio of Catholics now is one to six or seven of the inhabitants. The Catholics will outnumber, before the close of this century, all other believers in Christianity put together in the republic.

This is no fanciful statement, but one based on a careful study of statistics, and the estimate is moderate. Even should emigration from Catholic countries to the United States cease altogether--which it will not--or even should it greatly diminish, the supposed loss or diminution, in this source of augmentation, will be fully compensated by the relative increase of births among the Catholics, as compared with that among other portions of the population.

The spirit, the tendencies, and the form of political government inherited by the people of the United States are strongly and distinctively Saxon; yet there are no more patriotic or better citizens in the republic than the Roman Catholics, and no more intelligent, practical, and devoted Catholics in the church than the seven millions of Catholics in this same young and vigorous republic. The Catholic faith is the only persistently progressive religious element, compared with the increase of population, in the United States. A striking proof that the Catholic Church flourishes wherever there is honest freedom and wherever human nature has its full share of liberty! Give the Catholic Church equal rights and fair play, and she will again win Europe, and with Europe the world.

Now, who will venture to assert that these two mixed Saxon nations, of England and the United States, are not, in the order of divine Providence, the appointed leaders of the great movement of the return of all the Saxons to the Holy Catholic Church?

The sun, in his early dawn, first touches the brightest mountain-tops, and, advancing in his course, floods the deepest valleys with his glorious light; and so the Sun of divine grace has begun to enlighten the minds in the highest stations in life in England, in the United States, and in Germany; and what human power will impede the extension of its holy light to the souls of the whole population of these countries?

XVII. TRANSITION OF THE LATIN-CELTS

Strange action of divine Providence in ruling the nations of this earth! While the Saxons are about to pass from a natural to a supernatural career, the Latin-Celts are impatient for, and have already entered upon, a natural one. What does this mean? Are these races to change their relative positions before the face of the world?

The present movement of transition began on the part of the Latin-Celtic nations in the last century among the French people, who of all these nations stand geographically the nearest, and whose blood is most mingled with that of the Saxons. That transition began in violence, because it was provoked to a premature birth by the circumstance that the control exercised by the church as the natural moderator of the Christian republic of Europe was set aside by Protestantism, particularly so in France, in consequence of a diluted dose of the same Protestantism under the name of Gallicanism. Exempt from this salutary control, kings and the aristocracy oppressed the people at their own will and pleasure; and the people, in turn, wildly rose up in their might, and cut off, at their own will and pleasure, the heads of the kings and aristocrats. Louis XIV., in his pride, said, “L’Etat c’est moi!” The people replied, in their passion, “L’Etat c’est nous!”

Under the guidance of the church the transformation from feudalism to all that is included under the title of modern citizenship was effected with order, peace, and benefit to all classes concerned. Apart from this aid, society pendulates from despotism to anarchy, and from anarchy to despotism. The French people at the present moment are groping about, and earnestly seeking after the true path of progress, which they lost some time back by their departure from the Christian order of society.

The true movement of Christian progress was turned aside into destructive channels, and this movement, becoming revolutionary, has passed in our day to the Italian and Spanish nations.

Looking at things in their broad features, Christianity is at this moment exposed to the danger, on the one hand, of being exterminated by the persecutions of the Saxon races, and, on the other, of being denied by the apostasy of the Latin-Celts. This is the great tribulation of the present hour of the church. She feels the painful struggle. The destructive work of crushing out Christianity by means of these hostile tendencies has already begun. If, as some imagine, the Christian faith be only possible at the sacrifice of human nature, and if a natural career be only possible at the sacrifice of the Christian faith, it requires no prophetic eye to foresee the sad results to the Christian religion at no distant future.

But it is not so. The principles already laid down and proclaimed to the world by the church answer satisfactorily these difficulties. What the age demands, what society is seeking for, rightly interpreted, is the knowledge of these principles and their practical application to its present needs.

For God is no less the author of nature than of grace, of reason than of faith, of this earth than of heaven.

The Word by which all things were made that were made, and the Word which was made flesh, is one and the same Word. The light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world, and the light of Christian faith, are, although differing in degree, the same light. “There is therefore nothing so foolish or so absurd,” to use the words of Pius IX. on the same subject, “as to suppose there can be any opposition between them.”[52] Their connection is intimate, their relation is primary; they are, in essence, one. For what else did Christ become man than to establish the kingdom of God on earth, as the way to the kingdom of God in heaven?

It cannot be too often repeated to the men of this generation, so many of whom are trying to banish and forget God, that God, and God alone, is the Creator and Renewer of the world. The same God who made all things, and who became man, and began the work of regeneration, is the same who really acts in the church now upon men and society, and who has pledged his word to continue to do so until the end of the world. To be guided by God’s church is to be guided by God. It is in vain to look elsewhere. “Society,” as the present pontiff has observed, “has been enclosed in a labyrinth, out of which it will never issue save by the hand of God.”[53] The hand of God is the church. It is this hand he is extending, in a more distinctive and attractive form, to this present generation. Blessed generation, if it can only be led to see this outstretched hand, and to follow the path of all true progress, which it so clearly points out!

XVIII. PERSPECTIVE OF THE FUTURE.

During the last three centuries, from the nature of the work the church had to do, the weight of her influence had to be mainly exerted on the side of restraining human activity. Her present and future influence, due to the completion of her external organization, will be exerted on the side of soliciting increased action. The first was necessarily repressive and unpopular; the second will be, on the contrary, expansive and popular. The one excited antagonism; the other will attract sympathy and cheerful co-operation. The former restraint was exercised, not against human activity, but against the exaggeration of that activity. The future will be the solicitation of the same activity towards its elevation and divine expansion, enhancing its fruitfulness and glory.

These different races of Europe and the United States, constituting the body of the most civilized nations of the world, united in an intelligent appreciation of the divine character of the church, with their varied capacities and the great agencies at their disposal, would be the providential means of rapidly spreading the light of faith over the whole world, and of constituting a more Christian state of society.

In this way would be reached a more perfect realization of the prediction of the prophets, of the promises and prayers of Christ, and of the true aspiration of all noble souls.

This is what the age is calling for, if rightly understood, in its countless theories and projects of reform.

ODD STORIES.

IX.

KURDIG.

The sun was setting in the vale of Kashmir. Under the blessing of its rays the admiring fakir would again have said that here undoubtedly was the place of the earthly paradise where mankind was born in the morning of the world. Something of the same thought may have stirred the mind of a dwarfed and hump-backed man with bow-legs, who, from carrying on his shoulders a heavy barrel up the steep and crooked path of a hillside, stopped to rest while he looked mournfully at the sun. Herds of goats that strayed near him, and flocks of sheep that grazed below, might have provoked their deformed neighbor to envy their shapely and well-clad beauty and peaceful movements. Could he have found it in his heart to curse the sun which had seemed to view with such complacency his hard toils amid the burden and heat of the day, the compassionate splendor of its last look upon field, river, and mountain would still have touched his soul. As it was, he saw that earth and heaven were beautiful, and that he was not. Whether he uttered it or not, his keen, sad eyes and thoughtful face were a lament that his hard lot had made him the one ugly feature in that gentle scene. No, not the only one; he shared his singularity with the little green snake that now crawled near his feet. Yet even this reptile, he thought, could boast its sinuous beauty, its harmony with the order of things; for it was a perfect snake, and he--well, he was scarce a man. Soon, however, better thoughts took possession of his mind, and, when he shouldered his barrel to climb the hill, he thought that one of those beautiful peris, whose mission it is to console earth’s sorrowing children ere yet their wings are admitted to heaven, thus murmured in his ear, with a speech that was like melody: “O Kurdig, child of toil! thy lot is indeed hard, but thou bearest it not for thyself alone, and thy master and rewarder hath set thee thy task; and for this thou shalt have the unseen for thy friends, love for thy thought, and heaven for thy solace.” As he ascended the hill it seemed to him that his load grew lighter, as if by help of invisible hands. He looked for a moment on the snake which hissed at him, and though but an hour ago, moved by a feud as old as man, he would have ground it in hate beneath his foot, he now let it pass. The crooked man ascended the hill, while the crooked serpent passed downward; and it was as if one understood the other. At length the dwarf Kurdig reached the yard of the palace, which stood on a shady portion of the eminence, but, as he laid down his burden with a smile and a good word before his employer, suddenly he felt the sharp cut of a whip across the shoulders. He writhed and smarted, feeling as if the old serpent had stung him.

Kurdig was one of those hewers of wood and drawers of water whose daily being in the wonderful vale of Kashmir seemed but a harsh contrast of fallen man with the paradise that once was his home. When he did not carry barrels of wine, or fruit-loads, or other burdens to the top of the hill, he assisted his poor sister and her child in the task of making shawls for one of a number of large shawl-dealers who gave employment to the people of the valley. With them the dearest days of his life were spent. At odd times he taught the little girl the names of flowers, the virtues of herbs, and even how to read and write--no small accomplishments among peasant folk, and only gained by the dwarf himself because his mind was as patient and as shrewd as his body was misshapen. His great desire for all useful knowledge found exercise in all the common stores of mother-wit and rustic science which the unlettered people around preserved as their inheritance. How to build houses, to make chairs, ovens, hats; how to catch fish and conduct spring-waters; how to apply herbs for cure and healing; how to make oils and crude wine--these things he knew as none other of all the peasantry about could pretend to know. He had seen, too, and had sometimes followed in the hunt, the beasts of the forest; nor was he, as we have seen, afraid of reptiles. He could row and swim, and while others danced he could sing and play. This variety of accomplishments slowly acquired for the dwarf an influence which, though little acknowledged, was widespread. In all the work and play of the rude folk around him he was the almost innocent and unregarded master-spirit. The improvement of their houses owed something to his hand, and their feasts were in good part planned by him; for, while he acted as their servant, he was in truth their master. To cure the common fevers, aches, hurts, he had well-tried simples, and his searches and experiments had added something new to the herbal remedies of his fathers. All his talents as doctor, musician, mechanic, and story-teller his neighbors did not fail to make use of, while the dwarf still kept in the background, and his ugliness, whenever accident had made him at all prominent, was laughed at as much as ever. Even the poor creatures his knowledge had cured, and his good-nature had not tasked to pay him, uttered a careless laugh when they praised their physician, as if they said: “Well, who would have thought the ugly little crook-back was so cunning?”

Yet there was one who never joined in the general smile which accompanied the announcement of the name of Kurdig. This was his sister’s child. Never without pain could she hear his name jestingly mentioned; always with reverence, and sometimes with tears, she spoke of him. The wan, slender child had grown almost from its feeble infancy by the side of the dwarf. When able to leave her mother’s sole care, he had taught the child her first games and songs, and step by step had instructed her in all the rude home-lessons prevalent among the country people--how to knit, to weave, to read and to write, according to the necessities of her place and condition. The wonder was that from a pale and sickly infant the child grew as by a charm, under the eye of the dwarf, into a blooming girl, whose quiet and simple demeanor detracted nothing from her peculiar loveliness, and made her habits of industry the more admirable. There was, then, one being in the world whom the dwarf undoubtedly loved, and by whom he was loved in return.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE TRUE AND THE FALSE INFALLIBILITY OF THE POPES, ETC. By the late Bishop Fessler. Translated by Father St. John, of the Edgbaston Oratory. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1875.

Dr. Fessler was Bishop of St. Polten in Austria, and the Secretary-General of the Council of the Vatican. He wrote this pamphlet as a reply to the apostate Dr. Schulte. It was carefully examined and approved at Rome, and the author received a complimentary letter from the Pope for the good service he had rendered to the cause of truth. The true infallibility which the author vindicates is that infallibility of the Pope in defining dogmas of Catholic faith and condemning heresies, which was defined as a Catholic dogma by the Council of the Vatican. The false infallibility which he impugns is the travesty of the true doctrine, falsely imputed by Schulte and others to the Catholic Church as her authoritative teaching expressed in the definition of the Vatican Council. This doctrine of infallibility falsely imputed represents the Pope as claiming inspiration, power to create new dogmas, infallibility as a private doctor, as a judge of particular cases, and as a ruler. Such an infallibility was not defined by the Council of the Vatican, has never been asserted by the popes, is not maintained by any school of theologians, and is, moreover, partly in direct contradiction to the Catholic doctrine, partly manifestly false, and as for the rest without any solid or probable foundation. This false infallibility must, however, be carefully distinguished from the theological doctrine which extends the infallibility of the church and of the Pope as to its objective scope and limit; beyond the sphere of pure dogma, or the Catholic faith, strictly and properly so-called; over the entire realm of matters virtually, mediately, or indirectly contained in, related to, or connected with the body of doctrine which is formally revealed, and is either categorically proposed or capable of being proposed by the church as of divine and Catholic faith. Bishop Fessler confines himself to that which has been defined in express terms by the council, and must be held as an article of faith by every Catholic, under pain of incurring anathema as a heretic. This definition respects directly the Pope, speaking as Pope, as being the subject, of whom the same infallibility is predicated which is predicated of the Catholic Church. The object of infallibility is obliquely defined, and only so far as necessary to the precise definition of the subject, which is the Pope speaking _ex cathedrâ_. As to the object, or extension of infallibility, no specific definition has been made. The definition is generic only. That is, it gives in general terms those matters which are in the genus of faith and morals, as the object of infallible teaching. The truths formally revealed are the basis of all doctrine in any way respecting faith and morals which is theological; and they control all doctrine which is philosophical, concerning our relations to God and creatures, at least negatively. Therefore, taken in its most restricted sense, infallibility in faith and morals must denote infallibility in teaching and defining these formally-revealed truths. So much, then, respecting the object, is necessarily _de fide_, and is held as such by every theologian and every instructed Catholic.

As to the further extension of infallibility, or the specific definition of all the matters included in the term “de fide et moribus,” the fathers of the council postponed their decisions to a later day, and probably will consider them when the council is re-assembled. In the meantime, we have to be guided by the teaching of the best theologians whose doctrine is consonant to the practice of the Holy See. We may refer the curious reader to Father Knox’s little work, _When does the Church Speak Infallibly?_ as the safest source of information concerning this important point. As a matter of fact, the popes do teach with authority many truths which are not articles of faith, and condemn many opinions which are not heresies. Moreover, they command the faithful to assent to their teaching, and frequently punish those who refuse to do so. It is much more logical, and much more consonant to sound theological principles, to believe that they are infallible in respect to every matter in which they justly command our absolute and irrevocable assent, than to believe that we are bound to render this obedience to a fallible authority. But of the obligation in conscience to submit to all the doctrinal decisions of the Holy See there is no question. And this obligation is very distinctly and emphatically declared by Pius IX., with the concurrence of the universal episcopate, in the closing monition of the First Decree of the Council of the Vatican.

“Since it is not enough to avoid heretical pravity, unless those errors also are diligently shunned which more or less approach it, we admonish all of the duty of observing also those constitutions and decrees in which perverse opinions of this sort, not here expressly enumerated, are proscribed and prohibited by this Holy See.”

THE ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER’S REPLY TO MR. GLADSTONE.

BISHOP ULLATHORNE ON THE SAME SUBJECT.

BISHOP VAUGHAN ON THE SAME.

LORD ROBERT MONTAGU ON THE SAME, ETC.--All published by The Catholic Publication Society. New York: 1875.

The Archbishop of Westminster has the intellectual and moral as well as the ecclesiastical primacy in the Catholic Church of England, and in this controversy he leads the band of noble champions of the faith which Mr. Gladstone’s audacious war-cry has evoked. The illustrious successor of S. Anselm and S. Thomas à Becket has a remarkably clear insight into the fundamental principles of theology and canon law, an unswerving logical consistency in deducing their connections and consequences, a loyal integrity in his faith and devotion toward Christ and his Vicar, a lucidity of style and language, an untiring activity, dauntless courage, tactical skill, and abundance of resources in his polemics, which combine to make him a champion and leader of the first class in ecclesiastical warfare--a very Duguesclin of controversy. In the present pamphlet he has defined the issues with more precision, and brought the main force of Catholic principles more directly and powerfully into collision with his adversary’s opposite centre, than any other of the remarkably able antagonists of Mr. Gladstone.

We refer our readers to the pamphlet itself for a knowledge of its line of argument. We will merely call attention to a few particular points in it which are noteworthy. In the first place, we desire to note the exposition of one very important truth frequently misapprehended and misstated. This is, namely, that the doctrine of Papal Infallibility was not, before the Council of the Vatican, a mere opinion of theologians, but the certain doctrine of the church, proximate to faith, and only questioned since the Council of Constance by a small number, whose opinion was _never a probable doctrine, but only a tolerated error_. The archbishop, moreover, shows briefly but clearly how this error, whose intrinsic mischief was practically nullified in pious Gallicans by their obedience to the Holy See, and the overpowering weight which the concurrence of the great body of the bishops with the Pope always gave to his dogmatic decrees, was threatening to become extremely active and dangerous if longer tolerated; and that the definition of the Council of the Vatican was therefore not only opportune and prudent, but necessary.

He shows, moreover, that the violent and aggressive party which stirred up the conflict now raging was the party of faithless men who wore the mask of Catholic profession, with their political and anti-Catholic accomplices, whose unsuccessful _ruse de guerre_, at the time of the council, was only the preliminary manœuvre of a systematic war on the church.

The unchanged position of Catholics since the council, in respect to civil allegiance; the essential similarity of that position, doctrinally, with that of all persons who maintain the supremacy of conscience and divine law; its greater practical security for stability of government and political order over any other position; the firm basis for temporal sovereignty and independence which Catholic doctrine gives to the state; and the great variation of practical relations between church and state from their condition at a former period which altered circumstances have caused, are clearly and ably developed. We are pleased to observe the positions laid down in our own editorial article on “Religion and State in our Republic” sustained and confirmed by the archbishop’s high authority. Americans must be especially gratified at the warm eulogium upon Lord Baltimore and the primitive constitution of the Maryland colony.

Among the numerous other replies to Mr. Gladstone, besides those already noticed in this magazine, the pamphlets of Bishop Vaughan, Bishop Ullathorne, and Lord Robert Montagu are especially remarkable and worthy of perusal. Each of them has its own peculiar line of argument and individual excellence, and they supplement each other.

The want of sympathy with Mr. Gladstone generally manifested in England and America, and the respectful interest shown in the exposition of Catholic principles by his antagonists, are specially worthy of remark. We are under great obligations to Mr. Gladstone for the fine opportunity he has afforded us of gaining such a hearing, and he has thus indirectly and unintentionally done the cause of Catholic truth a very great service, which some of our opponents candidly, though with considerable chagrin, have acknowledged.

THE MINISTRY OF S. JOHN BAPTIST. By H. J. Coleridge, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

Father Coleridge has devoted himself to very extensive and critical studies, with the intention of publishing a new life of Christ. This volume is the first instalment. It is learned and critical without being dry or abstruse. It can be relied on, therefore, for scholarly accuracy, and at the same time enjoyed for its literary beauties. The author has a felicity of diction and a talent for historical narration, which, combined with his solid learning, make him singularly competent for the important and delightful task he has undertaken and so successfully commenced.

LIFE OF FATHER HENRY YOUNG. By Lady Georgiana Fullerton. London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This remarkable and somewhat eccentric priest lived and died in Dublin, though he exercised his apostolic ministry also in many other parts of Ireland. He was undoubtedly a saint, and in some respects strikingly like the venerable Curé of Ars. The author has written his life in her usual charming style, and it is not only edifying, but extremely curious and entertaining.

THE LILY AND THE CROSS. A Tale of Acadia. By Prof. James De Mille. Boston and New York: Lee & Shepard. 1875.

Here we have a kind of quasi-Catholic tale, written by a Protestant. As a story it has a good deal of stirring incident and dramatic power, mingled with a fine spice of humor. The writer shows no unkind or unfair disposition toward Catholics or their religion, and the priest in the story, as a man, is a noble and heroic character. His Catholicity, however, is too weak even for the most extreme left of liberal Catholics.

THE VEIL WITHDRAWN (_Le Mot de L’Enigme_). Translated, by permission, from the French of Mme. Craven, author of _A Sister’s Story_, _Fleurange_, etc. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1875.

In its didactic aspects we consider _The Veil Withdrawn_ superior to its immediate predecessor, _Fleurange_, inasmuch as its moral purpose is more decided and apparent; and we believe Mme. Craven has been very opportune in the choice of the principal lesson which her book inculcates, as well as felicitous in the manner in which it is conveyed. There is perhaps no peril to which a frank, confiding young matron is more exposed at the present day than that constituted by the circumstances which formed the temptation of the heroine of this novel, and which she so heroically overcame. And herein we trust the non-Catholic reader will not fail to observe the safeguard which Catholic principles and the confessional throw around the innocent--warning them of the threatened danger, without detracting from the ingenuousness and simplicity which constitute a chief charm of the sex. We purposely avoid being more specific in our allusion to the plot of this story, lest we diminish the pleasure of those who have delayed its perusal until now.

CALEB KRINKLE. By Charles Carleton Coffin (“Carlton”). Boston and New York: Lee & Shepard. 1875.

This “Story of American Life,” which would have been more aptly called a “Story of Yankee Life,” is really capital. Linda Fair, Dan Dishaway, and old Peter are excellently-drawn characters, and the others are good in their way. The description of the blacksmith and his daughter is like a paraphrase of Longfellow’s exquisite little poem. The author makes use both of pathos and humor, and although there are rather too many disasters and narrow escapes, yet, on the whole, the story is simple, natural, and life-like, its moral tone is elevated, and it is well worth reading.

POEMS. By William Wilson. Edited by Benson J. Lossing, Poughkeepsie: Archibald Wilson. 1875.

He is a bold publisher who sends forth a poetical venture in these prosaic days, backed though it be by a partial subscription list and the favorable reception of a first edition.

We are reminded in looking over this volume, as we have often been before in examining those of the tuneful brethren, how much the world is indebted to the church, consciously or otherwise, for its most refined enjoyments. If “an undevout astronomer is mad,” how can a poet’s instincts be otherwise than Catholic? Were it not for Catholic themes, he would lack his highest inspiration, as well as appropriate imagery to illustrate his thoughts withal. Even that doughty old iconoclast, John Bunyan--every inch a poet, though his lines were not measured--found no relief for his pilgrim-hero till he had looked upon that symbol of symbols--the cross.

The author of the present collection made no permanent profession of literature, and rarely wrote except when the impulse was too strong to be resisted. His impromptu lines were always his best, the Scottish dialect, in which many of them are written, adding not a little to their racy flavor. His verse is characterized by sweetness, beauty, and strength, and he is particularly happy when descanting upon the joys of home, of love and friendship, and the charms of outward nature.

We are not aware that the author ever made a study of the claims of the church, and some passages in his poems give evidence of much of the traditional prejudice against her; but we are confident, from other indications, that his head was too logical and his heart too large to be shut up within the narrow limits of Presbyterian or other sectarian tenets. The final stanza of “The Close”--the last he ever wrote--is touching and suggestive:

“And his pale hand signing Man’s redemption sign, Cried, with forehead shining, ‘Father, I am Thine!’ And so to rest he quietly hath passed, And sleeps in Christ, the comforter, at last.”

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXI., No. 122.--MAY, 1875.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by Rev. I. T. HECKER, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

PIUS IX. AND MR. GLADSTONE’S MISREPRESENTATIONS.

The recent conduct of the Right Honorable William Ewart Gladstone has filled his former friends and admirers with anger and sorrow, and the nobler among his enemies with astonishment and pity. He has done much to convert the defeat of the liberal party in Great Britain, which might have been but temporary, into absolute rout and lasting confusion; for its return to power is impossible as long as the alienation of the Irish Catholic members of Parliament continues. The more generous of Mr. Gladstone’s political foes cannot but deplore that the once mighty opponent, whom they succeeded in driving from office, has, by his own behavior, fallen into something very like contempt. His strictures on the Vatican decrees and the _Speeches_ of Pius IX. possess little merit in a literary point of view, being written in the bad style common to Exeter Hall controversialists, and being full of inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and oversights. They have accordingly received from the leading critical journals in Great Britain either open censure or that faint praise which is equally damning. The _Pall Mall Gazette_ observes that, if Mr. Gladstone goes on writing in a similar strain, no one will heed what he writes. The wild assault made by him upon Catholics is not only perceived by others to be causeless and gratuitous, but is freely confessed by himself to be uncalled for and unwarranted. Speaking of the questions, whether the Pope claimed temporal jurisdiction or deposing power, or whether the church still teaches the doctrine of persecution, he says in his _Expostulation_ (page 26): “Now, to no one of these questions could the answer really be of the smallest immediate moment to this powerful and solidly-compacted kingdom.” Again, in the _Quarterly Review_ article (page 300), he asserts that the “burning” question of the deposing power, “with reference to the possibilities of life and action, remains the shadow of a shade!” Why, then, does Mr. Gladstone apply the torch to quicken the flame of the burning controversy, which he affirms to be beyond the range of practical politics? Why does he summon the “shadow of a shade” to trouble, terrify, or distress his fellow-countrymen? Has he forgotten the history of his country, which teaches him that these very questions were among those which brought innocent men to the block, and caused multitudes to suffer the tortures of the rack and the pains of ignominious death? We read in Hallam (_Constitutional Hist. of England_) that one of the earliest novelties of legislation introduced by Henry VIII. was the act of Parliament of 1534, by which “it was made high treason to deny that ecclesiastical supremacy of the crown which, till about two years before, no one had ever ventured to assert. Bishop Fisher, almost the only inflexibly honest churchman of that age, was beheaded for this denial.” Sir Thomas More met the same fate. Burleigh, in a state paper in which he apologizes for the illegal employment of torture in Elizabeth’s reign, includes among the questions “asked during their torture” of those “put to the rack,” the question, “What was their own opinion as to the pope’s right to deprive the queen of her crown?” In those days, then, the mere opinions of Catholics concerning papal supremacy were torturing and beheading questions--questions of the rack, the block, and the stake. Now they are “burning” questions, in a metaphorical sense, and lead to wordy strife, polemical bitterness, and to widening the breach between two sections of Queen Victoria’s subjects, which all wise men during late years have deplored and striven to lessen, but which Mr. Gladstone deliberately sets himself to widen.

Into the causes which have provoked Mr. Gladstone to attack Catholics and the Pope it is not necessary to enter. Corrupt or impure motives are not imputed to him. Nor is it here intended to discuss the theological part of the subject, which has already been exhaustively dealt with by Dr. John Henry Newman, Archbishop Manning, Bishops Ullathorne, Vaughan, and Clifford, Monsignor Capel, and others. The aim of the present writer is to point out the inaccuracies of Mr. Gladstone in his _Expostulation_ and his _Quarterly Review_ article on the _Speeches_ of Pius IX., to exhibit his general untrustworthiness in his references and quotations, and to bring forward the real instead of the travestied sentiments of the Pope.

Now, to honest and fair examination of documents which concern their faith Catholics have no objection. On the contrary, they desire sincerely that Protestants should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. Nothing but good to the Catholic Church can result from impartial study of such documents as the Vatican decrees, the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus_ of Pius IX., to which, in his _Expostulation_, Mr. Gladstone made such extensive reference. Catholics give him a cordial assent when he says: “It is impossible for persons accepting those decrees justly to complain when such documents are subjected in good faith to a strict examination as respects their compatibility with civil right and the obedience of subjects.” But Catholics and all upright Protestants must join in condemning as unjust and unfair that bad habit common to controversialists of a certain class, who aim at temporary victory for themselves and their party, careless of the interests of eternal verity. There are partisan writers who cite portions of a document, in the belief that the mass of readers will have no knowledge of the entire, and who take extracts hap-hazard from secondary sources, without troubling themselves to search the authentic or original documents. Wilful inaccuracy and purposed misquotations are not, as has already been stated, to be imputed to Mr. Gladstone. But it often occurs that carelessness and prejudice lead distinguished writers into errors similar to those produced by malice, and equally or more detrimental. It so happens that Mr. Gladstone, in describing and quoting the Vatican decrees, the words of Pius IX., the _Syllabus_ and _Encyclical_, has published statements so incorrect and so misleading as to subject the author, were he less eminent for honor and scrupulous veracity, to the charge either of criminal ignorance or of wilful intention to mislead. For example, he cites, at pages 32-34 of his _Expostulation_, the form of the present Vatican decrees as proof of the wonderful “change now consummated in the constitution of the Latin Church” and of “the present degradation of its episcopal order.” He says the present Vatican decrees, being promulgated in a strain different from that adopted by the Council of Trent, are scarcely worthy to be termed “the decrees of the Council of the Vatican.” The Trent canons were, he says, real canons of a real council, beginning thus: “Hæc Sacrosancta,” etc., “Synodus,” etc., “docet” or “statuit” or “decernit,” and the like; and its canons, “as published in Rome, are _Canones et Decreta Sacrosancti Œcumenici Concilii Tridentini_, and so forth. But what we have now to do with is the _Constitutio Dogmatica Prima de Ecclesiâ Christi edita in Sessione tertia_ of the Vatican Council. It is not a constitution made by the council, but one promulgated in the council. And who is it that legislates and decrees? It is _Pius Episcopus, servus servorum Dei_; and the seductive plural of his _docemus et declaramus_ is simply the dignified and ceremonious ‘we’ of royal declarations. The document is dated ‘Pontificatus nostri Anno XXV.,’ and the humble share of the assembled episcopate in the transaction is represented by _sacro approbante concilio_.” Mr. Gladstone, stating that the Trent canons are published as _Canones et Decreta Sac. Œcum. Concilii Tridentini_, and particularizing in a foot-note the place of publication as “Romæ: in Collegio urbano de Propaganda Fide, 1833,” leads his readers wrongfully to infer that there exists no similar publication of the Vatican decrees. However, the very first complete edition of the Vatican decrees, printed especially for distribution to the fathers of the council, bears this title: _Acta et Decreta Sacrosancti Œcumenici Concilii Vaticani in Quatuor Prioribus Sessionibus--Romæ ex Typographia Vaticana_, 1872. What Mr. Gladstone appears to have quoted are the small tracts, containing portions of the decrees, for general use, one of which is entitled _Dogmatic Constitution concerning the Catholic Faith, Published in the Third Session_, while another is entitled _The First Dogmatic Constitution of the Church of Christ, Published in the Fourth Session_. Mr. Gladstone has not scrupled to take one of these tracts as his text-book, misstating its very title; for he quotes it as “edita in sessione tertia” instead of “quarta,” and deriving from it, instead of from the authentic _Acta et Decreta_, his materials for charging the decrees with a change of form “amounting to revolution.” Had the _Acta_ in their complete version been before him, he could not truthfully have said “the humble share of the assembled episcopate in the transaction is represented by _sacro approbante concilio_”; for he would have found it distinctly stated, and apparently as reason for their confirmation by the Pope, that the decrees and canons contained in the constitution were read before, and approved by, all the fathers of the council, with two exceptions--“Decreta et Canones qui in constitutione modo lecta continentur, placuerunt patribus omnibus, duobus exceptis, Nosque, sacro approbante concilio, illa et illos, ut lecta sunt, definimus et apostolica auctoritate confirmamus.” Why does Mr. Gladstone call attention to the date as being “Pontificatus nostri Anno XXV.”? Is it in order to show that the Vatican despises the other mode of computation, or is it to exhibit his own minute accuracy in quoting? In either case Mr. Gladstone was wrong, for the date in the _Constitutio Dogmatica_ before him was as follows: “Datum Romæ, etc., Anno Incarnationis Dominicæ 1870, die 18 Julii. Pontificatus Nostri, Anno XXV.” And why should Mr. Gladstone describe as “seductive” the plural of the Pope’s “docemus et declaramus,” and assert that plural form to be “simply the dignified and ceremonious ‘We’ of royal declarations”? Did he mean to impute to the use of the plural number a corrupt intention to make people believe that the ‘we’ included the bishops as well as the Pope? Did he mean also to impute to the use of the plural an arrogant affectation of royal dignity? If such were the purpose of Mr. Gladstone, it can only be said that such rhetorical artifices are unworthy of him and are not warranted by truth. The ‘we’ is simply the habitual form of episcopal utterances, employed even by Protestant prelates in their official acts. It is evident, moreover, that the use of the plural _docemus_ or _declaramus_, and the employment of the formula _sacro approbante concilio_, denounced by Mr. Gladstone as innovations, have ancient precedents in their favor. The _Acta Synodalia_ of the Eleventh General and Third Lateran Council, held under Pope Alexander III. in 1179, are thus worded: “Nos … de concilio fratrum nostrorum et sacri approbatione concilii … decrevimus” or “statuimus.” The same form, with trifling variation, was employed in 1225 by Innocent III. in another General Council, the Fourth Lateran. Mr. Gladstone thinks “the very gist of the evil we are dealing with consists in following (and enforcing) precedents of the age of Innocent III.,” so that it may be useless to cite the General Council of Lyons in 1245, under Innocent IV., with its decrees published in the obnoxious strain, “_Innocentius Episcopus, servus servorum Dei, etc., sacro præsente concilio ad rei memoriam sempiternam_.” The language of another General Council at Lyons, in 1274, under Gregory X., “Nos … sacro approbante concilio, damnamus,” etc., and the language of the Council of Vienne, in 1311, under Clement V., “Nos sacro approbante concilio … damnamus et reprobamus,” come perhaps too near the age of Innocent III. to have weight with Mr. Gladstone. But he cannot object on this score to the Fifth Lateran Council, begun in 1512 under Julius II., and finished in 1517 under Leo X. In this General Council, the next before that of Trent, Pope Leo was present in person, and by him, just as by Pius IX., in the Vatican Council, all the definitions and decrees were made in the strain which Mr. Gladstone calls innovating and revolutionary, namely, in the style, “Leo Episcopus servus servorum Dei ad perpetuam rei memoriam, sacro approbante concilio.” Leo X. uniformly employed the plural _statuimus et ordinamus_ in every session of that council. Pius IX. followed the example of Leo X., and obeyed precedents set him by popes who presided in person--not by legates, as at Trent--at General Councils held in the years 1179, 1225, 1244, 1274, 1311, and 1517. Accordingly, “the change of form in the present, as compared with other conciliatory (_sic_) decrees,” turns out on examination to be no revolution, but, on the contrary, appears to have in its favor precedents the earliest of which has seven centuries of antiquity. And yet to this alleged change of form, and to this alone, Mr. Gladstone appealed in evidence of “the amount of the wonderful change now consummated in the constitution of the Latin Church” and of “the present degradation of its episcopal order”!

The _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus_ of 1864 have been treated by Mr. Gladstone in the same loose, careless, and unfair way as he treated the Vatican decrees. He promised, at page 15 of his _Expostulation_, to “state, in the fewest possible words and with references, a few propositions, all the holders of which have been _condemned_ [the italics are Mr. Gladstone’s] by the See of Rome during my own generation, and especially within the last twelve or fifteen years. And in order,” so proceeds Mr. Gladstone, “that I may do nothing towards importing passion into what is matter of pure argument, I will avoid citing any of the fearfully energetic epithets in which the condemnations are sometimes clothed.” The references here given by Mr. Gladstone are to the Encyclical letter of Pope Gregory XVI. in 1831--a date, it may be noticed, rather more ancient than “the last twelve or fifteen years”--and to the following documents, which at page 16 of his pamphlet are thus detailed: The Encyclical “of Pope Pius IX., in 1864”; “Encyclical of Pius IX., December 8, 1864”; “Syllabus of March 18, 1861”; and the “Syllabus of Pope Pius IX., March 8, 1861.” Here are apparently five documents deliberately referred to, the first an Encyclical of Gregory XVI.; the second an Encyclical of Pius IX., in 1864; the third another Encyclical of Pius IX., dated December 8, 1864; the fourth a Syllabus of March 18th, 1861; and the fifth another Syllabus of the 8th of March, 1861. Yet these apparently five documents, to which reference is made by Mr. Gladstone with so much seeming particularity and exactitude of dates, are in reality two documents only, and have but one date--namely, the 8th of December, 1864--on which day the _Encyclical_, with the _Syllabus_ attached, was published by Pius IX. At page 67 of his pamphlet Mr. Gladstone “cites his originals,” and curiously enough, by a printer’s error, assigns the Encyclical of Gregory XVI. to Gregory XIV. But he cites from two sources only--namely, the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus_ of 1864. That Encyclical contains a quotation from an Encyclical of Gregory XVI., which and the _Syllabus_ are positively the only documents actually cited. By a series of blunders, all of which cannot be charged to the printer--and in a work which has arrived at the “sixteenth thousand” edition printers’ errors are hardly allowable--the two documents, with their one date, have been made to do duty for five documents, ascribed gravely to as many different dates!

Moreover, Mr. Gladstone’s assertion that he will state “a few propositions, all the holders of which have been _condemned_ by the Holy See,” is inaccurate, as far as his extracts from the _Encyclical_ and the _Syllabus_--the only documents to which he appeals--are concerned; for in them no “holders” of any propositions are condemned, nor is there a single anathema directed against any individual. The errors only are censured. Mr. Gladstone cannot illustrate any one of his eighteen propositions by a single epithet which could with truth be called “fearfully energetic.” As a matter of fact, there are no epithets at all attached to any condemnations in the eighty propositions of the _Syllabus_. When, therefore, Mr. Gladstone professes, in order to do nothing “towards importing passion,” that he will “avoid citing any of the fearfully energetic epithets in which the condemnations are sometimes clothed,” he plays a rhetorical trick upon his readers. In truth, had he quoted the entire of the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus_, he would not have been able to make his hypocritical insinuation that he might have culled, if he wished, more damaging extracts. Catholics have to lament, not that he quoted too much, but that he quoted too little; not that he quoted with severe rigor, but that he quoted with absolute unfaithfulness. It is justice, not mercy, which Catholics demand from him, and which they ask all the more imperatively because he has himself laid down the axiom: “Exactness in stating truth according to the measure of our intelligence is an indispensable condition of justice and of a title to be heard.”

It was urged by some persons that Mr. Gladstone gave sufficient opportunities for correcting the effect of his inaccuracies by publishing in an appendix the Latin of the propositions he professed to quote. But so glaring is the contrast between the “propositions” in English and the same in Latin that a writer in the _Civiltâ Cattolica_ exclaims in amazement: “Has he [Mr. Gladstone] misunderstood the Latin of the quoted texts? Has he through thoughtlessness travestied the sense? Or has his good faith fallen a victim to the disloyalty of some cunning Old Catholics who furnished him with these propositions?” Mr. Gladstone has asserted that Pius IX. has condemned “those who maintain the liberty of the press,” “or the liberty of conscience and of worship,” “or the liberty of speech.” On referring to the Latin original of these the first three of his eighteen propositions, it is found that Pius IX. has given no occasion for such a monstrous assertion. The Pope has merely condemned that species of liberty which every man not a socialist or communist must from his heart believe worthy of censure. Gregory XVI. called this vicious sort of liberty by the name of _delirium_, and Pius IX., in his _Encyclical_, terms it the “liberty of perdition.” It is a liberty “especially pernicious (_maxime exitialem_) to the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls,” and the claim to it is based on the error “that liberty of conscience and of worship is the proper right of every man; that it ought to be proclaimed and asserted by law in every well-constituted society; and that citizens have an inherent right to liberty of every kind, not to be restrained by any authority, ecclesiastical or civil, so that they may be able, openly and publicly, to manifest and declare their opinions, of whatever kind, by speech, by the press, or by any other means.” Such is the sort of liberty which the _Encyclical_ condemns, which is not the general liberty of the press, or of conscience and worship, as Mr. Gladstone would have it, but that sort of liberty which might be better termed licentiousness--a liberty, that is, which knows no bridle or restraint, whether human or divine, and which refuses to be kept in check by any authority, ecclesiastical or civil--“omnimodam libertatem nullâ vel ecclesiasticâ, vel civili auctoritate coarctandam.” The _Expostulation_ has been widely circulated among the learned, and also in a sixpenny edition among the masses. It is evident that thousands of persons accustomed to entertain a high opinion of the veracity of great men in Mr. Gladstone’s position will take his statements upon trust, and never dream of testing, even had they the requisite acquaintance with a dead language, the accuracy of his translations and quotations. To abuse the confidence of this section of the public is a sin severely to be reprobated.

The _Speeches of Pius IX_.--which, it would appear, were not read by Mr. Gladstone until after he wrote the _Expostulation_--have been by him criticised in the _Quarterly Review_ unmercifully and unfairly. He did not take into consideration the circumstance that these speeches are not elaborate orations, but are merely the unprepared, unstudied utterances of a pontiff so aged as to be termed by the reviewer himself a “nonagenarian,” borne down with unparalleled afflictions, weighted with innumerable cares, and oppressed with frequent and at times serious illnesses. The speeches themselves were not reported _verbatim_ or _in extenso_. No professional shorthand writer attended when they were delivered, and they were not spoken with a view to their publication. But every word which comes from the lips of Pius IX. is precious to Catholics; and as some of these speeches were taken down by various hands and appeared in various periodicals, it was thought proper to allow a collection of them to be formed and published by an ecclesiastic, Don Pasquale de Franciscis, who himself took notes of the greater number of these _Discourses_. This gentleman is described by Mr. Gladstone as “an accomplished professor of flunkyism in things spiritual,” and one of the “sycophants” about the Pope who administer to His Holiness “an adulation, not only excessive in its degree, but of a kind which to an unbiassed mind may seem to border on profanity.” Mr. Gladstone is fond of insinuating that his own mind is “unbiassed” or “dispassionate,” and that he would by no means “import passion” into a controversy where calm reasoning alone is admissible. But, in point of fact, as the _Pall Mall Gazette_ has pointed out, he shows himself the bigoted controversialist instead of the grave statesman. Forgetting the genius of the Italian people, and the difference between the warm and impulsive natives of the South and the phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons; forgetting, also, the literary toadyism of English writers not many years ago, and the apparently profane adulation paid to British sovereigns, he attacks Don Pasquale for calling the book of the Pope’s speeches “divine,” and accuses him of downright blasphemy. Dr. Newman, in one of his _Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England_, has given an humorous account of the way in which foreigners might be induced to believe the laws and constitution of England to be profane and blasphemous. This he did by culling out a series of sentences from Blackstone and others, such as “the king can do no wrong,” “the king never dies,” he is “the vicar of God on earth.” Thus impeccability, immortality, and omnipotence may be claimed for the British monarch! Moreover, the subjects of James I. called him “the breath of their nostrils”; he himself, according to Lord Clarendon, on one occasion called himself “a god”; Lord Bacon called him “some sort of little god”; Alexander Pope and Addison termed Queen Anne “a goddess,” the words of the latter writer being: “Thee, goddess, thee Britannia’s isle adores.” What Dr. Newman did in good-humored irony Mr. Gladstone does in sober and bitter earnest. He picks out epithets here and there, tacking on the expressions of one page to those of another, and then flings the collected epithets before his reader as proof of Don Pasquale’s profanity. The temperament of Italians in the present day may or may not furnish a valid defence, in respect to good taste, for Don Pasquale. But it is certain that the phrases used by the latter, when taken in their context and interpreted as any one familiar with Italian ideas would interpret them, afford slight basis for the odious charge of profanity--a charge which Mr. Gladstone urges not only by the means already pointed out, but by other means still more reprehensible, namely, by fastening on Don Pasquale expressions which he did not employ. Thus, at page 274 of the _Review_, Mr. Gladstone, in reference to the “sufferings pretended to be inflicted by the Italian kingdom upon the so-called prisoner of the Vatican,” adds, “Let us see how, and with what daring misuse of Holy Scripture, they are illustrated in the authorized volume before us. ‘He and his august consort,’ says Don Pasquale, speaking of the Comte and Comtesse de Chambord, ‘were profoundly moved at such great afflictions which the Lamb of the Vatican has to endure.’” It seems, in the first place, rather strained to term the application of the word “lamb” to Pius IX., or any other person, a “daring misuse of Holy Scripture.” Many a man, when expressing pious hope under disaster, exclaims, “The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” using or misusing, as the case may be, not the language of Holy Scripture, but the words of the author of _Tristram Shandy_, to whose works, we believe, the epithet “holy” is not commonly applied. If Pius IX. had been termed “the lamb of God,” then indeed Holy Scripture might have been used or misused; but the single word “lamb,” even in the phrase “lamb of the Vatican,” is no more an allusion, profane or otherwise, to the Gospels than it is to the Rev. Laurence Sterne. In the second place, the expression, be it proper or improper, was not used by Don Pasquale. Turning to volume ii. of the _Discorsi_, page 545, as Mr. Gladstone directs us, we find the words were not employed by Don Pasquale, but by the writer of an article in the _Unità Cattolica_! Pages 545 and 546, the pages cited, contain a notice of the presentation to the Comte and Comtesse de Chambord of the first volume of the _Discorsi_; for the article is dated in 1872, and the second volume was not printed until 1873. So that it appears the naughty word was not only not used by Don Pasquale, but did not in reality form part of the “authorized volume,” being merely found in a newspaper extract inserted in an appendix. In this same newspaper extract the Comtesse de Chambord is said to have called the first volume of the _Discorsi_ “a continuation of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.” This statement rests on the authority of the writer in the _Unità Cattolica_, but is brought up in judgment not only against Don Pasquale, but against the Pope himself, who is held by Mr. Gladstone to be responsible for everything stated either by Don Pasquale in his preface or by any other persons in the appendices to the _Discorsi_!

Concerning the Pope, Mr. Gladstone, at page 299 of the _Review_, thus writes: “Whether advisedly or not, the Pontiff does not, except once (vol. i. 204), apply the term [infallible] to himself, but is in other places content with alleging his superiority, as has been shown above, to an inspired prophet, and with commending those who come to hear his words as words proceeding from Jesus Christ (i. 335).” At page 268 of the _Review_ it is also said that Don Pasquale, in his preface, p. 17, calls the voice of Pius IX. “the voice of God,” and that the Pope is “nature that protests” and “God that condemns.” If, however, in order to test the worth of these assertions of Mr. Gladstone, we turn to the passages he has cited, it will be discovered that Pius IX. did not even once apply the term infallible to himself; for he, in the passage cited, applied it not to himself individually, but to the infallible judgment (_giudizio infallibile_) in principles of revelation, as contrasted with the authoritative right of popes in general. Nor did Pius IX. assert any “superiority to an inspired prophet” by saying (_Review_, p. 276, _Discorsi_, vol. i. 366): “I have the right to speak even more than Nathan the prophet to David the king.” The right to speak upon a certain occasion does not surely contain of necessity an allegation of superiority nor imply a claim to inspiration! Nor did Pius IX. commend “those who came to hear his words as words proceeding from Jesus Christ”; for he merely said, in reply to a deputation: “I answer with the church; and the church herself supplies to me the words in the Gospel for this morning. You are here, and have put forth your sentiments; but you desire also to hear the word of Jesus Christ as it issues from the mouth of his Vicar.” That is to say: You shall have for answer “the word of Jesus Christ”--meaning this day’s Gospel--spoken by, or as it issues from, or which proceeds (_che esce_) out of, the mouth of his Vicar. The words, “He is nature that protests, he is God that condemns,” are evidently metaphorical expressions of the editor, harmless enough; for, as Pius IX. cannot be both God and nature literally, the metaphorical application is apparent to the meanest comprehension. It is true that Don Pasquale, in his preface, page 16, ascribes to Pius IX. this language: “This voice which now sounds before you is the voice of Him whom I represent on earth” (_la VOCE di colui che in terra Io rappresento_); but, turning to Don Pasquale’s reference (vol. i. p. 299) to verify the quotation, it is found that the editor made a serious mistake, by which the entire character of the passage was altered. The Pope had just contrasted himself (the _vox clamantis de Vaticano_) with John the Baptist (the _vox clamantis in deserto_). “Yes,” he adds, “I may also call myself the Voice; for, although unworthy, I am yet the Vicar of Christ, and this voice which now sounds before you is the voice of him who in earth represents him” (_è la voce di colui, che in terra lo rappresenta_). Don Pasquale imprudently put the word “voce” in capital letters, changed “lo” into “Io,” and “rappresenta” into “rappresento.” The Pope simply said that his voice, as it cried from the Vatican, was the voice of the Vicar of Christ. And in the belief of all Catholics so it is.

The charge of “truculence” is brought against the Pope by Mr. Gladstone. “It is time to turn,” he says (_Review_, p. 277), “with whatever reluctance, to the truculent and wrathful aspect which unhappily prevails over every other in these _Discourses_.” The first proof of this “truculence” is, it seems, the fact that the “_cadres_, or at least the skeletons and relics of the old papal government over the Roman states, are elaborately and carefully maintained.” One would suppose that these _cadres_ were maintained with the bloodthirsty intention of making war on Victor Emanuel. But Mr. Gladstone does not say so; nay, he insinuates in a foot-note that their maintenance is for a purpose far from truculent. “We have seen it stated from a good quarter,” so Mr. Gladstone writes, “that no less than three thousand persons, formerly in the papal employment, now receive some pension or pittance from the Vatican. Doubtless they are expected to be forthcoming on all occasions of great deputations, as they may be wanted, like the _supers_ and dummies at the theatres.” It appears from the _Discorsi_ that the Pope received in audience deputations from the persons formerly in the papal employment on twenty-one occasions, between September, 1870, and September, 1873. On fourteen of these occasions the _impiegati_ were received on days when no other deputations attended. On the other occasions, although other deputations were received on the same days, the ex-employees were never mixed up with other deputations, but were always placed in separate rooms for audience. Mr. Gladstone has not the least ground for insinuating that these unfortunate persons, who refused to take the oath of allegiance to Victor Emanuel, and thereby forfeited employment and pay, were ever called upon like _supers_ or dummies to make a show at great deputations. If these ex-employees receive pay from the Pope, it surely is no proof of papal “truculence.” But “none of these,” so asserts Mr. Gladstone (_Review_, p. 278), “appear at the Vatican as friends, co-religionists, as receivers of the Pontiff’s alms, or in any character which could be of doubtful interpretation. They appear as being actually and at the moment his subjects and his military and civil servants respectively, although only in _disponibilità_, or, so to speak, on furlough; they are headed by the proper leading functionaries, and the Pope receives them as persons come for the purpose of doing homage to their sovereign.” The references given for this somewhat confused statement are pages 88 and 365 of volume i., where the Pope very naturally speaks of “the fidelity shown by them to their sovereign,” and of their “faith, constancy, and attachment to religion, to God, and to the Vicar of Jesus Christ, their sovereign.” It was in consequence of the introduction by Victor Emanuel, into the several government departments in Rome, of an oath of allegiance to the head of the state--an oath not demanded previously under the Papal rule--that these _impiegati_ resigned their situations, their consciences not permitting them to take the oath. It was no wonder, then, that Pius IX. should notice their fidelity to himself. But he makes no assertion whatever to the effect that these civil and military servants are merely on furlough or in _disponibilità_. That they do appear as pensioners on the bounty of Pius IX. may be proved, in spite of Mr. Gladstone’s denial, by reference to the _Discorsi_, at pages 38, 50, 99, 182, 235, 308, 460, and 472 of volume i. and pages 25, 38, and 122 of volume